Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/332

324 manuscript includes not only letters relating to Arnold's disputes with his bishop, Ivo, but also a number of domestic letters which could not have been of interest outside his immediate circle. As the names are mostly given only in initials, it is not possible to identify them all with absolute certainty; but enough is plain to enable us to fix the date of the collection. Bishop Ivo died on 23 December 1115, and few of the letters are later than that year. It is necessary to state positively that Ivo died in 1115, because the year has been given differently by recent writers. M. Léon Mirot places it in 1116, and Father De Ghellinck in 1117. Both dates are wrong; for Paschal II announced the consecration of Ivo's successor, Geoffrey, in a letter of which the original is still preserved at Chartres, dated from the Lateran on 5 April. This can have been written only in 1116; for in April 1117 the pope was not at Rome but at Benevento, and in January 1118 he died.

One letter is so early as 1087, but most belong to the first fifteen years of the twelfth century. Among them is a group of familiar letters addressed to their mother Letitia by two schoolboys A. and James. Letitia I take to be the sister of Dean Arnold; she is afterwards mentioned as a widow. The editor of the letters would carry the letters back to an earlier generation and make Letitia the dean's mother. But the two brothers were boys together, and they are associated in a letter addressed to Geoffrey, dean of Le Mans, when the younger, James, was still a student. Now Geoffrey was dean in 1096, possibly a little earlier, and was made archbishop of Rouen in 1111. Arnold, however, was already dean of Chartres in 1087, and it is not likely that he had a brother of student's age ten years or more later. That they were Dean Arnold's nephews is a conjecture which I base on the fact that letters of this sort appear in a collection mainly connected with him and his family. Arnold had also a nephew Hugh, who in time became dean himself. A letter which bears no name sends messages to the writer's father and uncle (avunculus), his mother and grandmother, which perhaps bring together the dean and his sister. From