6 - Placing Durham in Time: Writing Annals and Chronicles, c.1100–1130

Summary

Having spent the greater part of the period from c.1090 collecting, composing and revising narrative sources mostly pertaining to a localised history of St Cuthbert's cult in Northumbria, the interests of Durham's historians appear to have evolved from around the turn of the twelfth century onwards. Between c.1110 and the end of the 1120s, a new historiographical project developed at Durham, which, like the production of the LDE is likely to have been co-ordinated by Symeon, working with a small number of supporting scribes. Together, they were attempting to explore an altogether more abstract approach to the study, writing and visual representation of the past, through the media of short chronicles and annals. Several examples of these minihistories were acquired and produced by the Durham community within this timeframe. All show a blending of new imported sources and older local ones. Some examples show Durham compilers duplicating historical information across multiple sources, while other sections of the same works record differing information, even when collecting historical notices from the same geographical and chronological foci. Throughout all of these sources, however, it is possible to see a clear intellectual focus on exploring abstract notions of time, and of placing known historical events within measurable frameworks of chronology, royal genealogy, geography and theology. These chronicles show how Durham audiences used historical knowledge to negotiate heated contemporary debates on the measurement of time, and in so doing, made original contributions to an international discourse on this subject.

One of the best examples of the works produced during this period and the challenges faced by modern audiences when attempting to understand them, survives across fols. 52r to 129v of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 139. The text in question provides a rough outline of some events of interest in England from the seventh century down to 1129, but displays significant gaps in chronological and geographical coverage between these limits. Until the second half of the twentieth century, these materials were known collectively as the Durham Historia regum, and often understood as a single and complete text. However, Blair, and more recently Rollason, have proven that the surviving copy represents an incomplete draft or sections of drafts relating to a work never finished.