Discuție:Oswald de Worcester
O biografie a Sf. Oswald de Worcester
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Oswald [St Oswald] (d. 992), archbishop of York, was one of the leaders of the English monastic reformation of the tenth century. His cult was developed at his principal monastic foundation, Ramsey, and at his cathedral at Worcester, where he was bishop from 961 to 992. What is known of his career derives chiefly from an anonymous life, written between 997 and 1002, which is attributed to Byrhtferth of Ramsey, and from charters that were preserved in the medieval archives of Worcester Cathedral.
- Origin and early life
The names of Oswald's parents are unknown; but he was of Anglo-Danish extraction, a nephew of Archbishop Oda (941–58) and grandson of one of the settlers who had come to Britain in the ‘great’ army of Ivarr and Ubbe. Other kinsmen, Archbishop Oscytel of York and Abbot Thurcytel of Bedford, had Scandinavian names, but his own name is English and it is possible that his mother came from the south-west midlands where Oswald later had many kinsmen with English names. During boyhood Oswald was trained in sacred letters by his uncle, Archbishop Oda, and was believed in the twelfth century, both at Ramsey and Canterbury, to have also been tutored by the West Frankish scholar, Frithegod of Canterbury. Enriched with numerous gifts from his uncle, Oswald is purported by Byrhtferth to have purchased a ‘monastery’ in Winchester, where, however, the luxurious lifestyle of the married secular clerks perturbed the pious adolescent. He was therefore sent by Oda to the pre-eminent monastery (arcisterium) of St Benedict at Fleury-sur-Loire, where the archbishop himself was said to have previously made his monastic profession and where the most perfect service of God in accord with Benedict's rule was believed to be observed. There, under Abbot Wulfhard (Wulfald), Oswald undertook for several years the full rigours of the monastic life, practising additional personal austerities; he also memorized monastic regulations and the office, so that he would be able to teach them in England.
Archbishop Oda, towards the end of his life, sought permission from the diocesan bishop of Orléans and from the community at Fleury for Oswald's release from his obligation of stability in order that he might return to England. The archbishop may have wished to install his nephew at Ely, a site he had just acquired from King Eadwig, perhaps in the hope of re-establishing monastic life there. But any such plans were dashed, first by King Eadwig's loss of control in 957 of all territories north of the River Thames and then by Oda's death (2 June 958) before Oswald had reached Dover. Oswald therefore sought instead the patronage of a more distant kinsman, Oscytel, who had become archbishop of York two years previously. The story in the twelfth-century Ramsey Liber benefactorum (in Chronicon abbatiae Rameseiensis, ed. W. D. Macray, Rolls Series, 1886) that Oswald, with his friend Germanus, then accompanied Oscytel to Rome to secure the pallium and that the two companions delayed at Fleury on the return journey should probably be accepted. Tenth-century English archbishops seem to have gone to Rome for their pall if they had been uncanonically translated to their metropolitan church from another see. Oscytel, who had been bishop of Dorchester before his elevation to York and who seems to have retained that see after his promotion, certainly fits that category. His journey, seemingly in late 958 or early 959, would have been the first time an archbishop of York had needed to go to Rome for that purpose. Oscytel's patronage of Oswald also led, according to Byrhtferth, to an introduction to ‘Bishop Dunstan’, presumably also in 958 or 959 when Dunstan was bishop of both Worcester and London. It is recounted that after his elevation to Canterbury, Dunstan persuaded King Edgar to appoint Oswald to the vacant see of Worcester; Oswald was commended to the king by the magnates of the region and ‘elected and honourably consecrated by the bishops’ (Byrhtferth of Ramsey, 1.420), events which may be placed early in the year 961, to judge from his attestation as bishop in the bulk of the extant charters of that year.
