St Frideswide’s Priory as a centre of learning in early Oxford

The priory of Augustinian canons dedicated to St Frideswide (founded ca. 1120, dissolved 1524) was the home of several writers with a focus on learning and pastoral care in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: Robert of Cricklade (d. 1174×79), Prior Philip (fl. 1179–91), likely Alexander Neckam (1157–1217), W. Bothewald (fl. 1200), and Brother Angier (fl. 1207–14). This survey of their works identifies several additional manuscripts from what Robert Sherborne could still call ‘that immortal library of St Frideswide’ in 1525 by searching for direct involvement from their authors. Contrary to earlier assumptions, the priory is one of the most plausible candidates for an institution that supported education in the decades leading to the creation of the University of Oxford.

This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in Mediaeval Studies following peer review. The version of record is Andrew N. J. Dunning, ‘St Frideswide’s Priory as a Centre of Learning in Early Oxford’, Mediaeval Studies 80 (2018): 253–96.

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On the feast of St Frideswide, 19 October 1525, Robert Sherborne (ca. 1454–1536), bishop of Chichester, wrote to Thomas Wolsey of ‘that immortal library of St Frideswide’.¹ Sherborne had been a benefactor of St Frideswide’s Priory in Oxford, a house of Augustinian canons, founded around 1120 to replace a house of secular canons. Wolsey dissolved it in 1524 to form Cardinal College.² The first college library was probably in the former refectory, which may already have been subdivided for the purpose. Yet the priory’s books had disappeared by the creation of King Henry VIII’s College in 1532, which the modern Christ Church replaced in 1546; a fifteenth-century cartulary is the only volume to remain there.³ Lacking evidence of vitality in its later days, St Frideswide’s Priory does not usually appear among the institutions of Oxford that historians consider to have had intellectual potential or influence on the development of the university. Yet in the context of the sketchy evidence for learning in twelfth-century Oxford, the work of the writers at St Frideswide’s allows us to glimpse the brilliant collision of interests that eventually brought about the university.

The canons at St Frideswide’s produced a range of learned works in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to meet the needs of varied audiences, bridging divisions between the non-expert and scholarly, the secular and monastic. There are several authors connected with the house: Robert of Cricklade (d. 1174×79), Philip of Oxford (fl. 1179–91), possibly Alexander Neckam (1157–1217), W. Bothewald (fl. 1200), and Brother Angier (fl. 1207–14). By telling these canons’ stories, surveying their writings, and examining the underlying manuscripts, this article aims to understand their intellectual goals and uncover more books that were likely once at the priory. St Frideswide’s emerges as a well-resourced institution in its early days from which authors had both interest in circulating texts and the means to do so. Although there is no direct evidence for teaching there, the priory was a true centre of learning in the sense that the canons fostered a community mixing scholarly and contemplative approaches to edify and care for both themselves and local society.

The Augustinian canons in twelfth-century Oxford

Intellectual life in early Oxford can be attached to little more than a litany of names. A recent official history of the university skims over the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries in only a few pages.⁴ R. W. Southern highlights Theobald d’Étampes, teaching liberal arts or philosophy there from 1095 to the early 1120s; and Robert Pullen, lecturing in theology from 1133 to 1139, later becoming a cardinal.⁵ During and since Southern’s time, historians have debated whether education only achieved a critical presence in the 1190s, as he argues, or gradually emerged over the course of the century.⁶ There is now evidence that Serlo of Wilton (ca. 1105–81) lectured to a sizeable group of students in Oxford;⁷ but Master Vacarius (ca. 1120–ca. 1200), once viewed as its founder of legal studies, is no longer believed to have had a connection with the area.⁸ Although there were a few prominent ecclesiastics with the title magister, such as Robert de Chesney (d. 1166), there is little evidence for the scope of their activities. The title could be used in ways that did not necessarily refer to an active teacher.⁹ By the 1190s, Alexander Neckam became the first known person to call himself a reader in theology; and John of Tynemouth (d. 1221) taught law.¹⁰ Emo of Friesland (d. 1237) became Oxford’s first known international student. Southern argued that it was not the schools that would attract a cleric to Oxford in the twelfth century, but its ecclesiastical courts.¹¹ These have been argued to have given Oxford an advantage over potential rivals such as Lincoln or Northampton, especially in the study of canon law.¹² Among almost all these figures, it is unclear where they lived and worked, or what relationship they might have had to Oxford’s institutions.

Houses of the Augustinian canons near Oxford

The existence of religious houses in Oxford is far better documented than that of the schools, and the Augustinian canons were particularly active in the area. These houses were groups of clerics that lived communally according to a rule of life – for which they are often called canons regular – but often worked to fulfil their local communities’ needs for pastoral care and teaching.¹³ St Frideswide’s was believed to have been the monastery founded by Frithuswith herself; it later became a mixed house of secular canons, refounded as a priory around 1120.¹⁴ There were around thirteen to eighteen canons at the priory.¹⁵ It was the first of several Augustinian foundations in the area: within Oxford, there were also Osney Abbey, founded in 1129,¹⁶ and several smaller foundations not far away, at Dorchester (founded ca. 1140), Cold Norton (ca. 1150), Chacombe (in the time of Henry II), Notley (ca. 1160), Bicester (1180s), Wroxton (ca. 1217), and Chetwode (1245), with possibly other smaller cells.¹⁷ Such institutions must have been a draw in themselves for those seeking a religious life while working within the world.¹⁸

In spite of sharing a common rule of life, the Augustinian houses did not always cooperate: there is evidence for a rivalry between St Frideswide’s and Osney Abbey in the twelfth century. Around 1149, Osney absorbed St George’s, originally a college of secular priests founded in 1074.¹⁹ The presence of several learned figures there in the middle of the twelfth century has led to the suggestion that there were already students at St George’s by this time, as there certainly were in later centuries.²⁰ Geoffrey of Monmouth was probably there while writing De gestis Britonum, and it has been speculated that he might also have been teaching, on the grounds that he witnessed charters as a master.²¹ An initial survey of Osney Abbey likewise found evidence of canons capable of teaching and scholarship in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.²² Ralph, the first prior, had come from St Frideswide’s, but this did not presage a harmonious relationship between the houses.²³ The cartulary and annals of Osney Abbey report a dispute with St Frideswide’s over the investiture of the church of St Mary Magdalen in 1147–51, 1173–76, and 1200, requiring papal intervention on each occasion. The church had been part of St George’s, and the canons of St Frideswide had grounds to question whether this remained the case following the college’s absorption after Roger of Salisbury declared that he had given the church to them.²⁴ The extent to which this rivalry reflects the houses’ ambitions among the citizenry is unclear. There are hints of capacity for teaching and learning at many of Oxford’s religious houses, but few definite answers as a result of the scarcity of documentation. The writings of the Augustinian canons at St Frideswide’s do not distinguish them from their peers elsewhere in Europe, but they collectively form one of the most comprehensive bodies of evidence for a centre of learning in Oxford, suggesting that they would have taken an interest in fostering intellectual life in the area.

Robert of Cricklade

A lack of documentation makes the history of St Frideswide’s difficult to reconstruct. The priory’s archives consist primarily in two cartularies, from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.²⁵ There are also a little more than a hundred charters, mostly from a later date and many in poor condition; most of these are at the Bodleian Library.²⁶ It is not even possible to determine from these the dates of the priors of St Frideswide’s in its first century.²⁷ The first Augustinian prior was Master Wimund or Guimund, from ca. 1122 until the late 1130s. He had been a royal chaplain to Henry I.²⁸ William of Malmesbury praised him as having transformed the house from a small collection of clerics ‘who were living as they pleased’.²⁹ An account in a cartulary from St Frideswide’s describes Wimund as learned, pointedly in contrast to the earlier residents.³⁰ He may have had a scholarly bent, but nothing more is known of him.

Robert of Cricklade became the second prior of St Frideswide’s in 1138 or 1139. Robert was a former schoolmaster and successful writer, and the manuscripts of his works give the first evidence of capacity to distribute literary works from the priory.³¹ He is first recorded, already with the title magister, in a charter of Kenilworth Priory, an Augustinian house founded in 1124. The document is not datable more precisely than 1125×33, but is probably among the priory’s earliest charters.³² He became a canon at Cirencester Abbey, thirteen kilometres north-west of Cricklade. In gratitude for this, he gave land near Cricklade to the abbey during his priorate.³³ On the basis of this and the description of him as an ‘ancient man’ by Gerald of Wales around 1191,³⁴ he was probably born around 1100. Alongside a respectable corpus of theological works and hagiography, he was responsible for building works and setting the foundations for a shrine of St Frideswide as a destination for pilgrimage.

Robert’s earliest surviving work, The Marriage of the Patriarch Jacob (De connubio patriarche Iacob), is from his time at Cirencester. The book is an introduction to monasticism, allegorizing Jacob’s betrothal to Leah and Rachel, who represent among other things the active and contemplative lives in the imagery of Augustine and Gregory the Great.³⁵ He later characterizes it as a treatment of the conflict between the virtues against the vices alongside contemplation.³⁶ He remained self-conscious of his identity as a canon writing for monastics, but equally unapologetic: ‘I am not a monk, but the most unworthy of the canons of Cirencester.’³⁷ Though he writes in a contemplative, homiletic mode, he also refers to letters of Seneca that were rarely used in this period.³⁸ Godfrey, abbot of Winchcombe, was the book’s intended dedicatee, but he died on 5 March 1137, before the book was finished; Robert instead dedicated the book to Laurence, Gervase, and Achard, also monks at Winchcombe.³⁹ Godfrey had been a friend before Robert became a canon, and he had promised to send the abbot a book while still ‘a scholar, devoted to the guidance of the schools.’⁴⁰ Fearing that Godfrey would see the work he had originally planned as too frivolous, Robert wrote the Marriage instead.

The Marriage became Robert’s most widely disseminated work, surviving in five manuscripts, with another six records of untraced medieval copies.⁴¹ Robert’s vision for the text as a foundational monastic work is fulfilled in the late twelfth-century copy from Reading Abbey (now Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 725), which appropriately prefaces the Marriage with the John Cassian’s Collations (or Instituta monachorum, as it is called here). It is an immaculate production, carefully planned and adorned with splendid initials, and it was further annotated and illustrated in later centuries.⁴² The text was also successful in scholastic circles, perhaps reflecting circulation of the book via St Frideswide’s. Two thirteenth-century copies with an Oxford provenance refer to him as its prior, though this could have been an update by an astute scribe.⁴³ Of the eleven known manuscripts or records of manuscripts, four were in a college library by the end of the Middle Ages, often listed alongside standard scholastic texts. This book shows Robert’s ability, as an Augustinian, to bridge the monastic and secular.

Administration soon consumed Robert after his move to Oxford. There is a gap of at least fifteen years during which he likely did not write anything that survives. The priory was left in an unstable position when its founder, Roger of Salisbury, died on 11 December 1139 after his sudden fall from power. He had not clearly transferred to the community the rights to churches such as St Mary Magdalen’s supposedly intended for its support.⁴⁴ Robert travelled to Rome in 1140/41 to secure a papal confirmation of the priory’s rights.⁴⁵ He was in Paris in 1147 to resolve a conflict over the manor of Eddington, in Hungerford. Even in the midst of this, Robert was engaged with building works: archaeologists date a cloister to the 1140s, while the chancel of the priory church was probably begun in the 1160s and completed in the 1170s.⁴⁶ He travelled again to Rome on priory business by way of Sicily and Paris, gaining along the way the dedication to the translation of Phaedo by Aristippus and bringing back a Greek medical book to Eleanor of Aquitaine. Documents suggest that he was abroad between 1156 and 1158, and he likely did not return until at least 1159.⁴⁷ In Sicily, he contracted a disease that caused swelling of his left leg, perhaps elephantiasis, which would recur periodically until a pilgrimage to the grave of Thomas Becket in 1171–72.⁴⁸ He was nonetheless able to travel to Scotland in the winter of 1164–65, where he probably stayed at the court of King Malcolm.⁴⁹ He looks to have filled the periods of forced leisure with writing, producing a combination of works suggestive of a combined interest in academics and pastoral care.

Robert dedicated his Anthology of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (Defloratio naturalis historie Plinii secundi) to Henry II (reigned 1154–89), consisting of excerpts from Pliny with brief comments. As Robert explains in the proem, he seeks to rationalize Pliny’s work and make it more comprehensible, addressing himself "to the diligent, both especially to the cloistered and to scholars’.⁵⁰ It had lasting influence, with copies still being made in the fourteenth century.⁵¹ The work was once thought to be of importance to the textual tradition of Pliny, though more recent scholarship has deemphasized its value in this respect.⁵² It is as close to pure classical scholarship as any work one finds in this period. There are clues that the Anthology of Pliny was originally written before Robert was a canon. It has long been proposed as the book ‘filled with playful readings’ that Robert promised to Abbot Godfrey before The Marriage of Jacob.⁵³ Several aspects of Robert’s commentary suggest that it was originally composed in the early 1130s, perhaps dedicated to King Henry I (reigned 1068–1135), but the evidence is inconclusive.⁵⁴ A revision published out of Oxford suggests that that there was use at St Frideswide’s for the work Robert produced during his former role as a schoolmaster.

The Mirror of Faith (Speculum fidei) is a summary of Christian belief composed largely of extracts from the Old and New Testaments, interpreting them through patristic and classical sources. Robert dedicated the work to Robert de Beaumont (1104–68), the second earl of Leicester, stating that he wrote it at the earl’s request. This was not the only work to attract the earl’s patronage, who was known for an interest in monasticism.⁵⁵ The Mirror is best known for condemning Peter Lombard as a ‘heretic’ based on his Christology, as Robert recalls from a trip to Paris.⁵⁶ He records a conversation with Robert de Melun, who is known to have been in Paris from 1137 to 1142 and from 1147 into the 1150s.⁵⁷ The prior himself is recorded at Paris on 25–27 May 1147, when Pope Eugene III resolved a dispute between St Frideswide’s and Bec Abbey, allowing it to take possession of the manor of Eddington, once part of the priory at Beaumont.⁵⁸ Intriguingly, this leads back to the earl of Leicester, whose twin brother Waleran (1104–1166), count of Meulan and earl of Worcester, had refounded Beaumont as a daughter house of Bec in 1142.⁵⁹ The earls are not listed as witnesses in the version of the charter recorded in the priory’s cartulary, but they must have taken an interest in the negotiations. The dispute would resurface periodically through the 1150s and 60s.⁶⁰

The Mirror itself appeared after Peter Lombard’s death, and in the midst of renewed hostilities over Eddington. Robert of Cricklade refers to bishop Roger of Worcester, which means that the book must have been written between Roger’s consecration on 23 August 1164 and the earl’s death on 5 April 1168.⁶¹ One can only wonder about the book’s relationship to a suit started by the earl against St Frideswide’s over Eddington in 1166. The earl was nearly excommunicated for this, and in penitence took the habit of an Augustinian canon at the end of his life.⁶² The book must have played some role in the negotiations or in healing the relationship with the earl of Leicester afterwards, appealing to his sense of religiosity with reference to an experience that the two Roberts might have recalled from almost two decades earlier. The earl looks to have accepted the book, since a copy is known to have existed in the Abbey of Lyre, patronized by the earls of Leicester.⁶³ Both this and a copy from Malmesbury Abbey have disappeared.⁶⁴ Whatever the precise circumstances of its creation, the Mirror must have been a calculated political move.

