Cult of saints in Anglo-Saxon England facts for kids
A cult of saints was a very important part of Anglo-Saxon Christianity. This was a type of Catholicism practiced in Anglo-Saxon England from the late 500s to the mid-1000s.
Writers for the church created stories about these saints, called hagiographies. These stories were mostly for other church members. But some were also for kings and nobles. They showed how to live a perfect Christian life.
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What is a Saint?
In Anglo-Saxon England, there wasn't always a clear rule for who was a saint. Sometimes, especially after the 800s, a bishop or church meeting would say someone who had died was a saint. Other times, only certain churches or religious groups would call someone a saint.
Historian Blair said it was often "rather vague" if a respected person was truly a saint back then. The Pope started to have more say in who became a saint after the 900s. But it wasn't until the 1100s that the Pope took full control of canonization. This is the official process of declaring someone a saint. After that, specific rules were set. To be a saint, a person had to have been martyred (killed for their faith) or lived a very good life. They also had to have performed miracles after their death.
How We Know About Them
Between about 1000 and 1200, lists were made showing where different English saints were buried. The oldest of these lists, called Secgan, might even include a list from before the Viking attacks.
How Saints' Cults Started and Grew
Early Ideas
The idea of a local saint in Anglo-Saxon England grew from an older Roman tradition. Worshipping saints became a key part of Christianity from at least the 300s. Even the last pagan Roman Emperor, Julian the Apostate, criticized it.
Cemeteries outside city walls, where people believed to be saints were buried, became important places for Christians. For example, St. Peter's Basilica in Rome was built over a cemetery thought to hold the remains of St Peter.
Connected to the worship of saints was the worship of relics. Relics are special objects linked to saints. In the eastern Roman Empire, people started breaking up saints' original remains to share them among different churches. This idea soon spread across Christendom. Some Christian thinkers, like Victricius, an Archbishop of Rouen, argued that saints had so much power that it even came from small pieces of their bodies.
The Church of Rome was worried about human remains being spread too much. So, they encouraged worshipping "secondary relics." These were objects that had touched a saint's remains, offered as an alternative.
Historian David Rollason suggested that some Romano-British saint cults might have survived the Anglo-Saxon migration in the 400s. They might have continued even as Anglo-Saxon paganism grew. One of these might have been the cult of St. Alban. Another was linked to Sixtus, a person mentioned later by Pope Gregory the Great, but we don't know much about him.
Converting the Anglo-Saxons
Saints' relics started appearing in Anglo-Saxon England soon after the first Christian missionaries arrived. In the early 600s, Pope Gregory the Great wrote to Augustine. Augustine was leading the Gregorian mission to convert the Kingdom of Kent to Christianity. The Pope told him he was sending not just books and church items, but also "relics of the holy apostles and martyrs" to help with the conversion.
Later in that century, Pope Vitalian sent "benefits" of the saints to King Oswiu of Northumbria. These were relics of important saints like Peter, Paul, and Lawrence. He also sent Oswiu's queen "a cross with a golden key, made from the holy fetters of the apostles St Peter and St Paul." These gifts likely showed the Pope's wish to connect the new Anglo-Saxon Church with the one in Rome.
Many Anglo-Saxons also wanted more relics from Rome. Around 761, Benedict Biscop, who started monasteries at Monkwearmouth and Jarrow, visited Rome. He brought "holy relics of the blessed apostles and Christian martyrs" back to England. According to his biography, Wilfrid, who founded Hexham Abbey and Ripon Abbey, also brought many relics from Rome after his visits in 680 and 704. Rollason also thought Benedict Biscop and Wilfrid likely brought relics from Frankish Gaul. This area was a big source of relics, and they had strong ties there. We don't know what these relics looked like, but Rollason thought they were probably secondary relics, which the Pope preferred to give out.
