APPENDICES:
page
- SAMSON AS AN AUTHOR [215]
- NOTES TO THE TEXT OF THE CHRONICLE [222]
- TABLE OF CHIEF DATES IN THE HISTORY OF THE ABBEY OF ST. EDMUNDSBURY (a.d. 870 to 1903) [257]
APPENDIX I
samson as an author.
Samson having been generally looked upon as a man of action rather than as a man of letters, it seems desirable to consider at greater length than is possible in the general Introduction, his claims to be regarded as a literary character.
In the Bodleian Library at Oxford is a huge codex of 898 pages (MS. 240) in a script of the 14th century. This once belonged to Bury Abbey, as at the beginning is the note "Liber monachorum Sancti Edmundi, in quo continetur secunda pars Historia auree, quam scribi fecit dominus Rogerus de Huntedoun sumptibus graciarum suarum anno domini mccc.lxxviio." Over the title is written on the margin "Thomas Prise possidet," and in another hand "Io. Anglicus erat author."
There is considerable difficulty in assigning the exact authorship of this work: but that it was compiled at Bury is certain, and it was no doubt added to as new materials turned up or were deemed worthy of admission, especially such as were connected with St. Edmundsbury. Dr. Carl Horstman has published in the preface to Vol. I. of his Nova Legenda Anglie (Oxf. Univ. Press, 1901) a summary of the contents of this book which throws much new light on its provenance. It is, as he says, "the depository of documents of Bury Abbey, and not the work of one individual; but the joint work, the common concern of the monastery, for a whole generation."
The MS. contains only the second part of the Historia aurea, and with an abbreviated text; and this is followed by a collection of miscellanies, lives of saints, poetry and documents of all sorts. Dr. Horstman prints in his second volume the lives of several saints, scattered through the last half of the codex.
The only one of these lives that need concern us is that of St. Edmund, which is very long and detailed, and occupies 116 printed pages. This is followed almost immediately by a chapter De modo meditandi vel contemplandi (including St. Edmund's prayer, "Gratias tibi ago"), and later by a compilation on monastic discipline for the novices of Bury Abbey.