Angels in Early Medieval England (Oxford Theology and Religion Monographs) 9780198785378, 0198785372

Citation preview

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OXFORD THEOLOGY AND RELIGION MONOGRAPHS Editorial Committee J. BARTON M. J. EDWARDS G. D. FLOOD D. N. J. MACCULLOCH

M. N. A. BOCKMUEHL P. S. FIDDES S. R. I. FOOT G. WARD

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OXFORD THEOLOGY AND RELIGION MONOGRAPHS Patmos in the Reception History of the Apocalypse Ian Boxall (2013)

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Heidegger’s Eschatology Theological Horizons in Martin Heidegger’s Early Work Judith Wolfe (2013) Ethics and Biblical Narrative A Literary and Discourse-Analytical Approach to the Story of Josiah S. Min Chun (2014) Hindu Theology in Early Modern South Asia The Rise of Devotionalism and the Politics of Genealogy Kiyokazu Okita (2014) Ricoeur on Moral Religion A Hermeneutics of Ethical Life James Carter (2014) Canon Law and Episcopal Authority The Canons of Antioch and Serdica Christopher W. B. Stephens (2015) Time in the Book of Ecclesiastes Mette Bundvad (2015) Bede’s Temple An Image and its Interpretation Conor O’Brien (2015) Defending the Trinity in the Reformed Palatinate The Elohistae Benjamin R. Merkle (2015) The Vision of Didymus the Blind A Fourth-Century Virtue-Origenism Grant D. Bayliss (2015)

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Angels in Early Medieval England RICHARD SOWERBY

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Richard Sowerby 2016 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2016 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2015960790 ISBN 978–0–19–878537–8 Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Acknowledgements The seeds of this book were planted a very long time ago, in an essay about Bede and Adomnán written during my final year as an undergraduate at the University of St Andrews. I suspect that Alex Woolf might not have been so encouraging about that piece of work had he known how long I would be carrying it around in my head, through the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Much of this book’s evolution in those years was overseen by Sarah Foot, for whose tireless enthusiasm, careful critique, and patient forbearance I remain profoundly grateful. Further support of another kind was given by the Arts and Humanities Research Council; by a Senior Scholarship at Christ Church, Oxford; and by a Fellowship at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, endowed by the generosity of John Osborn. A great number of people have given gladly of their time, expertise, and unpublished research in answer to all manner of queries, great and small. Particular thanks go to John Arnold, Graham Barrett, Lisa Colton, Marie Conn, Katy Cubitt, Helen Foxhall Forbes, Yannis Galanakis, Mary Garrison, Cristian Gaşpar, Karen Jolly, Anne Kreps, Diarmaid MacCulloch, George Molyneaux, Ellen Muehlberger, Conor O’Brien, James Palmer, Henry Parkes, Tom Pickles, Christine Rauer, Tamsin Rowe, Maria Elena Ruggerini, Laura Sangha, Alan Thacker, Laura Varnam, Benjamin Withers, David Woodman, and Charles Wright. I am no less indebted to the kindness and good humour of friends: chief among them Lesley Abrams, Leif Dixon, Phil Dunshea, Renée Hlozek, John Hudson, Patrick Lantschner, Sarah Mallet, Rosamond McKitterick, Oliver Pengelley, Ben Pohl, and Andy Woods. But the greatest debt is owed to my parents, Ann and Steve Sowerby, by whose generosity and love I am continually humbled; and to Stacey Caldicott, without whom the last few years would have been much more difficult, and much less fun.

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Contents List of Illustrations Abbreviations and Short Titles

Introduction

ix xi 1

Part I. Past Opinions 1. Filling the Silence of the Bible

17

2. The Meanings of Angels

45

Part II. Unseen Worlds 3. The Changing Fortunes of the Guardian Angel 4. The Rules of the Otherworld

79 110

Part III. Losing Beliefs 5. The Servants of the Saints

149

6. Prayer, Benediction, and the Edges of Beliefs

185

Postscript Bibliography Index

220 223 251

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List of Illustrations 1. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11, p. ii © Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

18

2. London, British Library, Cotton Claudius B.iv, 2r © The British Library Board.

43

3. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11, p. 3 © Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

43

4. Eyam, Derbyshire: remains of standing cross © Richard Sowerby.

51

5. Dewsbury, West Yorkshire: fragment of cross arm © Archaeological Services WYAS, photographed by Paul Gwilliam.

53

6. Otley, West Yorkshire: fragment of cross-shaft © Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, photographed by Ken Jukes and Derek Craig.

53

7. Halton, Lancashire: fragment of cross-shaft © Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, photographed by Ross Trench-Jellicoe.

53

8. Halton, Lancashire: fragment of cross-shaft © Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, photographed by Ross Trench-Jellicoe.

56

9. Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna: detail of mosaic © Nick Thompson, University of Auckland.

56

10. London, British Library, Harley 603, 17v and 18r © The British Library Board.

108

11. Utrecht, Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS 32, 17r © Universiteitsbibliotheek Utrecht.

108

12. Remains of St Cuthbert’s wooden coffin © Richard Sowerby, after Donald McIntyre, The Coffin of Saint Cuthbert, ed. Ernst Kitzinger (Oxford, 1960).

198

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Abbreviations and Short Titles Adomnán, VC

Adomnán, Vita S. Columbae, ed. and trans. Alan Orr Anderson and Marjorie Ogilvie Anderson, Adomnán’s ‘Life of Columba’ (2nd edn., Oxford, 1991)

Ælfric, CH, I

Ælfric, Catholic Homilies (first series), ed. Peter Clemoes, Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The First Series (Oxford, 1997)

Ælfric, CH, II

Ælfric, Catholic Homilies (second series), ed. Malcolm Godden, Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The Second Series (Oxford, 1979)

Ælfric, Supp.

Ælfric, Supplementary Homilies, ed. J. C. Pope, Homilies of Ælfric: A Supplementary Collection, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1967–8)

Ælfwine’s Prayerbook

London, British Library, Cotton Titus D.xxvi + xxvii (Ælfwine’s Prayerbook), ed. Beate Günzel, Ælfwine’s Prayerbook (London, 1993)

Æthelwulf, DA

Æthelwulf, De abbatibus, ed. and trans. Alistair Campbell, Æthelwulf: De abbatibus (Oxford, 1967)

Alcuin, Ep.

Alcuin, Epistolae, ed. Ernst Dümmler, MGH, Epp. IV.2 (Berlin, 1895), 18–48

Aldhelm, CdV

Aldhelm, Carmen de uirginitate, ed. Rudolf Ehwald, MGH, Auct. ant. XV (Berlin, 1913–19), 327–471

ASC

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

A

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition. Volume 3: MS A, ed. Janet M. Bately (Cambridge, 1986)

B

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition. Volume 4: MS B, ed. Simon Taylor (Cambridge, 1983)

C

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition. Volume 5: MS C, ed. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (Cambridge, 2001)

D

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition. Volume 6: MS D, ed. G.P. Cubbin (Cambridge, 1996)

E

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition. Volume 7: MS E, ed. Susan Irvine (Cambridge, 2004)

F

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition. Volume 8: MS F, ed. Peter S. Baker (Cambridge, 2000)

ASE

Anglo-Saxon England

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xii

Abbreviations and Short Titles

ASPR

The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, ed. George P. Krapp and Elliott van Kirk Dobbie, 6 vols. (New York, 1931–53)

B., VD

B., Vita S. Dunstani, ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom and Michael Lapidge, The Early Lives of St Dunstan (Oxford, 2012), 1–109

Bazire–Cross

Joyce Bazire and James E. Cross (eds.), Eleven Old English Rogationtide Homilies (2nd edn., London, 1989)

Bede, HE

Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford, 1969)

Bede, Hom.

Bede, Homeliarum euangelii, ed. David Hurst, CCSL 122 (Turnhout, 1960), 1–378

Bede, VCP

Bede, Vita S. Cuthberti, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave, Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert: A Life by an Anonymous Monk of Lindisfarne and Bede’s Prose Life (Cambridge, 1940)

Blickling

Princeton, Scheide Library, MS 71 (The Blickling Homilies), ed. and trans. Richard J. Kelly, The Blickling Homilies (London, 2003)

Brodie Pontifical

London, British Library, Add. 57337 (The Brodie Pontifical), ed. Marie A. Conn, ‘The Dunstan and Brodie (Anderson) Pontificals: an edition and study’, unpublished Ph.D thesis, University of Notre Dame (1993), 172–338

Byrhtferth, VO

Byrhtferth, Vita S. Oswaldi, ed. and trans. Michael Lapidge, Byrhtferth of Ramsey: The Lives of St Oswald and St Ecgwine (Oxford, 2009), 1–203

CASSS

Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture (Oxford, 1984– )

CCCC

Corpus Christi College, Cambridge

CCCM

Corpus christianorum continuatio mediaeualis

CCSA

Corpus christianorum series apocryphorum

CCSL

Corpus christianorum series latina

Cerne

Cambridge, University Library, Ll.1.10 (The Book of Cerne), ed. A. B. Kuypers, The Prayer Book of Aedeluald the Bishop, Commonly Called the Book of Cerne (Cambridge, 1902)

CSEL

Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum

Die Briefe

Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, ed. Michael Tangl, MGH, Epp. sel. I (Berlin, 1955)

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Abbreviations and Short Titles

xiii

Dunstan Pontifical

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 943 (The Dunstan Pontifical), ed. Marie A. Conn, ‘The Dunstan and Brodie (Anderson) Pontificals: an edition and study’, unpublished Ph.D thesis, University of Notre Dame (1993), 24–172

Durham Collectar

Durham, Cathedral Library, A.IV.19 (The Durham Collectar): 1r–61r, ed. Alicia Corrêa, The Durham Collectar (London, 1992); 61r–88v, ed. U. Lindelöf, Rituale ecclesiae Dunelmensis. The Durham Collectar (London, 1927)

Egbert Pontifical

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 10575 (The Egbert Pontifical), ed. H. M. J. Banting, Two Anglo-Saxon Pontificals (London, 1989)

EETS

Early English Text Society

EHR

English Historical Review

Eighth-Century Gelasian

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 12048 (The Gellone Sacramentary), ed. A. Dumas, CCSL 159–159A (Turnhout, 1981)

EME

Early Medieval Europe

Fadda

A. M. Luiselli Fadda (ed.), Nuove omelie anglosassoni della rinascenza benedettina (Florence, 1977)

Felix, VG

Felix, Vita S. Guthlaci, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave, Felix’s Life of St Guthlac (Cambridge, 1956)

H&S

Arthur West Haddan and William Stubbs (eds.), Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents relating to Great Britain and Ireland, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1869–78)

Harleian Prayerbook

British Library, Harley 7653 (The Harley Fragment), ed. F. E. Warren, The Antiphonary of Bangor: Part II (London, 1895), appendix

HBS

Henry Bradshaw Society

JEGP

Journal of English and Germanic Philology

JML

Journal of Medieval Latin

JTS

Journal of Theological Studies

Lantfred, Translatio

Lantfred, Translatio et miracula S. Swithuni, ed. and trans. Michael Lapidge, The Cult of St Swithun (Oxford, 2003), 252–333

Leofric Missal A, B, C

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 579 (The Leofric Missal), ed. Nicholas Orchard, The Leofric Missal, 2 vols. (London, 2002)

LSE

Leeds Studies in English

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xiv

Abbreviations and Short Titles

MGH

Monumenta Germaniae Historica

Auct. ant.

Auctores antiquissimi

Capit.

Capitularia regum Francorum

Capit. episc.

Capitularia episcoporum

Epp.

Epistolae

Epp. sel.

Epistolae selectae

Poetae

Poetae Latini medii aevi

SS

Scriptores (in folio)

SS rer. Germ.

Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi

SS rer. Merov.

Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum

Napier

Arthur Napier (ed.), Wulfstan. Sammlung der ihm zugeschriebenen Homilien (Berlin, 1883)

Nunnaminster

British Library, Harley 2965 (The Book of Nunnaminster), ed. Walter de Gray Birch, An Ancient Manuscript of the Eighth or Ninth Century (London, 1889)

Old Gelasian

Vatican, Biblioteca apostolica, cod. reg. 316 + Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 7193, 41/56 (The Old Gelasian Sacramentary), ed. Leo Cunibert Mohlberg, Liber sacramentorum Romanae aeclesiae ordinis anni circuli (Rome, 1960)

OTP

James H. Charlesworth (ed.), The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 2 vols. (London, 1983–5)

P&P

Past and Present

PG

Patrologia Graeca, ed. J.-P. Migne, 161 vols. (Paris, 1857–66)

PL

Patrologia Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, 221 vols. (Paris, 1844–65)

RegConc

Regularis concordia, ed. Lucia Kornexl, Die ‘Regularis Concordia’ und ihre altenglische Interlinearversion (Munich, 1993)

Robert Benedictional

Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale, Y.7 (369) (The Benedictional of Archbishop Robert), ed. H. A. Wilson, The Benedictional of Archbishop Robert (London, 1903)

Robert Missal

Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale, Y.6 (274) (The Missal of Robert of Jumièges), ed. H. A. Wilson, The Missal of Robert of Jumièges (London, 1896)

Royal Prayerbook

British Library, Royal 2.A.xx (The Royal Prayerbook), ed. A. B. Kuypers, The Prayer Book of Aedeluald the Bishop, Commonly Called the Book of Cerne (Cambridge, 1902), appendix

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Abbreviations and Short Titles

xv

S

P. H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and Bibliography (London, 1968); unless otherwise stated, charters are cited from the Electronic Sawyer,

Stephen, VW

Stephen, Vita S. Wilfridi, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave, The Life of Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus (Cambridge, 1927)

Supplement

Supplementum Anianense, ed. Jean Deshusses, La sacramentaire grégorien, 3 vols. (Freiburg, 1971–82), i. 349–605

VCA

Vita S. Cuthberti auctore anonymo, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave, Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert: A Life by an Anonymous Monk of Lindisfarne and Bede’s Prose Life (Cambridge, 1940), 59–139

Vercelli

Vercelli, Biblioteca Capitolare, CXVII (The Vercelli Homilies), ed. D. G. Scragg, The Vercelli Homilies and Related Texts (Oxford, 1992)

Winchcombe Sacramentary

Orléans, Bibliothèque municipale 127 [105] (The Winchcombe Sacramentary), ed. Anselme Davril, The Winchcombe Sacramentary (London, 1995)

Wulfstan, Hom.

Wulfstan, Homilies, ed. Dorothy Bethurum, The Homilies of Wulfstan (Oxford, 1957) Wulfstan of Winchester, Narratio metrica de S. Swithuno, ed. and trans. Michael Lapidge, The Cult of St Swithun (Oxford, 2003), 372–551

Wulfstan of Winchester, Narratio Wulfstan of Winchester, VÆthel

Wulfstan of Winchester, Vita S. Æthelwoldi, ed. and trans. Michael Lapidge and Michael Winterbottom, Wulfstan of Winchester: The Life of St Æthelwold (Oxford, 1991)

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Introduction Searching for an appropriate image to sum up the Anglo-Saxon past in the first decades after the Norman Conquest, an unnamed author sought to conjure a sense of a golden age irrevocably lost. He struggled at first for words—‘What shall I say about England? What shall I tell future generations?’—before finally offering his lament for the present age. It went as follows: Woe unto you, England, you who once shone forth with holy, angelic offspring, but who now groans mightily with worry for your sins.1

Fleeting though this eulogy for pre-Conquest England was, the Anglo-Saxons themselves would have thought its choice of imagery apt. When they had considered their own history, they too had found it studded with angels. They had believed that the occasional visitations of heavenly beings had played a direct role in bringing the early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to Christianity, and that a steady stream of supernatural messengers had continued to take an interest in the affairs of the English ever since. From the end of the sixth century until the middle of the eleventh, Anglo-Saxon Christians dedicated churches to angels and adorned others with their image, speculated about their nature and their origins, prayed for their assistance, and anticipated a future world in which they would live alongside them in deathless eternity. Early medieval England in fact produced such a volume of material relating to these immaterial spirits that it would be possible, if one were so inclined, to string it together as a narrative, starting with the Northumbrian slave-boys whose faces were allegedly so angelic that a pope determined to convert their countrymen, and ending with the Norman fleet which landed in Sussex just as the churches of England were preparing to offer their annual prayers to the archangel Michael.2 1 Vita Ædwardi regis, II.7, ed. Frank Barlow, The Life of King Edward who Rests at Westminster, attributed to a Monk of Saint-Bertin (2nd edn., Oxford, 1992), 108. 2 The sources disagree about whether Duke William’s forces landed on Michaelmas or Michaelmas Eve: see Marjorie Chibnall, The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1968–80), ii. 170–1, n. 2. For Pope Gregory and the Northumbrian slave-boys, see later in this Introduction.

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2

Angels in Early Medieval England

A book which sought to produce that kind of narrative might succeed in drawing attention to a few lesser-known aspects of early medieval storytelling, but would only reinforce old impressions that these ideas occupied some quaint and esoteric corner of a superstitious Middle Ages. It is instead the aim of this book to find a way to use the Anglo-Saxons’ apparent fascination with angels to reveal something about their social ideals, their religious culture, and their mental picture of the world. The notion of taking seemingly arcane ideas about the supernatural, the otherworldly, and the imaginary, and using them as lenses with which to examine the society in which they evolved, is no longer an unusual one. In place of the regret once voiced by scholars, that so many ancient and medieval authors were prevented from commenting fully on the serious matters of their day by their taste for writing about the mysterious and the fantastical, there is now a greater awareness of the potential for using such preoccupations to uncover alternative—but complementary—insights into past societies. AngloSaxon England, indeed, has always been a productive focus for this kind of study, due in large part to the draw of the demon-stalked landscape at the heart of the poem Beowulf, as well as the variety of legendary material related to the saints and their miracles. It is now possible to turn to the Anglo-Saxons’ writings about elves in order to reconstruct their ideas about gender and medicine, to find their ecclesiastical politics buried within accounts of marvels worked at saints’ shrines, and to see stories about the wandering dead used in conjunction with the archaeological remains of their society.3 Examining the mental picture of the universe which early medieval men and women carried around in their heads has undoubtedly proved rewarding. Where the evidence permits us to come close to seeing the world as they did, it has frequently helped us to make sense of their actions, their outlook, and their societies. All too often, however, their thoughts remained their own. Every now and then, one or two particularly garrulous men and women might leave us some unusually full account of their beliefs, but such individuals are always few in number. Not only does this have the effect of reducing our source material to a handful of potentially unrepresentative opinions, it also inhibits our ability to see early medieval beliefs as dynamic and changeable, subject to 3 The literature here is vast, and the following works represent only some of the fullest selfcontained discussions. For Beowulf, see esp. Andy Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-Manuscript (Cambridge, 1993). For elves: Alaric Hall, Elves in AngloSaxon England: Matters of Belief, Health, Gender and Identity (Woodbridge, 2007). For saints’ cults: David Rollason, Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1989); and Alan Thacker and Richard Sharpe (eds.), Local Saints and Local Churches in the Early Medieval West (Oxford, 2002). For the wandering dead: John Blair, ‘The dangerous dead in early medieval England’, in Stephen Baxter et al. (eds.), Early Medieval Studies in Memory of Patrick Wormald (Farnham, 2009), 539–59. A holistic consideration of many of these separate strands is offered by Helen Foxhall Forbes, Heaven and Earth in Anglo-Saxon England: Theology and Society in an Age of Faith (Farnham, 2013).

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Introduction

3

reinterpretation by successive generations. A single document preserves a single iteration of an idea, suspended as if in amber, but seldom gives any sense of how much it resembled or differed from earlier versions of that same idea. Does a twelfth-century Anglo-Norman ghost story, for instance, express a view of the world which would have been recognizable to, say, a seventhcentury Anglo-Saxon Christian? Presumably the answer is: in some ways, but not in others. It can nevertheless be difficult to say more about how and why such ideas might have changed over time if our body of source material is discontinuous. And for the ideas and beliefs of Anglo-Saxon England at least, discontinuous sources are indeed a major problem. They hamper not only our sense of beliefs which lay outside the Christian mainstream, the evidence for which is notoriously fragmentary, but also even our understanding of comparatively well-attested religious phenomena like the cult of saints, since the great majority of our sources about the veneration of the holy dead is confined either to first three decades of the eighth century or to the final quarter of the tenth. Angels, on the other hand, appear to have received more or less constant attention from the thinkers, writers, and artists of Anglo-Saxon England after c.700 CE. Celestial beings reappear time and again in the earliest hagiographies of the eighth century, in the letters of insular writers sending word from the Carolingian empire, in the prayerbooks of the ninth century and the sermons of the tenth, as well as in manuscript decoration completed on the eve of the Norman Conquest. Their recurring presence in almost all the surviving traces of Anglo-Saxon culture means that this is above all a book about change. It traces one particular collection of beliefs as they shifted and developed over time, in ways perhaps barely registered by contemporaries, yet in ways which remodelled their own sense of the world they inhabited. For this was a period which experienced profound changes in other respects: changes of political allegiance, as the early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were brought under the control of an overarching ‘English kingdom’; of social organization, in tandem with the growth of towns and urban markets; and of ecclesiastical provision, as the character and structure of religious institutions underwent gradual transformation.4 It is easy to suspect that the mental world experienced similar transformations over this same long period, but often difficult to say more about how and why. This book aims to do just that, and to show how this single strand of early medieval thought connects with and illuminates other aspects of the religious imagination in Anglo-Saxon England.

4 The best points of entry into each of these issues are now: George Molyneaux, The Formation of the English Kingdom in the Tenth Century (Oxford, 2015); D. M. Palliser (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain. Vol. I: 600–1540 (Cambridge, 2008), 25–270; John Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford, 2005).

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4

Angels in Early Medieval England

The prospect of using Anglo-Saxon beliefs about angels in this way, as a prism through which to study broader changes in contemporary society, might initially seem limited. Faced with images of winged beings carved upon stone monuments from the Anglo-Saxon past, like the extraordinarily well-preserved angel found in excavations at Lichfield in 2003, the modern viewer could be forgiven for seeing little that was distinctive to the early Middle Ages and to early medieval thought. Visitors to the Lichfield Angel’s glass case in the city’s cathedral might be struck by its similarity to artistic models from Late Antiquity, or note that the arrangement of curled hair derives from still older, Hellenistic traditions; or they might observe that the angel was originally only the left-hand side of a larger panel, and speculate that the lost right-hand piece once contained an image of the Virgin Mary, thereby putting them in mind of other representations of the Annunciation familiar from later medieval and early modern art. Like many other artistic representations of angels, the Lichfield Angel appears caught between two worlds—between the creativity of Christianity’s early centuries, which first generated the familiar image of winged angels clad in flowing robes, and the definitive expression of that image during the Renaissance.5 Any distinctively early medieval contribution to that long tradition seems difficult to discern, or confined to the level of fleeting, ultimately inconsequential, details. A contemporary piece of theological writing might provoke the same response when an ostensibly detailed discussion of angels in an Anglo-Saxon sermon or biblical commentary is revealed, upon closer inspection, to be nothing more than an assemblage of recycled phrases culled from the pages of Augustine of Hippo, Gregory the Great, or Isidore of Seville. This ‘slavish adherence to earlier authorities’ which has been observed in more than one theological tract from the early Middle Ages might only dissuade us further from trying to find evidence of innovation in such a well-worn part of medieval Christian teaching.6 Anglo-Saxon intellectuals would hardly have sought to detract from this impression, either. Looking back through their scriptures, which gave abundant though somewhat disconnected evidence about the nature of angels, and through the writings of the Church Fathers, which attempted to impose order on those biblical hints, medieval Christians saw little that still required original interpretation. They were of the opinion that, although thinking about angels had once involved the careful assembly of enigmatic scriptural statements, this was no longer necessary. Instead, they surveyed the development of Christian 5 On the development of a distinctive iconography for angels in Late Antiquity, see Federica Pirani, ‘Quando agli angeli spuntarono le ali?’, in Serena Ensoli and Eugenio La Rocca (eds.), Aurea Roma. Dalla città pagana alla città cristiana (Rome, 2000), 389–94. On the Lichfield Angel itself, see Warwick Rodwell et al., ‘The Lichfield Angel: a spectacular Anglo-Saxon painted sculpture’, Antiquaries Journal 88 (2008), 48–108. 6 The opinion is that of M. L. W. Laistner, ‘A ninth-century commentator on the Gospel according to Matthew’, Harvard Theological Review 20 (1927), 129–49, at 129.

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Introduction

5

thought about angels with an air of confidence in a task which was now complete, singling out key figures who had resolved scripture’s deepest mysteries. In the Northumbrian monastery of Whitby, one early eighth-century hagiographer emphasized the contribution of Gregory the Great (d. 604), the revered pope who is now remembered chiefly for having launched a mission to convert the early Anglo-Saxons: Gregory dealt with their orders—the orders of the [angelic] hosts, that is—with an ingenuity that we have never found in any other saint before or since. Even St Augustine, a man sound in faith and pure of life, from whose belly flow rivers of living water, said about them: ‘I confess that I know nothing about these things.’ But not only did Gregory divide them up in their hosts, basing everything on holy scriptures, he also drew out the commonalities to our way of life, with that clean heart by which only the blessed shall see God.7

This sense of living in an age in which even the invisible organization of the heavens had been laid bare in the pages of patristic theology seems to reject any notion that the Anglo-Saxons—or any other early medieval Christians— could hold their own views, different from both what had come before and what was to follow. The sight of medieval writers expressing their complete indebtedness to past authorities gave cheer to some twentieth-century scholars too, who sought to uphold the sound doctrine of pre-modern believers by pointing to those occasions when they had found the shape of Christian teaching about angels to be at its ‘most constant and solid’.8 But in truth, patristic footsteps only led so far. Even those who followed the trail left by Pope Gregory the Great, whose contribution had been applauded in eighth-century Northumbria, would soon find that the opinions of the Church Fathers did not provide comprehensive guidance for every aspect of this invisible world of spirits. Someone who was interested in other theological questions could often rely upon enormous and influential works of sustained exegesis: the nine homilies on Creation penned by Ambrose of Milan, the twenty-two books written by Augustine about the City of God, or the massive exegetical project undertaken in Gregory’s own thirty-two-volume Moralia in Iob. On the subject of angels, however, the professional religious in the Latin West relied first and foremost on a single sermon, first delivered by Gregory to a congregation in Rome in the year 591.9 There, in the course of an exposition 7 Liber beatae Gregorii papae, ch. 25, ed. Bertram Colgrave, The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great by an Anonymous Monk of Whitby (Cambridge, 1968), 118–20. The words attributed to Augustine echo the sentiments of De ciuitate Dei (XV.1), Enchiridion (ch. 58), and De trinitate (III.iii.5), but are not an exact quotation. 8 Jean Daniélou, Les Anges et leur mission d’après les Pères de l’Église (Paris, 1951), 93. Cf. also Erik Peterson, Das Buch von den Engeln. Stellung und Bedeutung der heiligen Engel im Kultus (Leipzig, 1935). 9 Gregory, Homeliae in euangelia, XXXIV, ed. Raymond Étaix, Gregorius Magnus: Homiliae in evangelia, CCSL 141 (Turnhout, 1999), 299–319.

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on two parables from the gospel of Luke, the pope sketched for his audience the intricate workings of an unseen world. He described an ascending sequence of angelic orders, spanning the divide between humankind and the Creator. The names of these orders could be found scattered through the Old and New Testaments, and there were nine in total: angels, archangels, virtues, powers, principalities, dominations, thrones, cherubim, and seraphim. The titles indicated that each rank fulfilled its own distinct function, and implied that the nine hosts were arranged hierarchically, from the lower angels and archangels who brought messages to humanity, to the higher cherubim and seraphim who offered incomparable worship to God by virtue of their eternal closeness to him. Although Gregory noted apologetically that, ‘in unveiling the secrets of the heavenly citizens, I have digressed far from my proper subject’, his digression swiftly became embedded in the intellectual fabric of early medieval Christendom. The literate studied his words, or made use of the encyclopedic summary of them in the widely read Etymologiae (‘Etymologies’) written by Isidore, bishop of Seville (d. 636).10 What they found they pressed into service in their own sermons and liturgies.11 Passing references to ‘nine orders of angels’ were soon to be found in everything from private prayers to judicial formulae—so much so that when one monk from Ramsey sat down to list the exegetical significance of numbers at the turn of the eleventh century, the number nine suggested to him only angelic meanings.12 Gregory’s explanation of the angelic hosts had clearly proved revelatory. His Northumbrian devotee from early eighth-century Whitby (either a monk or a nun of that institution, given that the monastery housed both male and female inmates) in fact held up Gregory’s exposition as proof that the pope had gained his knowledge by revelation, thereby showing him to be the equal of St Peter and of the prophet Ezekiel before him.13 In reality, Gregory had drawn 10 Isidore, Etymologiae, VII.5, ed. W. M. Lindsay, Isidori Hispalensis episcopi etymologiarum sive originum libri XX, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1911). 11 A litany in a Breton psalter of c.900 does contain an additional rank of ‘seats’ (sedes) alongside the usual nine, but this in fact only confirms a general dependency on the Etymologiae. It derives from a misreading of Isidore’s statement that ‘throni sunt agmina angelorum, qui Latino eloquio sedes dicuntur’, by a compiler who was intent on listing as many heavenly intercessors as possible: Salisbury, Cathedral Library 180, 170r, ed. Michael Lapidge, AngloSaxon Litanies of the Saints (London, 1991), 288 [no. 44]. 12 Byrhtferth, Enchiridion, IV.1, ed. Peter S. Baker and Michael Lapidge, Byrhtferth’s ‘Enchiridion’ (Oxford, 1995), 212–14. A rare invocation of ‘XX ordines angelorum’, found in an adjuration against toothache in an Anglo-Saxon medical manuscript, is a simple scribal error, for later versions of the same formula give the more usual nine: see Lacnunga, 183v–184r, ed. Edward Pettit, Anglo-Saxon Remedies, Charms, and Prayers from British Library MS Harley 585: The Lacnunga, 2 vols. (Lewiston, NY, 2001), i. 108 [no. 158]. 13 Liber beatae Gregorii, ch. 27 (ed. Colgrave, p. 122). For the text’s creation and audience within a double monastic context, see esp. Diane Watt, ‘The earliest women’s writing? AngloSaxon literary cultures and communities’, Women’s Writing 20 (2013), 537–54, at 545–50.

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heavily upon the writings of a man whom he took to be Dionysius the Areopagite (a convert of St Paul’s briefly mentioned in the book of Acts), but who is now known to have been a Neoplatonic writer based, in all likelihood, in Syria around 500 CE.14 One of the treatises written by this pseudo-Dionysius was entitled The Celestial Hierarchy, an audacious piece of mystical theology based around an explanation of the angelic society, and it was from this that Gregory had derived much of his understanding of the nine orders of angels.15 Quite how Gregory came to know the works of pseudoDionysius is unclear, given that he had elsewhere professed his ignorance of Greek.16 But since pseudo-Dionysius’ Celestial Hierarchy would remain unknown in the West until the ninth century, when it was made more widely available in Latin translations, Pope Gregory’s homily was for many centuries the only sustained treatment of angels available in early medieval Europe.17 Early medieval Europe produced nothing to rival pseudo-Dionysius’ Celestial Hierarchy, nor even anything to rival Gregory’s much-simplified reworking of pseudo-Dionysus’s theology in his sermon on Luke. Only after the thirteenth century would medieval theologians begin to write their own sustained discourses about angels, and it has often seemed, as a result, that there is nothing more to say about the place of angels in the religious imagination of the early Middle Ages. But it would be a mistake to take that as a sign of an inactive age, populated by intellectuals who were content simply to repeat the judgements of previous thinkers. To do so is to ignore indications from other quarters that early medieval imaginations were still actively grappling with the subject of invisible beings. Take, for instance, the basic issue of what an angel was and how one might recognize it if it appeared before one’s eyes. A good grounding in patristic theology would equip an early medieval intellectual with the knowledge that it was technically incorrect to talk about ‘angels’ as if they were a particular kind of being. The Latin word angelus (like the Greek angelos from which it derived) meant simply ‘messenger’, and so denoted their function rather than their

14

On the author and his works, see variously: see Andrew Louth, Denys the Areopagite (London, 1989); Paul Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to their Influence (Oxford, 1993); Rosemary A. Arthur, Pseudo-Dionysius as Polemicist: The Development and Purpose of the Angelic Hierarchy in Sixth Century Syria (Aldershot, 2008). 15 Pseudo-Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchy, ed. Günter Heil and Adolf Martin Ritter, Corpus Dionysiacum II (Berlin, 1991). 16 For Gregory’s knowledge of Greek, with particular reference to the Celestial Hierarchy, see Joan M. Petersen, ‘Homo omnino Latinus? The theological and cultural background of Pope Gregory the Great’, Speculum 62 (1987), 529–51, esp. at 530–42. 17 P. G. Théry, Études dionysiennes. Hilduin, traducteur de Denys, 2 vols. (Paris, 1932–7); Iohannis Scoti Eriugenae Expositiones in ierarchiam coelestem, ed. J. Barbet, CCCM 31 (Turnhout, 1975). See further Paul Rorem, Eriugena’s Commentary on the Dionysian Celestial Hierarchy (Toronto, 2005).

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nature.18 They themselves were spirits, and therefore immaterial, adopting a visible form only when they had to appear before humans, who were otherwise unable to see them in their natural state. The learned were in broad agreement on this point, and observations along similar lines would issue easily from the pens of sermon-writers and biblical commentators for centuries to come.19 Alongside this consensus about the general theory, however, could be found a quite considerable range of opinion about the details of precisely how the spirits chose to manifest themselves. There were stories of angels attending the dead and the dying in the guise of beautiful robed men in one place, or in the form of brightly coloured songbirds in another.20 There were storytellers convinced that, no matter what shape a spirit took, its heavenly origin and nature would be clearly revealed by the unnatural light which encased its body; while still others not only supposed that angels could hide such obvious signs if they chose, but even held that they could adopt the faces and manners of living human beings, so that one might never be quite sure if one were speaking with the person themselves or only with a spirit who had briefly taken their shape.21 While some of these ideas might strike us as more novel or interesting than others, it is their contemporaneity which I wish to emphasize here. My preceding examples have all been drawn from a single early medieval polity—from the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria—and from documents separated by no more than a few decades of each other. While one could certainly widen the net to find still more disparate ideas from across medieval Christendom, to do so would be to miss the significance of this variety of opinion. The surprising fact is not that such variety existed, but that early medieval Northumbrians appear not to have recognized it. They spoke of things being ‘angelic’ in appearance and assumed that their meaning would be transparent, as if the word called to mind a specific set of characteristics which all Christians might share. There was, for instance, a story told in the north 18 The eventually commonplace observation seems to have begun with Augustine: Enarrationes in psalmos, CIII.i.15, ed. Franco Gori, CSEL 95, 5 vols. (Vienna, 2001–11), i. 131–2; Sermones de uetere testamento, VII.3, ed. Cyrille Lambot, CCSL 41 (Turnhout, 1961), 72. Cf. also Gregory, Hom. in euang., XXXIV (ed. Adriaen, p. 306); Isidore, Etym., VII.5 (ed. Lindsay); Isidore, Sententiae, I.10, ed. Pierre Cazier, CCSL 111 (Turnhout, 1998), 29–38. 19 See Glenn Peers, Subtle Bodies: Representing Angels in Byzantium (Berkeley, 2001), esp. 1–4, 107–8. 20 Compare, for instance, Bede, HE, IV.11 and V.12 (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 366 and 488–96), with Æthelwulf, DA, chs. 8 and 18 (ed. Campbell, pp. 20–2 and 46). Although angelic birds have sometimes been taken to reflect distinctively Irish influence, inspiration may also have come from Jerome’s commentary on Ecclesiastes, which refers to ‘angels in the likeness of birds which bear our words and our thoughts of heaven’: Commentarius in Ecclesiasten, X.20, ed. Marcus Adriaen, CCSL 72 (Turnhout, 1959), 344. 21 For shining light: Alcuin, VdP, ll. 1607–48 (ed. Godman, pp. 130–2). For angels taking the shape of specific individuals, see later in this Introduction; and cf. also Einhard, Translatio et miracula sanctorum Marcellini et Petri, III.13, ed. Georg Waitz, MGH, SS XV.1 (Hanover, 1887), 252–3.

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Introduction

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about a group of young pagan Northumbrians who had ended up in the city of Rome, where they were seen by the soon-to-be Pope Gregory the Great. The tale explained that Gregory had become transfixed by these youths, struck by the exceptional whiteness and beauty of their faces and hair, and that he had found it highly significant that these men called themselves ‘Angles’, for they were, he said, like the angels of God. These words were said to have prefigured future events, for in 597 papal missionaries would land in Kent, bearing instructions from Gregory to convert the English kingdoms to Christianity. It was a convenient and flattering story, and attempts have occasionally been made to find a kernel of historical truth within it.22 Yet there was one detail which marred the tale, and which the Northumbrians who told it were hardly in a position to notice. They saw nothing strange about the fact that Gregory should associate young men with pale faces and paler hair with the angels of God, and these were indeed attributes frequently given to angels by many seventh- and eighth-century English and Irish Christians. Italian artists from Gregory’s own day, however, supposed instead that God’s messengers would naturally carry Mediterranean features if they took human form, and consistently presented them with darker hair and complexions. This was a trivial discrepancy, but a revealing one. The Anglo-Saxons who told the tale remained utterly unaware that their own sense of the angelic might not be shared by all. It is curious that this should be so, given the real diversity of opinion about angels and angelic bodies which could exist, as we just have seen, within the borders of even a single early medieval kingdom. Yet when faced with ideas that ran counter to their own, our early Anglo-Saxon writers gave every impression that they sought to reject the beliefs of others rather than to rethink their own. The anonymous hagiographer from Whitby whose Life in praise of Pope Gregory we have already met, was one such individual whose understanding of angels came to be rejected in this way. Appended to the Whitby Life’s account of Gregory’s meeting with the Northumbrian youths are a series of stories about the pope’s missionary Paulinus, and his role in the conversion of the north. One was a strange tale about an encounter between Edwin, the exiled pagan king of Northumbria, and a mysterious visitor who forewarned the king about the approaching missionary and the powerful god to whom Paulinus was devoted. This the visitor did by taking on Paulinus’ physical appearance, and instructing the king ‘to obey the man who first appears to you in this form (cum hac specie)’.23 Among the first readers of the Whitby Life of Gregory was the monastic scholar Bede (d. 735), who retold the story in his own Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (‘The Ecclesiastical For such efforts, see Michael Richter, ‘Bede’s Angli: Angles or English?’, Peritia 3 (1984), 99–114. Liber beatae Gregorii, ch. 16 (ed. Colgrave, p. 100). It is the hagiographer who supplies the information that ‘it is said to have been Bishop Paulinus who first appeared to him in that form’. 22 23

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History of the English People’).24 Bede was happy to accept that the sudden appearance of strange men offering instructions about the service of ‘the one true living God who created all things’ surely identified them as God’s spiritual messengers rather than earthly creatures of flesh and blood, and his retelling did not hesitate to observe that ‘this was not a man but a spirit who had appeared before the king’. But all references to the ability of spirits to clothe themselves in the bodily forms of particular, living individuals were quietly put aside. Something about that notion had evidently troubled Bede, although an Ecclesiastical History was clearly no place to deal with these concerns at length. Dismissing what he considered to be the story’s problematic features, Bede reassembled the rest into a form that seemed to him ‘much more probable’ (ut uerisimile uidetur), until there was little that remained to distinguish King Edwin’s mysterious visitor from any of the other divine messengers who appeared now and then in the pages of his historical works. Seeing Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastics disagreeing about the mechanics of heavenly apparitions puts the modern reader in mind of the old joke about medieval intellectuals arguing over the number of angels which could dance on the head of a pin.25 Nothing could seem further from the concerns of the ‘real world’ in which such people lived. And yet, in the way that these seemingly inconsequential beliefs were presented, we can see something of that real world. They give us a glimpse of a landscape made up of somewhat unconnected communities of thought, each holding beliefs which they took to be universal, and yet which were often quite distinct from those of their neighbours. The degree to which our individual writers seem unaware of the real variety of contemporary opinion, seen in the ease with which they could dismiss divergent views as erroneous rather than endemic, is perhaps suggestive of a period of time in which local communities still remained in indirect and occasional contact with others. If so, it was not to last. Before long, AngloSaxon writers began to speak with a more consistent voice and draw from a shared religious imagination. By at least the middle of the tenth century, stories about angels taking physical form to intervene in human affairs spoke only about anonymous men of radiant whiteness, with little of the variety which once characterized such tales.26 It was perhaps the mark of an 24 Bede, HE, II.12 (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 174–83). While it has not always been accepted that Bede knew the Whitby Life directly, I follow Alan Thacker’s reasons for thinking it likely that he did: ‘Memorializing Gregory the Great: the origin and transmission of a papal cult in the seventh and early eighth centuries’, EME 8 (1998), 59–84, at 69–70. 25 For the joke, see Robert Bartlett, The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2008), 73–5. 26 Cf. Lantfred, Translatio, chs. 2 and 35 (ed. Lapidge, pp. 266–70); B., VD, chs. 29–30 (ed. Winterbottom and Lapidge, pp. 86–90). Ælfric tended to remark that angels appeared ‘shining with light’ even when it jarred with the story he was telling, as it often did when he was paraphrasing biblical tales about angels being mistaken for ordinary mortal men: see e.g. Supp., XIII (ed. Pope, p. 593).

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increasingly homogenized religious culture, a sign that certain sets of ideas were managing to achieve a monopoly over others. Caught within this outwardly esoteric matter of angels and their bodies, in short, are small indications of the way that one particular society was undergoing change. Observations of a similar kind could easily be made for other clusters of beliefs held in any part of early medieval Christendom, and my brief sketch of changing ideas in a changing world may stand for a more general process in which the religious inheritance of Christian antiquity underwent gradual evolution during the early Middle Ages. By drawing attention to a particular bundle of ideas about angels in the way that I have just done, I do not wish to imply that these alone proved ripe for reconceptualization in ways that other parts of the Christian tradition were not; and nor is my focus on only a single part of the early medieval West intended to suggest that the AngloSaxons were unique in the way that they handled their beliefs about angels and the supernatural. This book in fact joins a small collection of other historical studies which have begun to use angels as a way to talk about topics as various as religious diversity in the late Roman world, the emergence of Christian asceticism, the issues of representation and veneration contested in Byzantium during the iconoclast era, and the new confessional identities forged in Europe during the Reformation.27 Each has found it productive to pursue these quite distinct enquiries by paying close attention to the ways in which particular societies thought about angels, because of the way that the subject raised fundamental questions about issues like free will, goodness, divine foreknowledge, and life and death. This was as true in the medieval West as it was elsewhere, but here scholars have been rather less interested in exploring how ideas about angels responded to the intellectual currents of particular times and places. It is perhaps the discontinuous nature of the historical record which has encouraged scholars to write more impressionistically about the ways that angels were understood during the Middle Ages, and which has led them to give particular emphasis to the works of major patristic and scholastic theologians, who gave the subject the most systematic discussion.28 But to skip Peers, Subtle Bodies; Conrad Leyser, ‘Angels, monks, and demons in the early medieval West’, in Richard Gameson and Henrietta Leyser (eds.), Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages: Studies Presented to Henry Mayr-Harting (Oxford, 2001), 9–22; Peter Marshall and Alexandra Walsham (eds.), Angels in the Early Modern World (Cambridge, 2006); Feisal G. Mohamed, In the Anteroom of Divinity: The Reformation of the Angels from Colet to Milton (Toronto, 2008); Joad Raymond, Milton’s Angels: The Early Modern Imagination (Oxford, 2010); Alexandra Walsham, ‘Invisible helpers: angelic intervention in post-Reformation England’, P&P 208 (2010), 77–130; Rangar Cline, Ancient Angels: Conceptualizing Angeloi in the Roman Empire (Leiden, 2011); Joad Raymond (ed.), Conversations with Angels: Essays towards a History of Spiritual Communication, 1100–1700 (Basingstoke, 2011); Laura Sangha, Angels and Belief in England, 1480–1700 (London, 2012); Ellen Muehlberger, Angels in Late Ancient Christianity (Oxford, 2013). 28 David Keck, Angels and Angelology in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1998); Richard F. Johnson, Saint Michael the Archangel in Medieval English Legend (Woodbridge, 2005); Meredith J. Gill, 27

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over the period between the seventh century and the eleventh is a mistake, for it was during those very centuries that many of the seemingly commonplace beliefs about angels in the Christian tradition underwent slow but fundamental transformation. Understanding how and why this was so is the real object of this book; and while one could readily find evidence of change from every quarter of early medieval Europe, it has seemed better to follow the process of cultural development of one relatively discrete region than to use an eclectic range of unconnected evidence drawn from a much wider area. The choice of Anglo-Saxon England is, in that sense, more or less arbitrary, and might at first appear too narrow a frame of reference to explore changes which were occurring throughout medieval Christendom. But when one finds within that single region eight-foot stone sculptures covered in winged figures, collections of prayers seeking the aid of strange archangels for a good harvest, and sermons drawing on apocryphal traditions from ancient Judaism and patristic theology alike, then the potential of using Anglo-Saxon beliefs as an entrypoint into a much larger world of medieval imagination seems rather more promising after all. The argument of this book proceeds in three stages. The first begins in the pages of patristic theology, and explores the way that the ideas of the Church Fathers spiralled off in new and varied directions during the early Middle Ages. Finding that the religious imagination of Anglo-Saxon England was by no means as unchangingly traditional as we often imagine, the second part of the book reconstructs the Anglo-Saxons’ own ideas about the world which they thought they shared with invisible spirits. It points in particular to a gradual process of diminution, by which Anglo-Saxon Christians grew increasingly unwilling to ascribe to angels the powers which previous generations had once believed them to possess. The final part of this book asks why this might have been, and considers the dwindling importance of angels within the context of other trends and developments which were transforming the religious culture of Anglo-Saxon England. To focus as I have upon change inevitably means that some themes which were undoubtedly important for the Anglo-Saxons themselves, but which show little or no evidence of significant historical development, are noticeably absent from this investigation. The Anglo-Saxon artist from Lichfield who had laboured over his sculpture of the archangel Gabriel, for instance, would certainly have expected any book about angels to include a detailed consideration of the story of the Annunciation with which the gospels began. Such

Angels and the Order of Heaven in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, 2014). More compelling is the published text of an inaugural lecture given by Henry Mayr-Harting in 1997, but the constraints of the occasion place understandable limits on the discussion: Perceptions of Angels in History (Oxford, 1998); repr. in Henry Mayr-Harting, Religion and Society in the Medieval West, 600–1200: Selected Papers (Farnham, 2010), no. VII.

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familiar biblical stories are, however, precisely those upon which this book does not dwell, for although the story of the angel’s conversation with the Virgin Mary must have been familiar to any medieval Christian, the importance of the moment gave the Annunciation a fixed significance. It was, by contrast, whenever Anglo-Saxon men and women felt compelled to deal with aspects of their beliefs which were less familiar and less well trodden that they more freely revealed their own preoccupations and concerns. We should not pretend that those concerns would have been shared by everyone: our texts are, for the most part, the product of relatively narrow group of religious professionals, whose ideas might well have been radically at odds with those of the majority of the laity. Early in the thirteenth century an Augustinian canon named Peter complained that ‘there are many people who will give thought only to things that they can see, and who do not believe in the existence of angels, whether good or bad’.29 How many people of this kind also existed in Anglo-Saxon England is hard to tell, when we possess such scant evidence for the religious opinions of so many lay men and women. It seems preferable to me to leave the views of ordinary people unexplored than to ascribe to them beliefs which they themselves may never have held. Lay men and women might nevertheless have wondered how and why the dominant ecclesiastical culture of their day could speak with such regularity and conviction about creatures which almost no Anglo-Saxon churchman had even claimed to have seen for himself; and that at least is a question which this book can go some way towards answering.

29

Peter of Cornwall, Liber reuelationum, prologue, 1, ed. Robert Easting and Richard Sharpe, Peter of Cornwall’s Book of Revelations (Toronto, 2013), 74.

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Part I Past Opinions

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1 Filling the Silence of the Bible At no time in the early Middle Ages was it particularly common to come across a book which had been reserved exclusively for the collection of poetry, still less one which had also been illustrated. But a book of just that sort had been designed in an English scriptorium during the late tenth century. It is now known as the Junius manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11); and its makers had intended it to be lavish, for the scribe who copied out the poems left room for well over a hundred pictures, including several pages set aside for full-page illustrations. Although the task of finding enough material to fill all this space eventually exceeded the endurance of the artists (who in the end abandoned their work with fewer than half of the planned pictures even begun), they must initially have been thankful for the generous space with which they had to work—for this was a book which collected together poetic retellings of the biblical books of Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel, which meant that the artists’ first task was to illustrate the creation of time and space. Searching perhaps for some way to approach so large a theme, the illustrator looked to the opening words of the first poem for a cue. There he found that the poet had begun with a reminder about ‘how right it is to praise the Guardian of the heavens, the glorious King of hosts [for whom] there was never any beginning’. That suggested to the illustrator his opening image, and alongside the poem’s opening lines he drew a full-page image of the eternal Creator sat upon a throne amidst a swirling mist (FIG. 1). Beneath and beside the enthroned deity, surrounding him on every side, is a mass of feathered wings, some belonging to a pair of disembodied heads beneath his feet, while the rest gradually resolve themselves into the bodies of two six-winged creatures floating next to his outstretched arms. Although many of the individual details were copied from other manuscripts, their combination into a single image was probably the artist’s own.1 His hope was that others would recognize the scene from their devotional studies, as an image of the time before the 1 The best guide to the artist’s sources remains Barbara Raw, ‘The probable derivation of most of the illustrations in Junius 11 from an illustrated Old Saxon Genesis’, ASE 5 (1976), 133–48.

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Fig. 1. The Creator (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11, p. ii).

creation of the universe. The artist had drawn long streams of air bursting from the faces beneath the throne, to identify these winged heads as the winds. They were meant to recall a statement found in certain anonymous collections of esoteric Christian lore, which declared that ‘when God made the heavens and the earth . . . he sat on the wings of the winds’. Intellectuals who had pored over these books of wisdom might also remember the next lines: ‘And who restrained the fury of the winds? The cherub and the seraph with their

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twelve wings.’2 The artist allowed his learning to guide his pen, and he placed his two angels on either side of the throne, their many wings stretching out to calm the swirling turbulence which rose up from the raging winds beneath. As bookish as the picture’s inspirations were, this was more than a mere display of erudition. The artist had found a way to give definite shape to a world before the world. His material had, nonetheless, given him pause. He was being asked to believe that even before the creation of heaven and earth, the Creator had not been alone. The notion of ‘the wings of the winds’ was perhaps not so troubling, since the phrase had long been thought to carry a poetic, rather than a literal, meaning.3 It was more difficult to know what to make of the cherubim and seraphim, though, and if our artist had chosen to consult the biblical account of Creation, he would have found them curiously absent from the works of the first six days. No cherub stepped forward in the book of Genesis until God stationed them on the way to the tree of life; nor indeed any other kind of angel, until one of them found the exiled handmaid Hagar wandering in the desert.4 Even if our artist had not personally searched through the Bible looking in vain for an account of the creation of the angels, some of his contemporaries certainly had. An Old English translation of the book of Genesis, made around the same time, was prefaced with the following note from its translator: ‘The book is named Genesis, that is “origin book”, because it is the first book and it tells of the origin of everything (but it does not tell of the creation of angels).’5 This apparent omission raised troubling implications: it either called into question the completeness of the biblical text, or allowed for the possibility that there existed certain creatures which had not been made by God. The Anglo-Saxon artist illustrating the Junius manuscript seems to have realized this. He drew his two six-winged angels calming the winds before Creation, just as his books had told him, but he showed them springing up from the Creator’s hands to make it clear that they still numbered 2 The first of these two questions is still extant in surviving insular wisdom collections: these include the Prose Solomon and Saturn and Adrian and Ritheus dialogues edited by James E. Cross and Thomas D. Hill, The ‘Prose Solomon and Saturn’ and ‘Adrian and Ritheus’ (Toronto, 1982), 26 and 35; and also Collectanea pseudo-Bedae, ed. Martha Bayless and Michael Lapidge, Collectanea Pseudo-Bedae (Dublin, 1998), 132 [no. 90]. The second question is only attested in an eleventh-century Spanish copy of a Libellum de sancta trinitate siue de interrogationes de fide catholica, II.5, ed. H. Omont, ‘Interrogationes de fide catholica (Joca monachorum)’, Bibliothèque de l’école des chartes 44 (1993), 58–71, at 63; but the connection is made by Ben Reinhard, ‘The opening image of MS Junius 11’, Old English Newsletter 42 (2010), 15–25, at 15–17. 3 Cf. Augustine, Enarrationes in psalmos, CIII.i.12, ed. Franco Gori, Augustinus: Enarrationes in psalmos 101–150, CSEL 95, 5 vols. (Vienna, 2001–), i. 127: ‘You should understand that by “the wings of the winds” is meant the speed of the winds, and that God’s word travels faster than any wind.’ 4 Gen. 3.24 and 16.7. 5 Ælfric, Preface to Genesis, ed. Jonathan Wilcox, Ælfric’s Prefaces (Durham, 1994), 117.

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among the works of God. But if the issue of the Bible’s completeness had also troubled him, as it had troubled others, then nevertheless his artwork could do nothing to resolve it. Although we have little idea who this late Anglo-Saxon artist was, or even where he was working, this single image in the Junius manuscript gives some sense of the difficulties which faced early medieval Christians who posed questions which the Bible seemed unable to answer, as well as the ways that they attempted to resolve them.6 It was standard practice to turn first to books and to consult past opinions, for it was probable that some earlier Christian thinker had already asked the question and offered an answer. This often proved sufficient, and the traditionalism which characterizes many early medieval theological tracts indicates the extent to which the early medieval West considered itself indebted to the intellectual work of previous centuries. Sometimes, however, as our tenth-century artist found when he consulted his wisdom collections to find out more about the time before Creation, the answers offered by old authorities were less satisfactory. They might even be in contradiction with one another: a familiar situation for scholars in any age, but uniquely worrisome for the intellectuals of medieval Christendom, who numbered many of these earlier theologians among the holy saints. This perhaps made the act of breaking away from past opinion a complicated matter; but in the right conditions, old ideas could be channelled into new forms and lead to changes in the whole intellectual framework of early medieval life. The artist of the Junius manuscript would probably have been as surprised as any to discover that the issue about the creation of the angels, which had briefly attracted his attention, was in his own day undergoing just such a transformation. This chapter follows the way that this purely theological question eventually became bound up in the ecclesiastical politics of Anglo-Saxon England, to such a degree that it would encourage the rise of new theories about mankind’s own place in a divinely ordained universe.

IN THE F OOTSTEPS OF THE F ATHERS? Although numerous efforts were made to explore the mysteries of Creation in the early Christian period, the matter of the angels and their origins seemed only to grow more intractable with every new attempt. It was not that the subject was deemed incapable of investigation, or that theologians could only profess their inability to deal with a topic about which scripture itself was 6 For consideration of the context in which the manuscript was produced, see Leslie Lockett, ‘An integrated re-examination of the dating of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11’, ASE 31 (2002), 141–73.

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silent. The problem was rather than so many intellectuals had offered their own considered, but contrary, opinions that it became increasingly difficult to pick among them with certainty. The fourth-century bishop of Salamis, Epiphanius (d. 403), thought that the question merited a short statement in his Panarion, a work given over to the rejection of false beliefs and heretical sects. There were, he said, many of his contemporaries who would explain the silence of Genesis about the origins of angels as an indication that spiritual beings owed their existence to some prior act of creation; but such a view was clearly erroneous, declared Epiphanius, when anyone could read that ‘In the beginning, God made heaven and earth’.7 The Bible could not possibly have been clearer that ‘this is the beginning of Creation, and no created thing preceded it’.8 Epiphanius himself thought that the first of the six days of Creation was obviously the correct place to fit the angels into the biblical account, and had perhaps come to that opinion during his contemplation of the ancient Jewish book of Jubilees, which he cited with approval elsewhere and which openly declared that, ‘on the first day, God created the heavens, which are above, and the earth, and the waters, and all the spirits which minister before him’.9 But Jewish traditions had never, in fact, been any closer to consensus than were their Christian counterparts. One could just as readily turn to a pseudepigraphal book like 2 Enoch, and there find that the angelic armies had instead been formed from fire on the second day.10 Nor were the Christians whom Epiphanius chastised for their careless readings of scripture actually as inattentive as he claimed. It had been the controversial third-century theologian, Origen (d. c.254), who had proposed that the creation of angels preceded the creation of the earth—not by ignoring the statement that ‘In the beginning, God made heaven and earth’, but rather by positing that the ‘earth’ of the first day was different from ‘this earth of ours’, which was actually only made on the second day when God said ‘let the dry land appear’. According to this view, an act of creation had indeed preceded the making of the material world, and Origen explained that what scripture had ‘rather covertly introduced with the words “In the beginning God made the heaven and earth”’ was in fact to be understood as ‘the creation of a large number of intelligent beings’, which would in time be known by the names of ‘angels’, ‘souls’, and ‘demons’.11 There was a great deal to this reading of 7

Gen. 1.1. Epiphanius, Panarion, ch. 65, ed. Karl Holl, Epiphanius III: Panarion haer. 65–80, De fide, rev. Jürgen Dummer (Berlin, 1985), 7. 9 Jubilees 2.2, trans. O. S. Wintermute, ‘Jubilees’, in OTP ii. 35–142, at 55. Epiphanius’ knowledge of Jubilees is the subject of a forthcoming article by Anne S. Kreps, ‘From secret knowledge to public paideia: citations of Jubilees in Epiphanius’ Panarion’. 10 2 Enoch 29.3–5, trans. F. I. Andersen, ‘2 (Slavonic Apocalypse of) Enoch’, in OTP i. 91–221, at 148. 11 The connection of Origen’s statements about the spiritual creation to his wider theological argument is usefully summarized by R. M. M. Tuschling, Angels and Orthodoxy: A Study in their 8

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Creation which proved unacceptable to later Christians, Epiphanius chief among them; but the basic idea that some kind of spiritual, angelic creation had indeed preceded the material creation of the world was still being confidently expressed in sermons preached a hundred years or more after Origen’s death.12 Yet as Epiphanius knew, even if he tried to avoid confronting it, all that could really be said with certainty about the angelic creation was that it must have been completed before God had fashioned the stars on the fourth day, since the Creator himself had once told Job that, ‘when the stars were made, all my angels praised me with a loud voice’.13 Beyond that, the sheer number of opinions offered with their own distinct justifications only compounded the difficulty of finding a solution. A late antique Christian concerned with such issues would probably not have supposed that the intervention made early in the fifth century by Augustine, bishop of Hippo (d. 430), would do anything but muddy the waters further. Augustine certainly brought no new scriptural evidence to bear on the question, and in fact seemed decidedly uncertain about the very solution he was trying to advance. The strength of Augustine’s posthumous reputation, however, ensured that his suggestions gained a canonical status in the Latin West that effectively silenced all previous explanations. In his De ciuitate Dei (‘The City of God’), Augustine approached the question in much the same way as Epiphanius had done before him. He first noted the book of Job’s statement about the angels who had witnessed the birth of the stars on the fourth day, and then worked back through the known works of the previous three days until a suitable place for the angels could be found. With an initially authoritative tone, he declared that the angelic creation was ‘without doubt (nimirum)’ to be understood as part of the divine command ‘Let there be light’ issued on the first day.14 This was an interpretation which grew out of many years of work on the literal meaning of Genesis, but returning to the subject now in De ciuitate Dei only made Augustine unwilling to commit fully to his

Development in Syria from the Qumran Texts to Ephrem the Syrian (Tübingen, 2007), 137–53. The quotations above are from Origen, On First Principles, II.iii.6 and II.ix.1, ed. Herwig Görgemanns and Heinrich Karpp, Origenes vier Bücher von den Prinzipien (Darmstadt, 1976), 320 and 398–402. 12 Cf. Basil of Caesarea, Hexameron, I.5, ed. Emmanuel Amand de Mendieta and Stig Y. Rudberg, Basilius von Caesarea. Homilien zum Hexaemeron (Berlin, 1997), 8–9; Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration XXXVIII.9, ed. Claudio Moreschini, Grégoire de Nazianze. Discours 38–41 (Paris, 1990), 120; Ambrose, Exameron, I.5, ed. Karl Schenkl, CSEL 32 (Vienna, 1896), 15–16. For hostility towards Origen: Jon F. Dechow, Dogma and Mysticism in Early Christianity: Epiphanius of Cyprus and the Legacy of Origen (Leuven, 1988); Elizabeth A. Clark, The Origenist Controversy: The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate (Princeton, 1992). 13 Job 38.7, cited by Epiphanius, Panarion, ch. 65 (ed. Holl and Dummer, p. 7). 14 Augustine, De ciuitate Dei, XI.9, ed. Bernhard Dombart and Alfons Kalb, CCSL 47–8 (Turnhout, 1955), ii. 329.

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own reading.15 He began to acknowledge the existence of other views and thought it best not to press the issue: ‘Each reader may take it as he likes, for the matter is so profound that many interpretations could be produced which are not incompatible with the rule of faith.’ Perhaps the whole point was that scriptural obscurity was meant ‘to exercise the minds of readers’, so that ‘even if the writer had something else in mind, the discussion of this obscure passage would not prove unprofitable’.16 Yet rather than draw a line under his unravelling explanations, Augustine circled back to offer another possibility: that the angels may have been meant by the ‘waters’ above the firmament made on the second day, an idea with which he had doubts but not solid refutation.17 In the middle of De ciuitate Dei’s next book another thought struck him, and he asked yet again ‘if it is correct that the first-created light signifies the angels; or better, that they are signified by “heaven” in the place where it is written: “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth”’.18 It would have been possible for the bishop of Hippo’s many readers in later centuries to make allowances for Augustine’s indecision. When Gregory the Great built his own views on Creation around those of Augustine, he managed to combine firm argument with a nod towards some of the open-endedness of Augustinian thought: For because the nature of rational spirits is believed (creditur) to have been created first in time, the angels are not undeservedly called ‘morning stars’. But if this is so (Quod si ita est), then while the earth was invisible and unformed, while darkness was over the abyss, they prefigured by their existence the coming day of the following age through the light of wisdom.19

Here, Augustine’s other possibilities about the angelic creation were being quietly acknowledged even while they were being ignored. But as Catherine Conybeare has elsewhere remarked, the reverence with which these later generations read Augustine’s words could easily lead them to overlook ‘the privileging of uncertainty and indeterminacy’ that was such a regular feature of his writing.20 If the bishop of Hippo had once expressed a preference for one exegetical reading among many, then those preferences could easily gain an authority of their own. Seventh-century Latin commentators on Genesis could be found making verbatim copies of the passage from De ciuitate Dei 15

Cf. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram, II.8 and IV.32, and De Genesi ad litteram imperfectus liber, chs. 3 and 5: ed. Joseph Zycha, CSEL 28.1 (Vienna, 1894), 43–5, 130–1, 461–4, and 471–6. 16 Augustine, De ciu. Dei, XI.32 and XI.33 (ed. Dombart and Kalb, ii. 352 and 353). 17 Augustine, De ciu. Dei, XI.34 (ed. Dombart and Kalb, ii. 354–5). 18 Augustine, De ciu. Dei, XII.16 (ed. Dombart and Kalb, ii. 370). 19 Gregory, Moralia in Iob, XXVIII.xiv.34, ed. Marcus Adriaen, CCSL 143 (Turnhout, 1979–85), 1421. 20 Catherine Conybeare, The Irrational Augustine (Oxford, 2006): the quoted statement is made at p. vii. The appropriateness of Conybeare’s observations to Augustine’s writings about angels in particular is developed further by Muehlberger, Angels in Late Ancient Christianity, 3–6.

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where Augustine outlined the case for reading an angelic creation into the command ‘Let there be light’, and simply refusing to copy out any of the more doubtful chapters which Augustine had appended to it.21 Hailed now as someone ‘whose intelligence and learning surpassed anything written by earlier Latin speakers’, as Isidore of Seville wrote in the first half of that century, Augustine’s reputation achieved what his reasoning could not. In the description of the ages of the world which Isidore offered in his Etymologiae, readers were informed that, ‘on the first day, by the name of “light”, God created the angels’, as if the matter had never been in doubt.22 Endorsements of this kind, in works which were themselves widely circulated and widely read, meant that Augustine’s unfinished arguments swiftly became traditional without ever quite being resolved. A change of emphasis nevertheless accompanied the traditionalism of early medieval thought about the opening chapters of the book of Genesis. To many late antique theologians, Augustine included, it had been vital to guard against the notion that Christian beliefs about immortal spirits, which had occupied the celestial spheres even before the creation of man, could in any way lead to the conclusion that ‘these beings must be co-eternal with God, if they have always been there since the beginning like he has’.23 In the fifth century this was ground still actively contested between Christians and Neoplatonists, and the conclusions one reached by reading between the lines in Genesis could dictate one’s whole outlook on the shape of the world. In contrast, once Augustine’s vision of Creation was raised from the level of speculation to the level of established truth, the question which mattered to the Christian thinkers of the early medieval West was no longer ‘What happened in the beginning?’, but rather, ‘How could the book of Genesis have passed over certain things in silence?’ Questions of that kind were posed to senior ecclesiastics by their junior counterparts, who noticed a disjuncture between the spare verses of scripture and the expanded narrative which had been given to them in their catechetical instruction. To an Anglo-Saxon priest from eighthcentury York, named Sigewulf, it seemed that the book of Genesis was guilty of ‘hiding things in silence’; and when he shared his problems with his school’s most active intellectual, the deacon Alcuin (d. 804), his list ran to almost 300 questions.24 Few of those questions can have given Alcuin much trouble, for early medieval exegesis was already providing ready answers to these sorts of dilemmas. A fellow Northumbrian, Bede, had previously used his own writings on Creation to explain that the book of Genesis ‘spoke so briefly 21 See e.g. the influential commentary on Genesis known as the Intexuimus, ed. Michael Gorman, ‘The Visigothic commentary on Genesis in Autun 27 (S. 29)’, Recherches augustiniennes 30 (1997), 167–277, at 243–4. 22 Isidore, Etym., V.39 and VI.7 (ed. Lindsay). 23 Augustine, De ciu. Dei, XII.16 (ed. Dombart and Kalb, ii. 371). 24 Alcuin, Interrogationes et responsiones in Genesin, 3, ed. Migne, PL 100, col. 517.

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about the higher world [of the spirits in heaven] because it had resolved to speak only about this world, in which man was made, for the instruction of the human race’. This was made possible, Bede had suggested, because ‘the higher heaven was not created empty and vacant like the earth . . . but was actually filled with its inhabitants, the blessed angels, as soon as it was made’; and so the single word ‘heaven’ could therefore ‘describe the whole condition and adornment of this spiritual and invisible creation’.25 To earlier ages, searching for reasons to justify a place for the angels among the known works of God, Bede’s reasoning would have sounded like a circular argument; but for Bede himself, in the early eighth century, the knowledge that the angels emerged on the first day of Creation was now so conventional as to be unassailable. It scarcely mattered that Bede had simultaneously done away with Augustine’s most powerful support for that position, and had refused to interpret the words ‘let there be light’ as anything other than the literal creation of daylight.26 He and his contemporaries believed there to be now ‘no doubt that the angels were made among the first created things’, and no longer found the silence of scripture an impediment to their understanding of a distant past.27 As speculation gave way to certainty, angelic history also gained new weight and significance. When Sigewulf the priest asked Alcuin to explain why the book of Genesis had passed over certain details about the angels, he had more in mind than the specific day of their creation. Coupled with the patristic discussions of angels, early medieval Christians found a second story: about a rebellion in heaven that prefigured mankind’s own disobedience, and which was ultimately responsible for introducing evil into the divine creation. Churchmen like Sigewulf knew the story as well as they knew that of Eden. It revolved around Lucifer, the brightest of the angels, who had believed himself worthy of greater honours than those which God bestowed upon him, and who was overthrown by his Creator and cast into the torments of hell, where he was stripped of his former angelic nature and came to be known as Satan or the Devil. He languished there still, together with a host of fallen angels who followed him into perdition: these were the demons who now contended against humankind out of envy and hatred, inciting men and women to work further evils against their Creator. This, at least, was one form of the story, which was already ancient by the time it entered first Jewish and then Christian thought.28 Although the canonical books of the Bible 25

Bede, In Genesim, I.i.2, ed. C. W. Jones, CCSL 118A (Turnhout, 1967), 4. Bede, In Gen., I.i.3–5 (ed. Jones, pp. 7–10). See Conor O’Brien, ‘Bede on Creation’, Revue Bénédictine 123 (2013), 255–73, at 258. 27 Bede, In epistolas septem catholicas, IV.iii.8, ed. David Hurst, CCSL 121 (Turnhout, 1983), 305. 28 The variety of opinion regarding the angelic fall before the fifth century is usefully summarized by Joseph P. Christopher, St Augustine: The First Catechetical Instruction (De Catechizandis Rudibus) (London, 1946), 126, n. 191. For fuller discussions: J. M. Evans, ‘Paradise 26

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possessed no clear account of it, enough stray hints and sidelong allusions were written into various books of the Old and New Testaments to ensure that the story would continue to attract the attention of Christian theologians. Just as generations of believers wondered why the book of Genesis said nothing about the origins of the angels, so successive readers of the New Testament found it odd that they could be told how ‘the Devil sinned from the beginning’, and yet find nothing about his crime in the book which preserved the story of that beginning.29 That was precisely Sigewulf ’s question to Alcuin: ‘Why is the angelic sin hidden by silence in Genesis, and that of mankind made known?’ Sigewulf ’s question would once have been answered in the same way that Bede had tackled the absence of angels from the biblical account of Creation: that is to say, by appealing to the idea that scripture revealed only as much as mankind needed to know. Alcuin himself certainly knew of earlier exegetes who had talked about the fall of the angels in that way. Among the works available to him when Sigewulf ’s questions arrived was a late seventh-century treatise ‘on the marvels of holy scripture’, in which a skilful but otherwise unknown Irish theologian had argued that the book of Genesis ‘reveals how the sin of man happened, so that man would not despair of eventually earning forgiveness’. Being aware of the equivalent fault of the angels, in contrast, could not be considered to serve any similar purpose, when God had left no such path towards redemption open to those angelic transgressors.30 Alcuin agreed with this seventh-century commentator up to a point, and he wrote back to Sigewulf echoing his predecessor’s distinction between the way that ‘God had not foreordained to heal the angelic wound, but did foreordain to cure that of mankind’.31 But it could no longer really be thought that understanding the angelic fall held no intrinsic benefit for human beings; for in the years since the Irish treatise had been written, a whole series of different thinkers and teachers had tried to find ways in which the story of the angelic fall could indeed become beneficial for the faithful. They took their lead— again—from Augustine, who had argued that Lucifer’s fall must have taken place in the very instant he was created, and that this ‘first defect’ among the angels must have been the sin of pride.32 Exhortatory writing about the perils of incorrect conduct seized upon the idea as a particularly vivid way to amplify Lost’ and the Genesis Tradition (Oxford, 1968), 26–104; Virginia Day, ‘The fall of the angels in Old English literature’, unpublished Ph.D thesis: University of Cambridge (1974), 1–20. 29 1 John 3.8; cf. also John 8.44. 30 De mirabilibus sacrae scripturae, I.2, ed. Migne, PL 35, col. 2153; on which, see Gerard MacGinty, ‘The Irish Augustine: De mirabilibus sacrae scripturae’, in Próinséas Ní Chatháin and Michael Richter (eds.), Irland und die Christenheit: Bibelstudien und Mission/Ireland and Christendom: The Bible and the Missions (Stuttgart, 1987), 70–83. 31 Alcuin, Int. 3 (ed. Migne, col. 517). 32 Augustine, De ciu. Dei, XI.13 and XII.6–7 (ed. Dombart and Kalb, ii. 333–5 and 359–62); De. Gen. ad lit., XI.14–26 (ed. Zycha, 346–59).

