Edward the Confessor & New Year Saints

Ever wondered why the medieval world was so captivated by saints? Matt Lewis welcomes in the new year with Amy Jeffs, author of 'Saints, A New Legendary of Heroes, Humans and Magic,' to unveil the mysteries and miracles that made saints central to medieval life. They delve into the legend of Edward the Confessor, recounting his miraculous encounter with a beggar who turned out to be St. John the Evangelist. Amy also shares the spellbinding tales of St. Bridget's miraculous milk churn and St. Patrick's purgatory, a pilgrimage destination that offered visions akin to a medieval 'Dante's Inferno.' Join us to journey through the enchanting and rebellious world of saintly legends that reveal the medieval mind and its intricate beliefs. Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis and edited by Amy Haddow. The narrative script was written by Joseph Knight, performed by Sophie Gee. The producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds and All3 Media Music. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:01Matt Lewis?

  From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

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• 2:29Matt Lewis?

  Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders, to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.

• 3:12Matt Lewis?

  In this episode of Gone Medieval, you might have already gathered, we're doing things a little bit differently.

• 3:21Matt Lewis?

  The veneration and worship of saints were an intrinsic part of the medieval world, and the celebration of their dedicated feast days formed the main threads around which the rhythms of medieval life revolved. So today, we're bringing in the new year by focusing on one of January's most famous saints and one of England's most famous kings, Edward the Confessor.

• 3:47Matt Lewis?

  I'll be joined by the marvellous Amy Jeffs, author of the new book, Saints: A New Legendary of Heroes, Humans and Magic, in which she delves into the legends, myths and miracles that suffused the cults of several medieval saints. We'll be chatting about why saints captured the imagination of so many people in the Middle Ages, what they meant to the medieval mind, and which saintly lives and legends were important in the first few months of the new year. But first, we're delving into the legendarium of Edward the Confessor himself with a retelling of one of his most famous saintly adventures. It was recorded by the St Albans monk Matthew Parris

• 4:32Matt Lewis?

  about 100 years after Edward's canonization in 1161, and comes from a history of Edward's life that attempts to justify and strengthen his status as a legendary saint.

• 4:46Matt Lewis?

  Whilst Paris’s account is consciously rooted in real events, it’s important to remember that its contents are more literary than historical. It’s designed to make Edward seem saintly and supernatural, so take what you hear with a pinch of salt. But regardless of its veracity, such legends can still reveal a huge amount about what medieval people thought and how they understood their own lives. So let’s return to 1065 to find out what this mysterious stranger wants from St. Edward.

• 5:34Speaker 05

  It is a bright summer Sunday in the heart of Saxon London as peasants and pilgrims go about their business. But soon, the clinking of iron horseshoes and the creaking of rickety carts are drowned out by a surging roaring crowd. It’s as if every citizen of London has poured out into its streets. They jostle and heave, shove and swarm, each one hopes to catch a glimpse of a king amongst his people. The one they have flocked to see is no ordinary king of England. He is Edward the Confessor, legendary saint-king of this sceptred isle, blessed, they say, with the power to work the most extraordinary of miracles. Stories have spread like wildfire across the land,

• 6:18Speaker 05

  that he has helped the blind to see and the lame to walk, that his exacting piety and dedication to church-building have bestowed the favour of St. Peter upon him. It is little wonder that his presence has drawn such a throng. This particular Sunday, however, he does not intend to perform any miracles. Rather, a simple mass at the church of St. John, his loving wife Edith of Wessex by his side, is the order of the day.

• 6:47Speaker 05

  That is, until he is approached during the service by a mysterious and unknown stranger.

• 7:01Speaker 05

  The stranger is impoverished, a vagabond, haggard and bedraggled. And as he walks towards the king, he begs incessantly. "For the love of Saint John, a part of your possessions for a lowly beggar?" The king, gracious and paternal, as all kings ought to be, hears the beggar's prayer and reaches for his arm's chest. But he can find neither gold nor silver. He asks for his treasurer to be summoned, but the man cannot be found in the melee of people. All the while, the poor man grows more and more desperate. He tears at his hair and rips at his ragged clothes. Unsure how to ease the stranger's distress,

• 7:43Speaker 05

  the king reflects for a moment and then looks down at his hand and remembers. On his finger is a cherished ring, large and beautiful, an opulent symbol of his rank and stature. He slides the ring off his finger and presents it to the poor man, who grasps it with joy, giving thanks to the king with a gentleness that would have been inconceivable just moments before. A gentleness that perhaps only a saint could possess. With commotion quelled, the king returns to mass, whilst the stranger vanishes as quickly as he appeared, slipping away into the swirling bustle of the city.

• 8:30Speaker 05

  Our story now turns to a far-off desert, to the other end of Christendom, across the glittering Mediterranean Sea, in the holy land of Syria, two pilgrims of English birth find themselves astray. They seek the holy places where Jesus lived and died, but can see neither man nor house. Lost among the dunes as the sun sets, they fear robbers and wild beasts, monsters and dreadful tempests. The encraching dark of the night drapes over them like a shroud. Suddenly, a luminous old man appears before them, more dazzling than the sun at midday. In his hands he carries two torches that banish the creeping darkness,

• 9:13Speaker 05

  and on one finger is a ring shimmering in the flickering light.

• 9:18Speaker 05

  Drawing closer, he asks them from whence they have come. "We are both from England, sire. Our king is named Edward, and we have come to seek the Holy Sepulchre, but we have befallen misfortune." The old man comforts them. "Be not troubled or sad, dear friends, for I am John, the evangelist, and your loyal and generous king is my friend. For when I came to him in lowly rags and begged for his riches, he did not turn me away as most vain rulers would. No, he gave me this cherished ring, which I will now return to him. Take it as proof of this encounter and as a testament of my anointing."

