St Edmund, King and Martyr: Changing Images of a Medieval Saint (York Medieval Press) 1903153263, 9781903153260

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Rites of Passage: Cultures of Transition in the Fourteenth Century Edited by NICOLA F. MCDONALD and W. MARK ORMROD

Piety, Fraternity and Power: Religious Gilds in Late Medieval Yorkshire, 1389-1547 DAVID J. F. CROUCH

Nunneries, Learning and Spirituality in Late Medieval England PAUL LEE

St William of York CHRISTOPHER NORTON

Edited by W. MARK ORMROD, GWILYM DODD and ANTHONY MUSSON

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S

t Edmund King and Martyr

Changing Images of a Medieval Saint

ANTHONY BALE (ed.)

Medieval Petitions: Grace and Grievance

ST EDMUND, KING AND MARTYR

Other titles available

Changing Images of a Medieval Saint

York Medieval Press

ST EDMUND, king and martyr, supposedly killed by Danes (or `Vikings’) in 869, was one of the pre-eminent saints of the Middle Ages; his cult was favoured and patronised by several English kings and gave rise to a rich array of visual, literary, musical and political artefacts. Celebrated throughout England, especially at the abbey of Bury St Edmunds, the saint also inspired separate cults in France, Iceland and Italy. The essays in this collection offer a range of readings from a variety of disciplines – literature, history, music, art history – and of sources – including chronicles, poems, theological material – providing an overview of the multi-faceted nature of St Edmund’s cult from the ninth century to the early modern period. These studies demonstrate the openness and dynamism of a medieval saint’s cult, showing how the saint’s image could be used in many and changing contexts: Edmund’s image was bent to various political and propagandistic ends, often articulating conflicting messages and ideals, negotiating identity, politics and belief.

Contributors:

ANTHONY BALE, LISA

COLTON, A. S. G. EDWARDS, ALISON FINLAY, ALEXANDRA GILLESPIE, PAUL ANTONY HAYWARD, CARL PHELPSTEAD, REBECCA PINNER.

Jacket: The Martyrdom of King Edmund by the Danes, from the Carmelite Missal, BL MS Add. 29704, f.160v. YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS

Edited by ANTHONY BALE

St Edmund, King and Martyr Changing images of a medieval saint

YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS York Medieval Press is published by the University of York’s Centre for Medieval Studies in association with Boydell & Brewer Limited. Our objective is the promotion of innovative scholarship and fresh criticism on medieval culture. We have a special commitment to interdisciplinary study, in line with the Centre’s belief that the future of Medieval Studies lies in those areas in which its major constituent disciplines at once inform and challenge each other.

Editorial Board (2005–2009): Professor J. G. Wogan-Browne (Dept of English and Related Literature) Dr T. Ayers (Dept of History of Art) Professor P. P. A. Biller (Dept of History) Dr J. W. Binns (Dept of English and Related Literature) Dr Gabriella Corona (Dept of English and Related Literature) Professor W. M. Ormrod (Chair, Dept of History) Dr K. F. Giles (Dept of Archaeology)

Consultant on Manuscript Publications: Professor Linne Mooney (Department of English and Related Literature)

All enquiries of an editorial kind, including suggestions for monographs and essay collections, should be addressed to: The Academic Editor, York Medieval Press, University of York, Centre for Medieval Studies, The King’s Manor, York, YO1 7EP (E-mail: [email protected]).

Publications of York Medieval Press are listed at the back of this volume.

St Edmund, King and Martyr Changing images of a medieval saint

Edited by Anthony Bale

YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS

©  Contributors 2009 All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2009 A York Medieval Press publication in association with The Boydell Press an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9  Woodbridge  Suffolk IP12 3DF  UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue  Rochester NY 14620  USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com and with the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York ISBN  978–1–903153–26–0

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents Preface

vii

List of Contributors

ix

List of Abbreviations

xi

Introduction: St Edmund’s Medieval Lives Anthony Bale

1

1. King, Martyr and Virgin: Imitatio Christi in Ælfric’s Life of St Edmund 27 Carl Phelpstead 2. Chronology, Genealogy and Conversion: The Afterlife of St Edmund 45 in the North Alison Finlay 3. Geoffrey of Wells’s Liber de infantia sancti Edmundi and the ‘Anarchy’ of King Stephen’s Reign Paul Antony Hayward

63

4. Music and Identity in Medieval Bury St Edmunds Lisa Colton

87

5. Medieval Images of St Edmund in Norfolk Churches Rebecca Pinner

111

6. John Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund: Politics, Hagiography and Literature A. S. G. Edwards

133

7. St Edmund in Fifteenth-Century London: The Lydgatian Miracles of St Edmund Anthony Bale

145

8. The Later Lives of St Edmund: John Lydgate to John Stow Alexandra Gillespie

163

Select Bibliography

187

Index

193

Preface The essays in this volume stem from a very productive and rewarding public seminar held at Birkbeck College, University of London, in 2004. The seminar, entitled St Edmund: Royalty, Martyrdom, Masculinity, was sponsored by Birkbeck’s School of English and Humanities but was not just focused on literary texts. The seminar brought together an exciting and diverse range of disciplines: Old and Middle English studies, Scandinavian studies, music, art history, histories of gender and sexuality, book history, theology, political history. The audience, comprising scholars, students and members of the public, likewise attested to the appeal and relevance of the saint and to the ongoing blossoming of ‘medieval studies’, broadly conceived. The essays assembled here contribute a range of readings of St Edmund’s cult, from different disciplines, and also offer a kind of history of St Edmund’s cult in its many different facets, from the ninth century to the early modern period. The time-frame of this collection covers the chronological span of Edmund’s medieval cult, from the murky circumstances of the saint’s death and his first vita, written between 985 and 987 by Abbo of Fleury, to a life of the saint written in newly Protestant sixteenth-century England. This collection is not, however, intended to provide an exhaustive account of the cult of St Edmund; given the enormous range and reach of the cult, such would be an over-ambitious undertaking. Rather, the guiding principle to these essays is the rewritings, continuities and reconceptualisations of sanctity represented in Edmund’s changing saintly image. In this way, the intention of the volume is to show the openness and dynamism of a medieval saint’s cult, to demonstrate how the saint’s image could be used in many and changing contexts. Edmund’s image was bent to various political and propagandistic ends, negotiating identity, politics and belief. While Edmund’s iconographic attributes generally remain constant – crowned or shot through with arrows – this stability belies a variety of rewritings of his life and a steady accretion of traditions and apocrypha. When we think of medieval people being devoted to a saint, we need to prompt ourselves to ask what it is that people were devoted to; the substance of devotion is not necessarily fixed or stable, and it is not easily retrievable. Thus this collection of essays alights on those key but often neglected interventions in the cult of St Edmund at which new images were produced, in which traditions were invented, and in which older elements of the cult were elided. This collection is intended to put multi- and inter-disciplinary scholarship into practice, for which a saint’s cult makes an ideal subject. The essays gathered here mine a rich seam of polyglot texts, translations, images, music, vii

Preface ideas, politics and myth buried in Edmund’s cult. The cult touches kings (among them Stephen, Richard II, Henry VI), poets (notably John Lydgate), and a great many anonymous medieval people who engaged with Edmund’s saintly image, through pilgrimage, wall-painting, stained glass, sermons, prayer and so on. And moreover, through Edmund’s cult we can query conventional boundaries, such as Scandinavian: English; pre-Conquest: postConquest; national: regional; strength: weakness; mercy: vengeance; medieval: modern; elite: popular.

viii

List of Contributors Anthony Bale is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, and has held positions at the universities of Oxford, Tel Aviv and Michigan. He has written a study of representations of Judaism in medieval England, The Jew in the Medieval Book (2006), and is now working on Christian–Jewish relations and concepts of fear and terror in the later Middle Ages. Lisa Colton is a Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Huddersfield. In 2008, Lisa held a Visiting Scholarship at St John’s College, Oxford, in order to work on a monograph exploring aspects of music and identity in late medieval England. She has published articles in Plainsong and Medieval Music and the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, as well as the first full published transcription of the York Masses. A. S. G. Edwards is Professor of Textual Studies at De Montfort University, Leicester. He has published widely in the fields of medieval and early modern literature, textual criticism and bibliography. He co-authored (with Julia Boffey) A New Index of Middle English Verse (2005). Alison Finlay is Reader in Medieval English and Icelandic Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of Fagrskinna: A Catalogue of the Kings of Norway (2004) and has published articles on Old Icelandic sagas and poetry. Alexandra Gillespie is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto. She is the editor of John Stow (1525–1605) and the Making of the English Past (2004) and a forthcoming collection of essays, Book Production in England, 1350–1535; she is the author of Print Culture and the Medieval Author (2006). Paul Antony Hayward teaches medieval history at Lancaster University, England. Chiefly interested in the development of historical writing in the Middle Ages, he has edited The Winchcombe and Coventry Chronicles: Hitherto Unnoticed Witnesses to the Work of John of Worcester (2009), and is the author of The Politics of History in Anglo-Norman England (forthcoming). With James Howard-Johnston he co-edited The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Essays on the Contribution of Peter Brown (2000). Carl Phelpstead is a Senior Lecturer at Cardiff University, where he teaches Old English and Old Norse. His most recent book is Holy Vikings: Saints’ Lives in the Old Icelandic Kings’ Sagas (2007). Rebecca Pinner is a doctoral student in the School of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Her research interests centre on late ix

Contributors medieval popular religious belief and practice, in particular the social and cultural construction of sanctity and the representation of saints in both the Middle Ages and today.

x

List of Abbreviations BHL BL CPR EAN EETS ES EETS OS LALME MED MPL NIMEV NLA ODNB PSIA RC RRAN STC

TLES VCH

Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina British Library Calendar of the Patent Rolls A. E. Nichols, The Early Art of Norfolk (Kalamazoo, 2002) Early English Text Society, Extra Series Early English Text Society, Original Series A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English, ed. A. McIntosh et al., 4 vols. (Aberdeen, 1986) The Middle English Dictionary The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. H. N. MacCracken, 2 vols., EETS ES 107, OS 192 (London, 1911–34) New Index of Middle English Verse, ed. A. S. G. Edwards and J. Boffey (Woodbridge, 2006) Nova Legenda Anglie, ed. C. Horstmann, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1901) The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. L. Benson (Oxford, 1987) Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum, ed. H. W. C. Davis et al., 4 vols. (Oxford, 1913–) A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640, 3 vols. (London, 1976–91) Three Lives of English Saints, ed. M. Winterbottom (Toronto, 1972) Victoria County History

Editorial Note The terms ‘Dane’, ‘Danish’, ‘Viking’ and ‘viking’ are used variously in the essays gathered here to describe St Edmund’s adversaries; the inconsistency in this nomenclature derives from medieval accounts of those who killed St Edmund. References to John Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund are given by line number and refer to the forthcoming edition of the poem, edited by Anthony Bale and A. S. G. Edwards.

xi

Introduction: St Edmund’s Medieval Lives Anthony Bale

In the following pages I will introduce the vitae and cult of St Edmund, providing an overview of the chronology of Edmund’s life, a brief account of the role of the abbey at Bury St Edmunds in Edmund’s cult, a history of how the cult was celebrated, and a survey of some key scholarly approaches to medieval hagiography. For scholarly studies of medieval Bury St Edmunds the enduring work of M. R. James, M. D. Lobel, Antonia Gransden and Rodney Thomson remains essential;1 their scholarship provides a comprehensive context to monastic and cultural life at Bury, that context in which the cult of St Edmund was constantly nurtured, performed, promoted and revised. The vita of St Edmund: a chronology The outline of Edmund’s life is conventionally given thus: Edmund, king of East Anglia and martyr, was born around 840 (later traditions state he was crowned as a youth, in 855); he was killed by Danish invaders on 20 November 869. At Hoxne, a Suffolk village, a monument now stands to Edmund, marking the putative site at which his martyrdom is said to have taken place.2 In a passage discussed in greater detail below by Carl Phelpstead (pp. 30–31), the near-contemporary Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (compiled c.  890) merely records that Edmund fought the Danes, the Danes were victorious, Edmund was killed and the Danes took the land.3 Another early

1

See in particular M. R. James, On the Abbey of S. Edmund at Bury (Cambridge, 1895); M. D. Lobel, The Borough of Bury St Edmund’s: A Study in the Government and Development of a Monastic Town (Oxford, 1935); A. Gransden, ‘The Legends and Traditions Concerning the Origins of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds’, English Historical Review 100 (1985), 1–24; The Archives of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, ed. R. Thomson (Woodbridge, 1980). 2 The year of the martyrdom is sometimes given as 870, on which see D. Whitelock, ‘Fact and Fiction in the Legend of St Edmund’, PSIA 31 (1969), 217–33. Bradfield St Clare, rather than Hoxne, has been proposed as the site of the martyrdom; see S. E. West, ‘A New Site for the Martyrdom of St Edmund’, PSIA 35 (1985), 223–4. The location of the martyrdom at Hoxne is probably an eleventh-century invention; see below, p. 3. 3 The context of these accounts is considered in detail by M. Mostert, King Edmund of East Anglia: Chapters in Historical Criticism (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 23–5.

1

Anthony Bale source, Asser’s Life of King Alfred (written in 893), includes an account of the king’s death based on that given in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: In the same year [i.e. AD 869/870], Edmund, king of the East Angles, fought fiercely against that [Danish] army. But alas, he was killed there with a large number of his men, and the Vikings rejoiced triumphantly; the enemy were masters of the battlefield, and they subjected that entire province to their authority.4

Neither the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle nor Asser mention a martyrdom ordeal. As is the case with many saints’ lives, there is little in the biography of St Edmund that can be regarded as fact; the story of his life quickly became overlaid with legend, apocryphal narratives and new traditions. In contrast to the rather spare accounts from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Asser, Edmund was revered as a martyr and saint fairly soon after his death: coins from before 900, bearing Edmund’s memorial image, show the recognition of Edmund’s cult by the Danes, whose own ancestors had slain the saint.5 Susan Ridyard has argued that, rather than growing out of popular enthusiasm, the cult was used by the Danes to control East Anglia.6 In the mid-tenth century, Abbo of Fleury (c. 945–1004) wrote the first hagiographical narrative of Edmund’s life and martyrdom;7 this was based on an oral account given by Archbishop Dunstan (d. 988), communicated to Abbo. Abbo, abbot of St Benoît-sur-Loire, had been educated at the schools of Paris, Reims and Orléans, and spent several years at Ramsey (Huntingdonshire).8 According to Abbo’s prologue, Dunstan had listened to Edmund’s former arms-bearer recount the story of Edmund’s martyrdom. Dunstan narrated this to Abbo and, on returning to Ramsey, Abbo was commissioned to write a Latin life of Edmund. This, he states, had never before been done. Antonia Gransden suggests that the founder of Ramsey, Oswald (d. 992), commissioned the life in order to extend the cult of saints in East Anglia, possibly as a response to the development of Northumbrian cults.9 An Anglo-Saxon version, a kind of translation at once abbreviated and augmented, of Abbo’s

4 5

6 7

8 9

Translation from Asser, Alfred the Great, ed. and trans. S. Keynes and M. Lapidge (Harmondsworth, 1983), p. 78. These are now in the British Museum in London (gallery 41, room 32). See C. E. Blunt, ‘The Saint Edmund Memorial Coinage’, PSIA 31 (1969), 234–55, and comments by Phelpstead and Finlay, below p. 30 and p. 46. S. J. Ridyard, The Royal Saints of Anglo-Saxon England: A Study of West Saxon and East Anglian Cults (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 211–33. Abbo’s text is BHL 2392, printed in TLES, pp. 67–87. On Abbo, see P. Riché, Abbon de Fleury: Un Moine Savant et Combatif (vers 950–1004) (Turnhout, 2004), esp. pp. 40–3; also, A. Gransden, ‘Abbo of Fleury’s Passio Sancti Eadmundi’, Revue Bénédictine 105 (1995), 20–78. ‘Dunstan (d. 988), archbishop of Canterbury’, ODNB. Gransden, ‘Legends and Traditions’, p. 5.

2

Introduction text was made by Ælfric of Eynsham (c. 950–c. 1010) within his collection of saints’ lives. Abbo’s life formed the enduring template of Edmund’s vita, and manuscripts of the work continued to circulate into the fifteenth century.10 The basic details of Abbo’s account are thus: the Danish pagan Hinguar attacked East Anglia and sent an ambassador to Edmund, king of East Anglia, who was at this point residing at the place Abbo calls ‘Haeglisdun’. The Danish communiqué demanded that Edmund reign under Hinguar. One of Edmund’s bishops advised the king to surrender or flee, but Edmund swore his devotion to his men and to Christ. Citing Christ’s example, Edmund then said that he would not slay Hinguar’s ambassador because he did not wish to stain his hands with blood; Edmund told the ambassador that he would submit to Hinguar if the Danish invader converted to Christianity. His ambassador having returned, Hinguar ordered the seizure of Edmund. Edmund discarded his weapons, was bound, ‘tried’ before Hinguar, scourged and then tied to a tree. During this ordeal, Edmund repeatedly called out to Christ, further stimulating the Danes’ ire. The Danes then shot arrows into Edmund’s body, until he resembled a hedgehog; then the Danes beheaded Edmund, and discarded the head in woodland. A range of miracles is then said to have taken place: particularly popular in medieval imagery is the story of a wolf that guarded Edmund’s head until the head was found (miraculously shouting ‘Here! Here! Here!’) and reunited with the body. Early accounts of Edmund’s death do not agree on the site of martyrdom (Abbo gives ‘Haeglisdun’, other accounts name ‘Sutton’, and later monastic documents give Hoxne); none locate it at Bury.11 Around the memory of Edmund grew a rich and versatile cult; the saint was lauded not only as an exemplary Christian, but also as a model king, scholar, virgin and East Anglian. A small chapel was soon set up at the site of Edmund’s martyrdom, but when Edmund’s body was found to be incorrupt the body was moved to Beodericisworth (i.e. Bury); it is unknown precisely when the body of St Edmund reached Bury, although this can probably be dated to the early years of the tenth century.12 According to the Bury monk Hermann (late eleventh century), between 1010 and 1013 the saint’s body was removed from Suffolk to London, by the monk Ailwyn (or Egelwin) in

10

Medieval Libraries of Great Britain: A List of Surviving Books, ed. N. R. Ker, 2nd edn (London, 1987), s.v. ‘Bury St Edmunds’. 11 See Gransden, ‘Legends and Traditions’, pp. 8–9. 12 A. Gransden, ‘The Cult of St Mary at Beodricsworth and then in Bury St Edmunds Abbey to c. 1150’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 55 (2004), 627–53, argues that the church at Beodericisworth, later Bury, was first dedicated to the Virgin and only later, when Edmund’s cult was well established, dedicated to the martyr. In the later medieval period, the date of the first Translation of Edmund’s body to Beodericisworth was given as some time during the reign of Æthelstan (893/4–924).

3

Anthony Bale order to protect it from renewed Danish raids;13 having performed a range of miracles for Londoners, the body returned to Bury. Ailwyn’s presence was required, some forty years later, to confirm the authenticity and the incorrupt nature of the body when the coffin was opened at Bury by Abbot Leofstan (abbot 1045–65).14 The wealthy Benedictine abbey at Beodericisworth was rededicated to Edmund in 1095 and the reputedly incorrupt corpse was translated into the abbey church in 1097.15 The erection of the shrine was part of a concerted effort by the abbey to promote the cult, which included, also in the late eleventh century, a collection of miracles of St Edmund written at Bury by Hermann.16 Certainly from around this time, if not earlier, Edmund’s cult ‘sustains the idea of St Edmund as inhabiting a pivotal position between East Anglia as a discrete political entity and those outsiders seeking to consolidate their authority over it’.17 Bury had secured its place as the focus of Edmund’s cult; with its close links to the English Crown and its distinctive East Anglian identity, Bury became a popular and lucrative pilgrimage site. Gransden has described a ‘boom’ in Edmund’s cult from the 1020s, commensurate with the ‘spectacular development’ of other Anglo-Saxon saints’ cults.18 Ridyard has argued that Anglo-Saxon cults blossomed in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest.19 Edmund’s cult seems only to have been recognized formally by the Church in 1122, although it was clearly well established before this.20 In the period around 1140, before St Thomas Becket’s shrine at Canterbury garnered massive celebrity, Edmund’s shrine at Bury was probably the most popular pilgrimage site in England.21 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21

See S. Yarrow, Saints and their Communities: Miracle Stories in Twelfth-Century England (Oxford, 2006), p. 35. Memorials of Saint Edmund’s Abbey, ed. T. Arnold, 3 vols., Rolls Series 96 (London, 1890– 96), I, 40–6. The change of name from Beodericisworth to Bury St Edmunds or Saintedmundsbury occurred by 1050; see Lobel, Borough of Bury, pp. 4–5. On the translation of Edmund’s body, see the near-contemporary account given by Hermann, monk of Bury, in Memorials, ed. Arnold, I, 84–91; this is discussed by Yarrow, Saints and their Communities, pp. 24–31. On the movement and the changing state of Edmund’s corpse, see Gransden, ‘Legends and Traditions’, pp. 5–7, which also nicely describes the conventions and topoi of hagiography used in the Edmund legend. On Hermann and his text, see Yarrow, Saints and their Communities, pp. 24–62. Yarrow, Saints and their Communities, p. 34. Gransden, ‘Legends and Traditions’, p. 11. S. Ridyard, ‘Condigna Veneratio: Post-Conquest Attitudes to the Saints of the AngloSaxons’, Anglo-Saxon Studies 9 (1987), 180–206. See C. G. Loomis, ‘The Growth of the St Edmund Legend’, Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature 14 (1932), 83–113 (p. 84). See R. H. C. Davis, ‘The Monks of St Edmund’, History 40 (1955), 227–39 (esp. p. 234); B. Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record and Event, 1000–1215 (Philadelphia, 1982), pp. 105–6, on the ‘competition’ between the cults of Cuthbert, Edmund and Thomas.

4

Introduction Much work on the abbey buildings at Bury was done during the abbacy of Anselm (abbot 1121–48), with significant steps being made in new building.22 Anselm, who travelled widely and was a close friend of Henry I (1068/9–1135, r. 1100–), seems to have actively promoted the interests of Bury at the English court and in northern France, and would have realized that the community of St Edmund’s men needed splendid buildings. The abbey itself was largely finished by 1150 and would have presented an imposing, indeed spectacular, monument to St Edmund and the community under his patronage and protection.23 The twelfth century has generally been characterized as the ‘golden age’ of the abbey at Bury and was certainly the period in which the cult of St Edmund was most energetically developed and promoted. Much of this sense of a high point in Bury’s spiritual and material wealth is due to the dazzling figure of Abbot Samson (abbot 1182–1211), ‘truly great as a man of many activities and as a ruler’.24 Samson, according to the Bury monk and historian Jocelin of Brakelond (fl. 1180–1200), had a particular reason for his devotion to St Edmund: aged nine, he had a dream that Edmund saved him from the devil; his mother then took him to visit Edmund’s shrine. As abbot, Samson was responsible for the increased prosperity of the abbey, the development of written records there, and the confirmation of its privileges; as Jocelin describes, Samson made some key interventions, which considerably strengthened the abbey’s positions.25 As well as refurbishing the shrine of St Edmund following the fire of 1198, Samson moved towards direct management of the abbey’s estates, he travelled between his manors as a supervisor, he banished the town’s Jews, he founded the hospital of St Saviour at Babwell, and he repurchased for the abbey the large and lucrative manor of Mildenhall. Samson also reworked the version of the miracles of St Edmund found in the famous illustrated Pierpont Morgan manuscript.26 Key texts in the development of Edmund’s cult continued to be produced at Bury: the Annals of St Neots, written at Bury probably in the twelfth century, furnished further details of Edmund’s life, including the widely accepted date of his accession in 855.27 Around 1150 Gaulfridus (Geoffrey) of

22 23 24

25 26

27

James, On the Abbey, p. 119. On Anselm’s fostering of the cult of St Edmund, see Gransden, ‘The Cult of St Mary’. Such is the assessment of D. Knowles, The Monastic Order in England: A History of the Development from the times of St Dunstan to the Fourth Lateran Council 943–1216 (Cambridge, 1940), p. 306. See Gransden’s biography of Samson, ODNB. C. Hahn, ‘Peregrinatio et natio: The Illustrated Life of Edmund, King and Martyr’, Gesta 30 (1991), 119–39 (the vita is BHL 2398); the text of the Morgan manuscript miracles is BHL 2395–6. Whitelock, ‘Legends and Traditions’, p. 224; ‘Edmund (d. 869), king of the East Angles’, ODNB; The Annals of St Neots with Vita Prima Sancti Neoti, ed. D. M. Dumville and M. Lapidge (Cambridge, 1985).

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Anthony Bale Wells (‘de Fontibus’) produced his De Infantia Sancti Eadmundi (examined in detail by Paul Antony Hayward in this volume) at Bury, describing the childhood of Edmund and further miracles connected with him. Around the same time, a further set of miracles (now BL Cotton MS Titus A.viii) was produced, attributed to Osbert of Clare (d. c. 1158), prior of Westminster, who also had a Suffolk background.28 A giant compilation made in the fourteenth century at Bury (now Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 240) gathers together a wide range of texts about Edmund’s life and miracles. This was the source in the fifteenth century for much of the long narrative poem, The Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund, written for the English king Henry VI (1421–71) by the Bury monk John Lydgate (c. 1370–1449/50). Lydgate’s rich text is discussed further in the essays in this volume by A. S. G. Edwards, Anthony Bale and Alexandra Gillespie. Bury St Edmunds: abbey, town and saintly community The town and abbey at Bury were crucial to the development and growth of the cult of St Edmund, and they enjoyed an unusual, indeed unique, governmental and religious authority that frames almost every aspect of the medieval cult of St Edmund.29 The town of Bury seems to have been established in the Anglo-Saxon period; a monastery, built of wood, was founded there by Sigeberht (fl. 630/31–654), king of the East Angles, in the mid-seventh century.30 In 1020 the Benedictine abbey at Bury was founded (or possibly refounded) by king Canute (d. 1035), as an expiatory gesture;31 Canute’s father, Sweyn Forkbeard (Sveinn Tjúguskegg Haraldsson, d. 1014), had tried to exact tribute from Bury and was said to have been killed by Edmund, an episode discussed below in Rebecca Pinner’s essay.32 Canute’s stone church was consecrated 28

29 30

31

32

On the complicated history of authorship and attribution of this text, see Paul Antony Hayward’s essay in this volume; also, R. M. Thomson, ‘Two Versions of a Saint’s Life from St Edmund’s Abbey: Changing Currents in Twelfth-Century Monastic Style’, Revue Bénédictine 84 (1974), 383–408; Yarrow, Saints and their Communities, pp. 55–8. A thorough history of the town’s governance is given by Lobel, Borough of Bury. See M. Statham, The Book of Bury St Edmunds (Buckingham, 1988), pp. 11, 25; this information is based on references from Bede and the Liber Eliensis, a twelfth-century Ely chronicle, and is, therefore, not entirely reliable. D. W. Rollason, Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1989), pp. 156–8, surveys Canute’s uses of sanctity in terms of nationalism and the development of a coherent English political identity. Thus the secular canons of Beodericisworth were replaced by Benedictine monks, although, as Antonia Gransden has cogently warned, there is the possibility of continuity between these seculars, devoted to the incorrupt body of St Edmund, and the formally Benedictine monastic community. Moreover, religious from Holme might have formed part of the first monastic community at Bury. See Gransden, ‘Legends and Traditions’, pp. 1; 10; 14–16.

6

Introduction in 1032, but building seems to have been fairly constant and on a grandiose scale between the eleventh century and the 1530s. Abbot Baldwin (abbot 1065–97) was instrumental in furthering Edmund’s cult, in building a giant stone Romanesque pilgrimage church, and drawing up charters, harking back to the saint’s life, which supported Bury’s claims to independence.33 The abbey church, commenced in the 1080s and built on a plan similar to that of Winchester Cathedral, was enormous – its length about 500 feet – and spectacular in decoration;34 it would, Eric Fernie avers, have been in a class with only two or three other buildings of its time, such as the imperial cathedral at Speyer (begun 1030) and the abbey at Cluny (begun 1088).35 Bury’s church, the ruins of which can be seen today, had an exceptional West Front, ‘perhaps the most complex façade structure ever built in Britain or, indeed, on the Continent’, although we know little about its decoration other than that it had magnificent bronze doors.36 The abbey had at least ten chapels, dedicated to saints other than Edmund, some of whom were of particular local significance such as Botolph (d. 680, an East Anglian saint), Jurmin (a seventh-century East Anglian prince), Petronilla (a Roman virgin martyr whose image features frequently in medieval East Anglian church art), and Robert of Bury (d. 1181, said to have been murdered by Bury’s Jews). The religious community at Bury was granted a significant amount of land in 945 by Edmund I of England (r. 939–46), which became known as the ‘banleuca’ of St Edmund; this area was the abbot’s jurisdiction in which he enjoyed all but regal powers;37 the abbot appointed his own justices in the ‘banleuca’ and royal justices did not have authority here. More contentiously, the ‘banleuca’ was exempt from the spiritual jurisdiction of the bishops of Norwich, in whose diocese Bury was located; the abbot of Bury was thus subject directly to the pope, rather than the local bishop. The ‘banleuca’, an ecclesiastical franchise, which became a kind of statelet endorsed by St Edmund’s protection and was directly antagonistic to Norwich, would, for several hundred years, provide a powerful image of belonging and exclusion 33

34

35

36

37

See B. Abou-El-Haj, ‘Bury St Edmunds Abbey between 1070 and 1124: A History of Property, Privilege and Monastic Art Production’, Art History 6 (1983), 1–29; ‘Baldwin’, ODNB. For a hand-list of the various charters known from the medieval abbey, see Thomson, Archives of the Abbey, pp. 45–164. James, On the Abbey; J. Crook, ‘The Architectural Setting of the Cult of St Edmund at Bury 1095–1539’, in Bury St Edmunds. Medieval Art, Archaeology and Economy, ed. A. Gransden (London, 1998), pp. 33–44, describes the Norman influences on the shrine and crypt. See E. Fernie, ‘The Romanesque Church of Bury St Edmunds Abbey’, in Bury St Edmunds, ed. Gransden, pp. 1–15 (p. 5); Fernie’s account usefully supplements that given by James, On the Abbey, in its precise description of the construction of the church. See J. P. McAleer, ‘The West Front of the Abbey Church’, in Bury St Edmunds, ed. Gransden, pp. 22–33; McAleer (p. 23) gives a good summary of the stages in the abbey’s construction, including the various collapses and repairs. See Statham, Book of Bury, p. 11; the inhabitants of Bury paid geld to the abbey, while the rest of Suffolk paid it to the Crown.

7

Anthony Bale based on reverence to St Edmund.38 Alongside the ‘banleuca’, the abbey at Bury retained the Liberty of St Edmund, a large area of west Suffolk in which the abbot had vice-regal rights; in the Liberty, the abbot exercised sheriff’s powers, largely concerned with crime and justice.39 The abbey also developed distinctive, effectively legal, posts with a secular, rather than clerical or moral, remit: the abbey’s cellarer was similar to a lord of the manor, responsible for provisioning the abbey, and the more powerful sacrist executed the abbot’s rights in the borough and had control over the town (but not the abbey) of Bury, including the gaol.40 Thus in considering the context of Edmund’s cult the abbey must be seen not only as a religious foundation but as a political, financial, judicial and legal entity with a distinct and idiosyncratic local identity and a specific territory.41 In addition to its holdings in Bury and Suffolk the abbey enjoyed significant estates in Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Northamptonshire, and had a London property, Bevis Marks, from at least around 1390. The abbey, unusually, also had its own mint, until the fourteenth century.42 The vita of St Edmund – showing the saint as pious yet vengeful to those who encroached on his territory – both fed and was fed by the unusual independence and autonomy of Bury’s abbey. From the end of the eleventh century the abbey had a flourishing scriptorium and an enormous library.43 In the fifteenth century, if not earlier, the abbey was engaged in secular book-selling as well as monastic book production.44 Some of the most splendid and significant English medieval manuscripts come from this milieu: of particular note are the Bury St Edmunds 38

39 40 41

42 43

44

Gransden, ‘Legends and Traditions’, pp. 8–9 describes the hostilities between Bury and Norwich in the eleventh century, when Arfast, bishop of East Anglia, proposed moving his see from Thetford to Bury, which would have incorporated the community at Bury. See The Chronicle of Bury St Edmunds 1212–1301, ed. A. Gransden (London, 1964), pp. xii–xiii. The history and roles of the cellarer and sacrist are explored in detail in Lobel, Borough of Bury, pp. 16–59. This exclusive territory was accompanied, not surprisingly, by an animosity towards the Jews and Friars. According to Jocelin of Brakelond, the Jews were expelled from Bury in 1190 on the grounds that they were ‘not St Edmund’s men’. The Friars were expelled from the town in 1263, having entered the town ‘in violation of the liberties of St Edmund’s church’ (Chronicle of the Abbey, ed. and trans. Gransden, p. 27). See R. J. Eaglen, ‘The Mint at Bury St Edmunds’, in Bury St Edmunds, ed. Gransden, pp. 111–21. On the early history of the book production at Bury, see Webber, ‘The Provision of Books’; also Thomson, ‘The Library of Bury’. A surviving late twelfth-century list of Bury’s books, of some 261 items, gives a detailed picture of intellectual and spiritual interests in the abbey; see R. Sharpe et al., English Benedictine Libraries, the Shorter Catalogues, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues 4 (London, 1995), pp. 50–87. James, On the Abbey; N. Rogers, ‘Fitzwilliam Museum MS 3–1979: A Bury St Edmunds Book of Hours and the Origins of the Bury Style’, in England in the Fifteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1986 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. D. Williams (Woodbridge, 1987), pp. 229–43.

8

Introduction Psalter (Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica MS Reg. lat. 12) and the Bury Bible (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 2).45 Moreover, much of this de luxe book production was concerned with the cult of St Edmund, seen in stunning productions such as the Pierpont Morgan manuscript of the illustrated life of St Edmund (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS M.736) produced c. 1130.46 The abbey was also a centre for historical writing, which often took the form of pièces justificatives for the continuing independence of Bury;47 such books include the beautiful illuminated history of England (now Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 251), made by a Bury monk at the command of Richard II around 1390.48 As described in the essays that follow, the abbey’s scriptorium also made many hagiographical works that elaborated upon the vita and miracles of St Edmund. As well being a destination for national and international books and learning, Bury was also exporting the image of St Edmund through books produced there. A mid-eleventh-century copy of Abbo’s Passio (now Copenhagen, Royal Library MS Gl.Kgl.S.1588, fols. 4v–28r), certainly made in East Anglia and probably at Bury, was owned, by the thirteenth century, by the abbey of St-Denis near Paris.49 From the eleventh century onwards, numerous foreign abbeys (Benedictine, Cluniac, Cistercian and Premonstratensian in France, Germany and the Low Countries) included Edmund in their legendaries and liturgies.50 Closer to home and from a later date, one manuscript (now Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud misc. 683) demonstrates the abbey’s use of vernacular poetry and culture to further Edmund’s cult. This fifteenth-century collection of religious English poetry was organized, made and written at the abbey, although this is not explicit anywhere in the manuscript.51 The manuscript (discussed further below, p. 154) contains a number of devotional texts to St Edmund and other local saints (again, Robert of Bury, Petronilla) and weaves an emphatic sense of Bury’s distinctive spiritual identity with conduct literature, Marian devotion and nationalist sentiments. Behind the flowering of book production at Bury we can discern the

45

46 47 48 49 50 51

On these particular books, see A. Heimann, ‘Three Illustrations from the Bury St Edmunds Psalter and their Prototypes’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 29 (1966), 39–59; C. M. Kauffmann, ‘The Bury Bible (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 2)’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 29 (1966), 60–81. See above, note 26. See Gransden’s chapter, ‘Historical Writing at Bury St Edmunds in the Thirteenth Century’ in her Historical Writing in England I, c. 550 to c. 1307 (London, 1974), 335–54. See John de Taxster (fl. 1240s) in Chronicle, ed. Gransden; V. H. Galbraith, ‘The St Edmundsbury Chronicle, 1296–1301’, EHR 58 (1943), 51–78. Gransden, ‘Abbo of Fleury’s Passio’, p. 65. Gransden, ‘Abbo of Fleury’s Passio’, p. 70. A. Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms 1350–1500 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 112–17.

9

Anthony Bale hand of another dynamic abbot who considerably extended the prestige and wealth of the abbey, namely William Curteys (abbot 1429–46). Curteys built on the legacy of Abbot William Cratfield (abbot 1389–1415), who had managed Bury’s independence well and admitted several magnates (including John of Gaunt and Edmund Mortimer) to Bury’s Confraternity.52 Curteys presided over the visit to St Edmund’s abbey of the boy-king Henry VI over the winter of 1433–4. This episode is recalled in greater detail in the essays in this volume by A. S. G. Edwards and Anthony Bale; suffice to say that the royal visit was accompanied by great splendour, with the king’s party staying until April 1434. Curteys’ abbacy, though splendid, was not window-dressing; under Curteys, book production and scholarship at Bury was encouraged, and Curteys also made significant bequests to Gloucester College, the centre of Benedictine learning in Oxford. Three vitae of St Edmund were written at Bury in the fifteenth century, each of which foregrounds a different aspect of the cult: Andrew Astone’s 1424–6 Vita et Passio of St Edmund (BL, Cotton MS Claudius A.xii, fols. 81r–192r) is focused on the historical distinctiveness of Bury and its abbey, while a life written by Curteys himself in his great register (BL, MS Add. 14848, fols. 240r­–56r) makes much of the legal precedents by which Bury attained its independence.53 Both these Latin lives were largely gatherings of previously inscribed material. The third life written around this time is the English versified Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund by John Lydgate, poet, propagandist and ‘prince-pleaser’. Lydgate, who was possibly educated at Gloucester College in Oxford and spent much of his life as a monk at Bury, was the foremost poet of fifteenth-century England and occupied a role akin to laureate at the court of Henry VI. At Bury, a distinctive spiritual environment was fostered to which Henry VI withdrew; through Lydgate, the monk-poet, the image of St Edmund was furthered and made more prestigious in vernacular culture. Around the same time, the abbey at Bury produced English, versified charters that celebrated St Edmund and justified Bury’s independence.54 Aspects of devotions to St Edmund: an overview St Edmund’s cult did not have a heyday but rather seems to have enjoyed a number of bursts of popularity. Without doubt the cult of St Edmund was focused on the saint’s shrine at Bury but, far from being confined to Suffolk,

52

See ‘Cratfield’, ODNB. By far the fullest and most nuanced treatment of these texts and their contexts is N. J. Heale, ‘Religious and Intellectual Interests at St Edmunds Abbey at Bury and the Nature of English Benedictinism, c. 1350–1450: MS Bodley 240 in Context’ (unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1994). 54 K. A. Lowe, ‘The Poetry of Privilege: Lydgate’s Cartae Versificatae’, Nottingham Medieval Studies 50 (2006), 151–65. 53

10

Introduction Edmund’s medieval cult was popular throughout England and, as Alison Finlay’s essay in this volume shows, in Scandinavia and Iceland. Somewhat separate cults developed at Lucca (from the tenth to the twelfth century) and Toulouse (from the thirteenth century).55 Edmund’s life and miracles were narrated not only in English but in various Anglo-Norman, French and Latin texts: these included widely circulated texts by Henry of Avranches (in Latin verse), an anonymous Passiun de Seint Edmund in French prose, an influential section on Edmund in Geffrei Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis, and Denis Piramus’s Anglo-Norman poem, La Vie Seint Edmund le Rei;56 Piramus himself was probably a monk at Bury. Edmund’s cult spawned a range of traditions and legends, concerned with the saint’s childhood, his saintly relatives, or examples of his potent posthumous vengeance.57 The late-medieval appearance of the shrine at Bury, indubitably the focus of Edmund’s cult, is well known from the fifteenth-century illustrations to the magnificent copy of Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund (BL, Harley MS 2278).58 John Crook has thoroughly investigated the architectural setting of the shrine of St Edmund in the period from the Translation of the body

55

On the cult at Lucca, see Gransden, ‘Abbo of Fleury’s Passio’, pp. 75–8; in a striking example of cultural exchange, the Bury monks’ visits to their Lucchese counterparts may have been responsible for importing the cult of St Zita of Lucca to England: see C. Barron, ‘The Travelling Saint: Zita of Lucca and England’, in Freedom of Movement in the Middle Ages, ed. P. Horden, Harlaxton Medieval Studies XV (Donington, 2007), pp. 186–202. The Toulouse cult concerns a rival set of relics, mostly now held at Arundel Castle; see R. Gem, ‘A Scientific Examination of the Relics of St Edmund at Arundel Castle’, in Bury St Edmunds, ed. Gransden, pp. 45–56, concluding that the Toulouse relics ‘represent a minimum of twelve individual skeletons, and almost certainly more, of both male and female sex’ (p. 52); the altar to Edmund can still be seen in the cathedral of St Sernin at Toulouse. Twelfth-century capitals at St-Denis featuring St Edmund demonstrate the earlier knowledge of the cult in France; see P. Z. Blum, ‘The Saint Edmund Cycle in the Crypt at Saint-Denis’, in Bury St Edmunds, ed. Gransden, pp. 57–68. 56 See D. Townsend, ‘The Vita Sancti Eadmundi of Henry of Avranches’, Journal of Medieval Latin 5 (1995), 95–118, which explores the vita by Henry of Avranches, BHL 3101; La Passiun de Seint Edmund, ed. J. Grant, Anglo-Norman Text Society 36 (London, 1978); J. Grant, ‘The Manuscript Tradition of the Old French Prose Life of St Edmund of East Anglia’, Notes and Queries 26 (1979), 204–6; Gaimar, L’estoire des Engleis, ed. A. Bell, Anglo-Norman Text Society 14 (Oxford, 1960); and, for the vita by Denis Piramus, La Vie Seint Edmund le Rei, ed. H. Kjellamn (Göteborg, 1935, reprinted 1974). Kjellman’s edition (based on one manuscript, before a second in Manchester was identified) is supplemented by W. Rothwell, ‘The Life and Miracles of St. Edmund: A Recently Discovered Manuscript’, Bulletin of the John Rylands’ Library 60 (1977), 135–80, and I. Short, ‘Denis Piramus and the Truth of Marie’s Lais’, Cultura Neolatina 67 (2007), 319–40. A new edition of Piramus’ text is in preparation, edited by D. W. Russell for the Anglo-Norman Text Society. 57 See Whitelock, ‘Legends and Traditions’. 58 The manuscript is now available in facsimile: John Lydgate, The Life of St Edmund, King & Martyr. John Lydgate’s Illustrated Verse Life Presented to Henry VI: A Facsimile of British Library MS Harley 2278, ed. A. S. G. Edwards (London, 2004). It should be noted that the

11

Anthony Bale to the Reformation (when the shrine was dismantled); the shrine, which was built in the 1090s, apparently largely wooden, was located in the church’s apse behind the high altar. This was damaged in a fire of 1198, as described by Jocelin of Brakelond.59 It was after this fire that the coffin, decorated with a golden angel above the site of St Edmund’s heart, was opened, an incident described by Jocelin in an arresting passage of mysterious ceremony. Abbot Samson, accompanied by twelve monks, found Edmund’s body wrapped in a silk cloth, then a linen cloth (‘of wonderful whiteness’), then another silk cloth, and then a further layer of linen at which point the saint’s body became visible; Jocelin continues: … the abbot stopped, saying that he dare not proceed further and see the Saint’s naked flesh. So taking the head in his hands, he groaned as he said, ‘O glorious martyr St Edmund, blessed be the hour in which you were born. O glorious martyr, do not cast me, a miserable sinner, into perdition for daring to touch you; you understand my devotion and purpose.’ And he proceeded to touch the eyes and the very large and prominent nose, and then he felt the breast and the arms, and raising the left hand, he took hold of the Saint’s fingers and put his fingers between them. Continuing, he found that the feet were stiffly upright, as of a man who had died that very day, and he felt the toes, counting them as he went.60

His ‘naked flesh’ having been witnessed, Edmund’s body was replaced in the shrine. In Samson’s desire to touch Edmund’s ‘glorious’ corpse we can see a need to reiterate and re-establish not only the validity of Edmund as an exemplar but also the miraculous immediacy, proximity and authenticity of his physical body. Jocelin’s account of the opening of the tomb is the last clear record of the whereabouts of Edmund’s remains. Following the fire of 1198, the shrine was raised on marble blocks, and in the fourteenth century the shrine known from the later manuscript illustrations took shape: sitting on a Decorated base, the enormous shrine seems to have been multicoloured with paint and jewels and covered in metal plates. Oblations at Edmund’s shrine were large and contributed significantly to the wealth of the abbey. For example, the gifts of Henry Lacy, earl of Lincoln (1249–1311) included ‘a gold cross value 66s. 8d., which stood “on top of the shrine of S. Edmund”… [and] another gold cross with jewels, “which hung on the right side of the shrine, and farther, a carbuncle which was placed at the foot of the said cross”‘.61 At the other end of the scale, the 1439 will of

images of the shrine in this manuscript are somewhat inconsistent and are therefore only of limited use in reconstructing the actual appearance of the shrine. 59 Crook, ‘The Architectural Setting’, p. 39. 60 Jocelin of Brakelond, Chronicle of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, ed. and trans. D. Greenway and J. Sayers (Oxford, 1989), p. 101. 61 James, On the Abbey, p. 136.

12

Introduction John Cowe of Wickham Skeith (Suffolk) left 40d. for the making of an image of St Edmund for the parish church;62 a huge number of people probably visited the shrine at Bury, as well as chapels, wells and images devoted to St Edmund, in a humble fashion and lit a candle, the most common kind of medieval devotion to saints. In 1275 the Prior’s Chapel at Bury was dedicated to Ss Edmund and Stephen, probably on account of increased pilgrimage traffic following the granting of indulgences for those visiting Edmund’s tomb.63 The relics at the shrine were a particular subject of Edward I’s devotion in the 1290s (the king seems to have visited the monastery at Bury some six times between 1296 and 1301);64 after a visit in 1300 he sent his standard to be touched by all of Edmund’s relics.65 While Jocelin of Brakelond claimed that Edmund’s body was whole and incorrupt in the 1190s, the cathedral of St Martin at Lucca claimed St Edmund’s head.66 It is clear, however, that the monks at Bury in the twelfth century believed Edmund’s entire body to be entombed at the Bury shrine, as evinced in the account given by Jocelin. In John Lydgate’s fifteenth-century vita of Edmund, the saying of the antiphon and orison to St Edmund at his shrine meant the granting of two hundred days of pardon.67 The shrine survived unscathed in a great fire in 1465.68 As Alexandra Gillespie explores in her essay below, the shrine was destroyed by iconoclasts in 1539, although no mention was made of Edmund’s body therein; on the other hand, the bones of Ss Botolph and Petronilla, used as weather-charms, were removed from Bury by the reformers.69 It is possible that St Edmund’s body was buried or hidden by the monks before the reformers could reach it. At a parish level, Edmund’s cult was popular and widespread. There are over sixty church dedications to Edmund throughout England and Wales, attesting to the fact that Edmund’s cult was far from isolated in East Anglia. The extent of the saint’s cult is demonstrated by scattered church dedications: from Allestree and Fenny Bentley (Derbyshire) to Maids Moreton (Buckinghamshire), and in Wales at Crickhowell (Powys). Christopher Wren’s church of St Edmund in Lombard Street, London, replaced a twelfth-century church destroyed in the Great Fire of London. Rebecca Pinner’s essay in this volume

62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69

Wills of the Archdeaconry of Sudbury 1439–1474. Vol. 1: 1439–1461, ed. P. Northeast, Suffolk Records Society XLIV (Woodbridge, 2001), #22, p. 11. Chronicle, ed. and trans. Gransden, p. 59. See Galbraith, ‘St Edmundsbury Chronicle’, p. 59. Chronicle, ed. and trans. Granden, p. 157. Gransden, ‘Abbo of Fleury’s Passio’, p. 78. In particular, Hermann’s miracle of the story of the healing of a local girl, Seietha, shows some doubt about the incorruption of Edmund’s body, as discussed by Yarrow, Saints and their Communities, pp. 49–51. Lines 73–80 of The Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund. See N. Scarfe, ‘The Body of St Edmund: An Essay in Necrobiography’, PSIA 31 (1970), 303–17 (p. 316). Scarfe, ‘The Body of St Edmund’, p. 317.

13

Anthony Bale explores Norfolk church dedications to Edmund, drawing out key themes in the ways in which the cult was mediated at parish level. Edmund was certainly an extremely popular subject of mural art in parish churches – from the rustic (as in the fourteenth-century martyrdom image at Bishopsbourne, Kent) to the narrative (the twelfth-century scheme at Fritton, Norfolk), from the regal (Lakenheath, Suffolk) to the downright gory (the fifteenth-century image at Pickering, North Yorkshire). At Abingdon (Berkshire), the bloodied shirt (‘camisia … sanguinolenta’) worn by St Edmund at the hour of his Passion was held as a relic, together with some wood from his coffin and from the tree on which he suffered.70 Two guilds in the wealthy port of Lynn (Norfolk) were dedicated to St Edmund, although their records do not provide much information about the specific nature of devotions to the saint;71 traders from Lynn would have conducted much of their business in and around the Baltic, perhaps giving the Scandinavian elements of Edmund’s vita a particular relevance. The Confraternity of St Edmund at Bury was a very significant political and devotional motor for Edmund’s cult, with an influential membership that counted Henry VI and the early Humanist, Humfrey, duke of Gloucester, among it. Both Henry and Humfrey were patrons of Lydgate’s poetry (which rarely had St Edmund or the interests of Bury far from its concerns) as well as patrons of learning, humanism, texts on statecraft and the endowment of educational institutions and libraries.72 There is evidence too of a dramatic or quasi-dramatic performance, a procession through Bury, in honour of St Edmund on his saint-day.73 Pilgrimage badges depicting Edmund survive and can be seen today at the Moyses Hall museum in Bury; pilgrims bought these cheap tin badges to show they had visited Edmund’s shrine.74 Marian Campbell’s investigation of metalworking connected with Bury shows that many such badges of St Edmund were found at London and Southampton;75 among other things, this suggests international as well as regional pilgrimage, as Southampton was then one of the main ports for travel to the Continent. Campbell discerns two main types of iconography on the pilgrim badges,

70 71 72

73 74 75

Chronicon Monasterii de Abingdon, ed. J. Stevenson (London, 1858), 2.157. See English Gilds, ed. T. Smith, EETS OS 40 (London, 1870), pp. 94, 106. There were at least seven further guilds dedicated to St Edmund in Norfolk alone; see below, p. 114. Two important account of Duke Humfrey and his proximity to Lydgate and Bury have appeared recently: J. Summit, ‘“Stable in study”: Lydgate’s Fall of Princes and Duke Humphrey’s Library’, in John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England, ed. L.  Scanlon and J. Simpson (Notre Dame IN, 2006), pp. 207–31, and D. Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature 1430–1530 (Oxford, 2007), pp. 23–61. A. Crawley, ‘A Saint for Fertility? The Improbable Procession on St Edmund’s Day at Bury’, paper presented at the International Medieval Congress, Kalamazoo, 2000. See B. Spencer, Pilgrim Badges and Secular Badges (London, 1998), p. 181. M. Campbell, ‘Medieval Metalworking and Bury St Edmunds’, in Bury St Edmunds, ed. Gransden, pp. 69–80 (p. 74).

14

Introduction consistent with the other imagery of Edmund’s cult: Edmund is shown semiclothed and shot through with arrows, or crowned and robed with an arrow in his hand.76 Edmund’s crowned head, foregrounding his royalty, was also a crucial feature of his ongoing relevance in the Middle Ages, an element of the cult explored in detail in work by Ridyard, Cownie, Folz and reconsidered in this volume by Phelpstead and Edwards.77 Edmund was one of several AngloSaxon royal saints – similar in particular to St Edward the Confessor (1003– 66) – taken up by medieval English kings and used, in the later Middle Ages, as an image of an emphatically English monarchy. Moreover, the abbots of Bury were consistently closely involved in affairs of state, and often linked to the royal court. Kings Henry II and John were guests at the abbey at Bury, although the Crown did not always have a happy relationship with the abbey: we have already noted how it was Edmund I of England who endowed Bury with its ‘banleuca’ of St Edmund but it was in St Edmund’s church on or around St Edmund’s saint-day in 1214 that a number of English barons gathered to swear on Edmund’s altar to exact their liberties from King John.78 Henry II (1133–89, r. 1154–), whose involvement in Edmund’s cult is considered below by Paul Antony Hayward, wrote to the abbot of Bury reporting that Queen Eleanor had called her son Edmund (b. 1245), ‘after the glorious king and martyr Edmund’.79 Edward I (1239–1307, r. 1274–) visited several times, including once in May 1300 ‘in order to dedicate his life to the blessed martyr with deep devotion’; this visit was accompanied by various grants and edicts in the abbey’s favour.80 Henry III (1207–72, r. 1216–) too was closely involved with both Bury and the cult of St Edmund; as Lisa Colton observes in her essay below, Henry’s devotion to Edmund included the singing of an antiphon to the saint during the birth of the king’s fourth son (see below p. 92). Edmund appears, next to St Edward the Confessor and in the company of John the Baptist and Richard II (1367–1400, r. 1377–), on the beautiful Wilton Diptych (which can be seen today in the National Gallery, London), a portable altarpiece made for Richard II in the late fourteenth century. Richard

76

Campbell, ‘Medieval Metalworking’, p. 74. Ridyard, Royal Saints, pp. 211–33; E. Cownie, ‘The Cult of St Edmund in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries: The Language and Communication of a Medieval Saint’s Cult’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 99 (1998), 177–97; R. Folz, ‘Naissance et manifestation d’un culte royal de saint Edmund, roi d’Est-Anglie’, in Festschrift für H. Löwe, ed. K. Mordek and H. Mordek (Cologne, 1978), pp. 226–46. Also, A. Chapman, ‘King Alfred and the Cult of St Edmund’, History Today 53 (2003), 37–43. 78 J. I. Miller, ‘Exploring a Medieval Saint’s Legend and its Context’, in Literature and History, ed. I. E. Cadenhead (Tulsa, 1970), pp. 59–72 (p. 64). 79 Chronicle, ed. and trans. Gransden, p. 13. Abbot Hugo of Bury was one of two bishops sent by Henry III to escort Eleanor from Provence to England. 80 Chronicle, ed. and trans. Gransden, p. 156. 77

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Anthony Bale II was especially devoted to St Edward, but it is clear that he considered St Edmund an auspicious precedent too: Richard was invested as Prince of Wales on Edmund’s saint-day in 1376; one of St Edmund’s slippers was worn, and lost, by Richard during his coronation; Richard made a pilgrimage to Bury in 1383; and Richard expressed his devotion to St Edmund, through feasts, masses, the burning of candles and the giving of banners, at Westminster Abbey in 1390 and 1391.81 The Wilton Diptych is structured to confirm a connection between Richard II and St Edmund, perhaps revealing Richard’s desire to be depicted as a specifically English king, like Edmund, ‘refusing to accept foreign overlordship’.82 The diptych thus taps a powerful vein of an isolationist identity running through Edmund’s cult, which at first figured East Anglian regionalism and separation then developed into a potent image of English regal nationalism. Richard II’s especial devotion to Edmund perhaps sets the scene for that of Henry V. After the battle of Agincourt (1415) Henry V (1386/7–1422, r. 1413–) entered London to a cityscape that depicted Ss George, Edward and Edmund, together with Christ, all of whom decorated the conduit at Cornhill; like the Wilton Diptych, this pageant presented a multifaceted kind of kingship, comprised of martial, royal, nationalistic and martyred models of masculinity.83 Henry V’s closeness to the abbey at Bury is reflected in his repeated patronage of Lydgate, not least in the massive Troy Book, commissioned by Henry before he became king, and the Life of Our Lady.84 The connection between St Edmund and the English monarch reached its zenith in the reign of Henry VI, as mediated in the poetry of John Lydgate. In his career as a poet, Lydgate aimed to emulate and surpass Geoffrey Chaucer; Lydgate marries aureate diction to laureate encomium, and many of his poems were produced for specific royal, political or religious occasions or patrons. Lydgate wrote for a wide range of people, including Henry V and Henry VI, for London guilds and merchants, for East Anglian gentrywomen, for Lancastrian princes, and for several monastic institutions.85 Lydgate’s poetry ranges from domestic instruction on the cleaning of clothing (‘A Treatise for Lauandres’) to immense, dark works of princely advice and counsel in

81

82 83

84 85

N. Saul, Richard II (New Haven, 1999), pp. 308–11; S. Mitchell, ‘Kingship and the Cult of Saints’, in The Regal Image of Richard II and the Wilton Diptych, ed. D. Gordon, L. Monnas and C. Elam (London, 1997), pp. 115–24 (p. 118). Mitchell, ‘Kingship’, p. 118. The pageant is described in Gesta Henrici Quinti, ed. and trans. F. Taylor and J. S. Roskell (Oxford, 1975), pp. 106–7. The evidence considered by E. Danbury, ‘English and French Artistic Propaganda during the Period of the Hundred Years War: Some Evidence from Royal Charters’, in Power, Culture and Religion in France c.1350–c.1550, ed. E. T. Allmand (Woodbridge, 1989), pp. 76–95, suggests that Ss Edward and Edmund were, by this period, considered to be England’s principal spiritual patrons. See D. Pearsall, John Lydgate: A Bio-Bibliography (Victoria BC, 1997), pp. 18–23. See Pearsall, Lydgate: A Bio-Biobibliography.

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Introduction the de casibus tradition (The Fall of Princes, The Serpent of Division).86 Central to Lydgate’s career and oeuvre are Bury’s franchise and the cult of St Edmund: Lydgate’s career was enabled and furthered by his contacts, via Curteys, with the most influential and wealthy men and women, and culminated in his writing of the grandiose Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund, a production that might be seen, as described below by A. S. G. Edwards, as the high point both of Edmund’s late-medieval cult and Lydgate’s career. The splendid illuminated copy of the poem (Harley 2278) seems to have been made for Henry VI around 1438. Lydgate’s poem embellishes Edmund’s legend as given by Abbo of Fleury, and pairs this with the legend of Edmund’s putative ‘cousin’, St Fremund; then follow posthumous miracles of St Edmund, including a rich account of Edmund’s vengeful slaying of Sweyn Forkbeard. Lydgate’s source for most of his material on St Edmund was Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 240, the giant Latin devotional compendium from Bury St Edmunds, a kind of encyclopaedia of texts about St Edmund.87 Lydgate’s poem was evidently popular, with a dozen surviving manuscripts.88 Besides this grandiose life in ‘aureate’ poetry, St Edmund appears frequently in the vernacular writing of medieval England. Lydgate also wrote an English ‘Prayer to St Edmund’.89 Edmund’s life, largely based on the account given by Abbo, appeared in the ubiquitous hagiographic legendaries of the later Middle Ages: the Gilte Legende (the English version of the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Voragine) and in the South English Legendary.90 The Gilte Legende describes Edmund as ‘a fulle gode man and a softe and fulle of mekenes’, who ‘rewlyd his kyngdome fulle welle to the pleasyng of God’; he is slain by the wicked, violent Danes, led by ‘this wyckyd tyrand Hungar’.91 The South English Legendary presents Edmund as both a ‘curteys and quoynte’ prince and a martial hero (‘Swiþe fair knyyt he was & strong & hardi in eche poynte’), quite at odds with most other accounts; however, this account does revert to describing Edmund’s passive martyrdom, drawing explicit parallels between Edmund and Christ (‘As me ladde oure Louerd tofore Pilatus’) and St Sebastian (‘As þe holi man imartred was þe holi seint

86

87 88 89 90 91

M. Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (Cambridge, 2005) and N. Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes: Narrative Tragedy in its Literary and Political Contexts (Oxford, 2005) are the best accounts of Lydgate’s milieu and his political poses; both Nolan and Mortimer show how, even as a monk, Lydgate’s poetry is vitally engaged with worlds outside the cloister and away from Bury. The manuscript is discussed in further detail by A. S. G. Edwards and Anthony Bale, below, pp. 136–7 and 150–51. See the article by Edwards, below. MPL, I, 124. I. P. McKeehan, ‘St Edmund of East Anglia: The Development of a Romantic Legend’, University of Colorado Studies, General Series 15 (1925), 13–74. Supplementary Lives in Some Manuscripts of The Gilte Legende, ed. R. Hamer and V. Russell, EETS OS 315 (Oxford, 2000), p. 149.

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Anthony Bale Bastian…’).92 The evidence of medieval wall-painting suggests that most English people remembered Edmund most keenly for his passive death, à la St Sebastian, naked but for a loin cloth and shot through with arrows; as the Gilte Legende says, … thaye bounde hym to a tree, and they shotte his body fulle of arowys that noo place of his body was left vnwoundyd, that he appierid fulle of arowys lyke as an vrchyn fulle of pryckis, that it was a pytious sight to beholde. And this holy seynt toke alle these tormentis fulle pacyently for oure lordis loue as though it had not grevyd him.93

The essential and most memorable features of St Edmund became his pious passivity under the Danes’ cruelty, his body filled with arrows, and the miracle of the wolf guarding the saint’s head. The account of Edmund’s life in the anonymous fourteenth-century Short English Metrical Chronicle is representative, reducing Edmund’s vita to a gory account of the martyrdom and an endearing portrait of the tame wolf holding Edmund’s head in its paws.94 As described by Alexandra Gillespie in her essay in this volume, Edmund’s shrine was dismantled, proving hard to take apart, by the Reformers in 1539. The abbey at Bury was disbanded as Suffolk became one of the focal points of iconoclasm and Reformation. The magnificent wealth and influence of Bury during the Middle Ages was answered in its swift and total fall in the Reformation.95 Saints and scholarship Much of the previous scholarship on St Edmund has been focused on establishing the circumstances and facts of the saint’s martyrdom, in the context of the Danish invasions, East Anglian monarchy and early medieval military and burial practices.96 Scholarship has, in general, wrestled with the combination of fact (that a king called Edmund did exist and was killed by the Danish invaders) and fancy (the many miracles attributed to Edmund and his posthumous endorsement of Bury’s worldly ambitions). Increasingly, we see how much the vitae and media of different cults have in common with each other and we are more aware of the difficult issues of conviction, belief, ideology, desire, silencing and propaganda at work in hagiography. More92 93 94 95 96

The South English Legendary, ed. C. D’Evelyn and A. Mill, 3 vols., EETS OS 235, 236, 244 (London, 1956–9), II, 512. Supplementary Lives, ed. Hamer and Russell, p. 149. An Anonymous Short English Metrical Chronicle, ed. E. Zettl, EETS OS 196 (London, 1935), p. 33. D. MacCulloch, Suffolk and the Tudors (Oxford, 1986), pp. 327–9; see Gillespie’s comments below, p. 163–4. E.g. Gransden, ‘Legends and Traditions’; Loomis, ‘Growth’; Whitelock, ‘Fact and Fiction’.

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Introduction over, scholarly emphasis has to some extent shifted from the producers of hagiography to its audiences: what did images of sanctity mean, how were they understood, what do they demand of their audiences and how can the context in which the saint is revered change the cult’s meanings?97 Given the inherent instability and inconsistency in the vita (or vitae) of Edmund, the essays in this volume do not insist on one image or understanding of the saint, but rather show how Edmund’s dynamic image facilitated the discussion of many and ambivalent issues. Saints are intercessors – thought of as the link between God and the world – and the saints have long been seen as representatives of their audiences. The art historian Emile Mâle discerned, in thirteenth-century Western European hagiography, an intimacy, domesticity and emphasis on the local (borne out by the miracles of St Edmund considered below by Anthony Bale); Mâle viewed popular hagiography as ‘moral sustenance’ for all. In Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea were stories that ‘charmed the childlike people’.98 Mâle’s approach is not dissimilar to that taken up by Eamon Duffy in his wide-ranging study of late medieval English religion, The Stripping of the Altars, which discusses the ‘affectionate dependence’ of people to their saints and the ‘unspectacular gentleness and charity’ of many saints’ miracles.99 Similarly, in his influential work on canonization and hagiography, the Belgian sociologist Pierre Delooz centred his discussion of sanctity on the profoundly ‘constructed’ nature of many saints, of whom ‘everything, included their existence, is a product of collective representation’, speaking on behalf of their audiences.100 Thus Delooz describes both the fictive nature of the saint and the self-regarding ‘work’ he or she performs for an audience. Delooz’s emphasis on the saint as a representative of his or her worshippers finds an echo in many studies of different kinds: Duffy, exploring religious traditions in England on the eve of the Reformation, emphasizes the saints as helpers, healers, sponsors and stimuli to community; Ronald Finucane and Eleanora Gordon see the saints as crucial fictions through which medieval people made sense of death, disease and other hazards;101 several of the

97

98 99 100

101

In particular, this is the thrust of D. Weinstein and R. Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom 1000–1700 (Chicago, 1982), who see sanctity as a reflection of ‘popular piety’ (p. 4); they state, ‘[t]he questions we ask concern the perceived actions and the social and religious contexts of these holy people’ (p. 1). E. Mâle, Religious Art in France. The Thirteenth Century (Princeton, 1984), pp. 272–9. E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400–1580 (New Haven, 1992), pp. 161, 170. P. Delooz, ‘Toward a Sociological Study of Canonized Sainthood in the Catholic Church’, in Saints and their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore and History, ed. S. Wilson (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 189–216 (p. 195). R. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (London, 1977); E. C. Gordon, ‘Accidents among Medieval Children as seen from the Miracles of Six English Saints and Martyrs’, Medical History 35 (1991), 145–63.

