On the Northern Provenance of Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.7.5

Abstract

Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.7.5 contains an early eleventh-century copy of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, which was subject to significant correction in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. As such it was produced and intensively used at the peak of the popularity of Bede’s historical text in medieval England, which Antonia Gransden and R.H.C. Davis long ago linked to the renewal of monasticism in the North in the long twelfth century. This essay explores how this manuscript, which has been accepted to be of northern provenance, fits into this wider context. It interrogates the evidence provided by additions to the manuscript and annotations of the text itself to argue that this copy of the Historia Ecclesiastica, which has hitherto not been linked to a specific religious house, was in the possession of the canons at Hexham from shortly after their re-formation as an Augustinian community in 1113 until the Dissolution. In doing so it demonstrates how, against the wider backdrop of the Historia Ecclesiastica as an inspiration for religious renewal in the North, the interests of the canons of Hexham in the text in the twelfth century were motivated by specific issues of jurisdiction.