Robert Bartlett: "The complexity of modern national politics has placed history at risk"

Robert Bartlett speaks to Emily Briffett about the large-scale destruction of medieval manuscripts – and how such losses affect our ability to understand the Middle Ages

Fire rages in Dublin’s ‘Four Courts’, housing the Public Record Office of Ireland, in 1922. Many historical documents were destroyed in the conflagration. (Photo by Getty Images)

Published: October 15, 2024 at 5:26 PM

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Emily Briffett: Your new book explores episodes in which large volumes of written material were destroyed in a single day – not by accident, fire or flood but by human forces. Why are these cases so interesting, and what makes them worth studying?

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Robert Bartlett: As a medieval historian, I’m very aware of how we know what we know about the Middle Ages, when all written material was produced by hand, as manuscripts. There was no printing, so very often there’s only one copy of something – even famous documents such as the Old English poem Beowulf.

This material is precarious – particularly in situations like the ones I describe in the book. I take five case studies in which thousands – sometimes tens of thousands – of medieval books and documents go up in flames, or explode, or are incinerated, by bombing and shelling in just a couple of hours, leaving huge holes in the historical record.

There are several things in common across these episodes. First, they are mainly cases where the modern state had begun to concentrate material in public record offices or national archives – places founded from, say, the time of the French Revolution onwards. The second, slightly more cheerful common factor is that an incredible amount of effort has been made to see what can be saved.

Overall, do we know how much material has been lost?

The answer boils down to two questions: how much was produced, and how much survives? These are not easy things to work out.

In a manuscript culture, the number of copies of anything will be far lower than in a print culture, because copying by hand is a slow process. Then you also have the question of what difference various upheavals have made to document survival.

In England and Scotland, the Reformation was really destructive. Monasteries were closed down and their libraries lost. Parchment had other uses: it was good for wrapping butter and fish and, after the arrival of muskets, for making cartridges. The great scholar and medievalist Neil Ker thought that something like 85 per cent of books from monastic libraries no longer existed.

At the beginning of the 19th century, as part of a peace settlement during the Napoleonic Wars, many German princes lost territory. In compensation, they were given lots of monasteries, along with their libraries.

In Bavaria, the ruler sent out a team to assess these libraries and to say who was going to have what. As a result, the Bavarian State Library in Munich holds rows and rows of these books, all shelved more or less as they were in the monastic libraries. The transition of monastic guardianship to the modern state was far more orderly than it had been in the English and Scottish Reformations – and that obviously made a big difference to survival levels.

Who decides what is worth keeping, and why?

In Bavaria, the oldest and most valuable books went to the ruler, and ones that might be useful for study went to educational institutions. Then there were those described as ‘superstitious’ – mainly books from the libraries of the Franciscan and Dominican friars. They were seen as useless, so were mashed up to make paper.

Otherwise, people in charge pick books that look the nicest and, sometimes, are most valuable. At times when libraries were simply despoiled, people just took gilded covers and things like that – the stuff inside the book was considered to have no value whatsoever.

What is so significant about concentrating material in libraries and archives?

Material placed in a central depository is in a controlled environment, and is more accessible – but also vulnerable if something goes wrong.

As an example, one of my case studies is the destruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland during the Irish Civil War in 1922, which was caused by a rift within those opposed to British rule in Ireland. Some were willing to accept a compromise settlement; others were not. The eventual outcome was a divided Ireland, creating an Irish Free State that remained in the British commonwealth.

In April 1922, forces opposed to this outcome occupied a site in the middle of Dublin. Following intense shelling by their opponents, it went up in flames on 30 June – and, unfortunately, that occupied complex of buildings housed the Public Record Office.

Though that office was founded as recently as 1867, there had been a campaign to gather and concentrate documents from all over Ireland in that place. This material hadn’t been produced in a public record office or national archive but in the royal courts and monasteries of the Middle Ages – but its movement to these locations was a product of the state that served only to make it more vulnerable.

In your book, you write that the modern state has taken on a dual role as curator and destroyer of the past. What do you mean?

Modern European nationalism is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, nationalism asks: what is a nation? The 19th and 20th centuries were a wonderful time for historical scholarship – much of it, especially in the early days, inspired by this nationalist sentiment.