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the old biblical enjoinder that ‘the beginning of all sin is pride’.33 The very earliest Anglo-Latin poetry contained reminders about the existence of a vice so virulent ‘that it could even manage to beat the companies of heaven into submission’, and it was this notion, that pride ‘did not originate among mortals [but] found its beginnings above the high peaks of heaven’, which evidently left the greatest impression on ecclesiastical imaginations.34 When Anglo-Saxon clerics composed little riddles about pride for themselves and their brethren, they began by making the sin itself boast of its celestial origins— about how ‘a distinguished ancestor begot me long ago and lost his realm through me’, or ‘an angelic serpent gave birth to me in the height of heaven, viperously and harmfully breathing sins into its heart’.35 Churchmen could hear similar things in the words of contemporary sermons too, which spoke of how ‘the example of the archangel who was condemned for his pride has convinced the whole world about the judgement of God’; or else find the same allusions being made in letters from their colleagues, who made the same casual reminders about ‘the infernal punishments prepared for the prideful angel’ when he ‘tumbled from heaven through pride’.36 Wherever these examples from angelic history were introduced, a moral lesson for the present was seldom far behind: ‘ . . . for if infernal punishments were prepared for the prideful angel, what kind of place has been arranged for a prideful man?’ Those were Alcuin’s words, offered in a letter to a contemporary of Sigewulf ’s named Monn; and it was a theme which Alcuin took up more than once in correspondence with ecclesiastical colleagues, reminding them that, ‘as soon as the angel’s mind raised itself up with pride, at that moment was it completely overthrown; and this is the reason that humility towards God is so necessary for his obedient servants’.37 These compressed summaries of extra-biblical narratives, appended with an emphatic moral message, go some way towards explaining why Alcuin’s students and correspondents harboured the misgivings that they did about the shape of Christian history. Alcuin, and others like him, had worked hard to tap into the didactic potential of the story about the creation of angels and their fall, but the allusive way that churchmen deployed their reminders about the angelic rebellion could leave the story in a somewhat anomalous place within the greater narrative of salvation history. The terrible, eternal punishment of Lucifer

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34 Eccles. 10.13. Aldhelm, CdV, ll. 2730–51 (ed. Ehwald, p. 464). Tatwine, Enigma XXV; Boniface, De uirtutibus et uitiis, ll. 251–2: ed. Maria De Marco, Collectiones aenigmatum merovingicae aetatis, CCSL 133 (Turnhout, 1968), 192 and 325. 36 Bede, Hom., II.11 (ed. Hurst, p. 256); cf. also II.3 (p. 205); Alcuin, Ep. XXXVIII (ed. Dümmler, p. 81). Allusions of this kind are not uncommon in Bede’s works: cf. In epist. sept. cath., III.ii.4 (ed. Hurst, p. 270); In Lucae euangelium expositio, III.x.18, ed. David Hurst, CCSL 120 (Turnhout, 1960), 218; Epistola ad Ecgberhtum episcopum, ed. Christopher Grocock and I. N. Wood, Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow (Oxford, 2013), 158–60. 37 Alcuin, Ep. CXXXVII (ed. Dümmler, p. 211); cf. also Ep. I (p. 18). 35

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and his angels certainly made for an effective warning about the dangers of pride, but it was perhaps difficult for many to rationalize this with their notion of a benevolent, merciful Creator. Reassurance on that point was chiefly what Sigewulf was seeking from Alcuin. He followed up his question about the taciturnity of Genesis with others about the source of Lucifer’s evil will, and about how evil itself ought to be defined, and most importantly, about ‘why the sin of the angels was incurable, and that of mankind was curable’.38 Answers to each of these could have been found in the exegesis of the Church Fathers, who had consistently coupled their accounts of the angelic fall with explanations of how evil could arise in the essential goodness of Creation, and why this was a fault with no hope of redemption.39 That Sigewulf showed no awareness of these patristic discussions, but could instead consider them to reflect open questions in need of urgent answers, suggests the extent to which his knowledge of the creation and fall of the angels came from an encounter with the story as a story, shorn of all the careful trappings with which late antique theologians had once encased it. Sigewulf cannot have been alone in that regard. All over Europe early medieval ecclesiastics were busy lifting theological insights out of the scholarly pages of patristic exegesis and repackaging them in more accessible narrative forms. Their intention was to provide basic doctrinal teaching for catechetical instruction, framing a few key theological ideas within a general survey of Christian history since the Creation.40 They seldom sought to innovate, and their writings sometimes seem little more than an assemblage of previous opinions, but we should not overlook the fact that the way their narratives were assembled had the potential to encourage their readers or listeners to start thinking in new ways. Take, for instance, the sermon written by Martin, the sixth-century bishop of Braga in what is now Portugal, as a teaching tool for preachers introducing Christian history and conduct into rural communities.41 Martin started at the beginning, with the divine works of Creation and with the angelic transgression which had introduced evil among them. This was a sermon intended for use when ‘chastising rustics who are still bound by old pagan superstitions, who offer more veneration to demons than they do to God’, and so Martin

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Alcuin, Int. 4 and 93–4 (ed. Migne, cols. 517 and 526). Augustine, De ciu. Dei, XI.13 (ed. Dombart and Kalb, ii. 333–5); De Gen. ad lit., XI.20–1 (ed. Zycha, pp. 352–3); Gregory, Mor. in Iob, XXXII.xxiii.47–9 (ed. Adriaen, pp. 1665–7); Isidore, Etym., VIII.xi.19 (ed. Lindsay). 40 See Virginia Day, ‘The influence of the catechetical narratio on Old English and some other medieval literature’, ASE 3 (1974), 51–61. 41 Martin, De correctione rusticorum, ed. C. W. Barlow, Martini episcopi Bracarensis opera omnia (New Haven, 1950), 183–203. On the text as a teaching tool, see Yitzhak Hen, ‘Martin of Braga’s De correctione rusticorum and its uses in Frankish Gaul’, in Esther Cohen and Mayke de Jong (eds.), Medieval Transformations: Texts, Power, and Gifts in Context (Leiden, 2001), 35–49. 39

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paused for a moment on the first-created man in the hour when those two options were both equally open to him, supposing that this might echo the situation of his intended audience. The choice which was available to them was ‘to obey the Lord’s command, and so succeed without death to that celestial place from which the runaway angels had fallen; or to disregard God’s command, and die a death’.42 By pointing towards a deathless future in which virtuous humans would gain that which had been lost by sinful angels, Martin was nodding towards a theology of salvation which he had learned from his study of Augustine. It is sometimes called Augustine’s ‘doctrine of replacement’, and it represented a particularly creative interpretation of the biblical promise that the dead, ‘when they rise again shall neither marry, nor be married, but are as the angels in heaven’.43 The statement surely indicated, the bishop of Hippo had asserted, ‘that a portion of mankind will be restored [from original sin] and fill up the loss which that devilish disaster had caused in the angelic society’, in a process of repopulation that was even now provoking the fallen host of angels ‘to envy the others as they gather in their pilgrims’.44 Where Augustine had led, Martin of Braga sought to follow; but his decision to embed this understanding of salvation into the story of Eden produced a complication. Reaching the point in the story where the fallen Lucifer returned to tempt mankind, and knowing from scripture that ‘it was through the Devil’s envy that death entered the world’, Martin informed his listeners that: ‘When the Devil saw that the reason man had been created was so that he could succeed to the place in the kingdom of God from which he himself had fallen, he was moved by envy and persuaded the man to transgress against God’s commands.’45 Although thoroughly indebted to Augustine’s ‘doctrine of replacement’, this offered a vision of Creation which Augustine himself had tried hard to counter. All his writings on Genesis had been keen to affirm that ‘everything is simultaneous in the creative act of God’; that the works of the six biblical days should not be understood as the discrete actions of a Creator gradually refining his Creation, ‘as if he was incapable of creating all things at once’.46 Although others took a more literal view of the six days and discussed them as a real sequence of events, they did not—as Martin of Braga now did—write about the making of humanity on the sixth day as a 42

Martin, De corr. rust., ch. 3 (ed. Barlow, p. 184). Mark 12.25; cf. Luke 20.34–6; Matt 29.29–30. For other early medieval readings of this passage, see Ch. 2, pp. 61–2 (‘Living the Vita Angelica’). 44 Augustine, Enchiridion, IX.29 (ed. Evans, p. 65); and De ciu. Dei, XI.33 (ed. Dombart and Kalb, ii. 353). My understanding of these issues is indebted to the brief but useful summary provided by Dorothy Haines, ‘Vacancies in heaven: the doctrine of replacement and Genesis A’, N&Q 44 (1997), 150–4. 45 Martin, De corr. rustic., ch. 4 (ed. Barlow, p. 185); cf. also Martin, Item de superbia, ch. 5 (ed. Barlow, p. 71). For mortality as the product of the Devil’s envy, see Wisdom 2.24. 46 Augustine, De Gen. ad lit., IV.35 (ed. Zycha, p. 136) and De ciu. Dei, XI.30 (ed. Dombart and Kalb, ii. 350). 43

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sort of remedial necessity, a late introduction into the divine plan and in response to a vacancy which had recently opened in heaven.47 Under other circumstances Martin himself would doubtless have sought to deny such an interpretation as well. It was perhaps the demands of producing a narrative that had encouraged him to write as he did, given what Roland Barthes memorably called ‘the confusion of consecution and consequence which seems to be the mainspring of narrative, with that which comes after in the story being read as that which is caused by’.48 Narratives about the shape of Christian history are perhaps particularly open to that sort of reading, since the beginnings of the story are always read in full knowledge of how that story will end. By bringing Augustine’s teachings about humanity’s end into an account of its beginnings in this way, Martin of Braga opened for his audience the possibility of believing that God’s original plans for his Creation involved no part for mankind at all. Even though patristic teachings about the creation and fall of the angels allowed early medieval Christians to speak with confidence about things which could not be found in Genesis, then, late antique theology nevertheless proved to be a difficult resource to mine for the raw material of new sermons and doctrinal treatises. Augustine’s notion that an angelic inheritance awaited the human race was only a minor theme in his writing, but it offered such an efficient postscript to the story of Lucifer’s rebellion that few could resist the opportunity to repeat it anew; and not every reiteration managed the intellectual balancing-act of affirming that mankind would eventually restore heaven’s losses while nevertheless avoiding the suggestion that humanity represented a ‘second attempt’ at creation on the part of the Creator. Refocusing the ‘doctrine of replacement’ squarely onto the occasion of Christ’s resurrection provided one potential solution, which Pope Gregory the Great advanced on a number of occasions. Rather than taking it as the function of humanity itself to restore the angels, Gregory urged his readers and listeners to consider Ephesians 1.10—‘all things are gathered together in one in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth’—and so to understand that a twofold restoration of heavenly and earthly creations had been worked through Christ, who had adopted earthly form ‘so that once the human race had been redeemed, he might repair these losses of angels’.49 Even in their unfallen and first-created state, the angels had never made up the total number of the elect, for Gregory

47 For opposition to Augustine’s idea of a unitary Creation, see O’Brien, ‘Bede on Creation’, 262–3. 48 Roland Barthes, ‘Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits’, Communications 8 (1966), 1–27, at 10 (original emphases). 49 Gregory, Mor. in Iob, XXXI.xlix.99 (ed. Adriaen, iii. 1618); Hom. in euang., XXI (ed. Étaix, p. 175). Gregory’s appeal to Ephesians 1.10 amplifies Augustine, Enchiridion, XVI.62 (ed. Evans, p. 82).

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averred that there had always been ‘two creations made to contemplate God: the angelic and the human’.50 In an influential piece of exegetical creativity, Gregory thought he could see this confirmed in a parable from the gospel of Luke, about a woman who possessed ten silver coins, one of which was lost and then found again: ‘The woman had ten silver coins, because there are nine ranks of angels; but so that the number of the elect would be complete, mankind was created as the tenth. This rank, after its crime, was not lost by its Creator—because he, in his eternal wisdom, restored it.’51 Gregory’s work ought, perhaps, to have resolved the question of what to do with the ‘doctrine of replacement’. In fact, his words proved just as malleable in the hands of later homilists as had Augustine’s in the hands of Martin of Braga. As the Frankish homilist Haimo of Auxerre (d. c.875) revised the pope’s sermon for use in the pulpits of the Carolingian empire, for instance, he felt that some acknowledgement ought to be made to the matter of the angelic fall. It took barely more than an additional sentence before Haimo had once more conjured up the image of a Creator who had never originally planned for the creation of humanity: The woman had ten silver coins, because there are nine ranks of angels (that is: angels, archangels, thrones and dominations, virtues, principalities and powers, cherubim and seraphim). A tenth order fell through pride. But so that the number of the elect would be complete, mankind was created as the tenth to be its replacement.52

It is not normally possible to tell how pronouncements like this were received by the lay congregations who heard them; but one indication that words very much like Haimo’s could indeed influence the way that secular men and women understood human nature can be found in an unusually personal book of lay authorship: the Liber manualis written by the Carolingian noblewoman Dhuoda for her son William, shortly after the year 840. There, amid the other pieces of instruction and exhortation which Dhuoda offered to her son, she thought it worthwhile to give to William some account of mankind’s role in God’s plan, and it is clear that she had taken the idea of humanity as a replacement creation very much to heart: ‘The meaning, William my son, is that the high and omnipotent God saw fit to form man from the mud of the earth, to share in the splendour of the angels and to restore their number. . . . Everything has to be reunited so that the tenth angelic order can be lawfully

50

Gregory, Mor. in Iob, IV.iii.8 (ed. Adriaen, i. 168). Gregory, Hom. in euang., XXXIV (ed. Étaix, pp. 304–5), in reference to Luke 15.8–9. 52 Haimo, Homiliae de tempore, CXIV (ed. Migne, PL 118, col. 613). In Migne’s edition the homilies are wrongly attributed to Haimo of Halberstadt, but see Riccardo Quadri, ‘Aimone di Auxerre alla luce dei collectanea di Heiric di Auxerre’, Italia medioevale e umanisctica 6 (1963), 1–48, at 7–18. 51

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restored.’53 This was undoubtedly a view shaped by the words of contemporary sermons, for Dhuoda spoke to her son about the way that her theological outlook was modelled upon ‘such things as I have heard being read’, fostered by ‘watching the priests from afar . . . and gathering clear, worthy, beautiful words from among the intellectual and spiritual crumbs’ which they dropped for their congregations.54 This is not to deny that Dhuoda was well read, with independent access to a number of her own volumes of lore; and she was, of course, also well born, the member of an unidentified but clearly aristocratic family, with standing enough to be married in the palace chapel at Aachen.55 Much as we might wish it to be so, neither Dhuoda herself nor her book is a straightforward representative of ‘popular opinion’ in her day. Nevertheless, on the matter of the angelic and human creations, where we can see Dhuoda’s views connecting with those of contemporary preachers, her writings might just allow us a rare glimpse of the way that these early medieval versions of Augustinian ‘replacement doctrine’ had gained the acceptance of some lay Christians by the ninth century. As well as leading some early medieval intellectuals to suggest that the creation of mankind had been an afterthought on the part of the Creator, the story of an extra-biblical angelic fall could even spur them to generate new visions of the beginning of time which dispensed entirely with the biblical assertion that ‘In the beginning, God created heaven and earth’. That at least was the outcome of one anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet’s attempt to find a place for angels within the six biblical days of Creation. He had not set out to challenge the word of scripture, only to recast the story of Genesis into the vernacular, making its familiar details more vivid and immediate for his eighth-century audience—an undertaking which only continued in later centuries when, as we have already seen, his poem was copied into a new manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11) and furnished with its ambitious series of illustrations.56 His poem, which is now known by the editorial title Genesis A, seemed initially content to draw upon the usual ideas about the history of the angels: the opening lines described how ‘the chief of the angels fell into error through pride’, and how God ‘cast the presumptuous race of angels from the heavens’ in answer to their rebellion, restoring peace to his Creation but leaving his kingdom less populous than before.57 Like other

53 Dhuoda, Liber manualis, III.10 and IX.4, ed. Marcelle Thiébaux, Dhuoda: Handbook for her Warrior Son. Liber Manualis (Cambridge, 1998), 116 and 214; cf. also IX.3 (p. 212). 54 Dhuoda, Liber manualis, I.2 and 5 (ed. Thiébaux, pp. 60–2). 55 For Dhuoda and her literate resources, see Rosamond McKitterick, The Carolingians and the Written Word (Cambridge, 1989), 224–5; and Janet L. Nelson, ‘Dhuoda’, in Patrick Wormald and Janet L. Nelson (eds.), Lay Intellectuals in the Carolingian World (Cambridge, 2007), 106–20. 56 See Fig. 1 and discussion there. 57 Genesis A, ll. 9–91, ed. A. N. Doane, Genesis A: A New Edition, Revised (Tempe, Ariz., 2013), 145–7.

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writers throughout Christendom, the Genesis A-poet was well aware of the patristic ‘doctrine of replacement’, and found it a useful way to move on from angels to the human story which followed; but so completely did the idea of replacement make sense for the poet that he extended it to encompass the entire creation of the physical world: In the depths of his mind, our Lord thought about how he might once again people that glorious creation with a better company, now that the boastful ones had given up their dwellings and heaven-bright thrones, high in the heavens. And so with mighty powers, holy God willed that under the span of the heavens, an earth and a firmament and a wide sea should be made for them: earthly creatures in place of those evil ones which he had sent from his protection when they fell.58

Here, the biblical assertion that ‘In the beginning, God created heaven and earth’ was being broken apart by an Anglo-Saxon poet. The tenacity with which he held to Augustine’s ‘doctrine of replacement’ had encouraged him to look upon those two realms as successive, rather than simultaneous, acts of Creation. It is perhaps ironic that this should have been the case, when Augustine himself had tried to discourage his readers from supposing that there could be anything ‘before’ the earth save only changeless eternity: ‘the world was not made in time,’ he had argued, ‘but simultaneously with time.’59 But it is also symptomatic of the way that early medieval writings about Creation could manage to be at once thoroughly indebted to ideas drawn from the pages of late antique theology, yet also capable of combining those ideas into forms which were untraditional and potentially even disquieting. Not only could the suggestions of the Church Fathers supplement the account of Genesis, they could sometimes manage to supplant it. My examples in the preceding pages draw deliberately upon a wide and relatively unconnected selection of texts, produced under very different circumstances in very different parts of early medieval Europe. They reflect no consensus of opinion (indeed, they were sometimes radically at odds with one another), but instead attest to the way that ideas inspired by the writings of the Church Fathers could often generate accidental innovation. We cannot deny that biblical and patristic teachings exerted a profound influence on the intellectual outlook of educated men and women all over Christendom, but nor should we imagine that that ancient inheritance prevented the emergence of new ideas, even within the most ostensibly traditional corners of early medieval theology. Not every ‘new idea’ represented a serious attempt to remodel old notions or to overturn old authorities. As one scholar has observed in relation to the study of classical mythology, there is a ‘tendency to treat every variation in mythic narratives as equally significant’, and to 58 59

Genesis A, ll. 92–102 (ed. Doane, pp. 147–8). Augustine, De ciu. Dei, XI.6 (ed. Dombart and Kalb, ii. 326).

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forget that ‘if mythology is like a language, it may still contain spelling mistakes’.60 The mythic stories about the angels and their history, which were already ancient when they became the intellectual property of the early Christian Church, are no different in that respect. Individuals differed in their precise understanding of these stories, and it seems hardly to have mattered to any of them: for most people in medieval Europe, the need to work out a robust theology about the creation and fall of angels can hardly have been a pressing concern. During the late tenth century, however, it so happened that one of the most prominent monastic communities of Anglo-Saxon England came to pin its very existence on it. As theology became entangled with ecclesiastical politics, views which might once have seemed like nothing more than ‘spelling mistakes’ came to dominate public discussions of angels, and to generate a new mainstream opinion about the significance of angels for humankind.

THINKING ABO UT ANGELS IN AN AGE OF REFORM In 964 the clerics who staffed the Old and New Minsters of Winchester were forcibly ejected, to make way for new monastic inmates.61 The expulsion of the clerics was carried out with the assistance of prominent royal thegns, and with the backing of Edgar the king, only a matter of months after the consecration of Winchester’s new bishop, Æthelwold (d. 984). Some other communities of canons within Æthelwold’s diocese were similarly emptied of their former inmates, in a sequence of events that marks the first major stage in the so-called ‘Benedictine reform movement’ pursued during Edgar’s reign as the single king of a newly united England (959–75).62 The justification for these unprecedented and uncompromising measures was the alleged laxity and sinfulness of the clerics’ unregulated lives, and Æthelwold’s ‘reformed’ monks clung tenaciously to the notion that their ‘unreformed’ predecessors had pursued lives of debauchery, sexual immorality, and irregular religious observance which had 60

Richard Buxton, Imaginary Greece: The Contexts of Mythology (Cambridge, 1994), 1. ASC 964 AEF; Wulfstan of Winchester, VÆthel, chs. 18 and 20 (ed. Lapidge and Winterbottom, pp. 32 and 36). 62 For other houses reformed by Æthelwold, see Barbara Yorke, ‘Introduction’ to Barbara Yorke (ed.), Bishop Æthelwold: His Career and Influence (Woodbridge, 1988), 1–12, at 3–4. The historiography of the tenth-century reform movement as a whole is extensive: for an overview, see Blair, Church, 346–54. The following collections offer more detailed treatments of the movement: David Parsons (ed.), Tenth-Century Studies: Essays in Commemoration of the Millennium of the Council of Winchester and Regularis concordia (London, 1975); Yorke (ed.), Bishop Æthelwold; Nigel Ramsay, Margaret Sparks and Tim Tatton-Brown (eds.), St Dunstan: His Life, Times and Cult (Woodbridge, 1992); Nicholas Brooks and Catherine Cubitt (eds.), St Oswald of Worcester: Life and Influence (London, 1996). 61

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demanded urgent correction. Even thirty years after the event, Wulfstan, a cantor of the Old Minster at Winchester who had been only a child when the clerics were expelled from his eventual monastic home, was still seeking to remind his readers about the ‘pride, insolence, and riotous living’ of the old Winchester clerics, with their illicit wives and continual drunkenness.63 The regularity with which Æthelwold’s monks at Winchester returned to the story of the cleansing of the Minsters is remarkable, as is the vehemence with which they chastised their predecessors. Their pursuit after justification began almost immediately, and received its first public expression in the form of a royal charter presented to the New Minster in 966. Although promulgated in the king’s name, the charter was drafted with the personal involvement of Bishop Æthelwold, who sought to set the New Minster’s recent history within a much bigger context: the creation of the universe.64 The result was a carefully crafted piece of heightened rhetoric, which explained that the recent events at Winchester had been an attempt ‘to do what God himself did by administering all his affairs in heaven’.65 By this, Æthelwold meant the expulsion from heaven of the fallen angels, whose rebellion against God had implanted in creation the pattern upon which ‘every other wicked deed’ was modelled.66 Æthelwold castigated the clerics for the way that they ‘taken pride in the haughtiness of arrogance (fastu superbientes arrogantiae)’, just as the rebel angels had once ‘grown arrogant with insolent haughtiness (contumaci arrogans fastu)’. He spoke of the reformers ‘clearing away the filth (spurcitias) of evil deeds’, in just the way that God had ‘cast out the filth of the rebel angels with their puffed-up haughtiness (eliminata tumidi fastus spurcitia)’.67 The repeated terminology of filth, arrogance, and expulsion had not come about by chance: this was mannered and elaborate language, which had been deliberately chosen for the purpose. It recurred again and again in other documents associated with Æthelwold and his circle, always in connection with the denunciation of the 63 Wulfstan of Winchester, VÆthel, ch. 16 (ed. Lapidge and Winterbottom, p. 30); cf. also Wulfstan’s Narratio, II.164–74 (ed. Lapidge, p. 420). For the recollections of other writers connected to Winchester, see Lantfred, Translatio, ch. 1 (ed. Lapidge, pp. 260 and 264); Ælfric, Life of St Swithun (Lives of the Saints, XXI), ch. 5, ed. Lapidge, Cult, p. 592; Byrhtferth, VO, II.2 (ed. Lapidge, p. 34). 64 For Æthelwold’s involvement: Dorothy Whitelock, ‘The authorship of the account of King Edgar’s establishment of the monasteries’, in J. L. Rosier (ed.), Philological Essays: Studies in Old and Middle English Language and Literature in Honour of Herbert Dean Meritt (The Hague, 1970), 125–36; Michael Lapidge, ‘Æthelwold as scholar and teacher’, in Yorke (ed.), Bishop Æthelwold, 89–117, at 95–6. 65 S 745, ed. Sean Miller, Charters of the New Minster, Winchester (Oxford, 2001), 95–111 [no. 23]. 66 S 745, preface (ed. Miller, p. 96). My comments here build upon observations first made by David Johnson, ‘The fall of Lucifer in Genesis A and two Anglo-Latin royal charters’, JEGP 97 (1998), 500–21. 67 S 745, preface, chs. 1 and 6 (ed. Miller, pp. 96 and 98).

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clerical life. It even found its way into the Regularis concordia, the ‘Monastic Agreement’ of c.970 in which Æthelwold publicly laid out his prescriptions for the religious life in England.68 In other circumstances this kind of rhetorical denunciation might have amounted to little more than name-calling. But in 966, when Æthelwold’s charter was issued under the king’s name, there were more urgent reasons which had made it useful to liken the dispossessed clerics of Winchester to fallen angels. Some among the reformers clearly feared reprisals from the old clerics, and the charter therefore pronounced ‘an anathema on anyone who plots against the monks’. The anathema was intended to apply specifically ‘to anyone who might be blinded by some kind of bribe and so wish to give assistance to the clerics’ in their alleged plots; and here, the connections between the disinherited clerics and the fallen angels were exploited to their fullest. Anyone who gave in to the demands of the clerics would, Æthelwold claimed, be doomed to suffer the fate of Adam, who had given in to the demands of the fallen Lucifer and so doomed himself. Æthelwold promised that the clerics and their co-conspirators would all ‘be thrust down into the fires of the abyss . . . as happened in the case of the proud angels and the first man who was seduced by the Devil’s trickery’.69 Æthelwold could probably have made these same points by likening the Winchester clerics to anyone who had ever been punished by God for sinfulness and disobedience; and indeed, the charter does make reference to the sins of Adam and Eve, to the ‘heap of vices’ which brought on the Flood, and to fresh misdeeds which arose periodically in the pre-Christian era. Æthelwold connected none of these so directly to the matter at hand, however. His reasons for stressing the angelic connection above all others became finally clear when he sought to explain the rationale for the expulsion of the Winchester clerics. The king and the reformers had, he claimed, been attempting ‘to bring about on earth what Christ himself has justly brought about in heaven: namely, the clearing away of the filth of evil deeds from the Lord’s ploughland (as if by a diligent farmer), and the insertion of the seeds of virtues’.70 Here was the utility of the angelic fall for Æthelwold’s present needs. He was arguing that the ejection of Winchester’s cathedral canons had been a necessary first step before a new and virtuous community could grow up in its place; and this, as Æthelwold understood it, was precisely what had happened before in heaven, when a sinful host of angels had been overthrown and a replacement had been sought from among humankind. The reformers’ uncompromising

68 Cf. RegConc, ch. 2 (ed. Kornexl, p. 2); S 817 and 818, ed. Alexander R. Rumble, Property and Piety in Early Medieval Winchester: Documents Relating to the Topography of the AngloSaxon and Norman City and its Minsters (Oxford, 2002), 111 and 131–2. The extent of this shared language was previously noted by Rumble, Property and Piety, 75, n. 11. 69 70 S 745, ch. 9 (ed. Miller, p. 99). S 745, ch. 6 (ed. Miller, p. 98).

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attitude towards the clerics of Winchester was therefore to be justified on the grounds that God himself had resorted to such measures before: the reformed monks, indeed, were to redress the offence done to God by the fallen clerics. Æthelwold made sure that those who read the charter (or who heard it read to them) would recognize the connection, by briefly offering an account of ‘Why God made man and what he entrusted to him’: When the seat of the celestial vaults had been purged and the filth of puffed-up haughtiness had been cast out, the highest Judge of all goodness could not endure the bright thrones of the heavens remaining idle without an inhabitant. Having formed all kinds of things from inform matter, he eventually made man out of the mud, and fashioned him in his own likeness, giving him the breath of life. Subjecting every created thing on the surface of the whole universe to him, he placed man and his descendants under his own [authority], in order that the posterity of man (which was to follow) should supply the number of the angels of heaven thrust down from their thrones by swelling pride.71

Thinking about Creation in this way was meant to establish a very direct precedent for the dispossessions and reallocations recently witnessed at Winchester. This was Æthelwold’s attempt to persuade both his community and its critics that the reformers really had done no more than to ‘bring about on earth what Christ himself has justly brought about in heaven’. Æthelwold’s rendition of angelic history resembles that handful of poems and narrative sermons which we have already encountered: Martin of Braga’s sermon ‘for the correction of peasants’, the Old English poem Genesis A, Haimo of Auxerre’s homily on Luke. Each of them drew upon the ‘doctrine of replacement’ formulated by Augustine, retelling it in a simplified form which implied that mankind had originally been absent from God’s original plans for his Creation, and had been introduced only as a remedial afterthought intended to redress the harm caused by the angelic rebellion. It may be that Æthelwold had drawn directly upon one of those earlier texts; indeed, David Johnson has previously noted that there are particularly striking similarities between Æthelwold’s charter and Genesis A, in which the depleted ranks of heaven were also characterized in terms of ‘empty thrones’ in need of new occupants.72 But whatever had informed Æthelwold’s views about the angels’ fall, the charter of 966 now made this otherwise rarefied point of theology matter. His appeal to angelic history justified an ideological and otherwise unprecedented reallocation of lands and rights, and underpinned the Benedictine occupation of the Old and New Minsters. 71

S 745, ch. 1 (ed. Miller, p. 96). Johnson, ‘Fall of Lucifer’, 518–19. While the image of ‘empty thrones’ is not exclusive to these two works, it is not a consistent feature of early medieval writing about the angelic fall, and only seems to appear with any regularity in the corpus of Old English poetry: see Haines, ‘Vacancies in heaven’, 153. 72

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Had this been communicated in a private document, to which few would ever have gained access, then it might not have mattered that Æthelwold’s ideas about the Creation rested on little more than an oversimplified interpretation of Augustinian theology. But the ‘New Minster Refoundation Charter’ had been made to have its message heard. Its lavish production, with an illustrated frontispiece and gold lettering, suggests that it had been intended as a display piece from the beginning; and it even included specific instructions about ‘How often, and why, this privilege should be read to the brothers [of the New Minster] in the course of the year’.73 The monks of the New Minster can only have been flattered at the way that their bishop had likened their arrival to the act by which God had perfected his Creation; but a monastic audience was also precisely the sort of community which could be expected to notice the lack of explicit biblical support for their bishop’s rhetoric, not to mention the rather imprecise reading of Augustine’s theology upon which it relied. Not for nothing, we might suspect, did a Winchester monk comment to one of his lay correspondents, in the final years of the tenth century, that the book of Genesis was so called because the word meant ‘“origin book”, because it is the first book and it tells of the origin of everything (but it does not tell of the creation of angels)’.74 The theology of the angels’ creation and fall had been appropriated in the service of a particular political argument, and those who had benefited from that appropriation had every reason to become experts on the sources which might support or challenge that argument. The Winchester monk who commented on the absence of angels in Genesis was Ælfric (d. c.1010), a prolific and influential writer who continued to identify himself proudly as a ‘student of Æthelwold’ or ‘student of Winchester’ for many years after he himself had ceased to live among that community.75 Again and again his writings return to the matter of establishing the place of the angels within the sequence of the Creation; and it is from those writings that we can get some hint as to the importance which had been attached to the issue during his early education in Æthelwold’s school.76 To judge from his sermons and letters, it sometimes seems as if Ælfric was incapable of talking about the creation of mankind without making some kind of allusion to the fallen angels which had, according to Bishop Æthelwold, reduced the

73 The leaf which contained the instructions for the public reading of the original charter is now lost, and their inclusion in the document is known only from the rubric which precedes the missing leaf: S 745 (ed. Miller, p. 102). 74 Ælfric, Preface to Genesis (ed. Wilcox, p. 117). 75 See Wilcox, Ælfric’s Prefaces, 7–9; and Christopher A. Jones, ‘Ælfric and the limits of the “Benedictine reform” ’, in Hugh Magennis and Mary Swan (eds.), A Companion to Ælfric (Leiden, 2009), 67–108, at 76. 76 For a full treatment of Ælfric’s writings on this subject, see Michael Fox, ‘Ælfric on the creation and fall of the angels’, ASE 31 (2002), 175–200.

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population of heaven and so forced God to create a second order of beings to restore his kingdom to fullness. Ælfric had begun to speak in this way about the creation of mankind in his very first homilies, written around the year 990, in which he told his congregation about the way that God had ‘said that he would make man from the earth, so that earthly man should prosper, and merit with meekness the dwellings which the Devil had forfeited in the kingdom of heaven’.77 That was still his opinion twenty-five years later, when he broached the subject again in a letter to a layman named Sigeweard: ‘With his own hands, God made a man from the earth—Adam—and gave him a soul, and then made Eve from Adam’s rib so that they, and their offspring with them, could have that fair dwelling that the Fiend had lost.’78 Ælfric seems to have thought that any account of human origins was incomplete without some explanation of the angelic events which had brought it about. The angelic fall and the human creation were, in fact, so closely connected in Ælfric’s mind that he began to think of them as one and the same event. Most early medieval theologians had always followed Augustine, to argue that Lucifer’s rebellion against God must have been occurred in the first moment of his creation; but when Ælfric came to write a treatise on the six days of Creation, he informed his readers that ‘it was on the sixth day that our Lord wished to create man from the earth, because it was at this time that the Devil, on account of his presumption, fell from the lofty heaven into hell along with his companions’.79 Whether by choice or by accident, Ælfric’s conviction that the creation of humanity was causally connected to the fall of the angels was so strong that it could even trump other long-held and hitherto authoritative teachings. When Ælfric recounted the story of the angels, he did so with the confidence of someone who had heard it being told all his life. All its details were familiar to him, and when he repeated them to others he did so matter-of-factly. But the curious thing to note is that many of those details which seemed so self-evident to Ælfric would have seemed peculiar, even eccentric, to any earlier Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastic. The Winchester monk was, for example, insistent that God had originally created not only the nine well-known orders of angels, archangels, virtues, powers, principalities, dominations, thrones, cherubim, and seraphim, but also a tenth rank of angels which had swiftly followed the rebel Lucifer into perdition.80 This had never been a part of mainstream teaching about the angels 77

Ælfric, CH, I.1 (ed. Clemoes, pp. 180–1). Ælfric, Letter to Sigeweard, ed. S. J. Crawford, The Old English Version of the Heptateuch: Ælfric’s Treatise on the Old and New Testaments and his Preface to Genesis (London, 1922), 20. 79 Ælfric, Exameron, ed. S. J. Crawford, ‘Exameron Anglice’ or ‘The Old English Hexameron’ (Hamburg, 1921), 55–6. Cf. Augustine, De ciu. Dei, XI.13 (ed. Dombart and Kalb, ii. 333–5); De Gen. ad lit., XI.14–26 (ed. Zycha, pp. 346–59). 80 Ælfric, CH, I.1, 24 and 36 (ed. Clemoes, pp. 179, 373–4, and 486–7); Letter to Sigeweard (ed. Crawford, p. 18). 78

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in previous centuries, and earlier exegetes had usually supposed that Lucifer’s rebellion had robbed heaven of a full third of the angels, explaining that this was supported by the reference in the book of Revelation to the dragon whose ‘tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and cast them to earth’.81 There were nevertheless other sources of information about such matters if one looked beyond the usual scriptures; and those few with access to the pseudepigraphal book of 2 Enoch might notice that God had originally created ten ‘bodiless armies’ of angels, one of which was expelled from heaven when its leader ‘deviated, together with the division that was under his authority’.82 Still, for a long while there were few early medieval Christians who would endorse such a poorly attested idea. Whenever it surfaced, as it did periodically in Francia and Saxony, it remained something of a rarity.83 In the insular world it seems to have been treated only as a novel piece of esoteric arcana. Homilists made no mention of it, only the writers of abstruse wisdom poetry who delighted in the kind of riddling extra-biblical lore that it represented. Before the 980s the only AngloSaxon text to make any reference to a fallen tenth order was the self-consciously cryptic poem known as Solomon and Saturn II, in which it was claimed that Lucifer had once ‘said that he wished to ravage the whole kingdom of the heavens with his companions, and then settle half of it himself and propagate himself with the tenth part, until he could give his anger an end through incest’.84 This was never intended to be the kind of statement that the average Christian was meant to recognize as self-evident, or perhaps even meant to comprehend in full. We ought, therefore, to find it odd that Ælfric’s many discussions of the angels and their history always began with the flat declaration that ‘God created ten hosts of angels’, as if that was simply common sense. It seems likely that this once-unusual belief about an original ten orders of angels had indeed become commonsensical at Winchester in the late tenth century. Other members of that community in addition to Ælfric appear to have shared the belief, if previous scholars have been correct in identifying a charter of Æthelred II, granting land to his scriptor Ælfwine in 984, as the work of a Winchester draftsman: it too made reference to the creation of ‘ten hosts 81

Rev. 12.4. See e.g. Victorinus, Commentarii in Apocalypsin, XII.2, ed. Johannes Haussleiter, CSEL 49 (Vienna, 1916), 106–8; Cassian, Conlationes, VIII.8, ed. Michael Petschenig, CSEL 13 (Vienna, 2004), 223–5; Aldhelm, CdV, ll. 2743–7 (ed. Ehwald, p. 464). 82 2 Enoch 29.3–5 (trans. Andersen, p. 148). 83 See Cosmographia Aethici Istrici, ch. 4, ed. Michael W. Herren, The Cosmography of Aethicus Ister (Turnhout, 2011), 4; Genesis B, l. 248a, ed. A. N. Doane, The Saxon Genesis: An Edition of the West Saxon ‘Genesis B’ and the Old Saxon Vatican ‘Genesis’ (Madison, Wisc., 1991), 207. 84 Solomon and Saturn II, ll. 275b–278a, ed. Daniel Anlezark, The Old English Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn (Woodbridge, 2009), 92. My sense of this material differs somewhat from Daniel Anlezark, ‘The fall of the angels in Solomon and Saturn II’, in Kathryn Powell and Donald Scragg (eds.), Apocryphal Texts and Traditions in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge, 2003), 121–33.

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of angels, and after the tenth had fallen through pride . . . God, who wanted to fill up the tenth order, afterwards made heaven and earth and made man’.85 It is not hard to identify the inspiration for these statements, for we have already encountered it. They were building on an exegetical reading of a parable from the gospel of Luke, which spoke of a woman who had lost one of her ten silver coins and then found it again. We have already seen how Gregory the Great had explained that this was in fact a reference to the kingdom of heaven, which would eventually comprise the nine orders of angels and a new tenth order of human beings, whose inheritance had been briefly lost after the sin of Eden but later reclaimed through Christ.86 But we have also seen that Gregory’s explanation was open to misreading, and that some of Gregory’s early medieval readers had taken the loss of the tenth coin to refer to the fall of Lucifer rather than to that of Adam and Eve, as the pope had intended. The Carolingian homilist Haimo of Auxerre had been one of those to mistake Gregory’s meaning, and his sermons spoke of ‘a tenth order of angels which fell through pride; but mankind was created to be its replacement, so that the number of the elect would be complete’.87 Given the fact that Haimo’s sermons were known and used in Anglo-Saxon England (by Ælfric himself, among others), it seems likely that the Carolingian homilist’s adaptation of Gregorian exegesis underlay these references to a lost tenth host of angels. But why was it only now, in the final quarter of the tenth century, that Haimo’s words had gained acceptance in England? How, in fact, had anyone ever cared enough about this small point of detail—a minor issue even in Haimo’s own theology—to notice it and seize upon it as something which future generations needed to know? One suspects that it had a great deal to do with the way that the theology of the angelic fall had become a live issue among the reformers of Winchester. Their attempts to justify their own actions by appealing to the precedent set by the expulsion of sinful angels from heaven had granted new significance to an otherwise obscure corner of Christian thought. They can only have been eager to know that other theologians had understood the relationship between the fall of angels and the creation of mankind in the same way that they did; and if Æthelwold and his circle had become aware that their original arguments had rested on little more than a misreading of Augustinian doctrine, they might well have searched with particular urgency for anything which could bolster their stated position. The available evidence permits no more than speculation on this point; but we should certainly entertain the possibility that when the 85 S 853, ed. P. H. Sawyer, Charters of Burton Abbey (Oxford, 1979), 39–41 [no. 24]. The connection with Winchester was proposed by C. R. Hart, The Early Charters of Northern England and the North Midlands (Leicester, 1975), 190–2, and supported by Johnson, ‘Fall of Lucifer’, 515. Cf., however, Simon Keynes, The Diplomas of King Æthelred ‘the Unready’, 978–1016 (Cambridge, 1980), 14–83. 86 Gregory, Hom. in euang., XXXIV (ed. Étaix, pp. 304–5). 87 Haimo, Hom. de temp., CXIV (ed. Migne, PL 118, col. 613).

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homilist Ælfric emerged from Æthelwold’s Winchester with such insistent yet unusual views about the history of angels, those views had been shaped as much by political as by purely theological considerations. Because angels had become a matter of institutional importance there, members of that institution gained a very particular kind of education about the history of heavenly beings, and so came to hold opinions which were not necessarily shared by others in the early medieval West. These writings associated with the Benedictine reformers at Winchester not only gave new weight to hitherto minority opinions about angels, but also resulted in those opinions entering the mainstream of late Anglo-Saxon thought about angels and their history. In the final years of the tenth century, and in those that followed, archbishops like Sigeric of Canterbury (d. 994) and Wulfstan of York (d. 1023) could be found making passing references of their own to previously uncommon ideas about ‘Lucifer and the tenth order’, or God’s decision to create Adam and Eve ‘so that they and their offspring would fill and enlarge that which had been depleted in heaven’.88 Intellectuals like Byrhtferth (fl. c.986–c.1020), a monk of Ramsey and one of the most prolific writers of his generation, also assumed that such ideas were uncontroversial and widely held; when Byrhtferth composed an Enchiridion as a teaching tool for the classroom and for ‘rustic priest[s who] do not know what an atom is’, he took it for granted that his readers would know all about ‘the tenth order which fell once it had grown haughty’, even if they still needed instruction about the length of the year and the progress of the seasons.89 Given how rarely these ideas had been voiced before they had been caught up in the ecclesiastical politics of the tenth-century reform movement, and how widely they were now being spread, it seems fair to say that Æthelwold’s polemical appropriation of angelic history had unintentionally but profoundly affected the theological outlook of late Anglo-Saxon England. By a curious set of circumstances, the old myth about an expulsion of angels from heaven had become a matter of cardinal importance in early medieval England, central to the Anglo-Saxons’ understanding of humanity and its origins. Some indication of the significance which was now attached to the story is offered by the work of one late Anglo-Saxon artist, who had been given the responsibility of illustrating a vernacular translation of the first six books of the Old Testament during the early part of the eleventh century.90 His illustrations were to accompany the biblical story as it unfolded, and yet the artist felt that it was appropriate to begin his cycle of pictures with a scene 88

Sigeric: S 880, ed. H&S, i. 683–6, at 684. Wulfstan: Hom. VI (ed. Bethurum, pp. 144–5). Byrhtferth, Enchiridion, IV.1 (ed. Baker and Lapidge, p. 214); the castigation of uneducated priests is at II.3 (p. 110). 90 London, British Library, Cotton Claudius B.iv. On the manuscript and its artwork, see Benjamin C. Withers, The Illustrated Old English Hexateuch, Cotton Claudius B.iv: The Frontier of Seeing and Reading in Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto, 2007). 89

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Fig. 2. The fall of the angels (London, British Library, Cotton Claudius B.iv, 2r). Fig. 3. The fall of Lucifer (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11, p. 3).

which could be found nowhere among the biblical texts contained within the book. It was an image of ragged angels tumbling from heaven, their rebellious leader seemingly trapped within a mandorla and staring up at the enthroned deity above him, his fate now sealed by the jaws of the coiled beast which held him fast and dragged him downwards (FIG. 2).91 There were already other books which contained equivalent full-page depictions of this event—among them Junius 11, the illustrated book of Old English poetry with which we began this chapter (FIG. 3). At first sight, the image in the illustrated Hexateuch might strike us as rather crude in comparison with that slightly earlier composition, which seems to have adapted a Continental exemplar full of drama and narrative complexity.92 But although the artist of the Hexateuch was perhaps the less skilled of the two illustrators, it is his work which gives the clearer sense of the grasp which the story of the angelic fall had come to exert 91 On the iconography, see Benjamin C. Withers, ‘Satan’s mandorla: translation, transformation, and interpretation in late Anglo-Saxon England’, in Colum Hourihane (ed.), Insular and Anglo-Saxon: Art and Thought in the Early Medieval Period (University Park, Pa., 2011), 247–69. 92 For the sources of the Junius imagery, see Raw, ‘Probable derivation’.

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on the theological imagination of Anglo-Saxon England. The Hexateuch manuscript had been supplied with a preface by Ælfric—the very piece in which he had drawn attention to the fact that the book of Genesis was a book about origins which nevertheless ‘does not tell of the creation of the angels’.93 The image of the angelic fall immediately follows this preface and, as Benjamin Withers has observed, the artist’s choice of imagery must be understood in some sense as a reaction to its words, filling this collection of scripture with the angels whose absence Ælfric had just lamented.94 But the artist had done more than simply correct the apparent deficiency in the book of Genesis, for he had not only put the angels back where they belonged, but also sought to remind the book’s users of a story about an ancient rebellion which was now widely believed to hold the key to understanding the origins of mankind. The eighth-century monk Bede had once been of the opinion that Genesis had said so little about the creation of the angels and their heavenly realm because its author ‘had resolved to speak only about this world, in which man was made, for the instruction of the human race’.95 By the turn of the first millennium, on the other hand, any such instruction seemed fundamentally incomplete without a consideration of the events among the angels which had brought about humanity’s very creation.

93

Ælfric, Preface to Genesis (ed. Wilcox, p. 117). Benjamin C. Withers, ‘A “secret and feverish genesis”: the prefaces of the Old English Hexateuch’, Art Bulletin 81 (1999), 53–71, at 57–8. For other features of the Hexateuch’s artwork which respond to specific details in the text, see Rebecca Barnhouse, ‘Pictorial responses to textual variations in the Illustrated Old English Hexateuch’, Manuscripta 41 (1997), 67–87. 95 Bede, In Gen., I.i.2 (ed. Jones, p. 4). 94

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2 The Meanings of Angels Late tenth-century Winchester was far from the only ecclesiastical institution in Anglo-Saxon England to devote its collected energies to matters concerning celestial beings. Other religious communities might not have made angels central to their institutional identities in the way that the Winchester reformers did, but many of them certainly had spent long years raising up monuments adorned with angelic figures, and decorating the very buildings in which they lived and worked with images of winged creatures. Some of these images, like the implacable face carved into a ninth-century stone panel at St Mary’s Church in Deerhurst (Gloucestershire), number among the finest artistic productions of the early Middle Ages; others impress simply by their scale, as do the angels painted across the interior walls of the church at Nether Wallop (Hampshire) around the turn of the first millennium. These surviving artworks represent only a fraction of what once existed: at Nether Wallop traces of more winged figures are just visible above those which remain; while it seems likely that the Deerhurst angel was originally one of seven, positioned in each of the seven bays of the apse. When excavations continue to amass still more fragments of celestial figures, visible only as traces of feathers and flowing robes on pieces of painted plaster or broken stone, it is clear that religious communities all over early medieval England had put a great deal of time into giving visible shape to an invisible world.1 The frequency with which early medieval ecclesiastics returned to the image of the angel seems to have struck many scholars as odd. ‘Why were these communities going to such expense to commission and carve these monuments?’ asked one recent investigation, faced with a cluster of Northumbrian 1 For the Nether Wallop wall-paintings, see Pamela Tudor-Craig, ‘Nether Wallop reconsidered’, in Sharon Cather, David Park, and Paul Williamson (eds.), Early Medieval Wall Painting and Painted Sculpture in England (London, 1990), 89–104. For the suggestion that the Deerhurst panel represents one of seven archangels, see Richard N. Bailey, Anglo-Saxon Sculptures at Deerhurst (Deerhurst, 2005). For additional fragments discovered by excavation, see Michael Webber, ‘Anglo-Saxon and later medieval wall plaster’, in Carolyn Heighway and Richard Bryant (eds.), The Golden Minster: The Anglo-Saxon Minster and Later Medieval Priory of St Oswald at Gloucester (York, 1999), 122–14 and fig. 3.10 (top-right fragment).

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stone crosses carved prominently with scenes of angels and men; ‘What was he doing there?’ asked another, in response to the angel in the wall at Deerhurst.2 Not every angel in Anglo-Saxon art has raised scholarly eyebrows, of course. Many are to be found on biblically inspired pieces like the Nether Wallop wall-painting (which seems originally to have depicted the Ascension), and so are shown simply reprising the roles which scripture had granted to them. Added to those, however, are others created by artists who were doing more than bringing a particular biblical scene to life: the series of celestial heads which peer out from medallions on an ecclesiastical monument from eighth-century Otley (Yorkshire), for instance, or the earlier group of neatly incised figures cut into the wooden coffin which once contained the bones of the Northumbrian saint, Cuthbert (see FIG. 12). Taken together, these diverse pieces of public and private art evidently indicate that a great many religious communities in early medieval England found something of value in the image of the angel, and modern studies have naturally tried to discover what that was. Searching for some unifying theme, scholars have typically looked either for evidence of what these images did, or for suggestions of what they might have said—proposing, that is, either that depictions of angels were believed to serve an apotropaic function and so were used on buildings and objects to protect them from harm; or that they were used primarily as vehicles to communicate the social ideals of the communities who commissioned and created them. To many, it is that last idea which has come closest to providing a general explanation for the ubiquity of angels in Anglo-Saxon religious culture. While arguments about the apotropaic functions of medieval images are by no means uncommon, they tend to depend on inescapably subjective assessments, and cannot easily rise above the level of speculation: if the sight of angels and apostles which surround St Cuthbert’s coffin puts some scholars in mind of an incantatory prayer enlisting supernatural powers for protection against demons, say, others might equally see the coffin’s iconography as a visual counterpoint to the way that contemporary hagiographers described the souls of the holy dead taking up posthumous places amidst the massed ranks of saints and angels.3 It takes no such guesswork, by contrast, to say that early 2 Thomas Pickles, ‘Angel veneration on Anglo-Saxon stone sculpture from Dewsbury (West Yorkshire), Otley (West Yorkshire) and Halton (Lancashire): contemplative preachers and pastoral care’, JBAA 162 (2009), 1–28, at 10; Bailey, Deerhurst, 14. 3 The notion that the holy dead would be ‘established among the choir of angels, saints, and martyrs’ was certainly propounded by the early cult of St Cuthbert: see VCA, IV.10 (ed. Colgrave, p. 126). Support for the idea that the coffin’s iconography served an apotropaic function is, by contrast, based chiefly on the extra-biblical names inscribed alongside some of the angels, and the assumption that this constituted a quasi-magical practice: cf. E. Kitzinger, ‘The coffinreliquary’, in C. F. Battiscombe (ed.), The Relics of Saint Cuthbert (Oxford, 1958), 202–304, at 280; T. Julian Brown, The Stonyhurst Gospel of Saint John (Oxford, 1969), 38–41; Bailey, Deerhurst, 14; but see Ch. 6.

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medieval Christians were often instructed to turn their eyes to the heavens, and to think hard about the ways that they might model their lives upon those of the angels above. Exhortations to do just that were regularly issued by early medieval intellectuals, often accompanied by explicit advice as to how it ought to be done. Pope Gregory the Great had been insistent about the need to turn one’s understanding of heavenly spirits to practical advantage: ‘What use is it for us to consider these angelic spirits, if we do not also strive to take something from them for our own gain?’, he asked in one sermon. ‘We must draw from them something useful for our own way of life.’4 Renewed appeals to use angels as models for a virtuous life on earth rang out with some frequency in the churches of early Anglo-Saxon England, and were a particular feature in the writings of the Northumbrian monk Bede. Those who listened to his sermons or read his biblical commentaries found themselves urged to have angels continually in view, and were reminded of the ways in which corruptible human beings could—and indeed, must—emulate these heavenly beings if they wished one day to join them after the resurrection: The angels are his perfect tabernacle in every way, for the one by whom they were made never ceases to remain in them and dwell in them. An existence like theirs, sharing a common way of life before the Lord, is promised to all in the resurrection—provided that we strive, while we are on earth, to leave the contagions of this world behind and to imitate their life by praising and loving God, by loving our neighbour in God, and by helping even our enemies.5

It is not hard to imagine that exhortations of this kind served to enhance the symbolic potential of the angels which cover the books, buildings, and monuments of Anglo-Saxon religious institutions, and to suppose that the ecclesiastics responsible for commissioning and creating these visual artworks might seek to communicate some of these same social ideals by finding a prominent place for angels in the material culture of the Anglo-Saxon church. One particular category of Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastics has, in recent years, been thought to have had especially good reasons to produce art of this kind. It was the view of some early medieval churchmen, Bede among them, that members of monastic communities ought not to remain continually cut off from the world, but should return into it to offer preaching and administer the sacraments to the laity. The extent to which this was so, and the extent to which pastoral care was therefore primarily undertaken by monks rather than non-monastic clergy during the seventh and eighth centuries, remain contested issues; but regulatory documents from that time do sometimes reveal an expectation that the pastoral needs of a locality would be provided for by

4 5

Gregory, Hom. in euang., XXXIV (ed. Étaix, p. 309). Bede, De tabernaculo, I.3, ed. David Hurst, CCSL 119A (Turnhout, 1969), 12.

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members of a nearby monastery, if one lay to hand.6 It has been proposed that these monastic preachers, accustomed to the rhythms of a contemplative life yet also actively involved in bringing Christian instruction to lay society, represent the group of Anglo-Saxon churchmen who would have responded most strongly to the idea of living a life which emulated the example of the angels—and sought, therefore, to promote their association with the heavenly citizens through art. Independent investigations by Jane Hawkes and Thomas Pickles have argued that several pieces of Anglo-Saxon public artwork express a shared message about the exemplarity of the angels, and act as visual symbols of ‘the importance of contemplation in the pastoral life of the Church’.7 This message about the ‘angelic life’ of contemplative preachers was inspired, they propose, by the exegesis of Gregory the Great, popularized by the later writings of Bede, and eagerly adopted by a number of pastorally committed monastic houses, who raised a series of large stone monuments to promote their ideals beyond the monastery walls. This is an argument which goes beyond the interpretation of specific monuments, for it seems also to offer a key to understanding why both Anglo-Saxon art and Anglo-Saxon literature were drawn so frequently into discussions about heavenly beings: the potency of this iconography about angelic preaching relied, it is suggested, upon the fact that ‘there were other texts circulating at the time that would have reinforced all these associations’, from vision-narratives and saints’ Lives, to prayers and litanies.8 If that is true, then Gregorian exhortations about imitating the exemplary life of the angels might well offer us a unifying theme for understanding the place of angels within Anglo-Saxon religious culture at large. While it is not my intention to deny that angels could and did carry symbolic and associative significance for Anglo-Saxon Christians, the present chapter argues that this confidence in the potential of exegesis to provide evidence for a single, coherent set of widely shared ‘themes’ or ‘meanings’ may be misplaced. Methodologically, it pays too little attention to the way that medieval biblical exegesis often drew out different meanings from the same figure, or number, or image, depending entirely on the context. It is one thing to say that medieval monastic artwork, or medieval monastic literature, is capable of being read exegetically in order that it might be ‘decoded’. It is quite another to suppose that exegesis provided early medieval ecclesiastics with a uniform set of symbols whose meanings were fixed and universally 6 See e.g. Theodore’s Penitential, II.vi.7, ed. H&S, iii. 195. The most convenient point of entry into these issues and their historiography is Sarah Foot, Monastic Life in Anglo-Saxon England, c. 600–900 (Cambridge, 2005), 285–336. 7 Jane Hawkes, ‘Gregory the Great and angelic mediation: the Anglo-Saxon crosses of the Derbyshire Peaks’, in Alastair Minnis and Jane Roberts (eds.), Text, Image, Interpretation: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature and its Insular Context in Honour of Éamonn Ó Carragáin (Turnhout, 2007), 431–48; Pickles, ‘Angel veneration’. 8 Pickles, ‘Angel veneration’, p. 21.

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understood. A mundane example from the writings of a single exegete can illustrate the problem: since various biblical books deal occasionally with matters of buildings and fortifications, the eighth-century commentaries of Bede occasionally pause to consider the potential allegorical meaning of walls. On one occasion, Bede followed the suggestions of Ambrose to argue that the wall mentioned in the Song of Songs ought to be taken to ‘signify the guard of the heavenly powers with which the Lord has encircled the Church’, in the way that physical walls were often built around places to offer protection. The same did not apply to the walls of Solomon’s Temple, however, which in another commentary he took to stand for ‘the multitudes of believers which make up the holy universal church’. On a third occasion, a biblical account of city walls being repaired put him in mind of yet another explanation: that these were ‘the walls of true faith, being repaired by the stones of heavenly testimonies’.9 The meaning of any one thing in scripture was not, therefore, always absolutely fixed. Its significance was often fluid, and had to be discerned on the basis of its broader context. If something as simple as a wall could be thought to possess a wide range of possible meanings in scripture, then it should hardly surprise us that the same was also true for the Bible’s many references to the activities of angels. Yet it has proved possible for many scholars to overlook this diversity and to insist that a single core set of meanings played a dominant role in shaping the way that Anglo-Saxon Christians thought about celestial beings. The present chapter argues that this assumption has less to do with the things that the Anglo-Saxons themselves wrote, painted, or carved, and has instead rather more to do with a common methodological approach which scholars have used to understand medieval beliefs—namely, the idea that medieval religious ideas are best understood as a reflex of the patristic period, in the sense that we can use the writings of the Church Fathers as a way to ‘decode’ the more enigmatic writings and artworks of later centuries. It is an approach which seems particularly prevalent in some art-historical analyses, in which the task of interpreting some puzzling feature of a medieval image is pursued primarily by looking backwards into the pages of patristic exegesis, rather than looking outwards to the (usually more fragmentary) remains of documents recording contemporary opinion. It is by no means an illogical approach, for the influence of the Church Fathers was immense, and often they might have been the first to discuss a particular biblical image or theme at any length. It makes sense, therefore, to consult the store of patristic learning in our attempts to understand medieval religious culture. It makes less sense, 9 Bede, In cantica canticorum, II.ii.13–14, ed. David Hurst, CCSL 119B (Turnhout, 1983), 225, drawing upon Ambrose, Exameron, III.12 (ed. Schenkl, p. 92); De templo, I.8, ed. David Hurst, CCSL 119A (Turnhout, 1969), 169; In Ezram et Neemiam, I.iv.11–12, ed. Hurst, CCSL 119A, 284–5.

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however, to content ourselves with what we find there without further investigation, for though the Fathers were often the first to discuss something, they were usually not the last. Subsequent generations built on the foundations laid by patristic exegesis, and were not prevented from developing their own ideas on the same theme. If we do not make the effort to engage equally with the opinions of less authoritative writers from the early Middle Ages, we risk obscuring the intentions of the very people we are trying to understand. The present chapter is an attempt to show what we might have missed in our attempts to find a single ‘meaning’ in the idea of the early medieval angel. Beginning with a re-examination of the eighth- and ninth-century stone sculpture which previous scholars had thought to be ‘encoded’ with messages about contemplative preaching, this chapter aims to emphasize instead the variety which characterizes so many of the Anglo-Saxons’ earliest written and artistic responses to the idea of the angel. It is a variety which we cannot see if we pay attention only to the works of a few prolific but unrepresentative writers, and which only emerges when we set their ideas within a broader landscape of contemporary opinion. Trying to capture it, and to chart its changing nature in the centuries that followed, seems to me the only way to really do justice to the living texture of Anglo-Saxon religious culture.

FIN DING MEANING IN ANGLO-SAXON STONE SCULPTURE The late eighth- or early ninth-century cross in the churchyard at Eyam, Derbyshire, is certainly striking for the sheer number of angels it carries (FIG. 4). Atop a shaft decorated with interlace and plant-scroll motifs, and above figural depictions of a prophet carrying a scroll and the Virgin carrying her child, there sits a cross-head covered in winged figures. The angels fill both of the broad faces of the cross-head, even the central roundel where an image representing Christ might be expected. Yet another is carved into the narrow end of one of the cross-arms. Only the narrow face of the opposite cross-arm bears a human image, an unassuming male figure devoid of accoutrements. For Jane Hawkes, the position of this single human figure amidst the angels ‘serves dramatically to associate the human viewer standing below, being “stretched upwards” in contemplation, with the angelic company of heaven’. This suggested to her a connection with Gregory the Great’s conception of the priesthood as an idealized union of spiritual reflection and active ministry. She saw this confirmed by another Derbyshire cross, a roughly contemporary monument from Bradbourne, which bears more images of angels on its very fragmentary cross-head, along with what may be a portrait of St Gregory at the

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Fig. 4. Eyam, Derbyshire: remains of standing cross.

base of its shaft. Both crosses, she concluded, were thus reflections on the status of angels as exemplars for the Anglo-Saxon ministry, produced by selfaware ecclesiastical communities ‘that wished to present themes expressly concerned with the Church and its pastoral role in the Christian community’.10 Prominent though they may be, the angels on the Derbyshire crosses do not easily evoke ideals of either contemplation or exemplarity. Just as striking as the winged figures themselves are the objects in their hands. These accoutrements are clearest on the Eyam cross, one side of which carries angels bearing foliate rods, the opposite side showing others blowing trumpets. The same items were evidently carried by the angels on the Bradbourne cross-head, although too little of it survives to know if its sculptor too had lined up his rodbearing and trumpet-blowing angels on opposing sides of the monument.11 Rods and trumpets were common enough attributes for angels in early Hawkes, ‘Gregory the Great’, 440–8. For general similarities between the carvings, see Rosemary Cramp, ‘Schools of Mercian sculpture’, in Ann Dornier (ed.), Mercian Studies (Leicester, 1977), 191–233, at 219; Hawkes, ‘Gregory the Great’, 435. 10 11

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medieval art: the rod was customarily used to show angels in their role as divine messengers, most commonly seen in depictions of the archangel Gabriel at the Annunciation; while trumpets were regularly placed into the hands of angels to echo the imagery of the book of Revelation. But on the Eyam cross at least, the arrangement of the rod-bearing and trumpet-blowing angels on opposite faces of the cross-head suggests that the artist was intended to draw attention to a contrast between one group and the other. Rather than trying to showing angels busy in the act of divine contemplation as a role model for contemplative preachers, it seems more likely that the sculptor at Eyam intended to deliver a message about the shape of Christian history. He carved one face with angels in their historical role as messengers to humanity, while the other turned towards their future duty as heralds of the Last Judgement. The arrangement draws attention to the passage of time, and especially to the moment upon which past had given way to future: the incarnation of Christ. The images on the cross-shaft seem to have made the same connection as those on the head, for as Hawkes rightly notes, the image of the Virgin and Child above a prophet carrying a scroll serves to highlight ‘the salvation of humanity as foretold by the prophets, confirmed in the incarnation of the Christ Child’.12 With salvation also came the means whereby humanity could gain eternal fellowship with the angels, which might provide a clue about the meaning of the sole human figure carved upon the cross-head. His elevated position clearly associates him with the angels that are carved all around him, but the sculptor’s decision to place him off to one side also suggests that his role is somehow supplementary to that of the angels: the solitary human figure is squeezed onto the narrow end of one of the cross-arms to complete an artistic scheme in which every other available space on the cross-head has already been taken by a celestial creature. In their present arrangement, these angels number nine (four on each broad face, and another on the end of the other cross-arm); and although a small piece at the top of the cross-shaft has now been lost to us, large enough to have once contained another figural image, it seems likely that the sculptor had intended these nine angels to stand for the nine orders of the celestial hierarchy. If so, then the fact that the human figure on the remaining cross-arm fills a tenth position might well be deliberate, intended to call to mind those exegetical sermons which spoke of mankind as a tenth order of rational beings, created by God to supplement the nine ranks of angels and so to complete the number of his elect. As we saw in the last chapter, this was an idea founded upon Gregory the Great’s reading of a parable from the gospel of Luke about a woman who had ten silver coins.13 We have seen how Gregory’s suggestion, that nine of the woman’s coins signified the nine ranks of angels and the tenth 12 13

Hawkes, ‘Gregory the Great’, 443. See Ch. 1, pp. 30–1 (‘In the Footsteps of the Fathers?’).

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coin—which was lost and then found again—signified mankind fallen and restored, became a central aspect of early medieval speculation about the angels. It explained how humanity came to inherit a place among the angels after Christ had redeemed it. This seems an apt iconographic programme for a monumental cross, itself symbolic of the means by which human beings had attained that angelic inheritance. The Eyam cross might thus be an eloquent piece of Anglo-Saxon artwork that deals with the revelation of Christ’s coming, the changed roles of the angels before and after his incarnation, and the changed fate of mankind after his death and resurrection—but the significance of the angels carved upon it was based on their past and future dealings with mankind, not their status as models for human contemplation. An altogether closer relationship between human and angelic figures in Anglo-Saxon stone sculpture is suggested by surviving fragments of stone crosses from Dewsbury and Otley in West Yorkshire, and Halton in Lancashire. Roughly contemporary with the Derbyshire monuments, each depicts an image of a human figure bowed or knelt before an angel (FIGS. 5–7).14 Despite differences between the images, Thomas Pickles argued that the sculptors sought to represent the same biblical event: the prostration of John of Patmos before an angel during his vision of the Apocalypse (Rev. 19.10 and 22.8–9).15 The significance of this moment, he proposed, derived again from Gregorian exegesis, since Gregory had drawn attention to the way that

Fig. 5. Dewsbury, West Yorkshire: fragment of cross arm. Fig. 6. Otley, West Yorkshire: fragment of cross-shaft. Fig. 7. Halton, Lancashire: fragment of cross-shaft (detail of angel and figure).

14 Dewsbury 9 (CASSS viii, 141–2); Otley 1a–c (CASSS viii, 215–19); Halton St Wilfrid 3 (CASSS ix, 185–7). 15 Pickles, ‘Angel veneration’.

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the angel had responded when John bowed down in adoration: ‘See that you do not do that: I am thy fellow servant, and of thy brethren, who have the testimony of Jesus. Adore God.’ This, Gregory noted, was strikingly different to anything that any heavenly creature had ever said in the era of the Old Testament, when angels had been quite content to accept human beings falling at their feet.16 The pope explained that the angels’ changed attitude towards human supplication was symptomatic of mankind’s changed status in the new Christian era: ‘Why was it that, before our Redeemer’s coming, angels were worshipped by human beings and remained silent, but afterwards shunned it? Is it not that after they beheld our nature, which they had formerly despised, raised above them, they were afraid to see it ranked beneath them?’17 Pickles describes this statement as ‘the linchpin for Gregory’s angelology’, and centrally important for understanding why Gregory elsewhere preached about the benefits of using the example of the angels as a guide for living virtuously on earth. The pope offered his most sustained recommendations about how that could be done in the same sermon which described the nine orders of the celestial hierarchy, and promised his congregation that every human soul admitted into heaven would take up a place among the particular order of angels which most closely corresponded to their own conduct; but in Pickles’ estimation, since every kind of angel divided its time between worship in the heavens and ministrations upon the earth, the entire hierarchy exemplified for Gregory a perfect balance between contemplation of God on the one hand and active ministry on the other. Anything which the pope said about following the example of the angels might therefore be understood, in this generalized sense, as an exhortation to adopt the lifestyle of a contemplative preacher, in which were united those same two aspects of devotional meditation and active ministry to others. Since Gregory’s writings about angels came to be well known in Anglo-Saxon England, Pickles proposed that we should understand the image of John and the angel from Revelation as a reflex of the same ideas, the product of certain pastorally active monasteries in eighth- and ninth-century Northumbria as a kind of visual shorthand for these ideals of exemplary monastic preaching: it gave these communities a way of ‘drawing attention to the connections and contrasts between Old and New Testament narratives of angel veneration [which] constituted the linchpin in a model promoting imitation of angels as the key to gaining access to heaven through a ministry combining contemplation with action’. The scene from Revelation is certainly a persuasive candidate for the images on the West Yorkshire crosses, and Pickles’ observation that the 16 Gregory makes reference to prostration before angels in Gen. 19.1 and Jos. 5.15; equivalent scenes are at Num. 22.31; Jdg. 13.20; 1 Chron. 21.16; Tob. 12.16; and Dan. 8.17–18. 17 Gregory, Hom. in euang., VIII (ed. Étaix, p. 56).

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sculptors depicted only the moment of prostration (while other early medieval illustrators showed the angel raising John from the ground) does indeed suggest that the image, like the Eyam cross-head, was intended to call to mind the contrast between the status of humanity before and after Christ’s incarnation. The Halton sculpture is less easily interpreted in this way. As well as the presence of the large rectangular object in the Halton angel’s hand, an object presumably intended as a book or tablet, the Halton figure is equally distinguished from the others by the fact that it appears to be seated. Folds of drapery around the angel’s legs are clearly visible, and although the angel’s robes have been cut short to accommodate the kneeling figure at its feet, the folds flow over and around its knees in the manner used for other seated figures, notably in depictions of the enthroned Christ. We can understand why the Halton angel was so depicted, if we consider it in light of another carved fragment from Halton which seems to have belonged to the same monument. This piece bears a representation of sheep or goats, drawn up into two flocks which stand facing each other (FIG. 8). Although some scholars have wondered whether this was intended as a zoomorphic depiction of the apostles or the twenty-four elders, it seems much more probable that the scene drew upon a particular eschatological image found in the gospel of Matthew.18 There it was stated that the nations of the earth would one day be gathered together for Judgement, and ‘separated one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.’19 The visual potential of this imagery was obvious, and one of the sixth-century mosaics in the basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna had already put it to good use, in an image of the two figurative flocks drawn up on either side of the central Judge, shown ‘sat on his throne of glory’ and attended by angels according to the words of the parable (FIG. 9).20 The repetition of all the same elements on the Halton monument—Christ enthroned in Judgement, angels, the separated nations of humanity—strongly suggests that the sculptor was intending his various scenes to evoke an apocalypse cycle. This would certainly accord with suggestions that the object carried by the angel represents a liber uitae: a ‘book of life’ inscribed with the earthly deeds

18 Halton St Wilfrid 7A (CASSS ix, 191–2). For the idea that these fragments belong to a single monument, see W. G. Collingwood, Northumbrian Crosses of the Pre-Norman Age (London, 1927), 74; W. T. W. Potts, ‘A fragment of an Anglo-Saxon cross shaft from Halton Green’, Contrebis 9 (1982), 18–20, at 19. The question is revisited, along with discussion of the iconography, by Bailey, CASSS ix, 192. 19 Matt. 25.31–3. 20 On the iconography of the Ravenna mosaic, see also E. Kirschbaum, ‘L’angelo rosso e l’angelo turchino’, Rivista di archeologia cristiana 17 (1940), 209–48, at 209–27; Giuseppe Bovini, Mosaici di S. Apollinare Nuovo di Ravenna. Il ciclo cristologico (Florence, 1958), 37–40.

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Fig. 8. Halton, Lancashire: fragment of cross-shaft. Fig. 9. Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna: detail of mosaic.

of the prostrate figure at the angel’s feet.21 Presumably the angel had been depicted enthroned so as to reinforce the judgement setting, perhaps adapting an image of Christ in Majesty with the simple addition of wings and book. Since an image of Christ in judgement occupies the uppermost arch, immediately above the enthroned angel, the various scenes on the crossshaft must surely be understood as a connected Doomsday scheme: the supplicating figure has been plucked from the assembled mass of humanity after the Lord has segregated them like sheep and goats, and the solitary soul kneels now not only to the angel which holds a record of his deeds, but also to the supreme Judge who looks down from the arch above. Despite the partial similarity with the image on Dewsbury and Otley monuments, then, the figure bowed before an angel on the Halton cross does not illustrate John of Patmos adoring an angel in the book of Revelation, but belongs to an original and well-articulated depiction of the Last Judgement based on the gospel of Matthew. We are thus left with only two monuments that might communicate ideas about the need for religious communities to imitate the lifestyle of the angels, if Pickles’ reading of the symbolism of Revelation 19.10 and 22.8–9 is correct. There needs to be a compelling reason to think that a scene from Revelation necessarily carried any message that angels ought to be imitated by humankind. That is not, after all, what the angel itself said to John in his vision: it spoke only of equality between humans and angels, as ‘fellow servants’ of God, rather than one being the guide for the other. Nor can Gregory the Great be truly held responsible for turning this biblical episode into ‘the linchpin of his angelology and his model for the role of the contemplative preacher’, for the 21 Rosemary Cramp, ‘Nature redeemed’, in David Brown and Ann Loades (eds.), The Sense of the Sacramental: Movement and Measure in Art and Music, Place and Time (London, 1995), 122–36, at 131; Bailey, CASSS ix, 186.