The surviving copy of the Mirror can linked directly to Robert, and shares an illuminator with a manuscript of his Anthology of Pliny, suggesting that both volumes were once at St Frideswide’s. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 380 has a triumphant addition by the prior quoting a bull of Pope Alexander III from 1170 condemning Peter Lombard. This is on a bifolium added to the beginning of the book, in a hand different from that of the main text, but produced in the same context. This suggests that the addition was made under Robert’s direction in the early 1170s, probably as soon as he had received a copy of the bull. Though Robert’s own hand does not appear in the manuscript, it must have been sufficiently connected to him that he could request the addition. The manuscript is produced to a high standard, and includes four illuminated initials by the ‘Simon master’, an itinerant artist who worked in Paris and possibly Denmark before moving to England.⁶⁵ He is named after Simon, the abbot of St Albans from 1167 to 1183, under whom he worked on several manuscripts. Another one of his initials appears in a copy of Robert’s Anthology of Pliny made around the same time (Eton, College Library, MS 134). This manuscript has another link to Oxford in the fifteenth century: Thomas Gascoigne (1404–58), the chancellor of the university, annotated it extensively.⁶⁶ Neither manuscript is written in any known St Albans hand.⁶⁷ The most plausible explanation is that both manuscripts are the result of a stint by the Simon master in Oxford.⁶⁸

The prior’s most influential works are also those that are most difficult to trace: his hagiography. His healing at the tomb of Thomas Becket from the long-standing disease contracted in Sicily awoke him to the possibilities of pilgrimage as a tool for healing, as his enthused letter to Benedict of Peterborough (d. 1193) shows. This probably occurred in late 1171 or early 1172: he says that he was healed ‘twelve years or more’ after his trip to Sicily.⁶⁹ Robert wrote a narrative of the life and miracles of Thomas that other hagiographers reused, but now only survives through an Old Norse adaptation.⁷⁰ Scholars also point to Robert of Cricklade as the most likely author of a life of St Magnus, also an Icelandic translation from a lost Latin source, written by a ‘meistari Roðbert’ who was deeply influenced by the tradition surrounding Thomas Becket.⁷¹ Robert composed the work for the secular canons of St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall,⁷² perhaps part of a repeat trip to Scotland.

Most significantly for the future of the priory, Robert turned his skill to promoting the cult of Frideswide. He rewrote the anonymous ‘Life A’ from the early twelfth century to remove certain confusions of Oxford geography and improve its style. The resulting ‘Life B’ is also anonymous in the manuscripts, but is firmly in Robert’s style.⁷³ He emphasizes Frideswide’s learning and virtue: for instance, while ‘Life A’ gives her six or seven months to learn the psalter, ‘Life B’ reduces this to five months, specifically elevating her beyond the capacities of any male child.⁷⁴ The book is designed to bring the saint into the priory’s liturgical life: unlike ‘Life A’, it is broken into thirteen short sections that can be read independently.⁷⁵ It was probably during Robert’s time that the priory orchestrated the invention of Frideswide’s relics, later celebrated on 15 May.⁷⁶ Robert’s own experience probably inspired him to promote St Frideswide’s as a local centre for pilgrimage.

Robert’s Homilies on Ezekiel (Omelie super Ezechielem) return to allegory, continuing the homilies on Ezekiel by Gregory the Great. He dedicates the prologue to Reginald, prior of Church Gresley, whose dates are unknown,⁷⁷ but refers to the death of Thomas Becket in 1170; the tone suggests that he was writing before the canonization in 1173.⁷⁸ The homilies are for a learned audience, assuming some knowledge of different exegetical approaches to Ezekiel; the work is in part a criticism of Richard of Saint-Victor’s approach to this text.⁷⁹ The work survives in two manuscripts, the earliest of which (Hereford, Cathedral Library, MS O.iii.10) is extensively revised and thought to be written in the prior’s own hand.⁸⁰ The opening rubric states that the prior himself published or composed the work.⁸¹ The hand varies over the course of the volume, but the letterforms are sufficiently similar to allow for this being the same person; the corrections are mostly in the same hand. The text has an untidy look, suggesting that the scribe was not a professional. There are some rough notes in the margins linking some homilies with particular feasts. The manuscript probably belonged to Cirencester in later years.⁸² It is possible that the book was written by another canon as an amanuensis, but if past scholarship is correct in identifying the nature of Robert’s involvement, this helps to shed light on the composition practices and physical abilities of a prior in his sixties or seventies.

In Robert of Cricklade, St Frideswide’s had a prior that took an active interest in both academics and pastoral care, and did not hesitate to use writing to promote connections with other communities. His reputation as a scholar went beyond his writings: Gerald of Wales recounts that the prior spent years looking for manuscripts of Josephus.⁸³ He is last documented in 1174,⁸⁴ and probably died in the late 1170s: he was not present at the translation of Frideswide in 1180, which occurred early in Philip’s priorate.

Philip of Oxford

Prior Philip took up his predecessor’s ambition of growing the priory through the cult of St Frideswide.⁸⁵ Almost nothing is known about this figure, even his full name: he is sometimes called Philip of Oxford.⁸⁶ He became prior after Robert’s death, probably in 1178 or 1179, and ended his tenure between 1191 and 1195.⁸⁷

Philip wrote the Miracles of St Frideswide (Miracula sancte Frideswide) within a few years of the translation in 1180, collecting the miracles that occurred for pilgrims to the priory. The work survives in a single manuscript, now Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 177.⁸⁸ A reference to John the Scot as bishop-elect of St Andrews at fol. 2ra was later erased, indicating that Philip finished at least the first part of the work between 1180 and 1183.⁸⁹ The work shows that the canons had planned the translation to a new shrine before Philip became prior. He recounts that in his first year as prior, his relative and assistant, Robert, had a vision in which Frideswide appeared demanding that the date of the translation be moved forward.⁹⁰ The translation took place on 12 February 1180, timed to coincide with a council organized by Henry II that introduced a new coinage.⁹¹

Philip’s aspirations for the shrine are illustrated by a new seal for the priory made during his time, towards the end of the 1180s.⁹² Frideswide holds a fleur-de-lis in her right hand, and what has been described as an ‘open book’ in her left hand, but appears more specifically to be a set of wax tablets.⁹³ This connects her equally with the typical female personifications of the liberal arts and the church, as much as with ecclesiastical administration. The shape of the canopy is particularly audacious: it matches the form of the Holy Sepulchre, the tomb of Christ, depicted on the bulls of the masters of the Order of Knights of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem.⁹⁴ He could not have made a bolder comparison.

Seal of St Frideswide’s, 1180s (✠ sigillvm: ecclesie sancte frideswide oxenefordie:), from the frontispiece to Wigram’s edition of the cartulary

Philip’s Miracles overwhelm the reader with evidence for the efficacy of pilgrimages to the saint’s shrine, documenting over a hundred miracles that took place in his own day. He opens the book with an elaborate prologue on the purpose of miracles and particularly those of Frideswide, which he interprets as gifts from God to strengthen faith. There are hints that Philip composed the work for a learned audience: the prologue, for example, includes a casual reference to the Aristotelian concepts στέρησις (priuatio or loss) and ἕξις (habitus or possession), one of the earliest in British writing.⁹⁵ The miracles themselves are less flourished, and focus on providing sufficient evidence to document their veracity, usually including recipients’ names, the places from which they came, and the miraculous occurrence. Philip takes a sympathetic approach to the pilgrims. The presence of the new shrine and the crowds that came with it created new disruptions for the community. Pilgrims vomit, shout irreverently, and sleep in the church overnight. The prior never complains, and is almost completely non-judgemental in describing the patients’ circumstances; he does not take obvious opportunities in the narratives to castigate them for unchastity or attempting suicide.⁹⁶ He follows the pattern of twelfth-century writers that increasingly looked for medical explanations for behaviour such as madness that they would once have described as demonic possession.⁹⁷ Drawing on conversion tropes, he recounts his own difficulties in understanding the miracles, and the experience of his own recovery from a fever, accompanied by a realization that healing is both physical and psychological.⁹⁸ Philip’s stories show the canons addressing both these needs.

Like Robert’s Life, Philip designed his Miracles in part for worship within the priory. The sole manuscript of the complete text reflects direct use at the priory, as well as revisions to the text from the author himself. MS Digby 177 came to the Bodleian via Thomas Allen (d. 1632), many of whose books came from Oxford, and who also owned books from other shrines.⁹⁹ Nine readings have been marked out in the margins (fols 1v–15r), recounting the translation and miracles that took place at the priory soon after. The book’s users repunctuated the text to make it easier to read aloud and probably to indicate chant divisions.¹⁰⁰ The text has been lightly revised by Philip or under his direction, notably adding a chapter to the end of the text in a distinctively darker shade of ink, still written in Philip’s voice (fols 28v–30v). The volume was still in use at the end of the Middle Ages, with two mnemonic texts on Frideswide added to the back page in later hands (fol. 30v). In the early fourteenth century, the compiler of the ‘Romsey Legendary’ made excerpts from Philip’s Miracles, giving statistics on the miracles that match Digby 177, referring to it as Philip’s Liber translationis et miraculorum beate uirginis Frideswide.¹⁰¹ All this evidence points to the manuscript having been at the priory until its dissolution, and likely being a local product.

While Philip’s Miracles mention a few scholars, he is focused on documenting the experiences of everyday people of Oxfordshire and the surrounding area, to a degree rarely found in medieval sources. It shows the success of the programme begun by Robert of Cricklade to increase the priory’s prominence through promoting the cult of St Frideswide’s. This increased prominence came at some inconvenience to the canons, but it certainly promoted ties between local residents and the priory church.

Alexander Neckam

The works of Robert of Cricklade and Prior Philip reflect highly educated individuals who could write for a learned audience, but there is no direct evidence for their activities beyond administration. It is probable that Robert conducted some teaching, given his past life as a schoolmaster and his revised Anthology of Pliny, but there are only stories of him as a scholar. Alexander Neckam presents the opposite problem: he is known to have taught theology at Oxford, but he is one of the many masters who has no known institutional affiliation there. He was later an Augustinian at Robert’s former home of Cirencester Abbey, and although the evidence for his earlier life is inexact, it suggests that it he became a canon in Oxford, and it is only with St Frideswide’s that he has a known association.

Alexander’s many writings span poetry, theology, philosophy, biblical and classical scholarship, and pastoral care.¹⁰² He was born at St Albans on 8 September 1157, the same night as the birth of Richard I, with his beloved mother Hodierna serving as the future king’s wet nurse. After an education in St Albans and Paris, he became master of the school at Dunstable around 1182. Soon after, he applied to be master of the school at St Albans: the abbot’s response, as recorded by Matthew Paris, is now inscribed on a sixteenth-century gateway on display at the Weston Library in Oxford.¹⁰³ He gained a reputation as a writer early in his career, completing On Useful Things (De utensilibus) for vocabulary development; commentaries on Martianus Capella and the Athanasian Creed; and verses for learning and entertainment, including the New Aesop (Nouus Esopus) and New Avianus (Nouus Auianus). Later in life, he reflects fondly on St Albans and Paris as the key places for his formation.¹⁰⁴ He was in an enviable position, as one of the few secular clerics able to support themselves through working in education; life as a teacher rarely offered stability.¹⁰⁵

Alexander was looking for something more than work as a schoolmaster; he had a long-standing goal to take religious vows. He tells in his commentary on the Song of Songs that he made a pact with a fellow student to undertake this, presumably during his time at Paris, where he likely stayed from around 1177 until 1182.¹⁰⁶ The masters of the school at St Albans were usually seculars.¹⁰⁷ Alexander’s sermons, compiled at Cirencester after his death by his fellow canon Walter of Mileto,¹⁰⁸ are the best source for understanding his developing relationship to the Augustinians. Two show him addressing monks in complementary terms, but as an outsider; in one, he places himself with the scholares. In both, he seems to be seriously considering the monastic life.¹⁰⁹ He speaks in Solace of the Faithful Soul, written after his move to Cirencester, of his interest in comparing different monastic customs.¹¹⁰ A presumably apocryphal story from Caesarius of Heisterbach of Alexander’s chiding of a group of monks in a sermon might reflect this period of vacillation.¹¹¹ Alexander describes his choice as a middle way between the earthly life of scholarship and the heavenly life:

The life of the cloistered is in between the life of scholars and the life of the triumphant. I slept therefore ‘in the middle of lots’ [Ps. 67:14], that is in the middle of fates. For one fate of grace is the honour of the life of scholars; the final fate is the delicious joy of the life of the triumphant; in the middle is the tranquillity of the cloistered.¹¹²

Joining the Augustinian canons ideally matched Alexander’s mindset. The question is whether he did so at Cirencester, as R. W. Hunt argues, or whether he journeyed to Oxford for this purpose.

Alexander moved from St Albans to Oxford possibly in time to hear Gerald of Wales’ public reading of his Topography of Ireland in 1188 or 1189.¹¹³ Alexander appears to have reused his story of the barnacle goose.¹¹⁴ Their accounts share many similarities, although the story itself predates Gerald of Wales.¹¹⁵ There are no documentary sources for Alexander’s time in Oxford; the evidence is his own later account in a commentary on the Song of Songs:

I myself who write this, while I was reading publicly in theology, was an energetic maintainer that the day of the conception of the Virgin Mary should not be celebrated solemnly. On that basis, every year I would announce that on that day I would read publicly, just as I would on a day not kept as a holiday. But I call the sun of justice to witness, because I was plagued with a sudden disease at Oxford every year on that day, so that I could by no means persist in taking up the duty of teaching, whether it happened by chance or divine will. But those wise men who at that time listened to me carefully scrutinized this, secretly rebuking me, since I seemed to wish to fight against those celebrating the day of the conception of the blessed Virgin.¹¹⁶

Alexander mentions that he lectured on Ezekiel, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs.¹¹⁷ One wonders if he drew on Robert of Cricklade’s homilies on Ezekiel, and if this might explain the autograph’s move to Cirencester. Among his sermons are texts labelled specifically as having been delivered for the scholars of Oxford: these have a exegetical bent typical of early scholasticism practised by the Parisian masters in theology.¹¹⁸ He was a spirited teacher, and was not afraid to speak his mind.¹¹⁹ He equates the function of ‘reading publicly’ with preaching in his glosses on the psalter, which itself reads as an edited version of his lectures.¹²⁰ He treats the functions of teaching and preaching, in other words, as aspects of pastoral care.

Preaching and lecturing in Oxford, if Alexander were an independent master unattached to a particular institution, would have been a step down from St Albans. For Alexander to leave his hometown, where he not only had an enviable position but his beloved mother was likely living,¹²¹ there must have been something pressing to draw him away – surely something more significant than another instructional position. Given Alexander’s stated desire to become a religious, it was most plausibly the opportunity to join the Augustinians that brought him to Oxford.

