SOURCE: Gillingham, John. ”Civilizing the English? The English Histories of William of Malmesbury and David Hume.” Historical Research 74, no. 183 (February 2001): 17-43.

[In the following essay, Gillingham compares the histories of England composed by William and Hume, noting that the idea of using histories as an aid to refining the temperament of the Englishman was as popular in the twelfth century as it was during the eighteenth, the time of Hume's writings.]

According to Gervase of Canterbury, writing early in the thirteenth century, ‘William the Bastard brought into England a new form of living and speaking’ (‘novam vivendi formam et loquendi’).¹ By a new form of speaking he presumably meant French.² But what did he mean by a new form of living? Gervase—who explicitly described himself as a simple chronicler and not anything as sophisticated as a historian—does not tell us. But we do at least know the very sophisticated history that Gervase had been reading and was deeply influenced by. This was William of Malmesbury's Deeds of the Kings of the English.³ William, recently described as ‘one of England's greatest historians’⁴—a judgement with which I entirely concur—was a monk, and some of his other works were to be major contributions to strictly ecclesiastical history.⁵ But this history, the Deeds of the Kings, was quite different. Its three major themes and its tone have been well characterized by Rees Davies: first, the making of the English into one people; second, the political unification of England under a single king; third, the cultural and social improvement in manners and civility, learning and governance. As a history it is ‘secular, political, progressive, one might almost say Whiggish’.⁶ We might compare this with J. G. A. Pocock's characterization of the main themes of his eighteenth-century historians: the emergence of sovereign states and the emergence of a shared civilization of manners and commerce, the two themes combining to produce ‘the macro-narrative of philosophical history’.⁷

The Gesta Regum was completed by 1125, which—astonishingly—means that most of the research and writing was done while William was still in his twenties,⁸ and it sprang at once ‘into the position of a popular and standard history’.⁹ Its success was due in large part to the style and tone that made it a ‘good read’. It is brilliantly and often ironically written, full of cynical insights into human nature and spiced with entertaining and scandalous anecdotes, many of them set far away from England.¹⁰ These digressions William deliberately included for variety's sake and in order to reach a wider and courtly audience.¹¹ But it is also evident that he included them because they were part of the pleasure history gave him.¹² As Antonia Gransden noted, ‘Lust, bastardy and gluttony are the favourite themes—William's humour almost anticipates Rabelais’.¹³ This frequently earned him disapproval from high-minded modern historians from Stubbs onwards.¹⁴ But his history was not just a young man's entertainment, it was also profoundly serious stuff. By the time he completed his history, as current research by Rodney Thomson and Neil Wright is making ever clearer, William had a good claim to be regarded as ‘the best read European of the century’.¹⁵ The intensity of his admiration for antiquity was matched by the depth of his immersion in its literature, the literature with which his own prose is saturated.¹⁶ In consequence, in some crucial respects he came to revive Greco-Roman modes of perception. This resulted in the Christian view of the world, one which divided men and women into two basic groups—Christian and non-Christian—being decisively supplemented by a non-religious system of classification, one which divided men and women into ‘us’ and the barbarians. His view that the Welsh, Scots and Irish, though Christian, were also barbarians was to colour subsequent English historiography for many centuries. Following in the footsteps of Rees Davies and Rob Bartlett, I have already said a great deal about the English view of Celtic barbarians.¹⁷ Here I wish to focus on the other side of the coin: civilizing the English.

When William took the religious component out of the concept of barbarian and re-defined it in terms of learning and material culture (what Gibbon, in his analysis of ‘the wild barbarians of Germany’, would call letters and money),¹⁸ he did at least have the Latin words for ‘barbarian/barbarity’ conveniently to hand. But did ‘civilizing’ exist either as concept or word in the twelfth century? Hence the question mark in my title. Perhaps at this stage I had better make clear what I mean by civilization. ‘What do you think of English civilization?’ Mahatma Gandhi was asked, or so the story goes. ‘I think it would be a good idea’, he replied.¹⁹ The point here is the obvious one that there are no objective criteria, that civilization is only a self-congratulatory intellectual construct.²⁰ This construct became a main theme of historical writing in the eighteenth century—the century in which the word ‘civilization’ took over from ‘civility’.²¹ But was it a construct of which twelfth-century intellectuals were capable? Did the vocabulary for it exist at that time?

It is widely assumed that there was no notion of historical development and progress in the middle ages.²² This comes across very clearly, for example, in the 120-page-long entry ‘Zivilisation, Kultur’ in the recent German handbook, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. When dealing with both classical and modern periods, the author of the entry, Jörg Fisch, cited passages written by a great variety of types of author, but for the middle ages he cited only theologians and scholastic philosophers, plus Dante. In his comparison of the uses of certain words across the ages he fell at the most elementary hurdle, that of comparing like with like. Given the narrow range of medieval authors he consulted, it is not surprising that Fisch felt able to assert that ‘the decisive difference between the medieval and the modern concept was that in the middle ages greater value was put on spiritual or contemplative life than on civil life’. In the middle ages, he concluded, civilitas ‘could not embody the highest endeavour of an individual or a people’. Hence, although he quoted passages containing the word civilitas, as when Aquinas said that Orpheus ‘brought bestial and solitary men ad civilitatem’, Fisch attached little importance to such phrases.²³ He evidently believed that theological and religious patterns of thought were dominant throughout that long interval between ancient and modern times. This is a nonsense, though a widely held one, on a par with the myth invented in the nineteenth century, and still widely held in the twenty-first, that in the middle ages people believed the earth was flat.²⁴ My own sense of twelfth-century English historical writing is that it fully bears out Richard Vaughan's observations: ‘It is simply not true to say that history was at the service of theology in the medieval world’ for although ‘historians sometimes noted what the theologians told them fortunately they failed to follow their example or apply their ideas in practice’.²⁵ Of course there were historically-minded theologians and historians interested in grand theory—authors such as Hugh of St. Victor in France and Otto of Freising in Germany—men whose minds were dominated by such patterns of thought, but among historians they were everywhere the exceptions, not the rule, and there were none such in twelfth-century England.²⁶

Here I shall argue that William of Malmesbury did have a notion of ‘civilizing’, and that it was central to his vision of English history, which he saw as ‘a progress from barbarism to civilization’.²⁷ English patriot though he undoubtedly was, and much as he regretted the political losses suffered by native-born Englishman in the first two generations after the Norman Conquest, he was none the less in the eleven-twenties profoundly convinced that the society of his own day, a newly Frenchified and Europeanized yet still identifiably English society, was significantly superior to the one which had existed before 1066. William's view was that a combination of Christianity and the French had civilized the English, and that the Norman Conquest was the most recent act in what he saw as a long historical process. This, I think, is why Gervase of Canterbury, having read his William of Malmesbury, wrote of William the Bastard introducing a new form of living into England.

In describing William's Deeds of the Kings in this way I am claiming that it contains themes and approaches which bear comparison with the next English history to deserve to be called ‘great and influential’, David Hume's History of England, also composed at a time of profound French influence upon English intellectual life.²⁸ Consider Hume's words in a New Year's letter (January 1753) to a friend: ‘You know that there is no post of honour in the English Parnassus more vacant than that of History. Style, judgement, impartiality, care—everything is wanting’.²⁹ This was precisely how William had seen his own situation and ambitions. In his reflections on the death of Bede he lamented that with Bede ‘was buried almost all historical writing down to our own day. In his field of study there has been no English competitor since then, no would-be rival of his fame to take up the broken thread’. On completing the Gesta Regum in 1125 he congratulated himself: ‘I have set in order the continuous course of English history, and am since Bede the only man to do so, or at any rate the first’. As late as 1142, very near the end of his life, he made the same claim: ‘Therefore as we men of the present day severely and rightly blame our predecessors, who since Bede have left no record of themselves and their doings, so I, who set myself to remove this disgrace from us, may fairly claim the kindly favour of my right-thinking readers’.³⁰

In the same New Year's letter Hume announced his plan: ‘I shall make my work very concise, after the manner of the Ancients’. ‘I have inserted no original Papers, and entered into no detail of minute, uninteresting facts’, he claimed in 1754.³¹ William's avowed intention was ‘to mend the broken chain of our history’ by writing concisely and ‘with Roman polish’.³² Few spelled out more explicitly than William their determination to avoid boring their readers.³³ While it is true that he occasionally inserted ‘original papers’, he usually abbreviated them. He pointed out, for example, that he was quoting parts of a letter written by Boniface ‘as evidence of facts’, and that he was ‘shortening the long sentences at my discretion; an action for which I justifiably expect to be excused, since readers anxious to hurry on to historical narrative have to be given the advantage of pace’.³⁴ If Hume can be described, as in a recent book by Philip Hicks, as a ‘neo-classical historian’ who intended to free historical writing in England from the factional conflict of whig and tory,³⁵ then so too William, who explicitly set out to be impartial between Norman and English views of the Conquest, with the difference that William the monk wrote in a truly neo-classical language, a Latin consciously based not on the late classical Christian authors such as Jerome and Augustine but on pagan stylistic models, on Seneca, Cicero, Lucan and Virgil.³⁶

That William and Hume approached history in such similar ways is doubtless to be explained by the similarity of their situations. But it is also clear that Hume came to admire William. He calls him ‘one of the best of the old English historians’ and ‘a judicious man’—high praise for an English monk from the sceptical Scot.³⁷ Indeed Hume's overall view of the first seven centuries of English history was heavily influenced by William. It is not so much that he relies upon him for material—which he does and which he by and large acknowledges, though in undiscriminating fashion—but rather that he often follows him in his interpretations. Hume's account of the reign of Egbert of Wessex (802-39) is typical and revealing. He repeats, with acknowledgement, William's comment apropos of Egbert's exile in France, that the French were ‘eminent both for valour and civility above all the western nations’, but when he ascribed the union of ‘all the kingdoms of the heptarchy in one great state’ to ‘the fortunate arms and prudent policy’ of Egbert, there is nothing to tell his reader that here he was merely following the systematic analysis on which Book One of the Gesta Regum was based. Nor when he used Egbert's career as the peg on which to hang his observations on the consequences of the absence of ‘an exact rule of succession’—‘thence the reigning prince was continually agitated with jealousy against all the princes of the blood whom he still considered as his rivals’—was there any hint that on and at this point he was following in William's footsteps.³⁸

