A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons
Page 20
While the king pursued his missionary work ‘partly by conquest . . . partly even by bribes’, Abbot Sturm focused on the cult centres, cutting down sacred groves and destroying temples. Not surprisingly the Saxons, clearly ‘a depraved and perverse race’, responded in kind. In 778 a particularly violent resurgence forced the community at Fulda to quit the monastery and carry the body of Boniface to temporary refuge at Hammelburg. Local forces in fact drove the Saxon threat back but Charles returned with a new army. Yet more campaigns against the Saxons under their famous ‘duke’ Widukind followed: in the mid-780s we find Abbot Beornred giving hospitality to his fellow Englishman Willehad, forced to abandon his missionary work because of the war. When Widukind finally submitted to the Frankish king and his religion of love in 785, Willehad ‘resumed his work among the Saxons with obvious success’. He was consecrated bishop of Bremen on Charlemagne’s orders.
The Sword in the Book – martyr and patron
The continuing influence of Alcuin’s scholarship and teaching ran deep. More dramatic are the memories of Willibrord of Utrecht and Boniface, the patron saint of Germany, who ended his life in martyrdom. In his seventies he had decided to return to the mission field of Frisia. There on 5 June 754, as he and his party were reading in their tents, they were set upon by a robber band and the saint felled by a sword cut to the head – he died, we are told trying to fend off the blow with the Gospel book in his hand.
Today it is tourists as much as pilgrims whose money bulks the municipal income of Echternach on the celebration of Willibrord’s saint’s day (7 November), but for Roman Catholics in the Netherlands after its independence as the United Provinces, he and his great assistant Boniface meant much more than a holiday. In 1583 the archbishopric of Utrecht was dissolved by the Protestant States General and Roman Catholicism outlawed, following the tyranny of the former ruler, Philip II of Spain. The religion went underground. Its spiritual leader was a priest from Delft, Sasbout Vosmeer, with his seat at Utrecht. According to the German historian Michael Imhof (2004), the cults of Willibrord and Boniface enjoyed a resurgence and Vosmeer compared himself, surrounded by heretics, to St Boniface surrounded by heathen. So, at the very time when the English Protestant state, like the Dutch, was proscribing Roman Catholicism, two Englishmen were venerated as spiritual champions by an oppressed Catholic minority on the Continent.
As to St Boniface himself, his cult in Germany flourished vigorously at the time of the Counter-Reformation with paintings and sculptures portraying him at his martyrdom or brandishing the sword transfixing the Gospel book; this image became his emblem. A fine statue of the saint (restored and refurbished in 2002–3) stands in the main square of Fulda. For the purposes of this book, however, it is a nice thought that this Anglo-Saxon gentleman from Wessex, whose kin no doubt caroused to the lays of Beowulf, also found himself, under the auspices of nineteenth-century greater German nationalism, listed with Luther, Goethe, Beethoven, Mozart and other German worthies as Walhalla Genossen, ‘Companions of Valhalla’, the hall of the gods in Germanic legend.
Cultural campaign
The death of Boniface provoked controversy as to his body’s final resting place. His relic, full of numinous spiritual power, would be a strong protector for the place where it lay: a generator of miraculous manifestations, and a powerful magnet for pilgrims and the wealth they would bring. The chief contenders for the prize were the saint’s cathedral city of Mainz and its bishop, his friend and successor Lull, and Abbot Sturm at Fulda.
‘A certain deacon’ had a vision in which the dead saint had insisted on burial at Fulda. The body was duly laid to rest there. Abbot Sturm and his monks gave thanks to God. The following day Bishop Lull, ‘together with the throng of clerics and [towns] people’ who had come with him to protest, had to accept defeat and return to Mainz. When Sturm was exiled to Jumièges in Normandy, people said that Bishop Lull bribed King Pippin to place the monastery under his jurisdiction. In the end Sturm was reinstated. The controversy had temporarily sapped the energies of the community at Fulda, but it recovered and grew in numbers and wealth as noblemen competed in munificence of endowments. It was to become a premier centre of learning under Abbot Rabanus (803–40), a pupil of Alcuin.
