The Chronicle of Ralph of Coggeshall

Publication and Censorship in Angevin England *

James Willoughby
(Oxford)

In 1877, shortly before becoming Regius Professor of History

at Oxford, Edward Augustus Freeman wrote, “to me a manu-
script becomes practically useful only when it is changed into the
more every-day shape of a printed book”.1 That Freeman’s com-
ment should occur in the preface to one of the great editions in
the Rolls Series is a sign of the scholarly self-confidence of the
age: the second half of the nineteenth century was a remarkable
moment in Britain for the making of editions.2 Those of the Rolls
Series — administered on behalf of the government, its editors on

* This essay derives from a paper originally delivered in 2014 as the Uni-
versity of London’s John Coffin Memorial Lecture in Palaeography. I remain
very grateful to Elizabeth Danbury and Pam Robinson for their invita-
tion to speak on that occasion. I am also pleased to record my gratitude to
Nicholas Vincent for always enlightening discussion and to Samu Niskanen
for his insightful comments that have improved this text.
1 From his preface to the seventh volume of Giraldi Cambrensis opera, ed.

by J. F. Dimock, 8 vols, London, 1861–1891 (Rolls Series, 21), p. ciii. Free-

man was completing the work of James Dimock, his late friend.
2 The Rolls Series (properly named Rerum Britannicarum medii aevi

scriptores, or Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during

the Middle Ages), whose editions occupy 259 physical volumes, began print-
ing in 1858 and concluded in 1911. An entertaining account of the project’s
inception and history is given by D. Knowles, Great Historical Enterprises.
Problems in Monastic History, London, 1963, pp. 99–134. As well as numerous
county record series that began publishing at the same time, kindred contem-
porary enterprises that might be mentioned, still alive today, are the Early
English Text Society (1864), for the publishing of medieval literary sources
in English, the Pipe Roll Society (1883), for documents of medieval royal

The Art of Publication from the Ninth to the Sixteenth Century, ed. by Samu Niskanen
with the assistance of Valentina Rovere, IPM, 93 (Turnhout, 2023), pp. 131–166.
© DOI 10.1484/M.IPM-EB.5.133083

This is an open access chapter distributed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International

License.
132 james willoughby

civil-list pensions — occupy a high position. The great proportion

of these editions of medieval texts have been relied upon for more
than a century and are still current. Historians have taken it on
trust that the Victorian editor, in forming the everyday shape of
his printed book, saw in the manuscript everything that he ought
to have seen. But of course any edition — any fair copy — of an
author’s draft, as much one copied by hand as typeset in print,
will flatten the uneven landscape of the exemplar, smoothing its
corrections, additions, and second thoughts. Sometimes that will
not matter very much, sometimes it will. To make any theoretical
statement about medieval publication, and to understand recep-
tion, it is in fact necessary to see Freeman’s process in reverse.
One must begin by reifying the text as a manuscript book, imag-
ining it in the hands of its medieval makers, and learn to see
transmission as a concessionary process, from writer to reader.
The early thirteenth-century chronicle that is the principal
object of discussion here is another of those edited in the Rolls
Series, published in this case only two years before Freeman’s. In
this case, too, the edition is still current. What is unusual about
this chronicle is that the author’s copy happens to survive. In it
may be tracked all manner of additions, corrections and second
thoughts, the import of which have not been fully understood.
The editor, Joseph Stevenson, recognizing the national interest of
the chronicle, gave the work the title Chronicon Anglicanum. 3 The
chronicler was Ralph, abbot of the Cistercian abbey of Coggeshall
in north Essex, in the medieval diocese of London.4 His work has
an independent fame. It is one of only a handful of contemporary
English chronicle sources for the reigns of Kings Richard I (1189–
1199) and John (1199–1216), and is the unique contemporary
source for some picturesque and famous events in English history,
such as the circumstances of King Richard’s capture in Austria
and the disaster of John’s loss of his baggage train in the Wash

government, the Henry Bradshaw Society (1890), for liturgical texts, and the
Canterbury and York Society (1904), for medieval ecclesiastical records.
3 Radulphi de Coggeshall Chronicon Anglicanum, ed. by J. Stevenson,

London, 1875 (Rolls Series, 66) [hereafter CA].

4 An account of his life is given by D. Corner in the Oxford Dictionary of

National Biography.
 the chronicle of ralph of coggeshall 133

off the East Anglian coast. 5 While not a self-conscious stylist or

reflective about either his sources or his role, Ralph can be a vivid
story-teller. He offers much on the Third and Fourth Crusades
— some of it told to him by returning crusaders — and on the
relations of Richard and John with each other, with the English
barons, with King Philip II of France, and with the papacy. There
are censorious accounts of heresies, such as that of the Publicani
in the diocese of Reims, and credulous accounts of visions, a genre
much enjoyed by Cistercians.6 Ralph retells visions of purgatory,
as well as the story of an angelic visitation at Coggeshall itself.
There is also a strand of marvels.7 In Ralph’s account of two
green children who had come from a land under the earth, found
in a pit in the neighbouring county of Suffolk, folklorists identify
England’s first fairy story.8
As with any author attempting to chronicle his own times, Ral-
ph’s sources of information were various. His knowledge of the
circumstances of King Richard’s capture at Vienna in 1192 came
from conversation with Anselm, the king’s chaplain and mem-

5 Summaries of the chronicle’s contents are given by A. Gransden, His-

torical Writing in England c. 550–c. 1307, 2 vols, London, 1974, vol. 1, pp. 322–
31; and, with a particular interest in demonstrating how Ralph shaped his
history to appeal to specifically Cistercian interests, E. Freeman, Narratives
of a New Order: Cistercian Historical Writing in England, 1150–1220, Turnhout,
2002 (Medieval Church Studies, 2) pp. 179–213. Ralph’s status as a histo-
rian is discussed by M. Staunton, The Historians of Angevin England, Oxford,
2017, esp. pp. 117–20.
6 For the Cistercian interest in purgatory and vision literature, see

B. McGuire, “Purgatory, the Communion of Saints and medieval change”,

Viator, 20 (1989), pp. 61–84, at 75–78; C. Watkins, “Doctrine, politics and
purgation: the Vision of Tnúthgal and the Vision of Owein at St Patrick’s
Purgatory”, Journal of Medieval History, 22 (1996), pp. 225–36; Freeman,
Narratives of a New Order, pp. 188–93.
7 Summarized and discussed, in relation to a Cistercian orthodoxy, by

Freeman, Narratives of a New Order, pp. 193–213; further discussed by

Staunton, Historians of Angevin England, pp. 120–27.
8 CA, pp. 118–20. The story was first popularized by T. Keightley, The

Fairy Mythology: Illustrative of the Romance and Superstition of Various Coun-

tries, rev. edn, London, 1878, pp. 281–83; see also K. Briggs, The Fairies in
Tradition and Literature, London, 1967, pp. 7–8, and many other dictionar-
ies of English folklore. The fullest consideration of the Green Children is by
J. Clark, “The Green Children of Woolpit” (2018), online at <https://www.
academia.edu/10089626>.
134 james willoughby

ber of his tiny fugitive retinue.9 Ralph’s detailed description of

Richard’s death came from Milo († 1226), the king’s almoner and
Cistercian abbot of Le Pin in the Île-de-France, who had taken
confession, administered extreme unction, and closed the dead
king’s eyes.10 Hugh de Neville († 1234), royal forester, supplied a
valuable eyewitness account of the Siege of Jaffa in 1192.11 Most
of Ralph’s informants are unidentified, but it may be suspected
that Cistercian networks as well as local ones provided him with
significant assistance.12 As he received information, Ralph also
disbursed it. The evidence is inferential, but combines strongly
to suggest that Ralph was ambitious for his work and cultivated
publishing circles to receive and propagate it.13 Before turning to
an examination of his major work and what it can say to the mat-

9 CA, p. 54, illustrated in Plate 1 below.

10 Ibid., pp. 94–98. See further J. Gillingham, “The unromantic death
of Richard I”, Speculum, 54 (1979), pp. 18–41, at 27. Ralph had himself met
King Richard and remembered him vividly: CA, pp. 92, 97.
11 CA, p. 45. Ralph replaced his earlier account with Hugh’s: in Cotton

MS Vespasian D. x, discussed below, it is written on an erasure and car-

ried over on an inserted bifolium (RC, pp. 44–46; Vespasian, fols 60 v, 62–63).
Hugh de Neville had been chief justice of the forest since 1198. On 1 January
1204, Coggeshall abbey was granted licence to enclose its park, which would
normally have brought the justice to the abbey, offering one occasion on
which Hugh could have given Ralph his account: Pipe Roll 6 John, ed. D. M.
Stenton, Publications of the Pipe Roll Society, n.s. 18 (1940), pp. 33–34.
12 Local networks will be discussed further below. Cistercian networks

were tightly integrated through monasteries’ own affiliations and through

the requirement upon abbots to attend general chapters of the order. As
abbot, Ralph is known to have been at Cîteaux in 1214 when he was called
on to deliver the decision of the General Chapter on three separate lawsuits
(Statuta 1214, §§ 10, 24, 40; ed. by J.-M. Canivez, Statuta capitulorum gen-
eralium ordinis Cisterciensis ab anno 1116 ad annum 1786, 8 vols, Louvain,
1933–1941), 1. 420, 422, 425). On such an occasion he could have met Abbot
Milo, from whom he had his vivid account of the death of King Richard men-
tioned above; also Adam of Perseigne, abbot of Le Mans, who gave Ralph
the details of his interview in Rome with the visionary, Joachim of Fiore
(CA, pp. 68–69). Both men were intimates of the king, respectively his almo-
ner and confessor; see further H. Shaw, “Cistercian abbots in the service of
British monarchs (1135–1335)”, Cîteaux: Commentarii Cistercienses, 58 (2007),
pp. 225–45, at 235, n. 46.
13 I use the notion of “publishing circle” as defined by J. Tahkokallio,

The Anglo-Norman Historical Canon. Publishing and Manuscript Culture, Cam-

bridge, 2019.
 the chronicle of ralph of coggeshall 135

ter of Ralph’s strategies for composition and publication, it will

be helpful to review other texts associated with his name for what
they can reveal about his practices as a publishing author.