- Monastic revival
The appointment of Oswald to the wealthy see of Worcester was part of a deliberate policy (with Dunstan's promotion to Canterbury and, in 963, Æthelwold's to Winchester) of putting reformed monks into the key positions in the English church in order that they might initiate the rapid adoption of ideas of monastic reform that had been current on the continent for a generation. Oswald therefore recalled from Fleury his friend Germanus, directing young clerks to be instructed by him in monastic customs; and he soon established him with twelve companions in the parochia (minster) at Westbury-on-Trym where they are said to have remained for some four years. Byrhtferth portrays King Edgar's support for the new monasticism with a highly imaginative account of an Easter witan attended by all Edgar's bishops, and even by all the abbots and abbesses with their monks and nuns, in which Edgar, acknowledging the fame of St Benedict through Oswald's narration, ordered the construction of more than forty monasteries and was urged by Æthelwold to expel clerks from these houses. It is difficult to know whether any more credence should be given to the ensuing story that when Oswald sought a more secure foundation for his monks, the king offered him a choice of three possible sites: St Albans, Ely, or Benfleet. That may have been designed to gratify Ramsey's self-importance, but it may surely be accepted from Byrhtferth that it was the Anglo-Saxon nobleman, Æthelwine, a son of Ealdorman Æthelstan Half-King, who offered Oswald the fenland island site of Ramsey, where three men seeking the monastic habit had already gathered.
Having accepted Ramsey, Oswald sent Eadnoth (‘the elder’) to oversee the construction of temporary accommodation there in the spring (some time between 965 and 969) and himself led the Westbury monks there on 29 August. The construction of the permanent buildings began in the following year and the monastery received handsome endowments from Oswald himself, from Æthelstan Mannessune (who was married to a kinswoman of Oswald), as well as from the founder, Ealdorman Æthelwine, and his brother, Ælfwold. Oswald retained control over Ramsey throughout his lifetime and Byrhtferth claims that he visited every year, though he only describes two visits. The day-to-day direction of the Ramsey monks was exercised by a dean (successively Germanus, Æthelnoth, and Eadnoth ‘the younger’). Oswald was believed to have consecrated the completed church there in 974. Byrhtferth also describes a great gathering at Ramsey on 8 November 991, when the ailing Oswald seems to have rededicated the church, which had had to be extensively rebuilt after the original central tower had split. After Oswald's death, the dean Eadnoth (the son of Æthelstan Mannessune and therefore a kinsman of Oswald) became the first abbot of Ramsey.
After the transfer of the Westbury monks to Ramsey in the heart of the eastern Danelaw, where his paternal kin were based, Oswald turned to the revival of monasticism within his own diocese, first in his cathedral at Worcester and second at Winchcombe. Byrhtferth knew only of Ramsey's role in these events: namely that their dean, Germanus, had been appointed to head the house at Winchcombe and that the priest Wynsige (Wynsinus), who had been schooled at Ramsey, led a group of their choir monks to Worcester. Both the manner and the chronology of Oswald's introduction of monks to the cathedral community were the subject of conflicting interpretations in twelfth-century sources and have also occasioned controversy among modern historians. The best evidence is the series of nearly eighty leases issued by Oswald in the course of his pontificate to tenants of the church of Worcester, most of which are witnessed by members of the community. The leases show that the composition of Oswald's community (or at least of those senior enough to act as witnesses) changed gradually, but with influxes of new names in the 960s and 970s. They also show that the bulk of the community continued to be styled by their clerical grades (priest, deacon, or clerk) and that the style ‘monk’ was used occasionally, but irregularly, from the later 970s. There is a gap in the witnessed leases between 970 and 976, but from 977 to 985 the community is found headed by the priest Wynsige, who in one lease of the year 977 is styled ‘monk’ along with nine of the other twenty-six witnesses, though most of them revert to their clerical styles in subsequent leases. Nine of Oswald's leases were grants of properties to individual clerks, deacons, or priests of the church of Worcester, usually specifying their right to bequeath the land to two subsequent clerics; one such was the lease to the monk Wynsige of property which his father had previously held. There is no sign here, then, of the introduction of stricter rules of communal property following Oswald's reform. The leases also show that from the year 966 the church of Worcester was dedicated to St Mary, in addition to St Peter, and that in 983 Oswald had exceeded all expectation by completing the construction of the new church of St Mary.
All this accords with the belief, current at Worcester in the second decade of the twelfth century and reported both by Eadmer and by William of Malmesbury, that Oswald had introduced monks gradually to his see ‘with most holy guile’ (De gestis pontificum, 248) and had built the church of St Mary for them, immediately adjacent to the old cathedral church of St Peter, where the clerks continued to serve. On this interpretation, from 966 Oswald gradually built up a community of monks in the church of St Mary, who had an increasingly important role in the whole cathedral community; many of them proceeded beyond the minor clerical orders to be ordained as deacon and priest and may have had a full share of pastoral work alongside the clerks of St Peter's.