The key evidence for the circumstances of Alexander’s conversion is a letter of Peter of Blois (no. 137), congratulating ‘master Alexander of St Albans’ on having taken up monastic vows after long consideration.¹²² He commends Alexander on having given up a valuable position:

For a long time before your conversion, surrendering many desirable things, you chose to be humbled in the house of the Lord; you rejected the honour of a master, the praise of men, and the empty delight of this world in order to delight in the delight of the people that Christ has inherited, so that he might be praised with his inheritance.¹²³

Peter also refers to Alexander’s writing, and the reputation that went along with it.¹²⁴ As canons did not cease to use the title magister, Alexander had apparently ceased to be the master of a school. Alexander himself writes that he made the decision against the advice of his superiors, and implies that he had held a secure position.¹²⁵ The most logical interpretation is that Alexander joined the Augustinians on moving away from St Albans.

The alternate reading of Peter’s letter is to assume that Alexander joined the Augustinians when he moved from Oxford to Cirencester. This happened before 8 May 1203, when he was named as a canon in being appointed a papal judge-delegate under Innocent III.¹²⁶ In an earlier appointment as judge-delegate under Pope Celestine III, on 23 January 1195, he was not associated with any house.¹²⁷ This led R. W. Hunt to argue that Alexander was still a secular cleric at this time.¹²⁸ This supposes too much consistency in such documents, which often name figures without an affiliation they were known to have. The cartulary of Cirencester Abbey itself notes Alexander’s position as canon or abbot inconsistently.¹²⁹ The document of Celestine III might equally be taken as evidence that Alexander was already a canon, as it concerns Llanthony Priory, an Augustinian foundation.¹³⁰ In the winter of 1204–5, Alexander was again involved in defending Llanthony in a dispute with the earl of Hereford.¹³¹ Hunt also worked from an older understanding of the textual history of the letters of Peter of Blois. The letter in question is part of the collection’s second recension, formerly dated ca. 1197, and this has become the date for Alexander’s move to Cirencester.¹³² More recent research dates this recension to 1198×1205 and confirms that Peter added earlier letters to his revised collections.¹³³ Hunt’s narrative also creates an unrealistic scheme for the dating of Alexander’s writings: if one assumes with Hunt that any work in which Alexander calls himself cloistered was written at Cirencester, this creates a gap of perhaps a decade in which he wrote almost nothing, followed by a glut of works far too numerous to complete for someone who was also busy with the administration of an abbey.¹³⁴ This even includes Alexander’s glosses on the psalter, which Hunt otherwise concludes has a distinctly scholastic style characteristic of lecture notes.¹³⁵ Given the bulk of evidence suggesting that Alexander was actively seeking to join the Augustinians from an early age and made personal sacrifices to do so, it is more plausible on balance that he became a canon at Oxford.

If Alexander was an Augustinian canon in Oxford, it was probably at St Frideswide’s, since this is the only institution with which he had any known association. In 1190, a large fire broke out in Oxford, seriously damaging the priory.¹³⁶ A fundraising effort to rebuild lasted several years: an Ascension Day sermon by Alexander from the early 1190s preserves its rhetoric. It was customary on this occasion for the people to make gifts to the church. He exhorts them to restore the building, in a humorous play on the liturgy:

I grieve, brothers, that ‘this place’ of the church of St Frideswide ‘is awful’ [Gen. 28.17; Exod. 3.5] now and horrible because of the ruin of its walls. Why do you not consider, you laymen, that it is said literally, ‘Lord, I have loved the beauty of your house’? [Ps. 25:8] Why therefore do you not love the beauty of the house of the Lord?¹³⁷

The fire did not entirely destroy the church, but it required substantial restoration work, still visible in the present Christ Church.¹³⁸ Pope Celestine III issued a bull in support of the campaign in 1194;¹³⁹ Alexander might have delivered his sermon in association with this.¹⁴⁰ The text further suggests that Alexander was an Augustinian by this time. He frequently addresses his fellow canons in his sermons and biblical commentaries as ‘uiri fratres’ (‘brothers’); the phrase does not seem to appear in any sermon given before he was a canon.¹⁴¹ In the St Frideswide’s sermon, he uses it to address different parts of his audience: first the canons, as equals, followed by the laity. The phrase also appears in a sermon in which Alexander was once again obliged to berate the people of Oxford for their miserliness, though also citing the town’s self-perception as a learned centre.¹⁴² The sermon, together with the movement of Robert of Cricklade’s autograph manuscript of his homilies on Ezekiel from St Frideswide’s to Cirencester, is thin proof for placing Alexander at the house; but no hint has survived of another possible association.

Several of Alexander’s writings might have be the result of his work at Oxford: the best candidate among these is his glosses on the psalter, which appear to be the direct result of his lectures. He wrote this work some time after the death of Saladin in March 1193, interpreting Psalm 78 as referring to the conflict at Antioch.¹⁴³ Alexander had recently become a canon, and refers repeatedly to the experience of his conversion, as already shown. Unlike his works beginning with Solace of the Faithful Soul, he does not refer to his teaching in the past tense.¹⁴⁴ The style of the work is typical of a biblical commentary designed for teaching in the schools,¹⁴⁵ similar to Peter Lombard’s commentary on the Psalms: a running, lemmatized commentary on the text, often citing patristic authorities and the ubiquitous Glosa. This contrasts with his later commentaries on Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, and Proverbs, which are written as discursive meditations. The earliest manuscript of the glosses, now Oxford, Jesus College, MS 94, fols 1r–56v, is a set of fragments of a heavily revised copy, with many additions to the text in Alexander’s own hand.¹⁴⁶ It is the first booklet of a volume, still in its original binding, that appears to be a collection of loose ends left at Alexander’s death: it also contains his unfinished commentary on Proverbs and a partially revised copy of Tractatus super Mulierem fortem, his commentary on the strong woman of the end of Proverbs.¹⁴⁷ It is entirely unlike other Cirencester manuscripts in its script or page layout; although the first folio bears a rubric identifying Alexander as its abbot, this is a later addition. The leaves are heavily worn, and the text is incomplete as a result of lost gatherings, though other copies exist showing its state both before the additions (Lambeth, Palace Library, MS 61) and after (London, British Library, Royal MS 2 C. xi; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 284). Alexander revised the text far more extensively revised than any of his other works, increasing the number of references to the biblical Glosa and other commentators. He would have had far more reason to make such changes while he was lecturing on the text; the only other of his works for which there is similar evidence of revision is his commentary on the Athanasian Creed, also stemming from his teaching work.¹⁴⁸ Not only Alexander’s glosses on the psalter but the Jesus College manuscript itself appear to be an artefact from Alexander’s teaching in Oxford.

Alexander’s writings are the earliest surviving from a master who lectured on the liberal arts in Oxford, predating John Blund’s Treatise on the Soul (Tractatus de anima).¹⁴⁹ Alexander refers to his glosses on the psalter in The Natures of Things (De naturis rerum, begun before 1204) and Speculum speculationum (begun 1201×13).¹⁵⁰ Along with his work on the psalter and sermons, he might also have written his commentaries on the Athanasian Creed and Martianus Capella there. He writes both in a similar style to the glosses, but there is no way to prove whether they are from Oxford or an earlier stage in his career, though he later notes his fellow canons’ interest in Martianus.¹⁵¹ An abbreviated set of twenty-eight scholastic questions survives in one manuscript (Lambeth, Palace Library, 421, fols 124va–127ra), reflecting a serious approach to analytic theology that was not afraid to use humour. His Corrogationes Promethei reflects experience in the schools, but it refers to teaching in the past tense.¹⁵² Speculum speculationum is essentially an attempt at an improved version of Peter Lombard’s Sentences, and its editor suggests that it is derived from ‘a lecture-course in dialectical theology’.¹⁵³ It remained unfinished at his death, and the sole manuscript looks to have been hastily tidied up from loose notes. This body of works is consistent with higher education in theology, but also with an Augustinian writer.

Alexander Neckam’s works provide some of the earliest solid evidence of teaching in Oxford approaching the level of the schools in Paris. The surviving evidence suggests that he came to Oxford, abandoning his teaching position at St Albans, for the purpose of joining the Augustinian canons. The only known institutional association he has there is with St Frideswide’s, but the sources are not explicit in this. It is difficult to judge what impression Alexander left, or how his experience there affected his later career, especially because he might plausibly have spent anywhere from five to fifteen years in Oxford. He certainly absorbed works in the vein of Robert of Cricklade’s meditative, homiletic commentaries, especially evident in Solace of the Faithful Soul and his commentary on the Song of Songs, both works that he published soon after leaving Oxford. The cult of St Frideswide might also have prompted his focus on praising of holy women, especially in his Song of Songs commentary (written in praise of the Virgin Mary), meditation on Mary Magdalene,¹⁵⁴ and commentary on the ‘mulierem fortem’ of Proverbs (whom he interprets to refer to Mary Magdalen, the Virgin Mary, and the Church, with many other stories of other Old Testament women included). He both heaped praise upon monastics of other traditions and continued to write works specifically designed for the schools well after his conversion. Alexander was able to bridge the worlds of scholars and the cloistered, and life at St Frideswide’s would have cultivated this way of thinking.

Brother Angier and the early thirteenth century

The attention visible in Robert of Cricklade, Prior Philip, and Alexander Neckam to a combination of scholarship and pastoral care designed to reach beyond the Augustinians continued into the thirteenth century. While Robert and Philip wrote entirely in prose, Alexander also composed verse throughout his life. In this, he might have influenced Master W. Bothewald, who appears as subprior of St Frideswide’s in the early thirteenth century.¹⁵⁵ He wrote ‘Lancea Longini’, a poem directed against Walter Map while he was archdeacon of Oxford, from 1196 or 1197 until 1209 or 1210.¹⁵⁶ The author is only known from the single copy of the surviving text, now part of a small (125 × 95 mm) miscellany of poetry and theological works from the late thirteenth century.¹⁵⁷ There are no known documentary sources referring to Bothewald. His poem defends the Cistercians against Walter’s satire. The canon felt the criticism to be unjust in light of their poverty, austerity, and charitable works.¹⁵⁸ He argues particularly that their exemption from tithes was just.¹⁵⁹ This chance survival hints at a livelier literary culture in Oxford than what now remains.

The last writer certainly associated with the priory also focused on poetry: Brother Angier, in Oxford from at least 1212 until 1214. He composed verse French translations of the Dialogues and Life of Gregory the Great, and more scholarly attention has been given to these than to all the other writers of St Frideswide’s combined.¹⁶⁰ His origins are obscure: he may have been the ‘magister Angerius’ who worked among the Benedictines as an administrator at Durham Priory from the 1180s until 1203×7.¹⁶¹ According to the detailed colophons he wrote in the single surviving manuscript,¹⁶² he became a canon in 1206/7, and was a subdeacon at St Frideswide’s when he finished the Dialogues on 29 November 1212.¹⁶³ He further states that he became a priest in 1212/13 and finished his life of Gregory on 30 April 1214.¹⁶⁴ England was under interdict in 1208–14, which may have obliged him to travel to France or Scotland for ordination.¹⁶⁵ The language of the Dialogues has been argued as more continental than that of his life, which given the short span of time between the composition of the works would seem to reflect a purposeful change to accommodate the needs of different audiences rather than a shift in the author’s own dialect.¹⁶⁶

Scholars have analysed Angier’s work primarily as evidence for interest in pastoral care among the Augustinian canons.¹⁶⁷ He opens the Dialogues with a fascinating introductory section setting out his purpose and audiences, and the precise ways in which the features of the book are intended to fulfil it.¹⁶⁸ He addresses himself to ‘lais ou clerz’ in the opening line.¹⁶⁹ This might lend weight to the idea that Prior Philip also had a lay audience in mind for his Miracles.¹⁷⁰ His writings fit squarely into the category of pastoralia.¹⁷¹ This attempt to make a book directly suitable for the laity suggested the use of French, which he feels his audience could understand more easily than Latin.¹⁷² The book includes a set of chapter headings and rubrics to mark out speakers, and he advises the reader short on time to pick and choose chapters.¹⁷³ This links the book to the growing body of reference works in this period designed for preachers.¹⁷⁴ The manuscript itself is portable (190 × 135 mm), with careful page layout and punctuation; it has even been argued that one set of accents in the text is designed to allow it to be chanted.¹⁷⁵ The intent seems to have been to create a lively text that could compete with Arthur and romances, which Angier feels take away attention from holiness,¹⁷⁶ reminiscent of Alexander Neckam’s complaint that he could more easily hold his fellow canons’ attention with Martianus Capella than the Bible. Angier, possibly exploring the potential of Frideswide’s shrine, aimed to create a book that lay people could read or have read to them.

Angier was certainly involved in the production of the single manuscript of his works. The book appears to have remained at the priory after his author’s death: a reader added an invocation of St Frideswide later in the thirteenth century.¹⁷⁷ Whether Angier wrote it there is another question. There has been much scholarly debate over Angier’s meaning when he writes in the colophon to the Dialogues of 1212 that it is the ‘work of my hands’. It has been argued since the manuscript came to modern attention that this refers to the physical creation of the manuscript, which would make it the earliest holograph in French literature.¹⁷⁸ Alternatively, the colophon might refer to the book’s composition.¹⁷⁹ The hand varies over the manuscript, but it appears to represent a single scribe. Most convincingly, the book itself seems to reflect stages in the text’s creation: the first gathering, for example, contains an extensive invocation and, introduction, and list of chapters that was probably added after the rest of the Dialogues.¹⁸⁰ As in the examples of Robert of Cricklade, Prior Philip, and Alexander Neckam, the presence of revision unlikely to be undertaken by someone other than the author allows one to identify that person’s involvement in the manuscript. Angier could plausibly have written the book from its outset, though he must have had cooperation from others.

