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Towards the end of his long career Abbot John Whethamstede, for many years the most celebrated Benedictine monk in England, took the opportunity of a letter he was writing to the prior of Tynemouth to engage in rhetorical but equally eulogistic praise of the ‘extraordinary melodies in praise of the Muses’ to be found not only at ‘the Cabalinian font which gushes forth in the midst of Oxford’ but also from ‘the Cirrean stream which runs near the suburbs of Cambridge’. Few historians of England’s two medieval universities have found it altogether easy to share the undiscriminating enthusiasm of the venerable abbot of St Albans for both Oxford and Cambridge. Gordon Leff — not of course at all alone in this — has done much to elucidate the intellectual and institutional life of the university of Oxford only to find the medieval history of his own university of Cambridge so much less rewarding that it rarely figures in his published work at all. Quite why, for at least the first two centuries of their existence, the Cambridge schools should have always remained less numerically significant and academically influential than their Oxford counterparts is still perhaps a more difficult question to answer than is usually assumed. Even more difficult to explain are the changing patterns of recruitment, patronage, endowment and intellectual activity which during the course of the mid and later fifteenth century at long last eradicated Cambridge’s inferior academic status and established an approximate degree of parity and prestige between the two universities. Without much doubt it was only then, during the century or so before the Reformation, that the historian encounters what Mr Malcolm Underwood has recently diagnosed as perhaps the most remarkable and influential of all ‘Cambridge phenomena’. Indeed if one had to choose a particular point in time when that ‘phenomenon’ must at last have become obvious to all contemporaries, even at Oxford, one might do worse than choose the years between 1505 and 1508, when Lady Margaret Beaufort’s transformation of God’s House into Christ’s College ‘took place against the background of an unprecedented number of royal visits’.* It was on one of those occasions, almost certainly on 22 April 1506, that Henry VII rode towards Cambridge, where ‘within a quarter of a mylle, there stode, first of all the four Ordres of Freres, and after odir Religious, and the King on Horsbacke kyssed the Crosse of everyche of the Religious, and then there stode all along, all the Graduatts, aftir their Degrees, in all their Habbitts, and at the end of them was the Unyversyte Cross’.
1 Registra quorundam abbatum monasterii S. Albani, ed. Riley, H. T. (RS, 1872-3), 2, pp. 313–14 ; a reference I owe to Clark, J. G., ‘Intellectual life at the Abbey of St Albans, and the nature of monastic learning in England, c. 1350 – c. 1440: the work of Thomas Walsingham in context’ (Oxford University D. Phil, thesis, 1997), p. 256.
2 For the most recent survey, placing particular emphasis on the dramatic increase (from seven to sixteen) in the number of academic college foundations at Cambridge between the creation of God’s House in 1439 and of Trinity College in 1546, see Leader, pp. 218–32, 264–91, 341–51: cf.Lovatt, R., ‘The triumph of the colleges in late medieval Oxford and Cambridge: the case of Peterhouse’, History of Universities, 14 (1998), pp. 95–7 ; Taylor, J., ‘The Diocese of York and the university connexion, 1300–1520’, Northern History, 25 (1989), pp. 39–59.
3 Jones, M K. and Underwood, M G., The King’s Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 227–30.
4 Ibid., p. 229; Underwood, M., ‘John Fisher and the promotion of learning’, in Bradshaw, B. and Duffy, E., eds, Humanism, Reform and the Reformation: The Career of Bishop John Fisher (Cambridge, 1989), p. 43, a 22.
5 Ashmole, E., The Institutions, Laws and Ceremonies of the Noble Order of the Garter (London, 1672), pp. 558–9 ; Cooper, , Annals, 1, p. 281.
6 For a recent full-scale survey of much of the documentary as well as the architectural and archaeological evidence for the history of the four mendicant houses in Cambridge, see Vintén Mattich, J. L. W., ‘Friars and Society in Late Medieval East Anglia’ (Cambridge Ph. D. thesis, 1995); cf.Moorman, J. R. H. The Grey Friars in Cambridge (Cambridge, 1952); Zutshi, P. and Ombres, R., ‘The Dominicans in Cambridge, 1238–1538’, AFP, 60 (Rome, 1990), pp. 313–73 ; Zutshi, P., The Dominicans in Cambridge, 1238–1538: A Catalogue of a Commemorative Exhibition (Cambridge University Library, 1988).