Ralph’s Life and Works

Four facts about Ralph’s life are supplied by two passages in
the Chronicon Anglicanum: that he was the sixth abbot of Cog-
geshall, from 1207 to 1218; that he resigned through ill health,
much against the wishes of the brethren; that he wrote vision sto-
ries; and that he composed a chronicle of the years 1187 to 1226
or 1227.14 Earlier scholarship had it that Ralph had been in the
Holy Land, present at the siege of Jerusalem where he took an
arrow to the face, the tip of which remained embedded in his nose
for the rest of his life.15 The picture of the abbot as a spent cru-
sader retiring to the cloister to take up the writing of history is
an enjoyable vignette to conjure; but this aspect of Ralph’s pseu-
do-biography rests on an accident of transmission. An account
of the disasters suffered by the Christians in Palestine in 1186
and 1187, known editorially as the Libellus de expugnatione Terrae
Sanctae per Saladinum, whose anonymous author it really was who
took the arrow to the face, happens to have been transmitted with
Ralph’s chronicle.16 It was therefore attributed to Ralph by the

14 CA, pp. 162–63: “Anno mccvii, obiit domnus Thomas, abbas quintus

de Cogeshal, cui successit domnus Radulfus, monachus eiusdem loci, qui hanc
chronicam a captione Sancte Crucis usque ad annum undecimum Henrici
regis III, filii regis Iohannis, descripsit, ac quasdam uisiones quas a uenera-
bilibus uiris audiuit, fideliter annotare ob multorum edificationem curauit.”
Ibid., p. 187: “Eodem anno [sc. mccxviii] domnus Radulfus abbas sextus de
Cogeshale, cum iam per annos xi. et mensibus duobus administrasset, circa
festum sancti Ioannis Baptiste, contra uoluntatem conuentus sui, cure pasto-
rali sponte sua renunciauit, frequenti egritudine laborans.”
15 As, for example, Edmond Martène and Ursin Durand, Veterum scrip-

torum et monumentorum historicorum, dogmaticorum, moralium; amplissima col-

lectio, 9 vols, Paris, 1724–1733, vol. 5, coll. 543–44.
16 An edition was included by Stevenson with his printing of Ralph’s chron-

icle: CA, pp. 209–62. It is newly edited, with full discussion, by K. Brewer,
J. H. Kane, The Conquest of the Holy Land by Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn: A Critical Edition
and Translation of the Anonymous Libellus de expugnatione Terrae Sanctae per
Saladinum, Abingdon, 2019. Sensible reasons for preferring the title Libellus
de expugnatione Terrae Sanctae over Chronicon Terrae Sanctae, which was John
Bale’s coinage and has had currency in the past, are given at p. 1, n. 1. The
136 james willoughby

Tudor antiquary, John Bale (1495–1563), and became empanelled

as such in the bibliographical tradition.17 In fact, as Bishop Stubbs
first showed, the account of events in the Holy Land that can be
found in Ralph’s chronicle and the account given by the Libellus
de expugnatione Terrae Sanctae bear no relation to each other either
stylistically or in tone, and they tell much of the same story in
very different ways and with reference to different, and sometimes
inconsistent, details.18 The author of the Libellus wrote a memoir
in rhetorical and indeed exegetical mode; Ralph, using the imper-
sonal voice of the annalist, produced a condensed account deriving
his information at second hand from the Libellus as well as Roger
of Howden’s Chronica.
However, this is not to say that the monks at Coggeshall played
no part in the transmission of the Libellus. Quite the contrary: in
three of its four manuscripts, all copied at Coggeshall, the Libellus

wound mentioned by the author (“the one relating these things”) is at p. 200:
“Nam et facies hec referentis, sagitta per medium nasum infixa uulnerata
est, atque extracto ligno ferrum usque hodie permansit”; discussed further by
Brewer, Kane, Conquest of the Holy Land, pp. 11–12.
17 John Bale, Index Britanniae scriptorum, ed. by R. L. Poole, M. Bate-

son, John Bale’s Index of British and Other Writers, London, 1902, repr. Wood-
bridge, 1990, pp. 327–28; idem, Scriptorium illustrium Maioris Britanniae
catalogus, 2 vols, Basel, 1557–1559, vol. 1, p. 275; John Pits, Relationum his-
toricarum de rebus Anglicis tomus I (Paris, 1619), pp. 301–02; Thomas Tanner,
Bibliotheca Britannico-Hibernica; sive, De scriptoribus, qui in Anglia, Scotia, et
Hibernia ad saeculi XVII initium floruerunt, commentarius, ed. by D. Wilkins,
London, 1748, p. 187; D. N. Bell, An Index of Authors and Works in Cistercian
Libraries in Great Britain, Kalamazoo, MI, 1991, pp. 119–20; R. Sharpe, A
Handlist of the Latin Writers of Great Britain and Ireland before 1540, Turnhout,
1997, pp. 445–46. In editions, Bale’s attribution was followed in the editio
princeps by Martène, Durand, Veterum scriptorum et monumentorum histori-
corum […] collectio, vol. 5, coll. 548–82; the nineteenth-century editors pre-
ferred to consider the work anonymous. But the attribution to Ralph contin-
ues, as in S. de Sandoli (ed.), Itinera Hierosolymitana Crucesignatorum, vol. 3,
pt 1, Jerusalem, 1983, pp. 109–19.
18 W. Stubbs, Itinerarium peregrinorum et gesta regis Ricardi, Rolls Series

38/1, London, 1864, pp. lv–lvi. The same conclusion was reached by Steven-
son in his edition, CA, p. xviii, and, in a work published the following year,
by H. Prutz, “Anonymi Chronicon Terrae Sanctae s. Libellus de expugnati-
one, 1186–1191”, in his Quellenbeiträge zur Geschichte der Kreuzzüge, Danzig,
1876, pp. xix–xxv. The matter of Ralph’s assumed authorship through the
work’s various editions is carefully set out by Brewer, Kane, Conquest of the
Holy Land, pp. 12–14, 98–105.
 the chronicle of ralph of coggeshall 137

is transmitted with Ralph’s chronicle, and the fourth, the oldest

copy, was written by a known scribe following normal Coggeshall
scriptorium practices of ruling thirty-one long lines to a page in a
written space of 155 × 100 mm.19 This manuscript, BL, Cotton MS
Cleopatra B. i, is a discrete component in a volume assembled by
Sir Robert Cotton (1571–1631). Its original context is not known,
but there is at least a possibility that Cotton had separated it
from the other Coggeshall manuscript he had in his possession,
Vespasian D. x. The Coggeshall texts in Vespasian D. x are all
primary, as is the copy of the Libellus in Cleopatra B. i.20
Just as the monks of Coggeshall were central to the transmis-
sion of the Libellus, it seems that they can also be awarded a
share of the authorship. For it is a curious fact that the narra-
tive appears to be the work of two separate personalities. From
the declamatory opening apostrophe to the grandiloquent nar-
rative of events leading to the spoliation of the Holy Sepulchre,
the authorial voice is coherent. At that point, however, the text
breaks off and the remainder of the work, closing with the letter
sent by the Emperor Frederick to Saladin in 1188 with Saladin’s
reply, is otherwise nothing but a recapitulation of the chapters of
the first book of the Itinerarium peregrinorum et gesta regis Ricardi
attributed to Richard de Templo, Augustinian canon of Holy Tri-
nity, Aldgate, in London, to which the reader is then referred for
fuller information: “si quis plenius nosse desideret, legat librum
quem dominus prior sancte Trinitatis Londoniis ex gallica lingua
in latinum, tam eleganti quam ueraci stilo, transferri fecit”.21 This

19 J. M. W. Willoughby, “A Templar chronicle of the Third Crusade: ori-

gin and transmission”, Medium Ævum, 81 (2012), pp. 126–34. A further man-
uscript, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 343 (s. xv), descends directly
from London, College of Arms, Arundel 11 and has no independent value. See
further Brewer, Kane, Conquest of the Holy Land, pp. 69–72.
20 In two other early copies of the Libellus from Coggeshall, London, College

of Arms, 11, and BnF, lat. 15076, the Libellus is the first item in the manu-
script. As was argued by Brewer, Kane, Conquest of the Holy Land, p. 69, the
creased and rubbed condition of the opening recto of the copy in Cleopatra B. i
suggests that it too was at the front of its original manuscript. The possibility
of a connection with Vespasian D. x “has much to recommend it”.
21 “If anyone wishes to know more, let him read the book that the lord

prior of Holy Trinity, London has translated from French into Latin, in a
style as elegant as it is faithful.”
138 james willoughby

highly unsatisfactory conclusion and abrupt change of tone and

style makes it more convenient to assume that the continuation
is the work of another hand, a suggestion given support by small
orthographical differences between the two sections and also by
the palaeography of Cleopatra B. i, in which this continuation is
written in a browner ink and by a scribe who also worked on Ral-
ph’s chronicle.22 The words recommending Richard de Templo’s
work are strongly reminiscent of words Ralph used in his chroni-
cle to praise the work of Adam of Eynsham, who wrote “preclaro
atque eleganti stilo”, and to direct his reader into further rese-
arch: “sed quisquis […] plenius scire desiderat, legat libellum in
quo predicte uisiones diligenter exarate sunt”.23 Weaving that sort
of quotation into an independent narrative is entirely in keeping
with Ralph’s own habits of work as a collector and compiler of
historical materials. It is plausible to believe that Ralph himself
was the continuator of the Libellus. He considered the work to be
incomplete and decided that it needed rounding off in some way
before being brought into his dossier of historical materials. He
then ensured its dissemination with his own chronicle.24

22 Willoughby, “Templar chronicle”, pp. 127–29; Brewer, Kane, Con-

quest of the Holy Land, pp. 26–29.

23 Adam wrote “in a pellucid and elegant style”; “whoever wishes to know

more, let him read the little book in which the foresaid visions have been care-
fully laid out”; Vespasian D. x, fols 70 v–71r (new foliation); CA, p. 72. Adam
was praised again for his composition “eleganti stilo” in the Visio Thurkilli,
a work which can be safely attributed to Ralph (discussed in what follows).
To strengthen the case, a repeat of the same diction is found in the annal for
1204 (CA, p. 151): “Si quis autem plenius nosse desiderat qualiter urbs Con-
stantinopolis semel et iterum ab exercitu Latinorum Hierusalem tendentium
capta sit […] legat epistolas quas idem imperator et H. comes de Sancto-Paulo
direxerunt ad amicos suos in occiduas mundi partes commanentes.” (As was
pointed out by by Brewer, Kane, Conquest of the Holy Land, pp. 28–29).
24 In a previous article (“A Templar chronicle”, p. 131), I suggested that

Cressing Temple, only a few miles away from Coggeshall, might have been the
channel through which Ralph received his copy of the Libellus, believing the
author to have been connected with the Knights Templar. Brewer, Kane,
Conquest of the Holy Land, pp. 23–25, advance sound arguments against Tem-
plar authorship, making the connection to Cressing less interesting. They
make a tentative suggestion that the author might have been a Cistercian
(ibid., pp. 47–50), which would open the possibility of a straightforward chan-
nel of transmission to Ralph through Cistercian networks.
 the chronicle of ralph of coggeshall 139

Another work attributed to Ralph’s pen is the Visio Thurkilli,

a lengthy account of a dream-vision of Purgatory experienced by
a peasant named Thurkill living in Stisted in Essex: “in partibus
nostris” as the text says, and Stisted is not four miles from Cogge-
shall.25 The authorial identification was first made by Henry Ward
in 1875 and has not been challenged since.26 Ralph certainly had
an interest in such material.27 His chronicle includes a vision of a
monk of the Cistercian abbey of Strata Florida in Wales, and one
of the first English accounts of the Italian visionary, Joachim of
Fiore (1135–1202).28 The latter is followed by Ralph’s précis of the
vision in 1191 of a monk of Eynsham abbey (Oxon), as written
by Adam of Eynsham, mentioned above.29 It is worth noting that
Adam is also referred to in the Visio Thurkilli and praised for his

25 Visio Thurkilli, ed. by P. G. Schmidt, Visio Thurkilli relatore, ut videtur,

Radulpho de Coggeshall, Leipzig, 1978.