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moral lesson which he drew from the angel’s words to John had nothing to do with either emulation or contemplative preaching: after the angels beheld our nature, which they had formerly despised, raised above them, they were afraid to see it ranked beneath them. Therefore, beloved brothers, let us take care not to pollute ourselves with corruption, we who are citizens of God in the eternal foreknowledge, equal to his angels. Let us claim our dignity by our way of life: let no luxury stain us, no shameful thought accuse us, no malice gnaw at the mind, no tarnishing of envy consume us, no boasting puff us up, no desire for worldly pleasures pull at us, no anger inflame us. For human beings have been called gods! So defend the honour of God against vice for yourself, O human, for it was on your account that God became man.22

Gregory’s advice here was of a wholly conventional nature. He exhorted his audience to make themselves worthy of being called ‘God’s citizens’ (ciues Dei) and ‘equal to the angels’ (equales angelis), but in such general terms that it is hard to see how he might be ‘promoting imitation of angels as the key to gaining access to heaven through a ministry combining contemplation with action’.23 This is not to say that Gregory was unconcerned with heavenly role models. In his other sermons angels do occasionally feature as exemplary figures—but when they do, Gregory’s teaching had little to do with either John of Patmos or with ideas about contemplative preaching. When he listed the nine ranks of angels, he encouraged his audience to ‘strive, with appropriate reflection, to take something from them for our own gain’.24 John’s prostration before the angel was nowhere mentioned; instead, Gregory took as his starting-point Augustine’s suggestion that the numbers of the angels had been diminished by Lucifer’s rebellion. Gregory argued that angels had probably fallen from all nine ranks, and that human souls would therefore need to be placed in every order, from the lowest angels to the highest seraphim.25 Since the name of each angelic order carried an etymological or exegetical significance which showed its particular qualities or functions, the human beings who would join them would have exhibited corresponding virtues during their earthly life. The order of the Powers, for example, held sway over demonic forces, so their counterparts among mankind would be those who have excelled in exorcism. Knowing how the inheritance of heaven was to be apportioned meant that one knew what virtues should be pursued on earth that would merit a place in the celestial society. Armed with this knowledge, Gregory concluded, ‘it remains 22

Gregory, Hom. in euang., VIII (ed. Étaix, p. 56). Pickles, ‘Angel veneration’, 15. This is not to deny that the question of how best to combine contemplative and active ideals was elsewhere a recurring concern in Gregory’s writings: see G. R. Evans, The Thought of Gregory the Great (Cambridge, 1986), 105–11; Carole Straw, Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection (Berkeley, 1988), 248–51; R. A. Markus, Gregory the Great and his World (Cambridge, 1997), 17–23. 24 Gregory, Hom. in euang., XXXIV (ed. Étaix, p. 309). 25 On this aspect, see Haines, ‘Vacancies in heaven’, 152. 23

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for those humans who are returning to the heavenly homeland to imitate the [angelic] hosts in some way as they are returning’.26 In Gregory’s eyes, imitating angels was a surprisingly simple matter. He took comfort in the notion that ‘there are different kinds of human life that correspond to the orders of the hosts’.27 There was, of course, room in Gregory’s vision of heaven for contemplative preachers; indeed, they took pride of place as the kind of people who would be joined to the highest rank of the seraphim, ‘the ones who are inflamed by lofty contemplation . . . and who set on fire with the love of God anyone whom they touch with their words’. But other orders exemplified different traits, and adopting any of them as one’s personal role model was an equally good way to prove worthy of a heavenly reward. Some of the hosts required the performance of rather particular feats before a human being could join their company: only those ‘who work miracles and perform powerful signs’ could claim to be living like the order of the Virtues, for instance. In the majority of cases, however, the qualities which Gregory associated with the various orders were less narrowly defined, and more easily attainable. The men and women who would be joined with the lowest rank of angels in the future, then, were those who might not be exceptional, but who nevertheless spoke to others with such wisdom as they had; those who have achieved dominion over their own vices will be placed among the Dominations; while those who are ‘filled with love for God and their neighbour will rightly receive the name of the cherubim’. Profession of one’s faith to others, resistance to temptation, and love of God and man are not exclusive virtues tied to a particular vocation, but the basic components of any Christian life. As Conrad Leyser has noted, ‘the ethical imperative of Gregory’s angelology applied not only to monks, but to all the faithful’.28 Simply repeating Christian truths was sufficient for anyone to be counted as an angel, Gregory enthused in another homily, finding universal significance in the knowledge that Jesus had once referred to John the Baptist as an angel: You too can gain the loftiness of this name, if you are willing. Each one of you, in so far as he can, in so far as he receives the grace of heavenly inspiration—if he calls his neighbour away from depravity, if he makes sure to encourage him to do good, if he instructs the wayward about the eternal kingdom or the eternal punishment, offers a holy message with words—then surely, each one of you steps forward as an angel.29

26

Gregory, Hom. in euang., XXXIV (ed. Étaix, pp. 308–9). Gregory, Hom. in euang., XXXIV (ed. Étaix, pp. 309–11). 28 Leyser, ‘Angels, monks, and demons’, 21; developing views first presented in his Authority and Asceticism from Augustine to Gregory the Great (Oxford, 2000), 184–5. 29 Gregory, Hom. in euang., VI (ed. Étaix, pp. 42–3). For John the Baptist as an angel, see Matt. 11.10. 27

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Gregory’s instructions about emulating the angels here remain of a deliberately generalized nature. Any attempt to read more specific messages into them about the lifestyle of contemplative preachers is therefore hard to support. If, in this final analysis, a connection between sixth-century papal writings and eighth- to ninth-century figural art seems slight, we ought to ask ourselves why it should ever have been thought otherwise. Chiefly, of course, the answer lies in the esteem in which medieval Christians held Gregory’s writings. In Anglo-Saxon England, as elsewhere, Gregorian theology laid many of the foundations for the way that the professional religious understood their world. In recent decades we have become increasingly aware that the task of reconstructing early medieval Christian mentalities ‘needs to be approached with the texts of the liturgy and the Fathers readily to hand’, as Richard Bailey has put it in connection with other pieces of Anglo-Saxon stone sculpture.30 Faced with the task of understanding the angels which adorn several of the Anglo-Saxon monuments of northern England, both Hawkes and Pickles did just that; and finding that the writings of Gregory the Great stood out from among all those liturgical and patristic texts as some of the most sustained and widely disseminated sources of information about angels, it proved natural to interpret Anglo-Saxon stone sculpture through the framework of Gregory’s teachings on the subject. As both Hawkes and Pickles acknowledged, this could only follow if one accepted that Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastics grew up ‘steeped in these ideals’, to such an extent that Gregory’s ‘angelic associations would have been widely known and understood’ by the circulation of other texts which ‘would have reinforced all these associations’.31 Both looked to the writings of the Jarrow monk Bede as an essential conduit in sharing Gregory’s advice about imitating angels to a wider audience of Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastics, for Bede hid neither his admiration for Gregory nor his conviction that any person who successfully adhered to the example of the angels would be rewarded with the gifts of eternity. Yet although we might safely hold Gregory responsible for the underlying notion that human beings could and should model their lives upon the angels, there existed in early medieval England a greater range of opinion about precisely how to achieve that ideal than we might have expected. In writings produced during the same centuries as the crosses at Eyam, Otley, and Dewsbury were being raised, a series of AngloSaxon thinkers put into words their own views about the nature of an ‘angelic life’ on earth. They proved to be as distinct from each other as they were from the earlier views of Pope Gregory. Their words were often briefer, and less fully developed, than those of the sixth-century pope, but they deserve our attention nonetheless. If nothing else, they force us to remember that this was a time of intellectual creativity, when the old and influential ideas of the late antique 30 31

Richard N. Bailey, The Meaning of Mercian Sculpture (Brixworth, 1990), 14. Hawkes, ‘Gregory the Great’, 442; Pickles, ‘Angel veneration’, 15–17, 21.

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past could still be reimagined and reformulated. More than that, they remind us that divergence of opinion characterized the early Middle Ages no less than it characterizes other periods of history. It is easy to lose sight of that divergence when we allow ourselves to be beguiled by the works of a Gregory or a Bede, whose literary output dwarfs—and therefore sometimes threatens to eclipse—the surviving writings produced by their contemporaries. We might not be able to hear their voices as clearly as we hear those of more prolific authors, but we owe it to them to listen where we can. Images of angels were surely not uniquely divisive in the Anglo-Saxon period, and if even these ubiquitous symbols of medieval Christianity could trigger different responses from different people, it perhaps goes some way towards suggesting how many other aspects of their life and thought might have been characterized by variety, diversity, and individuality.

L I V I N G T H E VITA ANGELICA Keen student of Gregory though he was, Bede thought that the pope had failed to capture fully the essence of the angels and their existence. Although he echoed his predecessor’s basic point that human beings could benefit from imitating the example of heavenly spirits, Bede dispensed with almost all the features which Gregory had identified as typical of an ‘angelic life (uita angelica)’. Instead, the Jarrow monk supplied his own instructions about how best to emulate the angels: With their example, we can free ourselves on earth by mutual love in God, by divine praise, by unanimous peace, by true chastity and other such virtues, and so deserve to be their comrades in heaven according to the promise of the Lord, who says: ‘But those that be accounted worthy of that world, and of the resurrection from the dead, shall neither be married, nor take wives. Neither can they die any more: for they are equal to the angels, and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection.’32

Bede’s sense that the angels possessed a number of different qualities which were worthy of emulation is obviously indebted to Gregorian writings on the subject, but here the old message was being remodelled into something quite distinct. Gregory had proposed that successfully replicating any single characteristic of an angelic life would be enough to qualify someone for a place among the angels in the future. Bede, on the other hand, was of the opinion that an angelic life was gained only through amassing an entire collection of heavenly virtues. The deeds he had in mind were largely uncomplicated—love, 32

Bede, De tab., II.7 (ed. Hurst, pp. 69–70), quoting Luke 20.35–6.

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peace, praise of God—but one among them put Bede’s rather generic list of virtues into a different perspective. This was his exaltation of ‘true chastity (sincera castitas)’, and it was no casual remark. Lists of ‘angelic’ qualities issued from Bede’s pen at regular intervals, and although no two lists are identical in every respect, it was chastity which remained the one constant hallmark of a Bedan uita angelica. During the writing of his commentary on Genesis, for instance, the idea of an ‘angelic way of life on earth’ put him in mind of ‘those who live soberly and justly and piously and chastely’.33 A few years later, his treatise on the Temple offered a different list of good actions, but freely admitted that these were merely stepping-stones to the overarching virtue of angelic chastity: ‘God teaches [his chosen ones] to imitate in this world, as far as they can, the chastity of the angelic way of life, which is done especially by vigils and divine praises, by genuine love of the Creator and one’s neighbour’34 The consistent stress on chastity gave Bede’s idea of an ‘angelic life’ a very specific meaning. In place of Gregory the Great’s expansive vision of the many ways that Christian communities could model their lives on the heavenly citizens, Bede was of the opinion that a life lived according to angelic standards was only possible for men and women avowed to a life of celibacy— in short, to strict monastics like himself. Bede’s views drew less upon Gregory’s writings about angels than upon a particular reading of the gospels first proposed in the fourth-century East, by writers justifying the earliest monastic ideals of sexual renunciation. In the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke it was said that Jesus had once been challenged about the idea of the resurrection by the Sadducees, who denied the soul’s existence after the death of the body and asked him if he could explain what would happen in the resurrection to a woman who had had more than one husband during her earthly life. If she had been married seven times in life, to whom would she be married in the resurrection? The gospels of Matthew and Mark both stated that Jesus had dismissed their question as wrong-headed, ‘for when they rise again from the dead, they shall neither marry, nor be married, but are as the angels in heaven’.35 The future life in the resurrection, being free of death, had no need of marriage. Luke’s version of the story, however, expressed Jesus’ response in a subtly, but importantly, different way: The children of this world marry, and are given in marriage: but they that shall be accounted worthy of that world, and of the resurrection from the dead, shall neither be married, nor take wives. Neither can they die any more: for they are

33

Bede, In Gen., IV.xviii.16 (ed. Jones, p. 219). Bede, De templo, I.14 (ed. Hurst, p. 184). 35 Mark 12.25; cf. Matt. 22.30: ‘For in the resurrection they shall neither marry nor be married; but shall be as the angels of God in heaven.’ 34

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equal to the angels, and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection.36

Here, in the gospel of Luke, Jesus’ response implied that those who will be ‘worthy’ of the resurrection will be those who had already shunned marriage while still on earth, as a result of which they have escaped death because ‘they are equal to the angels’. While the point of the Jesus’ words in Matthew and Mark had been primarily to express that marriage would be unnecessary in an existence without death, Luke’s wording thus implied that the renunciation of marriage itself provided the means to achieve an equality with the angels even while still living in the flesh.37 As Ellen Muehlberger has recently shown, the first ascetic communities of early Christianity placed considerable emphasis on Luke’s version of the story, because it seemed to offer a crucial support for their own practices of sexual renunciation.38 By 371 Gregory of Nyssa felt able to pass over the different emphases of the three gospels on this point and to fix his attention solely on the implications of Luke, confidently asserting that ‘if part of the angelic nature is being released from marriage, then the virgin has already received the benefits of the promise’.39 The habit of turning to this passage from Luke to justify ascetic celibacy swiftly became an established part of the rhetoric of the monastic enterprise in late antiquity. Thanks to the enthusiasm with which influential writers like Cassian and Ambrose took to the theme, the idea of a strictly monastic uita angelica defined primarily by sexual renunciation passed into the imaginative framework of medieval monasticism and remained there, unquestioned.40 At least one modern scholar thought that that was all that needed to be said, for ‘the equation of the celibate life of the monk with the uita angelica is so common throughout the medieval period that it needs no further comment’.41 But even commonplaces have a history. They can ebb and flow, rising and 36

Luke 20.34–6. See further Turid Karlsen Seim, ‘Children of the resurrection: perspectives on angelic asceticism in Luke-Acts’, in Leif E. Vaage and Vincent L. Wimbush (eds.), Asceticism and the New Testament (New York, 1999), 115–25, esp. 119–20. 38 Ellen Muehlberger, ‘Ambivalence about the angelic life: the promise and perils of an early Christian discourse of asceticism’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 16 (2008), 447–78, esp. 451–4. See also Elizabeth A. Clark, Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity (Princeton, 1999), 199–203. 39 Gregory of Nyssa, On Virginity, XIV.4, ed. Michel Aubineau, Grégoire de Nysse. Traité de la virginité (Paris, 1966), 442. 40 See Cassian, De institutis coenobiorum, VI.6, XII.11, ed. Michael Petschenig, CSEL 17 (Vienna, 2004), 118–19, 213; Ambrose, De institutione uirginis, ch. 104, ed. Franco Gori, Sant’Ambrogio. Opere morali II: verginità e vedovanza, 2 vols. (Milan, 1989), ii. 184–6. 41 John Bugge, Virginitas: An Essay in the History of a Medieval Ideal (The Hague, 1975), 30–5. More extended discussions of the theme exist, but they too tend to stress the idea’s longevity rather than chart its development over time: cf. Jean Leclercq, La Vie parfaite. Points de vue sur l’essence de l’état religieux (Turnhout, 1948), 19–56; García M. Colombás, Paraíso y vida angélica: sentido escatológico de la vocación cristina (Monsterrat, 1958), esp. 196–201; Karl 37

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falling in significance in response to changing needs or tastes. Even among contemporaries, one person’s deeply held ideals might be another’s mindless rhetoric. Simply tracing the transmission of late antique ideas about the angelic life of monks into the monasteries of eighth-century England does not, in itself, allow us to ascertain its significance in Anglo-Saxon England. There can be no doubt that Bede was convinced of the idea’s utility, and that his writings on the subject strove to turn it into a true organizing principle of the monastic enterprise; but did others share his conviction, or did they simply consider the image of the angelic monk to be a casual piece of self-affirmation? We have perhaps been keener to suppose the former than the latter, hoping that Bede’s writings might tell us about more than a single inmate of a single Northumbrian house; and knowing that Bede’s monastic contemporaries also exalted the merits of chastity at regular intervals, it is easy to assume that they would have echoed his words about using angelic role models to reinforce their own practices of renunciation. In fact, while they had plenty to say in praise of the virginal life, and no shortage of exemplary role models to drive home their point, Bede’s contemporaries made surprisingly little use of angels and their own sexless existence. They knew of the ancient connection between monk and angel, of course, and noted that if angels ‘are praised for the merit of chastity, then it ought to be extolled with the acclaim which it is due’. Those were the words of Aldhelm, abbot of Malmesbury (d. 709), and they made their own small contribution to the much larger argument Aldhelm was making about the spiritual gains of the virginal life.42 When it had been completed and sent to the nuns of Barking in Essex, Aldhelm’s De uirginitate (‘On Virginity’) stood as a monumental eulogy of the virtues of sexual renunciation, overflowing with stories of exemplary virgins and the dedication with which they had lived their lives. There was room for angels here, but Aldhelm fixed his gaze upon human exemplars instead. The angelic connotations of his virginal heroes were perhaps too obvious to labour, for Aldhelm praised them freely for the way that ‘the future loftiness of the angelic life is currently being greedily anticipated, to some extent, by those who continually follow the way of inviolate virginity’.43 But the abstracted qualities of the angels seem not to have held Aldhelm’s attention in the way that the physical deeds of pious men and women did. When he revisited his treatise a few years later, to recast its main themes into a new poetic form, he found even less to say about the angels. All that remained of angelic chastity in the new poetic version, the Carmen de uirginitate, was the pithy assertion that virginity ‘is the

Suso Frank, Αγγελικος Βιος: begriffsanalytische und begriffsgeschichtliche Untersuchung zum ‘engelgleichen Leben’ im frühen Mönchtum (Münster, 1964), 23–86. 42 Aldhelm, De uirginitate, ch. 7, ed. Scott Gwara, CCSL 124A (Turnhout, 2001), 77. 43 Aldhelm, De uirginitate, ch. 18 (ed. Gwara, p. 203).

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most chaste sister of the angelic life’.44 The connection between the life of the angels and an asexual life on earth was no more than a thread in Aldhelm’s virginal tapestry. It was no longer a live issue, as it had seemed in the first decades of the Christian ascetic movement, and the idea of the monastic uita angelica had become more of an emblem than an aspiration. In eighth-century England, talk of the angelic qualities of monks and nuns was more often confined to brief pieces of praise or flattery, such as might be used to close letters written to esteemed nuns. ‘Farewell,’ declared one such letter in its final lines: ‘may you live a life of angelic virginity, and so reign forever with an honest reputation in heaven.’45 As firmly rooted as was the link between monastic renunciation and the life of angels, then, few seem to have shared Bede’s interest in raising it up to a truly motivating ideal. It may well be that Bede’s sense that monasticism alone provided the exclusive means to an earthly uita angelica was not, therefore, shared by other Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastics. Certainly, others seem to have been more flexible in their thought. Alcuin, for instance, found nothing objectionable in the idea that ‘chastity is the angelic life’, and quoted a pseudoAugustinian sermon to that effect when he compiled his De uirtutibus et uitiis.46 Yet, perhaps because Alcuin himself had never taken monastic vows, his own notion of that ideal permitted a greater range of people to share in the same honour.47 Instead of turning to the gospel of Luke, Alcuin recalled Malachi 2.6: ‘the lips of the priest shall keep knowledge, and they shall seek the law at his mouth: because he is the angel of the Lord of hosts.’ The example of the angels ought therefore to be a prompt for the way that an office was carried out, rather than the practices of the individual, as Alcuin reminded Æthelheard, archbishop of Canterbury, in a letter of 793: ‘Be mindful that, since the priest is the angel of the high Lord God, the holy word is required from his mouth, just as we read in the prophet Malachi.’48 Love and praise were sufficient for humankind to aspire to the angelic: ‘he who is eager to live among men peaceably, with charity and holy love, may live the angelic life on earth’, he enthused to the community at Lérins in the early years of the ninth 44

Aldhelm, CdV, ll. 100–1 (ed. Ehwald, p. 357). Cf. De uirg., ch. 7 (ed. Gwara, p. 77): ‘sanctae uirginitate gloria angelicae beatitudinis germana creditur’. 45 Die Briefe, X (ed. Tangl, p. 15). Cf. also Boniface, De uirtutibus et uitiis, ll. 162–3 (ed. De Marco, p. 305). 46 Alcuin, De uirtutibus et uitiis, ch. 18, ed. Migne, PL 101, col. 626; ps.-Augustine, Sermo CCXCI, ed. Migne, PL 39, cols. 2296–7; Donald A. Bullough, ‘Alcuin and the kingdom of heaven’, in his Carolingian Renewal: Sources and Heritage (Manchester, 1991), 161–240, at 198. 47 Alcuin’s lack of monastic vows was a sensitive subject for his Carolingian biographer: Vita Alcuini, ch. 5, ed. Wilhelm Arndt, MGH, SS XV.1 (Hanover, 1887), 187; Mayke de Jong, ‘From scholastici to scioli: Alcuin and the formation of an intellectual élite’, in L. A. J. R. Houwen and A. A. MacDonald (eds.), Alcuin of York: Scholar at the Carolingian Court (Groningen, 1998), 45–57, at 50–2. 48 Alcuin, Ep. XVII (ed. Dümmler, p. 46). Cf. also CXIV (p. 168).

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century.49 Lérins was a monastic foundation, but in those same years Alcuin could also be found offering similar guidance to Charlemagne, intimating that even an emperor with secular duties might participate in such a life. All it took was ‘praise without contempt, without defect, sung from the heart and the mouth’, said Alcuin, ‘and as often as we do this on earth, we are imitating the angelic life’.50 The varied nature of Alcuin’s correspondence, addressed not only to the ecclesiastical elites of his day but also to their secular counterparts, is sufficient to show us that even phrases as traditional as that of the uita angelica could hold a broad range of meanings. The strictly monastic sense of the idea, as a shorthand for angelic celibacy, is certainly the most widely attested, but it is difficult to judge whether or not that might be a false impression produced by the overwhelmingly monastic nature of so much of our evidence for this period. Alcuin’s writings ought to alert us to the existence of other, more expansive ideas about what the angels exemplified for nonmonastic Christians in the early medieval West. Still, if the notion of an ‘angelic life’ clearly meant different things to different people, what united them all was a shared sense that this life could never be achieved fully while still on earth. That was the fundamental meaning of a uita angelica, however one thought it should be put into practice. The love and praise which the angels offered to their Creator, Alcuin told Adalhard of Corbie in c.801, was being given ‘always and unceasingly (semper et iugiter)’, but mankind could only ever hope to join in ‘often (saepius)’. Alcuin did not doubt that it was ‘a necessary thing for us to do’, but he was under no illusion that that which was done on earth could fully match anything performed in the heavens.51 Some of his countrymen averred that real similitude with the angels had only truly been fulfilled by living human beings in their firstcreated state, before the fall from Eden. This was an idea which resonated strongly with the anonymous poet of Genesis A: ‘They were like the angels (englum gelice) once Eve, Adam’s bride, was furnished with a spirit. By the Lord’s might, they were both born into the world in radiant youth. They did not know sin, how to do or commit it, but a burning love of the Lord was in the breast of both.’52 For this eighth-century poet, the notion of ‘being like angels’ had nothing to do with ideals of contemplative preaching or asexual celibacy, for the first human beings practised neither of those things—the latter least of all, given that the poet immediately moved on to a scene of God blessing Adam and Eve in all their physicality, exhorting the man and the woman to ‘be fruitful now and multiply: fill the all-green earth with your offspring and progeny’.53 49 50 51 52 53

Alcuin, Ep. CCXIX (ed. Dümmler, p. 363). Alcuin, Ep. CXCVIII (ed. Dümmler, p. 328). Alcuin, Ep. CCXXII (ed. Dümmler, p. 365). Genesis A, ll. 185b–191 (ed. Doane, p. 117). Genesis A, ll. 192–198a (ed. Doane, p. 117).

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Nor was it wholly to do with the fact that angelic and human beings shared the same rational nature, although Frederick Biggs may well be right to suggest that the poet was aware of biblical commentaries which had made that connection.54 Throughout his poem, the writer of Genesis A revealed himself as someone inclined to a certain literal-mindedness.55 That did not make him wholly unlearned or artless as a writer, but it seems that when he had heard others describing God’s human creations as being in some way ‘like angels’, he took that primarily in the sense that Adam and Eve had been born into the world without the prior knowledge of sin. That was why he emphasized the fact that the pair ‘did not know sin, how to do it or commit it’. But if that was so, then that made them unique in the whole history of mankind: after the fall from Eden no other human being could make such claims to an utterly sinless existence. Although some of the poet’s contemporaries recommended men and women to model themselves on the example of the angels, the poet himself seems to have shared Alcuin’s sense that any earthly life could never actually reach the heights to which it aspired. Acknowledging the limits of an earthly uita angelica in this way became a notable theme in the writings of Bede, who never ceased to champion the ideal but who was nevertheless firm about the way that the corruptible, mortal state of humankind placed limits upon any attempt to follow the example of incorrupt and immortal angels. In a Christmas homily, for instance, Bede thought it best first to inspire his brethren with the example of the angels who had appeared with joyful tidings in that season, but then to offer an immediate qualification by noting that human beings were not capable of fully joining the life of angels: ‘let us be in harmony with that most clean life of the blessed spirits, as far as we are capable (quantum ualemus).’56 Similar notes of caution (or perhaps of reassurance) become a refrain that runs through Bede’s writing on angels. In his earliest commentaries he spoke of human souls who were ‘always devoted to heavenly thought and who to a certain extent (quodammodo), as far as mortals are allowed (quantum mortalibus fas est), approach the angelic way of life’.57 Decades later he still reached for the caveats whenever he began to think about the ones who ‘imitate in thought and deed the angelic life on earth, as far as mortals can (quantum mortalibus possibile est)’.58 Convinced that it was nevertheless beneficial to aspire to such 54 Frederick M. Biggs, ‘Englum gelice: Elene line 1320 and Genesis A line 185’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 86 (1985), 447–52. 55 Previous attempts to read the poem as a sustained allegorical or Christological exposition are persuasively countered by Charles D. Wright, ‘Genesis A ad litteram’, in Michael Fox and Manish Sharma (eds.), Old English Literature and the Old Testament (Toronto, 2012), 121–71. 56 Bede, Hom., I.6 (ed. Hurst, p. 45). 57 Bede, Explanatio Apocalypsis, III.37, ed. Roger Gryson, CCSL 121A (Turnhout, 2001), 553. 58 Bede, De templo, I.16 (ed. Hurst, p. 187); cf. also De templo, I.7 (p. 163), and Hom., I.24 (ed. Hurst, p. 173).

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a goal, Bede finally tackled the issue of what was and was not possible during the writing of a commentary on the Tabernacle, breaking off from his main theme to address his readers directly: Perhaps you are asking how you, a fleshly human born from of the earth, can imitate [the heavenly angels which are] spiritual. They love God and their neighbours: imitate this. They come to the aid of the wretched (not to the angels, of course, who are all blessed, but certainly to human beings): imitate this. They are humble, they are gentle, they are peaceful towards each other, they obey divine commands: imitate this insofar as you can (hoc in quantum uales imitare). They neither speak, nor do, nor think anything evil, or idle, or unjust, but attend the divine praises with unwearied speech and mind: as far as you are able, imitate this (hoc quantum potes imitare).59

Even reduced to a mimetic checklist of straightforward actions, Bede’s vision of living an ‘angelic life’ was shot through with the idea of the unattainable. The striving mattered more than a misplaced notion that one could achieve a flawless existence. Bede sought to reassure his monastic readers that imitating the angels ‘as far as you are able’ was still virtue enough. In all these early Anglo-Saxon uses of the idea of a uita angelica, it is clear that what angels provided was not so much a model as a mirror, reflecting moral certainties already held. Learning a lesson from them was never really about poring over scripture looking for clues as to the details of angelic behaviour, but rather about fashioning an image of one’s own way of life that shone more brilliantly than any mundane, human ideal could capture. It was in all probability, and despite Bede’s best efforts, an ideal that few would actually spend their lives trying to achieve. Yet even as a purely rhetorical ideal, the notion of a uita angelica did contribute in a small way to a sense of profound difference between the natural states of earthly and heavenly beings. Even if humanity attempted to adopt some of the characteristics which it attributed to the angels, the very fact of living an earthly existence always placed limits on what was possible. There was nothing particularly new about this: centuries before, at the time of Augustine, it had been conventional wisdom to believe that ‘in terms of natural worth, the angelic creation . . . surpasses all of God’s other works’.60 Anglo-Saxon Christians from Bede to Alcuin thought very much along the same lines. Rather surprisingly, however, their successors did not. In the years which followed, it seems that this once firm sense of insurmountable difference between angelic and human life began to fade; and with it, much of the reason for maintaining the angels on their exemplary pedestal.

59 60

Bede, De tab., I.3 (ed. Hurst, pp. 12–13). Augustine, De ciu. Dei, XI.15 (ed. Dombart and Kalb, ii. 336).

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T H E L O S S OF P E RFE C TI ON Although the sixth-century philosopher Boethius believed in angels, he had found little to say about them. In his De consolatione Philosophiae (‘On the Consolation of Philosophy’), he had identified ‘angelic power’ as one of the links in the ‘chain of Fate’, but offered no further comment about their nature.61 When Boethius’ complex meditation on suffering, free will, and providence was translated into Old English, the Anglo-Saxon translator regularly took the opportunity to engage more directly with matters of Christian history and cosmology. Alongside digressions on Nimrod and the Tower of Babel, or brief allusions to the sacrifice and eternal reward of saintly martyrs, the English translator also added several comments about angels and demons. Although they were neither extensive nor developed, they were more than an attempt to make his source seem ‘more Christian’.62 The translator sought to amplify, or to modify, some of Boethius’ opinions about the spiritual world with his own ideas about supernatural beings and the characteristics they might share with humans. It seems best to leave open the question of exactly whose ideas these might be, for although the preface asserts that ‘King Alfred was the translator of this book’, the correctness of attributing the text to the ninth-century king of Wessex remains the subject of an entrenched debate.63 It is a debate worth having, and is surely vital if we are to interpret correctly the well-known passages of the Old English Boethius which touch on matters of kingship and justice, let alone accurately characterize the nature of Alfred’s reign. But confining our investigation of the Old English Boethius to its philosophical musings on the nature of angels means that we inevitably leave behind the personal experiences of the translator, whatever his station in life, and move instead into a wider world of theological speculation. On that basis, we might proceed by merely using the Old English Boethius as a guide to the ideas of an educated Anglo-Saxon working, so its dialect reveals, sometime between c.890 and c.930.64 Where Boethius spoke in terms of Neoplatonic diuini, spiritus, and daemones, the Old English translator preferred the less problematic language of simple angels and demons. He was not alone, and the wealth of glosses and 61 Boethius, De consolatione Philosophiae, IV, prose 6, ed. Ludwig Bieler, CCSL 94 (Turnhout, 1957), 80. 62 Pace Nicole Guenther Discenza, The King’s English: Strategies of Translation in the Old English ‘Boethius’ (New York, 2005), 44–5. 63 Old English Boethius, preface, ed. Malcolm Godden and Susan Irvine, The Old English Boethius: An Edition of the Old English Versions of Boethius’s ‘De consolatione Philosophiae’, 2 vols. (Oxford, 2009), i. 239 and 383. For the major points of debate, compare Malcolm Godden, ‘Did King Alfred write anything?’, Medium Ævum 76 (2007), 1–23; and Janet M. Bately, ‘Did King Alfred actually translate anything? The integrity of the Alfredian canon revisited’, Medium Ævum 78 (2009), 189–215. 64 Godden and Irvine, Old English Boethius, i. 145–6.

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annotations which accreted around De consolatione from the ninth century onwards regularly made the same connection.65 Thus, in the hands of the Old English translator, as in the minds of most other medieval readers of Boethius, statements about the free will of ‘celestial beings’ (superni) and ‘divine beings’ or ‘gods’ (diuini) lost their original ambiguity: the Old English translator clarified the meaning of his source and named ‘angels’ as the beings which possessed ‘just judgements and good wills’.66 Having introduced angels into the Consolation in this way, the translator occasionally felt compelled to add small truisms of his own about them. As he did so, his meaning began to diverge from that of his source. Boethius had set up a contrast between the untrammelled power and intellect of suprahuman beings, and the will of human beings curtailed by the passions and vices of their corporeal bodies. Even as he repeated Boethius’ distinction between higher and lower forms of free will, the translator felt compelled to add his own observation: ‘There is no creature which has freedom and reason except angels and people.’67 Short added comments like this swiftly made the Old English Boethius rather equivocal. It followed a source which insisted on absolute difference between the nature of heavenly and earthly creatures, yet inserted new comments about their shared potential for perfection. Thus, where Boethius distinguished sharply between the sentience of animals, the reason of humanity, and the true intelligence granted ‘only to the divine’, the Old English version refused to confine human beings to their intermediate position. The translator followed Boethius’ argument for a while, but then asserted that some among humanity had, in fact, proved capable of sharing—completely—in the loftier nature of heaven. More people ought to do the same, he said, ‘for it is pitiful that the majority of people . . . do not seek that which is above them, that which angels and wise men have: perfect understanding’.68 There was no stark difference between the earthly and the celestial in the mind of the translator, not when the state of the angels could be attained by humanity with a little effort. If human nature was capable of ‘perfect understanding’ from the perspective of the Boethian translator, then so too were celestial beings less stable in their own perfection. Where he read about the ways that ‘mighty Nature guides the reins of all things’, the translator felt it necessary to offer a few caveats: Now, I want to tell with songs how wonderfully the Lord governs all creatures with the reins of his power, and with what orderly arrangement he fixes and orders all creatures, and how he has bound and fettered them with unbreakable

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Godden and Irvine, Old English Boethius, ii. 465, 485, 493. OE Boethius, ch. 40 (ed. Godden and Irvine, i. 373); cf. Boethius, De consol. Phil., V, prose 2 (ed. Bieler, p. 91). 67 OE Boethius, ch. 40 (ed. Godden and Irvine, i. 373). 68 OE Boethius, ch. 41 (ed. Godden and Irvine, i. 378–9); cf. Boethius, De consol. Phil., V, prose 5 (ed. Bieler, p. 100). 66

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chains, so that every creature is bent and inclined towards its nature, the nature to which it was created—except for people and some angels, who sometimes turn from their nature.69

The translator knew too much about the distant past to be content with Boethius’ sketch of a wholly orderly universe, for he knew that the inhabitants of both heaven and earth had failed to remain obedient to their Creator. Not every human being turned against God, of course, nor every angel: ‘only a foolish man or, again, the rebellious angels’, the translator reiterated, unprompted, in a later chapter.70 Yet it is clear that in the mind of the translator the nature of angels and humans shared more in common than they had for Boethius. Alone among created beings, they shared the capacity both for perfection and for perdition. As a result, no clear division between the nature of one and the nature of the other emerges from the pages of the Old English Boethius, even though it followed a source which drew firm lines between the perfection of celestial beings and the lesser qualities granted to humankind. Adding caveats and qualifications to Boethius’ discourses on the nature of created beings, the translator blurred those lines and held instead that the angelic and human worlds were united by far more than divided them. The comments about the nature of angels found in the Old English Boethius about angels are, to be sure, little more than passing remarks; but they offer a perspective most unlike anything voiced a century or more before by Bede or Alcuin. Had either of those men set about translating De consolatione Philosophiae, they would have found its tidy divisions between higher and lower beings entirely in accord with their own ideas about the unapproachable perfection of the angels. Yet the knowledge that the angels had fallen from grace hung more heavily in the mind of our late ninth- or early tenth-century translator, and prevented him from sharing their confidence in the superiority of heavenly creatures. Taken to its logical conclusion, this made angels rather poor exemplars for humanity, for each kind of being seemed as changeable as the other. These were not implications drawn out in the Old English Boethius, but they are worth our attention because, after about the year 900, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to find any reference whatsoever to the exemplary qualities of angels coming once more from the pen of an Anglo-Saxon writer. Among all the exhortations and admonitions of late Anglo-Saxon homilists, the notion of striving towards any sort of ‘angelic life’ had almost entirely disappeared. Preachers still reminded their congregations about the need for regular and heartfelt praise, and monastics still glorified their life of chastity,

69 OE Boethius, ch. 25 (ed. Godden and Irvine, i. 293); cf. Boethius, De consol. Phil., III, metre 2 (ed. Bieler, p. 40). 70 OE Boethius, ch. 35 (ed. Godden and Irvine, i. 333).

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but neither made any great use of angelic role models when they did.71 Only a tiny handful of documents still made the connection, and even then only when they passively followed the lead of some older source. ‘Blessed are those men who are like angels in this world’, proclaimed a tenth-century Life of St Euphrosyne, but only because it followed closely on its much earlier Latin source; ‘I am not like [those who are] exalted for contempt of the world, glorified for the merit of justice, angelic for the praise of chastity’, moaned a prayer in an eleventh-century collection, but quoting from this time from Bede’s commentary on Luke.72 Unprompted, no original writings of the tenth and eleventh centuries offered their own messages about the virtuous state of those who emulated angels. Some, in fact, seem to have purposefully avoided making such a statement. Ælfric’s sermon for the fourth Sunday after Pentecost is an instructive example. It followed Gregory the Great’s homily on Luke 15, the sermon in which Gregory had laid out his ideas about the nine hosts of angels, how humanity would ultimately be joined to them, and why it was therefore a Christian’s duty to meditate on their example. ‘Examine your merits and your secret thoughts’, Gregory had urged. ‘See if you are doing anything good inside which can be seen in these hosts which we have briefly considered.’73 For Gregory, this had been the whole point of his lengthy digression on the ranks and virtues of the angels. When Ælfric came to the same place, however, he said nothing whatsoever about using the angels as moral guides: ‘But let us stop speaking about the mysteries of heavenly citizens for a while, and think about ourselves. Let us mourn our sins with repentance, so that we might possess the heavenly dwellings through the Lord’s mercy, just as he promised us . . . ’.74 Where Gregory had sought to turn speculative angelology to practical advantage, Ælfric turned instead to simple and well-worn teaching about the value of penitence. The example of the angels played no part in this. Although Ælfric still believed that ‘we will be joined to their hosts according to our worth’, he offered no sense that actively imitating their example while on earth was the key to achieving that reward. Nor did any of his contemporaries. As far as we can tell, the idea of the exemplary angel no longer played any part in either the rhetoric or the reality of Anglo-Saxon Christianity after the ninth century.

71 On asexual ideals in late Anglo-Saxon England, see Hugh Magennis, ‘ “No sex please, we’re Anglo-Saxons”? Attitudes to sexuality in Old English prose and poetry’, LSE, n.s. 26 (1995), 1–27; Catherine Cubitt, ‘Virginity and misogyny in tenth- and eleventh-century England’, Gender and History 12 (2000), 1–32. 72 Life of St Euphrosyne, ed. Skeat, Lives of the Saints, ii. 336–8; rendering Vita S. Euphrosynae, ch. 4, ed. Migne, PL 73, col. 644. Ælfwine’s Prayerbook, 67r–67v (ed. Günzel, pp. 190–1 [nos. 76.48]); quoting Bede, In Lucae, V.xviii.14 (ed. Hurst, p. 325). 73 Gregory, Hom. in euang., XXXIV (ed. Étaix, p. 311). 74 Ælfric, CH, I.24 (ed. Clemoes, p. 377).

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It is difficult to say now why that should have been. It certainly did not reflect the mood of Latin Christendom at large, for in nearby Francia homilists and hagiographers alike still spoke enthusiastically about the nature of ‘an angelic life on earth’, with no sign of change.75 Given the impact which the ideas of the Continent had always made across the Channel, it is curious that Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastics should not have continued to think in the same way as their Frankish counterparts on this matter. The paucity of surviving AngloSaxon religious writing after Alcuin does not help us pinpoint the moment at which something had changed, for by the time our evidence resumes in the middle of the tenth century, the angels seem already to have been unseated from their old position as role models for humanity. Yet perhaps a clue can be found by recalling the Old English Boethius, and supposing that the ideas about the fall of the angels which had nagged at its translator had also occurred to others. Faced with a decision between upholding the perfection of the angels, as Boethius seemed to suggest, or acknowledging instead their own capacity for fallibility, the translator tended towards the latter. So too did an anonymous homilist working a few decades later. His piece for the third Sunday in Lent, collected among the Blickling Homilies, focused on the theme of obligation, and he turned, like Alcuin before him, to the biblical connection between priests and angels made in Malachi 2.6 (‘the lips of the priest shall keep knowledge, and they shall seek the law at his mouth: because he is the angel of the Lord of hosts’).76 Nevertheless, where Alcuin had drawn a positive meaning from the words of the prophet—‘since the priest is the angel of the high Lord God, the holy word is required from his mouth’—this tenthcentury preacher inverted the Malachian language by drawing on the image of fallen angels instead: Bishops and priests must diligently encourage men of all classes, and command them appropriately to observe God’s decrees . . . . The mass-priest must do this out of necessity, or else take upon him himself the sins of [the laity]: he will then be like the angels of old who contended against God and were thrown into hell.77

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Vita Aldegundis abbatissae Malbodiensis, ch. 29, ed. Wilhelm Levison, MGH, SS rer. Merov. VI (Hanover, 1913), 89–90; Vita S. Walarici, ch. 5, ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH, SS rer. Merov. IV (Hanover, 1902), 162; Hildegar, Vita Faronis episcopi Meldensis, ch. 119, ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH, SS rer. Merov.V (Hanover, 1910), 199; Vita S. Eleutherii Tornacensis, ch. 11, ed. Godfried Henschen, AASS, Feb. III (Antwerp, 1658), 188; ps.-Eligius, Sermones, III, ed. Migne, PL 87, col. 605; Aduentus sanctorum Wandregisili, Ansberti et Vulframni in Blandinium, ch. 3, ed. N.-N. Huyghebaert, Une translation de reliques à Gand en 944. Le sermo de adventu sanctorum Wandregisili, Ansberti et Vulframni in Blandinium (Brussels, 1978), 5; Adso, Vita S. Frodoberti, ch. 5, ed. Monique Goullet, CCCM 198 (Turnhout, 2003), 28; Vita S. Menelei, I.8, ed. Wilhelm Levison, MGH, SS rer. Merov. V, 141; Vita S. Aichardi, ch. 5, ed. Jean Périer, AASS, Sept. V (Antwerp, 1755), 87. 76 See p. 64 in this chapter (‘Living the Vita Angelica’). 77 Blickling IV (ed. Morris, pp. 47–9). The statement does not derive from either of the homilist’s main sources, Caesarius of Arles’ Sermo XXXIII and the Visio Pauli.

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It was the same message, but differently framed. For this homilist, the biblical equation of priest and angel provided him with a way to offer a warning about the price of failure rather than a call to live up to celestial standards. The story of the angelic fall seems to have monopolized his understanding of heavenly spirits and their nature: negative associations came more readily than positive ones. He was probably not alone, given how frequently Anglo-Saxon poetry and prose alluded to the story of Lucifer and his rebellion, as we saw in the previous chapter. With so many different writers all drawing attention to the angels’ sinful past, it is perhaps unsurprising that they failed to maintain their position as guides for human life. If angels exemplified anything at all in late Anglo-Saxon England, it was not so much a lifestyle as an appearance. Tenth-century hagiographers remarked not when their saintly heroes had lived like the angels, but only when they looked like them. St Dunstan’s features were particularly commented upon, and late Anglo-Saxon saints’ Lives regularly described him as being ‘angelic with snowy-white hair’, or wondered at him for being ‘as beautiful as an angel’.78 The other new saints championed by the Benedictine reform movement were praised for similar qualities. In the stories of St Swithun’s frequent visits to tenth-century Winchester, it was often noted that he regularly appeared ‘resplendent with an angelic likeness, clothed in a linen robe and wearing golden sandals on his feet’.79 This was a form which all the righteous would share in the resurrection, and it sometimes seemed as if the physical transformation impressed Anglo-Saxon writers more than the entry of souls into a world which had been reborn. The gospels promised that the elect would live now without death, ‘like the angels’, yet for the Old English poet Cynewulf, this denoted an aesthetic state as much as an existential one. ‘They will shine forth in beauty like the angels and enjoy the inheritance of the King of glory for evermore’, Cynewulf foretold at the end of his poem Elene.80 The homilist Ælfric too, whenever he described the nature of angels, spoke of their ‘great strength and might’ in preference to their intellectual or moral superiority to human beings.81 These were not qualities which it greatly benefited human beings to emulate. Although the angels were still thought of as creatures which were somehow more than human, it was perhaps in a more superficial sense than

78 Wulfstan of Winchester, Narratio, dedicatory letter (ed. Lapidge, p. 376) and VÆthel, ch. 14 (ed. Lapidge and Winterbottom, p. 26). Cf. also Byrhtferth, VO, V.8 (ed. Lapidge, p. 166), quoting verses composed by Abbo of Fleury. 79 Lantfred, Translatio, ch. 1 (ed. Lapidge, p. 260); likewise also ch. 10 (p. 294); and Wulfstan of Winchester, Narratio, I.1384–5, II.183, and II.1006 (ed. Lapidge, pp. 478, 500, and 542). 80 Cynewulf, Elene, ll. 1319b–21, ed. P. O. E. Gradon, Cynewulf ’s Elene (rev. edn., Exeter, 1977), 75; Biggs, ‘Englum gelice’, 447–8. 81 Ælfric, CH, I.1 (ed. Clemoes, p. 179); Exameron (ed. Crawford, p. 41); Letter to Sigeweard (ed. Crawford, p. 18). See also Fox, ‘Creation and fall’, 184.

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before. Anglo-Saxon Christians set their sights on other role models instead. The image of idealized monasticism offered by the tenth-century Benedictine movement in its Regularis concordia (‘Monastic Agreement’) of c.970 was an image of ‘abbots and abbesses, with communities of monks and nuns under them, vying with one another to follow the footsteps of the saints’.82 It sought to create the conditions whereby that would become second nature, and declared that its regulations would succeed in making the professional religious be ‘bound by monastic custom and the imitation of the fathers’.83 Yet although there was evidently a value in human role models, all that the Regularis concordia had to say about the imitation of angels was contained in its instructions for the Easter celebrations: Four monks should dress themselves; and one of them, wearing an alb as if doing something different, is to enter and go stealthily to the place of the ‘sepulchre’ and sit there quietly, holding a palm in his hand. . . . The other three brothers, all wearing copes and carrying thuribles with incense in their hands, are to follow after and go the place of the ‘sepulchre’, step by step, as if searching for something. Now these things are done in imitation of the angel seated on the tomb and the women coming with perfumes to anoint the body of Jesus.84

Far removed from Bede’s impassioned instructions to cultivate the moral qualities of the angels diligently, the kind of imitation recommended by the new monastic leaders of tenth-century England went no further than impersonation. It is a facile contrast, perhaps, but an emblematic one nonetheless. Late Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastics fixed on the physicality of angels where their predecessors had looked for celestial role models, of one kind or another. It had, perhaps, become difficult to shake the knowledge that even angels had fallen, and that made their nature seem ultimately just as changeable and potentially as fallible as humanity’s. Almost imperceptibly, Anglo-Saxon Christians had turned their backs on otherworldly guides for life. The intellectual modulations which this chapter has been tracing are relatively slight, but it is curious that they have not generally been noticed before. Quite the contrary, in fact: the religious climate of late Anglo-Saxon England has sometimes been adduced as precisely the kind of environment in which Gregory the Great’s old teachings about following the example of the angels ought to have flourished anew. Rosemary Cramp, for instance, has raised the possibility ‘that the revival of monastic life in England in the tenth and eleventh century fostered a more general interest in angels’, given the fact that ‘an ancient tradition in which the religious life is seen in terms of the life of angels [could] have played a particularly significant part in the devotions of

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83 RegConc, ch. 4 (ed. Kornexl, pp. 3–4). RegConc, ch. 14 (ed. Kornexl, p. 21). RegConc, ch. 51 (ed. Kornexl, p. 105): on which, see M. Bradford Bedingfield, The Dramatic Liturgy of Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge, 2002), 156–61. 84

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religious communities in late Saxon England’.85 Ancient though it was by the tenth and eleventh centuries, the notion of living a uita angelica had never really been as fixed and immutable a part of early medieval Christian thought as we have typically imagined. In our efforts to reconstruct the ideals of the early Middle Ages, we have been impressed by the way that widely disseminated and prolific writers like Gregory or Bede directed their audiences to model themselves on the angels, and assumed that long generations of successive Christians would naturally have internalized those commands. But even Gregory and Bede differed in how they thought a uita angelica was to be achieved, and chance remarks in the writings of others allow us to glimpse the still greater range of opinion which existed in the minds of their contemporaries. For some in the age of Bede, the ‘angelic life’ meant naturally the life of strict monasticism. For others, the phrase could be extended to encompass the lives of any Christian, from the humblest devotee to the mightiest secular ruler. Still others thought that the term could only really have been meaningful in the blessed days before the fall from Eden. This was not so much an ‘ancient tradition’ as a loose cluster of different ideas, all built around the notion that human life could be improved and perfected when it clung to the example of some higher kind of existence. It has perhaps been difficult to notice this diversity of opinion with the proclamations of a sixth-century pope still ringing in our ears; and certainly the attentiveness with which we have listened to Gregory’s ideas has made it hard to hear the quieter sound of the uita angelica falling into disuse in Anglo-Saxon England. Recognizing that Anglo-Saxon believers were free to alter, adjust, and even abandon the ideas which they took from earlier centuries of Christian thinkers forces us to listen hard for evidence of their own beliefs. As indebted as AngloSaxon Christians were to their late antique predecessors, we must resist the temptation to use the writings of the patristic era as a shortcut to the AngloSaxons’ own ideas about the world, overlooking the sorts of change which could and did take place over the intervening centuries. That theme has been very much at the heart of the last two chapters, and I hope that they have together served to demonstrate the ways that even such ostensibly traditional areas of thought as the theology of Creation or the ideals of the uita angelica could nonetheless branch off in unexpected directions as successive generations grappled with them for themselves. But if we have rejected the notion that the writings of the Church Fathers set an inviolate template for the AngloSaxons’ own beliefs about angels, then it means we cannot take anything for granted. When Anglo-Saxon preachers stood before their congregations and spoke of angels watching over the souls of the living, or being sent to collect

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Rosemary Cramp, CASSS vii, 61.

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the souls of the dead, can we be confident that those words called to mind the same mental images as they might have done in other periods of history? Just as we have been sometimes too quick to reach for our patristic handbooks to help us decode enigmatic pieces of Anglo-Saxon art and literature, we might also have been too slow to realize that our stock of mental images is often strikingly at odds with those of Anglo-Saxon writers. The second part of this book turns to two aspects of Anglo-Saxon belief which have, I argue, typically been misunderstood precisely by reading the words of the past with the wrong set of mental images: the beliefs about guardian angels on the one hand, and about the spirits who involved themselves with the souls of the dead on the other. Both seem to belong to the realm of well-worn Christian teaching and conventional religious imagery, and we do not often think of them as fluid and changeable aspects of medieval Christian thought. But the apparent familiarity and stability of these beliefs is an illusion. Over the course of the early Middle Ages communities and intellectuals came to develop their own, distinct ideas about the actions of the invisible beings with whom they shared their world. Listening to the changing ways that they spoke about these unseen creatures, we can perhaps also hear the beginnings of a new attitude towards the supernatural starting to take hold. The Anglo-Saxons were unconsciously redrawing their mental maps of the universe—not by utterly casting out old notions, but by quietly adjusting them in ways which seemed better able to explain the world as they saw it.

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Part II Unseen Worlds

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3 The Changing Fortunes of the Guardian Angel Speculating about the origins and history of angels, or the nature of their society, was not greatly aided by scripture. Stray hints and associations had to be assembled and explained with a good deal of creativity. When it came to thinking about the ways that these first-created spirits interacted with humanity in the present, however, early medieval theologians found the Bible to be a less ambiguous guide. They knew from the Psalms that ‘the angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him, and shall deliver him’, just as they knew that Christ himself had once warned his followers ‘not to despise any of the little ones, for their angels always see the face of my Father, who is in heaven’.1 Assurances about the constant presence of angels by the side of the living tumbled from the lips of sermon writers and exegetes, who were perhaps relieved to find so little mystery in these forthright declarations about the angels attached continually to watch over the living. Their assertions in turn exerted such an influence on others that ‘angel’ became, for many, completely synonymous with notions of protection and watchfulness. One Anglo-Saxon scribe could think of little else, it seems, and as he set about copying an account of the creation of the angels, he mistook the Old English words gasta werodum (‘hosts of spirits’) for gasta weardum (‘guardians of [people’s] spirits’). He wrote down what he thought he saw, although it made no sense in the context of the piece he was copying out. A few lines later and he had made the same mistake again.2 The scribe had always been taught that angels were indeed ‘guardians of [people’s] spirits’, and so convinced had he been that he let his expectations guide his pen.

1

Ps. 33.8; Matt. 18.10. Genesis A, ll. 12a and 41a (ed. Doane, pp. 145–6). See Robert Getz, ‘ “Guardians of souls” or “host(s) of spirits”? (Genesis A 12a and 41a)’, JEGP 112 (2013), 141–53. 2

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It may not be wholly unfair to say that modern scholars have also sometimes been guilty of letting their expectations about medieval ideas of ‘guardian angels’ dictate their readings of documents which dealt with the subject. The theologian Jean Daniélou was convinced that ‘it is on the question of the guardian angel that tradition seems to be at its most constant and solid’, and similar feelings have sometimes led scholars to second-guess their sources for medieval beliefs.3 Finding, for instance, that early baptismal liturgies regularly petitioned God to ‘send a holy angel to protect [his] servants and lead them to the grace of baptism’, it can seem commonsensical to suppose that this was an invitation for God to bestow a guardian angel upon a new Christian, and that these words simply articulated a common medieval belief ‘that there is a personal angelic presence from the time of baptism’.4 But in truth, early medieval writings about guardian angels tend to resist our attempts to synthesize them into a single concrete doctrine. Some looked not to baptism but to birth as the moment that angels began to involve themselves with human souls.5 Others thought that angels and souls were joined even before then, and that heavenly spirits were responsible for placing the soul inside the body in the first place.6 Still others, more numerous for a time, believed that an angel’s companionship was not freely granted, but could only be gained with effort in later life.7 And once the angel had arrived, what was it meant to offer? An impenetrable barrier against demonic onslaught, thought some; or perhaps only the encouragement which enabled a person to fortify themselves, said others; or maybe no tangible assistance at all, suggested some less optimistic thinkers. Early medieval Christians had not inherited a stable and well-defined tradition about guardian angels from antiquity. They were instead still actively engaged in shaping ideas about angels into forms which could conform to biblical teachings on the one hand, and the lived experience of daily life on the other. A great many seem to have found the balance difficult to strike; and in Anglo-Saxon England, at least, it became ever more common to find intellectuals dwelling upon the potential limitations and failures of angels rather than upon their mighty deeds of old. Caught within the gradual transformation of the Anglo-Saxons’ ideas about guardian angels, then, appears to be some fragment of a broader transformation of Anglo-Saxon religious culture. In a way that perhaps no contemporary might have noticed, old certainties were giving way to new anxieties.

3

4 Daniélou, Les Anges et leur mission, 93. Foxhall Forbes, Heaven and Earth, 108. See pp. 90 and 98 in this chapter (‘The Two Spirits’ and ‘Inconstancy’). 6 Soul and Body I, ll. 27–9, ed. George Philip Krapp, ASPR II (New York, 1932), 55; Soul and Body II, ll. 24–6, ed. George Philip Krapp and Elliott van Kirk Dobbie, ASPR III (New York, 1936), 175. 7 See pp. 84–8 in the present chapter (‘The Saved and the Damned’). 5

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THE S AVED AND THE DAMNED ‘Of the angels, the apostle says: “Are they not all ministering spirits, sent to serve for the sake of those who are to receive the inheritance of salvation?”’8 The knowing statement of Hebrews 1.14 came easily to the lips of early medieval writers when they needed to offer a reminder about the constant presence of angels in their world. They tended to have one particular kind of service in mind. In a commentary on the Song of Songs, Bede observed that the ministry of the angels ought to be linked with the words of the prophet Isaiah, who had lingered over the image of a wall surrounding a hilltop vineyard. ‘The wall’, Bede noted, ‘signifies the guard of the heavenly powers with which the Lord has encircled his vineyard, the church, so that it may not be ravaged by the invasion of unclean spirits.’9 This was a thoroughly scholarly interpretation of Isaiah’s meaning, following an exegetical path laid down by Ambrose.10 But in the eighth century it was hardly necessary to be a patristic scholar to think that an unseen force of angels was busily engaged with the spiritual defence of human souls. It was considered such basic Christian teaching that when Bede took to the pulpit in the 720s or 730s, he thought it almost too obvious to labour: ‘It is no secret that angels are frequently present, invisibly, alongside the elect, so that they can defend them from the snares of the cunning enemy, and raise them up with the mighty grace of heavenly desire. The apostle attests to this when he says: “Are they not all ministering spirits . . . ”.’11 These were uncomplicated duties, easily imagined. An anonymous Old English poet contemporary with Bede cannot have been alone in thinking that the angels went about their tasks in much the same manner as the warriors who performed more mundane services for earthly lords. He pictured the spirits stationed in readiness beside the men and women placed under their protection: Angels stand before these people, ready with the weapons of spirits and mindful of their safety. They preserve the life of holy people, knowing that their hope is with the Lord. They are the proven champions who serve a king who never withholds the reward from those who persevere in his love.12

The degree to which this was a distinctly ‘Germanic’ image is less self-evident than some have supposed: the image of angels as warrior-spirits had become a 8 Bede, In cant., II.ii.13–14 (ed. Hurst, p. 225), quoting Heb. 1.14. Cf. De templo, I.xiii.6 (ed. Hurst, p. 181); Hom., II.10 (ed. Hurst, pp. 248–9). 9 Bede, In cant., II.ii.13–14 (ed. Hurst, p. 225), drawing on Isa. 5.1–2. 10 Ambrose, Exameron, III.12 (ed. Schenkl, p. 92). 11 Bede, Hom., II.10 (ed. Hurst, pp. 248–9). 12 Guthlac A, ll. 88b–92, ed. Jane Roberts, The Guthlac Poems of the Exeter Book (Oxford, 1979), 85. For the date, see n. 20 in the present chapter.

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major theme in Jewish writing centuries before.13 It is nevertheless true that eighth-century Anglo-Saxons deemed the protection of body and soul to be among the most needful services to obtain from the powers of heaven. Their surviving prayerbooks overflow with petitions, requests, and entreaties which attempt to secure physical and spiritual protection against all manner of adversities.14 The sorts of people who made and used those private prayerbooks naturally hoped that an unseen force of supernatural assistants stood nearby in continuous readiness, and imagined that if one could only lift the veil from one’s eyes it might be possible to see them stationed beside the living with weapons reserved for their protection. It was probably with a certain degree of reassurance, therefore, that a nun named Eadburg read, in a letter which she received in the second decade of the eighth century, that a contemporary of hers had recently confirmed the existence of these guardian spirits in a remarkable vision. This had taken place at the monastery of Wenlock, in the kingdom of the Magonsætan, where one of the brethren had risen from the dead with a startling story about his experiences in the otherworld. The account of his story which Eadburg now received was the work of a West Saxon monk named Wynfrith—a man better known by his assumed name of Boniface, and whose martyrdom in 754 meant that he would become more famous as a saint than the anonymous brother from Wenlock would ever manage as a visionary. But for a short time, perhaps, the monk of Wenlock had indeed enjoyed some measure of celebrity, for Boniface himself had sought him out to discover everything that the man could recall about his otherworldly experience. Some of the man’s revelations pertained to the activities of immaterial spirits, which he was able to see clearly during his time among the dead. Boniface informed Eadburg that the visionary monk had been able to look down upon the world with his new, spiritual sight and to see how closely human beings lived beside unseen friends and foes: Those people who were not guilty of sins and who were supported by holy virtues were known to have the favour of almighty God; these were overseen and defended at all times by angels, and were joined to them in kindness and intimacy. But for those who were defiled by wicked crimes and the stains of a polluted life, a hostile spirit constantly accompanied them, always urging them on to evil deeds. Whenever they sinned in word or deed, the demon always made it known to other loathsome spirits for their joy and delight. And if someone sinned, the evil spirit did not even wait until they might sin again, but brought

13 See Aleksander Michalak, Angels as Warriors in Late Second Temple Jewish Literature (Tübingen, 2012); contra Michael D. Cherniss, Ingeld and Christ: Heroic Concepts and Values in Old English Christian Poetry (The Hague, 1972), 228–9. 14 See Patrick Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature in Western England, 600–800 (Cambridge, 1990), 285–302.

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each vice individually to the attention of the other spirits. As soon as it persuaded the person to sin, it gave an account of what had been done to the demons.15

What the monk of Wenlock’s spiritual sight had shown him was that the world contained two kinds of people, each entangled in a different way with invisible companions. It was perhaps typical of Boniface to have hurried past the righteous half of humanity with its angelic helpers, and to dwell instead upon the sinful half plagued by demons. In this, as in other respects, the letter provides a better insight into Boniface’s own ideas and predilections than it does for the details of an eighth-century ‘near death experience’ as it might actually have happened.16 And as brief as this passage is, it reveals a great deal about Boniface’s understanding of what it meant for angels to be the ‘ministering spirits’ of mankind. For a start, it seems that angels were not believed to be ubiquitous. The fact that the monk of Wenlock could see only one part of the human race accompanied by angelic helpers—the part which was ‘known to have the favour of almighty God’—indicates that angels, in Boniface’s eyes, only descended upon those individuals who had already earned their fellowship. It is worth pausing to consider that idea in detail. At one level, Boniface was being very careful about the implications of what he was saying. He noted that while demons might coax people into error—an unproblematic notion, since the devil had once ‘put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon, to betray Jesus’17—the wellspring of both virtue and vice lay firmly within the mind of the individual human rather than with their invisible companion. Neither the angels nor the demons were simple puppet-masters of the soul; they could only nurture and encourage what they found there. In that sense, Boniface’s words comprised a tacit but cogent defence of free will, even when his account admitted that human beings lived in a world which could still be rocked by powerful beings of absolute good or evil. He and his contemporaries might find themselves nudged one way or another by invisible forces, but only along the road that they had already chosen for themselves. Yet at the same time, Boniface’s conviction that human beings lived their lives under the charge of either a helpful or a hostile warden entailed a rather pessimistic view of humanity. The world seen by the monk of Wenlock was so sharply divided into moral extremes that it seemed to have a sort of natural inertia about it. Over the course of a single life, the good were only ever encouraged to do good, just as the sinful were only ever incited towards further sin. This made for such a fundamental division that Boniface considered moral change to be something of an unnatural event. Human souls did not regularly 15

Die Briefe, X (ed. Tangl, p. 13). For the various stages of oral and literary reshaping that must underlie Boniface’s letter, see Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, 243–72. For other aspects of the monk’s otherworldly journey, see also Ch. 4, pp. 122–3 and 127 (‘Breaking the Rules of Death’ and ‘The Road out of Life’). 17 John 13.2. 16

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cross from one side to the other, and the physical toll exerted on any person who did was immense. That became abundantly clear a little later in the letter, when Boniface described how the monk of Wenlock had seen the moral worth of Ceolred, king of Mercia (d. 716), being reassessed. The king had evidently once numbered among those who enjoyed ‘the favour of God’, for a group of angels stood guard over him. As the monk watched, the king’s situation took a fateful turn: He said that he saw the king protected against the assault of demons by a kind of angelic screen, extended over him like an enormous book. But the demons begged the angels with breathless voices to withdraw the protection and to let them work their savage will on him. They accused him of a horrible and wicked collection of shameful acts, threatening to have him shut up in the most frightful dungeons of the underworld, there to be racked with eternal torments as his sins deserved. Then the angels spoke, more sadly than usual: ‘Alas that this sinful man no longer allows himself to be protected. We can offer him no more help, because of the things he has done.’ And they withdrew the protection of the sheltering screen. The demons gathered together then with joy and exultation from every part of the world, a greater number than the monk had thought there were human souls in existence, and attacked the king with an incalculable burden of diverse torments.18

This was more than a routine changing of the guard. The departure of Ceolred’s angels in fact led directly to an ignominious death. Boniface laid a great deal of emphasis on that fact, and saw it as the key piece of evidence which authenticated the monk of Wenlock’s entire vision, explaining to Eadburg that ‘the swift death of the wicked king shortly after proved beyond doubt that the things which had been seen happening to him were the truth’.19 Presumably this indicates that Boniface expected Eadburg, and probably others as well, to share his sense that abandonment by one’s guardian angels might constitute a plausible cause of death. If so, then Boniface and his contemporaries in early eighth-century England shared a starkly black-and-white outlook on life and the capacity for moral change. When it was possible to treat as anomalous an individual like King Ceolred, who had once lived in a manner which was ‘known to have the favour of God’ but who had failed to live up to his early promise in later life, then equally anomalous was the figure of the reformed sinner. That was, in effect, the argument made by one Old English poet who wrote an account of the life and deeds of St Guthlac at some point during the eighth century.20 His poem 18

Die Briefe, X (ed. Tangl, p. 14). Die Briefe, X (ed. Tangl, p. 15). In a later letter, Boniface ascribed the king’s death to a fit of demonically induced madness which struck him during a feast: Die Briefe, LXXIII (pp. 152–3). 20 An early to mid-eighth-century date is implied by the poet’s reference to people who had known Guthlac before his death in 714 and were still alive. Alaric Hall observes that this is not a common claim in Old English verse, and ought therefore to be taken seriously: ‘Constructing Anglo-Saxon sanctity: tradition, innovation and Saint Guthlac’, in Debra Higgs Strickland (ed.), 19

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(now known as Guthlac A) did not hide the fact that Guthlac’s life had undergone a dramatic shift of fortune, for this eventual hermit-saint had been a wayward youth and had once ‘loved many perilous things’. This the poet blamed in large part on the instigations of a demon, who ‘urged him on so that he sought by night a band of marauders, to struggle with audacity after worldly things as outcasts do’.21 In those years Guthlac shared the lot of the sinners seen by the monk of Wenlock: like them, he lacked any guardian angel to shield him from the demon’s advances. Yet if that was so, the poet needed to explain how it was that Guthlac had ended his days as a saint and so managed to escape the demon’s clutches. The pivotal moment turned out, said the poet, to have been planned by God all along: The time when God, in his wisdom, would give an angel to Guthlac—so that the lust for sin would subside in him—was in the judgement of God. The moment was approaching: two guardians kept watch about him when the Lord’s angel and the loathsome spirit waged war. Many times they brought advice (by no means alike) into his mind’s thoughts. . . . They incited him on two sides, until the Lord of hosts ordered the end of the fight in the angel’s favour. The fiend was put to flight, and the consoling spirit stayed thereafter in support of Guthlac.22

The poet intended his words to be taken literally, not as some allegorical psychodrama which personified Guthlac’s inner feelings. His decision has jarred against the sensibilities of many modern readers, who have occasionally preferred to read this episode as an extended metaphor for Guthlac’s mental turbulence (and who have then struggled to explain the continued reappearance of both angels and demons in various ‘real world’ settings throughout the poem).23 Such readers are perhaps entirely correct to think that attributing a literal sense to this scene would rob it of any real drama, since that would require us to read Guthlac A as the story of a man who had been allowed no personal agency in his own spiritual transformation, rather than as the story— to us, more compelling—of a sinner’s personal redemption. But that, it seems, was precisely the poet’s point. His account was to be a demonstration of God’s

Images of Sanctity: Essays in Honour of Gary Dickson (Leiden, 2007), 207–35, at 209. Others have associated the poem with the tenth-century monastic reform, on the basis of general conformities with Benedictine ideals; but these cannot rule out composition in any earlier Benedictine community: cf. Patrick W. Conner, ‘Source studies, the Old English Guthlac A and the English Benedictine reformation’, Revue bénédictine 103 (1993), 380–413; Christopher A. Jones, ‘Envisioning the cenobium in the Old English Guthlac A’, Mediaeval Studies 57 (1995), 259–91. 21 Guthlac A, ll. 109–110a, 127–9, ed. Roberts, Guthlac Poems, 86–7. 22 Guthlac A, ll. 114–37 (ed. Roberts, pp. 86–7). 23 Cherniss, Ingeld and Christ, 229; Daniel G. Calder, ‘Guthlac A and Guthlac B: some discriminations’, in Lewis E. Nicholson and Dolores Warwick Frese (eds.), Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Essays in Appreciation for John C. McGalliard (Notre Dame, Ind., 1975), 65–80, at 71–3. The literal intent of Guthlac A is convincingly argued by Jennifer Neville, Representations of the Natural World in Old English Poetry (Cambridge, 1999), 126–7.

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love for a chosen soul, and Guthlac’s own free will played little part in the process. Setting out for a new life as an ascetic hermit was not the product of some personal spiritual awakening within Guthlac himself, but had been entirely prearranged by God. The poet was explicit that the eremitical life became attractive to Guthlac only after God had intervened in his fate (siþþan hine inlyhte se þe lifes weg gæstum gearwað).24 In much the same way as Boniface could only fit human changeability into his rigidly divided picture of the world by treating it as an exceptional event with potentially fatal consequences, the Guthlac A-poet found that he could only explain fundamental moral change by assuming that God had intervened directly to mould an unlikely soul into a suitable candidate for sainthood. When these eighth-century Anglo-Saxons told stories about the winning and losing of guardian angels, they were probably unaware that their view of the world had not always been shared by earlier Christians. The major theologians of antiquity had never reached a consensus on the matter of precisely who might enjoy the companionship of angels. In the third century Origen had been adamant that the services of a guardian angel would ‘be withdrawn from a person if, through disobedience, he becomes unworthy’. He found it altogether more difficult to say whether that meant that angels took up their stewardship from the moment of a person’s birth or only after an individual joined the community of believers upon baptism, and on this question Origen ultimately asked his readers to judge the matter for themselves.25 But considerations of this kind scarcely shook the certainties of others, and prominent thinkers began to enthuse in more sweeping terms about the fact that ‘every visible thing in the world is placed under angelic power’.26 The steering hand of the angels represented something akin to an immutable law of creation, in their view, and the moral status of any single human being could do little to alter the attentiveness of the spirit which had been assigned to them. According to Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea (d. c.340), even the pre-Christian Plato had been dimly aware of the ministrations of guardian angels, though the pagan philosopher could never have been numbered among God’s elect.27 But within monastic circles, as Ellen Muehlberger has elsewhere shown, insistent voices began to return to the notion that human beings needed to live up to more exacting criteria before angels took an interest in their affairs. The letter to the Hebrews had, after all, described 24

Guthlac A, ll. 98b–102a (ed. Roberts, p. 86). Origen, On First Principles, II.x.7 (ed. Görgemanns and Karpp, p. 436); and Commentary on Matthew, XIII.27–8, ed. Erich Klostermann, Origenes Matthäuserklärung I. Die Griechisch erhaltenen Tomoi (Leipzig, 1935), 254–9. 26 Augustine, De diuersis quaestionibus octoginta tribus, ch. 79, ed. Almut Mutzenbecher, CCSL 44A (Turnhout, 1975), 225. 27 Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, XIII.13, ed. Karl Mras, Eusebius Werke VIII.2, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1956), i. 199–200. 25

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angels as ‘ministering spirits sent to serve those who are to receive the inheritance of salvation’—a reward for those already walking towards eternal life, rather than a helping hand to turn the imperfect away from damnation. Late antique monastics like the Egyptian abbot, Shenoute of Atripe (d. 465), were little inclined to overlook the connotations of exclusivity in those words. Injunctions about the need for Christians to prove worthy of supernatural aid issued from Shenoute’s sermons, as he railed against the folly of those who thought it possible to seek after worldly favour when ‘he has not acquired for himself an angel to rescue him from Satan’.28 There was more than a touch of self-congratulation in declarations like this, made by ascetics who exulted in the spiritual gifts which their exemplary conduct afforded them. These the anonymous author of Guthlac A (seemingly a monk himself) placed into the mouth of his hermit-saint, who eagerly explained to a crowd of demons that, ‘now that a spiritual shepherd watches over me, cravings come upon me only a little, and anxieties hardly at all’.29 The sense of contractual obligation upon which this monastic vision of guardian angels depended continued to shape the religious imagination of monks for centuries. A Frankish monk in the ninth-century cloister of Reichenau was once led by his guardian angel on an out-of-body journey, during which he discovered that his angel had previously been assigned to the biblical Samson as well. The angel recalled that it had stood by Samson only ‘until he incurred God’s wrath when he became softened by the charms of the flesh with Delilah . . . and was abandoned by God, at which point I left him’.30 Believing that guardian angels associated themselves only with the right sort of people, to such a degree that one might lose their aid and suffer terrible consequences, impressed itself deeply on monastics, who were already accustomed to see the world in terms of islands of piety amidst an otherwise sinful world. As comfortably as these ideas sat with monastic rhetoric, they can never have seemed very true to life. If angels and demons only joined themselves to those individuals whose moral outlook matched their own, and abided with them thereafter, then the world was one in which the good might find it easier to remain good, and the wicked increasingly likely to persevere in wickedness. Boniface at least was fully aware that this was seldom the case—that human nature was changeable, and that a single lifetime in fact produced a mixture of the good and the bad. The monk of Wenlock himself had certainly performed 28 These points are indebted to Ellen Muehlberger, ‘Angels in the religious imagination of late antiquity’, unpublished Ph.D thesis, Indiana University (2008), 72–87, from which is also taken the translated quotation from Shenoute’s De iudicio (ed. Heike Behlmer, Schenute von Atripe: De iudicio (Turin, 1996), 98). Only some of this material has since been published in Muehlberger, Angels in Late Ancient Christianity, 89–147. 29 Guthlac A, ll. 314b–322 (ed. Roberts, p. 92). For the poem’s monastic connections, see n. 20 in the present chapter. 30 Heito, Visio Wettini, ch. 20, ed. Ernst Dümmler, MGH, Poetae II (Berlin, 1884), 273.

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both, and Boniface described the way that the monk’s virtues and vices alike cried out to him with audible voices as soon as he entered the otherworld.31 Perhaps in more careful and extended writing about salvation, or in texts written with pastoral intent, it would have been possible to explain how these ideas about guardian angels could be rationalized with the observable facts of human nature. But it seems that Anglo-Saxon Christians in the eighth century preferred to articulate their beliefs about the function of guardian angels in an altogether more eschatological manner, as if those who would eventually number among the saved and the damned could already be easily distinguished from each other during life. That was the force of Bede’s declaration that ‘angels are frequently present alongside the elect’, and thinking of supernatural protection in this way—as God’s reward for chosen souls—made it hard to express change and moral development as anything other than anomalous.32 Doubtless this way of thinking suited Anglo-Saxon churchmen in the early years of their religion in England, when it was both easy and convenient to think of the world being split between Christians and non-Christians, believers and pagans, saved and damned. But as Christianity gained a monopoly in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, this strictly segregated vision of human society must have seemed increasingly uncompromising. It was certainly one with which future generations seem to have grown dissatisfied.

T H E TW O S P I R I T S To one early Christian thinker, the essential changeability of human beings seemed perfectly compatible with the notion that God had granted powerful spirits the ability to influence the course of mortal lives. It simply indicated that men and women possessed not one but two invisible companions, alike in strength but opposed in will. This he revealed in the course of a protracted but enduring piece of early Christian mysticism known as the Shepherd of Hermas, written in Rome no later than the second century CE, and purporting to relate the visionary experiences of a former slave, Hermas. ‘Every person has two angels,’ Hermas was told during one of these visions, ‘one of righteousness and the other of wickedness.’ The works of each were identified for him by the eponymous Shepherd, who possessed a certain authority in the matter, since he himself was an angel placed over Hermas for his instruction and protection. ‘Righteousness, purity, reverence, and contentment’ were the hallmarks of a person’s good angel, ‘and when these things rise up in your heart, realize that the angel of righteousness is with you’. The angel of wickedness, on the other 31 32

Die Briefe, X (ed. Tangl, pp. 9–11). Bede, Hom., II.10 (ed. Hurst, pp. 248–9).

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hand, was characterized by a wretched and malicious nature, and so, ‘whenever any irascibility or bitterness should fall on you, realize that he is in you’.33 Human lives were continually buffeted by these two opposing forces, in much the same way that an Old English poet would later imagine St Guthlac being ‘incited on both sides’ by the dissimilar advice of an angel and a demon. The difference was that, in the Shepherd of Hermas, the contest fought by the two spirits was endlessly reconvened.34 Anyone at any time might find themselves drawn this way or that, for the continual presence of these two spirits was a simple fact of human existence. This account of the two spirits attached to every person was a small, almost incidental, part of the broader theology of the Shepherd of Hermas, but it was a convenient piece of lore that swiftly became detached from its original context. ‘Scripture attests that two angels, one good and one bad, are attached to each one of us’, observed Cassian in the early part of the fifth century. ‘The book of the Shepherd teaches very explicitly about both.’35 It was in part through such second-hand references that the Shepherd of Hermas attained the reputation of being an authority on the subject of guardian angels during the early Middle Ages, even for those who had never themselves read it. Bede, for instance, saw fit to recommend the ‘Liber Pastoris’ as an instructive work for anyone who harboured questions about guardian angels, even though none of his own writings show any real engagement with its ideas.36 Bede’s endorsement, in turn, seems to have prompted the Frankish monk Walahfrid Strabo (d. 849) to recommend it himself, although he too seems to have known nothing more than that the book confirmed the basic fact ‘that men have heavenly guardians’.37 Although a few curious souls were perhaps directed by the likes of Cassian, Bede, or Walahfrid to seek out the Shepherd of Hermas, which was available in libraries from northern England to eastern Francia during these centuries,

33 Shepherd of Hermas, Mandates, VI.2, ed. and trans. Bart D. Ehrman, The Apostolic Fathers, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), ii. 262–6. The basic notion draws upon ancient ideas: see Pierre Boyancé, ‘Les Deux Démons personnels dans l’antiquité grecque et latine’, Revue de Philologie, de littérature et d’histoire anciennes, 3rd ser., 9 (1935), 189–202. 34 For that reason, it seems unlikely that the teachings of the Shepherd of Hermas directly underpin the theological outlook of Guthlac A, as has sometimes been supposed. Although the poet stated that the spirits offered their dissimilar teachings to Guthlac ‘many times (mongum tidum)’, their struggle for his soul had been instigated (and eventually ended) by God himself: cf. Roberts, Guthlac Poems, 131; John P. Hermann, ‘The recurrent motif of spiritual warfare in Old English poetry’, Annuale Mediaevale 22 (1982), 7–35, at 23–4. 35 Cassian, Conlationes, VIII.17 (ed. Petschenig, p. 233). 36 Bede, Expositio in actuum apostolorum, XII.15, ed. M. L. W. Laistner, CCSL 121 (Turnhout, 1983), 59. 37 Walahfrid Strabo, Visio Wettini, ll. 695–8, ed. Ernst Dümmler, MGH, Poetae II (Berlin, 1884), 326. Bedan influence elsewhere in the Visio is observed by David A. Traill, Walahfrid Strabo’s Visio Wettini (Frankfurt, 1974), 117.

