Actus pontificum

Actus pontificum cantuariensis ecclesie

RS

Rolls Series

Tractatus

Tractatus de combustione et reparatione cantuariensis ecclesie

Between 1170 and 1220 the monastic community of Christ Church, Canterbury, lived through one of the most troubled, and yet at the same time most creative, periods of its history. In those few decades, the monastery went through a series of major upheavals, and saw great change, not least in the way in which the archbishops related to Christ Church, both as a church and as an institution. The murder and canonisation of Archbishop Thomas Becket (1162–70), the destruction by fire of the eastern end of the cathedral, followed by a delayed and protracted reconstruction, as well as a costly quarrel with Archbishop Baldwin (1184–90), all affected in various ways the relationship of the monks with their nominal abbot.

Accounts of these crises were written by a monk of the community, Gervase, between the years 1185 and 1205, for, he says, the benefit of his brethren.Footnote ¹ In these texts, Gervase focused almost exclusively on Christ Church, concentrating at all times on the particular history of his house. In doing so, he presented a very articulate, if not always flattering, image of the archbishop of Canterbury and of his ideal relationship with the monks. By putting two of these texts, the well-known Tractatus de combustione et reparatione cantuariensis ecclesie, and the somewhat less well-known Actus pontificum cantuariensis ecclesie Footnote ² into the wider context of the history of Christ Church, it will be argued that, at a time when the relations between the convent and its abbot were particularly strained, Gervase was constructing an image of the community in its role as the guardian of the archbishops' relics and memory, while strongly reasserting the status of the cathedral as the archiepiscopal church. By writing about the past incumbents of the see of Canterbury, Gervase was memorialising an ideal relationship offered as a model, and in some cases as a warning, to the current archbishop. The links established in the Actus pontificum and in the Tractatus between the prelate and a precise locus, the cathedral, and the emphasis put on the liturgical role played by the community in the commemoration of the archbishops will constitute the main focus points of this analysis.

Not much is known about Gervase: probably a native of Kent, in 1163 he became a monk at Christ Church, where he remained until his death in about 1210, holding the office of sacrist from 1193. In addition to the two texts considered here, he wrote a chronicle (the Gesta regum), a short treatise on the political and ecclesiastical geography of England (the Mappa mundi) and two legal tracts (Imaginationes) relative to disputes in which Christ Church was involved in the 1180s.Footnote ³ In all these works Gervase displays a strong loyalty to his own house, as well as a great familiarity with the history and administrative affairs of the convent. The community seems in fact to have trusted him with important archival and legal responsibilities: the Imaginationes in particular show Gervase to be up-to-date on the issues at stake, and in all his writings he made full use of the vast array of charters and documents available at Christ Church. Furthermore, as sacrist, he was in charge of the relics and reliquaries kept in the cathedral. Both these functions, related to the keeping and upholding of the history of Christ Church, greatly contributed to shaping his outlook.

All Gervase's works seem to have been written between 1185 and 1205, that is to say during very turbulent years for the monastic community. After the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket in 1170 and his canonisation in 1173, the rapid development of a pilgrimage on a scale not seen before in England deeply affected the daily life of the convent and contributed to refocusing many of the intellectual and artistic activities of the monks on the promotion of the cult of their new saint.Footnote ⁴ In 1174 the eastern end of the cathedral was partially destroyed by fire, and the community embarked on a vast programme of reconstruction, enlargement and redecoration of their church which would last well into the thirteenth century. And, last but not least, 1184 saw the election of Baldwin of Forde to the see of Canterbury, an event which heralded several years of bitter dispute between convent and prelate. Soon after his election in 1184, Archbishop Baldwin expressed his intention to found a collegiate church dedicated to St Thomas Becket near Canterbury. The monks took offence at this project on three counts: first, the new church was going to be endowed out of the monastery's revenues and the prebends given to the English bishops; second, the monks feared, with good reason it seems, that the right to elect the archbishop of Canterbury would be transferred to the canons; third, the archbishop intended to translate St Thomas's relics there. The project did not disappear with Baldwin's death in 1190, as it was pursued by some of his successors, Hubert Walter (1193–1205) and Edmund Rich (1233–40).

