Nicholas Vincent

Goffredo de Prefetti and the Church of Bethlehem in England

To Englishmen of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, few institutions inspired such horrified fascination as the Bedlam hospital, the principal London mad-house. Yet Bedlam, or to give it its proper title, the hospital of St Mary of New Bethlehem, had been in existence for several centuries before its principal charge became the care, or perhaps more correctly the confinement, of the insane. The origins of Bedlam lie in the 1240s, in the reign of King Henry III. To date, the circumstances which gave rise to the hospitals foundation have failed to attract the understanding and attention which they deserve. Bedlams founders would no doubt have been surprised to learn of the subsequent fate of their institution, intended in origin not as a mad-house but as a link between England and the Holy Land, part of a wider movement in which the cathedral church of the Nativity at Bethlehem and its bishops sought land, alms and hospitality in western Europe. The purpose of this present essay is to investigate the links between England and the church of Bethlehem which gave rise to the foundation of Bedlam. In the process, it is hoped that new light will be shed upon English attitudes to the crusades, upon the reorganisation of the finances and administration of the bishops of Bethlehem exiled from the Holy Land after 1187, and in particular upon the career of one bishop, Goffredo de Prefetti. It was Goffredo who was to be personally responsible for the introduction of the Bethlehemites to England, and so it is with his career that we should commence.

Records, Administration and Aristocratic Society in the Anglo-Norman Realm: Papers Commemorating the 800th Anniversary of King John's Loss of Normandy

The major theme of this volume is the records of the Anglo-Norman realm, and how they are used separately and in combination to construct the history of England and Normandy. The essays cover all types of written source material, including private charters and the official records of the chancery and Exchequer, chronicles, and personal sources such as letters, while some 100 previously unpublished documents are included in a series of appendices. There are studies here of particular Anglo-Normans, including a great aristocrat and a seneschal of Normandy; of records relating to Normandy surviving in England; of the Norman and English Exchequers, between them the financial mainstay of the king/dukes; of the controversial origins of the English Chancery records; and, of Rosamund Clifford, the Kings mistress. Contributors of this title include: Nicholas Vincent, David Carpenter, David Crook, Mark Hagger, David Crouch, Marie Lovatt, and Daniel Power.

Regional Variations in the Charters of King Henry II (1154–89)

In a well known, though perhaps apocryphal injunction to the future King Henry II, Henry’s father, Geoffrey Plantagenet, is said to have urged the about-to-be-king to respect the diverse laws and customs of his dominions, and to preserve in equal measure the Angevin customs of Anjou, and the Norman and English customs of Normandy and England.1 Over the past 300 years, much ink has been spilled in an attempt to determine the extent to which Geoffrey’s injunction was obeyed.2 Did the Plantagenet dominion under Henry II enjoy a centralized administration, sufficient to qualify it as a Plantagenet ‘empire’ in the modern sense of the term, or did it remain merely a diverse collection of lands, each governed according to local custom, ready at any moment to fracture, as after 1189 these lands were indeed to fracture, into a series of independent entities, Norman, Angevin, Poitevin or English as the case might be? The general consensus amongst twentieth-century historians, themselves merely echoing the opinion of David Hume set down as long ago as the 1760s, has been that Henry Plantagenet, whatever his imperialist aspirations, ruled no true empire but a haphazard collection of French and insular territories, at best a dominion or, as the French have grown accustomed to call it, an ‘espace Plantagenet’, lacking a fixed capi0tal or any unified body of laws, customs, coinage or administration.3

Master Alexander of Stainsby, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield 1224-1238

Within the league table of thirteenth-century English bishops, Master Alexander ‘de Stavensby’ has generally been considered no more than a second division player. The standard biographies do their best to credit him with a network of associations that includes such luminaries as St Dominic and Stephen Langton, but the evidence is uncertain, or at least has never been probed sufficiently deeply to achieve certainty. Master Alexander remains a shadowy figure; a scholar of strange dreams and visions; a rootless cosmopolitan whose family and even whose birthplace remain unknown. Yet it is possible to trace his earlier career with greater precision. His origins and his close association with Stephen Langton and the early friars can be traced more exactly, and once established they help to illuminate his achievements as bishop.