J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, in his masterly study of early Germanic kingship, concluded a brief examination of the Merovingian royal cults with the statement that ‘Frankish respect for the Merovingians never reached the point where it was possible to expect or assume royal sanctity.’ A random glance at Bede's Historia ecclesiastica might suggest that, in contrast, such a point was reached, and reached at a relatively early date, in Anglo-Saxon England. Indeed, William Chaney has noted of the Anglo-Saxon period that ‘the sacral nature of kingship, pagan and Christian, would lead the folk to expect God to honour the stirps regia. The recognised form of this in the new religion was sainthood.’ For Chaney the Christian saint king was the lineal descendant of the sacral ruler of the age of the migrations: sanctity simply was carried in the blood or went with the job of the Anglo-Saxon kings and, by extension, of their consorts and their offspring. It is the purpose of this chapter, first, to demonstrate that the reality was nothing like so simple and, second, to review the statements made about the relationship between royal birth and sanctity by the hagiographers of the royal saints.

ASCRIBED OR ACHIEVED? SANCTITY AND THE ROYAL STATE IN THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES

Kingship, as every medieval churchman knew and as every medieval ruler was informed, was instituted by divine concession: it was exercised Dei gratia.

THE LEGENDS OF THE SAINTS

In the making of a cult the preservation or acquisition of relics and the establishment of a shrine was but a first step. The success of the shrine was dependent upon continuing effective publicity; and that dependence generated a specialised literature whose function was to document the earthly career of the individual and to demonstrate the authenticity and efficacy of the relics there venerated. Among sources for the history and interpretation of the cults of the saints that literature occupies a place of prime importance. For the great majority of cults hagiography provides the earliest and by far the most complete evidence; for some it provides the only evidence. More than this, because it was generally written in association with the promotion of a cult, hagiography was itself a product of the phenomenon which it describes: it opens a unique window on the meaning which the cult held for its promoters and for its clients. The problems inherent in the genre, however, have caused it to be viewed with deep suspicion by generations of historians: it is the purpose of the following pages to review some of those problems and to propose a working model for the constructive use of the legends of the saints.

THE SEVENTH AND EIGHTH CENTURIES: THE ORIGIN OF THE ELY CULTS

The cult of the royal patron received its clearest expression in the veneration at Ely of St Æhelthryth. To Bede, as to the hagiographers of St Edburga and St Edith, the essence of his subject's sanctity lay in her preservation of uirginitas and in the replacement of secular by monastic goals which this both implied and symbolised. But to Bede as to the later writers virtue depended for its effectiveness upon the resources of an earthly kingdom. In the kingdom of the East Angles the Christian faith had been received with some hesitancy in the early decades of the seventh century. The attitude of Redwald, the first East Anglian ruler to receive baptism, had been ambivalent, if not downright cavalier: ‘After the manner of the ancient Samaritans’, Bede wrote with some distaste, ‘he seemed to be serving both Christ and the gods whom he had previously served; in the same temple he had one altar for the Christian sacrifice and another smaller altar on which to offer victims to devils.’ A second attempt to convert the East Angles had proved abortive when Redwald's son, Eorpwald, was killed by a heathen almost immediately after receiving the faith. It was not until the 630s, when King Sigebert joined forces with the Burgundian bishop Felix, that any real progress was made towards the establishment of the church.

FOL. 120: EXTRACT FROM A LIFE OF ST EDBURGA

Probat hoc quedam femina ceca, que in uisu edocta a pedessequis sancte uirginis poscens de lauatis manibus suis beneficia clam ab his accepit, uerentibus domine offensam si rescisceret factum, que omnis latere et Deo soli placere optabat depositum suum. Ubi ergo mulier aqua tactu uirginis medicata oculos tetigit et madefecit, albugo que luci obstabat rupta cecidit quam fluxa cruoris secutus lumina inuoluit; femina eadem sanatrice aqua cruorem abluit, moxque celum ac mundum serenissimo uisu hauriens, in laudes Dei sancteque sue uirginis erupuit. Hec signa adhuc uolentia latere, insidiantibus peruersis clarius fulser[e], lampade Dei sub modio tegi non u[a]lente. Consueuerat alma uirgo per singulas noctes orandi gratia a monasterio exire, et beati Petri apostoli basilicam proximam per hortum monasterii interiacentem adire, ibique Deo fam[u]lari affectu precum et lacrimarum contrito corde odoramenta immolare. Hunc eius usuma quidam sentientes …b exsua impuritate impurum iter e[i] [sus]picantes, uti mos est maligni ingfenii] animis ex sua malignitate omnia metir[i] atque innoxios suis ueneficiis deteriores suspicari, ceperunt quadam nocte sub astante arbore que dicitur alba spina proiecti, ipsius innocentie insidiari.

FOL. ii: A NOTE ON KING ALFRED, ST EDBURGA AND ST NEOT

Rex Aluredus et beatus Neotus fratres fuerunt filii Adulfi regis qui terciam partem totius regni sui liberam ab omni tributo fecit, et sic liberam sancte ecclesie dedit. Huius filius ut dixi rex Aluredus qui xxix anno regni sui obiit, sed ante mortem multa passus, ut sibi predixerat beatus Neotus.

