Lives of St. Thancred, St Torhtred, and the Virgin Tova

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The “Life of St Botolph” begins with a preface, and ends with an account of the movement of the relics of various saints to Thorney Island during the period of the Danish raids.  But in MS British Library Harley 3097 (12th c.), folios 64v-65v (online here), in between the “Life” of Botolph, and the “Translatio” of the relics, there is another text, about three hermits of Thorney Abbey.  These were Thancred (or Tancred), his brother Torhtred, and their sister Tova.  I don’t know of any other manuscript that contains it.

The text is headed, “De Sanctis Thancredo et Torhtredo”, “Concerning Sts Thancred and Torhtred”, and ends with the explicit: “Explicit De Sanctis Thancredo et Torhtredo et eorum sorore Christi virgine Sancta Tova.”

The Latin text was published long ago in W. Birch, Liber Vitae: Register and Martyrology of New Minster and Hyde Abbey, Winchester, London (1892), appendix F, pp.284-286.  This is online at Archive.org here.

Unfortunately these saints are not listed in the Bollandists’ Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina.  Not much seems to be known about these three, except that their relics were preserved at Thorney Abbey, and venerated there before 1000 AD, as I learn from the Oxford Dictionary of Saints:

Tancred, Torthred, and Tova (870). Hermits of Thorney (Cambs.), killed by the Danes in 870.

The first two were men, the third a woman, but nothing is known of them. The story of their martyrdom rests on the chronicle of Pseudo-Ingulph, which may include sources older than the 12th century. They were, however, venerated in their Thorney shrine by the year 1000, witnessed by R. P. S. and were among the many saints whose bodies were translated by Ethelwold, but whose names William of Malmesbury was unwilling to write because they sounded so barbarous. Their feast was on 30 September at Thorney and Deeping.

R.P.S. and C.S.P.; William of Malmesbury, G.P., pp. 327–9; E.B.K. after 1100, i. 129–44.

It does not seem that the author of these couple of pages in BL Harley 3097 knew much more. All he can tell us is material from the notes of Aethelwold, founder of Thorney Abbey, and all the latter knew was that they were hermits killed by the Danes.

Here is a draft translation of the text as given by Birch, slightly corrected against the manuscript.

The saints and elect of God, rejecting the world in its fragility through inward contemplation of the soul, with single intent fixed the gaze of their hearts upon earning that joy of future blessedness.  But if anything contrary to this holy purpose appeared, they cast it aside with firm deliberation, and with the clearer sight of the mind they freely conceded renunciations, lest the ancient enemy should imagine that he could triumph over them with his usual trickery.

Hence it happened, by the blessing of God, that the holy confessors of the Lord, Thancred and Torhtred, who are venerated in today’s celebration, after despising the world, having been divinely raised to such a height of virtue, were strengthened in godly contemplation, that in the wilderness of Thorney they sought out the enemy of the human race in single combat, and at the same time, while supported by the grace of God, that they triumphed with a wonderful cry (of victory) over the one shamelessly deceiving, although no history recommends to us and no page of ancient narrative reveals the birth of these flowers of sanctity, or the manner of living of their lives.  But seeing the almighty grace of God, justifying those who fear him in every nation, we will not allow the little which we have learned about them to remain hidden from our descendants.

They lived in the aforementioned wilderness in dwellings not far separate from each other, brother from brother, likewise priest from priest, having a remote cell in which they spent their entire bodily life in meditation on the heavenly commandments. Who can measure, who can relate their labours in such a great solitude, their vigils, fastings, patience of soul, discomfort of body, the glorious tears and pious longings of a soul sighing constantly for God?

During the holy praise of these two holy brothers, a transparent pearl of the splendour of God cannot lie hidden, namely their sister and glorious partner in Christ, the virgin Tova.  She, as the blessed bishop of Christ, both the first builder of the same place, and its most holy abbot, Ethelwold, attests in his writings, was not only the sister of so many saints by blood, but also by diligent imitation of their virtues. And so she had chosen for herself with a manly spirit a solitary cottage in the woods, further away and about a mile more distant, in order to obtain divine aid more closely, having left earthly comfort and society far away. Triumphing over the tyrant of the world in that struggle, she, having become a member of Christ, deserved to have Christ as her head, to whom she was united in the framework of the body of the Church, that is, in that heavenly communion of the saints.