If the similarity here and elsewhere between Hume's and William's views has gone largely unremarked, it is, we might hazard, because those who know Hume's History do not also know his medieval (as opposed to his sixteenth- and seventeenth-century) sources. Hence modern students of Hume have credited him with ideas and attitudes without realizing that he shared them with William of Malmesbury and was in fact borrowing them from him. Hicks, for example, noted that Hume ‘distrusted the writings of monks, who by their very nature were prone to superstition and credulity’ and cited the following famous passage as an example of his ‘criticism of the chroniclers’: ‘What instruction or entertainment can it give the reader to hear a long bead-roll of barbarous names: Egric, Annas, Ethelbert, Ethelwald, Aldulf, Beorne, Ethelred, Ethelbert, who successively murdered, expelled or inherited from each other, and obscurely filled the throne of the East Angles?’³⁹ In fact although—not surprisingly—Hume made no reference to William here, it was precisely of the East Angles, as well as of the East Saxons, that the ‘superstitious monk’ had announced—and very prominently, in the Prologue to his history—that those kingdoms were ‘worthy neither of my labours nor of the attention of posterity’. In writing this William was not just displaying the local prejudice of Wessex man. More than once he refused to list pre-Conquest royal lineages on the grounds that ‘the barbarous and discordant sound of their names would give the reader less pleasure than I would wish’.⁴⁰

Similarly, historians of the eighteenth century note Hume's emphasis on the influence of the ‘more advanced’ French culture on English history, without apparently realising that in this he was reflecting what Rees Davies has called William's ‘fawning Francophilia’.⁴¹ They know, of course, Hume's own repeated assertions that the middle ages were a barbarous period, but seem not to know that William also took a condescending view of the English past.⁴² If Hume sneered, so too did William.⁴³ Very strikingly the aspects of medieval thought which Hume thought most characteristic of that period, and at which he sneered most, are aspects which were of little or no interest to William. For example Hume called the debates at the synod of Whitby—the date of Easter and all that—‘disputes of the most ridiculous kind, and entirely worthy of those ignorant and barbarous ages’; much though he admired Bede, these debates were evidently of no interest to William.⁴⁴ Similarly Hume mocked the Gregorian reformers' argument that hands which, in the sacrament of the Mass could create God, should not, in the ceremony of homage, be put between hands with blood on them as ‘reasonings which … can scarcely be delivered with the requisite decency and gravity’.⁴⁵ In his account of the ‘Investiture Contest’ this was not an argument to which William gave any space. Another quintessentially ‘medieval’ subject to which Hume gave much more space than William of Malmesbury was the Conqueror's introduction of the feudal system into England. Indeed William said not a word about it—hardly surprising, since it never happened. This was a seventeenth-century myth to which Hume fell victim.⁴⁶

Whatever Hume's intentions when he embarked on his history, by the time he completed it in 1761 the civilizing of England had become his explicit theme.⁴⁷ Although the medieval part of his History was the last to be written, what is now Volume One begins with a reference to ‘the curiosity entertained by all civilized nations of inquiring into the exploits and adventures of their ancestors’;⁴⁸ and ends with the battle of Bosworth—naturally—when we are told: ‘Thus have we pursued the history of England through a series of many barbarous ages, till we have at last reached the dawn of civility and science … and have the prospect of being able to present to the reader a spectacle more worthy of his consideration’.⁴⁹ William, it is assumed, could not have written in these terms because he lacked the concept of ‘a civilizing process’. How could it be otherwise—given that he was a medieval monk, and everyone knows that there was no notion of historical development and progress in the period labelled the middle ages? Specialists in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century historical thought concede that in their own period there was precious little in the way of ‘modern’ historical thought—that is to say a pattern of thought ‘conditioned by essentially developmental concepts and assumptions’, and therefore assume that a fortiori there can have been even less in the middle ages.⁵⁰ I certainly do not wish to suggest that in twelfth-century England ‘the main theme of history was the idea of civilization’—Momigliano's characterization of the eighteenth century.⁵¹ I shall argue, however, that in England—and probably only in England, since only England both endured the experience of conquest and was perceived as being situated on ‘the frontier’ between civility and barbarism—there was at least as much a notion of civilizing in the twelfth as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Most accounts of eighteenth-century historical thinking on the subject of civilization give a prominent place to what Pocock called ‘the appearance in western theory of the famous four stages theory of human history’—the ages of hunters, shepherds, agriculture, and of commerce, associated with the Scottish Enlightenment and above all with Adam Smith.⁵² But consider what Gerald de Barri (‘Cambrensis’) wrote about the Irish in the eleven-eighties, nearly six hundred years before Adam Smith:

The Irish have not moved on at all from the first mode of living, that is of pastoral life (‘a primo pastoralis vitae vivendi modo’). For while mankind usually progresses (‘processerit’) from the woods to the fields, and then from fields to settlements and communities of citizens, this Irish people scorns work on the land, has little use for the money making of towns (‘civiles gazas’) and despises the rights and privileges of the civil life (‘civium jura’).⁵³

This is a much more explicitly developmental and progressive view of history than anything written in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the mid fifteen-thirties Thomas Starkey, in his Dialogue between Reginald Pole and Thomas Lupset, wrote that over a long period of time ‘men were brought by little and little from the rude life in fields and woods to this civility which you now see stablished and set in all well-ruled cities and towns’—but his ‘little by little’ development lacks Gerald's clear economic/sociological stages based on modes of subsistence.⁵⁴ Indeed Gerald, in his brilliant ethnographic monograph Descriptio Kambriae, worked out the structural links between ‘pastoral manners’ and ‘the fierce and cruel habits of a military life’ in a manner not surpassed even by Gibbon in his analysis of ‘a nation of shepherds and warriors’ in the twenty-sixth chapter of Decline and Fall.⁵⁵ Naturally Gibbon knew Gerald's work.⁵⁶ Similarly the mid twelfth-century author of the Gesta Stephani based his views of the warlike and fierce nature of Welsh and Scots on their pastoral mode of subsistence.⁵⁷ Gerald's notion of stages almost certainly ultimately derived from classical ideas, in particular ideas expressed by Varro.⁵⁸ Given the fact that Gerald's Irish works were printed for William Camden in 1602 and subsequently reprinted,⁵⁹ and given the consequent notoriety and controversy surrounding Gerald's portrait of Irish society, his statement on the three stages—pastoral, agricultural, urban—must have been read by many thousands, Hume certainly among them.⁶⁰ Yet significantly even those who have looked hardest for the origins of the ‘stages theory’ have not bothered with the middle ages. Professor R. L. Meek emphasized that in his search he had scoured ‘the work of a very large number of writers stretching over a period of more than 2000 years’, but although this has been described by Pocock as ‘an overlong search’, the fact remains that Meek leapt from Varro's summary of Dicaearchus to Grotius's The Laws of War and Peace (1625) without glancing at anything in between.⁶¹ For all the differences between them, Meek and Pocock clearly shared the usual assumptions about medieval historical writing.⁶² At this stage all I would emphasize is that when, in the eleven-eighties, Gerald set down this concept of progress through various stages of economic and material life, he did so without any sense that he was saying anything remarkable or revolutionary. For him it was evidently a commonplace idea. With this commonplace in mind, I return to William of Malmesbury's Gesta Regum.

It is significant that William set his most explicit interpretation of what he called ‘the continuous history of the English’ in the context of his account of the Norman Conquest. It was at this juncture that he chose to point out how greatly the English had changed since their arrival in Britain in the fifth century, when they had been barbaric, bellicose and heathen.⁶³ As Sir Richard Southern has written: ‘At the level of literate and aristocratic society, no country in Europe, between the rise of the barbarian kingdoms and the twentieth century, has undergone so radical a change in so short a time as England experienced after 1066’. This was an experience that compelled historical reflection. How did those historians who saw themselves as Englishmen respond to that radical change? The most powerful modern view, that of Southern himself, has been to see their response as essentially a pessimistic and defensive one. In response to violent political change—and also to the new intellectual challenge posed by the burgeoning cathedral schools—that most traditional of monastic orders, the Benedictines, became articulate in self-defence, producing a remarkable clutch of historians at Canterbury, Worcester and Durham, as well as at Malmesbury. In Southern's words: ‘The main reaction of men who had known pre-Conquest England was one of outrage, resentment and nostalgia’, and they responded with a ‘corporate monastic purpose of recreating the Old English past’.⁶⁴ There is much to be said for this orthodoxy as a description of the early ‘main reaction’ to the conquest, but it does not do justice to William of Malmesbury—nor indeed to Henry of Huntingdon, though the latter, of course, was no monk. William, as Patrick Wormald has pointed out in another context, ‘was in so much an exception to the pattern’.⁶⁵ Moreover it was to be these exceptions to the pattern, Henry and William, who in subsequent centuries were to be the most influential:

The future of English historiography lay with them … Their accounts became the standard, one might almost say the definitive version of early English history and were subsumed into future histories down the generations. They did more indeed than provide the substantive account of England's past; they also in effect laid down some of the basic guidelines for its historiography: it should be regnal, political, continuous, developmental, and self-containedly English.⁶⁶

Of the two Henry was the better poet, but William the greater historian.⁶⁷ William wrote eloquently of 1066 as a disaster for ‘our sweet county’,⁶⁸ but he was also an exponent of what would become the good old English habit of regarding the course of English history, including the Norman Conquest, as a ‘Good Thing’. Rees Davies has recently referred to the ‘smug Anglocentricity’ of the ‘toffee-nosed William of Malmesbury’—and has described him as a key figure in the creation of the ‘self-satisfyingly and self-absorbingly’ as well as ‘astonishingly successful’ English historical myth.⁶⁹ And it was this aspect of English history, its positive tone, which continued to evoke a response in his later twelfth-century readers when the trauma, outrage and resentment caused by the Conquest were things of the distant past, and when the Englishness of the ruling elite was taken for granted. People accepted that the Normans of 1066 had been ‘cruel’ and ‘fierce’, but that was long ago.⁷⁰ In time the rising Francophobia of the thirteenth century, itself the reflection of an entirely new political situation after the loss of Normandy, Anjou and Poitou, followed by new fears of another French conquest, would re-create a memory of 1066 in terms of outrage and resentment—but that was still in the future.⁷¹

Although William's Gesta Regum Anglorum was a history of the English and written, he said, out of love for his country, it was none the less a very European history, and consciously so. ‘I have called it the Deeds of the Kings of the English’, he explained in his prefatory letter to Earl Robert of Gloucester, ‘to reflect the greater part of its contents, but I would like it to serve as a summary of many fields of history’.⁷² He included long chapters on the French kings on the grounds that ‘I regard ignorance of them as a serious gap in knowledge seeing that they are not only our neighbours but also the people mainly responsible for the Christian empire’.⁷³ His account of the reign of William Rufus has more on the crusade and capture of Jerusalem in 1099 than on events in England and Normandy. As Rodney Thomson has observed, William saw the crusade as ‘broadly a western Christian enterprise but not primarily a religious exercise’. ‘We may, for example, note the almost complete absence from William's account of features usually thought to have been central to the idea of the crusade: the motifs of penance and pilgrimage’. For him it was ‘a pan-European military action’ recovering ‘territory previously occupied by Islam, thus achieving a new balance of power’.⁷⁴ William explained earlier centuries of Muslim success in terms of Mahomet's powers. He was one of the very first in the West to point out that Mahomet was a prophet not, as in the Chanson de Roland, a false God.⁷⁵ In the twelfth century, as in the Enlightenment, there was a ‘Mahomet debate’, and Wiliam was engaging in it.⁷⁶ In his eyes the crusade was a struggle between East and West, between, on the one hand, independent-minded and bold westerners (‘gens occidentalis’) who often threw off the shackles of empire and, on the other, the more submissive peoples of the East.⁷⁷ Moreover his history of the crusade is indicative of his view of the present. ‘Let history’, he writes, ‘no longer praise the heroes of antiquity … Nothing that was achieved in those days can compare with the glory of what the crusaders have done’.⁷⁸