7 Rashdall, , Universities, 1, pp. 536–9 ; Smith, C. E., The University of Toulouse in the Middle Ages: Its Origins and Growth to 1500 AD (Milwaukee, WI, 1958), pp. 87, 118, 213 ; Dobson, , ‘Religious (Oxford)’, pp. 542–55 . It need hardly be said that this paper is an attempt, perhaps foredoomed to failure, to discover whether the acute shortage of original sources for the history of the monastic orders at medieval Cambridge will always make it impossible to compare and contrast their significance with that of their Oxford counterparts. Without the generous assistance of Professor Christopher Brooke, Mrs Catherine Hall, and Drs Joan Greatrex, Roger Lovatt, Tessa Webber, and Patrick Zutshi, it would be more inadequate still.
8 Pantin, , Chapters, 3, pp. 317–24 ; Grace Book A, pp. vii-ix; Peek, H. and Hall, G, The Archives of the University of Cambridge (Cambridge, 1962), pp. 27–8, 31 ; BRUC, pp. xiii-xv.
9 Brundage, J. A., ‘The Cambridge Faculty of Canon Law and the Ecclesiastical Courts of Ely’, in Zutshi, P., ed., Medieval Cambridge: Essays on the Pre-Reformation University (Wood-bridge, Suffolk, 1993), p. 22 ; cf.Brooke, C. N. L., ‘Monk and Canon: Some patterns in the religious life of the twelfth century’, in Sheils, W. J., ed. Monks, Hermits and the Ascetic Tradition, SCH, 22 (1985), pp. 124–5 ; Rashdall, , Universities, 3, pp. 274–7.
10 Liber Memorandorum Ecclesie de Bemewelle, ed. Clark, J. W. (Cambridge, 1907), pp. 71, 73 ; BRUC, p. 17.
11 Liber Memorandorum de Bernewelle, pp. Ivi, 71, 94–5, 146–7; VCH, Cambridge and Isle of Ely, 2 (1948), pp. 238–9.
12 Liber Memorandorum de Bemewelle, p. 94; Hackett, M. B., The Original Statutes of Cambridge University: The Text and its History (Cambridge, 1970), p. 64.
13 Chapters of the Augustinian Canons, ed. Salter, H. E., Oxford Historical Society, 74 (1922), p. 69 ; Cooper, , Annals, 1, pp. 121, 142, 153, 171–2 ; VCH, Cambridge, 3 (1959), pp. 58–9; Leader, p. 15.
14 BRUC, p. 20; , C. H. and Cooper, T., Athenae Cantabrigienses (2 vols, Cambridge, 1858-61), 1, pp. 28, 51, 82, 109, 219 ; VCH, Cambridge, 2, pp. 243, 247.
15 Baskerville, G., English Monks and the Suppression of the Monasteries (London, 1937), p. 41 . Despite the exceptionally detailed regulations for the care of the priory’s books recorded in the Observances in use at the Augustinian Priory of St Giles and St Andrew at Barnwell, ed. J. W. Clark (Cambridge, 1897), pp. 62–9, only eight of these have been identified: see Webber, T. and Watson, A. G., eds, The Libraries of the Augustinian Canons (Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues, 6; British Academy, 1998), pp. 5–7 . In sharp contrast to Osney Abbey near Oxford, no serious consideration was ever given after 1538 to the possibility of adapting the very extensive precincts of Barnwell Priory for alternative educational or religious use.
16 Stokes, H. P., Outside the Trumpington Gates (CAS, Octavo Publications, 44 [1908], pp. 57–63 ; Golding, B., Gilbert of Sempringham and the Gilbertine Order, c. 1130-c. 1300 (Oxford, 1995), p. 172.
