Abstract
This article argues that reports of ‘the death of the chronicle’ in the early modern period have been exaggerated. Through a close analysis of three manuscript chronicles from Worcester, Chester and Shrewsbury, it underscores the vitality and creative evolution of the genre against the backdrop of religious, cultural and technological changes that seriously challenged traditional modes and patterns of memory and commemoration. It explores their role as a mechanism for remembering a contentious recent past and considers how they functioned as a repository or archive of public and private information created by their compilers to be transmitted down the generations. It also probes the relationship between the chronicle and contemporary forms of life-writing that have been described as ‘diaries’ and ‘autobiographies’.
The chronicle was the most pervasive format for remembering the past in the Middle Ages. Akin to the annal, its basic unit of time was the year not the day. Marked by its formulaic recital of facts, it presented neither a connected narrative nor a coherent argument. Instead, it assembled a sequence or catalogue of discrete events: dynastic, civic, meteorological and providential (Gransden, 1990; Foot, 2012). Following the model provided by the Old Testament book of Chronicles, in which chronology and genealogy were interwoven (Spiegel, 1983), it said little if anything about human motivation and typically drew no conclusions about causation. To do so would have been a presumptuous attempt to read the mind of God. As Chris Given-Wilson (2004) has commented, the chronicle was a form not of eyewitness but of ‘godwitness testimony’ (ch. 2). It was monopolized by monastic writers who effaced their own identities to act as the scribes of their sacred communities. Adopting the stance of a detached observer and an omniscient narrator, the anonymous chronicler was less an independent author than a compiler, who gathered, organized, glossed and extended the work of his predecessors to create an enduring public record of divine intervention in the natural world and the human realm. A product of collaboration and accretion, the chronicle thus had an inherently polyvocal quality: it spoke with multiple voices that extended across the generations.
Medievalists have mastered the art of using these laconic and apparently unpromising sources, not merely to recover what happened in the past but also to reconstruct individual and collective mentalities (e.g. Foot, 2010; McKitterick, 2004; Spiegel, 1999: chs 4–5; Watkins, 2007). Early modern historians and literary scholars, by contrast, have largely neglected chronicles as examples of both ‘literary and historical mediocrity’, poorly organized, inaccurate, and ‘pock-marked by pretension’ (Clark, 1983: 106). They have seen them as the primitive products of a pre-critical ‘scissors and paste’ approach to historical writing, as texts that grew by plagiaristic accumulation and lacked analytical sophistication (see Fussner, 1962: 230; McKisack, 1971: 107). The persisting tendency to dismiss them as too dry and succinct to be of significance reflects the different historiographical standards we have inherited. It is a side effect of our adherence to an empirical methodology rooted in a humanist commitment to returning ad fontes that rubs uncomfortably against the chronicler’s propensity to borrow from previous authorities. It echoes the contempt of contemporary commentators such as Thomas Nashe who disparaged ‘lay chronigraphers that write of nothing but of mayors and sheriefs, and the dere yere, and the great frost’ and dismissed their texts as full of digression, irrelevance and triviality (Nashe, 1904–1910: i. 194). It is also a lasting legacy of Protestant prejudice against a genre that became synonymous with ‘superstition’ and ‘monkery’. For the vitriolic former Carmelite friar, John Bale (1546), for instance, along with the lives of the saints, chronicles were a chief engine of popish deceit (I, sig. A4v). Symbolic of the corrupt and defunct institution that was monasticism, they came to epitomize the ignorance and backwardness of the Middle Ages. Indeed, they helped to create it as a category of otherness and as a foil for secular modernity. As David Womersley (2005) observes, they resist insertion into paradigms of development that trace the ‘steady emancipation’ of our discipline from ‘the bondage of religion’ (esp. p. 98).
These interrelated assumptions have contributed towards the idea that the chronicle was a genre in inexorable decline in the early modern period. In his book Reading History in Early Modern England (2000), Daniel Woolf traced the process by which it gradually disappeared by the end of the sixteenth century. He argued that this was less because of changes in method associated with the so-called ‘historical revolution’ than because it was robbed of many of its core functions (commemorative, communicative, informative, historical and recreational) by the emergence of new, parasite genres of text that fed off and then superseded it, including newspapers, diaries, plays, almanacs and works of antiquarian history and topography. If it enjoyed an ‘Indian summer’ thanks to the boost of adrenalin injected by the advent of the mechanical press and became a staple product of the commercial book trade, in the long run it was doomed by technological change. The new medium of print had the effect of undermining the chronicle’s fluid and organic quality by fossilizing it at a particular moment in time. The consequence of what Woolf calls ‘genrecide’ was to turn the chronicle into a ‘museum piece’ and to render it more or less moribund as a mode of historiography. Some ‘orphans’ and ‘widows’ survived into the seventeenth century, but these were its ‘last gasp’ (Woolf, 1988: 347; Woolf, 2000: 26, 54, 57, 61; ch. 1). Chronicles were victims of the decisive changes in ‘the social circulation of the past’ – changes to the prevailing culture of communication, the media for transmitting historical information and perceptions of temporality itself. Their eventual demise was also symptomatic, in Woolf’s view, of the steady erosion of local forms of remembrance by a hegemonic narrative of national history (Woolf, 2003).
