In 1138, the last married priest of Hexham gave up his property. Eilaf II, who had inherited his clerical position and the property that accompanied it from his father and grandfather, surrendered his claim to the living of Hexham and confirmed his donation by handing over “a silver cross, in which the relics of the holy confessors and bishops Acca and Alchmund were contained”Footnote 1 to the prior of the new foundation of Augustinian canons. Eilaf II's sons witnessed his donation, renouncing their own claims to the property and position. The canons who received the donation, the Cistercians who witnessed the grant, and the reformed Benedictines at Durham who welcomed Eilaf into their midst were all part of a new world of changing monastic orders in the twelfth century.Footnote 2 The old world of hereditary priesthood was passing away, marked in this case by the symbolic donation of a reliquary containing bits of ancient local saints.
Seventeen years later, the canons decided to hold a formal ceremonial translation of the relics of the local saints at Hexham: the same saints whose relics had confirmed Eilaf II's grant, as well as several others. To mark the occasion, they asked one of Eilaf II's sons to return to his hometown and preach a sermon on the merits and miracles of the saints. Æthelred agreed, wrote a sermon for the occasion, preached it on March 3, 1154/1155, and revised the sermon into a brief tractate on the saints of Hexham and their miracles. Æthelred is most commonly known today by the Latinized version of his name and his monastery: that is, Eilaf II's son was Aelred of Rievaulx, the Cistercian monk famous for his treatises on monastic life (De spirituali amicitia and Speculum caritatis), his histories (Relatio de standardo and De genealogia regum Anglorum), and hagiographies (vitae of Edward the Confessor and Ninian, bishop of Whithorn).Footnote 3 Yet in Aelred's discussion of the saints of Hexham, referred to here as Miracula,Footnote 4 we can see him working through his own family history and local tradition, navigating carefully between personal commitments and monastic concerns. Miracula reveals an Aelred caught between the demands of past and present, between the old world and the new. Devotion to the ancient local saints remained an important element of Aelred's spiritual life and of the vibrant religious practices of the reformed canons and lay people of Hexham. I will first discuss Miracula, treating the evidence for Aelred's authorship (particularly the surviving manuscripts of the text) and its content. I will then turn to a detailed examination of the cult of the Hexham saints itself, particularly as Miracula reveals it. I will end by suggesting how this text complicates the image of Aelred as a reformed Cistercian, arguing that Miracula reveals its author's deep commitment to the local past and the local saints even as he remained the preeminent regional figure for the new monasticism. The local saints of the distant past remained a dynamic spiritual force in Aelred's life.
Aelred's work on the saints of Hexham has been largely incidental to the prolific scholarship on his life and writings that has emerged in the past fifty years. An interest in Aelred's “spiritual” writings and sermons has dominated Aelredian scholarship.Footnote 5 Many scholars have been interested in Aelred as a Cistercian and as a representative figure of Cistercian spirituality; these questions have been the domain largely, although not exclusively, of scholars who are themselves professed Cistercians. Other scholars have been interested in Aelred's historical writing, examining Aelred's works as sources for twelfth-century events in light of his political context.Footnote 6 Finally, some scholars have taken a psychoanalytic and psychosexual approach to Aelred's writing, speculating about his family relationships and his sexual identity.Footnote 7 These different approaches have, unsurprisingly, focused on different texts in Aelred's corpus. However, despite wide-ranging scholarly interest in Aelred, Miracula remains remarkably understudied.
We might expect that scholars in each of the three streams of Aelredian historiography would find the text useful for their purposes. Miracula reveals Aelred's sophisticated and affective thought about the role of the saints in personal devotion, highly relevant material for those interested in spirituality. He describes events of the eleventh and early twelfth centuries in some detail, valuable for historians interested in the events of Aelred's own lifetime. He gives information about his family and his own early life not attested by his hagiographer, Walter Daniel, as he describes miraculous events in the distant past and in his own present. Thus, Miracula expands our knowledge of Aelred's own biography.
Yet the gap in scholarly attention toward Miracula—to which Brian Patrick McGuire drew attention twenty years agoFootnote 8—has still not been addressed for several reasons. Among the few scholars who have dealt with the text, there has been widespread disparagement of its style. For instance, James Raine, the nineteenth-century editor of Miracula for the Surtees Society, complained that “the arrangement is faulty and confusing; the style often turgid and weak; and the whole work is perhaps the writer's poorest effort,”Footnote 9 an opinion that has been shared, albeit often with more moderation, by numerous scholars interested in Aelred.Footnote 10
Moreover, the attribution of Miracula to Aelred has not always been secure; Aelred's authorship has been disputed particularly since Miracula is not in Walter Daniel's list of Aelred's works.Footnote 11 Furthermore, Miracula begins with the remark that “this festival is particularly ours”Footnote 12 which could certainly suggest that it was written by one of the Augustinian canons resident at Hexham rather than by a Cistercian abbot from Yorkshire. However, there is ample evidence to support the attribution of the text to Aelred. Raine astutely pointed out that since the text was intended to be read on subsequent celebrations of the feast, the author would necessarily consider the lector of the text; Aelred could certainly have spoken of “our festival” without any incongruity.Footnote 13 Furthermore, Aelred's own biographical connections to Hexham, discussed below, would have been enough to merit this language of strong association and even ownership of the place. Despite the shifts in political regime, tenurial status, and form of religious life at Hexham over the previous century, Aelred could still identify with the place and was still active in devotion to its saints. However, the most persuasive argument for Aelred's authorship comes from the three surviving manuscripts of the text; the manuscript evidence can put concerns about Aelred's authorship to rest.