• 10:01Speaker 05

  The two pilgrims look at each other in astonishment, marveling at the gleaming garnet entrusted to them. "Now go to your king," John implores, "salute him from me, and let him know that for four, six months are over, he shall be in my company in heaven." And as swiftly as he had appeared, Saint John vanishes into the night.

• 10:27Speaker 05

  Now entrusted with a holy mission and a greater purpose, the pilgrims depart and hasten back to England. Guided by the saint, they arrive at the king's court without ill or trouble, and return to him the ring he long thought lost.

• 10:44Speaker 05

  Edward is overwhelmed by delight and wonders at the sheer impossibility of the ring's return. But his elation is soon tempered when the pilgrims relay the rest of John's portents.

• 10:57Speaker 05

  As he learns of his imminent death, Edward is gripped with a sorrow that only inspires acts of saintly generosity. He gives away all of his treasures and dedicates his final months entirely to prayer, almsgiving, and acts of devotion.

• 11:13Speaker 05

  Courteer and commoner alike marvel at his transformation, witnessing a man wholly resigned to divine will. And when the time arrives for his earthly life to end, Edward passes away in quiet dignity. True to St John's prophecy, he leaves behind a kingdom grieving not just the loss of a king, but a saint.

• 11:59Matt Lewis?

  Welcome back to Gone Medieval Amy. It's your second visit here, but the first time I've had the chance to speak to you.

• 12:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a pleasure to be back. I had so much fun with Kat.

• 12:06Matt Lewis?

  And you're here today to talk to us about saints and particularly about the saints that might feature in the first kind of few months of a new year. So we're in January, we're thinking about the new year. We've got a quarters worth of saints that we're going to try and get our way through during this episode.

• 12:23Speaker 05

  We could be here for weeks, couldn't we? I mean, there are just so many, but we've whittled it down.

• 12:28Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, we've done our best to whittle away and go for a few. I wondered if we could start off though, by just thinking a little bit about what saints meant to the medieval mind. Were they there to be exemplars? Were they there to be warnings? Were they guides to how to live a better life? What did medieval people take from saints?

• 12:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, okay, well, it's obviously it's a very big question, as you know. But when I had to define some parameters for myself with this book. And so I stuck to saints from the pre 1200 period almost exclusively, because it was around 1200 that the papacy retook charge of the saint making process. And then you see a shift in tone in terms of what their legends include. But you've also got these other, the mendicant saints, like St Francis of Sissi and St Dominic, and you've got the mystics. I think we'll steer for now, just steer clear of those categories of saints, because there's so much.

• 13:23Speaker 06

  We could say, and there's so many kind of conflicting stories, I suppose, but basically with the saints that I focus on in my book, they are mostly saints to be admired rather than imitated. They are saints who work wonders, who receive martyrdom. Um, and this is, you know, one of the things that really struck me when I was, uh, I'm working on, on stories, like the story of Saint Catherine, you know, Catherine of Alexandria. She was one of the most popular saints in medieval England. Her image, you would have gone into pretty much any parish church, you'd have seen Saint Catherine somewhere, you know, maybe on a panel painting or on the walls and the plaster or carved somewhere. You'd have seen her with her little wheel, you know, the Catherine wheel, the original version,

• 14:06Speaker 06

  peeping out from behind her legs, or perhaps she's holding it. This is torture instrument that explodes, um, because a big angel comes down and smashes it. So she can't be tortured, but you'd have seen her everywhere. And her story is that she's a great scholar. Her father educates her in the liberal arts and, and she learns rhetoric and grammar and, and everything that she needs to argue really convincingly. And so then when there's this big sweep of anti-Christian persecution happening under the Roman emperor, she argues with the governor of Alexandria about why his position is flawed and why she shouldn't worship the Roman gods.

• 14:45Speaker 06

  He's, actually he doesn't listen. It's quite, it's quite a classic situation. He says, I'm so sorry, sweetie. I wasn't actually listening. Would you like to come around for dinner?

• 14:54Speaker 06

  And so she then has dinner with him at night and they argue again and it becomes clear that he has, he can't argue with her. She's too good at it. Her logic is too good. So he then summons all of the great philosophers in the Roman Empire from far and wide to come and publicly argue with Catherine. And they do this, and of course, all of the philosophers are completely convinced by her arguments and convert to Christianity and the, the governor has to have them killed. And, you know, she then, there's the, she's put into prison. She then has the big wheel instruments of torture, four wheels with spikes and horrible things sticking out. She's going to be crushed by this mechanism of these four wheels. It's sort of presented in the arena, but then an angel appears and smashes it to bits. And then he chops her head off.

• 15:38Speaker 06

  Cause that tends to work with martyrs, but then she bleeds milk out of her neck, which is super strange. I thought to myself, surely she's a young woman in the story. Did not medieval young women kneel in front of Saint Catherine and think that? They too should become great rhetoricians. Surely she's an example to follow because I mean, I was raised in the Catholic faith. That's often how I felt as a modern Catholic. Saints were presented to you as exemplar. But in reading Eamon Duffy, the great scholar of English Reformation and that path of Christianity, he makes the point that saints are protectors, that their legends are like catalogues of, to prove their power, their immense power, their virtus is the word that comes up a lot.

• 16:21Speaker 06

  This idea of like, strength that is physical and spiritual and sort of exists, remains in the saints' body long after their spirits left it, you know. And that if you are lighting candles to a saint every week as an act of devotion, or you go on a great pilgrimage, you are kind of entering into a contract with the saint, whereby when you die and you're standing at the heavenly tribunal, which is a really, you know, in the kind of secondary world universe of the medieval Christian imagination, that is a real place. There are saints' legends or miracle stories where pilgrims actually die and they come back from the dead, having been in that heavenly tribunal.

