Two Crucifixes and the Norman Conquest

In my column for History Today this month, I've written about a church in Oxfordshire which has two incredible surviving Anglo-Saxon sculptures: two roods, one a life-size carving of Christ with outstretched arms, the other a smaller scene including Mary and John at the foot of the cross. They probably date to the tenth or eleventh century, and are a sign that the church in this quiet village must once have had some wealthy patrons.

I'm fascinated by early medieval life-size figures of Christ, such as this or the one at Romsey Abbey, and have written about them before here. They have a remarkably human presence, and the various records of how people interacted with them as if they were living creatures, and stories in which they actually come to life, make perfect sense when you are standing in front of them. The one at Langford can be seen from the road, before you even enter the churchyard; although now headless and damaged, its open-armed, welcoming embrace is strangely moving.

Also intriguing, particularly this year, is Langford's connection with a man named Ælfsige of Faringdon, who owned lands in the area both before and after the Norman Conquest. In this year, the 950th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, the events of 1066 are being commemorated in a variety of ways, including academic conferences, public events, and social media. I'm finding it all interesting to watch and participate in, especially because this year is also the 1000th anniversary of the Danish Conquest of England by Cnut - a bigger anniversary, receiving considerably less commemoration. Unlike 1066, Cnut's conquest doesn't even have a hashtag; and these days, can an event be said to exist at all if it doesn't have a hashtag? (That's a joke. Probably.)

There are many reasons for this disparity, some of which I explored three years ago when I began commemorating the anniversary of the Danish Conquest on this blog. (I'll consider it further later this year.) When it comes to engaging the public with history, anniversaries are very useful; as I've learned through my blogging and tweeting, there's no hook which seems to catch the public's attention more than 'On this day...' I don't entirely understand why this should be, but I think it's something more than idle curiosity; anniversaries have real power to stir the imagination, and I sometimes wonder about the relationship between this fascination, Twitter's daily obsession with new secular feasts in the form of 'National Whatever-it-is Day', and the fact that in the medieval church year almost every single day is an anniversary of something in one way or another. (Most liturgical feasts are to some extent based on the idea of 'on this day', literally or metaphorically.)

So it's interesting to watch the various responses to the anniversary of the Norman Conquest, and it provides a useful challenge to the historian: what's the best way to talk in public about this famous story, which is not just familiar but full of popular half-remembered facts (1066 and all that!) and bound up with some very deep-seated national myths? It stirs up emotions which manifest themselves in unexpected places, and the language we use to talk about this story can be revealing. I'm often taken aback by the tendency of twentieth-century historians to talk about people like Ælfsige of Faringdon in anachronistic language as collaborators, traitors, even 'quislings', as if a generation of historians who had grown up in the years after World War II were consciously or unconsciously applying the language of Nazi occupation to eleventh-century England. (Better historians than me have written about this.) It's bizarrely emotive language - whatever you think of the Norman Conquest, the Normans were not the Nazis! Although now less common in academia, it still has quite a hold on popular history, and it can cause problems if it leads historians to talk about the aftermath of the Conquest as if there was only one right way to respond to it and anything else is a bit morally suspect. It leads to a focus in popular discourse on the oppression/rebellion kinds of narratives (interesting as they are), and an omission of the more complicated ones, perhaps of the people for whom violent anti-Norman rebellion was not an option - women, the young, the old, monks and nuns, and so on. There's lots of great research being done on these kinds of topics, and hopefully the anniversary will allow some of it to filter through to the public.

But the use of an anniversary, a single date, has its problems too. The focus on one watershed moment, even one so undeniably dramatic and important as the Battle of Hastings, threatens to come at the expense of nuance. It's hard to simultaneously commemorate the anniversary of 1066 as a single decisive moment and to tell the longer story of what came before and after, and it can become all too easy to overlook the facts and stories which might get in the way. 'Are you Norman or Saxon?' asks this clever little English Heritage quiz, getting you to decide your allegiance on the day of battle - but of course it's not as simple as that. There are a hundred extra factors to take into account, from the other parties involved in the events of 1066 (the Norwegians, not to mention the Danes, who took an active role in the aftermath), to the fact that those who fought on the defending side at Hastings called themselves 'English', not 'Saxon' - as English as English Heritage itself. The king who led them was half-Danish: English-born, but with a Danish mother and a Scandinavian name, and cousin to the reigning king of the Danes. There's no particular reason to think that heritage made him less English in the eyes of his contemporaries - but then there are many complexities here we don't have the information to reconstruct. The popular use of the term 'Anglo-Saxon', though its widespread familiarity means it has its advantages, does have a tendency to obscure one of the most significant changes of this long span of time: the complex process of the development of an 'English' identity, which didn't exist at the beginning of the period and was firmly established by the end. 'Anglo-Saxon' is immediately understood as a historical term, and certainly has its uses in the early part of the period, but it's less helpful around the time of the Conquest; by 1066 these people generally called themselves, and their language, 'English' (englisc).

The fact that we don't often call them that says nothing about them, but a great deal about the effect the Norman Conquest had and still has on popular perceptions of history in this country, cutting off centuries of history and English literature as if they belonged to some kind of pre-history of a people who are not 'us'. The English Heritage website classifies all of Anglo-Saxon England, right up until 1066 (!), as 'the Dark Ages', which is pretty revealing about where their sympathies lie. (ETA: not any more, hurrah!) How can you hope to tell the story of the Norman Conquest with anything like objectivity when your unquestioned assumption is that the Normans brought 'light' into the 'dark' world of the Anglo-Saxons?

Dividing history into periods is always difficult, of course, though necessary, but there's no reason to use such pejorative language when there are plenty of less loaded alternatives available. No terminology is perfect, but acknowledging that fact openly can lead to useful discussions about how historians make these kinds of decisions. 'English' might work better than 'Anglo-Saxon' in 1066, but it certainly doesn't in 600 or 800 - and that can be the beginning of an interesting conversation about why. When it comes to engaging with the public, I think it can actually be very helpful to remind people that this sort of periodisation is mostly a matter of convenience, and that historical periods don't map easily onto human lives. If 1065 was the 'Dark Ages', and 1067 was 'medieval', how do you talk about the people, like Ælfsige of Faringdon, who lived through the decades before and after? (Or, for instance, St Wulfstan of Worcester, Earl Waltheof, St Margaret of Scotland, ordinary English monks, and so on.) It's not easy to classify the identities and allegiances of these people, or to label the world(s) they lived in; nor perhaps should we wish to.

