The Wisdom of Exeter

Anglo-Saxon Studies in Honor of Patrick W. Conner

E.J. Christie, E.J. Christie

• Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501512902
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire anglaise

This interdisciplinary volume collects original essays in literary criticism and literary theory, philology, codicology, metrics, and art history. Composed by prominent scholars in Anglo-Saxon studies, these essays honor the depth and breadth of Patrick W. Conner's influence in our discipline. As a scholar, teacher, editor, administrator and innovator, Pat has contributed to Anglo-Saxon studies for four decades. It is hard to say which of his legacies is most profound.

1 The Conners of Exeter, 1070–1150

Elaine Treharne

Stanford University

It is an immense privilege to have this opportunity to honor Professor Patrick Conner and to focus on Exeter, its manuscripts, and its historical context, all areas of research and scholarship in which he is a pioneer. Pat Conner’s contribution to our understanding and appreciation of the Exeter Book, of the book collections at Exeter Cathedral, and of the Benedictine movement more broadly, is, and will continue to be, of the greatest significance, and early Medievalists’ debts to him are many. In particular, he is the exemplary professional, teacher, researcher, and colleague, whose unwavering kindness and generosity is a model for others to emulate. It is thus with a sense of gratitude and pleasure that I offer this small note to Pat. It is somewhat speculative, proposing an innovative reading of some key texts from Exeter that seem, perhaps, to be of potential importance for Pat’s own work. Further research will prove if the new readings I offer can bear the weight of interpretation I shall place upon them.

The “Conners” of my title are offered in the spirit of Pat Conner’s academic life, and his sustained examination of evidence and inspection of detail, for these “conners” are persons who try, test, inspect, and examine.¹ This note will thus examine some of the scribes who wrote English in the post-Conquest decades at Exeter from ca. 1070 to 1140. These decades followed a period of immense importance for the diocese, when Bishop Leofric (d. 1072) expediently moved the see from rural Crediton to urban Exeter in 1050, and oversaw what was the single most important and rapid programme of manuscript copying in the late Anglo-Saxon era. In this programme, as is now well documented, Leofric ensured that both he and his, probably, small group of canons were supplied with core liturgical materials and a range of vernacular manuscripts for pastoral work throughout the see.² At some point during the 1050s and 1060s, then, dozens of books were written by a singularly well-trained cohort of scribes, whose generally expert hands bespeak a keen sense of the significance of the task they were set. Characterizing the English books in this group are a consistent calligraphic sensibility, a defined sense of the essential desirability of interlinear and marginal space in the mise-en-page, the dominance of legibility as the defining quality, and a visual propriety that marks the vernacular out as a worthy medium of textual transmission. This confident manuscript production might have extended some years or it might have been concluded relatively quickly by this expert team of scribes. Subsequently, there was no sustained vernacular textual facture and this compellingly implies that this programme was centered around Leofric himself. What legacy, then, did the work of his prelacy create?

“Where the Past Lives”

Caroline Steedman’s strange and compelling book, Dust, reminds us that

To enter that place where the past lives, where ink on parchment can be made to speak, still remains the social historian’s dream, of bringing to life those who do not for the main part exist, not even between the lines of state papers and legal documents, not even in the records of Revolutionary bodies and fractions. …

In the practices of history and of modern autobiographical narration, there is the assumption that nothing goes away; that the past has deposited all of its traces, somewhere, somehow (though they may be, in particular cases, difficult to retrieve).³

To search for substantial vernacular remains from post-Conquest Exeter is to search in vain, since no codices are extant in English—no large number of homilies such as we find from Worcester, Rochester, Christ Church Canterbury, and Ely. But there are textual materials that survive to be studied with these central premises in mind: that the ink on the parchment, and its in-between—between the lines—can be made to speak; that the inscribed remnants of the past, like the fragments of fabric clinging to resurrected bones, can be discovered and rewoven into a patterned narrative that completes our currently partial picture of Bishop Leofric’s legacy at Exeter. These materials testify to the profound impact Leofric had on his diocese, particularly the explicit appreciation for the value of the vernacular in pastoral and political activities, and the key role that seems to have been carved out for English-speaking local and regional congregations at the cathedral of St. Peter’s itself.

Scribes writing in English at Exeter ca. 1070–1140 left traces of their interaction with the manuscripts in short legal documents and annotations written in English. These now survive as additions to Exeter Cathedral Library, 3501 (the Exeter Book), and Cambridge University Library, Ii. 2. 11, recently discussed by Takako Kato,⁴ and Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 579. Without these brief texts, we should have no evidence of literacy or cultural and social exchange through the medium of English in the post-Conquest diocese of Exeter, despite the prolific production of vernacular manuscripts during the episcopacy of Leofric, up to 1072. These later scribes writing in the spaces of books created earlier—and many of whom were employed to write legal documents—evince a wide range of calligraphic ability, and a varied orthography in their crucial, public work. This suggests they were unlike their highly trained and consistent predecessors, who had written the corpus of manuscripts under Leofric. Their more personal and idiosyncratic responses to the manuscripts in which they intervene are apparent in the visual aspect and the mise-en-page of their stints.