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most of those who heard it said that human beings might have not one but two guardian spirits did not really have a clear sense of the origins of that idea.38 So completely had it floated free of the Shepherd of Hermas that it seemed to one Carolingian monk, Christian of Stavelot, to require no special explanation. He referred to the idea of the two spirits in the commentary on the gospel of Matthew which he wrote at some point around the year 865, connecting it with the declaration made by Jesus that the angels who watched over human beings ‘always see the face of my Father in heaven’. It was ‘on the basis of this passage and others’, said Christian, ‘that we discover that every single person has two angels assigned to them from the day of their birth until the day of their death: a good one and a bad one’.39 The fact that the gospel passage itself made no mention of any pair of opposing spirits seems not to have troubled Christian, although he could not quite put his finger on which ‘other passages’ he had in mind. Although Christian of Stavelot’s commentary quickly moved on to other matters, his casual reference to ancient teachings about the two spirits is illuminating. It need not imply that such ideas had simply become part of the religious common sense of his age, for other Carolingian writers expressed no similar views, and the rest of Christian’s commentary shows him to be a remarkably independent thinker in other respects.40 Christian must have recognized that his understanding of guardian angels and attendant demons was somewhat unusual, for he worked with a copy of Jerome’s commentary on Matthew open in front of him, and Jerome had said nothing more than that it was a ‘great honour for human souls that every person has an angel assigned over them from birth for their protection’.41 Jerome’s statement can only have jarred with Christian’s notion of angels (for what honour did a guardian angel really confer, if an attendant demon followed in its footsteps?), but the encounter with Jerome’s divergent views was evidently insufficient to shake Christian’s conviction. It is hard to say where the monk of Stavelot had first encountered the notion of human beings having personal demons as well as angels: he had maybe found it paraphrased in the works of Origen, which had engaged with the Shepherd’s teachings in detail, and which seem to have been

For the manuscript tradition, see E. Dekkers, ‘Les Traductions latines du Pasteur d’Hermas’, Euphrosyne, n.s. 22 (1994), 13–26. Useful surveys of the Shepherd’s influence are provided by Charles D. Wright, ‘Shepherd of Hermas [Vulgata]’ and ‘Shepherd of Hermas [Palatina]’, in Biggs (ed.), The Apocrypha, 63–5 and 65–6. 39 Christian, Expositio super librum generationis, XVIII.10, ed. R. B. C. Huygens, CCCM 224 (Turnhout, 2008), 342–3. 40 For Christian’s originality, the remarks of M. L. W. Laistner remain instructive: ‘A ninthcentury commentator’. 41 Jerome, Commentarii in euangelium Matthaei, III.xviii.10, ed. David Hurst and Marcus Adriaen, CCSL 77 (Turnhout, 1969), 159–60. 38

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known to Christian.42 But the crucial point is that, wherever Christian had first encountered the idea, it had evidently struck him as a useful and compelling way of understanding the shifting emotions of human life. It did not matter to him that he could not remember precisely where he had read about the idea, nor that he faced an absence of direct scriptural evidence when he included it in a commentary on the gospel of Matthew. This was teaching which seemed supported by personal experience, rather than by the careful sourcing of biblical evidence, and it was on that basis that it had lodged itself in this Carolingian exegete’s mind. In time, the idea of the two spirits attached to every soul would occupy a familiar place in medieval Christian thought, and by the fifteenth century the Good Angel and the Bad Angel had found their place in sermons, poetry, and morality plays alike.43 Although it was not yet so in the early Middle Ages, the periodic reappearance of this piece of ancient wisdom indicates that Christian of Stavelot was far from the only person to find the idea compelling. It was certainly known in Anglo-Saxon England, where after c.900 both homilists and poets could be found engaging seriously with the belief and seeking to apply it to didactic purposes of their own. It is impossible to say a great deal about the sorts of people to whom the idea seemed convincing and useful, for none of their writings have come down to us under their own names. Their words therefore supply us with only an impressionistic picture of the milieus in which they worked and the audiences they hoped to reach, but these anonymous writers do nevertheless show how some late Anglo-Saxon Christians had begun to think about human life in ways which their ancestors would scarcely have recognized. It is perhaps typical that our earliest indication of an Anglo-Saxon intellectual engaging with these ancient but uncommon teachings about angels comes from a poem entirely given over to the subject of esoteric wisdom. Among the curious subgenre of Anglo-Saxon literature which presents itself as a record of the dialogues of the biblical King Solomon with Saturn (identified in the dialogues not as a classical god, but as a well-travelled prince from Chaldea) is a dramatized account of the daily struggle between the two spirits which attend every human soul: Solomon said: ‘The Lord of the heavens sends an angel to each man when day breaks. It must watch how [the man’s] mind grows hungry for the will of God,

42

See Origen, On First Principles, III.ii.4 (ed. Görgemanns and Karpp, pp. 574–6). For knowledge of Origen in Christian’s day, see also Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale. Les quatres sens de l’Écriture, 3 vols. (Paris, 1959–64), i. 221–304. 43 For sermons, see Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea, ch. 141, ed. Giovanni Paolo Maggioni, Iacopo da Varazze. Legenda aurea, 2 vols. (Tavarnuzze, 1998), 995–6; retained in William Caxton’s fifteenth-century translation, The Golden Legend, or, Lives of the Saints as Englished by William Caxton, ed. F. S. Ellis, 7 vols. (London, 1900), v. 192. For poetry: The Mirror of the Periods of a Man’s Life, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, Hymns to the Virgin and Christ, The Parliament of Devils, and Other Religious Poems (London, 1967), 58–78. For plays: The Castell of Perseverance, scene IV, ed. Mark Eccles, The Macro Plays (Oxford, 1969), 11–16.

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agonizes over the glory of the Creator, for as long as it is day. Then two spirits hover about him: one is brighter than gold, the other blacker than the abyss; one comes < . . . >44 [the other from] the steely hell. One teaches him that he should keep the Creator’s love and mercy, and his kinsmen’s council; the other tempts him and instructs him towards ruin.’45

Given that the rest of the poem—known by its editorial name of Solomon and Saturn II—was packed with wilfully arcane utterances, one might suppose that the poet had been moved to this ancient but now rarely heard teaching about the two spirits precisely because it was rare, ancient, and bookish. In fact, it seems more likely that the anonymous poet had derived his understanding of attendant angels and demons from a contemporary sermon rather than a chance encounter with some obscure tome. Certainly, his remark about the evil spirit’s home in the ‘steely hell (stylenan hell)’ used a phrase which is found nowhere else in the corpus of Old English writings, except in an eschatological homily preserved in three manuscripts including the tenthcentury Vercelli Book. There too, the phrase was used in an exposition on the theme of the two spirits: Let us also consider how we are surrounded every day. Every day we have two shepherds: one comes from the heavens, who is to set a good example for us and teach us good virtues . . . and he wishes to defend us against the accursed demon, who comes from the steely hell to shoot us with his sharp arrows.46

The connections between this homily (Vercelli IV) and the poetic Solomon and Saturn II have been regularly noted, and it is easier to suppose that they are the result of a poet turning the words of a homilist to the services of wisdom literature than to imagine literature as obtuse as the Solomon and Saturn dialogues inspiring a doctrinal sermon. The supposition seems to be confirmed by the existence of a second Old English homily devoted partially to the same theme, which once more exhibits connections with Solomon and Saturn II. Just as King Solomon had told Saturn that the two spirits began their watch ‘when day breaks’, so this second homily explained that the rising and setting of the sun prompted the spirits to make a report of their activities to God: It is said in holy books that every man has two teachers during the day and two at night. One teaches us about the wonder of the heavenly kingdom; that is God’s 44 There is a lacuna here, although the sole manuscript (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 422, p. 26) reads through without a break. The missing words presumably describe heaven, from which the angel has been sent, in a manner intended to contrast with the ‘steely hell’ that follows. 45 Solomon and Saturn II, ll. 303–14 (ed. Anlezark, p. 94). 46 Vercelli IV (ed. Scragg, p. 104). For the relationship between the two complete manuscript witnesses and the additional single-page fragment, see Scragg, Vercelli Homilies, 87; id., ‘Studies in the language of copyists of the Vercelli homilies’, in Samantha Zacher and Andy Orchard (eds.), New Readings in the Vercelli Book (Toronto, 2009), 41–61, at 53–6.

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angel. The other teaches us about the terror of hell; he is called a demon. At sunrise they bring this in writing to God—the angel, everything that we did for good in that night; and the demon, everything that we did and committed for evil. And he wants, if he can, to confute the angel with those evil works. They come at sunset too and bring to God everything that we did for good and everything we did for evil.47

The coincidence of general theme with specific details and vocabulary indicates that the three pieces possess some close textual relationship; and Charles Wright has made the plausible argument that all three may well depend upon a lost Latin sermon circulating under the name of Gregory the Great, since the second homily (Napier XLVI) began with the words, ‘Dearly beloved, Sanctus Gregorius says . . . ’.48 These three texts are alone among Anglo-Saxon writings in endorsing the ancient notion, now dissevered from its origins in the Shepherd of Hermas, that human beings were assigned a personal demon as well as a personal angel. They hardly constitute an overwhelming proportion of the textual remains of the period, and so it might seem that positing the existence of a single common source behind them all only reduces their value still further: on the face of it, we seem to be left with nothing more than three Old English writers paraphrasing a single idea which did not originate with any of them. But few as they are, these anonymous writings still represent something more than a curious accretion upon mainstream Anglo-Saxon beliefs. For a start, the three authors were probably not contemporaries. A late ninth- or early tenthcentury date for Solomon and Saturn II is presumed from linguistic evidence, even if attempts to locate the poet’s origins more precisely remain conjectural.49 The homilist responsible for Napier XLVI, on the other hand, appears to have been active in the first half of the eleventh century, if Malcolm Godden is correct to see a brief echo of Ælfric in his piece; while our remaining text, Vercelli IV, seems to be the product of someone working at some unspecified point in the century between the others.50 These texts do not bear witness to some brief flirtation with novel doctrines, then, but rather to a surprisingly enduring strand of late Anglo-Saxon thought. More than that, the uses to which these three different writers were putting their shared source differed

47

Napier XLVI (p. 233). Charles D. Wright, The Irish Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Cambridge, 1993), 261. 49 For speculation as to the precise date and context, see variously: P. O’Neill, ‘The date, provenance and relationship of the Solomon and Saturn dialogues’, ASE 26 (1997), 139–68, esp. 152–64; Wright, Irish Tradition, 267–9; Anlezark, Old English Dialogues, 49–57. 50 For Napier XLVI and Ælfric, see Malcolm R. Godden, ‘An Old English penitential motif ’, ASE 2 (1973), 221–39, esp. 230, 236–8; cf. also Jonathan Wilcox, ‘The compilation of Old English homilies in MSS Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 419 and 421’, unpublished Ph.D thesis, Cambridge University (1987), 102–5. For the composition of Vercelli IV, see Scragg, Vercelli Homilies, 89. 48

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considerably, in a way that shows serious and creative engagement with the idea of the two spirits rather than the mindless redaction of past opinions. The author of Napier XLVI sought primarily to explain to his congregation what it meant when their minds began to wander during church services: ‘the spirits lead us into the church, where God’s angel teaches us stillness and moderate speech and meditation on God’s commands’, but ‘the demon teaches us unstillness and immoderate laughter’, encouraging people to ‘stand and gawp and look behind, which is careless worship. A person cannot make amends for it, because the demon has his heart in its hands.’51 The point being made in Solomon and Saturn II is less immediately obvious, since the sole manuscript breaks off in the middle of King Solomon’s rumination on the spirits; but from what remains, the poet seems to have been tracking the progress of one man’s slide into depravity, ‘until his eyes are full of grudges, made angry through miserable crime’.52 For Vercelli IV, meanwhile, the point was rather to reassure a congregation that such things could be avoided. The homily made use of the somewhat conventional image of demons as malevolent archers, armed with ‘a bow made of pride, and as many kinds of arrows as there are sins’; and coupled to this, an explanation of the way that human virtues acted like shields (‘one shield is wisdom, another caution, and constancy in good works’, and so on), which the guardian angel could then use against the demon’s arrows.53 So although a common source provided the framework for these three pieces, it was clearly being used actively and imaginatively by Anglo-Saxon writers addressing a number of related but distinct themes about sin and human action, over the course of a century or more. Their writings may have occupied no more than a corner of late AngloSaxon thought, but a well-tended and productive corner nonetheless. Since these anonymous Anglo-Saxons were evidently adapting and reframing their shared source, it is noteworthy that none of them did so in the way that their eighth-century predecessors would have done. Boniface’s natural inclination had been to split the world rigidly into two, in a way that straightforwardly prefigured the eventual separation of the saved and the damned after Doomsday. Those who took up the theme of the guardian angel in later Anglo-Saxon England were no longer so sure. The author of Napier XLVI could see only a single mass of constantly contested souls, and he made no special exception even for himself. ‘The spirits bring to God everything that we have done for good and for evil’, he said. ‘And they lead us into church, where

51

Napier XLVI (pp. 233–4). Solomon and Saturn II, ll. 318–19 (ed. Anlezark, p. 94). 53 Vercelli IV (ed. Scragg, pp. 102–4). For demons as archers, see Mark Atherton, ‘The figure of the archer in Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon psalter’, Neophilologus, 77 (1993), 653–7; and Scott Gwara, Heroic Identity in the World of Beowulf (Leiden, 2008), 203–6. 52

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they offer us their teachings.’54 It seemed to him more likely that every human being had a constant potential for both goodness and wickedness, and that a person could never truly rid themselves of either their guardian angel or their attendant demon in the way that Boniface and his contemporaries had imagined. When the two spirits took up their places ‘every day’ (as each of our three texts claimed), then every day was a new day, filled with fresh possibilities for virtue and vice alike. The consequence of rethinking humanity’s capacities for good and evil was that old certainties about the power and potency of angels began to slide away. That might not have been apparent to the writers of Solomon and Saturn II, Vercelli IV, and Napier XLVI, but their efforts to explain human reactions to invisible companions had nevertheless necessitated a different way of thinking about guardian angels and their abilities. We have already heard how a poeticized St Guthlac could boast in the eighth century about how little he felt temptation or unrest, ‘now that a spiritual shepherd watches over me’, and that the presence of an angel was believed to make a very real difference for the human being to whom they were attached.55 Such things were less easy to believe if one was also of the opinion that every individual was offered two choices at every turn by two evenly matched beings. The writer of Vercelli IV could be confident that guardian angels would certainly ‘wish to defend us against the accursed demon, who comes from the steely hell to shoot us with his sharp arrows’, but stated that angels were powerless to do anything unless they had already been armed by their human charge. He advised his congregation that ‘there is a great need that we have the shields which the Lord has provided for our protection against them’. The shields turned out to be human virtues (‘one is wisdom, another caution, and constancy in good works’, and so on), and if one had acquired enough of them, then ‘not a single one of the sinful wretches can shoot through, because God’s angels are armed with those shields to fight against the accursed spirits’. Reminding members of a congregation that every person needed to look to their own soul was a responsible pastoral message, but it also represented a new reluctance about thinking of guardian angels as powerful autonomous forces. That was brought home even more strongly in Solomon and Saturn II, where it was said that a person might face such overwhelming hostility from demons and their weapons that the angel would be entirely unable to prevent the worst from happening: ‘[When] the man turns during the daylong space of the devil’s deeds, and performs the will of the one who lures him into error, then the angel departs, weeping as he heads home. And he explains everything: “I could not draw the hard steel stone from his heart; it is stuck within him . . . ”.’56 54

55 Napier XLVI (p. 233). Guthlac A, ll. 314b–322 (ed. Roberts, p. 92). Solomon and Saturn II, ll. 321–7 (ed. Anlezark, p. 94). The text in the sole manuscript ends at this point, seemingly incomplete, but the ‘hard steel stone’ is presumably to be understood as 56

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The suggestion that guardian angels wept over stricken human souls was as much a learned gesture as a poetic flourish. It was inspired by an early Christian apocryphon known as the Vision of St Paul, a widely disseminated and much-redacted text which purported to relate the experiences of the apostle Paul when he was ‘caught up to the third heaven’.57 In reality the Vision was a product of the third century, and although several early medieval churchmen recognized its inauthenticity, it nevertheless exerted a profound influence on the way that many Anglo-Saxon Christians understood matters of heaven, hell, and the soul.58 The Long Latin versions of the Vision declared that St Paul had seen angels weeping in the presence of God when they came with reports of human misdeeds.59 It was a small detail in a long account of heavenly and hellish realms, and the fact that it came readily to the mind of our Old English poet as he worked on Solomon and Saturn II deserves our attention. No longer did the thought of guardian angels fill Anglo-Saxon men and women with simple confidence that these were beings which ‘can defend people from the snares of the cunning enemy, and raise them up with the mighty grace of heavenly desire’.60 Now, as the homilist of Napier XLVI put it, the mere presence of a guardian angel was often insufficient to protect a person from sin, when ‘the demon has his heart in its hands, and it is as hard as stone or flint against God’s commands, and as loose as cloth. It melts like wax before fire in the face of the demon’s teaching.’61 This consistent stress on the failing angel, or the angel impotent against his demonic opposite, is a surprising theme. Not that a guardian angel had ever been a guarantee of salvation, as King Ceolred once found to his cost; but his angels had still been an effective fighting force, and they successfully defended his soul against demonic attacks until the worthiness of his soul came to be reconsidered. Their tenth-century descendants were hardly guardian angels at all when demons accompanied them in their ministry, and our late AngloSaxon homilists now found it more appropriate to speak of them as a person’s an arrowhead: cf. Vercelli IV (ed. Scragg, pp. 102–4). An analogous account of an ‘evil spirit’ at work, in Beowulf, also refers to the ‘bitter arrow’ in a man’s heart: see pp. 100–2 in the present chapter (‘Inconstancy’). 57 Cf. 2 Cor. 12.2. 58 The Vision of St Paul had been translated from the Greek by the early sixth century, and it was known thereafter in the Latin West either in full (the so-called ‘Long Latin’ versions) or through a number of short redactions dealing chiefly with Paul’s vision of hell. For the current state of knowledge, with particular reference to Anglo-Saxon England, see Antonette diPaolo Healey, ‘Apocalypse of Paul’, in Biggs (ed.), The Apocrypha, 67–70. Since the redactions omit most of the comments relating to angels, reference is here made only to the Long Latin texts edited by Theodore Silverstein and Antony Hilhorst, Apocalypse of Paul: A New Critical Edition of Three Long Latin Versions (Geneva, 1997). 59 Visio Pauli (Long Latin), chs. 11–18 (ed. Silverstein and Hilhorst, pp. 82–109). 60 Bede, Hom., II.10 (ed. Hurst, pp. 248–9). 61 Napier XLVI (p. 234). For the heart as the seat of thought, see Leslie Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies in the Vernacular and Latin Traditions (Toronto, 2011).

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‘teachers’ (lareowas) or ‘shepherds’ (hyrdas). This represented a real shift in outlook, and not simply the appropriation of old images from ancient texts. True, it was the Vision of St Paul which had supplied many of the narrative details, from the angels’ tears to the notion that angels renewed their watch at sunrise or sunset (the hours at which St Paul had watched them making their reports to God); and it was the Shepherd of Hermas which had provided the ultimate inspiration for the idea that an attendant demon accompanied every guardian angel. But both of these ancient texts had contained a measure of hopefulness about the possibility of angelic assistance which was now noticeably lacking in their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. For the author of the Vision of St Paul, there was some comfort to be taken from the fact that St Paul had heard God encouraging his weeping angels that they needed to persevere in their ministry, ‘until [the sinners] are converted and repent’.62 So too had the Shepherd spoken to Hermas about the way that even ‘the most wicked person’ could still be swayed by their angel, for ‘if the works of the angel of righteousness should rise up in his heart, then that person must necessarily do something good’.63 In late Anglo-Saxon England, however, guardian angels were at best inconstant assistants, able to offer protection only after a human being had forearmed them with the shields of good deeds. Left to their own devices, guardian angels were no longer a dependable source of consolation and defence. If this notion had been confined to our three Old English texts which tackled the idea of the two spirits, then we might think it merely the pessimistic view of a handful of late Anglo-Saxon authors who had taken inspiration from an uncommon shared source. In fact, other evidence from documents unrelated to these suggests that doubts about the powers of angels had spread much further than we might first imagine.

INCONSTANCY Faced with theological difficulties, Ælfric of Eynsham tended to think through his problems aloud. His writings do not suggest that it was his custom to develop all the ramifications of his ideas before committing them to the page, and they had a habit of unravelling as he sought to bring them together in written form. Mary Clayton’s comments on his vernacular retelling of the biblical story of Judith are, in fact, appropriate to a good deal of his theological output: ‘Like a dog worrying a bone, Ælfric circles around and round in his conclusion, unable to find a safe resting-place . . . it is evident that [his 62

Visio Pauli (Long Latin), ch. 10 (ed. Silverstein and Hilhorst, pp. 80–1). Shepherd of Hermas, Mandates, VI.2 (ed. and trans. Ehrman, ii. 264–5). Cf. Origen, On First Principles, III.ii.4 (ed. Görgemanns and Karpp, pp. 574–6). 63

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source’s] problematic nature had already been exercising his mind as he translated and adapted.’64 When Ælfric decided to conclude his homily for the feast of St Michael with an overview of the nature and function of angels, he ought to have been on solid ground.65 He had a copy of Haimo of Auxerre’s sermon for the occasion, and his Carolingian predecessor had usefully stitched together the most pertinent biblical passages relating to the angels and their care of humanity.66 Ælfric began confidently: ‘It is a great honour for Christian men that everyone has from birth an angel assigned to them in fellowship.’ These were Jerome’s words, and we have heard them quoted before by Christian of Stavelot; the decision to insert them here among Haimo’s had either been taken by Ælfric himself or by an intermediate redactor of Haimo’s sermon.67 Jerome had not specified that an angelic companion was the honour of Christian men only, and this added detail in Ælfric’s version complicated the statement that the guardian angel was assigned at the moment of birth (fram his acennednysse) rather than upon entry into the community of believers at baptism. But perhaps the distinction did not matter so much in a country which was, at least nominally, entirely Christian, and it did not divert Ælfric’s attention. He did feel the need to offer a few caveats, however, when he came to explain why the angel was there in the first place. Haimo had stressed the fact that the angels were a perfect intermediary between humanity and a distant deity, ‘because when they go forth on our account, they do so in such a way that they never withdraw from the vision of God’. Ælfric took Haimo’s meaning to be that God was omnipresent and omnipotent. He therefore turned the Carolingian monk’s statement around, saying that in fact the angels ‘never depart from God’s presence, for God is everywhere (forðan ðe God is æghwær)’. But offering reminders about God’s constant presence and awareness sat badly with Haimo’s point about the intermediary status of angels. The importance of angels being present alongside human beings without being removed from God, Haimo had said, was that it made them perfectly placed ‘to announce our deeds to God, just as the angel said to Tobias: “When thou didst pray with tears I offered thy prayers to God”’.68 Ælfric appears to have had doubts about this, given what he had just said about God being ‘everywhere’. He added a caveat to Haimo’s point: ‘they announce our works and prayers to the Almighty, even 64 Mary Clayton, ‘Ælfric’s Judith: manipulative or manipulated?’, ASE 23 (1994), 215–27, at 222–3. 65 Ælfric, CH, I.34 (ed. Clemoes, pp. 473–5). 66 Haimo, Homiliae de sanctis, VII, ed. Migne, PL 118, cols. 770–6. The sermon is included in the homiliary of Paul the Deacon: Homiliarius, II.58, ed. Migne, PL 95, cols. 1525–30. 67 Jerome, Comm. in Matt., III.xviii.10 (ed. Hurst and Adriaen, p. 159). Jerome’s observation was regularly quoted, e.g. Hrabanus Maurus, In Matthaeum, V.181, ed. B. Löfstedt, CCCM 174, 2 vols. (Turnhout, 2000), 494; and Smaragdus, Expositio libri comitis, ed. Migne, PL 102, col. 479. 68 Cf. Tob. 12.12.

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though nothing is hidden from him, as the archangel Raphael said to the man of God, Tobias . . . ’. In the same breath, Ælfric had first explained what guardian angels did, then shown how they were entirely redundant beside their omniscient Creator. As he brought the homily to an end, he even managed to undermine Haimo’s other point, about guardian angels offering protection for the soul. Casting around for a way to tie his angelological discussion back to the primary needs of a Michaelmas sermon, Ælfric turned his comments about angelic protection in general into a eulogy of St Michael in particular: ‘the great heavenly angel is the continual helper of Christian men on earth, and their intercessor in the heavens before almighty God.’ Honouring Michael in this way was appropriate for the feast-day setting of this homily; but it made the personal protection offered by individual guardian angels now seem of secondary importance. Within the space of a single homily, Ælfric’s guardian angels, which started out as the ‘great honour for all Christian men’, had thus faded into insignificance beside an omnipotent deity who required no intermediaries, and a single powerful archangel whose abilities required no caveats. The logical problems running through Ælfric’s sermon are best explained as the accidental blunders of a homilist trying to cover all his bases, providing somewhat provisional reactions to issues that he had not completely worked through in his own mind. The sermon is nevertheless instructive in showing the way that ideas about guardian angels always raised implications for one’s understanding of other, weightier matters: the power of God, perhaps, or the nature of human action, and the possibility of doing good and evil. One’s opinions about guardian angels had always to be brought into line with established teachings about these critical issues, even if that meant downplaying the angels’ ability to intervene meaningfully in human affairs. Ælfric had discovered this to be true, and soon so did his contemporary, Byrhtferth of Ramsey. In the early eleventh century Byrhtferth was at work bringing his Enchiridion to a close with a short homiletic admonition, in which he found it appropriate to offer a brief reminder about the existence of guardian angels.69 Like Ælfric, he began by enthusing about the way that ‘God has entrusted you to his angels until your last day’. But any sense of comfort immediately dissolved as he tried to express his beliefs about angels in practical terms. Byrhtferth seems to have known about the Vision of St Paul’s testimony concerning the daily report made by guardian angels before God’s throne, and so he reaffirmed what it said about the angels which ‘announce your deeds every day in the presence of God’. But knowing that these deeds were probably not all praiseworthy, Byrhtferth felt compelled to add the warning that ‘the angels turn away from you as often as you sin’, and to observe that one’s heavenly companion could in no way prevent the Devil from ‘writing down all

69

Byrhtferth, Enchiridion, postscript (ed. Baker and Lapidge, p. 246).

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your misdeeds besides the good ones’. When Byrhtferth sought to offer some concrete advice about how one ought to respond to these facts of human existence, his solution was to ask his readers to ignore the angel and to place their trust elsewhere. ‘Pray to your Lord’, was his final counsel: ‘Through his might you can and will overcome the Devil.’ Like Ælfric before him, Byrhtferth had found that the safest way to deal with the guardian angel was ultimately to remove it from consideration altogether. Neither Ælfric nor Byrhtferth thought about guardian angels in quite the same way as those anonymous Anglo-Saxon authors who believed that an individual’s own personal demon exerted just as much influence over the soul as could their personal angel. But behind their dissimilar opinions some shared unwillingness to make too much of the powers of the guardian angel emerges. No late Anglo-Saxon Christian who read or listened to their words on the subject would have found it easy to say why Jerome had once thought of these beings as a ‘great honour’ for human souls, for now writers and preachers alike seemed to have much more to say about the limitations of angels acting as protectors and intercessors. Some sense of just how widely these sorts of doubts about angelic power had spread can be gained if we turn our attention away from the corpus of ecclesiastical literature, and listen for the echo of these ideas in texts of a less exclusively religious nature. One such text turns out, perhaps surprisingly, to be the Old English poem Beowulf. The echo can be heard in the midst of a speech made by King Hrothgar to the poem’s hero, shortly after Beowulf ’s victory in combat against the monstrous mother of Grendel. The speech has sometimes been called Hrothgar’s ‘sermon’, for the king’s words offer a warning to the young warrior about the dangers of pride. The appropriateness of such a warning at this moment in the narrative has often received comment, but its immediate interest for us lies in Hrothgar’s rumination upon the causes of pride, which turns upon a consideration of something which the king refers to as the ‘guardian’ or ‘shepherd of the soul’: The man swells in prosperity . . . until a measure of pride grows and flourishes within him, when the guardian, the shepherd of the soul, is asleep. The sleep is too sound, bound with cares; the killer very close, the one who shoots with sins from his bow. Then under the helm, he is struck in the heart by a bitter arrow; he cannot defend himself from the twisted teachings of the evil spirit. That which he has long possessed now seems to him too little; frenzied, he begins to covet . . . 70

Modern readers of Beowulf have always found it oddly difficult to know how to interpret these lines. The general point, about the prideful covetousness that may seize the fortunate and the prosperous, is obvious enough; but the onset of pride is here cast as an act of aggression, instigated by a ‘killer’ (bona), 70

Beowulf, ll. 1735a, 1740–47 (ed. Klaeber, p. 65).

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who approaches with bow and arrows while a careworn ‘guardian’ (weard) slumbers. Presumably the bona is to be understood as a demon (if not the Devil himself), for the image of an ‘evil spirit’ planting sins in the hearts of men with his ‘bitter arrows’ was regularly conjured up by writers throughout the Anglo-Saxon period when they sought to dramatize the effects of demonic activity. We have already seen that image being used in the likes of Vercelli homily IV, with its account of ‘the accursed demon, which comes from the steely hell to shoot us with his sharp arrows’.71 Critics have long noted the connection, and recognized the passage to be one of those characteristic moments in Beowulf in which vaguely Christian utterances issue from the mouths of ostensibly pre-Christian characters, as if virtuous pagans like Hrothgar might be expected to possess some dim awareness of the truths later affirmed by Christian teachings. But if Hrothgar’s bona is indeed to be understood as a Christian demon, does that mean that the ‘guardian’ (weard) which slumbers as the man’s soul lapses into sin is therefore to be identified as a Christian spirit, a guardian angel? Most scholars have generally preferred to think otherwise, and have thought it more appropriate for the weard to be either a personification of an abstract quality, such as Wisdom, Reason, or Conscience, or else a figurative reference to the mind of a man negligent of his moral state.72 None of these would have been out of place, had not this ‘guardian’ also been named as the ‘shepherd of the soul (sawele hyrde)’. As Andy Orchard has previously noted, the phrase can be found elsewhere in the Old English corpus, but with a very restricted circulation. It is, in fact, found exclusively in connection with either guardian angels or the archangel Michael.73 The case for reading Hrothgar’s words to refer to a contest of Christian angels and demons has occasionally been made before, and found little favour. The fact that the nineteenth-century critic Gregor Sarrazin was an early proponent of the idea probably did not help, for Sarrazin had numbered it among the alleged supports for his theory that Beowulf was actually written at the Danish court of Ingeld, and only later retouched with Christian additions

71 See p. 92 in the present chapter (‘The Two Spirits’). Cf. also Cynewulf, Juliana, ll. 382–417a, ed. Rosemary Woolf, Juliana (London, 1955), 38–40. 72 See variously: W. J. Sedgefield, Beowulf (2nd edn., Manchester, 1913), 134; Klaeber, Beowulf, 191; R. E. Kaske, ‘Sapientia et fortitudo as the controlling theme of Beowulf ’, Studies in Philology, 55 (1958), 423–56, at 433; Margaret E. Goldsmith, The Mode and Meaning of Beowulf (London, 1970), 196–9; Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson, Beowulf: An Edition with Relevant Shorter Texts (Oxford, 1998), 105; R. Mark Scowcroft, ‘The Irish analogues to Beowulf’, Speculum 74 (1999), 22–64, at 46, n. 77; Dorothy Haines, ‘Unlocking Exodus ll. 516–532’, JEGP 98 (1999), 481–98, at 495; R. M. Liuzza, Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (Peterborough, Ont., 2000), 106, n. 1; Dennis Cronan, ‘Poetic meanings in the Old English poetic vocabulary’, English Studies 84 (2003), 397–425, at 408. 73 Orchard, Pride and Prodigies, 51–2.

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by an Anglo-Saxon translator.74 Although we have ceased to think of the Christian elements of the poem as an aberration, and have instead grown familiar with the various layers of Christian meaning that run throughout the piece, there remains a sense that a guardian angel would be too ‘esoteric’ a subject to expect in Beowulf. That was the reaction of one scholar to suggestions made by Daniel Anlezark, who has recently returned to the idea that the weard of Hrothgar’s prideful man should be connected with the guardian angels of Old English poetry and prose—specifically, with the angels of Solomon and Saturn II which, like Hrothgar’s sleeping weard, were said to be sometimes unable to repel the attacks of ‘evil spirits’.75 Anlezark’s intention was to argue that Solomon and Saturn II and Beowulf must have been created within a ‘common intellectual milieu’, since ‘the failure of the soul’s protector presents a suggestive link’ between the two poems; and one can see why some of Anlezark’s readers have been sceptical about affirming a direct connection between the two dissimilar poems on the basis of so brief a passage. But as we have now seen, the tendency to emphasize the limits of the powers of guardian angels was in fact a far more widespread feature of late Anglo-Saxon religious writing. The theme does indeed link Beowulf with the esotericism of Solomon and Saturn II, but also with much more straightforward pieces of late Anglo-Saxon moralizing intended for less rarefied consumption in the vernacular homilies. The ‘common intellectual milieu’ which fostered ideas about failing angels was a wide one, and this portion of Beowulf would fit comfortably into any part of it. Finding that Hrothgar’s account of forces external to human souls, some of which act as the ‘guardians’ of souls while others assume the guise of ‘killers’, corresponds closely with this body of Anglo-Saxon religious writing about guardian angels does more than simply assist our understanding of some problematic details in Beowulf. It can ultimately tell us something further about the currency of ideas about angels in the time during which the poem was produced. Critics have always recognized that Hrothgar’s speech (like a number of other speeches within the poem) deals out Christian wisdom, but only such Christian wisdom as could be deployed without explicit reference to Christ himself, to salvation, or to other overtly theological issues.76 It deals in commonplaces which could remain recognizable to a Christian audience even 74 Gregor Sarrazin, Beowulf-studien. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte altgerminscher Sage und Dichtung (Berlin, 1888), 103. Cf. A. J. Wyatt, Beowulf with The Finnsburg Fragment, rev. R. W. Chambers (Cambridge, 1933), 86: ‘weard is apparently “the conscience” . . . hardly, as Sarrazin suggests, “the guardian angel”.’ 75 Daniel Anlezark, Water and Fire: The Myth of the Flood in Anglo-Saxon England (Manchester, 2006), 331–3. The doubts about the subject being ‘too esoteric to be handled by this character in this way’ are those of Frederick M. Biggs’ review, in Speculum 83 (2008), 655–6, at 655. 76 See Edward B. Irving Jr, ‘Christian and pagan elements’, in Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (eds.), A Beowulf Handbook (Exeter, 1997), 175–92, at 189–92. Cf. also H. Munro Chadwick, The Heroic Age (Cambridge, 1926), 47–8; Orchard, Pride and Prodigies, 53.

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when cast in a deliberately vague and allusive mould; to have attempted anything more would have been to destroy the illusion of pagan antiquity upon which the narrative depends. It is striking, therefore, that the notion of guardian angels failing to protect souls against demonic attack should have numbered among those commonplaces. The idea was evidently more than a preoccupation of a few homilists; the theme was instead a familiar one in the poet’s day. Attempts to ascertain exactly when that was, of course, continue to bedevil Beowulf scholarship, and this is no place to digress far into that territory. Personally, I see no reason to dissent from Michael Lapidge’s incisive argument that an early eighth-century archetype is detectable behind the scribal errors in the sole surviving manuscript; but Lapidge himself identifies part of Hrothgar’s speech as a likely tenth-century interpolation into a predominantly earlier work, given its peculiar stylistic similarities to the distinctive language of tenth- and eleventh-century vernacular homilies.77 His case for interpolation may well be strengthened, now that content as well as style shows affinities with late Anglo-Saxon religious writing.78 We must certainly note that the role ascribed to the guardian angel in Hrothgar’s speech would fit uncomfortably with the ideas of the early eighth century, when it was believed that a person had to merit the assistance of an angel who would thereafter prove to be a powerful ally, but is far more reminiscent of a theme which was regularly taken up by late Anglo-Saxon preachers. If the veiled but recognizable image of the failing guardian angel in Beowulf indicates how far the theme had spread into mainstream religious culture, then it should not surprise us to find that at least one late Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastic dispensed altogether with the idea that angels were really guardian spirits at all. To the eleventh-century archbishop of York, Wulfstan, it seemed likely that if angels attended human souls, they did not do so for their protection. He outlined their likely duties in his Institutes of Polity, a work which he seems still to have been revising at his death in 1023: What I say is true: after his baptism, angels continually watch over every man, [to see] how he fulfils that which he promised before when he wanted to be baptised. Let us regularly think that over, and diligently fulfil the things we promised when we accepted baptism, as is our duty.79

Michael Lapidge, ‘The archetype of Beowulf’, ASE 29 (2000), 5–41, at 38–40. Earlier scholars also supposed that parts of Hrothgar’s speech were interpolations, the most substantial argument to this end being that of J. R. R. Tolkien: Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, together with Sellic Spell, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London, 2014), 307–12. Margaret E. Goldsmith was nevertheless correct to say that many of these early doubts rested on little more than the passage’s apparent ‘inappropriateness to a preconceived theory of the meaning of the poem’: ‘The Christian perspective in Beowulf’, Comparative Literature 14 (1962), 71–90, at 85. 79 Wulfstan, Polity, ed. Karl Jost, Die «Institutes of Polity, Civil and Ecclesiastical». Ein Werk Erzbischof Wulfstans von York (Bern, 1959), 162–3. 77 78

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Wulfstan’s angels were silent watchers, detached from the things they observed. They did not ‘turn away from you as often as you sin’, as we have heard Wulfstan’s contemporary Byrhtferth saying. They did not need to. Byrhtferth had required his angels to avert their eyes because he still clung to the idea that God bestowed angels upon his people in order to guard them against misfortune: if misfortune struck nonetheless, then it must have happened while the angels had shifted their attention elsewhere. The ministries of Wulfstan’s angels, on the other hand, were dispassionate, and they took in the bad with the good. His spirits came not as guardians, but as guarantors of a baptismal pledge. Wulfstan was doubtless well aware of the fact that the baptismal rites of his day tended to be accompanied by petitions directed to God, asking him ‘to send a holy angel to protect [his] servants and lead them to the grace of baptism’.80 But where others took those petitions as an indication that Christians enjoyed angelic protection thereafter, Wulfstan thought that they came to preserve the dignity of the ecclesiastical rites rather than the souls of the living. ‘Whenever baptism is performed,’ he wrote, ‘or the host consecrated, angels hover there and protect those actions. Through the power of God, they help the priests as often as they serve Christ correctly.’81 There could even be something disquieting about their constant yet detached watchfulness, for they inspected thoughts and deeds in preparation for ‘the great Judgement to which we shall all come’.82 Wulfstan found a place for guardian angels in his mental picture of the world only by first freeing them of any obligation to be guardians at all. If the Anglo-Saxon Church seems, therefore, to have presided over a growing unwillingness to ascribe too much to the ‘ministering spirits’ which involved themselves with the lives of human beings, then it must still be said that medieval Christendom as a whole had not turned its back on the doctrine of guardian angels. Here and there across the medieval West, individuals began to compose prayers in honour of their angelic companions. The practice appears to have hardly pre-dated the tenth century, and only to have taken hold in England after the Norman Conquest.83 One twelfth-century woman was evidently of the opinion that the Anglo-Saxons ought to have been in the business of praying to their guardian angels during those earlier centuries. In her possession, or 80 Old Gelasian, 40r–40v (ed. Mohlberg, p. 44 [no. 291]); Eighth-Century Gelasian, 33r–33v (ed. Dumas, p. 50 [no. 402]); Supplement (ed. Deshusses, i. 373 [no. 1071]); Winchcombe Sacramentary, p. 79 (ed. Davril, p. 87 [no. 414]); Robert Missal, 64v–65r (ed. Wilson, pp. 94–5); CCCC 163, p. 30; CCCC 422, p. 370. 81 82 Wulfstan, Polity (ed. Jost, p. 104). Wulfstan, Polity (ed. Jost, pp. 164–5). 83 Prayers to guardian angels are surveyed by André Wilmart, Auteurs spirituels et textes dévots du moyen âge latin. Études d’histoire littéraire (Paris, 1932), 537–58. Although JacquesPaul Migne included a Greek petition addressed to a guardian angel in his edition of works attributed to the late fourth-century Macarius (PG 32, cols. 447–8), the prayer is unattributed in the fifteenth-century miscellany in which it is preserved (Vienna, Österreiche Nationalbibliothek, cod. theol. gr. 231, 59v–69r), and its antiquity is therefore uncertain.

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otherwise available to her, was an Anglo-Saxon prayerbook made either by or for the New Minster at Winchester in the early part of the eleventh century, and to it she added the following entreaty: I believe that you are the holy angel, assigned by Almighty God as my protection, and so I beg, and through him who has appointed you to this [duty] I humbly implore, that always and everywhere in this life you may guard me, wretched, frail, and unworthy; may you protect and defend [me] from all evil, and when God orders my soul to depart from here, may you not permit demons to have power over it, but may you take it gently from the body and lead it sweetly into the bosom of Abraham with the bidding and support of God, our Creator and Saviour, who is blessed for ever and ever. Amen.84

In other contemporary books of the twelfth century, this ‘prayer to one’s own angel’ could be found grouped together with older prayers which addressed themselves to the archangel Michael.85 It is not implausible that the whole idea of offering prayer to personal guardian angels was in fact an offshoot from the cult of St Michael, as Philippe Faure has elsewhere speculated.86 Whatever its origins, it would ultimately blossom into a vital strand of private devotion in the later Middle Ages.87 Seeing the Anglo-Saxons’ beliefs in a long-term perspective, therefore, might tempt us to pay little attention to the difficulties and doubts about angelic protection which we have seen were exercising the minds of late Anglo-Saxon Christians. Whatever had led Archbishop Wulfstan to relieve angels of their duties as personal protectors evidently did not occur to subsequent generations, who still addressed guardian spirits through prayer. Yet perhaps uncertainty and fervent prayer do actually belong together. The earlier extant Anglo-Saxon prayerbooks compiled material which had been current in the days of Boniface and of St Guthlac’s poetic hagiographer, when

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Ælfwine’s Prayerbook, 74r (ed. Günzel, p. 128 [no. 47]). The prayer is collected with others addressed to the archangels Michael and Gabriel in the early twelfth-century Shaftesbury Psalter (London, British Library, Lansdowne 383, 169v). Although Wilmart thought that the prayer must therefore have been intended for one of those two archangels, it nevertheless bears the rubric Ad proprium angelum in the manuscript: cf. Wilmart, Auteurs spirituels, 543. 86 Philippe Faure, ‘L’Homme accompagne. Origines et développement du thème de l’ange gardien en Occident’, Cahiers de Saint-Michel de Cuxa 28 (1997), 199–212. 87 The widespread popularity of cult of guardian angels in the later Middle Ages remains relatively unexamined. For preliminary comments, see: R. N. Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe, c. 1215–c. 1515 (Cambridge, 1995), 170–2; Anne F. Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs, ‘The cult of the angels in late fifteenth-century England: an Hours of the Guardian Angel presented to Queen Elizabeth Woodville’, in Lesley Smith and Jane H.M. Taylor (eds.), Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence (London, 1997), 230–65; Philippe Faure, ‘Les Anges gardiens (XIIIe–XVe siècles). Modes et finalités d’une protection rapprochée’, in Philippe Faure and André Vauchez (eds.), La Protectione spirituelle au Moyen Âge (Paris, 2001), 23–41. 85

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the powers of the guardian angel were assured.88 Among all the petitions made to the powers of heaven for assistance and protection in these books, not a single one sought to enlist the aid of the personal spirit attached to the soul. Ought we to take this as a sign of the guardian angel’s irrelevance to the lives of early Anglo-Saxon Christians, or rather as symptomatic of that wider confidence about angelic power which eighth-century writers expressed in their letters, sermons, and poetry? The likes of Bede and Boniface did not question the ability of guardian angels to intervene dramatically in the lives of those whom they served, and perhaps creatures possessed of that sort of power did not need to be cajoled or entreated to remain mindful of their duties. The act of making requests of guardian angels, on the other hand, is in effect a precautionary measure; it presupposes the reality of the angel, but does not take its assistance for granted. Seen in that way, it is perhaps less surprising that the first prayers addressed to guardian angels should begin to appear in English manuscripts after a series of late Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastics had begun to speak publicly about the potential limits of angelic protection. One can more easily imagine the unfortunate subject of King Hrothgar’s sermon begging his angel not to fall asleep at the critical moment than one can picture St Guthlac needing to plead with the warrior-spirit that followed him into the fens. Not every prayer to a guardian angel has to be thought of as a response to some acute anxiety about the dependability of one’s protector spirit, but it is important to recognize that personal doubt and devout prayer are far from incompatible. They might belong to the same mental universe. These are themes to which we will return.89 A suggestive visual postscript to the Anglo-Saxons’ waning confidence in the constancy of angelic power is offered by an arresting image in the lavishly decorated book of psalms known as the Harley Psalter.90 In its earliest stages, this was a product of the eleventh-century scriptorium of Christ Church, Canterbury, modelled on an imported Carolingian book now known as the Utrecht Psalter, which had been made at Reims around 830.91 The final shape of the Harley Psalter was nevertheless no slavish copy of the Utrecht Psalter, since more than a dozen different artists continued to add to the book over many decades. One of the most creative was the illustrator who we know only

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The early books are the subject of detailed study by Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, 275–327. For other aspects of their attitude towards angelic prayer, see Ch. 6. 89 See Ch. 6, pp. 215–19 (‘The Effects of Liturgical Prayer’). 90 London, British Library, Harley 603. The illustrations are reproduced in black and white in Thomas H. Ohlgren, Anglo-Saxon Textual Illustration (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1992); most are also available in colour via the British Library’s online catalogue of illuminated manuscripts. 91 Utrecht, Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS 32. A digital facsimile was released via CD-ROM in conjunction with the publication of Koert van der Horst, William Noel, and Wilhelmina C. M. Wüstefeld (eds.), The Utrecht Psalter in Medieval Art: Picturing the Psalms of David (’t Goy, 1996), and is now also available online at .

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as ‘Artist G’. He is known to have been actively engaged upon other projects in the third quarter of the eleventh century, and his work on the Harley Psalter involved alterations to the illustrations of his predecessors as well as the creation of new scenes of his own.92 One of his compositions was a dynamic image drawn to accompany the text of Psalm 30, and his illustration shows the Psalmist poised on difficult terrain between the opposing figures of an angel, which reaches to him with outstretched hands, and a ragged demon, which attacks him with a curved trident (FIG. 10). The scene could almost be taken as a deliberate visual counterpart to those Old English texts which described the daily struggle between a person’s ‘two spirits’; but in reality, Artist G had taken his lead from an artistic rather than a textual source. His composition was effectively a reduced summary of a more complex image made to introduce Psalm 30 in the Utrecht Psalter (FIG. 11), which some earlier hand had already copied into the Harley manuscript. Artist G had selected two individual details from that earlier image: a snake-haired demon which had originally been shown plucking an unwary man, and an image of the Psalmist reaching to an angel across the mouth of hell. He brought these figures together now into a new composition which vividly communicated a sense of spiritual turmoil and the plight of a beleaguered soul. Artist G did not stop there, though, for his picture of the Psalmist’s spiritual struggle was not intended to be complete in itself. At the top of the facing page lay the illustration for Psalm 31, already completed by one of Artist G’s predecessors to depict hosts of men and angels gazing upwards towards the central figure of God. To this, Artist G added a few small details: an extra fish in the sea, some touches of colour to the figures and their landscape, a larger cross behind the Lord’s head. To the left of the scene, standing on the shore, he added a small figure in red. It was the figure of a man, pointing upwards to God but looking back over his shoulder, staring out of the frame and out of the page towards the Psalmist caught between the two spirits. As William Noel noted, this unexpected figure ‘is pointing out the presence of the Lord to the Psalmist, a castaway at the bottom of the preceding page, and the fact that he has heard his cry’. The illustrator had been able to do this because the previous artist, faithfully following his source in the Utrecht Psalter, had already inclined the Lord’s head down towards the left of the page. Artist G saw a chance to follow the Lord’s gaze down into a new scene, to complement the plea of Psalm 31, ‘Make thy face to shine upon thy servant’.93 Although this eleventh-century artist may not have been aware of it, his extended composition represented a way of thinking about supernatural 92 The fullest consideration of the Harley Psalter remains William Noel, The Harley Psalter (Cambridge, 1995); but see also Richard Gameson, ‘The Anglo-Saxon artists of the Harley (603) Psalter’, JBAA 143 (1990), 29–48, at 33–4. 93 Ps. 31.17; Noel, Harley Psalter, 100–1.

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Fig. 10. Psalms 30 and 31 in the Harley Psalter (London, British Library, Harley 603, 17v and 18r). Fig. 11. Psalm 30 in the Utrecht Psalter (Utrecht, Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS 32, 17r).

beings which the original artists of the Utrecht Psalter had not shared. The illustrations of that earlier Carolingian book were full of angels, and they tended to be used to show God’s responses to the prayers of the Psalmist. Whenever a psalm addressed God directly, thanking or imploring him for some sign or favour, the illustrations of the Utrecht Psalter had dutifully shown an angel performing the required task on God’s behalf. The angels of the Utrecht Psalter were therefore acting straightforwardly as God’s surrogates on earth: when Psalm 30.4 declared unto God, for instance, ‘Thou hast

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brought forth, O Lord, my soul from hell: though hast saved me from them that go down into the pit’, then the Carolingian artist had responded by showing an angel standing beside the Psalmist as he escaped from a hellish pit (FIG. 11). But to our late Anglo-Saxon artist, with his image of the Psalmist hemmed in on either side by an angel and a demon, the activities of angels were evidently rather different. In his scene, the angel standing before the Psalmist was emphatically not the Lord’s surrogate, nor even his agent. Rather, it was here contributing to the Psalmist’s sense of spiritual unease just as much as the Psalmist’s demonic assailant. The little figure who gestured up to the heavens was instructing the Psalmist to set his sight upon no intermediary, angelic or otherwise, but to place his trust in God alone. It was the only dependable counsel in an age when religious thinkers had grown unwilling to ascribe great power to guardian angels, and instead drew attention to the limits of that power and the constant need for it to be renewed.

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4 The Rules of the Otherworld In the last days before the end of the world, said one Anglo-Saxon homilist, the skies would break open and the race of men would look up to see the whole host of angels staring down at them through the opening. A terrified mass of humanity would then run to the mountains, shouting up to the lofty peaks and asking them to ‘fall on us, cover and hide us so that we might no longer endure the terror of the angels; for now everything which we used to keep hidden is being made manifest’.1 Archbishop Wulfstan would have said that this was naive, and that no one had ever truly been able to hide their deeds from the watchers in heaven. But there was nothing unrepresentative about the homilist’s basic sense that the End Times would be accompanied by the dissolution of the old barriers between the human and angelic realms. His own vision of the End had been inspired chiefly by his study of an early Christian apocryphon known as the Apocalypse of Thomas, but even the canonical account of the world’s end found in the Bible made just as much of the activities of angels.2 The book of Revelation furnished medieval imaginations with a rich store of apocalyptic imagery, in which angels featured prominently as heralds and agents of the End. Even if one could not recall the precise sequence of events—from the four angels who would hold back the winds, to the seven whose trumpets would ring out over the crumbling world, and the numberless multitudes who would be led by the archangel Michael into a great battle in heaven—the activities of angels were so central to the story of the End that the merest nod to them could conjure up a whole apocalyptic scene. Medieval

1

Blickling VII (ed. Morris, p. 93). For other homilists’ perspectives, cf. Bazire-Cross III (p. 50), CCCC 41, homily III, ed. Max Förster, ‘A new version of the Apocalypse of Thomas in Old English’, Anglia 73 (1955), 6–36, at 25; Vercelli XV (ed. Scragg, p. 258). 2 A full edition of the Apocalypse of Thomas by Charles Wright is forthcoming; for his preliminary remarks, see ‘The Apocalypse of Thomas: some new Latin texts and their significance for the Old English versions’, in Powell and Scragg (eds.), Apocryphal Texts and Traditions, 27–64; ‘Vercelli Homily XV and The Apocalypse of Thomas’, in Zacher and Orchard (eds.), New Readings, 151–84; and ‘Rewriting (and re-editing) The Apocalypse of Thomas’, in C. Clivaz et al. (eds.), Écriture et réécriture. La reprise interprétative des traditions fondatrices par la littérature biblique et extra-biblique (Leuven, 2012), 441–54.

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writers needed to do no more than to speak of the time ‘when the heavenly Judge shall come in awful majesty amid hosts of angels and archangels’ for an entire Doomsday landscape to be evoked.3 Images of trumpet-blowing angels in artwork, or of celestial ranks marching down from heaven behind the returned Christ, served the same purpose, as a kind of visual shorthand for a much grander scene.4 This was what our unknown homilist meant when he said that, after the skies had been opened up to reveal the terrible faces of the angels, ‘everyone will then see what it will be like at the end of this world’.5 The promised future for mankind was a future in which angels would be terrifyingly present. If there was any comfort at all to be gained from this knowledge, it came in the fact that mankind had been so fully prepared for these Last Days. Although Christians were warned that it was impossible to predict the time of the End (even if many, in reality, possessed a keen interest in trying to do just that), their religion furnished them with a remarkably detailed account of the manner of the End.6 A great deal of medieval Christian teaching sought to equip the faithful with the means to contemplate this future with expectation and certainty. Bede, in fact, attributed much of Christianity’s success in winning converts in new lands to that very sense of certainty about the future. When he thought about the conversion of his own kingdom of Northumbria, as he composed his Historia ecclesiastica, Bede imagined the merits of the new religion being discussed at royal councils, and pictured pagan noblemen suddenly overcome with new-found understanding about the world and its destiny. With a memorable turn of phrase, Bede tried to capture their wonder by describing one Northumbrian lord likening the experience of mortal life to the short flight of a sparrow through a fire-lit hall: For the few moments the bird is inside, the storm and wintry tempest cannot touch it; but after the briefest moment of calm, it flits from your sight—it flies out of the wintry storm, and then back into it again. In the same way, this life of men is visible for a moment; but as to what might follow after, or even what went

3 Ælfric, CH, II.38 (ed. Godden, p. 324). For similar statements, cf. Bede, De die iudicii, ll. 57–8, 64–5, 142–5, ed. J. Fraipont, CCSL 122 (Turnhout, 1955), 441, 444; Bede, VCP, ch. 42 (ed. Colgrave, p. 294); Alcuin, Ep. CCLXXX (ed. Dümmler, p. 438); Christ and Satan, ll. 597–607, ed. Robert Emmett Finnegan, Christ and Satan: A Critical Edition (Waterloo, Ont., 1977), 86; Christ III, ll. 12–32, 58b–63, ed. Bernard J. Muir, The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry: An Edition of Exeter Dean and Chapter MS 3501, 2 vols. (2nd edn., Exeter, 2000), i. 79, 81; Cynewulf, Elene, ll. 1280–81a (ed. Gradon, p. 74); Vercelli VIII (ed. Scragg, pp. 143–5). 4 For one particularly striking example, see the image of the Second Coming in the Benedictional of St Æthelwold, 6v, edited in facsimile by Andrew Prescott, The Benedictional of Saint Æthelwold: A Masterpiece of Anglo-Saxon Art (London, 2002). Cf. also the Eyam Cross, discussed in Ch. 2. 5 Blickling VII (ed. Morris, p. 93). 6 The most convenient point of entry into these issues is now James Palmer, The Apocalypse in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2014).

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before, we have no idea. So if this new teaching brings something more certain, it seems right that it be followed.7

Whether or not this really was the sort of thing which a seventh-century nobleman might have said after a first encounter with the Christian religion, Bede’s words expressed the confidence which early medieval churchmen felt when they looked to the future. They found plenty to ponder and to discuss, of course, but the debates of theologians about the end of time had largely progressed to the level of detail by Bede’s day. It was well established, for instance, that a final persecution would have to be suffered as the world neared its end, instigated by Antichrist but to be endured only until he himself was defeated and killed. A curious Anglo-Saxon Christian might reasonably, therefore, speculate about the manner of Antichrist’s destruction, only to find that the evidence appeared to be equivocal as to whether it would be the returned Christ or the archangel Michael who would deal the fatal blow. Yet no one would have felt that this ambiguity shook their confidence in the general shape of Christian teaching about the Last Days, for it was hardly the kind of question upon which an entire vision of the future depended. Even theologians were content to keep their options open about questions like this, as Bede himself did when he wrote elsewhere about the destruction of Antichrist, and how it would be done ‘either by the Lord himself or by the archangel Michael, as some teach’.8 One could admit uncertainty about the details without feeling that one’s whole eschatological outlook was thereby compromised. Over the centuries, Anglo-Saxon Christians permitted themselves to speculate about matters such as the number of angels that would accompany Christ (five thousand, according to one Old English sermon), or the manner in which the angels would dress themselves (the archangel Michael would don a garment made from a cloth which the angels called spiritum paraclitum, alleged one purveyor of esoteric wisdom).9 But these were small innovations, and they simply fitted into a framework that was well understood and universally accepted. 7

Bede, HE, II.13 (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 182–4). Bede, De temporum ratione, ch. 69, ed. C. W. Jones, CCSL 123B (Turnhout, 1977), 539: my emphasis. The two notions derive ultimately from 2 Thess. 2.8 and Dan. 12.1, respectively, although one of Bede’s earlier letters attributed the idea that Michael would defeat Antichrist to Gregory the Great: Epistola XV, ed. Migne, PL 94, col. 707. 9 Be heofonwarum and be helwarum, ed. Loredana Teresi, ‘Be heofonwarum 7 be helwarum: a complete edition’, in Elaine Treharne and Susan Rosser (eds.), Early Medieval English Texts and Interpretations: Studies Presented to Donald G. Scragg (Tempe, Ariz., 2002), 211–44, at 226; Solomon and Saturn I, prose section, ed. Anlezark, Old English Dialogues, 74. The prose Solomon and Saturn dialogue on the Pater Noster is traditionally separated by editors from the poetic section which precedes it in the manuscript, and often considered as a separate piece entirely; but I find the arguments for the unity of the verse and prose compelling: see Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse (Cambridge, 1990), 68–9; Wright, Irish Tradition, 233–4. 8

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This sense of certainty about the shape of the Last Days might induce some to terse aphorisms, of the kind that delighted Old English poets. ‘It is going to happen,’ declared one in a poem devoted wholly to the theme of the Judgement: ‘The day is coming when we will bring forth all our sins, deeds, and thoughts.’10 But such forthright utterances tended to dry up when the topic shifted away from that distant End, and towards a different sort of future which lay more immediately to hand. Not all who came to the ultimate Judgement would have lived through the Last Days for themselves, since, as the New Testament declared, ‘the Lord himself will come down from heaven with commandment, and with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God; and the dead who are in Christ shall rise first’.11 Statements like this rather begged the question of where the dead might be found before their resurrection, and here the poets’ sense of certainty failed them. It was obvious enough that the bodies of the dead remained physically present in the world, but what of their immortal souls? The unknown writer responsible for the poem we now call Maxims II felt that he could not say: Only the Ruler knows which way the soul will turn afterwards, and all the spirits who go before God after their death-day wait for judgement in the Father’s embrace. The shape of the future is dark and hidden; the Lord alone knows, the saving Father.12

The poet’s words are revealing. Early medieval Christians possessed a curious sense of time, in which the further ahead one looked, the easier it was to be certain of what awaited. We tend not to set much store in such early medieval professions of uncertainty about the fate of the soul after death; or rather, we have tended to see in them only one kind of uncertainty. Late antique and early medieval Christians possessed no single, uniform vocabulary to describe the shape of the otherworld, nor any mental picture which looked much like the strictly tripartite otherworld—comprising Heaven, Hell and Purgatory—to which later medieval Christians adhered. Instead, their writings revealed a variety of notions about the place, or places, to which the souls of the dead would go to await the coming Judgement. A pioneering attempt to map these imagined geographies of the afterlife was made in Jacques Le Goff ’s La Naissance du Purgatoire, and a productive vein of scholarship has continued to refine many of the contours it sketched. Most of this work of redefinition has been concerned with returning to the documents which preceded the putative ‘birth’ of Purgatory in the twelfth century, and which Le Goff himself was content to treat more or less as a backdrop to the developments of the central 10 Judgement Day I, ll. 1a and 34b–36a, ed. T. A. Shippey, Poems of Wisdom and Learning in Old English (Cambridge, 1976), 120. 11 12 1 Thess. 4.15. Maxims II, ll. 58b–64a, ed. Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, ASPR VI, 57.

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Middle Ages which were his major focus.13 The result has been a greater sensitivity to the ways that early medieval authors wrote about and thought about the geographical shape of the otherworld, encouraging us neither to judge them by later medieval standards nor to overlook the meaning which these alternative visions of the afterlife held in their own time and place.14 Nonetheless, if early medieval opinions about the otherworld differed from those of later centuries, they often also differed one from another. There were recurring images, of course—fiery pits, boiling rivers, paradisiacal fields, and so on—but when early medieval writers tried to imagine how these various images might combine to make up a single otherworldly landscape, the results were radically dissimilar. It rather depended on one’s views about the possibility of post-mortem atonement for sin, about the nature of the soul, and about time itself—and since individuals often held quite different opinions on these matters, their mental maps of the otherworld were often idiosyncratic and deeply personal. If the spatial arrangement of the places in which the dead awaited their fate were our chief concern, as it was for Le Goff and as it remains for many of his later critics, then we can only affirm that ‘early medieval theologians failed to agree on a geography of the afterlife’.15 But the inability of early medieval ecclesiastics to agree upon a definitive ‘map’ of the otherworld seems not, in fact, to have been at the heart of the uncertainty expressed by our Old English poet in Maxims II. He was quite content in his understanding of where souls went to await the Judgement: they rested ‘in the Father’s embrace’, and that knowledge appears to have been enough for him. It was rather the matter of the soul’s journey towards that fatherly embrace which eluded him, the period between the death of the body and the arrival into the otherworld, and he denied that anyone other than God could really know ‘which way the soul would turn’ after it left the body. This was partially a literary pose, intended to emphasize that human wisdom (of the kind that had dominated the rest of his poem) could never rival the knowledge possessed by the heavenly Creator; and perhaps that is why 13 Jacques Le Goff, La Naissance du Purgatoire (Paris, 1981). For immediate responses to Le Goff ’s treatment of the early texts, see: R. W. Southern, ‘Between heaven and hell’, Times Literary Supplement, 18 June 1982, pp. 651–2; Adriaan H. Bredero, ‘Le Moyen Âge et le Purgatoire’, Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 78 (1983), 429–52, esp. 450–2; Aron J. Gurevich, ‘Popular and scholarly medieval cultural traditions: notes in the margin of Jacques Le Goff ’s book’, Journal of Medieval History 9 (1983), 71–90, esp. 79–84; Graham Robert Edwards, ‘Purgatory: “birth” or evolution?’, JEH 36 (1985), 634–46. 14 Of particular relevance here are Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Paradise, Death and Doomsday in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Cambridge, 2001); Marina Smyth, ‘The origins of purgatory through the lens of seventh-century Irish eschatology’, Traditio 58 (2003), 91–132; Sarah Foot, ‘Anglo-Saxon “Purgatory” ’, in Peter Clarke and Tony Claydon (eds.), The Church, the Afterlife and the Fate of the Soul (Woodbridge, 2009), 87–96; Helen Foxhall Forbes, ‘Diuiduntur in quattuor: the interim and judgement in Anglo-Saxon England’, JTS, n.s. 61 (2010), 659–84; Isabel Moreira, Heaven’s Purge: Purgatory in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2010). 15 Foot, ‘Anglo-Saxon “Purgatory” ’, 89.

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modern scholars have been content to speak about the things that the poet ought to have believed about the transit of the soul.16 We are accustomed to think of Anglo-Saxon deathbeds as spiritual battlegrounds, at which ‘it was widely believed that angels and demons fought over the soul as it left the body, the winners taking it to the place to which it belonged by right’.17 Human souls were spiritual beings, after all, and their exit from the body could hardly have failed to attract the attention of the other spirits who dwelt in that incorporeal world. In later medieval and early modern Europe, the faithful were instructed to prepare themselves for their encounter with the creatures of heaven and hell, and to seek guidance from books about ‘the art of dying well’. Such books were not hard to come by after the fifteenth century, and were typically furnished with a series of striking woodcuts in which supernatural friends and foes clustered around the bed of a dying man, trying to move him either to repentance or to despair, and waiting with open arms for the inevitable departure of the soul.18 These arresting scenes were obviously dramatic, but not theologically innovative. They drew upon ideas which had first emerged many centuries earlier, in writings produced in the late antique East. Among the things which had been granted to the apostle Paul during his apocryphal tour of the heavens, in the influential third-century Vision of St Paul which we encountered in the previous chapter, was permission to bear witness to ‘the manner in which the souls of just men and of sinful men go out of their bodies’. Paul watched as dying men were visited ‘by both holy and impious angels’, each host striving to ‘find a place of habitation in the man’ before ‘taking possession of his soul and guiding it until it left the body’.19 Similar visions had been granted to the first monks of Egypt, alleged one of St Pachomius’ fourth-century hagiographers, who promised that a gentle death overseen by heavenly attendants awaited pious souls, in marked contrast to the violent extraction of evil men’s souls which would be undertaken by

16 For other examples of the ‘God only knows’ theme, see Paul Cavill, Maxims in Old English Poetry (Cambridge, 1999), 53–7. Victoria Thompson sees its function in Maxims II as ‘a stubborn refutation of the power of Church and State to predict or engineer either salvation or damnation’: Dying and Death, 100–1. 17 Helen Foxhall Forbes, ‘Sealed by the cross: protecting the body in Anglo-Saxon England’, in Marie Louise Stig Sørenen and Katharina Rebay-Salisbury (eds.), Embodied Knowledge: Perspectives on Belief and Technology (Oxford, 2013), 52–66, at 58. Cf. also Morton W. Bloomfield, ‘Patristics and Old English literature: notes on some poems’, Comparative Literature 14 (1962), 36–43, at 38; Foxhall Forbes, Heaven and Earth, 111–25; Jill M. Fitzgerald, ‘Angelus pacis: a liturgical model for the masculine “fæle friðowebba” in Cynewulf ’s Elene’, Medium Ævum 83 (2014), 189–209, at 199. 18 On the genre and its development, see Mary C. O’Connor, The Art of Dying Well: The Development of the Ars Moriendi (New York, 1966); and Nancy Lee Beaty, The Craft of Dying: A Study in the Literary Traditions of the ‘Ars moriendi’ in England (New Haven, 1970). 19 Visio Pauli (Long Latin), chs. 14–15 (ed. Silverstein and Hilhorst, pp. 86–97).

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‘merciless angels’ with the assistance of a fish-hook and a spirit-horse.20 These examples could be easily multiplied. Clearly the idea of the deathbed as a place of supernatural strife haunted Christian imaginations for an extremely long time. The combined weight of all these textual and pictorial representations has, I think, induced us to overlook alternative perspectives into how early medieval men and women thought about the process of death. The problem is not that they offered no words of their own on the subject, but rather that we have not always succeeded in reading those words as carefully as they deserve. Like their late antique and early modern counterparts, early medieval Christians spoke about death as a transition from an earthly to a spiritual plane, and naturally expected that the progress of human souls through this unseen world might attract the attention of whatever creatures dwelt within it. Any encounter with angels or demons in this place could prove critical for the newly disembodied soul. But in Anglo-Saxon England at least, and perhaps in other parts of the early medieval West as well, such encounters were far from guaranteed or predictable. Unlike the earlier creator of the Vision of St Paul or the later writers of ars moriendi handbooks, who all spoke uncomplicatedly about the way that a person’s conduct in life determined the reception which awaited the soul when it parted with the body, many Anglo-Saxon Christians looked towards the deathbed with far less certainty. Their worries were precisely those of the Old English Maxims II: where would the soul turn after death; how would it find its way into ‘the Father’s embrace’; what sorts of dangers might await the unwary soul on the way, and how could they be overcome? To be clear, I do not mean to imply that these anxieties were unique to the Anglo-Saxons. The same questions about the transit of the soul ultimately underlay the creation of the ars moriendi literature in later centuries. What was different, however, was that those later guides to ‘the art of dying well’ could allay such fears with the reassurance that every soul would be provided with a psychopomp, a supernatural guide which took responsibility for the soul’s passage into the next world. One obviously hoped that the psychopomp would turn out to be an angel sent to carry the soul to bliss, rather than a demon pointing towards the road to hell—but either way, the fate of the soul after death was now out of one’s own hands. This was a way of thinking that was not generally shared in Anglo-Saxon England, at least until the tenth century. There, in contrast, it was thought likely that angels and demons alike reserved their energies for the deaths of only the most meritorious or reprehensible individuals. Less remarkable souls received no such assistance in their 20 Bohairic Life of Pachomius, ch. 82, trans. Armand Veilleux, Pachomian Koinonia, 3 vols. (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1980–82), i. 105–10. On the relationship of this Life to the other early hagiographies about Pachomius, see Philip Rousseau, Pachomius: The Making of a Community in Fourth-Century Egypt (Berkeley, 1999), 37–48.

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own departure from life, and faced an altogether less predictable journey as a result. Yet over time these beliefs underwent a slow transformation. Preachers felt increasingly able to reassure their congregations that they, too, might hope to receive the assistance of angels in their final hour. Bound up with that seemingly small mental shift were all kinds of further ramifications: about the purpose of prayer for the dead, about how to search for evidence of sainthood, and about the nature of supernatural power more generally. Ideas were changing in subtle but far-reaching ways; and perhaps that is why the anonymous poet of Maxims II felt that ‘the shape of the future is dark and hidden’. He bemoaned a lack of incontrovertible, first-hand testimony. Drawing his poem to a close, he noted bitterly that ‘no one comes back here under our roofs to tell men for sure what the Ruler’s destiny is, the dwelling of the victorious folk where he himself lives’.21 But in this, the poet was mistaken.

