Frithegod

London, British Library, Cotton Claudius A. i, 32v, a sheet from Frithegod's poem Breuiloquium uitae Wilfridi, possibly in his own hand made in the mid-10th century. Frithegod, (flourished circa (c.) 950 to c. 958 We do not know when he entered the clergy, or when he was ordained a deacon, just the fact that he held that office. He went to Canterbury after meeting Oda, where he served Oda as one of the teachers of Oda's nephew Oswald of Worcester. He also wrote poems while at Canterbury. which "may be dubiously described as the 'masterpiece' of Anglo-Latin hermeneutic style". Another scholar, Rose Graham, characterised his style as "long-winded and pretentious".

The Breviloquium is 1400 lines and its meaning is not always clear, even when compared to the Life of St Wilfrid which was its basis. The poem adds nothing new to historian's knowledge of Wilfrid, and in Lapidge's view its sole purpose was to "demonstrate [Frithegod's] poetic skill which, in the mid-tenth century, was unparalleled elsewhere in England". The Breviloquium contains a number of neologisms and Greek words, the rarity of some of which imply that Frithegod had some knowledge of the Greek language. The medieval scholar Eadmer, who used the poem on Wilfrid in his own works, said that the original poem was too full of Greek words to be read very often.

A modern edition of the Breviloquium was published in 1950. The historian Richard Gameson suggested that the copy of the Breviloquium in the Cotton Library as Claudius A.i on folios 5–36 was written by Frithegod himself, as it is in a mid-10th-century continental minuscule scribal hand, rather than the different English style of the Canterbury scriptorium. Besides the Cotton Library manuscript, two other manuscripts of the work exist. and the other is in Paris, in the Bibliotheque Nationale with the catalogue of lat. 8431. All three manuscripts probably date from the mid-10th century and were likely produced while Frithegod was still in Canterbury. They have glosses throughout, although most of the notations are in the Latin language rather than Old English.

Other works Frithegod wrote a number of other works, not all of which survive to the present day. A 16th-century antiquary, John Bale, knew of a manuscript that contained, besides the Breviloquium, a work on the life of St Ouen – whose relics Oda had also acquired, two poems, another work entitled De Visione Beatorum, and a work given the title of Contemplationes Variae. Although the Life of Ouen and the two named works do not survive, the two poems do in other manuscripts.

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