Anglo-Gascon Aquitaine

This volume contains ten papers from a 2011 conference marking the completion of the first stage of a recent major project to calendar the unpublished Gascon Rolls from 1317 to 1468, with an informative introduction on their significance and the long chequered history of previous attempts to edit them, together with a substantial bibliography of work on Anglo-Gascon Aquitaine, edited by Guilhem Pépin. First seriously exploited by Thomas Rymer in his monumental Foedera, the rolls properly begin in 1273. Thomas Carte (1743) calendared them summarily alongside two other Chancery series devoted to England’s continental interests (the Norman and French, now Treaty, rolls). But it was the prolific French historian and philologist Francisque-Michel, funded by the French government from 1833, ably assisted by PRO staff, who first began publishing them in full, starting with those compiled when Henry III and the Lord Edward were in Gascony in 1242–3 and 1253–4, now classified as supplementary Patent and Close Rolls. His volume finally appeared in 1885. Charles Bémont then took over with another volume of patent and close rolls relating to Gascony in 1254–5 (1896), before producing two volumes of the actual Gascon rolls for Edward I’s reign (1900, 1906). These admirably demonstrated their wealth of evidence not only for relations between the administrations at Westminster and Bordeaux but also for the social, economic and political history of English Gascony and its immediate neighbours, including those in Iberia. Yet it was not until 1962 that Yves Renouard, again much helped by the PRO, added a further volume for 1307–17. His premature death in 1965 once more deprived the series of momentum. It was thus 2008/9 before an ambitious project was launched to calendar all remaining rolls (TNA, C 61/32–144). Reflecting developments since the 1960s, the main intention was to put them on a website ‘permitting the use of the latest technology to enhance the content of the rolls’ (p. 3). The 2011 conference marked the end of AHRC funding for the project then directed by Malcolm Vale (Oxford) and Paul Booth (Liverpool). The baton was taken over by Frédéric Boutoulle and Françoise Lainé at the University of Bordeaux-Michel de Montaigne, and then between 2013–15, with Leverhulme support, by Anne Curry (Southampton) and Philip Morgan (Keele), with the principal researchers Simon Harris and Guilhem Pépin in post throughout, so that currently ‘almost all the rolls have been completed’ (online at www.gasconrolls.org), and plans are in hand for hard-copy versions

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