Reconsidering The Medieval Experience at The Shrine in High Medieval England. Anne e Bailey

Journal of Medieval History
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Reconsidering the medieval experience at the

shrine in high medieval England
Anne E. Bailey
To cite this article: Anne E. Bailey (2021) Reconsidering the medieval experience at
the shrine in high medieval England, Journal of Medieval History, 47:2, 203-229, DOI:
10.1080/03044181.2021.1895874
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JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY
2021, VOL. 47, NO. 2, 203–229
https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2021.1895874
Reconsidering the medieval experience at the shrine in high

medieval England
Anne E. Bailey
Faculty of History, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This article reassesses pilgrimage practices in eleventh- and twelfth- Received 6 December 2019
century England and questions the assumption that pilgrims had Accepted 23 June 2020
relatively unrestricted access to saints’ shrines and relics in this
KEYWORDS
period. Drawing on hagiographical evidence, and focusing on six Saints’ cults; pilgrimage;
case studies, the article finds that remarkably few pilgrims are relics; England; hagiography;
depicted in close proximity to a saint’s shrine in these narrative miracle collections; twelfth
sources; they are instead shown venerating at alternative places century
of devotion such as holy wells, empty graves and extra-mural
chapels. It proposes that policies of restricted access were
operated by many English cult centres earlier than is often
imagined, and in discussing why ecclesiastical institutions may
have distanced the laity from their principal shrines the article
sets its conclusions within the wider religious developments of
the time.
The opening pages of Ronald Finucane’s pioneering study on medieval saints’ cults,
Miracles and Pilgrims, invite readers to imagine themselves transported back to the
crypt of twelfth-century Canterbury Cathedral where pilgrims from various walks of
life are milling around the tomb of Thomas Becket.1 The scene depicted by Finucane
is based on a collection of over 500 miracle stories compiled between 1171 and c.1184,
many of which describe devotees in close proximity to the saint’s relics. They record
men and women placing offerings on the tomb, kissing the tomb, spending the night
beside it and even sleeping on it.2 In other examples, a devotee inserts his head into
one of the tomb’s recesses and another manages to crawl inside and becomes stuck.3
These stories support the popular idea that ‘the cult of saints was an unashamedly
physical affair, involving close access to, even contact with, human bodily remains.’4
CONTACT Anne E. Bailey anne.bailey@history.ox.ac.uk Faculty of History, University of Oxford, George

Street, Oxford OX1 2RL, UK
1
Ronald C. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995),
9–10.
2
Benedict of Peterborough, ‘Miracula S. Thomae Cantuariensis’, in Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Arch-
bishop of Canterbury, eds. James C. Robertson and J. Brigstocke Sheppard. Rolls series 67. 7 vols. (London: Longman,
1876–85), 2: respectively, 118–20, 245–7, 67–8; William of Canterbury, ‘Miracula S. Thomae Cantuariensis’, in
Materials … Becket, eds. Robertson and Sheppard, 1: 175.
3
William of Canterbury, ‘Miracula S. Thomae Cantuariensis’, in Materials … Becket, eds. Robertson and Sheppard, 1:
178; Benedict of Peterborough, ‘Miracula S. Thomae Cantuariensis’, in Materials … Becket, eds. Robertson and Shep-
pard, 2: 82–3.
4
John Crook, English Medieval Shrines (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011), xi. Also Adrian R. Bell and Richard S. Dale,
‘The Medieval Pilgrimage Business’, Enterprise and Society 12 (2011): 606.
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
204 A. E. BAILEY
Historians have tended to assume that the freedom allowed to pilgrims at Canterbury
was fairly typical in the twelfth century, in contrast to the later Middle Ages when
pilgrims’ movements were more restricted.5 An influential voice in this respect is the
architectural historian Ben Nilson. In ‘The Medieval Experience at the Shrine’ he
refers to the ‘frenetic activity around shrines that were relatively free of access in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries’.6 Nilson’s conclusions are taken, as is Finucane’s
description, from miracle collections which Nilson describes as ‘the most important
sources for pilgrim activities’.7 Citing examples from four or five collections, he con-
cludes that ‘the miracula suggest little regulation of pilgrims’ during this period.8
The purpose of this article is to take a more nuanced view of the laity’s encounter with
shrines and relics in England’s monastic and minster churches by reconsidering the
hagiographical evidence. The article revisits two of the sources cited by Nilson and exam-
ines a number of other miracle collections compiled during the late eleventh and twelfth
centuries. In particular, it focuses on six case studies of the cults of St James’s Hand at
Reading, St Aldhelm of Malmesbury, St John of Beverley, St Æbbe of Coldingham,
St Swithun of Winchester and St Ivo at Ramsey. Close examination of these texts suggests
that, while ‘freedom of pilgrim activity’ may have been characteristic of some English
saints’ cults in this period, unrestricted access was by no means universal.9
Miracle collections are compilations of short narrative accounts which describe the
stories of men and women who report miracles granted through saintly intervention.
Many of the miracle beneficiaries depicted are pilgrims, arriving at a shrine to request
a favour or to give thanks for one already bestowed. Their stories were typically recorded
by officials at the shrine and gathered into miracle books, but some were also sourced by
hagiographical researchers who interviewed witnesses after the event.10 In their finished
form, miracle collections were heavily mediated by clerical authors, underpinned by a
strong religious agenda and shaped by hagiographical convention, so are not unproble-
matic sources for understanding medieval saint veneration. Nonetheless, historians value
these texts for the incidental social and religious information they contain, and the
present author follows Nilson in drawing on evidence from a handful of miracle collec-
tions in order to consider where, when and how pilgrims engaged with relics at different
pilgrimage destinations.
What follows, however, finds that saints’ shrines were not always central to miraculous
activity in the miracula genre: in the texts under review, remarkably few lay visitors are
depicted in the vicinity of major shrines and relics. Moreover, where restricted access to
shrines is indicated, devotees are shown venerating at alternative places of devotion
such as holy wells, empty graves and extra-mural chapels. The article proposes that
some religious institutions may well have limited visitor access to the shrines of
5
See John Jenkins, ‘Replication or Rivalry? The “Becketization” of Pilgrimage in English Cathedrals’, Religion 49
(2019): 28–9, for details. For later restrictions see, for example, Jenkins, ‘Replication or Rivalry’, 24–47; Nicholas
Orme, ‘Access and Exclusion: Exeter Cathedral, 1300–1540’, in Freedom of Movement in the Middle Ages: Proceedings
of the 2003 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Peregrine Horden (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2007), 267–86.
6
Ben Nilson, ‘The Medieval Experience at the Shrine’, in Pilgrimage Explored, ed. J. Stopford (Woodbridge: York
Medieval Press, 1999), 101.
7
Nilson, ‘Medieval Experience at the Shrine’, 95.
8
Nilson, ‘Medieval Experience at the Shrine’, 100.
9
Jenkins, ‘Replication or Rivalry?’, 28
10
The two compilers of the Becket collections, Benedict of Peterborough and William of Canterbury, are examples of
the former, while William of Malmesbury and Goscelin of Saint-Bertin are examples of the latter.
JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY 205
important saints – perhaps in response to the difficulties posed by the growing number of
visitors – and redirected pilgrims to less intrusive locations. These subsidiary devotional
locations and activities seem to be an important, yet relatively unexplored, aspect of saint
veneration in miracle stories, and the article concludes by suggesting that pilgrims’
experiences in the high Middle Ages were much more varied and multifaceted than is
often appreciated.
The present article contributes to current scholarship in a number of ways. Encounters
between relics and the laity, for example, have come under investigation recently follow-
ing the popularity of studies focusing on material culture and the senses.11 Materiality-
themed research in this context examines the relationship between devotional objects
and their users, and examples which specifically consider saints’ relics include Caroline
Walker Bynum’s Christian Materiality, Charles Freeman’s Holy Bones, Holy Dust and
essays in the edited volume Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval
Europe.12 Interest in the materiality of the medieval pilgrimage experience has also taken
a ‘sensory turn’ in the last few years, prompting a surge of new research looking at the
way in which pilgrimage settings and their sacred objects provoked sensory responses
in audiences. Kathryn Hurlock, for example, has discussed the sensory experiences of
visitors to Welsh shrines, Javier Diaz-Vera has shown how pilgrims’ emotions were trig-
gered by sensory stimuli at Canterbury Cathedral and, more pertinently for the present
enquiry, Dee Dyas has explored the importance of tactile piety in relic devotion.13 More
generally, embodied pilgrimage practices – and particularly those engaging the sense of
touch – are a popular research theme in the social sciences.14 The present article hopes to
both contribute to this fast-growing experiential approach to pilgrimage and also intends
to probe some less familiar aspects of saint veneration such as the possibility that shrine
custodians actively discouraged tactile, and even visual, engagement with reliquaries and
relics at some twelfth-century shrines.
11
For example, Perry Curtis, Material Culture and Cultural Materialisms in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
(Tunhout: Brepols, 2001); Henning Laugerud, ed., Materiality of Devotion in Late Medieval Northern Europe:
Images, Objects and Practices (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2016); C.M. Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval
England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Richard G. Newhauser, ed., A Cultural History of the
Senses in the Middle Ages (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); Michael Bull and Jon P. Mitchell, eds., Ritual, Performance
and the Senses (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011); Suzannah Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
12
Charles Freeman, Holy Bones, Holy Dust: How Relics Shaped the History of Medieval Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2011); Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe
(New York: Zone Books, 2011); Martina Bagnoli and others, eds., Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in
Medieval Europe (London: British Museum, 2010). Other examples include Mark A. Hall, ‘The Cult of Saints in Med-
ieval Perth: Everyday Ritual and the Materiality of Belief’, Journal of Material Culture 16 (2011): 80–104; Karen
Overbey, ‘Seeing Through Stone: Materiality and Place in a Medieval Scottish Pendant Reliquary’, Res: Anthropology
and Aesthetics 66 (2014): 242–58; Sarah Blick, ‘Votives, Images, Interaction and Pilgrimage to the Tomb and Shrine
of St Thomas Becket, Canterbury Cathedral’, in Push Me, Pull You: Physical and Spatial Interaction in Late Medieval
and Renaissance Art, eds. Sarah Blick and Laura D. Gelfand (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 21–58.
13
Kathryn Hurlock, Medieval Welsh Pilgrimage c.1100–1500 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 79–112; Javier
E. Diaz-Vera, ‘Exploring the Relationship between Emotions, Language and Space: Constructs of Awe in Medieval
English Language and Pilgrimage Experience’, Studia Neophilologia 88, no. 2 (2016): 165–89; Dee Dyas, ‘To Be a
Pilgrim: Tactile Piety, Virtual Pilgrimage and the Experience of Place in Christian Pilgrimage’, in Matter of Faith:
An Interdisciplinary Study of Relics and Relic Veneration in the Medieval Period, eds. James Robinson and Lloyd
de Beer (London: British Museum, 2014), 1–7.
14
For example, Avril Maddrell and Richard Scriven, ‘Celtic Pilgrimage, Past and Present: From Historical Geography
to Contemporary Embodied Practices’, Social and Cultural Geography 17 (2016): 300–21; Richard Scriven, ‘Touching
the Sacred: Sensing Spirituality in Irish Holy Wells’, Journal of Cultural Geography (2019): 271–90; Ronan Foley, ‘Per-
forming Health in Place: The Holy Well as a Therapeutic Assemblage’, Health and Place 17 (2011): 470–9.
206 A. E. BAILEY
The article’s focus on English pilgrimage culture additionally accords with an emergent
trend in scholarship which finds medievalists engaging with heritage tourism professionals
for the purpose of understanding, and sometimes recreating, the medieval pilgrimage experi-
ence.15 Growing public enthusiasm for ‘historic’ pilgrimage trails, an increasing number of
pageants celebrating medieval saints and a concerted effort made by the Anglican Church
to promote its cathedrals as pilgrimage destinations have led to a widespread interest in
pre-Reformation pilgrimage in the British Isles.16 For those outside the Roman Catholic
faith, the relationship between pilgrims and holy relics is less about devotion and more
about cultural history;17 and one of the attractions of modern pilgrimage is the idea that
twenty-first century participants are following ancient traditions.18 As a consequence, the
activities of past and present pilgrims in English cathedrals are coming under greater scrutiny
from scholars, as well as finding a wider audience in the general public.19 Cathedral exhibi-
tions featuring medieval pilgrimage, as well as public engagement exercises such as the
‘measuring to a saint’ art installation at Southwark Cathedral in March 2020, are adding
to the public knowledge of medieval saint veneration.20 As interest in medieval pilgrimage
grows, it is likely that more detailed analyses of pilgrims’ practices, such as the one offered
in the present article, will contribute to what is becoming an increasingly popular strand
of western cultural heritage and academic scholarship.
Miracle stories as a source for pilgrim activities

