how martyrs became men

the idea of martyrdom in england between the seventh and eleventh centuries aka my master's thesis

I submitted this for my master’s in medieval history at Oxford in 2020. Read on if interested in early medieval ecclesiastical history. The original title was ‘The gender of martyrdom in early medieval England’ and it was supervised by Prof Sarah Foot, who cited it in her H.M. Chadwick memorial lecture.

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Introduction

‘Martyr’ is a notoriously slippery term. The Greek martys was originally a legal term referring to a witness in a trial; the first certain use of the term martyr in reference to a Christian killed for their faith comes in the Martyrdom of Polycarp, a text dating from the second century. Even in the early church, however, its meaning stretched beyond literal death: Tertullian wrote of the martyrdom of will, Ambrose and Jerome of the martyrdom of virginity, and Sulpicius Severus of the martyrdom of asceticism.¹

Uniting all applications of the term is the holiness of suffering: by death or by endurance, the experience of suffering allows the Christian to imitate Christ and draw closer to God. Martyrdom is neither an exclusively Christian nor an exclusively religious concept, although its usage in other faiths and in the secular world is dogged by the same interpretative issues.² Suffering is a ubiquitous feature of human society, but the value given to suffering is highly culturally relative. To identify or to venerate someone as a martyr is to make a claim about the special value of their suffering—to elevate it above the suffering of others and to suggest that it has a significance to a particular community. Given the variety of ideas about martyrdom, it is insufficient to simply say that people in a particular place at a particular time venerated martyrs and understood martyrdom to be important; rather, it is necessary to interrogate what was meant by martyrdom and what kind of work was being done by invoking the term.

One of the most recognisable images from early medieval England is found in the ‘Galba Psalter’, more popularly known as the ‘Æthelstan Psalter.’ In the full-page illumination, Christ sits in majesty surrounded by a tripartite division of saints: martyrs, confessors and virgins (see Figure 1).³

Figure 1: London, British Library, Cotton MS Galba A XVIII, fol. 21r

What immediately strikes the viewer is how explicitly these categories are gendered: the martyrs and confessors are entirely composed of male saints, some of whom are tonsured, whereas the group of virgins is entirely made up of women. This gendered division is reflected in calendars and litanies, where female saints—overwhelmingly virgin martyrs—are identified as virgins and only male saints as martyrs.⁴ That this is reflected in liturgical material suggests that monastic communities in early medieval England understood martyrdom as a fundamentally masculine category.

My intention in this thesis is to explore to what extent this was true or consistent and whether ideas about the relationship between gender and martyrdom changed over time. By necessity, this is a diachronic study, taking into account a wide range of texts across a period of almost five centuries. My first section will focus on sources predating the first encounter with the vikings in the late eighth century, primarily Aldhelm’s De Virginitate and Bede’s Martyrologium. My second section deals with material which can be dated loosely to the ninth century, including Old English hagiographic poetry and the Old English Martyrology. My final section covers material from the late tenth and early eleventh centuries.

The wealth of material concerning saints and sanctity in early medieval England is enormous and includes hagiography, martyrology, history, poetry, liturgy, homilies and documentary sources; this is especially the case for the tenth and eleventh centuries, where the surviving corpus is much greater than for the earlier period. My sources are therefore necessarily selective. There are also geographical disparities: while the earlier centuries are dominated by Northumbrian sources, the later texts were produced mainly in the south. These issues mean that it is unhelpful to attempt to trace a continuous narrative or to attempt to identify decisive points of change, especially in the earlier centuries. Given how little we know about how texts were read, it is impossible to know whether writers’ and redactors’ beliefs and assumptions were shared more widely. This is therefore a study of how particular people thought about martyrdom and its gender at particular times, attentive to context but without suggesting that one author or redactor is representative of broader trends. While looking for patterns in the material, I do not wish to minimise the theological diversity and creativity of this period.

Since the sources for early medieval England were overwhelmingly created by men, this thesis necessarily studies how men used gender to develop particular models of sanctity.⁵ I have not attempted to relate these ideas to the lived experience of women—on the contrary, a guiding assumption of this thesis is that ideas about gender, employed theologically, do not map onto the embodied experience of gender. When Bede or Ælfric held up female virgin martyrs as examples, it was with monks, rather than nuns, in mind.

Another assumption, central to the field of gender history, is that gender is a social category which can be constructed in different, historically contingent ways and therefore must be historicised.⁶ In scholarship on early medieval gender, particularly on gender and religion, scholars have argued that the requirement of celibacy in monastic and clerical cultures allowed for gender expressions which transcended a male/female binary, often referred to as a ‘third gender.’⁷ Monastic and clerical masculinities certainly differed from secular ones (and from each other): many scholars have shown how female saints and biblical figures were used as exempla for monks in the early middle ages, constructing a monastic masculinity based around the traditionally feminine virtues of obedience and virginity.⁸ However, as Derek Neal has argued, the existence of alternative monastic and clerical masculinities does not require that they are ‘unmasculine’—this is to grant an anachronistic primacy to secular masculinity.⁹

More useful than the ‘third gender’ model is the idea that multiple masculinities, and even a ‘range of potential versions of ideal masculinity’, can coexist.¹⁰ In the Galba Psalter illumination, the martyrs include both tonsured and non-tonsured men, suggesting the relevance of martyrdom to secular and monastic masculinities. It bears repeating that as the majority of sources from early medieval England are monastic, our access to secular masculinities is inevitably filtered through a religious lens. Nevertheless, monks were evidently concerned with secular men: Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, written under the patronage of laymen Æthelweard and Æthelmaer, includes a discussion on the legitimacy of warfare for the secular bellatores. It was clearly possible for monastic writers to hold different models of masculinity in their minds simultaneously. The idea of martyrdom is therefore a useful way of looking at the interaction of monastic and secular ideals of masculinity in this period.

Martyrological Thought in the Seventh and Eighth Centuries

Aldhelm composed the De virginitate as an opus geminatum, with one version in prose and another in verse. Both versions were widely read, copied and glossed throughout early medieval England.¹¹ While Aldhelm’s focus was virginity, the De virginitate includes many martyred saints and discussions of martyrdom; as one of the earliest texts written in England to deal with martyrs, it provides a useful starting point for understanding how martyrdom was conceptualised and gendered. Gender looms particularly large in the De virginitate: both the prose and verse versions separate saints by gender, listing male virgins first followed by female virgins. The prose version opens with a general theoretical discussion of virginity which uses masculine terminology. Despite dedicating the work to abbess Hildelith and her nuns at Barking and relying on patristic models which focused only on female virginity, Aldhelm presented virginity as a virtue accessible to men and women—and if anything, more naturally accessible to men. He identified both male and female saints as martyrs and there is no indication that he associated martyrdom particularly with male saints.

Christine Rauer has suggested that Aldhelm ‘avoids using martyr for individual female saints; to solve the problem, he resorts to using the rare feminine form martira for three of his female saints, although significantly only in poetry.’¹² Rauer’s suggestion that Aldhelm did not refer to female saints as martyrs in the prose De Virginitate is mistaken: in his discussion of St Lucy, he wrote ‘Igitur beata Lucia salvo pudoris signaculo et consummato vitae curriculo gloriosum martirii triumphum meruit.’¹³ Furthermore, he explicitly situated Lucy and three other female saints in the ‘catalogue of martyrs’: ‘Mihi quoque operae pretium videtur, ut Sanctae Agathae rumores castissimae virginis Luciae praeconia subsequantur, quad praeceptor et pedagogus noster Gregorius in canone cotidiano, quando missarum sollemnia celebrantur, pariter copulasse cognoscitur hoc modo in catalogo martirum poenens: Felicitate, Anastasia, Agathe, Lucia.’¹⁴ The ‘catalogue’ to which he referred was the Nobis quoque peccatoribus prayer added to the canon of the mass by the end of the fifth century and supplemented with the listed female saints in the early sixth.¹⁵ While the Nobis quoque did list male and female saints separately—male saints first, followed by female saints—it differed from the litany of saints in that it explicitly denoted female saints as martyrs by introducing all saints as ‘sanctis apostolis et martyribus.’¹⁶ Aldhelm repeated this identification in the De Virginitate.

In addition to parallels with the canon of the mass, Juliet Mullins has drawn attention to similarities between the structure of the De Virginitate and litanies of the saints.¹⁷ In particular, the order in which Aldhelm discussed the various categories of saints at the end of his Carmen de Virginitate— patriarchs, prophets, martyrs, confessors, virgins—mirrors the order typical of litanies. While litanic prayer dates from as early as the fourth-century Liturgy of St James, the litany of saints as a distinct liturgical form seems to have developed in England at some point between the late seventh and late eighth century. The earliest surviving litany of the saints is included in a Mercian prayerbook, now BL Royal MS 2 A XX (the ‘Royal Prayerbook’), dating from the second half of the eighth century. However, Michael Lapidge has argued that this is a translation of the Greek litany found in early tenth-century additions to BL Cotton MS Galba A XVIII.¹⁸ It seems probable that a Greek litany was brought to England by Theodore in 669 and developed into the recognisable Latin litany of saints which proliferated in England and on the continent in the tenth and eleventh centuries.¹⁹

There is little evidence for the liturgical contexts in which litanies were used until the tenth century, when they were used in church dedications, the ordination of monks, as part of monastic daily offices and the Office for the Visitation of the Sick and the Dying, penitential processions, the liturgy for Holy Saturday and for personal devotion.²⁰ In exactly what context Aldhelm experienced the litany is irrecoverable, but given the structural parallels between the earliest English litanies and the structure of the De Virginitate, it seems likely that he was familiar with some sort of litany of the saints.

Like the De Virginitate, litanies list male saints before female saints. In litanies from the tenth and eleventh centuries, groups of saints are identified by prayers addressing the group to which they belong: a list of martyrs, for instance, is typically followed by the prayer ‘omnes sancti martires orate.’ In earlier litanies, however, saints were implicitly grouped by category but were not explicitly labelled. The Royal Prayerbook begins with the Archangels, followed by St John, the Virgin Mary, the Apostles, male martyrs, male confessors, and female saints.²¹ Only one other litany was demonstrably in England before the tenth century, and like the Royal Prayerbook it does not identify saints by category. More strikingly, it contains no male martyrs or confessors, listing only Old Testament prophets, apostles, evangelists, and female martyrs.²² The litany contains the formula ‘ut pro me Dei famula oretis’, suggesting that it was produced for a woman, and offers a reminder that women’s devotional habits may have differed from those of their male contemporaries in ways now largely invisible to us.

