Power, Identity and Miracles on a Medieval Frontier

Catherine Clarke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367030063
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315536514
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

A thriving port, a frontier base for the lords of Gower and a multi-cultural urban community, the south Wales town of Swansea was an important centre in the Middle Ages, at a nexus of multiple identities, cultural practices and configurations of power. As the principal town of the Marcher lordship of Gower and seat of the Marcher lord's rule, Swansea was a site of contested authority, colonial control and complex interactions – and collisions – between different cultures, languages and traditions. Swansea also features in the miracle collection prepared for the canonisation of Thomas Cantilupe, Bishop of Hereford (d. 1282), as the setting for the intriguing case of the hanging and strange revival of the Welsh rebel, William Cragh. Taking medieval Swansea and Wales as its starting point, this volume brings into focus questions of place, power, identity and belief, bringing together inter-disciplinary perspectives which span History, Literary Studies and Geography / Archaeology, and engaging with current debates in the fields of medieval frontier studies, urban history, manuscript studies and hagiography.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Medieval History.

Witnessing history: perspectives on medieval Swansea and its cultural contexts

Catherine A.M. Clarke

Faculty of Humanities, Avenue Campus, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton, United Kingdom

This collection of essays is based on the inter-disciplinary project ‘City Witness: Place and Perspective in Medieval Swansea’. This special issue brings together new research produced by the project, alongside further contributions which extend these insights and explore important historical, political and cultural contexts for the project’s central themes and questions.

A thriving port, a Marcher base for the lords of Gower and a multi-cultural urban community, the south Wales town of Swansea was an important centre in the Middle Ages, comparable with many other historic European towns. Yet the medieval legacy of Swansea is almost invisible today. Wartime bombing and later re-development of the city centre in particular have almost completely obscured the traces of the medieval urban layout and its buildings. Currently, urban regeneration is fostering interest in Swansea’s medieval heritage, driven by rescue archaeological work in the city and on-going excavation and conservation projects on Swansea Castle. The City Witness project has sought to further our understanding of medieval Swansea and its cultural contexts, as well as to engage with wider-reaching questions about medieval urban culture, place, identity and memory.

As a case study, Swansea brings into focus a range of themes and research questions which are currently the subject of concentrated attention in Medieval Studies. Detailed work on the geography and urban culture of medieval Swansea contributes to our broader understanding of towns and cities in the Middle Ages, both in Wales and Britain and in comparison with continental contexts. Swansea also has a distinctive character as a town within the area known as the medieval March of Wales: that collection of Anglo-Norman conquest lordships created between the late eleventh and late thirteenth centuries, extending down the border between England and Wales, and along the south coast of Wales as far as Pembrokeshire in the west.¹ As the principal town of the Marcher lordship of Gower and seat of the Marcher lord’s rule, Swansea was a site of contested power and authority, colonial control and complex interactions – and collisions – between different cultures, languages and traditions. While the work of scholars such as R. R. Davies has long established the significance of the March of Wales as a locus for investigating the politics of medieval power, nationhood and internal colonialism, a current wave of new research into medieval frontiers and border regions – both in Britain and beyond – makes Swansea a timely subject for investigation.²

At its centre, the City Witness project has focused on the unique research resource of the witness statements attesting to the hanging – and apparently miraculous revival – of the Welshman, William Cragh, in Swansea in 1290, gathered as part of the canonisation proceedings for Thomas Cantilupe, Bishop of Hereford (d. 1282) in The Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat. Lat. 4015. The politics and cultural tensions of the medieval March certainly form an important context for the story of Cragh and its meanings for medieval audiences. Cragh was hanged by William de Briouze, the Anglo-Norman lord of Gower, for his alleged involvement in burning the castle of Oystermouth (in Mumbles, just west along the coast from Swansea), probably as part of the rebellion led by Rhys ap Maredudd, a descendant of the royal line of the Welsh kingdom of Deheubarth, in 1287.³ The Anglo-Norman project of conquest and colonialism in Wales is also an important background to the career of Thomas Cantilupe himself (as well as the later campaign for his canonisation), reflecting the complex imbrications of secular and religious power and politics in this period. As bishop of Hereford – a city itself located on the border between England and Wales – Cantilupe also acted as an adviser to King Edward I, his episcopate coinciding with Edward’s concerted campaigns to consolidate his power in Wales and to force the rebellious Welsh princes into submission.⁴ Promotion of the cult of an English bishop-saint in the March of Wales clearly served a political purpose: when Mary de Briouze, wife of Lord William, prays to Cantilupe to intervene in Cragh’s case, her choice of this putative saint from across the border in England speaks powerfully about her allegiances as an Anglo-Norman noblewoman.⁵

