Medieval chroniclers sometimes borrowed entire passages from earlier works, adapting old words to describe new people and events. Christopher Berard examines this understudied practice and shows how such borrowing could be more than a shortcut, allowing writers to draw meaningful connections between the past and their own times.
By Christopher Berard
In 1946, Laura Keeler discovered a textual borrowing in the St Albans Annals of England and Scotland, 1292–1300 (London: British Library, MS Cotton Claudius D. vi, fols. 165r–176v). The anonymous Benedictine monk who authored this chronicle segment used the description of King Arthur’s plenary court at Caerleon from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (c.1137) as the textual template for his coverage of the marriage between Edward I of England (r.1272–1307) and Princess Margaret of France (d.1318) at Canterbury (10 September 1299). He retained much of Geoffrey’s original wording but changed the name of the king and some other details to reflect the contemporary circumstance.
He left no textual clues or marginalia hinting that his account was derivative. Keeler did not detect any further borrowings in the Annals and regarded this use of Geoffrey’s History as a sign that the monk lacked specific details about the wedding. Although the event had numerous witnesses, subsequent scholarship embraced Keeler’s explanation.
Upon careful study of the Annals, I detected a dozen additional borrowings of varying lengths from Geoffrey’s History scattered throughout the chronicle segment as well as repurposed passages from other works of twelfth- and thirteenth-century historiography. The monk also used an oration (c.967) of King Edgar of England (r.959–975) to Dunstan, archbishop of Canterbury (r.960–988), as the template for a letter that Edward reportedly sent to Robert Winchelsey, archbishop of Canterbury (r. 1293–1313), in 1299.
Of all the borrowings, the monk’s use of Geoffrey’s History for his account of Edward’s Easter celebrations at St Albans in 1300 is the most revealing. Here, his decision to borrow words from an earlier, unrelated account seems to have been for style rather than substance.
My discovery that the Annals was a bricolage of repurposed passages prompted me to research textual borrowing in Medieval Latin more fully. A helpful secondary source is E. P. M. Dronke’s chapter on ‘Functions of Classical Borrowing in Medieval Latin Verse’ in Classical Influences on European Culture: A.D. 500–1500, ed. R.R. Bolgar (Cambridge, 1971). Dronke divides textual borrowings into three categories: ‘unconscious borrowing,’ ‘conscious borrowing,’ and ‘explicit quotation.’ These categories can be reduced to two fundamental questions. Was the writer intentionally borrowing from an earlier Latin author? If so, did he intend for his audience to catch the borrowing(s)?
Dronke’s discussion raises two further questions. Was the author skilled at Latin composition? For an unskilled writer, textual borrowing requires less time and effort than original composition. By the same token, extended borrowings with deft modification can show off the writer’s learning and intertextual acumen. The second question concerns the work’s intended audience: its identity and erudition.
Why Did Medieval Writers Borrow from Earlier Texts?
Uther Pendragon, Æthelberht, King Arthur and Oswald of Northumbria in Matthew Paris’s Epitome of Chronicles. British Library, Cotton MS Claudius D VI.
Thus far, I have considered the insights on medieval textual borrowing by a literary scholar focused on Latin verse poetry, but the St Albans chronicle segment is written in prose and is ostensibly a work of history. As I continued my survey of scholarship, I discovered a helpful article by two medieval military historians, Richard Abels and Stephen Morillo, entitled ‘A Lying Legacy? A Preliminary Discussion of Images of Antiquity and Altered Reality in Medieval Military History,’ Journal of Medieval Military History III (2005). Abels and Morillo cite numerous accounts of battles in medieval chronicles that borrow heavily from classical and biblical sources. Their primary concern is to assess the factual accuracy of derivative accounts, referring to this issue as ‘the problem of representation versus reality.’
Their article offers two perspectives on this matter. One approach, credited to medieval military historian Bernard S. Bachrach, begins with the assumption that the chronicler was careful and deliberate in his choice of biblical or classical borrowing. In some way, the borrowing was fitting for the event described. The challenge is to uncover the correspondence.
