At Ramsey abbey in the late eleventh century, the decaying blood, pus and gore of a cancerous growth were siphoned off the jaw of the monk Eadwacer into the cup of St Oswald.Footnote ¹ This contact relic was the very cup that St Oswald drank from whilst he lived, and the monastery of Ramsey had kept it there ever since. According to Eadmer's Miracula s. Oswaldi, on Oswald's feast day they would fill it with wine, and the brothers in the refectory would drink from it, hoping that it would bestow upon them the blessing of the renowned bishop. A fourteenth-century custumal from the monastic cathedral of Winchester enjoins that on St Æthelwold's feast day his cup should be carried around the refectory with a pitcher of wine and all the brothers should kiss it. These two monastic rituals are strikingly similar, and yet were recorded three centuries apart. The Winchester custumal belongs to the family of monastic obedientiary rolls: documents that recorded the financing, organisation and duties of monastic offices. Although the obedientiary offices themselves (the sacrist, cellarer etc) were probably established by the early eleventh century, these documentary accounts of their duties, incomes and expenses only developed in the later medieval period, brought on by the gradual tendency to assign certain monastic estates to certain offices.Footnote ² Now responsible for specific estates and with a fixed income to support their offices, the officers had to demonstrate that they were spending the money responsibly and discharging their duties. Whilst this manuscript is the only evidence of this ritual on the feast of Æthelwold's deposition, it is possible that it had been performed for centuries, but only recorded in the fourteenth century.

Items such as these cups were contact relics: objects that had been in contact with the saint during their life or after their death.Footnote ³ The holy power that the saint had commanded in life was believed to have instilled such items. More common variants of contact relics were the clothes that the saint was buried in, items of jewellery and water that had been used to wash the saint's body. Tom Licence has commented that some contact relics appear to have been seen as souvenirs rather than ‘official merchandise'.Footnote ⁴ The treatment of Anglo-Saxon saints' relics, translations and shrines in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries has been the subject of much discussion, and scholars have also discussed their relationship with Celtic and Brittonic cults.Footnote ⁵ John Blair has argued that English saints with smaller cults were mostly left undisturbed until the twelfth century or even later.Footnote ⁶ Their cults were not shrine-based and their relics were not translated but remained buried in below-floor graves. These cults were based at local minsters, and were not the focus of the cult-building which occurred after the Viking attacks, during the tenth-century Benedictine reform, and after the Norman Conquest. The cults that were promoted during those periods are the best documented, but perhaps are not representative of the experience of most English cults. Blair argues that oral culture, myth-making and secondary relics were more important to English cults than previously believed, and that they were more similar to British cults. He contends that ‘there was a basic continuum in the local cult practices of Brittonic and English societies, only superficially obscured by variant patterns in hagiographical output and folklore survival and in the promotion of a few major cults'.Footnote ⁷ Blair's study focused on the elements of continuity discernible in these smaller, local cults, but this has resulted in his conclusions being at odds with the evidence from saints' cults at larger monastic houses. This article investigates how saints' cults changed at monastic cathedrals and abbeys in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and examines the accounts of the cups of SS Æthelwold, Oswald and Edmund, which span three hundred years, in the hope of determining whether they evolved from a shared liturgical and cultural background. It discusses evidence of contact relic cults from Worcester, Winchester and Bury St Edmunds, the large monastic centres which Blair omitted from his study, and assesses the changes in the culture of cultic veneration there.

The ritual of the cup of St Oswald is recorded in Eadmer's Miracula s. Oswaldi which was completed by 1116. The ritual occurs during a miracle story concerning Eadwacer, a monk of Ramsey, during the pontificate of Wulfstan ii of Worcester (1062–95). Eadwacer was afflicted in the jaw with a cancerous ulcer. He was so ashamed of his face that he lived separately from the other monks and only joined them for the daily liturgy. On St Oswald's feast day, however, all the people of every age and sex had been gathered together to celebrate. After mass in the church the brothers begged Eadwacer to remain with the community and so he dined with them in the refectory. Eadmer states that in the church of Ramsey ‘the cup was preserved from which the holy bishop, namely the glorious father and pastor Oswald, used to drink'.Footnote ⁸ On his feast day,