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Anthony Bale essays on medieval hagiography in a collection edited by Stephen Wilson argue that folklore and folkloric motifs are the main animating force in saints’ cults, as popular culture imposed a veneer of Christianity on old, non-­ Christian stories;102 Benedicta Ward’s thorough study of the role of miracles in medieval culture suggests that saints’ cults were useful in staging practical contexts for the holy, making immediate and comprehensible the abstract nature of intercession, grace and judgment;103 Aron Gurevich describes how ‘parishioners considered the saint their own property’ and how the cult of saints responded ‘to the universal and compelling need for miracles’.104 In such scholarship late medieval cults reflect, and fit into, the everyday lives of medieval people, as the saint interacts with worshippers’ daily concerns, with the saint transformed from lofty eminence to household helpmeet.105 However, medieval European Christian sainthood has been increasingly seen not in terms of communal or lay needs, but as an expression of institutional dominance; such a line of enquiry posits the Church’s use of sanctity to extend clerical power and orthodox Christian expression further into secular life. We should not forget that each day in the medieval calendar had its own saints, that almost every occupation or life-cycle episode had its own patron saint, and that every parish church was devoted to a saint: sanctity suffused and structured the quotidian. Such is the thrust of Peter Brown’s stimulating study, The Cult of the Saints, which usefully employs anthropological ideas to analyse the medieval concepts of the saint’s ‘praesentia’ (presence) and ‘potentia’ (‘ideal power’); Brown’s reading of sanctity is social rather than theological, and his work foregrounds the pliability of the terms of sanctity. Brown argues that the ‘potentia of the saint in his shrine assumed a “vertical” model of dependence’. He goes on to suggest that ‘[t]he saint’s power held the individual in a tight bond of personal obligation that might begin, days of hard journey away, in a need to visit the saint’s praesentia in the one place where it could be found’.106 It is in pilgrimage that we see very clearly the benefits of the cult of saints to the Church; pilgrims took themselves, and their money, to a saint’s shrine, and might end, in Brown’s terms, in ‘a palpable and irreversible act of social dependence’.107 Meanwhile, in other

102 103 104 105

106 107

Ed. Wilson, Saints and their Cults. Ward, Miracles. A. Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture. Problems of Belief and Perception, trans. J. M. Bak and P. A. Hollingsworth (New York, 1988), pp. 41, 43. See, more specifically, the useful work on the English cult of St Sitha in P. Cullum and J. Goldberg, ‘How Margaret Blackburn Taught her Daughters: Reading Devotional Instruction in a Book of Hours’, in Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Medieval England, ed. J. Wogan-Browne et al. (Turnhout, 2000), pp. 217–36. P. Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago, 1981), p. 118. Brown, Cult of the Saints, p. 118.

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Introduction kinds of hagiographic devotions (guilds and parish churches dedicated to saints, saint plays and so on) the saint was brought to the people.108 André Vauchez’s important study of medieval hagiography stresses the role of the ecclesiastical authorities in attempting to control, indeed police, the cult of saints, making sure that sainthood was used to maintain orthodoxy. Vauchez’s study is a broad and complex one, at once nuanced, general and statistical; he makes several important points that are worth dwelling on here for their relevance to the cult of St Edmund. At the heart of Vauchez’s work is an interest in competing definitions of sainthood and rival versions of sanctity; Vauchez shows precisely and convincingly how the papacy repeatedly revised the requirements and conditions for sainthood and, consequently, how there was no easy definition of what it was to be a saint in the Middle Ages. Papal investigations and processes, seeking to identify and report the miraculous, brought to the fore issues of false or imperfect sanctity as often as they led to beatification or canonization;109 the later medieval emphasis on the saints’ intimacy, domesticity and familiarity was accompanied by the local and unofficial culting of women murdered by their husbands, men killed by their servants, pilgrims who died while travelling, children said to have been slain by Jews. Vauchez discerns how, in all such cases, ‘the shedding of blood’ and ‘the glaring injustice’ of death provoked a hagiographic response: ‘[v]ictims become martyrs, hence saints, since, in the popular mind, these two notions overlap and there are no other saints than those who died a violent death on behalf of justice’.110 Concomitantly, there was an enduring fascination in medieval northern Europe with ‘the suffering leader’, the slain temporal ruler – of which Edmund is a prime example – which, Vauchez suggests, was directly problematic to the Church and was supplanted, from the twelfth century, with new cults of bishops and poor people. On the whole, Vauchez does not present sainthood as either demotic or clerical, instead suggesting that sainthood was a slippery and ever-changing category, requiring ongoing negotiation on the part of worshippers and ecclesiastical authorities. Most recently, John Arnold’s fascinating study of belief and ‘unbelief’ in medieval Europe takes a sophisticated approach to the theme of power in terms of religious practices. Arnold rejects a simplistic idea of ‘popular’ piety and the ‘religion of the laity’ as divergent from, and definable against, a stable kind of orthodoxy represented by ‘the Church’ (that is, a ‘two cultures’ model

108

For a range of scholarly reactions to Brown’s work, see The Cults of Saints in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ed. J. Howard-Johnston and P. A. Hayward (Oxford, 1999). 109 A. Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. J. Birrell (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 148–51. 110 Vauchez, Sainthood, p. 151.

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Anthony Bale of ‘low’ versus ‘high’ cultures);111 instead, Arnold follows Michel Foucault in positing an idea of power ‘not as a straight line, one thing pushing at another, but as a field of relationships: a web of interactions and tensions that pull as much as push us into particular social, cultural and political hierarchies’.112 A further trend in recent scholarly work has purchased on critical and psychoanalytic theory to focus on the psychosexual positions enabled by the saints’ cults; Sheila Delany’s study of the poetry of Osbern Bokenham (a fifteenthcentury East Anglian cleric who wrote romance-inflected saints’ lives in a Lydgatian key) examines ‘corporeal semiotics’, describing how the dismemberment of the saint’s body is replete with associational meanings of politics, desire and theology.113 Robert Mills’s recent provocative work goes further than this, suggesting that medieval images of saintly martyrdom, displaying naked wounds, signify ‘mystical or even erotic pleasure’: Saints’ lives … set up a tension between two alternative conceptions of pain: on the one hand, the martyrs’ body-affirming discourse, which emphasizes corporeality as a route to mystical pleasure and spiritual empowerment, and, on the other, the mind–body dichotomies of dualistic pain concepts.114

Mills goes on to argue that medieval images of saintly martyrdom imply ‘that to immerse oneself in pain now is the path to future pleasure’ and has much in common with masochism, which is, like martyrdom, ‘reliant upon the aestheticization of pain and the drama of suffering’.115 Such comments have an obvious relevance to the cult of Edmund, at once king, martyr and virgin. Studies like that by Mills tend to see the saint, in his or her performative suffering and voyeuristic appeal, as a transgressive agent, performing the audience’s forbidden desires or exploring the audience’s taboos. The saint is then seen as a kind of psychic projection, an impossible but longedfor ‘superhero’ (to use Sarah Salih’s term) in whose pain there is a perverse pleasure.116 Given the instability of the very terms of sanctity, scholars have more

111 112 113 114 115 116

The binarism animates Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture, which is based on the premise that low culture always exists in antagonism to high culture. J. Arnold, Belief and Unbelief in Medieval Europe (London, 2005), pp. 7–14, quoting p. 14. S. Delany, Impolitic Bodies: Poetry, Saints and Society in Fifteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1998); see too K. Winstead, John Capgrave’s Fifteenth Century (Philadelphia, 2007). R. Mills, Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture (London, 2005), p. 158. Mills, Suspended Animation, pp. 159, 169. A Companion to Middle English Hagiography, ed. S. Salih (Woodbridge, 2006), p. 1. Gregory of Tours called a similar idea to mind in his Glory of the Martyrs, in which he described martyrdom as a ‘struggle’ or ‘contest’ in which men and women competed as ‘athletes of Christ’ (Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Martyrs, ed. and trans. R. van Dam (Liverpool, 1988), p. 12). This is manifested in a twelfth-century miracle of St Edmund, in which the saint is referred to as ‘athleta dei’ (see NLA 589.30).

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Introduction recently sought to focus on individual saint’s cults (the present volume fitting into this trend) in interdisciplinary terms, thereby taking account of the cultural, political and popular manifestations of a particular cult; in terms of medieval Europe, examples include Samantha Riches’ study of the legend of St George, Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn’s analyses of the cults of St Anne and St Faith, Katherine Lewis’s examination of the English cult of St Katherine of Alexandria and Christopher Norton’s recent study of St William of York.117 Using a literary methodology focused on the specific manuscript and authorial contexts of one collection of miracles, Ashley and Sheingorn show how miracle collections ‘became the vehicles for linking regional cult centers to larger economic and political networks. By using their saint to enhance their prestige, the sponsoring institutions also enhanced their power and authority.’118 Katherine Lewis’s full study of St Katherine in medieval England shows how the saint’s cult was developed to articulate a powerful vision of the ‘mixed life’ – of a life shared between the worldly and the spiritual – in which the household could be akin to a ‘little church’.119 As Patricia Cullum and Jeremy Goldberg have shown in their study of the cult of St Sitha in England, sainthood could inscribe powerful (and gendered) models of conduct and regulation.120 Recent scholarly work has also pointed out how medieval hagiography was instrumental in the marginalisation of European Jewry and other outcast groups. Indeed, as described by Jocelin of Brakelond, St Edmund’s image was invoked to justify the expulsion of the Jews from Bury St Edmunds in 1190: ‘either the Jews should be St Edmund’s men or they should be banished from the town’.121 Scholarly engagement has been made with the many gaps and elisions in hagiography – for example, those saints who appear in English narratives but have no known cult, those cults that were unofficial or forbidden, and those that failed even to garner worshippers.122 *

117

118 119 120 121 122

S. Riches, St George. Hero, Martyr and Myth, rev. edn (Stroud, 2005); K. Ashley and P. Sheingorn, Writing Faith: Text, Sign and History in the Miracle of Sainte Foy (Chicago, 1999); K. Ashley and P. Sheingorn, Interpreting Cultural Symbols: St Anne in Late Medieval Society (Athens GA, 1990); K. Lewis, The Cult of St Katherine of Alexandria in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge, 2000); C. Norton, St William of York (York, 2006). Ashley and Sheingorn, Writing Faith, p. 145. Lewis, The Cult of St Katherine, pp. 181–2. See above, note 105. Jocelin of Brakelond, Chronicle, ed. and trans. Greenway and Sayers, p. 42. See, for example, Vauchez, Sainthood, pp. 148–51; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, on ‘political’ cults such as those of Richard Scrope and Henry VI (pp. 164–9) and the late and highly localized cults of St Sidwell (p. 168) and St Walston (pp. 200–5); Bale, Jew in the Medieval Book, pp. 105–12, describes the not entirely successful attempts at Norwich and Bury to ‘invent’ two new boy-saint cults in the twelfth century, those of William and Robert.

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Anthony Bale This volume opens with a study of the early veneration of Edmund, in Anglo-Saxon writing, which shows the various influences at work on the formation of Edmund’s posthumous reputation. In ‘King, Martyr and Virgin: Imitatio Christi in Ælfric’s Life of St Edmund’, Carl Phelpstead explores the translation made by Ælfric of Eynsham of the Latin vita of Edmund by Abbo of Fleury; Phelpstead analyses some particularly important departures made by Ælfric in his reading of Abbo. Likewise, Alison Finlay, in her essay ‘Chronology, Genealogy and Conversion: The Afterlife of St Edmund in the North’, examines the early transformations of Edmund’s cult, as adopted enthusiastically by northern Europeans. Finlay’s essay, like Phelpstead’s, also explores one of the key fault-lines in the imagery surrounding Edmund, of virginity and masculinity. It is in artefacts connected with St Edmund that we see northern European cultures synthesizing Christian sensibilities of passivity and martyrdom with martial ideologies of heroism; this synthesis involved a profound renegotiation of gender roles. As Finlay shows, Icelandic genealogies claimed descent from Edmund, even as the saint was venerated as a virgin! In his essay ‘Geoffrey of Wells’s Liber de infantia sancti Edmundi and the “Anarchy” of King Stephen’s Reign’, Paul Antony Hayward draws out the pressing political currents in which Edmund’s cult was invoked and elaborated. Hayward offers a new reading of Geoffrey of Wells’s collection of miracles, which shows Geoffrey to have been vitally engaged with both politics and irony. The essays by Phelpstead and Hayward both show, albeit in very different ways, how Edmund’s life-story could complicate, as well as consolidate, dominant ideologies of kingship. In ‘Music and Identity in Medieval Bury St Edmunds’ Lisa Colton pieces together the ‘soundtrack’ to the cult of St Edmund, using the considerable surviving musical sources. Both Hayward and Colton show how the abbey at Bury used the cult of St Edmund to negotiate its changing collective identity. Colton’s enquiry brings a critical eye to bear on sources that are all-too-often ignored, but are profoundly relevant to all interested in medieval cultural politics. Edmund’s cult is seen to be useful because it bridges clerical and secular arenas, and spiritual and worldly concerns. The remaining essays in the collection examine the vibrant cult of St Edmund in the later Middle Ages. Rebecca Pinner, in ‘Medieval Images of St Edmund in Norfolk Churches’, explores a range of examples of the visual culture of St Edmund’s cult; she uses statistical and geographical methods to map the cult, showing how even as St Edmund was a phenomenally popular saint, this popularity had specific local facets. A. S. G. Edwards, in ‘John Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund: Poltics, Hagiography and Literature’, and Anthony Bale, in ‘St Edmund in Fifteenth-Century London: The Lydgatian Miracles of St Edmund’, explore precise moments of the renewed and reinvigorated cult of St Edmund in the mid-fifteenth century. It is in fifteenth-century Bury that key players in English politics conducted their 24

Introduction machinations in a way that was intimately connected to the vocabulary of St Edmund’s cult. As Bale shows in his analysis of a fifteenth-century miracle of St Edmund, the image of the martyr-king continued to be found resonant and affective, while new and site-specific meanings could be invested in it. The final essay, Alexandra Gillespie’s ‘The Later Lives of St Edmund: John Lydgate to John Stow’, is a fitting retrospective to the whole volume. Gillespie considers the dismantling of Edmund’s shrine and also modern critics’ reactions to Lydgate’s vita of St Edmund before examining the ways in which John Stow (1525–1605), the Tudor antiquary, wrote about St Edmund in newly Protestant England. The cult of St Edmund was born out of the cataclysmic events of the Danish invasions and regicide; attempts were made (as suggested by Phelpstead and Finlay) to heal this ‘wound of history’ via the cult; likewise, Gillespie suggests that even in its Reformation silencing, the cult of St Edmund contained an attractive, indeed fundamental, ‘fetishized’ energy that allowed English Protestants to look back on, and write about, their Catholic past. Clearly, the methodologies employed in these essays are diverse and the conclusions reached may not be in agreement with each other. While the abbey at Bury lies behind many of the narratives and cultural productions considered here, this volume does not aim to give a complete history of Edmund or its patron saint. What this collection seeks to do is to read a selection of products from the cult of St Edmund, to uncover the ways in which the worship of a saint can also be a search for origins, with contested versions of the past. Whereas academic research into hagiography at one point sought to test the veracity of saints’ lives or tease out an element of fact from these highly allusive, and often fantastical, narratives, these essays show the multiplicity of accounts of St Edmund, the ways in which the saintly image is augmented, reconfigured, transformed. The contributors to this volume display a keen awareness that a saint’s cult functions, and derives meaning, in specific sites; each essay sets up a context – literary, authorial, monastic or political – and views Edmund’s cult through its changing contexts. As a whole, this volume retreats from a conception of a coherent ‘cult of saints’, suggesting instead what Barbara Abou-El-Haj has called the ‘volatility and instability of cults’.123 Saint-making is not a simple process; in this volume many and various versions of St Edmund’s life, and death, are placed side by side, revealing the remarkable versatility and inherent precariousness of the saintly image.

123

B. Abou-El-Haj, The Medieval Cult of Saints: Formations and Transformations (Cambridge, 1994), p. 3.

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1 King, Martyr and Virgin: Imitatio Christi in Ælfric’s Life of St Edmund Carl Phelpstead

Then therefore [Pilate] delivered [Jesus] to them to be crucified. And they took Jesus and led him forth. And, bearing his own cross, he went forth to that place which is called Calvary, but in Hebrew Golgotha; Where they crucified him, and with him two others, one on each side, and Jesus in the midst. And Pilate wrote a title also; and he put it upon the cross. And the writing was JESUS OF NAZARETH, THE KING OF THE JEWS. (John 19. 16–19, Douai-Rheims translation)

Christian hagiography is intended to edify its audience and to promote the veneration of its subject by representing the saint in a way that will convince readers of his or her sanctity. Two main strategies are employed in pursuing these aims: recording the miracles that have been performed through the saint’s mediation, and showing how the saint’s life and death conformed to Christian expectations of a holy life and death. The latter can in turn be achieved by showing how closely the saint in question resembled other holy people. For the Christian, of course, the pre-eminent model of holy living and holy dying is Jesus of Nazareth, the man crucified under an inscription proclaiming him King of the Jews. Following the conventions of the genre, early medieval hagiographers of St Edmund represented his life and especially his death in ways designed to demonstrate to the faithful that he was holy, that is to say Christ-like. This is recognized quite explicitly at the climax of the earliest vernacular life of St Edmund, produced in the late tenth century by the Anglo-Saxon monk Ælfric of Eynsham (c. 950–c. 1010) and preserved as part of his collection of Lives of Saints.1 As Edmund casts aside his weapons and accepts martyrdom, Ælfric describes him as ‘þæs Hælends gemyndig’ (‘mindful of the Saviour’) and 1

Ælfric’s life is cited here by volume and page number from the edition (with translation) in Ælfric, Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, ed. W. W. Skeat [olim 4 vols.] repr. as 2 vols., EETS OS [76, 82] 94, 114 (Oxford, 1881–1900; repr. 1966), II, 314–35, but with the text arranged as prose and some minor adjustments made to spelling, punctuation and capitalization; other editions include Ælfric, Lives of Three English Saints, ed. G. I. Needham, rev. edn (Exeter, 1976), pp. 43–59 and, with a translation, E. Treharne, ed. and trans., Old and

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Carl Phelpstead specifically says that the king ‘wolde geæfenlæcan Cristes gebysnungum þe forbead Petre mid wæpnum’ (‘wanted to imitate Christ’s example when he forbade Peter to fight with weapons’).2 This essay analyses Ælfric’s construction of a Christ-like ideal of royal sainthood by examining the presentation of Edmund as imitating Christ in three different roles or identities: king, martyr and virgin. Without attempting to provide a full history of the early development of Edmund’s cult, some consideration of the text’s intended audience, its relation to earlier traditions, and its political and ecclesiastical contexts will nevertheless help to show that there are both incompatibilities between the different roles in which Edmund follows Christ and tensions between different understandings of each role. Ælfric is the most prolific writer of Old English known to us;3 his construction of Edmund as an ideal royal follower of Christ needs to be seen in the light of his milieu and intellectual background. Ælfric was a pupil of Æthelwold, bishop of Winchester (963–84), a leader of the tenth-century Benedictine Reform in England. Around 987, Æthelwold’s successor at Winchester sent Ælfric to join a newly founded monastery at what is now Cerne Abbas (Dorset). This had been founded by Æthelmær, the son of Æthelweard, the ealdorman of the western counties (d. 998 or 1002). In 1005 Ælfric became the first abbot of another monastery founded by Æthelmær, at Eynsham near Oxford. Among many other works, Ælfric produced two series of so-called ­Catholic Homilies for feasts and major holy days, compiled c. 990–5, and a further collection known to scholars as the Lives of Saints compiled c. 992–1002 and now best preserved in BL, Cotton MS Julius E.vii. Ælfric’s account of St Edmund appears in this third collection under the date of 20 November, the saint’s feast-day; like nearly all of Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, it is written in a rhythmical and alliterative prose style, which in some ways resembles the alliterative metre of Old English poetry. Peter Clemoes adduces evidence that the life of St Edmund was written a little before the compilation of the collection of which it is now part, and the preface to the life implies that it was written within a few years of 988.4 The intended audience for Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, and the use they were expected to make of the text, remain less than clear. In this collection Ælfric provides reading material on saints whose feasts were observed by monks but Middle English: An Anthology, 2nd edn (Oxford, 2004), pp. 132–9. Except where stated, translations in this chapter are my own. 2 Ælfric, Lives, ed. Skeat, II, 320–2. 3 A recent overview of Ælfric’s life and work is provided in the introduction to J. Wilcox, ed., Ælfric’s Prefaces, corrected reprint (Durham, 1996), especially pp. 1–65; see too the account by M. Godden, ‘Ælfric of Eynsham (c.950–c.1010)’, ODNB. 4 P. A. M. Clemoes, ‘The Chronology of Ælfric’s Works’, in The Anglo-Saxons: Studies in Some Aspects of their History and Culture Presented to Bruce Dickins, ed. P. Clemoes (London, 1959), pp. 212–47 (pp. 222, 226 n. 3).

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King, Martyr and Virgin not by the laity.5 However, the monastic liturgy would not normally involve the reading of vernacular, rather than Latin, versions of these saints’ lives. Clemoes notes a formal distinction between narrative pieces for non-liturgical devotional reading and homilies intended for preaching during the liturgy: the latter always include a reference to the anniversary being commemorated ‘today’.6 There is no such reference in Ælfric’s Passio Eadmundi, and by this criterion it is therefore among the ‘non-liturgical narrative pieces’ in the Lives of Saints collection.7 Ælfric’s dedicatory Prefaces address his two lay patrons, Æthelweard and his son Æthelmær, and the Lives of Saints collection seems to have been designed initially for their use.8 Jonathan Wilcox writes that ‘[t]hese two pious nobles seem to have wanted from Ælfric in the vernacular the works which were in use in Latin in the environment of the monastic reform’.9 Quite why as accomplished a Latinist as Æthelweard, who produced a Latin version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, should require such material in the vernacular is unclear.10 There is little evidence for the uses to which the collection was put by readers other than Æthelweard and his son, but Wilcox suggests that … it may have served as reading matter for other religiously-inclined secular patrons or, perhaps, in religious houses where a high standard of Latin was not maintained, particularly houses for women.11

Malcolm Godden emphasizes that ‘Ælfric wrote his saints’ lives for bishops and monks and for highly educated laymen like Athelweard and Athelmær, not just (if at all) for the ordinary laity.’12 He also cites evidence that ‘the Lives of Saints were to be read, in part at least, as providing important political and ethical lessons for the present’.13 What evidence there is for the intended audience of Ælfric’s Lives of Saints indicates that the collection was designed 5

6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13

On Ælfric’s liturgical calendar, see M. Lapidge, ‘Ælfric’s Sanctorale’, in Holy Men and Holy Women: Old English Prose Saints’ Lives and Their Contexts, ed. P. Szarmach (New York, 1996), pp. 115–29; for an account of the textual history of Lives of Saints arguing that its contents highlight issues of warfare and violence, see J. E. Damon, Soldier Saints and Holy Warriors: Warfare and Sanctity in the Literature of Early England (Aldershot, 2003), ch. 6, especially pp. 198–207. Clemoes, ‘Chronology’, p. 220 n. 3. Clemoes, ‘Chronology’, p. 218. Ælfric, Lives, ed. Skeat, I, 4. Ælfric, Prefaces, ed. Wilcox, p. 9. The identification of the Latin chronicler with Æthelweard the ealdorman has indeed been questioned on this basis, but Campbell offers evidence that the attribution is ‘well supported’: see Æthelweard, Chronicon Æthelwardi: The Chronicle of Æthelweard, ed. A. Campbell (London, 1962), pp. xxxvi–xxxvii. Ælfric, Prefaces, ed. Wilcox, p. 50. M. Godden, ‘Ælfric’s Saints’ Lives and the Problem of Miracles’, Leeds Studies in English, new series 16 (1985), 83–100 (p. 94). Godden, ‘Ælfric’s Saints’ Lives’, p. 94.

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Carl Phelpstead for the ecclesiastical and political elites, and, in choosing to write a life of Edmund the royal martyr at a time of renewed Viking hostility, Ælfric inevitably had to engage with political and ethical issues that would have been of concern to the nation’s leaders. Comparison with earlier accounts of St Edmund helps to highlight the particular emphases of Ælfric’s version and the ways in which he responds to the needs of his audience and the demands of his time. Ælfric’s source for his account of St Edmund was written by the most learned European of his day, Abbo of Fleury (d. 1004).14 Abbo spent the years 985–7 in England, having been invited by Oswald (d. 992) bishop of Worcester (961–92) and archbishop of York (971–92), to teach at a monastery he had founded at Ramsey (Huntingdonshire). Abbo begins his Passio sancti Eadmundi with a dedicatory letter addressed to Dunstan, archbishop of Canterbury (d. 988), who is both the text’s dedicatee and Abbo’s informant. In this preface Abbo explains that the monks of Ramsey persuaded him to write an account of Edmund’s passion because it was ‘unknown to most people’ (‘pluribus ignotam’) at that time (only a little over a hundred years after Edmund’s death) and had been ‘written down by no one’ (‘nemine scriptum’).15 There is numismatic evidence that Edmund was regarded as a saint within about a quarter of a century of his death, but Abbo’s is indeed the earliest hagiographic account of the king.16 The earliest reference to Edmund’s death is of importance because it at least leaves open the possibility that he was killed fighting in battle rather than as a martyr who had laid down his arms. The Parker manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (compiled c. 890) states: AN .dccclxx. Her rad se here ofer Mierce innan Eastengle 7 wintersetl namon æt Þeodforda. 7 þy wintra Eadmund cyning him wiþ feaht, 7 þa Deniscan sige namon 7 þone cyning ofslogon 7 þæt lond all geeodon.17 (‘870 In this year the Viking army rode across Mercia into East Anglia and took up winter quarters at Thetford. And that same winter King Edmund fought against them, and the Danes were victorious and slew the king and conquered all the land.’)

14

Abbo’s Passio sancti Eadmundi is edited in Corolla Sancti Eadmundi, ed. F. Hervey (London, 1907), pp. 7–59, and more recently in TLES, pp. 67–87; reference is made here to the latter. 15 TLES, p. 67. P. Cavill, ‘Analogy and Genre in the Legend of St Edmund’, Nottingham Medieval Studies 47 (2003), 21–45 (p. 22), notes recent scholarly disagreement on whether Abbo wrote his Passio at Ramsey or on his return to Fleury, but suggests that the former is ‘probably’ the case. 16 Ridyard, Royal Saints, pp. 214–16. 17 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition. Volume 3: MS A., ed. J. M. Bately (Cambridge, 1986), p. 46. In this part of the Chronicle the compiler begins the year in September, so Edmund’s death took place in 869 by modern reckoning.

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King, Martyr and Virgin Alfred the Great’s biographer, Asser, draws on the Chronicle for his very similar account of Edmund’s death in battle, and Ælfric’s patron, Æthelweard, adapts it in his Latin version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.18 Having recounted the Viking army’s arrival in East Anglia and its encampment at Thetford (Norfolk), Æthelweard continues: ‘Aduersus quos optauit bellum rex Eadmundus, breui spatio a quibus et interimitur ibi’ (‘And King Edmund decided on war against them, and after a brief interval he was killed by them there’).19 Written only a little before Ælfric provided its author with a vernacular passio of the king, this leaves open the precise manner of Edmund’s death, and offers almost no hint of Edmund’s sanctity.20 It is clear that there were earlier traditions, with which Ælfric’s audience would have been familiar, which did not portray the king as an unequivocally non-violent martyr, and in this context Ælfric’s portrait emerges as deliberately modelled more closely on that of Christ’s self-sacrificial death. Ælfric drastically abbreviates Abbo’s Passio, producing a text about onethird the length of his source.21 But Ælfric begins with an acknowledgement of his dependence on Abbo: Sum swyðe gelæred munuc com suþan ofer sæ fram Sancte Benedictes stowe on Æthelredes cyninges dæge to Dunstane ærcebisceope þrim gearum ær he forðferde, and se munuc hatte Abbo. Þa wurdon hi æt spræce oþþæt Dunstan rehte be Sancte Eadmunde, swa swa Eadmundes swurdbora hit rehte Æthelstane cynicge þa þa Dunstan iung man wæs and se swurdbora wæs forealdod man. Þa gesette se munuc ealle þa gereccednysse on anre bec, and eft ða þa seo boc com to us binnan feawum gearum, þa awende we hit on Englisc, swa swa hit heræfter stent.22 (‘A certain very learned monk came north over the sea from Saint Benedict’s place in the days of King Æthelræd to Archbishop Dunstan, three years before Dunstan died, and the monk was called Abbo. Then they talked together until Dunstan told about Saint Edmund, just as Edmund’s sword bearer had told it to King Æthelstan, when Dunstan was a young man and the sword bearer was an old man. Then the monk wrote all that story in a book and afterwards, when the book came to us within a few years, we translated it into English just as it stands hereafter.’) 18

See Asser, Life of King Alfred, ed. W. H. Stevenson (Oxford, 1904), p. 26. Æthelweard, Chronicon, ed. and trans. Campbell, pp. 36–7 (Campbell’s translation). 20 Æthelweard does go on to mention that Edmund’s body lies at ‘Beadoricesuuyrthe’, which perhaps suggests knowledge of a cult. Campbell dates the Chronicon to between 978 and 988, probably in the latter part of that period (p. xiii, n. 2). 21 He cuts out florid rhetoric and what Cecily Clark calls the ‘long formal tirades’ that Abbo puts into the mouths of his characters (C. Clark, ‘Ælfric and Abbo’, English Studies 49 (1968), 30–6 (p. 30)); he also omits a geographical description of East Anglia, brief references to Edmund’s childhood and accession, and some of the gorier details of the Vikings’ atrocities. 22 Ælfric, Lives, ed. Skeat, II, 314. 19

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Carl Phelpstead Ælfric thus positions Abbo in a tradition going back to Edmund’s own time: Abbo learned the story from Dunstan, archbishop of Canterbury, who in turn learned it as a young man when Edmund’s own very elderly sword-bearer related it to King Æthelstan. Much later in the text we are told of a man hidden nearby who witnessed Edmund’s torture and death and who ‘hit eft sæde swa swa we hit secgað her’ (‘told about it just as we tell it here’).23 This man is presumably to be identified with the elderly sword-bearer who told the story of Edmund’s death to Archbishop Dunstan, Abbo’s informant. It was clearly important for Ælfric to locate his life of St Edmund in relation to earlier traditions in order to assert his text’s authenticity and authority. Whether the historical tradition he evokes is in fact a dependable one has recently been questioned. Most historians have been content to accept the prefatory letter to Abbo’s Passio Eadmundi, on which Ælfric’s account of the genesis of Abbo’s text is based, at face value and have ascribed a high degree of historicity to Abbo’s narrative.24 Other evidence has also been adduced to support this view: Susan Ridyard, for example, notes that Abbo is the earliest source to identify Edmund’s opponent and that the name he provides (Hinguar) is evidently that of Ívarr inn beinlausi, son of Ragnarr loðbrók, who did indeed lead Viking forces in East Anglia in the late 860s.25 However, in a recent article on the legend of St Edmund, Paul Cavill has taken issue with past historians’ acceptance of Abbo’s account of the martyrdom, an acceptance they have tended to combine with scepticism about his miracle stories. By developing arguments made by Antonia Gransden, Cavill concludes that Abbo is likely to have known very little about what actually happened to Edmund and that his narrative – and so Ælfric’s – owes more to hagiographic conventions than to reliable historical tradition. Abbo and Ælfric took the miracles performed at Edmund’s shrine as proof that Edmund must have died a saint, and so augmented what little information there was in sources such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in order to show how this happened: ‘The details they supply, even down to the language they used, are there to demonstrate that Edmund was a martyr like all the other martyrs.’26 The appeal of the texts to an oral tradition originating with an eyewitness is not therefore a guarantee of historicity but rather an example of conformity to hagiographic convention. It is part of the ideological work of constructing Edmund as holy. 23

Ælfric, Lives, ed. Skeat, II, 322. See, for example, Whitelock, ‘Fact and Fiction’; TLES, p. 5; Ridyard, Royal Saints, pp. 61–9; J. W. Earl, ‘Violence and Non-Violence in Anglo-Saxon England: Ælfric’s “Passion of St Edmund” ‘, Philological Quarterly 78 (1999), 125–49 (p. 129). 25 Ridyard, Royal Saints, p. 67. 26 Cavill, ‘Analogy and Genre’, pp. 42–3; cf. Gransden, ‘Legends and Traditions’, pp. 4–8; Gransden, ‘Abbo’; G. Klaniczay, Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic Cults in Medieval Central Europe, trans. É. Pálmai (Cambridge, 2002), p. 91, similarly claims that ‘Abbo – perhaps precisely because of the dearth of concrete intelligence – used the person of Edmund […] to illustrate a new model of sanctity’. 24

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King, Martyr and Virgin In writing about St Edmund, Abbo and Ælfric contributed to what was already a venerable tradition of Anglo-Saxon royal hagiography, and Ælfric’s portrayal of Edmund’s kingship as imitative of Christ’s is informed by the traditions of royal hagiography to which he was heir. Royal saints are found in Merovingian Frankia, but they became much more prominent in AngloSaxon England, which produced more examples than anywhere else in medieval Europe. In his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (composed 731; hereafter HE) Bede, for example, mentions several Anglo-Saxon kings of outstanding sanctity who were celebrated for their asceticism, or for their withdrawal from the world to a monastery – kings such as Caedwalla of Wessex (d. 689; HE IV.12, 15–16; V.7), Sebbi of Essex (d. 693/4; HE III.30; IV.11), Ethelred of Mercia (675–704; HE V.24), his successor Coenred (d. after 709; HE V.19, 24), and Ini of Wessex (d. c. 726; HE V.7). Bede also includes accounts of holy kings who were murdered or killed in battle against pagans: Oswin of Deira (d. 651; HE III.14), Edwin of Northumbria (d. 633; HE II.5, 9–18, 20; III.1), and Oswald of Northumbria (d. 642; HE III.1–6, 9–13; IV.14).27 The king killed in battle, preferably against pagans, and the king who was betrayed and murdered were particularly productive types of saint in Anglo-Saxon England and in areas influenced by the English Church, such as Scandinavia. Both of the royal saints who appear in Ælfric’s Lives of Saints were venerated as martyrs: Oswald of Northumbria (item 26 in Skeat’s edition) and Edmund of East Anglia (item 32). Some scholars have explained the prominence of royal saints in AngloSaxon England in terms of continuity between Christian royal sainthood and pagan Germanic ideas of sacral kingship, the belief that kings derive a special status from their more or less direct association with divine powers.28 There are, however, crucial differences between sacral kingship and royal sanctity, as Janet Nelson points out: sacrality is an ascribed status, which ‘goes with the job’, whereas sanctity is something that has to be achieved.29 One does

27

Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum: Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969). 28 See especially W. A. Chaney, The Cult of Kingship in Anglo-Saxon England: The Transition from Paganism to Christianity (Manchester, 1970); E. Hoffmann, Die heiligen Könige bei den Angelsachsen und den skandinavischen Völkern. Königsheiliger und Königshaus (Neumünster, 1975). Klaniczay’s important recent contribution to scholarship on royal saints identifies Edmund (as portrayed by Abbo) as a new hagiographic type and a new kind of sacral kingship, rather than a continuation of pre-Christian tradition (Holy Rulers, pp. 62–3; on Edmund, see further ibid. pp. 89–96). 29 J. Nelson, ‘Royal Saints and Early Medieval Kingship’, in Sanctity and Secularity: The Church and the World, ed. D. Baker, Studies in Church History 10 (Oxford, 1973), pp. 39–44 (p. 42).

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Carl Phelpstead not become a saint just by being a king: there is no automatic qualification for it, and it has to be ‘recognized’ by others.30 Those who have, rightly, been cautious about links with pre-Christian sacral kingship have preferred to explain the ubiquity of royal saints by reference to the political usefulness of royal cults for the monarchy and/or the Church.31 Since it was the Church, rather than the monarchy, which canonized saints they provided what Nelson calls ‘not just a model but a yardstick of kingly conduct and performance in office’.32 There were advantages for the monarchy, too, though. A ruler who could claim descent from, or close family connection to, a royal saint was likely to be in a stronger position than a ruler or a pretender who could not, as was a ruler who secured the Church’s approval by conducting himself after the model provided by royal saints. Royal hagiographers who, like Ælfric, sought to show how a king who died a violent death exemplified Christian concepts of holiness naturally sought to represent the king as imitating the passion of Christ, who was crucified under an inscription proclaiming his kingship and provided the ultimate model of kingship. St Edmund himself makes it clear, in Ælfric’s account of his passion, that he understands his office as involving the imitation of Christ: he explains that he will not shed the blood of the Viking messenger who has offered him an ultimatum, ‘forðan-þe ic Criste folgie þe us swa ge-bysnode’ (‘because I follow Christ who set us such an example’).33 Christ had announced that ‘my kingdom is not of this world’ (John 18. 36) and the extent to which his kingship is a pragmatic model for earthly kings to follow could be thought limited. However, Ælfric’s intellectual background gave him particular reasons for seeing kingship in terms of imitatio Christi. The major ideological influences on Ælfric, and on Abbo, are hinted at in Ælfric’s opening account of the narrative tradition preceding his own work: the story of the martyred king is passed on by being told to another king, and this happens in the hearing of a future archbishop, Dunstan, who was a prominent leader in the monastic revival of the tenth century, the ideals of which received royal support and were espoused by both Abbo and Ælfric. The Benedictine Reform aimed to revive monastic life in England by encouraging observance of the monastic Rule and by replacing the communities

30

A distinction must also be made between possible pre-Christian origins of royal sainthood and the later influence of pre-Christian beliefs on saints’ cults. There is evidence (much of it assembled in Hoffmann, Die heiligen Könige) suggesting that, whatever their origins, cults did accrue to themselves elements that can be traced back to pre-Christian beliefs. 31 But see C. Cubitt, ‘Sites and Sanctity: Revisiting the Cult of Murdered and Martyred Anglo-Saxon Royal Saints’, Early Medieval Europe 9 (2000), 53–83 for a recent argument in favour of popular origins for royal cults. 32 Nelson, ‘Royal Saints’, pp. 43–4. 33 Ælfric, Lives, ed. Skeat, II, 320.

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King, Martyr and Virgin of secular clergy at major churches with monks.34 The three leaders of the revival in the episcopate all achieved sainthood and can all be connected more or less closely to the production of the earliest vitae of St Edmund: Dunstan, archbishop of Canterbury, is portrayed as the source of Abbo’s narrative and is its dedicatee; Oswald, bishop of Worcester and archbishop of York, was responsible for inviting Abbo to England; Æthelwold, bishop of Winchester, was Ælfric’s tutor. Dunstan and Oswald were closely connected with Abbo’s monastery at Fleury in France, which had an important position in the wider European monastic reform movement.35 The cause of monastic renewal in England was taken up not only by Church leaders but also by the monarchy, in the person of King Edgar (r.  959–75) who encouraged the reformers and endowed monastic foundations with new lands. Eric John goes so far as to claim that ‘King Edgar’s part in the reformation of the monasteries was as great as Henry VIII’s in their dissolution.’36 Given the crucial importance of royal support for the success of the monastic reform it is not surprising that the ecclesiastical leaders of the movement developed a political theology that accorded the king a high status.37 The political theology developed by the Reformers was Christo­centric, drawing parallels between the king and Christ, the King of Kings, and so suggesting that the ideal king is the one who best imitates Christ. Ælfric’s Christology emphasized Christ’s suffering, his Passion, and Eric John even suggests that Ælfric was somewhat ahead of his time in moving towards ‘the cult of the suffering and crucified Christ’ that was soon to become central to Western Christian devotion.38 Ælfric’s emphasis on Christ’s suffering role shapes his understanding of kingship modelled on Christ’s kingship, and the implications of such a Christocentric ideal of kingship for political practice become clear in an Ælfrician homily for Ascension Day: here Ælfric advises the king, if necessary, to give up his life for his people as Christ did.39 In this context it is not surprising that both the English kings 34

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The classic account of the Revival is Knowles, Monastic Order, ch. 3. See also the contributions to D. Parsons, Tenth-Century Studies: Essays in Commemoration of the Millennium of the Council of Winchester and Regularis Concordia (London, 1975) and a lucid recent overview in H. R. Loyn, The English Church 940–1154 (Harlow, 2000), ch. 1. Oswald spent the years c. 950–8 at Fleury. E. John, ‘The King and the Monks in the Tenth-century Reformation’, in idem, Orbis Britanniae and Other Studies (Leicester, 1966), pp. 154–80 (p. 176). Such a high status that John argues that ‘[i]n Ælfric’s circle, the king was not exactly a layman’ (E. John, ‘The World of Abbot Aelfric’, in Ideal and Reality in Frankish and AngloSaxon Society: Studies Presented to J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, ed. P. Wormald, D. Bullough and R. Collins (Oxford, 1983), pp. 300–16 (p. 309)). Elsewhere he describes the king as ‘a true mediator inter clericos et laicos’ in the political thinking of the Reformers (‘The King and the Monks,’ p. 177). John, ‘World of Abbot Aelfric’, p. 310. Ælfric, Homilies of Ælfric: A Supplementary Collection, ed. J. C. Pope, 2 vols., EETS OS 259–60 (London, 1967–8), I, 381, lines 58–61.

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Carl Phelpstead in Ælfric’s Lives of Saints (Edmund and Oswald) are martyrs. It was, as John puts it, ‘with the suffering Christ that kings were expected to identify themselves’ in Ælfric’s thinking.40 In Ælfric’s life of Edmund the traditions with which he worked are adapted to the intellectual and political contexts in which he wrote. The kingly ideals that inform the text, and which it in turn promotes, are clearly enunciated near its beginning in a quotation from Ecclesiasticus 32. 1: ‘[gif] þu eart to heafod-men geset, ne ahefe þu ðe ac beo betwux mannum swa swa an man of him’ (‘if you are established as a leader of men do not raise yourself up, but be among men as if you were one of them’).41 The virtues for which Edmund is then praised are also indicative of a particular ideal of kingship: humility, generosity, fatherly behaviour towards the poor and needy, benevolent guidance of his people and justice. There is no mention here of ability as a war-leader. The narrative part of Ælfric’s life of Edmund begins with the arrival in Northumberland of a Danish fleet under Hinguar and Hubba, followed by Hinguar’s sailing to East Anglia. Ælfric writes that the Danes arrived ‘on þam geare þe Ælfred æðelincg an and twentig geare wæs, se þe Weast-sexena cynicg siþþan wearð mære’ (‘in the year in which Alfred æðeling was twentyone, he who later become glorious as king of the West Saxons’).42 In his description of Alfred as mære Ælfric gestures towards an alternative model of kingship that does involve military leadership: Alfred’s renown comes from his defeat of Vikings like those to whom Edmund surrenders his life. In suggesting that there may be more than one way to be a good king, the text hints for the first time that an understanding of ideal kingship as imitative of Christ may be problematic. One might, however, argue that Alfred is only a famous king, not a saintly one, and the contrast between him and Edmund could imply a hierarchy of kingly ideals rather than an opposition between irreconcilable alternatives. Hinguar sends a messenger to Edmund commanding him to submit, to share his treasure with him and to be Hinguar’s under-kyning.43 The alternative is death. A bishop summoned by Edmund for advice fears for the king’s life and advises that Edmund do as asked, but the king feels his people have suffered enough and that a stand must be made: ‘Eala, þu bisceop, to bysmore synd getawode þas earman landleoda, and me nu leofre wære þæt ic on feohte feolle wið þam þe min folc moste heora eardes brucan’ (‘Alas, bishop, the poor people of this land are afflicted too shamefully, and I would

40

John, ‘World of Abbot Aelfric’, p. 312. Klaniczay similarly argues that Abbo’s great innovation was ‘the central place the legend accorded to the “martyr king – Suffering Christ” analogy’ (Holy Rulers, p. 94). 41 Ælfric, Lives, ed. Skeat, II, 314. 42 Ælfric, Lives, ed. Skeat, II, 316. This dating is not in Abbo. 43 Ælfric, Lives, ed. Skeat, II, 318.

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King, Martyr and Virgin now rather fall in battle as long as my people might enjoy their native land’).44 Edmund’s bishop again recommends capitulation or flight, but Edmund is determined ‘þæt ic ana ne belife æfter minum leofum þegum þe on heora bedde wurdon mid bearnum and wifum færlice ofslægene fram þysum flotmannum. Næs me næfre gewunelic þæt ic worhte fleames; ac ic wolde swiðor sweltan, gif ic þorfte, for minum agenum earde’ (‘that I do not live on alone after my beloved thanes who, with their children and women, have been suddenly killed in their beds by these seamen. It was never my custom to take flight, but I would rather die, if I must, for my own homeland’).45 In conformity to a Christocentric model of kingship a readiness to die fighting in battle has subtly shifted to a readiness to die as a sacrificial victim on behalf of his people. Edmund’s desire not to out-live his people is an exact reversal of the situation in the Anglo-Saxon poem, The Battle of Maldon, in which it is a lord’s retainers who do not wish to live on after their lord’s death. The Battle of Maldon commemorates a Viking victory in eastern England close in date to the composition of Ælfric’s life of Edmund: the encounter between Vikings and Anglo-Saxons at Maldon (Essex) in 991, after which Danegeld was first paid to the Vikings.46 At about the time Ælfric was compiling his Lives of Saints St Edmund’s enemies were once more attacking the Anglo-Saxons, and Ælfric’s life of Edmund relates to questions about the most appropriate way of meeting Viking aggression that were all too pressing for its earliest readers. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that in 994 Ælfric’s patron, Æthelweard, was involved in negotiating peace with the Vikings, a strategy that contrasts powerfully both with Edmund’s self-sacrifice and with Byrhtnoth’s determination to fight at Maldon: Ælfric’s earliest readers are unlikely to have felt that Edmund’s self-sacrificial path of passive resistance was for all to tread. They might have pointed out that Christ-like kingship is not a role all are called to perform; they could equally have pointed to alternative exemplary figures such as Alfred, and it is in relation to such alternatives that Ælfric constructs Edmund as imitating Christ. In Ælfric’s text the stand-off between Edmund and the Viking leader becomes a contest over who will submit to whom, a conflict in which political and religious authority are inseparable: Edmund says he will not submit to Hinguar ‘buton he to Hælende Criste ærest mid ge-leafan on þysum lande gebuge’ (‘unless he will first submit with faith to Christ the Saviour in this land’).47 Edmund appears to be willing to submit to the Danish king if he in turn will submit to the heavenly king to whom Edmund has already submitted. Hinguar, however, refuses and instead attacks Edmund. 44

Ælfric, Lives, ed. Skeat, II, 318. Ælfric, Lives, ed. Skeat, II, 319–20. 46 See The Battle of Maldon, ed. D. G. Scragg (Manchester, 1981). 47 Ælfric, Lives, ed. Skeat, II, 320. 45

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Carl Phelpstead At this point Edmund, ‘þæs Hælends gemyndig’ (‘mindful of the Saviour’), throws down his weapons, despite having earlier expressed his readiness to die in battle. Ælfric departs from his source to explain that Edmund ‘wolde geæfenlæcan Cristes gebysnungum þe forbead Petre mid wæpnum to winnenne wið þa wælhreowan Judeiscan’ (‘wanted to imitate Christ’s example when he forbade Peter to fight with weapons against the bloodthirsty Jews’).48 In comparing Edmund’s enemies to the Jews Ælfric constructs a clear parallel between the king and his model, strengthening the identification of Edmund with Christ by identifying his enemies with the supposed enemies of Christ. The text records both Edmund’s desire to imitate Christ and his fulfilment of that desire; in affirming imitatio Christi as a saintly ideal it promotes it as a kingly one. Edmund’s imitation of Christ continues in Ælfric’s account of his torture and death, in which the bloodthirstily sadistic leadership of Hinguar is juxtaposed with that of the passive and Christ-like Edmund. 49 Edmund is bound, mocked and beaten with staffs. He is then tied to a tree ‘mid heardum bendum’ (‘with firm bonds’) and whipped ‘langlice’ (‘for a long time’).50 While he is being abused in this way Edmund upsets the Vikings further by crying out to Christ. So ‘Hi scuton þa mid gafelucum swilce him to gamenes to oðþæt he eall wæs besæt mid heora scotungum swilce igles byrsta, swa swa Sebastianus wæs’ (‘They shot at him then with missiles, as if it were a game to them, until he was completely covered with their missiles just like the bristles of a hedgehog, as Sebastian was’).51 In making this comparison with the late-Roman martyr St Sebastian, Ælfric (and before him Abbo) again follows the conventions of hagiographic typology in order to promote

48

Ælfric, Lives, ed. Skeat, II, 320–2. Ælfric’s references to Jews in his Lives of Saints are discussed in A. P. Scheil, ‘Anti-Judaism in Ælfric’s Lives of Saints’, Anglo-Saxon England 28 (1999), 65–86. 49 James Earl notes that Ælfric has toned down the violence of Edmund’s martyrdom in comparison with his source, and in particular that he has omitted Abbo’s account of what Earl takes to be the Viking ritual of the ‘blood-eagle’ (as he notes, there has been extensive debate about whether this is an example of the blood-eagle ritual and indeed whether that ritual has any basis in history: see Earl, ‘Violence and Non-Violence’, p. 130 and references there; Cavill, ‘Analogy and Genre’, pp. 25–34, argues that the whole account of Edmund’s torture owes more to hagiographic convention than to knowledge of contemporary Viking practices). Earl suggests this omission may have been motivated by a recognition on Ælfric’s part of the dangers of indulging in the description of violence and by a desire to make Edmund’s sufferings conform more closely to those of hagiographic tradition (‘Violence and Non-Violence’, pp. 130–1). 50 Ælfric, Lives, ed. Skeat, II, 322. Earl, ‘Violence and Non-Violence’, and E. Christie, ‘SelfMastery and Submission: Holiness and Masculinity in the Lives of Anglo-Saxon MartyrKings’, in Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages, ed. P. H. Cullum and K. J. Lewis (Cardiff, 2004), pp. 143–57, have developed Freudian readings of this aspect of Ælfric’s text. 51 Ælfric, Lives, ed. Skeat, II, 322.

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King, Martyr and Virgin Edmund’s sanctity: Edmund must be a saint because his death is like that of another saint. What is perhaps more remarkable than Ælfric’s comparison of Edmund with St Sebastian is the zoological simile he also employs, describing Edmund as looking like a hedgehog. This comparison is in Abbo’s text (Ælfric’s source), and Ælfric uses the same image in his own account of St Sebastian’s martyrdom elsewhere in his Lives of Saints; Cavill traces the history of this simile from the fifth-century Acts of St Sebastian onwards.52 It must have been felt to be an edifying comparison, though for the modern reader its bathos undermines the effect of the scene all but irreparably. After all his tortures Edmund is still not dead, so Hinguar orders him to be decapitated. As the earlier reference to Alfred suggests, an ideology of royal martyrdom that assimilated kingship to a Christology emphasizing acceptance of suffering and death would be in competition with other models of kingly behaviour, including that of the ruler as successful leader of his men in battle. At one time scholars would have pointed to a pre-Christian heroic ideal in opposition to Christian self-sacrifice. More recent scholarship recognizes that Christianity was so firmly established in tenth-century England that, in Jocelyn Wogan-Browne’s words, ‘[r]ather than an alternative or opposition to Christian culture, the heroic is now more credibly seen as proceeding from within Christian culture and as having its own history of changing assimilations there’.53 The heroic is an alternative within Christian culture rather than an alternative in opposition to it: this could be seen as symbolized in Ælfric’s inclusion of the lives of two English royal martyrs in his Lives of Saints, with St Oswald dying in battle against his enemy (though, admittedly, praying rather than fighting at the moment he is struck down).54 What is at issue is whether it is right for a Christian, and more specifically a Christian king, to engage in war.55 The implication that passive acceptance of death is the appropriately Christian response to Viking aggression is contradicted elsewhere in the Lives of Saints. In a famous passage on the three orders of society Ælfric speaks approvingly of ‘bellatores […] ðe ure burga healdað and urne eard be-weriað wið onwinnendne here’ (‘soldiers […] who protect our towns and defend our native land against an invading

52

Cavill, ‘Analogy and Genre’, pp. 31–3. For the occurrence in Ælfric’s life of St Sebastian, see Ælfric, Lives, ed. Skeat, I, 144. 53 J. Wogan-Browne, ‘The Hero in Christian Reception: Ælfric and Heroic Poetry’, in Old English Literature, ed. R. M. Liuzza (New Haven, 2002), pp. 215–35 (p. 216). 54 Ælfric, Lives, ed. Skeat, II, 134–6. 55 J. E. Cross, ‘The Ethic of War in Old English’, in England Before the Conquest: Studies in Primary Sources Presented to Dorothy Whitelock, ed. P. Clemoes and K. Hughes (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 269–82 puts Ælfric’s statements on just war theory into the wider context of Old English literature as a whole, as does Damon, Soldier Saints, at much greater length and with a particular emphasis on the relationship between warfare and sanctity.

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Carl Phelpstead army’).56 In the preceding piece on the Maccabees Ælfric provides ‘the most explicit statement of the Christian doctrine of the just war that is extant in Anglo-Saxon’;57 he specifically relates this to the Viking attacks, ‘Iustum bellum is rihtlic gefeoht wið ða reðan flot-menn, oþþe wið oðre þeoda þe eard willað fordon’ (‘Iustum bellum is just war against the cruel seamen, or against other peoples who wish to destroy our land’).58 Ælfric’s threefold division of society and approval of bellatores is also found in his Letter to Sigeweard on the Old and New Testaments, and in that text Ælfric also cites the biblical Judith as an example to those defending their land.59 Earl, however, draws attention to an Ælfrician fragment (Wyrdwriteras us secgaþ), in which Ælfric implies that the king is not himself among the bellatores and advises him to delegate military authority to others.60 Earl argues from this that although Ælfric saw violence as justified in certain circumstances, he saw the king’s function as being to pray rather than to fight; in other words, Ælfric here aligns the royal role with that of the monks rather than the warriors in his threefold division of society.61 The question of the right response to Viking aggression is linked to beliefs about the ultimate cause of that aggression. Godden identifies two conflicting explanations of the Viking raids in another text in Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, De oratione Moysi.62 On the one hand the raids are seen as a punishment for the sins of the English that can be averted by prayer, but they are also seen as part of a ‘final and inevitable’ apocalypse, the end of the world.63 In Ælfric’s life of St Edmund the Anglo-Saxons are seen as innocent victims, not people who have brought down just punishment on themselves. While this might be seen as justifying armed resistance, this particular text suggests that, at least for the king, Christ-like self-sacrifice is the more saintly course of action. Two recent studies have addressed the question of Ælfric’s views on war

56

57 58 59

60 61

62 63

Ælfric, Lives, ed. Skeat, II, 122. On Ælfric’s use of the theory of the three orders, see T. E. Powell, ‘The “Three Orders” of Society in Anglo-Saxon England’, Anglo-Saxon England 23 (1994), 103–32. Godden, ‘Ælfric’s Saints’ Lives’, p. 95. Ælfric, Lives, ed. Skeat, II, 114. Ælfric, The Old English Version of the Heptateuch, Aelfric’s Treatise on the Old and New Testament, and his Preface to Genesis, ed. S. J. Crawford, EETS OS 160 (London, 1922), pp. 71–2; 48. M. Godden, ‘Apocalypse and Invasion in Late Anglo-Saxon England’, in From AngloSaxon to Early Middle English: Studies Presented to E. G. Stanley, ed. M. Godden, D. Gray and T. Hoad (Oxford, 1994), pp. 130–62 (p. 140), points out this treatise is addressed to a secular landowner who would himself have been a member of the bellatores class. Ælfric, Homilies II, 728–32, especially p. 731. Earl, ‘Violence and Non-Violence,’ p. 135. Magennis suggests that Ælfric’s Edmund appears ‘more like an orator […] than an active military leader’ (H. Magennis, ‘Warrior Saints, Warfare, and the Hagiography of Ælfric of Eynsham’, Traditio 56 (2001), 27–51 (p. 45)). Ælfric, Lives, ed. Skeat, I, 282–307. Godden, ‘Apocalypse and Invasion’, p. 137.

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King, Martyr and Virgin and its relation to sanctity through comparative studies of his lives of warrior saints, including Edmund. The two studies reach very different conclusions, but both have in common a tendency to play down tensions between different viewpoints expressed in Ælfric’s works. Hugh Magennis argues that in Ælfric’s saints’ lives ‘we find a world carefully abstracted from that of “real life”, a world in which normal contradictions and consequences do not normally apply’.64 This is a world that Ælfric ‘clearly intends to be seen as different from the real world’.65 Magennis describes Edmund’s decision not to fight as ‘an admirable stance for an orator but hardly to be commended for kings in the real early medieval world, as opposed to the special literary world of Ælfrician hagiography’.66 This removal of Edmund to a ‘special literary world’ certainly neutralizes the contradiction between Edmund’s behaviour and Ælfric’s comments elsewhere on the duty to resist aggressors (in the ‘real world’). But hagiography is by definition intended to make a difference in the ‘real world’, and one would have thought that its ability to do so would be severely compromised if the world it portrayed were as distant from that of its audience as Magennis argues: a moral and spiritual model who lived in a different world would be of very limited use. Godden’s claim, quoted earlier, that ‘the Lives of Saints were to be read, in part at least, as providing important political and ethical lessons for the present’ is surely nearer the mark.67 John Damon traces conflicting ideas about the relationship between sanctity and participation in war through the Anglo-Saxon period. He argues that Ælfric achieves a synthesis of different views as his thinking changes over time: [Ælfric] forg[ed] a unified theory of holy war in the crucible of a nation at war […] He moved from early works consistent with the Martinian model of Christian anti-heroism to later works confident in the belief that God ordained warfare as a means of righting wrongs.68

The Lives of Saints collection is central to this development: Damon (rather reductively) sees it as ‘a treatise on the Christian’s proper response to violence’ in which Ælfric attempts ‘to reconcile the contradictory traditions he had inherited’.69 This is an appealing explanation of the contradictory statements found in the Ælfrician corpus, but it is a little too tidy and there is

64 65 66 67 68 69

Magennis, ‘Warrior Saints’, p. 29. Magennis, ‘Warrior Saints’, p. 48. Magennis, ‘Warrior Saints’, p. 48. Godden, ‘Ælfric’s Saints’ Lives’, p. 94. Damon, Soldier Saints, p. 24. ‘Martinian’ is a reference to St Martin, who renounced his career as a soldier to become a saint. Damon, Soldier Saints, p. 198.

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Carl Phelpstead some circularity in the arguments.70 It may be more fruitful to explain Ælfric’s contradictions in terms of his sensitivity to context rather than his intellectual development, and it is clear that if Ælfric believed that ‘God ordained warfare as a means of righting wrongs’ he always maintained that God did so only for a particular section of society. Ælfric is far from being the only Christian to have had trouble in reconciling the example of Christ’s pacifism with the demands of a particular historical situation. His ability to see more than one solution to such a complex moral problem might itself be seen as a virtue. St Edmund’s Christ-like self-sacrifice is certainly represented as a commendable response to violent aggression, but this need not imply that other responses might not be equally commendable in other contexts. I noted at the beginning of this essay that the hagiographer is able to demonstrate the sanctity of his/her subject in two ways: by showing how the saint’s life and/or death conforms to authoritative models of Christian sanctity, and by recounting the miracles that confirm that the saint now lives with God.71 Having shown Edmund imitating Christ and his saints in death, Ælfric proceeds to record some of his posthumous miracles. The Vikings hide Edmund’s head, but it is miraculously able to call out ‘Her, her, her!’ (‘Here! Here! Here!’) to the search party looking for it.72 The hiding and finding of Edmund’s head picks up again the parallels between Edmund and Sebastian, as Sebastian’s body was miraculously salvaged from a sewer in which it had been hidden.73 Edmund’s recovered head is buried with his body; on the translation of Edmund’s remains some time later the head is found to be miraculously restored to the neck. In Ælfric’s text great emphasis is laid on the continuing incorruption and wholeness of the formerly wounded body, and the current state of Edmund’s body is taken to be a sign that God will raise people up whole on doomsday: it is a pledge of the resurrection of the body.74 Abbo also sees the state of Edmund’s body as foreshadowing the glory of the

70

71 72

73 74

Tracing the development of Ælfric’s thinking during the process of compilation depends upon being able to date items in the collection relative to one another, but Damon’s chronology is, to at least some extent, founded on perceptions of conceptual development: the very thing he is attempting to demonstrate. For a particularly clear example of this, see the discussion of the relative dates of the lives of Edmund and Oswald, Damon, Soldier Saints, p. 218. See Godden, ‘Ælfric’s Saints’ Lives’, for analysis of Ælfric’s contradictory statements about the possibility of contemporary miracles. It is also protected by a wolf, an animal associated with Woden/Óðinn and so seen by Hoffmann as evidence of continuity between pre-Christian ideas of sacral kingship and Christian royal sanctity (Die heiligen Könige, pp. 41–3); see also Pinner’s comments below, pp. 129–30. Ælfric, Lives, ed. Skeat, I, 146. Ælfric, Lives, ed. Skeat, II, 328.

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King, Martyr and Virgin resurrection to come, but he lays much greater stress than does Ælfric on its being proof of Edmund’s virgin purity, claiming that God keeps inviolate the bodies of those who die as virgin martyrs.75 Ridyard argues that the emphasis in Abbo’s Passio Eadmundi on the saint’s virginity may reflect a West Saxon desire to ensure that ‘St Edmund was allowed no successor whose claim to rule in East Anglia might be more watertight than that of the house of Cerdic’, the West Saxon rulers of East Anglia at the time Abbo wrote.76 A characteristic that from most perspectives would make Edmund a less than ideal king could certainly prove convenient for those who succeeded him by force of arms rather than descent. But it is also possible to see Abbo as emphasizing Edmund’s virginity in order to accommodate him more closely to the ideals of his monastic audience. It may be that Ælfric recognized the disadvantages of a virgin king incapable of producing an heir and chose not to emphasize this aspect of Abbo’s portrait both for pragmatic political reasons and also out of consideration for his non-monastic audience. Whatever the reasons for it, the reduced emphasis on Edmund’s virginity in Ælfric’s version draws our attention to tensions inherent in a Christocentric ideology of kingship: Christ was believed to be a virgin, but the king who models his life on Christ in that particular respect risks the stability of his kingdom after his death. Ælfric’s life of Edmund ends by making a contrast between the English, whose blessing by God is evinced by the miracles performed at English saints’ shrines, and the people seen earlier as enemies of God comparable to the Vikings who murdered Edmund, namely the Jews. It is stated that because they denied Christ they are damned ‘swa swa hi wiscton him sylfum’ (‘as they wished upon themselves’).77 The proof of this, says Ælfric, is that no miracles are performed at their shrines. The passage on English saints (mentioning Cuthbert (c. 635–87) and Æthelthryth (d. 679) and her sister in addition to Edmund) and the closing references to the Jews are additions that Ælfric has made to his source and they can be read as offering encouragement to Ælfric’s compatriots in the face of Viking attack by reminding them of God’s providential care for the English. The reference to the Jews in particular also continues the strategy of drawing parallels between Edmund and Christ and so further develops Ælfric’s Christocentric model of kingship. In Ælfric’s life of Edmund of East Anglia the king is portrayed in terms of a recognized type of Anglo-Saxon royal saint: the king killed in battle against pagans. In accordance with the political theology of the Benedictine Reform Edmund is seen as Christ-like in his kingship, his self-sacrifical acceptance of death for his people and his virginity. However, the text also acknowledges the existence of alternative understandings of the kingly office, as for example in the bishop’s advice to Edmund before his death, and we have 75

TLES, pp. 86–7. Ridyard, Royal Saints, p. 226. 77 Ælfric, Lives, ed. Skeat, II, 334. 76

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Carl Phelpstead seen that alternative models are also promoted in other texts by Ælfric, including other items in the Lives of Saints collection. These alternatives highlight tensions between the roles of king and martyr, and Ælfric’s reduced emphasis on Edmund’s virginity may also indicate his awareness of the limitations of an analogy between the king and Christ. The tensions within Ælfric’s life of Edmund and the contradictions between it and other texts by Ælfric may be read as indicative of an approach to moral and political issues that is sensitive to context. Ælfric’s life of St Edmund is a particular response at a particular time to the question of what it might mean for a king of AngloSaxons to follow the example of the King of the Jews.

