The Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond: A Picture of Monastic Life in the Days of Abbot Samson

by active 1173-1215 de Brakelond Jocelin

PREFACE

Samson and his Arch-Eulogist.—Abbot Samson of St. Edmundsbury and his biographer, Jocelin of Brakelond, undoubtedly owe such immortality as they possess to their introduction to the world at large by Thomas Carlyle. Learned historians and commentators of the past had made use of the dry facts of the Chronicle for their disquisitions and treatises; but none had recognized the human interest of Jocelin's narrative until the Sage of Chelsea seized upon it as evidence of that theory of Hero Worship on which he loved to insist.

The whole of the seventeen chapters of Book II. of "Past and Present," published in 1843, are devoted to a study of Abbot Samson, and the lessons which Carlyle thought "our own poor century" could learn from him.

From that day to this, Samson has been more or less a household word; and, as John Richard Green says in his "Stray Studies" (1876), "In the wandering gossipy pages of Jocelin of Brakelond the life of the twelfth century, so far as it could penetrate abbey walls, still glows distinct for us round the figure of the shrewd, practical, kindly, imperious abbot who looks out, a little travestied perhaps, from the pages of Mr. Carlyle."

The Chronicle.—Mr. Green further says:—"By a rare accident the figure of the silent, industrious Norfolk monk, who at the close of Henry the Second's reign suddenly found himself ruler of the wealthiest, if not the greatest, of English abbeys, starts out distinct from the dim canvas of the annals of his house. Annals indeed in any strict sense St. Edmund's has none; no national chronicle was ever penned in its scriptorium such as that which flings lustre round its rival, St. Albans; nor is even a record of its purely monastic life preserved such as that which gives a local and ecclesiastical interest to its rival of Glastonbury. One book alone the abbey has given us, but that one book is worth a thousand chronicles."

The original manuscript of the Chronicle occupies 43 folios (121-163) of a thick quarto volume on vellum once in the library of Bury Abbey, afterwards in the hands of the family of Bacon of Redgrave, then belonging to Bishop Stillingfleet of Worcester, and now preserved in the British Museum amongst the Harleian Manuscripts. The contents of this Liber Albus (Harl. MS. 1005) are very varied; and a complete list of the 144 items in it which relate to the Abbey will be found on pp. 122-4 of the 1821 Edition of the Monasticon. (Another copy of the Chronicle was in the Cottonian MS. Vitellius dxv., burnt in the fire of 1731.) Three facsimiles of portions of the MS. are given in the Camden Society's Edition of the Latin text (to be presently referred to), and the writing is there ascribed to the end of the 13th or beginning of the 14th century.

Previous Editions of the Chronicle.—In the year 1840, John Gage Rokewode, F.R.S. (1786-1842), Director of the Society of Antiquaries, brought out for the Camden Society a thin quarto book in the familiar green cover, which he entitled "Chronica Jocelini de Brakelonda de rebus gestis Samsonis Abbatis Monasterii Sancti Edmundi." It was this book that attracted the attention of Carlyle, with the results already stated. Rokewode was a scion of the distinguished family of Gage of Hengrave, near Bury, and took the additional name of Rokewode on inheriting in 1838 the estates of the Rookwood family. He was a very learned genealogist, and the author of a History of Hengrave and of the Hundred of Thingoe. His observations on Suffolk families and topography are therefore to be relied upon, though subsequent investigation has corrected some of his notes on historical matters.

Rokewode's text was in the original Latin; but to meet the popular demand for the Chronicle caused by Carlyle's published appreciation of it in "Past and Present" (1843), a translation into English was made by Thomas Edlyne Tomlins (1804-1872), and was published in 1844 by Whitaker & Co. in the "Popular Library of Modern Authors," under the title of "Monastic and Social Life in the Twelfth Century."

Mr. T. E. Tomlins was a nephew of the better known Sir Thomas Edlyne Tomlins (1762-1841), assistant counsel to the Treasury, who wrote "The Law of Wills" and other well-known text-books. The younger Thomas was an attorney, and also wrote on legal subjects. Tomlins' translation of Jocelin was issued in the somewhat forbidding form of a tall paper-covered book of 64 pages of double columns of small type, without any break from start to finish: the few notes at the end being mostly on legal points, and none of them of great merit.