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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2016
A chronicle of the Franciscan convent at Bridgewater, Somerset, in B.L., Cottonian MS Domitian A.ii, preserves a late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century record of the founding of a university in Dublin in 1358. The entry, on f. 5v, notes the founding of the university at Dublin as the second entry for the year 1358:
Ysabella mater Edwardi tercii obiit; vniuersitas diflinie in hibernia incepit.
Since the main scribe of the chronicle — perhaps the astronomer John Somer, O.F.M. (fl. 1380-1409) — appears to have recorded his portion of the entries in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, this is one of the earliest extant recordings of this event. The founding in 1358 is confirmed by an entry in Rotulorum patentium et clausorum cancellariae Hiberniae calendarium recording, according to Fitzmaurice and Little, ‘the King[’s promise [of] special protection to scholars travelling thither’.
1 At least ten hands have added notes of events. Many, or rather most, of the entries by these and the original hand are preceded by a number 1, 2 or 3, denoting the first, second, and third cycle of 532 years of the Great Cycle in which the dates of Easter repeat themselves. The first cycle here runs from 64 B.C. to A.D. 468; the second from A.D. 469 to 1000; the third, whose years are recorded in the first column of the chronicle, from 1001 to 1532. Many of the notes in the second cycle are accompanied by a date, e.g. ‘Merlinus 476’ in the column comparable to 1008 in the third cycle. The main scribe’s last record of current events (i.e. from the third cycle) is the entry for 1402: ‘Comata apparuit’. The past tense used in this entry suggests that it records an event witnessed, not forecast, by the writer. After 1402 he records only events from the first or second cycles (beside the years 1409, 1440, 1448, 1451, 1460, 1473, 1474, 1481, 1492, 1513 and 1528); he forecasts for the year 1433, in the third cycle, an eclipse of the sun. Another, later, hand has noted beside this entry that it is ‘per fratrem Somer’.
2 Rotulorum patentium et clausorum cancellariae Hiberniae calendarium (Irish Record Commission, Dublin, 1828), p. 73; noted in Fitzmaurice, E. B. and Little, A. G. (eds), Materials for the history of the Franciscan province of Ireland, A.D. 1230-1450 (British Society of Franciscan Studies, vol. 9, Manchester, 1920), p. 109 Google Scholar. My thanks to Dr Jeremy Catto for drawing my attention to these references, and to both him and Dr Malcolm Parkes for assistance in deciphering this entry in the chronicle.
3 Information throughout this paragraph taken from Fitzmaurice, & Little, (eds), Materials for the history of the Franciscan province, pp 107–8.Google Scholar
4 Ibid., p. 108.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., p. 109, citing Cal. papal petitions, i, 467.
7 Ibid., citing Stat. Ire., 1–12 Edw. IV, p. 369.
8 Somer wrote a Kalendarium for the years 1387–1462 at the instance of Joan, princess of Wales, mother of Richard II; it is named by Geoffrey Chaucer as a source for material to be included in the incomplete or lost third part of his Treatise on the astrolabe (Prologue, 1. 85, of the Riverside Chaucer edition of Chaucer’s works, ed. Benson, L. D. (Boston, 1987), p. 663)Google Scholar. See The Kalendarium of John Somer, ed. Mooney, Linne R. (The Chaucer Library, University of Georgia Press, Atlanta, forthcoming).Google Scholar
9 The principal work in the manuscript is The Chronicle of Battle Abbey, ed. Searle, Eleanor (Oxford Medieval Texts, Oxford, 1980).Google Scholar
10 Emden, A. B., A biographical register of the University of Oxford to A.D. 1500 (3 vols, Oxford, 1957-9), iii, 1727Google Scholar, citing P.R.O., E 403/549, 554.
11 B.L., Add. MS 10628, f. 10, begins the usual Prologue to the Kalendarium of John Somer: ‘Ad honorem dei et virginis gloriose necnon sanctorum confessorum ffrancisci Antonii et episcopi Lodowice …’, replacing the usual ascription to Somer with this attribution: ‘quod composuit quidam frater minorum in Cornubia Bodminne Gardianus’. Ker, N. R., Medieval libraries of Great Britain (2nd ed., London, 1964), p. 60 Google Scholar, gives as provenance for this MS the Benedictine priory of St George at Dunster, Somerset, not far from Somer’s home convent at Bridgewater.
12 He is known to have been there in 1380, when he wrote his Kalendarium (its figures are computed for Oxford), and again — or still — in 1394–5, when he received the royal alms for the Oxford convent. Mention of the Oxford riots of 1355 in the chronicle suggests that he was in Oxford already in the mid-1350s. For his receipt of royal alms for the Oxford convent in 1394–5 see Emden, as noted above (n. 10).