Popular Religion in Late Saxon England

Elf Charms in Context

Karen Louise Jolly

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780807845653, 9780807822623
• eBook ISBN: 9781469611143
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

In tenth- and eleventh-century England, Anglo-Saxon Christians retained an old folk belief in elves as extremely dangerous creatures capable of harming unwary humans. To ward off the afflictions caused by these invisible beings, Christian priests modified traditional elf charms by adding liturgical chants to herbal remedies. In Popular Religion in Late Saxon England, Karen Jolly traces this cultural intermingling of Christian liturgy and indigenous Germanic customs and argues that elf charms and similar practices represent the successful Christianization of native folklore. Jolly describes a dual process of conversion in which Anglo-Saxon culture became Christianized but at the same time left its own distinct imprint on Christianity. Illuminating the creative aspects of this dynamic relationship, she identifies liturgical folk medicine as a middle ground between popular and elite, pagan and Christian, magic and miracle. Her analysis, drawing on the model of popular religion to redefine folklore and magic, reveals the richness and diversity of late Saxon Christianity.

1 POPULAR RELIGION

THE PROCESS OF CONVERSION

Consider the following ceremony for blessing the fields, found on a few folios from the late tenth or early eleventh century, and ponder the contexts in which it was developed, performed, and written.

ÆCERBOT [FIELD REMEDY] RITUAL¹

Here is the remedy, how you may better your land, if it will not grow well or if some harmful thing has been done to it by a sorcerer [dry] or by a poisoner [lyblace].²

Take then at night, before dawn, four sods from four sides of the land, and mark where they were before.

Then take oil and honey and yeast, and milk of each animal that is on the land, and a piece of each type of tree that grows on the land, except hard beams, and a piece of each herb known by name, except burdock [glappan] only,³ and put then holy water thereon, and drip it three times on the base of the sods, and say then these words:

Crescite, grow, et multiplicamini, and multiply, et replete, and fill, terre, the earth. In nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti sit benedicti. [In the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit be blessed.] And the Pater noster [Our Father] as often as the other.

And then bear the sods into church, and let a masspriest sing four masses over the sods, and let someone turn the green [sides] to the altar, and after that let someone bring the sods to where they were before, before the sun sets.

And have made for them four signs of Christ [crosses] of quickbeam and write on each end: Matthew and Mark, Luke, and John. Lay that sign of Christ in the bottom of the pit [where each sod had been cut out], saying then: crux Matheus, crux Marcus, crux Lucas, crux sanctus Iohannes.

Take then the sods and set them down there on [the crosses], and say then nine times these words, Crescite [grow], and as often the Pater noster, and turn then to the east, and bow nine times humbly, and speak then these words:

Eastwards I stand, for mercies I pray,

I pray the great domine [lord], I pray the powerful lord,

I pray the holy guardian of heaven-kingdom,

earth I pray and sky

and the true sancta [holy] Mary

and heaven’s might and high hall,

that I may this charm [galdor] by the gift of the lord

open with [my] teeth through firm thought,

to call forth these plants for our worldly use,

to fill this land with firm belief,

to beautify this grassy turf, as the wiseman said

that he would have riches on earth who alms

gave with justice by the grace of the lord.

Then turn thrice with the sun’s course, stretch then out lengthwise and enumerate there the litanies and say then: Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus to the end. Sing then Benedicite with outstretched arms and Magnificat and Pater noster thrice, and commend it [the land] to Christ and saint Mary and the holy cross for praise and for worship and for the benefit of the one who owns that land and all those who are serving under him.⁴ When all that is done, then let a man take unknown seed from beggars and give them twice as much as he took from them, and let him gather all his plough tools together; then let him bore a hole in the beam [of the plough, putting in] incense and fennel and hallowed soap and hallowed salt. Take then that seed, set it on the plough’s body, say then:

Erce, Erce, Erce,⁵ earth’s mother,

May the all-ruler grant you, the eternal lord,

fields growing and flourishing,

propagating and strengthening,

tall shafts, bright crops,

and broad barley crops,

and white wheat crops,

and all earth’s crops.

May the eternal lord grant him,

and his holy ones, who are in heaven,

that his produce be guarded against any enemies whatsoever,

and that it be safe against any harm at all,

from poisons [lyblaca] sown around the land.

Now I bid the Master, who shaped this world,

that there be no speaking-woman [cwidol wif] nor artful man

[cræftig man]⁶

that can overturn these words thus spoken.

Then let a man drive forth the plough and the first furrow cut, say then:

Whole may you be [Be well] earth, mother of men!

May you be growing in God’s embrace,

with food filled for the needs of men.

Take then each kind of flour and have someone bake a loaf [the size of] a hand’s palm and knead it with milk and with holy water and lay it under the first furrow. Say then:

Field full of food for mankind,

bright-blooming, you are blessed

in the holy name of the one who shaped heaven

and the earth on which we live;

the God, the one who made the ground, grant us the gift of growing,

that for us each grain might come to use.