This essay argues that reports of ‘the death of the chronicle’ have been exaggerated. It underscores the continuing vitality and creative evolution of the genre in a world in which the relationship between script and print was changing, and in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, by focusing particular attention on the tradition of urban chronicling. This began to proliferate in the fifteenth century in the context of developments that partially democratized the genre: a shift in the locus of production of chronicles from religious houses to the lay and civic realm, their movement out of Latin into the vernacular, and the expansion of literacy (Gillespie and Harris, 2013; Woolf, 2000: ch. 1). The production of annalistic summaries spread outwards from London to provincial cities and towns, including Bristol, Derby, Exeter, Lincoln, Ludlow, Newcastle, Norwich, Plymouth, Southampton and York (Clark, 1983; Dyer, 1976–1997: esp. p. 291). Alongside the elaboration of new ceremonies, regalia, portraiture and architecture, keeping records and preserving archives became a critical feature of communal civic consciousness as articulated by the prosperous middling-sort citizens who served as mayors, aldermen, sheriffs, bailiffs and clerks, especially merchants and tradesmen. Modes of expressing collective identity and pride, they bear witness to the resilience of both scribal culture and local memory (Tittler, 1997, 1998: ch. 13, 2001: ch. 5; see Wood, 2013).
Urban manuscript chronicling continued to thrive throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by adapting to the changes of the time. It was fuelled and fed by popular printed texts like those prepared by Edward Hall, John Stow and Raphael Holinshed, with which it existed in fruitful symbiosis. While chronicles flourished in all kinds of confessional environments (see Pollmann, 2016), their persistence and resilience in England must be understood against the backdrop of significant ruptures in the culture of remembering wrought by the Reformation – the traumatic break in traditional practices of memorialization that resulted from the abolition of purgatory and the mnemonic institutions, rituals and texts that this doctrine had served to engender and buttress (Archer, 2001: 90–3; 2005: 215; Gordon, 2013: 5, 8, 59; Tittler, 1997: 286, 1998: ch. 13, esp. pp. 270–272; 2001: ch. 5, esp. p. 137). Protestantism not only severed the link between commemoration and intercessory prayer for the dead; it also erased inherited memory by sponsoring a programme of iconoclasm and by consigning accepted versions of Christian history to oblivion (Marshall, 2002: ch. 7; Sherlock, 2010). At the same time, by strongly reinforcing belief in divine providence, it promoted the idea that the finger of God could be traced through the course of human history (Walsham, 2012). Indeed, in a climate in which the end of the world was widely anticipated, it invested this task with eschatological urgency. For many prophecy and gnosis were linked: close scrutiny of the past provided a vital key to unlocking the future (Barnes, 1988: 101–115; Parry, 1987).
In the space of a short essay, it is not possible to provide a comprehensive overview of the early modern chronicle. However, by scrutinizing selected examples of this increasingly heterogeneous genre and by paying close attention to what Hayden White once called ‘the content of the form’ (1987 esp. ch. 1), I hope to illuminate the ways in which chronicles operated as a mode of remembering both remote and recent history and preserving it for posterity, as well as a mechanism by which people established a link between their ancestors, themselves and decisive events. In turn, it served as a repository of information for the compiler’s descendants and successor. Linking former, present and future generations, it functioned as a space in which people gave expression to a sense of their own place within the fabric of unfolding religious developments and in which memory of contentious episodes was crystallized and cemented. Finally, by tracing the subtle transmutations that made the chronicle an archive of private as well as public experience, this essay seeks to enhance our understanding of the cultural shifts by which ‘history’ and ‘autobiography’ were eventually demarcated as separate spheres of expression, consciousness and feeling.
Chronicles and memory
The main body of this essay places three manuscript chronicles from the West Midlands and Welsh Marches under the microscope. Compiled between the mid-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, they offer fresh insight into the reinvigoration of the genre and into how individuals and communities responded to the upheavals and alterations associated with England’s haphazard and protracted Reformation. Each of them hovers ambiguously on the frontier between public and private, official and personal.
