The Search for Parity: Rulers, Relationships and the Remote Past in Britain's Chronicles, c. 1100-1300

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The period c. 1100-c. 1300 saw a flourishing of historical writing in England and Wales, which included a burgeoning interest in the shared remote past of the island of Britain. There has been a tendency to view these narratives as chronicles of Anglo-centric civilization, progress, and expansion on the one hand; on the other, as accounts of the kingdoms of Britain and their struggles for independence and hegemony. In some senses, it has been sensible to view this period of historical writing in light of conflict. In the two centuries between the Norman Conquest of England and Edward I's conquest of Wales, the people of Britain-as well as their rulers and elites-faced civil war, pitched battles and sieges, and contested borders. However, it is possible to discover what chroniclers of the remote past thought not only about conquest and struggle, but also about moments of peaceful, formal or even merely respectful interaction between rulers, obscured as these might be by accounts of short-term or protracted violence and oppression between peoples.We contend that their historians were engaged in another kind of struggle which played out on the pages of the remote past: the search for parity. The presence of this search is not an obvious phenomenon in scholarly thought about high medieval Britain which highlights, rightly, the very real presence of conquest and colonization on the one hand, and of competition and struggles for self-realization on the other. The glimmers of real effort on the part of Britain's medieval chroniclers to make alliances and meetings work, in a past that was long over, have the potential to provide a set of new and refined insights about historical writing in this period and qualities it shares in both England and Wales, across language and genre, and the precise nature of any political commentary it is really making. We argue that chroniclers' revisions to the past often sought to refine and to improve the relationships between leaders, which will revise how contemporary historians should view chroniclers' perceptions of the differences in statuses of the peoples of Britain.Our project considers meetings, missives and messages purportedly exchanged between and among rulers in Britain's remote past (that is, the era of the Britons, Picts and Scots, and early Anglo-Saxon settlement) in twelfth-century chronicles of Britain. It looks specifically at narratives of meetings and exchanges (in writing or via a messenger) in the past that were rewritten based on existing accounts, interpolated into existing accounts, or perhaps entirely imagined. The significance of newly-written correspondence in these chronicles lies in how it served to redefine relationships between early medieval rulers and peoples in the minds of twelfth-century readers. Our core primary sources are several important Latin and Welsh chronicles with several characteristics in common: those that a) exhibit some knowledge, direct or indirect, of Geoffrey of Monmouth, b) write at some length about Britain's remote past, c) are at least in part rewritings of earlier sources, and d) display an awareness and interest in interactions among rulers in Britain pre-900. In Wales, the core sources are the Welsh Latin Annals, the Welsh Brut y Tywysogion and the Brenhinedd y Saesson; in England, they are Geoffrey of Monmouth and his contemporaries, and the later twelfth-century works of Roger of Howden and Richard of Devizes.