3
C. M. Woolgar
A customary from the Benedictine Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, from the second half of the thirteenth century, sets out the punishments that a monk who had committed a serious offence might expect.1 A series of actions isolated the monk, detaching him from things that were sacred, and from sensory aspects of life. In chapter, immediately after the president had noted the offence, the monk was to seek pardon. If that pardon was not given, the monk was straightaway to cover his face with his hood as far down as his mouth, or further, and he was to leave chapter in company with his master (the monk who had been allocated to take charge of him). He was to be taken to the church, between the pulpit and the great door of the choir. Here he was to sit on the great step throughout the day with his face covered to his mouth; if it was a great offence, he was also to sit there during every liturgical office, day and night, singing his psalter or crying and lamenting his crimes. His master was to ensure that whenever the convent processed from the choir, the monk was to lie prostrate on the floor, close to the door, with his head turned to the north, so that some of the monks could pass by his head, and some by his feet. The custom of the house was such and the scale of his crime so great that the convent might walk over his body and kick him if they wished.2 After Compline, when members of the convent were aspersed, the monk was to lie prostrate in the church, and he was not to receive the holy water. He was never to be with the whole convent, except at night in the dormitory, and in summer, at the early afternoon sleep. The monk was to be excluded from all occasions when blessings were given. He was separated from anything that was holy, and – as far as possible within a community that was continually resanctifying itself through prayer and blessing, in a place that had been hallowed – he was cast out.
Religious practices have much to tell us about holy things and the processes by which they acquired, or lost, their sacred character. Typically, there is most information about this subject at points of transition, those moments at which holiness was acquired, lost, or suspended. The first focus of this essay is on these liminal events, especially the creation of the sacraments, and practices around baptism, death, burial, and canonisation – and, in the case of disobedient Bury monks, the ways in which they were separated from things holy.
How things became holy was both a theological question and a physical process. From antiquity onwards, theologians had debated consecration and the transformation made through the liturgy by which things became sacred. In the case of transubstantiation of the Eucharist, for example, there were a range of different, entrenched positions about what in fact happened, and a good deal of confusion. Ambrose of Milan (d. 397) maintained that the consecration of the bread and wine in the mass converted them into the body and blood of Christ, by divine action through the words of the priest; Augustine of Hippo (d. 430) and others following him believed that the elements remained unchanged, but that the process of sanctification added a divine grace to them. In the eleventh century, debates over the real presence in the elements of the mass divided churchmen between the symbolists, such as Berengar of Tours (d. 1088) – who held that Christ was only present figuratively – and realists, such as Lanfranc of Bec (d. 1089), who held that Christ was physically present. Berengar was made to abjure his beliefs and conform to the realist position, confessing at the Council of Rome in 1079 that the Holy Spirit, operating through the words of consecration spoken by the priest, converted the elements both to sacraments and to the physical body and blood of Christ.3
These theological debates have attracted a good deal of attention, but the physical process by which holiness was acquired, sustained and transmitted, has been examined less closely and is under-appreciated by historians. That transformation operated in ways medieval people would have understood as part of sensory perception. The monks of Bury had very different ideas about perception to those of the contemporary world. Perception was thought of as a two-way process, and one that was much more open and wide-ranging in its expectations of what might pass between perceiver and perceived than has commonly been the case in the West since the Enlightenment. As well as receiving information about the object of perception, other qualities might pass to the perceiver; and at the same time, qualities might pass the other way, from the individual to the person or object he or she perceived. These qualities might encompass a wide range of possibilities, but prominent among them were moral or spiritual qualities, such as good and evil. At the same time, the limits of life and the influence of perception on the body operated over a different timescale to present-day beliefs, from soon after conception, to well beyond death, to the Resurrection. Objects and the inanimate, then, might have an influence on those perceiving them – and on other objects with which they had contact – and vice versa.4
This was the normal pattern of sensation in the later Middle Ages. The way in which these qualities passed was by touch, or something closely akin to it: general proximity might be sufficient. From Aristotle onwards, the senses were believed to operate largely by a form of contact between the perceiver and the perceived. Medieval philosophy offered an explanation of the method of contact by means of species – that is (to take the example of sight), a series of images or similitudes replicated all the way between the eye and the thing perceived. Within the body, the species were then replicated from the sense organ to the brain. An identical process happened with touch, smell, taste, and hearing, with the sense organs receiving an impression of the item perceived. A common metaphor saw the senses as two-way gates. The species brought information and qualities to the body, and in the same manner the body’s spirit, the spirit that animated the body’s senses and movements, might convey its own qualities outside the body through further species.5
While the Middle Ages inherited from antiquity a notion of five senses – sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch – the two-way nature of perception made this a broader process. Speech, for example, was considered to be one of the senses of the mouth: taste was the receptive part, speech the outgoing part.6 Speech was an ethical act: the speech of a good man might carry beneficence, whilst the speech of a bad man might convey the opposite. This conception of speech as a sense is especially important for a consideration of the ways in which things were made holy. We should not think that the sense or meaning of words was all that mattered, or all that might be conveyed; the sound was important too. When Thomas Flesshor, a Coventry Lollard, abjured his heresy in November 1511, he confirmed that he had ‘spoken, affermed and holden divers articles, opynyons and erroures ageinst the feithe of all holy church and contrarie to the determynation of the same, to the evill sowding of the eres of well disposed cristen men’.7 Evil was transmitted by the very sound of his words, just as holiness might pass through words of consecration. Individuals did not have to understand heresy to be guilty of it: simply hearing heretical words contaminated the individual, just as words of blessing or holy sound brought beneficence. This underlying breadth of qualities that passed by perception is paramount for understanding medieval life, especially given the moral outlook that characterised so much of it.