26 H. L. D. Ward, “The vision of Thurkill, probably by Ralph of Cog-

geshall, printed from a manuscript in the British Museum with an Introduc-

tion”, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 31 (1875), pp. 420–59;
and his Catalogue of Romances in the Department of Manuscripts in the Brit-
ish Museum, 3 vols, London, 1883–1910, vol. 2, pp. 506–07. The attribution
has been affirmed by Schmidt, Visio Thurkilli, pp. v–vi. For discussion, see
C. Watkins, “Sin, penance and purgatory in the Anglo-Norman realm: the
evidence of visions and ghost stories”, Past & Present, 175 (2002), pp. 3–33,
at 18–22.
27 See further E. Freeman, “Wonders, prodigies and marvels: unusual

bodies and the fear of heresy in Ralph of Coggeshall’s Chronicon Anglicanum”,

Journal of Medieval History, 26 (2000), pp. 127–43; and C. M. Neufeld, “Her-
meneutical perversion: Ralph of Coggeshall’s ‘Witch of Rheims’”, Philological
Quarterly, 85 (2006), pp. 1–23.
28 CA, pp. 141, 67–71. See further C. Egger, “A pope without a successor:

Ralph of Coggeshall, Ralph Niger, Robert of Auxerre, and the early reception
of Joachim of Fiore’s ideas in England”, in Joachim of Fiore and the Influence
of Inspiration: Essays in Memory of Marjorie E. Reeves (1905–2003), ed. by
J. E. Wannenmacher, Farnham, 2013, pp. 145–79.
29 CA, pp. 71–72. Adam of Eynsham’s Visio Eadmundi monachi de Egne-

sham (1197) is ed. by M. Huber, “Visio monachi de Eynsham”, Romanische

Forschungen, 16 (1904) 641–733; H. Thurston, “Visio monachi de Eynsham”,
Analecta Bollandiana, 22 (1903), pp. 225–319; H. E. Salter, Cartulary of Eyn-
sham, 2 vols, Oxford, 1907–1908 (Oxford Historical Society, 49, 51), vol. 2,
pp. 285–371; and R. B. Easting, The Revelation of the Monk of Eynsham,
Early English Text Society, Original Series, 318 (2002), pp. 2–170. See also
Ward, Herbert, Catalogue of Romances, vol. 2, pp. 493–506.
140 james willoughby

“elegant style” in exactly the same words as are used in the chro-
nicle, as mentioned above. 30
Ralph’s autobiographical note in the Chronicon Anglicanum
s.a. 1207 states that he had taken care to note down for general
edification visions he had heard from trustworthy men. 31 It is
unclear whether these visiones in the plural should be taken to
refer to those included in the chronicle or to visions separately
assembled in a dedicated manuscript and circulated indepen-
dently, in the way that the Visio Thurkilli had its own circula-
tion. A “book of visions” at the Cistercian houses at Coggeshall
and nearby Sibton (Suffolk) was referred to in the mid-fourte-
enth century by the bibliographer Henry of Kirkestede, librarian
and then prior of Bury St Edmunds abbey. He noted in his own
miscellany of prophetic material that his excerpt on Joachim of
Fiore could be found in that book. 32 The text he excerpted is
included in Ralph’s chronicle. If, instead, Henry was referring to
an independent “book of visions”, which is the more natural way
to read his statement, then that collection is now lost. 33
The Visio Thurkilli circulating on its own had a wider reach.
A copy of the early thirteenth century, now BL, Royal 13 D. v,

30 Visio Thurkilli, ed. Schmidt, p. 3: “uisio […] quam domnus Adam

supprior eiusdem cenobii, uir ualde grauius ac religiosus, eleganti stilo cons-
cripsit”.
31 “domnus Radulfus […] qui hanc chronicam […] descripsit, quasdam

uisiones quas a uenerabilibus uiris audiuit, fideliter annotare ob multorum

edificationem curauit”; see n. 14 above.
32 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 404, fol. 66v: “Hec in libro

uisionum apud Sibetone et apud Coggeshale”. See further R. H. Rouse and

M. A. Rouse, Henry of Kirkestede, Catalogus de libris autenticis et apocrifis,
London, 2004 (Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues, 11), pp. lvii–
lviii, also lxxvii–lxxxii. Nothing is known of the library at the Cistercian
abbey of Sibton beyond one survivor, a fifteenth-century Polychronicon, Bodl.
Laud. Misc. 545; see Medieval Libraries of Great Britain, online at <http://
mlgb3.bodleian.ox.ac.uk>.
33 A contemporary effort in a similar direction was Peter of Cornwall’s

enormous Liber reuelationum, compiled at Holy Trinity, Aldgate in London,

where Peter was prior (for which, see R. Easting and R. Sharpe, Peter of
Cornwall’s Book of Revelations, Toronto, 2013). The monks of Coggeshall were
in touch with the canons of Holy Trinity, to whom they paid an annual rent;
see The Cartulary of Holy Trinity Aldgate, ed. G. A. J. Hodgett, London, 1971
(London Record Society, 7), p. 185, nos. 943 and 947.
 the chronicle of ralph of coggeshall 141

reached the great Benedictine abbey of St Albans (Herts), where

it was read by Roger of Wendover († 1236): he incorporated it
in extenso in his Flores historiarum, under the year 1206; it was
also used by Roger’s confrere and successor as house historian,
Matthew Paris († 1259), who included it in his famous Chronica
maiora. 34 The Benedictine abbey at Peterborough (Northants) had
two copies of the Visio Thurkilli in the late fourteenth century,
now lost. 35 Other provenanced copies are Cambridge, University
Library, Mm. 6. 4 (s. xiv), from the Cistercian abbey of Quarr
(Hants), and a lost copy from the Augustinian priory at Thurgar-
ton (Notts), reported in a fifteenth-century booklist (“Item visio
turchildi in vno paruo quaterno”). 36
The near-contemporary production of at least four copies of
the Libellus de expugnatione Terrae Sanctae at Coggeshall shows
that these works were being copied for propagation. It is possible
that the Visio Thurkilli was treated in a similar way for it had a
wide, notably early, reception. In the spread of copies there are
hints that Ralph had targeted particular publication channels for
the dissemination of his work. It is a matter we shall return to
below; but it is of significance at this point to note Roger of Wen-
dover’s role in the publication of Visio Thurkilli. The picture of
what publishing meant at Coggeshall can be expanded by Ralph’s
authorial practices in his major work, the chronicle. 37

34 Roger of Wendover, Flores historiarum: ed. by H. G. Hewlett, 3 vols,

London, 1886–1889 (Rolls Series, 84), vol. 2, pp. 16–35; Matthew Paris,
Chronica maiora: ed. by H. R. Luard, 7 vols, London, 1872–1884 (Rolls
Series, 57), vol. 2, pp. 497–511. MS Royal 13 D. v is marked with a St Albans
ex libris and contains the annotations of Matthew Paris, albeit he took his
text verbatim from Wendover.
35 The lost Peterborough copies are reported in the late fourteenth-cen-

tury Matricularium of the library; ed. by K. Friis-Jensen, J. M. W. Wil-

loughby, Peterborough Abbey, London, 2001 (Corpus of British Medieval
Library Catalogues, 8), pp. 132, 166 (BP21. 212, 314).
36 T. Webber, A. G. Watson, The Libraries of the Augustinian Canons,

London, 1998 (Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues, 6), p. 425

(A36. 44b).
37 One other work, a collection of distinctions known as the Distinctiones

monasticae et morales, composed around 1220, was attributed to Ralph with-

out any strong foundation by G. Morin, “Le cistercien Ralph de Coggeshall
et l’auteur des Distinctiones monasticae utilisées par Dom Pitra”, Revue Béné-
dictine, 47 (1935), pp. 348–55. R. W. Hunt, recognizing a regional interest
142 james willoughby

Chronicon Anglicanum
Where Ralph’s authorship of the Visio Thurkilli and the evidence
of his intervention in the Libellus have to be inferred, the state-
ment of authorship in the chronicle is definitive. It is internally
ascribed in an entry under 1207, the year of Ralph’s election.
“Dom Thomas, fifth abbot of Coggeshall, died, and was succeeded
by Ralph, a monk of the same place, who wrote this chronicle
from the capture of the Holy Cross [i.e. 1187] to the eleventh year
of King Henry III, the son of King John [i.e. 28 October 1226–
1227 October 1227]”. 38 That is the limit of the textual evidence for
Ralph’s authorship, and it marks the inner limit of scholarly doubt,
for this statement has often been questioned since its description
of the chronicle does not match the text as it now stands. The
text begins in 1066 rather than in 1187, and ends not in Henry’s
eleventh year but in 1224. Furthermore, the entries for the years
1206 to 1212 are bald annals and are barely “composed” at all.
Antonia Gransden judged that it is “not certain that the chronicle
is all the work of one man”, and a modern trend has preferred
the circumlocution “the Coggeshall chronicle”. 39 But there is no
need for such caution. The chronicle under the years 1066 to 1186
is purely annalistic and is largely derived from John of Worces-
ter, Henry of Huntingdon, and the Margam Annals. In 1187 the
chronicle expands greatly and becomes original — “composed”, as
the authorship ascription would have it, rather than merely “com-
piled”. The other date, of the eleventh year of Henry III, may in
fact refer to Ralph’s death, and I will return to that below. There
is no textual reason to doubt Ralph’s authorship, and I will hope
to show that palaeography secures it.
It is, however, a textually complex work, particularly in its
later reaches. The expansive style employed from 1187 later came

in the text, argued instead for the author’s having been a Cistercian of Louth
Park in Lincolnshire, but again on no strong grounds (“Notes on the Distinc-
tiones monasticae et morales”, in Liber Floridus. Mittellateinische Studien. Paul
Lehmann zum 65. Geburtstag, Sankt Ottilien, 1950, pp. 355–62).
38 See above, n. 14.

39 Gransden, Historical Writing, vol. 1, p. 323. Maurice Powicke (as n. 42

below) had earlier commented that the entries for the years 1206–1213 show
that “Ralph was evidently unable to go on with his work” and that “it is diffi-
cult to estimate his responsibility for the rest” (p. 286, n. 1).
 the chronicle of ralph of coggeshall 143

to be abandoned and the chronicle is baldly annalistic again for

the years 1206 to 1212 and rather patchy thereafter. It is usually
assumed that the burdens of abbacy had required Ralph to set his
pen aside. This annalistic central portion of the work has always
been a frustration to the historian since contemporary chronicle
sources for the reign of King John are few. The matter has histo-
riographical significance since John has been arraigned before the
jury of Posterity like no other English monarch. “Bad King John”
is a familiar figure in English legend and school history. William
Stubbs’s famous opinion of him, that he had “neither grace nor
splendour, neither strength nor patriotism” took lineal descent
from the so-called “Terrible Verdict” of the St Albans historians,
Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris, in which John’s general-
ship grew ever more feeble, and the personal cruelties in which he
indulged himself grew ever more vindictive and bizarre.40
In modern times, historians have sought to untangle John’s
reputation from the polemical distaste of those who were writing
after John’s time. In 1963 J. C. Holt assigned the chronicle sour-
ces for John’s reign to three groups: those which were completed
before or soon after John’s accession; those which were completed
by the time of his death; and those which were written after his
death.41 It was an important exercise, for it showed how the king’s
reputation progressively deteriorated; and it has demanded that
the historian should tread carefully when dealing with the evi-
dence. Chroniclers of the early group, the most important being
Roger of Howden, were careful to present a judicious account of
the reign. The chroniclers who were howling with outrage at the
king’s misdemeanours were those of the third group, who were
writing after — sometimes decades after — John’s death. The
contemporaneity and content of Ralph’s commentary on John the-
refore assumes some importance.
Maurice Powicke, who was the first to give serious attention
to the chronicle’s composition, argued that it was written up in

40 W. Stubbs, Preface to his edition of Memoriale fratris Walteri de Coven-

tria, 2 vols, London, 1872–1873 (Rolls Series, 58), vol. 2, p. xi. On Roger of
Wendover and the Terrible Verdict, see Warren, King John, pp. 11–16.
41 J. C. Holt, King John, London, 1963, reprinted in his Magna Carta and

Medieval Government, London, 1985.

