‘All it takes to make a man a saint is grace. Anyone who doubts this knows neither what makes a saint nor a man.’
Blaise Pascal, Pensées, VII, 508
As the country changed, so did its saints. The earliest, Alban, emerged from a time of persecution, when being Christian was punishable by death and martyrdom was the highest form of devotion. With the collapse of the Roman Empire sanctity became the preserve of other parts of the British Isles, as England was populated by pagans from across the sea. In Ireland, Scotland, Wales and throughout the isles, saints were emerging from the pagan Celtic past and embracing a harsh monastic way of life. This was spread by fervent missionaries, and through the sixth century began to exert influence on the highest strata of Anglo-Saxon society, particularly along the northern borders.
To the south, across that small stretch of water – the English Channel – that has proved to be a barrier and a conduit over the millennia, a papal mission brought with it a new kind of saint. Along with relics, manuscripts and personnel, Gregory the Great’s mission would clash with the contrasting Celtic Church, and only home-grown saints like Cuthbert could bridge the divide. The Golden Age of Northumbria has loomed heavy in this book, because Bede’s texts and remarkable survivals from the time allow the saints of seventh- and eighth-century Northumbria, more than most, to come into sharp relief. The life and times of Wilfrid, Benedict Biscop and Hilda can be reconstructed from a range of evidence, and individual artworks like the Franks Casket, Ruthwell Cross and Lindisfarne Gospels bring them and their environments into sharp relief.
There is a notable shift towards royal saints as the political situation in England changed. The threat of Viking raids that began at the end of the eighth century culminated in sustained invasion by the Great Heathen Army in the ninth, and would challenge Anglo-Saxon rulers like never before. Ironically, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes were similar in many ways to the Vikings who came to Britain in the ninth and tenth centuries. The major change, however, was that by embracing Christianity so completely, the Anglo-Saxons had distanced themselves from their pagan Germanic roots.
Kings like Alfred and Edgar understood the power of saints within the psyche of the English and created cults to suit their own ends. Edgar’s own illegitimate daughter was crafted into a saint for no apparent reason other than her connection to the king, while the three men who propped up his reign – Athelwold, Oswald and Dunstan – were also commemorated as saints. Ultimately, however, even with a saint on the throne as king it was impossible to stem the inevitable flux of change. The Normans, recognising the influence of Anglo-Saxon saints, supressed their cults. The time of Anglo-Saxon saints was relatively short-lived, but it has had a lasting effect on this nation and its relationship with its past.
To understand the saints is to shed light on those individuals who were celebrated in their time. What they were celebrated for – their virtues and achievements – holds a mirror to the communities around them. As we have our celebrities, notorious characters, national treasures and high achievers, so did the Anglo-Saxons. As our representatives reflect aspects of our society, so did the saints during the early medieval period. And their notoriety has meant that their names have been remembered down the centuries. The individuals covered here range from revolutionary martyrs to bibliophiles, princesses to goddesses, hermits to spin doctors. There are no cut-and-dry answers as to what makes a saint. Yet their diversity is, for me, what makes them so fascinating.
Each saint covered in this book tells a different story about the British Isles from the fourth to the eleventh century. And this shouldn’t come as a surprise. If a cross-section of the British public today was sampled, and their lives, interests and achievements were documented, the variety would be staggering. To lump ‘saints’ together as somehow interchangeable and interconnected is misleading. They should be studied as individuals, and each one holds up a different lens to their lives and times.
Yet they are bound together through the hagiographical texts that record their actions and through the powerhouse of the Church, which has perceived unity and harmony among its representatives on earth. They are reduced to names, with feast days attached, and their stories chime with similar miracles and pronouncements, built upon the foundations of earlier biblical and theological texts. Yet, stripped from this setting, they were real, living, breathing people, who walked on the same land we can still visit, and touched some of the same objects we can still see today. More work needs to be done to add flesh to the one-dimensional impressions we have now of these seminal, important people. Yet the Anglo-Saxon saints represent the colours and shades of humanity across the ages. Examining their lives and stories outside of the official hagiography doesn’t diminish their relevance; it makes them more relevant, since they become a syphon for the cultural, social and intellectual developments taking place around them.
