Abstract
About the year 1001, a peasant ploughing a field at Slepe, in a manor belonging to the abbey of Ramsey, stumbled upon the bones of four bodies hidden in the soil. One set of bones was extravagantly identified in a dream as those of St Ivo, a Persian bishop, no less, who had spent his last days in England as a hermit. A great crowd witnessed the translation of these relics from Slepe to the abbey. So that the relics would be accessible for public veneration, the sarcophagus containing them was allowed to protrude through the abbey walls into the world outside. A spring gushed from the sepulchre and became the source of many cures. Some people were sceptical: a foreign monk suspected the cult to be nothing more than the product of silly, superstitious rustics, who were habitually deceived out of heathen error into making cults of springs and bones. But his objections were stilled by the spring’s miraculous powers.1
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Notes
W.D. Macray (ed.), Chronicon Abbatiae Ramesiensis (Rolls Series; London, 1886), lix-lxxiv (for Miracula S. Iovinis), esp. lxxi-lxiii.
A. Thacker, ‘Saint Making and Relic Collecting by Oswald and His Communities’, in St Oswald of Worcester. Life and Influence, ed. N. Brooks and C. Cubitt (London, 1996), p. 258;
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H. Mayr-Harting, The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England (London, 2nd edn, 1991);
C. Cubitt, Anglo-Saxon Church Councils c.650-c.850 (Leicester, 1995), esp. pp. 99–122;
N. Brooks, The Early History of the Church of Canterbury: Christ Church from 597 to 1066 (Leicester, 1994);
J. Blair, ‘Secular Minsters in Domesday Book’, in Domesday Book; A Reassessment, ed. P. Sawyer (London, 1985), pp. 104–42;
J. Blair, ‘Local Churches in Domesday Book and Before’, in Domesday Studies, ed. J.C. Holt (Bury St. Edmunds, 1987), pp. 265–78.
S. Foot, ‘Anglo-Saxon Minsters: A Review of Terminology’, in Pastoral Care Before the Parish, ed. J. Blair and R. Sharpe (Leicester, 1992), pp. 212–25;
E. Cambridge and D. Rollason, ‘Debate: The Pastoral Organization of the Anglo-Saxon Church: a Review of the Minster Hypothesis’, Early Medieval Europe iv (1) (1994), pp. 87–104.
J. Blair, ‘Debate: Ecclesiastical Organization and Pastoral Care in Anglo- Saxon England’, Early Medieval Europe iv (2) (1995), pp. 193–212.
P.H. Hase, ‘The Church in the Wessex Heartlands’, in The Medieval Landscape of Wessex, ed. M. Aston and C. Lewis (Oxford, 1994), pp. 47–81;
J. Blair, Early Medieval Surrey. Landholding, Church and Settlement before 1300 (Stroud, 1991), p. 105.
N. Orme, English Church Dedications with a Survey of Cornwall and Devon (Exeter, 1996), pp. 21–4;
N. Orme, The Saints of Cornwall (Oxford, 2000).
D. Whitelock (ed.), English Historical Documents, Volume 1, c.500–1042 (London, 1955), pp. 411–2.
See generally H.R. Loyn, The English Church 940–1154 (Harlow, 2000), chap. 2;
J. Hill, ‘Monastic Reform and the Secular Church’, in England in the Eleventh Century, ed. C. Hicks (Stamford, 1992), pp. 103–16.
English Historical Documents, i, pp. 650–1; J. Frantzen, The Literature of Penance in Anglo-Saxon England (New Brunswick, 1983), esp. chap. 6.
D. Whitelock (ed.), Anglo-Saxon Wills (Cambridge, 1930), passim.
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Chronicon Abbatiae Ramesiensis, pp. 90–101, 447–8; M. Lapidge, ‘Byrhtferth and Oswald’, in St Oswald of Worcester. Life and Influence, ed. N. Brooks and C. Cubitt (London, 1996), pp. 64–83.