I. Aelred's Authorship of Miracula
The limited scholarship on Aelred's work on the saints of Hexham cites the text using the title printed by James Raine, De sanctis ecclesiae Haugustaldensis, although Raine admitted that this title came from Jean Mabillon's printing for the Acta sanctorum in the seventeenth century.Footnote 14 In the three surviving manuscripts, only one contains a title: the rubric “Here begin the miracles of the holy fathers who rest in the holy church of Hexham, dictated by venerable abbot Æthelred.”Footnote 15 An early library catalog from Rievaulx lists among its contents “On the miracles of the church of Hexham,” clearly referring to this text and almost certainly describing a surviving manuscript discussed in more detail below.Footnote 16 As the early evidence for the text suggests that the miracles were its primary identifying feature, I will follow the manuscript evidence in calling it Miracula here.Footnote 17 Internal evidence makes clear that part of the text was preached at Hexham on the occasion of the saints’ translation on March 3, 1154/1155. Because it also contains a narrative description of that translation liturgy, it is evident that Aelred revised the text after he preached it and before his death in 1167, a reasonably narrow window for composition and revision.
The manuscript evidence for Aelred's authorship is compelling. Miracula survives in its most complete form in three manuscripts, all of which seem to have been copied before the end of the twelfth century and have a northern English provenance.Footnote 18 These manuscripts are: (1) London, British Library, MS Additional 38816, folios 1r–17v, hereafter referred to as A; (2) London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius F.iii, folios 77r–93v, hereafter referred to as F; and (3) Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 668, folios 62r–78r, hereafter referred to as L.
A is a twelfth-century manuscript containing material relating to Saint Mary's York.Footnote 19 In fact, Miracula is the only non-York text in the manuscript, although it may have been inserted into the book as a way to bolster York's tenurial claim to the property at Hexham, which was disputed in the twelfth century.Footnote 20 It seems clear that the bulk of the manuscript was copied and compiled at York.Footnote 21 Miracula was copied in two quires of four bifolia each, with a seventeenth-century insertion at folio 6 to supply a missing folio and with an insertion from Symeon of Durham's Libellus de exordio at folio 12. Differences between A, F, and L suggest that A may be a different recension of the text than that which survives in F and L. First, A is the only manuscript that explicitly attributes Miracula to Aelred; it was, according to the rubric, “dictated by venerable abbot Æthelred.”Footnote 22 Second, it contains several sets of lection marks, indicating that this copy was intended to be read in a liturgical context and was in fact used in that way. Third, its final list of the specific saints who rest in Hexham differs from the lists in F and L. Fourth and finally, A is the only witness to three additional miracles which seem to have occurred in the late twelfth century and were copied into the existing manuscript no later than the early thirteenth century.Footnote 23 A was thus being used, updated, and revised after it was first copied by a Yorkshire scribe who explicitly said the text was by Aelred within a generation of Aelred's death.
F and L seem to be from a slightly different textual tradition than A. F was damaged in the Ashburnham House fire of 1731.Footnote 24 It is almost exclusively a collection of Aelredian texts, containing his Vita Edwardi regis et confessoris, his Vita Davidis Scotorum regis (the first chapter of his De genealogia regum Anglorum), and his Vita S. Niniani episcopi, along with an anonymous early Vita S. Agathe.Footnote 25 The Vita S. Agathe aside, F is a collection of Aelred's hagiography, and the Vita Davidis starts “here begins the preface of Aelred, abbot of Rievaulx.”Footnote 26 In their descriptions of the manuscript, both N. R. Ker and Anselm Hoste argued it originated at Rievaulx,Footnote 27 and it almost certainly corresponds with a manuscript described in the Rievaulx library catalog as “Ailred on the life of saint Edward. On the nobility and customs and death of king David. On the life of saint Ninian, bishop. On the miracles of the church of Hexham in one volume.”Footnote 28 The catalog includes F in its class of volumes containing works of Bernard of Clairvaux, Anselm, and Aelred.Footnote 29 It seems unlikely that the Rievaulx library cataloger, working circa 1190–1200,Footnote 30 would have included Miracula among Aelred's works if he had known it to be composed by an anonymous Augustinian canon instead of Aelred.Footnote 31 The cataloger would probably have simply omitted Miracula from his list, as he omitted the anonymous Vita S. Agathe. Thus, F contains a version of Miracula copied at Rievaulx within a generation of Aelred's death, if not within his own lifetime, in a manuscript that almost exclusively comprises texts securely attributed to him.
Raine made no mention of F in his edition. He knew of the existence of A, but did not have access to it.Footnote 32 Rather, he followed Mabillon in using L as the basis of his edition.Footnote 33 L contains a blank space for a title or capitulum, but none survives: there is only a later marginal note next to the blank space that reads “the miracles of Eata.”Footnote 34 L’s place of origin and early provenance remain obscure, but catalogers have argued that both the contents and a note suggest a northeastern English provenance for the manuscript.Footnote 35 The words “W Boynton” in a fifteenth-century hand appear amid sketches and pen trials on folio 152r. The Boyntons had been established in Yorkshire in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, and at least one member of the family held land from the bishop of Durham.Footnote 36 Several W. Boyntons were active in fifteenth-century east Yorkshire, and there is a place with the name of Boynton near Bridlington as well.Footnote 37 William Laud gave the manuscript to the Bodleian Library in 1633; although it is not clear where Laud obtained L, a number of the manuscripts he donated to the Bodleian in that year came from Durham. It is therefore reasonable to suspect that L had its origins in northeast England.Footnote 38 Like F, L contains the same core of Aelredian hagiographic material: the Vita Edwardi, Vita Davidis (here called de genealogia), and the Vita Niniani (incorrectly identified as anonymous in the Bodleian Library's quarto catalog).Footnote 39
The contents of the manuscripts and the versions of Miracula suggest, therefore, that F and L derive from a slightly different exemplar than A. However, all three manuscripts demonstrate that the text was copied frequently enough to exist in different recensions within forty-five years of its composition. Two of the three surviving manuscripts, A and F, were certainly produced at or near houses with which Aelred was affiliated within a generation of his death; whether by their contents or by explicit attribution, all three manuscripts support the case for Aelred's authorship and suggest that interest in the text was concentrated in northeastern England.
