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bX HENRY BRADSHAW SOCIETY for the editing of rare liturgical texts
THE LITURGY PRESIDENT
OF THE
Miss Barbara Harvey, CBE, FSA, FBA
LATE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH VICE-PRESIDENTS The Very Revd Professor Henry Chadwick, KBE, DD, FBA Professor Dr Helmut Gneuss, FBA M. Michel Huglo Professor Aimé-Georges Martimort The Revd Professor Richard W. Pfaff, DD, FSA Professor Achille Triacca
Edited by H e l e n G itto s a n d M . B r a d fo r d B e d i n g f i e l d
OFFICERS OF THE COUNCIL Professor M. Lapidge, LittD, FSA, FBA (Chairman) D. F. L. Chadd Esq. (General Secretary) Dr M. B. Moreton (Treasurer)
Enquiries concerning membership of the Society should be addressed to the Hon. General Secretary, D. F. L. Chadd, School of Art History & Music, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ.
LONDON 2005
HENRY BRADSHAW SOCIETY Ifounbeb in tbe ]j)ear of ©ur Xorb 1890 for tbe cutting of TRare Xiturgical ©exte
S U B S ID IA
• V
PUBLISHED FOR THE SOCIETY BY
THE BOYDELL PRESS i
© Henry Bradshaw Society 2005 All Rights Reserved. Except as perm itted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transm itted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner
First Published for the Henry Bradshaw Society 2005 by The Boydell Press an im print of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, W oodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com
Contents List of Illustrations
vii
Preface
ix
Abbreviations
x
Introduction Helen Gittos
1
1.
The Roman Psalter, its Old English Glosses and the English Benedictine Reform Mechthild Gretsch
13
2.
Making the Liturgy: Winchester Scribes and their Books Susan Rankin
29
3.
Rending the Garment and Reading by the Rood: Regularis concordia Rituals for Men and Women Joyce Hill
53
4.
Rites for Public Penance in Late Anglo-Saxon England Sarah Hamilton
65
5.
The Chrism Mass in Later Anglo-Saxon England Christopher A. Jones
105
6.
The Veneration of the Cross in Anglo-Saxon England Sarah Larratt Keefer
143
7.
The Rites and Ministries of the Canons: Liturgical Rubrics to 185 Vernacular Gospels and their Functions in a European Context Ursula Lenker
8.
Cross-Referencing Anglo-Saxon Liturgy and Remedies: the Sign of the Cross as Ritual Protection Karen Louise Jolly
Transferred to digital printing
ISBN 978-1-870252-21-8 ISSN 1352-1047
This publication is printed on acid-free paper
213
9.
The Sign of the Cross: Poetic Performance and Liturgical Practice in the Junius 11 Manuscript Catherine E. Karkov
245
Illustrations
10. How much can Anglo-Saxon Buildings Tell us about Liturgy? 271 Richard Gem 11. Ritual and Drama in Anglo-Saxoh England: the Dangers of the Diachronic Perspective M. Bradford Bedingfield
291
Index of Manuscripts Index
319 324
Plates I. Cambridge, University Library, Ii. 2. 11, 5v-6r (A) Ila. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, cgm 5250/1 (‘ViennaMunich Gospels’), fragment II lib. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, cgm 5250/1 (‘Vienna-Munich Gospels’), fragment V III. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11, p. 9 IV. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11, p. 10 V. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11, p. 68 VI. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11, p. 84
192 194 194 264 265 266 267
Figures 1. The St Gallen Plan: redrawn plan of the east end of the church 270 2. Reculver, St Mary’s Church 277 3. Brixworth, All Saints Church 278 4. Gloucester, St Oswald’s Minster 281 5. Dover, church of St Mary in Castro 285
We are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce illustrations: the Syndics of Cambridge University Library (pi. I); the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich (pi. II); the Bodleian Library, Oxford (pis III—VI). Figures 1-5 were drawn by Richard Gem.
Vll
Preface This book arose out of a conference on Anglo-Saxon liturgy held in Oxford in the summer of 2000. Our aim in organizing the meeting was to bring together a group of scholars from disparate disciplinary backgrounds working on similar material. In doing so, we also hoped to raise the profile of the liturgy as a source of evidence for Anglo-Saxon history. It is hoped that this volume reflects both the nature and range of current work on the subject and will also provide a means for other scholars to appreciate the potential value of the liturgy for their own work. The editors are grateful to the following people for assistance with arranging the conference and help in producing this book: John Blair, John Caldwell, Clifford O. Davidson, Moira and Brian Gittos, Jason Hartford, David Hiley, Thomas D. Hill, Michael Lapidge, Roy Liuzza, Eamonn Ó Carragáin, Edward Pettit, Susan Rankin, Paul G. Remley, Elizabeth C. Teviotdale, M. J. Toswell, Carol Neuman de Vegvar. Chris topher A. Jones and Nicholas Orchard have been unflinching in their support and advice. We would also like to express our heartfelt thanks to the contributors for their enthusiasm, cooperation and patience.
IX
ABBREVIATIONS
Abbreviations Archaeol. AS ASE BL Canterbury Benedictional, ed. Woolley CCSL CSASE DAER
Archaeology, -ical Anglo-Saxon Anglo-Saxon England British Library The Canterbury Benedictional (British Museum, Harl. MS. 2892), ed. R. M. Woolley, HBS 51 (London, 1917)
Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England E. Marténe, De antiquis ecclesiae ritibus, 4 vols (rev. ed., Antwerp, 1736-8) Early English Text Society [original EETS [os/ss] series/supplementary series] English Eng. Old Gelasian Sacramentary, cited by text number in GeV Liber sacramentorum Romanae aeclesiae ordinis anni circuli: (Cod. Vat. Reg. lat. 316/ Paris Bibl. Nat. 7193, 41/56) (Sacramentarium Gelasianum), ed. L. C. Mohlberg, with L. Eizenhöfer and P. Siffrin, RED, ser. maior, Fontes 4 (Rome, 1960) ‘Hadrianic’ Gregorian Sacramentary, cited by text GreH number in Sacramentaire grégorien, ed. Deshusses Carolingian ‘Supplement’ to the Gregorian GreSp Sacramentary, cited by text number in Sacramentaire grégorien, ed. Deshusses Henry Bradshaw Society HBS History, -ical Hist. Journal Jnl Ker, Catalogue N. R. Ker, Catalogue o f Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford, 1957) Liturgical Books, The Liturgical Books o f Anglo-Saxon England, ed. R. W. Pfaff, Old English Newsletter, Subsidia 23 ed. Pfaff (Kalamazoo, MI, 1995) Medi(a)eval Med. Monumenta Germaniae Historica MGH Ordo Romanus/ Ordines Romani, cited by ordo and OR subdivisions in Les ordines Romani, ed. Andrieu x
Les ordines Romani, ed. Andrieu PL PRG
Les ordines Romani du haut moyen áge, ed. M. Andrieu, 5 vols., Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense 11, 23-4, and 28-9 (Louvain, 1931-61) Patrologia Latina, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris, 1844-64) Pontificale Romano-Germanicum, cited by ordo and subdivisions in Le pontifical romano-germanique du dixiéme siécle, ed. C. Vogel and R. Elze, Studi e Testi 226-7 and 269, 3 vols. (Vatican City, 1963-72) RED Rerum Ecclesiasticarum Documenta Regularis Regularis concordia Anglicae nationis monachorum concordia, sanctimonialiumque: the Monastic Agreement of the ed. Symons Monks and Nuns o f the English Nation, ed. T. Symons (London, 1953) Rev. Review Sacramentaire Le sacramentaire grégorien: Ses principales formes grégorien, aprés les plus anciens manuscrits, ed. J. Deshusses, ed. Deshusses Spicilegium Friburgensis 16, 24, and 28, 3 vols. (Fribourg, 1971-82; vol. 1 reprinted with corrections, 1992) ser. series SettSpol Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo Soc. Society Stud. Studies Tenth-Century Tenth-Century Studies: Essays in Commemoration of Studies, ed. the Millennium o f the Council of Winchester and Parsons Regularis Concordia, ed. D. Parsons (London and Chichester, 1975) Trans. Transactions 7vvo Anglo-Saxon 7vvo Anglo-Saxon Pontificals (the Egbert and Sidney Pontificals, ed. Sussex Pontificals), ed. H. M. J. Banting, HBS 104 Banting (London, 1989) Univ. University
xt
Introduction Helen Gittos
This book testifies to the vitality of the liturgy in later tenth- and eleventh-century England.1 New types of liturgical books were created, older rites were revised and new ones introduced. Occasionally, we have evidence for the individuals involved in reworking the liturgy and for whom it had such significance: Archbishop Wulfstan and his probable interest in the Chrism Mass; Æthelwold’s attachment to the Psalterium Romanunv, Wulfstan of Winchester’s influence on the chant of the Old Minster, Winchester,2 They are tantalizing reminders of the many men (and women) who compiled, collected, commissioned and performed the liturgy. Any liturgical manuscript is a product of individual choices made in the context of inherited and imported traditions. On his deathbed, Bene dict Biscop stressed that: ‘ “You must not think . . . that the ordinances I laid down for you were the result of my own untutored invention. No, all I found best in the life of the seventeen monasteries 1 visited during my long and frequent pilgrimages, I stored up in my mind and have handed on to you, to be steadfastly adhered to, for your own good.” ’3 Benedict 1 The best introductions to early medieval liturgy are: C. Vogel, Medieval Liturgy: an Introduction to the Sources, rev. and trans. W. G. Storey and N. K. Rasmussen (Wash ington DC, 1986); E. Palazzo, A History o f Liturgical Books from the Beginning to the Thirteenth Century, trans. M. Beaumont (Collegeville, MN, 1998); J. Harper, The Forms and Orders o f Western Liturgy from the Tenth to the Eighteenth Century: a Historical Introduction and Guide fo r Students and Musicians (Oxford, 1991); and for the Anglo-Saxon material: Liturgical Books, ed. Pfaff; H. Gneuss, ‘Liturgical Books in Anglo-Saxon England and their Old English Terminology’, Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies presented to Peter Clemoes on the Occasion o f his Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. M. Lapidge and H. Gneuss (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 91-141; and D. N. Dumville, Liturgy and the Ecclesiastical History o f Late Anglo-Saxon England: Four Studies, Stud, in AS Hist. 5 (Woodbridge, 1992). 2 See the chapters by Jones, Gretsch and Rankin below. 3 ‘ “Neque enim putare habetis. . . quod ex meo haec quae uobis statui decreta indoctus
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emphasizes that he invented nothing, yet even in this denial of author ship he claims to have selected and ordered what he considered best from all he knew. Because liturgy is inherently conservative, it is often tempting to think that any given manuscript is simply a copy, or compi lation, of previous material, yet it is unwarranted to believe that is always or only the case. Liturgy mattered to people like Benedict, as it did to Wulfstan and Æthelwold, and therefore it should be a concern to those who wish to understand such men and the world in which they lived. Early medieval liturgy was not uniform and unchanging. Although all the papers in this book are concerned with late Anglo-Saxon liturgy, there was no such thing as the liturgy of the period. Instead, we have a smattering of imperfect and unrepresentative evidence about what actu ally went on inside some pre-Conquest churches. The surviving manu scripts come from a handful of cathedrals, monasteries and nunneries, mostly in southern England and only in any quantity from c. 970 onwards. One cannot therefore generalize from what remains. Within an individual institution, worship was constantly evolving and even when there are good grounds for believing a manuscript was written at a particular place it does not necessarily represent what was actually performed. At worst, liturgical manuscripts may tell us about little more than the antiquarian tendencies of those who produced them; at best, they tell us about the ideals of contemporary liturgists. One of the inevi table themes of this book is the problem of distinguishing between ideal and reality. It is rarely possible when dealing with liturgical sources to talk about anything other than ideals. Sometimes, however, one can see the difference between ideal and practice. As Susan Rankin demon strates, the notion of uniformity, which was so central to the Benedictine reform, did not mean the slavish following of common forms, even at the Old Minster, Winchester. Ideals can themselves be instructive, even if we cannot be sure whether or how they were enacted. Men like Bishop Æthelwold and Archbishop Wulfstan wielded considerable power and influence. It is important for us to understand what their intentions were and the liturgy may also reflect what they were attempting to achieve by
corde protulerim. Ex decem quippe et septem monasteriis quae inter longos meae crebre peregrinationis discursus optima conperi, haec uniuersa didici, et uobis salubriter obseruanda contradidi” Bede, ‘Historia Abbatum’, Venerabilis Baedae Opera Historica, ed. C. Plummer, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1896) I, 374-5 (ch. 11). Translation: The A ge o f Bede, trans. J. F. Webb, ed. D. H. Farmer (London, rev. ed. 1998), p. 198:
ni her means as well. Liturgy must be handled cautiously but, as these impels demonstrate, the degree of caution required should not forestall Investigation.
The liturgy o f the Benedictine reform I lie nature and impact of the Benedictine reform is a recurrent motif of tills hook. Previous discussion of the liturgy associated with the reform lends to concentrate on two main areas: the attempt to establish uniformity of observance and the importation of continental practices, loyeo I till provides evidence that the Regularis concordia was adopted, with modifications, in at least two other communities in addition to Winchester and Eynsham. She discusses specific examples of iiilnplation and in so doing addresses questions also posed by Susan ItlUlkin: ill these (so far unidentified) houses there was a willingness to iidiipl lor local circumstances despite the apparent attempt at standardl/iilion. It is not surprising that the liturgy of the reform period has been most i loscly identified with the Regularis concordia. Yet, if we are to undernIiiikI the nature of the reform, it is essential to comprehend how (and if) II telutes to other liturgical manuscripts from the period. How liturgii nlly innovative were the reformers? To what extent does the Regularis concordia reflect the customs of Winchester; to what degree were Insular practices displaced by continental ones? The answers to these questions have implications for our understanding of the whole nature of llio reform. So far, there has been no sustained attempt to answer them.4 Olio way of doing so is to compare rites described in the Regularis i oncordia with evidence for them in other types of manuscripts. Sarah
t A. Correa, ‘The Liturgical Manuscripts o f Oswald’s Houses’, St Oswald o f Worcester: I /A' wid Influence, ed. N. Brooks and C. Cubitt (London, 1996), pp. 285-324 examines IIn' liturgical characteristics o f Oswald’s foundations. Although there has been no compre hensive discussion o f these questions, they have been addressed briefly in, for example: IIh1 Monastic Breviary o f Hyde Abbey, Winchester, VI: Introduction to the English Monastic Breviaries, ed. J. B. L. Tolhurst, HBS 80 (London, 1942); C. Hohler, ‘The Red Hunk o f Parley’, Nordiskt Kollokvium II i Latinsk Liturgiforskning, ed. H. Slott (Stock holm, 1972), pp. 39-47; C. E. Hohler, ‘Some Service-Books o f the Later Saxon Church’, liilllt-Ccntury Studies, ed. Parsons, pp. 60-83, at 74; C. A. Jones, ‘Two Composite Texts llulit Archbishop Wulfstan’s “Commonplace Book” : the De ecclesiastica consuetudine (lini Ilie Institutio beati Amalarii de ecclesiasticis officiis', ASE 27 (1998), 233-71; The
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Keefer’s study of the Veneration of the Cross on Good Friday demon strates that the other surviving rites are not comparable with the outline in the Regularis concordia, though at least one does seem to be related to it. This raises questions about influence and chronology. One of the difficulties is that the c. 973 synod at which the Regularis Concordia was sanctioned stands at the beginning of the period from which litur gical books begin to survive in any quantity. It is therefore difficult to identify whether certain features of the customary, and other books which may be associated with the reformers, were innovative or not. For this reason, the handful of early manuscripts which seem to reflect Anglo-Saxon practice deserve special attention. The recent re-edition of the Leofric Missal (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 579) is of partic ular importance, but as several contributions to this book make clear, other continental manuscripts, such as the Ratoldus Sacramentary (Paris, Bibliothéque nationale, lat. 12052; 972 x 986) and the Pontifical of Poitiers (Paris, Bibliothéque de 1’Arsenal, 227; s. ix2) also need closer scrutiny.5 A significant feature of studies on the Regularis concordia has been the identification of continental traditions employed by the reformers in its compilation. More recently, this approach has been tempered by emphasis on their interest in reviving the ‘golden age’ of the English church.6 Gretsch, in her study of psalters and their glosses, discusses these potentially contradictory tendencies. The gradual displacement of the Romanum version of the psalter by the Gallicanum demonstrates an inclination towards continental traditions. However, Gretsch argues that Æthelwold preferred the Romanum version partly because he knew it had always been used in England (it was the version most often quoted by Bede). He was also aware that it was the version still current in
Rome, with whom the English church retained a strong allegiance. Rankin’s study of the Winchester Tropers reveals how continental and insular compositions could sit happily beside one another. In a different context, Richard Gem reminds us that the veneration of earlier traditions does not necessarily mean continuity of function. At least in architec ture, earlier features can be retained even though they are no longer used for their original function. Monks play such a prominent role in the history of the pre-Conquest church that the secular canons are frequently neglected. Several contri butors provide a valuable reminder of their presence and draw attention to other evidence for their rites in addition to the Old English version of Chrodegang’s rule. Lenker argues that specific features of the liturgy of the canons provide a plausible context for the creation of some of the vernacular gospel translations. Sarah Hamilton also draws attention to potential differences in the way that penitential rites were celebrated by canons.
Leofric Missal, ed. N. Orchard, HBS 113-14, 2 vols. (London, 2002) I, 197-8. For the reformers’ interest in the liturgy see especially: C. A. Jones, ‘The Book o f the Liturgy in Anglo-Saxon England’, Speculum 73.3 (1998), 659-702. 5 Leofric Missal, ed. Orchard, op. cit. in n. 4; a new edition o f Ratoldus is being prepared for the HBS by N. Orchard; II cosidetto Pontificale di Poitiers (Paris, Bibliolheque de l'Arsenal, cod. 227), ed. A. Martini, RED, ser. maior, Fontes 14 (Rome, 1979). See also the chapters by Jones and Keefer below. 6 For example, C. Cubitt, ‘Review Article: The Tenth-Century Benedictine Reform in England’, Early Med. Europe 6.i (1997), 77-94, at 81-2 and 88-9 for discussion and references; A. Prescott, ‘The Text o f the Benedictional o f St Æthelwold’, Bishop Æthelwold: his Career and Influence, ed. B. Yorke (Woodbridge, 1988), pp. 119-47, at 145-6.
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E piscopal liturgy
One question that has not so far been satisfactorily considered is the extent to which the first and second generations of reformers were also interested in the rites reserved for bishops.7 Pontificals survive in relatively large numbers from the late tenth and eleventh century, yet their association with the reform has not been studied at length, though the benedictionals have received attention.8 This is odd given the strongly episcopal character of the reform. The Regularis concordia draws our attention to the reformers’ identity as abbots but they were also (arch)bishops who exercised considerable political power and to whom the episcopal office was important.9 The classic liturgical evidence for this is the benedictional that may well have been owned by Æthelwold (London, BL, Add. 49598; Winchester, s. x2), a lavish monument to the 7 For a recent study o f Wulfstan see: C. A. Jones, ‘Wulfstan’s Liturgical Interests’, Wulfstan, Archbishop o f York: the Proceedings o f the Second Alcuin Conference, ed. M. Townend, Studies in the Early Middle Ages 10 (Turnhout, 2004), pp. 327-52. I am grateful to the author for allowing me to see a copy in advance o f publication. * Prescott, ‘Text of the Benedictional o f St Æthelwold’, op. cit. in n. 6; idem, ‘The Struc ture o f English Pre-Conquest Benedictionals’, British Library Jnl 13 (1987), 118-58. 9 Cubitt, ‘Tenth-Century Benedictine Reform’, op. cit. in n. 6, pp. 84-5; Prescott, ‘Text o f the Benedictional o f St Æthelwold’, op. cit. in n. 6, esp. pp. 146-7.
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INTRODUCTION
ideal of grand episcopal liturgy.10 Dunstan’s pontifical also seems to have survived (as Paris, Bibliothéque nationale, latin 943; Christ Church, Canterbury, s. x2) and we could learn much from a proper examination of its contents.11 To what extent does it reflect Dunstan’s own ideology? It is noteworthy that one of this pontifical’s distinguishing features is the presence of a rubric couched in the first person, something which is extraordinarily rare in liturgical manu scripts.12 It appears to have been an attempt (which seems to have failed) to bring Anglo-Saxon practice in line with continental rites.13 A rare counterpart is found in the Regularis concordia where the first person is also used on only one occasion. Komexl reasonably interprets the latter as evidence for Æthelwold’s ‘emotional involvement in the matter’.14 These two instances appear to preserve the forthright voices of men to whom the liturgy was deeply significant. The extent to which the surviving pontificals reflect the interests of such men remains to be seen. Pontificals are complex liturgical manuscripts and as Jones says ‘relations between books as wholes cannot be argued merely on the evidence of this or that single component. And yet the working out of such larger relationships has few options but to proceed ritual by ritual.’15 Three of the papers in this volume are concerned with indi
vidual rites, two of which were reserved for bishops. They demonstrate the complexity of the relationships between the surviving manuscripts and the traditions they drew upon; none of the manuscript groups assigned on the basis of a single rite precisely overlap. This is a salutary reminder of how difficult it is to establish textual associations based on such fragmentary evidence. However, as Jones signals, such studies provide the basis for a more sustained investigation. An example may be illustrative. The Dunstan and Anderson (London, BL, Add. 57337; Christ Church, Canterbury, c. 1000) pontificals were both produced at Canterbury within no more than about thirty years of one another and are closely related. Anderson is the later of the two but, though its contents are very close to Dunstan’s, it is not an exact copy. It is, however, unusual for Anderson to include a completely different version of a rite, as is the case for the blessing of the oils on Maundy Thursday. Normally, this would not occasion remark given that such books are characterised by diversity, though in this case their close affinities demand an explanation for such divergence. Jones convinc ingly supplies one and in doing so reminds us that such details are not primarily significant for liturgical history but for what they reveal about wider concerns: in this case, what the archbishops and liturgists of Canterbury were thinking about c. 1000. Many of the chapters in this book are concerned with how liturgical books, and new forms of rites, were produced. The complexities of creating a new type of manuscript are examined in Susan Rankin’s discussion of the Winchester Tropers. Joyce Hill reconstructs the more minute, but no less revealing, alterations and adaptations that lie behind the fragmentary Old English translation of the Regularis concordia in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 201. Jones’ study of the Chrism Mass provides a clear example of how a new version of a ritual was created: drawing on pre-existing models, altering them where necessary, interweaving parts of different types of rites in ‘a protracted experi mental effort’.16 In the case of pontificals, this issue requires careful consideration in light of David Dumville’s observation that so many of the surviving manuscripts were produced at Canterbury and his sugges tion that ‘at least from Dunstan’s time, a new pontifical was created for each archbishop as he took up office’.17 The manuscript distribution of the distinctively English rites for the reconciliation of penitents on
10 ibid. 11 Dumville, Liturgy, op. cit. in n. 1, at 82-4 and references; J. Rosenthal, ‘The Pontifical o f St Dunstan’, St Dunstan: his Life, Times and Cult, ed. N. Ramsay, M. Sparks and T. Tatton-Brown (Woodbridge, 1992), pp. 143-63; N. K. Rasmussen with M. Haverals, Les Pontificaux du haut Moyen Age: genése du livre de l ’évéque, Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense, Etudes et documents 49 (Leuven, 1998), 258-317. An edition o f the Dunstan Pontifical is being prepared for the HBS by Birgit Ebersperger. See also discussion o f the additions made to the Leofric Missal during Dunstan’s pontificate: Leofric Missal, ed. Orchard, op. cit. in n. 4 , 1, 132-3, 155-205. 12 It is concerned with the number o f times that a church should be sprinkled with holy water in the dedication rite: ‘Ter dixi intrinsecus propter imbuendam fidem trinitatis quam fatetur aecclesia. et semel extrinsecus propter unum et non iteratum baptisma quod gerit exterius aecclesia’, fol. 17. (‘1 said three times inside for the sake o f instilling the faith of the trinity which the church declares and once outside for the sake o f the one and not to be repeated baptism which the church bears outwardly.’) The manuscript has never been fully edited though the church dedication rite was printed in DAER, lib. 2, cap. 13, ‘Ordo 4 ’ and the pontifical section in A. M. Conn, ‘The Dunstan and Brodie (Anderson) Pontificals: an Edition and Study’ (unpubl. PhD dissertation, Univ. o f Notre Dame, 1993). I am grateful to Dr B. Ebersperger for checking a reading in this manuscript. 13 H. Gittos, Sacred Space in Anglo-Saxon England: Liturgy, Architecture and Place (Oxford, forthcoming), ch. 5. 14 L. Komexl, ‘The Regularis Concordia and its Old English Gloss’, ASE 24 (1995), 95-130, at 101. 15 Jones, below, p. 128.
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16 Jones, below, p. 127. '7 Dumville, Liturgy, op. cit. in n. 1, p. 93.
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Maundy Thursday and the new ordo for the blessing of the oils seem to support Dumville’s contention that Canterbury played a decisive role in the production and dissemination of episcopal rites. This serves to strengthen the need for a proper investigation of Canterbury’s role, especially in relation to places like Winchester and Worcester.18 A feature of the rites studied here is that all contain peculiarly insular elements; although aware of continental traditions, some late AngloSaxon churches were clearly content to retain and indeed remodel their own traditions. One of the questions this raises is the extent to which the Romano-German Pontifical was influential in late tenth- and eleventhcentury England. Michael Lapidge’s deduction that a copy of the PRG which was imported by Archbishop Ealdred was the basis for two of the English versions of it should not (and was never intended to) preclude prior knowledge of this influential family of manuscripts.19 It may be that the PRG was never widely adopted in Anglo-Saxon England, as the vigorous revision of insular rites suggest.20 Yet this does not mean that individual ordines and prayers were not known and copied in England before the mid eleventh century as is suggested by the two Maundy Thursday rituals discussed here.21
unfortunately, divorced from the context in which they can be best understood. As Jolly discusses, some types of poison remedies, for example, are found in both medical collections and liturgical books, demonstrating the difficulties encountered when one tries to separate remedies and prayers.22 Historians of art and architecture are also, and increasingly so, looking to rituals to help interpret their sources. Karkov’s study of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11 is just such an example. However, these connections are not always easy to make. Liturgy is inextricably related to the physical spaces within which it was performed and which were designed as a setting for it. Gem examines the relationship between liturgy and architecture in Anglo-Saxon England and carefully outlines the problems involved. The wholesale destruction of major Anglo-Saxon churches means that the difficulty of relating buildings with rites is not surprising. Yet Gem reminds us of the complexities involved: in this case, that what was once a practical solution can become a formula and in turn be re-idealized. Perhaps the most significant change in the ecclesiastical landscape of the late tenth and eleventh centuries was the growth of parish churches and their potential to provide pastoral care on a hitherto unprecedented scale.23 Many of the contributions to this book seem to reflect how the church, and especially the episcopate, responded to these developments. Together they suggest a renewed emphasis on the power and role of bishops, together with strategies designed to oversee and facilitate the expansion in pastoral care. Maundy Thursday was potentially a significant day in the calendar for those who wished to maintain and enforce episcopal control over local churches. The absolution of penitents and the blessing of oils were both designed to draw ‘together the scattered rural clergy into the dioc esan centre’.24 Hamilton argues that the (first person indicative) absolu tion of penitents in the Anglo-Saxon rite ‘embodies a highly developed sense of the importance and extent of episcopal office’.25 The emphasis placed on episcopal reconciliation is at least in part explained because it provided a way of asserting episcopal authority. There is evidence that
Liturgy and the historian Just as liturgists must consider their evidence in its wider historical context, so liturgy provides a valuable source for understanding other types of historical material. Defining what is and what is not liturgical is not as easy as it might appear and both Hill and Lenker discuss examples of para-liturgical rites which are clearly rituals. A narrow definition may not be desirable and medical remedies are a classic example of the kind of texts which have been traditionally, and
18 It is, for example, worth contrasting Dumville’s suggestions with the emphasis placed on the role o f Winchester in: Hohler, ‘Some Service-Books o f the Later Saxon Church’, op. cit. in n. 4, pp. 72-4. 19 M. Lapidge, ‘Ealdred o f York and MS. Cotton Vitellius E. XII’, reprinted with addenda in his Anglo-Lalin Literature 900-1066 (London, 1993), pp. 453-67 and 492; M. Lapidge, ‘The Origin o f CCCC 163’, Trans, o f the Cambridge Bibliographical Soc. 8 (1981), 18-28. 20 See also discussion of the dissemination o f the PRG in: S. Hamilton, The Practice o f Penance 900-1050 (Woodbridge, 2001), Appendix 1. 21 See Hamilton and Jones, below, chs 4 and 5.
8
22 Jolly, below, ch. 8. See also R. M. Liuzza, ‘Anglo-Saxon Prognostics in Context: a Survey and Handlist o f Manuscripts’, ASE 30 (2001), 181-230. 22 J. Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford, 2005). 24 Hamilton, below, p. 88. 25 ibid. p. 81.