Worcester: a Tudor list of bailiffs
We begin with a short text relating to the cathedral city of Worcester, which is preserved in an anonymous manuscript volume of miscellaneous collections and official memoranda completed in the early seventeenth century (Hereford and Worcester Record Office, 009:1/BA 2636 parcel 11 (no. 43701), fos 155–159). Written in more than one hand, this unsigned text has been identified (MacCulloch and Hughes, 1995: 236–239) as partly the work of the prominent citizen and religiously conservative merchant, John Rowland or Steynor (c. 1507–1580), who may have built upon a chronicle begun by his father-in-law Robert Yowle, four times bailiff and Member of Parliament for the city. Although Yowle was described by a contemporary as ‘a joly Catholik’, this did not prevent him from benefiting from the sale of monastic lands or holding civic office under Edward VI and Elizabeth. Steynor too seems to have outwardly conformed to the ecclesiastical status quo and to have taken advantage of the release of religious property onto the market. The preamble to his will is non-committal, but his widow Anne was listed as a recusant in 1592–1593. After Steynor’s death, his son John, a keen antiquary and historian, seems to have transcribed and continued the chronicle to 1578. To do so, he borrowed the text from the civic archives (see also MacCulloch, 1998).
Underneath the names of the elected mayors and aldermen and reigning monarchs starting in 1483 are a series of short descriptions of contemporary events, probably summarized from previous manuscripts or printed texts. The entries become increasingly expansive from the 1530s. They trace Henry VIII’s divorce of Katherine of Aragon and marriage to Anne Boleyn in 1534, the abolition of the ‘Pops power and authoriti’ and the birth of Princess Elizabeth. They record the beheading of Bishop John Fisher and Sir Thomas More for resisting the royal supremacy, the dissolution of the monasteries and the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536. The removal of ‘all maner of Images, crucifixes, and roodloftes’ is also registered, together with the order to chain the English bible in churches, the abrogation of holy days and Edward VI’s command that altars be replaced with portable communion tables at which people were to stand rather than kneel (MacCulloch and Hughes, 1995: 243, 247). The chronicler notes the battle at Mousehold Heath near Norwich and the ‘insurrection’ in Devonshire now known as the Prayer Book Rebellion. Following the accession of Queen Mary and her marriage to Philip II of Spain, he documents the arrival of Cardinal Pole and England’s formal reconciliation to Rome in 1557, before tracing the progress of the renewed reform programme under Elizabeth I and the northern rebellion against it led by the earls of Northumberland and Westmorland in 1569.
If national events provide the framework, the chronicler also observes the effects of Tudor religious policy close to home: the taking down of the bells in the leaden steeple of Worcester’s magnificent cathedral in 1539, the destruction of the lady chapel and the Jesus altar in 1550, the dismantling of a pair of organs and the truncation of the choir in 1552, and the burning of a cross and image of the Virgin in the churchyard in May 1557. Reference is additionally made to the arrival of the diocese’s first married Protestant bishop, John Hooper, along with his wife and daughter: his long beard and neglect of the rite of confirmation evoke particular comment (MacCulloch and Hughes, 1995: 244–248).
The terse character of the chronicler’s account obscures but cannot completely repress an undercurrent of lament and regret. The very detail in which he records the material dimensions of liturgical change is telling: this is a roll call of redundant sacred objects that betrays the writer’s attachment to the ritual splendour of the old religion. In the context of the abbreviated character of the rest, his list of ‘pixes, chalices, paxies, crosses, Sensors, curettes with other thinges of silver, and copes of the best’ is revealing, as is his pointed reference to the removal of the body of Christ in the guise of the reserved sacrament. He likewise dwells on the incineration of service books and the removal of ‘the great brasen candelstick and the beame of timber before the highe altar’ (MacCulloch and Hughes, 1995: 243, 246, 245). His text is a catalogue of absence and loss rendered poignant by its very brevity: of the end of traditional rituals and ceremonies such as the blessing of candles at Candlemas, the hallowing of ashes at the start of Lent, creeping to the cross on Good Friday and Easter processions. Like the official inventories of redundant liturgical objects compiled by churchwardens in response to Edwardian injunctions, it ‘encode[s] a memory of now outlawed pieties’ (Duffy, 2012: 121).
The length of the chronicler’s description of the lavish Marian re-edification of Worcester Cathedral is likewise revealing: utilizing the adjectives ‘fair’ and ‘goodly’, it clearly betrays his approval (MacCulloch and Hughes, 1995: 248). Even more compellingly, immediately after recording the destruction of the shrines and relics of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury and of St Wulfstan and St Oswald at Worcester in 1538, the writer notes that ‘att that tyme God sent suche lighteninge and thunder that all theraboutes thought the churche would fall on them …’ (MacCulloch and Hughes, 1995: 244). No explicit causal link is drawn, but the juxtaposition between events is surely significant. As in medieval chronicles, it functions as a kind of ‘celestial rebuke’ (Watkins, 2007: 49). For the chronicler, it was evidently no coincidence that the violent demolition of these hallowed sites was followed by a dangerous storm. Equally strikingly, in the vast calendar of events between
Intermingled in the chronicle with entries about these local and national developments are two references to the history of the Steynor family itself: the marriage of John Rowland or Steynor to Anne Yowle on 18 January 1546 and the death and burial of Robert Yowle in August 1560 (MacCulloch and Hughes, 1995: 245, 249). This is therefore a text that is both a quasi-official account of the city’s history and a rudimentary genealogical record. By reading between the lines and attending to its gaps and silences, we catch fleeting glimpses of the elusive and subdued voice of one family’s resistance to reform. Filtered through the medium of scribal copying and passed down the generations as a kind of legacy, this chronicle provides a platform for articulating discontent about the Reformation itself. Its presence in the public archive makes it a counter-history of religious change that is hidden in plain sight.
