Abingdon

 

If you were asked to guess the oldest town in Britain, you might not think of Abingdon. But the market town, which lies six miles south of Oxford, claims — and with some justice — to be the “oldest continuously occupied town” in this country. Situated on a loop of the Thames, in a green river valley, Abingdon was a densely-occupied and well-defended settlement by the Iron Age, surrounded by ditches which can still be traced in the plan of the modern town. Throughout the Roman and early Anglo-Saxon periods, the town’s population persisted, and by the tenth century had become the site of an important monastery.

Tourists who come to Oxford from around the world rarely make their way to Abingdon; it’s a working town, not a showplace. Its central shopping area was a casualty of post-war planners, a mass of modern concrete and chain stores; to the north, new housing estates are creeping ever closer to the famous university city. What might have been Abingdon’s chief tourist attraction, its cathedral-like abbey church, was destroyed five centuries ago.

And yet few towns are better proof of just how long and rich the history of apparently ordinary places can be. The two caveats in Abingdon’s claim to longevity (“town”, rather than city, and “in continuous occupation”) are significant, because it’s in these smaller communities — and the remarkable continuity of their institutions and collective lives — that the bedrock of British history lies.

Read the rest, on St Æthelwold and St Edmund of Abingdon, at Unherd. 

St Edmund and Abingdon

St Edmund (Chichester Cathedral)

16 November is the feast of St Edmund of Abingdon, Oxford scholar and Archbishop of Canterbury, who died in 1240. (It's also the feast of St Margaret of Scotland and one of the feasts of St Ælfheah, a predecessor of Edmund's at Canterbury two centuries earlier.) St Edmund had a long and somewhat turbulent career, as many medieval bishops did, and we have a mass of detailed information about his life - the cause of his canonisation was started very shortly after his death, which means that materials to support the cause were gathered from his contemporaries and those who had known him well.

For me (quite selfishly), the interest of the hagiographical material about St Edmund lies in his early life, as a child in Abingdon and then a young scholar in late twelfth-century Oxford. It gives a vivid picture of Oxford in the early days of the university, which is not dissimilar, in some essential ways, from the work of universities and schools today. Education was one of the glories of the medieval church, and it's a shame that so many people today believe (on the basis of unthinking assumption, rather than fact) that the church in the Middle Ages was somehow 'anti-education'; nothing could be further from the truth, as St Edmund's life and story (and those of many others like him) demonstrate.

It’s also rare to know so much about the early life of a medieval figure, or to have such specific details about their childhood that it becomes possible to visit and envision the scenes of their youthful experiences. In this post I thought I'd share some of those early stories about Edmund, and take you on a visit to Abingdon, where they still cherish the memory of their home-grown saint.

All quotations are taken from the thirteenth-century The Life of St Edmund by Matthew Paris, ed. and trans. C. H. Lawrence (Stroud, 1996).

St Nicholas' church, Abingdon

Abingdon is a market town on the River Thames, six miles south of Oxford, and (like the village of Eynsham, north of the city) it has a much longer history - and longer scholarly history - than its more famous university neighbour. Abingdon actually claims to be 'the oldest town in Britain', because there's evidence of settled inhabitation here in the Iron Age; it subsequently became a Roman town, and in the Anglo-Saxon period it was the site of an important monastery. One of the most dynamic and influential figures in the late Anglo-Saxon church, St Æthelwold - he of the splendid Benedictional, and a champion of monastic reform and education - was abbot of Abingdon before he became Bishop of Winchester, and the town still bears traces of the work he did here in the tenth century. (The abbey millstream still follows the course he set for it, a thousand years later.)

Abingdon from above, looking south-east (from the roof of the town museum)

In Edmund's day the abbey would have been an imposing presence in the town, physically, institutionally, and psychologically. It was a major landowner here and for miles around, as well as the chief provider of education and healthcare. St Edmund was born in Abingdon around 1174, probably into a fairly prosperous middle-class family in trade. His parents were named Reginald and Mabel, and Edmund seems to have been the eldest of a large family; he had at least three brothers and two sisters, whom he took responsibility for after his parents’ death. Edmund's name might perhaps suggest that he was born or baptised on the feast of St Edmund of East Anglia (20 November); in the last days of his life he made reference to his namesake, telling his companions that after his death he would return to them on the feast of St Edmund, king and martyr, so perhaps he saw a link between himself and the Anglo-Saxon saint.

