The production of scholarly editions of documents is not a glamorous or high-profile activity, as academic publishing goes, but all medieval historians are deeply grateful to those who carry it out. This is all the more true when the documents in question are the next installment in a series like the ever- dependable English Episcopal Acta , and when the editor is someone like M.J. Franklin, who has already contributed so much to this exacting and invaluable work.
Franklin, who has previously brought us the acta of Winchester, 1070-1204 (1993) and Coventry and Lichfield, 1072- 1159 (1997), has now published the second volume of Coventry acta, those of Bishop Richard Peche (1160-82). The documents in this volume include benefactions, confirmations, agreements, letters, indulgences, and the like, painstakingly gathered from archival collections all over England. Franklin's formidably knowledgeable introductions and apparatus draw on a vast array of other sources as well, constantly putting the individual documents in the context of other records, scribal practices, and contemporary ecclesiastical developments (it's nice to see that Sally Thompson's Women Religious is used as a standard background resource here alongside such indispensable tools as Knowles and Hadcock). His accomplishment is all the more impressive given the brief reference in the preface to the spectacular-sounding mishap of a flooded office during the compilation of this book.
About half of the documents in the volume have never previously been published, so the book gives a much fuller picture of Richard's episcopate than could previously be pieced together. Indeed, Franklin asserts early on that the acta published here demonstrate the importance of Richard's term in office, in contrast to earlier assessments of this bishop as a "nonentity" (p. xxvii). While the acta (even along with what is known from narrative sources) hardly present a portrait of Richard Peche as a distinct personality, their content does show, in Franklin's view, that this was a significant period in the diocese of Coventry and Lichfield, particularly for the evolution of the office of vicar. To support this idea, the introduction to the volume contains a thorough and learned analysis of the terms and provisions of acta dealing with grants of churches to religious houses, especially the arrangements made for vicarage. A bit more general discussion and some explicit conclusions would be helpful in this section; only those readers already familiar with the details of the subject will find this discussion very informative.
Richard Peche, the subject of this work, was the son of Bishop Robert II of Coventry (1121-26), probably born around 1110 and therefore a child appointment to his first post, the archdeaconry of Coventry, in the mid-1120s. Despite this perhaps inauspicious beginning, he seems to have been a worthy enough archdeacon (for some thirty years) to have been elected bishop (almost certainly in 1160) with the "relative enthusiasm" of both cathedral chapters (p. xxiii). Franklin presents him a "conventional" benefactor of religious houses (p. xxix), almost dilatory in some financial matters, lukewarm- -perhaps timid--in the Becket controversy, and not even the pious retiree to St. Thomas', Stafford, that he has been thought--more likely only having been clothed as a canon as he lay dying in 1182.
The acta themselves are obviously of greatest interest to historians studying this diocese and to those exploring the documentary sources of this period for mention of particular individuals, families, and lands, but they also include a wealth of information, both in the texts of the acta and in the editor's comments, about such subjects as the arrangements between religious houses and their benefactors, disputes among foundations and donors, and the great variety of ecclesiastical offices and appointments. More generally familiar developments of the twelfth century also appear, in glimpses of Augustinian canons performing pastoral work, of nuns "chafing" under the authority of a neighboring abbot (p. 27), and of donors attempting to switch their spiritual allegiance and material gifts from traditional orders to the more fashionable Templars. For research purposes, information about diocesan office-holders and the episcopal household is presented in an organized way in two places here, a section of the introduction and the Fasti in Appendix I. Other appendices present a letter about a miracle of Thomas Becket, a (very basic) reconstruction of Bishop Richard's itinerary, and a detailed discussion of the Lichfield Registrum Rubrum .
As for the book's production quality, one's confidence in the accuracy of the texts as printed here is perhaps slightly undermined by a number of typesetting errors in the introduction (pp. xliii, l, lii, liii), the apparatus (p. 31, "Wain" for "Warin"; p. 34; etc.), and the index (no entry for Warin Bussel). The unremarked grammatical lapse (no verb in the main clause) in the second sentence of no. 87A may or may not be a typo, but one wonders whether there are other, undetectable, mistakes. On the plus side, the photographic plates of charters and seals, though few, are clear, attractive, and pertinent to the editor's arguments. There can be no doubt that this is a welcome volume and an admirable piece of scholarship.