Felice Lifshitz has demonstrated that explicit grouping of saints by category developed at the beginning of the ninth century, but that ‘the practice of categorical division had not yet fully taken hold so that—despite the categorical labels—a number of names appear in the "wrong" category’: one manuscript, for instance, listed Beatrix among the martyrs.²³ By the end of the century, however, the gendered division of saints had become standardised and female saints were always counted among the virgins regardless of martial status. While no ninth-century litanies survive from England, it is likely that a similar process occurred. During Aldhelm’s lifetime, however, litanies would not have identified all female saints as virgines. Aldhelm’s inclusion of female saints among the martyrs—as well as his discussion and prioritisation of male virginity—demonstrates that, at least for him, these two types of sanctity were accessible to Christians regardless of their gender.

Bede’s Martyrologium, compiled between 725 and 731, took a much more profound interest in martyrdom. It is the first example of a ‘historical martyrology’, combining the calendrical structure of the Martyrologium Hieronymianum on which it was based with narrative material drawn from the acta and passiones of the saints.²⁴ The Martyrologium contains both ‘long’ entries, which include narrative material, and ‘short’ entries, which are brief notices containing the name of the saint, the place of martyrdom or burial and the category of saint to which they belong.²⁵ As martyrologies accrete entries as they travel and are copied, it is difficult to reconstruct the Martyrologium in its original form. Henri Quentin, however, argued that two manuscripts take us closest to the form of the Martyrologium as originally compiled.²⁶

The Martyrologium commemorates far more male saints than female saints: among the narrative entries, there are seventy-nine entries for individual men or groups of men, twenty-one entries for individual women or groups of women, and fifteen entries for groups of mixed gender. However, Bede did not employ ‘martyr’ as a gendered term: Emerentiana is described as a ‘virgo Christi et martyr,’²⁷ and Juliana, having been tortured at length, finally accomplishes martyrdom: ‘de collatione capitis martyrium consummavit.’²⁸ Significantly, there is no noticeable difference in the narrative focus in accounts of male and female martyrs. Bede did not include the brothel scenes and threats of rape which he would have read in virgin martyrs’ passiones when compiling the martyrology; rather, he focused consistently on the physical tortures endured before death and the moment of death itself.

Bede did, however, treat male and female saints differently when he came to the ascription of virginity. He described ten female saints as virgins in contrast to a single male saint: Felix of Thibiuca.²⁹ If Bede linked virginity with women, however, he did not understand it as a category entirely distinct from martyrdom. In this light, it is significant that Bede included Æthelthryth—the only Anglo-Saxon saint other than the two Hewalds who merited a narrative entry in the Martyrologium.³⁰ It seems likely that Æthelthryth was mentioned because she offered a model of sanctity equivalent to martyrdom which could be imitated by Bede’s monastic contemporaries.³¹ In the hymn to Æthelthryth included in the Historia Ecclesiastica, Bede drew parallels with virgin martyrs—Agatha, Eulalia, Thecla, Euphemia, Agnes and Cecilia—writing, ‘Nostra quoque egregia iam tempora uirgo beatuit; / Aedilthryda nitet nostra quoque egregia.’³² Æthelthryth’s inclusion in the Martyrologium is particularly significant in the absence of other Anglo-Saxon saints. Oswald, for instance, merits not even a short entry, despite being almost certainly included in the recension of the Martyrologium Hieronymianum which Bede used as his main source.³³

For Bede, the example of the martyrs of the early church was emulated not by kings slain in battle but by the long-term commitment to asceticism and sexual renunciation modelled by Æthelthryth.³⁴ In his commentary In epistolas septem Catholicas, Bede stressed the value of suffering as a means of purification and protection from sin. In this way, the Christian could imitate the martyrs even ‘in pace ecclesiae.’³⁵ Few of Bede’s monastic contemporaries could hope to achieve martyrdom through persecution, but they could imitate the martyrs through the daily acts of renunciation which characterised monastic life. Bede’s decision to include Æthelthryth, rather than Cuthbert, however, suggests that a female virgin was a more suitable example than a male ascetic, perhaps because of the parallels that could be drawn with the female virgin martyrs of the early church. By offering Æthelthryth and the virgin martyrs of the early church as examples, Bede made female saints central to his theology of martyrdom.

Other than Æthelthryth, the only Anglo-Saxon saints included in Bede’s Martyrologium are the two Hewalds, martyred on the continent. The two Hewalds were also identified as martyrs in Alcuin's Versus de Patribus Regibus et Santis Euboricensis Ecclesiae, composed in the last two decades of the eighth century.³⁶ Alcuin took Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica as his source, rendering its history of his native Northumbria into verse.³⁷ He also followed Bede in not identifying murdered kings as martyrs. Oswald’s death he described as murder: ‘Pars inventa sacri est mecum de stipite ligni, infixum fuerat caput occisi illius in quo.’³⁸ He uses the same term, occisus, to describe Edwin’s death: ‘nam sibi praescriptae mortis dum venerat hora, belliger occubuit subito socialibus armis.’³⁹

While certainly venerated as saints, there is no evidence that kings were identified as martyrs before the tenth century. Oswald’s particular brand of sanctity, described by both Bede and Alcuin, derived more from his virtue in life and success in evangelism, rather than his death in battle against the pagan Penda. The fusion of secular heroism and martyrdom, so prominent in the literature of the ninth century, does not feature in sources which predate the ‘First Viking Age.’

The ninth century: vikings, heroes, martyrs

England in the ninth century is defined, more than anything, by the appearance of the vikings. Raiding of coastal settlements began in the last decades of the eighth century and continued through the first half of the ninth. From around 850, raiding shifted to overwintering; in 865, the ‘Great Heathen Army’ began to settle the area in the East of England which would become the Danelaw.⁴⁰ Following a victory in 878, Alfred established a number of fortified towns across southern England, and conducted a more organised and effective campaign against the encroaching armies. While Alfred’s reign is now seen as a period of strengthening which would ultimately lead to the unification of England, it could not have been clear at the end of the ninth century that Wessex would survive what other kingdoms had not. As Nicholas Brooks put it, ‘the deepest impression must have been of the defeat and destruction of the English polity and culture.’⁴¹ This collective experience of defeat by a common enemy catalysed the creation of a ‘national identity which overrode deeper distinctions.’⁴²

The degree to which the vikings constituted a material threat to ecclesiastical institutions is a matter of debate. Although few historians now accept the details of Peter Sawyer’s 1962 argument—that the size and violence of viking armies had been exaggerated due to the ecclesiastical bias of textual sources, and that the vikings posed no greater threat to the church than the English themselves—recent studies have generally stressed continuity rather than cataclysm.⁴³ Nevertheless, contemporary sources certainly record that viking activity in the ninth- century was perceived as a material and existential threat to Christianity.⁴⁴ In a letter to Æthelred of Northumbria, Alcuin wrote ‘Nonne potest putari a borealibus poenas sanguinis venire super populum? quod in hoc facto nuper ingruente super domum Dei incepisse videri potest.’⁴⁵

The idea of martyrdom became particularly relevant in this context; for the first time, it was possible to see in England a persecuted Church, threatened by pagan enemies. The terms of enmity were starker and could more easily adapt patristic models of persecution than in the earlier centuries when warfare had been conducted between Christian kingdoms. It is no surprise that Orosius’s Historiarum Adversum Paganos Libri VII, written as a defence against the charge that Rome’s conversion to Christianity had resulted in the empire’s decline, was translated into Old English as part of Alfred’s programme of vernacular education. I will argue that the Old English works concerning martyrdom composed in this period demonstrate a similar impulse to reconcile defeat with the conviction that Christians would be rewarded with God’s protection. As martyrdom took on new significance, the category of ‘martyr’ was reshaped in the image of the warrior and became increasingly associated with masculinity.

Perhaps the most powerful and evocative example of this blend of heroism and martyrdom is found in the Old English epic poem Andreas.⁴⁶ Based on a now-lost Latin translation of the Greek apocryphal acts Praxeis Andreou kai Matheian eis ten polin ton anthropophagon, the poem concerns St Andrew’s journey to Mermedonia, land of cannibals, where he frees an imprisoned Matthew and orchestrates the conversion of the Mermedonians to Christianity. In the process, he is brutally tortured almost to the point of martyrdom. He does not die in the text of Andreas, but as the poem concludes he is returning to Achaea ‘þær he sawulgedal / beaducwealm gebad.’⁴⁷ In modern scholarship, Andreas has lived somewhat in the shadow of Beowulf, to which it is often compared.

In a recent edition Richard North and Michael Bintley argue that the Andreas poet ‘adopts a Beowulfian style of epic in order to undermine the values of Beowulf itself.’⁴⁸ There are certainly verbal parallels between Andreas and Beowulf, as well as between Andreas and the Cynewulf poems.⁴⁹ However, this probably results from the oral-formulaic tradition of Old English verse, with stock phrases being repeated across multiple works. Verbal similarities are not necessarily evidence of direct textual influence, much less evidence of deliberate ‘Cervantesque commentary’.⁵⁰

What is significant, however, about the similarities between Andreas, Beowulf and other Old English poetry, is that it demonstrates the blending of literary traditions: Andreas is part heroic epic, part Late Antique passio. Much Andreas scholarship has tended to view its heroic elements as awkward and clumsy additions into a Christian context. Michael D. Cherniss, for instance, argues that ‘heroic concepts in Andreas appear alongside, but not necessarily in harmony with [Christian] doctrines and sentiments.’⁵¹ In Cherniss’s view, the heroic elements of the poem are used purely to capture of the attention of the audience, before moving on to discuss purely Christian themes, which are the poem’s true subject matter.⁵² This is typical of an approach to Old English literary criticism which understands ‘Germanic’ heroic values—often relying on evidence from Tacitus’ first-century Germania—as essentially incompatible with Christianity. It relies on an ahistorical understanding of Christianity as doctrinally static, denying its reality as a lived faith which was constantly reinvented by its practitioners. This artificial distinction between Christian and non-Christian elements obscures the theological creativity at work when martyrdom is described as if it were a military victory, or when an apostle is presented as a warrior loyal to his Lord. Understanding Old English hagiographic poetry as deliberately and self-consciously theological not only allows for a deeper understanding of the work but also provides a glimpse into the development of ideas about martyrdom in a period from which few Anglo-Latin sources survive.⁵³

It has often been suggested that the central conflict of Andreas—between a Christian warrior and a heathen, monstrous people—is a reflection or comment upon the experience of Viking raids and invasions.⁵⁴ Most recently, Richard North has argued for a prominent ‘anti-Danish animus’ in Andreas, suggesting that the Mermedonians are direct analogues for the Danes.⁵⁵ There are a number of issues with North’s argument: the term wælwulfas, which is found only in Andreas and in the Battle of Maldon, seems to be a general poetic term for warriors, rather than an epithet specific to the Vikings. More significantly, Mermedonia and its populace do not map easily onto the activities of the Vikings in ninth-century England: in Andreas, it is Andrew who crosses the sea; the Mermedonians are a distant mission rather than an invading force. It is also important to recall that the narrative of Mermedonia is ultimately derived from the Praxeis and follows its plot almost exactly; if there are parallels with contemporary events, they are likely accidental. However, while the argument that the Mermedonians are a direct stand-in for the vikings is an overreading of the material, it is likely that its descriptions of warfare against a powerful, non-Christian enemy held resonances for a ninth-century audience.

