Welsh Journals

THE ILLUSTRATED CHRONICLES OF MATTHEW PARIS. OBSERVATIONS OF THIRTEENTH-CENTURY LIFE. Translated, edited and with an introduction by Richard Vaughan. Alan Sutton in association with Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 1993. Pp. xiii, 210. £ 18.99. Professor G. R. Elton once claimed that 'a better title than history for Matthew Paris's Chronica Majora might be "Annual Register, or the year's events with a personal summing-up by our resident grumbler" This book serves to remind us that Matthew's work deserves to be remembered for much more than that. It consists of a new edition of Professor Vaughan's translation of the chronicle for 1247-50 first published in 1984, now illustrated by a hundred of Matthew's marginal drawings selected by Nigel Wilkins. These particular years, which were originally intended to form the last section of the chronicle, vividly reveal many of his strengths and weaknesses as a writer on his own times. Although he rarely left the great Benedictine abbey of St. Albans, he was kept informed on a wide variety of subjects by the many distinguished men, including the king himself, who stayed there on their journeys from London to the north. Wars, crusades, tournaments, parliaments, appointments and scandals were all dutifully recorded, but the way they were handled betray his xenophobia, his delight in malicious gossip, and his dislike of authority. Even those, like Henry III, who thought by befriending Matthew they could ensure a favourable record of their share in events, were viciously attacked in the chronicle. It seems only appropriate, therefore, that his attempts, late in life, to tone down or eradicate his more offensive remarks, and his occasional misquotations from the Bible and classical authors, are meticulously recorded in Vaughan's footnotes. Even so, it is Matthew's drawings which constitute the most striking feature of this eye-catching book. All are beautifully reproduced in colour, and the source of each is carefully identified. Some, such as the drawing of the new silver penny, with its distinctive long cross, used by Matthew to illustrate the reform of the coinage in 1248, appear alongside the appropriate section of the text, in accordance with his wish that 'what the ear hears the eyes may see'. Vaughan fails to warn the reader, however, that most of the drawings are not reproduced in their original context. Thus, the embrace of the two princes Louis and Henry at the end of the war in 1217 is found next to the papal prohibition of English magnates going on crusade without royal permission in 1250; and a poignant picture of French troops dying of the plague in Poitou in 1242-43 is used to illustrate Frenchmen dying of hunger at Damietta in 1250. Oddest of all, an account of an eclipse of the moon in 1248 is accompanied by a picture of 'an eclipse-in this case of the sun' which occurred in 1230. No less than a third of the drawings come from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS.26 and actually illustrate events before 1188. Nor are the captions always very illuminating. Few would realize, for example, that Matthew's dramatic drawing of 'sea monsters fighting' was used to illustrate his account of how in 1240 eleven whales and other sea creatures were washed up on the sea coast of eastern England 'dead, as if they had been injured in some kind of struggle'. Another opportunity is missed when part of Matthew's map of Britain is reproduced without explaining that the legend describes Wales as a mountainous