ST OSWALD AND THE CHURCH OF WORCESTER

WHEN OSBERN, THE PRECENTOR OF Canterbury in the early days after the Conquest, re-wrote the Life of St Dunstan, he described that saint’s passage from the abbey of Glastonbury to the bishopric of Worcester as involving no change of allegiance—’from the Virgin’ he passed ‘to the Virgin, from the Mother of the Lord to the Mother of the Lord’: or, as we might put it more plainly, from St Mary of Glastonbury to St Mary of Worcester.[1] The high-flown style in which Osbern wrote, and the historical errors which disfigured his work, soon called forth another Life of St Dunstan, written by a successor of Osbern in the precentorship, the historian Eadmer, the friend and biographer of St Anselm. Eadmer, in his preface, gives as an example of his predecessor’s inexactness the fact that he had said that the cathedral church of Worcester was dedicated to the honour of the Blessed Mary the Mother of God, whereas when Dunstan was bishop its dedication was to St Peter the Prince of the Apostles.[2] It was not long before a third Life of St Dunstan came from the pen of William of Malmesbury. He passes over the work of his contemporary Eadmer in silence, but he loses no opportunity of denouncing the ignorance of Osbern. As he was writing for the monks of Glastonbury, who were particularly eager at that time to assert their share in the glories of Dunstan, his depreciation of the Canterbury Chanter, as he calls him, would not come amiss. In his interpretation of the vision in which Dunstan beheld St Peter handing him a sword, he says: ‘Blessed Peter handed him his sword, because he grudged him not his own seat at Worcester. For the bishop’s throne at Worcester had not yet passed to the name of the Blessed Mother of God.’ After exposing the mistake which Osbern had made on this point, he adds: ‘I learn from this that his historical investigations have not gone very far, since he does not know the churches of his own country.’[3] In a later passage he gives an explanation of the change of dedication at Worcester. ‘Oswald’, he says, ‘furnished his episcopal see at Worcester with monks living according to rule; not indeed expelling the clerks by force, but circumventing them with holy guile. For in a purposeful neglect he withdrew his presence from the church of Blessed Peter, whom that see had served from ancient times, and exercised his pontifical office with his monks in the church of the Blessed Mother of God, which he had constructed in the churchyard. So, as the people flocked to the bishop and the monks, the clerks were deserted, and either took their flight or bowed to the monastic yoke.’[4]

We are not concerned for the moment with the fiction of Oswald’s ‘holy guile’, but only with the dedication of the church of Worcester. Eadmer tells us that he had sought for information from Worcester itself,[5] and we are fortunate in being able to appeal to a monk of Worcester who was a little earlier than Eadmer, and was unusually well informed as to the traditions of his own church. This was Heming, who under Bishop Wulstan’s guidance collected and arranged the ancient charters of the see, and copied them out to preserve them for posterity.[6] Heming’s chartulary, as we now have it, is a curiously composite document, the leaves of which have been disarranged, so that it is not easy to discover its original form or even to say whether it is all the work of one compiler. It has more than one preface, and more than one conclusion: but this may be only due to its original distribution into several books. One of these conclusions comes on f. 152. He has just given an early charter of a certain Wiferd and his wife Alta, and he adds to it a note to the effect that after their death a stone structure bearing a cross was erected over their grave and in their memory. By this cross, on account of the level space, Oswald often used to preach to the people; because the church of the episcopal seat, which was dedicated in honour of St Peter, was very small and could not contain the multitudes that assembled, and that noble monastery of St Mary, which he commenced for the episcopal seat and worthily brought tocompletion, had not as yet been built. This stone structure remained till the time of King Edward (the Confessor), when Alfric, the brother of Bishop Beorhtheah (1033–8), desiring to enlarge the presbytery of St Peter’s, pulled it down and used the materials for his building.[7]

Here is a picture to the life, far more convincing than the story of Oswald’s ‘holy guile’—a parable of what was happening in the English Church of the second half of the tenth century. A great spiritual movement was in progress: the old limits were too narrow for the new enthusiasm. It was no ‘purposeful neglect’ which made Oswald leave the little sanctuary which had sufficed for the needs and the ambitions of the past: it was the call of the people who could find no room inside. And the old church was spared, as the wattle-church at Glastonbury had been spared, when church after church rose beside it; and as, nearly a century later, the old church of St Peter at Jumièges was spared, when the noble minster of St Mary was built beside it by Abbot Robert, whom Edward the Confessor afterwards brought to Canterbury. Oswald, who was one of the foremost spirits of the new movement, had been a monk at Fleury when that abbey, newly reformed, was at the height of its fame. His conceptions of the dignity of divine worship doubtless impelled him forward, and he would embrace with eagerness the opportunity of raising a great ‘basilica’, as he himself calls it, in honour of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

We may now go back from these later authorities to Oswald himself, and read what he wrote in 983, when he had been bishop of Worcester for twenty-two years, and for half that time archbishop of York as well. These are the opening words of a charter (K. C. D. 637) issued in the year which had brought what he regarded as the crowning mercy of his life.

‘The mercy of our Lord and our Redeemer ruling all the kingdoms of the whole world: He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth up the beggar from the dunghill, to set them among princes, and to make them inherit the throne of glory. So to me Oswald, Archbishop, though unworthy, He hath granted so great a boon of His loving-kindness, that beyond all my expectation I should bring to its completion the basilica which I have founded in my episcopal see, to wit in the monastery of Worcester, in honour of Mary, Mother of God, in the year of our Lord’s Incarnation 983.’

We cannot fix with precision the year in which Oswald brought monks to Worcester. At the outset of his episcopate he had formed a small community at Westbury-on-Trym, as a model of monastic life after the reformed manner. Then came his great new foundation at Ramsey in Huntingdonshire, colonized in the first instance from Westbury. Ramsey in its turn supplied the nucleus of the settlement at Worcester. The great church of St Mary must have taken from six to ten years to build: for we have positive evidence that the monks were in Worcester by 977, if not sooner. But Oswald was no rough-handed reformer. He would not force the pace, and he would not obliterate the past. The little old church of St Peter still stood and enjoyed the prerogative of the bishop’s stool. In a charter (B. C. S. 1166), misdated 965, but shown by the signatures to belong to 991, the year before the archbishop’s death, a grant is said to be made ‘with consent and license of the monastic society of St Mary, the episcopal chair of whose monastery is known to be consecrated to St Peter’.

This reverence for the past is a fine trait in Oswald’s character, and it goes far to explain the peaceableness which marked the reform of his cathedral chapter. But we can well understand that his successors would feel the incongruity of the situation thus created; and the church of St Mary was bound to succeed to the dignity to which its superior merits entitled it.

It will seem to those who are familiar with the history of the church of Worcester, as it has been written in recent times, that the account given above is seriously defective, inasmuch as it makes no reference to an earlier church of St Mary and to the monks who at one time were attached to it, as evidenced by a series of notices in charters from the eighth to the tenth century. It has become customary to explain these notices by the supposition that there were two churches side by side with a common cemetery between them, the principal church being dedicated to St Peter and served by secular clergy, while the other of lesser dignity had at one time at any rate been served by monks. The two churches are thought of as receiving benefactions separately and competing for public favour, until Oswald put an end to their rivalry by rebuilding St Mary’s on a grand scale and transferring to it the bishop’s chair and the ancient endowments of St Peter’s.[8]

Instead of discussing point by point the difficulties inherent in the situation thus outlined, it may be well to state at once that an examination of the Worcester charters down to the time of Oswald has convinced me that there was no church of St Mary, and that there was no community of monks at Worcester before the days of the great reform in the latter part of the tenth...