62 



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gbWt 0f Ualm^terg, m\ first pftaj & *rtam f 



By the Rev. W. H. Jones, M.A., F.S.A., Yicar of Bradford on Avon. 



]T would be wrong, now that we have met at Malmesbury, 

 were not some notice taken of Bishop Aldhelm, whose name 

 ls^^ompletely identified with this place, and who was the virtual 

 founder of its once famous monastery. Few perhaps are there to 

 whom we really owe more, as regards the establishment of Chris- 

 tianity in Wessex, than to the great man whom the chroniclers 

 designate as "the good Aldhelm 1 ;" the first of that long line of 

 Bishops, who, now for well nigh eight centuries, have had their 

 See at Sarum. 



Separated as we are from the times of which we are to speak by 

 a gulph of more than 1200 years, it is hardly wonderful that we 

 should find it difiicult to give what might be deemed a trustworthy 

 account of Aldhelm's history. The notices concerning him in the 

 writings of his cotemporary Bede are but few and scanty, and the 

 sketch of his life by Alfred the Great, which, as we infer from some 

 remarks of Wm. of Malmesbury, once existed, has long since 

 perished. The principal biography 2 that is left to us, was not 



1 Thus in the " L'estorie des Engles" of Geoffrey Gaimar we have, after a brief 

 description of what occurred under the date 704, the following lines — 



" Un an apres cil de Westsexe 

 Del bon Ealdelm unt feit evesque." 



Monum. Hist. Brit., p. 783. 



2 Two biographies of Aldhelm have come down to us : one by Faricius, a 

 monk of Malmesbury, who was afterwards Abbot of Abingdon from A.D. 1 100— 

 1117; and another by William of Malmesbury, about A.D. 1150, a copy of 

 which is among the Cottonian MSS. in the British Museum. Both these lives 

 are printed in the " Acta Sanctorum." The latter is to be found in the second 

 part of Wharton's " Anglia Sacra," and also among Gale's " Collections." 

 Capgrave wrote a short life of Aldhelm, which is especially interesting as having 

 been published by Wynken de Worde. 



