Page:The Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon.djvu/13



The credit to be attached to an historical writer depends so much on his individual character, and his opportunities of acquiring infonnation, that the student must naturally wish to know something of the personal history of an author to whose works his attention is invited. Such memoirs are frequently compiled from scanty materials, hut it may be reasonably expected that their details, however defective, be at least correct as far as they extend. The author, one of our earliest national historians, the most valuable of whose works is now presented for the first time to the English reader, happily supplies the means of satisfying a natural curiosity, in the incidental references of a personal nature which may be collected from them. It is, therefore, somewhat singular, that most of the writers who have supplied biographical notices of one so well known as Henry of Huntingdon, should be at variance with each other, while they have been led into some inaccuracies. A careful examination, however, of his own works will seme to place the few facts of his personal and literaiy history, to be gleaned from them, on a correct footing.

There appears little doubt that our author was a native of Lincoln, or of some part of that formerly very extensive and important diocese; and that he was born towards the close of the eleventh century, probably between the years 1080 and 1090. His father's name was Nicholas, and that he was an ecclesiastic of some distinction in the church of Lincoln, we learn from an affectionate tribute to his