Say then thrice Crescite in nomine patris, sit benedicti [Grow in the name of the father, be blessed]. Amen and Pater noster three times.

How should we read this ceremony for blessing the fields? As pagan or Christian? Demonic or Godly? Manipulative magic or supplicative prayer? By the standards of a later age, this remedy is problematic because it defies the neat categories used to judge what is Christian or rational. The text was the product of the literate clergy who represented the formal church in late Saxon England. Yet it has enough identifiably pre-Christian elements to cause consternation among many later theologians and modern scholars, who see it as evidence of the retention of paganism in the practice of magic and as a failure of the Christianizing effort in the late Saxon church. My argument in this work is that the Christian charms, such as the formulas in the remedy above and the elf charms analyzed in Chapter 5, are not some kind of “Christian magic” demonstrating the weakness of early medieval Christianity but constitute evidence of the religions success in conversion by accommodating Anglo-Saxon culture. This book proposes a different model for understanding Christian conversion, one that allows us to consider these folk rituals within their own context. This model is popular religion, a modern construct that examines the broader religious experience of a society.

Popular religion, as one facet of a larger, complex culture, consists of those beliefs and practices common to the majority of the believers. This popular religion encompasses the whole of Christianity, including the formal aspects of the religion as well as the general religious experience of daily life. These popular practices include rituals marking the cycles of life (birth, marriage, and death) or combating the mysterious (illness and danger) or assuring spiritual security (the afterlife). Popular belief was reflected in those rituals and in other symbols exhibited in the society, such as paintings, shrines, and relics.

The cultural history approach employed here departs from traditional church history studies that focus on the well-defined area of formal Christianity—the institution of the church with its hierarchy of clergy and its canons, councils, and theological constructs.⁷ Representatives of this formal religion, the missionaries, reformers, and church historians, present conversion as a dramatic shift in religious orientation, a radical transformation in belief—a definition that is still common today. Writers such as Gregory of Tours, Bede, Ælfric, and Wulfstan follow a long tradition dating back to Eusebius and Augustine that tends to portray the world in a dualistic fashion, pagan versus Christian, magic versus miracle, Devil versus God. Conversion for them is therefore a dramatic event switching from one side to the other.

This formal religion, however, is only a subset of a larger whole; popular religion encompasses all practicing Christians and all everyday practices and beliefs. Expanding our view to this larger Christian community allows us to see the gradual nature of conversion. Under the influence of recent cultural history, the study of popular religion has begun to elucidate the slower processes of accommodation between culture and religion in everyday life that show how Christianity became an integral part of culture and, vice versa, how emerging European cultures changed Christianity.

In the context of popular religion, then, conversion is both an event and a process whereby an individual or a group changes religious orientation, in both belief and practice. Even though early Christian and medieval narratives frequently emphasize conversion as a dramatic event for a prominent individual and his or her society, these narratives also suggest that it was a dynamic process stretched over time involving a great deal of cultural assimilation between the imported Romano-Christian religion and the native folklife of the various “Germanic” peoples settling in Europe.⁸ This acculturation process creates many gray areas, containing practices that do not fit into tidy categories and are subject to differing interpretations, such as the Christian charms against the attack of elves examined at length in Chapter 5.

Late Saxon England, circa 900–1050, was a dynamic period of growth for popular religion, as seen in expanding local churches and in more documents recording folk religious remedies. In order to understand popular religious practices in this period, we need to place them in the context of this gradual process of cultural conversion, in which Germanic folklore and Christian belief bled into each other as much or more than they sought to destroy each other. Instead of focusing, as many histories do, on the traditional dualistic view of oppositions in conversion (magic versus religion, for example), this study examines the middle ground, the gray area of encounter and accommodation between Germanic cultures and the incoming Christian traditions.

The Field Remedy quoted at the outset is an excellent example of a ritual that needs to be seen in the context of a developing popular Christianity.⁹ In its invocation of both Father God and Mother Earth (subordinated here to the Allruler) and in its appeal to the combined forces of earth, sky, Mary, and Heaven, it draws on both the Germanic and Christian traditions in an unselfconscious way. The multiple spiritual agencies, mostly chthonic in nature, referenced in this remedy show continuity from Germanic animistic belief, and yet the use of masses and prayers and the ultimate appeal to a supreme divinity demonstrate the overlordship of Christianity. It is more appropriate, then, to see these practices as the retention of Germanic folklore in a popular Christianity rather than as the continuance of paganism as a religious system.