9
INTRODUCTION
bishops were successful in ensuring that local priests came to their cathedral on Maundy Thursday in order to collect the holy oils, because it was a right that was often jealously guarded by old mother churches. Canterbury’s sustained revision of the chrism mass was happening at exactly the same period as relationships between local churches, minsters and cathedrals were being renegotiated. This is hardly likely to be coincidental. It is difficult not to interpret this as an episcopal response to the growth of local churches. The interpretation of changes to the Chrism Mass, however, intro duces a problem which is often encountered in liturgical research. The distribution of the oils happened only once a year at a handful of places, only some of which are likely to have had access to the latest Canterbury rite. It was an extremely complex ritual that took place at the end of an intensive day whose significance can only have been grasped by a few of its witnesses. Even if it was performed as the manuscripts suggest, it can only ever have had a limited impact. But this does not mean that the evidence of the rituals should be dismissed.26 At the very least, it tells us how bishops and archbishops were trying to respond to changing circumstances. Bedingfield’s paper focuses squarely on the ideals and intentions of those who made the liturgy. By close reading of the liturgical texts in combination with other evidence, particularly Ælfric’s homilies, he discusses one of the things that the liturgy was intended to achieve: ‘to establish a connection between the faithful and their biblical models’ and thereby ‘to enhance the participatory role undertaken by the congre gation’.27 We will never know whether this ideal was ever accomplished, though other evidence for the emphasis on pastoral care and the control of parochial organization suggests that Ælfric was not the only man to whom the laity was a concern. The apparent importance placed on comprehension of the liturgy leads to a second issue that deserves further study, which is being under taken by Karen Jolly and Sarah Keefer: the role played by the vernacular in the liturgy and especially in pastoral care.28 It was perfectly accept able that sources such as the Regularis concordia should be translated
INTRODUCTION
into Old English, though not composed in it, and desirable to have full vernacular glosses for the psalter and gospels. However, Lenker is surely right to argue that the Old English version of the gospels was not designed to be used in the liturgy itself and to suggest other contexts for its use, including preaching. Her argument that such a translation ‘would have mitigated against the anxiety usually found in translators of Scripture who consider it demanding or even presumptuous to turn the authoritative and sacred word of God into another language’29 may also help to explain the retention of Æthelwold’s gloss of the Romanum version of the psalter even in manuscripts of the Gallicanum. Yet, Old English was creeping into the liturgy, one of the last places where Latin continued to be thought of as the appropriate language, and therefore the best place to examine its changing status. Liturgy is as complex and problematic as many other early medieval sources, not least in the difficulty of distinguishing between what was intended and what actually happened. This means that it must be studied cautiously and carefully, but it does deserve to be studied in its widest contexts because it is such a valuable source for so many aspects of the history of late Anglo-Saxon England.
26 Jones, below, eh. 5. 22 Bedingfield, below, p. 303. 28 K. L. Jolly and S. L. Keefer, 7vvo Languages at Prayer: the Vernacular in the Liturgy o f Anglo-Saxon England (working title, in progress). See also the brief discussion in Dumville, Liturgy, op. cit. in n. 1, at 127-33 and H. Gittos, Ms there any evidence for the Liturgy o f Parish Churches in Late Anglo-Saxon England? The Red Book of Darley and
the Status of Old English’, Pastoral Care in Late Anglo-Saxon England, ed. F. Tinti (Woodbridge, forthcoming). 29 Lenker, below, p. 204.
10
11
1
The Roman Psalter, its Old English Glosses and the English Benedictine Reform M echthild Gretsch
Psalters are one of the best preserved categories of manuscripts from Anglo-Saxon England: twenty-nine complete or almost complete psalters written or owned in Anglo-Saxon England have survived. In addition eight minor fragments of psalters are still extant.1 This substantial number of surviving manuscripts and fragments no doubt results from the paramount importance of the psalms in the liturgy of the Christian church, both in mass and especially in Office. Ten of the surviving manuscripts bear an interlinear Old English gloss to the entire psalter; in addition there are two psalters with a substantial amount of glossing in Old English, though not full interlinear versions. Since our concern will be primarily with the glossed psalters, I provide a list of all glossed psalters from Anglo-Saxon England which have been preserved.2 At the beginning of each item I give the siglum and the name by which the individual psalters are referred to by psalter scholars. An asterisk indicates that the Latin text is a Psalterium Romanum, the version in almost universal use in England before the Benedictine 1 For recent lists o f psalters from Anglo-Saxon England, see H. Gneuss, ‘Liturgical Books in Anglo-Saxon England and their Old English Terminology’, Learning and Litera ture in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies presented to Peter Clemoes on the Occasion o f his Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. M. Lapidge and H. Gneuss (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 91-141, at 114-16; and (with brief descriptions o f the manuscripts) P. Pulsiano, ‘Psalters’, Liturgical Books, ed. Pfaff, pp. 61-85. 2 Date and origin are usually as in H. Gneuss, Handlist o f Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: a List o f Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Ovmed in England up to I WO (Tempe, AZ, 2001). Unless otherwise stated the date refers to text and gloss. For full descriptions o f the manuscripts, see Ker, Catalogue. For printed editions o f the glossed psalters, see Gneuss, ‘Liturgical Books’, op. cit. in n. l,p p . 115-16; Pulsiano, ‘Psalters’, op. cit. in n. 1, pp. 61-70 and 76; and M. Gretsch, The Intellectual Foundations o f the English Benedictine Re;form, CSASE 25 (Cambridge, 1999), 18-21.
13
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reform; unmarked manuscripts contain the Psalterium Gallicanum. (I shall return to the various versions of the psalter in a moment.)
*A *B *C *D F G H I J K
Psalters with continuous Old English glosses Vespasian Psalter. London, BL, Cotton Vespasian A. i; s. viii2/4; OE gloss s. ixmed; probably Canterbury (St Augustine’s?). Junius Psalter. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 27 (S. C. 5139); s. x1/4 (probably in the 920s); Winchester (?). Cambridge Psalter. Cambridge, University Library, Ff. 1. 23; c. 1000; Ramsey (?). Royal Psalter or Regius Psalter. London, BL, Royal 2. B. V; s. xmed; Glastonbury or Abingdon (?). Stowe Psalter or Spelman Psalter. London, BL, Stowe 2; s. ximed or xi3/4; south-west England, probably Winchester (New Minster). Vitellius Psalter. London, BL, Cotton Vitellius E. xviii; s. ximed or xi3/4; Winchester (New Minster). Tiberius Psalter. London, BL, Cotton Tiberius C. vi; s. xi3/4; Winchester (Old Minster?). Lambeth Psalter. London, Lambeth Palace Library, 427; s. xi1; south-west England (Winchester?). Arundel Psalter. London, BL, Arundel 60; s. xi2; Winchester (New Minster). Salisbury Psalter. Salisbury, Cathedral Library, 150; s. x2 (969 x 978); south-west England (Shaftesbury?); OE gloss s. xi/xii.
Psalters containing substantial glossing in Old English Bosworth Psalter. London, BL, Add. 37517; s. x3/4; Canterbury (Christ Church?); OE gloss s. xiin. Continuous Old English gloss to parts of the psalter. *M Blickling Psalter or Blickling Glosses. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, M 776; s. viiimed. Two layers of scattered Old English glosses: 21 glosses in the Mercian dialect; s. ix; and 653 predominantly West Saxon glosses; s. x2.
*L
N
Membra disiecta o f a psalter containing a continuous gloss in Old English Cambridge, Pembroke College 312, C. nos. 1 and 2 + Haarlem, Stadsbibliotheek, 188 F 53 + Sondershausen, Schlossmuseum, Br. 1; s. ximed.
THE ROMAN PSALTER
*E
A twelfth-century psalter with an Old English gloss Eadwine Psalter or Canterbury Psalter. Cambridge, Trinity College R. 17. 1; s. xii2; Canterbury (Christ Church). A psalterium triplex; the Romanum text is glossed in Old English, with numerous corrections and alterations which are closely related to D.
From the foregoing list it emerges that some forty-one per cent of all extant psalters are glossed either continuously or in substantial parts. In view of the large number of manuscripts involved, this percentage can scarcely be accidental. To judge from the surviving evidence therefore, vast numbers of glossed psalters must once have been in existence. Interestingly, ten out of the twelve psalters come (certainly or arguably) from the most important ecclesiastical and intellectual centres: Canterbury, Glastonbury/Abingdon, Winchester and Ramsey. The number of manuscripts probably written at Winchester is especially noteworthy, given the fact that, for whatever reasons, Winchester manuscripts appear to have had a rather low survival rate. The evidence of the surviving Winchester psalters might therefore suggest that by the eleventh century at the latest, Winchester had developed into some sort of headquarters for the production of glossed psalters, catering for the needs of monasteries and minsters in other parts of the country. Not all the manuscripts in the above list present a fresh translation of the psalms. Broadly speaking, there are three distinct versions of Old English psalter gloss: the A-type, D-type and I-type glosses, so named after the oldest and purest surviving witnesses of the separate gloss traditions: the Vespasian (A), the Royal (D) and the Lambeth (I) psal ters. All the remaining manuscripts are clearly affiliated with one of these three gloss traditions, revealing at the same time contamination with other gloss traditions than the one to which they primarily belong.3 Let us now turn to the textual recensions of the psalter. For liturgical purposes two principal versions of the Latin psalter text must be distin guished: the Psalterium Romanum and the Psalterium Gallicanum. The Romanum forms a distinctive textual tradition among the often widely divergent manuscripts of the Vetus Latina or ‘Old Latin’ translation of the psalms, inasmuch as it represents a version which was slightly
3 For an excellent survey o f the textual affiliations o f the glossed psalters, see The Salis bury Psalter, ed. C. and K. Sisam, EETS os 242 (London, 1959), 52-75. For a brief list, see Gretsch, Intellectual Foundations, op. cit. in n. 2, pp. 26-7.
14
15
MECHTHILD GRETSCH
THE ROMAN PSALTER
revised after fresh consultation of the Greek Septuagint from which the psalter (like the other books of the Old Testament) had originally been translated. The Gallicanum is a more thorough revision of the Vetus Latina text, made by St Jerome between approximately 389 x 392, based on the Septuagint and, occasionally, the Hebrew text as found in the Hexapla.4 The two psalter versions came to be referred to by the names of Romanum and Gallicanum respectively in manuscripts from the ninth century onwards. These designations are usually taken to indi cate that the respective versions were in use in the churches of Rome and Francia by that time. Subsequently, the Romanum remained the psalter in official use in the churches all over Italy up to the time of Pope Pius V (1566-72) when it was replaced by the Gallicanum (except for St Peter’s in Rome, where it is still employed). Remnants of the litur gical use of the Romanum can be found in certain components of the Roman breviary, such as antiphons or responsories consisting of psalm verses. The Gallicanum was the version to be incorporated in the Vulgate text of the Bible from the ninth century onwards.5 In 392 x 393, subsequent to his Gallicanum revision, a fresh translation of the entire psalter was made by Jerome after the Hebrew original. However, this so-called Psalterium iuxta Hebraeos or Hebraicum never gained general currency, presumably because of conservative adherence to an already established textual form of a book of the Old Testament which
had always been of utmost importance in the liturgy.6*But the version iuxta Hebraeos is found in early pandects (complete Bibles), such as the famous ‘Codex Amiatinus’, written before 716 in Northumbria (Wearmouth-Jarrow) and now preserved as Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Amiatino 1. In connection with the WearmouthJarrow origin of the Amiatinus, it may be worth mentioning that Bede, who usually quotes from the Romanum version of the psalms, on one occasion expressly points out that one of his quotations is taken from a psalm iuxta Hebraicam ueritatem.1 Otherwise in English psalter manu scripts (as opposed to Bibles) the Romanum text is found invariably in books written up to the middle of the tenth century, the Gallicanum becoming established only gradually in the wake of the Benedictine reform with its close contacts with continental reformed monasteries. There is, however, ample manuscript evidence, in the form of psalters imported into England in the late ninth and early tenth century, that the Gallicanum was known in England long before it became the estab lished recension in the liturgy of the Anglo-Saxon church.8 By contrast, the Gallicanum was well established in the Irish church from an early date onwards. Here the Hebraicum must also have been disseminated early and widely in psalter manuscripts (not only in pandects) as can be seen from the manuscripts still extant.910This would explain why (according to his biographer Stephen of Ripon) the Irish-taught young Wilfrid, future bishop of York (669-78), who previ ously had known only the Psalterium Gallicanum, had to learn the Romanum during his stay at Canterbury in the early 650s en route to
4 The Hexapla was a massive one-volume edition o f the Old Testament which was compiled by Origen (c. 185-253); it originated c. 231 x 245 and consisted o f the Hebrew text of the Old Testament in Hebrew and Greek characters, and four Greek translations (the Septuagint among them), arranged in six parallel columns: see The Oxford Dictionary o f the Christian Church, ed. F. L. Cross, 3rd ed. by E. A. Livingstone (Oxford, 1997), p. 765. 5 For the Romanum and Gallicanum see, briefly, ibid. pp. 1344 (‘Psalter’), 1410 (‘Roman Psalter’), and 652 (‘Gallican Psalter’). For the substitution o f the Romanum by the Gallicanum in Francia, see B. Fischer, ‘Bibeltext und Bibelreform unter Karl dem GroBen’, in his Lateinische Bibelliandschriften im friihen Mittelalter, Vetus Latina: Aus der Geschichte der lateinischen Bibel 11 (Freiburg, 1985), 101-202, at 164-7. The critical edition of the Romanum is: Le Psautier Romain, ed. R. Weber, Collectanea Biblica Latina 10 (Rome, 1953). The critical edition o f the Gallicanum is: Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam Versionem ad Codicum Fidem, ed. H. Quentin et al., 18 vols. (Rome, 1926-94), X: Liber Psalmorum (1953). A critical edition o f the remnants o f the unrevised ‘Old Latin’ psalter texts will appear as volume 9 of the comprehensive edition o f the ‘Old Latin’ Bible prepared by the Erzabtei Beuron: Vetus Latina. Die Reste der altlateinischen B ibel. . . neu gesammelt u n d . . . herausgegeben von der Erzabtei Beuron (Freiburg, 1949- ). Until this volume has appeared, for the ‘Old Latin’ psalter texts one has to refer to Bibliorum Sacrorum Latinae Versiones antiquae seu Vetus Italica, ed. P. Sabatier, 2 vols. (Rheims, 1743).
16
6 For the Hebraicum, see Oxford Dictionary o f the Christian Church, op. cit. in n. 4, p. 1344. The critical edition is: Sancti Hieronymi Psalterium iuxta Hebraeos, ed. H. de Sainte-Marie, Collectanea Biblica Latina 11 (Rome, 1954). 7 The quotation occurs in the discussion o f the rhetorical figure o f paronomasia: see De schematibus et tropis, in Bedae Venerabilis Opera, pars I, Opera didascalica, ed. C. B. Kendall, CCSL 123A (Turnhout, 1975), 142—71, at 147—8. For Bede’s usual adherence to the Romanum text, see Bede, libri ii de arte metrica et de schematibus et tropis: The Art o f Poetry and Rhetoric, ed. and trans. C. B. Kendall (Saarbrucken, 1991), p. 175, n. 4. 8 All o f the six imported psalters listed by Pulsiano, ‘Psalters’, op. cit. in n. 1, p. 68 contain the Gallicanum version. For a brief discussion of the five psalters which, demon strably or arguably, were in England by the mid-tenth century, see Gretsch, Intellectual Foundations, op. cit. in n. 2, pp. 274-7. 9 See M. McNamara, ‘The Text of the Latin Bible in the Early Irish Church: Some Data and Desiderata’, Irland und die Christenheit: Bibelstudien und Mission, ed. P. Ní Chatháin and M. Richter (Stuttgart, 1987), pp. 7—55, at 39—41; and idem, ‘Psalter Text and Psalter Study in the Early Irish Church (A. D. 600-1200)’, Proc. o f the Royal Irish Academy 73C (1973), 201-76.
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MECHTHILD GRETSCH
THE ROMAN PSALTER
Rome.10 It should be stressed, however, that the differences between the two principal Latin text forms, the Romanum and the Gallicanum, although numerous, are by no means dramatic, since both derive from the Septuagint (unlike the iuxta Hebraeos version). Apart from aiming at a more accurate translation of the Greek text in general, the Gallicanum quite often presents a more ‘modem’ phraseology, replacing rare, difficult or obsolete words in the Romanum. The following short list of textual variants, randomly lifted from a few consecutive verses of one psalm (and not complete for the verses in question) will give some impression of the nature of these variants and the frequency with which they occur.11
the original but a copy, as can be seen from a few mistakes and discrep ancies between lemma and interpretamentum. It is, however, a copy which is very close to the original.14 This original Royal Psalter gloss is a fresh translation of the Latin psalter, the first to be undertaken in English since the Vespasian Psalter gloss, made in the earlier ninth century and preserved in BL, Cotton Vespasian A. i. The subsequent influence of the Royal Psalter gloss was very considerable; it was to become the progenitor of the family of the D-type glosses, and practi cally all surviving glossed psalters from the eleventh century draw (often heavily) on the Royal Psalter.15 The Royal Psalter gloss is of striking quality, revealing the Glossator’s proficiency in Latin as well as his remarkable competence and resourcefulness in choosing or coining his Old English interpretamenta. The scholarly cast of his mind can also be seen from the fact that in Royal 2. B. V the Old English gloss is accompanied by a marginal commentary on the psalms in Latin. (The Latin text of the psalter, the Old English gloss and the Latin commen tary are all written by the same scribe.) The commentary is largely drawn from Cassiodorus’s Expositio in psalmos, a text widely used in the early Middle Ages. Interestingly, for his Old English interpre tamenta, the Royal Glossator draws on patristic psalm exegesis on a scale hitherto unprecedented in psalter glossing. The commentary laid under contribution is again almost exclusively Cassiodorus’s Expositio, often, but not always, as found in the margins of Royal 2. B. V. As 1 have tried to show elsewhere, there are philological and historical reasons to believe that the Royal gloss originated in the 940s among the new Benedictine élite which had assembled at Glastonbury and that Æthelwold, the future bishop of Winchester and intellectual driving force in the Benedictine reform movement, played a leading part in its production. The principal philological reasons for suspecting Æthelwold’s involvement in the glossing are the close verbal and stylistic links which can be established between the Royal Psalter gloss and the translation of the Regula S. Benedicti into Old English prose, a
20.4 20.5 20.5 20.6 20.7 20.8 20.12 20.13 20.13 20.13
Romanum benedictione petiit in saeculum saeculi magna est gloria in benedictionem sperauit consilium quod deorsum reliquiis illorum
Gallicanum benedictionibus petiit a te in saeculum et in saeculum saeculi magna gloria benedictionem sperat consilia quae dorsum reliquis eorum
Even from these few examples it will be clear that an interlinear Old English gloss, originally designed for a Romanum text, could be copied into a Gallicanum psalter without causing major difficulties. Such copying has, for example, been done in the case of the Salisbury Psalter {Gallicanum), which is very closely dependent on the gloss in the Royal Psalter (Romanum).12 Let us now return to the psalters with Old English glosses. Among these we shall focus our attention on the Royal Psalter (BL, Royal 2. B. V), dated unanimously by the type of its script to the mid tenth century.13 The Old English gloss as transmitted in Royal 2. B. V is not 1(3 See The Life o f Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius Stephaniis, ed. and trans. B. Colgrave (Cambridge, 1927), ch. 3 (p. 8). 11 The typically Gallicanum variants are conveniently listed in the apparatus criticus of Psautier Romain, ed. Weber, op. cit. in n. 5. 12 For the close relationship between the Royal and Salisbury psalters, see Salisbury Psalter, ed. Sisam, op. cit. in n. 3, esp. pp. 39-47. 13 See Ker, Catalogue, p. 320 (no. 249); Salisbury Psalter, ed. Sisam, op. cit. in n. 3, pp.
53-4. D. Dumville, ‘English Square Minuscule Script: the Mid-Century Phases’, ASE 23 (1994), 133-64, at 149-50; and idem, English Caroline Script and Monastic History: Studies in Benedictinism A.D. 950-1030, Stud, in AS Hist. 5 (Woodbridge, 1993), 14, n. 3; cf. also idem, ‘On the Dating o f Some Late Anglo-Saxon Liturgical Manuscripts’, Trans, o f the Cambridge Bibliographical Soc. 10 (1991), 40-57, at 48. 14 See Salisbury Psalter, ed. Sisam, op. cit. in n. 3, pp. 54-5 and 71-2. 15 For the dependence o f the eleventh-century psalters on the Royal Psalter, see ibid. pp. 52-75; see also Gretsch, Intellectual Foundations, op. cit. in n. 2, pp. 26-7 and 268-9.
18
19
MECHTHILD GRETSCH
text which is unanimously ascribed to Æthelwold and which was produced presumably also during the 940s.16 Æthelwold’s orientation (and that of the Benedictine reform at large) towards the continent and towards Francia in particular are well known. For example, he based his translation of the Regula S. Benedicti not on the recension of that text which had been known in England for some centuries but on the recension then prevalent on the continent and disseminated in the wake of the reforms instigated by the emperor Louis the Pious and his ecclesi astical adviser Benedict of Aniane at the beginning of the ninth century.17 But the Latin text of the Royal Psalter presents the Romanum version, the version which had been ousted on the continent (except Italy) for more than a century. We must ask, therefore, why the Royal Glossator should have turned to the Romanum version of the psalter. We have seen that he set out to create a fresh vernacular gloss to the psalter, which in many ways differed radically from the existing Vespasian-type of gloss, that for his gloss he drew extensively on psalm exegesis, and that he even incorporated such exegesis into the manuscript in the form of marginal scholia. Furthermore, the Royal Psalter is the first AngloSaxon psalter to include a number of liturgical pieces following the text of the psalms, the most important of these being the so-called Athanasian Creed or Quicumque uult (after its incipit). All these pieces are continuously glossed in Old English by the same glossator as the psalms. The Athanasian Creed and its companion pieces are almost invariably found in Gallican psalters produced on the continent and in England after the middle of the tenth century. They are not found in any of the Roman psalters produced in England prior to Royal 2. B. V So there can be little doubt that the Royal Glossator’s mind was indeed
THE ROMAN PSALTER
keyed to the new forms of the continental liturgy and that consequently he will have been aware of the two principal recensions of the psalter.18 Considerations such as these inevitably lead to the conclusion that the Glossator’s choice of the Romanum is not to be explained simply as the result of the (by then) wide currency of that version in England, but that, on the contrary, his decision must have been made deliberately. But what were his reasons for such a decision? There are several answers to this question and they all turn on the authority attached to the Romanum and Gallicanum respectively. To begin with, for an Anglo-Saxon scholar in the 940s, the Gallicanum would have been the version which he probably knew to be in almost universal use on the continent, but apparently not on grounds of any promulgation by (say) an imperial edict or a church synod. Moreover, such a scholar would have been aware that yet a third recension, the iuxta Hebraeos, was in circulation on the continent. Matters were quite different with regard to the textual recensions of the Regula S. Benedicti. It was obviously understood among the new Benedictines in England that the so-called textus receptus was linked with the reforms of Benedict of Aniane and Emperor Louis the Pious, as emerges, for example, from the inclusion of important texts of the Aachen synods of 816 and 817 in several Anglo-Saxon manuscripts of the Regula}9 Given the absence of any such institutionally approved superiority for the Gallicanum, the vener able tradition of the Romanum in England would inevitably have come into play. Ever since the days of St Augustine the Romanum had been the psalter of the English church. It was (as we have seen) the version habit ually quoted by Bede, and (as we have also seen) all surviving psalters
16 There is a full discussion o f the nature o f the glossing in the Royal Psalter and o f the evidence for its association with Æthelwold and the Benedictines assembled at Glastonbury in Gretsch, Intellectual Foundations, op. cit. in n. 2, esp. chs. 3 ,4 and 8. The edition o f the Royal Psalter is Der altenglische Regius-Psalter, ed. F. Roeder, Studien zur Englischen Philologie 18 (Halle, 1904). The marginal commmentary is unprinted, though it is a crucial text for tenth-century intellectual culture. 17 For the so-called receptus recension o f the Regula S. Benedicti as the exemplar of Æthelwold’s translation, see H. Gneuss, ‘Die Benediktinerregel in England und ihre altenglische Ubersetzung’, Die angelsachsischen Prosabearbeitungen der Benedik tinerregel, ed. A. Schröer, 2nd ed. with a supplement by H. Gneuss (Darmstadt, 1964), pp. 263-84, at 280-2; M. Gretsch, Die Regula Sancti Benedicti in England und ihre altenglische Ubersetzung, Texte und Untersuchungen zur Englischen Philologie 2 (Munich, 1973), pp. 123-76; and idem, ‘Æthelwold’s Translation o f the Regula Sancti Benedicti and its Latin Exemplar’, ASE 3 (1974), 125-51, at 128-34.
18 For a discussion o f the significance of the Athanasian Creed and its companion pieces included in Royal 2. B. V, see Gretsch, Intellectual Foundations, op. cit. in n. 2, pp. 273-80. The only scholar to notice this significance so far was Karl Wildhagen in his pioneering essay, ‘Studien zum Psalterium Romanum in England und zu seinen Glossierungen’, Festschrift fiir Lorenz Morsbach, ed. F. Holthausen and J. Spies, Studien zur englischen Philologie 5Ö (Halle, 1913), 418-72, at 426 and 452-3. 19 For the significance which the Aachen texts had on the unfolding Benedictine reform in England, see M. Gretsch, ‘Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 57: a Witness to the Early Stages of the Benedictine Reform in England?’ ASE 32 (2003), 111—46. See also the brief but valuable accounts by P. Wormald, ‘Æthelwold and his Continental Counterparts: Contact, Comparison, Contrast’, Bishop Æthelwoid: his Career and Influence, ed. B. Yorke (Woodbridge, 1988), pp. 13-42, at 31-2, and M. Lapidge, Wulfstan o f Winchester: the Life o f St Ætheiwold, ed. M. Lapidge and M. Winterbottom (Oxford, 1991), pp. lv-lviii; and cf. the early study o f these texts by M. Bateson, ‘Rules for Monks and Secular Canons after the Revival under King Edgar’, Eng. Hist. Rev. 9 (1894), 690-708.
20
21
MECHTHILD GRETSCH
written in England earlier than the Royal Psalter were Romanum texts. The first Gallican psalters written in England which have survived are Salisbury Cathedral 150 (written between 969 and 987) and London, BL, Harley 2904, dated to the end of the tenth century and perhaps produced for the personal use of Bishop Oswald.20 It will also have been known in England that the Psalterium Romanum was still in use in the churches of Rome, which no doubt will have contributed to the authority attached to the Romanum. Evidence for such knowledge is found, for example, in an entry in the inventory of some sixty books donated by Bishop Leofric to his cathedral church at Exeter between 1069 and 1072. Among these books, three psalters are listed and referred to as follows ‘ii salteras 7 se þriddan saltere swa man singð on Rome’.21 Confirmation that the use of the Romanum was maintained at Rome will have come each time a newly appointed archbishop of Canterbury and his entourage made their trip there to collect the pallium. A special relationship between the English metropolitan see and Rome is indicated by the fact that at Christ Church the Romanum seems to have been in official use long after other Anglo-Saxon centres had adopted the Gallicanum in their liturgy.22 Two eleventh-century Roman psalters of Christ Church origin are of interest here: BL, Harley 603, which is a copy of the famous Utrecht Psalter (Utrecht, Universiteitsbibliotheek, 32). The Utrecht Psalter was written and lavishly illustrated at Rheims sometime during the first half of the ninth century; it had come to England by about 970 and was at Canterbury by about 1000. But while the artists of Harley 603 at Canterbury strove to imitate closely the splendid illustrations of the Utrecht Psalter, the Gallicanum text of that psalter was replaced by the Romanum, written by three scribes during the first two decades of the eleventh century (one of them the renowned Christ Church scribe Eadwig Basan).22 The
THE ROMAN PSALTER
second Roman psalter in question is BL, Arundel 155, written and deco rated by Eadwig Basan between 1012 and 1023 (on the testimony of its calendar). Various evidence, such as a set of canticles following the psalms, indicates that this psalter was intended for official liturgical use.24 But, of course, the contacts between the English church and Rome were numerous throughout Anglo-Saxon times and not restricted to the metropolitan see. Such contacts especially for the tenth and eleventh century have been listed and discussed by Veronica Ortenberg.25 For earlier such contacts much valuable information is to be found in a recent article by Simon Keynes.26 The notion that the English church in general (not only the see of Canterbury) had enjoyed an especial and intimate relationship with Rome from its very beginnings was an idea close to Æthelwold’s heart. Clear proof of this comes from a short text which passes under the name of ‘Edgar’s Establishment of Monasteries’ and which was almost certainly composed by Æthelwold to serve as a preface to his translation of the Regula S. Benedicti. The text is transmitted uniquely in the latest manuscript of the Old English Rule (BL, Cotton Faustina A. x, dated s. xii1), where it immediately follows the text of the Rule.27 Much of the preface is taken up with a glowing account of the early stages of the
20 In addition to those complete psalters, a single leaf from a (once complete?) Gallican psalter, dated s. x2 and of unknown English origin, has survived: Worcester, Cathedral Library, F. 173, fol. 1 (Gneuss, Handlist, op. cit. in n. 2, no. 764.1). The fragment contains Pss. XXXIII.20-XXXIV.7 and, interestingly, is provided with interlinear and marginal scholia in Latin. 21 The ‘ii salteras’ are presumably Gallicanum texts. The Leofric list has most recently been printed and discussed by M. Lapidge, ‘Surviving Booklists from Anglo-Saxon England’, Learning and Literature, ed. Lapidge and Gneuss, op. cit. in n. 1, pp. 33-89, at 64-9; for the entry in question, see p. 65 (nos. 9 and 10). 22 For the continued use o f the Romanum at Christ Church, see, for example, N. Brooks, The Early History o f the Church o f Canterbury: Christ Church from 597 to 1066 (London, 1984), pp. 261-5. 22 For Harley 603 and its connection with the Utrecht Psalter, see W. Noel, The Harley
Psalter (Cambridge, 1995), esp. pp. 140-9; for the psalter text in Harley 603, see ibid. pp. 23-4. (The Gallicanum version o f the exemplar is retained only in Pss. C-CV.24 and coincides with the work o f one o f the scribes.) For the Canterbury sojourn o f the Utrecht Psalter, cf. ibid. pp. 189-96. T. A. M. Bishop had first identified Eadwig Basan as the scribe o f Harley 603, 28r-49v: English Caroline Minuscule (Oxford, 1971), p. 22 (no. 24). 24 For Arundel 155, see Ker, Catalogue, p. 171 (no. 135); for that psalter in official use at Christ Church in the eleventh century, see Salisbury Psalter, ed. Sisam, op. cit. in n. 3, p. 49, n. 1; for Eadwig Basan as the scribe o f Arundel 155, see Bishop, English Caroline Minuscule, op. cit. in n. 23, p. 22 (no. 24), and most recently Dumville, English Caroline Script, op. cit. in n. 13, esp. pp. 122-3 and 139-40. 22 V Ortenberg, The English Church and the Continent in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries (Oxford, 1992). 26 S. Keynes, ‘Anglo-Saxon Entries in the Liber Vitae o f Brescia’, Alfred the Wise: Studies in Honour o f Janet Bately on the Occasion o f her Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. J. Roberts, J. L. Nelson and M. Godden (Woodbridge, 1999), pp. 99-119. 27 The text is printed in Councils & Synods with Other Documents Relating to the English Church 1: A.D. H71-1204, ed. D. Whitelock, M. Brett and C. N. L. Brooke, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1981) l.i, 142-54; a new edition for Anglo-Saxon Texts is in preparation: M. Gretsch, Æthelwold o f Winchester: King E dgar's Establishment o f Monasteries. For Æthelwold as author o f the ‘Establishment’, see D. Whitelock, ‘The Authorship o f the Account o f King Edgar’s Establishment o f Monasteries’, Philological Essays: Studies in Old and Middle English Language and Literature in Honour o f Herbert Dean Meritt, ed. J. L. Rosier (The Hague, 1970), pp. 125—36; and Gretsch, Intellectual Foundations, op. cit. in n. 2, pp. 230-3.
