The office of Lord High Chancellor is one of the oldest and most august in British government and may be the oldest office of cabinet rank anywhere in the world. Precisely how old it is, however, is a question which, though often asked, has never been satisfactorily answered.Footnote 1 It certainly existed shortly after the Norman Conquest, with Herfast usually being given as the earliest recorded holder of the office,Footnote 2 but at this point historians of the chancery hit a problem. So suddenly and so completely does the chancellorship appear that it is hard to believe that it had had no prior existence. It is unlikely that William the Conqueror simply imported the office. Norman charters were always written by monastic scribes hired by the beneficiaryFootnote 3 and there had been before the Conquest only a brief, fleeting experiment with a Norman chancery.Footnote 4 It is possible that William was inspired by the French chancery tradition but after 1066 Norman diplomatic practice actually imitated the English,Footnote 5 making it likelier that the roots of the English chancellor lie in England.
The Anglo-Saxon heritage of the chancellorship initially seems promising. The Anglo-Saxon kings had a seal and a richly developed and complex system of writs and charters,Footnote 6 which the Anglo-Norman kings inherited without (initially) changing it.Footnote 7 The point was made most pithily by W. H. Stevenson, who said of the Anglo-Saxon chancery that ‘if they had not the name, they must have had the thing. It is only by the supposition of the existence of a trained and organised body of royal clerks corresponding to the chancery of the continent that we can account for the highly technical way in which an Old-English royal charter is drawn up.’Footnote 8
None the less, historians hesitate to attribute a ‘chancery’ to the Anglo-Saxons and, even more so, a ‘chancellor’, as (the writs and charters themselves aside) there simply is not enough material to reconstruct such a department. No undisputed Anglo-Saxon charter names a chancellor, or even alludes to one. There is billowing smoke but the fire itself is frustratingly elusive.
The chancellor and the chapel
Part of the problem is that it is easy to be distracted by what the chancellor became. The chancellor has been reinvented many times through the millennium of his existence. He has played by turns at being a judge, a speaker, a viceroy and, most recently, a minister of justice and this shifting kaleidoscope of functions has made it difficult to fix on how he originally started. Even when one sheds all thoughts of breeches and wigs and concentrates solely on the Anglo-Norman chancellor, it is still easy to be misled by his sole surviving function from that time (custody of the seal) into thinking that that was the only function that he performed. That is quite untrue. In contrast to its later judicial and modern ministerial characterisation, the earliest form of the chancellorship was as an overwhelmingly ecclesiastical office, to which responsibility for the chancery and its attendant duties, for all their later importance, were merely accretions. It was not until 1340 that a layman was appointed chancellor.Footnote 9 The tendency to make anachronistic assumptions about what sort of office an Anglo-Saxon chancellorship would have been must be unconditionally and immediately abandoned if the search for one is to have any success. So, what sort of office would it have been?
In ancient Rome, a cancellarius was originally ‘the beadle at the bar [cancelli] which separates the court from the public’Footnote 10 but, by the time that the term appeared in Merovingian France, Ripuaria and Alemannia, it had come to mean a scribe.Footnote 11 In the reign of Louis the Pious (814–40) the title ‘summus cancellarius’ appeared for an official who oversaw the scribes' work and approved the final copy of each document.Footnote 12 He worked with an archicapellanus,Footnote 13 who appears to have had disciplinary authority over the scribes, who, as clerics of the royal household, would naturally have been under his charge, though precisely how the overlapping jurisdictions of the archchaplain and archchancellor were managed is unclear.Footnote 14
When the empire split in 843, the chancery split too.Footnote 15 In France, the title ‘archicapellanus’ fell out of favour in the late ninth century and the title ‘cancellarius’ (rarely ‘archicancellarius’) became attached to the bishop who was appointed head of the household clergy, in whose name documents were written.Footnote 16 In Italy too an archchancellor approved documents, while his scribes were referred to as notarii, cancellarii or capellani interchangeably.Footnote 17 In Sicily the chancellorship was also combined with the headship of the chapel royalFootnote 18 and in Spain the terms ‘capellania’ and ‘cancellaria’ were being used synonymously even into the twelfth century.Footnote 19
In Germany, the archchaplain assumed the functions of the archchancellorFootnote 20 and ‘capella’ is used in contexts where one might have expected ‘cancellaria’.Footnote 21 Only in Otto i's reign (936–73) did ‘cancellarius’ re-emerge as the title for the leading scribe, who verified documents on the archchaplain's behalf.Footnote 22 Even then, the chancellor was still indifferently referred to as a ‘capellanus’Footnote 23 and even into the twelfth century it was still the emperor's itinerant chapel that produced the scribes.Footnote 24
The continental analogue must not be pushed too far. If English kings ever dallied with an archchancellor or archchaplain, they left no record of it and, whereas such senior ecclesiastics as abbots or bishops had held honorary positions of superintendence in the French and German chapels royal (and ipso facto chanceries) since the ninth century,Footnote 25 this appears not to have been the practice in England until well into the chancellorship's established historyFootnote 26 and these bishop-chancellors’ authority over the chancery was not titular. William Longchamp and Hubert Walter, successive bishop-chancellors, were responsible for real innovations in the chancery's administration.Footnote 27
The continental evidence none the less demonstrates the fallacy of looking for a chancery first and a chancellor second. On the contrary, it was the chancery that was named after the chancellor. Thomas Becket's biographer William fitz Stephen used the term ‘cancellaria’ not for the office of chancery but for the office of chancellor.Footnote 28 Even in continental Europe the chancery as a distinct department crystallised long after its functions had become a certain official's routine duty. The cancellaria as a concept distinct from the cancellarius is a development of the second half of the twelfth century,Footnote 29 coinciding with the appointment in England of bishop-chancellors to run it. The official came first and his department subsequently assumed a name of its own derived from his title. The word, to adapt Tout's phrase, most definitely followed the thing.
