In 1847 the English antiquary Thomas Hudson Turner published a brief note about a manuscript that recently had come to his notice, and which contained a collection of model business correspondence.1 Turner included tantalizing transcriptions of three letters, all in Latin, between an earl and the merchants who supplied him with wine, cloth, and furs. However, other than saying that the collection dated from the reign of Henry III (1216–72), he provided no detailed description of its contents and no means of identifying the manuscript itself. But such as it was, this was the first printed notice of the work that provides the bulk of the documents in this collection.
Intrigued by Turner’s extracts from the business correspondence, of which few examples survive from thirteenth-century England, Martha Carlin searched for the manuscript and located it at last in the British Library, where it formed one section (Article 5, folios 88–133) of a larger volume, Additional MS 8167 (hereafter Add. 8167). Turner’s letters proved to be drawn from a formulary, a collection of model correspondence designed for the instruction of business students.
Although Turner’s article of 1847 seems to have escaped later scholarly notice, a number of scholars since his day have also noted the existence of the formulary material in Add. 8167. In 1879 Georg Waitz printed a description of urban trades and crafts that occurs on folios 88r–90v but did not discuss the other contents of Article 5 or of the manuscript more generally. Waitz also mistakenly identified the manuscript as dating from the fourteenth century.2 Charles Homer Haskins printed one of the student letters in the collection in 1898.3 In 1935 Noël Denholm-Young discussed the model manorial account in Add. 8167,4 and shortly afterward H. G. Richardson described Article 5 in some detail and identified it as containing the earliest English formulary.5 In 1947 and again in 1971, Dorothea Oschinsky briefly discussed the formulary’s material on estate accounting.6 More recently, Martin Camargo examined the significance of Add. 8167 in the history of dictamen (the art of letter-writing) in England,7 and Christopher Woolgar mentioned the model diet account in Add. 8167 in his study of medieval household accounts.8 Each of these scholars, however, focused on individual elements of the formulary; none of them remarked on the extraordinary range of the documents themselves or their significance as a collection.
As our study of the documents expanded we discovered that, despite Richardson’s belief that Add. 8167 was the oldest English formulary, several other collections (discussed below) were even earlier. A particularly rich and important one is in the Bodleian Library, where it forms part of Fairfax MS 27 (hereafter Fairfax 27). As we planned out the project that has become this book, it was clear that the letters in Fairfax 27 form a significant complement to the material in Add. 8167. This book therefore is a selection of letters and other documents drawn from these two early thirteenth-century formularies. They allow us to rediscover a lost medieval world through the model documents they preserve, which represent whole classes of genuine letters and other material that have not survived to the present day because they were discarded as of no lasting importance. Luckily, we can infer their existence and character from these surviving exemplars. It has to be said that the selection of material was the easy part. One reason why this is the first serious study of these documents is they are by no means easy to read. Many of them were ineptly drafted, and clumsily transcribed and altered by the medieval copyists, a not unusual feature in what were classroom products.9 Recovering their sense was frequently a frustrating task, but the importance of the material meant that it was a worthwhile and necessary endeavor.
1 Thomas Hudson Turner, “Original Documents,” Archaeological Journal, 4 (1847), 142–44.
2 Georg Waitz, Neues Archiv, 4 (1879), 339–43. Martha Carlin has printed a corrected transcription and a translation of this text in “Shops and Shopping in the Early Thirteenth Century: Three Texts,” in Money, Markets and Trade in Late Medieval Europe: Essays in Honour of John H. A. Munro, ed. Lawrin Armstrong, Ivana Elbl, and Martin M. Elbl (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 491–537.
3 Charles Homer Haskins, “The Life of Medieval Students as Illustrated by Their Letters,” American Historical Review, 3, no. 2 (January 1898), 210, n. 2; rpt. in idem, Studies in Mediaeval Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1929), 10. This letter is DOCUMENT 81 in our collection.
4 See Noël Denholm-Young, “Robert Carpenter and the Provisions of Westminster,” English Historical Review, 50 (1935), 22–35, rpt. in idem, Collected Papers on Mediaeval Subjects (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946), 96–110; and again in idem, Collected Papers (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1969), 173–86. See also idem, Seignorial Adminstration in England (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), 121–22.
5 Henry Gerald Richardson, “An Oxford Teacher of the Fifteenth Century,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 23, no. 2 (1939), 447–50. See also Henry Gerald Richardson, “The Oxford Law School Under John,” Law Quarterly Review, 57 (1941), 319–38; and Henry Gerald Richardson and George Osborne Sayles, “Early Coronation Records [Part I],” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 13 (1935–36), 134–38.
6 Dorothea Oschinsky, “Medieval Treatises on Estate Accounting,” Economic History Review, 17, no. 1 (1947), 54, 58; eadem, Walter of Henley and Other Treatises on Estate Management and Accounting (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 16, 226, 235.
7 Martin Camargo, “The English Manuscripts of Bernard of Meung’s ‘Flores Dictaminum,’” Viator, 12 (1981), 197–219 (especially 204–8).
8 Christopher M. Woolgar, ed., Household Accounts from Medieval England, vol. 1, British Academy, Records of Social and Economic History, new ser., 17–18 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, for the British Academy, 1992–93), 16 and n. 21. Two further scholars who have cited Add. 8167 may not in fact have seen the manuscript themselves, since their descriptions of it are incorrect. Margaret Wade Labarge commented briefly on the model household accounts, but erroneously reported that the manuscript contains versions in both French and Latin. A Baronial Household of the Thirteenth Century (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1965; rpt. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966), 189 and n. 1. D. Vance Smith’s characterization of Add. 8167 as a “Household miscellany and household formulary” in the bibliography of his book Arts of Possession: The Medieval Household Imaginary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 275, is similarly incorrect.
9 Suzanne Tuczek, in Die Kampanische Briefsammlung (Paris Lat. 11867). Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Briefe des Späteren Mittelalters (Hanover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2010), edits a fourteenth-century English formulary that exhibits a similar level of inept draftsmanship.