the goose resurrection miracles are an example of the absorption of an aspect of peasant culture into elite hagiography, not through a superstitious lapse on the part of hagiographers, but through the social relations in which ecclesiastical institutions were embedded. If that process happened in the case of the goose stories, then it might be expected to have occurred in other cases as well. The difficulty in assessing many miracle stories, particularly from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, lies in the large numbers of literary sources already in existence, while the same stories would have been circulating independently in popular and oral form. It was observed above, for example, that the ‘Elijah and the raven’ topos plausibly circulated at both levels by the eleventh century. Determining how far a particular example of a topos may have been broadly popular or literary in origin depends upon contextual and internal judgements on each, which often cannot be definitive. Many traditional topoi to do with the control of animals may be expected to have appealed to the concerns of the peasantry, but a literary adaptation of a popular story along these lines might be indistinguishable from a story emanating entirely from a monastic context. One group of stories which is open to analysis is the ‘hermit and hunter’ topos, where the saint protects hunted animals.