The language of warfare pervades Andreas. In his discussion with the disguised Christ, Andrew refers to the disciples as orettmægas, meaning ‘soldiers’ or ‘champions’. The term is also found in Beowulf, referring to Beowulf and his men, and in Judith, where it refers to the army of Holofernes.⁵⁶ Upon Andrew’s arrival in Mermedonia, Christ appears and says to him, ‘Is þē gūð weotod / heardum heoruswengum; scel þīn hrā dæled / wundum weorðan, wættre gelīccost / faran flōde blōd.’⁵⁷ Warfare and pain are thus depicted as inevitable, an essential part of Andrew’s mission. Christ, however, offers encouragement and consolation by reminding Andrew that such pain is an opportunity to imitate his own passion. A direct parallel is drawn between the blood that will flow like water from Andreas’s wounds and the water and blood which flowed from Christ’s side on the cross. In the same section, Christ advises Andrew of the missional function of apostolic imitatio Christi: ‘Wes ā dōmes georn; / læt þē on gemyndum hū þær manegum wearð / fira gefrēge geond feala landa, / þæt me bysmredon’.⁵⁸ The public spectacle of pain and its retelling becomes a method of evangelism; the renown earned by the endurance of suffering echoes the renown which a warrior might win for bravery and success in battle. Following this rousing speech from Christ, Andrew’s reluctance is replaced with virtues befitting his heroic role: ‘modgeþyldig, / beorn beaduwe heard... anræd oretta, elne gefyrðred’.⁵⁹ In the ninth-century context, this functions as a powerful reinterpretation of defeat. Rather than signs of God’s displeasure, suffering and defeat become instruments of conversion, soteriologically essential. On an individual level, Andrew’s suffering is not a sign of his failure as a warrior, but rather of his success as a Christian.

This theme reaches its climax towards the end of the poem, when, having endured the torture of the Mermedonians, Andrew is confronted by Satan’s mockery:

‘Hafast nu þe anum eall getihhad
land ond leode, swa dyde lareow þin? Cyneþrym ahof, þam waes Christ nama, ofer middangeard, þynden hit meahte swa.þone Herodes ealdre besnyðede,
forcom æt campe “cyning Iudea”,
rices berædde ond hine rode befealg
þæt he on gealgan his gast onsende.
Swa ic nu bebeode bearnum minum, þegnum þryðfullum, ðæt hie ðe hnægen. Gingran æt guðe, lætað gares ord,
earh ættre gemæl, in gedufan
in fæges ferð! Gað fromlice,
ðæt ge guðfrecan gylp forbegan!’⁶⁰

In this passage, Christ’s crucifixion is represented as a humiliating failure, the loss of his kingdom, the victory of Satan. For a Christian audience, the irony of this would be immediately apparent: the crucifixion was the final and irreversible victory over evil and the inauguration of the kingdom of God. After Satan departs, Andrew reenacts a passion scene—he echoes Christ’s final words, ‘hwæt forlætest ðu me?’⁶¹—but does not complete martyrdom. Instead, he is freed by Christ, who reassures him that ‘Ne scealt ðu in henðum a leng searohæbbendra sar þrowian.’⁶² His deliverance is followed by a miraculous torrent of water, a baptismal flood, which effects the conversion of the Mermedonians.⁶³ Thus, Andreas offers two modes of consolation: the sanctification of defeat and the guarantee of ultimate deliverance.

Andeas is immediately followed in the Vercelli Book by the poem Fates of the Apostles.⁶⁴ It is one of the four poems which include Cynewulf’s runic signature, and its placement and thematic similarities to Andreas have caused some scholars to argue that the two poems should be understood as a single work, both composed by Cynewulf, but it is now generally agreed that the Fates is a separate work. That Fates does not use any of the details derived from the Praxeis in the stanza on Andrew is a strong indicator that the works were composed by different authors. As J.E. Cross has argued, all of the details regarding the apostles found in Fates, with one exception, are found in extant apocryphal apostolic acta and passiones, which, as they were used as a source for Aldhelm’s De Virginitate, were circulating in England by at least 700.⁶⁵ Like Andreas, however, Fates describes the apostles as warriors. Peter and Paul’s martyrdom is described thus: ‘frame fyrdhwate, feorh ofgefon,’⁶⁶ while Simon and Thaddeus are depicted as ‘[n]æron ða twegen tohtan sæne, / lindgelaces’.⁶⁷ While Fates is considerably shorter than Andreas and lacks the same theological heft, it is significant that both the Andreas poet and Cynewulf adapted Latin sources concerning the apostles in precisely the same way—leaving narrative details unchanged, but recontextualising their endurance of suffering as heroic bravery.

Another of the four poems bearing Cynewulf’s signature, Juliana, departs radically from the depiction of martyrdom found in Fates. The language of military action here applies not to the saint, but to her pagan adversaries: daraðhæbbende, frumgar, hererinc, hildeþremma and hildfruma are used in relation to Juliana’s enemies.⁶⁸ This is unusual for Cynewulf: in Fates and Christ II, Christ and his apostles are characterised as warriors; in Elene, Constantine’s military and Christian heroism are bound together. For Claude Schneider, Juliana’s divergence from this pattern demonstrates Cynewulf’s ‘powers of independent manipulation of traditional diction.’⁶⁹ There is a teleological narrative at work in Schneider’s reading, in which the language of military heroism in Cynewulf’s other poems and in poems such as Andreas and Guthlac A is superseded by the more subtle—and in literary terms, more advanced—spiritual heroism of Juliana.

This reading misses the essential difference between Juliana and the characters of other Cynewulf poems to whom militaristic language is applied: which is, of course, her gender. While Fates and Juliana are both adapted from Latin passiones, Cynewulf adapted his sources differently according to the gender of the saints. This is particularly clear if one considers the minor differences between Juliana and Cynewulf’s source text, which is identical or very similar to the passio extant in an early ninth- century Canterbury manuscript, Paris, BNF, Lat. 10861.⁷⁰ Juliana differs from its source in that the saint’s verbal conflict with the Devil is emphasised, becoming the ‘dramatic core of the work’.⁷¹ Rather than physical combat, Juliana subdues the Devil’s attacks through a ‘behaviour called flyting, a kind of rhetorical battle.’⁷² The force of her verbal assault is made clear midway through the poem, when the Devil confesses,

‘Gif ic ænigne ellenrofne
gemete modigne metodes cempan
wið flanþræce, nele feor þonan
bugan from beaduwe, ac he bord ongean hefeð hygesnottor, haligne scyld, gæstlic guðreaf, nele gode swican,
ac he beald in gebede bidsteal gifeð fæste on fedan, ic sceal feor þonan heanmod hweorfan, hroþra bidæled,
in gleda gripe, gehðu mænan
þaet ic ne meahte mægnes cræfte
guðe wiðgongan, ac ic geomor sceal scan oþerne ellenleasran,
under cumbolhagan, cempan sænran
þe ic onbryrdan mæge beorman mine, agælan æt guþe.’⁷³

Here, the language of warfare is applied to Juliana, but as a spiritual warrior. Juliana’s gender is explicitly problematised in her exchange with the Devil: ‘þu me ærest saga, hu þu gedyrstig þurh deop gehygd wurde þus wigþrist ofer eall wifa cyn’.⁷⁴ Beyond this passage, the language of warfare is rarely used. Cynewulf was manifestly reluctant to apply the developing heroic associations of martyrdom to a female saint.

A reluctance to identify female saints as martyrs can also be seen in the Old English Martyrology (OEM).⁷⁵ The OEM is an idiosyncratic text structurally similar to Latin historical martyrologies, it differs in its inclusion of non-hagiographical entries on subjects such as the seven days of creation, rogation days, and the seasons. Its entries relating to cosmology and the measurement of time parallel calendars more closely than martyrologies, and was probably intended more as an encyclopedia than a liturgical book.⁷⁶ It also contains entries for non-martyr saints such as Ceolfrith, Jerome and Martin of Tours; indeed, if the entries derived from Bede’s Martyrologium are discounted, the majority of remaining entries pertain to non-martyr saints. For these reasons, the OEM should not be read as a text concerned with martyrdom to the exclusion of other types of sanctity. The inclusion of a particular saint within the OEM does not mean that the compiler considered them a martyr.

Despite this, it is a profoundly important text for understanding how martyrdom was conceptualised in the ninth century. As Christine Rauer has noted, the author does not refer to any female saint as a martyr—a word adopted into Old English from Greek via Latin— despite using it to refer to male saints.⁷⁷ The narrative passages for female saints centre their virginity and attempts to encroach upon it, demonstrating the focus on gendered sexual violence which is present in many of the source texts but absent in Bede’s Martyrologium. While ‘martyr’ is used exclusively in relation to male saints, however, the martyrologist does not harness martyrdom to a particular expression of masculinity—there is no trace of the language of heroism found in Andreas or Fates. Even the entry for Oswald does not discuss his death in battle, instead focusing on his focusing on his political authority and devotion; following Bede, he is described as a ‘Cristinan kyninges’ rather than a martyr.⁷⁸

This pattern is echoed in the single liturgical calendar surviving from the ninth century. As with other types of sources, the pattern of survival poses a problem for diachronic studies: calendars survive in much greater numbers from the tenth century than any earlier period. Rebecca Rushforth’s edition of early medieval English calendars lists only four manuscripts from before the tenth century.⁷⁹ The earliest, Willibrord’s calendar, was compiled at Echternach in the early eighth century and has strong links with Lindisfarne. It includes several Northumbrian kings, but these are likely obits rather than notices for feast days and are not accompanied by formulae identifying them as saints. She also includes two eighth-century Northumbrian fragments. A single calendar survives from the ninth century, now Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 63, fols 40r-45v. Internal evidence suggests that it was compiled between 867 and 892 in Northumbria. Oswald is evidently included as a saint—other Northumbrian kings are absent, and his feast is marked with a cross to signal its importance—but he is identified only as ‘Oswaldi rex.’⁸⁰ No female saints are identified as martyrs; four (Perpetua and Felicity, Eugenia, and Mary Magdalene) are included without labels, while the remainder of female saints are identified as virgins. This calendar records the liturgical practice of a single community and should not be taken as evidence of broader liturgical trends. However, viewed alongside the OEM and Old English hagiographic poetry from the same period, it suggests that by the late ninth century, martyrdom was being re-imagined as a masculine category.

