Dating the Life of St Chad: Reviewing the Evidence and Approaches

Abstract

The Life of St Chad is an anonymous Old English saint’s life and is extant only in Oxford, Bodleian, MS Hatton 116. Saint Chad (c. 634–672) was a Northumbrian monk, missionary, and bishop of Mercia. The Life is probably an Old English translation of a lost, original Latin vita, adapted from Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum with an introduction and conclusion based on Sulpicius Severus’s Vita Sancti Martini. This thesis includes an originally edited edition of the text, alongside a translation and critical apparatus. This thesis enters the debate about when the Old English Life was composed, with the central question of establishing the extent to which linguistic—and specifically vocabulary—evidence can be used to establish parameters for the date of the text and re-evaluating the evidence to date. More broadly, this thesis considers the dating methodologies employed in relation to early medieval English texts, and my approach offers new insights into these. I argue that a reasonable conclusion on the more likely date for a text is possible through employing probabilistic reasoning to analyse certain types of linguistic data, particularly the frequency and distribution patterns of pertinent vocabulary, when supported by the other literary, historical, and contextual evidence. I conclude that it is most likely that the Life was composed by the first half of the tenth century, and probably prior to c. 930. Almost certainly, based on vocabulary evidence, it was composed much earlier than it was copied in the extant twelfth-century manuscript. The findings of this thesis offer a range of insights into the importance of the Life of St Chad in understanding the development of early English prose and continuing literary activity in Mercia after the advent of a West Saxon literary tradition at the end of the ninth century.