Instead, the department with which the earliest generation of continental chancellors were associated was the chapel. This is unsurprising, since the body of priests attendant on the king would have been the natural group to whom he would turn for scribal purposes. As government became increasingly literate, the priests’ secretarial function would have developed from occasional moonlighting into a regular duty. From such a priori reasoning, as well as from the continental analogues, those historians who believe in an Anglo-Saxon chancellor have long hypothesised that his department grew from the chapel royal.Footnote 30 There is clearly nothing necessarily anachronistic about an Anglo-Saxon chancellor. What would be anachronistic would be to expect a chancellor who was strictly divorced from the king's household clergy.
This reasoning is apparently corroborated by the strong link between the chapel and the Anglo-Norman chancery shown by the Constitutio domus regis, a survey of the royal household written on the accession of King Stephen in 1136, which preserves several provisions which must have ceased to obtain before his reign.Footnote 31 As a reminder of the contemporary indistinguishability of the royal household and the government, it makes no distinction between ministers and servants in their respective modern senses, placing the stewards, dispensers, naperers, bakers, waferer, larder-dispensers, cooks, butlers, cup-bearers and fruiterers in between the chancellor and his associates at the beginning and the chamberlains, constables, marshals and huntsmen at the end. Its concern is not with the ministers’ functions but with their food and maintenance allowances.
The chancellor is certainly the best fed (and paid). Associated with him are the magister scriptorii and then the officers of the chapel: ‘The chaplain [who is] keeper of the chapel and of the relics has double rations, and four chapel servants each have double rations.’Footnote 32 That the master of the writing-office was associated with the chancellor should elicit no surprise but why was the chaplain-keeper of the relics in a similar position? The nature of this section implies that he was also an officer of the chancellor, suggesting that the chapel royal was as much the chancellor's department as the scriptorium. This overlap between chancery and chapel is confirmed by William fitz Stephen, who, in his biography of Thomas Becket (1189), gives a brief description of the chancellor's duties, including ‘that the king's chapel be in his disposition and charge’.Footnote 33 Such cross-fertilisation of the chapel and the chancery makes England no different from France, Germany, Italy, Sicily and Spain, where similar arrangements still prevailed after hundreds of years.Footnote 34
The separation of the two departments was a prolonged process. The clerici de cancellaria were separated from the clerici de capella after 1232Footnote 35 and in 1312 the Dean of the Chapels Royal (a newly-created post) was described as ‘capitalis capellanus’, yet only the following year the chancellor was still ‘chef de la chapele nostre seignur le Roi’. In 1318 the dean is again ‘chief chapellin’.Footnote 36 By 1449 Dean William Say could write affirmatively that
The dean … is principal and head over all, holding from the king power to rule and govern the chapel … neither the steward of the household nor the treasurer, nor any other officer or servant of the household whatever, may … correct or punish in any matter concerning the chapel.Footnote 37
The dean's was ‘a post evidently created to receive this authority’Footnote 38 from the chancellor, who had held it thitherto. Even thereafter, the chancellor would remain the official through whom the monarch exercised visitatorial functions over his chapels and peculiars, which would eventually evolve into the Lord Chancellor's general visitatorial jurisdiction over all eleemosynary corporations of the crown's foundation.
When the chancellor emerges clearly into history and his functions are described, the production of state documentation takes up only half of his portfolio. His other department was the chapel royal. Therefore, to search for an Anglo-Saxon chancellor as such is to make a fatally anachronistic assumption. Rather, if the Anglo-Norman chancery evolved from the Anglo-Saxon chapel, the Anglo-Norman chancellor must have evolved from the Anglo-Saxon head chaplain and so it is such a head chaplain who must be identified.
