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Memorializing Gregory the Great: the origin

and transmission of a papal cult in the seventh

and early eighth centuries

AL A N

TH A C K E R

This article examines the origins and early development of the cult of Pope Gregory the Great (590±604) in Rome, England, Gaul and Ireland. A ®rst section analyses the earliest Life of the pope, writtenbetween 704 and 714 at the Northumbrian monastery of Whitby,arguing that it depended not upon oral tradition but upon early

writings originating among Gregory's disciples in Rome and in partat least recorded by John Moschus. A second section relates thismaterial to the development of Gregory's cult in the seventh and early eighth centuries, highlighting the activity of ArchbishopTheodore in England. Although clerical rather than popular, the cultthus promoted established Gregory's reputation as a pastor, evangelistand father of the Latin liturgy.

Unlike most early medieval saints, whose cults were local and focusedaround their tombs, in the century and a half after his death PopeGregory the Great was venerated less in Rome, where he was born,died, and was buried, than in the distant province of England. There,remarkably, his cult reached its earliest ¯owering with a strange Life1

compiled c .700 by an anonymous inmate of the Northumbrianmonastry of Whitby.2 Rome itself produced no Life before the ninth

1 For the text and recent discussion see, The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great, ed. andtrans. B. Colgrave (Kansas, 1969; reprinted Cambridge, 1985), henceforth Earliest Life(commentary), VG (text); A.T. Thacker, `Social and Continential Background [to EarlyEnglish Saints' Lives]', DPhil thesis, University of Oxford (1976), pp. 38±79; S.E.Mosford, `Critical Edition [of the Vita Gregorii Magni by an Anonymous Member of the Community of Whitby]', DPhil thesis, University of Oxford (1989), esp. pp. xi±lxxvi; O. Limone, `La vita di Gregorio Magno dell' Anonimo di Whitby', StudiMedievali 3rd ser. 19 (1978), pp. 37±67.

2 The location of Streoneshalh remains controversial. I do not propose to discuss thematter here and therefore retain the conventional designation of Whitby. Cf. P. Hunter

Blair, `Whitby as a Centre of learning [in the Seventh Century]', in M. Lapidge and H.Gneuss (eds) Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England : Studies Presented toPeter Clemoes on the Occasion of his Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 3±32,

Early Medieval Europe 1998 7 (1) 59±84 # Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998, 108 CowleyRoad, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

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century.3 What is odd is not so much the relative lack of veneration for

Gregory in seventh-century Rome, where few popes apart from thosewho had been martyred achieved sainthood, but the early developmentof his cult elsewhere. In fact, as we shall see, the origins of the North-umbrian Life lie in reverence for Gregory immediately after his deathamong his Roman and English disciples. That nascent cult, however,soon lapsed, only to be revived in very different circumstances in thelate seventh century.

This article takes the Whitby Life as the starting-point for an exami-

nation of the cult's origins and early transmission. The analysis contri-butes to the debate about the role of oral tradition in the developmentof local cults, a debate of especial importance for Anglo-Saxonistswhose hagiographical literature is so sparse and whose cults are sonumerous.4 Although the Gregorian material in the Whitby Life isgenerally regarded as the product of a long process of oral transmis-sion, that assumption is inherently implausible. While oral testimoniesmay have had their role in localized cults, they can scarcely have

shaped one which, like Gregory's, was developed and recorded in anew and alien environment. The ®rst section of this article contendsthat the Whitby author's account of Gregory depended primarily uponearly written sources.

A second section analyses the diffusion and elaboration of thosesources in the context of the development of Gregory's cult in Rome,England, Ireland and Gaul up to the mid-eighth century. After whatappears to have been something of a false start, in the later seventh

century the cult was revived and promoted by the papacy in Rome andmore especially by Archbishop Theodore in England, a phase of activity which led to the reconstitution of the early material to formthe Whitby Life. In this period and the succeeding half century thegroundwork was laid for the Carolingian development of Gregory'sreputation as the father of the Latin liturgy.5

_________________

at 9±12. See also P. Rahtz, Ànglo-Saxon and Later Whitby' in L.R. Joey (ed.) YorkshireMonasticism: Archaeology, Art of Architecture from the Seventh to the SixteenthCenturies, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions 16 (Leeds, 1995),pp. 1±11.

3 John [the] Deacon, V [ita Sancti] Gregorii, Praefatio, P[atrologia] L[atina] 75, col. 61;Thacker, `Social and Continental Background', pp. 70±2.

4 Cf. J. Smith, Òral and Written: Saints, Miracles, and Relics in Brittany, c . 850±1250',Speculum 65 (1990), pp. 310±43, esp. 310±12.

5

See for example, L. Treitler, `Homer and Gregory: the Transmission of Epic Poetry andPlainchant', Musical Quarterly 60 (1974), pp. 333±72, esp. 334±44. I am grateful toCatherine Cubitt for this reference.

Alan Thacker60

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The sources of the Whitby Life and their transmission

The Life was written at one of the greatest monasteries in Northum-bria, a learned and cultured double community ruled by the in¯uentialprincess álf¯ñd (abbess 680±714).6 The author was one of the nuns orof the priests who served them as chaplains. Although a Latinist of strictly limited ability, whose style and approach was ungrammaticaland often naive,7 he or she 8 was relatively learned, well versed in thescriptures and the works of Gregory and with some knowledge of

other Fathers, including Jerome and Augustine.9

The promotion of Gregory at Whitby represented a signi®cant move within themainstream of Northumbrian politics and ecclesiastical life.

The Whitby author's account of Gregory falls into two discreteparts: the ®rst (chapters 1±11) a somewhat jejune recounting of thepope's origins, early career and teaching, culminating in the dispatch of the Roman mission to England; the second (chapters 20±32) a brief summary of the miracles which he performed as pontiff in Rome, and

of his later writings. The two sections are separated by a long digres-sion (chapters 12±19) on the Deiran royal family and its contributionto the Roman mission in the person of King Edwin (616±33), thepatron of Paulinus, ®rst bishop of York, and grandfather of álf¯ñd.As I have argued elsewhere, this connection provides the key to theproduction of the Life: Whitby under álf¯ñd and her mother, Edwin'sdaughter Ean¯aed, became the pantheon of the Northumbrian royalfamily, a shrine to Deiran kingship and the Roman mission, whose

Easter dating had already been accepted in the synod held in themonastery in 664.10

This article is primarily concerned with the two assemblages of Gregorian material, the contents of which may be brie¯y summarized.The ®rst opens with a prefatory statement announcing Gregory'suniversally recognized status as a saint; mention of his Roman paren-

6

Hunter Blair, `Whitby as a Centre of Learning', pp. 3±32; A.T. Thacker, `Monks,Preaching and Pastoral Care', in J. Blair and R. Sharpe (eds) Pastoral Care Before theParish (Leicester, 1992), pp. 137±70, at 143±4 and 149±50.

7 For discussion of the author's Latinity see Mosford, `Critical Edition', esp. pp. lvi±lxii;Colgrave, Earliest Life, pp. 55±6. Cf. W. Goffart, Narrators [of Barbarian History](Princeton, 1988), pp. 264±5.

8 Despite the uncertainty about the author's sex, to avoid stylistic inelegancy the masculinepronoun only has occasionally been used.

9 Mosford, `Critical Edition', pp. xxxix±xlii; Colgrave, Earliest Life pp. 53±4.10 For example, A.T. Thacker, `Kings, Saints, and Monasteries in Pre-Viking Mercia',

Midland History 10 (1985), pp. 1±25, at 2±4; `Membra Disjecta: The Division of the

Body and the Diffusion of the Cult', in C. Stancliffe and E. Cambridge (eds) Oswald: Northumbrian King to European Saint (Stamford, 1995), pp. 97±127, at 105±7; `Socialand Continental Background', pp. 42±59.

# Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998 Early Medieval Europe 1998 7 (1)

Memorializing Gregory the Great 61

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tage11 is followed by discussion based upon his own writings of his

predilection for the monastic life

12

and of why only some saints displaytheir status through miracles. Gregory himself, it is claimed, is to beacknowledged as a saint not primarily because he performed wonders(though he did so) but because of his apostolic teaching, above all hisaction in establishing the English mission.13

The author then turns to Gregory's election to the papacy, whichwas, he asserts, accompanied by wonders. Though Gregory assumedof®ce reluctantly and ¯ed the city, the people of Rome were granted a

sign which led to the discovery of his hiding place and ensured hisunwilling return.14 This account of Gregory's elevation serves to intro-duce the famous story of his encounter in Rome with the Anglian ±more speci®cally Deiran ± boys, whose beauty (`not Angles butAngels') inspired his determination to go in person to evangelize theEnglish. Though this wish was frustrated, it engendered the missioneventually dispatched from Rome in 596.15

At this point, the author inserts his account of Edwin;16 when he

returns to his main subject, the setting of his stories has become speci®-cally Roman, focused upon miracles attributed to the pope. Theyinclude the well-known vindication of transubstantiation through thetransformation of a host into a bloodstained fragment of human ¯esh,and a tale of relic rags authenticated when they bled at the pope'sincision.17 Other stories describe a meeting with the king of theLombards, and the posthumous baptism of the charitable (but pagan)Emperor Trajan by Gregory's compassionate tears.18 We also learn that,

because of his eloquence, Gregory was termed `golden-mouthed', anepithet widely used among the Greeks and among Christian saints ®rstbestowed on John Chrysostom (347±407).19 Most interesting of all,perhaps, is the brutal story of Gregory's attack upon an unnamedsuccessor for jealously disparaging his achievements in Rome.Although warned by Gregory in a vision to desist, the successor(presumably Sabinianus, 604±6) repeated his jibes, and for that offencewas kicked on the head by the saint to such effect that shortly after-

wards he died of the blow.20 Interspersed with this curious material are

11 VG, c. 1.12 Ibid . c. 2.13 Ibid . c. 3±6.14 Ibid . c. 7±8.15 Ibid . c. 9±13.16 Ibid . c. 14±19.17 Ibid . c. 20±1.18

Ibid . c. 23 and 29.19 Ibid . c. 24.20 Ibid . c. 28.

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summaries of Gregory's teachings and writings ± on angels, on the

signi®cance of miracles, on pastoral care, and on the Biblical books of Ezechiel and Job.21 The work concludes with a bald (and highlyunusual) statement that the writer knew little of Gregory's death, and areassertion of his conviction that Gregory was universally acknowl-edged to be a saint.22

It has been commonly assumed that the bulk of this material derivesfrom a body of oral tradition, perhaps preserved at Canterbury fromthe time of the Roman mission and taken north with Queen Ean¯ed,

or brought back from Rome by English travellers at some later date.23

Some passages in the Whitby Life will undoubtedly sustain such aninterpretation. At the end of his work, for example, the author excusedhis inaccuracies on the ground that he had not learned about Gregorydirectly from those who had seen and heard the events described, butonly `by common report', vulgata.24 Elsewhere, however, he declaredthat his sources were ancient and various, acknowledging dependenceupon narratio ®delium or narratio antiquorum, even a record of

Gregory's deeds, a gesta signorum.25

Such phrases more than hint at theexistence of earlier written authorities. In any case, much of theWhitby author's account, including some of the miracle stories,undoubtedly derived from Gregory's own writings. The bleeding relicrags, for example, evoke the pope's letter to the Empress Constantinawhich attributed an analogous wonder to Leo the Great (440±91) whenfaced with some sceptical Greeks.26 The tale of the excommunicatedphysician reprieved after death through Gregory's offering of the mass

retells the story of Justus, a monk of Gregory's own foundation on theCelian, ®rst related in the Dialogues.27 The confrontation with the

21 Ibid . c. 25±7 and 30±1.22 Ibid . c. 32.23 Colgrave, Earliest Life, pp. 50±5; idem, `The Earliest Life of St. Gregory the Great,

written by a Whitby Monk', in N.K. Chadwick (ed.) Celt and Saxon: Studies in theEarly British Border (Cambridge, 1963), pp. 119±37, at 131; C.E. Wright, [Cultivation of ]Saga [in Anglo-Saxon England ] (Edinburgh, 1939), pp. 43±8, 72 and 75; J. Richards,

Consul of God: The Life and Times of Gregory the Great (London, 1980), pp. 238±9;Mosford, `Critical Edition', pp. xliii±xlvii. But cf. C.W. Jones, Saints' Lives and Chronicles in Early England (Ithaca, 1947), p. 102, n. 27; J.M. Wallace-Madrill, review of Earliest Life, in English Historical Review 84 (1969), pp. 376±7.

24 Ùnde si quid horum que scripsimus de hoc viro non fuit, quae etiam non ab illis quividerunt et audierunt per ore didicimus, vulgata tantum habemus, de illo eius etiam essein magno dubitamus minime. . . . VG, c. 30.

25 VG, c. 3, 9 and 20.26 Ibid . c. 21; Greg[ory the] G[rea]t, Regist[rum Epistolarum], IV.30, ed. P. Ewald and L.

Hartmann in M [onumenta] G[ermaniae] H [istorica], Epistolae I±II, 2 vols (Berlin, 1887±99), I, pp. 264±5; P. Ewald, `Die a Èlteste Biographie Gregors I', Historische AufsaÈ tze dem

Andenken Georg Waitz gewidmet (Hanover, 1886), p. 34.27 VG, c. 28; Greg[ory the] G[rea]t, Dial [ogi], IV.57, ed. U. Moricca, Fonti per la storiad'Italia 57 (Rome, 1924), pp. 317±20.



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Lombard king seems to be based upon Leo the Great's famous

encounter with Attila, reworked to ®t the context of Gregory's knownmeetings with Agilulf.28 Such undoubted instances of the adaptation of written texts, whether by the Whitby author himself or some otherunknown hand, should make us wary of postulating orally-transmittedsaga as the main source of the Roman episodes in the life.29

There are several indications that the Whitby author had access toreliable tradition otherwise unknown in England. In particular, healone among the early sources recorded the name of Gregory's mother,

Silvia.30

We know that he was right about that because the pope'sninth-century Roman biographer, John the Deacon, stated that she wasso named in a portrait in the family monastery on the Celian hill.31

Other information probably obtained directly from Rome included theidentity of the pope whose permission Gregory sought for his abortiveattempt to visit England: Benedict I (574±9) was not mentioned byBede or Paul the Deacon, author of a late-eighth-century Life of Gregory.32 Similarly, the circumstantial detail in the story of Gregory's

¯ight after his election to the papacy indicated a source acquaintedwith the local topography of Rome, while the authenticity of the ¯ightitself was con®rmed in a near contemporary report by a deacon of Tours.33

Although genealogical information, such as the name of Gregory'smother, may have been transmitted orally to the Whitby author, it isless likely that he obtained narratives set in Rome in that way. Crucialhere is the episode of Gregory and the bleeding relic rags. As already

noted, the ultimate prototype for the anecdote is a story told byGregory himself about Pope Leo the Great.34 Interestingly, however,something very like the Whitby Tale exists in two closely relatedversions, one in Georgian, the other in Arabic, both in being by thetenth century and both believed to derive ultimately from a lost Greek

28 VG, c. 23; Colgrave, Earliest Life, p. 154; Ewald, in MGH Epistolae I, p. 319, n. 2.29 The Whitby author himself, concerned as he was with Gregory's apostolic status, perhaps

edited the story of Justus to demonstrate Gregory's special prerogative to bind and loose.He was certainly aware of its origin ìn scriptis . . . eius quoque hystoricis de exituanimarum': VG, c. 28. The Justus story was, however, exceptional. Other anecdotes weremore probably adapted in Rome itself.

30 VG, c. 1. Silvia is not mentioned by Bede or the Liber ponti®calis.31 John Deacon, V. Gregorii, I.9 (col. 66); H.M.R. Mayr-Harting, The Coming of Chris-

tianity to Anglo-Saxon England (London, 1972; 3rd edn, 1991), p. 58; Colgrave, EarliestLife, p. 141.

32 VG, c. 10; Paul the Deacon, Vita Sancti Gregorii, ed. H. Grisar, Zeitschrift fuÈ r katholischeTheologie 11 (1887), pp. 162±73. The Whitby author was, however, wrong in assumingthat Benedict was Gregory's immediate predecessor in the papacy.

33

VG, c. 7; Greg[ory] of Tours, H [istoria] F [rancorum], x.1, ed. B. Krusch and W. Levison,MGH , S[criptores] R[erum] M [erovingicarum I, part 1, 2nd end (Hanover, 1951), p. 478.34 VG, c. 21; above at n. 26.

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original. That original was probably once part of a celebrated collection

of anecdotes about Christian monks and clerics made in the earlyseventh century by John Moschus and known to posterity as the `Spiri-tual Meadow', Pratum spirituale.35

Moschus' work, no part of which was translated into Latin beforethe ninth century, circulated not in a de®nitive publication but invarious selections from his vast pool of stories.36 It was to one suchassemblage, translated from the original Greek into Georgian, that aversion of Gregory and the relic rags was appended. Moschus,

moreover, had undoubtedly preserved two further highly approvinganecdotes about the pope, one an otherwise unknown demonstrationof his exceptional humility, the other a version of the story of Justus.37

He also told of an irregular baptism: a Hebrew youth falling sick in thedesert tearfully sought the sacrament from his (lay) companions, whoin the absence of water effected it with sand. To justify such a depar-ture from the norm, Moschus cited a ®ve-fold classi®cation of baptism,attributed to Gregory of Nazianzus, one category of which was, signif-

icantly, baptism of tears.38

Embedded within his collections, then, wereversions of stories told in the Whitby Life and other matter emanatingfrom a Gregorian milieu. Evidently Moschus had access to, or hadhimself assembled, a corpus of material derived from circles close tothe pope in Rome.