The Christian medieval cult of saints has received much scholarly attention over the last
40 or 50 years, and miracle stories produced in England before 1200 have proved
15
As exemplified, for example, in John Jenkins, ‘Modelling the Cult of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral’,
Journal of the British Archaeological Association 173 (2020): 100–23; and Catherine A.M. Clarke, ed., The St Thomas
Way and the Medieval March of Wales: Exploring Place, Heritage, Pilgrimage (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2020).
16
For example, at the time of writing the British Pilgrimage Trust listed 125 pilgrimage routes on its website: https://
britishpilgrimage.org/routes/. Recently established pageants include Canterbury’s Medieval Pageant commemorat-
ing Henry II’s penitential pilgrimage to Becket’s shrine and the St Alban Puppet Pilgrimage. The announcement
by the Association of English Cathedrals that 2020 was to be a ‘Year of Cathedrals; a Year of Pilgrimage’ was pro-
moted in February 2020 with the production of ‘Pilgrim Passports’.
17
For example, see Anne E. Bailey, ‘The Troublesome Relic of a “Troublesome Priest”? Negotiating the Boundaries of
Religion, History and Popular Culture in Anglican Canterbury’, Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 31 (2019):
153–66.
18
As might be typified by Sally Welch’s comment that ‘the modern pilgrim is reminded at every turn in the road …
that the road they are treading now has been walked by thousands of people over hundreds of years.’ Sally Welch,
Making a Pilgrimage (Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2009), 15–16. ‘Celtic pilgrimage’ practices are redolent with this motif:
see, for example, Maddrell and Scriven, ‘Celtic Pilgrimage, Past and Present’. Participating in modern pilgrimage is
often interpreted by scholars as a form of medievalism. For example, Paul Genoni, ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress Across
Time: Medievalism and Modernity on the Road to Santiago’, Studies in Travel Writing 15, no. 2 (2010): 157–75;
Carol M. Cusack, ‘History, Authenticity and Tourism: Encountering the Medieval While Walking Saint Cuthbert’s
Way’, in Journeys and Destinations: Studies in Travel, Identity and Meaning, ed. Alex Norman (Newcastle upon Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars, 2013), 1–21.
19
In addition to the items mentioned above, n. 15, see, for example, Dee Dyas and John Jenkins, eds., Pilgrimage and
England’s Cathedrals: Past, Present and Future (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); Simon Coleman, ‘On
Praying in an Old Country: Ritual, Replication, Heritage and Powers of Adjacency in English Cathedrals’, Religion
49 (2019): 120–41; Tina Sepp, ‘“The Narrative Is Ambiguous and that Location Isn’t the Right Location”: Presenting
and Interpreting Medieval Saints Today in Canterbury, Durham and York’, Journal of Ethnology and Folklorists 13
(2019): 79–105; Marion Bowman and Tina Sepp, ‘Caminoisation and Cathedrals: Replication, the Heritagisation of
Religion, and the Spiritualisation of Heritage’, Religion 49 (2019): 74–98; Simon Coleman, ‘From the Liminal to the
Lateral: Urban Religion in English Cathedrals’, Tourism Geographies 21 (2019): 384–404.
20
For example, information boards at St Albans Cathedral when the author visited in 2019. For the Southwark art
installation, see https://www.englishcathedrals.co.uk/latest-news/southwark-cathedrals-lent-art/
particularly popular with scholars taking social, cultural, architectural and medical
approaches.21 Little of the literature, however, looks in any detail at the ways in which
ordinary pilgrims engaged with shrines and relics in ecclesiastical environments before
the thirteenth century. Evidence is often incorporated into more general studies which
sweep across centuries and different religious institutions and only mention pre-1200
sources in passing.22
Ben Nilson’s ‘The Medieval Experience at the Shrine’ – which later developed into his
Cathedral Shrines of Medieval England – is not unusual in this respect; the ‘shrine experi-
ence’ he outlines is largely a late medieval one. As Nilson is aware, the earlier centuries
suffer from a dearth of source material. Documentary records for the period are scarce,
and an absence of archaeological and architectural remains – particularly for smaller
monastic establishments – means that little specific detail is known about the physical
environment which would have governed a pilgrim’s encounter with holy objects in
English churches at this time. This is also true for some larger foundations such as
St Edmunds at Bury where pilgrims’ movements still remain a matter of scholarly specu-
lation.23 Latin miracula, however, offer a corrective to this deficit. They survive in large
numbers and depict the ritual practices of numerous pilgrims seeking intercession from a
saint in a ‘shrine’ setting.
The Latin sources on which the present study is based were chosen to provide a coun-
terpoint to the idea that shrines were freely accessible to pilgrims before 1200. They are
not, therefore, intended to be representative.24 Rather, they comprise a small group of
texts which offers an alternative to the free access scenario described by Nilson and
implied by other influential scholars. The collections featured were compiled, respect-
ively, between c.1080 and c.1200, with the earlier period represented by the Miracula
S. Ivonis and the Miracula S. Swithuni, the latter by the ‘Miracles of St James’s Hand’
and the Miracula S. Æbbe, with the miracles of St Aldhelm (from William of
21
Examples include Simon Yarrow, Saints and their Communities: Miracle Stories in Twelfth-Century England
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Henry Mayr-Harting, ‘Functions of a Twelfth-Century Shrine: The Miracles
of St Frideswide’, in Studies in Medieval History Presented to R.H.C. Davis, eds. Henry Mayr-Harting and R.I. Moore
(London: Hambledon Press, 1985), 193–206; S.J. Ridyard, ‘Functions of a Twelfth-Century Recluse Revisited: The
Case of Godric of Finchale’, in Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages: Studies Presented to Henry Mayr-Harting,
eds. Richard Gameson and Henrietta Leyser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 236–50; Finucane, Miracles;
Rachel Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England (Philadel-
phia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); T. Tatton-Brown, ‘Canterbury and the Architecture of Pilgrimage
Shrines in England’, in Pilgrimage: The English Experience from Becket to Bunyan, eds. Colin Morris and Peter
Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 90–107; John Maddison, ‘Housing and Honouring the
Saints: English Medieval Architecture and the Cult of Relics’, Studia Liturgia 50 (2020): 22–39; Irina Metzler, Dis-
ability in Medieval Europe: Thinking about Physical Impairment during the High Middle Ages, c.1100–1400
(London: Routledge, 2006), 126–85; Claire Trenery, Madness, Medicine and Miracle in Twelfth-Century England
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2019).
22
For example, Robert Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs
to the Reformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013); Sarah Hopper, To Be a Pilgrim: The Medieval
Pilgrimage Experience (Stroud: Sutton, 2002); Jonathon Sumption, Pilgrimage: An Image of Medieval Pilgrimage
(London: Faber and Faber, 2002); Diana Webb, Pilgrimage in Medieval England (London: Hambledon, 2000).
23
Rebecca Pinner, The Cult of St Edmund in Medieval East Anglia (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2015), 25, 163–4.
24
Since it is likely that we will never know the exact number of miracle collections produced in England at this time,
it is impossible to say how ‘representative’ this sample is. Examples which do depict pilgrims close to a shrine include
the miracula of Thomas Becket (discussed above); Reginald of Durham, Libellus de Vita et Miraculis S. Godrici, Here-
mitae de Finchale; appendix miraculorum, ed. J. Stevenson. Surtees Society 20 (London: Nicholas and Picker-
ing,1845), 371–499; R. Foreville and G. Keir, eds. and trans., The Book of St Gilbert (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1987); and Thomas of Monmouth, The Life and Miracles of St William of Norwich, eds. and
trans. A. Jessopp and M.R. James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896) which is discussed more fully
below.
208 A. E. BAILEY
Malmesbury’s Gesta pontificum Anglorum) and the two miracula of John of Beverley
positioned between.
While the chronology of a collection’s composition is usually known, ascertaining the
individual dates attached to particular events in the texts is less easy to achieve because
many stories describe historic episodes which occurred before 1080, or at an unknown
time in the past. For this reason, the study is limited to miracula which provide 10 or
more stories falling securely between the timeline of 1080–1200. In total, 170 stories
were surveyed across seven miracle collections (see the Appendix for details).
Whether composed by in-house hagiographers (for example, William of Malmesbury
for Aldhelm’s miracles) or by a professional writer (for example, Goscelin of Saint-Bertin
for St Ivo’s eleventh-century miracula), the main hagiographical remit of each author was
the same: to extol the posthumous activities of a particular saint by recording the miracles
attributed to him or her. While little is known about their audiences, it seems likely that
the stories were primarily intended for a cult’s immediate religious community, although
it is also possible that many were put to wider use to edify the laity, perhaps in the form of
sermons.25
Despite their evident potential as a historical source, miracle collections present many
interpretative difficulties for scholars wishing to understand how and when devotees
encountered relics in ecclesiastical settings. It cannot be known, for example, to what
extent the narratives accurately reflect pilgrims’ devotional practices and not least
because hagiographers limited their attention to those who reported miracles, presum-
ably a small fraction of visiting pilgrims. Hagiographers were also not especially con-
cerned to record every commonplace detail, and some may have been keener than
others to show pilgrims coming into close physical contact with their monastery’s
relics. Nonetheless, we should also bear in mind that hagiographers considered them-
selves truthful reporters, and moving too far from known reality would have lost them
credibility both for their stories and, by implication, for their saints.26
The task of trying to understand pilgrims’ experiences in high medieval England is not
helped by a conceptual problem concerning the word ‘shrine’ in modern academic usage.
It has become commonplace to use the term as a synonym for ‘cult centre’, broadly refer-
ring to a religious institution housing a saint. However, the word ‘shrine’ also has a nar-
rower definition. Derived from the Latin scrinium – meaning a container of sacred items
– it additionally pertains to a material object: an artefact containing holy relics, usually
the corporeal remains of a saint.27
The blurring of these two meanings in academic writing has important implications
for the present study, because it leads to some confusion as to where pilgrims
were physically located according to miracle accounts.28 A case in point can be
found in the introduction to the printed edition of Geoffrey of Burton’s Vita Sancte
Moduenne virginis miracula, which informs readers that ‘cures all took place at the
25
As implied, for example, by Thomas of Monmouth’s reference to using ‘simple’ language for instruction. Thomas
of Monmouth, Life and Miracles, 231, 272. For a modern English translation, see Miri Rubin, The Life and Passion of
William of Norwich (London: Penguin, 2014).
26
For approaches to miracle stories as a historical source, see Marcus Bull, The Miracles of Our Lady of Rocamadour:
Analysis and Translation (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1999), 11–20.
27
For a list of terminology pertaining to shrines and reliquaries, see John Crook, The Architectural Setting of the Cult
of Saints in the Early Christian West, c.300–1200 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 242–3.
28
As, for example, with Finucane’s juxtaposition of ‘shrine cures’ with ‘home-cures’. Finucane, Miracles, 83–99.
saint’s shrine’.29 The accuracy of this statement rests on the definition of ‘shrine’.
Although it is indeed the case that every recorded healing miracle occurs in the
church at Burton Abbey, close study of the text reveals that only one of these healing
stories mentions the reliquary containing St Modwenna’s relics.30 It may well have
been that ‘the central site’ for veneration was the saint’s reliquary, but it is not possible
to deduce from the hagiography that pilgrims were regularly allowed anywhere near it.31
In a collection of 30 miracle stories, there is only one other example in which a secular
visitor is described as being in close proximity to the shrine, and this features a penitent
who is said to have been granted special permission.32
This is not an isolated example. While Nilson’s hypothesis about ‘free access’ seems to
characterise lay devotion around some saints’ shrines – Becket’s is the prime example – it
is not the whole story. As this article will show, a striking aspect in many miracle collec-
tions is the dearth of lay devotees shown drawing close to a shrine, giving rise to the
possibility that public access was often more restricted than historians have hitherto
realised. Although argumentum ex silentio is, admittedly, a difficult approach, it
should be noted that it is one also employed by historians who propose that pilgrims
had unrestricted access to saints’ shrines based on the absence of evidence to the
contrary.33
If there is the possibility that lay devotees did not always come into contact with
enshrined relics – either in particular churches, or at particular times – this alternative
perspective is worth investigating. As well as suggesting that policies of restricted
access may not, after all, have been a feature specifically characteristic of the later
Middle Ages, it also raises the question of what pilgrims did when shrines were out of
bounds. Miracle stories go some way to answering this. As will be shown, their narratives
reveal a richer, and more complex, picture of saint devotion in high medieval England
than is often described by modern scholars.
Saints, shrines and pilgrims in high medieval England

