After the high drama of the previous century, the period from 1208 until 1296 was a time of comparative tranquillity and institutional consolidation. During these years the Abbey was ruled over by just four abbots. The first of these, Walter Loring (1208–22), responded astutely to the political crisis that played out during the final years of King John’s reign and greatly increased the Abbey's resources without resort to external patronage. Loring was opportunistic and skilfully exploited the weakness of John's position during the baronial rebellion of 1215–16. On 18 July 1215 the king was in Oxford. He had agreed to Magna Carta just one month earlier, but this had not brought an end to his troubles. When John reached Oxford, he was preparing for war and needed money and supporters. Shortly after arriving the king agreed to sell the castle and borough of Malmesbury, together with control of the three local hundred courts, to Loring. In return for these assets, the abbot made an immediate payment of 60 marks, pledging an annual contribution of £20 to the Crown as a so-called ‘fee farm’.

This was an extremely good deal for the Abbey which obtained, for the first time, ownership of most of the houses in the town, profits from local justice, control of the castle and the right to levy a range of additional fees on townsfolk – such as ‘landgable’ and ‘churchscot’ – that were previously due to the Crown. The clauses relating to the castle were explicitly advantageous to the Abbey: the king, not the abbot, was responsible for the cost of garrisoning the place ‘should there be war in England’. Arguably, the property rights in Malmesbury were not John's to sell because ever since his accession he had been involved in a bitter dispute with the dowager queen, Berengaria, widow of his brother, Richard the Lionheart. Berengaria claimed the profits from Crown holdings in Malmesbury and much else besides, as part of her dower income: in effect, her widow's pension. To compound this problem further, John had also granted the income from Malmesbury to his wife, Isabella of Angoulême, following their marriage in 1200. It seems that John sold the borough of Malmesbury while ignoring the claims of his sister-in-law and without seeking the agreement of his wife.

The destruction of Malmesbury Castle

Things went badly for John in the year that followed the grant of 1215.

The most active period of Anglo-Bohemian cultural contact, between the 1380s and the Council of Constance (1414–18), was marked by an impressive amount of textual transmission, mainly in the direction of Bohemia, which was at that time the political heart of the Holy Roman Empire. There was high demand in the empire for texts from across Europe, and the Anglo–Imperial alliance, formed in part to support the cause of the Roman pope during the Great Schism, helped facilitate the movement of people, books and other goods be tween these two regions in particular. For years, manuscript production in the empire proceeded at a greater pace than in any other European region, a trend that began during the Schism and continued through the introduction of print.

Malmesbury Abbey is famous, not only for its continuous longevity (part of it still survives today as the town's parish church), but, even more so, for its having given home to two individuals who were outstanding on the European stage: Aldhelm and William of Malmesbury. In fact, were it not for the writings of these two men, especially William, we should know far less and be much less interested in the Abbey. As it is, our knowledge is very ‘spotty’, and it is to Tony McAleavy's credit that he has not concealed the existence of the gaps, while doing his best to fill them. He sheds light on less well-understood phases of the monastery's history, such as the late Saxon period when celibate monasticism was restored, and the fourteenth century when the monks became entangled in national politics during the reign of Edward II. He gives us, for example, an excellent account of a chronicle written at Malmesbury in the mid-fourteenth century, the Eulogium Historiarum, and identifies, for the first time, its author as Thomas of Bromham. The misdeeds of John of Tintern, abbot in the fourteenth century, have received no previous scholarly attention, and Tintern is a splendid addition to the medieval gallery of ‘criminous clerks’. Thus, the text both synthesises findings from previous Malmesbury scholarship and includes significant new findings based on fresh research. It is greatly enriched by the excellent translations of Michael Winterbottom, many of which have not been previously published.

Tony McAleavy has given us the first connected, scientifically based history of the house, and it will be fundamental to any further research upon it. What remains to be done? It is most unlikely that many more literary sources will emerge, and expansion in our knowledge will only come through archaeology. William peppers the site with Anglo-Saxon churches of which nothing remains above ground, and which were thoroughly demolished after the Norman Conquest. There is much still to be discovered among the ruins and remains.

