Mental Maps: Sense of Place in Medieval British Historical Writing

Abstract

Bede opened his Ecclesiastical History (completed c. 731) with a description of Britain as ‘an island of the ocean, lying at the northwest of the habitable part of the earth, which is bounded by the sea’. He set his narrative of the process by which Christianity was introduced among the peoples of Britain in the context of the Church’s universal mission to take the faith to the ends of the earth, and saw the conversion of the English as the fulfilment of Christ’s last injunction to his apostles. This essay explores the sense of place expressed by medieval English historians. I consider how ideas of place changed to reflect shifts in the political geography of the isles, as the early English kingdoms were united into a single realm (first called Engla lond in the early eleventh century) and then examining the implications of the Norman Conquest, when England became part of a wider Norman empire. Further, the essay considers how English writers perceived and described the relationship between the English and their neighbours, Welsh, Scots and Irish and how the idea of Britain changed over the period. As well as the writings of Bede, I consider the evidence for the idea of place provided by Lives of English saints (both the early lives of Gregory, Wilfrid, Cuthbert and Guthlac but also Lives of the tenth-century reformers Æthelwold, Dunstan and Oswald), the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and other writings associated with the court of King Alfred including Asser’s Life of the king, the Latin epitome of the Chronicle produced by the tenth-century historian Æthelweard, the Encomium Emmae, and the writings of various twelfth-century English historians including Eadmer, Henry of Huntingdon, John of Worcester, Orderic Vitalis Simeon of Durham and William of Malmesbury. Through their eyes we will see how historians reflected changing political, social, and cultural attitudes towards place and how a writer’s immediate locality and regional identity helped to colour his wider geographical understanding.

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