17 The heads of England’s major religious houses cannot have been unmindful of the fact that three monastic houses (the Benedictine Collège de Saint-Denis, the Cistercian Collège de St Bernard and the Cluniac Collège de Cluny) had been securely established at the university of Paris by the 1260s: see T. Sullivan, The Visitation of the Collège de Cluny, Paris, 1386’, History of Universities, 11 (1992), p. 2; cf. Dobson, ‘Religious (Oxford)’, pp. 544–9; idem, The Foundation of Gloucester College in 1283’, Worcester College Record (Oxford, 1985).
18 CPL, 1 (1198-1304), p. 516; VCH, Cambridge, 2, pp. 254–5; Golding, Gilbert of Sempringham, pp. 171–3.
19 Liber Memorandorum de Bemewelle, p. 212.
20 CPL, 6 (1404-15), p. 126; Cooper, , Annals, 1, p. 250 ; Golding, , Gilbert of Sempringham, pp. 173–7 ; VCH, Cambridge, 2, pp. 253–6.
21 See, e.g., BRUC, pp. 34, 116, 124, 244, 418, 527. For justifiable doubts as to whether St Edmund’s Priory was ever open to students other than Gilbertine canons, see Golding, , Gilbert of Sempringham, pp. 174–5.
22 Valor ecclesiasticus (Record Commission, 1810–34), 3, p. 506; VCH, Cambridge, p. 256.
23 BRUC, p. 71; Dickens, A. G., Robert Holgate, Archbishop of York and President of the King’s Council in the North, St Anthony’s Hall Publications, York, 8 (1955), pp. 3–10 ; Cross, G and Vickers, N., Monks, Friars and Nuns in Sixteenth-Century Yorkshire, Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Record Series 150 (1995), p. 395.
24 Pantin, , Chapters, 2, pp. 230–2 ; Chapters of Augustinian Canons, pp. 214–67; Dobson, , ‘Religious (Oxford)’, pp. 544–55.
25 BL, Royal MS 12 E 14, fols 25V-26; Talbot, C. H., ‘The English Cistercians and the Universities’, Studia Monastica, 4 (1962), p. 212.
26 Cal. Patent Rolls, 1422–29, p. 475; Magdalene College, pp. 4–5.
27 By 1482 such delays had made the Cistercians ‘the centre of gossip for the whole of Oxford’: see Talbot, , ‘English Cistercians’, p. 214 ; Dobson, , ‘Religious (Oxford)’, pp. 552–5.
28 Grace Book A, pp. 51–2; BRUC, pp. 110, 503, 517. For evidence that many Augustinian canons studying at Oxford lived in an ‘external master’s school and/or hall’, see Forde, S., ‘The educational organization of the Augustinian Canons in England and Wales, and their university life at Oxford, 1325–1448’, History of Universities, 13 (1994), pp. 33–7.
29 Bentham, J., The History and Antiquities of the Conventual and Cathedral Church of Ely (2nd edn, Norwich, 1812), p. 220 ; Greatrex, p. 401; Crawley, C., Trinity Hall the History of a Cambridge College, 1350–1975 (Cambridge, 1976), p. 28 . For the later history of this Ely Hostel, see Stokes, H. P., The Mediaeval Hostels of the University of Cambridge, CAS, Octavo Publications, 49 (1924), pp. 9–10.
30 Venn, J., et al, Biographical History of Gonville and Cuius College, 1349–1897, 8 vols (Cambridge, 1897-1998), 3, pp. 332–3 ; Aston, T. H., ‘The medieval alumni of the University of Cambridge’, Past and Present, 86 (1980), pp. 54–5 ; Cobban, A B., The Medieval English Universities: Oxford and Cambridge to c. 1500 (London, 1988), p. 320.
31 The following estimates are based on an analysis of the biographical information about Cambridge monks and canons available in BRUC as well as (for the period between 1500 and 1540) the much less reliable Cooper, , Athenae, 1 , and , J. and Venn, J. A., Alumni Cantabrigienses to 1751, 4 vols (Cambridge, 1922-7). For Dr Peter Cunich’s much more authoritative ‘A biographical list of Benedictine monks at Cambridge University from the earliest times until 1540’, see Magdalene College Cambridge, MS R. 2. 15.