The years immediately after 1066 were traumatic for the Malmesbury monks, and the prospects did not look promising for an institution that was closely associated with the former royal house of Wessex and the cult of an Anglo-Saxon saint unknown to most Normans. Despite these challenges the monastery managed to weather the storm, and by the end of the reign of the Conqueror the cult of Aldhelm had been endorsed by leading members of the new Norman elite. When seeking to understand this story we are fortunate to have the testimony of the great historian, William of Malmesbury (c. 1086– c. 1143), who devoted considerable attention to the history of the monastery in the decades after 1066 in his Gesta Pontificum. The last Anglo-Saxon abbot, Brihtric, was dismissed and left Malmesbury, later receiving the abbacy of Burton-on-Trent as some sort of compensation. William wrote positively about Brihtric describing how ‘he ruled the house with high distinction for seven years’. He had much less time for the first Norman, Turold, the first Norman abbot, recruited from the Norman monastery of Fécamp, who was high-handed and acted ‘like a tyrant’. Turold's tenure at Malmesbury was extremely brief, and by 1070 he had been replaced by Warin of Lire, who was abbot until around 1091.

William of Malmesbury provided a curiously partisan account of Warin's rule at Malmesbury. He acknowledged that Warin introduced a good level of monastic observance, but he was also highly critical of other aspects of his behaviour, denouncing him as a man whose selfish misuse of the monastery's resources harmed the monks.

On arrival in Malmesbury Warin, at least according to William, treated many of the monastery's pre-Conquest relics with great disrespect.

Abbot William of Badminton (1296–1324) had a long and distinguished public career, and David Knowles considered that he was ‘the only abbot of note’ produced by Malmesbury after 1216. Towards the end of his abbacy he became entangled in the bitter conflict that broke out between Edward II's advisers, the Despensers, and the king's baronial opponents; but prior to this he had been a successful and respected prelate. In 1298, soon after becoming abbot, Badminton was chosen as one of the ‘presidents’ who organised the provincial chapter or conference of all Benedictine abbots in those parts of southern England subject to the archbishop of Canterbury. He continued to act as president until 1310 or 1311, visiting Rome twice, in around 1301–2 and also at some point between 1309 and 1314. Badminton played a central role in the campaign to ensure that the most talented Benedictine monks from English monasteries received a university education. In 1283 a small dependent cell of monks from Gloucester was established at Oxford, and in the 1290s the provincial chapter decided to expand Gloucester College, as it was known, and to make it a college for Benedictine monks from all over the Canterbury archdiocese. In 1298 Malmesbury Abbey was given a major stake in the governance of the institution. By this time a pious nobleman, Sir John Gifford, who owned the college's site, was living in retirement at Malmesbury Abbey, and he granted formal ownership of the premises to Malmesbury: the abbots of Malmesbury became the landlords of the college. William of Badminton appointed the first prior of the newly constituted college, and Malmesbury monks remained involved in the management of the institution throughout the fourteenth century. The site of the college is today part of Worcester College, and a late medieval sculptural shield bearing a griffin, the heraldic device of Malmesbury Abbey, can still be seen on the doorway of one set of rooms.

There is no reason to doubt that the Divine Office was taken seriously under the rule of William of Badminton. A beautiful psalter and hymnal survives from early fourteenth-century Malmesbury, which is held today in the library of Sankt Gallen in Switzerland. The manuscript contains a calendar of feasts celebrated by the Malmesbury monks and the text of the version of the Litany of Saints used by the Abbey.

A week before Christmas 1381, a small sixteen-year-old princess came ashore at Dover. After the anxieties of the crossing, she must have been alarmed by the storm the next day that battered the ship that had carried her over. She had lost her father, the emperor Charles IV, in 1378, and was now far from home. She was not entirely alone, of course. Apart from her own entourage, she was met in Calais by English knights who had paid court to her in Prague and was escorted in Kent by a large retinue including the uncles of the fifteen-year-old Richard II, her future husband. As Kent and London were epicentres of the recent revolt in England, she may have found a lack of warmth among the populace. The marriage, pursued, it was said, ‘without the consent of the kingdom’, was not seen in England as advantageous. Far from bringing a large dowry, Anne had been bought dear, with a hefty loan to her half-brother Wenceslas (Wenzel), king of the Romans and Bohemia; a large price, the monk of Westminster wrote, for ‘tantilla carnis porcione’ [such a small piece of meat]. It would nonetheless be a mistake to assume that she played a minimal role in the politics and culture of Ricardian England.

