The Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond, Monk of St. Edmundsbury: A Picture of Monastic and Social Life in the XIIth Century (The Medieval Library)

XXXVI, 255 pp. "FEW medieval documents have exercised a greater fascination over men's minds in these latter days than " The Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond." More than sixty years ago the publication of the Latin text of this history, by the Camden Society, attracted the attention of the great Thomas Carlyle, and furnished him with material for sketching his picture of " The Ancient Monk," which occupied the entire second book of his Past and Present. Although the modern sage in his own rugged way affected no little contempt for what he called this " extremely foreign book," and for " the monk-Latin " in which it was written, it is evident that Jocelin's simple story of the wise, firm, yet withal gentle rule of a medieval abbot over a great English monastery cast a spell over him the influence of which can be detected in every page of his delightful and almost surprisingly sympathetic account of Abbot Samson and of Edmundsbury. In this case the Past, as Carlyle read it in the "Chronicle," was so entirely different from the Present, as he knew it in his day, that the wonder is not that he was fascinated by it, but that he was able with its help to paint so true and living a picture and to fashion so fitting a frame in which to set it. For to him, without doubt, the story dealt with what he regarded as "vanished existences"-" ideas, life-furniture, whole workings and ways," which were not only Past, but gone beyond recall, and " covered deeper than Pompeii with the lava-ashes and inarticulate wreck of seven hundred years!" And indeed it cannot be denied that the ideals and aspirations, as revealed to us in the history of Abbot Samson and, so far as we know, in the life story of his biographer Jocelin, arc of a higher and almost a different order to those of our modern world. To men of their calling in those far-off times, the natural and the supernatural were united and intermingled in the simplest and most ordinary way. Their very notions of the unseen world are almost sufficient to take away the breath of those whose lots have been cast in this more material and prosaic age of doubts and disbelief's. To Samson, and Jocelin, and their fellow-monks at Edmundsbury in the twelfth century, heaven, as a great writer has said of earlier English monasticism, was hardly even " next door." The future life was merely the present continued, and each man went forth to his task as it came and laboured at it day by day, not with any idea of finishing it, but only of carrying on for the span of his allotted existence. They built, and planted, and wrote till the end came, and then they went to heaven and others stepped into their places and took up the common work. It was indeed a "simple life": it was almost Arcadian in its picturesque simplicity, and, as Cardinal Newman says of the same life in the days of our Venerable Bede, it reminds us of those times in the dayspring of the world, when Adam delved and Abel watched the flocks, and Noah tended his vines, and angels visited them. This living belief in the nearness and all-importance of the supernatural is the key-note of Jocelin's charming story of a few brief years in the long history of an old English abbey, a new translation of which is here given to the public. As a story, however, Brakelond's " Chronicle " is not wholly, nor indeed mostly, either mysterious or incredible " there are troubles, and trials, and difficulties enough recounted by the writer; and at every turn we may see evidences of human nature and even of human struggles and passions, which are sufficient, and as some may perhaps think, more than sufficient, to show us that it is a history of men, and not of angels, which the old monk is setting forth so naturally and so truthfully. At any rate, there is quite sufficient of the human element in the narrative to give most of us a human interest in the story. And this itself is proof that Jocelin is a true chronicler of what really took place, and no mere romancer tempted to edit or suppress entirely what might not be unto " edification." He manifests no desire to make himself or his brethren appear other than what they were in reality that is, thorough Englishmen, with strong wills and human passions, which, though these same passions might occasionally appear to gain the mastery, they were at all times endeavouring to subdue unto God's service by the help of His grace and through the broad-minded provisions of St. Benedict's Rule. The actors who appear in this living drama, though they are for the most part monks, are obviously men, natural and human enough in all their works and words; but these men are at the same time also monks, endeavouring to raise their minds and hearts to supernatural ideals, and striving to attain to that personal communion with God which is the aim and object of all true religion and of all religious observance and practice. This is "another world truly," writes Carlyle, " and this