In the opinion of one historian, the cultural contribution made to scholarship and learning in Europe by both Boniface and Alcuin may have been in part responsible for the decline of both in England. ‘Just as in Southumbrian learning one can trace a notable decline once Boniface took a whole generation of the learned aristocracy off to the Continent to convert the Germans, so too Alcuin’s departure to serve as chief adviser to Charlemagne marks a clear decline in Latin learning in the schools of Northumbria.10
Travellers and expatriates
Any study of the Anglo-Saxon intervention on the Continent, which for many of the men and women involved meant a permanent new home abroad, inevitably raises the question of why so many of them made the move. Travelling abroad for one’s health, in other words flying for one’s life into exile, was for a courtier a common hazard of existence. Eadburh, the daughter of King Offa of Mercia who married King Beorhtric of Wessex, ended her days in poverty in Pavia, we are told. In West Saxon tradition she emerges as a Lucrezia Borgia figure, manipulating court politics and disposing of rivals by poison. When the king himself fell victim to severe stomach pains, Eadburh supposedly escaped with as much of the royal treasure as she could conveniently carry and fled to the court of Charles the Great. Following a romantic episode with Charles himself and his son she once more took to the road in disgrace, heading south. Given its position on the approaches to the Alpine passes, Pavia was host to many such travellers.
But deeper motivations were at work for most of the Anglo-Saxon men and women who devoted themselves to the service of religion in the great age of the English missions. The anonymous Frankish biographer of St Lebuin (Leafwine) of Ripon, writing in the ninth century, describes England as a country ‘productive of holy men [where] one finds laymen devoted to the service of God, virgins of exceptional virtue and monks of outstanding generosity’; then he goes on to explain that many had left their own country ‘for the Lord’s sake, either to expiate their sins, or benefit pagans and Christians by their teachings’.11 In a religious age such motivations are to be expected; many also were fired by the call of Boniface to come over and help lead their cousins, ‘the Old Saxons’, into the way of heaven.
In addition to Christian altruism one is bound to suspect that for the English, then as now, simple curiosity about foreign parts was a powerful incentive. In the previous chapter we learnt something of an Anglo-Saxon view of the Middle East through the eyes of Willibald, bishop of Eichstätt, and he started life as a self-admitted travel enthusiast. Recalling his young experiences en route to the Holy Land one June day to an admiring circle in the monastery of Heidenheim, where he was presiding at the translation of his brother Wynnebald’s remains, he explained that his plans for a pilgrimage had also been devised in part as ‘a means of journeying to foreign countries that were unknown to him . . . and to find out all about them’. As he reminisced, Sister Huneberc (or Hygeburgor) of Heidenheim made notes so as to gather ‘a kind of bouquet of the virtues [of this soldier of Christ] . . . and the scenes where the marvels of [Jesus Christ] were enacted’.12
Willibald persuaded his reluctant father ‘to detach himself from the false prosperity of wealth’ to go with him. They sailed on a west wind from Hamwic ‘with a high sea running [and] the shouts of sailors and the creaking of oars’, buffeted by the wind. The father died at Lucca, where he was venerated as a saint, and his son went on to Rome where he stayed for three years before getting the itch to travel again. In the Holy Land he saw the place in the River Jordan where Jesus Christ was baptized and the very cave where Christ was entombed, with its great square stone a replica of the one the angel rolled away. Leaving the Holy Land he coolly smuggled a calabash of expensive ointment or balsam resin through the Arab customs. Before pre
senting it for inspection he concealed a little cylinder of petroleum so that when the officers prised open the cover they would smell only the petrol fumes. He spent two years in Constantinople; he visited Sicily, and the volcano on the isle of Vulcano, where a Gothic king had been thrown into Hell for imprisoning a pope. Unfortunately Willibald could not look down into the crater because of the mounds of black ‘tartar’ drifting like black snow, as he told Huneberc. From Sicily he travelled to Monte Cassino and lived in the monastery there for ten years. Then, at last passing through the Trentino via Lake Garda and so through Bavaria, in 740/41 he arrived at Eichstätt, where he was ordained priest by Boniface and later consecrated as bishop. The travelogue of St Willibald as written down by Huneberc, who seems to have coined its title Hodoeporicon, is one of the most intriguing documents to have survived from the Middle Ages . . . and has already detained us far too long.
