Ælfric of Eynsham
Æthelwold had carried on the tradition of Dunstan in his government of the abbey of Abingdon, then in Berkshire, and at Winchester he continued his strenuous support for the English Benedictine Reform.
Ælfric no doubt gained some reputation as a scholar at Winchester, for when, in 987, the abbey of Cerne (at Cerne Abbas in Dorset) was finished, he was sent by Bishop Ælfheah (Alphege), Æthelwold's successor, at the request of the chief benefactor of the abbey, the ealdorman Æthelmær the Stout, to teach the Benedictine monks there.
It was at Cerne, and partly at the desire, it appears, of Æthelweard, that he planned the two series of his English homilies, compiled from the Christian fathers, and dedicated to Sigeric, Archbishop of Canterbury from 990 to 994.
In the preface to the first volume he regrets that, except for Alfred's translations, Englishmen had no means of learning the true doctrine as expounded by the Latin fathers.
John Earle (Anglo-Saxon Literature, 1884) thinks he aimed at correcting the apocryphal, and to modern ideas superstitious, teaching of the earlier Blickling Homilies.
The first series of forty homilies is devoted to plain and direct exposition of the chief events of the Christian year; the second deals more fully with church doctrine and history.
was appealed to by the Protestant Reformation writers as a proof that the early English church did not hold the Roman doctrine of transubstantiation.
[3] After the two series of homilies, around 995 he wrote three works to help students learn Latin – the Grammar, the Glossary and the Colloquy.
[6] Some of the sermons in the second series had been written in a kind of rhythmical, alliterative prose, and in the Lives of the Saints the practice is so regular that most of them are arranged as verse by their editor W. W.
It has been suggested that this part of his life was chiefly spent at Winchester; but his writings for the patrons of Cerne, and the fact that he wrote in 998 his Canons as a pastoral letter for Wulfsige, the bishop of Sherborne, the diocese in which the abbey was situated, afford presumption of continued residence there.
[3] 1005 is the other certain date we have for Ælfric, when he left Cerne for nobleman Æthelmær's new monastery in Eynsham in Oxfordshire, a long eighty-five-mile journey inland.
After his elevation, he wrote his Letter to the Monks of Eynsham, an abridgment for his own monks of Æthelwold's De consuetudine monachorum, adapted to their rudimentary ideas of monastic life; a letter to Wulfgeat of Ylmandun; an introduction to the study of the Old and New Testaments (about 1008, edited by William L'Isle in 1623); a Latin life of his master Æthelwold; two pastoral letters for Wulfstan, archbishop of York and bishop of Worcester, in Latin and English; and an English version of Bede's De Temporibus.
Through the centuries, however, Ælfric's sermons were threatened by Viking axes and human neglect when – some seven hundred years after their composition – they nearly perished in London's Cotton Library fire that scorched or destroyed close to 1,000 invaluable ancient works.
This view was upheld by John Bale;[9] by Humfrey Wanley;[10] by Elizabeth Elstob;[11] and by Edward Rowe Mores, Ælfrico, Dorobernensi, archiepiscopo, Commentarius (ed.
The main facts of his career were finally elucidated by Eduard Dietrich in a series of articles in the Zeitschrift für historische Theologie,[15] which formed the basis of subsequent writings on the subject.