present poor distressed world might get some profit by looking wisely into it, instead of foolishly. But at lowest, O dilettante friend, let us know always that it was a world, and not a void infinite of grey haze with phantasms swimming in it. These old St. Edmundsbury walls, I say, were not peopled with phantasms, but with men of flesh and blood, made altogether as we are. Had thou- and 1 then been, who knows but we ourselves had taken refuge from an evil Time and fled to dwell here, and meditate on an Eternity, in such fashion as we could " Alas, how like an old osseous fragment, a broken blackened shinbone of the old dead Ages, this black ruin looks out, not yet covered by the soil; still indicating what a once gigantic Life lies buried there " It is dead now, and dumb " but was alive once and spake For twenty generations, here was the earthly arena where painful living men worked out their life-wrestle, looked at by Earth, by Heaven and Hell. Bells tolled to prayers " and men of many humours, various thoughts, chanted Vespers and Matins; -- and round the little islet of their life rolled for ever (as round ours still rolls, though we are blind and deaf) the illimitable Ocean, tinting all things with its eternal hues and reflexes, making strange prophetic music! How silent now!"" "The Author.-Jocelin de Brakelond, the writer of the Chronicle called by his name, was a monk of Edmundsbury. The date of his birth is uncertain, but as he became a novice in that abbey in 1173, we may suppose that he was born not later than 1156. It has been conjectured that he was a native of Bury St. Edmunds, and that his name Brakelond was derived from that of an ancient street of the city, in accordance with the common practice of calling monks by the name of the place from which they came to religion. Little more is known about him than he tells us incidentally in the course of his narrative, but one of his contemporaries in the monastery speaks of him as "a man of excellent religious observance, as well as a power both in word and work "-eximiae religionis, potens sermone et otere. Carlyle sees him in his writing as a man of a "patient, peaceable, loving, clear- smiling nature." A "wise simplicity," he adds, "is in him; much natural sense; a veracity that goes deeper than words." What more can we desire in a writer, especially when we may add that he shows himself to have been a cultured man, acquainted with the ancient authors, quoting Virgil and Horace and Ovid? His knowledge of the Bible is naturally extensive, and, as was common in those days, his very phraseology is obviously founded upon the sacred text. He once likewise cites, with acknowledgment, a short passage from the more modern Ralph de Diceto's Imagines Historiaruin. Our latter-day philosopher praises him also because he shows himself to have "a pleasant wit; and to love a timely joke, though in a mild subdued manner; very amiable to see." In AD . 1173, as just noted, Jocelin entered the community and passed under the care of Samson of Tottington, who subsequently became abbot, but who was then Master of novices. The then abbot, Hugh, was old, and although a high standard of the religious exercises and of the monastic life inside the cloister was maintained, the temporalities were in a sad state, and year by year tended to get from bad to worse, so that Jocelin's early experiences of monastic life were connected with anxieties about the load of debt to moneylenders under which Edmundsbury groaned. He tells us that he had himself seen bonds for repayment made out to the Jews, under which, for failure to meet the sums falling due, the original loan had grown in eight years from £100 to £800. No wonder that the youthful religious questioned his Master of novices as to why some remedy was not found by those in authority for a state of things which meant temporal ruin and disgrace for the community of Edmundsbury. In 1180 Abbot Hugh met with an accident and died. After a period of a year and three months the former Master of novices, Samson, then the provident Sacrist, was chosen in his place. It was during this period of vacancy that, in recording something which happened in the monastery, Jocelin incidentally makes mention of another literary work of his own, namely, the Book of the Miracles of St. Robert, a boy supposed to have been martyred by the Jews in 1118, who was entombed in the church at Edmundsbury. On the election of Samson, Jocelin was appointed his chaplain, and this brought him into the closest connection with the abbot for six years. In 1198 and 1200 he was Guest-master, and in 1212 he held the office of Almoner. In all these offices the future chronicler had exceptional means of acquiring information, and these he utilised in writing the story of Abbot Samson's administration, which is introduced by a vivid sketch of the temporal disorder of the house in the closing years of Abbot Hugh. His Chronicle covers the period of the history of Edmundsbury from 1173 to 1190 , and, as he says in the beginning, "he took care to write only what he himself saw and heard." The date of his death is uncertain."