Wonderful to Relate. Rachel Koopmans
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desirable as it might be, then, to read Lantfred’s collection as a text written in the service of Æthelwold and reformed monasticism, Swithun was clearly the figure who was uppermost in Lantfred’s mind. He seems to have been thinking of Æthelwold little or not at all. Lantfred certainly did not view Æthelwold as the creator of Swithun’s cult. For Lantfred, Swithun’s cult was both bigger than and separate from Æthelwold’s monastic reform—it was created by Christ himself. Historians will, of course, take a more de-tached view of this question, but we too should be careful not to give a prelate like Æthelwold more credit than he is due. It appears that Swithun’s cult was active, possibly quite active, before Æthelwold translated his relics.63 The rash of relic translations undertaken at reformed monasteries in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries by Æthelwold and others were most likely done not with the thought of initiating cults, but of hitching on to them.64 A prelate could help the visibility of a cult by a translation, but could not force a cult into existence: Swithun’s cult subsisted and grew because of the enthusiastic creation and exchange of miracle stories among many scores of people, most of whom never spoke with or even laid eyes on Æthelwold. Would the blind man seeing again, or the slave-girl freed from her unkind master, credit their experiences to Æthelwold’s actions or think of them as advancing Æthelwold’s monastic reforms? Would Æthelwold, for that matter?
Æthelwold himself does not mention Swithun in any of his writings. From the few instances in which Æthelwold and Swithun are connected in contemporary texts, it appears that Æthelwold may have viewed Swithun’s cult as helping his pastoral efforts: the reformation of hearts, in other words, more than the reformation of monasteries. Wulfstan of Winchester devoted a brief chapter to Swithun’s cult in his Life of Æthelwold. In it, he writes: “two lamps blazed in the house of God, placed on golden candlesticks; for what Æthelwold preached by the saving encouragement of his words, Swithun wonderfully ornamented by display of miracles.”65 In one of the closing chapters in his collection, Lantfred retells a story about the vision of an ill nobleman that he says Æthelwold told him. In Lantfred’s description of the man’s vision, Swithun is unusually full of moral guidance. Swithun exhorts the nobleman to “follow in Christ’s footsteps,” “do no evil to anyone,” “imitate Christ,” “love your enemies; do good to them that hate you,” “if thy enemy be hungry, give him to eat,” and so on. Might we hear Æthelwold’s voice here?66
Æthelwold appears in only a few other passages of Lantfred’s collection. The key human player in Lantfred’s collection is not Æthelwold, but Eadsige, the sacrist of the Old Minster. Eadsige had been a canon of the Old Minster before Æthelwold reformed the house in 964. He was expelled along with the rest of the canons when Æthelwold installed monks from Abingdon at the Old Minster, but he later rejoined the community as a monk.67 This extraordinary figure appears to have been Lantfred’s chief conversational partner in the making of the collection.68 He appears in five chapters spaced throughout the collection (cc. 1, 5, 16, 20, 36), including the story about the blacksmith’s vision that begins the collection. In the vision, Swithun tells the blacksmith to send word to Eadsige, then expelled and living at Winchcombe, that he was to tell Æthelwold it was time to translate Swithun’s relics. Eadsige, Lantfred writes, was at that time full of disgust “not only with the bishop of Winchester cathedral but also with all the monks dwelling there,” and refused to speak with the bishop.69 This is just the first example in the collection of Lantfred writing from Eadsige’s perspective. Lantfred concludes the chapter by rejoicing that two years after the message came from the blacksmith, Eadsige was finally able to overcome his anger, rejoin the community at Winchester, and “become a devout monk much beloved by God.”70 Strikingly, Lantfred forgets to tell us whether Eadsige ever discussed the translation with Æthelwold: the point of the story becomes Eadsige’s return to the Old Minster.