An alternative interpretation of Oswald's reform was current at Worcester by the 1130s, namely that on Edgar's orders Oswald had expelled all those Worcester clerks who refused to abandon their wives and to become monks, and that he appointed Wynsige from Ramsey as dean of the new monastic cathedral community. Both in a rewritten annal of John of Worcester's chronicle and in the dubious record of Bishop Wulfstan's synod of 1092, the supposed expulsion of the clerks is attributed to the year 969, the date of one of Oswald's unwitnessed leases into which a note of the ‘witness of Wynsige and all the monks of Worcester’ had already been inserted by the early eleventh century. About the middle of the twelfth century, however, an elaborate forged charter of King Edgar, known by its first word Altitonantis, was produced which placed the supposed expulsion in 964 (the year of the expulsion of clerks from Winchester). The purpose of the expulsion myths in twelfth-century Worcester (as of similar fabrications at Canterbury) was to exalt the status of the monastic chapter in relation to secular clergy at a time when the bishop was no longer a monk and when there were fears that he might therefore attempt to secularize the chapter. The lordship of Worcester The church of Worcester was already richly endowed before Oswald's day, and neither his reputation, nor that of the monks he introduced, seems to have led to any substantial new acquisitions of property. The practice of leasing estates to prominent laymen was also long established at Worcester but no previous (or later) Anglo-Saxon bishop seems to have taken so much care to record leases in writing. The properties which Oswald leased were smaller (mostly of 1, 2, or 3 hides) than the great ecclesiastical manors that had long been in the hands of his church. But together the leased estates amounted to almost a third of the 600 hides in the possession of the church of Worcester. They were often on peripheral, inferior land or in underdeveloped wooded country and they supported fewer peasant ploughteams, probably being more dependent upon hired labour. By contrast Oswald seems to have reserved the best arable land for the demesnes of his great estates and there is reason to think that these demesnes were already associated with nucleated settlements and open fields and perhaps too with production for the market in Worcester and in the other nascent towns in the region.
Oswald's leases were normally granted for a period of three lives, after which the land was to revert to the church of Worcester; they thus respected the canons prohibiting the permanent alienation of any properties given to the church. The bulk of the lessees were lay nobles, that is local thegns (though one—Ælfwold—was a king's thegn); but there were also a number of retainers (cnihtas) and craftsmen. Some tenants were from families whose members had held lands from earlier bishops and in some instances Oswald can be seen granting a lease for three lives to the heir of the recipient of one of his earlier leases, thus extending the duration of the lease and virtually turning it into a hereditary holding. Almost a quarter of Worcester's leased estates were granted to members of Oswald's own family, to his brothers, Osulf and Æthelstan, and to a series of nephews, nieces, and more distant relatives. All Oswald's tenants were bound personally to the service of the bishop; many indeed received their leases in recognition of their ‘faithful service’; others purchased them.
The leases do not themselves specify what services the bishop might require from his tenants. But a tripartite chirograph (indiculum) drawn up in the name of Oswald and addressed to King Edgar, of which the Worcester copy is preserved in Hemming's cartulary of the late eleventh century, purports to set down for the benefit of his successors in the see the terms which Oswald had agreed with his lessees. A great variety of obligations are specified as due from the tenants' estates: riding services, church-scot, toll, swine-scot and other church rights, lime burning and church building, erecting fencing for the bishop's hunt, and so forth. Much the most important, however, was the general demand for obedience to the bishop's commands: the tenants must both fulfil the service due to the bishop (as well as that due to the king) and be subject to the will of the bishop (archiductor) if they wished to retain their benefices. It is impossible to prove the authenticity of such a unique document in the absence of any of the three original copies; its terms do not seem improbable, though the insistence upon obedience and on the revocability of tenures would certainly have been of interest in the generation after 1066, when the third lives of Oswald's leases were coming to an end and when a Norman aristocracy was establishing itself in the diocese. Viewing the indiculum alongside the extant leases, we seem to see Oswald co-ordinating local notables and his own kinsmen into a network of fideles established throughout the diocese to support the bishop of Worcester's seigneurial standing at both national and local levels and to provide the expertise necessary for running a great landed lordship.
