6 - On the Defensive

Summary

Fortified by history

DURING Osweard's short abbacy Ecgwine's original church building suffered a sudden collapse. In other places the minster churches of Ecgwine's time, if built of stone, were solid structures; at Evesham the fall may therefore have been far from catastrophic. After it happened, however, the event was invested with great significance because the container that had held Ecgwine's remains had been unharmed by the crash, a circumstance that would be represented some forty years later as a miracle. The relics that were rescued were in a receptacle that was later described by the imprecise terms locellus and vasculum. All that one can say about its appearance is that the container was rectangular, for it was alleged to have survived without a mark ‘either on the front or the back’ (‘nec ante nec retro’); and that it was portable because the monks were said to have picked it up from the rubble. A possible interpretation of those small observations is that before the crash Ecgwine's bones had been translated from their original resting place to a box-like reliquary, which was kept inside the church. If so, the cult of Ecgwine may be said to have started at Evesham before the sudden structural accident took place, whether or not he had yet been accorded the title of saint. There is no evidence, however, as to precisely how old or how mature the cult may have been by the 970s; perhaps it had assumed significance only with the Benedictine reform. Be that as it may, it seems that the Benedictine abbey's new sense of purpose in the 970s was being sustained not only by the wholehearted monasticism that had recently been introduced but also by a culture of reverence for the house's remote origins in the great monastic age immortalized by Bede. The retrieval of Ecgwine's remains from the rubble of his church may have seemed to Osweard and his monks an obvious analogy for the revival of Ecgwine's monastic ideals after the demise of the old minster. It was a parallel so striking as to account for the exaggerated terms in which the rescue was later reported. The monastic revival at Evesham under Osweard may thus have caused the cult of St Ecgwine to be established or enhanced and it is perhaps no coincidence that in the forty years after the reform some alleged miracles effected by Ecgwine and his relics began to be noted.