D. Rollason, Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1989), pp. 174ff;
S.J. Ridyard, The Royal Saints of Anglo-Saxon England: A Study of West Saxon and East Anglian Cults (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 107–21;
A. Thacker, ‘Cults at Canterbury: Relics and Reform under Dunstan and his Successors’, in St Dunstan. His Life. Times and Cult, ed. N. Ramsay, M. Sparks and T. Tatton-Brown (Woodbridge, 1992), pp. 221–45; Aelfric, Lives of Saints, ed. W.W. Skeat (Early English Text Society, 2 vols; London, 1881–1900), i, pp. 441–71 (esp. 469).
D. Rollason, The Mildrith Legend. A Study in Early Medieval Hagiography in England (Leicester, 1992), pp. 64, 66–7.
PJ. Geary, Furta Sacra: Theft of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton, 1978), pp. 59–63;
M. Winterbottom, Three Lives of English Saints (Toronto, 1972), pp. 67–87.(for Abbo’s Passio Sancti Eadmundi);
T. Arnold (ed.), Annals and Memorials of St Edmund’s Abbey, vol. i (Rolls Series; London, 1890), pp. 42–6; Rollason, Saints and Relics, pp. 155–8; Brooks, The Early History of the Church of Canterbury, pp. 291–2.
Mayr-Harting, Coming of Christianity, pp. 245–9; Cubitt, Anglo-Saxon Church Councils; Brooks, The Early History of the Church of Canterbury, p. 315; C. Cubitt, ‘The Making of Angelcynn: English Identity Before the Norman Conquest’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society sixth series, vi (1996), pp. 25–49.
Loyn, English Church, chaps 1 and 2; M. Lapidge and M. Winterbottom (eds), Wulfstan of Winchester, The Life of St Aethelwold (Oxford, 1991), xlv;
J. Nelson, ‘Royal Saints and Early Medieval Kingship’, in Sanctity and Secularity: the Church and the World, ed. D. Baker (Studies in Church History x; Oxford, 1973), pp. 39–44; English Historical Documents, i, pp. 846–9
G. Klaniczay, Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses. Dynastic Cults in Medieval Central Europe (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 89–96.
M. Clayton, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge, 1990);
M. Clayton, ‘Centralism and Uniformity Versus Localism and Diversity: the Virgin and the Native Saints in the Monastic Reform’, Peritia viii (1994), pp. 95–106.
For the following see: Rollason, Saints and Relics, chap. 6; D. Rollason, ‘Relic-Cults as an Instrument of Royal Policy c.900-c.1050 in Anglo-Saxon England’, in Anglo-Saxon England, xv, ed. P. Clemoes (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 91–103; Ridyard, Royal Saints, passim; Brooks, Canterbury, p. 227;
Thacker, ‘Cults at Canterbury’; B. Yorke, Wessex in the Early Middle Ages (London, 1995), p. 209;
P. Stafford, The East Midlands in the Early Middle Ages (Leicester, 1985), pp. 175–6.
But for an attempt to see these royal cults as the product of more ‘popular’ origins see C. Cubitt, ‘Site and Sanctity: Revisiting the Cult of the Murdered and Martyred Anglo-Saxon Royal Saints’, Early Medieval Europe ix (2000), pp. 53–83.
J. Gerchow, ‘Prayers for King Cnut: The Liturgical Commemoration of a Conqueror’, in England in the Eleventh Century, ed. C. Hicks (Stamford, 1992), pp. 219–38.
Ridyard, Royal Saints, pp. 160–8; D.J.V. Fisher, ‘The Anglo-Monastic Reaction in the Reign of Edward the Martyr’, Cambridge Historical Journal x (1952), pp. 254–78.
Clayton, ‘Centralism and Uniformity’, pp. 95–106; and cf. A. Thacker, ‘Kings, Saints and Monasteries in Pre-Viking Mercia’, Midland History x (1985), pp. 1–25.
For the following see: C. Cubitt, ‘Virginity and Misogyny in Tenth- and Eleventh-Century England’, Gender and History xii (2000), pp. 1–32.