Abingdon from the river

Records show that Edmund's father owned several properties in Abingdon, and the family home was in West Street (now West St Helen Street). The house was remembered as Edmund's birthplace, and a chapel was established nearby at the end of the thirteenth century in memory of the saint. The street-name St Edmund's Lane preserves the name:

These were relatively modest origins, and it was entirely through Edmund's parents' commitment to his education, and his own hard work, that he later achieved a position of eminence. It was Edmund’s mother Mabel who was the guiding and inspiring influence of his early life, especially his education. His father died when Edmund was young, and Mabel encouraged her sons’ education, supporting them first at Oxford and then at Paris. She was a particularly devout and determined woman, known for her works of fasting, almsgiving and prayer; ‘of all the widows of Abingdon she was said to have been the jewel’, Matthew Paris says.

Abingdon has two medieval churches in addition to the lost abbey church, and one of them, St Nicholas', is associated with Mabel; at least, she was buried there. St Nicholas' stood at the edge of the abbey grounds, and though the abbey and its big church are gone, the little church of St Nicholas remains. This is what it looked like on St Edmund's day two years ago:

The church was founded in 1170, so it was brand-new in Edmund's childhood and not very old when Mabel was buried there. It has a plaque to Edmund and his mother:

A view of the inside:

Attached to the church is a gateway which would once have led into the abbey's grounds:

There's something evocative about a doorway which still stands and gapes, but no longer leads to the place it was built for.

This gateway is from the fifteenth century, and has a statue of the Virgin Mary above the door:

St Æthelwold and his fellow abbots were running a school at Abingdon when Oxford was just an ordinary Anglo-Saxon town, a ford over the Thames, but by Edmund's youth in the late twelfth century Oxford was increasingly gathering the communities of teachers, scholars and students who would in time form the nucleus of the university. Reginald and Mabel sent their son to be educated in a grammar school in Oxford, and the first signs of his future sanctity were said to have manifested themselves when he was around twelve years old. He was a devout child, and at that age he decided to pledge himself in a sacred marriage to the Virgin Mary. He placed a ring on the finger of a statue of the Virgin in token of his vow, and after making his promise he tried to remove the ring - but by miraculous power it could not be removed. (This miracle was supposed to have taken place in the church of St Mary the Virgin, in Oxford.)

Another miracle in Edmund's childhood took place when he went out one midsummer day for a walk with some fellow students in the meadows near Oxford (traditionally said to be the river meadows near what is now Magdalen College). He wandered away from his companions,

And, lo, he came upon a bush marvellously covered with most beautiful flowers, contrary to its habit and out of its proper season, scattering its fragrance far and wide all around. As he pondered on this, it occurred to him that it had some heavenly meaning, and kneeling down, he prayed, saying 'O God, who didst appear to the holy Moses on Mount Sinai in the figure of a burning bush that was not consumed, reveal to me what is portended by this miraculous thing.'

As he sank down on his knees, alone, praying tearfully, a flood of light from heaven shone round him, and in it, to his stupefaction, there appeared the infant Christ shining with great clarity, who spoke to him words of consolation: 'I am Jesus Christ, the son of Blessed Mary the Virgin, your spouse, whom you wedded with a ring and took as your Lady. I know the secrets of your heart, and I have been your inseparable companion as you walked alone. From now on I promise you that I and my mother, your spouse, shall be your helpers and comforters.' Saying this, he imprinted a blessing on the young man's brow with these words: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, and added 'Sign yourself often thus and repeat this in memory of me.'

He remained long in that place, praying on his knees and asking the Holy Spirit to grant him the learning that conduces to salvation with the other virtues.

The spire of St Helen's church, Abingdon, from the meadows outside the town

This window in the church of St Edmund and St Frideswide, Oxford, shows Edmund's vision:

The scene at the bottom is his vision of the Christ-child, with towers which evoke Oxford's spires behind him:

As he grew older Edmund continued his education at Oxford and then at Paris, before coming back to Oxford to teach. He remained a serious and devout young man, and his hagiographer observes that ‘when as a youngster of more mature years he was put to the study of liberal arts, he proceeded of his own will along the road by which he had previously been led, being – as his name signified – blessed and pure’. (The Old English name-element ead- means ‘blessed’.) He engaged in strict ascetic practices to mortify his flesh, following the example to which his mother had encouraged him; when he was studying in Paris she sent him clothes (as mothers do!) along with a hair-shirt, urging him to wear it as a form of self-discipline. But despite this he remained, his companions recalled, ‘affable and kind to others’, ‘full of joy and gaiety’, and ‘a refuge of the oppressed, a consoler of the wretched and a most kind comforter of the afflicted’.