The reliquary and the archive
Too little is known of the structure of the Anglo-Saxon chapel to be sure that there was an identifiable position of ‘head chaplain’. Indeed, ‘chapel’ itself is a term best avoided. It would perhaps be better to speak of ‘household clergy’, for ‘chapel’, like ‘chancery’, carries anachronistically corporate connotations.
Royal households had long included priests. The Merovingian court educated clerics, who maintained worship in the palace oratory, advised the king and occasionally were rewarded with bishoprics.Footnote 39 By the Carolingian period, a decline in lay education had added secretarial work (originally undertaken by laymen) to their duties.Footnote 40 Not all royal priests served in the itinerant household. Some were stationed at particular royal residences. When Charlemagne built a church dedicated to St Mary in his palace at Aachen,Footnote 41 he founded a college to serve it and deposited his most important relics in their altar.Footnote 42 From 972, one of the German king's chaplains was made provost (or abbot) of the college of Aachen,Footnote 43 though he was an absentee, continuing to serve in the itinerant court chapel,Footnote 44 which was under no diocese and had no fixed endowments and (except the archchaplain) little fixed structure.Footnote 45
As with the chancellorship, so information on the organisation of royal household clergy is relatively abundant for continental courts but frustratingly lacking for the Anglo-Saxon. None the less, there are faint indications of a hierarchy among the Anglo-Saxon household clergy and these implications tie in beautifully with one aspect of the chancellor's role as described in the Consitutio. The office of chaplain-keeper of the relics appears to be anticipated by a pre-Conquest class of chaplain which was responsible for the king's reliquary. King Alfred's biographer Asser reports that the king devised a candle-clock to illuminate the holy relics ‘which the king always had with him everywhere’.Footnote 46 It was his capellani who had to make these candles.Footnote 47 Asser's choice of the word ‘capellanus’, rather than ‘presbyter’ or ‘sacerdos’, is significant. The word had developed in mid eighth-century France, where St Martin's cappa, the most prized of the royal relics, gave the name ‘capella’ to the entire collection. The court priests designated to care for the relics became known as ‘capellani’, so ‘capella’ passed from the reliquary itself to the body of priests who tended it and thence to any church in which the reliquary was temporarily stored on the royal progresses.Footnote 48
That Asser was aware of the special meaning of ‘capellanus’ is confirmed by his description of Alfred's priests Æthelstan and Werwulf as ‘sacerdotes et capellanos’,Footnote 49 which would have been tautological if ‘capellanus’ did not imply something more than a private sacerdos. Æthelstan and Werwulf were not only Alfred's chaplains in the modern sense but also his capellani, the keepers of the royal reliquary. Asser also calls the priests who made the candle-clock ‘capellani’, indicating that this particular duty was not a deviation from these priests’ regular rota of functions but was an accretion to a routine responsibility for the king's reliquary that was a defining part of their role at court. King Alfred not only had a collection of relics but he had also a special group of priests entrusted with its custody.
This deduction is explicitly corroborated by the will of King Eadred (946–55), by which he bequeathed ‘to each of my mass-priests whom I have put in charge of my relics 50 mancuses of gold and five pounds in pence; and to each of the other priests five pounds’.Footnote 50 ‘Preost’ was the Old English word for clergyman (hence the specification ‘messepreost’ for priests in the proper sense), so it is unclear whether the priests of the household here denoted were all relic-keepers (with the generic oþerran preosta being only the minor clergy), or only some of the priests were relic-keepers (in which case the phrase ‘þæra oþerran preosta’ would include the rest of the mass-priests). Since the king spoke of custody of the relics as a special appointment within his gift, one suspects that the latter reading is the correct one but either way the fact remains that the only distinction which Eadred made between his household clerics is between those who kept the relics and those who did not. The relic-keepers were obviously of a higher status than the other clerics (apparently they had to be in priests’ orders, automatically putting them in the higher tier), so, if there were an identifiable head chaplain, he would have been one of them. The Anglo-Norman chancellor's association with a chaplain-keeper of the relics suggests that, if there was an Anglo-Saxon proto-chancellor, it is among these relic-keepers, if anywhere, that he is to be found.
Relics were not the only things that this reliquary contained. It is highly likely that, once land-grants had become regular, kings maintained an archive or register of such grants, in order to know what land was still bookland.Footnote 51 The earliest explicit evidence for such an archive is in an agreement between King Egbert and Archbishop Ceolnoth.Footnote 52 Two copies were made of the agreement, one kept ‘with the charters of Christ Church’Footnote 53 and the other ‘with the documents of their [Egbert's and Æthelwulf's] heritage’.Footnote 54 This proves that the West Saxon kings had an archive by 838 and had had for some generations.
