Æfric's Life of Saint Cuthbert

Abstract

iElfric's Life of Saint Cuthbert The Catholic Homilies written by jElfric, then abbot of Cerne in Dorset in the last decade of thetenthcentury1 consist largely of Old English renderings of materials drawn from the homiliary of Paul the Deacon and other Frankish monastic sources. In the century and a half since Benjamin Thorpe's first m o d e m editions for the jElfric Society (1844—46), much of the scholarly enquiry directed towards the homdies has been concerned with the identification of their sources,2 or has focused on a few particular homdies for their doctrinal content. The Sermo de Sacrificio in die Pascha, for example, Second Series X V , has attracted continuing attention for the doubtful light that it throws on tenthcentury views of the nature of the eucharist But though .Elfric is not only the most prolific but the most distinguished Anglo-Saxon prose writer, little attention has been given to the individual homilies or to the collection as a whole as literary constructs. In this paper I will attempt to show how comparison of one homily with its sources can illuminate what .Elfric is trying to do in that homily and also in the series to which it belongs. The homily in question is thetenthin the Second Series, for 20 March, the feast of St Cuthbert. Cuthbert is the only English saint to be given a homily in the series. Perhaps this reflects the assiduous promotion that D. W . RoUason, in his 1987 paper, suggests the cult of the saint received from royal sources in the tenth century—an effort to legitimize the claim of Wessex to be successor to the Northumbrian monarchy.3 However, as Colgrave points out4 Cuthbert's reputation spread both within England and outside it at an early date, no doubt reflecting respect for the authority of Bede. Bede's two lives of Cuthbert, that in prose,Vila Cuthberti Prosaica,5 henceforword V C P , and that in verse, Vita Cuthberti Metrical henceforword V C M , are the most complete sources of information about the life of the saint ^Elfric's Ufe has Utile to offer to studies of Cuthbert and his cult and so has not attracted much modern attention. It adds nothing to Bede: as jElfric acknowledges in his introduction, he is closely dependent on both Bede's lives, 1 JElfric's Catholic Homilies, Second Series, Text, ed. Malcolm Godden, Early English Text Society SS, London, 1979. 2 See in general the series Anglo-Saxon England, passim, though the most compendious account of the sources remains that of Max Forster, 'Ueber die quellen von jEfrics exegetischen Homiliae Catholicae', Anglia 16 (1894), 1-61. 3 Rollason, D. W., 'Why was St Cuthbert so popular?' in Cuthbert, Saint and Patron, ed. D. W . Rollason, Durham, 1987, pp. 9-22. 4 Two Lives of St Cuthbert, ed. Bertram Colgrave, Cambridge, 1940, p. 1. ^ Ed. Colgrave, as n. 4 above. 6 Jaager, Werner Bedas, Metrische Vita Sancti Cuthberti, Leipzig, 1935. 36 A. I. Jones and he shows no evidence of having used any other source. In a sense, iElfric's life is an epitome of both Bede's texts, for it contains no episode that is not in both. Sections 6, 8, 9, 23, 35, and 36 of VCP, which are not paralleled in V C M , and sections 5, 28, 32, 42, 44, and 45 of V C M , which are not paraUeted in VCP, are alike omitted by iElfric. The passages contained either in all three lives or in the two Bede lives, and not in iElfric, conespond as in Table 1 (see next two pages). In order of episodes iElfric is more like V C M — b o t h agree in placing Herbert after the miracles—though iElfric has the relative order of Herbert and the woodcutter's soul reversed. It could be, though, that the version of V C P known to iElfric agreed in order with V C M : in V C P the number oftinesof text in sections 29 to 33 (the miracles)—136—is the same as the number in sections 27 and 28 (Ecgfrith and Herbert). Possibly the breaks after sections 26, 28, and...