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 OF MALMESBURY, 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.