The community reacted violently against what Gervase calls the many ‘evils … perils … [and] adversities’ of Baldwin's pontificate,Footnote ⁵ which they perceived as an attempt to strip them of their traditional rights and privileges. The status of Christ Church as the most important cathedral in the kingdom, as the community that elected the archbishop of Canterbury and as the guardian of the some of the most revered relics in Christendom was at stake, and the monks intended to defend it. They launched a series of appeals to Rome to try to secure a papal judgement in their favour – which they eventually achieved, after years of legal wrangling, in 1201.Footnote ⁶

The years in which Gervase was writing therefore saw the authority of the archbishop challenged in the monastery in a way that it had never been before, while at the same time a particular image of archiepiscopal sanctity was being created and promoted in the new cathedral. Both the Actus pontificum and the Tractatus were informed by this paradox.

William Stubbs pointed out in his introduction to the works of Gervase that the Actus pontificum was the first attempt to write a continuous and ordered history of the archbishops of Canterbury.Footnote ⁷ In the prologue, Gervase claims that he is fulfilling his promise to complement his history of the kings of England, the Gesta regum, with an account of the succession to the see of Canterbury, along with a list of the endowments given by each of the prelates to the church and monastery of Christ Church.Footnote ⁸ He starts with the arrival of Augustine in the sixth century, and works his way chronologically through every prelate until the death of Archbishop Hubert Walter in 1205. The composition of the Actus pontificum can therefore be placed in the few years between that date and Gervase's own presumed death in, or about, 1210. Although the Actus pontificum was almost certainly written later than the Tractatus, it will be considered first because the genre to which it belongs – that of Gesta episcoporum Footnote ⁹ – and its clear approach to its material throw Gervase's preoccupations into sharp relief.

The chronological and repetitive structure of the Actus pontificum allows Gervase to articulate his presentation of Christ Church as the archbishops' church around three key concepts: the apostolic origins of Christ Church and the unbroken continuity of the line of archbishops since the sixth century; the legitimacy of the archbishops, symbolised by their receiving the pallium from Rome; and, finally, the sanction of this legitimacy through their burial at Canterbury, in effect inscribing the archbishops in a spiritual genealogy rooted in a specific space, the cathedral.

The notices are of very unequal length, denoting the scarcity of information available for some of the archbishops. The longer notices occur at the beginning of the Actus pontificum where Gervase could draw heavily on Bede's Historia ecclesiastica, and after the Norman Conquest, starting with the pontificate of Archbishop Lanfranc. From the pontificate of Archbishop Cuthbert in the eighth century, Gervase was able to use in-house texts produced at Christ Church, such as a series of Lives of the archbishops, written by the monks Osbern and Eadmer in the last decade of the eleventh and first decade of the twelfth centuries, although he also drew on a variety of other sources, including William of Malmesbury and the Worcester chroniclers, even for the period to which he himself had been an eye-witness.

One of the principal functions of episcopal notices such as the Actus pontificum, the ultimate model of which was of course the Liber pontificalis,Footnote ¹⁰ was to promote the idea of the apostolic and/or saintly origin of a pontifical line, to strengthen its position and prestige and to establish the continuity of the succession to the see. Unbroken continuity since its foundation was one claim that Christ Church could legitimately make, one which indeed it was never shy to assert, and Gervase could in this case rely on a well-established history. He none the less highlighted the continuity by weaving the notices one into the other, linking, often in one sentence, the death of one archbishop and the election of his successor, glossing over vacancies and underlining the smoothness of the process.

Starting with the account of how Pope Gregory had sent three pallia for Augustine and his immediate successors, and building on the traditional trip to Rome of every new archbishop in order to obtain the pallium, Gervase mentions in most of his notices how, through the granting of the symbol of his office, the prelate also acquired full metropolitan rights.Footnote ¹¹ This reference appears for the first time in the notice of Archbishop Theodore (669–90), whose pragmatic restructuring of the fledgling English Church in the middle of the seventh century involved the firm re-centring of metropolitan authority on Canterbury.Footnote ¹² Thereafter, almost all the archbishops are said to have received the pallium and the primatial rights from the pope at the same time. Through the motif of the granting of the pallium, Gervase was able to underline both the continuity and the legitimacy of the succession of the archbishops since the time of the foundation of Christ Church.

