4 - Lay Piety, Confessional Directives and the Compiler’s Method in Late Anglo-Saxon England

Summary

Any examination of lay piety in the early Middle Ages is fraught with difficulties because of the nature of the evidence. Historians have almost exclusively looked at land donations, which leave records in the form of charters, as testimony of pious lay-giving. The limited scope of charter evidence, however, seriously distorts our perception of lay piety in the pre-Conquest period. Certainly, recent research has highlighted a previously under-recognized trend of extensive and expensive gift-giving among the eleventh-century elite – bishops, earls, and high-status women – that did not involve land donations. It also has to be acknowledged that only the gifts of those who had something noteworthy to give – a gold cross, a book, an embroidered chasuble or the like – would find their way into the written record. Smaller and more humble gifts – candles, provisions, even voluntary service – were rarely noted, unless they became part of an obligation, which a community could demand on a regular and repeated basis. Moreover, the largely illiterate laity of the eleventh century have left few hints of their internal spirituality (in the way that, for example, seventeenth-century Puritans, who kept spiritual diaries, did), and this has inevitably led to a concentration on the external aspects of lay piety, in particular, on pious gift-giving and, in some cases, the anachronistic assumption that this generosity was in someway disingenuous or, at least, incongruous with true piety.

The study of pastoral care is plagued by similar difficulties. Elite churchmen were keen to promulgate their ideas about how pastoral care ought to be conducted and how lay people ought to express their piety, but how this theory related to the reality of ‘in the field’ pastoral practice is hard to discern. Although Ælfric of Eynsham, a cloistered monk, wrote his two books of Catholic Homilies, in part for a lay audience, with the intent of encompassing every major feast-day in the Christian calendar, we cannot know who heard these homilies, in what context, and during what decades. Nor can we know ‘how’ they were heard: the level of lay understanding of and interest in this material remain a mystery. Ælfric also wrote letters giving advice about pastoral care but, in a manner similar to the homilies, we rarely know whom, beyond the named recipient, this advice reached, whether it was taken, or how successful it was.