Saints’ relics, and the pilgrims they attracted, were a ubiquitous feature of English reli-
gious life in the Middle Ages. By the twelfth century most major Benedictine and Augus-
tinian establishments had laid claim to at least one important saint, with venerable saintly
patrons such as Swithun at Winchester, Edmund at Bury and Cuthbert at Durham
enshrined on elevated platforms and honoured with formal cults. These dead celebrities
were prized assets because they attracted prestige, patrons and pilgrims. Given their
social and spiritual worth, it is perhaps unsurprising that previously unknown relics
were often fortuitously ‘discovered’, and some monks even went so far as to steal
saints from rival monasteries if the hagiographical trope of furta sacra (sacred theft) is
to be believed.34
29
Geoffrey of Burton, Vita Sancte Moduenne virginis, in Life and Miracles of St Modwenna, ed. and trans. Robert
Bartlett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), xxvi.
30
Geoffrey of Burton, Vita Sancte Moduenne virginis, ed. and trans. Bartlett, 210.
31
Geoffrey of Burton, Vita Sancte Moduenne virginis, ed. and trans. Bartlett, xxxi.
32
Geoffrey of Burton, Vita Sancte Moduenne virginis, ed. and trans. Bartlett, 218.
33
For example, Nilson, ‘Medieval Experience’, 100.
34
Patrick J. Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Chichester: Princeton University Press,
1990).
210 A. E. BAILEY
Stories of furta sacra from the high Middle Ages highlight one significant character-
istic of many saints’ shrines in this period: they were portable, to the extent that a few
monks could lift and carry them away. Although surviving and reconstructed English
shrines – such as those of Edward the Confessor and St Alban – give modern visitors
the impression that medieval shrines were solid, towering edifices, those in the late ele-
venth and twelfth centuries were often rather different in scale. As John Crook explains,
typical shrines at this time were likely to comprise a richly adorned reliquary resting on –
but not necessarily attached to – a stone slab elevated by carved pillars.35 Many had
handles for carrying, as famously depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry. According to
Crook, these portable shrines were probably located close to, attached to – or even
placed on – the high altar.36 As will be shown, the movability of saints’ shrines offers
the possibility that some may have spent long periods out of sight, and were only put
on public display for important religious occasions.
One question to ask when considering pilgrim access in this period is whether all
Romanesque churches were architecturally equipped to accommodate large, unorganised
crowds around saints’ shrines in what was effectively the liturgical working area of a
sacred building. Although the late eleventh century saw some important English
churches such as St Albans, Winchester and Bury undergo building extensions to
create pilgrim-friendly ambulatories and axial chapels, it is also probable that many
smaller churches were spatially far more constrained.37 A story from Burton Abbey, in
which a penitent stationed by the saint’s shrine is miraculously freed of his iron bond,
attests to the close proximity of the shrine to the monks singing the monastic office.
The penitential device is said to have rolled into the choir, disturbing the celebration
of Mass.38
Disruption to the daily office is only one of many disadvantages of allowing pilgrims to
draw close to shrines. Many others come to light in contemporary sources including fire
hazards, structural damage and theft.39 There was also the dirt and mess left by visiting
pilgrims. The twelfth-century hagiographer, Thomas of Monmouth, relates how the
newly martyred St William appeared in a vision, complaining that his tomb was being
soiled by muddy feet and ‘by the foul spittle of many’ (inhonestis plurimorum
sputis).40 In a story featuring a woman suffering from poisoning Thomas also describes
one of the more unpleasant consequences of allowing sick pilgrims to congregate around
a shrine. The woman’s prodigious vomiting was so copious and obnoxious that bystan-
ders fled in disgust.41 There are, then, a number of practical reasons why ecclesiastical
35
Crook, Architectural Setting, 267–73.
36
Crook, English Medieval Shrines, 211–12.
37
Nilson, Cathedral Shrines, 65.
38
Geoffrey of Burton, Vita Sancte Moduenne virginis, ed. and trans. Bartlett, 188–90.
39
Examples include H.E. Butler, ed., The Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond Concerning the Acts of Samson, Abbot of the
Monastery of St Edmund (London: Nelson, 1949), 106–16; Arcoid, Miracula Sancti Erkenwaldi, in The Saint of
London: The Life and Miracles of St Erkenwald, Text and Translation, ed. and trans. E. Gordon Whatley (Binghamp-
ton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1989), 122; Thomas of Monmouth, Life and Miracles, 128;
Leslie Watkiss and Marjorie Chibnall, eds., The Waltham Chronicle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 66–8;
Gerald of Wales, The Journey through Wales/The Description of Wales, ed. and trans. Lewis Thorpe (London:
Penguin, 1978), 84.
40
Thomas of Monmouth, Life and Miracles, 171.
41
Thomas of Monmouth, Life and Miracles, 249.
authorities may have wished to restrict pilgrims’ movements, particularly in churches

