The Blending of Theoretical and Patriotic Answers
Historiography, still under humanist influence throughout the 1500s, became involved in and colored by the various national developments. In Italy it showed, up to 1559, the traces of the great upheavals and afterwards the marks of tranquility. In France, the turmoil of the civil wars of the second half of the sixteenth century projected the search for the proper past into the debate on national salvation. That led historians and historically minded scholars to concern themselves with Frankish customary law, feudalism, and the question of French identity (German, Roman, or Celtic). Ehzabethan England, more tranquil and sure of itself, produced histories of many kinds: most characteristic of them were the antiquarian works. In the vein of Varro and Biondo some scholars explored the antiquities of England. But even that endeavor touched on questions of national identity and politics, particularly in the studies of Anglo-Saxon laws. Indeed, the nineteenth-century debate between Romanists and Germanists in England, France, and Germany can be traced to the 1500s. And antiquaries and legal historians can at least partially be credited with history’s later concerns with sources, archives, and institutions.
The struggle for the proper French past. After 1560, what with campaign following campaign for the French, humanist historians would have had ample opportunity to practice their favorite genre: political and military history. Yet the best such histories were written by Italians—for example, by Enrico Caterino Davila, an Italian sympathizer of the queen-mother Catherine de’ Medici. He observed events closely and documented his account carefully. But even he was more interested in revealing large-scale shifts in political power than in narrating the numerous events. He shared that interest with a group of the most influential French scholars: lawyers and teachers of law whose attention was focused less on individuals and their actions than on such collective forces as laws and customs. After 1550, when the battle against the mos italicus had been won, they pushed the historical study of law into new directions. Many of them were at one time or another connected with the University of Bourges—Charles Dumoulin, Francois le Douaren, Francois Hotman, Francois Baudouin, and Jacques Cujas. Others were legal experts at the royal court and at the courts of law. Theseroims (those garbed in the robe longue) spearheaded the new exploration of the French past.
The early proponents of the mos gallicus had still wished to reestablish the “pure” Roman law as a universal model. That appreciation changed when some of the legists became Protestants and extended their dislike of the Roman Catholic church to everything Roman. Fran9ois Hotman considered all Roman influences on the French as corrupt. Not only was the Corpus juris civilis an unreliable jumble of republican and imperial Roman laws, but when Roman law had been imposed on the Franks it had suppressed the Frankish law that had best fit Frankish society. Roman law, Hotman held, was not an ideal, universal code but simply the law of the Roman people. Hesitantly, Hotman had taken one small step toward the historical interpretation of law by tying together changes in law and society. Unfortunately, however, he stepped back when he simply replaced Roman law with a new “proper” and timeless model, Frankish law. Nevertheless, Hotman’s approach led to an exploration of Frankish law and in due course to a new attitude towards the Middle Ages which the humanists had so despised. When legal scholars studied that period, they puzzled over the origin of feudalism and objected to a Romanist interpretation for that development too. Dumoulin showed that the Roman law knew no fiefs, and Hotman spelled out directly their German origin.
And there was the troublesome question of what kind of people the French were. For centuries the Trojan origin of the Franks, suggested by “Fredegar,” had given pride and self-confidence to the French. So eminent a scholar as Gaguin, who most likely doubted the Trojan connection, deferred to it nevertheless. Paolo Emilio, an Italian humanist with the irreverence of the new criticism and without a vested interest in a Trojan ancestry for the French, pronounced the Franks to be Germans. Beatus Rhenanus eventually proved Emilio’s assumption right. Hotman, a Protestant of German origin, was eager to substitute the German-origin thesis for the Trojan and Roman theses and bluntly labeled the Trojan tradition “fables and stories to please.” Although all evidence pointed to the German origin of the Franks, it was not popular with the French and the emphasis soon shifted from a Franco-German to a Franco-Gallic origin. Guillaume Postel had reemphasized the importance of the Celtic Gauls for early French history. They were, he thought, a people directly linked to the Israelites through Gomar, one of Noah’s grandsons. Baudouin even labeled the Franks as Gauls who had lived east of the Rhine. Later, some scholars with an antiquarian bent became skeptical about such pronouncements. Etienne Pasquier, himself most likely convinced of the validity of the Germanic position, escaped a decision by labeling the whole issue of origins unimportant. Who could tell now what had happened in the misty past?
In their discussions of French law, the legists had assumed law to be the supreme force in shaping the body politic, and in their researches on law they had learned to appreciate the value of history. Francois Baudouin declared flatly that he had become aware that law books resulted from history and that whatsoever was remarkable in history evolved from books of law. He also realized that, as the areas of historical interest changed, so did the historian’s sources of knowledge. If history dealt not with battles, heroes, or moral exempla but with the slowly changing law and social institutions, the story of the past could no longer be reconstructed by simply accepting the authority of former historians and their accounts; after all, most historians of the past had ignored the institutional structure of society. The new gates to the past were the primary sources (primi autores), which now were esteemed, critically assessed, and searched for bias. They would be the new authorities prevailing in cases of doubt, overruling even centuries-old traditions.
