The Search for Parity: Rulers, Relationships and the Remote Past in Britain's Chronicles, c. 1100-1300

The period c. 1100-c. 1300 saw a flourishing of historical writing in England and Wales, which included a burgeoning interest in the shared remote past of the island of Britain. There has been a tendency to view these narratives as chronicles of Anglo-centric civilization, progress, and expansion on the one hand; on the other, as accounts of the kingdoms of Britain and their struggles for independence and hegemony. In some senses, it has been sensible to view this period of historical writing in light of conflict. In the two centuries between the Norman Conquest of England and Edward I's conquest of Wales, the people of Britain-as well as their rulers and elites-faced civil war, pitched battles and sieges, and contested borders. However, it is possible to discover what chroniclers of the remote past thought not only about conquest and struggle, but also about moments of peaceful, formal or even merely respectful interaction between rulers, obscured as these might be by accounts of short-term or protracted violence and oppression between peoples.

We contend that their historians were engaged in another kind of struggle which played out on the pages of the remote past: the search for parity. The presence of this search is not an obvious phenomenon in scholarly thought about high medieval Britain which highlights, rightly, the very real presence of conquest and colonization on the one hand, and of competition and struggles for self-realization on the other. The glimmers of real effort on the part of Britain's medieval chroniclers to make alliances and meetings work, in a past that was long over, have the potential to provide a set of new and refined insights about historical writing in this period and qualities it shares in both England and Wales, across language and genre, and the precise nature of any political commentary it is really making. We argue that chroniclers' revisions to the past often sought to refine and to improve the relationships between leaders, which will revise how contemporary historians should view chroniclers' perceptions of the differences in statuses of the peoples of Britain.

Our project considers meetings, missives and messages purportedly exchanged between and among rulers in Britain's remote past (that is, the era of the Britons, Picts and Scots, and early Anglo-Saxon settlement) in twelfth-century chronicles of Britain. It looks specifically at narratives of meetings and exchanges (in writing or via a messenger) in the past that were rewritten based on existing accounts, interpolated into existing accounts, or perhaps entirely imagined. The significance of newly-written correspondence in these chronicles lies in how it served to redefine relationships between early medieval rulers and peoples in the minds of twelfth-century readers. Our core primary sources are several important Latin and Welsh chronicles with several characteristics in common: those that a) exhibit some knowledge, direct or indirect, of Geoffrey of Monmouth, b) write at some length about Britain's remote past, c) are at least in part rewritings of earlier sources, and d) display an awareness and interest in interactions among rulers in Britain pre-900. In Wales, the core sources are the Welsh Latin Annals, the Welsh Brut y Tywysogion and the Brenhinedd y Saesson; in England, they are Geoffrey of Monmouth and his contemporaries, and the later twelfth-century works of Roger of Howden and Richard of Devizes.

There are three categories of non-academic beneficiaries: first, secondary school students (Key Stage 3, GCSE and A-Level); second, secondary school teachers in England and Wales (in particular, leaders in curricular design); third, the Historical Association.

Our goal is to address two problems facing current secondary education, which we have identified in conversation with the Historical Association's CEO, Rebecca Sullivan, and Melanie Jones in the Education Department: first, students' assumptions that the Middle Ages are either 'alien' or are home to modern fantasy literature; second, the problem of teaching the Middle Ages as 'dehumanized' due to relative scarcity not only of primary source materials, but also adequate classroom resources which make these accessible to students and teachers.

We propose a solution: to provide research and insights (based on specific case studies from our work on chronicles) which will help teachers and students to compare representations of the experience of conquest, conflict and concord across time-both across the Middle Ages, and between the Middle Ages and more modern era. We plan to target misconceptions at their origins: in the original sources and their transmission; and in myths about ways in which human experience has changed over time.

We have developed a plan to work with the Historical Association in order to realize this solution, and we have established definite pathways to impact on four fronts in England and Wales. First, we will work with teachers to share our findings to aid curriculum development based on chronicles' and their interpretations, and imaginative recreations, of alliance and conflict in medieval Britain. Beneficiaries will include three different types of student papers: Understanding One Medieval Event and its Legacy (The Norman Conquest, Key Stage 3 (Year 7) and optional GCSE subject), Change over Time (A-Level Paper: 'The Experience of Warfare'), and Thematic Approaches to History (GCSE Paper: 'Warfare over Time'). Second, we have planned an intensive 2-day residential seminar in Oxford on the theme of 'Conquest Histories and Remembrance' for six secondary school teachers who are leaders in their field to disseminate our findings and collaborate on curriculum design. Third, we will help to develop primary-source in-class resources for the secondary curriculum in Wales, to help students understand the widespread Welsh awareness of a shared North Sea past, and to show that medieval Wales was far from isolated. Fourth, we will create podcasts (hosted by the Historical Association) based on our research, as a resource for students and teachers in order to stimulate new questions about medieval chronicles.