Abstract :
Recent investigations into the sources of Holinshed’s Chronicles, both in the latter’s
text and in the collections of the late-sixteenth-century antiquaries responsible for its
compilation, have brought to light a number of passages derived from the eleventhcentury
Vita Ædwardi regis, some in Latin and others translated into English. In most
cases, corresponding passages occur in the single surviving manuscript of the Vita, but
this is not invariably so. It is argued here that the antiquaries had access to a manuscript
of the Vita which was at one time in the keeping of John Stow, but has since been lost,
and that certain passages missing from the extant manuscript of the Vita can now be Numerous medieval writings owe their survival to their having been preserved,
in whole or in part, among the papers of Tudor or Jacobean antiquaries. To
their number can now be added portions of an important mid-eleventhcentury
text, the anonymous Vita Ædwardi regis. Only one manuscript of this
life of King Edward the Confessor survives, in London, British Library, Harley
526, fols. 38–57, and that is incomplete, wanting, it has been plausibly surmised,
two folios from each of its fi rst and last gatherings.1 Both these gaps can
now be partly fi lled, from writings and collections made in the late sixteenth
century by Francis Thynne and John Stow. Both men were heavily engaged in
the production of the Chronicles of Raphael Holinshed: Stow in the production
of both editions (1577 and 1587); Thynne in that of the second edition alone.
It was almost certainly Stow who brought the Vita to the attention of William
Camden.
reconstructed on the basis of the passages derived from Stow’s manuscript. Prominent
among them is the complete poem describing the magnifi cent ship and other gifts
given by Earl Godwine to King Edward the Confessor in 1042
