Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

view of the Reformation, had caused much offence. Gage, whose scholarship Lingard
endorsed, in no way supported the Glastonbury romance, but he was writing about a
specific benedictional, which really was a local variant, pointing out that ‘it has even
been a question with the learned, whether special benedictions of the people ever
constituted part of the Roman Liturgy’. 47 Local variations are one thing, a fully
independent church is quite another but here, as elsewhere, national mythology was
allowed to cast a mist over the finer outlines of argument and so Gage’s findings proved
acceptable.
Even more so was his transcript of another self-contained text, the Chronicle of
Jocelin of Brakelond. The manuscript, from the Harleian collection, which Gage edited
and published under the auspices of the Camden Society in 1840, was the perfect material
for the Jonathan Oldbuck view of pre-Reformation monastic England. Comprising ‘the
annals of the Monastery of St Edmund from the year 1173 to 1202’ it was interesting
Gage noted not so much for its mention of historic events, as for its picture of ‘the variety
of ordinary incidents detailed, from which often something is to be learnt touching our
language, manners, and customs, or our system, civil and religious, particularly the
monastic polity’. 48 ‘Manners and customs’, the meat and drink of both antiquarianism
and historical romance, combined with questions of ‘polity’ so much discussed in the
troubled 1840s, gave Carlyle the perfect starting point for Past and Present, his
meditation on the Condition of England question, published in 1843. In it he gave Gage
full credit for performing ‘his editorial function well’ adding:
Not only has he deciphered his crabbed Manuscript into clear print; but he has attended, what his fellow
editors are not always in the habit of doing to the important truth that the Manuscript so deciphered ought
to have a meaning for the reader. Standing faithfully by his text, and printing its very errors in spelling, in
grammar or otherwise, he has taken care by some note to indicate that they are errors, and what the
correction of them ought to be. 49
47
Hengrave mss 21/4/116.
48
Gage, Chronica Jocelini de Braklonda, Preface, p. vii.
49
Carlyle, Past and Present, p.46.
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