Moschus never directly revealed how he came by this corpus. Forthe story of Justus he cited as his source Peter, a Roman priest, perhapsthat Peter who was Gregory's interlocutor in the Dialogues; for

Gregory's humbling of himself he named a certain Abbot John of Fars

35 J.M. McCulloh, `The Cult of Relics in the Letters and `̀ Dialogues'' of Gregory the Great:a Lexicographical Study', Traditio 32 (1976), pp. 145±85; idem, `From Antiquity to theMiddle Ages: Continuity and Change in Papal Relic Policy from the Sixth to the EighthCentury', in E. Dassman and K. Suso Frank (eds) Pietas. Festchrift fuÈ r Bernhard KoÈ tting, Jahrbuch fuÈ r Antike und Christentum, Erga Ènzsband 8 (1980), pp. 313±24, esp. 314±18;

G. Garitte, `Histoire eÂdi®antes geÂorgiennes', Byzantion 36 (1966), pp. 396±423, esp. pp.406±8; J.-M. Sauget, `S. GreÂgoire le Grand et les reliques de S. Pierre dans la traditionarabe chreÂtienne', Rivista di archeologia cristiana 49 (1973), pp. 301±9; Mosford, `CriticalEdition', pp. 107±8.

36 H. Chadwick, `John Moschus [and his Friend Sophronius the Sophist]', Journal of Theological Studies, ns 25 (1974), pp. 41±74, esp. 42±7; M. Viller et al . (eds), Dictionnaire[de spiritualiteÂ asceÂ tique et mystique, doctrine et histoire], 16 vols (Paris, 1937±74), VIII,cols. 633±4; M. Geerard and F. Glorie, Clavis Patrum Graecorum 5 vols (Turnhout,1974±87), III, pp. 379±81.

37 John Moschus, Pratum spirituale, cc. 151 and 192, ed. in Patrologia Graeca, 87, cols3015±17 and 3071.

38

Ibid . c. 176 (cols 3043±6); T. O'Loughlin and H. Conrad-O'Briain, `The ``Baptism of Tears'' in Early Anglo-Saxon Sources', Anglo-Saxon England 22 (1993), pp. 65±83, esp.68±71.



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(Persa); and for the bleeding relic rags a Cilician abbot called Paul.39

Though he thus on occasion mentioned his informants, he neverexplained the circumstances in which he encountered them. The mostattractive explanation is a sojourn in Rome. According to an earlyGreek biographer, who is our only source for that period of his life,after ¯eeing from the Persians and taking ship at Alexandria, Moschusdid indeed travel eventually to Rome, where he remained until hisdeath, probably in 634.40 Recently that has been doubted, mainly onthe grounds that by `Rome' the biographer meant not Roma antica on

the Tiber, but the New Rome on the Bosphorus: Constantinople.41

Butwhile there would have been nothing particularly surprising inMoschus encountering stories of Roman popes in a Constantinopolitanmilieu, reference to Constantinople simply as Rome would have beenhighly unusual in a text such as the anonymous biography. The morestraightforward hypothesis that Moschus collected his material at ®rsthand from Gregory's disciples in Rome remains therefore preferable.42

The degree of correspondence between the different versions of the

story of the relic rags bears upon the means of transmission. It is neces-sary, therefore, to consider them in some detail. In the Whitby version,some men `from western parts' come to Rome to obtain relics.Gregory gladly accedes to their request and creates relics from piecesof cloth ( panna). The process by which this is effected is obscure: theauthor simply alludes to the celebrating of masses and the cutting up of the pieces of cloth then placed in sealed boxes. The envoys carry theirtrophies away but succumb to the temptation to open the caskets and

are dismayed by the absence of corporeal remains. They return toRome and accuse Gregory of having tricked them. The pope tells themto attend mass with the rest of the faithful, and at that mass urges theworshippers to pray for a sign that the relics are authentic. He thenmakes an incision in one of the pieces of cloth and it bleeds. Gregoryexplains that when relics (by which he means relic-cloths) are offeredon an altar they become infused with blood of the saint to which theyare assigned. The envoys are convinced and return to their master.

The story ascribed to Moschus is only slightly different. The envoys,

39 Pratum spirituale, cc. 151 and 192 (cols 3015±17 and 3071); Garitte, `Histoires eÂdi®antes,p. 406.

40 For Moschus' career see Dictionnaire, VIII, cols 632±40; Chadwick, `John Moschus', pp.41±74. For the revised chronology see E. Follieri, `Dove e quando [morõ Á GiovanniMosco?]', Rivista di Studi Bizantini e Neoellenici, ns 25 (Rome, 1988), pp. 3±39, esp. 13±21.

41 Follieri, `Dove e quando', esp. pp. 3±13 and 29±36.42

A. Louth, `Did John Moschus Really Die in Constantinople?', Journal of Theological Studies 49 (forthcoming, 1998). I am most grateful to Dr Louth for showing me his textin advance of publication.

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who are said to be Frankish, go to St Peter's, where Gregory puts

strips cut from an old altar cloth in a relic casket which is then sealedand placed upon the apostle's tomb to be sancti®ed. He prays andleaves them in situ for three days. On the third day the Franks returnand receive the sealed casket. Thereafter the story proceeds as in theWhitby Life. On their return journey they open the casket, and ®ndingonly cloths wrathfully return to Gregory in Rome. The pope ordersthem to leave the relics with him. The following day after prayer in StPeter's he opens the casket, cuts the cloth, and it bleeds.43

There are, then, few inconsistencies in the surviving versions of theanecdote, which almost certainly faithfully represents early-seventh-century Roman practice in relic creation. Such divergences as there arebetween the texts are best explained as the Whitby author's elaborationof his source in the light of his own reading of Gregory.44 That sourcemust surely have been written; it is in the highest degree unlikely thatsuch a relatively complex anecdote, and one which moreover originatedin a literate society and was preserved among literate communities,

could have been so faithfully transmitted over almost a century inRome itself, let alone an alien environment, by purely oral means.45

Most plausibly the Whitby author had access to some version of thematerial recorded by Moschus.

The episode of Gregory's vindication of Jerome also illustrates theprocess of transmission.46 As it stands the version in the Whitby Life isvirtually unintelligible: Jerome, a light upon a lampstand not only toRomans but to the whole world, had been expelled from Rome

through the misjudgment of the then pope; because that pope hadextinguished a light of such distinction, he deservedly47 suffered theindignity of having his own light put out by Gregory. The full storycan be reconstructed from two passages, extracted from a work knownas Alfred's Dicta and copied out in a late-twelfth-century hand in themargins of an earlier twelfth-century Worcester manuscript of theLiber ponti®calis. Since they have been published by Levison andColgrave, they will be only brie¯y summarized here. In essence, the

43 In the Arab version no mention is made of incision; blood simply ¯ows from the cloth.44 Above all his belief that sancti®cation was effected by the saying of mass over the relics

could derive from Gregory's stories about the power of the mass: Greg. Gt., Dial . IV.57±62 (pp. 315±25).

45 For the conditions for the transmission of oral material in non-literate societies see J.Vansina, Oral Tradition (London, 1973), esp. pp. 19±46. Cf. J. Fentriss and C. Wickham,Social Memory (Oxford, 1992), esp. pp. 49±59, 75±86 and 144±72. For a different view,see Mosford, who concludes that the Whitby stores about Gregory testify to à populartradition circulating in Rome in the seventh century, . . . transmitted to England by

English travellers': `Critical Edition', pp. xliii±xliv and 107±8.46 VG, c. 28.47 The phrase used is nec immerito, a favourite of Gregory himself.



