Texts

• Introduction
• Life of Saint Werburge
• De Laude Cestrie
  • Introduction
  • Text
• A Poem from Higden's Polychronicon
• Welsh Poems to Chester

The Text

The text which Lucian called De Laude Cestrie(On the Glory of Chester) is just over 82,000 words long. It is a massive testament to Lucian’s faith that ‘nothing upon earth is done without a voice cause’ (Job 5:6), that, to a trained observer, the urban landscape and local history can reveal the very nature of God.

Lucian prefaced his text with a table which gives the dates of Easter between 1195 and 1224. This may reflect Lucian’s belief in the ongoing involvement of God in human history. ¹ The text proper begins with some reflections on the value of studying place and history. Lucian then describes how he was inspired to write by an unnamed canon of St John’s. This canon inspired him to consider the etymology of Chester (Cestria), which Lucian explains derives from cis tria (‘threefold’), relating the name to the merits of Chester’s bishop, archdeacon and clergy; to its lords, citizens and monks; and to the supplies which come from Ireland, Wales and England. Lucian describes Chester’s location, natural resources, trading partners and street plan in vivid detail, encouraging its citizens to notice how generously God has provided for the city. Lucian’s description culminates by encouraging anyone standing in the marketplace to look east to St John’s, west to St Peter’s, north to St Werburgh’s and south to St Michael’s.

The next one hundred and forty pages of his text are devoted to explaining the spiritual significance of the location of each church. Lucian begins with St John’s, explaining that John the Baptist should be honoured because of his close relationship with Christ and his virginity and martyrdom. Lucian then imagines John introducing St Peter. Lucian’s discussion of St Peter’s includes a lengthy comparison of Chester and Rome which emphasises that Peter (and the Pope) is a most fitting guardian for Chester. Lucian turns from the eastern and western churches, St John’s and St Peter’s, to the northern and southern churches, St Werburgh’s and St Michael’s, by recounting the story of the widow of Sarephta collecting sticks (3Kings 17:8-24), which was traditionally taken to refer to the beams which formed the cross on which Christ was crucified. Lucian comments: ²

God thus provided these two sticks to us, so that we might hand over one to the precursor of the Lord and to his gate-keeper, and truly entrust the other to the Virgin and the Archangel.

With this neat transition, he moves to discuss St Werburgh’s. St Werburgh is admirable first and foremost because she was a virgin. Lucian treats her virginity in considerable detail, providing a list of pagan virgins, such as Ephigenia and Harpalyce, and Old Testament virgins, emphasising that Christ was born of a virgin. He includes a catalogue of some ninety virgins and the cities in which they were martyred or culted and places Werburgh ‘among these’. He argues that virgins are fertile in spiritual works, emphasising Werburgh’s willingness to intercede with God on behalf of Cestrians. This is manifest in the vigilance of the monks of the monastery (now cathedral) dedicated to St Werburgh. Finally, Lucian turns to St Michael’s, meditating on St Michael’s status as an archangel and the nature of angels’ heavenly home. He discourses on the creation of the angels and their nine orders, suggesting that, since Michael overthrew Satan, he is readily able to defend Chester. In all, Lucian devotes some fifteen pages to John, thirty to Peter, forty-five to St Werburgh, and fifty to Michael.

Lucian next turns to the various houses in Chester dedicated to Mary, beginning with some general reflections on the Virgin. Focusing specifically on the nunnery, Lucian compares the nuns to Amazons, identifying the spiritual weapons wielded by the nuns. This section occupies another fifty pages. Lucian then recapitulates his argument, adding a few further things (pauca qui restant), once again thanking his patron and defending his work against those who might carp.

The final two-fifths of Lucian’s text are devoted to the proper organisation of the church. His comments are never explicitly related to Chester, but they apply implicitly. He begins by comparing priests to monks, and argues that bishops owe a duty of care to monks. He then looks within the abbey, at the duties of the abbot (twenty pages), the prior (twenty five pages) and the sub-prior (sixty pages). Lucian’s emphasis on the sub-prior’s learning (doctrina supprioris) may suggest this was his role at St Werburgh’s.

In the final twenty pages of De Laude Cestrie Lucian fittingly turns his attention to the final things, briefly describing purgatory, hell and heaven and then the Day of Judgement. His emphasis on the rewards due to Mary, Michael and John the Baptist neatly closes the text.