which lacked the luxury of plentiful space.
Before turning to the six case studies, it is worth briefly examining one argument made
by scholars in support of free access. This is the practice of incubation, the ritual of sleep-
ing at a shrine overnight, which suggests to historians that shrines were open 24 hours a
day.42 Although these nocturnal vigils are frequently mentioned in miracle accounts, it is
important to note that they are usually associated with special feast days, and it is not
unlikely that religious institutions extended their opening hours, and made a special
effort to display their relics, during festive periods. It is striking, for example, that well
over three-quarters of St Aldhelm’s miracles at Malmesbury Abbey are said to have
occurred on important feast days, and the proportion in an anonymous late eleventh-
century collection of St Swithun’s miracles is even greater.43
The emphasis given to feast-day miracles is usually explained by modern commenta-
tors as a consequence of these times being considered particularly propitious for mira-
cles. However, an alternative explanation is that these were the only periods when
pilgrims were allowed access to relics in some cult centres.44 Textual clues supporting
this theory include references to individuals who repeatedly seek medical help from a
saint but solely on annual feast days, and the description of Beverley Minster – home
to the relics of St John of Beverley – as the place ‘where people used to come each
year hoping for the favour of divine mercy’.45 Even if all-year-round visitation was
allowed, many monastic churches clearly kept ‘opening times’. A miracle story in the
Liber Eliensis, for example, explains that a sick man arrived at Ely Cathedral at the
monks’ mealtime, ‘when the entrance and exits are customarily barred and guarded’.46
Access to cult centres, of course, did not necessarily equate to freely accessible relics,
and many miracle stories are fairly vague about exactly where pilgrims spent their time
while awaiting a cure, merely stating that he/she was taken ‘there’, ‘to this place’, or ‘to the
site of his/her future cure’. A few miracle stories show pilgrims in a monastery’s outer
precincts or being cured in outer areas of the monastic church, such as the girl depicted
rolling around the atrium of Coldingham Priory as her cure takes effect.47
Having entered the church building proper, secular visitors in medieval England nor-
mally had their movements restricted to the nave.48 The choir and presbytery – said to be
the usual locations of shrines in Romanesque churches – were areas reserved for the
clergy, and it seems unlikely that general access to this sacred area would have been per-
mitted. Although some miracle stories describe the odd pilgrim entering the choir, this
intrusion is usually shown as being by invitation only, as in the case of a man led to the
42
For incubation in miracle narratives, see Bartlett, Why Can the Dead?, 359–60; Finucane, Miracles, 87–8.
43
William of Malmesbury, Gesta pontificum Anglorum, ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom. 2 vols. (Oxford: Clar-
endon Press, 2007), 1: 618, 622, 624, 638, 642–4, 648–50, 652, 656, 658, 660. For St Swithun, see below, n. 103.
44
As was the case with relics at Westminster in the fifteenth century, for example: Julian Luxford, ‘Recording and
Curating Relics at Westminster Abbey in the Late Middle Ages’, Journal of Medieval History 45 (2019): 119.
45
William of Malmesbury, Gesta pontificum, 1: 652: ‘ … quo populus quoque anno venire consueverat, divinæ mis-
erationis gratiam exspectans’; William Ketell, Miracula Sancti Johannis, in Acta sanctorum, May II (Antwerp: Société
des Bollandistes, 1680), 176C.
46
‘Quando maxime introitus et exitus obserari solent et custdodiri’: E.O. Blake, ed., Liber Eliensis. Camden, 3rd
series, 92 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1962), 366.
47
Miracula S. Swithuni, in The Cult of St Swithun, ed. and trans. M. Lapidge. Winchester Studies, 4.2 (Oxford: Clar-
endon Press, 2003), 686; Ketell, Miracula, 176D; Robert Bartlett, ed. and trans., Vita et miracula S. Æbbe virginis: The
Miracles of St Æbbe of Coldingham and St Margaret of Scotland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 56.
48
Nilson, Cathedral Shrines, 94.
212 A. E. BAILEY
altar by the prior and monks of Winchester in order to give thanks for his cure.49 Unin-
vited incursions beyond the nave are more usually portrayed as exceptional. One example
involves a man at Malmesbury Abbey who waits until the monks have processed out of
the choir into the cloister before sneaking in and prostrating himself in front of the
altar.50
Here, then, are a few examples taken from miracula which indicate that public access
to some saints’ shrines in the high Middle Ages may not always have been quite as free
and easy as modern scholars sometimes suppose. What follows is a more detailed exam-
ination of six case studies which cast some doubt on the idea that shrines in the high
Middle Ages were usually freely accessible to members of the general public.
The case studies

The Miracles of St James’s Hand
The first case study is the cult of the Hand of St James at Reading Abbey. Established by
Henry I in 1121, Reading was a wealthy and influential foundation which, by the late
twelfth century, housed a prestigious relic: the Hand of St James the Great. The hand
relic had once been in the possession of the German emperor Henry V, although
exactly how and when it arrived at Reading is still debated. Nonetheless, its political
importance for Henry I and his Angevin heirs is well known, and the compilation of a
miracle collection in the last decade of the twelfth century doubtless helped to advertise
Reading Abbey as ‘a goal of pilgrimage and a source of miraculous healing power’.51
Although the Miracles of St James’s Hand contains 28 miraculous episodes, the relic
itself – kept in a portable reliquary on a beam above the high altar – makes an appearance
in a mere eight of them, only six of which involve lay pilgrims.52 These appearances,
moreover, are fairly formal affairs carefully orchestrated by the clergy. In three stories
the reliquary is described being brought out in procession: once to the congregation
during the feast of Whitsun, and twice to the local inhabitants as a means of combating
outbreaks of disease.53 During a particularly virulent epidemic in Reading, for example,
the town’s sick are laid out on the streets and the reliquary is carried over them.54 A
fourth story concerns the translation ceremony performed by Gilbert Foliot, bishop of
London (1163–87), when the relic is ritually transferred into a new, and more splendid,
casket. A blind member of the congregation is cured as the bishop holds aloft the Hand in
a gesture of blessing.55
Apart from these four ceremonial events, sightings of the famous relic in the stories
are limited to private viewings, such as that granted by the abbot to the earl of Gloucester
and his party.56 There are also two other private cures featuring women from less exalted
49
Miracula S. Swithuni, 686.
50
William of Malmesbury, Gesta pontificum, 1: 624–6.
51
B. Kemp, ‘The Miracles of the Hand of St James’, Berkshire Archaeological Journal 65 (1970): 5. For the political
background to the cult at Reading, and for further reading, see Kemp, ‘Miracles of the Hand of St James’, 1–6;
Yarrow, Saints and their Communities, 190–213.
52
See Appendix.
53
Kemp, ‘Miracles of the Hand of St James’, 7–8, 11–12.
54
Kemp, ‘Miracles of the Hand of St James’, 8.
55
Kemp, ‘Miracles of the Hand of St James’, 13–14.
56
Kemp, ‘Miracles of the Hand of St James’, 10–11.
backgrounds. One of these is Alice of Essex who is instructed in a vision to seek a cure for
her crippled hand at Reading. Alice duly arrives at the abbey church and tells her story to
the sacristan who proceeds to lead her to the altar where she hears Mass and offers a
candle. After Mass, the sub-prior brings out the reliquary. As the relic is held above
Alice’s arm a monk named Nicholas bathes her afflicted limb with ‘relic water’ (water
in which the relic had been dipped), and she is slowly but surely cured.57
What is particularly notable about the miracula of St James’s Hand is that, with the
exception of the clergy, no individual is ever shown coming into direct physical
contact with the relic or its casket. When St James’s Hand is brought out in procession,
the mere sight of the reliquary is said to induce cures, and the relic is held over, not on,
Alice’s arm.58 Alice’s cure is, in fact, activated through contact with relic water, a mediat-
ing substance which is shown being responsible for the cures of many more medical con-
ditions in the miracula than the relic itself. Moreover, the narratives reveal that
suppliants need not even visit the abbey to gain the benefit of this miraculous elixir:
some members of elite society, such as the sheriff of Surrey and the noblewoman Aqui-
lina, have it brought in ampullae to their sickbeds at home.59
Relic water was evidently not the only alternative source of miraculous power offered
to devotees at Reading, because the miracula also indicate that suppliants focused their
prayers and rituals on miscellaneous altars, including that of St James.60 Adorned with an
image of the saint, St James’s altar seems to have encouraged levels of tactile piety and
intimacy not associated with the hand relic. In one story, a crippled boy climbs the
altar steps, and clings to the image in a fervent embrace.61
In summary, then, although the cult of St James’s Hand may have been politically
important and widely celebrated in twelfth-century England, its associated miracle
stories suggest that pilgrims only had limited access to the relic. Kept in its magnificent
casket on a reliquary beam in the choir of the abbey church, the hand relic would nor-
mally have been out of sight as well as touch, and most cure-seeking devotees in the nar-
ratives seem to make do with alternative miraculous sources associated with the saint:
namely, relic water and subsidiary altars. Only on limited, and carefully managed,
occasions are ordinary pilgrims depicted coming into close proximity to the relic, and
even then these events are shown as being narrowly circumscribed. The narratives
seem to promote the idea that Reading’s hand relic was an object too precious and
sacred to be put on display for general public viewing. They suggest that the abbey,
which attracted and welcomed large numbers of visitors, kept its most prestigious holy
possession safely tucked away.
The cult of St Aldhelm at Malmesbury Abbey