Fittingly do we proclaim the saints, in their contempt for the world yet exalted in the world, and nothing prevents us from proclaiming those who, despising such things for the love of God , sought the peace of solitude, in order to pour out all their attention in the single-minded pursuit of divine things. For, exiled from the doings of this world, they stood as if in a constant line of battle against the assault of the devil, and they won the right to be honoured by the Lord, not with the martyrdom of a single day, month, or even a long year, but rather with the triumph of their whole lives.

Nor did their temporal gladiator lack a crown, because the same piratical plague, which is said to have depopulated England in the time of the blessed Edmund, king and martyr, troubling many locations in many places, also came to the same wilderness, and there made the blessed bishop of Christ Thancred into a martyr, having found him in his cell, and after some time adorned the struggle of a longer wrestling-match with a glorious end.

But his brother Torhtred, equally a bishop of the Lord, as the aforementioned pontiff of God Ethelwold teaches in his writings, conquering the foe and the world in the glory of confession,[1] departed to Christ in his sleep, and was buried in the same wilderness with his brother the martyr and his sister the virgin.

There, to this day, resting in their tombs, to the honour of the Holy Trinity, they are venerated by faithful Christians, who, with the support of their assistance, are freed from the burden of oppressive sins, and as the strength of their faith grows, they rejoice, to the honour and praise of the same God and our almighty Lord, who lives and reigns for ever and ever, Amen.

It sounds as if the Danes found Thancred in his cell in the woods, tortured him, no doubt in hopes of money, and then killed him.  They also tortured his brother Torhtred, but did not kill him.  The virgin Tova was a mile deeper in the woods, and perhaps went unnoticed.

 

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  1. [1]I.e. he was a “confessor”; presumably captured by the Danes and tortured, but not killed.↩

Admin – mail failures

Posted on by Roger Pearse

My apologies.  I have just discovered that no emails are being sent from the site.  I appreciate all those who took time to comment.  I was unaware of this.  I am trying to debug the issue.

Update (26 July 2025): I hope that this is now fixed.

Update (28 July 2025): Apologies for the errors on posts with comments.  The footnote plugin has not been updated for years, and it seems PHP 8 is a little stricter on variable declaration.  I’ve fixed it, I think.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

How the days fleet past!  Today vanished, waiting around for an engineer to come and upgrade my broadband.  Then a trip to take a couple of things to a sick lady, and then waiting for a plumber who never appeared.   Of course it is summer, and it seems a waste to be indoors sat in front of a screen.

Last month I had to stop doing everything in order to try to buy a house.  In the end I withdrew, after finding that the house needed much more work  doing than I had thought.  Curiously the agent seemed quite uninterested in my offer to buy, at full price, or my decision not to.  I infer that the “sale” was bogus, designed merely to obtain a market valuation.  Oh well.

Tis’ the season to be travelling abroad, like Irish monks.  Not that I will be going overseas, but I do need to get away, as we all do. I must book something or it just will not happen.

However today I have managed to return to working on Folcard’s “Life of St Botolph,” and I am going through the Latin and English and creating a combined version with notes and apparatus.  I’ve started work on chapter 5 today, out of 11.  I have a draft translation of the whole thing.  But it needs revising against the new critical text.

I am slightly uncomfortably aware that I have been working on Botolph for two years now.  That’s ridiculously slow.  But thus does life pass.

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Commentaries by Oecumenius now online in English

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An interesting email from John Litteral:

I just wanted to let you know that I have started translating the Bible commentaries by Oecumenius. So far I have translated James, 1-2 Peter, and I am starting on the epistles of John now. I plan to do them all, Acts-Jude, and perhaps Revelation, but since that has been translated into English multiple times I may not do Revelation.

