Augustinian Priory Research Articles

The Medieval Manuscripts of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin (review)

Reviewed by: The Medieval Manuscripts of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin Seán Duffy The Medieval Manuscripts of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin. Edited by Raymond Gillespie and Raymond Refaussé. (Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2006. Pp. 192. $65.00. ISBN 978-1-851-82985-9.) The origin of this book lies in a poignant event that took place in 2004, when the surviving medieval manuscripts of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin were reassembled for the first time in almost half a millennium in an exhibition in their original home. The Christ Church archive is unique in Ireland in terms of the chronological range and the diversity of document type, and allows remarkable insights into the changing world in which the books were compiled, and the chief mission—fittingly accomplished—of the seven essays newly written for this volume is to place the collection in its religious, social, and cultural context. The martyrology and calendar of the Augustinian priory of Holy Trinity at Christ Church survive today in a manuscript dating from the mid-thirteenth century, preserved as Trinity College Dublin MS 576, where they are bound together with the priory’s early-sixteenth-century book of obits and discussed in this volume by Pádraig Ó Riain and Colm Lennon. For sheer beauty these books cannot compare with the cathedral priory’s psalter produced in the mid-fourteenth century, probably under commission in England, for prior Stephen de Derby and now preserved as Rawlinson MS G 185 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Alan Fletcher expertly describes them and includes notices of the material added to the manuscript after it arrived in Dublin, including an interesting account of a battle between the English and Irish near Bray, County Wicklow, on July 11, 1402, and musical notations that, if local, are some of the earliest to survive from Ireland. [End Page 339] More of the medieval material from Christ Church is preserved in two administrative codices, the Liber Niger and the Liber Albus, both fortunately still in the cathedral’s collections. The former (discussed here by Colmán Ó Clabaigh) was begun c. 1300 under prior Henry la Warr and is hugely important as a source for the foundation of the cathedral and the early history of the diocese of Dublin; it has copies of early Christ Church charters and grants of privileges, the otherwise lost text of the famous Irish parliament of 1297, and a valuable set of annals. The Liber Albus (considered here in Fletcher’s second essay in the volume) was assembled under subprior Thomas Fyche in the early-sixteenth century and has a similarly eclectic compendium of material stretching back over the preceding 300 years. One final corpus of cathedral documents—a vast collection of charters, leases, papal privileges, wills and conveyances, rentals, manorial accounts, inquisitions, and more (collectively known as the Christ Church Deeds and surveyed in this volume by Raymond Gillespie)—did not survive the Irish Civil War in 1922, but fortunately the bulk of the corpus was transcribed or calendared before its destruction. The essays are generally of the solid and reliable—as opposed to virtuoso—variety, although two in particular stand out. Ó Riain, as well as dealing with one specific manuscript, is a font of expert knowledge on monastic “chapter” books in general, discussing their purpose and content (the monastic rule and eponymous chapters, martyrologies, necrologies or books of obits, calendars of feasts, and so on). Fletcher’s analysis of the hands present in the Liber Albus breaks new ground—he estimates a total of at least forty-three scribes—completing a task that the usually indefatigable canon H. J. Lawlor (a successor of Swift as dean of Dublin’s other medieval cathedral, St. Patrick’s) gave up in frustration. An exercise such as this is always worthwhile, but its true value can be seen from the stimulus to further research and publication that it provides. Seán Duffy Trinity College Dublin Copyright © 2009 The Catholic University of America Press

The Eastern Arm of Norwich Cathedral and the Augustinian Priory of st Bartholomew's, Smithfield, in London

The church of St Bartholomew the Great in West Smithfield is not generally thought of as a building of major importance, probably because the plan of its presbytery seems to suggest that it was a rather outmoded imitation of Norwich Cathedral. The first part of this paper examines the basis for such an assumption and offers an explanation for the similarities between the presbyteries of the two buildings. Affiliations between the two institutions are placed in the wider context of the aspirations of the London episcopate in the decades either side of II00. Smithfield emerges as an extraordinary building, highly untypical of contemporary Augustinian architecture. The twelfth-century foundation narrative of Smithfield implies that, while in building, the church struck onlookers as astonishingly innovative. Taken at face value, this is puzzling, since most of the elements of its design had been common architectural currency for a generation or more. This apparently paradoxical situation is explored in the second part of the paper and the basis for Smithfield's perceived modernity while under construction very tentatively reconstructed.