A tenth-century change: martyrdom and the Benedictine reform

The tenth and early eleventh centuries saw a proliferation of hagiographic and liturgical materials testifying to the cult of saints in England.⁸¹ It also saw the proliferation and flourishing of cults of kings. It was in the tenth century—specifically the 980s and 990s—that these kings were first identified as martyrs. Some of these saints, such as Oswald of Northumbria, had been the subject of cults for centuries, but in these decades their identification in calendars shifted from simply ‘rex’ to ‘rex et martyr’. The cult of St Edmund took on a new dynamism with the commission of a Passio from Abbo of Fleury, while Edward’s brief and turbulent reign was eclipsed by the cult which emerged in the decades after his death. Cults of royal martyrs were promoted particularly by figures associated with the Benedictine reform and patronised by kings; taken together, these sources suggest a reformed political theology of martyrdom, formulated in response to a widespread sense of threat and moral deterioration.

I have argued that in ninth-century Old English verse, martyrdom functioned as a discourse of consolation. Its fusion with secular heroism created a theological ‘safety net’ for those caught in the experience of military defeat. In the tenth century, a developing ideology of kingship placed increasing moral authority on the shoulders of the king, who was expected to defend his people both physically and spiritually. While a murdered or defeated king implied a failure of this duty, a martyred king could surpass even the strongest or most diplomatically skilled leader by interceding on behalf of his people. The transformation of murdered kings into martyrs transformed a cataclysmic event, suggestive of the withdrawal of divine protection from the nation, into evidence that God was still on the side of the English. While other models of martyrdom—represented not only by the martyrs of the early church but also by the first non-royal martyr, Ælfheah—existed, martyrdom was primarily associated by the eleventh century with murdered or defeated kings.

Royal sanctity is the subject of a long and controversial historiography. The idea of ‘sacral kingship’ was first advanced by anthropologist James Frazer in The Golden Bough. Frazer argued that kings initially emerged as adept magicians, capable of protecting their communities through control of nature, and that this supernatural element was therefore essential to the institution of kingship. He argued that the thaumaturgical powers of high medieval kings were a survival of an ancient sacral kingship, which was present, despite the lack of evidence, throughout the early medieval period.⁸² Frazer’s work provided a basis for generations of medievalists: Marc Bloch’s 1924 Les rois thaumaturges, while disputing Frazer’s suggestion that thaumaturgical powers were attributed to pre-Capetian kings, argued that a pre-Christian belief in sacral kingship persisted in the cultural memory centuries after conversion to Christianity.⁸³ For William A. Chaney, cults of royal saints were 'in direct descent from the sacral ruler of Germanic heathenism.’⁸⁴ This argument has been echoed more recently by Barbara Yorke, who has argued that ‘the tradition of murdered kings and princes being regarded as saints was exploited throughout the period and appears to have had a deep-rooted popular basis which may have had its origins before conversion.’⁸⁵

The lack of evidence regarding pre-Christian religion and pre-Christian political organisation, however, means that any argument for continuity with a pagan past is speculative. More recent studies of royal sanctity have moved away from the question of pre-Christian origins and have instead focused on the political function of cults of royal saints.⁸⁶ While these studies have transformed the understanding of sanctity in early medieval England, they have typically understood beliefs about sanctity as static and unchanging. Martyrdom is frequently invoked as a stable category into which all murdered or slain saints must have fitted: Ridyard, for instance, notes that a long notice Edward’s death, probably dating from the tenth century, is included in the ‘Northern Recension’ manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which ‘testifies to the speed with which Edward came to be regarded as a saint and martyr.’⁸⁷ In fact, as Christine Fell has noted, ‘whole structure of martyrdom is absent’ from the earliest manuscripts of the Chronicle.⁸⁸ Neither the Peterborough (E) nor the Worcestershire (D) manuscripts, which together make up the ‘Northern Recension’, name Edward as a martyr or refer to his death as a martyrdom. Only the later Abingdon manuscript (C), written in the mid-eleventh century, refers to Edward’s death as a martyrdom.⁸⁹ As a result, the contingency of categories of sanctity has been underestimated and the originality of late tenth- century ideas of martyrdom has been overlooked. By examining apparently minor changes in how saints are identified and categorised, sanctity appears as a more responsive concept, capable of almost infinite adaptation to meet new political and social realities.

In 978, Edward was murdered after only three years on the throne. His reign was turbulent, marked by a succession crisis which divided the leaders of the Benedictine reform movement and an ‘anti- monastic reaction’ resulting in the dispossession of lands granted to monasteries in Edgar’s reign.⁹⁰ He was identified as a martyr by at least 1001, when his intercessory powers were invoked in a charter, and possibly earlier. Byrthferth’s Vita Oswaldi, written between 997 and 1002, described him as ‘rex et martyr’ and explains, perhaps with a hint of justification, that his kingship was sufficient for martyrial status: ‘[b]ene testis, quia rex erat.’⁹¹ According to Byrthferth he was murdered by nobles associated with Æthelred. The post-conquest Passio gives Ælfthryth, Æthelred’s mother, a prominent role in the conspiracy, but there is no pre-Conquest evidence to suggest her involvement.

Regardless of Æthelred’s involvement, it was he who benefitted from the killing, and the historiography of Edward’s cult has reflected this. The cult has variously been interpreted as a piece of political propaganda designed to embarrass and chastise Æthelred and nobles associated with him for their role in the murder,⁹² as an act of penance for the king, designed to avert God’s punishment in the form of Danish invasions⁹³ and as a means of strengthening the office of the king, which took on a new fragility following a regicide.⁹⁴ There is little evidence to support the first explanation: Edward’s cult was promoted most strongly by Æthelred; a charter issued by the king to Shaftesbury Abbey explicitly names Edward as a martyr and enlists the aid of his relics in defending the foundation ‘aduersus barbarorum insidias’.⁹⁵ The latter two explanations are more plausible: it seems significant that Byrhtferth attributed the earliest miracles witnessed at Edward’s tomb to c. 990, when Viking raids were increasing in intensity. The 990s also saw Æthelred take on an increasingly penitential manner: charters from this period contain penitential proems, framing Æthelred’s extensive grants of land to monasteries as acts of penance designed to expiate his sins as well as the collective sins of his people.⁹⁶

The ideology of kingship in this period was such that the virtues or sins of the king were believed to bring divine favour or disfavour, respectively, upon the nation. In Ælfric’s Old English adaptation of the De duodecim abusivis saeculi, he wrote:

Gif se cyning wyle mid carfulnysse healdan þas foresædan beboda, þonne byð his rice gesundful on life and æfter life he mot faran to þam ecan for his arfæstnysse. Gif he þonne forsyhð þas gesetnyssa and lare, þonne byð his eard geyrmed foroft, ægðer ge on heregunge ge on hungre, ge on cwealme ge on ungewederum, ge on wildeorum.⁹⁷

In this view, Æthelred’s promotion of Edward’s cult was a way of making amends for the murder. Simon Keynes has argued that a law code promulgated in 1008, requiring the observance of Edward’s feast day throughout the country, was intended to join the English people in this demonstration of penance.⁹⁸ Edward’s murder, viewed thus, becomes a corporate crime, implicating the whole nation, and is met with a corporate punishment in the form of Viking invasions. While the penitential interpretation holds weight, it does not explain why the decades following Edward’s murder witnessed the first identification of murdered kings as martyrs.

In the winter of 869, Edmund of East Anglia was killed by a Viking army. Within decades, a cult had developed around him: by the last decade of the ninth century, coins bearing the name of St Edmund were minted in East Anglia, then under a Danish king.⁹⁹ The popularity of the cult was limited, however, and no new coins were minted after around 910.¹⁰⁰ A charter issued by King Edmund to the community of secular clerics at Bury St Edmunds in 945 identified Edmund as a saint, and the will of Theodred (945x952) made a grant of land to the church of St Edmund in Bury, but no authentic documents identify Edmund as a martyr.¹⁰¹ Edmund’s cult was transformed when, in 985, the community of reformed monks at Ramsey commissioned Abbo to write his Passio Sancti Eadmundi. Abbo remained at Ramsey until 987 and composed his Passio Sancti Eadmundi either during this period or after returning to Fleury the following year. Certainly, the Passio must have been completed before the death of Dunstan, to whom the work was dedicated, in 988. This makes Abbo’s Passio the earliest surviving hagiographic work in which an English king—and, excepting the two Hewalds, an English saint—was identified as a martyr. Abbo began the Passio with an account, adapted from Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, of the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons:

‘Et exclusis Britonibus stauunt inter se diuidere uictores alienigenae insulam, bonis omnibus fecundissimam, indignum iudicantes eam ignauorum dominio detineri, quae ad defensionem suam idoneis posset prebere sufficientem alimoniam et optimis uiris.’¹⁰²

Abbo followed Bede and Gildas in relating the Anglo-Saxon invasions to the moral and spiritual failure of the Britons. By beginning the Passio in this way, Abbo invited a parallel with the successive waves of invasions which had cost Edmund his life and which continued to pose an immediate threat. He offered a worst-case scenario to his readers: without reform, they would be overcome by sin and would meet the same fate as the Britons. The Danes, however, are not depicted as morally superior to the English, but as followers of the Antichrist. The consequence of a Danish invasion was cast in apocalyptic terms. This narrative, however, is undercut by Edmund’s martyrdom. The centrepiece of Abbo’s Passio is a lengthy dialogue between Edmund and Hinguar, the leader of the Danish fleet. Hinguar demands Edmund’s submission, promising shared rule and the retention of his wealth in return. Edmund responds in the strongest terms: ‘quia regem diminutum capite numquam, Danus, uidebis ad triumphum superuiuere.’¹⁰³ Edmund is then martyred, and Abbo makes explicit the parallels with Christ’s crucifixion: ‘Ille quidem purus sceleris in columna ad quam uinctus fuit sanguinem non pro se sed pro nobis flagellorum suorum signa reliquit; iste pro adipiscenda floria immarcescibili cruentato stipite similes poenas dedit.’¹⁰⁴ Like Christ, Edmund’s sacrifice was ‘non pro se sed pro nobis’—an act of holiness so great that it made amends for the sins of his people. Although ‘as a defender of his people, Edmund was a failure’, his martyrdom secured their spiritual defence—a greater victory than a successful battle.¹⁰⁵

Edmund was not the only royal martyr associated with Ramsey. Byrhtferth, who would discuss Edward’s martyrdom in his Vita Oswaldi, was a monk of Ramsey and studied under Abbo. Germanus, who witnessed a 993 charter as abbot of Ramsey, had moved by 997 to the abbacy of Cholsey, the first foundation dedicated to Edward the Martyr.¹⁰⁶ Byrhtferth is also thought to have composed the first five sections of the Historia Regum, earlier attributed to Symeon of Durham. These sections include the earliest version of the ‘Kentish Royal Legend’, detailing the martyrdom of seventh-century princes Æthelred and Æthelberht, as well as eighth- and ninth-century Northumbrian royal martyrs Eardwulf, Ælfwald and Ealhmund.¹⁰⁷ According to the Passio et translatio beatorum martyrum Ethelredi atque Ethelbri, which Rollason dates to the mid-eleventh century, the bodies of Æthelred and Æthelberht were translated to Ramsey between 978 and 992.¹⁰⁸ As we have seen, a calendar compiled at Ramsey, probably before 987, is also the earliest occurrence of the feast of Oswald of Northumbria as ‘regis et martyris’.

