Rheims, St Remigius

<Abbey of Saint-Remi.>  The abbey acquired various interests in England during the reign of Edward the Confessor, and retained them at the time of the Domesday survey: an estate of 3 hides, ‘with dependencies’, at Lapley, in Staffordshire (GDB 222v, entered erroneously under Northants.); half a hide in Meaford, and one virgate at (Hamstall) Ridware, also in Staffordshire, specifically said to have been given to Saint-Remi by Earl Ælfgar (GDB 247v); and one hide at an unnamed place (probably Silvington) in Shropshire (GDB 252r). <Letter from NV, iii.94.>

The text of S 1237, representing Earl Ælfgar’s grant of land to Saint-Remi, was printed by Dugdale ‘ex ipso autogr. apud S Remig. Rhemis’ (Mon. Angl. i. 1022); but the actual source of his text was probably the early-thirteenth-century cartulary of Saint Remi (Rheims, Archives municipales, Cartulary B of Saint-Remi (H 1411), pp. 143-4).  The document is a record of the grant by Ælfgar, quondam Anglorum comes, of land at Lapley, with its dependencies, to the church of Saint-Remi, made for the soul of his son ‘Burchard’ (?Burgheard) who died and was buried at Saint-Remi on returning from Rome; it is said to have been written in two copies, one in English retained by Earl Ælfgar himself, and the other in Latin sent by Ælfgar to Saint-Remi.  The document is not dated; but the list of witnesses suggests that it was drawn up in or soon after 1061, following the return from Rome of a party which had included Archbishop Aldred of York and Earl Tostig (ASC, MS. D).

Burchard’s burial at Saint-Remi is attested in other interesting ways; see Hinkle, ‘The Gift of an Anglo-Saxon Gospel Book to the Abbey of Saint-Remi, Reims’.  A Latin epitaph inscribed on Burchard’s tomb slab (lost in the Revolution) is quoted in the works of a seventeenth-century historian of Rheims (Hinkle, p. 31, n. 3); and five lines of verse said to have been inscribed on the borders of the cover of a gospel-book at Saint-Remi indicate that the gospel-book in question had been given to the church by Earl Ælfgar and his wife Ælfgifu, in memory of Burchard (Hinkle, p. 31, n. 4).  Hinkle suggests that the gospel-book given by Earl Ælfgar to Saint-Remi is to be identified as Rheims, Bibliothèque municipale, MS. 9, which on the basis of its script and decoration is thought to have been written in England in the third quarter of the eleventh century.

Miscellaneous.  1237.

Select bibliography

Mon. Angl. ii. 993-4; Mon. Angl. (rev. ed.) vi. 1098-9.  See also Matthew, Norman Monasteries, pp. 25 and 91.  For the alien cell at Lapley, see Mon. Angl. i. 1022-3; Mon. Angl. (rev. ed.) vi. 1042-3; MRH, p. 89.

Hinkle, W. M., ‘The Gift of an Anglo-Saxon Gospel Book to the Abbey of Saint-Remi, Reims’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association 3rd ser. 33 (1970), pp. 21-35.

Baxter, Stephen, 'The Death of Burgheard son of Ælfgar and its Context', Frankland: the Franks and the World of the Early Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of Dame Jinty Nelson, ed. Paul Fouracre and David Ganz (Manchester, 2008), pp. 266-84.

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October 2011