Coffee Morning: The Greatest Historian?

Who’s the fairest of them all…?

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A Chronicle illustration of five Canterbury monks espying the "split of the horn of the Moon" and Gervase recording the event.

Just after sunset on 18 June 1178, according to the English monk and chronicler Gervase of Canterbury, five monks watched a new crescent Moon explode into flames. The upper horn ‘split in two’ and a sudden and violent conflagration near the tip sprang up, from which sparks, fire and ‘hot coals’ flew out of its surface. The body of the Moon below ‘writhed like a wounded snake’ before taking on an unsettling ‘blackish appearance’.

What the monastic sky-spotters actually witnessed that night is still hotly debated by astronomers and historians alike, demonstrating the sheer credibility of Gervase’s historical account.

Throughout the High Middle Ages, many monasteries produced their own chronicles with each the responsibility of an individual monk. As one of the most engaging, Matthew Paris often holds first place among the prolific and influential historians of the time (as W. N. Bryant argued in History Today 1969). Yet, at Christ Church Priory, Canterbury, Gervase began not one, but seven historical works in 1180, continuing them until his death in around 1210. And his writing career encompassed some of the most extraordinary events of the age.

Professed as a monk by Archbishop Thomas Becket himself, Gervase attended the murdered prelate’s funeral – indeed, he would describe it, as well as his gruesome slaying, in lurid detail in his Chronica. An acute observer, in his time he noted down assiduously the lives of the Canterbury archbishops, from the arrival of St Augustine to the death of Hubert Walter in 1205, and an account of how Henry I’s plans for the succession fell apart, all the way through to that of Richard I, whilst taking in the wider history of Latin Christendom.

In my opinion, Gervase helped to lay the groundwork for modern historiography, and thus he deserves to be elevated above his more well-known contemporaries to England’s greatest historian.

But that’s just my opinion. Who do you think deserves the title of greatest historian — and why? Post your suggestions below…

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