Chester: William Aldersey’s ‘Collection of the maiors who have governed this Cittie’
A second, contrasting example illustrates how the chronicle format could be harnessed by a fervent Protestant who supported the Tudor religious revolution. Describing itself as ‘A collection of the maiors who have governed this Cittie of Chester’, this manuscript is part of the Aldersey family archive now preserved in the Cheshire Record Office (MS ZCR 469/542). It was first compiled by William Aldersey (1543–1616), a merchant who served as mayor between 1595–1596 and 1613–1614 (Baldwin, 2004). It was then added to after his death by his nephew Thomas and continued up to 1637. As in the Worcester chronicle, its earliest entries are brief and derive from oral tradition or written and printed texts; those inserted within the lifetime of William are more extended and voluminous. Once again, we see the interweaving of civic and national memory in a work that is closely related to a number of other unattributed annals and chronicles that reside in the official archive (e.g. CLAS, 63/1/17/1) and the British Library (e.g. Harley MSS 2057, 2125, 2133; Add. MSS 29777, 29779; see also Clopper, 1979: xxxvi).
Hybrid in character, the book is a working document, shaped in a series of stages. It contains lists of civic office holders, notes on the ‘antiquitie of the cittie’ (CLAS, ZCR 569/542, fos 7r–12r), a table of London baker’s prices (fos 46v–47r) and a record of ‘diverse thingis of Naples’ (fo. 45v). These are prefaced by an introduction that presents Aldersey’s endeavours as an attempt to ‘bring … to some better perfection’ existing accounts of Chester’s history and to correct ‘by serche of Recordes and other olde and Aunt[ient] evidence’ the biographical and chronological errors with which these inherited texts were riddled (fo. 6r). This situates his work in relation to the scholarly ‘descriptions’, ‘surveys’ and ‘perambulations’ of localities and counties written by William Lambarde, John Stow and other antiquaries that began to be published in this period. The text is also indebted to a ‘breviary’ of Chester compiled by Archdeacon Robert Rogers, who died in 1595 and whose own son David reduced his collection of ‘scatered notes’ into chapters (CRO, ZCX/3; Clopper, 1979: xxxiii). Thereafter, however, the manuscript becomes a more traditional urban chronicle, although Aldersey’s ongoing preoccupation with pursuing evidence to clear ‘causes of dubte’ and to establish the truth is reflected in occasional marginal notes (CLAS, ZCR 569/542, fo. 25v).
Aldersey records a series of civic improvement projects such as the paving of streets, the ‘ingenious work’ to extend the conduit and the construction of a shambles in the cornmarket, alongside thunderstorms, fires, epidemics of pestilence and the severe winter of 1564 that froze the River Dee so solid that people played football upon it (fo. 29r). His chronicle also documents the course of the English Reformation in England: the suppression of the friars; the death of Edward VI; the accession of Mary I, who ‘altered religion’; the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth I on 17 November 1558, ‘whom god longe preserve’ (fo. 27v, 28r-v); the Northern Rising and the rebellion fomented by the earl of Tyrone in Ireland in 1594 (fo. 29r). It also charts the repercussions of Protestant reform in Chester, notably the struggles to suppress ‘popish’ recreations on the Sabbath and the Whitsun and Midsummer plays (fos 29v, 30r-v, 38r). Aldersey openly endorses the iconoclastic initiatives of Sheriff Mutton, ‘a godlie zealus man’ who, in accordance with ecclesiastical orders, pulled down standing crucifixes to remove the stumbling blocks that stood in the path of the weak (fo. 30r). He celebrates the many preachers and bishops who ‘sufferd for the testimony of the truthe’, including the Cheshire martyr George Marsh, burnt at Boughton in 1555 ‘with suche patience as was marvelus’ (fos 28r, 28v). The most striking entry of all is an extraordinary outburst against the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, which ends with a fervent prayer uttered in the first person: This yeare I cannot but with an acclamacion remember it that so divillishe a practize shuld ever emongst Christians be onse purposed or thought upon, let it be memorable to all papistes, And lett their owne consciences be Judges wether … [they] oughte not to be canonized by all posterie for incarnate divilles traytors, rebells and inhumane caniballs not worthie the name of men … that culd or wold & did plotte the fyfte of this Instant November the moste barberus blowing upp of that most sacred senate & courte of parliament … Therfore let all posteritie contemne, detested and utterlie abhorre … a patterne to all the lyke mynded (as I hope there is non) to be by ther example warned from it amen. (fo. 36r)
Aldersey’s text does not conceal his outlook behind the mask of studied neutrality adopted by medieval chroniclers. On the contrary, it gives unrestrained expression to an intense Protestant piety infused with a passionate strain of anti-Catholic prejudice. Intertwining civic with patriotic pride, it highlights how local and national memory coexisted and complemented each other.