To return to the monk of Bury: his head was covered, certainly from the shame – that is implicit in his humiliation. But it was also covered for another reason, also implicit: his eyes were covered so that the negative influences that might come from the sight of a bad man would not pollute others (that is, the species that came from his eyes might not touch others). The Bury text says that he must always have his head covered, deeply (‘profunde’), so that his face could not be seen, and this to avoid scandal (‘Et hoc ad evitandum scandalum’). His mouth was not covered, but what he might say was closely limited: he was restricted to contrition, or to holy sound, saying psalms. He was also excluded from the beneficence that would come from the touch of holy water and from eating food that had been blessed.
The physicality of this separation from the holy brings the essay to its second focus, the ways in which holy objects were curated and disposed of. These were items of extraordinary power and a great deal of care and attention was given to looking after them. It is necessary here to consider a broad range of objects. Liturgy created holy items in an orthodox way, but others might acquire this characteristic by unofficial means. The same was true of the opposite process: pollution and desecration could occur through both official and unofficial means.
How do things become holy?
Consecration constituted the sacraments; it was used to create sacrality in objects and areas; and forms of the process were used on the living and on the dead. The process was conducted by consecrated individuals, in canonical orders – theoretically in an unbroken sequence stretching back to Christ and the apostles, or at least through the papacy as agent. Consecration occurred through the invocation of God, Christ and the saints by an individual in holy orders, that is, by one who had been consecrated himself. Consideration of this process in sensory terms is revealing. The ethical act of speech was used to consecrate individuals, who in turn then went on to consecrate others – touched by the words of holiness. Speech was also used to consecrate materials, especially the sacraments, that could then be used in the consecration of other things, by touching them, for example, through the use of holy water. In consequence, there was a chain of things holy, linked by the operation of touch.
How this was understood in detail and practice varied from place to place, and across time. For example, while practices for consecrating churches were similar over a wide area of Western Europe, processes of creating other kinds of spaces, such as cemeteries, as holy areas, were more disparate. Helen Gittos has demonstrated the importance of aspersion with holy water in English rites for consecrating cemeteries up to the eleventh century. At the same time, her research points to a later adoption on the Continent of separate rituals for hallowing a cemetery and to a much less elaborate liturgical procedure.8
The operation of the liturgy in practice was of great significance for understanding the creation and transmission of holiness.9 Some of the most interesting evidence for how sacrality was transmitted arises when things went wrong. The customary of St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury, from 1330–40, reviewed the preparation of the consecrated elements during mass. If there was negligence in speaking the words of consecration of bread or wine, for example, if the celebrant omitted all the form of their signification, or transposed words, or skipped over any word, it was considered to be a most grave sin, and the whole had to be started again from the beginning, from the words ‘This is my body’, or ‘This is the chalice’. At the same time, however, there was doubt whether the omission of a minor word, such as ‘enim’, required one to start again.10 Precision in speaking the words of consecration was important for their efficacy, and injunctions to say the liturgy correctly and exactly were made by long sequences of church councils and synods. Richard Poore’s injunctions for his diocese of Salisbury, 1217×1219, required all priests to have a correct text of the mass according to the use of Salisbury so that the words could be said roundly and distinctly. There were similar provisions issued in the statutes for the dioceses of Winchester, probably 1224; Durham, 1228×1236; Worcester, 1240; York, 1241×1255; and Chichester, 1289.11 The texts of the services were to be said without haste, without eliding words or skipping over them.
Lanfranc’s Monastic Constitutions, for Christ Church Canterbury (but not for that house alone), from around 1077, point to other areas of negligence, where mishaps had occurred or other materials had touched consecrated elements:
And if the body or blood of the Lord has fallen, or has been spilt, upon a stone or the earth or wood or mat or carpet or anything of that kind, the surface of the earth shall be taken up, that spot in the stone shall be scraped, and the part affected in the wood, matting, carpet or whatever it may be shall be cut out and thrown down the piscina [the drain in the church or sacristy, which leads directly into consecrated ground]. If the place where it fell cannot be accurately determined, and yet it is certain that it fell, a like taking up, scraping, cutting out, and secreting in the piscina shall be accomplished in and around the spot where it is thought most likely that the particle or drops fell.12 …
If the blood of the Lord shall have fallen upon the corporal or some other clean cloth, and it be quite certain where it fell, that part of the cloth shall be washed in a chalice and the water of the first washing shall be consumed by the brethren, and that of the two following washings shall be thrown down the piscina.13
Something similar can be seen in the process of the disposal of materials that had routinely – as opposed to inadvertently – touched the holy or consecrated elements. So, Lanfranc tells us, after anointing a dying monk, the priest who had performed the unction was to wash his hands, and the water was to be thrown into a fire or into the piscina.14 In Cistercian practice, at the anointing of the sick, those cloths that had been used to wipe up the excess oil were afterwards to be burned in the piscina.15 In the diocese of Winchester, in Peter des Roches’s statutes of 1224, old corporal cloths (the cloths on which the host was placed), when worn out, were to be put in the place for relics in altars, or were to be burned in the presence of the archdeacon or his official.16 In these cases, therefore, the touch of the holy item, the consecrated element, was sufficient to transmit sacrality to the item that it had been in contact with. Processes of disposal centred on arrangements that maintained these items, or the traces of them, in a holy environment. There was an understanding that objects, once they had become holy, continued to have this quality, and that holy matter generally could transmit holiness to anything that came into contact with it or was just even in close proximity.