One other artefact has been associated with Angier’s work: the ‘Edwardes’ manuscript. It is thought to have been bound together in the early fifteenth century, but was split into several volumes by Sir Henry Hope Edwardes (1829–1900) and sold at auction in 1901; some of them have since disappeared.¹⁸¹ It has received particular attention for apparent use by the compilers of the Auchinleck manuscript.¹⁸² Three of the booklets, now London, British Library, Add. MSS 38662, 38663, and 40142, were probably associated with one another by the first half of the thirteenth century.¹⁸³ Add. MS 38663 is the earliest copy of Gui de Warewic, linked to Osney Abbey and composed around 1205–15.¹⁸⁴ It was proposed in 1975 that these booklets were from the same ‘scriptorium’ as Angier’s manuscript, on the basis of comparing their initials.¹⁸⁵ The similarities are not sufficient to warrant such an attachment. For example, the descender of ‘Q’ in the Edwardes booklets consistently uses a long horizontal stroke to the right, whereas Angier’s ‘Q’ typically uses a vertical descender; where a horizontal stroke occurs, it is much shorter.¹⁸⁶ Unless other examples of the scribes’ work can be found, one cannot make any specific statements about the provenance of these booklets. There is no evidence to associate this manuscript with St Frideswide’s, though it is interesting as another example of pastoralia from a similar context.¹⁸⁷

After Angier, the evidence for writers at the priory is almost non-existent; the last work that scholars have proposed as the product of a possible canon of St Frideswide’s is A Brief Plan on Preaching the Holy Cross (Breuis ordinatio de predicatione sancte crucis), an introduction to the theology of crusading likely composed around 1213–14. This work survives in two manuscripts that were in Oxford by the end of the Middle Ages, with related collections that also include Robert of Cricklade’s Marriage of Jacob: Antwerp, Museum Plantin-Moretus, MS M. 103, from All Souls College, Oxford; and Oxford, Balliol College, MS 167.¹⁸⁸ Alexander of Ashby, writing around 1200, mentions a gifted preacher at Oxford named Master Philip.¹⁸⁹ Innocent III addressed Pium et sanctum in 1213 to three preachers in England including a Master Philip of Oxford to promote preaching for the Fifth Crusade, and this is likely the same person.¹⁹⁰ The work’s most recent editor attributes it to this Philip on the basis of the manuscripts’ common Oxford provenance; he was not aware of an earlier edition that suggests it is from Flanders or Hainaut.¹⁹¹ The two manuscripts could descend in part from a version of Robert’s Marriage made at St Frideswide’s, given that they both have a version of the opening rubric that names him as its prior, but this only shows that the two works had a common readership.

Liturgical books

Alongside the manuscripts that can be associated with the St Frideswide’s on the basis through a direct connection with authors at the priory, two psalters are the only other hints at the nature of the priory’s books. London, British Library, Arundel MS 157, is a splendid production from the 1200s, hinting that the fine copies of Robert’s works from the Simon master were not aberrations. It is thought to have been owned by the priory on the grounds that it unusually includes all three feasts connected with its saint in the opening calendar – St Frideswide’s day (19 October), her invention (15 May), and translation (12 February) – as well as a collect for her.¹⁹² It opens with a bifolium added around the 1240s, once attributed to Matthew Paris, but art historians no longer accept this.¹⁹³ The volume is among the most sumptuous psalters produced in this period, opening with a series of full-page illustrations depicting the life of Christ.¹⁹⁴ Its almost immaculate condition suggests that it was stored securely, perhaps for use on special occasions, though it could also have been intended for a wealthy patron devoted to St Frideswide.

The Arundel psalter has been used as evidence that a group of illuminated liturgical books was produced around Oxford, most showing Augustinian influence.¹⁹⁵ There are scribes and illuminators recorded around Catte Street as early as the 1190s, but few identified examples of what they produced.¹⁹⁶ Several of the books include two of the feasts of St Frideswide, including one owned by a priory of Augustinian nuns in Iona.¹⁹⁷ The books can be shown to have been made in a collaborative environment, with styles of individual artists occurring across volumes. Certain other manuscripts that are stylistically connected have textual affinities with Winchester, leading to the suggestion that the workshop may have began there and later moved to Oxford.¹⁹⁸ One must exercise caution here, as many of the psalters use an interwoven style of decorated initials with grotesques identical to London, British Library, Cotton MS Claudius B. ii, originally assigned on stylistic grounds to Christ Church, Canterbury, but later shown to have been written by a scribe known to have been working at Cirencester Abbey.¹⁹⁹ St Frideswide’s was evidently part of a tightly knit network of communities in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, but it must remain an open question where these books were produced, and whether religious houses were involved other than as patrons.

A second, well-used psalter from the priory suggests the sort of book that a canon might have used on a daily basis. Formerly in the collection of John Louis Ketterlinus (1852–1932) of Philadelphia, the manuscript is now in private ownership.²⁰⁰ It was made in England in the late thirteenth century, possibly for the priory, since in the litany the confessors are headed by Augustine, and the virgins by Frideswide (fol. 88v). The calendar was modified over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with feasts added and replaced by five different hands. All three saints of St Frideswide look to have been included originally. Both the translation of Frideswide (fol. 2r) and the feast of St Frideswide (fol. 6r) were erased and later replaced, with their octaves, in three different hands; the invention is erased, rewritten, and effaced again (fol. 3v). Where the other erased saints can be identified, they are often local.²⁰¹ Later readers also added other prayers, notably brief prompts for the responses at Vespers (fols 7v–8v), and collects at the back for Anne, Thomas de Cantilupe, and John of Bridlington (fol. 90v). A sixteenth-century reader added the daily divisions of the Psalms for mattins and evensong from the Book of Common Prayer, up to the twelfth day (Psalm 62). This might reflect a book that was passed between different religious communities on several occasions, centred on St Frideswide’s.

Reconstructing ‘that immortal library of St Frideswide’

In spite of its promising beginnings, there are no known writers or evidence for serious intellectual activity at St Frideswide’s after the early thirteenth century. This is not unusual in itself, as many religious houses experienced a decline in book production in this period.²⁰² The canons did not give up on pastoral care in the thirteenth century: the priory church also served as a parish church from the 1220s until 1298.²⁰³ In the early 1330s, the Dominican preacher Venturino da Bergamo (1304–1346) wrote a letter to a canon on spiritual pride that circulated broadly.²⁰⁴ The shrine of St Frideswide remained a site of pilgrimage, with Catherine of Aragon visiting to seek help in conceiving.²⁰⁵ When, however, Erasmus visited Oxford as an Augustinian canon in 1499–1500, he stayed at St Mary’s College, which the canons had created in 1435.²⁰⁶ The scarcity of evidence has led to the conclusion that both St Frideswide’s and Osney tended to function as little more than landlords to Oxford, with limited interest in its spiritual or intellectual life.²⁰⁷

The buildings of St Frideswide’s were used to some extent by the university community, but the evidence from the fourteenth century and later does not speak well of the priory. Until the mid-fifteenth century, it held the first university chests, used for objects (especially books) as a guarantee of a loan.²⁰⁸ This was likely the temporary resting place of a copy of Iohannes Balbus’s Catholicon inscribed as having been given to the priory but soon sold again by its original owner.²⁰⁹ Some of the library may have been dispersed at an early date, since in 1380 there was a royal commission into canons who allegedly sold off its books and other precious objects.²¹⁰ The scandal only grew, and by 1382 there was a plot to murder the prior, John Dodford.²¹¹ St Frideswide’s would seem to compare poorly even with Osney Abbey, from which some thirty books survive.²¹² Yet in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there was nothing to predetermine such later missteps: the writings produced there suggest that the community was much more vibrant in its earlier days.

This survey of St Frideswide’s writers and their manuscripts gives a few more glimpses of Robert Sherborne’s ‘immortal library of St Frideswide’ beyond the three volumes identified in the twentieth century.²¹³ It also eliminates some proposals, such as the ‘Edwardes’ manuscript. By relying on connections with the priory’s writers, this article’s arguments expand the list to nine books associated with the priory (question marks indicate probable identifications):

• ? Robert of Cricklade, Defloratio naturalis historie Plinii secundi (1160s–70s): Eton, College Library, MS 134 (Oxford provenance; initials by the Simon master)
• ? Robert of Cricklade, Speculum ecclesie (1160s–70s): Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 380 (initials by the Simon master; addition postdating the composition of the main text)
• Robert of Cricklade, Omelie super Ezechielem (1170s): Hereford, Cathedral Library, MS O.iii.10 (likely autograph; author’s revisions)
• Prior Philip, Miracula sancte Frideswide (1180s): Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 177 (author’s revisions; additions on Frideswide)
• ? Alexander Neckam, Glose super psalterium (1190s): Oxford, Jesus College, MS 94, fols 1r–56v (author’s revisions)
• Psalter (1200s): London, British Library, Arundel MS 157 (liturgical evidence)
• Angier, Dialogues and Vie of Gregory (1210s): Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 24766 (likely autograph; additions on Frideswide)
• Psalter (1290s): private collection (liturgical evidence)
• ? Iohannes Balbus, Catholicon (Venice, 1497/8?): private collection (deposit in the university chest?)

There is little resemblance between the books, though this is in part because few are contemporary with one another. The presence of four manuscripts corrected if not written by their authors is also striking, though this is in part an outcome of this study’s methodology, which has focused on surveying the works of authors possibly associated with St Frideswide’s and assessing the material circumstances of the manuscript transmission of their texts. In spite of the interest in writing among the canons in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, this collection does not provide evidence of any organized programme of book production at the priory.

The writers and surviving manuscripts from St Frideswide’s show a lively community in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that fostered an intellectual life coupled with attention to the spiritual needs of local residents, like many other Augustinian houses. This was a learned culture that actively sought to avoid the social detachment that later characterized the university’s town-and-gown conflicts. Robert of Cricklade, Philip of Oxford, Alexander Neckam, and Angier all produced writings that span cloistered and scholastic audiences. They sought in different ways to combine scholarship with pastoral care, often seeking explicitly to reach both clergy and laity. Their writings can only scratch the surface of the canons’ activities: Robert and Philip likely saw their books as only a small part of their output in comparison to their efforts to expand the priory and make it a destination for pilgrims. Nonetheless, the canons’ manuscripts are now the best means of understanding this community – indeed forming an ‘immortal library of St Frideswide’.

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This article originated as a paper for the Oxford Bibliographical Society delivered on 30 October 2017. I am grateful to Alexander Andrée, Claire Breay, James Carley, Andrea Clarke, Alexandra Gillespie, Joseph Goering, Christopher de Hamel, Ralph Hanna, Matthew Holford, Amy Jeffs, Martin Kauffmann, Rachel Koopmans, Paul Nash, David Rundle, Richard Sharpe, Ian Short, Faith Wallis, Teresa Webber, James Willoughby, Henry Woudhuysen, and the anonymous readers for posing questions and offering criticism. I conducted this research as a Royal Bank of Canada–Bodleian fellow at Oxford in early 2016 and a curator at the British Library in 2016--17, and am thankful for the support of these organizations.

1. ‘Scrutatus sum si quos libros haberem immortali illa sancte Frideswide bibliotheca’: Kew, National Archives, SP 1/36, fol. 95r, discussed in Ralph Hanna and David Rundle, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Western Manuscripts, to c. 1600, in Christ Church, Oxford (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 2017), 29–30; James Willoughby, ‘Thomas Wolsey and the Books of Cardinal College, Oxford’, Bodleian Library Record 28, no. 2 (October 2015): 118–19.↩

2. Statement of surrender (24 April 1524): Kew, National Archives, E 21/1/1.↩

3. Oxford, Christ Church Archives, D&C vi.c.1: Hanna and Rundle, Descriptive Catalogue of Christ Church, Oxford, 412–15.↩

4. L. W. B. Brockliss, The University of Oxford: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 11–13.↩

5. R. W. Southern, ‘From Schools to University’, in The Early Oxford Schools, ed. J. I. Catto, The History of the University of Oxford 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 5–8.↩

6. Henry Mayr-Harting, ‘The Role of the Benedictine Abbeys in the Development of Oxford as a Centre of Legal Learning’, in Benedictines in Oxford, ed. Henry Wansbrough and Anthony Marett-Crosby (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1997), 11–19, 279–80.↩

7. Rodney M. Thomson, ‘Serlo of Wilton and the Schools of Oxford’, Medium Ævum 68, no. 1 (1999): 1–12, https://doi.org/10.2307/43630121; A. G. Rigg, ‘Serlo of Wilton: Biographical Notes’, Medium Ævum 65, no. 1 (1996): 96–101, https://doi.org/10.2307/43629790.↩

8. Michael Jones, ‘Master Vacarius, Civil Lawyer, Canon of Southwell and Parson of Norwell, Nottinghamshire’, Nottingham Medieval Studies 53 (2009): 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1484/j.nms.3.457; James A. Brundage, The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession: Canonists, Civilians, and Courts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 92–94, https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226077611.001.0001; R. W. Southern, ‘Master Vacarius and the Beginning of an English Academic Tradition’, in Medieval Learning and Literature: Essays Presented to Richard William Hunt, ed. J. J. G. Alexander and M. T. Gibson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 257–86.↩

9. Mariken Teeuwen, The Vocabulary of Intellectual Life in the Middle Ages, Etudes sur le vocabulaire intellectuel du Moyen Âge 10 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 95–97, https://doi.org/10.1484/M.CIVI-EB.5.105931.↩

10. James McEvoy, ‘Liberal Arts, Science, Philosophy, Theology and Wisdom at Oxford, 1200–1250’, in Was ist Philosophie im Mittelalter? Akten des X. internationalen Kongresses für mittelalterliche Philosophie der Société internationale pour l’étude de la philosophie médiévale, 25. bis 30. August 1997 in Erfurt, ed. Jan A. Aertsen and Andreas Speer, Miscellanea mediaevalia 26 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1998), 560–70, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110801453.560 provides an overview of the thinkers of this period; expanded version, James McEvoy, Robert Grosseteste, Great Medieval Thinkers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), chap. 1.↩

11. Southern, ‘From Schools to University’, 16–26.↩

12. Frans van Liere, ‘The Study of Canon Law and the Eclipse of the Lincoln Schools, 1175–1225’, History of Universities 18 (2003): 1–13.↩

13. J. C. Dickinson, The Origins of the Austin Canons and Their Introduction into England (London: SPCK, 1950) remains the standard survey of the Augustinian canons for the British Isles; Janet Burton and Karen Stöber, eds., The Regular Canons in the Medieval British Isles, Medieval Church Studies 19 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), https://doi.org/10.1484/m.mcs-eb.6.09070802050003050302040806 updates his work in many areas.↩

14. John Blair, ‘St Frideswide’s Monastery: Problems and Possibilities’, Oxoniensia 53 (1988): 221–58, https://oxoniensia.org/volumes/1988/blair2.pdf outlines the archaeological evidence for these origins and later building works; the first serious survey of the priory’s history was Anthony Wood, ‘Survey of the Antiquities of the City of Oxford,’ Composed in 1661–6, ed. Andrew Clark, Oxford Historical Society 15, 17, 37 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889–1899), 2:141–178, which has yet to be superseded in its comprehensiveness and makes interesting use of Philip of Oxford’s Miracula sancte Frideswide.↩

15. David Knowles and R. Neville Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses: England and Wales, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1971), 170.↩

16. David Postles, ‘‘Patronus et advocatus noster’: Oseney Abbey and the Oilly Family’, Historical Research 60, no. 141 (February 1987): 100–102, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2281.1987.tb00488.x.↩

17. David A. Hinton, ‘Bicester Priory’, Oxoniensia 33 (1968): 22–52, https://oxoniensia.org/volumes/1968/hinton1.pdf; John Blair, ‘Thornbury, Binsey: A Probable Defensive Enclosure Associated with Saint Frideswide’, Oxoniensia 53 (1988): 3–20, https://oxoniensia.org/volumes/1988/blair.pdf.↩

18. Henry Mayr-Harting, Religion, Politics and Society in Britain, 1066–1272 (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 2011), 166–79, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315838359 discusses the rise of the Augustinian canons with particular reference to St Frideswide’s.↩

19. David M. Smith, Lincoln 1067–1185, English Episcopal Acta 1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1980), no. 208.↩