The burial site of each archbishop is another point that Gervase is careful to note. The first eleven archbishops had been buried at St Augustine's, the other Benedictine abbey in Canterbury, which had apparently from the start been intended to be the episcopal mausoleum.Footnote ¹³ From the pontificate of Archbishop Cuthbert (d. 760), the archbishops had been buried at Christ Church instead, a decision which added a new dimension to the liturgical functions of the cathedral community. In the Actus pontificum, Gervase recounted this momentous change in the very first sentence of the notice dedicated to Archbishop Cuthbert, making it the principal achievement of his pontificate: ‘Cuthbert, of blessed memory, succeeded … who, having gone to Rome received from pope Gregory the pallium and the plenitude of power, and also obtained that the burial of all the other archbishops be transferred to the church of Canterbury’.Footnote ¹⁴

Originally interred in a specific structure just outside the cathedral, the church of St John, it seems that very soon the archbishops started to be buried ad sanctos, near the altars and relics of the saints inside Christ Church itself, essentially in the eastern end of the building, but also in the nave and in the crypt.Footnote ¹⁵ From Cuthbert's time onwards, almost every notice in the Actus pontificum ends with a careful specification of the resting place of the archbishop.Footnote ¹⁶

The attention given to this information reveals much about Gervase's attitude to the archbishops. For him, Christ Church was not only the church of the archbishops, it was also, and perhaps most important, their rightful resting-place, a view which received a fuller development in the Tractatus, but which is, through its repetition, arguably one of the major themes of the Actus pontificum. The fate of the remains of some prelates who were not held in particularly high regard by the community serves to emphasise this idea. The notices written about them by Gervase tie the theme of the legitimacy of the archbishop to his last home in the cathedral. The fate of Ælfsige (959–60) is particularly striking.

His notice is among the shortest in the Actus pontificum, and the first thing that Gervase notes about him is that he had bought the archbishopric and had been imposed on the community by the will of the king. After this poor start, Ælfsige is shown as displaying a shocking lack of respect for the tomb of his saintly predecessor Oda (942–59), in the cathedral. The next recorded event is his death on the way to Rome, even before receiving the pallium, and his burial where he had died, somewhere unspecified in the Alps.Footnote ¹⁷ Here, the insult done to Archbishop Oda's tomb is followed, in the same sentence, by swift consequences akin to divine punishment.Footnote ¹⁸ Although this example is particularly stark, other archbishops suffered the fate of being buried elsewhere than in their cathedral: Robert of Jumièges, Stigand and, most notably, Baldwin. These notices stand in direct contradiction to Gervase's earlier claim that all the archbishops after Cuthbert had been buried at Christ Church and they serve to point out that these prelates did not rightfully belong in the line of archbishops, as made clear by their canonically dubious elections (Ælfsige, Robert, Stigand), or by their actions against the memory of the archbishops (Ælfsige, Baldwin). Gervase thus constructs an intimate and direct relationship between the legitimacy of the archbishop and his burial in the cathedral. The role of Christ Church – as a church and as a community – in the commemoration of the archbishops is more specifically the theme developed in the Tractatus.

Nowhere is the importance of the memoria of the archbishops more evident than in the Tractatus, which was composed, or so Gervase tells us, in order to document the reconstruction of the cathedral after the fire which in 1174 partially destroyed the eastern end. The information which Gervase gives in this text about the building campaign has been studied in great detail by architectural historians.Footnote ¹⁹ The Tractatus, however, provides first and foremost a fascinating insight into how the members of the monastic community perceived the space of their church, how they organised it around the altars, the relics and, maybe most important, the remains of the archbishops and their liturgical commemoration.

The structure of the Tractatus is not straightforward, as Gervase repeatedly interrupts his chronological account of the building works with descriptions and digressions. Compared to the Actus pontificum, the Tractatus is a relatively short text, and it does not fit easily into any historiographic or literary genre. For its composition Gervase could not rely on past models, nor draw so heavily on the hagiographic and historical sources available to him. Consequently, the Tractatus is much more of an original creation, in which Gervase's personal view found a more forceful expression.

Scholars are divided on the question of whether it was written, diary-like, as the rebuilding progressed and finalised in the second half of the 1180s, or whether it was compiled around the end of the century from notes taken earlier and from other documents. The argument for such a late composition rests on the hypothesis that the Tractatus was written for the benefit of the papal legates who came to Christ Church in 1199 to assess the progress of the rebuilding in the cathedral and to settle the dispute with the archbishop.Footnote ²⁰ Whether the earlier or the later date is accepted, however, it seems that the Tractatus was written at a period marked by the bitter dispute between the convent and the archbishop, probably Baldwin, but possibly also Hubert Walter, who rather unwisely revived the plan first mooted by Baldwin of an alternative foundation dedicated to St Thomas,Footnote ²¹ although this is at no point explicitly mentioned in the text. Gervase seized upon the reconstruction of the cathedral on a grand scale as an opportunity to define and publicise what he considered to be the essential function of his church and its community: the role of the monks as guardians of the relics of the archbishops of Canterbury. As sacrist, he was not only in charge of the liturgical vestments and objects, but he was also responsible for looking after the relics and reliquaries, and as such was particularly well placed to provide an accurate and authentic record of the holy remains in the cathedral's possession, a subject he was particularly fond of and well-informed about.