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®rst passage tells of Jerome making insulting accusations of worldliness

against Pope Siricius (384±99) and his entourage, and as a result beingexpelled from Rome. The second relates that it was the custom forlights to burn perpetually before the papal tombs in Rome, and thatwhen Gregory was pope he broke the lamp at the tomb of Siricius toavenge his treatment of Jerome.48 The metrical prose of the marginaliacontains several verbal echoes of the garbled story in the Whitby Life,and both versions clearly derive from a common (written) prototype.49

The Worcester Dicta probably comprised Alfred's rendering of the

Soliloquies of St Augustine and related material. The Alfredian prefaceto the Soliloquies apparently introduced a compilation includingpassages from the work of Augustine, Jerome and Gregory, to whichan anecdote linking Gregory with Jerome would have had obviousrelevance. The source of that anecdote is, however, uncertain. It hasbeen suggested that it may derive from a lost Life of St Jerome, but itis equally possible that it belonged to material that related primarily toGregory.50 In his translation of Gregory's Dialogues made in Alfred's

reign, Waerferth, bishop of Worcester, prefaced each book with a shortintroduction, in two of which he termed the pope `golden-mouthed'.That epithet, as we have seen, was applied to Gregory in the WhitbyLife, and its use by Wñrferth may well indicate a knowledge of theLife or a related text in ninth-century Worcester.51

The contents of the manuscript in which the marginalia wereinscribed hint at the source of this material.52 The text of the Liber ponti®calis was interpolated with a series of papal epitaphs, deriving

ultimately from a compilation of the 680s copied with one or twoadditions for Milred, bishop of Worcester (74365±74).53 The manu-script also contains the only English copy among the Leiden family of glosses, the lost original of which was compiled at ArchbishopTheodore's school at Canterbury in the late seventh century.54 Possibly,

48 W. Levison, Àus englischen Bibliotheken II', Neues Archiv 35 (1910), pp. 424±7;Colgrave, Earliest Life, pp. 159±61; Cambridge, University Library, Kk. 4. 6 (Worcester,s xii), ff. 233 and 244v.

49 Thacker, `Social and Continental Background', pp. 64±5.50 D. Whitelock, `Prose [of Alfred's Reign]', in E. Stanley (ed.) Continuations and Begin-

nings (London, 1966), pp. 67±103, at 71±3; T.A. Carnicelli (ed.), King Alfred's Version of St. Augustine's Soliloquies (Harvard, 1969), pp. 47±8.

51 Bischofs Waerferth von Worcester U È bersetzung der Dialoge Gregors des Grossen, ed. H.Hecht (Leipzig, 1900), pp. 94 and 179; Whitelock, `Prose', p. 77.

52 I am indebted to Michael Lapidge for ®rst drawing my attention to the contents of Cambridge, University Library, Kk. 4. 6.

53 P. Sims-Williams, `William of Malmesbury and La silloge epigra®ca di Cambridge',

Archivum Historiae Ponti®ciae 21 (1983), pp. 9±33.54 Cambridge, University Library, Kk. 4. 6, ff. 41r±44v; M. Lapidge, `[The] School of Theodore [and Hadrian]', Anglo-Saxon England 15 (1986), pp. 45±72.

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then, by the mid-eighth century Worcester possessed a collection of

late-seventh-century texts originating in Canterbury, among which washagiographical matter relating to Gregory.Perhaps the most convincing candidate for oral transmission among

the Whitby anecdotes about Gregory is the punning story about thepope and the Anglians, especially since Bede relates it in a ratherdifferent form and alludes to it as traditio maiorum, the tradition of hisforefathers.55 It should be remembered, however, that the word-playitself, which also occurs in a different (Roman) context in the following

chapter, works in Latin rather than the vernacular, and that the agentsof transmission were almost certainly clerics.56 Such a mode of expres-sion had prophetic connotations in the Hebrew Old Testament57 andwas discussed by Jerome.58 As Michael Richter has pointed out,Gregory himself indulged in similar punning on the theme `gensAnglorum in mundi angulo posita' in his letters.59 Although, therefore,the importance accorded the Deiran royal house in the word-play inthe Whitby Life suggests elaboration in Northumbria, there is no

reason to reject the ascription of the story, in at least its main essentials,to the pope himself.60

Noteworthy in this context are a number of similarities betweenBede's account of Gregory in the Historia ecclesiastica and certainsections of the Whitby Life. Both quote from, or allude to, the samewritten texts: the Liber ponti®calis, Gregory's letter to Leander of Seville, and his prologue to the Dialogues.61 They also occasionallyclose parallels in phrasing.62 Especially striking is Bede's appendix to

his long chapter in the Historia ecclesiastica, in which he tells not onlyof the Anglian boys in Rome but also of Gregory's frustrated attempt

55 Historia ecclesiastica [HE], II.1, ed. B. Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969;revised edn, 1991), pp. 132±5; VG, c. 9.

56 Cf. esp. Deira/de ira in VG , c. 9, and locusta/loco sta in VG, c. 10.57 For example, Jeremiah I.11; Amos VIII.2; Ezechiel XXXVII.9±10.58 For example, Jerome, In Heremiam prophetam, ed. S. Reiter, C[orpus] C[hristianorum],

S[eries] L[atina] 74 (Turnhout, 1960), pp. 7±8. Cf. In Amos prophetam, ed. M. Adriaen,

CCSL 76 (Turnhout, 1969), p. 326.59 M. Richter, `Bede's Angli[: Angles or English]', Peritia 3 (1984), pp. 99±114, at 103; Greg.Gt. Regist. VIII.29 (II, p. 30).

60 Richter, `Bede's Angli', pp. 100±5.61 For example, Liber pont[i®calis], ed. L. Duchesne, BibliotheÁque des EÂ coles FrancËaises

d'AtheÁnes et de Rome, 2nd ser. 3, 3 vols, 2nd edn (Paris, 1955±7), I, p. 312; R. Davis,The Book of Pontiffs, Translated Texts for Historians, Latin Series 5 (Liverpool, 1989),pp. i±xl and 61±2; Greg. Gt., Dial . I, Pref. (pp. 13±16); Moralia in Job, ed. M. Adriaen, 3vols, CCSL 143, 143A and 143B (Turnhout, 1979±85), I, pp. 1±7; VG, c. 1±2, 32; HEII.1 (pp. 120±320).

62 For example, VG, c. 32 (p. 138): `Corpus dormit in pace; a quo resuscitandus in gloriam'

± HE II.1 (pp. 130±2): `Sepultus est corpore. . .; quandoque in ipso cum ceteris sanctaeecclesiae pastoribus resurrecturus in gloria'. See Thacker, `Social and ContinentalBackground', p. 77.



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to evangelize England and his vicarious ful®lment of that intention

after his election to the papacy. To my mind the passage reads like anedited and condensed version of the relevant chapters in the WhitbyLife. It prompts the suspicion that the differences in the materialcommon to the two works may in general be ascribed to Bede's senseof style rather than to the variations inherent in oral transmission. Thatwould seem to be in accord with what we know from other sources of Bede's working methods as a hagiographer.63

The evidence, then, suggests that early written sources, both hagio-

graphic and homiletic, lay behind most of the Gregorian episodes inthe Whitby Life. The Whitby author himself, or some earlier writerbased at Canterbury, may have assembled the material from a varietyof texts. More probably, however, much of the work was done inRome, soon after the pope's death, by one of his disciples or byMoschus. The Gregorian episodes in the Whitby Life re¯ect knowledgenot only of Gregory's own works but ± even more crucially ± of thethought-world of the Dialogues. Both display an especial interest in the

apostolic powers of binding and loosing, and link them with the vislacrimarum, the peculiar power of certain holy men (including Gregoryhimself) to redeem condemned souls by their tears.64 There is morethan a touch of the crude materialism so noticeable in the Whitbyauthor in the Dialogues; in particular, both works lay extreme stress onthe corporeal aspects of the Real Presence and the eucharistic sacri-®ce,65 and present heroes who exercise their powers with the samevigour, even brutality.66 Perhaps the most obvious example in the Vita

is the unattractive story of Gregory and Sabinianus. In that story,Colgrave discerned à reminiscence of northern tales . . . told in Norsesagas, of the frightful havoc wrought by offended ghosts upon theliving'.67 But it is most unlikely that a story which (as we shall see) hasso much speci®cally Roman resonance was put together in England.Gregory himself, in his account of the nuns who perished excommuni-

63 Two Lives of St. Cuthbert, ed. B. Colgrave (Cambridge, 1940), pp. 14±16; C. Plummer,Baedae [Venerabilis Opera], 2 vols, (Oxford, 1896), I, p. xlvi. See also Thacker, `Socialand Continental Background', pp. 116±36; Goffart, Narrators, pp. 265±6 and 303±6;Richter, `Bede's Angli', pp. 101±2. I am not persuaded that Bede would necessarily haveincluded the name of Gregory's mother had he known it from VG. Cf. W. Stuhlfath,Gregor I [der Grosse], Heidelberger Abhandlungen zur mittleren und neueren Geschichte39 (Heidelberg, 1913), pp. 72±3; Colgrave, Earliest Life, p. 58. Goffart, Narrators, p. 266,n. 148 is wrong, however, to doubt the accuracy of the name supplied by VG.

64 VG, c. 28±9; Greg. Gt., Dial . I.12; II.1, 23; III. 33; IV.57 (pp. 67±9, 73±9, 114±16, 209±12 and 315±20).

65

VG, c. 20; Greg. Gt., Dial . IV.57±62 (pp. 315±25).66 Thacker, `Social and Continental Background', pp. 67±8.67 VG, c. 28; Colgrave, Earliest Life, p. 161, n. 121. Cf. Wright, Saga, p. 69.

