Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Modern Historians and the Period of Reform and Rebellion, 1258–1265
- The Secret Revolution of 1258
- Baronial Reform, the Justiciar’s Court and Commercial Legislation: The Case of Grimsby
- Crisis Management: Baronial Reform at the Exchequer
- Local Administration during the Period of Reform and Rebellion
- What Happened in 1261?
- Writing Reform and Rebellion
- Civic Government in Troubled Times: London c.1263–1270
- The Montfortian Bishops
- Reformers and Royalists: Aristocratic Women in Politics, 1258–1267
- The Midlands Knights and the Barons’ War: The Warwickshire Evidence
- Retinues, Agents and Garrisons during the Barons’ Wars
- The Barons’ War in the North of England, 1264–1265
- The Maritime Theatre, 1258–1267
- Reasserting Medieval Kingship: King Henry III and the Dictum of Kenilworth
- Index
Writing Reform and Rebellion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 May 2021
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Modern Historians and the Period of Reform and Rebellion, 1258–1265
- The Secret Revolution of 1258
- Baronial Reform, the Justiciar’s Court and Commercial Legislation: The Case of Grimsby
- Crisis Management: Baronial Reform at the Exchequer
- Local Administration during the Period of Reform and Rebellion
- What Happened in 1261?
- Writing Reform and Rebellion
- Civic Government in Troubled Times: London c.1263–1270
- The Montfortian Bishops
- Reformers and Royalists: Aristocratic Women in Politics, 1258–1267
- The Midlands Knights and the Barons’ War: The Warwickshire Evidence
- Retinues, Agents and Garrisons during the Barons’ Wars
- The Barons’ War in the North of England, 1264–1265
- The Maritime Theatre, 1258–1267
- Reasserting Medieval Kingship: King Henry III and the Dictum of Kenilworth
- Index
Summary
The political turbulence and civil war of the 1250s and 1260s inspired a resurgence in historical writing in England. Like generations of monks and clerks before them, English chroniclers responded to these great and calamitous events by picking up their quills and recording both the good and bad deeds of their contemporaries for the instruction of posterity. Through their writings they sought to grasp the lessons to be divined from the sudden shifts in fortune that had seen Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, rise to be virtual ruler of the kingdom in 1264, only to be laid low in the battle of Evesham a year later. For medieval chroniclers, the complicated political developments of the mid thirteenth century were not mere histoires événementielles . In the words of John of Salisbury, the chronicler's obligation was to record great events ‘so that the invisible things of God may be clearly seen by the things that are done’. Behind the spectacle of the baronial cause's rise and fall, contemporary chroniclers glimpsed a deeper structure, not the long march forward of British parliamentary democracy but rather a story of sin, pride, piety, persecution and divine retribution that was as old as the world and would go on until Judgement Day.
While the chronicles have been extensively used by historians seeking to reconstruct the conflict's events, there has not been much interest in the chronicles as texts, the way in which chroniclers understood the conflict, or the rhetorical techniques they employed in their writings. The last comprehensive overview of these sources was Antonia Gransden's superlative Historical Writing in England (1974), which laid the invaluable groundwork for any further study of the chroniclers. Gransden, however, was primarily interested in assessing the chronicles’ value as sources for political events, establishing their biases and sources of information. Although highly cognisant of their value, she expressed her disappointment that ‘the attitude of some chroniclers [to the conflict] was emotional rather than rational’. Their histories may not always fit our concepts of rational historical writing, but they had their own rationale, grounded in scripture and the didactic obligations of the historian. This essay then is less concerned with what actually happened during the war between Henry III and his barons, but rather with the way in which chroniclers understood and wrote about these events, and in what this tells us about their world view and perception of the conflict.
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- Baronial Reform and Revolution in England, 1258-1267 , pp. 109 - 124Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2016