By the time of Domesday Book the bulk of the estates of the church of Worcester had been organized into a judicial and administrative unit known as the ‘triple hundred’ of Oswaldslow, which took its name from Oswald. Indeed, in the forged Altitonantis charter King Edgar is purported to have granted the monks of St Mary's a half-hundred of ‘Cuthbergelaw’ which he then formed into a whole hundred with estates already in their possession, to be held by their priest Wynsige and his successors; the charter goes on to claim to create or confirm two hundreds (‘Wulfereslaw’ and ‘Winburgetreow’) for Bishop Oswald, which were to form (along with the monks' hundred) a ‘shipsoke’ of three hundreds in the place to be called thenceforth Oswaldslow, in memory of the bishop. Within Oswaldslow the monks and the bishop were to enjoy a most extensive range of royal judicial rights and a comprehensive immunity excluding all royal officials. That was what the twelfth-century church of Worcester wished to be believed, but it is difficult to know whether any historical reality lies behind it. The judicial immunity excluding the king's agents is a feature of post-conquest rather than Anglo-Saxon law; and the definition of private hundreds from the estates of great ecclesiastical lords seems likewise to have been a product of the mid-eleventh century, rather than the mid-tenth. It remains equally uncertain whether the definition of shipsokes of 300 hides to raise ships' crews of sixty armed men was indeed the work of Edgar or rather of Æthelred the Unready a generation later; it seems very unlikely to have been a policy already established as early as 964. It may be concluded that Oswaldslow is more likely to have been an eleventh-century creation, given authority by its attribution to Worcester's great saint, rather than a personal achievement of Oswald himself.
- The archbishopric of York
On the death of Archbishop Oscytel of York on 1 November 971, a certain Edwald of unknown origin was nominated to succeed him, but withdrew before his consecration, purportedly preferring a quieter life. The elevation of Oswald in his place suggests (as with the raising of Dunstan to Canterbury in 959 even though Bishop Byrhthelm had already been translated there) that the king was determined to have his own man in the see of York and to continue the policy begun under Oscytel of having the northern metropolitanate filled by a man from the eastern Danelaw but whose loyalties and interests were anchored by the tenure of a southern bishopric. Oswald's appointment to York seems (from his attestation of charters) to belong to the last days of 971 or the first half of 972. In the summer or autumn of 972 Edgar sent him on an embassy, with Abbot ‘Ætherius’ (perhaps Æthelgar of the New Minster, Winchester) and Wulfmær, a king's thegn, to the court of the German emperor, Otto I, which returned, according to Byrhtferth, with even more notable gifts than those that they had taken. The German journey may have been designed to gain approval and expertise in relation to Edgar's long-delayed ‘imperial’ coronation at Bath on Whit Sunday in the following year, a ceremony where the two archbishops, Dunstan and Oswald, were to preside jointly and which is described at length by Byrhtferth with quotations from the second English coronation ordo. Oswald's German embassy may have been combined with his journey to Rome to obtain the pallium from Pope John XIII, which belongs to very much the same time. According to Byrhtferth, Oswald earned the praise of both God and men for the substantial payments of pennies which he made as alms at monasteries, and at villas, castles, country estates, and cities, before he returned with the pope's blessing. A generation later Archbishop Wulfstan of York (d. 1023) was to take a much more critical view of the monetary payments that were expected in Rome in order to secure the pall.
Very little is known of Oswald's management of his northern diocese and province. There has survived (from a Worcester manuscript) a copy of a declaration that he made listing the York properties that he or his predecessor, Oscytel, had recovered but which had been lost again in the unsettled conditions after Edgar's death and the succession of Earl Thored in 975; the endangered properties include over twenty vills dependent upon the great York estates of Otley, Ripon, and Sherburn in Elmet. This suggests that (as with the Worcester leases) Oswald was determined to ensure through written records that the property claims of his cathedral should not be forgotten but rather, as soon as political circumstances permitted, vigorously prosecuted.
Oswald is not known to have introduced any reform to the clergy of his cathedral at York. But Byrhtferth claims that at the ruined monastery of Ripon, Oswald discovered a great hidden treasure, namely the bones of St Wilfrid along with the relics of five succeeding abbots (Tatberht, Botwine, Albert, Sicgred, and Wildegel); he goes on to assert that in the church with Wilfrid's pontifical seat, where hitherto ‘deacons and sparrows’ had dwelt, Oswald arranged for monks to serve God. Since what were held to be the relics of Wilfrid had already been taken from Ripon to Canterbury a generation earlier by Archbishop Oda and since nothing is known in any later source of this revival of monastic life at Ripon, it has been doubted whether Oswald really attempted to build a monastic community there around a revived cult of Ripon's founder and early abbots. But the fact that some relics of all six Ripon saints were later to be found in the high altar at Peterborough is most easily explained by the suggestion that Oswald and Ripon were indeed directly involved in the revival of their cult in the world of reformed monasticism. It may rather be that Ripon is simply one of the houses where the revived Benedictine life did not outlast the first generation of monastic reform.