This world was full of dangers and demons, engaged in a battle for souls that would only be concluded at the Last Judgement.17 It was not just the living that needed protection: the dead required an eternal safeguard, too. The sacred was one of humankind’s greatest supports in this long-lasting struggle. A defence for the dead was provided by burial in consecrated ground. On one level, the enclosure of the cemetery prevented material threats, such as disturbance by animals and other uncleanliness. Secular activities, such as markets, games, dancing, and so on, that might pollute the area from a spiritual perspective were excluded by episcopal statute. Further, physical touch with the sacred provided continuous spiritual protection: the cemetery was an area that was consecrated and then resanctified, through processions and services.18 Other practices might protect the body in readiness for the Resurrection: in the treasury of Chichester Cathedral, there is a lead cross, with the words of papal absolution, granted to Godfrey (d. 1088), the second bishop of the see, which must have been buried with his body. Recovered from graves elsewhere are examples of texts and objects, such as papal bulls, which may have been held to give some form of protection in anticipation of the Last Judgement, as well as bearing witness at that point to the absolution of sins.19 The same may also have been true of some other grave goods, such as fragments of crystal or the sapphires and other gems found in rings in episcopal burials.20
Especial care was taken to ensure the safety of the body from the moment of death until its committal in consecrated ground. The St Augustine’s customary instructed the monastic chamberlain and his deputy on how to prepare the deceased monk’s body for burial. They were not to use soiled cloths to wrap the head, the ‘principal member of the human body, in which all the senses are active’, as some did, saying ‘That is good enough for the earth’. Rather, the body was to be buried in new clothing and footwear, which no one had ever worn – that is, without possibility of pollution – and the head was to be wrapped in a clean cloth (sudarium).21 The unburied body was to be protected by the light of candles – light was one of the great beneficent forces in this world – and by sound. Sounds included the ringing of consecrated bells, which often had devotional inscriptions that they were effectively ringing out. Additionally, at no point between death and burial was the body of the monk to be without the protection of the psalms, continuously said by the brethren of the deceased monk.22
It was not only in the monasteries that these precautions were taken. In 1229, William of Blois, as Bishop of Worcester, forbade the singing of secular songs, dancing, and wrestling in houses where bodies lay unburied; nor was there to be dancing or wrestling near cemeteries at times when the offices were being sung: these were sounds and activities that had a diabolical inspiration.23 Despite the protection that was offered by these measures, there was a paradox here: these practices safeguarded the dead, yet the corpse was itself a threat to the living. At St Augustine’s there was another custom_ those who had touched the corpse also had to be protected, and they were expected to bathe in a ritual manner before they next ministered at the altar.24
The significance of maintaining the holiness of consecrated ground lies behind the practice of burying outside these areas those who died excommunicate or as the result of suicide: their bodies were potential contaminants. Gratian’s Decretum speaks of excommunication as exile from the Kingdom of God; effectively an excommunicated person had been given to the Devil.25 If, by chance, those who had been excommunicated were buried in a cemetery, the decretals of Gregory IX advised that, ‘because of the violence of their proximity’ (‘per eorum violentiam proprinquorum’), the cemetery had to be reconciled to holiness – this is the language of penance – by the aspersion of holy water, just as in the dedication of churches.26 Suicide was a crime, inspired by the Devil. When a Dutchwoman called Abby drowned herself at Boston in Lincolnshire in 1375, the jury reported to the coroner that those on the other bank had implored her in the name of God not to destroy herself, but she, by the temptation of the Devil (‘per temptacionem diaboli’), jumped in and drowned, unconfessed, before anyone could reach her.27 A Northamptonshire coroner in 1340s and 1350s had followed a similar line of thought in setting apart suicides for burial, and instructed that their bodies be dragged to the landimere, that is, the parish boundary. In one instance, he ordered the uprooting of the tree – literally its eradication – from which a woman had hanged herself.28 Evil might be transmitted in the same way as the holy, by touch, and it was important to obliterate any trace, and to remove a contaminated body as far as possible from the community.
The dead might also have a positive role, however. The saints, holy men and women generally, and those things associated with them, such as relics, could all help in the battle against evil. In the cult of relics, there were degrees of holiness, and therefore of effectiveness. Here, proximity or touch came to the fore. There was a long tradition of contact relics: contact could be brief, or maintained over a long period of time. Gregory of Tours (d. 594) tells us about the brandea, the cloths lowered by pilgrims onto the tomb of St Peter, which the devout pilgrim might then raise, soaked with divine power – and weighing more than when they were lowered.29 Some tombs had openings (foramina) into which pilgrims might crawl to get especially close to their saint. Physical contact might come through the kissing of relics, and the ingestion of the special waters in which the relics had been washed or which contained dust from a saint’s tomb.30 In some instances, the mere sight of the reliquary was sufficient.31
The Church did not deny the efficacy of holiness and its consequences transmitted in this way, but it did attempt to manage them. Holiness had its own dangers: however beneficial holy items might be, uncontrolled use of them was undesirable and precautions had to be taken, as we shall see below. There were risks of sacrilege and desecration, actions that might let in the diabolical. The interests of the Church were therefore in keeping the holy as far as possible in ecclesiastical hands, and also in establishing itself as the arbiter of what was holy.
One way in which the Church set out to achieve closer control of the holy in the thirteenth century was through the institution of a more formal process of canonisation, reserving the creation of saints to the papacy. Before this period, the communal renown of an individual for miraculous works, especially the healing of the sick, was sufficient to establish sanctity. Pope Innocent III set in train a process that required a formal demonstration of the miracles and also, in a new development, an examination of the virtues of the supposed saint, that is, the quality of his or her life, faith, and works.32 Canonisation, however, was formal recognition of something that had already happened, and the miracles examined as part of the process had already occurred. Miracles – recognised only by popular acclaim – had occurred in many instances where no process of canonisation was ever to take place. This was a reflection of an attitude of mind ingrained in popular belief, that holy people directly, or through items associated with them, might intervene to the benefit of those who sought their help – just as they had done before the Church intervened to establish a mechanism for the official recognition of cults. So, while the process, now framed by papal lawyers, set about establishing a formal arbitration of holiness and miracles, it ran in parallel with a more popular understanding of the holy and the operation of relics and miracles.
