rianus Scotus* supplied the groundwork. Marianus said little about events in Britain and Ireland. From the landing of the followers of Hengist and Horsa onward, such events, in order of time, are inserted by Florence of Worcester in the earlier part, chiefly from Bede, the Saxon Chronicle, and Asser's Life of King Alfred, but with additional detail and occasional change of a date, especially in what relates to the reign of Edward the Elder and Edward the Confessor. Florence inserted also, from sources not now to be traced, notices of saints and famous men among the clergy, especially of Worcester. His account of Bishop Wulfstan, and of his death in 1095, cannot be traced to any MS. of the Saxon Chronicle. Nothing more is known of Florence himself than that he was a monk, and that he died on the 7th of July, 1118. So much is told by the author of the first continuation of Florence's Chronicle of Chronicles, who speaks of it as in its time pre-eminent. The first continuer was another monk of Worcester, named John, who carried on the record from January 1118 to the year 1141. As Bishop Wulfstan died twenty-three years before Florence of Worcester, this could not have been the monk John who is said by Orderic to have added to the Chronicle of Marianus Scotus, at Wulfstan's request, the details of William the Conqueror, William Rufus, and Henry I., taken from William of Poitiers and Guy of Amiens. Copies of this piece of chronicling produced at Worcester have not yet been found. The work of the monk John, whose continuation of *"E. W." III. 23. [1118] "Nonis Julii obiit Ds. Florentius Wigornensis monachus. Hujus subtili scientia et studiosi laboris industria, præeminet cunctis hæc Chronicarum Chronicon. Corpus terra tegit, spiritus astra petat, Quo cernendo Deum cum sanctis regnet in ævum, Amen." Florence of Worcester extended from 1118 to 1141, was followed by another continuation to the year 1295,* which is from 1141 to 1152, a transcript from the Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon; its continuation, from 1152 to 1265, is a transcript from the Chronicle of John de Taxster, a monk of Bury St. Edmunds, and from 1265 to 1295 a compilation by a monk of Bury St. Edmunds, who gives much space to the affairs of Bury.† Thus by interpolations and additions, by uniting fragments of old chronicle into records interspersed with fresh notes, national or local, the story of the early life of England, or as much of it as quiet English monks could learn, was truly told. * Its MS. is in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. †The best MS. of Marianus with Florence of Worcester's interpolation, ending abruptly at the year 1140, by loss of its last leaves, formerly belonged to the abbey of Worcester, and is now in the library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Another MS., beautifully written at the end of the twelfth century, is in the library of Lambeth Palace. It ends at the year 1131. A later MS. is in the Bodleian Library, and another, which contains the continuation to 1295, in a handwriting of the thirteenth century, is in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. It formerly belonged to Peterborough. The better of the two MSS. of De Taxster's Chronicle belongs to the College of Arms (Arundel, No. 6), the other, damaged by fire, is in the Cotton Library, Julius A i. The first printed edition of Florence of Worcester was published at London in 1592, at the expense of Lord William Howard of Naworth. CHAPTER II. ORDERICUS VITALIS AND WILLIAM OF MALMESBURY GESTA STEPHANI. Two chroniclers of special mark were at work in the earlier half of the twelfth century, and they were so strictly contemporaries that the Chronicle of each ends with the year I142. Ordericus Ordericus Vitalis was born on the 15th of February, 1075, at Atcham, on the Severn, near Shrewsbury, close to that Wroxeter where the old Roman city of Uriconium has in our day been disinterred, and not far from the spot where the hall of Kyndyllan had been left a waste" without fire and without songs." His father, Odelirius, was a married priest, native of Orleans, attached to the household of Roger de Montgomery, Earl of Shrewsbury, as one of whose train he had crossed over to England. His own name of Ordericus the chronicler took from the Saxon priest and curate of the parish who baptised him, and was also sponsor for him. At five years old Orderic was sent to school at Shrewsbury, where he learnt during the next five years of his life reading, grammar, and chanting, under a priest of royal blood named Siward. Odelire, who was of Earl Montgomery's council, and received valuable gifts from his patron, gave a log-church, built by Siward in the suburbs of Shrewsbury, that had become his property, as the site of a stately Benedictine abbey of St. Peter, founded at his suggestion by the earl. Into that abbey, when his wife was dead, and the earl was dead, Odelire withdrew as a monk of the stricter rule, with his son Orderic, then ten years old, and his youngest son, whom he had called Benedict. One half of his estates he gave to the abbey, and the other half to be held as a fief under the abbey by his second son Everard, who remained outside in the world. But the father presently feared that with a son dear to his fleshly heart in the same monastery with him, the earthliness of natural affection would interfere with his chance of salvation by abstraction from the world; little Orderic, therefore, was sent to Normandy under the care of a monk named Raynold, and given, with thirty silver marks, to the Benedictine abbey of Ouche. That was an abbey founded by Evroult, for whom, as a saint of his own town, Odelire, still somewhat a victim to his sympathies, had a too natural predilection. The abbey, which afterwards took the name of St. Evroult, was buried among forests, and was at that time forming a good library. The boy of eleven, "from the farthest wilds of Mercia," was kindly received by Abbot Mainier. Forty years afterwards, still in the same religious home, he wrote in his Chronicle : "Then being in my eleventh year, I was separated from my father, for the love of God, and sent, a young exile, from England to Normandy, to enter the service of the King Eternal. Here I was received by the venerable father Mainier, and having assumed the monastic habit, and become indissolubly joined to the company of the monks by solemn vows, have now cheerfully borne the light yoke of the Lord for forty-two years, and walking in the ways of God with my fellow-monks, to the best of my ability, according to the rules of our order, have endeavoured to perfect myself in the service of the Church and ecclesiastical duties, at the same time that I have always devoted my talents to some useful employment.* * Ord. Vit., b. v., ch. 1. The next passage quoted is in book v., ch. 14. I follow the translation by Mr. Thomas Forester, which gives the whole Chronicle of Ordericus Vitalis in plain English, well D-VOL III. And in another place, having inserted an account of his father's connection with the monastery of St. Peter's, Shrewsbury, he says: "I have thus made a short digression respecting the foundation of the abbey on my father's property, which is now occupied by Christ's family, and where he, at the age of sixty, if my memory serves me, voluntarily submitted to the Lord's yoke till the end of his life. Forgive me, I pray you, good reader, and let it not be thought wearisome, if I have committed to writing these few short particulars respecting my father, whom I have never seen since the day when, for the love of the Creator, he sent me into exile as if I had been a hateful stepson." Orderic entered the Norman monastery in 1085. On the 22nd of September in the following year, on the Feast of St. Maurice, a boy in his twelfth year, he received the tonsure, and changed his English name of Orderic for that of Vitalis, one of St. Maurice's companions in martyrdom. That Maurice was in the year 286 commander of the Thebaan legion under Maximianus Herculius. Being camped in the Holy Land, he and all his men are said to have been baptised by Zembdal Bishop of Jerusalem, and afterwards, having crossed the Alps with the imperial army, when the Emperor sacrificed to his gods on a plain by the Rhône in the Valais, Maurice and his legion of 6,666 men marched eight miles away from the scene of impiety. Maurice having explained that they did this because they were Christians, the legion was ordered to be decimated, and as that did not shake their faith they were massacred in the place called Ayounum, now St. Maurice. Two of his lieutenants who died with St. Maurice and with all the men of the legion, Innocentius and Vitalis, are named with the chief saint in the celebration of the festival. And prefaced, annotated throughout, and fully indexed, in four volumes of Bohn's Antiquarian Library. |