II.
THE SAXON ABBOTS OF GLASTONBURY
Nothing has done more to discredit William of Malmesbury's work 'On the Antiquity of Glastonbury' than the discovery of an ancient list of the abbots of that monastery, contained in the Cottonian MS Tiberius B. 5, and printed by Bishop Stubbs in his Memorials of St Dunstan, p. lxxxii.[1] After comparing this list with the series of abbots in the De Antiquitate, Bishop Stubbs says: 'The order and dates of Malmesbury's list seem to be quite at random: yet there is enough likeness between the two lists to show that he had older materials to work upon.'
Now William of Malmesbury puts down no name and no date without telling us the source from which his information was drawn. The discrepancy between the two lists therefore is not to be explained off-hand by attributing gross carelessness to the historian. Nor have we any reason for suspecting that this part of the De Antiquitate has suffered, as we have shown the earlier part to have suffered, from the meddlesomeness of inventive interpolators. William of Malmesbury worked from the Glastonbury charters. Many of these had no doubt been recopied and partially recast in the tenth century or later: none of them perhaps can claim to be originals or even exact copies of the originals. Accordingly it is quite possible that he was misled on occasion by their testimony. Most of these charters we can read for ourselves in Kemble's Codex Diplomaticus or in Birch's Cartularium Saxonicum; others can be shown to have been in existence as late as 1247. The purpose of the present Essay is to consider William of Malmesbury's statements in the light of this evidence. The examination is necessarily minute and somewhat tedious; but the result will, I believe, be found to justify the pains expended on it. For we shall reach the conclusion that the compiler of the tenth-century list, however trustworthy he may be as he nears his own time, did not make use of the charters and so had but little to guide him in collecting and arranging the names of the earlier abbots. On the other hand we shall be rewarded by a growing conviction that the Glastonbury charters, however much they may have been depraved by copying and recasting, contain materials of
- ↑ A more exact transcript will be found below, p. 41.