• 17:04Speaker 06

  Your patron saint, the one that you've been doing these devotions for, will appear at that tribunal and argue your case to God and to the Virgin Mary, so that you can stay in heaven, basically. So if you know you've done some things, you know, you're probably going to need an advocate on judgment day. You want Catherine, like she is going to argue the devil out of the room. Like, there's going to be no one that can naysay her. So, yeah, I thought that was a really fascinating discovery in the process of writing this book. That role of saints, not so much as examples to follow perhaps, but as sources of immense power and as really powerful allies.

• 17:43Matt Lewis?

  It's like investing in a pension fund of a really good saint who can argue your case when you get to heaven.

• 17:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 17:50Matt Lewis?

  That's really interesting, interesting way of looking at it, I think. I guess I was listening to that also thinking, lots of women must kneel and pray to Saint Catherine, thinking, why don't men just ever listen? Because nothing changes very much, does it? And I'm always struck in the medieval world as well by how often they will measure. Dates and times by saints' days, rather than actually, they won't be talking about the fifteenth of January, they'll be talking about the saints' day when you're planning things.

• 18:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 18:18Matt Lewis?

  And I guess that's a really interesting way that people, we do it entirely by whatever the calendar date is, but that's a very different way to the way the medieval world thought about the passage of days and time.

• 18:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think, I suppose we do it with, say, Christmas. We would say, oh, it's around Christmas. There are certain festivals that if we're sort of raised in a Western Christian tradition, will loom so large in our imaginations, they will supersede the calendar date itself. I think it's, you know, when you were saying about how saints and the kind of year and time work together, I think one of the clearest places you can see this, if you go to a digital facsimile of or are able to get out a manuscript of a book of hours or a psalter, a book of Psalms, these were, a book of hours was a collection of prayers to be set at set times through the day. And it's one of the most

• 19:12Speaker 06

  common forms of manuscript to be commissioned by lay patrons, so probably lesser to upper nobility, people who aren't clerical but are, but can read and maybe have basic Latin. And so you see lots and lots of these books of hours produced for noble women and that sort of thing. And lots of these manuscripts start with a calendar and it will be a calendar of saints' days and liturgical feasts. And how each page is often laid out is that you have the list of, so you have the, say, January at the top and it'll say calends, which is where we get the word calendar. So the first day of the month's called calends. This is the Roman system for reckoning the months. You then about four days after that, you

• 19:56Speaker 06

  have noms. So it's sort of given like a list down the left hand side of the page. Noms is. Always eight days before Ides. Ides is to this fixed point in the month. And then you count down from Ides back to the calends of the next month. It was partly maybe because it's just really confusing system. I mean, you say it's around Ides, but you know, Ides might be a different, it might be around the fifteenth of what we call the fifteenth of the month, but it depends where Gones is. And so probably people didn't have every single month memorized in relation to where these points were. But how it's laid out in this calendar pages is that you then have the major feast days or the relevant feast days to that patron. So you'll have the super saints nearly always, but if the patron's from Oxford, you're going to have Frieswide

• 20:42Speaker 06

  in there. It's always like a smoking gun. So ah, this is an Oxford manuscript. And major liturgical feasts like Pentecost will be in there too, in this list. It's like, I think, kind of imagine it like a ladder. It's quite helpful. Because on beside the list of feasts, you'll also have two often like decorative roundels, little illustrations within circular frames. And the first one or the lower one will show the labour of the month for that month. It's a kind of misleading name because not all of what you would think of as labours. So the labour of the month for January is feasting.

• 21:15Matt Lewis?

  Oh, such hard work.

• 21:16Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 21:17Matt Lewis?

  Someone's got to do it.

• 21:18Speaker 06

  Yeah. If the labours of the previous eleven months have gone well, then you're going to have a really good January table. If you know, nature's been on your side and the weather's been on your side and all that sort of thing. So you often get the depiction of Janus, the Roman god with his two faces, sitting at a banqueting table. He's looking forward to the year to come, looking back at the year just gone. And he's doing the labour of the month for January. February is often warming your feet or your bum in front of the fire. Very important. Or sometimes it's somebody very, who looks very poor, sitting there warming their feet in front of the fire. You've got some great Dutch manuscripts where they're kind of lifting up their tunics and warming everything else. You might have a very wealthy, sort of well nourished looking individual standing in front of a hearth

• 22:03Speaker 06

  while somebody is working for them out the window, carrying a big bundle of sticks on their shoulders or something. March is Often April's picking flowers, May is carusing, June's the hay harvest, July is the wheat harvest, August is threshing, September's treading the grapes, October is putting the pigs out to panage on the acorns and the beech nuts. November, you've got to sow the wheat for the next year and December, you're going to kill the pig with the back of an axe, pole-axing, the doink, and then it all starts again. You'd have this image of the labour of the month, which is like connecting, you've got these saints down the side. At the bottom of the ladder, you've got the soil, what's going on at ground level. But then in the roundel above that, you've got a symbol of the zodiac for that month,

• 22:45Speaker 06

  which in the medieval way of reckoning, it mapped exactly onto the month. It didn't kind of straddle two months as we have it now. And the symbol of the zodiac would affect, you know, this was because we're in an age that believed in um humoral theory, subscribed to humoral theories of medical sciences inherited from Galen and the classics. And so actually via the Islamic world, I should say, but what the celestial bodies were doing and the stars were doing at any given moment, would it implicate the kind of medical treatment you might receive for different parts of your body? Or even issues of kind of mental health. So January is seen as a time that implicates the ankles, but also melancholy. And so what you might avoid

• 23:28Speaker 06

  certain medical treatments, certain times of the month, depending on a zodiac. But again, it's then we're at the top of the ladder now. It's can, it's the spheres, what's going on in the sky. And so one of each, just one of these calendar pages, it connects the soil to the spheres, the saints and the Taj Mahal feast being like a ladder in between, structuring time and bringing everything from the falling leaves and the weather into a kind of whole cosmological drama about creation and about why humanity's here and where it's going and what its fate's going to be. And that, there's something for me very,

• 24:06Speaker 06

  it sort of inspires a kind of nostalgia, but it's also deeply insufficient because, you know, it's anthropocentric, you know, it's not going to work as a, as a worldview really, but the poetry of it and the completeness of it is very engaging, I think.