When the chronicler and hagiographer, William of Malmesbury (c.1090–c.1143),
finished writing his Gesta pontificum Anglorum around the third decade of the twelfth
57
58
Kemp, ‘Miracles of the Hand of St James’, 8, 11. For the power of sight in this context, see Biernoff, Sight and
Embodiment.
59
Kemp, ‘Miracles of the Hand of St James’, 6–7, 16.
60
Kemp, ‘Miracles of the Hand of St James’, 9, 11, 15.
61
214 A. E. BAILEY
century, it included a final book charting the life and miracles of his patron saint,
St Aldhelm (d. 709). Working from an earlier Life of the saint by Faricius of Arezzo
(d. 1117) and his own personal memories, William recounted 17 posthumous miracles
attributed to Aldhelm at Malmesbury Abbey. If William’s chronology is reliable, 11 of
these pertain to events after 1078 when Bishop Osmund of Salisbury formally translated
the saint’s relics from a subterranean tomb into an elevated shrine.62
Aldhelm’s cult at Malmesbury was evidently very different in nature and scope from
that of St James’s Hand. William’s text suggests that it typically attracted local pilgrims
from the lower social orders, and seems to have been much more pilgrim-oriented
than the cult at Reading. Only one healing miracle is recorded away from the church,
and crowds and feast days are mentioned much more frequently. Despite this,
however, only a single member of the laity is said to come into tactile contact with Ald-
helm’s relics or reliquary, and just four miracles are shown taking place in its vicinity.63
Accounts in which pilgrims and relics combine all involve important feast days. Three
of these report how, on Ascension Day, the ‘shrine’ (scrinium, feretrum) is ‘brought out to
the people’ (‘Tunc scrinium effertur in populum’), and carried from the church, in pro-
cession, by the sacristans.64 It is the custom, adds William, that the procession halts at the
church door and the sacristans ‘fix’ (coaptent) the reliquary in such a way that pilgrims
must crouch to pass under it.65 One story describes how an archdeacon of Salisbury is
cured of his stammer the moment he stoops beneath the feretrum.66
The fourth, and final, story concerning Aldhelm’s relics is slightly bizarre on initial
reading. A mute man from Calne visits the abbey during an unspecified festival in the
hope of regaining his speech. After glimpsing a vision of the saint by the high altar, he
wanders down into the crypt where he has a similar experience. As he opens his
mouth to cry out, a monk has a premonition of an impending miracle and thrusts the
fingers of St Aldelm into his mouth. As a result, the man is cured.67
At first glance, the mechanics surrounding this cure are extremely odd. Since it is
usually assumed that the relics of Aldhelm were interred, more or less intact (minus
an arm bone given to Bishop Osmund of Salisbury), we might imagine that the oppor-
tunist monk dipped into the reliquary containing Aldhelm’s body and inserted some
bones into the pilgrim’s mouth.68 However, the Latin reads digiti brachii (‘the fingers
of the arm’), and this phrasing would make more sense if the object in question was
not a withered limb but an arm reliquary with two fingers outstretched in a gesture of
blessing.69 Indeed, a similar miracle involving the cure of a noble with the touch of an
arm reliquary is recorded by Guibert of Nogent a few decades earlier.70 In the case of
Aldhelm, we know that the shrine (scrinium, feretrum) carried out in procession was
62
63
William of Malmesbury, Gesta pontificum, 1: 658–60, 642–4, 650–2, 656.
64
William of Malmesbury, Gesta pontificum, 1: 652.
65
66
67
68
For Bishop Osmund and the arm bone, see William of Malmesbury, Gesta pontificum, 1: 640.
69
For the liturgical use of arm relics of this kind, see Cynthia Hahn, ‘The Spectacle of the Charismatic Body: Patrons,
Artists and Body-Part Reliquaries’, in Treasures of Heaven, eds. Bagnoli and others (London: British Museum, 2010),
166–7.
70
The arm relic of Arnoul of Clermont: Paul J Archambault, ed. and trans, A Monk’s Confession: The Memoirs of
Guibert of Nogent (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press), 210.
fairly large and substantial because pilgrims had to stoop in order to pass beneath it. This
leads to the possibility that there was more than one reliquary at Malmesbury containing
Aldhelm’s relics, and that a secondary arm-relic could have been used in a similar way to
that of St James’s Hand at Reading.
To return to the main reliquary, however, it may be telling that the shrine (scrinium) is
‘brought out to the people’ on Ascension Day.71 This implies a special coming together of
saint and devotees, and the possibility that on other days the shrine was not publicly
accessible. This is further suggested by three other objects mentioned by William
which seem to function as alternative locations for everyday devotion: a crucifix (crucifix-
ium), an altar (altar) and a tomb (sepulcrum, mausoleum). The crucifix features in four
accounts: three pilgrims are said to lie prostrate before it, and one leans her crutches
against it after her cure.72 Since it is likely that the crucifix refers to the rood normally
attached to the rood screen in monastic churches, we might infer that these cures took
place in the nave. References to ‘the altar’, however, are more difficult.73 The miracula
of St James’s Hand, for example, identifies three different altars at Reading Abbey, includ-
ing the high altar.74 However, William gives us a clue as to the whereabouts of the ‘altar’
at Malmesbury in a story relating how a man steals into the choir in the monks’ absence
and prostrates himself in front of the altar.75 The altar, therefore, seems to have been in
the choir. This provides us with two possibilities: the altar in question is either the high
altar, or one either attached to, or associated with, Aldhelm’s shrine.
This type of interpretative difficulty is compounded by the fact that three pilgrims at
Malmsbury are recorded at a ‘tomb’.76 In this particular collection, the distinction
between ‘tomb’ (mausoleum) and ‘shrine’ (scrinium) is clearly made by William in his
story of Aldhelm’s translation in 1078, in which he describes Aldhelm’s bones being
taken from a mausoleum and placed in scrinio (‘in a shrine’).77 For William, the signifi-
cance of the translation was that Aldhelm’s body was no longer ‘pressed down in the
earth by a stone’ but elevated above ground to a more worthy location.78 The word scri-
nium is used again with reference to the Ascension Day processions, but does not occur
again. The terms mausoleum and sepulchrum, however, are used for cases of miraculous
healing, and two of these accounts appear to have taken place after the translation of 1078
when the relics were no longer in the original tomb.79
Here, then, is something of a puzzle. In referring to a shrine, a sepulchre and an altar,
is William using three different terms for what was ostensibly the same object of devo-
tion, or is he identifying three completely separate items, and – if so – were they in
the same, or different, locations? Were the shrine and tomb one and the same, and
what was the relationship of the ‘altar’ to both? The simplest explanation is that a detach-
able reliquary containing Aldhelm’s body lay on, or was mounted above, his old tomb in
71
72
William of Malmesbury, Gesta pontificum, 1: 632, 652, 658, 660.
73
William of Malmesbury, Gesta pontificum, 1: 622–4, 626, 640, 650.
74
See n. 60 above.
75
76
William of Malmesbury, Gesta pontificum, 1: 618, 636, 656.
77
78
‘It is undignified that his bones should be pressed down in the earth by a stone’ (‘Indignumque erat ut ossa lapis in
solum premeret’): William of Malmesbury, Gesta pontificum, 1: 632.
79
William of Malmesbury, Gesta pontificum, 1: 636, 656.
216 A. E. BAILEY
the choir, and that this two-piece structure had an altar attached. However, this would
not adequately explain the absence of references to Aldhelm’s relics in the choir, nor
why the altar – rather than the saint’s shrine – features so prominently in healing
miracles.
An alternative scenario is that, as at Reading, there was no publicly accessible shrine of
the abbey’s principal saint, and the relics of St Aldhelm were only displayed to pilgrims
on feast days when they were brought out in procession. Pilgrim visitors at other times of
the year would have focused their prayers and rituals on other sacred objects: the crucifix
in the nave, the altar (possibly the high altar) in the choir and an empty tomb. There may
even have been a separate arm relic, available on special request, and used in much the
same way as was St James’s Hand at Reading.
St John of Beverley at Beverley Minister

John of Beverley, a near contemporary of St Aldhelm, was bishop of Hexham and York.
His cult at Beverley Minster, which possessed the saint’s relics, was promoted by Bede in
the eighth century, and posthumous miracles were credited to him for the next 700
years.80 John’s cult in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries is represented in hagiogra-
phy by two separate miracle collections: one attributed to William Ketell and written
before 1140, and another – known as Alia miracula I – compiled by an unknown
author before 1180.81 Together, these collections comprise 27 stories, 20 of which
depict lay devotees visiting Beverley Minster from around the time of the Norman
Conquest.82
If we consider the location of pilgrims as described in these collections, a pattern
emerges which is not dissimilar to that seen in the Gesta pontificum for Aldhelm’s
cult. Although in eight stories no particular focus of devotion is mentioned, others
make it clear that pilgrims are situated in the nave. A deaf and mute man, for
example, is said to be standing ‘at a distance with the laity’ (eminus cum laicis consistens)
when he is cured.83 In this account, the archbishop is officiating at the high altar, and
waits until after the service when he descends from the sanctuary and addresses the
people from the entrance of the chancel. In another story, a penitent prostrates
himself ‘in the northern part [of the church], in front of the cross’.84 As in the Gesta pon-
tificum, the saint’s relics or reliquary are far from the central attraction in these miracula,
and are outnumbered in appearances by three rival objects: a tomb, an altar and the cross
just noted.
John’s bodily remains – referred to as ‘relics’ (reliquiae) by both authors – take on a
different characteristic in each of the collections. Interestingly, Ketell only mentions
the relics in procession, whereas the Alia miracula only describes them in situ. Ketell’s
text records an Ascension Day ceremony similar to that described by William of Malmes-
bury for Aldhelm’s cult. The narrative explains how John’s reliquiae are taken out in
80
Susan E. Wilson, The Life and After-Life of St John of Beverley: The Evolution of the Cult of an Anglo-Saxon Saint
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 1.
81
Ketell, Miracula Sancti Johannis and Alia miracula, in Acta sanctorum, May II: 180D–187C. For the dating, see
Wilson, John of Beverley, 9, 12.
82
See Appendix for details.
83
Alia miracula, 182B.
84
‘In septemtrionali parte ante crucem’: Alia miracula, 184D.
procession, and held aloft at the entrance of the church so that the sick can pass ‘under
the reliquary’ (sub feretro).85 The story continues by relating how one Irishman is healed
the moment the shadow of the reliquary passes over him.86 Ketell also gives an account of
an episode in which the ‘body’ (corpus) of the saint is perambulated outside the church
for the purpose of combating a devastating drought: a response to natural disaster which
is reminiscent of those recorded at Reading.87
The second collection, the Alia miracula, provides some information as to where the
relics of John of Beverley were kept when they were not in procession. In documenting
the ‘Peace of St John’, allegedly instituted by King Athelstan in the tenth century, the
author sets out graduated penalties for the violation of asylum laws around, and in, Bev-
erley Minster. These radiate in topographical zones outwards from John’s relics, and
reveal that the saint lay inside an area demarcated by the arches over the entrance to
the chancel.88
This symbolic boundary possibly accounts for the clear distinction between the laity in
the nave and the clergy in the choir in some of the stories.89 Indeed, crossing the line into
the chancel may have been by invitation only: one account shows a man being led, by the
hand, with the approval of the clergy.90 When a woman ventures uninvited into the choir
in another story, this bold move is greeted with astonishment.91 It is important to note
that these ingresses into clerical territory are not made by cure-seeking suppliants, but by
healthy individuals wishing to give thanks for a miracle already granted. Indeed, the only
two stories depicting pilgrims ‘in the presence of the relics of the man of God’ (‘in prae-
sentia reliquiarum viri Dei’) involve thanksgiving visits, not cures.92 It may be significant
that miraculous cures – associated, as we have seen, with crowds, noise, filth and long
vigils – are not described taking place across the line dividing the nave from the chancel.
In the two miracula combined, four of John’s miracles are said to occur ‘before the
tomb’ (ante sepulchrum) and include the cure from blindness of a seven-year-old boy
and the miraculous release of two captives from their bonds.93 In these instances the
sepulchre and shrine seem to be separate objects, because Ketell informs us that the sepul-
chrum was the place ‘in which the body of the blessed man had been formerly buried’,
indicating that John’s relics were no longer there.94 The stories reveal that this empty
tomb is a location where crowds gather, individuals are cured and penitents are miracu-
lously released from their shackles. It is a place with very different connotations from that
‘above the altar’ (super altare) where grateful miracle beneficiaries politely offer candles
and a silk cloth ‘in the presence of the relics of St John’ (coram reliquiis S. Joannes).95
A locational distinction between shrine and empty tomb has possible hitherto unseen
implications for John of Beverley’s cult as with St Aldhelm’s: namely, that the saint’s relics
may have been less accessible than is generally assumed. Examples elsewhere depict
85
Ketell, Miracula, 177F.
86
Ketell, Miracula, 177D–178A
87
Ketell, Miracula, 175C–F.
88
Alia miracula, 181F.
89
Especially Alia miracula, 182A–D.
90
Ketell, Miracula, 177F.
91
Alia miracula, 185E.
92
Alia miracula, 184F–185B, 187A–C.
93
Ketell, Miracula, 174C–175C, 175F–176B, 176F–177C; Alia miracula, 182E–183D.
94
‘Quo beati viri corpus prius humatum fuerat’: Ketell, Miracula, 176A.
95
Alia miracula, 185A, 187C.
218 A. E. BAILEY
empty tombs as separate objects of veneration placed away from a shrine and, as will be
shown, miracula evidence even hints that many empty graves did not simply serve as
additional foci of pilgrim devotion, but were actually preferred ones.
Empty tombs: St Æbbe of Coldingham and St Swithun of Winchester