Despite its title William's history was not just a history of kings, it was also a cultural history—arguably indeed cultural matters, the arts of architecture and of letters in particular, were better integrated into his narrative than they were in Hume's History. His treatment of Alfred the Great is revealing of his own priorities and interests. He explains to the reader that rather than provide a detailed narrative of the king's wars against the Danes, which, he argues, would be ridiculous and confusing, ‘the height of folly’, he will instead ‘just pick out the salient points’. There then follows a summary concluding with an interpretation: the English willingly submit to a king who had, in William's words, ‘restored to them their liberties’.⁷⁹ Having got the military narrative out of the way, he turns to what interests him much more, the king's inner life (‘vita interior’). For William this means Alfred's reform of law and administration, his translations and his revival of letters—a revival initiated, in William's eyes, by those foreign scholars whom Alfred had invited to court.⁸⁰ Throughout his history William found ample room to praise the scholars and educators of the past. In his history we can hear the swish of the teacher's cane, and learn of the fear which that sound instilled—indeed one of his ‘good stories’ told of how one of the foreign teachers brought over from France by Alfred was stabbed to death by his pupils' pens.⁸¹ Other teachers were more fortunate: Theodore and Hadrian whose ‘schools in literature transformed an island which had been a nursery of tyrants into the home of philosophy’; Bede, whom he saw as his own predecessor and to whom he devoted no less than nine chapters; Dunstan whom he described as ‘second only to Alfred as a promoter of the liberal arts’; and finally, after 1066, Lanfranc, whose scholarship, he believed, ‘inspired the whole Latin world to pursue the liberal arts’.⁸² Of William's five educators of the English, three—Theodore, Hadrian and Lanfranc—had been foreign-born.

William fully accepted the then conventional notion that kingdoms prospered when learning flourished. Learned men contributed to the improvement of society. Dunstan's ingenuity helped to curtail the English habit of drunken brawling; in recent times Lanfranc had helped to eradicate slavery.⁸³ In his own day, as he saw it, under the wise King Henry and his bookish son, Robert of Gloucester, the kingdom prospered. ‘Blessed is the state (‘respublica’) whose ruler is a philosopher’, wrote William, dedicating his history to his principal patron, Earl Robert of Gloucester.⁸⁴ It was one of his favourite quotations, trotted out as part of his constant theme that what he called the ‘respublica Anglorum’ was best ruled when ruled by learned men.⁸⁵ Doubtless it made sense to praise the wisdom of the rulers to whom you were appealing for patronage—as William certainly was, for he was a shrewd operator; there is nothing further removed from the truth than a picture of him in a monastic cell remote from the world.⁸⁶ More telling than this creepy flattery are comments made casually in passing, comments such as ‘nowadays when things have improved’; or a reference to verses which ‘lack our modern polish (‘moderni temporis lima carentes’)’.⁸⁷ This is of a piece with his assertion that when at King Alfred's court Asser simplified the language of Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae, it was ‘a work necessary in those days though it would be a ridiculous waste of time in ours (‘labore illis diebus necessario, nostris ridiculo’)’.⁸⁸ The whole history ended on a positive note with the boast that ‘though the world is older now, none the less there are in England today many people distinguished for learning and famous in religion … By their admirable lives they have made the stories of old seem believable. We can no longer accuse the old tales of being untrue when recent achievements show they could indeed have happened’.⁸⁹ As with crusading, so with the world of religion and learning, England—and not an England in isolation, but as a component of what he called ‘these western lands’⁹⁰—was experiencing a re-birth of antique culture.⁹¹ This combination of admiration for the age of Augustus together with a fundamentally complacent (if theoretically cautious) view of England in his own day has much in common with Hume's assumptions.⁹²

A highly sophisticated sense of literary and architectural style enabled William both to appreciate the artistic achievements of the past and to believe that they had been surpassed in his own day. When writing about the foundation of the church of Winchester he noted both that ‘it was most beautiful for its time’ and that subsequent buildings there displayed ‘a more magnificent craftsmanship’. He strongly approved of greater magnificence. ‘Churches’, he wrote, ‘when they are made more beautiful and solemn can kindle even the dullest minds (‘brutas mentes’) to prayer’.⁹³ He said of Edward the Confessor that he was the first to commission an English building in that style (‘illo compositionis genere’) ‘which nowadays almost everyone tries to emulate’.⁹⁴ It reinforced his positive view of his ‘nowadays’ that he felt that although some modern prelates fell short of the holiness of former ages, they none the less made up for this by the lavish generosity with which they had built churches and shrines—he had in mind in particular Ranulf Flambard at Durham. In consequence ‘everywhere in England churches in villages, minsters in towns and cities are being raised in a new style of building (‘novo edificandi genere’)’.⁹⁵ He praised King Alfred for building in a style previously unknown in England;⁹⁶ and similarly praised an earlier monk, the seventh-century Benedict Biscop, precisely on the grounds that his ‘love of country and his delight in good taste (‘amor patriae et voluptas elegantiae’)’ led him to bring in ‘something new (‘aliquid insolitum’)’.⁹⁷ This is not a hide-bound Benedictine nostalgic for the past and instinctively distrusting anything new.⁹⁸

The new things of the modern age delighted William—if anything there were not enough of them. ‘Why do we so often just plod along in the footsteps of the Ancients without giving new ideas the acceptance they deserve?’ he asked, commenting upon a new scheme of chronology. He observed that old ideas are hard to root out, that people are all too reluctant to reject what they have imbibed with their mother's milk.⁹⁹ The context for this particular comment is an intriguing one. He has just described an episode in France, the foundation of the Cistercian order and, rightly or wrongly, he has portrayed an Englishman, Harding, as the inspirational figure behind the new order—an order for which this Benedictine had a great admiration: ‘I admire in others the good qualities I do not have’, as he more than once self-admiringly put it.¹⁰⁰ As William tells the foundation story, when the monastic observances of Molesme were put to Harding

he began to ask the reason for them, “For it was by reason”, he said, “that the supreme Creator of the world made all things; by reason he governs all things; it is reason that makes the fabric of the world go round, reason that sends even what we call the wandering stars around their courses, reason that moves the elements, reason and balance by which our nature ought to subsist”.¹⁰¹

Whether Harding said anything remotely like this may well be doubtful. The point here is that William said he did, and that he described what Harding did and said in France as something that pertained to the glory of England (‘ad Anglie gloriam pertineat’).¹⁰² William, it could be said, attacked conservatism wherever he found it. Education and modernization were his watchwords.

William certainly did not believe that English history was a history of irreversible progress. In the light of the evidence as he saw it that would have been ridiculous. After Bede there was a period of decline and it was then that the Vikings came, not so much sent by God as drawn by the opportunities offered by chaos in Northumbria.¹⁰³ Revival under Alfred and his immediate successors was then followed by another period of decline, so that by 1066 the English were, in William's view, once again in a desperate state.¹⁰⁴ For him, as for Hume, the achievements of the past, as of the present, were precarious. But he saw these developments not as parts of some profound cyclical process but merely as the ups and downs of nations. They were caused either by human failings, such as those of Æthelred the Unready, whom he castigated as a lazy king too fond of wine, women and staying in bed snoring,¹⁰⁵ or simply by the play of chance—which in William's history plays a greater role than God. ‘Our life is a dice-board’, he wrote, ‘on which Fortune with her unexpected throws makes game of mortal men’.¹⁰⁶ The only cyclical aspect of William's history is his frequent use of the device of Fortune's Wheel.

In his eyes the social and cultural changes that occurred as a result of the Norman Conquest amounted to a renewal of progress. ‘England now flourishes (‘videas patriam florere’)’, he wrote, ‘because although the Normans have adopted English manners in eating and drinking, in other ways the English have adopted Norman mores’.¹⁰⁷ One recent and profound change of which he wholeheartedly approved, he attributed to an act of policy on William the Conqueror's part. This was the end of the slave trade. Whether or not we think slavery compatible with civilization, it is clear that William, for all his love of Roman culture, thoroughly disapproved. The slave trade was one of the features of English society on the eve of the Norman Conquest which he most detested. ‘The common people were oppressed by the powerful, some were even sold abroad. One particularly unnatural practice (‘a natura abhorrens’) was that many of them got their female slaves pregnant and then, having sated their lust, sold them to public prostitution or into slavery abroad’.¹⁰⁸ His attitude is further revealed by his story of how Cnut's sister sold English slaves to Denmark, especially beautiful young women who fetched a high price. He describes this as a ‘hideous traffic’—and it served her right that she was struck by lightning.¹⁰⁹ According to William, it was at Lanfranc's instigation that William I banned the sale of slaves to Ireland—despite the fact that the king had enjoyed a share of the profits from the trade.¹¹⁰ The prohibition of the slave trade undoubtedly meant much to William of Malmesbury. For him it was one of the ways in which ‘we’ are no longer barbarians. Another contemporary author who explicitly associated the end of the slave trade with the Norman Conquest was Lawrence of Durham, like William a monk and poet: ‘After England began to have Norman lords then the English no longer had to suffer at the hands of foreigners that which they had formerly inflicted upon themselves; in this respect they found foreigners treated them better than they had themselves’. Lawrence went on to say that in Scotland and Ireland, where the people were still ruled by native lords, the old custom continued, if on a lesser scale.¹¹¹ The fact that for a while slavery continued in the lands of the Celts after it had disappeared from England undoubtedly contributed to the new English idea that their Celtic neighbours were barbarians.

