John of Eversden
Chronicler and monk
John of Eversden or Everisden (fl. 1300) was an English chronicler.
Life
John was presumably a native of one of the two villages of that name near Caxton, Cambridgeshire. He entered the Benedictine order, having been tonsured in 1255, and became a member of the Bury St Edmunds Abbey. He was cellarer there in 1300, when he made a "valida expedition" into Northamptonshire to carry out a claim of his monastery on the manor of Werketon (Warkton).
In the following year, 1 June, he is mentioned in a bull of Boniface VIII confirming the election of Abbot Thomas, and in January 1307 he attended the Parliament at Carlisle as proctor for his abbot. Nothing further is known of his life, and although for centuries he was remembered as a chronicler, his chief work was published merely as a continuation of the work done on the Chronicon ex chronicis by Florence of Worcester, without a suspicion of its authorship, except that it was apparently written by someone connected with Bury.
Works
The current edition was taken from a manuscript at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, No. 92, which stopped short at 1295. Another manuscript, mentioned by older biographers of Eversden, is preserved in the College of Arms (Norfolk MS. 30), and extends as far as 1296 in one handwriting; it is thence continued until 1301, after which date there is a break until 1313, "when a few slight notices occur, 1334, in another hand, and in a third an entry of 1382" The inference is that the work of Eversden himself ended in 1301, if not in 1296, and this chronicle is only original for the last portion. Down to 1152 it is a transcript of Henry of Huntingdon and his continuator, and thenceforth to 1265 it is a transcript of John de Taxster, likewise a monk of St.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “John of Eversden” is chronicler and monk. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through John, Eversden and Chronicler, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 30, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q16851581. VIAF identifies the subject as 336159474047327660922. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1300, 1255, 1307 and 1295.
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This entry incorporates text from “John of Eversden” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.