The canonisation process reveals the ways in which holy things might operate. Thomas Cantilupe, Bishop of Hereford, died in 1282. When the evidence for his sanctity was examined by a formal commission in 1307, witnesses were called to testify to his life, faith, habits, and conduct, and to his miracles, and to state how they knew these things. The witnesses responded to a series of interrogatories, which asked whether the miracles were ‘above or against nature’ (‘supra vel contra natura’), that is, whether they were not part of the natural order and required divine intervention; and whether, in the working of the miracles, herbs or stones or other natural things had been used, or medicines, or whether incantations, superstition, or any deception had occurred.33 It was therefore not only holy things that could have an effect that might appear miraculous; other things might do this too, in ways that could be recognised as part of the processes of sensation. Richard Kieckhefer comments in his Magic in the Middle Ages that ‘One of the most puzzling questions was how incantations could have effect’34 – but we may see them operating through the sense of speech, just as we can the words of the mass spoken by the priest. Sacrality was transmitted, in certain circumstances at least, by a physical process of sensing, and similar effects might be produced in other cases, by natural processes. From the Church’s point of view, the distinction between the sacred and the profane was one of context. All words, both spoken and written, could have a transformative power; but circumstances and intent distinguished between liturgy on the one hand, and magic on the other.35
An example of the power of speech as a sense can be seen in baptism. The words of baptism, in extremis, could be used by anyone who had themselves been baptised: a process of sanctification had to have taken place at some point to create a link to the chain of holiness.36 There was a good deal of episcopal concern about the process of lay baptism, including the exact form of words necessary to achieve this: Archbishop Pecham’s constitutions of 1281 usefully gave the words in English and French, so that all might know them.37 According to the statutes of Bishop Bitton for Bath and Wells, probably of 1258, the container which had been used to hold the water for a baptism in these circumstances was to be reserved to the Church or was to be burned; and the remaining water was to be poured into the fire or taken to the church and poured into the font – out of reverence for the sacrament.38 A layman might thereby create something that was as holy as anything created liturgically by the clergy. The words had made the water holy, and that holiness had also come into contact with the container, necessitating careful arrangements for its custody or destruction. The power of the exact words was recognised as remarkable.
In the same way, the use of holy words in charms and inscribed on amulets – in direct contact with the body – was popularly believed to make them effective. The Dominican John Bromyard, writing his manual for preachers shortly before the Black Death, noted the deception that came from sorcery: those men were in error that carried around their necks, or in their purses, or bound or sewn into their clothing, objects inscribed with strange characters or unknown names – as if they were the names of God or the angels. One can assume from Bromyard’s account, therefore, that those objects that were inscribed with holy names were effective, or might be so in some circumstances.39 From private collections of relics, to reliquary jewels – such as the Middleham Jewel – worn on the body, charms and amulets provided protection through holy words, extending practice far beyond any official discourse about the holy.40
How were holy things to be kept and used?
Curating the sacred was a primary duty of the Church and its clergy. In cases where it was known that items would become holy, especial care was taken, for example, with the ingredients for wafers for the host. At St Augustine’s, Canterbury, the wheat was to be chosen, grain by grain, and there was then an elaborate routine to be followed to protect against contamination. The wheat was to be milled carefully, so that it was not polluted in any way. In preparation for making the wafers, the subsacrist and his assistant were to wash their faces and hands, and to be dressed in albs, with amices; the board on which the flour was to be placed had to be exceptionally clean; and the servant who used the wafer iron was to wear gloves. The monks were to say the hours, the hours of the Virgin and the penitential psalms while the wafers were cooking; all others were to be silent.41
Yet there was a difficulty with some holy items in that they continued to behave – and decay – as material things.42 Taking this into account, bishops legislated about the custody of the host. Archbishop John Pecham, in 1281, instructed that the wafers were to be made at least once, if not twice, a week, and that they were not to be kept beyond a fortnight lest there be any appearance of decay. Earlier injunctions, for instance those of Richard Poore for the diocese of Salisbury, 1217×19, had stipulated that the wafers should not be kept beyond a week. Each parish church was to have a tabernacle, with a lock, ‘decent and honest’, in which the host might be kept in a beautiful box with a linen lining.43 Dignity was important, but so was maintaining the sacred in a way that prevented it from touching – or being touched by – other things, which might cause that sacrality to be transmitted further.