BL Harley 76, f.8

It's when you get past the labels that the most interesting stories appear. To take one example: I was amused (and pleased!) to see that one of the questions in the English Heritage quiz helps you determine your allegiance by asking you to pick between pre-Conquest and post-Conquest manuscripts. The 'Saxon' images come from the New Minster Liber Vitae and the Bury Gospels, the 'Norman' ones from this Life of St Dunstan and a Passionale from St Augustine's, Canterbury. All four are beautiful manuscripts, and they make good examples of pre- and post-Conquest manuscript art from the early eleventh and early twelfth centuries. But, as it happens, they also nicely illustrate the complexity of the situation. For one thing, none of these manuscripts belong to any period anyone might reasonably call the 'Dark Ages' (just look at them!). All four are texts of Christian learning, produced in monasteries which had far more in common with each other, and with similar institutions across Europe, than with the England of the fifth century or the fifteenth.

On the 'Saxon' side, the New Minster Liber Vitae is the manuscript which contains the famous image of Cnut and Emma presenting a cross to the monastery, and it dates to c.1031, when England was part of Cnut's Scandinavian empire; if there's any such thing as an Anglo-Danish rather than an Anglo-Saxon manuscript, this is surely it. But it kept being used and added to throughout the eleventh century, and for decades after the Conquest; Norman names were added alongside English and Norse ones in the lists of friends of the monastery. The other manuscript, the Bury Gospels, belonged to a monastery which claimed Cnut and the Danish earl Thorkell as its founders, and which was an especially cosmopolitan centre of learning, even by the standards of late Anglo-Saxon England. At the time of the Conquest it had a French abbot, appointed by Edward the Confessor, and he remained in his post for more than thirty years after 1066.

BL Arundel 16, f.2

As for the 'Norman' side, one of the images chosen (above) comes from an account of the life of a pre-Conquest English saint, Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury. The text dates to the late eleventh century (c.1090) but is based in large part on written sources from the tenth century. This image is of the text's author, the Canterbury monk and historian Osbern, who grew up in England before the Conquest and lived through its aftermath. Osbern later spent time in Normandy, grew close to St Anselm, dedicated some of his work to Archbishop Lanfranc, and lived in what we call 'Anglo-Norman' Canterbury. But he wrote only, and proudly, about English history, drawing on his memories of the pre-Conquest monastery as well as earlier written texts. So it's an image of an Englishman, writing about an Englishman, in a manuscript made in England at the birthplace, as Osbern describes it, of English Christianity; the very letter he's sitting is in an R for Regnante magnifico Anglorum rege Æthelstano, beginning a sentence which dates the birth of Dunstan, and the reign of 'Æthelstan, glorious king of the English', by reference, in true Bedan tradition, to adventus Anglorum in Britanniam. Is this a symbol of 'Norman' identity? Or of an attempt to preserve one (contested) version of pre-Conquest 'English' identity in the new Anglo-Norman world?

Langford

Perhaps this all just seems like pedantic nitpicking, but I'm not actually being critical - whatever image you chose might raise the same issues, and it's the complexity of those questions which makes the situation so fascinating. (And I approach these issues as a historian of literature; an art historian, or a legal historian, or an archaeologist would take a different view of periodisation here). You can tell the story of the Norman Conquest as a tale of goodies and baddies, the triumph of sophisticated Normans over the 'Dark Ages' of the primitive Saxons - but why would you want to, unless you think the public aren't capable of understanding anything more nuanced? There's nothing 'dark' about late Anglo-Saxon England, even in the sense of 'unrecorded' - there are ample surviving sources of all kinds, including an extraordinarily rich and sophisticated literature in both English and Latin. (It's one of my bugbears that because most people haven't heard of any Old English texts except Beowulf, they confidently assert that 'Anglo-Saxon England didn't have much literature'. So I try to redress the balance a little here...) Attempting to understand what did and didn't change at the Norman Conquest isn't helped by promoting the idea that someone just flicked a switch one day in 1066 and turned on the lights.

Anyway, there will be plenty of opportunities to think about these matters in this anniversary year. Though Langford is just a few miles from where I live, I only learned of its existence through a reader of this blog, who contacted me and invited me to go out and visit the church. It was a joy! I'll write a proper post about the church when I get a chance, but in the meantime you can read a bit more about it here.

'And thanne mette I with a man, a myd-Lenten Sonday'

BL Arundel 318, f. 123v

Something to read on Mid-Lent Sunday, from Piers Plowman.

And I awaked therwith, and wiped myne eighen,
And after Piers the Plowman pried and stared,
Estward and westward I waited after faste,
And yede forth as an ydiot, in contree to aspie
After Piers the Plowman - many a place I soughte.
And thanne mette I with a man, a myd-Lenten Sonday,
As hoor as an hawethorn, and Abraham he highte.
I frayned hym first fram whennes he come,
And of whennes he were, and whider that he thoughte.
"I am Feith,' quod that freke, "it falleth noght me to lye,
And of Abrahames hous an heraud of armes.
I seke after a segge that I seigh ones,
A ful bold bacheler--I knew hym by his blasen.'
"What berth that buyrn,' quod I tho, "so blisse thee bitide?'
"Thre leodes in oon lyth, noon lenger than oother,
Of oon muchel and myght in mesure and in lengthe.
That oon dooth, alle dooth, and ech dooth bi his one.
The firste hath myght and majestee, makere of alle thynges:
Pater is his propre name, a persone by hymselve.
The secounde of that sire is Sothfastnesse Filius,
Wardeyn of that wit hath, was evere withouten gynnyng.
The thridde highte the Holi Goost, a persone by hymselve,
The light of al that lif hath a londe and a watre,
Confortour of creatures--of hym cometh alle blisse.
So thre bilongeth for a lord that lordshipe cleymeth:
Might, and a mene his owene myghte to knowe,
Of hymself and of his servaunt, and what suffreth hem bothe.
So God, that gynnyng hadde nevere, but tho hym good thoughte,
Sente forth his sone as for servaunt that tyme,
To ocupien hym here til issue were spronge -
That is, children of charite, and Holi Chirche the moder.
Patriarkes and prophetes and apostles were the children,
And Crist and Cristendom and alle Cristene Holy Chirche...

