Cult of saints in Anglo-Saxon England

[1] From that point on, specific criteria were set out for who could be considered a saint: they had to have either been martyred or lived a particularly virtuous life, and to have produced posthumous miracles.

[3] The cult of saints had become a centrally important aspect of Christianity from at least the fourth century, when it was criticised by the final pagan Emperor of the Roman Empire, Julian the Apostate.

[5] As a theoretical justification for this, several Christian thinkers — notably the Archbishop of Rouen, Victricius — argued that the saints produced such power that it even exuded from fragments of their bodies.

[10] At the beginning of the seventh century, Pope Gregory the Great wrote to Augustine — who was leading the Gregorian mission to convert the Kingdom of Kent to Christianity — informing him that he was sending not only manuscripts, vestments, and sacred vessels, but also "relics of the holy apostles and martyrs" to aid the conversion process.

[10] Circa 761, Benedict Biscop, who founded monasteries at Monkwearmouth and Jarrow, visited Rome and brought "holy relics of the blessed apostles and Christian martyrs" back to England.

"[3] While hagiographies often presented saints' cults as arising spontaneously out of popular devotion,[14] the establishment of such cults would have required an ecclesiastical impresario who could commission hagiographies, publicise alleged miracles, construct and decorate a shrine, organise a feast day, and if necessary organise the saints' site as a place of pilgrimage.

[29] In one of the anti-Norman rebellions, that led by Hereward the Wake, the rebels swore fealty to their cause on the body of St Æthelthryth—a local saint in the area of Ely where they were based—but there is no evidence that Æthelthryth became an enduring symbol of Anglo-Saxon resistance.

[30] Many of the Norman bishops and other ecclesiastical figures that were brought to England following the conquest utilised the pre-existing saints' cults to promote their own monasteries and churches.

[35] Evidence for these figures dates from the seventh and eighth centuries and thus it is unclear if they were brought to Anglo-Saxon England earlier, with the Gregorian Mission.

[39] It is not clear whether this Italian influence on the Anglo-Saxon cult of saints arose through texts that had travelled west or whether it had instead arisen through direct contact between the two regions of Europe.

[41] An Anglo-Saxon copy of the Hieronymian Martyrology, which was originally composed in Rome during the fifth century, likely arrived in England via Gaul, where various saints were appended to it.

[42] A mid ninth century Anglo-Saxon calendar—MS Digby 63 in the Bodleian Library—includes various Frankish saints' days in it, particularly those from the Flanders area, testifying to an influence.

[47] The lives of some of these saints is attested from sources written in the Anglo-Saxon period, although others only survive in hagiographic accounts produced after the Norman Conquest.

[49] One suggestion has been that the emphasis that the Anglo-Saxons placed on royal saints derived from the influence of pagan ideas that kings had a sacred role in society.

[54] The fact that motifs and tropes repeat in the various hagiographies of martyred saints led Rollason to suggest that the different authors were operating in a known hagiographical tradition and were borrowing from earlier works.

[55] For instance, the motif of a beam of divine light revealing the location of the body is associated with eight of these martyrs in their hagiographies; nine entail the murder being committed by a servant ordered to carry it out by their master; and seven claim that a religious foundation was established in the aftermath of the killing.

[56] That he was sanctified purely for the manner of his death is suggested by the Vita Oswaldi—probably authored by Byrhtferth of Ramsey between 995 and 1005—which does not describe him as having exhibited any particular virtues during his lifetime.

According to the story set forth in the Historia Regum annals, Eardwulf was put to death outside the gates of Ripon Minster, after which the monks carried his body to a church, where he revived during the night.

[61] Also attested only by late medieval sources are the murders of the Mercian princes Wulflad and Rufinus, allegedly by their father, who sought to punish them for converting to Christianity.

[63] It is perhaps relevant that the apparent proliferation of martyred royal saints occurred in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, shortly after the 786 visit of the Papal legates to England, during which they had strongly condemned the killing of kings and princes.

[65] In Anglo-Saxon England, hagiographies—or written accounts of a saints' life—were not designed to serve as accurate biographies but rather as outlining a holy life for others to emulate.

[76] The only known possible exception was St Guthlac of Crowland, whose hagiographer, Felix, vaguely described his body being interred under a monument, the nature of which was unspecified.

[78] One account of such a translation is provided by Bede, who relates that when Æthelthryth, the Abbess of Ely, died in 679, she was buried in a wooden coffin amid other deceased nuns, as had been her instruction.

[78] Bede also provided an account of the disinterment and reburial of St Cuthbert, Bishop of Lindisfarne, who had initially been buried in the floor of St. Peter's Church.

[79] Rollason suggested that the act of disinterment and then reburial within the church served to mark out the deceased's identity as a saint within a societal context that had no standard process of canonisation.

[81] The idea that the body and clothes of a deceased individual would be preserved at the time of disinterment was seen as a sign of sanctity in Anglo-Saxon England,[82] as it had also been in Gaul.

[85] Such preservation may have resulted from the particular conditions of the soil into which he had been placed, or it may have been that the body had been deliberately embalmed; the latter concept was known in Anglo-Saxon England, for instance appearing in a reference by Bede.

[87] The fragmentary stone chests in the shape of houses located at Jedburgh and St Andrews, both of which are attributed to the Anglo-Saxon period, may have represented reliquary-coffins.

[89] Records indicate that in a later period of time the ridges of the Hedda Stone collected dust which was then considered to have the power to bring about miracles; it is possible that this belief has Anglo-Saxon origins.

[95] They also featured in a number of recorded judicial ordeals carried out with the intention of determining whether an accused individual was innocent or guilty of a particular crime.