The Author

We know nothing about Lucian except what we can infer from De laude Cestrie. His emphasis on Chester and on the proper organisation of monasteries makes it extremely likely he was a monk of St Werburgh’s. Though it seems Lucian was not a native Cestrian, he explicitly states that he was educated at St John’s.

Like much medieval Latin, Lucian’s prose style is ornately patterned and has rarely been favourably judged. Tanner called it ‘superficial’ (desultorius) ³ ; Taylor judged it ‘curious’, likening it to (unspecified) early-twentieth-century English literature; ⁴ and Danbury found ‘Lucian’s style [so] turgid and repetitive [that] it is unsurprising that large chunks of his work were omitted in the only printed edition’. ⁵ Lucian’s prose is certainly self-consciously filigree, even by medieval standards, but strives for rhyme and balance. For example: ⁶

Ipsa rerum puritas, locorum suauitas, temporum serenitas. Terror est hostium, tutela ciuium, tranquillitas populorum. Laus est eius meritum, opus leticia, lumen habitacio. Enses heberet, caligines amputat, discordias dissipat.

Werburgh makes everything sweet, everywhere pure, and always peaceful. She is the terroriser of enemies, the protector of citizens, the calm of the people. Praise is her dessert, work her happiness, light her dwelling. She blunts swords, lightens darknesses and diffuses discords.

Notice how all four sentences consist of three clauses; notice the rhyme and alliteration; notice also that the three clauses within each sentence have the same structures. A similar style was used by the sixth-century Spaniard Isidore in his Synonyma. For example: ⁷

Quaeso te, anima, obsecro te, deprecor te, imploro te, ne quid ultra leuiter agas, ne quid inconsulte geras, ne temere aliud facias.

I ask you, soul, I beseech you, I entreat you, that you shall no further do anything lightly, that you shall not do anything unreasonable, that you shall not do anything rash.

Like Lucian here, Isidore’s clauses are isosyllabic, asyndetic, rhyming and frequently synonymic. The thirteenth-century Latinist John of Garland called this the stylus ysydorianus, commenting that it had ‘great power to stir piety or joy’. ⁸ While Lucian’s style here might not appeal to our ears, it evidently had its medieval admirers.

Lucian’s vocabulary includes some unusual words. Taylor notes several, including bavosus (‘drivelling, dull witted’), calandra (‘lark’ though conceivably used by Lucian to mean ‘boat’), lechythus (‘oil flask’) and planatio (‘explanation, exegesis’), and her list could be expanded. ⁹ It has often been suggested that Lucian was very well read, ¹⁰ but the notion is misleading. Lucian was undoubtedly intimately familiar with the Bible. However, his sound bites from classical literature and general knowledge of mythology do not suggest he was any more learned than many of his literate contemporaries and there is as yet no evidence that he had access to any particularly recondite sources, though he does seem to have kept abreast with contemporary debates about papal authority. ¹¹

The Manuscript

Lucian’s De laude Cestrie is preserved in a single late-twelfth-century manuscript: Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 672. It is likely the manuscript and perhaps its marginal apparatus are in Lucian’s own hand.

Bodley 672 is a small, fat book which would have slipped easily into Lucian’s pocket. The leaves measure 150x110mm, and, as in other protogothic books, the text is densely written with between 23 and 26 lines per page and the frequent use of abbreviations. The manuscript is still in its original binding. It now consists of 198 leaves. One leaf, or perhaps several, has been lost at the end.

Lucian appears to have worked on the manuscript (and his text) over a number of years, conceivably between 1195 and 1200. ¹² It is not known what happened to the manuscript when he finished it: it may have passed to the monks of St Werburgh’s or the canons of St John’s, or even to a foundation outside Chester.

Bodley 672 was one of nineteen manuscripts which Thomas Allen (1540?-1632) presented to the Bodleian in 1601, shortly after its foundation. Allen, a member of Gloucester Hall in Oxford, began acquiring manuscripts from a variety of sources in 1563. ¹³ It is not known where he acquired the manuscript of De laude Cestrie.

A Note on the Edition and Translation

I have re-edited Lucian’s text with its marginalia from his autograph manuscript, preserving his spelling. Abbreviations have been silently expanded. Since it is likely we have Lucian’s autograph manuscript, I have avoided emending the text but have recorded any grammatical or textual infelicities in the notes.

