Library › Latin: History › Dies Obitualis Lanfranci
This anonymous obituary notice commemorates Lanfranc, archbishop of Canterbury, on the anniversary of his death, the fifth day before the Kalends of June. It praises him as a most faithful upholder of the Catholic faith, and lists his benefactions to his church in detail: he rebuilt it from the foundations and completed it, adorned it with ornaments of gold and gems, enriched it with many monks, and built the cloisters, cellars, refectories, dormitories and other buildings within the precinct together with its wall. He gave the church many books, a large number of which he corrected himself, and he recalled the archbishop of York and the other bishops of the realm to their due subjection to Canterbury.
The notice continues with his recovery of lands taken from the church, his provision of houses for the archbishops on their manors, and his rebuilding of the church of Rochester, where he established monks. Such obituary entries were read in the community on the anniversary of a benefactor’s death, and this one offers a contemporary summary of how Canterbury remembered Lanfranc’s work as builder, reformer and defender of its primacy after the Norman Conquest. It is short, at about 400 words, but precise and informative, and it is useful alongside the longer lives and chronicles of the period.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from Corpus Corporum, the Latin text repository of the University of Zurich (edition: Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 150, Parisiis 1854), reused with attribution for non-commercial purposes (CC BY-NC-SA). Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.