Malmesbury is supposed to have been a British town, and also a Roman settlement. A castle is known to have existed there as early as the 7th century, at which time the monastery was also founded. It received its first charter from Edward the Elder, which was confirmed by Athelstan. The charter granted to it by Charles I. has undergone various modifications, and at present it is governed by a high steward, an aiderman, and twelve capital burgesses. From the reign of Edward I. the town sent two members to parliament; since the Reform Act of 1832 it has returned only one. During the civil war it was twice captured by the parliamentarians and once by the royalists. Malmesbury is the birthplace of the philosopher Hobbes. Athelstan was buried at Malmesbury, but the Gothic canopy in the church called his tomb dates from the 16th century.

MALMESBURY, James Harris, Earl of (1746-1820), the best-known English diplomatist of the latter half of the 18th century, was born at Salisbury on April 21, 1746. He was the son of James Harris (q.υ.), the author of Hermes, and, what was important for his son’s future success, M.P. for Christchurch, a lord of the· treasury under George Grenville (1763-65), and comptroller to the queen (177 4-80). Educated at Winchester, Oxford, and Leyden, the younger Harris was intended for diplomacy. In 1768 he became secretary to the British embassy at Madrid, and in 1770 he was left as charge d'affaires at that court on the departure of Sir James Gray until the arrival of George Pitt, afterwards Lord Rivers. This interval gave him his opportunity; he discovered the intention of Spain to attack the Falkland Islands, and was instrumental in thwarting it by putting on a bold countenance. As a reward he was appointed minister ad interim at Madrid, and in January 1772 minister plenipotentiary to the court of Prussia. His success was marked, and in 1776 he was transferred to the court of Russia. At St Petersburg he made his reputation, for he managed to get on with Catherine in spite of her predilections for France, and steered adroitly through the accumulated difficulties of the first Armed Neutrality. In 1782 Sir James Harris (he was now a Knight of the Bath) returned home from ill-health, and was appointed by his friend Fox minister at the Hague, an appointment confirmed after some delay by Pitt, which he took up in July 1784. He did very great service in furthering Pitt’s policy of maintaining England’s influence on the Continent by the arms of her allies, and held the threads of the diplomacy which ended in the king of Prussia’s overthrowing the republican party in Holland, which was inclined to France, and re-establishing the prince of Orange. He was in recognition of his services created Lord Malmesbury of Malmesbury in the county of Wilts, and permitted by the king of Prussia to bear the Prussian eagle on his arms, and by the prince of Orange to use his motto “je maintiendrai.” In 1789 he returned to England, and took an anxious interest in politics, which ended in his seceding from the Whig party with the duke of Portland in 1793, in which year he was sent, but in vain, to try to keep Prussia true to the first coalition against France. In 1794 he was sent to Brunswick to solicit the hand of the unfortunate Princess Caroline for the prince of Wales, to marry her as proxy, and conduct her to her husband in England. In 1796 and 1797 he was at Paris and Lille vainly negotiating with the French Directory. After 1797 he became partially deaf, and quitted diplomacy altogether; but for his long and eminent services he was in 1800 created earl of Malmesbury, and Viscount Fitzharris, of Heron Court in the county of Hants. He now became a sort of political Nestor, consulted on foreign policy by successive foreign ministers, trusted by men of the most different ideas in political crises, and above all was the confidant, and for a short time after Pitt’s death almost the political director, of Canning. Younger men were also wont to go to him for advice, and Lord Palmerston particularly, who was his ward, was tenderly attached to him, and owed many of his ideas on foreign policy directly to his teaching. His later years were free from politics, and till his death in 1820 he lived very quietly and almost forgotten. As a statesman, Malmesbury had an influence among his contemporaries which is scarcely to be understood from his writings, but which must have owed much to personal charm of manner and persuasiveness of tongue; as a diplomatist, he seems to have deserved his reputation, and shares with Macartney, Auckland, and Whitworth the credit of raising diplomacy from a profession in which only great nobles won the prizes to a career opening the path of honour to ability.

Malmesbury did not publish anything himself, except an account of the Dutch revolution, and an edition of his father’s works, but his grandson the third earl published four volumes of his diaries and correspondence from 1768-1807, and afterwards two volumes of letters to and from his family and friends.

MALMESBURY, William of, an historical writer of t∩e 12th century, the date of whose birth is usually assigned to the year 1095, but may with more probability be placed some twenty years earlier. It may reasonably be conjectured from his own statement (“utriusque gentis sanguinem traho ”) that he was the son of a Norman father and an English mother; he undoubtedly represents the fusion of the two races, although his sympathies as a writer are unmistakably on the side of the conquerors. He received his early education at the ancient Benedictine abbey at Malmesbury, and he speaks of Aldhelm, bishop of Sherborne, the great benefactor and second founder of that house, who died in 709, as his “lord and patron,” to whom he was indebted both for his life and his learning iff! esta Pont., sec. 273). The earliest known incident in his personal history is the fact, which he himself records, that he assisted the abbot Godefrey in collecting books to form the first library of the abbey. William himself subsequently became the librarian, and was also precentor of the abbey; in 1140 he received the offer of the abbacy, an honour which he declined, probably from a desire to secure as much leisure as possible for study. In his later life he was honoured by the particular friendship of Robert, earl of Gloucester, a natural son of Henry I., and a distinguished patron of learned men and letters. In politics he was a warm partisan of the empress Matilda against Stephen, and he was present at the council of Winchester convened by her supporters in 1141. His death is supposed to have occurred in or after 1142.