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cate and ¯ed from their graves at every mass, reveals a notion of the

unquiet dead not far removed from that in the Whitby story.

68

The development of Gregory's cult

That in the early seventh century Gregory's disciples venerated theirmaster may be inferred from the stories recorded by Moschus. Theirsentiments perhaps in¯uenced Abbot Cummean, an Irish cleric in closetouch with Rome, who lauded Gregory as `golden-mouthed' in the

630s.69

Nevertheless, Gregory's reputation in Rome as a whole duringthat period appears to have been distinctly ambiguous. Revered whilealive within a tight monastic circle, he had relatively little interest inpopular preaching and made only a limited impact upon the plebs.70

Indeed, in some quarters he was actively disliked. Gregory had neverdisguised his marked preference for the monastic life, and had provedto be an active patron of monks from his own monastery on the Celianand elsewhere.71 He probably replaced some of the clergy serving the

Roman basilicas with monks, a process reversed by his successors andone which evidently created bitter feeling. The brief entries in theLiber ponti®calis for the period immediately after Gregory's death hintat a power struggle between the monastic and clerical parties. Therewas particularly intense con¯ict during the ponti®cate of Sabinianus(604±6), who was sympathetic to the clericalists, and later traditionsuggests that Gregory's good name did not escape unscathed.72 Johnthe Deacon, the pope's ninth-century Roman biographer, related that

the Romans were so in¯amed against Gregory that after his death theysought to burn his books in order to erase his memory (ad obliter-andum eius memoriam).73 The Whitby author's story of the awfulpunishment meted out to Sabinianus was probably an echo of these

68 Greg. Gt., Dial . II.23 (pp. 114±16). Cf. ibid . IV.32, 36, 42 and 53±6 (pp. 275±7, 282±5,297±300 and 311±140).

69 Cummian's Letter `De Controversia Paschali' and the `De Ratione Conputandi, ed. M.

Walsh and D. OÂ

CroÂ inõÂn (Toronto, 1988), pp. 3±7 and 82±3. Cf. Richter, `Bede's Angli',pp. 107±8; M. Richter, Ìrland und Europa: die Kirche im Fru È hmittelalter', in Ireland and Europe: The Early Church, ed. P. NõÂ ChathaÂin and M. Richter (Stuttgart, 1984), pp. 409±32, at 428; P. OÂ NeÂill, `Romani In¯uences on Seventh-Century Hiberno-Latin Literature',in ibid . pp. 280±90, at 287±8. Columbanus refers to Gregory as sanctus in a letter whichapparently dates from 603 and cannot therefore be evidence of cult: G.S.M. Walker,Sancti Columbani Opera, Scriptores Latini Hiberniae 2 (Dublin 1978), p. 20.

70 J. McClure, `Gregory the Great: Exegesis and Audience', DPhil thesis, University of Oxford (1978), pp. 131±74 and 265±9.

71 For example, Greg. Gt., Dial . I Pref. (pp. 13±15); Moralia, pp. 1±2.72 Liber pont. I, p. 315; P. Llewellyn, `[The] Roman Church [in the 7th Century]', Journal

of Ecclesiastical History 25 (1974), pp. 363±80, t 363±7.73 John Deacon, V. Gregorii, IV.69 (cols 221±2). Cf. those qui obtrectant virum beatissimumin the interpolated version of Paul the Lombard's Vita Gregorii, c. 28, PL 75, col. 58.



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controversies;74 so too perhaps was the account of the vindication of

Jerome, the monastic doctor par excellence. The situation remained inthe balance for some time after Gregory's death in 604, and the Liber ponti®calis records monastic sympathizers and clericalists succeededone another on the papal throne. Boniface IV (608±15) was a strongsupporter of monks, and his epitaph declared him to have beenGregory's disciple.75 His successor Deusdedit (615±18) was a cleric-alist.76 Honorius I (625±38) was a particularly enthusiastic Gregorian,but his tolerance of Monothelitism rendered him suspect and his

monastic zeal was eschewed by his successors.77

Thereafter no pope isrecorded as favouring monasticism in Rome until Adeodatus (672±6).78

All this helps to explain why the early interest in Gregory quicklyfaded in Rome. Apart from the brief and unenthusiastic entry in theLiber ponti®calis and the work of Moschus, no account of the popewas put together in the city before the Life of John the Deacon. Johnindeed believed that stories in the Whitby Life (in particular that of Trajan's redemption, whose orthodoxy was doubtful) originated among

the English, and expressly drew attention to the curious fact thatGregory had achieved greater fame among foreigners than his ownpeople.79 The only sign of early veneration dates, signi®cantly, fromthe ponti®cate of Honorius I: a pilgrim's itinerary written then orshortly afterwards guides its readers to Gregory's tomb in the westernportico of St Peter's and to the bed in which he died, apparentlydisplayed in an oratory nearby.80

The liturgical evidence is also largely negative. Gregory's feast is

absent from the surviving Roman calendars and occurs only sporadi-cally in the early missals.81 Nor did Roman liturgical books providethe Franks with an authoritative and consistent basis for the cult in theeighth and ninth centuries. Although the papal mass-book known as

74 E. John, `The Social and Political Problems of the Early English Church', in Land,Church and People, ed. J. Thirsk, Agricultural History Review 18 (1970), Supplement, pp.39±63, at 55, n. 4.

75

Liber pont. I, p. 317; M. Borgolte, Petrusnachfolge [und Kaiserimitation: die Grablegender PaÈ pste, ihre Genese und Traditionsbildung], Vero È ffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts fu È r Geschichte 95 (Go È ttingen, 1989), pp. 77±8.

76 Liber pont. I, p. 319.77 Ibid . I, p. 324.78 G. Ferrari, Early Roman Monasteries from the Fifth through the Tenth Century (Rome,

1957), pp. 389±91; Llewellyn, `Roman Church', pp. 366±7.79 John Deacon, V. Gregorii, Pref.; II.41, 44 (cols 61 and 103±6).80 Codice topogra®co della cittaÁ di Roma II , ed. R. Valentini and G. Zucchetti, Fonti per la

storia d'Italia, vol. 88 (Rome, 1942), pp. 98±9; M. Andrieu, `La chapelle de SaintGreÂgoire dans l'ancienne basilique Vaticane', Rivista di archeologia cristiana 13 (1936),

pp. 61±99.81 See for example W.H. Frere, Studies in the Early Roman Liturgy, 3 vols, Alcuin ClubCollections (London, 1930±5), I, The Kalendar , p. 97.

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the Hadrianum includes the feast, it is omitted from a related text, the

sacramentary of Padua, a mid-ninth-century adaptation of a late-seventh-century Roman prototype.82 Similarly, it occurs in only someof the eighth-century missals known as Gelasians (based on a mixtureof Roman and Frankish material) and then only in a form which differsfrom that in the Hadrianum.83 It looks as if the cult did not have asingle early focus in Rome, but developed locally in perhaps more thanone area.84

In Rome itself an of®cially sponsored cult probably emerged in the

later seventh century.85

Papal interest is evident in 668, when PopeVitalian (657±72) sent relics of Gregory, along with those of otherRoman apostles and martyrs, to King Oswiu.86 At that time, however,the saint was apparently valued more as an element in papal diplomacythan as a ®gure in the religious life of Rome. The city's liturgical booksdid not include Gregory until the late seventh century; his mass, whichwas closely related to that for Leo the Great, apparently composed atthe latter's translation c . 688, was introduced into the Gregorian sacra-

mentary by Pope Sergius (687±706).87

The period, in fact, saw theemergence in Rome of a number of cults under the in¯uence of popesof eastern origin or culture. The Sicilian Leo II (682±3), for example,translated the remains of Simplicius and other martyrs to the newchurch of St Paul, which he had built in the east of the city next to theancient basilica of St Bibiana.88 In the Velabro the same pope estab-lished the cult of St George, whose feast entered the papal mass-bookat much the same time as Gregory's. New Petrine and Marian feasts

were also introduced.89

Such changes marked something of a revolution

82 Padua, Biblioteca Capitolare, D 47: ed. L.C. Mohlberg, Die aÈ lteste erreichbare Gestaltdes Liber Sacramentorum anni circuli der roÈ mischen Kirche (Mu È nster, 1927). See C.Vogel, Medieval Liturgy[: An Introduction to the Sources] (Washington, 1986), pp. 92±7.

