The consideration of the role of books in medieval RPG worlds is hampered by an outdated conception of the extent of literacy in the period. Most settings that I am familiar with tacitly assume or explicitly mandate that levels of literacy in society are miniscule - somewhere between 5% - 10% of the population. In this, they reflect the old-fashioned view that medieval men and women were almost all illiterate. In some systems and settings such as WHFRP this is given solid mechanical expression by requiring that a character possess an appropriate skill in order to be able to read or write at all and constraining the ability of characters to access the relevant skill(s). Here I will indulge in a mild heresy and criticize the renowned The Enemy Within campaign for WHFRP which severely limits the characters’ ability to possess any literary ability and then makes several key plot points almost entirely contingent on the party’s ability to read letters and correspondence. This is less than ideal.
Of course, the degree of literacy will vary from setting to setting. In games set in a world analagous to Anglo-Saxon or high medieval England it might be appropriate for the vast majority of people to be unlettered. Not should we be misled into the equal but opposite error that late medieval England was a land of highly literate laymen - there is a very good reason why religious and secular art and architecture was designed to be pedagogical in nature. But any world that is modelled on England from c.1300 onward in terms of social, political and economic development should probably take in to account the extent to which these societies demanded a degree of literacy in order to function. The sheer volume of paperwork generated by the law courts, the church, the public and private administration of land, government, trade and commerce means that, while the formal act of writing might still largely be a skill confined to trained scribes, a much broader level of reading ability was necessary to the working of the world. From this it follows that written texts in such settings should not be the sole prerogative of mages and priests but, rather, should feature in many other contexts.
In the medieval world a book was a precious object. When every word had to be written out by hand using ink carefully crafted from sometimes rare ingredients, and when every page was the end result of the long and costly process of the production of parchment, then books become time-consuming and expensive to make. Most of the renowned surviving medieval codices such as the Bury Bible or the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry are objectively valuable items both in terms of rarity and artistic merit. To the extent that books in quasi-medieval RPG settings are considered in any depth at all, I think the focus tends to be on these jewelled masterpieces and that is, to some degree, understandable. These real-world volumes are perhaps to be viewed as the equivalent of the tomes associated with magicians and clerics - precious spellbooks and luxurious religious tracts - in conventional medieval RPG settings. But, tempting as it is, I will forbear to wax lyrical about the treasures of the world’s manuscript libraries because the subjects of this post are the orphans of these repositories - the tatty, the scrappy, the ugly and the commonplace which, I would argue, actually have at least as much utility and interest as a source for RPG material than their more well-known and illustrious cousins.
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The commonplace book has a long history that goes back to classical Greece and Rome and was a more or less constant up to the modern day, where it’s equivalent is probably a certain species of blog. It can be loosely defined as a volume constructed of a number of disparate texts bound together. These texts could include poetry, food recipes, medical receipts, collections of laws and statutes, extracts from chronicles, biblical texts, saints’ lives, prophecies, prayers, spells, proverbs and aphorisms, papal and episcopal orders, royal writs, tables of the stars, the moon and tides, sermons, charters and legal documents and notes taken from a wide variety of longer texts. The only governing principle for inclusion was that the text had some utility or interest for the compiler. A lawyer’s commonplace book might consist of copies of parlamentary statutes, specimens of writs needed to progress cases through the courts, a calendar of the term dates when the Westminster courts were in session. A commonplace book collated in a monastery could contain copies of papal and episcopal documents and royal charters relating to the privileges of the house, extracts from court rolls relating to the abbey’s legal disputes, the life and miracles of the monastery’s patron saint and chronicles of the church and the world. A rural priest’s commonplace book might contain a calendar of the local saints’ days and accounts of their lives and miracles, sermons, biblical texts, orders and letters from his bishop, and memoranda of which parishioners owed what in tithes. Both monks and parish vicars also displayed a keen interest in magic and sorcery.
The process of assembling these disparate texts within a single volume was facilitated by the way in which books were compiled as physical objects. Pre-modern methods of book production made them ‘modular’ as items. Leaves of parchment were laid one atop the other and the whole sheaf was folded vertically along the centre line and stitched together to form a booklet of pages called a quire. Each page was called a folio and each folio had a ‘recto’ and a ‘verso’ side and so, unlike modern books, a manuscript did not always have individual page numbers, but rather a single folio was numbered once on the ‘front’ of the page and the entire two sides of text were described as f.1r (1st folio, recto) and f.1v (first folio, verso). Several quires could then be sewn together to form a continuous writing surface for a book-length text or a series of discrete pamphlets, each containing a particular text, bound togther between covers to form the classic codex. This meant that a book could be disassembled with relative ease and its constituent quires removed and stitched into another volume, allowing the creation of a collection of texts written at various times in different hands for other purposes but now brought together to serve the new owner’s requirements and interests.
