6
Tom Lynch
To revisit the question posed in the introduction, it is worth considering how miracles were made in medieval England in light of the evidence presented previously. Take the example of a boy cured of a deformity during Swithun’s translation as recorded by Wulfstan:
Meanwhile a woman brought her own son; she was moaning with spasmodic sobs because of this same child. It chanced that his fingers were twisted back across his palm; thus afflicted in each hand he had come forth from his mother’s womb. With burning faith she cast him upon the tomb from which the saint had been translated. By chance she was holding in her hands that variety of fruit which an Englishman calls cyresan (‘cherries’). She continued in prayer, suddenly (it was wonderful to see!) the boy jumped up wholly sound; he snatched the cherries away from the hands of his mother and ate them. When she saw this she joyously poured forth devout tears and said: ‘Glory be to You, bountiful Christ, Who desert no-one who hopes in You, but in Your kindness bestow unexpected gifts on the wretched. Glory be to you through the Lord, St Swithun, who in your compassion for me, a poor woman, have from heaven relieved this boy from so great an illness, and have restored him to me sound by your prayer alone.’ The miracle becomes known as its report flies through the town. Those who shortly before had withdrawn come together again; the countless people all around behold these mighty events. The bells sound as usual; all things praise Christ and at the same time the holy praise echoes their patron Swithun, through whom God granted such mighty miracles to the world.1
First came the moment of crisis, the point when a person could not endure their problem anymore and resorted to a saint for help. In this case, the suffering of a son caused his mother to act. Generally such crises were either chronic conditions which had become too much to bear or more immediate and unexpected emergencies. People’s tolerance for pain and misfortune must have varied a great deal, and whilst most supplicants had a serious problem, the saints were open to dealing with less extreme issues.2 These crises could be caused by anything, including the supplicants own misdeeds. Indeed, the whole process could be started by a crime against a saint. For the crisis to change into a miracle, the instigator had to have a knowledge of a saint.
In order to know of a saint, that saint first had to be recognised as such. For our purposes, there was no saint without an attendant community. In the previous example, the action takes place in the midst of the translation of Swithun. Saints could be discovered, rediscovered or have been subject to cult since time immemorial. All of the saints whose cults we have considered came to be enshrined within a church through a translation, but this was not necessary for miracles to be made. The invention of a saint and translating them involved the whole community. For instance the invention of Swithun involved the laity and the clergy of Winchester as well as the saint’s future custodians, supplicants and the saint himself.3 Likewise the 1136 translation of Guthlac at Crowland was requested by the monks of the abbey, permitted by Abbot Waltheof and confirmed by miraculous signs from Guthlac. Bishop Alexander of Lincoln helped to complete the ceremony, and throughout the translation, a crowd of lay and religious folk watched the proceedings and successfully petitioned miracles.4 A saint had to be known to a person for a miracle to be made, and this usually meant that a religious community looked after the relics and that stories about the saint, whether oral or written, were circulating. The first step in making a miracle was to have knowledge of the relevant saint.
Next came the action which triggered the miracle. This included everything from a quick prayer, as in the previous example, to an extended pilgrimage with attendant vigils and fasts. It also included everything from insulting a saint to attacking a saint’s shrine. This is the point when the contingency of a person’s life coincided with the structures of the cult of the saints. As such these actions were heterodox but not entirely unpredictable. For a miracle petition, a person had only to ask for help. If this did not result in a miracle, various degrees of elaboration could be included, resulting either in divine intervention or the end of a supplicant’s patience.5 If a person had committed an offence against a saint, they could spur the saint into a reactive miracle. If not, the saint’s community could petition the saint for revenge or to otherwise solve the problem induced by the offence. Either way, a person punished by the saints could then petition the saint to reverse or alleviate their punishment. All of these actions had a communal expectation of intercession behind them. Saints rewarded the righteous, punished their enemies and reconciled with the contrite. This expectation could be fulfilled anywhere.