However, nationalism has also set European states at each other’s throats. For example, look at the destruction of the Municipal Library in Strasbourg during a long-running territorial dispute between the German states and France. Strasbourg had been a German city in the Middle Ages, but was annexed by the French in 1681. So when Prussian forces attacked it in 1870, they destroyed a city that was still largely German-speaking, and a library that contained monuments to their medieval past.

Another complicated case was that of the State Archives of Naples. When Italy entered the Second World War in 1940, that archive’s medieval documents were moved to a villa 20 miles from the city, to safeguard them from US and British bombing. But in September 1943, when Italy – formerly a German ally – switched sides, fighting broke out between German forces in Italy and the Italian resistance.

On 28 September, German troops came across the villa, and were suspicious of the crates stored inside. Though Italian officials declared that they contained only historical documents, that didn’t stop the Germans from burning the villa to the ground. Everything went up in smoke – material that wouldn’t have been there if it hadn’t been first evacuated from Allied bombing in Naples. This story highlights how the complexity of modern national politics has placed history at risk.

In these cases, what was done to save the written material?

In the run-up to the centenary of the destruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland in 2022, there was an enormous international effort to see what could be saved, starting with examining remaining physical fragments. Fortunately, three years before the explosion, the head of the Public Record Office in Ireland – little knowing what would soon happen – had produced a wonderful catalogue. So, though we no longer have the records, we at least have a guide to what was once there.

Over the course of several hundred years prior to 1922, quite a lot of learned people had worked on the manuscript material, making copies and describing it, so that was looked at. Additionally, in the Middle Ages Ireland had been a colony of England, so much of the documentation – or duplicates of it – produced by the Irish government was sent to England, where any surviving material now resides in the National Archives in Kew.

It would be rash to start destroying physical paper records. We rely on this material to build up our past; we can reconstruct it only from what survives

This project also launched a website, with a 3D reconstruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland as it was before the destruction. You can go to any of the shelves and see what was stored there prior to 1922 – a magnificent effort.

In Naples, after the war they did exactly what the Irish project did. They knew the documents had been studied for a long time before the war, and that there’d be scholars who had notes, transcriptions and copies. So they contacted these people all over Europe, and things were indeed sent in. You can no longer study something from 1285; instead, you must work with a copy from 1910.

It’s a matter of saving what there is – by the skin of the teeth, sometimes. In some cases, of course, the stuff has gone forever.

What can be done to remedy the loss of illustrative material?

One document that was in the Strasbourg Municipal Library in 1870 was a book called Hortus deliciarum (Garden of Delights), produced in the late 12th century in a nunnery not far from Strasbourg. This beautiful book, one of the jewels of medieval German book illustration, was destroyed by the German shelling.

We do have some copies of those illustrations that had been made in the 19th century, prior to the destruction, by the memorably named Comte de Bastard [Count Bastard], a military man from a poor noble family in the south of France. Having fought for Napoleon and the restored Bourbon monarchs, he taught himself lithography, a printing technique invented in the 1790s. He reproduced not only Garden of Delights but also other beautifully coloured medieval illuminated manuscripts. The French state, which saw his work as being of national benefit, gave him financial aid. He even lent some of his copies to the Great Exhibition in London in 1851.

Today, if you want to study medieval German book illustration, you can’t go to the original of this work, which is now long disintegrated. Instead, you have to go to Count Bastard’s lithographs – that’s all we have. He’s a real hero.

Who else would you consider a hero in this field?

My heroes might seem rather unheroic. They tend to be cataloguers, archivists and antiquarians – often middle-aged men with glasses. Count Bastard, though also a man of action, was one of these.

Another was Maurice Jusselin, who was an archivist in Chartres, which was bombed in the lead-up to D-Day. There was a complicated and strange contrast between what was done with these manuscripts and the efforts made to safeguard the stained-glass windows of Chartres Cathedral.

At the start of the Second World War, the windows were packed up and sent several hundred miles away to the cellars of a castle in the middle of nowhere, so they all survived the war. People in charge of the library and its books at first decided to do something similar, moving them to a villa about 20 miles away. Of course, in 1940, the Germans conquered France. After a while, they appointed someone to take charge of the historical and literary monuments of France. He promised that the books would be safe back in the library – so, at the end of 1940, they were a sitting target for the bombing that took place in the run-up to D-Day. Hundreds of medieval manuscripts were destroyed.