Moreover, akin to the Mortuary Rolls and Episcopal Professions analyzed in detail and used so effectively by Neil Ker in his English Manuscripts in the Century after the Conquest,⁵ this succession of legal and ceremonial documents written by these various scribes into Exeter books forms something of a catalogue of local vernacular script from the Conquest until the mid-twelfth century. Indeed, some of the hands can be dated relatively closely, and can thus be considered as anchor hands for developments in specifically southwestern English paleography during these post-Conquest decades. All testify to the continued use of the vernacular for specialized textual functions, particularly those involving the laity in confraternity with Exeter Cathedral, and lay communities in smaller parishes closely affiliated with Exeter. And unlike so many other documents and manuscripts from which we retrieve our fragments of knowledge, these have all the appearance—both paleographic and prosopographic—of being near-contemporary records of then-current legal procedures.

The three Exeter manuscripts contain batches of legal records that extend the function of the host volumes, though not all contemporaneously. Cambridge University Library, Ii. 2. 11 contains the West Saxon Gospels, datable to s. xi3/4, copied by one Exeter scribe; it also contains Leofric’s donation inscription, his inventory, and a relic-list. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 579 is the tenth- and eleventh-century sacramentary commonly known as the Leofric Missal. It also contains the Leofric inventory. Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3501, datable to s. x2, is, of course, the Exeter Book of Old English poetry. I am not concerned with the manuscript per se, since it contains a number of displaced leaves that properly belong to CUL Ii. 2. 11 and that can be discussed alongside these Gospel Book leaves. Seven other manuscripts, listed and discussed by Pat Conner in Anglo-Saxon Exeter,⁶ contain an inscription declaring their donation by Leofric to the secular community at St. Peter’s, Exeter in 1072.

Reconstructing the quires belonging to CUL Ii. 2. 11, which can be done thanks to Ker’s careful detective work, means it is possible to see two irregular gatherings—one at the beginning of the Gospels, and one at the end—containing a number of unique documents copied deliberately into the Old English Gospel Book. Their dates range from the contemporary inscription of ca. 1072 (Leofric’s death) to two Latin grants as late as ca. 1150. Some were entered retrospectively, and others suggest a present immediacy, and that raises all kinds of questions about the way this particular Gospel Book functioned after its creation as a municipal book, a public repository of legal materials sacralized by their specific physical context.

From early in the medieval period, Gospel Books, and other volumes of sacred writing, were used to deposit a multitude of writings; it is clear from this that reliance on memory or the potential ephemerality of the single-leaf document were deemed insufficiently secure means of ensuring the permanence of the record. Such writings include the famous inscription added to the mid-eighth-century Codex Aureus (Stockholm, Swedish Royal Library, A. 35) that surrounds the opening of the Gospel of St. Matthew. In Old English, the ninth-century annotation records that the book had been stolen by the Vikings, who first came raiding in England in 793, but had been ransomed back by Ealdorman Alfred and his wife Werburg. The determination of Alfred and Werburg to be remembered for their pious act is rendered through writing, a textual act relevant to the appropriate volume, rightly sure that the book’s glory would assist in its survival. This inscription and many others entered into Gospel Books are interventions in the text that are directly related to the host books; indeed, they become integral to the telling of the books’ history.

Less obviously integrated, perhaps, but still deliberately and meticulously included in Gospel Books, are the legal documents and manumissions added later to the eighth-century Llandeilo Fawr Gospels;⁷ to the late ninth-century Bodmin Gospels (London, British Library, Additional 9381); and to London, British Library, Royal 1 B. vii, which details the freeing of a certain Eadhelm by King Athelstan.⁸ In these books, space is a precious commodity, often filled by words considered as valuable in temporal terms as the salvific utterances of Christ himself, ciphered through the Gospels. The intruding texts become unified with the main text, especially in the Bodmin or St. Petroc Gospels where manumissions are squeezed into the bas-de-page of numerous folios, or even written vertically in the margins. They share the same substrate, and, to the casual peruser, are often hidden from view, fitting into the extent of the writing grid relatively unobstrusively.

This integration of ceremonial and legal writing into the secure environment of the sacred codex occurs, too, in Hereford Cathedral Library, P. 1. 2, a Gospel Book dated to the eighth century, with two eleventh-century legal records inserted into blank space.⁹ These insertions, which I have discussed briefly elsewhere,¹⁰ are fascinating, and relevant especially to the discussion of the Exeter Gospels. At folios 134rv, the legal texts extend bey...