One of Chaucer’s remarkable metaphors in the Canterbury Tales compares human life to a large barrel that is slowly tapped until there is nothing left. In the Prologue to his Tale, the Reeve tells us that Death, as a tapster, began emptying the cask at his birth and has been emptying it ever since, so it is now almost empty. Chaucerian scholarship has paid well-deserved attention to this metaphor, with V. A. Kolve being the first to show how it relates to other images that frame and organise the different parts of the Canterbury Tales.

Although the metaphor is otherwise widespread, as we will see below, the Reeve’s brief remark is the only passage in Chaucer’s masterpiece to feature the fascinating tapster figure, other than the line mentioning ‘any gaylard tappestere’, allegedly visited by Absolon in the Miller’s Tale (MilT 3336). How-ever, the tapster plays a prominent role in the early fifteenth-century continuation of the Canterbury Tales preserved in Alnwick, duke of Northumberland's Library, MS 45, known as the Prologue to the Tale of Beryn. It is a relatively extensive story, more than half of which describes the adventures of the Pardoner. During the pilgrims’ dinner at The Checker of the Hoop inn, the Pardoner starts flirting with a tapster named Kitt.

The story of the earliest days of the monastery at Malmesbury is obscure. The most important figure in the history of the monastic community of Malmesbury was St Aldhelm, who died 709–10 and was recognised during his own lifetime as a scholar and ecclesiastic of national significance. The later tradition of the house held that Aldhelm was not the first abbot, and instead an Irish holy man called Máeldub was revered as the founder of the community. Over four hundred years after Aldhelm's death, William of Malmesbury set out to explain how the monastery of Malmesbury was established by this Irish missionary.

According to William, it was this pre-existing community that Aldhelm joined and ultimately came to lead. It has been suggested that William may have invented some of the detail of his account of the career of Meldum. If the Irishman had indeed been the teacher of Aldhelm one might expect a reference to him in the extensive surviving works of Aldhelm; but there is none. Although understandable doubts have been raised about the Meldum/Máeldub story, there is evidence to suggest that a religious community at Malmesbury was founded by an Irish monk with a name similar to this and that he may well have been Aldhelm's earliest teacher. One early reference to a version of the placename, ‘Malmesbury’, comes from Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica, in which he described Aldhelm as the abbot of a monastery called Maildubi Urbs, which means literally ‘the city of Maildub’. The name ‘Maildub’ appears to be a rendering of an authentic Old Irish personal name, Máeldub. Bede was a careful historian and although he was based in Northumbria, he took steps to make sure that his information about the history of the faraway West Saxons was correct.

The tale of Griselda was bound from the very beginning to elicit a strong response from its audience, both real and fictitious. For it recounts Griselda's steadfast resolution to keep the oath of obedience given to her husband and lord, her self-abnegation, the meek surrender of her children (reminiscent of the Virgin Mary's sacrifice), and the stoic, Job-like endurance with which she faces her husband's bestial trials. Griselda began her journey across European literatures in Boccaccio's Decameron (c. 1353), in its final narrative – the tenth tale of the tenth day. The ladies in the patrician company that forms Boccaccio's fictional audience animatedly discuss her story ‘at length, some drawn one way and some another, some blaming an action which some others praised’. That such debates might have their counterparts in real life is attested by the anonymous conduct book intended for a young man's wife: Le Ménagier de Paris (1393). Here, the husband presents the Griselda story to his wife not because she might emulate Griselda's superhuman patience and obedience; rather he wishes to make her acquainted with the story so that she herself could take part in the public debate which the tale has engendered. Two other, this time original, responses to the tale are recorded in one of Petrarch's letters. One of the poet's friends, who had been given Petrarch’s own version of the tale (1374) to read, was moved by Griselda's ordeals to such an extent that he was quite unable to finish the story. In contrast, the response of the other friend of Petrarch's was not so much emotional as governed by reason, giving way to disbelief that such a woman could ever have existed.

Similarly, Chaucer in the Clerk's Tale represents Griselda as someone who lived a long time ago and whose equal it is impossible to find (ClT 1177–82).

The monastery at Malmesbury was in effect re-founded in the 960s as part of a wider programme of Benedictine reform in southern England promoted by King Edgar (959–75). This development involved a radical change to the Malmesbury community: the married clergy were evicted and replaced by celibate monks who followed the Rule of St Benedict under the authority of an abbot. The changes were part of a wider campaign to establish Benedictine monasticism as the form of religious life followed in a relatively small but elite and wealthy network of royal monasteries. The intellectual leaders of the movement were Dunstan (archbishop of Canterbury and previously abbot of Glastonbury) and Æthelwold (bishop of Winchester and previously abbot of Abingdon). The Benedictine campaign was linked to developments in monasticism in continental Europe, particularly in northern Francia.