22
23
MECHTHILD GRETSCH
Benedictine reform and a long panegyric on the pivotal role played by King Edgar in the success story of that reform, a panegyric which in many ways would meet the standards of a modem product placement campaign. The text begins, however, with an account of the coming of Christianity to England, based on Bede’s Historia ecclesiastical Here the part played by Pope Gregory the Great in the conversion of the English race is extolled and no mention is made of any missionaries of Irish extraction such as Aidan. But Æthelwold took great care to point out that Pope Gregory, having been prevented from coming to England himself, remained, nevertheless, closely involved in the progress of the English mission, being continually in touch with, and giving instruc tions to, Augustine, a most holy and orthodox man whom he himself had chosen as his representative: ‘He þeah sanctum Agustinum, þæt getreoweste beam þæs halgan geleafan, him to gespelian funde, 7 hine hider asende . . . He geome þone his gespelian þurh ærendracan manode and lærde .. .’.2829 It squares well with Æthelwold’s notion of such long-standing and close ties between the English church and Rome that, on the occasion of his expulsion of the secular clergy from his cathedral church, the Old Minster in Winchester, and their replacement with Benedictine monks from Abingdon, he produced a letter from Pope John XII, sanctioning his drastic action through auctoritate apostolica. The letter appears to have been written before November 963 and hence before Æthelwold’s consecration as bishop of Winchester on 29 November of that year. The expulsion of the secular clergy took place on 19 February 964. From this schedule it emerges that Æthelwold’s procedure in this matter had been premeditated for some time and that the papal letter and support was an integral and important part of his plans.30 But in spite of his fervent,
THE ROMAN PSALTER
even ruthless propagation of Benedictine monasticism and his pervasive adoption of continental monastic customs, Æthelwold had an ingrained penchant for the traditions of the English church (at least the ones he approved of). Thus several stipulations in his monastic customary, the Regularis concordia, such as the frequent prayers for the Royal House or the three prayers for the Veneration of the Cross on Good Friday are thought to represent native customs.31 In fact, in the Regularis concordia Æthelwold occasionally points out that a certain custom should be observed usu patrum or that such customs should be followed nam honestos huius patriae mores ad Deum pertinentes, quos ueterum usu didicimus, nullo modo abicere sed undique, uti diximus, corroborare decreuimus.32 There can be little doubt that for Æthelwold the text of the Psalterium Romanum would have been part of this venerable heritage of the English church. Given the Royal Glossator’s orientation towards Benedictine monas ticism, and his scholarly disposition as revealed by his consistent recourse to psalm exegesis, there are two further reasons why he should have decided to base his gloss on a Romanum psalter rather than on a Gallicanum. The Psalterium Romanum was the text habitually quoted by Cassiodorus in his Expositio psalmorum, the commentary principally drawn on by the Royal Glossator.33 And the Romanum was the version followed by St Benedict in his numerous quotations from the psalms.34
28 The chapters o f the Historia ecclesiastica drawn on by Æthelwold are 1.23-7 and 11.1: see Bede’s Ecclesiastical History o f the English People, ed. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, rev. ed. (Oxford, 1992), pp. 68-103 and 122-35. 29 ‘He chose, however, St Augustine, the most faithful son o f the Holy Church as his representative and sent him to this country . . . He eagerly exhorted and instructed this representative by his messengers . . . ’. 30 For the date o f Æthelwold’s consecration as bishop, see Wulfstan: Life, ed. Lapidge and Winterbottom, op. cit. in n. 19, ch. 16 (p. 30); for the expulsion of the clerics from the Old Minster, see ibid. chs. 16 and 17 (pp. 30-2). For discussion o f these and other events in the wake o f Æthelwold’s consecration, see Lapidge, ibid. pp. xlv-xlviii, and notes to chs. 16,17, 20 and 22. The letter from Pope John XII (955-64) to King Edgar (957/9-75) has been printed and discussed most recently by D. Whitelock: Councils & Synods, op. cit. in n. 2 7 ,1.i, 109-13 (no. 29).
31 For the English elements in the liturgical customs o f the Regularis concordia, see Regularis concordia, ed. Symons, p. xlvi; idem, ‘Regularis Concordia: History and Deri vation’, Tenth-Century Studies, ed. Parsons, pp. 37-59, at 44-5; and Lapidge, Wulfstan: Life, ed. Lapidge and Winterbottom, op. cit. in n. 19, p. lx. 32 ‘For we have ordained that the goodly religious customs o f this land, which we have learned from our fathers before us, be in no wise cast off, but confirmed on all hands.’ Regularis concordia, ed. Symons, ch. 23 (p. 30). 33 For Cassiodorus’s version o f the psalter, see Magni Aurelii Cassiodori Expositio psalmorum, ed. M. Adriaen, 2 vols., CCSL 97-8 (Tumhout, 1958) 1, xix; and G. A. Löffler, ‘Der Psalmenkommentar des M. Aur. Cassiodorus Senator. Die exegetische Bildung des Verfassers und sein Psalmentext’ (unpubl. dissertation, Freiburg Univ., 1920). 34 For Benedict’s version of the psalter, cf., briefly, A. de Vogiié, in La Regie de Saint Benoit, ed. A. de Vogiié and J. Neufville, 6 vols., Sources chrétiennes 181-6 (Paris, 1971-2) I, 139-40; and (with an annotated list o f all quotations) P. Volk, Die Schriftzitate der Regula S. Benedicti; printed as an appendix in E. Munding and A. Dold, Palimpsesttexte des Codex Latin. Monacensis 6333 (Beuron, 1930), pp. 1-35, at 15-25. Volk’s work on Benedict’s psalter was done before critical editions o f the Romanum and Gallicanum were available. His findings, however, are confirmed when compared with these critical editions.
24
25
MECHTHILD GRETSCH
must derive from the archetype of the Old English Rule and were still copied into manuscripts which were written at a time when the Gallicanum had held sway for several generations. These Romanum variants in the Rule and the prologue to the Regularis concordia may confirm our suspicion that Æthelwold personally was firmly attached to the Roman psalter and during the early stages of his career actively propagated its use in the liturgy, even though he will have known imported Gallican psalters such as the famous Æthelstan Psalter (BL, Cotton Galba A. xviii),38 even though he will have been aware of the role which the Gallican version played in the liturgy on the continent, and even though he himself may have encouraged the adoption of the Gallicanum in the liturgy at Winchester during his episcopate. The history of the Roman Psalter in Anglo-Saxon England, the pres tige attached to this version and its eventual replacement by the Gallicanum may teach us that liturgical details on occasion point beyond their immediate sphere and may be intimately linked with con temporary intellectual activities and even political conditions.39
2
Making the Liturgy: Winchester Scribes and their Books Susan Rankin
The manuscript London, BL, Royal 15. C. vii contains Lantfred’s Translatio et miraculi S. Swithuni, followed by an abecedarian, epanaleptic hymn in honour of St Swithun {Aurea lux patriae), and Wulfstan’s verse Narratio metrica de Sancto Swithuno.' The manuscript was copied throughout by one excellent Winchester scribe, probably within Wulfstan’s lifetime (c. 960 to after 996),2 and - as Michael Lapidge has argued, in view of the extreme degree of correctness of the text - possibly by Wulfstan himself.3 In the liturgy of the New Minster at Winchester by the end of the twelfth century (and possibly earlier) an anonymous Vita of St Swithun provided eight Matins readings for Swithun’s Deposition feast (the other four readings presumably biblical).4 The evidence of the Royal manuscript is that at the Old
Benediktinerregel, ed. Schröer, op. cit. in n. 17.) Note, however, that alongside such Romanum readings Gallican variants occur as well in the psalm incipits quoted in the Old English Rule. This situation is explained most economically on the assumption that the Gallicanum readings gradually and partly replaced the original Romanum text in the course o f transmission o f the Old English Rule (and not vice versa). 38 For Galba A. xviii and its presumed influence on Æthelwold, see Gretsch, Intellectual Foundations, op. cit. in n. 2, pp. 310-15 and 328-31. 39 The text o f this article is essentially as read at the Oxford conference. It is based on the examination o f the gloss in Royal 2. B. V in my Intellectual Foundations, op. cit. in n. 2.
1 On this manuscript and on Wulfstan, including discussion o f his authorship o f Aurea lux patriae and the Narratio metrica, see Wulfstan o f Winchester: the Life o f St Æthelwold, ed. M. Lapidge and M. Winterbottom (Oxford, 1991), Introduction, passim. On Wulfstan see also E. Teviotdale, ‘Wulfstan o f Winchester’, The New Grove Dictionary o f Music and Musicians, ed. S. Sadie and J. Tyrrell, 2nd ed., 29 vols. (London, 2001) XXVII, 585-6. 2 Ker, Catalogue, pp. 335-6, suggests the date o f copying o f the Narratio metrica as ‘s.xi'"’; the script is o f the kind known as Anglo-Caroline I, and thus typical o f the Old Minster during the last third of the tenth and the early eleventh centuries. In this source it is written in a smaller format than in the more famous Benedictional ‘o f St Æthelwold’ (London, BL, Add. 49598). 3 M. Lapidge, ‘Autographs o f Insular Latin Authors of the Early Middle Ages’, Gli Autograft Medievali. Problemi Paleografici e Filologici. Atti del Convegno di Studio della Fondazione Ezio Franceschini. Erice 1990, ed. P. Chiesa and L. Pinelli (Spoleto, 1994), pp. 103-36, at 132-3. 4 A breviary o f the New Minster copied c. 1300 survives as Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson lit.e. 1; it is edited in The Monastic Breviary of Hyde Abbey, Winchester, ed. J. B. L. Tolhurst, HBS 69—71, 76, 78 and 80, 6 vols. (London, 1930—42). For the Swithun readings see vol. IV (HBS 78), Sanctorale (July to December), fols. 281-2. The readings,
28
29
MECHTHILD GRETSCH
In sum, these various considerations lead one to the impression that it was predictable in some ways that a scholar of the intellectual and spiri tual make-up and backdrop of the Royal Glossator should have chosen the Psalterium Romanum as the version on which to base his vernacular gloss. In the event it turned out that his choice would not stand the test of time. With the massive importation of customs (liturgical and other wise) from the continental centres of reformed Benedictinism (in which Æthelwold himself had been instrumental) the Psalterium Gallicanum ultimately emerged victorious. It is a matter of interest that the Royal gloss itself survived the replacement of the Romanum. All extant glossed psalters with a D-type gloss are Gallicanum texts. In cases of divergence between the two versions, the scribes of these D-type psal ters either copied mindlessly the Royal glosses for the Romanum read ings over their Gallicanum counterparts, or the Gallicanum variants were left unglossed, or they were glossed afresh (more or less intelli gently) by some later glossator.35 We may be allowed to regard this adherence to the Royal gloss, shown almost unanimously by the eleventhcentury psalters, as a strong pointer to the authority which was attached to this mid-tenth-century gloss and the high esteem in which it was held by later generations. Let me conclude by drawing attention to two further pieces of evidence which reveal Æthelwold’s penchant for the Roman psalter and may therefore confirm the assumption that to base a fresh interlinear translation of the psalms on this text was a natural decision in the circle of the new Benedictines at Glastonbury in the 940s. The first piece of evidence comes from Æthelwold’s prologue to the Regularis concordia, that is from his Winchester period in the 970s, and thus from a time for which we may assume the replacement in the Anglo-Saxon liturgy of the Romanum by the Gallicanum to have been well advanced. Having invoked in the prologue for a last time the authority of the Regula S. Benedicti (inter alia by quoting verbatim from its text), which he considered the cornerstone on which to build his own consuetudinary, Æthelwold draws the prohemium to a conclusion as follows:
THE ROMAN PSALTER
ut ab ipso aeternae uitae remunerationem cuncti concorditer et gratulabunde conseruantes recipiant, qui facit unanimes, id est unius moris, habitare in domo, ubi est rex Deus, Dei et uirginis filius, qui cum Patre et Spiritu Sancto uiuit et regnat Deus in saecula saeculorum. Arnen.36 In this passage a psalm verse is employed to sum up a leitmotif of the prologue to the Regularis concordia: the necessity of, and reward for, unanimity and uniformity in daily monastic observance. In the quotation from the psalm the variant unanimes comes from the Psalterium Romanum, whereas unius moris (given as an explanatory gloss for it) is the Gallicanum reading. What is interesting here is not only a ready familiarity with the psalter which allows Bishop Æthelwold to produce a minute but highly pertinent quotation from the psalms at a very strategic point in his prohemium-, even more striking are his interest in the textual criticism of the psalms and his command of variant readings in psalm verses revealed in the above quotation. It may be significant to observe that the text of the brief quotation in the Regularis concordia is basically that of the Romanum. Not only is the Romanum variant unanimes cited first, habitare is Romanum for Gallicanum inhabitare, and the Romanum only has a relative clause, introduced by qui, whereas the Gallicanum omits the qui and has an independent sentence instead (‘Deus inhabitare facit unius moris in domo’). We may therefore deduce that the psalter text which came to Bishop Æthelwold most naturally (even as late as the 970s) was the Psalterium Romanum. My second piece of evidence concerns the quotations from the psalms in Æthelwold’s translation of the Regula S. Benedicti. These often take the form of additions to the Latin text, especially in the litur gical chapters (8-18) of the Regula, where Æthelwold supplies psalm incipits in addition to the bare psalm numbers given by St Benedict, no doubt for reasons of easy reference. In these quotations Romanum read ings occur, even in the latest manuscripts of the Rule.37 Such readings
35 Recall that, on the whole, the textual differences between the Romanum and the Gallicanum are not dramatic and might have been dealt with competently by an intelligent scribe (see above, p. 18). See, however, Salisbury Psalter, ed. Sisam, op. cit. in n. 3, pp. 17-19, for the not very intelligent methods by which the glossator o f the Salisbury Psalter tried to cope with the difficulties involved in copying a Romanum gloss to accompany a Gallicanum text.
36 ‘[and we pray] that all who observe these customs in peace and thanksgiving may receive the reward o f eternal life from Him Who maketh those o f one mind, that is, o f one way o f life, to dwell in that house where God is King, even the Son o f God, bom o f a Virgin, Who with the Father and the Holy Ghost liveth and reigneth God for ever and ever. Amen.’ Regularis concordia, ed. Symons, ch. 12 (p. 9). The italicized words in the text are quotations from Ps. LXVII.7. 37 Cf., for example, BR 44.7-8 (= Ps. IV2): ‘cum inuocarem te' (Gallicanum: te omitted); or BR 37.17 (= Ps. LX1I1.2): ‘Exaudi deus orationem meam cum tribulor' ('Gallicanum: deprecor). (The Old English Rule (BR) is quoted (by page and line) from
26
27
SUSAN RANKIN
MAKING THE LITURGY
Minster in the eleventh century the prose and verse accounts of Swithun’s translation and miracles were used for the first eight Matins readings on one or both of Swithun’s feasts (Deposition on 2 July, Translation on 15 July). This manuscript has no less than three sets of marginal markings indicating readings: first, in Lantfred’s prose account (marks on 3v-7r),5 second, in the hymn Aurea lux patriae (marks on 49v-50r),6 and third, in Wulfstan’s hexametrical Narratio (marks on 81r-84r).7 Those in the prose and verse accounts indicate
readings two to eight, those in the hymn merely the end of each of two readings. The first (unmarked) reading from the prose Translatio et miraculi must start at the beginning of the Preface, with readings two to six comprising the rest of the Preface, followed immediately by the seventh and eighth. This set of readings thus includes an account of the history of salvation from the incarnation of Christ, through the conversion of England up to the point at which it was resolved that Swithun’s relics be translated to the basilica of SS Peter and Paul; the last two readings - ‘de visione fabri’ - describe how Swithun appeared to a ‘faber’ (carpenter, smith) and demanded that his relics be brought into the basilica. The readings from the metrical Narratio describe the actual translation on 15 July 971. Both sets of eight lessons are marked formally, not in rough or hasty fashion, and possibly even by the original scribe. Since both sets deal with the translation, albeit in one case what led up to it, and in the other, the actual event, it is unclear whether one set was intended for the feast of the Deposition, the other for the Translation. Nevertheless, the two sets are complementary, and well chosen for their purpose of explaining, within the liturgical situation, why this saint was to be feted, above all, in the local setting at Winchester. Leaving aside the questions raised by Aurea lux patriae (marked to be read rather than sung),8 it could be argued that at the Old Minster a choice of readings for Matins on 15 July was available: either the older prose of Lantfred (perhaps more easy to read, despite its numerous Greek words) or the meters composed by Wulfstan (in the book, well marked-up for reading). The fixed element here was the use of this ‘Swithun book’ for the first eight lessons of Matins on a feast day for Swithun, allowing the person in charge of daily liturgical matters to make a choice of what should be read year by year.
as well as the anonymous Vita from which they were drawn are edited by M. Lapidge in The Anglo-Saxon Minsters o f Winchester II: The Cult o f St Swithun, ed. M. Lapidge, Winchester Studies 4 (Oxford, 2003), 107-9 and 630-9. 5 Marginal marks appear as follows: •.II/ at (Preface) 1. 11, ‘Que’ (3v), •.III.- at 1. 17, ‘Denique ymeris’ (4r), -.1111.• at 1. 24, ‘Moxque’ (4r), -.V- at 1. 36, ‘Gentes nimirum’ (4v), -.VI.- at 1. 49, ‘Post cuius’ (5r), -.VII,- at 1 1.5, ‘Triennio igitur’ (6r), and •.VIII/ at 1 1. 28, ‘Cui faber’ (7r); line references are to the new edition o f Lantfred’s text in The Cult o f St Swithun, ed. Lapidge, op. cit. in n. 4, pp. 252-333. At the end of the sixth passage and just before the rubric ‘Explicit praefatio. Incipit narratio . . . ’ on 6r9, the indication ‘Tu autem’ is written into the margin, again in a formal manner. This indicates the versicle ‘Tu autem Domine miserere nobis’ and thus marks the end o f a reading. The first reading probably began at the beginning o f Lantfred’s text (after the dedication): ‘Notum est fratres fidelibus ubique gentium de gentibus’ (3rl6). 6 On those folios on which the hymn was copied (49v-50v) there are several groups of marginal markings, added by at least three later hands. The earliest layer consists of two rubrics set into the upper margin o f 50r, above line 17 o f the hymn (11. 17-18: ‘Illa videre tuum, meruit super aethra meatum. / Digna fuitque obitum. Illa videre tuum.’). On the left is written ‘In deposicione .vi. nonas Iulii.’ and on the right ‘De translatione IDUS' Iul/i. Ista dies rutilat, tua quam translatio sacrat. / Clara tuis meritis. Ista dies rutilat.’ On 50v, after the hymn, a long rubric (copied throughout in uncials) ends ‘HOC EST REPERCUSSO CARMINE PER ABECEDARIUM COMPOSITUS. ATQUE IN EIUS SACRATISSIMA DEPOSITIONE. SUB DIE SEXTA NONARUM IULIARUM. QUA FELICITER AD REGNA MIGRAVIT CAELESTIA. SOLLEMPNITER RECITATUS.’ Thus the use of the hymn on the deposition feast was already envisaged at the time o f copying o f the manu script; at a later time (to judge by the script, not much later) it was considered useful to note an alternative wording for the translation feast (the two lines beginning ‘Ista dies rutilat’ to be substituted for 11.17-18, ‘Illa videre tu u m . . . ’). The second layer of marginal marks consists o f two rubrics, both an abbreviated form o f ‘Tu autem’ (indicating the versicle ‘Tu autem Domine miserere nobis’ which marks the end o f a reading), at the end o f lines 16 and 34 o f the hymn. These were added in a more informal hand than either the marginal numbers within the prose and metrical accounts or the other added rubrics discussed above. These indications effectively divide the hymn into three readings, the first ending after the lines ‘Haec veneranda dies, astris arridet et arvis. / Estque decora nimis. Haec veneranda dies.’, and the second beginning at I (see above) and ending at R, the third beginning at S. It is worth noting that this hymn text is consistently marked with the same repertory o f diacritical and punctuation signs as are used in the Narratio metrica. Such marks imply reading rather than singing, in as much as that distinction can be drawn; that is, the reading might have sounded like recitation, rather than something with greater melodic content. 7 The passage used (apparently without break) concerns the actual translation of Swithun’s relics by Æthelwold on 15 July 971. The marks appear as follows: TI- at 1. 800
30
(81r), -III- at 1. 813 (81 v), •II1I- at 1. 824 (81v), -V- at 1. 844 (82r), -VI- at 1. 868 (82v), -VIE at 1. 897 (83r), and -VIII- at 1. 936 (84r). That the first reading began at 1. 789 (81 r) seems fairly clear: this line numbering from Wulfstani cantoris narratio metrica de sancto Swithuno, ed. A. Campbell (Zurich, 1950). 8 Rubrics preceding and following Aurea lux patriae refer to it as ‘hymnus’. However, the manner in which it is presented in the manuscript (see n. 6 above) indicates that it was read, allowing exploitation o f its literary qualities, rather than sung as a liturgical hymn.
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The idea o f liturgical uniformity
Ne igitur singuli, si suam, quod absit, adinuentionem suapte praesumptuosi eligerent, excellentissimum sanctae oboedientiae fructum, alicuius arrogantiae fastu inopinate seducti, miserabiliter amitterent . . . uotum Domino nostro Ihesu Christo unanimes uouerunt pactoque spirituali confirmaverunt se vita comite iugo regulae deditos has annotatas morum consuetudines communi palam custodire conversatione. Ceterum unusquisque secretis oratorii locis . . . peculiaribus teste Deo . . . orationibus.9 The Regularis concordia, a code of monastic law made c. 970 under King Edgar draws a distinct line between communal and private devotion. Together monks and nuns are to follow a uniform observance; only privately can they act freely. The Regularis concordia then goes on to prescribe many of those observances. Yet as Dom Thomas Symons pointed out, thirty years later ‘Ælfric . . . was content to draw up a mere abridgement of the Concordia for his monks at Eynsham’; from this Symons concluded that ‘there was no cast-iron uniformity, no centralization of government’.10 So how was the ideal understood, and where lay reality? To what extent was liturgy, as an expression of communal worship, ‘fixed’ within an established and therefore ‘conservative’ framework? As an expres sion through ritual of the beliefs of those who perform it, the liturgy must live and breathe with those people, and thus be in some way malleable. That implies not only that individual communities should be able to make the liturgy in their own image, but also that an individual community should be able to re-shape its own liturgy in changing circumstances.11 Therefore the challenge to a liturgical scholar is to recognize where a set of liturgical instructions fixed in time by being 9 ‘Lest therefore they should all, which God forbid, prefer to act according to their own devices and thus wretchedly lose the most excellent fruit o f holy obedience, helplessly seduced by the pride o f arrogance . . . the assembly as one man m ade a solemn vow to our Lord Jesus Christ, confirming their oath with a spiritual pact, that, living all their life under the yoke o f the Rule, they would carry out these selfsame m onastic customs openly and with one uniform observance. For the rest, all shall be free to give themselves volun tarily to private prayer in the secret places o f the oratory, with God as their witness . . .’ Regularis concordia, ed. Symons, §6, p. 4. 10 ibid. p. xxix. 11 O f course, the specific instances o f liturgical change are often handled in the secondary literature, but for a general treatment of the relation betw een fixed and free
MAKING THE LITURGY
codified in a book sits in the matrix of time a,M, books act as a window through which both fixed ^ a c c i12 if liturgical of liturgical practice can be seen, how can th ^ changing aspects guished? These general observations provide aspects be distinstanding the similarities and divergences betwg 4n t clues for underWinchester Tropers: Cambridge, Corpus Q ^ ^ th e two (so-called) Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 775.13B o t h C o l l e g e 473 and at Winchester in the eleventh century, and both c S c r ip ts were copied repertories for the liturgy. But the content of eack/^in several musical tical to that of the other, and I believe that the m is far from idenhas previously been misunderstood.14 4t,c>n between the two
The liturgy o f the O ld Minster at ty,
lflc hester Under the wide umbrella of liturgical practj Regularis concordia - the Roman mass and^ re-affirmed by the certain musico-poetic repertories played a maj0f hedictine offices promoting the beliefs of individual communjj ^ e in expressing and genres of trope and sequence, each represe'e.S' Above all, in the accretions to the mass liturgy,15 a specific relatively recent uhity could shape the elements in Western liturgies see most recently A. Ano (Freiburg, Basel, Vienna, 2001), esp. pp. 118ff. '% t, Liturgik und Historik 12 The idea that an individual liturgical book represents Dr at a specific date in the middle ages can itself be at a speciflc institution xi°b j 'o 'n (elation to a twelfth-century book of liturgical for a discussion of this ™ circa 1200 , Music in the Medieval £ 4>sBe D Chadd, *An English Mediaeval Music Society Centennial Essays, ed. S. R a n k i^ H U tllrgy: m in s o n g and pp. 205-38. 01M j11>. Hiley (Oxford, 1993), 12 The name ‘Winchester Troper’ has been associated with the publication of Frere’s study and edition: The Winchester^ o f these tw0 books since 8 (London, 1894). As Frere s subtitle - ‘From MSS. of * \ er ed W H Frere HBS reveals, his intention there was to recreate an i m a g i 'Xth ’a nd Xlth Centuries’ comprising the various different repertories of chants whRkbOok o f Winchester use ‘tropes and sequences’ contained in the two ma nus c r i pt s * s>0 under the umbreUa 0f them the Winchester T roper. than to name each one o f 1* For presentation o f the contents o f each book, consi (Stockholm, 1975-), esp. (1975), and Tropes du Propre de la Messe 2: Cycle de Pác,Ue* \ %m, Corpus Troporum I ’ 9d. G. Björkvall, G. lversen
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uniform, ‘inherited’, observance to suit its own needs. This was never accomplished by the composition ‘ab initio’ of complete new repertories of tropes and sequences, but rather through the adoption of received compositions; by taking material from elsewhere, re-making it and adding to it, a community could build up its own repertory of tropes and sequences, thereby shaping both the form and meaning of ritual in the institution. For the beginning of mass on the first Sunday of Advent, for example, both Winchester books have the introit trope ‘O benefida tuis adsis protectio servis’, where a continental source of the same period has another, perhaps earlier, version (in which a hexameter is attempted if not achieved): ‘O bone rex, Christe tuis adsis protectio servis’.16 To this introductory hexameter trope the Winchester books then add a new set of hexameter tropes, probably composed at Winchester. The resulting arrangement for performance of the introit is shown below.17 Here trope texts are shown in lower case, the elements of the Proper (introit antiphon text, psalm verses and doxology) in capitals and manuscript rubrics in italics. Bodley 775, 8r Incipiunt tropi de adventu Domini nostri Hiesu Xpisti O benefida tuis adsis protectio servis. AD TE LEVAVI [ANIMAM MEAM, DEUS MEUS IN TE CONFIDO, NON ERUBESCAM NEQUE IRRIDEANT ME INIMICI MEI ETENIM UNIVERSI QUI TE EXSPECTANT, NON CONFUNDENTUR.] Ps. VIAS TUAS, [DOMINE, DEMONSTRA MIHI: ET SEMITAS TUAS EDOCE ME.]18 AD TE [LEVAVI ANIMAM MEAM . . . NON CONFUNDENTUR.] GLORIA [PATRI ET FILIO ET SPIRITUI SANCTO. SICUT ERAT IN PRINCIPIO ET NUNC ET SEMPER
MAKING THE LITURGY
ET IN SAECULA SAECULORUM. AMEN.] Ad repetendum: Almifico quondam perflatus flamine David, clarisonis Christo prompsit his vocibus odas. AD TE LEVAVI [ANIMAM MEAM, DEUS MEUS IN TE CONFIDO, NON ERUBESCAM] Sed virtute tua rutilans in honore triumphi. NEQUE IR[RIDEANT ME INIMICI MEI] Qui tempnunt sibimet sua subdere colla superbis. , ETENIM [UNIVERSI QUI TE EXSPECTANT, NON CONFUNDENTUR.] [DIRIGE ME IN VERITATEM TUAM ET DOCE ME QUIA TU ES DEUS SALVATOR MEUS ET TE SUSTINUI TOTA DIE.]19 [AD TE LEVAVI. . . NON CONFUNDENTUR.]20 Thus, to three repetitions of the introit antiphon, enclosing two psalm verses and the doxology, the Winchester liturgists added a Christological exegesis of the introit’s psalm text, expressed in the form of hexameters. , Not only are tropes for this first Advent Sunday relatively rare in continental repertories21 but, in addition, hexametrical expression char acterizes only a part of the trope repertory in general, associated above all with a small number of early compositions, and then observable as a pervasive stylistic quality of the Reichenau and Winchester reperto ries.22 Here, as with the Swithun readings in Royal 15. C. vii, creativity and aesthetic decisions are revealed as fundamental elements in shaping the liturgy. The two Winchester Tropers together provide an immense amount of information about the liturgy of the Old Minster at Winchester from the late tenth to the late eleventh centuries,23 up to which point both books
and R. Jonsson, Corpus Troporum III (1982); for further bibliography on tropes see A. E. Planchart, ‘Tropes’ The New Grove Dictionary, ed. Sadie and Tyrrell, op. cit. in n. 1, XXV, 777-94; and on sequences see R. Crocker, ‘Sequence’, ibid. XXIII, 91-107. 16 Tropes du Propre de la Messe I: Cycle de Noel, ed. Jonsson, op. cit. in n. 15, pp. 147 and 224. 17 All o f this text was sung, and both Winchester books have notation for the tropes; unfortunately, since these tropes do not appear in other, pitched sources, the neumatic notation cannot be transcribed. >8 Ps. XXIV.1-4.