I hadde wonder of hise wordes, and of hise wide clothes;
For in his bosom he bar a thyng, and that he blissed evere.
And I loked in his lappe: a lazar lay therinne
Amonges patriarkes and prophetes pleyinge togideres.
"What awaitestow?' quod he, "and what woldestow have?'
"I wolde wite," quod I tho, "what is in youre lappe."
"Lo!" quod he - and leet me se. "Lord, mercy!" I seide.
"This is a present of muche pris; what prynce shal it have?'
"It is a precious present," quod he, "ac the pouke it hath attached,
And me therwith," quod that wye, "may no wed us quyte,
Ne no buyrn be oure borgh, ne brynge us fram his daunger;
Out of the poukes pondfold no maynprise may us fecch
Til he come that I carpe of: Crist is his name
That shal delivere us som day out of the develes power,
And bettre wed for us wage than we ben alle worthi -
That is, lif for lif - or ligge thus evere
Lollynge in my lappe, til swich a lord us fecche."
"Allas!' I seide, "that synne so longe shall lette
The myght of Goddes mercy, that myghte us alle amende!'
I wepte for hise wordes.

Souls in the bosom of Abraham (BL Stowe 17, f.188)

And with that I awoke, and rubbed my eyes,
and after Piers the Plowman peered and stared about;
eastwards and westwards I looked for him,
and went forth like a fool, searching the region
for Piers the Plowman; many a place I sought.
And then I met with a man, on mid-Lent Sunday,
white-haired as a hawthorn-tree, and Abraham was his name.
I asked him first whence he had come,
and where he was from, and where he was going.
"I am Faith," said that man, "it befits me not to lie;
a herald of arms in Abraham's household.
I seek for a man I saw once,
a most bold knight - I knew him by his blazon."
"What does that warrior wear," I asked, "as bliss betide you?"
"Three figures in one person, none larger than another,
of one degree and power in length and in breadth.
What one does, all do, and each does alone.
The first has power and majesty, maker of all things:
Father is his proper name, a person in himself.
The second of that lord is Truth, the Son,
guard of all who have wits, who ever was without beginning.
The third is called the Holy Ghost, a person in himself,
the light of all that live on land and on water,
comforter of creatures - of him comes all joy.
So three attributes belong to a lord who lordship claims:
might, and the means of expressing his might,
his own and his agent's, and what sustains them both.
So God, who never had beginning but what seemed good to him,
sent forth his Son, to be servant for a time,
to busy himself here until issue be brought forth -
that is, the children of charity, with Holy Church the mother.
Patriarchs and prophets and apostles were the children
And Christ and Christendom and all Christians are Holy Church...'

[He goes on to discuss the Trinity further, and tells some of Abraham's story.]

I wondered at his words, and at his voluminous clothes -
for at his bosom he bore something which he kept blessing.
And I looked within his cloak: a leper lay there,
among patriarchs and prophets playing together.
"What are you waiting for?" he asked, "and what is it you want?"
"I want to know," said I, "what is in your cloak."
"Look," he said, and let me see. "Lord, mercy!" I said.
"That's a precious gift; for what prince is it intended?"
"It is a precious gift," he said, "but the devil has seized it -
and me, as well," said that one, "and no ransom may redeem us,
nor can anyone pay our bail or free us from his power;
no payment of surety can take us out of the devil's pound,
until the one comes whom I speak of: Christ is his name,
the one who shall deliver us, some day, out of the devil's power,
and pay a better price for us than we are all together worth:
that is, life for life. Else we would lie thus for ever,
lolling in my lap, until such a lord saved us."
"Alas," I cried, "that sin so long should hinder
the might of God's mercy, which might us all amend!"
I wept for his words.

Dives and Lazarus (BL Egerton 3277, f.128)

What the dreamer meets on this Mid-Lent Sunday is an old man, his hair as white as a hawthorn-tree in spring blossom, with a cloak wrapped around him, and within the fold of his cloak (his 'lappe'), against his breast, some miniature people. These are the souls of the dead, the righteous who had died before the coming of Christ, waiting in a place of comfort until Christ's incarnation can save them. The idea of these souls resting 'in the bosom of Abraham' comes from the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, and it was a popular subject in medieval art. In Piers Plowman, the combination of the idea with Abraham's explanation of the nature of the Trinity strikingly echoes an image found in medieval English alabaster, such as this beautiful example (follow the link for more images):

The souls here rest in a cloth held between the arms of God the Father, who has his hand raised in blessing. He holds the crucified Christ between his knees, with a symbol of the Holy Ghost marked above the cross. This way of depicting the Trinity, known as a 'Throne of Mercy' image, is common in medieval art, but this combination with the Bosom of Abraham is found only in English alabaster.

Piers Plowman brings this kind of iconography unforgettably to life, as we see the 'patriarchs and prophets playing together' in Abraham's lap. The little naked souls in these images look like children, and in the poem they are called 'the children of charity, with Holy Church the mother'. They are 'patriarchs and prophets', people of dignity, fathers and begetters - but here they are imagined as infants held against a parent's breast. Like children they 'loll' in Abraham's lap, happy enough but helpless 'til such a lord us fetch.' It's a tender, maternal image, fitting for this moment in the liturgical year, as the poem is starting to run towards Jerusalem to re-enact the events of the Passion. The Epistle for Mid-Lent Sunday speaks of the two children of Abraham, and of 'Jerusalem our mother'; and in part for this reason, the Fourth Sunday of Lent has traditionally been kept as Mothering Sunday in Britain. Mothering Sunday is first recorded nearly three hundred years after Piers Plowman was written, but the language here is unmistakably maternal: Abraham holds the souls against his breast and is constantly 'blissing' them, like a mother soothing and comforting her baby. There's something very poignant about Abraham's tenderness and the little creatures' vulnerability; no wonder it moves the dreamer to tears.

