Jocelin de Brakelonde

Jocelin de Brakelonde, a Benedictine monk at Bury St Edmunds, who held successively the offices of abbot's chaplain and almoner, wrote a domestic chronicle of his abbey from 1173 to the year 1202, and died about 1211. This is the famous Chronica Jocelini de Brakelonda, edited by J. G. Rokewode for the Camden Society in 1840, which gave Carlyle the inspiration out of which grew Past and Present, one of the happiest of his works. The admiration of this simple and veracious 13th-century monk for his superior, Abbot Sampson, touched the sympathetic imagination of the great 19th-century champion of hero-worship, with whose masterpiece Jocelin's name will remain for ever inalienably linked.