We asked members of Parergon‘s Early Career Committee to tell us about a Parergon article that stood out for them and why they found it valuable for their research. In this post, Francesca Battista discusses Kathleen Neal’s ‘Words as Weapons in the Correspondence of Edward I with Llywelyn ap Gruffydd’, Parergon 30.1 (2013), pp. 51-71 [DOI: 10.1353/pgn.2013.0051]

The one-day workshop on Letter Writing in the Middle Ages, held at the Bush House, King’s College London in 2019 and organized by Simon Thomas Parsons, Thomas W. Smith and Anaïs Waag, not only offered a great opportunity to be engaged in interesting debates on medieval epistolary culture, but it also allowed me to meet brilliant scholars and hear about their meaningful work. A stimulating exchange of ideas after the conference with one of the attendees, Amanda McVitty, and the paper presented by Kathleen Neal, introduced me to valuable scholarship on dictamen and related areas of study from Australia and New Zealand, which was unknown to me. Neal’s article that I am going to discuss in this post is part of this story. Her research method represents a great source of inspiration for the dictaminal research I am conducting.

The influence of ars dictaminis on the shaping of chancery style in England was long ago recognized by Kantorowicz, Denholm-Young, and more recently pointed out by Camargo, Richardson, and Grévin, among others. However, the investigation of the ways in which from the thirteenth century dictamen started to be used as a royal political communication tool is still not fully explored.

Neal’s article provides a relevant contribution to the field of investigation, offering a compelling reading of the letters exchanged between Edward I of England and Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, Prince of Wales, during the time period between the Anglo-Welsh wars (1276-77, 1282-83). This correspondence is read drawing attention to its dictaminal shape and interconnected political intent. Furthermore, it also illustrates a method based on the study of the epistolary drafting process for interpreting royal letters, not as “relics of a well-developed medieval bureaucracy,” but rather “as episodes of strategic communication” (p. 52).

The article concentrates on a single letter which is offered as an example of how Edward I’s letters functioned as rhetorical political artifacts in connection to the Anglo-Welsh struggle. It is a royal reply of 1280 to one or two of Llywelyn’s letters which were concerned, above all, with the issue of the possession of Arwystli region. The Treaty of Aberconwy of 1277, which marked the capitulation of Llywelyn to Edward I, left open the Welsh dispute over this land. As a result, rights to it were claimed equally by the Prince of Wales and Gruffydd ap Gwenwynwyn, ally of the king. In his letters addressed to the king, Llewelyn complains because the king was not able to settle this dispute in his Parliament. Such criticism resulted in an indirect aggression to the heart of Edward I’s monarchy.

Neal brilliantly shows how Edward’s reply appears to be a rhetorical means of legitimization of the manner of power execution in the hands of the superior party. Accordingly, for example, in the salutatio the address terms of “beloved and faithful”, which were used in line with the Anglo-Norman epistolary practices rather than on the basis of those of the Welsh chancery, stress the Prince of Wales’ subordination to the king and also show who “was willing to conduct their discussion” (p. 61).

Likewise, the hypertrophic narratio would suggest “that a hostile reception was anticipated” and indicates “how important it was in royal and Chancery circles that an English construction of the situation be articulated” (p. 61). It could be also argued that the length of the narratio is an especially significant aspect to be considered as a clear transgression of dictaminal norms. Handbooks of letter writing prescribed that narration had to be brief and concise, and English artes dictandi were not an exception. One of the most relevant merits of this article is its attentive examination of the editorial work involved in the production of this letter. Edward’s letter survives as a draft and all the draft’s changes and deletions represent a conscious use of language which is itself political. Notably, despite the fact that their consideration is necessary for a complete reading of the letter, they had been neglected in previous research. An edition and a translation of the letter, along with the annotation of the deletions and additions in the apparatus, are for the first time provided in the appendix of this article.

In conclusion, as shown by Neal, royal letters extant in the form of draft or not, can be regarded as a fruitful place for the investigation of the monarchy’s dictaminal construction of power. This applies to 13th century Britain, as in the specific case of this paper, but it could be extended to a European level to other royal chanceries. For the richness of its investigation, this article represents a wide range of scholarly interests. It can be especially recommended to historians of medieval Britain and Europe, specialists of dictamen, scholars of political communication and kingship, and researchers of medieval textuality and scribal activity.

Parergon can be accessed via Project MUSE (from Volume 1 (1983)), Australian Public Affairs – Full Text (from 1994), and Humanities Full Text (from 2008). For more information on the current issue and on submitting manuscripts for consideration, please visit https://parergon.org/

Parergon volume 37.1, featuring eight scholarly articles and 50 reviews and short notices, has now been published on all platforms except Project MUSE, where it will appear in July. 

