In Which Highly Indulges in Hagio-Tourism

Did you know that St John’s Cathedral Brisbane has all the windows in its south chapel dedicated to founding Anglo-Saxon, Irish and Welsh saints? I didn’t, but now I do and they were very lovely.

I went up to St John’s yesterday on the recommendation of assorted fellow-conference-goers at AEMA. On the Wednesday of the conference, before my flight got in, there had been a trip down to The Cathedral of St Stephen, the Catholic cathedral, for a demonstration and lecture on medieval organ music, which I’m rather sorry I missed. At any rate, St Stephens was declared to be nice, but not up to exacting medievalist standards in architecture, and so an excursion was made on the Thursday, by several attendees, up to St John’s.

Rear view of St Johns from Adelaide St, 1910. Photo from Wikipedia Commons.

St John’s is the Anglican (Episcopal, C of E) Cathedral of Brisbane, and will be the last Gothic cathedral ever built. The initial planning began in 1885; the nave was only finished last year, and the final of the three towers is yet to be erected. It is beautiful. I’ve never set foot in a more stunning building- although that just tells you I’ve never been to Europe.

So let’s talk about some of the outstanding features of St Johns. First of all, from the front, it looks a children’s birthday cake. The outer cladding is in shades of grey and pink, and having gone there expecting a neo-gothic marvel, my heart sank a little.

Front view of St Johns before the two front towers were erected. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons- released into the public domain by the photographer. Presumably that is him or his friend in the picture.

Happily, as soon as you step under the west porch, you look up into an intricate web of vaulting, made from sandstone, cut small and fine. WikiCommons has a slightly blurry image of the vaulting in the quire (although actually i think it’s the apse).

Inside, everything is long and thin and delicately curved, as a good gothic cathedral ought to be. The only odd thing about it is that the final bay of the nave- completed only recently- is of noticeably different stone to the rest of it.

The nave of St Johns, looking toward the west door.

I was struck by the overwhelming emphasis on verticality- this photo is taken facing the wrong way, so it doesn’t quite capture the effect. You walk in and your eyes are drawn up before they look along. The ornamentation at the top of the columns is minimal, and the lines are kept clean and vertical on the second tier of arches as well (can someone give me the technical term for that second tier?). Compare, for example, to the interior of Salisbury Cathedral (Below left, courtesy of WikiCommons), an early example of English Gothic:

English Gothic, I am told by Wikipedia and also by a book whose title I have forgotten, is characterised by emphasis on length and horizontality which is equal to or greater than the emphasis on height and verticality.

On the other hand, St Johns has in common with Salisbury a slim light feeling to the columns which the vertically-oriented French cathredals don’t seem to have. St Johns has less clustered columns per actual upright that does Salisbury (only three), but compare to the heavy columns of St Denis (Below, courtesy of WikiCommons):

Where St Johns falls down, in my humble opinion, is in the matter of windows. Look at St Denis here- you can see the light pouring in through these upper windows. Salisbury has the same second teir of arches going on that St Johns does, but you can still see that light floods in from the apse and from the sides. The windows at St Johns are exclusively thin, individual English Lancet Windows. If you look back up at the interior view of the west front, you’ll see that there are just three windows- long, thin, and spaced apart. Compare this to the west facade of York Minster:

(York Minister, courtesy of WikiComons)

York Minster, I presume (having never been there) is completely flooded in the afternoons by light from these windows, which are composed of individual lancet windows combined into one. Now consider Truro Cathedral, Cornwall, which was designed by John Loughborough Pearson, the same architect who designed St Johns Brisbane:

(Truro Cathedral, courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)

That big rose window, which is typical of French Gothic cathedrals, as well as the four lancet windows on either side of it, would do a wonderful job of lighting the nave.

No one seems to have pictures of apse windows, but logic tells me that if you need electric footlights at the base of the columns in your apse (which St Johns does), or hanging lights in your quire, then there is only one thing to say: Gothic Architecture: UR DOIN IT RONG.

