Saint Erkenwald

(ca. 1400)

   Saint Erkenwald is a poem in ALLITERATIVE VERSE, written in the late 14th or early 15th century in a north West Midland dialect of MIDDLE ENGLISH. The poem of 352 lines survives in a single manuscript (British Museum MS Harley 2250), in which it occurs amid a number of SAINTS’ LIVES from the SOUTH ENGLISH LEGENDARY, but Saint Erkenwald differs from those conventional saints’ lives in many ways, ignoring the lineage, calling, passion, or martyrdom of the saint, and focusing only on a single miraculous incident in the saint’s career— an incident that appears in no other work associated with Erkenwald.

   The historical Erkenwald was first described by the Venerable BEDE in his eighth-century Ecclesiastical History of the English People as a revered bishop of London and the first of the city’s saints. He was born in 630, and was purportedly the son of Offa, king of East Anglia. A pious young man, he founded two monastic houses—one for nuns at Barking in Essex, to be headed by his sister Aetehlburgh, and the other for monks at Chertsey in Surrey, which he entered himself. He was consecrated bishop of London in 675 at the age of 45, and died at Barking Abbey in 693. For some 450 years, his shrine stood in St. Paul’s Cathedral and was reputed to work miracles of healing. In 1148 his body was moved to the wall above the high altar in St. Paul’s, and in 1386, during a rebuilding project for the cathedral, Bishop Robert Braybrooke proclaimed that the feasts of St. Erkenwald (the dates of his burial and his reinterment) would be celebrated as major festival days in the cathedral. It may have been the contemporary interest in St. Erkenwald’s festivals and in the rebuilding of the cathedral that led the anonymous poet to compose the poem of Saint Erkenwald, but the poet chose to use neither Bede or the two more recent, 12th-century Latin saint’s lives of Erkenwald as sources for his own poem. Instead, he used a popular legend associated with St.GREGORY THE GREAT: According to this legend,Gregory, upon hearing of the acts of justice attributed to the righteous pagan emperor Trajan, shed tears for Trajan’s soul. God, witnessing Gregory’s compassion, released Trajan from his place among the unbaptized in hell. The Saint Erkenwald poet tells a similar story, but makes the protagonist the renowned English bishop. The poem begins with a 32-line section that situates the story in its historical context—another time of rebuilding of St. Paul’s Cathedral, as early English Christians transform it from a pagan building to a consecrated one.Workmen examining the foundations of the building discover an elaborate tomb. The mayor of the city has them open the tomb, and inside they find a richly dressed and perfectly preserved corpse—here the poem draws on the tradition that the bodies of the sanctified will not undergo corruption.As the people examine the tomb, they can find no indication of who the corpse is.Word of the mystery comes to Bishop Erkenwald in Essex, and he returns to London, where he spends the night praying that God will show him the truth. In the morning he first says Mass in the cathedral, then goes down to the vault, with the people of the city pressing behind him. Told by the mayor and dean of the cathedral that they have not been able to discover anything about the corpse, Erkenwald observes that this shows the limits of human reason. This ends Part 1, halfway through the text at line 176. In Part 2, Erkenwald addresses the corpse itself, conjuring it to speak in the name of God. The corpse reveals that he was a pagan judge, who lived some 350 years before the birth of Christ. So renowned was he for his just decisions that when he died the people buried him like a king. In death, though he believes in God and had led a just life, he is doomed to spend eternity in Limbo. Erkenwald is so moved by the righteous pagan’s story that he expresses a wish to be able to baptize him— and just as he says the words that he would say in baptism, a tear falls from his eye onto the face of the corpse.

   In the final 32 lines of the poem, the corpse describes what happened to his soul the moment Erkenwald’s tear fell: Instantly, it was transported to heavenly bliss.Having described this, the corpse falls into corruption and disintegrates. The poem ends as Erkenwald leads a procession from the cathedral, with all the people following. The poem is clearly intended as an illustration of the infinite mercy and the incomprehensible grace of God. The poet was aware of current 14thcentury debate concerning the fate of virtuous pagans, and may have been specifically aware of the way William LANGLAND dealt with the issue, as well as with the story of the Emperor Trajan in PIERS PLOWMAN, where Langland had described baptism by fire and grace as equal in value to baptism by water. The Saint Erkenwald poet provides a kind of compromise position, in which the pagan judge is saved, but only after an unconventional baptism— but still a baptism of water.

   One question that scholars have debated about the poem is its authorship. For many years, it was believed by a good number of scholars that the same poet who wrote SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT and PEARL was the author of Saint Erkenwald. In recent decades that theory has been convincingly dismissed by critics (notably L. D. Benson) who have argued that the subject matter, date of the manuscripts, dialect, and vocabulary of the poems are too different to suggest common authorship.More recently, a certain John Massey of Cheshire has been suggested as a candidate, based on the fact that the name “Massey” appears in the manuscript, and that Thomas HOCCLEVE speaks of a poet by that name being active in the right area of England at the time the poem was probably written. But any such identifications remain pure conjecture. Ultimately, the poem stands on its own merits, and the authorship question is merely a sidelight to the thematic interest and artistry of the poem.

   Bibliography

   ■ Benson, L. D. “The Authorship of ‘St. Erkenwald,’ ” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 64 (1965): 393–405.

   ■ Davidson, Arnold.“Mystery,Miracle and Meaning in Saint Erkenwald,” Papers on Language and Literature 16 (1980): 37–44.

   ■ Kamkowski,William.“Saint Erkenwald and the Inadvertent Baptism: An Orthodox Response to Heterodox Ecclesiology,” Religion and Literature 27, no. 3 (Autumn 1995): 5–27.

   ■ Morse, Ruth, ed. St. Erkenwald. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1975.

   ■ Peterson, Clifford, ed. Saint Erkenwald. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977.

   ■ Stone, Brian, trans. The Owl and the Nightingale; Cleanness; Saint Erkenwald. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1971.