BRADSHAW, HENRY
(ca. 1450–1513)
Henry Bradshaw was a Benedictine monk and English poet of the 15th century. Bradshaw was attached to St.Werburgh’s monastery in Chester, and his most significant literary contribution is his Chronicon and a Life of St.Werburgh, an epic-like text in rather crude RHYME ROYAL stanzas extolling the life of the patron saint of his monastery. Bradshaw was born in Chester where, in his youth, he was received into St.Werburgh’s Abbey. After a customary period of study at Gloucester College in Oxford when he was a novice, Bradshaw returned to spend the rest of his life in the monastery in his native Chester. As a young man he wrote a Latin treatise praising his home city, De antiquitate et magnificentia Urbis Cestricie (The ancient and magnificent city of Chester), which no longer survives.
Bradshaw’s second work, the English Chronicon and a Life of St.Werburgh, was finished, according to a dedicatory BALLADE at the end of the manu-script, in 1513, the year Bradshaw died.It contains passages on the founding of the city of Chester, a chronicle of the kings of Mercia, and also a life of St. Werburgh. Bradshaw describes her as the daughter of King Wulfere of Mercia. St. Ermenilde and St. Sexburge, abbesses at Ely, are Werburgh’s mother and grandmother. Bradshaw narrates the founding of Chester by a legendary giant named Leon Gaur, he tells of the Norse invasions of 875, and he relates the great fire of 1180 that threatened Chester until it was miraculously quenched when St.Werburgh’s shrine was carried into the streets. Little of Bradshaw’s work is original. Among others, he cites BEDE,WILLIAM OFMALMESBURY, GIRALDUS CAMBRENSIS, and Ranulph HIGDEN as sources; but his most important source was a Latin text called the True or Third Passionary, an anonymous life of the saint that Bradshaw found in St. Werburgh’s library.
Bradshaw’s poem was printed in 1521. It has since been both praised and derided by critics. Some have seen in the poem a refreshing kind of naïve or folk genius. Others have decried Bradshaw’s apparent lack of any sense of meter. In any case Bradshaw wrote not for a courtly but for an unsophisticated audience, and none of his critics has questioned the sincere piety evident in his work.
Bibliography
■ Horstmann, Carl, ed. The Life of Saint Werburge of Chester. 1887. Reprint, Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus Reprint, 1988.