University College London (UCL) is a UK ‘research-intensive’ university with a large undergraduate population. Our aim is to connect world-leading research with world-leading education, and we have achieved this by implementing a Connected Curriculum for Research-Based Education. We focus on the role played by educational developers in joining research with undergraduate education. We discuss different spheres of activity within the Connected Curriculum and show how the process brought different communities together and sparked relationships between fields such as student partnership and quality assurance that had hitherto remained separate. Most significantly, own sense of identity changed as we moved from a more traditional role where our work was almost exclusively with colleagues who taught students, to a more creative position working in partnership with a wider network of colleagues and communities.

Twenty-one new charter texts, or references to such texts now lost, add significantly to the corpus of materials that Marjorie Chibnall gathered for the biography of the Empress Matilda. In particular, this new evidence throws light upon the circumstances in which Matilda and Geoffrey Plantagenet brokered their alliance with Robert of Gloucester, for the first time properly identifying the role played here by Miles of Gloucester, subsequently promoted as earl of Hereford.

The document printed below survives in the mid-thirteenth-century cartulary of the abbey of Sainte-Geneviève at Paris. It confirms a settlement in which Master Herbert appears as one of eleven ‘assessors’ assisting the papal legate, Peter of Pavia, acting alongside a group of French and Italian dignitaries, including Herbert's fellow masters at Paris: Gerard Pucelle, Bernard of Pisa and Stephen of Tournai. The settlement was known to Beryl Smalley, but not Herbert's confirmation, which came to light only in January 2018, as the present volume was going to press. Although in many ways a standard instrument, merely confirming Herbert's presence at the legate's settlement, Herbert's choice of intitulatio, as ‘clerk of St Thomas, our glorious martyr’, is remarkable, demonstrating both his customary magniloquence and his determination, after 1170, to be seen dwelling constantly in Becket's shadow. Even the opening formula of the document declares this, being adapted from the first epistle of St John (1 John 1:1–3), the words of the disciple ‘whom Jesus loved’, witnessing to the truth of his master's teaching. Perhaps even more remarkably, Herbert, like St John the Evangelist, adopts the first person plural. This at a time when even bishops and were not always entirely confident in abandoning the first person singular. Before we attribute these features to Herbert's particular vanity, however, we should note that the quotation from St John occurs in others of the letters corroborating the legatine settlement, as does the first person plural. Although it is also worth noting here that the abbot and prior of Saint-Victor, in these same circumstances, employ first person singular. Herbert's seal, referred to at the end of the letter, is now lost. Can we doubt that it showed one of the earliest images of Becket's martyrdom?

Nicholas Vincent

WHAT we know of Herbert of Bosham we owe to two chief causes. The first and fundamental is the role that the self-dramatising Herbert played in the even greater drama of Thomas Becket. From this in turn springs the second cause for our knowledge of Herbert: the Victorian fascination with Becket. It was as a minor satellite of Becket's stardom that Herbert attracted an editor, John Allen Giles. In turn, it was Giles’ edition of Herbert's works, published in 1845–46, that first brought Herbert to wider attention. Even now, it is Giles’ edition as pirated by the Abbé Migne for volume 190 of his Patrologia Latina (1854) that still serves as the principal port of entry for modern scholars interested in Herbert's career. Even today, it is Giles’ edition with its many failings and omissions that continues to determine Herbert's reputation in our post-Victorian age. In what follows, I hope to subject both Giles and his edition to a degree of scrutiny. To understand Giles and his work, nonetheless, we must begin not with Giles himself but with the wider Victorian reception of Thomas Becket.

Becket mattered to the Victorians in ways that have only recently begun to be appreciated. As a bone of contention, left over from the great ossuary that Henry VIII and the Protestant Reformers had made of such remains, Becket could not be ignored by any historian of the Catholic Middle Ages. To a majority of writers, from the 1530s through to the 1790s, he remained nonetheless a divisive and for the most part indigestible medieval relic. To declare oneself in favour of St Thomas was to side unequivocally with a Catholic or crypto-Catholic cause, with a love for saints, relics and ritual. Such was the case, for example, with the Jesuit scholar Thomas Stapleton, author of the Tres Thomae published in 1588 as parallel lives of St Thomas the Apostle, St Thomas Becket and St Thomas More.3 To declare oneself against Thomas, by contrast, was to stand proudly for Reformation, King, country and the established Protestant church. Those in the first camp were inclined to refer to ‘St’ or ‘the Blessed’ Thomas. Those in the second, to ‘Becket’. In either case, Thomas himself remained combustible stuff.

In the summer of 1201, King John of England visited Paris. His visit is described for us by Rigord, the biographer of Philip Augustus:

Robert of Auxerre describes the same event in less elaborate terms:

There are already points of emphasis here: Paris as a place of solemn procession, of learning and liberality, of wine and song; Paris as a place of abundance, where all visitors to the French king's court were entertained luxuriously and free of charge. Already we find Paris itself personified as a symbol of la douce France, of all things civilized and sophisticated. Parisian accents are themselves more urbane than those of Rouen or Poitiers. By Parisian standards all else will be judged. The kings ruling from Paris claimed a dignity, a liberality, and a command over both religion and learning, that set them apart from any mere king of England. In all of this, there was much striving after what was intended to appear effortless superiority. Louis VII is said to have vouchsafed to Walter Map that, where the King of England might boast of wealth and power: ‘We in France have nothing, save bread and wine and joy’. But such simplicity was itself as sophisticated and hard-earned as the rustic antics of the court of Marie-Antoinette.