• 24:19Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, that's incredible. I mean, I'll never look at a page in a book of hours in the same way. Again, I'll be looking for all of those little things. It's really useful guide to how to read those pages. It's great.

• 24:27Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 24:28Matt Lewis?

  If we move on to think about some specific saints, so if we think about January, thoroughly enjoyed reading the book, by the way, brilliant.

• 24:34Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 24:34Matt Lewis?

  I recommend people go and dig through all of the stories of the various saints that are in there for each month. But for January, I kind of wanted to pick out Edward the Confessor because he's a medieval king, medieval king of England too. And so he's one of the January saints. What are the saintly stories that surround Edward the Confessor? How does he become a saint?

• 24:53Speaker 06

  Oh my gosh, I could talk about Edward the Confessor for days and it's going to be so hard

• 24:59Speaker 06

  to work out what to choose and where to start.

• 25:02Matt Lewis?

  Right, everyone get your packed lunch, Amy is going to talk, Edward the Confessor.

• 25:05Speaker 06

  I feel like some people are like this about steam trains and I'm like about Edward the Confessor. But so I'm going to start with a manuscript because I feel like manuscripts are, you know, it's nice to have an object to focus on. And there is in the university library at Cambridge University, there is a history of Edward the Confessor. And it was written by Matthew Paris, who was the incumbent historian at St Albin's Abbey in the 13th century, in the second half of the 13th century. He is a polymath, he's a great friend of Henry III. He is in touch with lots of noble women, he lends them books that he's written and illustrated. And he produces a load of saints' lives, which are verse lives, really engaging, keep saying engaging,

• 25:49Speaker 06

  but they're really sort of dynamic, old French, and most of them in the vernacular, poetry telling the story of a different saint with these prolific illustrations that he's done himself. And they've got, you know, I'm trying to think of an illustrator we'd all know that's got this kind of dynamic pen and wash. It's almost like Quentin Blake, but less kind of playful. But they got, they kind of roll into each other, these continuous narrative scenes, all these characters and doing things. And really mapping on to what's happening in the story underneath. And he produced a text that he called L'histoire de Saint-Edouard le Roi, The History of Saint Edward the King. And it tells the story, it's kind of like a saints' legend. It's closely based on his official hagiography.

• 26:32Speaker 06

  But it's also a story of English political history and the Battle of Hastings and the Norman conquest and the circumstances that led to that. It's absolutely fascinating. It's got an amazing Waz Wally Battle of Hastings scene at the end. Where it takes quite a while to find Harold, but when you do, you know, he's got his little crown on his head. He's right down in the melee at the bottom. He's fallen over and the arrow is poking out of his eye and he's looking you with the other eye, looking right at you. And it's this moment of reckoning, sort of, yeah, oh, oh, I've been found out, you know, the divine dart has fallen out of the sky and got me. So anyway, Edward the Confessor was very, he's obviously a historical figure, lots of saints are. But what happened in his

• 27:15Speaker 06

  reign and what happened to England after his reign means that his story is really loaded, symbolically loaded and ripe for kind of adaptation and embellishment in ways that serve the ruling elites, the Plantagenet ruling elite. So you've got this story of, so, okay, the main miracles of Edward the Confessor are that he gives a ring to a poor man that he meets outside his palace in London. The poor man then appears to some pilgrims way off in the Holy Land and gives them back the ring and says, can you tell your king, Edward the Confessor, these are English pilgrims, he said, can you tell them that I'm actually

• 27:56Speaker 06

  John the Evangelist? And when he gave me this ring, he was thinking that I was a poor man, he did not know, but you know, can you, and I actually also know the date he's going to die. So if you could return this ring to your king, tell him it's from John the Evangelist, thanks for that. And also you're going to die soon and this is when.

• 28:14Matt Lewis?

  Oh, wow. Thanks. That's, that's like a good news and bad news kind of thing. You've got your ring back, but.

• 28:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, a real double edged sword. So they, yeah, they return to London and do this and Edward's really pleased because he can't, can't wait to go to heaven. So that, that becomes the kind of motif, like the, the signature story of Edward the Confessor, Confessor's cult. So the ring was one of his primary relics at his shrine in Westminster Abbey. The pilgrims souvenir that's sold to pilgrims at the shrine shows Edward the Confessor and John the Evangelist disguised as a beggar, standing together in a kind of circle border and they're exchanging, they're being panning over this ring to John the Evangelist. It's an amazing sort of idea

• 29:00Speaker 06

  because obviously it's not just about Edward the Confessor, it's also about John the Evangelist. It's kind of elevating the saint by the. Royal English saint by association with a biblical saint. So his cult is being actively encouraged by Henry III. He names his son Edward, you know, Edward the first. That's, it's not a coincidence. He's refurbishing Westminster Abbey. This is a top down cult that they're, they want Westminster Abbey to feel like the Saint Denis of London. It's the necropolis of the Plantagenet. It's the same with the other big famous legend of Edward the Confessor. It's about how he was responsible for refurbishing Westminster Abbey the first time. So Henry III gives it a going over and he says, this is because I'm imitating Edward the Confessor,

• 29:45Speaker 06

  who did the same thing. And Edward the Confessor, that in the manuscript, all about his, you know, his history, I was talking about, there's a sort of digression and it says, way back when, long before Edward the Confessor was on the throne, the first bishop of London was called Melitus, and he was on his way to consecrate a new church that they'd been building on the Isle of Thorny, which is the future Westminster. It used to be an island. It's not anymore. Meanwhile, there's a fisherman out on the Thames and Saint Peter appears to him, asks to be carried across to the island where the church stands, as yet unconsecrated church stands. And he performs this miraculous consecration and angels appear and the walls, kind of, he's