By looking at saints this work has not sought to cast judgement on the people who have been celebrated in a previous age. Some of them behaved questionably at times, and can appear far from our modern notions of saintly. Yet this study has attempted to understand them and appreciate how they allow a reflection of wider concerns and ideas of which they formed a part. The word ‘saint’ is not necessarily wrapped up in ideas of faith or belief. Instead, it can provide another means of defining an individual’s role within society and the impact they had on the people around them. Terms like bishop, king, knight, monk, wife, princess or saint in the medieval people are modes of definition akin to doctor, teacher, aristocrat, stay-at-home mum or entrepreneur today.
There are repeating themes throughout this book, particularly the complex lines between religious and secular, spiritual and worldly. Each saint traversed these lines differently, and the ways in which they respond to the problems of balancing concerns for this world with those of the next reveal much about who they were.
This period was one of transition. The developments that took place between the fourth and eleventh centuries, and the individual saints who led these changes, would leave a lasting echo on the collective consciousness of nations.
This book has also shown, however, that the British Isles as we know it has a diverse and complex history. There is no history of the English, Irish, Welsh or Scots, but rather a merging web where different races intermarry, coexist and integrate. The fact that the main racial group at the heart of this study are immigrants – Angles, Saxons and Jutes who left their homeland in search of a better place to live – should carry resonance in our modern ethnically diverse nation. Our notions of identity are firmly imprinted with concepts of countries, geographical boundaries and religious affiliations, yet the early medieval period can be instructive in terms of eroding the importance of these distinctions.
As the example of the saints should highlight that intermarriage and integration have bound humanity together across space, so too should it demonstrate that we are bound together across time. History tends to box up names, events and ideologies, keeping one time and place separate from another, and suggesting that evolution continues on a micro level from generation to generation. There are obvious differences between Britain now and over a thousand years ago, particularly in terms of science and technology. However, spiritually, emotionally and imaginatively, the saints of the Anglo-Saxon period were not a separate breed of humanity. We can understand the issues that concerned them, and the day-to-day challenges that would have beset them. As historical figures they don’t need dressing up in alien garb and parading as a curiosity. They are not the subject of a condescending anthropological study. Instead, they reflect us as we are now, just at a distance through time. Their diversity reflects our own, and each is unique as we are ourselves.
Writing this book has meant straddling different worlds. Those that hold to the saints for spiritual security and guidance may find that this study strips them of their dignity and grandeur. This is not intentional, but it is somewhat inevitable once they are returned to their real earthly environments. Yet I have found that taking the individuals out of the painted icons, out from the pages of formulaic hagiography and the repeated cycles of liturgies, makes them all the more impressive. They were declared saints for a reason – because they profoundly influenced the people around them and the spirit of their time. To those that treasure the saints, this means that, as they continue to wield power in heaven, connecting the divine with the human, so too did they wield power on earth.
At times this has been an uneasy path to tread, manoeuvring through fragmented information, across disciplinary boundaries, over wide geographical areas and many centuries. But this journey with the saints has been a hugely illuminating one, and I look forward to many more developments in our understanding of these misrepresented and misunderstood characters. A quote by the wonderfully insightful nineteenth-century French novelist Honoré de Balzac seems a fitting place to draw this study on saints to a close:
What a splendid book one could put together by narrating the life and adventures of a word. The events for which a word was used have undoubtedly left various imprints on it; depending on place it has awakened different notions; but does it not become grander still when considered in its trinity of soul, body, and movement.1
The word ‘saint’ has been on a journey, and it continues to travel onwards. This work is just one attempt to trace the adventures the word went through. Those individuals who gained the epitaph ‘saint’ form a rich, diverse and complex canvas. Taking saints as the lens, many other insights into their lives and times can come into focus. But whether I can answer Pascal’s quote at the very start of this book is still uncertain. I am not sure I will ever know what makes a ‘man’ or a ‘saint’, since both these words carry infinite shades of possibility and impenetrable layers of complexity. Nevertheless, the journey remains inspiring.