It's possible that saints' relics were seen as vital for dedicating new churches in Anglo-Saxon England. Especially if, as Gregory the Great advised, many early churches were converted pagan temples. Or, relics might have been used for newly built churches. This is supported by Bede, who said Bishop Acca gathered relics and "put up altars for their veneration, establishing various chapels for this purpose within the walls of the church."
The 600s and 700s
In Anglo-Saxon England, the 600s and 700s are called the "age of saints." Blair noted that after 850, "saint-making was different in character and very much more restricted."
While saint stories often made it seem like cults appeared naturally from people's devotion, starting a cult needed someone in charge from the church. This person would order saint stories to be written, tell people about supposed miracles, build and decorate a shrine, organize a feast day, and if needed, set up the saint's site as a place for pilgrimage.
There were many links between kings and the worship of saints. Many saints were born into royal families, and many churches were started by royalty. In the Kingdom of Kent, saint cults were usually at abbeys. These abbeys were also royal villages and centers of royal power. Kings could use their connection to these cults to claim their right to rule against others. A royal family might gain respect by having a saint in their family. Promoting a certain saint's cult might help a royal family claim political control over an area, especially if it was newly conquered.
Political and church rivalries also affected saint cults. For example, there was competition between the cults of Cuthbert and Wilfrid.
Late Anglo-Saxon Period
From at least the late 800s, Anglo-Saxon kings had their own collections of relics.
The church reform movement of the late 900s showed a greater interest in the cult of saints. For these reformers, the church of saints offered a chance for greatness and respect. During this time, many saint stories were written, and this continued until the mid-to-late 1000s. The 900s also saw the first records of ordinary people making pilgrimages to places linked to saints' relics. This suggests that the popularity of saint cults among common people grew a lot during that time. This growth was similar to what was happening in the former Carolingian Empire. The rise of popular worship of saints could have come from people's natural faith. But it also could have come from the church's desire to involve ordinary people more in its activities. Adding saints' festivals to the calendar would have helped both the clergy and the kings control people's activities.
Kings continued to use the cult of saints for political reasons into the 1000s, as seen with Cnut.
After the Norman conquest of England in 1066, the cult of saints could have become a way to oppose the new Norman rulers. But this doesn't seem to have happened. In one rebellion against the Normans, led by Hereward the Wake, the rebels swore loyalty to their cause on the body of St Æthelthryth. She was a local saint in Ely, where they were based. But there's no sign that Æthelthryth became a lasting symbol of Anglo-Saxon resistance.
Many Norman bishops and church leaders who came to England after the conquest used the existing saint cults to promote their own monasteries and churches. Also, during the Norman period, several older Anglo-Saxon figures were made into saints. For example, church leaders at Rochester in Kent declared Ithamar a saint. He was a former Bishop of Rochester and a minor figure in Bede's Ecclesiastical History.
Blair suggested that by 1100, many local saints were recognized in their own churches as founders and protectors. But beyond that, little or nothing was known about them.
Even though hermits (people who live alone for religious reasons) didn't live in big churches, by the 1000s, some major reformed churches had gotten relics of hermits for their collections.
Types of Saints
Saints from Other Lands
Many saints in Anglo-Saxon England, like Peter and Paul, were already worshipped by the Church of Rome. We have evidence of these figures from the 600s and 700s. So, it's not clear if they were brought to Anglo-Saxon England earlier, with the Gregorian Mission.
The Dialogues by Gregory the Great, a book from Rome about Italian saints, was very important in Anglo-Saxon England. Anglo-Saxon writers, like Bede in his Life of St Cuthbert, copied its descriptions of miracles. The Lindisfarne Gospels, made around 700, list festivals for two southern Italian saints, Januarius and Stephen. These festival lists might have been copied from an older list from Naples. The Old English Martyrology, probably written in the 800s, also has many saints from southern and central Italy.
It's not clear if this Italian influence came from texts that traveled west or from direct contact between the two parts of Europe. There is some evidence of Italian church figures coming to England. Hadrian, a former abbot from an Italian monastery, came with the Greek Theodore of Tarsus to England in 669. Birinus, who spread Christianity in Wessex, was also from Italy. These people might have influenced the development of saint worship in Anglo-Saxon England.
