Thomas Elmham (1364in or after 1427
Life
Thomas Elmham was probably born at
North Elmham in
Norfolk. He may have been the Thomas Elmham who was a scholar at King's Hall, Cambridge from 1389 to 1394.
He became a
Benedictine monk at
Canterbury, and then joining the
, was prior of
Lenton Priory, near
Nottingham; he was chaplain to Henry V, whom he may have accompanied to
France in 1415, and may have been present at the Battle of Agincourt.
Works
Elmham wrote a history of the
monastery of St. Augustine at Canterbury, which was edited by
Charles Hardwick for the
Rolls Series (1858); and a
Liber metricus de Henrico V, edited by C. A. Cole in the
Memorials of Henry V (1858).
As well as this verse life of Henry V, Elmham himself says he wrote a prose biography of the king. The eighteenth-century editor of the
Vita et Gesta Henrici V, Thomas Hearne, made a claim for Elmham's authorship of that biography but, in fact, it was written in the mid-1430s, long after Elmham's death. The attribution was rejected by the early twentieth century and the
Vita et Gesta since then has gone by the designation of "Pseudo-Elmham" (this biography was the main source of the
Vita Henrici Quinti by Tito Livio Frulovisi). In the early twentieth century, it was suggested instead that Elmham's prose life could be equated with the
Gesta Henrici Quinti, which is the best authority for the life of Henry V from his accession to 1416. This work, sometimes referred to as the chaplain's life, and thought by some to have been written by Jean de Bordin, was first published for the English Historical Society by B. Williams (1850).
However, the modern editors of the
Gesta convincingly rejected this attribution to Elmham. In short, the prose life by Thomas Elmham is not known to survive.
Literature
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C. L. Kingsford, "The Early Biographies of Henry V", English Historical Review, xxv (1910), pp. 58–92.
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F. Taylor & J. S. Roskell ed., Gesta Henrici Quinti (Oxford, 1975), pp. xviii – xxiii and iid., "The Authorship and Purpose of the Gesta Henrici Quinti: I", Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, liii (1970–71), pp. 428–464.
External links
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The Text of the Liber Metricus De Henrico V
