THOMAS DE LA MARE

The first monk to be taken as a representative of his age is the long-lived abbot of St Albans, Thomas de la Mare, who held office for almost half a century and whom a distinguished modern historian has named the greatest in the long line of abbots of the premier house of England. Certainly, whether we assent to this judgement or not, it will not be disputed that Abbot de la Mare displays, magnified as it were to several dimensions, the qualities to be found in numerous prelates of his age; he occupies, in fact, very much the same place in monastic history as does Samson of Bury two centuries earlier, and had he found, like Samson, a vates sacer with a memory and a naïveté rivalling those of Jocelin of Brakelond, his name would doubtless be as familiar to his countrymen to-day.

His two predecessors had been men of marked individuality, if no more, and had shown, each in his own way, how such a house as St Albans could foster and give expansion to talents of all kinds that might otherwise have failed to blossom. Richard of Wallingford (b. 1291), the son of a blacksmith, was adopted, no doubt on account of his manifest promise, by the then prior of Wallingford, who sent him to Oxford—the Oxford of Duns Scotus—where he passed successfully through the arts course (1308–14), and at the age of twenty-three asked for the monastic habit at St Albans.