Ramsey thus appears to have been the centre of interest in royal martyrdom in the years following Edward’s death. This may reflect a personal interest of Ramsey’s founder, Oswald of Worcester, at whose invitation Abbo travelled from the continent. A psalter believed to belong to Oswald includes a litany featuring Kenelm, Edmund, Oswald of Northumbria, Æthelbert of East Anglia and Alban.¹⁰⁹ Certainly, interest in royal martyrs was more intense at Ramsey than at foundations associated with Dunstan or Æthelwold. However, it was Dunstan to whom Abbo dedicated his Passio, and a translation was made into Old English by Ælfric, who had studied under Æthelwold at Abingdon. This suggests that royal martyrdom was a shared interest of the Benedictine reformers, albeit to different degrees.

The reformers’ interest in martyred kings may reflect the Benedictine ideology of ‘pastoral kingship.’¹¹⁰ Æthelwold’s preface to the Regularis concordia begins with a Christlike depiction of the king, with responsibility for the spiritual welfare of his people: ‘[r]egali utique functus offici ueluti Pastorum Pastor sollicitus a rabidis perfidorum rictibus.’¹¹¹ Edgar’s patronage of the reform allowed for an intimate relationship between the Church and the ruling dynasty; the reformed monasteries ‘offered an atmosphere permeated with devotion to the royal family.’¹¹² In one of his later homilies Ælfric went so far as to suggest that it was among the king’s duties to offer himself as a martyr for his people:

‘For ðan ƿe se cyning is Christes sylfes speligend ofer ðam Christenan folce ƿe Christ sylfe alysde... Ælc cyning bið halig ƿe gehylt Godes folc and mid lufe gewissað, na mid wælhreownysse, ac æfre æfter rihte, na mid anwilnysse, and wyle eac syllan, gif hit swa micel neod bið his agen lif æt nextan for his leode ware, swa swa se Hælend sealde hine sylfne for us.’¹¹³

However, the intimate connection between the person of the king and the fortunes of his people also meant that the murder of a king could be interpreted negatively, as the ultimate sign of God’s wrath. As Paul Hayward has suggested, new developments in the cult of saints arose ‘out of moments of genuine crisis.’¹¹⁴ The murder of a king was such a moment: in Wulfstan’s Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, Edward’s murder was framed as a cataclysmic event by which the English had incurred God’s wrath; Susan Ridyard has argued that ‘the regicide of 978 was the greatest sin that the archbishop could conceive.’¹¹⁵ It is unlikely to be a coincidence that the commission of Edmund’s Passio came only a few years after Edward’s murder. Nicole Marafioti has drawn attention to the similarities between Abbo’s description of the desecration of Edmund’s corpse and the posthumous fate of Edward’s body, suggesting that the Passio ‘reflected the concerns of an audience coping with the recent royal assassination.’¹¹⁶

For early medieval Christians, negative events could be interpreted in one of two ways: either negatively, as divine punishment, or positively, as persecution. Reframing the murder of a king as a martyrdom provided reassurance that the English Church was in continuity with the persecuted early Church, and that God was still on the side of the English. This model might also explain the single non-royal martyr of this period: Ælfheah, archbishop of Canterbury until his execution by viking raiders in 1012. Although not a king, he occupied a similar position as ‘the spiritual leader of the English, one of the Lord's chosen shepherds.’¹¹⁷ These are the terms in which the entry for Ælfheah’s capture in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes the event: ‘Wæs ða ræpling, se ðe ær wæs heafod Angelkynnes 7 Cristendomes. Þær man mihte ða geseon yrmðe þær man oft ær geseah blisse on þære earman byrig þanon com ærest Cristendom 7 blis for Gode 7 for worulde.’¹¹⁸

An adaptation of Abbo’s Passio into Old English is found in Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, a collection written between 994 and 998.¹¹⁹ Ælfric dedicated the Lives of Saints to two secular patrons, West Saxon ealdormen Æthelweard and Æthelmær. As E.G. Whatley has argued, the concerns of secular aristocrats are visible in the selection of material: ‘the Lives collection emphasizes secular kings and military saints from the same social caste as Æthelweard and Æthelmær’; beyond the Life of Edmund, Ælfric included a Life of Oswald as well as Lives of military saints such as Martin, Maurice and the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste.¹²⁰ The collection also includes a sermon on the Book of Kings, which dwelt on the consequences of impious kings, and a passio of the Maccabees which discussed persecution against heathens and offered a justification for war in such circumstances. Malcolm Godden has argued that Ælfric ‘clearly did see a similarity between the times of the early martyrs under persecution and the contemporary pressure, or at least temptation, to side with the Vikings, which he interpreted as abandoning the faith.’¹²¹ As already noted, Ælfric presented a willingness to endure martyrdom as a duty of kings. In his Passio of the Maccabees, he also outlined three orders of society—laboratores, oratores, bellatores—in which he argues that just as warriors must fight physical enemies, so monks must be left alone to their spiritual battle.¹²²

In comparison with Abbo's Passio, Ælfric's Life of Edmund minimised the saint's virginity. Carl Phelpstead has suggested that while Abbo was creating a saint with a primarily monastic audience in mind, Ælfric’s de-emphasised Edmund’s virginity ‘out of consideration for his non-monastic audience.’¹²³ In Ælfric’s Lives of female virgin martyrs, meanwhile, the opposite dynamic is visible: virginity is emphasised and martyrdom minimised. These narratives follow the basic narrative structure found in the late antique passiones which Ælfric used as his sources: the saint, vowing to preserve her virginity, refuses to marry a pagan suitor; she is imprisoned and threatened with sexual violence, which she escapes through divine intervention; she subjected to a series of tortures and finally martyred.¹²⁴ Rather than focusing on the final moments of torture and martyrdom, Ælfric concentrated his narratives on the defence of virginity.

The emphasis on virginity is typical of Ælfric’s reformed milieu; for the reformers, ‘sexual abstinence was the hallmark of the new monasticism.’¹²⁵ For Ælfric, Cubitt notes, ‘virginity is the supreme test of obedience to God and the highest form of sacrifice. Virginity, indeed, can be regarded as a form of martyrdom.’¹²⁶ His minimisation of Edmund’s virginity thus seems significant. In his portrayal of male and female martyrs, Ælfric offered two routes to sanctity, both ‘created by a man for a primarily male audience’.¹²⁷ The duties of the oratores and bellatores were complimentary, and Ælfric’s choice of saints seems to reflect a desire to provide distinct models of sanctity which each order could imitate: for the bellatores, warrior saints and martyred kings; for the oratores, virgin martyrs.

This gendered division is also reflected in calendars, which survive in far greater quantity for the tenth century than preceding centuries. In the case of Oswald, a major shift in how his sanctity was conceptualised seems to have occurred in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, initially at Ramsey and then at other monastic centres. Oswald’s feast is absent from the earliest tenth-century calendar, the Junius Psalter (920s), and from the Leofric Missal (969x987). His feast is included in the Salisbury Psalter (969x987), but he is identified there only as a king. Significantly, the earliest calendar to identify Oswald as rex et martyr is Paris MS Lat. 7299, written at Ramsey. Rushforth suggests that the calendar was written during Abbo’s stay at Ramsey and taken with him to Fleury, where it accumulated additions in the early eleventh century.¹²⁸ The final tenth-century calendar, compiled between 988 and 1008 at Canterbury, also identifies Oswald as rex et martyr, although another Canterbury calendar from the early eleventh century refers to him only as a king.¹²⁹ Of the remaining eleventh-century calendars, all refer to Oswald as a king and a martyr except Cambridge, University Library, KK.5.32, which was compiled between 1012 and 1030 and possibly associated with Canterbury or Glastonbury.

Edward and Edmund’s identification demonstrate a similar lack of initial standardisation. In the Cambridge MS, both saints join Oswald in being identified as kings rather than martyrs.¹³⁰ The calendar in the Missal of Robert of Jumièges, dated tentatively to the first quarter of the eleventh century, also omits the designation ‘martyr’ for Edward.¹³¹ Neither saint is referred to as a martyr before the second decade of the eleventh century. After this, however, the calendars are unanimous in their acceptance of royal martyrdom. Within a matter of decades, the veneration of kings as martyrs had gained widespread acceptance.

The categorisation of female saints is more complicated. While virgo is by far the dominant identification, some female saints continue to be labelled as virgins and martyrs throughout the eleventh century; indeed, the calendar where this is most frequent is in the Crowland Psalter, dated to 1060x1087. There is no discernable pattern in the selection of saints; interestingly, Thecla is the saint most frequently labelled virgo et martyr, despite being one of the few ‘virgin martyrs’ who died a natural death. This may reflect particular local or personal devotion and familiarity with the passiones of particular saints, or it may suggest that normative categories of sanctity remained essentially unstable and contested. The passiones of female martyrs, while dwelling more on virginity than those of their male counterparts, follow the familiar trajectory towards martyrdom.

The inconsistency of their identification in calendars suggests a tension between a late antique model of martyrdom which was open to Christians of any gender, and an increasingly dominant understanding of martyrdom as a state exclusive to men—or more precisely, to royal men. A trace of this tension is visible in a manuscript of Ælfric’s Lives of Saints dating from the first half of the eleventh century.¹³² This manuscript omits the label martyris in the Latin title of Edmund’s Life and exchanges passio for natale. For the Life of Eugenia it uses male pronouns throughout, refers to Eugenia as abbod, and inserts Passio into the title; all other MSS use female pronouns and feminine labels such as fæmne and mæden. This is suggestive of an alternate discourse of gendered sanctity present in eleventh-century England, and provides a reminder that the loss of sources likely obscures a much greater diversity of ideas about sanctity.

Conclusion

Eadmer’s Vita Sancti Anselmi, written around 1124, records a conversation supposedly held in the 1070s between Lanfranc, then archbishop of Canterbury, and Anselm, abbot of Bec. Lanfranc expressed doubts about Ælfheah’s claim to sanctity, saying ‘Hunc non modo inter sanctos verum et inter martires numerant, licet eum non pro confessione nominis Christi, sed quia pecunia se redimere noluit occisum non negent.’¹³³ This kind of intense scrutiny of saints’ cults, and towards the validity of their claim to particular categories of sanctity, is usually associated with the post- Conquest period and the move towards a formal canonisation process.¹³⁴ In the absence of explicit evidence of this kind of questioning in earlier texts, historians have tended to assume that martyrdom was a less problematic category in the early middle ages, and that any saint who suffered a violent death was naturally perceived as a martyr. This thesis has demonstrated that martyrdom was a more dynamic category, subject to continuous reinterpretation and contestation.