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2 Chronology, Genealogy and Conversion: The Afterlife of St Edmund in the North Alison Finlay

The first history of Iceland, indeed probably the earliest written text in the Icelandic vernacular, is the Íslendingabók (‘Book of the Icelanders’), written sometime between 1122 and 1133 by Ari Þorgilsson. It is a text at the interface of oral and written cultures, for Ari derived much of his material from oral sources, learned people whom he enumerates in his text; at the same time he was attempting to provide a chronological framework by reference to events beyond the confines of the Nordic world. The very first of these references is that which establishes the date of the settlement of Iceland in the year 870. I quote the whole of Ari’s long and awkward sentence – the writing of narrative prose in the vernacular was in its infancy – since it demonstrates his customary combination of reference to oral informants with information culled from wider international sources: Ísland byggðisk fyrst ýr Norvegi á dǫgum Haralds ens hárfagra, Halfdanarsonar ens svarta, í þann tíð – at ætlun ok tǫlu þeira Teits fóstra míns, þess manns es ek kunna spakastan, sonar Ísleifs byskups, ok Þorkels fǫðurbróður míns Gellissonar, es langt munði fram, ok Þóríðar Snorradóttur goða, es bæði vas margspǫk ok óljúgfróð, – es Ívarr Ragnarssonr loðbrókar lét drepa Eadmund enn helga Englakonung; en þat vas dcclxx. vetra eptir burð Krists, at því es ritit es í sǫgu hans.1 (‘Iceland was first settled from Norway in the days of Haraldr hárfagri, son of Hálfdan inn svarti, at the time – according to the opinion and reckoning of my foster father Teitr, the wisest man I know, son of Bishop Ísleifr, and of my uncle Þorkell Gellisson, who remembered far back, and of Þóríðr, daughter of Snorri goði, who was both very wise and truthful – when Ívarr, the son of Ragnarr loðbrók, had Edmund, the holy king of the English, killed; and that was 870 years after the birth of Christ, according to what is written in his saga.’)

1

Íslendingabók. Landnámabók, ed. Jakob Benediktsson, Íslenzk fornrit 1 (Reykjavík, 1986), p. 4.

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Alison Finlay The date of the killing of St Edmund is one of three that form the chronological backbone of Ari’s work.2 The others are the killing of the Norwegian king Óláfr Tryggvason in the year 1000, itself dated relatively to ‘cxxx. vetrum eptir dráp Eadmundar’ (’130 years after the killing of Edmund’), and the beginning of a new cycle of the moon in 1120. These dates provide points of reference to which Ari relates events occurring in Iceland, thus fitting the history of Europe’s farthest-flung outpost into the mainstream context. Ari’s pioneering authority was such that his chronological system was adopted by subsequent Icelandic historians. It is not difficult to interpret the symbolic importance of the death of Óláfr Tryggvason, the proselytizing king of Norway widely credited with the conversion of the whole of Scandinavia, particularly since Ari’s account of the conversion of Iceland forms a pivotal chapter of his history. It is much less clear why the date which initiates the whole work, and which marks the seminal event of Iceland’s settlement, is that of the death of a saint who is not at first sight one likely to evoke the interest or sympathy of an Icelandic audience. The East Anglian king Edmund was martyred in 869/70 under attack from invaders who were not only heathen but more specifically Scandinavian, an event that might be considered at least irrelevant, if not embarassing, to an Icelandic audience, however Christian they might now be. The death of this English king is elevated by Ari to a prominence beyond even that which he gives to the deaths of the more familiar Scandinavian martyr-heroes, both kings of Norway, Óláfr Tryggvason and Óláfr Haraldsson, of whom the latter was proclaimed a saint after his death in 1030. The life of St Edmund, like that of many saints once they achieve status as focus of a cult, was adapted to suit a range of propagandist and rhetorical purposes. The cultural significance of the Scandinavian martyr-kings is defined, at least in the medieval period, by their local significance within Scandinavia, particularly their joint role – as much political as devotional – in the conversion of the Nordic lands to Christianity. This essay will examine how Edmund, in contrast, achieved significance within an alien culture. This was a process that began in England in the years after his death, and took a new turn, as we have seen, in Iceland in the early years of the twelfth century. Ari’s reference to Edmund will bear further examination here. Ari’s synthesizing of oral and written methodologies has been compared with that of Bede, ‘similarly positioned close to an interface of oral and literary cultures in eighth-century England’;3 some scholars have argued that some of Ari’s information and methodology must derive from direct 2

Ólafia Einarsdóttir, Studier i kronologisk metode, Bibliotheca Historica Lundensis 13 (Stockholm, 1964), pp. 43–4. 3 D. Whaley, ‘A Useful Past: Historical Writing in Medieval Iceland’, in Old Icelandic Literature and Society, ed. M. Clunies Ross (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 161–202 (p. 170).

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Chronology, Genealogy and Conversion knowledge of some version of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica.4 But in fact Ari’s only specific reference to a written source is that cited above, to a ‘saga’ of St Edmund. This rare witness to the materials available to a learned writer early in the twelfth century in Iceland is tantalizing. No surviving trace of or other reference to the work exists. In interpreting the reference we are bedevilled by Ari’s use of the notoriously vague word ‘saga’, which literally, in both medieval and modern Icelandic, means nothing more specific than ‘something said or told’, and could apply to any kind of narrative in any language. It was argued by Hermann Pálsson that this word would not have been used of a Latin source, and that Ari must have been referring to a nowlost Icelandic saga, that is a saint’s life, of Edmund.5 The category of ‘heilagra manna sögur’ (‘saints’ lives’) in Icelandic includes works translated from a wide range of sources, mainly in Latin, and fragmentary twelfth-century examples are among the oldest surviving records of vernacular narrative. Among the corpus there are surviving examples of lives of other English saints, sagas of Dunstan (including an account of the death of St Edward the martyr), of St Oswald and of Edward the Confessor, though these are phenomena of the fourteenth century rather than the twelfth.6 It is generally assumed, however, that the ‘saga’ to which Ari refers was a Latin text, probably Abbo of Fleury’s Vita S. Eadmundi, despite the fact that none of what Ari actually says about Edmund can be found in Abbo’s Vita as we now have it. The date, ’870 years after the birth of Christ’, is not given by Abbo, although Ælfric’s Old English translation dates Edmund’s death ‘on þam geare þe ælfred æðelincg an and twentig geare wæs, se þe west-sexena cynincg siþþan wearð mære’ (‘the year in which prince Alfred – he who afterwards became the famous king of the West Saxons – was twenty-one’).7 And it is not from Abbo that Ari got the identification of Edmund’s heathen attacker Ívarr (the first of the three Vikings named by Abbo as Inguar, Hubba and Healfdena) as the son of Ragnarr loðbrók (‘hairy breeches’).8 4

5 6

7 8

Einarsdóttir, Studier, pp. 24–8; E. F. Halvorsen, ‘Theodoricus monachus and the Icelanders’, in Þriðji víkingafundur. Third Viking Congress, Reykjavík 1956, ed. Kristján Eldjárn, Árbók hins íslenzka fornleifafélags, Fylgirit (Reykjavík, 1958), pp. 142–55. See Hermann Pálsson, ‘Játmundar saga hins helga’, Skírnir 132 (1957), 139–51. See C. Fell, ‘Anglo-Saxon Saints in Old Norse Sources and Vice Versa’, in Proceedings of the Eighth Viking Congress: Århus 24–31 August 1977, ed. H. Bekker-Nielsen, P. Foote and O. Olsen, Mediaeval Scandinavia Supplement 2 (Odense, 1981), pp. 95–106. Ælfric, Lives, ed. Skeat, II, 316, 37–8. This identification of Ívarr as son of Ragnarr loðbrók is first made by Adam of Bremen (writing c. 1075), who includes ‘Ingvar’ in a list of ‘kings over the Danes and Northmen, who at this time [the time of Rimbert, mid-ninth century] harassed Gaul with piratical incursions. … The most cruel of them all was Ingvar, the son of Lodbrok, who everywhere tortured Christians to death’ (‘Erant et alii reges Danorum vel Nortmannorum, qui piraticis excursionibus eo tempore Galliam vexabant. … Crudelissimus omnium fuit Inguar, filius Lodparchi, qui christianos ubique per supplicia necavit’) (Adam of Bremen, Gesta hammaburgensis ecclesia pontificum, ed. B. Schmeidler, Scriptores rerum

47

Alison Finlay Ragnarr is a famous figure in Old Norse tradition, and as the legends about him developed, information that could largely be called historical about the Viking leaders who established a dynasty of rulers in tenth-century York and Dublin was grafted on to the outrageously fictional saga of this possibly legendary ancestor figure.9 Of the sons of Ragnarr who, in his saga, are said to take vengeance on the Northumbrian king Ælla who put Ragnarr to death in a snake pit, three – Ívarr, Bjǫrn (járnsíða) and Sigurðr (ormr-íauga) – may have been historical ninth-century figures; the identification of Ívarr with the leader of the Vikings responsible for the death of Edmund is accepted by Scandinavian writers after Ari. Hubba (ON Ubbi) is a later addition to the roll of Ragnarr’s sons; he is mentioned by Abbo and Ælfric, but not said by them to be related to Ívarr. The first mention of their relationship with Ívarr is made in the twelfth-century Annals of St Neots.10 The connection of the third Viking mentioned by Abbo and Ælfric, Healfdene (ON Hálfdan), to this legendary family is still more tenuous.11 It is very possible that the special prominence of the martyrdom of Edmund in the eyes of the Icelanders, and Ari in particular, arose not so much from a pious regard for his sanctity as from a sense of identification with this famous Viking dynasty. Ari’s Íslendingabók closes immodestly with the author’s own genealogy – the last words of the book being en ek heitik Ari (‘and my name is Ari’) – which traces his descent from the earliest known (or legendary) ancestors of the Swedish royal house, via ‘Ingjaldr, dóttursonr Sigurðar Ragnarssonar loðbrókar’ (‘Ingjaldr, son of the daughter of Sigurðr (ormr-í-auga), son of Ragnarr loðbrók’).12 In part, Ari’s claim of descent from Ragnarr can be seen in the context of a more general concern to ally his family with the royal houses of Scandinavia, and indeed, in the course of the thirteenth-century project to chronicle the

9

10

11 12

Germanicarum (Hanover and Leipzig, 1917), pp. 39–40, translated in Adam of Bremen, History of the Archbishops, trans. F. Tschan (New York, 1959), pp. 36–7). It is not known whether Adam’s work had reached Iceland by Ari’s time, but it is quoted and partially translated in a number of fourteenth-century Icelandic texts (E. A. Rowe, Ragnarr Loðbrók in Medieval Icelandic Historiography (forthcoming)). For the development of the legend of Ragnarr, see R. McTurk, Studies in Ragnars saga loðbrókar and its Major Scandinavian Analogues, Medium Ævum Monographs new series 15 (Oxford, 1972). See McTurk, Studies, p. 231. The relationship is first mentioned in Scandinavian sources in the Chronicon Roskildense from c. 1140 (McTurk, Studies, p. 105). The fact that Ari mentions only Ívarr (Inguar) and Ragnarr loðbrók aligns him with the earlier stage of the legend represented by Adam. McTurk, Studies, pp. 41–2. Íslendingabók, ed. Benediktsson, p. 28. Other Icelanders claimed descent from Ragnarr via another son, Bjǫrn járnsíða. Rowe (Ragnarr Loðbrók, p. 1) points out that these claims were not universally accepted in Icelandic sources; Laxdœla saga, for instance, does not identify the mother of Ari’s ancestor Ingjaldr as the granddaughter of Ragnarr (Laxdœla saga, ed. Einar Ólafur Sveinsson, Íslenzk fornrit 5 (Reykjavík, 1934), p. 3).

48

Chronology, Genealogy and Conversion history of the kings of Norway, Ragnarr was, in one way or another, written into the ancestry of the Norwegian royal house too.13 But Ragnarr had independent significance in the north, where the conquests condemned by European churchmen were reinterpreted as a quest for the re-establishment of an ancient empire, as Elizabeth Rowe explains: Ragnarr became associated with the idea of a ‘Viking empire’ that supposedly was created by the conquests of the legendary Danish king Haraldr hilditǫnn… Haraldr was defeated in the Battle of Brávellir by a king named Hringr, and medieval Icelandic historians came to identify this Hringr with Sigurðr hringr, who was by this time thought to be Ragnarr’s father. Sigurðr and Ragnarr in turn were said to be occupied with the task of winning back the lands that they had acquired through the victory over Haraldr.14

As Rowe points out, historians outside Iceland did not acknowledge Ragnarr’s claim to the lands he conquered. She continues: The ‘Viking empire’ lasted for three generations and came to an end when Ragnarr’s sons divided it between them. They failed to keep England and Russia, but Ragnarr’s family became included in the genealogies of the royal dynasties of Denmark and Sweden, for example with the Danish king Gormr gamli (son of Hǫrða-Knútr) being made the grandson of Sigurðr ormr-í-auga.15

Rowe goes on to detect a ‘framework’ and careful patterning in the references to the sons of Loðbrók that begin and end Ari’s work: Ari’s work thus opens and closes with significant references to two sons of Ragnarr loðbrók, who help establish a chronological, cultural, and genealogical framework for the settlement of Iceland. Ari also deploys them in a way that shows Iceland’s place in God’s creation. Just as the coming of Christ divided salvation history into two ages, so too did the conversion divide Scandinavian history into a pagan age and a Christian age.16

13

According to the early thirteenth-century Fagrskinna, Ragnhildr, daughter of Sigurðr ormr-í-auga, was the second wife of Hálfdan inn svarti, and mother of Haraldr hár­fagri (Ágrip. Fagrskinna, ed. Bjarni Einarsson, Íslenzk fornrit 29 (Reykjavík, 1985), p. 57). Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla, written a few years later, records Ragnhildr as the greatgranddaughter of Sigurðr ormr-í-auga (Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringa, ed. Bjarni Aðal­ bjarnarson, 3 vols., Íslenzk fornrit 26–8 (Reykjavík, 1941–51), I, 87–90). Since Ragnhildr’s son, Haraldr hárfagri, was roughly contemporary with Edmund (his reign being dated c. 880–930), and therefore presumably with the sons of Ragnarr identified as his slayers, Snorri’s chronology is impossible while that of Fagrskinna is merely improbable. 14 Rowe, Ragnarr Loðbrók, p. 2. 15 Rowe, Ragnarr Loðbrók, p. 2. 16 Rowe, Ragnarr Loðbrók, p. 4.

49

Alison Finlay Rowe reads Ari’s treatment of the distinction between pagan and Christian in the light of conventions established in other Icelandic texts: In medieval Icelandic literature this Augustinian bipartition also appears on the smaller scale of family history, as when a father is pagan but his son has converted to Christianity. Additionally, it can show up in synchronic form, as when a pair of brothers illustrates the evil and good sides of paganism. In this case, the history of the settlement of Iceland opens with the evil pagan Ívarr Ragnarsson – a cruel, childless persecutor of Christians – and closes with the good pagan Sigurðr Ragnarsson – a heroic warrior whose descendants will immediately embrace Christianity when the time comes. Although Ívarr is damned, he cannot be omitted from the historical record, for he is needed for God’s plan, to be the instrument of Edmund’s martyrdom. Finally, Ragnarr’s son Sigurðr establishes a personal connection between the author and his subject. What appeared at first to be an objective history of a people is revealed to be Ari’s own family history.17

This attractive, though speculative, theory is based on a good deal of reading between the lines of Ari’s laconic text, for an explicit presentation of Ívarr as the ‘damned’ instrument of God’s plan is found neither in Íslendingabók nor in any of the largely fictitious texts detailing the bloodthirsty exploits of the sons of Ragnarr; nor is it easy to accept Ari’s work as guided by this kind of symbolic structuring. It is tempting, however, to try to extrapolate it, as Rowe has done, from the strategies employed in later Icelandic texts whose authors make a more transparent attempt to confront the ambiguities arising from their admiration for the values of their own pagan ancestors: the structuring of Njáls saga, for example, around a central Conversion episode, and the contrasting strains of personality – one turbulent and difficult, the other mild and sociable – in the (pagan) family of Egill Skalla-Grímsson. In English sources the death of Edmund, originally that of a warrior king who falls in battle, gradually comes to be represented in terms of a struggle between Christian and pagan. The brief annal in the oldest version of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 870 reports Edmund’s death in an active engagement against ‘se here’, the usual term for the ravaging Scandinavian army.18 Later Chronicle texts reveal hagiographical accretions. In the Peterborough manuscript (E), copied about 1122 from a version made in Canterbury, but incorporating material of local significance in a fashion typical of the different Chronicle versions, a continuation of the sentence sets the slaughter of the king 17 18

Rowe, Ragnarr Loðbrók, p. 4. ‘Her rad se here ofer Mierce innan Eastengle 7 wintersetl namon æt Þeodforda. 7 þy wintra Eadmund cyning him wiþ feaht, 7 þa Deniscan sige namon 7 þone cyning of­slogon 7 þæt lond all geeodon.’ (‘In this year the host rode through Mercia into East Anglia and took up winter quarters at Thetford, and that winter King Edmund fought against them, and the Danes were victorious, and killed the king, and overran all the land.’): Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 3, ed. Bately, p. 47.

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Chronology, Genealogy and Conversion in the context of a pagan assault on the institutions of Christianity, describing an attack on the monasteries and the murder of the monks of Peterborough.19 The bilingual F manuscript, also from the twelfth century, not only confers on the king the title of saint, but also has an addition, presumably derived from Abbo/Ælfric, identifying the Viking leaders Ingware and Ubba (here they are neither brothers, nor sons of Ragnarr loðbrók).20 Abbo’s life of Edmund, written a little more than a century after the event, and Ælfric’s Old English translation of Abbo’s text, convert death in battle into the king’s choice of martyrdom under the cruel torture of the Viking aggressor, complete with an exhortation to the heathen to convert and an explicit parallel with the death of Christ, as quoted and discussed by Phelpstead above (pp. 00–00). In Ælfric’s account, it is Edmund’s continuing to call on Christ that incites the heathens to step up the torture from whipping to the shooting of missiles – and here an explicit parallel is made with the fate of St Sebastian, similarly ‘entirely covered with missiles, like the bristles of a hedgehog’ (‘eall … besæt mid heora scotungum swilce igles byrsta, swa swa sebastianus wæs’, lines 117–18). Edmund’s steadfast invocation of Christ leads to the final assault and beheading: Betwux þam þe he clypode to criste þagit þa tugon þa hæþenan þone halgan to slæge and mid anum swencge slogon him of þæt heafod and his sawl siþode gesælig to criste.21 (‘While he was still calling out to Christ, the heathens dragged the holy man to the slaughter, and with one stroke cut off his head, and his soul journeyed joyfully to Christ.’)

The hagiographical intent is clear, no less in the tripartite patterning and heightened style than in the discrepancy with the bald story told by the Chronicle. However, these apparently clear generic signs have been somewhat masked in modern scholarly analysis by what has been seen as a competing or contradictory claim in the text for historical authenticity. For Abbo, like Ari Þorgilsson, positions his text at the interface of oral tradition and literary 19

‘… 7 fordiden ealle þa mynstre þa hi to comen. On þa ilcan tima þa comon hi to Medes– hamstede, beorndon 7 bræcon, slogon abbot 7 munecas.’ (‘and destroyed all the monasteries they came to. At the same time they came to Peterborough, burned and stormed it, and killed the abbot and monks.’): The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition. Vol. 7: MS E, ed. S. Irvine (Cambridge, 2002), p. 48. 20 ‘… 7 ðone cing “sancte Eadmund” ofslogan 7 þæt land eall geeodon. “Þara heauodmanna naman þa ðane cing ofslogan wæran Ingware 7 Ubba.” ‘ (‘and killed the king (Saint Edmund), and overran all the land. (The names of the leaders who killed the king were Ingware and Ubba.)’): The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition. Vol. 8: MS F, ed. P. Baker (Cambridge, 2000), p. 67. 21 Ælfric, Lives, ed. Skeat, II, 316 (lines 123–6).

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Alison Finlay record by means of a preamble in which he claims to derive his information about the martyrdom ultimately from an eyewitness account. In Ælfric’s version again: Sum swyðe gelæred munuc com suþan ofer sæ fram sancte benedictes stowe on æþelredes cynincges dæge to dunstane ærce-bisceope þrim gearum ær he forðferde. and se munuc hatte abbo. þa wordon hi æt spræce oþþæt dunstan rehte be sancte eadmunde. swa swa eadmundes sword-bora hit rehte æþelstane cynincge þa þa dunstan iung man wæs. and se swurd-bora wæs forealdod man. Þa gesette se munuc ealle þa gereccednysse on anre bec. and eft ða þa seo boc com to us binnan feawum gearum þa awende we hit on englisc. swa swa hit her-æfter stent.22 (‘A certain very learned monk came over the sea from the south, from St Benedict’s resting-place in King Æþelred’s day to Archbishop Dunstan, three years before Dunstan died [in 985; Dunstan died in 988], and this monk was called Abbo. Then they had a conversation, in which Dunstan related the story of St Edmund, just as Edmund’s sword-bearer related it to King Æþelstan when Dunstan was a young man and the sword-bearer was an aged man. Then the monk recorded the whole story in a certain book, and when the book came to us within a few years, we translated it into English just as it stands hereafter.’)

This emphasis on the importance of witness recurs in the account of the martyrdom, where by God’s agency a hidden observer is able to attest to the decapitation of the king and the whereabouts of his concealed head (lines 127–9). Abbo’s claim to be recording eyewitness testimony has prompted detailed scrutiny from historians anxious to discern a seed of realism under the jungle of hagiographical motif. Dorothy Whitelock’s is the classic statement of the case: The main facts of the martyrdom are likely to be true. On this central theme, Abbo could not drastically have altered what he claimed to have heard from Dunstan, to whom he sent this work. He could not have invented the armour-bearer. Nor is it likely that Dunstan should indulge in motiveless and flamboyant lying. It is one thing to add to one’s narrative speeches and moral statements; it is a different matter to turn a death in battle into a cruel execution after the battle. Nor is the account of the martyrdom incredible. The slaying of a prisoner by the Danes, using him as a target, can be paralleled by the martyrdom of St Ælfheah in 1012. The removal of the head is a well-evidenced practice among primitive peoples.23

The quest for realism and elements ‘likely to be true’ has taken a number of forms. One is the attempt to find specifically Scandinavian elements in the

22 23

Ælfric, Lives, ed. Skeat, II, 314 (lines 1–10). Whitelock, ‘Fact and Fiction’, pp. 221–2.

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Chronology, Genealogy and Conversion persecution of Edmund; thus it has been argued that a sentence found in Abbo, though not in Ælfric, can be interpreted to mean that Ívarr inflicted on Edmund the same torture he supposedly inflicted on Ælla, the killer of his father: the cutting of the ‘blood-eagle’ on his back:24 Ille seminecem, cui adhuc uitalis calor palpitabat in tepido pectore, ut uix posset subsistere, auellit cruento stipiti festinus, avulsumque retectis costarum latebris praepunctionibus crebis ac si raptum equuleo aut seuis tortum ungulis.25 (‘In this plight he was hastily wrenched from the blood-stained tree, his ribs laid bare by numberless gashes, as if he had been put to the torture of the rack, or had been torn by savage claws’).

Alfred Smyth claims for this description a note of authenticity that tempts him to attribute it to Abbo’s supposed informant: this remarkable description of Edmund’s condition is quite different from the conventional ‘hedgehog’ picture used elsewhere by both Abbo and Ælfric to describe the martyr. The simile of the hedgehog was borrowed from the Sebastian story, but the above account, since it has no obvious parallels, would seem to have been derived from Dunstan’s source, namely the veteran of the wars of 870.26

Similarly, the literary motif from Scandinavian sources of another form of Viking entertainment, what Ian McDougall describes as ‘murderous bonethrowing at boisterous dinner-parties’, seems to have a parallel in actuality in the murder of Ælfeah, referred to by Whitelock in the passage already cited.27 Archbishop Ælfeah, having refused to allow his people to pay a ransom for his release, was pelted to death with bones and animal heads by drunken Vikings.28 While the pelting with bones has a far stronger attestation in Scandinavian literary sources than the supposed rite of the ‘blood-eagle’, and may even have a basis in historical Viking practice, the distinctive nature of the missiles is missing in the account of Edmund’s pelting with ‘gafelucas’ (‘missiles’, translating Abbo’s ‘sagitta’ (‘arrow’) and ‘iaculum’ (‘javelin’)).29 24

25 26 27 28 29

A. P. Smyth, Scandinavian Kings in the British Isles 850–880 (Oxford, 1977), pp. 211–13. See McTurk, Studies, p. 230, for a summary of discussion of the ‘blood-eagle’, including the view that the story of the ‘blood-eagle’ being carved on Ælla’s back derived from a misunderstanding of ‘eculeus’ (‘rack’) in the passage cited here for ‘aquila’ (‘eagle’). TLES, p. 79. Smyth, Scandinavian Kings, pp. 211–12. I. McDougall, ‘Serious Entertainments. An Examination of a Peculiar Type of Scandinavian Atrocity’, Anglo-Saxon England 22 (1993), 201–26 (p. 219). Anglo-Saxon Chronicle E, ed. Irvine, p. 69. See Cavill, ‘Analogy and Genre’ for the use of ‘marked’ vocabulary in the almost unique word ‘gafelucas’, which he attributes to the writer’s consciousness of the derivation of the text from a Latin context (p. 29 and note 12). Smyth, on the other hand, finds in the

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Alison Finlay Another branch of the ‘realistic’ argument pursued by Alfred Smyth and again seeking to establish parallels with Scandinavian strategy elsewhere is based on Edmund’s declared refusal to submit to Ívarr’s demand that he should become a puppet king under the Viking’s authority. Smyth sees parallels with the establishing of the ‘unwis cyninges þegn’ (‘foolish king’s thegn’) Ceolwulf under Scandinavian authority in Mercia (874), and the truce between Alfred and Godrum in Wessex, which was achieved only when Godrum accepted Christianity (878) – the condition Edmund tries unsuccessfully to impose on Ívarr. Smyth comments: This Danish practice of carving up or ‘sharing out’ (‘dividere’) an English kingdom into a Danish and an English region, with the latter ruled by a tributary English king, seems likely to have been Ívarr’s original plan for East Anglia.30

Paul Cavill has examined these proposed parallels both individually and with reference to their context in the legend, and has showed convincingly, at the level of vocabulary as well as motif, that the torture of St Edmund, taken as a whole, has more in common with the martyrdom of early continental saints, especially Martin and Sebastian, than with Scandinavian legend or practice.31 Abbo’s citation of the eyewitness account is probably a product of the fact that the cult of Edmund seems to have begun to develop very soon after his death, and among those in the vicinity if not quite within eyewitness range.32 The intriguing thing is that it was adopted very early, not only by the English survivors, but also by their Viking conquerors and other Scandinavian rulers. Susan Ridyard, in her account of the beginnings of the cult of Edmund, notes its origins in English opposition to Danish rule: It can be inferred that, in the East Anglia of the late ninth and early tenth centuries, the cult of St Edmund was born of political and religious conflict: the veneration of the fallen ruler by his erstwhile subjects is intelligible only in terms of their opposition to the Danes.33

This is necessarily conjectural, since information about this period of East Anglian history is so hard to come by. After Edmund’s death, the focus of

30 31 32

33

use of spears (and the beheading) a parallel with Scandinavian accounts of ritual sacrifice to the god Óðinn (Smyth, Scandinavian Kings, p. 210). Smyth, Scandinavian Kings, p. 207. Cavill, ‘Analogy and Genre’. Ridyard points out that Abbo’s attribution leaves unclear how much of the account derives from the armour-bearer and how much from Archbishop Dunstan, and that ‘both Dunstan and Abbo had almost certainly embellished the armour-bearer’s story by constructing their own relatively sophisticated interpretation of the events of 869/70’ (Ridyard, Royal Saints, pp. 64–5). Ridyard, Royal Saints, p. 214.

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Chronology, Genealogy and Conversion the Chronicle account of Danish incursion shifts to what was always its prime concern, the affairs of Wessex, to which the ‘great army’ moved at this point for their confrontation with Alfred, soon to be king. Danish domination of East Anglia began with the withdrawal there of Godrum after his submission to, and conversion by, the victorious Alfred in 878.34 Some indication of the beginning of the cult among English survivors, of course, is provided by the Legend itself: after the king’s death the frightened English emerged from hiding to retrieve his severed head, at first burying the remains in a humble chapel; after the upheavals of war, the body (miraculously reunited with the head) was translated to ‘Bedricesgueord’ (Bury St Edmunds; named thus by Abbo, but not by Ælfric).35 The only chronological clue given by Abbo/Ælfric is that the relics were at Bury St Edmunds in the time of Theodred, bishop of London (926–51).36 By the very beginning of the tenth century, however, a unique contemporary source testifies to acceptance of the saint by the Danish rulers, newly Christian, of his erstwhile kingdom: the so-called ‘St Edmund memorial coinage’, bearing the inscription ‘sce Eadmund rex’, apparently minted and circulated in the area of the Danelaw that included Edmund’s former kingdom. According to Lesley Abrams, the coins ‘demonstrate that a cult of the recently dead king had developed by this stage, indicating that there were Christians in East Anglia to promote it’.37 It has been suggested that the Danish rulers were anxious to expiate the guilt of their pagan predecessors.38 Ridyard’s ultimate explanation of the Danish adoption of Edmund is necessarily speculative but along political lines: their adoption of St Edmund may have been, like their conversion to Christianity, a product of diplomacy, a negotiated, perhaps enforced, concession which might help to stabilize their political power. … Edmund seems to have been the last reigning monarch, and perhaps even the last surviving representative, of the ancient ruling dynasty of the East Angles. Quite possibly his Danish ‘successors’ hoped that by showing themselves to be patrons of his cult they might suggest their own legitimate succession to the kingdom and might accordingly buttress their somewhat anomalous political position.39

34

35 36 37

38 39

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle A, ed. Bately, pp. 50–1. The annal for 880 begins ‘Her for se here of Cirenceastre on Eastengle 7 gesæt þæt lond 7 gedęlde.’ (‘In this year the raiding army went from Cirencester into East Anglia and occupied that land, and divided it.’) TLES, p. 82. TLES, p. 83; Ælfric, Lives, ed. Skeat, II, 322 (line 196). L. Abrams, ‘Conversion and Assimilation’, in Cultures in Contact: Scandinavian Settlement in England in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries, ed. D. Hadley and J. D. Richards, Studies in the Early Middle Ages 2 (Turnhout, 2000), pp. 135–53 (p. 147). Ridyard, Royal Saints, p. 216; Rollason, Saints and Relics, p. 157. Ridyard, Royal Saints, pp. 216–17.

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Alison Finlay The political exploitation of the cults of martyred saints in Anglo-Saxon England has received considerable attention from scholars, who point particularly to evidence from the reign of Knútr (Canute) (1016–35). Matthew Townend’s recent article usefully summarizes the commentary on Knútr’s fostering of the cults of Edith, Edmund and Ælfheah, observing incidentally that political opposition to royal authority might also be expressed through the cults of saints;40 and Haki Antonsson suggests that Knútr, as ‘an enthusiastic translator of high-status relics’, may have been instrumental in transplanting the cults of these saints to the continent by way of translations of their corporeal relics.41 There is evidence in later sources of an attempt in a more secular genre by the Christianized Danes to come to terms with the deeds of their pagan forebears. The thirteenth-century historian Roger of Wendover preserves an account of the death of Ragnarr loðbrók, legendary father of the Viking Ívarr, transferred from the court of Ælla of Northumbria to that of Edmund of East Anglia.42 In Smyth’s words, The Scandinavian tale about the slaying of King Ælla was invented to explain how the Danes came to rule Northumbria; the English story about King Edmund grew up among the East Anglian Danes in an attempt to explain away the martyrdom of King Edmund and the subsequent conquest by the Danes.43

According to Roger’s account, which was taken up by several later writers including John Lydgate, Lothbroc drifts accidentally out to sea from Denmark in a small boat, and is cast ashore in the kingdom of King Edmund. He is welcomed by the king, but murdered by the royal huntsman Bern. Lothbroc’s hound reveals the hiding place of the body to the court. Bern, accused of the murder, is set adrift in Lothbroc’s boat and comes ashore in Denmark, where he is tortured by Lothbroc’s sons Hinguar and Hubba, and falsely accuses King Edmund of the murder. The sons in turn go to England to attack the innocent king, and kill him in revenge for their father’s death. Smyth comments, ‘[s]ince Edmund soon came to be revered by the Danes in England as their saint, it was necessary for them to explain the whole affair as an accident’.44 His detection of ‘saga-like’ elements in this story smacks of the same kind of wishful thinking that has led to the detection of Scan40 41 42

43 44

M. Townend, ‘Knútr and the Cult of St Óláfr: Poetry and Patronage in Eleventh-Century Norway and England’, Viking and Medieval Scandinavia I (2005), 251–79. Haki Antonsson, ‘Saints and Relics in Early Christian Scandinavia’, Mediaeval Scandinavia 15 (2005), 51–80 (especially pp. 60–1). Roger of Wendover, Liber qui dicitur Flores historiarum, ab anno domini MCLIV, annoque Henrici Anglorum Regis secondi primo, ed. H. G. Hewlett, 3 vols., Rolls Series 84 (London, 1886–9), I, 303–12. Smyth, Scandinavian Kings, p. 55. Smyth, Scandinavian Kings, p. 56.

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Chronology, Genealogy and Conversion dinavian historical features in the hagiographical account of the martyrdom of Edmund, but the point about the appropriation of Edmund by the Danes of the Danelaw is well made. As Smyth points out, the repeated motif of drifting across the sea from Denmark to East Anglia and back again minimizes the distance between their transplanted culture and the Scandinavian mainland almost to vanishing point. It is in these contexts, both religious and secular, that the cult of Edmund must have migrated to Scandinavia and, eventually, to Iceland. Direct literary and material evidence specific to Edmund himself is almost non-existent, but it is clear that the influence of the English Church was decisive in the Conversion and early establishment of Christianity in the Nordic lands, and that the English predilection for royal martyr saints was enthusiastically followed in Scandinavia, where, it has recently been observed, ‘martyrdom was in effect the sole form of saintliness until the late twelfth century’.45 The conversion of Norway to Christianity began with the short reign of Óláfr Tryggvason in 995; the process was completed by his successor, Óláfr Haraldsson, who was killed in battle in 1030. The emergence of a cult of St Óláfr began almost immediately after his death, and therefore only a decade or two after the conversion of the country, in a parallel to the adoption of St Edmund by the Danes in East Anglia very soon after their conversion. Townend argues that Knútr’s dynasty, in the person of his son Sveinn who was briefly Óláfr’s successor as ruler of Norway, actively fostered the nascent cult of Óláfr, in an extension of Knútr’s policy of exploitation of the English martyr cults.46 If this is so, the political advantage gained by Sveinn did not last long; as Russell Poole points out, ‘the initiative was short-lived, since Óláfr’s sanctity paved the way for a return to Norway and accession to power on the part of his son Magnús in 1034’.47 Haki Antonsson has recently investigated the prevalence of martyrs, and particularly royal martyrs, in newly Christianized Scandinavia. Among the explanations he suggests for this phenomenon are political considerations similar to those outlined by Ridyard for the promotion of Edmund by the Danes of East Anglia: the legitimization of their own power by particular dynasties or individual pretenders within dynasties; and the need of the Church to bolster its authority with that of the secular royal power in order to put down roots in a highly traditional culture. More specifically he suggests that

45

Haki Antonsson, ‘Some Observations on Martyrdom in Post-Conversion Scandinavia’, Saga-Book 28 (2004), 70–94 (p. 71). 46 Townend, ‘Knútr and the Cult of St Óláfr’. 47 R. Poole, ‘How Óláfr Haraldsson became St Olaf of Norway, and the Power of a Poet’s Advocacy’, Margaret and Richard Beck Lecture, University of Victoria, 20 November 2004. http://gateway.uvic.ca/beck/media/text/RP-sym-lec-text.htm, p. 3 [consulted 6 October 2008].

57

Alison Finlay the very idea of achieving heavenly reward/sanctity through suffering violent death struck a particular chord in post-Conversion Scandinavia. For example, the concept of dying while fighting against overwhelming odds, and in the heroic defence of one’s lord, was probably easily adaptable to the notion of the heavenly reward for martyrdom.48

A similar explanation has been offered by Margaret Cormack for the popularity of royal martyr saints in Anglo-Saxon England.49 It is interesting to notice in this context that, as Paul Cavill points out, the deployment of this theme is significantly stronger in Ælfric’s version of the Life of St Edmund than in Abbo’s, whether in straightforward terms or inverted, as it is when the saint discards rather than, conventionally, taking up his weapons, or when he as king refuses to live on after his followers (an inversion of the trope in which the followers avow their duty to die alongside their lord). The suggestion is that, both in Scandinavia and in Anglo-Saxon England, legends of saints became acculturated to the earlier ideology of Germanic warrior heroism, though Haki Antonsson notes similarly warlike cults in Kievan Rus’, Poland and Bohemia.50 Probably the most significant consideration in the popularity of royal martyrs in Scandinavia is the important role played by English clerics in the conversion of Scandinavia. An English bishop, Grímkell, served at the court of St Óláfr and took an active part in establishing his sanctity. Until the mid-twelfth century most bishops in Scandinavia were either English or German, and church organization in Norway followed the pattern of Anglo-Saxon England. Records for the early period in Norway are incomplete, but we know of three churches in Norway dedicated to Edmund; the only other Anglo-Saxon saints to whom there are dedications are St Botolph (two) and St Swithun (one). The personal name ‘Jetmund’ has been recorded a number of times in the 1520s in the district surrounding a church dedicated to Edmund in Vanlyven in Norway.51 In the words of Christine Fell, ‘[i]t is clear that although, or perhaps even because, Vikings were responsible for the martyrdom of St Edmund, his cult became early established among them, passing to Norway and thence to Iceland’.52 Although Iceland’s closest political and economic links were with Norway, other Scandinavian countries also played their part in the development

48

Antonsson, ‘Some Observations’, p. 76. M. Cormack, ‘Murder and Martyrs in Anglo-Saxon England’, in Sacrificing the Self: Perspectives on Martyrdom and Religion, ed. M. Cormack (Oxford, 2002), pp. 58–77. See also Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Kristninga i Norden 750–1200 (Oslo, 2003), p. 89. 50 Antonsson, ‘Some Observations’, pp. 74–5. 51 O. Johannesson, ‘Kristne personnavn i norsk middelalder’, in Kristendommens indflydelse på nordisk navngivning. Rapport fra NORNAs 28. symposium i Skálholt 25–28. maj 2000, ed. Svavar Sigmundsson (Uppsala, 2000), pp. 29–57 (p. 50). 52 Fell, ‘Anglo-Saxon Saints’, p. 101. 49

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Chronology, Genealogy and Conversion of the Icelandic church, and evidence of English influence in these countries can flesh out the picture, especially in view of the paucity of Norwegian records. At the time of Ari’s writing of Íslendingabók, for instance, the Icelandic church was under the control of the Danish archdiocese of Lund. During the period of the reign of the Danish kings Sveinn Forkbeard and Knútr in England (1013–42), cultural links were strengthened, including those relevant to church organization; Adam of Bremen tells us that Sveinn installed an English bishop, Godebald, in Skania; and Archbishop Aelnoth of Canterbury ordained three Danish bishops during Knútr’s reign. It has been suggested that Knútr expected the primacy of Canterbury to supersede that of the see of Hamburg-Bremen in Denmark.53 Direct English influence on Iceland continued as well: Iceland’s first bishop (and later first native saint), Þorlákr, went to school in Lincoln, and his nephew Bishop Páll Jónsson was also educated in England.54 John Toy has recently traced the evidence of the cult of St Botolph, an obscure East Anglian saint, in Scandinavia.55 As well as sixty-four churches in England, mostly in areas of concentrated Viking settlement, there are twelve churches dedicated to him in Denmark, and the personal name ‘Botulf’ is recorded from the thirteenth century in Norway, Sweden and Gotland. Toy uses the evidence to deduce a close connection with the conversions that were taking place in Scandinavia in the tenth–eleventh century. The implication is that missals and breviaries, and possibly clerics, were brought from Eastern England, and East Anglia in particular, and spread to every part of Scandinavia in the eleventh-twelfth century. The phenomenon of St Botulph in Scandinavia is one of the most enduring signs of the English role in the Christianising process in the Nordic lands.56

It is tempting to believe that the cult of the East Anglian royal saint could hardly have failed, in these conditions, to be adopted by the Scandinavians, with their penchant for royal martyrs, although there is little direct evidence for it. As Haki Antonsson points out, ‘Iceland was obviously not a good breeding-ground for princely martyrs.’57 But though Icelanders had no kings of their own they made a habit of writing about those of other nations. Haki analyses an episode in Njáls saga to show how the Icelandic author invests

53 54 55 56 57

M. Schwarz Lausten, A Church History of Denmark, trans. F. H. Cryer (Aldershot, 2002), p. 14. Rowe, Ragnarr Loðbrók, p. 3. J. Toy, ‘St Botulph: An English Saint in Scandinavia’, in The Cross Goes North: Processes of Conversion in Northern Europe AD 300–1300, ed. M. Carver (York, 2003), pp. 565–70. Toy, ‘St Botulph’, p. 570. Antonsson, ‘Some Observations’, p. 73.

59

Alison Finlay the death in battle of an Irish king with elements of a royal martyrdom, although these are not present in his source, and draws the conclusion that ‘even in Iceland, where royal cults were understandably absent, the literary paradigm of martyrdom was so deep-rooted and familiar that the unknown author was effortlessly able to place an Irish king within it’.58 In Iceland there is no record of any medieval church dedications to Edmund, but there is one indication other than Ari’s early mention of his ‘saga’ that he was known in Iceland: a statue of him existed after 1318 in Lögmannshlíð in the north of the country. Margaret Cormack adds to her record of this the following appropriately genealogical comment:59 In the fourteenth century, Icelanders in the country around Lögmannshlíð would have been able to trace their ancestry to Saint Edmund, and it is conceivable that this fact was responsible for the presence of a statue to him there.

This information is surprising at first sight, in view of the fact that chastity is high on the list of hagiographical attributes with which Abbo endowed his subject. Cormack is alluding to a genealogy given in some versions of Landnámabók (‘the Book of Settlements’) that found its way into other texts in the course of the thirteenth century: Bjǫrn buna hét hersir ríkr ok ágætr í Nóregi; hann var son Veðrar-Gríms hersis ór Sogni; Grímr átti Hervǫru, dóttur Þorgerðar Eylaugsdóttur konungs. Bjǫrn átti Vélaugu, systur Vémundar hins gamla; þau áttu þrjá sonu; var einn Ketill flatnefr, annarr Helgi, þriði Hrappr; þeir váru ágætir menn, ok er frá þeira afkvæmi mart sagt í þessi bók, ok frá þeim er flest allt stórmenni komit á Íslandi. Hrappr átti Þórunni grœningarrjúpu; þeira son var Þórðr skeggi; hann átti Vilborgu Ósvaldsdóttur konungs ok Úlfrúnar hinnar óbornu, dóttur Játmundar Englakonungs. … Frá Þórði er mart stórmenni komit á Íslandi.60 (‘Bjǫrn buna was an excellent and powerful chieftain in Norway; he was the son of Veðr-Grímr the hersir of Sogn; Grímr married Hervǫr, daughter of Þorgerðr, daughter of King Eylaugr. Bjǫrn married Vélaug, sister of Vémundr the Old; they had three sons; the first was Ketill Flat-Nose, the second Helgi, the third Hrappr; they were fine men, and much is told about their descendants in this book, and from them are descended most of the important people in Iceland. Hrappr married Þórunn grœningarrjúpa; their son was Þórðr skeggi; he married Vilborg, daughter of King Oswald and of Úlfrún the unborn, daughter of the English King Edmund. … From Þórðr are descended many important people in Iceland.’)

58

Antonsson, ‘Some Observations’, p. 71. Cormack, Saints in Iceland, p. 94. 60 Íslendingabók, ed. Benediktsson, pp. 48–9. Though Ari uses the form ‘Eadmundr’ in Íslendingabók (p. 4), the later Icelandic form of the name, ‘Játmundr’, appears in Landnámabók. 59

60

Chronology, Genealogy and Conversion Landnámabók is a genealogical and topographical account of the division of Iceland among its first settlers, with details of their origins and the families descended from them. It survives in five redactions, all considerably later than its presumed origins in the twelfth century; the original version is likely to have been contemporary with Íslendingabók, whose author, Ari, is often suggested as a possible compiler. The relations among the redactions are complex, as are the relations of the whole body of texts with the semi-fictional Sagas of Icelanders, which drew on them for information about historical characters but were in turn used as sources by later revisers of Landnámabók. The passage cited here belongs to the Hauksbók redaction from the beginning of the fourteenth century; its compiler, Haukr Erlendsson, based it on Sturlubók (from c. 1280) and the earlier, now lost, Styrmisbók from before 1245. Comparison shows the accretion of detail around the mistaken intertwining of the saints Oswald and Edmund with the genealogy of Þórðr ­skeggi’s wife. The Þórðarbók version, from the seventeenth century but based on the now-fragmentary early fourteenth-century Melabók, calls Vilborg Ávalda­dóttir (‘daughter of Ávaldi’) without reference to her mother’s name, but this is likely to be a misreading.61 The older Sturlubók names her simply as ‘Vilborg Ósvaldsdóttir ok Úlfrúnar Játmundardóttur’ (‘Vilborg, daughter of Oswald and of Úlfrún daughter of Edmund’).62 If Vilborg actually existed, she presumably came from an English family – or part-English, since neither Vilborg nor Úlfrún sounds like an English name (but both are unusual in Icelandic and could be Icelandicizations of English forms). It must be the coincidence of the two English names, Oswald and Edmund, presumably known as those of royal saints, that led to the identification in Hauksbók of these male relatives as kings.63 It may be to rationalize the birth of a daughter to the supposedly virginal Edmund that she is given the unusual nickname ‘óborna’ (‘unborn’), which may imply ‘unacknowledged, illegitimate’.64 But referring to these individuals as kings does not make certain the identification with the English royal saints. This elaboration is left to a garbled version of the same genealogy in the late thirteenth-century Njáls saga, where it is said of Vilborg (here Valborg) that ‘hennar móðir var Jórunn in óborna, dóttir Ósvalds konungs ins helga. Móðir Jórunnar var Bera, dóttir Játmundar

61

Íslendingabók, ed. Benediktsson, p. 48, note 1. Íslendingabók, ed. Benediktsson, p. 312. 63 ‘Hitt er sennilegra að nöfnum Ósvaldur og Játmundur í ætt Vilborgar hafi verið samsömuð nöfnum ensku konunganna sem báðir voru dýrlingar í þokkabót og kunnir á Ísland í þeirri veru’ (Íslendingabók, ed. Benediktsson, p. 49, note 4) (‘It is more likely [than that the story is a guess or invention] that the names Oswald and Edmund in Vilborg’s genealogy were identified with the names of English kings, who were both saints into the bargain, and known in Iceland in that connexion’). 64 But see J. Fritzner, Ordbog over det gamle norske sprog, 3 vols. (Kristiania [Oslo], 1896), III, s.v. ‘úborinn’. 62

61

Alison Finlay konungs ins helga’65� (‘her mother was Jórunn the Unborn, daughter of King Oswald the saint. Jórunn’s mother was Bera, daughter of King Edmund the saint.’). These references testify to knowledge of the English saints, including Edmund, among Icelanders, at least of the learned class, at least in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries; on the other hand, they suggest that knowledge of them may not have extended far beyond their names, since the manifest impossibility that Edmund (d. 870) could be the father-inlaw of Oswald (d. 642) seems to pass unnoticed. Nevertheless, their names must have been well-known enough to have struck a chord in the minds of Icelandic genealogical writers. This shows that awareness of Edmund in Iceland did not decline after the time of Ari, but was strong enough for him to be written into the genealogical record as a contributor to one of the most influential family lines in the country. Alongside families who were proud to trace their descent from the pagan Ragnarr loðbrók and his ferocious sons, there seem to have been others eager to establish even an unofficial line of descent from their royal, and saintly, victim, in defiance of chronological fact and hagiographically constructed virginity.

65

Brennu-Njáls saga, ed. Einar Ólafur Sveinsson, Íslenzk fornrit 12 (Reykjavík, 1954), p. 284.

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3 Geoffrey of Wells’ Liber de infantia sancti Edmundi and the ‘Anarchy’ of King Stephen’s Reign1 Paul Antony Hayward

Though much new hagiography was produced at Bury St Edmunds in the twelfth century, relatively little of this effort was put into writing up contemporary events. It is true that Osbert of Clare (d. in or after 1158) compiled, at the request of Abbot Anselm (1121–48), a brief collection of the miracles that the abbey’s patron saint had performed in recent times, and that some anonymous writers recorded a few more.2 However, the abbey’s artists and writers generally concentrated on revising and enhancing older texts. In the 1120s, for example, the makers of the famous Morgan Manuscript (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS M.736) rewrote the collection of the miracles of St Edmund that ‘Archdeacon Hermann’ had begun during the time of Abbot Baldwin (d. 1097), and they illustrated both that text and Abbo’s Passio S. Eadmundi with a lavish set of illuminations.3 In about 1180 Nicholas of Wallingford seems to have redrafted the fundamental text on which the cult depended, Abbo’s Passio.4 In the 1190s Abbot Samson (1182–1211) rephrased

1

Warm thanks are due to my colleagues Professor Keith Stringer and Dr Alexander Grant for helping to finalise the text of this essay. 2 On the dating, authorship, transmission and development of the various miracle collections, see Thomson, ‘Two Versions’; A. Gransden, ‘The Composition and Authorship of the De miraculis sancti Edmundi attributed to “Hermann the Archdeacon”‘, Journal of Medieval Latin 5 (1995), 1–52.� 3 New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS M.736, fols. 7r–22v (the illustrations) and fols. 23r–76r (the miracle collection). The text of the miracles Miracula S. Eadmundi is printed in Memorials, ed. Arnold, I, 26–92. For online access to images of all the illustrations, see CORSAIR: http://corsair.morganlibrary.org/ [consulted 6 October 2008]. The Morgan manuscript has been variously dated to 724/5 and to c. 730: see R. M. Thomson, ‘Early Romanesque Book Illumination in England: The Dates of the Pierpont Morgan Vitae Sancti Eadmundi and the Bury Bible’, Viator 2 (1971), 203–10; C. M. Kauffmann, Romanesque Manuscripts 1066–1190 (London, 1975), p. 26; and E. P. McLachlan, The Scriptorium of Bury St Edmunds in the Twelfth Century (New York, 1984), pp. 74–119, 330–2. 4 All that remains of Nicholas’s version are the extracts that an anonymous compiler incorporated into Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 240, pp. 623–77, the compendium of Edmund’s hagiography and other devotional works copied at Bury around 1377 (NLA II, 573–688, at 578–91); Abbo’s text (BHL 2392) is cited from TLES, pp. 67–87.

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Paul Antony Hayward the Morgan miracula, integrating what survives of Osbert’s Liber miraculorum;5 and at some point in the final quarter of the century Denis Piramus reworked much of the received corpus as a poem in Old French.6 The upshot is that the sources for the twelfth century, though abundant, typically provide oblique glances at the contemporary scene. They say relatively little about what was taking place at Edmund’s shrine, especially for long periods in the middle and latter half of the century, but they can yield useful insights into the times in which they were written through close analysis of nuances of detail and shifts of emphasis in their representations of the distant past. Some of these materials, especially the paintings, have been the subject of profitable analyses of this type.7 The present essay continues this work by re-examining the mid-eleventh-century Liber de infantia sancti Edmundi by Geoffrey of Wells, another of the several texts that attempt to enhance Abbo’s Passio.8 Advancing a new approach, this essay argues that the ‘Anarchy’ of King Stephen’s reign was the decisive factor in the development of this work’s novel but influential ideas about the saint’s origins. It will be useful to begin, however, by discussing De infantia’s date, its author, its contents and its audience.

I In contrast to most hagiographical texts, De infantia may be dated with some precision. The dedication to ‘dominus et pater Ording’ shows that it was completed while he was abbot of Bury – that is, between 3 January 1148 and 4 February 1156.9 The terminus post quem may be moved forward a few years 5 6 7 8

9

Miracula S. Edmundi, in Memorials, ed. Arnold, I, 107–208. For the sections attributable to Osbert of Clare, see Memorials, ed. Arnold, I, 152–5 and I, 178–207. Denis Piramus, La vie seint Edmund le Rei, ed. H. Kjellman (Göteborg, 1935; rpt 1974), pp. 1–155. Hahn, ‘Peregrinatio et Natio’; Abou-El-Haj, ‘Bury St Edmunds Abbey’. On the shifts revealed by the miracula, see Yarrow, Saints and their Communities, pp. 24–62. There are three different editions, each of which has its value: first, Memorials, ed. Arnold, I, 93–103 (from Cambridge, University Library, MS Ff.1.27, fols. 70v–72v); secondly, Corolla, ed. Hervey, pp. 134–61 (from Hereford, Cathedral Library, MS P.3.1, fols. 81v–83v); and, thirdly, R. M. Thomson, ‘Geoffrey of Wells, De Infancia sancti Edmundi (BHL 2393)’, Analecta Bollandia 95 (1977), 34–42 at pp. 34–42 (from the former manuscripts and Bodley 240, pp. 638–42). Liber de infantia is cited hereafter according to the chapter divisions found in Thomson’s edition, while his introduction is cited as Thomson, ‘Geoffrey of Wells’. The article was reprinted without further comment in Thomson, England and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance (same pagination). The former date is the obit of his predecessor, Abbot Anselm, and the latter is the date of his own obit: see D. Knowles, C. N. L. Brooke and V. C. M. London, The Heads of Religious Houses, England and Wales, Volume I, 940–1216, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2001), p. 32. Ording was first appointed to the abbacy in 1136 × 1138, when it looked as though Anselm was moving on to become the next bishop of London, but the result was put in abeyance when the dean of St Paul’s contested the latter’s election. Anselm was ejected from the see and only regained the abbacy of Bury after a struggle: see E. G. Whatley, The Saint

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Geoffrey of Wells’s Liber de infantia sancti Edmundi by Geoffrey’s description of Sihtric as the prior of Ording’s holy congregation, for he was not the first monk to hold that office under this abbot. He was still in office when Ording died, but he was preceded as prior by a certain William, who was the last of the three monks to serve as prior under Ording’s predecessor, Abbot Anselm.10 Sihtric had been appointed by 1153 at the latest, but he had probably been in office for a few years by that date.11 It follows that Geoffrey’s work may be dated to the last two-thirds of Ording’s abbacy, to between circa 1150 and January 1156: a period that saw the end of the civil war, the Treaty of Winchester (6 November 1153), the death of King Stephen (25 October 1154), and the accession and coronation of Henry II (19 December 1154).12 The preface mentions one other figure, a person who is said to have played a crucial role in getting the work written: this is Goscelin, a venerable colleague who compelled Sihtric to ask Geoffrey to write up the story of Edmund’s infancy that Geoffrey had recently related to the prior and his companions.13 That this Goscelin was a figure of some personal authority within the community is suggested by the way in which Geoffrey flatters him, and his seniority seems to be confirmed by Anselm’s and Ording’s charters, for a monk of this name is often among the first to attest when religious are found in their witness lists.14 For his part, Geoffrey seems to have been a canon of the abbey’s priory at Thetford (Norfolk), an inference that needs some justification.15 There were, during Abbot Ording’s time, three religious houses in and around Thetford: a Cluniac priory founded by Roger I Bigod (d. 1107) in about 1104; a house of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre founded by William III de Warenne (d. 1148)

10

11

12 13 14

15

of London: The Life and Miracles of St Erkenwald (Binghampton, 1989), pp. 32–5, and the sources cited there. But the reference to Sihtric as prior (discussed below) precludes the possibility that the work might date from Ording’s phoney abbacy of around 1138. Ording’s restoration took place before 16 April 1148, the latest possible date for King Stephen’s writ confirming his appointment (see RRAN, iii, no. 760). See also Feudal Documents from the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds ed. D. C. Douglas (London, 1932), p. cxxxvii. Sihtric issued one document that may be dated to the vacancy that followed, and is found witnessing another issued by his successor, Abbot Hugh: see Feudal Documents, ed. Douglas, nos. 144 and 186. Prior William witnesses two of Ording’s charters: see ibid., nos. 133 and 134. Feudal Documents, ed. Douglas, nos. 135 and 136, which are also attested by Daniel, abbot of St Benet of Hulme, who died in 1152 or 1153 (Knowles, Brooke and London, Heads of Religious Houses I, p. 68). See also Feudal Documents, ed. Douglas, nos. 140–2. Cf. Thomson’s comments in his ‘Geoffrey of Wells’, p. 27, n. 6. De infantia Edmundi, pref. (p. 34): ‘compellente cum ad hoc uenerabili collega suo Gocelino, cui magis hec competerent scribere quam michi imperito…’. See, for example, Feudal Documents, ed. Douglas, nos. 113, 119, 120, 122–4, 128–31, 133–4. He sometimes attests along with Ording, a monk and cellarer under Anselm (ibid., nos. 106 and 115; Knowles, Brooke and London, Heads of Religious Houses I, p. 32), but seems a somewhat more senior figure. Cf. Thomson, ‘Geoffrey of Wells’, p. 27: ‘probably a member of one of the religious houses at Thetford’.

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Paul Antony Hayward between 1139 and 1146;16 and a small community of canons that looked after a parish church dedicated to St George. The origins and history of this last house are quite obscure, but it was certainly a priory of St Edmunds Abbey in Geoffrey’s time.17 This much is clear from a charter of Ording’s successor, Abbot Hugh (1157–80), which describes how it was handed over to the nuns of Ling (Norfolk), where there was a chapel of St Edmund, between 1163 and 1173.18 There were then only two canons in residence, Folcard and Andrew, their colleagues having died one after another.19 Burdened by poverty and fearful of their inability to maintain their buildings and continue their way of life, they petitioned Hugh to have their house given to the nuns, lest it should lapse altogether. Now the preface to De infantia states that Geoffrey had participated in discussions about Edmund’s origins at the abbey and that Sihtric came to Thetford in order to ask him to put his version down in writing. Since he was associated with St Edmunds but resident at Thetford, it seems almost certain that Geoffrey was a canon of the Priory of St George.20 It is tempting to draw further support for the inference that he was a secular from his surname, since Wells (Somerset) had a school where a

16

Stephen’s confirmation of the confirmation charter is printed in RRAN, iii, no. 876. According to the tradition recorded by F. Blomefield, An Essay Towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk, 5 vols. (Fersfield, 1739–75), I, 430, Ufi, the first abbot of Bury (1020–44), founded the priory to commemorate those who had died when Edmund’s men fought the Danes there. 18 ‘Quomodo moniales S. Gregorii de Thetford ingressum habuerunt in Thetford’, in Monasticon Anglicanum: A History of the Abbies and other Monasteries, Hospitals, Friaries and Cathedral and Collegiate Churches, ed. W. Dugdale et al., 6 vols. (London, 1817–30), IV, 477–8: ‘quia saepe memoratum monasterium S. Georgii usque ad illum diem membrum ecclesiæ nostræ fuisse constabat’. The termini for the dating of the transfer are provided by Hugh’s statement that Geoffrey, ‘then archdeacon of Canterbury’, interceded on behalf the nuns. Geoffrey Ridel was archdeacon of Canterbury in succession to Thomas Becket, from early 1163, and until the time of his election to the bishopric of Ely in April or May 1173 (Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae 1066–1300, ed. D. Greenway, 10 vols. (London, 1968–), II, 13, 45). But the memorandum itself must postdate the death of William Turbe on 16/17 January 1174 (ibid., II, 56), because he is described as tunc bishop of Norwich and as being ‘of memorable sanctity’. See also English Episcopal Acta 6: Norwich, 1070– 1214, ed. C. Harper-Bill (London, 1990), p. 362; VCH Suffolk II, ‘Priory of St George, Thetford’, pp. 85–6; Knowles, Brooke and London, Heads of Religious Houses I, p. 221. 19 If Geoffrey was a canon of the priory, he would appear either to have died by this date or to have moved on, perhaps to the abbey itself. A magister called Geoffrey figures among the witnesses to Ording’s charters and especially among those of Abbot Hugh: see Feudal Documents, ed. Douglas, nos. 136, 142, 146–9, 150, 193, 196–7; Thomson, ‘TwelfthCentury Documents’, nos. 2, 9, 10. This Geoffrey also corresponded with John of Salisbury in the 1160s: see The Letters of John of Salisbury, ed. W. J. Millor and H. E. Butler, rev. C. N. L. Brooke, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1955–79), I, no. 95; II, nos. 161, 162, 192, 193, 268. 20 One attraction of this identification is that it helps to explain why Geoffrey, De infantia Edmundi, § 2 (p. 36), has one of his protagonists, King Offa, die after he reaches the channel ‘quem nostrates [the Cambridge MS has ‘viantes’] Sancti Georgii dicunt brachium’. That is, the placename may well have provided him with an oblique way of 17

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Geoffrey of Wells’s Liber de infantia sancti Edmundi clerk might obtain an education; but many villages and towns were known by this name, and there can be no certainty that ‘de Fontibus’ refers to the Somerset instance. The text itself is, more to the point, a startling contribution to Edmund’s dossier. An account of the martyr’s ancestry and childhood, it is constructed as a prolegomenon to Abbo of Fleury’s Passio S. Eadmundi. This much is clearly implied by the concluding sentence in which Geoffrey refers his readers to the passio if they wish to know how the story will unfold (§ 8). This kind of supplement seems to be unique in English hagiography and in that of royal saints in general: no other case where the life of a royal martyr or confessor was augmented in a similar way is known to the present author.21 De infantia tells a tale that is, moreover, somewhat at odds with the passio that it purports to complete. Since it is crucial to what follows, it is worth quoting in full the passage in which Abbo covers Edmund’s origins and youth, leaving the phrases at issue untranslated and putting them in italic. Having described the colonisation of Britain by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, and having credited the Saxons with the settlement of East Anglia, he continues: Sed ut ad propositum reuertamur: huic prouinciae tam feraci, quam diximus Eastengle uocabulo nuncupari, praefuit sanctissimus deoque acceptus Eadmundus, ex antiquorum Saxonum nobili prosapia oriundus, a primeuo suae etatis tempore cultor ueracissimus fidei Christianae. Qui atauis regibus aeditus, cum bonis polleret moribus, omnium comprouincialium unanimi fauore non tantum eligitur ex generis successione quantum rapitur ut eis praeesset sceptrigera potestate. Nam erat ei species digna imperio, quam serenissimi cordis iugiter uenustabat tranquilla deuotio. Erat omnibus blando eloquio affabilis, humilitatis gratia precluis, et inter suos coaeuos mirabili mansuetudine residebat dominus absque ullo fastu superbiae. Iamque uir sanctus praeferebat in uultu quod postea manifestatum est diuino nutu: quoniam puer toto conamine uirtutis arripuit gradum, quem diuina pietas praesciebat martyrio finiendum.22 (‘But let us return to our subject: Edmund, most holy and acceptable to God, was set in charge of this province so fertile (which, we say, is called ‘East Anglia’ in the vernacular). He was sprung ex antiquorum Saxonum nobili prosapia and had been the truest devotee of the Christian faith from the beginning of his life. Qui atauis regibus aeditus, when he was strong in alluding to the saint to whom his house was dedicated, the ‘nostrates’ being the canons of Thetford as distinct from his audience, the monks of Bury. But see n. 43 below. 21 For the dossiers of the other kings, princes and dukes who were venerated as saints in the early and high medieval West, see BHL 1550–56, 1573–1618p, 2081–81b, 2418–28a, 2514m, 2622–30, 2641–44ab, 2592m–98, 3144b–47, 3811–16m, 3850, 4641m–42d, 6322–26, 6361–73d, 6381–85, 7711–14, 7717–20, 7918–22, 8735–36a, 8821–44, 8975–78. 22 Passio Eadmundi, § 3 (TLES, p. 70). Passio Eadmundi, § 1 (TLES, p. 69): ‘Orientalem ipsius insulae partem, quae usque hodie lingua Anglorum Eastengle uocatur, sortito [nomine] Saxones sunt adepti.’ Abbo seems to have understood Eastengle to mean ‘eastern England’ as opposed to ‘the land of the eastern Angles’.

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Paul Antony Hayward good ways of life, then he was, by the unanimous choice of all his fellowprovincials, not so much elected ex generis successione as much as he was taken to rule over them sceptrigera potestate. For there was in him a countenance worthy of authority which the restful devotion of a pure heart constantly beautified. To all he was pleasant with persuasive eloquence; he was distinguished by the gift of humility; and he lived among his peers with a wondrous gentility – as a lord without a trace of pride’s disdain. Indeed, the holy man carried before him in his appearance what was manifested afterwards by God’s will, since with every effort the boy grasped the ladder of virtue which, divine piety foreknew, would come to an end in martyrdom.’)

