A considerable number of writs in English have come down to us, in originals or copies, from the chancery of William the Conqueror, and I have adduced the fact as proof that there was, to say the least, a considerable English element in his chancery. Because one or two pedigrees go back to the Norman Conquest and many hundreds of bogus ones pretend to do [so], it is too generally assumed that there was nothing in England before the Norman Conquest that could be considered civilisation. It has been recently assumed that England, even after twenty years of Norman rule, was unable to produce sufficient clerks possessing the modicum of Latin necessary for the compilation of the Domesday Survey. A generation before the Norman Conquest there were a handful only of newly founded monasteries in Normandy itself, and education was at a very low ebb. [295] It was practically brought into the country by foreigners such as Lanfrank and Anselm. England, on the other hand, during this period was a hive of busy authors and transcribers. The MSS. in existence in Latin written in England during the century preceding the Norman Conquest may be counted by the hundred. There was in addition an enormous vernacular literature that has not its equal anywhere in western Europe. England produced a Latin grammar in the native tongue, the work of the great prose writer Ælfric, long before any other nation. There are treatises on science in English, and in Byrhtferth of Ramsey the English produced a writer on chronology whose writings were still studied on the continent in the sixteenth century. When we consider the mass of Old English literature, a literature that enormously outweighs the vernacular literature of the whole of western Europe of the same period, and that the MSS. that have come down to us necessarily represent only a fragment of the production, we can see no reason to shrink from a comparison of the culture of England with that of Normandy, even when backed up by contributions from France. Within a century of its conversion to Christianity England produced the great scholar Aldhelm, the only man of Germanic race who figures in the list of authors quoted in the ordinary Latin lexicons, and the truly Venerable Beda, [296] whose works as historian and scientist had an influence second to none in Europe throughout the whole of the Middle Ages. In the eighth century it evangelized Germany, [297] and learned Englishmen and equally learned Englishwomen kindled the torch of learning in various quiet nooks of Germany and Holland. [298] Nor must we forget the very important part played by the great educationalist Alcuin under the auspices of the mighty Charles in that great revival of classical learning that challenges comparison in its far-reaching effects with the later and better known Renaissance. After the withering effects of the Danish invasions passed away, Englishmen and Danes applied themselves with equal energy to tending the lamp of learning, re-kindled into life by the inspiration of Alfred, triply great as ruler, warrior, and scholar, backed up by the tireless efforts of the saintly Æthelwold and of the great intellect of Dunstan. Their influence had not exhausted itself by the time of the Norman Conquest. The two most famous scribes in England in the early days of the twelfth century were Englishmen at Canterbury. One of them was Mainer, the writer of the magnificent bible in three folio volumes, which, in the words of a French scholar, is one of the treasures of the library of Sainte-Genevieve. The other was Eadwine, the writer of the sumptuous Psalter with English and French glosses preserved in the library of Trinity College. A contemporary of theirs was an English scholar whose reputation was so great that he was designated by the pope as mentor of the saintly and scholarly Anselm when he became archbishop. This was the monk Eadmer, who became the trusted friend and defender of Anselm, and his companion in his toilsome wanderings in exile, and who has proved by the admirable stile, lucid arrangement, and correct Latinity of his loving life of the great archbishop that he was no unfit companion for the scholarly prelate.
There is, I maintain, no necessity either on the grounds of the lack of educated English clerks or of deficient intelligence for the assumption that has been so freely made, owing to the ordinary Englishman's ignorance of Anglo-Saxon history, that William the Conqueror imported from Normandy an organized chancery. There is no evidence to prove that he possessed a very highly organized chancery in Normandy before the Conquest of England. It is an assumption based simply upon the fact that he called the head of his chancery chancellor, and that he used a seal. It has been again assumed that he used a seal as invariably as the later kings did. Professor Maitland has, however, taught us that even in the times of the Anglo-Norman kings the seal was not invariably used, and that in fact solemn and important documents were validated rather by the apposition of the sign of the cross than by the affixing of a seal. This is, in fact, the custom of the Old English chancery. The writ was necessarily validated by a seal, and the gradually increasing use of this form of record has led to the erroneous conclusion that the Norman kings sealed all their documents. As the writ gradually assumed some of the functions and even the formulas of the diploma, it was natural that the latter, a gradually decreasing class of record, should occasionally bear a seal. This was, in fact, a development that the diploma would probably have gone through in England if William had never crossed the sea. It must be remembered that the dependent 'seal of majesty' was in William's day somewhat of a novelty, imitated from the dependent bulla of the papal chancery. The Anglo-Saxon chancery forestalled by several centuries the chanceries of western Europe in the introduction of a change that was far more important than mere formalism. This was the production of a chancery form of the native tongue. It is quite evident that as early as the tenth century the chancery officials used a form of West Saxon that was more conservative in its grammatical forms than the ordinary language. [299] It was used in charters relating to Mercia, Kent, and even to Northumbria, and it was familiar enough at York for the canons, whose own tongue was Northumbrian strongly impregnated with Scandinavian, to understand and accurately copy Cnut's letter from Rome. Nay more, the so-called 'Laws of the Northumbrian Priests' were drawn up in this chancery West Saxon. The English chancery clerks of William and his successors used this chancery English when they issued writs in English. A chancery that could thus anticipate the other west European chanceries in providing a common literary language, which it was strong enough to keep free from the grammatical decay and confusion of the colloquial tongue, cannot have been otherwise than an organized institution. When it was able, moreover, to provide the substructure upon which the whole of the later royal records were erected with the aid of few unimportant foreign elements, we may reasonably claim that it must have been both a strong and a well-organized institution with definite regulations and formulas. Therefore we can wipe away the reproach implied in the oft made remark 'that the Anglo-Saxon kings did not possess a chancery'.