There's also evidence that Frankish Gaul (modern-day France) influenced the choice of saints in Anglo-Saxon England. Several Anglo-Saxon churches were dedicated to the Frankish St Martin of Tours. An Anglo-Saxon copy of the Hieronymian Martyrology, first written in Rome in the 400s, likely came to England through Gaul. Various saints were added to it there. A mid-800s Anglo-Saxon calendar—MS Digby 63 in the Bodleian Library—includes various Frankish saints' days, especially from the Flanders area. This shows their influence.
There is little evidence of Irish influence on Anglo-Saxon saint worship. Except for a few well-known saints like Patrick, Brigid, and Columba, Irish saints don't appear in Anglo-Saxon writings. There's also little evidence of Irish influence on Anglo-Saxon saint stories. The only possible exception is the idea that the Irish Life of St Columba might have influenced the anonymous Anglo-Saxon Life of St Cuthbert.
Gretsch said that, apart from the apostles, Gregory the Great was the most widely and universally worshipped saint in Anglo-Saxon England. By the time Bede and Aldhelm were writing, at least two altars and one chapel in England had been dedicated to Gregory.
Royal Saints
Anglo-Saxon England had more royal saints than nearby parts of Northwestern Europe. The lives of some of these saints are known from writings from the Anglo-Saxon period. But others only appear in saint stories written after the Norman Conquest.
Some of these royal saints were kings who left their thrones to focus on religious life. In some cases, like Ceolwulf, they were probably forced to do this by political rivals. One idea is that the Anglo-Saxons focused on royal saints because of pagan beliefs that kings had a sacred role in society.
One reason for so many royal saints might be that royal families encouraged it. They believed they would gain respect by having a saint in their family. Many important church leaders were also members of royal families. They might have wanted to promote their own family members as saints. The Church might also have wanted to strengthen the power of established royal families. This would help create a stable society and strong government, which would benefit the Church itself.
Martyred Royal Saints
In many cases, these royal saints were killed by other Christians. The earliest martyred royal saints are from the 600s. Very few appear in the 700s. Then, a number emerged in the late 700s and early 800s in the kingdoms of Northumbria and Mercia. The very last known example came from Wessex.
The fact that similar ideas and themes appear again and again in the stories of martyred saints led Rollason to suggest that the different writers were using a known tradition of saint stories and borrowing from earlier works. For example, the idea of a beam of divine light showing where a body is found is linked to eight of these martyrs in their stories. Nine stories involve a servant killing the saint on their master's orders. Seven claim that a religious building was started after the killing.
The earliest example of a martyred royal saint was Oswine of Deira. He was killed on the order of his rival, Oswiu of Bernicia. That Oswine was quickly made a saint is suggested by how Bede describes him and his inclusion in the 700s calendar of St Willibrord.
The best-known example of a martyred royal saint is Edward the Martyr. He was killed in 978 or 979 while visiting his half-brother Æthelred the Unready. The Vita Oswaldi—probably written by Byrhtferth of Ramsey between 995 and 1005—suggests he was made a saint purely because of how he died. It doesn't say he showed any special virtues during his life.
Three royal men from Northumbria were also martyred saints: the kings Eardwulf and Ælfwald, and the prince Ealhmund. Eardwulf seems different from most other martyred royal saints because he appeared to survive his execution. According to the Historia Regum records, Eardwulf was put to death outside the gates of Ripon Minster. After that, the monks carried his body to a church, where he revived during the night.
Two Kentish princes from the 600s, Æthelred and Æethelberht, are also presented as martyred saints in several 11th-century and later sources. However, there is evidence that they were worshipped as saints from at least the early 700s. There is also much evidence for the worship of a 9th-century Mercian prince, Wigstan. According to later medieval sources, he too was martyred. In this story, Wigstan refused to become king after his father's death. But he was then murdered in 849 by another prince, Beorhtfrith. This was because Wigstan opposed his own mother, Ælflædd, marrying Beorhtfrith's father, the new king Beorhtwulf.