Abbo’s prose, though exemplary when judged according to the notions of literary excellence current in his time, is ambiguous on points of historical detail. His use of the Horatian epithet ‘atauis regibus aeditus’ (‘begotten from royal forefathers) implies that St Edmund was the product of a royal dynasty;23 however, the identity of that family is far from clear.24 The phrase ‘ex antiquorum Saxonum nobili prosapia’ suggests that it was long established and that it belonged to the Saxon gens. The natural inference, given Abbo’s error as to which Germanic tribe was responsible for colonising East Anglia, is that Edmund was descended from the ruling house of the East Anglian kingdom, and this is how most of his readers seem to have understood the passage. The post-Conquest chroniclers, for example, usually reused Abbo’s words without any suggestion that they were to be read in anything other than this sense: thus, Henry of Huntingdon (c. 1088–c. 1157), writing in the second quarter of the twelfth century, treats Edmund as the ultimus Anglorum, the last of the English (or Angles), to reign in East Anglia before the Danes conquered the kingdom.25 But Anglo-Latin writers often

23

Horace, Carmina, ed. D. R. Shackleton-Bailey, 4th edn (Munich and Leipzig, 2001), i.1.1, p. 22. The allusion is identified in TLES, p. 70. 24 That Abbo’s informants, though possibly not the author himself, regarded the martyr as a member of the East Anglian royal house is seemingly confirmed by his story of how his severed head was found between the paws of a huge wolf: Passio Eadmundi, § 12 (TLES, p. 81). The family were known as the ‘Wuffingas’, after an ancestor called ‘Wuffa’ (Bede, Historia ecclesiastica, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, 2.15, p. 190). Wuffa is thought to be a diminutive form of Old English ‘wulf’, making the wolf a suitable totemic emblem or ‘guardian spirit’ for the family, its members and, apparently, their dismembered remains. See S. Newton, The Origins of Beowulf and the Pre-Viking Kingdom of East Anglia (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 105–9; S. Newton, ‘Beowulf and the East Anglian Royal Pedigree’, in The Age of Sutton Hoo, ed. M. Carver (Woodbridge, 1992), pp. 65–74; also Pinner’s comments on the Wuffingas, below, p. 130–31. 25 Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, ed. D. E. Greenway (Oxford, 1996), 5.35 (p. 336). See, likewise, John of Worcester, The Chronicle of John of Worcester [Chronica chronicarum], ed. R. R. Darlington, P. McGurk and J. Bray, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1995–), sub anno 855 (II, 274) (‘ex antiquorum Saxonum prosapia oriundus’); William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, ed. and trans. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom,

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Geoffrey of Wells’s Liber de infantia sancti Edmundi used the words ‘antiqui Saxones’ to denote the ‘Old Saxons’ – that is, the Saxons who had remained in northern Germany and their descendants.26 Furthermore, instead of taking Abbo’s account of Edmund’s elevation to the throne as saying that he owed his appointment, not simply to his hereditary rights, but chiefly to divine grace that had secured the support of his fellow citizens (unanimous behaviour being an expression of God’s will), it is possible, albeit with some twisting of the Latin, to construe it as implying that the saint was chosen from outside the natural order of succession. It is also possible to take ‘sceptrigera potestate’ as implying, not that the saint was taken to rule with the sceptre-bearing power, but that it was through the agency of a sceptre-bearing power that he was taken to rule. Geoffrey’s De infantia depends on these alternative readings. Its version is that Offa, a king of the East Angles who had failed to beget an heir, decided upon a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the hope that the Lord would deign to grant him one. He arranged to stay with his kinsman, the king of the Saxons, and he was received in Saxony with regal honour, especially by one of that king’s younger sons, Edmund, who had been assigned to look after him. When the moment came to depart this Offa gave Edmund a gold ring as a reward, and showed him another that would serve as a sign if it were sent to him. Travelling to Jerusalem in accordance with his vow, he reached the holy places and made his libations there, but fell ill on the return journey. Realising that his end was near, Offa bound his companions with an oath to elect Edmund as his successor, giving them his ring to authenticate his message. Having recalled an old prophecy of his future greatness, the king of the Saxons was finally persuaded to give up his son, and Offa’s companions brought him to East Anglia. He was then forced to remain in Attleborough for a year while the succession was being debated; but, fearful of the attacks of pirates from overseas, the East Angles relented. Acting as one, they brought Edmund to Bures in Suffolk where he was consecrated by Bishop Humbert. The remainder of the work, its final two sections, comprises further background to the Danish invasion of East Anglia. Geoffrey tells how a man called Lothbroc goaded his sons Hinguar, Ubba and Bjørn into attacking Edmund. The narrative ends with these leaders gathering an army at their base in Denmark for the purpose of destroying Edmund and his people. There is little doubt that the main contentions of this narrative are false. There is no other record of an East Anglian king with the name Offa. Indeed, the numismatic evidence shows, as Whitelock points out, that Edmund

2 vols. (Oxford, 1998–9), 2.213 (I, 392–7) (‘Edmundus uir Deo deuotus, auita prosapia regum excellens’). 26 E.g. Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, ed. Greenway, IX, 44 (p. 678); William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, ed. Mynors, Thomson and Winterbottom, 1.91.1 (I, 134).

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Paul Antony Hayward succeeded a king called Æthelweard.27 In the early 850s, the period when the alleged king Offa is supposed to have visited his kinsman, the king of the Saxons, the Old Saxons were ruled by a Frank, Louis ‘the German’, a king who hardly ever visited them.28 There is no evidence that Louis was connected to the East Anglian royal house either by blood or by marriage. Kingship was, moreover, an institution to which the Old Saxons were notoriously hostile during their time as an independent people: they had no royal family of their own until their dux, Henry, became king of the eastern Franks in 919.29 There is no record of any Anglo-Saxon king undertaking a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Geoffrey’s story would have been more convincing if he had made Rome and the limina apostolorum Offa’s goal; but writing at a time when the First Crusade was a much-celebrated event and when the Second was taking (or had recently taken) place, this detail seems to owe more to contemporary fashion than to the realities of Anglo-Saxon history. No contemporary record implies, finally, that East Anglia was already subject to Danish attack in the mid-850s when Edmund became king. The story is largely made up of conventional motifs. The episode with which it is set in motion is an instance of a common type of miracle-story, that of a pilgrim (King Offa) who makes a vow to visit a distant shrine (Jerusalem) in order to obtain a remedy for a long-standing issue (sonlessness), only to be guided by divine grace to a solution in a place that is usually much closer to home (Saxony). The rest of the narrative is concerned with the fulfilment of Offa’s scheme for the succession. This skeleton is fleshed out with various clichés: in a muted version of the puer-senex topos, the childEdmund gives lessons in civility and virtue to the mature Offa (§ 1);30 a Roman matron with prophetic powers is said to have had a pre-natal vision of Edmund’s greatness (§ 4); the place where the saint prayed on landing

27

Whitelock, ‘Fact and Fiction’, p. 225; for the numismatic evidence, see p. 218; Blunt, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Coinage’, p. 4; P. Grierson and M. Blackburn, Medieval European Coinage with a Catalogue of Coins in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (Cambridge, 1986), p. 294 and plate 54 (nos. 1173–9). 28 Only two, perhaps three, significant visits – in 845, 852 and perhaps 851 – to Saxony are known between 843 and 876. On none of these occasions does he seem to have gone beyond Paderborn and the southern reaches of the region: see Annals of Fulda, ed. T.  Reuter, Ninth-Century Histories 2 (Manchester, 1992), pp. 24, 33 and 34, n. 11; E. J. Goldberg, Struggle for Empire: Kingship and Conflict under Louis the German 817–876 (Ithaca NY, 2006), pp. 158, 164 and 177. 29 Vita Lebuini antiqua (BHL 4810b), § 6, ed. A. Hofmeister, Monumenta Germaniae historica, Scriptores, XXX (1934), p. 794; Bede, Historia ecclesiastica, ed. and trans. Colgrave and Mynors, 5.10 (p. 480). 30 On this topos and its meaning, see J. A. Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford, 1988), pp. 96–109. On its classical and early Christian origins, see also C. Gnilka, Aetas spiritualis: Die Überwindung der natürlichen Altersstufen als Ideal frühchristlichen Lebens (Bonn, 1972), pp. 223–45; E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. R. Trask (London, 1953), pp. 98–101.

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Geoffrey of Wells’s Liber de infantia sancti Edmundi in England becomes the most fertile ground in East Anglia, while twelve health-giving springs erupted from that earth as he mounted his horse (§ 5), and so on. A detail that owes more to folklore than to hagiography is the use of rings as tokens of recognition (§ 1).31 Geoffrey also deploys many of the usual platitudes about saintly kings: Edmund is handsome and attentive; his conversation gives delight; his service is welcome; he is quick in his work (§ 1), and so on. His mind is shown to have been inclined, however, towards the religious rather than the secular life: when he arrives in England he is in the process of learning the Psalter by heart, being as-yet untutored in the art of devising and delivering royal judgments (§ 5). Some three-quarters of the work could, in short, have been generated by someone who was well versed, as would be the case with most monks and secular clerics, with the lives and miracles of the saints. There is, to be sure, ample evidence that Geoffrey undertook historical research in the abbey’s library at Bury, but mainly for the purpose of supplementing the hagiographical core.32 His account, for example, of Edmund’s coronation is clearly indebted to either the Annals of St Neots or the B-text of John of Worcester’s Chronica chronicarum (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 297), two chronicles produced at Bury in the first half of the twelfth century.33 Both offer the same account of the coronation ceremony, and De infantia shares with this account the place (the town of Bures), the day when it took place (Christmas Day), and the name of the prelate who anointed Edmund (Humbert). Geoffrey adds some circumstantial detail about the town’s environs and its status as a royal vill – information that was probably common knowledge.34 His account of the Vikings who attacked East Anglia 31

See S. Thompson, A Motif Index of Folk Literature, 6 vols., rev. edn (Bloomington, 1966), III, 383 (no. H.94). 32 For discussion as to what histories were available at St Edmunds in Geoffrey’s time, see Thomson, ‘The Library’, esp. pp. 641–3. On the library’s later history, see R. Sharpe, ‘Reconstructing the Medieval Library of Bury St Edmunds Abbey: The Lost Catalogue of Henry de Kirkstead’, in Bury St Edmunds, ed. Gransden, pp. 204–18. 33 For the annals, see Annals of St Neots, ed. Dumville and Lapidge, pp. 1–107; the Bury additions to the Chronica chronicarum are printed as appendices in The Chronicle of John of Worcester, ed. Darlington, McGurk and Bray, II, 619–53, and III, 309–26. In order to avoid confusion, I follow the modern attribution to John. Geoffrey, however, will have known Chronica chronicarum as the work of Marianus Scotus. The making of Bodley 297 can be dated to 1133 × 1143 (see ibid., II, xlvi–liii), and this date also comprises the terminus ante quem for the compilation of the Annals of St Neots, because they supplied information that was added to the text and margins of Bodley 297 (see McGurk’s comments in ibid., II, xlvi–liii, 616–17). The manuscript of the Annals (Cambridge, Trinity College, MS 770, pp. 1–74) has been dated on palaeographical grounds to the two decades between about 1120 and about 1140: see Annals of St Neots, ed. Dumville and Lapidge, pp. xv–xix; and Thomson, ‘The Library’, p. 642, n. 160, and the works cited there. 34 Compare De infantia Edmundi, § 6, with Chronicon S. Neoti, sub anno 855 (p. 45) and 856 (p. 51), and Chronicle of John of Worcester, ed. Darlington, McGurk and Bray II, 630. The inclusion of this event may have owed something to the influence of Morgan M.736 (the

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Paul Antony Hayward also seems to have been indebted to a textual source, the Gesta Normannorum ducum. Gesta could have supplied many of De infantia’s details about Lothbroc and his son Bjørn, the idea that the name ‘Dacia’ refers to Denmark, the theory that the Danes were an offshoot of the Goths, and the notion that Lothbroc encouraged his progeny to conquer foreign lands.35 Gesta could not have contributed the idea that Hinguar and Ubba were members of Lothbroc’s family, and some details (such as the etymology of ‘Lothbroc’, ‘Hateful Stream’) may derive from an oral or a vernacular source;36 but it is possible to see how, if he were prepared to engage in a little legerdemain, Geoffrey could have created these chapters by combining and elaborating the material provided by Abbo and the Gesta. Apart from these passages, the only other section that seems to depend on book-based research is a brief digression in which Geoffrey asserts that his Offa must not be confused with the Mercian or the East-Saxon kings with the same name (§ 3). Its opening sentence about the Mercian Offa probably depends on Osbert of Clare’s Passio S. Æthelberhti. It tells how this Offa, described as ‘non rex sed tirannus iniquus’ (‘not a king but an unjust tyrant’), had Æthelberht killed, and it is in Osbert’s life as opposed to the anonymous alternative that the Mercian ruler is described as a tyrant.37 Verbal echoes

illustrated Passion and miracles of St Edmund), since the famous series of illustrations by the ‘Alexis Master’ on its opening leaves (fols. 7r–22v) includes an image in which an enthroned Edmund is crowned by a tonsured bishop (fol. 8v). For a reproduction and discussion, see Hahn, ‘Peregrinatio et Natio’, p. 121 (fig. 4). 35 Gesta Normannorum ducum of William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis and Robert of Torigni, ed. and trans. E. M. C. van Houts, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1994–5), 1. 1, 3–4 (I, 10, 14–16). It should be noted, however, that the details do not correspond exactly: Geoffrey uses the word ‘Dagi’ as a synonym for Gothi, a usage not attested in the Gesta Normannorum ducum; Geoffrey uses the phrase ‘in aquilonali sinu Dacorum’, a phrase that may be taken as equating Dacia with Danamarcha, an equation that is first attested in the Gesta; Geoffrey’s ‘Lodebrok’ is a ‘prediues et famosus homo’, whereas the Gesta’s ‘Lothroc’ is a ‘rex’; Geoffrey spells Bjørn ‘Bern’, whereas the Gesta uses a fuller name, ‘Bier Coste quidem Ferree’. Cf. Abbo in TLES, pp. 71–3. 36 Evidence that other legends about Lothbroc and his offspring were current at St Edmunds is provided by the Chronicon S. Neoti, sub anno 878, where ‘the three sisters of Hinguar and Ubba, the daughters of Lothbroc’, are said to have woven the Raven Banner. For a fuller exploration of the Lothbroc material, see Whitelock, ‘Fact and Fiction’, pp. 225–30. 37 The fullest of the extant fragments of Osbert’s Vita S. Ethelberhti regis et martyris (BHL 2627–8d) is that quoted by Richard of Cirencester, Speculum historiale de gestis regum Angliae, ed. J. E. B. Mayor, 2 vols. (London, 1863–9), I, 262–94. The likelihood that Geoffrey used this vita has a bearing on the dating of De infantia, for Osbert cannot have completed it until after September 1148, as it was dedicated ‘ad Gislebertum Hereforden. episcopum’. This dedication can only refer to Gilbert Foliot, bishop of Hereford from September 1148 to March 1163: see Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae 1066–1300, ed. J. S. Barrow, 10 vols. (London, 2002), VIII, 5. The dedication is not, however, present in any of the fragments now extant, but was reported by John Leland in the sixteenth century. For the earlier version, which Geoffrey of Wells might also have used, see Passio S. Athelberhti in

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Geoffrey of Wells’s Liber de infantia sancti Edmundi show that the second sentence, on the East-Saxon Offa, depends on Bede.38 It is the third and final sentence, however, that is particularly revealing: Neutrum, inquam, illorum, de quo agimus, ille extitit; sed illorum regum qui per spatium lx. unius annorum in Estangle ante Sanctum Eadmundum regnauerunt, iste Offa ultimus extiterat.39 (‘Neither one of them, I say, is he [the Offa] about whom we are concerned; rather, that Offa is the last of those kings who ruled in East Anglia for a span of sixty-one years before St Edmund.’)

Now, this sentence clearly derives from a passage in the summary account of East Anglia’s kings that was prefixed to Chronica chronicarum: [Æthelbertus] … occisus est ab Offa rege Merciorum. Deinde perpauci reges in East-Anglia per LXI. annos regnaverunt potentes; quoad ultimus eorum, sanctus Eadmundus, nactus fuerit culmen regiminis40 (‘[Æthelberht] … was killed by Offa, king of the Mercians. Then hardly any powerful kings reigned in East Anglia for sixty-one years; until St Edmund, the last of them, received the height of the government.’)

The crucial echo here is the timespan of ‘sixty-one years’. It refers to the period between 793 and 855, the years under which John of Worcester had placed King Æthelberht’s death and Edmund’s accession.41 Geoffrey’s allusion to this measure of years demonstrates that he had Chronica chronicarum before him at this point, but it is difficult to see why he should have used it here as it offers no support for the existence of his Offa. Indeed, his failure to

38

39 40

41

‘Two Lives of St Ethelbert, King and Martyr’, ed. M. R. James, English Historical Review 32 (1917), 212–44 (pp. 236–44). De infantia Edmundi, § 3 (p. 37): ‘Nec ille alter nobilis Offa, Orientalium Saxonum rex insignis, qui, teste Beda, Christi amore ductus, propter Euangelium, regnum, uxorem, liberos et gentem reliquit, profectusque peregre, in urbe Roma, Constantino papa presidente, attonsus, in monachicoque habitu uitam compleuit, et ad uisionem beatorum apostolorum in celis diu desideratam peruenit.’ The words emphasised here echo Bede, Historia ecclesiastica, ed. and trans. Colgrave and Mynors, 5.19 (p. 516). Cf. John of Worcester, Chronica chronicarum, sub anno 708 (II, 166). A mid-twelfth-century Bury copy of the Historia ecclesiastica survives as Trinity College Dublin, MS 492, and it is recorded among the abbey’s booklists: see Sharpe, Carley, Thomson, and Watson, English Benedictine Libraries, pp. 52–87 (no. B13.211). De infantia Edmundi, § 3 (p. 37). Bodley 297, p. 42. Florentii Wigorniensis monachi chronicon ex chronicis, ed. B. Thorpe, 2 vols. (London, 1848–9), II, 262. It is worth noting that Geoffrey could not have learnt anything about Edmund’s ancestry from either the summary account or the family tree that it supports: the account says nothing about his parentage, and there is no line in the diagram to indicate from whom Edmund was descended. See ibid., p. 249, and Bodley 297, p. 42. John of Worcester, Chronica chronicarum, ed. Darlington, McGurk and Bray, sub anno 793 and 855 (II, 224 and II, 274).

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Paul Antony Hayward give the ‘sixty-one years’ a starting point – that is, the absence of a word or two to link this timeframe to Æthelberht’s martyrdom – means that the allusion would have been meaningless unless the audience was familiar with the relevant part of Chronica chronicarum. This lapse might be taken as evidence of Geoffrey’s ineptitude, but it is perhaps better understood as an important clue as to the nature of the audience for whom he was writing. For the sentence causes no difficulty if it is seen as a response to listeners who had drawn Geoffrey’s attention to the Chronica chronicarum pointing out that it contains no record of an East Anglian king called Offa.42 His response, in effect, was to suggest that his Offa was one of the unnamed kings whom John had mentioned as ruling during these ‘sixty-one years’, but there was no need to spell out to the audience what these years were because they were well enough acquainted with this book and passage in question. It would follow that De infantia was devised for an audience of religious attached to Bury St Edmunds – that the intended audience was internal to the abbey and its dependencies. The chapter that this sentence brings to an end certainly reads as though it was inserted when the work was almost finished as a reply to associates who had identified the East Anglian Offa as a potential weakness. To these signs of faulty execution may be added the paucity of circumstantial detail when it comes to describing events and places beyond the shores of East Anglia. Geoffrey tells his readers a good deal about the distinguishing characteristics of Maiden’s Bower, Hunstanton, Attleborough and Bures, but he mentions only three overseas locations: Saxony, Jerusalem and ‘St George’s Arm’, a name used in the twelfth century for the Bosphorus.43 That last name is a useful detail, but Geoffrey says nothing about what these places were like or about their pasts. That is, he fails to invest the text with the even patina of circumstantial detail that was needed to give a hagiographical narrative a semblance of verisimilitude. His treatment of the Old Saxons is especially flawed, because he ought to have known that they were not ruled by kings, since Bede says as much: The Old Saxons have no king but only many chiefs (‘plurimi satrapae’) who are set over the nation: whenever war is imminent, they cast lots impartially, and everyone follows as their leader for the duration of the war whomsoever the lots put forward; but when the war is done, the chiefs revert to equality of status as before.44

42

Geoffrey, De infantia Edmundi, pref. (p. 34), states that the brothers used to exchange and critique what they knew about Edmund, but before the writing had begun: ‘Vbi quisque prout didicerat in medium proferebat, super quibus unus ac alterum postea conferebat.’ 43 De infantia Edmundi, § 2 (p. 36). For this name Geoffrey may have dipped into Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum, ed. R. T. Hill (Oxford, 1967), I, 3, p. 7, since this work also uses the name ‘Brachium Sancti Georgii’ for the Bosphorus. 44 Bede, Historia ecclesiastica, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, 5.10 (p. 480) (present author’s

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Geoffrey of Wells’s Liber de infantia sancti Edmundi This passage is clearly incompatible not only with the idea that Edmund was the son of a king of the Old Saxons but also with any suggestion that he came from Saxony, for Abbo had clearly stated that the saint was ‘begotten from royal ancestors’.45 Yet verbal parallels show that Geoffrey used the Historia ecclesiastica. The only possible conclusions are either that he had failed to read Bede thoroughly (an inference that would be in keeping with the other signs of haste), or that he has committed an act of pious fraud knowing full well (albeit perhaps, only from a late stage in the process of composition) that what he was saying was in direct conflict with a historical text that some of his contemporaries regarded as a bastion of unassailable truth.46 There is nothing to suggest, however, that the central contentions of Geoffrey’s work failed to win acceptance; on the contrary, they became fixed elements in the hagiographical tradition. Denis Piramus, writing in the late twelfth century, carries over the same narrative, elaborating a little and adding more scenes. His Edmund is descended ‘des ancienes Sechnes’, is found by ‘le roi Offe’ in ‘Sessoyne’, is designated as his successor as he lies dying ‘al brace seint Jorge’, and so on.47 The metrical version of the Passio Edmundi by Henry of Avranches (d. 1262/3) adheres to the scheme of Abbo’s text, but makes a nod in Geoffrey’s direction with the lines, ‘The Saxons sent a boy to be raised by the Angles, / that he might restore what their fathers had plundered.’48 Substantial extracts from De infantia were included in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 240 (pages 623–77), a compendium of Edmund’s hagiography that was copied for the abbey in 1377. A prefatory chapter adds more detail: the king of the Saxons is named as ‘Alkmundus’, his wife is called ‘Siwara’, and she gives birth to the saint in 841, in a royal city in Saxony called Nuremberg (‘Norhemberges’). But the remainder follows Geoffrey almost verbatim.49 Bodley 240 was in turn the source for Lydgate’s poem on Edmund and Fremund. Lydgate’s coverage of Edmund’s origins and infancy is largely the same as that found in Bodley 240 though he adds a few of his own refinements – King Alkmund becomes Offa’s cousin,

45 46 47 48

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translation). On the interpretation of satrapa, see Wallace-Hadrill, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, p. 183. Passio Eadmundi, § 3 (TLES, p. 70): ‘qui atauis regibus aeditus’. Cf. Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, 9.1 (p. 622): ‘Beda ... cuius auctoritas firmissima est.’ Piramus, La vie Seint Edmund le Rei, ed. Kjellman, lines 433–2018 (pp. 19–79). On Denis’s use of Geoffrey, see ibid., pp. xiii–xviii; Loomis, ‘Growth’, pp. 94–5. Townsend, ‘Vita Sancti Eadmundi’, p. 101 (lines 17–18): ‘Miserunt Anglis puerum saxones alendum / Qui restauraret quod rapuere patres.’ Henry may not use the word antiqui, but that ‘saxones’ refers to the Continental Saxons seems clear enough. Note also line 66 where, in another departure from Abbo, Edmund’s predecessor as king is described as his father’s uncle (‘patruus’). Townsend discusses Henry’s use of his sources at ibid., pp. 98–9 and 116. NLA II, 575–9-24. On Geoffrey’s place in this compilation, see Loomis, ‘Growth’, pp. 97–100; Thomson, ‘Geoffrey of Wells’, pp. 32–3.

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Paul Antony Hayward for example.50 It seems clear that Liber de infantia overcame whatever initial objections it may have encountered. Either the monks were unable to detect its flaws, an inference that would confirm the impression given by some other sources that St Edmunds suffered a slump in its intellectual capacity in the middle of the twelfth century, or they had reasons for preferring Geoffrey’s version of events.51

II Few commentators to date have given serious consideration to the possibility that Geoffrey was engaged in a sleight-of-hand. The usual view is that De infantia represents a flawed but essentially honest attempt to repair a ‘gap’ in the saint’s dossier.52 There are a number of variations on this theme, but when it comes to explaining the timing of the composition of Geoffrey’s text the focus has been on large, anonymous, factors such as the momentum generated by the cult’s growth and the changing intellectual context. There is certainly something to be said for this approach. When the reader pulls back from the text itself to view the development of the legend of St Edmund over the course of the Middle Ages, a trend towards greater detail seems obvious.53 There is little information as to whether the cult was attracting more devotees in the middle of the twelfth century, but it is easy to see how an escalation of interest might have led to demands for more information about the saint. In the first half of the twelfth century many English monks and clerics wrote histories in an attempt to rescue their traditions from the disdain of a Francophone elite.54 The twelfth century may be seen, moreover, 50 51

52

53

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Corolla, ed. Hervey, pp. 409–524. For the elements derived from Geoffrey, see ibid., pp. 424–47; for a synopsis, see Loomis, ‘Growth’, pp. 101–3. Consider, for example, Jocelin of Brakelond, The Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond: Concerning the Acts of Samson, Abbot of the Monastery of St Edmund, ed. and trans. H. E. Butler (Oxford, 1949), p. 11: ‘Abbas Ordingus homo illiteratus fuit et tamen fuit bonus abbas et sapienter domum istam rexit.’ Thomson, ‘Geoffrey of Wells’, p. 30, is especially generous, arguing that De infantia was a conscientious attempt ‘to construct a sensible, historical narrative from scanty (unfortunately unreliable) materials, to cover an excessively obscure period’. For the view that Abbo had left a ‘gap’ for De infantia, see ibid., p. 27; Loomis, ‘Growth’, p. 91; M. Lapidge and R. Love, ‘The Latin Hagiography in England and Wales’, in Hagiographies, ed. G.  Philippart (Turnhout, 2001), p. 245. The great exception to the rule is M. Otter, ‘La Vie des deux Offa, l’Enfance de Saint Edmond et la logique des “antécédents” ‘, Médiévales: Langue, Texts, Histoires 38 (2000), 17–34, who treats De infantia as deliberate fiction, arguing that the prequel format allowed greater detachment from the need to maintain the appearance of truth. Whitelock, ‘Fact and Fiction’, esp. p. 233. See also R. Folz, Les saints rois du moyen âge en Occident (Vie–XIIIe siècles) (Brussels, 1984), pp. 50–1; Cownie, ‘The Cult of St Edmund’, esp. pp. 188–9. In an attempt to place De infantia in this context, H. M. Thomas, The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation and Identity 1066-c.1220 (Oxford, 2003), p. 232,

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Geoffrey of Wells’s Liber de infantia sancti Edmundi as a period when readers of hagiography (not least those Norman critics) were better equipped to identify lapses in logic and in adherence to literary norms thanks to the rise of the Schools and to greater dissemination of the patristic models that were the foundation of the genre.55 In the midst of these new pressures, Abbo’s coverage of Edmund’s parentage and early life may well have been found wanting. Abbo’s treatment was certainly on the briefer side of the generic norm: it covers the topic of Edmund’s background with just 117 words (comprising some just over two per cent of the passio as a whole). The norm when it comes to covering the ancestors and upbringing of saintly kings and princes in a vita seems to have been roughly five per cent of the text, a percentage that often corresponds to around 250 words. The anonymous account of the Passion of Æthelberht (the Passio Athelberthi), to take an example dating from the late eleventh century, covers its subject’s ancestry in a mere eighty-seven words, and his baptism and maturity as a youth with another eighty-nine.56 The two paragraphs amount to just under five per cent of the whole. The late eleventh-century vita of St Edward the Martyr covers his ancestors and adolescence in 269 words, some seven per cent of the whole.57 The Life of Dagobert, to draw on a Frankish example, covers its subject’s lineage and education in 297 words, less than six per cent of the whole.58 All of these works offer, moreover, much more detail as to the identity of their subject’s ancestors. The anonymous Passion identifies Æthelberht’s father as King Æthelred, a descendant of Rædwald, a king of the East Anglians celebrated by Bede; it also names his mother as Leofruna. The Life of Edward the Martyr makes no mention of his mother, but it identifies his father as the glorious king Edgar. It also names the prelate who presided at Edward’s coronation as

55 56 57

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stresses the dedication to Abbot Ording and the encouragement that Geoffrey received from Prior Sihtric. Ording and Sihtric certainly appear from their names to have had English or Anglo-Danish roots. For the pre-Conquest usage and etymology of the name Ording, see O. von Feilitzen, The Pre-Conquest Personal Names of the Domesday Book, Nomina Germanica 3 (Uppsala, 1937), pp. 335–6. For a viking leader with the name ‘Sihtric’, see for example Flodoard of Reims, Les annales de Flodoard publiées d’après les manuscrits, ed. P. Lauer (Paris, 1905), sub anno 943 (p. 88). However, Geoffrey’s preface puts rather more emphasis on Goscelin’s role in getting the text written (see n. 14 above), and it is not uncommon in this period for histories to be dedicated to the leading opponent of an author’s position: see P. A. Hayward, The Politics of History in Anglo-Norman England (forthcoming). See Whatley, The Saint of London, pp. 41–50, and the works cited there. Passio Athelberhti, § 1 (p. 236). Passio S. Eadwardi, regis et martyris (BHL 2418), in Edward King and Martyr, ed. C. Fell, Leeds Texts and Monographs 3 (Leeds, 1971), pp. 1–2. Most of this passage comprises a 194-word digression on his father, King Edgar, a digression largely derived from the prologue to the Regularis concordia (see ibid., p. xvii). De actibus S. Dagoberti regis et martyris (BHL 2081), §§ 1–2, ed. B.  Krusch, Monumenta Germaniae historica, Scriptores rerum merovingicarum II (1888), pp. 512–13.

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Paul Antony Hayward Archbishop Dunstan. The Life of Dagobert names his grandfather, his father and his brothers. It also describes how his father, King Childebert, handed the saint over to be educated under the direction of his aunt, Queen Balthild, who was then living in retirement at Chelles. A reader wanting this kind of detail for St Edmund will not have found it in Abbo’s Passio. There is, furthermore, material that may be construed as showing that such details became more important in the twelfth century. The development of the Æthelberht Legend is a case in point. For Osbert of Clare greatly expanded the anonymous Passio’s account of the saint’s ancestry when he rewrote the life around 1150, devoting no less than 473 words to the topic.59 Drawn largely from Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica, Osbert’s additions celebrate the holiness of Æthelberht’s kin across six generations. Larger historical trends offer, then, one way of accounting for Geoffrey’s efforts, but this approach is not entirely satisfactory. There is no doubting that De infantia is a flawed work;60 but it seems especially defective when it is contextualised in this way. Consider, for example, whether it solves the problem of Abbo’s vagueness. Geoffrey is not much clearer about Edmund’s ancestry: he tells us that his father was a king of the Saxons, but he fails to supply his name, let alone those of any other member of his family! Their kingdom remains a nebulous entity: it has no capital; it has no history. Geoffrey provides information about Edmund’s coronation, but little more than what could already be obtained from the Annals of St Neots or the Bury interpolations in Bodley 297. There is, moreover, a telling imbalance in his coverage of Edmund’s childhood. Much is said about the saint’s dealings with the East Anglian Offa, about his passage from Saxony to England, and about his elevation to the throne; but it contains not a single scene or chapters whose main function is to illustrate his virtues as a child. Compare Osbert: he devotes a chapter to the way in which St Æthelberht was taught sacred letters and good morals.61 On his first appearance in Geoffrey’s story Edmund is already ‘iuvenis’ (§ 1), a label sometimes applied to men in their thirties and forties.62 If the concern that drove Geoffrey was the need to fill a

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Osbert, Vita Ethelberhti, in Richard of Cirencester, Speculum historiale, ed. Mayor, I, 262–4. But note also the way in which Gerald of Wales rewrote this vita in the 1190s. He covered Æthelberht’s ancestry in 105 words, reducing Osbert’s additions to a single sentence: Vita regis et martyris Æthelberhti (BHL 2626), § 2 (‘Two Lives’, ed. James, pp. 222–36, at p. 222). That strongly suggests that the individual priorities of authors often prevailed over broader trends. On Gerald’s priorities, see R. Bartlett, ‘Rewriting Saints’ Lives: The Case of Gerald of Wales’, Speculum 58 (1983), 598–613. 60 For damning assessments of De infantia’s merits as ‘history’, see J. Campbell, ‘Some Twelfth-Century Views of the Anglo-Saxon Past’, Peritia 3 (1984), 135–50; Thomas, The English and the Normans, p. 232. 61 Osbert, Vita Ethelberhti, in Richard of Cirencester, Speculum historiale, I, 264. 62 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive Originum Libri XX, ed. W. M. Lindsay, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1911), 5.38 and 11.2, defines iuventus as covering the years from 29 to 50! De

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Geoffrey of Wells’s Liber de infantia sancti Edmundi gap in Abbo’s coverage of the saint’s childhood, then one might surely expect a rounded account of his early life; but the dominant subject of De infantia is, as the author states towards the end of the preface, Edmund’s ‘aduentus … a Saxonia in Angliam’ (‘his coming from Saxony to England’).63 Clearly, the standard interpretation will not suffice. There is, I suggest, a better way of accounting for the work’s composition, one which can explain its focus on Edmund’s move from Saxony and his elevation to the throne.

III There are, to begin with, many points of contact between De infantia’s story of how Edmund became king of East Anglia and the vexed history of the succession to the English throne in the century before the work was written.64 There were three occasions in this period when a king died without leaving a legitimate son: in 1066, when a childless Edward the Confessor (1003 × 5–1066) died at Westminster; in 1100, when William [II] Rufus (c. 1060–1100) was struck by an arrow in the New Forest; and in 1135, when Henry I (1102–67), having fathered numerous bastards, left a daughter, the Empress Matilda, as his only legitimate heir. On each occasion there was a prolonged and violent conflict over the succession, and almost all of the contenders in these struggles were, in some sense, foreigners. In 1066, for example, Harold, earl of Wessex (Harold II; 1022/3?–1066), the native contender, faced no fewer than three foreign claimants: William, duke of Normandy (1035–87); Harald III Hardrada, king of Norway (1047–66); and Edgar the Ætheling (b. 1052?, d. c. 1125). Edgar was a great-grandson of Æthelred II (978–1016), but his mother was a German princess; he was born in Hungary, but he had been in the kingdom since 1057.65 Of the two infantia nowhere specifies Edmund’s age, but Chronicon S. Neoti, sub anno 856, and the Bury interpolations (John of Worcester, Chronicle, ed. Darlington, McGurk and Bray, II, 630), state that he was fifteen years old at his coronation. 63 Otter, ‘La logique des “antécédents”‘, esp. p. 21, argues that the use of an infancy ‘prequel’ to qualify the story of an established hero is a technique borrowed from the chanson de geste and romance. This suggestion certainly helps to explain why the word ‘infantia’ is used in the rubrics of the Cambridge and Hereford MSS (see n. 8 above) when the text proper is focused on the circumstances of Edmund’s succession to the throne. Note also that the longer of the two extracts from De infantia in Bodley 240 is rubricated ‘Qualiter electus fuit et consecratus in regem Estanglorum’ (NLA, II, 575). 64 What follows is an overview of relevant aspects of the succession, c. 1050–1150. For further information as to the facts the reader is referred to the relevant biographies in ODNB. For a succinct discussion of the causes and consequences of the unsteady nature of the royal succession in this period, see R. Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075–1225 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 4–11; for a fuller analysis, see now G. Garnett, Conquered England: Kingship, Succession and Tenure, 1066–1166 (Oxford, 2007). 65 For further details, see N. Hooper, ‘Edgar the Ætheling: Anglo-Saxon Prince, Rebel and Crusader’, Anglo-Saxon England 14 (1985), 197–214; F. Barlow, Edward the Confessor, 3rd edn (New Haven, 1989), pp. 215–19.

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Paul Antony Hayward contenders in 1100, following the death of William Rufus, Henry had at least been born in England, possibly at Selby, in 1068; but he was identified with the Norman cause, and had spent most of his adult life, since 1088, in Normandy. The other contender, Robert, seems to have made only two visits to England before 1100, one for some six or so months in 1080–1 and another for about the same length of time in 1091. Much the same is also true of the contenders in 1135. Stephen was the third son of Étienne VI, count of Blois-Chartres, and had spent the first two decades of his life within the orbit of his father’s court. It was between 1110 and 1113 that he became a follower of Henry I. Thereafter, he was able to build up a significant affinity in Normandy and England. Matilda had been born in England in 1102, and her mother was a niece of Edgar the Ætheling;66 but she would have seemed quite foreign when, in 1139, she landed on the south coast to assert her rights. Between the ages of eight and twenty-four she had lived in Germany as the consort of the Emperor Henry V (1105–25). Her return in 1126 was soon followed by her marriage to Geoffrey, count of Anjou (1128–51), and she had spent the eleven years since 1128 living in France, except for most of 1131 when she was estranged from her husband. Her cause was inherited by her son, the future king Henry II. Born at Le Mans in 1133, he first visited England when he was nine, spending twelve months at Bristol from November 1142. He next came to England in 1146–7 in order to fight for the Crown.67 Like Geoffrey’s St Edmund, most of the contenders in these disputes were kinsmen of the monarch whom they hoped to succeed: the Conqueror was the Confessor’s cousin; Robert Curthose and Henry I were William II’s brothers; Stephen of Blois was a nephew of Henry I; Henry II was Stephen’s cousin; and Edgar the Ætheling was a great-nephew of Edward the Confessor. Even Harold II was a kinsman of the previous monarch, albeit only by virtue of his sister’s marriage. Moreover, many of the leading contenders in these disputes were (or claimed to be) the king’s designated successor. The Conqueror claimed, to begin with the most notorious example, to be the chosen successor of Edward the Confessor;68 but so also in a sense was Edgar, because he had received the title ‘Ætheling’ from the same ruler;69 the same may also have been true of Harald II, if the Confessor did indeed choose him

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M. Chibnall, Empress Matilda: Queen Consort, Queen Mother and Lady of the English (Oxford, 1991), p. 67, suggests that she was born at Sutton Courtenay, near Abingdon. 67 See William of Malmesbury, Historia novella, ed. E. King and trans. K. R. Potter (Oxford, 1998), § 74, pp. 126–7, with A. L. Poole, ‘Henry Plantagenet’s Early Visits to England’, English Historical Review 47 (1932), 447–52. 68 William of Poitiers, Gesta Guillelmi ducis Normannorum et regis Anglorum, ed. and trans. R. H. C. Davis and M. Chibnall (Oxford, 1998), 1.14 (p. 20); Barlow, Edward the Confessor, pp. 107–9. 69 Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. F. Liebermann, 3 vols (Halle, 1903–16), I, 665.

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Geoffrey of Wells’s Liber de infantia sancti Edmundi to be his heir on his deathbed.70 Matilda was the most designated successor of all, having twice received oaths of fealty from the magnates at assemblies convened by her father – in January 1127 and again in September 1131.71 Not only did her son Henry inherit this entitlement, he also became Stephen’s adopted son and heir under the terms of the Treaty of Winchester.72 Even Harald Hardrada maintained that he was ‘a designated successor’: it was his contention that he had inherited the rights of his predecessor, King Magnus I (1035–48), who had entered into an agreement with Harthacnut, king of England (1040–2), that if either died without an heir, the other would inherit his kingdoms.73 The point here is not that Geoffrey’s narrative was modelled on any of these contests for the throne, but there are some striking resemblances. Like the Confessor, like William II and like Henry I, for instance, Geoffrey’s Offa is a king without a legitimate son. Like many of the contenders in these contests, Geoffrey’s Edmund comes from overseas; but, like them, he is still related in some way to the king he hopes to succeed.74 Like most of them, Edmund succeeds as a chosen successor. And like all of these rulers, he encounters opposition: from his own father, the king of the Saxons, who is unwilling to give up his son (§ 2); from certain unnamed East Anglians, the agents of Satan who manage to delay his coronation for an entire year by stirring up a perverse debate over the succession;75 and from the sons of Lothbroc, the foreign adventurers who will go on to murder him (§§ 7–8). It is worth noting that the Passio had offered no hint that Edmund was opposed by anyone other than the invading Danes, and it does not present them as rivals for the possession of the kingdom: it may only be a small shift of emphasis, but Abbo has his Hinguar invade to plunder, rather than to conquer, East Anglia.76 Geoffrey, on the other hand, has Lothbroc goad his sons with stories of how much Edmund has achieved by acquiring a kingdom (§ 8). There is, moreover, a fundamental way in which Geoffrey’s story differs from those of the aforementioned contestants: his Edmund does not acquire a kingdom through a swift seizure of authority or by recourse to armed

70 71

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Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (CD), sub anno 1065; John of Worcester, Chronica chronicarum, ed. Darlington, McGurk and Bray, sub anno 1066 (II, 600). William of Malmesbury, Historia novella, ed. King and trans. Potter, §§ 3, 8 (pp. 8–9 and 18–21); J. A. Green, Henry I, King of England and Duke of Normandy (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 193–5; W. C. Hollister, Henry I (New Haven, 2001), pp. 317–18, 463. Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, ed. Greenway, 10.37 (p. 770): ‘Ipsum siquidem rex in filium suscepit adoptiuum, et heredem regni constituit.’ F. M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1971), pp. 421, 560. Edmund is a ‘propinquus’ (kinsman) of the deceased king in De infantia Edmundi, § 6 (p. 40). De infantia Edmundi, § 5 (p. 40): ‘Vniuersalis uero inimici membris agentibus, et pro regni apice prepostere decertantibus, infra ipsius urbis menia per annum integrum deguit.’ TLES, pp. 70–4.

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Paul Antony Hayward conflict; rather, he achieves office through patience – by allowing God’s plan to unfold. He is summoned and brought to East Anglia by Offa’s men (§ 2). He waits at the Saxon court until his father’s assent has been granted (§ 5). He spends his year in residence at Attleborough completing his study of the Psalter and learning how to make and promulgate judgments (§ 5). He only becomes king after the people agree as one to have him. He plays no part in the assembly itself; rather, the people come to Attleborough after the meeting is over to acclaim him as their ruler. They then carry him off to Bures where Bishop Humbert crowns him as their king (§ 6). That acceptance of received arrangements is the fundamental virtue in De infantia is made all but explicit in two passages. In the first, Offa prefaces the announcement of his heir with a warning against the harm that is caused by disputes over the succession: Nostis quanta pariat mala dissensio, preualentibus quibus amica est ambitio, familiaris dominatio. Eapropter in regno consulendo uitari hoc diaboli uirus oportet, quod iustitie et pacis esse moderamen debet. Vt ergo in rege eligendo omnis inter uos prorsus obstruatur contentio, michi successorem, uobis strenuum designo gubernatorem, cognati scilicet mei regis Saxonum filium.77 (‘You know how much evil disagreement spawns. In its prevalence, ambition is a friend, lording over others a familiar. For that reason it is fitting that this diabolical poison should be shunned when deliberating over the kingdom, and that the rule of peace and justice ought to prevail. Therefore, that all disagreement in electing a king might be obstructed among you utterly, I designate as my successor a forceful governor for you, namely, the son of my kinsman, the king of the Saxons.’)

The wisdom of this warning is brought out later in the narrative when the year-long debate about Edmund’s elevation to the throne exposes East Anglia to the attacks of pirates and the designs of neighbouring kings (§ 6). But before that point is reached there is a second passage in which the importance of accepting received arrangements is again made all but explicit. When the king of the Saxons is dithering over whether to give up his son, Geoffrey makes his bishops and magnates advise their king ‘not to go against divine arrangements’ (‘ut dispositioni non refragetur diuine’); they are then made to remind him of Proverbs 21. 30, ‘There is no wisdom or counsel against the Lord’ (§ 4). The text displays, then, a concern with approaches to the succession that might lead one to argue that Geoffrey was attempting to make a constitutional point – that he was trying to fashion the behaviour of princes and kingmakers. It is certainly true that saint’s lives were sometimes directed at those with a pivotal role in high politics, including kings and potential heirs to the

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De infantia Edmundi, § 2 (p. 37).

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Geoffrey of Wells’s Liber de infantia sancti Edmundi throne. The obvious case in point is the Life of Edward the Confessor by Aelred of Rievaulx (1110–67), a work that makes a powerful case for the legitimacy of Henry II’s succession to the throne, arguing that he was ‘the cornerstone’, in which ‘the two walls of the English and Norman peoples have met’.78 But it is most unlikely that De infantia was aimed at such an audience: whereas Aelred speaks directly to Henry II in the prologue to his Vita Edwardi, Geoffrey addresses his work to Abbot Ording. His target audience was probably confined to the abbey and its dependencies, an impression supported by the paucity of manuscripts and by nuances in the text which suggest that the author was contributing to a conversation among the people attached to the abbey.79 It is difficult to believe, furthermore, that either side in the civil war would have welcomed this text. In so far as it favours the cause of a chosen successor it would seem to lend support to Henry of Anjou, who was, in a sense, the designated heir in that he had inherited that claim from Matilda; but he was also a foreign invader who was attempting to drive out a king who had possession of the kingdom by virtue of his coronation. If anything, Geoffrey’s account of Edmund’s passivity implies criticism of Henry II’s strenuitas – of his vigour in pursuit of his claim. Geoffrey seems to have had a less ambitious aim in mind, that of celebrating Edmund as a symbol of responsible conduct in high politics at a time when many will have yearned for an end to conflicts over the succession. It needs to be remembered that Geoffrey was writing either in the last years of the ‘Anarchy’ or in its immediate aftermath. The desire for peace seems to have been widely felt at this time;80 this must have been especially true at Bury St Edmunds where one player in the conflict had caused considerable damage. Enraged by the monks’ refusal to satisfy his demands for money, King Stephen’s own son, Count Eustace (c. 1129–53), had ravaged their estates in August 1153. He died shortly afterwards at his castle in Cambridge, probably of natural causes;81 the monks of Bury, converting his misfortune into a sign of Edmund’s ability to protect his people, would later claim that he

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Vita et miracula Edwardi regis et confessoris (BHL 2423), printed in Historiæ Anglicanæ Scriptores X, ed. R. Twysden and J. Selden, 2 vols. (London, 1652), I, cols. 369–414, at 369–70. 79 For the three manuscripts, see n. 8 above. 80 For war-weariness among the combatants, see Gesta Stephani regis Anglorum et ducis Normannorum, ed. and trans. K. R. Potter and R. H. C. Davis (Oxford, 1976), § 120 (pp. 236–40); for the general population, see Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, ed. Greenway, 10.37, 10.40 (pp. 770, 776). 81 Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, ed. Greenway, 10.35 (p. 768), emphasises the fact that Eustace and Simon, earl of Northampton – ‘Henry II’s fiercest and most powerful enemies’ – both died ‘of the same disease and in the same week’. Both men had been at the siege of Wallingford, and it seems likely that they caught this disease there: see D.  Crouch, The Reign of King Stephen, 1135–54 (Harlow, 2000), p. 270; T. Callahan, ‘Sinners and Saintly Retribution: The Timely Death of King Stephen’s Son Eustace, 1153’, Studia Monastica 18 (1976), 109–17.

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Paul Antony Hayward became ill upon eating the produce that he had just looted from their lands.82 However, as the monks at Bury went hungry in the immediate aftermath of Eustace’s raid, they are likely to have joined in the general despair at the inability of the two sides to end a war that had been going on for fourteen years. Such an audience might well have welcomed Geoffrey’s picture of how their saint had sought the throne in an orderly fashion. That Geoffrey’s aim was to console and reassure also emerges from a long digression in which he argues that the vikings’ successes should not be understood as evidence that a benign God is in control of events. The Danes put their trust, he writes, not so much in arms as in Ubba’s demoniacal arts and in the vicious and poisonous illusions with which he was well-versed. For in all he was an agent of evil and a master of the magical arts for those who followed him; and he had gained such assurance in these arts that he would say to his confederates as he was approaching an enemy force, ‘Raise me up on high that I may look down upon the army.’ If it happened that he got a sight of them, then it came about that destruction was brought down on the opposing side as he would prevail through these magical incantations. [But] the malevolence of these arts would have no efficacy except by the providence of God who justly disposes all things, and in accordance with the merits of the man suffering them. Whence it is written, ‘Satan’s will is always evil, but his power is never unjust. For he obtains his will from himself, but his power from God.’ It is not to be believed, therefore, that man who is made in God’s image may be overwhelmed by magic craft through the power of an insolent spirit, who can do nothing unless

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Gervase of Canterbury mentions a written source for the report that he included in his Chronica, sub anno 1153 (The Historical Works of Gervase of Canterbury, ed. W. Stubbs, Rolls Series 73, 2 vols. (London, 1879–80), II, 155): ‘Sed cum ad mensam, ut in scriptis legimus, pransurus sedisset, ad primum edulii gustum insanus effectus miserabiliter interiit, et pro contumacia martyribus illata, diras mortis pœnas exsolvit.’ Since the story redounded to Edmund’s glory, it would seem likely that Gervase’s written source was produced at the abbey. He might, however, have used the account in John of Salisbury, Policraticus, ed. C. C. R. Webb, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1909) 8.21 (II, 394–5), a work written between 1156 and 1159. Policraticus was the source for the account that appears in Bodley 240 (NLA II, 636), and there are verbal parallels between his account and the brief annal in the fourteenth-century Chronica Buriensis, sub anno 1153 (Memorials, ed. Arnold, III, 6). Since these later Bury authors would probably have used a local source if one had been available and since no other version is to be found in the miracle collections associated with Edmund’s cult, it seems most unlikely that an earlier, Bury, version existed in written form. The best that can be said is that John’s use of the story shows that it was circulating within five years of the event. If it was monks of St Edmunds who first gave this spin to Eustace’s death, their version would seem to have left the abbey as an oral narrative. For another near-contemporary version, see Robert of Torigni, Chronique de Robert de Torigni, abbé du Mont-Saint-Michel, ed. L. Delisle, 2 vols. (Rouen, 1872–3), sub anno 1153 (I, 280).

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Geoffrey of Wells’s Liber de infantia sancti Edmundi permitted. Hence also that powerful legion of demons could not enter the swine by its own power.83

Assertions of the efficacy of divine providence are a standard element of saints’ lives, but the present instance is unusual in its length. Geoffrey has even gone to the trouble of inserting a quotation from Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Iob, and this is not the only place where he asserts that divine providence has permitted an adverse outcome for a hidden reason of its own devising.84 The year-long delay while Edmund awaits the outcome of the debate over the succession is explained as having been allowed by the providence of divine piety so that he could learn the laws of the kingdom (§ 5). These emphases are explicable, however, as attempts to reassure those whose confidence in God had been shaken by the civil war and the excesses of the warlords who had profited from it – those whose angst was expressed in the infamous complaint that in Stephen’s reign ‘Christ and his saints slept’.85

IV By supplementing the legend of St Edmund with material that emphasised the providential and humble way in which he had become the ruler of his kingdom, De infantia S. Edmundi altered the received picture of his witness, putting a new emphasis in the foreground. Whereas Abbo had cast him as a martyr for Christian kingship in general, Geoffrey presented him as a witness for submission to the provisions made by higher authorities in the allocation of power.86 He exploited the openings offered by the ambiguities of Abbo’s account of the saint’s origins in such a way as to show how Edmund 83

De infantia Edmundi, § 7 (pp. 41–2): ‘Qui tamen non tantum confidebant in armis, quantum in Hubbe artibus demoniacis, et in quibus imbuebatur maleficiis et uirulentis prestigiis. Fuit enim ex toto iniquitatis minister, et sibi obsequentibus artis matheseos magister. Tantaque securitate huic arti inoleuerat, ut hostili exercitui appropinquans sodalibus diceret: “Erigite me in altum, ut superuideam exercitum.” Quem si ei contingeret circumspicere, contingebat in aduersam partem pessum ire, illo magicis quibusdam carminibus preualente. Non quia efficaciam habeant huius artis maleficia, nisi ex Dei cuncta iuste disponentis prouidentia et ex merito hominis patientis. Vnde scriptum est: “Sathane uoluntas semper iniqua potestas, [sed] nunquam iniusta. Habet enim a semetipso uoluntatem, sed a Domino potestatem.” Absit ergo ut homo ad ymaginem Dei factus magicis obrui credatur artibus pro uelle superbi spiritus, qui nichil ualet nisi permissus. Vnde et potens illa legio demonum in porcos ire non potuit per semetipsam.’ 84 Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob, ed. M. Adriaen, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 143, 3 vols. (Turnhout, 1979–85), 2.10.17 (p. 70). Gregory was also the source of the reference to the Gospel story of the swine: see ibid., 2.10.16, referring to Matthew 8. 30–2. 85 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle E, ed. Irvine, p. 135 (sub anno 1137). Note also the E-text’s assessment of Eustace, sub anno 1140: ‘a bad man … he ravaged lands and levied heavy taxes’ (p. 137). 86 See especially TLES, pp. 74–8, where Abbo’s Edmund, confronted by Inguar’s demands, considers whether or not to submit to his terms for surrender.

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Paul Antony Hayward would have acted had his coming and accession to the throne taken place in circumstances analogous to those from England’s recent past. Yet, although it distorted the Passio’s account of the saint’s origins, the result was still in keeping with the saint’s ‘image’ as found in the original legend, in as much as Abbo had stressed Edmund’s willingness to die for the faith rather than submit to the overlordship of a pagan ruler.87 Edmund emerges from De infantia as a model of propriety in the pursuit of royal office, but the aim need not have been to set the saint up as an exemplar for the imitation of others; rather, the work is more plausibly understood as aligning the saint’s image with the deepest longings of his community at the time when it was written, strengthening the cult by updating its appeal. De infantia, for all its weaknesses as hagiography, may represent, in short, a telling example of the way in which cult, context and community interact to produce ‘history’. It is difficult, however, to estimate the extent to which the final product was a result of authorial design as opposed to projection. That Geoffrey of Wells knew that his story was in conflict with received history as defined by Bede and the Chronica chronicarum and that he knowingly persisted in the fib of King Offa’s existence seems highly likely; but he may only have discovered just how suspect his narrative was in the process of completing it, long after he had committed himself to the view that Edmund was an Old Saxon. Much of the content of De infantia may have been generated through an unconscious process as retelling and exegesis permitted the monks of the abbey at Bury to elaborate the story in small increments. The monks may have projected on to Edmund images of the princely conduct for which they yearned while always believing in the truth of what they were saying. Indeed, it is likely that it was not Geoffrey but some other person who first suggested that the saint was an Old Saxon: the ambiguities of Abbo’s account of his origins might well have led others to consider this possibility long before he came upon the idea.88 But no matter what the balance between received belief, desire and literary invention in its evolution, the myth of Edmund’s German origin seems to have found its moment in the early 1150s because it allowed Geoffrey and his companions – not least the venerable Goscelin, the monk who emerges from De infantia’s preface as its most ardent sponsor – to celebrate their saint as the kind of heir to the throne who would have accepted defeat rather than allow rivalry to escalate into a civil war akin to the ‘Anarchy’ of King Stephen’s reign.

87 88

See ibid., § 8 (p. 75): ‘et nunc ero mei uoluntarius proditor …’. Geoffrey claims to have used oral as well as written sources in De infantia Edmundi, pref. (p. 34). See also Campbell, ‘Some Twelfth-century Views’, pp. 223–6.

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4 Music and Identity in Medieval Bury St Edmunds Lisa Colton

Evidence of the musical practices, ideas and works of medieval England has largely disappeared, and it is necessary to approach what remains with caution. Nevertheless, even the smallest fragments of plainchant and polyphony offer an irresistible challenge to scholars trying to piece together the soundscape of this period, one that is all too easily forgotten by historians whose primary interest is not music. The abbey at Bury St Edmunds once owned a significant quantity of music, including items in honour of its patron, St Edmund. The repertoire that survives from the late Middle Ages, including liturgical chant and polyphony, suggests that the monastic community used lyrics as a means of forging and expressing Bury’s identity, as a place of pilgrimage and as a Benedictine monastery frequently under attack from outsiders, both real and imagined.1 The present study focuses on aspects of local identity and the ‘Other’ in the music from Bury St Edmunds, and includes transcriptions of previously unpublished plainchant for the Office of St Edmund. The main kind of music performed in religious services was plainchant, liturgical text sung as a single melodic line. This would have been performed by the abbey’s monks and by priests working elsewhere in Bury’s various religious institutions, some sections by solo voices and others by the full community or choir.2 Though liturgical chant was written into Bury’s service books with pitch-specific music notation from at least the post-Conquest period, it was learned by rote and performed largely from memory.3 The

1

The current study adds to the list of plainchant sources for the Office of St Edmund discussed in R. M. Thomson, ‘The Music for the Office of St Edmund King and Martyr’, Music and Letters 65 (1984), 189–93. Music for the Office of St Edmund is printed in Antiphonale Sarisburiens: A Reproduction in Facsimile of a Manuscript of the Thirteenth Century, ed. W. H. Frere, reprint (Farnborough, 1966). See also The Customary of the Benedictine Abbey of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, ed. A. Gransden, Henry Bradshaw Society Publication 99 (London, 1973). 2 J. Harper, The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy from the Tenth to the Eighteenth Century: A Historical Introduction and Guide for Students and Musicians (Oxford, 1991); D. Hiley, Western Plainchant: A Handbook (Oxford, 1993). 3 F. Harrison, Music in Medieval Britain (London, 1958), p. 5.

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Lisa Colton service books that belonged to the abbey at Bury St Edmunds can be traced via the various catalogues that were copied during the Middle Ages and in later centuries, as well as through the examination of extant sources.4 There are a number of surviving plainchant sources from Bury, including four complete books and six fragments.5 In addition to these, special occasions, perhaps including recreational activity, inspired the copying or composition of polyphonic music (music in two or more parts). Polyphonic music was performed by a small group of soloists, and was disseminated in written form because it required strict uniformity in the interpretation of melody, rhythm and harmony in order to function effectively.6 This essay discusses both monophonic and polyphonic music from Bury, and highlights the aspects of local tradition and identity that were part of its liturgical customs. Liturgical books and monophonic music The majority of notated monophonic music performed at Bury St Edmunds during the Middle Ages was plainchant used in services. Liturgical chant and rubrics were copied into manuscripts belonging to individual areas of the abbey and its surrounding buildings; missals and breviaries gave only the text of the Mass and Office, but graduals and antiphonals also included the melodic lines to which chants were performed. Further liturgical books instructed the celebrant, and anyone else involved in the service, on details of liturgical custom, or preserved texts of specific genres such as hymns. Several books were imported from the house of St Benet’s Hulme by Abbot Uvius (1020–44) as early as 1020, and an inventory copied during the rule of his successor, Abbot Leofstan (1044–65) includes five copies of the Gospels, three lectionaries, three psalters, a book of the Epistles, five missals, two capitularies, a manual and a Life of St Edmund; it also alludes to thirty service books that were kept separately by the abbot.7 By the middle of the twelfth century, each of the dedicated chapels seems to have possessed its own copy of the missal, which was kept in place by chaining; a catalogue inscribed onto the final leaves of a Bury library book dating to c. 1150–75 appears to have been copied as an inventory, with liturgical books belonging to the chapels in the east end of the abbey copied in

4

James, On The Abbey; Thomson, ‘The Library’; R. H. Rouse, ‘Bostonus Buriensis and the Author of the Catalogus scriptorum ecclesiae’, Speculum 41 (1966), 471–99; Sharpe, ‘Reconstructing the Medieval Library’. 5 The present study updates the lower totals given by Thomson, ‘The Music’, p. 190. 6 For a discussion of the performance context of medieval polyphony, see R. Bowers, ‘To Chorus from Quartet: The Performing Resource for English Church Polyphony, c. 1390– 1559’, in English Choral Practice 1400–1650, ed. J. Morehen (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 1–47. 7 Thomson, ‘The Library’, p. 622. �See also R. M. Thomson, The Archives of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds (Woodbridge, 1980).

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Music and Identity in Medieval Bury St Edmunds architectural sequence.8 A breviary for the guests’ chapel, in the south transept, is followed later in the catalogue by missals belonging to spaces dedicated to St Martin (whose altar, consecrated c. 1119–48, stood in the east end), the Holy Cross (a chapel formerly in honour of St Peter), the Martyrs (jointly dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary), and St Saba.9 A further breviary, for use in the infirmary, is listed shortly afterwards, taking the sequence out of the main building, perhaps to the north-east.10 A gradual ‘per musicam [et] troparium cantoribus’, an antiphonal ‘magnum per musicam’, and a ‘Graduale … et troparia … duo [?] per musicam’ are listed without a specific location, perhaps because they were used in the main choir.11 Another missal belonged to the Chapel of St Edmund, which could either have been the space behind the high altar where his shrine was positioned, or, perhaps more likely, given the order of the catalogue, a chapel on the north side of the abbey.12 The Chapel of St Andrew, an outbuilding in the monks’ cemetery, owned its own missal, as did the crypt; finally the catalogue lists an antiphonal ‘ad catenam’, though it is not clear to which altar it was chained.13 These thirteen volumes do not represent a complete picture of the books found in Bury’s chapels, but they highlight the importance of the east end of the church and the chapels found outside as important liturgical spaces for the celebration of Mass.14 The liturgical items for the celebrations on the main feast and Translation of St Edmund are preserved in a number of documents, and merit further study. A late eleventh-century rhymed Office for St Edmund (20 November) is contained alongside twelve lessons drawn from Abbo of Fleury’s Vita et

8

9 10 11 12 13 14

Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 47, fols. 117r–19v, which is edited in James, On the Abbey, pp. 23–32. Thomson notes that James’s edition of this manuscript contains several errors; see Thomson, ‘The Library’, p. 618. James, On the Abbey, p. 33. ‘Breuiarium ad infirmos’; James, On the Abbey, pp. 27, 33 (his item 86). James, On the Abbey, p. 27. James notes the existence of this ‘Old Chapel’, but does not link the book list with the architectural sequence of chapels; James, On the Abbey, pp. 33–4. James, On the Abbey, p. 34, suggests it belonged to the main choir. The chapels at the west end of the church (Ss Denis, Faith, Katherine and John the Baptist) and the chapels in the north and south transepts (the Chapel of the Relics and the Chapel of St Botolph respectively) are noticeably absent from this catalogue, suggesting that the scribe either passed out of the door in the north aisle, leading to the cloister, from the east end, later returning the same way to reach the crypt, or that these books were not entered for other reasons. Thomson argues that the catalogue is written in ‘three main hands, with only the slightest attempt at logical ordering’, and that over thirty books known to have belonged to the abbey at the time do not appear in it; Thomson, ‘The Library’, p. 618. The first of the three hands is responsible for all the liturgical books listed above; the two other scribes listed seven glossed Psalters, but these are not ascribed to any particular place in the abbey.

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Lisa Colton Passio Sancti Eadmundi Regis et Martyris.15 The earliest source of the vigil and rhymed Office of St Edmund is New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M.736, a manuscript of Bury provenance;16 a version of the Office designed for use in a secular (non-monastic) institution survives as Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 109, which also contains the earliest copy of the Mass of St Edmund.17 Instructions for the Translation feast of St Edmund (29 April) are given in BL, Harley MS 2977 (fols. 49v–50r), an occasion during which the sword of St Edmund was carried in procession.18 The most celebrated plainchant items from the period are the antiphons attributed by Thomson to Abbot Garnier (or Warner) of Rebais, who wrote four such texted melodies some time before 1087: Ave rex gentis anglorum, O purpurea martyrum, Gaudes honore gemino and Princeps et pater patriae.19 Thomson has argued that they are ‘neither Bury nor English compositions’ because their author was only visiting Bury from Normandy.20 Yet, their continued use by Bury’s monks and by those venerating Edmund outside of the town emphasizes the acceptance of the four antiphons as adoptively East Anglian, regardless of the nationality of their author. The significance of these antiphons to St Edmund’s cult, in Bury and elsewhere, is evidenced by a number of references to their texts in visual art and literature. Ave rex gentis anglorum, the first antiphon at Vespers in the Office of St Edmund, was arguably the most central to Bury St Edmunds’ local, regional and national identity.21 Its opening, ‘Ave rex gentis anglorum, miles regis angelorum’, reflects both the English status of Edmund’s kingship, and the pun on the words angel/Angle ascribed to Pope Gregory I.22 Of the motets and carols that survive from the later medieval period, three make explicit reference to this 15 16 17

18 19

20 21

22

Copenhagen, Royal Library, MS Gl.Kgl.S. 1588; this source does not contain the antiphon Ave rex gentis anglorum. Thomson, ‘The Music’, pp. 190–1. Hahn, ‘Peregrinatio et Natio’. Thomson, ‘The Music’, p. 191. The non-monastic origin of this source is inferred from its inclusion of nine, rather than twelve, lessons for the Feast of St Edmund; W. A. Bloor, ‘The Proper of the Mass for the Feast of St Edmund, King and Martyr’, The Douai Magazine 7 (1933), 222–7 (p. 224). James, On the Abbey, p. 90. Thomson, ‘The Music’, p. 192. Hughes rejects Abbot Garnier’s authorship of the first antiphon, since it appears in the Copenhagen source on its own, and considers that the abbot wrote four antiphons in addition to those already in circulation: A. Hughes, ‘British Rhymed Offices: A Catalogue and Commentary’, in Music in the Medieval English Liturgy, ed. S. Rankin and D. Hiley (Oxford, 1993), pp. 239–84 (p. 260). Thomson, ‘The Music’, p. 192. This melody was also employed later for the liturgy of saints including St Edmund of Abingdon, St Oswine and St Ethelbert; for a fuller account, see Thomson, ‘The Music’, p. 193. The story is found in many sources, including the thirteenth-century Legenda Aurea by Jacobus de Voragine and the South English Legendary, where it forms part of the legend of St Augustine of Canterbury. The antiphon is reproduced in facsimile in Antiphonale Sarisburiens, ed. Frere, VI, 597.