BREAKING THE RULES OF DEATH One night in the 690s, a Northumbrian man named Dryhthelm died. To the alarm of his mourners, he rose again the next day. Not given to excessive speech in general, he was unwilling to speak indiscriminately about the things he had seen during that night. Only through repeated questioning did a priest named Hæmgils succeed in piecing together the man’s experiences, and it was from these conversations that Dryhthelm’s death and return to life came to be known by Bede. Whether by the efforts of Hæmgils, Bede, or some combination of the two, Dryhthelm’s discontinuous answers to Hæmgils’ questions were brought together to produce a seamless account of one man’s journey through the otherworld. By the time the story was incorporated into the final book of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica, a great deal of careful polishing had made it ring with echoes of Virgil and of early Christian vision-literature.22 But for all these literary flourishes, Bede recognized that the story gained real power when told in the first person, as if it were the unmediated account of man recently returned from a remarkable journey. So it was that the longest first-person speech in Bede’s History came not from any king or prelate, but from an ordinary man who had briefly glimpsed the world to which all souls must come. As if remembering a dream, Dryhthelm’s recollections began hazily with the memory that he had not been alone when he had left his body: ‘There was 21

Maxims II, ll. 64b–67 (ed. Dobbie, p. 57). Bede, HE, V.12 (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 488–98). On the quotation from Virgil, Aeneid, VI.268 and other literary echoes, see further Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, 260–1; Andrew Rabin, ‘Bede, Dryhthelm, and the witness to the other world: testimony and conversion in the Historia ecclesiastica’, Modern Philology 106 (2009), 375–98, at 396. 22

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someone who was leading me, someone of shining appearance and bright attire.’ Walking for the most part in silence, the figure never openly disclosed his identity. One later tenth-century reader of Bede, composing his own Old English version of Dryhthelm’s story, was little inclined towards such ambiguities and felt it necessary to add that this ‘someone’ was in fact ‘a shining angel’.23 But in truth, even in Bede’s version, the figure’s radiant form and dress left little uncertainty.24 The angel did not initially reveal why he was there, either, but it soon became obvious that he was acting as Dryhthelm’s guide (ductor) on a tour around the otherworld. Dryhthelm himself expressed no shock or surprise at this; indeed, he was evidently aware that he no longer numbered among the living, for he had begun to wonder whether a deep valley which he had seen filled with souls caught between raging fires and intolerable frost might be hell, and whether a peaceful sunlit meadow populated by joyful souls at rest might be heaven. As he did, the angel refuted his silent thoughts (‘“You should not presume so,” he said, “for this is not hell as you think.” . . . “No, this is not the kingdom of heaven as you assume.”’), for in the darkness beyond the valley a dark pit spewed forth fire, smoke, and foul vapours; and beyond the meadow, songs and wondrous fragrance emanated from some more distant abode of light. Only at the conclusion of the tour did the angel explain the nature and relationship of these four distinct realms and the souls they contain: the inescapable fiery pit was hell, holding the souls of the irredeemably sinful; the valley of fire and ice held those who died sinful but repentant and who would yet be judged on Doomsday; the souls in the meadow were kept from torment, but were not perfect enough to have gained immediate entry into the kingdom of heaven, which Dryhthelm had seen as a bright light ringing with the songs of the saints. The lesson over, the angel instructed Dryhthelm to return to his body, there to attend to his own soul better now that he knew what it would face in the world to come. Dryhthelm’s story was not unique. Accounts of death, seeming-death, and other unearthly visions formed a genre, and as a genre they shared conventional elements. The figure of an angelic interpreter or instructor was one of those conventions. The regularity with which angelic guides appear in vision literature is doubtless to be explained by the ease with which they could be turned into mouthpieces for didactically minded writers. Angels were God’s messengers, after all, and they could be depended upon to appear unprompted with ready explanations about the many enigmatic things witnessed during the course of a vision. They had been fulfilling this role since the earliest Jewish and Christian apocalypses, and the writers of late antique and early medieval vision literature often did little to disguise the convenient artificiality of these 23

Ælfric, CH, II.21 (ed. Godden, pp. 199–200). For other implicit angels in Bede’s History, compare HE, I.19, III.8, and IV.11 (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 60, 238, and 367). 24

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interpreter-angels who accompanied this or that visionary on their various travels through the otherworld.25 The apocryphal journey of Paul the apostle through the heavens, in the third-century Vision of St Paul, therefore began as a solitary venture but ended as a guided tour, an angelic guide having stepped forward unobtrusively to provide ready answers after only a few chapters.26 Likewise, a Merovingian abbot who received a dreaming glimpse of the otherworld, and whose tale was told in the sixth century by Gregory of Tours (d. c.594), found himself in the presence of knowledgeable bystanders as soon as they became necessary. The abbot, Sunniulf—a man remembered for being too lenient with his monks—had seen a vision of souls negotiating a burning river in front of a house painted white. Most of the souls were painfully submerged, but a few had managed to make it across a narrow bridge. Uncertain of what he saw, ‘he asked those who were with him what they thought this meant’. He received his answer straightaway, and was told that this was the bridge by which souls crossed over into bliss, a path which could only be taken by those who had kept good discipline over their flocks. The answer was straightforward enough; but who were Sunniulf ’s companions? Gregory had neither mentioned them before nor bothered to identify them now. As mysterious interlocutors speaking to a sleeping abbot through his dreams, they should probably be understood as angels.27 But they had emerged only when Gregory needed an authoritative, and appropriately otherworldly, outside voice to give didactic instructions to the visionary— and, more importantly, to the reader. Dryhthelm’s angelic guide was no less eager to offer instructions of this kind. At the conclusion of his tour, the angel made sure to ask Dryhthelm: ‘Do you know what all these things are, which you have seen?’ A long explanation soon followed, in which the four realms of the otherworld were identified in turn, along with moralizing comments about the sorts of people who populated them. As Helen Foxhall Forbes has shown, the content of the angel’s speech corresponds precisely to Bede’s own sermons on the subject of the posthumous fate of souls.28 In those sermons, Bede took as his starting-point an observation made by Gregory the Great, about the way that the human race 25 See Richard Bauckham, ‘Descent to the underworld’, in his The Fate of the Dead: Studies on the Jewish and Christian Apocalypses (Leiden, 1998), 9–48, at 36. Even the angelic figure in the book of Revelation seems to have been meant ‘to legitimate prophetic messages addressed to early Christian communities’: see Loren T. Stuckenbruck, Angel Veneration and Christology: A Study in Early Judaism and in the Christology of the Apocalypse of John (Tübingen, 1995), 260–1. 26 Visio Pauli (Long Latin), ch. 11 (ed. Silverstein and Hilhorst, pp. 82–3). 27 Gregory of Tours, Libri historiarum, IV.33, ed. Bruno Krusch and Wilhelm Levison, MGH, SS rer. Mer. I.1 (Hanover, 1951), 166. 28 Foxhall Forbes, ‘Diuiduntur in quattuor’, 667–73. These parallels between the angel’s explanation and Bede’s homilies go some way to answering earlier suggestions by Andrew Rabin ‘that to assume a transparency between the author and his narrative voice obscures the

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was comprised of four kinds of people: ‘for some people are judged and perish, others are not judged and perish. Some are judged and reign, others are not judged and reign.’29 Building upon the pope’s concise formulation, Bede sought to say a little more about the different states of these four groups in the interim period between death and Judgement Day. He reasoned that if there were four kinds of people, then the otherworld must therefore consist of four separate places: with the saints already assigned to heaven, the less-than-perfect waiting until Judgement in ‘paradise’, those of mixed moral worth purged in fire before coming to that Judgement, and the unbaptized and the apostate consigned immediately to eternal torment.30 This was the same vividly segregated landscape through which Dryhthelm had walked, and Dryhthelm’s angel ensured that there would be no misunderstanding about it. The spirit’s words might as well have been taken from an abbreviated copy of a Bedan homily, so closely did they follow the scheme outlined in the Jarrow monk’s sermons. Whatever the angel had said in Hæmgils’ version of events, let alone in anything that Dryhthelm may himself have attributed to that night in the 690s, the angel in the Historia ecclesiastica speaks with Bede and for Bede. While there can be no doubt that Bede considered Dryhthelm’s angel to be a useful didactic tool and intended its final exposition to serve a generally instructive purpose, the spirit ultimately spoke to Dryhthelm only of his own conduct: ‘if you seek to watch your actions with greater care and keep your ways and words righteous in singleness of heart, you yourself will receive a place after your death among the joyous bands of the blessed.’ Although the narrative encourages readers to place themselves in the dead man’s shoes (not least because Bede had refrained from giving the visionary a name until the vision had ended), Dryhthelm’s journey had in fact never been archetypal. From the moment he had stepped into the otherworld, he had stood out as an exception in this rigidly rule-bound land of the dead—not least because of the way that he was told finally to leave it, and to correct his life before returning to it better prepared. This was emphatically not the experience which all souls would share. Nor can it go unnoticed that Dryhthelm’s journey had been a curiously unhindered one. Even a potentially perilous encounter with a band of demons placed the dead man in no real danger. Dryhthelm recalled the way that the evil spirits had risen from the mouth of hell, beside which he had briefly been left alone while his angel went to carry out some sudden and unannounced mission, and remembered that, ‘although they terrified me, they did not dare to touch me’. We might suspect that it was only Bede’s editorial hand that held them back, and that maybe this was a scene that could have extent to which Bede’s narrator serves as a fictional person designed to implicate the reader in his narrative of penance and conversion’: Rabin, ‘Bede, Dryhthelm, and the witness’, passim. 29 Gregory, Mor. in Iob, XXVI.xxvii.50 (ed. Adriaen, p. 1304). 30 Bede, Hom., I.2 and 13 (ed. Hurst, pp. 12–13 and 89–90).

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played out differently in Hæmgils’ version of events. Perhaps Bede, aiming for consistency between the narrative and his theology, felt compelled to make sure that Dryhthelm was never in danger of being dragged into the eternal hell without having committed some cardinal sin. Elsewhere, however, Bede spoke of the threat of demons waylaying even the most meritorious of souls, and stated that only with God’s help could a soul overcome them.31 Dryhthelm alone had managed to travel unopposed, in a way that made him seem more like a privileged guest on a guided tour than an archetypal sinner on the brink of damnation. If some power preserved Dryhthelm from any real danger, the angel escorting the dead man professed to be unaware of it. When the spirit finally revealed why it had escorted Dryhthelm to the mouth of hell, only to vanish into the noisome air, its explanation was simply: ‘I did it so that I could find out what should happen to you (ut quid de te fieri deberet agnoscerem).’ This was not always the case. Other people’s angelic guides were quite content to admit that they had been sent on a special mission, which involved showing a human visitor around the otherworld while ensuring that the road back to the land of the living remained open. That was the experience of an eighthcentury Irishman named Laisrén, who received a vision of the otherworld as he fasted in an oratory in Connacht. Angels lifted him from the body, and met with an immediate challenge from a band of armed demons, who reeled off a list of unconfessed sins. Laisrén’s angels dissented not at all from the demons’ accusations, but observed that ‘this plea will have no power over us . . . for this man has not come to remain [but to] carry a warning from us to his fellows’.32 The demons departed and the tour commenced, safe in the knowledge that an exemption had temporarily been made for Laisrén in order that he could return to tell the tale. Unlike Dryhthelm, he had not even been required to suffer bodily death before seeing the next world; Laisrén’s journey had simply begun when ‘sleep overcame him at the end of the third three-day period’ of fasting, and his angels spoke openly about the fact that he still had time ‘before leaving the body’ for real.33 Angels might continue to grant special favours to 31

See the imagined transit of Benedict Biscop’s soul in Bede’s Historia abbatum, ch. 14, ed. Grocock and Wood, Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow, 54. 32 Fis Laisréin, chs. 5–6, ed. and trans. John Carey, ‘The Vision of Laisrén’, in John Carey, Emma Nic Cárthaigh, and Caitríona Ó Dochartaigh (eds.), The End and Beyond: Medieval Irish Eschatology, 2 vols. (Aberystwyth, 2014), i. 435. In the surviving manuscript, the angels specify that Laisrén ‘has not come to remain among demons’, but persuasive grounds have been offered for judging this to be a misunderstanding made by a later copyist: see Carey, ‘Vision of Laisrén’, 441–2; and Charles D. Wright, ‘Next-to-last things: the interim state of souls in early Irish literature’, in Carey, Nic Cárthaigh, and Ó Dochartaigh (eds.), The End and Beyond, i. 309–96, at 370–1. 33 Fis Laisréin, chs. 1–6 (ed. and trans. Carey, i. 434–7). For another visionary extracted by angels with ‘hope [of recovery] left here in his body’, cf. Visio Baronti monachi Longoretensis, ch. 3, ed. Wilhelm Levison, MGH, SS rer. Merov. V (Hanover, 1910), 380.

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their chosen visionaries, in order to provide them with full access to the pleasures and pains of the afterlife without becoming ensnared in them. Readers of the seventh-century Life of St Fursa, another Irish ascetic remembered for undertaking remarkable soul-journeys while his body lay motionless ‘as if it were dead’, discovered that a great wall of fire separated the material world from the spiritual realms beyond.34 Fursa had seen this in one of several out-of-body experiences, and his angels told him that all souls must pass through the flames in order to have their misdeeds burned away in its purging heat. But no sooner had Fursa been told this than his angels parted the flames for him and formed themselves into an armed escort to protect his soul from the fire (ab igne defendebant eum), in order that he might pass through it untested. The tour on which they then conducted Fursa thus took place in borrowed time. The normal procedures of the otherworld had been suspended for a moment to allow one chosen soul to travel through the impassable fire, there to meet the celestial hosts who come forward from ‘the secret part of heaven’ to meet him.35 Although Dryhthelm was not initially aware of it, special access was clearly being granted to him as well. After receiving instructions about what to do with Dryhthelm’s soul, his angel led his charge out of the darkness until the pair stood at the foot of an enormous and impregnable wall. But even this presented no obstacle to the tour, for Dryhthelm soon found himself on top of it—‘by what means I know not’. His angel was permitting him entry into places that would otherwise have been barred to him, temporarily breaking the rules that governed this otherworld in order to complete Dryhthelm’s lesson. Exemptions and exceptions of a similar kind were permitted to yet another traveller through the early medieval otherworld: the anonymous monk of Wenlock, whose experiences were reported by Boniface in the letter we discussed in the previous chapter.36 Like Fursa, the monk’s soul came first to an immense fire encircling the world, and was shielded from it by an angel which ‘touched my head with a protecting hand and brought me safe from harm in the flames’.37 On the other side, he gathered with other souls in a 34

There is frustratingly no single critical edition of the whole Vita S. Fursei: Bruno Krusch’s edition omits the larger part of the Life given over to the saint’s visions, while Maria Pia Ciccarese’s edition of the visions omits the biographical conclusion. Supplement, therefore, Ciccarese, ‘Le visioni di S. Fursa’, Romanobarbarica 8 (1984–5), 231–303, with Krusch, ‘Vita Sancti Fursei’, MGH, SS rer. Merov. IV (Hanover, 1902), 436–40. 35 Our sense of Fursa’s privileged status in the otherworld need not be undermined by the fact that the fires through which he first passed unharmed still burned him as he made his return (Vita Fursei, ch. 16), for other saints were said to have borne visible scars from supernatural trauma if their wounds might help to convince others of some urgent message: cf. Bede, HE, II.6 (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 154); Adomnán, VC, III.5 (ed. Anderson and Anderson, pp. 188–90). 36 Die Briefe, X (ed. Tangl, pp. 8–15). 37 On this detail, see Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, 252–4.

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place where their worldly deeds were inspected while angels and demons considered the merits of each one in turn. Although both the monk’s sins and his virtues were made known there, the tally of his life’s works remained uncounted. His entire vision seems to have taken place as he stood at ‘that assembly (illum conuentum)’, but although the fate of a certain abbot’s soul was decided in front of him, his own worth was never reckoned before he was returned to the body by his angels.38 Boniface’s account of the monk of Wenlock’s experiences tacitly acknowledges that, at every turn, exceptions were being made for a chosen soul, just as Dryhthelm and Fursa had discovered on their own journeys through the otherworld.

T H E RO A D OU T O F L I F E These stories about men who had gained brief glimpses of the afterlife held an obvious value for early medieval readers, who were encouraged to think of their own immortal souls as they read them. A note in one manuscript of the Old English translation of Bede’s History singled out the story of Dryhthelm for the reader’s special attention, observing that this was ‘some good man’s vision of the kingdom of heaven and the punishment of hell. Read it and understand well, and you are the better.’39 This was commonsensical advice; but there were nevertheless limits to the lessons which one could take from such stories, as soon as one recognized that their central characters were not the everymen they first appeared to be. That was obvious enough in the case of St Fursa, a holy ascetic accustomed to out-of-body journeys through the heavens in the manner of the apostle Paul in his apocryphal Vision. But Bede’s account of Dryhthelm and Boniface’s letter about the monk of Wenlock claimed to report the experiences of people who had actually died and which might therefore have a claim to universal validity. Instead, for all the authority with which these resurrected men spoke about the rules governing the otherworld, the progress of their own souls through it had explicitly contravened 38 The place at which the monk stood during his vision is explicitly named as an ‘assembly’ only late in the letter, when the abbot’s soul is brought ‘ad illum conuentum’. Boniface had nevertheless spoken of souls ‘assembling’ around the monk (‘illuc, ubi ipse fuit, conuenisse’). The repeated terminology should encourage us to identify Boniface’s third reference to a conuentum of souls—from which holy souls travel to enter heaven (‘Ad quod sanctae gloriosaeque animae ab illo secedentes conuentu properabant’)—as this same place of judgement, even though it follows his description of an interim paradise. This has typically been misunderstood, with the effect of making Boniface’s theology of the afterlife seem more peculiar than it really is: cf. Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, 263–4; Kabir, Paradise, 88–9, 99–101; Foot, ‘Anglo-Saxon Purgatory’, 92–4; Foxhall Forbes, ‘Diuiduntur in quattuor’, 673–4. 39 Cambridge, University Library, Kk.3.18, 87v: ed. Neil Ker, ‘Old English notes signed “Coleman” ’, Medium Ævum 18 (1949), 29–31, at 30.

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those rules at every stage. Any reader seeking to gain more than a general sense of the pleasures and pains of the world to come was therefore faced with the difficult task of trying to distinguish between which of the visionaries’ experiences were supposed to be typical of every human death, and which had happened to them alone. This is as true for the modern reader as for the medieval, and the singular problem in fact remains the role of the angels. By the end of a vision-narrative, no reader could fail to notice that almost everything has happened according to their volition—including, of course, a visionary’s final return to the body ‘by the angel’s command’.40 But why were they present at all? From the texts themselves, it is not quite possible to know whether these angels had come in accordance with some general law of death, performing duties that were endlessly replayed beside every human deathbed, or whether their arrival in fact marked the first of the exceptions made for these chosen visionaries. At first sight, this problem would seem easily answered. The earliest evidence for the liturgy of the sick and the dying, first attested in mid-eighthcentury Francia but drawing upon older traditions that might have their origins in fifth- or sixth-century Rome, prescribes three antiphons to be intoned in the moments after death.41 Interspersed with psalmody, these antiphons called directly upon the powers of heaven to assist the deceased: Come to [their] aid, saints of God; run to meet [them], angels of the Lord, receiving their soul and presenting it in the sight of the Most High. May Christ who created you receive you, and may angels lead you into the bosom of Abraham. May a choir of angels receive you and place you in the bosom of Abraham so that with Lazarus, he who was once a poor man, you may have eternal rest.42

While there is little unambiguous evidence for the liturgical forms in use in early England before the tenth century, it has been thought likely that these formulae were known to the Anglo-Saxons from at least the mid-eighth 40 Die Briefe, X (ed. Tangl, p. 15); cf. Vita Fursei, ch. 17 (ed. Ciccarese, p. 302). Dryhthelm professed ignorance about the means by which he returned to life, but his return nevertheless followed an angelic command that he ‘must now return to the body’: HE, V.12 (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 494). 41 Ordo XLIX, ed. Michel Andrieu, Les ‘Ordines romani’ du haut moyen âge, 5 vols. (Leuven, 1931–61), iv. 529–30. The most detailed study of the funeral rites remains Damien Sicard, La Liturgie de la mort dans l’église latine des origines à la réforme carolingienne (Münster, 1978); but see also Frederick S. Paxton, Christianizing Death: The Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY, 1990), 37–44; Kabir, Paradise, 113–22. While Andrieu’s ordo XLIX is generally considered to be of Roman origin, Bernard Moreton has expressed doubts which have still not yet been properly addressed: see his review of Sicard, Liturgie de la mort, in JTS, n.s. 31 (1980), 231–7. 42 Most of the early liturgical manuscripts give only the incipits of their prescribed orations; these are the fullest forms of the antiphons, as collated from later witnesses by Sicard, Liturgie de la mort, 66–71.

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century.43 Certainly by then, similar wishes were being voiced in private devotion, at least by the users of the personal prayerbooks which survive from eighth- and early ninth-century Mercia. Amidst a much longer litany of petitions to named intercessors found in two of these prayerbooks, for instance, is an appeal to ‘the holy and glorious archangel Michael, who took the power to guard souls, that he might deem my soul worthy to be taken up when it leaves my body’.44 It would, however, also be a mistake to read prayers like this as if they constituted a road-map for the individual soul, for these petitions deliberately tell only half of a less certain story. The liturgical ritual for the deathbed modelled itself around the story in the gospel of Luke about the rich man and the beggar Lazarus, whose fortunes were reversed after death: ‘And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom. And the rich man also died: and he was buried in hell.’45 Wherever this ‘bosom of Abraham’ was, and whatever its relationship with Paradise, the Kingdom of Heaven, and other possible or eventual locations of dead souls, the story assured the reader that Lazarus was now in a place of peace and the rich man in torment.46 The funeral antiphons were therefore petitioning that the particular circumstances of this one biblical death would now be replicated in the present, for every Christian soul in turn. But they stop short of simply tracking the soul’s invisible progress through a series of otherworldly checkpoints. The moment of death was not to be accompanied with words of gentle mourning, but with imperative commands—subuenite! occurrite!—asking to angels to come and help the soul, and to run to intercept it. Everything else that the antiphons said about the immediate fate of the soul depended on the arrival of that escort, and the ritual deliberately held back from saying anything about what might happen if it did not appear. Personal prayerbooks, which did not have to be mindful of a community’s grief at the moment of death, did not have to be so delicate. They do not hold back from saying precisely what might happen to the souls of the dead without an angel’s guidance. One asked that the archangel Michael would ‘free the soul from the power of the infernal ones and from the way of darkness, so that it may not come before the lion and the dragon who is accustomed to drag off wretched

43

Kabir, Paradise, 114; developing Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, 274. The petition is part of a longer prayer structured as a litany: Royal Prayerbook, 18r–19v (ed. Kuypers, p. 208); Cerne, 40v–41v (ed. Kuypers, pp. 80–2 [no. 1]). 45 Luke 16.19–31. 46 On relationship between these possible destinations of the soul according to the different theologies of patristic and early medieval writers, see variously: Joseph Ntedika, L’Évolution de l’au-delà dans la prière pour les morts. Étude de patristique et de liturgie latines (IVe–VIIIe s.) (Louvain, 1971), 136–225; Le Goff, Naissance, 70–4; Charles E. Hill, Regnum caelorum: Patterns of Future Hope in Early Christianity (Oxford, 1992), esp. 9–40; Kabir, Paradise, esp. 15–48, 113–22. 44

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souls and lead [them] to eternal torment’.47 Another asks God to ‘send an angel of peace who might guard my soul and lead it into the place of rest, making it pass through the dominions and powers of darkness undaunted’.48 A certain effort of will is now required to read these petitions on their own terms. Their talk of rival bands of angels and demons, each able to exert some power over the departed soul, can easily put us in mind of those ancient and early modern images of deathbeds swarming with warring spirits struggling for mastery over the souls of the dead. But that is not quite the situation that these short texts imagine. The ars moriendi handbooks of the later Middle Ages were written to assure believers that human deaths followed a pattern, and that the spirits of heaven and hell followed an orderly protocol to determine which host might claim the soul as their own. One could derive a certain comfort from that knowledge, for if one knew the manner in which angels and demons fought over the soul, one could hope to influence the outcome of the contest in one’s own favour. In contrast, when the prayers of the eighth- and ninth-century Anglo-Saxons looked ahead to the death of the body, they worried that there might be no benevolent gatekeepers waiting to usher the soul into its place of rest. The presence of angelic helpers had to be secured in advance, otherwise the soul faced an unaided journey ‘through the dominions and powers of darkness’. Rather than thinking of the soul emerging into the arms of a waiting psychopomp, Anglo-Saxon writers suggested that the death of the body simply marked the soul’s first step along a road which led out of the world. That, at least, was what Alcuin suggested in a story about a Northumbrian hermit named Balthere, who had saved a soul as it made the difficult journey out of life.49 Alcuin described how the soul had fallen from the sky while Balthere sat at prayer, and had explained that it had been a deacon in its earthly life. The deacon had recently died, but since he had once touched a woman’s breasts and failed to confess it,50 his soul had spent the last thirty days running through the otherworld trying to evade capture by demons. The demons followed him still, but when one of them insulted St Peter in Balthere’s presence, the hermit interceded ‘with tears for the soul’s 47

Cerne, 57r–57v (ed. Kuypers, pp. 113–14 [no. 18]). The imagery comes ultimately from Ps. 90.13, although Carol Neuman de Vegvar suggests a more direct debt to Gallican liturgy: ‘The doors of his face: early hell-mouth iconography in Ireland’, in Catherine E. Karkov and Helen Damico (eds.), Aedificia Nova: Studies in Honor of Rosemary Cramp (Kalamazoo, Mich., 2008), 176–97, at 186, n. 51. 48 Royal Prayerbook, 34r (ed. Kuypers, p. 215). 49 Alcuin, VdP, ll. 1319–62 (ed. Godman, pp. 104–6). 50 Michael Gleason suggests that Alcuin, a deacon himself, might have been trying to associate this leuita rescued from torment with the state of his own soul: ‘Water, water, everywhere: Alcuin’s Bede and Balthere’, Mediaevalia 24 (2003), 75–100, at 91. Unless we assume that the deacon’s admission is the veiled confession of a guilty conscience, it seems unlikely that Alcuin would have chosen only to identify himself with the one character in the poem noted for his lasciviousness.

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guilt . . . until he saw with his own eyes that it had been carried high over the stars of heaven by angelic arms’. It is easy to think nothing of this story, with its rather naive idea that a soul might fall back to earth from the otherworld, but its basic sense that the dead faced a short period of indeterminacy after their exit from the body was more widely shared than we might expect. It was, in fact, what the monk of Wenlock had seen during his time in the otherworld, for although he had been escorted by angels directly from his body into a meeting-place at which the fates of the dead were decided, he had nevertheless watched other souls having to make the journey on their own, without the aid of any guiding spirit. Even after their journey, this could prove a dangerously capricious place for an unaccompanied soul. In the assembly of gathered spirits, the semblance of legalistic efficiency soon degenerated into a scramble over the soul of an abbot, whom the monk of Wenlock saw being seized ‘unjustly (sine iure)’ by demons.51 The fear of souls being intercepted by dread forces before they found their ‘rightful’ place in the afterlife also found voice in prayers which asked for higher powers to watch over the soul’s progress and ‘snatch me from the hands of my enemies’.52 Whatever the funeral liturgies said about the hope for an angel to guide the soul on its way, Anglo-Saxon Christians spoke at other times about the very real possibility that the dead would have to make their way through unfamiliar places on their own. One such unclaimed soul belonged to a man named Merhtheof, a laybrother connected with an unidentified Northumbrian monastery in the middle of the eighth century.53 The man’s experiences after death became known because Merhtheof had happened to return to the body and tell the tale; and in the early years of the ninth century an Anglo-Latin poet named Æthelwulf (fl. 801–21) incorporated the man’s story into a verse history of the monastery. Summarized in those terms, Merhtheof sounds little different to Dryhthelm or the monk of Wenlock before him. In fact, Merhtheof ’s journey into and out of the otherworld took place under very different 51

Die Briefe, X (ed. Tangl, pp. 9, 12–13). Royal Prayerbook, 36v–37r (ed. Kuypers, pp. 216–17). The petition is here directed to God, but forms part of an abecedary sequence of prayers in which an earlier entreaty had already asked that an ‘angel of peace’ lead the soul after death. The degree to which the compiler intended the individual petitions in the sequence to interlock is unclear, especially since some parts of the sequence are also found individually in Nunnaminster, 25v–26r, 27r, 28r–28v (ed. Birch, pp. 70, 72, and 74): see Barbara Raw, ‘A new parallel to the prayer De tenebris in the Book of Nunnaminster (British Library, Harl. MS. 2965, f. 28rv)’, Electronic British Library Journal (2004), art. 1, pp. 1–9, at . 53 Crayke and Bywell have been proposed as the site of Æthelwulf ’s monastery, but the question remains open: cf. D. R. Howlett, ‘The provenance, date, and structure of De abbatibus’, Archaeologia Aeliana, 5th ser., 3 (1975), 121–30; Michael Lapidge, ‘Aediluulf and the school of York’, in Albert Lehner and Walter Berschin (eds.), Lateinische Kultur im VIII. Jahrhundert: Traube-Gedenkschrift (St Ottilien, 1989), 161–78, rpt. in his Anglo-Latin Literature, 600–899 (London, 1996), 381–98. 52

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circumstances.54 He had been alone as he ‘departed from the world, and rested his steps in unknown lands’. The otherworld he wandered through was gloomy and shaken by storms, filled with indistinct and malevolent faces that terrified him. Through the dire crowd he saw the spirits of his children, who had died from disease; but although they now appeared in a blessedly angelic state—dressed in white and shining with light—they offered him no explanatory tour of the otherworld. They only accompanied him to ‘the judgement, which the supreme magistrate from his high throne decides for every departing soul’. There, this pretor maximus condemned Merhtheof for breaking an oath made to his wife that neither of them would remarry if the other died, and, heedless of the excuses made by Merhtheof ’s sons, the judge decreed that he would meet with whatever fate his dead wife should deem appropriate. His wife, as radiant as her children and dwelling in a shining mountaintop house, ordered him ‘to go to the shades of the prison to be swallowed up amidst the dark flames’, but finally took pity as her children begged that he be returned to life to correct his ways. No angel took Merhtheof from his body. Although his sons served as his guides for part of his journey, they could make no exceptions for him when his soul came to the pretor’s judgement. His whole experience was utterly unlike the visions recounted by Bede and Boniface. The monk of Wenlock had somehow avoided his life’s worth being reckoned so that he might tell of what he had seen; Merhtheof ’s judgement, on the other hand, was real and unavoidable. His return to the body happened not because his posthumous journey was a privileged guided tour, but because of a technicality: the immutable sentence of the pretor was that his wife should choose his fate, and she finally chose to return him to life. In Merhtheof ’s story, therefore, we come closest to an account of what might face an ‘ordinary’ soul in the afterlife. Heavenly and hellish realms linger imperceptibly in the background, but everything that really mattered was decided before any soul even reached them. The importance of this place that is no place, through which souls do not remain but only travel, is easy to overlook. Yet it was through this less defined space that Dryhthelm walked for hours until his angel found out what to do with him, and in which Alcuin’s lascivious deacon searched for shelter from his demonic pursuers. In our efforts to map the mental geographies of the early medieval otherworld, inspired as we have been by Le Goff and his 54 Æthelwulf, DA, ll. 321–94 (pp. 27–33). Hans Joachim Kamphausen suggests that Merhtheof ’s ‘death’ might be entirely metaphorical, standing for his state of moral sin before being spiritually reborn into ‘a second, clean life’: Traum und Vision in der lateinischen Poesie der Karolingerzeit (Bern, 1975), 90–8. Æthelwulf doubtless intended Merhtheof ’s experiences to convey a moral lesson to others, but his note that the man’s soul eventually came back to its body (l. 386: ‘peruenit ad corpus’) is poorly suited to Kamphausen’s metaphorical reading, and seems sufficient to indicate that Æthelwulf believed that Merhtheof really had died and then returned to the world.

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focus on the variously purgatorial places it might contain, we have perhaps overlooked precisely that part which made our eighth- and ninth-century Anglo-Saxons most anxious. The soul’s time in this indeterminate place constituted an absolutely critical period, a brief window of time during which an individual’s status in the otherworld was not yet fixed. The transit of the unaided soul was arduous and apparently hostile. Æthelwulf did not dwell on the terrors of the road, but the ‘threatening faces’ who blocked Merhtheof ’s way with gloomy battle-lines (tristes phalanges) were doubtless demonic in nature, for elsewhere Æthelwulf described how evil spirits awaited the souls of the dead with ‘snares set for many people; they never cease to bear the wicked along the hard road, where eternal toil brings no rest to the traveller’.55 So Merhtheof ’s death was not utterly devoid of the agency of spiritual forces, but they lay in wait for him as his soul made his way through this strange and indistinct land. As much as Anglo-Saxon Christians in eighthand ninth-century England hoped that their own departing souls might be entrusted to the steady hands of helpful spirits, they accepted that there was a very real possibility that they might have to make the journey unaided.

THE CHOSEN FEW It may seem obtuse to privilege the story of Merhtheof, and to insist that the early Anglo-Saxon men and women who intoned prayers asking for heavenly spirits to meet them after death, or who wrote about visionaries who had been led out of the body by angels, did not therefore expect that the angels were present at each and every deathbed. After all, their contemporaries in seventhand eighth-century Ireland seem to have regarded it as common knowledge that angels would make at least a token appearance in the final moments of even the most sinful person. According to a series of Hiberno-Latin writings, and vernacular pieces dependent on them, St Augustine had revealed that two hosts of rival spirits attended each and every human death. Several Irish homilists took the opportunity to dramatize their meeting, some supposing 55

Æthelwulf, DA, ll. 159–82 (ed. Campbell, pp. 14–16). The activities of this turba nefanda have sometimes been taken as a reference to an earthly band of human robbers, since these are described in an account of the monastery’s foundation on a wild hilltop; but since Æthelwulf explicitly contrasts them with the angels which visited the site after the monastery’s construction, he seems to have had demonic assailants in mind. Hagiographical accounts of the eviction of demons from sites chosen by the professional religious are well known: Adomnán, VC, III.8 (ed. Anderson and Anderson, pp. 192–4); VCA, III.1 (ed. Colgrave, p. 96); Bede, VCP, ch. 17 (ed. Colgrave, pp. 214–16); Felix, VG, chs. 25–34 (ed. Colgrave, pp. 88–110); see also David F. Johnson, ‘Spiritual combat and the land of Canaan in Guthlac A’, in Blanton and Scheck (eds.), Intertexts, 307–17.

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that the two hosts would conduct an orderly inspection of the soul and tacitly decide upon its fate with minimal fuss, while others imagined violent battles taking place to determine which gained custody of the soul.56 The first of those two scenarios was probably the more traditional, and had certainly been shared by the third-century writer of the influential Vision of St Paul, who spoke of ‘both the holy angels and the impious angels’ descending upon the souls of the dead in order to see which could ‘find a place of habitation therein’.57 But the thought of heavenly and hellish armies joined together in the spirit of cooperation increasingly jarred with early medieval understandings of angels, demons, and their implacable opposition to one another. Irish monastics like Adomnán, abbot of Iona (d. 704), found it easier to imagine the two hosts engaging in aerial combat over newly emerged souls. He praised his abbatial predecessor, St Columba (d. 597), for having intervened with prayer in many such struggles to thwart the demons and to ensure that the forces of heaven emerged victorious.58 Such stories were hardly unknown to the Anglo-Saxons. The Vision of St Paul was read as widely in England as anywhere in early medieval Europe, and Anglo-Saxon scribes working on the Continent were among those who recopied the Hiberno-Latin sermons about the reception of the soul into the afterlife.59 Yet when they retold these sorts of stories in their own words, Anglo-Saxon writers gave them a very different emphasis. Take, for instance, the cautionary tale which Bede appended to his account of Dryhthelm in the Historia ecclesiastica. It concerned the ignominious death of a thegn in the service of Coenred, king of Mercia, who had been visited by angels and demons shortly before his death. The unnamed man had accrued only a handful of good deeds in his life, as he discovered when a pair of angels came to his sickbed and presented him with ‘a very beautiful but exceedingly small book’ in which they were written. There then followed a numberless army of demons brandishing ‘a volume of horrible appearance, enormous size, 56 The Latin and vernacular texts are edited, with translation and commentary, by John Carey, Katja Ritari, and Charles D. Wright in Carey, Nic Cárthaigh, and Ó Dochartaigh (eds.), The End and Beyond, i. 43–137. 57 Visio Pauli (Long Latin), chs. 14–15 (ed. Silverstein and Hilhorst, pp. 86–97). Other early Christian texts expressing similar ideas are conveniently summarized by Daley, Hope of the Early Church, 117–18, 174, 185; cf. also Charles D. Wright, ‘Next-to-last things’, 312–24. 58 Adomnán, VC, III.6, 10 and 13 (ed. Anderson and Anderson, pp. 190, 196, and 200). See Smyth, ‘Origins of purgatory’, 115–24; Katja Ritari, Saints and Sinners in Early Christian Ireland: Moral Theology through the Lives of Saints Brigit and Columba (Turnhout, 2009), 148–72; Wright, ‘Next-to-last things’, 335–7. 59 A full edition and study of the exemplum and its influence is in preparation by Charles D. Wright. His preliminary comments suggest that the earliest witness to the exemplum is an eighth-century manuscript from Freising written by the Anglo-Saxon scribe Peregrinus (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm 6433), which is edited in Charles D. Wright, ‘Latin analogue for The Two Deaths: The Three Utterances of the Soul’, in Carey, Nic Cárthaigh, and Ó Dochartaigh (eds.), The End and Beyond, i. 115–37.

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and unbearable weight’ which listed his sins. Thus claimed by the demons, the man watched as the angels vanished and ‘two extremely wicked spirits who had blades in their hands’ approached, pushing the weapons into his head and his foot. He endured an agonizing wait, for the daggers were ‘creeping inside my body with great torment, and as soon as they meet, I will die’. Death and damnation followed swiftly after, of course; and aside from the unusual cause of death, there seemed little to differentiate the story from those found in the Vision of St Paul or Adomnán’s Life of St Columba, which spoke of angels and demons measuring the worth of every person shortly before taking their souls.60 And yet, as he brought his tale to a close Bede went out of his way to specifically reject this apparently obvious meaning. While he claimed to be retelling the story simpliciter (‘just as I learned it from the venerable Bishop Pehthelm’), Bede followed his account with a carefully judged explanation that was intended to make his readers interpret the tale in a particular way. What the doomed thegn had experienced was not universal death. The thing he had seen had been shown to him so that he could tell others about what lay in store for them—but at Doomsday, and not before: As for the different books he saw presented to him by good and evil spirits, this was done by divine providence, so that we may remember that our thoughts and deeds do not melt away into the wind but are all kept for the examination of the high Judge (ad examen summi iudicis), and will be shown to us in the End (in fine) either by friendly angels or by our foes.61

Whether or not this was how Bishop Pehthelm had interpreted the story when he himself had told it to the Jarrow monk, Bede’s disarmingly matter-of-fact explanation attempted to ensure that a cautionary tale about one man’s damnation would not appear to undercut the singular importance of the final Day of Judgement. Similar thoughts emerge from his previous exegetical writings. In a commentary on the seven catholic epistles, Bede said that even demons already cast out of heaven await their sentence on that day, since they await renewed condemnation for the evils done by humanity at their instigation.62 He did not deny that there were some who would be consigned to eternal torment even before Judgement Day, and he openly hoped that relating their miserable deaths in his History would move his

60

For the cause of death, cf. Hall, Elves, 110. Bede, HE, V.13 (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 502). That Bede’s reference is to Judgement Day, rather than the moment of death, has generally gone unnoticed by translators and commentators: Colgrave and Mynors (trans.), Ecclesiastical History, 503; Aron J. Gurevich, ‘Au moyen âge: conscience individuelle et image de l’au-delà’, trans. Joanna Pomian, Annales. Économies, sociétés, civilisations 37 (1982), 255–75, at 264; Pierre Monat and Philippe Robin (trans.), Histoire ecclésiastique du peuple anglais, 3 vols. (Paris, 2005), iii. 89. 62 Bede, In epist. sept. cath., III.ii.4 and 11 (ed. Hurst, pp. 269–70 and 273). 61

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readers to confess their own sins.63 But it seemed to Bede more acceptable to conclude that the thegn’s death had therefore followed some strange and particular pattern through which God had intended to deliver a message to the faithful, rather than that the man had seen death as it would come to every soul. Bede grasped for the exceptional where previous generations had sought the universal because for him, as for many of his contemporaries, death was no longer the great leveller. A sense that God took a keener interest in the remarkable deaths of a few chosen souls pervaded Latin Christendom, and early Anglo-Saxon hagiographers, Bede included, spent an extraordinary amount of time relating the miraculous things that accompanied the deaths of the holy saints. Their hope was to find some tangible sign that the souls of these chosen few had not simply slipped away into the unknown, but had been decisively claimed by the powers of heaven. These signs would not be subtle or ambiguous, such as might easily be missed at an ordinary person’s deathbed. St Guthlac’s hagiographer, Felix (fl. 713–49), told of the heavenly fire that engulfed Guthlac as he raised his dying hands to heaven, the air thundering with the songs of angels so sublime that the saint’s awestruck companion fled the fens in terror.64 Scenes of this kind were inspired in large part by the writings of Gregory the Great, especially the Dialogi (‘Dialogues on the Miracles of the Italian Fathers’), in which Gregory returned time and again to matters of the deathbed and of the grave, showing his readers how miraculous signs witnessed at those locations could be taken as indicators of a dead person’s state in the afterlife. The extent to which Gregory’s attitude to posthumous signs shaped the outlook of all later Christian thinkers in the Latin West has been explored in detail by Peter Brown, who found it surprising, even paradoxical, to observe how early medieval Christians used stories of marvellous deaths to assert the inequality of death rather than some universal glory which would be bestowed on all believers.65 But even Gregory had hinted that this might be the case. All kinds of men and women, he said, ‘often [heard] the sound of heavenly singing’ as they slipped away from life, but such sounds were not to be taken as an indication that a crowd of supernatural undertakers stood nearby. The songs simply served as an anaesthetic, a sound from afar which could be heard only by the person on the brink of death, ‘so that while they listen to it, they might be preserved from feeling pain at the separation of soul and body’.66 The actual arrival of a heavenly psychopomp to 63 Cf. Bede, HE, V.14 (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 502–4). Bede had already described how Dryhthelm saw the irredeemably sinful dragged into the eternal hell: HE, V.12 (pp. 490–2). 64 Felix, VG, ch. 50 (ed. Colgrave, p. 158). 65 Peter Brown, ‘Gloriosus obitus: the end of the ancient other world’, in William E. Klingshirn and Mark Vessey (eds.), The Limits of Ancient Christianity: Essays on Late Antique Thought and Culture in Honor of R. A. Markus (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1999), 289–314. 66 Gregory, Dialogi, IV.15, ed. Adalbert de Vogüé, Grégoire le Grand. Dialogues, 3 vols. (Paris, 1978–80), iii. 58. The image of angels as ‘supernatural undertakers’, passively awaiting but not

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collect the souls of the blessed was an altogether more dramatic event. Gregory told the story of one Italian abbot, Stephen of Reiti, whose friends had had to flee from his bedchamber during his final hours, after angels suddenly appeared to receive his soul. Even those who were incapable of seeing the angels with their own eyes felt compelled to run from the room, shaking in terror like St Guthlac’s companion. As Gregory said, ‘the power that received this soul at death must have been mighty indeed, for no human being could endure its presence’.67 These stories reinforced, in their own way, the sense that the deaths of ordinary Anglo-Saxon Christians were not in fact moments when the spirits necessarily clustered around the body, struggling and inspecting and assessing. Stephen of Ripon was quick to say that the melodious sound of wings heard at St Wilfrid’s passing was, ‘without a doubt’, the sound of the angels arriving for his soul—and that this in turn ‘proved that our holy bishop stood in the presence of the Lord and among his saints’.68 An absence of signs meant, therefore, an absence of angels: if their presence could only be observed at a few exceptional deaths, then the quieter deaths of ordinary people suggested that their souls had simply slipped away unaided. This was a long way from the idea that every person’s death was the location of a violent struggle or meticulous inspection undertaken by supernatural beings to determine the post-mortem state of the soul. It meant that the moment in which soul and body parted company took on a curiously inconsequential quality in the Anglo-Saxon imagination. Nothing was really decided when a person reached the end of their earthly life. The tribunals witnessed by the monk of Wenlock or by Merhtheof lay some way off, and there were long roads and purging fires to negotiate before any soul arrived to hear its sentence being passed. The saints too experienced death as the merest transition from one mode of existence to another. True, there were signs and marvels which attended their final hour; but these were for the benefit of bystanders, who were being offered proof of God’s great love for these chosen souls. The saints themselves had received their own assurances hours, days, or even years in advance of that moment. Thus was it said that the angels sent to collect the saintly seventhcentury princess Eorcengota came early with news of their mission to ensure that the virginal princess would be prepared for their final arrival. Chad, bishop of Lichfield, received a similar summons a full week before his death, while St Wilfrid had been made privy to the timing of his last days four years

participating in human death, is gratefully borrowed from Peter Marshall, ‘Angels around the deathbed: variations on a theme in the English art of dying’, in Marshall and Walsham (eds.), Angels in the Early Modern World, 83–103, at 95. 67 Gregory, Dial., IV.20 (ed. de Vogüé, iii. 76); Hom. in euang., XXXV (ed. Étaix, pp. 327–8). 68 Stephen, VW, ch. 66 (ed. Colgrave, p. 142).

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before they arrived.69 As a result, the final meeting of angel and soul in the moment of bodily death came not as a triumphal act of personal affirmation, but with all the hallmarks of a promise being quietly kept. ‘I will lead you,’ one eighth-century poet imagined an angel telling the newly disembodied soul it had been sent to meet, ‘the ways will be gentle.’70 For the rest of humanity, with no signs that their souls were received immediately by the powers of heaven, a short but critical period seemed to open between life and afterlife. It was into this yawning gap that the living poured prayers and supplications on behalf of the dead. A petition in the Royal Prayerbook looked ahead to that crucial moment, and tried to ensure that any prayers offered just after death would be as effective as any angelic guide, making sure that ‘all the prayers sent for me in that hour might come to your open ears of mercy, my Lord Jesus Christ’.71 If the assistance of angels seemed only guaranteed for the deaths of the holy saints, then the necessity of prayer for the rest of humankind must have seemed ever more crucial.

THE S ILENT UNDERTAKERS The deacon Alcuin did not know precisely where his soul would go when he died, but this did not greatly trouble him. Like others raised at York in the latter half of the eighth century, he knew that there existed a beautiful and joyous place reserved for the cathedral community in the afterlife. He knew this because a young boy from the community had once visited it and returned to describe the place to the brethren. Alcuin remembered the boy, and had composed a poeticized version of his story to conclude his metrical history of York.72 He was reminded of it a second time when he wrote to the cathedral from his new home on the Continent, sometime around 795: And even if another place is assigned to my body, I still believe that my soul— whatever kind of place it is to have—will be granted peace with you, God willing, through your prayers. For I believe that the souls of our brotherhood will be brought together in a place of happiness, just as our boy Seneca’s vision testifies.73

Professing to be uncertain of one’s eventual place in the afterlife was perhaps little more than a show of humility, but clearly Alcuin took more comfort in 69 Bede, HE, III.8, IV.3 (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 238–40, 338–44); Stephen, VW, ch. 56 (ed. Colgrave, p. 122). 70 Guthlac A, ll. 6–8a (ed. Roberts, p. 83). 71 Royal Prayerbook, 34r (ed. Kuypers, p. 215). 72 Alcuin, VdP, ll. 1597–1648 (ed. Godman, pp. 128–32). For the boy and his vision, see Ch. 5, pp. 168–70 (‘The Burden of Proof ’). 73 Alcuin, Ep. XLII (ed. Dümmler, p. 86).

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considering the future reward than dwelling on the mechanics of how his soul might reach it. It was ultimately of little consequence when the resurrection would eventually ‘grant eternal blessedness to all the righteous in the kingdom of heaven’. Many of Alcuin’s contemporaries probably shared his optimism that, ‘whatever kind of place’ they might find themselves in, they would be safe if they had attended to their soul during life and if the proper rites were enacted as they died.74 But outright certainty about the things that awaited after death remained possible only for those saints and sinners to whom foreknowledge had been granted. That made it rather easier for AngloSaxon Christians to talk about the kind of death that would not come to them than the kind that would. This was a somewhat unsatisfactory position for preachers and homilists. If hagiographers tended to polish every fragment of heavenly grace so that it shone upon a single holy individual, homilists had an equally natural tendency to try to find some universal principle in even the most exceptional event. Their efforts sometimes led them into remarkable inconsistency. The tangle that one insular homilist got into when writing about Christ’s temptation in the wilderness is instructive. He was modelling his comments closely on those of Gregory the Great, who had dealt with the subject in one of his own sermons. Gregory had drawn attention to the angels who attended Christ after his temptation, and argued that their appearance clearly proved the divinity of Jesus, ‘because if he had not been the God who stands above all things, then angels could hardly have ministered to him’.75 The insular homilist repeated the same observation, but then added an additional note of his own which utterly undercut his original Gregorian argument, remarking: ‘In this way it is shown that angels look after all believers when they have defeated the devil.’76 He made no attempt to explain how these two statements could be squared, and it is clear that in this instance his search for relevance and universal applicability had taken precedence over consistency. Faced with an obvious need to talk to their congregations about death, and a shortage of material which dealt explicitly with the souls of ordinary people, Anglo-Saxon homilists did what they could. A number of them turned to the early Hiberno-Latin sermons about the ‘two hosts which come to every person’s death’, which we have already met briefly and which now deserve a

74 On optimism, see Paxton, Christianizing Death, 44; Helen Foxhall Forbes, ‘The development of notions of penance, purgatory and the afterlife in Anglo-Saxon England’, unpublished Ph.D thesis, University of Cambridge (2008), 125–31. 75 Gregory, Hom. in euang., XVI (ed. Étaix, pp. 112–13). 76 Blickling III (ed. Morris, pp. 33–5). Given the connections between the homily and Hiberno-Latin biblical commentaries, it is impossible to determine whether the remark is that of the Old English translator himself or his lost Irish source: cf. Charles D. Wright, ‘Blickling Homily III on the temptations in the desert’, Anglia 106 (1988), 130–7.

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closer examination.77 One group among these Hiberno-Latin texts shares a common exemplum, known as ‘The Three Utterances of the Soul’, since it is framed around an account of a good soul and a bad soul crying out as they leave the body, each making three exclamations about the hardship or delight which now faced them in the afterlife. These utterances were unsophisticated but evocative: the wicked soul shrank before the darkness, the roughness of the road, and the pain which came with it, while the good soul remarked upon the light, and the easiness and sweetness of its passage. Each soul’s utterances met with an appropriate answer from either a band of angels or a band of demons, whichever had won custody of the soul at the moment of death.78 We have already noted how the Irish exemplum’s understanding of death was strikingly at odds with mainstream opinion in eighth- and ninth-century England, but the overall story held an obvious attraction for any Anglo-Saxon preacher in search of a blunt instrument with which to convey a basic reminder that the manner of one’s life dictated the shape of things to come. The result was that among the corpus of Old English homilies, produced in England during the tenth and eleventh centuries, are several revised versions of Three Utterances sermons prepared for the instruction of Anglo-Saxon congregations. It would have been possible for the homilists who produced these revised sermons to have used the story like Bede used his collected tales of predestined saints and prematurely damned sinners. That seemed to be what the original author of the Three Utterances exemplum had in mind, since the most common Latin recension stated that as soon as the souls of the dead had been fought over, ‘the impious go into eternal fire, and the just into eternal life’.79 Despite initial appearances, then, the Three Utterances exemplum had little to say about ordinary souls after all, those who were still waiting to receive entry into heaven or hell after the Last Judgement. But the AngloSaxon redactors of the exemplum evidently sought to rectify the situation and tried to universalize the story’s message. One did so by relocating the whole story from the deathbed to Doomsday, where references to souls being sent into ‘eternal fire’ or ‘eternal life’ raised fewer problems.80 Others saw greater value in retaining the focus on the hour of bodily death, and sought instead only to make small adjustments to the souls’ destination: a second redaction 77

See pp. 129–30 in the present chapter (‘The Chosen Few’). ‘The Three Utterances of the Soul’, ed. Wright, ‘Three Utterances’, i. 113–37. 79 ‘The Three Utterances of the Soul’, ch. 8 (ed. Wright, p. 126), quoting a statement from Matt. 25.46 which originally applied to Judgement Day. An exceptionally useful discussion of the theology of this text and related writings is provided by Wright, ‘Next-to-last things’, esp. 334–45. 80 Be heofonwarum and be helwarum (ed. Teresi, p. 227). On the inconsistencies caused by the compiler’s treatment of his material, see Rudolph Willard, Two Apocrypha in Old English Homilies (Leipzig, 1935), 68–74; and Loredana Teresi, ‘Mnemonic transmission of Old English texts in the post-Conquest period’, in Mary Swan and Elaine M. Treharne (eds.), Rewriting Old English in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, 2000), 98–116, at 105–7 and 114–15. 78

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therefore indicated that it was to the interim paradise rather than the eternal heaven that angels brought good souls, and that the ordinary good were left in the place ‘where the souls of holy men rest until Doomsday’.81 In yet another version, an abbreviated Latin redaction of the original sermon and an Old English translation dependent on it, it was the scene of two hosts of spirits struggling for mastery over the soul which was done away with, as the redactor sought only to describe in turn the deathbed experiences of a ‘sinful man’ and a ‘holy man’.82 That decision might have allowed the redactor to turn this into the tale of a saint winning his eternal reward and a man with no hope of future salvation, if he had so wished; but Ananya Kabir has drawn attention to the careful way that this abbreviated homily also distinguishes paradise, to which the soul is immediately led, from the eternal heaven, which the angels proclaim is still to come.83 Whenever the exemplum was reworked, therefore, it was rewritten in such a way as to allow homilists to talk about things that awaited relatively ordinary, although undoubtedly meritorious, souls. Although a number of Anglo-Saxon homilists had clearly found problems with the theology of the Three Utterances exemplum, each had sought to rework its story rather than to relinquish it. As they did so, any sense that death came differently to the exceptional few than to the ordinary good dissolved. None of these homiletic redactors sought to complicate their message by trying to differentiate the truly saintly from other good souls. Nor did the late Anglo-Saxon homilist Ælfric of Eynsham, whose own exhortatory writings, produced around the turn of the first millennium, displayed the same universalizing tendencies. He too sought to turn material which talked only about the most exalted souls, those who gained immediate entry into heaven, to more general use. Writing about the assumption of the Virgin Mary, and sticking closely to the argument of a ninthcentury sermon by Paschasius Radbertus (d. c.865), for instance, Ælfric found that his source was leading him into a discussion of saintly deaths. Paschasius was doing so in order to draw out a contrast between the passing of the Virgin and the deaths of other Christian saints, asking his congregation to remember the stories about ‘the angels which came to the burials and tombs of whatever saint you like, and which carried the souls of the elect all the way to heaven with hymns’, and to imagine how the assumption of the mother of God must have outshone them all.84 Ælfric found a different way to plant the message in 81 Bazire-Cross IX (p. 123). On other changes made to the fate of the soul in this homily, see also Kabir, Paradise, 53–5. 82 The Latin text is edited by Mary F. Wack and Charles D. Wright, ‘A new Latin source for the Old English “Three Utterances” exemplum’, ASE 20 (1991), 187–202, at 189–90; they reproduce alongside it an emended version of the Old English version, Fadda I (pp. 19–23). 83 Kabir, Paradise, 51–3. 84 Paschasius Radbertus, De assumptione S. Mariae uirginis, ch. 49, ed. Albert Ripberger, CCCM 56C (Turnhout, 1985), 130.

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the minds of his hearers. He asked them to compare the assumption of the Virgin not to the death of another saint, but to their own departure from life. ‘We read everywhere in books’, he said, ‘that angels have very often come to the passing of good men (to goddra manna forðscipe), and with spiritual hymns led their souls to the heavens.’85 The death-scenes found in hagiographies were clearly what Ælfric had in mind, when he said that these things could be ‘read everywhere in books’, but the message had been universalized to include any ‘good man’ who might have been present in his audience that day. In a later piece for the season of Lent, he spoke again about the deaths of ‘good men’, distinguishing them from the holy saints yet intimating that they shared essentially the same post-mortem state until Doomsday: ‘What is the death of good men (godra manna deað) but a transition and a passage from death to everlasting life? The body turns to earth and awaits the resurrection, and feels nothing during that time. The pure soul also awaits the eternal resurrection, but it dwells in glory in that interval with the saints.’86 And in so doing, of course, these homilists had at last brought the angels down to the deathbeds of ordinary men and women, there to perform the duties which were once reserved for the holy saints. They still maintained that the saints were treated somewhat differently after their entry into the next world, for Christ himself had stated that ‘in my Father’s house there are many dwellings’, and his words had generally been taken to imply some sense of a meritocracy within the society of heaven.87 But this was no longer coupled with a conviction that death itself came differently to the exceptionally pious and the merely good. In a later sermon for the octave of Pentecost, Ælfric assured his congregation that all good men would be guided to their dissimilar places in the afterlife by exactly the same means. An angelic escort, he declared, would be provided for them all: ‘God sends his angels to the passing of good men (to goddra manna forðsciþe), to take their souls at their departure and lead them to rest, as we learn in books, and Christ offers them a dwelling according to their works.’88 The ‘books’ which Ælfric had in mind included the seventh-century Prognosticum futuri saeculi (‘Foreknowledge of the Age that is to Come’), the compilation of biblical and patristic wisdom made by Julian of Toledo (d. 690), which had done much to shape Ælfric’s eschatological thought. Ælfric had made notes on the Prognosticum earlier in his career, and he used them now as he pieced together this new sermon.89 As he 85

Ælfric, CH, I.30 (ed. Clemoes, p. 432). 87 Ælfric, CH, II.13 (ed. Godden, p. 132). John 14.2. 88 Ælfric, Supp., XI (ed. Pope, i. 424–5). Ælfric did not always hold to a consistent line about the meritocratic organization of the afterlife: see Kabir, Paradise, 38–43. 89 The series of excerpts from Julian’s Prognosticum made by Ælfric are among his earlier extant writings, and are edited as an appendix in Milton McC. Gatch, Preaching and Theology in Anglo-Saxon England: Ælfric and Wulfstan (Toronto, 1977), 134–46. For their influence on his later works, see Enid M. Raynes, ‘MS. Boulogne-sur-Mer 63 and Ælfric’, Medium Ævum 26 86

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reread his notes, Ælfric might have been surprised to see that Julian could only cite the biblical story of Lazarus as proof for his claim that angels attend ‘the separation of holy souls (sanctarum animarum) as they leave the body’.90 Ælfric himself knew of dozens more such stories, and had retold many of them in his own Lives of the Saints.91 One might have expected that Ælfric’s long study of hagiography would have encouraged him to differentiate sharply between the awesome spectacle of a saint’s demise and the quiet stillness of the ordinary person’s death. It did not. In his efforts to instruct his hearers about their own futures, Ælfric had succeeded instead in equating the two and in bringing the angels to the bedsides of every ‘good man’ in his congregation. The ways in which these Anglo-Saxon homilists, both Ælfric and the anonymous redactors of the Three Utterances exemplum, grappled with their source material to make it speak to the needs of ordinary people would count for little if their congregations failed to take their words to heart. We cannot now interrogate the beliefs of the Anglo-Saxon laity directly, nor know what they made of their preachers’ advice. Yet there are indications from other quarters that the Anglo-Saxons’ understanding of death was indeed changing during the tenth and eleventh centuries. We find it reflected, for instance, in the new wave of saints’ Lives produced in England at that time. The churchmen responsible for this explosion of hagiographic writing showed remarkably little interest in the sorts of deathbed wonders which had impressed their predecessors. The various Lives and lectiones written around the year 1000 in honour of Dunstan, archbishop of Canterbury (d. 988), stand as good examples of this new tone in late Anglo-Saxon hagiography. They spoke of no thunderous signs witnessed in the saint’s final hour, but described only the quiet dignity which he had displayed at the end of his life. Dunstan’s first hagiographer—an unknown cleric who signed himself only as ‘B.’—said that the saint had sent forth his spirit like ‘an old man, full of happy days’.92 An eternal state of bliss awaited him in the next world, of course, since God had decided that ‘he would take his reward in heaven, among the blessed hosts of angels’. That sentiment was taken up by another of Dunstan’s devotees, a monk at the monastery of St Peter’s in Ghent named Adelard (fl. 1006–11), who thought it likely that each of the citizens of heaven had welcomed Dunstan into heaven as one of their own, saying that the saint ‘had turned out to be an angel among angels, a patriarch among patriarchs, a prophet among prophets, an apostle among apostles, a martyr among martyrs (having

(1957), 65–73; and Milton McC. Gatch, ‘MS Boulogne-sur-Mer 63 and Ælfric’s First Series of Catholic Homilies’, JEGP 65 (1966), 482–90. 90 Julian, Prognosticum futuri saeculi, I.10, ed. J. N. Hillgarth, CCSL 115 (Turnhout, 1976), 24. 91 Ælfric, Lives of the Saints, XX, XXVI, XXVIII, XXXIV, and XXXVI, ed. Walter W. Skeat, Ælfric’s Lives of the Saints, 2 vols. (London, 1881–90), i. 440; ii. 142, 162, 372, and 408. 92 B., VD, ch. 38 (ed Winterbottom and Lapidge, pp. 106–8).

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suffered greatly for justice), a co-heir among confessors, and the purest virgin among holy virgins’.93 But if any of those holy orders had descended to earth to stand beside Dunstan’s deathbed, they had left no discernible sign of their presence. Adelard thought that the angels had probably been there all the same, since one of Dunstan’s clerics had previously experienced a vision of the saint turning away a group of angels a few days before his eventual death, asking them to postpone their services for two more days until Dunstan had completed his necessary duties for the Ascension Day celebrations.94 But when death did finally come, it remained a quiet and unremarkable affair. Devoid of signs or miracles, B. said that it had simply played out according to ‘the ageold laws of death (leges auitae mortis)’.95 Somehow, the old conviction that dying saints passed into fellowship with the angels no longer required proof. Hagiographers working in late AngloSaxon England merely asserted that this or that saint now enjoyed the posthumous company of heavenly beings, and saw no need to support that claim with evidence of miraculous signs witnessed at the deathbed. That freed some of them to indulge their imaginations to the fullest, as Byrhtferth of Ramsey did in honour of St Oda, in an exuberant piece of unsupported assertion which described how ‘the power of God made Oda’s soul ascend above the orbit of the Milky Way, above the solar and lunar spheres, enabled him to behold all the mysteries of the heavenly region and to see the joys of eternal bliss as well as to join in with the blessed throngs’.96 There was more to this than a single writer being unconcerned about the absence of evidence for his claims; for even when first-hand testimony was available, some hagiographers thought it unnecessary to appeal to it. A long tenth-century retelling of the Life of St Wilfrid, for instance, made no mention of the strange and beautiful sound of beating wings heard at the saint’s death and burial, despite the emphasis that the original Vita Wilfridi had placed upon the sound as evidence ‘that the choirs of angels had come with Michael to lead the holy bishop’s soul into paradise’.97 It was not that the rewriter, Fredegaud, doubted that angels had been present: he still maintained that the archangel Michael had been at hand ‘to take up the blessed man’s spirit with hymnody’.98 It was

93 Adelard, Lectiones in depositione S. Dunstani, XII, ed. Winterbottom and Lapidge, Early Lives of Dunstan, 144. 94 Adelard, Lectio X (ed. Winterbottom and Lapidge, pp. 136–8). 95 B., VD, ch. 38 (ed. Winterbottom and Lapidge, pp. 104–8). Adelard’s emphasis was little different: cf. Lectio XI (ed. Winterbottom and Lapidge, pp. 138–40). 96 Byrhtferth, VO, II.1 (ed. Lapidge, p. 32). 97 Stephen, VW, ch. 66 (ed. Colgrave, p. 142). 98 See Fredegaud, Breuiloquium, ll. 1293–308 and 1354–9 (ed. Campbell, pp. 57–8 and 60). On the identity of the author of the Breuiloquium and a speculative, but compelling, reconstruction of his career, see Michael Lapidge, ‘A Frankish scholar in tenth-century England: Frithegod of Canterbury/Fredegaud of Brioude’, ASE 17 (1988), 45–65.

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just that Fredegaud had deemed it unnecessary to prove his claim by recourse to the reports of others, as if the actual evidence of deathbed visitations carried little weight in the eyes of his readers. There are perhaps two ways of explaining why the attention of hagiographers had drifted from the deathbed in this way. The first might be to see it as a symptom of Continental influence on the religious culture of AngloSaxon England. Frankish hagiographers had once been as keenly interested in demonstrable signs of angels attending saintly deaths as were their counterparts in eighth-century England,99 but by the Carolingian period it had become common to find Frankish writers claiming that a saint ‘had been received by an angelic chorus into the company of the saints’ after their death, with not the slightest piece of evidence to support their claim.100 Since a number of the hagiographers at work in late Anglo-Saxon England (like the monk Fredegaud) were recent arrivals from the Continent, we might find it unremarkable that these overseas scholars wrote about deathbed miracles in ways which differed from earlier Anglo-Saxon writers in the age of Bede. Yet if this accounts for some relatively superficial changes in the style and presentation of miracles in Anglo-Saxon hagiography, it does not explain why even English hagiographers seem to have changed their mind about the underlying significance of angels attending the dead. We have already seen how eighth-century Anglo-Saxon hagiographers deemed the arrival of an angelic psychopomp to be an infallible sign of the sanctity of the individual whose soul was being received. Even if one knew nothing else about a person and their way of life, to know that their soul had been collected by angels after death was to know that God had looked upon them as one of his chosen saints. When Bede, for instance, read in the earliest eighth-century Vita Cuthberti that a young shepherd named Hadwald had been seen ‘being carried to heaven in the hands of angels and set amid the choirs of angels, saints, and martyrs’, Bede concluded at once that this obscure Hadwald must therefore have been a secret holy man himself. Retelling the story of Hadwald’s angelic death in his own versions of the Vita Cuthberti, Bede honoured the shepherd’s memory by identifying him as both ‘a saint’ and ‘a

99

Venantius Fortunatus, Vita S. Radegundis, II.22, ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH, SS rer. Merov. II (Hanover, 1888), 392; Vita Aldegundis, ch. 29 (ed. Levison, pp. 89–90). 100 Vita Ansberti, ch. 24, ed. Wilhelm Levison, MGH, SS rer. Merov. V (Hanover, 1910), 636. Cf. also Vita Lantberti abbatis Fontanellensis et episcopi Lugdunensis, ed. Levison, MGH, SS. rer. Merov. V, p. 609; Vita Condedi, ch. 10, ed. Levison, MGH, SS. rer. Merov. V, p. 651; Vita S. Vulframni, ch. 13, ed. Levison, MGH, SS rer. Merov. V, p. 672; Vita Sigiramni abbatis Longoretensis, ch. 33, ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH, SS rer. Merov. IV (Hanover, 1902), 625; Vita prosaica Landelini Crispiensis, ch. 8, ed. Wilhelm Levison, MGH, SS rer. Merov. VI (Hanover, 1913), p. 444; Vita secunda S. Arnulfi, ch. 23, ed. Peter Boscho, AASS, July IV (Antwerp, 1725), 444; Vita S. Chlodulphi, ch. 17, ed. Godfried Henschen, AASS, June II (Antwerp, 1698), 132.

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chosen soldier of God (praelectus miles)’.101 This was a logic which tenthcentury English hagiographers did not share. When St Dunstan saw angels collecting the soul of a dead boy from Glastonbury, his hagiographers took it as evidence of Dunstan’s sanctity (since the story showed his powers of spiritual sight) but not the boy’s. So unremarkable was the youth that his death was immediately forgotten by Ceolwig, prior of Glastonbury, until Dunstan reminded him the next day. Even then, neither the prior nor the hagiographer who reported these events saw fit even to make a note of the dead boy’s name.102 Seeing angels taking an interest in human death might once have commanded both awe and reverence for the person receiving their ministrations, but evidently no longer. Rather than attributing this new attitude to the influence of ideas and personnel from the Continent, we should instead see the hagiographers’ reinterpretation of angelic psychopomps as a necessary reaction to those growing numbers of homilists who, as we have seen, were now promising their congregations that ‘God sends his angels to the passing of good men, to take their souls at their departure and lead them to rest’.103 Their promises had been born out of the challenge of providing their flocks with concrete instruction about death, when only the passing of the very good and the very bad could really be known with any certainty. Rather than probe the more complicated grey area between these two extremes, an unclear middle ground about which some eighth- and ninth-century writings were noticeably anxious, homilists preferred to find ways of reducing the uncertainty. They did so either by deliberately recasting old material about ‘saints’ in the more expansive language of ‘good men’, or instead by making clear that when they spoke of ‘holy men (halgan menn)’, they meant only individuals who had performed small and achievable works of piety during their lives. According to one eleventh-century sermon, the defining characteristics of these halgan menn amounted to little more than a charitable and obedient disposition, a love for Christian teaching, and a willingness to give alms.104 And by playing down the difference between the exalted saints and the ordinary good in this way, the homilists had brought the angels away from the tombs of the holy dead and towards the deathbed of the average believer. They did not always agree about precisely what the angels might do there: perhaps angels fought with demons to gain custody over departing souls (a popular choice); or perhaps the decision rested with God, who measured the worth of a soul

101 Respectively VCA, IV.10 (ed. Colgrave, p. 126); Bede, VCP, ch. 34 (ed. Colgrave, pp. 260–4); and Bede, Vita metrica S. Cuthberti, l. 667, ed. Werner Jaager, Bedas metrische ‘Vita sancti Cuthberti’ (Leipzig, 1935), 109. 102 B., VD, chs. 20, 34–5 (ed. Winterbottom and Lapidge, pp. 64, 96–100); cf. Adelard, Lectio V (ed. Winterbottom and Lapidge, pp. 122–4). 103 104 Ælfric, Supp., XI (ed. Pope, i. 424–5). Napier XLVI (pp. 237–8).

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before arranging a suitable escort for its journey.105 Each homilist had his own opinion, conditioned by his sources and perhaps also by his optimism. But they shared a common intent to make their message apply to as many of their audience as possible. By simply refusing to talk about the difference between the exceptionally saintly and the averagely pious, every one of these varied and even incompatible sermons available to Anglo-Saxon preachers in tenth- and eleventh-century England drew the angels closer to the deaths of ordinary people. That necessarily reduced the utility of the deathbed for hagiographers, too, for if heavenly psychopomps were not now thought to be the exclusive privilege of the holiest men and women, then sightings of angels at the moment of death could no longer be used as an infallible marker of a person’s sanctity. The dwindling interest of Anglo-Saxon hagiographers in proving the presence of angels in a saint’s final hour stands, therefore, as an indication of the mutual influence that sermons and saints’ Lives exerted upon one another. The more that homilies drew upon hagiographic tropes, reworking them to make them applicable to the circumstances facing ordinary Christians, the more too did hagiographies need to adjust their criteria for sanctity to maintain the special reverence owed to the ‘very special dead’. Through this almost unnoticed process of redefinition, successive generations of AngloSaxon Christians had managed to rewrite the rules of the otherworld. This chapter has involved itself less with what the angels were believed to do, than with exactly when and for what reasons they were believed to do it. Behind it all lies a single biblical verse, which told how ‘it came to pass, that the beggar died and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom. And the rich man also died, and he was buried in hell.’ The shifting emphases of successive Anglo-Saxon writers essentially form an extended gloss on the fate of Lazarus and the meaning of his death. It was never particularly a question of the angels themselves, only the significance of their actions. But perhaps the pursuit after significance helped, in its own small way, to redefine the kind of world that the Anglo-Saxons believed they inhabited. The spirits who walked abroad in early Christian England could disguise their appearance, but not their presence. There was always some sign that showed their utterly different nature to the mundane sphere which they occasionally visited. Simply by manifesting themselves in the human world, they distorted its natural laws and sent a palpable ripple through this temporary, transitory place. The rarity with which such signs appeared at human deaths might have contributed to a sense of unease about what awaited the soul, but it also reinforced the notion that angelic intervention, if it could be attained through prayer, came with awesome power. But the efforts of tenth-century preachers to find some system in 105 Cf. Napier XLVI (pp. 235–6); Byrhtferth, Enchiridion, postscript (ed. Baker and Lapidge, p. 246); Ælfric, Supp., XI (ed. Pope, i. 424–5). See also Wright, ‘Next-to-last things’, 315–16, 335–40.

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death, to discern laws that governed the soul in its last moments, meant that they talked about angels simply as part of that system. There was little consensus about the details—maybe the angels would come to inspect the dying, perhaps they only came for the good—but the moral standards required before an angel might show an interest in one’s death had slipped. That which they had once done only for the saints, accompanied by heavenly fire and thunderous singing, was now being done silently and invisibly at less exalted deathbeds. But that silence now made angels more akin to the mundane natural forces of the world. They worked without discernible trace, and the world carried on without noticing. It was a small step towards a different kind of mental universe, in which the supernatural might not necessarily be less powerful, but was certainly more subtle in its workings. The cumulative impression offered by the last two chapters is not only that beliefs about angels did indeed undergo gradual transformation over the course of the early Middle Ages, therefore, but also that the powers ascribed to angels by Anglo-Saxon Christians had become increasingly circumscribed as a result of that transformation. Some might choose to see in this an affirmation of the notion of a ‘disenchantment of the world’—a concept coined by Weber to describe the slow diminution of old beliefs about the place of the supernatural and the sacral in the physical world.106 Certainly, we have witnessed a community of believers growing increasingly reluctant to ascribe any meaningful power to the invisible guardian spirits on which they had once placed so much emphasis; and we have also now charted the gradual disappearance of the numinous manifestations which were once thought to accompany the deaths of certain people. But Weber defined his notion of ‘disenchantment’ as the ‘great historic process in the development of religions’, whereby a belief in the irrational and the supernatural might come to be progressively ousted by the spread of rational thought. This has proved to be an alluring paradigm for historical scholarship, perhaps chiefly due to the comforting way that it equates the advance of reason with the approach of modernity.107 Yet if we can see that the Anglo-Saxons’ world was indeed, in some small respects, becoming less overtly ‘enchanted’ than it had once been, it is by no means clear that it was some new wave of scepticism which was stripping the angels of their old significance. Quite the contrary, in fact, for at the same time as the status of angels was diminishing, early medieval Christians were witnessing the rise of miracle-working saints and their cults,

106 Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus; trans. Talcott Parsons, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York, 1958), 105. 107 For a cogent critique of the influence of Weber’s ‘disenchantment’ on historians of religion, see Alexandra Walsham, ‘The Reformation and the “disenchantment of the world” reassessed’, Historical Journal 51 (2008), 497–528.

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as well as continued attempts to enlist the aid of the higher powers through prayer, benediction, and supplication. Nevertheless, if it can hardly be said that the early Middle Ages were hostile to the supernatural, ancient beliefs about angels did not always sit easily amongst these emerging ideas about saints’ cults and correct patterns of prayer. As the final part of this book seeks to show, it was perhaps chiefly through the writing of prayers and of saints’ Lives that the Anglo-Saxons’ came to rethink much of what they had always thought they knew about the place of angels in their world.