When he became a Master of Arts and began lecturing at Oxford, he was known for going to hear mass daily before giving his lectures, ‘which was more often than customary among lecturers at that time’, comments Matthew Paris (or indeed any time, I suspect...). While he was still what we’d now call an Early Career Researcher, Edmund gave financial help to support poor scholars at the university (sometimes selling his own books in order to do so) and built a chapel in Oxford dedicated to the Blessed Virgin. The miracles of this phase of Edmund’s life are closely tied to his work as a lecturer: stories tell how he contended with the devil while making lecture notes for his students; how he healed one of his scholars from a serious illness; how he miraculously kept rainclouds away when he was preaching outside, and so on. He wrote, lectured and preached with great skill and eloquence; ‘when he lectured or preached, it seemed to his hearers that the finger of God was writing in his heart the words of life that flowed from his mouth like the river of paradise.’ He had so little concern for wealth that one of his colleagues testified that ‘when he received money from his scholars, he was in the habit of placing it, or rather tossing it, in the window, as if it were available to everybody’, and people would carry it away!

By this time his mother had died, but she was still exerting a powerful influence on his life. At this point he was lecturing on the liberal arts, but had not yet progressed to teaching theology; and then he had a vision of his mother which sent him in a new direction:

[At a time when he was giving lectures on geometry to his students] his most pious mother, who had died shortly before, appeared to him in a dream, and said: ‘My son, what are those shapes to which you are giving such earnest attention?’ When he replied, 'These are the subject of my lecture,' and showed her the diagrams which are commonly used in that faculty, she promptly seized his right hand and painted three circles in it, and in the circles she wrote these three names: 'Father. Son. Holy Spirit.' This done, she said, 'My dearest son, henceforth direct your attention to these figures and to no others.'

Instructed by this dream as if by a revelation, he immediately transferred to the study of theology.

This is a lovely story – a spur of parental guidance (disapproval?) from beyond the grave! The fact that she draws circles on his hand, as a mother might with a child, is a nice touch, echoing the sign Christ drew on Edmund's forehead in his earlier vision. Mabel is not imagined here disapproving of geometry per se; the point is that this is basic knowledge, and it’s now time for Edmund to progress to higher and deeper subjects, through the study of theology. This story suggests something of the powerful bond between Edmund and his mother, enduring after her death; but it’s also relevant that in the Middle Ages educational subjects – from Boethius’ Lady Philosophy to Geometry and Theology, as in the image below – are often represented as female. Here the real woman Mabel is envisaged teaching her son as if she were a vision of Theology itself, guiding the promising student towards the Queen of the Sciences.

A female figure teaching Geometry (BL Burney 275, f. 293)

Edmund's best-known work in the Middle Ages was his Speculum Ecclesie, which was probably written during this period of his career. It's a work on the contemplative life, offering (among other things) meditations on different moments in the life of Christ, aiming to help the reader to enter imaginatively into the scenes of his Passion and feel intense compassion for his sufferings. I don't know whether people read the Speculum Ecclesie today, but most students of Middle English will have read a poem which survives as part of it. This is one of the earliest, shortest, and most popular devotional poems in Middle English:

Nou goth sonne under wod,
Me reweth, Marie, thi faire rode.
Nou goth sonne under tre,
Me reweth, Marie, thi sone and thee.

[Now goes the sun under the wood,
I grieve, Mary, for your fair face;
Now goes the sun under the tree,
I grieve, Mary, for thy son and thee.]

This short poem is designed to be a spur to meditation on the Crucifixion, perhaps at the appropriate hour of the day when the sun begins to set. Apparently very simple, the poem is dense with meaningful wordplay: as the sun sets behind the wood, so Christ the Son is shrouded in darkness on the wood of the cross, the tree; that is, the 'rode', which means both 'face', and 'rood' (cross). And here we have another pair of a mother and her son, and their strong emotional bond: the poem encourages the reader to meditate and dwell on Christ's crucifixion by approaching the Son through the Mother, to feel compassion for his suffering as it is reflected in her grief (underlined by that wordplay on 'rode' - his cross and her face). We don't know who wrote this precious little poem, but it's possible it was St Edmund himself - and either way, how wonderful it is that this poem should be associated with a saint whose mother was such an important presence in his life.

