active 1173-1215 de Brakelond Jocelin

Jocelin de Brakelond was an English Benedictine monk of Bury St Edmunds Abbey, active from about 1173 to 1215. He is remembered for a chronicle describing the abbey during the troubled rule of Abbot Hugh and the later leadership of Abbot Samson.

His account is valued because it is direct, practical, and full of detail about everyday monastic life, local politics, and the personalities around him. Later readers helped keep his work in view, especially after Thomas Carlyle drew on it in Past and Present.

Reliable portrait images are not readily available on the pages found for him, which is not unusual for a medieval writer of this period.