Rebels, Saints, and Visions: English miracles in the early Norman kingdom
The English abbot Ælfsige is a mysterious figure. He was close to Edward the Confessor and Harold;
William the Conqueror sent him to negotiate with the Danish king shortly after the Conquest; at some
stage he went on the run and fled again to Denmark; back in England, he was for a while detained at the
king’s pleasure; yet he was finally promoted to the abbacy of Ramsey in 1080 and held it until his death
in 1087.
At various stages he was thus monk, abbot, diplomat, spy, outlaw, prisoner; and also a visionary,
associated in three independent traditions with three different miracle stories. In the most long-lived and
influential, Ælfsige is sailing home from his embassy to Denmark when a sudden storm threatens the
ship. There then appears an apparition who tells him that he will be saved as long as he promises to
celebrate the Feast of the Conception of Our Lady. This was a controversial feast of Anglo-Saxon origin,
and Ælfsige’s miracle story was used throughout the twelfth century and beyond as part of the campaign
for its acceptance. The second miracle is set in the midst of the events of 1066, when Harald Hardrada
had invaded the north. The ghost of Edward the Confessor appears to Ælfsige, commanding him to tell
King Harold that he is promised victory against the Norwegian invader – an ironic triumph which is
contextualized rather differently in its textual afterlives. Finally, Ælfsige appears as the Norman king’s
prisoner in a fortress not far from Bury, where he is an eyewitness to the heroic self-sacrifice and
miraculous bodily preservation of an English anchorite, who refuses to leave his cell even as it is burnt
down by raiding pirates.
Each of these miracles is structurally a triangulation, the Englishman’s visionary experience of
sanctity juxtaposed with the threat or fact of both Norman and Danish raiders, invaders, or
conquerors. Set in circumstances of the greatest threat to English identity and integrity, they
shore up both, with an access to divine authority achieved only in liminal spaces and times of
crisis. In this, the figure of Ælfsige can stand for a whole disparate literature which we might
label ‘post-Conquest’ in the profoundest sense. This paper is about these stories’ emergence, and
traces some of their adaptiveand transformative textual afterlives.
Relevant publications (on Englishness, the Conquest, identity, romance, historiography, and sanctity):
-‘Killing the King: Romance and the Politicization of History’, in Think Romance: ReConceptualizing a Medieval Genre, ed. Nicola MacDonald and Katherine C. Little. Submission due April
2013.
-‘The Ideal of Knighthood in English and French Writing, 1100-1230: Crusade, Piety, Chivalry
and Patriotism’, in Narrating the First Crusade: Historiography, Memory and Transmission in the
Narratives of the Early Crusade Movement, ed. Marcus Bull (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2012/13), under
contract and forthcoming.
-‘The Anomalous King of Conquered England’, in Every Inch a King: The Issue of Kingship from
Antiquity to the Medieval World, ed. Charles Melville and Lynette Mitchell (Leiden: Brill, 2012).
-‘Harold Godwineson’, in Heroes and Anti-Heroes in Medieval Romance, ed. Neil Cartlidge
(Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2012), pp. 59-80.
-‘Mutatio dexterae Excelsi: Narratives of Transformation after the Conquest’, Journal of English
and Germanic Philology 110 (2011), 141-72.
-‘The Hero and his Realm in Medieval English Romance’, in Boundaries in Medieval Romance.
Studies in Medieval Romance 6, ed. Neil Cartlidge (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008), pp. 129-47.
-Fiction and History in England, 1066 – 1200. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 68
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
-‘William Marshal, Lancelot, and Arthur: chivalry and kingship’, Anglo-Norman Studies 30
(2007), 19-40.
-‘‘Exile-and-return’ and English Law: The Anglo-Saxon Inheritance of Insular Romance’,
Literature Compass 3 (2006), 300-17.
I am currently working on the new Oxford English Literary History vol. 1: 1000-1350 (Oxford University
Press, publication contracted for 2015).