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
3 - Royal patronage and exploitation (710–960)
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
After Aldhelm's death much of the community's history is obscure for several centuries, although there is some evidence that the monastery continued to function in a recognisably ‘Aldhelmian’ manner for a while. The key source for understanding the period 710–50 is the correspondence of Lullus, later archbishop of Mainz and a missionary, with St Boniface, to the German people. Lullus was a student at Malmesbury in the early 730s before setting off on a journey that took him first to Rome and ultimately to Germany. Letters to and from Lullus, together with other documents with Malmesbury connections, were preserved by Lullus and survive in a ninth-century codex held in Vienna. This manuscript is famous for its collection of the letters of Boniface, but it also provides vital clues for an understanding of life in Malmesbury in the first half of the eighth century. The Vienna codex contains an undated letter sent to Lullus in Germany many years after he had left England, perhaps in the 750s, and written by an anonymous Malmesbury monk, who reminisced about the ‘good old days’ of the early 730s when he and Lullus had both been young members of the Malmesbury community.
[…] do not forget but recall to memory in your most learned mind our former friendship, which we shared in the monastery at Malmesbury, when Abbot Eaba fostered you with loving care. I remember this token, that he nicknamed you ‘Little’.
This letter implies that Abbot Eaba's relationship with Lullus in the 730s had been fundamentally educational, and the reference to ‘fostering’ is similar to the language used decades earlier by Æthilwald when he described his relationship with Aldhelm and his time at Malmesbury. In the 730s, as in the 690s, it seems that some students joined the Malmesbury community temporarily for ‘fosterage’ or temporary educational purposes and did not make a lifelong commitment to the place. The correspondence of Lullus also reveals that before he came to Malmesbury he was a member of an entirely different monastic community, headed by an abbess called Cyneburg. In a letter dated to 739–41, Lullus and two friends wrote from Germany to one Abbess Cyneburg, thanking her for her role in their early education and promising that if they ever returned to Britain they would re-join her community and offer her their obedience and loyalty.
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- Malmesbury Abbey 670-1539Patronage, Scholarship and Scandal, pp. 35 - 46Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2023