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Leaving the architecture alone for a bit, the other reason I went up there was the cushions, about which I heard much praise over Thursday night’s conference dinner. All the pews have cushions on them, each cushion being donated by and dedicated to a different Anglican parish in Australia. When the cushions are properly arranged (and it looks like someone in the congregation enjoys mixing them up), each pew has four cushions which, when placed side by side, form one long machine-embroidered picture. There are some lovely landscapes, and some striking sets depicting Australian water-birds.

(Lady Chapel, St John’s Brisbane, courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.)

In the Lady Chapel on the north side, however, is a set of eight four-cushion depictions of the life of Mary in ‘modern times’. For some reason the medievalists who told me about this were half-cringing, but it’s not like medieval iconography was free of anachronisms, is it? Granted, the sight of Mary and Joseph peering at a parking meter which said ‘no spaces’ made me cringe a little too, but the Madonna and Child depiction is particularly lovely. How many cathedrals have a depiction of the Virgin Mary naked? Not many, I’ll bet. She has not long given birth, and is holding the infant Christ to her breast. The newborn Christ does not mysteriously look nine months old, as many of them do. He’s not quite the wrinkly red alien most newborns are, but he does have the ridiculously oversized head and hair all stuck down to his scalp. And no halos in sight. Joseph is peering over Mary’s shoulder with an expression of mixed concern and confusion, which seems about right for a first-time father.

I do want to know how the heavily pregant Mother of Christ found time- while travelling, too- to shave her legs and underarms and keep her pubic region neatly trimmed, though. I wonder if the cushion designer even thought about how bloody difficult it would be to depilate when nine months pregnant?

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And now, as promised, the bit about Anglo-Saxon saints! The south chapel has all its windows dedicated to founding saints / patron saints of important British cathedrals. Along the east wall you will find St Alban, St Augustine, St Oswald (twice. or are there two St Oswalds?), and someone else whose name I have aggravatingly forgotten. On the south wall, there are St Patrick, St Ninian, St David and another Welshman whom I have likewise forgotten. And then right at the west end of the chapel, but still on the south wall, there is St AEthelthryth, under the name of Etheldreda.

The iconography seems to be heavily based on this image from the Benedictional of St AEthelwold, which I have abused in the interests of icon-making (right), but in much brighter colours. She wears blue, with a blue halo and gold crown; her neck-coverings are white; she carries something green and leafy in her left hand, as in the Benedictional, and but the book in her other hand is red and is accompanied by another long piece of foliage topped by what looks like it might be white Australian flannel flowers, but could as well be any other white flower for all I know about botany. There’s a red, green and blue background behind her, and a red ribbon with the words ‘Ely Cathedral’ in gold (as with one of the St Oswalds and the other bloke whose name I’ve forgotten, who were accompanied by their cathedral titles. I wonder if they were all cathedrals associated with the Benedictine reform?). I have a feeling I’ve seen another window or picture somewhere which is closer to this than is the Benedictional, but google images isn’t turning up anything helpful.

Furthermore, to my great delight, as I was buying postcards, the lady in the shop told me their Etheldreda postcard (the only postcard with a saint’s window shown on it) was the most popular card .

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To finish up, and speaking of postcards: having tacked three to my wall and put aside various ones for friends, I have two left over. First two people to comment and then send an email to nakedphilologist AT gmail DOT com with their postal address can have a postcard from the last gothic cathedral ever to be built! One is of the apse and the high altar, and one is a view of the Genesis Window from the side, under an arch.

The High Altar, St John’s Brisbane. (Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.) Note the slim three-part colums, and bemoan the fact that down in the ambulatory, there are footlights lighting up the base of each column from the rear.

And the moral of today’s lecture is: when in Australia, visit St John’s Brisbane .

Dear Google

Just to be clear on this:

none of AElric’s Saint’s Lives deal with Homosexual saints. Most of AElfric’s saints are stridently celibate, so at best you could call them anti-sexual. I doubt AElfric had any idea about ‘Homosexuality’ as an umbrella identity, although he certainly knew some people commited acts of Sodomy. Just not his saints.

We here at Helpful Industries suggest you look elsewhere for legends about homosexual saints (I believe you will find relevant, more recent, accretions to ledgends like that of St Sebastian).

The Humourous Later Life of St Aethelthryth

So, my attempt to make Arthurian fudge cookies isn’t going so well. When the recipe says ‘refrigerate for an hour’, but your fridge is full, covering the mixture and putting it outside for a while will only be a suitable substitute if you live somewhere where winter is actually COLD.