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Music and Identity in Medieval Bury St Edmunds liturgical item. The motet Ave miles celestis curie opens with the same word as the chant, emphasizing the relationship between the motet and its borrowed material. Both Ave miles celestis curie and the motet De flore martirum use the plainchant as a cantus firmus in their tenor lines.23 The chorus of the single surviving fifteenth-century English carol to St Edmund (which survives without music) also makes reference to the plainchant in its refrain: ‘Synge we now all and sum, Ave rex gentis anglorum.’24 References to Ave rex gentis anglorum are found in the works of Bury monk John Lydgate (c. 1370–1449). Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund, composed for the visit to the abbey made by Henry VI in 1433–4, called St Edmund Bury’s ‘cheef patroun’ (line 148). Its prologue ends with an invitation for ‘alle men’ to ‘seyn this Anteph[o]ne and this Orisoun’ (Prologue, lines 73–6), Ave rex gentis and Deus ineffabilis misericordie, in return for which they would be granted 200 days of pardon.25 One of the miracles added by Lydgate as proof of Edmund’s intercession, the revival of a two-year-old boy who had been run over by a cartwheel, includes this reaction from the laymen: The peple aroos with greet devocioun, Cam to the shryne on processyoun, With joye and wepyng medlyd euere among, ‘Te deum’ songe, with devout knelyng, ‘Ave rex gentis’ was afftir that ther song.  (lines 436–40)26

The opening line of the second verse of John Lydgate’s fifteenth-century Prayer to St Edmund, ‘Benygne and blessed, O gemme purpurat!’, clearly alludes to the antiphon O purpurea martyrum.27 Anthony Bale has noted that the reference to royal purple in this line of Lydgate’s poem appeared also

23

24 25

26 27

It is conventional to refer to motets, which often carried two or more texts (one per musical line) simultaneously, by the incipit of their uppermost text. The full list of incipits is sometimes referred to in this manner, where the final text is usually the plainchant on which the tenor line was based: Ave miles celestis curie / Ave rex gentis, De flore martirum / Deus tuorum militum / Ave rex gentis. A cantus firmus in a motet of this period comprises a melody, often taken from plainchant, which is usually set as a lower line in a polyphonic texture, though in England it often appeared in the middle of the texture. It was common for the upper texts of motets to relate in some way to the plainchant on which their tenor was based, troping its message. The Early English Carols, 2nd edn, ed. R. Greene (Oxford, 1977), p. 190; see below for more details on this source. This is mistranscribed by Horstmann, whose translation reads ‘Domine rex gentis’, but there can be little doubt that it was the Edmund antiphon that was intended by Lydgate; Altenenglische Legenden, ed. Horstmann, p. 378, lines 73–80. On this miracle, see too Bale’s comments below, pp. 147–54. The poem is found in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 683, fols. 19r–21r; MPL, I, 124–6.

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Lisa Colton in the poet’s Praier to St Robert, a devotional work in honour of the local boy alleged to have been ritually murdered by the Jewish population in the twelfth century.28 The end of the Prayer to St Edmund, ‘Aue rex gentis shal ech day be ther song / Callyng to þe for helpe in ther most need’, quotes again from Edmund’s antiphon. It is not necessary to take this as evidence of a daily performance of the antiphon by ‘Folk of thy toun and of thy monasterye’, nor are the prayer and miracle proof that that town was united in its commitment to Edmund’s cult above other saintly figures. Lydgate’s monastic bias leads him to imply that the ‘people’ of Bury were naturally inclined to sing Ave rex gentis anglorum in St Edmund’s honour rather than any more ‘popular’ song, and the reader is invited to imagine abbey and community as spiritually integrated, under the protection of their most important local patron saint. Outside of the immediate area of the abbey, the antiphon was well known and often closely associated with the cult of St Edmund. A fifteenth-century stained glass window at St Edmund’s church, Taverham (Norfolk) contains depictions of six angels, of which four survive, each of whom sings a verse of Ave rex gentis anglorum; a late medieval bell at St Mary’s parish church in Ayston (Rutland) is inscribed with the incipit.29 As a royal foundation, it was in the interest of the monastery at Bury to remind kings of both the importance of Bury’s patron saint in the history of the English monarchy, and the benefits the abbey could offer kings in terms of piety, prayer and devotion. The relationship between the royal family and the antiphon can be traced to the thirteenth century, when Henry III’s clerks sang a plainchant that was almost certainly Ave rex gentis anglorum during the queen’s labour, ensuring the safe delivery of Henry’s fourth child. The king recorded this occasion in a letter to the abbot of Bury: Know that on Monday after the feast of St Hilary, when our beloved consort Eleanor, our Queen, was labouring in the pains of childbirth, we had the antiphon of St Edmund chanted for her, and when the aforesaid prayer was not yet finished, the bearer of this present letter, our valet [Stephen de Salines, told us that she had] … borne us a son. So that you may have the greater joy from this news we have arranged for it to be told to you by Stephen himself. And know that, as you requested us if you remember, we are having our son named Edmund.30

28

‘Thy purpil blood allayed with mylk whiht.’ The poem, found only in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 683, fols. 22v–23r, is edited in Bale, Jew in the Medieval Book, pp. 173–4. 29 The windows are described in A. Rose, ‘Angel Musicians in the Medieval Stained Glass of Norfolk Churches’, Early Music 29 (2001), 187–217 (pp. 214–15). 30 M. J. Howell, ‘The Children of Henry III and Eleanor of Provence’, in Thirteenth Century England 4, ed. P. R. Coss and L. G. Lloyd (Woodbridge, 1992), pp. 57–72 (p. 63).

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Music and Identity in Medieval Bury St Edmunds Over a century later, when Henry VI arrived for his lengthy stay at Bury, from Christmas 1433 to St George’s Day 1434, the monks processed him from the south side of the abbey to the high altar using the antiphon as a processional tune.31 The appearance of the plainchant Ave rex gentis anglorum in narrative and musical contexts suggests that it was considered particularly important to the monks of Bury St Edmunds, and to the local lay population. It represented both the local and regional contexts of St Edmund and the power of his cult in the country as a whole. A fragment that has attracted no attention from music scholars, perhaps on account of its inaccurate reference in Analecta Hymnica, allows us new insight into the monophonic items cultivated especially for the celebration of St Edmund’s liturgy at Bury.32 The fragment, a single bifolium, contains monophonic items in honour of various saints, seemingly in liturgical order: lux diei lumen mundo prebint (Blessed Virgin Mary, perhaps the Annunciation on 15 August, or the Nativity on 8 September), Ad celebres rex celice (St Michael, 29 September), Illudat letus ordo psallens (unnamed saint), In hoc mundo (St Edmund, 20 November), Dulci symphonia (St Edmund) and Dilecto regi virtutum (St Katherine, 25 November). The inclusion of unicum In hoc mundo, in addition to a second item in honour of St Edmund, suggests a Bury provenance for the source, and the notation dates its copying to the thirteenth century; Dulci symphonia is known from six other sources, including Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 109 (see above), and was probably composed in the twelfth century. In hoc mundo and Dulci symphonia are sequences in honour of St Edmund, and may have been performed from this manuscript as part of Mass on St Edmund’s Day (see Figs. 1 and 2). In hoc mundo comprises six pairs of verses (twelve lines), only the first two pairs of which have been provided with their melody. Blank, ruled staves are provided above the remaining text, indicating that the task of writing in the melody was interrupted. It is possible, though unlikely, that the music was composed by the scribe. In hoc mundo plays with frequent puns on the name ‘Edmundus’, using ‘mundus’, both ‘clean’ and ‘the universe’, and ‘immundo’, literally ‘to defile’, referring to the impurity of earthly life.33 There is a close relationship in this sequence between the poetic text and Edmund’s Passion as described by Abbo of Fleury. It is rare to find words in the vernacular in liturgical items, but the tenth line of In hoc mundo 31

�C. Ord, ‘An Account of the Entertainment of Henry the Sixth at the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds’, Archaeologia 15 (1806), 65–71 (p. 70); Ord prints the Latin account of Henry’s visit, ‘De adventu regis Henrici VI ad monasterium de Sancto Edmundo 1433’, preserved in the Register of Abbot Curteys, now BL, Additional MS 14848, fols. 128r–v. 32 Oxford, New College, MS 362, Fragment IX, fols. 31r–32v. Analecta Hymnica Medii Aevi, ed. G. M. Dreves et al., 55 vols. (Leipzig, 1886–1922), XL, 170–1 (Dulci symphonia) and LV, 119. Dreves gives an inaccurate manuscript reference for In hoc mundo, and fails to list the New College source in the transcription of Dulci symphonia. 33 This punning is also a feature of the motet De flore martirum (see below).

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Lisa Colton Figure 1: Transcription of In hoc mundo, from Oxford, New College, MS 362, fol. 32r*

3a. Rex terrenus seruus tamen, cum suppressus** dat lavamen, collaudantur seruitus. 3b. Talis seruus est beatus, qui corona decoratus, seruit nunc diuinitus. 4a. Hic ad lignum religatus, et sagittis uulneratus, mira densitate. 4b. Stetit tamen fide plenus, Christi martyr tam serenus, uernans caritate. 5a. Tandem capud amputatum, inter spinas ocultatum, uerba profert anglica. 5b. Rex her dicens in deserto, quod hic sonat in aperto, lingua sub ytalica. 6a. Huic ergo preces denture, ut cum Christo coronentur, in celisti patria. 6b. Omnes illum uenerantes, et deuote supplicantes, eius patrocinia. Amen.

* **

Only the first two pairs of lines are provided with their melody. MS source reads suppressis.

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Music and Identity in Medieval Bury St Edmunds reads, ‘Rex her dicens in deserto, quod hic sonat in aperto lingua sub ytalica’ (‘the king says “here” in the place where he is abandoned, that is uttered aloud as “hic” in the Latin tongue’). Clearly, the martyred king’s use of the vernacular language of England to indicate the whereabouts of his severed head was an important part of the legend, underpinning Edmund’s status as an English royal saint.34 Dulci symphonia also makes reference to the head of St Edmund and its miraculous speaking voice, before closing with a standard prayer for intercession. Dulci symphonia praises King Edmund and reflects the ideals of sweet songs found in the opening words of the motet De flore martirum: ‘De flore martirum modum milicie, quam pleno vulnerum canamus hodie voce dulcedinis.’35 In the motet, the word ‘dulcedinis’ is highlighted by its decoration with melisma (several notes sung to one syllable of text) against silence in the duplum (second part). The triplum ends with wordplay, ‘mundet mundicia’, in which the sound of the saint’s name is embedded, and is also reminiscent of the puns used in Dulci symphonia. De flore martirum was composed a century or more later than Dulci symphonia’s text and melody, but employs similar themes and poetic devices. Polyphonic music: The fourteenth-century evidence Bury singers evidently sang polyphonic music, which was a relative luxury in English liturgical practices before the Renaissance period.36 The earliest local sources date to the middle of the thirteenth century, and include music from the putative Notre Dame School in Paris such as motets, organa and conductus.37 Some pieces in these sources were composed in England, though the exchange of ideas and repertoire between northern France and various parts of Britain makes a firm identification of provenance problematic.38 Of the insular items, some may have been composed at Bury St Edmunds, but others were doubtless imported from institutions across the country.

34

See likewise the comments by Phelpstead (p. 36) and Pinner (p. 123) in this volume. ‘Let us sing today, with a voice of sweetness, the song of soldiery about the flower of martyrs, how full of wounds!’ Translation from Motets of English Provenance, ed. F. Harrison and P. M. Lefferts (Monaco, 1980), p. 190. 36 R. Bowers, ‘Obligation, Agency, and Laissez-Faire: The Promotion of Polyphonic Composition for the Church in Fifteenth-Century England’, in Music in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. I. Fenlon (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 1–19. 37 For a full discussion of this repertoire, see N. Losseff, The Best Concords: Polyphonic Music in Thirteenth-Century Britain (New York, 1994). On copying practice within commonplace books, see H. Deeming, ‘Music in English Miscellanies of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries’ (unpublished D.Phil. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2004). 38 M. Everist, ‘Anglo-French Interaction in Music c. 1170–c. 1300’, Revue Belge de Musicologie 46 (1992), 5–22. 35

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Lisa Colton Figure 2: Transcription of Dulci symphonia, from Oxford, New College, MS 362, fols. 32r–v

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Music and Identity in Medieval Bury St Edmunds

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Lisa Colton Several manuscript sources of polyphonic music can be associated with Bury. Cambridge, St John’s College, MS 138 (F.1) (s. xiii3/4) contains motets including items in honour of Simon de Montfort and St Bartholomew.39 Cambridge, University Library, MS Ff.2.29 (s. xiii) contains thirteenth-century French repertory in an English hand.40 BL, MS Royal 12.C.VI is perhaps best known for preserving one of two surviving copies of the late thirteenthcentury treatise of Anonymous IV, whose account details the repertory of sacred polyphony performed in Paris (s. xiii3/4); this fourteenth-century compendium of treatises, compiled by Bury’s librarian Henry de Kirkstead (c. 1314–c. 1378), also includes a French polyphonic item as an example.41 From the fourteenth century, three sources survive in fragmentary form: BL, MS Add. 24199 (settings of the Sanctus, s. xiv); Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS e Musaeo 7 (s. xiv, for contents, see Table 1); and Oxford, Magdalen College, MS 266/268 (motets and Mass items, s. xiv2/2).42 The discussion below will focus primarily on the final two of these sources. Many pieces of music from the Middle Ages carry standard texts, in honour of the Virgin Mary or universal saints, or texts that formed part of religious services in most types of religious institution. In the same manner as liturgical chant items, some motets can be pinned to specific feasts in the church calendar and others can be assigned a provenance based on their text or other evidence. Previous studies of collections of polyphony from medieval England have revealed that every source probably contained a unique selection of music; though many manuscripts from different institutions share concordances, no two collections of motets have more than a handful of pieces in common, and these tend to be copied in a different order.43 In several cases, fragments of music associated with a specific provenance contain at least one item in honour of their patron (for example, a collection

39

40 41

42 43

For the Simon de Montfort motets, see P. M. Lefferts, ‘Two English Motets on Simon de Montfort’, Early Music History 1 (1981), 203–25. The music associated with Simon de Monfort’s cult is also discussed in L. Colton, ‘Music and Sanctity in England, c. 1260–c. 1400’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of York, 2003). Full descriptions of these manuscripts can be found in Répertoire Internationale des Sources Musicales, ed. G. Reaney, BIV, 1–2 (München-Duisburg, 1966–9), where Cambridge, St John’s College, MS 138 (F.1), fols. 127r–128v is described in I, 480. Répertoire Internationale, ed. Reaney, I, 486. Répertoire Internationale, ed. Reaney, II, 229. For a re-examination of the provenance of the treatise of Anonymous IV, see J. Haines, ‘Anonymous IV as an Informant on the Craft of Music Writing’, The Journal of Musicology 23 (2006), 375–425. Haines argues that the treatise was originally written in the west of England, c. 1280, and that Bury’s copy may not have arrived at the abbey until the fourteenth century, though it was in Bury’s library by 1380; Haines, ‘Anonymous IV’, p. 414. Répertoire Internationale, ed. Reaney, II, 235; Répertoire Internationale, ed. Reaney, II, 257; Répertoire Internationale, ed. Reaney, II, 271. P. M. Lefferts, The Motet in England in the Fourteenth Century (Ann Arbor, 1986); Losseff, Best Concords.

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Music and Identity in Medieval Bury St Edmunds from Westminster Abbey might contain music in honour of St Peter, or St Edward the Confessor). Rather than supposing that the musicians in a given location copied items at random, it seems likely that the survival of a number of leaves from one book could reveal something about the sorts of figures who were important to a specific institution in a way that more standardized books of plainchant often cannot.44 The texts of motets could be used to refer to the specific virtues attributed to a saint in his or her earthly life. There are traces of five polyphonic works in honour of St Edmund, though the earliest two are known only from the appearance of their incipits in a thirteenth-century list of works.45 Of the surviving three, Flos anglorum inclitus, an incomplete motet, is the latest in date, probably copied c. 1400.46 The two complete motets, Ave miles celestis curie and De flore martirum, appear in the mid-fourteenth century flyleaves of a source of Bury provenance, perhaps copied in the 1330s or 1340s.47 Edmund was praised in these three fourteenth-century motets for his status as a martyr, his virginal life and his miraculous achievements. The opening of De flore martirum, cited above, describes the Passion of St Edmund, when he was filled with pierced by arrows by the Danes in the manner of the martyrdom of St Sebastian. His virginal life is described both explicitly and through the association between the sweet sound of vocal music and virginity, an allusion that was found in a number of medieval devotional and didactic texts. The anonymous early thirteenth-century text Hali Meiðhad, for example, discusses the hierarchy of status between virginity, marriage and widowhood, and states that it is virgins who have the sweetest song of these groups in heaven.48 By singing a polyphonic motet, Bury’s singers made a direct comparison between their performance of the motet about a virgin martyr and their own celibate lifestyle. Ave miles celestis curie and De flore martirum are preserved in the largest surviving source from Bury St Edmunds, two groups of flyleaves that had been attached to the front and rear of one of Bury’s twelfth-century library

44

45

46 47 48

For the case of Westminster Abbey, concentrating on the liturgical items in honour of St Peter and St Edward the Confessor, see A. T. Shaw, ‘Reading the Liturgy at Westminster Abbey in the Late Middle Ages’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Royal Holloway College, University of London, 2000); Colton, ‘Music and Sanctity’. Christi miles rex Edmundus and Miles Christi qui vestiti appear in the list of contents of BL, Harley MS 978, as items 4.9 and 3.5 respectively. Miles Christi qui vestiti may have belonged to the liturgy of St Edward the Confessor, and Lefferts cites both possibilities; The Motet, p. 163. Oxford, Magdalen College MS 266/268, item 3, fol. 26v. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS e Musaeo 7, items 7 and 8, fols. Vv–VIr. This is found in the text Hali Meiðhad, as discussed in B. Millett and J. Wogan-Browne, Medieval English Prose for Women (Oxford, 1990), p. xviii.

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Lisa Colton Table 1: Musical contents of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS e musaeo 7, with dedications or subject-matter Item Dedication/content (Front leaves, pp. v–xii, modern pagination) Maria mole pressa St Mary Magdalene Zorobabel actibus Antisemitic content (?for Easter) Petrum cephas ecclesie St Peter Rex visibilium Jesus Christ the King Lux refulget monachorum St Benedict Duodeno sydere St Andrew and the Apostles Ave miles celestis curie St Edmund De flore martirum St Edmund Templum eya Salomonis Dedication of a church Barrabas dimittitur Good Friday (Rear leaves, pp. 529–36, modern pagination) Cuius de manibus Omnis terra Kyrie [textless] Deus creator Pura placens Domine quis Parce piscatoribus *

?Blessed Virgin Mary (text almost illegible) Against corruption in the world Mass Ordinary setting Jesus and the Holy Trinity Blessed Virgin Mary* God and Jesus St James

Other Biblical and mythological figures mentioned in this motet are Euclid, Pygmalion, Orpheus, Pluto, Euridice, Absolom, Jason, Esther, Helen, and St Katherine of Alexandria, to whom the Virgin Mary is compared; a recording and textual translation of this motet is available on the CD by Gothic Voices, Masters of the Rolls: Music by English Composers of the Fourteenth Century, dir. C. Page (Hyperion CDA67098, 1999).

books once the music became obsolete.49 The majority of the pieces within this source are fourteenth-century motets, choral items in which two or more texts were often sung simultaneously. In terms of subject, English motets were most often written in honour of God, Christ, the Virgin Mary or saints; their texts were usually in Latin.50 It is difficult to identify the precise function that the motet might have had in England, but it is likely that it formed part 49

H. Besseler, Die Musik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance (Potsdam, 1930), p. 172 (which includes the beginning of De flore martirum). G. Reese, Music in the Middle Ages (New York, 1940), p. 402 includes the second half of this motet. Both motets were edited and described in detail in M. Bukofzer, ‘Two Fourteenth-Century Motets on St Edmund’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music (New York, 1950), pp. 17–33. They have since been re-edited in Motets of English Provenance, ed. Harrison and Lefferts, from which texts and translations have been drawn for this and the other English motets in the Bury St Edmunds choirbook, unless otherwise indicated. 50 Lefferts, The Motet, p. 155.

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Music and Identity in Medieval Bury St Edmunds of a range of religious services in only those places that could afford the best singers, such as cathedrals, abbeys and wealthier collegiate institutions. In terms of the precise location for the performance of motets, there is a paucity of direct evidence, and practice may have varied considerably between institutions. Some motets were designed to mark significant occasions, and it is plausible that a motet in honour of a particular saint might be performed before an image at a dedicated altar or chapel on their feast day, as had been the way with votive antiphons since the thirteenth century.51 The fragmentary remains of the motet collection from Bury display an interesting selection of items associated with a range of feasts (see Table 1). The list does not appear to offer any suggestion of strict ordering by alphabetical or liturgical means. Some collections of music with similar dimensions to this source contained well over one hundred items, and it is likely that an index once provided this information, so that pieces could be added to the overall volume over time without causing confusion. Bury’s status as a royal Benedictine foundation, housing the relics of a king saint, are emphasized, as many of the motets refer to ideal forms of kingship. In Petram cephas, Jesus is the ‘rex clemencie’ (‘king of clemency’), a phrase that appears in two other items, Rex visibilium and Deus creator omnium. Rex visibilium is dedicated to Jesus Christ the King, and demonstrates an interest in righteous war, a divine struggle against evil rather than a terrestrial battle, in its laudatory lines, ‘Rex invinctissime regnorum omnium, princeps milicie celorum civium’ (‘Invincible king of all kingdoms, leader of the army of the citizens of heaven’). Beneath this, the tenor emphasizes the infinite status quo, ‘Regnum tuum solidum permanebit in eternum’ (‘Your firm kingdom will endure forever’).52 A heavenly king embodies paradox: he is visible and invisible (Rex visibilium), he is ‘maker unmade’ (Deus creator omnium). Hell is presented as an opposite kingdom, a court of punishment, in Deus creator omnium. Thus the divine nature of sacral kingship, and Bury’s own status as permanent resting place of one of England’s most important king saints, were entwined. The motets in this source express Bury’s perceived identity as a seat of royal sanctity on a par with the royal court itself, or with Westminster Abbey (the location of St Edward the Confessor’s shrine); this may reflect the importance of the Liberty of Bury St Edmunds, a sizable area of land within Suffolk, within which the abbot’s powers rivalled that of the reigning monarch. Within St Edmund’s 51

The votive antiphons in the Eton Choirbook were used in this manner, performed before an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary on various occasions in the late fifteenth century; it is possible that appropriate motets were used in the same way in the fourteenth century. A votive antiphon in honour of the Virgin Mary or other saintly figure became an increasing feature of local liturgical developments in English monasteries from the thirteenth century, and notably at collegiate and secular institutions from the late fourteenth century; see K. Zieman, Singing the New Song: Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia, 2008), pp. 145–6. 52 Translation from Motets of English Provenance, ed. Harrison and Lefferts, p. 189.

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Lisa Colton ‘banleuca’ – the monastic borough that reached a mile in every direction from the abbey, and within which the abbot ‘held a virtual monopoly over every conceivable activity’, whether sacred or secular, legal or commercial – the quasi-kingly powers of the abbot may have been felt even more keenly.53 The status of this area, physically defined by a cross at each corner, acted in tandem with the abbey’s freedom from episcopal control: the only figures who could exercise their authority apart from the abbot were the king and the pope, and bishops had little success in intruding on the abbot’s monopoly of power within this area.54 The Liberty, and the ‘banleuca’ within it, created geographical and psychological boundaries that encouraged the mistrust of ‘outsiders’ of any kind by the ruling elite on its interior, and vice versa. It is no wonder that hostility was directed at the abbey by Bury’s population regarding the relative powers of civic and monastic governing bodies, and equally unsurprising that the monks expressed fear in this respect, even if the occasional conflicts were to some extent economically, rather than spiritually, driven.55 The motets dedicated to St Edmund are rich in hagiographical detail. Ave miles celestis curie describes the saint as ‘Rex patrone patrie, matutina lux Saxonie, lucens nobis in meridie, sidus Angligenarum’ (‘King of our protectress, of our homeland, morning light of Saxony, shining upon us at midday, star over the children of Anglia’).56 The royal birth of the saint is blurred with sentiments relating to Englishness and Edmund’s Saxon bloodline. The shining star motif, a commonplace in texts associated with Translation ceremonies, might relate this motet to the liturgy of the Translation of St Edmund.57 It also occurs in Lydgate’s Praier to St Robert, where in reference to St Edmund the poet describes the ‘Kyng of Estynglond, martir and virgine, with whos briht sonne lat thy sterre shyne’.58 Edmund’s biographers frequently described him bearing the ‘triple crown’ of king, virgin and martyr. Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund, which drew on Abbo’s vita as well as other items in Bury’s library, highlighted the saint’s triple sanctity: The firste tokne, in cronycle men may fynde, Graunted to hym for Royal dignyte, And the second for virgynyte, For martirdam the thrydde in his suffryng.59

53 54 55 56 57 58 59

G. M. Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago, 1989), p. 117. Lobel, Borough of Bury, p. 41. On this point, see Lobel, Borough of Bury, pp. 118–70. Translation by M. Miller, CD liner notes to Hoquetus: Medieval European Vocal Music, dir. P. Hillier, Theatre of Voices (Harmonia Mundi HMU 907185, 1999). I am grateful to Joanna Huntingdon for this information. Bale, Jew in the Medieval Book, pp. 173–4. Altenenglische Legenden, ed. Horstmann, p. 378, lines 51–4.

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Music and Identity in Medieval Bury St Edmunds The motet De flore martirum draws on the same imagery in its triplum text: Corone triplicis / qui privilegium Fert palman martiris / fert munus regium Decusque virginis … Edmundus virginem / simul amplecitur Regem et martirem / sic trinus dicitur In trino nomine.60 (‘He bears the privilege of the triple crown: the martyr’s palm, the office of the king, and the honour of virginity … Edmund is esteemed at once as virgin, king and martyr; thus he is called threefold, in his triple name.’)

The fact that this text refers three times to these features in the triplum text (the highest of the three parts) may also be significant.61 The emphasis on Edmund’s martyrdom in this motet is underpinned by the paraphrase of the hymn for a martyr found in the duplum text, Deus tuorum militum, and by the reference to wounds and blood in the triplum. The triplum also mentions the wolf that guarded Edmund’s severed head, the head that miraculously spoke in English in the plainchant In hoc mundo.62 Ave miles celestis curie focuses less on the legend of St Edmund, but highlights his intercessory powers in typical allusions to setting captives free, healing the lame and the sick, restoring sight to the blind, and protecting the Christian community from its enemies. The text and music of Flos anglorum inclitus is fragmentary, but does use familiar words relating to Edmund as a rose or lily (an image closely associated with virgin martyrdom), and refers to a noble English king and a figure of holiness since infancy.63 Apart from the two motets in honour of St Edmund in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS e Musaeo 7, other items can be linked with Bury’s abbey and local liturgy, perhaps even with a specific liturgical space in which they were performed. Motets dedicated to specific feasts would doubtless have been sung in the services of that day, and, where their tenor line was taken from plainchant, may have replaced a portion of the monophonic liturgical melody in some way. They may also have been performed outside of the saint’s official day; motets with no clear liturgical focus, or whose message is admonitory or even secular, are difficult to place in terms of the liturgical calendar, and invite speculation regarding their performance context in terms 60

Translation from Motets of English Provenance, ed. Harrison and Lefferts, p. 190. J. Melville-Richards, ‘Text- and Music-Structures in Two Fourteenth-Century Manuscripts of English Provenance’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wales, Bangor, 1999), p. 77. 62 See Pinner’s comments below, p. 128. 63 The text is edited in the unpublished appendix to P. M. Lefferts, ‘The Motet in England in the Fourteenth Century’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1983). 61

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Lisa Colton of other liturgical/non-liturgical function, or architectural space. The motet in honour of St Benedict, Lux refulget monachorum, reflects the Benedictine provenance of this collection, but can also be associated with the monks of Bury St Edmunds more specifically. The opening, ‘Lux refulget monachorum regis in palacio’ (‘The light of the monks shines in the palace of the king’) might allude to the church of God, or to the abbey building that housed Edmund’s shrine.64 This motet may have been sung at an altar of St Benedict in the infirmary chapel.65 Duodeno sydere, a motet for St Andrew, might be associated with performance in the Chapel of St Andrew in the monks’ cemetery. Some items suggest a certain suspicion of the outside world, particularly of outsiders of various kinds. Parce piscatoribus, a motet in honour of St James, reflects the prominence of this saint in Bury: the parish church (the fabric of which dates from the early sixteenth century, but rests on the remains of an earlier building) and gatehouse were dedicated to him, and Bury was also on pilgrim routes to Santiago de Compostela in Spain and Walsingham (Norfolk).66 The text of this motet is particularly interesting, opening with a warning against singing (a reference to the silence preferred by the Benedictine rule): Cantat avis garula / in melos diserta / Plausu sed reticula / sola fit incerta / Sunt amena tempora / tuis peregrinis / Jacobe sed impera / ne cadent ruinis / Parari nam scelera / gentibus vulpinis / Assolent et funera / nimis dare finis / O quanta miracula / pandes tuis servis / Jacobe per secula / nexibus et nervis / Refertis ergastula / vinctis a protervis / Nulla nocent vincula / Jacobi catervis / Hinc rogamus precibus / ut serves a malis / Circumseptos menibus / curie claustralis / Et solvas a nexibus / cete furialis / Nam cis spretis retibus / fugimus sub alis. (‘The garrulous bird sings in an eloquent song, but the net alone becomes uncertain. The times are pleasant for your pilgrims, James, but command that they do not fall in ruins, for crimes are wont to be prepared by foxy persons, and the end, too often, gives death. O what miracles you reveal to your servants, James, through the ages, with your powerful bonds and ropes. You cram the prisons

64

Melville-Richards, ‘Text- and Music-Structures’, Appendix, p. 13. The possible identification of this altar with St Benedict was made in James, On the Abbey, facing p. 212. 66 A list of chaplains serving at the abbey, compiled in the early fourteenth century, includes three working in the church of St James, as well as three at St Mary’s; VCH Suffolk, II, 70. 65

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Music and Identity in Medieval Bury St Edmunds with the bound sinners; no chains harm the companions of James. Hence we ask with prayers that you save us from the wicked, [we who are] fenced around with walls of cloistral care; and that you save us from the toils of the furious sea monster, although we previously spurned the net, we flee under your wings.’)67

The plea that the monks are protected from wickedness lurking without the cloister walls, and from a sea monster, probably refers to crossing the sea on the way to Santiago de Compostela, but may also reflect the concerns of the monks as inhabitants within the ‘banleuca’. More specifically, though with due caution, it is also interesting to note that the copying of this motet may date from the same period as the 1327 uprising when the townsmen of Bury attacked the abbey, including St James’s gatehouse.68 While not wishing to posit a direct link between the writing of the motet and the uprising itself, one may imagine a certain resonance felt by the monks singing for aid from St James in view of these events. Petrum cephas, dedicated to St Peter, could have been sung at the altar of St Peter housed in the chapel in the east end of the abbey church (although the dedication of this had been changed by the time of this motet’s composition). Its duplum describes how Peter defeated Simon Magus by foiling his demonstration of flying: ‘Destruxit artes magicas viri malefici’ (‘destroyed the magic arts of the evil man’).69 The triplum also warns of the threat of corruption, ending: Tibi, Petre, conquerimur, pastor ecclesie Quod hostis arte fallimur, plena fallacie. Pastorum sedes occupant, heu!, mercenarii Plures ut gregi noceant; sunt lupo socii. (‘To you, Peter, we complain, O shepherd of the church, that we are being deceived by the deceitful cunning of the foe. Alas, all those mercenary crooks are occupying seats of the shepherds, so that they might do damage to the flock; they are fellows to the wolf.’)70

The duplum echoes the same imagery, closing, ‘Pastores pigri latitant; lupo nolunt resistere’ (‘the slothful shepherds lie hidden; they do not wish to oppose the wolf’).71 The wolf in these texts is not the gentle creature that guarded Edmund’s head, but Simon Magus, leading the community astray. The motet Petrum cephas expresses fear that the monastic community is being

67

Translation from Melville-Richards, ‘Text- and Music-Structures’, II, 44. A full description can be found in VCH Suffolk, II, 62–3. 69 Translation from Motets of English Provenance, ed. Harrison and Lefferts, p. 188. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid. 68

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Lisa Colton corrupted and tempted by deceptive outsiders. Like Rex invisibilium, Petrum cephas may have been understood as reflecting the abbey’s need to protect its Liberty, and its fear that the burgesses within the town could undermine its authority if not properly controlled. Alternatively, the fictional outsiders could have been non-Christian: the imagined Jew of post-1290 literature, for example.72 Omnis terra, possibly a Latin contrafact for a pre-existing French motet, hints at the strength of evil men in the world, and makes further allegorical references about the power of false prophet Simon Magus. The upper texts of this motet are rather obscure, and often contradictory; they complain of the flourishing of evil men, in reference to Psalm texts that had suggested that only God’s chosen people should flourish, perhaps implying anti-Jewish sentiment. The idea that Simon Magus could lead others astray also reflects religious sentiment about the gravity of the sin of simony. Taking its name from Simon Magus (as described in Acts 8. 18–24), simony was understood as any act whereby material goods were exchanged for spiritual gain, or money was paid for religious indulgences or acts of worship; it was particularly associated with the Jews’ practice of lending money at interest to the Church, one that had been a problem for many monasteries before the expulsion. In the light of this, the message of the motet is to some extent clarified. The duplum remarks, ‘Ideo stupeo nam Simonem video quod non pontificabit’ (‘therefore I am astounded for I see Simon, because he will not pontificate’).73 It may refer to the denial of the Christian message by individuals or groups who refuse to convert to Christianity, or strengthen the fear of the rise of sin (in this case simony) within the Church. Somewhere in the abbey at Bury, artwork displaying the ‘story of Simon Magus and the martyrdoms of Ss Peter and Paul’ was found, perhaps raising the prominence of this episode and inspiring the copying of the motet.74 The evidence for the precise physical or liturgical location of polyphonic singing in the Middle Ages is patchy, but it is interesting to note that in 1520, the feretrar’s account roll at Bury records the payment of three ‘cantores’, trained singers, for the performance of music in the chapel of Robert of Bury on his feast day.75 It is certainly possible that this involved the performance of a polyphonic antiphon or similar item, a practice for which individual singers often received one-off payments by a religious establishment for the embellishment of music for a particularly important occasion. Sadly, no Office or polyphonic music in honour of Robert of Bury has survived.76

72

Bale, Jew in the Medieval Book. Bale, Jew in the Medieval Book, p. 192. 74 James, On the Abbey, p. 143. 75 Bale, Jew in the Medieval Book, p. 112; Kew, National Archives SC 6/HENVIII/ 3397. 76 Only one polyphonic work, the fourteenth-century motet Rex quem / O canenda / Rex regem, might be remotely associated with the cult of St Robert. This Latin-texted French 73

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Music and Identity in Medieval Bury St Edmunds Some items in this choirbook concord with pieces found elsewhere in England or abroad. One motet, Barrabas dimittitur, exists in three separate sources; in addition to the Bury manuscript, it is also found in sources from Durham Cathedral and Framlingham.77 This effective three-part piece tells the story of the Crucifixion, and would probably have been performed on Good Friday. The two texted parts relate the death of Christ on the Cross, concentrating on the torture and cruelty inflicted upon him, blaming the Jews explicitly for this: ‘Barrabas dimittitur dignus patibulo, et Iudaico Christus cum obproprio ceditur, illuditur, facie conspuitur’ (‘Barrabas, deserving the gallows, is let go, and Christ, because of the Jews’ abuse, is given up, is ridiculed, is spat upon the face’).78 At the heart of the piece, the lower and upper texted lines exchange melodic material as the lower line quotes Christ’s last words on the Cross in a powerful line that contains an unusual number of rising and falling leaps by a perfect fifth for the text: ‘Heloy Hely, lama zabatani?’ (‘My Lord, my Lord, why have you forsaken me?’).79 The triplum drops by the same large interval, entwining this event with a text that describes Jesus’ position as if by an onlooker, surrounded by thieves and despised by the (Jewish) crowd. The theme of this piece is perhaps shared by another motet in the collection, Zorobabel actibus. Zorobabel is perhaps the most striking example of a piece with antisemitic content, and is unusual because it is written in the first person. As Melville-Richards has pointed out, previous scholars have stated that this motet is in the form of a prayer against the evil in the world, but the text is ‘more specifically directed against the Jews, using Zorobabel, their hoped-for Messiah, as a representative of their race’.80 The content of this motet cannot be linked with any specific feast in the Christian calendar. The last part of the upper text states that the true Christ was sent from God to save Mankind, but makes it clear that the Jews were not worthy of this salvation; the triplum ends: ‘Non peperit proprio sane ne pro populo peperam perdito morsu pro pestifero’ (‘Nor was he borne for such a people so lost and with such wicked envy’); the alliteration within this text would have created a powerful, spitting declamation in performance, perhaps inten-

77

78 79 80

motet appears in Durham, Cathedral Library, MS C.I.20, a collection of motets from Durham Cathedral. It has been related to the veneration of Robert of Anjou, because of the appearance of the name ROBERTUS as an acrostic in one of its texts. However, it is possible that a textual link with the boy martyr could have been inferred by insular performers. Durham and Bury held some musical items in common in their choirbooks in this period, as well as with other insular and continental sources. Berkeley Castle, Select Roll 55: Motets and Sequences from the Early Fourteenth Century, ed. A. Wathey (Newton Abbot, 1991). A fragmentary thirteenth-century conductus with the same textual incipit is discussed in Losseff, Best Concords, pp. 28–31. Translation from Motets of English Provenance, ed. Harrison and Lefferts, p. 200. Quoting Matthew 27. 46; Mark 15. 34. Melville-Richards, ‘Text- and Music-Structures’, II, 33 whose translation is used here.

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Lisa Colton tionally highlighting the spitting of Jewish bystanders at the Crucifixion as described in Barrabas dimittitur. Arguably, this is the most clearly and dramatically antisemitic motet that has survived from fourteenth-century England. Its first-person placement of the text in the mouth of Zorobabel himself speaks in the voice of the Jews, but contradicts their belief that he is the Messiah to come. In the texts of this work, we witness Zorobabel’s conversion; the triplum opens, ‘I, Zorobabel, from this moment,’ the duplum, ‘I, Zorobabel, renounce and straightway reject wicked studies … I desire to please the Lord alone whom I now long to serve.’81 If even Zorobabel has turned his back on the Jews, denouncing their ‘wicked envy’, there is no other conclusion for the listener than that which confirms the Jews as conscious deniers and murderers of Christ. Aside from those that had converted to Christianity before the formal expulsion of 1290, there was no Jewish population at the time that this piece was written and performed. Bury’s antisemitic history reached back to at least 10 June 1181 to the alleged murder of Robert of Bury, after Christian members of the town found his body in a stream.82 A chapel dedicated to Robert of Bury was staffed by a chaplain from at least the late thirteenth century, indicating that Mass would have been celebrated there.83 It is likely that there was a local liturgy in honour of St Robert, perhaps a rhymed office, but no evidence of it has survived. It is difficult to estimate the extent to which Robert’s cult was emphasized liturgically from the few references to it in surviving sources. There were other ways in which the anti-Jewish message could be emphasized by the Christian monks and laymen of Bury, as we have seen, and the veneration of more high-ranking saints may have played a part in the same process. The importance to the abbey, and presumably the town, of St Edmund’s cult was matched to some extent by the town’s esteem for St Nicholas, culminating in the dedication of their peculiar Douzegild, or Guild of the Translation of St Nicholas. This may have reflected the association felt to have existed between St Nicholas and the conversion of

81

Melville-Richards, ‘Text- and Music-Structures’, II, 6. On the forced conversion of Jews, see R. C. Stacey, ‘The Conversion of Jews to Christianity in Thirteenth-Century England’, Speculum 67 (1992), 263–83. Stacey points out that converted Jews remained in England after 1290, and there were communities of converted Jews into the middle of the fourteenth century. 82 On ritual murder allegations, see Stacey, ‘Conversion of Jews’. 83 Page lists the twenty-one staff of the various chapels in the abbey and adjacent churches of St James and St Mary, according to a list compiled during the reign of Edward I (1272–1307). These include ‘three chaplains of the church of St Mary, three of the church of St James, one general chaplain, and one each of the chapels of St Robert, St Margaret, St John of the Mount (de Monte), the Round Chapel, St Denis, St John at the Well (ad fontes), St Katherine, St Faith, the Great Rood, St John at the Latin Gate, St Michael, the chapel of the Brazen Cross (ad crucem aream), the hospital of St Saviour, and the Domus Dei’; VCH Suffolk, II, 69.

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Music and Identity in Medieval Bury St Edmunds Jews as found in the miracle stories associated with his cult, or the connection between St Nicholas and children (and therefore the town’s veneration of the boy-martyr, Robert). The fifteenth-century carol Synge we now, described above, is preserved in its single source alongside the only two carols to have survived in honour of St Nicholas, indicating that the manuscript is of Bury provenance.84 I would argue that the manuscript belonged to the chaplains working in the town rather than to the monks of the abbey. The Douzegild comprised burgesses and twelve secular priests, who were responsible for the running of the grammar school and the song school; there are payments recorded to this effect in a rental of 1386.85 Close control of the fraternity was maintained by the abbey, whose sacristan seems to have controlled the selection of the guild’s master. The Douzegild appointed the staff and scholars of the song school, held the right to grant permission to teach the singing of canticles and psalms in the town, and oversaw the ceremony of the Feast of Fools in which a boy was selected to preside as bishop.86 Sacred pieces from other locations, such as Durham, Westminster and the royal chapel, make reference to Jews or Judas interchangeably as usurers or as deniers, betrayers or murderers of Christ; these references most often appear in music for performance at Easter or in music in honour of St Nicholas.87 Part of Bury’s local identity was its emphasis on accepted Christian doctrine, particularly when this made reference to the suspected danger of outsiders of any kind. The motet Zorobabel and pieces like it helped to emphasize the perceived threat of the stereotypical ‘Other’.88 Though Bury’s musical remains are but a fraction of what the monks once owned, it is evident that singing polyphonic and local plainchant items was a significant part of religious ritual. It is not known precisely what role some of this music had in services, and some liturgical music was performed without its service context. John Lydgate’s religious writings, which contain many explicit references to the liturgy of St Edmund, emphasize the relationship between music and local identity by placing Edmund’s melodies 84

BL, Sloane MS 2593; Early English Carols, ed. Greene, p. 193. Cambridge, University Library, MS Ff.2.33, fol. 150r; see Lobel, Borough of Bury, p. 73. 86 Lobel, Borough of Bury, p. 46. 87 O vos omnes / Locus iste, a motet from the Durham source cited above, may be antisemitic in content, but translation of its confused lyrics is problematic. Obscure references to coffers and to making a journey across the sea may perhaps refer to the coffers the Jews used to collect taxes in England before the expulsion, and to the expulsion itself. For a fuller discussion of the antisemitic content in late-medieval English polyphony, see Colton, ‘Music and Sanctity’. 88 On the development of antisemitism within Christian religious culture, see Bale, Jew in the Medieval Book; R. C. Stacey, ‘Anti-Semitism and the Medieval English State’, in The Medieval State: Essays Presented to James Campbell, ed. J. R. Maddicott and D. M. Palliser (London and Rio Grande, 2000), pp. 163–77; M. Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews, 2nd edn (Philadelphia, 2004); R. Chazan, Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism (Berkeley, 1997). 85

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Lisa Colton in the fictional mouths of the laymen of the town. The saints and religious occasions venerated in motets from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries reflect both local and wider traditions, but several items from the collection from the fourteenth century reflect ideals or religious figures that were of local significance. Stacey has argued that ‘there is no simple correlation between the growth of English antisemitism and the power of the medieval English state’.89 Yet, the removal of Jews from the country helped to reaffirm the blessed identity that English kings and the wider population saw for themselves in the later Middle Ages. Motets such as those found in the fourteenth-century choirbook reaffirmed the need to address political and religious corruption, particularly in the reforming and moralizing spirit of post-Lateran culture. The liturgical repertory at Bury was crafted on a foundation of texts by continental authors such as Abbo and Garnier, but the messages in these works were appropriated by the monks in order to fashion a complex local identity. In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the monks continued to build upon the basic liturgy in their performance of written chant and polyphony, notably in motets that expressed their opinions over carefully chosen liturgical tenors. The fabric of ideas found within the music sung at Bury St Edmunds throughout the later Middle Ages was formed from the monks’ anxieties and aspirations as a community, but was wrapped around the central figure of St Edmund, Bury’s royal and spiritual patron. As such, the music manuscripts that remain show evidence that performance may have been used as a tool in the fashioning of the community’s sense of self, and these fragments may be held up as a mirror to their values as monks under the protection of St Edmund.

�

89

Stacey, ‘Anti-Semitism’.

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5 Medieval Images of St Edmund in Norfolk Churches1 Rebecca Pinner

Visual culture was fundamental to the medieval cult of saints, with some communities ‘immortalising their particular holy man or woman in paint, stone, wood and precious metals as much as, if not more so, than in verse and prayer’.2 Hagiographic art could fulfil many functions and its didactic potential was recognized by contemporaries. The familiar repertoire of religious art provided a highly visible, pervasive reminder of the events described in sermons and commemorated in services, and contemporary authors frequently invoked Gregory I in support of art as a means of instructing the illiterate.3 In Dives and Pauper, for example, an early fifteenth-century prose commentary on the Ten Commandments, Dives, a layman, asks his adviser, Pauper, to teach him about images, the ‘book of lewyd peple’.4 The visual arts were the driving force behind the pilgrim trade. Images could be used as a means of advertising the efficacy of the saint, with the area around a shrine frequently adorned with representations of the miracles ascribed to that individual, and pilgrim badges were a means by which knowledge of a cult could be transmitted.5 In the absence of relics an image 1

2 3

4 5

I am indebted to Sarah Salih and Sandy Heslop for their invaluable contributions. I am also grateful to Vic Morgan for allowing me to present part of this research as work in progress at the Centre for East Anglian Studies Associates Day and the helpful feedback and comments of the Associates. R. Gameson, ‘The Early Imagery of Thomas Becket’, in Pilgrimage, The English Experience from Becket to Bunyan, ed. C. Morris and P. Roberts (Cambridge, 2002) pp. 46–89 (p. 46). For recent discussions of the Gregorian topos, see L. G. Duggan, ‘Was Art really the Book of the Illiterate?’, Word and Image 5 (1989), 227–51 and C. Chazelle, ‘Pictures, Books and the Illiterate: Pope Gregory I’s Letters to Serenius of Marseilles’, Word and Image 6 (1990), 138–53; see too R. Marks, Image and Devotion in Late Medieval England (Stroud, 2004), pp. 26–7. Dives and Pauper, ed. P. H. Barnum, 3 vols., EETS OS 275, 280 and 323 (London, 1976– 2004), I, 91. For example, on the role of art in determining the experience of pilgrims to the shrine of Thomas Becket, see A. Harris, ‘Pilgrimage, Performance and Stained Glass at Canterbury Cathedral’, in Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage in Northern Europe and England, ed. S. Blick and R. Tekippe, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions

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Rebecca Pinner could become the focus of a miracle-working cult, with some of the most popular and reputedly efficacious shrines based primarily around images, such as Walsingham or Bromholm in Norfolk.6 It was this perceived ability of images to act as conduits for the power of the individual they depicted that led some to be critical of what they saw as superstition and idolatry.7 Richard Gameson suggests that ‘by the means of depictions, one could appropriate and possess any saint or particular figure’.8 ‘Appropriation’ implies a degree of ownership, which the elevated status of saints within medieval religion renders unlikely; saints were, after all, the conduits through which flowed the power of God. Rather than a one-way transaction, with the saint obediently at the behest of the community, the decision to depict a particular saint represented the creation of a mutually beneficent relationship; an individual or parochial community would have hoped to attract the intercessory favour of the one depicted in return for identifying that particular saint as especially worthy of devotion. What ultimately determined any decision on the part of an individual or community to pay homage to a particular saint was how this figure was perceived. It was above all the reputation of the holy man or woman to act effectively on their behalf, whether based upon evidence from their life or, frequently, their posthumous activities, that encouraged those who sought their favour and intercession. Images played a key role in this process, able to represent the identity of a saint as understood by those involved in the creation of the image, whether at the level of commissioning, design or production. It is not my intention to produce a catalogue of medieval images of St Edmund in Norfolk churches; Ann Nichols has already conducted this research and my aim is to supplement her findings with other lines of enquiry. I therefore intend to examine what survives of the visual cult of St Edmund in medieval Norfolk as a means of exploring his saintly identity as manifested in various contexts as a means of understanding his enduring popularity in medieval England. The material Images from churches are particularly useful as they survive in relatively large numbers, enabling comparisons to be made. They are often, although not always, within their original context, and their containment within one

104 (Leiden, 2005), pp. 243–81; for pilgrim badges, see B. Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs and Secular Badges (London, 1998). 6 See Marks, Image and Devotion, especially pp. 186–227; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, pp. 166–7. 7 For an example of Lollard polemic against images, see Selections from English Wycliffite Writings, ed. A. Hudson (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 83–8. 8 Gameson, ‘Early Imagery’, p. 45.

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Medieval Images of St Edmund in Norfolk Churches clearly defined space allows speculation about not only the individual images but also relationships between images, the ‘holy geography’ of a church. Table 1: Known images of St Edmund in Norfolk churches9 Type Painted glass

Frequency Extant  9 21

Rood screen panels Unspecified ‘image’ Stone sculpture Bench ends Roof bosses Wall-paintings Font images Carved wooden wall post Painted cloth frontal Inscribed brass bell

10  7  6  4  4  3  3  1  1  1

 9  0  6  4  4  1  3  1  0  0

Date range Comments 1250–1558 Eight undated, but of those dated all but one are post-1400 1400–1500 80% are post-1470 1380s-1506 Four are undated 1100s-1500 1400–1500 1327–1480 1300–1400 1400–1475 1400–1500 1350–75 Unknown

Totals

61

37

1100s-1558

Nearly two-thirds are post 1400

As can be seen in Table 1, around sixty images of Edmund are known to have existed in churches in Norfolk, and of these thirty-seven remain extant, although this number would undoubtedly have been higher before the Reformation.10 Edmund is depicted in numerous formats, most frequently in painted glass and on roodscreen panels, and both the range and frequency of depiction in each media accord with the manner in which most saints were depicted in Norfolk churches during the Middle Ages.11 The relative numbers of some types of images may be accounted for partly by fashion; for example, the fashion for painted murals declined in the later Middle Ages, and by the late fourteenth century other modes of depiction, particularly the painted screen and rood, on which Edmund appears more frequently, were favoured.12 Issues of destruction and survival are also likely to be influential; painted glass and wall-paintings were undoubtedly easier for reformers and

9

Unless stated otherwise, information in this table and any statistics cited hereafter are derived from EAN, pp. 184–9. 10 For the Reformation in general, see Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, especially pp. 377–593. For documents pertaining to the destruction of the shrine at Bury, see M. R. James, On the Abbey, pp. 169–71. 11 See EAN. 12 See S. Cotton, ‘Medieval Rood Screens in Norfolk – Their Construction and Painting Dates’, Norfolk Archaology 35 (1984), 44–54, and H. O. Mansfield, Norfolk Churches: Their Foundation, Architecture and Furnishing (Lavenham, 1976), pp. 112–13.

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Rebecca Pinner iconoclasts to remove by breaking or whitewashing than a stone sculpture high on the roof of a porch or the side of a tower such as those which can be seen at Pulham St Mary and Acle. The particular vulnerability of certain types of images is reflected in the disparity between the numbers we know to have existed and those surviving, a trend that is likely to have continued after the periods of reforming zeal.13 More problematic is the somewhat anomalous unspecified ‘images’ category. These are derived from documentary sources such as wills or antiquarian descriptions that refer to an image of St Edmund but give no further details.14 Ann Nichols identifies one of these, at Tilney All Saints, as a guild image but this lone example is certainly not representative of guild activity relating to St Edmund. Ken Farnhill has found evidence for nine guilds in Norfolk dedicated to Edmund, and the existence of a guild would almost certainly have ensured the presence of an image of the guild’s patron in the church.15 I will return to the subject of guilds and dedications below, but in the context of the corpus of images of Edmund, it is clear that many have been lost. Nevertheless I believe that images of the saint survive in Norfolk in both sufficient quantities and variety to enable them to illuminate several aspects of cultic devotion. The chronological range within which images of Edmund occur, for example, is broad, from a twelfth-century sculpture in the chancel of St Edmund’s, Emneth, to glass installed in the north window of St Peter Parmentergate, Norwich, in 1558. However, the distribution of images within this range is by no means even. The twelfth-century sculpture at Emneth is uniquely early, and although a few images survive from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it is in the fifteenth century that we see an exponential growth in numbers, with around two-thirds of known images dating from after 1400. This apparent growth in Edmund’s popularity in the later Middle Ages may be misleading, and it should not be assumed that a lack of earlier images represents a lack of devotion. Such an assumption would depend upon the remaining images representing the full extent of the visual cult, and this is evidently not the case. Churches were remodelled and rebuilt throughout the Middle Ages, and it was during the later fifteenth century, at the time of greatest prosperity, that the majority of both rebuilding and new church building took place in Norfolk. However, while this may account for the lack

13

Some types of images, for example, a sculpture incorporated into the structure of a wall, may also have seemed to later generations more integral to the fabric of the church and therefore more problematic to remove, in contrast to the purely decorative glass. 14 For further details, see EAN, pp. 184–9. 15 K. Farnhill, Guilds and the Parish Community in Late Medieval East Anglia c.1470–1550 (York, 2001), Appendix (‘A List of Guilds in Norfolk’), pp. 172–211; see also p. 38 for a table summarizing his findings.

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Medieval Images of St Edmund in Norfolk Churches of earlier images, the social and political context in which Edmund’s cult flourished in the fifteenth century is likely to have contributed to the preponderance of examples in this period, and I will return to this below. The geographical distribution of images is concentrated in particular areas of the county: in the north-east; to the west in the area around King’s Lynn; and in a band running north-west to south-east across the centre. This pattern corresponds with a variety of geographic, demographic and social determinants: the majority of settlements are found where soil quality is best, such as the fertile Breckland region in the south and the Good Sands area in the middle of the county, and in turn settlement density affects the distribution of wealth and the presence of industry, particularly the worsted textile industry.16 Once again, however, while the overall distribution of his cult may be attributed to general determinants such as these, Edmund’s presence in particular locations can be identified as the result of the influence of certain groups or individuals, which will form the focus of my discussion below. Although necessarily representing an incomplete picture of the cult of St Edmund in medieval Norfolk, the surviving images may paradoxically provide an insight into an otherwise neglected era of his cult. Despite his enduring popularity, devotion to the cult of St Edmund in the later Middle Ages has received considerably less scholarly attention than the period of his reign and the years surrounding the establishment of his reputation as a figure of devotional importance. Thus the survival of images from Norfolk churches may go some way towards furthering understanding of the later cult in general. I have chosen to confine my study to Norfolk for a number of reasons. Given the widespread devotion to Edmund and the perception of him as a saint of particular potency, evidence exists from throughout the country in quantities that would render consideration of his cult on a national scale a formidable task. East Anglia, however, was the heartland of the cult and is therefore the most appropriate place in which to locate a detailed study. In the context of this essay it is necessary to refine the area under consideration still further. It is in Norfolk rather than Suffolk that the majority of material evidence for the cult survives and a larger sample will hopefully prove more representative. The provision of published material for Norfolk is also considerably greater.17 In addition, while much of Suffolk fell under the direct or indirect influence of the abbey at Bury, areas of Norfolk were at a greater remove from the unique religious environment of Bury, and may therefore provide a more general reflection of the cult’s form and popularity.

16

These patterns are illustrated in An Historical Atlas of Norfolk, ed. P. Wade-Martins, 2nd edn (Norwich, 1994), pp. 18–19, 76–7, 78–9 and 94–5. 17 EAN in particular is invaluable for such a study.

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Rebecca Pinner Patronage and popularity To understand how Edmund is depicted we must know who created an image and for what purpose. As Richard Marks notes, ‘images did not function in a vacuum, but were framed by current ideologies and local power structures … by their environment and by the particular historical moment they occupied’.18 Although the function and reception of images may have altered over time, appreciating the context in which they originated invariably adds further nuance. Certain factors would have made the presence of an image of St Edmund within a church extremely likely, including the dedication of the church and the presence of a guild dedicated to the saint.19 However, this pattern is complicated by the evidence from Norfolk where, of the nineteen churches dedicated to Edmund, only ten are known to have contained an image of the saint, and of the nine guilds dedicated to Edmund in Norfolk only four of these accord with the parochial dedication.20 While it is likely that these apparent anomalies may be accounted for by loss, either of an image or records relating to the guild, it is noteworthy that guild records do survive for two churches dedicated to Edmund and refer to guilds with alternative patrons.21 Eamon Duffy avers that there is ‘little sign in the later Middle Ages of strong individual devotion to the parish patron’, and notes that few surviving screens portray such individuals, who also occur infrequently as recipients of bequests.22 In determining the presence of an image of St Edmund within a church the affiliation of the parish may therefore be more significant than its dedication. In the case of St Edmund, affiliation of a church or chapel with the abbey at Bury or with another house where devotion to this saint was particularly strong would be likely to influence his inclusion. At Thornham Parva (Suffolk), for example, although the church is dedicated to St Mary, it contains one of only two surviving cycles in English wall-painting of scenes from the life of St Edmund. Thornham Parva was affiliated to the nearby priory at Thetford that was itself a subsidiary of the abbey at Bury, which is likely to have influenced the presence of St Edmund here. In addition to the patronage of an institution, the proclivity of the individual is also likely to be a significant factor in determining the presence of a saint. In contrast to the paucity of documentation surrounding the majority of parochial church images, literary renderings of saints’ lives sometimes 18

Marks, Image and Devotion, p. 25. For discussion of patronal images, see Marks, Image and Devotion, pp. 64–85 and for guild images, see Farnhill, Guilds and the Parish Community, pp. 34–40. 20 For dedications, see F. Arnold-Foster, Studies in Church Dedications, 3 vols. (London, 1899), II, 327–35 and III, 359, and for guilds, see Farnhill, Guilds and the Parish Community, pp. 172–211. 21 Farnhill, Guilds and the Parish Community, pp. 172–211. 22 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, p. 162. 19

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Medieval Images of St Edmund in Norfolk Churches include details as to why a particular individual has been selected. Although the medium and circumstances of patronage may differ considerably, the underlying principles of selection detailed in literary vitae may illuminate the choices of saints within a material context. In his fifteenth-century Legendys of Hooly Wummen Osbern Bokenham (1393–1447) describes the circumstances of the composition of each vita, informing us, for example, that the legend of St Anne was composed for John and Katherine Denston who had a daughter named Anne, and that the vitae of Ss Elizabeth and Katherine are dedicated to Elizabeth de Vere, Katherine Denston and Katherine Howard.23 St Anne is also invoked in her capacity as patroness of conception and fertility, representing a common appeal to saints associated with specific occupations or circumstances. Although documentary references are sparse, bequests to roodscreens in the county exhibit similar patterns of patronage; for example, at North Burlingham the names of the donors of the roodscreen correlate with the saints and frequently occur on the panel with their ‘name’ saint.24 Devotion to the saints could also have a political dimension. As an erstwhile king of East Anglia Edmund’s cult was particularly strong in this region, but in addition to being worshipped locally, he was for several centuries regarded as a patron saint of England and was a particular favourite of a number of English kings (see above, pp. 15–16). As we have seen elsewhere in this volume, almost from the inception of his cult Edmund had been deployed by various groups in support of their respective causes.25 Promoted by both the Danes and the West Saxons within decades of his death, it is likely that Edmund offered a focus for regional resistance to the Danish occupation of East Anglia. Alternatively, his cult may have been adopted by the Danes as a means of integrating themselves into their new society and performing an act of expiation and reconciliation for the former king’s death at the hands of their kinsmen. The West Saxons under King Alfred may likewise have sought to promote the cult in support of their dynastic expansion into the Viking lands of the east.26 Edmund continued to be invoked in political disputes throughout the Middle Ages. The death of Swein Forkbeard in 1014 was attributed to Edmund, acting in defence of his kingdom and his shrine from pillage and 23

O. Bokenham, Legendys of Hooly Wummen, ed. M. S. Serjeantson, EETS OS 206 (London, 1938), lines 2092, 5054 and 6365–6 respectively. 24 The donors at Burlingham include Edward Lacy, John and Cecilia Blake, Thomas and Margaret Benet and John Benet; among the saints are Edward the Confessor, John the Baptist, Thomas Becket, Benedict and Cecilia. Cited by Cotton, ‘Medieval Roodscreens’, pp. 44–5. 25 This a process that continues to this day, with members of a local pressure group in Bury St Edmunds styling themselves the ‘Knights of St Edmund’ and invoking the martyr’s curse in defiance of the planned redevelopment of the town centre. 26 For a summary of the arguments in favour of each party responsible for early promotion of the cult, see Chapman, ‘King Alfred’; Ridyard, Royal Saints, pp. 211–33.

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Rebecca Pinner taxation. This story was first recounted by Archdeacon Hermann in the late eleventh century, during the ongoing dispute between Norwich and Bury as to the location of the episcopal see, with Bury no doubt hoping the incident would serve as a potent and bloody reminder of the fate of those who attempted to infringe on the rights and privileges of the abbey and its patron.27 As described by Lisa Colton, in her essay in this volume, the image of St Edmund could act as a powerful reminder of exclusion as well as inclusion. In addition to the influence of individual preference in determining the presence of St Edmund imagery in the Norfolk parish church, the visual cult must therefore also be located in its political context, both locally and nationally. However, for many of the images under consideration here, as for the majority of medieval church art, the details of their patronage, craftsmanship, even date, remain fugitive. Yet despite the uncertainty surrounding their origin, I believe it is important also to consider those images for which context and patronage cannot so easily be determined. The Norwich Cathedral cloister bosses As part of the monastic precinct, the images of St Edmund found in the cloisters of Norwich Cathedral Priory exist in a different physical context and may therefore not be directly comparable to the majority of images from Norfolk, which occur in the lay end of parish churches. It is possible that the context of these images and their intended monastic audience may result in representations of Edmund different from those on display to the general populace in a parish church, although the tendency of the cathedral to act as a prototype for work replicated elsewhere is also well known.28 However, this is the only location in Norfolk in which multiple images of St Edmund survive in one location as part of a larger iconographic scheme and as such contribute a unique perspective to a discussion of Edmund’s visual cult. Although completed as part of the original cathedral building, the cloisters, along with much of the structure, suffered considerable damage during the riots in Norwich in 1272 and were rebuilt between 1300 and 1450 as part of a massive programme of repair. This included the sculpture and painting of the approximately four hundred keystone bosses that hold in place the ribs

27

Reproduced in Memorials, ed. Arnold, I, 32–9 and discussed in Gransden, ‘Legends and Traditions’, pp. 8–9. 28 The cathedral as an architectural prototype is discussed by M. Thurlby, ‘The Influence of the Cathedral on Romanesque Architecture’ and R. Fawcett, ‘The Influence of the Gothic Parts of the Cathedral on Church Building in Norfolk’, in Norwich Cathedral: Church, City and Diocese, 1096–1996, ed. I. Atherton, E. Fernie, C. Harper-Bill and H. Smith (London, 1996), pp. 136–57 and pp. 210–27.

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Medieval Images of St Edmund in Norfolk Churches of the vaulting.29 The north walk was the last to be restored, and the bosses here depict scenes from the lives of the saints. Most are shown during their martyrdom, ‘their most characteristic moment’.30 Thus St Martin is shown dividing his cloak with the peasant (CNJ3) and St Laurence appears roasted on the gridiron (CNI5).31 Most saints are afforded only one boss, but Edmund appears twice, bound to the tree and pierced with arrows in the seventh bay (CNI7) and his followers discover the wolf guarding his severed head in the ninth (CNH7). This suggests that the creators of the bosses considered Edmund to be of suitable significance to be included twice: only Thomas Becket occupies a greater number, with his martyrdom depicted in a series of five (CNH3/5/6/8, CNI1). Edmund also appears in the east walk, the first to be rebuilt, begun under Bishop John Salmon (1299–1325) and Prior Henry Lakenham (1289–1310). The bosses were completed in two phases: the first group spans eight bays and runs from the entrance of the Chapter House to the Dark Entry at the south end and were completed in 1316–19. The imagery here is mostly foliate, with a few figural images such as the Green Man, and numerous hybrids and mythical creatures.32 The second phase, rebuilt in 1327–9, runs northwards from the Chapter House to the Prior’s Door into the cathedral across six bays. The theme of these later bosses, the first sequence of narrative bosses carved in England, was the Passion of Christ.33 It is in the context of the Passion narrative that Edmund can be found. His martyrdom appears in the second bay and forms one of the ‘orbital’ bosses around the central scene of the Resurrection (CEB3). The sequence of bosses leads to the Prior’s Door, through which the monks passed on their way through the cloisters to services in the cathedral. Edmund is also depicted above the Prior’s Door, where along with Moses and Ss Peter and John the Baptist, he flanks an image of Christ enthroned. The inclusion of Edmund, the only non-biblical saint, in this illustrious group again attests to the exceptionally high regard in which he was held. The image here is of Edmund crowned and made whole, and provides a sharp contrast with the bound and helpless individual depicted during his martyrdom in the second bay and the two north walk images. Edmund’s presence in the Resurrection bay prefigures his appearance above the Prior’s Door, and alludes to his spiritual glorification in the company of heaven. It also reiterates the sacrificial

29 30 31 32 33

See M. Rose, Stories in Stone: The Medieval Roof Carvings of Norwich Cathedral (London, 1997), pp. 23–50. Rose, Stories in Stone, p. 42. The imagery of the bosses in this walk is discussed by S. Mittuch, ‘Medieval Art of Death and Resurrection’, Archaeology Today 209 (2007), 34–40. References to boss and bay numberings are given throughout in accordance with those in Rose, Stories in Stone. See p. 47 for a plan of the cloisters. Rose, Stories in Stone, p. 11.