The distinction between shrine and empty tomb made by William of Malmesbury and
John of Beverley’s hagiographers has some relevance for the public veneration of
another English saint in the twelfth century: that of St Æbbe of Coldingham. The Vita
et miracula Sancte Ebbe virginis, attributed to Reginald of Durham, records how
St Æbbe’s dusty and damp remains were sieved and sorted, and placed into a small reli-
quary (theca) which was then set on an altar in the monks’ priory church. However, the
stone tomb (sepulcrum) from which the relics were taken was not simply dispensed with,
but was put to good use. The hagiographic account explains that, despite its great weight,
the sepulchrum was moved from the south side of the altar to a place in the church ‘where
the devotion of the faithful could revere and embrace it’.96 The implication is that, in its
original position in the choir, the old tomb was not publicly accessible. The probability
that the new reliquary containing the saint’s bones remained inaccessible to lay devotees
is further suggested by the fact that only the tomb (tumba, sepulcrum), and not the reli-
quary (theca), is mentioned in miracle stories featuring the laity.97
While it was a widespread belief that sanctity lingers in places which have come into
contact with holy persons, empty tombs seem to have received special attention in the
Middle Ages perhaps owing to the prominence given to the most famous empty tomb
of all, the Holy Sepulchre. In a more local context, the veneration of empty graves is a
phenomenon which has not gone unrecognised: indeed, Ben Nilson has estimated that
nearly half of England’s cathedrals venerated empty tombs by the end of the Middle
Ages.98 However, the topic has not been studied in any depth, nor has it been approached
in the context of restricted access to relics before the thirteenth century. This is surpris-
ing, especially as the most famous example of empty-tomb veneration comes from this
earlier period: namely St Swithun’s grave in Winchester.
The relics of Swithun were installed in the new Romanesque minster in 1093, but
apparently behind the high altar in an area which, by the mid twelfth century, was out
of bounds to pilgrims.99 Swithun’s original grave, however, was a more pilgrim-friendly
affair since – with the demolition of the Old Minster – it now stood in the cathedral pre-
cinct among other burials, in a paved area known as the ‘Memorial Court’. Located close
to the ‘pilgrim’s door’, giving access to the north aisle of the church, this long-abandoned
grave seems to have been intended to appease pilgrims’ desire to draw close to a holy
object associated with Swithun, a desire which was evidently thwarted with respect to
the relics proper.100
96
‘Quo illud deuocio fidelium uenerari posset et amplecti’: Bartlett, ed., Vita et miracula S. Æbbe, 24.
97
Bartlett, ed., Vita et miracula S. Æbbe, 56, 58, 64, 66.
98
Nilson, Cathedral Shrines, 56–7. Interestingly, Jenkins suggests that ‘empty tombs’ may not always have been
empty but may have contained relics: Jenkins, ‘Replication or Rivalry?’, 38.
99
John Crook, ‘Bishop Walkelin’s Cathedral’, in idem, ed., Winchester Cathedral: Nine Hundred Years, 1093–1995
(Chichester: Phillimore, 1993), 33–4.
100
John Crook, ‘St Swithun of Winchester’, in idem, ed., Winchester Cathedral, 57–9.
The fact that Swithun’s old burial site functioned as a surrogate shrine is attested by a
small collection of miracle stories. Perhaps to mark the 1093 translation of Swithun’s
relics into the New Minster, an anonymous hagiographer updated an earlier compilation
of Swithun’s miracles by adding 16 of his own.101 Out of the nine episodes depicting
cures of pilgrims at New Minster, seven explicitly feature the ‘tomb’ (sepultura) – ident-
ified by Michael Lapidge as the saint’s former grave – and one implicitly refers to it.102
Significantly, none mentions the main shrine in the church or Swithun’s relics. Moreover,
seven of the eight cures are said to occur on the most important feast day of St Swithun in
July.103
The stories describe large crowds coming to Winchester for the feast-day celebra-
tions, and depict the sick either lying prostrate before the sepultura or standing
holding candles around it, praying for cures. One account, which describes a one-
eyed boy reverently kissing an image of the saint fixed to the sepultura, is reminis-
cent of the story of the boy embracing St James’s altar bearing a picture of the
saint.104 These 16 stories, then, suggest that the empty grave outside the church
was the main arena of pilgrim activity, rather than St Swithun’s shrine inside the
building, and that pilgrims were encouraged to concentrate their pious enthusiasm
on an area which more conveniently accommodated the large numbers of visitors
suggested in the miracula.
St Æbbe of Coldingham priory

Swithun’s original burial place lay not too far away from the church containing his relics,
but this was not always the case for other newly translated saints. Although, as we have
seen, Æbbe’s old tomb was made available to pilgrims at Coldingham Priory, the
hagiography records that it was originally discovered on the site of the abbess’s
convent, a windswept headland two miles distant from the priory. An oratory (orator-
ium) was established at St Abb’s Head in commemoration of the abbess’s erstwhile
home, and in the late twelfth century this oratory was promoted with regular weekly
services.105
Strikingly, it is the oratory at St Abb’s Head – rather than the priory housing the saint’s
relics – where most of the pilgrims in the miracle stories are located. Without Æbbe’s
relics to venerate, it seems that visitors to the oratory were provided with an alternative
devotional focus – an altar dedicated to the saint – which repeatedly features in the stories
of miraculous cures.106 As if to compensate for the absence of her bodily remains, Æbbe’s
spiritual presence is frequently suggested in the stories by visionary episodes in which the
saint appears to pilgrims in their sleep, hovering around, or even sitting on, the miracle-
working altar. After one such vision, a woman awakes, finds herself cured, and plants
grateful kisses on the altar: the only example of a pilgrim coming into contact with a
holy object in the whole of the collection.107
101
Miracula S. Swithuni, 676–96. See Appendix for details.
102
Miracula S. Swithuni, 682 (two stories), 684, 686, 690, 692, 694.
103
Miracula S. Swithuni, 682, 684 (two stories), 686, 690 (two stories), 694.
104
Miracula S. Swithuni, 692.
105
Bartlett, ed., and trans., Vita et miracula S. Æbbe, 30, 38.
106
Bartlett, ed., and trans., Vita et miracula S. Æbbe, 42, 44, 48, 50, 64, 66.
107
Bartlett, ed., and trans., Vita et miracula S. Æbbe, 64.
220 A. E. BAILEY
Extra-mural grave chapels: the cult of St Ivo Huntingdonshire

A similar pattern can be seen a century earlier with St Ivo’s cult in Huntingdonshire.
When the remains of what was claimed to be a seventh-century Persian bishop were dis-
covered by a ploughman on a manor belonging to Ramsey Abbey, the monks of Ramsey
eagerly appropriated the relics and enshrined them in their monastery. As at Colding-
ham, a church was built on the spot of the saint’s inventio (discovery) – in this instance,
seven miles from the abbey in the fenland hamlet of Slepe – with the intention of creating
a new pilgrimage attraction.108
The posthumous miracles of St Ivo were recorded by the Flemish hagiographer
Goscelin of Saint-Bertin in the late eleventh century, and this collection was
added to by an anonymous compiler in the early twelfth century.109 Although
these comprise 40 miraculous episodes in total, the majority focus on the brethren
of Ramsey and monks from other monasteries, or on cures obtained long-distance
through the agency of Ivo’s famous spring-water. However, from the 16 stories
which do involve lay pilgrims we might deduce that very few secular devotees
went ‘to the place of the relics’ (ad locum reliquiarum) at Ramsey Abbey.110
Instead, they seem to focus their attention on ‘St Ivo’s ancient resting place’
(‘locum sancti Yvonis requietionis antique’), otherwise referred to as ‘the place of
the discovery’ (locum inventionis).111 Here, at the recently consecrated church at
Slepe, pilgrims direct their devotions on a ‘health-giving tomb’ (salutiferum sepul-
chrum, also described as a tumba or mausoleum), which was evidently marked by
some sort of monument (monumentum) and, as at St Abb’s Head, an altar.112
What the church at Slepe did not have, of course, was the body of St Ivo, which
lay a couple of hours’ walk away at Ramsey Abbey.
Other cult features: alternative places of veneration

Miracula evidence, then, seems to suggest that devotees of Æbbe and Ivo kept away from
the main monastic church, in preference for newly established subsidiary religious sites
which, instead, of containing the saint’s body, held empty tombs and altars. These extra-
mural grave-chapels were served by clergy from their respective mother houses and, in
the case of Slepe, public access to the tomb was greatly increased by building the
church in such a way that part of the sepulchrum protruded beyond the exterior wall,
enabling pilgrims to reach it ‘whether the doors were open or closed’.113 The numinous
quality of St Ivo’s empty tomb was emphasised with an additional focus of devotion: a
healing spring said to have bubbled up on the exact spot of the inventio. The miraculous
water features in at least 11 miracle stories, and – as was the case for St James’s relic water
at Reading – it is depicted as the main healing agent for those who are cured at home. The
oratory at St Abb’s Head also boasted a miracle-working water source ( fons), and the
108
For Ivo’s cult, see S.B. Edgington The Life and Miracles of St Ivo (St Ives: Friends of the Norris Museum, 1985).
109
Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, Miracula S. Ivonis, in Chronicon abbatiae Rameseiensis, ed. W.D. Macray. Rolls series 83
(London: Longman, 1886), lix–lxxxiv.
110
Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, Miracula S. Ivonis, lxxvi.
111
Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, Miracula S. Ivonis, lx, lxv, lxxi.
112
Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, Miracula S. Ivonis, lxxviii; respectively lxvii, lxx, lxxiv, lxxviii; lix, lxxxii; and lxx.
113
Edgington, Life and Miracles, 21.
hagiography for both cults records that an overwhelming majority of cures centre on
these tomb-chapels and their associated healing springs.114
Although less prominent in the hagiographical record, the combination of extra-
mural chapel, empty grave and spring also feature in the cults of William of Norwich
and Frideswide of Oxford, at Thorpe Wood and Binsey respectively.115 Curative wells
associated with empty graves are also found within monastic precincts. St Æthelthyrth’s
shrine at Ely was supplemented by a miracle-working spring allegedly denoting her
former burial site, and Dunfermline Abbey – which housed the relics of Margaret of Scot-
land – maintained a well in the nave, in addition to an empty tomb and subsidiary
altar.116 In both Ely and Dunfermline, the wells were seemingly easier to access than
the enshrined relics in the chancel.
It would appear, then, that pilgrims in eleventh- and twelfth-century England were
often provided with alternative places and objects of veneration to that of a saint’s
main shrine, and many of these lay outside the walls of the main monastic church. In
some miracle collections – such as those of Swithun, Ivo and Æbbe – these secondary
sites appear to be the chief focus of pilgrimage activity with the saint’s main shrine
barely mentioned at all. Most secondary places of devotion would have included altars
containing small relics which effectively sacralised them with the saint’s praesentia. In
this respect, the ancillary chapels, tombs, crucifixes, crosses and holy wells which
feature in miracle narratives may have satisfied pilgrims’ desire for close proximity to
a saint, thus acting as substitutes for the saint’s main channel of power which, miracle
stories suggest, lay in places of restricted access.
Analysis and discussion

