monks about the lives of those who had founded a religious house. Nor was it only the pious founder, but also his immediate relatives, whom monks delighted to honour in those strange 'histories', by which the uncritical genealogist has often been led astray. Indeed, it is insufficiently realized how much erroneous genealogy and absolutely fabulous history has found its way, through the Baronage, from the tales thus concocted into modern books which deal with the ancient baronage of England. Yet, even here, the marginal references put the reader on his guard against statements based only on monastic evidence.
The great Benedictine abbey of St. John the Baptist, Colchester, 'was founded towards the end of the eleventh century by Eudo, the son of Hubert de Ria, who was dapifer or sewer of William Rufus'.[1] Its cartulary, which has been privately printed for the Roxburghe Club, has hardly any preface and only a poor index of place-names and none at all of persons. I have dealt in the pages of this Review[2] with the early charters of the abbey, and Dr. Armitage Robinson (then dean of Westminster) has carried their critical treatment further still.[3] In this paper, however, my object is to discuss the curious narrative concerning the founder and foundation of the house, which is found, not in the cartulary nor among the muniments of the abbey, but in a single manuscript in the British Museum,[4] where it is found at the end of the volume, 'in a hand of the sixteenth century'.[5] Of its origin we know nothing.
This narrative was known to Dugdale, who used it in his Monasticon (editio prima), and cited it thence in his Baronage (1675). Morant, who thus came to know of it, drew upon it for his History of Colchester (1748), but the first historian to deal with it, and the first to criticize its statements, seems to have been Freeman, whose works on the reigns of the Conqueror and his successor were conceived on so vast a scale that he was enabled to examine the whole of the evidence (in print), good, bad, or indifferent, that might possibly bear upon his subject. It was, so far as I know, in his William Rufus (1882) that he finally and most fully expressed his opinion of the tale.
In the meanwhile, Mr. Walter Rye, the well-known Norfolk antiquary, was coming forward as an ardent champion of what
- ↑ See the valuable history of this abbey contributed by Mr. Robert C. Fowler, O.B.E., F.S.A., of the Public Record Office staff, to the Victoria History of Essex (ii. 93).
- ↑ Ante, xvi. 721.
- ↑ See his monograph on Gilbert Crispin (abbot of Westminster).
- ↑ Cotton MS. D. viii, fo. 345.
- ↑ This statement is made in a paper on 'Medieval Colchester' by Mr. Dukinfield Astley (Essex Arch. Trans, viii. 120), but seems, from what he says, to be taken from the Catalogue of Romances in the British Museum (i. 230), a not inappropriate domicile!