Printed Works.— William’s earliest important work was the Gesta Regum Anglorum, which he dedicated to his patron, the earl of Gloucester. It was originally completed in 1120, but subsequently brought down to 1128. It extends from 449 a.d. to the twentyeighth year of the reign of Henry I., and is a record of the highest value, preserving from unknown sources numerous facts which would otherwise be lost to us. In 1125 William completed his Gesta Pontificum Anglorum. He himself tells us that the production of this work cost him especial pains, but that the material for its composition was neither so abundant nor so easily reducible to consistency as that for the Gesta Regum. The work may be regarded as the main source for our early ecclesiastical history, and constitutes the basis of later productions relating to the same subject at the same period. It is divided into five books, the bishops being grouped under their respective sees, and the chief monasteries under their jurisdiction being also noticed, sometimes at considerable length. The fifth book is mainly occupied by the life of St Aldhelm, and includes numerous details of interest not given in the earlier life by Faricius. The Gesta Pontificum is likewise brought by further additions down to the year 1140. William’s last work was a continuation of the Gesta Regum under the title of Historia Novella. It concludes abruptly with the escape of Matilda from Oxford when besieged there by Stephen in 1142, and the manner of its termination suggests that the narrative was broken off by the death of the writer. Like the Gesta Regum, the Historia is dedicated to the duke of Gloucester, whose doings in behalf of his sister Matilda are described in such a way äs to make him in a great measure the central figure of the narrative. Other printed writings of William are an account of the church of Glastonbury (included along with the life of St Aldhelm in Gale’s Scriptores Xf r .), and a life of St Wulstan, of which a considerable portion is given in the second volume of Wharton’s Anglia Sacra. The best text of the Gesta Regum and the Historia Novella is that given by Sir T. D. Hardy in the edition published by the English Historical Society in 1840; the text in Savile’s Scriptores is faulty in the extreme. The Gesta Pontificum was edited for the Rolls Series, in 1870, by Mr N. E. S. A. Hamilton, from a manuscript which he was the first to identify as the autograph of William himself.

Extant Works Unprinted.— Among these are Miracles of the Virgin Mary; Miracles of St Andrew; Life of St Dunstan ; a compend of the commentary on the book of Jeremiah attributed to Paschasius Radbertus; an abridgment of the treatise by Amalarius on Sacred Offices; Lives of the English Saints ; and an epitome of the History of Haymo of Fleury, together with other abridgments or transcripts of historical and legal writers,—this last being an autograph preserved in the Bodleian, where, or at the British Museum, the other manuscripts are also to be found.

Lost Works. —Among these are a Life of St Patrick ; a metrical Life of St Aelfgiva ; the Miracles of St Benignus ; and the Little Chronicle, in three books (of which a supposed fragment is preserved at the British Museum, Lansdowne MS. No. 436). The work which we have probably most cause to regret is the Itinerarvum Johannis Ablatis, or account of the journey of John, abbot of Malmesbury, to Rome in 1140. This was written by William from the oral account which he received from Peter Baldwin, John’s companion. A few extracts are given by Leland in his Collectanea, iii. 272.

Malmesbury’s merits as an historian are of a very high order. He labours, it is true, under the defect of being but imperfectly acquainted with English institutions, and having but little sympathy with the English race, while he occasionally evinces a Norman contempt for the English language. His habitual carelessness in chronology is also at times extremely perplexing, and his narrative of facts is alloyed with romantic details which serve to excite distrust with respect to his general credibility. But, notwithstanding these faults, he is entitled to rank as an authority (in relation to the period of which he treats) with Bede and Matthew Paris. He is again the first of our historical writers in whom the critical faculty is to any extent discernible, and the comparisons which he occasionally institutes between two different and discrepant accounts of the same events form a noteworthy feature in his mode of treatment. The pains and judgment which he employs in the arrangement of his materials are also often no less conspicuous than his industry in collecting them.

Malmö (Malmhauge, Malmey, Malmöye, Malmoughe), sometimes called “Ancona Scanorum” or “Ellenbogen,” first appears in history about the middle of the 13th century. During the Hanseatic period it was the most important commercial town on the Sound, but in the 16th and 17th centuries greatly lost ground owing to the decay of its herring fisheries and the rise of its rival Copenhagen. Its modern prosperity is largely due to the enterprise of Frans Suell, one of its merchants, who first constructed the harbour, which has more than once been enlarged subsequently.