The Holy Cow

Abstract

IN the spring of the year 1oo3 the aged pontiff, Sylvester II, died-not improbably from poison-in the rambling and half ruinous palace of the Lateran. Compared with the darkness of the age in which he lived, Pope Sylvester was a man of surprising learning and even more surprising broadmindedness; and it is not to be wondered at, therefore, that the majority of his contemporaries regarded him fearfully as a wizard of the deepest dye and wove the most fantastic legends about his name. One such-first recorded by Martinus Polonus of Corenza and repeated by William of Malmesbury-declared that the Pope, by his magic arts, had constructed a speaking statue which he was accustomed to consult on all occasions of doubt, and that the devil, by this means, had promised him that he would live long if he avoided Jerusalem. As usual, the fiend was merely paltering with him in a double sense, as Sylvester realized-too late-when one day he incautiously celebrated Mass at the Jerusalem Church in Rome (Sta. Croce in Gerusalemme). Feeling his end approaching, the Pope confessed his sins, and bade his attendants lay his body on a cart and bury it wherever the horses chose to take it. In token that his sins were forgiven, they drew up in front of the Lateran basilica; and there-to witness to the truth of the story-the sarcophagus of Pope Sylvester, with its crabbed gothic inscription, may be seen to this very day. In its general outlines the story follows a'familiar enough pattern, but I cannot help feeling that the horses have got in by mistake. They should be oxen or cows: they always are in such legends. When, for example, the famous crucifix known as the Holy Face (Volto Santo), which is said to have been made by Nicodemus, the Pharisee who came to Jesus by night, was first brought to Lucca in 742, it was placed on a four-wheeled waggon, made specially to receiVe it, and two unbroken steers drew it unbidden to the cathedral of S. Martino.1 During the reign of Cnut, another effigy of the Crucified was miraculously discovered at Montacute, in Dorset, and the problem of what should be done with it was settled in similar fashion: it was laid on a cart drawn by two oxen, and-a long list of suitable sanctuaries being then recited to them-the intelligent creatures evinced no reaction till the name of Waltham Abbey, in Essex,