With sponsorship from Edgar, and guidance from Dunstan and Æthelwold, Malmesbury became an important institution within the new network of Benedictine houses. It is possible that the Malmesbury monks, including the abbot, Ælfric I, were recruited from Dunstan's Glastonbury. Certainly, Dunstan took a close personal interest in Malmesbury, and Faricius provided a detailed account of Dunstan's ‘loving regard’ for Malmesbury.

William of Malmesbury endorsed this view and copied out one of Dunstan's ‘curses’ which was inscribed on an organ.

The exact sequence of the events whereby Edgar and Dunstan relaunched celibate monasticism in Malmesbury is unclear, and William of Malmesbury misunderstood the chronology. The monastery preserved in its cartulary a charter of 974, granted by Edgar in favour of Malmesbury, which confirmed ownership of an estate at Eastcourt.

The fifteenth century witnessed important developments in the management of the estates of Malmesbury Abbey. Unfortunately, the evidence is fragmentary or circumstantial, but at some point following the death of Abbot Walter Camme in 1396 the demesne manors of the Abbey were all leased out, and the supervision of agricultural work was no longer a responsibility of the abbot and obedientiaries. The exact chronology is not known but by the time of an inquisition post-mortem following the death of Abbot Thomas Bristow in 1456 only cash income from the manors was recorded, almost certainly indicating that all the demesnes had been leased out.

As in the rest of England, the labour shortages after the Black Death eventually led to the collapse of serfdom on the estates of Malmesbury, and by the early Tudor period only a tiny minority of families in Wiltshire were, in the eyes of the law, villeins. The late medieval estate records of Glastonbury Abbey relating to its north Wiltshire manors are much more comprehensive than any Malmesbury Abbey documents for the same period, but it is reasonable to assume that the trends in the manors held by Malmesbury were similar to those in nearby Glastonbury lands. The Glastonbury estate rental of 1518 made a careful note of any tenants who were serfs, and in the four manors near Malmesbury only one family was identified as having villein status. Serfdom had almost, but not quite, disappeared from north Wiltshire. Malmesbury Abbey did not welcome the disappearance of serfdom, and as late as 1500 the abbot of Malmesbury was accused of wrongly imprisoning a prosperous farmer called Robert Carter, and seizing his livestock, on the grounds that he was the Abbey's villein. Just two years before the Dissolution, in 1537, the last abbot of Malmesbury, Robert Frampton, was charged with falsely claiming that a local man was his ‘bondman’ or serf.

Although the Abbey leased out the demesne farmland during the fifteenth century, wooded closes were retained in several manors. At these locations the abbot had the right of ‘free warren’ entitling him and his guests to hunt specific birds – pheasant and partridge – and hares and rabbits.

In Chaucer's Miller's Tale, the student Nicholas, motionless, gapes upwards at the ceiling as a part of his complex trick on the old carpenter John, designed – successfully – to seduce John’s wife, Alison. When John finds Nicholas in his trance, he shakes him, saying, ‘Awak, and thenk on Cristes passioun!’ (MilT 3478). The urgent call to be mindful of Christ's Passion appears suddenly and, as a piece of sacred history, seems so inappropriate in the context of the lewd deceit that it has an immediate comic effect.

The attempt to wake someone up from a trance by reminding him of an event long gone, and only known from hearsay, rather than by calling attention to his actual situation and surroundings, may seem ironic. Yet, especially during the late Middle Ages, Christ's Passion was not only an important historical event, it was a crucial narrative re-enacted at every mass and the centre of daily Christian practice, the liturgical calendar and, importantly, personal salvation. The reminder to medieval Christians to ponder the Passion was implicit at all times. Moreover, the coupling of laughter and the Passion was widespread throughout the Middle Ages. Texts that contain this combination are usually called parodic but are not necessarily rooted in folk culture, or critical of the institution of the church, as much previous research has suggested. Many of them were written in Latin and were fully integrated into mainstream Christian writings.

