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Herluin, Abbot of Bec and his Biographer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Christopher Harper-Bill
Christopher Harper-Bill*
Affiliation:
St Mary's CollegeStrawberry Hill
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Extract

The Vita Herluini, composed by Gilbert Crispin, abbot of Westminster, has long been recognised as the most important source for the foundation and early history of one of the greatest of the Norman religious houses. It formed the basis of Porée’s account several years before it was first edited in its entirety by Armitage Robinson. The significance of the text is more than local or hagiographical, for it covers a crucial period in Norman ecclesiastical development. When Herluin first determined to adopt the monastic habit, the reconstruction of religious life in the duchy was far from complete. When Gilbert wrote the Vita, some time after the elevation of Anselm to the see of Canterbury, Norman prelates, many of them sons of Bec, were urgently engaged in the reformation of the church in William the Conqueror’s new kingdom. Gilbert Crispin’s interpretation of the religious vocation was very different from that of the founder. He wrote as a man experienced in ecclesiastical government and as a theologian of moderate distinction; he had grown to maturity in the cloister and had experienced no crisis of conversion. His outlook was certainly coloured by his own experience and preoccupations. The Vita is the interpretation by a man raised in a flourishing and learned community of the motivation of an uneducated knight who had experienced spiritual rebirth in a world where religious values were far less certain. The form and emphases of the Life are perhaps worth some consideration.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 15: Religious Motivation Biographical and Sociological Problems for the Church Historian , 1978 , pp. 15 - 25
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1978

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References

1 Porée, A. A., Histoire de l’Abbaye du Bec (Evreux 1901)Google Scholar; the Vita is printed by Robinson, [J.] Armitage, [Gilbert Crispin, Abbot of Westminster] (Cambridge 1911) pp 87–110 Google Scholar. I am indebted to professor R. Allen Brown for many discussions of this topic.

2 Armitage Robinson, caps 4-5; Southern, R. W., ‘St Anselm and Gilbert Crispin, abbot of Westminster’, Medieval and Renaissance Studies 3 (London 1954) pp 78–115 Google Scholar.

3 Vila pp 87-90.

4 Ibid p 88.

5 See Baker, D., ‘Vir Dei: Secular Sanctity in the Early Tenth Century’, SCH, 8, pp 41–53 Google Scholar.

6 Vita p 89.

7 Ibid p 90.

8 Ibid p. 87.

9 [The Ecclesiastical History of] O[rderic] V[italis], ed Chibnall, M. (Oxford 1969) 2 p 12 Google Scholar.

10 Vita pp 94-5.

11 OV, 2, pp 40, 74.

12 Ibid 3, p 206.

13 Ibid p 226.

14 Ibid 2, p 14; 3, p 208; 2, p 132.

15 Ibid 3, p 196.

16 Vita pp 91-2.

17 Clapham, A. W., English Romanesque Architecture after the Conquest (Oxford 1934) PP 4–5 Google Scholar.

18 Southern, R. W., St Anselm and his Biographer (Cambridge 1963) p 323 Google Scholar.

19 Kemp, E. W., Canonisation and Authority in the Western Church (Oxford 1948) p 105 Google Scholar.

20 Vita pp 93, 104; OV 2, p 20; The Rule of St Benedict, ed McCann, J. (London 1952) cap 2 Google Scholar.

21 Lanfranci, Vita, auct. Milo Crispin, PL 150 (1880) cols 19–98 Google Scholar.

22 Leclercq, J., ‘A Sociological Approach to the History of a Religious Order’, in The Cistercian Spirit: A Symposium, ed Pennington, M. B. (Shannon 1970) pp 134-43Google Scholar.

23 Vita p 96.

24 See Holdsworth, C. J., ‘The Blessings of Work: the Cistercian View’, SCH 10, pp 59–76 Google Scholar.

25 The Monastic Constitutions of Lanfranc, ed Knowles, M. D. (London 1951) especially p 82 Google Scholar, n 1.

26 Vita p 96.

27 Ibid p 98.

28 OV 2, pp 64-6.

29 Ibid p 74.

30 Vita pp 105-8.

31 Ibid pp 99-100.

32 Ibid p 100.

33 Ibid p 103.

34 Leclercq, J., ‘Une doctrine de la vie monastique dans l’école de Bec’, Spicilegium Beccense: Congrès International de IXme Centenaire de l’arrivée d’Anselme au Bec (Paris 1959) PP 477-88Google Scholar.

35 Vita p 93.

36 Ibid p 89.

37 Ibid pp 100-2.

38 Ibid p 102.