19 Ps. XX1V5. Although implied by the rubric ‘Ad repetendum’, this specific verse is not mentioned by incipit in the manuscript; in those few sources which note verses ad repetendum, ‘Dirige m e’ is the usual choice. 20 Corpus 473, lOr, has the same tropes, but with less full liturgical detail o f their placing; after the first A d te levavi incipit, there is no indication o f the psalm or doxology, merely the rubric ‘Item alii’, followed by ‘Almifico quondam’. 21 Tropes du Propre de la Messe I: Cycle de Noel, ed. Jonsson, op. cit. in n. 15, p. 224, lists Advent tropes from nineteen sources, associated with thirteen institutions. 22 On the Reichenau trope repertory see esp. R. Jacobsson, ‘Contribution á la géographie des saints’, La Tradizione dei tropi liturgici, ed. C. Leonardi and E. Menestó (Spoleto, 1990), pp. 145-82; and A. Bucker, ‘Liturgical Theology: Tropes at Ottonian Reichenau’ (unpub. PhD dissertation, Cambridge Univ., 2002). 23 For this period the number o f extant books o f liturgical chant known to have been
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continued to receive supplements. Besides repertories of tropes, they both include large numbers of sequence melodies and proses, all repre senting new, post-Carolingian composition. While the tropes elaborate the antiphonal chants of the Roman mass (introit, offertory and commu nion), the proses sit beside the Roman chants but are composed in self-contained form. In Corpus 473 another dimension of Winchester’s specific liturgical practice is represented: here ways of singing a second voice (‘vox organalis’) to many different chants are recorded.24 That these second voices - which are more usefully described as representa tive of a performance practice than as fixed compositions, and were not codified elsewhere25 - were written down at all, underlines the depth of aesthetic concern for the liturgy at Winchester: the result of writing down organal voices was to provide a form of written control of what was elsewhere practised orally. In a period when other institutions relied on an entirely oral practice (governed by mles), at Winchester, ways of singing organal voices recognized as ‘good’, once found, were preserved in writing. Rubrication in that part of Corpus 473 which preserves the organal voices (135r-189v) confirms this assessment of pronounced interest on the part of Winchester liturgists with the artistic qualities of what they sang. Some of these rubrics are descriptive to a highly unusual degree: 135r Incipiunt melliflua organorum modulamina super dulcissima celeste preconia. 135v Laus amoenissima per sacra dulciter reboanda sollemnia. Laus iocunda Christi gloriae digna. Laus pulchra grecis preconiis compta. 137r Laus herilis utilis et salubris. Melodia sublimis et dulcis.
MAKING THE LITURGY
138v Organa dulcisona docto modulamine compta. Ut petat altare resonat laus ista sacerdos 181 r Organa pulcherrima incipit de sancta Trinitate. 183r Responsoria iocunda melodia compta de sanctis evangelistis organorum hic modulis notata incipiunt. Both manuscripts also have such rubrics in their trope collections: in Corpus 473, the brief ‘Ecce pulchri tropi’ (42r), and in Bodley 775 in leonine hexameters, ‘Incipiunt sancti modulamina dulciter hymni . quem cecinere chori Christo nascente superni’ (64r). It is difficult not to see the hand of Wulfstan in these rubrics, so much does the language of some of them mirror that in other works attributed to him.26 It would have been possible for later Winchester liturgists to imitate or to copy Wulfstan’s phrases, however, and the most interesting question remains whether Wulfstan himself associated these descriptions with the chants to which they are now attached.
The dates and order o f copying o f Corpus 473 and Bodley 775
The fact that the two Winchester manuscripts were copied at different times ought, on the face of it, to allow us some insight into how liturgy was made and remade at the Old Minster during the period between their copying. On the basis of the order and content of feasts, as well as palaeographical assessment of text hands, the copying of Corpus 473 has, until recently, been set between 996 and 1006.27 It is an especially small book (146 x 92 mm), but well written and containing the most detailed notation of specialist repertories of its time: on this basis it has been speculated that it belonged to Wulfstan,28 precentor of the Old
copied for use at Winchester is very small: apart from these two ‘tropers’, there is only a twenty-folio fragment o f a missal, now Worcester, Cathedral Library, F. 173. On the origin o f this fragment see R. M. Thomson and M. Gullick, A Descriptive Catalogue o f the Medieval Manuscripts in Worcester Cathedral Library (Woodbridge, 2001), p. 116. 24 For a catalogue and study see A. Holschneider, Die Organa von Winchester (Hildesheim, 1968); also S. Rankin, ‘Winchester Polyphony: the Early Theory and Prac tice o f Organum’, Music in the Medieval English Liturgy, ed. Rankin and Hiley, op. cit. in n. 12, pp. 59-99. 25 On sources o f polyphony of this period see S. Fuller, ‘Early Polyphony’, The Early Middle Ages to 1300, ed. R. Crocker and D. Hiley, The New Oxford History o f Music 2, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1990), pp. 485-556 and W. Arlt, ‘Stylistic Layers in Eleventh-Century Polyphony: How can the Continental Sources Contribute to our Understanding o f the Winchester Organa?’, Music in the Medieval English Liturgy, ed. Rankin and Hiley, op. cit. in n. 12, pp. lO l^f 1.
26 On elements o f Wulfstan’s verse style and choice o f words see F. Dolbeau, ‘Le Breviloquium de omnibus sanctis: un poéme inconnu de Wulfstan, chantre de Winchester’, Analecta Bollandiana 106 (1988), 35-98; and Wulfstan: Life, ed. Lapidge and Winterbottom, op. cit. in n. 1, Introduction, passim. 27 For detailed discussion o f the dates o f the two manuscripts see J. Handschin, ‘The Two Winchester Tropers’, Jnl o f Theological Stud. 37 (1936), 34-49 and 156-72; Holschneider, Die Organa, op. cit. in n. 24, pp. 19-20 and 24-7; and A. E. Planchart, The Repertory o f Tropes at Winchester, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1977) I, 26-33 and 40-3. 28 Holschneider, Die Organa, op. cit. in n. 24, p. 80: ‘Der Codex, nach Format und Inhalt ein Cantatorium, also ein fur den Gebrauch des Cantors bestimmtes Buch, entstand unter seinen Augen.’ Planchart, The Repertory o f Tropes, op. cit in n. 2 7 ,1,32: ‘The dates for the copying of CC, and the unusual palaeographic traits o f the organa fascicles, suggest that CC was copied during Wulfstan’s cantorship, and that if he is the composer o f the organa, he is also the notator o f the manuscript and the main copyist o f the organa fascicles . . . ’.
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MAKING THE LITURGY
Minster at Winchester in the 990s, and therefore responsible for all liturgical music. Bodley 775 was certainly copied later: it belongs to a group of liturgical books from Winchester all written in the same characteristically mannered script, and dated in the mid eleventh century. But it has also been argued that Bodley 775 is a copy of an exemplar itself copied between 978 and 984, and thus, that it represents the state of the repertories of tropes and sequences before Corpus 473 was prepared. In fact both sources raise difficult palaeographical and liturgical issues. The dating of c. 1000 for Corpus 473 has been challenged separ ately by Dumville, Lapidge and Hiley. Dumville associates the two main text hands with his Style IV Anglo-Caroline, not spread from Canter bury before the 1020s, and recognizable in Winchester books of the 1030s.29 Lapidge describes characteristics of the second hand of Corpus 473 (that of the main music notator) as not common until the second quarter of the eleventh century, and cites as the closest parallel the hand of Ælfwine, writing at the New Minster in 1034.30 While it has not proved possible to identify either of the two main hands of this manu script with those in other Winchester books, the examination of hands in Winchester manuscripts of the first half of the eleventh century strongly supports this later dating.31 Hiley’s argument deals not with palae ography but with content, specifically the date of composition of an office for St Gregory: again, this would suggest a date for the copying of Corpus 473 as late as the 1030s.32 A much more difficult issue is the hypothesis first proposed by Holschneider in 1967, and supported by Planchart in his study of the Winchester trope repertory published in 1977, that Bodley 775 is an anachronistic manuscript, reflecting ‘a prototype from the last quarter of the tenth century’.33 The two main arguments for this are, first, the naming in the third Easter Vigil litany of King Æthelred,34 placing the
exemplar between 978 and 1014, and second, the position of the chants for the Dedication feast, between the feasts of St Clement (23 November) and St Andrew (30 November).35 In this latter case there is no question of misplacement: the rubric ‘In dedicatione aecclesiae sanctorum apostolorum Petri et Pauli Wintoniae’ is followed by the date ‘VIII KALENS Decembris’. 24 November was the date on which the Old Minster’s dedication was celebrated until 980 when, after a period of reconstruction, the Old Minster church was re-dedicated, the feast then falling on 20 October. In fact, Holschneider recognized that other parts of the book did not entirely support the early date of copying suggested by these parameters of between 978 and 980: the position of the alleluia for the Dedication feast in the alleluia cycle matches the October date, while the (texted) proses and (partially texted) sequences include items in honour of Æthelwold, who died in 984.36 He explained these contradictions by suggesting that the copying (of the exemplar) began with the tropes between 14 April 978 and 20 October 980, followed by the alleluia cycle, copied after 20 October 980, and later (after 1 August 984), the proses and sequences.37 Clever as it is, the hypothesis that the trope repertory of Bodley 775 was copied directly from a much older book raises serious problems, besides making significant claims for the trope repertory which have not yet been seriously considered by musicologists. For the hypothesis appears to argue that this large, highly stylized and well-organized repertory was in place and codified at the Old Minster by 980. That is not especially problematic in relation to continental trope repertories, several of which were, by this time, already large, although it does constitute a relatively early date for an organized, controlled repertory (as opposed to a large, unorganized, collection).38 More problematic is the claim that so early in the period of reform of the Old Minster, and so quickly after the deliberately introduced impact of continental liturgical
29 D. N. Dumville, English Caroline Script and Monastic History: Studies in Benedictinism A.D. 950-1030, Stud, in AS Hist. 5 (Woodbridge, 1993), 136. 30 Lapidge, ‘Autographs o f Insular Latin Authors’, op. cit. in n. 3, pp. 134-5. 31 The palaeographical characteristics o f the hands working in Corpus 473 will be described in more detail in a forthcoming facsimile o f the manuscript to be published in the series ‘Early English Church Music’. 32 D. Hiley, ‘The English Benedictine Version o f the Historia Sancti Gregorii and the Date of the “Winchester Troper” (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 473)’, Cantus Planus: Papers read at the 7th Meeting (Budapest, 1998), pp. 287-303. 33 Planchart, The Repertory o f Tropes, op. cit. in n. 2 7 ,1,40. 34 18v: ‘Ut æthelredum regem et exercitum anglorum conservare digneris te [rogamus]’.
33 56v-57r. 36 To these out-of-order items Planchart adds the offertory for the Dedication, which follows that for SS Simon and Jude (28 October) at the end o f the original offertory verse cycle: Planchart, The Repertory o f Tropes, op. cit. in n. 2 7 ,1, 41. 37 Holschneider, Die Organa, op. cit. in n. 24, pp. 25-6. Experience suggests that such precise dating for the copying o f liturgical books is inappropriate: see n. 12 above. 38 For example, at St Gallen - one of the most prominent centres o f troping - the work of sorting and editing the trope repertory, to move from a large collection to an organized, specific repertory, was carried out during the second half o f the tenth century: see Stiftsbibliothek Sankt Gallen Codices 484 & 381, ed. W. Arlt and S. Rankin, 3 vols. (Winterthur, 1996).
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MAKING THE LITURGY
practice, Winchester should have produced such an original and distinc tive repertory. Whatever the order of copying of the two manuscripts, the relation between the two trope repertories of Corpus 473 and Bodley 775 is actu ally very close. For example, the basic structure and order of introit tropes for mass on Easter Sunday is the same in both manuscripts (tropes and chants are listed here by incipit): Psallite regi / Dormivi / Ita pater / Qui abscondisti En ego verus sol Ecce pater / Victor / Quo genus Fregit inferni Virgine progenitus / Quem non / Ut per me Exurge gloria mea Postquam factus / In regno / Laudibus / Cui
Ant. RESURREXI Ps. DOMINE Ant. RESURREXI GLORIA PATRI Ant. RESURREXI Ps. INTELLEXISTI Ant. RESURREXI
Each source includes a first set for the introit antiphon, a trope for the psalm verse, a second set for the introit antiphon, a trope for the doxology, a third set for the introit antiphon, a trope for the psalm verse ad repetendum, and a fourth set for the introit antiphon. For the offertory, however, Corpus 473 has more material than Bodley 775. Both have the set of trope elements beginning Ab indignatione, but only Corpus 473 has tropes for the three offertory verses: Ab indignatione / Monumenta / Christus surrexit lam pura (not in Bodley 775) Pacifici (not in Bodley 775) Ecclesiam (not in Bodley 775)
Ant. TERRA TREMUIT V. NOTUS EST V. ET FACTUS V. IBI CONFREGIT
Finally both manuscripts have two communion tropes: Laus honor virtus Naturae veteris
Ant. PASCHA NOSTRUM Ant. PASCHA NOSTRUM
The pattern for the third Christmas mass is very similar: here Bodley 775 has an extra doxology trope, Qui celestia simul, which appears in Corpus 473 for the Christmas octave, and Corpus 473 has two extra communion tropes which appear in Bodley 775 for the octave: INTROIT Hodie cantandus Ecce adest / Quem virgo / Nomen
Rex lumen Quod prisco /Daviticae / Perdita Hodie natus es Qui celestia simul (not here in Corpus 473) Deus pater / Qui sedebit / Ecce / Eo quod OFFERTORY Qui es sine / Nobis / Ab initio Glorificant Parcens conversis Apparens humilis COMMUNION O quam mira / Agnum Desinat esse / Cernere Filius dei / Quod et (not here in Bodley 775)
Ant. TUI SUNT CÆLI V. MAGNUS V. MISERICORDIA LTU HUMILIASTI Ant. VIDERUNT OMNES Ant. VIDERUNT OMNES Ant. VIDERUNT OMNES
And so it goes on from one feast to the next, with small rearrangements of trope order, and the inclusion of new material or removal of old material - although without knowing in what chronological order the two repertories stand it is impossible to assess what constitutes addition and what removal. 1 There is one part of the repertory, however, where the manuscripts show more significant divergence. Both have tropes for the feast of the Deposition of St Swithun, but only Bodley 775 has tropes for the feast of Swithun’s Translation: INTROIT DEPOSITION (Corpus 473) Ecce dies / Rex regum / Digne / Qui bene Divini fuerat / Et pactum / Incensumque Os ky hereos / Ut vigeat / Inter / Grex tuus DEPOSITION (Bodley 775) Ecce patronus / Quod maneat / Ordine / Nos Aurea lux / Gentibus / Pontificale / Huius Os ky hereos / Ut vigeat / Inter / Grex tuus TRANSLATION (Bodley 775) Ecce dies / Rex regum / Digne / Qui bene Divini fuerat / Et pactum / Incensumque
Ant. PUER NATUS EST 40
Ps. CANTATE DOMINO Ant. PUER NATUS EST GLORIA PATRI GLORIA PATRI Ant. PUER NATUS EST
41
Ant. STATUIT Ps. Misericordias Ant. STATUIT Gloria patri Ant. STATUIT Ant. STATUIT Ps. Misericordias Ant. STATUIT Gloria patri Ant. STATUIT Ant. STATUIT Ps. Misericordias Ant. STATUIT Gloria patri Ant. STATUIT
MAKING THE LITURGY
SUSAN RANKIN
39 For a full discussion o f the Swithun tropes see M. Lapidge, ‘Tropes’, and S. Rankin, ‘Music for St Swithun’, in The Cult o f St Swithun, ed. Lapidge, op. cit. in n. 4, pp. 90-4 and 191-213.
can be explained in two ways, according to the order in which the two repertories are placed. On the one hand, adopting the Holschneider/ Planchart theory which sets the Bodley 775 tropes before 980, we could conclude that celebration of the Translation feast with tropes was aban doned, along with early Winchester compositions, in the eleventh century. On the other hand, arguing that the dates of copying of the two manuscripts represents the correct chronological relation of the two trope repertories, the conclusion would be reached that the smaller group of Swithun tropes represents an earlier stage in the composition of a trope repertory for the Old Minster. Then, at a later time, a Winchester monk (possibly Wulfstan) made new tropes for the Deposition feast, thus allowing the older, ‘foreign’, compositions to be used for the feast of the Translation. The idea that, in the middle of the eleventh century, a trope repertory made seventy years earlier should have been copied in preference to a more recent arrangement of the repertory has never seemed satisfactory. The evidence of extant liturgical books is that the work of establishing, extending and organizing liturgical repertories of Proper tropes and sequences in individual Benedictine monasteries was concentrated in the hundred years between the mid tenth and the mid eleventh centuries. Moreover, it is not difficult to find another explanation of the conflict between the liturgical content of Bodley 775 and the date of its copying. In this, the differing natures of Corpus 473 and Bodley 775 as books are critical. Corpus 473 contains what is often found in a ‘troper’ - tropes of the Proper and Ordinary, full Ordinary chants, sequences and proses. In Corpus 473, this is supplemented by material useful to a cantor, and unlikely to be used by others: a tonary and the organal voices for 169 chants. As previously noted, the format of Corpus 473 is very small. In contrast, the size of Bodley 775 more closely resembles the format of graduals, and it contains, besides tropes, sequences and proses, much more of the material necessary for the singing of mass: the verses for graduals, full alleluias, tracts and verses for offertories (see Table II). For a feast such as Swithun’s Deposition for example, the last set of introit tropes in Corpus 473 is immediately followed by the rubric Ad offertorium and the first offertory trope Hos inter mea, whereas in Bodley 775, that same set of introit tropes is followed by the incipit of the gradual Iuravit dominus, the full gradual verse, Dixit dominus, the incipit of the alleluia and its verse, Beatus vir (the full alleluia and verse appear on 81r) and then the offertory trope, Hos inter mea (offertory verses on 117v).
42
43
OFFERTORY DEPOSITION (Corpus 473) Hos inter mea / Egregium / Vinceret O dee virtutum DEPOSITION (Bodley 775) Hos inter mea / Egregium / Vinceret TRANSLATION (Bodley 775) Hos inter mea / Egregium / Vinceret O dee virtutum
Ant. INVENI DAVID E POTENS ES Ant. INVENI DAVID Ant. INVENI DAVID EPOTENS ES
COMMUNION DEPOSITION (Corpus 473, Bodley 775) + TRANSLATION (Bodley 775) Quam bene laetatur Ant. FIDELIS SERVUS In fact, both sources have three sets of introit tropes for the Deposition, but the first two differ: the two sets beginning Ecce dies and Divini fuerat in Corpus 473 are prescribed in Bodley 775 for the Translation. Instead Bodley 775 has two other sets, beginning Ecce patronus and Aurea lux, which only appear in Corpus 473 as additions made by a mid-eleventh-century hand. So the bare bones of this relationship are that Corpus 473 has a total of three introit trope sets for one Swithun feast, while Bodley 775 has a total of five introit trope sets, for two Swithun feasts (see Table I). Table I: Arrangement of introit tropesfor thefeasts of Swithun's Deposition and Translation Deposition
Corpus 473: A, B, C Bodley 775: D, E, C
Translation
Bodley 775: A, B____________________
Going beyond this to look at concordance patterns, it quickly emerges that all three sets used in Corpus 473 have wide continental con cordances, including several in tenth-century sources, and are extremely unlikely to have originated at Winchester. The two extra sets in Bodley 775, on the other hand, are known only in these two sources, and their language and style are both suggestive of a Winchester origin.*39 These changes in the sets of tropes for Swithun’s feasts at Winchester
SUSAN RANKIN
MAKING THE LITURGY
Table II: Contents of the two Winchester Tropers (not in manuscript order)
of the mid-eleventh-century book41 - was copied from only one exemplar, certainly not one tenth-century exemplar. In this first part, a repertory of tropes for Proper chants is combined with a cycle of incipits for the Proper chants, as well as the full gradual verses. To my knowledge, that specific combination is not known in any other extant chant book. Either tropes were copied as a separate repertory, with only the incipits of the chants they trope, as in Corpus 473, or, in a combination found more commonly in Italian books of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, tropes were integrated into a full gradual (producing a ‘troped gradual’). The pattern of change in trope transmission between the late ninth and the twelfth centuries is from tropes copied on their own, to tropes combined with Proper chants, and not vice versa; viewed en masse, the earliest sources of tropes show them copied in small groups mixed with other material,42 followed by their collection in large groups, followed by organization into selected, liturgically necessary, repertories. Only after this were tropes copied directly alongside Proper chants. The other elements in the first part of Bodley 775 derive from a different kind of book. Cycles of Proper chants for the mass appear in two forms, each common enough to be treated as book types recognizable to a liturgist in this period. By far the most common is the gradual, containing the full mass Propers for the annual liturgical cycle. Such books can be recognized among the earliest surviving sources of liturgical chant, and continued to be copied through the whole Middle Ages.43 But another form of transmission of the cycle of Proper chants, to which Bodley 775 appears more directly related, is that in which incipits of Proper chants are listed, feast by feast. Such lists can also be dated to the earliest period of production of chant books, with well-known ninth-century examples from Corbie, St
Proper of the mass Introit tropes Introit incipits
Alleluias (added s. ximed) Sequence melodies Proses Offertory tropes Offertory incipits Communion tropes Communion incipits Ordinary of the mass Tropes
Chants required for the mass
Bodley 775
Corpus 473
Introit tropes Introit incipits Gradual incipits Gradual verses Alleluias Sequence melodies Proses Tracts Offertory tropes Offertory incipits Offertory verses Communion tropes Communion incipits Tropes Ordinary chants
Introit antiphons Gradual responsories Gradual verses Alleluias
Tracts Offertory antiphons Offertory verses Communion antiphons
Ordinary chants
Other Tonary Organa (for several chant genres)
Exemplars fo r B odley 775
Holschneider’s explanation of the inconsistencies between the content of Bodley 775 and the date of its copying - principally the naming of King Æthelred in the Easter litany and the placement of the Dedication feast in its pre-980 position - pointed to an older exemplar, copied between 978 and 98440 In a simple sense he must be correct. But what neither he nor Planchart went on to examine was what was really implied by the idea of an exemplar for Bodley 775. For it is unlikely that that part of Bodley 775 to which all their arguments refer - the first part 40 Holschneider, Die Organa, op. cit. in n. 24, p. 24: ‘Bo ist die anachronistische Kopie einer zwischen 978 und kurz nach 984 entstandenen Primárquelle’.
41 8r-61v, in seven gatherings. 42 The idea that tropes were probably copied on small offcuts o f parchment, singly or in groups, follows the model suggested by Notker Balbulus in his preface to the Liber ymnorum, and the analysis o f extant early sources of tropes strongly supports this proposal. For the preface see W. von den Steinen, Notker de Dichter, 2 vols. (Bern, 1948) II, 8-10, and on early sources, Sankt Gallen Codices 484 & 381, ed. Arlt and Rankin, op. cit. in n. 38, 1, 83. 43 Although the description ‘gradual’ would normally describe a book containing musical notation, books containing the text o f cycles o f Proper chants existed independent o f musical notation in the eighth and ninth centuries. The texts o f the earliest extant books of mass chants are edited in R.-J. Hesbert, Antiphonale Missarum Sextuplex (Rome, 1935). With or without notation, then, this represents one of the oldest types o f music books for the liturgy.
44
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Amand and Senlis.44 As is apparent in Bodley 775, such lists depended on the full versions of the chants being available elsewhere; Bodley 775 contains the gradual verses, alleluias and offertory verses, the latter two categories presented as separate cycles. Thus, leaving aside the gradual verses, to create the tropes + Proper cycle of Bodley 775 (or its direct exemplar), a scribe needed not just one but at least two books: a troper (of the kind represented by Corpus 473) and a book containing Proper chants for the mass, or their incipits. The set of feasts for which Proper chants were needed was, of course, much longer than that for which tropes were composed: tropes were not sung in Lent, or on the twenty or more Sundays after Pentecost, or on all of the saint’s feasts celebrated. Therefore the outline structure of what the scribe copied had to be taken from the gradual or gradual list, the tropes being inserted into this. Understood in this way, it is not necessary to date both exemplars for Bodley 775 at c. 980, but only the gradual. From this would come both the order and choice of feasts to be copied and the special items for Easter week, that is, the placement of the chants for the Dedication feast, as well as the litany naming King Æthelred. Of course, the argument that multiple exemplars were involved in the making of Bodley 775 (or its direct exemplar) allows the trope repertory to be dated later than the cycle of Proper chants. Besides presenting a useful solution to the Swithun problem - the expanded trope repertory representing the later stage of composition - this explanation of what a scribe had to do to create the first part of Bodley 775 also helps to explain a series of substantial errors and misplacements,45 through the problems encoun tered by a scribe who had the task of combining material from at least two exemplars. 44 Paris, Bibliothéque nationale, lat. 12050, lat. 2291, and Paris, Bibliothéque Sainte-Geneviéve, 111 (this latter ed. in Hesbert, Antiphonale, op. cit. in n. 43); on these lists see E. Palazzo, Le Moyen age des origines au xiiie siécle (Paris, 1993), p. 94. 45 These include (a) on 17r, the placing o f the Easter Quern queritis dialogue between Palm Sunday and Easter Saturday (rather than between Saturday and Sunday); (b) on 35r, a rubric preceding the versus ante officium for the feast o f St John Evangelist, which reads ‘VERSUS SANCTI STEPH/I/V/’; (c) on 38r, the placing o f the versus ante officium for the Holy Innocents after the other tropes and Proper chant incipits, rather than before; (d) on 38v, the rubric ‘XII KALENDIS FEBRUARII NATALE SANCTE AGATHE VIRGINIS’ for the feast o f St Agnes (21 January). Holschneider, Die Organa, op. cit. in n. 24, p. 27, notes most of these, as well as errors o f spelling, describing Bodley 775 as ‘eine wenig sorgfaltigen Kopie’. In a study o f Easter dramas, Nils Holger Petersen has interpreted the placement of the Quern queritis dialogue in a different fashion: see his ‘Les textes polyvalents du Quern queritis á Winchester au Xe siécle’, Revue de musicologie 86 (2000), 105-18.
