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Adam
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Adam

the latter fifty-three sermons we read that there were fourteen ‘qui specialiter ad viros spectant religiosos.’ Oudin tells us that, when a young theological student in the Præmonstratensian abbey of Coussi, near Laon, he used often to have a certain codex containing about 114 sermons in his hands. The writing of this codex he assigns to the year 1200 or thereabouts, and though the first leaves had been torn away he does not hesitate to identify this volume with the complete work of which Ghiselbert's forty-seven sermons formed the first division. The account Oudin gives of the scope of these discourses strengthens this belief, and we can hardly fail to surmise what the fourteen odd sermons are. Copies or originals of the remaining sermons (in whole or in part) were, according to the same authority, to be found in the hands of Herman à Porta, abbot of St. Michael's at Antwerp, and in the library of the Cœlestins at Mantes (cod. 619), where they are ascribed to ‘Brother Adam, the Præmonstratensian.’ Ghiselbert tells us that the Cœlestins at Paris were still accustomed at mealtimes to read aloud our author's sermons, of which, in another passage, he adds that they possessed an old manuscript entitled ‘Magistri Adami Anglici Præmonstratensis Sermones.’ From the above remarks it would appear that the Præmonstratensian Adam of the sermons was very probably the Præmonstratensian Adam of the fourteen sermons entitled ‘De Ordine,’ &c., who in that case went by the name of Adam Anglicus the Præmonstratensian. Again, both Herman à Porta and the Cœlestins at Mantes (cod. 618) possessed a ‘Libellus Adam Præmonstratensis, natione Anglici, De Instructione Animæ,’ which they assigned to the author of the sermons. Now this work was in 1721 published by Pez from altogether another source, and is by him headed as the work of ‘Adam the Præmonstratensian, abbot and bishop of Candida Casa in Scotland.’ But Pez neglects to tell us whether he is here following the manuscript title of the work, or merely adopting Ghiselbert's theory alluded to above. The treatise in question is, in its prologue, dedicated to Walter, prior of St. Andrew's in Scotland, by brother Adam ‘servorum Dei servus,’ a phrase which seems to imply that its author was an abbot or other high church dignitary. Now there appears to have been only one Walter among all the known priors of St. Andrews, and he held office from 1162 to 1186, and from 1188 to at least the year 1195 (Gordon's Ecclesiastical Chronicle, iii. 75). This agrees very well with the date already established for the so-called Adam Scotus; but of course there may have been many Adams flourishing at this time in Scotland, though it would seem hardly likely that there should be two Scotch Præmonstratensian canons of this name with a European reputation. The deduction to be made from the above remarks is that all the before-mentioned works are probably by one author, who was certainly a Scotch Præmonstratensian canon and probably an abbot, but whether of Whithorn—in which case he may have been bishop also—or not can hardly be considered as settled in one way or the other. Still more uncertain is Ghiselbert's identification of our Adam with the Præmonstratensian English bishop, the contemporary of Cæsar Heisterbachensis (scripsit c. 1222), of whose death that author tells so pretty a story (Miracula, 1. iii. c. 22). Ghiselbert makes mention of a lost work written by our Adam entitled ‘De dulcedine Dei,’ and also of a volume of letters. Pez believed himself to have traced the former work in a fifteenth-century catalogue of ‘Codices Tegernseenses,’ and assigns a set of Latin verses entitled ‘Summula’ to the same author, but on very insufficient grounds.

[Migne's Patrologiæ Cursus Completus, cxcviii., which contains all Adam's writings that have as yet been published under his name; Mackenzie's Writers of the Scotch Nation, i. 141–5; Oudin De Scriptor. Eccles. ii. 1544–7; A. Miræi Chronicon Ord. Præmonstr. ap. Kuen's Collectio Scriptorum. vi. 36, 38, and sub anno 1518; B. Pez' Thesaurus Anecdot. pt. ii. 335–72; Fabricius' Biblioth. Lat. i. 11; Cave's Scriptores Ecclesiæ, ii. 234. For Christian, bishop of Candida Casa, and his suspension in 1177, see Roger Hoveden (Rolls Ser.), ii. 135, &c.]

T. A. A.

ADAM of Usk (fl. 1400), lawyer and writer of a Latin chronicle of English history from 1377 to 1404, was born at Usk, in Monmouthshire, probably between 1360 and 1365. By the favour of Edmund Mortimer, third earl of March, who held the lordship of Usk, he was appointed to a law-studentship at Oxford, and took a doctor's degree, being in 1387 an ‘extraordinarius’ in canon law. He also entered the church. He pleaded in the Archbishop of Canterbury's court for seven years, from 1390 to 1397; and in the latter year he attended, perhaps in some official capacity, the last parliament of Richard II, of the proceedings of which he has left a valuable account. In the revolution of 1399 he joined Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury—one of Bolingbroke's principal adherents—and accompanied the invading army in its march northward from Bristol to Chester. By his influence his native place escaped the punishment with which it was

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