Writing, Chronicles and Learning in Norman Realms

From Normandy’s formation around 911 through the twelfth century, writing served communities in Normandy, England after 1066, and southern Italy and Sicily. Normandy lay in what is now northwestern France; the Norman kingdom of Sicily joined the island to lands in southern Italy. Latin linked many churches and royal institutions, while English and French also carried histories to readers and listeners. Greek and Arabic remained important in Sicilian administration and scholarship. A monk copying a medical book, an abbey defending a port and a royal clerk checking a county account used writing for different work.

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Making and using books

A manuscript began before the scribe took up a pen. Workers prepared animal skin as parchment, cut it to size and pricked and ruled the sheets to guide lines of writing and spaces for images. A scribe copied from an exemplar, or model text, using a quill and ink; a small knife could reshape the quill’s nib or scrape away a mistake. An illuminator added color or gold, and a binder secured the gatherings, called quires, in order and protected the finished book. These stages divided skilled work among people whose names rarely survive.

Monasteries remained important places to keep books, train copyists and use liturgical texts in worship, but books also moved through court, noble and church households. At Cava, an armarius, the officer responsible for the abbey’s liturgical books, oversaw volumes used in services. A 1097 document records a married couple giving Cava their remaining one-eighth share in a church: the husband could enter the monastery, while the wife arranged burial there and liturgical commemoration. The record joined property transfer to a future place in the community’s worship and remembrance.

Books could travel with a reader or be copied from a borrowed exemplar. Between about 1070 and 1073, Anselm, prior of Bec in Normandy, asked Maurice, a monk visiting Canterbury in England, to copy medical works that included Hippocrates’ Aphorisms and its commentary. Anselm also asked to borrow the model text itself. Maurice visited Christ Church, Canterbury, in 1073. A specific request, a travelling monk and access to an exemplar carried the medical works across the Channel.

Medical manuscripts at Bury St Edmunds in eastern England show what happened after books arrived. A Latin recipe collection, probably brought from northern France by Abbot Baldwin or someone in his household, received further recipes from Bury scribes, including a hand closely linked to Baldwin. A scribe added medicinal prayers in the twelfth century. Another Bury scribe copied the Salernitan Passionarius, a compilation of medical theory associated with Salerno in southern Italy, between the late 1110s and the 1130s; later readers added notes and diagrams in its margins. Copying created a working volume that local readers continued to adapt.

Schools and learned readers

Learning also took place with teachers in schools. In late eleventh-century Caen, in Normandy, Arnulf of Chocques taught Ralph of Caen at the abbey of Saint-Étienne; Ralph remained there as a student through 1106. Caen’s schools attracted laymen as well as monks and clerics, and teaching at Saint-Étienne centered on theology. A student could carry this learning into later service as a writer: Ralph became a historian whose work described the Norman principality of Antioch.

Literacy therefore involved several tasks rather than a single skill: reading or singing a service, copying Latin, composing a history, keeping an account or understanding a vernacular story. Some people encountered texts by listening as well as reading. A book’s use depended on the institution and reader: a liturgical volume directed worship, a medical compilation gathered treatments and a chronicle gave a community a remembered past.

Norman and English histories

Norman rulers had Latin histories before the conquest of England. Dudo of Saint-Quentin wrote his History of the Normans around 996–1015, and William of Jumièges continued the ducal history in the mid-eleventh century. Their accounts were copied more often in the twelfth century, giving later communities a written history of the dynasty. At Saint-Évroult, Orderic Vitalis composed his Ecclesiastical History between about 1114 and 1141. It remained at the abbey for present and future monks to consult, and the surviving manuscript is Orderic’s own working copy.

In England, William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon wrote Latin histories that connected earlier English rulers with the kingdom governed by Norman kings. William’s Gesta regum Anglorum passed through copies and revisions. He presented a version to Robert, earl of Gloucester, in 1127–29; a manuscript was probably copied at Winchester from William’s draft, and further copies descended from it. A patron or religious house could preserve a copy that scribes elsewhere then used as their exemplar.