Although this evidence does not locate the archive, it seems reasonable to assume that it had always been a department of the royal reliquary.Footnote 55 It was a long-established custom of the Anglo-Saxons to associate documents with sacred things, as a way of consecrating them. Charters were often kept in or even transcribed into gospel-books.Footnote 56 If the king's priests themselves served as scribes, they would have been the obvious custodians to whom to entrust the relics of written government.
Archive and reliquary are first explicitly associated in the late tenth century, in a cyrograph confirming the will of one Æthelric of Bocking.Footnote 57 A note at the end of the cyrograph announces that three copies of it existed: one kept at Christ Church, Canterbury, one by Æthelric's widow and ‘oðer æt þæs cinges haligdome’.Footnote 58 There are three other similar examples (four, if the spurious no. 981 in Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon charters, is included).Footnote 59 One is a will, one of the three copies of which ‘is mid þise kinges halidome’.Footnote 60 Another is an agreement between Bishop Wulfwig and Earl Leofric over a Lincolnshire monastery: ‘an is mid ðæs kinges haligdome’.Footnote 61 The Liber benefactorum of Ramsey AbbeyFootnote 62 provides another example. Between 1050 and 1056 Ralph, earl of Hereford, granted a cyrograph to the abbey, which was approved by a royal assembly and made in three parts: ‘One part of the writing remained, by the king's command, in his chapel with his relics of the saints.’Footnote 63
Special attention must be paid to a glossary, based on the glossaries of Ælfric of Eynsham (c. 950–c. 1020), written in the margins of a manuscript of the Excerptiones de Prisciano in the early eleventh century. This source bears the unique distinction of being the only Anglo-Saxon text to refer explicitly to the office of chancellor. It contains the passage:
Scrinium was the term used in the Roman Empire for the secretarial departmentsFootnote 65 and the glossarist neatly falls into line with this by equating scrinium with cancellaria. He also, however, seems aware of the two literal meanings of scrinium as either ‘chest of books’ or ‘reliquary’ and conveniently comprehends both by the coining of hordfæt (treasure-chest). His arrangement of the material thus implies that the functions of a chancellor (this, rather than a department of charter-production, being the contemporary meaning of ‘cancellaria’), included the custody of relics and books, which beautifully complements the picture that has built up of royal clergy who doubled as secretaries and who stored an archive of their productions with their reliquary, under the care of the most senior of their number. It is somewhat frustrating, therefore, to find the glossarist eschewing the opportunity to give the Old English title for this official by translating ‘cancellarius’. Instead, he glosses its synonym (or so he believes it to be), ‘scriniarius’, with the seemingly inappropriate translation ‘burþen’.
Bur can mean a whole household but in this context the preferable interpretation seems to be a private chamber. St Pelagia rejects the Devil's blandishments by declaring herself to be ‘in Cristes brydbure’.Footnote 66 Hrothgar spent the night in a brydbure.Footnote 67 King Cynewulf visited his mistress in gebærum.Footnote 68 Ælfric had St Bartholomew meet King Polymius in þæs cinges bure,Footnote 69 a translation of the original Passio's cubiculum.Footnote 70 The tenth-century Old English Apollonius of Tyre Footnote 71 translates the cubiculum in which Antiochus's daughter sleeps as ‘bur’.Footnote 72 Arcestrates's daughter is also to be found in a bur (an expansion on the original).Footnote 73
By the end of the tenth century, a senior tier of household priests had charge of the king's reliquary, with which was stored an archive. The junior household priests are believed to have been responsible for writing the documents in the first place. The Abingdon glossarist could equate the cancellarius with the scriniarius because the keeper (or keepers) of relics and archives (the scriniarius) was also in a position of seniority (perhaps even of official control) over the clerics who wrote state documentation. In other words, the scriniarius was the cancellarius. However, if this was so, why did the Abingdon glossarist gloss cancellarius or scriniarius not as cinges messepreost but as burþen?
The burþen as chamberlain
Apart from this one ambiguous glossary, all evidence that mentions burþenas makes them chamberlains (and apparently laymen), a more literal interpretation of the word and a more natural meaning than chancellor or chaplain. One of the earlier glosses of the Abingdon manuscript glosses burþen as ‘cubicularius’ and bedþen as ‘camerarius’,Footnote 74 while another glossaryFootnote 75 puts them vice-versa.Footnote 76
Titstan and Winstan, cubicularii of King Edgar, are described in the endorsements of certain charters that he granted to them as burþen.Footnote 77 Winstan was also granted another charter as camerarius Footnote 78 and the same year another charter was granted to the camerarius Æthelsige,Footnote 79 who may be the Ælfsige burþen who appears tucked away in a corner of a charter surviving in its original form.Footnote 80 There is no implication that any of these men was a priest. In The Battle of Maldon, Eadweard is described as Ealdorman Byrhtnoth's burþen.Footnote 81 Clearly, Eadweard was not a priest, so he cannot have been custodian of Byrhtnoth's reliquary. Ælfwold, bishop of Crediton, willed his bed-clothes to his burþenon,Footnote 82 clearly implying that they were servants of his bedchamber, not of his reliquary.
