Hearne's 'Fragment' and the Long Prehistory of English Memoirs

• Published in: The English historical review Vol. CXXIV; no. 509; p. 811
• Main Author: Morgan, D A L
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Oxford Publishing Limited (England) 01.08.2009
• Subjects: Autobiographies; European history; Politics; Social conditions & trends; England
• ISSN: 0013-8266; 1477-4534
• DOI: 10.1093/ehr/cep183

By the mid-sixteenth century, in much of Europe, a genre of 'memoirs' had established its appeal to the reading-public, thanks not least to the writings of fifteenth-century eye-witness participants of court-life and politics. Such developing reading-tastes can be found in sixteenth-century England as elsewhere; why then did the writing of English memoirs fail to take hold until the later seventeenth century? Throughout the sixteenth century in England the chronicle held its own, despite its perceived inadequacies and lack of such participant, eye-witness testimony; the 'parasite genres' were slow to displace it as the vehicle of narrative record. That something other than English cultural peculiarity caused this retardation is suggested by the text written towards the end of his long life by Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk (d. 1524), who in his younger days had served as ecuyer echanson to Charles the Bold and as esquire of the Body to Edward IV. Had it survived in more than fragmentary form, that text would have provided for Yorkist England the type of political memoir which his fellow-courtiers Olivier de la Marche and Philippe de Commynes provide for contemporary Valois Burgundy and France. What that text, aimed at offering a royal household servant's eye-witness recollections of Edward IV's reign, would not have provided, even had it survived complete, was Thomas Howard's memoirs of the course of events in and after 1483: even a generation later, the violent uncertainties of English regime change, actual or prospective, evidently rendered a protagonist's written reminiscences inadvisable--dictating instead a prudential reticence which left England for long 'the land without memoirs'. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]