Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Stubbs, Thomas

by James Tait

STUBBS, THOMAS (fl. 1373), chronicler, is said by Bale to have been a native of Yorkshire and a Dominican friar. Canon Raine thinks he may possibly be identical with the Franciscan Thomas de Stoubbes who was ordained priest at Durham on 13 Jan. 1344 (Historians of York, ed. Raine, vol. ii. p. xxiii). If so, he must have changed his order. He was certainly a Dominican in 1381, when Bishop Hatfield made him one of the executors of his will (Testamenta Eboracensia, i. 122). The reference confirms Bale's statement that Stubbs was a doctor of divinity, but it is not known of which university. A number of works are attributed to him by the sixteenth-century literary biographers, but the only one that appears to be now extant is his ‘Chronicle of the Archbishops of York.’ None of the manuscripts mention him as the author, but Bale's ascription is generally accepted for the latter part of the chronicle from Paulinus to Thoresby, the whole of which he assigned to Stubbs. Twysden did the same in his edition of the chronicle in the ‘Decem Scriptores’ (1652), but the subsequent discovery of a twelfth-century manuscript ending with Archbishop Thurstan (Bodl. MS. Digby, 140) proved that Stubbs only continued the work from 1147 (Tanner, p. 697; Historians of York, vol. ii. p. xxi). It appears from the preface in some of the manuscripts (a list of which is given by Canon Raine) that Stubbs had originally intended to carry it down only to the death of Archbishop Zouche in 1352, but he afterwards added a life of Archbishop Thoresby, which brought it down to 1373. It was afterwards continued to Wolsey. A critical edition of the whole chronicle was published by Canon Raine in 1886 in the Rolls Series as part of the second volume of the ‘Historians of the Church of York and its Archbishops.’ The other works attributed to Stubbs by Leland, Bale, and Pits are:

1. ‘Statutum contra impugnantes ecclesiasticas constitutiones’ or ‘Contra statutorum ecclesiæ impugnatores.’
2. ‘De Stipendiis prædicatoribus verbi debitis.’
3. ‘De perfectione vitæ solitariæ.’
4. ‘De arte moriendi.’
5. ‘Meditationes quædam pro consolatione contemplativorum.’
6. ‘In revelationes Brigidæ.’
7. ‘De Misericordia Dei.’
8. ‘Super Cantica Canticorum.’
9. ‘Sermones de Sanctis.’
10. ‘Sermones de tempore.’
11. ‘Officium completum cum missa de nomine Jesu.’
12. ‘Officium de B. Anna.’
13. ‘De pœnis peregrinationis hujus vitæ.’

[Leland's Commentarii de Scriptoribus Britannicis; Bale, De Scriptoribus Majoris Britanniæ, ed. 1559; Pits, De Illustribus Angliæ Scriptoribus; Tanner's Bibliotheca Scriptorum Brit.-Hib.; other authorities in the text.]

J. T-t.