The first book ever to be printed in Old English was Ælfric's Easter homily, edited by Archbishop Matthew Parker and his circle, and Ælfric played a paramount role in the formative period of Anglo-Saxon studies from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century. It was through his Latin Grammar written in Old English and the Latin paradigms provided with English translations that the early ‘antiquaries’ gained a first glimpse of the grammatical structure of Old English, and, above all, it was through his vast corpus of homilies and saints' Lives that scholars such as Matthew Parker, William L'Isle, George Hickes and Elizabeth Elstob sought to demonstrate that the Church of England had its venerable roots in pre-Conquest times. Scholarly interest in Ælfric has not abated since the days of these pioneers, and consequently Ælfric is one of the best researched authors in Old English literature. Surprisingly, perhaps, in spite of this wealth of secondary literature, there remain aspects of his oeuvre on which so far scarcely any work has been done. In a recent article Michael Lapidge has pointed out one such aspect when he suggested that the structure of Ælfric's sanctorale and the principles according to which Ælfric selected the saints and feasts for commemoration in his homilies and Lives would deserve close attention. As Lapidge pointed out, there are obvious peculiarities with regard to the saints and feasts chosen by Ælfric for commemoration in his sanctorale, when, for example, he commemorates the deposition of St Swithun (2 July), not the feast of the translatio (15 July), or when, as a Benedictine monk, he celebrates only one of the two feasts of St Benedict (again the less important depositio), or when, though Winchester-trained, he seems to depart from Winchester's liturgical practice in commemorating the feast of Quadraginta milites (9 March), while omitting from his sanctorale all the Northern French and Flemish saints such as SS Vedastus, Iudoc or Bertin, who were especially culted at Winchester.

It is not difficult to imagine what writing a uita of St Benedict will have meant to a Benedictine monk of the second generation of the tenth-century English reform, a monk moreover, who had been trained in the intellectual and political headquarters of the reform, the Old Minster at Winchester under Bishop Æthelwold. Benedict was of course the father of western monasticism. By the turn of the first millennium, however, he had long been established as one of the principal saints of Anglo-Saxon England. This much is attested, for example, by Ælfric's inclusion of a Life of Benedict in the Catholic Homilies, which contain uitae only of those saints who were venerated by all the English people (as distinct from the Lives of Saints, in which the sanctorale of monastic communities is represented); and the evidence of surviving calendars, litanies, hymnals and mass sets points in the same direction. The evidence of the calendars can be conveniently controlled in a recent publication by Rebecca Rushforth, where for each month of the year the contents of the twenty-six calendars and calendar fragments from Anglo-Saxon England are set out in tabular form. Of the three feasts of St Benedict (dies natalis 21 March, translation 11 July, (second) translation 4 December), that on 21 March is represented in all twenty-six calendars, the translation on 11 July is in twenty-four, and the translation on 4 December in fourteen calendars.

With this chapter we enter a different work: the Lives of Saints. Do we also enter a different world, that is, an intellectual, spiritual or narratological ambience that is tangibly distinguished from the one prevailing in the Catholic Homilies? What may be deduced about the Lives of Saints in contradistinction to the Catholic Homilies – their date, their subject matter and manner of discourse, their aims – is based on the sparse remarks by Ælfric himself in his various prefaces to both works.

THE TWO COLLECTIONS

From these prefaces it is clear that Ælfric intended the two works as a sequence: the two volumes of Catholic Homilies (each containing forty pieces) were to be followed by at least one volume of Lives of Saints (again approximately forty pieces). It is possible, but not provable, that at one point Ælfric had in mind composing a second volume of saints' Lives in order to match entirely the two series of Catholic Homilies. The composition of the Lives of Saints can be assigned to the years c. 994 × c. 998, that is, after the completion of the Second Series of Catholic Homilies, and before the death of Æthelweard, ealdorman of the western provinces, to whom the Lives of Saints are dedicated (and who, in both their prefaces, is referred to as alive).

In the foregoing exploration of the five saints' Lives I have employed a strictly historical approach. By examining historical evidence of various kinds I have sought to glean as much information as possible about the standing of the five saints and the popularity of their cults by the end of the tenth century, when Ælfric set about composing their uitae. The evidence provided by Latin hagiography and surviving liturgical books and calendars combines with our ever-increasing understanding of the political events that were witnessed by Ælfric, and of the intellectual and spiritual world in which he grew up. If we add to this Ælfric's own remarks, concerning contemporary events, his perception of the past, his own intellectual training and the cult of saints, a reasonably clear picture may be obtained of the overall historical situation in which the five Lives originated.

