between 800 and 950. Bede had composed numerous hagiographical texts in the early eighth century, including a particularly influential account of the life and posthumous miracles of Cuthbert (d. 689), but the Viking invasions destroyed many monasteries in England and brought this literary tradition to a standstill. When the political situation had finally stabilized somewhat in the second half of the tenth century, there was a renewal and reform of monastic life in England. With this came a “mini-revival,” in Rosalind Love’s words, of hagiographic composition.1 In the late tenth and early eleventh century, new and often quite substantial Latin vitae were composed for Wilfrid, Ouen, Edmund, Dunstan, Oswald, Æthelwold, Ecgwine, and others; vitae were also written in Old English in this period.2 Late Saxon monks translated saints’ relics, built special apses, crypts, and chapels to house these relics, and lavished precious metals on saints’ shrines. They compiled lists of the resting places of saints—lists that were necessary because they had moved so many of them. They celebrated saints in liturgies and litanies and cherished their presence in their monasteries and churches.3 What late Saxon monks rarely did, however, was to collect stories of saints’ miracles.
Anglo-Normans would scold their forbearers for negligence on just this point. They looked in vain at the close of late Saxon vitae for stories of miracles and complained about the lacunae they found there: the first miracle collections for Wilfrid, Ouen, Edmund, Oswald, and Dunstan would be written by Anglo-Normans, not Anglo-Saxons. The modern scholar searching for evidence of late Saxon miracle collecting is also in for a frustrating time. Antonia Gransden has identified two stories about the miracles of Edmund that appear to have been written by an author named Ælfwine in the early eleventh century: these stories are known only from their incorporation in a larger Anglo-Norman collection.4 Rosalind Love, too, has found evidence of pre-Conquest miracle stories being utilized by a post-Conquest author. In this case, a cleric named Ælfhelm seems to have written a collection of Æthelthryth’s miracles that was rewritten by an anonymous early twelfth-century author.5 Neither of these pre-Conquest collections appears to have been very substantial in their original form. In terms of surviving texts, we have a little vita about Neot, likely composed in the mid-eleventh century, that includes a couple stories of healing as part of the text’s account of the building of a church for Neot in Cambridgeshire.6 Wulfstan of Winchester’s Life of Æthelwold, composed at the end of the tenth century, closes with five stories of recent miracles, while Byrhtferth of Ramsey’s Life of Ecgwine, composed in the early eleventh century, ends with four posthumous miracle stories of a distinctively folkloric flavor.7 There is also the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto, a curious text of anonymous authorship. The composition of the Historia has been placed anywhere from the tenth to the early twelfth century. The Historia appears to have been compiled mostly or even wholly out of previously written texts: it reads principally as a list of donations granted to or stolen from Cuthbert’s community by a procession of early Anglo-Saxon nobles who are rewarded or punished by Cuthbert accordingly.8
Evidence of miracle collecting in Old English is even more faint. One surviving composition that could perhaps be thought of as a collection is the little text known as the Vision of Leofric. Though it does not concern any specific saint, it contains stories such as earl Leofric’s experience of seeing a marvelous light shine out in Canterbury cathedral. The Vision of Leofric is probably a post-Conquest composition, but there may have been pre-Conquest texts like it.9 Goscelin of St.-Bertin says he used an account in Old English as the source for a miracle concerning St. Edith of Wilton.10 Osbern of Canterbury, too, mentions sermons about Dunstan in Old English.11 An anonymous twelfth-century writer of a short passio and miracle collection for St. Indract at Glastonbury claims to have used an Old English exemplar.12 Most intriguingly, a late eleventh-century text refers to sheets of parchment attached to the walls near the shrine of St. Leofwynn in Sussex. Accounts of Leofwynn’s virtues were written on these sheets in Old English, a language the Flemish writer could not read.13 From such a sprinkling of references to texts now lost, it is difficult to judge what might once have been. Still, it seems safe to conclude that late Saxon hagiographers composing in Old English, like those writing in Latin, concentrated their efforts on vitae.
There is only one miracle collection surviving from late Saxon England that fully justifies the term: the Translation and Miracles of St. Swithun by Lantfred, a monk of Fleury.14 Michael Lapidge, whose monumental volume on the cult of Swithun has put the study of Lantfred’s text on a firm footing for the first time, terms the collection “one of the most substantial Latin prose texts which has survived from Anglo-Saxon England.”15 Lantfred wrote the Miracles sometime after July 971, the year that Bishop Æthelwold, the chief leader of the monastic reform movement in England, translated Swithun’s relics from an outside grave into the Old Minster at Winchester.16 The Miracles has little to say about the translation: its forty chapters are almost all concerned with Swithun’s contemporary miracles.17 The collection makes it clear that Lantfred was present at Winchester in the 970s and was thrilled by what he witnessed there: “I myself saw more than two hundred sick people cured through the saint’s merit in ten days, and in the course of a year, the healings were countless! I also saw the precincts around the minster … so packed on either side with crowds of sick persons, that any traveler would find difficulty in gaining access to it.”18 In the collection, Lantfred tells story after story of healings and liberations and states that there were many more miracles he could have recounted. “I … have come trembling to the mighty vastness of this sea,” he writes in the letter prefacing the collection, “and, as if it were a drop from the ocean’s waters, thus have I collected together a very few from the many miracles of our saint.”19
As it would turn out, Lantfred’s collection now serves not just as a “drop from the waters” of Swithun’s cult of the 970s, but of late Saxon cults more generally. While we can assume that the late Saxon religious landscape was, in Diana Webb’s words, “honeycombed with local cults,”20 Lantfred’s text stands alone in giving us a wealth of specifics about individual supplicants and their miracles. Webb has noted the “inestimable value” of Lantfred’s collection, “for it shows that … the practice of pilgrimage and the conventions of miracle stories were familiar to the English in the late tenth century.”21 Indeed, Lantfred’s text is like a spotlight on a stage that otherwise remains dark or barely illuminated. Why was miracle collecting so rare in late Saxon England? It is not that Lantfred’s text was not admired: Wulfstan of Winchester versified the entire collection around 996, while Ælfric, the famed Old English homilist, made a Latin abbreviation of Lantfred’s collection and translated it into Old English.22 Wulfstan concluded his versification by noting that Swithun’s miracles continued “up to the present day,” and Ælfric stated at the end of his vernacular translation that “as long as I have lived, there have been abundant miracles [of Swithun].”23 While both Wulfstan and Ælfric added a couple of miracle stories in the course of their writings, neither thought to make a collection of new stories, not even with Lantfred’s splendid example before them.24 It would be left to a post-Conquest collector to start where Lantfred had left off.
In this chapter, I read the composition of Lantfred’s collection in the context of the lack of miracle collecting in late Saxon England and seek explanations for both collection and context. Lantfred’s collection is usually thought to have been written at the instigation of Bishop Æthelwold and the monks of the Old Minster with the aim of promoting Swithun’s cult and the monastic reform movement. I see little evidence for this. I argue that Lantfred’s collection is better viewed within a literary framework and as a largely self-instigated work. The collection, in my reading, is the result of a conjunction of highly unusual circumstances. There were many cults, but very few writers of Lantfred’s west Frankish background and interests in England in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Late Saxon monks who could have collected miracle stories, someone like Ælfric, for instance, did not share Lantfred’s sense that it was important to do so. To take an analogous example, late Saxons also did not think it was important to build the kind of enormous churches that Normans