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Rebecca Pinner nature of Edmund’s own martyrdom. Despite there being only two images of Edmund, their association with the larger Passion narrative invests them with a similar narrative progression of their own: just as Christ’s passion culminates in His enthronement in heaven, so Edmund’s suffering and death ensure his place in the company of heaven. Edmund’s depiction in the cathedral cloisters suggests that for the creators of the bosses the martyrdom was the most characteristic scene from Edmund’s vita and defined him in relation to other saints. His presence in the Resurrection bay, however, reiterates that while death marks the end of a saint’s earthly life it is also the beginning of their heavenly existence and the means by which they may achieve glory in the company of heaven. Edmund the martyr As seen above, Edmund’s martyrdom is undoubtedly an intrinsic part of his saintly identity. In his discussion of images of Thomas Becket, Richard Gameson describes the martyrdom as the ‘irreducible minimum’ in terms of visual representation and refers to the tradition of depicting martyrs by allusion to, or at the moment of, their death.34 In the case of St Edmund, his death at the hands of the Vikings is one of the few elements of his narrative that may be described as irreducible: it is recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the only near-contemporary ‘historical’, as opposed to literary text, in which Edmund is mentioned, but no further details of his life or reign are supplied, leaving later hagiographers, from Abbo to Lydgate, to compose their own versions of events.35 It is they who construct the narrative of Edmund’s death and portray him as a martyr, preferring to die rather than abjure his faith in favour of the Danes’ pagan religion. In addition to the cause for which he died, the manner of Edmund’s torture by arrows would also have been significant to the medieval faithful. As Carl Phelpstead describes above, sagittation was not a form of martyrdom unique to Edmund: St Sebastian was put to death in this manner (thus it is not always clear whether Edmund or Sebastian is being depicted).36 In addition, Edmund was eventually put to death by beheading, and many early Christian martyrs were similarly executed after enduring protracted and violent torture. Edmund’s association with these early martyrs is made explicit in the spandrels above the west door of St Laurence’s church in Norwich, dating from the third quarter of the fifteenth century. In the triangular spandrel to the left of the door, stretched across his gridiron, is the patron of the church, himself an early martyr who was beheaded. To the right is Edmund, bound to a tree and being shot at from close quarters by 34

Gameson, ‘Early Imagery’, p. 53. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. D. Whitelock (London, 1961), p. 46. 36 For example, the roodscreen at Stalham may show St Edmund or St Sebastian. 35

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Medieval Images of St Edmund in Norfolk Churches several archers, many arrows already protruding from his body. The allusion to decapitation is further emphasized by the wolf lurking in foliage at the bottom of the spandrel, waiting to take possession of the saint’s head, which will soon be struck from his body. Edmund’s martyrdom similarly appears in two mid-thirteenth-century roundels now in the east chancel window of St Mary’s, Saxlingham Nethergate, where he is afforded two bosses, with Ss James and John in another and St Peter in a fourth. This implies that not only is Edmund continuing a long tradition of defending the faith, but that he is being represented as on a spiritual par with the earliest founders of Christian sainthood. His martyrdom therefore integrates him into the continuous narrative of Christian history, establishing a link with individuals from all periods that transcends conventions of era or nationality. Considering the apparent importance of the martyrdom to Edmund’s saintly identity it is surprising that so few representations are known in Norfolk churches, although the four known examples do span a broad time period: from the mid-thirteenth-century roundels at Saxlingham Nethergate; to the Norwich Cathedral cloister bosses from 1327–9 and 1427–8 respectively; and the spandrel above the west door of St Laurence’s church, Norwich, dated to the latter part of the fifteenth century. However, I believe this trend may in part be explained by reference to the iconographic modes identified in the cathedral cloister bosses, where, in addition to his martyrdom, Edmund is also depicted as glorified in the company of heaven. Edmund in Glory This is by far the most widespread mode of representation, accounting for over three-quarters of all known images from Norfolk churches. The majority depict Edmund crowned, robed and glorified, and while he holds the arrow, the symbol of his martyrdom, he bears no wounds from his ordeal. The emphasis is upon Edmund’s status as a martyr and the spiritual consequences of this event rather than the physical act of martyrdom itself. The medium of each image and their relative positioning within the holy geography of the church is also significant: more than two-thirds are either painted glass or painted roodscreen panels, and the connotations of each reinforce the spiritual nature of Edmund’s sanctity. Although painted glass undoubtedly fulfilled a highly decorative function, it also had theological connotations. Sarah Crewe describes the perceived mystical association of light with the spirit of God, for which it was a common metaphor.37 Thus when light shone through a painted glass 37

S. Crewe, Stained Glass in England, c.1180–1540 (London, 1987), pp. 7–8. For detailed discussion of medieval glass, see also R. Marks, Stained Glass in England During the Middle Ages (London, 1993).

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Rebecca Pinner window, bringing to life the colours and shapes therein, this could be seen as analogous with the spirit of God radiating through the individuals depicted. In a general sense this may represent the omnipresence of the Holy Spirit, penetrating all aspects of creation just as light illuminates the multitude of scenes depicted in glass. However, it is particularly relevant to images of saints as it reiterates the role of the sainted individual as a conduit between humankind and God: their likenesses in glass refract light just as they were believed to refract the power of God. The saint is quite literally glorified, and although scenes of all types could be depicted in glass, it is a particularly appropriate medium in which to show saints as they were believed to exist in heaven. Edmund is represented on screen panels in much the same way as in painted glass, royally attired and with the same attribute. Similarly, the physical context and associations of the screens also invests them with additional meaning. Approximately two hundred roodscreens in various stages of preservation survive in Norfolk, the majority of which date from the fifteenth century, and of these around eighty retain painted panels.38 Eight panels depicting Edmund survive, six in their original screen framework, with two disarticulated. The original focus was the rood, now invariably lost, suspended from the rood beam, from which the structures derive their name. At the foot of the crucifix were Mary and John, and often on the tympanum above or behind them was a scene of the Last Judgement. The positions of the saints beneath the rood therefore represented the heavenly hierarchy. Eamon Duffy maintains that the presence of the saints on these screens and their relationship to the other figures ‘spoke of their dependence on and mediation of the benefits of Christ’s Passion, and their role as intercessors for their clients not merely here and now but at the last day’.39 This is reiterated by the position of the screens within the internal dynamic of the church, marking as they did the move from lay to clerical areas of authority: just as the screens were the portals to the holiest part of the church, so the saints were spiritual portals between humankind and God. Edmund is thus once again represented in his capacity as spiritual intermediary, with emphasis upon his heavenly rather than earthly lineage. Representations of St Edmund as an individual figure therefore appear to correspond with the iconographic scheme suggested in the cathedral cloisters, emphasizing the saint as intercessor. The emphasis is upon Edmund postmortem, but he is restored and glorified. He grasps the implement of his martyrdom, symbolizing that his death was not a defeat, but a victory: his martyrdom is literally within his own grasp. 38

W. W. Williamson, ‘Saints on Norfolk Roodscreens and Pulpits’, Norfolk Archaeology 31 (1955), 299–346; J. Eve, Saints and the Painted Roodscreens of North East Norfolk (Norwich, 1997). 39 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, p. 158.

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Medieval Images of St Edmund in Norfolk Churches Edmund the King However, examining the iconographic context in which Edmund is found in these same media reveals a further aspect of his saintly identity. In some cases an image of Edmund occurs as one of a series of saints, and in Norfolk he is most frequently to be found in the company of other sainted monarchs, for example on a number of roodscreen panels in Norfolk. The preservation of the surviving Norfolk screens varies considerably and it is not possible in all cases to identify each figure; while St Edmund may be distinguished with considerable certainty on each screen owing to his characteristic attribute the identity of many of his companions is at best ambiguous and in some cases entirely unknown. At Catfield, however, and on the south screen at Barton Turf, it is clear that each individual is drawn from among the ranks of sainted English monarchs. Although the screen at Catfield is damaged, two of the figures can be identified with certainty by their attributes as Ss Edmund and Olaf, with others believed to be Ethelbert of East Anglia, Margaret of Scotland, Oswin of Deira and Edward the Confessor. The variety of ways in which even this relatively small sample achieved the status of saint and the subsequent influence this has upon their perceived identity differs considerably; it is difficult, for example, to draw many comparisons between the peaceable diplomat Edward the Confessor and the warrior-king Olaf (killed in battle and most often seen brandishing his war axe) other than that both were kings. The feature of their sanctity that unifies these figures is therefore their royalty. This is reiterated by Edmund’s appearance: on all but the screen at Stalham he is crowned and richly robed; at Barton Turf, for example, his elaborately patterned mantel is trimmed with ermine. In addition, on around half the screens he is shown not only with an arrow, the means by which he achieved his heavenly status, but also a sceptre, a symbol of his earthly authority. Ann Nichols similarly notes that none of the monarchs are nimbed, an omission that she feels places further emphasis upon their temporal status.40 Edmund similarly appears in the company of other sainted kings in the glazing schemes of a number of Norfolk churches, including St Peter Mancroft (Norwich), Outwell, Marsham, Salle and Stody. Anglo-Saxon kings such as Ss Kenelm, Edward Martyr, Edward the Confessor and Æthelbert feature frequently. Where individuals are identified by means of a label, such as at St Peter Mancroft, the use of ‘rex’ similarly emphasizes their temporal status. The majority of these images, both windows and screens, were installed around the middle of the fifteenth century, the period that saw the deposition and reinstatement of Henry VI. Sequences of English kings were frequently used to present Henry VI’s royal ancestry as a way of justifying the Lancastrian hold on the throne, and this appears to be the case, for example, in the 40

EAN, p. 317.

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Rebecca Pinner original glazing at Salle.41 Nothing remains of the main light glazing of the side chancel windows, but antiquarian evidence indicates that Edmund was once depicted here among other sainted kings, popes and archbishops in the main lights of the three triple-light windows on either side of the church.42 An element of political propaganda in the Salle glazing is indicated by the presence in the sequence of the only non-English king, Louis IX of France, who David King suggests was probably chosen by the designer of the scheme in reference to and support of Henry VI’s claim to the dual monarchy of England and France through his descent from Louis IX.43 This is supported by the patronage implied by the inscriptions and heraldry, which indicate links with Cardinal Beaufort and William de la Pole, both key supporters of Henry VI.44 In addition to emphasizing Edmund’s own royalty, images such as these demonstrate that he was a useful example of an indigenous, saintly, pre-Conquest king who would therefore be an appropriate inclusion in a royal genealogy, and whose image could be deployed in support of another monarch, in this case Henry VI. Following Henry VI’s eventual demise in 1471 there is evidence that already in the 1470s the late king was himself revered as a saint.45 His cult flourished in East Anglia, and images of Edmund paired with Henry VI appear on the roodscreens at Barton Turf and Ludham (see Plate 1).46 Although Edward IV was understandably concerned about Henry’s apparent apotheosis and attempted to suppress the fledgling cult of the king he had deposed, Richard III, in a gesture of expiation and reconciliation, had Henry’s body exhumed 41

42

43 44 45

46

Richard Marks discusses other series of English kings to appear in ecclesiastical glazing schemes, including All Souls College, Oxford, which contains similar elements of genealogical propaganda: see Marks, Stained Glass in England, pp. 88–9. For uses of royal genealogies as Lancastrian propaganda in other media, see J. W. McKenna, ‘Henry VI of England and the Dual Monarchy: Aspects of Royal Political Propaganda, 1422–1432’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 28 (1965), 145–62. North side, left to right: St Lucius, Pope Eleutherius, St Fagan, St Ethelbert, Pope Gregory I, St Augustine, unknown, Pope Boniface, St Laurence of Canterbury. South side, right to left: St Alphege, Pope Urban I, St Edmund King & Martyr, St Thomas Becket, Pope Silvester, St Edward King & Martyr, St Edmund Rich, Pope John I, St Louis IX of France. Sequence reconstructed by D. J. King, ‘Salle Church – The Glazing’, Archaeological Journal 137 (1980), 333–5 (p. 335). King, ‘Salle Church’, p. 335. Again, see McKenna, ‘Henry VI’, pp. 145–62. King, ‘Salle Church’, p. 335. The cult of Henry VI is exhaustively documented by P. Grosjean in Henrici VI Angliae Regis Miracula Postuma (Brusells, 1935); see also F. A. Gasquet, The Religious Life of King Henry VI (London, 1923); B. Wolffe, Henry VI (London, 1981), especially pp. 3–24 and pp. 351–60; J.W. McKenna, ‘Piety and Propaganda: the Cult of Henry VI’, in Chaucer and Middle English Studies in Honour of R. H. Robbins, ed. B. Rowland (London, 1974), pp. 72–88. On the visual cult of Henry VI at a national level, see R. Marks, ‘Images of Henry VI’, in The Lancastrian Court, ed. J. Stratford, Harlaxton Medieval Studies XIII (Donnington, 2003), pp. 111–24.

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Plate 1.  Ss Edmund and Henry VI on the roodscreen of St Catherine’s church, Ludham (Norfolk). Photo: Leon Doughty

and translated to Windsor in 1484. Henry VII likewise sought to promote the cult of his uncle, petitioning the papacy for his canonization, in an attempt to legitimate the Tudor dynasty by tracing its origins back to his saintly relative.47 In this post-mortem context, the long-established and successful cult of Edmund would provide the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century cult of Henry VI with an historical context and precedent and reinforce it by association. This element of the cult is clear from the Lydgatian miracles of St Edmund, also connected with William de la Pole (as discussed below by Anthony Bale, p. 157–9). Edmund the royal saint was therefore not only part of an established tradition of holy monarchs, but a useful and relevant tool in the world of later medieval political propaganda. This facet of Edmund’s sanctity may be appreciated by considering the national political context in which it was 47

Wolffe, Henry VI, pp. 3–1.

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Rebecca Pinner reimagined. Evidence of patronage survives in very few cases, but where it does exist it can additionally illuminate the means by which the cult of St Edmund was manipulated to serve political ends at a local and personal level. The Toppes window The east window in the north chancel chapel of St Peter Mancroft was the gift of Robert Toppes, the richest merchant in Norwich and an active participant in the stormy political life of the city, including the troubles of the 1430s and 1440s.48 The window displays Toppes’s arms, his merchant’s mark and the arms of his wife’s landed family, and may have been glazed by the time of the consecration in 1455.49 Although the panels of the Toppes window are no longer in situ, David King has reconstructed the original glazing scheme based upon surviving panels and fragments and the observations of a number of antiquarians.50 The thirty main light panels contained scenes from the Infancy of Christ and the Death, Funeral and Assumption of the Virgin Mary. The tracery lights contained three series: Old Testament figures; sainted English bishops and archbishops; and (mainly) sainted English kings, among whom Edmund is to be found. The extant kings are all nimbed, hold either swords or sceptres or, in Edmund’s case, the usual arrow. It seems likely that the kings were arranged in chronological order of date of death, and David King has based his reconstruction of the missing figures upon this premise.51 Edmund’s presence in the Toppes window is, literally, marginal, appearing as he does in one of the tracery lights, and his connection with the main subjects is not readily apparent. The national political significance of sequences of English kings created during this period has been discussed above. In this context, however, some aspects of the series assume particular, local significance. St Alban, for example, was not a royal saint but his presence may have arisen from local political considerations, being a possible reference to the particular devotion of Humfrey, duke of Gloucester, to the English proto-martyr.52 Gloucester was popular in Norwich, in contrast to 48

49 50 51

52

For the background to this disturbance and details of the political unrest in the city in this period, see N. Tanner, ‘The Cathedral and the City’, in Norwich Cathedral, ed. Atherton and Fernie, pp. 255–80 (pp. 255–69). King, Medieval Stained Glass of St Peter Mancroft, p. lxxviii. King, Medieval Stained Glass of St Peter Mancroft, pp. clxix–clxxxi. King, Medieval Stained Glass of St Peter Mancroft, pp. clxxxix–cxcii. The reconstructed sequence is: St Alban, St Oswald, St Oswin, St Ethelbert, St Alcmund, St Kenelm, St Edmund, King Athelstan, King Edgar, St Edward the Confessor. It will be noted that not all the figures are kings, and that likewise not all were sainted, points I will return to below. Gloucester’s relationship with the Abbey of St Albans and its patron is discussed by K.

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Medieval Images of St Edmund in Norfolk Churches William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, who David King suggests is portrayed as the Jew interrupting the Funeral of the Virgin in the main lights below.53 The exact significance of this reference is ambiguous; on the one hand de la Pole is depicted as committing a heinous act as he interrupts the Funeral of the Virgin Mary, whereas in adjacent panels we see the Jew converted, and subsequently being handed the palm given to St John by the Virgin. This ambiguity is likely to have arisen as a result of de la Pole’s participation in the factional unrest in the city and his support of the Cathedral Priory’s claims over those of the citizens, for while de la Pole was now dead and the troubles had largely subsided, the memory of his involvement may have lingered. Similar themes are implied by the presence of Athelstan in the sequence of holy kings. Athelstan was a monarch renowned for his piety and for the number and importance of his charters, and this is therefore a possible reference to the recent signing of a new royal charter for the city in 1452. The charter marked the official reconciliation of the city with the king, following the years of political unrest that erupted in Gladman’s Insurrection in 1443. Henry VI visited Norwich in February 1453, followed by Margaret of Anjou in April of that year, and these royal visits, symbolic of the city’s reconciliation with the king, may have suggested the themes of political hostility and reconciliation found in the Toppes window. The sainted English kings, including Edmund, may therefore have also been part of the city leaders’ attempts to confirm the restitution of good relations between themselves and the king by asserting Henry’s legitimacy and royal pedigree. Edmund of East Anglia The final examples to be considered are a group of Edmund images whose provenance cannot so easily be determined. These are carved wooden bench ends found at Gimingham, Neatishead and Walpole St Peter (see Plate 2), which depict Edmund’s head being guarded by the wolf, which according to his hagiographers had been cast into the woods by the Danes following his decapitation to prevent a proper Christian burial. These images are primarily problematic owing to their lack of provenance. They are difficult to date precisely, with Nichols only able to ascribe a broad date range of 1400–1500.54 The benches are no longer in their original locations within their respective churches and are rare survivors of more extensive sets

H. Vickers, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester: A Biography (London, 1907), pp. 329–32. The figure of the Jew is wearing a surcoat over full plate armour in pale blue glass on which are painted three leopards’ faces in silver stain, a reference to William de la Pole whose arms were Azure a fess between three leopards’ faces two and one or. King, Medieval Stained Glass of St Peter Mancroft, p. clxxxvi. 54 EAN, pp. 184–9. 53

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Plate 2.  The wolf guarding St Edmund’s head: carved wooden bench end, St Peter’s church, Walpole St Peter (Norfolk). Photo: Rebecca Pinner

that are now lost. In addition, the bench ends at Walpole St Peter appear to have been reset. It is thus particularly difficult to assess how Edmund was being depicted in these contexts. Despite this I feel these images may still contribute to our knowledge of the cult, and rather than dismissing them it is instead necessary to approach them via alternative sources and methodologies. The wolf was an important motif of the official cult, attested to by its presence on several surviving seals of the abbots of Bury St Edmunds and on a number of pilgrim badges excavated in London.55 The story of the wolf and the head is recounted by Abbo, Edmund’s first hagiographer, and the incident is thereafter repeated throughout the medieval tradition. It forms part of the 55

For examples of the seals of the Abbots of Bury St Edmunds, see R. H. Ellis, Catalogue of Seals in the Public Record Office: Monastic Seals (London, 1986), p. 15, M140 and p. 16, M142–4; for pilgrim badges including the wolf, see Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs and Secular Badges, p. 182.

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Medieval Images of St Edmund in Norfolk Churches martyrdom narrative: chronologically it is the next scene to be described and appears to take place soon after Edmund’s death. It is Edmund’s first posthumous miracle, representing the saint’s ability to overcome the wolf’s usually savage nature.56 It also alludes to the later rejoining of Edmund’s head and body by virtue of the saint’s physical purity as a result of his virginity. It is thus a key moment of transition, encapsulating Edmund’s transformation from earthly king to heavenly saint. As such, it appears that we are once again being offered an image of the glorified saint displaying his powers. However, as illustrated above in relation to images in painted glass and on roodscreens, an additional aspect of Edmund’s sanctity is revealed when the images are contextualized, in this case in relation to evidence from archaeology and ethnography. Edmund was probably the last of the pre-Danish kings of East Anglia, the last of the royal dynasty of the Wuffings who had ruled Norfolk and Suffolk for at least three hundred years.57 Etymologically, the name Wuffa appears to be a diminutive form of Wulf, and should be translated as ‘little wolf’, with the patronymic form ‘Wuffingas’ being a variant of ‘Wulfingas’, literally ‘the kin of the wolf’.58 The wolf may also have been of significance to the Wuffing rulers above and beyond the genealogical origins of their clan, as an emblematic personification of their founder.59 The importance of the wolf to the kings of East Anglia is reflected artistically. The Sutton Hoo ship burial, for example, believed to be the burial-place of the Wuffings during the late sixth to early seventh centuries, yielded several artefacts featuring an image of a wolf, most notably the purse lid retrieved from Mound One bearing the ‘man between beasts’ motif. The lower limbs of the animals are entwined with the legs of the man, whose arms appear to reach towards their front paws. The proximity of the wolves’ open mouths to the man’s ears is suggestive of them whispering or speaking directly to him, possibly representing the communication of ancestral knowledge from 56

Pluskowski cites numerous examples of saints enjoying amicable relations with wolves. The Early Desert Fathers, for example, frequently shared their living space with wolves and other fierce animals. and the wolf also appears frequently in Celtic hagiography. See A. Pluskowski, Wolves and the Wilderness in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 167–9. 57 Little is known of the history of the Wuffings. A late eighth-century regnal list now in London, BL, Cotton MS Vespasian B.vi traces the dynastic genealogy of the Wuffings back through fourteen generations and twenty rulers to the Norse god Woden/ Óðinn. Cited in P. Warner, The Origins of Suffolk (Manchester, 1996), p. 70. Bede similarly describes a king named Wuffa ‘from whom the kings of East Anglia are called Wuffings’ (Ecclesiastical History, ed. J. McClure and R. Collins, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History (Oxford, 1969), 2.15 (p. 99). 58 Newton, Origins of Beowulf, p. 106. 59 For the significance of the wolf to the Wuffing dynasty, see Newton, Origins of Beowulf, p. 106; for a broader discussion of the emblematic wolf in the Middle Ages, see Pluskowski, Wolves and the Wilderness, pp. 134–53.

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Rebecca Pinner the dynasty’s totemic guardian animals. The relationship between the three figures is reiterated by the repetition of patterns, for example the blue millefiore gems on the wolves’ forelegs and the man’s abdomen. Sam Newton suggests that the ‘peculiar flanking position of the beasts could be regarded as a representation of the protective presence of the putative ancestral guardian-spirit of the Wuffings’.60 The possible underlying meaning of this image is thus remarkably similar to the manner in which the wolf is described as guarding the head of St Edmund and how this was subsequently represented artistically.61 Whether notions of ancestral totemism persisted in the intervening centuries between the Sutton Hoo ship burial, the conversion of East Anglia to Christianity and the establishment of Edmund’s cult is uncertain, and the paucity of the material record from East Anglia in this period obscures attempts to establish the prevalence of wolf imagery. Wolves are, however, present on a seal found at Eye (Suffolk) in the nineteenth century.62 It is the earliest physical evidence for an English seal and is believed to have belonged to Aethelwold, bishop of Dummoc, who made his confession to the archbishop of Canterbury between 845 and 870.63 The seal is of bronze, mitre-shaped, of two rows of arches, supported in the interstices of the arches by nine wolves’ heads with garnet eyes; the use of garnet is reminiscent of the material of the man-between-beasts images on the Sutton Hoo purse lid. It is possible that Aethelwold is the bishop referred to in some accounts as advising Edmund during his negotiations with the Danes.64� The date of the seal is important in determining the significance of the wolf and head motif. Although a precise date is not known, it is believed that Aethelwold held office until around 870. If it was created following Edmund’s martyrdom it is possible that the use of the wolf was a gesture of religious and political defiance, referring simultaneously to the political autonomy and religious sensibility of the region in the wake of the Danish conquest. However, the likelihood of such an object being produced in the immediate aftermath of the Danish incursion is slight, suggesting that it dates from during, or before, Edmund’s reign. If the seal was made before Edmund’s martyrdom it would reinforce the link between Sutton Hoo and the wolf and head, and suggest 60

S. Newton, Wuffings Website at www.wuffings.co.uk. The wolf’s possible status as a sacred animal in Wuffing East Anglia may also account for the popularity of images of the she-wolf and Romulus and Remus from the Roman foundation myth, for example on an eighth-century coin series of King Aethelberht of East Anglia. For further discussion and examples of this motif, see Newton, Origins of Beowulf, p. 108 and Pluskowski, Wolves and the Wilderness, pp. 144–9. 62 N. Scarfe, Suffolk in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2004), p. 130 and plate 7 for the discovery of the seal. 63 T. A. Heslop, ‘English Seals from the Mid-Ninth Century to 1100’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association 133 (1980), 1–16 (pp. 2–3). 64 Ridyard, Royal Saints, p. 221. 61

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Medieval Images of St Edmund in Norfolk Churches that this element of Edmund’s vita is in part a back formation by hagiographers to explain an earlier visual tradition and represents continuity in the popular use of the emblematic wolf in East Anglia. It is of course impossible to determine the extent to which those who adorned their churches with the image of Edmund and the wolf were aware of such connotations. It is possible that the wolf came to be understood in a more generic heraldic sense, representing the royal dynasty without its previous totemic associations. The use of a symbol rather than a narrative scene distances the image from the sequence of events it represents, enabling the symbol to be invested with meaning above and beyond its immediate context. Edmund himself becomes a symbol, once again of kingship but in this instance specifically regional East Anglian kingship, in a similar way in which the wolf and head is a symbol of Edmund as a saint. Thus Edmund’s image on the bench ends at Gimingham, Neatishead and Walpole St Peter, far from being rendered redundant by their lack of iconographic and social context, may still contribute to the debate surrounding Edmund’s saintly identity if approached through alternative methods and sources. Conclusion: ‘martyr, mayde and kynge’ This tripartite epithet, repeatedly afforded to St Edmund by John Lydgate during his mid-fifteenth-century verse vita, attests to the complexity of Edmund’s saintly identity by the later Middle Ages. Consideration of images of Edmund within Norfolk parish churches has revealed that iconographically he could be depicted in one of three distinct ways: either during his martyrdom; as an individual figure with his characteristic feature, the arrow; or by means of a severed head guarded by a wolf. While distinct in their own right, these three categories are afforded further nuance according to their material, physical, iconographic or social context, and where it is not possible to determine their provenance, by reading them through alternative sources and methodologies. Closer interpretation reveals multiple layers of meaning within these types. These variously emphasize Edmund’s spiritual glorification, his intercessory ability and his royalty. They are not restricted to one type of image and are not mutually exclusive; the co-existence of multiple meanings within one type of image attests to a subtle and complex visual code. The martyrdom is arguably the most characteristic, irreducible feature of Edmund’s sanctity, ensuring his place in the ranks of the exalted. Images of Edmund bearing his attribute, the arrow, are not narrative scenes like the martyrdom, but rather the culmination of all narratives, the universal image that simultaneously depicted Edmund’s royalty, his martyrdom, physical regeneration as a result of his chastity and his spiritual triumph and subsequent potency as intercessor and miracle worker. These elements are all 131

Rebecca Pinner implicit in each image, and through the manipulation of the context in which they were placed could be made to emphasize one while still encapsulating all. The incident of the wolf and head is miraculous; it is Edmund’s first posthumous miracle, and confirms the sanctity that his life and the manner of death had suggested. In this sense it forms part of the narrative of his vita, linking his martyrdom with the miracles later attributed to him. As an image of his kingship, however, it relies upon very different conditions to generate meaning. It is to a large extent detached from Edmund’s saintly history, emphasizing as it does his temporal ancestral lineage; Edmund is in the company of his forebears rather than the company of heaven. Multifarious identities allowed Edmund to appeal to numerous sensibilities: as a martyr and image of faith he was ideally placed to answer the prayers offered by his devotees; he embodied the institution of the monarchy, but also the humility and restraint of chastity; he appealed to history and indigenous Englishness, providing a sense of continuity and a legitimizing link between both the Anglo-Saxon and post-Conquest kingdoms and later royal dynasties; he also offered a precedent in light of which contemporary events could be understood and recast. Other saints offered similar benefits, but Edmund’s regional identity made him particularly appealing in an East Anglian context. He was a symbol of the region, its past autonomy and origins, and as its former ruler was ideally placed to offer the protection that in life he had been unable to provide.

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6 John Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund: Politics, Hagiography and Literature A. S. G. Edwards

John Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund seems to have been conceived as an immediate response to the visit of the young Henry VI to the Benedictine Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, where he was resident from Christmas Eve 1433 until 23 April 1434, when he was admitted to the abbey’s confraternity.1 Lydgate (c. 1370–1449) was himself a monk in the abbey, which he had entered in his youth and to which he had returned in the early 1430s after various forms of clerical and political service in the outside world.2 His time in the public sphere was chiefly a consequence of his established status as the most prolific and versatile English poet of the fifteenth century.3 His return to the abbey did nothing to lessen his poetic output. Indeed, his presence made him the inevitable choice for the execution of such an important commission as the commemoration of Henry’s extended stay in the abbey. As Lydgate explains in his poem, this commission was the idea of his abbot, William Curteys: … to the kyng for to do pleasaunce Thabbot William, his humble chapeleyn Gaf me in charge to do myn attendance The noble story to translate in substaunce … He in ful purpos to yeue it to the kyng  (lines 107–10, 112)4

1

For details of Henry’s sojourn at the abbey, see Ord, ‘Account’. For the most detailed account of Lydgate’s life, see Pearsall, John Lydgate (1997). 3 For the fullest assessments of Lydgate’s poetic career, see W. F. Schirmer, John Lydgate: A Study in the Culture of the XVth Century, trans. A. E. Keep (London, 1961) and Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (Charlottesville, 1970). 4 The poem has previously been edited in Altenglische Legenden, ed. Carl Horstmann (Heilbronn, 1881), and Corolla, ed. Hervey. Citations from Lydgate’s poem are from the edition by Anthony Bale and A. S. G. Edwards, forthcoming in the Middle English Texts series; I gratefully acknowledge the extensive debt I owe to my collaborator in the present essay. 2

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A. S. G. Edwards Curteys was an adroit statesman who came to enjoy Henry VI’s favour and steadfastly pursued the abbey’s larger political and economic interests.5 Lydgate’s poem was evidently conceived by his abbot as a means of confirming the abbey’s relationship with the king by reminding him of the generosity that it had shown him. His memorial of the king’s visit was an elaborate one in which poetic content and material form were carefully integrated. After Lydgate had completed his work, a de luxe presentation copy was prepared for presentation to Henry VI, probably in the late 1430s, presumably at the initiative of the abbot.6 This manuscript is now BL, Harley MS 2278, and it is among the most sumptuous of surviving fifteenth-century English manuscripts, containing a hundred and twenty miniatures, nearly all of which illustrate aspects of the narrative and reflect an unusually detailed awareness of Lydgate’s text.7 The text itself, composed primarily in rhyme royal, with ballade stanzas at the beginning and end, is the most developed literary examination of the legend of St Edmund: the full text amounts to just over 3,600 lines.8 It was, in every sense, a book fit for a king, particularly one who was to demonstrate a recurrent interest in poetry and books.9 However, the manuscript circulation of Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund was certainly not restricted to royalty. Eleven other complete manuscripts survive.10 Some of these testify to a continuing interest in the produc-

5 6

7 8 9

10

See J. W. Elston, ‘William Curteys, Abbot of Bury St Edmunds, 1429–1446’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 1979). It is difficult to establish the date of Harley 2278 with precision. Lydgate appears not to have started the poem until after Henry VI’s departure from Bury. After the interval of composition there would have been a possibly lengthy further interval in which scribes, decorators and illustrators were assembled and the content of the drawings established, perhaps even in consultation with Lydgate himself. It would seem unlikely that the manuscript could have been completed before the later 1430s. It is unclear whether this manuscript, and other elaborate manuscripts of Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, also dating from the 1430s, were produced by the abbey itself or through these use of hired professionals of the book trade; for discussion of this question, see A. I. Doyle, ‘Book Production by the Monastic Orders in England (c. 1375–1530): Assessing the Evidence’, in Medieval Book Production: Assessing the Evidence, ed. L. M. Brownrigg (Los Altos Hills CA, 1990), pp. 1–19 (p. 7). For detailed description and analysis of the manuscript, see K. L. Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, 1390–1490, 2 vols. (London, 1996), II, 225–9. At some point after 1441 Lydgate composed several additional miracles of St Edmund; see further Bale’s chapter in this volume. For a facsimile of this manuscript, see Lydgate, Lydgate’s Life of St Edmund, ed. Edwards. There is no adequate study of books owned by Henry VI, but see however A. I. Doyle, ‘English Books In and Out of Court from Edward III to Henry VII’, in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne (London, 1983), pp. 163–81. As follows: His Grace the Duke of Norfolk, Arundel Castle MS, sine numero; Cambridge, University Library, MS Ee.2.15; BL Harley MSS 372, 4826, 7333 and Yates Thompson MS 47; Manchester, Chetham’s Library MS 6709; Oxford, Bodleian Library MSS Ashmole

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John Lydgate’s Lives of St Edmund and Fremund tion of elaborate copies of the poem and contain illustrations that appear to draw on the illustrative models used in Harley 2278; these copies were made in the Bury area, if not in the abbey itself.11 While these copies contain only the Lives, a number of other manuscripts conjoin the poem with other works by Lydgate or by other writers, some of which were again handsomely produced with miniatures and/or other decoration. Interest in the poem continued into the sixteenth century when the antiquary John Stow annotated some of the surviving manuscripts and made various extracts or summaries.12 The extent of this popularity is quite remarkable. Lydgate’s Lives enjoyed a far wider circulation than any other separately circulating verse Middle English saints’ life. The fact that de luxe copies were produced within Bury itself suggests that the poem continued to enjoy a marked local appeal. Doubtless there were affluent patrons of the abbey who felt it desirable and appropriate to possess a memorial of its patron saint, especially one that linked Edmund both with the Abbey and with the current king Henry. The Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund itself insists on these links between hagiographical tradition and current political circumstances, particularly in stressing the connections between past and present at both its beginning and end. The Prologue invokes the power of the banner of St Edmund for the current king: This vertuous baner shal kepen and conserue This lond from enmyes, daunte ther cruel pryde. Off syxte Herry the noblesse to preserue It shal be born in werrys be his syde. Tencrese his vertues Edmund shal been his guyde. By processe tenhance his royal lyne  (lines 41–6)

It goes on to associate the banner of St Edmund with the ‘syxte Herry the noblesse to preserue / It shal be born in werrys be his syde. / Tencrese his vertues Edmund shal been his guyde.’ (lines 43–5), while the abbey’s badge of three crowns that King Edmund wore in battle (lines 57–60) comes to possess an immediate political application, since it now reflects Henry’s claims to the thrones of both France and England: These thre crownys historyaly taplye, By pronostyk notably souereyne, To sixte Herry, in fygur signefye 46, Rawlinson B.216 and Tanner 347; Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 61. There is a fragment in Exeter, Devon County Record Office Misc. Roll 59. 11 See K. L. Scott, ‘Lydgate’s Lives of Saints Edmund and Fremund: A Newly Located Manuscript in Arundel Castle’, Viator 13 (1982), 217–33. 12 For details, see A. S. G. Edwards and J. I. Miller, ‘John Stowe and Lydgate’s St. Edmund’, Notes and Queries 228 (1973), 365–9, and Alexandra Gillespie’s essay in this volume.

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A. S. G. Edwards How he is born to worthy crownys tweyne, Off France and Ingland lynealy tatteyn. In this lyff heer affterward in heuene The thrydde crowne to receyue in certeyne For his meritis aboue the sterrys seuene.  (lines 65–72)

The poem concludes in the same vein both with a prayer to Henry in his dual roles as rightful king of both England and France: 13 Encresse our kyng in knyhtly hih prowesse, With al his lordys off the spiritualte. Pray God to grante conquest and worthynesse By ryhtful tytle to al the temporalte. And to syxte Herry ioie and felycyte Off his two rewmys, feith, loue, and obeissance. Longe to perseuere in his victorious se As iust enheritour off Ingelond and France.  (lines 3564–71)

And the final address to Henry VI, headed ‘Regi’, links the king directly with the abbey praying for him to ‘take this tretys’ and ‘for kyng Edmundis notable reuerence / Beth to his chyrche dyffence and champion, / Because yt ys off your ffundacion’ (lines 3609, 3611–13). The action of the poem is set within these encircling implications that link past and present kings. For while Lydgate seeks to place the significance of Edmund and Fremund in the present the poem is also rooted firmly in earlier hagiographical tradition. He makes explicit that he is drawing on written sources and that his role is to ‘translate’ (lines 14, 53, 110) them, to produce a ‘translacion’ (lines 55, 126). But Lydgate, untypically, does not specify the work he is translating, only its language. He claims that it is his intention ‘The noble story to translate in substaunce, / Out of the Latyn…’ (line 110–11). Elsewhere he insists that he is ‘folowyng myn Auctours’ (line 347), or, more generally, and more frequently, the ‘story’ (lines 191, 445, 468, 491, 885, 968, 1138, 1223, 1336, 1343, 1875, 1903, 1969). Lydgate’s chief source for The Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund is readily identifiable. This is a collection of materials on the life of St Edmund that is now Bodleian Library MS Bodley 240. The manuscript was compiled for the library of the Abbey at Bury St Edmunds in the later fourteenth century. The Bodley manuscript assembled a number of earlier accounts of St Edmund, and clearly provided Lydgate with the outline of his narrative as well as some detail.14 But Lydgate’s use of this book was not in any sense slavish. He seems to have drawn quite selectively from this large assemblage and felt able to make a number of additions or other changes to it in his own work. 13 14

See further McKenna, ‘Henry VI’. The relevant portions of the Latin text are printed in NLA. The most extensive study of this collection is Heale, ‘Religious and Intellectual Interests’.

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John Lydgate’s Lives of St Edmund and Fremund For example, the Prologue and the account of the poem’s occasion (lines 1–240) are Lydgate’s invention, as are his account of Edmund’s virtues (lines 939–1029) and details of his battle with the Danes (lines 1394–1477). There are various other smaller additions, such as the proto-humanist allusions to Petrarch (lines 477–83) and Vegetius (line 486), and occasional mentions of contemporary events, as in his reference to ‘Lollardis’ (line 934).15 The emphasis on direct speech at various points is also Lydgate’s invention. Such a summary indicates the relatively limited use Lydgate made of Bodley 240. The overall effect of his reworking of his source is striking. Pious ‘historical’ chronicle becomes poetic narrative with the attendant shifts in emphasis and tonality. Edmund remains a local hero, whose achievements are located in relation to specific Suffolk sites. But Lydgate invests him with different dimensions, particularly, as his life moves to its heroic end, with the power of speech. Much of the final part of his life is made more dramatic by being direct speech, from the initial addresses by Hyngwar’s messenger (lines 1506–47), and the bishop’s advice to Edmund (lines 1569–82), both of whom urge him to submit to the Danes. Edmund’s spoken responses to both of these figures (lines 1604–38, 1646–66), and his final long speech to Hyngwar himself (lines 1709–78) become a crucial means of establishing his identity. They demonstrate in a direct, dramatic way the power of his faith in the face of opposing forces: the evil of the messenger and the weakness of the bishop. This reshaping of the narrative gives a new directness to Edmund’s presentation that makes him more immediately accessible to the poem’s audience. While the narrative changes Lydgate makes serve to establish Edmund’s identity, questions must remain as to whether the overall design of the Lives works clearly to achieve the same effect. In BL Harley 2278, the earliest and best manuscript, its structure seems unsystematically accretive. The life of Edmund himself is divided into two books, signalled by a break at fol. 39r (after line 1036), ‘Explicit liber primus Incipit secundus.’ There is no formal indication of the end of Book II, but on fol. 69v (after line 2051) there is a rubricated heading beginning ‘Incipit vita sancti ffremundi’; the narrative of St Fremund begins at the top of fol. 70r (line 2052). This summary points to the narrative problem posed by the Life of St Fremund: why is it there at all? It is not indicated as part of Lydgate’s original intention. At the start of his poem Lydgate announces that The noble story to putte in remembrance Of saynt Edmund, martir, maide, and kyng, With his support my stile I wil auance, First to compile aftir my kunyng  (lines 1–4)

15

A more extensive discussion of Lydgate’s sources, to which I am indebted here, will appear in the forthcoming Middle English Texts edition (see note 4).

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A. S. G. Edwards After Fremund’s martyrdom the poem returns to detail further miracles of St Edmund with this rather laboured transitional passage: For semblably as thow kyng Fremund Venquysshedest Danys at Ratforde on the pleyn, Riht so thyn vncle, the hooly kyng Edmund, To saue this lond fro trybut in certeyn, At Geynesboruh by myracle slowh kyng Sweyn, The which story accomplysshed of old daie I am purposid in ynglyssh to translate.  (lines 2892–98)

This passage insistently recalls lines from the Prologue to the poem, where Lydgate recalls how Edmund … was sent be grace off goddis hond At Geynesburuh for to slen kyng Sweyn; By which myracle men may vndirstond Delyuered was fro trybut al thys lond, Mawgre Danys, in ful notable wyse. For the hooly martyr dissoluyd hath that bond …   (Prologue, lines 58–63)

The echoes are possibly deliberate. The verbal recapitulation seems to suggest some attempt to recover a coherent narrative focus on St Edmund himself that Lydgate seems to feel has to be reasserted after the inclusion of the Fremund narrative by reminding the poem’s audience of its chief subject. And, at first glance, the appearance of St Fremund is curious. This ‘obscure and possibly fictional saint’ does not appear to have been documented until around the 1220s, when Henry of Avranches included a verse life of him in a hagiographical collection, immediately after one of St Edmund.16 Fremund does not appear in Bodley 240. Lydgate credits the source of this account as ‘Burchardus’ (line 2213), the name of Fremund’s secretary who is generally credited in prose lives of Fremund as the auctor. But Lydgate seems to have taken as his source for his account of him a version of Fremund’s life either directly from, or closely related to that which survives in Dublin, Trinity College, MS 172. This is a Latin manuscript copied in England in the fourteenth century. The manuscript cannot be localized, but it seems highly likely that the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, which actively collected materials to do with its patron saint, would have sought to acquire a version of a life of his ‘cousin’ and fellow martyr. And to have sought to have it presented in

16

The characterization is A. G. Rigg’s in A History of Anglo-Latin Literature 1066–1422 (Cambridge, 1992), p. 182, which also provides a convenient summary of Henry of Avranches’ narrative (pp. 182–3). The text has been edited by D. Townsend, ‘The Vita Sancti Fredemundi of Henry of Avranches’, Journal of Medieval Latin 4 (1994), 1–24.

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John Lydgate’s Lives of St Edmund and Fremund English by Lydgate. Indeed, it may be that the decision to include Fremund’s life after Edmund’s was not Lydgate’s own, but that of his abbot, Curteys. The lack of any clear necessity for its inclusion makes this a possible reason for its appearance. After all, Lydgate was, demonstrably, in other circumstances, willing to comply with the wishes of his patron.17 But whoever was responsible for the inclusion of this part of The Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund, Lydgate was able to impose a degree of overall literary coherence on this section of his poem and to accommodate it into his larger design. The greater narrative weight in the work obviously falls on Edmund’s life. It begins with an account of his parentage and birth in Saxony, together with the miraculous portents accompanying his birth and the process of his accession to the kingdom of ‘Estyngland’ in succession to King Offa, where he swiftly established himself as an ideal ruler, a true ‘cristene prince’ (line 876). The second book recounts the inexorable movement to Edmund’s martyrdom, from the inadvertent arrival in East Anglia of the Danish king Lothbrok at the ‘heuenly paradys’ (line 1183) of Edmund’s kingdom, his murder by the king’s hunter Bern and the arrival of his sons, Hingwar and Ubba seeking revenge. There follows Edmund’s victory in battle over the Danes at Thetford, his subsequent renunciation of war, martyrdom and the miraculous restoration of his body and its later interment in a shrine. The account of Fremund follows. Fremund becomes king but then retreats to become a contemplative on an island, ‘Ilefaye’ (line 2464), with two companions. In his absence Hyngwar and Ubba lay waste to the kingdom and to Christianity: ‘With furye off Danys brouht vnto ruyne. / Crystene feith brouht to destruccion’ (lines 2506–7). In this crisis messengers are sent to find Fremund and urge his return. When he reluctantly assumes his kingly role he vanquishes the Danes with a small band: ‘And foure and twenty that day withoute obstacle / Slouh fourty thowsand only be myracle’ (lines 2582– 3). In the moment of victory Fremund is murdered by the traitor Oswy. After recounting some of the miraculous consequences of Fremund’s death and the establishment of his shrine (lines 2640–891), the narrative then returns to St Edmund. Lydgate then describes various posthumous miracles with which Edmund was associated, and procedes to concluding prayers (lines 3508–613). The sandwiching of Fremund between the account of Edmund’s life and martyrdom and the detailing of the miracles associated with him after his death superficially suggest a clumsiness to the overall narrative design of Lydgate’s poem. But Lydgate seems to handle Fremund’s inclusion with some narrative and thematic dexterity. He establishes familial links by

17

The poem was commissioned by the king’s uncle, Humfrey, duke of Gloucester; on his role in its development, see E. P. Hammond, ‘Poet and Patron in the Fall of Princes’, Anglia 38 (1920), 121–36.

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A. S. G. Edwards claiming that Fremund is Edmund’s ‘cosyn’ (lines 2057, 2122, 2202, 2879) and he is, like him, identified as ‘kyng, martyr and virgyne’ (lines 2262). As with Edmund, miraculous portents attend his birth (lines 2150–77, 2241–82), and both Edmund and Fremund have to contend with the Danish invaders Hyngwar and Ubba. Although Lydgate’s design may initially appear rather shapeless it is possible to discern an overarching purpose to it that meaningfully connects the narratives of Edmund and Fremund. In Lydgate’s narrative, Fremund’s life provides a careful counterpoint in important respects, to Edmund’s own. Their approaches to the conflicts with the Danes are very different in ways that serve to set the protagonists in striking contrast. While Edmund demonstrates his powers as king to establish an ideal kingdom (lines 904–66) and is a ‘worthy prynce famous in al vertu’ (line 981), Fremund relinquishes his rule after ‘but a yeer’ (line 2381) to live as ‘an hermyte’ (line 2526). While Edmund begins as a triumphant king and warrior, who vanquishes the Danes before espousing martyrdom, Fremund is only briefly a king before renouncing the world. He returns miraculously to triumph in battle with his tiny band over a vastly superior enemy. The trajectory of his life reverses that of Edmund. The reluctant king becomes the reluctant warrior, while Edmund the successful king renounces earthly prowess to allow God to demonstrate his power through Edmund’s submission. And it is noteworthy that Fremund is denied the capacity through which Edmund is most distinctively defined: that of direct speech. In this respect Fremund is clearly a less developed figure, a less dramatically realized figure, than Edmund himself. Thus although both protagonists demonstrate the power of the miraculous to prevail over the forces of evil, in the overall shape of the narrative Fremund functions to amplify our sense of the achievements of Edmund himself. This is achieved not simply by the greater narrative weight that is given to Edmund, but through the ways in which Fremund’s achievements are set within the encapsulating narrative of Edmund’s own, both before and after his death and are implicitly measured against them. Such a design is not subtle, but it gives the poem a relative degree of coherence of purpose, if not clarity of form. It also introduces into the narrative some elements of dramatic contrast, most crucially between the treatment of the poem’s two major figures and their clearly juxtaposed responses to Christian crisis: Edmund moves from an active to submissive stance, while Fremund reverses this movement. But beyond this, the later stages of the poem move from the larger political and historical dimensions of East Anglia history to the local and more domestic in the final recounting of the later miracles associated with Edmund. It is through such contrasts that the narrative sustains its overall focus on specifically regional hagiography. Critics have not generally responded to the narrative in such terms, probably because they have not found an appropriate way to categorize it generi140

John Lydgate’s Lives of St Edmund and Fremund cally. They have sometimes tended to perceive the work as an ‘epic’,18 or a ‘legend-epic’.19 It is, of course, nothing of the sort and the terms distract attention from the significantly innovative dimension of The Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund. Lydgate’s poem introduces a new form into Middle English verse, the separately circulating verse saint’s life. Hitherto such lives had circulated as part of collections, like the South English Legendary or the Northern Homily Cycle. Lydgate was the first to explore the potential of a single, more developed life. He deployed it later in his Lives of Ss Alban & Amphibal of c. 1439, written at the commission of John Whethamstede, prior of the Abbey of St Alban’s. It was a form that was to achieve a wider popularity in Lydgate’s native East Anglia in the middle of the fifteenth century. Lydgate’s fellow regional (and clerical) poets, John Capgrave and Osbern Bokenham, were quick to emulate his example and to produce similar verse lives of local saints, chiefly, but not exclusively, female.20 Such a narrative form is, in The Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund, marked by its relative conciseness of execution, not a quality for which Lydgate is invariably noted.21 There is little emphasis on action, apart from the account of Edmund’s martyrdom (lines 1778–1869) and the recovery of his missing head (lines 1940–2009). Far greater weight falls on the political and spiritual choices that the protagonist is called upon to make and the tangibility of the forces of evil that oppose him in the form of the Danes. The poem delineates these polarities with a stark clarity that gives them a dramatic and spiritual force. The narrative is constructed in ways that reduce all forms of agency to catalysts or contrasts to foreground Edmund’s own political, military and spiritual prowess, without any attempt to establish causality. Thus, the hunter Bern, whose murder of the Danish king Lothbrok precipitates his sons’ invasion, which leads to Edmund’s martyrdom, is given only the most perfunctory motivation for his evil action: So serpentyn was the violence Which of this Bern sette the herte afire, Of fals malys moordre to conspire. Cause was ther noon, sauf that Lothbrok Was more eurous and gracious onto game fortunate 18

The term occurs several times in Schirmer’s discussion of the poem: Schirmer, John Lydgate, trans. Keep, pp. 163–5. Ebin terms it a ‘full-fledged epic legend’ (L. Ebin, John Lydgate (Boston, 1985), p. 130). 19 Pearsall, John Lydgate (1970), p. 280. 20 See further A. S. G. Edwards, ‘Fifteenth-Century English Collections of Female Saints’ Lives’, Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2002), 131–41. Apart from Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Albon & Amphibel, Capgrave wrote a verse Life of St Norbert, patron saint of the Augustinian house of Lynn, Norfolk. 21 Pearsall (John Lydgate (1970), p. 282) speaks of the poem’s ‘fluent narrative line, unclogged by imprecation and apostrophe’.

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A. S. G. Edwards Than was this hunte, and mo beestis took, In such practik hadde a grettere name,  (lines 1210–15)

The invading Danes are presented as the embodiment of inherent evil, a polar contrast to Edmund himself: Thus euer hath been a merueilous difference Twen liht of uertu and vecious derknesse, Twen perfeccion and raueynous violence, Atwen fals pillage and knyhtly hy prowesse. Enuye alwey is contrary to goodnesse.  (lines 1112–16)

In the context of this stark contrast between pagan evil and Christian good the narrative explores the qualities that Edmund embodies and demonstrates to be the bases for his own conduct. His qualities are presented as more significant than his actions themselves, which are shown to be the inevitable consequences of his commitment to his faith. Indeed, what is striking is how little of the narrative is devoted to Edmund’s actual martyrdom, which occupies fewer than a hundred lines (lines 1793–1875). In contrast, considerable emphasis falls on Edmund’s ‘knightly hih prowesse’ (lines 188, 1117), his ‘hih prowesse and knyhtly discipline’ (line 1173) and ‘prowesse of knyhthood’ (line 1025). He is ‘a good knyht (lines 994, 1444) and ‘an heuenly knyht’ (lines 900, 1403), as well as ‘Goddis knyht’ (line 1602), his ‘owne knyht’ (lines 1013, 1432, 1755) and ‘Cristis knyht’ (lines 1641, 1777). This juxtaposing of the chivalric and spiritual dimensions of Edmund’s identity is reflected in larger aspects of the design of Lydgate’s Lives. Although some weight is placed on the omens that precede his birth (lines 220–42), thenceforward little emphasis falls on his divinely ordained destiny until near the conclusion of the narrative. It is after his death that the miraculous manifests itself through the preservation and recovery of his separated head (lines 1877–1904). But even here there is no attempt to invest The Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund with any larger symbolic structure. There is an implicit parallel between the circumstances of Edmund’s head being preserved ‘kept by a wolff foryetyng his woodnesse’ (line 1950) until it is found by the searchers (lines 1996–2009) and the earlier discovery of Lothbrok’s body by his faithful greyhound (lines 1231–60). But such parallelism remains latent and undeveloped. The tangible demonstrations of Edmund’s miraculous power are posthumous and are associated with his body and the creation of his shrine. While he is alive it is Edmund’s social and political achievements on which Lydgate’s narrative focuses. His accession as king of ‘Estyngland’ signals the beginning of an enlightened social, legal and political programme designed to serve the ‘comon profit’ (line 819). Edmund is presented as a paradigm of just and orderly rule: Thus first of prynces the notable excellence, And of the cherch the preued perfeccion,

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John Lydgate’s Lives of St Edmund and Fremund And of the iuges thauyse prouydence, And of knyhthod the marcial hih renon, And of marchantis the hih discrecion, With al the residue in oon ymage knet, Wer by kyng Edmund in ther dew ordre set.  (lines 855–61)

As ruler he offers a model of conduct within the world as the embodiment of ‘thyngis kyngly’ (line 404) that Offa immediately perceives in him, qualities that establish him as the king’s natural successor. Such qualities doubtless have a wider implication in a work intended for presentation to the young Henry VI, a king noted from his early years for his piety and earnestness.22 Edmund offer an example of the Christian king in whom spiritual and secular qualities co-exist in perfect equilibrium. It is a life shaped to form a model of kingly virtue and kingly policy. Edmund ultimately also becomes a model for kingly submission and death, but Lydgate sensibly does not press the implied parallelism with Henry VI in the later stages of his narrative.23 The sustained seriousness of Lydgate’s spiritual and moral concerns in The Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund is reflected in the work’s relatively unadorned style. Lydgate insists recurrently (if conventionally) on his poetic incapacity: ‘In rethorik thouh that I haue no flour / Nor no coloures his story tenlumyne’ (lines 8–9); he claims that ‘sauf whit and blak I haue no mo coloures’ (line 750; cf. line 3579). Such modesty topoi recur in his writings. But here his assertions of stylistic limitation seem to be an indication of a level of deliberate rhetorical restraint that reflects his sense of the nature of his subject matter. He does occasionally engage in some ponderous word play, as with the homophones ‘sun’ and ‘son’.24 Elsewhere there are echoes of Chaucer, particularly of his Troilus & Criseyde, to which he predictably turns in his attempts at a high style: Lo heer the guerdon off his mortal outrage! Lo how that God off ryhtful iuggement Kan punysshe the mordre off folkis innocent!  (lines 2623–5)25

and in his valedictory apostrophe:

22

See the earliest biography of Henry VI, John Blacman, Henry the Sixth, ed. M. R. James (Cambridge, 1919), where great stress is laid on this quality. 23 See Somerset, ‘“Hard is with Seyntis For to Make Affray”: Lydgate the Poet-­Propagandist as Hagiographer’, in John Lydgate, ed. Scanlon and Simpson, pp. 258–78, for a reading of the poem that concludes that Lydgate ‘provides Henry with a way to imagine himself as a saint and hero in waiting … [as] Lydgate has found the only genre within which Henry’s character and actions can be compared with history in praiseworthy terms’ (p. 270). 24 In, for example, lines 231, 239, 585, 590, 590, 595, 1078, 2059, 2085, 2288, 2328. 25 Cf. Chaucer, Troilus & Criseyde, V, 1849–52.

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A. S. G. Edwards Go litel book. Be ferfful, quaak for drede, For tappere in so hyh presence. To alle folk that the shal seen or reede Submytte thysylff …  (lines 3572–5)26

But Lydgate’s gestures towards a high style are, at best, perfunctory. He seems to feel that the nature of his subject does not invite an intrusive narratorial presence. Indeed, the treatment of his subject seems to require of Lydgate a consistency of tone of unmodulated seriousness as he chronicles the triumph of Christian sacrifice and submission over agents of active evil. The narrative maintains its focus on such clear-cut polarities until near the end when it moves into the concluding account of the history of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, the enduring embodiment of the power of its patron saint, who is directly associated with the present king. The Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund can be counted as one of Lydgate’s most effective religious narrative poems. In it style and structure are integrated to create a form that serves the multiple functions for which it was designed: one in which local piety, abbey and national politics, and kingly instruction are integrated with a degree of skill; in it, the story of St Edmund moves from history into political and poetic art.

26

Cf. Chaucer, Troilus & Criseyde, V, 1786ff.

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7 St Edmund in Fifteenth-Century London: The Lydgatian Miracles of St Edmund Anthony Bale1

As the essays in this volume show, a saint’s cult is fed by and feeds into a wide range of cultural artefacts: not just ‘official’ religious media, but also texts and images, musical and dramatic productions, which depend on exchange between clerical and secular arenas, between priestly and demotic interests. This essay considers a relatively minor element in the later medieval cult of St Edmund: a miracle text, the Lydgatian Miracles of St Edmund, written in the mid-fifteenth century, almost certainly under the auspices of the Abbey at Bury St Edmunds. I am concerned in this essay with identifying, describing and analysing the text’s ‘environment’. This term is used advisedly, to connote something different from the text’s ‘occasion’ (that is, the persons, institutions or events for whom or for which the text was written) or its general context (the background conditions against which the text can be seen to exist). In seeking a textual environment I hope to be able to account for the variety of factors – some contextual, some authorial, some occasional, some pertaining to audience and patronage – that made the cult of St Edmund attractive and resonant to audiences in fifteenth-century Suffolk and London. While one can establish a credible and precise occasion for at least part of the poem (described further below), the Miracles of St Edmund cannot be accounted for by patronage alone but must be seen within and against the specific dynamics of literary and devotional fashions of the 1440s, as well as a politics of hagiography concerning the reshaping of the cult of St Edmund. The Miracles comprise fifty-eight eight-line stanzas, of three similar but separate miracle narratives, hereafter called miracles A, B and C.2 Miracle A 1

I am very grateful for the feedback on this material that I received at the Harlaxton Symposium (2005) and the Institute of Historical Research Medieval and Tudor London History seminar (2006) and to Julia Boffey, Vanessa Harding and Caroline Barron for organizing these opportunities. I am also grateful to A. S. G. Edwards, John Ganim, Timothy Phillips, Gervase Rosser, Marion Turner and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne for useful discussions with me about St Edmund in the fifteenth century. 2 The miracles are edited in Altenglische Legenden, ed. Horstmann. There is an online edition, based on Horstmann’s and introduced by Stephen Reimer at www.ualberta.

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Anthony Bale (lines 1–152) is set at London, 20 November 1441 (the Feast of St Edmund). Miracle B (lines 393–465) is set at Bury St Edmunds, 28 April 1444 (the Eve of the Translation of St Edmund). Miracle C (lines 393–465) is also set at Bury, and takes place on 8 July 1444. Each miracle describes an injured child, saved or revived by the invocation of St Edmund. Miracle A tells the story of a young boy, ‘sone of a ffleccheer’ (a fletcher, arrowmaker) and ‘of age but thre yeer’ (lines 30–2), who was playing with other children on London Bridge. A ‘droof of oxes’ (‘herd of oxen’; line 37) passed by and, ‘by sodeyn violence’ (line 39), one of the oxen caught the little boy in its horns and knocked him into the River Thames east of London Bridge. His body flows to the west, carried through the bridge ‘with the waves rage’ (line 61) until ‘casuelly’ (line 62) a man passing in a boat picks up the child. Meanwhile, the boy’s mother has been informed of her son’s accident by a neighbour and goes crazy with anxiety: ‘As modrys weepe at ffeestys ffuneral,/ Lyk a mad woman, ffuryous and wood …’ (lines 79–80). She runs screaming through Thames Street, a major road which runs along the north bank of the River Thames, until a gentleman apprehends her. This man is from the household of Lord Fanhope, living nearby; he counsels the mother to be calm and to pray to St Edmund, whose saint-day it is. The mother falls down in the street ‘on bothe hire knees, bowed hed and chyne’ (line 111) and makes a devout prayer to Edmund. She then turns to the river and sees her son waving and crying out to her from the boat, ‘Wher is my moodir? Myn owne moodir dere?’ (line 129); so the boy is saved, following his mother’s prayer to St Edmund, and the incident is understood as a miracle, which ‘must oonly been ascryved/ To God alloone and to no mannys myght’ (line 145–6). The boy’s parents dedicate themselves to St Edmund. In miracle B a two-year-old girl at Bury St Edmunds gathers flowers with her older sister, ‘nat ferre fro the Northgat’ (line 251), the main road leading out of Bury to Norwich. Suddenly, the little girl falls into a stream, seven feet deep, and an alarmed crowd starts ‘a noyse’ and ‘vnwar clamour’ (line 267); as in miracle A, ‘a certeyn neyhbour’ alerts the little girl’s mother, who ‘almost ffyl in a swowne’ (lines 269–72) and runs through the street to her daughter. The little girl, however, seems to be dead: ‘drownyd hed and fface’ (line 276) in the mud, her ‘ded cors’ is recovered ‘bolne with watir’ (‘swollen with water’; lines 283–5). However, a certain woman ‘of strong herte…bold of corage’ (lines 287–8) takes up the girl by her legs and pours the water

ca/~sreimer/edmund/text/mtxt1.htm. The miracles will be included in the new edition of The Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund being prepared by Anthony Bale and A. S. G. Edwards, from which quotations are taken. A recent article puts the Miracles in the context of Lydgate’s poetry and the ‘poetics of exemption’ developed at Bury: J. M. Ganim, ‘Lydgate, Location, and the Poetics of Exemption’, in Lydgate Matters: Poetry and Material Culture in the Fifteenth Century, ed. L. H. Cooper and A. Denny-Brown (Basingstoke, 2008), pp. 165–83.

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St Edmund in Fifteenth-Century London out of her nose and mouth, from which runs ‘lykour horryble almoost a galoun’ (line 293). The gathered crowd makes an orison to St Edmund and the child is set beside the fire: after an hour, she revives. Again, the parents dedicate themselves to St Edmund, this time by visiting his altar in the abbey at Bury. ‘For this myracle al the bellys rang’ (line 353) and Abbot William (i.e. William Curteys, Lydgate’s abbot) is present: the little girl is carried through the streets of Bury and seemingly the whole town, ‘of cuntre or the toun/ Estatys reknyd of hih or lowe degrees’ (lines 370–1), prays to St Edmund. In miracle C, set in Bury’s western suburb of Rysbygate, a ‘yong babe’ is ‘over-redyn with a carte wheel’ (lines 399–400). The boy is dead, lying in the street, but a ‘neyhbour’ takes the infant to his father’s house. A great ‘clamour’ arises in the street, and the many people start to pray to St Edmund and Christ: the boy miraculously revives. The abbot again describes this as a miracle. The text closes with a request to St Edmund to stand in Bury’s ‘diffence’ against those who seek ‘to breke his liberte’ (lines 459–60) and ‘to save his chirche, his toun, and his cuntre’ against those who might in any way disparage or ‘interupte his royal dignite’ (lines 460–2). These miracles appear in four manuscripts as an appendix to Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund, as follows: A2 (The Duke of Norfolk, Arundel Castle, sine numero, fols. 96r–99r, acephalous text); B (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 46, fols. 87r–96v); T (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 347, fols. 88v–98r); Y (BL, Yates Thompson MS 47, fols. 94r–104r). A version of the Miracles, featuring only miracles B and C, appears, separate from the Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund, in one further manuscript, L (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 683, fols. 45v–52v). Manuscripts A2, B and Y were copied by the same scribe, at some point after 1461 (as attested to by references elsewhere in the manuscripts to Edward IV, who assumed the throne in that year). Authorship and manuscript context Authorship of the Miracles has usually been ascribed to Lydgate;3 the Miracles are certainly deeply engaged with Lydgatian poetic conventions. They are very much indebted to Lydgatian style and device and are thoroughly attuned to Lydgatian notions of both piety and literary distinction. While the authorial occasion of the poem is, as I shall explain below, crucial to its context, the Miracles, as an accretive text, represents the abilities of saints’ lives to respond to the changing needs and desires of their audiences. The miracles are replete with distinctively Lydgatian aureate terms, formulae and pleonasm, such as ‘pleynly to termyne’ (line 20), ‘sodeyn 3

See G. H. Gerould, Saints’ Legends (Boston, 1916), p. 264, with the comment that ‘Lydgate’s poetical gift seems by this time to have deserted him utterly’; Schirmer, John Lydgate, trans. Keep, p. 268; Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 282; Ganim, ‘Lydgate, Location’.