What follows is an examination of three actual medieval commonplace books held in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. The first was compiled by a London merchant c.1350, the second in an Augustinian priory at various times between c.1300 - c.1400 and the third is a 14th century manuscript of edifying and educational material perhaps intended for a layman who was interested in the history of England. Between them, they offer a broad (though far from exhaustive) sweep of the sort of texts that could be found in medieval portmanteau books and which will serve as exemplars of the sorts of volumes that GMs and players can introduce - mutatits mutandis - into their worlds.
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Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS37 is a fairly typical example of a portmanteau manuscript assembled by a prosperous and politically engaged man of busines - very probably a London merchant - sometime after 1343. A list of its contents can be used to re-construct the compiler’s interest in astonomy, astrology, bureauracy, accountancy, trade, commerce, law and foreign policy with a particular emphasis on London and south-east England. It is a profoundly practical book when viewed from the perpective of a 14th century man for whom astrology and prophecy were perhaps as real and immediately useful as knowing the dates when the royal Exchequer was open for business or an account of wool prices and weights and measures. The interest in affairs in France, Scotland and Ireland surely reflects the compiler’s commercial concerns with the ways in which war and peace affected international trade between England and her neighbours.
A Theory of the Planets
Notes on Astronomical Conjunctions, 1306-1315
Calendar of Exchequer Term Days
Treatise on Drawing up Accounts
The Mathematical Treatise Algorismus
Astronomical Tables
Zodiac Predictions
Treatise on Atrological Medicine
Gazetteer of England (castles, abbeys, priories)
Gazetteer of England (Suffolk, Berkshire, Hertfordshire)
Statutes, Writs
Proceedings of the London Eyre, 1321
List of Values of English Wool (per sack, by county)
A Petition Against Extortion from Lincoln, Derby, Leicester, etc.
Writ 'non molestando'
The Law of the Liberty of Lex Marisci in Kent
Names of the Sheriffs of Scotland
Ordinance for the King's Household
Terms of the Surrender of Berwick
Prophecy of the Conquest of Ireland
Material Relating to Ireland (customs, fees, services, exchequer days)
The Truce of Malestroit between Edward III of England and Philip VI of France 19 January 1343
Treatise on Weights and Measures
Treatise on the Method of Measuring Land
CCCC MS59 was almost certainly compiled largely at the mid-twelfth century Augustinian foundation of Merton Priory in Surrey at various times between c.1300 and c.1400. At some point after the dissolution of the monasteries in the mid-1530s it made its way into the collection of Archbishop Matthew Parker, but not before someone who was worried about its contents in the politicially charged circumstances of the English break with Rome had taken great care to write on one of the flyleaves “Yf ther be any nayme of the bysschope of Rome or ells any other matter apertayning to his usurpide powre in this bowke contayned I doe vtterly renownce them.” This caution was perhaps merited, given that the book contains a great deal of material supporting the power of the pope in England that was so hotly disputed during the English Reformation. In this period, many were highly motivated to forget that, 300 years earlier, King John had surrendered England to the pope and had received it back as a papal vassal.
The various documents appear in a manuscript that is something very close to an epitome of the commonplace documents of an English monastic house. It shows a great deal of interest in eccleisatical and secular history with a number of lists of emperors and popes, senior church figures, kings and local officials. There are also the various annals of the Britons, Saxons, Danes and Normans or of Merton itself. The information in these texts was important because it allowed the monastery correctly to date events and documents that it might receive, acquire or even - in some cases - forge. This also explains the retention in the codex of a number of papal bulls, royal charters, letters, writs and other formal written instruments. Some such material would be kept because it was directly relevant to defining the house’s rights and privileges, but others might be ‘specimens’ that were used as templates when drafting similar documents for the same purpose - whether genuine or otherwise. Any landholder would want copies of royal statutes that often set out the rights and responsibilites of landlords and the legal processes by which they were enforced. Of course, being the product of a religious institution, it is not surprising to find some theological material, but it is interesting to note that two of those in CCCC MS59 - the treatise against schismatics and John XXII’s bull condemning the Imperial theologian Jean de Jandun - reflect the manuscript’s general theme of upholding the authority of the pope that was so dangerous in the 16th century. Also interesting are the ocassional oddities and curiosities such as - in this case - the preposterously far-fetched letter purporting to be from Alexander the Great to his tutor Aristotle descibing the marvels of India.