For both Aldhelm and Bede, the most resonant type of martyr was the virgin martyr, whose continence in life and steadfastness in death provided an ideal for contemporary monasticism. While Bede embraced at least one king—Oswald— as a saint, he emphatically rejected the idea that martyrdom could be achieved in a single moment, through death on the battlefield, and never identified such saints as martyrs. The vernacular poetry of the ninth century provides an alternative idea, rendering martyrdom in the language of secular heroism. Due to the difficulty of dating and locating the Old English material, it is impossible to associate this development with any particular historical moment. It is possible that this idea of martyrdom was current before the ninth century, existing contemporaneously with the ideas of Aldhelm, Bede and Alcuin.

Another possibility, I have suggested, is that this understanding of martyrdom emerged in response to the experience of viking raiding and settlement. The experience of an external, pagan enemy made it easy to draw parallels with the persecution of martyrs. Understanding contemporary events in these terms also translated profoundly negative events into moments of grace. The central paradox of Christianity—that victory is found in defeat, that death is conquered through death—offered a consolatory lens through which the events of the ninth century could be understood. The result of this conflation of martyr and warrior was the masculinisation of martyrdom. Other ninth-century texts such as the Old English Martyrology further suggest that the category of ‘martyr’ was increasingly unable to accommodate female virgin martyrs.

Following the death of King Edward in 978, the idea of martyrdom underwent another transformation: murdered and defeated kings were identified as martyrs for the first time, and their cults were patronised at the highest levels. I have argued that this is related to an ideology of kingship that developed alongside the Benedictine reform. The king was seen to have a greater responsibility for the moral and spiritual welfare of the nation than ever before; his own actions were thought to bring God’s favour or retribution upon his people. The royal office of sainted kings was not incidental; rather, their veneration as martyrs emerged from a political theology of martyrdom developed at the close of the tenth century. When understood as murders or military defeats, the deaths of kings appeared to be national disasters, suggesting the fiercest kind of divine judgement. The martyrdom of a king, meanwhile, demonstrated that God was still on the side of the English—it transformed a moment of cataclysm into a moment of hope. Discussing the ‘great persecution’ in his commentary on Ezra and Nehemiah, Bede had made this logic explicit: ‘for though with the killing of the martyrs [the Church] seemed to be on the point of complete destruction, she was built up even better when they were crowned in secret.’¹³⁵ It is therefore no surprise that the cult of martyred kings began to flourish in the last decades of the tenth century as viking raids intensified.

The way in which a society, a community, or even an individual conceptualises martyrdom can reveal a great deal about how they think about suffering, persecution and protection. At the dawn of the eighth century, Bede had focused on Æthelthryth as an equivalent to the martyrs of the early church—she demonstrated that God continued to make saints among the gens Anglorum, if not by a martyr’s death then by unwavering witness to the faith in the face of tribulation, which Bede’s monastic contemporaries could hope to emulate. By the tenth century, the archetypal martyr was a leader and defender of the nation, both physically and spiritually; he was, by definition, a man. At the same time, female virgin martyrs were being understood primarily in terms of their virginity, in line with the reformers’ emphasis on celibacy. The development of ‘martyrs’ and ‘virgins’ into two distinct and distinctively gendered categories of sanctity demonstrates that theology, rather than languishing in doctrinal stasis, could be readily adapted to meet the particular challenges of its day.

1. E.E. Malone, The Monk and the Martyr (Washington DC, 1950).

2. On martyrdom in Islam, see A. Afsaruddin, Striving in the Path of God: Jihad and Martyrdom in Islamic Thought (Oxford, 2013), especially pp. 205-268 on the polysemic nature of Islamic concepts of martyrdom.

3. BL Cotton MS Galba A XVIII, fol. 21r. For the production context of the illumination, see R. Deshman, ‘The Galba Psalter: pictures, texts and context in an early medieval prayerbook’, Anglo- Saxon England, 26 (1997), pp. 109-138, at pp. 110-11. The illumination has been dated to the first quarter of the tenth century based on the script of the Metrical Calendar of Hampson, which includes decorated initials corresponding in style and pigment with the full-page illumination: S. Keynes, ‘King Æthelstan’s Books’, in M. Lapidge and H. Gneuss, eds, Learning and literature in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 193-6.

4. This feature has been occasionally noted; see T. Berger, Gender Differences and the Making of Liturgical History (Farnham, 2011), p. 175, where she notes ‘the prevalence of the descriptor “virgin” for women saints (and not only religious women) and its absence as a title for male saints’, and in M. Rubin, 'Cults of Saints' in J. Bennett and R. Karras, The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe (Oxford, 2013), p. 487, which notes that within litanies 'the specific circumstances of these women were effaced by the category virgo.’ To my knowledge, the only study to undertake an examination of gendered categories of sanctity in this period is F. Lifshitz, ‘Priestly Women, Virginal Men: Litanies and Their Discontents’, in L.M. Bitel and F. Lifshitz, eds, Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe (Pennsylvania, 2011), pp. 87-102.

5. For the case for female authorship of anonymous texts, see D. Watt, Women, Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650–1100 (London, 2020). Such arguments are necessarily speculative and the majority of texts discussed below are securely attributed to male authors. However, difficulty of attributing liturgical texts to particular monastic houses means that female authorship of these texts is theoretically possible and in some cases probable, and there is often no reason to assume that particular calendars or litanies originated from male monasteries.

6. This position was famously formulated in J. Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, American Historical Review, 91/5 (1986), pp. 1053-1075.

7. R. Swanson, ‘Angels Incarnate: Clergy and Masculinity from Gregorian Reform to Reformation’, in D.M. Hadley, ed., Masculinity in Medieval Europe (New York, 1999), pp. 160-77; R. L. McDaniel, The Third Gender and Ælfric's Lives of Saints (Kalamazoo, 201

8. C. Williamson, ‘Bede's Hymn to St Agnes of Rome: The Virgin Martyr as a Male Monastic Exemplum', Viator, 43/1 (2012), pp. 39-66; R. Stephenson, ‘Judith as Spiritual Warrior: Female Models of Monastic Masculinity in Ælfric's Judith and Byrhtferth's Enchiridion’, English Studies, 101/1 (2020), pp. 79-95.

9. D. Neal, ‘What Can Historians Do with Clerical Masculinity? Lessons from Medieval Europe’, in J.D. Thibodeaux, ed., Negotiating Clerical Identities: Priests, Monks and Masculinity in the Middle Ages (Basingstoke, 2010).

10. P.H. Cullum and K.J. Lewis, ‘Introduction’, in Religious Men and Masculine Identity in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2013), p. 3. The idea that profession, socal status and religious vocation demand different expressions of ideal masculinity is central to R. Karras, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia, 2003). This is not necessarily true of more peripheral medieval societies: see G.L. Evans, Men and Masculinities in the Sagas of Icelanders (Oxford, 2019), pp. 16-23, for a discussion of a singular hegemonic masculinity and multiple subordinate masculinities in medieval Iceland.

11. M. Lapidge and M. Herren, ‘General introduction’, Aldhelm: The Prose Works (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 2-3.

12. C. Rauer, ‘Female Hagiography in the Old English Martyrology’, in P. Szarmach, ed., Writing Women Saints in Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto, 2013), p. 19.

13. Aldhelm, De Virginitate, MGH, Auctores antiquissimi XV, Aldhelmi Opera, p. 294; trans. M. Lapidge and M. Herren, Aldhelm: The Prose Works, p. 109: ‘Therefore the blessed Lucia, having preserved the seal of her chastity and having finished the course of her life, was found worthy of the glorious triumph of a martyr.’

14. Aldhelm, p. 293; trans. M. Lapidge and M. Herren, p. 108: ‘To me it seems worthwhile that the fame of St Agatha should be followed by the glories of our most chaste virgin Lucia, which two our teacher and instructor St Gregory the Great is known to have coupled together in the daily litany, when the solemnities of the Mass are celebrated, placing (them) in the catalogue of martyrs in this order: Felicity, Anastasia, Agatha and Lucia.’ It has been noted that this translation misleadingly renders ‘canone’ as litany: G.H. Brown, ‘Review: The Prose Works by Aldhelm, Michael Lapidge and Michael Herren’, Speculum, 57/2 (1982), p. 341-2.

15. J. Mullins, ‘Aldhelm’s Choice of Saints for his Prose De Virginitate’, in S. McWilliams, ed., Saints and Scholars: New Perspectives on Anglo-Saxon Literature and Culture (Cambridge, 2012), p. 45.

16. V.L. Kennedy, The Saints of the Canon of the Mass (Vatican City, 1938), p. 61.

17. Mullins, p. 44.

18. M. Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Litanies of the Saints (London, 1991), pp. 13-15.

19. Ibid., pp. 20-25. See also C. Hohler, ‘Theodore and the Liturgy’, in M. Lapidge, ed., Archbishop Theodore: Commemorative Studies on his Life and Influence (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 222-235.

20. Lapidge, Litanies, pp. 43-49.

21. Lapidge, pp. 212-3.

22. Lapidge, pp. 75, 210-211.

23. Lifshitz, pp. 94-5.

24. On the development of the historical martyrology as a genre, see J.M. McCulloh, ‘Historical Martyrologies in the Benedictine Cultural Tradition’, in W. Lourdaux and D. Verhelst, eds, Benedictine Culture, 750-1050 (Leuven, 1983), pp. 114-131. The fundamental treatment of Bede’s Martyrologium remains H. Quentin, Les Martyrologes Historiques du Moyen Age (Paris, 1908), pp. 2-119. However, this is an investigation of Bede’s sources rather than an edition, and does not contain entries for which Bede had no written source. An edition based on Quentin’s work is provided in J. Dubois and G. Renaud, Edition Pratique des Martyrologes de Béde de L’Anonyme Lyonnais et de Florus (Paris, 1976), though this contains multiple errors. Due to the shortcomings of this edition and the availability of digitised manuscripts, I have quoted directly from the MSS.

25. The only translation of the Martyrologium does not include these short entries, which creates a misleading impression of the text: F. Lifshitz, ‘Bede, Martyrology’, in T. Head, ed., Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology (New York, 2001), pp. 169-197.

26. These are St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 451 and Munich, Bayerische Statsbibliothek, MS Clm. 15818. The St Gallen MS, compiled in Francia, probably at Fulda, in the ninth century, seems to include only one continental interpolation: an entry for St Boniface written in the original hand. Unfortunately, it includes no entries after July 25. The Munich MS, also of ninth-century Frankish origin, includes many additional short entries but its long entries show no continental influence; see Quentin, pp. 18-47.

27. St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 451, p. 12.

28. Ibid., p. 17.

29. It is unclear why Bede chose to emphasise the virginity of this otherwise obscure saint. The reference to Felix’s virginity is also found in the the early ninth-century Latin legendary associated with Christ Church Canterbury, now MS Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 10861, but not in the Old English Martyrology.

30. I have discussed Bede’s theology of martyrdom at greater length in my BA thesis, Bede’s Martyrs, and in a paper given at IMC Leeds 2019, ‘Making Martyrology: Bede's Martyrologium and an Imagined Eusebian Tradition.’