144 james willoughby

different stages in the 1190s and 1200s.42 David Carpenter, in a

perceptive article on the earlier portion of the chronicle, demon-
strated that the text for the period between 1195 and down to
nearly the end of 1200 was written up probably in 1201 with suc-
cessive bursts of composition in the following years.43 Holt judged
that Ralph did not begin his narrative of the period after 1207
“until 1221 or thereabouts”.44 Antonia Gransden argued that some
of the passages from the last years of Richard’s reign were written
close in time to the events, but thought that in the main the chro-
nicle was written “soon after John’s death”.45 Passages from early
in the reign are rather complimentary about John, who initially
stood quite high in Ralph’s estimation after the reign of Richard,
a king whom Ralph did not esteem. It remains the case that the
section from 1206 to 1224 is a complex one, and it is this section
which will be the principal focus here.
The field for speculation is offered by the primary manuscript,
BL, Cotton MS Vespasian D. x. It is the oldest copy of the work
and the exemplar on which all the others depend. As mentioned
above, it is remarkable for its numerous additions — marginal,
interlineated, in rasura, and interfoliated — all clearly work of
an authorial nature. There are numerous changes of hand in the
manuscript as well as of ink and nib, to show that work was being
kept up over a long period of time. It must be the working copy,
standing very close to the author’s notes. Plate 1 illustrates how
new information was accommodated as it arrived. It shows the

42 F. M. Powicke, “Roger of Wendover and the Coggeshall chronicle”,

English Historical Review, 21 (1906), pp. 286–96. The essay was in unusual
territory for Powicke, who, like Freeman (see n. 1), preferred to base his
work on published sources; see M. T. Clanchy, “Inventing thirteenth-cen-
tury England: Stubbs, Tout, Powicke — now what?”, in Thirteenth Century
England V, ed. by P. R. Coss, S. D. Lloyd, Woodbridge, 1995, pp. 1–20, esp.
4–5; also N. C. Vincent, “Magna Carta and the English Historical Review: a
review article”, English Historical Review, 130 (2015), pp. 646–84, at 658–61.
43 D. Carpenter, “Abbot Ralph of Coggeshall’s account of the last years

of King Richard and the first years of King John”, English Historical Review,
113 (1998), pp. 1210–30.
44 Holt, King John, p. 102.

45 Gransden, Historical Writing, vol. 1, pp. 318, 324. Elizabeth Free-

man, Narratives of a New Order, p. 179, likewise concluded that the chronicle
principally dates to “between 1200 and the 1220s”.
 the chronicle of ralph of coggeshall 145

passage mentioned above on the capture of King Richard I in

Vienna which Ralph heard from Anselm, the king’s chaplain and
an eye-witness. The first account was erased and overwritten with
the new information, continued in the margin at the foot and mar-
ked with a signe-de-renvoie.
The Vespasian manuscript naturally has priority, but there are
two other principal witnesses: London, College of Arms, Arun-
del 11; and BnF, lat. 15076. These three are the witnesses used
by Stevenson for his edition. There are also ten lesser witnesses
which Stevenson did not notice.46 The three chief manuscripts are
all Coggeshall work of the early thirteenth century. While some
of the marginal additions to Vespasian appear as continuous text
in the Arundel manuscript, other additions are marginal to both,
showing that the two copies were kept up side by side. Arundel 11,
copied by one scribe, is therefore certain to be a Coggeshall pro-
duction. The Paris manuscript, lat. 15076, shows the normal Cog-
geshall scriptorium layout of thirty-one or sometimes thirty-two
long lines. It breaks off in 1216 at a point where the ink and hand
can be seen to change in Vespasian.47 It carries over into its text
additions that are marginal to both Vespasian and Arundel.48 Evi-
dence that it was also made at Coggeshall and copied from Vespa-
sian is communicated by a scribal blunder: on fol. 46r (s.a. 1192)
the scribe of Paris copied the passage on King Richard’s capture
of a desert train, ending ‘ciuitatibus collocans’, and passed directly
to the passage beginning, ‘Rege autem apud Ptolomaidem’, over-

46 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 343 (s. xiv, ex Arundel 11); Dublin,
Trinity College, 508 (s. xiii1, a conflated text); 634 (s. xvi, excerpts copied
by John Dee, probably ex Arundel 11); London, BL, Harley MS 545 (s. xvi,
excerpts copied by John Stow); Royal 13 A. xii (s. xiii1, a conflated text);
Stowe MS 61 (s. xvii, excerpts copied by Sir Roger Twysden); London, Col-
lege of Arms, Arundel 24 (s. xiii, excerpts); London, Lambeth Palace, 371
(s. xiiiex, excerpts, ex BnF, lat. 15076, or family thereof); BnF, lat. 14359 (St
Victor, Paris, s. xvii, ex lat. 15076); lat. 15077 (St Victor, Paris, s. xvii, ex
lat. 15076).
47 Vespasian, fol. 119 v (new foliation), Paris, fol. 29 v (RC, p. 193 at n. 4).

48 For example, the passage “Hec pauperibus […] et pace interrupta

resarciri” which describes the life and miracles of St Alpais, a holy woman
of Sens (RC, pp. 125–28), is interpolated on a separate half-leaf in Arundel
(fol. 85bis new foliation, fol. 90 old foliation) and Vespasian (fol. 95), but is
continuous text in Paris.
146 james willoughby

looking an intervening passage which is an interleaved addition

to the Vespasian manuscript; he quickly spotted his mistake and
cancelled the eight lines he had written with the comment uacat
before proceeding with the transcription of the material contained
in the interfoliation.49
The copy of the Libellus de expugnatione Terrae Sanctae in Cot-
ton Cleopatra B. i, as has been seen, forms part of this tightly
interconnected group. That the copy of the Libellus in Arundel 11
was taken directly from it is shown by an obscure error in Ralph’s
sentence about Prior Richard’s elegant and veracious style. Cleo-
patra here shows ‘ueraci sti | lo transferri fecit’, where ‘stilo’ is
split by a line-break; the scribe of Arundel wrote ‘uerati\sci/stilo
transferri fecit’, adding ‘sci’ above the line as if confused by what
he saw in his exemplar. 50 As suggested above, it is possible that
Cleopatra was once part of Vespasian before being bound into its
present volume by Sir Robert Cotton.
The fact that all the oldest manuscripts of both the Libellus and
Ralph’s chronicle can be shown to have been in production at Cog-
geshall at the same time suggests that they were being copied for
propagation rather than for domestic consumption. Evidence inter-
nal to the chronicle is revealing about what publication meant for
Ralph and about his practices in achieving it. Maurice Powicke
showed long ago, in one of his first published articles, that it must
have been Ralph’s practice to send out his chronicle — to publish
it — periodically during its composition, something that can be
inferred from the verbatim use that was made of it at St Albans
abbey by the historian Roger of Wendover, perhaps in the 1220s.51
Ralph’s chronicle was Wendover’s principal source for his account
of the years 1191 to 1195, after which no further use of it seems

49 Willoughby, “Templar chronicle”, pp. 128–29. A detailed discussion

of the composition of the Paris copy has now been provided by Brewer,
Kane, Conquest of the Holy Land, pp. 86–88, 89–90, 95, concluding that a
Coggeshall origin “is beyond reasonable doubt”.
50 Cotton Cleopatra B. i, fol. 21r (20 r old foliation); Arundel 11, fol. 14 r.

51 Powicke, “Roger of Wendover and the Coggeshall chronicle”. Daniel

Hobbins makes a similar case that medieval publication could be an ongoing

process of “publishing moments” from a study of the work of Jean Gerson:
Authorship and Publicity Before Print: Jean Gerson and the Transformation of
Late Medieval Learning, Philadelphia, PA, 2009, pp. 154, 178–82.
 the chronicle of ralph of coggeshall 147

to have been made at St Albans. 52 Wendover’s extracts from the

Chronicle end at precisely the point in Ralph’s narrative where in
the Vespasian copy the ink and nib both change (fol. 68v), showing
a break in Ralph’s composition and explaining why the St Albans
copy should have ended at that point: it marks the extent of one
‘release’ of material. It will be recalled that a separate Coggeshall
publication, Ralph’s Visio Thurkilli, which survives in a manu-
script with St Albans provenance, was taken over into Wendover’s
History under the year 1206. St Albans was clearly a targeted
publication channel for Ralph.
For his account of the years from 1191 to 1195, Wendover’s
pre-eminent source was Ralph’s chronicle, quoted in extenso. He
took very few liberties with the material and never departed from
its burden, even if occasionally he chose to recast a shorter annal
for the turning of a more felicitous phrase. Certain of Ralph’s alte-
rations to the Vespasian manuscript were made before this copy of
it left Coggeshall for St Albans, because they are visible in Wen-
dover’s text, taken over verbatim. Other changes, however, were
clearly brought into Ralph’s text after this moment of publica-
tion, and Wendover in these cases preserves older readings than
now survive. Some of them are of historical interest. For example,
under the year 1193, in a section in Wendover that is otherwise
a verbatim borrowing from Ralph, Wendover explains that while
Richard I was away in the Holy Land, John plotted traitorously
with Philip of France to usurp the crown, but was foiled by the
laudable virtue of the English people:
Rege autem Richardo, ut dictum est, ab imperatore detento,
comes Iohannes frater eius, audito regis infortunio atque de eius
regressu diffidens, foedus amicitie cum Philippo, Francorum rege,
iniit, sinistroque usus consilio in Anglia pro fratre disposuit co-
ronari, sed Anglorum uirtute laudabili fuit impeditus. Rex autem
Philippus […]53

In Ralph’s account there is an abrupt break at this point in the

narrative and instead an inconsequential entry is intruded about
the election of Savarinus as bishop of Bath (given here in italics):

52 Roger of Wendover, Flores historiarum, ed. by Hewlett, vol. 1,

pp. 192–236.
53 Wendover, Flores historiarum, 1, p. 229.
148 james willoughby

Rege autem Ricardo apud imperatorem detento, comes Iohannes

frater eius, qui filiam comitis Gloecestrie duxerat in uxorem,
audito fratris infortunio, atque de regressione regis diffidens, foe-
dus amicitie iniit cum rege Philippo. Sauarinus ad episcopatum
Bathoniensem eligitur et consecratur. Rex autem Philippus […]54

In the Vespasian manuscript, this revision is written in rasura in

a distinctive style (Pl. 2). Although Ralph was no partisan for
John, the criticism implied here, in the original version preserved
by Wendover, is stronger and more outspoken than was usual with
him. Two other significant differences between Wendover and
Coggeshall concerning accusations against John were discussed by
Powicke.55 Their concealment suggests something in the nature of
censorship.
That suggestion is supported by a far larger and far more
important expurgation in the chronicle. For it is a peculiar fact,
and a frustration for the historian, that for the years 1206 to 1212
Ralph abandoned the vivid and expansive narrative style of pre-
vious years and returned to writing bare, laconic annals.56 His
account of one third of King John’s reign is therefore slim indeed.
This sudden change of emphasis is the source of much of the sub-
sequent insecurity over how much of the chronicle Ralph was per-
sonally responsible for. However, an inspection of the Vespasian
manuscript shows that these annals occupy one leaf only, folio 112,
an inserted leaf in a different hand (Pl. 3). Stevenson noted this
discrepancy in the apparatus of his edition.57 It was noted again by
Antonia Gransden, who stated that four leaves had been excised
and this singleton inserted in their place. 58 Subsequent scholarship
has followed her, with the result that it is not suspected that any

54 CA, p. 61.
55 Powicke, “Roger of Wendover and the Coggeshall chronicle”, pp. 288–
91. Gransden, Historical Writing, vol. 1, p. 326, n. 51, pointed out that Wen-
dover’s two readings s.a. 1193 are too long to fit the erased spaces, but she did
acknowledge that Wendover might have reworded Ralph’s phrasing. I find her
assertion that Powicke’s “proposition cannot be proved” too defeatist.
56 CA, pp. 162–65. For comparison, the annals for the single preceding

year of 1205 cover twelve pages of the edition.

