'THE BALLAD OF ST STEPHEN AND HEROD': BIBLICAL HISTORY AND MEDIEVAL POPULAR RELIGIOUS CULTURE

Abstract

One immediate problem concerning medieval popular religious culture is how to define it. There has been extensive discussion of popular medieval religious culture; and to paraphrase Douglas Gray, most medievalists who are concerned with it are rather like the Supreme Court justice who remarked (concerning pornography), 'Of course I can't define it, but I know it when I see it.'1 I share Gray's sense that it is much easier to distinguish between popular and 'learned' medieval religious culture on a case-by-case basis, intuitively, than it is to formulate clear and appropriate definitions. The late medieval ballad 'St Stephen and Herod' may, however, serve as a kind of test case because it exemplifies certain aspects of 'popular' medieval Christianity very clearly. The object of this paper is thus twofold. On the one hand, it will attempt to answer the puzzlement of the first editor of the ballad, Thomas Wright, who remarked, 'I know not whence this strange legend of St Steven being King Herod's clerk of the kitchen is derived.'2 At the same time, I wish to suggest that this ballad clearly displays the tendency of medieval popular religion to reshape 'historical' narrative to conform to the conventions and expectations of traditional or 'folk' narrative.3 Obviously any attempt to define or even move towards a definition of a broadly based cultural phenomenon on the basis of one brief poem may seem arbitrary, yet the poem can serve as a strikingly clear example of differing concerns in conflict-- the 'folk' sensibility of medieval popular religious culture reshaping the 'facts' of scriptural history, a mode of history which may be defined for present purposes as a narrative of past events which can be supported from scriptural texts. Since 'St Stephen and Herod' is brief and since it is not widely known, I give a text of the ballad as a convenience to the reader:4 This is a remarkable and interesting narrative, and it is radically unhistorical in two quite different ways. The modern reader might immediately be struck by the fabulous nature of the miracle that provokes Herod to martyr Stephen, but the narrative violates history in a simpler and less debatable way. Stephen proto-martyr was a deacon early in the apostolic age of the Church; he preached the faith to a hostile audience of Jews (including Paul before his conversion) and he was martyred by stoning immediately afterwards. His history, indeed, all that is known about him, is prominently recorded in Acts vi.5-vii.59.5 It therefore follows that he was alive after the Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus. The emphasis in the ballad on the association of Stephen and Herod, and the claim that Stephen's martyrdom was the result of the manifestation of the star at Christ's birth, are radically at odds with biblical chronology. The biblical figure was a witness for the faith in the early years of the Church: the hero of the ballad narrative was martyred while Jesus was still an infant. Medieval religious writers might expect their audience to accept the truth of extra-scriptural miracles concerning some New Testament figure - indeed the New Testament itself provides some sanction for such claims6 - but this narrative flatly contradicts Scripture. At least one medieval author was aware of this specific problem concerning the legend of Stephen and Herod; the anonymous author of the northern Middle English verse account of Stephen's martyrdom 'De Sancto Stephano protomartire' comments: In addition to its intrinsic interest as a medieval comment on the Stephen narrative preserved in the ballad, this text also offers evidence (hitherto unnoticed as far as I am aware) for the possible currency of the English version of the Stephen ballad itself, which is only preserved in one mid-- fifteenth-century manuscript. The comment shows that the core narrative of the Stephen ballad and possibly some version of the ballad itself was current among 'laude ['lewd', i. …