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Part III Losing Beliefs

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5 The Servants of the Saints Towards the end of his commentary on the book of Tobit, Bede found it necessary to discuss the significance of a dog. The dog in question belonged to the book’s main protagonist, Tobias, but it is fair to say that the animal had not played a critical role in the eventful journeys of its master, who had travelled for days with an archangel that was pretending to be a man, escaped being eaten by an enormous fish, saved a woman from a demon, and then married her. Of the dog, it was noted only that ‘Tobias went forward, and the dog followed him’; and that when he returned, ‘the dog, which had been with them on the way, ran ahead, and coming as if it had brought the news, showed its joy by its fawning and wagging its tail’.1 But Gregory the Great had stated that the barking of biblical dogs sometimes signified the words of preachers, and Bede was quick to extend the symbolism to encompass these other remarkable canine traits of running and tail-wagging.2 He assured his readers that looking for spiritual meaning in Tobias’ dog was not as inconsequential as it might at first seem, warning that ‘one must not scorn the figure of this dog, who is a traveller and companion of an angel’.3 To be granted an extended period in the presence of an angel was no small matter. It changed everything. In the fens of eighth-century England there lived a hermit who had met with an angel every morning and evening for over a decade.4 The hagiographer who recorded this for posterity made it clear that the hermit was no stranger to otherworldly visitors, benevolent or otherwise. Demons swarmed around him as soon as he had picked out his retreat, an ancient burial mound on the edge of the marshes, and he fought against them with the help of the disembodied spirit of a long-dead martyr.5 But even though it was the martyr, the apostle Bartholomew, who first helped the man to establish himself among the fens and actually saved him from being dragged into hell one night, it was that daily 1

Tob. 6.1, 9.9. Gregory, Hom. in euang., XL (ed. Étaix, p. 395); Mor. in Iob, XX.vi.15 (ed. Adriaen, p. 1014). 3 Bede, In Tobiam, XI.9, ed. David Hurst, CCSL 119B (Turnhout, 1983), 15; similarly VI.1 (p. 8). 4 Felix, VG, ch. 50 (ed. Colgrave, p. 156). 5 Felix, VG, chs. 25–36 (ed. Colgrave, pp. 88–116). 2

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closeness with an angel that truly marked the hermit out from others. Over a century after his death, when the hermit was considered a saint and his life briefly summarized in a calendrical martyrology, it was unnecessary to say anything more than that he had had a portentous birth, and so subsequently ‘deserved it that an angel of God spoke to him every evening and again in the early morning and told him heavenly mysteries’.6 This abbreviated summary was proof enough of an exceptional life. The hosts of early medieval Christians who prayed to saints and visited their shrines knew that miraculous intercession could occasionally be won by any of the faithful, and knew also that simply attracting the attention of the heavenly powers did not indicate that God numbered someone among his chosen few. A person who was found to be in more prolonged contact with celestial beings, on the other hand, who could look upon them as companions just as real and tangible as any human friend, was altogether different. Such a one belonged to the massed ranks of the holy whose lives would be told and retold by future generations, and whose intercession in heaven was sought long after their bodies had grown cold. At a time when a dog mentioned only in two lines of scripture merited an exegete’s attention because it had walked with an angel, the handful of men and women whom the angels were said to have treated as equals could hardly fail to provoke even greater wonder. The image of the early medieval saint surrounded on all sides by the powers of heaven and hell has become a familiar one, and the particular experiences of St Guthlac (d. 714), the fenland hermit met by the spirits at his marshy retreat, have often been used to illustrate it. Indeed, with his formative years spent at the head of a warband emulating ‘the deeds of the heroes of old’, and his later life withdrawn ‘into the shady groves of the wilderness’ in the manner of the desert monks of distant Egypt, Guthlac has always seemed a fitting encapsulation of how late antique ideas of Christian sanctity could be transplanted into a new social setting.7 Thanks especially to the work of Peter Brown, we are much better equipped to understand how those ideas had first risen to prominence in the Late Roman period, and how they had functioned at a time of religious change and diversity.8 The saints had taken root in a world which was already brimming with supernatural power, and they expressed a

6

Old English Martyrology, ch. 63, ed. Christine Rauer, The Old English Martyrology: Edition, Translation and Commentary (Cambridge, 2013), 80. 7 Felix, VG, chs. 16, 25 (ed. Colgrave, pp. 80, 88). 8 The fundamental works are: ‘The rise and function of the holy man in Late Antiquity’, Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971), 80–101; and The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago, 1981). Although these earlier works remain influential, it is important to read them now alongside Brown’s own reassessments of their central themes: see Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World (Cambridge, 1995), 59–70; ‘The rise and function of the holy man in Late Antiquity, 1971–1997’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 6 (1998), 353–76.

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new kind of relationship with the divine. In the ancient world, Christians and non-Christians alike believed that that the gulf which separated the celestial and the mundane spheres was regularly crossed by a numinous host of spiritual forces, and that it was sometimes possible to attain the assistance of those powerful but disconcertingly inhuman powers. The followers of the saints also believed that the gap between heaven and earth could be bridged, but that it was done so by the less alien figure of a dead human being. In its early expression, the relationship of the living with these new human intercessors was reminiscent of the way in which previous Christians had thought about the care of guardian angels assigned to their souls in constant protection and companionship. That should not surprise us; but in Peter Brown’s estimation, the arrival of the saints eroded the once closely felt bond between the individual and their personal angel, replacing it with a more recognizable kind of friendship between two people, one of whom simply happened to be dead. While the angels remained occasionally invested in human affairs after the Late Roman period, they could no longer truly be the close companions and intimate partners of mankind—not when a new generation had found its ‘need for intimacy with a protector with whom one could identify as a fellow human being’.9 In time, the cult of saints would of course become a major feature on the mental landscape of medieval Christianity, and ecclesiastics undoubtedly contributed to that when they asked churchgoers to reflect upon the fellowship which they had with these long-dead holy men, ‘whom we resolve to have, however undeservedly, as our comrades and patrons in this life’.10 Acknowledging the appeal of the cult of the saints should not, however, lead us to assume that it utterly swept away older ideas at the moment of its arrival. As Guthlac’s experiences in the marshes of eighth-century England demonstrate, the advance of the saints did not necessitate the simultaneous retreat of the angels. Guthlac had enjoyed both the personal protection of St Bartholomew and the visitations of an angel, and although his hagiographer lavished attention on Bartholomew’s occasional dramatic appearances, it was the nameless angel which remained Guthlac’s constant companion and support. Nor was Guthlac himself much of a companion to others after he died and joined Bartholomew in the choirs of the holy. The story told about the visit of Æthelbald, the future king of Mercia (r. 716–57), to the saint’s tomb is instructive in its emphasis.11 Æthelbald was devastated when he heard of Guthlac’s death, for the hermit had interceded for him in the past, offering advice and prophetic encouragement in the long days of political exile.12 9

Brown, Cult of the Saints, 50–68, esp. 61–2. Liber mozarabicus sacramentorum, ed. Marius Férotin, Le liber mozarabicus sacramentorum et les manuscrits mozarabes (Paris, 1912), col. 96 [no. 208]; on which, see also Peter Brown, ‘Enjoying the saints in late antiquity’, EME 9 (2000), 1–24, at 4–5 and 14–15. 11 Felix, VG, ch. 52 (ed. Colgrave, pp. 164–6). 12 Felix, VG, chs. 40 and 49 (ed. Colgrave, pp. 124 and 148–50). 10

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He went to the saint’s grave and wept: ‘Where shall I find help now, most excellent father? Who will give me counsel? Who will console me if you leave me?’ When Guthlac’s soul appeared to him one last time, Æthelbald might have thought for a moment that he had been mistaken—that he was being shown how their old conversations need not cease simply because death had come between them. But although the grave was evidently no impediment to the saint, this was to be their last meeting. Guthlac had come to direct his old acquaintance towards a more obvious source of guidance and comfort, which Æthelbald in his despair seemed to have overlooked: ‘Fear not, be strong, for God is your helper.’ The saint delivered final prophecies about the course of Æthelbald’s life, as if to ensure that the man would have everything he needed to live the rest of his life without Guthlac’s personal guidance, and then departed. He may have come before Æthelbald ‘clothed in angelic splendour’, but Guthlac did not now offer the kind of relationship which he himself had enjoyed with the angel that came to him unbidden every morning and evening. Among the various different ways in which the powers of heaven might occasionally intervene in earthly affairs, that relationship still stood apart in the minds of early eighth-century writers. The rise of the saints had never, therefore, been contingent upon an immediate decline of the angels, as if heavenly power could only have for itself one kind of champion. The idea of sainthood in early Anglo-Saxon England was in fact dependent, to a large extent, on the continued workings of the angelic. And yet it is nevertheless true that ‘the story of angels in the medieval west’ is, as Henry Mayr-Harting has observed, the story of their ‘diminishing importance . . . as social agents’.13 Over the course of the early Middle Ages men and women spoke ever more rarely about interventions made by angels into the affairs of human beings. We have already seen two ways in which this was so: in the growing reluctance of Anglo-Saxon Christians to ascribe any meaningful power to their guardian angels, and in the gradual disappearance of angelic signs from the deathbeds of the great and the good. In hagiography too, it simply became less common to find stories of individuals like Guthlac whose lives were continuously steered by the private counsel of angels; and even those who did still report new apparitions found that the content of such celestial conversations became increasingly inconsequential. The saints, on the other hand, seem only to have gone from strength to strength over this same period, as any tenth-century visitor to St Swithun’s shrine at Winchester could attest after seeing ‘the many fetters, manacles, crutches and walking-sticks which bear witness to illustrious miracles’ and which were kept as a permanent reminder of the saint’s power.14 Angels had sometimes played their part in a few of those miraculous healings, but they 13 14

Mayr-Harting, Perceptions of Angels, 13–14. Wulfstan of Winchester, Narratio, II.296–8 (ed. Lapidge, p. 506).

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now performed only the most minor of supporting roles. It was in honour of saints like Swithun that the faithful offered their thanks to God, praising him for ‘having sent to the English people their own archangel Raphael’.15 Not only had the Anglo-Saxon saints outgrown their earlier dependency on angels by the tenth century, they had even begun to supplant them in the minds of many. If this change in the relative status of saints and angels had taken place simultaneously with the first rise of saints’ cults in late antiquity, then we might justifiably ascribe it to the way that a human intercessor could give a ‘recognizable face’ to God’s power on earth, in the way that an inhuman angel could not.16 Knowing instead that this shift occurred only gradually, over the course of several centuries, requires us to look for alternative explanations. This chapter argues that, in Anglo-Saxon England at least, the changing status of saints and angels is best understood not in terms of functional replacement, as one type of intercessor gradually accrued the characteristics and duties of the other, but rather as a symptom of developments within the genre of hagiography itself. Those developments centred around one crucial concern: how to prove sanctity? This was a question which hagiographers were compelled to answer, however tacitly. As we shall see, angels were for a while a useful form of hagiographic proof, but simultaneously shot through with ambiguity and difficulty in a way that other kinds of miraculous emanations were not. The way that successive generations of hagiographers handled this question of miraculous proof seems ultimately to have been responsible for the gradual sidelining of angels in the uitae of Anglo-Saxon saints. In the hands of tenth- and eleventh-century writers, much of what had previously distinguished the angelic from other kinds of supernatural power inevitably became hard to discern, so that by the end of the period it was no longer possible for Anglo-Saxon Christians to say with confidence what was distinctive about the spirits which had once so fascinated their ancestors.

THE P RIVATE CO NVERSA TIONS OF AN GELS AND HOLY MEN When St Guthlac’s clerical servant, Beccel, finally plucked up the courage to ask his master why he had often heard him deep in conversation when he appeared to be alone, his curiosity was satisfied when the saint told him he had 15 Lantfred, Translatio, ch. 3 (ed. Lapidge, p. 286). A tenth-century priest was said to have expressed analogous views about another Anglo-Saxon saint, when he boasted that he had experienced a vision in which ‘there came to me not Gabriel the high archangel, but the glorious St Oda’: Byrhtferth, VO, I.7 (ed. Lapidge, pp. 28–30). 16 Brown, Cult of the Saints, 66.

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been talking to an angel. Although many of his contemporaries were in the habit of crossing kingdoms to speak with visionaries, or making copies of the latter-day ‘letters from Christ’ which occasionally dropped from the heavens, Beccel did not press Guthlac for some new piece of celestial wisdom. Nor did Guthlac’s hagiographer Felix, upon whom we depend for our knowledge of the saint, seek to speculate and connect the saint’s admission with the various predictions and forewarnings he had made during his life. Such apparent incuriosity was not unusual in saint’s Lives. Although hagiographers took careful note of stories in which angels appeared with direct and pointed messages, they were much less inclined to scrutinize the sort of casual angelic conversations which Guthlac enjoyed. It was said of St Cuthbert (d. 687), for instance, that he met with angels both as a young man, when one appeared to offer him medical assistance during a period of debility, and in his maturity, when they began to call upon him with greater frequency. We might find it odd to note that it was the former which really impressed Bede, when he came to write a Life of the saint c.720, even though the young Cuthbert had passed only a few minutes with his angelic visitor on that occasion. Bede sought nevertheless to probe every detail of the event, asking why it was that this angel had appeared to Cuthbert on horseback, and repeating every detail of the rather mundane recipe which the spirit prescribed for the boy’s swollen knee.17 Of the saint’s more intimate meetings with angels in later life, Bede said hardly a word. Many years of heavenly conversations were simply condensed into a passing notice that Cuthbert ‘often deserved to see and talk to angels’, after being tested by one of them at Ripon.18 In truth, there was only so much that either Felix or Bede could say about these conversations with the angels, for the saints themselves had refused to speak openly about them. Guthlac had paraphrased St Paul when he said that the things that his angel had shown him were expressly forbidden to others: ‘every morning and evening the Lord has sent an angel to talk with me for my consolation, who showed me mysteries which it is not lawful for man to utter, who relieved the hardness of my toil with heavenly oracles, and who revealed to me things which were absent as though they were present.’19 This modern era needed no Old Testament prophets to act as God’s mouthpieces on earth. When the angels came with messages for the holy few, they spoke of personal, and private, matters. Even if the angels’ words had a very obvious relevance for others, they were revealed only under duress. A story told by Bede about one

17 Bede, VCP, ch. 2 (ed. Colgrave, pp. 158–60); cf. VCA, I.4 (ed. Colgrave, pp. 66–8). Valerie I. J. Flint notes the ‘medical orthodoxy’ of other surprisingly practical, rather than miraculous, angelic healings in early medieval saints’ Lives more generally: The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Oxford, 1991), 163. 18 Bede, VCP, ch. 7 (ed. Colgrave, p. 178). 19 Felix, VG, ch. 50 (ed. Colgrave, p. 156). Cf. 2 Cor. 12.4.

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especially pious and penitent monk who received an unexpected visitor is instructive in its emphasis. The monk was named Adomnán, and he was an inmate of the monastery of Coldingham in Northumbria. One evening, during a nocturnal vigil, an unidentified figure appeared to him in a vision and announced that fire would soon consume the monastery, in order to punish the rest of the community for its persistent sinfulness.20 This was news which Adomnán’s fellows might presumably have wished to know; but Adomnán’s first reaction was to keep it to himself. His foreknowledge eventually proved too much, for the sight of the doomed monastery now moved him to tears, which alerted others that something was wrong. The news came at last to the attention of Adomnán’s abbess, who marvelled that he should ever have tried to keep such a dire prophecy to himself. Adomnán excused himself by saying that he had been trying to show respect for her; but in truth, his angel had never really come to offer a warning to the community at large, only to commend Adomnán for his own conduct: ‘You do well’, the angel said to him, ‘to choose to spend the night hours of rest in vigil and prayer instead of indulging in sleep.’ Inevitably, the monastery at Coldingham was indeed reduced to ruin, and when Bede heard about its fate, he at once recognized that the story had the potential ‘to warn the reader about the workings of the Lord and how terrible he is in his dealings with the children of men’. But it remained no less the story of a virtuous penitent, whose encounter with an angel served as a demonstration of his personal holiness. As modern readers of the tale, we have tended to be more interested in the litany of sins which Bede attributed to Coldingham’s inmates than in the visionary individual to whom these sins were divulged.21 For Bede himself, however, these two aspects held an equivalent value. He split his story of Coldingham into two halves of equal length, the first devoted entirely to the practices of virtuous renunciation which had made Adomnán worthy of holding an angelic conversation. Adomnán’s reluctance to disclose the content of that private and edifying exchange was thus understandable, perhaps even expected. When Bede wrote elsewhere about the Irish saint Fursa and his encounters with angels, he informed his readers that Fursa would only speak about them to those who came to him in a spirit of true penitence. The Merovingian author of the original Vita Fursei, upon which Bede was here drawing, had claimed no such thing: he had suggested instead that the saint had been eager to talk about his

20

Bede, HE, IV.25 (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 420–6). Since Coldingham was a double monastery, the episode has sometimes been read as evidence of Bede’s distaste for mixed monastic communities: see Stephanie Hollis, Anglo-Saxon Women and the Church: Sharing a Common Fate (Woodbridge, 1992), esp. 101–3. However, as David Rollason rightly notes, ‘although Bede criticises the loose morals of [Coldingham’s] inmates, there is no suggestion that these derived from its double character’: Northumbria, 500–1100: Creation and Destruction of a Kingdom (Cambridge, 2003), 135. 21

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otherworldly visions to all comers.22 Evidently a more guarded attitude was the proper response in eighth-century Anglo-Saxon eyes. Even when necessity dictated that the saints retell their conversations with angels, they kept their words to a minimum. When angels came to speak with St Chad (d. 672) at Lichfield, an event related by Bede on the basis of stories told by the brothers of Lastingham, a monk named Owine was at work and heard the sound of singing descend upon the oratory in which Chad was praying alone. He heard it again half an hour later, returning the way it had come, and could not hide his curiosity from the bishop. Chad told him: If you heard a voice singing and realized that a heavenly company had come, I order you in the name of the Lord not to tell anyone before my death. For truly, they were the spirits of angels come to call me to the heavenly rewards which I have always loved and desired; and they promised to return in seven days and to take me away with them.23

Chad’s explanation stripped the encounter to its barest essentials. But the angels had been with him in the chapel for a full thirty minutes. As Joseph Nagy has observed of similar scenes in Irish hagiography, the dialogue of the saints with their otherworldly visitors ‘is never conveyed or captured in its totality [but is] only a fragment of what was or could have been said’.24 Even those tiny pieces of angelic wisdom were frequently accompanied by an order of secrecy, so that no one else should know until after the saint’s death. Similar injunctions were made for all kinds of miracles, and hagiographers explained that the saints were following the example of Christ, who had demanded the same of those who witnessed his Transfiguration.25 Applied to those celestial conversations which the saints would only mention when pressed, and even then with guarded words, no reader of the early Anglo-Saxon saints’ Lives could fail to understand that although the angels still fulfilled their ancient duty as God’s messengers to humanity, their messages were not meant for general consumption. To some extent these were old ideas. It had always been a commonplace that, since those closest to God were doubtless more perceptive than ordinary souls, the saints had an affinity with the angels that moved through a world otherwise blind to their presence. Contained in the ‘Sayings of the Desert Fathers’, for example, was a story of a group of holy men who had gathered together in conversation. One of them ‘had the gift of vision’, and he alone was therefore able to watch as angels waved branches in their honour for as long as 22 Bede, HE, III.19 (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 274). Vita Fursei, chs. 17–18 (=‘Le visioni’, ed. Ciccarese, pp. 302–3 [ch. 17]; plus ‘Vita sancti Fursei’, ed. Krusch, p. 436 [ch. 4 (=18)]). 23 Bede, HE, IV.3 (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 340–2). 24 Joseph Falaky Nagy, Conversing with Angels and Ancients: Literary Myths of Medieval Ireland (Dublin, 1997), 3. 25 See esp. Bede, VCP, ch. 10 (ed. Colgrave, p. 190), directly quoting Matt. 17.9.

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their talk pertained to matters of the soul.26 In sixth-century Wales, St Samson had similarly been the only one able to see the angelic hands that joined his as he celebrated Mass, while an entire congregation looked on unawares.27 Yet while the first Anglo-Saxon saints sometimes experienced visions in the sight of others, looking with spiritual eyes upon things happening many miles away, the angels which brought them quiet words of comfort chose more secluded places to make their presence known. Sulpicius Severus (d. c.425) had thought it a truism that ‘the one who is often visited by men cannot often be visited by angels’, and eighth-century English hagiographers agreed.28 Felix certainly thought that these words encapsulated St Guthlac’s experience, and imagined his saint quoting them to a visiting Bishop Wilfrid.29 This did not mean that angels restricted their attentions to hermits; but the aristocratic monasteries of Anglo-Saxon England, which have struck historians as little more than a ‘special kind of nobleman’s club’, could be crowded places, and the spirits tended to wait until the saints were alone.30 They visited Cuthbert at the monastery of Ripon while he was at work in the guesthouse, on a winter morning when it lay empty.31 At Lichfield, they waited until Bishop Chad’s entourage were engaged elsewhere before they descended upon the bishop in his own private oratory.32 Moments of solitude were perhaps harder for Bishop Wilfrid to find during his time at the head of a ‘kingdom of churches’, and so it was only after he had been imprisoned by royal command, ‘in some secret place where the sun rarely shines’, that he too received visitors of his own. Angels were of course accustomed to such inhospitable places, and were known to have broken more than a few saints and apostles out of wrongful captivity; but in Wilfrid’s case it probably was the quiet of the makeshift prison which had attracted his angel, since it executed no miraculous prison-break and simply sought to ease his hardship and terrify his captors.33

26

Apophthegmata patrum, ch. 228, trans. Benedicta Ward, The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers: Systematic Sayings from the Anonymous Series of the ‘Apophthegmata patrum’ (Oxford, 1975), 62. 27 Vita prima S. Samsonis, I.44, ed. Pierre Flobert, La Vie ancienne de saint Samson de Dol (Paris, 1996), 210. For the context of this episode, see Richard Sowerby, ‘The Lives of St Samson: rewriting the ambitions of an early medieval cult’, Francia 38 (2011), 1–31, at 26–30. 28 Sulpicius Severus, Dialogi, I.17, ed. Jacques Fontaine, Sulpice Sévère. Gallus: Dialogues sur les ‘vertus’ de saint Martin (Paris, 2006), 170. 29 Felix, VG, ch. 39 (ed. Colgrave, p. 122). 30 The phrase is James Campbell’s: ‘Elements in the background to the Life of St Cuthbert and his early cult’, in Gerald Bonner, D. W. Rollason, and Clare Stancliffe (eds.), St Cuthbert, his Cult and his Community to AD 1200 (Woodbridge, 1989), 3–19, at 12. 31 VCA, II.2 and Bede, VCP, ch. 7 (ed. Colgrave, pp. 76–8, 174–8). 32 Bede, HE, IV.3 (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 338–40). 33 Stephen, VW, ch. 36 (ed. Colgrave, pp. 72–4); for Wilfrid’s regnum ecclesiarum, cf. VW, ch. 21 (p. 42). Stephen himself suggests a parallel between Wilfrid and the imprisoned St Peter (Acts 12.7), but other stories of saints visited by angels in prison had become somewhat traditional during late antiquity. They remained well known in Stephen’s day: see e.g. the entries in Bede’s Martyrologium for SS Benignus of Dijon, Apollinaris, Mark the Evangelist, and Felix of

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This consistent emphasis on the physical isolation of the meetings of the saints was more than a narrative backdrop. It was a way for hagiographers to make a lot out of a little. By locating these angelic conferences behind closed doors, while others slept or busied themselves elsewhere, they suggested the possibility that these things could have been going on, unreported, all the time. One or two stories could easily stand for an entire lifetime of heavenly conversations, about which none save the saint had ever known. Precisely by refusing to narrate those conversations in full, and turning their attention to the very circumstantial ways that they had ever come to anyone’s attention, hagiographers gave the impression that their stories were simply the tip of a larger iceberg. On the island-monastery of Iona in the late seventh century, Abbot Adomnán was clear that this was how the stories about his venerable predecessor, Columba (d. 597), ought to be interpreted. St Columba had been known to have watched angels carrying the souls of the dead, but on one occasion a monk saw him leaving the monastery to receive their ministrations for himself. Adomnán insisted that this could hardly have been the only time in which Columba had met with angels, and that this event was unusual only in that someone else had been on hand to witness it. His justification of that idea could have been made by almost any contemporary hagiographer in the early medieval West who claimed that a saint had been in the regular habit of speaking with angels: One should take note of this story, and carefully think about the number and nature of the sweet and angelic visitations which came to the blessed man, as he stayed awake on many winter nights and prayed in the most remote places while others rested. They were undoubtedly frequent, even though there was no way that they could come to people’s notice; for although some of them, whether by day or night, could somehow be found out by men, these were unquestionably very few in comparison with all the angelic visitations about which no-one could know anything.34

Adomnán’s words are those of a man trying to wring every last drop of divine grace from an inherited body of stories.35 They might strike us as simple bluster, like the conventional statements in hagiographers’ prefaces about the abundance of miracles which the author has neither the space nor the ability to relate. It is nevertheless worth noting how easily we still dance to their tune. We often tend to assume that early medieval saints’ Lives are more filled with angels than they really are, but hagiographers were in fact remarkably economical with their reports of angelic appearances. A handful of stories, Nola, printed by Henri Quentin, Les Martyrologes historiques du Moyen Âge. Étude sur la formation du martyrologe romain (2nd edn., Paris, 1908), 62, 63, 86, 107. 34 Adomnán, VC, III.16 (ed. Anderson and Anderson, p. 206). 35 For Adomnán’s handling of earlier material, see Mark Stansbury, ‘The composition of Adomnán’s Vita Columbae’, Peritia 17–18 (2003–4), 154–82.

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reported in a way that implied many more left untold, was all that was required to hint at a life lived in constant closeness with heavenly companions. The convenience of all this for hagiographers was hard to miss. The saints’ access to information withheld from others had the potential to provide a ready explanation for any erratic behaviour or questionable judgements which might have been displayed during their lifetimes. Writers of saints’ Lives across early medieval Europe busied themselves with showing the hidden causes of the saints’ otherwise puzzling decisions. Travelling through northeastern Francia in the company of a missionary bishop, St Columbanus’ hagiographer—Jonas of Bobbio (d. c.665)—felt the need to explain why the saint whose Life he was now writing had taken such a limited interest in missionary activity. The saint had, after all, lingered for a time on the shores of Lake Constance, and might easily have departed thence in search of the nearby pagan Slavs, rather than taking the less urgent road to Christian Italy as he eventually did. According to Jonas, the answer was not immediately obvious but nevertheless simple: it was because an angel had appeared just as Columbanus was about to take his vows, and had dissuaded him from his missionary course.36 Elsewhere in seventh-century Europe, stories of angelic visitations allowed the monks of Iona to claim that their first abbot, St Columba, had at different times supported different claimants to the throne of Dál Riata, first favouring Éogenán mac Gabráin, but then being directed by an angel to ordain Éogenán’s brother Áedán instead. Since the descendants of both brothers remained close at hand during the century after Columba’s death, one can hardly avoid the suspicion that the real facts of the matter were here being adjusted into a convenient new shape which would better fit the political mood of the time.37 Each of these stories would have fallen apart without the angel whose instructions had directed the saint’s actions: one was simply the tale of a wandering holy man who had neglected an opportunity to preach to the heathens, while the other represented a monastery’s attempts to curry favour with a powerful local kin-group which it was believed once to have snubbed. The hagiographers faced the difficult task of explaining how and why their saintly hero had acted in ways which now seemed inconvenient or inappropriate. Simply stating that this or that holy individual had been prone to sudden changes of heart was unlikely to convince anyone who mattered; but

36 Jonas, Vita S. Columbani, I.27, ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH, SS rer. Germ. XXXVII (Hanover, 1905), 216–17. On Jonas’ attempts to cast Columbanus in a missionary mould, despite the realities of his life, see Ian N. Wood, The Missionary Life: Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe, 400–1050 (Harlow, 2001), 31–9. 37 Adomnán, VC, III.5 (ed. Anderson and Anderson, pp. 188–90). For various attempts to explain the story’s origins and purpose, see: Anderson and Anderson, Adomnan’s Life of Columba, p. xviii; James E. Fraser, From Caledonia to Pictland: Scotland to 795 (Edinburgh, 2009), 142–4; Michael J. Enright, Prophecy and Kingship in Adomnán’s Life of Saint Columba (Dublin, 2013), 58–61.

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appealing to the belief that men like Columbanus and Columba really were granted privileged access to celestial instructions allowed hagiographers to argue that any such changes of heart had, in retrospect, possessed a hidden logic after all. One hagiographer who found himself in need of an angelic explanation for an otherwise unconvincing claim was a Northumbrian priest named Stephen, who had received a commission to write a saint’s Life of the recently deceased bishop of Hexham, Wilfrid (d. 710). In the years which had immediately preceded Wilfrid’s death, the question on the lips of Wilfrid’s many subabbots and associates was that of succession: how would the remains of his vast monastic empire be divided between his followers, and who would take Wilfrid’s place when he had gone? When a bout of near-fatal illness struck Wilfrid in 708, a flood of abbots and anchorites hurried to his bedside to beg God to let him live a little longer—‘or at least’, said Wilfrid’s uita a few years later, ‘to let him speak and dispose of his houses and divide his possessions, so as not to leave us like orphans without abbots’.38 It so happened that Wilfrid did recover on that occasion, but still he gave no public indication of his wishes. Within two years, he was dead.39 His body was brought back to the monastery of Ripon for burial, and with it came the news that Wilfrid had fortunately been able to name his successors just before he died. Chief among those were Tatberht, his kinsman, who was to become abbot of Ripon, and Acca, his priest, who was to become bishop of Hexham. The monks of Ripon were doubtless surprised to hear this, since at their last meeting with Wilfrid he himself had declared his intention to travel to Mercia to find ‘a man worthy of presiding over you’.40 And so, as soon as they had taken up their new positions, Tatberht and Acca commissioned Stephen, in his role as one of the priests at Ripon, to write a Life of the dead bishop, addressed to his followers and intended to explain how it was that Wilfrid had so fortuitously arranged his succession in the weeks before he died.41

38

Stephen, VW, ch. 62 (ed. Colgrave, p. 134). For the date, see Clare Stancliffe, ‘Dating Wilfrid’s death and Stephen’s Life’, in N. J. Higham (ed.), Wilfrid: Abbot, Bishop, Saint. Papers from the 1300th Anniversary Conferences (Donington, 2013), 17–26. 40 Stephen, VW, ch. 64 (ed. Colgrave, p. 138). 41 The Vita Wilfridi has not typically been read in this way. The full argument on which this reading depends is the subject of my forthcoming article, ‘The heirs of Bishop Wilfrid: succession and presumption in early Anglo-Saxon England’. Stephen nevertheless names his patrons explicitly (VW, preface), and the continued address to an audience of Wilfrid’s followers has been noted before by Walter Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550–800): Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede, and Paul the Deacon (Princeton, 1988), 282. Stephen’s primary audience may have been limited for the most part to Ripon, to judge from the greater place given to its affairs: cf. D. P. Kirby, ‘Bede, Eddius Stephanus and the Life of Wilfrid’, EHR 98 (1983), 101–14, at 110–11. 39

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Stephen’s explanation was that Wilfrid had once received a visitation from the archangel Michael, and that the archangel had divulged to Wilfrid the precise number of years which remained to him. It was this foreknowledge which had allowed Wilfrid to ‘completely and utterly set right all those things which had previously seemed to be lacking in the eyes of his men’ during his final days on earth.42 The vision had not been generally known before Wilfrid’s death, because it had happened as the bishop was returning from a journey to Rome with a few of his followers. Illness had struck him for the first time during that journey, and he had spent several days in bed at the town of Meaux in northern France. He recovered and enjoyed many more years of life, of course, but Stephen now revealed that the archangel Michael had come to Wilfrid during that time to announce that ‘several years have been added to your life through the prayers of the Virgin Mary’, and that Wilfrid should now ‘be prepared, for I will visit you again four years from now’.43 Wilfrid had spoken of the vision to no one but his priest, Acca; and Acca, for his part, had remained silent until the angel’s prophecy had been fulfilled.44 Now, however, the full truth could be made known, and Stephen’s Vita Wilfridi described the way in which Wilfrid had spent his final days in a flurry of secret meetings, preparing for the archangel’s return. He had embarked upon a final tour of his monasteries, calling aside a few chosen abbots ‘as if he was, by the spirit of prophecy, dividing inheritance among his heirs before his death’.45 He had made an oral will ‘in conversation to the priest Tatberht while they were out riding one day, as though he foresaw his death’. It was to Tatberht that he listed his plans for each of his monasteries, ‘including the monastery of Hexham, which he ordered to be given to the priest Acca’. And it was Tatberht whom he now named as the future abbot of Ripon to a select group of eight followers (including Tatberht) in a private meeting in the treasury at Ripon, on his last day at the monastery. In that meeting, unknown to the rest of the community, Wilfrid had divided his stores of gold and silver and explained that: ‘I am giving these orders so that when the archangel Michael visits me, he may find me prepared; for many signs of my death are crowding around.’46 Stephen of Ripon made angelic prophecy inextricable from the final events of Bishop Wilfrid’s life. It was, in fact, all that could stop his story from becoming deeply implausible—for he was asking his fellow-monks to believe that, although Wilfrid had always intended to divide his wealth and his titles between his followers, he had given no outward indication of his wishes even after at least two attacks of near-fatal illness, nor issued them on his deathbed, 42

Stephen, VW, ch. 63 (ed. Colgrave, p. 136). Stephen, VW, ch. 56 (ed. Colgrave, pp. 120–2). 44 Acca’s silence is unmentioned by Stephen, but implied by Bede’s claim that Wilfrid had sworn him to secrecy: HE, V.19 (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 526). 45 Stephen, VW, ch. 65 (ed. Colgrave, p. 140). 46 Stephen, VW, chs. 63 and 65 (ed. Colgrave, pp. 136–8 and 140). 43

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but had instead made all the necessary arrangements in a hastily arranged oral will, the contents of which only the beneficiaries of that will could attest. Even were it not that those same beneficiaries had commissioned Stephen’s Vita Wilfridi, we should feel confident in concluding that this whole story was a post euentum fiction designed to tidy up a less clear-cut reality. Knowing as we do that it was Tatberht and Acca who were responsible for the Life, however, enables us to see the story in its true light. It can hardly be coincidental that only Tatberht could attest to the will which granted Hexham to Acca, and that only Acca could attest to the angelic vision which had spurred Wilfrid to make that will. This was a deliberate and self-interested fiction woven by the men who had set themselves up as Wilfrid’s heirs. The usefulness of angels to hagiographers extended beyond the demonstration of holiness. Heavenly conversations could be made to play their part even in the underhand business of rigging ecclesiastical inheritance. The Vita Wilfridi is a special case. The angels who came to other early Anglo-Saxon saints did not always spring from the mind of someone looking for the deus ex machina which might give credibility to an otherwise dubious series of events. Unlike the archangel Michael’s appearance to Wilfrid, the messages they brought to other saints mostly remained unrepeated, and even a saint’s hagiographer did not claim to know them. Yet the way that Stephen of Ripon handled the convention of angelic conversation may nonetheless serve to underline what it was that set apart stories of angels from the countless other miracles with which early medieval uitae are replete. Other types of miracle-stories could be impressive, no doubt, but also tended to feel complete in themselves. There were portentous signs accompanying a saint’s birth which indicated future greatness, but which were ultimately of little consequence in comparison with whatever a saint did when they reached maturity. There were miraculous healings which showed the intervention of the saints at its most critical, but which nevertheless remained discrete incidents contingent on the particular circumstances that led the sick and the desperate to seek their intervention. In stories such as these the flame of divine power burned brightly, but intermittently. Evidence of conversations with angels, on the other hand, cast a saint’s life in the glow of a more constant light. It suggested that an individual had been accustomed to receive personal messages of comfort, consolation, and revelation. The degree to which these conversations had directed the whole course of a saint’s life could not be estimated fully, for they had taken place in moments of quiet solitude over many years. Although a few snatches of conversation had been overheard by the saint’s contemporaries, these strange encounters seemed all the more intimate and mysterious for being only partially revealed to others. These were qualities which, in combination, provided the most compelling indication of an individual’s claim to sanctity. Yet, inescapably, these same qualities of privacy, intimacy, and revelation were precisely those which gave hagiographers the ability to

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reach back and insert messages into the mouths of angels, reshaping a few elements of an otherwise problematic or inconvenient life into a form they found more suitable.

THE BURDEN OF P ROOF Although it was undoubtedly convenient for writers to claim that their saints were in the habit of speaking with angels when no one else was present, assertion alone was only persuasive to the most uncritical reader. It was certainly not sufficient if one intended to place anachronistic fictions into the mouths of God’s own messengers. As Henry Mayr-Harting has aptly said of this kind of story, it is wrong to think ‘that anyone at any time could easily produce an angel to suit his purpose, like a magician in a pantomime rubbing his magic lantern to bring up a genie through a trap door’.47 Medieval Christians accepted the reality of miracles, but seldom without evidence. And most miracles did indeed leave behind some kind of evidence: the abandoned crutches of men and women restored to health, or the springs of clear water called into existence through a saint’s prayers. The bodiless beings that appeared to the saints when they were alone seldom left such tangible things behind them. Outside England, they sometimes left footprints in solid rock, and a few places in Italy and Byzantium claimed that the archangel Michael had carved new caves and moved rivers to make room for cult sites where human beings might venerate him.48 In later centuries, religious communities occasionally claimed to have taken possession of items that the angels had abandoned on earth. These included candles used by the angels who attended Christ’s tomb, one of which had entered the relic collection at Exeter by the eleventh century; and before long, the abbey of Mont St-Michel could even boast that it possessed its angelic patron’s sword and shield.49 47

Mayr-Harting, Perceptions of Angels, 9–10. See variously: Liber de apparitione sancti Michaelis in monte Gargano, chs. 3 and 5, ed. Georg Waitz, MGH, SS rer. Lang. (Hanover, 1878), 541–3; ‘Homiliary of St-Père’, homily LV, ed. J. E. Cross, ‘An unpublished story of Michael the Archangel and its connections’, in Arthur Groos (ed.), Magister Regis: Studies in Honour of Robert Earle Kaske (New York, 1986), 23–35, at 34; Narratio de miraculo a Michaele archangelo Chonis patrato, ed. Max Bonnet, Analecta Bollandiana 8 (1889), 289–307. For these physical signs as ‘negative relics’ of Michael’s cult, see Peers, Subtle Bodies, 157–80. A rare example unconnected with the cult of Michael is mentioned by Muirchú, Vita S. Patricii, ch. 11, ed. A. B. E. Hood, St Patrick: His Writings and Muirchu’s Life (London, 1978), 66. 49 The documents inventorying the Exeter relic-collection, some but not all of which had been donated in the mid-tenth century by King Æthelstan, are edited with detailed discussion by Patrick W. Conner, Anglo-Saxon Exeter: A Tenth-Century Cultural History (Woodbridge, 1993), 171–209. For the relics possessed by Mont-St-Michel, see Baudri de Bourgueil, Relatio de scuto et 48

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But such things were rare even in the twelfth century, and the angels who talked to the earlier Anglo-Saxon saints with such secrecy came and went without a trace. The one that called on St Cuthbert did not even disturb the freshly fallen snow.50 Lacking any material evidence of angelic apparitions, it might be expected that Anglo-Saxon hagiographers had to try harder to establish the truth content of their stories. In fact, they simply appealed to the testimony of witnesses—specifically, witnesses who were ‘true and religious men’. This was standard practice when reporting any kind of miracle-story. Yet no matter how trustworthy these informants might have been, as witnesses to angelic manifestations they function rather imperfectly. An unvoiced question renders their testimony less clear-cut than it might seem to be: precisely what is it that they are testifying to? Cuthbert had told a few probatissimi uiri that he was in the habit of receiving angelic assistance, said the anonymous monk of Lindisfarne who first wrote a Life of the saint, but the fact of the matter was that these ‘exceptionally trustworthy men’ were only in a position to tell others what Cuthbert had told them.51 We have already seen how even witnesses who stood nearby when the saints received their visitors seldom understood what was happening until the saint explained it to them. The monk Owine heard a celestial song descend upon St Chad’s oratory, but had seen nothing himself and needed to ask the bishop to explain it for him; Beccel had heard Guthlac talking to someone for years, but had no idea as to whom until his master told him.52 While it was improper to question the saints’ own explanations (Bede was emphatic that ‘whatever such a person said must be true’), the testimony of eyewitnesses was only ever a partial proof of a saint’s encounter with angels.53 They were telling stories about things that they had not themselves seen. Whatever their reputation for truthfulness, their testimony still awaited interpretation before it could be understood as evidence of a saint’s conversations with angels. Once a saint had died, such interpretation could only be offered by hagiographers. Writing with the benefit of hindsight, hagiographers were in fact in a position to re-examine past events and to unearth new evidence of angelic contact which contemporaries themselves might have missed. Retrospective reinterpretation of this kind was a critical part of what Stephen of Ripon was attempting in his Vita Wilfridi. His text was completed within four years of Wilfrid’s death, and was addressed throughout to the old followers of ‘our gladio sancti Michaelis, ed. Pierre Bouet and Olivier Desbordes, Chroniques latines du Mont Saint-Michel (IXe–XIIe siècle) (Caen, 2009), 347–65. 50 VCA, II.2 and Bede, VCP, ch. 7 (ed. Colgrave, pp. 78 and 176). 51 VCA, I.4 (ed. Colgrave, p. 68). 52 See pp. 153–4 and 156 in the present chapter (‘The Private Conversations of Angels and Holy Men’). 53 Bede, HE, IV.3 (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 344).

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bishop’ (pontifex noster).54 He was therefore narrating recent history to a readership that had lived through it. From time to time, Stephen drew upon their memories as he recounted the events of Wilfrid’s life. Yet as he did, he was quietly asserting that personal recollections were often insufficient to make sense of what had really happened. His readers might recall, for instance, that the sound of birds in flight had been heard at the moment when Wilfrid died. This was well known, ‘and can be confirmed by a cloud of witnesses’, he said. Even so, many of those witnesses had not been in a position to recognize the sound for what it was, and Stephen now asked them to reinterpret their memories now that the full facts of Wilfrid’s life had come to light. Because it was now known that the archangel Michael had visited the bishop, foretelling his death and promising to return for his soul, the sound of flapping wings heard in the skies as Wilfrid died must have been the sound of the archangel’s return. Only those who were wise (sapientes) had recognized it at the time, and Stephen now sought to inform the rest of Wilfrid’s followers that it could be ‘known beyond any doubt that the choirs of angels had come with Michael to lead the holy bishop’s soul into paradise’.55 Stephen was providing further reason to believe that Wilfrid’s last days really had been overseen by the archangel, as the bishop’s successors claimed. Once a person had been identified as a saint who had been in the habit of speaking to angels, old memories could be reconsidered. Although the saints had been able to see angels with their own eyes, the experience of the rest of mankind generally hinged on the correct interpretation of this kind of secondary sign: the presence of strange sounds and smells, or unexpected lights. It did not always take long to interpret the signs. When a bright light and a beautiful fragrance filled the church in which St Ceolfrith’s body was interred, ‘it could be plainly understood that the ministers of eternal light and perpetual sweetness had been present’.56 But it was an interpretation nonetheless, not as self-evident as the things seen by the saints. Only in dreams could the ordinary person come close to the same experience; and even then, unusual dreams could be difficult to interpret with certainty. It was widely known that the things seen during sleep could be dangerous guides to reality. Sometimes they could indeed offer a brief glimpse of a world normally hidden from view, but it was equally possible that they were simply an illusion formed within one’s own mind. They might even be deceptions woven by cunning demons in an attempt to ensnare the gullible.57 The dreamer, in contrast to the 55 See Stancliffe, ‘Dating’. Stephen, VW, chs. 65–6 (ed. Colgrave, pp. 140–2). Vita S. Ceolfridi, ch. 40, ed. Grocock and Wood, Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow, p. 120. 57 The wealth of different ancient and medieval responses to this issue has provoked a lively field of enquiry, the most stimulating being: Steven F. Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1992), 17–122; Paul Edward Dutton, The Politics of Dreaming in the Carolingian Empire (Lincoln, Nebr., 1994), 27–38; Jesse Keskiaho, Dreams and Visions in the Early Middle Ages: The Reception and Use of Patristic Ideas, 400–900 (Cambridge, 2015), esp. 24–75. 54 56

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saint, could not take these things at face value without first seeking corroborating evidence. The dream which came to an Anglo-Saxon nun called Begu one night in the year 680 is a case in point.58 Asleep in the dormitory at Hackness one evening, Begu thought that she could hear the monastery’s bell ringing, as it did to summon the community to prayer or upon news of a death. Opening her eyes, it seemed to her that the dormitory roof had been rolled back, and she saw an immense light in which the soul of her abbess, Hild, was being carried to heaven by angels. Begu was neither the first nor the last to see a sight like this; and only a few years later it would be Hild’s successor, Abbess Ælfflæd, who would be told a very similar story by the visiting Bishop Cuthbert.59 But Cuthbert was a saint, and when he received visions of angels carrying souls, he was fully awake and instantly aware of what he had seen. Begu, on the other hand, had been a nun for thirty years, but her works, it seems, were not exceptional. Her immediate reaction was uncertainty. When she awoke and saw everyone else still asleep, the dormitory intact, and the bell no longer ringing, ‘she realized that what she had seen had been revealed to her either in a dream or in a mental vision (uel in somnio uel in uisione mentis)’. To decide which was more probable, she sought the advice of her superior, Frigyth, whom Hild had placed in charge of Hackness while she herself remained at the nearby monastery of Whitby. Frigyth was sufficiently convinced by the story to wake the others and mourn the passing of the abbess, but it was only when messengers from Whitby arrived announcing Hild’s death that Begu’s dream could be confirmed as a genuine vision. Doubtless this careful construction of Begu’s reaction was the work of Bede, who reported these events in order to attest to the sanctity of Abbess Hild. Certainly, the story presents an ideal relationship of deference to one’s monastic superiors as well as eulogizing a saintly soul. It nevertheless made clear that when different kinds of people realized that they were in the presence of angels, their experiences were not identical. Ordinary men and women, like Begu or the crowds who heard the sound of wings when St Wilfrid died, could be under no illusion that they had been granted some special privilege, ordained by God, to deliver them a personal message for the benefit of their own souls. Nor should they now think that a door onto another world had been opened to them, and that they might spend the rest of their lives receiving regular visitations from heavenly beings. They had simply chanced to be bystanders while God glorified another. Policing this distinction was an essential part of any hagiographer’s task. It was absolutely necessary to preserve a sense of difference between the wonder-worker through whom God shone his light, and the others whom God occasionally allowed to catch a 58

Bede, HE, IV.23 (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 412–14). VCA, IV.10 and Bede, VCP, ch. 34 (ed. Colgrave, pp. 126 and 260–4). On stories of this kind, see Ch. 4, pp. 132–4 (‘The Chosen Few’). 59

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glimpse. There were no hard-and-fast rules here; the experience of the ordinary person might vary according to the circumstances. Nevertheless, when the things which they had seen seemed too great for one of their station, the writers of saints’ Lives felt compelled to step in with explanations for their readers. Adomnán of Iona did so during a story about one of St Columba’s monks, who had followed the saint—against his command—and so seen ‘with his own bodily eyes’ the angels who came to talk to him. Adomnán repeated the man’s story, and then quickly offer his explanation for why such a disobedient monk had been allowed to witness such mighty things: ‘This cannot have happened, I think, without God’s permission, so that the name and honour of the saint could be spread even further because this vision had been made known, despite the saint’s own reluctance.’60 A similar sentiment was voiced by Stephen of Ripon, as he reported the last of his angelic happenings connected with the death of St Wilfrid. He described how a band of marauders had attacked the monastery of Oundle in which the bishop had died, and attempted to raze it to the ground. The thatch on the roof of the building in which Wilfrid had died resisted their torches, so one of the men pushed his way inside. In front of him stood a young man dressed in white holding a golden cross. The attacker ran out in terror, shouting to the rest that an angel protected the place, and Wilfrid’s room alone escaped the blaze. The building’s physical survival might have been evidence enough that something strange had happened there, but Stephen still felt compelled to add his own explanation of how a layman (and a sinful one at that) could ever have looked upon the face of an angel. Like Adomnán, he concluded that it had been done by God, ‘in order to make his saint known to people’.61 Saints were not, then, the only people whose paths sometimes crossed with heavenly spirits; but the testimonies of ordinary men and women who had occasionally found themselves in the presence of an angel were never reported without some kind of qualification or caveat from a hagiographer. Writers insisted that a clear contrast ought to be made between the ‘full and proper’ appearance of an angel to God’s chosen saints, and the experiences of other people, who saw things only ‘improperly and in part, by looking in from the outside or by prying’.62 These were Adomnán of Iona’s terms, but this was an argument that was maintained by the writers of other seventh- and eighthcentury saints’ Lives, whatever their nationality. In many ways, it was an argument that they were compelled to make if they were to uphold angelic visitations as evidence of pre-eminent holiness, while simultaneously using the reports of less exalted souls to prove that those encounters really had happened. Whenever these two kinds of encounters seemed to be in danger of 60 61 62

Adomnán, VC, III.16 (ed. Anderson and Anderson, p. 204). Stephen, VW, ch. 67 (ed. Colgrave, pp. 144–6). Adomnán, VC, III, preface (ed. Anderson and Anderson, p. 182).

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overlapping, the simplest explanation was that God had briefly made an exception in order to make some greater truth known. Although this was not a problematic notion in itself, proving a rule by appealing to anomalies was a risky business. It should probably not surprise us too greatly, therefore, to discover that it eventually became untenable. At the end of his poem about the church of York in which he had spent his formative years, Alcuin related a sequence of miraculous events centred around a young boy he had known in his childhood.63 He did so in order to close his work with a brief glance towards the future, for the boy had once been led out of his body and taken to a beautiful place inhabited by all the dead brethren from York, who were gathered there in joyful bliss. The story was particularly meaningful for Alcuin when he came to record it in verse, for his poem seems to have been written either just before or just after he left York to begin a new life at the court of Charlemagne in 781/2.64 Retelling the boy’s vision at this moment was thus a reassurance to himself and, he hoped, to his old friends at York that their separation would only be temporary. Yet although Alcuin had personal reasons for telling the story, it was more than a convenient way for the departing deacon to bid farewell to his friends. It evidently mattered to the rest of the cathedral community at York too, and indeed they must have known far more about the boy and his experiences than Alcuin chose to put into his poem. Alcuin’s verses did not, for instance, record the boy’s name; but from a passing reference in a later letter from Alcuin to York, which spoke briefly about ‘the vision of our boy Seneca’ (presumably either the boy’s assumed name, or a nickname), we can tell that this otherwise unknown youth had gained some kind of posthumous fame within York.65 Alcuin’s story is therefore a compressed retelling of the kind of local legend which only rarely found written form in this period: a report of events which were strikingly free of any political or moralizing agenda. Although Alcuin was chiefly interested in the evidence which ‘Seneca’ had provided that the York brethren would remain united after death, that otherworldly vision was in fact only one in a series of strange events which had taken place over several months. They had begun when the boy was visited by an angel during a solitary night-time vigil. The angel approached him with a mysterious book to read, and foretold that ‘something greater’ was drawing near. The angel’s words were confirmed when ‘Seneca’ was granted his vision during a bout of illness, some months later; but still this was not the end of the tale. The boy went on to foretell the death of one of the other brethren, and

63

Alcuin, VdP, ll. 1597–1648 (ed. Godman, pp. 128–32). For the date, see Godman, Bishops, Kings and Saints, pp. xlii–xlvii. 65 Alcuin, Ep. XLII (ed. Dümmler, p. 86), quoted in Ch. 4, p. 134 (‘The Silent Undertakers’). For Alcuin’s habit of nicknaming, see Mary Garrison, ‘The social world of Alcuin: nicknames at York and the Carolingian court’, in Houwen and MacDonald (eds.), Alcuin of York, 59–79. 64

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later that year, when he was struck once more by sickness, another member of the York community saw an angel descending again from heaven to visit ‘Seneca’, whose soul was then released from the body with a kiss and carried away, this time for good. Almost every detail in this story could be easily sourced from among the hagiographies and uisiones which circulated in eighth-century England. Only the angel’s kiss stands out from the usual topoi of visions and visitations; but even that probably represents no more than an evocative detail added by Alcuin to express a sense of fellowship and brotherhood between boy and angel, for that was the meaning that Alcuin attached to kisses when he used them in his own letters to fellow ecclesiastics.66 Yet although this story was clearly indebted to hagiographical motifs from saints’ Lives, ‘Seneca’ himself was no saint. Not even Alcuin—who was writing his poem about the recent history of his church in order both ‘to praise holy men and to create them’, as Simon Coates has rightly said67—claimed that the boy’s experiences showed that he had been marked out by sanctity. Perhaps promoting one so young as a saint seemed problematic; but youth was never an insurmountable barrier to cultic veneration, as growing numbers of medieval child saints increasingly made plain. This boy from York was never added to their number, despite the fact that he had received some mysterious revelation from an angelic visitor, a vision of otherworldly bliss, foreknowledge about the deaths of others, and the personal escort of an angel to finally take him from his body. The boy had managed to become the focus of so many supernatural favours without any great feat of piety or exceptional virtue. He remained, for Alcuin, a simple boy at heart (simplex animo).68 It was as if God’s messengers had lowered their standards over the course of the eighth century. Adomnán, the visionary monk of Coldingham, had had to spend his entire life in a state of extreme ascetic deprivation in order to merit a lesser sight; Guthlac endured a year of isolation perched on a burial-mound besieged by demons before any angel came to speak to him. A few decades later, the things that had previously been the hard-won privilege of the saints—a series of heavenly encounters offering personal revelation, culminating in a visibly angelic death—were now being offered to an ordinary boy in a Northumbrian cathedral school. Gone also was the old insistence of hagiographers that the spirits would only manifest themselves openly and unambiguously to the ones they had come to visit. Alcuin happily informed his readers that the

66 For a particularly effusive example, see Alcuin’s letter to Arno, archbishop of Salzburg: Ep. X (ed. Dümmler, pp. 35–6). See also Philippe Depreux, ‘Gestures and comportment at the Carolingian court: between practice and perception’, P&P 203 (2009), 57–79. 67 Simon Coates, ‘The bishop as benefactor and civic patron: Alcuin, York, and episcopal authority in Anglo-Saxon England’, Speculum 71 (1996), 529–58, at 529. 68 Alcuin, VdP, l. 1603 (ed. Godman, p. 130).

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angel’s final appearance to the dying boy was watched by another brother who was standing nearby. The stories which the brothers at York told among themselves, at the end of the eighth century, represent the start of something new. In the centuries that followed, it seemed that the old distinctions between the ‘full and proper’ visions of the saints, and the lesser sights seen only ‘improperly and in part’ by less exalted souls, had ceased to matter. The actual accounts of angelic visitations still closely resembled the older stories of earlier times. One unnamed monastery in Northumbria, the history of which was commemorated in verse by the early ninth-century scholar Æthelwulf, was, for instance, believed to have experienced a whole series of angelic visitors, some of which were seen openly by the monks, others only perceived through dreams or visions.69 But where earlier writers like Bede or Stephen would have explained that the dissimilar quality of these encounters was the product of the dissimilar merits of the human beings who had experienced them, Æthelwulf was content to treat them all as equivalent manifestations of supernatural power. He was even prepared to claim that he himself had personally witnessed two seemingly angelic events: once when he had waited up one night to watch the stars with a companion, and had seen a shining choir descend upon the monastery; and again when a radiant figure dressed in white had stepped into his dreams and conducted him to a mysterious church, in which the souls of the monastery’s pious brethren seemed to be reunited in death, in much the same state as the dead brothers of York who had earlier been seen by ‘Seneca’.70 No previous Anglo-Saxon writer had ever claimed to be in possession of first-hand evidence about an angelic manifestation (and indeed, no equivalent claims would ever be made again in Anglo-Saxon England). It is impossible to tell whether Æthelwulf ’s account, contained as it is within an elevated poetic text, represents anything more than a literary flourish to add the immediacy of supposed personal experiences to his verse history—perhaps inspired directly by the model of Alcuin’s poem, which he clearly knew well in other respects.71 But the fact that it was there at all is surely the clearest signal that the old ways of interpreting the meaning of angelic apparitions had now been abandoned. Even hagiographers, who still needed to extol the merits of one particular person by sharply differentiating their experiences from those of their fellows, were growing uninterested in trying to schematize different kinds of heavenly encounters as if they fitted neatly into a typology. By the tenth century, readers of hagiographies could learn that it was St Dunstan himself, rather than some 69 Æthelwulf, DA, ll. 234–66, 309–20, 518–24, 574–8, 656–795 (ed. Campbell, pp. 21–3, 27, 43, 47, 53–63). 70 Æthelwulf, DA, ll. 656–795 (ed. Campbell, pp. 53–63). 71 See Lapidge, ‘Aediluulf and the school of York’.

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prying monk, who stood outside the closed door of an oratory at St Augustine’s, Canterbury, peering uninvited through an opening to listen to the sound of heavenly music sung by unfamiliar voices.72 Although Dunstan was said to have sometimes perceived angels going about their business, the saint’s own meetings with his guardian angel took place only during the hours of sleep.73 Reports of nocturnal visions had once been a poor substitute for accounts of actual waking conversations with celestial spirits, but the new hagiographers working in tenth-century England were now content to treat them all as broadly equivalent events. The stories which were told about the marvels which accompanied the translation of St Swithun’s relics in 971 seem to flit in and out of consciousness with dizzying regularity. Several of them began with a sleeping man meeting a heavenly spirit in the middle of the night, being questioned closely by the visitor to determine that he was in fact awake, then receiving celestial instructions before ‘waking from the depths of slumber’ for what seemed like a second time.74 Ambiguities of this kind would once have risked undermining the credibility of the story, and hagiographers had previously worked hard to guard against their tales of nocturnal apparitions being dismissed as ‘just a dream’. These considerations seem no longer to have mattered. St Swithun’s miracle-collector, the Frankish monk Lantfred (fl. 974–84), was content just to call them ‘dreams’ (somnia) and leave it to his readers to work out what that meant with regard to these partly conscious, partly slumbering visionaries. Successive generations of hagiographer found it impossible—or irrelevant—to continue to try to distinguish clearly between the ways in which different kinds of people perceived the supernatural when it drew close. Such considerations had ceased, during the latter half of the eighth century, to be a convincing indicator of whether this or that person was more or less holy than another. Hagiographers duly turned their attention to other things which might better demonstrate the special sanctity of a particular holy person, and the angels found themselves being passed over in favour of more conclusive signs of divine grace. One would imagine that evidence of contact with the angels would always have remained among the clearest indication that a person had not lived a normal earthly existence. But it was the way that the early hagiographers had needed to prove that the secret conversations of saints and angels really were going on behind closed doors, by recourse to the testimonies of witnesses, which had brought about this strange reversal. The testimonies of ordinary bystanders were meant to bolster the idea that a particular person had been 72

B., VD, ch. 36 (ed. Winterbottom and Lapidge, p. 100). B., VD, chs. 29–30 (ed. Winterbottom and Lapidge, pp. 86–90). 74 Lantfred, Translatio, chs. 1–2 (ed. Lapidge, pp. 260, 266–8). Another miracle-story in the same collection is equally perplexing, since it involves a sick man being promised that a miraculous cure will be granted if he stays awake during a nocturnal vigil, yet eventually receiving his cure only after succumbing to sleep: Translatio, ch. 3 (pp. 280–2). 73

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marked out, as a special gift from God, by the ability to see and to talk with the angels. In fact, they had precisely the opposite effect. They seem to have impressed upon the minds of their readers only the sense that, if the circumstances were right, anyone at all might see an angel with their waking eyes. The hagiographer’s need to provide evidence for his miracle-stories brought the angels out of their invisible world and gave them a substance which could be occasionally perceived by humankind, saint and ordinary Christian alike. Religious communities like Alcuin’s York started telling their own stories about encounters with angels that had happened in their very midst. Those stories drew their ideas and imagery from the common stock of hagiographic motifs about angelic visitations and marvellous deaths, but no longer used them as the building-blocks of an argument about the pre-eminence of a chosen soul. The boy visited by angels, whose life was briefly told by Alcuin, never became immortalized by a reverential cult. He remained to the end ‘our boy Seneca’, and if his otherworldly vision had not struck a chord with Alcuin’s personal situation and his departure for the Continent, it would never have been preserved. Stories like this one did not spread far, and retained a purely local significance. Yet the fact that they existed at all ensured that the hagiographical tradition from which they derived had had its day. It is a telling sign that when, early in the eleventh century, Byrhtferth of Ramsey described the burial of St Ecgwine, he said that Ecgwine himself had chosen the spot where his body was to be laid, because that was where he wanted to stand on Doomsday, ‘to rise again when he, joyously accepting the triumph of his own resurrection, shall hear the sweet voice of the holy angels’.75 It did no discredit to Ecgwine’s memory to suggest that he had not heard their voices before and still awaited the day when he would hear them, for the angels had long before ceased to be an infallible marker of who was or was not to be considered a saint.

THE RHYTHM O F THE SAINTS When the angels first started bringing unexpected news to ordinary AngloSaxon Christians, they still brought mysteries and revelations, profound things which would otherwise have been forbidden for humankind to know. They spoke in cryptic words and departed with promises of ‘greater things’ to come.76 By the time that two of them descended upon a house in Winchester in the summer of 969, they were starting to content themselves with humbler mysteries, for on that occasion they came to show where the owner of the 75 76

Byrhtferth, Vita S. Ecgwini, IV.6, ed. Lapidge, Lives of Oswald and Ecgwine, p. 280. Alcuin, VdP, l. 1613 (ed. Godman, p. 130).

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house had misplaced his sword and the key to his strongbox.77 Lantfred, who first described their visitation, would doubtless have said that this observation missed the point: the house belonged to a moneyer who had taken in a crippled pilgrim, and the miraculous restitution of lost property was meant to spur the moneyer into finally keeping his long-delayed promise to take the pilgrim to the Old Minster for healing. Yet the wholly circumstantial nature of the errand entrusted to these angels offers the clearest sense of the changed status of heavenly messengers in the hagiography of Anglo-Saxon England. In place of a startlingly otherworldly emanation which the hagiographer could only capture in part, Lantfred offers an account so minutely precise that any sense of its unearthliness was soon buried under a mass of more mundane details: Glowing with the radiance of inexhaustible light, the beautiful youths [led Æthelsige, the crippled pilgrim] to the strongbox of his host, the moneyer, which was then opened with a key. They showed him the unharmed property [i.e. the sword] which the man had lost. Then, securing the chest with the latch and putting the aforementioned key under the sleeping moneyer’s pillow, they ordered the sick man to reveal to his lord that his scabbard had not been altogether taken from him by theft, but had been gathered among his treasures by heavenly means . . .

Reaching the end of the vision, Lantfred ran through the whole thing again. He reiterated every detail of pillow, key, strongbox, and sword as he described Æthelsige reporting them to the moneyer. Even then Lantfred ploughed on relentlessly, describing how the moneyer did indeed look under his pillow, find the key, open the chest, discover his sword, and see that it was unharmed—by which point, any brief sense of wonderment at the shining figures who brought the message had been utterly submerged beneath the repetitious listing of items lost and found. Lantfred recounted all this at a luxurious pace. His story was longer by far than any previous reports of angelic apparitions offered by English hagiographers. Even so, his eyes were only briefly drawn to the angels themselves. His attention remained fixed on the message they brought, but the messengers themselves could almost have been anyone.78 The same was true of the other hagiographers of late Anglo-Saxon England. They spoke of otherworldly visitors breaking into people’s dreams all over England, imparting urgent instructions to men and women from every section of society. Smiths and slave-girls, travellers and noblemen, all gained access to secret knowledge from heaven, but their experiences were all of a type, no matter whether they had

77

Lantfred, Translatio, ch. 2 (ed. Lapidge, pp. 268–70). Compare the story of the angels with Lantfred’s account of a visitation by St Swithun, which is cut from almost identical cloth: Lantfred, Translatio, ch. 1 (ed. Lapidge, pp. 260–2). 78

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encountered a saint, an angel, or the Holy Spirit itself. Whatever heavenly agent arrived, they delivered their message and promptly left; if they returned another night, it was to reiterate their instructions or to add to them rather than to strike up a lasting bond with the person they called upon. Even St Dunstan received no special attention in that respect, and when angels came to speak with him, their conversations lacked the familiarity which earlier Anglo-Saxon hagiographers had thought were the hallmark of private conversations between saints and angels. In time-honoured fashion, Dunstan met with a group of angels shortly before his death. They had come to reveal the hour at which his body and soul would part company, as they had done in previous centuries for earlier Anglo-Saxon saints like Chad. But although the meeting itself was a traditional one, something in the angels’ manner had changed. When Chad had received his summons, his visitors had lingered over their duty for half an hour.79 Now the crowd of cherubim and seraphim which brought similar news to Dunstan had no time for such a leisurely conversation: they arrived, they were promptly rebuffed when Dunstan pointed out the inconvenience of the moment (since he was expected to preside over the feast of the Ascension that day), and they duly rescheduled for the following Saturday. ‘With these words, the vision was gone.’80 Dunstan’s guardian angel was little better, entering into the saint’s dreams with the brisk manner of a choirmaster rather than the warmth of a friend: he drilled his pupil by making him recite antiphons until the visionary lesson concluded, so that Dunstan in turn could teach them to others.81 In short, much of what had previously distinguished angelic conversation from other types of heavenly apparition had dissipated. Although the new breed of hagiographers working in late tenth- and early eleventh-century England still spoke eagerly about recent manifestations of angels, these visitations had a more narrowly functional air about them. The effect of a visionary encounter was ultimately more important than knowing whether or not angels had been instrumental in it. Nothing signals that more clearly than watching Ælfric of Eynsham at work producing his own account of St Swithun’s miracles in the 990s. He was working chiefly from the stories of Lantfred’s Translatio et miracula Swithuni, but Ælfric’s repackaged version of the saint’s deeds was meant for inclusion in his own series of short Lives of the Saints, and this necessitated some careful summarizing before Lantfred’s elaborate storytelling could be brought down to size.82 Among the casualties of Ælfric’s 79 Bede, HE, IV.3 (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 340–2); see p. 156 in the present chapter (‘The Private Conversations of Angels and Holy Men’). 80 Adelard, Lectio X (ed. Winterbottom and Lapidge, pp. 136–8). 81 B., VD, ch. 29 (ed. Winterbottom and Lapidge, p. 86). 82 Ælfric, Life of St Swithun (ed. Lapidge, Cult, pp. 590–608). For varied assessments of Ælfric’s handling of his source material and his purposes in this piece, see Gretsch, Ælfric and the Cult of Saints, 172–94; Elaine Treharne, ‘Ælfric’s account of St Swithun: literature of reform

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editorial pen were the angels. They disappeared from Ælfric’s retelling of the story of Æthelsige, the crippled pilgrim who had been led to St Swithun’s tomb after two angels had revealed the location of his host’s lost property. The essence of their words remained, as Ælfric reported that Æthelsige went to the tomb ‘like he was told to (swa swa him gesæd wæs)’; but the facts of this angelic apparition evidently struck Ælfric as superfluous, for he said nothing more about them. A second miracle, involving another pair of angels bringing another sick man into the presence of St Swithun, was cut back less drastically, but still at the expense of any angelic interest which the story had once possessed. It had once been a tale of strange and dreamlike details: two shining beings had appeared suddenly to a sleeping man after years of paralysis, and made it possible for the man first to run and then to fly as they sped towards a church in a beautiful field, in which St Swithun awaited with words of healing. The identity of the man’s visitors was revealed by their radiant beauty and explicitly ‘angelic’ faces when Lantfred had first told the story, but Ælfric remained interested only in their activities and not in their nature. He retold the story in curiously opaque language, saying that the beings which visited the man were halgan. It was a word which might usually mean ‘saints’, in the human sense, but Ælfric nevertheless added that these beings could fly through the air.83 At least the word made clear the visitors’ heavenly origin, and that seems to have been sufficient for Ælfric. If he believed that anything really distinguished an angelic apparition from any other kind of celestial vision, his words gave no indication. It was as if the simple act of praising a figure like Swithun through a piece of hagiography gave sufficient demonstration of that figure’s claim to sanctity. Hagiographers no longer felt the need to explain every detail of the visions they reported, and gave no indication that potential ambiguities would threaten to undermine their particular saint’s memory. This marked a subtle but significant shift from the working habits of earlier hagiographers. For the earliest Anglo-Saxon writers of saints’ Lives, it had been absolutely necessary to iron out potential ambiguities before committing a miracle-story to the page. That was why Bede had felt it necessary to conclude his story about the encounter between the young St Cuthbert and an angel on horseback with a note of reassurance to the doubtful reader, remarking that, ‘if it should seem incredible to anyone that the angel appeared on horseback, he should read the history of the Maccabees, in which it is mentioned that angels on horses came and reward’, in Elizabeth M. Tyler and Ross Balzaretti (eds.), Narrative and History in the Early Medieval West (Turnhout, 2006), 167–88; Jones, ‘Ælfric and the limits’, 103. 83 It is difficult to determine whether Ælfric’s detail about the two figures being able to fly (LS XXI, ed. Lapidge, p. 602: ‘þa flugon hi geond þa lyft and feredon þone adligan’) is a deliberate addition or a simple misunderstanding of his source, for Lantfred had described only the nobleman flying mysteriously above his guides, who themselves remained on the ground (Translatio, ch. 35, ed. Lapidge, p. 326: ‘sursum in aera eleuatus super eos uolauit diuinitus’).

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to defend Judas Maccabeus and the temple’.84 During the tenth and eleventh centuries, by contrast, hagiographers were content for a measure of ambiguity to creep into all manner of visions. Wulfstan of Winchester described how a monk named Theodric had been chastised in his sleep by a mysterious ‘someone’ after trying to emulate St Æthelwold’s capacity for reading by candlelight, to see if his eyes were a match for the elderly bishop’s. The angered figure in his dreams bore an unfamiliar face (quidam uultu incognitus), and condemned his audacity with words of absolute authority—‘You cannot play with me by deceiving me, as you suppose’, he said, stabbing Theodric in the eyes when he tried to deny his actions—but there were no clues to his identity.85 Other people saw things that were just as perplexing: radiant old men, with the hair and robes of angels but with the aged bearing and priestly garb of human saints; or doves that seem at first glance to be straightforward manifestations of the Holy Spirit, yet soon delivered the news of death usually granted to angels.86 All these drew from old tropes and imagery, but the combination of details seemed now to defy absolute identification and point in several different directions. Tellingly, the writers who reported these stories were content to leave them open and undefined in a way that their predecessors had not. If the general tenor of a vision revealed its heavenly origin, that was enough. Now that hagiographers had ceased to think that an angelic visitation signified something profound about the person whom the spirits had favoured with their attention, it became harder for the idea of angelic conversation to conjure some distinctive quality in the minds of others. Whether through private reading or through the act of listening to a feast-day sermon, hagiographical stories fuelled the imagination of ordinary Anglo-Saxon Christians. We have seen that already in the cathedral community of York during the time of Alcuin, when stories from saints’ Lives about angelic visitations began to generate new stories in the minds of those who had read or heard about encounters between the holy saints and their ethereal companions. Tenth- and eleventh-century hagiography could hardly provoke an equivalent reaction in the minds of the faithful, not when there was now very little left to distinguish a meeting with an angel from an encounter of a dead saint, the Holy Spirit, or some more ambiguously manifested figure. Each was essentially an extra in the human dramas told by hagiographers and miracle-collectors, and that made it easy to give them the same lines to read and to dress them all in almost undifferentiated costumes. This sort of blurring together scarcely mattered for the saints and the Holy Spirit: these came sharply into focus on other 84

Bede, VCP, ch. 2 (ed. Colgrave, p. 160). Wulfstan of Winchester, VÆthel, ch. 35 (ed. Lapidge, pp. 52–4). 86 Wulfstan of Winchester, VÆthel, ch. 38 (ed. Lapidge, p. 56); B., VD, chs. 3, 11 (ed. Winterbottom and Lapidge, pp. 14, 36–8). 85

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occasions and in other sorts of texts. Every invocation of the Trinity imparted some knowledge about the Holy Spirit, and further exposition on the persons of the Trinity was a prime subject for homiletic writing. In the same way, every saint’s feast-day provided a platform for the concept of sanctity in general, regardless of whichever holy figure was being honoured in particular. But where else, beyond hagiography, did angels receive prolonged attention? The diminishing importance of angels in Anglo-Saxon saints’ Lives meant the diminishing importance of angels in the religious imagination more broadly. There were, nevertheless, one or two days every year on which an angel could still command the complete attention of the faithful. Although the bulk of the Christian calendar was given over to the commemoration of human saints, it was the habit of early medieval communities also to celebrate feasts in honour of the archangel Michael. Regardless of how many such feasts were offered during the year (early medieval calendars differed on that point), these occasions required preachers to talk more directly and at greater length about the nature and exploits of an angel than at any other time in the liturgical year. Here, it would seem, was the platform the angels required; and in later centuries, when the day was known as the feast of ‘St Michael and All Angels’, it became customary to think of this occasion as a time for venerating a whole class of heavenly beings, as much as one renowned figure from among their number.87 In the early Middle Ages, however, the day was named in honour of Michael alone, and although preachers often thought it appropriate to offer some general teaching about angels, they spoke primarily of Michael and of his miraculous deeds in ancient times. The result was that, just as a saint’s Life could mould beliefs about angels into new forms which better suited a hagiographer’s attempts to champion a single holy figure, so too could a sermon in honour of a famous archangel make it seem as if the deeds of the one eclipsed those of the many. If our examination of saints’ Lives has shown angels being gradually overshadowed by a different kind of heavenly intercessor, the veneration which early medieval Christians still owed to the archangel Michael shows that this did not stem from a fundamental need ‘to find the recognizable face of a human being, whose behaviour could be rendered intelligible’ when one sought intercession from the heavens.88 Human and inhuman powers alike could be fitted with a ‘recognizable face’, if the circumstances were right, but only if they had first gained a place in the cycle of the Christian calendar. This the archangel Michael had done, after first rising to prominence as a cult figure in Egypt and Asia Minor during antiquity, and later securing his position in the liturgical calendar after a rapid phase of 87 For the addition of ‘All Angels’ to the Michaelmas feast in the seventeenth century, see Vernon Staley, The Liturgical Year: An Explanation of the Origin, History and Significance of the Festival Days and Fasting Days of the English Church (London, 1907), 123–6. 88 Brown, Cult of the Saints, 62, 66.