32 Hockey, S. F., Quarr Abbey and its Lands, 1132–1631 (Leicester, 1971), p. 245 . Two of the three (only) Cistercian monks who appear in the pages of BRUC had previously been scholars of St Bernard’s College, Oxford (ibid., pp. 285, 562, 607).
33 BRUC, pp. 22, 422, 460, 634, 655–6; Colvin, H. M, The White Canons in England (Oxford, 1951), pp. 321–6 . The common assumption that Bishop Richard Redman, much the most celebrated White Canon of late medieval England, studied at Cambridge or Oxford is shown to be completely without evidence in Gribbin, J. A., ‘The Premonstra-tensian Order in late medieval England’ (Cambridge University Ph. D. thesis, 1998), pp. 188, 196.
34 BRUC, p. 20.
35 Chapters of Augustinian Canons, pp. 70–1.
36 The Chronicle of Bury St Edmunds, 1212–1301, ed. A. Gransden (London, 1964), p. 140; Hackett, Original Statutes, p. 131, n. 2; BRUC, p. 685.
37 Greatrex, J., ‘Monk students from Norwich Cathedral Priory at Oxford and Cam bridge, c. 1300 to 1530’, EHR, 106 (1991), pp. 561–2, 579–83 . There is no evidence that Cardinal Adam de Easton, the most distinguished of all English university monks by the time of his death in 1397, had any personal connection with Cambridge at all (Greatrex, pp.502-3).
38 Visitations of the Religious Houses in the Diocese of Lincoln, 1436–1449, ed. Thompson, A. H., CYS, 24, 33 (1919, 1927), 2, pp. 270, 273, 330 ; Account Rolk of the Obedientiaries of Peterborough, ed. Greatrex, J., Northamptonshire Record Society, 33 (1983), pp. 15, 92, 95, 104, 213, 216, 247.
39 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 170, p. 22; Pantin, , Chapters, 2, p. 76.
40 Graham, R., ‘The English Province of the Order of Cluny in the fifteenth century’, in idem, English Ecclesiastical Studies (London, 1929), pp. 53–4 ; BRUC, pp. 177, 181, 26s, 615.
41 Magdalene College, p. 3; Aston, , ‘Medieval alumni’, pp. 55–6.
42 Willis and Clark, 2, pp. 351–66. ‘The following very summary account of Buckingham College is especially indebted to Dr Cunich’s recent and much more detailed discussion of its history in Magdalene College, pp. 1–30.
43 Pantin, , Chapters, 2, pp. 149, 172–3.
44 Cal. Patent Rolb, 1422–29, p. 475. In addition to enjoying particularly warm relations with Bishop Langley, Prior Wesssington – in the company of the then abbot of Crowland — had played a prominent role at the extraordinary assembly of English Black Monks convoked at Westminster by Henry V in May 1421: there is however no evidence that issues relating to university education at Oxford or Cambridge were on the lengthy agenda at that time: Dobson, R. B., Durham Priory, 1400–1450 (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 223–4, 240–4 ; Pantin, , Chapters, 2, pp. 98–134.
45 Magdalene College, pp. 4–5, 29, 31–3. By at least 1432 the Cambridge borough treasurers had begun to receive an annual payment of 18 from the abbot of Crowland for the fishponds or ‘pondyards’ on the site: see Cambridge Record Office, Treasurers’ Accounts, 1432–3, 1435–6, 1436–7; Cambridge Borough Documents, 1, ed. W. M. Palmer (Cambridge, 1931), pp. 40, 57.
46 Cooper, , Annals, 1, p. 227 ; Magdalene College, pp. 7–9.
47 Pantin, , Chapters, 2, pp. 183–220.
48 Dobson, Tleligious (Oxford)’, pp. 546–8; Brooke, C. N. L, ‘The dedications of Cambridge colleges and their chapels’, in Zutshi, ed., Medieval Cambridge, p. 19 . The name of Buckingham College was only added to John Rous’s well-known list of Cambridge colleges after that list’s original compilation c. 1450 (Aston, ‘Medieval Alumni’, p. 15).