A second major change for the better which William associated with the Norman Conquest was the practice of a more humane style of politics, a style which I have labelled ‘chivalrous’. William greatly admired those rulers who showed mercy to their defeated enemies. In his account of earlier English kings there is one whom he explicitly picks out as being greater than his reputation, i.e. he judged him greater by criteria which he—William—thought important. This was Cenwulf of Mercia (796-821). William praised him above all for showing mercy to a fellow human being and so giving a marvellous demonstration of clemency. For this, he wrote, Cenwulf will be praised ‘so long as an impartial judge is to be found in England’—i.e. a man such as myself, for William of Malmesbury's middle name, as Galbraith said in an earlier Creighton Lecture, ‘was not modesty’.¹¹² His account of Cnut is similarly revealing. He described Cnut's mutilation of hostages in 1014 as an action ‘in contempt of both human and divine law’. His comment on Cnut's treatment of Earl Uhtred of Northumbria was that ‘although Uhtred had surrendered to Cnut, he was sentenced with typical barbarian lack of principle to have his throat cut’.¹¹³ However William judged that Cnut improved once he had secured his hold on the throne, ‘regulating his life with great civility and courage (‘magna civilitate et fortitudine vitam componens’)’.¹¹⁴ By contrast with the early Cnut, William the Conqueror, he asserted, treated those who submitted with mildness (‘leniter’).¹¹⁵ It is clear that William associated this more humane political conduct with French influence. As one example of this I take his view of the reign of King Ecgberht of Wessex. His source, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, told him that before he ascended the throne Ecgberht spent some time in exile in France. The interpretation which William put on this was all his own. According to William, Ecgberht had used his exile there ‘to learn the art of government (‘disciplinam regnandi’). The French in both martial exercises and polished manners are [N.B. present tense] easily first among the nations of the West and it was with them that he sharpened the edge of his mind by acquiring habits very different from his native barbarity (‘mores longe a gentilitia barbarie alienos’)’.¹¹⁶

What did William understand by this French art of government? A few lines later he wrote that Ecgberht won the love of his subjects by clemency and moderation (‘clementia et mansuetudine’). With this view of French political and cultural values William appreciated the fact that chivalrous clemency, the convention of sparing the life and limb of defeated members of the elite, came in with 1066.¹¹⁷

A third development which William perceived in the course of English history, and of which he took a very positive view, was the growth of towns and markets. He praised both King Alfred's son Edward and his daughter Æthelflaed for their investment in towns old and new, at the same time saying that in this respect the greater credit was due their father.¹¹⁸ He praised Athelstan for his re-development of Exeter, writing that ‘it is now a magnificent city, with a fine market that supplies all that you could possibly desire’.¹¹⁹ He noted that London's market was so attractive to foreign merchants that when harvests were poor, food was cheaper there than elsewhere.¹²⁰ Although he did not associate urbanism with French influence, he none the less looked upon towns and commerce as central components of a good society, and something that England and France had in common. ‘While in Ireland the cultivators of the soil are so poor, or rather so unskilful, that the land produces only a ragged mob of rustics living extra urbes, the English and the French, with their more cultivated way of life (‘cultiore genere vitae’), live in towns and carry on trade and commerce’.¹²¹ Here we clearly have a train of thought close to Gerald de Barri's three stages, associating a more cultivated life-style with towns, and doing so in the same context, i.e. triggered by a view of Ireland. William's contemporary, Henry of Huntingdon, wrote that England was richer even than Germany and listed its cities as being amongst the country's greatest assets—the cities which, in Henry's words (in Professor Diana Greenway's translation), ‘glitter on the banks of fruitful and very beautiful rivers’. Thus the inhabitants of this England were, in Henry's opinion, superior in life-style and in dress to all other peoples.¹²² Such views as this were commonplace, both then and in subsequent decades. According to William of Newburgh in the eleven-nineties, German visitors were staggered by the wealth of the city of London.¹²³ For Richard of Devizes, a Benedictine monk of Winchester, England was a kingdom made up of cities, of which Winchester was, of course, the finest, ‘civitas semper civiliter’. The people of Winchester had only one fault, they lied like troopers, said Richard, a Winchester man himself.¹²⁴

Compare all this—these utterly conventional twelfth-century views of urban and commercial life—with what Pocock wrote in a celebrated essay:

In every phase of Western tradition there is a conception of virtue—Aristotelian, Thomist, neo-Machiavellian or Marxian—to which the spread of exchange relations is seen as presenting a threat. In this perspective those thinkers of the 17th through 19th centuries who argued that the market economy might benefit and transform human existence appear to be the great creative heretics and dissenters.¹²⁵

Doubtless a conception of virtue hostile to exchange relations did exist in some quarters in the middle ages, but only in narrowly academic and theological quarters. However creative a historian William of Malmesbury may have been, it was certainly not necessary to be a great creative heretic in order to take a highly positive view of the market economy in twelfth-century England. It was enough to look around you as the leaders of society, men who doubtless liked to think they were virtuous, founded new towns: twenty founded in Henry I's reign (1100-35), and more new towns at a faster rate later in the century. Between 1066 and the twelve-twenties more than 120 planned towns were founded—a higher rate than in any other similar length period of English history.¹²⁶ There is indeed something depressingly academic in the still widespread modern notion of medieval thought—if by that we mean something broader than just ‘academic thought’—being dominated by theological constructs. As already pointed out, it was certainly not the way most practising historians, as opposed to historically-minded theologians such as Hugh of St. Victor, thought. Consider, for example, William's comment on King Alfred's translations as ‘bringing together a rich cargo of foreign merchandise for the benefit of his countrymen’—a strikingly commercial image for a cultural activity of which he whole-heartedly approved.¹²⁷

Whether or not we call it ‘civilization’, William and his readers clearly had a conception of a superior life-style, fuelled by the amenities of towns and markets. In part it may well have been their response to real historical changes: town growth and foundation, a building boom;¹²⁸ the newly chivalrous style of politics that freed political leaders from the fear of being killed or mutilated as a consequence of defeat and capture; the end of slavery; the great growth in the number of teachers leading to the emergence of universities. ‘Are not teachers’, one mid twelfth-century commentator complained, ‘as common as royal tax-collectors?’¹²⁹ Moreover William and his readers assumed that this superior way of living could be taught and learned.¹³⁰ Just as the French had taught the English, so the English were now teaching the Scots. In William's view King David of Scotland had been ‘made more courtly by his upbringing amongst us (‘curialior nostrorum convictu’) and the rust of his native barbarism had been polished away’. As king of Scotland David promised no less than three years exemption from taxes to any of his subjects ‘who would live in a more cultivated style, dress with more elegance and learn to eat with more refinement’.¹³¹ According to the English Cistercian Ailred of Rievaulx, writing a panegyric on King David soon after his death in 1153, the king's programme had been achieved

Weep for him Scotland. He adorned you with castles and towns … He filled your ports with foreign goods and added to your own delights the riches of other kingdoms. He refined your barbarous customs with Christian piety (‘Ipse barbaros more tuos Christiana religione composuit’) … He knew how to bring a whole people, once rough and rustic (‘rudem et agrestem’), to manners which were refined and gentle (‘ad mores compositos et edomitos’) … The barbarity of that people was completely overcome by his benevolence and by the laws which his royal gentleness (‘mansuetudo’) imposed.¹³²

Given this English view of how the Scots were improved, it is not surprising to find the English justifying their invasion of Ireland in the eleven-seventies in similar terms. Thus Gerald de Barri asserted that if the barbarous Irish could be compelled to obey the king of England, then they would enjoy the benefits of peace and be introduced to ‘a better form of life from England (‘meliorem formam vivendi ex Anglia’)’.¹³³

Given all this, was there a word in twelfth-century learned usage which corresponded to the eighteenth-century term ‘civilized’? The most recent English translation of William's Gesta Regum quite often uses the word ‘civilized’; for example the characterization of Wihtred of Kent, ‘domi enim civilis et bello invictus’, is translated as ‘civilized at home and invincible in war’.¹³⁴ Undoubtedly the most obvious candidate is civilis, meaning urbane, refined; and related to it civilitas meaning civility or humanity, and civiliter meaning in seemly fashion, or sometimes wittily.¹³⁵ The ideal ruler, wrote Gerald de Barri, lived ‘civilissime’. This was the Emperor Augustus, famed, in Gerald's eyes, for his patronage of letters and architecture.¹³⁶ It might be argued that the word civilis lacked a sense of dynamic, of development over time, and that this dynamic was a crucial element in the eighteenth-century notion of civilization. But there was a word with, as it seems to me, just this dynamic sense: compositus, from the verb componere—to put together, to set in order, to embellish.¹³⁷ The basic meaning of compositus is ‘well-ordered, refined’, but it has connotations of being ‘composed’ in the sense of composure and also of being ‘composite’, and therefore complex, in the sense of being made up of a number of components.¹³⁸ Bearing in mind Boswell's phrase, ‘civilization … in the sense opposed to barbarity’ (see above, n. 22), consider the way Gerald chose to contrast England and Wales: England as a ‘regio composita’ as opposed to Wales, a ‘regio barbara’.¹³⁹ For Gerald a language could be ‘incomposita’—by which he meant primitive, still undeveloped. Thus in The Description of Wales, when comparing the varieties of Welsh in his own day, he wrote that the less ornate and the more ‘incomposita’ one sort of Welsh was, the more it approached the ancient British tongue; among English dialects, he added, that of Devon was the most ‘incomposita’.¹⁴⁰ Clearly compositus was a word that implies change and development, a process of refining—as in ‘aurum compositum’, ‘refined gold’. It is clear that Ailred saw Scotland as having been refined, brought to ‘compositos mores’ by King David.¹⁴¹ Richard of Devizes, the author of the Winchester Annals and one of William of Malmesbury's close readers, summed up Alfred's reign in these words: ‘he thoroughly improved and brought to good order (‘erudivit et informavit ad regulam’) the kingdom of England, which before his days had been rough and uncivilized (‘rude et incompositum’)’.¹⁴²

Two points by way of conclusion to this study of some historians and their words and assumptions. The first, and more specific, relates to twelfth-century England, and is merely a situational point. Consider the situation of the English learned elite in the twelfth century: their situation in time, with 1066 a recent and massive upheaval; their situation in place, positioned, as they saw it, like Luther at Wittenberg ‘in termino civilitatis’ (‘on the edge of civility’)—a short journey and they were in the midst of barbarism. Yet they believed that these neighbouring Celtic regions, barbarous and backward—at least one stage behind them—could be improved, even were being improved, being made to look like a ‘second England’.¹⁴³ In this situation the idea of historical development, of a civilizing process, was one that seemed pretty obvious once it had been adumbrated by the creative mind of William of Malmesbury. In this situation (in some respects not unlike that of the eighteenth-century Scottish intellectual elite on the edge of the Highlands after 1745),¹⁴⁴ twelfth-century English historians were perfectly capable of developing both the concept of civilizing and an appropriate vocabulary. It may well be that as time passed, as the Norman Conquest receded into the distance and as Wales and Scotland themselves became more Anglicized, then English historians writing in the thirteenth and subsequent centuries saw little that struck a chord with them in the patterns of thought that had made sense to William of Malmesbury and his twelfth-century successors. They had been inspired by change and contrasts which they observed within one small part of Europe. By contrast the great historical thinkers of the eighteenth century, even those Scots who lived on the Lowland/Highland border, were inspired by change and contrasts which they perceived in Europe, and with Asia and America. Not surprisingly the legacy of the latter to later generations of historians was correspondingly greater, and has been much better appreciated. The second point is a very general one. To a depressing extent modern perceptions of medieval patterns of thought still imagine them to have been dominated by theological and religious ideas. In that respect at least we have hardly moved beyond the eighteenth century. I finish with a quotation from another great historian, though one much less influential than either William of Malmesbury or David Hume. This is Samuel Daniel, writing in 1602: ‘It is but the clowds gathered about our owne judgement that makes us thinke all other ages wrapt up in mists’.¹⁴⁵

Notes

1. The Historical Works of Gervase of Canterbury, ed. W. Stubbs (2 vols., Rolls Ser., 1879-80), ii. 60 (hereafter Gervase). This is in the Gesta Regum, the lesser known of his 2 substantial works of history, a chronicle covering the period from the arrival of Brutus in Britain to the reign of King John.