In preserving the memory of Chester’s magistrates and governors, Aldersey’s chronicle is akin to a collective obituary. Along with similar commemorative lists in which the names of past mayors and their terms of office are rubricated in red (e.g. British Library, Add. MS 29777), it arguably provides an outlet for some of the impulses displaced by the ‘memorial crisis’ created by the Reformation (see Gordon and Rist, 2013). Charles Phythian-Adams (1994) has spoken of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century county histories as ‘a retrospective ceremonial substitute for the perpetual chantry’ (p. 230), and texts such as this perhaps performed a similar function. Like civic portraits, they served as mechanisms for commemorating deceased worthies in a Protestant world from which the possibility of intercessory prayer for their souls had been surgically removed. They bear out Andrew Gordon’s (2013) remark that ‘an interest in textualisation whether as a substitute or response to displaced rites’ was prominent within the culture of remembrance that religious reform engendered (p. 5; ch. 3).
And if William Aldersey’s book is a monument to his predecessors, in turn it came to operate as an archive of remembrance of his family and himself. Like the Worcester manuscript, this annalistic narrative of public occurrences is interspersed with private memoranda: Aldersey’s own birth and baptism in 1543 as documented by the parish register of St Oswald’s in Chester (CLAS, ZCR 569/542, fo. 27v), the death of his father Ralph in 1555 (fo. 28v), his marriage to Mary Brereton in 1578 (fo. 30r) and a scribbled Aldersey family tree and pedigree (fos 28r-v, 30r, 34v). In due course, the manuscript records William’s own death in 1616: the Collector of his booke departd this life the 26th day of October having bene twise mayor of the Citty A man whome all the dayes of his life trulie feared god/ a true lover of all good preachers, a wise sage & grave Cettecene beinge at his death 73 yeares olde. (fo. 38v)
Continued by his nephew Thomas, it has become a paper memorial to the man who compiled it.
Aldersey’s chronicle has survived because it became a family heirloom: straddling the boundary between a set of city annals and a personal journal, it was handed down to successive heirs and eventually deposited in the public archive in 1985, after allegedly being saved from incineration in a garden bonfire, although the tale of its timely rescue may itself be a pious myth (Cheshire Archives and Local Studies, catalogue entry on ZCR 469, Aldersey family collection). This is a document that quite literally bridges the gap between the generations: between those who witnessed and participated in historic events and those whose knowledge of them was inherited and second-hand. It also combines what Jan Assmann (2008) calls ‘communicative’ and ‘cultural memory’: memory that is transmitted informally over a limited period of time and memory that is shaped by and stored in durable institutional forms. The very acts of reading, continuing and transcribing such chronicles were acts of remembering. Accordingly, they may be seen as a kind of living museum, treasury and shrine – a mnemonic repository that facilitated dialogue between past and present and between the living and the dead.
Shrewsbury: ‘Dr Taylor’s Book’
The third example for examination is a folio volume containing 460 closely written pages now in the possession of Shrewsbury School (MS Mus X. 31). This is known as ‘Dr Taylor’s book’ after the learned clergyman, critic and philologist John Taylor, who bequeathed it with the rest of his library in 1766. Arranged under the heading of mayoral years, it begins in 1372 and ends around 1603. The earlier sections, covering the period up to the late 1570s, comprise brief summaries of events recounted in Stow’s Chronicle or Annales, but those relating to the lifetime of the anonymous writer are clearly drawn from local records and personal experience and recounted at greater length. This text too co-exists with and borrows parasitically from other official and semi-official annalistic accounts of the town that survive (e.g. British Library, Add. MS 21,024). Its compiler appears to have been closely connected with the civic administration of the town and to have had access to material in its chest of records. Internal evidence suggests that he may have been a draper.
‘Dr Taylor’s book’ casts unparallelled light on the history of Shrewsbury and Shropshire in the Elizabethan and early Jacobean era (for the relevant extracts, see Leighton, 1880). Its increasingly detailed entries describe the instalment and refurbishment of civic amenities, sittings of the great assize, the results of parliamentary elections, orders for the mustering of soldiers and the prices of staple grains such as wheat and rye. The chronicler also allocates space to notable benefactions, including the bequest made by William Lambe, citizen and clothworker of London, to the towns of Bridgenorth and Ludlow in 1577 to provide employment for the poor (Shrewsbury School MS Mus X. 31, fos 123v–124v). In this respect, his text doubles as a surrogate for traditional modes of remembering the charitable acts of civic worthies that had been discredited during the Reformation.