57 CA, p. 162 n. 1: “The narrative of the Cotton MS is apparently defec-

tive, or incomplete, at this point; the contents of the leaf which is here
inserted being an insertion by a different hand.”
58 Gransden, Historical Writing, vol. 1, p. 323, n. 23.
 the chronicle of ralph of coggeshall 149

great quantity of material has been lost. It is certainly true that

for the most part the Cotton Manuscripts are notoriously tightly
bound in their nineteenth-century boards; establishing the quiring
in them can be difficult, and such is the case with Vespasian D. x.
But I happen not to agree with Gransden’s collation: it seems that
only the first leaf of the original quire is intact, and the supplied
singleton has been stuck to its stub. Four leaves therefore cannot
have been excised — a quire of five not being possible — and one
might in any case ask why only four leaves should be thought to
have gone. Clearly, any number of discrete quires could have been
removed following the excision of the first. There are, in fact, rea-
sons for believing that a great deal of material in multiple quires
has been plucked out here.
Palaeographically, the first significant thing to notice is that
this hand is the same as the Censor’s hand seen making the era-
sure about John’s treachery, overwriting it with the note of Sava-
rinus’s election. Plate 4 shows the two specimens together. While
at first glance they might seem to be rather different, they possess
the same flat, squarish module as well as the left-leaning slant in
the hand. There is a deliberateness in the formation of the n and
m; they are carefully drawn, perhaps over-drawn, with a definite
shoulder before the minim is traced. Most particularly, we might
look at the very unusual S, which is formed by two overlapping
but not intersecting curves: Savarinus may be compared with Ste-
phanus. The similar construction of the word consecratur, appea-
ring in the bottom line of each specimen, may be compared, as
also the abbreviation mark for -ur.
The question then falls, who was the censor? There is a lea-
ding answer, since the principal feature of this hand is its inepti-
tude. One need only glance at the hand to be aware of its shortco-
mings.59 No monastic scriptorium in the early thirteenth century
could have been brought so low as to entrust book-work to such a
scribe. Indeed, there were fine scribes available at Coggeshall, as
is proved by the other manuscripts of the chronicle. Such a scribe
as we see here must have stood in an important relation to the
chronicle to have been permitted to write in it. It would be most

59 It is worth remarking that folio 112 is poorly prepared, rather greasy

on the hair-side, which must contribute something to the writing’s ragged

appearance.
150 james willoughby

natural to assume that the hand is authorial. From that sugge-

stion follows a larger one: that much of the Vespasian copy was
written by the same man. While it is true that multiple scribes
wrote in the manuscript, one hand predominates but at different
levels of achievement. It shows the same square aspect as the Cen-
sor’s hand, the same firm treatment of shoulders and minims, the
same mode of construction of the abbreviation marks. The graphs
are always consistently shaped even when the aspect can differ.
It must be remembered that the Vespasian manuscript shows the
chronicle in a state of polygenesis, a text over whose composition
the author spent at least thirty years. That fact may be called
upon to explain changes in the writing. Its differences are no more
than the normal variations in a hand over time, writing neater
and closer at first, and looser and more irregularly towards the
close.
Palaeographers have been reluctant to discuss the longevity
of scribes, for the obvious reason that it is impossible to con-
trol for.60 Few individual medieval hands have been tracked over
time. It is rare to encounter the sort of peculiarities that make
the so-called “Tremulous Hand” of Worcester so recognizable.
Presumed to have been a monk of the cathedral priory, he was
a thirteenth-century glossator of manuscripts in Old English: in
his case, the degree of tremor in the formation of his graphs,
worsening as his health deteriorated, allowed Christine Franzen
to assign specimens of his hand to a timeline.61 John Grandis-
son, bishop of Exeter from 1327 to 1369, was a keen annota-
tor of books for more than forty years.62 An observable feature

60 One exception being a thoughtful piece by A. S. G. Edwards, “What is

palaeography for?”, The Mediaeval Journal, 8 (2018), pp. 21–40, esp. 31.
61 The Tremulous Hand of Worcester: A Study of Old English in the Thir-

teenth Century, Oxford, 1991; an attempt at retrospective diagnosis, reported

at pp. 190–91, ends with the suggestion that the writer was afflicted with
“congenital tremor”.
62 The key discussion of the varieties of his handwriting is by M. W.

Steele, “A study of the books owned or used by John Grandisson, bishop

of Exeter”, unpublished DPhil diss., University of Oxford, 1994, pp. 15–21.
A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to a.d.
1500, 3 vols, Oxford, 1957–1959, vol. 2, pp. 800–01, printed convenient lists
of Grandisson’s identified books: those that passed to Exeter cathedral, those
that belonged to him, and those containing notes in his own hand.
 the chronicle of ralph of coggeshall 151

of Grandisson’s hand, rather like Ralph’s later hand, is that the

strokes are traced separately and do not flow; later specimens
show less good consistency. Henry of Kirkestede, prior of Bury
St Edmunds, who has been mentioned above, was another keen
annotator of books. He acquired a noticeable tremor in his old
age. Some years before he died another man was serving as prior,
so, as was the case with Ralph, it would seem that infirmity had
caused him to resign his office.63
The semi-automatic motor performance required for wri-
ting depends upon co-ordinated function by neuromuscular and
visual systems. These systems deteriorate, to some extent, in
every elderly writer, and even more so when neurological dise-
ase is present. A certain amount of forensic work has been
done on age- and illness-related change in modern handwriting,
partly to provide guidance in cases where a will has been con-
tested because the elderly testator’s signature looks like a for-
gery.64 There is no reason to expect to see a tremor in an elderly
hand, but one might plausibly expect a larger module and some
inconsistency in duct. Angles instead of curves are understood
to be a sign of arthritis. Square and flattened forms are typical
of Parkinson’s patients. Those aspects might be said to be pre-
sent in Ralph’s hand, but other indications are absent; his hand
lacks, for instance, the typical micrographia of the Parkinson’s
sufferer; rather the reverse, in fact. Larger and more spread-out
handwriting conforms to vision change. In ageing hands, the pen
is lifted more often, because the hand is moving more slowly.
Other aspects of an ageing hand may be seen in the performance
on fol. 112: the leftwards lean, the greater size of the letters and
the failure to join up strokes.
If some of what have usually been taken to be different scribes
in the Vespasian manuscript are instead different stages of Ral-
ph’s own handwriting then it ought to be possible, and would be
valuable, to assign specimens of his hand to a timeline. The incre-
asingly larger module, the increasingly deliberate execution, and
the more hesitant duct should allow one to venture the suggestion

63 Rouse, Rouse, Henry of Kirkestede, Catalogus, pp. lxxiv–lxxv.

64 See, for example, J. Walton, “Handwriting changes due to aging and
Parkinson’s syndrome”, Forensic Science International, 88 (1997), pp. 197–214.
152 james willoughby

that the state of the hand in the major expurgation is later than
the state seen in the Savarinus addition, and that both are later
than the state of the hand in the first part of the chronicle (as
illustrated in Pl. 1). It is clear that the expurgation must have
been made after John’s death, because of the passage on the inter-
foliated leaf stating that Abbot Ralph kept up the chronicle until
the eleventh year of Henry III (Pl. 3). Although the regnal year in
question is an addition in the manuscript, the fact that it belonged
to the reign of Henry III is original, so the expurgation belongs
to this time. We do not have the final state of his hand, because
the back quire or quires of the Vespasian manuscript are missing,
and have been since at least the second quarter of the sixteenth
century, when John Bale supplied the missing material from Cam-
bridge, Corpus Christi College 343.65
One of the four known facts about Ralph’s life is that he resi-
gned the abbacy in 1218 through ill health. The handwriting
of fol. 112 appears to be infirm — at least, it is a hand that
appears throughout the manuscript and which seems to suffer
a decline in its powers to the point where it was barely sui-
ted to its task. It accords with the state of the same hand in
a late stint of writing on fols 123r –124 r, communicating a set
of short annals for 1223. That is the sort of date which might
be applied to the large expurgation. By 1223 the chronicle was
being kept up within one or two years of events. This under-
standing throws a sidelight on the chronicle’s seemingly misle-
ading assertion that Ralph wrote until late 1226 or 1227, or
the eleventh year of Henry III. The claim occurs on folio 112
in a space apparently left blank for the purpose. If the wri-
ting is autograph, as I think it is, then we must assume that
Ralph himself left the gap, expecting it to be completed after
his death. Although no annal survives for 1226 or 1227, the
scribe who added the regnal year was probably perfectly cor-

65 Bale’s hand appears in the margin of Corpus Christi 343, fol. 28r. In his

Index, ed. by Poole, Bateson, p. 327, he reported taking his information on

Ralph of Coggeshall “ex magno libro Nicholai Brigan”; this was his friend,
the antiquary Nicholas Brigham († 1558), a collector of manuscripts. Albeit
Corpus Christi 343 is a large book of roughly folio size, the “great book”
referred to may have been Brigham’s own De venationibus rerum memorabil-
ium, a collection on which Bale relied for information on other authors.
 the chronicle of ralph of coggeshall 153

rect to record that Ralph was writing then, still working on his
chronicle in what was the year of his death.
The question as to what purpose this major expurgation was
intended to serve can be answered if we accept the palaeographi-
cal conclusions. (And the answer remains valid even if the pala-
eographical conclusions are not accepted.) The censorship affects
annals hostile to John. That is unequivocally the case with the
Savarinus addition; what the larger expurgation might therefore
have concealed is a question of considerable interest. John Bale’s
work with the manuscripts mentioned above catches the attention
since his play King Johan is the first occasion in English letters
when King John is portrayed as a hero, a proto-Protestant with
the courage to oppose the vicar of Rome even when the pall of
interdict had been cast over the country.66 Shakespeare’s King
John is a more nuanced character, drowned by events. But these
are peaks in an otherwise deteriorating reputation that has left
“Bad King John” as one of the villains of English history. Only in
modern times have historians sought to rehabilitate the king, in
so far as he can be. One very important plank in this rehabilita-
tion has been a balanced consideration of the attitude of the chro-
niclers who were writing during his reign.67 The annals of Margam
and Waverley are neutral or only incidentally hostile — albeit the
Waverley annalist takes a certain relish in listing John’s misfortu-
nes — while the so-called Barnwell Chronicle, now reassigned to
Crowland, retains a judicious balance.68 As has often been pointed
out in this connection, Ralph’s chronicle is merely annalistic for

66 John Bale, King Johan, ed. by B. B. Adams, San Marino, CA, 1969.

Bale’s thematic source was William Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christen Man,

first published in 1528; but for historical detail he drew also on the chronicle
sources with which he was acquainted (ibid., pp. 25–38).
67 See above, n. 41.

