Michael Spence's study of the late medieval Cistercian abbey of Fountains will be of interest to scholars studying medieval monasticism, the late medieval English economy, and medieval archival practices. Spence's book analyzes the archival memory of Fountains abbey. Specifically, he studies the memories that the monks preserved in their cartularies, inventories, and charters and the ways these texts reflect the monks’ recopying and reorganization of their economic and legal documents. Spence performs what he calls a “forensic analysis” of these materials, using them to reconstruct other documents that are now missing. His study considers the relationship between documentary production and the political, economic, and demographic crises of the long fifteenth century.
Spence notes that the history of Fountains Abbey during its first 150 years has been thoroughly explored, as have the last fifty years before the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Spence instead focuses on what he, following John Van Engen, calls the long fifteenth century. In fact, the fourteenth century is pivotal for Spence's analysis, as this was the period in which the monastery transitioned from a grange-based economy to one based on tenancies and rents. Fountains in the fifteenth century continued to face demographic challenges, but it also faced new political ones. Not only economic transformations, but also the papal schism and the wars between the Yorks and Lancasters influenced the monastery's relations with its patrons, provoked disputes over its abbots, and encouraged its production of documents. Central to Spence's study is the abbot John Greenwell (1442–1471) who assumed his position after a long period of instability in which monks fought over the office of abbot and the followers of the Percy family at times occupied the abbey and its properties. In fact, Greenwell still had to negotiate between the Yorks and the Lancasters; Spence notes that the Yorkist Nevilles assaulted the abbey in 1443, and that Greenwell had to hide his Lancastrian sympathies in an oath to Edward IV in 1461, an oath that Henry VI annulled ten years later. It is in this context of late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century political and economic crises that the monks of Fountains produced many of their extant documents, especially the majority of their cartularies and other business records.
After providing a chronological overview, Spence organizes his book topically. Drawing on the scholarship of Patrick Geary and Constance Bouchard, he emphasizes that the monks did not assemble their cartularies and related documents in a passive fashion but instead selected and organized the contents according to political and economic concerns. He focuses especially on the fifteenth-century “President Book,” which he argues served as an aide-memoire for Abbot Greenwell. Appearing to be a compendium of nine independently produced sections (explained in Appendix I), this composite codex contains a set of indices to extant and no longer extant cartularies, a catalogue and chronicle of abbots, and detailed lists of acquisitions and revenues in two districts of the monastery's property. Spence uses this codex to demonstrate Greenwell's documentary practices. First, he shows that Greenwell's cross-referencing techniques linked each index to a discrete document; he later argues that these referencing tools parallel the practices of theologically trained scholars educated in exegetical studies. Second, he shows that Greenwell carefully reshaped the history of the abbey and his list of abbots to gloss over the early fifteenth-century disputes in the abbey. He also shows how one fascicule's careful reworking of the landholdings and rents due from one particular sheep-rearing estate reclassified the financial commitments due to the abbey as well as reconstructing the genealogies of the benefactors.
The book's final chapter pulls together the insights from the early chapters to offer a forensic approach to the cartularies from Fountains. Recognizing that the “President Book” indexes a no longer extant cartulary, Spence ties the rewriting of the abbey's cartularies to changing economic practices and the varied ways the monks used their documents. Both cartulary 1 and the now missing cartulary were navigational tools that inventoried the monks’ archive of charters, but their differences reflect the fourteenth-century move from a grange economy to one based on rents and tenancies. Other cartularies were made for the supervision of manor courts (Cartulary 2) and for display to enhance the abbey's prestige (Cartulary 3); still other cartularies served again as inventories to replace missing volumes of the cartulary Spence hypothesizes. Spence concludes that the archival memory and redaction processes at Fountains demonstrates the choir monks’ professional attention to their record keeping and their concern for their temporal well-being, despite the vicissitudes of the long fifteenth century.
Spence ends his monograph with six appendices that introduce in detail the manuscripts he analyzes in his chapters. Readers might want to start with these appendices, as they present essential information to which the text in the chapters only alludes. The book still shows signs of the dissertation it once was, especially in the descriptions of hypotheses and interpretations that Spence presents and then dismisses. Nonetheless, this volume provides a valuable analysis of the ways monks shaped their archives to respond to economic, legal, and political situations. Spence's application of forensic methods to these documents offers an important model for the study of other monastic archives.
