of late Saxon miracle collections should not be read as disrespectful: cults, as argued in the chapters above, did not need collections to thrive. Lantfred’s composition of this one collection, this foreign monk’s sense that he should write about Swithun’s miracles “so that such great favours may not lie hidden from succeeding generations,”26 was a happy chance. His text gives us, in Lapidge’s words, an “astonishingly detailed picture … of life in late tenth-century England.”27 It also gives us a base from which to explore the early history of English miracle collecting.
Lantfred begins his collection with a prefatory letter addressed to the monks of the Old Minster and then a preface that describes Christ’s incarnation, the Anglo-Saxons’ conversion to Christianity, and Christ’s decision “to grant to His Anglo-Saxons a heavenly gift [i.e., Swithun].”28 Lantfred complains in the letter that “very little” was known of Swithun’s life and quotes Priscan’s lament about “the shortage of writers.” Lantfred would not attempt to describe Swithun’s life either: “let us come to those things which without any doubt took place posthumously at the man of God’s tomb.”29
The ensuing collection divides into two sharply distinct sections. In the first three chapters of the text, Lantfred constructs a tidy origin myth or “inventio” for the beginnings of Swithun’s cult. In 968, the dead Swithun announces himself in a vision to a blacksmith (chapter 1); in 969, Swithun performs his first miracle (chapter 2); in 971, Swithun performs a miracle that convinces everyone of his sanctity (chapter 3).30 At the close of chapter 3, Lantfred states briefly that Swithun’s relics, which were situated by a cross in a graveyard outside of the Old Minster, were exhumed and placed inside the church by “the venerable lord bishop Æthelwold and by the distinguished abbots Ælfstan and Æthelgar.” These three chapters are the longest in the collection, together comprising over one-third of the entire length of the text. The fourth chapter is transitional: here Lantfred discusses the many miracles in the days and months after the translation and writes about his own eyewitness of the great crowds at Winchester.
Chapters 5 through 39 of the collection all concern post-translation miracles. In this, the longer section of his text, Lantfred does not bother with dates or attempt to tell an overall story.31 The cult is just there, hugely there. In the first story of this section (chapter 5), ill people on the Isle of Wight already know that “the holy bishop was prevailing with his marvelous miracles” at the Old Minster in Winchester, and when they get there, the monks already have a “usual manner” for celebrating Swithun’s miracles.32 Lantfred alludes to the size of Swithun’s cult in many other chapters as well: he describes how a sick man in Rome heard from other English pilgrims that “the Lord was healing countless illnesses of sick persons through the merit of St. Swithun,” and so hurried home to try his luck at Winchester; in another chapter, he tells how throngs of pilgrims were streaming by a blind man frustrated by his young guide’s desire to stop and eat lunch before entering Winchester.33 Over three-quarters of Lantfred’s stories concern healings: the blind, the paralyzed, the crippled, the mute, and those suffering from accidents or simply “serious” or “manifold” illnesses all make appearances.34 Lantfred also liked what one might term “liberation” miracles, such as stories about slaves in fetters.35 In almost the last lines of the collection, Lantfred excuses his interest in these liberation stories—at the same time restating his primary interest in Swithun’s healing miracles—by writing, “this is highly remarkable: that this holy servant of God … should not only have healed the sufferings of the diseased … but that he even released many who were shackled from powerful bindings.”36 Lantfred concludes the text with a very brief chapter in which he urges his readers to rejoice that “Christ … in our days deigned to bestow so many benefits on suffering men through the restorative intercession of St. Swithun.”37
In assessing why Lantfred created this collection, it is especially important to consider what the text reveals about Lantfred’s own engagement with Swithun’s cult. Lantfred appears to have been genuinely amazed by the magnitude of the cult he witnessed at the Old Minster. “No one person could see with his own eyes, nor learn by reading aloud the holy parchment letter by letter, nor comprehend as rumour struck his stinging ears, that so many had been cured at the tomb of one saint,” he exclaims in the collection’s preface.38 To give his readers a sense of the cult’s breathtaking scale, Lantfred dedicates some chapters to describing how large groups of people were cured: 25 people healed in one day, 124 cured in two weeks, and so on.39 Notably, less than a quarter of Lantfred’s stories are about Winchester citizens.40 His focus on the stories of nonresidents—people coming from Essex, Wiltshire, London, Bedfordshire, Rochester, Abingdon, Collingbourne, the Isle of Wight, “the west,” Rome, and France—demonstrated that Swithun’s cult was not just local. These nonresidents, moreover, were like Lantfred himself: they too were outsiders who had a conceived a strong devotion to this saint of Winchester.
Lantfred’s foreign origins did not prevent him from developing a personal zeal for Swithun. If anything, the cultural difference seems to have piqued Lantfred’s interest. He speaks a lot about “the English” in this text and formulates an extraordinary explanation for the strength of English saints’ cults. Lantfred explains in the preface that the miracles of Swithun and other English saints were heavenly rewards for a much earlier event, what he considered to be England’s quick conversion to Christianity. It was because the early Anglo-Saxons did not slaughter their missionaries and were devoted to the faith that “[Christ] bestowed an immense bounty on the aforesaid nation, such that it would have from its own peoples a nearly incalculable number of saints who … would be able to heal the sick people, afflicted with various illnesses, of the whole island.”41 Here and elsewhere in the text it is clear that Lantfred envisioned non-English readers of his collection. He describes, for instance, how the king had an enormous retinue with him when he traveled to an estate “as is the custom among the Anglo-Saxons,”42 and he also makes explanatory statements about English geography: “a certain powerful lady was living in another region of England which in their language is called Bedfordshire,” he writes, as well as stating that a paralyzed man “was living in a province of the English which is called Ham in their language.”43
In addition to writing this collection so that his brethren at Fleury would understand it, Lantfred told other people about Swithun’s cult in his homeland of Frankia. He devotes one of the later chapters of the collection to the story of a “priest from England named Lantfred,” who was traveling in France when a nobleman sent him messengers asking for advice. It was not unusual for writers of the time to speak of themselves in the third person in this manner—this traveling priest was clearly Lantfred himself. The messenger explained to Lantfred that his friend’s wife was very ill. Lantfred writes that he replied, “‘As you well know, I have not studied the practice of medicine from an early age. Nevertheless, I shall give you some excellent advice … arrange for [a candle] to burn this coming night … in honour of the kindly bishop through whom God is performing many miracles among the English.”44 The friend had a wax candle made, and Lantfred carved a supplicating poem to Swithun onto it, a poem he includes in his account of this miracle. It worked: the noblewoman was well again the next day.
This story illuminates the depth of Lantfred’s enthusiasm for Swithun; it is also interesting for its biographical detail about Lantfred’s study of “the practice of medicine.” Unusually in a collection of this size and date, Lantfred does not tell a single story about monastic property, lawsuits, battles, shipwrecks, fires, or lost objects: his unwavering focus is on healing and liberation miracles, most especially healings. His keen interest in Swithun’s “medication to