83 It occurs, for example, in Paris, BibliotheÁque Nationale, lat. 12048 and St Gall, Stiftsbi-bliothek, 348: Liber Sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. A. Dumas, introd. J. Deshusses, 2vols, CCSL 159±159A (Turnhout, 1981), I, pp. 30±1; Das fraÈ nkische SacramentariumGelasianum in alamanischer U È berlieferung: Codex Sangallensis 348, ed. L.C. Mohlberg(Mu È nster, 1918, reprinted 1971), p. 34. Crucially, however, it does not occur in Rome,

B[iblioteca] A[postolica] V[aticana], Reginensis latinus 316, a Gelasian sacramentary of the second half of the eighth century: A. Chavasse, [Le] sac [ramentaire] geÁl [asien](Tournai, 1957); Vogel, Medieval Liturgy, pp. 64±70.

84 B. Moreton, [The Eighth-Century] Gelasian Sacramentary (Oxford, 1976), p. 103.85 This is not to say that there was no liturgical cult of Gregory in Rome before 688,

merely that if there was it was very local and presumably primarily at the pope's ownmonastery on the Celian hill.

86 HE, III.29 (p. 320).87 Chavasse, Sac. geÂl . pp. 551±2 and 591±2; J. Deshusses, [Le] sac [ramentaire] greÂg[orien], 3

vols, Spicilegium Friburgense 16, 24 and 28 (Freiburg, 1971±82), I, pp. 50±6, 127 and243; III, pp. 60±3.

88

Liber pont. I, p. 360 (no. 82).89 Ibid .; Deshusses, Sac. greÂ g. I, p. 54; III, pp. 61 and 63; Moreton, Gelasian Sacramentary,p. 103.



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in conservative Roman attitudes to the cult of the saints in general and

to their own pontiffs in particular,

90

and were perhaps connected withthe consolidation of a clerical eÂlite, bent on the elaboration of civicceremonies around the person of the pope.91 Initially it seems that itwas Leo who bene®ted most from this new approach. Gregory, unlikeLeo, was not translated.92 For its full ¯owering his cult in Rome had towait until the ninth century.93

In the seventh century Gregory's reputation clearly stood higheroutside the Eternal City than within. In Gaul, for example, Gregory of

Tours accorded him a contemporary notice much warmer in tone thanthe chilly entry under his name in the Liber ponti®calis.94 Again,however, the evidence for the development of the cult dates mostlyfrom the late seventh century or later. By the 670s, for example, amonk of Longoretus (Saint-Cyran, deÂp. Indres) could term the popesanctus.95 Within twenty years the Missale Gothicum, a mass-bookproduced in Burgundy, included a mass for Gregory.96 Its distinctivelyenthusiastic invocations indicate the liveliness of the cult in the centre

for which it was compiled and contrast, for example, with the consider-ably more muted treatment accorded the pope in another survivingGallican massbook, the Missale Gallicanum Vetus,97 and his omissionfrom a third, the Missale Bobbiense.98 If, as seems likely, Burgundycontained a particularly active centre of the cult, it was perhaps atGregorienmu È nster or Gregoriental, a dependency of the metropolitan

90 The interest in previous popes is also indicated by the introduction of a mass for a dead

bishop, related to those for Gregory and Leo into the papal mass-book: Deshusses, Sac. greÂ g. I, p. 346.91 P. Llewellyn, Rome in the Dark Ages (London, 1971), pp. 123±6; T.F.X. Noble, `Rome in

the Seventh Century', in M. Lapidge (ed.) Archbishop Theodore: Commemorative Studieson His Life and In¯uence, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 11 (Cambridge,1995), pp. 68±97, at 82±3.

92 Borgolte, Petrusnachfolge, pp. 76±7 and 95±7. Note, however, the popularity of the nameGregory among the senior clergy of Rome, including two successive popes, in the earlyeighth century, evidence perhaps of the growth in Gregory's standing at that time: Liber pont. I, pp. 396±425 (nos 91±3), esp. p. 421; J.D. Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova et Amplissima Collectio, 53 vols (Paris and Leipzig, 1901±27, reprinted 1960±1), XII, cols

261±2 and 265±6.93 F., Homes Dudden, Gregory the Great, 2 vols (London, 1905), II, pp. 268 and 273; Liber pont. II, pp. 73±83 (no. 103); John Deacon, V. Gregorii, IV.80 (col. 228).

94 Greg. of Tours, HF X.1 (pp. 477±81).95 Visio Baronti, c. 10 and 17, ed. W. Levison, MGH , SRM V (Hanover, 1890), pp. 384 and

391.96 Rome, BAV, Reginensis latinus 317, ff. 200v±201v: ed. L.C. Mohlberg, Rerum Eccle-

siarum Documenta, Series Maior, Fontes 5 (Rome, 1961), pp. 87±8; H.M. Bannister, 2vols, H[enry] B[radshaw] S[ociety] 52 and 54 (London, 1916±19), I, p. 100.

97 Rome, BAV, Palatinus latinus 493, ff. 19±99: ed. L.C. Mohlberg, Rerum EcclesiarumDocumenta, Fontes 3 (Rome, 1958), pp. 55±6. Dated by E.A. Lowe to the later eighth

century: C [odices] L[atini] A[ntiquiores] I (Oxford, 1934), no. 93.98 Paris, BN, lat. 13246, ed. E.A. Lowe, 3 vols, HBS 53, 58 and 63 (London, 1917±24).Dated by Lowe to the eighth century: CLA V (1950), no. 653.

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of BesancËon near Munster in Alsace. The church there, which claimed

to have been founded by disciples of Gregory, was dedicated to SSGregory and Mary by the ninth century.99

In England, Gregory's missionaries venerated their sender. Bede, inhis account of Augustine's translation into the north porticus of themonastery, which he founded outside the walls of Canterbury, impliedthat ab initio it contained an altar dedicated to the pope; the epitaphthereafter inscribed upon Augustine's tomb alluded to beatusGregorius. Outside Canterbury, however, such early evidence is

lacking. Although a porticus at York and an altar at Whitby dedicatedto Gregory were associated respectively with the head and corporealremains of Edwin, they need not antedate the royal cult with whichthey were linked and probably originated in the late seventh century.100

Almost certainly it was Archbishop Theodore (668±90) who ®rmlyestablished the cult in England after its tentative early beginnings inCanterbury. The Whitby author writes as if it was an accomplished factthat in his day Gregory was invoked as a saint in the litanies, which

probably formed a distinctive element in the Anglo-Saxon liturgy fromTheodore's time.101 Michael Lapidge has very plausibly linked thearchbishop with a litanic prayer in the book of Cerne which invokedGregory after the archangels and angels, the apostles, the Virgin, Johnthe Baptist, the Holy Innocents, and the martyrs, naming the pope asrepresentative of the holy priests (sacerdotes) and confessors.102 ThatLapidge is right, and the Cerne payer is indeed early, is suggested bythe fact that it invoked Gregory alone and did not couple his name

with Augustine's as was required by the council of Clofeshoh in 747.103

Vitalian's choice of Theodore to succeed Wigheard, the dead Englisharchbishop-elect, was preceded by the despatch of relics, includingsome of Gregory, to Northumbria. The contents of the Worcestermanuscript already discussed104 indicate that the new archbishop andhis circle continued to promote the pope's cult in the school whichthey founded at Canterbury. Very possibly, Theodore used Gregory's

99 G. Morin, `Sur la provenance du Missale Gothicum', Revue d'histoire eccleÂ siastique 37(1941), pp. 24±30.

100 HE. II.3 and 20 (pp. 144 and 204); VG, c. 19.101 M. Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Litanies [of the Saints], HBS 106 (London, 1989±90), pp. 25±6;

VG, c. 32.102 A.B. Kuypers, The Prayer Book of Aedeluald the Bishop, commonly called the Book of

Cerne (Cambridge, 1902), pp. 81±2; Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Litanies, pp. 25±7.103

A.W. Haddan and W. Stubbs, Councils [and Ecclesiastical Documents], 3 vols (Oxford,1869±78), III, p. 368; below.104 Above at nn. 46±54.



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name to give authority to his decrees:105 one of the versions of the

penitential which bears his name and which apparently represents arecord of his judgements (iudicia) goes under the title Canones SanctiGregorii, and was already so termed by the late eighth century; in themanuscripts it is closely linked with the Libellus responsionum, PopeGregory's replies to Theodore's predecessor Augustine.106 An echo of the archbishop's views occurs perhaps in the work of his pupilAldhelm, one of the ®rst to credit Gregory with the composition of thecanon of the Roman mass. Aldhelm, who styled the pope `pervigil

pator et pedagogus noster', is in fact the earliest known exponent of StGregory as the especial apostle of the English, his claims predatingthose of the Whitby author by some twenty years.107

Theodore's interest in Gregory's cult was not purely altruistic. Heseems to have interpreted his role as archbishop expansively, in accor-dance with certain eastern models, most notably Alexandria, where thearchbishop could approve and consecrate all bishops made within thesix Egyptian provinces over which he presided.108 Unlike Augustine,

he did not see himself simply as the southern metropolitan, and by 679had adopted the style àrchbishop of the island of Britain', exercisingauthority over both English provinces.109 The fact that Gregoryprovided the English church as a whole with an apostolic patron notlocalized upon Canterbury would therefore have rendered his cultespecially attractive to Theodore. It is also, of course, the explanationof its appeal to the Northumbrians after 664 and to the Whitby authorhimself. Signi®cantly Theodore's links with Whitby were close. Of the

®ve pupils of Abbess Hild who became bishops, two at least, Oftfor of Worcester and John of Beverley, had also studied under the archbishop;

105 Even though those decrees in some instances ignored or contraverted Gregory's ownprescriptions: R. Meens, `Ritual Purity and the In¯uence of Gregory the Great in theEarly Middle Ages', Studies in Church History 32 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 31±43, at 35±6;Thacker, `Monks, Preaching and Pastoral Care', pp. 155±6.