King Francis II entrusted Jean du Tillet with the reorganization of the royal archives, thus starting a trend toward systematic archival collections. By the 1560s scholars still used archives rarely, because the collections were usually poorly organized and because access to them was not routinely granted, often being given only on the basis of partisanship. After all, even legal antiquarians did not always produce works for mere scholarly contemplation. Thus Jean du Tillet and Pierre Rthou, another keeper of the royal archives, lent their legal, antiquarian, and historical skills to the support of their monarch. Such a connection of law, history, and service to France was typical for the members of an erudite circle that included, besides Pithou, Qaude de Fauchet, Louis le Caron, Antoine Loisel, and Etienne Pasquier. The latter wrote the monumental Re-cherches de la France, describing in ten books France’s poHtical, judicial, and financial institutions, its church, language, and general past. Only de Thou’s History of His Own Time achieved a comparable recognition. These scholars did not allow their Gallic sympathies to conflict with their methodology, for which truth in history writing was guaranteed by eyewitness reports (the old authority) and by critically examined and verified documents (the new authority).
English historiography: tradition, pride, and tranquility. Love for the chronicle continued in England through the 1500s. A number of scholars even tried to satisfy popular tastes for a national history by writing chronicles. Edward Hall pleased Protestant and Tudor sympathizers with his Union of the Two Noble and Illustrious Families of Lancaster and York. Then Thomas Lanquet and Thomas Cooper abbreviated a number of chronicles into one compact account. An Epitome of Chronicles (1549). It ushered in a boom in short histories. The printer Richard Grafton, who had continued Hall’s work, included too much material from Creation onward in his own Chronicle at Large and failed in the market. Finally Raphael Holinshed and some coauthors pleased their contemporaries with The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland. It provided a rich and appealing mixture of material taken from many chronicles, legends, Polydore Vergil, and Matthew Parker’s extraordinary collection of chronicles and documents, and remained a treasure house of information for a long time.
John Stow, a tailor by profession but a scholar by vocation, compiled the Summary of English Chronicles (1565), particularly those of Hardyng, Fabyan, and Hall, and updated it from time to time. The share of his own contributions increased with every edition. By 1592 his attempt to provide an English history had grown into the Annales of England. Stow never abandoned his intention to write a really new history of England, but he failed to produce one. Then, in 1603, the Elizabethan era came to a close and with it faded the age of the chronicle,
The wave of translations and printed editions of ancient historians enhanced the new historical awareness sweeping over England and the continent. Henry Savile’s translation and edition of Tacitus and Philemon Holland’s livy, Suetonius, and Ammianus Marcellinus editions were among the best-known examples. By 1600 others included Thomas Nicholls’s Thucydides, Thomas North’s Plutarch, Thomas Lodge’s Josephus, and Thomas Heywood’s Sallust. Yet, though classical historians were widely read, English historical records were not ignored. Savile loved the classical historians, but he also worked on the chronicles of William of Malmesbury, Richard Howden, and Henry of Huntingdon. Indeed, the editing and publishing of English historical accounts went on at a quick pace.
During the Elizabethan age, with its peculiar mixture of tradition, innovation, and national pride, the discovery of the English past proceeded briskly but not necessarily predictably. English scholars focused on their love of aniquities, which they had imbibed from the works of ancient writers and also from the Italian antiquarian literature from Biondo to Onofrio Panvinio. Antiquarian history prospered in England after 1570 because it allowed scholars to satisfy their curiosity about the past, their desire to acknowledge the new standards of precision, their quest for demonstrating the proud history of towns, regions and the nation, their demand that history depict all of life, and, one may suspect, their predilection for empirical data.
Preliminary work for the antiquarian period of English historiography had been done during Henry VIII’s reign. When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, the threat of destruction of many records prompted historians to salvage whatever they could. John Bale gathered as many manuscripts as he could, only to lose them again when he himself became an exile. His plan of a depository for every shire, a mixture of museum, archive, and hbrary, failed, too. Then in the 1570s, antiquarianism began in earnest. While historians influenced by humanist ideals told of individuals and their actions in narratives, antiquarians studied the remains of collective life. For centuries, the narrative and antiquarian approaches were rarely combined.
Still, in Henry VHI’s reign, John Leland drew up a visionary plan for English scholars to inventory all references to British place names in classical literature and in later English works and to ascertain the actual locations referred to. Eventually inscriptions and objects such as coins, tombs, and ruins were added as research topics. On the basis of these new data and already available accounts, a chorography—that is, a description and mapping of England—was to be accomplished, to be followed by a county-by-county history of England. While Leland supplied little more than the plan and a set of notes, he had sketched out an ambitious program for English antiquarians.