Eadwacer turned his mind to God and St Oswald and prayed that they would have pity on him. He drank from the cup and clasped it to his jaw. When he removed the cup ‘all the gore and decay caused by his sickness had adhered to the cup in such a way that his jaw was restored from illness and no trace of the former affliction could be detected there'.Footnote ¹⁰ Turner and Muir have drawn attention to the similarities between the miracle of the cup of St Oswald, and a miracle in chapter forty-six of Bede's Vita s. Cuthberti. Footnote ¹¹ In Bede's account, the monk Felgild came to the island of Farne to inhabit the cell of Cuthbert, and his successor, Æthilwald. His face was disfigured by a red swelling, which had been growing for a long time. He took a scrap of calf-skin which Æthilwald had fixed to the walls of the cell to keep out the wind and rain, soaked it in water, and bathed his face with it. The swelling was healed and the foul scab disappeared.Footnote ¹² Bede and Eadmer's miracle stories are similar examples of a bishop's contact relic healing the disfigurement suffered by one of their followers. Where they are different, however, is in the importance ascribed to the relic itself. In Bede's story the relic is a scrap of leather, unceremoniously cut from a wall hanging, and Bede states that the identity of the saint who performed the miracle is inconsequential. He ascribes the miracle itself to neither Cuthbert nor Æthilwald, because the significance was the fact of the miracle itself: they were witnessing the common sanctity of the saints, and God alone knows to whose virtue the miracle was to be credited. In Eadmer's tale, it is clear that the cup and its owner were extremely important. This cup was used by Oswald during his life, was kept as a sacred vessel that was precious to the community, and used ceremoniously on his feast day. It was a high-status relic for the monastic community of Ramsey.

Aside from the evident miraculous powers of the cup, Eadmer's account provides information about who knew of and was allowed to touch the cup of St Oswald. Whilst the ‘multitude’ of people (‘multitudinem populi innumerabilis’) attending the feast of St Oswald is probably an exaggerated hagiographical topos, it is clear that the laity gathered at Ramsey church to celebrate it.Footnote ¹³ It is unlikely that the laity were allowed to celebrate the feast by dining in the refectory, which was governed by strict monastic rules, and so it is doubtful that they were able to touch this contact relic.

Eadmer's Miracula, however, mentions two other Oswaldian contact relics with which the laity could interact, and which performed miracles. The first is the water of St Oswald. When his bones were raised by Bishop Ealdwulf in 1002, they were washed carefully. From then on ‘that very water provided a certain remedy for many who were besieged by different illnesses’.Footnote ¹⁴ Eadmer also relates how Oswald's chasuble was removed and remained intact. Eadmer states that in his own time the chasuble was ‘preserved in the vestry of Worcester and is brought out for use at mass whenever the need arises …. I myself have seen it, holding it in my hands’.Footnote ¹⁵ Although these contact relics supposedly had appeared in the early eleventh century, this is the first record of their existence. The laity evidently could touch these relics, through which miracles were performed.

The document describing the ritual of the cup of St Æthelwold is a fourteenth-century monastic custumal which contains an account of the duties of monastic officers who were connected to the refectory of the cathedral priory. The ritual is described in the section detailing the refectorian's duties on the feast of the deposition of St Æthelwold. It survives in one manuscript that is quite badly damaged. The document describes the ritual and duties of the refectorian:

On the feast of the deposition of St Æthelwold, the refectorian would carry the cup of St Æthelwold and a pitcher of wine around the refectory for all the monks there to kiss, before taking it to invalids in the infirmary. The Winchester obedientiary rolls state that the officer known as the curtarian (curtarius) would supply two pitchers of wine to be drunk on Æthelwold's deposition day, and so it is probable that those assembled to celebrate the feast also drank wine from the cup of St Æthelwold, as they did on Oswald's feast.Footnote ¹⁷ The cup was presumably taken to the infirmary to ensure that all the monastic community were able to kiss the relic, and also in the hope that the cup would miraculously cure the sick there. After this, the prior and monks within the Prior's Hall would also kiss the cup, as would any honorati viri present. This could refer to any important lay visitors that the prior happened to receive that day, but it is more likely that notable high-ranking members of the Winchester laity were invited to dine with the prior on the feast of St Æthelwold. As is described in Eadmer's account, St Oswald's feast day gathered together the laity of Ramsey, and in Anglo-Saxon times the laity were involved in liturgical celebrations, especially at reformed monastic houses, which often featured portable relics such as a cup, and lay involvement in later medieval liturgical ceremonies was also common.Footnote ¹⁸ It is quite likely that the laity of Winchester were involved in the celebration of Æthelwold's deposition, and that high-ranking members of the community stayed to dine with the prior afterwards, and were allowed to kiss the cup of St Æthelwold.

The ritual is similar to the one recorded in the Miracula s. Oswaldi in several ways. The saint's cup is the focal point of the ritual, which takes place on the saint's feast day. The laity attend and play a part in the celebrations. The cup is filled with wine, and circulated around the refectory so that the monks can drink from it, after which is it taken to the sick monk(s). The Vita s. Æthelwoldi does not mention any miracles being performed through a cup of St Æthelwold and so the relic cult must have originated after Wulfstan's writings (c. 996). The custumal does not state the origin of the cup, but it is possible that it was believed to be the cup that the saint had drunk from in life.Footnote ¹⁹ Alternatively, it could be the cup that Æthelwold used at mass, although it is not described as gold or silver, which was customary for late Anglo-Saxon mass cups.Footnote ²⁰ The custumal also states that at the end of the ritual it should be taken back to the refectory. The usual place for relics to be kept was in the sacristy, and John Crook has argued convincingly that Winchester's relics were kept on the feretory platform behind the high altar.Footnote ²¹ Yet Æthelwold's cup was kept in the refectory, which was exclusively used by the monks. This indicates that the cup was particularly associated with the monastic life, and thus is unlikely to have been the episcopal chalice used at mass. Interestingly, the primary difference between the use of these two cups is that it appears that only the monks of Ramsey could touch the cup of St Oswald, whereas the laity too could interact with the cup of St Æthelwold.

Another cult that produced a miracle-working cup was that of St Edmund of Bury, which was reportedly used by both secular and monastic persons. In the early twelfth century, Osbert of Clare wrote an extended account of the miracles performed by St Edmund from his martyrdom until Osbert's own time, and some of the miracles included a cup of St Edmund. Herman, a monk of Bury St Edmund's, wrote the first Miracles of St Edmund in about 1070 and added others, updating the collection in the 1090s. These changes were presumably made for Edmund's translation that was to occur in 1094, but was postponed until 1095.Footnote ²² Herman subsequently added miracles in 1094 and 1095. His work was the subject of revision by Goscelin of Saint-Bertin in about 1100.Footnote ²³ Osbert of Clare subsequently rewrote the collection, inserting thirteen additional miracles at some point in the 1120s and 1130s, possibly when in exile as prior of Westminster Abbey in 1139 after his trip to Rome.Footnote ²⁴ Osbert's work has been lost to the ravages of time, but Abbot Samson produced a new Miracles of St Edmund in the 1190s, based on Osbert's work, and so his miracles have been preserved.Footnote ²⁵

Of the thirteen new miracles in Osbert of Clare's work, three concern the cup of St Edmund. There is no evidence of the cup being used before his account. Whilst Æthelwold and Oswald's cups were seemingly kept in refectories at Winchester and Ramsey, the Bury cup was probably kept within the church itself, possibly on an altar or the saint's shrine. The chronicle of Jocelin de Brakelond, written in the early 1200s, reports that in 1198, when the shrine of St Edmund caught fire, the cup was found uninjured once the flames were extinguished.Footnote ²⁶