However, it is also filled with reports of events of a more sensational and sinister kind: outbreaks of plague and sweating sickness; devastating floods, tempests and fires; cases of suicide, murder and infanticide. The chronicler is fascinated with blazing stars, spectral sights, diabolical apparitions and deformed births, including the hatching of a ‘monsterous goslinge’ in a house in Shrewsbury with two feet like a swan and two like a goose in 1568–1569 (fo. 107r). If he received much of this news by word of mouth, in compiling his text he also drew liberally on ephemeral pamphlets and ballads, many of which he paraphrases very closely indeed. Attesting to the penetration of cheap print into the West Midlands, his chronicle records numerous ‘strange’ and ‘wonderful’ events, including the discovery of healing wells in Newnham Regis in 1579, the Suffolk schoolboy who fell into a trance at Christmas 1580, the catastrophic collapse of a gallery at the bearbaiting pit at Paris Garden in London in 1583, the worm found in a horse’s heart in Huntingdonshire in 1586, and the ‘deadly damppe’ that killed a judge, several magistrates and 11 members of a jury in Exeter in the same year (fos 132r, 138r, 146r, 164v). Nor are his horizons confined to the British Isles: he also incorporates stories of freak weather events and worrying omens in Switzerland, France, the Low Countries, Hungary and Silesia.
The moralizing tone of the chronicle mimics that of the providential journalism upon which it relies (Walsham, 1999). Departing from the diffident style typical of his precursors, the compiler of ‘Dr Taylor’s Book’ wears his piety more clearly on his sleeve. He revels in cautionary tales and takes smug satisfaction in the divine punishments that befall notorious sinners such as the blasphemous oath-taker Anne Averies, who died after vomiting up her own excrements in 1576 (fo. 120v). His entry regarding the mysterious groaning of a mighty oak tree in Brentford Park in Essex in 1595 ends effusively, declaring that this arboreal prodigy is … a just ensample of god to call us all to repentance to leave our excessive pride and umble our wickid and stony hartes seinge that preachers cannot amend us he cause the senseles thinges as treesse & other thinges to groane for our wickyd lyves and unmercifull dayes sleepinge in this worldly cradle of securitie beringe of a careles mynde, hastinge godes judgements and signifienge the latter daye cannot be farr of, god gyve us grace to repent in tyme Amen Amen for his mercye sacke. (fos 206r-v)
Attentive to the restless intervention of the Almighty in human affairs to correct and chastise, he also understands the disturbing events he records as apocalyptic signs that he is living in the latter days of the world. Signalling an avid interest in biblical chronology (see Hopes, 2014), he chooses to date each entry not merely with reference to Anno domini but also to Anno mundi. His text echoes the preoccupations of another possible source: Stephen Batman’s popular Doome warning all men to the judgemente (1581), an expanded English translation of the German humanist Conrad Lycosthenes’ Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon (1558), a Latin anthology of signs and wonders foreshadowing the impending apocalypse. Although Batman offers no explicit commentary on the meaning of the portents he gathers from friends, acquaintances and printed texts, his book is freighted with topical and political significance (Walsham, 2012).
Refracted through the lens of the news literature that he read so voraciously and which he ventriloquized, the Shrewsbury chronicler’s religious convictions are earnest Protestant ones. Thankful that he lives in ‘the cleare light of the gospell’ (fo. 139v), he takes pride in the courage of the martyrs burnt under Mary I, marvelling at the ‘meeckenes’ with which they faced the fiery flames, ‘to the greate glory of God to whom be prase for ever’ (fo. 100r). He rejoices in the defeat of the Spanish Armada (fo. 173r), overtly professes loyalty to Queen Elizabeth I as ‘a lovinge debora’ (fo. 220v) and expresses violent distaste for ‘rancke’ and ‘arrogant traytors’ and the ‘enymies’ of God’s word (fos 133v, 145r, 155v). A loyal member of the Church of England who deploys the language of God’s ‘chosen flock’ (fo. 211r), he nevertheless distances himself from ‘the secte of the purytanes’ (fo. 114v) and from religious extremists such as the illiterate Northamptonshire maltster William Hacket, ‘a dampnid and desperate wretche’ whose accomplices Coppinger and Arthington (two ‘witles creatures’) stood up on a cart in London’s Cheapside in 1591 and proclaimed him the messiah (fo. 188v). He comments on the controversy in Shrewsbury regarding the erection of maypoles in 1589, frowning upon the ‘lewde persons’ who threatened the learned preacher of St Mary’s Church, John Tomkys, when he called for ‘reformacion’ of these traditional pastimes (fo. 175r; see also Collinson, 1998). But he is evidently not one of ‘the perfect protestantes’ who responded to Tomkys’ death in June 1592 with ‘great lamentacion’ (fo. 190v).