The Chronicle Imago Mundi (Books 1-2)
Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle on his Travels inIndia
Ecclesiastical Lists of Cardinals, Archbishops etc
Catalogue of Roman Pontiffs from St Peter to Nicholas III
On Schismatics in the Roman Church
Catalogue of Archbishops of Canterbury from St Augustine to Simon Meopham
Catalogue of Roman Pontiffs and Emperors to Innocent III
List of Synods
Chronicle of Roman Emperors
Annals of the Deeds of the Britons, Saxons, Danes and Normans to the year 1216
The Annals of Merton From the Arrival of the Normans to the Year 1242
Services owed by the Barons of the Cinque Ports to the Crown
List of Wardens of Dover Castle
Confirmaton of the 1225 re-issues of Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forests
Decree of the Church for the peace of the realm and the liberty of the church, 1253
Letter of Innocent IV to the English bishops in answer to their letters concerning the Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forests
Two Bulls of Alexander IV Confirming the Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forests
Bull of Innocent IV to the Clergy of the Province of Canterbury Concerning the Authority of the Archbishop
Bull of Innocent IV that no Archbishop or Suffragan Shall Prevent Appeals to Rome
Charter of Liberties Granted to the County of Surrey by Edward I
The Law of Oléron (The law of the sea)
Evidences of the Liberty and Immunity of the Church of St Martin, Dover
Statutes of Marlborough, Westminster I, Gloucester, Merton, Westminster II
Charter of King Athelred to Ealdred, bishop of Cornwall, Granting Episcopal Privileges, 994
Charter of King Cnut to St Mary's Exeter Confirming its Privileges, 1019
Edward the Confessor’s Charter Merging the Dioceses of Devon and Cornwall and Transfering the See to Exeter, 1050
Bull of Pope John Against the Errors of Master John de Senliac (Jean de Jandun) 1326-7
Genealogical Tables Demonstrating the Rights of the English King in France
Writ of Assize Juris Utrum to determine whether land is held by the church
Letter of the Barons to Clement VI, 1244
The Manner of Richard II's Abdication and Henry IV's Election, 1399
Proceedings of the Visitation of Bayham Abbey by William, Abbot of Langdon
Proceedings of the Papal Nuncio against King John
Charter of King John Surrendering England to the Pope as a Vassal
Bull of Innocent III Confirming King John's Charter Concerning Ecclesiastical Elections
Summons to a Provincial Chapter, Incorporating the Copy of a Bull of Benedict XII, 1337
Decree of the Holy Roman Emperor that his election does not require papal confirmation, c.1338
Letter of the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Cistercians concerning tithes
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CCCC MS414 was copied in the 14th century. The great medieval manuscript scholar M.R. James noted the several ‘rather rough’ hands employed in the copying and speculated, on the basis of the style and the text of one of the incipits, that it was produced by a Franciscan in East Anglia. One should never bet against James’ sometimes elliptically expressed hunches abour manuscript provenance, but nothing is known for certain about this codex until it came into Archbishop Parker’s collection in the mid-1500s. We can, however, form some tentative conclusions about who it was intended for based on the texts that it contains.
It is clear that whoever arranged for the book’s compilation did not share the practical and political concerns of the compiler of CCCC MS37 nor the ecclesastical interests of the monks of Merton Priory as collected in CCCC MS59. Instead, the owner of CCCC MS414 was a student of English history and broader European courtly culture. The single longest text in the volume is a copy of Gervase of Tilbury’s Otia Imperiala, a title sometimes translated as Recreation for an Emperor written for the Holy Roman Emperor Otto IV c.1210-14. The work discusses history, geography, natural science, folklore and tales of the fantastic, including the first known account of the supposed ghosts of Wandelbury Camp in Cambridgeshire. For 300 years the Otia Imperiala remained a staple of European ‘mirror literature’ with that genre’s twin concerns for the diverting and the improving. As the medieval equivalent of Reader’s Digest, it does not, in itself, greatly narrow the scope of the volume’s possible readership.
More revealing are the other texts that display the reader’s interest in the history of England and a branch of romatic literature. To take the second subject first, the volume contains versions of both the History of Alexander the Great and the History of Charlemagne and Roland. The legends of Alexander the Great intrigued medieval Englishmen and Europeans more widely because of the combination of stories of martial prowess and the fantastical accounts of North Africa, India and Asia. The Historia of Charlemagne and Roland was falsely attributed to Turpinius, a bishop said to have accompanied Charlemagne during his incursions into Arabic Spain. Like the History of Alexander, it is an account of warfare in an exotic context and was, therefore, a species of chivalric literature of the kind that was of great interest to the lay noblity and gentry.
The final series of texts reveal something very interesting about the compiler. They are a series of accounts of the history of England copied at a time that marks the first great flowering of the notion of a post-Conquest English identity, as distinct from an Anglo-Norman one. The causes are complex and not wholly understood. It was probably a combinaton of the loss of most of the Angevin lands on the continent in the 1200s and the Plantagenet wars of expansion beginning under Edward I in the later 1200s and culminating in the 100 Years’ War from the 1330s. A new national identity was made necessary by the erosion of cultural ties to France and the wartime requirement for patriotism. Famously, one the of most popular texts to explode in popularity in the 1300s was the tale known as the Brut, which told how the Trojan Brutus was cast up on the Island of Albion and conquered the race of giants he found there that would be the progenitors of the English. What we find in CCCC MS414 is not the Brut, but rather a series of texts that tell something very like the same story. There is an account of the siege of Troy, the tale of Aeneas’ flght from the city and eventual arrival in Italy and an account of the giants who were the first inhabstants of England. This is accompanied by the text of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth century History of the Kings of Britain which incorporates the tale of the coming of Brutus - himself a descendant of the Trojan Aeneas - into a narrative that leads on to the invasion of Julius Ceasar and the earliest ancestors of King Arthur.