These six case studies provide some intriguing data (see Appendix). Looking at a total of
170 miracle stories, only 17 indicate that pilgrims came in close proximity to the saint’s
main shrine or reliquary. Nine of these involve feast days or other formal events when the
relics were moved out into public space and put on display. This leaves eight stories
(fewer than 5 per cent) which point to pilgrims being physically present at a saint’s
shrine in the chancel. Perhaps more surprisingly, only one pilgrim is shown coming
into direct physical contact with a saint’s reliquary.
Although it is dangerous to assume that these statistics accurately mirror pilgrim-
age patterns in historical reality, the lack of references to what scholars take to be a
fundamental element of saint veneration is decidedly odd. At the very least, these
findings raise considerable doubts as to whether unrestricted public access to a
saint’s main shrine really was a widespread norm. This is not to argue, of course,
that the laity did not yearn to touch, kiss, hold or otherwise experience relics in
a physical way. While a pilgrim’s desire to draw close to a shrine is not in question,
what is debatable is how often such proximity was allowed, or encouraged, in high
medieval England.
114
For the two springs at St Abb’s Head, see Bartlett, ed., and trans., Vita et miracula S. Æbbe, 34, 36, 52, 58, 62.
115
Thomas of Monmouth, Life and Miracles, 178–81, 272–3, 279–83, 284–9; Miracula S. Frideswidae in Acta sanc-
torum, Oct. VIII (Antwerp: Société des Bollandistes, 1853), 579; John Blair, ‘St Frideswide’s Monastery: Problems and
Possibilities’, Oxeniensia 53 (1988): 248.
116
Blake, ed., Liber Eliensis, 366–8. For St Margaret’s well, see Bartlett, ed. and trans., Vita et miracula S. Æbbe, xliv–
xlv.
222 A. E. BAILEY
The proposition that pilgrims before 1200 were sometimes distanced from major relics
can be further supported by situating the evidence within a wider chronological context.
If we return to the early days of relic veneration, we find little to suggest that English cults
were originally intended to attract ordinary members of the laity, particularly en masse.
The holy men and women interred as saints – often founding bishops or abbesses – were
important spiritual figureheads for their respective religious houses, and the cults that
developed around their graves functioned primarily to serve the spiritual, liturgical, insti-
tutional and political needs of a religious community and its royal or aristocratic
patrons.117 More generalised pilgrimage was, in all probability, an unintended by-
product and not necessarily a welcome innovation.
Cynthia Hahn has shown how, in the Carolingian era, shrines were ‘hidden away’
from the laity in funerary chapels and crypts.118 Many early English shrines were also
housed in separate chapels, and the idea that the Anglo-Saxon laity was similarly dis-
tanced from saints’ shrines is suggested by Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, written in the
eighth century, which supplies our most detailed knowledge of cults in England before
the arrival of the Vikings. Like writers of contemporary English saints’ lives, Bede
rarely mentions specific examples of popular piety, but when he does these tend to
involve secondary relics accessed outside, not inside, a monastic church. The most strik-
ing example is the cult of St Oswald. Bede is at pains to demonstrate the extent to which
devotees hankered after Oswald’s relics: as well as procuring no less than four different
types of contact relics for their personal use, fans of the saint collected so much earth
from the spot where he had died that they left a pit the height of a man.119 Strangely,
however, Bede makes no mention of the general public venerating at Oswald’s shrine
inside Bardney Abbey church; the closest they seem to come is the abbey’s cemetery
where they gather soil soaked with the water that had washed Oswald’s body.120
In early hagiography, saints worked miracles principally on behalf of their own reli-
gious communities, and they continued to do so until the late tenth or eleventh centuries
when, as observed by Benedicta Ward, there was a notable increase in ‘outsiders’ being
included as miracle beneficiaries.121 Historians agree that this shift in focus reflects the
fact that saints’ cults were beginning to take on a wider social importance, as is further
evidenced by architectural enhancements to churches in the late eleventh century to
accommodate growing pilgrim numbers.122 Diana Webb has recognised the twelfth
century as a ‘transitional time’ in the history of pilgrimage when saints’ cults were begin-
ning to reach out to a wider public.123 Webb’s idea of a lengthy transition – beginning in
the late tenth century and ending in the early thirteenth – raises the question of when,
and indeed how, different religious institutions met the challenge of increased pilgrim
traffic. While some cults, such as that of St Thomas at Canterbury, appear to have initially
117
For the development of early saints’ cults, see Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin
Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
118
Cynthia Hahn, ‘Seeing and Believing: The Construction of Sanctity in Early-Medieval Saints’ Shrines’, Speculum
72 (1997): 1079–1106.
119
Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, trans. Leo Sherley-Price (London: Penguin, 1990), 145–6, 158–9,
160–2, 163–4.
120
Bede, Ecclesiastical History, 160–2.
121
Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record and Event, 1000–1215. Rev. edn. (Philadelphia,
PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 36, 67.
122
Webb, Pilgrimage, 39.
123
Webb, Pilgrimage, 37–9.
welcomed lay visitors in a fairly free and easy way, others seem to have been less accom-
modating and may have remained largely closed-off to the general public even in the first
flush of their success. It is striking, for example, that the majority of miracle beneficiaries
in Goscelin’s St Ivo collection are monks, not pilgrims.
Some monastic establishments may have met pilgrim demand with a compromise. In
this respect, it is worth pointing out that while the addition of ambulatories facilitated the
smooth circulation of lay visitors around a saint’s shrine, the continual movement of ped-
estrian traffic would have done less to encourage devotees to stop and engage with these
shrines in a lingering, intimate way. The ambulatory at Winchester allowed pilgrims to
‘glimpse’ – but presumably not actually touch – St Swithun’s shrine on the high platform
above their heads.124 As well as facilitating a degree of crowd control, such careful sta-
gings of relics also accentuated their numinous quality in the minds of pilgrims, and dis-
tancing strategies may have been purposely employed by shrine custodians to heighten
the viewer’s sense of reverence and wonder: a technique still used today.125
Although hagiographers’ attitudes towards pilgrim access are often hard to gauge,
there is one twelfth-century writer who expresses clear distaste at the idea of hoi polloi
coming too close to a shrine. This is Eadmer of Canterbury who is horrified that
St Oswald was buried in a place of ‘easy access’ ( facilis accessus). He advocated that
the bones of the archbishop should be moved to ‘a place free of the bustle of secular
persons and removed from access by the irreverent’.126 After the saint’s translation,
the general public was kept at bay, and Eadmer records how a laywoman was only
granted permission to approach the shrine on account of her respectability and noble
status.127
Eadmer’s belief that an exception might be made for respectable members of the nobi-
lity prompts the question of whether shrines operated exclusion policies predicated on
social status. It is often pointed out that women were prohibited from certain pilgrimage
churches such as Durham, but little has been written about social segregation, perhaps
because it is often difficult to establish background information about individuals in
miracle accounts. However, if we return to Eadmer’s noble devotee, we can see that
she had two qualities which expediated her access to the saint: in addition to her
noble lineage she was ‘known to have an upright character’ (nota cunctis probitas
eius). In other words, she and her family were known and held in high esteem.
These qualifications have some relevance for a twelfth-century cult which, at first
appearance, seems to have operated an open-door policy to pilgrims: the cult of
William of Norwich. Thomas of Monmouth’s Life and Miracles of St William describes
large numbers of devotees at the saint’s tomb when it was located in Norwich Cathedral
Priory’s chapter house. Indeed, of the 49 miracle beneficiaries recorded visiting the cathe-
dral premises at this time, 44 are depicted at the tomb. They come, we learn, with prayers
and candles. Close contact does not seem to be a problem: many kiss the stone, one
woman presses her painful knees to the shrine, and a man breaks off a piece of the
124
See n. 99.
125
Myra Shackley, Managing Sacred Sites: Service Provision and Visitor Experience (London: Thomson, 2001), 64–5.
126
‘ac in loco saecularium personarum frequentia uacuo irreuerentique accessu remoto collocaret’: Eadmer of Can-
terbury, ‘De Miraculis S. Oswaldi, in Eadmer of Canterbury: Lives and Miracles of Saints Oda, Dunstan and Oswald,
eds. and trans. Andrew J. Turner and Bernard J. Muir (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 300.
127
Eadmer of Canterbury, ‘De Miraculis S. Oswaldi’, 302.
224 A. E. BAILEY
structure and rubs it onto an aching tooth.128 In view of the fact that William was buried
in a place usually reserved for the use of the monks and occasional privileged guests, this
apparent public takeover of private monastic space appears unusual.129
However, careful examination of the miracle beneficiaries at William’s tomb reveals a
more nuanced story. First, nearly one third of these devotees are identified as Norwich
monks, their relatives and members of their households. Second, of the 20 secular pil-
grims apparently unconnected to the monastery, more than half are said to be from
Norwich and some were personally known to the monks. These pilgrim visitors were,
in all probability, not strangers drifting in uninvited off the streets, but people known
and respected in the locality. Reading between the lines, we might imagine a scenario
whereby the occasional parishioner or local family were escorted into the monks’
private domain, and allowed to stay long enough to offer a prayer and the obligatory
candle.
A notable aspect of William’s cult is that, within the space of a few years, his body was
moved, step by step, to ever more accessible spaces in response to growing public interest
and the monks’ increasing desire to promote their cult to a wider audience.130 While Wil-
liam’s original grave in the cathedral’s cemetery and his tomb in the chapter house situ-
ated him bodily and metaphorically among the Norwich brethren, his further two
translations into the cathedral church – first to a location south of the high altar and
then to a vacant chapel in order to accommodate the growing crowds – placed him in
a wider cultic context.131 The miracula of William of Norwich therefore allows us to
trace the gradual development of an individual cult along a private-public continuum
both in terms of physical location and religious devotion, reflecting the long-term
trend identified by Diana Webb in which saints gradually moved into a widening orbit
of influence.
This is not to claim, of course, that the movement from the private to public domain
was smooth, or even universal. Some cults, such as those of St Thomas of Canterbury,
seem to have welcomed pilgrims from their inception while saint devotion at others
remained limited to a saint’s religious community and its immediate socio-religious net-
works. A collection of St Anselm’s miracles, for example, refers to ‘a constant stream of
brethren to his tomb, by day and night’, but is curiously silent about the presence of
pilgrims.132
Conclusion
In reconsidering the miracula evidence for pilgrims’ experiences at English churches in
the period 1080–1200, this article has thrown some doubt on the supposition that the
laity generally enjoyed unobstructed access to a cult centre’s principal shrine. In so
doing the article has also questioned the popular notion that medieval relic veneration
was characterised by direct physical contact with shrines and reliquaries. Careful
128
Thomas of Monmouth, Life and Miracles, 128, 132, 133, 135–6, 155, 169–70, 171.
129
Roberta Gilchrist, Norwich Cathedral Close: The Evolution of the English Cathedral Landscape (Woodbridge:
Boydell Press, 2005), 249.
130
For William’s cult, see Yarrow, Saints, 122–67; Ward, Miracles, 68–76.
131
See Thomas of Monmouth, Life and Miracles, 221.
132
‘Diebus ac noctibus frequens ad sepulchrum eius fractrum accessus erat’: Eadmer, The Life of St Anselm, Arch-
bishop of Canterbury, ed. and trans. R.W. Southern (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 167.
examination of seven miracle collections reveals a curious dearth of pilgrims around the
shrines of six well-known saints and little indication that the faithful regularly engaged in
tactile piety. Since this evidence is at odds with that found in other contemporary mir-
acula, such as those featuring the miracles of St Thomas at Canterbury, it is likely that
pilgrims’ experiences at English cult centres were not as homogenous as more generalised
scholarship on the topic has often implied.
Although we can only speculate on the reasons for these disparities between religious
institutions, it is probable that the unwillingness of some to grant public access was gov-
erned by a variety of considerations including logistical difficulties, the fear of outside
intrusion into sacred, private space and anxieties about the disruption to the life of the
resident monks and clerics. However, the fact that some religious houses, such as
Norwich, gradually made their shrines more accessible to visitors suggests that many
put aside their initial reservations and became more open to the lay enthusiasm for pil-
grimage which was growing fast in the twelfth century.
While the apparent absence of pilgrims from beside some saints’ shrines in high med-
ieval England is significant, it is only part of the story. In mapping the physical move-
ments of visitors at pilgrimage destinations in specific case studies, the article has also
discovered that lay devotees often found more than one way of paying homage to a
chosen saint. It appears that many pilgrims carried out ritual activities at alternative
sacred locations away from the main shrine, for example at empty tombs, subsidiary
altars, crucifixes, images and ancillary chapels.
There is also a further possibility: that some pilgrims may have preferred to spend time
at subsidiary cult sites rather than at major shrines. Less subject to crowd control, con-
gestion and routinised ritual, these informal places must have encouraged greater
freedom of movement as well as individualised devotional expression. A similar
phenomenon is evident today at St James’s Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela
where the informal custom of hugging the statue of St James is more popular with visitors
than viewing his imposing shrine in the crypt.133 Like the boy emotionally embracing the
image of St James at Reading Abbey, modern pilgrims seem to find it easier to engage
intimately with a saint in places less given to formality and regulation.
It would seem, then, that the ‘experience at the shrine’ in late eleventh- and twelfth-
century England was far more multi-dimensional than is often realised. In focusing so
intently on the shrine in its narrowest sense, modern scholarship has often overlooked
the fact that empty tombs, holy wells, subsidiary chapels, secondary altars, images and
minor relics also played an important part in the wider shrine experience in the high
Middle Ages. To date, little scholarly attention has been given to extended pilgrimage
activities and locations.134 Empty graves and tombs are under researched, and the
topic of holy wells in England largely belongs to the realm of popular writers, local his-
torians, health geographers and anthropologists.135 Bringing these practices into the
wider pilgrimage discourse for the Middle Ages would greatly enrich our understanding
133
A phenomenon witnessed by the author in 2019.
134
However, for an exception, see Pinner, Cult of St Edmund, 144–51.
135
This is despite the fact that almost 20 ‘ancient’ wells within British churches have been identified by Janet Bord,
including examples at Canterbury, Winchester, Wells, Exeter and York. Janet Bord, Cures and Curses: Ritual and Cult
at Holy Wells (Loughborough: Heart of Albion, 2006), 147–8.
226 A. E. BAILEY
of lay religiosity and belief, as well as provide further knowledge about the sensitive
dynamics between cult centres and pilgrims in high medieval England.
The scene at Canterbury described by Ronald Finucane at the beginning of this article
is often taken as typical of local saints’ cults in high medieval England. Although Becket’s
cult was indeed important and influential in the twelfth century, it was, nonetheless,
merely one among many. As I hope this article has shown, there was a variety of ‘med-
ieval experiences at the shrine’ in the Middle Ages, and it is only by teasing these out that
we can really begin to appreciate the multifaceted – and changing – relationship between
pilgrims, relics and cult centres in the medieval West.
Note on contributor
Anne E. Bailey is based at Oxford University where she is an associate member of the
History Faculty and teaches part-time at the University’s Department for Continuing Edu-
cation. She has published widely on the topics of medieval saints’ cults, hagiography and
pilgrimage.
Appendix. Case studies