Another Mercian royal who became a saint was Æthelberht II of East Anglia. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, he was killed by Offa of Mercia in 794. As with Wigstan, the details of his murder are only found in later medieval sources. Kenelm is also a supposed murdered Mercian who became a saint. But the sources about his murder are from the late medieval period and contradict earlier sources about the Mercian royal family. Also only known from late medieval sources are the murders of the Mercian princes Wulflad and Rufinus. They were supposedly killed by their father, who wanted to punish them for becoming Christians. There are inconsistencies with this story, but it might be a confused version of a 7th-century event.
One idea why various murdered royals became saints is that the Church wanted to stop such killings and promote stability in society. In this situation, kings might have thought twice about killing their rivals if they feared the person would become a saint as a result. It's perhaps important that the increase in martyred royal saints happened in the late 700s and early 800s. This was shortly after the 786 visit of the Papal legates to England. During that visit, they strongly condemned the killing of kings and princes.
Another reason for the growth of martyred royal cults might be political, not just religious. These cults might have been encouraged by the enemies of the killers. They hoped the cults would show and focus opposition to the killers. For example, Cnut might have promoted the cult of Edward the Martyr to make Æthelred the Unready look bad. Æthelred might have been Edward's killer and was a key rival of Cnut's.
Saint Stories (Hagiography)
In Anglo-Saxon England, hagiographies—or written accounts of a saint's life—were not meant to be exact biographies. Instead, they aimed to show a holy life for others to copy. Evidence from the dedications in Anglo-Saxon hagiographies suggests they were mostly for religious communities and sometimes for kings. Because they were often written in Latin, and sometimes used difficult Latin words, it's clear their main audience was church members. In a few cases, some Old English translations were made. For example, there are Old English versions of Felix's Life of St Guthlac and Bede's Life of St Chad. These could have reached a wider audience.
The Life of Saint Guthlac and Bede's Life of St Cuthbert, for instance, both describe how to be a good monk or hermit. There are other stories within the hagiographies that would have been more relevant to ordinary people, especially members of royalty and nobility.
In the 900s, Anglo-Saxon saint stories started to focus more on saintly power and the close link between saints and kings.
Of the 106 Old English saintly works, 66 (about two-thirds) were written by the abbot Ælfric of Eynsham. Of these, only 6 deal with English or British saints, with most being about foreign ones. After studying this material, Gretsch suggested that political and ethical reasons would have influenced Ælfric's choices about which saints to write about.
Relics
The early medieval idea of a local saint was based on the belief that something holy could have a physical presence. If a church had bodily relics of a saint, this showed its importance and gave worshippers a focus for their prayers.
Saints' Bodies
Being buried inside a church was usually required for someone to be seen as a saint in Anglo-Saxon England. The only known possible exception was St Guthlac of Crowland. His biographer, Felix, vaguely said his body was buried under a monument, but didn't say what kind.
Placing a saint's body inside a church allowed the church community to control the saint's worship. It also let them keep the relics and their believed power. Doing this also meant the saint's remains could be near an altar, making the altar more sacred and making it easier to hold masses for the saint.
Some saints—like St Sebbi and St John of Beverly—were buried directly inside the church after they died. In other cases, people who later became saints were first buried in the ground, usually in a churchyard. Only later were their bodies dug up and moved into the church. This act of moving the relics is called "translation".
Bede tells one story of such a translation. When Æthelthryth, the Abbess of Ely, died in 679, she was buried in a wooden coffin among other dead nuns, as she had asked. Sixteen years later, her successor and sister, Seaxburgh, ordered the monks of Ely to dig up Æthelthryth's body. They placed it in a white marble coffin found at an abandoned Roman fortress, and then moved it into the church at Ely.
Bede also described the digging up and reburial of St Cuthbert, Bishop of Lindisfarne. He had first been buried in the floor of St. Peter's Church. Cuthbert's successor, Eadberht, later ordered his body to be moved to a higher, more visible spot, either on or above the church floor.
