At Wilton, Goscelin heard stories about Edith from the abbess and the nuns, both “the things which they saw with their own eyes,” and “those things which they heard from the venerable senior nuns, who both saw the holy virgin herself and devotedly obeyed her.”40 Goscelin does not provide such a direct statement about hearing stories from the brothers at Winchcombe, but many of the stories he tells about Kenelm show clear signs of having come from them: in a chapter about Kenelm healing a mute man, for instance, Goscelin describes how the man was “restored to speech in the sight of the aforenamed abbot and the brothers and the assembled crowds.”41
Thus, though Goscelin did not dig into contemporary cults the way Lantfred had, his texts are still almost wholly comprised of stories being told at the time. No single informant stands out in any of Goscelin’s texts the way Eadsige does in Lantfred’s, but there was a type of conversation partner he sought out: elderly monks and nuns, people who could explain why things looked the way they did in their churches and tell stories about the miracles that had happened in their youth, people who were in a chain of testimony stretching back, in the case of Wulfsige and Edith, even to the living presence of the saints themselves. Goscelin talks about hearing the stories of Ælfmær, for instance, a monk who he says “was with [Wulfsige] himself not only during his life but also as he lay dying.”42 Counting from the time Wulfsige died and when Goscelin arrived in England, Ælfmær must have been in his seventies, at least, when the young Goscelin first met him. Bishop Herman, Goscelin’s own elderly patron, was a source for a story about one of Edith’s miracles.43 In the Translation of Edith, Goscelin describes a miracle of Wulfthryth experienced by “a sister, who is still alive under the nursing of the younger nuns”; he also discusses the story of a nun who was healed by Edith in her infancy and was “still surviving” in Goscelin’s day.44 Queen Eadgyth, one of Goscelin’s conversation partners for the composition of the Life and Miracles of Kenelm, must also have been elderly by the time he spoke to her. She died in 1075.45 Goscelin did interact with younger people. In his Translation of Edith, for instance, he writes about a nun named Ealdgyth, “still in the springtime of her youth,” who was “grumbling to us” about the loss of some possessions of the nunnery.46 There was also, of course, Eve, though with her Goscelin seems to have done more talking than listening. In general, though, Goscelin seems to have sought out old stories from older informants when he was collecting stories for his texts.
From his conversation partners at Sherborne, Wilton, and Winchcombe, Goscelin heard hand-me-down stories about the saints’ lives, deaths, and burials. He heard and recorded stories of all sorts of miracles—about fetters bursting and the healing of many kinds of illnesses, but also stories about lawsuits, property, and punishments for those who failed to observe feast days; stories about translations, kingly gifts, and patronage; stories that explained how certain objects came to be hanging up near shrines; stories about former abbots, recently dead monks, fellow nuns, relatives outside of the monastery, and lay visitors from near at hand and far away. Notably, Goscelin does not appear to have tried to track down or speak to any lay supplicants. Almost all of the miracles involving the laity in Goscelin’s texts closely involve someone in the monastic house, such as the affecting story of how Abbot Godwin of Winchcombe rubbed wax into the sores of a man whose stomach had been tightly bound in chains, a story that was still remembered twenty-odd years later when Goscelin came to Winchcombe.47 Some of the miracles about lay people in these three texts concern blood relatives of the monks and nuns, such as the story of the evildoings of a certain Brihtric, the kinsman of a nun at Wilton; the cure of crippled man “connected by kinship” to the abbess of Wilton; and the mother of a monk at Sherborne cured by the water of Wulfsige and Juthwara.48
To all appearances, Goscelin did his story collecting in-house. That, and Goscelin’s decision not to bother much with the swirl of current cults, made his collecting task easier, in certain ways, than Lantfred’s. But Goscelin was determined, in a way Lantfred was not, to arrange the stories he heard into a chronology. Whereas Lantfred had not worried about chronology after the first three chapters of his collection, Goscelin wanted to put the stories remembered and treasured by the monks or nuns about their saints in their proper order. This was difficult. Goscelin might ask, for instance, whether anyone knew the story behind the distaff and spindles hanging up over Wulfsige’s shrine.49 Even if a monk said he knew what had happened—that an obstinate woman had refused to stop her work on Wulfsige’s feast day and found that she was frozen to those very objects—that did not necessarily mean he knew or remembered when this happened. How could Goscelin know where to insert such a story into his overall narrative of Wulfsige’s life and afterlife?