• 30:28Speaker 06

  just flinging holy water around. There are kind of candles burning. He then goes outside Saint Peter and writes a Greek message in the sand by the entrance to the church. And then he says to the fisherman, have you got any fish? I'm hungry. And the fisherman says, oh no, I've been so distracted by you doing all this magic-y stuff and kind of all the angels that I haven't done any fishing. And he says, well, throw your nets over the side of the boats in a classic Saint Peter move. And so the fisherman does, the nets fill with salmon and he pulls this catch onto his boat. And Saint Peter says, can you take this salmon to Melitus, the first bishop of London, who is on his way to consecrate this church and tell him that by this salmon

• 31:10Speaker 06

  and by other signs that I've left, like the wet walls from all of the holy walls and the Greek message, that Saint Peter's already been here and I've dedicated it to myself and, you know, it's all done. Yeah. And, and so you don't need to, you don't need to worry. And so, again, this is, the church then falls into disrepair. It's refurbished in the reign of Edward the Confessor and again in the reign of Henry III. But it's got this miracle story links the Cult of Edward to St Peter as well. And so now he's got these kind of really powerful sidekicks of John the Evangelist and St Peter, who holds the keys to heaven.

• 31:53Speaker 06

  There's so much more I could say about him, but in terms of what you actually asked me about the famous stories, those are probably the two, the two big miracle stories that people would have thought of if they were into the Cult of Edward in the 13th century.

• 32:15Matt Lewis?

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• 33:42Matt Lewis?

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• 35:21Matt Lewis?

  And I guess if I was being slightly cynical, which maybe I am, I guess there's an attraction for particularly Henry III, but any medieval king to want a previous saint king of England. There is something to be gained from having the fact that kings of England can be saints. And I'm thinking Henry III in particular, because I think he'd have loved to have been a saint, would have been his dream come true. So he's kind of almost setting the precedent that kings of England can be saints, because there's Edward. What about me, guys? What about me? What about me?

• 35:53Speaker 06

  Yes, yeah. And there was, of course, the, um, so one of Saint Edward's parting, you know, as he's on his deathbed, he has a vision of a tree that gets chopped down and then reroots. He says it's like three furlongs later or something. Basically, it's a kind of allegory. I mean, this is, you know, being written down in the, so I think that miracle story with the vision of the tree is composed in the reign of Henry the First, because the tree, it's interpreted in allegory for how the English royal line will be severed by the Norman conquest, but by blood will re-emerge with the reign of Henry the First.

• 36:33Speaker 06

  This is also is useful to Henry the Third later, because he had basically saying, we are descended from Edward the Confessor. There's been this kind of blip. And this is useful to them politically, because their cousins in France are becoming more and more like enemies. And so I don't know if you'd agree, but it's quite useful to be defining themselves by a history that roots them more securely on English soil and not as kind of migrants, essentially.

• 37:00Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, we do see kind of early on in Henry the Third's reign, probably while he's still a child, you know, before he's really in charge of things. But when you've had that French invasion, twelve fifteen, twelve sixteen, with Louis coming over, you do see an emergence of a much more English identity in driving the French away, you know? No longer do we consider ourselves Anglo-Norman, basically French elite over here.

• 37:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 37:23Matt Lewis?

  We're now separating ourselves. So you get that real sense of an English divide from the French. And this is part of the English building that identity for themselves, that, you know, we can have saints over here as well, that are separate from anything that's going on in France.

• 37:39Speaker 06

  Yes, and that are royal and that are blood related to us. You know, so, yeah, that's such an interesting point. And I think this is the same period, it's the latter part of Edward, Edward the First's reign, that he, um, and not even the latter part sort of in it. So Henry the Third's son is then really promoting the story of Brutus, the Trojan, and Claiming and he has, it's in his reign that the amazing bodily roll genealogical diagram is produced that goes all the way from Brutus the Trojan to Edward the first. And was probably kept St Mary's Abbey in York while he was kind of leading the campaigns in Scotland.

• 38:17Speaker 06

  And so, yeah, there's this, there are various ways through myth and through sacred legend that they are really establishing this fixed English identity and, and you that sense of place and heritage.

• 38:30Matt Lewis?

  Fascinating. Then if we move into February, maybe a little bit of a step change, a change of direction. We've got St Bridget. What can you tell us about when St Bridget was around and again, how she becomes a saint?

• 38:41Speaker 06

  Okay, so St Bridget is one of those really intriguing saints that, you know, I think it's quite a common assumption today to say that so many of the more weird and wonderful saints legends in medieval Christianity must have come from pre-Christian cults. And I think there are two kind of comments that's worth making about that. Firstly, that the evidence is really slim. Mostly, there's no evidence for that. The evidence that does exist, exists in relation to the cult of St Bridget. She appears in a very, an early medieval glossary as having come from a pre-Christian Celtic cult to three goddesses all called Bridget, but that's rare.

• 39:22Speaker 06

  And there's also a letter from Pope Gregory the Great, who led a great deal of missions into northwestern Europe to the first Bishop of London, Melitus, who we met earlier. And he actually says, don't destroy what he calls pagan temples in your efforts to convert the people, but clear them of their furniture and put in altars to the saints, dedicate them to the saints. And modify the animal sacrifices they were making to feasts on the dedication days of those new churches. And so that's a kind of active instruction to appropriate pre-Christian places of worship for Christian worship. But so, you know, there is some evidence it's happening. On the other hand,

• 40:06Speaker 06

  the Reformation, the reformers in the Protestant Reformation are very, very keen on accusing medieval Catholicism of heathenism, pagan practice, superstition, magic at every possible turn. And at that point, that is the gravest slur. To worship an image in a manner that was held to be idolatrous was not just doing. The wrong thing. It was not just imagining something was there that that wasn't or in believing it had life. It actually created a vacuum into which the devil could move. You know, pagan idols are not are not just a misunderstanding. They have the devil in them. They're deeply dangerous.