This chapter is dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God and Queen of Heaven; Anne of Bohemia, queen of England and daughter to a Holy Roman Emperor; and Geoffrey Chaucer, Esquire. Use of forenames puts them on the same plane, suggesting some degree of commensurability. The addition of titles opens up vast vertical distances, neck-craning separations. Such is the peculiar dynamic of late-medieval Catholic imagining, alternating comforting intimacy with a distancing so extreme it can feel like abandonment. And since medieval heaven is a court, with Mary ‘quen of cortasye’, comparable dynamics play out between those at the heart of a secular court and those lurking uncertainly at its fringes. This essay explores relations between the English poet and the Bohemian English queen by triangulating them with the Virgin Mary, chiefly as represented through Chaucer's poetry.

The most famous and dramatic shifting of ground from first-name intimacy to titles-only distance in Catholic culture is supplied by the Ave Maria, ‘the child's first prayer, the dying person's last’:

The monastic compiler of the Liber Eliensis, writing in the late twelfth century, offers a vivid impression of the unpleasant nature and conduct of the sheriff. Indeed, most have heard of the medieval sheriff: the pre-modern period was apparently riddled with unsavoury, grasping, malicious thugs perpetually seeking to deprive unjustly the public of their money, land, and sometimes even their freedom. One could go so far as to say that the ‘poster boy’ for the poor character of the medieval sheriff is the bullying, greedy sheriff of Nottingham, immortalized in various retellings of the Robin Hood legend. But how much does this figure resemble the agents who operated in Edward the Confessor's England? What do we know of the men and the office in the eleventh century, closer to the origins of the role? This article aims to provide a clearer picture of the Confessor's sheriffs and their activities. It has been well-established – by Ann Williams, Judith Green, Tom Lambert, Richard Abels, and George Molyneaux – that sheriffs were an important cog in the machinery of the eleventh-century English administration. The emergence of this official, beginning in the late tenth century, significantly impacted the exercise and reach of royal power. But what do we know of the men who operated in the office of sheriff in the last decades of the pre-Conquest period?

Malmesbury Abbey is one of England's great medieval sites. Its significance is considerable but often underestimated: a Christian community lived and worshipped on this site more or less continuously for over eight centuries – from around 670 to 1539 – and during these years the Abbey was an important national institution for a shifting combination of religious, artistic, cultural and political reasons. By 700 the monastery was one of the leading centres of higher learning in Britain and Ireland, with a library that could match any in western Europe. The large fragment of the Abbey church that still survives today is a masterpiece of twelfthcentury Romanesque architecture and the south porch contains some of the finest sculpture of the period in England. Malmesbury had many links with royalty, both before and after the Conquest: it was originally endowed jointly by the royal houses of both Wessex and Mercia; Æthelstan chose the place as his mausoleum; Edmund Ironside was married there; Queen Matilda, wife of the Conqueror, was a patron; and Henry I gave control of the monastery to his wife, Matilda of Scotland, as part of her dower.

The monastery produced two great writers: Aldhelm, the first English ‘man of letters’ (died c. 709), and William of Malmesbury, the most learned English historian of the high Middle Ages (died c. 1143). The place was also home to many other now largely forgotten individuals who led surprisingly interesting lives, such as: Faricius of Arezzo, the Italian monk who became the personal physician to Henry I; William of Colerne, the farming abbot who transformed the economic fortunes of the Abbey in the thirteenth century; Thomas of Bromham, the chronicler and English nationalist who envisaged a messianic role for the Black Prince; and John of Tintern, the criminal abbot who lived openly with his lover in the 1340s and was accused by local people of arson and murder. The monastery was established in the seventh century in unsettled times, and perhaps it is unsurprising, therefore, that the most striking features of the topography of the site are its strong natural defences. The historic centre of Malmesbury is built on a plateau which tops an elevated promontory of oolitic limestone.

The succession crisis that followed the death of Henry I in 1135 led to protracted political turmoil and conflict in England. Civil war broke out in 1139, and the monks of Malmesbury witnessed several episodes of conflict in the years that followed. We are blessed with exceptional sources for the study of Malmesbury during Stephen's turbulent reign. William of Malmesbury provided commentary on the early stages of the conflict between Stephen and Matilda in his Historia Novella. William was not an objective witness because the work was commissioned by Robert of Gloucester, Matilda's half-brother and general, who was one of the main actors in the events of the period. Despite his partisan perspective the Historia Novella was carefully written and well-informed, and it remains a source of immense value to historians today. William’s testimony breaks off towards the end of 1142 but the anonymous chronicle, the Gesta Stephani, provides a narrative guide to the whole conflict. Gesta Stephani was written by someone with in-depth knowledge of the Malmesbury area: over a quarter of all the places mentioned in it lie within a 25-mile radius of Malmesbury. On the basis of substantial circumstantial evidence the author has been identified as Robert of Lewes, Bishop of Bath. In addition to the Historia Novella and the Gesta Stephani, other chroniclers such as Henry of Huntingdon and John of Worcester provided detailed accounts of events at Malmesbury during the Anarchy.