St James’s Hand. Reading Abbey
Source: B. Kemp, ‘The Miracles of the Hand of St James’, Berkshire Archaeological Journal 65
(1970): 1–19.
Total number of miracle stories: 28
Episodes involving lay visitors at the cult centre: 18
. Monastic church: 18
. Secondary cult location: n/a
Pilgrims in the presence of the relics/shrine/reliquary: 6
. Procession/formal ceremony: 4
. Suppliant: 2
. Thanksgiving: 0
Altar: 3 (high altar, altar of St James and altar of St Mary Magdalene)

Tomb: 0
Cross/crucifix: 0
Contact with relics/shrine/reliquary: 0
Other forms of tactile piety: 1 (altar of St James)
St Aldhelm of Malmesbury
Source: William of Malmesbury, Gesta pontificum Anglorum, ed. and trans. Michael Winterbot-
tom. 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 1: 614–63.
Pilgrims in the presence of the relics/shrine/reliquary: 4 (corpus; scrinium; feretrum)
. Procession/ceremony: 3
. Suppliant: 1
. Thanksgiving: 0
Altar: 4
Tomb: 4 (sepulchrum; mausoleum)
Cross/crucifix: 4 (crucifixium)
Other forms of tactile piety: 0
St John of Beverley, I: William Ketell

Source: William Ketell, Miracula sancti Johannis, in Acta sanctorum, May II (Antwerp: Société des
Bollandistes, 1680), 174C–180D (BHL 4341).
Pilgrims in the presence of the relics/shrine/reliquary: 2 (corpus; reliquiae, capsella; feretrum)
. Suppliant: 0
. Thanksgiving: 0
Altar: 1
Tomb: 3 (sepulchrum)
Cross/crucifix: 0
St John of Beverley, II: Alia miracula

Source: Alia miracula, in Acta sanctorum, May II: 180D–187C (BHL 4342).
Pilgrims in the presence of the relics/shrine/reliquary: 2 (reliquiae)
. Suppliant: 0
. Thanksgiving: 2
Altar: 3
Tomb: 1 (sepulchrum)
Cross/crucifix: 0
228 A. E. BAILEY
St Æbbe of Coldingham
Source: R. Bartlett, ed. and trans., Vita et miracula S. Æbbe virginis: The Miracles of St Æbbe of
Coldingham and St Margaret of Scotland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 30–67.
. Secondary cult locations: 25 (oratory at St Abb’s Head and healing springs)
. Suppliant: 0
. Thanksgiving: 0
Altar: 6 (all but 1 at secondary cult location)

Tomb: 5 (tumba; sepulchrum)
Cross/crucifix: 0
Other forms of tactile piety: 1 (altar of saint at secondary cult centre)
St Swithun of Winchester
Source: Miracula S. Swithuni, in The Cult of St Swithun, ed. and trans. Michael Lapidge. Winche-
ster Studies, 4.2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 676–96.
. Secondary cult location: 7 (grave site)
. Suppliant: 0
. Thanksgiving: 0
Altar: 2 (saint’s altar)

Tomb: 7 (sepulchrum; sepultura)
Cross/crucifix: 0
Other forms of tactile piety: 1 (image of saint on tomb)
St Ivo at Ramsey Abbey

Source: Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, Miracula S. Ivonis, in Chronicon abbatiae Rameseiensis, ed.
William D. Macray. Rolls series 83 (London: Longman, 1886), lix–lxxxiv.
. Secondary cult locations: 11 (chapel at Slepe, the locus inventionis, with healing spring)
Pilgrims in the presence of the relics/shrine/reliquary: 3 (corpus)
. Suppliant: 2
. Thanksgiving: 1
Altar: 2 (saint’s altar at secondary location)

Tomb: 6 (sepulchrum, tumba; mausoleum)
Cross/crucifix: 0

Reconsidering The Medieval Experience at The Shrine in High Medieval England. Anne e Bailey

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Journal of Medieval History

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmed20

Reconsidering the medieval experience at the

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2021.1895874

Published online: 03 Mar 2021.

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Reconsidering the medieval experience at the shrine in high

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

CONTACT Anne E. Bailey anne.bailey@history.ox.ac.uk Faculty of History, University of Oxford, George

Miracle stories as a source for pilgrim activities

Saints, shrines and pilgrims in high medieval England

authorities may have wished to restrict pilgrims’ movements, particularly in churches

The case studies

The cult of St Aldhelm at Malmesbury Abbey

St John of Beverley at Beverley Minister

Empty tombs: St Æbbe of Coldingham and St Swithun of Winchester

St Æbbe of Coldingham priory

Extra-mural grave chapels: the cult of St Ivo Huntingdonshire

Other cult features: alternative places of veneration

Analysis and discussion

Appendix. Case studies

Pilgrims in the presence of the relics/shrine/reliquary: 6

Altar: 3 (high altar, altar of St James and altar of St Mary Magdalene)

Pilgrims in the presence of the relics/shrine/reliquary: 4 (corpus; scrinium; feretrum)

St John of Beverley, I: William Ketell

Pilgrims in the presence of the relics/shrine/reliquary: 2 (corpus; reliquiae, capsella; feretrum)

St John of Beverley, II: Alia miracula

Pilgrims in the presence of the relics/shrine/reliquary: 2 (reliquiae)

Pilgrims in the presence of the relics/shrine/reliquary: 0

Altar: 6 (all but 1 at secondary cult location)

Pilgrims in the presence of the relics/shrine/reliquary: 0

Altar: 2 (saint’s altar)

St Ivo at Ramsey Abbey

Pilgrims in the presence of the relics/shrine/reliquary: 3 (corpus)

Altar: 2 (saint’s altar at secondary location)

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