In the first miracle concerning the cup, a rich lady had been in distress from a fever for a long time before she travelled to Bury. There, after drinking from the cup, she recovered her health.Footnote ²⁷ The second tale concerns a man from Dunwich who was suffering from dropsy.Footnote ²⁸ His wife insisted that he be carried to St Edmund's tomb, whereupon he drank from the cup and was cured. In the last story, Gervasius, a Cluniac monk living at St Saviour's, Southwark, fell ill with an intermittent fever.Footnote ²⁹ He was induced to drink of St Edmund's cup, and then had a fresh malady come upon him. He was received into the infirmary at Bury, and drank from the cup again and was cured. Like Æthelwold's cup, Edmund's cup was touched and drunk from by members of the lay and religious communities but, in the stories that relate to it, the ceremonial context of use at a festive meal is lacking.

The earliest hagiography concerning Æthelwold, Oswald and Edmund (namely Wulfstan's Vita s. Æthelwoldi, Byrhtferth's Vita s. Oswaldi, and Abbo of Fleury's Passio s. Eadmundi) do not contain accounts of miracle-working cups. What then are the origins of these relics? Eadmer's Miracula s. Oswaldi and Osbern's Miracula s. Eadmundi are not the only twelfth-century collections that featured new contact relics. The Chronicle of Hugh Candidus, written around 1155 by a monk of Peterborough, states that, at Peterborough, the water of St Oswald, king and martyr (presumably water in which the arm had been washed during its display in 1140) cured the sick, exorcised a female demoniac and was taken to London to cure the sick there.Footnote ³⁰ In the Miracula s. Dunstani, written 1112 × 1116, Eadmer relates that a special vessel was erected at Canterbury to hold the water of St Dunstan's staff. This water, in which Dunstan's staff had been dipped, had the power to cure pilgrims afflicted with horrendous illnesses. The staff and water are not mentioned in Dunstan's earlier hagiography, yet Eadmer reported that because ‘nearly every day many people rush there to get some [water] and carry away with them a certain cure for those who are sick’ the vessel was set up so that pilgrims were not ‘hindered in recovering their health by any kind of delay or inconvenience’.Footnote ³¹ By this Eadmer implies that formerly there had been crowds and queues of pilgrims waiting to access the water and receive their cure. Indeed, the miracles performed through the water were so numerous that Eadmer does not relate most of them because ‘this occurrence is so evident and commonplace that it appears more remarkable whenever on occasion someone is not cured of illness by having drunk of this same water than when someone is cured’.Footnote ³²

Contact relics were well known in early Anglo-Saxon England. After the death of St Oswald, king and martyr, on the battlefield of Maserfelth, the laity would take the earth, imbued with the saint's blood, and mix it with water. This water performed miracle cures and was so effective that the devotees dug a man-sized chasm out of the earth.Footnote ³³ The shroud in which the body of St Æthelthryth of Ely was wrapped became the source of miracles after her translation in 695, curing maladies and exorcising demons.Footnote ³⁴ After the eighth century, the English tradition of translating saints' remains and incorporating them into free-standing shrines seems to have made the use of contact relics redundant: why venerate the secondary relics when you could access the saint's corporeal remains?Footnote ³⁵ In the Celtic lands of Wales and Brittany, because saints' relics were not translated into above-ground shrines, contact relics such as bells, croziers, staffs and garments were often at the centre of cultic veneration, and the primary object of lay devotion. They were regarded as the saint's possessions and were thought to be imbued with awesome powers. They acted as an adjunct to the corporeal relics or as a substitute for them.Footnote ³⁶ In 1191 Gerald of Wales reported that

In early medieval Ireland saints' garments were often accorded miraculous qualities, and the enshrinement of contact relics was occurring by the eighth century.Footnote ³⁸ The importance of contact relics in Celtic Britain and Brittany has been attributed to the continued reluctance there to disturb the bodily remains of saints, which meant that saints' corporeal relics were inaccessible to pilgrims.Footnote ³⁹ Celtic saints' cults were highly localised and often centred on only one site: instead of translating saints' bones it was common practice to build churches over the graves; it was only in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, under Norman influence, that above-ground shrines were introduced in these regions.Footnote ⁴⁰

But if it is the case that contact relics were primarily venerated in Wales and Brittany because pilgrims did not have access to the corporeal relics, why then is there seemingly a resurgence of contact relics in eleventh- and twelfth-century English monastic houses where the saint's bodies, largely translated and housed in shrines, were supposedly easily accessible?