The Abingdon glossarist, by equating burþen with scriniarius and scriniarius with cancellarius, seems to be saying that this secular chamberlain was custodian of the reliquary and archive, in contradiction of all other evidence, which clearly linked the reliquary with the king's priests, but to explain this away peremptorily as simply a mistake would be precipitate, for he is not completely alone in this understanding of arrangements. Two documents do state that they were kept not in the royal reliquary but in the treasury. A will transcribed in the Liber Eliensis Footnote 83 reports that ‘These things are recorded in a document written out in triplicate. There is one at Ely, another is in the king's treasury [thesauris] and Leofflæd [the testatrix] possesses the third.’Footnote 84
The Ramsey Liber benefactorum records a dispute over the will of Ailwin the Black, a benefactor of the abbey, which was settled by royal arbitration in 1049, when ‘the king decreed that everything should be declared for the remembrance of those to come in English letters … and that half of the same writing [i.e. a cyrograph] should be kept diligently in the treasury [gazophylacio] … by Hugelin his chamberlain’.Footnote 85 Hugelin was definitely not a chancellor or chaplain. He appears (as Hugo) in the Domesday Book as ‘camerarius regis Edwardi’Footnote 86 and in one of Edward's chartersFootnote 87 as ‘regis camerarius’, simultaneously with Regenbald regis sigillarius. Yet he was a burþen. A forged writ in favour of Ramsey Abbey, purportedly of 1053, claims the attestation of Hugelin cubicularius, rendered in the purported Old English original burðeines.Footnote 88 This apparently contradicts all previous evidence (including that of the Liber itself), which put archival material in the reliquary.
The treasury and the archive
Was the royal archive kept in the reliquary by the king's priests, or in the treasury by the burþen? There are six genuine sources which say where their copies were kept. Of these, four state that they were kept in the reliquary: two wills,Footnote 89 an agreement between a bishop and an earlFootnote 90 and a grant to Ramsey Abbey,Footnote 91 the first three being contemporary and vernacular (‘cinges haligdome’) and the last post-Conquest and Latin (‘in ejus capella cum reliquiis'. By contrast, the only two sources to state that documents were kept in the treasury are neither contemporary nor vernacular.Footnote 92 Again, it would be tempting to assume that these sources, being as it were outvoted, are simply inaccurate but that would be lazy and would still leave unexplained how this alternative tradition had arisen in the collective memory. Another, more complex explanation must be found.
One possibility is simply that the two arrangements are not diametrically opposed alternatives but that both obtained simultaneously. The nature of any central archive would have been affected by practical considerations. The itinerancy of the royal household would have imposed a limit on the number of treasures (documents, relics or anything else) that could be transported from one royal estate to another. Hence, some historians have rejected the image of an archive that spent most of its time dangling in sacks from horseback over moor and heath in favour of a stationary collection, on which the king would have called when necessary.Footnote 93 There is apparent support for this view in the oldest Vita Dunstani, written around 1001, which records that King Eadred entrusted ‘his most valuable possessions: many land charters, the old treasure of earlier kings, and various riches of his own acquiring’Footnote 94 to various ‘regalium gazarum custodes’,Footnote 95 including Abbot Dunstan, who kept his share at Glastonbury. The king recalled them on his deathbed. It is therefore in principle possible that there were in fact several reliquaries and therefore, possibly, several archives and several custodians. Part of the reliquary (and archive) might have been entrusted to the king's priests, while another part was entrusted to the chamberlain.
This elegant solution, however, is unnecessary, for the evidence that lay chamberlains had a share in the haligdom, however theoretically acceptable an idea, is illusory. Leofflæd's will is the easiest to explain. This text does not introduce the chamberlain but merely says that a copy of the will was kept in the thesauris. The writer, one must remember, was translating a will which would have been written in Old English. Such is the resemblance of the tripartite phrase that the will uses to the phrases in the vernacular documents which are studied above that it is very easy to believe that thesauris is a translation of ‘haligdome’. As thesaurus literally means anything stored, this would not be an inappropriate usage. In fact, it is an established alternative usage. For example, Adomnán states that a stone with curative properties used by St Columba is now kept ‘in thesauris regis’.Footnote 96 Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, describes the office of thesaurarius as one who ‘bears oversight of the windows and all other things which belong to the integrity, utility and preservation of the church and to its service’,Footnote 97 which would have included the reliquary.