20. John Barron, ‘The Augustinian Canons and the University of Oxford: The Lost College of St George’, in The Church and Learning in Later Medieval Society: Essays in Honour of R. B. Dobson. Proceedings of the 1999 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Caroline M. Barron and Jenny Stratford (Donington, Lincolnshire: Tyas, 2002), 231–36.↩

21. Michael D. Reeve, ed., Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain: An Edition and Translation of De gestis Britonum (Historia regum Britanniae), trans. Neil Wright, Arthurian Studies 69 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2007), vii; Andrew Taylor, ‘Can an Englishman Read a Chanson de Geste?’, in Conceptualizing Multilingualism in Medieval England, c. 800–c. 1250, ed. Elizabeth M. Tyler, Studies in the Early Middle Ages 27 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 329–31, https://doi.org/10.1484/M.SEM-EB.4.8016; H. E. Salter, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and Oxford’, English Historical Review 34, no. 135 (July 1919): 382–85, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/xxxiv.cxxxv.382.↩

22. David Postles, ‘The Learning of Austin Canons: The Case of Oseney Abbey’, Nottingham Medieval Studies 29 (1985): 32–43, https://doi.org/10.1484/j.nms.3.123.↩

23. David Knowles et al., eds., The Heads of Religious Houses: England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001–2008), 1:179.↩

24. H. E. Salter, ed., Cartulary of Oseney Abbey, Oxford Historical Society 89–91, 97, 98, 101 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929–1936), nos. 780–94; Henry Richards Luard, ed., ‘Annales de Oseneia et Chronicon Thomæ Wykes’, in Annales monastici, vol. 4, Rerum Britannicarum medii aevi scriptores 36 (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1869), 25–27, 37–38, 50, https://archive.org/details/annalesmonastici04luar; Adrian Morey, Bartholomew of Exeter: Bishop and Canonist. A Study in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: University Press, 1937), 56–59; C. R. Cheney, From Becket to Langton: English Church Government 1170–1213 (Manchester: University Press, 1956), 114; C. R. Cheney and Mary G. Cheney, The Letters of Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) Concerning England and Wales: A Calendar with an Appendix of Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), no. 276; Barron, ‘The Augustinian Canons and the University of Oxford’, 238.↩

25. G. R. C. Davis, Medieval Cartularies of Great Britain and Ireland, ed. Claire Breay, Julian Harrison, and David M. Smith, 2nd ed. (London: British Library, 2010), nos. 739, 740; alongside the fifteenth-century cartulary still at Christ Church is Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 160, from the early fourteenth century: Rodney M. Thomson, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Medieval Manuscripts of Corpus Christi College Oxford (Cambridge: Brewer, 2011), 84–85.↩

26. Bound into MS Charters Oxon. a. 10, listed in William H. Turner and H. O. Coxe, Calendar of Charters and Rolls Preserved in the Bodleian Library (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1878), 300–314, https://archive.org/details/calendarofcharte00bodluoft; Spencer Robert Wigram, ed., The Cartulary of the Monastery of St. Frideswide at Oxford, 2 vols, Oxford Historical Society 28, 31 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895–1896) edits the cartularies alongside the charters known to him.↩

27. Knowles et al., Heads of Religious Houses, 1:180, 284.↩

28. Judith A. Green, The Government of England Under Henry I, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, 4th ser., 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 176n170, https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511560248.↩

29. Michael Winterbottom and Rodney M. Thomson, eds., William of Malmesbury: Gesta pontificum Anglorum/The History of the English Bishops, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 4.178.4, ‘qui pro libito uiuerent’; Reginald R. Darlington, P. McGurk, and Jennifer Bray, eds., The Chronicle of John of Worcester, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995–1998), 2:546–547 gives a similar account.↩

30. Wigram, Cartulary of the Monastery of St. Frideswide, no. 4: ‘litteratus cum esset et integre opinionis’.↩

31. Listed in Andrew N. J. Dunning, ‘Robert of Cricklade’, in Arlima: Archives de littérature du Moyen Âge, ed. Laurent Brun, 29 December 2017, https://arlima.net/no/1967; Richard Sharpe, A Handlist of the Latin Writers of Great Britain and Ireland Before 1540, Publications of the Journal of Medieval Latin 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997), no. 1447.↩

32. C. Watson, ‘Edition of the Kenilworth Cartulary’ (Ph.D. thesis, Birkbeck College, University of London, 1966), 256, https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.297448 suggests 1125×26.↩

33. C. D. Ross, ed., The Cartulary of Cirencester Abbey, Gloucestershire (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), no. 473/729: ‘in qua habitum canonici suscepi’; his first appearance at Cirencester is in a charter of 1136×39: Ross, no. 372/423.↩

34. De principis instructione 1.17 (London, British Library, Cotton MS Julius B. xiii, fol. 80ra–rb), Robert Bartlett, ed., Gerald of Wales: De principis instructione/Instruction for a Ruler, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2018), 214–215: ‘prior sancte Frideswide apud Oxoniam magister Robertus quem uidimus, et qui uir erat antiquus et auctenticus, cuius eciam ultima tempora nostra occuparunt.’ Bartlett, xvii–xviii argues that Gerald completed the first book by 1191 and the second recension by 1216–17.↩

35. Cuthbert Butler, Western Mysticism: The Teaching of Augustine, Gregory and Bernard on Contemplation and the Contemplative Life, 3rd ed. (London: Constable, 1967), pt. 2; Giovanni Catapano, ‘Leah and Rachel as Figures of the Active and the Contemplative Life in Augustine’s Contra Faustum Manichaeum’, in Theoria, Praxis, and the Contemplative Life After Plato and Aristotle, ed. Thomas Bénatouïl and Mauro Bonazzi, Philosophia Antiqua 131 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 215–28, https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004230040_013.↩

36. Robert of Cricklade, Speculum fidei 4.46 (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 380, fol. 132v):

    Si quis sciscitatus fuerit quare inter hęc sacramenta nichil de conflictu uirtutum contra uicia scripserim, uel saltem de celsitudine contemplationis: nouerit intentionem meam non fuisse de his in hoc libello disputare, cum presertim in tribus libellis quos de conubio patriarche iacob conscripsi abundanter super his deo donante disputauerim.

    ↩

37. Robert of Cricklade, De connubio Iacob 2.22 (Hereford, Cathedral Library, P.iv.8, fol. 38vb):

    Non enim inuideo monachis scribentibus, sed congaudeo, licet non sim monachus, sed indignissimus canonicorum cirecestrensis ecclesie sancte dei genitricis Marie, sub disciplina sancti et uenerabilis Serlonis primi eiusdem loci abbatis, pro remissione peccatorum suorum deo supplicantium.

    Quoted in R. W. Hunt, ‘English Learning in the Late Twelfth Century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th ser., 19 (1936): 31, https://doi.org/10.2307/3678685 from Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud misc. 725, fol. 130ra (not 129va as he records), which omits ‘cirecestrensis’.↩

38. L. D. Reynolds, The Medieval Tradition of Seneca’s Letters (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 117, 120–24.↩

39. De connubio Iacob 3.3, discussed in Rodney M. Thomson and Michael Winterbottom, eds., William of Malmesbury: Miracles of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2015), xv; Knowles et al., Heads of Religious Houses, 1:79, 180, 284.↩

40. Robert of Cricklade, De connubio Iacob, preface (Hereford, Cathedral Library, P.iv.8, fol. 1va):

    Dum adhuc scolaris scolarum insisterem regimini libellum quem composueram – sed estimo id memoria excidit tua – tibi transmitti rogasti. Promisi. Sed ne religiosissimi animi tui offenderet grauitatem lectis in eo ludicris quibus plenus erat, malui falsus promissor existere.

    Quoted from Oxford, Balliol College, MS 167, fol. 177r in T. E. Holland, ‘The University of Oxford in the Twelfth Century’, in Collectanea, Second Series, ed. Montagu Burrows, Oxford Historical Society 16 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1890), 161, https://archive.org/details/secondcollectan16burruoft; translated in part, Arthur F. Leach, Educational Charters and Documents, 598 to 1909 (Cambridge: University Press, 1911), 102–3, https://archive.org/details/educationalchart00leacuoft.↩

41. Cistercian copies at Bordesley, Combe, Merevale, and Waverley: R. A. B. Mynors, Richard H. Rouse, and Mary A. Rouse, Registrum Anglie de libris doctorum et auctorum veterum, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues 2 (London: British Library, 1991), no. R54.3; Queen’s College, Cambridge: Peter D. Clarke, The University and College Libraries of Cambridge, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues 10 (London: British Library, 2002), nos. UC50.212, UC52.44; St Gregory’s College, Sudbury: James M. W. Willoughby, The Libraries of Collegiate Churches, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues 15 (London: British Library, 2014), no. SC304.13 (bequest of Geoffrey Bryce, 1446).↩

42. Otto Pächt and J. J.G. Alexander, Illuminated Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966–1973), 3:207. The care put into the book is demonstrated by its perfect collation: i (fol. i), 1–23⁸ (fols 1–184), i (fol. 185, early-modern flyleaf). The text ends on the final page with half a column to spare.↩

43. Antwerp, Museum Plantin-Moretus, MS M. 103, fol. 109r: J. Denucé, ed., Musaeum Plantin Moretus: Catalogue des manuscrits/Catalogus der handschriften (Antwerp: Bracke van Geert, 1927), no. 107; Oxford, Balliol College, MS 167, R. A. B. Mynors, Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Balliol College, Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), no. 167.↩

44. Edward J. Kealey, Roger of Salisbury, Viceroy of England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 121–23, 202–3, 245–46, 265–69.↩

45. Wigram, Cartulary of the Monastery of St. Frideswide, nos. 15–16; but no. 16 is a forgery, according to Walther Holtzmann, Papsturkunden in England, Abhandlungen der Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. Philologisch-historische Klasse, n.s., 25, 3rd ser., 14, 33 (Berlin, 1930–1952), 3:164–5.↩

46. Richard Halsey, ‘The 12th-Century Church of St. Frideswide’s Priory’, Oxoniensia 53 (1988): 120–21, 127–28, 133–35, 154–55, 157–58, https://oxoniensia.org/volumes/1988/halsey.pdf; Blair, ‘St Frideswide’s Monastery’, 237–39.↩

47. Charles Homer Haskins, ‘Further Notes on Sicilian Translations of the Twelfth Century’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 23 (1912): 162–64, https://doi.org/10.2307/310450; reprinted, ‘The Sicilian Translators of the Twelfth Century’, in Studies in the History of Mediaeval Science, 2nd ed., Harvard Historical Studies 27 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), 168–70; Elisabeth M. C. van Houts, ‘Les femmes dans le royaume Plantagenêt: Gendre, politique et nature’, in Plantagenêts et Capétiens: Confrontations et héritages, ed. Martin Aurell and Noël-Yves Tonnerre, Histoires de famille. La parenté au Moyen Âge 4 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 100–102, https://doi.org/10.1484/M.HIFA-EB.3.603.↩

48. Anne J. Duggan, ‘Thomas Is the Best Healer of the Virtuous Sick: The Medical Miracles of Thomas of Canterbury’, Transactions of the Medical Society of London 128 (2011–2012): 105; Emily Williams, Notes on the Painted Glass of Canterbury Cathedral (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1897), 31, https://archive.org/details/notesonpaintedgl00farrrich suggested that a window of Canterbury Cathedral depicted Robert; but Rachel Koopmans, ‘Kentish Pilgrims in Canterbury Cathedral’s Miracle Windows’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 80, no. 1 (2017): 10–12 shows that it better matches Benedict of Peterborough’s story of William of Dene.↩

49. Haki Antonsson, St. Magnús of Orkney: A Scandinavian Martyr-Cult in Context, Northern World 29 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 66, https://doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004155800.i-272.↩

50. Defloratio Plinii, proem: ‘studiosis et precipue claustralibus et scolasticis’, printed in Bodo Näf, ed., Roberti Crikeladensis Defloratio naturalis historie Plinii secundi, Lateinische Sprache und Literatur des Mittelalters 36 (Bern: Lang, 2002), 2–3.↩

51. Élisabeth Pellegrin, ‘Membra disiecta: Un nouveau manuscrit de la « Defloratio naturalis historiae Plinii Secundi » de Robert de Crichlade’, Revue d’histoire des textes 1 (1971): 202–5, https://doi.org/10.3406/rht.1971.1776.↩

52. L. D. Reynolds, ‘The Elder Pliny’, in Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics, ed. L. D. Reynolds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 313–14.↩

53. Jonathan Woolfson, ‘John Claymond, Pliny the Elder, and the Early History of Corpus Christi College, Oxford’, English Historical Review 112, no. 448 (September 1997): 886, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cxii.448.882; Holland, ‘The University of Oxford in the Twelfth Century’, 163.↩

54. Van Houts, ‘Les femmes dans le royaume Plantagenêt’, 106–10; one should not read too much into the correction of the word ‘secundo’ in Eton, College Library, MS 134, fol. 1v, noted by Neil R. Ker, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969–2002), 2:755–756: the surface is sufficiently undisturbed that it cannot have been changed from ‘primo’.↩

55. Paul Antony Hayward, ‘The Earls of Leicester, Sygerius Lucanus, and the Death of Seneca: Some Neglected Evidence for the Cultural Agency of the Norman Aristocracy’, Speculum 91, no. 2 (11 March 2016): 346, https://doi.org/10.1086/684917.↩

56. Speculum fidei 3.5 (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 380, fols 62r–63r), translated in Hunt, ‘English Learning in the Late Twelfth Century’, 32–33, with the Latin at pp. 37–38; discussed in Matthew Doyle, Peter Lombard and His Students, Studies and Texts 201 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2016), 90; Clare Monagle, Orthodoxy and Controversy in Twelfth-Century Religious Discourse: Peter Lombard’s ‘Sentences’ and the Development of Theology, Europa Sacra 8 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 88–92, https://doi.org/10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.106028; Jean Châtillon, ‘Achard de Saint-Victor et les controverses christologiques du XXIe siècle’, in Mélanges offerts au R.P. Ferdinand Cavallera (Toulouse: Bibliothèque de l’Institut catholique, 1948), 322–23.↩

57. M. L. Rampolla, ‘Melun, Robert de (c. 1100–1167), Theologian and Bishop of Hereford’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Howard Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/23727.↩

58. Wigram, Cartulary of the Monastery of St. Frideswide, nos. 1119–25; R. C. van Caenegem, ed., English Lawsuits from William I to Richard I, Publications of the Selden Society 106–107 (London: Selden Society, 1990–1991), no. 316 translates the priory’s account, Wigram’s no. 1123; David Crouch, The Beaumont Twins: The Roots and Branches of Power in the Twelfth Century, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, 4th ser., 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 95–96, 161–62, https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511897139 gives the background.↩

59. Crouch, The Beaumont Twins, 206.↩

60. Wigram, Cartulary of the Monastery of St. Frideswide, nos. 1121–5.↩

61. John Le Neve and Diana E. Greenway, Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae, 1066–1300 (London: Athlone Press, 1968), 2:99–100.↩

62. Crouch, The Beaumont Twins, 95–96, 162; Hayward, ‘The Earls of Leicester, Sygerius Lucanus, and the Death of Seneca’, 329.↩