Two proteges of Lord William Cecil Burghley, who competed with Matthew Parker for the services of historically inclined scholars, began to translate Leland’s plan into reality. However, Laurence Nowell and his student William Lambarde produced, once more, only notes. Lambarde’s mass of notes was published in 1730 as the Topographical and Historical Dictionary of England. Lambarde himself completed one true antiquarian county history, A Perambulation of Kent (1576), a remarkable and readable account of cities, ports, religious institutions, schools, legal rights, and customs of that shire. It influenced John Stow’s the Survey of London (1599), the first English town history that was built not only on chronicles but also on public records and antiquities. It contained a history of London and a full description of past London life, including the water supply, fire-fighting procedures, welfare, garbage disposal, and drainage. The disparaging remark about “lay chronigraphers that write of nothing but of Mayors and Sheriffs and the dere yere, and the great frost,”' could not be turned against him; the world of the London burgher had found in him its historian. That his history presented no synthesis but consisted of a large number of discrete facts (without assertions about Brutus and the Trojans) did not disturb his contemporaries. William Camden wrote a chorography of Roman Britain by the use of the Antonine Itinerary, a kind of Roman-road book: by locating Roman remains; by himself traveling on many of the old roads; by interviewing knowledgeable people and consulting public records; and by inspecting locations. Although at first glance Camden’s Britannia (editions from 1586 to 1606) appeared to be little more than a list of place names and Roman remains, it provided the basis for histories of specific localities and enhanced England’s and Camden’s prestige among Continental scholars. Some of these scholars were in contact with Camden, such as the geographer Abraham Ortelius and the antiquarian De Thou. Yet, the Britannia did not hold readers spellbound and thus never became popular, despite Philemon Holland’s good English translation of the Latin text.
Antiquarians inevitably touched upon the troublesome problem of English ancestry. Historians of the Tudor period still affirmed the Trojans and the British heroes in England’s distant past. Polydore Vergil, who had rediscovered Gildas’s work, doubted the traditional versions of early English history but could not dissuade the English. Antiquarians may well have doubted the traditional accounts of early English history but they discarded neither Noah’s descendants nor the British Arthur nor Brutus, the great-grandson of Aeneas. National pride upheld the stories of a biblical, Trojan, or British origin. Camden made light of the Trojan origin and celebrated the Roman phase of the early English past in his Britannia. However, to the rising English national consciousness with its strong Protestant component, the Romans were “foreigners.” Now was the time the Anglo-Saxon tradition, which would eventually prevail, gathered its early advocates. Parker traced the English church’s story back into the Anglo-Saxon period, other scholars became interested in the Anglo-Saxon language, and Nowell and Lambarde were intrigued by the history of Anglo-Saxon law. In 1568, Lambarde published the texts of old Anglo-Saxon laws (Archaionomia), and from this time began in earnest the fascination with the common law and the unique English institution. Parliament. The legal continuity seemed so convincing that it gave rise to the idea of the common law’s immemorial antiquity and of Parliament as a part of a mythical ancient constitution. For decades the attempts to interpret contemporary law and Parliament in those terms overshadowed thoughts of a development in law and politics that contemporary studies suggested.
History clearly was popular in the Elizabethan age. English readers could study military histories, learn political lessons and proper conduct from historical handbooks, indulge in nostalgia through chronicles, get spiritual uplift and material for the defense of Anglicanism from histories, catch a glimpse of the New World, learn from the topographical accounts of antiquarians about early English life, and even be entertained, taught, and inspired by historical plays, of which Shakespeare’s dramas were the most famous.
While members of the gentry fervently searched the past under the banner of genealogy and heraldry, the scholars devoted to antiquarianism worked individually and cooperatively on mapping the English past. Their common interests led some of them to join forces in the Society of Antiquaries (1586). For about twenty-one years they met first in Derby House, the home of the College of Heralds, and then in Sir Robert Cotton’s home. They were generally men of means and high social status, except for John Stow, the tailor, and a few others. Membership required that one did historical research either individually or collectively. Most of this research centered on English law, customs, and institutions. As for the methods of “doing history,” the scholars knew the accomplishments of humanists but had to work out much of their methodology, because they usually dealt with nonliterary primary sources. Few English historians, with the notable exceptions of Thomas Blundeville and Francis Bacon, were theoreticians in the Continental mold. It therefore mattered little that Giacomo Aconcio, one of the Italian ars historica theoreticians, arrived in 1559 as an exile in England. Neither did it help that Thomas Blundeville made a brave attempt to push the Italian ars historica controversy onto the English scene with translations of two Italian tracts and his own work. When in the early 1600s Francis Bacon dealt with history, his considerations transcended the limits of the ars rhetorica debate and encompassed the broader concerns of the theory of knowledge.
As for the sixteenth-century English antiquaries they were content to explore the past, find and describe its remainders, and leave it at that. They felt no need for synthesis or interpretation.
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