The evidence suggests that in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, except in the course of ceremonial occasions, rogation days or translation ceremonies, shrines and relics in monasteries and cathedrals became increasingly inaccessible to secular persons. Bernhard Töpfer has discussed the impact of the tenth-century reform of Frankish monasteries on the cult of relics and pilgrimage, stating that it made saints' shrines and relics more accessible to the laity.Footnote ⁴¹ But, in England, the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries saw a rise in the number of saints' translations which moved the relics of the saints from crypts onto high altars and feretories: places where pilgrims and laypeople could not go. In 1091 St Augustine was translated to the monastic east end of St Augustine's, Canterbury; at Winchester, in 1093, St Swithun was translated to the high altar; in 1106, Abbot Richard of Ely translated St Æthelthryth into the new church and placed her ‘behind the high altar'.Footnote ⁴² These are but a few examples. Controlling access to holy items was not restricted to relics; in his Monastic Constitutions, for example, Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury (1070–89) stated that on Good Friday if ‘any clerics or lay folk be there who wish to adore the cross’ it should ‘be carried to them in another place more suitable for their worship', since they were not allowed to access it in the choir.Footnote ⁴³

The isolation of relics in high status areas of abbeys and cathedrals continued, limiting pilgrims' access. At Winchester, from the middle of the twelfth century, pilgrims had to crawl through a ‘holy hole’ to gain any proximity to the shrine of St Swithun, which was kept atop a platform in the feretory, blocked from view by a great screen.Footnote ⁴⁴ This ‘holy hole’ was a fifteen-foot passage, running underneath the feretory platform, which pilgrims could enter and crawl through to prostrate themselves underneath the platform, where they would be closest to Swithun's relics.Footnote ⁴⁵ In 1158 Henry of Blois translated all Winchester Cathedral's saints and holy men on to the top of the feretory platform. As a result, pilgrims had no direct access to any of the saints of the cathedral. Access to the tomb of St Thomas Becket was similarly limited: a wall was built around it, with holes along the sides through which pilgrims could stretch their arms (and sometimes their heads or bodies) to touch the coffin inside.Footnote ⁴⁶ The holes were so restrictive that one fat pilgrim got stuck inside it. This type of tomb-shrine evidently became popular in the late twelfth century; another example is that of St Osmund, originally in Old Sarum (where miracles were performed from about the 1180s) and moved to the new cathedral in 1226.Footnote ⁴⁷ The shrine of St John of Beverley was blocked by a large stone altar, about which Archbishop Greenfield of York complained in 1314.Footnote ⁴⁸

