Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Foreword
- Prologue: Before the Monastery
- 1 From Máeldub to Aldhelm
- 2 Aldhelm's community
- 3 Royal patronage and exploitation (710–960)
- 4 Malmesbury and the late Anglo-Saxon Benedictine reform movement
- 5 Responding to the Conquest (1066–1100)
- 6 William of Malmesbury and Queen Matilda
- 7 The ascendancy of Bishop Roger of Salisbury
- 8 The Abbey and the Anarchy
- 9 The dispute with the bishops of Salisbury (1142–1217)
- 10 A self-confident age: the Abbey in the thirteenth century
- 11 The Despenser years and the criminal career of Abbot John of Tintern
- 12 Thomas of Bromham and the Eulogium Historiarum
- 13 After the Black Death
- 14 The abbots of the fifteenth century
- 15 The Tudor Abbey
- Epilogue: After the departure of the monks
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Responding to the Conquest (1066–1100)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 December 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Foreword
- Prologue: Before the Monastery
- 1 From Máeldub to Aldhelm
- 2 Aldhelm's community
- 3 Royal patronage and exploitation (710–960)
- 4 Malmesbury and the late Anglo-Saxon Benedictine reform movement
- 5 Responding to the Conquest (1066–1100)
- 6 William of Malmesbury and Queen Matilda
- 7 The ascendancy of Bishop Roger of Salisbury
- 8 The Abbey and the Anarchy
- 9 The dispute with the bishops of Salisbury (1142–1217)
- 10 A self-confident age: the Abbey in the thirteenth century
- 11 The Despenser years and the criminal career of Abbot John of Tintern
- 12 Thomas of Bromham and the Eulogium Historiarum
- 13 After the Black Death
- 14 The abbots of the fifteenth century
- 15 The Tudor Abbey
- Epilogue: After the departure of the monks
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The years immediately after 1066 were traumatic for the Malmesbury monks, and the prospects did not look promising for an institution that was closely associated with the former royal house of Wessex and the cult of an Anglo-Saxon saint unknown to most Normans. Despite these challenges the monastery managed to weather the storm, and by the end of the reign of the Conqueror the cult of Aldhelm had been endorsed by leading members of the new Norman elite. When seeking to understand this story we are fortunate to have the testimony of the great historian, William of Malmesbury (c. 1086– c. 1143), who devoted considerable attention to the history of the monastery in the decades after 1066 in his Gesta Pontificum. The last Anglo-Saxon abbot, Brihtric, was dismissed and left Malmesbury, later receiving the abbacy of Burton-on-Trent as some sort of compensation. William wrote positively about Brihtric describing how ‘he ruled the house with high distinction for seven years’. He had much less time for the first Norman, Turold, the first Norman abbot, recruited from the Norman monastery of Fécamp, who was high-handed and acted ‘like a tyrant’. Turold's tenure at Malmesbury was extremely brief, and by 1070 he had been replaced by Warin of Lire, who was abbot until around 1091.
William of Malmesbury provided a curiously partisan account of Warin's rule at Malmesbury. He acknowledged that Warin introduced a good level of monastic observance, but he was also highly critical of other aspects of his behaviour, denouncing him as a man whose selfish misuse of the monastery's resources harmed the monks.
Turold's successor was a monk, Warin of Lire, a man of achievement, especially in accustoming the monks to the Rule. But in other respects he was of little use to the church, because he was the helpless puppet of his own hopes of a higher position. That made him adept at emptying the monks’ pockets and raising cash from any and every source. Still, he did not hide away the profits of his greed; instead, he wasted the church's resources on both sides of the Channel, to increase his influence with the great, and to cut a dash in the eyes of those who had known him as a poor man in the past.
On arrival in Malmesbury Warin, at least according to William, treated many of the monastery's pre-Conquest relics with great disrespect.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Malmesbury Abbey 670-1539Patronage, Scholarship and Scandal, pp. 61 - 74Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2023