49 Magdalene College, pp. 8–14; Pantin, , Chapters, 3, p. 116.
50 Harris, B.J., Edward Stafford, Third Duke of Buckingham, 1478–1521 (Stanford, CA, 1986), pp. 19–20 ; Rawcliffe, C., The Staffords, Earls of Stafford and Dukes of Buckingham, 1344-1521 (Cambridge, 1978), p. 97 ; Jones, and Underwood, , King’s Mother, pp. 142–3 ; Magdalene College, pp. 11–12.
51 McDowall, R. W., ‘Buckingham College’, Proceedings of CAS, 44 (1950), pp. 5–12 ; Willis and Clark, 2, pp. 359–87; Magdalene College, pp. 14–19.
52 These very approximate estimates are calculated from the entries in BRUC, Cooper’s Athenae and Venn’s Alumni Cantabrigienses. Cf. Aston, ‘Medieval Alumni’, p. 19; and Magdalene College, pp. 3, 20, 27.
53 Knowles, D. and Hadcock, R. N., Medieval Religious Houses: England and Wales (revised edn, London, 1971), p. 123 ; Cooper, , Athenae, 1, pp. 18, 61, 68, 69, 70, 186–7.
54 Rowntree, C., ‘Studies in Carthusian history in later medieval England’ (York University D. Phil, thesis, 1981), pp. 147–51.
55 Grace Book B, ii, p. 99; John Hope, W. St, The History of the London Charterhouse (London, 1925), pp. 150–1 ; Wines, A. R, ‘The London Charterhouse in the later Middle Ages: an institutional history’ (Cambridge University Ph. D. thesis, 1998), pp. 218–19.
56 Grace Book B, ii, pp. 99, 170–1; Venn, , Alumni Cantabrigienses, 2, pp. 113, 322, 413; 3, p. 182; 4, p. 354 ; Rowntree, , ‘Studies in Carthusian history’, pp. 148–9 . Not one of these Carthusians is known to have been the author of devotional or indeed any other treatises.
57 Account Rolb of Peterborough, pp. 88, 92, 95, 97, 104, 106, 240, 247; The Letter Book of Robert Joseph, monk-scholar of Evesham and Gloucester College, Oxford, 1530–3, ed. H. Aveling and W. A. Pantin, Oxford Historical Society, ns, 19 (1967), p. 265; BRUO 1501–1540, p. 192.
58 See, c.g., BRUC, pp. 115, 220, 298, 424, 443, 520, 534, 609. By the late fifteenth century, if not earlier still, most religious houses seem to have been free to decide to which of the two universities they would send their students (Forde, ‘Educational organization of Augustinian Canons’, pp. 29–30).
59 Between 1458 and 1479 at least five St Mary’s monks graduated from Cambridge with the degree of either B. Th. or D. Th. (BRUC, pp. 316, 374. 5°3. 587. 616). Cf.Taylor, , ‘Diocese of York and university connexion’, pp. 50–1.
60 Clark, , ‘Intellectual life at St Albans’, pp. 59–60 ; BRUC, pp. 237–8, 418.
61 Leader, pp. 39, 106. The early history of incorporation at Cambridge is discussed in Hackett, , Original Statutes, pp. 54, 122–3, 146.
62 Grace Book A, p. 97; BRUO, 1, p. 413; 2, pp. 1282–3; Harvey, B. F., ‘The monks of Westminster and the University of Oxford’, in Boulay, F. R. H. Du and Barron, C. M, eds, The Reign of Richard II: Essays in Honour of May McKisack (London, 1971), pp. 112, 126, 128 . Cf. the career of William Codenham, alias Buntyng, a Bury St Edmunds monk and Oxford B. Th. who then incepted in theology at Cambridge in 1494–5, three years before he became abbot of his monastery (BRUO, 1, p. 454).