46
MAKING THE LITURGY
Yet many questions remain. The fact of using an ‘old’ gradual, copied perhaps seventy years previously, is not in itself problematic: the Old Minster cantors may not have seen the need to remake an older notated book until much later, since most of what it contained never changed. But why were alterations not incorporated when Bodley 775 was made? How competent was the trope scribe, and who oversaw his work? Given that one of the three main scribes of Bodley 775 has been identified as the writer of London, BL, Cotton Tiberius B. vi (famous for its picture cycle, but also containing a unique compilation of texts preceding the psalter),46 the activities of liturgical scribes at Winchester surely bear further investigation. In the case of Bodley 775, the inconsistencies in the book mount in number, the more parts of it are examined. Indeed, the hypothesis that exemplars which themselves were copied at different times underlie the tropes + Proper repertory needs to be extended to cover all parts of the book, and perhaps expanded to include exemplars deriving from different locations. Briefly described, none of the cycles of Proper chants included in Bodley 775 matches any of the others: this includes graduals, alleluias, offertories and tracts.47 This non-matching functions on two levels: the series of feasts represented in each cycle, and the choice of chant for each feast. For example, 97r-121v contain the incipits of 100 offerto ries, each followed by the full text and notation for its verses (one, two or three). But comparison of this large cycle with the incipits of offerto ries included in the tropes + Proper repertory at the beginning of the book reveals considerable differences. None of the offertories notated by incipit in the tropes + Proper repertory is missing from the offertory cycle. However, many more offertories are provided in the cycle than are needed according to the tropes + Proper repertory: the former includes incipits and verses for each of the weekdays of Lent (as well as Sundays), where the latter includes only Sundays. In addition the order of the offertory cycle, above all of offertories for saint’s feasts, suggests a different underlying festal calendar. That of the sanctoral can be seen to be based on an older Roman-Frankish model (as were the festal calen dars of earlier graduals), where that of the tropes + Proper repertory
46 T. A. M. Bishop, English Caroline Minuscule (Oxford, 1971), p. 23 (no. 27). 47 It is highly likely that the same may be said of the repertories o f sequence melodies and proses, but I have not yet examined them.
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MAKING THE LITURGY
shows considerable adaptation, through the exclusion of certain Roman saints and inclusion of local saints (Swithun, Justus and Birinus).48 Table III shows the feasts represented in each of the two cycles for the period between Christmas and the end of February.49 The compar ison of the two sets of offertory incipits suggests that the cycle of verses depends on a much older exemplar, while those notated by incipit in the tropes + Proper repertory represent the form in which the liturgy was celebrated at Winchester in the mid eleventh century. In this respect, the offertory Adducentur; placed in the verse cycle between Filie regum and Laetamini, presents a critical case. Since Filie regum and Laetamini are identifiable as offertories for the feasts of St Prisca (18 January) and SS Fabian and Sebastian (20 January), Adducentur - normally sung on the feast of a virgin - suggests such a celebration on 18,19 or 20 January. In fact, a feast for 19 January and using this offertory can be found in a late-ninth-century gradual copied at Senlis (Paris, Bibliothéque SainteGeneviéve, 111): in that book the feast is entitled ‘in natale sanctae Mariae’.50 But in the Roman liturgy since the end of the seventh century the feast ‘in natale sanctae Mariae’ had been celebrated on 8 September. In sorting out what is going on here, several historical layers of changes to the sanctoral need to be disentangled. First, at Rome in the sixth century, the feast of Mary’s birth into heaven was celebrated on 1 January.51 According to Chavasse, when the Roman Propers for that feast were transmitted to the north (apparently before the end of the
Table III: Thefestal calendars o f offertory chants in Bodley 775 Date
Trope + Proper chant incipits cycle Offertory verses cycle
26.12
Stephen (33r)
26.12 27.12 28.12 1.1 16.1 18.1 19.1 20.1 21.1 22.1 2.2 5.2 14.2 22.2 24.2
Stephen (116r, Posuisti +Elegerunt) vigil, John Evangelist (117r, Gloria et honore) John Evangelist (35r) John Evangelist (117r, Justus ut palma) Holy Innocents (37r) Holy Innocents (117r, Anima nostra) Silvester (117v, Inveni David) Marcellus (l 17v, Veritas mea) Prisca (118r, Filie regum) Nativity of the BVM (118r, Offerentur maior) Fabian and Sebastian (38r) Fabian and Sebastian (118v, Laetamini) Agnes (38v) Agnes (118v, Offerentur minor) Vincent (38v, Gloria et honore) [see note 49] Purification of the BVM (38v) Purification of the BVM (118v, Diffusa est gratia) Agatha (40r, Offerentur minor) [see note 49] Valentine (119r, In virtute tua) Chair of St Peter (40r, Veritas mea) [see note 49] Matthias (40v, Michi autem) [see note 49]
48 I note that this was Justus the martyr, o f whom Winchester cathedral possessed relics, not Justus o f Canterbury. 49 Within the offertory cycle there is no rubrication, so that its festal calendar has to be reconstructed through comparison with other sources. This can be done using Hesbert, Anliphonale, op. cit. in n. 43; the cycle in Bodley 775 closely matches those represented in these early chant books. In the Bodley 775 cycle, once an offertory incipit and verses had been notated, it never appeared a second time, even if a subsequent feast used the same chant. Thus the feasts o f St Vincent, St Agatha, the Chair o f St Peter, and St Matthias, for which Propers are listed in the first part o f the book, lack an offertory in the cycle. But for each o f these, the appropriate offertory had already been notated. 50 See Hesbert, Antiphonale, 23bis. 51 On the early history o f Marian feasts see esp. Dom G. Frénaud, ‘Le Culte de Notre-Dame dans l’ancienne liturgie latine’, Maria: Eludes sur la sainte vierge, ed. H. Du Manoir, 7 vols. (Paris, 1949-64) VI, 157-211, and A. Chavasse, Le sacramentaire Gélasien (Vaticanus Reginensis 316): Sacramentaire presbytéral en usage dans les titres romains au Vile siécle, Bibliothéque de théologie, série 4, Histoire de la théologie 1 (Toumai, 1958), 375-402. For a useful summary with a study o f Marian feasts in Anglo-Saxon England, see also M. Clayton, ‘Feasts o f the Virgin in the Liturgy o f the Anglo-Saxon Church’, ASE 13 (1984), 209-33.
sixth century), the Gallican liturgies simply transferred them to their own Marian feast, on 19 January. At Rome, the 1 January feast disap peared once the new scheme of four Marian feasts - Purification (2 February), Annunciation (25 March), Assumption (15 August), Nativity (8 September) - was in place; that was achieved gradually, the 8 September Nativity feast the last to be instituted, by the end of the seventh century at the latest. But it took a long time for that scheme to be fully reflected in the chant books: none of the early Roman-Frankish graduals of the eighth and ninth centuries uses it. Rather, three graduals have the Roman 1 January mass, and one - that of Senlis - preserves the old Gallican placing of the same set of Propers. And it is to this very old model, surely not being followed in eleventh-century Winchester, that the offertory cycle copied in Bodley 775 can be most closely related. In
48
49
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MAKING THE LITURGY
contrast, the tropes + Proper cycle has the fourfold scheme (Purification, 38v; Annunciation, 41v; Assumption, 49r; Nativity, 50r). Such a straightforward explanation does not work for the two sets of alleluias, however. Comparison of the large cycle (76r-87v) with the incipits in the tropes + Proper repertory indicates that in one important sense these two sets are much closer than the offertory cycles. The series of alleluias for the Sundays after Pentecost - a standard criterion for determining manuscript origin52 - are identical, with one exception.53 But the alleluia cycle as a whole seems to be in considerable disarray: after the standard temporal cycle stretching up to Pentecost come alle luias for the three following Sundays (V. Benedictus es, In te domine speravi, Jubilate deo). There then follow thirty-nine alleluias for the sanctoral, in an order which I cannot explain, and only after these the remaining alleluias for Sundays after Pentecost, and after this list, five more. Two aspects of this alleluia cycle are of great interest for the present discussion. First, the disorder in which this cycle has been copied - with a confused sanctoral and the post-Pentecost series split into two groups by the sanctoral - implies disorder in the model(s), and either inability or lack of need to correct that disorder in this copy. Second, the group of five alleluias which follows the completion of the post-Pentecost list includes four required by the trope + Propers reper tory, but not previously notated in the grand cycle (although four of these five circulate widely). The last five must therefore constitute a supplement, made to a received model in the knowledge that, at Winchester, those alleluias were required for the local liturgy. And in this group are the alleluias for feasts late in the year, including that for the Dedication feast {Alleluia V. O quam metuendus), which is placed here between the feasts of St Michael (29 September, Alleluia V. In conspectu angelorum) and St Martin (11 November, Alleluia V. Beatus vir sanctus Martinus), in other words, in the right order for the new Dedication feast on 20 October.54 In this tiny sense at least, someone
planning the Bodley 775 collection was aware of the need to place chants for the Dedication feast at a different date. Such analyses of the Bodley 775 repertories of chants can be pursued for a long time; moreover, the comparison of these cycles with material in Corpus 473 raises even more interesting issues. The order of alleluias for the period following Easter in the Corpus 473 cycle of organa does not agree with either of the two cycles in Bodley 775. And each of the two sources approaches the division of temporal and sanctoral in a different fashion: in Corpus 473 they are integrated, where in Bodley 775, they are separated, the sanctoral beginning each time with the feast of St Stephen. But my intention here has been to demonstrate the nature of the difficulties experienced by a mid-eleventh-century scribe at Winchester, faced with the task of making a book for which there was no single exemplar, but probably several. In observing the inconsisten cies of the result, the depth of problems encountered becomes apparent. Surely, the precise dating of any of the individual repertories copied here cannot be based on content: all that can be observed on that subject is in the nature of termini a quo.
52 On the post-Pentecost alleluias o f Winchester see M. Huglo, ‘Remarks on the Alleluia and Responsory Series in the Winchester Troper’, Music in the Medieval English Liturgy, ed. Rankin and Hiley, op. cit. in n. 12, pp. 47—58; for this study he has used the cycle of alleluias in the tropes + Proper chants repertory, rather than those in the alleluia cycle. On post-Pentecost alleluias elsewhere, see M. Huglo, Les Livres de chant liturgique (Tumhout, 1988), pp. 102-5, and A. W. Robertson, The Service-Books o f the Royal Abbey o f Saint-Denis (Oxford, 1991), esp. pp. 430-1. 53 For the fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, the tropes + Proper chants repertory has Alleluia V. Dominus regnavit where the alleluia cycle has Alleluia V. Eripe me de inimicis. 54 As Holschneider had noted: Die Organa, op. cit. in n. 24, p. 25.
Finally, I return to the general theme of ‘making the liturgy’. Evidently, most of the chant books copied for use at the Old Minster in Winchester before the Conquest have perished. Yet, by some strange chance, two related books have survived. And the main content of those two books is not the relatively stable Roman-Frankish Propers of the mass, but those musical repertories with which the Propers were elaborated and in the making of which liturgical composers could shape the liturgy of their own institutions. Whether it be the artistic, theological, or ritual aspects of tropes, sequences and musically elaborate performance practices which interest the modern student, however, no proper account of liturgical stability and change will be achieved without correct assessment of the relation between the two books, and between their individual parts. As I see it, it was erroneous on the part of Holschneider and later Planchart to regard the material copied in Bodley 775 as something solid, fixed and coherent; what they apparently did not consider was either what a scribe had to do to make such a book, nor that the liturgy is in a fairly constant state of flux, hard to capture in all its dimensions at any one moment, since it changes in the hands of those who use it. With this in mind, one of the most interesting results of the redating of Corpus 473 from c. 1000 to the 1030s or later is the observation that, while the little troper
50
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certainly cannot have been written or possessed by Wulfstan the cantor, it reveals at every turn the long-lasting influence of that great figure on the liturgy of the Old Minster. Details of the liturgy changed over time, but the influence of a master could endure.
3
Rending the Garment and Reading by the Rood: Regularis concordia Rituals for Men and Women Joyce Hill
In the context of a collection of papers on the rituals of the Anglo-Saxon Church, it is inevitable - and indeed proper - that attention should at some point be focussed firmly on the Regularis concordia, which embodies the new liturgical complexities of the Anglo-Saxon Benedictine reform, reflecting closely the elaborations found in continental consuetudinaries. It is not my purpose here to pursue the question of sources and analogues,1 although in the course of the discussion I shall make comparative reference to continental texts from the tenth-century Lotharingian reform. I shall focus, rather, on two examples of ways in which the rituals of the Regularis concordia evolved once this consuetudinary was in use. One example, referred to in my title as ‘rending the garment’, is an evolution which took place within at least one community of monks. The other, which 1 refer to as ‘reading by the rood’, is an adaptation made to accommodate the particular needs of female houses, where there were no priests or deacons available for community rituals. The class of texts to which I refer throughout this study are monastic consuetudinaries or customaries, written for particular monastic communities in order to record and describe the liturgical and extra-
1 The Regularis concordia draws upon Carolingian liturgical traditions and the practices o f the Cluniae and Lotharingian monastic reforms. Some information about sources and analogues is given in the editions cited in n. 3 below, but it is also worth consulting the more detailed studies by Thomas Symons: ‘Sources o f the Regularis concordia', Down side Rev. 59 (1941), 14-36, 143-70 and 264-89, and T. Symons, ‘Regularis Concordia: History and Derivation’, Tenth-Century Studies, ed. Parsons, pp. 37-59.
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liturgical customs (consuetudines) through which that community carried out the prescriptions of the Benedictine Rule. The need for such supplementation became pressing in the ninth and tenth centuries as a result of the Carolingian and particularly the Cluniae and Lotharingian monastic reforms, which established a far more elaborate liturgical ritual and a more complex community life than was catered for by the rather spare Benedictine Rule. In Anglo-Saxon England this new complexity is associated with the tenth-century Benedictine reform, with the Regularis concordia being issued in the early 970s as the standard consuetudinary for all reformed houses. In thus striving for uniformity, England was untypical, although in practice variant con suetudinaries grew up. The major surviving witness is Ælfric’s Letter to the Monks o f Eynsham,2 but the much more modest adaptation of the Regularis concordia for women in the text under discussion here should also be seen as evidence of a continuing willingness to adapt consuetudinaries to local needs, despite the authority in England of a supposedly standard national text. In the present study I focus not on the Latin Regularis concordia familiar to us in Symons’ edition,3 but on a fragmentary survival of an Old English translation in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 201.4 The manuscript was originally two distinct items, which were brought together by Archbishop Parker in the sixteenth century: pp. 1-178 (now Part I), and pp. 179-272 (now Part II). Part I, which was acquired by Parker from Edward Cradock, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford, is of uncertain provenance: on linguistic grounds it has been assigned to the south-east, perhaps Canterbury; on the grounds of
2 C. A. Jones, Æ lfríc’s Letter to the Monks ofEynsham, CSASE 24 (Cambridge, 1998). 2 Regularis concordia, ed. T. Symons (London, 1953). See also ‘Regularis Concordia Anglicae Nationis’, ed. T. Symons, S. Spath, M. Wegener and K. Hallinger, Corpus consuetudinum saeculi X/XI/XII monumenta non-Cluniacensia, ed. K. Hallinger, Corpus consuetudinum monasticarum 7.3 (Siegburg, 1984), 61-147. However, the 1953 edition is preferred here because it is more widely available and is provided with a full introduction in English and a facing translation. 4 I am grateful to the Master and Fellows o f Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, for per mission to consult this manuscript. The quotations below are from my own transcript, and the translations are also my own, but there is a printed edition o f the Old English text: J. Zupitza, ‘Ein weiteres Bruchstiick der Regularis Concordia in altenglischer Sprache’, Archiv jiir das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 84 (1890), 1-24. On the manuscript, see Ker, Catalogue, pp. 82-3 and 90, and the discussion in The Old English Poem Judgement Day II: a Critical Edition with editions o f De die iudicii and the Hatton 113 Homily Be domes dæge, ed. G. D. Caie (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 1-5 (description o f the manuscript), 7-9 (provenance) and 9-10 (dating).
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content a case can be made for York or Worcester; and there is palaeographical evidence to indicate that it was in Winchester by the middle of the eleventh century. Scribe A, who wrote the Regularis concordia translation on pp. 1-7 and the Old English Poem Judgement Day II on pp. 161-7 - both beginnings of quires - is thought to have been working early in the eleventh century; Scribe B, who was respon sible for the rest of Part I, nearer the middle of the century. The frag mentary Old English translation, as it now survives, runs from Palm Sunday to part way through Good Friday.5 Strangely, it stops abruptly in mid-sentence, on line 19 of a fully ruled-up page, with the rest of the page remaining blank, as if awaiting further continuation text. In the event, the mid-sentence was terminated by a strong final punctuation, not necessarily by the original scribe, and Scribe B used the next page to begin a miscellany of homilies and laws. If the sudden termination is a puzzle, we can nevertheless be sure that the preceding material once existed. What Parker had in front of him, on what is now p. 1, was run-on Old English text which simply continued from pages already missing by the sixteenth century, and in order to contrive something approaching a tidy beginning, he erased most of the first page, so that it began with the account of the Palm Sunday rituals. In the space thus created, he entered a list of manuscript contents. Within the Old English text there is also a retrospective allusion to material earlier than that now surviving: ‘eallswa we wiðforan cwædon be þam candelan’ (p. 2).6 We do not know when the translation into Old English was first made, but the translator was thoroughly familiar with the text of the Regularis concordia (which it has to be said is often quite cryptic in its Latin form), and he was very familiar with it in practice too, because he sometimes elaborates on the text in explanatory ways which show that he knew the consuetudinary through personal experience. More signifi cantly still, the elaborations demonstrate that enough time had elapsed since the first issue of the Latin text for some of the practices to have evolved, at least in the house where the translation was made. In its origins, then, this translation gives us an insight into life in a reformed monastery probably in the 980s or 990s. We can also work out that during this period a copy of the translation was acquired by a reformed
5 The Old English text corresponds to p. 34 ‘Dominica die Palmarum’ to ‘et dicat primam’ in Symons’ 1953 edition. 6 ‘just as we said before about Candlemas’. This is an elaboration on the Latin, which simply reads ‘sicut supra dictum est’.
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house of female religious who adapted it - not entirely systematically for their own use by occasional interlineations and by marginalia, which were then incorporated into the body of the text either by the scribe of CCCC 201 or by a predecessor at an earlier stage in transmission. However, the incorporations are often awkward in terms of grammar and syntax, which is why I am sure they are additions later than the translation itself. The original translator was far too careful to have allowed such disturbances in the Old English or to have overlooked places where modification of grammar or syntax was necessary, if he had been responsible for providing the adjustments for women. Fortu nately for us, it is one of these awkward modifications that gives us a glimpse of women reading by the rood and in the refectory as part of a special community ritual on Maundy Thursday. I wish to turn first, however, to an evolved ritual which appears to be intrinsic to the translation - the dramatic ‘performance’ of rending the garment on Good Friday, which occurred during the office of None, although, as will be evident, this is not a straightforward re-enactment of a biblical scene:
The Latin text of the Regularis concordia states that the deacon reads the Passion of Christ according to John, and that when he comes to the words ‘Partiti sunt vestimenta mea’ (John XIX.24), two other deacons shall immediately strip from the altar the cloth which had previously been placed under the gospel book.8 As Symons notes in his study of the sources of the Regularis concordia, some kind of liturgical enactment of the tearing of Christ’s raiment was common in continental consuetudinaries.9 But the performance details vary, and those in the Latin text of the Regularis concordia, which I have just summarized, are less vividly realized than some of the continental examples, and are also less vivid than the Old English text in CCCC 201. All that is specified in the Latin Regularis concordia in terms of how the action is to be performed is that a cloth shall be put in place in advance and that the deacons shall strip it away (‘nudent’) as if stealing it (‘in modum furantis’), a ‘stage direction’ for demeanour and bearing which is not quite accurate in relation to the gospel narrative, but which was presum ably intended to elicit some kind of representation of underhandedness or shameful behaviour in the movements of the two enacting deacons. The Old English text in CCCC 201 does not translate ‘in modum furantis’, but evokes the appropriate demeanour by explaining, as the Latin text does not, that the action is to be performed just as the Saviour’s garment was divided up (‘on þæt gemet þæs hælendes reaf todæled wæs’). More striking is a detail which has no parallel in the Latin, namely that it is a sewn-together raiment (‘getreagode hrægl’) which is placed in advance on the altar. This seems to imply that two pieces of cloth were loosely tacked together in such a way that the deacons could easily pull them apart in a ritual act of tearing, as is clearly indicated in the verb ‘toteon’.10 Ælfric, in his Letter to the Monks o f Eynsham, which draws heavily on the Regularis concordia, retains the original directive ‘in modum furantis’ to describe the manner of the action, and he is more detailed than the Old English translation in explaining with reference to the biblical account why the ritual is performed, although he has no prac-
. . . se subdiacon gestige þone rædingscamel and þas rædinge ræde Oseae prophetae: In tribulatione sua and, æfter þære, þes reps mid his feower fersum Domine audiui. Æfter þam, sy þeos collecta fram þam abbode mid cneowunge gecweden, Deus, a quo et ludas, and þæræfter oðer ræding, Dixit dominus ad Moysen, and þæræfter þes traht, Eripe me, domine. Æfter þam sy geræd ures drihtnes þrowung; æt þære þrowunge anginne ne secge se diacon Dominus uobiscum, ac forðrihte Passio domini nostri Ihesu Christi secundum Iohannem, and nan ne andswarige Gloria tibi domine. Þonne mon ræde Partiti sunt uestimenta mea, þa twegen diaconas þe standað on twa healfe þæs altares toteon þæt getreagode hrægl þe up on þam altare ligð under þære Cristes bee, on þæt gemet þe þæs hælendes reaf todæled wæs.7
7 CCCC 201, p. 7. ‘. . . the subdeacon shall mount the lectern and read this reading, Oseae prophetae: In tribulatione sua and, after that, this respond with its four verses: Domine audiui. After that, this collecta shall be said by the abbot with a genuflection, Deus, a quo et Iudas, and thereafter a second reading, Dixit dominus ad Moysen, and thereafter this tract, Eripe me, domine. After that shall be read Our Lord’s passion: at the beginning o f the passion the deacon shall not say Dominus uobiscum, but immediately Passio domini nostri Ihesu Christi secundum Iohannem, and no-one shall answer Gloria tibi domine. When Partiti sunt uestimenta mea is read, the two deacons who are standing on both sides o f the altar shall tear the sewn-together raiment which lies upon the altar beneath Christ’s book [i.e. the gospel book] just as the Saviour’s garment was divided.’
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8 Regularis concordia, ed. Symons, p. 42. 9 T. Symons, ‘Sources o f the Regularis Concordia’, op. cit. in n. 1, pp. 27-8. 10 Treagian, to sew, is relatively uncommon, but there are three instances o f getreagode/ getreagede outside the present text and all are glosses to consuta ‘stitched together’: A Microfiche Concordance to Old English, ed. R. L. Venezky and A. di Paolo Healey (Toronto, 1980).
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tical information about the preparation of the cloth, nor does he suggest that it is tom apart:
Jones makes the further suggestion that there may be an implied refer ence back to the stripping of the altars after Vespers on Maundy Thursday, when the division of Christ’s garments is also mentioned.15 The two ‘strippings’, as he notes, are associated in a number of liturgical treatises, and it is an association made by Ælfric also in his explanation of the Maundy Thursday rituals: ‘Ipso etiam die post celebrationem missae et uespertinalis sinaxis altaria exspoliamus, et stent denudata usque in sabbatum, quia Dominus noster exspoliatus est uestimentis suis.’16 Yet it is not explicit in the accounts of Maundy Thursday in the Latin Regularis concordia or the Old English translation. Ælfric’s complex network of associations for stripping, dividing and parting on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday seems to come directly from his immediate source at this point, the augmented version of Amalarius’s Liber officialis.'1 Since the ‘meaning’ of liturgical gestures was usually polyvalent, associative and variable from one observer to the next, it is possible that other allusions - instead or in addition - were perceived by those watching what, in the Old English text, seems to have been set up as a particularly striking ritual. Perhaps, because it was Good Friday and the cloth was taken from the altar and from under the gospel book, there were those who perceived in its rending an allusion to the ‘tearing’ of Christ’s physical body on the cross; perhaps for others there was an allu sion to the tearing of the veil in the Temple at the moment of Christ’s death.18 In any event, whatever its network of associations, it broke through the normal tenor of the liturgy as a shocking, if stylized, ritual and must have had the effect of concentrating the mind on the serious ness and even horror of the physical event of the Crucifixion and the treatment of the Son of God by man. The ‘actors’ who rend the garment are deacons who are within the
In eadem Passione, quando legitur ‘Partiti sunt uestimenta mea’ et reliqua, duo diaconi trahant uestem quae iacet sub euuangelio in modum furantis, quia milites crucifixo Christo uestimaenta eiuis diuiserunt sibi sortem mittentes.11 But there are quite detailed parallels to the ritual enactment of the Old English translation if we turn to the continent. The consuetudinary of St Emmeram states that two cloths are to be prepared (‘preparati sint duo sindones’) which are temporarily joined (‘parumper coherentes’) and that the deacons are then to tear this apart (‘scindant’) and carry it away ‘in modum furantis’.12 The Redactio Fuldensis-Trevirensis is iden tical, except for substituting ‘quasi furtim’ for ‘in modum furantis’.13 How widespread this more dramatic enactment was in England is impossible to tell, but the translation in CCCC 201 shows it was used in at least one house. It is, of course, not at all out of keeping with the dramatization of the liturgy within the Benedictine reform context, which is well attested in the Latin text of the Regularis concordia, and which reaches its climax on Good Friday, the very day when this elabor ation of rending the garment also took place. In common with the Regularis Concordia's more famous ritual of the Deposition and Visitation, however, it is not a straightforward represen tational re-enactment, but something more complex in its allusions, since Christ’s seamless garment was not rent but was assigned by lot, although the rest of his clothes were divided (John XIX.23-4). The allu sion is thus to the general division, not to the treatment of the special garment, a point that Ælfric makes explicit in his Letter to the Monks of Eynsham, quoted above, where he adds the comment ‘quia milites crucifixo Christo uestimenta eius diuiserunt sibi sortem mittentes’.14
11 Jones, Ælfric s Letter to the Monks o f Eynsham, op. cit. in n. 2, p. 132, translated by Jones (p. 133) ‘In the same Passion [reading], at the words “They have parted my vest ments”, etc., two deacons shall, in the manner o f thieves, pull away the cloth lying beneath the gospel book, because after crucifying Christ the soldiers divided his vestments among themselves by casting lots.’ 12 ‘Redactio Sancti Emmerami dicta Einsidlensis’, ed. M. Wegener, C. Elvert and K. Hallinger, Corpus consuetudinum monasticarum 7.3, op. cit. in n. 3, 187-256, at 231. 13 ‘Redactio Fuldensis-Trevirensis’, ed. M. Wegener, C. Elvert and K. Hallinger, ibid. 257-322, at 300. 14 ‘because after crucifying Christ the soldiers divided the vestments among themselves by casting lots’.
13 Jones, Æ lfrics Letter to the Monks o f Eynsham, op. cit. in n. 2, pp. 196-7. 16 ibid. p. 128, translated by Jones (p. 129) ‘Also on that day after the celebration o f mass and the service o f Vespers, we should strip the altars so that they stand bare until Saturday, because our Lord was stripped o f his garments.’ 17 ibid. p. 192 (note 194), and 196-7 (note 217). For the full source-text, see A Lost Work by Amalarius o f Metz: Interpolations in Salisbury, Cathedral Library, MS. 154, ed. C. A. Jones, UBS Subsidia 2 (London, 2001), pp. 191 and 202. 18 As one o f the anonymous readers of this article has kindly pointed out, anyone present at Matins would have just heard an allusion to the tearing o f the veil, since the second response o f the first nocturn in standard Roman (and therefore Anglo-Saxon) use is ‘Velum templi scissum est, et omnis terra tremuit’, ‘the veil o f the temple was rent, and all the earth trembled’. Furthermore, the second antiphon of the same nocturn is ‘Diuiserunt sibi uestimenta mea, et super uestem mean miserunt sortem’, ‘They divided my garments, and for my coat they cast lots.’