And on with the later life of St Aethelthryth! If you recall, we left her two weeks ago, newly proffessed as a nun at Coldingham. One week ago, we looked at her image in the Benedictional of St Aethelwold, in which she appears the right holy sourpuss.

After only a year as a nun, Aethelthryth was appointed abbess at Ely, which, if I recall correctly, was a new foundation at the time. Aelfric tells us she was a mother to many nuns- Mecthild Gretsch, in her book ‘Aelfric and the Cult of Saints’, writes as if everyone knew that Ely in Aethelthryth’s day was a double monastery, but how everyone comes by this information I’m not sure. (It could be Aelfric’s use of the term ‘mynstre’, but I don’t know what the word for convent would be if it were a distinct term…) I also read a theory once- and this was back before I had any idea how to spot a crackpot Anglo-Saxon theory when I saw it- that Ely before Aethelwold refounded it was never a ‘real’ monastery, but a house where Aethelthryth and her sisters and their women retired to live chastely (not unlike the ‘nunnan’, not nuns but consecrated widows, a distinction Sarah Foot makes in her several-volume work, ‘Veiled Women’).

Regardless of the formal arrangements at Ely, Aethelthryth continued to be on her best saintly behavior. She fasted, eating only one meal a day, except for feast days; she prayed alone; she wore woollen clothes. She took a bath only on high feast days, and then only after first bathing everyone else in the convent with her own hands.

Eight years on, she grew a ’swelling’ under her jaw- variously accounted for as a tumour, swollen glands, and a leftover plague buboe. As you do, if you’re a saint, Aethelthryth thanked God for sending her an ‘affliction in her neck’, concluding that it was punishment for having worn necklaces adorning said neck in her youth. ‘And now’, she said, ‘me thinketh that God’s justice may cleanse my guilt, since I now whave this swelling, which shineth instead of gold, and this scorching heat instead of sparkling gems.’ (Trans. in Skeat, which is not, as it turns out, by Skeat, but by Skeat, Gunning and Wilkinson, the two latter ladies having done all the grunt work and Skeat the revision.)

A leech was called to ’shoot’ the swelling, and shoot it he did, ‘and there came out matter’. In spite of this helpful leech, Aethelthryth ‘gloriously departed to God’ on the third day after his ministrations.

Strangely, dying of a tumour qualifies her for an entry in Bede’s Martyrology- the only Anglo-Saxon saint therein, in fact-, which interesting piece of information I found via Michelle of Heavenfield.

Having carked it, Aethethryth was buried in a wooden coffin and remained quiet for sixteen years. After sixteen years, her sister Sexburh, now abbess, decided Aethelthryth belonged inside the church itself, and ordered the brethren- (ah, that’s where the double monastery thing comes in)- off into the fens to look for a nice big stone to make a sargophagus out of. Off they went, rowing their way to Grantchesteter, where they found a coffin-ready made, standing against a wall, made out of white marble. The brethren nicked off with the coffin, declaring it a miracle. This explanation seems to have been acceptable, and no one asked who the coffin might have belonged to in the first place.

Next stop: the graveyard. They pitched a tent over Aethelthryth’s grave and dug her up, singing hymns all the while. Lo and behold, she lay there as if asleep. The leech who had tended her was there, and gave assurance that she looked exactly as she did the day they buried her, save that the wound he had made was healed, and all her clothes were freshly pressed and laundered. Despite this last fact, Sexburh took out the body, had it bathed and dressed in new clothes, and interred in the church, where, conveniently, the new marble coffin was found to fit her body exactly and to have a hollow in the pillow just the right size for her head. Aethelthryth’s shrine, her first shroud and her first coffin all went on to be mighty potent in the way of healing miracles, and it was generally agreed that between the incorrupt body and the miracles, we had definite proof she had been a lifelong virgin.

Ely Cathedral- which did not exist in Aethelthryth’s day but is neverthless very pretty.