63. Henri Omont, Catalogue général des manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques de France. Départements: Rouen, vol. 2 (Paris: Plon, Nourrit, 1885), 381, https://archive.org/details/catalogueg8502fran (no. 67); cited in Max Manitius, Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters (Munich: Beck, 1911–1931), 3:241n2, https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hbz:061:1-111684; Hunt, ‘English Learning in the Late Twelfth Century’, 32n2.↩

64. Richard Sharpe et al., English Benedictine Libraries: The Shorter Catalogues, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues 4 (London: British Library, 1996), no. B54.17; Geneviève Nortier, ‘La bibliothèque de l’Abbaye de Lyre’, Revue Mabillon 48, no. 191 (1958): 1–19 discusses the fate of Lyre’s books.↩

65. Walter Cahn, ‘St. Albans and the Channel Style in England’, in The Year 1200: A Symposium (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975), 187–230; Patricia Stirnemann, ‘The Copenhagen Psalter Reconsidered as a Coronation Present for Canute VI (Kongel. Bibl., Ms. Thott 143 2º)’, in The Illuminated Psalter: Studies in the Content, Purpose and Placement of Its Images, ed. F. O. Büttner (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 323–28.↩

66. Ker, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, 2:756; R. M. Ball, Thomas Gascoigne: Libraries and Scholarship, Cambridge Bibliographical Society Monograph 14 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Library, 2006), 151 does not list this manuscript, but notes that Eton, College Library, MS 22 might have been at either Oxford or Eton in his lifetime.↩

67. Rodney M. Thomson, Manuscripts from St. Albans Abbey, 1066–1235 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Brewer, 1982), nos. 92, 93.↩

68. Christopher de Hamel, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (London: Lane, 2016), 593.↩

69. James Craigie Robertson, ed., ‘Miracula sancti Thomæ Cantuariensis, auctore Benedicto, abbate Petriburgensi’, in Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, vol. 2, 7 vol., Rerum Britannicarum medii aevi scriptores 67 (London: Longman, 1875), 21–281, https://archive.org/details/materialsforhist02robe, chaps. 2.51–52; the letter also appears in an Old Norse version with an English translation, Eiríkr Magnússon, ed., Thómas saga erkibyskups: A Life of Archbishop Thomas Becket, in Icelandic, with English Translation, Notes and Glossary, trans. Eiríkr Magnússon, Rerum Britannicarum Medii Aevi Scriptores 65 (London: Longmans, 1875–1883), chap. 111, https://archive.org/details/thmassagaerkib02eir, followed by additional details that suggest the date of 1171–72: Eilward of Westoning was certainly at Canterbury into 1172, as Rachel Koopmans’ forthcoming translation of Benedict of Peterborough shows.↩

70. Margaret Orme, ‘A Reconstruction of Robert of Cricklade’s Vita et Miracula S. Thomae Cantuariensis’, Analecta Bollandiana 84 (1966): 379–98, https://doi.org/10.1484/j.abol.4.02618; Haki Antonsson, ‘Two Twelfth-Century Martyrs: St Thomas of Canterbury and St Magnus of Orkney’, in Sagas, Saints and Settlements, ed. Gareth Williams and Paul Bibire, Northern World 11 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 41–64.↩

71. Antonsson, St. Magnús of Orkney, 42–67.↩

72. Antonsson, 65.↩

73. John Blair, ‘Saint Frideswide Reconsidered’, Oxoniensia 52 (1987): 80, https://oxoniensia.org/volumes/1987/blair.pdf.↩

74. Blair, 32, 96, 103; Simon Yarrow, Saints and Their Communities: Miracle Stories in Twelfth-Century England, Oxford Historical Monographs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 173–74, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199283637.001.0001 discusses the differences between the two versions.↩

75. Blair, ‘Frideswide’, 102, gives a list of headings that correspond to the thirteen paragraphs in the edited text, reflecting the sections found in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 114, fols 132r–140r.↩

76. Blair, 116–18 prints the undated account from London, British Library, Lansdowne MS 436, fol. 103r–v.↩

77. ‘Reinalde prior de Gresileia’: Knowles et al., Heads of Religious Houses, 1:159, 278.↩

78. Aelred Squire, Aelred of Rievaulx: A Study (London: SPCK, 1969), 136, 169 postulates ‘a date one summer soon after 1170’ based on the liturgical feasts mentioned; examples in Beryl Smalley, The Becket Conflict and the Schools: A Study of Intellectuals in Politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973), 196–200, citing Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 30, but the relevant passages are also in Hereford, Cathedral Library, MS O.iii.10.↩

79. Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 109; Smalley, The Becket Conflict and the Schools, 197.↩

80. R. A. B. Mynors and Rodney M. Thomson, Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Hereford Cathedral Library (Cambridge: Brewer, 1993), 22 and plate 44.↩

81. Hereford, Cathedral Library, MS O.iii.10, fol. 1r: ‘Incipit prologus Roberti prioris sancte Frideswide oxonie super nouam expositionem Ezechielis prophete, ab eodem editam.’ For contemporary uses of edere, see Richard Sharpe, ‘Anselm as Author: Publishing in the Late Eleventh Century’, The Journal of Medieval Latin 19 (2009): 1–87, https://doi.org/10.1484/j.jml.1.100545.↩

82. John Leland notes a copy of Robert’s Homilies there: Teresa Webber and Andrew G. Watson, The Libraries of the Augustinian Canons, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues 6 (London: British Library, 1998), no. A9.7; John Prise later owned the book, who acquired most of Cirencester’s surviving manuscripts: Neil R. Ker, ‘Sir John Prise’, The Library, 5th ser., 10, no. 1 (March 1955): 1–24, https://doi.org/10.1093/library/s5-x.1.1.↩

83. Gerald of Wales, De principis instructione 1.17: Bartlett, De principis instructione, 214–15; Ruth Nisse, Jacob’s Shipwreck: Diaspora, Translation, and Jewish-Christian Relations in Medieval England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017), 20–23, https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501703072.001.0001; Alice Whealey, Josephus on Jesus: The Testimonium Flavianum Controversy from Late Antiquity to Modern Times, Studies in Biblical Literature 36 (New York: Lang, 2003), 61–62; Raphael Loewe, ‘The Mediaeval Christian Hebraists of England: Herbert of Bosham and Earlier Scholars’, Jewish Historical Society of England Transactions 17 (1951–1952): 237, https://jstor.org/stable/29777904; Cecil Roth, The Jews of Medieval Oxford, Oxford Historical Society, n.s., 9 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), 121.↩

84. Knowles et al., Heads of Religious Houses, 1:180; A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to AD 1500 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957–1959), 1:513–14.↩

85. For an overview of the cult, see Yarrow, Saints and Their Communities, chap. 6; Benedicta Ward, ‘St Frideswide of Oxford’, in Benedictines in Oxford, ed. Henry Wansbrough and Anthony Marett-Crosby (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1997), 3–10, 278; Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record and Event, 1000–1215, 2nd ed. (Aldershot, Hampshire: Scolar Press, 1987), 83–87; Henry Mayr-Harting, ‘Functions of a Twelfth-Century Shrine: The Miracles of St Frideswide’, in Studies in Medieval History Presented to R. H. C. Davis, ed. Henry Mayr-Harting and R. I. Moore (London: Hambledon Press, 1985), 193–206, https://doi.org/10.5040/9781472599131.ch-014.↩

86. Sharpe, A Handlist of the Latin Writers of Great Britain and Ireland Before 1540, no. 1212; Thomas Tanner, Bibliotheca Britannico-Hibernica, ed. David Wilkins (London: Bowyer, 1748), 596, refers to him as ‘Philippus de S. Fridiswida’.↩

87. Knowles et al., Heads of Religious Houses, 1:180, 284.↩

88. Benjamin Bossue, ‘Appendix ad acta S. Frideswidæ. De libro miraculorum eius, auctore Philippo Priore’, in Acta Sanctorum Octobris, ed. Joseph van Heck et al., vol. 8 (Brussels: Alphonse Greuse, 1853), 567–90, https://archive.org/details/actasanctorumquo56boll prints the text, but with over 180 substantial errors: I have produced a forthcoming edition, translated with Benedicta Ward. I cite the work using its structure in the manuscript: prologue (chapters 1–3 in Bossue), chapters 1–101 (4–104), 102 (105–6), 103–6 (107–10).↩

89. John was elected in 1178 and consecrated in 1180, but he resigned in 1183 after a protracted conflict: D. E. R. Watt, Medieval Church Councils in Scotland (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 25–29; A. A. M. Duncan, Scotland: The Making of the Kingdom, The Edinburgh History of Scotland 1 (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1975), 270–77.↩

90. Philip of Oxford, Miracula sancte Frideswide 4.↩

91. Martin Allen, Mints and Money in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 49–52, https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139057394; Gilbert Stack, ‘A Lost Law of Henry II: The Assize of Oxford and Monetary Reform’, Haskins Society Journal 16 (2005): 96–97.↩

92. T. A. Heslop, ‘The Late 12th-Century Seal of St. Frideswide’s Priory’, Oxoniensia 53 (1988): 271–72, https://oxoniensia.org/volumes/1988/stfrideswidenotes.pdf.↩

93. Composite drawing from London, British Library, Seal LXX.79 in Heslop, 272; the seal is reproduced from four Oxford charters in Wigram, Cartulary of the Monastery of St. Frideswide, 1:ii; Wood, Survey of the Antiquities of the City of Oxford, 2:159 describes this as a ‘picture of a doctor with a kind of cope’.↩

94. Heslop, ‘Seal of St. Frideswide’s Priory’, 271–72, 274; Blair, ‘St Frideswide’s Monastery’, 256; Colin Morris, The Sepulchre of Christ and the Medieval West: From the Beginning to 1600 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 212–15 discusses the Hospitallers’ work there.↩

95. Philip of Oxford, Miracula sancte Frideswide, prologue: ‘Succumbit humana prudentia, cum secreta dispensatione uirtus diuina coruscat; philosophia subticet secularis, cum in habitum uertitur priuatio’. Compare D. A. Callus and R. W. Hunt, eds., John Blund: Treatise on the Soul, trans. Michael Dunne, 2nd ed., Auctores Britannici Medii Aevi 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) chaps. 10.129–131; Rodney M. Thomson, ed., Alexander Nequam: Speculum speculationum, Auctores Britannici Medii Aevi 11 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), chap. 2.59.↩

96. Mayr-Harting, Religion, Politics and Society in Britain, 1066–1272, 177–79.↩

97. Anne E. Bailey, ‘Miracles and Madness: Dispelling Demons in Twelfth-Century Hagiography’, in Demons and Illness from Antiquity to the Early-Modern Period, ed. Siam Bhayro and Catherine Rider, Magical and Religious Literature of Late Antiquity 5 (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 241–44, https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004338548_014.↩

98. Philip of Oxford, Miracula sancte Frideswide 102, translated in Yarrow, Saints and Their Communities, 187.↩

99. His MS fº 7: Andrew G. Watson, ‘Thomas Allen of Oxford and His Manuscripts’, in Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts and Libraries: Essays Presented to N. R. Ker, ed. M. B. Parkes and Andrew G. Watson (London: Scolar Press, 1978), 284–86, 311; W. D. Macray, Digby Manuscripts, ed. R. W. Hunt and Andrew G. Watson, Bodleian Library Quarto Catalogues 9 (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1999), 82, 162; Michael Foster, ‘Thomas Allen (1540–1632), Gloucester Hall and the Survival of Catholicism in Post-Reformation Oxford’, Oxoniensia 46 (1981): 109–10, https://oxoniensia.org/volumes/1981/foster.pdf.↩

100. For example, an annotator spells out the exact wording of large numerals in the margins of Digby 177, fols 1v–2r, not because they were incorrect as written, but to make them easier to read aloud without hesitation.↩

101. London, British Library, Lansdowne MS 436, fol. 103vb.↩

102. R. W. Hunt, ‘Alexander Neckam’ (DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1936) is the standard survey; partially updated, R. W. Hunt, The Schools and the Cloister: The Life and Writings of Alexander Nequam (1157–1217), ed. Margaret T. Gibson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); Peter Hochgürtel, ed., Alexandri Neckam Suppletio defectuum, Carmina minora, Corpus Christianorum, continuatio mediaevalis 221 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), ix–xvi summarizes more recent biographical findings.↩

103. Diane Bilbey and Marjorie Trusted, British Sculpture, 1470 to 2000: A Concise Catalogue of the Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum (London: V&A, 2002), nos. 50 (A.5–1925); Henry T. Riley, ed., Gesta abbatum monasterii sancti Albani, a Thoma Walsingham, regnante Ricardo secundo, ejusdem ecclesiæ præcentore, compilata, Rerum Britannicarum medii aevi scriptores 28.4 (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1867–1869), 196; Leach, Educational Charters and Documents, 132–35.↩

104. Alexander Neckam, Laus diuine sapientie 11.317–44, Thomas Wright, ed., Alexandri Neckam De naturis rerum libri duo. With the poem of the same author, De laudibus divinæ sapientiæ, Rerum Britannicarum medii aevi scriptores 34 (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1863), 503, https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139208239; translated in James P. Carley, John Leland: De uiris illustribus/On Famous Men, British Writers of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period 1 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2010), chap. 218.↩

105. Julia Barrow, The Clergy in the Medieval World: Secular Clerics, Their Families and Careers in North-Western Europe, c. 800–c. 1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 108, 216, https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781316091364.↩

106. Super cantica 8.15, Oxford, Magdalen College, MS 149, fol. 179vb, Hunt, Schools, 9n41; Stephen C. Ferruolo, The Origins of the University: The Schools of Paris and Their Critics, 1100–1215 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985), 195, suggests that Alexander might instead have travelled to Paris twice, first studying the liberal arts in the 1170s under Adam of Balsham and second in preparation for the magisterium.↩

107. Arthur F. Leach, The Schools of Medieval England (London: Methuen, 1915), 116–18, http://archive.org/details/schoolsofmedieva00leacuoft.↩

108. Andrew N. J. Dunning, ‘Mileto [Melida, Melide], Walter of (fl. c. 1170–c. 1220), Scribe and Augustinian Canon’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780198614128.013.111226; Walter’s letter on Alexander’s sermons is Canterbury, Cathedral Library, MS Lit. B. 13, leaf inserted after fol. 67, printed by Ker, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, 2:274.↩

109. Alexander Neckam, ‘Sermo in assumptione beate Marie’, no. 18 (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodl. MS Wood empt. 13, fol. 53r), quoted by Hunt, Schools, p. 87, and ‘Dominica .i. post octauam pasche sermo’, no. 30 (fol. 86r). The sermon numbers follow Johannes Baptist Schneyer, Repertorium der lateinischen Sermones des Mittelalters für die Zeit von 1150–1350, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters, Texte und Untersuchungen 43 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1969–1990), 1:271–277; Hunt, Schools, 150–53 emends his list.↩

110. Solatium fidelis anime 16, Canterbury, Cathedral Library, MS Lit. B. 6 (4), fol. 19ra, cited in Hunt, 10n44.↩

111. Alfons Hilka, ed., Die Wundergeschichten des Caesarius von Heisterbach, Publikationen der Gesellschaft für Rheinische Geschichtskunde 43 (Bonn: Hanstein, 1933–1937), 1:120–121; Anton E. Schönbach, Über Caesarius von Heisterbach, Sitzungsberichte der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien. Philosophisch-historische Klasse 144.9 (Vienna: Gerold, 1902), 77, https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb11168089-3; Hunt, Schools, 15.↩

112. Alexander Neckam, Super cantica 2.16, Oxford, Magdalen College, 149, fol. 79rb, quoted in Hunt, Schools, 9n43:

     Vita claustralium media est inter uitam scolarium et uitam triumphantium. Dormi igitur inter medios cleros hoc est in medio sortium. Est enim quedam sors gratie honestas uite scolarium; sors ultima est delitiosa iocunditas uite triumphantium; media tranquillitas claustralium.

