personal appetite for medical learning.
When Lantfred first came to Winchester is unknown. Lapidge believes that the New Minster Foundation charter, dated to 966, may show Lantfred’s influence. Part of the document is composed in rhyming prose, a trademark of Lantfred’s Miracles and otherwise extremely unusual in tenth-century Anglo-Latin prose.47 It seems likely, as Lapidge suggests, that Lantfred was initially invited to England to help Æthelwold with his reform program.48 Fleury was a powerful and flourishing monastic center in the tenth century, and it had ties with England: Æthelwold, we know, wanted to study there, and saw it as a model for the refoundation and reformation of monastic life in England.49 In the introduction to the Regularis Concordia, Æthelwold states that he had summoned advisors from Fleury and Ghent to help him develop the monastic observances outlined in the text.50 An Englishman sent to Fleury by Æthelwold—Abbot Osgar—was known to Lantfred, and Lantfred must have known Æthelwold: toward the end of his collection, he includes a miracle story that he heard recounted by the bishop.51 Lantfred wrote the Miracles sometime after July 971. From internal evidence, it is clear that he had to have finished the text by the early 980s at the latest.52 Lantfred was also likely the author of mass-sets for the liturgical celebration of Swithun’s cult.53 We have one other piece of evidence about Lantfred’s residence in England: Lapidge has identified a letter that Lantfred wrote to Archbishop Dunstan at Canterbury thanking him for his kindness while he was England and requesting the return of books. Lantfred sent the letter from Fleury; it is dated 974 × 984.54 Lantfred’s name is found on a list commemorating the monks of the Old Minster in Winchester, but where or when he died are unknown.55
Scholars have always read Swithun’s cult within the framework of Æthelwold’s monastic reforms. Lapidge writes of Æthelwold “conceiving” the idea of Swithun’s cult and sees it as beginning on the day Æthelwold translated the relics: “the cult of St. Swithun began, at a stroke, on Saturday 15 July 971.”56 Mechthild Gretsch is more doubtful about whether Swithun’s cult was created ex nihilo, but writes, “There is little doubt, however, about what, for Æthelwold, would have mattered most in the cult of Swithun … Swithun’s ‘revelation’ confirmed to Winchester and to all England that these recent political and ecclesiastical developments had indeed been pleasing to God.”57 Robert Deshman’s reading is very similar: “Æthelwold began to promote Swithun’s previously obscure cult so that the saint’s unexpected rise to prominence and his subsequent flurry of miracles would appear as signs of heavenly approval for the bishop’s policy of monastic reform.”58
While Lantfred must have supported Æthelwold’s reform efforts, he never once suggests in the collection that Swithun’s miracles were signs of approval of Æthelwold’s policies. Lantfred addressed the collection’s prefatory letter to the monks of the Old Minster, not to Æthelwold. In the letter, he says nothing about reform. In the preface of the collection, Lantfred presents Swithun’s cult as a reward for the Anglo-Saxons’ bloodless conversion to Christianity centuries earlier; again, he says nothing about reform.59 Lantfred has so little to say about the translation performed by Æthelwold that Lapidge suspects he might not have been present for it.60 The miracle stories themselves are about healings and liberations, not reform. The overall moral Lantfred saw in Swithun’s miracles was a general one: he thought that they were meant so that “the kindly love of our Lord may be manifest to all peoples,” and “so that the stony hearts of evil men may become gentle and recover their senses, and so hasten toward heavenly joys with their good works.”61 The conclusion to the collection would seem to be an ideal place to press home a reforming message, but here again Lantfred simply tells 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.”62
As desirable as it might be, then, to read Lantfred’s collection as a text written in the service of Æthelwold and reformed monasticism, Swithun was clearly the figure who was uppermost in Lantfred’s mind. He seems to have been thinking of Æthelwold little or not at all. Lantfred certainly did not view Æthelwold as the creator of Swithun’s cult. For Lantfred, Swithun’s cult was both bigger than and separate from Æthelwold’s monastic reform—it was created by Christ himself. Historians will, of course, take a more de-tached view of this question, but we too should be careful not to give a prelate like Æthelwold more credit than he is due. It appears that Swithun’s cult was active, possibly quite active, before Æthelwold translated his relics.63 The rash of relic translations undertaken at reformed monasteries in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries by Æthelwold and others were most likely done not with the thought of initiating cults, but of hitching on to them.64 A prelate could help the visibility of a cult by a translation, but could not force a cult into existence: Swithun’s cult subsisted and grew because of the enthusiastic creation and exchange of miracle stories among many scores of people, most of whom never spoke with or even laid eyes on Æthelwold. Would the blind man seeing again, or the slave-girl freed from her unkind master, credit their experiences to Æthelwold’s actions or think of them as advancing Æthelwold’s monastic reforms? Would Æthelwold, for that matter?
Æthelwold himself does not mention Swithun in any of his writings. From the few instances in which Æthelwold and Swithun are connected in contemporary texts, it appears that Æthelwold may have viewed Swithun’s cult as helping his pastoral efforts: the reformation of hearts, in other words, more than the reformation of monasteries. Wulfstan of Winchester devoted a brief chapter to Swithun’s cult in his Life of Æthelwold. In it, he writes: “two lamps blazed in the house of God, placed on golden candlesticks; for what Æthelwold preached by the saving encouragement of his words, Swithun wonderfully ornamented by display of miracles.”65 In one of the closing chapters in his collection, Lantfred retells a story about the vision of an ill nobleman that he says Æthelwold told him. In Lantfred’s description of the man’s vision, Swithun is unusually full of moral guidance. Swithun exhorts the nobleman to “follow in Christ’s footsteps,” “do no evil to anyone,” “imitate Christ,” “love your enemies; do good to them that hate you,” “if thy enemy be hungry, give him to eat,” and so on. Might we hear Æthelwold’s voice here?66
Æthelwold appears in only a few other passages of Lantfred’s collection. The key human player in Lantfred’s collection is not Æthelwold, but Eadsige, the sacrist of the Old Minster. Eadsige had been a canon of the Old Minster before Æthelwold reformed the house in 964. He was expelled along with the rest of the canons when Æthelwold installed monks from Abingdon at the Old Minster, but he later rejoined the community as a monk.67 This extraordinary figure appears to have been Lantfred’s chief conversational partner in the making of the collection.68 He appears in five chapters spaced throughout the collection (cc. 1, 5, 16, 20, 36), including the story about the blacksmith’s vision that begins the collection. In the vision, Swithun tells the blacksmith to send word to Eadsige, then expelled and living at Winchcombe, that he was to tell Æthelwold it was time to translate Swithun’s relics. Eadsige, Lantfred writes, was at that time full of disgust “not only with the bishop of Winchester cathedral but also with all the monks dwelling there,” and refused to speak with the bishop.69 This is just the first example in the collection of Lantfred writing from Eadsige’s perspective. Lantfred concludes the chapter by rejoicing that two years after the message came from the blacksmith, Eadsige was finally able to overcome his anger, rejoin the community at Winchester, and “become a devout monk much beloved by God.”70 Strikingly, Lantfred forgets to tell us whether Eadsige ever discussed the translation with Æthelwold: the point of the story becomes Eadsige’s return to the Old Minster.
No other monk of the Old Minster appears like this in Lantfred’s collection—in fact, no other monk is even named. Lantfred describes how Eadsige held the keys to the enclosure surrounding Swithun’s tomb and how he would ring a bell to alert the community that Swithun had performed a miracle. In one chapter, Eadsige carries on a lengthy discussion with a slave-girl and a young cleric; in another, Eadsige comforts
