A History of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, 1182–1256: Samson of Tottingham to Edmund of Walpole (review)

Intended as the first part of a two-volume survey of one of the greater Benedictine abbeys of medieval England, Antonia Gransden's history of Bury St. Edmunds in its golden age inevitably invites comparison with other such studies, most notably Barbara Harvey's ground-breaking volumes on the economy and domestic arrangements of the monks of Westminster. Whereas Westminster boasts an extraordinary wealth of obedientary and manorial accounts, Bury in the period 1180–1250 has bequeathed evidences equally rich but slanted more toward the historical and the liturgical, in particular the Bury Customary of c.1234, and two great works of history: Jocelin of Brakeland's chronicle of Abbot Samson and the long anonymous history of the election of Samson's successor, Abbot Hugh. Taken en masse, these shed unique light on internal squabblings and rivalries within the monastic community. Gransden's survey reveals the full richness of the Bury sources, although much of the second half of her book is recycled from previous work, most notably from her introduction to the Customal that she first published in 1973.

Launching herself in medias res, with no attempt to trace the first two centuries of the abbey's existence, her book as a whole is perhaps better consulted, rather like the Bury sources themselves, as a series of self-contained libelli, dealing with such themes as election, liturgy, learning, or the economy, rather than as a coherent or comprehensive institutional history. Within these limitations there is much to admire. There are, for example, fascinating details on such topics as bells and bell-ringing; the monks' employment of minstrels, water clocks, windmills and ruby rings; the cult and profits of the Bury saints; the problems that arose from allowing Cistercians to legislate on the diet of unreformed Benedictine monks; and a whole host of other such things.

There is, however, a tendency to allow the tangential to run riot. Some of the most original and fascinating details are consigned to footnotes (for example, at page 156 on the contrast between monastic voting at St. Albans and Bury). There is rather too much of the simplicity of the dove and too little of the cunning of the serpent. For example, it could be argued that excessive credence continues to be afforded to Jocelin of Brakeland, despite Gransden's acknowledgment that Jocelin was capable of exaggeration or deliberate distortion. On those rare occasions when the testimony of Bury sources is called into question, as for example in respect to a writ of King Henry II here branded a forgery (on p. 54, in fact an almost certainly genuine mandate to the eyre justices of 1177), or the charter of Edward the Confessor granting free election here (pp. 155, 163) said to have left no trace before 1200 (in fact, "renewed" in a well-known and apparently genuine charter of Henry II of the 1150s), it is unfortunate that the questions themselves can seem misdirected. In setting out a wealth of detail, Gransden occasionally misses broader points. For example (p. 171), it is surely much more important to notice that Pandulf was the first bishop of Norwich to serve as papal legate and hence that Bury's immunity from diocesan supervision came under particular threat in the years around 1220, than it is to dwell upon the finer details of his dispute settlement. The fact that the abbey's sacrist (p. 211) played so significant a role in the ceremonial recognitions of the abbey's lordship over the town surely takes us back to the rise of a particularly powerful succession of sacrists in the twelfth century and even further back to the role of the sacrist as custodian of the shrine and hence as chief earthly minister of St. Edmund himself. Why continue blindly to trust Jocelin's account of the...