- The anti-monastic reaction
Byrhtferth's life of Oswald claims that seven monasteries had been constructed within the Mercian province of the Hwicce (that is, in the diocese of Worcester), under Oswald's control and with their heads appointed by King Edgar. To the already mentioned Worcester, Westbury, and Winchcombe, may readily be added Pershore (established under Abbot Foldbriht by 970) and Evesham (under Abbot Osweard from much the same time). If Byrhtferth's figure is accurate rather than symbolic, we may guess that the missing houses may have been at Deerhurst, where St Ælfheah was said to have received his monastic training, and conceivably at Gloucester, whose history is very dark at this time. Whatever the true number, however, the early years of Oswald's pontificate had certainly seen a remarkable transfer of landed resources in the diocese into the hands of reformed monks. In that process there are likely to have been losers, both among the local nobles and among the secular clerks previously associated with minster churches. The tension thereby created in Hwiccan society was exacerbated by the succession dispute that arose following Edgar's death on 8 July 975, when the powerful Mercian ealdorman, Ælfhere, supported the claims of Æthelred, the son of Edgar's third wife, Ælfthryth, while Oswald, together with the leading reformers and with Ramsey's founder, Ealdorman Æthelwine, backed Edward, the child of the first marriage. In the ensuing struggle for power, land, and followers, that was only finally resolved by the murder of Edward the Martyr and the accession of Æthelred the Unready in 978, the lands of the new monasteries associated with the opposing faction were an obvious target.
Byrhtferth describes these events in terms of a general expulsion of abbots and their monks and of the reintroduction of married clerks in their place. In particular he relates that Abbot Germanus and his monks were driven from Winchcombe by Ealdorman Ælfhere of Mercia; late traditions and breaks in the succession of abbots indicate that similar (but more temporary) expulsions occurred at both Evesham and Pershore. Byrhtferth believed that Ælfhere, ‘the mad wind coming from the western territories’, influenced others to follow his example of replacing monks by secular clerks (Byrhtferth of Ramsey, 1.443–6). Clearly Oswald's houses were particularly vulnerable since the bishop was known as one of Edward's leading supporters; Ramsey, however, lying within the ealdormanry of its founder, Æthelwine, was a safe refuge and the cathedral community at Worcester also seems to have survived intact. Whether the clerks of St Peter's and the monks of St Mary's were a sufficiently unified community to mean that there were at Worcester no ousted married clerks seeking to encourage the ealdorman to restore them by force, or whether Worcester's noble tenants were sufficiently influential to protect their lord's church from interference, are subjects for speculation. Most of the leases had originally been made with Ælfhere's consent and licence and this continued to be the pattern throughout Edward's reign, so it may be that bishop and ealdorman collaborated at least to preserve the cathedral. Moreover, one of the Worcester lessees was a king's thegn, Ælfwold, very possibly to be identified as the brother of Ealdorman Æthelwine, whom Byrhtferth singles out as the first man to resist the anti-monastic tide in Mercia. Oswald, it would seem, had provided his see with potent protectors.
- Books and liturgy
Like other English centres of monastic reform, Oswald's Worcester acquired books written on the continent and also developed its own distinctive version of the Carolingian minuscule script, which is first witnessed in the part of a charter of the year 961 which seems to have been written by Oswald himself. It is instructive, however, that (as at Canterbury) the new Anglo-Caroline script was practised at the same time, and even in the same volumes (for example, British Library, Royal MS 8 B.xi), as the traditional insular square minuscule. At Winchester, by contrast, Æthelwold's reform meant that from 964 for Latin texts only Caroline script was permitted. The coexistence of the two scripts at Worcester may reflect the collaboration of both monks of St Mary's and clerks of St Peter's in the production of books for the Worcester Library. Between 983 and 985 Oswald leased land at Bredicot to the priest Goding and Hemming's cartulary records that this grant was to enable him to serve as scribe and that he wrote many books for the monastery. His work for the community cannot be identified, but one Worcester scribe, Sistan, can be shown to have copied works by the Carolingian writers Smaragdus and Paschasius Radbertus for the Worcester Library at this time in the new script.