In almost all of these portmanteau manuscripts there is somethng that stands out as an oddity. In the case of CCCC MS414 it is the Epistola Valerii ad Rufinum - The Letter of Valerius to Rufinus on the Inadvsabilty of Taking a Wife - a text extracted from Walter Map’s De Nugis Curalium - The Trifles of Courtiers. This early 13th century work is a varied collection of anecdotes ranging from tales of ghosts, faeries and demons to miracles and historical accounts of the founding of spiritual orders and the nobility and royal houses of Europe. Why the compiler saw fit to include this particular extract is entirely unclear.
Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia
The History of Alexander the Great
The History of Charlemagane and Roland
The History of the Siege of Troy
The Letter of Valerius to Rufinus on the Inadvisabilty of Taking a Wife extracted from Walter Map’s De Nugis Curalium with the Commentary of John Ridewall
The History of Aeneas’ Arrival in Italy
On the First Inhabtants of England
Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain and the Prophecies of Merlin
It is hoped that the above discussion has demonstated something of the variety of written material that a quasi-medieval world could generate. I will conclude with a few words on how this might have a practical impact on a game in terms of world-building and genre.
Implicit in this whole discussion is the trite assumption that the written word is a reflection of the culture in which and for which it is produced. From this it is a short step to understanding that literature can serve as a tool of world-building on a macro- and a micro-level. In the former case, a culture in an RPG setting can be defined or brought into sharper focus through the incorporation of textual artifacts. It seems to me that a truly developed quasi-medieval RPG setting and culture should be able to answer the questions ‘How do we know who we are?’, ‘Where is our history to be found?’ ‘What happened to make the world the way it is now?’
In medieval England the Brut legend communicated to its readers a sense of who the English were - the descendants of legendary Tojan warriors and giants. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia allowed the English to conceive of themselves as the heirs to King Arthur. The equally popular Polychronicon of Ranulf Higden - described as ‘the best-seller of its age’ - offered an account of English and world history from creation to the reign of Edward III and was perhaps the closest thing that the period had to an ‘agreed’ history of England. The same questions and answers can be asked and answered with respect to many other spheres of activity from religion to medicine, from magic to bureaucracy, from husbandry to the rules of war and romantic love. All of these subjects have one or more texts that explain and define what literate medieval men and women thought about them.
On the micro-level, it is hoped that the previous discussion of particular codices has illustrated how a book can reveal a great deal about its owner. There is a reason why the cliché exists that a person’s books reveal more about them than many other social signals. If a character would learn about an NPC, he could do a lot worse than peruse his or her library. This segues neatly into the question of the relationship between literacy and investigative games.
There are games that are justly renowned as being able to generate a certain species of investigative scenarios - most famously, perhaps, Call of Cthulhu. In part this is a result of the implementation of the BRP system that allows for skills such as Library Use and the Read/Write/Speak Other Language. But the reality is that most systems can, with only a little hacking, be made to imitate these mechanical requirements. Instead, what gives a certain interpretation of classic Call of Cthulhu its unique tone and feel is the centrality - from Lovecraft onwards - of books and manuscripts. I still recall the thrill I had as a young teenager reading the pastiche of the textual history of the Necronomicon in an early edition of the rules. The Eltdown Shards, The Celano Fragments, The Sussex Manuscript, Unaussprechlichen Kulten, The King in Yellow. These evocative titles and their central presence in the fiction conjure a world and almost demand a certain way of discovering more about that world. The entire appeal of forbidden lore, dusty tomes and eldritch codices depends upon the existence and relevance of a culture of books and literacy.
This is why it is almost always a struggle to construct that form of investigative game in quasi-medieval fantasy settings where that literate culture is absent. It is not that D&D or Pathfinder are objectively mechanically unsuited to the genre - it is that the settings in which they are commonly played lack the requisite background assumptions. This is not a call to turn all fantasy games in to ponderous scholarly endeavours. Rather, it is to suggest that if one wants to facilitate the inclusion of those evergreen elements of RPGs - the quest for occult information and the seach for lost answers to current challenges - then it helps to have a world in which books are meaningful objects and not just a casual afterthought as simply ‘those things that a wizard writes his spells in’ and where the written word is more than the rarified preserve of clerics and magicians.