The contents of Miracula are not entirely straightforward. None of the manuscripts preserve capitula, although all three contain colored initials to divide the text into sections. Raine followed Mabillon in dividing the text into chapters, although he divided some of the chapters differently than Mabillon and the chapter divisions in both editions do not always correspond with the divisions in the manuscripts.Footnote 40 Although I reference Raine's chapter divisions here for convenience, I must emphasize that these divisions are not authorial, nor are they found in the manuscripts.
The text has five main sections, unequal in length.Footnote 41 The first is a homiletic prologue, beginning with Aelred's direct address to his audience: “Today's reverent festival, dearest brothers, we should undertake faithfully and celebrate joyously, in as much as our consolation, our hope, and above all our glory are especially commended in it. For certainly this celebration is ours, particularly ours who live in these holiest places under the protection of those in whose honor we have dedicated the joys of this day.”Footnote 42 It seems clear that this section was in fact part of the homily given on the occasion of the translation of the relics of the saints on March 3, 1154/1155.
The homiletic prologue is followed by a series of miracle stories that either take place at Hexham or detail miracles worked by the saints of Hexham at another location. This is the core of the miracle collection. Throughout this second section, Aelred continues to address his audience, usually as “dearest brothers,” so clearly not only the prologue was delivered orally on March 3. Relating the miracle stories seems to have been both part of the sermon as it was originally delivered at the feast of the translation and an indication that Aelred anticipated the subsequent liturgical reading of the miracles. This second section of miracles corresponds with Raine's chapters one through ten. Although miracle collections are often a hodgepodge, the disunity in Miracula is particularly striking; the text lacks internal unity of situation, context, chronology, and even location and which particular saint or saints effect the miracle.Footnote 43 The miracles describe the way the saints protect the town, church, and people from the raids of Malcolm (in chapter two) and David (in chapter five). Malefactors are punished (in chapters three and five) or spared when they ask the saints for help (in chapter one). Peasants or conversi are healed (in chapters four and seven) as are a blind woman (in chapter eight), a craftsman (in chapter nine), and a doubting cleric on a pilgrimage (in chapter ten). The miraculous events range in chronology from the late eleventh century (during the raids of Malcolm, King of Scots, who died in 1093) to the mid-twelfth century, since Aelred describes a miracle occurring “in our own times.”Footnote 44 The miracles are not arranged in chronological order, which may be a sign of Aelred's own editorial process; he may have added additional miracles while revising the text after he had preached the sermon.
The third main section of the text, Raine's chapter eleven, is a history of Hexham, of the care taken by Aelred's ancestors (who had the church in their possession and undertook various restoration projects there), and of the earlier translations of Saints Acca and Alchmund. Placed here in the text's third section, the information about Hexham's history is chronologically out of order. This section shares many similarities with other narrative histories of Hexham, particularly interpolations in the Historia regum and Richard of Hexham's Brevis annotatio.Footnote 45 Aelred did not simply rely on his own knowledge of local lore, but had access to and used recent scholarly works as well.
The fourth section of the text, a description of the ceremony of 1154/1155 and the translation of the relics on that occasion, also occurs in chapter eleven. The description was clearly not part of the sermon delivered on March 3 but part of the revision of the text after the translation. Chapter twelve returns to an account of an eleventh-century translation of Alchmund and contains a miracle in which Alchmund rescued a young man from drowning; its reference to the eleventh-century translation means that chapter twelve is also out of chronological order. Chapter thirteen returns to the description of the translation of 1154/1155, the relics of Saints Frethbert and Tilbert, and a description of the enshrinement of the all the saints’ relics in the church at Hexham.
The fifth and final section, chapters fourteen and fifteen, are an abbreviated account of the life of Bishop Eata: a summary of Eata's life (drawn from Bede) and a description of the abortive attempt of Thurstan of York to translate his relics from Hexham to York in the early twelfth century. The text ends abruptly in all three manuscripts, although it is not clear if Aelred simply never finished his revisions of Miracula or if his original ending was lost and thus unknown to the three scribes.
Miracula thus contains elements of a sermon, a miracle collection, a history, a translation narrative, and a vita, all out of chronological order. They are not discrete elements, nor does the text move in a linear or tightly organized, thematic way. Rather, the text as it survives incorporates all these elements. It was clearly created in stages, and Aelred had access to preexisting miracle stories, both written and oral. He updated these older stories for a public address on a specific occasion and then revised his address to include a discussion of that event. That is, he brought the text together piece by piece, composing some of it before 1154/1155 and some of it after as he incorporated a description of the translation ceremony itself. Aelred's process of composition and revision in Miracula is consistent with the process outlined by Michael Casey in his discussion of Aelred's discourses on the rule of Benedict. Miracula, like Aelred's chapter discourses, contains multiple themes, interactive direct remarks to the audience, moments of humor, references to the particular situation of delivery, and lacks a systematic organization of contents.Footnote 46
The similarity to his chapter discourses reminds us that, although scholars tend to characterize Miracula as one of Aelred's historical works,Footnote 47 it is of a different genre entirely. Instead of seeing Miracula as a defective history, plagued by the folkloric elements that so irritated its editor, or as an unpublished sermon in need of further revision, we should instead consider it as a narrative translatio, an account of the movement of relics.Footnote 48 As a translatio, Miracula is a mix of history, hagiography, tractate, and sermon: a “hybrid” of vitae and chronicles written to extol the powerful virtue of the saint and to describe a particular event, the movement of a saint's body.Footnote 49 In this case, multiple movements of multiple saints make the text even more complex, but it is quite clear that Aelred did not intend to write a work that was merely historiographical or even hagiographical: rather he intended to retell old stories that celebrated the power of the saints of Hexham, revising those stories and bringing them up to date not only for the particular celebration on March 3, 1154/1155, but in such a way that the canons of Hexham would continue to tell them. Moreover, these old stories were personal for Aelred, as his own family was intimately connected to the movement of the relics.