2. Although much later authors, from Robert of Gloucester, writing c.1300, onwards, saw the new language as itself a form of oppression, there is nothing in the tone of Gervase's other remarks to suggest that he resented the introduction of French. In England linguistic nationalism is essentially a 14th-century development (see T. Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature and National Identity, 1290-1340 (Oxford, 1996); R. R. Davies, ‘The peoples of Britain and Ireland, 1100-1400, iv: language and historical mythology’, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., 6th ser., vii (1997), 1-24; A. Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 44-6.

3. In his Gesta Regum (Gervase, ii. 23), Gervase of Canterbury advised readers who wanted to know more to turn to Geoffrey of Monmouth and William of Malmesbury. For Gervase's assessment of his own work, see ibid., i. 87-91.

4. By Edmund King (William of Malmesbury, Historia Novella, ed. E. King and trans. K. R. Potter (Oxford, 1998), xvii (hereafter H.N.)). Cf. ‘By almost any standards William of Malmesbury was a great historian’ (P. Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the 12th Century (Oxford, 1999), p. 137).

5. Appropriately for a Creighton Lecture his interests included the history of the papacy; he compiled an edition of the Liber Pontificalis (R. M. Thomson, William of Malmesbury (Woodbridge, 1987), pp. 119-38).

6. R. R. Davies, The Matter of Britain and the Matter of England (Oxford, 1996), p. 15. As long ago as 1815 the Revd. J. Sharpe noted how William ‘carefully, though perhaps only incidentally, brought forward’ such topics as ‘the gradual progress of man towards civilization; his mental improvement; his advance from barbarism to comparative refinement’. Sharpe's brilliant short sketch of William's achievement has happily been re-printed (and enhanced with up-to-date notes) in William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, ii, ed. R. M. Thomson (Oxford, 1999), pp. xxxvi-xlvi (hereafter W.M., ii).

7. J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, ii: Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 20-1.

8. For discussion of the date of William's birth, see H.N., p. xviii, and Willelmi Malmesbiriensis Monachi de Gestis Regum Anglorum, ed. W. Stubbs (2 vols., Rolls Ser., 1887-9), ii. xxxviii (hereafter Stubbs). In this article I shall say nothing about the quality of William's research, though it has—rightly—been much praised, and was discussed in V. H. Galbraith's 1949 Creighton Lecture, ‘Historical research in medieval England’, pp. 15-19, repr. in his Kings and Chroniclers: Essays in English Medieval History (1982), pp. 1-46. Relevant to my subject here is Galbraith's admiration (ibid., p. 19) for William's ‘sense of historical development’, though I do not agree that it was ‘unique in that age’.

9. Stubbs, i. xci-iii, where Stubbs summarizes the use made of William's history by many subsequent historians, including Aubri des Trois-Fontaines and Vincent of Beauvais, up to the time of its printing in the 16th century.

10. There is a fine analysis of William's qualities as a stylish and insightful historian in H. Richter, Englische Geschichtschreiber des 12. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1938), pp. 54-125, esp. pp. 60-5, 91-8. His psychological insights seem to me to be of the same order as Hume's, on which see D. Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 117-21.

11. For his fear that he might bore his readers, and for the entertaining tales from Italy and Germany included ‘to enliven what I write’, see William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, i, ed. and trans. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom (Oxford, 1998), chs. 47, 173. Since the division into chapters is essentially the same both in the Rolls Series edition and in this recent Oxford Medieval Texts one, I cite the Gesta Regum as W.M. and by chapter number.

12. In his Commentary on Lamentations he wrote: ‘Formerly when I played at history (‘cum historias lusi’) the delightful material matched my youthful years’ (cited Stubbs, i. cxxii). But this was not just an older man's view of the frivolities of youth composed at a gloomy moment early in Stephen's reign; in the Prologue to Bk. II of the Gesta he referred to the pleasure he took in history—‘iocunda gestorum notitia’.

13. A. Gransden, Historical Writing in England, i: c.550-c.1307 (1974), pp. 171-2.

14. E.g., ‘his reputation as the most entertaining as well as the most comprehensive historian since Bede is based in part on his less praiseworthy qualities’ (D. H. Farmer, ‘Two biographies by William of Malmesbury’, in Latin Biography, ed. T. A. Dorey (1967), p. 157). See Stubbs, ii. cxli-ii for his great editor's mixed feelings about him. Stubbs, and following him R. R. Darlington, would have preferred William if he had been more of a chronicler and less of a historian. None the less, although Stubbs regretted that the interest which his works from the first inspired was ‘in no small proportion’ due to ‘the most glaring of his weaknesses’, he recognized that these stories were included to ‘help to float the heavier portions of his works’ (Stubbs, i. xciii n. 6), and his last words were that ‘the history, the literature and the culture of the English race would have been much poorer without him’.

15. Thomson, William, p. 39.

16. This is well brought out in ibid., chs. 1-2.

17. R. Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 1146-1223 (Oxford, 1982), chs. 6 and 7; R. R. Davies, ‘Buchedd a moes y Cymry: the manners and morals of the Welsh’, Welsh Hist. Rev., xii (1984-5), 155-79; J. Gillingham, ‘The beginnings of English imperialism’, Jour. Historical Sociology, v (1992), 392-409 and idem, ‘The foundations of a disunited kingdom’, in Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History, ed. A. Grant and K. J. Stringer (1995); both repr. in J. Gillingham, The English in the 12th Century: Imperialism, National Identity and Political Values (Woodbridge, 2000).

18. E. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. 9.

19. An anecdote which I owe to the kindness of Dominic Shirley.

20. Although he did not discuss the word itself, W. R. Jones described the antithesis which opposed civilization to barbarism as a cliché useful as ‘a means of self-congratulation and a rationalization for aggression’ (idem, ‘The image of the barbarian in medieval Europe’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, xiii (1971), 377.

21. A famous passage in Boswell's Life of Johnson: ‘1772. On Monday March 23 I found him busy preparing a fourth edition of his folio dictionary. He would not admit civilization but only civility. With great deference to him I thought civilization from to civilize, better in the sense opposed to barbarity, than civility’ (cited in Oxford English Dictionary, ‘civilization’).

22. For a recent example, see J. M. Dean, The World Grown Old in Later Medieval Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), pp. 4, 34-5.

23. In Fisch's view the words ‘civilitas’ and then ‘civilité’ and ‘civility’ were occasionally used in opposition to barbarism in the 16th century, but even then meaning a condition rather than a process. For the word ‘civilization’ we have to wait for the verb ‘civilize’ to appear, first in late 16th-century French then in 17th-century English (Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. O. Brunner and others (8 vols. in 9, Stuttgart, 1972-97), vii. 694-703).

24. J. B. Russell, ‘Inventing the flat earth’, History Today, Aug. 1991, 13-19. William of Malmesbury, of course, knew that Bede had described the earth as ‘round like a ball’; see W.M., ch. 372 for his own reference to the globe, ‘volubilitas orbis’.

25. R. Vaughan, ‘The past in the middle ages’, Jour. Medieval Hist., xii (1986), 1-14, esp. pp. 4-5.

26. On the absence of philosophy of history in 12th-century English historical writing, see M. Otter, Inventiones: Fiction and Referentiality in 12th-Century English Historical Writing (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996), p. 2. For the contrast between William and Otto of Freising, see Richter, pp. 64-5. See R. W. Southern, ‘Hugh of St. Victor and the idea of historical development’, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., 5th ser., xxi (1971), 159-79, for ‘the grand historical visions of the 12th century’ which, he argues, dominated historical thought until Voltaire's attack on them in the 18th century. It may well be true that such visions dominated academic theories of history, but that is another matter.

27. I have asserted this before (J. Gillingham, ‘The context and purposes of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain’, Anglo-Norman Studies, xiii (1991), 107, repr. in idem, The English in the 12th Century), but without explicitly discussing the term ‘civilizing’. Cf. William was ‘conscious of major changes in the course of English history, of the impact and contribution of new peoples and cultures’ (Thomson, William, p. 25).

28. In some of his other works William demonstrated a much greater talent for historical research and textual criticism than Hume ever showed. (As a systematic philosopher, of course, Hume was immeasurably the greater.) Here I compare them only where they can usefully be compared, where their interests and ambitions coincided, in their general histories of England.

29. The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig (2 vols., Oxford, 1969), i. 170 (hereafter Letters).

30. W.M., chs. 62-3, 445; H.N., Prologue to Bk. III. With some justification it has been observed that ‘in a manner approaching arrogance, he filled the Gesta Regum and the Historia Novella with his presence’ (J. Blacker, The Faces of Time: Portrayal of the Past in Old French and Latin Historical Narrative of the Anglo-Norman Regnum (Austin, Tex., 1994), p. 10). It could be that the very paucity of historical writing in the previous 4 centuries created problems which, in his effort to think through and overcome them, helped to make William the great historian he was. On the scale of the challenge see J. Campbell, ‘Some 12th-century views of the Anglo-Saxon past’, Peritia, iii (1984), 131-50, repr. in idem, Essays in Anglo-Saxon History (1986; repr. 2000).

31. Also ‘I have more proposed as my model the concise manner of the antient Historians, than the prolix, tedious Style of some modern Compilers’ (Letters, i. 170, 193).

32. Prologue to Bk. I; cf. ‘Placet nobis dicendi parsimonia’ (W.M., chs. 73, 175).

33. E.g. W.M., Prologue to Bk. IV and ‘nausiam longitudinis evitans’ (ch. 15).

34. W.M., ch. 82. Those who check the footnote will see I have followed William's method.

35. P. Hicks, Neoclassical History and English Culture: from Clarendon to Hume (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 170-8. If, in 1754, Hume wrote of his Stuart volumes, ‘I have the impudence to pretend that I am of no party’, by 1762 when he completed his last two—medieval—volumes, he was able to report that ‘some people tell me that as the 2 volumes last published do not shock any party prejudices, they have been better received than the former, and procure good reception for the whole’ (Letters, i. 185, 370).

