Sulcard
Open-knowledge reference entry
Sulcard (floruit c. 1080) was a Benedictine monk at St. Peter's, Westminster Abbey, and the author of the first history of the abbey.
Little is known of Sulcard, whose unusual name may reflect either Anglo-Saxon or Norman parentage. His entrance into the monastery may be dated to the 1050s and it is possible that he was previously attached to the cathedral priory at Rochester, which receives a noticeable degree of attention in his work.
Prologus de Construccione Westmonasterii
The sole work which Sulcard is known to have produced is the so-called Prologus de Construccione Westmonasterii (“Prologue concerning the Building of Westminster”), dedicated to Abbot Vitalis of Bernay (c. 1076–?1085) and hence datable to about 1080. It relates the history of the abbey, beginning in the time of Mellitus, bishop of London (604—17), with the foundation of its first church on what was then Thorney Island by a wealthy Londoner and his wife. It concludes with the dedication of a new church erected by King Edward the Confessor (r. 1042–1066) for the monastery.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 25, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q7636069. VIAF identifies the subject as 42272165. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1080, 1076, 1085 and 1042.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sulcard” 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.