Aelfric doesn’t go into any great detail about Aethelthryth’s posthumous miracles, as he did with St Edmund. Instead, he goes on to a little appendix, beginning ‘In like manner have laymen also, as books tell us, preserved often their chastity in the marriage-state, for the love of Christ’, and proceeding with a short story adapted from the Vita Patrum, about an upstanding citizen who lived with his wife in ‘claenysse’ (chastity, purity, continence- the same word Aelfric uses for the virgin Aethelthryth, but not limited to absolute abstinence), had three kids and then abstained, lived a virtuous life and finally entered a monastery. There have been all kinds of speculations about this appendix- a good summary of which you can find in Peter Jackson (not the director)’s article in Anglo-Saxon England for the year 2000, entitled ‘Aelfric and the purpose of Christian marriage’. Suffice it to say, Aelfric seems to have had nearly as much trouble with Aethelthryth’s obstinate abstinence has he did with Judith, who used her sexual attractiveness to manipulate men. (Aelfric wrote a homily/letter on Judith, which can be found in an eddition by Assman or in an online edition by Lee.) In the case of Judith, he carefully wrote out all hints of sex from the narrative, but it’s not really possible to rewrite Aethelthryth as a good wife and queen, when her whole sanctity rests on her virginity. Instead, throughout the Life Aelfric refers back to Bede and his judgement of Aethelthryth; he also shifts power off Aethelthryth and onto God, as he does with Judith; and finally he appends this example of marital ‘claennysse’ appropriate to the layity. In my humble opinion, it’s the word eac (also) which is crucial here. Laymen also have often preserved their chastity, Aelfric announces, implicitly setting Aethelthryth appart from the laity even though she lived most of her life as a laywoman. Aelfric certainly didn’t like sex much, or want anyone to enjoy it, but he did understand that the laity had to marry and reproduce; if anyone, male of female, was going to neglect their conjugal duties in imitation of Aethelthryth, he, Aelfric, wasn’t going to be responsible for it.

So that’s St Aethelthryth for you. Next week… who knows? Maybe something really odd, like the Seven Sleepers.

St AEthelthryth: Some entertaining pictures

AEthelthryth’s amusing afterlife will have to wait for next week, I think. I’m still settling into Awesome’s house, where I’m cat-sitting for a few weeks, and I was going to make a quick post with some images, inspired by the exciting discovery of a facsimile Benedictional of St AEthelwold on her bookshelf, before knuckling down to work:

St AEthelthryth, bearing a flower, which refers to Bede’s hymn in her honour, which is full of floral imagery. AEthelthryth is the only Anglo-Saxon woman in the Choir of Virgins, depicted in the opening folios of the Benedictional- she and St Swithun, I think, are the only Anglo-Saxon saints in the whole thing.
She doesn’t look too happy, really. You’d think, having got what she wanted (a habit), she’d look a little more serene. Joyful in the lord, and all that. But apparently not. Can anyone tell me who the preachy lookin’ fellow on the page opposite her is? And what he’s carrying?

My intention to do some work was defeated by the possibilities of humourous hagiographical icons. Some teasers:

Plus a few more in my LJ.

AElfric: quite a tricksy fellow

*Scratches head* I swear, I will never understand the ways of AElfric. In my quest to put together an essay about the importance of books in the Life of St Edmund, I happily stumbled across a synopsis of his source text, the Passio Sancti Eadmundi of Abbo of Fleury. Abbo, who had made a tactical retreat from the monastic politics of Fleury and buggered off to England to advise the Benedictines there, wrote the Passio based on the testimony of St Dunstan, who had his information from Eadmund’s sword-bearer, who either had it from the unnamed observer who saw the martyrdom, or was himself said observer.

Looking at this synopsis, I can see that AElfric made a few particular changes: he shortened Abbo’s introduction; he twiddled with the representation of Eadmund a little, presumably to make him as heroic as possible under the circumstances; he altered Bishop Theodred’s penance; and he left out a final moralising on the value of virginity.

The alteration of the penance is fortuitous for my purposes. In the passio, Theodred hangs the thieves and the next day regrets it. There is no mention of books in this synopsis, although I’ll have to chase down a proper translation. ¹As penance, he begs to wash, clothe and re-coffinate the body of St Eadmund.

