Matthew Paris was a monk at St. Albans who was a chronicler and artist and cartographer who illustrated his own works. The Chronica Majora is his longest work, from which an excerpt is taken recounting the otherwise unattested meeting between king John’s envoys to Morocco and the Muslim Caliph to whom John wishes to hand over Britain. The Caliph is shocked, and unimpressed by the envoys’ description of Britain and of the king, and he refuses the offer.

To understand fully English medieval history writing, it is necessary to recognize the ways in which Christians interpreted universal history as teleological, as ranging from creation to doomsday, and as including both past events and future expectations of the Last Days. This essay surveys the apocalyptic nature of universal history based on four scriptural structures: the two dispensations encapsulated in the Christian Bible and symbolized by Synagoga and Ecclesia; the Pauline Three Laws (ante legem, sub lege, and sub gratia); the visions of Daniel interpreted as prophesies of four sequential kingdoms concluding with Rome; and creation week considered as an analogy for Six Ages of the World. The essay then examines in greater depth the intertwining of history and apocalyptic prophecy in two English manuscripts: the thirteenth-century Gulbenkian Apocalypse illustrating the Latin commentary on Revelation by Berengaudus; and a fifteenth-century Carthusian miscellany depicting the Middle English Revelations of Pseudo-Methodius.

This chapter explores how classical ideas of the gift were utilised by medieval writers. The chapter focuses on three particularly influential writers from medieval England active across a range of genres: John of Salisbury, William of Malmesbury and Matthew Paris. The chapter shows that these writers were highly familiar with classical ideas of the gift and drew extensively upon them in shaping their own writings.