In 1222 Edmund became treasurer of Salisbury Cathedral, and began increasingly to preach outside Oxford; in 1233 he was selected (as fourth choice) to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury. His time as archbishop involved mediating in various political crises and disputes between Henry III and his barons, as well as conflict between Edmund and the monks of Canterbury; but it lasted only seven years. In 1240, on his way to Rome for a council with the Pope, he was taken ill on the journey. He died, and was buried at Pontigny - a long way from Abingdon and the banks of the Thames.

On his deathbed he was happy and peaceful, and made play with a proverb which the hagiographer quotes in English:

After being fortified by the viaticum of salvation, he began to seem a little better, and became merry, as though he had been fed to repletion by the celestial banquet. Supported by a pillow so that he could sit, he looked serene and he joked with those standing around, telling them this proverb in English: ‘Men seth gamen goth on wombe. Ac ich segge, gamen goth on herte’; which is to say, play enters the belly, but now I say play enters the heart. The meaning of this epigram is: it is commonly said that a fully belly makes men joyful and ready for play; but it is my opinion that a heart fed by a spiritual feast produces a serene conscience, freedom from anxiety and joyfulness. In fact, he displayed such joyfulness and hilarity that those who were with him were quite astonished.

Edmund's name is preserved in Oxford in the college St Edmund Hall, in the east of the city, which stands on the site of a house where Edmund is said to have taught. There's a modern sculpture of Edmund in the grounds of the college (above), which shows him reading - a companion to today's students, who can sit and read next to him if they like. He is depicted in thirteenth-century stained glass, made within a few decades of his death, in the church of St Michael at the Northgate:

Back in Abingdon, the Catholic church (a Victorian building) is dedicated to him and to the Virgin Mary, the mother and bride who was so constant a presence in his spiritual life:

And to close, here are a few more pictures of Abingdon, because I'm very fond of it. A lively small town, full of civic pride and rich in history, is just about my favourite kind of community; it's not very fashionable to love such places, but I do. Abingdon has an excellent town museum, in this gorgeous building in the centre of the town:

From the roof you can look across the town, down to the Thames and beyond to Didcot Power Station...

The clump of trees in the last picture are growing on the site of Abingdon Abbey, which still takes up a large expanse of ground in the east of the town. Much of the site is now a public park (well, a bit of it's under Waitrose carpark).

Standing here in the Middle Ages, you would have been looking at the west end of a huge church - apparently along the lines of the west front at Wells Cathedral. Can you imagine it?

This would all have been where the abbey church once stood:

The park has some picturesque ruins which look like they're the remains of the abbey, but are in fact mostly Victorian follies (in some cases with medieval stone):

Lots of empty and evocative doors to nowhere here.

But there are some remaining buildings from the abbey, too - this is the impressive 'Long Gallery' (perhaps built as a guesthouse for the abbey), dating to the fifteenth century:

Look at those beams!

And underneath are some impressive vaults:

If that's just the guesthouse, what might the church have been like...

I was in Abingdon most recently on August Bank Holiday this summer; the park was full of children and their parents, playing on the site of the abbey church, and the flowerbeds were bright with colour. I don't know what St Æthelwold would have thought of it all, but it brought Edmund and Mabel to mind.

Eynsham and Ælfric

One of the most valued regular contributors to this blog is the prolific Anglo-Saxon monk Ælfric, who lived in the second half of the tenth century. Ælfric is best known for his two great collections of English homilies, which aimed to provide sermons for the whole cycle of the church's year, as well as another large collection of saints' lives - more than 160 homilies in all, which display the full range of his remarkable talents as a communicator. He translates and explains an impressive variety of Biblical extracts, patristic texts, liturgical customs, and historical and theological material of many different kinds. This was an incredibly ambitious project, but it was only one part of Ælfric's extraordinary body of work: he also composed letters of pastoral guidance and instruction on various subjects, and a range of works for use in the monastic classroom, including English 'textbooks' on Latin grammar and science.

Almost all Ælfric's writing is educational or pastoral in purpose, and he was a teacher to his fingertips, constantly engaged with the question of how best to communicate complex and challenging ideas to his audiences. He was a fluent writer of English prose, and later in his career he developed a beautifully measured blend of prose and alliterative verse which falls melodiously on the ear. His Life of St Edmund is a nice example of that style; I'm also fond of his poetic Christmas homily, and there are lots more in the archives. He was a popular as well as a prolific writer, and his works were still being read and reused as late as the thirteenth century - he had provided an invaluable resource for others to draw on, and while political upheavals in the centuries after his death altered other aspects of Anglo-Saxon literature and culture, the pastoral work of the church for which Ælfric had laboured still went steadily on.