Given the length of Lucian’s text, and the duration of the Mapping Medieval Chester project, this is necessarily an abridged edition. Its selections are intended to give the reader a sense of why Lucian is writing about Chester, and how he interpreted the urban landscape. All in all, this edition presents some 7.9% of De laude Cestrie. It is the first modern English translation of Lucian’s text, and provides an editio princeps for several passages which were excluded from Taylor’s 1912 edition.

The translation is intended to be readable. This has regularly led me to pare down Lucian’s verbosity and to adjust his similes and metaphors so that they are more familiar to modern eyes. I have also taken some liberties with Lucian’s habit of denoting places and institutions allusively – translating, for example, Cestrie prouincia, literally ‘the province of Chester’, with its modern designation ‘the county palatine of Chester’.

The Critical Reception of Lucian’s De Laude Cestrie

Extracts from Lucian’s work were first published in 1600 in William Camden’s Britannia, ¹⁴ but the work was neglected until 1906 when it was ‘rediscovered’ by Bodley’s librarian, Falconer Madan. Madan asked a Roman archaeologist, Margery Venables Taylor, to edit the text, and in 1912, her edition was published in the Record Society of Cheshire and Lancashire. Taylor, no fan of Lucian’s style, judged that the text ‘contained far too much irrelevant matter to be printed in full’ ¹⁵ and published a series of excerpts about the geography of Chester together with a brief commentary on the passages she had omitted.

Taylor’s excerpts amount to some 8.9% of Lucian’s text. The accuracy of her edition and her sound deductions regarding the date of the work and Lucian’s biography deserve praise. Unfortunately, Taylor’s hostility to Lucian’s ornate, digressive style – she called the text ‘one long sermon disguised as a guidebook’ – lead most future readers to disparage the text in similar terms. Thus H. J. Hewitt found it to contain ‘much irrelevant moralising’ ¹⁶ and Philip Morgan described it as ‘a lengthy sermon’. ¹⁷ Equally, Taylor’s principles of selection have inevitably coloured scholars’ approaches to Lucian.

Lucian’s text has found more sympathetic readers recently. In her book, Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, Catherine Clarke showed how Lucian ‘exploited [the natural topography of Chester] as a symbolic landscape which displays the city’s spiritual identity and heritage’ and how this was ‘constructed at the expense of the realities of contemporary urban life’. ¹⁸ John Doran has explored Lucian’s presentation of Rome, and set Lucian’s De laude in the context of difficulties faced by the monks of St Werburgh’s in the late 1180s and early 1190s. Most recently of all, Robert W. Barrett Jr. has examined ‘allegorical topographies’ in Lucian’s text. Like Clarke, he stresses that Lucian’s conviction that the city manifests ‘the Word made Flesh’ forces him to work ‘deliberate deformations’ on medieval Chester. ¹⁹

Place and Identity in Lucian’s De laude Cestrie

Chester is at the centre of Lucian’s De laude Cestrie. This is most evident in a diagram in the lower margin of fol. 60v:

In the passage which this diagram illustrates, Lucian explains how Chester is surrounded by four Cistercian abbeys: Combermere to the east and Basingwerk to the west, forming the vertical axis of a cross, and Stanlaw (the locus benedictus)to the north and Pulton to the south, forming its crossbar. Lucian’s schematic geography is surprisingly accurate:

Lucian argues that the location of the monasteries suggests that ‘whatever is found in the middle will be bright and nourishing’ ²⁰ and concludes, triumphantly: ²¹

Surely the inhabitant should perceive these things if the reader can? Recalling them revives the spirit.

Que percipit lector, nonne perspicit habitator? Quociens recordamur, animo reparamur.

This brief passage highlights many of the key preoccupations of Lucian’s De laude Cestrie: the delineation and description of city space, the nature of belonging, the lessons of geography and history, the possible sources of solace in a post-lapsarian world and the relationship between experience and learning.

Though Chester is ‘at the extremity of the world’, ²² it is for Lucian ‘the principal place of the province’, ²³ which provides a vista of the ‘whole globe for inspection’. ²⁴ The rest of the world is relevant only insofar as it relates to Chester. Thus Lucian stresses that Chester is a major port, with ships continually ‘arriving from Aquitaine, Spain, Ireland and Germany’, ²⁵ and that the city is enriched by the daily arrival of merchandise from Ireland, Wales and England. ²⁶ Chester becomes defined not so much by what it excludes, by what it others, but by everyone it includes. The physical limits of Chester, delineated by its walls, and the contours of Cestrian identity are both unexpectedly permeable.

