[20] Joffred was appointed abbot of Crowland in 1109 in succession to Ingulph: the xiv c. forgery the Historia Croylandensis pretends to be written by Ingulph (nat. 1030) and continued by Peter of Blois. It contains fables about the antiquity of Oxford. See Ingulph and the Historia Croylandensis by W. G. Searle, M.A.
[21] p. 8.
[22] Fuller.
[23] “The monk Odo, a singular grammarian and satirical poet, read grammar to the boys and those of the younger sort assigned to him”; logic and rhetoric were imparted to the elder scholars. Soi-disant Peter of Blois.
[24] iii. p. 164. Their school was in the parish where the university schools rose later—under the shadow of Great S. Mary’s; and opposite was Le Glomery Lane (the Vicus Glomeriae).
[25] La Bataille des vii Ars. Oeuvres Rutebeuf, Paris 1839, ii. 415.
[26] Abbot Sampson (b. 1135) had himself been “a poor clerke” at the school of Bury, and William Diss, a Norfolk man, was the schoolmaster. In 1160 Sampson became its magister scholarum. He proceeded to buy certain stone houses—those solid structures which either as Jewish or Norman building were sought for at Cambridge and at Oxford also—so that the scholars might live rent free; and in 1198 he endowed the magister scolarum grammaticalium so that the tuition too became free. (The Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond, newly edited by Sir Ernest Clarke, M.A., F.S.A.) “School Hall Street” was just outside the abbey precincts, and answered to the “School Street” and the Vicus Glomeriae in Cambridge. There was an ancient chapel in Cambridge dedicated to the patron saint of Bury, and one of the chief possessions of that rich abbey was the manor of Mildenhall, which provided the expenses of its sacrist and cellarer: it is at least an interesting coincidence that Robert and Edmund of Mildenhall were original fellows of Michaelhouse; the former was its second master, third master, according to Le Neve, of Peterhouse, and chancellor of the university in 1334. An abbot and a monk of Bury are two of those to be specially commemorated in every mass said by the scholars of the new foundation of Michaelhouse (1324); and Curteys the 24th abbot of Bury was one of the personages invited by Henry VI. to assist at the laying of the foundation stone of King’s College. Walter Diss (a name well known in Bury) was a famous Carmelite friar at Cambridge in the xiv c. Fuller preserves the legend that Jocelyn, Abbot Sampson’s Boswell, had studied in the Cambridge schools, the source of which is Bale who was a Carmelite of Norwich and Cambridge. Together these things perhaps suggest that the schools of Cambridge and Bury had some relation to each other as well as to Orléans.
Bury was reckoned among fen monasteries because of its Suffolk property (of which Mildenhall formed part) where the See of Ely possessed several manors.
[27] A Henry of Orléans was sub-bailiff of Cambridge in the 2nd year of Edw. I. (Hundred Rolls i. p. 49).
[28] The transformation of houses of canons serving a church or cathedral into Regular Canons in the xii and xiii centuries was the effect of the rule indited by Yvo of Chartres which gave its final form and name to the “Canons Regular of S. Augustine” at the end of the xi c. The canons of S. Giles and Lanfranc’s hospital of S. Gregory at Canterbury were among the earliest of these communities to be converted, in the reign of Henry I., into Regulars.