In 1901, John Bradley established a connection between the dramatic change of style in English medieval art at the end of the fourteenth century and the marriage of Richard II to Anne of Bohemia. In Bradley's words, ‘she was the moving spirit of this change which her immediate popularity soon rendered universal in every native scriptorium’. He even went so far as to claim that Bohemian illuminators had accompanied the Emperor's daughter on her way to England. Bradley's idea was later refuted by Elfrida Saunders and Eric Millar, whose work provoked a meticulous study by Emanuel Dostál. The latter based his research on a detailed comparison of the so-called Bible of Richard II (Fig. 9.1) with contemporaneous Bohemian works of art, in order to prove a distinctive influence of Bohemian art production on English art at the turn of the fourteenth century. Dostál, like previous researchers, came to the conclusion that several elements of various sources, including the Bohemian ‘soft style’, were merged together to form the style of English book illumination of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.

William of Malmesbury made no reference in his surviving works to one of the most dramatic events in the history of the Abbey that he personally witnessed: the deposition by Bishop Roger of Salisbury of Abbot Aedulf in 1118. We only know that this happened because it was recorded in the chronicle known as Annales de Wintonia, which stated that in the immediate aftermath of Queen Matilda's death Aedulf was dismissed ‘without good cause’ from the abbacy of Malmesbury. It is no coincidence that this act was recorded in a Winchester chronicle because Aedulf was a Winchester monk prior to his promotion to Malmesbury. To the profound annoyance of the Malmesbury community, Bishop Roger then became titular abbot and treated the institution as an episcopal priory rather than an autonomous abbey. In the years that followed William of Malmesbury played a central role in a protracted but discreet campaign to question the correctness of Roger's takeover. He began work almost immediately on this project: in around 1119 William produced an edition of the papal history known as Liber Pontificalis, in which he included the full text of the ‘privilege’ of Sergius, the document granting the monastery perpetual exemption from episcopal interference.

During the early 1120s William was working on his major historical works: Gesta Regum and Gesta Pontificum. He used both works to indicate, in a veiled way, that the Malmesbury community rejected the legitimacy of Roger's power over them. In Gesta Pontificum William incorporated the full text of three ancient documents, all of which appeared to indicate that the independence of Malmesbury from episcopal control had been solemnly endorsed in charters granted to Aldhelm. The first was the ‘privilege’ of Sergius. The second was Bishop Leuthere's ‘foundation charter’, which purported to date from 675 and declared that no future bishop should ‘exercise a tyrant's power’ over the monastery. The third document was a charter supposedly issued by Aldhelm himself in 705, which included a directive forbidding future episcopal interference. The ‘privilege’ of Sergius may contain authentic elements, but the other two charters are generally seen as twelfth-century forgeries designed, probably with the collusion of William, to invalidate the claims of Bishop Roger. The Leuthere charter contains a highly suspicious clause forbidding future bishops or kings from meddling in the monastery’s liberties.

During the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries Malmesbury was home to a remarkable scholar known to posterity as William of Malmesbury. He was one of the great historians of the Middle Ages, and accounts by modern historians of political events in England during the eleventh and early twelfth centuries still rely heavily on information provided by William's major historical works: Gesta Pontificum, Gesta Regum and Historia Novella. In addition to these well-known surveys of national history, William wrote many other works on a range of topics such as biblical commentary, the miracles of the Virgin Mary, the lives of saints and the history of Glastonbury. William broke off from writing his last work, Historia Novella, at the end of 1142, and it is generally assumed that he died shortly afterwards.

In recounting the story of the Norman Conquest in the Gesta Regum William explained that he was of mixed parentage, both English and Norman. This, he felt, positioned him ideally as an objective and fair commentator on the career of William the Conqueror.

William joined the community at Malmesbury as a boy and remained a monk of Malmesbury for the rest of his life. He was, by his own account, a studious child and recalled in Gesta Regum how he acquired a love of learning from both his parents.

Establishing when William of Malmesbury was born, and when he joined the Malmesbury community, is not straightforward.

No trace remains above ground of Aldhelm's monastery, and the precinct has not been subject to any modern archaeological investigation. 1 We are forced therefore to rely on clues found in documentary sources, such as the works of Aldhelm and William of Malmesbury, when trying to reconstruct the early monastic campus. In the Gesta Pontificum William stated that a ‘very small church’ reputed to have been built by Máeldub was extant until his own time, and he also described how Aldhelm built new churches for the community.