The Foundation of St Andrews Cathedral Priory, 1140.

The hitherto accepted date of the priory's foundation, 1144, was copied on the bishop's diploma from the bull of Lucius II, and is impossible; Bower's 1140 is to be preferred. The foundation narrative (FN) probably by Robert, the first prior, ascribes to a Pictish king the grant to St Andrew of the Boar's Raik, but that was ignored by Wyntoun and Bower and is probably wrong. It seems that Alexander I made this gift, renegued on it, and restored it towards the end of his life. Though intended to found an Augustinian priory, the Raik was kept by the bishop until in 1138-9 David I obtained from Nostell a prior, Robert; Robert was unable to advance the foundation through his reluctance to recruit canons from elsewhere, perhaps resisting Scone and/or Holyrood. He and clerics of his resided in a ‘parsonage’, the vacant house of one of the seven ‘parsons’ who represented the earliest clerics of St Andrews, and are uniquely described in FN; they developed the hospital. In 1140 David I and Earl Henry at St Andrews compelled the bishop to disgorge the Raik and thereby establish the priory. The date was probably St Andrew's day, 1140, a month after the foundation of the abbey of St Mary at Newbattle. Both foundations should be seen as thanksgiving for Henry's recovery from serious illness. A narrower dating is suggested for some St Andrews charters, the endowments showing a closer relationship with those of Holyrood abbey than with those of Scone priory. Prior Robert probably wished from the beginning to recruit the céli Dé (Culdees) as canons and to obtain their endowments, succeeding at Lochleven but, despite papal and royal approval, failing at St Andrews. A final section asks why David I was so generous to the regular orders, suggesting that he was much influenced by the development of Marian devotion in his lifetime, when the Virgin had become head and most powerful of the hierarchy of saints.

‘Swiping … and Daguerreotyping’: Photographing Golf at St Andrews

When photography was invented, St Andrews was already a very old town, littered with the remains of a glorious and turbulent his tory: notably the skeletons of a once magnificent cathedral and a large Augustinian priory and a ruined castle, horne of the former bishops and archbishops. Zealous reformers had helped reduce these great symbols of medieval Scotland's archiepiscopal see, which were now picturesque ruins, ideal for recording in the new medium of photography. However, St Andrews in the nineteenth century was more than just ‘that Reformation bombsite’.1 It had a small, sleepy university, with old college buildings nestling among the town's commercial and private properties. But also it had something else alive and stirring in the western end of the town — its famous 'Old' golf course. Around the time the first St Andrews photographs were being made, George Fullerton Carnegie penned the following lines in his Golfiana: Address to St Andrews:

Chronicle of the Third Crusade. A Translation of the Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi by Helen J. Nicolson