Ælfric was educated at Winchester, under the influential reforming bishop St Æthelwold, and then spent nearly twenty years at Cerne Abbey in Dorset, where he wrote most of his homilies between 987 and 1005. He ended his life as abbot of Eynsham, a village about five miles from Oxford. I recently visited Eynsham for the first time, and this post is really an excuse to share some of my pictures from that visit - there's nothing left of Eynsham Abbey, but it's a lovely village, and it's possible to stand on the site where Ælfric's abbey once stood.

Eynsham was 'Ælfric's abbey' in more ways than one, since it was founded - in a way - for him. He was its first abbot, and it was founded in 1005 by his patron Æthelmær, the head of one of the leading families of Anglo-Saxon England. Æthelmær and his father Æthelweard had supported Ælfric's work for many years, and his collection of Lives of Saints was written for them (you can read the preface addressed to them here). They were a powerful and well-connected family, descended from one of the brothers of Alfred the Great, who were proud of their roots in the royal line of the kings of Wessex and were involved in contemporary politics - as ealdorman of the 'western shires', Æthelweard governed part of the south-west (probably Somerset, Devon and Dorset), and was a counsellor to King Æthelred. Both father and son had sophisticated literary and spiritual interests: Æthelweard was the author of a chronicle in Latin - a remarkable achievement for a layman at this date - and the family's patronage of Ælfric must have been a great help and protection to him.

Æthelweard probably died around 998, and a few years later his son Æthelmær founded Eynsham Abbey and installed Ælfric as its abbot. There may have been a monastic community of some kind at Eynsham earlier in the Anglo-Saxon period, but under Ælfric - with his impeccably Benedictine education - it became a Benedictine monastery.

Eynsham lies near the Thames, a little way south of what was once the great forest of Wychwood, and divided from Oxford by the green hills of Wytham Woods, which you can see in the distance here. This view can't have changed much since Ælfric's day:

This is a quiet corner of Oxfordshire now, but when the abbey was founded in 1005 England was in turmoil, under near-constant attack from Viking armies, and riven by internal conflict too. Three years earlier there had been a horrific incident just a few miles away in Oxford, when on St Brice's Day 1002, in response to an edict from King Æthelred, a group of Danes living in the city were chased into a church (on the site of what is now Christ Church Cathedral) which their pursuers burned down. In 1005, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle also records a 'great famine in England, such that no one ever recalled one so terrible before'. The following year a Viking army burned Wallingford - less than twenty miles away from Eynsham - and flaunted their dominance over Wessex all along the Berkshire Downs (I'll tell you that story another day), finishing up by parading their stolen booty past the very walls of Winchester, Ælfric's former home.

Æthelmær seems to have founded Eynsham around the time he left Æthelred's court for a few years, perhaps escaping the violent factionalism which reigned there in the early 1000s. (He came out of retirement in 1013, to lead the submission of Wessex to the Danish king Svein Forkbeard.) Eynsham was perhaps a kind of retirement post for Ælfric, too; most of his writings were composed in the 990s, so when he came here his life's work was almost all behind him, and he is thought to have died around five years later.

But Ælfric was anything but unworldly - though he was 'in the world but not of the world' - and medieval abbots were expected to be practical people, so it can't have been entirely a sinecure. There are plenty of reminders of industrious abbots at Eynsham, dating mostly to the centuries after Ælfric: while the first abbot probably never had the chance to do much here, the village is criss-crossed by signs of later monastic fishponds, building programmes, water engineering - all the practical things which leave marks on a landscape over many centuries of daily life.

It's a pretty village of honey stone, quiet and friendly, an oasis between the noisy A40 to the north and to the south the 'warm, green-muffled hills' which separate it from busy Oxford. It feels like another world - a peaceful, pleasant world. When Ælfric came here a thousand years ago, Oxford was already a town (a burh) but not yet a university city; in him, little Eynsham can claim an older scholarly heritage than its neighbour, the oldest university in England.