     ↩

113. Lewis Thorpe, ‘Gerald of Wales: A Public Reading in Oxford in 1188 or 1189’, Neophilologus 62, no. 3 (July 1978): 455–58, https://doi.org/10.1007/bf01511649.↩

114. A. G. Rigg, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature, 1066–1422 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 117; Gerald of Wales, Topographia hibernica 1.15, James F. Dimock, ed., Topographia Hibernica et Expugnatio Hibernica, vol. 5 of Giraldi Cambrensis opera, Rerum Britannicarum medii aevi scriptores 21 (London: Longman, 1867), 47–48, https://archive.org/details/giraldicambrensi05gira; Alexander Neckam, De naturis rerum 1.48, Wright, De naturis rerum, 99–100.↩

115. Daniel Donoghue, ‘An Anser for Exeter Book Riddle 74’, in Words and Works: Studies in Medieval English Language and Literature in Honour of Fred C. Robinson, ed. Peter S. Baker and Nicholas Howe, Toronto Old English Series 10 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 49–52; Rhona Beare, ‘Gerald of Wales on the Barnacle Goose’, Notes and Queries 44, no. 4 (December 1997): 459–62, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/44.4.459 cites later occurrences; further references in S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns, Gervase of Tilbury: Otia imperialia/Recreation for an Emperor, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), chap. 3.123.↩

116. Alexander Neckam, Super cantica 1.4, Oxford, Magdalen College, 149, fol. 5rb:

     Ego ipse qui hec scribo, dum puplice legerem in theologia, uehemens eram assertor quod dies conceptionis beate Marie celebrandus sollempniter non esset. Vnde et quotannis illo die legere publice decreueram, sicut in profestis diebus consueueram. Set testor solem iusticie quia repentino morbo uexatus sum Oxonie singulis annis in illo die ut nullomodo susceptum magisterii offitium exequi ualerem siue id casus ageret siue diuina uoluntas. Set et uiri prudentes qui me tunc temporis in scolis audierunt diligenter hoc considerauerunt, me secreto corripientes eo quod inpugnare uelle uidebar celebrantes diem festum conceptionis beate uirginis.

     Hunt, Schools, 8n36; Helmut Riedlinger, Die Makellosigkeit der Kirche in den lateinischen Hoheliedkommentaren des Mittelalters, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters 38.3 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1958), 322n4; Josiah Cox Russell, ‘Alexander Neckam in England’, English Historical Review 47, no. 186 (April 1932): 261, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/xlvii.clxxxvi.260.↩

117. Solatium fidelis anime 22, Canterbury, Cathedral Library, MS Lit. B. 6 (4), fol. 25va, and Super cantica 6.24: cited in Hunt, Schools, 8.↩

118. Russell, ‘Alexander Neckam in England’, 262 gives the example of ‘In primo aduentu scolaribus Oxonie’ (no. 1), Bodl. MS Wood empt. 13, fol. 3v.↩

119. Southern, ‘From Schools to University’, 23 provides examples.↩

120. Alexander Neckam, Super psalterium 32:1, Oxford, Jesus College, MS 94, fol. 32vb: ‘Legere enim publice de celesti pagina predicare est.’↩

121. Hodierna died in 1215/16: Alexander’s elegy for her is Suppletio defectuum 835–870, Christopher J. McDonough, ed., Alexander Neckam. Suppletio defectuum, Book I, Per verba 12 (Florence: SISMEL, 1999), 56–58.↩

122. J. A. Giles, ed., Petri Blesensis Bathoniensis archidiaconi opera omnia (Oxford: Parker, 1847), 2:21–26, here emended using Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 266, pp. 224–226; Alexander of St Albans is a common alternative to Alexander Neckam, also unfortunately the name of another contemporary: Frederick M. Powicke, ‘Alexander of St. Albans: A Literary Muddle’, in Essays in History Presented to Reginald Lane Poole, ed. H. W.C. Davis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), 246–60.↩

123. Peter of Blois, Letter 137:

     Diu enim ante conuersionem uestram desiderabili multis redditu abiecto⸵ abiectus esse in domo domini elegistis. honorem magisterii laudemque hominum et inanem huius seculi leticiam expuistis ad letandum in leticia gentis quam cristus hereditauit ut laudetur cum hereditate sua.

     ↩

124. Letter 137: ‘Litteratura siquidem uestra et fame commendabilioris celeberrimus odor multos uobis conciliauit ad amiciciam.’↩

125. Alexander Neckam, Super psalterium 37:12–15, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 284 (SC 2339), fols 92vb–93ra (London, British Library, Royal MS 2 C. xi, fol. 59va; Lambeth, Palace Library, MS 61, fol. 49va–b):

     Qui ergo iam claustrum intrauit, dicat: Amici. etc. Et steterunt aduersum me ne intrarem. Et qui iuxta me erant prius dum eram in seculo, delonge steterunt postquam intraueram claustrum, nullo me recreantes solacio. Sed sufficit michi solacium trinitatis. Et illi qui querebant animam meam seducere ante hunc statum uim faciebant id est uim facere uolebant ne ad hunc statum deuenirem. Et qui inquirebant mala michi, id est anime mee, locuti sunt uanitates dicendo: Summa inuidia regnat inter [fol. 93ra] claustrales, et dolos tota die meditabantur, ut me uel sic retraherent a proposito felici. Ego autem maxime postquam claustrum intraui tanquam surdus non audiebam strepitum mundanorum, nec uolebam audire suggestiones illius qui in abscondito insidiatur. Et eram sicut mutus non aperiens os suum postquam subditus sum iugo religionis. Et factus sum non audiens qui prius per loquacitatem lingue nimis deliqueram, et dum hanc medicinam apposui eram sicut homo maturus qui prius me humanam ut puer et factus sum sicut non habens in ore suo redargutiones; maiores enim redarguite [cf. Eph. 5:11] in claustro non debebam.

     See also Super psalterium 72:22, Bodley 284, fol. 179ra (Royal MS 2 C. xi, fol. 123ra; Lambeth MS 61, fol. 90rb):

     Secundum opinionem uulgi male sencientis de uita religiosorum redactus sum ad nichilum, dum caput meum iugo religionis supposui. Hoc enim uulgus pusillanimitati ascribit. Et nesciui id est gessi me tanquam non curarem quid uulgus de me sentiret.

     Quoted in part by Hunt, Schools, 9–10.↩

126. Cheney and Cheney, Letters of Pope Innocent III, no. 471, ‘magister Alexander de sancto Albano, canonicus Cirecestrie’; Thomas Madox, ed., Formulare Anglicanum: Or, a Collection of Ancient Charters and Instruments of Divers Kinds, Taken from the Originals (London: Tonson, 1702), no. 45; cf. Jane E. Sayers, Papal Judges Delegate in the Province of Canterbury, 1198–1254: A Study in Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction and Administration (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 121.↩

127. Holtzmann, Papsturkunden in England, 1:619: ‘magister Alexander de Sancto Albano’.↩

128. Hunt, Schools, 11.↩

129. Ross, Cartulary of Cirencester Abbey, nos. 86, 233*, 327/186.↩

130. Compare the evidence for Alexander of Ashby as a papal judge-delegate, Greti Dinkova-Bruun, ‘Alexander of Ashby: New Biographical Evidence’, Mediaeval Studies 63 (2001): 306–11, https://doi.org/10.1484/j.ms.2.306487; for cases with involvement from St Frideswide’s, see C. R. Cheney, English Bishops’ Chanceries, 1100–1250, Publications of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Manchester 3 (Manchester: University Press, 1950), 125–26; Stephan Kuttner and Eleanor Rathbone, ‘Anglo-Norman Canonists of the Twelfth Century: An Introductory Study’, Traditio 7 (1949–1951): 325, https://doi.org/10.1017/s036215290001518x.↩

131. H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles, eds., Select Cases of Procedure Without Writ Under Henry III, Publications of the Selden Society 60 (London: Quaritch, 1941), clxxix–clxxxi; cited in Hunt, Schools, 13; translated, Harry Rothwell, ed., English Historical Documents, 1189–1327, vol. 3 (London: Routledge, 1996), 863.↩

132. Hunt, Schools, 11–12; Southern, ‘From Schools to University’, 25.↩

133. John D. Cotts, The Clerical Dilemma: Peter of Blois and Literate Culture in the Twelfth Century (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 281–84 summarizes the debate.↩

134. Hunt, Schools, 9–10, 125–26.↩

135. Hunt, 98–103.↩

136. Annals of Osney Abbey, London, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius A. ix, fol. 56va–vb: ‘mº·cº·xcº· Combusta est ecclesia sancte Frideswide cum maxima parte ciuitatis Oxen’.’ Luard, ‘Annales de Oseneia et Chronicon Thomæ Wykes’, 43.↩

137. Alexander Neckam, ‘Sermo in die ascencionis Cristi’ (no. 98), Bodl. MS Wood empt. 13, fol. 93v:

     Doleo uiri fratres quod locus iste ecclesie sancte Frideswide terribilis est modo et horribilis propter ruinam murorum. Quare non cogitatis o laici, quia ad litteram dictum est: Domine dilexi decorem domus tue. Quare igitur non diligitis decorem domus domini?

     Cited in H. E. Salter, Medieval Oxford, Oxford Historical Society 100 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), 37, 132; Hunt, Schools, 7; Halsey, ‘The 12th-Century Church of St. Frideswide’s Priory’, 134.↩

138. Blair, ‘St Frideswide’s Monastery’, 240–42.↩

139. Wigram, Cartulary of the Monastery of St. Frideswide, no. 39.↩

140. Halsey, ‘The 12th-Century Church of St. Frideswide’s Priory’, 134–35; Southern, ‘From Schools to University’, 22; Salter, Medieval Oxford, 37.↩

141. Examples in Hunt, Schools, 89, 92–93: this statement is based on unpublished sermons associated with a particular period of Alexander’s life, and an edition of the full corpus may show otherwise.↩

142. ‘Sermo in dominica xª post festum trinitatis’ (no. 26), Bodl. MS Wood empt. 13, fol. 74r, quoted in Hunt, 87–88.↩

143. Hunt, 26 quotes Super psalterium 78:3, Bodley 284, fol. 192rb.↩

144. Southern, ‘From Schools to University’, 23 implies that Super psalterium 31:3, Oxford, Jesus College, MS 94, fol. 32r is a reminiscence on teaching in the schools, but this is an accident of paraphrasing.↩

145. Hunt, Schools, 97–103.↩

146. First identified by Hunt, 30–31; Michael Gullick, ‘A Twelfth-Century Manuscript of the Letters of Thomas Becket’, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700 2 (1990): 21–23.↩

147. The collation of the volume is i, 1⁸, 2¹⁰–4¹⁰ (the last of these gatherings marked ·iiii·), 5¹⁰ (·ix·), 6⁸ (·x·) | 7⁸, 8⁸, 9^8–1 (8 cancelled) | 10⁸–14⁸, 15⁶, 16⁴, totalling 129 parchment leaves. It is apparent from the smaller size of the glosses on the psalter (330–43 × 272–85 mm) in comparison to the rest of the manuscript (354–92 × 266–97 mm) that it has a different origin from the other booklets.↩

148. Hunt, Schools, 21.↩

149. Callus and Hunt, John Blund: Treatise on the Soul, ix; McEvoy, ‘Liberal Arts, Science, Philosophy, Theology and Wisdom at Oxford, 1200–1250’, 563.↩

150. Hunt, Schools, 26; Thomson, Speculum speculationum, ix.↩

151. Alexander Neckam, Super cantica 2.10: Christopher J. McDonough, ed., Alexander Neckam. Commentum super Martianum, Millennio Medievale 64, Testi 15 (Florence: SISMEL, 2006), xii, xvi; Hunt, Schools, 246, 248.↩

152. Hunt, Schools, 24–25.↩

153. Thomson, Speculum speculationum, xviii.↩

154. Thomas H. Bestul, ‘The Meditation on Mary Magdalene of Alexander Nequam’, The Journal of Medieval Latin 9 (1999): 1–40, https://doi.org/10.1484/j.jml.2.304112.↩

155. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to AD 1500, 1:227 calls him William Bothewald, but without evidence.↩

156. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1281, fols 272v–273v, Thomas Wright, ed., The Latin Poems Commonly Attributed to Walter Mapes, Camden Society 16 (London: Nichols, 1841), xxxv–xxxvii, http://archive.org/details/latinpoemscommo16mapw.↩

157. William H. Black, A Descriptive, Analytical, and Critical Catalogue of the Manuscripts Bequeathed Unto the University of Oxford by Elias Ashmole: Also of Some Additional MSS. Contributed by Kingsley, Lhuyd, Borlase and Others, Bodleian Library Quarto Catalogues 10 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1845), no. 1281, https://databank.ora.ox.ac.uk/misccoll/datasets/QuartoAshmole/Ashmole.pdf.↩

158. Lewis Thorpe, ‘Walter Map and Gerald of Wales’, Medium Ævum 47, no. 1 (1978): 7–9, https://doi.org/10.2307/43628319; Rigg, History of Anglo-Latin Literature, 89; Carsten Wollin, ‘Vera loqui liceat. Eine ungedruckte Satire gegen die ungastlichen Zisterzienser von Pipewell’, Sacris Erudiri 51 (2012): 339–40, https://doi.org/10.1484/j.se.1.103179; Stephen Gordon, ‘Monstrous Words, Monstrous Bodies: Irony and the Walking Dead in Walter Map’s De nugis curialium’, English Studies 96, no. 4 (2015): 384, https://doi.org/10.1080/0013838x.2015.1011891.↩

159. Coburn V. Graves, ‘The Economic Activities of the Cistercians in Medieval England (1128–1307)’, Analecta sacri ordinis Cisterciensis 13 (1957): 50; M. R. James, C. N. L. Brooke, and R. A. B. Mynors, Walter Map: De nugis curialium/Courtiers’ Trifles, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), xxxi.↩

160. Renato Orengo, ed., Dialogues de Gregoire le Grand traduits par Angier, 2 vols (Paris: Société des anciens textes français, 2013); Paul Meyer, ‘La Vie de saint Grégoire le Grand traduite du latin par frère Angier, religieux de Sainte-Frideswide’, Romania 12, no. 46 (1883): 145–208, https://doi.org/10.3406/roma.1883.6260.↩

161. Ian Short, ‘Sur l’identité de frère Angier’, Romania 132 (2014): 222–26, https://doi.org/10.3406/roma.2014.7438.↩

162. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 24766, described in Maria Careri, Christine Ruby, and Ian Short, Livres et écritures en français et en occitan au XIIe siècle: Catalogue illustré, Scritture e libri del Medioevo 8 (Roma: Viella, 2011), no. 74.↩

163. BnF MS fr. 24766, fol. 151r, the first part being completed the day before the feast of St Andrew:

     Explicit opus manuum mearum quod compleui. Ego frater .A. subdiaconus. Sancte frideswide seruientium minimus. Anno uerbi incarnati .mº.ccº.xiiº. Mense .xiº. Ebdomada .iiiiª. feria .vi. In uigilia sancti Andree Apostoli. Anno conuersionis mee .viiº. \Generalis interdic[ti] per angliam anno [.vº.]/ Ad laudem et honorem domini nostro Ihesu Cristi qui cum patre et spiritu sancto uiuit et regnat deus per infinita secula seculorum. Amen.