108BOOK REVIEWS abroad,foreigners in England, and pilgrimage within England and Scotland,with some excellent, lively material. Webb introduces each chapter with a helpful summary, setting the scene and referring to some of the excerpts to follow. Chapter 4, "Help and Hazard: The Pilgrims' Experience," is particularly interesting , touching upon some often-ignored aspects of this commonplace of medieval life, including one case that resembles a modern lawsuit for false advertising (pilgrims who had unwisely relied upon Rome's "proclamation of safe-conduct" [p. 106]). The next brief chapter, too, is one of the more engaging : "Remembering Pilgrimage: Souvenirs," contains apposite authorial comments , and sources, for the trinket business in its technical as well as tawdry aspects. The professional medievalist will probably enjoy this collection, which is a convenient teaching tool, as a stimulus to reflection rather than research. (Though most of the excerpts are in print, Webb includes some unpublished material from Italian archives.) Since the intended audience seems to be the student interested in this facet of medieval life, one hopes that a paperback edition will be forthcoming, given the price of the hardback. One might add, to Webb's extensive bibliography of sources, source collections, and secondary works, Brian Spencer's Pilgrim Souvenirs & Secular Badges: Salisbury & South Wiltshire Museum Medieval Catalogue, F'art 2 (Salisbury, 1990), and Linda Davidson and Maryjane Dunn-Wood's Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages: A Research Guide (NewYork, 1993). Diana Webb is to be thanked for combing a great deal of printed (and some archival) materials in an imaginative fashion with an eye to the ordinary as well as the unusual, and in providing succinct, well-crafted introductions to each of the chapters in her enjoyable, and useful, book. R. C. Finucane Oakland University, Michigan Chronicle of the Third Crusade. A Translation of the Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi. By Helen J. Nicolson. [Crusade Texts in Translation 3] (Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing. 1997. Pp. ix, 409. $72.95.) This excellent translation of Stubbs's Rolls Series edition (1864) of the most comprehensive, near-contemporary history of the Third Crusade will be an immense boon to all students of the crusade and of the crusading movement in general. It has long been accepted that the history, though strictly speaking anonymous, was compiled c. 1220 by Richard de Templo, prior of the Augustinian priory of Holy Trinity, London. In 1962 Hans Eberhard Mayer showed that it was an amalgam of two eyewitness narratives: the first a Latin history, which Mayer called IP 1 (Itinerarium Peregrinorum I) of events up to the death of Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury (November 19, 1 190)—a date which, curi- BOOK REVIEWS109 ously, is nowhere mentioned by Dr. Nicolson in her otherwise very helpful notes—and the second, IP 2, based on the Anglo-Norman Estoire de la Guerre Sainte by Ambroise. In deciding to translate Stubbs's edition she took the simplest and most sensible course since he had taken as his base manuscript an expanded text, including some matter from Howden and Diceto which was tacked on later in the thirteenth century. Here then we have the most complete version of the chronicle in readily accessible form. Dr. Nicolson has successfully achieved her aim of producing readable modern English while staying close to the original Latin. Just occasionally she has amplified in ways which could mislead . For example, the addition of the word 'Europe' when it is not there in the Latin (Book I, cc. 10 and 11) might deceive those studying ideas of Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. My one regret is that the opportunity to provide a full translation of IP 1 , as well as of Richard de Templo's text, was not quite grasped. This would have required no more than to give the former in the footnotes on those rare occasions, as in Book I, cc. 11, 25, 33, and 40, when Richard de Templo altered IPl 's words. Dr. Nicolson has provided an admirably lucid introduction, discussing the relationship between Richard de Templo's text and its sources—though without considering Hannes Möhring's suggestion that IPl could have been written as late as early 1 194, nor using...

William of Newburgh and the Cathar Mission to England

Born at Bridlington in 1136, William of Newburgh was educated at Newburgh, an Augustinian priory a few miles north of York, where he became a canon. William probably lived at Newburgh for the rest of his life, for the only instance of him travelling outside Yorkshire is one visit he paid to Fínchale. He died between summer 1199 and autumn 1201, leaving three extant writings. This outline of his life is based on John Gorman’s introduction to the only writing by William which has received a modern critical edition, his commentary on the Song of Songs. William’s other writings are sermons, and the Historia rerum Anglicarum (hereafter History). Yorkshire Cistercian patronage envelopes two of the works. The commentary on the Song of Songs is dedicated to Roger, Abbot of Byland, while the History is prefaced by a dedicatory letter to Ernald, Abbot of Rievaulx (1189-99), which states that Ernald had requested the work.

Expounding George Ripley: A Huntington Alchemical Manuscript

he following pages contain a transcription, accompanied by introduction and annotations, of a manuscript commentary that is bound into the Huntington Library copy of The Compound ofAlchymy (STC 21057), a long alchemical poem written by George Ripley, the fifteenth-century alchemist, author, and canon of the Augustinian priory at Bridlington in Yorkshire. Ripley's poem, which is the subject of the commentary, was not published until 1591. The copy of the book in which the six manuscript leaves (twelve pages) are bound was acquired by Henry E. Huntington in the Huth purchase of 1918, and their existence is noted in the sale catalogue;' however, the manuscript in question has not previously been transcribed or received scholarly attention. The manuscript leaves are of heavy paper, measuring approximately 18 by 13 centimeters, and they have wide penciled margins on the sides, top, and bottom, with the running head Reply Expounded centered at the tops of pages 2 through 12. The leaves of both the manuscript and the printed book have the same marbled edges; the whole is bound in calf. The manuscript is written clearly in a seventeenth-century hand; and of particular interest is the fact that it is signed (M:P.), addressed (to Mrs A:R:), and dated very precisely (Westminster: Dominica ffeb:8.1671. Media Nocte:). I will discuss several puzzling matters related to the manuscript's authorship and transmission later in this introduction, but it seems apparent from both the opening epistle and the final page that the author is a native of the north of England (Ripley's Country man) now living in Westminster, that he has affectionate regard for the addressee, that she has expressed keen interest in hermetic philosophy, and that in explaining Ripley's alchemical poem to MA:R:, M:P.