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shrine-building in Italy during the fifth and sixth centuries.89 Although the circumstances through which Michael came to attract the attention of so many church-builders and ecclesiastical patrons in the early stages of his cult remain much discussed, we may content ourselves here only with the observation that it was Michael alone among the angels who became the focus of so much cultic activity. The rest of the angels, in contrast, were more commonly found as auxiliary figures in other people’s legends, and it was to that auxiliary position that they were increasingly confined. For all the attention that Michael’s cult undoubtedly received in other parts of the Christian world, there is little to suggest that men and women in AngloSaxon England ever harboured any special affinity of their own for him. That may seem surprising, given that the Anglo-Saxons in particular (and the Germanic peoples of the early medieval West in general) have developed something of a reputation for exceptional devotion to the archangel. Much of this has rested upon a sense that the scriptural reference to ‘a great battle in heaven, when Michael and his angels fought with the dragon’, must naturally have endeared this warrior-spirit to the sort of society that produced their own tales of dragon-fights like those found in Beowulf.90 When J. M. WallaceHadrill asked in 1974 whether anyone could say ‘that St Michael of later days was not Woden under fresh colours’, he was expressing an already traditional sense that the cult of the archangel ought to have connected, in some profound way, with the martial ethos of a newly converted pagan society.91 Positive evidence for that supposition is, however, hard to find. Although the archangel was regularly invoked in private prayer during the early Middle Ages, he was seldom marked out for special attention. Prayerbooks from the Anglo-Saxon period contain the text of only a single prayer addressed exclusively to Michael, and it was far more common to find his name mentioned in passing as part of a compendious litany of saints rather than being invoked for its own sake. Even that one prayer which did address itself only to Michael singled out the 89 The literature on this subject is vast, and extremely varied in quality: Marcel Baudot (ed.), Millénaire monastique du Mont Saint-Michel. Tome III: Culte de saint Michel et pèlerinages au mont (Paris, 1971); Pierre Canivet, ‘Le Michaelion de Ḥ ūarte (Ve s.) et le culte syrien des anges’, Byzantion 50 (1980), 85–117; Cyril Mango, ‘St Michael and Attis’, Deltion tes Christianikes Archaiologikes Hetaireias, 4th ser., 12 (1986), 39–62; Pierre Bouet, Giorgio Otranto, and André Vauchez (eds.), Culte et pèlerinages à saint Michel en Occident. Les trois monts dédiés à l’archange (Rome, 2003); Pierre Bouet, Giorgio Otranto and André Vauchez (eds.), Culto e santuari di san Michele nell’Europa medievale/Culte et sanctuaires de saint Michel dans l’Europe médiévale (Bari, 2007); John C. Arnold, The Footprints of Michael the Archangel: The Formation and Diffussion of a Saintly Cult, c. 300–c. 800 (Basingstoke, 2013). 90 Rev. 12.7. 91 J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, ‘War and peace in the earlier Middle Ages’, TRHS 25 (1975), 157–74, at 168. Similar remarks were already being made, with less rhetorical intent, by Christian Wilsdorf, ‘La Diffusion du culte de saint Michel en Allemagne’, and H. P. R. Finberg, ‘The Archangel Michael in Britain’, in Baudot (ed.), Millénaire monastique III, 389–92 and 459–69, at 390–1 and 462–4, respectively.

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archangel as ‘the most splendid and beautiful minister of God’, not as some Germanic dragon-slayer.92 Anglo-Saxon exegetes did, of course, comment on biblical references to the archangel and his deeds, as they would have done for any scriptural passages; and England did gradually accumulate a significant collection of churches and oratories dedicated to Michael, but their number seems never to have rivalled those of the apostles or other universal saints.93 The archangel was by no means an obscure figure for Anglo-Saxon Christians, but there is little reason to believe that they looked to him as a particular patron or favoured intercessor. But if Michael himself exerted no great influence on the thoughts and deeds of Anglo-Saxon men and women, the occasion of his feast-day did. ‘All over the world’, declared one Old English poet, ‘we honour the feast of the archangel Michael in the autumn, as many people know: it is five nights after the equinox is shown to mankind.’94 The date that this anonymous writer had in mind was 29 September, and it commemorated the day on which the archangel himself was said to have dedicated a church in his own name on Monte Gargano, a mountaintop shrine in southern Italy. The poet was wrong to think that the day was reserved ‘all over the world’ for the honour of the archangel, since there were other churches in other places which claimed their own legendary connections with Michael, many of which were commemorated in their own localities with different feasts held on different days.95 But the poet could hardly be blamed for his ignorance of that fact, and his error reflects the importance which the September feast possessed in Anglo-Saxon England. Perhaps because the sanctuary at Monte Gargano had been attracting Anglo-Saxon pilgrims since at least the eighth century, or perhaps because the feast on 29 September coincided so closely with the autumnal equinox, the day became Michael’s main feast-day in England and marked an important 92 Four Anglo-Saxon copies of the prayer to Michael survive, with only minor variations: Cerne, 76v–77r (ed. Kuypers, pp. 152–3 [no. 53]); Nunnaminster, 35v–36r (ed. Birch, p. 87); British Library, Arundel 60 (s. xi), 136r (see Kuypers, Book of Cerne, pp. 152–3); British Library, Arundel 155 (s. xi), 183r–183v, ed. Jackson J. Campbell, ‘Prayers from MS. Arundel 155’, Anglia 81 (1963), 82–117, at 84–5 [no. 29]. 93 For exegesis, the paucity of references to Michael among the Bedan corpus is worth noting: Expositio apocalypsis, II.20 (ed. Gryson, pp. 391–2); Ep. XV (ed. Migne, col. 707); In epist. sept. cath., VII.9 (ed. Hurst, pp. 337–8). For churches, an indication of Michael’s place among other saints is provided by Wilhelm Levison’s list of ‘patron saints of English churches in the seventh and eighth centuries’, in his England and the Continent in the Eighth Century (Oxford, 1946), 259–65. Levison lists only four known Michaeline dedications from those centuries (Hexham, Malmesbury, Clive, and Stanmer), and the numbers of later Anglo-Saxon dedications remain modest, even with the addition of Cuxton (S 321), Winchester (Wulfstan, Narratio, I.3), York (Folcard, Vita Iohannis, ch. 11), and perhaps also Worcester (see Julia Barrow, ‘The community of Worcester, 961–c. 1100’, in Brooks and Cubitt (eds.), Oswald, 84–99, at 89–90). 94 Old English Menologium, ll. 176–80, ed. Kazutomo Karasawa, The Old English Metrical Calendar (Menologium) (Cambridge, 2015), 82. 95 See Richard F. Johnson, ‘Feasts of Saint Michael the Archangel in the liturgy of the early Anglo-Saxon church: evidence from the eighth and ninth centuries’, LSE, n.s. 31 (2000), 55–79.

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moment in both the ecclesiastical and the secular year.96 Certain dues which had previously been paid at the equinox were now owed on Michaelmas, and the liturgical event attained a greater stature simply by association.97 Tasked with delivering sermons for this significant moment in the year, Anglo-Saxon preachers nevertheless faced an obvious problem. On any other saint’s day, preachers could generally rely upon the Life of the saint in question to provide them with adequate material for a feast-day sermon. An immortal angel, on the other hand, could be the subject of no such Life. Thanks to the interest shown by the Lombard dukes of Benevento in the shrine on Monte Gargano, the archangel Michael had secured a hagiography of sorts by at least the early eighth century—but as the title of this ‘Book of St Michael’s Apparition at Monte Gargano’ suggested, this was a work with a distinctly local focus, full of miraculous detail about the legendary origins of a specific church, but not immediately relevant to the interests of a congregation outside Italy.98 Those Anglo-Saxon preachers who did make use of this Liber de apparitione needed, therefore, to find ways in which the story of a faraway shrine could illuminate matters of more universal relevance; while any who chose not to recycle the legend of Monte Gargano needed to look elsewhere for equivalent material. Finding such material to supplement, or to substitute for, the story of Michael’s church was not easy. The canonical books of the Bible revealed little more than that Michael was ‘the great prince who stands for the children of the people’ of Israel, that he had once ‘contended with the Devil about the body of Moses’, and that he would participate in a battle against ‘the old serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan’.99 Those with access to non-canonical texts might find further snippets of information about the archangel’s involvement in matters as varied as the naming of Adam or the Assumption of the Virgin

96

The presence of Anglo-Saxon pilgrims is indicated by runic inscriptions discovered at the shrine: see R. Derolez and U. Schwab, ‘The runic inscriptions of Monte S. Angelo (Gargano)’, Academiae Analecta. Mededelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en schone Kunsten van België: Klasse der Letteren, 45 (1983), 95–130. Other aspects of the shrine’s archaeology have also received extensive discussion: for a full overview, see Marco Trotta, Il Santuario di San Michele sul Gargano dal tardoantico all’altomedioevo (Bari, 2012). 97 For the payment of dues, compare the reference made to Michaelmas in the late tenthcentury Rectitudines singularum personarum (ch. 4, ed. F. Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, 3 vols. (Halle, 1898–1916), i. 446) with an earlier charter of Edward the Elder which refers instead to the autumnal equinox (S 359, ed. A. J. Robertson, Anglo-Saxon Charters (2nd edn., Cambridge, 1956), 206 [no. 110]). 98 Liber de apparitione (ed. Waitz, pp. 541–3), on which see esp. Nicholas Everett, ‘The Liber de apparitione S. Michaelis in Monte Gargano and the hagiography of dispossession’, Analecta Bollandiana 120 (2002), 364–89. Further context is also provided by Alan Thacker, ‘Peculiaris patronus noster: the saint as patron of the state in the early Middle Ages’, in J. R. Maddicott and D. M. Palliser (eds.), The Medieval State: Essays Presented to James Campbell (London, 2000), 1–24, at 10–15. 99 Dan. 10.13–12.4; Jude 9; Rev. 12.7–9.

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Mary; but many deemed such ancient texts dubious at best, and their testimony still provided a rather disparate collection of allusions to the archangel’s past deeds.100 The writers who prepared the Michaelmas sermons which still survive in Anglo-Saxon books of the tenth and eleventh centuries tended to respond to these difficulties in one of two ways. They either emphasized Michael’s reputation as a miracle-worker, retelling stories about the wondrous healings performed at his shrine on Monte Gargano and treating Michael in much the same way as they might any other saint; or else they offered instruction about the less material duties over which Michael, as an angel, had been granted. That is to say that homilists either chose to downplay the significance of the fact that this saint was also an angel, or else to exult in his unearthliness with an exhaustive list of angelic duties and attributes. The first was the obvious consequence of following the hagiographical material written for Michael’s Italian church, for the Liber de apparitione had made every effort to tether this immortal being to a particular time and place, making him much like any human saint who had achieved fame as a builder of churches. The anonymous Anglo-Saxon homilist responsible for the Michaelmas sermon preserved in the Blickling homiliary gave much the same impression, when he devoted the majority of his sermon to a vernacular retelling of the Gargano legend, ending with a brief observation about how Michael’s salutary intercession might extend into the next life too, when he might offer ‘protection against the evil fiends of hell’.101 Alternatively, a homilist might make more of Michael’s immaterial and immortal nature by describing the ways in which he exemplified the angels’ customary care over human souls. Another anonymous homily, preserved in the margins of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 41, did just that by providing an exhaustive list of Michael’s past, present, and future deeds. These ranged from the unproblematic notion that Michael acted as a ‘noble protector against the Devil’s cunning’, and the plausible suggestion that he could ‘offer the prayers of each and every holy person in the presence of the Lord’, to the more curious assertion that Michael had in fact been the angel ‘who was the mighty guardian of the three youths’ in Nebuchadnezzar’s 100 For the notion that Adam’s name was created using letters collected by angels from the Greek names of the stars at the four cardinal points: Vita latina Adae et Euae (recension E), ch. 57, ed. Jean-Pierre Pettorelli and Jean-Daniel Kaestli, CCSA 18–19 (Turnhout, 2012), ii. 597; and De plasmatione Adam, ed. Max Förster, ‘Adams Erschaffung und Namengebung. Ein lateinisches Fragment des s. g. slawischen Henoch’, Archiv für Religionswissenschaft 11 (1907–8), 477–529, at 481. For Mary’s Assumption, and varied opinions in late antiquity about the involvement of angels, see Stephen J. Shoemaker, Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption (Oxford, 2003). For knowledge of these apocryphal themes in Anglo-Saxon England, see the relevant entries in Biggs (ed.), The Apocrypha, at 3–5, 33–5. 101 Blickling XVI (ed. Morris, pp. 197–211 [no. 17]). The homilist’s comments about the nature of hell and its inhabitants have often attracted attention on account of their similarities to the description of Grendel’s mere in Beowulf, on which see Wright, Irish Tradition, 116–36.

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furnace.102 No authoritative source existed for any of these claims, nor for most of the others which this sermon attributed to the archangel. Instead, the homilist’s attempt to fill out Michael’s duties had led him either to take the deeds of anonymous biblical angels (the rescue of the three youths mentioned in the book of Daniel, for example) and to claim that these were in fact done by Michael; or to turn generic angelic traits (such as the guarding of souls or the relaying of prayers to God) into Michael’s particular specialities.103 Whichever of these approaches a homilist took, the effect on their congregation’s sense of angels other than Michael was the same. Either the homilist treated Michael in the same way as they would treat any other saint, in which case his status as an angel became almost irrelevant alongside stories of his shrines and miraculous cures; or else he became the angel, a being in whom all the traits of all the angels seemed to be focused, to such a degree that it became difficult to see what further services they could offer that he did not already offer. To be sure, many homilists did often find it appropriate to provide a few words of general instruction about the rest of the angels on this day, but they painted a static and distant picture that the vivid accounts of Michael’s deeds quickly outshone. Where Michael was illuminated by miracle-filled hagiographical legends, information about the other, nameless spirits tended to be of a dry and encyclopedic nature in comparison. A homily of indeterminate Celtic, perhaps Breton, origin and known to late Anglo-Saxon preachers in the so-called ‘Homiliary of St-Père’ thus followed a gripping story of Michael’s dragon-slaying exploits with a bland etymological exposition about the names and functions of the nine angelic choirs. The exercise served only to emphasize the irrelevance of most of those ranks to human concerns, since the author was adamant that only the lowest ranks of angels actually interacted with mankind as Michael did, and that the rest confined themselves to purely celestial tasks.104 It was much the same with Ælfric, who appended a similar piece of general angelic instruction to the end of his own Michaelmas sermon. Drawing upon an earlier piece by Haimo of Auxerre, he added some brief comments about the duty of angels to stand as guardians over human souls. As we saw in a previous chapter, Ælfric had not quite worked out all the 102 CCCC 41, homily V, ed. Raymond J. S. Grant, Three Homilies from Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 41 (Ottawa, 1982), 56–64. 103 Grant valiantly attempts to find sources for the claims made in the homily for St Michael, but his efforts only serve to confirm how far it was from established traditions, orthodox or otherwise: cf. Three Homilies, 67–77. For other explorations of the homily’s sources and analogues, see Cross, ‘Unpublished story’, 26–32; Maria Elena Ruggerini, ‘Saint Michael in the Old English Martyrology’, Studi e materiali di storia delle religioni 65 (1999), 181–97, at 191–2. 104 ‘Homiliary of St-Père’, homily LV (ed. Cross, pp. 34–5). Isidore’s discussion of angels (Etym. VII.5) provided a large portion of the material for this homily, and almost the entirety of one other Michaelmas piece in the same homiliary: see homily LIV, ed. Thomas N. Hall, A Digital Edition of Cambridge, Pembroke College MS 25, available at .

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ramifications of this idea, and had struggled to rationalize his thoughts about the angels’ role as intermediaries with his view of an all-knowing and everpresent God.105 Perhaps with relief, he moved back to his main subject for the day and offered some final words about the archangel Michael’s own care of souls. By a reasoning which no other early medieval Christian seems to have shared, Ælfric argued that the statement in the book of Daniel, in which Michael had been called ‘the prince of the Jewish people’, ought now to be revised: ‘It is to be believed that the archangel Michael, who was the prince of the Hebrew people while they believed in God, now has care of Christian men; he showed that when he built himself a church among a faithful people on Monte Gargano, as we read before.’106 It was an emphatic conclusion which pulled together Ælfric’s two major themes: the story of Monte Gargano and the protective care of angels. But if it succeeded in making Monte Gargano relevant, by using Michael’s miracles in Italy as proof ‘that the great heavenly angel is a constant support of Christian men on earth, their intercessor in heaven with Almighty God’, this conclusion nevertheless also raised an implicit question about the kind of power which other angels might possess, when they lacked a dossier of miracles equivalent to Michael’s. Although Michaelmas represented the one day in the Christian calendar when an angel was truly the centre of attention, the feast-day requirement to glorify a single individual inclined preachers to play down the active role of other angels so as to emphasize Michael’s pre-eminent status among them. To anyone who walked out of an Anglo-Saxon church after hearing one of these Michaelmas sermons, it must have seemed that Michael was the only angel who was in any way equivalent to the human saints venerated on the other days of the year—a figure who was more than some mere background presence, and an intercessor whose assistance could actually be sought. Gregory of Tours had once noted that ‘it was the way of common men to venerate the more attentively the saints whose struggles could be read over and again (quorum agones relegunt)’.107 It was only through repeated engagement with an individual’s deeds that the face of a saint could really become imprinted upon the minds of the faithful. That was true regardless of whether the saint had been drawn from human or from angelic ranks, as the fame of St Michael the Archangel and his feast-day demonstrated. But Michael remained an exception, and his place in the annual cycle of saints’ days was the 105

See Ch. 3, pp. 97–9 (‘Inconstancy’). Ælfric, CH, I.34 (ed. Clemoes, pp. 474–5). Malcolm Godden suggests that Ælfric’s comment drives from Gregory’s Moralia in Iob (XVII.xii.16–73), but the correspondence is not close: cf. Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: Introduction, Commentary and Glossary (Oxford, 2000), 289. Darrell D. Hannah notes that no early Christian texts make such an argument: Michael and Christ: Michael Traditions and Angel Christology in Early Christianity (Tübingen, 1999), 165–6. 107 Gregory of Tours, Liber in gloria martyrum, ch. 63, ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH, SS rer. Merov. I.2 (Hanover, 1885), 531. 106

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result of a few well-connected churches around the late antique Mediterranean claiming him as their patron. Without an equivalent occasion for their deeds ‘to be read over and again’, the rest of the angels remained ill-defined, known through their supporting role in other people’s legends and becoming increasingly unimportant even there. The hagiographers who had once placed a premium on accounts of angelic conversations, using them as the clearest possible sign that a person had lived a life of heavenly purity, found it impossible to maintain that claim when there seemed to be so many others who had occasionally stood close enough to the saint to somehow share in their vision. The place of such stories in the uitae of Anglo-Saxon saints dwindled over the course of the period, gradually losing much of what had previously seemed distinctive. The heavenly encounters reported by writers in the century before the Conquest seemed all of a type, cast in the same mould and hard to distinguish from each other. Some writers did not even try: it was said of one eleventh-century dreamer only that he ‘was shown a heavenly vision, which comforted and consoled him and told him to be stout of heart’.108 Now that it was possible for writers to show not the slightest flicker of interest in discovering who or what had appeared to visionaries, it is little wonder that the continued appearance of angels to Anglo-Saxon men and women seemed altogether less worthy of note, even to those who still reported them. The angels could not capture the imagination as they once had, when there was no opportunity to know them as regularly and as fully as Christians knew the culted saints of the liturgical calendar. Their sporadic interventions with humanity seemed eclipsed by the great individuals whose lives and achievements were lauded from page and pulpit.

108

Encomium Emmae reginae, III.9, ed. Alistair Campbell, Encomium Emmae reginae, rpt. with supplementary material by Simon Keynes (Cambridge, 1998), 50.

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6 Prayer, Benediction, and the Edges of Beliefs Although hagiographers and homilists were finding ever fewer opportunities to ascribe great deeds to celestial spirits, no medieval Christian could forget about angels altogether. Anyone who attended the Mass was reminded that this was a time when the voices of human worshippers joined with those of the unseen spirits of God, with some variant of the declaration that ‘with angels and archangels, with thrones and dominations, and with the every host of the heavenly army, we sing the hymn of your glory without end, saying: “Holy, holy, holy, the Lord God of hosts, all the earth is full of his glory”.’1 These final words—the Sanctus—were themselves thought to represent the very hymns of the angels themselves, since the prophet Isaiah had claimed to have heard them being used by the seraphim which attended the throne of God.2 They conveyed a sense of humans and angels joined together during prayer that was taken extremely literally in the early Middle Ages. In his homilies, Bede declared his conviction that ‘the angelic spirits are especially present to us . . . whenever we enter a church, open our ears to sacred readings, give our attention to psalm-singing, or apply ourselves to prayer, or celebrate the solemnity of the Mass’.3 According to one sixth-century monastic legislator, these were the times when one had to be especially careful about one’s conduct, and he recommended that anyone who ‘wants to spit or get rid of any filth from his nose while he is praying should not just cast it into the air, but only after turning around, on account of the angels who are standing in

1 On the development of the prefaces to the Sanctus, see Bryan D. Spinks, The Sanctus in Eucharistic Prayer (Cambridge, 1991), 93–8. 2 Isaiah 6.1–3. On angels and the Mass, see Keck, Angels, 174–9; Mayr-Harting, Perceptions, 14–15. 3 Bede, Hom., II.10 (ed. Hurst, pp. 248–9). Bede’s conviction about the angelic presence during the canonical hours seems to have become proverbial, for Alcuin later referred to Bede’s habit of worrying about ‘what would happen if I was not in attendance among the other brothers? Would the angels not have cause to say: “Where is Bede? Why has he not come to the established prayers with the brothers?” ’: Ep. CCLXXXIV (ed. Dümmler, pp. 442–3).

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front of him’.4 Although few others shared that particular worry, preachers might still remind their congregations that it was by means of his angels that God received the prayers of human beings, and that any act of personal or public devotion was therefore bound to rely in some way upon the actions of unseen creatures.5 From the prayerbooks and liturgical handbooks which survive from this period, it is also clear that many early medieval Christians thought it appropriate to acknowledge the presence of these ministering spirits on the occasions when they drew near. One of our earliest witnesses to the private devotions of AngloSaxon England, a fragment of a prayerbook written in the vicinity of Worcester in the years around 800, in fact opens in the middle of just such an address: < . . . > be my healthiness. Cherubin, you be my strength. Seraphin, you be my health and arms.6

The professional religious might also seek the salutary intervention of angels on behalf of others, as the users of several later liturgical manuals were directed to do when they prevailed upon God ‘to send your holy angel, who might lift up this ailing person, your servant, in his pain and need’.7 Short and direct statements of this kind can be found in any manuscript containing texts for the communal rituals of the liturgy, as well as for the quieter moments of individual prayer. For those who depended upon such texts for their acts of worship and devotion, these entreaties must have played a key role in shaping their expectations about angels and their activities. Yet the regularity with which the prayers and rites of the early medieval Church returned to the theme of angelic aid and intervention has often attracted the suspicion of modern readers. In large part, this has been a reaction to the frequently miscellaneous contents of service-books and other ecclesiastical compilations (most especially those which were produced in the insular world), in which unremarkable formulae for hymns, benedictions, and Masses coexist with invocations that are harder to categorize: I entreat all the angels: drive out whatever unclean spirit, whatever bond, whatever human sorcery may wish to harm me.8

4 Regula magistri, ch. 48, ed. Adalbert de Vogüé, La Régle du maître, 3 vols. (Paris, 1964–5), ii. 218–20. See Leyser, ‘Angels, monks and demons’. 5 Haimo, Hom. de sanctis, VII (ed. Migne, col. 776); Ælfric, CH, I.34 (ed. Clemoes, p. 474). 6 Harleian Prayerbook, 1r (ed. Warren, p. 83). 7 Gregorian (ed. Deshusses, iii. 129 [no. 3993]); Winchcombe Sacramentary, p. 323 (ed. Davril, pp. 254–5 [no. 1812]); Robert Missal, 212v (ed. Wilson, p. 295); CCCC 163, pp. 30–1. On this prayer, see also Paxton, Christianizing Death, 160. 8 Harleian Prayerbook, 2r–2v (ed. Warren, p. 84).

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More tersely practical than most of the items contained within an early medieval prayerbook, and less overtly reverential, petitions of this kind fit uncomfortably with our expectations about the characteristics of mainstream Christian practice. But do they therefore constitute evidence for illicit, magical intentions on the fringes of the early medieval Church? Although scholars have generally sought to emphasize ‘the difficulty of distinguishing the “allowed” from the “forbidden”’ when faced with such varied material, their circumspection has given the impression that there was something uniquely peculiar in the whole business of enlisting angels through prayer in the Middle Ages.9 It is not, for instance, in relation to the habit of early medieval Christians to offer prayers to God or to his saints that one reads about ‘how closely linked it was with the world of forbidden magical practices’.10 The ease with which statements of this kind suggest themselves to scholars dealing with angelic invocations is perhaps to be explained by the awareness that angels had always been the subject of prayer, petition, and entreaty outside Christendom as well as within it. One does not have to search for long among the inscriptions, curses, and mystical papyri of antiquity to find ‘an endless procession of angelic names’ invoked in pursuit of an equally endless series of outcomes and goals.11 Where the canonical Christian scriptures identified only three angels by name—Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael— these ancient documents and objects were filled with dozens of other Hebraic names for yet more of the inhabitants of heaven.12 The contexts in which these names had first been coined are now generally obscure, and seemingly a world away from the devotional practices of the early medieval West; yet many of these same names would nonetheless be called upon again in the prayers offered by the Anglo-Saxons and their neighbours during the eighth and ninth centuries. The fragmentary Mercian prayerbook, from which we have already quoted, identified seven angels as potential sources of aid and assistance: I beseech the holy and glorious archangel Michael, Gabriel and Uriel, Raphael and Raguel, Heremiel and Azael, that they may take my soul on the utmost day with a choir of angels and lead it to the pleasantness of paradise.13 9

Mayr-Harting, Perceptions, 24, n. 49; cf. also 12–14. Flint, Rise of Magic, 169. 11 The quotation represents the verdict of Joshua Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion (New York, 1939), 77. For the naming and invocation of angels, see also Saul M. Olyan, A Thousand Thousands Served Him: Exegesis and the Naming of Angels in Ancient Judaism (Tübingen, 1993), 70–115; Daniel Sperber, Magic and Folklore in Rabbinic Literature (Ramat-Gan, 1994), 81–91; Rebecca Lesses, ‘Speaking with angels: Jewish and GrecoEgyptian revelatory adjurations’, Harvard Theological Review 89 (1996), 41–60. For nonAbrahamic contexts, see n. 20 in the present chapter. 12 Michael: Dan. 10.13, 10.21, 12.1; Jude 9; Rev. 12.7–9. Gabriel: Dan. 8.16–26, 9.21–7; Luke 1.19–20, 1.26–38. Raphael: Tob. 3.25–12.21. 13 Harleian Prayerbook, 4r (ed. Warren, p. 85). On this prayer, see further p. 205 in the present chapter (‘Names from the Past’). 10

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Although couched in the impeccably humble language of confessional prayer, this sort of appeal to angels unnamed in the Bible has sometimes struck scholars as evidence of a ‘shadow tradition’ of unorthodox beliefs running unchecked on the fringes of the mainstream Church, as an alternative to its established practices.14 It hardly matters that the documents which now preserve those beliefs for us were themselves the products of the institutional Church: the fact that even ecclesiastics could harbour such ideas has seemed sufficient to show how deeply rooted these alternative traditions of invocation still were.15 To see the attempts of early medieval Christians to enlist the aid of angels primarily as a development of much older patterns of angelic invocation is, I think, to mistake their own nature and development. Although the legacy of ancient magical entreaty has some part to play, the angels gained their place in the rites and prayers of the early medieval Church by other means. To say that is not to explain away the obscure names of arcane angels which sometimes issued from the pens of churchmen in Anglo-Saxon England and elsewhere, and we shall certainly have reason to search for the origins and inspiration of such unexpected petitions. But rather than attesting to some remnant of ancient superstition lingering on the edges of medieval Christendom, the use to which these names were put only reveals the degree to which a common mode of prayer and benediction had developed during the early Middle Ages. It was a mode of prayerful entreaty which called upon the aid of God, his angels, and his saints almost without discrimination. But if that statement gives the impression that the prayers of the early medieval Church ultimately contributed very little towards the way that men and women thought about angels, then it has been mistaken. This chapter suggests that the attempts of early medieval churchmen to express their beliefs about angels through their established language of prayer may have resulted in the transformation of the very ideas they were seeking to articulate. In Anglo-Saxon England at least, and perhaps also elsewhere, their prayers might finally have robbed angels of much of their remaining power and influence in the minds of those who believed in them.

THE APPEARANCE OF UNORTHODOXY It cannot be denied that the idea of calling directly on the angels had aroused strong reactions during the early centuries of Christianity. The synod that met

14 The characterization is that of Karen Louise Jolly, ‘Prayers in the field: practical protection and demonic defense in Anglo-Saxon England’, Traditio 61 (2006), 95–147, at 120; on which, see pp. 200–11 in the present chapter (‘Names from the Past’). 15 Flint, Rise of Magic, 168–9; Keck, Angels, 173–4.

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at Laodicea in Anatolia during the fourth century included it among other prohibited actions: Christians must not forsake the glory of God and his church, and go away and invoke angels and gather assemblies: these things are forbidden. If, therefore, anyone is found engaged in this secret idolatry, let him be anathema, for he has forsaken our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and gone over into idolatry.16

The council may not have had a single group or a particular kind of practice in mind. Although the synod was gathered scarcely more than ten miles from Colossae, whose citizens had once been warned in a letter from St Paul ‘not to let anyone disqualify you [from righteousness by] insisting on self-abasement and the worship of angels’, this was more than a purely local matter.17 The letter to the Colossians seems to have drawn on an emerging Christian notion that traditional Jewish worship involved ‘serving the angels and archangels, the month and the moon’,18 and many of the other injunctions against incorrect worship pronounced at Laodicea certainly did seek to discredit specifically Jewish observances, or superstitions which Christians attributed to them.19 At the same time, even the non-Abrahamic religions of the late Roman world could be found addressing dedications ‘to Zeus most high and the good angel’, and accusations of ‘angel worship’ thus became part of a broader language of religious polemic.20 Denouncing the Valentinians around AD 180, Irenaeus of Lyons made every effort to distinguish their practices from those of ‘true Christians’, saying that ‘the Church does nothing by angelic invocations, nor incantations, nor any other perverse curiosity; but when it directs its prayers purely, cleanly, and straightforwardly to the Lord who made all things, and invokes the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, it brings about miracles.’21 A combination of all these concerns, both real and imagined, probably lay behind the canon of Laodicea. Whoever it thought was going round ‘invoking angels’, they stood outside the Church. It was more concerned with the potential attraction of these extra-ecclesial groups than with making an outright ban on entreaties to angels. Nevertheless, that is how its 16 Laodicea, ch. 35, ed. Périclès-Pierre Joannou, Discipline générale antique (IVe–IXe s.). Tome I, 2: Les canons des synodes particuliers (Grottaferrata, 1962), 144–5. 17 Col. 2.18. 18 The quotation derives from a largely lost second-century text known as the Preaching of Peter, fragments of which are preserved by Clement of Alexandria (Stromateis, VI.5) and Origen (Commentarii in euangelium Iohannis, XIII.17). The connections between it and the prohibitions in Colossians are discussed by Muehlberger, ‘Angels’, 157–60. 19 See Marcel Simon, Verus Israel. Étude sur les relations entre chrétiens et juifs dans l’empire romain (135–425) (Paris, 1948), 374–7, 382–3. 20 The dedication to Zeus and the good angel, from a second-century inscription at Stratonicea, is collected with other evidence for ‘pagan angels’ by A. R. R. Sheppard, ‘Pagan cults of angels in Roman Asia Minor’, Talanta 12–13 (1980–81), 77–101 [no. 1]. Cline revisits the evidence in relation to Laodicea: Ancient Angels, 142–55. 21 Irenaeus, Aduersus haereses, II.32 (ed. Rousseau and Doutreleau, iv. 342).

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ruling was interpreted. The fifth-century bishop of Cyrrhus, Theodoret (d. c.460), thought the very notion of invoking angels in prayer a ‘disease’ that still infected the cult of the archangel Michael, despite the fact that ‘a synod convened in Laodicea of Phrygia forbade by law praying to angels’.22 The council’s ruling did not, therefore, slip quietly into oblivion. It remained known to subsequent compilers of canon law and penitentials.23 With the outraged voices of synods and theologians still ringing out well into the ninth century, the numerous appeals to angels found among the prayers of Christians in the early medieval West look all the more improper. As numerous as they were, very few of those invocations were actually directed solely to the angels. It was more common to find an entreaty to the angels embedded within a much longer list of benevolent intercessors. One early piece, an evening hymn, typifies the standard form of these petitions: I ask the Father and the Son; I ask the Holy Spirit; I ask the new Church; I ask Enoch and Elijah; I ask the [seven] patriarchs; I ask John the Baptist; I also ask the [good/blessed]24 angels; I ask the perfect prophets; I ask the elect martyrs; I ask [St] Patrick; I ask St [Curig]; I ask the Saviour of the World, I ask our Redeemer: that they might see fit to save my soul [when it] leaves the body.25

Although made so briefly as to be almost incidental, the undeniably direct petition to the angels would have made Theodoret of Cyrrhus bristle. By the time this prayerbook was put together in late eighth century, however, prayers like this one had become a familiar part of religious expression across large parts of Christendom. The practice of addressing supplicatory prayer to an extended list of intercessors seems to have first arisen in the East and become common in Greek liturgies by at least the sixth century, if not substantially earlier. These ‘litanies of saints’ had no absolutely fixed form, but sought to obtain the assistance of heaven by calling a variety of its citizens to the aid of the supplicant, invoking them either individually by name or collectively by rank. While the precise means by which litanies of saints spread westwards remain largely conjectural, it has long been recognized that the earliest evidence for their adoption in the Latin West comes from the British Isles,

22

Theodoret, Interpretation of the Letter to the Corinthians, II.18, ed. Migne, PG 82, col. 613. e.g. Collectio Hispana, VII.35, ed. Gonzalo Martínez Díez and Félix Rodríguez, La colección canónica hispana III. Concilios griegos y africanos (Madrid, 1982), p. 165; Poenitentiale pseudoTheodori, ch. 27, ed. F. W. H. Wasserschleben, Die Bussordnungen der abendländischen Kirche nebst rechtsgeschichtlichen Einleitung (Halle, 1851), 596. 24 MS: ‘Rogo et b< . . . > angelos’. Both bonos and beatos are possible reconstructions: Warren, Antiphonary of Bangor, ii. 86, n. 4; cf. Birch, Ancient Manuscript, 119. 25 Harleian Prayerbook, 7r–7v (ed. Warren, p. 86). The invocation of Patrick and Curig suggests composition in either Ireland or Wales: Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, 284–5. 23

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and that it was on the basis of their insular use that they would became known on the Continent by the mid-eighth century.26 Although it is the formal development of litanies which has attracted the attention of liturgists, we should not overlook the fact that this development was driven by a sense that it was somehow beneficial to pray to a collected group of heavenly citizens, rather than to God alone. This was not intercession of a strictly functional kind, for the saints and their Creator were being called upon together. Rather, the naming of the saints seems to have been intended to amplify a prayer already offered to God—presumably either because it was thought that such a prayer was more likely to be answered, or because it seemed in some way more appropriate. Early examples of this kind of serial invocation restricted themselves to the human powers of heaven, some named as individuals but most called upon collectively.27 By the seventh century, not only had litanies begun to invoke greater numbers of individual saints, but they also looked beyond them to the angels.28 Although prominently placed at the head of the litany among the higher powers, the spirits had not been sought for any specifically angelic qualities which they might bring with them. They had been brought in to fill out the ranks, in a particular form of prayer which saw merit in exhaustiveness. Thereafter, it would be difficult to find a litany, either eastern or western, which did not number angels among its massed ranks of intercessors. Praying to angels had thus become a part of accepted, and ultimately mainstream, Christian practice without anyone ever really noticing. However it was that they first came to be known in early medieval Britain and Ireland, it soon became commonplace to find descending lists of heavenly intercessors in all manner of prayers and devotions. Many could be short, just the basic outline of a litany inserted in the midst of other appeals addressed to God alone. The petition in the evening hymn quoted above was thus bookended by others made directly to God; others, like a penitential piece in the ninth-century Mercian prayerbook known as the Book of Cerne which was

26

Edmund Bishop, Liturgica Historica: Papers on the Liturgy and Religious Life of the Western Church (Oxford, 1918), 137–64; Ernst Kantorowicz, Laudes regiae: A Study in Liturgical Acclamations and Mediaeval Ruler Worship (Berkeley, 1946); Lapidge, Litanies, 2–41. Suggestive but impressionistic comments on the early development are given by Anton Baumstark, Liturgie comparée. Principes et méthodes pour l’étude historique des liturgies chrétiennes (3rd edn., Chevetogne, 1953), 87–90. 27 See e.g. the ‘Liturgy of St James’, ed. F. E. Brightman, Liturgies Eastern and Western, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1896), i. 35, 40 and 66 (Mary, John the Baptist, apostles, prophets, martyrs, and ‘all the holy and righteous’); and i. 47–8 (Mary, John the Baptist, apostles, Stephen, Moses, Aaron, Elias, Elisha, David, Daniel, prophets, and ‘all the holy and righteous’). 28 A Syrian example is edited by Anton Baumstark, ‘Eine syrisch-melchitische Allerheiligenlitanei’, Oriens Christianus 4 (1904), 98–120, at 116–19; Lapidge reproduces Baumstark’s Latin translation, with further discussion: Litanies, 17–18.

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otherwise assembled from snippets of psalmody, might conclude with a short litanic section to reinforce their message: . . . May the Lord’s right hand forever preserve me. May Christ’s grace always defend me from the enemy. Lord, direct my heart on the way of peace. May the angels and archangels pray for me. May the patriarchs and prophets pray for me. May the twelve apostles and all the holy martyrs pray for me in the name of the Holy Trinity. Amen. Lord God, hear me in my need; hasten, Lord, to help me. O Lord, thou wilt open my lips, and my mouth shall declare thy praise.29

Short though they were, appeals like this had become a major part of the devotional language available to the Anglo-Saxon and to their neighbours in the insular world. No two prayers voiced them in exactly the same way. Some were basic and summary in nature, while others subdivided the ranks of heaven ever more minutely. It was on that basis that the numbers of angels, like the numbers of human intercessors, could swell and multiply: Angels and archangels, virtues and powers, principalities and dominations, thrones, cherubim and seraphim, patriarchs and prophets, apostles and martyrs and confessors and all the holy virgins, and all the saints of God: pray for me so that I might deserve to have eternal life in heaven.30

No functional need had necessitated that this prayer list each of the nine angelic orders in turn, where others sufficed to say omnes angeli orate pro me.31 It certainly provides little support for the notion that the specific duties of each angelic rank, those which had been asserted by Gregory the Great and Isidore of Seville after him, were being sought so that ‘carefully selected angels might fill the gaps left by those magicians’ whose services were now forbidden.32 No extant prayer singled out one particular angelic order for special attention, at the expense of others. Even if the writer of a prayer decided to make a series of individual requests to each of the heavenly powers he invoked, it was still the combined effect of the prayer as a whole which mattered most. Reading through the contents of any given prayerbook, one finds the same concerns recurring again and again, but every time directed to a different patron. Among the prayers in the Book of Cerne, for instance, are three which seek intercession for the moment that the soul will come before the throne of the Judge. They do so in almost identical language (with some variant of the phrase ‘apud iustum iudicem, ut demittat peccata mea’), but never to the same intercessor twice. One prayer asked this favour from the archangel 29

Cerne, 50v–51v (ed. Kuypers, pp. 100–2 [no. 14]). Cerne, 77v (ed. Kuypers, p. 154 [no. 55]). 31 Cf. also Royal Prayerbook, 40v–42r (ed. Kuypers, pp. 218–19); Cerne, 70r–70v (ed. Kuypers, pp. 139–40 [no. 42]). 32 Flint, Rise of Magic, 162–3; likewise Keck, Angels, 174. 30

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Michael; another from the angels collectively but not from Michael, whose assistance was sought instead for the transit of the soul; and a third time from the saints and martyrs.33 It was important that the demand was made, but it hardly mattered to whom. Nor did many of the Anglo-Saxons’ prayers confine themselves to one or two specific concerns. Few of them remained focused on any particular matter for long, preferring instead to make a series of loosely connected requests covering a whole range of different themes. In short, everything about these prayers—from the making of petitions to the naming of intercessors—had a compendious quality to it. They sought to cover a wide variety of circumstances, and addressed their demands to a correspondingly wide range of heavenly forces. This was the context in which Anglo-Saxon Christians invoked the spirits of heaven, and their prayerbooks give us no sense that they looked to angels as a distinct kind of intercessor. To invoke an angel was to invoke one among a multitude, and it was the assistance of the multitude which so many of the items in the early Anglo-Saxon prayerbooks were attempting to secure. By the mid-eighth century, the idea of the litany—the idea that there was something beneficial in the practice of serial invocation—had clearly become deeply rooted in insular devotion. It was not yet so elsewhere. When a papal synod gathered late in the autumn of 745, to be read a prayer written by a Frankish priest accused of heresy, these compendious lists of names and petitions were still an unfamiliar expression of piety in Rome.34 The priest, Aldebert, had already been declared a blasphemous madman, but according to the record of his condemnation it was upon the reading of his prayer that the council’s mood changed from incredulity to outrage.35 It was not, of course, the prayer’s formal qualities which condemned Aldebert, but rather the fact that it sought to enlist the service of eight angels, which it named as Uriel, Raguel, Tubuel, Michael, Adinus, Tubuas, Sabaoc, and Simiel. The members of the council were quick to observe that they recognized only the name of Michael from scripture, and duly charged Aldebert with ‘calling demons to his aid under the guise of angels’. It was a deduction that came easily to other would-be legislators. Among an earlier Frankish list of prohibited writings was a note warning against ‘All the amulets (phylacteria) which are written with not with the names of angels, as they pretend, but rather of demons’.36

33

Cerne, 63v, 76v–77r (ed. Kuypers, pp. 126, 152–3 [nos. 29, 53, 54]). Kantorowicz notes that the Roman use of litanies hardly pre-dates the turn of the ninth century: Laudes regiae, 35. 35 Die Briefe, LIX (ed. Tangl, pp. 108–20). 36 De libris recipiendis et non recipiendis, ch. 5, ed. Ernst von Dobschütz, Das Decretum Gelasianum de libris recipiendis et non recipiendis (Leipzig, 1912), 57–8; on which see McKitterick, Written Word, 202–4. 34

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Yet Aldebert’s invocation had little in common with ways that phylacteries and talismans tended to be made.37 His prayer opened with Christ, addressed in somewhat idiosyncratic but nonetheless biblically inspired language: It began as follows: ‘Lord God almighty; Father of Christ, of the Son of God, of our Lord Jesus Christ; alpha and omega, who sittest upon the cherubim and seraphim [cf. 2 Kings 19.15]; great piety and abundant sweetness are with you. Father of the holy angels, who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all the things that are in them [cf. Acts 4.24], I call upon you, cry out to you, invite you upon wretched men, because you have seen fit to say: Whatsoever you shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you [cf. John 16.23]. To you I pray, to you I cry out, to Christ the Lord I entrust my soul.’ As it was read out in order, the notary came to the place where it said: ‘I pray and conjure and supplicate myself to you, angel Uriel, angel Raguel, angel Tubuel, angel Michael, angel Adinus, angel Tubuas, angel Sabaoc, angel Simiel.’ When this sacrilegious prayer had been read right through to the end, the most holy and blessed Pope Zacharias said, ‘Most holy brothers, what do you say to that?’38

The prayer had been read in its entirety, but the council’s verdict concerned only its brief invocation of angels. While they could hardly have been expected to turn a blind eye to the strange list of names, evidently nothing else in the prayer had attracted their disapproval, outlandish though it may have seemed to them in its expression. They assumed that the names were an unambiguous indicator of his intentions. Scholarly discussions of Aldebert have tended to assume the same, noting either that other lists of arcane names can be found in ‘the world of forbidden magical practices’; or that since there are still others in purely liturgical contexts, Aldebert’s list is simply ‘a reflection of the bewildering variety of traditions current in the churches of Gaul, and the unsettled nature of late antique angelology’.39 Yet to judge from the comparatively few words which Aldebert himself gave to the angels, in contrast to the effusive quality of his opening petition to God, his own interest in the spirits may have been minimal. He certainly seems to have made no particular demands of them, and perhaps that ought to suggest that his prayer was of the compendious and litanic kind we have already seen—the kind which tried to list as 37 Compare the objects and texts assembled by Francisco Javier Fernández Nieto, ‘A Visigothic charm from Asturias and the classical tradition of phylacteries against hail’, in Richard L. Gordon and Francisco Marco Simón (eds.), Magical Practice in the Latin West (Leiden, 2010), 551–99. Campbell Bonner’s less focused collection still has some value as a catalogue: Studies in Magical Amulets, Chiefly Graeco-Egyptian (London, 1950). 38 Die Briefe, LIX (ed. Tangl, p. 117). 39 Jeffrey Burton Russell, ‘Saint Boniface and the eccentrics’, Church History 33 (1964), 235–48, at 237–8; Aron J. Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception, trans. János M. Bak and Paul A. Hollingsworth (Cambridge, 1988), 71; Flint, Rise of Magic, 168–9; Matthew Innes, ‘ “Immune from heresy”: defining the boundaries of Carolingian Christianity’, in Paul Fouracre and David Ganz (eds.), Frankland: The Franks and the World of the Early Middle Ages. Essays in Honour of Dame Jinty Nelson (Manchester, 2008), 100–25, at 117.

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many intercessors as possible, but made requests which were either generic or which only attained their force from their cumulative quality. This is not to claim that Aldebert’s prayer was simply some misunderstood piece of orthodoxy. His decision to pass over the more common names of Gabriel or Raphael, in preference for the likes of Tubuel and Simiel, ought to indicate that Aldebert was a man with a taste for arcane lore. Nevertheless, Aldebert was clearly not alone in thinking it beneficial to call upon one’s hoped-for intercessors by name where possible. To some, naming names in fact mattered more than making requests. That, at least, was the impression given by one lengthy prayer preserved in two of the early Anglo-Saxon prayerbooks, which found that it could think of a great deal to say about the archangel Michael but rather less about his fellow angels. It called out their names anyway, but with only the vaguest of entreaties: I ask the holy and glorious archangel Michael, who received the power to guard souls, that he might deem my soul worthy to be taken up when it leaves my body, to lead it through into the pleasantness of paradise, there to place it into the rest of the blessed spirits. I also beseech the archangel Gabriel, the servant of lofty God’s throne. And the same with the nine orders of the angels, and the hosts of the angels, who are angels and archangels, virtues, powers, principalities, dominations, thrones, cherubim and seraphim: intercede for me, you who every day render praises to eternal God before the throne of glory, saying: Holy, holy, holy . . . 40

This was angelology learned by rote, repeated chiefly to fulfil the formal qualities of litanic prayer rather than to target the particular specialities of individual intercessors. This remained true whether the angels which one invoked were the well-known figures of the Bible, or the stranger creatures whose names had been unearthed from some less conventional source of wisdom. Whenever Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael found themselves sharing the page with the likes of Uriel or Raguel, it was generally the case that these uncommon angels had been enlisted by a compendious writer aiming for completeness in his prayers, rather than by a would-be sorcerer delighting in outlandish mysteries: Likewise I beg the angels, archangels, virtues, powers, principalities, dominations, thrones, cherubim, and seraphim that they may intercede for me, a sinner, before the just Judge, so that he may dismiss all my sins. I beseech the holy and glorious Michael, Raphael and Uriel, Gabriel and Raguel, Heremiel and Azael, that they may take my soul on the utmost day with a choir of angels and lead it to the pleasantness of paradise. I ask Peter, Paul, Andrew and Jacob, John and Thomas, Bartholomew and Mathew, Philip and Jacob, Simon and Thaddeus that they help me on the Day of Judgement, so that my joyful soul may behold the purest

40

Royal Prayerbook, 18r–19v (ed. Kuypers, p. 208); Cerne, 40v–41v (ed. Kuypers, pp. 80–2 [no. 1]).

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divinity. I pray John and Clement, Gregory and Benedict, Martin and Laurence, Stephen and George that they help me all the time. All the saints and martyrs, pray for me.41

I quote these somewhat repetitious and unengaging lists of names at greater length than is strictly necessary simply to demonstrate the extent to which each is very much of a type with the last. Extracting a clause which lists only the non-canonical names of angels, as Aldebert’s accusers did in 745, can give a misleading sense of the whole when so much of the rest is drawn from the same common stock. If we cannot help our eyes being drawn to unexpected names like Azael and Heremiel, we should nevertheless notice that the prayers in which they are found typically treated them no differently to their canonical counterparts. For the most part, extra-biblical knowledge about the names of angels supplemented rather than supplanted the information which one already possessed. Few seem to have shared Aldebert’s inclination to prioritize the arcane over the commonplace. It was more fitting to think of every additional invocation as if it were a new piece of armour around the supplicant soul, each new layer of spiritual protection overlapping and interlocking with the last. That, at least, was the way that one early insular writer had thought about the function of his petitions as he brought them together into a single piece: In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Gabriel be my breastplate. Michael be my sword-belt. Raphael be my shield. Uriel be my protector. Rumiel be my defender. Phanniel be my health. And I beseech all the saints and martyrs that they might help me before the just Judge . . . 42

Prayers of this sort, which used the imagery of armour and which therefore became known as ‘breastplate’ prayers (loricae), had their roots in early medieval Ireland, but evidently came to be valued in other parts of the medieval West—including among the Anglo-Saxons, one of whom found a place for this particular lorica in the Book of Cerne.43 The preoccupation of

41

Harleian Prayerbook, 4r–4v (ed. Warren, p. 85). Cerne, 77r–77v (ed. Kuypers, pp. 153–4 [no. 54]). The prayer is only otherwise found in the Collectanea pseudo-Bedae (ed. Bayless and Lapidge, p. 196 [no. 387]). There is, however, a partial analogue from a later miscellany edited by R. I. Best, ‘Some Irish charms’, Ériu 16 (1952), 27–32, at 31–2 [no. 8]. This in turn ought to be compared with the beginning of headless text in the Harleian Prayerbook, 1r (ed. Warren, p. 83), quoted at the start of this chapter. 43 Louis Gougaud, ‘Étude sur les loricae celtiques et sur les prières qui s’en rappochent’, Bulletin d’ancienne littérature et d’archéologue chrétiennes 1 (1911), 265–82, and 2 (1912), 33–41, 101–27; Michael W. Herren, Hisperica Famina: II. Related Poems (Toronto, 1987), 23–31; Pierre-Yves Lambert, ‘Celtic loricae and ancient magical charms’, in Gordon and Simón (eds.), Magical Practice in the Latin West, 629–47. For loricae in Anglo-Saxon England, see Thomas D. Hill, ‘Invocation of the Trinity and the tradition of the lorica in Old English poetry’, Speculum 56 (1981), 259–67, at 264–7; and Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, 277–9, 285–6, 324–6. 42

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loricae with the enumeration of multiple intercessors, called upon to combat an equally multifarious list of ills, placed them firmly within the same mental world as the litanies of saints. It may even be that the creators of loricae had been directly inspired by the form of litanies: the two kinds of prayer seem to have appeared in the West almost simultaneously in the middle of the seventh century, after all, even if modern scholars have generally been interested in charting the development of the one in isolation from the other.44 That is not a matter which can be pursued here: at the very least, however, we can say that the lorica was just as natural a home for extra-biblical angels as were other litany-like entreaties. When one was engaged in a form of prayer which saw value in specificity, and which encouraged the petitioning of multiple named individuals rather than anonymous groups of intercessors, then there was always room to enlist new angels as reinforcements. And reinforcements they indeed were, for in lists of angelic names it was customary to begin with the most well-known before proceeding to the less. The seventh-century monks of Lindisfarne, for instance, knew the names of seven angels, and chose to carve their names and their images into two sides of a wooden coffin made to hold the body of St Cuthbert around the year 698 (FIG. 12). Four of the seven carried names like Rumiel or Uriel, which had found no place in the canonical scriptures, and the makers of the coffin evidently considered these angels to hold a lesser status than the well-attested figures of Michael and Gabriel, for these were the two which were singled out for special attention. They were the ones selected to adorn the head-end of the coffin, while the rest were assembled as a barely differentiated group along the coffin’s side. It was important that they were present, for the archangel Raphael had long ago revealed in the book of Tobit that he was ‘one of the seven who stand before the Lord’.45 Surrounding Cuthbert’s body with the images of those seven angels, as well as the figures of the apostles and the Virgin Mary on the remaining sides, was perhaps a way of indicating that Cuthbert too had joined their company and now ‘stood before the Lord’. Certainly, their overall number was more important to the artists than the names themselves, for the bodies of the angels grow appreciably wider towards the right-hand side of the coffin’s long side, indicating that the artists had deliberately chosen fill up the space with precisely seven angels, even though they had room for more. Names like 44 Previous studies have regularly remarked that loricae frequently possess a ‘litany-like’ form, but only a handful of scholars have wondered whether this indicates direct influence: cf. Jane Stevenson, ‘Hiberno-Latin hymns: learning and literature’, in Próinséas Ní Chatháin and Michael Richter (eds.), Irland und Europa im früheren Mittelalter: Bildung und Literatur/Ireland and Europe in the Early Middle Ages: Learning and Literature (Stuttgart, 1996), 99–135, at 100, n. 2; Juliet Mullins, ‘Aldhelm’s choice of saints for his prose De Virginitate’, in Stuart McWilliams (ed.), Saints and Scholars: New Perspectives on Anglo-Saxon Literature and Culture in Honour of Hugh Magennis (Cambridge, 2012), 33–53, at 51. 45 Tob. 12.15.

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Fig. 12. Inscribed figures on the remains of St Cuthbert’s wooden coffin, bearing the names: [SC]S MICH[AE]L, [SCS G]ABR[I]AEL, [SCS] RA[PH]AEL, SCS VRIA [ EL ], SCS [ . . . ], [SCS R]VMIA[EL], [ . . . ].

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Rumiel or Uriel gained significance only when they could be fitted into one’s biblical learning. They did not represent a wholly alternative and independent way of thinking about heavenly mysteries. None of these considerations would have convinced someone like Theodoret of Cyrrhus to change his mind about the ‘disease’ of praying to angels. But the devotional world of the Anglo-Saxons was not Theodoret’s, and the centuries which had passed since the day of that fifth-century bishop had seen the emergence of new forms of prayer which had turned the invocation of angels into a respectable, and eventually a required, practice. To omit the angels from one’s litanies, which ranged widely across the heavens to obtain the support of the maximum number of intercessors, would have seemed like foolishness. And if exhaustiveness now seemed like a desirable quality in one’s prayers, then we should hardly be surprised that this encouraged some early medieval churchmen to make use of every piece of information at their disposal, as they made room for angels more numerous than those which had been identified in scripture. To focus attention on the goals and methods of a particular genre of devotional writing in this way is not to claim that searching outside the Bible for the names of angels was a perfectly regular activity for every early medieval Christian. Doubtless, different individuals held divergent views on that point, as they did in other contexts when they sought to determine what extra-biblical information did or did not deserve the respect of the faithful.46 But we can better understand why some early medieval ecclesiastics did accommodate the invocation of non-scriptural angels in their own personal devotions if we do not resort to heavy-handed judgements about how they gave in to ‘a powerful temptation . . . to recover unorthodox traditions’.47 The evidence for the place of angels in the prayers of the Anglo-Saxons is a continuum, and its oddities are extensions of the norm rather than inversions of it.

NAMES F ROM THE PAST Some of those who were openly sceptical about angels unattested in scripture justified their scepticism in the strongest possible terms. When it was known that ‘Satan himself transformed himself into an angel of light’, then there was always a chance that unknown angels might actually be demons.48 We have already heard that fear being expressed, in the eighth-century papal court which condemned the Frankish priest Aldebert as a heretic for invoking creatures which bore names like Tubuas, Sabaoc, and Simiel. Others, however, 46 47

See A. M. C. Casiday, ‘St Aldhelm on apocrypha’, JTS 55 (2004), 147–57. 48 Keck, Angels, 174. 2 Cor. 11.14.

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preferred a much more mundane explanation. According to the Admonitio generalis issued by Charlemagne in 789, and echoed in a string of later Carolingian capitulary collections, it was taken instead that any unfamiliar angel was probably a simple fabrication. ‘The unknown names of angels shall not be made up,’ declared Charlemagne’s Admonitio, ‘nor shall they be named, except for those which we hold in authority: Michael, Gabriel, Raphael.’49 In fact, it is extraordinarily difficult to find any angel mentioned in an early medieval text which actually can be shown to bear a newly fabricated name. Instead, they bore names which were identical (or very nearly so, for the passage of time was not always kind) to those which had been invoked centuries before, and which survive in ancient texts written in earlier Jewish or gnostic circles. When one of the Old English dialogues of Solomon and Saturn, for instance, asked for the names of the angels ‘who track the devil from heaven’s forest and bring him into the arms of Christ’s warriors’, it could have said almost anything it liked in answer: few Anglo-Saxon Christians could ever have been in a position to know what the answer really was, or to know precisely what the question even meant. But rather than invent some pseudo-mystical names, the author declared soberly that these were the angels Uriel and Rumiel.50 We have already seen their names incised upon St Cuthbert’s coffin, around two centuries before the Solomon and Saturn dialogues were composed; and they were ancient already in the time of the coffin-makers, for equivalent names could be found in the first book of Enoch, in Jewish magical treatises from late antiquity, and in inscriptions made on amuletic objects from the same period.51 While it is not always possible to follow their transmission from antiquity into the early medieval West in any detail, this lack of inventiveness is enough to reveal a genuine effort to search for obscure angelic material (or, more plausibly, to make a note of it when it happened to appear), rather than to engage knowingly in pious fraud. It has sometimes seemed that the periodic reappearance of these ancient names must attest to a persistent ‘shadow tradition’ of popular belief, in which ideas about these angels and their functions were preserved outside the mainstream church. According to this view, early medieval texts dealing with extra-biblical angels represent only the smallest fragment of a larger, 49 Admonitio generalis, ch. 16; Capitulare missorum item speciale, ch. 5; Heito, Capitula ecclesiastica, ch. 19; Ansegis, Capitularium collectio, I.16: ed. Alfred Boretius, MGH, Capit. I (Hanover, 1881), 55, 102, 365, 399. Herard, Capitula, ch. 3, ed. Rudolf Pokorny and Martina Stratmann, MGH, Capit. episc. II (Hanover, 1995), 128. 50 Solomon and Saturn I, prose section (ed. Anlezark, p. 72). 51 Attestations and variant forms of these names have been conveniently catalogued on more than one occasion: see J. Michl, ‘Engel V (Katalog der Engelnamen)’, in Theodor Klauser (ed.), Reallexicon für Antike und Christentum (Stuttgart, 1950– ), vol. v, cols. 200–39; Michael Mach, ‘Jeremiel’ and ‘Uriel’, in Karel von der Toorn, Bob Becking, and Pieter W. van der Horst (eds.), Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (2nd edn., Leiden, 1999), 466–7 and 885–6. See also Frederick M. Biggs, ‘1 Enoch’, in Biggs (ed.), The Apocrypha, pp. 8–10.

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orally transmitted subculture of pan-European religious belief. That was the conclusion of a recent investigation by Karen Jolly, who has argued that the same angelic names reappear ‘with such frequency and regularity from late antiquity through the later medieval periods that [they] must have been both widespread and popular, both in the form of written amulets and oral performance’.52 Jolly found that impression confirmed by the fact that some early medieval men and women, in Anglo-Saxon England and elsewhere, not only knew the names of angels unmentioned in the Bible but also tried to enlist their services in matters of health and personal well-being, in much the same way as some late antique medico-magical writings did. Among the marginalia in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 41 (an eleventh-century copy of the Old English translation of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica), were, for instance, two short prayers bearing Old English rubrics, which named the individual angels and demons which dealt with pains in the ears and in the stomach: Against sore ears. Christ, glorious King, shut out Fondorael53 from the ears of this servant of God [by sending] the angel Raphael. You [i.e. Fondorael] must quickly withdraw from the tormenting of [his] ears, but in the angel Raphael may you [i.e. Christ]54 bring health to his hearing. Against great sickness. Help us, our health-giving God: shut out the evil angel Laniel, who makes stomach pain of the stomach [sic], but in your holy angel Dormiel grant the health of your servant in your holy healing name.55

The early editors of Anglo-Saxon texts took these texts as indicative of the ‘leechdoms, wortcunning and starcraft of early England’, and collected them together with other pieces of ‘Anglo-Saxon magic’.56 Information about Jolly, ‘Prayers from the field’, 117–30. The manuscript reads fondorohel, corrected with superscript a to fondorahel. Although Jolly adduces the medial -h- as a distinctively Irish/Northumbrian feature (‘Prayers from the field’, 127, 129–30), it is in fact common to Hebrew names written by Latin scribes across early medieval Europe, as observed by Jean Rittmueller, CCSL 108F (Turnhout, 2003), 114. For the purposes of translation, the demon’s name ought therefore to be rendered Fondorael (as Israhel = Israel, Michahel = Michael, etc.). 54 The prayer is addressed in the second person throughout, but the petitions appear to switch between addressing Christ and addressing the demon. 55 CCCC 41, p. 326, ed. Jolly, ‘Prayers from the field’, 145 [no. 5c]. For the manuscript context, see also Karen Louise Jolly, ‘On the margins of orthodoxy: devotional formulas and protective prayers in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 41’, in Sarah Larratt Keefer and Rolf H. Bremmer (eds.), Signs on the Edge: Space, Text and Margin in Medieval Manuscripts (Paris, 2007), 135–83. 56 Oswald Cockayne (ed.), Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England, 3 vols. (London, 1864–6), i. 387; Godfrid Storms, Anglo-Saxon Magic (The Hague, 1948), 315 [nos. A5 and A6]. Although Storms claimed to have transcribed the prayers from a later twelfth-century manuscript (Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, 379, 49r), inspection of the manuscript has shown this to be erroneous: it is therefore likely that Storms’ text was also transcribed from CCCC 41, which appears to be the sole copy of these prayers. 52 53

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strange angels and demons is nevertheless absent from the surviving books of Anglo-Saxon medical lore, and finds its only true parallels in much earlier texts from Jewish and Christian antiquity. Jolly wondered, therefore, whether these sorts of Anglo-Saxon prayers, short as they are, might represent ‘evidence of continuity from earlier Christian popular religion transmitted into northern European communities’.57 The prayers in the margins of Corpus 41 must indeed represent ‘continuity’ of a sort from the much older ideas of earlier Christian centuries. At least seven centuries before our Anglo-Saxon scribe recorded his own views about the depredations of Fondorael and Laniel, an anonymous text known as the Testament of Solomon was composed somewhere in the Greek-speaking East, claiming to know the names of thirty-six individual demons and the physical ailments in which they specialized. They bore names like Sphendonael and Leroel, and were clearly the forefathers of the demons Fondorael and Laniel known to our eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon scribe.58 For every demon named in the Testament there was also a named angel to oppose them, just as the prayers from Corpus 41 had thought. Despite the great distances that separated the third- or fourth-century author of the Testament and the eleventh-century annotator of Corpus 41, the two evidently shared a common understanding of angels and demons. But before we conjure up some vast yet ill-attested community of unorthodox Christians to explain the recurrence of these beliefs about the medical specialities of angels and demons, we ought to ask whether a more direct relationship between the Testament of Solomon and our late Anglo-Saxon prayers is possible. Was the creator of the prayers simply responding to something which he had read in a chance encounter with a manuscript copy of the Testament of Solomon? On the face of it, nothing could seem less likely: the Testament was written in Greek, and can be found in no western manuscript until the fifteenth century. Since the absence of extant manuscripts is as much a feature of the Testament’s eastern transmission as of its diffusion into the West, however, this ought not to be our primary consideration.59 Jolly, ‘Prayers from the field’, 135. Testament of Solomon 18, ed. Chester Charlton McCown, The Testament of Solomon (Leipzig, 1922), 51*–59*. Since the Testament of Solomon is known primarily through very late manuscripts, in which the names given to the demons often vary considerably, it is not always possible to know which of the attested forms best represents the original spelling. For related issues raised by the Testament’s manuscript history, see: Dennis C. Duling, ‘The Testament of Solomon: retrospect and prospect’, Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 2 (1988), 87–112; Todd E. Klutz, Rewriting the Testament of Solomon: Tradition, Conflict and Identity in a Late Antique Pseudepigraphon (London, 2005); Sarah L. Schwarz, ‘Reconsidering the Testament of Solomon’, Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 16 (2007), 203–37. 59 The remains of a fifth- or sixth-century rotulus are the only early witness to the Testament of Solomon. The surviving fragments indicate that this rotulus contained only the portion of the Testament concerning the thirty-six demons from which our Latin prayers derive 57 58

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We should consider instead the terminology used by the Testament of Solomon to describe the actions of angels and demons, for this was one of Testament’s most distinctive features. Each of the thirty-six demons named in the Testament was said to have introduced itself to the biblical King Solomon with a short and formulaic address. It will be enough just to print the declarations of the fifth and sixth demons to show the typical form that these formulaic utterances take in the Testament: The fifth demon said: ‘I am called Ioudal, lord king. I cause ears to have obstructions. If I should hear [someone say] “Ourouel, imprison Ioudal”, I withdraw immediately.’ The sixth said: ‘I am called Sphendonael. I produce tumours of the salivatory gland and tetanic recurvation. If I hear “Sabael, imprison Sphendonael”, I withdraw immediately.’60

This talk of imprisoning and withdrawing is the constant refrain of the demons in the Testament of Solomon. It is not widely shared in other ancient and medieval demonological writings—but it is almost exactly paralleled in our Latin prayers from Corpus 41. Where the Greek apocryphon spoke of a demon named Sphendonael ‘withdrawing’ (anachoron) to escape the powers of heaven, one of the Latin prayers instructed the demon Fondorael again to ‘withdraw’ (recede) at the supplicant’s behest. The same prayer also issued the imperative command, exclude Fondorahel (‘shut out Fondorael!’), which looks like a Latin writer’s best guess at transliterating the Testament’s original egkleison Sphendonael (‘shut up/imprison Sphendonael!’). It may be objected that, in the passage from the Testament quoted above, Sphendonael’s specialities are mouths and backs, rather than causing the earaches associated with Fondorael in Corpus 41. But we know from the evidence of the later manuscripts that the Testament’s list of the thirty-six demons, with their unfamiliar names, was frequently misread and miscopied by scribes. Mistakes and scribal corruptions are so frequent, in fact, that they represent the rule rather than the exception in the Testament’s few surviving manuscripts.61 Since Sphendonael immediately follows the demon who causes earache in the original Testament (corresponding to 18.4–40 in McCown’s edition): see Robert Daniel, ‘The Testament of Solomon XVIII 27–28, 33–40’, in Helene Loebenstein and Hermann Harrauer (eds.), Papyrus Erzherzog Rainer (P. Rainer Cent.): Festschrift zum 100-jährigen Bestehen der Papyrussammlung der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, 2 vols. (Vienna, 1983), i. 294–304. Given this evidence for the independent circulation of the Testament’s demonological section, the writer of our prayers might plausibly have had access only to this passage in isolation. 60 Testament of Solomon, 18.8–9 (ed. McCown, pp. 52*–53*); trans. D. C. Duling, ‘The Testament of Solomon’, in OTP, i. 935–87, at 978; with amendments in light of Daniel, ‘Testament of Solomon XVIII’, 297. 61 See Daniel, ‘Testament of Solomon XVIII’, 304; and Sarah L. Schwarz, ‘Building a book of spells: the so-called Testament of Solomon reconsidered’, unpublished Ph.D thesis, University of Pennsylvania (2005), 173–5.

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of Solomon, it seems likely that the Latin Fondorael’s predilection for the ears comes from just this sort of scribal confusion and conflation. Even the prayer’s assertion that it is the angel Raphael who opposes Fondorael seems likely to be the product of scribal error—at least to judge from some of the later manuscripts which corrupted the name of Spendonael’s angelic opposite from ‘Sabael’ to ‘Saphael’, a name which was ripe for further confusion with the more famous biblical angel.62 With so much of the Testament of Solomon’s manuscript history now lost to us, no one of these considerations can be considered absolutely conclusive proof that the creator of Corpus 41’s Latin prayers had been inspired by the availability of a written copy of this obscure Greek apocryphon. But it is difficult to imagine how else the names and ideas first articulated in the Testament of Solomon could have transformed themselves into the form in which we find them in the margins of Corpus 41, without a corrupted manuscript of the Testament playing some part in the process. After all, there is no other scrap of evidence that anyone else in medieval Christendom was of the opinion that individual demons took charge over specific kinds of physical ailments. That had been the particular innovation of the Testament of Solomon’s demonology in the late antique East, and the most probable explanation for how it came to be known to our late Anglo-Saxon scribe is to suppose that someone in the Latin West had gained access to a copy of this ancient text. The effort required to unearth the textual inspiration for these short prayers may seem wholly disproportionate to the value of the prayers themselves. They remain short and somewhat unsophisticated texts, confined to a single eleventh-century manuscript. But texts of this kind—short, practically minded, and willing to engage with extra-biblical ideas about supernatural creatures—are still regularly assumed to be representative of the ‘folklore’ or ‘popular religion’ of early medieval England, and discussed as if they take us closer to the attitudes and ideas of the Anglo-Saxon laity than other documents allow. Finding that the prayers from Corpus 41 against demonically induced illness are dependent on some of the rarest literary resources of medieval Christianity, and were produced by someone with some grasp of Greek, encourages us to think differently about the sorts of people to whom ideas about non-canonical angels and demons might appeal. They did not stand outside the institutional Church, but were instead the inhabitants of that bookish world of libraries and learning. In the course of their studies, depending on the textual resources available to them, they might chance upon half a page of scribbled lines about the activities of angels and demons of which they had been previously unaware; and at that point they were faced with two choices. Either the strange names of the spirits aroused their suspicion, for surely their names would be better-known through

62

London, British Library, Harley 5596 (s. xv), 17v (= McCown MS L).

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canonical writings if they really did belong to powerful and helpful beings; or perhaps, since reasoned speculation about the hidden mysteries of scripture was encouraged among exegetes and intellectuals, it was permissible to put one’s newfound knowledge to use. It should not surprise us that individual ecclesiastics responded differently to this question. Few were probably so unbending that they would reject any extra-biblical information, or so gullible as to accept everything they read, and individuals must have varied as to how they divided the acceptable from the unacceptable. On one page in the ninth-century Book of Cerne, it is just possible to see one Anglo-Saxon churchman in the process of distinguishing the one from the other. On folio 63v, a litanic prayer invokes the assistance of four named angels: Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel.63 These petitions had been carefully edited, as we can see when we compare them against the earlier copy of the same prayer in the Harleian prayerbook, which had continued with further invocations of the angels Raguel, Heremiel, and Azael.64 Someone had evidently taken exception to those final three angels, and had removed their names from the prayer before it was recopied into the Book of Cerne. And yet the Book of Cerne did still preserve the name of Uriel, an angel for which there was no greater scriptural basis than for the three which had been excised. Uriel had, however, found his way into the list of angels named in Isidore of Seville’s authoritative Etymologiae.65 The Anglo-Saxon copyist who had deleted Uriel’s more exotic colleagues from the prayer was not, therefore, the sort of person who was categorically unwilling to engage with extra-biblical material. He was instead the sort of person who more cautiously cross-checked new information against known authorities before he saw fit to repeat it. The more one surveys the wide range of uses to which knowledge of extrabiblical angels was put, the less one is inclined to agree with Valerie Flint’s remark about ‘how closely linked it was with the world of forbidden magical practices’.66 There were, of course, magical ends to which the names of angels could be put. Those who sought to achieve worldly success and influence by otherworldly means might, for instance, have been attracted by the following list of instructions, drawn up at some point before the tenth century: Have the archangel Gabriel in mind when it thunders, and nothing will harm you. Have Michael in mind when you rise in the morning, and you will have a good day.

63 64 65 66

Cerne, 63r (ed. Kuypers, p. 126 [no. 29]). Harleian Prayerbook, 4r (ed. Warren, p. 85). Isidore, Etym., VII.5 (ed. Lindsay). Flint, Rise of Magic, 169.

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Have Oriel/Uriel in mind against your enemy, and you will conquer all things. Have Raphael in mind when you take your food and drink, and it will abound in every way for you. Have Raguel in mind when you go on a journey, and you will go prosperously. Have Barachael in mind when you want to address some powerful judge, and you will explain everything. Have Pantasaron in mind when you come to a feast, and everyone will acclaim you.67

This list of promises was still being recopied with some regularity (and no less variation) into manuscripts from as late as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.68 It remained, however, one of a kind: a reasonably well-known but nevertheless isolated attempt to conjure with angels. It seems likely, indeed, that some of those who recopied the list may have been more interested in the names it attached to the angels than in its list of vain promises. That, at least, was the reaction of one English reader, who stumbled across the list a few decades before or after the Norman Conquest. From the original list, with its magical intentions, he extracted only the information which mattered to him, and summarized it in the following note: ‘Here are the names of the seven archangels: Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, Barachiel, Raguel, Pantasaron.’69 Magic was clearly the last thing on this redactor’s mind, but a dry list of angelic names still seemed to him worthy of preservation. This was information that could serve the needs of the curious and the contemplative, and it was for them that he made a note of it. 67 Cologne, Dombibliothek, MS 174 (s. ix–x), 45v, ed. Philipp Jaffé and Wilhelm Wattenbach, Ecclesiae metropolitanae Coloniensis codices manuscripti (Berlin, 1874), 73. 68 London, British Library, Harley 2253 (s. xiv), 134r, ed. Susanna Fein, The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, 3 vols. (Kalamazoo, Mich., 2014– ), iii. 268 [no. 100]; Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College 85 (s. xiv), p. 5, ed. M. R. James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (Cambridge, 1895), 69; Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College 451a/750 (s. xiv), 17r; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson C.814 (s. xiv), 1v, ed. Tony Hunt, Three Receptaria from Medieval England: The Languages of Medicine in the Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 2001), 1–2; Lincoln, Cathedral Chapter Library, MS 98 (s. xiv–xv), see Rodney M. Thomson, Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Lincoln Cathedral Chapter Library (Cambridge, 1989), 75; New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS 775 (s. xv), 275r, ed. M. J. Swanton, ‘A fifteenth-century cabalistic memorandum formerly in Morgan MS 775’, Harvard Theological Review 76 (1983), 259–61, at 259; London, British Library, Harley 1260 (s. xv), 234r; Durham, University Library, MS Cosin V.V.19 (s. xviin), 67v–68r. A lost fifteenthcentury manuscript seen by M. R. James contained an almost identical list of names, apparently in the context of a litany: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge, 1895), p. xxxi. 69 Rochester, Cathedral Library, A.3.5 (s. xii1), 116v; reproduced in facsimile by P. H. Sawyer, Textus Roffensis: Rochester Cathedral Library Manuscript A.3.5, 2 vols. (Copenhagen, 1972–62). The list of angels follows other lists of kings, bishops, and popes; some of the latter seem to derive from a late tenth-century exemplar, but it is unclear whether the list of angelic names was also collected together then, or at a later date: cf. David N. Dumville, ‘The Anglian collection of royal genealogies and regnal lists’, ASE 5 (1976), 23–50, at 43–5.

