The legacy of C. Warren Hollister The figure of Charles Warren Hollister dominated the field of medieval studies in North America during the closing decades of the twentieth century. This volume brings together a series of wide ranging essays designed to do justice to the breadth and depth of his scholarship, and to show how little his death, now more than a decade past, has diminished his influence in the field. Hollister represented in all respects the epitome of the medieval scholar: a kind and caring mentor to graduate students and younger colleagues, a vociferous champion of his chosen subject matter, and a meticulous and painstaking researcher. Each of the eleven contributions to the volume, a special issue of the Haskins Society Journal which Hollister himself helped to launch, aims to demonstrate how his ideas continue to shape the questions that scholars ask about the Anglo-Norman period in England.
The collection begins with a retrospective by Lois Honeycutt on Hollister's lifelong fascination with the figure of Henry I (1100-1134), perhaps the most controversial of the Anglo-Norman kings of England. The essay also reviews her mentor's scholarly achievements as the author of some 50 penetrating journal articles, more than a dozen best-selling textbooks, sourcebooks and readers, and a clutch of other publications. While she is careful to note Hollister's success, year after year, in establishing productive working relationships with his (very numerous) graduate students, she does not hesitate to address frankly his aversion to exploring the personal and political failings of Henry I, or to suggest the consequences of Hollister's focus on the institutions, rather than the people, of Anglo-Norman England. Although he did not live long enough to see the publication of his massive study of the king's reign, Hollister was keenly aware of both the praise and the criticism that the biography was bound to--and did--generate.
Several of the essays examine the figure of Henry I as the ruler of an empire that stretched well beyond the borders of England itself. Kathleen Thompson views Henry's years of residence in Normandy before 1100 as an apprenticeship during which the youngest son of William the Conqueror learned a series of difficult lessons. Collectively, she suggests, these shaped the political affiliations that he would forge after his accession to the English throne. In his study of Henry's relations with the region of Maine, Richard E. Barton highlights another feature of the king's mastery of political gamesmanship, tempered in this instance by a genuine friendship with Count Helias that proved salutary at Tinchebray in 1106. David S. Spear's study of the spiritual ties that the bishop of Rouen cultivated with the English royal house serves as a reminder, if any were needed, that Henry's effectiveness as a ruler was as relevant in the sphere of church politics as it was in that of the secular. Robert S. Babcock argues that, although he never visited Ireland and Wales, Henry's treatment of rebels from both regions is a testament to his shrewd recognition of the challenge that each represented to English royal authority. The policies that Henry adopted in respect to Ireland and Wales, in Babcock's estimation, constituted nothing less than a thorough "political reorientation" of the Irish Sea province (60), one that would have important consequences later in the twelfth century.
Another several essays explore aspects of Henry I's role in shaping English institutions of government. Among the most hotly contested of Hollister's arguments about Anglo-Norman England was the leading role he accorded Henry in establishing the central organs of Chancery and Exchequer and in directing the affairs of the English church. Sally N. Vaughn considers the relationships that the king cultivated with the three men who served as archbishop of Canterbury during his reign. The most contentious of these, as Hollister demonstrated, was that which spanned the years of Anselm's pontificate. Vaughn argues convincingly that despite the deep rift that developed between the king and his prelate over the issue of investiture both were in essential agreement about the idea of a "right order" in which the secular and ecclesiastical authorities worked in comfortable concert. While neither of Anselm's successors distinguished himself in office, Henry never abandoned this idealized notion of good governance. In a careful analysis of the pipe roll of 1130, Stephanie Mooers Christelow takes respectful, if firm, issue with Hollister's portrayal of Henry I as the masterful architect of the English Exchequer. The court, she shows, was at once less efficient than Hollister allowed and its work less Henry's own design. That it functioned as well as it did, she claims, was a reflection of the judicial and financial efforts of the barons who presided over its business. These men, moreover, were well practiced in the art of manipulating the process of collecting fines and farms in order to feather their own nests, and better still at keeping their actions safe from the close scrutiny of the king.
David Crouch's beautifully crafted essay on the charters of Robert of Beaumont count of Meulan and earl of Leicester similarly challenges Hollister's thesis that Henry was key to the shaping of a uniquely "Anglo-Norman" notion of aristocracy in the early twelfth century. The transformation of the political community occurred, according to Crouch, when noblemen themselves began self-consciously to deploy awareness of their dignity and status. Henry's England did, however, offer them new vehicles through which to do so, in the form of writs modelled on the royal style. Heather J. Tanner argues that Hollister's view of Henry I as a much more efficient ruler than his successor, Stephen, is in need of revision. Her analysis of the activities of the royal chapel during the years after Henry's death turns on a re-evaluation of the methods for measuring Chancery output that Hollister and several of his students first developed. Ultimately, she finds little evidence of the administrative decline that is said to have set in after 1134.
Two essays in the volume place noble women at the centre of scholarly discussion of Hollister's Anglo-Norman world, although he himself devoted little effort to a gendered interpretation of royal power and authority. Ann Williams uses Henry I's relations with his Scottish wife, Matilda, as a lens through which to understand the ways in which contemporary interpretations of ethnicity and race shaped the king's view of his English subjects. RáGina DeAragon's study of the marital tribulations of Countess Agnes of Essex belongs chronologically to the late twelfth century, but it serves as a useful reminder that Henry I's infamous clash with Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury over questions of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, yet another focus of Hollister's scholarly writings, was but the opening volley in a protracted struggle for control over the secular aristocracy that would endure for many years after 1134.
The essays that make up this festschrift suffer few of the flaws that so often mar such collections. Each is well written, each a model of the vigorous scholarship that was so integral a feature of Warren Hollister's work. There is, none the less, little here to engage the interest of historians of the Celtic realms whose political aspirations so deeply influenced English affairs in the twelfth century. Warren Hollister was unapologetic in his conviction that the Anglo-Norman world of Henry I revolved around an axis that stretched across the English Channel, rather than north and west into Gaeldom. It is perhaps inevitable, if disappointing, that in a volume dedicated to his memory the Celtic presence in the British Isles should be portrayed as being of merely incidental relevance to the shaping of Anglo-Norman identity. With no index or bibliography, moreover, the volume will remain a good read, but of limited value to readers hoping to use it as a ready guide to the recent historiography of the period.