The English saints interceded at their shrines and away from them. They cured people as far away as Greece and Italy; they saved people at sea and liberated the incarcerated. They even cured people on their way to visit them. In the same way, they could punish people regardless of where they were located. Even after death, a saint could exact their revenge. Despite this there remained a preference for the shrine as the locus of intercession. I believe this ties into the intimate relationship between saint and supplicant. Supplicants chose their saint, knew about them and connected with them on a human level. They knew, or found out, where the saint’s home was and wanted to visit them there. Where people asked for help at a distance, they usually had a compelling reason not to attend the saint in person. Usually this was due to the extremity or immediacy of their problem. There is something of a tension here between the universal and the local, between the spiritual potency of the saint and their embodied earthly form. Even when miracles were performed at a distance, people were often brought back to the shrine, finally, to give thanks.
Thanksgiving was pervasive and expected, if not strictly mandatory, much like the translation of the saints. Thanksgiving allowed people to address their debt to the saint, a debt which could never be fully repaid. For some it was enough to admit their debt to the saints, say thank you as best they could and move on with their lives. Others felt compelled to visit and revisit the shrine, donate huge fortunes or dedicate their whole lives to the saints. In the previous example, the mother immediately gave thanks for Swithun’s intercession, and this was picked up by the community of Winchester, almost becoming an element of the translation festivities. No matter the reaction, an act of thanksgiving would begin the person’s life after their crisis and the miracle which solved it. Like a miracle petition, thanksgiving could be enacted anywhere, but people were drawn to the shrine to meet with the saint personally. These visits could also fulfil vows, be accompanied by gifts and bring new stories to the attention of the saints’ custodians. As in the example of the woman and her son above, sometimes a miracle was picked up on by the custodians and the act of thanks spiralled into a quasi-liturgical event with hymns and bells and crowds in tow.
At the end of all of this, some miracle stories would resonate and be retold. Fewer still would be written down for later recitation or against the ravages of time. The previous vignette shows a miracle performed before a crowd and then circulating through the community and drawing people in. Saints built reputations through their thaumaturgy, but they needed supplicants to petition them, enemies to threaten them, custodians to run their shrines and hagiographers to record select events. The writing down of a miracle story helped to fix these events. Written miracle stories are satisfyingly complete narratives that show how things should, and sometimes did, work. These stories could be copied and distributed, added to the liturgical texts of a house, recited on feast days and paraphrased in sermons and discussions. Writing miracles was a part of making miracles; the hagiographer took from and added to the community of the saint. In fact, the hagiographers were a part of that community, whether they collected their stories at a remove or they lived with the saint and their custodians for their entire life. But without the hagiography, the cult could have survived. The central pillar of the cult of the saints was the structure of the petition. A person had a problem, they knew of a saint, they asked that saint for help and the saint responded. This is how miracles were made in medieval England.
Each step in the making of miracles saw the interaction of different elements of the saint’s community. Miracle petitions were initiated by supplicants, who made decisions as to the nature and length of the petition. As the person petitioned, the saint responded to this request. This response did not have to be immediate and could lead to other shrines and new petitions. The whole process was moderated by the custodians of the saint through access to the saint’s shrine and relics. Miracles of vengeance saw the saint reacting to the actions of their enemies. This was often in defence of the accepted norms of the custodians regarding issues of property, sanctuary and service. The saint could also defend the community more generally from all manner of offences. When giving thanks for a miracle, the supplicant would declare they had received successful intercession. This could then be investigated and picked up by the custodians of the saint and the other people gathered at the shrine. Stories of the saints’ power would reverberate within and between their communities. Miracle collections were made through an interaction with these stories, taking into account the supplicants, custodians and saints as well as the influences and inclinations of the hagiographers. The hagiography would then feed into the liturgical observation of the cult and augment the tales of the prowess of the saint.