Alternatively, the twelfth-century translatorFootnote 98 may have been influenced by contemporary terminology, for thesaurus was the term used for the royal archive from the late eleventh to the thirteenth century.Footnote 99 Evidence from elsewhere in the Liber Eliensis, however, confirms that ‘reliquary’ is indeed what the writer meant, for he records the fabulous tradition that Æthelred ii ‘laid down and granted that the church of Ely … would fulfil the office of chancellor in the royal court … performing service with the reliquaries and other ornaments of the altar’.Footnote 100 The fact that this tradition is almost certainly fictionFootnote 101 is irrelevant. The writer had reason to believe that the office of chancellor involved service with the reliquary. Admittedly, he might simply have extrapolated this from his own time (when the chancellor was associated with the chaplain-keeper of the relics) but the fact that he does not mention the seal or the secretarial functions which characterised the office by then suggests that he must have picked up a genuine recollection of what it meant to be chancellor in Anglo-Saxon times.Footnote 102
The last piece of evidence to consider in this matter is a forged charter of Cnut,Footnote 103 of which three copies were made, one for Christ Church, Canterbury, one for St Augustine's and ‘ðe þridde is inne mid ðæs kynges haligdome’. The Latin version of this document renders this as ‘thesauro regis cum reliquiis sanctorum’. This evidence finally and explicitly confirms that thesauris was an acceptable translation of haligdome and there can be no doubt that the translation of Leofflæd's will intends it in that sense.
Like the compiler of the Liber Eliensis, the Ramsey Chronicler apparently understood that documents were kept with the relics in the chapel, for he would say so quite explicitly only two chapters on from his putting the cyrograph in the gazophylacio, presumably a word lifted or translated from the cyrograph's endorsement. Significantly, though gazophylacium is used abundantly in the Vulgate Bible, it is never used for the king's treasury. Ezekiel xliv.19 says that the priests of the Jerusalem Temple left their vestments in the ‘gazophylacio sanctuarii’ and this is the place where the prophet is met by the priests in xlvi.19. In 2 Kings xii.10, a gazophylacium was placed beside the altar to receive money, which was counted by the ‘scriba regis’. Finally, in Jeremiah xxxvi.12, the eponymous prophet ‘Descendit in domum regis, ad gazophylacium scribae.’Footnote 104 In all these cases, gazophylacium is used to translate the Hebrew lishkah, which generally denotes rooms used for religious purposes, not a treasury.Footnote 105 The closest it comes to that meaning is when referring to the temple's own treasury. One cannot help but notice that on the only occasion when the word is used in a royal context it refers to the office of the royal scribe.
The most explicit and detailed description of the function of the gazophilacium is from Nehemiah xiii.4, 5, when Elishiab, ‘qui fuerat positus in gazophylacio domus Dei’,Footnote 106 made a ‘gazofilacium grande’, in which were stored meat offerings, frankincense, tithes, wine, oil and the sacred vessels. In his commentary on Nehemiah, Bede summarises the gazophylacium thus: ‘gazofilacium is that in which would be placed those things which … were necessary for the use of the ministers’.Footnote 107 Gazophylacium clearly means a vestry and sacristy, not a treasury.
While it is unlikely that King Edward's clerks would have known the Hebrew, they might still have realised (as Bede did) the sense in which gazophylacium was used in the Bible and its use as the working-room of the king's scribe would have made it even more appropriate for their purposes. In the later Middle Ages, however, it was used in the sense of a treasury.Footnote 108 If the clerks had used gazophylacium in their 1049 cyrograph, they must have meant haligdome by it but the Ramsey Chronicler would misconstrue it as referring to the treasury. Knowing that the treasury would have been under Hugelin's care, he interpolated that detail himself.
Thus, all sources, both contemporary and late, English and Latin, are in fact unanimous: the royal archive was kept in the royal reliquary, so under the custody of the king's priests, whose job it was to write these documents in the first place. There still, however, lurks unresolved a potential complication raised by the possibility of several reliquaries stationed at different locations. To leave these separate reliquaries mewed up in their separate minsters avoids, rather than answers, the question of whether or not there was a central archive and, if so, in whose care it was.