Chester’s walls, and particularly its gates, provide the literary structure of the first third of De laude Cestrie, as Lucian discusses the east, west, north and south gates in sequence. At one point, he quotes Isaiah’s words, ‘Upon thy walls, O Jerusalem, I have appointed watchmen’ [Isa 62:6], and remarks that ‘nothing is sweeter than this evidence that God gave us such guardians’. ²⁷ However, these guardians (seruatores) usually look inward to the inhabitants’ personal woes rather than outward to external threats, and the ‘cunning foxes’ which threaten the city are unappreciative inhabitants not Welsh or Irish attackers. ²⁸ The walls themselves are extremely porous. Lucian at one stage imagines John the Baptist, who is responsible for Chester’s east gate, throwing open the gates to release the inhabitants from the discomforts of earthly life. ²⁹ Lucian also famously comments that Chester is ‘adjacent to the Welsh on one side and, through a long exchange of customs, for the most part similar’, ³⁰ suggesting such interchanges were possible and unexceptionable.

Indeed, it can be argued that Lucian sees Chester as a profoundly multicultural city, in which people are constantly arriving and departing. He describes his own monastery, St Werburgh’s, offering excellent hospitality to a steady stream of visitors from England and Ireland. ³¹ His intended audience seems to have included both the inhabitants (habitatores) of Chester and visitors, whom he at one point imagines using the De laude as a sort of guidebook, looking ‘at the text with one eye and the streets with the other’ ³² and it is arguable that part of his purpose in writing was to create a sense of identity based not on birth (ius soli), but on residence (ius domicile) and universal Christian community. ³³

When Lucian wants to encourage the reader not to scorn his ‘native city’ (patriam suam), he suggests that: ³⁴

it might easily come to pass that a sly and cunning foreigner, a refugee, becoming an inhabitant, provides a reproach for the ignorant citizen, smiling that he does dwell in such a city and declining to return home.

facile continget ut superueniens alienigena quispiam uersipellis et callidus, temporis lapsu conuena factus et habitator inscriptus, stulti ciuis uituperium augeat, et ipse subridens cum non habeat talem, non inde recedat.

This sentence strongly suggests that visitors to Chester (even sly and cunning foreigners) could and did become inhabitants. Lucian usually describes those who dwell in Chester as habitatores or ciues, but he does not seem to use ciues in any technical sense. It is arguable that the text problematises any sense of belonging based on where one was born, since Lucian alternately describes himself as both alienus and ciues.

The inclusive identity which the De laude offers those who dwell in Chester is rooted in an appreciation the city and in particular in a textual community around Lucian’s work. Lucian repeatedly quotes Eliphaz’s advice to Job that ‘nothing upon earth is done without voice cause’ [Job 5:6] and encourages the inhabitants of Chester to practise monastic techniques of ruminative thought to appreciate more fully the variety of ways in which God has provided for the city. This is clear from the opening of the De laude Cestrie: ³⁵

Time, place and the unfolding of events provide a suggestive, unwritten lesson to each sentient being … The field opened to human inspection for contemplation, consideration and reflection is so spacious and plentiful, that in this manifold variety fittingly might virtue be exercised and idleness reproached.

Tempus et locus et rerum lapsus sensato cuique tribuunt suadiblem, etiam sine literis, lectionem … Tam largus et latus contuendi, cogitandi, considerandi campus humanis aperitur aspectibus, ut in hac uarietate multimoda digne uirtus exerceatur, uituperetur ignauia.

The justification for the exhaustive contemplation of tempus et locus et rerum lapsus given here is quite conventional, ³⁶ but further, more complex reasons emerge through the course of the text. As one might expect, Lucian sees earthly life in very unflattering terms, developing a series of metonyms - mud, dust, lowland, prison – which contrast it to the exalted life the faithful can expect in heaven. Paradoxically, ruminative meditation on Chester’s natural setting and built environment becomes the only way of escaping the fetid tedium of earthly life in the city: ³⁷

And so, if a mind is healthy, it is not enclosed by a hedge or a wall, but rather marvellously and magnificently through its natural freedom can escape widely and without limit.

Sensus itaque si sanus fuerit, sepi non recluditur nec murali custodia, quin posit mirabiliter atque magnifice per libertatem condicionis diffuse ac sullimiter emigrare.

A few examples will make clear what Lucian expected the reader and inhabitant to learn from this meditative activity.