P. Stafford, ‘Women and the Norman Conquest’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society sixth series, iv (1994), pp. 221–49.
P. Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith: Queenship and Women’s Power in Eleventh-Century England (Oxford, 1997);
M. Otter, ‘Closed Doors: An Epithalamium for Queen Edith, Widow and Virgin’, in Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages, ed. C. L. Carson and A.J. Weisl (Basingstoke, 1999), pp. 63–92.
V. Ortenburg, The English Church and the Continent in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries (Oxford, 1992), pp. 133–94.
R. Faith, The English Peasantry and the Growth of Lordship (London, 1997), chap. 6.
F. Hill, Medieval Lincoln (Cambridge, 1948), pp. 136–8.
J. Stevenson (ed.), Chronicon Monasterii de Abingdon (2 vols; Rolls Series: London, 1858), ii, pp. 18–19.
For the following see: J. Campbell, ‘The Church in Anglo-Saxon Towns’, in The Church in Town and Countryside, ed. D. Baker (Studies in Church History, xvi; Oxford, 1979), pp. 119–35;
C.N.L. Brooke and G. Keir, London 800–1216: The Shaping of a City (London, 1975);
C. N.L. Brooke, ‘The Medieval Town as Ecclesiastical Centre: General Survey’ in European Towns. Their Archaeology and Early History, ed. M.W. Barley (London, 1977), pp. 459–74;
C.N.L. Brooke, ‘The Churches of Medieval Cambridge’, in History, Society and the Churches: Essays in Honour of Owen Chadwick, ed. D. Beales and G. Best (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 49–76;
G. Rosser, ‘The Cure of Souls in English Towns before 1000’, in Pastoral Care Before the Parish, ed. J. Blair and R. Sharpe (Leicester, 1992), pp. 267–84;
R. Morris, Churches in the Landscape (London, 1989), chap. 8;
R. Fleming, ‘Rural Elites and Urban Communities in Late-Saxon England’, Past and Present cxli (1993), pp. 3–37.
R.R. Darlington (ed.), The Vita Wulfstani of William of Malmesbury (Camden Society, second series, l; 1928), p. 45.
For the following see English Historical Documents, i, pp. 603–7; G. Rosser, ‘Anglo-Saxon Gilds’, in Minsters and Parish Churches: the Local Church in Transition 950–1200, ed. J. Blair (Oxford University Committee for Archaeology, Monograph xvii; Oxford, 1988), pp. 31–5.
K.L. Jolly, Popular Religion in Late Saxon England. Elf Charms in Context (University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 5–23, 71–95; Arnold, Memorials, 90–1;
A. Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture. Problems of Belief and Perception, trans. J.M. Bak and P.A. Hollingsworth (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 78–103; Morris, Churches, pp. 58–63.
T.P. Hudson, ‘The Origins of Steyning and Bramber, Sussex’, Southern History ii (1980), pp. 12–29. Cubitt goes further (‘Sites and Sanctity’), arguing that royal martyred saints may also have had ‘popular’ and ‘pagan’ roots and sprung up spontaneously. Whether the elements identified as ‘pagan’ (such as a sense of injustice provoked by violent death) were in fact ‘popular’ or ‘pagan’ when these cults appeared, may be a contentious issue. Even so, the presence of so many royal martyrs in England compared with continent again points to the relative strength of Anglo-Saxon kingship.
J.M.H. Smith, ‘Oral and Written: Saints, Miracles, and Relics in Brittany, c.850–1250’, Speculum lxv (1990), pp. 309–43.
J. Rattue, The Living Stream: Holy Wells in Historical Context (Woodbridge, 1995), pp. 52, 68–71.
P. Wormald, ‘Bede, Beowulf and the Conversion of the Anglo-Saxon Aristocracy’, in Bede and Anglo-Saxon England, ed. R.T. Farrell (Oxford, 1978), pp. 32–95.
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Brown, A. (2003). Anglo-Saxon Church and Society c. 1000. In: Church and Society In England 1000–1500. Social History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-3739-1_2
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