Bourges Cathedral

The story of Dives and Lazarus, as told in an English folk-song:



And reimagined by Vaughan Williams:

The Death of King Ethelbert

Worth, Kent

Today is the 1400th anniversary of the death of Ethelbert, king of Kent, the first English king to convert to Christianity. Ethelbert died on 24 February 616, around twenty years after receiving the mission of St Augustine and his companions, who had been sent from Rome to spread Christianity to (what they thought) a 'barbarous, fierce, and unbelieving nation'. So today is a good day to read Bede's account of Augustine's meeting with Ethelbert in 597, and what came after it. This is how Bede describes Augustine's coming, in Book I of his Historia Ecclesiastica (beginning at chapter 25, taken from here):

Augustine, thus strengthened by the confirmation of the blessed Father Gregory, returned to the work of the word of God, with the servants of Christ, and arrived in Britain. The powerful Ethelbert was at that time king of Kent; he had extended his dominions as far as the great river Humber, by which the Southern Saxons are divided from the Northern.

On the east of Kent is the large Isle of Thanet containing, according to the English way of reckoning, 600 families, divided from the other land by the river Wantsum, which is about three furlongs over, and fordable only in two places, for both ends of it run into the sea. In this island landed the servant of our Lord, Augustine, and his companions, being, as is reported, nearly forty men.

Augustine landing (St Laurence, Ramsgate)

They had, by order of the blessed Pope Gregory, taken interpreters of the nation of the Franks, and sending to Ethelbert, signified that they were come from Rome, and brought a joyful message, which most undoubtedly assured to all that took advantage of it everlasting joys in heaven and a kingdom that would never end with the living and true God.

The king, having heard this, ordered them to stay in that island where they had landed, and that they should be furnished with all necessaries, till he should consider what to do with them. For he had before heard of the Christian religion, having a Christian wife of the royal family of the Franks, called Bertha; whom he had received from her parents, upon condition that she should be permitted to practice her religion with the Bishop Luidhard, who was sent with her to preserve her faith.

The traditional site of Augustine's landing, Thanet

Some days after, the king came into the island, and sitting in the open air, ordered Augustine and his companions to be brought into his presence. For he had taken precaution that they should not come to him in any house, lest, according to an ancient superstition, if they practiced any magical arts, they might impose upon him, and so get the better of him. But they came furnished with divine, not with magic virtue, bearing a silver cross for their banner, and the image of our Lord and Saviour painted on a board; and singing the litany, they offered up their prayers to the Lord for the eternal salvation both of themselves and of those to whom they were come.

When he had sat down, pursuant to the king's commands, and preached to him and his attendants there present the word of life, the king answered thus: ­ "Your words and promises are very fair, but as they are new to us, and of uncertain import, I cannot approve of them so far as to forsake that which I have so long followed with the whole English nation. But because you are come from far into my kingdom, and, as I conceive, are desirous to impart to us those things which you believe to be true and most beneficial, we will not molest you, but give you favourable entertainment, and take care to supply you with your necessary sustenance; nor do we forbid you to preach and gain as many as you can to your religion."

Augustine preaching to Ethelbert (Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford)

Accordingly he permitted them to reside in the city of Canterbury, which was the metropolis of all his dominions, and, pursuant to his promise, besides allowing them sustenance, did not refuse them liberty to preach. It is reported that, as they drew near to the city, after their manner, with the holy cross, and the image of our sovereign Lord and King, Jesus Christ, they, in concert, sung this litany: "We beseech Thee, O Lord, in all Thy mercy, that thy anger and wrath be turned away from this city, and from the holy house, because we have sinned. Hallelujah."

Augustine processing to Canterbury (St Augustine's, Ramsgate)

As soon as they entered the dwelling­-place assigned them they began to imitate the course of life practiced in the primitive church; applying themselves to frequent prayer, watching and fasting; preaching the word of life to as many as they could; despising all worldly things, as not belonging to them; receiving only their necessary food from those they taught; living themselves in all respects conformably to what they prescribed to others, and being always disposed to suffer any adversity, and even to die for that truth which they preached. In short, several believed and were baptized, admiring the simplicity of their innocent life, and the sweetness of their heavenly doctrine.

There was on the east side of the city a church dedicated to the honour of St. Martin, built whilst the Romans were still in the island, wherein the queen, who, as has been said before, was a Christian, used to pray. In this they first began to meet, to sing, to pray, to say mass, to preach, and to baptize, till the king, being converted to the faith, allowed them to preach openly, and build or repair churches in all places.

A statue of Queen Bertha in the church of St Martin's

When he, among the rest, induced by the unspotted life of these holy men, and their delightful promises, which, by many miracles, they proved to be most certain, believed and was baptized, greater numbers began daily to flock together to hear the word, and, forsaking their heathen rites, to associate themselves, by believing, to the unity of the church of Christ. Their conversion the king so far encouraged, as that he compelled none to embrace Christianity, but only showed more affection to the believers, as to his fellow­-citizens in the heavenly kingdom.

For he had learned from his instructors and leaders to salvation, that the service of Christ ought to be voluntary, not by compulsion. Nor was it long before he gave his preachers a settled residence in his metropolis of Canterbury, with such possessions of different kinds as were necessary for their subsistence.

Ethelbert and the towers of Canterbury Cathedral

Later on, in Book II:

In the year of our Lord's incarnation 616, which is the twenty-first year after Augustine and his companions were sent to preach to the English nation, Ethelbert, king of Kent, having most gloriously governed his temporal kingdom fifty-six years, entered into the eternal joys of the kingdom which is heavenly. He was the third of the English kings that had the sovereignty of all the southern provinces that are divided from the northern by the river Humber, and the borders contiguous to the same; but the first of the kings that ascended to the heavenly kingdom...