If you like going in search of medieval abbeys in England you have to use a fair bit of imagination, because most of the time you'll be looking at ruins - or empty space. For various reasons, in the past few years I've visited several sites of what were once great abbey complexes, and they all have their own stories to tell about the way later centuries have managed to accommodate the traces of their monastic past. I've been to St Augustine's Abbey in Canterbury, now an English Heritage site with an entrance fee and guidebooks and the footprint of the abbey carefully marked out; Crowland, a dream of a Gothic ruin; Bury St Edmunds, a large and well-kept public park where children play on the graves of the abbots; Abingdon, where the stones of the abbey led by Ælfric's teacher St Æthelwold are rearranged into tasteful Victorian follies; Peterborough, where the town has largely eaten up whatever remained of the monastery; and Reading, where the abbey's former precincts now contain modern skyscrapers more ghostly in their glittering emptiness than any medieval ruin could be. Most of these towns once revolved around their monasteries, and losing them must have been like having their heart ripped out. But places grow back, and build in different ways upon the ruins.

Eynsham was never on the scale of those great monasteries, but what stands on its site now is more appropriate than any of them. It's a churchyard, of the rambling shadowy rural kind, which lies between the (Anglican) church of St Leonard's on one side and the (Catholic) church of St Peter's on the other. Their two adjoining graveyards cover the space where the abbey church once stood. The site has been well investigated, and a neat little collection of signs point out the exact spot of each of the abbey's buildings; if you exercise a bit of imagination you can see church, cloisters, refectory, rising up out of the ground before you.

This sign on the wall marks the site of the high altar of the Anglo-Saxon church, and it points out that Ælfric - as the first abbot, entitled to a place of honour in death - was probably buried very close by. I hadn't expected that. If this is the site of his now-vanished tomb, it's a beautiful one - surrounded by well-tended graves just a few years old, bright with flowers and tokens of love. On this July day it was like an informal rose garden, with a view of the green hills beyond, still and quiet except for the occasional shriek of a red kite. A resting-place among Eynsham's parishioners seems fitting for this most pastorally-minded of monks - the shepherd amid his flock.

Fitting too that the site should span the grounds of both the Catholic and Anglican churches - however it turned out that should happen, it's a lovely thing. When you stand on the site of a destroyed medieval abbey - and if you are, as I am, fond of medieval monks and their ancient, industrious, imperfect but very human communities - it's hard not to think of the wanton violence which laid waste to them and all that unnecessary loss. But this is something more peaceful and rather beautiful, a belated healing of wounds. (A very recent one; the Catholic church was only built in the 1960s.)

Some remains found during the excavation of the abbey are buried in the Catholic cemetery.

The Anglican church, St Leonard's, was (and is) the parish church for the people of the town, and dates to the thirteenth century. The abbey church in its heyday would have been quite a bit larger.

Inside the church, I was pleased to find Ælfric in glass:

The church also displays various bits of stone which are supposed to have come from the abbey buildings when they were destroyed, such as this stranded above the doorway:

And the base of the font, said to have been a capital in the abbey church:

And some fragments of medieval stained glass, reassembled into a kaleidoscope of colour:

The Catholic church, on the other side of the abbey-now-churchyard, is very different, and has an interesting history of its own which you can read about here.

Though plain on the outside, inside it's elegant in its simplicity, and warmly welcoming.

This church adjoins the site of the abbey buildings, and behind the church is a meadow where the refectory and kitchens used to be:

It's called the Tolkien Meadow, after Tolkien's eldest son, Fr John Tolkien. He was the priest here when the archaeological excavations were going on in the early 1990s, and apparently took an enthusiastic interest in the project to discover more about the abbey. It's wonderful to think of Tolkien's son in Ælfric's abbey - Tolkien (the elder) must have taught Ælfric's work many times, and there's even a brilliant little nod to Ælfric in The Lord of the Rings...

The meadow contains a limestone boulder which was discovered under the foundations of the abbey when they were excavated. According to the guide, it was in a deep ditch which was dug over 3000 years ago, and 'the archaeologists think that the builders of the abbey decided to incorporate the stone into the wall foundations rather than move it'. It's a solid reminder of the ancientness of this site - Ælfric, living here a thousand years ago, is closer to us than he was to the people who dug the ditch where this stone lay.

And the hills are older still, of course, and he would have seen them.

After inspecting the site of the abbey church, it's possible to walk the perimeter of the medieval abbey - boundaries change slowly in the English countryside, and the modern roads still follow the lines of their medieval predecessors. It's the kind of place where the guide says 'the main road was diverted west in 1217 to expand the abbey precincts', and there the road still is, as if 1217 was really just the other day.