I have already published James and 1-2 Peter, and I have put them on Archive for free.

Oecumenius has been my favorite Bible commentator for a long time, so I am excited to be the first to translate his commentaries on the Catholic Epistles and God willing to do Acts and Paul’s epistles.

The translations have been made from the Patrologia Graeca text.

Excellent news!  Let us hope that the author does still more of the commentaries!

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Translating the mega-sentence…. how?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The first sentence of the “Life” of St Botolph reads as follows:

Omnipotentis Dei benignitas, compatiens errori humani generis, quod ab antiquo serpente caelitus concessa denudatum glo­ria, ignorantiae damnatur tenebris; divitias misericordiae suae in eius restauratione exhibere voluit, ut ad gloriam lucis de qua cae­cum aberraverat, rediret per lumen quod ei ineffabili gratia administravit.

I.e.

The benevolence of almighty God – compassionate towards the error of the human race, which, having been stripped by the ancient serpent of the glory granted to it by heaven, is condemned to the darkness of ignorance – wished to display the riches of His mercy in the restoration of it, so that (the human race) might return to the glory of the light from which it had blindly strayed, through the Light which He bestowed upon it, by His ineffable grace.

I’ve been staring at that, and wondering how to turn that into English without departing too far from the original.

Suggestions anyone?

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The Society of St Botolph

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Few will be aware that there is actually a society devoted to the study of St Botolph, and the churches dedicated to him.  But there is.

The Society of St. Botolph (https://www.botolph.info/) is an association which is free to join. It’s purposes are:

The primary object of the Society is to remember, celebrate and raise the profile of Botolph, Britain’s most important forgotten Saint.

The secondary object is to provide communication, fellowship and a sense of ‘family’ between our relatively small cluster of seventy Botolph’s churches.

It has a regular newsletter, the Botolphian, full of material about Botolph, and the churches that bear his name.  Far from being purely superficial, this also contains some serious scholarly research.  For instance the April 2022 issue contains a very careful analysis of the sources to determine whether the relics of St Botolph spent a period at Burgh, or at Grundisburgh.

Thankfully the website is archived at Archive.org.

The secretary is D. S. Pepper, who took over from the founder and has run things enthusiastically for the last 12 years.  Highly recommended.

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Capgrave is not the author of the “Nova Legenda Anglie”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Anybody who works with the texts known as the “Lives” of the saints will encounter a volume called the Nova Legenda Angliae (NLA), the “New Legends of England”.  First printed in 1516, it consists of a mass of abbreviated “lives” of various saints, in alphabetical order by saint name.

Very often, the author of the NLA is said to be a writer named John Capgrave.  This claim is not true, and has been known to be false since 1970.  The real author was a man named John of Tynemouth.  Yet the false attribution persists, especially online.  It seems worth a post to debunk it.

Let’s take this step by step.

In 1516 an English printer in London named Wynkyn de Worde produced a printed volume containing a collection of the lives of the saints.  The original edition may be found online at Archive.org here.  (The page has the daft title “[Nova lege[n]da Angliae]”.)  The book had no title page, but the colophon says “Explicit nova legenda anglie” (“here ends the New Legends of England”), which title it has had ever since.  The colophon gives no author, and states frankly that it reprints existing material, but “emended and corrected”.  It is best known in a 2 volume “reprint” by Horstmann in 1901, which unfortunately also interleaved material from elsewhere between the “lives.”

Colophon of the Nova Legenda Anglie (1516)

From the 16th century onwards, this Nova Legenda Anglie (NLA) was attributed to the prolific 15th century author John Capgrave (1393-1464).

But already in 1970 Peter J. Lucas demonstrated concisely and conclusively that Capgrave could not have any connection to the work.  Unfortunately his article in The Library (5th series, vol. 25, pp.1-10: “John Capgrave and the ‘Nova legenda Anglie’: a survey”) is not easily accessed online.