Rollason suggested that digging up a body and reburying it in the church helped show that the deceased person was a saint. This was important in a society that didn't have a standard way of making someone a saint. Various Anglo-Saxon accounts mention a saint's body being dug up and then placed in a newly built church. In this case, the saint's presence could have helped make the church holy. The church itself would then provide a place for the saint's worship.
He also stressed that the act of digging up bodies might have been adopted by the Anglo-Saxons from Frankish Gaul. He noted that such practices were not in line with the Church of Rome at the time. The Roman Church in the 600s and 700s continued to oppose digging up saintly remains.
The idea that a deceased person's body and clothes would be preserved when dug up was seen as a sign of holiness in Anglo-Saxon England, just as it was in Gaul. Bede recorded that during the digging up of both St Æthelthryth and St Cuthbert, their bodies were found to be miraculously preserved and not decayed. In the 1800s, a medical exam of St Cuthbert's remains found some evidence of flesh preservation. This supports the Anglo-Saxon claim that his body was preserved after its original burial. Such preservation might have happened because of the specific soil conditions where he was buried. Or, the body might have been deliberately embalmed. Embalming was known in Anglo-Saxon England, for example, Bede mentions it.
Coffins and Grave Coverings
The wooden coffin of St Cuthbert was found in 1827. It has carvings of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus, angels, and apostles on the sides, and Jesus on the lid.
A number of decorated stone coffins also survive from the Anglo-Saxon period. But it's not clear who was buried in them. Some might have held the remains of saints, while others might have contained wealthy ordinary people.
The broken stone chests shaped like houses found at Jedburgh and St Andrews, both from the Anglo-Saxon period, might have been reliquary-coffins (coffins used to hold relics). The one at St Andrews was found in the churchyard of the church of St Rule. So, it might have once covered the tomb of this figure.
It's also possible that the ridged stones with Anglo-Saxon decorations—like the Hedda Stone from Peterborough Cathedral and the St. Leonard's School Shrine from St. Andrews—might have covered saints' graves. Records show that later, the ridges of the Hedda Stone collected dust that was believed to have healing powers. This belief might have Anglo-Saxon origins.
Smaller Relics
Smaller relics were likely often placed in a small hole inside a stone altar. This hole would be covered with a stone or a metal plate. No English examples of this survive, but a similar one can be found in Petersburg-bei-Fulda in western Germany.
In other cases, smaller relics were likely kept in special boxes called reliquary caskets. Two possible Anglo-Saxon examples have been saved in Europe. One, from the second half of the 700s, is made of walrus ivory and is in the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum in Brunswick. The other is wooden with gilded copper and has both English runes and the English name Ædan, likely the creator. It is at St Évroult at Mortain in Normandy.
One possible reliquary was the gold and garnet cross—with a hole in its center—that was found with St. Cuthbert's remains.
Social Uses of Relics
Church books from the 900s and 1000s show that relics were used in ceremonies to dedicate a church.
Saints' relics were sometimes used when people swore oaths. In 876, King Alfred the Great made the Danish Army swear on such relics. The Bayeux Tapestry shows Harold Godwinson swearing an oath to William, Duke of Normandy over a reliquary. Several records from the period also show that saints' relics sometimes played a part in ceremonies for freeing slaves. They also appeared in judicial ordeals, which were trials meant to decide if an accused person was innocent or guilty of a crime. The presence of relics is mentioned in five of the sixteen surviving texts that describe ordeal rituals from this period.
Records also show that relics were used during outdoor religious parades. These included Rogation Day processions meant to help the land be fertile by blessing it. They also appeared in parades meant to ward off a specific threat. For example, at his council at Bath, King Æthelred ordered processions involving relics to counter the Viking threat.
Saints and Healing
In many saint stories, there are accounts of saints performing acts of healing. In most of these descriptions, those who were healed were church members or nobles.
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