The other approach, favored by Abels and Morillo, is to focus one’s attention on the subtle modifications the medieval writer made to his source text to isolate information of historical importance. In other words, ‘the devil is in the details.’ These two approaches are not mutually exclusive. Having access to supplemental chronicle and documentary sources greatly facilitates these undertakings.
There is another genre of historical writing that is pertinent to this investigation: royal biography. Rahewin (d.c. 1177), who completed The Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa (1160), repurposed lengthy passages from Sallust’s The War with Jugurtha (41 BC) and The Conspiracy of Catiline (c. 40 BC) and also from Josephus’s The Jewish War (AD 75) in his account of Frederick Barbarossa’s northern Italian campaigns. Charles Christopher Mierow notes in his translation of The Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa (1953) that Rahewin drew upon these texts especially when crafting his characters’ speeches and physical descriptions.
An analogy exists in the St Albans Annals where, as we have seen, the words of King Edgar become those of King Edward I. Mierow adds: ‘most startling of all is Rahewin’s description of Frederick in words copied from an epistle of Apollinaris Sidonius depicting Theodoric II, king of the Visigoths, and from the famous life of Charlemagne by Einhard.’ Einhard himself, it should be noted, borrowed from Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars (AD 121) when writing his Life of Charlemagne (c. 830).
The opening of Rahewin’s continuation of the Gesta Friderici, from a manuscript dating to c. 1180–1182. Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Cod. Guelf. 206 Helmst., fol. 62v.
Mierow rationalizes Rahewin’s extensive borrowing from earlier sources on the grounds that the chronicler ‘must have realized the inadequacy of his own style and often enough the paucity of his information.’ A lack of confidence in one’s own compositional competence is plausible. The need to embellish an account based on a paucity of information is less likely, especially when the event chronicled is a relatively recent major battle or royal wedding where there would have been an ample number of firsthand witnesses.
Not uncommonly, there is daylight between the objective of the medieval chronicler and royal biographer on the one hand and that of the modern historian on the other. Often, the modern historian is seeking a factually accurate account that can be used for the reconstruction of history. In some instances, the medieval chronicler or biographer was writing principally to satisfy his immediate élite and learned audiences, who presumably were familiar with his biblical and classical source material and had direct knowledge of the people and events described.
The textual borrowings may have functioned in a manner akin to literary conceits or may have provided models about how to ‘spin’ recent history for optimal political and ideological advantage.
Borrowing History for a Purpose
In medieval historiography, originality and veracity, as we understand these terms, are set aside for the many-faceted authority of past models. Historical chronicles are also works of literature (let alone statements of political ideology); understanding their literary qualities, therefore, is essential for deriving historical meaning from them.
Frederick Barbarossa, for example, was responsible for the translation and canonization of Charlemagne at Aachen (1165–66). Thus, Rahewin’s borrowing from Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne for his continuation of the Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa seemingly has within it an ideological component—establishing a direct continuity between two great emperors of the West, Charlemagne and Frederick I.
When it comes to the St Albans Annals, a desire to add flourish to the monk’s prose surely accounts for many of his borrowings; ideological considerations also appear to have been a motivating factor for many, if not all, of the borrowings: the monk’s choice of medieval insular and especially Brut chronicle source material—as opposed to biblical and classical sources—overlaps with Edward I’s use of legendary British and Anglo-Saxon history as a precedent for English rule over Scotland.
Edward I and the Uses of the Past
Portrait in Westminster Abbey, thought to be of Edward I
Our St Albans monk likely acquired knowledge of the history of Anglo-Scottish relations working on Edward’s two appeals to history (in 1291 and 1301 respectively) to justify English suzerainty over Scotland. For the Annals, our monk sought out historical episodes—especially those involving Anglo-Scottish relations—that bore some measure of similarity to his subject matter, that celebrated the justness of and divine favor for the English cause, and that enabled a likening of Edward I to his pre-Conquest royal predecessors, be they British or Anglo-Saxon.
The chronicler’s writing is a patchwork of unannounced borrowings that suggests, to the ‘initiated’, a recurrent and distinctive pattern of insular history.