31. Bede’s hymn to St Agnes also used a female martyr as an example for monks: C. Williamson, ‘Bede's Hymn to St Agnes of Rome’.

32. Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. B. Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), p. 398-9: ‘Nor lacks our age its Æthelthryth as well; / Its virgin wonderful nor lacks our age.’

33. The version of the Martyrologium Hieronymianium used by Bede was closely related to the Echternach recension, which includes Oswald: BNF Lat. 10837, f. 22v.

34. The idea that asceticism could constitute a ‘white’, bloodless martyrdom was popular in Ireland, and might have influenced Northumbrian Christianity: C. Stancliffe, ‘Red, White and Blue Martyrdom’, in D. Whitelock, R. McKitterick, D.N. Dumville, eds., Ireland in Early Mediaeval Europe (Cambridge, 1982), p. 31.

35. Bede, In Epistulas Septem Catholicas, ed. D. Hurst, CCSL, 121 (Turnhout, 1983), p. 252; trans. D. Hurst, The Commentary on the Seven Catholic Epistles (Kalamazoo, 1985), p. 108: ‘[in times] when the Church is at peace’. See also P. C. Hilliard, ‘Quae res Quem sit Habitura Finem, Posterior Aetas Videbit: Prosperity, Adversity, and Bede’s Hope for the Future of Northumbria’, in P.N. Darby & F. Wallis, eds, Bede and the Future (Burlington, 2014), pp. 181-206.

36. Alcuin, The Bishops, Kings, and Saints of York, ed. and tr. P. Godman (Oxford, 1982), pp. 86-7.

37. For the generic influence of the opus geminatum on Alcuin’s Versus and his work more broadly, see P. Godman, Alcuin: The Bishops, Kings and Saints of York (Oxford, 1982), pp. lxxviii-lxxxviii.

38. Alcuin, pp. 42-3: ‘I have with me a piece of holy wood found from the stake on which Oswald's head was nailed after his murder.’

39. Ibid., pp. 22-3: ‘for when the appointed hour of his death arrived, the warrior-king was suddenly murdered by his allies.’

40. S. Coupland, ‘The Vikings in Francia and Anglo-Saxon England to 911’, in R. McKitterick, ed., The New Cambridge Medieval History II: c.700–c.900 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 190-201.

41. N.P. Brooks, ‘England in the Ninth Century: The Crucible of Defeat’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 29 (1979), p. 1.

42. S. Keynes, ‘England, 700-900’, in R. McKitterick, ed., The New Cambridge Medieval History II: c.700–c.900 (Cambridge, 1995), p. 41.

43. D.M. Hadley, ‘Conquest, colonization and the Church: ecclesiastical organisation in the Danelaw’, Historical Research, 69/169 (1996), pp. 109-28; J. Barrow, ‘Survival and Mutation: Ecclesiastical Institutions in the Danelaw in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries’, in D.M. Hadley and J.D. Richards, eds, Cultures in Contact: Scandinavian Settlement in England in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries (Turnhout, 2000), pp. 155-176.

44. S. Foot, ‘Violence against Christians? The vikings and the Church in ninth-century England’, Medieval History, 1/3 (1991), p. 8.

45. Alcuin, Epistola 16, ed. E. Dümmler, MGH, Epistolae Karolini Aevi, IV.II, p. 42; trans. G.F. Browne, in D. Whitelock, ed., English Historical Documents: Volume 1, c. 500-1042 (2nd ed, London, 1992), p. 900: ‘Can it not be expected that from the north there will come upon our nation retribution of blood, which can be seen to have started with this attack which has lately befallen the house of God?’

46. Like all Old English poetry, Andreas is difficult to date with any certainty. Its terminus ante quem is established by the date of its manuscript, Biblioteca Capitolare di Vercelli, MS CXVII, more popularly known as the Vercelli book, which can be dated on palaeographic grounds to the mid- tenth century. On linguistic grounds, Andreas has been dated to the mid-ninth century, but this method of dating is unreliable due to the possibility of anachronistic language: see R. Boenig, Saint and Hero: Andreas and Medieval Doctrine (Michigan, 1991), p. 23. For the purposes of this thesis, it is enough to accept that Andreas was composed no earlier than the ninth century, which situates it within the context of viking invasions, whether ongoing or fresh in the cultural memory.

47. Andreas: An Edition, ed. and trans. R. North and M. Bintley (Liverpool, 2016), p. 209: ‘where his soul’s parting awaited, death in the war.’

48. R. North and M. Bintley, ‘Introduction’, in Andreas: An Edition (Liverpool, 2016), p. 64.

49. Ibid., p. 58.

50. Ibid., p. 99.

51. M.D. Cherniss, Ingeld and Christ: Heroic Concepts and Values in Old English Christian Poetry (The Hague, 1972), p. 171.

52. Ibid., p. 176

53. For a discussion of theology in Old English hagiographic verse, see S.B. Greenfield and D.G. Calder, A New Critical History of Old English Literature (New York, 1986), pp. 158-182.

54. S. Godlove, ‘Bodies as Borders: Cannibalism and Conversion in the Old English Andreas’, Studies in Philology, 106/2 (2009), pp. 137-60.

55. R. North and M. Bintley, ‘Introduction’, pp. 98-102.

56. Andreas, p. 153; J. Bosworth, 'oret-mæcg', in T.N. Toller, ed., An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Oxford, 1898), p. 765.

57. Andreas, pp. 168-9: ‘War is assured for you / with harsh bloody strokes your body shall / be dealt wounds, almost like water / will the gore flood out.’

58. Andreas, p. 169: ‘Be always eager for renown, keep remembering how among many men the fame spread through a lot of countries how I was abused.’

59. Andreas, p. 170: ‘man of mental patience, warrior hard in battle... a single-minded soldier sustained by valour.’

60. Andreas, pp. 188-9: ‘Have you alone now laid claim to the whole land and people just as your teacher did? He, whose name was Christ, raised royal majesty over the middle world for as long as he could. That man did Herod bereave of his life, overcame in conflict the “King of the Jews”, him deprived of kingdom and to rood applied, that he from gallows might send on his spirit. Just so will I now command my children, my thanes of power, to humiliate you. Disciples in the war, let the spear’s point, the poison-patterned dart-head, dive deep in the doomed man’s spirit! Go quick and crush the boasting of this war-brave!’

61. Andreas, p. 193: ‘why forsake me?’

62. Andreas, p. 195: ‘Nor shall you any longer suffer pain of being humbled by armed men.’

63. M.M. Walsh, ‘The Baptismal Flood in the Old English ‘Andreas’: Liturgical and Typological Depths’, Traditio, 33 (1977), pp. 137–58.

64. As with Andreas, the dating of Cynewulf’s poetry is impossible to establish with certainty, but scholars generally favour an early ninth century date: D.G. Calder, Cynewulf (Boston, 1981), pp. 15-18 and R.D. Fulk, A History of Old English Metre (Philadelphia, 1992), p. 392. More recently, Patrick Conner has argued for a tenth century date based on, as John McCulloh has shown, the incorrect assumption that Cynewulf used the Martyrology of Usuard as a source for Fates: P. Conner, ‘On Dating Cynewulf’, in R.E. Bjork, ed., The Cynewulf Reader (New York, 1996), pp. 23-55; J.M. McCulloh, ‘Did Cynewulf Use a Martyrology? Reconsidering the Sources of Fates of the Apostles’, Anglo-Saxon England, 29 (2000), pp. 67-83.

65. J.E. Cross, ‘Cynewulf's traditions about the apostles in Fates of the Apostles’, Anglo-Saxon England, 8 (1979), pp. 163-175. See also A.M. O’Leary, ‘Apostolic Passiones in Early Anglo- Saxon England’, in D. G. Scragg and K. Powell, eds, Apocryphal Texts and Traditions in Anglo- Saxon England (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 103-119.

66. Andreas and the Fates of the Apostles, ed. K.R. Brooks (Oxford, 1961), p. 56; trans. R.E. Bjork, The Old English Poems of Cynewulf (Massachusetts, 2013), p. 131: ‘bold, warlike, gave up their lives’.

67. Brooks, p. 58; trans. Bjork, p. 135: ‘not slow to the battle, to the play of shields’.

68. C. Schneider, ‘Cynewulf’s devaluation of heroic tradition in Juliana’, Anglo-Saxon England, 7 (1978), p. 117.

69. Ibid.

70. M. Lapidge, ‘Cynewulf and the Passio S. Iulianae’, in M.C. Amodio, ed., Unlocking the Wordhord (Toronto, 2003), pp. 147-171.

71. R. Woolf, ‘Introduction’, Cynewulf’s Juliana (Exeter, 1955), p. 15.

72. J.A. Frederick, ‘Warring with Words: Cynewulf's Juliana’, in E.M. Treharne and D.F. Johnson, eds, Readings in medieval texts: interpreting old and middle English literature (Oxford, 2005), p. 67.

73. Woolf, pp. 38-9; trans. Bjork, p. 105: ‘If I should meet any courageous warrior of the measurer, bold against a storm of arrows, not willing far from there to flee from battle, but wise in mind he raises a board, a holy shield against me, spiritual battle gear, not willing to fail God, but brave in prayer he makes a stand steadfast in the troop, I must depart from there, downcast, deprived of joys, in the grip of burning coals, lament my miseries, that I could not prevail in battle by force of might, but sad, I must seek another, a less courageous one in the phalanx, a worse warrrior, whom I can incite with my leaven of evil, hinder in battle.’

74. Woolf, p. 40; trans. Bjork, p. 107: ‘You tell me first how you, bold through deep reflection, became so daring in battle above all womankind’.

75. The date of the Old English Martyrology is impossible to determine; it has been connected, on thematic grounds, with Alfred’s programme of vernacular education, but there is no reason to rule out a pre-Alfredan date, especially as, as Christine Rauer has argued, the scholars associated with Alfred’s circle must have already had established careers and reputations. Rauer assigns the OEM a cautious dating of c.800-c.900; see C. Rauer, ‘Introduction’, The Old English Martyrology: Edition, Translation and Commentary (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 1-31.

76. C. Rauer, ‘Usage of the Old English Martyrology’, in R. H. Bremmer and K. Dekker, eds, Foundations of Learning: The Transfer of Encyclopaedic Knowledge in the Early Middle Ages (Leuven, 2007), pp. 125-46.

77. Rauer, ‘Female Hagiography’, p. 18; the author does, however, use ‘martyrdom’ in relation to female saints such as Anastasia, Eugenia and Agnes.

78. The Old English Martyrology, pp. 154-55.

79. R. Rushforth, Saints in English Kalendars Before A.D. 1100 (London, 2008).

80. F. Wormald, English Kalendars Before A.D. 1100 (London, 1934), p. 9.

81. The Norman Conquest is, like any marker of periodisation, a largely artificial terminus. The post- conquest period saw the continuation and intensification of pre-conquest trends in the cult of saints, particularly with regard to royal martyrs. While later sources potentially preserve traces of earlier belief and practice, in the interest of space I have chosen to limit this study to pre-conquest sources.