No other monk of the Old Minster appears like this in Lantfred’s collection—in fact, no other monk is even named. Lantfred describes how Eadsige held the keys to the enclosure surrounding Swithun’s tomb and how he would ring a bell to alert the community that Swithun had performed a miracle. In one chapter, Eadsige carries on a lengthy discussion with a slave-girl and a young cleric; in another, Eadsige comforts a crippled young man and returns later to find him cured; in a third, Eadsige questions a man about his state of health before his miracle.71 Perhaps the most telling story, though, has to do with the ringing of the bell. Some monks “bore it ill that they were so frequently awakened from their night-time sleep” to give thanks for miracles, Lantfred writes, and “they perversely persuaded others” to ignore Eadsige’s bell-ringing.72 After nearly two weeks of this—Eadsige must have been very upset—Swithun appeared in a vision to a noblewoman, telling her to tell Æthelwold that the monks of the Old Minster were not being properly grateful. Æthelwold sent a reprimand to the monks, and things improved: “From that time on … no matter how often a miracle was performed at the body of the blessed saint, whether during the day or in the middle of the night, and the sacrist rang the bell even lightly, the monks went to the monastery in order to praise the omnipotent Lord.”73
The detail about “ringing the bell lightly” certainly sounds like it would have come from Eadsige. When Lantfred writes that 25 people were cured on the day of the Feast of the Assumption or that 36 people were cured in three days, it likely that such information came to him from the man who rang the bell for all those miracles.74 Indeed, Eadsige may well be behind more chapters of Lantfred’s collection than those in which he is named. If Lantfred did not speak Old English, or spoke it haltingly, it would have been difficult for him to get details about many of the miracles in his collection for himself. Lantfred claims to have spoken with the blacksmith whose vision was relayed to Eadsige—“I learned from the smith himself that these things had happened exactly as the present little book describes”75—but otherwise does not present himself as listening to the lay English men and women featured throughout his collection. In two chapters, Lantfred mentions how people came and “reported to the monks of that place” about their miracles—it seems likely that Lantfred then heard the story from the monks, rather than the original tellers.76 Lantfred many well have heard many of the stories he recounts in the comfortable company of Eadsige and other Old Minster monks enthusiastic about Swithun’s cult.
In the collection’s prefatory letter, Lantfred addresses the monks of the Old Minster: “I, the most worthless of all men … sustained by no prerogative of divine learning nor by any authority accruing from my good conduct, but obeying your commands, trusting in your prayers—have come trembling to the mighty vastness of this sea.” In the next sentence, Lantfred speaks of “the good will of you who are requesting the work.”77 Lapidge reads this passage as indicating that after Swithun’s translation, “the monks of the Old Minster soon felt the need to have these abundant miracles recorded, and the task fell to Lantfred.”78 However, Lantfred’s presentation of his composition as the result of a “request” seems more like a considerate genuflection than an indication that it was the Old Minster monks who had first felt a need for such a text. It had been over 150 years since an English monk had produced a miracle collection. Lantfred, in contrast, came from a monastery and a region in which miracle collections were actively being made. Fleury, Lantfred’s own monastery, had a distinguished tradition of miracle collecting. It was home to one of the most well-known collections of the early medieval period, Adrevald’s collection of the miracles of St. Benedict written in the 860s.79 While Adrevald’s collection was not so focused on contemporary healing miracles as Lantfred’s would be, this collection must have been known to Lantfred and impressed on him how a text could keep the memory of past miracles alive. Lantfred was also likely aware of the translations of relics and miracle collections compiled at Trier in the 960s, at Metz around the same time, in Picardy after 964, at Gorze in 965, and other contemporary examples, as Lapidge has outlined.80
It seems likely that Lantfred was the one who thought it was important to write a miracle collection. Writing was something Lantfred clearly enjoyed; in his collection for Swithun, he employs grecisms, rhyme, and other rhetorical pyrotechnics. Lantfred was such a fine writer, in fact, that Lapidge terms him “the most accomplished prose stylist active in England since the days of