King Ethelbert died on the 24th day of the month of February, twenty-one years after he had received the faith, and was buried in St. Martin's porch within the church of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul, where also lies his queen, Bertha. Among other benefits which he conferred upon the nation, he also, by the advice of wise persons, introduced judicial decrees, after the Roman model; which, being written in English, are still kept and observed by them.

The ruins of St Augustine's, Canterbury;
in the foreground is the porticus where Ethelbert was buried

...post regnum temporale, quod L et VI annis gloriosissime tenuerat, aeterna caelestis regni gaudia subiit...

In telling of the king's death, Bede carefully (though not perhaps accurately) notes the length in years of Ethelbert's reign and the geographical extent of his kingdom, as if to underline the point that the king is departing from these temporal and territorial limits to a kingdom without boundaries and without time. Here in the realm of time and space, we make a virtue of these limits by commemorating the when and where of history: keeping anniversaries and marking sites. Most of the images in this post are of physical memorials to Ethelbert and Augustine from the area where they are most plentifully memorialised, in Canterbury and the Isle of Thanet. In this region a disparate collection of memorials, many more than are pictured here, commemorates not just the people in this story but the places where it played out, the meaning-rich landscape of island and mainland, marginal shore and royal capital, which is symbolic as well as real. Thanks to a combination of folklore, genuine continuity, and dedicated local history-making, you can visit most of the sites mentioned in Bede's story, from the shore where Augustine landed to the well where he baptised the king, to the city where Queen Bertha's church still stands, the cathedral soars, and the foundations of King Ethelbert's burial-place are neatly marked out in English Heritage stone. If so inclined, you can now walk the way (or even canoe it) in Augustine's footsteps.

St Augustine's Cross, Cliffsend

Some of these memorials also mark anniversaries. This cross, erected in 1884, is near the supposed site of Ethelbert's meeting with Augustine, and was the focus of celebrations for the 1300th anniversary of Augustine's arrival in 1897. One of my own first encounters with Anglo-Saxon history was witnessing the commemoration of the 1400th anniversary in Ramsgate in 1997 (I was eleven years old, and it would be nice to say that this event fired me with a love of Anglo-Saxon history and inspired me then and there to become a medievalist - but actually I don't recall being especially clear on what we were commemorating...). Ethelbert is the first Anglo-Saxon king whose date of death we know in part because the coming of Augustine, of Christianity, also brought to the English new ways of marking time and of recalling and commemorating history. Like the making of memorials, the marking of anniversaries is a creative act, a work of the historical imagination through which we can locate ourselves in time as well as place, with ever-richer possibilities as the passage of time adds more and more layers. So perhaps it's a good day to celebrate not only Ethelbert but the historian who gives him to us. Bede looked back on Ethelbert from the distance of 140 years, and we're now 1400 years away; but with even the historian's history under threat, it's all the more important to go on telling his stories.

A memorial of a memorial (St Laurence, Ramsgate)

Spring

Just a quick post to advertise a beautiful new book, which contains my translation of an extract from the Old English poem The Seafarer: it's called Spring: An Anthology for the Changing Seasons, and you can read about it here. The anthology, among many exquisite pieces of writing on the season, reproduces an extract from the poem which I wrote about in this post, beginning:

Bearwas blostmum nimað, byrig fægriað,
wongas wlitigað, woruld onetteð;
ealle þa gemoniað modes fusne
sefan to siþe, þam þe swa þenceð
on flodwegas feor gewitan.
Swylce geac monað geomran reorde,
singeð sumeres weard, sorge beodeð
bitter in breosthord. Þæt se beorn ne wat,
esteadig secg, hwæt þa sume dreogað
þe þa wræclastas widost lecgað.
Forþon nu min hyge hweorfeð ofer hreþerlocan,
min modsefa mid mereflode
ofer hwæles eþel hweorfeð wide,
eorþan sceatas, cymeð eft to me
gifre ond grædig, gielleð anfloga,
hweteð on hwælweg hreþer unwearnum
ofer holma gelagu.

The woods take on blossoms, towns become fair,
fields grow beautiful, the world hastens on;
all these things urge on the eager mind,
the spirit to the journey, in one who thinks to travel
far on the paths of the sea.
The cuckoo too gives warning with mournful voice,
summer's watchman sings, foretells sorrow,
bitter in the heart. Of this that man knows nothing,
the warrior blessed with wealth, what some endure
who furthest tread the paths of exile.
And so now my spirit roams beyond the confines of the heart,
my spirit over the sea-flood;
it wanders wide over the whale's home,
the expanse of the earth, and comes back to me
eager and greedy; the lone flier cries,
incites the heart to the whale's way, irresistible,
across the ocean's floods. 

You can read the whole poem here (or, for a rather more daring translation, here's Ezra Pound's version - and listen to this!).

The Seafarer is a poem I admire more every time I read it: it's an irresistible poem, strange and beautiful in its strangeness, restless, urgent and uncompromising. Although not 'nature writing' in the sense we would understand it, it offers as complex and ambivalent an approach to the season of spring - the season as it interweaves with human experience - as any later poet could hope to create. The spring of The Seafarer is an uncomfortable, eager season, impelling movement and growth; the voice of the poem, like the cry of the cuckoo and the soaring seabird-soul, 'greedy' and never satisfied, calls to those of us - and so really to all of us - not truly at home in this world. It presses ever onwards, away from safety and comfort out onto the moving waters. In my last post I talked briefly about love and 'longing' in Anglo-Saxon poetry, but The Seafarer's most famous line of longing pushes away from, not towards, human love: A hafað longunge se þe on lagu fundað, 'He always has a longing who sets out on the sea'.

Anyway, I'm very pleased to be part of this anthology; this the first time I've ever seen any of my writing in an actual physical book, so it's pretty exciting for me! I'm especially glad that the editor chose to include some medieval poetry (Chaucer's there too), since the first six centuries of English literature are all too often overlooked in collections like this. One of my favourite things in blogging about medieval literature is introducing it to people who might not otherwise encounter it; and though The Seafarer is not the most obscure example, and is just the tip of the iceberg (an apt metaphor for such an ice-bound poem) of the wonders of Anglo-Saxon poetry, it belongs among any collection of the best writing in English. Do take a look at this book - it's a beautiful volume.