This apparent growing inaccessibility of relics was mirrored by a growing tension in eleventh- and twelfth-century English hagiography about unauthorised individuals touching saints' corporeal relics. There is an increase in the number of miracle stories that display disapproval towards the handling of relics by the irreverent, whether they be lay or religious. In his Legend of St Edith, written 1080 × 1082, Goscelin of Saint-Bertin states that when Eadwulf, a monk of Glastonbury, cut off a fold of St Edith's tunic to keep as a relic, blood poured out, gushing over the saint's clothing and the floor.Footnote ⁴⁹ The terrified priest did penance and the blood disappeared. In his account of the translation of the relics of St Ouen, Eadmer relates how he and Osbern of Canterbury embarked on a search for relics in Christ Church and found an incomplete skeleton in the crypt.Footnote ⁵⁰ They inspected the bones until they reached the skull, which contained a piece of parchment stating that they were the bones of St Ouen. That night, both he and Osbern were visited by a terrifying vision of two angels who rebuked them for handling the relics. Eadmer evidently felt deep concern about irreverent or unsuitable people touching relics because he also discusses it in the Miracula s. Oswaldi. Footnote ⁵¹ When describing St Oswald's tenth-century translation, Eadmer states that Bishop Ealdwulf realised that he had placed the saint's body in a place where he could easily gain access to it and that those who were less worthy might also be able to touch it. He soon translated the saint, moving his bones to a place that was inaccessible to the laity and the irreverent. Osbert relates that at the inspection of Edward the Confessor's tomb in 1102 Bishop Gundulf tried to pluck a hair from the saint's head to keep as a relic, but was rebuked by Westminster's abbot, Gilbert Crispin.Footnote ⁵² These accounts were not completely new. When rewriting the hagiography of St Æthelthryth, Goscelin included a tale that may be derived from the lost Miracles of St Æthelthryth, written by Ælfhelm in the reign of King Edgar. In the story, an impudent priest cut off a piece of the saint's clothing, only for her hand to reach out and grab it back.Footnote ⁵³ When Goscelin recounted this tale in the twelfth century he said ‘[l]et any unworthy handlers of holy relics learn from this that they ought only to dare such a thing with purity and humility of heart'.Footnote ⁵⁴ But it should be noted that these stories rebuke members of the religious community, not just lay pilgrims. This was evidently a problem associated with all those who could possibly touch saints' relics.

The inclusion and promotion of contact relics such as cups, staffs and water in eleventh- and twelfth-century hagiographies could have been a measure to circumvent the growing restriction of access to saints' shrines and bodily relics. Early Anglo-Saxon hagiography records how the laity venerated contact relics without the encouragement or direct promotion of ecclesiastical centres. The monasteries that controlled the larger saints' cults may have re-introduced contact relics as proxies for the corporeal relics themselves. This would not only allow monks to continue to interact with their saints' relics in monastic ceremonies, but would also maintain and attract lay veneration, without having to let pilgrims touch the saint's corporeal remains. Pilgrims were authorised and encouraged to touch these specific relics and, more importantly, interact with them; such contact relics gave pilgrims direct access to saints whom they were not usually allowed to touch in any way.

For example, in the Vita s. Anselmi, written around 1124, Eadmer promoted the miracles performed through Anselm's contact relics over those performed at the saint's tomb. Of the many miracles recorded by Eadmer, only one concerns a person being healed at Anselm's tomb: a Canterbury monk who was cured as he lay, stretched out on the ground, by the tomb.Footnote ⁵⁵ The other accounts are of miraculous visions of Anselm, and the curative power of St Anselm's belt, which he had worn during his life. The belt cures a nobleman suffering of dropsy (who is allowed to keep a strip of the belt afterwards, which cures him a second time), a noblewoman on the brink of death, a monk of Christ Church who has a fever, and many more. Eadmer states that it was common for ‘sick people on all sides and especially for women in the dangers of childbirth, to ask for the belt with pious intention’ in the certain hope that they would be cured.Footnote ⁵⁶ Eadmer promoted the miracles performed through Anselm's belt, rather than those performed at the tomb.

The cup of St Edmund itself may have been introduced during the abbacy of Anselm (1121–48), nephew to St Anselm. Licence has argued that one of Anselm's predecessors, Abbot Baldwin (1065–97) led the way in re-establishing contact relics in the eleventh century.Footnote ⁵⁷ Baldwin was not afraid of propagating Edmund's cult at churches elsewhere, because he saw it as an opportunity to enhance his saint's reputation. Herman states that when the saint's remains were inspected during the abbacy of Leofwine he was ‘divested of his holy martyr's garments, in some places stained red with blood and in others riddled with arrow-holes’.Footnote ⁵⁸ In 1071, when Baldwin travelled to Rome, he stopped in the town of Lucca, and gave St Martin's basilica part of these contact relics of St Edmund to place on or in an altar dedicated to St Edmund.Footnote ⁵⁹ When Warner, a French monk, was visiting the abbey of Bury St Edmunds Baldwin gave him a piece of the saint's clothing.Footnote ⁶⁰ Warner took it to Rebaix and placed it upon an altar.