68 The Margam Annals are ed. by H. R. Luard in Annales Monastici,

5 vols, London, 1864–1869 (Rolls Series, 36), vol. 1, pp. 3–40; and the Waver-
ley annals, ibid., vol. 2, pp. 129–411. The annals for 1202–1225 that have
been known since the nineteenth century as the “Barnwell Chronicle” have
now been assigned to Roger, a monk of Crowland: see C. Ispir, “A critical
edition of the Crowland Chronicle”, unpublished PhD diss., King’s College,
London, 2015; also his “History writing in the cloister: the Crowland Chroni-
cle”, in Guthlac: Crowland’s Saint, ed. by J. Roberts, A. Thacker, Donning-
ton, 2020, pp. 426–77.
154 james willoughby

the central years of John’s reign, so apparently unroused was the

author by the king’s alleged misdeeds.69 The lack of material at
this point in the chronicle is therefore found to be historiographi-
cally important, for these were the very years that a Cistercian
writer ought to have felt most uncomfortable. The king had refu-
sed the pope’s man as archbishop of Canterbury and brought a
papal interdict on the country; he then retaliated against that by
seizing the clergy’s revenues, taxing the Cistercians particularly
severely. The absence of comment by Ralph during these cruel
years makes the revisionist point, that King John did not excite
the outrage of his contemporaries but has been damned instead by
the lurid imaginings of later historians.
We have seen that we do not in fact have Ralph’s first thou-
ghts for that crucial section of the chronicle. More than that, the
inserted annals clearly stand across a lacuna. There is evidence
to assert that this lacuna was substantial. It has escaped notice
hitherto, but an epitome exists of the earlier, unexpurgated ver-
sion of Ralph’s chronicle. This epitome is really no more than a
list of capitula, describing each annal, no matter its original len-
gth, in one or two sentences. But it amounts to a faithful sum-
mary of the entire chronicle. Such chroniculae are not unknown
for medieval chronicles: they survive, for example, for Henry of
Huntingdon, John of Worcester, and Matthew Paris. But rarely
has one offered anything of such value to textual history. This
epitome is transmitted by the Arundel manuscript and its depen-
dent copy, Corpus Christi College 343. The last entry in the epi-
tome is for 1225.70 It does show what very severe changes Ralph

69 Stubbs, Memoriale fratris Walteri de Coventria, vol. 2, p. xii, notes that

Ralph on John “ventures on no inferences from his acts to his character”,

and that Ralph, “although generally prone to run into descriptions of char-
acter, draws none of John; only an occasional adverb, ‘dolose’, ‘crudeliter’, or
‘ignaviter’, shows what he thought”. Other historians writing about Ralph’s
chronicle of John’s reign have noted the paucity of information: A. Lloyd,
King John, Newton Abbot, 1973, p. 399: “the chronicle is sometimes illumi-
nating but too often trivial and scrappy”; Warren, King John, p. 8: “the
weather and the crops, phenomena in the heavens, and strange happenings in
East Anglia, have as big a place as King John”.
70 It is worth mentioning that the start of Ralph’s Chronicon follows the

end of the epitome (fol. 51vb) without a break and in the same hand, establish-
ing 1225 as the earliest date for the copying of Arundel 11.
 the chronicle of ralph of coggeshall 155

imposed on his work. For the years before 1206 and after 1212,
either side of the major expurgation, the contents of the chronicle
and the epitome marry very exactly. The Savarinus insertion is
not there, which confirms that the epitome was begun earlier than
that act of censorship. For the years of the expurgation, however,
epitome and chronicle differ wildly. The implication must be that
the epitome was drawn up earlier and is the key to material that
Ralph subsequently removed and replaced with the very blandest
of his annals. These he selected from the epitome itself, for they
are taken over verbatim.71
A fruitful comparison may be made between the two sources
for just one year, 1211. The Vespasian manuscript and every other
known copy of the chronicle transmit only three annals under that
year; the epitome offers twenty-one. It is a similar picture for all
the other years between 1206 and 1212. We are left to wonder
what expanded hostility towards the king might have lain behind
the laconic capitular descriptions of annals such as that on the
“complaint of the king against the Cistercians”; or how much hor-
ror at one of the outrages of the year Ralph might have projected
into his account of the death of William de Braose, the former
royal favourite chased into exile, his wife and son murdered by
John.
The possibility that the Terrible Verdict of the St Albans school
might have come not from the imagination of a later generation
but have its feet instead in the contemporary clay of Ralph’s
unexpurgated chronicle is a tantalizing proposition. After all, we
know that Ralph shared an early state of his chronicle with St
Albans — why not his later work too? But that would be a specu-
lation too far: there seems to be little trace in the work of Roger
of Wendover or Matthew Paris of the topics listed in the epitome:
Ralph’s account of those years appears in fact to have been very
much richer. Instead, it is salutary merely to realize that we have
inherited something very different from the full chronicle as it
was once constituted for the years between 1206 and 1212. The
state of the manuscript and Ralph’s hand proves that the expur-

71 The epitome, although it has escaped scholarly notice, was in fact par-

tially printed, in parallel with the Vespasian text, for this expurgated section,
in excerpts from the Chronicon Anglicanum edited by R. Pauli and F. Lieb-
ermann, Hannover, 1885 (MGH SS [folio], 27), pp. 355–57.
156 james willoughby

gation was late, and that what was removed had been written as
a contemporary witness to John’s reign. It is worth remembering,
when King John’s reputation is discussed and decided, that one
plank of his modern rehabilitation may not be as sound as has
been assumed.

Publication and Dissemination

Ralph appears to have been ambitious for his work. An interim
copy of his chronicle down to the return of Richard I from captiv-
ity in 1195 was sent to St Albans abbey, as we have seen. Another
release, ending in 1216, the last year of John’s reign, is represented
by the Paris manuscript. As with the earlier release, this one
breaks off at a point where in the Vespasian manuscript the ink
and hand can be seen to change, showing another break in compo-
sition.72 This version, however, is complicated: its text is jumbled
and partial. But for the years between 1206 and 1212 it follows
the expurgated Vespasian text, showing that it was copied only in
the 1220s.73 There was a copy at Reading abbey (Berks) deriving
from the Paris family: it was excerpted there and worked into two
accounts of the life and times of Richard I, composed towards the
end of the thirteenth century.74 There may also have been a copy
at Glastonbury abbey (Soms), where a fifteenth-century library
catalogue reported a chronicle extending from 1066 to the reign
of King John.75 As we have seen, two copies of Ralph’s Visio
Thurkilli were in the library at Peterborough abbey (Northants).76
It could also be found at St Albans, whence it was taken over by

72 Other such breaks in composition are visible in Vespasian, such as at

the end of the section from 1195 to 1200; see Carpenter, “Abbot Ralph of
Coggeshall’s account”, p. 1216.
73 Willoughby, “Templar chronicle”, pp. 128–29; Brewer, Kane, Con-

quest of the Holy Land, pp. 85–90.

74 S. J. Spencer, “Two unexamined witnesses to Ralph of Coggeshall’s

Chronicon anglicanum in London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 371”, Manu-

scripta, 62 (2018), pp. 279–86.
75 English Benedictine Libraries: The Shorter Catalogues, ed. by R. Sharpe,

J. P. Carley, R. M. Thomson, A. G. Watson, London, 1996 (Corpus of Brit-

ish Medieval Library Catalogues, 4), p. 245 (B45. 68: “Chronica a Wilhelmo
Normanno ad regem Iohannem”).
76 See above, n. 35.
 the chronicle of ralph of coggeshall 157

Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris for their own chronicles.

Henry of Kirkestede at Bury St Edmunds abbey knew of a book
of visions from Coggeshall. All of these institutions were large,
wealthy, regionally important Benedictine houses with strong his-
toriographical traditions of their own. It is plausible to think that
Ralph was cultivating a publishing circle.
The Paris manuscript of the Chronicon Anglicanum was owned
by the famous Augustinian abbey of Saint-Victor in Paris, whose
arms and fifteenth-century ex libris appear prominently at the foot
of fol. 1r and there is an earlier inscription in fourteenth-century
Textura on the preceding flyleaf (fol. iv) including an anathema.
The most interesting inscription is a third one, over the top of
the first page. It reads Hic est liber Ecclesie beati Victoris Paris’
quem qui ei abstulerit uel super eo fraude fecit, sit anathema mara-
natha, where the words Victoris Paris’ are written on an erasure.
The original inscription is of the second half of the thirteenth cen-
tury and the addition is of the fourteenth. The manuscript clearly
had at least one intervening home between Coggeshall and Paris.
(The form of the original ex libris inscription does not help iden-
tify it.) It would be plausible for St Victor to have acquired its
copy through Augustinian networks. The Augustinian priory at
Thurgarton — famous in a later age as the place where the mysti-
cal writer Walter Hilton († 1396) passed his final years — had
a copy of the Visio Thurkilli.77 That being the case, perhaps the
Augustinian priory of St Osyth in Essex had been Ralph’s con-
duit to wider Augustinian networks. A certain connexion existed
between St Osyth’s and Coggeshall, only seventeen miles distant
from each other: Ralph was always scrupulous in observing the
obits and elections of priors there, a practice he otherwise reser-
ved only for his own community and the neighbouring Cistercian
house of Tilty.78 Accompanying the Chronicon Anglicanum in the
Vespasian and Arundel manuscripts are annals from 1162 to 1178
which have been ascribed to a monk of Coggeshall, even to Ralph
himself.79 In fact, the two references in them to St Osyth’s priory,

77 See above, n. 36.

78 RC, pp. 20, 162. Thurkill’s closing vision was of SS Katharine, Marga-
ret, and Osyth; Visio Thurkilli, ed. by Schmidt, p. 36, l. 15.
79 The annals were ed. by R. Anstruther, Radulphi Nigri Chronica. The

