The collapse of a monastic friendship: the case of Jocelin and Samson of Bury

Abstract

Despite the popularity in recent times of Jocelin of Brakelond's Chronicle, with its memorable portrait of Abbot Samson, the work has not received sufficient attention for what it reveals about the dissolution of a monastic friendship. If we concentrate on what Jocelin says about himself, instead of mining the Chronicle for nuggets of monastic history, we soon dicover that his personality is just as much on the surface of the work as Samson's is. After examining the vexed problems of Jocelin's identity and the stages in which he wrote his work, we find how Jocelin sought and initially received Samson's friendship. The practice of openness, trust, and love between monks as seen in the lives of Anselm of Canterburn or Ailred of Rievaulx could not survive amid the demands of administration at Bury St Edmunds. Jocelin's work was not recognized for its merits at Bury. But excerpts that were later made from it reveal that Jocelin's monastic readers were attracted mainly by his contribution to the abbey's hagiography. The brilliance of his descriptions of people - including himself - was not noted until the nineteenth century. Jocelin's disappointing experience with Samson and the limited reception for his work at Bury are symptomatic of a decline in individual expression in Western Europe after about 1200. Jocelin's Chronicle is one of the last manifestations of a generous and open quality in twelfth-century monastic life.