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The Merovingian monastery of St Evroul in the light of conflicting traditions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Marjorie Chibnall*
Affiliation:
Cambridge CLAIRE CROSS, University of York

Extract

Historians of early monasticism in Frankish Gaul either have little to say about the monastery founded by St Evroul or, like Dom Laporte, devote their attention to a discussion of the probable date of his life. The disappearance of almost all early documentary sources is one reason for this: there was certainly a break in the occupation of the site for perhaps half the century between the destruction of the monastery in the tenth century and its refoundation in 1050, and only one charter, dated 900, was rescued and copied in the eleventh century. The fact that there has been no systematic excavation of the site, so that archaeological evidence of buildings before the thirteenth-century church is lacking, is another. Early annals and reliable lives of other saints have nothing at all to say on the subject. The first historian to tackle it, Orderic Vitalis, writing in the early twelfth century, had to admit that he could discover nothing about the abbots for the four hundred years after St Evroul; and he had to draw on the memories and tales of the old men he knew, both in the monastery and in the villages round about. Needless to say he harvested a luxuriant crop of legends and traditions of all kinds. The problem of the modern historian is to winnow a few grains of historical truth out of the stories that he garnered, and the hagiographical traditions, some of which he did not know.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1972

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References

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page no 33 note 2 Above, p 31, n I.

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page no 34 note 4 Ibid, p 436. ‘ Consuetudo enim erat sancto viro ut post collectas fratrum, dum ad lectum suum revertebatur ad pausandum, ministrum suum ad se silenter vocans legere rogaret ... Et ut omnes cursus compleret, scilicet Romanum Gallicanum Sancti Benedicti, Scotticum seu Sancti Columbani, per diversa horarum spatia psallebat. Cotidie etiam cum sacredote oblationes suas Domino studebat offerre, et dominico die sacerdotes ante eum tres missas canere solebant. ‘

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page no 35 note 5 This has been a subject of controversy. Dates suggested for the appearance of benedictine influence range from C 629 (McLaughlin, p 19) to the mid-eighth century (James, O’Carroll.’Monasticrules in Merovingian Gaul’, Studies, XLII (Dublin 1953) pp407-19)Google Scholar.

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page no 36 note 3 Ibid. ‘Oblationes etiam per singulos dies sacerdotibus sacrandas offerebat, et diebus dominicis omnibus tres jubebat se presente missas celebran, in quibus solitas offerebat oblationes.’

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