106 Meens, `Ritual Purity', pp. 37±8; P.W. Finsterwalder, Die Canones Theodori und ihreuÈ berlieferungsformen (Weimar, 1929), pp. 22±53 and 253±70.

107

Aldhelm, De virginitate ( prosa), c. 42 and 55, ed. R. Ehwald, MGH , Auctores Antiquissimi [ AA] XV (Berlin, 1919), pp. 293 and 314; E. Bishop, Liturgica Historica(Oxford, 1918), pp. 42 and 104±5. On Aldhelm's education see Aldhelm: The ProseWorks, ed. M. Lapidge and M. Herren (Ipswich, 1979), pp. 7±9; Aldhelm: The Poetic Works, ed. M. Lapidge and J. Rosier (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 7±8.

108 R. Bingham (ed.), Works of Joseph Bingham, 10 vols, (Oxford, 1855), I, pp. 94, 171, 201±3 and 206±7. In sixth- and seventh-century Alexandria the dignitary known in the westas the patriarch was apparently styled archbishop: F. Cabrol and H. Leclercq (eds),Dictionnaire d'archeÂologie chreÂtienne et de liturgie, 15 vols (Paris, 1907±52), I, part 2,cols 2732±3. Cf. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, VII.xii.6±10, ed. W.M. Lindsay, 2 vols(Oxford, 1911), I, p. 299.

109

HE IV.17 (p. 384); C.P. Wormald, `Bede, Bretwaldas and the Origins of the Gens Anglorum', in C.P. Wormald, D.A. Bullough, and R.J.H. Collins (eds) Ideal and Reality[in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society] (Oxford, 1983), pp. 99±129, at 120±9.

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another, Bosa, was his candidate for the key see of York after Wilfrid's

®rst expulsion in 678.

110

When he settled the feud with Wilfrid in 686,Theodore singled out Abbess álf¯ñd as the means of making peace.111

The archbishop's teaching probably in¯uenced the Whitby author inseveral ways. That Theodore discussed `baptism by tears', a crucial (if misconstrued) factor in the Trajan story, is apparent from a sentence inhis Iudicia which cited Gregory of Nazianzus as an authority for theconcept.112 Interestingly, too, he may have provided the Whitby authorwith the latter's curious Trinitarian glossing of Àlleluia', in which àlle'

is held to signify the Father, `lu' the Son, and ìa' the Holy Ghost. Oneof the earliest occurrences of that etymology is in the Leiden glossary,which as Lapidge has shown, re¯ects the teaching of the school of Canterbury in the archbishop's time.113 It looks, then, as if Theodorepromoted Gregory at both Whitby and York. To make good his claimto be archbishop of Britain he had to court the Northumbrians, andthe exaltation of Gregory as apostle of England and the diffusion of material replete with ¯attering allusions to the Angli were clearly good

ways of doing that.We have already seen that there is an eastern context for the trans-

mission of some, perhaps much, of the Gregorian material in theWhitby Life, including the stories ascribed to Moschus, and the epithet`golden-mouthed' applied to the pope at a very early period.114

Theodore's origins, his long sojourn in Rome, and his interest inGregory render him the obvious means of making such material acces-sible to the Latin culture of seventh-century England. Interestingly,

Lapidge has recently suggested that Theodore may have knownPratum spirituale, the source perhaps of the quotation from Gregory of Nazianzus in the Iudicia.115

Theodore's patronage was undoubtedly effective. Although no earlymass has survived, the establishment of altars and chapels at Canter-bury, York and Whitby, and the production of the Whitby Life suggestthat full liturgical honours were paid to Gregory at those centres by

110 HE IV.12 and 23; V.3 (pp. 370, 408 and 460).111 Eddius Stephanus, V [ita Sancti] Wilfridi, c. 43, ed. B. Colgrave (Cambridge, 1927), p. 88.112 B. Bischoff and M. Lapidge (eds), Biblical Commentaries [ from the Canterbury School ],

Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 10 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 152±3 and 225±6;O'Loughlin and Conrad-O'Briain, `Baptism of Tears', 68±73; above, at n. 38.

113 VG, c. 13; `The Leiden Glossary', ed. J.H. Hessels, [Late Eighth-Century] Latin-Anglo-Saxon Glossary (Cambridge, 1906), p. 3; Lapidge, `School of Theodore', pp. 45±72, esp.54±60. The etymology has been discussed by Jane Stevenson, who argues that it origi-nates in àn erroneous English tradition': review of Hisperica Famina II, in CambridgeMedieval Celtic Studies 16 (1988), p. 102. See below, at n. 118.

114

See above at n. 19.115 Bischoff and Lapidge, Biblical Commentaries, pp. 225±6, esp. n. 110; O'Loughlin andConrad-O'Briain, `Baptism of Tears', pp. 68±71.



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the late seventh century. The cult's success is apparent from its promi-

nence in the earliest surviving Insular calendar, that of Willibrord (c .700), which, most unusually, includes two Gregorian feasts, one in theoriginal hand commemorating the pope's deposition (12 March), theother, added shortly after compilation, his ordinatio (29 March).116

Willibrord, a Northumbrian long resident in Ireland before he estab-lished himself in Frisia, had a wide network of contacts in both hisnative and adopted lands, and his calendar indicates the regard in whichGregory was held in contemporary Hiberno-Northumbrian milieux.117

In those circles there appears to have been an urge to attribute worksto Gregory not unlike that among Theodore's pupils. A number of early Hiberno-Northumbrian glosses, for example, ascribe theÀlleluia' gloss to Gregory, although there is no evidence that the popedid in fact invent this fanciful piece of exegesis.118

Such evidence raises the question of veneration for Gregory inIreland itself. There, undoubtedly, the admiration of the Romani forthe pope had had its effect. That is apparent in one of the early-eighth-

century notulae appended to TirechaÂn's collections on St Patrick,which contains a prayer from the canon ascribed to Gregory, writtenout in full, together with some obscure notes about the pope's agewhen he died and the length of his ponti®cate.119 Yet, despite suchinterest, it does not look as if the liturgical observance of Gregory'scult was especially advanced among the Irish. Signi®cantly, the earliest

116 Calendar of Willibrord , ed. H.A. Wilson, HBS 55 (London, 1918), plate III, pp. 5 and 26.

Cf. Gregory's inclusion in the Echternach martyrology in the early eighth century:Martyrologium Hieronymianum, ed. Acta Sanctorum, Nov. II.2 (Brussels, 1894), p. 31.117 Thacker, `Membra Disjecta', pp. 114±15; D. OÂ CroÂ inõÂn, `Rath Melsigi, Willibrord and the

Earliest Echternach Manuscript', Peritia 3 (1984), pp. 17±49.118 The etymology is ascribed to Gregory in, for example, Pseudo-Bede, Collectanea, PL 94,

col. 548, on which see N.R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon(Oxford, 1957), no. 388 (pp. 457±8); Glossa in Psalmos, ed. M. McNamara, Studi e Testi(Vatican City, 1986), p. 216; `De alleluia', in London, British Library, Harley 3271, f. 92r.,ed. H. Henel, Englische Studien 69 (1934±5), p. 349, on which see Ker, Catalogue, no.239 (p. 320). It is not attributed to Gregory in Latin-Anglo-Saxon Glossary, ed. Hessels,p. 3; anonymous gloss in London, British Library, Cotton Cleopatra A.iii, ed. T. Wright

and R.P. Wulcker, Anglo-Saxon and Old English Vocabularies (London, 1884), I, col. 411.Ìa' is glossed as spiritus in Vocabularius Sancti Galli, ed. G. Baesecke (Halle, 1933), p. 9.Àlle' is glossed as pater in a mid-eleventh-century manuscript of the Hiberno-Latinpoem Adelphus adelpha, Cambridge, University Library, Gg. 5. 35, f. 420r., on which seeHisperica Famina, II, ed. M. Herren (Toronto, 1987), p. 171. A short Old English text onÀlleliua' in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 321, f. 139, is also indebted to theetymology: ed. M.R. James Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1912), II, p. 138, and see Ker,Catalogue, no. 59 (p. 106). I am most grateful to Peter Jackson for supplying the refer-ences to these texts.

