Читать книгу Wonderful to Relate - Rachel Koopmans - Страница 12

CHAPTER THREE

A Drop from the Ocean’s Waters: Lantfred of Fleury and the Cult of Swithun at Winchester

No hagiography of any kind was written in England 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 would begin to construct soon after their arrival in England.²⁵ The lack of large churches in the late Saxon landscape does not indicate disrespect for Christian worship. So too, the lack 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 ailing bodies,”⁴⁵ and descriptions of how the saint “confers the benefit of health on the bodies of the sick, innumerable because of their multitude,”⁴⁶ may well be tied to this early 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 a crippled young man and returns later to find him cured; in a third, Eadsige questions a man about his state of health before his miracle.⁷¹ Perhaps the most telling story, though, has to do with the ringing of the bell. Some monks “bore it ill that they were so frequently awakened from their night-time sleep” to give thanks for miracles, Lantfred writes, and “they perversely persuaded others” to ignore Eadsige’s bell-ringing.⁷² After nearly two weeks of this—Eadsige must have been very upset—Swithun appeared in a vision to a noblewoman, telling her to tell Æthelwold that the monks of the Old Minster were not being properly grateful. Æthelwold sent a reprimand to the monks, and things improved: “From that time on … no matter how often a miracle was performed at the body of the blessed saint, whether during the day or in the middle of the night, and the sacrist rang the bell even lightly, the monks went to the monastery in order to praise the omnipotent Lord.”⁷³

The detail about “ringing the bell lightly” certainly sounds like it would have come from Eadsige. When Lantfred writes that 25 people were cured on the day of the Feast of the Assumption or that 36 people were cured in three days, it likely that such information came to him from the man who rang the bell for all those miracles.⁷⁴ Indeed, Eadsige may well be behind more chapters of Lantfred’s collection than those in which he is named. If Lantfred did not speak Old English, or spoke it haltingly, it would have been difficult for him to get details about many of the miracles in his collection for himself. Lantfred claims to have spoken with the blacksmith whose vision was relayed to Eadsige—“I learned from the smith himself that these things had happened exactly as the present little book describes”⁷⁵—but otherwise does not present himself as listening to the lay English men and women featured throughout his collection. In two chapters, Lantfred mentions how people came and “reported to the monks of that place” about their miracles—it seems likely that Lantfred then heard the story from the monks, rather than the original tellers.⁷⁶ Lantfred many well have heard many of the stories he recounts in the comfortable company of Eadsige and other Old Minster monks enthusiastic about Swithun’s cult.

In the collection’s prefatory letter, Lantfred addresses the monks of the Old Minster: “I, the most worthless of all men … sustained by no prerogative of divine learning nor by any authority accruing from my good conduct, but obeying your commands, trusting in your prayers—have come trembling to the mighty vastness of this sea.” In the next sentence, Lantfred speaks of “the good will of you who are requesting the work.”⁷⁷ Lapidge reads this passage as indicating that after Swithun’s translation, “the monks of the Old Minster soon felt the need to have these abundant miracles recorded, and the task fell to Lantfred.”⁷⁸ However, Lantfred’s presentation of his composition as the result of a “request” seems more like a considerate genuflection than an indication that it was the Old Minster monks who had first felt a need for such a text. It had been over 150 years since an English monk had produced a miracle collection. Lantfred, in contrast, came from a monastery and a region in which miracle collections were actively being made. Fleury, Lantfred’s own monastery, had a distinguished tradition of miracle collecting. It was home to one of the most well-known collections of the early medieval period, Adrevald’s collection of the miracles of St. Benedict written in the 860s.⁷⁹ While Adrevald’s collection was not so focused on contemporary healing miracles as Lantfred’s would be, this collection must have been known to Lantfred and impressed on him how a text could keep the memory of past miracles alive. Lantfred was also likely aware of the translations of relics and miracle collections compiled at Trier in the 960s, at Metz around the same time, in Picardy after 964, at Gorze in 965, and other contemporary examples, as Lapidge has outlined.⁸⁰

It seems likely that Lantfred was the one who thought it was important to write a miracle collection. Writing was something Lantfred clearly enjoyed; in his collection for Swithun, he employs grecisms, rhyme, and other rhetorical pyrotechnics. Lantfred was such a fine writer, in fact, that Lapidge terms him “the most accomplished prose stylist active in England since the days of Aldhelm and Bede.”⁸¹ A different monk from Fleury might have been impressed by the goings-on at Winchester, told his friends about Swithun’s miracles, and enjoyed mulling over miracles with Eadsige, but written nothing. Lantfred, though, wanted to write—and, as noted above, he was thinking about Frankish readers as well as English ones. Four manuscripts of Lantfred’s collection survive. There are two early copies written at Winchester, one dated to the late tenth century, perhaps 996, the other to c.1000; there is one copy with a Fleury origin, dated c.1000–1050; and there is a copy made at Worcester between about 1050 and 1075.⁸² Without Lantfred’s text, it would be hard to guess at the full vibrancy of Swithun’s cult in the 970s. Apart from his collection, all we have concerning Swithun from this ten-year period is an enigmatic and unlabeled image in the Benedictional of St. Æthelwold, a set of benedictions that briefly mention Swithun’s abundant miracles in the same manuscript, and recently discovered archaeological evidence indicating a rebuilding of the Old Minster around this time.⁸³

“It was in no small measure a result of Lantfred’s eloquent advocacy of St. Swithun,” Lapidge writes, “that he quickly became established in the vanguard of Anglo-Saxon saints.”⁸⁴ Surely, though, it was not Lantfred’s eloquence that placed Swithun in this vanguard, but the volatile oral spread of stories of his miracles and the making of more and more. By the time Lantfred began collecting miracle stories, Swithun’s cult had already reached far more locales outside of Winchester than his text ever would. Lantfred’s essential motive for miracle collecting—I want this cult and these stories to be remembered, “so that such great favours may not lie hidden from succeeding generations”—would be articulated again and again by later miracle collectors in England. It is a less ambitious and less political motive than scholars tend to want to read into miracle collections, but it is precisely what Lantfred’s text accomplished, both in the medieval period and up to the present day.

Lantfred’s collection, in sum, appears to be the result of a fortunate and unusual conjunction of circumstances. Here was a Frankish visitor whose home monastery was a traditional center for miracle collecting, a gifted writer coming upon a cult that astounded him, a foreigner who developed a friendship with and appreciated the stories of the prickly sacrist at Winchester. Lantfred’s initial trip to England likely had nothing to do with Swithun. We should not imagine that Lantfred’s sole business in England was miracle collecting, nor that he came to England with the intent of creating such a text. Instead, he seems to have been inspired to write by the contemporary cult, whenever he first came upon it. It was an extremely unusual project for someone residing in late tenth-century England. Lantfred’s efforts were respected, considering Wulfstan’s pains to versify the collection and Ælfric’s to abbreviate and to translate it, but his example seems to have done little to inspire more miracle collecting in England. After Lantfred finished his collection, new English cults appeared (Dunstan’s at Canterbury seems to have been particularly strong), other cults faded, and still others, including Swithun’s, rolled on, all with minimal or no written record of the miracle stories being created and exchanged.⁸⁵ It would be a full century before another writer—a foreigner, again—would think it important to preserve miracle stories about English saints in texts.