PREFACE.

WHILE in the general chronicles of the kingdom we find the records of the conquest of race by race, and the establishment of an individual sovereignty, in the chronicles of the earliest religious houses we trace continually, on the other hand, the record of the gradual consolidation of the several races in one people, the spread of civilization, as well as of religion, from common centres, the establishment of law and custom, and the formation of national life. It is almost a truism to say that it is from the side lights thrown on the general history by biographies and hagiographies, by charters of foundation and gift, by ecclesiastical decrees as well as civil, that we can often best understand how through the midst of wars and wastings the English nation in its earliest days grew on and grew up. Because the centre of unity in the religious life. was maintained, therefore the national life waxed strong.

And although the great abbey of Ramsey stood in point of time very low down in the long list of Saxon monasteries, the share which its narrative contributes to this work of illustration, especially for the days of Danish occupation, is by no means the least. The abbey rises in a time when the worst of the invasious of the heathen Northmen are past, but, being fixed in that East Anglia where, only some century before, Ely and Medeshamstede had been burned by them, and the whole, province laid waste by their inroads, there was the same work now to be renewed afresh, which had

been begun aforetime, of enlightenment and civilization. And they who chose their solitary homes in the districts of marsh and fen, till then undrained, untilled, uninhabited, or (as at Evesham and at the Thorneys of Cambridgeshire and Middlesex) in places overgrown with brushwood and briar, were not at least chargeable with great greed of gain or gross indulgence of self-pleasing.1 The speeches which are often put in the mouths of founders and benefactors are not, of course, any more than those which are found in Livy and the like, to be taken as historical; but nevertheless in that of Oswald to Ailwin which is given so fully, as "by our own. reporter," in the twenty-second (or, as in the margin, eighteenth) chapter of the ensuing narrative, we may see a true statement of the objects which must have been had in view in the foundation of many a religious house on a site remote from the noise of tumultuous times. There, where men have renounced the world and its cares, says the archbishop, "the air becomes salubrious, the fruits of the earth are gathered in abundance, famines and pestilences disappear, the State is duly governed, prisons are opened and captives set free, those wrecked at sea are relieved, the "sick are healed, and the weak find means for their "convalescence." We can easily understand how amidst a people sorely wasted by their fellow-men, ignorant, unskilful, half or wholly heathen, the marvellous results that came from skill in draining and embanking and tillage, from the study and practice of medicine, from the teaching and practice of the principles of justice and right, and of charity to the suffering and the weak, seemed to be, as Oswald is made to represent them, the directly miraculous outpouring at first hand of a blessing from on high.

1 Nor even with regard only to personal security in their isolation, as said infra, p. xvi.

The Ramsey story as here printed appears in this its complete shape for the first time. It is divided into four parts, called in the first and third parts, in the artificial phraseology which the writer too often, after the fashion of his time, affects, "webs" (tela) spun with the "spindle" (liciatorio) of a pen. Of these the fourth together with the preface to the first, have not previously been printed. But before noting what portions have appeared in print and where, it will be most in order to describe the manuscript sources from which the contents of the volume have been drawn.

I. For the primary authority for the text of the first three parts, and of the narrative of abbot Walter's abbacy which is attached as a kind of supplement to the fourth part, the chartulary of the abbey which is preserved in the Public Record Office has been adopted. This is designated in the notes as "A." It is a MS. of (as concerns our portion) the early part of the 14th century, and the chronicle occupies ff. 103-1326. For fuller details respecting this volume it is only necessary to refer to the edition of the rest of its contents which, under the editorial care of Mr. Hart and Rev. Ponsonby Lyons, is included in this series.1

An earlier MS., which belongs to the close of the 13th century, is referred to in the notes as "B." This is a very important MS.; it is the only one which contains the fourth part complete, and it is also one which has been frequently used. It is now Rawlinson MS. B. 333, in the Bodleian Library. Its earliest known owner after the Dissolution was Sir Henry Spelman, who quotes

1 The name of Ramsey, whether in substantival or adjectival form, is written in the Exchequer MS. always in a contracted way, and the extensions are taken from the Bod

leian copy.
The former MS. is
quoted by Dodsworth, as being in
his time in the Remembrancer's
Office in the Exchequer, in vol. lxvi.
of his MS. Collections, p. 124.

it and refers to it in his Glossarium Archaiologicum in frequent instances, some of which will be found noted in the glossary to this volume. In the notes to pp. 200-5, I have printed his collations and remarks upon the charter granted by William I.; and alterations made in a few words in St. Oswald's farewell address (which are pointed out in notes on p. 99) give occasion for the following curious memorandum, inserted by Spelman at the end of the volume:-" Apr. 16 ( 1638. "Md. that one Adams and an other, beinge the bailiffe of St. Need's, came to me this morning as from my L. Privy Seale and Sir Thomas Cotton to see this my booke of Ramsey, and the said Adams had the perusinge of it in the presence of his companion an "hower or twoe by themselues in the parlor here at a bye table, and when they were gone, I found the blott, rasure and new writinge thereuppon (as it appeareth "fol. 13, col. 1), the yncke beinge very fresh and scarsly dry. H. Spel. Witnesse, Edward Drake and Edward Swanton." The cause of the "rasure and

66

new

writinge" appears only to have been that the luckless readers spilt their ink, and, in anxious fear as to the consequences of their misadventure, erased the blotted words, and then filled up the spaces with ingenious fancy readings of their own. A hundred years after Spelman the MS. was in the possession of Walter Clavell, of the Inner Temple, F.R.S., and in the catalogue. of his library, which was sold in London by auction in March and April 1738, it appears on p. 83 as no. 22 of the MSS. in folio; "Registrum monasterii de Ramsey, in pergam." It was then bought by Dr. Richard Rawlinson (as appears from his own interleaved copy of Clavell's catalogue, now in the Bodleian Library) for the sum of 17. 148.

46

The volume is a folio, written in double columns, and contains for the Ramsey chronicle portion 58 leaves, but

altogether 66 leaves.

The initial letter U represents a ram and an ewe facing each other on opposite sides of a tree, in allusion to one of the suggested derivations of the place-name. Between folios 51 and 52 (p. 314 of the printed text) there is a gap which unfortunately comes at a very interesting point, viz., at the commencement of a charter of the second Geoffrey Mandeville, earl of Essex, which contained a grant to the abbey in expiation of the misdeeds of his father. It seems that the two middle leaves of one of the gatherings (which are irregular in number) are here lost, and as no other MS. amongst those described below contains this portion of the text, the loss cannot be supplied from any other as yet known source. The loss occurred before the MS. came to Spelman's hands, since the pagination and numbering of the sections, which apparently are his, go on consecutively, That the MS. is, so far as regards the first part at least, only a copy of one of earlier date, is shown by the curious error on p. 95 in reading causa for tam, and still more evidently by the strange omission, without any break in transcription, of a long passage at pp. 104-106. And that, again, the fourth part is work of a later date may very safely be inferred from the apocryphal addition in it of Ailwin's dying prophecy, found at p. 107. It is with the charter of William I. that this fourth part really commences; all that precedes, from p. 181, being only (with the excep tion of K. Edgar's charter) an abridgment of the most noticeable portion of the pre-Norman narrative; and that this abridgment was compiled to provide a series of lections, to be read it may be presumed in the refectory, appears from three references to hearers and readers. In chapter 23 (xxi.) at the beginning of part ii., p. 47, instead of the "præsenti hujus operis distinctioni" of

It is fully described at cols. R. Rawlinson, by the editor of this 601-3, part i. of the Catal. Codd. | volume, printed at Oxford in 1862.