The Language of Anglo-Saxon Love

A long, long time ago, back in the early days of this blog (2011) I wrote two not-entirely-serious posts compiling some lists of Medieval Compliments and Medieval Terms of Endearment. To my surprise and amusement these have since proved to be far and away the most popular posts on this blog, with page-views in the tens of thousands. They always get a big spike around Valentine's Day, and I like to think that people are still using them (along with my Resources for a Medieval Valentine's Day) to add a little medieval flavour to the day.

Most of the words and phrases in those posts came from Middle English texts, so today I thought I'd offer up some Old English terms in which you might wish to express your admiration or love. Now, some people will tell you that Anglo-Saxon literature is devoid of romance, and it is true that the Anglo-Saxons did not write much love poetry, nor did they celebrate St Valentine's feast as a romantic holiday (surely proof, if any more were needed, that English literature has been going downhill since 1066). But while romance may have come to us (etymologically and historically speaking) from the French, it was the Anglo-Saxons who gave us the word love - and there's plenty of love in Old English literature, if you're looking for some inspiration today.

Lovers in the Old English Hexateuch (illustrating Genesis 6)

BL Cotton Claudius B IV, f. 12v

So, let's imagine you want to send what Beowulf calls a luftacen - a token of your affection - to express what lies on heortscræfe 'in the cavern of the heart'. The obvious place to start for Valentine's card inspiration is the poem known as The Husband's Message, in which a man forcibly separated from his lover sends her a message urging her to join him:

þec þonne biddan het se þisne beam agrof
þæt þu sinchroden sylf gemunde
on gewitlocan wordbeotunga,
þe git on ærdagum oft gespræcon...
Heht nu sylfa þe
lustum læran, þæt þu lagu drefde,
siþþan þu gehyrde on hliþes oran
galan geomorne geac on bearwe.
Ne læt þu þec siþþan siþes getwæfan,
lade gelettan lifgendne monn...
Nis him wilna gad,
ne meara ne maðma ne meododreama,
ænges ofer eorþan eorlgestreona,
þeodnes dohtor, gif he þin beneah.

He who carved this wood [did I mention your Valentine's message should be carved in runes?]
instructed me to bid you, treasure-adorned one,
to recall to mind the vows
which you two often spoke in days gone by...
Now he himself has commanded me
to joyfully instruct you to take to the sea,
after you have heard by the cliff's edge
the mourning cuckoo sing in the woods.
Do not then let any man living prevent your coming
or hinder your journey...
He has no lack of joy,
nor of horses, nor treasures, nor the pleasures of mead,
any of the noblest riches upon earth,
if he has you, prince's daughter.

You too should promise, of course, that your lover will find in you tirfæste treowe, 'fidelity of steadfast glory'; or such vows as appear in The Wife's Lament, where the speaker says of her husband:

Ful oft wit beotedan
þæt unc ne gedælde nemne deað ana,
owiht elles.

Very often we two vowed
that we would not be parted except by death alone,
nothing else.

You're going to need the dual pronoun wit 'we two' if you want to compose a properly intimate Old English love-message.

As compliments go, sinchroden ('treasure-adorned') may not get you very far these days. You might have better luck with the veritable flurry of compliments provided by the poem Juliana, in which the heroine is variously called seo dyreste ond seo sweteste in sefan minum, 'the dearest and the sweetest in my soul', minra eagna leoht 'light of my eyes', min se swetesta sunnan scima 'my sweetest sunbeam', and so on. Unfortunately, the speakers of these words are very unpleasant characters - Juliana's bullying father and nasty would-be husband - and they're trying to butter her up with these endearments to force her into an unwanted marriage. So that's a bit of a downer. (Maybe it suggests something about what one Anglo-Saxon poet thought of such flowery endearments and the people who use them.)

Let's try again. The heroine of Judith is described (by the narrator this time) as gleaw on geðonce, ides ælfscinu 'clever in thought, a woman beautiful as an elf' - both excellent terms of praise. I don't really think you can beat 'elf-shining' as a compliment, but there's also fæger ('fair', obviously) and wlitig 'beautiful', which works for both men and women: St Guthlac, for instance, is described as wlitig on ansyne 'beautiful of face' and Eve (in the poem Genesis) as wifa wlitegost 'most beautiful of women' and wlitesciene wif 'woman of radiant beauty'.

'gleaw on geðonce, ides ælfscinu' (BL Cotton Vitellius A XV, f.202)

Juliana's flatterers aside, lovers in Old English poetry tend to be on the restrained side with their terms of endearment. Even in The Wife's Lament, the speaker mostly calls her husband min freond and min wine, which both mean 'my friend'; min wine is also the heroine's choice of address in the fragmentary Waldere, in the middle of an impassioned speech, so it must have had more intimate overtones than simply 'friend'. But my favourite endearment was one I mentioned in this post, from a sermon in which God, speaking to the Virgin Mary, calls her min meregrot... min eorclanstan 'my pearl, my precious jewel'. You're not going to get a better endearment than 'my arkenstone', now, are you?

In Old English someone you love is leof 'dear, beloved' and therefore lufsum 'lovesome, lovable' and dyre 'dear, precious', perhaps even your deorling 'darling' (although that doesn't always have positive overtones). Leof can also be used as an address - one might, for instance, address someone as leofa Beowulf 'beloved Beowulf' (assuming their name was Beowulf). As the advertisers are so keen to convince us around Valentine's Day, everyone wants someone to love: Æfter leofan menn langað swiðost 'People long most for a loved one', says one of the Durham Proverbs. (Which is very sweet, but the compiler of the proverb-collection rather wickedly juxtaposes it with another proverb about unsatisfied desire: Hwilum æfter medo menn mæst geþyrsteð 'Sometimes men are thirstiest after drinking mead'. I see what you did there, you cynical monk.)

Leof and longung go together, alliteratively speaking, in Old English poetry. The speaker of The Wife's Lament, separated from her husband, describes herself as oflangod, 'seized with longing', and concludes by saying:

Wa bið þam þe sceal
of langoþe leofes abidan.