Gervase took a very keen interest in the physical fabric and history of the cathedral, and may even have been closely involved in the reconstruction process in the 1170s and 1180s.Footnote ²² However, although the Tractatus provides invaluable information about the reconstruction of a major church at the end of the twelfth century, Gervase is not solely – and maybe not primarily – interested in architectural detail. As he is at pains to point out himself, his ‘purpose is not to describe the mere arrangement of stones, yet it is impossible clearly to show the places of the saints and of their repose which are in various parts of the church, without first describing the building itself in which they are arranged’.Footnote ²³ The description of the stonework is only a means to an end for him. Like the Actus pontificum, the Tractatus was intended to provide a genealogy, this time not spiritual but physical, of the cathedral.

Soon after the fire, so the Tractatus tells us, the monks chose to entrust the rebuilding to a French architect who convinced them that the partially destroyed choir had to be pulled down in order to make way for a safer and better church.Footnote ²⁴ Before embarking on his account of the reconstruction Gervase notes that ‘as the new work is of a different fashion from the old it may be well to describe the old work first and then the new’.Footnote ²⁵ He then proceeds to quote a long passage from a description of Christ Church written by Eadmer in the early twelfth century,Footnote ²⁶ followed by an account of what he knows of the Anglo-Norman cathedral. His architectural description is then interrupted by a digression about the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, before he begins the year-by-year account of the works. This is then interrupted again by another digression, this time a comparison of the old and new choirs, before Gervase resumes the description of the reconstruction.

What is remarkable is that Gervase describes no fewer than four distinct structures: first, the old Anglo-Saxon church destroyed in 1067; second, the Anglo-Norman nave built under Lanfranc in the last decades of the eleventh century to replace it – and which, it should be noted, had not been much affected, let alone destroyed, by the 1174 fire;Footnote ²⁷ third, the ‘glorious choir’ built under Anselm and which replaced Lanfranc's at the beginning of the twelfth century; and finally, the choir and Trinity Chapel erected between 1174 and 1184. Strikingly, the descriptions of the past structures make up the most part of the whole Tractatus, and more space is dedicated to them than to the narration of the rebuilding itself.Footnote ²⁸

According to Eadmer, the cathedral which was destroyed by fire in 1067, ‘was that very church which had been built by Romans, as Bede bears witness in his history, and which was duly arranged in some parts in imitation of the church of the Blessed Prince of Apostles, Peter’.Footnote ²⁹ The rebuilt cathedral was thus firmly placed within the Canterbury tradition as transmitted by Bede's Historia ecclesiastica.Footnote ³⁰ This constitutes a critical aspect of the Tractatus, as it links the new building to the original one founded by the missionaries sent by Pope Gregory the Great. The quotation in full of Eadmer's text also allows Gervase to bolster the claims of the convent to a continuous and uninterrupted history stretching back to the foundation of the cathedral, much as the Actus pontificum set out to do the same by listing the succession of the archbishops since Augustine.

Concern to preserve the memory of things past is central to Gervase's entreprise. No fewer than four times he justifies the introduction of architectural descriptions and digressions with the words ‘lest the memory of these things should fade’ or ‘lest the memory be utterly lost’,Footnote ³¹ thus underlining his commemorative purpose. In the ‘spiritual landscape’Footnote ³² mapped out by the Tractatus, one type of memorial is given particular prominence: the resting places of the former archbishops of Canterbury, whose bodies ‘were deposited, as they were of old’,Footnote ³³ in close proximity to the altars, as is repeatedly pointed out. In the Tractatus, as in the Actus pontificum, Gervase inserts the episode relative to the transfer of the burials of the archbishops from St Augustine's to Christ Church under Archbishop Cuthbert. The passage allows him to foreground the very specific role played by the community in relation to the remains of their abbot:

The description of the resting-places of the archbishops is, however, not chronological but this time purely spatial, as Gervase is more careful to note the tombs of the prelates in relation to the main altars and to the general structure of the church, than to refer to the archbishops in order of succession.