     ↩

164. BnF MS fr. 24766, fol. 174r: ‘Istud compleui conuersionis mee anno .ixº., sacerdocii .iiº., in uigilia apostolorum Philippi et Iacobi.’↩

165. Ian Short, ‘Frère Angier: Notes and Conjectures’, Medium Ævum 80, no. 1 (2011): 105–8, https://doi.org/10.2307/43632467.↩

166. Short, 107n23 summarizes this debate.↩

167. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, ‘Time to Read: Pastoral Care, Vernacular Access and the Case of Angier of St Frideswide’, in Text and Traditions of Medieval Pastoral Care: Essays in Honour of Bella Millett, ed. Cate Gunn and Catherine Innes-Parker (Woodbridge, Suffolk: York Medieval Press, 2009), 62–77; Taylor, ‘Can an Englishman Read a Chanson de Geste?’, 333–34; William H. Campbell, The Landscape of Pastoral Care in Thirteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 17, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108226837.↩

168. Translated in Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Thelma S. Fenster, and Delbert W. Russell, eds., Vernacular Literary Theory from the French of Medieval England: Texts and Translations, c. 1120–c. 1450 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Brewer, 2016), 232–42.↩

169. Angier, Dialogues 1, BnF MS fr. 24766, fol. 3ra: Orengo, Dialogues, 2:14; Wogan-Browne, Fenster, and Russell, Vernacular Literary Theory, 235.↩

170. Anne E. Bailey, ‘“The Rich and the Poor, the Lesser and the Great”: Social Representations of Female Pilgrims in Medieval England’, Cultural and Social History 11, no. 1 (March 2014): 9–29, https://doi.org/10.2752/147800414X13802176314401 approaches Philip’s collection and others as intended for popular dissemination.↩

171. Joseph W. Goering, ‘Leonard E. Boyle and the Invention of Pastoralia’, in A Companion to Pastoral Care in the Late Middle Ages (1200–1500), ed. Ronald J. Stansbury, Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition 22 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 7–20, https://doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004183537.i-430.5.↩

172. Dialogues 159–164, BnF MS fr. 24766, fol. 9vb: Orengo, Dialogues, 2:33; Wogan-Browne, Fenster, and Russell, Vernacular Literary Theory, 239.↩

173. Angier, Dialogues 21–36, BnF MS fr. 24766, fol. 3ra: Orengo, Dialogues, 2:28; Wogan-Browne, Fenster, and Russell, Vernacular Literary Theory, 235–36.↩

174. Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, ‘Statim invenire: Schools, Preachers, and New Attitudes to the Page’, in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. Robert L. Benson, Giles Constable, and Carol D. Lanham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 201–25.↩

175. Orengo, Dialogues, 1:100–110.↩

176. Angier, Dialogues 141–150, BnF MS fr. 24766, fol. 9va: Orengo, 2:32; Wogan-Browne, Fenster, and Russell, Vernacular Literary Theory, 238.↩

177. BnF MS fr. 24766, fol. 8r, first observed by Meyer, ‘La Vie de saint Grégoire le Grand traduite du latin par frère Angier, religieux de Sainte-Frideswide’, 193.↩

178. Giuseppina Brunetti, Autografi francesi medievali, Biblioteca di Filologia e critica 8 (Roma: Salerno, 2014), 31; Orengo, Dialogues, 1:159–192.↩

179. Short, ‘Frère Angier’, 106–7.↩

180. Table in Wogan-Browne, ‘Angier of St Frideswide’, 66.↩

181. Ronald N. Walpole, ed., The Old French Johannes Translation of the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle: A Critical Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 2:165–174 describes their known contents with a bibliography; Don C. Skemer, Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Princeton University Library (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 332–34 updates some statements.↩

182. Judith Weiss, ‘The Auchinleck MS. and the Edwardes MSS’, Notes and Queries 16, no. 12 (December 1969): 444–46, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/16-12-444; Fred Porcheddu, ‘Edited Text and Medieval Artifact: The Auchinleck Bookshop and “Charlemagne and Roland” Theories, Fifty Years Later’, Philological Quarterly 80, no. 4 (September 2001): 483–84.↩

183. Maria Careri, ‘Membra disiecta. I mss. di Londra, BL, Add. 38662 (Gui de Warewic), 38663 (Chanson de Guillaume) e 40142 (Pseudo-Turpin)’, Cultura neolatina 62 (2002): 211–28.↩

184. Carol E. Harding, ‘Dating Gui de Warewic: A Re-Evaluation’, Notes and Queries 56, no. 3 (September 2009): 333–35, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjp097.↩

185. Jeanne Wathelet-Willem, Recherches sur la Chanson de Guillaume: Études accompagnées d’une éditions, Bibliothèque de la Faculté de philosophie et lettres de l’Université de Liège 210 (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1975), 47–50.↩

186. Compare Add. MS 38662, fols 4v, 5r, 6r, 10v, 13v, 15v–17r (etc.) with BnF, MS fr. 24766, fols 3r and 6v.↩

187. Hannah Weaver, ‘A Tool for Exemplary Pastoral Care: Three Booklets of the Edwardes Manuscript in Context’, Manuscript Studies 2, no. 2 (Autumn 2017): 296–327, https://doi.org/10.1353/mns.2017.0016.↩

188. The Antwerp copy has not disappeared, contrary to Penny J. Cole, The Preaching of the Crusades to the Holy Land, 1095–1270, Medieval Academy Books 98 (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1991), 110–11, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.31140.0001.001.↩

189. Alexander of Ashby, De artificioso modo praedicandi (long version) 3, Franco Morenzoni and Thomas H. Bestul, eds., Alexandri Essebiensis Opera theologica, Corpus Christianorum, continuatio mediaevalis 188 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 53; translated in Hunt, ‘English Learning in the Late Twelfth Century’, 20.↩

190. Cole, Preaching of the Crusades, 107; James M. Powell, Anatomy of a Crusade, 1213–1221 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 24, 52, https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812200829; Alfred J. Andrea, ‘Walter, Archdeacon of London, and the “Historia occidentalis” of Jacques de Vitry’, Church History 50, no. 2 (1981): 147, 149–50, https://doi.org/10.2307/3166879; the preacher cannot be connected to the notary who worked with Innocent III, C. R. Cheney, ‘Master Philip the Notary and the Fortieth of 1199’, English Historical Review 63, no. 248 (1948): 342–50, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/lxiii.ccxlviii.342.↩

191. Reinhold Röhricht, ed., Quinti Belli sacri scriptores minores (Geneva: Fick, 1879), ix–x, http://archive.org/details/quintibellisacri00rhuoft; Johann Heinrich Nolte, ‘Un traité inédit de santa cruce’, Revue des sciences ecclésiastiques, 4th ser., 5, no. 204 (January 1877): 346–68, https://archive.org/details/revuedessciences1877arrauoft.↩

192. Nigel J. Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts, Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles 4 (London: Miller, 1982–1988), no. 24.↩

193. Nigel J. Morgan, ‘“Veronica” Images and the Office of the Holy Face in Thirteenth-Century England’, in The European Fortune of the Roman Veronica in the Middle Ages, ed. Amanda Murphy et al., Convivium Supplementum 2017 (Brno: Masaryk University, 2017), 84–101; John Munns, Cross and Culture in Anglo-Norman England: Theology, Imagery, Devotion, Bristol Studies in Medieval Cultures (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2016), 270–72; Suzanne Lewis, The Art of Matthew Paris in the Chronica Majora, California Studies in the History of Art 21 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 29, 127–29, 290.↩

194. Nigel J. Morgan, ‘Patrons and Their Devotions in the Historiated Initials and Full-Page Miniatures of 13th-Century English Psalters’, in The Illuminated Psalter: Studies in the Content, Purpose and Placement of Its Images, ed. F. O. Büttner (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 309–22.↩

195. Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts, nos. 23, 24, 28, 29. London, British Library, Arundel MS 157, is the earliest of the group with an Oxford connection, which also includes Edinburgh, National Library, MS 10000 (the ‘Iona psalter’); London, BL, Harley MS 2905; London, BL, Royal MS 1 D. x; London, Victoria and Albert Museum, MS L.404.1916 (missal from Lesnes Abbey); and Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS Clm. 835 (‘Munich psalter’).↩

196. M. A. Michael, ‘English Illuminators c. 1190–1450: A Survey from Documentary Sources’, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700 4 (1993): 63–68, 78–98; Graham Pollard, ‘The University and the Book Trade in Mediaeval Oxford’, in Beiträge zum Berufsbewußtsein des mittelalterlichen Menschen, ed. Paul Wilpert (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1964), 336–44, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110842142.336; M. B. Parkes, Their Hands Before Our Eyes: A Closer Look at Scribes, The Lyell Lectures 1999 (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008), 40.↩

197. Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts, no. 29.↩

198. Morgan, no. 26, discussing Imola, Biblioteca Communale, MS 100.↩

199. Compare Cotton MS Claudius B. ii, fol. 2v with BL, Arundel MS 157, fol. 19r; BL, Harley MS 2905, fol. 7v; Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS Clm. 835, fol. 31r; and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Liturg. 407, fol. 9v. Gullick, ‘Letters of Thomas Becket’, 2–4 argues for the Cotton manuscript’s association with Cirencester; C. M. Kauffmann, Romanesque Manuscripts, 1066–1190 (London: Miller, 1975), no. 93 had proposed Christ Church, Canterbury.↩

200. Sold at auction on 19 April 1933, The Splendid Library of the Late J. L. Ketterlinus, St. Augustine, Fla. (New York: American Art Association–Anderson Galleries, 1933), no. 330: the volume consists of 90 folios and measures 165 × 110 mm. I am indebted to Christopher de Hamel for loaning it to support this research.↩

201. Fol. 2r: 1 Feb., red-letter day erased, Ignatius of Antioch and Brigid of Kildare added (hand 1); 4 Feb., day erased (Gilbert of Sempringham?); 6 Feb., Vedast and Amandus added (hand 2); 12 Feb., day erased, replaced with ‘Translatio sancte Frideswide’ (hand 1); 19 Feb., day erased, replaced with ‘Octaue sancte Frideswide’. Fol. 2v: 1 Mar., St David added (hand 3); 2 Mar., Chad of Mercia added (hand 3); 18 Mar., Edward the Martyr added (hand 4). Fol. 3r: 11 Apr., day erased (Guthlac?); 23 Apr., George (in blue) erased and replaced (hand 1). Fol. 3v: 15 May, day (in blue?) erased, replaced with ‘Inuentio sancte Frideswide’ (hand 1?), erased. Fol. 4v: 6 July, day in blue erased, replaced with ‘Dedicatio ecclesie sancte frid[?]’ (hand 3?), erased; 18 July, red-letter day erased (Translation of Edburga of Bicester; her main feast on 15 June is unmodified); 26 July, Anne added (hand 1). Fol. 5v: 2 Sep., day erased; 17 Sep., day erased. Fol. 6r: 2 Oct., Thomas de Cantilupe added (hand 2); 9 Oct., Dionysius and companions added (hand 5); 19 Oct., day in blue erased, ‘Sancte Frideswyde uirginis’ added (hand 2?); 26 Oct., day in blue erased, Octave of St Frideswide added (hand 4?). Fol. 7r: 30 Dec., day erased (Egwin of Evesham?).↩

202. Rodney M. Thomson, ‘Monastic and Cathedral Book Production’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, ed. Nigel Morgan and Rodney M. Thomson, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 165–67, https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521782180.011.↩

203. Campbell, The Landscape of Pastoral Care in Thirteenth-Century England, 82, 211–13.↩

204. Thomas Kaeppeli, ‘Lettera inedita di Venturino da Bergamo a un canonico di S. Frideswide, Oxford (1332–4)’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 24 (1954): 189–98.↩

205. Diana Webb, Pilgrimage in Medieval England (London: Hambledon and London, 2000), 140; Daphna Oren-Magidor, Infertility in Early Modern England (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 124–25, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47668-5.↩

206. James D. Tracy, Erasmus: The Growth of a Mind (Geneva: Droz, 1972), 84; John Blair, ‘Frewin Hall, Oxford: A Norman Mansion and a Monastic College’, Oxoniensia 43 (1978): 64–68.↩

207. David Postles, ‘The Austin Canons in English Towns, c. 1100–1350’, Historical Research 66, no. 159 (February 1993): 4–5, 9–13, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2281.1993.tb01796.x; R. B. Dobson, ‘The Religious Orders 1370–1540’, in Late Medieval Oxford, ed. J. I. Catto and Ralph Evans, The History of the University of Oxford 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 543–44.↩

208. M. B. Parkes, ‘The Provision of Books’, in Late Medieval Oxford, ed. J. I. Catto and Ralph Evans, The History of the University of Oxford 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 481; Hanna and Rundle, Descriptive Catalogue of Christ Church, Oxford, 26–27.↩

209. It once belonged to Mr. D. L. Cumming of Coulsdon, Surrey: Neil R. Ker, Medieval Libraries of Great Britain: A List of Surviving Books. Supplement to the Second Edition, ed. Andrew G. Watson, Guides and Handbooks 15 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1987), 52.↩

210. Kew, National Archives, C 66/306, mem. 27d. 17, cited in Hanna and Rundle, Descriptive Catalogue of Christ Church, Oxford, 26–27.↩

211. Kew, National Archives, C 66/313, mem. 33, a tergo, printed in Wigram, Cartulary of the Monastery of St. Frideswide, 1:490–492; R. L. Storey, ‘Papal Provisions to English Monasteries’, Nottingham Medieval Studies 35 (1991): 81–82, https://doi.org/10.1484/j.nms.3.193.↩

212. Webber and Watson, The Libraries of the Augustinian Canons, 403–5.↩

213. Neil R. Ker, Medieval Libraries of Great Britain: A List of Surviving Books, 2nd ed., Guides and Handbooks 3 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1964), 141; Ker, Medieval Libraries Supplement, 52.↩