63 BRUO, 1, p. 101; 2, p. 1126; Gribbin, , ‘Premonstratensian Order’, p. 187–90 . It seems hard to believe that the unusually mobile career of Thomas Mersche, a Gilbertine canon from Lincoln who studied theology at Cambridge and other universities for many years before being appointed apostolic penitentiary at Rome in 1426, can have been anything but highly exceptional (BRUC, p. 402).
64 The late T. H. Aston’s numerical analysis (‘Medieval Alumni’, p. 63) of the higher degrees obtained by members of the various religious orders who studied at late medieval Cambridge almost certainly over-emphasises the gradual decline of theology to a supposed ‘modest position’.
65 CclR, 1500–09, P.139; Harvey, , ‘Monks of Westminster’, pp. 126–7 ; Letters and Papers, 14, pt ii, pp. 60–1.
66 Greatrex, pp. 387–465, 478–576; idem, ‘Monk students from Norwich’, pp. 579–83.
67 Dickens, A. G., Late Monasttcism and the Reformation (London, 1994), p. 17 ; Cooper, , Athenae, p. 60.
68 Aston, , ‘Medieval Alumni’, pp. 67–8 ; Magdalene College, pp. 21–2; VCH, Cambridge, 2, pp. 216–17 frhorney Abbey).
69 John Le Neve, Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae. 1300–1541, revised edn, Institute of Historical Research, London (12 vols, 1962–7), 10, The Welsh Dioceses, p. 5; Dobson, R. B., ‘English and Welsh monastic bishops at the end of the Middle Ages: the final century, 1433–1533’, in Monasteries and Society in Medieval England, ed. Thompson, B. J. (Proceedings of the Eleventh Harlaxton Symposium, 1994), forthcoming.
70 For some representative examples of the highly variable (apparently more variable than at Oxford) number of years of study specified by the Cambridge university graces required for admission to a higher degree, see Grace, Book A, pp. 15, 30, 95 ; B, 1, pp. 134, 144, 145; T. pp. 54, 65.
71 Visitations of Religious Houses in the Diocese of Lincoln, 1420–1436, ed. Thompson, A. H., CYS, 17 (1915). p. 91.
73 Cooper, , Annals, 1, pp. 297, 375 ; Magdalene College, p. 29; Cambridge Borough Documents, 1, p. 146.
74 Grace Book A, p. 30; B (1), pp. 134, 144–5; BRUC, pp. 337, 438.
75 Whether the protective head covering was to take the form of a hat or a handkerchief seems not entirely certain: Grace Book A, p. 107; Greatrex, p. 486; Cooper, , Athenae, p. 19.
76 Greatrex, pp. 423–4, 444, 447, 454, 465. Walter Hothom, a monk of St Mary’s Abbey, York, was licensed to preach within the diocese of York in 1478, apparently long before he had completed his theology studies at Cambridge [Grace Book A, p. 95; BRUC, p. 316).
77 Pantin, , Chapters, 2, p. 156 ; Letters and Papers, 2, pt ii, appx, p. 1544; Chapters of Augustinian Canons, pp. 131–43.
78 Dobson, , ‘Religious (Oxford)’, pp. 572–6.
79 Crosby, R., ‘Robert Mannyng of Brunne; a new biography’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 57 (1942), pp. 15–28 . No attempt is made here to assess the influence of a small élite of Cambridge graduates who only joined a religious order after leaving the university.
80 BRUC, pp. 36, 316; cf.Ker, N. R., ed., Medieval Libraries of Great Britain, 2nd edn, Royal Historical Society (London, 1964), pp. 228, 321.
81 Lincoln Visitations, 1436–1440., p. 330.
82 Knowles, Rei. Orders, 3, p. 26; BRUC, pp. 36, 126; cf.Dobson, , Durham Priory, pp. 371–3.
83 Sharpe, R., Carley, J. P., Thompson, R. M., and Watson, A. G., eds, English Benedictine Libraries: the Shorter Catalogues, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues, 3 (1992); Webber and Watson, Libraries of Augustinian Canons. Unfortunately no evidence at all has yet been discovered for either the nature of the library or the books themselves at Buckingham College.