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Anthony Bale violence’ (line 39), ‘sugryd cadence’ (line 231), as well as the uniquely Lydgatian plural ‘oxes’ (line 37) for oxen.4 Evidence for a typically Lydgatian commitment to Chaucerian diction can be seen in the discrete echoes and paraphrases of Chaucer’s Prioress sequence from The Canterbury Tales, particularly in miracles A and B. For instance, consider Lydgate’s ‘as I best can or may’ (line 123), the same dubitatio modesty topos used by Chaucer’s Prioress (VII, 460), and the ‘bush unbrennt’ (line 172) to describe the burning bush (Exodus 3. 2–4), again identical to the formula used by Chaucer’s Prioress (VII, 468).5 Chaucer’s Prioress’s story of childhood rescued and miraculously preserved would have provided an obvious template for Lydgate here. While Lydgate can almost certainly be identified as the author of the text, in part or whole, it is clear that the miracles were not written together as a piece. Carl Horstmann averred that the Miracles can be read as a first draft of a more finished version that has not survived;6 this was no doubt suggested to Horstmann by the fact that the constituent parts of the Miracles do not cohere well or easily. Miracles B and C, both set in Bury in 1444, seem to have been composed together, separate from miracle A; throughout miracles B and C, these miracles are described as a pair: ‘of two [miracles] / that ffyl but late’ (line 211), ‘Anothir myracle / with this to combine / I wyl remembre’ (lines 391–2), and so on. The closing lines of miracle C refer to ‘thys miracles two’ (line 449), suggesting a separate circulation of the Bury miracles separate from miracle A, the London miracle. Miracle B has an extravagant and long proem, which begins thus: Name of our lord to exalte and reyse We ar comaundid be scrypture and wryting, In the sawteer of herte and wyl to preyse By hym that was choose prophete and kyng, First by prayer and devout knelyng, Last of his psalmys Dauid biddith soo For myracles and merveyllous werkyng Calle to his seyntes in what we haue doo.  (lines 153–209)

These opening lines are similar to the initial lines of miracle A (‘Laude of our lord vp to the hevene is reysed’) and sound like the beginning of a poem, not a continuation.7 Miracle C is an obvious continuation of, or partner to, 4

See MED, s.v. ‘ox’. Other echoes of the Prioress appear at lines 1, 99, 189, 220 and 356–60. The affiliation of the Miracles with the Prioress’s prologue and tale is noted in passing by Schirmer, John Lydgate, trans. Keep, p. 268. 6 Altenglische Legenden, ed. Horstmann, p. 440. 7 As can be seen from the brief summary of the miracles given above, there are many points of repetition between miracles A and B, not least in the portraits of the good neighbour and the panicked mother (who, in both miracles, runs through the streets bare-headed and out of her mind with worry). 5

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St Edmund in Fifteenth-Century London miracle B, with both set at Bury in 1444, although the sudden and rather halting transition between the two miracles, leaping from the ‘tyrannye’ of the Dane Sweyn Forkbeard (lines 389–90) at the end of miracle B to ‘Anothir myracle’ which ‘ffyl also but late … In a subarbe / callyd Rysbygate’ (lines 391–5), may indicate the accretion of miracle texts if C was reworked from miracle B. It is likely that further miracles were planned or once attached; the narrator writes that his task is ‘Al the myracles / in order for to sette / Off oold and newe / doon by this gloryous kyng / Them to compile …’ (lines 217–19). It is hard to believe that ‘al’ the miracles of St Edmund, both ‘oold and newe’, are represented by just two events from 1444! Meanwhile, the relationship of the Miracles to Lydgate’s grandiose Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund (begun 1433) demands further questions of origin and authorship. Walter Schirmer, in his influential but unreliable study of Lydgate’s poetry, rejected Horstmann’s suggestion that the Miracles text is incomplete or experimental and asserted instead that the Miracles are ‘independent’ from The Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund.8 This is evidenced only by one manuscript, L, which contains miracles B and C (the Bury miracles) and does not include The Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund. The Miracles, written in ballade form (rhyming ABABBCBC), contrast with the more stately and aureate rhyme-royal metrics of The Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund, although we might view the formal change as an appropriate move into domestic, vernacular material rather than evidence of a different authors (and, besides, the Prologue and Envoy of the Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund are written in the same ballade form). Contra Schirmer, I suggest that the Miracles are very much a logical continuation of Lydgate’s saints’ lives, demonstrating the devotional, geographical and literary relevance of St Edmund to a fifteenthcentury audience. That the Miracles developed at Bury, whether by Lydgate or not, can hardly be doubted; not only does the content suggest this, with its focus on Edmund and (in miracles B and C) on the town of Bury itself and the reference to abbot William Curteys (line 354), but four of the five extant manuscripts (B, A2, L and Y) were produced at Bury, with B, A2 and Y written by the same scribe.9 Vernacular hagiography and the sources of the miracles The manuscript and internal lexical evidence surveyed above suggests that miracles A, B and C did not originally circulate together and were not written 8 9

Schirmer, John Lydgate, trans. Keep, p. 165. Analysis using LALME conclusively gives a Bury provenance, while studies of the scribal hands, by Rogers and Seymour, have identified the manuscripts as Bury productions. See Rogers, ‘Fitzwilliam Museum MS 3–1979’ and M. C. Seymour, ‘Some Lydgate Manuscripts: Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund and Danse Macabre’, Transactions of the Edinburgh Bibliographic Society 5 (1985), 10–24.

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Anthony Bale at the same time. Likewise, the poem does not have a single source as such, but rather engages with its genre. The narratives – of children in peril saved by saintly intercession – are generic and, with their saintly miracles, utterly predictable. It is the details and imagined topographies that give specific resonance to the text and locate the Miracles within particular cultural and political projects. The Miracles are similar to the miracle collections and exempla associated with St Edmund and cognate domestic cults, such as those of Thomas Becket (?1120–70), Simon de Montfort (c. 1208–65), Thomas Cantilupe (c. 1220–82) and, later, Henry VI (1421–71) himself. In all these cults accounts of children in peril were especially popular and the Miracles reflect the esteem in fifteenth-century popular devotion for the image of the endangered child.10 The Miracles are also one of several fifteenth-century artefacts that demonstrate the dynamic ways in which the abbey at Bury, led by the energetic Abbot Curteys, sought to extend the cult of St Edmund and thereby further Bury’s status, privileges and prestige.11 It is not usually possible to locate a precise source for this kind of text, although specific affiliations can, in this case, be suggested. In each case, the source seems to be in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 240, a massive devotional and hagiographic compendium, written in the late fourteenth century at Bury St Edmunds and which, as Edwards describes above (p. 00), was used by Lydgate as the source for most of his Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund.12 Miracle A, of the drowning child in London, is cognate with the miracle in Bodley 240 of a boy at St Botolph’s, London, who is thrown into deep water by a swine (transformed into the ‘droof of oxes’ (line 37) in the Miracles) and then revived by the invocation of St Edmund. Miracles B and C, of the revived boy and girl at Bury, are cognate with the miracle of St Edmund (dated 1374–5), likewise in Bodley 240, of a child at Irby-in-theMarsh (Lincolnshire) thrown from a cart carrying a load of salt. In Bodley 240, the boy lies in a deep pit, dead, for the space of an hour, conventional details also found in miracles B and C (lines 299; 425). The image of the deep pit and the raising of the child are found in miracle B, and the element of the road traffic accident, involving the cart, is found in miracle C. Significantly, in the Irby-in-the-Marsh miracle, the boy’s parents pray at the chapel of St Edmund at Wainfleet (Lincolnshire), suggesting that the author of the Miracles merely translated one provincial miracle of St Edmund from Irby-in-the-Marsh to its

10

See R. C. Finucane, Rescue of the Innocents: Endangered Children in Medieval Miracles (Basingstoke, 1997); Gordon, ‘Accidents Among Children’; D. Lett, L’enfant des miracles: enfance et société au Moyen Age (Paris, 1997). 11 See further Heale, ‘Intellectual and Religious Interests’. 12 The first section of Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund, dealing with the life of St Edmund, and the third section, covering the miracles of St Edmund, were taken from Bodley 240. The middle section, the life of St Fremund, was taken from an unknown source.

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St Edmund in Fifteenth-Century London more ‘proper’ location at Bury.13 A further drowned child miracle in Bodley 240 is set at the chapel of St Edmund at Ling (Norfolk), and there are several other artefacts associated with Lydgate, St Edmund and Henry VI that make use of the affective martyrological topos of childhood drowning.14 In turn, the Lydgatian Miracles and those of Bodley 240 clearly borrow from earlier miracle texts of drowning children; consider, for example, the well-known miracle of Joanna la Schirreve of Marden (Herefordshire), which was used in the canonization process of Thomas Cantilupe in 1307: Being bumped, as she fell [into a pond] she clutched at whatever vegetation was growing along the sides of the pond, screaming; but as there was no one nearby, besides [her playmate] John, to hear her screams and come to her assistance, uprooting the plants to which she was clinging she drowned in the pond. She heard it said by her parents that she lay drowned in the water from the afternoon until sunset. Being found and removed from the water, she heard that her parents vowed and measured her to the lord St Thomas, promising to take her to his tomb with a wax image if she should revive. And she said that she had heard that after this, she revived. Afterward, her parents, with a wax image, took her to [the cathedral at] Hereford.15

The similarities of this miracle with the Lydgatian ones are striking, and could be used to prove how common accidental drowning was in the Middle Ages. But whether or not such texts reflect the dangers of medieval life is less important in the present context than the fact that such accounts of children’s accidents are generic, formulaic and imitative.16 Imitation, often said to be the 13

The abbey at Bury had estates at Wainfleet for the purposes of salt-making. See A. Owen, ‘St Edmund in Lincolnshire: The Abbey’s Lands at Wainfleet and Wrangle’, in Bury St Edmunds, ed. Gransden, pp. 122–7 (p. 126). Owen suggests the 1374–5 miracles in Bodley 240 were composed to raise money for the upkeep of the dilapidated chapel of St Edmund at Sailholme near Wainfleet. 14 The late-fifteenth-century collection on the miracles of Henry VI repeatedly depicts drowning children saved by the king’s miraculous intervention. One of the ‘miracles’ performed by Henry VI in John Blacman’s vita is that he intervenes when a women is drowning a child; see Blacman, King Henry the Sixth, ed. and trans. James, p. 44. The cult of little Robert of Bury St Edmunds, revived by Lydgate in the fifteenth century, evidently featured the drowning child topos too and can be connected with Henry VI, on which see Bale, Jew in the Medieval Book, p. 138. 15 Translated in Finucane, Rescue of the Innocents, p. 172. Finucane publishes a translation of the testimonials surrounding this miracle from the 1307 canonization hearings (preserved in Vatican MS Lat. 4015). Testimonials include the trope, also found in miracle B, of the mouth being opened and foul water pouring out (Finucane, Rescue of the Innocents, p. 199). 16 Finucane, Rescue of the Innocents, pp. 145–7, and Gordon, ‘Accidents Among Children’, produce statistical evidence to make historical conclusions; for instance, about 52 per cent of recorded medieval childhood accidents involved drowning; in 46 per cent of cases, the ‘first-finder’ of the endangered child was a neighbour. I remain sceptical about

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Anthony Bale most sincere form of flattery, fixes prestige and gives the template for response and might provide a kind of continuum of saintly places and miracles. As Valerie Flint has demonstrated regarding the miracles of Thomas Cantilupe, legal paradigms inflect the way such incidents were recorded; such accounts provide a ‘singularly unified’ portrait of the interaction between civic and ecclesiastical authorities and, perhaps most powerfully, frame everyday experience within established remedies of prayer, piety and salvation.17 The Lydgatian miracles: a demotic text? This text of the Miracles probably originates at the abbey at Bury and reflects strenuous and innovative attempts to involve the laity in a religious and cultural life with a distinctive Bury flavour; miracles B and C are set up to appeal to a highly local imagination in Northgate and Rysbygate, and the social world of all the miracles is potently municipal, artisanal and nonaristocratic, the ‘Mixed Life’, combining clerical and lay arenas, as lived ‘in a subarbe’ (line 395) of Bury. The miracle narratives themselves avoid authority figures – such as bishops, mayors or justices who usually figure in such stories – but rather imagine the community united around the figure of St Edmund. However, the Lydgatian miracles have a surprising intertext, in coroners’ accounts of child death in medieval London. Again, I do not wish to suggest here that it is necessary to find an historical event ‘behind’ the Lydgatian text; a miracle, of course, does not have to be justified either to ‘nature’ or to fact and religion, for scripture and belief are more important to miracles than evidence. However, the frequency and narrative form of accounts of road traffic accidents and drowning in the Thames suggest that the Miracles may also have served to add a veneer of sanctity, royalty and mythology to the quotidian trials of London life; alternatively, might texts such as coroners’ accounts themselves be based on descriptions of saints’ miracles? In a recent article about the London poor, Barbara Hanawalt draws attention to two very pertinent fourteenth-century examples: John Stolere … was a pauper and mendicant aged seven. He sat relieving himself in the street when Ralph de Mymmes, aged twelve and groom to John Absolon, accidentally ran over him in the early morning. Ralph was driving a water cart drawn by two horses, with a cask full of water when he ran over the boy. Another mendicant, John de Kent, aged twelve years, had

the historical validity of such statistics as they are highly stylised accounts which only claim, rather than reflect, ‘eye-witness’ status. 17 V. I. J. Flint, ‘The Saint and the Operation of the Law: Reflections upon the Miracles of Thomas Cantilupe’, in Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages, ed. R. Gameson and H. Leyser (Oxford, 2001), pp. 342–57 (p. 357).

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St Edmund in Fifteenth-Century London been standing on a wharf alone after dinner and, with the Thames being at full tide, he accidentally fell in and was drowned.18

Obviously, then as now, accidents happened. We might note here, however, not only the similar, generic kinds of accidents but also how the ages given to boys in the coroners’ accounts are more often than not either seven or twelve; these were particularly meaningful ages, on the cusp of Hippocratic categories of pueritia and adolescens respectively.19 These ages are also given to the protagonists in Benedictine boy-saint vitae, such as St Kenelm of Winchcombe (d. c. 811), St William of Norwich (d. 1144) and St Melar of Amesbury. This echo of coroners’ accounts in the Lydgatian Miracles is unlikely to reflect an actual intertext but rather reflects an impulse to make a ‘sense’ of child-death at once religious and demotic, just as earlier East Anglian communities (at Norwich and Bury) had blamed the deaths of children on local Jews. The Miracles, in particular miracles B and C, suggest a concerted attempt to reformat the grand, royal, spectacular cult of St Edmund and privilege into a domestic, familiar miraculous world. Pearsall describes the ­Miracles as similar to the miracles we would expect to ‘accumulate’ around any patron saint, suggesting a popular religious impetus.20 The precision of the Bury locations given in miracles B and C – ‘nat ferre fro the northgat’ and at ‘Rysbygate’ – and the envisioned world of good neighbourliness and community (‘a certayn neyhbour,/ Nat ffer absent’, line 265–6; ‘A neyhbour casuelly took heed’, line 403) suggests a narrative produced in Bury for the people of Bury. The exhortation to ‘oold and yong of age’ (line 314) to make a pilgrimage to Edmund’s shrine at Bury likewise suggests a desire to appeal to popular religious sentiment and action. The ominous threat, that Edmund can be not only ‘gloryous and notable’ (line 345) but also ‘vengable / To them that been / to his ffredam contrarye’ (line 347–8; cf. final stanza) reflects the local devotional exclusivity to which such texts could appeal, replacing distinctions of age and class (‘Estatys reknyd / of hih or lowe degrees…’, line 371) and education (‘symple and lettryd’, line 374) with a vengeful definition of Bury identity. This is commensurate with the ecclesiastical and financial ‘banleuca’ and Liberty of St Edmund (described above, pp. 7–9 (Bale) and pp. 108–9 (Colton)), which sought to embed Bury’s exemption from external control. One manuscript, L, suggests a highly localized and, to some extent, popular uptake of the Miracles within a literary aesthetic based around the distinctiveness of Bury’s religious identity. Like manuscripts A2, B and Y, L hails from Bury; but whereas A2, B and Y were produced by the same scribe, no doubt working in what Doyle and Rogers have identified as a

18

B. A. Hanawalt, ‘Reading the Lives of the Illiterate: London’s Poor’, Speculum 80 (2005), 1067–86 (p. 1077). 19 See further Lett, L’enfant, pp. 112–13. 20 Pearsall, John Lydgate (1970), p. 282.

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Anthony Bale vernacular book-production ‘factory’ at Bury’s abbey (described below by Alexandra Gillespie), L is a more amateurish, indeed unreliable, witness. The L scribe, even while apparently working in a monastic scriptorium, introduced many errors into the text, including some confusion over pronouns and transforming ‘a dowe / with snowych ffetherys whight’ (‘a dove, with snowy white feathers’, manuscript B, line 189) into a ‘dowe / with sonnyssh ffetherys briht’ (‘a dove, with sunny bright feathers’, manuscript L, line 189). Linguistic analysis securely suggests a Bury provenance for L, and the ‘mastres cole’ who once owned the book and signed her name in it may, tentatively, be connected with the wealthy testatrix Margaret Cole (d. 1449) or her family of Stoke by Clare, near Bury. The contents of L provide an indication of the appeal of the hagiographic and pious identity articulated in the Miracles. The manuscript contains several other Lydgatian poems that stress the devotional distinctiveness of Bury: a ‘Prayer to St Robert’ (NIMEV, 2399; fols. 22v–23r); Lydgate’s life of St Giles (NIMEV, 2606; fols. 33v–42r), verse propaganda about Bury’s ‘franchise’;21 and another prayer to St Edmund (NIMEV 915; fol. 19r). Crucially, the acephalous version of the Miracles in L omits miracle A, the London miracle and, moreover, manuscript L is the only witness in which the Miracles appear without The Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund. This suggests several important facets of the reception of the Miracles: the text could be received as a highly local and near-contemporary artefact rather than as a transhistorical and grandiose saintly exemplum. National and regal concerns are replaced by a forceful and coherent notion of Bury and its independence, while Edmund’s encounter with the Vikings, his martyrdom and the legends of Bury’s foundation are made relevant to an audience in Bury in the 1440s and 1450s. The Lydgatian miracles: a Lancastrian text? While miracles B and C are thus very much Bury texts – connected with Bury, celebrating Bury, making an entire miraculous world within Bury and its patron saint – miracle A is set in London and its concerns are rooted there, rather than in Bury. Miracle A includes an intrusive and ostentatious reference to Lord Fanhope, ‘a baroun / dwellyng ther be syde / The lord ffanhoop / which heeld ther his housoold’ (lines 91–2). The child is plucked from the water just by the riverside mansion known as the Coldharbour, which was Lord Fanhope’s London home. Fanhope, previously Sir John Cornwall (d. 1443), was one of Henry VI’s councillors and was married to Elizabeth of Lancaster, the sister of Henry IV. He was, therefore, Henry VI’s great-uncle. From about 1437 Fanhope was one of Henry’s closest and most influential

21

On this poem, see G. M. Gibson, ‘Bury St Edmunds, Lydgate, and the N-Town Cycle’, Speculum 56 (1981), 56–90.

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St Edmund in Fifteenth-Century London ministers and had a considerable reputation as a soldier and statesman.22 The mention of Fanhope, in its awkward, inserted bluntness, suggests a pressing and specific, if buried, occasion for at least part of the poem or the surviving manuscripts. The reference gives us a fairly concrete terminus a quo of 1443 for miracle A, the date of Fanhope’s death (although the use of the perfective ‘heeld’ may suggest that the text merely seeks to be associated with the past figure of Fanhope). Fanhope may, or may not, have been the patron of a rewriting or augmentation of the Miracles; certainly, the references to Fanhope associate the text with him and, moreover, seek to orientate the miracles around London as well as Bury. Fanhope may have wished to associate himself specifically with a poem about vulnerable children because he had no legitimate heir; his only legitimate son had been slain by the Franco-Scots army at the Battle of Baugé in 1421.23 By being connected to the Lydgatian miracle, Fanhope may have been troping his own piety and a devout, grieving identity. Likewise, Fanhope had commissioned a piece of stained-glass, showing him and his wife kneeling in a pious donor image, at Ampthill.24 We might observe that Fanhope’s palace at Ampthill was very close to Dunstable (Bedfordshire), feted in The Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund as the resting place of St Fremund and thus providing another plausible reorientation for the text. In his quasi-paternal role to the young king, moreover, Fanhope may have used the miracle text to suggest benign guardianship and his closeness to virtuous youth, just as The Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund connects Henry VI with Edmund’s boyish chastity. Alternatively, far from attempting to wrest the Miracles from Bury, miracle A may attempt to knit, imitatively and flatteringly, Henrician and Lancastrian models of piety and polity, lordship and counsel, with the city of London, through the image of Fanhope. London, the capital, becomes connected, through miracle A, with Edmund’s ancient capital, Bury. Through the potent image of the endangered child, recalling Henry VI himself, the Miracles imagine a kind of sacramental, civic and distinctly urban authority, seamlessly uniting secular, clerical and royal jurisdictions. Yet miracle A is emphatically a London text, as its precise geography reveals. Sanctity and hagiography are usually closely related to the saint’s place; saints’ lives have their own distinctive and important local geographies, and Edmund’s saintly space is, of course, at Bury. During the fifteenth century Bury had strenuously sought to develop and extend its distinctive devotional identity through the cult of Edmund (and, to a lesser extent,

22

London, BL Add. MS 18752, fol. 162v details a banquet given to Henry VI by Fanhope (then Sir John Cornwall). I am grateful to Julia Boffey for this reference. 23 ‘Cornewall, John’, ODNB. 24 Moreover Fanhope was buried not at Burford (Oxfordshire) with his wife but at the Minorite church near Ludgate in London, again troping his piety and, possibly, a distinctively London identity (ODNB).

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Anthony Bale related local cults, such as those of Botolph, Petronilla and little Robert). Likewise, Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund fixes St Fremund’s cult at Dunstable, silencing competing texts, which held the proper site of Fremund’s martyrdom to be at Cropredy (Oxfordshire). However, the precise and detailed topography (quoted below), and the information given about timing (line 26) and the rising tide of the River Thames (line 65), suggest not just a London setting but also a London authorship and audience. Chronicles and coroners’ accounts from the early 1440s do not mention the incident, although the precision with which the poet sets the scene suggests an ‘eye-witness’ narrative (although this could simply be a suasion in such a miraculous text). Because the Bury-produced manuscripts (B, A2 and Y) include the London miracle suggest that the London miracle could be considered consonant with Edmund’s cult at Bury. So it is not necessarily correct to think of miracle A existing in tension with miracles B and C even if the texts respond to different local and temporal (and possibly authorial) demands. For instance, that the juvenile protagonist is described as the ‘sone of a ffleccheer’ (line 30) in miracle A is unlikely to be a historical detail but rather a martyrological trope, recalling Edmund’s death by ‘arwes sharp / suffryng ful gret penaunce’ (EF 130); in this way, miracle A articulates a kind of figuration, with London imbued with the spirit and signs of St Edmund and Bury. Alternatively, and if we pursue a ‘realist’ perspective on the Miracles, the Fletchers’ Hall in Moor Lane was very close to Bevis Marks, the abbot of Bury’s house in the eastern district of London.25 It is thus hard to discern exactly where saintly myth and lived history are separable; however, the miracle certainly shows Bury’s activity in London’s devotional scene. The miracles oblige the modern reader to think of Bury and London as overlapping, interrelated cultural and devotional spheres. The cult of St Edmund was manifested in London in the church dedicated to the martyr in Lombard Street. Lydgate was extremely active as a poet in London and, elsewhere in his oeuvre, there is abundant evidence of his cultural activities in the metropolis: this involved a remarkably wide-ranging list of patrons, from the royal to the civic to the ecclesiastical to the mercantile. For Henry VI and his queen Margaret of Anjou Lydgate wrote regal entries and mummings, which were performed at Eltham and Windsor; for the city’s government (the ‘Shirreves of London’), Lydgate wrote a mumming for performance at ‘Bishopswood’ (on the Bishop of Hornsey’s estates on Hampstead Heath); Lydgate introduced the fashion for the ‘danse macabre’ into England through mural images and text decorations at St Paul’s; his Bycorne and Chicevache was written for a ‘werþy citeseyn of London’; he wrote mural verses on St George for the armourers’ guildhall; he also wrote a mumming for the goldsmiths’ 25

The Fletchers’ Hall was probably at St Mary Axe near Bevis Marks, and the fletchers seem to have lived in the area of Moor Lane and Fore Street, some way from London Bridge. See J. E. Oxley, The Fletchers and Longbowstringmakers of London (London, 1968).

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St Edmund in Fifteenth-Century London guild.26 This activity does not just show that Lydgate was a very successful patronage poet; it shows too that he was actively shaping and reflecting devotional and literary tastes in the capital. Miracle A as an occasional poem By locating Lydgate in London we can retrieve from miracle A a specific Lancastrian occasion, which would have had clear affiliations to an audience in fifteenth-century Suffolk and London. Indeed, the precise topography of miracle A – between London Bridge and Suffolk Lane, home of the earls of Suffolk – effectively links the two spheres of Bury and London and, in doing so, bridges Edmund’s spiritual and temporal roles. We have already seen the possible significance of the citation of Lord Fanhope in the text. Fanhope’s man counsels the grieving mother (lines 89–111) and advises her to remember St Edmund (line 109), past Ebgate Lane (line 55; where the Swan Inn was; now called Swan Lane and leading to Swan Pier) and near Fanhope’s house at Coldharbour (lines 55; 90), which was on the river a little to the west. The mother has run along Thames Street (line 87; now Lower Thames Street) and therefore meets Fanhope’s man, and makes her prayer to St Edmund, precisely where Thames Street meets Suffolk Lane; at this point there now stands a coin-operated public toilet, but in 1441 this location would have been directly beneath the now-vanished church of All Hallows the Less. The topography of miracle A is very accurately set up, with all its action taking place within the parish of All Hallows the Less and within Dowgate ward, an area of only a few hundred square yards. As its name suggests, Suffolk Lane, at the foot of which street the London miracle takes places, is an appropriate and meaningful location. The street contained a building closely linked to Fanhope’s Coldharbour, namely the Manor of the Rose (or Pountney’s Inn) which, during the period 1439–50 was owned by William de la Pole (1396–1450), earl (later duke) of Suffolk, benefactor of the abbey at Bury and patron of John Lydgate; Suffolk’s wife, Alice Chaucer (c. 1404–75; granddaughter of Geoffrey Chaucer), also lived here until her retirement in the 1460s to Ewelme (Oxfordshire).27 Suffolk Lane, on a relatively steep hill, overlooks the Coldharbour and the site of miracle A would have been directly in its purview. By 1441, the date of miracle A, Lydgate was an old man; he had recently completed (in 1439) the Lives of Ss Alban and Amphibal for John Whethamstede, abbot of St Albans, and, in the same year, was awarded a royal annuity.28 On 26

See MPL II for all these texts. See C. M. Meale, ‘Reading Women’s Culture in Fifteenth-Century England: The Case of Alice Chaucer’, in Mediaevalitas: Reading the Middle Ages, ed. P. Boitani and A. Torti (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 81–101 (p. 84). 28 See Pearsall, John Lydgate (1970), p. 283. 27

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Anthony Bale 14 November 1441, just six days before the putative date at which miracle A occurred (20 November), John Lydgate had petitioned the king for new letters patent of his annuity of £7 13s. 4d.; this was done in the presence of Suffolk, who had endorsed Lydgate’s petition, and Adam Moleyns (d. 1450), clerk of the royal council from about 1438, diplomat and, later, bishop of Chichester.29 One day after the miracle, on 21 November, the annuity was granted at Westminster.30 Therefore we know that Lydgate was in London and Westminster and with Suffolk and Moleyns at this time, celebrating both the Feast of St Edmund on 20 November and the granting of the annuity on the following day. Lydgate possibly stayed at Bevis Marks, the London house of the abbot of Bury, but almost certainly visited, or even stayed at, Suffolk’s Manor of the Rose, in Suffolk Lane, by the site of miracle A. Given this remarkable congruence of places and dates, it is very likely that miracle A was written by Lydgate for, or at the request of, the earl of Suffolk and/or his wife, Alice. The abiding proximity of the Suffolks to the culture of Bury St Edmunds is well documented, as is their patronage of Lydgate. Lydgate had written a ballad for Thomas Chaucer (c. 1367–1434), son of Geoffrey Chaucer and father of Alice Chaucer; Lydgate wrote his ‘Virtues of the Mass’ for Alice Chaucer herself.31 In the 1420s Lydgate translated Deguile­ ville’s Pélerinage de la Vie Humaine for Thomas Montagu (1388–1428), earl of Salisbury, Alice Chaucer’s second husband, a manuscript of which was owned by Alice.32 Alice Chaucer also owned tapestries showing the Fifteen Signs of the Last Judgement and the life of St Anne, both of which were subjects of Lydgate’s poetry.33 Suffolk himself owned a manuscript of Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes (now BL, MS Arundel 119) while Suffolk has been associated with the poetry, as well as the confinement, of Charles d’Orléans (1394–1465). For his part, Moleyns too is closely linked to Lydgate’s poetic patronage; he is

29

30

31 32 33

The record of Lydgate’s petition, apparently by Moleyns, is now Kew, National Archives SC.8/248, item 12382, printed in Pearsall, John Lydgate (1997), p. 62; on Moleyns’ careers, see ‘Moleyns, Adam’, ODNB; A. Petrina, Cultural Politics in Fifteenth-Century England: The Case of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (Leiden, 2004), pp. 347–8; W. Calin, ‘Will the Real Charles of Orleans Please Stand! or, Who Wrote the English Poems in Harley 682?’, in Conjunctures: Medieval Studies in Honor of Douglas Kelly, ed. K. Busby and N. J. Lacy (Amsterdam, 1994), pp. 69–86 (pp. 75–6). The king’s patent, signed at Westminster on 21 November 1441, granting the annuity to Lydgate is now Kew, National Archives C.66/451, m. 20, printed in Pearsall, John Lydgate (1997), p. 63. The order to the sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk to pay this annuity to ‘Johannes Lydgate Monachus de Bury sancti Edmundi’, made at Westminster on the same day, is now Kew, National Archives C.54/292, m. 24, printed in Pearsall, John Lydgate (1997), p. 64. Alice Chaucer’s patronage is noted in Oxford, St John’s College MS 56; see Meale, ‘Reading Women’s Culture’, p. 92. Meale, ‘Reading Women’s Culture’, p. 84. These may well have been among the tapestries and cushions Alice Chaucer removed from the Manor of the Rose to Ewelme; Meale, ‘Reading Women’s Culture’, pp. 84, 96.

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St Edmund in Fifteenth-Century London name-checked in Lydgate’s verses ‘On the Departing of Thomas Chaucer’, described as ‘gentyl Molyns, myn owne lord so der’ (stanza 7), a poem written for Alice Chaucer’s father.34 Suffolk’s relationship with Fanhope is also assured; both were senior members of Henry VI’s council, and had served together at Agincourt in 1415. Suffolk had been placed in charge of the imprisoned Charles d’Orléans from 1432 until about 1435; beforehand, Fanhope had held Charles at Ampthill from 1429 to 1432.35 Thus miracle A, an ostensibly minor text about a little boy and his family, involves Lydgate, the Suffolks, Moleyns and Fanhope, and thus occurs at the point of convergence of Bury and London, monasticism and aristocracy, East Anglia and England, Church and State, and poetry and politics. This is not to suggest that miracle A refers to a historical incident, of a miracle involving a little boy occurring on this day in 1441, but that the poem was composed, by Lydgate, for the Suffolks, in London, around the time at which the miracle is set, possibly to thank the Suffolks for their support or as a kind of celebration of Edmund’s saint-day. Clearly, however, the four manuscripts that include the miracle are much later than this occasion and, circulating in or around Bury, the precision of the location may have been lost on mid- and late fifteenth-century audiences. The location of miracle A may be given a further piquancy by its very close proximity to the Kontor or Stahlhof (the inn or ‘Steelyard’) of the London Hansard community, the self-governing enclave of Baltic tradesmen, which had recently been established there.36 Given the subject of Edmund’s vita – of English piety versus Danish savagery, English legitimacy versus Baltic usurpation – there may be a yet more specific micro-context, or just a literary side-swipe, retrievable in miracle A.37 There was growing animosity between Londoners and the Hansa in the fifteenth century, culminating in a brief attack on the Steelyard in 1493; it is noteworthy that the xenophobic ‘alien subsidy’ 34

‘Chaucer, Thomas’, ODNB. The name ‘Anne Molins’ appears in an acrostic in Charles d’Orléans’ personal manuscript, an ‘album of occasional verse’ (now Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale MS fr. 25458), composed at his court at Blois; on the connection of this manuscript to Suffolk and his circle, see Calin, ‘Will the Real Charles of Orleans please stand?’, p. 70. 35 ‘Fanhope’, ODNB; see too the biography in A. C. Reeves, Lancastrian Englishmen (Washington DC, 1981), pp. 139–202. 36 While the Hansa had long been established in London, the Steelyard is first mentioned in 1422; it was next door to the Coldharbour and just a few yards from the site of the mother’s prayer on Thames Street. Cannon Street railway station now occupies the site. See P. Dollinger, The Emergence of International Business 1200–1800. Volume 1: The German Hansa (London, 1999). 37 The Hansards were not, as is frequently perceived, ‘German’ in the modern sense; there were Hansard colonies from London, Lynn and Bergen to Reval (Tallinn) and Novgorod. The Hansa had itself fought against the Danes in the late 1360s, which, through the victory over the Danish king Valdemar IV, resulted in the Hansa’s trade monopoly throughout the Baltic.

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Anthony Bale – in effect a poll tax on foreigners – was first levied in 1440, just before the date of miracle A, with the Hansards immediately claiming exemption.38 The highly nationalistic cult of St Edmund might usefully be placed against this background of competing definitions of Englishness and belonging. Conclusions Current affairs – affairs of state and affairs of the self – were mediated through the imagery and vocabulary of St Edmund’s cult. In a sense, the spare early accounts of the saint’s life and martyrdom offered later writers and worshippers a tabula rasa on which to graft and embellish new legends. St Edmund did not remain devotionally relevant without an effort being made by those who, for both devotional and political reasons, wished to further his cult. Edmund’s story had to be tailored and refined to show how this East Anglian king, murdered by Danes, retained relevance in fifteenth-century England. Equally important was the wealthy abbey at Bury, which, from the twelfth century, had assumed responsibility for extending the cult of St Edmund in everyday popular devotion. My essay has demonstrated the many agents involved and the many frames through which we can view a cult such as that of St Edmund. It was a local and national cult, speaking to those in suburban Bury and the London aristocracy alike. St Edmund’s cult was popular and vigorous in the fifteenth century, partly on account of Bury’s innovative attempts to extend the remit and prestige of the cult, through art, literature and, in particular, through Henry VI’s involvement. A significant part of the spiritual environment made for and around Henry VI concerned the piety, chastity and passive martyrdom of Edmund. However, alongside this royal-led revival of interest in Edmund we must consider the Suffolks’ probable patronage of miracle A: for the earl and countess of Suffolk, Edmund marked vernacular prestige and contemporary devotion, and was a shrewd expression of the conjoined political and religious ambits of Bury and St Edmund’s cult. However, the specific circumstances of miracle A – a minor miracle that happened on a date when we know Lydgate was in London and has a precise and correct topography – force difficult, and unresolvable, questions of belief and truth. Did Lydgate and the people at London Bridge, that dark November afternoon in 1441, really see a little boy topple into the water, only to be plucked out safely by a passing boatman? Were the earl and countess of Suffolk there, and Lydgate and Moleyns, watching the boy’s perilous adventure? How far did they, or the unlettered people around London Bridge, attribute the saving of the boy to God and St Edmund, and how much to

38

See further J. L. Bolton, Alien Communities of London in the Fifteenth Century: The Subsidy Rolls of 1440 and 1483–4 (Stamford, 1998), pp. 3–6.

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St Edmund in Fifteenth-Century London chance or luck or the passing boatman? If people did not see this happen, how far did they believe Lydgate’s account? Did a local cult develop around the little boy, or is the poem a retrospective attempt – perhaps an anniversary poem – to place the miraculous within the familiar? Or, to put these questions in more theoretical terms, is the poem a record and account of ‘collective activity’, is it a ‘transactional’ poem rooted in the financial facts of patronage, or is it a ‘top-down’ insertion of hierarchy (St Edmund, Bury, the earl and countess of Suffolk, Fanhope) into the religious and literary culture of London? Is the miracle an expression of ‘collective symbolic action’, as an urban parish comes together in a pious polity, or is it, to use Jacques Rossiaud’s terms, a ‘deployment of ordained power’, a ‘proclamation of instructive sacred images’, an attempt by ‘ruling urban groups … to maintain a coherent system of reverential comportment’?39 To answer these questions would be to deny the complexity and partiality of the poem and its contexts; as John Arnold writes, ‘[t]he making of a saint … could involve a curious collision between elite and popular ideas, politics and desires’.40 Whether ‘authentic’ or ‘constructed’ (and miracle A appears to be both), Lydgate’s Miracles of St Edmund opens a window on to a saint’s cult and its meanings at a specific place and time. Miracle A, which appears at first to be a civic and demotic text, cannot be separated from either the political ends of the duke and duchess of Suffolk or the better-known monkish and propagandist poses with which we usually associate John Lydgate. Moreover, the narratives of Lydgate’s Miracles disclose those difficult but precious elements that made St Edmund’s cult so valuable, revealing an ongoing exploration of the nature of sacrifice, martyrdom, holy community, salvation, chastity, monarchy and sacred space.

39

Rossiaud, ‘Les rituels de la fête civique à Lyon, XIIe–SVIe siècles’, in Riti e rituali nelle società medievali, ed. J. Chiffoleau et al. (Spoleto, 1994), pp. 205–308 (p. 285). 40 Arnold, Belief and Unbelief, p. 85.

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8 The Later Lives of St Edmund: John Lydgate to John Stow1 Alexandra Gillespie

In 1538, some of Thomas Cromwell’s agents at the time of the dissolution of the English monasteries reported by letter to their employer that they had been at St Edmund’s Bury, where we found a rich shrine very cumbrous to deface. Have taken in the monastery over 5,000 mks. in gold and silver besides a rich cross with emeralds and stones of great value; yet have left the church, abbot and convent well furnished with silver plate.2

Another of Cromwell’s men, the zealous reformer John Ap Rice (or Prise), had already had a great deal to say to Cromwell about the monastery at Bury, whose visitations he oversaw in 1535 and 1536. The abbot, he wrote, ‘delited moche in playing at dice and cards’; the monks had a great ‘frequence of women’. He complained of the dull silences of the monks; he was sure that ‘they had confedered and compacted before our coming that they shulde disclose nothing’ on the matter of the abuses in the community, whose basis was no longer a fraternal ideal – a fellowship in Christ – but precisely the ill-contrived pretence he so abhorred. The monks and the monastery they inhabited, like the shrine itself, concealed nothing of true value, only forms of bodily corruption: ‘the coles that St Laurence was toasted withal, the paring of St Edmundes naylles, St Thomas of Canterbury penneknyff and his bootes and divers skulls for the headache, pieces of the Holy Cross able to make a whole cross of, other relics for rain’.3 The foundation at Bury, it seems, really had the Reformation coming to it. But it would have lessened the honour of

1

My thanks to Anthony Bale for introducing me to St Edmund; to Chris Lay for assistance; to Andrew Watson and A. I. Doyle for help with Stow’s manuscripts. 2 Letter from John Williams, Ric. Pollard, Philip Parys and John Smyth: see Calendar of Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. J. S. Brewer, 2nd edn, rev. R. H. Brodie, 21 vols. (London, 1920), XIII, i, 192 (p. 66). 3 Calendar, ed. Brewer, IX, 772 (p. 261) (1535); X, 364 (p. 144) (1536). Quotations are from the first, English letter; the second is in Latin – an elaboration of Ap Rice’s earlier statements.

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Alexandra Gillespie Ap Rice’s triumph rather sadly if the ancient establishment had yielded all that it valued on some of its own silver platters. The reformers made no such claim. The task that they undertook was a challenging one, for the confection of stones and metal heaped upon Edmund’s dead body, like the brethren’s confederacy, was ‘very cumbrous’ – the medieval past thick and stubborn, and almost immovable. This essay is concerned with this immovability – with the rather ‘cumbrous’ story of the English saint Edmund at the end of the Middle Ages and with the ways in which, in its unchangefulness in the face of change, that story speaks of the medieval period, of its art and of modern (our own and nascent ‘early modern’) uses for both. It does not present any especially new reading of the late medieval life of St Edmund or the culture that sustained it. It surveys readings that have been offered; it considers possibilities for further work and comments upon what the broad shape of that work might most usefully be. I begin with the reformist account of the foundation at Bury St Edmunds and the shrine of St Edmund in the 1530s because Ap Rice and his fellows’ treatment of the medieval culture that it was their job to ­denigrate and dismantle is evidence of the violence of the English reformations of ­religion and the languages of otherness that enabled that violence – topics of considerable interest in recent scholarship. But I remain interested in what the iconoclasts were unable to change, in evidence of the resistance encountered by any culture that seeks to annihilate or appropriate the energies of another, and in the ways that this resistance might be useful to scholarship. The essay then moves back, to one of the last medieval tellings of St Edmund’s tale, that of the Bury monk, John Lydgate. There have been many discussions of Lydgate’s literary work over the last couple of decades. Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund is accommodated by the concerns of many of these discussions: by a broadly historicist take on fifteenthcentury literature that has made Lydgate a poet-propagandist for his complicated moment; and by codicological studies, some of these focused upon the manuscript forms the Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund, that demonstrate that fifteenth-century provincial book production was a dynamic and innovative industry well before the press’s products arrived on the English scene. But I will also argue that Lydgate’s poem is a more intransigent cultural artefact than these scholarly approaches suggest. Unlike his political values and unlike the forms of commercially produced manuscripts, the forms, material and literary, and the values of Lydgate’s devotional writing, which I will suggest constitute the aesthetic appeal of a poem such as St Edmund, cannot be easily appropriated for modern interpretive schemes. The life of this text is that of a culture made to seem radically distant by the schemes of modernity; the life that inheres in the story of St Edmund is also the meaning that inheres in his relics and his shrine. It may serve as useful reminder that the life of any text is inalienably different from the critical account that is made of 164

The Later Lives of St Edmund it. ‘Poems’, writes Maurice Blanchot, ‘have their voice, which one must hear before thinking one understands them.’4 The essay does not end, as it might, with the sustained close reading of Lydgate’s St Edmund that, I will suggest, might be an alternative to recent historicist and codicological approaches to the text. Instead it moves on; I attempt to build on my argument about the static and unchanging meanings of Edmund’s relics and vita by considering, paradoxically, the changes wrought after the advent of printing and reform. Decades after his shrine was stripped, more than a century after Lydgate penned his vita, St Edmund’s story was still being told in multiple and widely disseminated printed English chronicles. In large part, this was because of the efforts of the Tudor antiquary John Stow, whose approach to the remnants of medieval culture that so preoccupied him will be my concern at this stage in the essay. Stow was accused by his contemporaries of being unable to change the past into something commendable, something properly ordered or reformed. His strange jumble of evidence, his heap of blotted papers, his half-revised editions and his somewhat anxious account of the unreformed past, seem to me a suitable ending for a discussion of Edmund’s rather ‘cumbrous’ late medieval lives.

I In their visitations of and invective against religious houses and shrines like Edmund’s in 1530s England, reformers such as Ap Rice were, like the Wycliffite writers who preceded them, still in the process of establishing a stable vocabulary for the practices they considered superstitious abuse. The English term ‘idol’ was available to them: an idol, in the Wycliffite translation of Corinthians 8. 4, was ‘no thing in the world’, a human image of a false god (MED). But the word, and the word ‘idolatry’, were not used to describe the worship of saints’ relics until the 1540s (OED). The term ‘fetish’ (meaning not the worship of representations but the worship of the spirit that inheres in objects themselves) was, as many commentators have observed, a much later addition to the English language. It is ultimately derived from Latin facticius; it was carried to Africa in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Portuguese colonists and used by them and by later Western anthropologists to describe the ‘inanimate objects’ worshipped by Africa’s ‘primitive’ peoples (OED). But what we might identify as charges of idolatry and fetishization are implicit in the reformist rereading of medieval devotion contained in Ap Rice and the 1538 iconoclasts’ letters to Cromwell about Bury. These letters accuse the devout of mistaking bejewelled representations of the divine for God’s

4

M. Blanchot, A Voice from Elsewhere, trans. C. Mandell (New York, 2007), p. 10.

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Alexandra Gillespie reality. They charge the monks with turning the ideals of Christian life into corrupt confederacies and uneasy silences. And they suggest that all those who visit St Edmund believe the letter – and for that matter, old toenails, skulls and hunks of wood – to be one with the spirit. The trouble with the sullen monks and those who come to gawp at Edmund’s shrine is that they mistake things arranged ‘fetisly’ for things that convey some sort of spiritual truth. The Middle English term I use here, ‘fetisly’, again from ‘facticius’, meaning finely wrought or contrived (MED), is borrowed from Geoffrey Chaucer’s description of the Prioress’s too-elegant French in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales.5 Chaucer means to accommodate all of the contrivances of this woman religious in the satire of his Tales – her dainty table manners, her rich apparel, the jewelled form of her motto ‘Amor vincit omnia’ (I, 162), her lapdog, her learning. In Chaucer’s portrait of the Prioress, the word ‘fetisly’ begins to take on some of the sense of its modern cognate, fetish, for Chaucer’s satire works only if the reader or listener recognizes the Prioress’s fetishized mistake: like the Bury monks, or like pilgrims to St Edmund’s shrine, she has made her spiritual life out of investment in and careful arrangement of things. Her ‘amor’ is not a charitable impulse, but an all-conquering desire to find meaning in the material.6 Chaucer’s portrait of the Prioress and its use of the word ‘fetisly’, I would argue, suggest that a framework for understanding the religious ‘other’ within Christianity itself was established in England by the end of the Middle Ages. It was an understanding that prepared the way for what James Simpson has described as a ‘revolution’ of religion in the sixteenth century.7 That revolution, of course, accommodated Chaucer’s art by reading in his critique of his culture – his wry take on all that was ‘fetisly’ arranged around him – as an absolute rejection of it. The reformers found a way to see, in the Prioress’s mistakes, something ‘right Wycleuian’:8 they suggested that Chaucer recognized the fetishes and idols, the meaningless materiality, of medieval religion. But what was implicit in the charge of fetishization, and what could not be accommodated by that change, was not something the reformers could, finally, escape. In his well-known discussion of the ‘fetish’ and the anthropological, psychoanalytical and Marxist approaches to and uses of its meanings,

5

RC, I, 124. D. Williams, The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 31–49; also A. Taylor, Textual Situations: Three Medieval Manuscripts and their Readers (Philadelphia, 2002), ch. 5. 7 J. Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution: The Oxford English Literary History. Volume 2: 1350–1547 (Oxford, 2002). 8 This is John Foxe’s famous assessment of Chaucer; see Acts and Monuments, STC 11223, sig. DDd4r (1570 edition). 6

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The Later Lives of St Edmund William Pietz defines it as something that depends upon and reinforces ‘a particular order of social relations’; that owns its ‘untranscended’ meaning wholly; that exerts external control over the will of the individuals who revere it; that takes possession of the capacity of those individuals to act or change.9 In that sense, as they stand before the shrine to St Edmund, the reformers are right to recognize it as ‘cumbrous,’ for it is not just the ideas that it represents that they must negotiate – not just the cult of the saints, the doctrine of intercession or doctrine of penance, or any other belief associated with the old religion. It is the shrine itself that is meaningful: the coffin for St Edmund made at the monastery’s expense in 1095; the reliquary for that coffin, adorned with silver plate; the marble base that Abbot Samson installed after the shrine was damaged by fire in 1198; Henry III’s gift of gold and a crown with four flowers on the rim; and two gold crosses and a carbuncle donated by the earl of Lincoln’s gift in the fourteenth century.10 Ap Rice and the 1538 iconoclasts object to a human ‘order’ that has made a meaning that cannot be separated from bones, metal, stone and the work of arranging, changing and venerating these. And if the word ‘fetisly’ describes the way that Cromwell’s men regard the shrine of St Edmund, it works exactly the opposite way as well. The iconoclasts are to change the material evidence of abusive practice for what they perceive to be its true meaning. They will recognize and so turn relics back into markers of corruption. They will take crosses, precious stones and brooches – whatever they can find – and make these into something much more useful, something worth ’5000 marks and above’. One order is imposed upon another here: the materials layered upon Edmund’s shrine make sense to Ap Rice as commodities, and specifically, in the terms of my logic here, as commodity fetishes. Their worth inheres not in themselves or in any devotional practice they might inspire, but in the possibility of their exchange for cash. This ‘exchange value’ is everything to the reformers – to quote Theodor Adorno, ‘it is the only quality that they enjoy’.11 9

W. Pietz, ‘The Problem of the Fetish, I’, Res 9 (1985), 5–17 (pp. 5–6). N. Rogers, ‘The Bury Artists of Harley 2278 and the Origins of Topographical Awareness in English Art’, in Bury St Edmunds: Medieval Art, Architecture, Archaeology and Economy, ed. A. Gransden (London, 1998), pp. 220–7 (pp. 223–4). 11 In Horkheimer and Adorno’s account of the capitalist appropriation of ‘popular’ art, which develops Marx’s original distinction between use and exchange value in his definition of the commodity fetish, use value is replaced by exchange value: ‘Everything has value only in so far as it can be exchanged, not in so far as it is something in itself. For consumers the use value of art, its essence, is a fetish, and the fetish – the social valuation (gesellschaftliche Schätzung) which they mistake for the merit (Rang) of works of art – becomes its only use value, the only quality they enjoy.’ See M. Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (1947), ed. G. S. Noerr, trans. E. Jephcott (Stanford, 2002), p. 128. See also the discussion in P. Stallybrass, ‘The Value of Culture and the Disavowal of Things: draft’, Early Modern Culture: An Electronic Seminar 1 (2000), http://emc.eserver.org/1–1/issue1.html [consulted 1 September 2007]. 10

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Alexandra Gillespie At the moment of its destruction, at least as this is represented in the letters of Ap Rice to Cromwell, the shrine of St Edmund thus has two different meanings for me. On the one hand it is evidence of how, as Simpson argues, the medieval past was obliterated by sixteenth-century English reformations of religion. The cult associated with the king-saint, the diverse beliefs associated with it and the creative expression given to those beliefs, were re-formed: they were imagined as dull confections of fetishized objects and idolatrous practices. Medieval thinkers, Chaucer among them, were quite capable of ridiculing beliefs they did not share; the medieval church and state had and used a variety of mechanisms for the suppression of precisely this sort of dissent. But where, so Simpson argues, medieval culture tended to absorb division of this sort, to accommodate it by slow processes of ‘reform’, it was the work of sixteenth-century reformers to represent the culture they sought to change as so radically ‘other’ to a nascent Protestant English culture and to the centralized authority of its monarch as to deserve destruction at that monarch’s hands. On the other hand, I am interested in the way that, in letters to Cromwell, the past encumbers and in doing so betrays the interests and the slightly unstable metaphorical strategies of the reformers. The monks may only imagine that toenail clippings are worthy of devotion, but their confederate silences, their systems of belief, their way of life, the layers of artistic pretence upon Edmund’s shrine – all these stop Cromwell’s agents in their tracks. They have the power to make the past into something new. In their schemes, the materials of medieval devotion are valued within a framework for their imagined, repeated exchange in a money economy. But the meaning that the reformers afford such materials is thus revealed as the product of an ‘order of social relations’ to which they belong at the very moment that they discover they cannot, without a considerable and violent effort, impose that order upon others. In thinking about the iconoclasts’ actions and that which encumbered them in this way, I am influenced by Paul Stevens’s recent reading of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.12 Stevens’s description of the Protestant, Christian reformation of Shylock and of the immovable social order that he and his pound of flesh represent argues that a traditional economy of grace (in Chaucer’s Prioress’s words, the hope that God will ‘his grete mercy multiplie’, VII, 688) is the basis for the conversion of antiquated custom to new sorts of spiritual capital. In The Merchant of Venice, mercy is ‘twice blest: / It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes’.13 In this, and in the reach of a new global imagination – Antonio’s international business affairs, the wilderness of monkeys for 12

P. Stevens, ‘Heterogenizing Imagination: Globalization, The Merchant of Venice, and the Work of Literary Criticism’, New Literary History 36 (2005), 425–37. 13 W. Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. S. Wells and G. Taylor (Oxford, 1986), Act 4, Scene 1, 183–4.

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The Later Lives of St Edmund which Shylock, unlike Jessica, would not change his bachelor’s ring – early modern culture stages, even if it does not completely realize, the values of a capitalist and an imperialist ‘exchange society’. The stripping of St Edmund’s shrine seems to me a similar kind of performance. The new culture to which Cromwell’s agents imagine they belong is not precisely modern (and it is certainly not precisely ‘capitalist’). It is not even, yet, properly reformed or ‘Protestant’. But as it silently appropriates or noisily destroys all that seems surplus to its own ends – gold and silver, rings, carbuncles, customary worship of the saints, a monastery’s feudal rights to tenure over its lands, everything – it constructs a version of modernity, from which, in retrospect, it seems impossible for anything or anyone to escape. What most attracts me to Stevens’s work, therefore, is his argument about Shylock’s ring. It was given to him by his wife Leah, and he will not change it even for the very best that his Christian adversaries can offer (a whole wilderness of monkeys); it ‘conjures up an elegiac vision of lost Jewish family life’ in an otherwise trimphantly comic plot. In doing so, Stevens argues, it suggests one way for literary criticism to proceed – by revealing ‘the crucial value and fragility of cultural alterity’.14 My own thinking about the medieval past, and the medieval text of Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund, to which I now turn, follows from this. That which remains from the Middle Ages seems to me most interesting when it cannot be accommodated to modern, including the most familiar interpretive, schemes – when it stays still, a part of a culture that may speak to us but will not finally be changed. In this sense, Lydgate’s story of the martyr St Edmund might be more compelling than Chaucer’s of the Prioress, which has always been easy for critics to read. For in its steady resistance to critical pressure, Lydgate’s text might require that its critics describe, delight in, even ‘fetishize’, a kind of otherness in the literary past and perhaps in literature itself.15

II Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund was first edited for the press in 1894 (in a German collection, by Carl Horstmann), and has been edited just once since then, in 1907 (when it was printed as part of Francis Hervey’s Corolla Sancti Eadmundi). It was catalogued as Lydgate’s in some texts that were printed in the sixteenth century: a verse list by Stephen Hawes and the

14 15

Stevens, ‘Heterogenizing Imagination’, pp. 432, 436. I mean to use the word ‘fetishize’ as Pietz (rather than Adorno) uses it: my argument is that that which is ‘untranscended’ in Lydgate’s text might usefully speak of a medieval ‘order of social relations’ otherwise lost to modernity (thus to make the ‘fetish’ a part of, rather than the antithesis of, dialectical reading).

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Alexandra Gillespie printed bibliographies of John Bale and John Stow.16 But otherwise – unlike Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, Troy Book, or Siege of Thebes, all of which were printed and reprinted in the early modern period, all of which are available in hefty EETS editions – The Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund is, until the forthcoming new edition appears, still fixed in the forms in which its fifteenth-century readers knew it. That is, the most readily accessible ‘edition’ of the text is a facsimile – with a helpful introduction and transcription by A. S. G. Edwards – of its most lavish and earliest witness, BL, Harley MS 2278, a 1430s manuscript that was decorated by a group of artisans based around the monastery at Bury and is one of the finest examples of late medieval English luxury book production.17 A reader approaching the Harley 2278 facsimile should not be so dazzled by its shiny surfaces or rich illuminations as to forget that one scholarly view of books produced in monastic contexts in this period, that of David N. Bell in The Cambridge History of the Book, is that ‘the fifteenth century was, in general, a period of intellectual stagnation’ in the English monasteries; that ‘change … comes with the introduction of printing’, which stimulated ‘acquisition’ of books and so ‘intellectual activity’.18 By this reckoning, the book made of the Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund, like the layers of finery on the saint’s casket, is something elegant but without a dynamic or engaging meaning. If the book was intended as a display copy – like the decorated copy of Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Alban and Amphibal produced at the behest of John Whethamstede, abbot of St Albans, in 1452 – then it may even have been placed at and so mapped on to the meaning of St Edmund’s shrine ‘ad feretrum ad laudem et gloriam martiris [in a casket for the praise and glory of the martyr]’, to be gazed upon passively by those who wanted printing and then reform to release them from their stupid thrall.19 Of course, much scholarly work belies Bell’s claims about the late medieval ‘stagnation’ of manuscript production – think of A. I. Doyle’s studies of fifteenth-century monastic book production, or James C. Clark’s account of

16

S. Hawes, The Pastime of Pleasure by Stephen Hawes, ed. William Edward Mead, EETS OS 173 (Oxford, 1928), line 1344 (composed 1503/4); J. Bale, Scriptorium illustrium maioris Brytanniae … catalogus (Basle, 1559), pp. 586–7; and the list appended by John Stow to Thomas Speght’s 1598 edition of Chaucer’s Works, STC 5077, sig. 3Z3r. 17 Rogers, ‘Bury Artists’. 18 D. Bell, ‘Monastic Libraries’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Volume III 1400–1557, ed. L. Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 229–54 (pp. 252–3). 19 The description of the copy of Lydgate’s Life of St Alban is in the abbey’s Liber Benefactorum, cited here from D. R. Howlett, ‘Studies in the Works of John Whethamstede’ (unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1975), p. 206. As I understand it, there is no definitive evidence of the date of the manuscript or evidence that it was ever presented to Henry VI (see Rogers, ‘Bury Artists’ and Scott, ‘Lydgate’s Lives’, p. 351, for the equivocal statement that the book was ‘almost certainly’ for Henry). The copy could have been intended for display at the shrine.

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The Later Lives of St Edmund the manuscript culture of St Alban’s.20 I will elaborate upon the relationship between some of these arguments and manuscripts of the Lydgate’s life of St Edmund below. But the suggestion that the world in which the best copy of St Edmund was produced was as dull as stagnant ditchwater is a tidy match not only for reformist attitudes to worship of St Edmund himself, but for the traditional argument that all of fifteenth-century literature is ‘dull’, and that Lydgate’s poetry is the dullest drivel: written, Joseph Ritson says, by a ‘voluminous, prosaick, and driveling monk’, whose most original work, writes Derek Pearsall, closely resembles ‘flatulence’. It has become conventional for critics to describe the most malign assessments of Lydgate’s literary achievement, and then to attempt a rehabilitation of his reputation (I borrow here, for instance, from Nigel Mortimer’s especially useful history of Lydgate criticism at the beginning of his book on Lydgate’s Fall of Princes).21 I will go one step further here and try to give Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund the unsympathetic close reading it has never attracted (Pearsall reads it closely but rather likes it).22 Finding fault with the text along the Ritson–Pearsall lines is not difficult. Writing of the martyr, borrowing from his literary predecessors in the same unthinking way that he borrows from his Latin sources, Lydgate apostrophizes: O amatist with peynes purpureat, Emeraud trewe of chastite most cleene, Which natwithstandyng thi kyngli hih estat For Cristis feith suffredyst peynes keene. Wherfore of mercy my dulnesse to susteene Into my brest sende a confortatiff Of sum fair language tenbelisshe with thi liff.  (lines 134–40)

This stanza contains all of the elements of Lydgate’s writing at its worst. Its form is that of ‘kyngli hih estat’ – rhyme-royal – but in this instance Lydgate seems metrically inept, unable to handle the syllables he loads into each line (and the eleven syllables that describe his ‘kyngli’ metre in particular). The modesty topos is overfamiliar; the diction as aureate and rhetorically overwrought as Lydgate claims it is not. The ‘amatist’ and ‘emeraud’ are nothing like the Prioress’s brooch, or the marble tomb with which she adorns her own story of a martyred saint, or even the ambiguous images of precious stones that bedeck the works of the Pearl-poet.23 It is only by anachronistic

20

Doyle, ‘Book Production’; J. Clark, A Monastic Renaissance at St Albans: Thomas Walsingham and his Circle, c. 1350–1440 (Oxford, 2004). 21 J. Ritson’s Bibliographica Poetica (London, 1802), p. 87; Pearsall’s views are cited by Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, pp. 2–3. 22 Pearsall, John Lydgate (1970), pp. 281–3. 23 F. Riddy, ‘Jewels in Pearl’, in A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, ed. D. Brewer and J. Gibson (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 143–55.

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Alexandra Gillespie force, and not by subtle irony or even suggestiveness, that a reader can use Lydgate’s images to interrogate the stuff of medieval devotion. The jewels here are just a way to be silent: they are words-as-ornaments, disambiguated and accumulated without taste by a writer who even admits that Edmund ‘sustains’ (enriches but also maintains) his ‘dulnesse’. Lydgate will take his share of the mercy (a ‘confortatiff’) that is in Edmund’s gift by means of his martyr’s ‘liff’ and use it, redundantly, ‘tenbelisshe’ that ‘liff’ once more, as if all the authority for the text, all of its value, comes from and then inheres again in its divine subject, leaving no space for anything that might make a ‘liff’ worth living or a poem worth reading. Lydgate writes his Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund as the Prioress speaks her French, ‘fetisly’, but without any awareness of the complex, problematic nature of this or any other medieval cultural production. As I hope I have made clear, I do not find this way of approaching Lydgate’s poetry satisfactory, and I am of course aware that it emerges from a formalist (or a ‘new critical’) interpretive framework, at its most brilliant in Pearsall’s work, that has been out of fashion for a time. New Historicism – in all of its forms, since I will use the term to totalize some diverse critical work – has been much kinder to Lydgate. David Lawton, Lee Patterson, Paul Strohm and recently Maura Nolan argue that what has been perceived as fifteenth-century ‘dullness’ and intellectual stagnation is in fact a complex, and as handled by these critics fascinating, socio-political effect. It is evidence of the reining-in of the literary exuberance of Lydgate’s fourteenth-century forebears in the context of ecclesiastical censorship of the Wycliffite and Lollard heresies and the Lancastrian princes’ efforts to shore up their usurped authority, or, in Nolan’s especially rich account, evidence of Lygdate’s attempts to reconcile, in these conditions, paradoxical ideas about counsel, common profit and the public sphere.24 A reading of Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund along these lines is possible, and I will hazard one here. The text was written to celebrate, retrospectively, the visit of the childking Henry VI to Bury in 1433–4, at the request of Lydgate’s abbot, William Curteys. It is a politically astute text, one that creates an implicit parallel between virgin kings who hate heterodoxy, whether heresy or paganism; and one that signals and promotes a mutually beneficial relationship between the monarch, a wealthy and powerful English monastic foundation and that monastery’s abbot (the virtuous sponsor of the translation), who is carefully named. As it does this cultural work, Lydgate’s text also describes fractures

24

D. Lawton, ‘Dullness and the Fifteenth Century’, English Literary History 54 (1987), 761–99; L. Patterson, ‘Making Identities in Fifteenth-Century England: Henry V and John Lydgate’, in New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History, ed. J. N. Cox and L. J. Reynolds (Princeton, 1993), pp. 69–107; P. Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 (New Haven CT, 1998), especially ch. 7; Nolan, John Lydgate.

