London Governance and Middle English Literature: Pathways to Impact

Professor Linne Mooney and Dr Estelle Stubbs (RA) were PI and RA on the major AHRC research grant, Identification of the Scribes Responsible for Copying Major Works of Middle English Literature, 2007-11, made a remarkable discovery in the course of their research: almost all of the earliest manuscripts of works by Geoffrey Chaucer and his contemporary late fourteenth and early fifteenth-century London writers were copied by men who held the highest bureaucratic offices at the London Guildhall. For instance, the two scribes responsible for the four earliest manuscripts of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (writing two manuscripts each) were both employed as clerks in the Guildhall, one as Chamber Clerk and then Common Clerk, and the other as Recorder's Clerk. Tracing records of the lives of these men, Mooney and Stubbs further discovered that they were members of a faction of London citizenry who appear to have advocated the use of English, as opposed to French or Latin, in the conduct of business and governance in London in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Thus their literary copying may have been linked to their advocacy of English as the language of Englishmen. Mooney and Stubbs published a book for academics in 2013, but these discoveries about who were the men of influence who copied and disseminated the literary writings of Chaucer and his contemporaries in this crucial linguistic period of English history will be of interest to many more people than academic historians of the book. Through collaboration with the London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) where the records upon which the discoveries were based are kept, we will now extend the reach of these new findings to a wider non-academic audience, to interest the general public in medieval London literature and government, and to increase the profile of the London Metropolitan Archives.
London Metropolitan Archives will work in partnership with us to disseminate these findings to a wider audience of school learners and adults in the London area. LMA works with over 200 schools, mostly in Greater London, and has been running a schools programme for about twelve years. The staff of LMA will coordinate the production of resource learning materials related to these findings for the school subjects of literature, history, drama and art, with Stubbs and Mooney providing ideas and information from the AHRC-funded research. These sessions will relate to the National Curriculum and also to the Mayor of London's newly emerging London Curriculum. This partnership will enable LMA to extend their offer around the specialist subject of medieval history and literature, demonstrating its relevance today. Sessions developed as part of this project would be embedded in LMA's regular programmes, thus ensuring its legacy.
We also propose to develop better facilities for adults to use the archival materials around which Mooney and Stubbs's findings were based through digitizing images of them and making these available in the reading rooms of the London Metropolitan Archives. This will promote access to these amazing documents while ensuring that the originals are safely preserved.
London Metropolitan Archives also hosts school visits and events for adult learners in association with artists and professionals in the crafts of book production (calligraphers, book-binders, etc.) which for the duration of this project and beyond will be linked to the discoveries of Mooney and Stubbs in the AHRC Research Project.
Outcomes will include learning resource materials for schools, self-learning packs, maps for self-guided tours, and digitized documents accessible in the LMA reading and education rooms, all of which will continue to be used long after completion of the project.

The activities and learning resource materials developed with support of the AHRC Follow-On grant will awaken in school-age learners a new excitement about the history of their city, its people, and their role in influencing language and literature in the late Middle Ages; it will offer them hands-on learning tools for discovering medieval culture through history, literature, art and drama. These learning resource materials will thus help students and teachers to make links between their studies of history, literature, art and drama with the medieval past of the city They will bring the past to light for them by sharing the discoveries of AHRC-funded research about the individuals (names, biographies, places of work and residence, networks of friends and patrons, etc.) who were involved in writing by hand the earliest copies of English literature, composing English government documents, and influencing the shift from French and Latin to English at this crucial period. Adult learners--librarians and archivists, amateur historians, and interested members of the public in general--will be given an opportunity to learn about these discoveries by academics that affect their daily lives, and will be excited by awareness of the lives of the men who were responsible for preserving for us writings like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, walking in their footsteps in and around the London Guildhall and in London neighbourhoods.
Teachers, school-leavers, and members of the public will become more aware of the rich sources of information about their history held in the London Metropolitan Archives. They will be inspired by greater knowledge of the history of their city, its literature, and the men who recorded both history and literature in the late medieval period.
The London Metropolitan Archives will benefit when more members of the public are inspired to take an interest in local London history and through this the Archives will benefit from increased footfall in their reading rooms, and enhanced profile for their medieval archival materials.