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A kind of Noah’s ark: Aelred of Rievaulx and national identity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Rosalind Ransford*
Affiliation:
University of London Birkbeck College

Extract

Aelred of Rievaulx was born of English parents at Hexham in about 1110, that is only thirty years after the final Norman punitive harrying of the north and thirty-four years after the execution of earl Waltheof, grandfather of Aelred’s lifelong friend, Waldef. Aelred’s father was the last of a long line of English ‘hereditary’ priests of Hexham, a foundation of Saint Wilfred which lay within the patrimony of Saint Cuthbert; Cuthbert and Wilfred were kept alive in Northumbria by the writings of Bede whose bones Aelred’s great-grandfather had stolen in a dawn raid on Jarrow and brought to Durham, where Aelred’s father ended his days as one of Cuthbert’s monks. Such a background could be expected to have given Aelred a strong sense of the difference between Norman and Englishman and of his own Englishness. But national identity in Northumbria in the first half of the twelfth century was a complex affair.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1982

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References

1 [Walter, Daniel, Vita Airedi, ed Powicke, F. M.] (Edinburgh 1950) p 60 Google Scholar.

2 Texts PL [195] (1854) cols 702-790. For the dates of writing, Powicke p xcvii.

3 PL 195 col 706.

4 Ibid col 707.

5 Ibid col 711.

6 Ibid cols 709-710.

7 Ibid cols 708-710.

8 Ibid col 710.

9 Ibid col 710.

10 Ibid col 705. For the date of Walter Espec’s death, Powicke p xcix.

11 Ibid 195 col 710.

12 Ibid col 716.

13 Ibid col 717.

14 Ibid cols 729-730.

15 Ibid cols 723, 726 and 714 respectively.

16 Ibid cols 727 and 714 respectively.

17 Ibid cols 727-29.

18 Vita Aedwardi Regis, ed Barlow, F. (London 1962) pp xxxvvii Google Scholar. The Prologue to Aelfred’s Life is at PL 195 cols 737-740.

19 Ibid cols 719-720 and 740 (Alfred); 726 (Edward the Elder); 724 (Athelstan); 726 (Edgar); 716 and 736 (Maud); 713 (David).

20 Ibid cols 726 and 728 (Edgar); 719 (Alfred); 731 (Edmund Ironside).

21 Ibid cols 727 and 729.

22 Ibid col 726; also col 729.

23 Ibid cols 720 (Cuthbert); 724-725 (John); 730 (Edmund).

24 Ibid cols 738-740.

25 Ibid col 713.

26 Ibid cols 736-737.

27 Speculum Caritatis, [translated and arranged by Webb, G. and Walker, A.] (London 1962) p 88 Google Scholar.

28 Powicke p xcvii.

29 Speculum Caritatis p 22.

30 Ibid pp 136-137.

31 Ibid p 88.

32 PL 195 col 737.