Autonomy and Community: the Royal Manor of Havering, 1200-1500 (review)

Reviews 139 'expanding their mature years upon the conquest of Granada' (p.140); we are told that, on one occasion, in order to follow up another matter, 'Ferdinand broke off his persecution of the Moorish war . .. ' (p.112). In view of what was finaUy to happen in Granada on the score of religion, perhaps 'persecution' could be allowed to stand Grahame Harrison Department of History University of Sydney Mcintosh, M.K., Autonomy and Community: the Royal Manor of Havering, 1200-1500 (Cambridge Studies in Medievd Life and Thought, 4th ser., no. 5), Cambridge, C.U.P., 1986; pp.xiv, 319; R.R.P. A U S $107.00. Although the topic of this book is the history of a single manor there is something in it for a wide range of historians: from those interested in manorid diversity and the nature of ancient demesne to those concerned with theories of the origins of individudism, proto-industridisation, and the transition from feudatism to capitdism. In short, the author successfully relates her story to broader issues within and beyond late medievd English history. T w o things make this possible: the time span (1200-1500) and the size of the manor of Havering. Havering was an unusudly large manor encompassing the three villages of Hornchurch, Romford and Havering itself (later Havering-atte-Bower), and they in turn were the sites of an Augustinian priory, a market and a royd residence with a park. The generd impression is that Havering was a microcosmic medieval world with a great degree of autonomy, privilege and economic freedom. As the author puts it 'Havering's history illustrates life at one extreme of the spectrum of persond and collective freedom during the later Middle Ages' (pp.3-4). Its residents enjoyed the privileges of ancient demesne, virtud hundredd jurisdiction and a distinctly non-peasant-like economy in which tenants and sub-tenants dike possessed therightto buy, sell or divide holdings as they wished Alan Macfarlane fans would be deUghted! As such, however, Havering was very much an atypicd manor. Other dissimilarities were the absence of a 'high farming' era in the thirteenth century, when a period of intense individual assarting lasting from the Norman Conquest to c.1251 gave way to a period of wholesde leasing of the demesne to the tenantry between 1251 and 1275, almost a century before its more generd practice elsewhere. Nor does Havering appear to have experienced a marked recorded demographic crisis in 1348-9. The author makes the weak suggestion that a superabundant pre-Plague population must have replaced rapidly plague- 140 Reviews stricken tenants, resulting in a fully recovered manor by the time of the 1352/3 extent, which shows aU holdings fully occupied. The avdlable evidence simply suggests that the later outbreaks of plague in 1361-2 and 1369 were far more severe than that of 1348-9 on this particular estate. There were, of course, ways in which Havering's history did illustrate some of the more generally accepted themes of late medievd English history. These included decUning agricultural yields and rents in the late thirteenth/early fourteenth centuries, active participation in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 - arising, no doubt from 'the ease and riches that the common people were of - and increasing involvement in a market economy, which was accelerated by the London 'pdl*. An extremely meritorious aspect of the book lies in its treatment of women. The author has skilfdly incorporated references to the important role of women in this society well beyond what is suggested in the Index. For the most part, her argument is that tenurid freedom and the commercidised but not deeply capitatised economy operated in favour of femde independence, dthough this was certdnly not true of femde brewers and de-seUers, who were dmost totdly replaced by men in the second half of the fifteenth century. It is clear that the book has been written as a prelude to a forthcoming volume on Havering-atte-Bower in the sixteenth century. Precocity of development is the dominant theme, with c.1460 as the turning-point Between that date and 1500 many of the developments normally recognised as characteristic of the late sixteenth/early...