But the importance of Thomas Cantilupe as a figure within medieval culture and politics extends far beyond any connections with the aspirations of Edward I and colonialist agendas in Wales. Cantilupe was born into the higher Anglo-Norman aristocracy in Buckinghamshire between 1218 and 1222: his father William, a prominent baron, had been steward of the household of Henry III and his uncle, Walter Cantilupe, was bishop of Worcester (1237–66). Thomas Cantilupe’s career spanned academia, including a period teaching canon law at Oxford and the chancellorship of the university in 1261; he was, as well, a prebendary of Hereford from 1274 and bishop from 1275. At the time of his death in 1282, Cantilupe was in Rome to plead his case to the pope, after having been excommunicated in a dispute with John Pecham, archbishop of Canterbury. This delayed the return of his bones to Hereford for burial, and also complicated the task of securing his canonisation. Nevertheless, Thomas Cantilupe’s cult was promoted vigorously in the years following his death by Richard Swinfield, his former chaplain at Hereford and his successor as bishop: his remains were translated to a new tomb in Hereford Cathedral at Easter 1287, and the ensuing reports of miracles were immediately compiled into a careful chronological record.⁶ Swinfield proposed Cantilupe to the pope for canonisation in April 1290; the inquisitorial commission was established in 1306, and the witnesses (including those in the William Cragh case) gave their depositions the following year. After years of sustained campaigning and pressure from Hereford, as well as complex processes of papal review and evaluation of the case, Cantilupe was finally made a saint by Pope John XXII in 1320.

One of the most important miracle collections from medieval Britain, the Cantilupe materials collected in MS Vat. Lat. 4015 (and other associated manuscripts) remain relatively little-known and under-exploited by modern scholars, yet they offer important insights into a wide range of ideas and practices which reach into diverse aspects of medieval life and culture. The detailed evidence they provide for canonisation procedure in the early fourteenth century illuminates constructs of sainthood, miracles and official religious protocols, but also memory techniques, notions of authority and the use of written records to curate a complex and contested process. The depositions of the witnesses, in the William Cragh case and others, cast light on the relationships – and tensions – between lay devotion or popular piety and the tenets of official religion. Their words offer glimpses into a wide variety of medieval social, cultural and spatial practices. Even the silences in the testimonies, as recorded by the papal notaries, invite attention to what is unvoiced or elided: from ambivalent attitudes to power and authority to the parallel cultural worlds – such as those of the Welsh gentry – suppressed by the dominant interests of the church and the Anglo-Norman regime. The hanging of William Cragh in medieval Swansea has been explored in detail in Robert Bartlett’s micro-historical study, The Hanged Man.⁷ Bartlett’s book examines many aspects of this case, including what it can tell us about medieval canonisation processes, the politics of internal colonialism in medieval Britain and questions of ‘time and space’. But this rich source material also has the potential to extend our understanding of the landscape of medieval Swansea and the spatial practices of the witnesses and others involved in the events surrounding Cragh’s execution and miraculous recovery.

The City Witness project brought together a new digital edition and translation of the William Cragh text (by Harriett Webster), with an interactive digital atlas of Swansea c.1300 (from which Figure 1 is derived). Produced in a Geographical Information System (GIS), using processes of retrogressive plan analysis, as well as drawing on other archaeological and documentary evidence, the atlas shows the principal topographical and landscape features of Swansea around the time of Cragh’s hanging, including key aspects of the built environment, such as the town’s streets, walls, gates and ecclesiastical buildings. By linking the digital edition of the medieval witness statements with the digital map, the project team were able to plot the routes of witnesses in the Cragh case within the urban landscape of medieval Swansea, as well as to employ three-dimensional visualisations of settings and sight-lines within the medieval town. These resources are available at www.medievalswansea.ac.uk and form an important digital companion to this special issue: many of the contributions in this volume refer to the online content and make use of these materials.

