1 - Forgetting Kings: The First 100 Years of Historiography of Eadred’s and Eadwig’s Reigns

Summary

As the following essays show, the middle decades of the tenth century have been unjustly neglected in the historiography of the early English kingdom. This has been the case for, arguably, over 1000 years. Eadred's and Eadwig's reigns were subject to a damnatio memoriae almost as soon as they were over, as many scholars have noted. This chapter will further examine the earliest historiography of the 940s and 950s. It will consider how the most prominent voices in the surviving sources – those of radical monastic reformers – were motivated to condemn or ignore Eadwig and Eadred. These views were not shared by all members of the political elite, or even by all Anglo-Latin or Old English writers: some contradictory viewpoints can be found briefly in a few sources. Nevertheless, monastic reformers’ control of libraries and scriptoria meant that their viewpoints came to dominate not just in the texts they created but also in the texts that they copied – and edited.

Good Monks, Bad Kings

The surviving annals and narrative sources give the overwhelming impression that the late 940s and early 950s were a time when little of import happened – apart from decay and decadence. Those years are dealt with in a few lines in most of the pre-Conquest chronicles. In particular, the reigns of Eadred and Eadwig were given much shorter entries than those of Æthelstan, Edmund, and Edgar. In some cases, the 950s were covered more briefly even than the two-year reign of Edward the Martyr. This can be seen in Anglo-Saxon Chronicle manuscripts that seem to have been begun in the pre-Conquest period: MS A (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 173); MS B (London, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius A VI); MS C (London, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius B I); and MS D (London, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius B IV).

In addition to chronicles, in the late tenth century there was a flowering of hagiography, monastic manifestos, and other religious texts that recounted recent histories. However, hagiographies from the later tenth century often omit mention of Eadred and Eadwig – or at least some of the key developments of their reigns – even when discussing churchmen who knew and worked with those kings.