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sanctuary. But no women could emulate this, and indeed their opportu nities for dramatizing the liturgy were more limited than those of the men, because there was so much of the liturgy that they could not perform. So what could they actually do? It is true that for the nonsacramental liturgy, such as the offices as normally observed, and for the daily ordering of monastic life, they did the same as the men, so that the male-oriented language of the Regularis concordia presented no difficulty, provided it was taken to subsume the female. Even so, in the piece of the Old English translation surviving in CCCC 201, we can see the female religious striking a blow for visibility, for ownership of text and ritual in the occasional insertion of ‘abbess’ alongside ‘abbot’, and ‘or sisters’ alongside ‘brothers’, as in such phrases as ‘gan þa gebroðra oþþe geswystema’,19 ‘æfter þæs abodes oððe þære abbodyssan dome and dihte’.20 Likewise, as far as the sacramental liturgy was concerned, the male-oriented language was also unproblematic, because this had to be executed by priests and deacons, exactly as described in the Latin text, even in female houses. The difference here is simply that, in their role as worshippers and communicants, communities of women could not ever have that community identity with ceremonies for which, in male houses, the ministers were drawn by rotation from among the ordained brethren. But there were grey areas, most obviously in connection with special ceremonies for feast days, where communities of nuns would have needed guidance, whether in confirming that they could carry out the ceremonies as described, or in establishing what modifications were necessary, particularly if there were aspects of the ceremonial where those performing special functions were identified in the Regularis concordia text in terms of the orders of the church (for example as ‘priest’ or ‘deacon’, for which there is no female alternative), rather than the offices of the community (such as ‘abbot’ or ‘prior’, which have female equivalents). The obvious way of responding to this need was to adapt the Regularis concordia - as indeed the Benedictine Rule was also adapted during the reform period21 - but our only evidence for such a response is the translation in CCCC 201, into which, as I have already suggested, I believe marginal and interlineated adaptations have been drawn.
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The passage I wish to focus on here is the most extensive of the female adaptations in this text; it concerns the Maundy Thursday collatio, in which we have a rare description of a woman reading aloud in an ecclesiastical - if not quite liturgical - context. First, however, it is necessary to review how the collatio was usually carried out. According to the Latin text of the Regularis concordia, the normal daily collatio took place in the refectory, with the length of the reading being deter mined by the prior. No information is given about what the subject of the reading might be.22 On Saturdays, however, there was more formality: the collatio or reading - again subject unspecified - was begun in the church and continued in the refectory, with the moment for the procession from church to refectory being signalled by the ringing of a small bell. Once in the refectory, the reading continued whilst the community carried out the caritas, a weekly custom which was intended to strengthen the sense of community life. It required the abbot to kiss the hands of each member of the community and to offer him a drink, with the abbot then being similarly treated by the prior as a representa tive of the community as a whole.23 It was this more elaborate Saturday ceremony which was used on Maundy Thursday as one of the ways of marking the special nature of the day. However, on Maundy Thursday there seems to have been more formality still. The deacon and other hebdomadary ministers vest, the reading - begun in the church as on Saturdays - is from St John’s gospel (John XIII. 1-15: Christ washing the disciples’ feet), the reader is the deacon, and there is a formal procession from church to refectory, with acolytes and thurifer, where the reading continues simultaneously with the caritas.24 This is a classic example of where female religious would have needed explicit guidance. What is described is not a sacramental act, so that it is not necessary to use a priest. Indeed, a priest is not specified in the Latin text: it involves movement from the church (where female activity is highly circumscribed) into the community proper (in this case the refectory) where, as we know from the proem of the Regularis
19 CCCC 201, p. 4: ‘the brothers or sisters go’. 20 CCCC 201, p. 5: ‘according to the abbot’s or abbess’s judgement and command’. 21 M. Gretsch, ‘Æthelwold’s Translation o f the Regula Sancti Benedicti and its Latin Exemplar’, ASE 3 (1974), 125-51.
22 Regularis concordia, ed. Symons, p. 23. The term ‘prior’ is in fact more problematic than might appear; it could denote the abbot or the most senior member o f the community who was present on a given occasion, rather than being the set term for a particular office. See J. Hill, ‘Provost and Prior in the Regularis Concordia', American Notes and Queries 15.2 (Spring 2002), 13-17. 23 Regularis concordia, ed. Symons, pp. 22-3. 24 ibid. pp. 40-1.
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concordia,25 even monks were forbidden to go in female houses; and yet it is described in the Regularis concordia as a ceremony in which the leading figure is identified not by his community role, but as a deacon, vested in a dalmatic and supported by other priestly ministers in albs. Furthermore, what is to be read is a gospel text and, as Ælfric explains in his Pastoral Letter for Wulfsige, bishop of Sherborne, the lector of the scripture in church must be in orders because he is in effect preaching God’s word.26 What, then, were the women to do, given that the prescribed text is the gospel, and the reading begins in the church? Needless to say, the Latin text of the Regularis concordia gives no clues whatsoever, but the modified Old English translation in CCCC 201 is quite specific. The description begins by following the Latin source, giving an account of what men do - deacon, gospel, and so forth - but this is marked out as a male-only scenario by the addition of the phrase ‘mid munecum’, ‘among monks’, at the beginning of the first sentence. This little phrase has no basis in the Latin. The description translated from the source is then followed by an account of what nuns do, introduced by a parallel distinguishing phrase ‘Mynecena þonne’, ‘Nuns at this time... ’. The ceremony for them is as follows:
scence þam abbode oþþe þære abbodessan and þam oðrum þenan þe þær stodon. Geendedre rædinge and geendedum scence, stæppe wiðforan se processio, þæt hy onscryden hy, gif hit munecas synd, þæt hy gearwe beon ealle endemes heora nihtsang ætgædere singan.27
Mynecena þonne, þeah him swa gerad scrud ne gebyrige, gan hi þeah for arwyrðnesse þæs mæran dæges mid taporum and mid storcillan, and swylce þincg be þære halgan rode ræde swylce him þearflic sy to gehyrenne and, swa seo cimbalum sy geslægen, gan hi ealle to beodeme, þeahhwæðere seo rædestre and þa þeningmen gan on foreweardum mid taporum and mid store, and swa in cumen, lecge þa boc up on ðam rædingscamole, and þa þenas on twa healfa hyre mid taporum standan and mid ðære storcyllan wiðforan mid ðam halgan recelse smociende. Onmang þan þe heo standende ræde, scence se abbod oþþe seo abbodysse æne eallum gebroðrum oþþe geswystemum heora hand cyssende. Ðære þenunge geendedre, sitte se abbod oððe seo abbodesse and seo rædinge mid þysum worde sy geendod: Tu autem domine miserere nostri. Arise þonne se þe on þam gefere yldest bið and
The women do not have the formality of wearing a special vestment since, as the text rather pedantically says, this is not appropriate for them. Of course not: unlike their male counterparts, they could not heighten the solemnity of this or any other occasion by vesting in albs or dalmatics because they were not in orders. Equally, it is noteworthy that the reading is expressly not the gospel: the reader is to stand by the holy cross and ‘swylce þincg .. . ræde swylce him þearflic sy to gehyrenne’, ‘shall read such a thing as is profitable for them to hear’, presumably some appropriately devout work, which is then continued in the refec tory.28 The bearers of candles and censer must be other female religious, these also, of course, not wearing any special robes. There is one further distinction between male and female houses alluded to in this passage, which is rather less obvious, but which gives us a tantalizing glimpse of another way in which practices differed. The nuns are said to begin their reading in church supported by candles and incense ‘for arwyrðnesse þæs mæran dæges’, ‘for the honour of this
25 ibid. p. 4. 26 Die Hirtenbriefe Ælfrics in altenglischer und lateinischer Fassung, ed. B. Fehr, Bibliothek der angelsachsischen Prosa 9 (Hamburg, 1914; reprint with a supplement to the introduction by P. Clemoes: Darmstadt, 1966), pp. 9-10. In commenting on the seven orders within the church Ælfric explains that the lector reads in church and is ordained for the purpose (i.e. in minor orders) because he preaches God’s word (§31), and that one of the particular duties o f the deacon (ordained, o f course, although not specified here by Ælfric) is to read the gospel in the divine services (§36).
27 CCCC 201, p. 6: ‘Nuns at that time, even though such a vestment is not appropriate for them, nevertheless for the honour o f this special day shall go with candles and with censer and beside the holy cross [the lectrix] shall read such a thing as is profitable .for them to hear and, as the bell is struck, they shall all go to the refectory, but the lectrix and the acolytes shall go in front with candles and with incense, and, having entered thus, she shall place the book upon the lectern, and the acolytes shall stand on each side of her with candles and with the censer in front with the holy incense smoking. Whilst she stands and reads the abbot or abbess alone shall offer a drink to all the brothers or sisters one by one, kissing their hands. When this ministration is ended, the abbot or abbess shall sit and the reading shall be concluded with this sentence: Tu autem domine miserere nostri. Then the one who is the most senior in the community shall arise and offer a drink to the abbot or the abbess and to the other ministers who were standing there. When the reading is concluded and the offering o f the cup is ended, the processio shall move on ahead, in order that they may unvest themselves, if they are monks, so that they shall all be ready at the same time to sing their compline together.’ 28 It has alternatively been suggested to me that the whole phrase ‘swylce þincg be þære halgan rode ræde swylce him þearflic sy to geyrenne’ describes what they read: ‘. . . read such a thing pertaining to the holy cross as may be profitable for them to hear’. This is certainly linguistically possible, but one wonders what such a text might be, and particu larly why this should be an appropriate topic for Maundy Thursday, when the whole emphasis o f the day is on confession, compunction and humility. In the Latin text o f the Regularis concordia, what the deacon reads at this point is the account o f Christ’s washing o f the disciples’ feet (John XIII. 1—15).
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special day’. Such a phrase is not used by the Old English translation in relation to men. In their case it would be superfluous, because although the act of beginning the reading in the church was not normal for a weekday (here a Thursday), it was nevertheless a common enough occurrence because the collatio was carried out in this way fifty-two times a year, on every Saturday. That the phrase is used to explain the female ceremony, however, suggests that the Maundy Thursday practice of beginning the collatio in the church was exceptional for them. From this, then, we can reasonably infer that, except for Maundy Thursday, the collatio in a female house was always entirely in the refectory, and that communities of nuns did not enjoy the weekly variation of added solemnity when, in male houses, the collatio was begin in the church and continued in the refectory after a formal procession. Thus, not only did the women’s Maundy Thursday ceremony differ, but so also did their weekly community practice, even though the text of the Latin Regularis concordia allows for neither variation.29 There is a male/female differentiation in the passages we have been looking at, and that in itself is, I think, an interesting - and indeed rare contribution to our understanding of liturgy and ritual in Anglo-Saxon England. But more broadly, and in ways which relate to other contribu tions in this collection of essays, ‘rending the garment’, and ‘reading by the rood’ draw attention to the importance of ritual and performance in the Benedictine reform liturgy, and its capacity to engage the commu nity in a variety of ways.
4
Rites for Public Penance in Late Anglo-Saxon England Sarah Hamilton
According to Wulfstan, bishop of London (996-1002) and archbishop of York (1002-23), public penance, whilst ‘a needful practice’, was not observed as it ought to be in this land. He made his complaint in a sermon for Ash Wednesday in which he described how on this day, the beginning of Lent, bishops expel from the church community those guilty of high sins, and how, having atoned for their sins during Lent, they re-enter the church on Maundy Thursday and the bishops absolve them.1 Wulfstan did not refer here to public penance by name but nevertheless he envisaged a dual system of public and secret penance, akin to that first articulated by Carolingian reformers, the so-called Carolingian dichotomy, which was repeated by Wulfstan’s contempor ary Ælfric (d. c. 1020): ‘Þa diglan gyltas man sceal digelice betan, and ða openan openlice, þaet ða ær wæron þurh his mandæda geæwiscode.’2
29 It is worth bearing in mind, however, that the evidence preserved for us in CCCC 201 cannot safely be used to generalize about female religious houses in late Anglo-Saxon England, since Sarah Foot has recently argued that it was at best only in the handful of West Saxon royal foundations that one would have found liturgical and community life organized along the elaborate lines set out in the Regularis concordia: S. Foot, Veiled Women l: the Disappearance o f Nuns from Anglo-Saxon England (Aldershot, 2000), particularly ch. 4 (pp. 85-110), ch. 6 (pp. 145-98), and ch. 7 (pp. 199-208).
1 The Homilies o f Wulfstan, ed. D. Bethurum (Oxford, 1957), pp. 234-5. 2 The Homilies o f the Anglo-Saxon Church: the First Part Containing the ‘Sermones Catholici' or Homilies o f Ælfric, ed. B. Thorpe, 2 vols. (London, 1844-6) I, 498-9 (Sermon for the seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost); ‘Secret sins shall be expiated secretly, and open openly, that those may be edified by his repentance who had previously been seduced by his sins.’ On this text see L. Grundy, Books and Grace: Aelfric’s Theology (London, 1991), p. 197. Cf. ‘Qui publice peccauerit arguatur et publica penitentia purgabitur. Et si hoc occulte fecerit et occulte ad confessionem uenerit, occulte ei penitentia imponatur’, Die Hirtenbriefe Ælfrics in altenglischer und lateinischer Fassung, ed. B. Fehr, Bibliothek der angelsachsischen Prosa 9 (Hamburg, 1914), p. 243; this text is also found in a manuscript which contains Wulfstan’s ‘canon law collection’: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 190 (s. xi1, Worcester hand?, provenance; Exeter, s. xi2), p. 238. For the date and palaeography o f this codex see: D. N. Dumville, English Caroline Script and Monastic History: Studies in Benedictinism, A.D. 950-1030, Stud, in AS Hist. 5 (Woodbridge, 1993), 52, n. 228; on its contents and codicology see P. Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, I: Legislation and its Limits (Oxford, 1999), pp. 220-4. The earliest reference to the Carolingian dichotomy is
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Secret penance was for those sins whose effects were limited, public penance for those ‘high’ sins whose ramifications were wider, or more horrifying, such as fratricide. Secret penance could be administered by priests but, as the Carolingian and late eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical legislation made plain, public penance was an episcopal prerogative.3 And Wulfstan himself thought absolution for serious sins should be reserved to the bishop.4 Modem historians have until very recently concurred with Wulfstan’s assessment that public penance was little known in early eleventhcentury England.5 Research on Anglo-Saxon penance has instead focussed on the penitentials, the texts written to support the system of ‘secret’ penance promoted by the Irish.6 Despite several references in
the Dialogue o f Egbert (750 x 760) to public penance, the reference in Theodore’s seventh-century penitential to the absence of public penance in this province has been taken as confirmation of its absence in the early Anglo-Saxon church.7 Scholars have instead assumed that ‘secret’ penance prevailed in pre-Conquest England because the texts of most of the early medieval penitentials, the earliest manuscripts for which are continental, have been shown to have insular origins. This bias towards ‘secret’ penance is reflected in wider studies of early medieval penance and is in part a legacy of the confessional debates which preoccupied penitential scholarship in the first half of the twentieth century.8 The views of the American Protestant Henry Charles Lea, published in 1896, that confession was a thirteenth-century papal construct, led to a Cath olic backlash in which various scholars, including the English historian Oscar Watkins, sought to show that confession had a long and distin guished history within the church, evolving out of the practice of secret penance.9 At the same time as confessional considerations led historians to focus on the evidence for secret penance, social historians began to discover the wealth of material within the early medieval penitentials for the study of Anglo-Saxon as well as continental societies.10
Paenitentiale Remense, IV. 50-1: Das Poenitentiale Remense und der sogen. Excarpsus Cummeani. Qberlieferung, Quellen und Entwicklung zweier kontinentaler Bussbiicher aus der I. Hdlfte des 8. Jahrhunderts, ed. F. Asbach (Regensburg, 1975), p. 30; on the dichotomy see M. de Jong, ‘Power and Humility in Carolingian Society: the Public Penance o f Louis the Pious’, Early Med. Europe 1 (1992), 29-52, at 34-6. 3 For Carolingian public penance see C. Vogel, Lepécheur et la pénilence au moyen-áge (Paris, 1969), pp. 24-7; de Jong, ‘Power and Humility’, op. cit. in n. 2; eadem, ‘What was Public about Public Penance? Paenitentia Publica and Justice in the Carolingian World’, SettSpol 43 (1996), 863-902. The clearest statement o f the episcopal prerogative in English conciliar legislation is late: the Council o f Winchester (1070), c. 11: ‘Quod de criminibus soli episcopi poenitentiam tribuant’, Councils & Synods with Other Documents Relating to the English Church I: AD 871-1204, ed. D. Whitelock, M. Brett and C. N. L. Brooke, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1981) II, 576. But there are references to episcopal penance in the laws and penitentials from the seventh century onwards: see nn. 7, 89, 91, 95 and 100 below. 4 Or the archbishop, pope or even God himself: Homily LI, Wulfstan. Sammlung der ihm Zugeschriebenen Homilien nebst Untersuchungen iiber ihre Echtheit, ed. A. Napier, with a bibliographical appendix by K. Ostheeren (first publ. 1883; this edition, Dublin and Zurich, 1967), p. 275. On the legal significance o f this sermon, K. Jost, Wulfstanstudien, Schweizer anglistische Arbeiten 23 (Bern, 1950), 104—9. Dorothy Bethurum argued that the close connection between LI and Æthelred’s laws meant it should be classsified ‘with legal documents rather than Wulfstan’s sermons’: Homilies o f Wulfstan, ed. Bethurum, op. cit. in n. 1, pp. 37-8. 5 See now B. Bedingfield, ‘Public Penance in Anglo-Saxon England’, ASE 31 (2002), 223-55. I would like to thank Dr Bedingfield for generously supplying me with an advance copy o f his article; I only became aware o f his researches into public penance at the Oxford conference where I learnt that we had independently come to very similar conclusions about the rites for Anglo-Saxon penance. However, because we have arrived at our conclusions from different starting points this article will, I hope, cast further light on this hitherto neglected topic. 6 For an excellent overview see A. J. Frantzen, The Literature o f Penance in AngloSaxon England (New Brunswick, NJ, 1983). The idea that ‘secret’ or ‘private’ penance was a practice invented by the Irish has been criticized; for the argument that it also has contemporary sixth-century continental roots see I. N. Wood, ‘The Vita Columbani and Merovingian Hagiography’, Peritia 1 (1982), 63-80.
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7 Theodore’s Penitential I. xiii.4, in Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents Relating to Great Britain and Ireland, ed. A. W. Haddanand W. Stubbs, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1869-78) III, 187. As Thomas Charles-Edwards points out, this statement is at odds with the text’s preceding canons on reconciliation which are concerned with the practical aspects of penance’s performance and suggest ‘a system o f penance which is changing rather than a system which is dead and being replaced with something quite different’: ‘The Penitential o f Theodore and the ludicia Theodori', Archbishop Theodore: Commemorative Studies on his Life and Influence, ed. M. Lapidge (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 141-74, at 165. The Dialogue o f Egbert assumes the practice o f public penance is in place when outlining the bars which exist for those wishing to enter the priesthood: Councils, ed. Haddan and Stubbs III, 410. On this text see Frantzen, Literature, op. cit. in n. 6, p. 83. 8 A. Murray, ‘Confession before 1215’, Trans, o f the Royal Hist. Soc. 6th ser. 3 (1993), 51-81, at 52-4. 9 S. Hamilton, The Practice o f Penance 900-1050 (Woodbridge, 2001), pp. 9-13. H. C. Lea, A History o f Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church, 3 vols. (London, 1896). For the Catholic backlash see O. D. Watkins, A History o f Penance (London, 1920); B. Poschmann, Die abendlandische Kirchenbiisse imfriihen Mittelalter (Breslau, 1930); idem, Penance and the Anointing o f the Sick (Freiburg and London, 1964), trans, by F. Courtenay o f Busse und letzte Ölung (Freiburg-im-Breisgau, 1951); É. Amann, ‘Pénitence-sacrement: la pénitence primitive’, Dictionnaire de théologie catholique (Paris, 1930-46) XI Li, 749-85 and ‘Pénitence-sacrement: la pénitence privée: son organisation, premieres speculations á son suject’, ibid. 845-948; Vogel, Le pécheur, op. cit. in n. 3. 10 On early medieval society in general see T. P. Oakley, ‘The Penitentials as a Source for Medieval History’, Speculum 15 (1940), 210-23; Medieval Handbooks o f Penance: a Translation o f the Principal ‘Libri Poenitentiales’, ed. J. T. McNeill and H. M. Gamer
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Older works on continental penitential practice also dismissed the importance of public penance, preferring instead to concentrate on the development of the pastorally more satisfactory and less arduous prac tice of ‘secret’ penance. Previously dismissed as an archaic early church practice, unsuccessfully revived by the Carolingian bishops in the early ninth century, recent scholarship has highlighted the continued impor tance of public penance in the early Middle Ages. Although the Carolingian church made efforts to codify both the laws and liturgy for public penance, as Mayke de Jong and Rob Meens have shown, much of this material is prescriptive; quite how these precepts were interpreted in practice is more problematic.11 Mayke de Jong’s work in particular demonstrates that the dichotomy between public and secret penance was not as straightforward as the legislation suggests, and that in practice penance could and did mix elements from both public and secret rites.12 Mary Mansfield’s work on twelfth- and thirteenth-century France has similarly shown how contemporary reality was more muddled than theo logical and legal definitions would suggest.13 But all are agreed that various forms of ‘public’ penance continued to be practised on the conti nent from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries. In this paper I will consider whether the same is true for Anglo-Saxon England by exam ining the liturgical and legal evidence for public penance from a conti nental perspective, beginning with a brief history of the rites for continental public penance in the early Middle Ages.
From at least the eighth century the liturgy for the penitent’s public entry into penance and subsequent reconciliation had been associated with Lent.14 The eighth-century Old Gelasian sacramentary contains the earliest full rite for the public entry into penance on Ash Wednesday,15 and a version of this service was included in the later eighth-century Frankish Gelasian sacramentaries,16 and entered the mixed GelasianizedGregorian sacramentaries of the tenth and eleventh centuries.17 The Gelasian ordo (and its descendents) is very simple: the (male) penitent should be received into penance, dressed in the cilicium, and shut up (presumably in a monastery) until Maundy Thursday, when he is reconciled by the bishop.18 The evidence that the public reconciliation of penitents took place on Maundy Thursday goes back even earlier, to the fifth century.19 Like the rite for Ash Wednesday, the Old Gelasian’s version of this service was to prove very influential in the succeeding centuries, although in its case more accretions entered the mixed rites of the late ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries. Whilst the Gelasian rites continued to be copied on the continent during the tenth and eleventh centuries, the late ninth and first half of the tenth century in Frankia witnessed an important innovation in the public penitential liturgy: the introduction of drama. Evidence for the
(New York, 1938). Amongst more recent studies which take up this theme are: P. J. Payer, Sex and the Penitentials: the Development o f a Sexual Code, 550-1150 (Toronto, 1984); J. Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago, 1987); R. Meens, ‘Pollution in the Early Middle Ages: the Case o f Food Regulations in Peniten tials’, Early Med. Europe 4 (1995), 3-19. 11 de Jong, ‘Power and Humility’, op. cit. in n. 2; eadem, ‘What was Public’, op. cit. in n. 3; R. Meens, ‘The Frequency and Nature o f Early Medieval Penance’, Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages, ed. P. Biller and A. J. Minnis, York Stud, in Med. Theology 2 (York, 1998), 35-62. 12 In addition to the works mentioned in n. 3 see M. de Jong, ‘Pollution, Penance and Sanctity: Ekkehard’s Life o f Iso’, The Community, the Family and the Saint: Patterns o f Power in Early Medieval Europe, ed. J. Hill and M. Swan (Turnhout, 1998), pp. 145-58. 13 M. Mansfield, The Humiliation o f Sinners: Public Penance in Thirteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY, 1995). On this point for the tenth- and eleventh-century Reich see Hamilton, Practice, op. cit. in n. 9.
14 On the history o f these rites generally see J. A. Jungmann, Die lateinische Bussriten in ihrer geschichtiichen Entwicklung, Forschungen zur Geschichtes des innerkirchlichen Lebens 3/4 (Innsbruck, 1932); C. Vogel, ‘Les rites de la pénitence publique aux Xe et Xle siécles’, Mélanges René Crozet, Société d ’Études médiévales (Poitiers, 1966), pp. 137-44 (repr. in idem, En remission des péchés, ed. A. Faivre (Aldershot, 1994), no. VIII. 15 GeV, no. 15 (orationes el praeces super paenitentes), no. 16 (ordo agentibus publicam poenitentiam), pp. 17-18. For example Das frankische Sacramentarium Gelasianum in aiamannischer Ueberlieferung (Codex Sangall. No. 348): St Galler Sakramentar-Forschungen /, ed. L. C. Mohlberg (Munster, 1918), pp. 37-8. 17 On mixed-sacramentaries, see C. Vogel, Medieval Liturgy: an Introduction to the Sources, trans, and rev. W. Storey and N. Rasmussen (Washington, DC, 1986), pp. 102-5. An example is the ordo in the Fulda Sacramentary: Sacramentarium Fuldense Saeculi X, ed. G. Richter and A. Schönfelder, HBS 101 (1975), 46, on which see Hamilton, Practice, op. cit. in n. 9, p. 140. Neither the Hadrianum nor the Supplemented Hadrianum make explicit provision for public penance; the Supplement includes only prayers for entry into penance ‘in the usual way’ (Orationes et praeces super penitentem confitentem peccata sua more solito feria 1111 infra L): Sacramentaire grégorien, ed. Deshusses 1,451. GeV, p. 18. 19 Vogel, ‘Les rites’, op. cit. in n. 14, p. 143.
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The continental background
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physical expulsion of the penitent from the church on Ash Wednesday first emerges in the late ninth century: it is recorded in the so-called Pontifical of Poitiers, which dates from the second half of the ninth century, and in the collection of canons compiled by Regino of Priim for the archbishops of Trier and Mainz c. 906.20 The full liturgy for both the expulsion from, and for the elaborate re-entry of the penitents into, the church first appears in the PRG, composed in Mainz c. 950.21 According to Regino of Priim, on Ash Wednesday those who were about to undergo public penance were supposed to present themselves, together with their priest, before the bishop at the doors of the cathedral church. Here they were examined about their sin and a penitential sentence awarded. After awarding sentence, the bishop then led them into the church where he, with the clergy, chanted psalms for their abso lution, sprinkled holy water and ashes over them and covered their heads in sackcloth, and then banished them from the church with the words with which God dismissed Adam from paradise in Genesis 111.19: ‘In sudore vultus tu vesceris pane tuo.’22 In the rite given in the PRG the service is amplified: the penitents are awarded their penance, prayers and psalms are recited for their absolution, followed by a mass.23 At the end of the mass the priest takes up the theme of Adam’s dismissal from paradise, and places ashes on the heads of the penitents, saying ‘Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.’24 The peni tents put on their hair shirts, and the bishop with his clergy drives them out of the church with the words, ‘Ecce eieceris hodie a sinu matris tuae sanctae ecclesiae propter peccatum tuum sicut Adam primus homo eiectus est a paradiso propter transgressionem suam.’25
On Maundy Thursday the penitents returned to the cathedral. The first part of the service took place outside: the bishop was seated in front of the cathedral church’s doors.26 The penitents were presented to the bishop by the archdeacon; the bishop then invited them to come into the church, whilst the antiphon venite, venite was sung. The penitents approached the bishop by walking forward, prostrating themselves, and getting up - this motion was repeated three times until they arrived pros trate at the feet of the bishop. Each penitent was presented to the bishop in a ceremony in which they were handed up the ecclesiastical hierarchy, by their priest to his immediate superior, the dean, and by the dean to the bishop. They were then absolved and formally reconciled with the church.27 In the second part of the service, everyone entered the church, the bishop petitioned God through intercessory prayer and absolved the penitents.28 The service ended with the bishop sprinkling holy water and censing the prostrate penitents, and commanding them, ‘Exurge qui dormis, exurge a mortuis et illuminabit te Christus.’29 The service thus ended with the penitents being restored to the Christian community and given the promise of eternal life. The physical movement in the rite communicated its basic message very effectively; expulsion from the physical and metaphysical church on Ash Wednesday, and re-entry to both on Maundy Thursday.
20 Paris, Bibliothéque de 1’Arsenal, 227 (written for the bishop o f Bourges, s. ix2): II cosidetto Pontificale di Poitiers (Paris, Bibliothéque de l'Arsenal, cod. 227), ed. A. Martini, RED, series maior, Fontes 14 (Rome, 1979); Regino o f Priim, Libri Duo de Synodalibus Causis et Disciplinis Ecclesiasticis, ed. F. G. A. Wasserschleben (Leipzig, 1840), pp. 136-7. 21 PRG, xcix.44-80 (Ash Wednesday), 224-51 (Maundy Thursday). These rites have been considered by Vogel, ‘Les rites’, op. cit. in n. 14; for a revision o f Vogel’s views see Hamilton, Practice, op. cit. in n. 9, pp. 108-21. 22 Regino, Libri Duo, op. cit. in n. 20, pp. 136-7; ‘In the sweat o f thy face shalt thou eat bread (till thou return unto the ground; for out o f it wast thou taken; for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return).’ 23 PRG, xcix.44-73. 24 ibid, xcix.71; ‘Remember, o man, that you are dust and that you will revert to dust’; this text is also derived from Genesis 111.19: ‘quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris’. 25 ibid, xcix.73; ‘Behold today you are ejected from the bosom o f your holy mother church for your sin, as Adam the first man was ejected from paradise because o f his trans gression.’