36. For William's claim to be impartial between Norman and English, see W.M., Prologue to Bk. III. On questions of style, see Thomson, William, pp. 30-1, and a number of articles by Neil Wright, foremost among them, ‘William of Malmesbury and Latin poetry: further evidence for a Benedictine reading’, Revue Bénédictine, ci (1991), 122-53.

37. D. Hume, The History of England (3 vols., 1871; 1st edn. 1786), i. 28, 200n., 699n. (hereafter H.E.). Here Hume was following in the footsteps of Polydore Vergil and John Milton; in the latter's view William ‘must be acknowledged both for stile and judgment to be by far the best writer of them all’ (Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. D. M. Wolfe (8 vols. in 10, 1953-82), x. 180). As has been observed, one of the ironies of Hume's history is the positive role he accords men who took religion very seriously: just as they brought liberty to 17th-century England, so also humanity in the middle ages (N. Phillipson, Hume (1989), pp. 125-6, 134-5). Cf. Pocock, Barbarism, ii. 252-3.

38. H.E., i. 32-3; W.M., chs. 105-6 and Prologue to Bk. I. Other subjects on which, without acknowledgement, he followed William are the notion of Northumbrian anarchy (H.E., i. 26; W.M., chs. 72-3), Sigeberht and the schools of East Anglia (H.E., i. 26; W.M., ch. 97).

39. Hicks, pp. 190-1. H.E., i. 26.

40. W.M., Prologue to Bk. I, chs. 44, 115, where he referred to ‘the pain to the ear caused by the uncouth barbarous names listed in the Old English Chronicle’.

41. Davies, The Matter of Britain, p. 10. Of course it suited Hume's own temperament and interests to follow William in this (see Forbes, pp. 140, 305, 311-2). For some e.g.s., see H.E., i. 117 (here he acknowledged William of Malmesbury), 127, 188, 324-5, 327, 336.

42. By fixing the time when people were lowest sunk in ignorance at about the age of William the Conqueror, Hume acknowledged that things began to improve soon afterwards—a process which he attributed primarily to the rediscovery of civil law after 1130 (H.E., i. 699-701). In this context it is worth observing that William's Gesta Regum was also a history of law and that what Patrick Wormald has called his ‘astounding achievement’ in this field, his ‘unique effort to do justice to Anglo-Saxon law’, was ‘sparked off by his personal encounter with that of Rome’ (Wormald, pp. 137-42).

43. Of the 10th-century chronicler Æthelweard, he wrote, ‘the less said of him the better’ (W.M., Prologue to Bk. I), which did not prevent William from targeting him again later in the same prologue. See also ch. 63 for his contempt for ‘the piteous doggerel’ of an earlier age.

44. H.E., i. 35-6. Not even in his Gesta Pontificum, when William had much to say about Wilfrid's career, did he show any interest in the Whitby arguments on which Hume poured such scorn.

45. H.E., i. 168. N B. Macaulay's comment on those writers ‘whose habit was to apply to all events in the history of the world the standard received in the Parisian society of the eighteenth century’ (Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James II, ed. T. F. Henderson (1907), p. 2).

46. Of course those who despise medieval ‘chroniclers’ continue to believe that there was a feudal revolution and that contemporary chroniclers failed to notice.

47. For the argument that it was implicit from the beginning, since his explanation of the 17th-century conflicts was ‘in terms of the progress of society, the hall-mark and organizing principle of Scottish “philosophical” history’, see Forbes, p. 298.

48. H.E., i. 1. On this curiosity compare the claim of William's contemporary, Henry of Huntingdon, that ‘History … distinguishes rational beings (‘rationabiles’) from brutes, for brutes whether men or beasts, neither know nor wish to know about their origins, their race or the events and happenings in their native land’ (Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, ed. D. Greenway (Oxford, 1996), pp. 4-5 (hereafter cited as H.H.)).

49. H.E., i. 699.

50. See, e.g., A. B. Ferguson, Clio Unbound: Perception of the Social and Cultural Past in Renaissance England (Durham, N.C., 1979).

51. A. Momigliano, Studies in Historiography (1966), p. 21.

52. J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The mobility of property and the rise of 18th-century sociology’, in his Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the 18th Century (Cambridge, 1985), p. 116. According to R. L. Meek, this was ‘the idea whose emergence made possible many of the remarkable developments in the Enlightenment science of society’ (idem, Smith, Marx and After: Ten Essays in the Development of Economic Thought (1977), ch. 1; cf. J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Gibbon and the shepherds: the stages of society in the Decline and Fall’, Hist. European Ideas, ii (1981), 193-202.

53. Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, v: Topographia Hibernica, ed. J. F. Dimock (Rolls. Ser., 1867), p. 151; English translation in Gerald of Wales, The History and Topography of Ireland, trans. J. J. O'Meara (Harmondsworth, 1982), pp. 101-2. Curiously J.-M. Boivin, L'Irlande au Moyen Age: Giraud de Barri et la Topographia Hibernica (1188) (Paris, 1993) does not comment on this passage.

54. T. Starkey, A Dialogue between Reginald Pole and Thomas Lupset, ed. K. M. Burton (1948), p. 60.

55. Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, vi, ed. J. F. Dimock (Rolls Ser., 1868), esp. Bk. I, chs. 8-9, Bk. 2, ch. 4. See Bartlett, pp. 178-210, ch. 7, ‘Gerald's ethnographic achievement’. On Gibbon's approach and sources, see R. Minuti, ‘Gibbon and the Asiatic barbarians: notes on the French sources of The Decline and Fall’, in Edward Gibbon Bicentenary Essays, ed. D. Womersley (Studies on Voltaire and the 18th Century, ccclv, 1997), pp. 21-44.

56. As is clear from his discussion of the manners of the Britons (Decline and Fall, ch. 38).

57. ‘Wales is a country of woodland and pasture, abounding in deer and fish, milk and herds; it breeds men of an animal type, naturally swift-footed, accustomed to war’. ‘Scotland is a land well supplied with productive forests, milk and herds; its inhabitants are barbarous and filthy; at home they consider the awful moment of bitter death as nothing, among foreigners they surpass all in cruelty’ (Gesta Stephani, ed. and trans. K. R. Potter and R. H. C. Davis (Oxford, 1976), pp. 14-15, 54-5).

58. Marcus Terentius Varro, De re rustica (Loeb edn., 1934), pp. 176, 314-6. Although I know of no evidence that Gerald had read De re rustica, it seems likely that somewhere in his reading he came across such ideas, given how commonplace technological progressivism was in antiquity (see, e.g., T. Cole, Democritus and the Sources of Greek Anthropology (Cleveland, OH, 1967); S. Blundell, The Origins of Civilization in Greek and Roman Thought (1986), pp. 153-4, 166, 198; L. Edelstein, The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity (Baltimore, Md., 1967); K. S. Sacks, Diodorus Siculus and the 1st Century (Princeton, N.J, 1990), ch. 3).

59. Anglica, Hibernica, Normannica, Cambrica a veteribus scripta, ed. W. Camden (2nd edn., Frankfurt, 1603). The passage relating to the stages of development is printed there on p. 739 in Bk. III, ch. 10 of the Topographia.

60. In his 9th chapter (H.E., i. 235-40), Hume demonstrably made extensive use of Gerald's other Irish work, The Conquest of Ireland. That the 17th-century controversies surrounding Gerald, Keating and Lynch were still a live issue in mid 18th-century England is clear from F. Warner, The History of Ireland, i (1763), pp. i-iv, 99-107. According to Charles O'Connor of Roscommon, in Ireland the times before the English came were ‘the days of Liberty, Commerce and Agriculture’ (idem, Dissertations on the Ancient History of Ireland (Dublin, 1753), pp. 130-41, esp. pp. 138-9).

61. R. L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge, 1976), ch. 1, ‘The four stages theory and its prehistory’, esp. pp. 6, 12, 35; he was explicitly not concerned about the precise number of stages.

62. See Pocock, Barbarism, ii. 11-17 for his view of the middle ages and its historical interests; p. 315n. for his judgement on Meek's search.

63. W.M., ch. 245.

64. R. W. Southern, ‘Aspects of the European tradition of historical writing, iv: the sense of the past’, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., xxiii (1973), 246, 253. Cf. M. Brett, ‘John of Worcester and his contemporaries’, in The Writing of History in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to R. W. Southern, ed. R. H. C. Davis and J. M. Wallace-Hadrill (Oxford, 1981), pp. 125-6.

65. Wormald, p. 137.

66. Davies, The Matter of Britain, pp. 15-16.

67. The Gesta Regum survives in at least 37 manuscripts (W.M., xiii-xxi; and see above n. 9). Moreover many of William's attitudes and values come across in his other—and in many respects more original—great work: the Gesta Pontificum with 25 manuscripts. On the over 40 manuscripts of 6 different versions of Henry of Huntingdon, see H.H., pp. cxvii-lviii.

68. W.M., ch. 245.

69. R. R. Davies, ‘The peoples of Britain and Ireland, 1100-1400, iv: language and historical mythology’, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., 6th ser., vii (1997), 18-20; Davies, The Matter of Britain, p. 10.

70. E.g. an anonymous author, writing c.1180, who identified those who spoke English as his ‘fellow-countrymen’ and described the Normans of 1066 as ‘perfidious’, ‘fierce’ and ‘savage’, none the less went on to assert that ‘our Norman kings have assimilated all that is best in the English spirit of generosity, in their pride in their kingdom, in their honourable way of life (‘morum honestate’) and in their fine physical strength’ (The Waltham Chronicle, ed. and trans. L. Watkiss and M. Chibnall (Oxford, 1994), pp. 2-3, 48-9, 56-7). For further discussion of this more relaxed attitude to the Conquest, even in cults which might have seemed natural vehicles for expression of anti-Norman feelings, see D. Rollason, Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1989), pp. 217-20. On the trauma see E. Van Houts, ‘The memory of 1066 in written and oral traditions’, Anglo-Norman Studies, xix (1996), 167-79.

71. On late 13th-century attitudes see Turville-Petre. But note that D. J. A. Matthew, The English and the Community of Europe in the 13th Century (Reading, 1997) warns against an overly nationalist interpretation of 13th-century politics and culture.

72. ‘multarum historiarum breviarium’—perhaps an allusion to the Breviarium of Eutropius, as suggested in Richter, p. 58.

73. W.M., ch. 68. For the critical importance of the European dimension in Hume's History of England, see Forbes, Philosophical Politics, pp. 297-8. His characterization of Hume's history—‘not a history of the English people, or of English civilization: it is a history of civilization in England’—would serve very well as a description of William's Gesta Regum.

74. R. Thomson, ‘William of Malmesbury, historian of crusade’, Reading Medieval Studies, xxiii (1997), 126-9. William's cynical suggestion (W.M., ch. 344) that amongst the pope's motives for launching the crusade was the hope that, in the general confusion, he would recapture Rome and his ally Bohemund overrun Illyricum and Macedonia is worthy of Hume.

