Wonderful to Relate. Rachel Koopmans
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twelfth-century writer of a short passio and miracle collection for St. Indract at Glastonbury claims to have used an Old English exemplar.12 Most intriguingly, a late eleventh-century text refers to sheets of parchment attached to the walls near the shrine of St. Leofwynn in Sussex. Accounts of Leofwynn’s virtues were written on these sheets in Old English, a language the Flemish writer could not read.13 From such a sprinkling of references to texts now lost, it is difficult to judge what might once have been. Still, it seems safe to conclude that late Saxon hagiographers composing in Old English, like those writing in Latin, concentrated their efforts on vitae.
There is only one miracle collection surviving from late Saxon England that fully justifies the term: the Translation and Miracles of St. Swithun by Lantfred, a monk of Fleury.14 Michael Lapidge, whose monumental volume on the cult of Swithun has put the study of Lantfred’s text on a firm footing for the first time, terms the collection “one of the most substantial Latin prose texts which has survived from Anglo-Saxon England.”15 Lantfred wrote the Miracles sometime after July 971, the year that Bishop Æthelwold, the chief leader of the monastic reform movement in England, translated Swithun’s relics from an outside grave into the Old Minster at Winchester.16 The Miracles has little to say about the translation: its forty chapters are almost all concerned with Swithun’s contemporary miracles.17 The collection makes it clear that Lantfred was present at Winchester in the 970s and was thrilled by what he witnessed there: “I myself saw more than two hundred sick people cured through the saint’s merit in ten days, and in the course of a year, the healings were countless! I also saw the precincts around the minster … so packed on either side with crowds of sick persons, that any traveler would find difficulty in gaining access to it.”18 In the collection, Lantfred tells story after story of healings and liberations and states that there were many more miracles he could have recounted. “I … have come trembling to the mighty vastness of this sea,” he writes in the letter prefacing the collection, “and, as if it were a drop from the ocean’s waters, thus have I collected together a very few from the many miracles of our saint.”19
As it would turn out, Lantfred’s collection now serves not just as a “drop from the waters” of Swithun’s cult of the 970s, but of late Saxon cults more generally. While we can assume that the late Saxon religious landscape was, in Diana Webb’s words, “honeycombed with local cults,”20 Lantfred’s text stands alone in giving us a wealth of specifics about individual supplicants and their miracles. Webb has noted the “inestimable value” of Lantfred’s collection, “for it shows that … the practice of pilgrimage and the conventions of miracle stories were familiar to the English in the late tenth century.”21 Indeed, Lantfred’s text is like a spotlight on a stage that otherwise remains dark or barely illuminated. Why was miracle collecting so rare in late Saxon England? It is not that Lantfred’s text was not admired: Wulfstan of Winchester versified the entire collection around 996, while Ælfric, the famed Old English homilist, made a Latin abbreviation of Lantfred’s collection and translated it into Old English.22 Wulfstan concluded his versification by noting that Swithun’s miracles continued “up to the present day,” and Ælfric stated at the end of his vernacular translation that “as long as I have lived, there have been abundant miracles [of Swithun].”23 While both Wulfstan and Ælfric added a couple of miracle stories in the course of their writings, neither thought to make a collection of new stories, not even with Lantfred’s splendid example before them.24 It would be left to a post-Conquest collector to start where Lantfred had left off.
In this chapter, I read the composition of Lantfred’s collection in the context of the lack of miracle collecting in late Saxon England and seek explanations for both collection and context. Lantfred’s collection is usually thought to have been written at the instigation of Bishop Æthelwold and the monks of the Old Minster with the aim of promoting Swithun’s cult and the monastic reform movement. I see little evidence for this. I argue that Lantfred’s collection is better viewed within a literary framework and as a largely self-instigated work. The collection, in my reading, is the result of a conjunction of highly unusual circumstances. There were many cults, but very few writers of Lantfred’s west Frankish background and interests in England in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Late Saxon monks who could have collected miracle stories, someone like Ælfric, for instance, did not share Lantfred’s sense that it was important to do so. To take an analogous example, late Saxons also did not think it was important to build the kind of enormous churches that Normans would begin to construct soon after their arrival in England.25 The lack of large churches in the late Saxon landscape does not indicate disrespect for Christian worship. So too, the lack of late Saxon miracle collections should not be read as disrespectful: cults, as argued in the chapters above, did not need collections to thrive. Lantfred’s composition of this one collection, this foreign monk’s sense that he should write about Swithun’s miracles “so that such great favours may not lie hidden from succeeding generations,”26 was a happy chance. His text gives us, in Lapidge’s words, an “astonishingly detailed picture … of life in late tenth-century England.”27 It also gives us a base from which to explore the early history of English miracle collecting.
Lantfred begins his collection with a prefatory letter addressed to the monks of the Old Minster and then a preface that describes Christ’s incarnation, the Anglo-Saxons’ conversion to Christianity, and Christ’s decision “to grant to His Anglo-Saxons a heavenly gift [i.e., Swithun].”28 Lantfred complains in the letter that “very little” was known of Swithun’s life and quotes Priscan’s lament about “the shortage of writers.” Lantfred would not attempt to describe Swithun’s life either: “let us come to those things which without any doubt took place posthumously at the man of God’s tomb.”29
The ensuing collection divides into two sharply distinct sections. In the first three chapters of the text, Lantfred constructs a tidy origin myth or “inventio” for the beginnings of Swithun’s cult. In 968, the dead Swithun announces himself in a vision to a blacksmith (chapter 1); in 969, Swithun performs his first miracle (chapter 2); in 971, Swithun performs a miracle that convinces everyone of his sanctity (chapter 3).30 At the close of chapter 3, Lantfred states briefly that Swithun’s relics, which were situated by a cross in a graveyard outside of the Old Minster, were exhumed and placed inside the church by “the venerable lord bishop Æthelwold and by the distinguished abbots Ælfstan and Æthelgar.” These three chapters are the longest in the collection, together comprising over one-third of the entire length of the text. The fourth chapter is transitional: here Lantfred discusses the many miracles in the days and months after the translation and writes about his own eyewitness of the great crowds at Winchester.
Chapters 5 through 39 of the collection all concern post-translation miracles. In this, the longer section of his text, Lantfred does not bother with dates or attempt to tell an overall story.31 The cult is just there, hugely there. In the first story of this section (chapter 5), ill people on the Isle of Wight already know that “the holy bishop was prevailing with his marvelous miracles” at the Old Minster in Winchester, and when they get there, the monks already have a “usual manner” for celebrating Swithun’s miracles.32 Lantfred alludes to the size of Swithun’s cult in many other chapters as well: he describes how a sick man in Rome heard from other English pilgrims that “the Lord was healing countless illnesses of sick persons through the merit of St. Swithun,” and so hurried home to try his luck at Winchester; in another chapter, he tells how throngs of pilgrims were streaming by a blind man frustrated by his young guide’s desire to stop and eat lunch before entering Winchester.33 Over three-quarters of Lantfred’s stories concern healings: the blind, the paralyzed, the crippled, the mute, and those suffering from accidents or simply “serious” or “manifold” illnesses all make appearances.34