The actual author of the material in the NLA is John, Vicar of Tynemouth, who flourished around 1366.[1]  He composed a “Sanctilogium Angliae, Walliae, Scotiae et Hiberniae”, composed of abbreviated lives of the saints.  In this work, the “lives” appeared in calendar order, the order of the anniversaries of their date of death or commemoration.  This is the same order as we find in the Acta Sanctorum, and for the same reason: liturgical use.

A single manuscript of this work survives, containing 157 “lives.”  This is MS British Library Cotton Tiberius E.1, of the 14th century, from St Albans, which was damaged badly in the fire of 1731 and is today in two volumes, (E.1/1, and E.1/2).

MS British Library Cotton Tiberius E 1/2, fol. 14v. The beginning of the “Life” of St Botolph. The manuscript was burned and restored.

At some unknown point the contents of the work were rearranged by some unknown person into alphabetical order, into the order of the names of the saints.  This makes it less useful for liturgical purposes, but more useful as a reference volume  Three manuscripts of the alphabetical order have survived, containing 148, 151, and 153 lives respectively, and others may have existed.  None of these copies indicate any connection to Capgrave.

The NLA is also in alphabetical order.  It contains 168 lives.  Most early printed books were made by taking some manuscript – usually a late manuscript – and printing it.  Most likely this is the source for the NLA: a manuscript of the alphabetical order of John of Tynemouth’s Sanctilogium.  Unfortunately the manuscript has not survived.

The NLA also contains  a prologue and a colophon.  But this prologue cannot be by Capgrave.  It refers to the book as “newly printed”; and it also refers to the Fasciculus temporum of Werner Rolevinck, published 1474.  Capgrave died in 1464, before printing arrived in England, or the publication of Rolevinck.  Yet the writer of the prologue and colophon is claims that the text is his own work, even though he accepts that he makes use of earlier, widely available (“apud plures”) material.  In the absence of any other indication, this suggests that the writer was a contemporary of De Worde, perhaps a hack employed by him.

So how did all of this material get attributed to John Capgrave?  The answer seems to be the obscurity of John of Tynemouth, the multiple names used for him in the manuscripts of his various works, and simply confusion by 16th century bibliographers – John Leland and John Bale – between two authors both called “John.”  Dr Lucas goes through this material concisely but conclusively.

I imagine that the Nova Legenda Angliae will continue to cause confusion.  But this is what it is; an early printed edition, from a now lost manuscript, of a work by John of Tynemouth.

Update: 28 July 2025: fixed missing link to 1516 edition.

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  1. [1]Henry of Kirkstede, in his “Catalogus scriptorum Ecclesiae”, formerly attributed to “Bostonus Buriensis” – See Horstmann, vol. 1, p.xxxiv↩

Cheap hand-held multi-spectral imaging for manuscripts?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A very exciting post yesterday on LinkedIn (but visible even if you don’t have an account) from Leonardo Costantini:

Yesterday marked the beginning of a new phase of Digital Humanities applied to manuscript studies.

Imagine a hyperspectral imaging system that weighs 500 grams and gives you instantaneous results, making the post-processing of the images easy and accessible. Its name is ChromaMapper. It’s being developed by PyrOptik Instruments Limited and it will be a gamechanger!

Designed by Dr Mary Stuart, Lecturer at the University of Derby, with the collaboration of Matt Davies and Elizabeth Allen from PyrOptik Instruments Limited, we tested their prototype on the manuscript fragments at the Special Collections of the University of Bristol. Our thanks to Emma Howgill for the kind collaboration.

It has been a mind-blowing experience, and it was so exciting to see the results seconds after the digitisation.

There are no further details, except that the hope is that it should be relatively cheap.  The PyrOptik website is here.

This would revolutionise manuscript studies.  There must be acres of unsuspected palimpsests out there, reused parchment with an unsuspected lower text.

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Manuscripts of the “Life” of St Botolph (BHL 1428)

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The 11th century “Life” of St Botolph by Folcard of St Bertin, which is BHL 1428, has reached us in the following medieval manuscripts: (The sigla or abbreviations are by me).

