Geoffrey of Wells

Who is Geoffrey of Wells?

Geoffrey of Wells was a mid-twelfth-century English hagiographer, doubtless formerly a canon of Wells Cathedral, whose De Infantia Sancti Edmundi, part of the burgeoning library of twelfth-century legendaries concerning Saint Edmund accounted the royal saint's childhood to have been full of adventure; he dedicated his "largely spurious account" to Ording, eighth abbot of Bury St. Edmunds, and spoke of the encouragement of another well-placed Anglo-Saxon, Prior Sihtric. The manuscript of Geoffrey's pious embroidery was among the manuscripts collected by the early seventeenth-century antiquary Robert Bruce Cotton, now conserved in the British Library.