Cults of Irish, Scottish and Welsh saints in twelfth-century England

Abstract

In the twelfth century the constituent parts of the British Isles came to be bound together in new ways. Sometimes this involved consciously aggressive military and political action resulting in the subordination of some areas to authorities based in other parts of the islands; sometimes it stemmed from emulation by the ruling classes of one region of the institutions, techniques and culture of elites elsewhere; and beneath all this there was a process of convergence and assimilation which can best be seen as part of the wider European scene of migration and cultural change. This increased contact can be studied in a dozen fields – coinage, kingship, vernacular literature, feudalism, urbanism and so forth, but the purpose of this paper is to look at the minor, but relatively unexplored, case of saintly cult. In theory saints are international and hence easily transportable. In reality, of course, individual cults often had strong regional, national and other particularist associations and characters. Below the level of the great biblical saints, like Mary, Peter and John, the early medieval saints of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales are easily distinguishable. Of the eighty-nine saints listed in the early eleventh-century inventory of saints' resting places in England, the vast majority are Anglo-Saxon kings, bishops and heads of religious communities, especially those of the conversion period.

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