In another part of the Gesta Pontificum William stated that the chief monastic church was dedicated not just to St Peter but jointly to ‘the chief of the apostles, Peter and Paul’, and this church ‘was from of old the centre, the place at which the monks came together’. William's account of the monastic campus is consistent with early English and contemporary Frankish usage, with two main monastic churches ‘one dedicated to an apostle or martyr, the other to St Mary’. William indicated that, in addition, there were at least two other smaller churches: the chapel of Máeldub and a church dedicated to St Michael, which was probably a mortuary chapel, given that such chapels were often dedicated to St Michael, an archangel who could act as a guide to the dead on their journey to Heaven. Significantly William preserved the tradition that Aldhelm was initially buried in St Michael’s.

One of Aldhelm's poems supports the idea that he built a substantial church at Malmesbury which was dedicated jointly to St Peter and St Paul. This source also gives us some flavour of the collective worship in the church.

Around the year 1360 a monk of Malmesbury called Thomas of Bromham set out to write a history of the world, from the Creation to the present day. Bromham's book is generally known today as Eulogium Historiarum although the author called it simply Eulogium. A first draft of the work was completed by 1362, but the author continued to revise the book, adding extra material until late 1366, at which point the chronicle breaks off abruptly. The author's autograph manuscript has survived and is held by Trinity College, Cambridge. While Bromham was not a writer of the calibre of Aldhelm or William of Malmesbury, his work sheds light on the intellectual life and interests of the Abbey in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death.

The writer of the Eulogium was, without doubt, a monk of Malmesbury Abbey. Although the work was a universal history that attempted to summarise in encyclopaedic fashion the totality of human experience, significant prominence was also given to events and personalities relating to Malmesbury. There are frequent references to Malmesbury throughout the text, and the chronicle often juxtaposes events of national or international significance with information about the history of Malmesbury. We are told, for example, that in 637 the Prophet Muhammad died, and that ‘in the same year the monastery of Malmesbury was founded’. Similarly, for 675 the key events considered worthy of record were the devastation of Sicily by Muslim Arabs and Aldhelm's success in moving the Malmesbury community to a site provided by the local bishop. This pattern of juxtaposing local and much wider history can be seen throughout the work. The summary entry for 1215, for example, relates how in that year the baronial enemies of King John seized control of London and Abbot Walter Loring obtained control of Malmesbury Castle.

The Malmesbury provenance of the chronicle is thus patent, but the authorship is less clear. The work is presented as an anonymous text, but the Victorian editor of the Eulogium, Frank Scott Haydon, skilfully worked out that the author's first name was manifestly Thomas. In an account of a miraculous vision towards the end of Book III of the work, the writer refers to St Thomas of Canterbury as ‘nostro patrono’ meaning ‘our patronal saint’.

In May 1134, Empress Matilda, countess of Anjou, spent some time with her father Henry I, king of England and duke of Normandy, in Rouen. She was pregnant with her second child and as the childbirth approached she fell perilously ill. She gave birth to her son at Notre Dame-du-Pré, a priory of the monks of Bec, where she convalesced, having almost lost her life. During her stay, the historian Robert of Torigni (prior of Bec and later abbot of Mont-Saint-Michel, best known for his World chronicle, a continuation of the work of Sigebert of Gembloux) was amongst the monks who provided spiritual care. Robert's earlier work is pertinent to this article. In the late 1130s, within a few years of Empress Matilda's almost fatal illness, he revised the Gesta Normannorum ducum, the deeds of the dukes of the Normans, originally written by William of Jumièges for William the Conqueror, and added a biography of Henry I. In it Robert included Matilda's reminiscences about her early life in the empire to which she owed her epithet ‘empress’. Matilda's semi-autobiography, embedded in the history of the Norman dukes, is of crucial importance for any reconstruction of her early life. Although it is very well known, there are aspects of Matilda's own story as recorded by Robert of Torigni that have either been under-represented or entirely overlooked.

Modern scholarship has painted Matilda as a capable and intelligent woman frustrated by circumstances and gendered prejudice who failed in her bid for the English throne due to her arrogance and impetuosity. This is the picture we find in the most recent biography, written by Marjorie Chibnall who herself followed the German late nineteenth-century biography of Oskar Rössler. Numerous historians have analysed her life, not least the modern biographers of King Stephen: R. H. C. Davis, David Crouch, Edmund King, and Carl Watkins. None of them has paid much attention to Matilda's early career in Germany. During the last twenty years, however, in Germany Amalia Fössel and Claudia Zey have thrown new light on Matilda, not so much as a result of new source material, but because of comparative research on German queens-consort. Both medievalists have stressed the fact that Matilda was unusual in three important aspects.