Aelred's process of composition relied both on local oral stories and on written sources. Hexham in the twelfth century was a relative hotbed both of interest in and composition of historical narratives, and the surviving chronicles and historical compilations reveal much about devotion to the local saints and about Aelred's own sources for Miracula. Some were written at Durham about Hexham and some were written at Hexham itself. Two anonymous sources from Durham deal explicitly with Hexham: the annals composed before 1083 (reconstructed by Edmund Craster as the Cronica monasterii Dunelmensis) and a brief history composed between 1083 and 1127 (surviving only in a manuscript famous for its elaborate illustrations of the life of Saint Cuthbert) which James Raine called An account of the early provosts of Hexham.Footnote 50 The sources composed at Hexham include two interpolations inserted into the historical compilation attributed to Symeon of Durham called the Historia regum, Richard of Hexham's Brevis annotatio (called the Historia Hagustaldensis ecclesie by its editor), and Aelred's Miracula.
Miracula and the historical sources reveal a vibrant cult at Hexham, so we might expect vitae of the Hexham saints to have been written, copied, and read in the process of commemoration, then used by Aelred in composing Miracula. Yet only one short vita survives.Footnote 51 Devotion to the saints in a monastic context also would have required liturgical production, yet no Hexham liturgical material has been identified; we do not have surviving offices, mass propers, or even calendars. This paucity of hagiographical and liturgical sources may be due in part to the small number of manuscripts of any kind with an identifiable Hexham provenance.Footnote 52 Yet the canons at Hexham surely must have had books for the commemoration of their saints.Footnote 53 However, despite the scarcity of surviving hagiographical and liturgical sources, the richness of the surviving texts, especially of Miracula, allows us to see devotion to the saints of Hexham in both belief and practice. Moreover, as the manuscript evidence demonstrates that Aelred was indeed the author, Miracula thus reveals what a reformed monk thought about local saints: that they endured and had continuing relevance in his changing world.
II. Aelred's Saints
As the most extensive of the surviving twelfth-century texts dealing with Hexham's saints, Aelred's Miracula reveals both what people—whether a local layperson in Hexham or a widely-traveled Cistercian abbot of international repute—believed about the saints and how those beliefs were put into practice. We can see both belief and practice at work by pursuing deceptively simple questions: who, precisely, were the saints of Hexham? And what, precisely, could and would they do for the people devoted to them? Miracula provides surprisingly complex answers that illuminate its author's view of devotion in novel ways. It reveals Aelred's sophisticated understanding of the enduring power of ancient local saints’ cults in a world marked by political and religious upheaval.
At first glance, it is easy enough to identify the saints of Hexham. The relics of four bishops were translated on March 3, 1154/1155, and thus the core group of saints appears to be composed of those four: Acca (d. 740), Frethbert (d. 766), Alchmund (d. 781), and Tilbert (d. 789). As these are the four whose translation was celebrated both in the event and in the textual commemoration of the event, Miracula, they are the obvious answer to the question of who, precisely, could be called the saints of Hexham.
However, Miracula begins not with the four bishops whose relics Aelred says everyone knows rest in the churchFootnote 54 (that is, not with the saints whose relics were being translated), but with Wilfrid (d. 710), Hexham's founder, whose activities were described by Bede in his Historia Ecclesiastica. Even long after Wilfrid's death, Aelred declares, “all of the people had recourse to him in this church, as if to someone who was alive,”Footnote 55 a moving description of the kind of deep personal connection inhabitants of Hexham felt with their saints and of the ongoing relationship between saint and devotee.Footnote 56 Even though Wilfrid's relics were not, in fact, present at Hexham—a fact which Aelred clearly knew and never disputed—Aelred is emphatic from the outset: Wilfrid belongs with the rest of the bishops whose relics rest at Hexham as a patron of the place and the community. This is a surprising assertion with which to open a sermon on the occasion of a translation of relics in a specific church.
Yet the needy can seek Wilfrid for assistance “in this church,” and so Aelred begins his account of the Hexham miracles with a story of Wilfrid's intervention in the case of a young criminal who had been imprisoned for theft. Unable to find anyone to provide surety for him, the thief was led to execution. The moment before the executioner struck, the boy looked at the church of Hexham and cried out, with dark humor, “Help me now, Wilfrid, because if you don't now, soon you won't be able to!”Footnote 57 In Aelred's recounting of the story, everyone burst out laughing, and the executioner found the remark so hilarious that he had to take a moment to recover himself before he could land the fatal blow. In that instant, the saints of Hexham worked their miracle: two young men galloped up to provide the required surety, and the criminal was spared. The mere fact of beginning a translatio with a discussion of a saint whose relics are elsewhere suggests that in this story, the presence (or absence) of bones does not matter as much as the reputation of the powerful founder. Wilfrid, Aelred says, “was always present to those who called on him . . . to such an extent that after his bodily presence was gone his spiritual grace flowed forth to them the more richly.”Footnote 58 The Bedan scholarly tradition of Wilfrid's role as founder finds its confirmation in local lore in the story of the criminal's plea to Wilfrid. Aelred knew both the scholarly and the popular, and he brought both to bear in his retelling of the Hexham saints’ miracles.
Even more importantly, Aelred uses the story of the criminal to emphasize that, for a resident of Hexham in need, to call on one saint was to call on all. Aelred is explicit that all the saints of Hexham were responsible for this miracle; even though the young man “had named only the most blessed Wilfrid in the hour of his death, no one supposed that the other saints who rest in this present church were not co-workers in this miracle, since he had invoked all of them in his heart, hoped in them all, and in respectful trust lifted his eyes to them all.”Footnote 59 The interior act of devotion—invoking a saint in one's heart—is just as efficacious as the exterior act—calling the saint's name aloud. Moreover, Aelred says that everyone knows that the saints work together. No one (nemo) thought Wilfrid was acting on his own. All the saints, those whose relics were present and about to be ceremonially translated when Aelred was preaching and those whose relics were elsewhere, worked the miracle.