Another set of useful signs trace the path to the south of the village, around the sweep of the abbey's fishponds. This was the grand plan of a thirteenth-century abbot, and the land has hardly been touched since the abbey was destroyed; it's now an extensive green meadow, with weeds and waterfowl, still watery after eight centuries.

I do like a good heritage trail, and this is a very good one - a kind of secular Stations of the Cross, or Rogation procession of the kind Ælfric preached about. Part of the idea of a Rogationtide procession is that by walking the borders of your community you come to know it better, to feel its shape, and to remember what (and who) falls within its bounds. That has a practical and a spiritual function, at one and the same time. I wonder if Ælfric took a Rogation procession out into the fields the first spring he was at Eynsham, as he got to know the lands and souls entrusted to his care.

There are lots of things to think about here, in an empty meadow on a sunny July day. I was thinking about service. In his Preface to the Lives of Saints, Ælfric addresses his two noble patrons and summarises for them some of the characteristics of the collection which is to follow:

Ælfric gret eadmodlice Æðelweard ealdorman, and ic secge þe, leof, þæt ic hæbbe nu gegaderod on þyssere bec þæra halgena þrowunga, þe me onhagode on Englisc to awendene, for þan þe ðu, leof swiðost, and Æðelmær swylcera gewrita me bædon, and of handum gelæhton eowerne geleafan to getrymmenne mid þære gerecednysse, þe ge on eowrum gereorde næfdon ær...

We writað fela wundra on þissere bec, for þan þe God is wundorlic on his halgum, swa swa we ær sædon, and his halgena wundra wurðiað hine, for þan þe he worhte þa wundra þurh hi. An woruldcynincg hæfð fela þegna and mislice wicneras; he ne mæg beon wurðful cynincg buton he hæbbe þa geþincðe þe him gebyriað, and swylce þeningmen þe þeawfæstnysse him gebeodon. Swa is eac þam ælmihtigan Gode þe ealle þincg gesceop: him gerisð þæt he hæbbe halige þenas, þe his willan gefyllað, and þæra is fela on mannum anum, þe he of middanearde geceas, þæt nan bocere ne mæg, þeah þe mycel cunne, heora naman awriten, for þan þe hit nat nan man. Hi synd ungeryme swa swa hit gerisð Gode; ac we woldon gesettan be sumum þas boc mannum to getrymminge and to munde us sylfum, þæt hi us þingion to þam ælmihtigan Gode swa swa we on worulde heora wundra cyðað.

[Ælfric humbly greets ealdorman Æthelweard, and I say to you, my beloved man, that I have now gathered in this book the Passions of the saints which it was appropriate for me to translate into English, because you, my dearest man, and Æthelmær asked me for such writings, and received them from my hands in order to strengthen your faith by means of these stories, which you never had in your own language before...

We will write about many wonders in this book, because God is wonderful in his saints, as we said before; and the wonders of his saints bring honour to him, because he worked those wonders through them. An earthly king has many thegns and various officers; he cannot be an honourable king unless he has the things which are fitting to him, and such attendants to offer him their obedience. So it is also with Almighty God who created all things: it is fitting for him that he have holy thegns, who carry out his will, and of these there are many among mankind, whom he chose out of the world, so that no learned person – even if he knows many things – can write down their names, because no one knows them. They are beyond number, as is fitting for God. But we wanted to compile this book about some of them, for the encouragement of people and as security for ourselves, so that they could intercede for us with Almighty God, just as we make their wonders known in the world.]

The metaphor of the saints as God's 'thegns' is obviously one chosen to suit Ælfric's audience: Æthelweard and Æthelmær knew very well that 'an earthly king has many thegns and various officers', since they had fulfilled such a role themselves. The king's court was as apt a metaphor for them as it was for Alfred the Great when he used it in a text all three may have been familiar with, talking about how everyone at the king's court - from the highest to the lowest, from the royal chamber to the jail-cell - is in some sense in the presence of the king, just as everyone in the world is to some degree in the presence of divine wisdom, though some may be closer and others further away. There is a suggestion of that diversity here too in the reference to the mislice 'diverse, various' kinds of servants who serve God, and it's a theme Ælfric develops at greater length in his sermon for All Saints' Day - there are many different kinds of saints, who by their different lives and deaths bring glory to God.

