Herinnering in geschrift en praktijk in religieuze gemeenschappen

THE FINAL STAGES OF MEMORIAL TRADITIONS:
THE WARENNE FAMILY
Elisabeth van Houts
Emmanuel College, Cambridge (UK)
In this working paper I shall explore not the origins but the end of memorial traditions and
make an attempt to answer the question why memorial traditions die out. By memorial
tradition I mean the process whereby a community (institution or family) creates a record or
object that has as its purpose to remember one individual (or more) after their death over a
length of time (sometimes in perpetuity) with ceremonies being put in place to rekindle at
specific times (often the anniversary of the day of death) the memory of the deceased. Can we
pinpoint exact moments in time that names of the dead disappear, that the record fades or that
ceremonies cease to be celebrated? Or is the end of a tradition a more fluid process? Can we
distinguish between the dying out of traditions in institutions, like monasteries or churches, and
in families and kin groups? Or is this an artificial divide given that in our period few families
kept archives and most evidence of memorial traditions comes from ecclesiastical sources. And
by contemplating the vocabulary of our own research, I hope to reflect on the biology of
the life of the memorial tradition; if the purpose of the paper is to identify the dying stages of
thinking about those who are dead why do we do that in the terminology of the lifecycle?
Finally, it is in the nature of the phrase ‘the final fases’ that inevitably we can only identify
them in retrospect. Only in hindsight, by looking back, can we recognise a turning point and
identify ‘the end’ before things change.
The memorial traditions of the Warenne family form an interesting sample on which to test
the above raised questions. 1 The family goes back to William I of Warenne (d.1088), a younger
son of a Norman family from the Pays-de-Caux, who made his fortune after the Norman
Conquest of England in 1066. Married to a Flemish wife, Gundrada (d. 1085), who probably
was a kinswoman of William the Conqueror’s wife Matilda, William exploited her Flemish
contacts by establishing Anglo-Norman links with the abbey of Saint-Bertin at Saint-Omer
with, as we shall discover, long lasting effect. Gundrada’s father was Gerbod Oosterzeele-
Scheldewindeke, hereditary advocate of Saint-Bertin. Her brothers Gerbod and Frederick were
prominent Flemish fighters at Hastings who were richly rewarded by the Conqueror. Gerbod
became earl of Chester, an appointment that lasted only a few years until his return to Flanders
in 1070. Around the same time Frederick was killed in England by the famous resistance
1
Early Yorkshire Charters, Vol. VIII: the Honour of Warenne, ed. C. T. Clay, Yorkshire Archaeological Society,
Record Series, extra series (s.l., 1949), pp. 1-7; E. van Houts, ‘The Warenne View of the Past, 1066-1203’, Anglo-
Norman Studies, 26 (2003), pp. 103-22, where references to the Warenne dynasty can be found.
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