The Lyell Version of the Quadrilogus Life of st Thomas of Canterbury *

Among the valuable collection of one hundred manuscripts bequeathed to the Bodleian Library by James Lyell in 1949 ¹ , there is a fine early thirteenth-century book containing a copy of the so-called Second Quadrilogus ² . This is the composite Life of St Thomas of Canterbury completed c. 1198-1199 by Brother E(lias?), a monk of the Benedictine monastery of Evesham. Working, as the dedicatory epistle recorded ³ , at the instance (and initially with the help) of Henry de Longchamp, later abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Crow-land, Brother E. had interwoven substantial extracts from the Lives of Becket written by John of Salisbury, William of Canterbury, Alan of Tewkesbury and Herbert of Bosham (hence Quadrilogus) to form a continuous narrative of the Life and Death of the new martyr of Canterbury, augmented, for the account of Becket’s murder and its aftermath, by extracts from a (now lost) Passio by Benedict, formerly monk and prior of Canterbury, later abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Peterborough ⁴ . To this he added a substantial appendix of materials and documents relating to Becket’s posthumous triumph and the cause for which he died, mostly taken from Herbert of Bosham. Each extract was preceded by the name of its author, and until the discovery of the single surviving copy of William of Canterbury’ s Vita S. Thome in Winchester College MS. 4, the Quadrilogus was the only source for his biography of Becket; and it remains the only source for Benedict’s Passio ⁵ . Despite obvious dependence on earlier works - or, indeed, perhaps because it conflated five separate works - it enjoyed a considerable vogue. Composed at the turn of the twelfth century for an audience to whom Becket was the hero of a previous generation, it appeared well in time to catch the accentuation of interest in the Becket controversy occasioned by the Langton crisis ⁶ . Versions of the text were translated into English ⁷ and Icelandic/Norwegian during the thirteenth century ⁸ ; and at least four adaptations of the work were made in the thirty or so years following its composition.