Vestiges of the supremacy of Mercia in the South of England, during the eighth century / by Thomas Kerslake.

  • Thomas Kerslake
Date:
1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vestiges of the supremacy of Mercia in the South of England, during the eighth century / by Thomas Kerslake. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    by the importation of later monastic orders ; ancl generally by more catholic, but less national or local, dedications. The names of the places, in some few cases identified by immemorial traditions, are often the only indications of the whereabouts of some of the greatest events ; but even the names themselves are obscured by the different methods, used in that age and in ours, of distinguishing them from other similar names; and the traditions, which should have preserved them, are interrupted by the long interval, between the events themselves, and the time at which the names first come again into our sight. But this Clovesho = Clofeshoum = or Clobeshani1 had neces- sarily retained its hold upon the public memory of the ages from the eighth to the sixteenth centuries, from the importance to the Church of the great acts of councils, both royal and pontifical, there held j and the memory or tradition of the National Church, was, of all others, the most vivid and tenacious of any, during that long period • perhaps the only one which may be said to have bridged it, unbroken by interruptions, such as dynastic revolutions. When the tradition of the actual whereabouts of this famous place comes first into our view, we find it attached to the “ ffoo ” of Kent above described, and to the place called “ Cliffe ” there situated. The name now current is “ Cliffe-at-Hoo,” and this appears to have been the form in which it came to Camden’s knowledge : at any rate, in the earlier editions of Britannia (1587), he mentions this place as “ Cliues at Ho Bedse dictum.” There is, however, extant a still earlier record, that the tradition had not yet been doubted by the learned. The Rev. Prebendary Earle, Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, has most judiciously preserved some marginal notes of the 16th century, that he found in that MS. of the Saxon Chronicle,2 which he distinguishes as “ C.;” which notes he considers to’ be “ written in an Elizabethan hand: ” but as will be presently seen they must have been of the reign of Henry VIII. One of these is written in the margin against one of the occurrences of the name “ Clofes lioo ” in the Chronicle, and reads “ doctor Hethe’s benyffyce ; ” and 1 See Cod. Dip. passim, for other varieties of the name. 2 Two S. Chronicles, Oxford, 1565.
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