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The Later Lives of St Edmund and paradoxes in the apparently smooth surface of England’s fifteenthcentury polity. Edmund, Lydgate writes, … disdeyned of kyngly excellence To alle fals tonges to yeuen audience. To his hihnesse it was abhomynable. Feynyd lesynges and adulacion, Kankrid mouthes and lippis detestable.  (lines 937–41)

The monk writes a new kind of abjection – all the risk of change and decay – into the traditional image of the body politic; he makes the faces of bad advisers an inverted mirror image of the wilful head of the prince. He thus registers the risk to any regime of the contradictory claims of ‘fals tonges’. False voices are among those we hear in Chaucerian and Langlandian courts, parliaments and pilgrimages; such voices must, in the fifteenth century, be silenced. Lydgate thus describes the way that Edmund’s vita will overwrite the risks that such voices pose. Edmund’s own severed head is the end to which the narrative tends, ‘this holy tresour, this relik souereyne’ (line 1983) – more holy because royal, possessing more temporal might because holy. It is Edmund’s head that holds the text together at its most anxious moments. Lydgate must, after all, write of a young and pacifist king who cannot protect his subjects from some belligerent foreigners: Of [Hingvar’s] komyng the cetesynes vnprouyded, Sleyng the peeple as he wente up and doun. For lik as sheep they stood alone vnguyded Withoute an hed, dispers and eek deuyded.  (lines 1374–7)

The repetition of the diminishing suffix ‘un-’; the relentless negativity of the rhymes that follow it, ‘vnprouyded’, ‘vnguyded’, ‘deuyded’; the breathless accumulation of phrases and words for abandonment combine for a forceful rhetorical effect that seems to match Hinguar’s coming. But the danger – that an untested king, a virgin king, a king of doubtful lineage, might leave his people ‘withoute an hed’ – is forestalled in the next sequence. Edmund turns to one of his clerical advisers, a bishop, in the midst of the crisis. The bishop Koude yeue no counseil in so short a space. Such mortal dreed gan al his look difface That he vnnethe had no woord to speke, Til atte laste thus he gan out breke …  (lines 1565–9)

The bishop is right to be nervous; he proposes a course of action that is just the opposite of the one that the king will take. Pretend to give in, he says, save your head, save the land and people from rape and pillage. Lydgate’s handling of Edmund’s decision to fight and die must redeem the king and the idea of clerical counsel (Lydgate’s own, if not the bishop’s). It must retrieve 173

Alexandra Gillespie the text from what critics detect in so many of Lydgate’s poems of counsel – trembling ‘mortal dreed’ of the writer’s own power to ‘speke’ his own ideas about good rule, and in doing so perhaps ‘breke’, or at least describe cracks, in England’s already fragile polity. But Lydgate is up to the challenge. His Edmund does not choose martyrdom for Christ alone. He chooses it as an exercise of will, in disdain of counsel that he rightly seeks but with which he disagrees. As a result, he loses his head, but he also gets to keep it: But blissid Edmond was not born to feyne. Yt longid not onto his roial blood. His herte euer on departed not on tweyne. Hatid too heedis closed in oon hood. So stable and hool withynne his soule he stood, By manly force of o face and of o cheer …  (lines 1590–5)

This is St Edmund’s miracle: it is the answer to the sheep-like bleating of the ‘vnguyded’ people as they search for their king’s lost head. There may be ‘too’ or more meanings for Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund, as there may be for any ‘feyned’ text: literature, like counsel, like the ‘liff’ of a king-saint, is full of complexity and contradiction that threatens to overspill its own bounds. But, schooled in a careful, clever and deliberate dullness, Lydgate writes just ‘o’ meaning for his life of St Edmund, a meaning at once inscribed and enshrined in a ‘holy treasure’, all of it ‘here! here! here!’ I first presented this account of Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund some time before the publication of Larry Scanlon and James Simpson’s collection of essays, John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England. Fiona Somerset and Ruth Nisse’s chapters in that volume offer readings of the poem much like the one here; Somerset’s argues persuasively – from historical evidence of the events and concerns of the reign of the poem’s dedicatee Henry VI – that Lydgate the hagiographer is always, also, Lydgate the Lancastrian ‘ideologue’ (a word by which Somerset means to suggest something more than just ‘poet-propagandist’).25 Another reading of this text is made possible by James Simpson’s arguments about Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes and Churl and the Bird:26 perhaps the bishop’s stuttering voice is meant to map on to Lydgate’s ‘dreed’-filled one because the bishop’s critique of Edmund’s manly, bloody and futile end is meant to map on to Lydgate’s

25

Somerset, ‘“Hard is with Seyntis’”; R. Nisse, ‘“Was it not Routhe to Se?”: Lydgate and the Styles of Martyrdom’, in John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England, ed. Scanlon and Simpson, pp. 279–98. 26 J. Simpson, ‘“Dysemol Daies and Fatal Houres”: Lydgate’s Destruction of Thebes and Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale’, in The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray, ed. H. Cooper and S. Mapstone (Oxford, 1997), pp. 15–33; and ‘“For al my Body … Weieth Nat an Unce”: Empty Poets and Rhetorical Weight in Lydgate’s Churl and the Bird’, in John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England, ed. Scanlon and Simpson, pp. 129–46.

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The Later Lives of St Edmund critique of a belligerent Lancastrian leadership and the bloody excesses of his violent century. My point is simply that The Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund can be accommodated to the broadly historicist shape of Lydgate studies at present: a variety of recent readings of his work reinforce this point. Lydgate’s poem is securely located within another body of work concerning fifteenth-century culture. Since Malcolm Parkes and A. I. Doyle published an important essay on the copying of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Gower’s Confessio Amantis, arguing for the existence but not the regularized practice of commercial scribes in London after 1400, work on late medieval English books has tended to focus on evidence for paid, ‘professional’ scribal activity – on repeated commissions of, and collaborations, between scribes; standardization of book format and illustration; and the use of single exemplars for multiple copies. All of this evidence suggests that Bell, cited above, is simply wrong to argue that the fifteenth century was a period of ‘stag­nation’ for medieval book production. Far from it: the rise of a late medieval trade in English manuscript books matched continental trends and preceded and informed ‘print culture’s’ commodification of the book and development of new systems for the commercial exchange of texts.27 It was Doyle who first argued that some of the best evidence for a dynamic late medieval manuscript culture comes in the shape of The Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund. A scribe known as the ‘Edmund-Fremund’ scribe (or perhaps two or more scribes with similar styles), linked to the abbey at Bury and thought to have been based in Suffolk in the 1460s, appears to have operated what Doyle describes as a ‘Lydgate-factory’, an assembly-line for the repeated production of the writer’s texts, which were then decorated by artists, local and metropolitan, who were themselves busy developing methods for the standardization and even speculative production of manuscript books. A. S. G. Edwards, Stephen Reimer and Linne R. Mooney have added further evidence to Doyle’s preliminary findings, and Kathleen Scott has argued that this evidence supplies a new way for scholars to read texts such as Lydgate’s Lives.28 The readers of

27

A. I. Doyle and M. B. Parkes, ‘The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the Early Fifteenth Century’, in Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts and Libraries: Essays Presented to N. R. Ker, ed. M. B. Parkes and A. G. Watson (London, 1978), pp. 163–210; and L. R. Mooney, ‘Professional Scribes?: Identifying English Scribes who had a hand in more than one manuscript’, in New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies, ed. D. Pearsall (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 131–41. 28 The Edmund-Fremund scribe produced copies of The Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund in the Arundel Castle manuscript; London, BL Yates Thompson MS 47; Bodleian MS Ashmole 46 and, probably, Harley MS 4826. He also copied Lydgate and Benedict Burgh’s Secrees of Old Philisoffres, BL Sloane MS 2464 and Bodleian Library MS Laud misc. 673; two versions of The Fall of Princes, BL Harley MS 1766 and Montréal, McGill University Libraries MS 143, and a Troy Book, BL Arundel MS 99. See (with summaries of the earlier scholarship of Doyle’s 1967 Lyell Lectures and A. S. G. Edwards), Scott, ‘Lydgate’s Lives’, and Later Gothic Manuscripts, 1390–1490, II, 308; and S. R. Reimer and

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Alexandra Gillespie the products of the ‘Edmund-Fremund’ scribe, and his associates and artisans like him, were often lay members of the gentry and merchant classes, and as such ‘new’ sorts of owners for English manuscript books, which in earlier centuries tended to end up in the hands of the nobility or religious.29 Scott suggests that the books that these new readers held in their hands cannot be understood outside the commercial contexts into which literature had passed. She describes the commercial decoration of three of the ‘EdmundFremund’ manuscripts of The Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund and one of the Fall of Princes (the latter perhaps made for the Bury monks): The essential element in all four introductory miniatures is the enthroned figure of St Edmund placed exactly in the centre of an oblong picture space. In the Yates Thompson miniature the saint is alone … In the Arundel Castle and Oxford copies [there is] a kneeling figure of a black monk …; and in the same scene, transferred to the Fall of Princes, where it has no particular relevance to the text, a kneeling figure of a black monk occurs on each side of the saint. … Commercial acumen showed itself – as it had in other aspects of the production of these copies – in realizing the efficiency of snapping figures in and out of scenes.

Her conclusion is unequivocal: books ‘standardized in content … are, therefore, not a reading of a text’.30 They represent instead transactions between savvy bespoke producers and wealthy patrons, who were just as interested in displaying their wealth and connoisseurship as they were in literary content – at least, we have as much evidence of their love of, or willingness to pay for, codicological display, things arranged ‘fetisly’ in a book, as of their pleasure in saints’ lives.31 Scholarly assessment of an increasingly organized trade that P. Farvolden, ‘Of Arms and the Manuscript: The Date and Provenance of Harley 2255’, Journal of the Early Book Society 8 (2005), 239–60. 29 That there was new readership for has been argued in a variety of ways: A. S. G. Edwards and D. Pearsall note that ‘the most cursory comparison of the seventy-five year periods on either side of 1400 reveals … the difference between a rate of production that leaves extant about thirty [vernacular literary] manuscripts and one that leaves extant about six hundred’ (in ‘The Manuscripts of the Major English Poetic Texts’, in Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375–1475 ed. J. Griffths and D. Pearsall (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 257–78 (p. 257); see also E. Kwakkel, ‘A New Type of Book for a New Type of Reader: The Emergence of Paper in Vernacular Book Production’, The Library, 7th ser., 4 (2003), 219–48. 30 K. Scott, ‘Caveat Lector: Ownership and Standardization in the Illustration of FifteenthCentury English Manuscripts’, English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700 1 (1989), 19–63 (pp. 39–42, 51). 31 For a similar argument, see L. Lawton, ‘The Illustration of Late Medieval Secular Texts, with Special Reference to Lydgate’s Troy Book’, in Manuscripts and Readers in FifteenthCentury England: The Literary Implications of Manuscript Study, Essays from the 1981 Conference at the University of York, ed. D. Pearsall (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 41–69; C. M. Meale, ‘Patrons, Buyers and Owners: Book Production and Social Status’, in Book Production, ed. Griffiths and Pearsall, pp. 201–38.

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The Later Lives of St Edmund anticipated and then counted on the commercial value of texts and the books that bore them – that thought about the Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund in much the same way that Ap Rice thought about the jewels on the saint’s shrine – thus privileges the moment at which Lydgate’s literary text became a commodity, the product of a ‘factory’, harbinger of a culture in which the best-known literary works are always mass-produced consumables, ready for exchange. It is at about this point that I wonder whether the focus of the two schools of thought that usually admit some discussion of Lydate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund – New Historicism and fifteenth-century manuscript studies – leave something to be desired or at least some things unsaid. The effect of both approaches is to transform Lydgate’s poem about St Edmund in particular ways. Lydgate’s text is not about the life of St Edmund so much as it is about that life’s relevance to a fractured Lancastrian polity. It is not evidence of any readerly interest in St Edmund, so much as it is evidence of a commercial book trade in which patrons and producers substituted the process of exchange, and value of the commodities so exchanged, for any other way of ‘reading’ or understanding texts. It seems to me that neither of these ways of discussing the text is much concerned with the ‘cultural alterity’ that interests me in Paul Stevens’s reading of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, above. On the contrary, both these approaches seem involved in an attempt to do what early modernity could do with Chaucer, but had a tougher time doing with Lydgate: that is, to bring him up to date. The Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund, it seems, is an early publishers’ best-seller, the first stirrings of print’s ‘factory’-based culture of mass production. And Lydgate the Lancastrian apologist is, at least in recent criticism, an early writer of modern political discourse. His avant garde ‘politique’ language is described by Paul Strohm as the basis for early modern conceptions of counsel, which is one way to account for the post-Reformation life, if not of his saints’ lives, at least Lydgate’s secular writings. The monk of Bury’s Fall of Princes, Siege of Thebes, Troy Book, Verses on the Kings and Serpent of Division did not disappear when the community at Bury St Edmunds was dissolved, but, as Nigel Mortimer and I have shown, were reprinted, reread and reworked well into the Elizabethan period.32 So the narrative need not be one about otherness and loss: there is no break here between manuscript and print, or medieval and early modern ways of imagining the world. But there is a break in the story of St Edmund. The reformers are a part of this break as they smash Edmund’s shrine apart. Lydgate is a part of it too. His St Edmund was not published in the sixteenth century. Unlike his major secular works, it has not yet been published, at least in a scholarly

32

Mortimer, Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, pp. 261–77; and A. Gillespie, Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydate, and Their Books, 1473–1557 (Oxford, 2006), ch. 5.

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Alexandra Gillespie edition, in the twentieth or twenty-first century either. This is, in part, just an accident: an edition based on a 1960s dissertation was planned by EETS but never completed; a recent project to edit the text online is incomplete (though it has produced some interesting recent discussion).33 But it is also, in part, because Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund is not just about Henry VI and political counsel, it is also about that which the Reformation and its dominant version of modernity has constructed as ‘other’: Lydgate’s, his community’s and his culture’s belief in the power of relics, pilgrimage, donation, good works, monastic vows and the ability of stories of the lives of saints to change lives, to make the partial whole, to sanctify the flesh, to speak at once of the world and of the divine – as does the life of St Edmund, king and martyr. Of course, any number of studies of medieval texts and culture take account of these beliefs: in James Simpson’s scholarship there exists a powerful model for criticism that finds, for instance in Lydgate’s depictions of religious imagery in the Life of Our Lady, the complexity and elegance of thought that it was the Reformation’s business to strip back, swap for tales of idolatry and fetishization, and finally suppress.34 But it is striking how little attention has otherwise been afforded to Lydgate’s religious writings in recent scholarship, and how determined the effort is in some of that scholarship to make even Lydgate’s hagiography secular in its concerns. And it is interesting to me that, in a text such as The Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund, the devotional and spiritual is inseparable from that other aspect of Lydgate’s writing that is also a little ‘cumbrous’ for modern criticism: his aesthetic – about which there is still very little positive to say. My intention here is to marry the observation that it would be useful to read St Edmund as a devotional text with another, newer (or perhaps a revision of an older) way of thinking about Lydgate’s poetry and medieval writing more generally. In their chapters in the collection John Lydgate, Larry Scanlon, Maura Nolan and Philippa Hardman each propose, in different ways, that Lydgate’s writings deserve attention as ‘literary documents’: aesthetic reflections and the constituent parts of a coherent ‘poetic’.35 They suggest that we read Lydgate’s poems ‘closely’. Christopher Cannon proposes something 33

S. R. Reimer, ‘The Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund’, The Canon of John Lydgate Project, University of Alberta, 2006, http://www.ualberta.ca/~sreimer/ edmund/edmund. htm [consulted 6 October 2008]; and ‘Unbinding Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund’, in The Book Unbound: Editing and Reading Medieval Manuscripts and Texts, ed. S. Echard and S. Partridge (Toronto, 2004), pp. 169–89. 34 Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, ch. 8, ‘Moving Images’. 35 P. Hardman, ‘Lydgate’s Uneasy Syntax’, in John Lydgate, ed. Scanlon and Simpson, pp. 12–35; M. Nolan, ‘The Performance of the Literary: Lydgate’s Mummings’, in John Lydgate, ed. Scanlon and Simpson, pp. 169–206; and L. Scanlon, ‘Lydgate’s Poetics: Laureation and Domesticity in The Temple of Glass’, in John Lydgate, ed. Scanlon and Simpson, pp. 61–97.

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The Later Lives of St Edmund similar in his chapter on ‘Form’ in a recent volume of new essays on medieval literature: that scholars think again about ‘the structural levels we traditionally anatomize when we refer to “literary form” … [and] the integration of all those levels’, for these together are the structure of ‘a text’s meaning’.36 In doing so all these critics must argue – even as their discussions move in other directions – that poems are poems. They have a poetic or aesthetic ‘form’, or what Blanchot calls, as I cite him above, a ‘voice’, that precedes, enables and changes each reading of that form, and that changes in, but is not finally changed by, reading.37 Those of us schooled in 1980s and 1990s ‘new’ historicisms were taught to be rather suspicious of such claims – to discount anything that smacked of essentialism; to write about each period’s construction and then reconstruction of the field of the literary; to collapse the distinction between artistic and other productions and read closely for the sake of history not of art. What I want to propose is that a text such as Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund is, on the one hand, evidence of a ‘fragile … cultural alterity’ we should account for: it is evidence of the otherness, that, as Simpson argues, is always the legacy of the Reformation’s – and thus early modernity’s – rejection of the medieval past. I build on Simpson’s case as I argue that this alterity, because (like stubborn Shylock in The Merchant of Venice) it will not be wholly suppressed, threatens the culture that sought to suppress it. The past’s ‘relics’ suggest that cultural change is just the substitution of one order, one set of tropes, fetishes and idols, for another. On the other hand, I propose that Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund is evidence of the neglected alterity of the literary text itself. And I argue that Lydgate situates its codicological and literary forms in precisely the place he situates Edmund’s relics, his cult and his ‘life’. These are the ‘fetisly’ arranged (or for a reformer ‘fetishized’) objects of each reader’s and viewer’s reverence; they are intended for reverence: they are meant to order our desire, and own our capacity to read and act. Consider the very lines from Lydgate’s poem that I malign in my ‘new critical’ reading above: Wherfore of mercy my dulnesse to susteene Into my brest sende a confortatiff Of sum fair language tenbelisshe with thi liff.  (lines 134–40)

Lydgate’s syntax in the final couplet in this rhyme-royal stanza is ambiguous. 36

C. Cannon, ‘Form’, in Oxford Twenty First-Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English, ed. P. Strohm (Oxford, 2007), pp. 177–90 (p. 178). 37 D. Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London, 2004) is an especially persuasive recent argument for attention not only to the alterity recorded in texts, but the texts’ own performative otherness, the inexhaustible ‘singularity’ that is an effect of their literariness.

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Alexandra Gillespie Either Lydgate asks that Edmund send him ‘fair language’ with which to embellish the saint’s life, or the poet will embellish his language with the ‘confortatiff’ (the salve) that is Edmund’s ‘liff’. The two meanings seem to me to merge, so that the poet’s ‘dulnesse’ involves a willing – a deliberately sustained – deadening of his ‘language’, one that mimics the saint’s own martyrdom and so lays claim to some part of the holy ‘liff’ (the poet takes it ‘into my brest’) that he can then describe in such enriched, embellished, sustained terms. Obviously, Lydgate describes an affective Christian devotion, and the images and texts – which are suitable combined in illustrated manuscript copies of The Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund, including the one that was perhaps kept at the saint’s shrine, alongside its plate and carbuncles – that facilitated this kind of medieval religious observance. And obviously, that affective devotion could be the basis for a reading of the text that was much less concerned with its political significance than previous readings have been; and a reading of the manuscripts of The Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund that argued that all of its bespoke and commercially replicated forms are designed for pious ‘readings’ of Edmund’s vita, rather than just expediency. But I want to end my discussion of Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund by suggesting, instead, that the poet is concerned with the formal properties of art as well as the forms of devotions: with ‘fair language’ and the ‘liff’ that it sustains. If we let them, imaginative texts, like the enshrined relics of a saint as they are perceived by an unreformed believer, dull our sense of our own ‘liff’ so that we might live differently; they work on us externally; they own what we ‘enjoy’. It is in this sense, perhaps, that Lydgate can make his poem a sort of dull equivalent to Edmund’s own ‘liff’, a powerful ‘confortatiff’ to readers. It is in this sense that there are overlooked ‘energies’ in Lydgate’s intractable, unpublishable story of St Edmund – and for a while ‘old-fashioned’ ideas about the value of poetry and its relationship to what it is ‘cumbrous’ about the medieval past that, it seems to me, have new urgency.

III My approach to this point, then, argues for a resemblance between the bejewelled shrine of St Edmund, Shylock’s bachelor’s ring, Lydgate’s Lives, manuscript copies of it, and poetic texts themselves. I am arguing that all these are evidence of a ‘fragile … cultural alterity’ that might be made central to literary criticism. I will circle back to an earlier part of my discussion in order to conclude it. The destruction of Edmund’s shrine, I argue above, was part of the reformist project to convert or despoil all that was other to its purposes. I also argue that the medieval past – rendered ‘other’ to the reformist definition of early modernity – encumbered, threatened the integrity of, the very historical processes that defined it in this way. This is my modification (or 180

The Later Lives of St Edmund perhaps just extension) of Simpson’s argument about the sixteenth-century’s ‘cultural revolution’ upon which much of my own thinking depends. In Reform and Cultural Revolution, Simpson argues that by stripping shrines, smashing windows, outlawing plays, failing to print some books, and facilitating the movement of whole monastic libraries of other books, as John Bale complains, to stacyoners and boke bynders store howses … grosers, sopesellars, taylers, and other occupyers shoppes … shyppes ready to be carryed ouer the sea into Flaunders to be solde … in those vncircumspect and carelesse dayes, [when] there was no quyckar merchaundyce than lybrary bokes,38

the revolutions of ‘Renaissance’, early modernity and reform left little room for the old. There were exceptions to this: texts such as Chaucer’s ‘Prioress’s Tale’ were ‘rendered thoroughly Protestant’, Simpson argues, by their inclusion along the rest of Chaucer’s Works in editions that were produced by reform-minded printers and publishers, who ascribed Lollard dialogues as well as saint’s lives to the poet, and emphasized the fictionality of texts that did not quite fit their Protestant order for things.39 But (and I have argued this with respect to Chaucer’s Works elsewhere), some old stories – about St Edmund for instance – could neither be changed for cash in quite the same way that the emerald cross and the gold and silver on the royal saint’s casket could, nor readily accommodated by printerly schemes that made and then sold medieval writing as the product of some earlier reformation. John Stow, for instance, a Tudor antiquary, editor of Chaucer, collector of old books, England’s most prolific writer of early modern chronicle history, and the first surveyor of its City of London, was also a rewriter and a collector of copies of Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund. His interest in and use of Lydgate’s text will be described in the final section of this essay. Stow’s work on medieval texts could and will be ascribed to his relationship to a commercial, sixteenth-century book trade. His interest could also be ascribed to what some of his biographers have described as his only outwardly conformist nostalgia for the old religion.40 If Stow never wholeheartedly left the Middle 38

Bale’s 1560 letter to Archbishop Matthew Parker, now Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 7489, fol. 1r, in The Recovery of the Past in Early Elizabethan England: Documents by John Bale and John Joscelyn from the Circle of Matthew Parker, ed. T. Graham and A. G. Watson, Cambridge Bibliographical Society Monograph 13 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 17–53 (p. 17). 39 See Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, p. 41, and my development of this argument in Print Culture and the Medieval Author, ch. 5. 40 See I. Archer, ‘John Stow, Citizen and Historian’, in John Stow (1525–1605) and the Making of the English Past, ed. I. Gadd and A. Gillespie (London, 2004), pp. 13–26; and P. Collinson, ‘John Stow and Nostalgic Antiquarianism’, in Imagining Early Modern London: Perceptions and Portrayals of the City from Stow to Strype, 1598–1720, ed. J. F. Merritt (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 27–51.

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Alexandra Gillespie Ages, then his copies and versions of the story of St Edmund are simply out of place, improperly unreformed and so not properly early modern. But I think that these points, while important, miss another equally important one. The Middle Ages were among those things left over by the ideological and social reformations of the sixteenth century. Medieval cultural products could sometimes be useful, readily exchanged for new meaning. But in their increasingly fragile state, and by their evidence of an alternative way of ordering the world, they also exposed, and still reveal, the fractured basis for early modernity’s revolutionary schemes. Stow’s interest in Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund can be traced within the books made of the poem. Stow collected, or at least tracked down, read and annotated, several manuscripts of the text; notes in his distinctive hand appear in the Arundel Castle manuscript, BL, Harley MS 372, and Oxford, Bodleian MS Ashmole 59. He transcribed sections of the poem into his notebook, now BL, Harley MS 367. He apparently composed his own prose vita of St Edmund, loosely based on Lydgate’s version of events, and extant only as a fragment, copied on the back of an envelope to a letter from someone at the Leadenhall in London to Stow, his ‘assurid frend’ (now BL, Harley MS 247, fol. 45r, usually described, incorrectly, as a partial transcription of Lydgate’s text).41 And, using Lydgate’s text and the various Latin versions of the vita available to him, Stow had the story of Edmund printed. Edmund and Lydgate are there at the very beginning of Stow’s long career as a producer of chronicles of English history, in his 1565 octavo Summarie of Englyshe chronicles (STC 23319): A company of Danes entred the countrey of Norffolke, where they slue the holy kyng Edmonde, which gouerned the prouince of Norffolke: because he wolde not forsake the faith of Christ. Of this kynge Edmunde, John Lidgate, monke of Bury hath compyled a goodly treatice in englishe meter heroicall. (fol. 39v)

A new edition of the Summarie of 1566 tells the same story (STC 23319.5). The Summarie of 1570 tells a longer version, in which Edmund is ‘beaten with battes, then scourged with whippes, he stil calling on the name of Jesus, his aduersaries in a great rage shotte at him, till his body was as full of shaftes 41

See A. Renoir and C. D. Benson, ‘XVI: John Lydgate’, in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, gen. ed. J. Burke Severs and A. E. Hartung, 11 vols. (Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1967–), VI, 1809–1920, 2071–175; Edwards and Miller, ‘John Stowe’; and Edwards, ‘John Stow and Middle English Literature’, in John Stow, ed. Gadd and Gillespie, pp. 109–18; I do not include Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 46, noted by Edwards, in which the sixteenth-century hands are not close enough to Stow’s for me to ascribe them to him with confidence. Harley 372 is not included in Edwards’s list, perhaps because Stow’s single note appears in a separate booklet from that containing The Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund; there is no particular reason, however, to think that the book was not together when Stow saw it.

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The Later Lives of St Edmund as an Vrchin is full of prickes, and lastly they stroke of his head’ (STC 23322, fols. 50r–v). Lydgate is not mentioned (nor is any other source). This second version of the story, sometimes in slightly more and sometimes less detail, is found also in the 1574 and 1575 editions (STC 23324–5); in the duodecimo Summarye of the chronicles of Englande … abridged of 1573, 1579, 1598 and 1604 (STC 23325.6–5.7 and 23338–9); and in the expanded quarto Chronicles of England of 1580 (STC 23333). No version of the story at all is told (or not so far as I could find it) in the Summarie of 1590 or the Summarye … abridged of 1587 (STC 23325.2 and 23326). The quarto Annales of 1592, larger again than the Chronicles of 1580, as well as all further editions of this book, contain an account of St Edmund’s life added to the stock (but here more detailed) account of his death. He ‘learned his Psalter in the Saxon tongue, which Booke was reserued in the Reuestrie of the Monastery of Saint Edmundsbury, till the same Church was suppressed in the reigne of King Henrie the eyght’. Once struck off, his head was thrown in ‘into a bush’ (STC 23334, p. 76).42 Missing from all of Stow’s lives of St Edmund is the saint’s miracle itself, the moment at which the head of the saint is lost and then restored: the ‘holy treasure’, which is an important part of any historicist reading of the text and a vital aspect of its devotional and aesthetic meaning. The head, like Edmund’s ‘lif’, is untranscended in this text: it is akin to the poem itself. It is struck from Edmund’s body, separated from counsel and community, cut off from sovereign power – from all that makes it meaningful – but it still speaks its whole meaning, by God’s grace, and because that is the way that poetic devices work. In this sense, it is possible (though as I will shortly argue, it may not be necessary or desirable) to align Stow’s use of the story with Ap Rice’s acquisitive response to the riches on Edmund’s shrine. Stow takes what he can from Lydgate’s dense work of art; he defaces its complexity; slices off Edmund’s all-important head; and he sells it on in his oft-reprinted postReformation histories. His treatment of Edmund’s vita may be compared with his treatment of the story with which he usually pairs the life of the king-saint, that of St Ebbe of Colyngham, who, with the nuns of her abbey, cut off her nose and lips better to preserve her virginity from the Danes. The marginal gloss to the narrative in the 1565 Summarie (‘Women to kepe their chastity disfigured them selues by cuttinge of theyr noses and ouerlyppes’, fols. 39v–40r) does not speak to the spiritual meaning of Ebbe’s martyrdom: 42

The remaining editions of Annales are STC 23335–7. I consulted copies of many of the editions I describe in Cambridge University Library; for those not held by that library I consulted the digital version of the UMI microfilm on Early English Books Online, ProQuest Information and Learning Company, 2003–2005 http://eebo.chadwyck.com/ search [consulted 28 October 2004]. EEBO does not always allow reliable access to these books; but even the STC account of editions, issues, variants and dates for Stow’s chronicles could do with revision. I have not consulted any copy of STC 23323.5 (an issue of 1573 Summarie) or STC 23325.8 or 23328.5 (an issue and an edition of Summarye … abridged).

183

Alexandra Gillespie her real value is as a titillating scrap, a quick and readily consumed comment on the feminine condition, which is perfectly evident when Stow summarizes his own gloss in the 1579 Summarye … abridged: ‘Chastitie before beautie preferred’ (STC 23325.7, p. 79). Edmund’s story has, likewise, been stripped of its devotional meaning, and its commercial value has been discovered in the process. Work by D. R. Woolf, Anthony Bale and Alfred Hiatt reminds us that Stow’s chronicles, mass-printed and in competition with those of Richard Grafton and the Holinshed team, among others, were ‘merchaundyse’, updated, abbreviated, pithily summarized in order that they might be ‘quyckar’ – more saleable than the last word printed on the matter.43 However, I find some of the evidence of Stow’s use of Lydgate’s poem does not fit perfectly into this account of the exigencies of sixteenth-century historiography and print publication. Stow’s detail is not accumulated in any systematic way; the Summary … abridged of 1573 has a longer version of St Edmund’s story than the more monumental edition of Chronicles of 1580 or the unabridged Summarie of 1590 where the story is missed out entirely. The additional information that Edmund’s head ended up in ‘a bush’ hardly seems like an enlargement or repackaging of the story for new readers who seek to make new meaning from the Annales of 1592, but it is there anyway. It seems like a detail added by someone who simply delights in detail, in the accumulation of things. By his contemporaries, Stow’s histories were thought of as vast vulgar tomes [which] seem to resemble some huge disproportionable temple […] in which store of rich marble, and many goodly statues, columns, arks, and antique pieces, recover’d from out of innumerable ruins, are here and there in greater number then commendable order erected.44

They were made ‘fetisly’, with more concern for the collection of great heaps of facts than the proper, reformed, early modern-historiographical meaning of things. In this, they resemble the ruins of unreformed shrines from which they are in part confected, and whose destruction John Stow seems to regret as he notes, amid his tales in the Annales of churches and their inhabitants burned and destroyed by ravening Danes, a ‘Church … suppressed in the reigne of King Henrie the eyght’ and a book, a relic from the life of a saint, gone missing in consequence.45 It seems to me that the material products of a lost, medieval social order and the medieval texts are somehow untran-

43

A. Hiatt, ‘Stow, Grafton, and Fifteenth-Century Historiography’, in John Stow, ed. Gadd and Gillespie, pp. 45–55; A. Bale, ‘Stow’s Medievalism and Antique Judaism’, in John Stow, ed. Gadd and Gillespie, pp. 69–80; D. R. Woolf, Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000). 44 E. Bolton, Hypercritica: or a Rule of Judgment for the Writing of our Histories (London, 1621), cited and discussed helpfully by Archer, ‘John Stow’, p. 13. 45 J. Stow, The Annales of England, STC 23334 (London, 1592), p. 79.

184

The Later Lives of St Edmund scended in Stow’s writing: they own what he enjoys. They supply details that can be and are reformed and renewed, but they also remain stories and scraps, like toenail parings and rich marble columns, or like the forms of a work of art, which refer to nothing that makes sense to reform or early modernity, but only to themselves, but which, as such, are freely available to Stow, who copies them onto the back of an envelope and incorporates them into a ‘liff’. Stow’s use of Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund suggests that the imposition, by violently coercive or metaphorical means of a new order – whether reform or the values of an ‘exchange society’ – is never wholly complete or unencumbered. Consider, finally, how the details of Edmund’s life supply unexpected, miraculous detail in Stow’s 1598 Survey of London: For I reade in the historie of Edmond king of the East Angles, written by Abbo Floriacensis, and by Burchard somtime Secretarie to Offa king of Marcia, but since by Iohn Lidgate Monk of Bery, that in the yeare 1010. the Danes spoiling the kingdome of the East Angles, Alwyne Bishop of Helmeham, caused the body of king Edmond the Martyre to bee brought from Bedrisworth (now called Bury Saint Edmondes,) through the kingdome of the East Saxons, and so to London in at Cripplegate, a place sayeth mine Author so called of Criples begging there: at which gate, (it was said) the body entering, miracles were wrought, as some of the Lame to goe vpright, praysing God.46

Stow, who conformed to the new religion, and knows that this history fits rather awkwardly within his reformed moment, also knows how to hedge his bets. ‘[I]t was said’ miracles were wrought – said in the past, and not by him, not even by his ‘Author’. But Stow also finds in the story of St Edmund things that can be translated but not changed, or even smoothed away by his careful rhetoric, as they are carried from source to Survey. The body of Edmund suggests an almost miraculous, fragile continuity between England’s pre and post-Reformation culture, and at the same time a break in the wall that reform erected between the medieval and early modern age. ‘[M]ine Author’, writes Stow – who is that monk Lydgate, silent on most matters that might concern the early modern ‘now’ – describes the place that the lame and blind and their saint had, and still have, in a history of ‘Cripplegate’. The static energy of Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund, the ‘vast’ lists Stow drew from this and other texts but could not get into ‘commendable order’, may suggest those aspects of the medieval text – of the products of any period or culture – that cannot be readily appropriated, reformed or exchanged, that are, finally, too ‘cumbrous to deface’.

46

Stow, A Survey of London by John Stow, Reprinted from the Text of 1603, ed. C. L. Kingsford, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1908), I, 33.

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SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY This bibliography includes only manuscripts consulted in the essays in this collection and selected items concerning the cult of St Edmund and the history of the abbey at Bury. It is designed to assist scholars in locating key reading concerning St Edmund’s medieval cult. Manuscripts consulted Arundel Castle, His Grace the Duke of Norfolk, sine numero (Lydgate, Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund) Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 2 (Bury Bible) Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 251 (English history) Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 7489 (letters of John Bale, etc.) Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 47 (Bury inventories, etc.) Cambridge, St John’s College MS 138 (motets, etc.) Cambridge, Trinity College MS 770 (Annals of St Neots) Cambridge, University Library MS Ee.2.15 (Lydgate, Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund) Cambridge, University Library MS Ff.1.27 (Geoffrey of Wells, Liber de infantia sancti Edmundi) Cambridge, University Library MS Ff.2.29 (polyphony, etc.) Cambridge, University Library MS Ff.2.33 (Bury charters) Copenhagen, Royal Library, MS Gl.Kgl.S.1588 (Abbo, Passio S. Eadmundi) Dublin, Trinity College MS 172 (saints’ lives) Dublin, Trinity College MS 492 (Bede, Historia ecclesiastica) Durham, Cathedral Library, C.I.20 (motets, etc.) Exeter, Devon County Record Office Misc. Roll 59 (incl. fragments of Lydgate, Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund) Hereford, Cathedral Library MS P. 3.1 (Geoffrey of Wells, Liber de infantia sancti Edmundi) Kew, National Archives C.54/292 (annuities, etc.) Kew, National Archives C.66/451 (annuities, etc.) Kew, National Archives SC.6/HENVIII/3397 (Bury, feretrar’s accounts) Kew, National Archives SC.8/248 (petitions, etc.) London, BL Add. MS 14848 (Curteys register) London, BL Add. MS 18752 (Secreta philosophorum, etc.) London, BL Add. MS 24199 (settings of the Sanctus, etc.) London, BL Add. MS 34360 (Lydgate, Chaucer, etc.) London, BL Add. MS 70513 (lives of saints) London, BL Arundel MS 99 (Lydgate, Troy Book) London, BL Arundel MS 119 (Lydgate, Siege of Thebes)

187

Select Bibliography London, BL Cotton MS Claudius A.xii (Astone, Vita et Passio) London, BL Cotton MS Julius E.vii (Ælfric, Homilies) London, BL Cotton MS Titus A.viii (Osbert of Clare) London, BL Cotton MS Vespasian B.vi (genealogy) London, BL Harley MS 247 (miscellany) London, BL Harley MS 367 (Stow, notebook) London, BL Harley MS 372 (Lydgate, Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund) London, BL Harley MS 978 (miscellany) London, BL Harley MS 1766 (Lydgate, Fall of Princes) London, BL Harley MS 2278 (Lydgate, Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund) London, BL Harley MS 2977 (Bury charters, etc.) London, BL Harley MS 4826 (Lydgate, Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund) London, BL Harley MS 7333 (Lydgate, Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund) London, BL Royal 12.C.vi (Bury music, etc.) London, BL Sloane MS 2464 (Lydgate and Burgh, Secrees) London, BL Sloane MS 2593 (Bury carols, etc.) London, BL Yates Thompson MS 47 (Lydgate, Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund) Manchester, Chetham’s Library MS 6709 (Lydgate, Chaucer) Montréal, McGill University Libraries MS 143 (Lydgate, Fall of Princes) New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS M.736 (Abbo, Life of St Edmund) Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 46 (Lydgate, Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund) Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 240 (Bury chronicles, etc.) Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 297 (John of Worcester, Chronica chronicarum) Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Digby 109 (Office of St Edmund, etc.) Oxford, Bodleian Library MS e Musaeo 7 (Bury music, etc.) Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud misc. 673 (Lydgate and Burgh, Secrees) Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud misc. 683 (Lydgate, miscellaneous) Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson B.216 (Lydgate, Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund) Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Tanner 347 (Lydgate, Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund) Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 61 (Lydgate, Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund) Oxford, Magdalen College 266/268 (motets and Mass items) Oxford, New College, MS 362, Fragment IX (Bury music, etc.) Oxford, St John’s College MS 56 (miscellany) Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale MS fr. 25458 (Charles d’Orléans, verse, etc.) Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica, MS Reg. Lat. 12 (psalter)

Edited primary texts Ælfric of Eynsham, Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, ed. W. W. Skeat [olim 4 vols.], repr. as 2 vols., EETS OS [76, 82] 94, 114 (Oxford, 1881–1900, repr. 1966). Ælfric of Eynsham, Lives of Three English Saints, ed. G. I. Needham, rev. edn (Exeter, 1976). Altenglische Legenden, ed. C. Horstmann (Heilbronn, 1881). Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, gen. ed. D. N. Dumville and S. D. Keynes (Cambridge, 2004–).

188

Select Bibliography Annals of St Neots with Vita Prima Sancti Neoti, ed. D. M. Dumville and M. Lapidge (Cambridge, 1985). Archives of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, ed. R. M. Thomson (Woodbridge, 1980). Asser, Alfred the Great, ed. and trans. S. Keynes and M. Lapidge (Harmondsworth, 1983). Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum: Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969). Chronica de rebus gestis Samsonis abbatis monasterii sancti Edmundi, ed. and trans. H. E. Butler, Nelson’s Medieval Texts (London, 1949). Chronicle of Bury St Edmunds, 1212–1301, ed. A. Gransden, Nelson’s Medieval Texts (London, 1964). Corolla Sancti Eadmundi, ed. F. Hervey (London, 1907). Customary of the Benedictine Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk, ed. A. Gransden, Henry Bradshaw Society Publication 99 (London, 1973). Feudal Documents from the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, ed. D. C. Douglas (London, 1932). Gaimar, L’estoire des Engleis, ed. A. Bell, Anglo-Norman Text Society 14 (Oxford, 1960). Henry of Avranches, ‘The Vita Sancti Eadmundi of Henry of Avranches’, ed. D. Townsend, Journal of Medieval Latin 5 (1995), 95–118. Jocelin of Brakelond, The Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond: Concerning the Acts of Samson, Abbot of the Monastery of St. Edmund, ed. and trans. H. E. Butler (Oxford, 1949). La passiun de seint Edmund, ed. J. Grant, Anglo-Norman Text Society 36 (London, 1978). Lydgate, J., The Life of St Edmund, King & Martyr: John Lydgate’s Illustrated Verse Life Presented to Henry VI: A Facsimile of British Library MS Harley 2278, ed. A. S. G. Edwards (London, 2004). Memorials of Saint Edmund’s Abbey, ed. T. Arnold, 3 vols., Rolls Series 96 (London, 1890-96). Piramus, Denis, La vie saint Edmund le Rei, ed. H. Kjellman (Göteborg, 1935, reprinted 1974). Þorgilsson, Ari. Islendingabók; Landnámabók. Ed. Jakob Benediktsson. Reykjavík: Hi Islenda Fornritafílag, 1968. Three Lives of English Saints, ed. M. Winterbottom (Toronto, 1972). William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, ed. and trans. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1998–9).

Secondary material Abou-El-Haj, B., ‘Bury St Edmunds Abbey between 1070 and 1124: A History of Property, Privilege and Monastic Art Production’, Art History 6 (1983), 1–29. Blunt, C. E., ‘The Saint Edmund Memorial Coinage’, PSIA 31 (1969), 234–55. Cownie, E., ‘The Cult of St Edmund in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries: The Language and Communication of a Medieval Saint’s Cult’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 99 (1998), 177–97.

189

Select Bibliography Davis, R. H. C., ‘The Monks of St Edmund, 1021–1148’, History 40 (1955), 227–39. Duffy, E., The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400–1580 (New Haven, 1992). Earl, J. W., ‘Violence and Non-Violence in Anglo-Saxon England: Ælfric’s “Passion of St Edmund”’, Philological Quarterly 78 (1999), 125–49. Gibson, G. M., The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago, 1989). Gransden, A., ‘The Legends and Traditions Concerning the Origins of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds’, English Historical Review 100 (1985), 1–24. Gransden, A., ‘Abbo of Fleury’s Passio Sancti Eadmundi’, Revue Bénédictine 105 (1995), 20–78. Gransden, A., ed., Bury St Edmunds: Medieval Art, Archaeology and Economy (London, 1998). James, M. R., On the Abbey of S. Edmund at Bury (Cambridge, 1895). Lobel, M. D., The Borough of Bury St Edmund’s: A Study in the Government and Development of a Monastic Town (Oxford, 1935). Loomis, C. G., ‘The Growth of the St Edmund Legend’, Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature 14 (1932), 83–113. Lowe, K. A., ‘The Poetry of Privilege: Lydgate’s Cartae Versificatae’, Nottingham Medieval Studies 50 (2006), 151–65. McKeehan, I. P., ‘St Edmund of East Anglia: The Development of a Romantic Legend’, University of Colorado Studies, General Series 15 (1925), 13–74. McLachlan, E. P., The Scriptorium of Bury St Edmunds in the Twelfth Century (New York, 1984). Ord, C., ‘An Account of the Entertainment of King Henry the Sixth at the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds’, Archaeologia 15 (1806), 65–71. Pearsall, D., John Lydgate (Charlottesville, 1970). Pearsall, D., John Lydgate: A Bio-Bibliography (Victoria BC, 1997). Riché, P., Abbon de Fleury: Un Moine Savant et Combatif (vers 950–1004) (Turnhout, 2004). Ridyard, S. J., The Royal Saints of Anglo-Saxon England: A Study of West Saxon and East Anglian Cults (Cambridge, 1988). Rogers, N., ‘Fitzwilliam Museum MS 3-1979: A Bury St Edmunds Book of Hours and the Origins of the Bury Style’, in England in the Fifteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1986 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. D. Williams (Woodbridge, 1987), pp. 229–43. Rollason, D. W., Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1989). Scanlon, L. and Simpson, J., ed., John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England (Notre Dame IN, 2006). Statham, M., The Book of Bury St Edmunds (Buckingham, 1988). Thomson, R. M., ‘The Library of Bury St Edmunds in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, Speculum 47 (1972), 617–45. Thomson, R. M., ‘Two Versions of a Saint’s Life from St Edmund’s Abbey: Changing Currents in Twelfth-Century Monastic Style’, Revue Bénédictine 84 (1974), 383–408. Thomson, R. M., The Archives of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds (Woodbridge, 1980).

190

Select Bibliography Whitelock, D., ‘Fact and Fiction in the Legend of St Edmund’, PSIA 31 (1969), 217–33. Reprinted in From Bede to Alfred: Studies in Early Anglo-Saxon Literature and History (London, 1980), item XI. Yarrow, S., Saints and Their Communities: Miracle Stories in Twelfth-Century England (Oxford, 2006).

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Index Names are given under their standard form, so ‘Lydgate, John’ but ‘Abbo of Fleury’. Entries are not given for subjects (for example, St Edmund and Bury St Edmunds) that appear throughout the book. Entries are given to footnoted material only when discussion or analysis of this material occurs outside the main text. Manuscripts discussed in detail are listed under ‘manuscripts’. Numbers in italic refer to illustrations. Abbo of Fleury, Vita et Passio Sancti Eadmundi 2–3, 17, 30, 31, 34, 43, 47, 52, 58, 60, 63, 67–9, 75, 77, 81, 85, 89–90, 93, 109, 120, 128 Abingdon (Berkshire) 14 Abou-El-Haj, Barbara 25 Abrams, Lesley 55 Acle (Norfolk) 114 Adam of Bremen 59 Adorno, Theodor 167 Ælfheah, St 52, 56 Ælfric of Eynsham 3, 24, 27–44 passim; Catholic Homilies 28; Lives of Saints 28–32, 36–44, 47, 51–3, 58 Ælla of Northumbria 56 Aelnoth of Canterbury, Archbishop 59 Aelred of Rievaulx, Life of Edward the Confessor 83 Æthelberht, King 73–4, 77–8 Æthelbert of East Anglia, St 123 Æthelmær 28–9 Æthelræd II 79 Æthelræd, King 31 Æthelstan, King 3 n.12, 32, 52 Æthelthryth, St 43 Æthelweard, 28–9, 37, 70; Cronicon 31 Aethelwold, Bishop of Dummoc 130 Æthelwold, Bishop of Winchester 28, 35 Agincourt (France), battle of 16, 159 Ailwyn 3–4, 185 Alfred, King 36–7, 54–5, 117 Allestree (Derbyshire) 13 Ampthill (Bedfordshire) 155, 159 Andrew, Canon 66 Andrew, St 100, 104 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 1–2, 29, 30, 32, 37, 50–51

Annals of St Neots 5, 71, 78 Anne, St 23, 117 Anselm, Abbot 5, 63, 65 Antonsson, Haki 56–7, 59 Ap Rice, John see Prise, John Ari Þorgilsson, Íslendingabók 45–51, 59–62 Arnold, John 21–2, 161 Ashley, Kathleen 23 Asser, Life of King Alfred 1, 31 Astone, Andrew 10 Attleborough (Norfolk) 82 Ayston (Rutland) 92 Babwell (Suffolk) 5 Baldwin, Abbot 7, 63 Bale, Anthony 91, 184 Bale, John 170 Balthild, Queen 78 ‘banleuca’ 7–8, 15, 102, 153 Barrabas 107 Bartholomew, St 98 Barton Turf (Norfolk) 123–4 Battle of Maldon 37 Baugé (France), battle of 155 Beaufort, Cardinal Henry 124 Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum 33, 46–7, 73, 74–5, 77–8, 86 Bell, David N. 170, 175 Benedict, St 100, 104 Bera 62 Bern [Bjørn] 48, 56, 69, 72, 139–41 Bigod, Roger I 65 Bishopsbourne (Kent) 14 Bjørn, see Bern Blanchot, Maurice 165, 179 Bokenham, Osbern 22, 117, 141 Botolph St 7, 13, 58–60, 156

193

Index Brávellir, battle of 49 Bromholm (Norfolk) 112 Brown, Peter 20–21 Burchardus 138, 185 Bures (Suffolk) 69, 71, 82 Burlingham, see North Burlingham Caedwalla of Wessex 33 Cambridge (Cambridgeshire) 83 Campbell, Marian 14 Cantilupe, St Thomas 150–51 Canute [Knútr] 6, 56, 59 Capgrave, John 141 Catfield (Norfolk) 123 Cavill, Paul 39, 54, 58 Ceolwulf 54 Cerne Abbas (Dorset) 28 Charles d’Orléans 158–9 Chaucer, Alice 157–9; see also Pole, William de la Chaucer, Geoffrey, 177; Canterbury Tales 175; ‘Prioress’s Prologue’ and ‘Tale’ 148, 166, 181; Troilus and Criseyde 143 Chaucer, Thomas 158 Chelles (France) 78 Childebert, King 78 Christ 17, 27, 34–6, 40–42, 45, 85, 100, 107, 119, 126, 174 Chronica chronicarum, see John of Worcester Clark, James C. 170 Clemoes, Peter 28–9 Cluny (France) 7 Coenred of Mercia 33 Coldharbour 154, 157–8 Cole, Margaret 154 Cormack, Margaret 58, 60 Cowe, John 13, Cownie, Emma 15 Cratfield, Abbot William 10 Crewe, Sarah 121 Crickhowell (Powys) 13 Cromwell, Thomas 163, 165 Crook, John 11 Cropredy (Oxfordshire) 156 Cullum, Patricia 23 Curteys, Abbot William 10, 133–4, 147, 149, 172 Cuthbert, St 43 Dagobert, St 77 Damon, John 41

Danegeld 37, 118 Danes 1–4, 36–7, 49, 54–62, 69–70, 72, 81–2, 99, 127–30, 137–8, 159–60 David, King 148 Deguileville, Guillaume de, Pélerinage de la Vie Humaine 158 Delany, Sheila 22 Delooz, Pierre 19 Denmark, see Danes Denston, Anne 117 Denston, John 117 Denston, Katherine 117 Dives and Pauper 111 Douzegild 108 Doyle, A. I. 153, 170, 175 Dublin (Ireland) 48 Duffy, Eamon 19, 116, 122 Dunstable (Bedfordshire) 155 Dunstan, Archbishop 2, 31–2, 34–5, 52, 54 n.32 Earl, J. W. 40 Ebbe, St 183 Edgar the Ætheling 79–80 Edgar, King 35, 77 Edith, St 56 Edmund Crouchback 15 ‘Edmund-Fremund’ scribe 175–6 Edmund I 7, 15 Edward I 13, 15 Edward IV 147 Edward the Confessor, St 15, 16, 47, 79–80, 99, 101, 123 Edward the Martyr, St 47, 77, 123 Edwards, A. S. G. 170, 175 Edwin of Northumbria 33 Egelwin, see Ailwyn Eleanor of Provence 15, 92 Elizabeth of Lancaster 154 Emneth (Norfolk) 114 Ethelred of Mercia 33 Étienne VI of Blois-Chartres 80 Eustace IV of Boulogne 83 Ewelme (Oxfordshire) 157 Eynsham (Oxfordshire) 28 Faith, St 23 Fanhope, Lord John 146, 154–5 Farnhill, Ken 114 Fell, Christine 58 Fenny Bentley (Derbyshire) 13 Fernie, Eric 7

194

Index Finucane, Ronald 19 Folcard, Canon 66 Folz, Robert 15 Foucault, Michel 22 France 5, 80, 95, 135 Fremund, St 17, 137–40, 155–6; see also Lydgate, John Fritton (Norfolk) 14 Gaimar, Geffrei, Estoire des Engleis 11 Gameson, Richard 112, 120 Garnier of Rebais, Abbot 90, 109 Geoffrey of Anjou 80 Geoffrey of Wells, Liber de Infantia Sancti Edmundi 5–6, 24, 64–86 George, St 23, 66, 93 Gesta Normannorum ducum 72 Giles, St 154 Gilte Legende, see Jacobus de Voragine Gimingham (Norfolk) 127 Gladman’s Insurrection 127 Godden, Malcolm 29, 40–41 Godebald, Bishop 59 Godrum 54–5 Goldberg, Jeremy 23 Gordon, Eleanora 19 Gormr gamli 49 Goscelin 65, 86 Gower, John, Confessio Amantis 175 Grafton, Richard 184 Gransden, Antonia 1–2, 4, 32 Green Man 119 Gregory [I] the Great, Pope 90, 111; Moralia in Job 85 Gregory of Tours 22 n.116 Grímkell, Bishop 58 Gurevich, Aron 20 ‘Haeglisdun’ 3 Hali Meiðhad 99 Hanawalt, Barbara 152 Hansards 159 Harald [III] Hardrada 79, 81 Harald II 80 Haraldr hárfagri 45 Haraldr hilditonn 49 Hardman, Philippa 178 Harold II 79 Harthacnut, King 81 Haukr Erlendsson 61 Hawes, Stephen 169 Henry de Kirkstead 98

Henry I 5, 79–80 Henry II 15, 80–81, 83 Henry III 15, 92, 167 Henry IV 154 Henry of Avranches, Passio Edmundi 11, 75, 138 Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum 68 Henry V of England 16 Henry V, Emperor 80 Henry VI 6, 10, 14, 17, 91, 93, 123–5, 125, 133–5, 143, 150, 155, 172. 178 Henry VII 125 Hermann, Archdeacon 3–4, 63, 118 Hervey, Francis 169 Hiatt, Alfred 184 Hinguar, [Hingvar, Hungar, Hyngwar, Ívarr inn beinlausi] 17, 32, 36–7, 39, 45, 47, 56, 69, 81, 137, 139, 173 Holinshed, Raphael 184 Horstmann, Carl 148–9, 169 Howard, Katherine 117 Hoxne (Suffolk) 1, 3 Hubba [Ubba] 47–8, 51, 56, 69, 84, 139 Hugh, Abbot 66 Humbert, Bishop 71, 82 Humfrey of Gloucester 14, 126 Hungar, see Hinguar Hunstanton (Norfolk) 74 Hyngwar, see Hinguar Iceland 11, 45–62 iconoclasm 13, 18, 163–6 Ini of Wessex 33 Ívarr inn beinlausi, see Hinguar Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda Aurea 17–18, 19 James, M. R. 1 James, St 100, 104–5, 121 Jerusalem 69, 74 Jews 5, 7, 21, 23, 27, 38, 43–4, 107–9, 127, 153 Joanna la Schirreve 151 Jocelin of Brakelond 5, 12–13, 23 John de Kent 152 John of Gaunt 10 John of Worcester, Chronica chronicarum 71, 73–4, 86 John the Baptist, St 15, 119, 121–2, 127 John, Eric 35–6 John, King 15

195

Index Katherine of Alexandria, St 23, 93 Kenelm, St 123, 153 King, David 124, 126–7 King’s Lynn (Norfolk) 14, 115, 141 n.20 Knútr see Canute Lacy, Henry [Earl of Lincoln] 12, 167 Lakenham, Prior Henry 119 Lakenheath (Suffolk) 14 Landnámabók 60–62 Laurence, St 119, 163 Lawton, David 172 Leland, John 72 n.37 Leofruna 77 Leofstan, Abbot 4, 88 Lewis, Katherine 23 Liberty of St Edmund 8, 101–2, 106, 153 Ling (Norfolk) 66, 151 liturgy 29, 89, 93, 101–3 Lobel, M. D. 1 Lögmannshlíð (Iceland) 60 Lollards 112 n.7, 137, 181 London 8, 13, 14, 128, 145–61, 175, 181, 185 Lothbroc [Ragnarr loðbrok] 32, 45, 47–51, 56, 69, 72, 81, 139, 141–2 Louis IX of France, King 124 Lucca (Italy) 11, 13 Ludham (Norfolk) 124, 125 Lydgate, John, 109, 133–4, 136–40, 147–9, 156–60, 171–6; Bycorne and Chichevache 156; Churl and the Bird 174; Fall of Princes 17, 170, 171, 176–7; Life of Our Lady 178; Life of St Giles 154; Lives of Ss Alban and Amphibal 141, 157, 170; Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund 6, 10, 13, 17, 24–5, 56, 91, 102, 120, 133–44, 164–5, 169–82; Miracles of St Edmund 145–61; Mumming at Bishopswood 156; Mumming at Eltham 156; Mumming at Windsor 156; ‘Prayer to St Edmund’ 17, 91–2, 154; Praier to St Robert 92, 102, 154; Serpent of Division 17, 177; Siege of Thebes 158, 170, 174, 177; Troy Book 170, 177; Verses on the Kings of England 177 Lynn (Norfolk), see King’s Lynn Magennis, Hugh 41 Magnus I, King 81 Maiden’s Bower 74 Maids Moreton (Buckinghamshire) 13

Maldon (Essex) 37 Mâle, Emile 19 Manor of the Rose 157–9 manuscripts Arundel, The Duke of Norfolk, Arundel Castle, sine numero, Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund 147, 182 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 251 9 Cambridge, St John’s College MS 138 98 Cambridge, University Library MS Ff.2.29 98 Copenhagen, Royal Library MS Gl.Kgl.S.1588 9 Dublin, Trinity College MS 172 138–9 London, BL Add MSS 14848 10; 24199 98; Arundel MS 119 158; Cotton MSS Titus A.viii 6; Claudius A.xii 10; Julius E.vii 28; Harley MSS 247 182; 367 182; 372 182; 2278 11, 17, 134–5, 137, 170; 2977 90; Royal MS 12.C.VI 98; Yates Thompson MS 47 147 New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS M.736 5, 9, 63, 90 Oxford, Bodleian Library MSS Ashmole 46 147; Ashmole 59 182; Bodley 240 6, 17, 75, 136–7; Bodley 297 71; e Musaeo 7 98, 103; Digby 109 90, 93; Laud misc. 683 9, 147, 154; Tanner 347 147 Oxford, Magdalen College MS 266/268 98 Oxford, New College MS 362 94, 96–7 Vatican, Biblioteca Apolstolica MS Reg. lat. 12 9 Marden (Herefordshire) 151 Margaret of Anjou 127 Margaret of Anjou 156 Margaret of Scotland, St 123 Marks, Richard 116 Marsham (Norfolk) 123 Martin, St 54, 89, 119 Mary Magdalene, St 100 Mary, St 89, 93, 101 n.51, 122, 126 Matilda, Empress 79–81 McDougall, Ian 53 Melar, St 153 Melville-Richards, Pamela 107 Michael, St 93 Mildenhall (Suffolk) 5

196

Index Mills, Robert 22 Moleyns, Adam 158–60 monarchy 15, 18, 33, 79–86 Montagu, Thomas 158 Mooney, Linne R. 175 Mortimer, Edmund 10 Mortimer, Nigel 171, 177 Moses 119 Neatishead (Norfolk) 127 Nelson, Janet 33–4 Nicholas of Wallingford 63 Nicholas, St 108–9 Nichols, Ann 112–13, 123, 127 Nisse, Ruth 174 Njáls saga 50, 59, 61–2 Nolan, Maura 172, 178 North Burlingham (Norfolk) 117 Northern Homily Cycle 141 Norton, Christopher 23 Norwich (Norfolk) 7, 8 n.38, 146; Cathedral Priory 118–20; Church of St Laurence 120–21; St Peter Mancroft 123, 126; St Peter Parmentergate 114 Nuremberg (Germany) 75 Offa, King 69–71, 73, 81, 86, 139, 143, 185 Óláfr Haraldsson [St Óláfr, Olaf] 46, 57–8, 123 Óláfr Tryggvason 46 Ording, Abbot 64, 83 Orléans (France) 2 Osbert of Clare 6, 63, 78–9; Passio S.Æthelberhti 72 Oswald of Northumbria, St 33, 39, 47, 60–62 Oswald, St, Archbishop 2, 30, 35 Oswin of Deira, St 33, 123 Oswy 139 Outwell (Norfolk) 123 Oxford (Oxfordshire) 10 Páll Jónsson, Bishop 59 Pálsson, Hermann 47 Paris 95, 98 Parkes, Malcolm 175 Passio Athelberhti, see Æthelberht Passiun de Seint Edmund 11 patronage 116–18, 139, 154–60 Patterson, Lee 172 Paul, St 106 Pearl-poet 171

Pearsall, Derek 171–2 Peter, St 99, 100, 105–6, 119, 121 Peterborough (Cambridgeshire) 51 Petrarch 137 Petronilla, St 7, 9, 13, 156 Pietz, William 167 pilgrimage 4, 7, 13,14, 16, 20–22, 70, 111, 153, 178 Piramus, Denis, La vie Seint Edmund le Rei 11, 64, 75 Pole, William de la 124, 127, 157–8, 160–61; see also Chaucer, Alice Poole, Russell 57 potentia 20 Pountney’s Inn, see Manor of the Rose praesentia 20 Prise, John [John Ap Rice, Siôn ap Rhys] 163–5 Pulham St Mary (Norfolk) 114 Rædwald, King 77 Ragnarr loðbrok, see Lothbroc Ralph de Mymmes 152 Ramsey (Huntingdonshire) 2 Reimer, Stephen 175 Reims (France) 2 Richard II 15–16, Riches, Samantha 23 Ridyard, Susan 2, 4, 15, 32, 43, 54–5, 57 Ritson, Joseph 171 Robert Curthose 80 Robert of Anjou 107 n.76 Robert of Bury, St 7, 9, 106, 108–9, 156; see also Lydgate, John Roger of Wendover 56 Rogers, Nicholas 153 Rossiaud, Jacques 161 Rowe, Elizabeth 49–50 Russia 49 Saba, St 89 Sailholme (Lincolnshire) 151 n.13 Salih, Sarah 22 Salle (Norfolk) 123–4 Salmon, Bishop John 119 Samson, Abbot 5, 12, 63, 167 Santiago de Compostela (Spain) 104–5 Saxlingham Nethergate (Norfolk) 121 Saxony 74–5, 79, 81–2, 139 Scanlon, Larry 174, 178 Schirmer, Walter 149 Scott, Kathleen 175

197

Index Sebastian, St 17–18, 38–9, 42, 51, 54, 99, 120 Sebbi of Essex 33 Selby (N. Yorkshire) 80 Shakespeare, William, Merchant of Venice 168, 177, 179 Sheingorn, Pamela 23 Short English Metrical Chronicle 18 Sigeberht 6 Sigurðr hringr 49 Sihtric, Prior 65 Simon de Montfort 98, 150 Simon Magus 105–6 Simpson, James 166, 174, 178–9 Sitha, St 11 n.55, 23 Smyth, Alfred 53–4, 56 Somerset, Fiona 174 South English Legendary 17, 141 Southampton (Hampshire) 14 Speyer (Germany) 7 St Benet’s Hulme (Norfolk) 88 St Benoît-sur-Loire (France) 2 St Denis (France) 9 ‘St George’s Arm’ 74 Stalham (Norfolk) 120 n.36, 123 Stephen de Salines 92 Stephen, King 65, 80–81, 85–6 Stephen, St 13 Stevens, Paul 168–9, 177 Stody (Norfolk) 123 Stoke by Clare (Suffolk) 154 Stow, John 170, 182–85 Stow, John 25, 181; Summarie of Englyshe chronicles 182–5; Annales 183–5 Strohm, Paul 172, 177 Sturlubók 61 Styrmisbók 61 Suffolk, Duke of, see De La Pole, William Sutton (Suffolk) 3 Sutton Hoo (Suffolk) 129 Swein see Sweyn Sweyn Forkbeard [Swein; Sveinn Tjúguskegg Haraldsson] 6, 17, 57, 59, 117, 149 Swithun, St 58 Taverham (Norfolk) 92 Thames, River 146, 156–60 Theodred, Bishop 55 Thetford (Norfolk) 8 n.38, 30–31, 65–6, 116, 139

Thomas Becket, St 4, 119, 120, 150, 163 Thomson, Rodney 1 Þórðr skeggi 60 Þorlákr, St, Bishop 59 Thornham Parva (Norfolk) 116 Tilney All Saints (Norfolk) 114 Toppes, Robert 126–7 Toulouse (France) 11 Townend, Matthew 56–7 Toy, John 59 Ubba see Hubba Uvius, Abbot 88 Vanlyven (Norway) 58 Vauchez, André 21 Vegetius 137 Vere, Elizabeth de 117 Vilborg 61–2 Walpole St Peter (Norfolk) 127, 128 Walsingham (Norfolk) 104, 112 Ward, Benedicta 20 Warenne, William III de 65 Wells (Somerset) 66 Westminster 16, 79, 99, 101 Whethamstede, Abbot John 141, 157, 170 Whitelock, Dorothy 52–3, 69–70 Wickham Skeith (Suffolk) 13 Wilcox, Jonathan 29 William [I] of Normandy 79 William [II] Rufus 79–81 William of Norwich, St 153 William of York, St 23 Wilson, Stephen 20 Wilton Diptych 15–16, Winchester (Hampshire) 7; Treaty of 65, 81 Windsor (Berkshire) 125 Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn 39 Woolf, D. R. 184 Wren, Christopher 13 Wuffings 68 n.24, 129–30 Wycliffite writing 165–6, 172 York 48 Zita of Lucca, St see Sitha Zorobabel 107–8

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Rites of Passage: Cultures of Transition in the Fourteenth Century Edited by NICOLA F. MCDONALD and W. MARK ORMROD

Piety, Fraternity and Power: Religious Gilds in Late Medieval Yorkshire, 1389-1547 DAVID J. F. CROUCH

Nunneries, Learning and Spirituality in Late Medieval England PAUL LEE

St William of York CHRISTOPHER NORTON

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S

t Edmund King and Martyr

Changing Images of a Medieval Saint

ANTHONY BALE (ed.)

Medieval Petitions: Grace and Grievance

ST EDMUND, KING AND MARTYR

Other titles available

Changing Images of a Medieval Saint

York Medieval Press

ST EDMUND, king and martyr, supposedly killed by Danes (or `Vikings’) in 869, was one of the pre-eminent saints of the Middle Ages; his cult was favoured and patronised by several English kings and gave rise to a rich array of visual, literary, musical and political artefacts. Celebrated throughout England, especially at the abbey of Bury St Edmunds, the saint also inspired separate cults in France, Iceland and Italy. The essays in this collection offer a range of readings from a variety of disciplines – literature, history, music, art history – and of sources – including chronicles, poems, theological material – providing an overview of the multi-faceted nature of St Edmund’s cult from the ninth century to the early modern period. These studies demonstrate the openness and dynamism of a medieval saint’s cult, showing how the saint’s image could be used in many and changing contexts: Edmund’s image was bent to various political and propagandistic ends, often articulating conflicting messages and ideals, negotiating identity, politics and belief.

Contributors:

ANTHONY BALE, LISA

COLTON, A. S. G. EDWARDS, ALISON FINLAY, ALEXANDRA GILLESPIE, PAUL ANTONY HAYWARD, CARL PHELPSTEAD, REBECCA PINNER.

Jacket: The Martyrdom of King Edmund by the Danes, from the Carmelite Missal, BL MS Add. 29704, f.160v. YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS

Edited by ANTHONY BALE