Who were the ‘initiated’? They were readers and writers engaged in the same cause as the author of the St Albans Annals: the clerical élite of England whom Edward had conscripted on two separate occasions to scrutinize their chronicles and records for precedents concerning the status of England and Scotland. The monk’s historical and pseudo-historical source material for borrowings was very much ‘in the air’ at the dawn of the fourteenth century in these circles. These historical precedents were cited in monastic replies to Edward’s inquests and/or in Edward’s own letter to Pope Boniface VIII (1301).
The St Albans Annals may well have been written directly for this intimate audience (c.1300–1310). An audience steeped in these Latin insular histories could have caught at least a few of the lengthier borrowings—much as Laura Keeler and I did—and then would have been inspired to reread the work carefully to find even more borrowings. The borrowings collectively invite consideration of parallels between remote and recent history. The chronicle segment is a thoughtful defense of political continuity from ancient Britain to post-Conquest England in response to Scottish objections.
This learned clerical reader would have been well prepared not only to detect verbal echoes, but also the typological resonance of this artful wordplay. As noted above, the St Albans chronicler responsible for the Annals was by no means the first monastic writer to repurpose silently accounts of earlier illustrious kings, emperors, and heroes in the service of his own monarch.
Just as Frederick Barbarossa sought to be seen as the new Charlemagne, and prior to that Charlemagne sought to be seen both as a new King David and as a restorer of the Roman Empire (and its imperial line) in the West, Edward I sought to link himself with his illustrious insular antecedents, including, of course, King Arthur.
As biblical exegetes and as writers conscripted in the crown’s ideological and historiographical projects, the clerical elite of Edward I’s England would have appreciated the exemplary comparison drawn in the Annals between past and present circumstances. Such a niche audience may well have reveled in the sort of historiographical, indeed typological, work that this chronicle segment performs. This learned audience was well placed to disseminate these ideas to the wider clergy of England and then to the masses.
Christopher Berard is the author of Arthurianism in Early Plantagenet England (Boydell & Brewer, 2019) and The Alliterative Morte Arthure as Christian Epic Poetry (Boydell & Brewer, forthcoming 2026). He completed his PhD at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies (2015), and he is currently an adjunct professor at Providence College.
Medieval chroniclers sometimes borrowed entire passages from earlier works, adapting old words to describe new people and events. Christopher Berard examines this understudied practice and shows how such borrowing could be more than a shortcut, allowing writers to draw meaningful connections between the past and their own times.
By Christopher Berard
In 1946, Laura Keeler discovered a textual borrowing in the St Albans Annals of England and Scotland, 1292–1300 (London: British Library, MS Cotton Claudius D. vi, fols. 165r–176v). The anonymous Benedictine monk who authored this chronicle segment used the description of King Arthur’s plenary court at Caerleon from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (c.1137) as the textual template for his coverage of the marriage between Edward I of England (r.1272–1307) and Princess Margaret of France (d.1318) at Canterbury (10 September 1299). He retained much of Geoffrey’s original wording but changed the name of the king and some other details to reflect the contemporary circumstance.
He left no textual clues or marginalia hinting that his account was derivative. Keeler did not detect any further borrowings in the Annals and regarded this use of Geoffrey’s History as a sign that the monk lacked specific details about the wedding. Although the event had numerous witnesses, subsequent scholarship embraced Keeler’s explanation.
Upon careful study of the Annals, I detected a dozen additional borrowings of varying lengths from Geoffrey’s History scattered throughout the chronicle segment as well as repurposed passages from other works of twelfth- and thirteenth-century historiography. The monk also used an oration (c.967) of King Edgar of England (r.959–975) to Dunstan, archbishop of Canterbury (r.960–988), as the template for a letter that Edward reportedly sent to Robert Winchelsey, archbishop of Canterbury (r. 1293–1313), in 1299.
Of all the borrowings, the monk’s use of Geoffrey’s History for his account of Edward’s Easter celebrations at St Albans in 1300 is the most revealing. Here, his decision to borrow words from an earlier, unrelated account seems to have been for style rather than substance.