Grief it is for the one who must
wait in longing for the beloved.

Beowulf movingly describes the overwhelming love felt by Hrothgar for Beowulf as the latter prepares to leave Heorot (Beowulf 1876-9):

Wæs him se man to þon leof
þæt he þone breostwylm forberan ne mehte,
ac him on hreþre hygebendum fæst
æfter deorum men dyrne langað
beorn wið blode.

To him that man was so beloved
that he could not restrain the surging of his breast;
in his heart, fast in the mind's bonds,
a hidden longing for the dear man
burned in the blood.

Love is often described as surging, burning and 'hot' - like the treowlufu, hat æt heortan, 'true love, hot in the heart' of Christ II (539). With hot hearts and love-longing we should mention a third alliterative pair, the verbs clyppen and cyssan 'to embrace and to kiss', which frequently appear together. (Hug came later, probably from Old Norse - those cuddly Vikings!).

Symptoms of love-longing also include 'sickness', like the woman in Wulf and Eadwacer, who cries:

Wulf, min Wulf! wena me þine
seoce gedydon, þine seldcymas,
murnende mod, nales meteliste.

Wulf, my Wulf! My hopes of you
have made me sick - your rare visits,
a mourning heart, not lack of food.

Wulf is generally taken to be the man's name, rather than a term of endearment, but I suppose you could use it that way if you chose...

To return to what you might write (or carve) in a Valentine's card: when the princess Arcestrate in the prose romance Apollonius of Tyre falls in love with Apollonius, she writes a letter confessing her love in which she says:

Gif ðu wundrige þæt swa scamfæst fæmne swa unforwandigendlice ðas word awrat, þonne wite þu þæt ic hæbbe þurh weax aboden ðe nane scame ne can þæt ic silf ðe for scame secgan ne mihte.

If you wonder that so modest a girl should so boldly write these words, then know that I have declared to you through wax, which does not know shame, what I myself could not say to you for shame.

When Apollonius reads her letter, he turns red as a rose (mid rosan rude... eal oferbræded). She has fallen in love (gefeol hire mod on his lufe) with him in part because he's such a good harpist, and it gives her a sleepless night:

þæt mæden hæfde unstille niht, mid þare lufe onæled þara worda and sanga þe heo gehyrde æt Apollonige.

The maiden had a restless night, kindled to love by the words and songs which she had heard from Apollonius.

In general, however, songs are a good remedy for those suffering 'longing': longað þonne þy læs þe him con leoþa worn, says Maxims I ('he is less troubled by longing who knows many songs'). The same poem famously sketches a little pen-portrait of a sailor's wife waiting for her leof:

Leof wilcuma
Frysan wife, þonne flota stondeð;
biþ his ceol cumen ond hyre ceorl to ham,
agen ætgeofa, ond heo hine in laðaþ,
wæsceð his warig hrægl ond him syleþ wæde niwe,
liþ him on londe þæs his lufu bædeð.
Wif sceal wiþ wer wære gehealdan, oft hi mon wommum belihð...
Lida biþ longe on siþe; a mon sceal seþeah leofes wenan,
gebidan þæs he gebædan ne mæg.

The loved one is welcome
to the Frisian's wife, when the ship docks.
His boat has come and her husband is home,
her own provider; and she calls him in,
washes his sea-stained clothes and gives him fresh garments,
grants him on land what his love asks for.
A woman should keep faith with a man; often they are accused of sins...
A sailor is long away; but still one should hope for the beloved,
wait for what cannot be hastened.

How's that for Anglo-Saxon romance?

Anglo-Saxon calendar for February, including St Valentine's feast, but no hearts and flowers

(BL Harley 863 f.1v)

St Wendreda and the Danish Conquest

St Wendreda, March

January 22 is the feast of St Wendreda, an obscure East Anglian saint about whom very little is known. Her name suggests she was an Anglo-Saxon woman, but that's pretty much as far as we can get. She is associated with the town of March, to the north-west of Ely, where she may have been head of some kind of community; the church in March is dedicated to her, the only church to bear that dedication. If she can be identified with the St Mindred to whom a well is dedicated at Exning, she may be connected to St Etheldreda of Ely and the East Anglian royal house, and if so she would have lived in the late seventh or early eighth century - or she may not, in which case she didn't. She doesn't appear in any medieval calendars, so January 22 may not have been her original feast-day, if she had one; but they celebrate her on this day at Ely Cathedral, and that's good enough for me.

Although so very little is known about St Wendreda, there is one fact about her which is actually very topical this year, the 1000th anniversary of the Danish Conquest of England. During the reign of King Æthelred, probably in the first decade of the eleventh century, the relics of St Wendreda were acquired from March by the abbot of Ely and placed in a gold shrine in the abbey church. At that time, as you will know if you've been following my series of posts on the anniversary of the Danish Conquest, England was under sustained attack from a number of Viking armies, the most successful of which was led by the Danish king Svein Forkbeard. In 1013 Svein drove Æthelred into exile and became king of England, but died after a few months, the victim (later legend said) of the vengeful spirit of St Edmund of East Anglia. After the deaths of Svein and Æthelred the war was carried on by their sons, Cnut and Edmund Ironside, who fought a succession of battles across the south of England in 1016.

When Edmund Ironside met Cnut's army for the last time, on 18 October 1016, at a place in Essex called Assandun, the monks of Ely carried the relics of St Wendreda to the battlefield in the hope they would bring divine aid to the English side. In the years leading up to 1016 East Anglia and its powerful monasteries had put up a spirited defence against the Danes (as they were to do against the Normans, a few decades later). Ely provided support to the East Anglian army who fought against the Danes at Maldon in 991, and after the battle it was the monks of Ely who recovered Ealdorman Byrhtnoth’s body from the battlefield and buried him; it may well have been a monk of Ely or a neighbouring monastery who composed the Old English poem which commemorates the Battle of Maldon, which has made Byrhtnoth and his men a symbol of Anglo-Saxon resistance against the Vikings. Another casualty of the Danes, Byrhtnoth’s son-in-law Oswig, killed in battle at Ringmere in 1010, was probably buried at Ely too. So it's not surprising that the monks of Ely took their relics and their prayers to help Edmund Ironside at Assandun (especially as the battle may have been fought near to one of the abbey's Essex estates). They were not the only monks on the battlefield: the abbot of Ramsey Abbey, Wulfsige, was there too, as was his predecessor Eadnoth, Bishop of Dorchester. Both were killed in the battle, along with eall seo duguð of Angelcynnes þeode, 'all the nobility of the English nation', as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle puts it. The twelfth-century Liber Eliensis, our source for this information, calls Eadnoth a martyr, and says he was cut down by the Danes as he was saying Mass on the battlefield.

