Mortuary Rolls and Women’s Religious Networks

Medieval Networks of Memory is a project combining manuscript studies and digital humanities in order to discover new information about mortuary roll culture, female literacy (especially female scribes), and commemorative networks in thirteenth-century England. Our project aims to be the entry into a scalable study of mortuary rolls. In order to test both our hypotheses and our digital workbench we focused on two manuscript rolls, London, British Library, Egerton MS 2849 and Cambridge, St John’s College, MS N.31.¹ The Egerton Roll commemorates Lucy, Prioress of the Benedictine nunnery at Castle Hedingham, Essex, who died in c.1225. The St John’s Roll commemorates Amphelisa, Prioress of Lillechurch (Higham) in Kent, who (from internal evidence provided by the roll) died some years prior to 1220. These two rolls together provide evidence for hundreds of contemporary scribes writing in the second and third decades of the thirteenth century in or for religious houses from multiple orders throughout England, Scotland and Wales. This is exceptional evidence for the significant shifts in palaeographical practices evidenced in the period c.1215 to 1230, just as Anglicana script emerged, Gothic became firmly established, and documentary hands came into their own centrally and regionally. In these rolls, it’s possible to get a real sense of the variety of hands at work in these decades, and these textual objects present a stunning range of scripts, scribal practices, and competencies.

Spaces

We are chiefly focused on the codicological and palaeographical reading of the rolls, which means that we have looked at each of the rolls as a whole. This is why, when mapping the rolls, we put special emphasis on representing the material reality of the manuscript in its geographical context. On the first two of our interactive maps readers can look not only into the various types of houses and the itinerary taken by the breviator, the person tasked to take the roll to various monasteries, but can also explore the digital facsimiles of the individualised tituli–the commemorative entries–set alongside the transcriptions of their texts.

In our research we have paid close attention to the hierarchy of space: which houses were supposed to write their tituli in which space. The order and connections between entries reflect the complex relationships between various houses and their affiliation. Some houses copy errors and whole formulations from others. In some cases, the same scribe is responsible for a series of entries. The internal construction of the rolls, the joins between membranes and their size, also dictate how the tituli interact with each other. In a way, the space of the membrane dictates its own hierarchies. For example, in the St John’s College Amphelisa Roll female houses take on average slightly more space for their tituli than the male ones and the Cistercian nuns seem to be most economical with their parchment as opposed to Benedictine nuns that need the most of it.² But numbers of lines are not all: some houses take fewer lines but write in especially ornate script that takes an extraordinary amount of vertical space. Scribal hierarchies do not always follow monastic hierarchies on those rolls, either. We can be fairly sure that some houses had a space reserved for them while others followed seamlessly from previous entries, and still others appear to have been squeezed into left-over space. Some tituli are collectively entered by the same scribe (perhaps contracted for that very purpose), but most often these scribes attempt to disguise the fact that their hand is responsible for more than one institution’s titulus. At the same time some of the houses represented were very small (fewer than a half-dozen nuns or monks) and yet seem to have completed their entries on their own. Some of the entries are very conservative in their script; others show features that are absolutely contemporary and even preemptive of palaeographical changes that are not in common use for some decades.

Scripts

Both Egerton MS 2849 and St John’s College MS N. 31 provide obvious grounds for questioning our assumptions about the development of script forms and features in the first third of the thirteenth century. We see features appearing in the tituli that can be deemed old-fashioned by c.1215-1230; the ligature of round-backed d and high e, for example. Other features, such as the use of a flat, almost brushstroke-like, abbreviation mark, are more commonly associated with later thirteenth-century script. Because of the intermediary, somewhat liminal genre of the mortuary roll, many hands regularly demonstrate features that are ‘blended’ (a term we have coined for hands that take features from more than one notional model of script), somewhere on a spectrum between the strictly ‘documentary’ (documentaria) and ‘book’ (textura) registers. Such ‘scriptural events’ urge a reassessment of the evolution of particular forms and categories of writing in this period.

It is already evident to us from our analyses of the manuscripts that it was not only ‘professional’ scribes who took part in the commemorative practices demonstrated by the two mortuary rolls. The variety of hands and scripts, as well as registers and competencies, in the various tituli makes it abundantly clear that the rolls challenge our expectations about levels of developed literacy (both reading and writing) within monastic and canonical contexts in this period. There may be clear patterns of distinction between female and male houses and this is one of the areas of Treharne’s work. Moreover, elaborate and highly practised entries share the same membrane with what some palaeographers, even now, would describe as an ‘untrained hand’.³ While a particular form and genre in its own right, a mortuary roll nevertheless offers a snapshot of concurrent scribal practices in what we believe is a relatively constrained period of time. This provides scholars with the opportunity to see the variety of forms of scribal training and performance throughout England, and some parts of Wales and Scotland, both in large and well-resourced institutions and those smaller, modest, much less well-known, religious houses.

The research team is gathering a database of palaeographical and codicological features for both rolls. This should allow us to better compare and analyse not only the individual entries but also the connections between various scribes. How prominent are specific letter-forms and modes of abbreviation? Is it possible to describe discernible regional or institutional patterns of writing? Which features tend to coexist within individual hands and then in what kind of spaces? What do the coexistence of components of graphs or types of scribal practice in decoration, punctuation, abbreviation, and capitalisation tell us about the development, display and perceived functionality of scripts? These specific questions are prioritised in our project’s first major publication, a substantial article currently under review.

In his monumental and foundational work, Dufour organised the entries of his rolls into a hypothetical order in which he believed the breviator visited successive institutions.⁴ His concept is more or less based on the ‘path of least resistance’ of the perceived transport network in early thirteenth-century Britain. But the rolls could be created over a span of time that could potentially be as much as a few years, and it is possible that a breviator often carried more than one roll. This led us to question some features of Dufour’s order. The itineraries of Lucy’s and Amphelisa’s rolls can only be established if the geographical proximity of various houses and their filiation is supplemented by the information delivered from the material and palaeographical strata of the manuscripts. Since the order of the tituli do not always correspond with an obvious route, there are numerous questions to be addressed about how the rolls were actually compiled. Treharne is visiting every site on the rolls to examine proximities and topography. Such field research is a significant part of the next stage of the research process and we are hopeful that our discoveries of related hands and shared scribes will help to fill out the evidence for these remarkable and generative records that testify so clearly to commemorative practices and networks of memory in the High Middle Ages.