It is clear from these contemporary sources that both sides in the war between Stephen and Matilda were anxious to control Malmesbury because of the strategic importance of its castle. The precise location of the castle is not known but it was undoubtedly very close to the conventual church. In his Historia Novella William of Malmesbury stated that Bishop Roger had established the castle ‘in the churchyard itself, hardly a stone’s throw from the abbey’. No trace remains above ground of the structure because the monks, who greatly resented the castle's existence, completely destroyed all traces of the fabric following their acquisition of the site in 1216. However, we can surmise that the castle was substantial and built to a high specification because it was besieged in 1144 and 1153 but on both occasions the attackers were unable to take it by force.

What does the story of Troy tell us about literary cultures in the later Middle Ages? This is a large question which the present essay considers with reference to two apparently different linguistic, cultural and political contexts as exemplified, first, by Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie (c. 1165) and Guido de Columnis's Historia destructionis Troie (1287) and, second, by John Lydgate's Troy Book (1412–20). The first context is the transnational Latin and French literary culture of the late thirteenth century that is found in a variety of intersecting forms across Europe (Troie and the Historia); the second is the more local English-language situation specific to England (Troy Book), which may be instructive for Bohemian Troy material despite the latter's cultural and linguistic separation from English since Czech literature, like that of England, is written in a vernacular with a limited rather than a transnational dissemination. Although these two contexts – the ‘learned’, Latinate transnational literary culture and the more demotic, vernacular local or (proto)national one – appear to be so different, there are in fact important connections between them that result from a shared approach to translatio studii, the ‘transfer of learning’, across Troy literature.

The Black Death had, of course, a devastating impact on Malmesbury Abbey, just as it did on every community in England. Victims probably included Abbot John of Tintern, and the prior of the dependent cell at Pilton, John of Lokyngham, both of whom died in 1349. There were doubtless many other victims in the monastery and the neighbourhood of the Abbey. There is no documentary evidence relating specifically to the death rate among the monks of Malmesbury Abbey but data from other Benedictine communities suggests that the mortality level was often extremely high. At Durham Cathedral Priory about half of the community died during the Black Death. Although we do not know how many monks died, it is possible to estimate quite precisely the rate of mortality among some of the rural poor in the Malmesbury area using the records of Glastonbury Abbey which owned property extremely close to Malmesbury Abbey in north Wiltshire. Four Glastonbury manors lay within a ten-mile radius of Malmesbury: Christian Malford, Grittleton, Kington and Nettleton. The village of Christian Malford was just six miles from Malmesbury and immediately adjacent to the manor of Sutton Benger which belonged to Malmesbury Abbey. Records survive from the Glastonbury archive which can be used to demonstrate the death rate of ‘garciones’, adult male villeins without land, on Glastonbury's Wiltshire estates. It is reasonable to assume that the mortality rate in the villages owned by Malmesbury Abbey resembled that on the nearby Glastonbury lands, where the death rate among this class of villeins ranged from 48% to 66%.

The mortality for townsfolk was doubtless high also. One indicator of the disappearance of whole households in the town is found in legal records from 1352, which state that four men from Malmesbury – Nicholas Handsex, Thomas Smyth, Richard Uphulle and Thomas Terry – were guilty of ‘carrying doors and windows from empty tenements in Malmesbury’.

At a national level the shortage of labour after the Black Death created problems for monastic landlords, and eventually led to the end of direct demesne farming. At Malmesbury this process was protracted: the abandonment of demesne farming took place at some point in the early fifteenth century. The ‘inquisition post-mortem’ for Abbot Walter of Camme, following his death in 1396, indicates that his demesnes were largely still in hand, although with dilapidated buildings and lands wasted by the pestilence.

