Gripla - 2021, Blaðsíða 24

GRIPLA22
Table 1: Archbishops of Canterbury named in Anecdotes, and their years in office.47
The compiler then moves back in time to tell the life of St Cuthbert (d.
687), bishop of Lindisfarne – one of the aðrir byskupar promised in the
prologue. But then he or she seems to run into a lack of sources and tells a
short anecdote about St Bede’s (d. 735) grave marker. Timeline-wise there
is nothing suspect about Bede being mentioned here, but he never was a
bishop, a fact of which the compiler is fully aware, as Bede is called prestr
(priest). However, as one of England’s most famous saints and scholars,
the compiler may have found it fitting to include him, even if he was not
a bishop.
At this point, another scribe (hand I) picks up the quill and writes
another short anecdote about Bede, followed by a Marian miracle and
a text on the seventy-two names of the Virgin Mary, neither of which
have anything to do with English clergymen.48 This, however, is not the
original state of the manuscript; where there is now the second scribe’s
text on Bede, there were originally seven lines that have been erased and
replaced with another text in six lines. The script of the replacement text
is unusually large, as if the scribe wanted to fill all the erased space but the
47 Dates are taken from the Handbook of British Chronology, 3rd edition, eds. E. B. Fryde,
D. E. Greenway, S. Porter, and I. Roy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
213–14, 232.
48 According to Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir, “Universal History,” 48, hand I is responsible for
texts on 3bisv, 9bisr, 36r14–36v15, and 36v20–37r in AM 764 4to.
Augustine 597–604/609
Oda 941–958
Dunstan 960–988
Lanfranc 1070–1089
Anselm 1093–1109
William [de Corbeil] 1123–1136
Theobald [of Bec] 1139–1161
Thomas [Becket] 1162–1170
John [of Salisbury?] never in office
Stephen Langton 1207–1228
Edmund [of Abingdon] 1234–1240