The tabernacles that appear in secular households that had their own chapels help us explore some of the other associations that came with liturgical equipment and the holy. The examples from elite households are more elaborate than those described among parish goods. The 1359 inventory of the possessions of Queen Isabella, made after her death, records a silver gilt and enamel tabernacle, with six pinnacles and crystal in the middle, with assorted jewels attached to it, for the Eucharist.44 The presence of the crystal and jewels was not simply a question of their financial value: from their shine, they brought further beneficence as a source of light.45 The construction and ornamentation of these and other holy objects was significant, serving not as superficial decoration, but as a contribution to the force of the object. In the 1388 inventory of the vestry of Westminster Abbey, all the patens listed had a sacred image – Christ in majesty, Christ in judgement, the Veronica – which would have carried a power of its own.46 To add jewels and decoration of this kind to holy objects, or to place them near to them, enhanced the power of the holy. This was one reason that shrines attracted gifts of gold, silver and jewellery, and other holy objects were adorned in this way.47
There is little evidence in the late medieval period for the contribution of craftsmen to this enhanced sacrality, as opposed to that made by the intrinsic qualities of the jewels and precious metals; but there had earlier been a connection between at least some churchmen and the manufacture of religious artefacts in precious metals. Two eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon abbots, Mannig of Evesham (d. 1066) and Spearhafoc of Abingdon (fl. 1047–51), had been craftsmen, associated with work in precious metals; and the royal wardrobe had in 1300 a ring said to have been made by St Dunstan (d. 988), an object which can be traced in the royal household into the reign of Edward III. In Dunstan’s case, the notion that he had been a craftsman was almost certainly a post-mortem addition to his reputation.48
The holy presented problems of curation, simply because of the scale and diversity of material that might be involved: anything might become holy. The overriding concern, however, was to achieve ecclesiastical control of these objects. Bishop Grosseteste instructed in 1239 that in the diocese of Lincoln the ornaments and holy vessels of the church should be in safe and honest custody, and not rest in the houses of the laity, nor in their custody, unless out of extreme need.49 Testamentary practice was that sacred items, particularly those associated with the mass and the sacraments, and including vestments, were only to be bequeathed into contexts where they could be used legitimately for these purposes.50 One of the consequences of this is that inventories of churches and the possessions of the clergy list large quantities of goods that had clearly been considered sacred, and which were kept because deconsecration was scarcely an option. Sometimes these accumulations cannot have received much sustained interest, other than continuing protection. Bishops’ chambers must have had an element of the lumber room about them, with lots of sacred objects around, in chests and bags.51 The privy wardrobe in the Tower of London, a great storehouse of the surplus goods of the Crown, inventoried under the keepership of John de Flete from 1325 onwards, had an array of liturgical goods, among them an entry for ‘a case of various unknown relics’.52
Beyond the principal liturgical goods of the church and chapel, there was a whole range of items that might have an occasional and brief liturgical use and which then continued to have a sacred character. Many of these had an association with the lives of parishioners. The council of Winchester, in its canons of 1072 (reiterating those of Rouen of 1050), turned to the items accompanying baptism, particularly chrisom cloths and candles. The purpose of a chrisom cloth was to protect the oil of chrism that had been used to anoint the child’s head, lest it rub off onto other things. The council of Winchester ruled that the chrisom cloth was not to be washed until the seventh day after it had been used, and then in church, over the font; both it and the candle used at this time were to remain in the church.53 In Richard Poore’s statutes for Salisbury, 1217×19, and for Durham, 1228×36, chrisom cloths were only to be used for church ornaments. Other church ornaments which had received a blessing were not to be turned to profane use.54 Another set of statutes from the 1220s for an English diocese may suggest that these cloths had been brought to church by the family: its insistence that the casule in which the newly baptised were wrapped might not be taken from the church, nor out of reverence for the sacrament put to common use, suggests that there was a recurring problem and one that may have had its roots in a customary practice. Instructions, probably towards the mid-thirteenth century, from the diocese of Salisbury required nursing mothers to give the chrisom cloths to the church – and it was certainly practice by the sixteenth century that the cloth might either act as a shroud for an infant who had died close to birth, or that it should be offered by the mother to the church at her purification.55 In 1229, Bishop William de Blois of Worcester was to point to a range of things beyond the chrisom cloths that might acquire a sacred character and were used both in the church and, clearly by some, out of it. Altar cloths, even those that had not been blessed, might not be used to decorate houses or marriage beds; candles blessed at the Purification might not be used for common purposes, although they could be liquified and reused.56
These examples show the demand for the holy in secular contexts and the laity’s belief in the benefits of having these objects in their houses and possession, the countervailing position of the clergy notwithstanding. Beyond these items, a range of material moved in the opposite direction, coming into the church as gifts and offerings, thereby making a formal transition to sacrality. Prominent among these were domestic goods, or items associated with the events of the life course, given to the church. These items then took on a sacred character, and with it, something of the nature of a memorial. Robert Yislowe, rector of Onehouse in Suffolk, made his will on 13 September 1375, bequeathing a board cloth and two towels for use in the chancel, in honour of St John the Baptist.57 Parishioners made gifts for those parts of the church for which they were responsible. Katherine French has documented a form of domestic piety: women’s giving of gifts – gowns, curtains, textiles, veils, rings – in the diocese of Bath and Wells from after the Black Death until the end of the Middle Ages.58 These goods sometimes had the character of heirlooms.59 Simply placing them in the church may have brought to them a sacred character. Other objects, such as paternosters, were linked to the repeated sacred sound of prayer, which may have been sufficient in the opinion of some to make them holy. That they might then also be loaned out, for example, to assist at childbirth, speaks to the powers they might acquire. One of Katherine French’s examples is of amber beads – perhaps a rosary – with this quality that were in the parish church of Netherbury in Wiltshire.60 At the other end of the social scale, there were gifts of high-status items to form liturgical equipment, such as chalices. Sir John Neville, the son of Ralph, Earl of Westmorland, left instructions in 1449 that the standing cup of silver and gilt called ‘ye Kateryne’ be left to the church of Haltemprice in the East Riding of Yorkshire, to make a chalice.61