Byrhtferth records Oswald's gift to Ramsey of a ‘glorious pandect’, that is, a complete Bible, which sadly has not survived. But a number of high-quality volumes with illuminated initials and scripts in various registers from Oswald's houses are extant. The so-called Winchcombe sacramentary seems to have been produced in that house, or by Winchcombe monks after their flight to Ramsey, as a gift to the mother house of Fleury (Orléans, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 127, 105). A huge and magnificently written and illuminated psalter (British Library, Harley MS 2904), once attributed either to Winchester or to Ramsey, seems likely to have been made for Oswald's own use at York or Worcester. The scribe of this psalter also wrote a pontifical (Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College, MS 100, part 2) intended for a bishop to carry around with him; it was probably made for Oswald's own use, either at Worcester or in his northern diocese; its ordination and other ceremonies represent a fascinating mixture of English and continental liturgical practices, perhaps typical of Oswald's eclectic and compromising instincts. Death and cult After the rededication of the monastic church at Ramsey in November 991 and the great banquet that followed, Oswald returned to Worcester in failing health. Byrhtferth tells that despite weakening further that winter, he resumed in February 992 his Lenten custom of washing the feet of twelve poor men each day, accompanied by the singing of Psalms 120–34. After this task he passed away peacefully on 29 February, while singing the doxology. After being elaborately washed and laid out, the body was buried by the community next day within a mausoleum of wonderful workmanship which the community later claimed had been constructed by Oswald himself.
A cult developed very rapidly. Byrhtferth describes miraculous signs that accompanied the funeral and the working of wonders at Oswald's tomb. Probably within two years of his death, his feast (28 February) had already been entered into the York metrical calendar that was being extended at Ramsey. Ten years after his death an elaborate translation was masterminded by his successor, Bishop Ealdwulf, who had the bones solemnly enshrined on the south side of the altar of the cathedral church of St Mary on 15 April 1002. A series of miraculous cures and events then effectively established his sanctity. His deposition and translation were treated as major feasts in local calendars and less prominently in some other English texts and at Fleury. He is invoked in four or five Anglo-Saxon litanies, including the portable prayer book (or portiforium) of St Wulfstan (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 391) which also contains three hymns in his honour and a calendar that lists his second translation (8 October), occasioned by Wulfstan's rebuilding of the cathedral. Byrhtferth's life held the field for more than a century, but c.1115 the Canterbury hagiographer and historian, Eadmer, wrote at the request of the Worcester community an account of the life and miracles of St Oswald, which clarified and updated Byrhtferth's account and recounted miracles associated with the two translations. Nothing of significance is added by the life written by the late twelfth-century prior, Senatus, nor by the later medieval abbreviated versions.
- Sources
Byrhtferth of Ramsey, Vita sancti Oswaldi auctore anonymo, The historians of the church of York and its archbishops, ed. J. Raine, 1, Rolls Series, 71 (1879), 399–475
Liber benefactorum ecclesiae Rameseiensis, Ramsey Abbey, Chronicon abbatiae Rameseiensis a saec. x usque ad an. circiter 1200, ed. W. D. Macray, Rolls Series, 83 (1886)
Eadmer, Vita sancti Oswald and Miracula sancti Oswaldi, The historians of the church of York and its archbishops, ed. J. Raine, 2, Rolls Series, 71 (1886), 1–59
N. Brooks and C. Cubitt, eds., St Oswald of Worcester: life and influence (1996)
P. H. Sawyer, Charters of the reform movement: the Worcester archive, Tenth-century studies, ed. D. Parsons (1975), 84–102
D. N. Dumville, English Caroline script and monastic history (1993)
M. Lapidge, Anglo-Latin literature, 900–1066 (1993)
D. Knowles, The monastic order in England, 2nd edn (1963), 31–82
E. John, Land tenure in early England (1958)
Senatus, Vita S. Oswaldi archiepiscopi, The historians of the church of York and its archbishops, ed. J. Raine, 2, Rolls Series, 71 (1886), 60–97
Willelmi Malmesbiriensis monachi de gestis pontificum Anglorum libri quinque, ed. N. E. S. A. Hamilton, Rolls Series, 52 (1870)
- Archives
Bibliothèque Municipale, Orléans, MS 127, 105
Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, MS 100, pt 2
