John Blacman (also spelt Blackman or Blakman; ) was a medieval author, chaplain to Henry VI of England, and a clericus redditus in the Carthusian order.Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online (ODNBO), "John Blacman" by Jonathan Hughes.
Life and career
Writing in 1474, Blacman stated that he had seen sixty-six winters, indicating he was likely born around the year 1408 in the diocese of Bath and Wells.Roger Lovatt, "John Blacman: Biographer of Henry VI," in R. H. C. Davis and J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, eds. The Writing of History in the Middle Ages, (Oxford, U.K.: 1981) p. 417. He likely began studying at the University of Oxford in 1432, and "was elected a bachelor fellow of Merton College" in 1436.Lovatt, "Biographer", pp. 417-418. Blacman remained a fellow at Merton until 1443, when he may have also served as sub-warden. During his time at Merton, he was ordained subdeacon in September 1441, and deacon in February 1442.A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Cambridge to 1500, (Cambridge, U.K.: 1963) pp. 670-671. Atypically for a theology scholar, Blacman likely trained as a notary public, as he later served in that role at Eton College.Lovatt, "Biographer," p. 418, 420; C. R. Cheney, Notaries Public in England in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, (Oxford, U.K.: 1972) p. 78. Blacman established several relationships while at Merton that would serve him later in life, including one with Henry Sever, who served as the first provost of Eton College in 1440.Lovatt, "Biographer," p. 419. Sever was likely responsible for Blacman's transfer to and fellowship at Eton college in 1443.
Blacman's fellowship at Eton college put him into close contact with the founder of Eton, King Henry VI. Henry took a personal interest in the education of the pupils at Eton, and in the construction of the new buildings and chapel for Eton college. He was a semi-frequent visitor to the college to see and manage the ongoing construction, in part because of the college's location near Windsor Castle.Lovatt, “Biographer,” pp. 420-422; John Blacman, Henry the Sixth; A Reprint of John Blacman's Memoir with Translation and Notes, Edited by M. R. James, (Cambridge, U.K.: 1919) p. 34. Blacman remained a fellow at Eton from 1443 to 1454, and developed a relationship with the King during that time. A Carthusian monk, writing c. 1465–1470, described Blacman as being the king's chaplain during his time at Eton. Although Blacman is never included in one of the formal lists of the king's chaplains, he still likely served some spiritual advisory role to the king, and was known to hold mass with the King in private.Bertram Wolffe, Henry VI, (New Haven, CT: 2001, originally published in 1981) p. 6; Lovatt, "A Collector of Apocryphal Anecdotes: John Blacman Revisited," in Tony Pollard, ed. Property and Politics: Essays in Later Medieval History, (New York, NY: 1984) p. 173. In late 1452, Blacman was appointed warden of King's Hall, Cambridge. Henry VI had also taken a significant interest in King's Hall, and fostered the strong connection between scholars at Eton and the college at Cambridge.Emden, Biographical Dictionary, Cambridge, pp. 670-671; Alan B. Cobban, The King's Hall within the University of Cambridge in the Later Middle Ages, (Cambridge, U.K.: 1969), pp. 188-193. In the same year as his appointment to King's Hall, Blacman was also appointed to his first recorded clerical living as deacon in Sapperton, Gloucestershire. The following year, Bishop Carpenter, of Worcester appointed Blacman as dean of the College of the Holy Trinity in Westbury-on-Trym. Carpenter had begun a renovation project at the college in the years before his appointment of Blacman, indicating Blacman's wardenship was not a sinecure and Carpenter intended to use Blacman's experience at Eton to inform his reforms at the college.Lovatt, "Biographer," pp. 424-425.
Blacman resigned his position at King's college in 1457, and had left the College of the Holy Trinity by 1459 in order to join the Carthusian order. The exact timing on when Blacman joined the order, and where are unclear. He spent some time at the London Charterhouse, and likely transferred to the Witham Charterhouse, by 1465.Lovatt, "Biography," pp. 427-429; idem, "The Library of John Blacman and Contemporary Carthusian Spirituality," Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 43, No, 2 (April, 1992), p. 199. Carthusians were an eremtical, exceptionally ascetic monastic order in late medieval Europe.Joseph R. Strayer, ed. Dictionary of the Middle Ages, 14 volumes, (New York, NY: 1982-2004) 3:119-120. Blacman was required to serve a probationary period for a year before he was allowed to join the order, but in the end decided not to take his final vows. He was a clericus redditus, which is a midway version of a monk within the Carthusian order. He was a member of the community, tonsured, and sat with the monks in the choir of the church. However, clericus redditus could own property and with sufficient reason, leave the order at any time.Andrew Gray, "A Carthusian Carta Visitationis of the Fifteenth Century," Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, Vo. 40, No. 101, (May, 1967) pp. 91-101.
