Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2022
Dunstan saw, while asleep… what looked like a tree of wonderful height… extending far and wide over all Britain. The branches of the tree were loaded with countless cowls… at its topmost point, a very large cowl, which protected the others… A priest with white hair like an angel’s… replied… ‘The big cowl standing at the top of the tree is that of your monk, Æthelwold… The other cowls… denote the many monks who are to be instructed by his scholarship… for the service of almighty God in this district’.
– Wulfstan, Vita S. ÆthelwoldiTHE PRECEDING chapters have argued that Æthelwold's circle used supra-communal veneration to interact with groups outside their monasteries, from expelled clerics to farmworkers in the Fens. They modified their venerating practices, and even which saints they venerated, in response to groups outside their monasteries. Since Æthelwold's houses existed in different geographic, social, and political contexts, no two houses within the circle promoted the same set of saints during Æthelwold's lifetime. However, in the years after Æthelwold's death – during ‘the second generation’ (c. 984–c. 1016) of Æthelwold's circle – monks at various monasteries within Æthelwold's circle prominently venerated saints who had been established at other monasteries in the circle. I will suggest this shared veneration was a manifestation of the cooperation between these houses as they supported each other through the turbulent early years of Æthelred's reign. Additionally, the second generation seems to have continued to promote saints from the first generation – as well as new saints – in order to entrench relationships with outside groups. These practices helped the monasteries in Æthelwold's circle establish the basis for their economic, social, and cultural dominance in England in the eleventh century and beyond. This is not to suggest that the circle was unique among late tenth-century ecclesiastics in promoting saints in this way. On the contrary, most of the strategies discussed in this book – from giving property to saints to stealing relics – needed to be comprehensible to groups outside the circle to be effective. However, the circle's continued flexibility in its venerating strategies is notable because it reinforces the arguments in earlier chapters that even these most extreme of reformers adapted to local contexts via saints’ cults.
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