course of action, or the stories he told about himself, or the actions others took—much less how this worked for all the hundreds of other stories in high medieval miracle collections. Nevertheless, what is clear is that though the knight’s story was unique to him, it was blueprinted on others he had heard before. He did not invent the underlying plotline of his story or the culturally specific form of that plotline, the Christian saint metanarrative. He did not invent the idea of appealing to Dunstan as a divine figure. Nor did the blueprinting process stop there. Stories in circulation suggested not just who to ask for help, but also how that asking should be done.
Patterns of Invocations
Once the knight of Thanet decided that Dunstan was his saint of choice, he kneeled and prayed. Osbern writes that he said: “God of father Dunstan, favor my part today.” Invocations form a part of nearly all stories in high medieval miracle collections, usually appearing in the point of the story after the problem is described and before the solution takes shape. In some stories a saint is unintentionally invoked, as when a person insults a saint and provokes divine punishment. In cases in which an individual is too ill or otherwise unable to ask for help, the invocation might be done by friends or relatives. Most of the stories, though, follow a predictable pattern: the saint acts after aid is specifically requested by the person in need.
The repetitiveness of this narrative arc and the similarity of many of the invocations are another reason why accounts of personal miracles can sound so much the same. The knight was obviously not the first to think of praying for help. A verbal request is the most ancient and most widespread mode of divine invocation. Osbern and Lanfranc also chose to pray for Dunstan’s help, as did other people in the stories of Osbern’s collection, as did many other people in many other societies with many other deities. Still, there was much that was culturally specific even about prayers designed to invoke the divine: how to arrange one’s body, for example (the knight knelt), and especially what kinds of words should be said. The knight’s prayer, carefully phrased to invoke God through Dunstan rather than Dunstan himself, looks suspiciously like Osbern’s own tweaking. Was the knight really so aware that God, not Dunstan, should be considered the ultimate source for any help he received?
Perhaps he was. Perhaps those conversations with Osbern shaped the words the knight said in just this way. Whether or not, the knight must have known that he could try to get Dunstan’s attention by other means. Prayers were just one option. The knight had almost certainly heard stories in which saints were stimulated to action by a person’s contact with a relic, by entry into sanctified space, or by the presentation of a gift. These were also very old ideas, and they too took on a variety of culturally specific forms depending on the kinds of stories being exchanged in a particular time and place. Stories in the Becket collections, for instance, describe people invoking Becket’s aid by bending a coin over an ill person or by taking measurements of a person’s body and making a candle to the length. The Becket collectors mention these gift-giving practices without comment, as if they had always been used to invoke saintly aid in Canterbury, but coin bending is not mentioned in stories collected by Osbern or other Anglo-Norman collectors. It is possible that they were not part of their conversational milieu.17
Someone must have had the initial idea of bending a coin over an ill person, just as someone had to have been the first to think of asking the dead Dunstan for help. How a new cluster of stories started to coalesce is not usually easy to perceive in our sources, but Benedict of Peterborough’s collection provides a remarkable glimpse into the first clustering of stories describing the use of the “Canterbury Water,” or just the “Water”: a mixture of water and Thomas Becket’s blood people drank in hopes of healing.18 When Becket was murdered in December 1170, he lay for some time on the floor of the cathedral in his own blood. People from Canterbury dipped bits of cloth and clothing into this blood. Later, when the monks came to tend to Becket’s body, they gathered the remaining blood, apparently into some kind of vessel. Drinking water that had come in contact with a saint’s relic or tomb was a time-honored practice.19 But drinking blood was different. As Benedict later commented, the monks were fearful of endorsing this idea, “and with no wonder, for it was an unusual thing for people to drink human blood.”20 The monks later diluted the blood partly to prolong its use but also, in Benedict’s words, “lest the taste or color of blood produce horror in the drinker.”21 A bigger problem than the disgust factor, though, was how drinking Becket’s blood mirrored the Eucharistic ritual. When Christ’s blood was drunk in liturgical celebrations, was it right to experiment with drinking Becket’s blood?
A Canterbury citizen was probably the first person who decided that it was. At the close of his vita for Becket, William FitzStephen writes that some hours after the murder a Canterbury man, who had acquired a cloth stained with Becket’s blood, washed the cloth, gave the water to his paralyzed wife to drink, and cured her.22 Whether or not FitzStephen got this right, it does seem highly likely that it was a Canterbury citizen who took this first step rather than the Christ Church monks themselves. But though the monks did not start the practice, they did have to decide for themselves whether they would participate. When people like Atheldrida, a Canterbury woman suffering from fevers, “asked the custodian monk of the tomb if she might drink of the martyr’s blood,”23 what would they do? “This was not begun without great fear,” Benedict writes after telling of William of London’s cure, the blood miracle he claims to have been the first, “but seeing that it gave profit to the ill, our fear receded, little by little, and security came.”24 Later Benedict again comments on the nervous tension this “experiment” [experimentum] produced: “although many had already experienced the efficacy of this medication, yet it was not given without fear to those seeking it.”25
What eventually overcame all objections was that drinking Becket’s blood so often worked. “O marvelous water,” Benedict exclaims, “that not only quenches the thirst of drinkers, but also extinguishes pain! O marvelous water, that not only extinguishes pain, but also reduces swellings!”26 Set as the invocation in untold numbers of stories, stories told and repeated in many different places, the use of the water was solidly established. In fact, in the second miracle collection for Thomas Becket, started by William of Canterbury in 1172, drinking the water is already mentioned as casually as any other invocation method, such as bending a coin, with no discussion of its development. William’s only comment concerns his awe at the fact that Thomas’s blood was a safer option than the Eucharist: you could eat and drink the Eucharist to your damnation, but even Becket’s enemies could seek healing through his blood.27
The success of the blood and water mixture appears to have drowned out other incipient invocation strategies. In the early days of Becket’s cult in Exeter, a man had a vision in which he was told how to cure an outbreak of disease: boiled eggs were to be cut into quarters, Thomas’s name written on them, and then eaten.28 Perhaps this inventive and apparently effective invocation practice was continued in the region, but it is never heard of again. In another story, told by Benedict, a London priest named Roger became ill with a fever, but did not have the water, nor the means to travel to Canterbury. Roger came up with the idea of sleeping in a place where he heard Thomas had once slept, and after he woke up healed, he had another idea. He collected some of the dust from that place, mixed it with water, and when he gave this mixture to others to drink (no doubt with a telling of his story), “he gave happiness to many ill people.”29 Yet although Roger’s idea was an initial success, nothing more is heard about drinking dust-laden water in the rest of the Becket collections. Benedict decided to recount Roger’s narrative, he says, because it shows “how much virtue must be in his blood, when the dust from his bed is able to do such things.”30
Once stories about drinking the water had ballooned to such a degree that they overrode all objections, what made them frightening at the beginning—their overtones of Eucharistic sacrifice—were their biggest asset, the blood overwhelming mere dust, and the narrative line linking into other strong currents at large in medieval culture.31 The proactive experimenting process that initiated these stories