Chronicles of Ralph Niger, London, 1851 (Caxton Society) [hereafter RN],

158 james willoughby

one of them a long excursus, point rather to an origin there.80 If

Ralph received these annals from St Osyth’s — and they are only
transmitted in Coggeshall manuscripts — then nothing would
have been more natural than a reciprocal exchange of information.
The St Osyth’s Annals connect with a more substantial fellow
traveller, the Shorter or ‘English’ Chronicle of Ralph Niger, which
is likewise only transmitted alongside the Chronicon Anglicanum
(save only in the Paris manuscript). It begins at the Incarna-
tion and concludes around the year 1180: the death and burial of
Louis VII of France in that year are mentioned.81 Because of the
way the St Osyth’s Annals follow Niger’s chronicle in the Vespa-
sian manuscript — their oldest witness — they have been taken
as a continuation of Niger’s chronicle.82 The surmise then follows

pp. 170–78. T. D. Hardy, Descriptive Catalogue of Materials relating to the His-

tory of Great Britain and Ireland, 3 vols in 4 pts, London, 1862–1871 (Rolls
Series, 26), vol. 2, p. 415, states that this attribution is “on the authority of
the Heralds’ College MS” (i.e. London, College of Arms, MS Arundel 11). In
fact, the manuscript does not ascribe the continuation to Ralph, although its
former owner Lord William Howard of Naworth (1563–1640) has written a
note to attribute to Ralph the Additiones (1114 to 1158) which follow, on the
authority of John Bale (Bale, Index, ed. by Poole, Bateson, p. 327). For the
collection context, see further R. Ovenden, “The manuscript library of Lord
William Howard of Naworth (1563–1640)”, in Books and Bookmen in Early
Modern Britain. Essays Presented to James P. Carley, ed. by J. Willoughby
and J. Catto, Toronto, 2018 (Papers in Mediaeval Studies, 30), pp. 278–318.
80 RN, pp. 173, 177, for a long description of a fire-breathing dragon seen

in the sky at St Osyth’s in 1171 and mention of St Osyth’s again in 1177 in

relation to Henry II’s foundation of another Augustinian house at Waltham.
See further Gransden, Historical Writing, vol. 1, p. 331, nn. 92–93. On the
literary culture of St Osyth’s at this time, see D. Bethell, “The Lives of St
Osyth of Essex and St Osyth of Aylesbury”, Analecta Bollandiana, 88 (1970),
pp. 75–127.
81 RN, pp. 105–78. Ralph Niger wrote two chronicles, the first and proba-

bly the earlier is known as Chronicle I, or the “Universal Chronicle”, ed. RN,
pp. 1–104, covering the Creation to the 1190s (its final entries being variously
dated by scholars between 1194 and 1199). It survives in BL, Cotton MS Cleo-
patra C. x, and Lincoln Cathedral, 15. The second chronicle is often called
the “English Chronicle”, which is something of a misnomer since there is no
special concentration on English affairs.
82 They are found on fols 35v –39 v. The Annals were presented as a con-

tinuation by Anstruther in his edition of Niger’s Chronicle, and, on the rare

occasions they have attracted scholarly attention, they are so described. See,
for example, Hardy, Descriptive Catalogue, vol. 2, p. 145; Gransden, His-
 the chronicle of ralph of coggeshall 159

that Coggeshall’s copy of Niger’s chronicle had likewise been recei-

ved from St Osyth’s.83 Instead, the two items should be seen as
independent of each other. Albeit the St Osyth’s Annals follow
Niger’s chronicle on a verso in the same hand, to assume they
were likewise connected in the exemplar is to ignore the possibi-
lity that this is no more than the smoothing effect of the same
scribe’s copying of two sources. It is in fact misleading to speak of
a “continuation” or “addition” since the St Osyth’s Annals cover
years between 1162 and 1178 while Niger’s chronicle ends around
1180. Both texts appear in a portion of the manuscript that con-
veys other, miscellaneous texts on historical subjects, including
the Additiones mentioned below. It would be better to see the St
Osyth’s Annals and Niger’s Chronicle as two discrete texts gathe-
red into this dossier of historical materials.
The question of the route taken to Coggeshall by Niger’s Shorter
Chronicle bears further reflection since the chronicle has no tran-
smission outside of Coggeshall manuscripts. Ralph Niger († ?1199)
was a theologian and historian, the author of two chronicles.84 He
was an Englishman, a Parisian master, sometime member of the
courts of Henry II and Henry the Young King, a friend to John
of Salisbury and companion in exile to Thomas Becket. Although
he clearly admired the Cistercians, there is no evidence that he
took any monastic vow. But there exists the smallest of hints that
he was known to Abbot Ralph in his friendship with the courtier
and historian Gervase of Tilbury († in or after 1222). Gervase,

torical Writing, vol. 1, p. 331; E. D. Kennedy, “Annals of St Osyth’s”, in

Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle, ed. by G. Dunphy & C. Bratu, 2 vols,
Leiden, 2010, vol. 1, p. 88; the online edition is kept updated.
83 As I myself surmised in a previous article, “A Templar chronicle”,

p. 131. I now think that this codicological connection lacks persuasive force.
84 The known details for his life are assembled by G. B. Flahiff, “Ralph

Niger. An introduction to his life and works”, Mediaeval Studies, 2 (1940),

pp. 104–26, and see 122–23 for the Shorter Chronicle. Also A. Saltman,
“Supplementary notes on the works of Ralph Niger”, Bar-Ilan Studies in His-
tory, 1 (1978), pp. 108–13; and see the article by A. J. Duggan in ODNB.
The account has been usefully enlarged by F. Lachaud, ‘Ralph Niger and
the Books of Kings’, Anglo-Norman Studies, 40 (2017), pp. 125–46, at 126–
28; there are also useful comments by H. Krause in his edition of Niger’s
other chronicle, Radulphus Niger—Chronica. Eine englische Weltchronik des 12.
Jahrhunderts, Frankfurt, 1985, pp. 5*–22*.
160 james willoughby

in a complimentary passage about Ralph Niger’s learning, tells

that he and Ralph were fellows together in the court of Henry
the Young King († 1183).85 It is also the case that Gervase was
acquainted with Abbot Ralph: it was Gervase who told Ralph
about his meeting with a pretty girl in a vineyard near Reims
who, it transpired, was a member of the heretical Publicani sect,
a history that Ralph reported in the Chronicon Anglicanum.86 The
view is closed to us, but these connections triangulate the possi-
bility that the two Ralphs also knew each other, perhaps through
court or diocesan networks.
Ralph Niger’s biblical glosses were finished by 1191, when they
were submitted to the archbishops of Sens and Reims for their
nihil obstat. This scrutiny was a papal commission at the author’s
request, and the archbishops duly reported to the pope a year later
that they had found nothing in the works contrary to sound doctri-
ne.87 The postills survive uniquely as a set at Lincoln cathedral,
where Ralph held a prebend.88 His chronicles came afterwards,
the work of the 1190s, since his first Chronicle contains a com-
pleted list of his theological writings.89 It seems that he was then

85 Otia imperialia, ed. by S. E. Banks & J. W. Binns, Otia imperialia:

Recreation for an Emperor, Oxford, 2002 (Oxford Medieval Texts), pp. 186–87:
“Vnde litteratus ille nostri temporis uir, magister Radulfus Niger, domini mei
regis iunioris concurialis, cum Topica Aristotilis et Elencos uersibus glosaret,
ait”.
86 CA, p. 122: “magister Gervasius Tilleberiensis, videns quandam puellam

in vinea solam deambulantem, lubrice iuuentutis curiositate ductus, diuertit

ad eam, sicut ab eius ore audiuimus postea, cum canonicus esset”. The girl,
using theological arguments to fend Gervase off, provoked a cross-examina-
tion by the archbishop and was eventually burned at the stake as a heretic.
See further Neufeld, “Hermeneutical perversion”.
87 G. B. Flahiff, “Ecclesiastical censorship of books in the twelfth cen-

tury”, Mediaeval Studies, 4 (1942), pp. 1–22, at 1–2, 17–22.

88 Lincoln Cathedral Library, 15, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27. The set is reported in

an addition to the twelfth-century catalogue of the chapter library in Lincoln

Cathedral, MS 1, fol. 1r: “Septem volumina Magistri Radulfi Nigri” (J. M. W.
Willoughby and N. Ramsay, The Libraries of the Secular Cathedrals of England
and Wales, London, 2023 (Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues,
17), SC62. 104). The missing volume, postills on Joshua and Judges, was last
reported in the 1450s (SC72. 14). An eighth, on Genesis and Exodus, had
been lent to the abbot of Thornton and was already lost c. 1200 (SC62. 105).
89 For the chronicles, see Flahiff, “Ralph Niger”, pp. 122–23. He was

also the composer of offices for the four great Marian feasts (Nativity, Annun-
 the chronicle of ralph of coggeshall 161

living in a house in London, for in 1199 King John made a regrant

of the house he had formerly granted to Master Ralph Niger.90
This grant and its date may therefore relate to Niger’s death.91
Ralph Niger is an example of an author who took pains to obtain
ecclesiastical sanction for his works but failed to find publication
channels thereafter. Other than the surviving set at Lincoln, his
postills are only known by a reference from Henry of Kirkestede
at Bury St Edmunds in the mid-fourteenth century.92 Ralph was
fortunate that where his Shorter Chronicle was concerned, it came
into the hands of a man who was more positively committed to
publication: it is entirely thanks to the monks of Coggeshall that
Ralph Niger’s Shorter Chronicle has survived at all.
The authorial ascription for Niger’s chronicle is given in two
places in the Vespasian manuscript: in the opening rubric (“Inci-
pit prefatio Magistri Radulfi Nigri”, fol. 4r) and in a non-autho-
rial passage at the end, before the start of the St Osyth’s Annals
(fol. 35v, beginning at line 4). The author of this paragraph states
that Ralph Niger’s chronicle ends at this point (“Hucusque protra-
xit hanc cronicam Magister Radulfus Niger”) and he continues by
seeking to excuse Niger his patent hostility to Henry II since it
was Henry who had sent Niger into exile (with Thomas Becket);
that would have naturally coloured Niger’s feelings about “so great
and serene a king”.93 This apologetic paragraph might already

ciation, Assumption, and Purification), prefaced by a short didactic treatise,

which survives uniquely in Lincoln Cathedral, MS 15; see further A. Hughes,
“British rhymed offices: a catalogue and commentary”, in Music in the Medi-
eval English Liturgy: Plainsong & Mediaeval Music Society Centennial Essays,
ed. S. Rankin, D. Hiley, Oxford, 1993, pp. 239–84, at pp. 250–51.
90 Rotuli chartarum in turri Londinensis asservati, ed. by T. D. Hardy,

London, 1837, p. 22; Flahiff, “Ralph Niger”, p. 113.

91 But for a suggestion that he might have lived on until at least 1205, see

Willoughby, Ramsay, Secular Cathedrals, SC62. 104. It is possible that he

had left London and retired to his Lincoln prebend.
92 Rouse, Rouse, Henry of Kirkestede, Catalogus, p. 422 (K495).

