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Heyam, Kit
2020.
The Reputation of Edward II, 1305-1697.
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English History Abridged: John Stow's Shorter Chronicles and Popular History*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2014
Extract
John Stow's abridged chronicles present a short, simplified version of English history that formed an important component of sixteenth-century popular culture. The author was a citizen historian, a self-educated man, whose social status placed him outside the gentry, and a scholar who was closer to medieval traditions than to the New Learning associated with Renaissance humanism. Stow and his chronicles therefore stand apart from the university-educated intellectual elite whose writings shaped the high culture of Elizabethan England. His abridged chronicles, based on his larger Annales of England, offered readers of lower social and economic status a more affordable national history than was available in the larger quarto volumes. This essay considers the character of abridged chronicles, examines Stow's interpretation of a variety of significant topics from the Norman Conquest to the death of Henry VIII, and argues that Stow's work offers valuable insights into the historical understanding of ordinary men and women.
For centuries John Stow, identified in the Dictionary of National Biography as a “chronicler and antiquary,” lived in the shadow of more illustrious contemporaries. Shakespeare preferred Raphael Holinshed's chronicle to Stow's Annales of England as the source for his history plays while William Camden was a scholar of vastly greater erudition to whom the DNB assigned the higher status of “historian.” In contrast to the glittering literati of Elizabethan England, Stow is usually cast in gray, a worthy man of negligible learning who through a lifetime of hard work produced books that were generally accurate but dull.
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Footnotes
*
Earlier versions of this paper were presented to the Western Conference on British Studies at Denver in October 2000 and to a conference on “John Stow (1525–1605) Author, Editor, and Reader” at Oxford in April 2001.
References
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26 The 1598 edition has about the same account of Magna Carta. A fuller account may be found in the Annales of England (1605) where there is a reference to the barons' attack on London and their plundering of Jews' property, pp. 257–58. There is a discussion of the rediscovery of Magna Carta by chroniclers and lawyers during the 16th and 17th centuries in Thompson, Faith, Magna Carta (Minneapolis, 1948)Google Scholar. Thompson, pp. 162–63, notes that Stow's account of the reign of John is based on Robert Fabyan. For the later role of Magna Carta in English education see Heathorn, Stephen, For Home, Country, and Race: Constructing Gender, Class, and Englishness in the Elementary School, 1880–1914 (Toronto, 2000), pp. 62–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Heathorn also stresses the importance of Simon de Montfort, Edward I, and Parliament.
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