  • J = Cambridge, St Johns College, H.6 (olim M. R. James 209), ff.171r-182v. 12th century.  Includes prologue and translatio.
  • H = London, British Library Harley 3097.  ff.61v-64v.  1075-1125 AD.  Includes prologue, translatio, and extra vita in between.
  • T = BL Cotton Tiberius D. iii, ff.223v-225v.  13th century.  Badly damaged so only selected readings available.  Includes prologue.
  • P = Paris BNF lat. 13092, ff.110r-113v. s. XII. (nearly unreadable microfilm.)  P omits “ut…monastica”. Is followed by C and L.  Also has liturgical prayers.
  • G = London, Grays Inn 3, ff.136r-137.  Note use of thorn, ae ligature in Anglosaxon names, probably “corrections”.  Gloss present.  CPL omission present.  No prologus or translatio.
  • C = Cambridge, Corpus Christi College Parker 161, ff.61v-63v. ca. 1200. [Prefixed with 8 capitula, unlike the other mss].  Often slightly different, and has three omissions.

There are three editions:

  • Ach. = Luc d’Achery, & Jean Mabillon, Acta sanctorum Ordinis S. Benedicti, vol. 3: Saeculum III: quod est ab anno Christi DCC ad DCCC, Paris (1672), pp. 3-7. – This is based on P plus emendations.  No prologue or translatio.
  • AASS = Acta Sanctorum, Jun. vol. 3, 402 (1701), pp.398-406. – A copy of Ach. plus emended from R and K.  No prologue, and only part of the translatio from the NLA.
  • Har. = T. D. Hardy, Descriptive Catalogue of Materials Relating to the History of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 1, Part 1, London (1862) pp.373-4.  This is just the prologus.

These other witnesses are a somewhat different version of the text:

  • L = Lincoln Cathedral Library 7. ff.82r-83r. 1151-1200 AD. (different recension)
  • R = Vienna OSB SN12814 (olim Rooklooster), ff.960r-961r. 1451-1487 AD. (different recension)
  • K = an unidentified Koln/Cologne manuscript used for the AASS, but clearly very like R.
  • NLA = Nova Legenda Anglie, Horstmann edition.  This is an abbreviated version, also found in other MSS.
  • SB = Schleswig Breviarium. This refers to Scotland, so must descend from a manuscript of the family of R.

I have compared all of these, and, just for fun, I have worked out the following stemma.  The earliest manuscripts are at the top.

So how did I get this?  From 5 simple features of the text that jump out at you when you compare the text.

  • Is the prologue present?
  • Is the translatio present?
  • There is an obvious gloss in chapter 11, and this is only found in later manuscripts.
  • There is a common omission, found in manuscripts C, P and L.
  • Chapters 1-3 are omitted in some manuscripts.

Another feature of the text, not shown above, is whether there is a reference to “Scotis”, “the scots”, i.e. Scotland.  This appears in the AASS, and also in R, but nowhere else.  But it does appear in the abbreviated and rewritten version of the story that appears in the Sleswig Breviary, which must therefore derive from a manuscript in this late part of the stemma.

The NLA is an epitome, so not very related to the full text.  But the presence of an abbreviated translatio tells us where it fits in the tree of transmission.

I also compared how often various witnesses disagreed.

  • How often do J and H differ?  Only in 5 places, 4 of which are obvious scribal errors.
  • How often do JH and G differ?  Only in 3 places, 2 of which are anglosaxon names.
  • How often do J and P differ?  16 times.
  • How often does T disagree with H and H?  One obvious scribal error in T, and the gloss is present in T.  It does not have the unique readings of H.  So… it is derived from J.

and so on.

The introduction of the gloss into otherwise unrelated branches of the tradition must indicate some kind of cross-contamination.

