The Deeds of the Abbots of St Albans: Gesta Abbatum Monasterii Sancti Albani ed. by James G. Clark (review)

The Gesta Abbatum of St Albans, from the foundation under King Offa until the death of Abbot Thomas de la Mare in 1396, is the longest continuous chronicle of an English monastery. H. T. Riley's Latin edition in the Rolls Series (1867–69) has shaped the work of historians of the abbey, such as James Clark and Michelle Still, and scholars of broader monastic history, especially David Knowles. But it has been available in English only in excerpts, by G. G. Coulton and Richard Vaughan, and has attracted less notice than St Albans's national chronicles by Matthew Paris, Thomas Walsingham, and others. The present volume fills that gap admirably.

The translation uses Riley's Latin, based on Walsingham's final ('C') version, as a starting point, but Clark and Preest have done the comparative work on the manuscripts necessary for a critical edition of the Latin. Each chapter has an annex with notes recording manuscript variants, in parallel with comprehensive footnotes that identify people, places, and subjects in the text and provide helpful commentary. Documents reproduced in the text appear in précis for brevity, but the work still runs to a thousand pages—a massive achievement in every sense. Only a few minor typographical errors have crept through.

The translation is excellent. It is unfailingly accurate in the passages that I have checked against the original, but not slavishly literal. Rather, it is fluent and lively, recapturing the voice, mentality, and outlook of the authors and their community.

A corporate work of many hands over more than 300 years, the Gesta conveys a sense of memory handed down. The thirty abbatial portraits are neither liturgical necrologies nor hagiographies. Indeed, each concludes with a reflection on the subject's faults and failings, for moral education and perhaps to put the incumbent's in perspective. They may have originated in a roll kept by the cellarer; by Walsingham's time the responsibility was the precentor's. The early entries are brief, formulaic, and sometimes inaccurate. But from the late eleventh century the detail and colour increase, reflecting the growing need for written historical validation. The hands of Paris and Walsingham are evident in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century entries (for example, some vintage Matthew Paris invective on pp. 484–88), and Walsingham draws extensively on the abbey's records. But even they keep to the inherited format, mute their personal styles, and look internally rather than out to the wider world.

The insight into the inner life of the house is unrivalled among English monasteries. We have detailed accounts of liturgy, devotion, and observance of the Rule in the abbey and its cells and of the thinking behind the abbots' measures, which other houses' customaries lack. The tension between upholding the Rule and the humane urge to mitigate runs through the chronicle, including the sections on Michael of Mentmore and de la Mare as presidents of the provincial chapter. The portraits of the abbots are matched elsewhere only by Jocelin of Brakelond and Walter Daniel, and then only for one man. The chronicles detail not only the house's acquisition of liturgical items but also its interest in books and learning, in which St Albans stood out; the monastic school, the move into the universities and the achievements of university-educated abbots are documented. We also get rare glimpses of monastic preaching (pp. 769–70) and pastoral care.

The text displays the tendency of St Albans, like other monasteries, to see the abbot's duty as building up the house's resources, to its glory and that of its patron saint. Each chapter proudly documents his acquisitions and catalogues his losses as failings, or even as sin. That mentality also shapes the chroniclers' dismissive attitudes towards the townsmen and peasants, who rebel wickedly against...