By the time AElfric gets his hands on the story, however, books are explicitly the catalyst for his penitence; and he asks the nation to join him in a three-day fast. I reckons I can argue that this change universalises the relevance of canon law and canon law books and invests the laity with an interest in their contents and use.

So that’s happy.

On the other hand, AELfric cuts out the passage at the end which attributes his incorrupt body to his virginity, while in the same book he insists that AEthelthyth’s incorruptibility is testament to her virginity. Abbo, a bigshot Benedictine reformer, used the end of Edmund’s life, and his apparent virginity to appeal to those who served him to follow in his chaste footsteps. Why on earth would AElfric, himself a staunch second-generation Benedictine reformer and opponent of clerical marriage, leave out this interpretation? I dinnae understand it, I don’t think it’s crucial for this essay, but it’s sitting there and niggling at me and driving me batty.

I was reading Peter Jackson (not the director)’s article ‘AElfric and the purpose of Christian marriage’ (ASE 29) the other day, in which he discussed AElfric’s addition of an exemplar from the Desert Fathers, a fellow who had three kids with his wife before embarking on thirty years of married abstention, and then buggering off into a monastery. In the first part of the article, he talks about AELfric’s habit of singling out the virtue of chastity above all other virtues attributed to a given figure, particularly when using Desert Fathers material. With St Eadmund, meanwhile, he deliberately avoids talking about virginity, even though it was in his otherwise authoritative source. Very, very strange.

My only thought here is that perhaps lifelong chastity is not something AElfric regards as conventionally appropriate for the laity. As the Jackson article- not mention AElfric himself, constantly propping up his authority by reference to Bede- shows, AElfric had terrible trouble with AEthelthryth, a ’strong willed, sexually autonomous woman’. It’s not really the Done Thing as Queen of anywhere to refuse sexual congress (and therefore procreation) with your husband. The exemplar at the end functions as a sort of balance, an example of proper marital chastity, a co-operative effort between husband and wife. It also provides a model of chastity which enables marriage to fulfil its proper function: the creation of children, after which abstention shall commence by mutual agreement.

Maybe AElfric doesn’t want to hold up Edmund as an example of virginity, because Edmund is a member of the laity- and a king, at that. You really do want your kings to produce sons, particularly when you have Vikings swarming around trying to conquer your kingdom.

On the other hand, maybe AElfric is just frustrating and weird.

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1. Anyone know if there’s a translation of Abbo’s Passio out there somewhere? It looks as though there might be one in Winterbottom’s Lives of Three English Saints, from the Fisher Catalogue, but that book has a long list of holds on it. A keyword search for ‘Abbo of Fleury’ only brings up four books, though. Does he go by another name? Anyone know the title of his collection of saint’s lives?

I’m not the only one with strange interests…

WordPress’ tag surfer function is pretty awesome. Today, it directed me to ‘The Illegiterati’, who make a regular feature of Obscure Saint Blogging. Check out the account of St Ethelreda/AEthelthryth/Audrey, which seems to be based on some later sources than AElfric, which are lot more particular about her early life. Also featured are St Simeon, who didn’t quite get his miracles right, St Christina the Astonishing, and St Expeditus, patron saint of procrastinators.

Sorry for the series of linky posts. Procrastination is overwhelming my life, to the extent that I don’t even have time for my regular procrastinatory pursuits. Bless me, St Expeditus.

St AEthelthryth, Naysayer

It’s hard to improve on the AElfrician narrative for sheer weirdness, sometimes.

We will now write, miraculous though it is, regarding the holy St AEthelthryth, the English virgin, who was with two men and nevertheless remained a virgin.

It doesn’t get odder than that. But wait, it does! Her father, a man unfortunately named Anna, was king of the East Angles (which possibly makes AEthelthryth a distant cousin of St Edmund), and Anna was a bit of a god-botherer. His daughters, at least, inherited this trait, and none more so than AEthelthryth. Of Anna, AElfric informs us solemnly that ‘all his team was honoured by God’ (team- ‘line’ of descendants, progeny, family, etc).

This Anna married AEthelthryth off to a fellow named Tondbyrht, as his wife. Who knows what AEthelthryth thought about this at the time, but if she was determined at that stage to avoid hanky-panky, Tondbyrht didn’t put up any resistance. Quite possibly he wasn’t in a state to put anything up, because he carked it not long afterwards, and AEthelthryth was summarily handed off to King Ecfrid of Northumbria.