Figure 1 Swansea c.1300.

Source: www.medievalswansea.ac.uk

The City Witness project built on the research team’s previous work on medieval Chester, collected at www.medievalchester.ac.uk and in the volume Mapping the Medieval City: Place, Space and Identity in Chester c.1200–1600.⁸ But while the project on medieval Swansea has employed and developed many of the same methodologies, including using digital tools to link textual and visual mappings and bringing inter-disciplinary approaches to questions of place and identity, it has its own distinctive thematic emphases which have shaped and driven the research. In particular, the concept of witnessing, prompted by the depositions gathered in MS Vat. Lat. 4015, has underpinned the new research on medieval Swansea from the start through attention to the witnesses’ experiences, perceptions and recollections, as well as wider questions of memory and authority foregrounded by the Cantilupe records, and in an alertness to the different kinds of ‘witnesses’ to medieval history offered by varied source materials and multi-disciplinary methods. Similarly, the idea of perspective has been central to the project research, both in terms of the literal perspectives and sight-lines of the nine medieval witnesses to the hanging of William Cragh, which the project has sought to recover and reconstruct, and in the more figurative sense of their views and vantage points as members of different social and ethnic groups with different roles within the cultural landscape of medieval Swansea. As with notions of ‘witnessing’ and ‘witnesses’, the idea of perspective has also sharpened our attention to the different interpretations of the medieval evidence produced by the project’s multi-disciplinary contributors.

This special issue broadens the reach of the City Witness project and extends its inter-disciplinary approach, bringing together further multi-disciplinary perspectives and engagements with a more diverse range of primary materials or historical witnesses. It draws in further new research on the politics and culture of medieval south Wales ‒ the immediate context for the events outlined in the William Cragh depositions ‒ and on the potential of the Cantilupe canonisation proceedings more widely for advancing our understanding of questions of power, identity and authority in medieval Wales and beyond. The essays collected here include perspectives from history, historical geography and literary studies, as well as insights generated by Digital Humanities methods and practices. Together, they offer a varied series of vantage points on medieval Swansea and its historical and cultural contexts.

The volume begins with an article by Catherine A.M. Clarke on ‘Place, Identity and Performance: Spatial Practices and Social Proxies in Medieval Swansea’. This examines the reported itineraries of the nine witnesses to the hanging of William Cragh, as recorded in MS Vat. Lat. 4015, mapping them within the landscape of medieval Swansea and its environs, and exploring what these routes might reveal about spatial and social practices within the medieval town. In particular, her essay identifies the ways in which individuals make use of ‘proxies’ to circumvent spatial constraints and regulation and to extend their sphere of agency. Next, Keith D. Lilley and Gareth Dean contribute an article, ‘A Silent Witness? Medieval Urban Landscapes and Unfolding their Mapping Histories’, which picks up on the assertion made by Maurice Beresford, in his New Towns of the Middle Ages, that the urban landscape can represent a silent ‘witness’ to the origins and early development of a town.⁹ Lilley and Dean show how maps of medieval landscapes can function as more than simply reference sources, arguing that processes of mapping (especially using GIS technology) can open up spaces for hypothesis and experimentation with various possible models for a town’s development. Using medieval Swansea as a case study, they demonstrate how mapping can illuminate important critical questions about historical landscapes and prompt more serious engagement with the connections between text, history and place.

Two contributions focus particularly on the canonisation proceedings of St Thomas Cantilupe as a resource for investigating medieval cultural values and practices. Harriett Webster’s article, ‘Mediating...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Chapter 1: Witnessing history: perspectives on medieval Swansea and its cultural contexts
• Chapter 2: Place, identity and performance: spatial practices and social proxies in medieval Swansea
• Chapter 3: A silent witness? Medieval urban landscapes and unfolding their mapping histories
• Chapter 4: Mediating memory: recalling and recording the miracles of St Thomas Cantilupe
• Chapter 5: The resuscitation of Roger of Conwy: a Cantilupe miracle and the society of Edwardian north Wales
• Chapter 6: The geography of Welsh literary production in late medieval Glamorgan
• Chapter 7: The Briouze family in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries: inheritance strategies, lordship and identity
• Index