By the time of Herman's writing, Edmund's tunic was kept in a sacrary coffer ‘from which the benefits of the shrine's divine power are available to common folk'.Footnote ⁶¹ Yet, when Goscelin reworked the Miracula s. Edmundi in about 1100, he implicitly criticised Herman for his treatment of Edmund's tunic. Goscelin records that during the celebration of Pentecost in an unknown year Herman briefly displayed the bloodied clothes to the congregation. Not long after, a nobleman heard about this and requested to see the relics. In secret, he was allowed a private audience in the crypt. A crowd, however, surged to the church, demanding that they should see the martyr's clothes, too. Herman set out a display and rashly invited the crowds to kiss the garments; fragments of the tunic, stained with the saint's blood, fell to the floor. Herman was punished with a horrible illness. The monk's friend, Edwin, received a vision of the recently deceased sacrist, Toli, who said:

Herman died three days later as punishment for his sacrilege. After this, there is no further mention of the vestment being displayed.Footnote ⁶³ These garments, contact relics of St Edmund, were evidently felt to be too holy to be handled by pilgrims, because they were imbued with the saint's blood: they partook of the corporeality of the saint. Future pilgrims must have been bitterly disappointed upon completing their journey to Bury, when they discovered that they were not able to see or touch the saint's garments. Goscelin's miracle collection also implies that, after the saint's translation in 1095, the new placement of the tomb was not easily accessible to pilgrims. When a blind boy was taken to the tomb by his uncle and stepmother, they had to use their ‘special friendship with the brethren’ to get ‘seats closer to the venerable tomb’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Licence has argued that the Golden Age of Edmund's cult passed after the deaths of Abbot Baldwin and the hagiographer Herman.Footnote ⁶⁵ It would not be surprising if pilgrimage to the shrine slowed thereafter because visitors could not touch or attain close proximity to the saint or his relics. It is possible that Anselm introduced the cup of St Edmund to encourage pilgrimage to Bury. The cup could be offered to pilgrims as a contact relic to make up for the fact they no longer had easy access to Edmund's shrine or his bloodied garments.

The accounts of the cups of SS Oswald, Edmund and Æthelwold all specifically mention monks and/or the laity interacting with the contact relics in a positive and authorised manner. Similarly, the belt of St Anselm, chasuble of St Oswald, staff of St Dunstan and waters of St Dunstan and St Oswald, king and martyr, allowed pilgrims to interact with the saints' relics, without touching the corporeal remains. They stand in contrast to the miracle stories of saints punishing those who touched their relics without permission, or pilgrims having to endure cramped conditions to attempt to touch the saints' tombs, or not being able to reach them at all.

The evidence suggests that from the late eleventh century, when saints' shrines were commonly moved to restricted areas, and when there was evidently a concern about unworthy or unauthorised people touching primary relics, communities promoted contact relics as alternative miracle-workers to the traditional saint's shrine. Although pilgrims could sleep near to saints' tombs, hagiographies actively warned pilgrims not to attempt to touch the saints' bodily relics lest something dreadful happen, such as a gushing of blood or a ghoulish vision of the saint. Instead, pilgrims were encouraged to interact with contact relics, which the hagiographers promoted as effective repositories of saintly power.

So where does the fourteenth-century account of Æthelwold's cup fit into this twelfth-century evidence? The startling similarities between the rituals of the cup of St Æthelwold and the cup of St Oswald suggests that they were informed by the same religious, cultural and liturgical influences. The relic cult of Æthelwold's cup may have been initiated in the late eleventh or early twelfth century, around the time that the cups of St Edmund and St Oswald were recorded as working miracles. It is possible that the monks of Winchester introduced the cup of St Æthelwold as a relic with which the laity could interact at a time when the rest of the cathedral's relics were kept out of sight and reach on the feretory platform.