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Anglo-Saxon rites fo r public penance Wulfstan’s sermon suggests a knowledge of this tenth-century continental practice of expulsion; he compared the sinner to Adam, expelled from the community of angels for his crime, thus echoing the words with which the penitents are ejected from the church in the PRG?0 Wulfstan’s words are not proof that he had the liturgy to support them, especially in the light of our knowledge that his sermon about the reconciliation of penitents on Maundy Thursday was heavily influenced by that of Abbo of St Germain on the same theme.31 But his canon law 26 ibid, xcix.224. 27 ibid, xcix.225-9. 28 ibid, xcix.229-51. 29 ibid, xcix.251; ‘ Rise up you who are asleep, rise from the dead and Christ will give you light.’ 30 Homilies ofWulfstan, ed. Bethurum, op. cit. in n. 1, p. 234. 31 ibid. pp. 236-8. Cf. Abbo, ‘Sermo II: De Coena Domini, et de Multis Sacramentis
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collection suggests he had a strong a strong interest in penance: it includes several model letters concerning penitents ordered into exile.32 One copy of his collection, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 265 (s. xi3/4), compiled at Worcester, also includes some rites from the PRG but not those for public penance.33 Whilst it is possible that the PRG was known at Worcester in Wulfstan’s time, the absence of any direct evidence makes it much more probable that it only arrived there later in the century.34 The earliest copy of the PRG known to have been in England is London, BL, Cotton Vitellius E. xii, a copy probably made in Cologne c. 1030, with additions which Michael Lapidge has shown can be associated with Ealdred, bishop of Worcester (1046-60) and archbishop of York (1060-9).35 Public penance was still being admin istered at Worcester in the second half of the eleventh century; William of Malmesbury records in his version of Coleman’s life of St Wulfstan II (1062-95) how the bishop reconciled penitents on Maundy Thursday
and, as was customary, afterwards dined with them.36 Wulfstan’s works suggest therefore that he was aware of fairly recent developments in continental public penance, and was anxious to promote its practice in England. But does the surviving evidence of for the Anglo-Saxon liturgy support his criticism that the continental practice of public penance was ‘almost unknown’ in early eleventh-century England?37 In particular was the physical ritual of expulsion and re-entry into the church foreign to early eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon rites? As public penance was reserved to the bishop its rites are to be found in bishops’ liturgical books. Out of a total of twenty-one pontificals surviving from Anglo-Saxon England, thirteen contain rites for the absolution and reconciliation of penitents on Maundy Thursday but only seven contain rites for entry into penance, and the dismissal of the peni tents, on Ash Wednesday; the full details are listed in Table I (pp. 91-2 below).38 The inclusion of a Maundy Thursday reconciliation rite without provision for entry into penance on Ash Wednesday is also a common feature of Lotharingian and German pontificals of the period.39 Two
Eiusdem Diei’, PL 132, cols. 766-7. A direct Old English translation o f Abbo’s sermon is found in several manuscripts o f Wulfstan’s canon law collection: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 265, pp. 142-8; CCCC 190, pp. 253-8; and London, BL, Cotton Nero A. i, 159v-162v; for the text see Homilies o f Wulfstan, ed. Bethurum, op. cit. in n. 1, pp. 366-73. 32 Councils & Synods 1, ed. Whitelock, et al., op. cit. in n. 3, no. 43,1, 231-7. See also those o f Wulfsige III, bishop o f Sherborne recorded in the Dunstan Pontifical (Paris, Bibliothéquc nationale, lat. 943): ibid. no. 4 2 ,1, 230-1. One o f Wulfsige’s letters is iden tical to one issued by Wulfstan (no. 43.ix) but it is unclear who borrowed from whom. On the penitential aspects o f Wulfstan’s collection see H. Sauer, ‘Zur Oberlieferung und Anlage von Erzbischof Wulfstans “Handbuch” ’, Deutsches Archiv fu r Erforschung des Mittelalters 36 (1980), 341-84, at 383 (Textblock IX). 33 CCCC 265, pp. 298-326; PRG III, 10. For the dating o f this codex see D. N. Dumville, Liturgy and the Ecclesiastical History o f Late Anglo-Saxon England: Four Studies, Stud, in AS Hist. 5 (Woodbridge, 1992), 73-4. 34 I owe this conclusion to Patrick Wormald: ‘had Wulfstan known o f the RGP, we should have heard a lot more o f it from him’ (personal communication). 35 M. Lapidge, ‘Ealdred o f York and MS. Cotton Vitellius E. XII’, reprinted with addenda in his Anglo-Latin Literature. 900-1066 (London, 1993), pp. 453-67 and 492. Two manuscripts, both s. xi2, are derived from Cotton Vitellius E. xii: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 163 (s. ximed), made at Winchester, is a full copy o f the PRG with rites for both the public dismissal and reconciliation o f penitents: idem, ‘The Origin o f CCCC 163’, Trans, o f the Cambridge Bibliographical Soc. 8 (1981), 18-28; Leofric ‘C’, that is s. xi2 additions made to the Missal at Exeter, includes some Romano-German elements but the penitential rites are not amongst them: idem, ‘Ealdred’, p. 466, n. 67. It should be noted, however, that the copy o f the PRG in CCCC 265 belongs to a different recension to those o f the ‘Ealdred’ family: PRG III, 10, raising the possibility that the text was known at Worcester independent o f Vitellius E. xii. For the view that foreign liturgies, which may have included individual rites from the Romano-German tradition, were known at Worcester in Wulfstan’s time see C. A. Jones, ‘A Liturgical Miscellany in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 190’, Traditio 54 (1999), 103-40.
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36 Vita Wulfstani, 111.18, in William o f Malmesbury, Saints’Lives: Lives ofSS. Wulfstan, Dunstan, Patrick, Benignus and Indract, ed. M. Winterbottom and R. M. Thomson (Oxford, 2002), p. 134. 37 In addition to Wulfstan’s lament (see n. 1 above), the author o f the Pseudo-Egbert penitential describes how those guilty of capital sins should follow the customs ‘held across the sea amongst Christian folk’. Each should report to the bishop in his episcopal seat on Ash Wednesday, confess his sins and receive an appropriate penance and, if neces sary, be expelled from the church community; on Maundy Thursday the penitents should return and the bishop sing over them and grant forgiveness: Die altenglische Version des Halitgar'schen Bussbuches (sog. Poenitentiale Pseudo-Ecgberti), ed. J. Raith (Darmstadt, 1964), pp. 9-11. This text survives in three eleventh-century manuscripts: CCCC 190; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 121 (Worcester, s. xi3/4); and Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 482 (Worcester?, s.ximed). 38 This total is taken from Dumville, Liturgy, op. cit. in n. 33, pp. 67-8. The Samson Pontifical includes four penitential ordines; the early eleventh-century Canterbury/ Winchester part includes an ordo for a communal entry into penance on Ash Wednesday, rather than public penance (p. 177) and an ordo for absolution on Maundy Thursday (pp. 188-92); as these do not accord with the ‘English ordo’ tradition they deserve separate attention elsewhere. The late eleventh-century Worcester supplement includes ordines for Ash Wednesday and Maundy Thursday (pp. 16-23 and 31-7) which because o f their late date lie outside the scope o f this survey. Also deserving o f attention is the penitential material within CCCC 190 and CCCC 265. 39 For continental pontificals see Hamilton, Practice, op. cit. in n. 9, pp. 135 and 152. This pattern might also on occasion be due to subsequent damage. The copy o f the PRG brought to England by Archbishop Ealdred o f York (1060-9), now Vitellius E. xii (fols. 116-52: Cologne?, s. xi1), was badly damaged in the Cotton fire; it now only includes part o f the rite for reconciliation o f penitents on Maundy Thursday (PRG, xcix.224-38) at
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possible explanations for books which contain only the second half of a two-part rite suggest themselves. First, the absence of an Ash Wednesday ordo implies that a form of mixed penance was followed; any priest could oversee the entry into penance, but only the bishop could reconcile penitents.40 This practice was apparently promoted by Wulfstan himself: according to him, priests could and should act as private confessors, but absolution must,be reserved to the bishop or his superiors.41 Alternatively, the presence of the Maundy Thursday rite might represent the inclusion of an obsolete rite due to the inertia of tradition, just as thirteenth- and fourteenth-century northern French scribes continued to copy into their pontificals early medieval coron ation rites which would never be used.42 But as I hope to demonstrate, the sheer variety in the ordines for public penance available in late Anglo-Saxon England militates against such an explanation, as does the way in which one can trace the evolution of particular versions such as that which I will call the English Maundy Thursday ordo. Public penance, I will suggest, was a live issue, encouraging inventiveness amongst the scribes who copied, and perhaps composed, its rites. That the reconciliation of penitents on Maundy Thursday was seen as a vital element in a pontifical perhaps explains why the scribe of the tenthcentury Dunstan (or Sherborne) Pontifical added the rite as something of an afterthought - after the benedictional section of the book.43 The earliest English rite for entry into penance on Ash Wednesday is that recorded in Leofric ‘A’. The debate about whether the origins of the
Leofric Missal lie in the last half of the ninth century or the first half of the tenth, whether at St Vaast, Arras or somewhere in southern England, has been put to bed by Nicholas Orchard in his recent edition of the Missal. He presents a comprehensive case for regarding Leofric ‘A’ as an English book, made for Plegmund, archbishop of Canterbury (890-923), using a book from Arras to update an eighth-century Italian text.44 One of the English ‘symptoms’ Orchard identifies is the ordo for entry into penance on Ash Wednesday.45 Whilst it is basically an elabo rated version of the Gelasian rite, Orchard’s careful analysis suggests it was based on a north Italian model adopted by the early Anglo-Saxon church in the seventh or eighth century and, despite its being subse quently exported by Boniface to Fulda, remained essentially an insular rite 45 Thus the penitential psalms, usually regarded as a feature of ninth-century Frankish penitential liturgy, are cited in the Roman, not Gallican, text; the rite also includes both an absolution prayer, ‘Omnipotens deus qui dixit qui me confessus’, and a rubric advising the penitent, ‘si homo intellectus sit’, to return on Maundy Thursday to be reconciled, which are otherwise only to be found in manuscripts with insular or Italian associations.47 If we accept Orchard’s thesis, based on his research into both the palaeography and the liturgical content of Leofric ‘B’, that the Missal remained at Canterbury from Plegmund’s pontificate (he died in 923) through to that of Dunstan (959-88), then this would suggest at least one native rite for public penance existed in England from at least the early tenth century.48 But this was not subject to revision in the same way that other parts of ‘A’ were over the course of the tenth century; it is unclear, therefore whether this rite was found acceptable and used, or just ignored. In any case it made no mention of the formal dismissal of the penitent from the church. The earliest liturgical evidence for the expulsion of the penitents on Ash Wednesday is found in the two rites in the early eleventh-century Lanalet and Claudius I Pontificals 49 Although markedly different from
119v-121v, and makes no provision for entry into penance, either publicly on Ash Wednesday or ‘in the usual way’ (PRG, cxxxvi. Qualiter sacerdotes suscipere debeant poenitentes more solito). 40 On mixed penance in early medieval practice see R. Kottje, ‘Busspraxis und Bussritus’, SettSpol 33 (1987), 369-95; de Jong, ‘Pollution’, op. cit. in n. 12; Meens, ‘Fre quency’, op. cit. in n. 11, pp. 47-52; Hamilton, Practice, op. cit. in n. 9, pp. 127-8, 138-50, 166-70 and 209-10. 41 See n. 4 above. Theodulf’s Capitula, which were translated into Old English in the tenth century, promoted the idea that the priest should encourage all his flock to make their annual confession and be awarded a penance in Lent: H. Sauer, Theodulfi Capitula in England, Miinchener Universitats-Schriften. Institut ftir Englishche Philologie. Texte und Untersuchungen zur Englischen Philologie 8 (Munich, 1978), 376-7. 42 J. L. Nelson, ‘Ritual and Reality in the Early Medieval Ordines’, The Materials, Sources and Methods o f Ecclesiastical History, ed. D. Baker, Stud, in Church Hist. 11 (1975), 41-51; repr. in eadem, Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe (London, 1986), pp. 329-40. 42 The most detailed study o f the codicology o f the Dunstan Pontifical to date is that of N. K. Rasmussen, Les pontificaux du haut moyen áge: Genése du livre de l ’évéque, Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense 49 (Leuven, 1998); this observation at p. 317.
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44 The Leofric Missal, ed. N. Orchard, 2 vols, HBS 113-14 (London, 2002) 1 ,1-131. 43 ibid. II, nos. 485-93. 46 ibid. I, 39-43; see also the comparative table ibid. 271. 47 ibid. II, nos. 492-3. 48 ibid. I. 132-305. 49 Pontificale Lanaletense (Bibliothéque de la Ville de Rouen, A. 21. Cat. 368): a Pontif ical Formerly in Use at St Germans, Cornwall, ed. G. H. Doble, HBS 74 (London, 1937), 68-72; Tlte Claudius Pontificals (from Cotton MS. Claudius A. Hi in the British Museum), ed. D. H. Turner, HBS 97 (London, 1971), 83-5.
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each other, both are simpler than that recorded in the PRG and, indeed, more closely resemble those for secret rather than public penance. Clau dius I was seemingly compiled, either at London, Worcester or York, for Wulfstan; it includes corrections in his own hand to part A.50 The Ash Wednesday dismissal rite is found in part B, which was written, possibly as a supplement to A, in a hybrid Insular-Caroline which David Dumville has dated to c. 1000.51 The ordo itself, whilst unique, is made up of elements from the mixed Gelasian-Gregorian tradition. It begins with Ps. XXXVI1, Domine ne in furore II, one of the penitential psalms, followed by various prayers in which the penitent acknowledges his sinfulness and begs forgiveness.52 The blessing of the ashes follow, after which they are mixed with holy water and put on the heads of the penitents who are expelled from the church with the antiphon, ‘In sudore uultus tui’. That this is an episcopal rite is clear from the refer ence to the bishop who should prostrate himself before the host and pray to God to look mercifully on the sinner and forgive his sins.53
The Lanalet Pontifical was compiled somewhere in the west country in the early eleventh century, and was probably owned by Lyfing, abbot of Chertsey (c. 990-8), bishop of Wells (998-1013) and archbishop of Canterbury (1013-20).54 The Lanalet ordo begins with the standard opening for an ordo for secret penance: ‘Incipit qualiter suscipere debeant paenitentem episcopi vel presbiteri. Quotiescumque Christiani ad paenitentiam accedunt . . ,’.55 A similar service to that given in the PRG for ‘penance in the usual way’ (that is ‘secret’ penance) then follows for the imposition of penance, in which Pss. XXXVII, CII, L, LIII and LI are recited, alternating with prayers for God’s forgiveness of the sinner taken from the Gelasian and Gregorian traditions.56 Then, according to the rubric, if any one has sinned so gravely that he ought to be expelled from the Church, the response ‘In sudore uultus tuae’ should be sung, and the penitent should prostrate himself before the doors whilst the Pater noster is sung, followed by various preces and prayers
50 There is no consensus as to where it was written: Dumville suggests it belongs to Wulfstan’s period as archbishop o f York and bishop o f Worcester (1002-22/3): Liturgy, op. cit. in n. 33, pp. 78-9; Wormald argues it was composed for Wulfstan whilst he was bishop of London (996-1002) because the pontifical omits an ordination rite: Making, op. cit. in n. 2, pp. 194-5. On the appearance o f corrections in Wulfstan’s own hand: N. R. Ker, ‘The Handwriting o f Archbishop Wulfstan’, England before the Conquest: Studies in Primary Sources presented to Dorothy Whitelock, ed. P. Clemoes and K. Hughes (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 315-51 51 Dumville, Liturgy, op. cit. in n. 33, pp. 78-9. For further detail on the codicology see Claudius Pontificals, ed. Turner, op. cit. in n. 49, pp. xi and xviii-xxviii. 52 ‘Feria llll. Caput ieiunii. Incipit ordo ad dandam penitentiam. In primis dicitur psalmis, Domine ne in furore II, per totum postea dicit. Exaudi quaesumus domine (GreH, no. 842; GreSp, no. 1323; PRG, cxxxvi.29), Ps. (CII) Benedic anima; Adesit quaesumus domine huic famulo tuo (Sacramentaire grégorien, ed. Deshusses 111, 115, no. 3961 codices TU| (Tours, Bibliothéque muncipale, 184, s. ixex) and Tu2 (Paris, Bibliothéque nationale, n.a.l. 1589, s. ixex, Saint-Maurice, Tours); PRG, cxxxvi.35), Ps. (L), Miserere, miserere deus; Praeveniat hunc famulum tuum (C eV, no. 79; GreSp, no. 1380; PRG, xcix.59); Ps. (Ll) Quid gloriaris; Adesto domine supplicationibus nostris (GeV, no. 80; GreSp, no. 1381; PRG, xcix.60); Ps. (LII1) Deus in nomine; Domine deus noster qui offencione nostra non vinceris (GeV, no. 81; GreSp, no. 1382), Deinde dicatur Pater noster et ne nos precibus; (various preces followed by) Da quaesumus domine huic famulo (Sacramentaire grégorien, ed. Deshusses III, 115, no. 3962 - Tui; Tu,; PRG, xcix.58); Deus cuius indulgentia nemo non diget (Sacramentairegrégorien, ed. Deshusses III, 117, no. 3969 (slightly different text) -T U |j PRG, xcix.66, cxxxvi. 10)’, ibid. pp. 83-5. 53 'Benedictio cinerum. Deus qui non mortem sed penitentiam desideras peccatorum (PRG, xcix.75). Hic mittuntur cineres super capita eorum cum aqua benedicta et expellanture extra ecclesiam incipitur. In sudore uultus tui. Et prosterens se ante hostium canit episcopus. Inclina domine. Or. Precor domine clementie tue (GeV, no. 82; Sacramentairegrégorien, ed. Deshusses III, 115, no. 3960; PRG, xcix.64)’, ibid. p. 85.
54 It has been attributed to both Lanalet and Wells, but the evidence for Lanalet is late, relying on the reference to ‘Lanaletensis monasterii’ in the excommunication formula added s. xi1; the evidence for Wells relies on the prominence given to the cult o f St Andrew as well as a later colophon that the book belonged to Bishop Lyfing: Pontificale Lanaletensis, ed. Doble. op. cit. in n. 49, pp. ix and xii-xiii; D. N. Dumville, ‘Ón the Dating o f Some Late Anglo-Saxon Liturgical Manuscripts’, Trans, o f the Cambridge Bibliographical Soc. 10 (1991), 40-57, at 51-2; idem. Liturgy, op. cit. in n. 33, pp. 86-7; W. Rodwell, ‘The Anglo-Saxon and Norman Churches’, Wells Cathedral: a History, ed. L. S. Colchester (Shepton Mallet, 1982), p. 22, n. 14. It therefore seemingly did not belong to Lyfing, bishop o f Crediton (1027-46) as suggested by A. Prescott, ‘The Structure o f the English Pre-conquest Benedictionals’, British Library Jnl 13 (1987), 118-58, at 128. 55 'How bishops or priests ought to receive the penitent. As often as Christians come to penance. . . ’, Pontificate Lanaletense, ed. Doble, op. cit. in n. 49, p. 69. For example, these words begin the ordo for penance given in Halitgar’s Penitential, Bk VI: H. J. Schmitz, Die Bufibiicher und das kanonische Bufiverfahren (Diisseldorf, 1898), pp. 290-2. For a consid eration of this rubric and its appearance in the early medieval penitentials see L. Körntgen, Studien zu den Quellen der friihmittelalterlichen Bufibiicher, Quellen und Forschungen zum Recht im Mittelalter 7 (Sigmaringen, 1993), 130—8. 56 'In primis dicit psalmum xxxvii, totum domine ne in furore tuo arguas me et postea dicit oremus, Exaudi quesumus domine supplicum preces (Claudius Pontifical 1, Claudius Pontificals, ed. Turner, op. cit. in n. 49, p. 83), Ps. (CII): Benedica anima (ibid. p. 83); Adsit quesumus domine huic famulo (Sacramentaire grégorien, ed. Deshusses III, 115, no. 3961 [Tu|, Tu2]; Claudius Pontificals, ed. Turner, p. 83), Ps. (L): Misere mei deus (ibid. p. 84); Preveniat hunc famulum tuum quesumus (GeV, no. 79; GreSp, no. 1380; Claudius Pontificals, ed. Turner, p. 84); Ps. (LHI): Deus in nomine tuo (ibid. p. 84); Adesto domine supplicationibus nostris nec sit ab hoc famulo (GeV, no. 80; GreSp, no. 1381; Claudius Pontificals, ed. Turner, p. 84); Ps. (LI): Quid gloriaris in malitia (ibid. p. 84); Domine deus noster qui offensione nostra non vinceris (GeV, no. 81; GreSp, no. 1382; Claudius Pontificals, ed. Turner, p. 84)’, Pontificale Lanaletense, ed. Doble, op. cit. in n. 49, pp. 69-71.
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for God’s mercy.57 This response also accompanies the physical ejec tion of the penitents in the PRG, and together with the rubric suggests that here we have evidence that the practice of the ejection of public penitents on Ash Wednesday was known in early eleventh-century England.58 The rite is followed by the blessing of the ashes.59 Whilst this rite begins with a rubric taken from rites for secret penance, it shares many elements with the rites for entry into public penance found in the later recensions of the Gregorian model, the PRG, and the Claudius I Pontifical. It should also be noted that the initial prayer is written for plural penitents, although subsequent prayers are in the singular.60 Claudius Pontifical I was probably compiled for, and perhaps even by, Wulfstan himself, either as bishop of London, or archbishop of York and bishop of Worcester. The Lanalet Pontifical is associated with Lyfing about whom little is known, probably because he was not vener ated as a saint at Canterbury, but he was apparently a student of Dunstan’s at Glastonbury, and forms the last in a series of southern bishops promoted to the provincial see by Æthelred.61 Although both pontificals can therefore be associated with reforming bishops, there is seemingly no closer connection between them. This geographic and diocesan disparity may therefore explain why two different rites for the dismissal of penitents were owned by LondonAVorcester/York and
Wells/Canterbury by the early eleventh century.62 Their differences may be due to different stages of evolution from a common rite or to different versions of the continental model. The evidence for the Maundy Thursday penitential rites suggest the Anglo-Saxons’ liturgy differed significantly from that of their conti nental counterparts. The early tenth-century Leofric ‘A’ includes a seemingly unique rite which, nevertheless, contains many elements from the Gelasian tradition.63 The penitent should present himself in the bosom of the church, and whilst he lies completely prostrate on the ground, the bishop (sacerdos) should pray that he be reconciled as follows: first the antiphon is sung, ‘Cor mundum crea in me, deus; spiritum rectum innoua in uisceribus’, then Ps. LI, followed by the Kyrie eleison, Pater noster and preces, and then prayers asking for God’s mercy towards the penitent.64 This sequence is also part of tenth-century continental rites from Fulda and Mainz.65 There is no mention here, or in rites from the late tenth and early eleventh century, that the elaborate procedure for re-entry into the church, accompanied by the venite chant, was known in England. In contrast this process is recorded in two fami lies of tenth-century continental ordines: that in the PRG, which began in the province of Mainz, and the ‘north-central’ rite recorded in Trier and other centres in Lotharingia.66 Instead, an ordo for the reconcilia tion of penitents on Maundy Thursday which is, apparently, peculiar to the English church survives in five English manuscripts, two of which,
57 ‘Et si in grauis fdelectisf preocupatus f fuerit expelli debet ab ecclesia.cantando R. In surdore t uultus tuae. Et prosternat se ante ianuam eclesiae tunc orent pro eo Pater noster. [Followed by preces]. Et dicit oremus. Deus cuius indulgentia nemo non indiget (Sacramentaire grégorien, ed. Deshusses III, 117, no. 3969 [Tu,]); Deus sub cuius oculis (ibid. Ill, 115, no. 3960 [Tu,]); Deus infinitae misericordiae (ibid. Ill, 114, no. 3958 [Tu,]); Da quaesumus domine famulo tuo continuam purgationis (ibid. Ill, 115, no. 3962; Claudius Pontificals, ed. Turner, op. cit. in n. 49, p. 85)’, Pontificale Lanaletense, ed. Doble, op. cit. in n. 49, p. 71. There are neumes above the chant. 58 PRG, xcix.73. 59 ‘Benedictio cinerum. Omnipotens sempiterne deus parce metuentibus (PRG, xcix.74); Deus qui non mortem sed paenitentiam (Claudius Pontificals, ed. Turner, op. cit. in n. 49, p. 85; PRG, xcix.75)’, Pontificale Lanaletense, ed. Doble, op. cit. in n. 49, pp. 72-3. 60 ‘Domine deus omnipotens propitius esto mihi . . . Suscipe orationem meam quam fundo ante conspectum clementiae tue pro fam ulis ac famulabus tuis qui ad paenitentiam uenerint’, ibid. p. 69. Cf. Sacramentaire grégorien, ed. Deshusses III, 114, no. 3957 [Tu2]. A similar pattern is found in the PRG. 61 On the significance o f an absence o f cult see N. Brooks, The Early History o f the Church o f Canterbury: Christ Church from 597 to 1066 (London, 1984), pp. 55 and 278-9. For Lyfing’s career see The Heads o f Religious Houses England and Wales, 940-1216, ed. D. Knowles, C. N. L. Brooke and V C. M. London (Cambridge, 1972), p. 38; for his associations with Dunstan see D. Knowles, The Monastic Order in England from the Times o f St Dunstan to the Fourth Lateran Council, 943-1216 (Cambridge, 1950), p. 64, n. 3.
62 Although I know o f no evidence for a connection between Chertsey or Wells and Worcester in the early eleventh century, Chertsey was part o f a prayer confraternity which joined all the houses o f the Worcester diocese with Chertsey and Bath during the episco pate o f Wulfstan II: ibid. p. 161. 63 Its distinctiveness is not recognized by Nicholas Orchard: ‘It remains to say that ri’s penitential order for Maundy Thursday (nos. 766-70) is fairly normal: an expanded version appears later in Andrieu’s Ordo L and in the Romano-German Pontifical’: Leofric Missal, ed. Orchard, op. cit. in n. 4 4 ,1.43. 64 ibid. II, 163-4, nos. 766-69; ‘Create a clean heart in me, O God, and renew an upright spirit within me.’ On parallels with other texts see Orchard’s collation table: ibid. I, 278. The reference to sacerdos, rather than episcopus in an episcopal rite is not uncommon: Hamilton, Practice, op. cit. in n. 9, p. 109. 65 This sequence is paralleled, but not identical, to the more elaborate ordo found in the PRG: PRG II, 59-67: ordo xcix.229,230,235,245 (different version) and 251. It is closer to the ordo in the Fulda Sacramentary: Sacramentarium Fuldense, ed. Richter, op. cit. in n. 17, pp. 76-8, where the initial sequence is almost identical, but the text includes additional prayers; this closeness may be due to Fulda’s insular origins; the Ash Wednesday dismissal rite shares several similarities with a ninth-century rite from Fulda: Leofric Missal, ed. Orchard, op. cit. in n. 4 4 ,1,42-3. 66 Hamilton, Practice, op. cit. in n. 9, pp. 118-21 and 155-66.