Aelred claims elsewhere in Miracula that multiple saints protected the region and multiple saints could be called upon for help in a pick-and-mix approach to saintly protection. In a time of crisis, when the Scots were threatening Hexham, some of the local people “appealed with groans and outcries to Wilfrid, some to Cuthbert, some to Acca, and not a few to Alchmund.”Footnote 60 Of the four saints Aelred names in this instance, only the relics of Acca and Alchmund were present at Hexham, yet Wilfrid and Cuthbert could both be called upon for aid. It was an incontrovertible fact that Wilfrid's and Cuthbert's relics were elsewhere, but for Aelred, there were clearly other ways of being associated with the church or inhabiting the place—and thus being able to help local people in their time of need—than the mere physical presence of relics. Being a founder, as Wilfrid was, or being a bishop of the see only for a matter of months, as Cuthbert was before he became bishop of Lindisfarne,Footnote 61 was enough to establish an ongoing connection with the place. History, popular and scholarly, was just as relevant to Aelred as presence of relics when it came to providing saintly benefits.
In Aelred's narrative description of the events of the translation liturgy on March 3, 1154/1155, we see again the same concern with which saints are present at Hexham and Aelred's sophisticated notions about saintly presence. It is necessary to describe what happened at the ceremony, as Aelred reports it, in some detail. Before the translation, the canons prepared three containers (thecae): a large one covered in silver and gold and decorated with precious stones and two smaller ones.Footnote 62 Three containers for the relics of four saints is perhaps a little unexpected. On the chosen day, the brothers gathered in the church in the morning: “Barefoot, they prostrated themselves before the holy altar.”Footnote 63 They prayed the penitential psalms and the responsory for confessors, and then processed, still barefoot, in albs.Footnote 64 They set out the relics, with the container in which they had been stored, in front of the altar steps. They placed a cloth on the floor and spread the relics on it. There were, Aelred says, the relics of four saints wrapped in beautiful coverings.Footnote 65 The canons examined the relics and discovered a “wonderful fragrance,” a sign that “God's saints had bestowed on their holy relics this gift from the odors of paradise that they forever enjoy.”Footnote 66
Not only were the relics marked by this particular fragrance, but they were also identified by documents in the coverings. The relics of three of the saints (Acca, Alchmund, and Frethbert) had labels (schedula) with the saints’ names and death dates written at an earlier translation, “lest posterity should have any doubt concerning the name of the holy confessor.”Footnote 67 However, the canons discovered that the fourth bundle had no label. Aelred admits he does not know why this particular set of relics did not have a label, but this lack of written verification of one saint's identity is not a problem for Aelred or presumably for his audience. Aelred speculates that the omission occurred “perhaps because the people all knew that there were four bishops whose names had not been a secret at all”Footnote 68 and seems unworried by the discrepancy. The labels were only confirming what everybody, including Aelred, already knew.Footnote 69 Aelred also gives no indication as to when the labels might have been originally adhered.Footnote 70 The canons replaced the labels with lead plates affixed to the relics.Footnote 71 Curiously, Aelred only describes this replacement of the labels for Acca's relics, although when describing Frethbert he says that the canons “restored the testimony of his identity,” so we can perhaps infer that the lead plates were attached to the relics of all four saints.Footnote 72 The relics of all four were rewrapped, and just as they had been discovered together, they were replaced together in the larger container.Footnote 73
However, this was not the end of the translation ceremony. The canons then opened a reliquary (scrinium) containing the relics of Eata, about whom Aelred had made no previous mention. Neither the saint—also an early bishop of Hexham—nor his relics figured in the text or the translation liturgy as Aelred described it until this point. Yet the bones gave off a “heavenly fragrance,”Footnote 74 and more than that, the container held portions of the relics of one of the original four bishops: Frethbert. These relics were in a small lead theca and emitted the same fragrance.Footnote 75 Aelred makes no mention of labels in this context, and it is not clear how the canons were able to identify the relics of Frethbert or even of Eata. Perhaps we should imagine that the canons were able to identify the relics by the “same fragrance”; that is, that the odor of sanctity was individual to each saint and that the canons were identifying the relics by smell. Regardless, the canons put the relics of Eata and those of Frethbert (still in their lead container) into one of the two smaller decorated boxes. Into the other, they put some of the relics of Babylas (a third-century martyr whose relics Aelred had also not previously mentioned) along with some of the dust from the relics of Acca (which is surprising, considering that Acca's bones had already been put in the larger theca).Footnote 76 All three containers were placed on a decorated table (tabula) near the altar; mass was celebrated, the translation liturgy was completed, and all the people went away, leaving the canons in peace and quiet.Footnote 77
The mixing of relics—that is, finding and keeping Frethbert's relics with Eata's and placing a bit of the dust of Acca's relics with the otherwise-unknown Babylas—suggests again that the central group of four Hexham saints (Acca, Alchmund, Frethbert, and Tilbert) were the holy patrons. By putting a bit of two of that coterie in with others, the others (Eata and Babylas) are brought into the central group and made more holy by their incorporation with Hexham's patrons. Curiously, Aelred is completely silent about the relics of Andrew in the translation ceremony. Hexham was dedicated to Andrew at its founding, yet there is no direct evidence that Andrew's relics were in the church before the twelfth century.Footnote 78 Aelred only mentions Andrew's relics when he says that the first Augustinian prior, Ansketil, “embellished the church with precious ornaments and enriched it with the relics of Saint Andrew and other saints, increasing the devotion of both visitors and inhabitants.”Footnote 79 If Ansketil was in fact the first to put relics of Andrew in the church, as Aelred implies, then the dedicatory saint's relics had been on the site for only about forty years before the translation of the other saints. Still, one might expect that, for maximum impact, all the relics should be brought together with those of the dedicatory apostle, but this is clearly not Aelred's view.Footnote 80 Andrew, the dedicatory saint, is virtually a nonentity in the entire proceeding.
