I’m currently doing some reading in Legenda Aurea, the Dominican Jacobus de
Voragine’s great compendium of saints’ legends and other liturgical feasts,
designed to be a reference book for homilists. Jacobus compiled these stories
in the 1260s and relied on a wide range of Christian authors, often citing
contradicting views on certain matters as a summary of the views held by
previous authors. Legenda Aurea is
first and foremost a conservative compilation, since it contains only five
saints from Jacobus’ own time or the preceding century. Four of these modern
saints are connected with the vogue of mendicant sanctity that dominated the
religious sentiments of the Latin Mediterranean in the thirteenth century.
These are the mendicant founders Francis (d.1226) and Dominic (d.1221), the
Dominican friar and martyr Peter of Verona (d.1252) and the Franciscan tertiary
Elizabeth of Hungary (d.1231). The last of the modern saints is Thomas Becket
(d.1170) whose martyrdom in Canterbury cathedral Jacobus erroneously dates to
1174, the year after his canonization by Pope Alexander III.
This incorrect date suggests that although Jacobus was extremely well-read and
could draw references from a long and impressive list of sources, his knowledge
of English material was quite sparse. Jacobus’ lack of familiarity with English
hagiography becomes all the more apparent when you compare his original work
with the adaptations from thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England such as
the Gilte Legende, the South English Legendary and the Nova Legenda Anglie. Considering that
Jacobus probably envisioned only a relatively local circulation of his work,
his lack of English material is neither surprising nor something that merits rebuke,
but it does result in the occasional misinformation, such as the year of Becket’s
death.
Another piece of information is an interesting anecdote appended to his chapter
on St John the Apostle. Jacobus writes (in William Granger Ryan’s American translation):
Saint Edmund [of East Anglia], king of
England, never refused anyone who asked a favor in the name of Saint John the
Evangelist. Thus it happened one day when the royal chamberlain was absent that
a pilgrim importuned the king in the saint’s name for an alms [sic]. The king,
having nothing else at hand, gave him the precious ring from his finger. Some
time later an English soldier on overseas duty received the ring from the same
pilgrim, to be restored to the king with the following message: “He for whose
love you gave this ring sends it back to you.” Hence it was obvious that Saint
John had appeared to him in the guise of a pilgrim.
'Cy seynt Edward dona un anel a Iohan le ewangelist'
Courtesy of British Library
'Cy sein Johan le ewangelist vient a seint edward p[ur] demaund[er] acun bien pur lam[ur] de deu'
Courtesy of British Library
This anecdote is significant for several
reasons. First of all because it shows an interesting confluence of two of
high-medieval England’s most important saints: Edmund of East Anglia and Edward
the Confessor. The story of the king giving his ring to Saint John in disguise
belongs to the legend of Edward the Confessor and is perhaps one of the most
famous miracles from his hagiographies. It first appears in Aelred of Rievaulx’s
Vita Sancti Edwardi Regis, a work
written for the translation of Edward’s body in 1163, and which was
commissioned by Lawrence, abbot of Westminster. The ring became Edward’s main
attribute and remained so throughout the Middle Ages, as seen below from a
calendar page from the early 1400s.
Edward the Confessor holding his ring, oddly placed at March 18
Harley 2332, Almanac with astrological miscellany, England, 15th century (before 1412)
Courtesy of British Library
Jacobus’ attribution of this episode to the
legend of St Edmund is also significant because it allows us a glimpse of the
close relationship between those cults from the twelfth century onwards. Edmund
had been venerated as a saint since the late ninth century, and his cult centre
had been at Bury St Edmunds from the start. In the second half of the eleventh century
and onwards, the cult of St Edmund experienced an increased literary output of
hagiographical and liturgical material. A new, proper, liturgical office was composed between 1065 and 1087, and Herman the Archdeacon wrote De Miracula Sancti Edmundi c.1100. In the literature of Bury’s
long twelfth century, King Edward the Confessor – universally respected in
English history – was invoked as one of Edmund’s devotees, and as a just king
who granted the abbey many valuable charters. The generosity of Edward was a
recurring feature, appearing both in Herman’s De Miracula and Jocelin’s late-twelfth-century Chronicle of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds.
Edward the Confessor was not canonised until 1161 and his cult was a product of
Westminster Abbey and the political interests of King Henry II. Edward’s cult
had a brief but intense first period of popularity which rapidly diminished at
the explosive growth of the cult of Thomas Becket in the 1170s. Becket’s cult
did not affect the cult of Edmund in the same way, much thanks to Bury being a
thriving literary centre, and brief anecdotes in late-twelfth-century
historiographies – such as Benedict of Peterborough’s Gesta Henrici II and Ralph Coggeshall’s Chronicon Anglicanum – suggests that Edmund enjoyed a much wider
and more stable veneration than did Edward.
Martyrdom of St Edmund
Courtesy of British Library
From the thirteenth century onwards, the two
royal saints began to appear together in both art and literature. We don’t know
which is the earliest example of this. Edward and Edmund – along with two
others – are both listed among England’s peaceable kings in the anonymous Anglo-Norman
Le Estoire de Seint Aedward le Rei
from the 1240s, and in the late 1300s William Langland states in Piers Plowman that Edmund and Edward
were both followed by the personification of Charity. To name some of the
examples of these two appearing together in art, we have a glass cycle in
Amiens from c.1280, and perhaps the most famous instance of them all, the
Wilton Diptych where they appear together with John the Baptist as patron for
the young Richard II.
The Wilton Diptych
Edmund and Edward both displaying their most well-known attributes
Courtesy of Wikimedia
In all these instances mentioned above the
pairing of Edmund of Edward have been done deliberately, while in Jacobus’ Legenda Aurea the two saints have
blended together by mistake. The interesting question is whether this mistake
was owing to Jacobus’ own faulty memory, having heard the story from one of the
many English pilgrims in Italy and then confused the characters, or whether the
story was transmitted to Jacobus in the way he recorded it. In any case, the
faulty attribution of the miracle of the ring to Edmund of East Anglia,
suggests that by the latter half of the thirteenth century, the two royal
patrons of England may already have begun to be paired together, not only in
art and literature but also in the common imagination.
Literature
Anonymous, Le Estoire de Seint Aedward le
Rei, translated by Thelma Fenster and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, ACMRS Press,
2008
Aelred of Rievaulx, The Life of Saint
Edward, King and Confessor, translated by Jane Patricia Freeland and
published in Dutton, Marsha (ed.), Aelred
of Rievaulx: The Historical Works, Cistercian Publications, 2005
Herman the Archdeacon, The Miracles of St
Edmund, translated by Tom Licence, Clarendon Press, 2014
Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda Aurea,
translated by William Granger Ryan, Princeton University Press, 2012
Jocelin of Brakelond, Chronicle of the
Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, translated by Diana Greenway and Jane Sayers,
Oxford World Classics, 2008
Langland, William, The Vision of Piers
Plowman, translated by Schmidt, Everyman, 1995
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