Having looked at how miracles were made, it is worthwhile to consider why they were made in this way. Saints were Christlike both in their ability to perform miracles and in their dual nature. The humanity of the saints made them more easily approachable than the Trinity. The physical bonds of the body and relics of a saint made them more obviously present in the world than God. Relationships could be formed with a saint as with any powerful human being, although the favours requested were of a different magnitude.6 People visited saints as they would do any other patron, and they often came to pay homage when a saint inter-ceded in their lives away from the shrine. People knew of the saints because there were stories of their power written and spoken, rumours of the punishment of the unworthy and the deliverance of the worthy. They also knew of saints because it was personally useful. Knowing where a saint rested, when their feast day was and who acted as custodians of their relics gave you the option to call upon that saint in the most favourable manner. Of course supplicants had to maintain their piety, promises had to be kept and the saints propitiated. If the saints were capable of miracles, they were capable of exposing the cynical and withholding support or even punishing them. Equally miracles could be used to strengthen faith and bring outsiders into a saint’s community. The devout would visit and revisit a saint regardless of their intercessory potential, but miracle-seeking behaviour could easily be reconciled with genuine belief.
Therefore, a saint’s cult was a way for a person to take action against their own misfortune. Through dealing with the saint, you could change your lot for the better. The vicissitudes of life could be counteracted by performing a petition successfully and dealing appropriately with a near omnipotent – if still human – patron. The agency of the supplicant was magnified by the cult of the saints. Ultimately they chose whether to engage a saint, which saint to go to and how to approach the petition. At any stage, the saint could interpose themselves and alter the course of the petition as the custodians could bar access to a shrine or impose additional requirements. But the supplicant still had the choice to take up the petition, the choice to give thanks and the choice of when to go home. This choice also existed for the subjects of the punitive miracles. They chose to commit these offences, more often than not with some knowledge of the saint and their reputation. Saints reacted to people’s actions, and these people in turn reacted to the saints.
Petitioning the saints gave people an opportunity to exert agency in an uncertain world, but a petition said something about the supplicant as well. When a person resorted to the saints for help, they were humbled, admitting that whatever other means they had to deal with their problem had failed. This demonstrated a faith in the petitionary process. We cannot access people’s understanding of the powers behind miracles, of the exact nature of the saints or of their relationship to God. What we can see is that ‘appropriate participation’ seems to have been required for intercession7 and was favoured by the custodians and hagiographers. We are shown that people who petitioned the saints were pious and that those who behaved poorly were sinful and could be damned. By petitioning a saint, a person was expressing that they had a problem and that they knew how to deal with it appropriately. The supplicant performed their misfortune publicly, demonstrating relationships with the saint, the custodians and other supplicants. At the end, a person was nominally back where they were before their crisis, but they had shown they were worthy individuals. The whole ordeal would also have been cathartic, a way of putting misfortune behind you and beginning your life in a different phase. The great noise and joy of corporate thanksgiving, of bells and shouts and group singing, was a fine way to end a crisis, as was a quiet prayer of thanks.
To take into account all of these people and their sometimes conflicting needs, the cult of the saints had to be flexible. People were more or less able to travel, to spend time away from home or to visit a shrine. The contingent nature of each individual’s life had to be encompassed by the structure of the cult of the saints. This is shown not only by the diversity of the problems brought to the saints and of the methods of supplication but also by the incorporation of distance miracles, unlooked-for miracles and reconciliation. Of course there were failures, reversals, collateral damage and people who acted in such a manner that they could not be reincorporated. The hagiographers portray perpetrators as enemies of God, the saints and their communities. This helps to explain the lack of failed petitions in the miracle collections. A person is either good and gets a beneficent miracle or is bad and gets a negative miracle. Supplicants could be sent on to another saint, healed conditionally on the fulfilment of a vow or forced to wait for days for intercession. Perpetrators could transition into supplicants in the right situations, as well. But an outright failure is unsatisfying, both in terms of the narrative of a miracle story and in terms of the structure of the cult of the saints. Where hagiographers allow for failure, it serves a purpose within a story and does not reflect poorly on the power of the saint.8 In reality every petition to a saint cannot have succeeded, just as every enemy of a saint cannot have been all bad. Whilst many perpetrators were self-serving and some were violent, they were reacting against an institution which they felt unfairly curtailed their behaviour or encouraged unscrupulous actions in others. People seem to have thought that it was unfair that the saint was enriched while they were impoverished, that the invocation of a saint in a legal case prejudiced the outcome or that the local religious house had a monopoly on usable land. If they acted on these feelings, they could well be the subject of a miracle of vengeance, and the only record we have of many of them is in this context.