It is also possible that the relic cult was initiated in the following centuries, as was the case at Barking Abbey. The custumal of Barking documents that during her abbacy Katherine de Sutton (1358–76) reformed the liturgy of the abbey and began a new ceremony to venerate the feast of St Erkenwald, which she had raised to the level of a principal feast. During the processional, a bell of St Erkenwald would be rung and taken to the abbess's chamber where it would be filled with wine. Those present would drink from it and then it would be carried to other nuns' rooms.Footnote ⁶⁶ This monastic ceremony, which occurs on the saint's feast day and includes the community drinking wine from a portable contact relic, clearly mirrors those from Worcester and Winchester. Erkenwald's corporeal remains were housed at old St Paul's in London, and could not therefore be included in ceremonial activity on his feast day at Barking.Footnote ⁶⁷ Thus, here we have a late medieval initiative which saw an Anglo-Saxon saint's contact relic being used within a monastic ceremonial context.

Documents concerning Henry viii's dissolution of the monasteries also supply evidence of Anglo-Saxon contact relics being used within late medieval religious houses. One such letter, from Thomas Thacker to Cromwell, details how one of Cromwell's servants brought to him the staff of St Modwen of Burton-upon-Trent which women leant upon whilst in labour.Footnote ⁶⁸ This is reminiscent not only of St Anselm's belt, which helped women in labour, but also of the miracle-working staff of St Dunstan. In the Compendium compertorum for the Province of York and the dioceses of Coventry and Lichfield, and Norwich, there is a section for ‘superstitions’ held by the inhabitants of the monasteries which detailed any pilgrimages that they undertook, relics that they owned and sometimes their specific use.Footnote ⁶⁹ Some of these were universal relics such as part of the Holy Cross, the milk and/or girdle of St Mary, but many of them were contact relics of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman saints. The monastery of Repton had St Guthlac's bell, used to alleviate headaches; the nuns of St Mary in Darby had part of the shirt of St Thomas, ‘which is reverenced among pregnant women'; at the convent of Wallingwells they kept the comb of St Edmund; St Werburga's, Chester, held the girdle of that saint, which was ‘in great request by lying-in women'; the nuns of St Mary, Chester, had the girdle of St Thomas of Canterbury; St Olave's had the wimple of St Æthelthryth, which was thought good for sore throats, the comb of St Audrey for headaches and the ring of St Æthelthryth for women lying-in.Footnote ⁷⁰ And, most relevant to this study, the monastery of Tynemouth had the cup of St Cuthbert,Footnote ⁷¹ and Alnwick monastery had the cup of St Thomas of Canterbury.Footnote ⁷² These entries appear to be the only references to these cups.Footnote ⁷³ William of Malmesbury reports that upon the elevation of Cuthbert's body by Ralph, abbot of Seez, in 1104, a chalice of gold and onyx was found on the saint's breast.Footnote ⁷⁴ The fate of the cup from then on is undocumented, but it is not improbable that it was an object of veneration. The cups of St Thomas and St Cuthbert could have emerged as relics at any point between the twelfth and sixteenth century, but they demonstrate that there may have been a continuity in the veneration of cups as contact relics between these times.Footnote ⁷⁵

The continued existence of contact relics of Anglo-Saxon saints both as used in monastic ceremonies and as objects of lay devotion until the Reformation demonstrates that they were as much an important part of English saints' cults as of Welsh and Brittonic. Blair's argument that English saints' cults remained largely unchanged does not entirely work for those in large monastic houses. Contact relics had been popular in early Anglo-Saxon England, but later developments (particularly the Benedictine reform) placed devotional emphasis on corporeal relics, which were translated and placed in accessible tomb-shrines. This reduced the demand and need for contact relics. By the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, however, monasteries were uncomfortable with unauthorised individuals touching high status corporeal relics without enough reverence, and so re-introduced and promoted contact relics as alternatives. The main shrines and tombs were often moved away from the reach of pilgrims, and hagiographies warned of the dangers of attempting to touch them. It would be fruitful to consider how this development in the use of contact relics in England compares to that of the continent, and how insular cults compare to those of universal importance. By studying how monastic communities and the laity directly interacted with saints' relics, wider developments within the cult of the saints in medieval Europe can be observed.