Writing history at Burton Abbey: national politics, local networks and the construction of the past in medieval England

The thirteenth century saw audacious governmental experiment in medieval England, including Magna Carta, baronial reforms and opposition to royal power. Historians have analysed these events mostly from a regnal-centric approach, using 19th-century printed editions, which conceal how news was spread, how public documents were disseminated and how local institutions co-opted them to serve their agendas. This project aims to analyse a key source for the period, the Annals of Burton, alongside archive registers produced simultaneously, to uncover networks of scribes and circulation of manuscripts, revealing how the self-fashioning of local elite institutions relied on an insertion within a national narrative.
Recent historians have analysed both chronicles and cartularies in new and exciting ways, but my thesis will be the first to consider the two together and analyse how they are related. In the process, I hope to shed new light on how a monastery understood and constructed the past, both national and local, ultimately offering a reflection on what it means to write history in the Middle Ages.