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

公元1100年至公元1100年。1300年，英格兰和威尔士的历史写作蓬勃发展，其中包括对不列颠共同遥远的过去的兴趣迅速增长。人们倾向于一方面将这些故事视为以盎格鲁为中心的文明、进步和扩张的编年史；另一方面，将这些故事视为不列颠各王国及其独立和霸权斗争的记录。在某种意义上，从冲突的角度来看待这一时期的历史写作是明智的。在诺曼征服英格兰和爱德华一世征服威尔士之间的两个世纪里，英国人民--以及他们的尺子和精英阶层--面临着内战、激战和围困，以及有争议的边界。然而，我们可能会发现，遥远过去的编年史者不仅对征服和斗争有看法，而且还有关于尺子之间和平、正式甚至纯粹是尊重互动的时刻的想法，尽管这些互动可能会被人们之间短期或长期的暴力和压迫的描述所掩盖。我们认为，他们的历史学家从事的是另一种在遥远过去的页面上上演的斗争：寻求平等。这种探索的存在在关于中世纪晚期英国的学术思想中并不是一个明显的现象，它正确地突出了非常真实的存在，一方面是征服和殖民，另一方面是为实现自我而进行的竞争和斗争。在一个久远的过去，英国中世纪的编年史工作者做出了切实的努力，使联盟和会议发挥作用，这些微光有可能为人们提供一套关于这一时期历史写作的新的、精致的见解，以及它在英格兰和威尔士具有的跨语言和体裁的共同特质，以及它真正做出的任何政治评论的确切性质。我们认为，编年史作者对过去的修订通常是为了改进和改善领导人之间的关系，这将改变当代历史学家应该如何看待编年史作者对英国人民地位差异的看法。我们的项目考虑了12世纪英国编年史中(即，不列颠人、毕克特人、苏格兰人和早期盎格鲁-撒克逊人定居的时代)尺子之间的会议、信件和据称相互交换的消息。它特别关注过去会议和交流的叙述(以书面形式或通过信使)，这些叙述是根据现有账户重写的，插入现有账户，或者可能完全是想象出来的。这些编年史中新写的书信的意义在于它如何重新定义了中世纪早期尺子与12世纪读者心目中的人们之间的关系。我们的核心主要来源是几部重要的拉丁语和威尔士语编年史，它们有几个共同特点：a)直接或间接地展示了对蒙茅斯的杰弗里的一些了解，b)写了一些关于英国遥远的过去的长篇文章，c)至少部分重写了早期的来源，以及d)对900年前英国尺子的互动表现出了意识和兴趣。在威尔士，核心来源是威尔士拉丁编年史、威尔士布鲁特和塞松；在英格兰，它们是蒙茅斯的杰弗里和他的同代人，以及12世纪后期豪登的罗杰和德维塞斯的理查德的作品。

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.