‘History’, as it was understood by medieval Christians, was a broad concept with many meanings. It could be defined as a written record, compiled through processes inherited from classical Greek and Roman authors. But even when it proclaimed itself to be ‘factual’, the work of those who shaped the past in the Latin Middle Ages was different from that of their pagan ancestors. Although they often made claims about veracity, even when dealing with the miraculous, they did not ‘absolutize’ history (as de Lubac put it). Although they had a sense of universal history, time instead related to and unfolded within a framework conditioned by the Incarnation of the Word, and by the moral sense that this history-transforming event could impart to listeners and readers. The biblical orientation of history gave time a clear beginning and also predicted an apocalyptic end. But even as time moved relentlessly forward in this cosmic sense, the liturgy made it constantly spiral backward, rendering past sacred events present through ritual commemoration. Such liturgical celebration of time had many layers, mingled and arranged according to the calendar, with its varying and its fixed cycles of feasts, voiced through psalmody, readings from the Old and New Testaments and the lives of the saints.

How the past was known, both by individuals and within communities, varied from one specific local community to another, for the liturgy was ever changing, especially as new feasts, and feasts of new saints, were added to suit particular needs. Some knew about certain past events from what they read, as had long been the case, but in the Middle Ages many more knew about the past from various reenactments: ritual actions, dramatic productions, sermons and tales they heard about biblical characters and saints, encounters with art and architecture and from contact with shrines and relics.

Much of medieval history-making was thus memorial in nature, bringing the past forward, again and again, to recall its individual or communal significance. At the heart of the medieval Christian understanding of the past was a simple, foundational command from Christ: ‘Hoc facite in meam commemorationem’ [‘Do this in remembrance of me’] (Luke 22. 19).

In the early 680s a member of the monastic community at Coldingham named Adomnan had a vision. Because ‘the cells that were built for praying and for reading have become haunts of feasting, drinking, gossip and other delights’, God's judgment would fall upon the double monastery and it would be destroyed. Coldingham's abbess, Abbe, would be spared from these dire consequences, and she was assured that the destruction of the monastery would happen after her death. Events transpired as Adomnan had predicted; shortly after Abbe's death, the monastery burnt to the ground. When he recounted the incident in his Historia ecclesiastica, Bede observed darkly that, although the fire seemed like an accident, ‘tamen a malitia inhabitantium in eo, et praecipue illorum qui maiores esse videbantur, contigisse omnes qui novere facillime potuerunt advertere’ (‘all who knew the truth were easily able to judge that it happened because of the wickedness of those who dwelt there and especially of those who were supposed to be its leaders’).

This is hardly an endorsement of the holiness of the monastery's abbess. Yet in the twelfth century, Abbe was the focus of a significant cult. Women and men, young and old, trekked up the steep paths along the North Sea, north of the river Tweed, and spent Saturday nights in prayer at an oratory on the site of her monastery, waiting for visions and healing through their devotion to the saint. Abbe often responded to their veneration, loosing knots in tongues tied by the devil, opening clenched and crippled hands, and miraculously removing a goose bone from the throat of a choking man. In response, cripples left their crutches on the site ‘as a memorial of this great miracle’. The saint's reputation spread; at the end of the twelfth century, a local monk at Coldingham priory, a dependency of Durham, observed that ‘crowds throng here from nearby and from distant regions’ for miraculous cures. So how did an abbess with no particular reputation for holiness in the seventh and eight centuries – indeed, quite the opposite – become a popular saint in the twelfth century? How did worshippers and writers reshape history for the purposes of forming and promoting this cult?