A History of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, 1257–1301

In the period when the monasteries’ temporal and spiritual power seemed almost unassailable in England—between Domesday and the Statute of Mortmain—it was those houses of Anglo-Saxon origin which were pre-eminent. Of this venerable group of survivors, among them the brethren of Canterbury, Durham, St Albans and Worcester, one can argue that it was the monks of St Edmund at Bury who proved to be the most resilient and successful over these two centuries, building a formidable endowment and commanding the devout attentions to their king-and-martyr of an almost unbroken succession of Norman, Angevin and Plantagenet monarchs. Bury’s high medieval achievement is especially vivid because it also sustained a rich literary life from the time of its first non-English abbot, Baldwin (1065–97), through the turbulence of the thirteenth century (when even St Albans faltered) and into the fourteenth. It is this remarkable pattern of writing and record-keeping which has given Antonia Gransden both the raw material and the template for her epic, two-volume history of the abbey: the focal point of the first (rev. ante, cxxiv [2009], 936–7) was Abbot Samson (1182–1212) whose choleric, combative leadership was celebrated by his biographer, Jocelin of Brakelond; in this second and concluding instalment, she follows the outline of the years of the Baronial conflict and the wars of Edward I as compiled by the anonymous continuators of the abbey’s chronicle narrative. This does make for a somewhat laboured structure for the book, and for repetition—since the main protagonists (abbey, convent, kings and magnates) are reintroduced when John succeeds Simon—but it should not detract from the rich texture that Gransden weaves. This half-century saw just two abbacies, by contrast with the five covered in Volume One, but the better preservation of narrative and archival records besides the chronicle itself—such as the fifty-odd folios of the letter-book (BL Harley MS 230) of William of Hoo, sacrist under Abbot John of Northwold, and the compendium of key charters and current customs (BL Harley MS 1005) made by the monk ‘A’—allow for a very detailed study of the internal life of the monastery only glanced at in the earlier book, following the monks into the choir, the dormitory (where they squabbled over the possessions of brethren who had died) and the common table (where irregular drinking was somewhat compensated by an exemplary commitment to fish)

Archaeology · Art · Literature · Martyr · Narrative · Power (physics · Servant · The Venerable · Classics · Historical and Archaeological Studies · Historical Studies of British Isles · History · Medieval Literature and History