An aversion to the notion of an itinerant reliquary is unfounded. It is in fact already established that capellae (i.e. reliquaries) were transported on horseback, at least by the pope and by the German king, on their progresses in the later Middle Ages.Footnote 109 Walter Reynolds, archbishop of Canterbury (1313–28), transported the contents of his chapel in nine chests, amongst which were distributed vestments, books (on both religious and secular subject-matter) and charters of the archbishopric.Footnote 110 Abbot Dunstan is described as transporting King Eadred's charters on horseback.Footnote 111
That Anglo-Saxon kings observed a similar practice is made quite apparent by Asser, who expressly states that King Alfred always had relics with him (though these may have been just a selection, not necessarily his entire set).Footnote 112 One of the reasons why he devised the horn screen for his candle-clocks was because the exposed candles were constantly being fanned by the wind that blew ‘through the doors of the churches or through the numerous cracks in the windows, walls, wall-panels and partitions, and likewise through the thin material of the tents’.Footnote 113 Since Asser is talking about the king's relics, these descriptions of their locations must be heeded. The churches to which he alludes are churches on royal estates, where the relics would have been stationed during the household's period of residence.Footnote 114 The king would have taken some of them with him to his bur, which Asser seems to describe next. Most importantly for the present inquiry, however, some were displayed in tents, i.e. in a temporary chapel (Asser describes King Æthelred i hearing divine service in just such a facilityFootnote 115 ) while the household was in transit.
No matter into how many different sets the total collection of relics might have been divided and no matter how far they might have been dispersed, a nucleus at least remained on the move with the king all the time and this itinerant reliquary must have been in someone's care. The question is, was it in the care of the priests, or in the care of the chamberlain? Most sources that consider this question assign the reliquary (and, by implication, the archive) to the king's priests. The exception of the Ramsey Liber benefactorum's attribution of the duty to Hugelin is, for the reasons already expounded, of dubious authority but the Abingdon glossary, the only Anglo-Saxon source to discuss the cancellarius as such, commands special attention and it equates the cancellarius not with a cynges messepreost but with the burþen, which meant ‘chamberlain’. Can this remaining inconsistency be explained?
The Abingdon conundrum resolved
Ælfric of Eynsham himself was certainly familiar with the term burþen. Despite the interpretation of his imitator, his own glosses used it to mean cubicularius. However, another of his works does suggest a slightly different interpretation. In his homily on the Book of Esther, Ælfric calls Ahasuerus’ seven servants his ‘burþegnes’ and he later uses ‘burcnihtas’ and ‘cnihtas’ interchangeably for them.Footnote 116 These are mistranslations of the Vulgate's ‘septem eunuchis, qui in conspectu ejus ministrabant’.Footnote 117 He similarly refers to the eunuchs from the Book of Judith as ‘burþenas’.Footnote 118 This implies that burþen could mean any close and intimate servant, rather than literally a chamber-servant.
This paper's initial assumption was that the Abingdon glossarist was saying ‘chancellor, or treasurer, means burþen’. An alternative reading could be that what he was really writing was that ‘chancellor, or treasurer, is a burþen’. In other words, there were several officials who could be described as burþenas. The suggestion now is that, rather than choosing between ‘chamberlain’ and ‘chancellor’, one should instead interpret burþen as meaning more vaguely ‘minister of the crown’ or ‘household servant’. Indeed, the glossarist's translation of primiscrinius as yldest burþen implies the existence of juniors. An alternative reading would therefore be that the cancellarius or scriniarius was one of several burþenas. The only other kind of scriniarius (and therefore, perhaps, another kind of burþen) mentioned by the glossarist is the sacriscriniarius, the cyrcweard.
The word ‘cyrcweard’ appears in only a few Old English sources but they are enough to give a clear view of what the term meant. A line from the Regularis concordie Anglicae nationis monachorum Footnote 119 reads ‘Now, while the children are entering the church, let the edituus sound the first gong.’Footnote 120 A contemporary gloss supplies cyrcwerd for edituus,Footnote 121 a word which in classical Latin meant the keeper of a temple. In Bishop Wærferth's translation of Gregory's Dialogorum libri quatuor, Constantius, who ‘served acting in the office of resident’Footnote 122 in St Stephen's Church near Ancona, is described as ‘se breac þær and þeowode cyricweardas þenunge’.Footnote 123 His duty, of lighting the candles in the church, is reminiscent of that of Alfred's priests in making his candle-clock.
Relics were also the responsibility of a cyrcweard. The Liber vitae of the New Minster, Winchester, lists the halidom (i.e. relics) kept in the scrin made by the ciricweard Ælwold.Footnote 124 Ælfric of Eynsham describes the cyrcweard of St Mercurius’ church in Caesarea as custodian of the saint's weapons, producing them for inspection on demand.Footnote 125 From these examples it is abundantly clear that cyrcweard was the appropriate term for a keeper of relics.
It is possible that Anglo-Saxon kings had a cyrcweard at court. The lack of reference to one is not strong evidence to the contrary. Scattered references affirm that kings had hræglþegnas, discþegnas, byrlan, horderan and (of course) burþenas, yet these titles are seldom used in charters, their holders usually being identified by their rank as ealdormen or thegns.Footnote 126 If there were a cyrcweard in the royal household, then it must have been he who kept the reliquary and archive and so approximated to the cancellarius. It may seem perplexing that the glossarist does not therefore simply equate cancellarius and cyrcweard directly but it must be remembered that he was not really glossing cancellarius at all but scriniarius, an office which he believed was synonymous with that of cancellarius. He had come to this conclusion because of the synonymy (or so he believed) of scrinium and cancellaria.