For twelve years AEthelthryth kept King Ecfrid hanging, and- even more bizarrely- for twelve years King Ecgfrid kept waiting for her to come around. He must’ve been a nice guy, King Ecfrid, and not inclined to enforce his conjugal rights. He stuck it out for twelve years, begging the Archbishop Wilfrid,¹ AEthelthryth’s spiritual adviser, to convince her to ‘have enjoyment of his marriage’, with no luck. He promised Wilfrid lands and money and what have you in return for a compliant wife, but no luck.

AEthelthryth, meanwhile, spent twelve years begging for permission to enter a nunnery, which Ecfrid steadfastly refused. Eventually, he gave up, and Wilfrid took her to Coldingham and veiled her as a nun.

There are a few things I wonder about, at this point in the story, and I think it all comes down to one man: Wilfrid.

Q: Why didn’t Ecfrid repudiate AEthelthryth from the day dot? An unconsummated marriage is grounds for annulment, yes?

A: Wilfrid. You don’t get far in your appeal for annulment if your local bishop wants you to stay married. (There could be political reasons here, like not wanting to alienate Anna, and I bet Wilfrid, an astute politician, would have brought them all out whenever the King spoke to him.)

Q: Why didn’t Ecfrid let AEthelthryth go into a nunnery when she first asked?

A: Wilfrid, surely. Was Wilfrid playing one off against the other? Was he telling Ecfrid he’d talk AEthelthryth around, and telling AEthelthryth to ask just one more time? Was he taking Ecfrid’s bribes, smiling, and then taking whatever AEthelthryth was offering him as ’spiritual adviser’ in her celibacy? (No, not like that. Well, ok, maybe like that. If it amuses you….)

AELfric relies heavily on Bede here, and having poked around in Bede, and Eddius Stephanus,  his biographer, Wilfrid strikes me as a very, very wily politician. I wouldn’t put it past him to be pulling all the strings in the King’s marriage… the question is: why?

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1. Have I mentioned my giant crush on the Archbishop Wilfrid of York (or really, of Ripon and Hexham, but his diocese included York)? Um. In case you can’t tell, my taste in dead men runs to powerful reformist prelates…
Yes, I do realise it’s a bit odd.

The Hilarious (After)Life of St Eadmund, with still more apologies to AElfric.

King Eadmund lived a boring life full of piety, generosity and justice. Things hotted up when Vikings stalked in his land and ran off with his head. But wait, it doesn’t stop there! What Eadmund’s life lacked in action and adventure, he made up for in the afterlife.

Last week, we left the East Angles as they ventured into the forest in search of Eadmund’s missing head. Off they went, into the deep dark forest, and, as sensible woodsmen do, they shouted out to one another as they went:

Where are you, comrade?

Where are you, comrade?

And the head shouted back to them:

Over here! Over here!

As often as one of them shouted out Where are you, comrade?, the head of King Eadmund shouted back: Over here! Over here! And soon enough they came across the head, nestled between the paws of a slavering, ravening wolf. This wolf really, really, desperately wanted to eat the head. Om nom nom, tasty head. However, luckily for the East Angles, God had given the wolf divine orders not to eat the head of king Eadmund. Not even a little bit. Not even a tiny snacking around the ears. (Unlike the Wolfish stalking Hinguar, real wolves obey God. Vikings are mean and nasty and diabolical. Subtlety and tolerance? Not Aelfric’s cup of tea.)

The East Angles were quite pleased to have the head back, and they grabbed it out of the wolf’s paws and scurried back to the castle. The wolf followed them all the way back to the town, and, realising that it wasn’t going to get even a nibble of the head, finally gave up and went home. Poor wolf.

Delighted with the way things were going (despite the obliteration of their king and most of their countrymen), the East Angles got together and put up a church over Eadmund’s body. Some time later, (in 869) their descendants decided that a shoddy job and been done, and built a grand shiny new church. Predictably, when they pulled out Eadmund’s body, it was all perfectly intact, head attatched, wounds healed, the whole works. (‘Now, if I were a skeptical person,’ says a devout audience, ‘which I’m not, that might suggest to me that it wasn’t the same body.‘) What’s more, there’s a nice silk thread around his red throat. (‘If I were a skeptical person,’ says my devout listener, ‘I might be inclined to think it was the body of a recently hanged man…’)

The ruins of Bury St Edmunds Abbey, est. 869.