Print copies will be posted to ANZAMEMS members from mid-June. The contents of the volume are posted below:

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We asked contributors to the current issue of Parergon to give us some additional insights into their research and the inspirations for their articles. In this post, David C. Harvey, Associate Professor in Critical Heritage Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark, discusses the article he co-wrote with Joanne Parker, Associate Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Exeter, UK: ‘Myth, Reality and Revelation: The Performance of Divine Power on Dartmoor’. DOI: 10.1353/pgn.2019.0056

Just a few weeks after I first came to Exeter University as an undergraduate student in October 1988, I remember being taken by Vic Ambler, the Warden of the St Lukes Hall of Residence, for an evening walk to Dartmoor. We got dropped off near Challacombe, and walked via Grimspound, the Headland Warren and Bennett’s Cross to the Warren House Inn. Just before we reached the pub, we walked past the Devil’s Playing Cards; four mysteriously shaped fields laid out on the hillside, in the shape of the four suits of a deck of playing cards. I remember Vic telling a story about how these got their name: that during a Great Storm, the Devil crashed through the roof of the Church at nearby Widecombe-in-the-Moor and carried off a man called Jan Reynolds who was playing cards at the back of the Church. As he flew across the moor, Jan dropped the four aces that he had up his sleeve and they fell to earth as four enclosures. I squinted at the hillside – OK; I could pick out the Diamond quite clearly… perhaps the Heart; but one needed to have a bit more imagination to make out the Club and the Spade. It was a good story – though I would have thought that the Devil would have been happy with someone playing cards at the back of a Church Service?

The walk, across Hameldown, between Widecombe and Warren House is one of my favourites, and the legend about the Devil is a nice story to impress visitors. It might even place me as a ‘local’, or at least as someone who ‘knows’ the Dartmoor landscape. Over the following years, I became more and more familiar with Dartmoor and its legends; lots about the Devil, many about ‘hauntings’, and a good few about environmental hazards – deep bogs or terrible storms. Indeed, there’s a story about a ‘Great Storm’ of 1638, written up on a series of tablets in the Nave of Widecombe Church, in which several people were killed – victims of God’s Judgement. I vaguely realised that the Devilish Legend about the Playing Cards was referring to the same storm event as the tragedy of 1638 in Widecombe, but never really followed up on how and why the two stories were connected.

In the Autumn of 2013, I was to run a 3rd year day field trip to Dartmoor to talk about landscape history and archaeology. The Headland Warren, Bennett’s Cross and the Devil’s Playing Cards was an obvious destination to take a group of third years in the Autumn Term of 2013, and all my Landscape Knowledge or Lore comes into its own when running such a student field trip. The legend of the Devil will be memorable for the students – just as it was for myself in 1988 – and if that helps to instil the ‘factual’ elements of landscape history, then all the better. On Friday 18th October 2013, I led a group of 35 students up to Dartmoor, as part of the Undergraduate Level 3 ‘Geographies of Heritage and Memory’ module within the Geography Department at Exeter.

I wrote a blog about this field trip here – and was struck by the juxtaposition of the two stories about the ‘Great Storm’. Of course, the students also asked some tricky questions – surely, they ask me, the Devil should have been happy that people were playing cards in Church(!); and how come the figure of ‘God’ turned directly into the figure of the Devil. These loose ends needed tidying up….

I re-visited the Church at Widecombe and took some photos of the tablets on the wall of the Nave. This story was very clear – that it was God that brought on the Great Storm and God’s Judgement that carried off several parishioners.

I also began talking to my colleague in the English Department, Joanne Parker, who had previously written about Dartmoor stories and legends. We had been working together within the ‘Past-Place’ research team, at Exeter, and so the idea of producing a ‘life history’ of storytelling associated with an event such as the Great Storm took hold.

Together, we started to patch together the accounts of the Great Storm, of October 1638, from the first pamphlet publications only a couple of weeks after, through renditions in poetic and prose form during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, and to their re-deployment in tourist legend in the 19th and 20th centuries. The first accounts of the event appeared in London in November 1638, and in this version, the storm is very much associated with God’s Judgement – though we also found the vestiges of some quasi-scientific reflection and interest. The Devil gets a mention in the 18th century, but only starts to dominate the accounts in the 19th century – which is the point at which the stone enclosures (the Devil’s Playing Cards) near the Warren House Inn enter the scene.

Just as my imagination was captivated in 1988 – and just as I have recounted it to many visitors in the last 30 years – the legend of the Devil has good currency through which to support ‘insider’ credentials. In some ways, its slightly comical and clearly mythical nature provides a gloss of specifically ‘local’ landscape knowledge. It is a story of ‘place making practice’, both over the last 380 years over which the legends have been circulated, and also the 30 years over which I have been telling the stories myself – as a ‘professional landscape historian’. And over the last 6 years, the blog on a WordPress site has now become a published journal article!

All images belong to the author.

Parergon can be accessed via Project MUSE (from Volume 1 (1983)), Australian Public Affairs – Full Text (from 1994), and Humanities Full Text (from 2008). For more information on the current issue and on submitting manuscripts for consideration, please visit https://parergon.org/