The chronicler’s identity remains a mystery. He rarely uses the pronoun ‘I’, but frequently employs ‘us’ and ‘we’, mostly in the mode of collective supplication and prayer that was a characteristic feature of Protestant sermons and liturgies. His pious interjections reflect a world in which prayer is no longer directed primarily towards interceding for the dead but towards securing communal repentance and the intervention of a severe but benevolent God. While he makes no direct allusions to his family or himself, this is nevertheless a text that seems to have been preserved both by and for his successors, for whom he tries to make sense of events in Shropshire, England and Europe in the context of past developments and to preserve their memory. Oriented as much towards the future as the past, he reads the signs of the times within an eschatological framework that anxiously anticipated the imminent end of time. In such an atmosphere, it is the fate of the imagined community of the city and nation that concerns the chronicler rather than his own.
Heterogeneous, flexible and polyphonic, all three of these chronicles are texts in which local and national, civic and familial, communal and individual memory converge and coexist. They fuse the annalistic tradition with antiquarianism and providential history in ways that question assumptions about the incapacity of the genre to adapt in the face of intellectual, cultural and technical change and about its consequent decline into disuse.
Chronicles and ‘autobiography’
Intriguingly, these documents also share some features with the forms of life-writing that began to proliferate in the early modern period, including journals and diaries. They blur and challenge the distinction we draw between ‘historiography’ and what, only in the late eighteenth century, came to be termed ‘autobiography’.
The appearance of autobiography in the sixteenth century is part of an enduring teleological story about the rise of individualism. In their search for the ‘eloquent I’ (Webber, 1968), scholars have long identified the Renaissance as a crucible in which the impulse for self-fashioning emerged and seen the advent of Protestantism as a powerful stimulus to habits of introspection. They have heralded the texts that these processes engendered as early precursors of the genre in its secular modern form (Greenblatt, 1980; Mascuch, 1997; Taylor, 1989). Our understanding of them, however, has been transformed over the past few decades. Tom Webster (1996) has subjected spiritual journals to sophisticated scrutiny and shown that they cannot be understood outside the theological context from which they arose. The vocabulary and voices of interiority that emanate from them are the product of a religious culture that paradoxically revolved around the duty of denying the self: they were a form of ‘writing to redundancy’ (p. 33). Building upon Margo Todd’s (1992) comment that it is necessary ‘to locate introspection … in the midst of an overpowering concern with the Christian community’ (p. 254), Andrew Cambers has demonstrated that many ‘diaries’ defy presuppositions about their private status. They were written for the benefit of posterity, circulated scribally and played a key role in the godly sociability of the family and the surrogate kinship group of the gathered church or incipient sect. ‘Multilayered sites of conversation’ within and between generations, they underline the corporate nature of Protestant piety (Cambers, 2007: 824).
Other scholars have also contributed to reconceptualizing ‘autobiography’ and extracting it from the generic straitjacket in which it has long been imprisoned. Investigating a range of works that do not neatly fit dominant templates, they have trained their ears to ‘listen for inwardness’ (Skura, 2008) in unlikely places, including polemic and fiction (Conti, 2014). Adopting an even more capacious and creative definition, Adam Smyth’s Autobiography in Early Modern England (2010) focuses less on texts that bear the classic hallmarks of more recent examples of the genre than on a culture of life-writing whose ‘very inclusivity and taxonomical strangeness’, ‘generic unfixity and experimentation’ (pp. 1, 14), test our inherited assumptions. He discovers individuals writing about their lives in a variety of ostensibly unpromising genres – from bureaucratic records such as parish registers and churchwardens’ accounts to financial account books and published almanacs. While some defend the value of ‘autobiography’ as a heuristic tool (Amelang, 1998; Lynch, 2012 12), others eschew the term because of ‘the problematic baggage of the concept of the self’ that it carries with it, arguing that it is more of a hindrance than a help to our understanding of early modern cultures of documentation in which the personal and public, private and collective, were interconnected (Scott-Warren: 155; see also Spearing, 2012).
Although the chronicle as a genre has been virtually absent from these discussions, many of the foregoing observations help to illuminate its own elasticity and instability in a time of transition. And it is telling that such texts have themselves sometimes been mis-categorized as forms of life-writing. The manuscript composed by the merchant taylor, citizen and parish clerk of Holy Trinity, Henry Machyn, covering the years between 1550 and 1563 is a case in point (British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius Fv; Machyn, n.d.). Edited by John G. Nichols in 1848 as a ‘diary’, close inspection reveals that this too is a document in the civic chronicle tradition. Listing executions, punishments, political events and the terms of office of civic dignitaries, it serves both as a record of the heraldic funerals for which Machyn supplied elaborate trappings and as the journal of a conservative Londoner who lived through the turmoil of the mid-Tudor period and observed the obliteration of other forms of memory-making and commemoration. Partly compensating for the loss of these time-honoured rituals, it opens an oblique window into the world view of an individual who seems to have complied obediently but ruefully with the changes ushered in by the English Reformation. Like the Worcester chronicler, Machyn’s sympathy for the proscribed Catholic faith and partisan perspective occasionally shines through his persona as a detached observer, especially in the passages pertaining to Mary’s reign. Once again, the absences are as revealing as the presences: he says surprisingly little about the burnings of the Protestant martyrs at Smithfield of which he must have been an earwitness if not eyewitness. This was an aspect of the Marian Counter Reformation that he apparently preferred to forget and omit from the record (Gibbs, 2006).