Within his first few years at Witham, Blacman donated twenty-four books from his collection to the priory. The books reflected Blacman's academic interests to that point in his life, including manuscripts copies of a Bible, Ranulf Higden's Polychronicon, William of Ockham’s Sum of Logic, and two copies of Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova.Lovatt, "Library", pp. 202-203; Vincent Gillespie, and A. I. Doyle, eds. Syon Abbey and the Libraries of the Carthusians, (London, U.K: 2001), pp. 629-651. The collection was fairly standard for a theology scholar and notary public for the late medieval period. During his time at the Witham priory, Blacman continued to expand his personal library, but the books took on a different tone. In 1474, the librarian at Witham made a second list of books that Blacman donated to the priory, and these shared little in common with the first list. The works are nearly exclusively religion in tenor and subject, many of them taken from popular continental mystics. Works about and by mystics such as Catherine of Siena and Bridget of Sweden, and a copy of Imitatio Christi by Thomas à Kempis are included in the list of books. Also included are works regarding local saints, such as St. Edmund, a ninth-century East Anglian saint.Lovatt, "Library," pp. 205-208.
Little is known about Blacman's final years at Witham. Blacman's date of death or burial is unknown, but Lovatt argues his death most likely occurred before 1485. Blacman is not included in the lists of Carthusian obits, and likely died outside the order.Lovatt, "Collector", p. 192 n. 24.
Writings
Blacman has two written works that survive to the modern era. The first was a commonplace book that he composed sometime in the 1460s, likely before entering the London Charterhouse. The work survives as Sloane MS 2515 in the British Library. The work is an anthology ars moriendi reflecting on death. Blacman compares his transition from a worldly life to his life in the Carthusian order as a type of death, as significant as the physical death of a person. The style and content of the work is typical for fifteenth century spirituality; the exceptional element being Blacman's meditations on death as part of joining the Carthusian order.Lovatt, "Library," pp. 204-205; Michael G. Sargent and Marlene V. Hennessy, "The Latin Verses over the Cell Doors of London Charterhouse" in Studies in Carthusian Monasticism in the Late Middle Ages, edited by Julian M. Luxford (Turnhout, Belgium: 2008) pp. 187-189.
Blacman's other work that survived to the present is his much more famous personal biography of Henry VI. The work is less of a biography, and more of a collection of anecdotes regarding the King. Blacman didn't cover the life of the king evenly, as most of the events described took place when Blacman was at Eton and had the greatest opportunities to interact with the King. Blacman did go further than recording his own recollections, potentially interviewing servants and government officials who worked in Henry's inner circle.Lovatt, "Collector", pp. 193-194, n. 48; Ralph A. Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI: The Exercise of Royal Authority, 1422-1461 (Berkeley, CA: 1981) p. 7 n. 9. Despite being, "the most intimate free-standing biography yet written of an English king," Blacman's work was considered near useless for most of the past 150 years.Karen A. Winstead, The Oxford History of Life-Writing, Volume 1: The Middle Ages, (Oxford, U.K.: 2018) p. 105.
Charles L. Kingsford gave the authoritative reading of Blacman in his classic English Historical Literature in the Fifteenth Century, calling Blacman's work as nothing more than a panegyric, and not "of great value from a purely historical point of view."Kingsford, English Historical Literature, (Oxford, U.K.: 1913) p. 149. K. B. McFarlane reinforced this position in 1948, writing that Blacman was an "unreliable hagiographer."McFarlane, "At the Deathbed of Cardinal Beaufort" in Studies in Medieval History, edited by R. W. Hunt, W. A. Pantin, and R. W. Southern (Oxford, U.K.: 1948) p. 422. The opinions of Kingsford and McFarlane were in part drawn from the mistaken argument that Henry VII encouraged Blacman to write the hagiographic work in support of Henry's attempt to have his uncle canonized as a saint.Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England, Volume 2: c. 1307 to the Early Sixteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: 1982) p. 497. However, beginning in the 1980s with the works of R. A. Griffiths and Roger Lovatt, Blacman's works and reputation gained appreciation and relevance. Lovatt's pair of essays, "Biographer of Henry VI" and "A Collector of Apocryphal Anecdotes" made a solid case that Blacman's work was written prior to 1485, that Blacman provided accurate testimonies (when they could be independently verified), and that the work did not come from or serve the agenda of Henry VII. More recently, Thomas Freeman has argued that Blacman wrote against a more populist understanding of Henry VI developing in the late 1470s and 1480s.Thomas S. Freeman, "Ut Verus Christi Sequester: John Blacman and the Cult of Henry VI," in Of Mice and Men: Image, Belief, and Regulation in Late Medieval England, edited by Linda Clark (Woodbridge, U.K.: 2005), pp. 127-142. The cult of Henry VI celebrated Henry's miraculous healings, and Blacman does not mention any of these supposed miracles, despite many of them occurring before 1484. Instead, Blacman focuses on the type of life Henry VI lived, emphasizing the mystical spirituality Blacman had come to celebrate after entering the Carthusian order. In Freeman's argument, Blacman was not arguing that Henry VI needed canonization due to his popular post-mortem miracles, but instead served to be an example of the kind of life that elite laity should aspire to.
Unlike the copy of Blacman's commonplace book, the manuscript copy or copies his writing on Henry VI have not survived. Luckily, Robert Copland published an edition of the work in the early sixteenth century, and then Thomas Hearne republished it in 1732.Lovatt, "Biographer", pp. 415-417; Blacman, Henry the Sixth, p. vi-ix; Blacman, Collectarium Mansuetudinum... (London, U.K.) ; Hearne, Duo Rerum Anglicarum Scriptores Veteres... (London, U.K.: 1732) pp. 285-307 M. R. James published an English translation of Hearne's edition collated with Copland's in 1919.