Alexander Alesius' Lectures on the Psalms at Cambridge, 1536

In the summer of 1535 Anglo-German relatios assumed a new dimension. Faced with the prospect of a Catholic alliance on the continent and the possibility of a general council in the near future, Henry VIII was forced to consider more seriously than ever before a defensive alliance with the German Protestants. In August of that year, while Robert Barnes was approaching Wittenberg via Hamburg, commissioned by Henry both to prevent Melanchthon's rumoured visit to France and to make preparations for a full diplomatic mission to the princes of Lutheran Germany, Philip Melanchthon sent copies of the latest edition of his Loci Communes to the king of England, to whom they had been dedicated. The envoy on this mission was the Scottish Augustinian, Alexander Alesius, who was lecturing at the University of Wittenberg at that time. Alesius had received his own university education in St Andrews. Upon his graduation in 1515, he had entered the Augustinian priory there and subsequently proceeded to the study of theology. As a successful student of scholastic theology he had felt himself called to refute Lutheran theology as soon as it began to be debated in Scotland. In February 1528 he was commissioned to bring about the recantation of Patrick Hamilton, but the discussions with this first martyr of the Scottish Reformation as well as the latter's steadfast death at the stake led to a profound questioning of his own convictions. In the following year Alesius emerged as a severe critic ofthe old Church, for which he paid dearly by persecution and imprisonment. After an adventurous escape from St Andrews and months of travelling he finally reached Wittenburg, where he was inscribed in the faculty of arts in October 1532. So far very litde is known about Alesius' activities in Wittenberg. Yet there are two reasons why some elucidation of his academic activities and theological development during his three years at Wittenberg is highly desirable. First, it would be surprising indeed if his first experiences at this university, and especially the direct contact with Luther and Melanchthon, had not left a mark on his thought and career as a reformer. Second, his close friendship with the English reformers and his involvement in the doctrinal debates in England during the late 1530s suggests that Alesius formed an important link between the Reformation in England and in Germany.

The sacred and the secular: the Augustinian priory of Kells in Ossory, 1193–1541

At first sight the choice of the Augustinian priory of Kells in Ossory as the subject of a case study may seem a trifle arbitrary. True, its imposing ruins provide a feast for the archaeologist, but the loss of the original register — in place of which we have to settle for a few pages of tantalising excerpts — leaves the historian with a mere snack. Moreover, the priory falls well short of being a member of the big monastic league: at the Dissolution its income was barely quarter that of the great Augustinian abbey of St Thomas, Dublin. How can one justify choosing a subject which is both poorly documented and undistinguished? The short answer is that it is precisely this lack of distinctiveness which makes it representative of a large proportion of Augustinian houses founded in the wake of the Norman conquest.

THE LIBRARY OF JAMES STEWART, EARL OF MORAY, 1531-1570

Lord James Stewart was born in 1531, an illegitimate son of King James V of Scotland by Margaret Erskine, the wife of Sir Robert Douglas of Lochleven. It is said for King James that he at one time thought of legitimising his son by obtaining a divorce for the mother and marrying her. In 1538 the young James, having earlier obtained a papal dispensation from bastardy as a handicap to ecclesiastical preferment, was appointed prior in commendam of the wealthy Augustinian priory at St. Andrews, which became his home then or on the death of his father in 1542. He remained in close contact with his mother at Lochleven, to whom the revenues of the priory then passed.1 These first few years of the young child's life at once focussed attention on two evils which contributed to the desire to throw off the authority of the Catholic church in Scotland: the profligacy of the Catholic royalty—James V had at least four bastard sons—and the flagrant misappropriation of church benefices to the illegitimate royal and noble sons by means of which the revenues of abbeys and priories could largely be assigned to the Crown.

The Augustinian Priory and Parish Church of Monymusk, Aberdeenshire

During the thirteenth century the ancient Culdee settlement at Monymusk was replaced by a priory - sometimes in later records styled an Abbey '” of Augustinian Canons Regular, under the Bishop of St Andrews.The possibility that the settlement was Celtic in origin is suggested by the existence of a sculptured stone at Monymusk. The remains of the priory were plundered in the late 16th century for the construction of the House of Monymusk. The parish church is much altered but retains many Norman features although the question of whether it was the parish church or the church of the priory is unresolved.

The Augustinian Priory at Haverfordwest

The Augustinian Priory at Haverfordwest