At any rate, miraculous preservation of body achieved, King Eadmund is set up in a brand spanking new church, with a holy widow to keep him company and clip his fingernails. (Her name was Oswyn, and her fondness for barbering and manicuring dead saints is all we know of her.) All the locals brought gifts and offerings in Eadmund’s honour, and Bishop Theodred decked the church out in gold and silver. The afterlife was going well for King Eadmund, but a rich church will attract unwonted attention, and one night, eight ‘unblessed’ theives turned up, bent on knicking off with the offerings.

Some of them slogged at the door haspe with sledge-hammers; some filed around it with files; some of them got spades and tried to dig under the door; and some of them brought ladders and tried to get in by the windows. For a mere eight thieves, they were swarming all over the place like flies. But for naught- St Eadmund, it turns out, was the best kind of saint: better than a closed-circuit video camera. He froze those theives in their tracks, and held them there all night. When the townspeople (and presumably the monks) turned up in the morning, they found eight thieves- some hanging from ladders, some frozen over spades, and so on, stuck fast in their tracks. They picked them up (apparently without un-freezing them) and dragged them off to Bishop Theodred.

Now, Bishop Theodred was a pretty good bishop, but not the best bishop around. He was good about donating silver and gold to churches, not so good on his canon law. And so he (conveniently?) forgot that he, as a bishop, shouldn’t be sentencing anyone to death, and ordered the poor frozen thieves to be hung. And hung they were, nowhere does AElfric mention any un-freezing.

After the thieves were good and dead, Bishop Theodred thought to look in his books¹, and suddenly remembered that he was a churchman, and not supposed to be orchestrating hangings. He was properly sad, and feared for his immortal soul, and ordered the East Angles to fast with him for three days and pray for his salvation. (Salvation: so much easier if you have minions!)

Next up, a fellow named Leofstan, of a more skeptical bent than was generally good for you in Anglo-Saxon England, came along and demanded to see the intact body of St Eadmund. The monks were obliging, and opened up the tomb for him to have a looksee. Leofstan looked, and saw, and went barking mad and ran off and committed suicide. I’ve no idea what was going on there, but AElfric assures us it was a copycat miracle, in the model of St Lawrence, who sent mad seven men who dared to look upon his intact body.

Apparently many more hilarious miraculous things happened to St Eadmund in his afterlife, but AElfric didn’t feel like writing them down for us, and so we don’t get to find out what they were.

~

1. Look, look, books! AElfric and Wulfstan seem to be on common ground here: books (ie, canon law books) are crucial to proper bishoply behavior.

The Hilarious Death of St Eadmund, part two

Firstly, allow me to gloat about three things:

1. I finally finished the dratted chapter. It was supposed to be half a chapter but blew itself out to around 4000 words. I sat down to write 800 or so concluding words last night and ended up writing 2500 words. But I think they’re bloody good words, so that’s happy.

2. I have been relieved of the deadline (which, to be fair, I nominated in the first place) for my Anglo-Saxon essay. Apparently since there’s only me in the class, I can write whatever I want and hand it in whenever I want.

3. The University appear to have put five hundred dollars in my bank account without warning or explanation. This is exciting (pays for flights to the Australian Early Medieval Association conference in October…), but also somewhat disconcerting (what if I wasn’t meant to get five hundred dollars?). I am supposing that it is the same prize I won last year, and that information to that effect will turn up eventually.

And now, on to

The Hilarious Death of St Eadmund, with apologies to AElfric:

Last week, Stalking Hinguar and his ravening Vikings were on their way to take King Eadmund of East Anglia captive. Scary stuff.

King Eadmund stood in his royal hall, resolute and noble, and completely without backup. Into the hall came Hinguar and his Vikings, and Eadmund raised up his weapons and….