If St Wendreda's relics had managed to save England from conquest, she might not today be quite such an obscure saint. But unfortunately (or not, depending on your view) the relics were unsuccessful, and the English were defeated. Not only did Cnut win the battle - and six weeks later, on the death of Edmund Ironside, the whole kingdom of England - but he also captured Wendreda's relics: the Liber Eliensis says that the Ely monks believed Cnut took the relics from the battlefield and subsequently gave them away to Canterbury. It's hard not to think Cnut had bigger things on his mind at the time, what with having just conquered a kingdom and all, so perhaps he doesn't personally deserve the blame for this, but it might conceivably have been intended to punish Ely for its longstanding opposition to the Danes.

Cnut eventually managed to establish a good relationship with Ely, even being inspired to compose a spontaneous song - so says the Liber Eliensis - on a visit to the monastery:

Merie sungen ðe muneches binnen Ely
ða Cnut ching reu ðer by.
Roweþ cnites noer the lant
and here we þes muneches sæng.

[Merry sang the monks in Ely
When Cnut the king rowed by;
Row, men, near the land
And let us hear these monks sing.]

But he never returned the relics of St Wendreda.

The relics did eventually come back to March, some three centuries after Cnut's time, but their whereabouts are now unknown. If the name of St Wendreda is familiar today, it's not for her own sake but because of the fabulous church in March which bears her name. The church is famous for its stunning medieval roof, which is adorned with squadrons of angels - 120 of them, winging their way across the beams.

It's an astonishing sight. Above is a not very good picture of it I took in haste a few months ago, but have a look at this site for more and lovelier photographs. St Wendreda's intervention didn't do much for the Angles at Assandun, but her angels are above reproach.

(Sorry. Couldn't resist.)

'Learn to love as I love thee'

Nativity (BL Harley 2915, f.28)

Learn to love as I love thee.
In all my limbs thou mayest see
How sore they quake for cold;
For thee I suffer all this woe,
Love me, sweet, and no mo; [no other]
To thee me take and hold.

Jesu, sweet son dear,
In poor bed thou liest now here,
And that grieveth me sore.
For thy cradle is a bier,
Ox and ass are thy fere, [companions]
Weep may I therefore!

Jesu, sweet, be not wroth;
I have neither scrap nor cloth
Thee in for to fold;
I have but a piece of a lappe, [the fold of a cloak]
Therefore lay thy feet to my pap
And keep thee from the cold.

Cold thee taketh, I may well see;
For love of man it must be
For thee to suffer woe;
For better it is thou suffer this
Than man should lose heaven's bliss.
Thou must ransom him thereto.

Since it must be that thou be dead
To save man from the fiend,
Thy sweet will be done.
But let me not stay here too long:
After thy death me underfonge [receive]
To live for evermore. Amen.

One last Christmas poem. This is a version in modern spelling of a fourteenth-century poem (the original can be found here) which imagines a dialogue between Mary and the infant Christ. It comes from a manuscript which belonged to a friar called John of Grimestone (the manuscript is now Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates Lib. 18.7.21; the first three verses also appear in British Library, Harley 7322). His manuscript, which dates to 1372, is a collection of preaching materials, containing a large amount of English verse and including several tender poems about the baby Christ: 'Lullay little child, rest thee a throwe' is especially lovely, as are 'As I lay upon a night' and this lullaby carol. Although it focuses on Christ's death rather than his birth, Grimestone's 'Love me brought' also has some parallels to this poem.

Long-term readers of this blog will know that I have a soft spot for Middle English lullaby carols, especially ones in which the baby and his mother talk about his future, the suffering both will face before his work on earth is completed. I always feel - perhaps this is excessively literal of me - that these poems are more fitting reading for the weeks after Christmas than for the day itself. They look forward, turning the reader's attention from Christ's birth to his future life, while being careful always to evoke the naturalistic details of their setting in his first newborn days: makeshift cradle, anxious mother, a baby to be fed, wrapped, soothed, sung to. This one is not a lullaby, though the lulling ls of its first line might bring the sound to mind, but the speaker of all except the first verse is Mary; the fact that the verses are all dialogue makes it possible for the reader to take on her voice, to feel and to plead with her. 'Learn to love as I love thee', she, and we, are told.

These poems are sweet and gentle but tinged with sadness, the vulnerability of the child and his mother's fears piercing any sentimentality with a sharp dart of cold realism. Cold is a word which quivers through this poem, and it seems to be the discomfort most troubling baby and mother - not only because they're poor, we might think, and staying in a chilly stable, but perhaps too because it suggests something about the nature of the world this child has come to. In Middle English cold often evokes death, the chill of the clammy grave, and so hints at the death the baby will face for mankind's sake; and it also suggests the coldness of a hard heart, cruelty and lack of love, the very opposite of the warm-hearted tenderness we are supposed to learn from this poem. The months after Christmas are usually colder than December itself, despite the turn of the year at the solstice; there used to be a proverbial saying, 'as the day lengthens, so the cold strengthens'. And so it is here, as the elation of the child's birth turns into contemplation of the sorrow his future will bring. It reminds me of Neale's 'Earth Today Rejoices', a version of a medieval carol which is titled, in some carol-books, 'A January Carol':

Though the cold grows stronger,
Though the world loves night;
Yet the days grow longer,
Christ is born, our Light.

BL Royal 2 A XXII, f. 13v (The 'Westminster Psalter', c.1200)