SOME RESULTS

My rationale for selecting the five Lives has been the prominence of these five saints in Æthelwold's Benedictional and the two groups formed there (for reasons that can be reconstructed) by Gregory, Cuthbert and Benedict, and by Swithun and Æthelthryth respectively. No claim is made here that the insights obtained from an assessment of the five Lives can be brought to bear on Ælfric's hagiographic writings in general. What has resulted, perhaps most importantly, from an assessment of the Lives, is that Ælfric's approach to his source(s) for an individual saint's Life varied according to the sources in question and according to the specific aspects he intended to stress in the individual uitae.

When, at some point in the early 990s, Ælfric set out to compose his homily for the feast day (12 March) of Pope Gregory the Great (590–604), he will have been sharply aware that he was recording the uita of the saint who, apart from Christ's apostles, had enjoyed the longest and most universal veneration in Anglo-Saxon England. By the time Ælfric was writing, the cult of St Gregory in England stretched back at least 300 years. In the light of the universality and the venerable tradition of Gregory's cult in England, Ælfric will no doubt have given especial attention to what he chose to relate about the saint in the first vernacular account of his life ever to be written. For an adequate assessment of how Ælfric, the Benedictine monk and Winchester alumnus, saw Gregory, and how he wished his lay audience to see the saint, a twofold approach will be necessary. In the first part of this chapter I shall try to establish what may be assumed Ælfric the scholar knew about Gregory's life, his personality and writings, and the development of his cult. In the second part I shall examine what of his knowledge Ælfric the priest and teacher thought suitable to impart to his audience, and what, possibly, was the rationale for his decision.

THE APOSTLE OF THE ENGLISH

In the collective memory of the English church Gregory had always been doctor et apostolus of the gens Anglorum.

Why did Ælfric write a Life of St Cuthbert? The answer may not be so obvious (and hence the question so futile) when we look at the corpus of surviving Old English prose saints' Lives and hagiographical pieces. Of the 106 items listed by Gordon Whatley sixty-six (that is, almost two thirds) are by Ælfric. This relation changes significantly, however, when we look at the Lives of the English saints in the list. From the twelve (or thirteen) English (or British) saints registered by Whatley, six have their Lives written by Ælfric (SS Alban, Æthelthryth, Cuthbert, Edmund, Oswald and Swithun), while equally six (possibly seven) are by anonymous authors (SS Augustine of Canterbury, Chad, Guthlac, Mildred, Neot, Paulinus and, possibly, Seaxburga). To Ælfric's account one might, perhaps, add the vision of the Northumbrian þegn Drihthelm, derived from Bede, and assigned by Ælfric (in the Second Series of his Catholic Homilies) to the Tuesday during the Minor Litanies. One may also add Ælfric's Life of St Gregory, the apostle of the English. Nevertheless, it is clear that English saints figure much more prominently among the anonymous Lives than among those written by Ælfric. It is also worth noting that, with the possible exception of St Mildred, no English saints can be found among the saints and feasts commemorated by more than one piece in the Old English corpus.

This book does not claim to be a comprehensive monograph on Ælfric's hagiographic writings. Indeed, the idea to write a book on the subject only occurred to me after I had finished what are now its first two chapters, which were commissioned for specific purposes and which are included here in a revised and updated form. When I was invited to contribute to a Festschrift for Don Scragg, my immediate reaction was that a piece dealing with saints might be appropriately presented to a scholar who had devoted a considerable amount of his working life to saints' uitae and homilies. In the course of my previous work on the intellectual foundations of the English Benedictine reform I had become convinced that the most lavish book which was produced during Ælfric's lifetime, the Benedictional of his master Æthelwold, had interacted with various kinds of contemporary intellectual activities such as defining the essence of kingship or translating Christian key terms into the vernacular. I therefore proposed to explore possible relationships between the texts and the iconography of the Benedictional and the formation of Ælfric's sanctorale, that is, his selection of the saints to be represented in his three great cycles of Catholic Homilies and Lives of Saints. As a result, the present chapter 1 took shape, in which a possible influence of the Benedictional is reviewed in the context of other factors which may have contributed to the formation of Ælfric's sanctorale.