sehepunkte 25 (2025), Nr. 10

Abigail S. Armstrong: Approaching Records of the Household and Wardrobe

A brief guide to the records of the English royal household has long been wanted. Thomas Tout's massive six volume Chapters in the Administrative History of Mediaeval England (1920-33), although still unmatched in point of detail, is too vast a sea upon which to launch any fledgling or foreign visitor to the National Archives in Kew. The Archives' own 1964 handlist to such records (List of Documents Relating to the Household and Wardrobe, John to Edward I) is not only unhelpfully organized but ignores many of the more significant individual items, including various of the great wardrobe books, that have escaped incarceration at Kew and must now be hunted down in the badlands, from the British Library, via Manchester to Bryn Mawr Pennsylvania. Individual studies, such as those of the chamber of King John, or by Benjamin Wild of The Wardrobe Accounts of Henry III (Pipe Roll Society, 2012), capture only certain aspects of the story, and are in many instances little known beyond England and a narrow circle of expertise.

Hence the justification for this present brief guide, intended to explain the nature of such records, their various types, and to some extent the uses to which they can be put. As Armstrong notes (13), they are potentially valuable to all manner of specialisms, here listing 'piety, patronage, diplomacy and politics, material culture, household attendants, hospitality, food and drink, consumption, education, fashion and more', with Armstrong's 'more' pretty much infinitely extendable. Without these records, the work of Marc Bloch on English royal sacrality would have been immeasurably impoverished. So too would that of Michael Prestwich on the politics and finances of Edward I, or more recently of Hugh Thomas on court display under King John (Power and Pleasure, Oxford 2020, uncited here), itself a worthy successor to Sybille Schröder's study of the material culture of King Henry II (Macht und Gabe, 2004), still too little known outside Germany (and likewise ignored here).

Armstrong, herself originally trained in the study of late medieval manorial account rolls, comes to the thirteenth-century aware both of the vast extent of the records and of the inadequacy of their present listing. Her introductory chapter charts the emergence of the wardrobe as a major department of government, evolving from the earlier 'chamber' of Henry II or John, itself supplying the means by which the chief royal accounting office, the Exchequer, permanently planted in Westminster from the 1170s onwards, could funnel cash to the still largely itinerant royal court. In course of time, as Armstrong (following Tout) explains, the wardrobe itself became too unwieldy an affair, charged with so many functions from the production of correspondence with popes and emperors, to the custody of the King's jewel and relic collections, that it in turn bifurcated into a secretarial and accounting office (the 'Wardrobe' proper), and the somewhat confusingly named 'Great Wardrobe'. It was this latter department that, from the reign of Edward I onwards, continued to deal with the nitty-gritty of household supply: coping, in a phrase we might borrow from Lewis Carroll, with the practical realities of 'ships and string and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings'.

Having in a second chapter considered where and how any interested student might locate and use these records (including a very basic guide to their physical appearance, their heavily abbreviated Latin, and the units of currency employed therein), she then proceeds to two individual studies. The first of these (chapter 3) deals with an account for the household of Margaret of France, Edward I's second queen, from May to July 1307, the second (chapter 4) with a list of more than a thousand rings acquired and in many cases distributed by Henry III's Queen Eleanor of Provence over the eight years from 1257 to 1264. What are supplied here are in effect not editions of these records, but brief synthetic studies teasing out various details, including a degree of statistical analysis.

No-one reading this brief book will fail to learn from it. At the same time, perhaps inevitably, it leaves many stones unturned. As its author explains, it confines itself to only the first seventy or so years of household records that continued to proliferate, in bewildering abundance, into the sixteenth century and beyond. Post-Covid restrictions apparently complicated access to at least some of the earlier documents, although a wide selection (particularly from the National Archives series E 101) is freely available online. Here, although noticed, Robert Palmer's indispensable Anglo-American Legal Tradition website has much more to offer than this brief guide allows. It is perhaps a shame that no attempt was made here to offer a full or comprehensive listing even of the pre 1307 records, to replace that supplied in 1964, not least to reward purchasers of this book with rather more for their £52 than they will obtain from the two brief 'case studies', chapters 3 and 4. Armstrong's bibliography, by contrast, is both extensive and useful. I suspect through no fault of the author, the dozen or so photographic illustrations, although well chosen, are reproduced so small and so heavily shaded as to be practically illegible: a problem that applies to the hard-copy version but that may be amendable in the e-book, where magnification can be applied. And then there is the conundrum, otherwise known as 'editing'.

There are still far too many household records consultable only in manuscript and in situ at Kew. Only one of the massive Edward I wardrobe books has been fully published (as long ago as 1787), and this from an exemplar for the year 28 Edward I (1300) belonging to the London Society of Antiquaries, in reality inferior to a duplicate, now in the British Library (Additional Manuscript 35291). Between 1977 and 1986 Benjamin and Catherine Byerley edited two significant volumes of excerpts and individual rolls, for the years 1285-9, and (in 2004, for a Belgian series, little known in England) Bruce and Mary Lyon edited part of the 1296-7 Wardrobe Book relating to Edward I's campaign in Flanders. Even so, there is much work here still to be done, not least for the prototype daily account books that run from 1278 onwards. Even the National Archives' online catalogue for these continues to list several of them (TNA C 47/4/1-) either with the wrong dates or with other points misdescribed. Nor has nearly enough thought been devoted to the ways in which these records evolved in tandem with the importation of Italian clerks, Italian bankers, and Italian record formats. More generally, there has been insufficient recognition of the importance of Edward's stay in Sicily and the Regno on his return from crusade, as a turning point not only in diplomatic but administrative history.

Like many young medievalists, Armstrong thus enters a field in which the edition as well as the exposition of texts remains a priority. She is aware of this, and does not herself claim advanced editorial skills. At least a finger of blame must therefore be pointed at her publishers and their copy-editing process, by which faults of case, gender, tense or of person have been left uncorrected. Medieval Latin is today so rarely taught (and, let it be confessed, so inadequately studied) amongst English postgraduates, that it is hardly surprising that editorial standards have slipped. Even so, what are we to make of a reference to the 'anno regni regis Eduardi primus' (p.53), where 'primus' is in fact neither 'primus' nor 'primi' but 'patris' (i.e. from a record compiled under Edward's son), and where (within the next few lines) we find 'via universis carnis' translated as 'the way of the (rather than 'of all') flesh'? The inchworm might grind on here, through instance after instance, indeed through pretty much every passage of Latin here set down. But this would serve little purpose, not least because publishers these days seem oblivious to shame. Where a fledgling historian's transcription skills may improve, machines that can read will never entirely supplant human oversight. Armstrong's enthusiasm, and the clarity of her exposition remain uncompromised. Even so, let the rule be clearly stated, that no medievalist, or academic copy-editor, should work without a Latin primer close at hand. As for the imprint in which this handbook appears, what more can we expect from a series itself defined by a gerund ('Approaching') all too easily misreadable as an adjective?