In her way, the authoress is also most interesting. A contemplative rather than a traveller, she seems a measure of the quality of woman to be found in the communities founded in the wake of the Bonifacian missions to Germany. Besides the Life of Willibald (Vita S. Willibaldi), of which the Hodoeporicon is part, she did a Life of his brother St Wynnebald (d. 761). Probably a Mercian or West Saxon, she, like St Boniface himself and many English writers, modelled her style on the ornate, mannered and neologistic Latin of Aldhelm of Malmesbury. Since Huneberc may well have entered Heidenheim during the abbacy of Walburga, Wynnebald’s sister and successor, it is a pity that she did not write a biography of her.
A nun in the abbey at Wimborne, Walburga was sent to join Abbess Lioba, probably a kinswoman of hers, in Germany before taking up the position at Heidenheim that she inherited from her brother. Of the various monasteries founded by the Anglo-Saxons in Germany, Heidenheim is the only double house, for men and women. After her death in 780 this venerable abbess suffered the fate of having her memory embroiled with the pagan fertility goddess Waldborg, celebrated on 30 April, May Day Eve. Since the relics of Walburga were moved from Heidenheim to Eichstätt on May Day itself, the event came to be confused with the folklore excesses of the witches’ Sabbaths supposedly held on the Brocken in the Harz Mountains on Walpurgisnacht.
English networking in action
The career of the Frisian Ludger, who died in 809 as bishop of Münster, is a marker for English networking in the Carolingian age. Born about 744 near Utrecht, the pioneering see of the English mission, the young Ludger went to England where he studied under Alcuin at York until about the age of thirty. In 775 he was posted, presumably at Alcuin’s suggestion, to Deventer in Friesland to reinvigorate the community that had been established there by another Anglo-Saxon, Lebuin of Ripon. Later in life he established the bishopric of Münster, with its ‘minster’. Years later the memory of Alcuin’s teaching at York was still remembered with respect in the cathedral school of his old pupil.
There were family contacts that give the lie to any idea that pre-Conquest England was cut off from the Continent. As we shall see, a German churchman, Egbert of Trier, was proud to trace his ancestry back to King Ecgberht of Wessex, as was Abbess Matilda of Essen. It was for her that Ealdorman Æthelweard (d. 998), a distant kinsman, wrote his Latin translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. He recalls anecdotes about the Anglo-Saxons’ origins ‘in the forests of Germany’ to be found neither in Bede nor the Chronicle itself and wrote asking her for any information she might have about their family’s doings in Germany. Right at the end of the period (1051) the marriage of Earl Tostig of Northumbria to Judith, half-sister of the Count of Flanders, had its own cultural resonance. When, after his death at Stamford Bridge, she married Welf I of Bavaria the dynastic union opened other avenues of influence linked to the cult of St Oswald in southern Germany.
Thus, it was Oswald of Northumbria, a man who never set foot outside the British Isles, whose cult left its mark at local level on the landscape and folklore of the continent from northern Italy to Scandinavia and Iceland, from the region around Metz (now in France) through Austria and Switzerland to parts of Eastern Europe. Its spread was, in part no doubt, thanks to the wide diffusion of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, but the admiring followers of the Northumbrians Wilfrid and Willibrord could be relied upon to sing the praises of the famous saint king of old Northumbria.
Bede’s influence is to be traced in the biography of Oswald written about 1050 by the Flemish monk Drogo, though he also evidently had Continental sources to hand. In the next century the saint blossomed into a figure of romance as the eponymous hero of the ‘Oswald’ Spielmannsepike, the kind of ‘minstrel’s epic’ popular in aristocratic circles of the German empire. More than 3,500 lines long, and probably written at the imperial city of Ratisbon (modern Regensburg) during the reign of the crusader emperor Frederick I Barbarossa, the poem tells how Oswald falls in love with the daughter of a pagan king, Aron. The royal love quest involves the king’s raven, magically able to speak; an expedition of warriors all fitted out with golden crosses at the king’s expense; Oswald’s marriage; and, need one add, King Aron’s conversion to Christianity. In the tenth century the nun and playwright Hrotswitha of Gandersheim (d. 1000) wrote a book extolling the achievements of Emperor Otto I (d. 973) and claimed that his Anglo-Saxon wife Eadgyth, daughter of Edward the Elder, king of Wessex, also numbered Oswald among her ancestors. The genealogy is dubious but perhaps Hrotswitha took it for granted that any royal Englishwoman taken to wife by the German emperor must have the blood of England’s most famous saint king in her veins. (This royal biographer also wrote a number of Latin plays, which she hoped would replace the works of the pagan Terence in monasteries. They probably did since, an advocate of chastity, Hrotswitha outlined in some detail the temptations attendant upon it.)