82. J. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion: A New Abridgement from the Second and Third Editions (Oxford, 1998).

83. M. Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France, trans. J.E. Anderson (London, 1973), p. 37.

84. W.A. Chaney, The Cult of Kingship in Anglo-Saxon England: The Transition from Paganism to Christianity (California, 1970), p. 259. Cf. R. Frank, ‘Review: The Cult of Kingship in Anglo- Saxon England’, Notes and Queries, 18/7 (1971), p. 265.

85. B. Yorke, Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses (London, 2003), p. 120. C. Cubitt, 'Sites and sanctity: revisiting the cult of murdered and martyred Anglo-Saxon royal saints', Early Medieval Europe, 9/1 (2000), pp. 53-83 also suggests that cults of royal saints may have had popular origins, despite subsequent ecclesiastical promotion.

86. D. Rollason, ‘The cults of murdered royal saints in Anglo-Saxon England’, Anglo-Saxon England 11 (1983), pp. 1-22; D. Rollason, Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1989); S.J. Ridyard, The Royal Saints of Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge, 1983); A. Thacker, ‘Kings, Saints and Monasteries in Pre-Viking Mercia’, Midland History, 10/1 (1985), pp. 1-25.

87. Ridyard, p. 46.

88. C. Fell, ‘Edward King and Martyr and the English Hagiographical Tradition,’ in D. Hill, ed., Ethelred the Unready (Oxford, 1978), p. 3.

89. T. Jebson, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’, http://asc.jebbo.co.uk (1996-2006); trans. M. Swanton, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (London, 1996).

90. D.J.V. Fisher, ‘The Anti-Monastic Reaction in the Reign of Edward the Martyr’, The Cambridge Historical Journal, 10/3 (1952), pp. 254-70.

91. Byrhtferth, The Lives of St Oswald and St Ecgwine, ed. and trans. M. Lapidge (Oxford, 2009), p. 144.

92. Rollason, Saints and Relics, pp. 142-4.

93. S. Keynes, ‘The cult of King Edward the Martyr during the reign of King Æthelred the Unready’, in J.L. Nelson, et al. eds, Gender and historiography (London, 2012), pp. 115-126; L. Roach, Æthelred: The Unready (New Haven, 2016).

94. Ridyard, p. 167.

95. S 899.

96. Roach, pp. 133-185.

97. M. Clayton, ‘De Duodecim Abusiuis, Lordship and Kingship in Anglo-Saxon England’, in S. McWilliams, Saints and Scholars: New Perspectives on Anglo-Saxon Literature and Culture (Cambridge, 2012), p. 159-160: ‘If the king is willing to keep the aforementioned commands with care then his kingdom will be prosperous in his lifetime and after his lifetime he may go to the heavenly kingdom because of his piety. If he neglects these decrees and teachings then his country will very often be afflicted both by ravaging and by hunger, by pestilence and bad weather and wild animals.’

98. S. Keynes, ‘The cult of King Edward the Martyr’, pp. 123-5.

99. M. Blackburn and H. Pagan, ‘The St Edmund Coinage in the Light of a Parcel from a Hoard of St Edmund Pennies’, British Numismatic Journal, 72 (2002), pp. 1–14.

100. A. Gransden, ‘The Legends and Traditions concerning the Origins of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds’, The English Historical Review, 100/394 (1985), pp. 1-24.

101. S. Foot and K.A. Lowe, Anglo-Saxon Charters of Bury St Edmunds Abbey and St Benet's at Holme (forthcoming).

102. Abbo, Life of St. Edmund, ed. M. Winterbottom, Three Lives of English Saints (Toronto, 1972), p. 69; trans. F. Hervey, The Garland of Saint Edmund King and Martyr (London, 1907), p. 16: ‘the Britons were turned out, and the alien conquerors set to work to parcel out among themselves the island, replete, as it was, with wealth of every kind, on the ground that it was a shame that it should be retained under the rule of a lazy populace, when it might afford a competent livelihood to men of mettle who were fit to defend themselves.’

103. Abbo, p. 77; trans. Hervey, p. 33: ‘be assured, Dane, you shall never see me, a king, survive the loss of freedom to adorn your triumph.’

104. Abbo, p. 79; trans. Hervey, p. 37: 'Just as Christ, free from all taint of sin, left on the column to which he was bound, not for himself, but for us, the blood, which was the mark of his scourging, so Eadmund incurred a like penalty bound to the blood-stained tree, for the sake of gaining a glory that fades not away.’

105. A. Gransden, ‘Abbo of Fleury's "Passio sancti Eadmundi”', Revue bénédictine, 105/1 (1995), p 53.

106. S. Keynes, ‘The cult of King Edward the Martyr’, p. 119.

107. D. Rollason, ‘The cults of murdered royal saints’, pp. 3-5.

108. Ibid., p. 18, n. 90.

109. A. Thacker, ‘Saint-making and relic collecting by Oswald and his communities’, in C. Cubitt, et al. eds, St Oswald of Worcester: Life and Influence (London, 1996), pp. 252-3.

110. M. Clayton, ‘Ælfric and Æthelred’, in J. Roberts and J. Nelson, eds, Essays on Anglo-Saxon and related themes (London, 2000), pp. 65-88.

111. Regularis concordia, ed. and trans. T. Symons (New York, 1953), pp. 2-3: ‘thus, in fulfillment of his royal office, even as the Good Shepherd, he carefully rescued and defended from the savage open mouths of the wicked.’

112. E. John, ‘The King and the Monks in the Tenth-Century Reformation’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 42/1 (1959), p. 87.

113. Quoted in M. Clayton, ‘Ælfric and Æthelred’, pp. 81-2: ‘The king is Christ's own representative over the Christian people whom Christ himself redeemed... Every king is holy who protects God's people and directs them with love, not with cruelty, and always according to what is right, not with self-will, and also is willing to give his own life in the end for the protection of his people, if there is such great need, as the Saviour gave himself for us.’

114. P.A. Hayward, ‘Demystifying the role of sanctity’, in P.A. Hayward and J. Howard-Johnston, eds, The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2000), p. 135.

115. Ridyard, p. 46.

116. N. Marafioti, The King’s Body Burial and Succession in Late Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto, 2014), pp. 184-7.

117. Roach, p. 265.

118. ‘Manuscript C: Cotton Tiberius C.i’, in T. Jebson, ed., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: An Electronic Edition, http://asc.jebbo.co.uk/c/c-L.html; trans. M. Swanton, p. 142: ‘Then he was earlier the head of the English race and of Christendom was a roped thing. There wretchedness might be seen where earlier was seen bliss, in that wretched own where there first came to us Christendom and bliss before God and the world.’

119. Ælfric, Old English Lives of Saints, ed. and trans. M. Clayton and J. Mullins (3 vols, London, 2019), v. 1, p. vii.

120. E.G. Whatley, ‘Pearls before Swine: Ælfric, Vernacular Hagiography and the Lay Reader’, in T.N. Hall, et al., eds, Via Crucis: essays on early medieval sources and ideas (West Virginia, 2002), pp. 158-184.

121. M.R. Godden, ‘Ælfric's Saints' Lives and the Problem of Miracles’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s. 16 (1985), p. 97.

122. Ælfric, Old English Lives of Saints, vol. 2, pp. 334-5.

123. C. Phelpstead, ‘King, Martyr and Virgin: Imitatio Christi in Ælfric’s Life of St Edmund’, in A. Bale, ed., St Edmund, King and Martyr: Changing Images of a Medieval Saint (York, 2009), p. 43.

124. 124 The most likely source for Ælfric’s Lives of Saints is a predecessor of the collection of vitae and passiones found in the eleventh-century ‘Cotton-Corpus legendary’: see P. Zettel, Ælfric's hagiographic sources and the Latin legendary preserved in B.L. MS Cotton Nero E i + CCCC MS 9 and other manuscripts (1979, unpublished DPhil thesis).

125. C. Cubitt, ‘Virginity and Misogyny in Tenth- and Eleventh-Century England’, Gender & History, 12/1 (2000), p. 3.

126. Ibid., p.7.

127. Ibid., p. 17.

128. R. Rushforth, Saints in English Kalendars, p. 27.

129. Wormald, p. 65; Rushforth, p. 27, Table VIII. The latter calendar is not printed in Wormald.

130. Wormald, pp. 71-83.

131. Rushforth, Table III.

132. Ælfric, Lives of Saints, p. 352. This MS was severely damaged in the Cotton Library fire in 1731; the surviving fragments are catalogued as London, British Library, Cotton Otho B x. and Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson Q.e.20. Its contents were, however, transcribed by Humfrey Wanley prior to the fire, and can be found in H. Wanley, Librorum veterum septentrionalium, in. G. Hicks, ed., Linguarum veterum septentrionalium (2 vols, Oxford, 1705), vol. 2.

133. Eadmer, The Life of St Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, ed. and trans. R.W. Southern (London, 1962), pp. 51-2: ‘This man they not only number among the saints, but even among the martyrs, although they do not deny that he was killed, not for professing the name of Christ, but because he refused to buy himself off with money.’

134. For an examination of scepticism regarding claims of martyrdom in the high middle ages, see J.D. Ryan, ‘Missionary Saints of the High Middle Ages: Martyrdom, Popular Veneration and Canonization’, Catholic Historical Review, 90/1 (2004), pp. 1-28.

135. Bede, In Ezra et Neemiam prophetas allegorica exposito, ed. D. Hurst, CCSL 119A (Turnhout, 1969), pp. 377-8; trans. S. DeGregorio, Bede: On Ezra and Nehemiah (Liverpool, 2006), p. 208.

List of illustrations

Figure 1: London, British Library, Cotton MS Galba A XVIII, fol. 21r [http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=cotton_ms_galba_a_xviii_f021r]

Bibliography

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London, British Library, Cotton MS Galba A XVIII Munich, Bayerische Statsbibliothek, MS Clm. 15818 St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 451

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Lapidge, M., ‘Cynewulf and the Passio S. Iulianae’, in M.C. Amodio, ed., Unlocking the Wordhord: Anglo-Saxon Studies in Memory of Edward B. Irving, Jr (Toronto, 2003), pp. 147-171
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—‘Did Cynewulf Use a Martyrology? Reconsidering the Sources of Fates of the Apostles’, Anglo-Saxon England, 29 (2000), pp. 67-83
McDaniel, R. L., The Third Gender and Ælfric's Lives of Saints (Kalamazoo, 2018) 45
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4. Unpublished theses

Zettel, P., Ælfric's hagiographic sources and the Latin legendary preserved in B.L. MS Cotton Nero E i + CCCC MS 9 and other manuscripts (1979, unpublished DPhil thesis)