This doesn't only apply to saints, of course. One of the most attractive themes which crops up in several places in Old English poetry is the 'gifts of men', celebrating all the many and various skills which different people contribute to society. When Ælfric addresses this theme he does so in an explicitly Biblical context, in his homily for Whitsun, where he describes the gifts of the Holy Spirit:

He sylð his gife ðam ðe he wile. Sumum men he forgifð wisdom and spræce, sumum god ingehyd, sumum micelne geleafan, sumum mihte to gehælenne untruman, sumum witegunge, sumum toscead godra gasta and yfelra; sumum he forgifð mislice gereord, sumum gereccednysse mislicra spræca. Ealle ðas ðing deð se Halga Gast, todælende æghwilcum be ðam ðe him gewyrð; forðam ðe he is Ælmihtig Wyrhta, and swa hraðe swa he þæs mannes mod onliht, he hit awent fram yfele to gode.

[He gives his gifts to whomever he will. To some men he gives wisdom and eloquence, to some good knowledge, to some great faith, to some the power to heal the sick, to some the power of prophecy, to some the power to distinguish between good and evil spirits; to some he gives various languages, to some interpretation of various sayings. The Holy Ghost does all these things, distributing to everyone as seems good to him; for he is the Almighty Maker, and as soon as he enlightens the mind of a man, he turns it from evil to good.]

But other Anglo-Saxon writers elaborated on the theme with a wider range of very practical skills, including climbing trees, sailing ships, architecture, swimming, looking after horses, hunting and hawking, and much more. Here's an example from the poem Christ II:

Sumum wordlaþe wise sendeð
on his modes gemynd þurh his muþes gæst,
æðele ondgiet. Se mæg eal fela
singan ond secgan þam bið snyttru cræft
bifolen on ferðe. Sum mæg fingrum wel
hlude fore hæleþum hearpan stirgan,
gleobeam gretan. Sum mæg godcunde
reccan ryhte æ. Sum mæg ryne tungla
secgan, side gesceaft. Sum mæg searolice
wordcwide writan. Sumum wiges sped
giefeð æt guþe, þonne gargetrum
ofer scildhreadan sceotend sendað,
flacor flangeweorc. Sum mæg fromlice
ofer sealtne sæ sundwudu drifan,
hreran holmþræce. Sum mæg heanne beam
stælgne gestigan. Sum mæg styled sweord,
wæpen gewyrcan. Sum con wonga bigong,
wegas widgielle. Swa se waldend us,
godbearn on grundum, his giefe bryttað.

To one he sends wise speech
into his mind’s thoughts through the breath of his mouth,
fine perception. One whose spirit is given
the power of wisdom can sing and speak
of many things. One can play the harp well
with his hands loudly among men,
strike the instrument of joy. One can tell
of the true divine law. One can speak of the course of the stars,
the vast creation. One can skilfully
write with words. To one is granted success in battle,
when archers send quivering arrows flying
over the shield-walls. One can boldly
drive the ship over the salt sea,
stir the thrashing ocean. One can climb
the tall upright tree. One can wield a weapon,
the hardened sword. One knows the expanse of earth’s plains,
far-flung ways. Thus the Ruler,
God's Son on earth, gives to us his gifts.

I love these catalogues of skills. They are celebratory and generous, finding something to praise in gifts of many different kinds, and valuing them all. All require skill and labour, all are important to society, all have a beauty of their own. In this context it's an explicitly Christian viewpoint, but a distinctively Anglo-Saxon one too - fitting for a culture for whom Weland the Smith was a hero. I can't really imagine what a modern version of this poem would look like ('One can phrase snarky Tweets so they fit within 140 characters...'); we just don't value craft in the same way, and our hierarchy of skills is quite a bit more rigid.

Within this view of the world, all gifts can be not only valuable in themselves, but a service to others and to God. Eynsham made me think of that. Æthelweard and Æthelmær had practical gifts of their own ('wise speech', they must have hoped, whether Æthelred listened to them or not) and they nurtured Ælfric's gifts as a writer and teacher, and Ælfric in his turn spent his life sharing those gifts with the world. Think of all the skills, too, which built and maintained an abbey like Eynsham - the labourers and craftsmen, the abbot with his fishponds, the cooks in the kitchen which is now Tolkien Meadow. Building and running a community takes so much dedicated labour - just read this touching history of Eynsham's Catholic church and see all the years of work which went into getting that church built, and all the very different but clearly much-loved parish priests whose diverse gifts are affectionately remembered by their parishioners. Such work is rarely celebrated and is often lost to history, because it's not dramatic or self-aggrandising - it's incremental, collaborative, self-giving, and it does an unfathomable amount of good.