Introduction to the Prosopographical Study of the Thorney Liber Vitae

Summary

Three libri vitae survive from monasteries of the English Middle Ages: Durham, Thorney and Hyde Abbey in Winchester. The scribal stints entered in these works, which consist of groups of names, are very difficult to define simply. The names in them are of people who are equally likely to have been alive or dead at the time they were enregistered. The intention behind the entries was the memorialisation in perpetuity of persons who had entered confraternity agreements with the community, and of those they chose to be remembered with them. These were not always relatives, but could be household servants or mesne tenants, for example. A particularly clear expression of what was expected by lay people entering confraternity agreements comes from Abingdon Abbey, to which Earl Hugh of Chester (d. 1101), who appears in ThLV at 2r35(1), restored the hamlet of Shippon. In return for his grant he required that: ‘you give me £30 of pennies from your money, and that I may be your brother, and my wife and father and mother be in your prayers, and in such a way that we all be written in the Book of Commemorations, and that, wherever we die, there be such a funeral for us as there might for one of the brethren of the church’.

Each of the three surviving libri vitae is highly individual and each has to be considered on its own terms. The Durham Liber vitae is the oldest of the three and has received a comprehensive edition and analysis in recent years. Begun in the ninth century, apparently as a copy of an older liber vitae, only twenty-four names were added to it between the 840s and 1083, when the Norman bishop of Durham, William of St Calais, replaced the cathedral's community of secular clerks with a Benedictine priory. The Liber vitae of New Minster, Winchester, was a deliberate creation of Abbot Ælfwine in response to the politics of the day, which saw the rise of Winchester as the political power-base of the Anglo-Danish regime of King Cnut, in contrast to the London base of his predecessor King Æthelred.