84 Thus of the three largest library catalogues transcribed in Webber and Watson, Libraries of Augustinian Canons, only that for Llanthony (Secunda) provides much evidence of the provenance (often Oxford) of the books catalogued.
85 Clark, , ‘Intellectual life at St Albans’, passim; Knowles, Rei. Orders, 2, p. 264.
86 Dobson, , Durham Priory, pp. 342–3.
87 BL, Harley MS 3721; Greatrex, pp. 457–8.
88 For an especially well documented example, see Piper, A. J., ‘Dr Thomas Swalwell, Monk of Durham, Archivist and Bibliophile (d. 1539)’, in Carley, J. P. and Tite, C. G. G, eds, Books and Collectors, 1200–1700: Essays presented to Andrew Watson (BL, London, 1997), pp. 71–100.
89 Registra abbatum S. Albani, ed. Riley (RS, 1872–3), i, p. 462; The Life of St Norbert by John Capgrave, OESA (1393-1464), ed. C. L. Smetana (Toronto, 1977); Gribbin, , ‘Premon stratensian Order’, pp. 157, 169–79 ; cf.Gransden, A., Historical Writing in England, 2: c. 1307 to the Early Sixteenth Century (London, 1982), pp. 342–424 ; Dobson, R. B., ‘Contrasting chronicles: historical writing at York and Durham in the later Middle Ages’, in Wood, I. and Loud, G. A., eds, Church and Chronicle in the Middle Ages: Essays presented to John Taylor (London, 1991), pp. 205–12.
90 Doyle, A. I., “Publication by members of the religious orders’, in Griffiths, J. and Pearsall, D., eds, Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–147$ (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 109–23 ; idem, ‘Book production by the monastic orders in England (c. 1375–1530)’, in Brownrigg, L. L., ed., Medieval Book Production: Assessing the Evidence (Altos Hills, CA, 1990), pp. 1–19.
91 Cited from De planctu ecclesiae (completed in 1340) in Coulton, G. G., Five Centuries of Religion (1000-1500), 4 vols (Cambridge, 1923-50), 2, p. 545.
92 Visitations of the Diocese of Norwich, A. D. 1492–1532, ed. A. Jessopp, Camden Society, ns, 43 (1888), p. 264; Venn, J., Early Collegiate Life (Cambridge, 1913), pp. 77–8.
93 Lincoln Visitations, 1436–49, p. 44.
94 See Collectanea Anglo-Premonstratensia, ed. F. A. Gasquet, Camden Society, 3rd ser, 6, 10, 12 (1904-6), I, pp. 90, 148; 3, p. 626; Snape, R. H., English Monastic Finances in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1926), pp. 105–8 ; Lincoln Visitations, 1420–36, p. 56.
95 For the most detailed study of the ‘precarious financial substructure’ of a monastic college within the university of Paris (‘such insecurity was not conducive to intellectual progress’), see John, J., The College of Prémontré in Mediaeval Paris (Notre Dame, IN, 1953), pp. 31–43 , a reference I owe to Dr Joseph Gribbin.
96 Collett, B., Italian Benedictine Scholars and the Reformation: The Congregation of Santa Giustina of Padua (Oxford, 1985), pp. 1–27 ; Schmitz, P., Histoire de l’Ordre de Saint Benoit, 7 vols (Gemblous, 1943-56), 3 , passim; but see the critical comments on such ‘piecemeal reforms’ in Cameron, E, The European Reformation (Oxford, 1991), pp. 41–3.
97 See, e.g., Bishop John Alcock’s Mons Perfectionis, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1486; Bishop Richard Fox’s edition of the Ruyle of Seynt Benet, printed by Richard Pynson in 1517; Caraman, P. G., ‘An English monastic reformer of the sixteenth century’, Clergy Review, ns, 28 (1947), pp. 1–16 ; Meek, E. L., “Printing and the clergy in the later Middle Ages’ (Cambridge University M. Phil, thesis, 1997).
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