CHRONICA JOHANNIS DE OXENEDES. EDITED BY SIR HENRY ELLIS, K. H., F. R. S., S.A. PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHORITY OF THE LORDS COMMISSIONERS OF HER MAJESTY'S LONDON: LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, LONGMANS, & ROBERTS. 1859. Brit, Hist, 513 HARVARD COLLEGE LICCARY 1862, 44 f Cambridge Printed by EYRE and SPOTTISWOODE, Her Majesty's Printers, PREFACE. No Manuscript of the Chronicle of John de Oxenedes but that which forms the text of the volume before the reader is at present known, nor have any particulars reached us as to the personal origin or history of the writer. The Title of the Cottonian manuscript which stands at the head of the Chronicle, and names John de Oxenedes as its author, is not in the original handwriting of the manuscript, but in a hand apparently of the middle of the seventeenth century. Smith, however, in his Catalogue of the Cottonian Collection, printed in 1696, gives it as it stands, with the name of John de Oxenedes as that of the author. The work is cited as his by Wharton in the Anglia Sacra, as well as by Bishop Tanner in the Notitia Monastica; and Bishop Tanner has expressly given a place as the author of this Chronicle in his Bibliotheca Britannico-Hibernica. Wherever this Chronicle has been quoted, it has been referred to as the production of John de Oxenedes. him That the writer was a monk of the Abbey of St. Benet Holme is obvious, not only from the particuenumerated throughout his history regarding the Abbey itself, the progressive rise of its buildings, lars 1 and the series of its abbots and their characters, but more especially from a passage in which the minute circumstances are detailed attending King Edward the First's grant in the year 1286, in confirmation to St. Benet Holme of all its previous charters of endowment. Again, the writer's exultation, as regarded his abbey, at the favourable issue of a suit relating to the manor of Swantone in 1289; 2 and in the very last page but one of his work, where the manor of Ludham Ferding was claimed in a suit for the king, under the advice of one Robert de Rose; but upon the production of Edward the Confessor's charter and the passage of the Domesday Survey in which the manor was entered as belonging to the abbey, the claim made before the lords justices became invalidated. These confirm the connexion of the author with the Abbey of St. Benet. The monk says in the summary of his satisfaction: "Et sic "Domino volente, et Sancto Benedicto protegente, "actum est ut, remanente manerio prædicto in statu pristino, prædictus Robertus de suo maligno plane "deficeret proposito." OXNEAD, the place from which our chronicler is presumed to have obtained his name, is a village situated about ten miles from the Holme, though it appears never to have had any connexion with the abbey, nor is its name mentioned in any of the abbey's Cartularies. We have proof that the estate of Oxnead has continued to be the property of private families from the time of the Saxons to the present hour. The presumption can only be that John de Oxenedes received the additional appellation to his christian name, like a large portion of our best |