The place to stay
In the 790s Alcuin opened the pilgrim hostel of St Judoc’s, near Quentovic, with funds provided by Charles the Great. This place, now St Josse sur Mer, near Etaples, had associations with English pilgrims since at least the days when St Boniface and his party had pitched their tents there back in the 720s. It soon became a natural rendezvous point for the English on business to the Continent. It would remain tied into a network of Anglo-Saxon/Frankish connections for generations. Alcuin was an important part of the explanation. Founder of the hostel, he was also made abbot of Ferrières by Charles the Great, where he was succeeded by one of his pupils from the York school, the Northumbrian monk Sigulf. Noted as a singer and an expert in the Roman style of plainchant,13 he also developed Alcuin’s traditions of learning at Ferrières. The house reached its peak as a centre of the late Carolingian Renaissance during the abbacy of Servatus Lupus (c. 850–62), like Alcuin also abbot of St Judoc’s.
As a letter-writer Lupus prefigures aspects of Italian humanism; as a churchman he was very much involved in the correspondence networking patterns of the ecclesiastical confraternities (one might almost call them ‘prayer gilds’) introduced to the Continent from England. The house liber vitae, ‘book of life’, in which the names of departed brothers or of benefactors were inscribed so that they might be remembered in the monks’ prayers, was basic. At first little more than single-fold ‘diptyches’, over the years these expanded into sizeable volumes as individual names were added. Sometimes an entire community would ask to be remembered in the prayers of a brother house, sometimes a neighbour, sometimes someone overseas. When he had finished his lives of St Cuthbert, Bede asked the monks of Lindisfarne to record his name in the ‘album’ of their house and hence of their confraternity.
Common in early English monasticism, the ‘confraternity’ was extended into a support network and bonding in the mission field. The letters of Boniface and Alcuin contain many examples of bishops, abbots and even kings included in their prayer families. There is also an excellent letter from Æthelberht II of Kent (725–62) to Boniface in which he mentions a saintly kinswoman of his and recalls how she told him Boniface had agreed to remember her in his prayers. He then asks if the sain
t would do the same service for him and draws attention to a couple of extremely valuable gifts he is sending with the bearer. Only in the last paragraph does he come to the point – a request for a quite specific and very clearly described type of falcon, which he is sure the churchman should be able to find without too much difficulty.
It was no doubt through his connections with the ‘societies’ between Ferrières and York that Abbot Lupus first got wind of the famous victory of Aclea won by Æthelwulf of Wessex over the Danes in the year 851. At the time the abbot was in desperate need of lead for the roof of his abbey’s church of St Peter and was clearly well aware of the lead mines of Devon, by this time part of Wessex. He wrote to praise the king for God’s grace in granting him the victory, praises him for his fabled generosity and offers him the chance of benefiting his soul by sending a sizeable supply of roofing material. He signed off not as abbot of Ferrières but of St Judoc’s, knowing the English sentimental attachment to this saint. (In the early tenth century, when King Edward the Elder of Wessex had completed the building of his splendid New Minster at Winchester, the relics of the saint were translated there from across the Channel – as was recorded in the liber vitae of the Minster.) The links between England and the Continent forged in the era of the Anglo-Saxon missions would stretch across the centuries.
Distinguished guests expected and received distinguished treatment. On their journey to Rome in 855 the boy Prince Alfred of Wessex and the royal entourage of his father, King Æthelwulf, crossed the Channel to Quentovic where they were handsomely received at St Judoc’s; from there they were escorted to the court of Charles the Bald at Soissons. After the mandatory exchange of diplomatic gifts, their host provisioned them for the onward journey and sent them under escort to the borders of his kingdom.14 From there the way was through the lands of Charles’s older brother, Emperor Lothar. The well-mounted column with its escort of household warriors passed unmolested along roads where bandits would pick off less well-protected travellers. It would have been well worth their attentions. Æthelwulf’s treasure-house of gifts to St Peter included the sword of a warrior inlaid with gold and a crown of pure gold, four pounds in weight. Fortunately the successors to the Fisherman of Galilee have never had trouble in accommodating such largesse. The populace in general, cleric and lay, were treated to a distribution of gold and silver. Great men liked to make their mark at Rome and one imagines the West Saxon monarch succeeded.