Henry of Huntingdon studied Latin at Lincoln and became archdeacon of Huntingdon, a senior church official responsible for part of a diocese. Bishop Alexander of Lincoln commissioned Henry’s Historia Anglorum, whose first version Henry dated to 1135. He revised and extended it through several stages: a polished third version circulated in 1141–42, and later work brought the history to 1146. A copy of this fourth version travelled to Normandy after 1147, where Robert of Torigni, prior, or deputy abbot, of Le Bec, revised it for new readers. The work’s successive versions record how a commissioned history changed as it moved between readers and houses.

English and French writing in England

At Peterborough Abbey, monks rebuilt their history book after a fire devastated the abbey in 1116. They compiled a new copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle around 1121, carrying earlier records forward and adding material about Peterborough’s own past, possessions and privileges. One local continuation recorded events from 1122 to 1131; a second scribe continued it from 1132 to 1154. Across these entries, Old English forms gave way to features of early Middle English. The chronicle let monks record the abbey’s local concerns in the language of an existing English historical record.

French verse offered a different way to tell England’s past. Geffrei Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis, probably composed around 1141, was written for Constance Fitz Gilbert, a patron from a Lincolnshire landholding family. Gaimar retold English and British history in French verse for lay readers and listeners alongside the Latin prose histories used in church and court circles. His epilogue describes drawing on English, Latin and French books, bringing accounts from several written traditions into one narrative.

Charters, property and proof

A charter recorded a grant, sale, confirmation or other agreement about property and rights. Names, boundaries, witnesses and sometimes a seal helped identify what had been transferred. Religious houses kept earlier charters when land changed hands because the documents could later support a claim. The abbey of Cava near Salerno in southern Italy acquired records made by both religious houses and lay owners.

In May 1130 Cava bought a house in Salerno and received four older charters for the property, dated 1071–1102. The seller and his heirs could borrow the documents temporarily if they needed to testify about the sale, then return them to the abbey. The arrangement kept the papers available to those who might have to explain the transaction while giving Cava custody of the evidence. In a 1125 dispute over a Salerno house, the monks produced two recent charters. In 1182 at Salerno’s royal palace, Abbot Benencasa presented King William II’s mandate about Cava’s port rights at Vietri alongside Duke Roger Borsa’s 1086 grant, whose lead seal remained attached. The abbey used the earlier grant to set out the basis of its claim when a later governor challenged it.

Royal accounts in England

In England, sheriffs brought county financial accounts to the Exchequer, the royal office that checked revenues, payments and debts. Clerks entered the annual audit in a Pipe Roll, recording sums owed to the Crown, payments made to or by the king, and debts carried forward. The earliest surviving roll is an isolated account for 1129–30; a nearly continuous annual series begins with the roll for 1155–56. Read county by county, these records show how the king’s officials rendered account for local revenues.

Languages and translation in Sicily

The Sicilian monarchy’s administration drew on established Greek and Arabic records as Norman rule developed. Greek served as the principal royal administrative language for registers of dependent peasants, or villeins, and estate boundaries; officials could preserve local boundary markers in Arabic. Latin gained ground after Roger II’s coronation in 1130 and surpassed Greek after his death in 1154. Arabic documents also continued to record transactions within Muslim communities and between landholders and royal officials.

These records addressed practical needs: an estate description identified land, a household register connected people to a holding, and a contract could set out a property sale, irrigation agreement, boundary dispute or tax obligation. Some property documents were issued under the authority of a cadi, a Muslim judge. The Oxford Arabic Documents project identifies about eighty surviving Arabic records from Norman and later Hohenstaufen rule, including registers of Muslim families and taxes owed by Muslim peasants to Christian lords.

Translation brought scholarly work into the same multilingual court. During William I’s reign (1154–66), the royal official Henry Aristippus carried out or supervised Latin translations from Greek and Arabic, including works by Plato, Aristotle and Ptolemy. The court could therefore use translators to move learned texts between languages while officials continued to rely on distinct documentary practices in Greek, Arabic and Latin.