The book refers to its compiler in the third person and at one remove, as in the entry regarding ‘Monsieur Machyn de Henry’, who ate half a bushel of oysters and drank claret, ale and muscatel with his neighbours in Anchor Lane (Machyn, n.d., 30 July 1557). He uses the same formal title to record the public penance he was obliged to perform at Paul’s Cross in November 1561 for spreading slanderous sexual gossip to the effect that the French Protestant preacher Jean Veron had been ‘taken with a wench’, although he adds in a wry and more familiar moment that ‘the sam Hare [Harry] knellyd down [be]fore master Veron and the byshope’ begging their forgiveness (London Provisioner’s Chronicle, 2 November 1561). As Andrew Gordon (2013) comments, this is the point at which the text comes ‘comes closest to the effect of intimacy more commonly associated with autobiographical forms’ (p. 58). Described as ‘my cronacle’ in his will (Mortimer, 2002: 986), Machyn’s book sits awkwardly in the mould of an ‘ego-document’ (Dekker, 2002; Schulze, 1996). It must rather be seen on a continuum with his activities as a public record keeper in a society in which the creators and curators of archives were called remembrancers (Gordon, 2013, ch. 1; see also Hanebaum, 2016). Combining private information with collective experience, Machyn’s ‘cronacle’ occupies the same ambiguous zone between historical and life-writing as the examples discussed above. It further underscores the point that early modern England was a culture in which the boundaries between ‘chronicle’ and ‘diary’, ‘annal’ and ‘autobiographical journal’, were porous and in flux.
Conclusion
Chronicles are often perceived as emblems and talismans of continuity, but the scribally transmitted specimens that have been the subject of this article highlight less their static immutability than their dynamic transformation. Facilitating a series of transactions between past and present, they attest to the entanglement of semi-official civic and corporate remembrance with elements of what we now call individual ‘subjectivity’. Our obsessive search for the origins of modern selfhood may lead us to look for such traces of ‘inwardness’ in early modern chronicles at the expense of acknowledging their role in documenting factual and experiential knowledge for spiritual, didactic and practical use. But this is a temptation that we must resist. Texts in which neither connected narrative nor explicit use of the first person was necessarily present and in which personal recollection is as often enshrined in pregnant silences as in vocal pronouncements, they stretch the parameters of the generic category we call ‘life-writing’ and compel us to reconsider its relationship with other forms of early modern ‘historiography’.
The lingering tendency to treat ‘chronicles’ and ‘diaries’ as completely different types of text occludes significant points of intersection and overlap. It reflects epistemological taxonomies that are both unhelpful and anachronistic in the context of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Paul Ricoeur (2004) has made the astute observation that our impulse to polarize ‘public’ and ‘private memory’ is itself an historical artefact – a manifestation of the gradual estrangement of two pools of knowledge about the past from each other (p. 95). Chronicles offer insight into the contours of early modern memory culture in an era before the bifurcation of these universes of discourse, but within which we can nevertheless detect stirrings of change. One symptom of this metamorphosis was the eventual exile of emotion and the first person pronoun from professional historical discourse into the realm of the diary and memoir. The positivist brand of academic history championed by Leopold von Ranke in the nineteenth century insisted that expressions of opinion and interior feeling were inappropriate for practitioners of a discipline aspiring to the impartial recounting of the ‘truth’ about the past. It involved what Gabriel Motzkin (1994) has called ‘the objectification of subjective experience’ (p. 108).
The conventions that governed the medieval and early modern tradition of chronicle writing also prized neutrality and inhibited overt self-reflection, but for other reasons: they arose from the assumption that their compilers were merely recorders and ciphers of God’s providential interventions in the world, not its interpreters. They conceptualized the historical texts they created as archives of facts rather than critical analyses of their causation and meaning. However, by dissecting and reading them carefully, we can trace the manner in which England’s prolonged and fractious Reformation was both remembered and forgotten. Ironically, a genre that for some Protestants was emblematic of the errors of the Catholic past may prove to be one of the most revealing routes into understanding both how it was experienced by its eyewitnesses and the process by which it gradually became entrenched in contemporary consciousness as a historic event (see Lyon, in press). Fusing chronology and genealogy, chronicles remained versatile vehicles of social memory. They served as repositories for recording information about the past and present for reference in the future, and they helped to fill the void left by the Reformation’s own profound and destructive assault upon the traditional machinery for commemorating previous generations. In conclusion, we should speak less of the decay and death of the chronicle in early modern England than of its reinvigoration.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
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