Another tension that is evident from the hagiography is over access to the saints, particularly at their shrines. Custodians – and sometimes the saints themselves – kept certain people excluded at certain times, often for unclear reasons. It is likely that leading a religious life in a foundation with a major cult was difficult. Interruptions could come at all hours of the day, during the performance of the divine office and Mass and especially at irregular or seasonal occasions like processions, translations and feast days. Custodians wanted their saint to be popular and hagiographers wanted to represent them as such, but popularity brought issues of overcrowding, access and comportment to the fore. The difference between a mob and a crowd was largely how the people behaved, whether they pushed and shoved and tore doors from their hinges or they followed along taking a small part in the celebrations of their saint. Some of these pressures may have led to changes in the cult of the saints, but these are difficult to track.
The cult of the saints in 1170 was very similar to the cult in 970, or indeed in 770. Change comes slowly to large, complex and enduring systems like the cult of the saints, often through an ‘accumulation of incalculable little glitches’.9 Any changes would come by living and reproducing the cult of the saints. By engaging in and observing the cult, the lived experience of the cult of the saints, the community developed their understanding of appropriate behaviour. This is what Mauss termed habitus, the total education that all people must go through in order to know how to behave in any given situation. This is an embodied experience which may include mistakes, errors and even deliberate misbehaviour but that goes beyond mere instruction.10 Mauss’ idea of habitus has been much developed by Bourdieu. For Bourdieu each person in a society produces and reproduces their society through their habitus. Through this process, individuals become culturally competent, are able to cope with most social situations and are also able to improvise appropriately when they have to. Practices can change over time and include individual variation, but people always start from a point of observation and imitation as children. Behaviour is not taken from abstract models of how things should work but from actions actually working in the world.11 Thus, every petition, reconciliation and thanksgiving was an imitative and an original act. This collision of a social structure and a contingent event could change the way the cult worked. There was no great crisis in the cult of the saints in England during this time, but there are traces of a few ‘glitches’.
Perhaps the potential disruption caused by miracle seekers in processions led to the later practice of holding or fixing a feretory aloft at the end of a procession, which allowed people to pass underneath.12 We see a development in the later evidence of the deposit of wax votives and measuring to a saint, both precursors to large trindles donated to saints after 1170. The use of saints’ water was popular in earlier medieval England and then is absent from the evidence until after the Conquest. As our only sizeable collections from late-tenth-century England concern Swithun at the Old Minster this could be due to some local issue. According to Wulfstan, Swithun’s remains were washed during his translation, and it can be presumed that dust would have gathered on the saint’s tomb and dirt was available at his original grave site.13 Distance miracles were recorded in Lantfred’s work and continued to be throughout the period. Such petitions are a common feature of the later material, but they were always in the minority compared to shrine cures. Largely the cult remained the same, the saints being reliable patrons in times of change and conflict: probably never as hegemonic or ubiquitous as the hagiographers described them, with tension within and from outside the saint’s community, but weathering the trials of the Conquest and the Anarchy.