There is a certain amount to be said for this identification. Scrinium is clearly related to Old English scrin, a connection which is unlikely to have slipped past the glossarist, for an earlier glossary in the manuscript glosses Arca, uel scrinium as scrin.Footnote 127 Scrin is almost always used in religious contexts, including as a reliquary. Ælfric called the Ark of the Covenant, the greatest of all reliquaries, ‘Đæt halige scrin’Footnote 128 and devoted a section of his sermon De falsis diis Footnote 129 to its adventures among the Philistines.Footnote 130 He introduces it as ‘arcam Domini … þæt is Drihtnes scrin’Footnote 131 and refers to it as a ‘scrin’ throughout. He even describes its contents as ‘heofonlican haligdome’.Footnote 132
This is one of several instances suggesting synonymy between haligdom and scrin (which is particularly important in the light of the Abingdon glossarist's identification of a scriniarius with a cancellarius and of the association of senior royal chaplains with the king's haligdom). Ælfgyfu wills to Winchester Old Minster ‘hire scrin mid hiræ haligdomæ’.Footnote 133 The Liber vitae of the New Minster uses ‘halidom’ for relics and ‘scrin’ for their containers.Footnote 134 If the king's cyrcweard of the early eleventh century kept the king's scrin and was also head of the king's priests, then he would approximate quite neatly to the contemporary Frankish and German cancellarii.
However, this still does not explain why the glossarist did not gloss cyrcweard and cancellarius directly. He came close, by glossing cyrcweard as sacriscriniarius and then connecting that word, through scriniarius, to cancellarius but he still forwent the opportunity to equate them directly. Why?
The reason appears to be that, like the Ramsey Chronicler, who mistakenly assigned the gazophylacium to Hugelin's care, the Abingdon glossarist attributed to the Anglo-Saxon king's scrinium a wider meaning than was appropriate to the context. Despite the word's premier religious meaning, he glossed it as hordfæt, an ambiguous coinage which (like gazophylacium) can cover both secular and religious treasures. The earlier gloss, which equated scrinium with arca, may have been responsible for this confusion, as arca too can be used in both secular and religious contexts.
The Abingdon glossarist understood (probably correctly) that the haligdom in which the king's senior priests kept his reliquary and archive was called in Latin scrinium. He also understood that an alternative Latin term for scrinium was arca, which had a double meaning. Knowing that and feeling adventurous, he coined hordfæt, which has the same two-fold meaning as arca, for scrinium; but this was a crucial error, for, although it comprehends the religious meaning of scrinium (and therefore can, with some generosity of interpretation, cover cancellaria), it also has secular connotations inappropriate to either word. It appears to have been this factor which prevented a direct equation of cancellarius with cyrcweard. A cyrcweard could keep the treasures of a religious hordfæt but not those of a secular hordfæt. So, the glossarist translated cancellarius and scriniarius with the safely generic burþen, reserving cyrcweard for a gloss which specifically restricts itself to religious uses.
By trying to gloss too many things at once, the glossarist obfuscated the meanings of all of them. He was correct in what he wanted to say but tried to say too much at once, making more connections than the analogy allowed and so he rendered needlessly complicated something that should have been simple. This is a common vice among scholars.
The Lord Chancellor's office is, in origin, ecclesiastical. By the mid-tenth century and probably long before, the priests who served Anglo-Saxon kings doubled as a chancery. The senior priests had special responsibility for the royal reliquary, which doubled as an archive. If there was a specific title for these men, then it was cyrcweard.Footnote 135 At some point, these senior priests were consolidated into a single official, sooner or later known by the continental title cancellarius.Footnote 136 This office was inherited by the Norman kings, who ensured that the new Latin title stuck. The office becomes clearly visible in 1136, by which time the chancellor's functions had ballooned to such an extent that his department had been divided in two. One part remained the chapel proper, where the reliquary was kept. The chancery was now semi-detached from the chapel and would grow into a separate department. As a hangover from his early development, the chancellor remained responsible for both until the fourteenth century, when the Dean of the Chapels Royal finally divorced him from his original department.
The office of chancellor would change a great deal from that day to this. Traditionalists may be reluctant to acknowledge the Rt Hon Michael Gove mp as Lord Chancellor on the grounds that he does not sit upon a woolsack but neither, of course, did his very earliest predecessors. Instead, one can take comfort from the Public Records Act of 1958, under which the Lord Chancellor (in an unwitting reversion to Anglo-Saxon practice) was, after centuries of separation, once again made responsible for the National Archives. The Abingdon glossarist, one suspects, would have approved.