75. Ibid., ch. 189 and Thomson, William, pp. 174-84

76. Cf. Decline and Fall, ch. 50.

77. In his version of Urban II's Clermont speech (W.M., ch. 347), William attributed to the pope the notion that ‘we come from the more temperate zones, and though, even in thick of battle we still act with prudence and good counsel, we are more ready to fight and risk losing blood than men from hot climates’. Elsewhere he attributed the long duration of the Muslim empire, which he saw as a continuation of the Persian, to the submissive nature of the people of the East—‘they do not understand that weapons exist so that “none need be a slave”’, he said, citing Lucan. ‘Hence while the eastern empire goes on for ever, the Roman imperium went first to Franks and then to Germans because bold and fierce Westerners prefer to fight for freedom against the long continued lordship of any one nation’ (Ibid., ch. 360). None of this was in Fulcher of Chartres, his principal source for the crusade.

78. Ibid., ch. 372. Hume and Gibbon, of course, took an entirely different view of the crusading movement, but then they thought of it in terms of folly and superstitious frenzy, and not, as the monk had done, in terms of global power politics. William's approach to the intercontinental politics of his time was not so different from Voltaire's and Gibbon's view of the situation of Europe in their day.

79. Ibid., ch. 121. There are echoes of Sallust here (W.M., ii. 94). Cf. ‘Hume chose to discuss only the most material events of those uncultivated times’ (Hicks, p. 191).

80. W.M., chs. 122-3. Hume, like so many early modern historians, both followed and went beyond William in his admiration for Alfred, in seeing his laws as the origin of the Common Law and him as the founder of Oxford (H.E., i. 53-4). Here, once again, we see the sceptical Scot fall victim to later English myth. For William as historian of law see above n. 42.

81. See W.M., chs. 123, 133 for John the Scot's death and Athelstan's fear of the cane. His tale of John the Scot's death was modelled on that of St. Cassian in Prudentius, which William himself cited in his book of miracles (W.M., ii. 101). On William's own role as a teacher, see Thomson, William, pp. 32-4.

82. W.M., chs. 12, 54-62, 149, 267.

83. Ibid., chs. 149, 269.

84. Ibid., ch. 449. Conversely when learning declined, morals degenerated and the kingdom was weakened (chs. 69, 71).

85. Ibid., chs. 48, 65, 132, 156, 390 (where Henry I has acquired more than a tincture of philosophy). Cf. Geoffrey of Monmouth's similar flattery in the prologue to his History of the Kings of Britain.

86. In the Prologue to Bk. V (on the deeds of Henry I) he describes himself as ‘a man remote from the secrets of the court’, but the fact that he began his history at the request of Henry I's queen, and dedicated it to Henry's most powerful son, suggests that he was writing tongue in cheek (H.N., p. xxiii; ‘literarisch übertrieben’, Richter, p. 55), while at the same time providing himself with an excuse should it transpire that he had written anything politically dangerous about the reigning king, a man to be feared. In Stubbs's judgement, the 5th book contained ‘what little it was safe to say of Henry I in his lifetime’ (Stubbs, i. xxxvi).

87. W.M., chs. 122, 183.

88. Willelmi Malmesbiriensis Monachi de Gestis Pontificum Anglorum, ed. N. E. S. A. Hamilton (Rolls Ser., 1870), Bk. ii, ch. 80, p. 177.

89. W.M., ch. 445. The last man to whom he devoted a chapter (ch. 444) was Godfrey, prior of Winchester (1082-1107), whom he described as ‘a priceless storehouse of philosophy’, outstanding in both piety and literature, an author of letters, epigrams and poems written ‘dulci stilo’: ‘The whole divine office which had become a kind of rustic survival he made shine with a new brilliance’.

90. Ibid., ch. 406: ‘occiduas plagas’.

91. For William's ‘general point that antique culture was experiencing a rebirth in his own time’, see Thomson, William, p. 17, and for his assessment of the improved education of the monks of Malmesbury, see Gesta Pontificum, ch. 271, pp. 431-2. For the reality behind this belief, the late 11th- and early 12th-century acquisition and copying of many new manuscripts of classical authors, such as Plautus, Cicero, Suetonius, Terence, Virgil, Ovid and Lucan, see T. Webber, Scribes and Scholars at Salisbury Cathedral c.1075-c.1125 (Oxford, 1992).

92. Hume who believed that ‘almost all improvements of the human mind had reached nearly to their state of perfection about the age of Augustus’, concluded the first written (Stuart) part of his history with the thought that ‘it may justly be affirmed, without any danger of exaggeration, that we, in this island, have ever since [i.e. since 1688] enjoyed, if not the best system of government, at least the most entire system of liberty, that was ever known amongst mankind’; and the last written (medieval) part with a reference to ‘a civilized nation like the English who have happily established the most perfect and most accurate system of political liberty that was ever found compatible with government’ (H.E., i. 700, 704, iii. 773). Cf. Forbes, Philosophical Politics, pp. 167-9.

93. W.M., chs. 19, 26.

94. Ibid., ch. 228. Cf. Gesta Pontificum, p. 141, ‘a new kind of building’.

95. W.M., chs. 246, 445. William's enthusiam for the new style led R. A. Brown to write that ‘in spite of his antiquarian interests and sympathies, his Norman blood triumphed over his English in this respect as in others’ (idem, ‘William of Malmesbury as an architectural historian’, in his Castles, Conquest and Charters: Collected Papers (Woodbridge, 1989), p. 233).

96. W.M., ch. 123, based on Asser's Life of Alfred, ch. 76. Cf. S. Keynes and M. Lapidge, Alfred the Great: Asser's Life of Alfred and other Contemporary Sources (Harmondsworth, 1983), pp. 249-50 for discussion of a possible alternative meaning for Asser's ‘aedificia supra omnem antecessorum suorum consuetudinem nova sua machinatione facere’. Elsewhere William cites Athelney as an example of a church built in a new manner (Gesta Pontificum, p. 199).

97. W.M., ch. 54; the motivation (which was not in Bede) was supplied by William, and the phrase repeated in his Gesta Pontificum, p. 328. Amongst the new things brought in by Benedict Biscop were books—as William himself had done. For his notion of voluptas see ‘the pleasure of reading’ in the Prologue to Bk. II, and the description of how Alfred began to read, ‘ioco litteras ingressus’ (W.M., ch. 123). When William praised Alfred for carrying a pocketbook around with him at all times he called it a practice ‘insolens et inauditum’—a phrase not to be found either in Asser or in John of Worcester's rendering of the passage.

98. Note his praise for both Reading and Citeaux (ibid., chs. 334, 413).

99. Ibid., chs. 292, 335. Cf. John of Salisbury: ‘I have not been ashamed to cite moderns whose opinions in many instances I unhesitatingly prefer over those of the ancients’ (Metalogicon: a 12th-Century Defense of the Verbal and Logical Arts of the Trivium, Prologue, trans. D. D. McGarry (Berkeley, Calif., 1955), p. 6). In his De diversis artibus Theophilus explicitly claimed to offer the reader new things. Also Abelard: ‘mirabile est, cum per aetatum seriem et temporum successionem, humana in cunctis rebus creatis intelligentia crescat’ (idem, Dialogus inter Philosophum, Iudaeum et Christianum, ed. R. Thomas (Stuttgart, 1970), p. 45). I owe this reference to the kindness of Michael Clanchy.

100. W.M., chs. 334-7, 413. Much as he admired them William also predicted their decline, on the grounds that ‘the unfailing principle of human frailty is that nothing achieved by great toil can endure for long’.

101. Ibid., ch. 334. The speech was discussed by two of the contributors to Renaissance and Renewal in the 12th Century, R. L. Benson and G. Constable (Oxford, 1982), pp. 61-2, 104-5.

102. W.M., ch. 334. Cf. Gesta Pontificum, p. 15 for his justification of a digression about Boniface's pupil Frederick of Utrecht ‘ut Anglorum deputetur glorie’. Moreover whether or not Harding spoke in these terms, such things were often said in the early 12th century (T. Stiefel, The Intellectual Revolution in 12th-Century Europe (New York, 1985)). For some examples see Bartlett, pp. 148-9.

103. W.M., chs. 62-3, 69, 71, 73.

104. Ibid., ch. 245. Although God's inscrutable judgement had a role to play in William's perception of the battle of Hastings (ch. 228), and although he would doubtless have accepted, as an abstract principle, the primacy of divine providence, in practice secondary causes counted for more. On the relative unimportance of the Christian God in this worldly (but occasionally conscience-struck) monk's history see Thomson, William, pp. 24-8, and Blacker, pp. 2, 5.

105. W.M., chs. 176-7.

106. W.M., ch. 17. Cf. ch. 107: ‘such is the play of chance in human affairs’. ‘Ohne sich viel dabei zu denken gebraucht er sonst häufig die Worte fortuna und fatum’ (Richter, p. 64). Here too his view is very similar to Hume's view that development was due to ‘the great mixture of accident which commonly concurs with a small ingredient of wisdom and foresight’ (H.E., i. 704).

107. W.M., ch. 245-6. According to Orderic Vitalis, the Shropshire lad who became a Norman monk, already in William I's reign ‘English and Normans were living peacefully together in boroughs, towns, and cities and were intermarrying with each other. You could see many villages and town markets filled with displays of French wares and merchandise, and observe the English, who previously seemed contemptible to the French in their native dress, completely transformed by foreign fashions’ (The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. and trans. M. Chibnall (6 vols., Oxford, 1969-80), ii. 256-7). Doubtless Orderic dates this process of acculturation far too early, but clearly something of the kind had occurred by the time he and William were writing.

108. W.M., ch. 245, where ‘ancillas suas’ has been misleadingly translated as ‘serving-maids’.

109. Ibid., ch. 200.

110. Ibid., ch. 269. William associates Wulfstan of Worcester with Lanfranc in bringing pressure to bear on the king. Here the translators have rendered ‘mancipia sua’ as ‘their serfs’, although in ch. 200 ‘agmina mancipiorum’ became ‘parties of slaves’! Hume too confounds slavery and serfdom (H.E., i. 320, 324, and above all 703).

111. ‘Sed postquam Anglia dominos cepit habere Normannos, nuncquam hoc Anglici passi sunt ab alienis quod saepe passi sunt a suis, et hac in parte sibi meliores invenerunt extraneos quam se ipsos. Scotia autem et Hybernia, dominos habens de gente sua, nec omnino amisit nec ut olim exercet hunc morem suum’ (‘Life of S. Brigid’, in Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae, ed. W. W. Heist (Brussels, 1965), p. 1. I owe this reference to the kindness of Rob Bartlett. As a monk Lawrence compared his own frustration at not having time to write poetry to that of a eunuch in the company of a beautiful girl. On his writings see A. G. Rigg, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature 1066-1422 (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 54-61. Fifty years later Gerald de Barri still associated the enslavement of English by English with the period before 1066 (Expugnatio Hibernica: the Conquest of Ireland, ed. and trans. A. B. Scott and F. X. Martin (Dublin, 1978), p. 70).