Folk medical remedies, merging across the boundaries into the spiritual cures found in liturgy, are one clear type of evidence illustrating the conversion of Germanic folkways to Christianity or, to put it the other way, the adaptation of Christianity to Germanic ways. Anglo-Saxon charms against the attack of invisible elves, and their demonization in late Saxon remedies, exist in sufficient numbers in the medical manuscripts to show a variety of accommodation techniques that reveal this conversion process. These middle practices, as I term them, symbolize a unique creation, an Anglo-Saxon Christianity. This model of popular religion thus highlights the flash points between the formal religion and the popular, the areas where some kind of negotiation between the two took place. Folklore as an areligious concept is therefore a more appropriate term than paganism or magic to describe the transmission of Germanic practices and beliefs that ultimately lost their pagan context as they were integrated into popular Christianity.

I am arguing here for a more favorable view than that reflected in previous scholarship of this mixture of Germanic folklore and Christian belief: not as evidence of the lowest, degenerate fringe of a dominant Christian orthodoxy (the older view prominent in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century treatment of charms) or even as evidence of the failure of Christianization in the face of a recalcitrant pagan population (the more recent view promulgated especially by Jacques Le Goff), but as evidence of the dynamic interaction that takes place between a native culture and an introduced religion.¹⁰ This is Christianity succeeding by way of acculturation and Germanic culture triumphing in transformation. Neither is the passive victim of the other. Likewise, most ordinary Anglo-Saxon Christians were not suffering from a split personality; rather, they created a wholeness out of their mixed heritages. Whether to refer to this hybridization process as Christianizing the Anglo-Saxons or as Germanicizing Christianity is problematic. The biblical analogy of new wine in old skins shows the dilemma of trying to understand this transformation: Is Christianity the new wine put into old skins? Or is it the new skin into which old wine is poured? These questions about form and substance defy precise answers because they are a matter of perspective.

This first chapter reviews some of the various historiographical perspectives on the issue of Christianization and outlines a model for understanding popular religion and conversion. The second and third chapters explore the context for the development of late Saxon popular religion by examining the tensions between local clergy and reform leaders. Chapter 4 analyzes the specific context for the charms in the intermingling of medicine, liturgy, and folklore. Chapter 5 demonstrates how the elf charms in particular are a hybrid of these diverse, intertwining contexts and constitute middle practices that reveal the negotiated territory between popular and formal religion in the process of cultural conversion in the late Saxon world.

Historiographical Perspectives

Popular religion as a modern construct is part of the cultural history movement toward democratizing and diversifying history. Its broader vision adds new perspectives to the controversy over the Christianization of Europe. The nineteenth-century view of the Middle Ages as “an Age of Faith,” dominated by an essentially Catholic worldview, came under attack in the 1970s in a de-Christianizing effort begun in part by Jean Delumeau. As historians interested in popular culture brought to light more and more exceptions to the rule, evidence of magic or paganism, the whole notion of a Christian society was discredited as an idea limited to the minority elite of medieval society. However, the pendulum is now swinging back from this extreme reaction to something between the traditional, “Christian society” view and the un-Christianized view, and a dynamic synthesis between Christianity and folk cultures is being postulated.¹¹ This middle position works if popular culture is studied as a meeting ground between elite and folk cultures and not as the antithesis of “high” culture. In other words, if popular culture assimilated and internalized Christianity through interaction with the formal religion, then the label of Christian society can be used to describe medieval culture as a whole; however, it will not be the narrow, highly controlled Christianity of the religious elite.

The difficulty with the reactionary view positing an incomplete Christianization is that it depends on an assumed model of pure religion rather than on a complex, diverse, and changing one.¹² The de-Christianizing approach accepts from the traditional view the elite definition of religion, that Christianity in its purest form is represented best in the expressions of theologians and churchmen; deviations from or additions to this pure doctrine and ritual are aberrations and therefore “less Christian” or, worse yet, not Christian at all. This definition gives primacy to abstract concepts and literacy over symbolic rituals and devalues the religious comprehension of those who “mindlessly” participate in religious rituals without being able to articulate the meanings behind them.¹³

If, however, the religion is defined not just by its elite leaders but by the behaviors and norms of all of its adherents, then Christianity becomes a broader and more pervasive phenomenon in society. The approach of cultural history, under the rubric of mentalités in the Annales school and through the influence of ethnography, offers a way to read the inarticulate rituals of popular behavior and to view them a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations & Maps
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Crossing Boundaries
• Chapter 1. Popular Religion: The Process of Conversion
• Chapter 2. The Late Saxon Religious Environment: The Growth of Local Churches
• Chapter 3. Magic and Miracle: The Augustinian Worldview and the Reform of Popular Christianity
• Chapter 4. Locating the Charms: Medicine, Liturgy, and Folklore
• Chapter 5. Elves, Demons, and Other Mind-Altering Afflictions: Evidences of Popular Practices
• Conclusion. Religion and Culture: Rethinking Early Medieval Worldviews
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index