My discovery that the Annals was a bricolage of repurposed passages prompted me to research textual borrowing in Medieval Latin more fully. A helpful secondary source is E. P. M. Dronke’s chapter on ‘Functions of Classical Borrowing in Medieval Latin Verse’ in Classical Influences on European Culture: A.D. 500–1500, ed. R.R. Bolgar (Cambridge, 1971). Dronke divides textual borrowings into three categories: ‘unconscious borrowing,’ ‘conscious borrowing,’ and ‘explicit quotation.’ These categories can be reduced to two fundamental questions. Was the writer intentionally borrowing from an earlier Latin author? If so, did he intend for his audience to catch the borrowing(s)?
Dronke’s discussion raises two further questions. Was the author skilled at Latin composition? For an unskilled writer, textual borrowing requires less time and effort than original composition. By the same token, extended borrowings with deft modification can show off the writer’s learning and intertextual acumen. The second question concerns the work’s intended audience: its identity and erudition.
Why Did Medieval Writers Borrow from Earlier Texts?
Thus far, I have considered the insights on medieval textual borrowing by a literary scholar focused on Latin verse poetry, but the St Albans chronicle segment is written in prose and is ostensibly a work of history. As I continued my survey of scholarship, I discovered a helpful article by two medieval military historians, Richard Abels and Stephen Morillo, entitled ‘A Lying Legacy? A Preliminary Discussion of Images of Antiquity and Altered Reality in Medieval Military History,’ Journal of Medieval Military History III (2005). Abels and Morillo cite numerous accounts of battles in medieval chronicles that borrow heavily from classical and biblical sources. Their primary concern is to assess the factual accuracy of derivative accounts, referring to this issue as ‘the problem of representation versus reality.’
Their article offers two perspectives on this matter. One approach, credited to medieval military historian Bernard S. Bachrach, begins with the assumption that the chronicler was careful and deliberate in his choice of biblical or classical borrowing. In some way, the borrowing was fitting for the event described. The challenge is to uncover the correspondence.
The other approach, favored by Abels and Morillo, is to focus one’s attention on the subtle modifications the medieval writer made to his source text to isolate information of historical importance. In other words, ‘the devil is in the details.’ These two approaches are not mutually exclusive. Having access to supplemental chronicle and documentary sources greatly facilitates these undertakings.
There is another genre of historical writing that is pertinent to this investigation: royal biography. Rahewin (d.c. 1177), who completed The Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa (1160), repurposed lengthy passages from Sallust’s The War with Jugurtha (41 BC) and The Conspiracy of Catiline (c. 40 BC) and also from Josephus’s The Jewish War (AD 75) in his account of Frederick Barbarossa’s northern Italian campaigns. Charles Christopher Mierow notes in his translation of The Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa (1953) that Rahewin drew upon these texts especially when crafting his characters’ speeches and physical descriptions.
An analogy exists in the St Albans Annals where, as we have seen, the words of King Edgar become those of King Edward I. Mierow adds: ‘most startling of all is Rahewin’s description of Frederick in words copied from an epistle of Apollinaris Sidonius depicting Theodoric II, king of the Visigoths, and from the famous life of Charlemagne by Einhard.’ Einhard himself, it should be noted, borrowed from Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars (AD 121) when writing his Life of Charlemagne (c. 830).
Mierow rationalizes Rahewin’s extensive borrowing from earlier sources on the grounds that the chronicler ‘must have realized the inadequacy of his own style and often enough the paucity of his information.’ A lack of confidence in one’s own compositional competence is plausible. The need to embellish an account based on a paucity of information is less likely, especially when the event chronicled is a relatively recent major battle or royal wedding where there would have been an ample number of firsthand witnesses.
Not uncommonly, there is daylight between the objective of the medieval chronicler and royal biographer on the one hand and that of the modern historian on the other. Often, the modern historian is seeking a factually accurate account that can be used for the reconstruction of history. In some instances, the medieval chronicler or biographer was writing principally to satisfy his immediate élite and learned audiences, who presumably were familiar with his biblical and classical source material and had direct knowledge of the people and events described.
The textual borrowings may have functioned in a manner akin to literary conceits or may have provided models about how to ‘spin’ recent history for optimal political and ideological advantage.
