he says, 'furnished his episcopal see at Worcester with monks living according to rule; not indeed expelling the clerks by force, but circumventing them with holy guile. For in a purposeful neglect he withdrew his presence from the church of Blessed Peter, whom that see had served from ancient times, and exercised his pontifical office with his monks in the church of the Blessed Mother of God, which he had constructed in the churchyard. So, as the people flocked to the bishop and the monks, the clerks were deserted, and either took their flight or bowed to the monastic yoke.'[1]
We are not concerned for the moment with the fiction of Oswald's 'holy guile', but only with the dedication of the church of Worcester. Eadmer tells us that he had sought for information from Worcester itself,[2] and we are fortunate in being able to appeal to a monk of Worcester who was a little earlier than Eadmer, and was unusually well informed as to the traditions of his own church. This was Heming, who under Bishop Wulstan's guidance collected and arranged the ancient charters of the see, and copied them out to preserve them for posterity.[3] Heming's chartulary, as we now have it, is a curiously composite document, the leaves of which have been disarranged, so that it is not easy to discover its original form or even to say whether it is all the work of one compiler. It has more than one preface, and more than one conclusion: but this may be only due to its original distribution into several books. One of these conclusions comes on f. 152. He has just given an early charter of a certain Wiferd and his wife Alta, and he adds to it a note to the effect that after their death a stone structure bearing a cross was erected over their grave and in their memory. By this cross, on account of the level space, Oswald often used to preach to the people; because the church of the episcopal seat, which was dedicated in honour of St Peter, was very small and could not contain the multitudes that assembled, and that noble monastery of St Mary, which he commenced for the episcopal seat and worthily brought to com-
- ↑ Memorials of St Dunstan (Rolls S.), pp. 303f.
- ↑ Ibid., pp. 163f.
- ↑ Heming was not the first to collect the Worcester Charters into a Register. A like attempt was made a hundred years before, possibly begun under the direction of St Oswald himself. Fragments of this—'by far the earliest English chartulary of which we have any trace'—are preserved in the British Museum (Nero E. 1) and among Lord Middleton's MSS. at Wollaton (see the description by Mr. W. H. Stevenson in the Middleton Catalogue, published by the Historical MSS. Commission, pp. 197 ff.). The order of the charters in the surviving pages of this ancient register agrees with that followed by Heming: but happily Heming did not follow his predecessor in the abbreviation of the text of the documents.