93 “Hucusque protraxit hanc cronicam Magister Radulfus Niger, qui

accusatus apud predictum principem [sc. Henricum] et in exilium pulsus, ob

expulsionis iniuriam atrociora quam decuit de tanto ac tam serenissimo rege
mordaci stilo conscripsit, magnificos eius actus quibus insignis utique habe-
batur reticendo, atque praua eius opera absque alicuius excusationis pallia-
tione replicando, cum pleraque de his que commemorauit in pluribus articulis
aliquantulam admittant excusationem si gestorum eius intentio iusto libra-
162 james willoughby

have existed in the exemplar that arrived at Coggeshall; it would

be impossible to prove since Vespasian is the oldest manuscript.
But it is also a possibility that Abbot Ralph himself wrote this
apology. His own comments on Henry II in his Chronicon Angli-
canum are more irenic, and in his panegyric on the king’s death
he was concerned to list the king’s deeds in full.94 That exercise
might be considered a careful riposte to Niger since the main
complaint in this anonymous passage about Niger’s treatment
of Henry II is that Niger had allowed exile, his and Becket’s, to
obscure the king’s many other notable deeds. Also, the comment
that Niger wrote with a biting pen (“mordaci stilo conscripsit”)
may be considered a verbal reminiscence of Abbot Ralph’s prefe-
rence for referring to other authors’ styles, as has been mentioned
above. Although it remains not proven, the suggestion is made
that Ralph Niger’s Shorter Chronicle was received at Coggeshall,
perhaps through personal contact between the author and Abbot
Ralph, that the latter Ralph then rounded it out with his own
postscript — something he did with the other texts that passed
through his hands — and then saw to its being copied and com-
piled with the annals he had received from St Osyth’s, covering a
similar period of years as the latter part of Niger’s chronicle. The
two texts were then transmitted together from Coggeshall.
A yet grander intention for publication is detectable in two
overlooked manuscripts, both dating from the first half of the
thirteenth century. In these, the Coggeshall chronicle was merged
and interwoven with Niger’s chronicle and the St Osyth’s Annals
to produce one unified, continuous history from the Incarnation.
The manuscripts are affiliated: BL, Royal 13 A. xii (s. xiii1), later
owned by the London Carmelites, and Dublin, Trinity College,
508 (s. xiii1). It was an ambitious scheme, albeit imperfectly car-

mine ponderetur, si regie potestatis lubrica libertas pensetur, que fere cunctis
potentibus dat licere quod libet, quorum uiciis fauent inferiores, proni ad imi-
tandum, prompti ad adulandum, cum et impunitas prestet audaciam, diuitie
uero accuant et accendant culpam.” Printed in RN, pp. 169–70; also printed
by T. Wright, Biographia Britannica literaria, 2 vols, London, 1842–1846,
vol. 2, p. 423 n.; Hardy, Descriptive Catalogue, vol. 2, p. 287 n.; and Grans-
den, Historical Writing, vol. 1, p. 331, n. 92. On Niger’s view of kingship, or
moralia regum, see further Lachaud, “Ralph Niger and the Books of Kings”.
94 CA, pp. 25–26, s.a. 1189.
 the chronicle of ralph of coggeshall 163

ried through. Both manuscripts break off incomplete, the Royal

manuscript in 1213 and the Dublin manuscript in 1205, so it is
not possible to know how far they once extended.95 A scribal addi-
tion to the text on the River Pant, then in flood, could only have
been made by a writer possessing local information.96 The River
Pant rises east of Saffron Walden and runs through Coggeshall,
where it is known as the River Blackwater. However, the name of
Pant was used more widely in the Middle Ages, even to its limits
at Maldon, where it empties into the sea in what is now named
the Blackwater Estuary. The eleventh-century Old English poem
“The Battle of Maldon”, for example, described the Anglo-Saxon
warriors massed “alongside Pante’s stream” with the Viking army
“westward across the Pante”.97 It is enough to affirm a local con-
text for this amalgamated chronicle. Otherwise, local details such
as abbatial elections are suppressed, as if the intention were to
create a national chronicle of wider scope than either chronicle on
its own could supply. The composition of this conflated chroni-
cle deserves further investigation. What is of particular interest
is that for the years 1206 to 1212 it conveys the fuller annalistic
entries of the epitome of the Chronicon Anglicanum rather than the

95 The matter is complicated in the Dublin manuscript by the fact that,

while the text does certainly break off, the last leaf (fol. 221) is a singleton
added to a quire of six, suggesting that the quire was in this way “finished”.
It may hint at a break in ongoing composition at Coggeshall. The familiar lay-
out of thirty-one ruled lines to a page would reinforce the suggestion of Cog-
geshall, albeit the text is bi-columnar, as in Arundel 11, rather than the scrip-
torium’s more usual long lines. Marvin Colker, in his Trinity College Library
Dublin: Descriptive Catalogue of the Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Manu-
scripts, Aldershot, 1991, p. 942, states that the abbreviated copy of Ralph
de Diceto’s Ymagines historiarum that is also in the manuscript (fols 1r –142 v)
was written by the same scribe of our portion. The scribes, while similar,
are distinct, and the codicology confirms that these components are separate
booklets: the final quire of the Diceto portion, fols 133–42, was made up to a
ten so as to accommodate the end of the text. There is nothing to argue that
the two components were bound together before early-modern times.
96 It is in the Royal manuscript, fol. 26r, but is not found in the Dublin

copy, which seems in general to be a text with a tighter grip on a purely

universal narrative.
97 “The Battle of Maldon”, ll. 68 (“Hī þǣr Pantan strēam | mid prasse

bestōdon”) and 97 (“wīċinga werod, | west ofer Pantan”); ed. by D. Scragg,

The Battle of Maldon, ad 991, Oxford, 1991, pp. 20, 22.
164 james willoughby

diminished version copied on to the supply leaf in the Vespasian

manuscript. It does not preserve the original, fuller material that
Ralph later chose to censor. It shows that the conflated chroni-
cle was compiled after the expurgation of the chronicle had taken
place and with recourse to the Arundel copy, which preserves a
fuller set of annals for those years than does Vespasian. It would
be plausible to assume that this conflated chronicle was compiled
at Coggeshall.
The same process of compilation can be observed in some deri-
vative annals from 1114 to 1158 which are transmitted in Vespa-
sian, Arundel, and Corpus Christi 343.98 An early-modern hand
described them in Vespasian (fol. 40 r) as “Additiones monachi de
Cogeshale”, although Bale had treated them as Ralph’s own.99
There is in fact nothing to associate the annals textually with Cog-
geshall, they being merely excerpts from William of Malmesbury,
Ralph de Diceto, and Orderic Vitalis. But it is possible to show
that they were at least copied at Coggeshall since in Vespasian,
the oldest manuscript, the mise-en-page follows normal Coggeshall
scriptorium practices and the text is continuous in the same quire
with the start of Ralph’s Chronicon Anglicanum. They represent
further evidence of the monks’ historiographical ambitions.
It is owing entirely to the monks of Coggeshall that Ralph
Niger’s Shorter Chronicle and the St Osyth’s Annals owe their
survival. The same is true of the Libellus de expugnatione Terrae
Sanctae. This remarkable memoir of the disasters suffered by the
Christians in Palestine before the Third Crusade concludes with
the defining act of the removal of the golden cross from the pin-
nacle of the Dome of the Rock. As discussed above, Ralph saw fit
to continue this account with the history of the Third Crusade,
by subjoining extended reference to the monumental Itinerarium
peregrinorum et gesta regis Ricardi attributed to Prior Richard of
Holy Trinity. That work’s enormous size required him to refer to
it in précis, offering no more than a concatenation of excerpts of
chapter headings and opening lines, melded to produce something
like a coherent narrative, with onward reference to the Itinerarium

98 In the Vespasian manuscript, the primary copy, they occupy fols 40 r –

45 . They were edited by Anstruther, RN, pp. 178–91.
r

99 Bale, Index, ed. by Poole, Bateson, p. 327.

 the chronicle of ralph of coggeshall 165

for the reader wanting to know more.100 Making that sort of inter-
vention was entirely in keeping with Ralph’s own habits of work
as a collector and compiler of historical materials. The fact that
the Libellus deals with events in 1186–1187 and that Ralph’s own
chronicle becomes original in 1187 may be more than coincidental,
showing that he was trying to incorporate the Libellus as part of
an overarching narrative, as he also did with Niger’s chronicle.
He certainly used the information from the Libellus to rewrite
his account of the year in the Chronicon: a new hand operates on
fol. 52r to the top of fol. 54r in Vespasian, where the first two lines
on fol. 54r had to be erased and overwritten, the new text spilling
out into the margin; it signals an intervention that was probably
made when the copy of the Libellus arrived at Coggeshall.101 The
Libellus was then given its place in Ralph’s dossier of historical
materials and disseminated.
There is a self-consciousness, even a grandeur, to these activities.
Given his lofty designs, and his patent desire to gather as many
sources of historical information as he could, one is left wondering
why Ralph should have come to make so extensive an expurgation
of his own chronicle. I have tried to argue that the palaeography
shows that it must have occurred late in his life, during the period
of his infirmity. It is possible that he was anxious to make a good
end and decided to retract some of the vitriol he had spilled over
his pages. Matthew Paris intended to make a similar retraction
of some of his more controversial passages at the end of his life,
expurgating some and marking others for deletion.102 William of
Malmesbury removed an unusually outspoken passage hostile to
William I from his Gesta regum, which must have been done in
later life.103 There exist numerous examples from literary history,

100 Brewer, Kane, Conquest of the Holy Land, p. 63.

101 As was pointed out by Brewer, Kane, ibid., pp. 79–81. This inter-
polation covers short annals from halfway through 1181 to 1186 (doubtless
repeating what existed on the original page) and then a very expanded
account for 1187 to the end of 1188.
102 R. Vaughan, Matthew Paris, Cambridge, 1958, pp. 117–24.

103 Not having his autograph, the change is visible as a variant in the

transmission; M. Winterbottom, ‘The Gesta regum of William of Malmes-

bury’, Journal of Medieval Latin, 5 (1995), pp. 158–75, at p. 162; repr. in his
Style and Scholarship: Latin Prose from Gildas to Raffaele Regio. Selected Papers,
ed. R. Gamberini, Florence, 2020, pp. 206–21.
166 james willoughby

from Vergil to Kafka, of febrile demands from the death-bed to

destroy work. Gogol and Gerard Manley Hopkins destroyed their
own work after religious conversion. Would that we still had Ral-
ph’s first, enlarged thoughts on those years between 1206 and
1212, some of the most bruising of John’s reign and likely to have
inspired some of Ralph’s most entertaining polemic — extrava-
gances he would later wish to retract. In other parts of his chro-
nicle Ralph felt he could make surgical interventions, lifting out
hostile notices about John and transplanting bland news about
episcopal elections and so forth. It is almost as if he felt that the
section of the work between 1206 and 1212 was beyond that sort
of repair and that instead, like an angry spleen, it would have to
come out entirely. Were it not for the accidentally surviving epi-
tome, we should have no sense at all of the extent of this expurga-
tion. What is not known and probably now unknowable is whether
Ralph made any attempts to circulate a replacement version of his
chronicle within the same distribution channels he had used long
before.
The suggestion that Ralph’s expurgated material has been
plucked out of the historian’s hands not by the usual accidents of
fire or theft but by an act of nervous compunction is not, perhaps,
an implausible one for a historian of the Middle Ages to accept.
Freeman’s challenging assertion, with which this chapter opened,
was that manuscripts are useful when they serve the making of
editions. The activities of Ralph of Coggeshall as publishing author
and self-censor emerge only from the manuscripts, and provide
excellent reasons for preferring the manuscript to the smoother
texture of the printed book.