Borrowing History for a Purpose
In medieval historiography, originality and veracity, as we understand these terms, are set aside for the many-faceted authority of past models. Historical chronicles are also works of literature (let alone statements of political ideology); understanding their literary qualities, therefore, is essential for deriving historical meaning from them.
Frederick Barbarossa, for example, was responsible for the translation and canonization of Charlemagne at Aachen (1165–66). Thus, Rahewin’s borrowing from Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne for his continuation of the Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa seemingly has within it an ideological component—establishing a direct continuity between two great emperors of the West, Charlemagne and Frederick I.
When it comes to the St Albans Annals, a desire to add flourish to the monk’s prose surely accounts for many of his borrowings; ideological considerations also appear to have been a motivating factor for many, if not all, of the borrowings: the monk’s choice of medieval insular and especially Brut chronicle source material—as opposed to biblical and classical sources—overlaps with Edward I’s use of legendary British and Anglo-Saxon history as a precedent for English rule over Scotland.
Edward I and the Uses of the Past
Our St Albans monk likely acquired knowledge of the history of Anglo-Scottish relations working on Edward’s two appeals to history (in 1291 and 1301 respectively) to justify English suzerainty over Scotland. For the Annals, our monk sought out historical episodes—especially those involving Anglo-Scottish relations—that bore some measure of similarity to his subject matter, that celebrated the justness of and divine favor for the English cause, and that enabled a likening of Edward I to his pre-Conquest royal predecessors, be they British or Anglo-Saxon.
The chronicler’s writing is a patchwork of unannounced borrowings that suggests, to the ‘initiated’, a recurrent and distinctive pattern of insular history.
Who were the ‘initiated’? They were readers and writers engaged in the same cause as the author of the St Albans Annals: the clerical élite of England whom Edward had conscripted on two separate occasions to scrutinize their chronicles and records for precedents concerning the status of England and Scotland. The monk’s historical and pseudo-historical source material for borrowings was very much ‘in the air’ at the dawn of the fourteenth century in these circles. These historical precedents were cited in monastic replies to Edward’s inquests and/or in Edward’s own letter to Pope Boniface VIII (1301).
The St Albans Annals may well have been written directly for this intimate audience (c.1300–1310). An audience steeped in these Latin insular histories could have caught at least a few of the lengthier borrowings—much as Laura Keeler and I did—and then would have been inspired to reread the work carefully to find even more borrowings. The borrowings collectively invite consideration of parallels between remote and recent history. The chronicle segment is a thoughtful defense of political continuity from ancient Britain to post-Conquest England in response to Scottish objections.
This learned clerical reader would have been well prepared not only to detect verbal echoes, but also the typological resonance of this artful wordplay. As noted above, the St Albans chronicler responsible for the Annals was by no means the first monastic writer to repurpose silently accounts of earlier illustrious kings, emperors, and heroes in the service of his own monarch.
Just as Frederick Barbarossa sought to be seen as the new Charlemagne, and prior to that Charlemagne sought to be seen both as a new King David and as a restorer of the Roman Empire (and its imperial line) in the West, Edward I sought to link himself with his illustrious insular antecedents, including, of course, King Arthur.
As biblical exegetes and as writers conscripted in the crown’s ideological and historiographical projects, the clerical elite of Edward I’s England would have appreciated the exemplary comparison drawn in the Annals between past and present circumstances. Such a niche audience may well have reveled in the sort of historiographical, indeed typological, work that this chronicle segment performs. This learned audience was well placed to disseminate these ideas to the wider clergy of England and then to the masses.
Christopher Berard is the author of Arthurianism in Early Plantagenet England (Boydell & Brewer, 2019) and The Alliterative Morte Arthure as Christian Epic Poetry (Boydell & Brewer, forthcoming 2026). He completed his PhD at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies (2015), and he is currently an adjunct professor at Providence College.
For the complete article upon which this feature is based, see Christopher Berard, ‘Once and Future History: Textual Borrowing in an Account of the First War of Scottish Independence,’ Arthurian Literature 35 (2020).
Top Image: King Arthur and his knights at the Round Table, from a medieval French manuscript. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 343, fol. 3r
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