When Aelred talks about the “miracles of the saints who rest in the holy church of Hexham,”Footnote 81 he seems to mean Acca, Alchmund, Frethbert, and Tilbert, but also Eata and Babylas, even though they are never explicitly credited with a miracle, and also Wilfrid and Cuthbert, who work miracles at Hexham on behalf of its inhabitants even though their relics rest elsewhere. Aelred claims at the outset of Miracula that the absence of Wilfrid's relics is totally immaterial when considering Wilfrid's presence at Hexham; Wilfrid's role as founder, as Bede had described it, was enough to guarantee his patronage. Yet Aelred goes on to argue the opposite where Acca is concerned: the relics present at Hexham are more important even than Bede's testimony about Acca's holiness. As “speaking signs” (signa loquentia), the relics proclaim Acca's sanctity.Footnote 82 Relics do matter as an indication of presence and of power. The canons, Aelred says, knew the saints were present not only because their relics were there but because of the miracles they worked: “They sensed their presence not only in their relics but also in their miracles.”Footnote 83 Yet saints whose relics are not at Hexham (such as Wilfrid) can still be powerful patrons, and the inverse is also true: saints whose relics do rest at Hexham (such as Babylas) are not necessarily active protectors of the place and the community. Aelred is making a sophisticated argument for sanctity and power in Hexham because of its saintly bishops’ lives and deaths, independent of where their bones actually rest.
Aelred continues this nuanced treatment when he discusses what the saints do, that is the miracles themselves. Regardless of which particular saint effects a miracle, Aelred is explicit about the purpose of miracles: they “commend the holiness of this place, increase the faith of those who live here, and arouse their devotion.”Footnote 84 The first purpose of a miracle has to do not with the human beneficiaries but with the place itself, and the place is imbued with the power of the saints. Miracula addresses multiple audiences: as the content of the miracle stories makes clear, “this place” is sometimes the single church, sometimes the whole monastic complex, sometimes the city, and sometimes the region around the city.Footnote 85 “Those who live here” are, of course, the Augustinian canons, but they are also the laypeople of the city and may even also be members of Aelred's own family still resident there. Aelred's broad definitions of place and people make his remarks applicable to diverse audiences.
Miracula describes miracles of punishment and of healing, and Aelred mentions in general terms that the blind and lame were healed, but protection seems to be the primary benefit the people of Hexham expected from their saints.Footnote 86 If there was a widespread expectation that the saints of Hexham could heal everyday ailments, as some of their fellow saints in Northumbria could,Footnote 87 no evidence seems to have survived in the sources. Aelred insists that the material benefits of miracles—the protection or vengeance or healing that the saints bestow—are secondary to the spiritual benefits they provide. “Our holy fathers,” Aelred says, “the presence of whose relics we boast, never cease to heap new miracles on old, so as always to increase the devotion of those serving here, to assure their hope, to nourish their love, and by the sight of present gifts to confirm their expectation of future ones.”Footnote 88 The primary purpose of miracles is a spiritual one. Aelred does not diminish the physical benefits of the miracles but encourages his audience of both laypeople and canons that “from physical, temporal, and earthly benefits we may be led to hope for those that are spiritual, eternal, and heavenly.”Footnote 89 Just as the people of Hexham were protected by the saints from the marauding Scots, so those devoted to the saints can be rescued from spiritual attacks. Just as the young criminal was snatched from death, so those who are overwhelmed with sins will be saved, “knowing that the same goodness that rescued a man condemned to death from the hand of his executioner will likewise immediately rescue us who are overwhelmed with sins if summoned with tears and prayers.”Footnote 90 Aelred is attempting to persuade his audience to move from an expectation of material benefits from the saints to a desire for spiritual benefits. He never says that the saints do not provide practical help, just that material assistance ought not to be as important as spiritual aid.
The association of the saints with protection was not unique to Aelred.Footnote 91 Yet Aelred's insistence on the supremacy of the spiritual significance of miracles over the material significance is unusual when compared with other Hexham sources. For instance, Aelred and the author of the Historia regum both include a story of Acca's miraculous healing of a blind woman.Footnote 92 However, Aelred's interpretation in Miracula differs notably from the interpretation in the Historia regum. Where the Historia regum simply says that the woman “recovered her sight through the merits and intercession of Saint Acca,”Footnote 93 Aelred notes that the canon who witnessed the miracle and the woman both rejoiced equally: “She because of bodily benefit, he because he experienced the effect of spiritual fruit.”Footnote 94 Aelred places the spiritual benefit and the material benefit on the same plane. Similarly, where the Historia regum describes Malcolm's retreat from Hexham, the author simply observes that “everyone who had fled from [Malcolm's] cruelty to the aforesaid church of Hexham was rescued by the merits of the saints who rested in it.”Footnote 95 Aelred tells the same story, but adds a moralizing lesson after Malcolm's defeat, reminding his audience that they have more to fear from the devil than from an invading king. He addresses the canons:
As for us, dearest brothers, whose duty it is to care for souls rather than for bodies and to guard ourselves against the powers of the air rather than those of earth, how many times has he, the king of all the children of pride, armed the minions of his wicked strength to endanger our salvation? How often has the dread host of vices rushed in bands upon us? Let us approach with confidence to the protection of these saints, begging with deep sighs that, like Elisha the prophet, they may strike all our enemies with blindness and, when the eyes of our heart have been opened, show us that there are more with us than with them.Footnote 96
The moral of the story is less that the saints will protect their people from military threats, as the Historia regum claims, than that the saints will protect their devotees from looming spiritual attacks.
