Josiah C. Russell

Master Henry of Avranches as an International Poet

Exul perambulo mundum Et per barbarias inglorius erro poeta. T HE wandering entertainer of the Middle Ages, jongleur, minstrel, or poet, is an intriguing subject.1 We easily conjure up pictures of his errant life, intermittent poverty, and occasional triumphs at feudal courts, and in our imagination we share his vagabond life, the pinch of his poverty, and the joy of his success. Imagination admittedly paints a large portion of the picture of any one jongleur or poet, because the facts of the life of such a character are usually obscure, and the deficit of information about one is filled out with deductions from the lives of others. Rather more than usual information, however, is available concerning the career of Master Henry of Avranches, the author of the lines quoted above. To reconstruct his life we have more than one hundred and fifty of his poems, a long diatribe against him by a rival, Michael of Cornwall, a few documentary references from the Continent, and an illuminating series of items from the Public Record Office, London.2 From this evidence his career of nearly half a century (1214-1260) emerges, the career of a wandering poet which touches many of the important persons of that time. Cosmopolitanism was the poets birthright: his father was a Norman of Avranches, but the son was born in Germany, probably in the last decade of the twelfth century. His early associations are rather clearly with Cologne. Indeed he is possibly to be identified with the envoy, Master Henry of Cologne, who served Otto

Social Status at the Court of King John

SOCIAL status is an important factor in society at all times, not merely as the legal condition of social groups, which has received much scholarly attention, but also as the pattern of social relationship of men and groups.1 A mans status has meaning to him as a position in human society relative to other people. He is intensely interested in that position whether it is in the Notitia Dignitatum of the later Roman Empire or at a Washington dinner. The sum of these individual opinions about social status is a collective social custom which operates to unite and divide society into a wide variety of groups. This study is an effort to analyze the types of social grouping which existed at the court of King John of England (1199-1216) and is based largely upon the evidence afforded by the witness lists of the royal charters of that reign.2 The reign of King John was selected for study because the witness lists of his charters are published.3 The royal charters were transcribed on rolls which have been preserved in the archives of England. Since they were copied at the time of the issuance of the original charters, they are probably accurate transcripts. The charters were among the more formal royal documents and thus the names of witnesses were written in them. These documents were probably written by royal clerks under the direction of the officials whose names are given.4 The variety of names from day to day is an indication that these are genuine lists of witnesses who were actually present. Indeed, we may assume that the recipient of such a charter would insist upon the inclusion of the names of the persons who had actually witnessed the charters; it was a very serious matter for him since he might need them to testify in court that the charter was not a forgery.