Making miracles in medieval England was a communal affair. It required people to interact, to make space for one another and to communicate. None of this was a given, and people fell into conflict with the saints. They fell into conflict amongst themselves as well over the possession of relics and access to the shrines. A miracle could change the course of someone’s life, and a good relationship with a saint could be proof against misfortune. All of this relied upon the actions of the community to keep the saints happy and to facilitate their cults. Saints grew in reputation and had their intercessions documented and their deeds read and recited. Translations were conducted, saints were carried out in processions and elaborate feast day celebrations were performed. Churches were dedicated to English saints, fairs coalesced around their feasts and places were named for them. But none of this would have happened if not for the miracles. At the heart of the cult of the saints was a suffering person petitioning their saint for help.
Notes
· 1 ‘Adtulit interea proprium muliercula natum, singultu quatiente gemens pro pignore eodem. Cuius erant digiti trans palmam forte retorti, sic in utraque manu matris progressus ab aluo. Proicit hunc tumulo sanctus fuit unde leuatus ardescente fide. Casu manibusque tenebat id genus uuarum ‘cyresan’ quod nuncupat Anglus. Prestitit in precibus; subito (mirabile uisu!) prosilit incolomis totus puer, abripit uuas e manibus matris comedens. Quod uidit ut illa laeta pias fundit lacrimas, ‘sit gloria’, dicens, ‘O bone Christe, tibi, nullum qui deseris umquam in te sperantem, miseris sed munera prestas insperata pius. Tibi sit, Suuithuneque sancte, gloria per Dominum, mihi qui miserendo misellae caelitus hunc puerum tanta de clade leuasti huncque mihi incolomem sola prece restituisti.’ Fit notum signum fama uolitante per urbem. Rursum conueniunt qui illinc paulo ante recedunt; innumeri circum populi magnalia cernunt. Signa sonant solito, conlaudant omnia Christum, Suuiðhunumque simul reboat laus sancta patronum per quem tanta Deus tribuit magnalia saeclo.’ Wulfstan, Narratio de S. Swithuno, pp. 462–3.
· 2 For example, the three miracles concerning spending money, the sacristan’s keys and a new curtain for Æthelburh’s shrine, the lost penny of a supplicant visiting Edmund and the lack of fish for the banquet on the feast of St Augustine at Canterbury. See Goscelin, Vita S. Vulfhilde, pp. 433–4; Herman, Miracula S. Edmundi, pp. 340–1; Goscelin, Miraculis S. Augustini, p. 406. On the other hand, a woman put up with an agonising and untreatable paralysis for six years before going to Æthelthryth’s shrine for a cure. Miracula S. Ætheldrethe, pp. 110–13.
· 3 Lantfred, Miracula S. Swithuni, pp. 260–85.
· 4 Miracula S. Guthlaci, pp. 55–7.
· 5 Unsurprisingly the impatient are not generally included in the miracle accounts. However, see Goscelin, Translationis S. Augustini, pp. 423–4 for a woman who lost patience in her initial petition for the healing of her son but who returned nine months later and succeeded in her petition on the saint’s feast.
· 6 Mia Di Tota, ‘Saint Cults and Political Alignments in Southern Italy’, Dialectical Anthropology, 5.4 (1981), 317–29 (pp. 327–8).
· 7 Roger M. Keesing, ‘On Not Understanding Symbols: Towards an Anthropology of Incomprehension’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2 (2012), 406–30 (p. 422).
· 8 See Herman, Miracula S. Edmundi, pp. 14–27, 64–7; Goscelin, Miracula S. Yuonis, pp. lxix–lxx; Liber Eliensis, pp. 216–17.
· 9 Kleinberg, p. 289.
· 10 Mauss, Sociology and Psychology, pp. 120–2.
· 11 Bourdieu, pp. 79–89.
· 12 See William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum, I, pp. 642–43 (V.270); William Ketell, Miracula S. Johannis, pp. 278–80. Examples of potential disruption in a procession can be found in Passio S. Edwardi, pp. 9–10; Miracula S. Guthlaci, pp. 55–7; Goscelin, Translationis S. Augustini, p. 443.
· 13 Wulfstan, Narratio de S. Swithuno, pp. 452–61.