However, Aelred does not think that the spiritual benefits are only for the canons. Although he most frequently advises the canons about how they should interpret the miracles, he also responds to the knowledge and the needs of his lay audience. Aelred mentions local liturgical practices of devotion that predated the canons, observing that Acca's feast day was “a day celebrated by the inhabitants of the region with great honor every year”Footnote 97 and that an earlier translation of Alchmund was “celebrated every year by the people.”Footnote 98 Lay liturgical participation continued in the translation of 1154/1155. At the end of his description of the translation, Aelred wrote that “when the rites had been performed and Mass celebrated with the appropriate joy, the populace was sent away, and all the brothers returned to their usual peace and quiet.”Footnote 99 The inhabitants of Hexham were present and participating in the translation ceremony.
Aelred is careful to include miracle stories with lay beneficiaries in Miracula, and often those are stories his lay audience at the translation would already have known. For instance, in relating how the young thief is saved after crying out to Wilfrid, Aelred remarks: “This miracle became known to so many that the youth's words, proven effective in so great an extremity, became a common adage among all the people.”Footnote 100 Aelred also includes stories about lay beneficiaries of the saints’ miracles not found in other Hexham sources: a man named Raven, “who lived an ordinary life under a certain extremely rich nobleman,”Footnote 101 was healed from blindness after he had gone “to my Acca”Footnote 102 and prayed at the saint's shrine. Raven was subsequently freed by his master who wanted to stay on the right side of Acca: “He—wishing to gain favor with the saint—gave the man [that is, Raven], whom he freed, and all his money to the saint and directed the man to serve the church as long as he lived.”Footnote 103 When he interprets this miracle, Aelred again addresses the canons directly as “dearest brothers” (fratres karissimi), stressing its spiritual import and pleading that we “might in dangers to our souls implore his aid with the same faith, equal devotion, and no less hope, mindful of the tears and the constancy in prayer by which a man of the flesh obtained help for his flesh.”Footnote 104 Yet there is also an implied lesson for a lay audience here: generous giving—of money to the saint and of labor to the church—is an effective way to gain favor with a powerful saint. Miracula thus reveals not only practical details about clerical and lay devotional practices, but also Aelred's sophisticated understanding of who the saints were and what they could do for their devotees, both clerical and lay.
III. Aelred's Past and Present
In Miracula, we see an author and also a cult in tension: not in a deep antagonism, but a tension between a commitment to the past and a concern with innovation. The old world is visible here, a devotional world marked by veneration of the long-dead local bishops by the common people of Hexham and a family of priests committed to the celebration of the saints over multiple generations. However, Aelred shows us a new world as well: veneration of these same saints by monks in new orders at refounded and reformed monastic centers. In fact, this tension is apparent both personally in Aelred himself, son of a family of priests and Cistercian monk, and textually, as it pervades Miracula. Devotion to the local saints endured across changing social and religious landscapes.Footnote 105
When Aelred returned to his hometown to preach in 1154/1155, he was returning to a church that had been the personal possession of his family for several generations. His great-grandfather, Aelfred Westou, was a sacristan of Durham who had traveled all over Northumbria gathering saints’ relics in the eleventh century.Footnote 106 He was also priest of Hexham, and positions in Durham and Hexham were held by his son (Eilaf I) and grandson (Eilaf II, Aelred's father). As Ralph Walterspacher points out, while the clerical positions at Hexham can be traced through several families, they were not strictly hereditary; Hexham was a valuable commodity in both spiritual and material respects, and the bishops of Durham could use it “to reward important laymen and Durham clerks of their choice.”Footnote 107 Aelred's father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had received that reward. When the Norman bishop of Durham, William of Saint Calais, established the Benedictine rule and celibate clergy there in 1083,Footnote 108 Aelfred Westou's son, the married treasurer of Durham, Eilaf I, retreated from Durham to the property under his control at Hexham, and sought to put Hexham under the jurisdiction of the archbishop of York rather than Durham.Footnote 109 In Miracula, Aelred describes Eilaf I's restoration of the church property at Hexham, noting that it had fallen into significant disrepair:Footnote 110 “He found everything desolate, the walls of the roofless church overgrown with grass and overrun by the encroaching forest. Defaced by rain and ravaged by storms, it retained nothing of its former beauty. The land was so desolate that for almost two years he sustained himself and his family only by hunting and fowling.”Footnote 111 Eilaf I's son and Aelred's father, Eilaf II, also priest of Hexham, continued the restoration after Eilaf I's death: “Directing all his attention and care to restoring the Hexham church, he cut down the encroaching forest, cleared the overgrown walls, roofed the whole church with tiles, and, when the walls had been plastered inside and out, decorated the church with an ancient painting of great beauty.”Footnote 112 As part of the rebuilding project, Eilaf II elevated the relics and put his brother Aldred in charge of the shrine.Footnote 113
Just as reform had come to Durham, necessitating Eilaf I's move to Hexham, so reform came to Hexham, necessitating a change of life for Eilaf II and his sons, that is, for Aelred and his brothers. The archbishop of York changed the pattern of religious life at Hexham by establishing regular canons there, effectively eliminating the possibility of Hexham continuing as a possession of the family of priests. As Walterspacher points out, “history repeated itself” for Aelred's family; one generation after the introduction of Benedictine monasticism ousted the family from Durham, the introduction of regular canons at Hexham changed their fortunes again.Footnote 114 Eilaf II's handover to the Augustinian canons was arranged in 1113,Footnote 115 and Thurstan of York appointed Ansketil to be prior in 1114, although Eilaf II remained vicar of the church.Footnote 116 As we have seen, Eilaf II finally handed over the rest of the property at Hexham to the canons in 1138 and joined the Benedictines at Durham.Footnote 117
Aelred grew up in Hexham, in the shadow of the church and its saints, clearly aware both of his family's traditions and of clerical precariousness in a new context of religious life. The old career options of proceeding in the family occupation had evaporated by the time Aelred came of age. Yet, he came from a line of men whose professional and personal lives were devoted to the care of saints at major centers in Northumbria, both Durham and Hexham, and Aelred continued this family tradition of devotion to the local saints in his own context and in his own way. Although he ultimately adopted a new mode of religious life, Aelred neither forgot nor abandoned his heritage of priestly dedication to saints’ shrines.
