Conquered by Eleanor Parker;

Author:Eleanor Parker; [Parker;, Eleanor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350287068
Publisher: Bloomsbury

Figure 22 Crowland Abbey, the place of Waltheof’s burial. © Author’s own.

An English martyr

As an unusual and high-profile execution, Waltheof’s death must have had an immediate impact. It is possible that when the monks of Crowland sought permission to claim his body for burial, they already recognized the possibility that he might come to be seen as a martyr (Figure 22). However, it was only in the 1090s, fifteen years or so after his death, that his saintly cult began to emerge. In 1091 Crowland suffered a serious fire in which the church was damaged, and the following year, during the process of rebuilding, Waltheof’s tomb was opened. His body was found to be intact, with the severed head rejoined to the trunk, and miracles began to be reported at the tomb – the first tokens of sainthood.

Over the next few decades, Crowland began to promote Waltheof as a martyr. Although his tomb was opened in 1092, it was still not until more than twenty years later, in the decade between c. 1114 and c. 1124, that texts were produced at the instigation of the monks in support of his claim to sanctity. Unlike Thorkell’s lament, therefore, the first written accounts of Waltheof from Crowland date from at least forty years after the earl’s death and look back on his rebellions from a period when Norman rule was firmly established in England. What they have to say about ‘Norman’ and ‘English’ attitudes to Waltheof must be interpreted with this in mind. The abbot of Crowland who had brought Waltheof’s body to the abbey, Wulfketel, was deposed around 1085, and it was later suggested that this was because he was ‘an Englishman hated by the Normans’.30 The two abbots who oversaw the growth of Waltheof’s cult were, however, not likely to be anti-Norman partisans. Abbot Ingulf, who presided over Waltheof’s first translation in 1092, was an Englishman by birth but had entered monastic life in Normandy at St Wandrille, while his successor, who encouraged the flowering of Waltheof’s cult in the 1110s, was Geoffrey of Orléans, formerly prior of St Évroul.

It was Geoffrey, who became abbot of Crowland in 1109, who saw the advantages of providing a full textual record of Waltheof’s story. He commissioned Orderic Vitalis, whom he knew from St Évroul, to write an account of Waltheof’s life and death, as well as of the abbey’s early history and its other saint, Guthlac.31 Orderic stayed at Crowland while engaged in this work, drawing on written sources for the monastery’s history as well as the oral recollections of the monks. The resulting texts were incorporated into Orderic’s Ecclesiastical History but copies also remained at Crowland, where they formed the basis of later accounts of the earl’s life. These texts provide an insight into how the monks were choosing to present their patron in the second decade of the twelfth century and in particular how they saw fit to interpret the story of his controversial death. They also allow us to

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