Jusselin had been a pioneer of aviation and, before the First World War, he had taken aerial pictures of Chartres Cathedral. But he was also very interested in the manuscripts in Chartres, and took plenty of photographs of those, too. So, even after the loss of the original manuscripts, palaeographers and historians could still apply their scholarly eyes to the content and script.

Who’s winning the race between preservation and destruction?

More money has gone into artillery, high explosives and bombers than has gone into finding suitable places to store medieval documents. There’s no question – the race is definitely one-sided. On the other hand, the amount of historical work done by archivists, librarians, scholars and antiquarians, especially in the past couple of hundred years, is extremely impressive.

Even where the loss of an original document is total, there’s hope. Perhaps my most dramatic example is the so-called Ebstorf Map, which was in Hanover when that German city was bombed by the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. It was the largest known map from the Middle Ages, measuring more than 3 metres by 3 metres. It was a Mappa Mundi, a term often associated with the great medieval map in Hereford – though that example was made using only one animal skin, whereas Ebstorf’s required 30.

In the 1890s, the Ebstorf Map was disassembled, and each skin was photographed on a slightly reduced scale. By putting those images together, you can see what the map was like. Frustratingly, it does seem as though someone might have done a bit of touching up with
a pen. Nevertheless, these scraps can tell us something.

The technology of reproduction and analysis is always getting more sophisticated. But you can learn new things about old documents only if the physical remains still exist, right? Nothing new can be learned about the Ebstorf Map after it was destroyed. We’ve learned all we can about it; the benefit of technological advancement cannot help us there. Yet, still, the technology of warfare advances.

How has our knowledge of the Middle Ages been affected by the destruction of such fragile resources?

I suppose the truth is that we don’t know what we don’t know. But sometimes we can get little indications.

Take the first English royal accounts, called pipe rolls. The very earliest dates from 1130 – a rare survival. It mentions payments made by royal authority, sent out in writs; hundreds of those are recorded, but none survive. Though we don’t have those documents themselves, we do have indirect evidence of proto-bureaucratic state activity from references in that pipe roll. That’s one way you can go from the known to the unknown. Of course, when studying any medieval document, you always have to bear in mind that it’s just the tip of an iceberg. But how big is the iceberg? How big is the stuff we don’t know about?

It’s been said many times, for example, that the written material we have makes writing the history of the lower classes, women and dissidents harder than writing the history of rulers and men. It’s an inbuilt bias to be aware of. But that’s probably true of any historical period, I’d have thought.

Medievalists often seem to be picking through tiny pieces of evidence to better understand their period. What value is there to be found in small fragments of the past?

If it’s all you’ve got, then that’s what you’ve got to deal with, isn’t it? If you think of those studying the ancient world, they’re far worse off. Someone calculated the number of Aeschylus’s plays that survive today – and about 90 per cent have been lost.

As a historian, I work mainly with written remains – but those are not guaranteed to last forever. The past, insofar as it’s transmitted by written material, is vulnerable to disappearing, even now.

The Ministry of Justice in London has been digitising all last wills and testaments made since 1858, when the government took over this duty from the church. All wills used to be prepared on paper, either handwritten or typewritten. Now the question is being asked: shall we destroy those originals?

In response, the historical community has issued a loud howl – because if you destroy that stuff, you’ve lost any way of looking at the physical remains. Is digitised technology as secure and as durable and as lasting? Can we be sure that digitised material will still be accessible in 100 years’ time? It would be rash to start destroying the physical paper records. What we can lose is very great. We rely on this material to build up our past; we can reconstruct it only from what survives.

Of the documents lost, which would you most like to have seen?

Ah, that’s a very interesting question. There are references to literary works that no longer survive – stories of great tales told in the 12th and 13th centuries. We know the titles of some of them. I think I’d like to read those stories.

Robert Bartlett is Bishop Wardlaw professor of medieval history emeritus at the University of St Andrews. His previous books include Blood Royal: Dynastic Politics in Medieval Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

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This interview was first published in the October 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine

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