He came agayne and dwelled in the
abbaye of Ludene of Whyte Monks in Irlonde, and tolde of joye and of
paynes that he had seen." The history of Enius had, however, existed
in MS. for nearly three centuries and a half before the Polychronicon
was printed; it had been written by Henry, the monk of Saltrey in
Huntingdonshire, from the account which he had received from Gilbert,
a Cistercian monk of the Abbey of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Luden,
or Louth, in Lincolnshire (Colgan, 'Trias Thaumaturgae', p. 281.
Ware's 'Annals of Ireland', A.D. 1497). Colgan, after collating this
MS. with two others on the same subject which he had seen, printed it
nearly in full in his 'Trias', which was published at Louvain, A.D.
1647, where with the notes it fills from the 273rd to the 281st page.
Messingham, as we have seen, had printed it earlier from other
sources, in 1624. Matthew Paris, however, had before this, in his
History of England, under the date 1153, given a full account of the
adventures of Oenus in the Purgatory, and in the few places that I
have compared his account with that given in Colgan, I find both
generally agreeing in substance, though not in words. In the folio
edition of Mathew Paris, London, 1604, the history of Oenus begins at
the 72nd and ends at the 77th page. In Montalvan's life of St.
Patrick, the adventures of Enius are given much more fully than
either in Matthew Paris or Colgan.
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