A first, simple example is Lucian’s second etymology of Cestria, which he renders as cis tria (‘threefold’) and explains with three threefold interpretations. The second etymology he gives centres around ‘the honesty of her nobles, the faith of her citizens, and the religion of her monks’. He remembers Chester’s suffering under William the Conqueror, ³⁸ and implies that the (re)foundation of the abbey in 1092 was a significant turning point. This prompts Lucian to comment: ³⁹

But God, omnipotent and invisible in his majesty, augustly works visible deeds through his goodness, so that when this place was surrounded by spiteful enemies, it was manifestly, inviolably protected from calamities.

Set Deus omnipotens et inuisibilis in sua maiestate, eciam uisibiliter et uenerabiliter operatur ex sua bonitate ut cum locus idem collimitetur liuidis hostibus, euidenter et excellenter muniatur a cladibus.

With the text’s help, Lucian implies, the invisible can be made visible, making the true magnitude of God’s generosity evident. ⁴⁰

Another interesting example is Lucian’s discussion of the marketplace in the centre of Chester. He emphasises that the marketplace is in the ‘very middle of the city’ and offers ‘an abundance of merchandise, particularly food’. ⁴¹ This is compared with Christ, ‘the eternal bread … formed in the centre of the earth’, and taken as evidence that ‘God wanted to supply all nations of the world equally’. ⁴² There is both a moral (tropological) and an allegorical lesson here: one must appreciate both God’s generosity, and the ongoing applicability of biblical types and tropes. Lucian privileges monastic modes of thought here, but does not make any heiratic claim that this thought is the privilege only of a select few.

A final, heavily metaphorical example is the way Lucian describes his patron, a canon of St John’s Cathedral in Chester. Lucian tentatively advances the hypothesis that ‘with the intimacy of comradeship, the Baptist (not the reed in the mud, but the friend of the bridegroom) seasoned the vitals of his priest’. ⁴³ Though his words are richly freighted with meaning, Lucian’s point is pre-eminently that a canon of a cathedral dedicated to St John the Baptist can be expected to behave like St John. John did not apply this seasoning in a literal sense, that is, not in his earthly life in the early first century (when he was just a ‘reed in the mud’) but in his eternal role as a close associate of Christ in heaven, ‘the friend of the bridegroom’. Lucian’s patron must and does imitate John the Baptist’s example. This congruence, itself harmonious, creates for Lucian a wonderful harmony that can be the basis for effective community. Lucian’s thinking is markedly utopian.

Lucian’s own biography demonstrates the powerful consolation that this kind of reflection can offer. His text continually refers to a day when he was engaged in the monastery’s business at the earl’s court at Chester Castle, but found time to hear mass at St Michael’s and visit St John’s. He reflects: ⁴⁴

I confess that time passed that day in a variety of ways: the castle was a nuisance, but the church was a consolation; haughty, worldly cares confounded me in the settlement of my business, but the integrity and affection of the community revived me; and whatever wounds the Earl’s castle inflicted, the precincts of St John’s fully soothed.

Fateor eo die differenter ac uarie temporis tractus effluxit: castellum tedio, set ecclesia solatio fuit; in definicione negocii distulit me turgiditas et superbia secularium, set refouit honestas et amor domesticorum; et quicquid lesit aula principis, leniuit uberius atrium Precursoris.

Lucian goes on to describe meeting his patron in the cathedral precincts and being inspired to write De laude Cestrie. Lucian, moreover, repeatedly emphasises that he is not a native Cestrian, but an alumnus of the city, who received his basic education at St John’s. Though the city is better known to natives (indigenis notior) ⁴⁵ , it can still offer newcomers fellowship and consolation. It can be argued that De laude Cestrie tries, most ambitiously, to create a textual community which can in the city be the very base of the inhabitants’ identity.

De laude Cestrie repeatedly describes the consolation that continual rumination on the city’s situation and topography can offer. To take one instance, Lucian remarks that contemplation is: ⁴⁶

an act of thanks [which] will be richly repaid, and the devotion of the citizens will grow more fervent, so that our charming and simple filial love fittingly matches his paternal feeling.

refundatur uberior actio graciarum, recalescat ardentior deuocio ciuium, ut digne perpendat pectus paternum suauis et simplex caritas filiorum.

This harmony makes the city into a maternal bosom which can console whatever salty, ugly everyday life throws at the reader, ⁴⁷ and offers the greatest jouissance that post-lapsarian life can offer. Lucian’s text ultimately makes this jouissance available to any and all who visit Chester, and offers them a place to belong.