Christ Church could boast quite a number of sainted and saintly archbishops. Of the forty-two prelates listed by Gervase in the Actus pontificum, eight at least were the objects of a devotion which can be traced in the liturgical calendars of the cathedralFootnote ³⁵ and there are hints in the Tractatus that several others were also the objects of more spontaneous cults. As was often the case when a church like Canterbury Cathedral underwent major work, the rebuilding at the end of the twelfth century triggered a certain reorganisation of the cults and of the liturgy. It has sometimes been said that the older cults at Christ Church, in particular those of two Anglo-Saxon archbishops, St Dunstan and St Alphege, were, from the late twelfth century, distinctly overshadowed by that of their more famous successor, and that, after Thomas Becket's murder, they never enjoyed the same popularity.Footnote ³⁶ There seems to be evidence, however, that far from being confined to oblivion by the more recent and more famous new saint, the two Anglo-Saxon archbishops remained very important for the monastic community.

Both liturgical and iconographic evidence underlines a continuing strong devotion towards these two saints on the part of the community. In the old cathedral their relics were located in altars situated on either side of the main altar in the choir of the cathedral,Footnote ³⁷ and they were both commemorated by several ceremonies which were among the most important in the liturgical calendar of the monastery.Footnote ³⁸ In a series of calendars which cover the twelfth century, the feasts associated with St Dunstan and St Alphege can even be seen to gain gradually in importance. In a calendar used continuously from the beginning of the eleventh century, the feast of the Ordinatio of St Alphege was added in the course of the twelfth century.Footnote ³⁹ In another calendar, dated to the first quarter of the thirteenth century, the celebration of an octave for the Natalitio of both saints appears for the first time,Footnote ⁴⁰ indicating continuing, if not renewed, devotion. As late as the last quarter of the twelfth century, when Gervase was writing his Tractatus, Dunstan and Alphege could still be called the ‘patroni nostri’ of Christ Church.Footnote ⁴¹ Gervase mentions besides that their images were placed on a beam crossing the choir above the main altar, on either side of that of the Lord, a position of honour, and that they were put back there after the reconstruction.Footnote ⁴² In addition, extensive picture cycles about the lives of Dunstan and Alphege – up to fifteen panels each – were planned for the stained glass windows of the rebuilt cathedral.Footnote ⁴³

Furthermore, in the Tractatus, the narrative of the reconstruction of the choir is framed by two dramatic events. The first is the relocation of the holy relics of St Dunstan and St Alphege, in the days following the fire. Usually kept in the choir of the cathedral, they had been left exposed to the elements by the destruction of the roof, and had to be transferred immediately into the nave, where temporary arrangements had been made.Footnote ⁴⁴ The second event is the triumphal entry of the community into the rebuilt choir at Easter 1180.Footnote ⁴⁵ These two events are presented by Gervase as diametrically opposed.

In 1174 the removal of the saints' bodies was done ‘weeping and lamenting with incredible grief and anguish’,Footnote ⁴⁶ and indeed seemingly against the saints' wishes. The whole passage reads like an inversion of the traditional translation topoi: the saints' bodies were heavy, almost refusing to budge,Footnote ⁴⁷ the wailing and howling of the community replaced the usual rejoicing and singing of psalms, and the monks felt, in Gervase's words, ‘like as the children of Israel were ejected from the promised land, even from a paradise of delight’, ‘as Adam had been from paradise’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Nothing could be more different than the description of the Easter celebrations which took place in 1180, when, at long last, the monks were able to take possession of the choir again. This particular ceremony provides an almost exact inversion of the description of the removal of the relics a few years earlier. The mood of the convent in the weeks leading up to this event is described as full of joyful expectation and exultation as the building of the choir nears completion;Footnote ⁴⁹ the relics of the saints are prepared for their new resting places;Footnote ⁵⁰ and, at last, the convent, united behind the archbishop carrying the host, enters the new choir praising God and ‘shedding the sweetest tears’.Footnote ⁵¹ As Gervase puts it, ‘Thus our Lord Jesus Christ went before us into Galilee, that is, in our transmigration to the new church.’Footnote ⁵² The monks were back in their promised land.

