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Ordinationes and
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De Vita Monastica have reached to our times. St. Benedict Biscop, the founder of the monasteries of St. Peter and St. Paul, at Wearmouth and Jarrow, a nobleman by birth, and a man of extraordinary learning and ability, to whom England owes the training of the father of her ecclesiastical history, the Venerable Bede. St. Aldhelm, nephew of King Ina, St. Wilfrid, St Brithwald, a monk of Glastonbury, elevated to the dignity of Archbishop of Canterbury, which he held over thirty-seven years. His works which have come down to us are a
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Life of St. Egwin, bishop of Worcester, and the
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Origin of the Monastery of Evesham. Tatwin, who succeeded him in the archbishopric. Bede the Venerable, who was skilled in all the learning of the times, and; in addition to Latin and Greek, was versed in Hebrew; he wrote an immense number of works, many of which are lost, but the best known are the greater portion of the
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Saxon Chronicle, which was continued after his death as a national record; and his
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Ecclesiastical History, which gives to England a more compendious and valuable account of her early church than has fallen to the lot of any other nation. He was also one of the earliest translators of the Scriptures, and oven on his death-bed dictated to a scribe almost up to the final moment; when the last struggle came upon him he had reached as far as the words,
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But what are they among so many, in the sixth chapter of St. John's Gospel, and the ninth verse. St. Boniface, already alluded to as the apostle of Germany, was a native of Devonshire. He was made Archbishop of Mentz, but being possessed with an earnest longing to convert the heathen Frieslanders, he retired from his archbishopric, and putting on his monk's dress took with him no other treasure than a book he was very fond of reading, called
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De Bono Mortis, went amongst these people, who cruelly beat him to death in the year 755; and the book stained with his blood {168} was cherished as a sacred relic long after. Alcuin, whom we have already mentioned as the founder of the University of Paris, was a Yorkshireman, and was educated under Bede. He lived to become the friend of Charlemagne, and next to his venerable master was the greatest scholar and divine in Europe; he died about the year 790. John Asser, a native of Pembrokeshire, is another of these worthies. It is supposed that Alfred endowed Oxford with professors, and settled stipends upon them, under his influence, he being invited to the court of that monarch for his great learning. He wrote a
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Commentary upon Boethius de Consolatione Philosophiae, the
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Life of King Alfred, and the
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Annals of Great Britain. St. Dunstan, a monk of Glastonbury, the best known of all these great Englishmen, died Archbishop of Canterbury; but as we shall have much to say of him hereafter we pass on to St. Ethelwold, his pupil, also a monk at Glastonbury, distinguished for his learning and piety, for which he was made abbot of the Monastery of Abingdon, where he died in the year 984. Ingulphus, a native of London, was made Abbot of Croyland, in Lincolnshire, in the year 1075. A history of the abbey over which he presided has been attributed to him, but its authenticity has been gravely disputed. Alfric, a noted grammarian. Florence, of Worcester, was another great annalist, who in his
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Chronicon ex Chronici brings the history down to the year 1119, that in which he died; his book is chiefly valuable as a key to the
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Saxon Chronicle. William, the renowned monk of Malmesbury, the most elegant of all the monastic Latinists, was born about the time of the Norman Conquest. His history consists of two parts, the
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Gesta Regum Anglorum, in five books, including the period between the arrival of the Saxons and the year 1120. The
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Historia Novella, in three books, brings it down to the year 1142. He ranks next to Bede as an historic writer, most of the others being mere compilers and selectors from extant chronicles. He also wrote a work on the history of the English bishops, called
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De Gestis Pontificum Anglorum, in which he speaks out fearlessly and without sparing: also a treatise on the antiquity of Glastonbury Abbey,
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De Antiquitate Glastoniensis Ecclesiae; his style is most interesting, and he is supposed to have written impartially, separating the improbable from the real, and gives us what can readily be appreciated as a fair and real picture of the state of things, more especially of the influence and policy of the Norman court, and the opening of the struggle between the two races. Eadmer was another contemporaneous celebrity with William of Malmesbury; he was the author of a history of his own times, called
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Historia Novorum sive Sui Secula,