St Albans in the Later Middle Ages

Abstract

Abstract In medieval England St Albans was a byword for the older monastic order. For Londoners like Geoffrey Chaucer there could have been no more familiar Benedictines. But even those beyond the capital could not have failed to recognize a name connected not only with the country ‘s own protomartyr but also, across the centuries, with countless prelates, scholars, and (even) books; it was a measure of the monastery ‘s fame that many popular works of the period—Alexander Nequam ‘s Denaturis rerum, Mandeville ‘s Travels—circulated with spurious St Albans credentials of their own.² The reasons for the abbey ‘s pre-eminence were rooted in the distant past.