ORIGINS: ‘REX ORIENTALIUM ANGLORUM’

Edmund, rex Christianissimus, fell victim to the heathen Ivarr on 20 November 869. The king's body, according to Abbo, was left where it had fallen; the head was tossed into the undergrowth of the wood of Haegilisdun in order to prevent a proper burial: thus was the humiliation of the Christian king complete. But lvarr, it seems, did little to follow up his victory. The history of East Anglia in the years following Edmund's martyrdom is extremely obscure, but it seems that the great army which Ivarr had brought into the kingdom moved in the year following Edmund's death to Reading; Ivarr himself may have left England for Dublin. In 871, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records, the great army was joined in Wessex by a further force, a ‘great summer army’, and until 874 these armies acted in unison against Wessex, Mercia and a rebellious Northumbria. In the latter year the forces divided – the one, under Halfdan, going to Northumbria, and the second, ‘summer army’, under Guthrum, Oscetel and Anwend, moving from Repton to Cambridge. Cambridge seems thereafter to have been used as a base for an intensified attack upon an ever-weakening Wessex: King Alfred was forced to withdraw to the marshes of Athelney in order to avoid the fate of his East Anglian counterpart. But the tables were soon to be turned.

INTRODUCTION

The manuscript

The earliest extant Vita of St Edburga of Winchester, composed in the twelfth century by Osbert of Clare, is preserved in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 114 (fols. 85–120). The manuscript comprises 170 leaves; its collation is as follows: 18–48, 58 (7 cancelled), 68–118, 128 (wants 1), 138–148, 156 (wants 6), 168–218, 228 (3, 4, 8 cancelled). Its average page size is 260 × 165 mm., although quires 20 and 21 average about 259 × 160 mm. The size of the written space varies considerably. Quires 1–3, containing Augustine's De doctrina Christiana, have thirty lines to the page; elsewhere thirty-one is general.

The manuscript, containing in addition to the Augustine work a series of hagiographical texts, seems to be of Pershore provenance. N. R. Ker attributes it to that house on palaeographical grounds, and notes that the list of contents is in the same hand as that of Oxford, St John's College, MS 96, a manuscript known to have connections with Pershore. A late medieval hand has scribbled ‘Pershor’ on fol. 23. These indications of Pershore origin are of course corroborated by the inclusion of the Vita Edburge, composed specifically for the Pershore monks.

Close to the heart of medieval Christianity stood the cult of the saints. As real presence and potent symbol, the saints occupied a central place within both church and community. Their cults, in theory founded upon divine acknowledgement, in fact created by man, fulfilled a complex series of functions, spiritual, social and political. The creators of those cults were men and women of great power: theirs was the ability to create the saints, if not in their own image at least in accordance with their own interests, and thereafter to pursue those interests through the manipulation of legend and cult. The present study has sought, by analysis of the identity, the beliefs and the actions of such creators – and of those who continued and adapted their work – to recover the history and function of a group of West Saxon and East Anglian royal cults. Focussing upon the three major problems of theoretical interpretation, historical explanation and continuity of cult, it has attempted to arrive at a new understanding of the place of the Angio-Saxon royal saint not only in pre–Conquest society but also in that of the Anglo-Norman realm.

At no point in the history of Anglo-Saxon England was it possible to expect or to assume royal sanctity. The Lives of the royal saints combine with the broader traditions of medieval political theory to demonstrate the weakness of the Chaney thesis which, portraying the saint king as the lineal descendant of the sacral king, makes sanctity an almost inevitable adjunct of birth into the ruling dynasties of Anglo-Saxon England.

EDITH AT WILTON: THE ROYAL PATRON

Goscelin's Vita Edithe provides a finely drawn portrait of a royal child who, renouncing her secular status, became an exile from her earthly home and sought instead the heavenly and immortal land, ‘showing in the preservation of chastity that she sought the virgin's son and seeking by a pilgrim's life on earth to win a heavenly spouse above’. Goscelin, like Osbert of Clare, makes of his subject a hagiographical stereotype, whose sanctity is founded upon a conventional antithesis between the uirgo regia and the sponsa summi regis. And in so doing Goscelin, like Osbert, seriously obscures the historical role of a saint whose posthumous reputation was founded less upon the pleasant theory of royal piety than upon the hard fact of royal patronage.

I have suggested in my analysis of St Edburga's cult that the hagiographical model of Edburga's sanctity as derived from an ecclesiastical role both divorced from and antithetical to that implied by her royal birth tells only a part of the truth. It breaks down because Edburga's life was spent in a religious community closely associated with the West Saxon royal house, predominantly aristocratic in composition and thoroughly au fait with the dealings of the royal and aristocratic world. Within that community there could be no real renunciation of secular status and no real antithesis between uirgo regia and sponsa summi regis: the path to the heavenly bridal chamber lay not through the renunciation of the attributes of royalty but through their redeployment within the monastic context.

In the early days of January, in the momentous year 1066, ‘King Edward, the beloved of God, languishing from the sickness of soul he had contracted, died indeed to the world, but was joyfully taken up to live with God.’ Thus wrote Edward's earliest biographer, probably within two years of his death. And almost a century later, on 7 February 1161, the apotheosis which he describes received universal recognition when Pope Alexander III announced the canonisation of Edward and decreed that his name should be enrolled among the confessors of the Christian church.

Edward the Confessor was the last and most famous of the Anglo-Saxon royal saints: but he was far from unique. It is clear from Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, completed in the year 731, that already by that date Anglo-Saxon England was remarkable for the very considerable number of its kings, princes and royal ladies who, in an age before the development of papal canonisation, had come to be venerated as saints by the regional church. A vernacular tract on the resting-places of the saints in England not only includes many royal saints but also is associated in its extant manuscripts with the so-called Kentish royal legend – an account of Kent's earliest Christian kings and their saintly families. Towards the end of the eleventh century the professional hagiographer Goscelin of Canterbury produced an impressive series of Lives of the English royal saints.