Often, it is clear, he did not know. Stories about the life, death, and burial of a saint should obviously go in that order, but things were much more free-floating when it came to posthumous miracles. Goscelin’s strategy was to place stories within the succession of religious leaders at the local house in question or (sometimes and) within the succession of Anglo-Saxon kings. In his Life and Miracles of Kenelm, for instance, he ties posthumous miracles to the time of King Cnut, Abbot Godwin, Abbot Godric, and then to the present living abbot, whom he does not name. Goscelin structures the Translation of Edith around the regimes of Archbishop Dunstan, Abbess Wulfthryth, King Cnut, then abbesses Brihtgifu, Ælfgifu, and finally Godiva, the living abbess. The succession of bishops forms the skeletal structure of the Life of Wulfsige, although past priors and kings—Cnut again—also make appearances. Quite a few of the miracles Goscelin tells directly concern these religious leaders: Abbess Ælfgifu’s eye is healed, Bishop Ælfwold and Prior Ælfweard have visions about translating Wulfsige, the present abbot of Winchcombe takes Kenelm’s relics on a tour to Clent, Kenelm’s martyrdom site, and so on.50 Goscelin never provides dates for these abbots, abbesses, kings, or bishops, but he uses a considerable amount of parchment moving the narrative from one leader to another. Many transitions between chapters concern the death of one and the succession of the next.
Goscelin sweated over these chronological frameworks, but, as we can see now, they are riddled with error. Goscelin starts his Translation of Edith, for instance, by announcing that “thirteen years” after her death, Edith appeared in a vision to Archbishop Dunstan, “then still living,” and demanded to be translated.51 Edith died in 984 or 987. Add thirteen and that makes 997 or 1000. At this point, Dunstan had been dead himself for at least nine years: there is no way to make these numbers work. In the Life and Miracles of Kenelm, Goscelin places a miracle story in the reign of Cnut (1016–35) and the regime of Abbot Godwin (1042–53).52 In the Life of Wulfsige, Goscelin refers to a bishop of Sherborne succeeding Wulfsige that we now know not to have existed.53 Editions of Goscelin’s texts bristle with footnotes noting and attempting to rectify his blunders. “Goscelin here seems to have got into confusion over his kings of England,” writes Rosalind Love in a typical editorial comment.54
Frustrating as they are, these mistakes are some of our best clues to Goscelin’s working process. He appears to have learned about these leaders the same way he learned about the miracles: by steeping himself in house conversation, listening and asking questions. The further back he tried to go, the more he struggled and stumbled. One can imagine the nuns of Wilton telling stories in which Dunstan played a role in Edith’s translation and not realizing themselves that this was chronologically impossible. It must have been equally difficult for the monks of Winchcombe to recall whether Abbot Godwin’s tenure overlapped with Cnut’s reign or not. Old Ælfmær’s memory seems to have failed him when it came to the names of Wulfsige’s immediate successors, or maybe Goscelin did not to think to ask him about this until it was too late, or got confused about what he had said. In sum, these are the kinds of mistakes one would expect to find if someone was attempting to put chronologies together working only with passed-down oral stories and very few written texts.55
Goscelin himself saw limits to what he could do in this situation. In his Life and Miracles of Kenelm, he skips over two centuries of Kenelm’s posthumous history, leaping from the story of Kenelm’s translation to Winchcombe (which Goscelin presents as