The monks saw themselves not only as in charge of looking after the remains of their abbot, but most important, as choosing which archbishops received devotional attention, and which did not, and as in charge of orchestrating their cult. Gervase shows the community fulfilling this duty in the case of the body of Archbishop Theobald (1139–62), which had to be moved when the Trinity Chapel was rebuilt. When Theobald's sarcophagus was opened, the body of the archbishop was found in a state of preservation that some deemed miraculous, prompting the beginnings of a spontaneous cult.Footnote ⁵³ In this passage, the monks are seen taking all the decisions relative to the prelate in a very communal way, acting in every respect as the guardians not only of his earthly remains but, more important, of his memory – even allowing a cult to develop and flourish at his tomb.Footnote ⁵⁴

In the years when, according to Gervase, Archbishop Baldwin was intending to replace the monks by secular clerks,Footnote ⁵⁵ these accounts served both to reassert that the primary function of the cathedral was the celebration of the liturgy by the monastic community, and to associate the archbishops' relics to this liturgical function. By recording Cuthbert's wish not to be separated from ‘his church and his children’, Gervase provided a justification for the liturgical role played by the monks in the preservation and the transmission of the archbishops' memoria. He repeatedly showed them fulfilling this function, with regard not only to Christ Church's ‘official’ saints, but also to all the other saintly prelates. Any archbishop trying to remove the monks from the cathedral or to transfer the archbishops' burial to any other location would be, in effect, breaking away from a tradition hallowed by time.

Although quite different in form and in length, the Tractatus and the Actus pontificum reveal similar intentions and do complement each other: the Tractatus establishes the physical continuity of the church of Canterbury by linking the rebuilt cathedral to the church founded by St Augustine in the sixth century, in spite of the accidents of time, while the Actus pontificum celebrates the uninterrupted line of archbishops since the arrival of the mission sent by Pope Gregory the Great, a spiritual continuity and an antiquity few English sees could claim. Both texts link the space of the cathedral to its temporal dimension, in what could be called a memorialising strategy, which places the figure of the archbishop centre-stage.

The archbishop is indeed repeatedly presented in his cathedral, but only at the discretion of the monastic community. The role the monks played as guardians of the earthly remains of the prelates, as biographers and hagiographers, ensured that they retained a firm grasp on the archbishops' memoria. It is significant that neither the Tractatus nor the Actus pontificum was written at the initiative or at the request of an archbishop – Gervase was explicitly writing with his brethren in mind. The projection of an image of the archbishop which fitted into the tradition of the monastery as it had been developed over centuries took on critical importance as relations between abbot and convent became more and more difficult and more and more distant.

Both the Tractatus and the Actus pontificum belong to what could be called the hagio-historiographic tradition of Christ Church, which had been developed since the Norman Conquest by writers like Osbern and Eadmer, and to which Gervase added in his turn. The many trials and tribulations undergone by the cathedral – including two fires which may have destroyed a number of important documents – fostered a keen sense of the desirability of recording and preserving for future generations. Like Osbern and Eadmer before him, Gervase was very aware of the usefulness of the records he was making. Just as Eadmer self-consciously pointed out that he was recording facts and events about Anselm's pontificate which could be used as precedents by his successors,Footnote ⁵⁶ Gervase repeatedly underlined the memorial dimension of the Tractatus, to prevent any future attempt at altering the status and function of the cathedral, thus indicating that he was aware that his text might be used as a record in case of future litigation. The very strong Canterbury bias exhibited by Gervase has been described as a narrowness of outlook which ultimately detracts from his achievements as a historian.Footnote ⁵⁷ Gervase himself, however, rejects the notion that he could be counted among historians; on his own admission he was merely compiling facts and events that he thought relevant for the benefit of the Christ Church community. Gervase's recording is indeed at times indiscriminate and it is quite often frustratingly narrow, but both texts were explicitly composed to memorialise the status and function of the cathedral and community of Christ Church, in a context in which both were being threatened.

Within this admittedly limited scope, Gervase was it seems at least modestly successful. The manuscript tradition of his works confirms that, as Gervase intended, they remained local records: the manuscripts which have come down to us are all of Christ Church origin. The Actus pontificum was copied and occasionally added to down to the sixteenth century. The Tractatus was prefixed to three copies of Gervase's greater Chronicle along with the two Imaginationes, underlining that it was understood that it could be used in a legal context. All Gervase's works seem to have been considered as functioning together as complementary and valuable evidence for the history of the monastery and its community, and they stand as monuments, literally, to the cathedral's glorious past.