112. W.M., ch. 95. By contrast, though he recognized Offa's greatness, he condemned him for cruelty (chs. 86, 90). Moreover whereas Bede had recorded in neutral words the pagan Cadwalla's promise to give a quarter of his profits to the Christian church once he had wiped out the pagan population of the Isle of Wight (Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, iv. 16), William (W.M., ch. 34) explicitly condemned this action, quoting Ecclesiastes 34.24: ‘Whoso bringeth an offering of the goods of the poor, doeth as one that killed the son before his father's eyes’. Elsewhere, in his Life of Wulfstan, he equated a fierce desire for vengeance with a loss of humanity (The Vita Wulfstani of William of Malmesbury, ed. R. R. Darlington (1928), pp. 38-9).

113. W.M., chs. 179, 180: ‘barbarica levitate’. William clearly believed that pagans were more likely than Christians to shed blood cruelly and treacherously (chs. 8 (on Hengest), 18 (Cwichelm)).

114. Ibid., chs. 181, 183. See … [p. 92] for the word componens.

115. Ibid., ch. 258. Here he was following very closely William of Poitiers' view of the conqueror.

116. Ibid., ch. 106. On Hume's use of this passage see … [p. 86].

117. As also did the other major English historian of the 2nd quarter of the 12th century, Henry of Huntingdon, in whose eyes Danish conquest was crueller than other conquests, and who observed that by contrast the Normans gave the defeated life, liberty and their ancient laws (H.H., pp. 272-3). On this subject see J. Gillingham, ‘1066 and the introduction of chivalry into England’, in Law and Government in Medieval England and Normandy: Essays in Honour of Sir James Holt, ed. G. Garnett and J. Hudson (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 31-55 and J. Gillingham, ‘Thegns and knights in 11th-century England: who was then the gentleman?’, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., 6th ser., v (1995), 129-53, both repr. in idem, The English in the 12th Century.

118. W.M., ch. 125. For his belief that Alfred founded Shaftesbury, see Gesta Pontificum, p. 186.

119. W.M., ch. 134. The last phrase, ‘humane usui conducibile existimes’, is there translated as ‘that would contribute in your view to a civilized life’.

120. Gesta Pontificum, p. 140.

121. W.M., ch. 409. In the same chapter he explained that it was simple matter for Henry I to bring the Irish king Muirchertach to heel by imposing a trade embargo - for what would Ireland be worth if goods did not come to it from England?

122. H.H., pp. 10-11, 18-21. According to Henry, an extensive foreign trade brought in so much silver that there appeared to be more silver in England than in Germany itself.

123. William of Newburgh, Historia Rerum Anglicarum, ed. R. Howlett, in Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I, vols. i and ii (Rolls Ser., 1884), i. 406. Hume quotes William FitzStephen on the prodigious riches, splendour and commerce of 12th-century London. Naturally in Hume's eyes this ‘proves only the great poverty of the other towns of the kingdom, and indeed of all the northern parts of Europe’ (H.E., i. 201). However it is only the attitude to commerce taken by these authors, all ecclesiastics, with which I am concerned here.

124. The Chronicle of Richard of Devizes, ed. J. T. Appleby (1963), pp. 4, 65-7. See N. F. Partner, Serious Entertainments: the Writing of History in 12th-Century England (Chicago, Ill., 1977), pp. 152-66 for Richard's urbanity, urbane wit, urban shrewdness and cynicism, knowing—and reporting—the price of everything.

125. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, p. 104.

126. M. Beresford, New Towns of the Middle Ages: Town Plantation in England, Wales and Gascony (Sutton, 1967), p. 328.

127. W.M., ch. 123. Indeed he saw himself as engaged in something similar. In the Prologue to Bk. II he described how he first spent a good deal of money ‘getting together a library of foreign historians’ and then collected chronicles from far and wide in a frustrating attempt to see whether anything ‘worth the attention of posterity’ had been written about our people, before setting to work himself to ‘bring into the light things lost in the rubbish-heap of the past’.

128. J. C. Holt, Colonial England, 1066-1215 (1997), pp. 6-12. For the economic climate in which William wrote, see E. King ‘Economic development in the early 12th century’, in Progress and Problems in Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Edward Miller, ed. R. H. Britnell and J. Hatcher (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 1-22.

129. R. W. Southern, ‘Master Vacarius and the beginning of an English academic tradition’, in Medieval Learning and Literature: Essays Presented to R. W. Hunt, ed. J. J. G. Alexander and M. T. Gibson (Oxford, 1976), p. 268.

130. So also, William assumed, could barbaric ways. According to him the Londoners who chose Cnut's son Harald as the next king had been made almost barbarous by their contacts with Danes (W.M., ch. 188). Hence the fear of degeneracy in Ireland, already perceived as a problem by Gerald de Barri in the 1180s.

131. ‘habitare cultius, amiciri elegantius, pasci accuratius’ (W.M., ch. 400). I was reminded of this passage when reading an account of a Pathé newsreel describing Kemal Atatürk as a benign autocrat who imported the best English hotel housekeepers ‘to teach Turkish women how to lay the table with knives and forks, and to keep their homes in a European manner’ (New Statesman, 27 Feb. 1998).

132. Pinkerton's Lives of the Scottish Saints, ed. W. M. Metcalfe (2 vols., Paisley, 1889), pp. 271, 273, 279. According to Symeon of Durham, writing earlier in the 12th century, Malcolm Canmore had been significantly improved when he married the English Margaret: ‘deposita morum barbarie, factus est honestior atque civilior’ (Symeonis Monachi Opera Omnia, ed. T. Arnold (2 vols., Rolls Ser., 1882-5), ii. 192). This passage was to be taken over by 2 other 12th-century English writers, the unknown author of the Historia post Bedam and, following him, Roger of Howden (Chronica Magistri Rogeri de Hovedene, ed. W. Stubbs (4 vols., Rolls Ser., 1868-71), i. 122).

133. According to Gerald, it was laid down at the 1172 synod of Cashel that in future the Irish church was in all matters to follow the observances of the English Church. Indeed he claimed that by the time of writing (late 1180s) they had already given up many of their longstanding evil practices (‘multimoda malorum genera’). Gerald credits Henry II with bringing English cuisine to Ireland (especially the eating of crane) and praises his own brother, Robert de Barri, as the first person ever to fly a sparrow-hawk in Ireland (Scott and Martin, pp. 38, 96, 100).

134. W.M., ch. 15. Cf. chs. 19 and 134 for other Latin words and phrases which the translators rendered as ‘civilized’.

135. Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, i (1975). In some contexts another candidate would be cultus, in the sense of culture or refinement

136. Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, viii, ed. G. F. Warner (Rolls Ser., 1891), p. 51.

137. As in the lines ‘Cura hominum potuit tantam componere Roman quantum non potuit solvere cura deum’ (‘The work of man was able to make of Rome such a city that not even the gods could wholly overthrow it’), from the great poem of Hildebert of Le Mans on Rome, Par tibi, Roma, nichil (cited in full by William, W.M., ch. 351).

138. ‘componere’, in Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources.

139. ‘Mihi vero visum est et indubitata veritate compertum, quod sicut nonnullos regio composita malos educat et incompositos, sic aliquem interdum regio barbara bonum producere possit et eruditum’ (Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, viii. lviii). This was from his first preface to De Principis Instructione and was used again in his 1199 selection of his favourite pieces, the Symbolum Electorum, letter 28. On this, see Bartlett, pp. 205, 210, 218-19.

140. ‘Quanto delicata minus et incomposita magis, tanto antiquo linguae Britannicae idiomati magis, ut arbitror, appropriata. Sicut in australibus Angliae finibus, et praecipue circa Devoniam, Anglica lingua hodie magis videtur incomposita’ (Descriptio Kambriae, Bk. 1, ch. 6; Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, vi. 177).

141. See above n. 133. By contrast when William of Malmesbury wanted to destroy Robert of Bellême's reputation, he referred to his ‘incompositis moribus intolerabilis’ (W.M., ch. 398).

142. ‘Iste regnum Anglorum ante dies suos rude et incompositum, totum erudivit et informavit ad regulam’ (‘Annales de Wintonia’, in Annales Monastici, ed. H. R. Luard (5 vols., Rolls Ser., 1864-9), ii. 10). Since he went on to emphasize Alfred's contribution to letters and to law and order in words echoing William of Malmesbury, there is no doubt what he understood by ‘incompositum’. Equally there can be no doubt that Richard was the author of these apparently anonymous annals (see Wormald, p. 142 n. 92 and P. Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith: Queenship and Women's Power in 11th-Century England (Oxford, 1997), pp. 19-22).

143. Gesta Stephani, p. 17.

144. Thus there are echoes of the Norman Conquest in Dr. Johnson's observation: ‘There was perhaps never any change of national manners so quick, so great and so general, as that which has operated in the Highlands, by the last conquest, and the subsequent laws’ (cited in J. Osterhammel, ‘Nation und Zivilsation in der Britischen Historiographie von Hume bis Macaulay’, Historische Zeitschrift, ccliv (1992), 313—an article to which I am much indebted). For the way in which Hume's view of the Highlands shaped his perception of Anglo-Saxon ‘freedom’, see H.E., i. 119; cf. Forbes, Philosophical Politics, p. 300. When Hume left London for Scotland, he evidently felt that some members of London society needed an explanation: ‘I return to a very sociable, civilized people’ (Letters, i. 348).

145. S. Daniel, Poems and a Defence of Ryme, ed. A. C. Sprague (Cambridge, Mass., 1930), p. 143. Daniel analysed the situation in which he decided to turn from poetry to prose history in terms very like those employed by the two great historians considered here: ‘I resolved to make triall of my forces in the contexture of our owne Historie, which for that it lay dispersed in confused peeces, hath bene much desired of many. And held to be some blemish to the honour of our Country to come behind other Nations in this kind’ (The Collection of the History of England in Complete Works, ed. A. B. Grosart (5 vols., 1885-96), iv. 75-6). It was in a similar frame of mind that Mandell Creighton agreed to become the first editor of the English Historical Review.

This article is a revised version of the Creighton Lecture in History, delivered in the University of London, 8 Nov. 1999. I would like to thank former colleagues and present friends in the University of London for inviting me to give the Creighton Lecture; the History Society of the University of East Anglia and the Medieval Society of the University of Sheffield, where I tried out some of these ideas; and Tim Hochstrasser who kept an amused and properly sceptical eye on my rash forays into the Enlightenment.