The Golden Book

The Anglo–Imperial alliance initiated by the marriage of Anne of Luxem-bourg, daughter of Emperor Charles IV, to Richard II, king of England, in 1382, had little immediate political impact. However, the dynastic connection certainly opened the door for contacts between the two countries, reflected among other things by the increasing numbers of people travelling between the two courts along the Main–Rhine waterway in the 1380s and 1390s. Regular contact continued even after the death of Queen Anne in 1394; in this connection, the transfer of Wyclif's teachings to Prague is commonly mentioned, although the actual evidence for individuals mediating such an exchange of ideas is rather scarce.

However, not everyone travelling to England at the turn of the fourteenth century need necessarily have been interested in Wyclif and his writings. In this context, there is an interesting ‘Brief report’ about a manuscript from the Prague Metropolitan Chapter Library (D.12), in which F. M. Bartoš discovered a ‘long-forgotten sad obituary, written by an anonymous English poet after the queen's death in 1394’.

The epithet in solo nomine (in name only) was designed to crack smooth veneers. Late antique and early medieval theologians attached this label to purported members of their Christian community, whom the disapproving authors deemed deficient. In the ninth and tenth centuries, political commentators, including the Astronomer and Liudprand of Cremona, scolded Emperor Louis the Pious and King Lothar of Italy with just this epithet, castigating them as consecrated rulers who could not uphold the political values associated with their nomen. This sharp turn of phrase drew attention not only to the individual ruler's perceived failure, but also to the constant challenge that faced early medieval leaders across Christendom who sought to adapt to the fluid expectations embedded in their titles.

This essay examines the intersection between titles, on the one hand, and the expectations of the wider political community, on the other. It does so by offering a focused examination of the title dux as it was attached to two tenth-century women, Beatrix of Upper Lotharingia and Judith of Bavaria. Scholars have often classified the ascription of this title to these women as a rare instance of the manifestation of ‘masculine’ power by early medieval women. As such, historians have often analysed the degree to which Judith's or Beatrix's power did or did not match the masculine norm and the extent to which they did or did not occupy a reified officium. This essay queries these established readings. In order to do so, it first introduces the philosophical framework of the ‘economy of esteem’, as conceptualized by Geoffrey Brennen and Philip Pettit, with its important emphasis on virtue and the feedback loop required for political systems to function. It then examines the lexical quality of the term dux as a communal noun, building upon recent philological examinations of the variety and fluidity of gender in classical and medieval Latin. This concentration on dux casts doubt on scholarly claims of the ascription of ‘masculine’ titles to female political leaders as a sign of increased political power in the tenth century. The essay then examines the metaphorical and historical usage of dux as applied to female rulers from the fifth to the tenth century.

Over the last two decades, scholars have made a great deal of progress in trying to understand how tenth- and eleventh-century authors represented intentional change in religious settings. Their nineteenth- and twentieth-century predecessors saw no issue with referring to such changes as ‘reforms’, and even today the term remains firmly embedded in the discourse of specialist publications. However, recent studies have argued that its current use reflects a semantic shift that took place in the 1600s. As such, it implies a programmatic logic, forward-looking dynamic, and ideological cohesiveness, all three of which are features that sit uncomfortably with the ‘messy’ reality that emerges from the primary evidence. Not only that, but the early modern conceptualization of reform is a mismatch with the way in which high medieval people perceived religious change, what they expected from it, and how they wrote about it. In response to this greater semantic awareness, specialists have become a great deal more focused on answering questions about the literary traditions and ideological trends that inspired the language of restoration and renewal in tenth- and eleventh-century sources. The narrative tropes used in these sources to describe real-life processes of spiritual and institutional change have likewise been subject to a new scrutiny. The same is true of the degree to which this language and these tropes accurately captured these complex and incremental phenomena.

Among a large number of publications that address these issues, one of the latest and most intriguing is a monograph by the German scholar Stephan Bruhn. Analysing literary sources from tenth- and early eleventh-century England, he notes that authors relied on a concept of religious change that was neither programmatic nor ideological, but social. Their argument centred on the existence of what Bruhn calls ‘communities of value’ (Wertegemeinschaften), heterogeneous cohorts of people who shared the same ethical values and interest in religious change, but who neither necessarily agreed on a course of action, nor always had a precise view of long-term outcomes. When it comes to applying his analysis to the Continent, however, Bruhn has expressed reservations. In his view, specific contextual factors and literary traditions in England created the conditions for authors to write about religious change in this manner. True as this may be, to not take up the implied challenge would be an opportunity missed.