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Pastoral Care in Late Anglo-Saxon England

2006; Oxford University Press; Volume: CXXI; Issue: 491 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ehr/cel041

1477-4534

F. Barlow,

Medieval Literature and History

This book comprises an introduction by Francesca Tinti, the editor, and seven essays on the pastoral work of the clergy in England at the end of the Anglo-Saxon period. Most of the essays are longer versions of papers delivered in four sessions dedicated to pastoral care at the International Medieval Congress held in Leeds in July 2002. Dr Tinti excellently sets the scene: the proliferation of small churches in the English countryside due largely to the emergence of a new class of small landowners interested in their own private local churches, and also in the towns due to a new prosperity. At the same time, at a higher level, reform of the Benedictine monasteries drew a sharper line between ‘true’ monasteries and secular minsters. Everywhere churches were being built or reconstructed in more durable materials. This architectural side, however, receives little attention here. Except for one essay on the archaeology of burials, the dominant interest is in the learning, activity and teaching of the parish clergy. Julia Barrow, in a well-researched and erudite essay on the secular clergy c. 900–1066, examines their family backgrounds, how they obtained churches and how they were disciplined before the arrival of archdeacons. Francesca Tinti investigates the early history of church dues in England, church scot and tithes, a very difficult subject which she handles magisterially. Jonathan Wilcox looks at the Catholic Homilies composed by Ælfric ‘the homilist between 987 and 995 when he was a monk at Cerne Abbas, a small Dorset monastery. They are two sequences, each of 40 homilies, for the use of a priest on the Sundays and festivals throughout the church year. Comprising passages translated from the Latin, they make up 14.65 per cent of the surviv-ing corpus of Old English. Copies of these collections were disseminated throughout Anglo-Saxon England; and Wilcox considers what light this throws on the learning of the clergy, the composition of the congregations, and the general religious scene. The red book of Darley (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 422), produced about 1061 at either Sherborne or New Minster, Winchester, is the kind of book that, Helen Gittos considers, a good pastorally-minded priest would take with him as he ministered to parishioners in the villages, and also is good evidence for the liturgy of the parish churches at that time. Moreover, it shows that by 1061 Old English was a perfectly respectable language for the rubrics of the liturgy and even occasionally for the liturgy itself. Gittos pays special attention to the rite of baptism. The ceremony starts with an exorcism, the priest blowing on the child three times and saying (in Latin), ‘Depart from him, unclean spirit, and make room for the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit’. The distribution of the holy water receives detailed instruction: the priest should sprinkle it over himself and the people standing around. And some of it should be taken in a vessel home with the child and used to sprinkle its house and wherever seems appropriate. Sarah Hamilton looks at penance, which the higher clergy in the late Anglo-Saxon church strove hard to ensure played a regular part in the life of every Christian, and also at the means used to force contumacious sinners to repent. Secret confession of sins to a priest should be regular and at least annual, and culminate with death-bed repentance. In return the priest imposed a secret penance. Old English texts of penitentials, rites for administering confession and imposing penance, survive, and are analysed and discussed by Hamilton. There was also public penance restricted to a public services on Ash Wednesday and reconciliation with the penitent on Maundy Thursday. More drastic was excommunication, the expulsion of the sinner from the church, a penalty reserved for recalcitrant public sinners. The evidence for this penalty in the Anglo-Saxon period is scanty and has been controversial: but Hamilton, using especially charter evidence, establishes excommunication as an important aspect of the pastoral life of the church in the late Anglo-Saxon period. Victoria Thompson maintains that Oxford Bodl. MS Laud Misc. 482, a mid-eleventh-century anthology of quotations, which ‘underpin and give force to the performative language of the litany’, allow us to glimpse the questions that troubled the minds of the mid-eleventh-century Worcester clergy as they confessed the sick and the dying. She thinks that Worcester cathedral was its provenance and that it was probably produced in the episcopate of either Ealdred (1046–62) or Wulfstan (1062–95). It contains one comparatively simple penitential and one more complex compilation, and the purpose may have been to promulgate them as ‘the standard set texts’. Thompson describes the manuscript and its contents. Apart from the Latin of the ordines it is entirely in English. Its vernacular entries are the longest extant and are unparalleled in their detail and precision. Finally, Dawn M. Hadley and Jo Buckberry consider the light thrown by the archaeology of funerary practice on attitudes towards the dead. Their description of a large number of excavations of burials throughout England is adorned by eight illustrations. They conclude, because of the variety in locations for burial and the great variety in form (coffins, shrouds, etc., etc.), that, although funerary arrange-ments may have become increasingly under the direct control of the church, there was still opportunity for localised and individual traditions and beliefs to be expressed through the medium of burial. This is a relatively short volume. But it deals with aspects of Anglo-Saxon history which are not often encountered and is full of interest. For once we are brought into the company of the priest, hesitantly, but also zealously, ministering to his parishioners in their houses as well as in the church, and sometimes we meet the parishioners as well.