There is some opacity about whether gemstones and jewels should be considered as having powers or virtues in their own right, or whether they should be considered as invested with sacrality. From a medieval perspective, as a source of light, gemstones were of benefit to all who saw them, or came in contact with them. Beyond that, as catalogued by authors including the eleventh-century Marbode of Rennes, some stones were commonly believed to protect against thieves or sudden death, whilst others were considered to have innate sacred powers. On the other hand, some stones required consecration or episcopal intervention to recover powers that had been interrupted.62
Bishops had stones and jewels of this kind. Among the goods of John de Sandale, Bishop of Winchester, inventoried after his death in 1319 was a great ring with a crystal and a good sapphire – which was believed to be virtuous – surrounded by small rubies and emeralds, and enclosed in a copper box.63 The Cantilupe enquiry had asked witnesses to distinguish the Bishop’s own miracles from any in which stones, herbs and other natural things had been employed – without saying whether in fact those stones might have worked miracles themselves, but implying that they may have been involved. What was at issue here was establishing the Bishop’s own powers, rather than the powers of things that might operate of their own accord or assist the Bishop in his work. It was therefore essential that the two should not be confused. Other items of jewellery, such as wedding rings and cramp rings (made from coins offered by the king on Good Friday, and valued for their medicinal properties), obtained powers from association with liturgical processes.64
Besides their direct use in the liturgy, holy items could be used in a range of other circumstances. In many of these, touch was the key component in bringing the holy directly to bear. For example, holy water might be employed to bring sanctity or beneficence. In a late twelfth-century case, a relation of Roger, son of Warin, who was possessed and who had threatened to eat his own wife and children, was taken to Lincoln Cathedral, where the saintly Bishop Hugh aspersed him and adjured the evil spirit to leave him. The man fell down, whereupon the bishop soaked him with holy water, in great quantity; immediately the man stood up and raised his hands to heaven, thanking God for curing him.65 Yet it was not only the clergy who might use holy water as part of routines and rituals: the household ordinances of Henry VII, from c.1493, show it being used to impart sacrality to the King’s bed after it had been made, by an esquire of the King’s body – a body which had itself been sacralised at the anointing at the coronation.66
Consecration of an object did not ensure that it was used for virtuous purposes. Some people used holy elements for nefarious practices, for example, by secreting the host and then using it for magic. The fifteenth-century English translation of the Alphabet of Tales, following Caesarius of Heisterbach’s twelfth-century collection of miraculous stories, tells of a woman whose bees kept dying. Others told her that to remedy this, she should take the sacrament and put it in her hive – so she surreptitiously took the host out of her mouth after it had been given to her by the priest, and placed it in her hive. The bees, however, recognised in the host their creator, and built a chapel for it in their hive.67 One senses the nervousness of authorities about these possibilities in their injunctions for the safe custody of church goods. In order to guard against ‘sortilegia’ – sorcery – synodal statutes, such as those for Salisbury, 1217×19, and Chichester, 1245×52, required fonts to be covered and well kept, and for the oils, chrisom, and Eucharist to be kept under lock and key.68 Even the clergy might be implicated in sorcery. In 1485, for example, Nicholas Barton, the rector of part of the church of Waddesdon, in Buckinghamshire, was accused of conjuring by the magic arts using a psalter and a key.69 What is implicit in these cases, though, is that even misuse did not invalidate the sacred powers that might be inherent in the object. Indeed, in the case of the bees, when the woman showed the hive with its chapel to her priest there was joy and rejoicing, and she received the same sacrament in a proper manner.
Conclusion
Holiness appears to us as a spiritual quality above all others, but medieval men and women knew it too for its physical characteristics. They lived in a world where sacrality was directly linked to God, through Christ and his successors on earth, particularly the clergy. All holy items were connected by physical contact, in an unbroken chain (in theory at least), right back to the first days of the Church. Holiness passed down this chain, to individual or object, in a process that operated in the same way as, and as part of, sensory perception. It might embrace any being, alive or dead, or object, not just things that had been specifically consecrated, although the Church implemented patterns of control to keep the most obvious categories of sacred object in its custody and reserved to its own use, or to be used by others in defined circumstances. Almost anything might become holy by association with a holy person or object, or by touch, a category that included contact through any of the senses, including speech. People might gain benefit simply from seeing a holy object, such as the host. The same advantage might come from hearing sacred words, and objects that were frequently in the vicinity of holy sound would equally become holy.
The physical nature of holiness was apparent to most medieval people, even if it has been largely overlooked by historians. Theologians might debate the nature of holiness, or what happened in the miracle of transubstantiation; but most men and women were more interested in physical encounters with the holy that would allow its benefits to touch them and to protect them for eternity. There were no bounds to what might become holy, even if there were differences between ecclesiastical and lay approaches to the efficacy and agency of material objects. Ecclesiastical responses looked for control of the holy, for dignity and honour in the way holy items were looked after – and for the holy to be employed in defined ways, with theological support, for the benefit of the souls of parishioners in the eternal struggle against evil. The Church established official rites of consecration to create holiness, and did its best to avoid circumstances in which holy items were exposed to profanation. This control of holy items was essential to avoid their corruption or the misuse of their power. Implicit in these arrangements, however, was an acceptance by the Church of the physical process by which things became holy.
Secular society, particularly those members of it who spent a great deal of time in prayer, would not have found it difficult to see holiness in objects around them – or, indeed, to create it through, for example, the long usage of the sounds of pious prayer. Just as late medieval devotional texts ranged around household goods to recall divine truths from everyday objects as part of the process of meditation, any of those goods might in practice become holy in themselves.70 That these objects might then be brought to churches for safekeeping, and for use in a wide range of secular contexts, speaks of a widespread reverence for the power of the holy and for the strength of unofficial religion. From the perspective of today’s students of material culture, however, there may be nothing obvious to mark many of these objects as having a sacred character – the physical consequences of holiness may be invisible to us, but they were not to believers in the later Middle Ages. The holy was essential in the long journey towards eternal life: to be continually associated with it, to touch it, kept the powers of evil at bay, and it brought recurring benefits.
