Cerne | Kemble

The mythical origins of religious life at Cerne are recorded in an elaborate form by William of Malmesbury (GP, pp. 184-6). According to William’s account, it was St Augustine himself who on visiting the place during the course of his missionary activity found occasion to make the remark which gave Cerne its name (from his words ‘Cerno Deum …’, compounded with Hebrew el, ‘God’), and who proceeded to work the miracle which brought into being what came to be known as ‘St Augustine’s Well’; many years later Eadwold, brother of King Edmund of East Anglia (killed by the Danes in 869), lived at Cerne as a hermit; and it was in honour of St Eadwold that a wealthy man called Æthelweard established a monastery there. The antiquary John Leland, on the other hand, attributed the foundation of Cerne abbey to Æthelmær, ‘comes of Cornwall’, during the reign of King Edgar; and he adds on the authority of an ‘ancient book’ that before the ‘new foundation’ there was a small monastery at Cerne, of three monks (Collectanea, iv. 67). It is recorded in yet another context that King Edgar had given land at Muston (in Piddlehinton, Dorset) to a certain John, abbot of Cerne; but the evidence to this effect is in the form of an inquisition taken at Dorchester in 1440 (Notes & Queries for Somerset and Dorset 12 (1911), p. 371, and 13 (1913), p. 49), and cannot suffice to confirm the existence of an abbey at Cerne before 975. In the preface to the ‘First Series’ of his Catholic Homilies (composed between 990 and 994), Ælfric remarks that he was sent from Bishop Ælfheah, i.e. from Winchester, ‘to a minster which is called Cernel’, at the request of Æthelmær the thegn (The Homilies of Ælfric, ed. B. Thorpe, 2 vols. (London, 1843-6) i. 2); it would follow that Æthelmær (son of Ealdorman Æthelweard) had occasion to recruit the services of a priest some time between 984 and 994, though it remains uncertain whether Ælfric came to an established monastic community, or to a private church under Æthelmær’s patronage. Whatever the case, it was during his years at Cerne that Ælfric wrote many of his major works, including the two series of his Catholic Homilies (dedicated to Archbishop Sigeric, but also produced in a form specifically for Ealdorman Æthelweard’s use), his Lives of the Saints (in response to a commission from Ealdorman Æthelweard and Æthelmær), and his translation of Genesis (again, for Æthelweard). In 1005 Æthelmær appears to have decided to forsake the public life, retiring for the time being to the monastery which he founded at Eynsham, in Oxfordshire (below, p. 000); it would appear that Ælfric himself was appointed abbot of Eynsham at about the same time. A certain Leofsunu, ‘abbot of Cernel’, attests a vernacular lease, c. 1012 (S 1422); King Cnut is credited with despoiling the abbey but seems latterly to have become a major benefactor (Leland, Collectanea, iv. 67, and i. 66; see also Coker’s Survey of Dorsetshire, pp. 65-6); and by the end of the Anglo-Saxon period the abbey’s endowment in Dorset amounted to the respectable total of nearly 130 hides (GDB 77v-78r).

See Mon. Angl. i. 253-5; Not. Mon. (Dorset), no. VIII; Mon. Angl. (rev. ed.) ii. 621-30; VCH Dorset ii. 53-8 and iii. 43-4; MRH, p. 62; HRH, p. 37. See also The Cerne Abbey Millennium Lectures, ed. K. Barker (Cerne, 1988).

According to the account of St Edwold of Cerne in BL Cotton Tiberius E. i (pt 2), 57v-58v (cf. Capgrave’s Nova Legenda Anglie, ed. C. Horstmann, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1901) i. 362-4), Ealdorman Æthelmær was instrumental in translating the relics of the saint from their resting-place in the hermit’s cell four miles west of Cerne to the abbey which the ealdorman had founded and endowed at Cerne itself, though the shrine was subsequently despoiled by the Danes; see also L. Keen, ‘St Edwold the Confessor of Cerne’, Cerne Abbey Millennium (Cerne, 1987), pp. 7-10.

A vivid impression of the sorry state of Cerne abbey in the years immediately preceding its dissolution is conveyed by the list of complaints directed by a disaffected monk to Thomas Cromwell in 1535 (Cerne Abbey Millennium Lectures, pp. 45-6); and the prospects for the preservation of any surviving muniments may not have been improved by the fact that the abbey’s estates appear to have passed after its dissolution in 1539 into the hands of various relatively minor parties. In fact, the only surviving ‘cartulary’ of the abbey (Davis 218) is the miscellaneous collection of documents written in several thirteenth- and fourteenth-century hands on leaves bound up at the beginning of the ‘Book of Cerne’ (Cambridge, University Library, Ll. 1. 10), a prayer-book written in the ninth century and associated at one stage in its transmission with a certain Bishop Æthelwald (Ker, Catalogue, no. 27; Making of England, ed. Webster, et al., no. 165); for an edition and translation of this material, see B. Fosset Lock, ‘The Cartulary of Cerne Abbey’, Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Antiquarian Field Club 28 (1907), pp. 65-95, and 29 (1908), pp. 195-223. Unfortunately, none of the documents in this collection concerns the pre-Conquest period; and one can only wonder what might have emerged had the muniments of a house so significant in its distinctive way been preserved in better order.

The text of a charter which purports to record the initial endowment of Cerne abbey (S 1217) is preserved in a thirteenth-century Chartae Antiquae roll. The charter is dated 987, and is cast in the form of a declaration by Æthelmær, son of Æthelweard, to the king, to Archbishop Dunstan, and to Ælfheah, bishop of Winchester. Æthelmær (styled satrapa of King Æthelred) states that he founded a monastery at Cerne, endowing it initially to the best of his ability; a few years later he granted the community land at Cerne itself and at Æscere, both grants apparently to take effect after his death; and he gave the community various other estates in Dorset, to be held by them during his own lifetime and for ever thereafter. He then records three other grants to the community, by the clerk Leofric of Poxwell, by Æthelmær’s kinsman Ælfn[o]th of Bincombe (after the lifetime of their kinsman Leofwine), and by Ælfwold (after the death of Ælfwold’s wife). Æthelmær grants the abbey the tithes of the annual renders from Cerne and Cheselbourne, and specified tithes in kind from his other estates; he expresses his wish that the community will observe the Rule of St Benedict; and he says that they should have the power to choose a ‘secular patron’ as they see fit. Judged by the normal standards of Anglo-Saxon diplomatic, the charter would have to be discounted as a fabrication; but it is curious enough in form and substance to make one wonder whether such standards should necessarily be applied, and certainly it may well represent the adaptation of authentic records in the abbey’s archives. The charter accounts for the greater part of the abbey’s pre-Conquest endowment, though not for the whole; but it is the grant of the reversion of Æthelmær’s estate at Æscere which is of particular interest. Ealdorman Æthelweard had given an estate of 20 hides at Esher, in Surrey, to his son Æthelmær ‘a long time before his death’ (S 911); but if Æthelmær might once have intended it for Cerne, in the event he gave the estate to his foundation at Eynsham. Eynsham did not, however, retain control: 11 hides and 3 virgates at Esher were held TRE by a certain Tovi (GDB 34r, 36v), and the rest of the estate was in other hands (GDB 32rv). The greater part of Tovi’s holding was given by William I to the abbey of Croix St Leufroy; and in 1219 the abbot of Cerne attempted to recover the land from the Norman abbey, on the grounds that it had belonged to his predecessor Abbot William (in the first half of the twelfth century), though without result (Curia Regis Rolls, viii. 20, 284).

Miscellaneous. 1217.