A History of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, 1182-1256

There can be no doubting the central importance of the great Benedictine abbey of Bury St Edmunds in English medieval monastic history. Growing up around the shrine of Edmund, the East Anglian king murdered in 843, the abbey came to be one of only five English monasteries to be fully exempt from diocesan and provincial jurisdiction and to enjoy direct dependence on the papacy. Moreover, its control of a liberty of eight and a half hundreds—the whole of west Sussex—and of the town of Bury itself, gave it an immense economic and political role in the region and beyond. Bury St Edmunds also has the good fortune to be extensively documented, with more than forty registers and cartularies, a substantial number of books from the abbey library (though only a fraction of what once existed) and literary and historical works produced by its monks. As editor of several of these sources, notably the chronicle of Bury St Edmunds and the abbey customary, there is no one better placed than Antonia Gransden to write a full history of the abbey. This is the first of two projected volumes which will cover the period from the late twelfth century to 1301. It spans the abbacy of Samson of Tottington (1182–1211), so vividly chronicled by Jocelin of Brackland (Part I, pp. 1–147), and the vacancy that followed his death (1212–15), and the rule of his four successors (1215–56) (Part II, pp. 149–248). That the first section of the book is rather longer than the second is a result of the imbalance of source material. Not only did Samson find a lively and eloquent chronicler in the person of Jocelin, but his abbacy also saw the compilation of the earliest surviving register. Using these and other sources Gransden is able to write at length about Samson's career before and after his election, the process of the election itself, his administration of the abbey, and his relations with external authorities. Full attention is given to his government of the abbey and his attempts to resolve the chronic economic difficulties which he inherited from his predecessor. What emerges is a vivid snapshot of the tensions between the abbot and convent in a large, powerful, and potentially wealthy Benedictine house by the close of the twelfth century. So, too, do the external demands on the abbot as landowner, secular justice (on his election Samson had to appoint his own legal advisers to bring himself up to the levels of knowledge required in his new situation), papal judge delegate, and lord of the town where he enjoyed regalian rights. In his relations with the kings of England, the popes, archbishops of Canterbury, his fellow abbots, his knights, and the townspeople of Bury, Samson's overriding concern was for the liberties of his monastery

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