Notes
1 Antonia Gransden, ed., The Customary of the Benedictine Abbey of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk (from Harleian MS. 1005 in the British Museum), Henry Bradshaw Society, 99 (Chichester: Regnum Press, 1973), 82–3.
2 Lanfranc’s Constitutions for Canterbury, which cover similar ground, are to us a little more humane, with the brothers saying to the offending monk in a low voice, as they passed, ‘God have mercy on you’: David Knowles, ed., The Monastic Constitutions of Lanfranc, revised by Christopher N. L. Brooke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 150–51.
3 Edward J. Kilmartin, The Eucharist in the West: History and Theology, ed. Robert J. Daly (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2004), 67–78, 97–102; Eric Palazzo, Liturgie et société au moyen âge (Paris: Aubier, 2000), 33–4. See also Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 154–62.
4 C. M. Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2006), 5–62, 267–73; Béatrice Caseau, ‘The Senses in Religion: Liturgy, Devotion, and Deprivation’, in A Cultural History of the Senses in the Middle Ages, ed. Richard G. Newhauser (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 89–110.
5 Woolgar, Senses in Late Medieval England, 13.
6 Ibid., 84–116.
7 Shannon McSheffrey and Norman Tanner, eds., Lollards of Coventry 1486–1522, Camden fifth series, 23 (London: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Historical Society, 2003), 260.
8 Helen Gittos, Liturgy, Architecture, and Sacred Places in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 19–54.
9 For an overview, see Palazzo, Liturgie et société au moyen âge.
10 Edward M. Thompson, ed., Customary of the Benedictine Monasteries of Saint Augustine, Canterbury, and Saint Peter, Westminster, Henry Bradshaw Society, 2 vols., 23 and 28 (London: Henry Bradshaw Society, 1902–1904) 1: 284.
11 For example, Frederick M. Powicke and Christopher R. Cheney, eds., Councils and Synods with Other Documents Relating to the English Church. II A.D. 1205–1313, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 1: 79, 127, 300, 488; 2: 1085.
12 Knowles, Monastic Constitutions of Lanfranc, 134.
13 Ibid., 136.
14 Ibid., 178.
15 P. Bruno Griesser, ‘Die “Ecclesiastica Officia Cisterciensis Ordinis” des Cod. 1711 von Trient’, Analecta Sacri Ordinis Cisterciensis 12 (1956): 153–288 (at 256, 273–4).
16 Powicke and Cheney, Councils and Synods II, 1: 126.
17 Gerald R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England: A Neglected Chapter in the History of English Letters and of the English People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 110–14.
18 Powicke and Cheney, Councils and Synods II, 1: 128, 172, 174, 297.
19 Elisabeth Okasha, ‘The Lead Cross of Bishop Godfrey of Chichester’, Sussex Archaeological Collections 134 (1996): 180–92; see also Elzbieta Dabrowska, ‘Passeport pour l’au-delà: Essai sur la mentalité médiévale’, Le Moyen Âge 111 (2005): 313–37.
20 David A. Hinton, Gold and Gilt, Pots and Pins: Possessions and People in Medieval Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 165–66, 187–88; Roberta Gilchrist, ‘Magic for the Dead? The Archaeology of Magic in Later Medieval Burials’, Medieval Archaeology 52 (2008): 119–59.
21 Thompson, Customary of … Saint Augustine, Canterbury, and Saint Peter, Westminster, 1: 339–40: ‘et involvunt capud, quod est principale membrum corporis humani, in quo vigent omnes sensus.’
22 Ibid., 1: 353.
23 Powicke and Cheney, Councils and Synods II, 1: 174, 601.
24 Thompson, Customary of … Saint Augustine, Canterbury, and Saint Peter, Westminster, 1: 361. For threats from the corpses of revenants, Stephen Gordon, ‘Social Monsters and the Walking Dead in William of Newburgh’s Historia rerum Anglicarum’, Journal of Medieval History 41 (2015): 446–65.
25 Gratian, Decretum, Causa XI, Quaestio III, c. XI and c. XXI, in Corpus iuris canonici, ed. Emil Friedberg, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1881–1922) 1: cols. 646, 648–9.
26 Gregory IX, Decretales, lib. iii, tit. XL, cap. 7, in Corpus iuris canonici, ed. Friedberg, 2: col. 634.
27 Kew, The National Archives (TNA), JUST 2/78, rot. 2, m. 1r.
28 TNA, JUST 2/113, mm. 7r, 28r, 31r.
29 Discussed in Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 87–88; Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality, 131–45; Robert Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 244–50.
30 Ronald C. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 89–90, 94; Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?, 248–49, 255–56.
31 For example, Brian Kemp, ‘The Miracles of the Hand of St James’, Berkshire Archaeological Journal 65 (1970): 1–19 (at 4).
32 André Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 32–104.
33 The Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV), MS Vat. Lat. 4015, ff. 3r–4v: f. 4v, third article, ‘Item tercio si dicta miracula fuerunt supra vel contra naturam’…; fifth article: ‘Item quinto si in operacione dictorum miraculorum fuerunt apposite herbe vel lapides vel alique alie res naturales vel medicinales et si incantationes vel superstitiones vel fraudes alique intervenerunt in operatione ipsorum miraculorum’. For the process, Harriett Webster, ‘Mediating Memory: Recalling and Recording the Miracles of St Thomas Cantilupe’, Journal of Medieval History 41 (2015): 292–308. See also the discussion of marvels and miracles in Gordon, ‘Social Monsters’.
34 Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, Rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 182.
35 See, for example, Florence Chave-Mahir, ‘L’exorcisme des possédés, une parole efficace d’après quelques oeuvres doctrinales des VIe-XIIIe siècles’, and Gábor Klaniczay, ‘L’efficacité des mots dans les miracles, les visions, les incantations et les maléfices’, in Le pouvoir des mots au Moyen Âge, ed. Nicole Bériou, Jean-Patrice Boudet, and Irène Rosier-Catach (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 305–26 and 327–47.