Hurled them. Not at the Vikings; just away. This, AElfric opines, is because he was imitating Christ, who wouldn’t let Peter defend him with weapons, when Christ was under attack. Christ’s example or no, this is not a good way to deal with Vikings.

Hinguar and his Vikings marched straight up to the dais, grabbed King Eadmund and trussed him up like a christmas ham. They poked fun at him and battered him with cudgels, and then stuck him under their arms, dragged him out of the hall, and shackled him to a tree. Then, moderation not being a traditional virtue of pillaging Vikings, they proceeded to whip him with scourges. AElfric tells us that King Eadmund ‘cried out to the Savior Christ’ the whole time. I’m not sure why this is surprising, really. If someone was thrashing me with a scourge, I would certainly be shouting ‘JESUS CHRIST!’, and every other swear word I knew.

Eadmund’s caterwauling eventually pissed off the Vikings. Taking a few steps back, they shot him repeatedly with spears, until he was stuck all over with them, just like hedgehog’s bristles, not unlike St Sebastian.

Hinguar then got really fed up with Eadmund, who was still kicking up a stink and shouting about Jesus. He waved a commanding Viking hand, and someone lopped off Eadmund’s head. Eadmund died crying out to Christ, and we know this because, conveniently, there was a watching Anglo-Saxon nearby, miraculously hidden from the Vikings.

Soon enough, what remains of Eadmund’s people come along, and, shock and alarm, they find the body of King Eadmund, but Hinguar and co have nicked off with the head. (Leave a body with its head, after all, and it’s only a matter of time before you have a zombie on your hands…) The Mysterious Watcher chooses this moment to unveil himself, and to conveniently announce that he saw the Vikings peg the head off into the forest somewhere.

So off they go into the forest, the remnant of the East Angles, poking around in the bushes for a decorpsed head. What will happen next? Tune in next week to find out!

The hilarious death of St Eadmund: Part One

I’ve been translating AElfric’s Life of St Eadmund this past week. Which is funny, because it contains very little of Eadmund’s life at all, but a whole lot of hilarity surrounding his death. Tonight, because sleep is for the weak, I present to you: St Eadmund Without the Boring Bits

King Eadmund ruled in East Anglia, and he was the most awesome king you could possibly imagine. He was gentle and generous and just, he was pious and princely, he was faithful and fair. He ruled over his people like a father and a shepherd.

Unfortunately for Eadmund, East Anglia had a sudden case of Vikings. A fellow named Hinguar stalked on the land, like a wolf, and then slew the people. Interestingly, this same Hinguar was Ivarr, son of Ragnar Loðborok (‘Hairy-Pants’, or more stodgily, ‘Shaggy-breeches’). Ragnar had been busy sacking Paris, and Ivarr later went on to cause havoc in Ireland. And while Hinguar was stalking around in East Anglia, his brother Hubba was controlling Northumbria. Quite a respectable lineage of Vikings, they were.

But you don’t want to know about Hinguar’s family tree. What you want to know is that he sent Eadmund a message saying:

You are powerless, and my army need somewhere to stay for the winter. Give me all your goldhoards, and I will let you live as my underking.

Eadmund was a little taken aback by this, and he called a nearby bishop. This bishop was a pragmatic sort of fellow, and he said to King Eadmund: ‘Look, your kingliness: you’re outnumbered, you have no army, and you’re going to die. Either agree to his terms or run away.’

Eadmund thought about this for a while, and then he said to the bishop: ‘Hang on, bishop! I’ve never run away from my enemies yet, and I’m not about to start now!’

So king Eadmund went back to the messenger and said:

You’re an arrogant bastard of a Viking, and I ought to kill you, but I won’t defile my hands with your blood. You tell your chief Hinguar to bugger off- I won’t serve him, unless he converts to Christianity first.

So the messenger trotted back the way he had come, and along the way, he met Hinguar, with his bloodthirsty band of Vikings, all ready to take Eadmund down.

‘No luck,’ says the messenger. ‘The snotty little English king is going to be all honourable about things.’

Whereupon Hinguar smirks, and gives orders that his henchmen go after the unprotected Eadmund and take him captive.

What will happen next? Tune in to the Naked Philologist for talking heads, miraculous uncorrupted bodies, bumbling theives, and a madman.