• 40:46Speaker 06

  And so, you know, to accuse a medieval Christian of worshipping images of being pagan was a massive accusation. Nowadays, we hear the word paganism and I think by and large we go, ooh, cool. There's a free song. Yeah, it doesn't mean we haven't inherited the Reformation smear campaign. It just means that we perceive it differently. So, wetting into Bridget, basically, chances are she is an example of a pre-Christian cult being transformed into a Christian cult. However, we shouldn't overstate it. She is held to have lived in the mid fifth, first, second quarter of the sixth century or died then.

• 41:28Speaker 06

  Her first hagiography is written down in the mid seventh century by a monk called Cogitosis. She was believed to have lived and killed there in Ireland. She is one of the most wonder-working saints. There's a wonder worker extraordinaire, as she's described. She performs all kinds of amazing miracles, such as, you know, the famous one is that when she was a girl and she was churning butter for her mother, she gave away all the butter to some travellers who were hungry. And then the churn just filled back up. So she's associated with kind of milk, the new season of sort of the sheep in the fields and the lambs and that kind of the beginning of spring and the first milk coming in.

• 42:09Speaker 06

  Then she also, this story of how she came in from the outside into the into the buildings that she shared with her community, and it's been raining outside. And so she just takes off her cloak and without thinking drapes it over a sunbeam. Another is that to repel unwanted suitors, she just burst her eyeball with her finger. Uh, or another lovely one where she is said to have found a beehive under the floor of their communal buildings. And it's just this enormous beehive, all these bees have been living. Like immense productivity, the honey, like, you know, how the chosen, you know, the promised land is just in the Old Testament is described as somewhere flowing with milk

• 42:50Speaker 06

  and honey, you know, that is Bridget. And that's kind of how, I mean, the, the, the story that I chose to recreate in the fiction section of her chapter in my book is the one of how she is said to have performed an abortion, quote unquote, abortion on one of her followers. And this is, this is just a really interesting and, and challenging miracle.

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• 44:41Matt Lewis?

  So I think it's interesting because you talk around that in the book then a little bit about this kind of the restoration of virginity as a miracle. And I did want to talk a little bit about kind of what that is meant to mean. The idea that you could be restored to innocence, I guess, is a core Christian message, really, isn't it?

• 44:58Speaker 06

  Yes. So this abortion miracle, she's not alone. There are some other early Irish saints that end pregnancies. They're kind of glibly called abortion miracles, but it's possibly an inappropriate term. And this is something discussed in an article by a scholar called Maeve Callan. She describes how in early Irish penitentiels from the period, you can go back to being a virgin after seven years of penance, and that becoming a holy virgin isn't, it's, it's a kind of constructed thing. It's not necessarily how we would perceive it now. And so she also describes how a sort of the sin of fornication, let's say, didn't remove your virginity until the sin was manifest in the form of

• 45:40Speaker 06

  a child. And so if your pregnancy ended before the child arrived, and if the child vanished in the process, you were still, kind of, you still haven't lost your status within the community necessarily. And so the way that the miracle occurs with Bridget is that she, follower comes to her and confesses that she's pregnant, and then Bridget, her hands on the woman's belly, and the flesh recedes, and the child vanishes, and the woman experiences no pain, and she thanks God. And there's this kind of sense that it's a returning of the fetus to where it came from, and for a sort of a chance for the female follower to stay in the community and not forfeit her choice to be a follower

• 46:25Speaker 06

  of Bridget. And this idea of purity is so interesting, especially in relation to Bridget, who's got these kind of motifs of fertility, of the milk and the honey and that kind of thing. The virgin body, or the chaste body, it's sometimes described as a hortus conclusus, an enclosed garden, and that you, this is sort of in a medieval way of imagining things, that by the sort of the womb that has the potential to make life but doesn't, is a kind of sacrifice for God. It's a reservation of power. And that really tallies up with her association with the very first glimmerings of spring and all of the life force in the first shoots in the fields and in the animals that are getting ready to have their young.

• 47:07Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, I think that was what I was taking away from Bridget's story was it's kind of fits with that idea of spring and the arrival of lots of new life and the coming of plenty and all of that kind of thing is all tied in.

• 47:20Speaker 06

  In the glossary that her name appears in relation to those three goddesses, it says how, you know, her feast is celebrated at the very start of February, around the time of the feast of Imbolc, which the writer of the glossary says is when the is, he gives this kind of etymology, says it's to do with ewe's milk and when the first ewe's milk comes in. So it seems that maybe the timing of her feast has something to do with that pre-Christian cult, if it did indeed exist.

• 47:45Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. Interesting though. The next one I wanted to talk about is Patrick. I mean, I think probably lots of people will be aware of St. Patrick, the idea that we have a Patrick of going to Ireland, converting all of the Irish and driving out the snakes is possibly the limit, probably the limit of my knowledge before I read the book, to be perfectly honest. How accurate is that view of Patrick? What did he mean to medieval people?

• 48:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think saints like Patrick are so tricky because they've got, like Bridget, you know, they've got ongoing cults. It's not enough just to learn about what writings actually survive from Patrick's life, lifetime, which he, you know, there are two texts that he wrote that survive. You can learn that, you still don't know anything about Patrick, the legend, you know, you could learn his later medieval hagiographies and you'd have another layer. But then, of course, there's everything that Patrick has meant since then as well. I am, I started with that, you know, that these texts that survive, there's his confession, his Confessio, in which he lays out biographical information. So that's where

• 48:49Speaker 06

  we know that, you know, where the evidence comes from, that he was a British born man who in his teens was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Ireland. He worked in the region of what's now County Mayo and was enslaved there. He had been raised Christian.