36 Gregory IX, Decretales, lib. iii, tit. XLII, cap. 4, in Corpus iuris canonici, ed. Friedberg, 2: cols. 646–47.
37 Powicke and Cheney, Councils and Synods II, 2: 896–7.
38 Ibid., 1: 589–90.
39 Don C. Skemer, Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006); John Bromyard, Summa predicantium (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1485), Sortilegium S xi, Art. ii: iii; and Art. iii: iiii.
40 Peter Murray Jones and Lea T. Olsan, ‘Middleham Jewel: Ritual, Power, and Devotion’, Viator 31 (2000): 249–90.
41 Thompson, Customary of … Saint Augustine, Canterbury, and Saint Peter, Westminster, 1: 119–20; also at Westminster Abbey: 2: 67.
42 Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality, 153–54.
43 Powicke and Cheney, Councils and Synods II, 1: 78; 2: 894–95, 1119–20.
44 TNA, E 101/393/4, f. 4r.
45 Martina Bagnoli, ‘The Stuff of Heaven: Materials and Craftsmanship in Medieval Reliquaries’, in Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe, ed. Martina Bagnoli et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 136–47.
46 J. Wickham Legg, ‘On an Inventory of the Vestry in Westminster Abbey, Taken in 1388’, Archaeologia 52 (1890): 195–286 (at 202, 231–32). The images are not all identified in 1388, but they are in the list of the same items in 1540: see 232, nn. a-f.
47 In 1307, for example, Cantilupe’s shrine at Hereford was adorned with many silver and wax images, from the devotion of the people and by reason of the miracles that he had worked. Among the objects there were 65 gold necklaces, and 31 silver ones, 450 gold rings and 70 silver rings. BAV, MS Vat. Lat. 4015, ff. 74r-v.
48 Charles Reginald Dodwell, Anglo-Saxon Art: A New Perspective (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), 48–55; John Blair, ‘Spearhafoc (fl. 1047–1051), Abbot of Abingdon and Craftsman’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and B. Harrison, online edition, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/49416 (accessed 30 August 2015); John Blair, ‘Mannig [Wulfmær] (d. 1066), Abbot of Evesham and Craftsman’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and B. Harrison, online edition, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/49414 (accessed 30 August 2015); Hinton, Gold and Gilt, 329, n. 146; Woolgar, Senses in Late Medieval England, 51–2; 289, n. 141.
49 Powicke and Cheney, Councils and Synods II, 1: 273.
50 C. M. Woolgar, ed., Testamentary Records of the English and Welsh Episcopate 1200–1413: Wills, Executors’ Accounts and Inventories, and the Probate Process, Canterbury and York Society, 102 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2011), 73, 89, 102.
51 Ibid., 208–14.
52 London, BL Add. MS 60584, f. 11r: ‘i cophino de diversis reliquiis ignotis sigillato sigillo domini Thome Donsflete’.
53 Dorothy Whitelock, Martin Brett, and Christopher N. L. Brooke, eds., Councils and Synods with Other Documents Relating to the English Church I. A.D. 871–1204, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981) 2: 605.
54 Powicke and Cheney, Councils and Synods II, 1: 69–70.
55 Ibid, 1: 141, 512; OED, s.v. “chrisom.”
56 Powicke and Cheney, Councils and Synods II, 1: 174.
57 Norfolk Record Office, Norwich Consistory Court Records, Will Register 1 Heydon (1370–82), ff. 102r-v.
58 Katherine L. French, The Good Women of the Parish: Gender and Religion after the Black Death (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 17–49.
59 Roberta Gilchrist, Medieval Life: Archaeology and the Life Course (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2012), 216–51.
60 French, Good Women of the Parish, 47.
61 James Raine, ed., Testamenta Eboracensia II, Surtees Society, 30 (London, 1855), 146–47.
62 Gervase of Tilbury, Otia imperialia: Recreation for an Emperor, eds. S.E. Banks and J.W. Binns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 614–19; Hinton, Gold and Gilt, 187; Woolgar, Senses in Late Medieval England, 51–2.
63 Woolgar, Testamentary Records of the English and Welsh Episcopate, 212.
64 TNA, E 101/393/11, f. 61r; E 101/398/9, f. 23r; E 101/403/10, f. 34v.
65 H. Farmer, ‘The Canonization of St Hugh of Lincoln’, Lincolnshire Architectural and Archaeological Society Reports and Papers 6 (1956): 86–177 (at 98).
66 Anon., ed., A Collection of Ordinances and Regulations for the Government of the Royal household …, for the Society of Antiquaries (London, 1790), 121–2.
67 Mary MacLeod Banks, ed., An Alphabet of Tales, an English 15th Century Translation of the Alphabetum Narrationum of Etienne de Besançon from Additional MS. 25,719 of the British Museum, 2 vols., EETS, o.s. 126–27 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. 1904–1905), 2: 465.
68 Powicke and Cheney, Councils and Synods II, 1: 68, 453, echoing Lateran IV, cap. 20.
69 E.M. Elvey, ed., The Courts of the Archdeaconry of Buckingham 1483–1523 (Buckinghamshire Record Society, 19; 1975), 23.
70 For example Anthony Ian Doyle, ‘“Lectulus noster floridus”: An Allegory of the Penitent Soul’, in Literature and Religion in the Later Middle Ages: Philological Studies in Honor of Siegfried Wenzel, ed. Richard G. Newhauser and John A. Alford (Binghamton, New York: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995), 179–90.