Folcard wrote a biography, with prologue and translatio.  This was fed into the liturgical sausage-making machine, ending up as a set of lectiones (readings) for the sanctoral office, the church service read to celebrate the saint on his feast day.  So the loss of literary elements, and the presence of liturgical elements will always suggest modification of the text.

J is the prince among these manuscripts because it alone contains the prologue and the translatio.   The liturgically useless translatio is still found in the NLA which must therefore derive from J via an abbreviator.  H and T are also relatively pure as containing the liturgically useless prologue.  Next to go is chapter 1, also liturgically useless.  Then the material about Botolph’s brother Adolph, chapters 1-3, is omitted for the same reason, leaving ch 4 as the start.  It all makes perfect sense, as the text is transformed into something that can appear in a Sanctilogium, a medieval service book.

This is the second time that I have worked on a Latin text to create a critical text.  I have found in both cases that the process of manual comparison gives you something that machine comparison does not.  It gives you a feel for the text, and it gives you a feel for the witnesses and the kind of text that they bear.  The text starts to become real and alive under your hand.  You get a feel for certain witnesses.  “Oh yes, it’s gone off on its own again.”  After a while certain things just jump out at you.  The longer you work on it, the more this happens.  The extended period of time that it takes to produce a modern edition is not a vice; it is what the editor needs to do in order to become truly familiar with his text.  I really do not see how this process will ever be possible to avoid, or can ever arise purely from machine comparison.  Which is food for thought.

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AI firm “cut up and destroyed” millions of books

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A curiously revealing story at Ars Technica (June 25, 2025):

Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models : Company hired Google’s book-scanning chief to cut up and digitize “all the books in the world.”

On Monday, court documents revealed that AI company Anthropic spent millions of dollars physically scanning print books to build Claude, an AI assistant similar to ChatGPT. In the process, the company cut millions of print books from their bindings, scanned them into digital files, and threw away the originals solely for the purpose of training AI—details buried in a copyright ruling on fair use…

… in February 2024, the company hired Tom Turvey, the former head of partnerships for the Google Books book-scanning project, and tasked him with obtaining “all the books in the world.” …

While destructive scanning is a common practice among some book digitizing operations, Anthropic’s approach was somewhat unusual due to its documented massive scale. By contrast, the Google Books project largely used a patented non-destructive camera process to scan millions of books borrowed from libraries and later returned. ….

The article is well-worth reading for what it reveals about the insides of the AI world.  The 32-page court judgement is also interesting itself as it describes what the AI company did, and why.  Anthropic made a billion dollars this way.

For AI systems (“large language models”) to work, they have to be populated with high quality text.  Unfortunately that all belongs to other people, publishers and the like, who have lawyers.  So one way around this is to buy a physical copy of a book, and then store it inside your computer in digital form.

This trick is perfectly legal, or so a court has just ruled.  Why? because they legally purchased them, destroyed each copy after use, and kept the digital files internally rather than distributing them.

Buying used physical books sidestepped licensing entirely while providing the high-quality, professionally edited text that AI models need, and destructive scanning was simply the fastest way to digitize millions of volumes. The company spent “many millions of dollars” on this buying and scanning operation, often purchasing used books in bulk. Next, they stripped books from bindings, cut pages to workable dimensions, scanned them as stacks of pages into PDFs with machine-readable text including covers, then discarded all the paper originals.

The court documents don’t indicate that any rare books were destroyed in this process—Anthropic purchased its books in bulk from major retailers—but archivists long ago established other ways to extract information from paper. For example, The Internet Archive pioneered non-destructive book scanning methods that preserve physical volumes while creating digital copies. And earlier this month, OpenAI and Microsoft announced they’re working with Harvard’s libraries to train AI models on nearly 1 million public domain books dating back to the 15th century—fully digitized but preserved to live another day.

While Harvard carefully preserves 600-year-old manuscripts for AI training, somewhere on Earth sits the discarded remains of millions of books that taught Claude how to juice up your résumé.

I think most of us will feel somewhat appalled at this treatment of books.  Clearly the development of AI is straining the US copyright regime.

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