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Rather than looking for magical applications, then, early medieval Christians who found themselves in possession of new information about extra-biblical angels relied upon their knowledge of the typical forms of prayer to show them how they could put it to use. This did not just mean invoking a few new names in one’s private prayers. There were also more public and communal uses to which specific information about angels could be applied. Over the course of the Middle Ages it was, for instance, increasingly common to find liturgical books which contained an array of occasional blessings and benedictional formulae, intended to allow priests to sanctify particular objects, possessions, and places.70 Blessings might be created for bells and buildings, wells and fruit-trees; in each case, they were typically little more than a short prayer, which called upon God to preserve the thing in question against harm, for the benefit of his people’s human needs. The form lent itself to modification and adaptation, as one early medieval ecclesiastic found when he penned a new set of benedictions for the blessing of fields and crops. He had come to believe that there was an archangel named Panchiel who watched over such things, and he naturally made use of that belief as he set out the terms of his new benedictional formulae. The fullest record of this unknown ecclesiastic’s efforts is provided by the Anglo-Saxon servicebook known as the Durham Collectar (Durham, Cathedral Library, A.IV.19), into which the tenth-century provost of Chester-le-Street, Aldred, copied the following formulae sometime around the year 970: Creature for birds over the crops on the fourteen[th day of the lunar month.]71 We pray to you, almighty God, controlling God, who named your son Jesus Christ with twelve names. Therefore, creature of water, I adjure you through the archangel Panchiel, that demons and flying things, worms and mice and all venomous animals may be burned up and chased from our fields, in the name of God the Father and Son and Holy Spirit, you who reigns forever and ever.

70 The classic survey of this material is Adolph Franz, Die kirchlichen Benediktionen im Mittelalter, 2 vols. (Freiburg, 1909); but cf. also Derek A. Rivard, Blessing the World: Ritual and Lay Piety in Medieval Religion (Washington, DC, 2009); and Tamsin Rowe, ‘Blessings for nature in the English liturgy, c. 900–1200’, unpublished Ph.D thesis, University of Exeter (2010), 218–45. 71 The end of the rubric is now illegible, and reads only ‘creatura super messem pro auibus in XIIII < . . . >’. Previous readers have proposed Rogation Week or Lammas as likely times for the performance of the rite, but have been at a loss to explain why the rubric ought to have specified use on a ‘fourteen[th]’ day: cf. Edward Churton, Poetical Remains, ed. Susanna M. Inge (London, 1876), 28; Jolly, ‘Prayers from the field’, 108–11. It had, however, been supposed since antiquity that crops were thought to grow in sympathy with the waxing moon, and that attempts to promote further growth ought therefore to take place during the first fourteen days of the lunar month: see Eugene Tavenner, ‘The Roman farmer and the moon’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 49 (1918), 67–82. It seems likely that this was the meaning of Aldred’s rubric—especially since two of his blessings were later copied into a twelfth-century lunarium, where they were recommended for use on the fourteenth day of the month: see n. 75 in the present chapter.

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Likewise for birds. Creator and keeper of the human race, giver of spiritual grace, bestower of eternal salvation, send forth your Holy Spirit over this creature of water so that armed with the power of heavenly protection it might grant the health of the soul and the body. Through the Lord. Likewise another. Holy Lord, almighty Father, eternal God, send forth your Holy Spirit with the archangel Panchiel, so that it [i.e. the Holy Spirit] may defend our fields from worms, from flying things, from demons, from thunderbolts, from all temptations of the devil, by the invocation of your holy name, Jesus Christ, who reigns with the Father and who lives with the Holy Spirit, forever and ever. Likewise another. We entreat you holy Lord, almighty Father, eternal God: nourish the germinating seed, as Panchiel wishes in your name—he who, with forty-four thousand angels, is set over all the fruits of the earth and over seeds—which may, by this creature, take root and then remain unharmed over the wide earth, so that your name may be extolled on the whole earth, indeed in all places, so that [all] the peoples may know that there is no other God beside you. Through almighty God and through the ruling Lord and through his son Jesus Christ, who called the twelve apostles by [their] names. Therefore I adjure you, creature of water, that the Lord commands [that] neither evil nor disease nor temptation may work in this crop; but instead, like the demon Asmodeus who was driven out by the fish gall through the archangel Raphael, so may winged things be driven from our fields, and this creature be made useful for the driving away and conquering of demons. In the name of God the Father and Son and Holy Spirit. A creature against birds which attack our fields and eat them. Through the Lord, almighty Father, you who have named your son with twelve names, I adjure you creature of bread that you be a fire burning against snares of the devil and winged things: just as the demon Asmodeus fled, who was driven out by the fish gall through the archangel Raphael, so may winged things by driven out from our crops. In the name of God, Father and Son and Holy Spirit. Lord, deign to bless our crop through this creature of water and through the blessing which we bless so that the flying things of the sky and birds of the earth be overthrown from them through the invocation of your name, Father and Son and Holy Spirit.72

It seems likely that these prayerful requests represent more than the local traditions of Chester-le-Street and its environs in the days of Aldred the provost, since several of the blessings would reappear much further afield during the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries. Somewhere in southern Britain, perhaps even at Winchester, another roughly contemporary set of blessings for use in the fields concluded with a near-identical copy of Aldred’s

72

Durham Collectar, 66r–67v (ed. Lindelöf, pp. 145–7).

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final petition against pests from the sky and the earth.73 Beyond the British Isles, a well-used and rather ‘scrapbook-like’ German servicebook from tenthcentury Mainz holds a copy of Aldred’s third blessing.74 Collections of liturgical and para-liturgical texts were not the only books to advise their readers to acknowledge the role of the archangel Panchiel when blessing the crops: there is also a lunarium found in a twelfth-century manuscript connected with Lyons which lists the auspicious deeds to perform at each phase of the moon, and which recommended two of the blessings for use on the fourteenth day of the lunar cycle.75 Although this rather disparate collection of manuscripts does little to help us identify the origins of these prayers, it does at least indicate that these benedictions, with their manifestly uncommon ideas about angels, could nevertheless gain acceptance among readers all over the Christian West. This would have been impossible had not so much of the language of these ‘prayers over the crops’ been drawn from the common stock of liturgical benediction. As Karen Jolly has ably demonstrated, the creator of these blessings was indebted to the language of pre-existing liturgical rites, and drew heavily upon formulae borrowed or adapted from other practical benedictions for cleansing, sanctifying, and hallowing.76 That is not to say that potential users of these blessings would not have noticed their unusual features—the details about the oddly named archangel in particular, but also the fact that the blessings seem to have been intended to work in sympathy with lunar, rather than liturgical, time.77 Nevertheless, the creator of these prayers had chosen to align his texts as far as possible with normal modes of benediction. He was not seeking to subvert established practices, but rather to work within them. He had created a set of prayers which, if simply stripped of their allusion to an unusual angel, would not have stood out greatly from any of the other blessings

73

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 572, 40r, ed. H&S, i. 697. The present shape of Bodley 572 is a collection of five originally separate manuscripts, one of which was the work of a tenthcentury British scribe named Bledian. The blessing for the crops was one of a number of undated English additions made to Bledian’s manuscript; since some of these additions include copies of cryptograms and paschal tables which can also found in Winchester manuscripts, it is possible that it was at Winchester where the blessing for the crops had been added to Bledian’s manuscript. Cf. Neil Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford, 1957), 376–7 [no. 313]. 74 Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, lat. 1888 (s. x/xi), 6r–6v, ed. Martin Gerbert, Monumenta veteris liturgiae Alemannicae, 2 vols. (San-Blasianis, 1777–9), ii. 92. On the manuscript and its ‘scrapbook-like’ qualities, see Henry Parkes, The Making of Liturgy in the Ottonian Church: Books, Music and Ritual in Mainz, 950–1050 (Cambridge, 2015), 91–117. 75 Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica, lat. 642 (s. xii), 91v–94r, ed. Emanuel Svenberg, Lunaria et zodiologia latina (Gothenburg, 1963), 36. 76 Jolly, ‘Prayers from the field’, 112–17. 77 The connection with the lunar cycle is suggested not only by the later appearance of two of the blessings in the lunarium from twelfth-century Lyons, but also by the opening rubric in Aldred’s manuscript: see n. 71 in the present chapter.

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for seeds, fruit, and crops found in countless other medieval servicebooks. And in fact, that was precisely what happened to his benedictional formulae. The blessing which had made its way to Germany, and which had been copied into the tenth-century servicebook from Mainz, continued to circulate within the German liturgical tradition during the eleventh century and after, but with its original prayer about the Holy Spirit coming ‘cum Panchielo archangelo’ replaced by ‘cum angelo et archangelo’. It would remain in use in this form for the duration of the Middle Ages.78 Clearly, its original creator had not taken his frame of reference from any tradition other than that of standard liturgical practice, if his benedictions could be so readily divorced from their strange archangel. This feature of the blessings known to Aldred the provost in tenth-century Northumbria deserves our attention just as much as their more obviously unusual ideas about particular heavenly creatures with jurisdiction over the harvest. It is natural that we should want to identify the source which had induced the author of these prayers to believe that there really was an archangel named Panchiel who was ‘set over all the fruits of the earth and over seeds’. As with other early medieval churchmen who claimed to know the names of extra-biblical angels, the creator of the blessings had probably derived his certainty from some older text. Exactly what that text might have been is unclear: his angel’s name was Hebrew in origin (from Phanuel or Penuel: ‘the face of God’), and had been used in the first book of Enoch as the name of one of the four ‘angels of the presence’.79 There was no mention of any connection with seeds and plants there, but a lengthy Coptic incantation from a late antique papyrus does make a brief reference to ‘Phanuel, who presides over the fruit’, which is probably sufficient to show that the creator of our field blessings had somehow gained access to much older ideas from the ancient past.80 It would unquestionably be fascinating to know how this early medieval ecclesiastic had come across a rare textual fragment from distant antiquity, and to discover what had led him to accept its testimony 78 Jolly (‘Prayers from the field’, pp. 120–3) compares Durham A.IV.19 and Vienna, ÖNB 1888 with the version printed by Cyrille Vogel and Reinhard Elze, Le Pontifical romanogermanique du dixième siècle, 3 vols. (Vatican City, 1963), ii. 363 [no. 214A]. Henry Parkes informs me that the earliest witness to the revised form of the prayer is Bamberg, Öffenliche Bibliothek, cod. lit. 53, 134v (s. xi1, ?Seeon for Bamberg). Others are listed by Andrieu, Ordines romani, i. 53. 79 1 Enoch 40.2–10, 54.6, 71.8–9 and 13, trans. Matthew Black, The Book of Enoch or 1 Enoch: A New English Edition (Leiden, 1985), 45, 53, 68, with additional comments on 201. The name had previously been used in connection first with places (Gen. 33.30–1; Jdg. 8.8–9 and 17), and later with people (1 Chron. 4.4, 8.25; Luke 2.36). 80 The text is edited, with an Italian translation, by Francesco Rossi, Di alcuni manoscritti copti che si conservano nella Biblioteca Nazionale di Torino (Turin, 1893), 121–52. English translations can be found in Erwin R. Goodenough, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period, 13 vols. (New York, 1953–68), ii. 174–88; and Marvin Meyer and Richard Smith, Ancient Christian Magic: Coptic Texts of Ritual Power (San Francisco, 1994), 133–46 [no. 71].

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as authoritative; but those details are now lost to us. We should not, however, suppose that his belief in the existence of an archangel which presided over the crops marked him out as a fundamentally unorthodox soul, opposed to the mainstream ideas of the early medieval Church and determined to circumvent them where possible. There was nothing in the way that he acted on his newfound knowledge about the archangel Panchiel which was out of keeping with the intellectual common sense of his age. His advice to use his blessings on the last day of the waxing moon, the fourteenth day of the lunar month, might now sound risibly superstitious, but it was in fact based on a widely shared reasoning that trees and plants grew in sympathy with the growing size of the moon. ‘Every corporeal thing born from the earth is fuller and stronger under the full moon than under the waning moon’, the homilist Ælfric would later proclaim: ‘This is no sorcery, but a natural thing.’81 And if one wished to act upon this information, and to acknowledge the other—angelic—forces which exerted power over seeds and crops, the only available option was by seeking the assistance of God through the accepted channels of benediction. Any early medieval man or woman who believed that they knew the ancient names and duties of angels unmentioned in the Bible also knew that there was an established language of prayer, and that it was the only dependable way to gain the aid of such creatures.

THE E FFECTS OF L ITURGICAL PRAYER Whatever else it meant to the individual believer, to speak in the language of prayer was to acknowledge that there were things that could not be accomplished by humanity alone. Prayers and benedictions were thus necessarily precise about what they were asking for, and from whom they asked it. Those who wrote and used them did not, however, pretend to know exactly how their desires might become realities. We have seen this already in the prayers from Corpus 41 which drew upon the Testament of Solomon to secure relief from earache and stomach pains: they addressed themselves to God and described the illnesses which were to be reversed (the naming of the demon which was responsible for the ailment being akin to a diagnosis in this context), and they intimated that an angel might act as God’s agent, but they made no attempt to convey how the angel might achieve its goal. Instead, they skirted around the process of healing with the vaguest of phrases, asking God to work ‘in’ his angels, whatever that might mean (in Raphaelo angelo, or in Dormielo sancto 81 Ælfric, CH, I.6 (ed. Clemoes, p. 230); cf. also De temporibus anni, ed. Martin Blake, Ælfric’s De temporibus anni (Cambridge, 2009), 90. For the basic principles and their antiquity, see Tavenner, ‘The Roman farmer and the moon’.

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angelo). It was the same in almost any private prayer or liturgical entreaty which sought the intervention of God and his angels. Rites for blessing the ashes which were to be used during the consecration of new churches or on Ash Wednesday, for instance, implored God to imbue the inert matter with spiritual potency, and supposed that an angel would be involved in the transformation; but they did not presume to know precisely how the arrival of an angel could change the physical properties of ashes. The liturgical books of Anglo-Saxon England simply directed their attention to God, who could be asked to ‘send your holy angel from heaven, which can bless and sanctify these ashes so that they can be a salutary medicine for all who call out humbly in your name’.82 We can hardly expect that the churchmen who performed this rite could have explained, if pressed, exactly how and why the properties of ashes were changed when an angel ‘blessed and sanctified’ them; but this was hardly a significant problem. All that mattered was that the supplicant had not sought to achieve the transformation himself, and had instead deferred to God and the means which were proper to him. Anything further was a moot point if one thought that God, or whatever agent he might send, did indeed have the ability to bring about an act of healing or sanctification. Instead of appealing to the deity with a prescriptive set of instructions, then, benedictional formulae used less precise but more evocative ways to frame their demands. Many pointed out the similarities between their petition and an equivalent event from the biblical past, in the hope that God might continue to work in ways which were evidently familiar to him. If a bishop or priest was required to bless a layman’s house, for instance, his books directed him to appeal to biblical precedents for his new request: ‘Lord, bless this house and all who dwell in it, just as you saw fit to bless the house of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.’83 Baptismal liturgies were much the same. They prefaced the catechumen’s approach towards the sacrament of baptism with a reminder to God of the time that he ‘led the sons of Israel out of the land of Egypt by sending the angel of your kindness who guarded them day and night’, in the hope that God might then also ‘deem us worthy to be sent your holy angel to guard [the person about to be baptized] in the same way and lead him to the grace of your baptism’.84 Liturgical rites were studded with biblical allusions of this kind. This has led more than one scholar to suppose that a great deal of the early medieval liturgy had been created primarily so as to provide material for monastic contemplation, with individual rites being 82

Egbert Pontifical, 49r–49v (ed. Banting, p. 40); Robert Missal, 41v (ed. Wilson, p. 61). Eighth-Century Gelasian, 235v (ed. Dumas, i. 443 [no. 2820]); Egbert Pontifical, 152r (ed. Banting, p. 124). 84 Old Gelasian, 40r–40v (ed. Mohlberg, p. 44 [no. 291]); Eighth-Century Gelasian, 33r–33v (ed. Dumas, p. 50 [no. 402]); Supplement (ed. Deshusses, i. 373 [no. 1071]); Winchcombe Sacramentary, p. 79 (ed. Davril, p. 87 [no. 414]); Robert Missal, 64v–65r (ed. Wilson, pp. 94–5); CCCC 163, p. 30; CCCC 422, p. 370. 83

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intended to be ‘read devotionally as spiritual allegories’.85 Doubtless some of the individuals who wrote out and used liturgical prayers were moved to contemplate the spiritual meaning of the words which lay before them, but it seems illogical to suppose that prayers addressed to God himself were not meant for him above all others. That was why the blessings which Aldred the provost had copied out for use in the fields were embedded with allusions to the biblical book of Tobit, expressing their hope that ‘winged things may be driven from our crops, like the demon Asmodeus who was driven by the fish gall through the archangel Raphael’. Aldred the copyist gave the allusion no sustained thought whatsoever—if he had, he would surely have recognized that his prayers had got their facts wrong, and that the biblical story of the exorcism of the demon Asmodeus had never involved the gall of a fish.86 Instead, the creator of the prayers had been searching through his memory for a way to liken his request for pest-free fields to a known story from the biblical past, in the hope that it might move God to act in ways which were customary to him. When liturgical and para-liturgical prayers were framed with stories of biblical angels granting favours upon God’s chosen people, they did so in order to emphasize that the demands being made of him now were not unreasonable, but were entirely in accordance with the established pattern of his laws. This gave benedictions an air of conservatism, even when the things which they hoped to achieve were actually more novel than they suggested. New rites asked God for favours which he had never before granted, but nevertheless aligned their requests firmly within the established parameters of acceptable liturgical entreaty. When, for instance, a liturgical procedure was designed for the consecration of new cemeteries (apparently during the tenth century, and perhaps confined at first to Anglo-Saxon England), the conclusion of the rite involved the celebrants seeking from God ‘an angel to be assigned as a guard for this cemetery’.87 This built on no particular doctrine that dead bodies passed into the jurisdiction of the heavenly hosts; the rationale came instead from the fact that there were already several liturgical benedictions which sought to secure angelic watchmen for some specific purpose. It was by means of an angel that ecclesiastics sought to fortify the houses of the laity: ‘Hear us, holy Lord, omnipotent Father, eternal God, and deign to send your holy angel from the heavens, who may guard, cherish, protect, visit, and defend all those

Jolly, ‘Prayers from the field’, 136; Rowe, ‘Blessings for nature’, 251–3. Cf. Tob. 6.8–9, 8.2, 11.4–15; and see also W. J. P. Boyd, ‘Aldrediana XXV: Ritual Hebraica’, English Philological Studies 14 (1975), 1–57, at 33–4. 87 Egbert Pontifical, 75v (ed. Banting, p. 59); Robert Benedictional, 121r (ed. Wilson, p. 102); Dunstan Pontifical, 44r–44v (ed. Conn, p. 79); Brodie Pontifical, 35v–36r (ed. Conn, p. 229); CCCC 44, p. 171; CCCC 146, p. 93. For the origins of the rite, see Helen Gittos, ‘Creating the sacred: Anglo-Saxon rites for consecrating cemeteries’, in Sam Lucy and Andrew Reynolds (eds.), Burial in Early Medieval England and Wales (London, 2002), 195–208. 85 86

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living in this dwelling.’88 If new church bells were made and consecrated, priests declared unto God their hope that, ‘as the sound of this little instrument goes through the clouds, an angelic hand might watch over this monastery of the Church, and so save the minds and bodies of believers by means of its everlasting protection’.89 Although the existence of rites such as these has sometimes been taken as clear evidence of ‘the magic of the medieval Church’, the ecclesiastics who had first composed these benedictional utterances were seeking the assistance of angels precisely so as to avoid making demands which depended on magical reasoning.90 Their consecrated church bells were to have no apotropaic power of their own, but were merely to be the signal for a waiting angel to work in the ways which were natural to it. Their blessings for houses, fields, and graveyards did not pretend that the act of intoning a prayer would itself serve to protect that place from harm, but were instead meant as prayerful requests for God to send spiritual agents which could indeed secure that protection. Not that every favour which one sought from God necessitated the involvement of angels; there were other ways in which one’s petitions could be made to sound reasonable, traditional, and realistic. But since new prayers, blessings, and rites always sought to follow where the precedent of previous biblical or liturgical texts seemed to be leading, it is hardly surprising that the idea of angelic protection—so fully embedded in both traditions—continued to suggest itself to the creators of benedictions. The sorts of benedictional prayers which I have just been discussing seldom attract the attention of historians of religion, or even of liturgists; but it was primarily through them that early medieval Christians sought to use their beliefs about angels. During the rest of the liturgical year, and during its major sacraments, angels were at best a distant presence. Perhaps they joined their voices to those of human congregations during the celebration of the Mass, as Gregory the Great had once asserted, describing how, ‘at the moment of the sacrifice, the heavens are opened by the voice of the priest, and choirs of angels are present in that mystery of Jesus Christ, [so that] the lowest is united with the highest, earth joined with heaven’.91 This eucharistic union was nevertheless temporary, and most Masses did not seek to create a connection which would outlast the ceremony itself. There were a few notable exceptions: if a Mass was to be held for travellers and pilgrims before they set off on their 88 Old Gelasian, 221r (ed. Mohlberg, pp. 225–6 [no. 1558]); Eighth-Century Gelasian, 257r–257v (ed. Dumas, i. 482 [no. 3013]); Robert Missal, 199v (ed. Wilson, p. 277). 89 Egbert Pontifical, 127r (ed. Banting, p. 127); Robert Benedictional, 124r–124v (ed. Wilson, p. 105); Leofric Missal B, 9r (ed. Orchard, ii. 16 [no. 50]). Orchard comments on the ubiquity of the formula: Leofric Missal, i. 135. 90 Cf. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenthand Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1971), 34–5; Flint, Rise of Magic, 188–90. 91 Gregory, Dialogi, IV.60 (ed. de Vogüé, p. 202). See Keck, Angels, 174–9.

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journeys, for instance, some liturgical books recommended that priests take the opportunity to ask God ‘to grant us an angel of peace, who can lead us to our destination’.92 For the most part, however, the liturgical formulae used during the celebration of Mass expressed awe and delight about the invisible union of the angelic and human realms, without trying to make further demands upon the spirits. Extra-sacramental benedictions, on the other hand, were free to make as many requests of the angels as seemed appropriate. It was primarily here, rather than in the regular round of the Mass and the Office, that early medieval Christians sought to put their beliefs about angels to practical use. It is important to recognize this, because benedictional prayer also presented early medieval Christians with a problem. Taken in isolation, every blessing spoke to God of some pressing human need, and outlined some plausible means whereby supernatural assistance could be obtained in answer to it. The demands of these prayers neither fell back on ‘magical’ reasoning, nor required God to make some great exception to the normal laws of his creation. Blessings asked him to work only in the ways in which he was already known to work, perhaps using angels to watch over and protect human interests as he had always done. But the users of these prayers also hoped that human beings were assigned their own personal guardian angel, who already watched over and protected their interests. Was a person’s guardian angel affected in any way when they offered a prayer to God seeking the intervention of new angels for specific circumstances? The text of the prayer did not explicitly say, of course; and there was little reason to suppose that a guardian angel’s attention wavered if a person set out on a journey, or entered a house or a church. But early medieval churchmen across Europe had still seen fit to devise and retain prayers for just these sorts of occasions, in which they asked God to send yet more angels to serve the needs of humankind—in ways which overlapped noticeably with everything that a person’s own guardian angel did. The priest whose liturgical books instructed him to ask God to ‘give to this people the guardian angel who faithfully foretold the conception of Mary’s son’ on 8 September, yet read from his homiliary on 29 September that ‘every one of the faithful has an angel assigned to them for their protection’, might justifiably have wondered whether his benedictions were intended to supplement or to supplant the angels already watching over his congregation.93 92 Robert Missal, 189r (ed. Wilson, p. 261). Cf. also Old Gelasian, 188v and 189v (ed. Mohlberg, pp. 192–3 [nos. 1317 and 1320]); Eighth-Century Gelasian, 166v and 234r (ed. Dumas, i. 299 and 439–40 [nos. 2098 and 2799]); Supplement (ed. Deshusses, i. 571 [no. 1726]); Egbert Pontifical, 127v–128v (ed. Banting, pp. 105–6); Leofric Missal B, 16r (ed. Orchard, ii. 24 [no. 125]); Leofric Missal C, 29r (ed. Orchard, ii. 42 [no. 208]). 93 This admittedly hypothetical situation follows the ‘Eighth-Century Gelasian’ blessing for the Nativity of the Virgin Mary (ed. Dumas, i. 291–2 [no. 2077]), and Haimo of Auxerre’s homily for the Feast of St Michael (ed. Migne, PL 118, cols. 770–6). Both were known in Anglo-Saxon

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It is not at all anachronistic to suppose that thoughts of this kind might have suggested themselves to Christians during the first millennium CE. They had occurred to one exegete as early as the fourth century. That exegete was Tyconius, a Donatist (and a layman) from late antique Africa, whose ideas are primarily known to us now because of the extraordinary influence of his commentary on the book of Revelation; and it was in the course of his work on that commentary that Tyconius became troubled by traditional Christian understandings of the care which angels exercised over humankind.94 He knew that many of his contemporaries believed firmly that individual human beings lived under the protection of their own guardian angel, but he himself argued that this notion was incompatible with one key biblical account of angelic protection in action. Tyconius drew his readers’ attention to the book of Acts, in which it was revealed that St Peter had been broken out of prison by an angel sent to him from God.95 Tyconius pointed out that the angel had clearly not been Peter’s own angel, ‘for not only had the angel been sent, but afterwards it went back again, as it is written: “And they went down one street, and immediately the angel departed from him.”’ So did St Peter even have an angel of his own? Tyconius was not so sure: ‘If there really are angels bestowed upon and joined to us, protecting us against every attack and serving us,’ he asked, ‘why was a personal guardian angel not able to snatch the apostle Peter from danger, and why did another one have to be sent to free him?’ The only reasonable conclusion, decided Tyconius, was that those who argued for the existence of personal guardian angels were mistaken. When biblical writers had described people having ‘their own angel’, they had intended their words to be taken metaphorically: ‘A person’s angel is his own soul,’ Tyconius declared, ‘the inner man, who always contemplates God with a pure heart.’96 Tyconius’ refutation of the doctrine of guardian angels deserves our attention, even though few Christians in later centuries would endorse it. The problems which he had tried to resolve in relation to the book of Acts were identical to the problems faced—implicitly—by any medieval Christian who was in the habit of requesting the assistance of angels through their own private prayers and public acts of worship. Prayerbooks and liturgical manuals alike directed believers to seek the aid of God through his angels in response to England and elsewhere: the former can be found, for instance, in the Egbert Pontifical (ed. Banting, p. 93) and the Robert Benedictional (ed. Wilson, p. 37); while the latter, used eventually by Ælfric, was spread widely by inclusion in the expanded version of Paul the Deacon’s homiliary (ed. Migne, PL 95, cols. 1525–30). 94 For Tyconius and his work, see esp. Kenneth B. Steinhauser, The Apocalypse Commentary of Tyconius: A History of its Reception and Influence (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1987). Tyconius’ commentary does not survive in its entirety, but has now been reconstructed by Roger Gryson: Tyconii Afri expositio Apocalypseos, CCSL 107A (Turnhout, 2011). 95 96 Acts 12.6–16. Tyconius, Expositio Apocalypseos, I.11 (ed. Gryson, pp. 109–13).

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specific needs; but if such petitions were really necessary, then they raised awkward questions about the abilities of those other angels which were said to watch over the souls of God’s chosen people as a matter of course. In a previous chapter we saw that the confidence which the ecclesiastics of Anglo-Saxon England placed in those guardian angels and their abilities did in fact dwindle over the course of the early Middle Ages. In place of the old monastic stories which remembered the fates of sinners whose misdeeds had cost them the protection of their angels (and with that, their lives), the homilies and poems of late Anglo-Saxon England spoke about the guardian angel as a frequently powerless force, a silent spectator incapable of offering constant protection to the human being it accompanied.97 It may well be that prayers and benedictions had contributed to this mental shift. There was something problematic about articulating one’s beliefs about angelic protection through the established language of prayer. The specificity of blessings, the fact that they provided for the minutiae of daily life as well as the major festivals—‘a safeguard for the small things as much as the great’, as the Regularis concordia said of them—did not lend itself to the idea that human life was dependably overseen by a lifelong warden.98 It was also supremely difficult to express any sense of angelic constancy through prayers which only ever asked God to renew and extend the protection which he gave through his spirits. The set of blessings which had been inserted into the Durham Collectar for the protection of crops, with their strange angel Panchiel, highlight the problem succinctly. As we have seen, the benedictions named Panchiel as ‘the one who, with forty-four thousand angels, is set over all the fruits of the earth and over seeds’; yet the very act of praying and blessing the crops indicated that this multitude of angels could not be expected to carry out their duties unaided.99 As was proper, the prayers addressed themselves to God alone: it was he alone who ultimately possessed the power to ‘nourish the fertile seed, as Panchiel wishes’. Presumably, whoever had first written these words did really believe that an archangel named Panchiel had been set over the fruits of the earth, on the basis of some obscure text which he had taken to be authoritative; but by articulating this belief as a request, he robbed Panchiel of any direct and autonomous action whatsoever. Other blessings gave the same impression that angels, whatever duties they fulfilled, could not be trusted to carry them out without human prompting. A unique (if somewhat garbled) prayer for the protection of livestock, seemingly known in England during the ninth century, expressed its wish that ‘the angel who is placed over our animals might guard them (angelus qui positus est super animalia nostra custodiat ea), so that the

97 99

98 See Ch. 4, pp. 97–109 (‘Inconstancy’). RegConc, ch. 14 (ed. Kornexl, p. 21). Durham Collectar, 66v (ed. Lindelöf, p. 146).

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devil will not be able to ride them’.100 The safety of livestock was a pressing concern, but this was a petition which changed nothing: the angel had been assigned its task before anyone had asked it to do anything, and it would remain at its post thereafter. The fact that the request had to be made at all thus complicated, rather than complemented, the belief which it was trying to express. It may well seem inappropriate to ask so much from prayers and benedictional formulae, short and practically-minded statements whose writers had neither the opportunity nor the inclination to offer an extended theological treatment of a particular issue. They did not attempt to define belief, nor to describe minutely whatever they thought was happening in the unseen world of spiritual beings. But it is precisely because that world and its workings were unseen that the implied relationships between the Creator, his invisible agents, and his needful believers expressed through prayers are important. The ministrations of angels could not be known objectively, and the words which enlisted their services were therefore both the beginning and the end of any Anglo-Saxon Christian’s direct experience of angelic activity in action. Men and women must have constructed their own mental images of what angels were and what they did from the requests which they and their priests put to them during moments of worship; and when the prayers and benedictions of the Anglo-Saxons seemed to be in the habit of offering the angels pointed reminders rather than simple thanks, it should probably not surprise us that Anglo-Saxon homilists and other ecclesiastical writers increasingly thought of heavenly spirits as rather inconstant creatures whose attention needed regular renewal. Praying for the assistance of the angels was never a discrete activity, something which could be sharply distinguished from other types of petition involving other sources of supernatural power. The prayers of early medieval Christians ranged widely across the heavens, and the intervention of angels was sought in much the same way as the help of the saints or of God himself. Yet it was nevertheless true that angels alone seemed poorly served by this shared language of entreaty. Seeking the intercession of the saints, for instance, never carried with it the troublesome implications about the constancy and effectiveness of their power which lingered at the edges of prayers involving angels. The problem was that angels had always been defined, to a greater or 100 Durham Collectar, 57v–58r (ed. Corrêa, p. 231 [no. 646]). This section of the Collectar is chiefly derived from a Continental exemplar, recopied in the early tenth century; but this prayer is the last of a miscellaneous group of Latin blessings (55r–58r) which have no known Continental analogues. Since they also bear Old English rubrics, they may conceivably be a copy of a hitherto unnoticed libellus of practical benedictions, of the kind described by Helen Gittos, ‘Is there any evidence for the liturgy of parish churches in late Anglo-Saxon England? The Red Book of Darley and the status of Old English’, in Francesca Tinti (ed.), Pastoral Care in Later AngloSaxon England (Woodbridge, 2005), 63–82, at 64.

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lesser extent, in functional terms in a way that the saints were not. When a preacher or a theologian found it necessary to say what angels were, they did so by explaining the tasks which they performed. The spirits watched over human souls, supported their virtues, guided their progress through a dangerous world. Naturally, these functions came to the minds of ecclesiastics as they wrote new prayers and benedictions to secure protection, safety, and salvation for themselves and their contemporaries. But the conservative tone of liturgical prayer meant that the angels only ever seemed to be asked to perform tasks which they were thought already to be doing. They had been a late arrival into the mainstream of early medieval prayer, fitted into litanies of intercessors for the sake of completeness rather than on their own terms, and pressed into service in liturgical blessings primarily as a way to assure God that one’s demands were reasonable and achievable. If we seek to understand why it was that the angels, such a deep-rooted part of ancient Christianity, came to be overshadowed by the intercessory power of human saints over the course of the early Middle Ages, it may well be that the constraints put upon angels by the language used to voice early medieval Christians’ most pressing concerns effectively shut them out. Augustine had once wondered whether he ought to have sought the help of the spirits in the process of his own personal reconciliation to God: ‘Should I have turned to the angels?’ he asked; ‘But with what prayer? With what holy rites?’101 It was precisely by trying to seek the help of the angels through language which was ill-suited for the purpose that the religious elite of early medieval Europe succeeded in unconsciously remodelling their mental universe.

101

Augustine, Confessiones, X.42, ed. Luc Verheijen, CCSL 27 (Turnhout, 1981), 191.

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Postscript When I began work on this book, I expected that the changing ways that the surviving sources from pre-Conquest England expressed their beliefs about the unseen actions of ethereal beings were probably to be explained by underlying social changes. The changing structure of the institutional Church, the political and military upheavals of the ninth century, the formation of a single kingdom of the English—these and other broad changes in the cultural and political landscape of early medieval England would be seen faintly reflected in the attempts of successive generations to express their belief in a heavenly society populated by suprahuman beings. To think about angels was, after all, to think about a particular paradigm of goodness and perfection, for theirs was said to be an undimmed life free from worldly troubles: they were always bound to be, as Peter Hunter Blair put it, ‘the apotheosis of short-lived, rheumaticky Anglo-Saxon man’.1 Writing about angels might not exactly have been escapism, but it did offer the opportunity to give shape to one’s ideals or to imagine the inversion of earthly society and its shortcomings. If the historian were to chart how this idealized image shifted over time, it would seem possible to use it as an index of changing circumstances in the ‘real world’ of early medieval England. There are certainly moments when the preoccupations of a particular time and place have suggested themselves: we have heard clear echoes of ecclesiastical politics ringing in the theological writings of tenth-century Winchester during its period of reform under Bishop Æthelwold; and perhaps in the tendency of the earliest Anglo-Saxon monastics to divide the world into two groups—the saved, with their guardian angels; and the damned, toiling away under the influence of their demons—we can catch a whisper of the sort of rhetoric which might have been used by missionaries during the conversions of the seventh century. Nevertheless, the cumulative impression to emerge from this book is that when ideas about angels underwent change and development, sometimes involving quite profound reversals of past certainties,

1

Peter Hunter Blair, Northumbria in the Days of Bede (London, 1975), p. 145.

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those intellectual shifts had little to do with the major events in Anglo-Saxon England’s ecclesiastical history. Instead, an unexpected but recurring feature of the Anglo-Saxons’ beliefs about angels was their tendency to experience modification whenever ideas were lifted out of one genre of religious writing and transplanted into another. It was, for instance, when the writers of sermons began to use the stories of saints’ Lives to inform their congregations about the process of death that it suddenly became necessary to rethink old assumptions about whether the presence of angels in a person’s final hour was the special privilege of a few exceptional souls, or a natural and expected part of every human death. A similar degree of rethinking seems to have followed when the old homiletic message about the duty of angels to act as the guardians and protectors of human welfare inspired the creation of new prayers and blessings to ensure the support of those angels, which had succeeded only in making them seem like rather less dependable creatures whose services had to be regularly renewed through petition and entreaty. Comparable examples can now be multiplied: hagiographic stories about conversations between the saints and their angels inspired local legends about humbler folk, the existence of which forced hagiographers to reconsider some of the old criteria for sanctity; exegetical arguments about the early history of angels were integrated into the narratives of preachers and poets, and found themselves fundamentally changed in the process. In every case, we are dealing with a discrete bundle of ideas which had developed within the frames of reference of a single literary genre—saint’s Life, sermon, narrative poetry, prayer—and which was later lifted out of that genre and pressed into the service of another, undergoing change in the process. Genres possess their own conventions, after all, and scholars of religion are now much more inclined than once they were to admit that texts ‘are not mere receptacles from which beliefs and ideas may be recovered in pristine form. Rather, they are moulds, which impress their shape and structure on the very concepts they preserve.’2 If certain ideas happened to pass through a series of such moulds, then complications, reconsiderations, and accidental innovations were almost bound to occur. Quite apart from anything that this book may have said about Anglo-Saxon England and its shifting beliefs about angels, that last observation seems to me pertinent for the study of early medieval religion more generally. The sources available to us are a disparate collection of extremely varied material, and we often worry, with good reason, whether by bringing these documents together we are producing an impression of order and coherence which simply does not reflect the realities which we are trying to reconstruct. We might take comfort, however, in the fact that the individuals whose words and ideas we

2

Kabir, Paradise, p. 7; cf. also Hall, Elves, p. 17.

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use were also grappling with a diverse and discontinuous literary inheritance left by their predecessors, and were attempting to combine insights gleaned from poetry, liturgy, scripture, exegesis, sermon, and prayer alike in order to understand an unseen world which they did not—could not—experience directly. They synthesized and conflated, trying to find connections between these different strands of their religious culture. Few seem to have purposefully set out to change opinions already held; and yet we can see that the things which they were saying shifted and changed all the same, as an unforeseen but perhaps unavoidable consequence of their actions. We do not often make room for changes of this sort in our histories of religions and past beliefs, and we are perhaps more comfortable with the notion that religious ideas tend to remain reasonably stable until change is forced upon them, either from above, by the intervention of some major intellectual figure, or from below, in tandem with other sorts of social changes. But the series of mental shifts followed in this book suggest that a quieter process of redefinition was often under way whenever early medieval men and women sought to deduce general principles of belief from the collection of radically dissimilar writings which were available to them. Just as we have become aware of our own interaction with the sources and the effects of combining evidence taken from different kinds of writing, each operating according to their own genre rules, so we need to become sensitive to the ripples produced when medieval authors did the same. This book has suggested that they were sometimes sufficient to transform long-standing and apparently traditional ideas about angels into new forms, and that those remodelled ideas could go on to play a major part in the religious culture which housed them. The degree to which that might also have been true for other aspects of medieval religion, for other beliefs held at different times and in different places, still awaits exploration.

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Index Abraham, patriarch bosom of, see otherworld, places of rest in house of 212 Acca, bishop of Hexham 160–2 Acts, book of 7, 157n33, 216; see also biblical texts Adam, first man creation of 39, 42, 65–6 fall of 29, 36, 41 likened to an angel 65–6 naming of 180–1 Adelard, monk of Ghent 139–40, 174 Admonitio generalis 200 Adomnán, abbot of Iona 130, 131, 158–9, 167 Adomnán, monk of Coldingham 155, 169 Áedan mac Gabráin, king of Dál Riata 159 Ælfflæd, abbess of Whitby 166 Ælfric, abbot of Eynsham on the angelic fall 38–9 on Creation 39, 44 on death and the otherworld 137–9 on guardian angels 98–9, 100, 182–3 on Michael 98–9, 182–3 on the moon 211 on the physical appearance of angels 10n25, 73, 175 on subjects unmentioned in scripture 19, 38 on the tenth order of angels 39–40 on visions 174–5 tendency towards inconsistency 97–9 treatment of earlier authorities by 71, 98–9, 137–9 and Winchester 38, 41–2 Æthelbald, king of Mercia 151–2 Æthelsige, Anglo-Saxon pilgrim 173, 175 Æthelwold, bishop of Winchester and Benedictine reform 34–8, 41–2 miracles associated with 176 politicized appropriations of angels by 35–9, 41–2, 220 Æthelwulf, Northumbrian poet 127–9, 170 afterlife, see otherworld Alcuin, Northumbrian deacon on the angelic fall 26–7 on chastity 64 on death and the otherworld 126–7, 134–5, 168–9 on the emulation of angels 64–5, 70

on Genesis 24–8 on the presence of angels during church services 185n3 on visions 126–7, 134–5, 168–70, 172 Aldebert, Frankish priest 193–5, 196 Aldhelm, abbot of Malmesbury on the angelic fall 27, 40 on pride 27 on virginity 63–4 Aldred, provost of Chester-le-Street 207–10, 213 Alfred, king of Wessex 68 Ambrose, bishop of Milan on Creation 5, 22 on the emulation of angels 62 on guardian angels 49, 81 amulets 193–4, 200 angels appearance of 8–11, 73–4 as authorial mouthpieces 118–20, 159–63 changing importance relative to saints 151–3, 176–7, 182–4 creation of 19–25, 38 at deathbeds 115–16, 129–34, 135–9, 142–4 demons mistaken for 193, 199 dressing up as 74 emulation of; see ‘angelic life’ equality with human beings 54, 56–7, 60, 61–2, 69–70 and the end of the world 55–6, 110–12 fall of 25–34, 35–7, 38–44, 57–8 guardian 79–109, 144, 151, 152, 171, 174, 182–3, 215–17 images of 4, 12, 17–20, 42–4, 45–6, 48, 50–6, 106–9, 111, 197–9 inconstant nature of 96–7, 98–109, 215–19 likened to shepherds 87, 92, 95, 96–7, 100–1 likened to teachers 92–3, 94–5, 96–7, 174 and magic 187–8, 192, 194, 201, 205–6 merciless 115–16 names of 46n3, 187, 193–211 nature of 7–8 orders of (nine) 5–7, 31, 52–3 (ten) 6n11, 31, 39–42

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Index

angels (cont.) prayers involving 82, 104–6, 124–6, 127, 134, 186–9, 201–5, 207–15, 216–19 relayed to God by 98–9, 181–2, 186 recording human deeds 55–6, 93, 99–100, 130–1 superiority to human beings 57, 65–7, 69–70 used as evidence of sanctity 132–4, 140, 141–2, 150, 152, 153–9 weeping 95–6, 97 worship of 54, 189 ‘angelic life’ associated with sexual renunciation 60–4, 71 associated with sinlessness 65–6 available to all Christians 57–9, 64–5 restricted to monastics 60–2 unattainability of 65–7 unimportant in late Anglo-Saxon England 70–5 Angles, likened to angels 1, 8–9 animals blessings for 217–18; see also benedictions, extra-sacramental otherworldly 8, 115–16, 154, 175–6 Annunciation, the 4, 12–13, 52, 215 Antichrist 112 antiphons funereal 124–5 taught to St Dunstan by his guardian angel 174 apocalypse, see Revelation, book of; world, end of the Apocalypse of Thomas 110; see also apocryphal texts apocryphal texts attitudes towards the validity of 199 on the causes of illness 202–4 on Creation 21, 40 on death and the otherworld 115 on guardian angels 88–90, 93, 96, 97 on Judgement Day 110 on Mary’s assumption 180–1 on Michael 180–1 on the names of angels 200, 202–5, 210 on the naming of Adam 180–1 see also entries for individual texts Apophthegmata patrum (‘The Sayings of the Desert Fathers’) 156–7 archangels angelic order of 6 images of 4, 12, 52, 197–9 Jesus likened to 113 worship of 189 see also Gabriel, angel; Michael, angel; Panchiel, angel; Raphael, angel ars moriendi (‘the art of dying’) 115–16, 126

art angels in 4, 9, 17–20, 42–4, 45–6, 48, 50–6, 59, 107–9, 197–9 supposedly apotropaic function of 46 ashes, blessings for 212; see also benedictions, extra-sacramental Asmodeus, demon 149, 208, 213 Augustine, bishop of Hippo on the angelic fall 26, 39, 57 on Creation 22–4, 28, 29, 33, 67 on the difficulty of seeking angelic assistance 219 on the doctrine of replacement 29 on guardian angels 86 influence on later writers 4, 26–7, 29–30, 33, 57 on the nature of angels 8n18 on the winds 19n3 posthumous reputation of 5, 23–4 views later attributed to 64, 129–30 Azael, angel 187, 195–6, 205 ‘B.’, hagiographer 139–40, 142, 170–1, 174 Balthere, Northumbrian hermit 126–7 baptism 80, 86, 98, 103–4, 212 Barachael, angel 206 Bartholomew, apostle 149, 151 Beccel, Anglo-Saxon cleric 153–4, 164 Bede, monk of Jarrow on the angelic fall 27 on angelic visitations 9–10, 133–4, 154–6, 157, 174, 175–6 on Antichrist 112 on the conversion of the AngloSaxons 9–10, 111–12 on Creation 24–5 on death and the otherworld 117–23, 130–2, 133–4, 141–2 on dogs 149 on dreams and visions 165–6 on the emulation of angels 47, 59, 60–1, 63, 66–7, 70, 75 on guardian angels 81, 88, 96, 106 on Judgement Day 131–2 on Michael 112, 179n93 on the pastoral duties of monks 47 on the physical appearance of angels 9–10, 175–6 on the presence of angels during church services 185 on saints 133–4, 141–2, 154, 155–6, 164 on the Shepherd of Hermas 89 on subjects unmentioned in scripture 24–5, 44 views later attributed to 185n3 on walls 49

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Index Begu, nun of Hackness 166 bells, blessings for 214; see also benedictions, extra-sacramental Benedictine reform movement 34–8, 40–2 benedictions booklets of 207, 218n100 conservative tone of 213–14 difficulties of articulating beliefs through 215–19 extra-sacramental 207–10, 212–15, 217–19 sacramental 80, 104, 186, 212, 214 Beowulf 2, 100–3, 178, 181n101 biblical texts on angelic ministrations 79, 81, 86–7, 90, 98–9, 135, 181–2, 216 on angelic songs 185 on Creation 21–4 on the Devil 25–6, 29, 40, 83, 180, 199 on the dead 125, 126n47, 138 on the exorcism of demons 213 on Judgement Day 55, 110–12, 113 on Gabriel 187 on Michael 112, 178, 180, 183, 187 on the physical appearance of angels 10n26, 175–6 on pride 27 on priests 64, 72 on prostration before angels 53–4, 56 on Raphael 98–9, 149, 187, 197, 213 on the resurrection 29, 30–1, 61–2, 113, 138 on ‘the seven who stand before the Lord’ 197 subjects unmentioned by 19, 20–1, 24–5, 25–6, 27–8, 38, 44 summarized in prayers 185, 194, 125–6, 212–13 on the worship of angels 189 see also entries for individual books birds heavenly 8, 165, 176 prayers against 207–8 blessings, see benedictions Blickling homilies 72, 110, 111, 135, 181; see also sermons Boethius, philosopher 68–70 Boniface, West Saxon missionary on angels and demons 82–4, 106 on the capacity for moral change 83–4, 86, 87–8, 94 on death and the otherworld 84, 88, 122–3, 127, 133 on pride 27 books of life 55–6, 93, 99–100, 130–1 bosom of Abraham, see otherworld, places of rest in

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Bradbourne (Derbyshire) 50–1 Byrhtferth, monk of Ramsey on death and the otherworld 140, 142–3, 172 on guardian angels 99–100, 104 on the number nine 6 on the ten orders of angels 42 on visions 153n15 Cassian, monk on the angelic fall 40n81 on guardian angels 89 on the emulation of angels 62 Celestial Hierarchy, see angels, orders of; pseudo-Dionysius cemeteries, attended by angels 213 Ceolfrith, abbot of MonkwearmouthJarrow 165 Ceolred, king of Mercia 84, 96 Ceolwig, prior of Glastonbury 142 Chad, bishop of Lichfield 133, 156, 157, 164, 174 Charlemagne, emperor 65, 200 chastity, see sex, renunciation of cherubim angelic order of 6, 58 in the Bible 19 emulation of 58 foretelling St Dunstan’s death 174 prayers invoking 186 restraining the winds at Creation 18–19 Chester-le-Street (County Durham) 207–8 Christian, monk of Stavelot 90–1, 98 Chronicles, first book of 54n16, 210n79; see also biblical texts clerics expelled from the minsters of Winchester 34–7 likened to fallen angels 35–7 visions seen by 140 Coenred, king of Mercia 130 Coldingham, Northumbrian monastery 155 Colossae 189 Columba, abbot of Iona 130, 158, 159–60, 167 Columbanus, monastic founder 159–60 conquest of England 1 magical recommendations for 206 contemplation 30–1, 48, 50–2, 54, 57–8 conversion 8–9, 111–12, 159, 178; see also missionaries Corinthians, second letter to the 96, 199; see also biblical texts creation altered by God 29–33, 37–9, 44 of angels 19–25, 39–41, 67

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creation (cont.) of heaven 17–19, 21–3, 24–5 of human beings 29–33, 37, 38–9, 44, 65–6 of light 22–3, 25 of the stars 22 of time 33 of the world 17–19, 21–2, 33 crops, blessings for 207–11, 213, 217; see also benedictions, extra-sacramental Cuthbert, bishop of Lindisfarne coffin of 46, 197–9, 200 visions attributed to 141, 166 visited by angels 154, 157, 164, 175–6 Cynewulf, Anglo-Saxon poet 73 Daniel, book of 54n16, 112n8, 180, 182, 183, 187n12; see also biblical texts death anxieties about 113, 114, 116, 134 handled differently by hagiographers and homilists 135–9, 142–3 individuals returned from 82–3, 117–24, 127–8 introduced into Creation 29 miraculous signs seen at 132–4, 141, 143–4, 156, 165–6, 168–9 of saints 132–4, 137, 139–42, 160–2, 166, 172 as spiritual battleground 115–16, 126, 129–30, 142 as an unaided journey 128–9 see also psychopomps; otherworld Deerhurst (Gloucestershire) 45–6 demons accompanying sinners during life 82–5, 87, 220 animals afflicted by 217–18 as archers 92, 94, 95, 100–1 assigned to every person 88–97 at death 115–16, 129–31, 136–7, 142 encountering human souls in the otherworld 116, 120–1, 122–3, 125–7, 129 eviction of 129n55, 207–8 images of 43–4, 107–9 at Judgement Day 131 names of 193, 199, 201–4, 208, 213 origins of 21, 25, 35–6, 43–4, 72 possibility of mistaking for angels 193, 199 prayers against 105, 125–6, 201–4, 207–8, 211–13, 217–18 repulsed by saints 87, 126–7, 149 responsible for causing illness 201–4, 211 as a tenth order of angels 31, 39–42 Devil, the deception of Judas 83 and Michael 180

origins of 25–8, 39 temptation of Adam and Eve 29, 36 transformation into an angel of light 199 Dewsbury (West Yorkshire) 53–6, 59 Dhuoda, Carolingian noblewoman 31–2 disbelief 13 ‘disenchantment of the world’ 144–5 dog, the bit with the 149 dominations, angelic order of 6, 58 Doomsday, see Judgement, day of Dormiel, angel 201, 211–12 dragons 40, 125–6, 178–9, 182 dreams first-hand reports of 170 in hagiography 119, 171–2, 174–5, 176 veracity of 165–6, 171 see also visions Dryhthelm, Northumbrian layman 117–23, 124n40, 128, 132n63 Dunstan, archbishop of Canterbury death of 139–40, 174 eavesdropping on angels 170–1 physical appearance of 73 taught antiphons by his guardian angel 174 visions attributed to 142 Eadburg, nun 82, 84 earth, see world Easter 74 Ecgwine, bishop of Worcester 172 Edgar, king of England 34 Edwin, king of Northumbria 9–10 elect, the after death 73, 137 angelic ministries reserved for 81, 88 number of 30–1, 41 Enoch, first book of 200, 210; see also apocryphal texts Enoch, second book of 21, 40; see also apocryphal texts Éogenán mac Gabráin, royal claimant 159 Eorcengota, nun of Faremoutiers-en-Brie 133 Ephesians, letter to the 30; see also biblical texts Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis 21–2 equinox, autumnal 179–80 esotericism 40, 91–2, 102, 112, 200; see also wisdom literature Euphrosyne, Old English Life of 71 Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea 86 Eve, first woman creation of 39, 42, 65–6 fall of 36, 41 likened to an angel 65–6 Exeter (Devon), relic-collection of 163 Eyam (Derbyshire) 50–3, 59, 111n4

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Index fall, see Adam, first man; angels, fall of; Eve, first woman; human beings, fall of Felix, Anglo-Saxon hagiographer 132, 153, 157 fire creation of angels from 21 of hell 36, 118, 136 seen at the deaths of saints 132 souls purged in 118, 120, 122, 128, 133 Fondorael, demon 201–4 Francia doubts about extra-biblical angels voiced in 193, 199–200 hagiography from 72, 141 influence upon the Anglo-Saxons 141 Fredegaud, Frankish cleric 140–1 free will 69, 83, 85–6 Frigyth, nun of Hackness 166 Fursa, Irish monk 122, 123, 155–6 Gabriel, angel associated with visions 153n15 in the Bible 12–13, 187, 200 invocations of 105n85, 195, 196, 205 images of 4, 12, 52, 197–9 Genesis, book of 19, 20–3, 24–5, 26, 38, 44; see also biblical texts Genesis A 17, 32–3, 37, 65–6, 79 Genesis B 40n83 genre 221–2 God changing his creation 29–33, 37–9, 41–2, 52 as Creator 17–33, 38–41, 65–6 intervention in the lives of human beings 85–6 as judge 37, 55–6, 85, 111, 113, 128 omnipresence of 98–9, 183 omniscience of 26, 98–9, 183 prayers to 211–15, 216–19 punishments meted out by 25–8, 32, 35–7, 43, 72, 87 ‘good men’, distinguished from saints 138–9, 142 gospels; see Luke; Mark; Matthew; John; see also biblical texts Gregory I, pope on Creation 23 on death and the otherworld 119–20, 132–3 on the doctrine of replacement 30–1, 41, 52–3 on the emulation of angels 48, 54, 57–61, 71 images of 50–1 influence on later writers 4–5, 7, 75, 149

255

on the Mass 214 on the nine orders of angels 5–7, 31, 58, 192 on the status of humanity after Christ’s incarnation 53–4, 57 supposed encounter with Northumbrian slave-boys 1, 8–9 on the temptation of Christ 135 views later attributed to 93, 112n8 Gregory, bishop of Nyssa 62 Gregory, bishop of Tours on the veneration of saints 183 on death and the otherworld 119 guardian angels; see angels, guardian Guthlac A 81, 84–6, 87, 89, 95, 134 Guthlac, Mercian hermit assailed by demons 85, 87, 149, 169 death of 132 dispenses advice from beyond the grave 151–2 visited by St Bartholomew 149–50, 151 visited by angels 149–50, 153–4, 157, 164, 169 wayward youth of 84–6 Hadwald, Northumbrian shepherd 141–2 hagiography angels increasingly unimportant to 143, 152–3, 172–5, 176–7, 184 experiences of saints and laity differentiated in 132–3, 141–2, 164, 165–8, 171–2 need for evidence and proof in 140–1, 153, 163–8, 171–2, 175 opportunities for fabrication presented by 159–63 responding to new ideas propounded by homilists 139–40, 142–3, 221 secrets divulged in 153–9, 161 stimulating local legends 168–70, 172, 221 willingness to report ambiguous events 171, 173–6 written about the archangel Michael 180–3 Haimo, monk of Auxerre on mankind replacing a lost angelic order 31, 41 on the ministries of angels 98–9, 182, 186, 215 Halton (Lancashire) 53–6 Harley Psalter 106–9 health afflicted by demons 84, 131, 201–4, 211 prayers for 6n12, 201–4, 211–12 restored with angelic assistance 154, 201–4, 211–12 heaven expulsion of angels from 25–6, 27–8, 32–3, 35–7, 40, 43–4, 131

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heaven (cont.) forest of 200 and the souls of the dead 118, 120, 122, 123n38, 125, 127, 132–3, 135, 136–8, 139–40, 141, 166 see also otherworld Hebrews, letter to the 81, 86–7; see also biblical texts hell fallen angels cast into 25, 39, 72 and the souls of the dead 108–9, 113, 118, 120–1, 125, 132n63, 136, 181n101 see also demons; Devil; otherworld Heremiel, angel 187, 195–6, 205 Hermas, see Shepherd of Hermas hermits, see Balthere, Northumbrian hermit; Cuthbert, bishop of Lindisfarne; Guthlac, Mercian hermit Hexateuch, illustrated Old English translation of 42–4 Hild, abbess of Whitby 166 Holy Spirit invocations of 190, 196, 208, 210 manifestations of 173–4, 176 ‘Homiliary of St-Père’ 182 homilies, see sermons horses ridden by angels 154, 175–6 used for the extraction of human souls 115–16 houses, blessings for 212, 213–14; see also benedictions, extra-sacramental Hrothgar, legendary king 100–3 human beings accompanied by angels in life 79–106, 149–51, 153–9, 185–6 accompanied by demons in life 82–5, 88–90, 91–7, 100–3 changeability of 87–9, 91 characteristics shared with angels 47, 57–8, 60–2, 63–5, 67, 69–70, 72, 73–4 creation of 29–30, 31, 33, 37, 39, 41, 42, 65–6 as equals of the angels 54, 56–7, 60, 61–2, 69–70 fall of 26, 29, 31, 36, 41, 52–3 as inferior to angels 57, 65–7, 69–70 and the total number of the elect 30–1, 41 redemption of 26, 28, 30, 31, 41, 52–3 interim, see death; otherworld invocation of angels 6n12, 186–99, 203, 205–6, 217–19 of demons 193–4, 199–200 of God 177, 211–14, 215, 216–19 of saints 218 Ioudal, demon 203

Ireland biblical commentaries from 26 hagiography from 121, 130, 156 prayers from 190n25, 196–7 sermons from 129–30, 135–7 Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons 189 Isaiah, book of 81, 185; see also biblical texts Isidore, bishop of Seville on Creation 24 influence on later writers 4, 6, 182n104, 205 on the names of angels 205 Jerome on angels in the form of birds 8n20 on guardian angels 90, 98 Jesus on death and the resurrection 61–2, 138 divinity of 135 invocations of 134, 189, 208 on the ministries of angels 9, 90 second coming of 55–6, 111 Job, book of 22; see also biblical texts John, gospel of 83, 138; see also biblical texts John of Patmos 53–4, 55–6 John the Baptist 58, 190 Jonas, monk of Bobbio 159–60 Joshua, book of 54n16; see also biblical texts Jubilees, book of 21; see also apocryphal texts Judaism angels in 21, 25, 81–2, 118–19, 187, 200 Christian allegations about 183, 189 Judas 83 Jude, book of 99, 187n12 Judgement Day I 113 Judgement, day of earthly deeds announced on 104, 113, 131 separation of saved and damned during 55–6 sinners condemned at 131 timing of 111 judgement, posthumous 122–3, 127, 128 Judges, book of 54n16, 210n79; see also biblical texts Julian, bishop of Toledo 138–9 Laisrén, Irish visionary 121 Laniel, demon 201–2 Lantfred, monk of Winchester on dreams and visions 171, 173–4 miracles reported by 172–4, 174–5 on the physical appearance of saints and angels 10, 73 on the superiority of saints to angels 153 Laodicea, synod of 188–90 Lazarus 124–5, 139, 143

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Index Lichfield Angel 4, 12 Lindisfarne 164, 197 light associated with angelic manifestations 8, 10, 165, 166, 173 creation of 22–4, 25 lists of angelic orders 6, 182 of angelic names 200, 206–7 in prayers 190–3, 195–7 litanies angels in 6n11, 125, 178, 190–7, 199, 205, 206n68, 219 development of 190–2, 199 embedded within other prayers 191–2 and lorica prayers 196–7 liturgy 124–5, 177, 179–80, 183–4, 207, 209–10, 212–15, 219; see also antiphons; baptism; benedictions; Mass, the lives of the saints, see hagiography lorica prayers 196–7 Lucifer, see Devil, the Luke, gospel of 5–6, 31, 41, 52–3, 61–2, 125, 210n79; see also biblical texts lunaria, angels in 207n71, 209 magic angels in 200, 205–6 historiography of 46n3, 187–8 prayers and blessings mistaken for 201–2, 214 Malachi, book of 64, 72; see also biblical texts mankind, see human beings Mark, gospel of 29, 61–2; see also biblical texts marriage after the resurrection 29, 60, 61–2 vows of 128 Martin, bishop of Braga 28–30 Mary, mother of Jesus annunciation to 13, 215 assumption of 137, 180–1 images of 4, 50–2, 197 intercession of 161 invocation of 191n27 Mass, the 157, 185, 214–15 Matthew, gospel of 56, 61–2; see also biblical texts Maxims II 113, 114, 116, 117 Merhtheof, Northumbrian monk 127–9, 133 Michael, angel in apocryphal texts 180–1 in the Bible 180, 187, 200 cult sites of 163, 177–8, 179 feasts in honour of 1, 177, 179–80 images of 197–9

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invocations of 105, 125, 178–9, 187, 190, 192–4, 195–6, 205 and the Last Days 110, 112, 180 as a saint 177, 183–4 sermons about 98–9, 177, 180–4 supposed importance to Germanic peoples 178–9 visions of 140–1, 161–2, 165 miracles increasingly ambiguous nature of 171, 175–6 proofs for 152, 153, 163–8, 171–2 see also hagiography; saints; witnesses, in hagiography missionaries angels in the form of 9 failure of saints to become 159–60 possible angelology of 220 monasticism aristocratic nature of 157 associated with angels 37, 60–4, 74–5, 214 double monasteries 6, 155n21 and pastoral care 47–8, 54 and sexual renunciation 60–4 views on guardian angels promoted within 86–7 see also Benedictine reform movement Monn, Anglo-Saxon priest 27 Mont St-Michel 163 Monte Gargano 179–81, 183 moon dark side of the 204 growth of plants in sympathy with the 207n71, 211 worship of the 189 names of the angelic hierarchy 5–6, 57–8, 192 of angels (biblical) 187, 195; see also Gabriel, angel; Michael, angel; Raphael, angel of angels (extra-biblical) 187–8, 193–9, 199–211 of demons (biblical), see Asmodeus, demon of demons (extra-biblical) 201–4 suspicions about 187, 193–4, 199–200 usefulness in prayers 195–6 Napier homilies 92–7; see also sermons Nether Wallop (Hampshire) 45–6 New Minster, Winchester 34–8, 105 Numbers, book of 54n16; see also biblical texts Oda, archbishop of Canterbury 140, 153n15 Old English Boethius 68–70, 72 Old English Martyrology 150

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Old English Menologium 179 Old Minster, Winchester 34–7, 173 Oriel, angel 206 Origen of Alexandria on Creation 21–2 on guardian angels 86, 90–1 knowledge of during the Middle Ages 90–1 otherworld anxieties about journeying through 113, 114, 116, 125–6, 126–7, 128–9, 134 escape from 124, 126–7, 128 geography of 113–14, 118, 120, 123n38, 128–9 places of judgement in 122–3, 127, 128 places of purgation in 118, 119, 122, 128 places of rest in 105, 113, 114, 118, 124, 125, 134–5, 136–7, 138 visions of 82, 88, 117–23, 127–9 see also death; heaven; hell Otley (West Yorkshire) 46, 53, 56 Ourouel, angel 203 Owine, monk of Lastingham 156, 164 Pachomius, abbot 115–16 Panchiel, angel 207–11, 217 Pantasaron, angel 206 paradise, see otherworld, places of rest in Paschasius Radbertus, abbot of Corbie 137 pastoral care 47–8 patristic theology early medieval engagement with 5–7, 23–4, 25–7, 28–33, 52–3, 60–1, 81, 119–20, 138 potential to eclipse early medieval ideas 11, 49–50, 59–60, 75 see also entries for individual writers Paul, apocryphal vision of; see Vision of St Paul Paulinus, papal missionary 9–10 Pehthelm, bishop of Whithorn 131 Peter of Cornwall, Augustinian canon 13 Peter, apostle insulted by demons 126 released from prison by angel 157n33, 216 Phanniel, angel 196 pilgrims blessings for 214–15 miraculous cures sought by 172–3, 175 at Monte Gargano 179 pins, angels dancing upon 10 Plato 86 poetry Anglo-Latin 27 Old English 17, 37n72, 73, 113 see also entries for individual texts popes, see Gregory I, pope; Zacharias I, pope

‘popular religion’ 13, 188, 202, 204 powers, angelic order of 6, 57 prayer all-purpose nature of 193 carried to God by angels 98–9, 181–2, 186 closeness of angels and human beings during 185 to guardian angels 104–6 for health 201–4 inspired by apocryphal texts 201–4, 207–11 invoking angels through 186–97, 199 to Michael 105, 178–9, 192–3, 194, 195 relating to the posthumous fate for the soul 125–6, 127, 134, 195 undermining notions of angelic constancy 215–19 see also benedictions; liturgy preaching; see sermons pride demonic bows made from 94 sin of 26–8, 35, 100 priests attended by angels 104, 214 ignorance of 42 likened to angels 64, 72–3 likened to demons 72–3 principalities, angelic order of 6 prison angelic visitations in 157, 216 demons threatened with 203 otherworldly locations of souls likened to 128 prophecy delivered by angels 9–10, 133–4, 154–5, 161, 168–9, 215 delivered by ordinary people 168–9 delivered by saints 151–2 usefulness for hagiographers of 159–63 protection attributed to angels 79–88, 92, 95–7, 98–100, 103–6, 167, 213–14, 215–18 sought through prayer 82, 104–6, 196–7 withdrawn from sinners 83–4 Psalms, book of 79, 107–9; see also biblical texts pseudo-Dionysius 6–7 psychopomps angelic 115–16, 123–6, 129–30, 132–4, 135–43, 161, 165, 166, 168–70, 174 demonic 115–16, 129–30, 135–7, 142–3 human 128 in the form of birds 8 presence indicated by deathbed signs 132–4, 137, 165, 166

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Index present even in the absence of deathbed signs 139–41, 143–4 Purgatory 113; see also otherworld, places of purgation in Raguel, angel 187, 193–4, 195, 205, 206 Raphael, angel in the Bible 98–9, 149, 187, 197, 200, 208, 213 images of 197–9 invocations of 187, 195–6, 201, 204, 205, 206, 211 St Swithun likened to 153 Ravenna 55–6 Regula magistri (‘Rule of the Master’) 185–6 Regularis concordia (‘Monastic Agreement’) 36, 74, 217 relics of angels 163 of saints 46, 163, 197–8 replacement, doctrine of 29–33, 36–7, 38–9, 41–4 resurrection of Dryhthelm 117, 124 of humanity 60–2, 73, 113, 172 of Jesus 30 of Merhtheof 82, 128 of the monk of Wenlock 124 Revelation, book of 40, 52–3, 54–6, 110–11, 119n25, 178, 180, 187n12; see also biblical texts Ripon, abbatial succession of 160–2, 164–5 role models angelic 46–7, 54, 56–9, 60–3, 64–5, 66–7, 74–5 saintly 63–4 unattainable 65–7, 176 Rumiel, angel 196, 197–9, 200 Sabael, angel 203–4 Sabaoc, angel 193–4 Sadducees 61–2 saints changing importance relative to angels 151, 152, 153, 173–4, 183–4, 218–19 deaths of 132–4, 137–8, 139–42, 156, 160–2, 164–5, 166 distinguished from ordinary people by hagiographers 165–8, 170, 171–2 feasts in honour of 177–84 likened to angels 73, 153 as role models 63–4 secrecy of 154–8, 161–2 side-lining troublesome details about 159–62

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visions of 152, 153n15 visited by angels 149–51, 153–60, 162–3, 164–5, 171 see also hagiography; miracles; relics; and entries for individual saints Samson (biblical figure) 87 Samson, bishop of Dol 157 Sanctus, the 185 Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna 55–6 Satan, see Devil, the scepticism 13, 144–5, 199–200 seeds, blessings for 207–11, 217; see also benedictions, extra-sacramental ‘Seneca’, boy from York 134, 168–70, 172 seraphim angelic order of 6, 57–8 in the Bible 185 foretelling St Dunstan’s death 174 invocations of 186, 192, 195 restraining the winds at Creation 18–19 sermons on the angelic fall 27, 38–9 on the angelic hierarchy 5–7, 31–2, 38–9, 41, 52–3 circulating under the name of Augustine 64, 129–30, 135–8 circulating under the name of Gregory the Great 93 on Creation 22, 27, 28–30, 38–9 on death and the otherworld 119–20, 129–30, 135–9 on the emulation of angels 46–7, 54, 56–9, 71 on guardian angels 81, 87, 91, 92–7, 98–9, 102–4 Hiberno-Latin 129–30, 135–9 influence on Beowulf 102–3 influence on hagiographers 142–3, 221 on Judgement Day 110–11, 112 on Michael 98–9, 177, 180–4 on the temptation of Christ 135 universalizing tendency of 135–9, 142–3 sex blessed by God 65 intended by Lucifer 40 renunciation of 60–4, 71 Shenoute, Egyptian abbot 87 Shepherd of Hermas 88–91, 97; see also apocryphal texts shepherds angels as 87, 92, 97, 100–1 attended by angels 141–2 demons as 92, 97 Jesus as 55–6 Sigeric, archbishop of Canterbury 42 Sigeweard, lay correspondent of Ælfric 39

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Sigewulf, Northumbrian priest 24, 25–6, 28 Simiel, angel 193–4 sin Adam and Eve’s ignorance of 65–6 of the angels 26–8, 36–7 incited by demons 82–3, 84–5, 88–97, 100–3 guardian angels unable to prevent 84, 88, 94–7, 99–103, 105–6, 215–17 reported to God by angels 96, 103–4 reported to God by demons 93 sinners abandoned by angels 84, 87, 99–100 accompanied by angels 88–97, 103–4 accompanied by demons 82–5, 88–97 deaths of 84, 115–16, 125–9, 130–2, 135–7, 142–3 visions seen by 130–2, 167, 176 Solomon, biblical king dialogues with Saturn 19n2, 91 demons interrogated by 202–3 Solomon and Saturn I 200 Solomon and Saturn II 40, 91–7, 102 songs heard at death 132, 137–8 sung by angels and saints 118, 132, 137–8, 140, 156, 164, 170–1 taught to human beings by angels 174, 185 souls attended by angels, see angels, guardian creation of 21–2 extracted from bodies by angels 121–2 placed into bodies by angels 80 post-mortem fate of, see death; otherworld; saints; sinners Sphendonael, demon 202–4 spirits, see angels; demons; souls stars angels likened to 23, 40 associated with the naming of Adam 181n100 creation of 22 observations of 170 Stephen, abbot of Reiti 133 Stephen, monk of Ripon 133, 157n33, 160–2, 164–5, 167 stone sculpture, see art Sulpicius Severus, Gallo-Roman hagiographer 157 sun, angels responding to the rising and setting of 92–3, 97 Sunniulf, abbot of Randan 119 supernatural, historiography of 2–3 Swithun, bishop of Winchester likened to an angel 73, 153 miracles attributed to 152, 171, 172–4, 174–5

Tatberht, abbot of Ripon 160–2 teachers angels likened to 92–3, 94–5, 96–7, 174 demons likened to 92–3, 94–5, 96, 100 Testament of Solomon 202–4; see also apocryphal texts thegns visions seen by 130–2 worldly deeds of 34 Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus 190, 199 Theodric, monk of Winchester 176 Thessalonians, first book of 113; see also biblical texts Thessalonians, second book of 112n8; see also biblical texts ‘Three Utterances of the Soul’ (homiletic exemplum) 129–30, 135–7 thrones, angelic order of 6 thrones, vacated by fallen angels 33, 37; see also replacement, doctrine of Tobias 98–9, 149 Tobit, book of 54n16, 68, 149, 187n12, 197, 213; see also biblical texts travellers blessings for 214–15; see also benedictions, extra-sacramental magical recommendations for 206 Tubuas, angel 193–5 Tubuel, angel 193–5 two spirits, doctrine of 88–97 Tyconius, exegete 216 uita angelica, see ‘angelic life’ Uriel, angel 187, 193–4, 195, 196, 197–9, 200, 205, 206 Utrecht Psalter 106–9 Vercelli homilies 92–7, 101, 110n1; see also sermons vices, see pride; sin virginity, see ‘angelic life’; sex, renunciation of virtues accrued by the soul to arm the guardian angel 94–5, 97 associated with particular angels ranks 57–8 inspired in human beings by angels 88–9, 92, 94–5, 97 recorded by angels 92–3, 99, 130–2 see also ‘angelic life’ virtues, angelic order of 6, 58 Vision of St Paul 196–7, 99, 115–16, 119, 130–1; see also apocryphal texts visions and dreams 165–6, 171, 174

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Index granted to ordinary people 82–4, 117–24, 127–9, 165–70, 172–5, 176 granted to saints 96, 115–16, 122, 141, 156–7, 166 of the otherworld 82, 96, 115, 117–24, 127–9, 134 proofs offered for 84, 166 unidentified figures in 176 Walahfrid Strabo, abbot of Reichenau 89 walls exegetical interpretations of 49 in the otherworld 122 paintings upon 45–6 weather magical recommendations against adverse effects of 205 in the otherworld 128 prayers against adverse effects of 208; see also benedictions, extrasacramental Wenlock (Shropshire), visionary monk of 82–4, 87–8, 122–3, 127, 128, 133 Wetti, monk of Reichenau 87 Whitby (North Yorkshire) Life of St Gregory written at 5, 6, 9 miracles associated with 166 Wilfrid, Northumbrian bishop 133–4, 140–1, 157, 160–2, 164–5, 166, 167

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Winchester (Hampshire) Michaeline dedications at 179n93 miracles associated with 73, 152, 172–4, 176 novel angelology of 34–42 prayers from 208–9 winds 18–19, 110 Wisdom, book of 29n45; see also biblical texts wisdom literature 18–20, 40, 91–2, 112, 200 witnesses, in hagiography 158, 164–8, 169–70, 171–2 Woden, god 178 world creation of the 17–19, 21–3, 25, 32–3 end of the 110–11 seen from the otherworld 82–4 Wulfstan, archbishop of York on the creation of human beings 42 on guardian angels 103–4 Wulfstan, monk of Winchester 35, 176 Wynfrith, see Boniface, West Saxon missionary York (North Yorkshire) church dedicated to Michael at 179n93 stories told at 134, 168–70, 172, 176 Zacharias I, pope 194 Zeus, god 189