When describing devotion to the saints in Miracula, Aelred includes his own personal knowledge as a child born and raised at Hexham. He knows precisely which relics are being translated, independent of any labels, because he heard everyone name the four saints during his childhood. “Many years before this translation,” he says, “when I was still a boy, the whole populace unhesitatingly claimed that Acca, Alchmund, Frethbert, and Tilbert were resting there [at Hexham] together.”Footnote 118 The local knowledge of the vulgus enables him to identify the saints at the translation with confidence. As we have seen, Aelred also knew about long-standing lay devotional practices. He augments the canons’ knowledge with his own. When he describes the elevation and translation of Alchmund, Aelred observes that the canons were surprised to find Alchmund's body intact.
The brothers stood around the heavenly treasure; intently examining everything, they found every part of the human body. And because those who had once buried the saints had taken some bits of the bones of blessed Acca for their devotions, they marveled that no such thing had been done to the remains of blessed Alchmund. Why this had not occurred, some had forgotten and others had not heard. So I am not at all reluctant to add an account of his former translation to his new one and to explain the reason for his integrity.Footnote 119
Aelred knew more than the canons did and could answer their queries with information of his own about a translation undertaken by members of his own family.
However, Aelred's personal knowledge of a local oral tradition was mediated by his scholarly knowledge of written sources and by his own sophisticated spiritual thought. Aelred did not simply repeat what he knew from popular report or from his own personal memories or from his written sources. He adapted the stories both for the specific occasion of the translation and for his own concerns as a Cistercian monk speaking to a group of Augustinian canons. He argued for the continuing relevance and significance of the ancient local saints in a newly reformed world. Despite the discontinuity in the veneration of the saints, the power of the saints still worked miracles to the spiritual benefit of the canons and people: “Even their dead bones burgeon with frequent miracles and by clear signs continue to perpetuate their memory, which time had hidden or neglect destroyed.”Footnote 120 Thus Aelred carefully modernizes the information he has gathered from his own family lore, local oral stories, and written sources, reinterpreting the ancient miracle stories in his reformed context.
Personally, Aelred was at this fulcrum between past and present as well. An ongoing devotion to Anglo-Saxon saints marked Aelred's life. He heard stories of the Hexham saints as a boy, and the family tradition of working as custodians of saints’ shrines did not end with Aelred's own entry into religious life.Footnote 121 The local saintly past remained present for Aelred, and that is evident both in Aelred's own writing in Miracula and in other twelfth-century works about Aelred. Walter Daniel's vita and other sources provide tantalizing clues about the depth of Aelred's devotion to the saints in general and to the Anglo-Saxon saints in particular. Walter Daniel hints Aelred imitated Cuthbert's devotional practices in some particulars; Aelred's nighttime immersion in freezing water is reminiscent of Cuthbert's own ascetic practice.Footnote 122 Aelred's devotion to Cuthbert was known outside Rievaulx as well. In his collection of the shrine miracles of Cuthbert at Durham, the hagiographer Reginald of Durham not only says that he has received stories from AelredFootnote 123 but in fact goes further and addresses his collection of Cuthbert's miracles at Durham to Aelred.Footnote 124 Aelred also, according to Reginald, took care to celebrate Cuthbert's feast on March 20, 1164 at Kirkcudbright, the village named for the saint on the coast of the Solway Firth.Footnote 125 On his deathbed, he asked for the relics of the saints to be brought to him, along with the Gospel of John.Footnote 126 Walter Daniel does not specify which relics Aelred requested, but it is not at all improbable that the relics were those of Anglo-Saxon saints, perhaps even some of the saints of Hexham that his father had not given to the canons when he surrendered his property.Footnote 127 Aelred's repeated cry “festinate [hasten] for crist luve” on his deathbed reminds us of his deep identification with the language and culture of his youth.Footnote 128
Conversion to Cistercian life did not totally supplant Aelred's other religious traditions, interests, and practices as we might expect and indeed as some scholars have argued.Footnote 129 Certainly, there was concern in the twelfth century at Clairvaux that devotion to saints would interfere with the appropriate practice of monastic life. In a particularly dramatic example, the abbot of Clairvaux forbade Bernard himself from working posthumous miracles,Footnote 130 and all Cistercian monasteries were dedicated not to local saints, or even to apostles, but to the Virgin Mary.Footnote 131 Nevertheless, despite what we may see as anti-saint sentiment among the broader Cistercian community, devotion to ancient local saints remained an important part of Aelred's religious life and experience.
Miracula shows how the local saintly past of one small Northumbrian town was personal to one of the great Cistercian thinkers of the twelfth century. Moreover, as William Faulkner observed: “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”Footnote 132 Although the religious world had changed irreversibly, the past was neither dead nor past for Aelred. In spite of political regime change, in spite of religious reform, commemoration of the local saints endured at Hexham, and that commemoration mattered to a reform-minded monk. Aelred was particularly well situated to update the traditions and the devotional practices for a new era; he could modernize an understanding of miracles without jettisoning the past, and Miracula shows him maneuvering through these competing commitments to past and present. A Cistercian monk who was committed to reform was convinced that the saints of his youth continued to be relevant. Although his father had handed over relics of the Hexham saints, the family saints never really left Aelred; devotion to the ancient local saints was a constant in Aelred's changing world.
