The question of whether equipping audiences with an internalized penitential vocabulary and opening up pastoral reading to them does not simultaneously render them independent of their instructors is an area of concern in vernacular pastoralia. As a result, clerical writers, whether anxious to keep their vernacular audiences more dependent or more autonomous, tend to articulate explicitly and copiously the rationale and aims of their work and the common interests, as they see them, of themselves and their audiences. Pastoralia are always potentially texts of writerly as well as readerly self-awareness and often surprisingly innovative. Bella Millett has recently shown, for example, that a group of late twelfth and early thirteenth century English homilies, far from being a dying flicker of Anglo-Saxon tradition, is much more likely to have its true context in response to concern at diocesan level with meeting the need for vernacular pastoralia. These homilies, she argues, use older as well as newer material, but are fundamentally a fresh response and redeployment of existing homiletic tradition. Alongside these developments in English writings, there are a number of francophone writers in the multilingual culture of late twelfth and thirteenth-century England who also seek newly effective ways to present pastoral teaching to those in their spiritual care.

Shortly before Lateran IV, a canon named Angier working in the Augustinian priory of St Frideswide at Oxford composed a French verse translation of Gregory the Great’s Dialogues in some 20,000 lines of rhyming couplets, completed, according to his own inscription, on 29 November, 1212. The Dialogues de saint Grégoire are extant in a single, almost certainly holograph manuscript, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS f. fr. 24766, a small thick quarto, without illustrations, but decorated with blue and red, and occasionally green capitals and flourishings, as well as rubrics and other kinds of marking-up.

Angier identifies himself in his Latin colophon as ‘Brother A. the subdeacon, the least of the servants of St Frideswide’ (fol.151rb/8-9) and in the French text itself as ‘the old sinner Angier, seven years young in the cloister’ (fol. 151rb/1-2). Angier’s work is of interest here for his creation of a vernacular accessus to the authority and spiritual benefits of the classic pastoral figure of Gregory the Great.