Nomen est omen? Scribal (self-)identification in the medieval English hinterlands (c.1100–c.1300)
Abstract. Foregrounding new techniques developed in relation to the internationally significant (and yet comparatively underexplored) archive of medieval deeds at Magdalen College, Oxford, this collaborative paper will explore the activities and identities of scribes and clerks working in the medieval English hinterlands during the central Middle Ages.
It is a widely held but rarely articulated (and hardly ever challenged) assumption among pre-modern historians and palaeographers that, for most of the Middle Ages, scribes were active either inside monastic communities (some with their own scriptoria/writing offices) or, from the later medieval period, in sophisticated urban centres (many with their own commercialised workshops, some of which were serving the needs of both a nascent university and the municipal development of the city/town more generally). In both monastic and urban scenarios, scholars have long acknowledged the importance of professional scribes to the documentary culture(s) of these worlds from the eleventh century onwards. What has heretofore received relatively little scholarly attention, by contrast, are the activities of scribes and clerks working in—or in relation to—the medieval hinterlands, be it small towns, villages, or isolated hamlets. This paper helps redress this imbalance by examining the scribal and documentary ecosystems of medieval rural England through the internationally significant (and yet comparatively underexplored) archives of Magdalen College, Oxford. Home to more than 13,000 medieval deeds, of which well over 4,000 date to the period before c.1300, the Magdalen collection is comprised of acts issued in relation to the landed estates of a range of small ecclesiastical institutions that were annexed to the college at the time of its foundation (1458), in particular priories and rural hospitals. As our recent collaborative work on one small part of this collection has shown, medieval hospitals and their archives offer a particularly fruitful gateway for the identification of rural scribes and professional clerks, many of whom were just as active as their monastic/urban counterparts and were commissioned to produce documents for a range of institutions in the locality that otherwise lacked in-house scribal expertise. Having explored as a testbed and case study the archive of Aynho Hospital, which was located in a small village some thirty kilometres to the north of Oxford, we have shown how a combination of traditional methods (forensic, comparative analysis of witness lists and scribal hands) and new techniques (mass digital photography and vector graphic manipulation of the results) allows for the work of those scribes active in Aynho’s vicinity to be identified and, in some instances, for these otherwise anonymous individuals to be named and their activities further contextualised. Expanding our survey beyond the Aynho archive to larger parts of the Magdalen collection, this paper will show how the new techniques we have developed to date allow for more than just a simple case study of a specific archival corpus, but instead provide a methodology for identifying scribal milieux and local documentary cultures, the principles of which have the potential to be applied to charter corpora produced within similarly circumscribed localities by multiple contemporary scribes. In presenting the findings of our research at this symposium, this paper will also touch upon issues such as multigraphism, writing speed and its effects on form, multidisciplinary approaches, etc. Since our rural scribes also occasionally identify themselves as charter scribes, something their urban counterparts never do, this paper will also be able to articulate some hypotheses as to the possible reasons behind this self-identification, thereby bringing these findings into conversation with recent ideas about medieval ‘publishing’.