• 49:06Speaker 06

  But Ireland at that point wasn't Christian. So he was in a Romano-British household that was Christian. And so when he manages to escape enslavement and return to Britain, he quickly resolves to go out to Ireland and become a missionary and to convert the Irish people. And then he becomes Bishop of Ireland. He has a major role in that conversion process. It's probably been exaggerated with time. But you you can imagine these scenes of kind of mass baptism and there's this. Well, he does come back to Britain once to be tried for a crime. And he doesn't say what it was.

• 49:43Matt Lewis?

  Must have been really bad if he doesn't bother to say what it was.

• 49:45Speaker 06

  That's a kind of true crime novel waiting to be written. The other surviving text from Patrick is his letter to Caroticus, who is a British slave dealer. And Patrick is furious in this letter. He has just recently baptized a group of people in Ireland, a large group of people. Caroticus has been through with his men and has slaughtered all the men in that community and taken away the women and children. And he's kidnapped them into slavery, which is of course what Patrick experienced as a young man. And this letter urges Caroticus to see the crime, understand the crime that he's committed.

• 50:26Speaker 06

  And I think Patrick even says in the letter, they were still in their baptismal robes. Maybe that's an exaggeration, or maybe it's a kind of they symbolically were. They were like fresh out of having converted. And you struck them down like lambs. And he's so enraged and embittered. And he says, if you don't change your ways and return the women and children and protect them, you're going to burn in hell. And who knows if it worked? You think if Caroticus was prepared to do all of that, probably a you're going to burn in hell letter isn't going to cut it. But so these are the two things that actually survived from Patrick's life. You then get these later medieval, much more conventional hagiographies. And that's where he's kind of driving out snakes and doing all kinds of things with his staff.

• 51:11Speaker 06

  Like standing at the top of a mountain and kind of hitting his staff against the air and way down in the valley and idle falls. You know, really fantastic stories. But then sometime after that, you get.

• 51:24Speaker 06

  The story of St Patrick's purgatory. This is what really intrigued me. So in my fictional kind of story of St Patrick, it's about his, it starts with him being shown the entrance to purgatory by Christ. So there's a Middle English story called Sir Owain, and it's about how a knight travels this place called St Patrick's purgatory. It opens with St Patrick dreaming that he is in this beautiful meadow and he encounters Christ, and Christ gives him a huge book with all the knowledge that ever was and that ever will be in it. And he gives him a staff that will be his powerful miracle working staff. And then he leads him through the meadow into a desert and across the desert to a huge pit, a hole in the ground, so deep you can't see the bottom.

• 52:08Speaker 06

  And he explains that this is purgatory. This is where souls will go to be cleansed of their sin, however long it takes before entering heaven. And then in the story of Sir Owain, this is about a knight living around the time of King Arthur, who decides he's going to go to this place, this hole that St Patrick was shown. And it was actually by then associated with an actual kind of cave network or system of caves on an island in Lochteug in Ireland. And so Sir Owain goes there, he sort of defies the abbot and goes into the pit. And then he goes on this kind of Dante's Inferno journey through purgatory and sees all kinds of awful terrifying things and a lot of naked writhing bodies

• 52:52Speaker 06

  and farting demons and that kind of thing. And then sort of ascends via this terrifying road into the kind of holding zone before heaven. But basically with Patrick, there's this place, this St Patrick's purgatory on Lochteug, which was a genuine pilgrimage destination. It's thought that this is no longer open, but you get this story of Sir Owain's purgatory. You get another story in the Chronicles of Frosta, which you're probably familiar with as a medievalist. He's a French historian. He talks about riding with some knights and asks some, I think they're English knights. And he, one of them's called William de Lisle, I believe. And he asks, he says, you've been to St Patrick's purgatory, haven't you? And he says, oh, yeah, I have. He was like, what was it like? Well, yeah, we went across to the island of Lochteug and we got permission to go.

• 53:33Speaker 06

  And spend the night in the cave system and see what it's like because people say they see all kinds of amazing things. And he said, what happened is we went down into the cave, we went down all these steps. We sat down and we fell asleep. We think we had all kinds of really weird, we said impossible desire to sleep. We couldn't resist it and we fell asleep at the bottom of this cave network and had all these crazy dreams. But in the morning, when we came out again, we couldn't articulate what they were. And we'd kind of forgotten what these dreams were. And there's this theory that possibly this genuine sort of cave system known as St Patrick's Purgatory is a sort of prehistoric sweat house somewhere that that sort of herbs were burned, maybe hallucinogenic herbs. And that Frosta's companion on this journey was Sir William Delisle.

• 54:17Speaker 06

  Actually kind of went and had like kind of wild trip in this this cave in the 14th century. I couldn't remember anything and he kind of couldn't resist falling asleep and had all these crazy dreams. There's this completely baffling and fascinating interweaving of myth and history and evidence and fiction. And, you know, it's just with Patrick, that's, you know, that's ramped up to the extreme. So he's such a a complex character.

• 54:45Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, and I was struck, I think, by what you described a little bit earlier, the way that Patrick's is a good example of where the the stories are layered up to mean different things at different times, you know, we we kind of have what Patrick tells us about himself. But then people will start adding on to that and creating this driving out the snakes thing. Then he becomes a representative of of the idea of purgatory when that's something the church is beginning to evolve and and drive home for people. And Patrick just gets attached to that. So it's sort of the the the living nature of the cult of saints that they can be grafted on to whatever they're needed for in any given moment.

