Bridging the Gap Between Written and Oral Accounts

Bridging the gap between written and oral accounts

Mike Whelan (History)

Embedded historians: “Truth”, Rhetoric and perception of the Chroniclers of the First Crusade

"Embedded reporters are seen as a modern concept. From the Peninsula Campaign of the Napoleonic Wars through the 19th and 20th Centuries and into the 21st, war correspondents have been found living, travelling and in some cases dying with combat troops. These journalists, whilst experiencing the same events as the soldiers, add their own perspectives and rhetoric to them, potentially adding their own bias to how the engagements are portrayed and the other people that experienced them in response to their target audience. In the period of the First Crusade; Ecclesiastical members travelled with the armies of the campaign; chronicling and presenting the events of the campaign from a perspective that was not always in cohesion with the events experienced by other combat elements. Whilst accepting that some, if not many, clerics took part in direct military action; many remained in their primary roles as spiritual support and councillors. Nevertheless all but one of the First Crusade chronicles have been identified as being authored by members of the Church. Only the GestaFrancorum is believed to have been composed by a lay fighting pilgrim.

This paper attempts to parallel the challenges found in modern warfare with those of the First Crusade and ideas on how meet them."

Zoe Cunningham (History)

Medieval Knowledge and Legal Connections: Consciousness of Custom in the Middle Ages

Research in the humanities is increasingly interdisciplinary, but the field of legal history is comparatively removed from this milieu. This approach is restrictive because it frequently limits our appreciation of legal history to letters of the law, ignoring the contemporary consciousness of it. This is especially problematic for some topics, notably custom. In Medieval Europe custom was a unique form of legal knowledge validated by the principle that the ‘authority of...long use‘ is not slight,’ and the parallel practice of it connected all jurisdictions across the region in this period. It was the most important source of secular law before the appearance of the ius commune in the 12th century, but it was generally not transcribed until the 13th century. Thus, it is important to identify and extract the oral, intangible qualities of this ‘consciousness’ from the context of it. In this paper I shall explore this dimension of it with reference to social practices: compurgation and trial by ordeal; and literary texts, including the Gesta of Robin Hood. Custom is a foundational factor in the development of medieval law and principles and perceptions of it are an important base for our knowledge of one of the most precocious and productive periods in the history of western jurisprudence.

Edward Taylor (History)

“The miller is a thief” said no one ever: the problems with modern dictionaries of early modern proverbs

Is that a proverb? When faced with this question most early modern scholars turn instinctively to M.P. Tilley’s A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1950). This monumental tome has been praised for the depth and breadth of its scholarship and is still regularly cited as evidence that a phrase or allusion was proverbial. However, there are significant issues with what Tilley defines as a proverb and the evidence he uses to support the proverbs he includes. This paper will test the limits of this repository of knowledge by examining the evidence offered to support a single proverb: The miller is a thief. It will demonstrate that though some of the evidence Tilley provides suggests that millers were believed to habitually steal from their customers, there is no evidence that the “proverb” ever existed. Furthermore, despite including cogent criticism of how Tilley selected and evidenced his proverbs, subsequent scholarly dictionaries include this “proverb” and even offer additional erroneous examples or it. This raises significant concerns about the validity of “proverbs” they include and, therefore, any scholarship that relies on them.