Crowland Abbey and The Provenance of Orderic Vitalis's Scandinavian and Scottish Material

Abstract

SOME of the contemporary Scandinavian and Scottish material in Orderic Vitalis's Historia Ecclesiastica is first extant therein, the former either unique or only appearing elsewhere in the Icelandic sagas and the latter sometimes next to be found only in fourteenth-century Scottish texts.1 Both, independently, have intrigued scholars because of their importance for, variously, Anglo-Norman contact with Scandinavia, the Scottish royal family, and the textual transmission of the Historia Ecclesiastica, but their provenance remains unknown. Here the case is made for Crowland abbey, Lincolnshire, to which Orderic paid a five week visit some time between 1114 and 1124.2 Scandinavian information first reported in the Historia Ecclesiastica includes a trip by the exiled English Earl Tostig to Norway in 1065, aspects of the childhood of King Sigurðr Jórasalafari of Norway, and the story of King Magnus Berfœttr, also of Norway, leaving his treasure in the care of a citizen of Lincoln when he embarked on what was to be his last expedition to Ireland in 1103.3 Orderic's most questionable Scottish episode is the murder of the eldest son of David earl of Huntingdon, future king of Scotland (1124–53), by a cleric who had been in Norway, had been punished there by losing his hands and now had iron fingers (which became his murder weapon).4 Orderic is the earliest source for this story and, indeed, for the child, who does not appear in any other contemporary material, narrative or documentary, and whose existence has, as a result, been dismissed or ignored by some.5 There are only two medieval variants of this episode, both Scottish, one from the late thirteenth century and one from the fourteenth, and all three are significantly different, not least in their identification of the killer who in the later variants is Donald Bane, once king of Scotland himself, and an anonymous member of the Scottish royal court respectively. Orderic's Norwegian connection is unique.6 It is this episode, with its combination of Norwegian and Scottish elements, which provides a starting point for the case for Crowland.