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the Dunstan and Anderson Pontificals, date from the late tenth century; the text of all five copies of this rite is virtually identical (see Table II, pp. 93-103 below, for details). The relationship between these five books requires further investigation.67 My examination of some twenty-three north French, Lotharingian and German pontificals has not found any continental parallels for the English ordo. As Table II demon strates, the Egbert Pontifical, whilst closely related to the English ordo, omits crucial elements, and therefore I have chosen not to regard it as part of the English ordo. This ordo omits any elaborate procedure for re-entry into the church, making provision for the absolution of the penitent as follows: he should prostrate himself before the altar and sing Ps. L, but if he is illiterate, he should ask God to be merciful to him as a sinner.68 This is followed by a prayer which does not appear outside England before the eleventh century and which begins ‘Absoluimus teYvos/ vice beati petri apostolorum principis cui dominus potestatem ligandi atque soluendi dedit.’69 That this was an English prayer is also suggested by its inclu sion in the Egbert Pontifical in an Old English translation.70 This prayer is followed by various others drawn from the Gelasian and Gregorian traditions which all ask for God’s mercy on and forgiveness of the sinner. The penitent is then taken by the hand to the bishop and bows in
the presence of the bishop, who formally reconciles the penitent. The ordo lacks the dramatic re-entry of the penitents into the church, both physical and metaphysical, found in the tenth-century continental rites. But unlike the tenth-century continental rites which prefer the subjunc tive, the absolution prayer is said in the first person indicative. The bishop verbally assumes responsibility for the absolution of the peni tent, a development not usually found on the continent until the later eleventh century.71 The English ordo may lack drama, but it embodies a highly developed sense of the importance and extent of episcopal office. The English ordo first appears in the Dunstan Pontifical. Despite some attempts to revise the dating of this manuscript, its association with Dunstan, archbishop of Canterbury (959/60-988) seems to stand, and it was probably made at Canterbury in the 970s before being sent with Wulfsige to Sherborne after Dunstan’s death.72 It is one of three copies of the English ordo identified by David Dumville as being written at Christ Church, Canterbury.73 The remaining two examples of the English ordo were copied in codices from Wells and Winchester.74 Not only the rite itself, but some of its constituent elements seem to be peculiar to England. Its origins nevertheless remain unclear as many of its elements drew on the traditional Gelasian and Gregorian tradition. But its circulation within the books of the English episcopate shows the importance that the bishops associated with both the first and second waves of the reform movement attached to episcopal reconciliation. This rite does not appear to have had a lengthy shelf-life. The English ordo was incorporated into the rite for a form of one-stop penance, combining confession, the awarding of penance and the absolution of sins in one procedure, recorded in the mid-eleventh-century Canterbury Benedictional (London, BL, Harley 2892).75 That the English ordo was
67 There are other correspondences between the Dunstan and Anderson Pontificals: see J. T. Rosenthal, ‘The Pontifical of St Dunstan’, St Dunstan: his Life, Times and Cult, ed. N. Ramsay, M. Sparks and T. Tatton-Brown (Woodbridge, 1992), pp. 143-63, at 148-9. Both contain the second English coronation ordo, and Helen Gittos’ research on the church dedication rites suggests that those in Anderson may represent a revised version o f those in Dunstan (personal communication). 68 See Table II for details. This description is based on the ordo in the Anderson Pontif ical, which is partially transcribed by Rasmussen, Les pontiflcaux, op. cit. in n. 43, pp. 222-4. Of. the rites in Paris, Bibliothéque nationale, lat. 943,151 r-4v, edited in DAER, lib. 1, cap. 6, §7, ‘ordo’ II); Pontificale Lanaletense, ed. Doble, op. cit. in n. 49, pp. 75-80; The Benedictional o f Archbishop Robert, ed. H. A. Wilson, HBS 24 (London, 1903), 57-60; Canterbury Benedictional, ed. Woolley, pp. 29-35. 69 London, BL, Add. 57337,98r; ‘We absolve you in place o f the blessed Peter, prince o f the Apostles, to whom the Lord gave the power to bind and loose.’ A. Nocent suggests that there are no precedents for this prayer outside England: ‘La pénitence dans les ordines locaux transcrits dans Le D e Antiquis Ecclesiae Ritibus d ’Edmond Marténe’, Paschale Mysterium: Studium in Memoria dell’abatate Prof. Salvatore Marsili (1910-83), ed. G. Famedi, Studi Anselmiana 91/Analecta Liturgica 10 (Rome, 1986), 115-38, at 119. 70 Paris, Bibliothéque nationale, lat. 10575,163v-164r; Two Anglo-Saxon Pontificals, ed. Banting, p. 132, n. 30. The Egbert Pontifical can be dated to c. 1000 on palaeographical grounds, but its provenance before it reached Évreux in the early eleventh century is unknown: Dumville, ‘On the Dating’, op. cit. in n. 54, p. 51; idem, Liturgy, op. cit. in n. 33, pp. 85-6.
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71 One o f the earliest continental examples is in The Cracow Pontifical (Pontificale Cracoviense Saeculi XI): Cracow: Jagiellonian Library, MS. 2057, ed. Z. Obertynski, HBS 100 (Manchester, 1977), 103. The Cracow Pontifical was written at Tyniec monas tery near Cracow c. 1075; it was probably based on a Lotharingian or Rhineland model: ibid. pp. 14-16. On this development in general see Jungmann, Die lateinische Bussriten, op. cit. in n. 14, pp. 223-8. 22 Rosenthal, ‘The Pontifical o f St Dunstan’, op. cit. in n. 67, pp. 144-63. 73 The Christ Church examples o f the English ordo are: Paris, Bibliothéque nationale, lat. 943; BL, Add. 57337; London, BL, Harley 2892. The circulation o f this ordo therefore supports in part David Dumville’s suggestion that Canterbury provided the model for most o f the books for the English episcopate: Dumville, Liturgy, op. cit. in n. 33, pp. 91-5. 74 On the Wells provenance for the Lanalet Pontifical see n. 54 above. On the Winchester provenance for the Benedictional o f Archbishop Robert see ibid. p. 87. 75 Canterbury Benedictional, ed. Woolley, pp. 29-34. On this particular rite see
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no longer popular in Canterbury, at least, by the mid eleventh century may explain why the text for it in the slightly earlier Benedictional of Archbishop Robert ends abruptly part way through the final prayer on a recto folio; this end is not therefore due to a lost folio.76 This evolution of the English ordo occurred at a time when continental liturgies were becoming more influential in England. Amongst the changes to Leofric ‘A’ made in a hand which Elaine Drage has identified as that of Leofric, bishop of Devon and Cornwall (1046 x 1072), himself, is the addition at the end of the Maundy Thursday reconciliation rite of the concluding antiphon from the PRG: ‘Exurge qui dormis, exurge a mortuis et illuminabit te Christus.’77 Elsewhere the bishop added new cues for chants, and new directions for the Vigils of Easter and Pentecost; that this rite attracted Leofric’s attention whilst he was updating Leofric ‘A’ suggests its importance to him.78 But if this is the case, why did he not also update the Ash Wednesday ordo for entry into public penance? The answer may be that he had no need: the portable pontificalbenedictional made at Exeter for Leofric (London, BL, Add. 28188), includes a different service for entry into penance on Ash Wednesday which, whilst it makes no provision for the dismissal of the penitent, includes the imposition of ashes which were an important part of the PRG dismissal rite.79 This rite is virtually identical to those in London, BL, Cotton Vitellius A. vii,80 a pontifical closely related to Add. 28188,
and the Canterbury Benedictional.81 This second Ash Wednesday rite appears peculiar to these English books and owes a good deal to rites for secret penance, both in its choice of prayers, and in the alternation of prayers with penitential psalms in a manner reminiscent, for example, of ninth-century Frankish rites for secret penance.82 But it also includes the imposition of ashes, an integral part of the PRG’s dismissal rite, ending with a direction that everyone should return to the monasteriumP The audience for the second English Ash Wednesday rite was, seemingly, the regular clergy - perhaps the canons of the cathedral - in what was a devotional service for the community rather than a pastoral one for the segregation of heinous sinners; a reminder, perhaps, that public penance was part of the life of the canons regular. It was recommended for those canons guilty of homicide and other serious crimes in the Old English version of Chrodegang, copied at Exeter under Leofric.84 Far from being used to dismiss penitents, this second English rite appears to have been intended for a communal entry into penance at the beginning of Lent. It is described as a rite for doing public penance in only one of the three codices, the Canterbury Benedictional,85 but this rubric is a reminder that the distinctions between public and secret penance may be more rigid for historians than they were to eleventh-century churchmen; public penance need not always mean canonical penance, and penance for ‘secret’ sins could be conducted in a public service.86 Nevertheless, these remain useful, if artificial terms; whilst eleventh-century bishops like Leofric made provision for communal entry into penance, it should be remembered that they also attached importance to the liturgy for the public reconciliation of penitents on Maundy Thursday.
Bedingfield, ‘Public Penance’, op. cit. in n. 5. On the willingness o f the compiler of the Canterbury Benedictional to innovate see C. A. Jones, ‘The Chrism Mass in Later Anglo-Saxon England’, ch. 5 in this volume; 1 would like to thank Professor Jones for letting me see an advance copy o f his article. 76 The Benedictional o f Archbishop Robert, ed. Wilson, op. cit. in n. 68, p. 60 n. 3. 77 Leofric Missal, ed. Orchard, op. cit. in n. 44, II, 164, n. 3, no. 769*; cf. PRG, xcix.251 discussed at n. 29 above. Nicholas Orchard identifies the hand as Exeter scribe 1, whom Drage identified with Leofric: ‘Bishop Leofric and the Exeter Cathedral Chapter (1052-1172): a Reassessment o f the Manuscript Evidence’ (unpubl. DPhil thesis, Oxford Univ., 1978). 78 Leofric Missal, ed. Orchard, op. cit. in n. 44,1,212. 79 BL, Add. 28188 (s. xi2), 79v-84v. On the dating and provenance o f this manuscript see J. Briickmann, ‘Latin Manuscript Pontificals and Benedictionals in England and Wales’, Traditio 29 (1973), 391-458, at 426; Drage, ‘Bishop Leofric’, op. cit. in n. 77, pp. 146, 167-8 and 357-9; A. G. Watson, Catalogue o f Dated and Datable Manuscripts c. 700-1600 in the Department o f Manuscripts, the British Library, 2 vols. (London, 1979), no. 322; H. Gneuss, Handlist o f Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: a List o f Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to 1100 (Tempe, AZ, 2001), no. 286 (p. 59); Prescott, ‘The Structure’, op. cit. in n. 54, pp. 130-3; R. Gameson, ‘The Origin of the Exeter Book o f Old English poetry’, ASE 25 (1996), 135-85, at 141-7; see also Leofric Missal, ed. Orchard, op. cit. in n. 4 4 ,1, 207. 80 59r—61 v; the beginning o f the rite was damaged in the Cotton fire.
82
The penitential tradition in tenth-century England By c. 970, or perhaps even earlier if one includes the evidence of Leofric ‘A’, public penance was known in England. As these rites survive in manuscripts associated with reformers in the south, the south-west and 81 Canterbury Benedictional, ed. Woolley, pp. 13-17. 82 For example, Schmitz, Die Bufibiicher, op. cit. in n. 55, pp. 270-5. 83 ‘Finitis orationibus agantur letaniae redeundo ad monasterium’, Add. 28188, 84r. Cf. Vitellius A. vii, 61 v. 84 The Old English Version o f the Enlarged Rule o f Chrodegang together with the Latin Original, ed. A. S. Napier, EETS os 150 (London, 1916), c. 37, at pp. 34-7. 83 Canterbury Benedictional, ed. Woolley, p. 13. 86 Hamilton, Practice, op. cit. in n. 9, pp. 209-10 and passim.
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the north, it appears as if Wulfstan’s known preoccupation with penance, typified perhaps by the devotional general penance declared in 1009 on the coming of the ‘great army’, was symptomatic of wider concerns within the late tenth- and early eleventh-century English church.87 There are also hints of interest in public penance earlier in the tenth century; the ‘great penance’ of 1009 was anticipated in the tenth-century monastic reform movement; the Regularis concordia was intended by Æthelwold to alleviate national sin and consequent punishment.88 In particular, the references to penance in the late ninthand tenth-century Anglo-Saxon laws require a more detailed con sideration before we can reach any conclusion as to the novelty of the early eleventh-century concerns with public penance. The first reference occurs in Alfred’s laws: anyone who fails to fulfil a pledge must give up his weapons and possessions and enter prison for forty days and endure the penance prescribed by the bishops.89 The sentence echoes the penalties commonly associated with public penance; under Carolingian and tenth-century continental church law the penitent was expected to give up his weapons and public office, and also abstain from marriage if unmarried, or refrain from marital rela tions if married.90 The second reference occurs in the ‘Grately’ laws of
Athelstan (924-39): anyone guilty of perjury should be forbidden from taking further oaths and from burial in consecrated ground unless his bishop testifies he has performed the penance prescribed by his confessor satisfactorily, or commuted it satisfactorily.91 This clause was in line with earlier church law on the subject of peijury, for according to c. 26 of Theodulfs Capitula (c. 800) a perjurer should be awarded the same penance as for crimes such as adultery, fornication and homicide: if a peijurer refuses to go to confession, he should be repelled from the church, and from the communion with and the company of the faithful, and no one should eat, drink or pray with him, or receive him into his house.92 It is not clear how far Theodulfs Capitula circulated in mid-tenth-century England although they were well known by the late tenth and eleventh centuries.93 Of course these prohibitions also hold true for excommunicants, but the reference in ‘Grately’ to a penance prescribed by the confessor, whose performance was to be witnessed by the bishop, appears to be a reference to some form of mixed penance.94 According to II Edmund (939-46) no killer may have resort to the royal court until he has undergone ecclesiastical penance and paid compensa tion to the kindred and submitted to all the legal obligations as instructed by his diocesan bishop.95 Both public and secret penances
87 On Wulfstan’s general preoccupation with penance see Homilies o f Wulfstan, ed. Bethurum, op. cit. in n. 1, pp. 345-7 and also Wormald, Making, op. cit. in n. 2, pp. 211-24. For the text o f the general penance o f 1009 see Councils & Synods I, ed. Whitelock, et al., op. cit. in n. 3, no. 5 0 ,1,376 (Latin) and 379 (Old English); on its signif icance for Æthelred’s reign see S. Keynes, The Diplomas o f King Æthelred ‘the Unready ’: a Study in their Use as Historical Evidence (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 217-19; Wormald, Making, pp. 331-2 and 455. 88 P. Wormald, ‘Æthelwold and his Continental Counterparts: Contact, Comparison, Contrast’, Bishop Æthelwold: his Career and Influence, ed. B. Yorke (Woodbridge, 1998), pp. 13-42, at 42. 89 Alfred, 1.2, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. F. Liebermann, 3 vols. (Halle, 1903-16) 1,48-9. On Alfred’s Domboc, see Wormald, Making, op. cit. in n. 2, pp. 265-90. One copy (A) is preserved in BL, Nero A. i (s. xi3/4), a codex which also includes a set o f texts associated with Wulfstan (B) but Patrick Wormald has convincingly argued that (A) and (B) were probably only bound together in the sixteenth century: ibid. pp. 224-8. Wormald’s analysis suggests that this clause o f Alfred’s laws has no precedent in English law: ibid. pp. 282-4. 90 Council o f Pavia (850), c. 12: MGH Concilia III: Concilia Aevi Karolini, II: 843-59, ed. W. Hartmann (Hanover, 1984), pp. 225-6; Regino, Libri duo, ed. Wasserschleben, op. cit. in n. 20,11, 27, 28, 29,42,43 and 75, pp. 224-5, 230-1 and 243. The penitent must not bear arms or conduct any secular, especially legal, business, eat meat, drink alcohol, marry, or take communion, except the viaticum: Burchard o f Worms, Decretorum Libri XX, XIX, v, PL 140, col. 954. Both Regino’s and Burchard’s collections are very dependent on Carolingian legislation: H. Hoffmann and R. Pokomy, Das Dekret des
BischoJ's Burchard von Worms. Textstufen, Friihe Verbreitung, Vorlagen, MGH Hilfsmittel 12 (Munich, 1991). For a review o f Carolingian legislation on this topic see K. J. Leyser, ‘Early Medieval Canon Law and the Beginning o f Knighthood’, in his Commu nications and Power in Medieval Europe: the Carolingian and Ottonian Centuries, ed. T. Reuter (London, 1994), pp. 51-72. 91 Athelstan II, c. 26: Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, op. cit. in n. 89,1,164-5. Wormald dates the ‘Grately’ laws to after 928: Making, op. cit. in n. 2, p. 440. On Athelstan’s laws in general, ibid. pp. 290-308. Wormald suggests that Archbishop Wulfhelm o f Canterbury (926-41) is responsible for the preservation o f the text o f Athelstan’s laws and that he was probably behind their composition, ibid. pp. 299-300. For consideration o f this particular clause, ibid. pp. 307-8, although Wormald is not concerned with the penitential aspects o f this text. 92 Sauer, Theodulfi Capitula in England, op. cit. in n. 41, pp. 340-3. 93 One recension was translated into Old English in southern England (either East Anglia or the south-west Midlands) in the second half o f the tenth century, another in early eleventh-century southern Englánd: ibid. pp. 507-13 94 Measures against excommunicants and public penitents were identical: according to Wulfstan’s own law collection, an excommunicant should not enter church, nor accept the kiss o f peace, but should abstain from meat, wine and uxorious relations; he should not communicate until he has done penance unless he is dying: Die Hirtenbriefe Ælfrics, ed. Fehr, op. cit. in n. 2, p. 246. The text is recorded in Nero A. i, 1S7v-158v; CCCC 190, p. 243. Cf. Burchard, Decretum, XIX, 5, op. cit. in n. 90. For the ninth-century definitions and treatment o f excommunicants see E. Vodola, Excommunication in the Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1986), pp. 12-20. 95 II Edmund (965/6), c. 4: Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, op. cit. in n. 8 9 ,1, 188-9; on this
84
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were enjoined on those guilty of homicide but here the reference to the bishop suggests it is he who oversees the penance.96 Therefore the refer ence in II Edmund could be to either public or secret penance; many penitentials were undoubtedly composed and owned by bishops, perhaps for use in their own courts.97 The laws of Æthelred enjoined frequent confession on all Christians98 but also enjoined penance on all excommunicants.99 In II Cnut bishops,are enjoined to follow the law outlined in the penitentials in demanding ecclesiastical amends, and secular law in demanding secular amends for a crime.100 Whilst there is no explicit reference to public penance here, these laws assume that
ecclesiastical penance was administered by the bishop and that it should have the same penalties as awarded in continental forms of public penance. Although Æthelred V and II Cnut were both compiled by Wulfstan, the laws of Alfred, Athelstan and II Edmund anticipate the interest in public penance evinced by both Wulfstan and Ælfric by up to a century; they therefore suggest an earlier and more local context from which sprang the late tenth-century reformers’ concern with public penance and its liturgy.
The appeal o f penance code, compiled to deal with blood feud, see Wormald, Making, op. cit. in n. 2, pp. 310-12 and 440-1. Unlike I Edmund this code is not recorded in any o f the manuscripts of Wulfstanian material. Wormald sees this clause as part o f a trend in Edmund’s legislation to strengthen the role of the king and peacemaker and the ‘personification o f good order’, ibid. p. 312. 96 For example the Old English Handbook is prefaced by an ordo confessionis, and instructions to the priest on how to administer ‘secret’ penance, but its tariffs includes those for homicide: ‘A late Old English Handbook for the Use o f a Confessor’, ed. R. Fowler, Anglia 83 (1965), 1-34. 97 For the view that the ninth-century penitentials were composed to support the bishop in his synodal work, see F. Kerff, ‘Mittelalterliche Quellen und mittelalterliche Wirklichkeit. Zu den Konsequenzen einer jiingst erschienenen Edition fur unser Bild kirchlicher Reformbemiihungen’, Rheinische Vierteljahrsblatter 51 (1987), 275-86; idem, ‘Libri paenitentiales und kirchliche Strafgerichtsbarkeit bis zum Decretum Gratiani: ein Diskussionsverschlag’, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung fu r Rechtsgeschichte: Kanonistische Abteilung 75 (1989), 23-57. For a critique of this view, based on a codicological study o f the ninth-century manuscripts o f penitentials, see Meens, ‘Fre quency’, op. cit. in n. 11; however, my own research suggests a more legalistic context for tenth-century continental manuscripts: Hamilton, Practice, op. cit. in n. 9, pp. 44-50. 98 V Æ thelred, c. 22, Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, op. cit. in n. 8 9 ,1,242-3. On the compi lation o f this code and Wulfstan’s authorship o f it see Wormald, Making, op. cit. in n. 2, pp. 330-45 and 449-65 passim. For specific consideration o f this clause, ibid. pp. 449-50. Wulfstan’s preoccupation with penance was a reflection o f his millenarian concerns, ibid. pp. 451-5. 99 V Æthelred, c. 29, Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, op. cit. in n. 8 9 ,1,244-5. CCCC 265 (s. xi2, Worcester), one o f the manuscripts o f ‘Wulfstan’s Commonplace Book’, includes formulae for both excommunication and absolution o f ‘those who after excommunication come to reconciliation with the grief o f penitence’: Wormald, Making, op. cit. in n. 2, p. 211. These excommunication formulae are part o f a section which also includes (in the same hand) a liturgy for the blessing o f the chrism on Maundy Thursday which refers to the absolution of sinners on that day, ibid. p. 212. For further consideration see C. A. Jones, ‘The Chrism Mass’, below, ch. 5. The most detailed study o f CCCC 265 remains that of M. Bateson, ‘A Worcester Cathedral Book o f Ecclesiastical Collections, Made c. 1000 AD’, Eng. Hist. Rev. 10 (1895), 712-31. 100 II Cnut, c. 38.2: Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, op. cit. in n. 8 9 ,1, 338-9. This code was composed by Wulfstan and reflects his desire to reform society along Christian lines and his belief in the bishops’ responsibility for achieving this: Wormald, Making, op. cit. in n. 2, pp. 349-66. It appears to be based on VI Æthelred 52: ibid. p. 359 (Table 5.4).
86
The reasons why the tradition of public penance would have a special appeal to reformist bishops are not hard to find, and explain why Wulfstan was anxious to promote its practice. Penance is often portrayed by historians as one way in which the clergy sought to assert their authority over the laity.101 It was a ritual in which the penitent underwent a change of status, from layman to penitent, which was defined by the change in dress on Ash Wednesday, from normal clothes to hairshirt, and the imposition of ashes. This transition had various consequences: as we have already seen according to repeated canon law prescriptions, a public penitent should not eat meat, carry a weapon or go to war, marry or undertake any public office. If penitents submitted to some form of public penance, as the letters in Wulfstan’s canon law collection suggest they did, penance could lead to exile. The importance bishops attached to penance is shown by the fact that Wulfstan’s collection of penitential letters were assiduously preserved by his successors.102 Public penance was thus a powerful instrument but the prescriptive nature of the liturgical and legal evidence means we cannot assume that public penance was regularly administered by the late Anglo-Saxon episcopate. Even in the idealized world of legislation episcopal control over the penitential system itself was recognized as being shaky, for how were bishops to ensure that all scandala were reported to them? English bishops, like their continental counterparts, decreed that unrepentant
10' E.g. Lea, History o f Auricular Confession, op. cit. in n. 9, II, 107-12; T. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve o f the Reformation (Princeton, NJ, 1977); F. Kerff, ‘Libri paenitentiales’, op. cit. in n. 97. For a consideration of these views, and those o f their opponents, see Hamilton, Practice, op. cit. in n. 9, pp. 21-3. 102 Councils & Synods I, ed. Whitelock, et al., op. cit. in n. 3, no. 4 3 ,1, 231-7.
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sinners were to be reported to the synod;103 and that priests who concealed from their bishop any heinous sins committed in their parish were to be punished.104 But public penance also served another purpose for reform-minded bishops: the rural clergy serving small and relatively isolated communities probably rarely saw their bishop and the require ment in the PRG, for example, that they accompany the penitent to the cathedral on Ash Wednesday and Maundy Thursday would bring them into contact with their superior at least twice a year. Maundy Thursday was important for other reasons: it was the day on which the clergy came to the cathedral to collect the chrism.105 Penance thus became one of several forces envisaged by the reformers as drawing together the scattered rural clergy into the diocesan centre on Maundy Thursday. Whilst it would be illegitimate to imagine that the rites and laws of the late Anglo-Saxon church give twenty-first-century historians access to the reality of penitential practice in the tenth and eleventh centuries, they allow us some insight into the rhetoric and aspirations of reformminded ecclesiastics.
103 ‘The so-called “Canons o f Edgar” ' (composed by Wulfstan 1005 x 1008), c. 6: ibid. I, 317. This text was, in part, influenced by the Old English version o f Theodulf’s Capitula: Capitula ofTheodulf, ed. Napier, c. 28, op. cit. in n. 84, p. 104; Sauer, Theodulfl Capitula, op. cit. in n. 41, pp. 285-6. According to Hans Sauer, Wulfstan drew on an earlier Old English translation o f Theodulf’s Capitula which was probably made in the south-west Midlands in the second half o f the tenth century, ibid. pp. 510-12. On the continental counterparts to this teaching, see S. Hamilton, ‘The Unique Favour o f Penance: the Church and the People c. 800-c. 1100’, The Medieval World, ed. P. Linehan and J. Nelson (London, 2001), pp. 229-45. 104 The Law o f the Northumbrian Priests (1008 x 1023), c. 42 in Councils & Synods 1, ed. Whitelock, et al., op. cit. in n. 3, I, 460. The sole copy of this text survives in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 201, a collection o f Wulfstan’s writings. Although the text is influenced by Wulfstan’s works, Wormald suggests that it was not composed by him, but rather by one o f his successors as archbishop o f York: ‘Archbishop Wulfstan and the Holiness o f Society’, Anglo-Saxon History: Basic Readings, ed. D. A. E. Pelteret (New York, 2000), pp. 191-224, at 211-14; idem, Making, op. cit. in n. 2, pp. 396-7. 105 References to the collection o f the chrism in Anglo-Saxon law appear to be associated with the laws compiled under Wulfstan’s influence, e.g. ‘Edward and Gurthrum’, c. 3.2: Councils & Synods I, ed. Whitelock, et al., op. cit. in n. 3, I, 306; ‘The Law o f the Northumbrian Priests', c. 9, ibid. 1,454. For a summary o f the duties o f the English clergy on Maundy Thursday see F. Barlow, The English Church 1000-1066: a History oj the Later Anglo-Saxon Church, 2nd ed. (London, 1979), p. 270, n. 2. See also Jones, below, ch. 5.
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Conclusions In his sermon Archbishop Wulfstan complained that public penance was almost unknown in England. My study of the late tenth- and early eleventh-century pontificals suggests steps were being taken before and during Wulfstan’s time to provide bishops with the liturgical material to redress this position. Not all pontificals by any means contain both rites for public penance, but some do, and they include a sufficient variety of them, to suggest that some form of public penance was available at most of the important centres of the English church by the early eleventh century. Moreover, the evidence from York/Worcester/London on the one hand, and Canterbury and the south-west on the other, suggests that the interest of late tenth-century Anglo-Saxon churchmen in public penance must precede Wulfstan. He may have promoted public penance, but rites for it existed in England before his time. Where did the late Anglo-Saxons get their liturgies for public penance from? Ultimately they belong to the early medieval GelasianGregorian traditions but the evidence presented here suggests that English public penance did not mirror that recorded in the continental ordines. Public penance was not the only rite for which there was a peculiarly English tradition. The obvious examples are the Anglo-Saxon coronation rites, but C. A. Jones has shown the diversity of rites avail able for the Chrism Mass, whilst Alicia Correa has identified an ordina tion rite which is unique to England amongst the manuscripts of houses associated with Oswald of Worcester. This ordination rite is of interest here because it is found, amongst other manuscripts, in two pontificals which also include the English reconciliation ordo: the Dunstan Pontif ical and the Benedictional of Archbishop Robert.106 The apparent devel opment in tenth-century southern England of a local rite for the reconciliation of penitents on Maundy Thursday also fits in with litur gical developments on the continent. The mid to late tenth century saw the emergence of the ‘north French rite’ for public penance in Lotharingia, and that of the PRG in the Rhineland from a similar ninthcentury Frankish legacy. Thus the English experience was not perhaps
106 A. Correa, ‘The Liturgical Manuscripts o f Oswald’s Houses’, St. Oswald o f Worcester: Life and Influence, ed. N. Brooks and C. Cubitt (London, 1996), pp. 285-324, at 301-2.
89
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Table I: Anglo-Saxon pontificals which contain ritesfor public penance The date and provenance of these manuscripts follows in the main: D. N. Dumville, Liturgy and the Ecclesiastical History of Late Anglo-Saxon England: Four Studies, Stud, in AS Hist. 5 (Woodbridge, 1992), 66-95. More detailed references are given in the notes to the discussion of specific manuscripts. Bold is used to signify those codices which contain the ‘English’ ordo for the reconciliation of penitents on Maundy Thursday.
Date
Leofric Missal ‘A’ (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 579)
s. ix2 with additions in s. X
Dunstan Pontifical (Paris, BN, lat. 943)
S. X2 (960 x 993)
Egbert Pontifical (Paris, BN, lat. 10575)
c. 1000
Anderson Pontifical (London, BL, Add. 57337)
c. 1000
Scriptorium 9
Provenance
Southern England (?Canter- * bury) > 930; Exeter < 1046 x 72
Maundy Thursday reconciliation o f penitents *
C hrist Church, C anterbury/ W estm inster 9
C anterbury/ W estm inster; Sherborne from 993
*
Evreux from s. xi
—
*
C hrist Church, C anterbury
9
_
•k
Claudius Pontifical I c. 1000 with (London, BL, Cotton Claudius additions A. iii, fols.31-86 and 106-50) s. xi1/4
Prob. York; or Worcester?
Corrections in the hand o f Wulfstan, archbishop of York (1002-23)
*
*
Samson Pontifical (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 146)
Winchester (Ker)/Christ Church, Canterbury (Dumville)
*? (entry into communal penance through imposition o f ashes)
*
* (Worcester supplement)
* (Worcester supplement)
s. xi'n
Augmented at Worcester s. xi2
RITES F0R PUBLIC PENANCE
Call mark
Ash Wednesday entry into penance
Date
Scriptorium
Provenance
L analet Pontifical (Rouen, BM, A. 27 (368))
s. xiin
Wells. M ade for Lyfing, bishop of Weils 998/9-1013?
later at Jum iéges
*
* (begins p a rt way through)
London, BL, Cotton Vitellius E. xii
s. xi1 s. xi2
Germany with later ? additions at York and Exeter
- (private penance only)
*
Ramsey Pontifical (London, BL, Cotton Vitellius A. vii, fols. 1-112)
Part I > 1030 Part IIs. xi2
East Anglia Ramsey Abbey Exeter
?London s. x mcd Exeter s. x i 2
*
*
Benedictional of A rchbishop R obert (Rouen, BM, Y. 7 (369))
s. xi2/4
W inchester (?New M inster)
Rouen by 1111x1128
“
Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 163
s. xime cc < L ) X o -J