• 55:22Speaker 06

  Yes, and sometimes you really feel that kind of top down pressure of the church, quote unquote, to use the cult of saints to their to serve the theological purposes. But at the same time, this cult of saints is unruly and challenges orthodox theology throughout its history. You know, it's the uh in the earliest period, the martyrs are, there is no relic veneration in the Bible. This is something that seems to appear with the early martyrs, other Christian communities, early Christian communities going to their tombs. Because these are people that have died. Heroically and who become sort of saints by popular vote. But then you get the missionary period post legalization of Christianity and becoming

• 56:05Speaker 06

  the official religion of the Roman Empire. Missions going into northwestern Europe, they take with them the bones of apostles and that kind of things. And these become very effective tools for evangelization. They're kind of focal points for storytelling and for kind of performance of miracles. Whether or not that's literally happening is kind of up to listeners to decide. But you sense this in the story. There's a story of Saint Andrew, the apostle's bones going to Scotland and how they're taken by Saint Rule or Saint Regulus and how a pictish king sees a kind of great host of angels in the sky above the box of Andrew's bones that Saint Regulus is holding.

• 56:46Speaker 06

  You can kind of imagine how these, how the sort of dramatic or theatrical potential of these, of these folkies for devotion. And so, you know, by the time the Christian church is really established across Europe and theologians are saying, how do we feel about this kind of mass pilgrimage and venerating human remains and the reports of miracles? You know, how does that actually tally up with the teachings of, say, the Church Fathers or the Gospels? It's too late. It's already in there in the popular imagination. It's massive part of Christian belief, of folk belief. You know, there's a shrine to a dog in 13th century France, just outside Lyon, and a

• 57:29Speaker 06

  contemporary Dominican preacher says, this is really not what we think is appropriate. And yet the cult persisted into the 20th century. It's one of those Bad Galat stories where the dog had saved a baby from a viper but is found with the cots tipped over and the dog's got blood round its mouth. And so the father kills it and throws it down a well. And then he realizes, he discovers the body of a snake covered in dog bites under the crib when he lifts the baby back up and realizes he's wrongfully killed the dog. And it was like this martyr story. Throughout this history, we're also seeing a kind of push and pull between orthodox theology and popular belief and the force of mass devotion.

• 58:11Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah, it's fascinating. And we're hoping to twist your arm to bring you back to talk about more saints throughout the year. So I just wondered whether there are patterns to the saints that match the periods of the year. So we've dealt with kind of January, February, March, springtime. Do the saints kind of reflect the season? Or is it much more random than that?

• 58:34Speaker 06

  I think it depends on the stories associated with saints come from such a variety of sources. In my book, I've tried not to only talk about the official lives of saints, but also the spin off stories. And one of the stories that I found particularly wonderful, which I hope we come to in the summer, but it is actually highly appropriate for a winter episode, because it's the story of how the Virgin Mary, while travelling to Bethlehem with Joseph, and she's heavily pregnant, they encounters a cherry tree growing beside the road, and it miraculously bursts into fruit, which is an astonishing thing in the middle of winter. And you've got to imagine that this is a kind of medieval English imagined landscape. This isn't actual Middle East we're imagining

• 59:16Speaker 06

  here. So it's probably snow everywhere. And, you know, this cherry tree is suddenly covered in this glistening red fruit. And I'm quoting the N-Town plays, which is a travelling mystery play set from 14th century. She says, Oh, Joseph, could you please pick me some of these cherries? I'm so hungry. And you look at this amazing miracle. And he says, It is wild work. Let the one that got you pregnant pick the cherries. And the cherry tree realises that there's a deity in the womb of the Virgin. And so the whole cherry tree bows down for her to pick her fill of cherries. This is taken from the Gospel of the apocryphal Gospel of pseudo Matthew, in which the Virgin encounters not a cherry tree, but a date palm, and it bows down to her. But in the 15th century England, for some reason, the version in which it's a cherry

• 1:00:00Speaker 06

  tree, and so kind of matches on to what people from England would have been able to see out their windows, becomes an incredibly popular story, gives rise to all sorts of spin off stories, often featuring Unexpected gluts of fresh cherries in the middle of winter and at Christmas feasts. And so, you know, in the same way with stories where like of Cuthbert, where there are otters, where in a Middle Eastern predecessor, there might have been a helpful camel or a helpful lion. You can see how these stories are being shaped for a British landscape or northwestern European landscape and taking those tropes that they've seen elsewhere and of, yeah, playing with them.

• 1:00:42Speaker 06

  So I don't know if it's if it's exactly seasonal, but it is certainly local.

• 1:00:47Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah, fascinating. Thank you very much. One question I really need to ask you before you go, and I'm sure anyone else who reads the book will want to know this as well. What does the manuscript reading room at Cambridge University Library smell like?

• 1:00:59Speaker 06

  Absolutely lovely.

• 1:01:01Matt Lewis?

  You describe it in the book and you you talk about the smell in there and I was just, I wonder what it actually smells like. I've never been there.

• 1:01:06Speaker 06

  Oh, it just smells of, you know, there was a part of the stores of the British Library manuscript. I mean, it's still it's still there. Obviously, there's manuscript stores in the British Library. Just if you go through some particular area of of the stacks, smells of smoke because some of the manuscripts in that section were rescued from a fire a long time ago. This isn't the case in the Cambridge University Library manuscript reading room, but when you go in there, it smells of leather and old paper and parchment. And when you, you know, I am, I'm sure I'm definitely not alone in being a furtive manuscript sniffer. You think it's so, you know, you've got this permission to come in and look at this amazing artefact. And you open it and it's on the, you know, it's on its cushion. You've got the snakes there weighing the pages down. And then when no one's looking, you just even forget.

• 1:01:51Speaker 06

  Because it's just, you know, it's, you wished that you were a dog and you could kind of read it, read the smells. And yeah, that's just, there's something so organic about it and such a lack of plastics and plastic sizes, which I think we just inured to. I don't know. It's my happy place.

• 1:02:08Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, it wasn't a very saintly question. I just wondered.

• 1:02:11Speaker 06

  Well, there is something so sacred about the smell of manuscripts.

• 1:02:15Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, lovely. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Amy. It's been fantastic to explore the first quarter of the year. And we'll return to this for the spring months very soon.

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