119 Patrician Texts in the Book of Armagh, ed. L. Bieler, Scriptores Latini Hiberniae 10

(Dublin, 1979), pp. 183 and 238; E. MacNeill, `Dates in the Texts of the Book of Armagh', Journal of the Royal Society of the Antiquaries of Ireland , 58 (1928), reprintedin St. Patrick (Dublin, 1964), p. 151.

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surviving missal, which dates in its ®nal form from the late eighth

century, provided no special mass for his feast but merely included himin the litany, and perhaps the Memento of the dead.120 The martyrolo-gical tradition is also instructive. Although the FeÂ lire Oengusso (c . 800)correctly records the pope's deposition, the date ascribed by Willibrordto his ordination is given to Gregory of Nazianzus;121 in the Martyr-ology of Tallaght (826 6 833) the references to Gregory appear, likeother entries in that text, to derive from an English exemplar.122

The Gregorian cult reached its apogee in eighth-century England.

Although dif®cult to interpret, early dedications suggest that by then itwas fostered at a number of early minster centres. Chief amongst thoseis London, where a group of early dedications, focused upon St Paul'sand aligned along Watling Street, included St Pancras, St Martin, and StGregory. The arrangement undoubtedly recalls Canterbury's earlychurches, and is an indication, as Tim Tatton-Brown has pointed out,that the church or oratory of St Gregory, which lay very close to theminster itself, dates from the eighth century if not before.123 Another

dedication which may well go back to this period is Kirkdale, a minsterparish which had a stone-built church in pre-Viking times, and which,signi®cantly, is not far from Whitby.124 At Northampton a church of StGregory, which dates from at least to the eighth century, appears tohave been part of an important complex including early timber andstone halls and another church dedicated to St Peter. It too may havebeen the site of a minster.125 Other ministers with possibly early

120

Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, D. II. 3; Stowe Missal , ed. G.F. Warner, 2 vols, HBS 31±32(London, 1906, 1915), I, pp. 14±15. It seems likely therefore that despite his stay inIreland, Willibrord's commemoration of Gregory's two feasts derives from his Northum-brian background. For the cult of Gregory in Ireland see J.F. Kenney, Sources for theEarly History of Ireland: Ecclesiastical (New York, 1929), pp. 45, 219, 265 and 789; J.Szo È veÂrffy, `Heroic Tales, Medieval Legends and an Irish Story', Zeitschrift fuÈ r celtischePhilogie 25 (1955±6), pp. 183±98, esp. 197. Szo È veÂrffy's argument that the story of Trajan's baptism by tears in¯uenced stories in TirechaÂn's collections has been effectivelyrefuted by L. Bieler, Àncient Hagiography and the Lives of St. Patrick', in Forma Futuri.Studi in onore del Cardinale Michele Pellegrino (Turin, 1975), pp. 650±5.

121 Martyrology of Oengus the Culdee, ed. Whitley Stokes, HBS 29 (London, 1905), pp. 82

and 84.122 P. OÂ Riain, Anglo-Saxon Ireland: The Evidence of the Martyrology of Tallaght, H.M.Chadwick Memorial Lecture, 3 (Cambridge, 1993), esp. pp. 16±17. Cf. J. Hennig,Ìreland's Contribution to the Martyrological Tradition of the Popes', ArchiviumHistoriae Ponti®ciae 10 (1972), pp. 9±23, esp. 20±3.

123 T. Tatton-Brown, `The Topography of Anglo-Saxon London', Antiquity 60 (1986), pp.21±8, at 22±3; C.N.L. Brooke and G. Keir, London, 800±1216: the Shaping of a City(London, 1975), pp. 140±1.

124 H.M. and J. Taylor, Anglo-Saxon Architecture, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1965±78), I, pp. 357±61; J. Lang, York and East Yorkshire, Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture (Oxford,1991), pp. 158±66, esp. 161±3; Thacker, `Monks, Preaching, and Pastoral Care', p. 144,

and references there cited. See now L. Watts, J. Grenville and P. Rahtz, Archaeology at Kirkdale, Ryedale Historian 18 (Helmsley, 1996).125 Personal communication from John Blair.



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dedications to Gregory include Wye in Kent (where again there is a

link with St Martin), Tredington (Warwickshire) and Sudbury(Suffolk).126 All this indicates a cult ®rst established at the majorchurches associated with the Roman mission in Kent and Northumbria,and then fostered in a secondary phase at ecclesiastical centresthroughout England.

Gregory's standing is especially apparent in the work of Bede, whoallotted him an exceptionally long and detailed chapter in the Historiaecclesiastica, and whose late commentaries such as De tabernaculo, De

templo, and In Esdras were particularly in¯uenced by his teaching.127

Bede expressed his view of the Gregorian mission's contribution to theNorthumbrian church most plainly in the Chronica maiora (725),which mentions Edwin and Paulinus but not Oswald, Aidan andIona.128 Curiously, however, his attitude to Gregory's plan for a metro-politan see at York, which he might have been expected to approvewithout reservation, was distinctly ambivalent. While he drew attentionto the plan in both the Chronica maiora and the Historia ecclesiastica,

and expressly commended it to Archbishop Ecgberht in 734,129

henevertheless accepted its subversion by Theodore without question.His approval of Theodore manifests itself in his inclusion of the latter'sdispatch from Rome in his chronicle and in his proclaiming in theHistory that the archbishop was the ®rst to whom the whole Englishchurch submitted.130 Bede clearly supported Theodore's division of theNorthumbrian diocese, and more especially his establishment of Berni-cian sees separate from Deiran York.131 Only when that had been

accomplished could Gregory's plans for a northern metropolitan berevived.

At York itself, the tradition that Gregory alone was the peculiarapostle and patron of England not surprisingly died hard. The saint'sfeast was still kept there with especial reverence in the late eighth

126 Mosford, `Critical Edition', p. xxv. I am grateful to John Blair for drawing my attention

to the status of these churches.127 P. Meyvaert, Bede and Gregory the Great, Jarrow Lecture 1964 (Jarrow, 1965); A.T.Thacker, `Bede's Ideal of Reform', in Wormald et al . (eds) Ideal and Reality, pp. 130±53,at 133±6.

128 Bede, Op[era] Didasc [alica], 3 vols, CCSL 123±123B (Turnhout, 1975±80), II, p. 525.129 HE I.29; II.17±18 (pp. 104±6 and 194±8); Epistola ad Ecgbertum, c. 9, ed. Plummer,

Baedae, I, pp. 412±13. It is extremely curious that Wilfrid did not exploit these provi-sions. We must assume ignorance, even though his biographer Stephen twice describedthe see of York as metropolitan: V. Wilfridi, c. 10 and 16 (pp. 20 and 32). Cf. W. Levison,England and the Continent (Oxford, 1946), pp. 18±19; M. Gibbs, `Decrees of Agathoand the Gregorian Plan for York', Speculum 48 (1973), pp. 213±46.

130

Bede, Op. Didasc . II, p. 527; HE IV.2 (p. 332).131 Cf. the active co-operation of Lindisfarne, where Theodore eventually established abishopric and consecrated the church of St Peter: HE III.25; IV.12 (pp. 294 and 370).

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century,132 when, ignoring Augustine, Alcuin presented the conversion

of Northumbria as the achievement of Gregory, Edwin andPaulinus.133 Interestingly, it was in eighth-century York that Gregorywas ®rst explicitly credited with the authorship of the sacramentary forwhich he later became famous throughout the Latin West.134

The extraordinary authority which the Responsiones commanded inInsular tradition con®rms Gregory's dominance. Boniface's request fora copy of the text and for authentication that it was by Gregoryhimself,135 suggests an outlook dominated by veneration of the apostle

of England in person rather than the papacy as an institution. Presum-ably such attitudes were disseminated quite widely by English mission-aries in the eighth century, and helped to consolidate Gregory's cult onthe continent. By then the pope's standing was such that he could benamed along with Ambrose, Augustine, and Jerome in the Communi-cantes section of the canon in a number of Gallican massbooks.126

In England, the council of Clofeshoh con®rmed Gregory's specialstatus in 747, ordering the whole country to keep his feast.137 By then,

however, a new orientation was emerging. The cult was being ostenta-tiously coupled with that of Augustine of Canterbury: the council notonly required the general observance of Augustine's feast, likeGregory's, but also the invocation of the bishop immediately after thepope in the litanies. That perhaps is only to be expected from acouncil, which though concerned to secure uniformity of Roman obser-vance throughout England, was essentially a Mercian gatheringpresided over by the southern metropolitan.138 Following upon the

revival of York under Archbishop Ecgberht (732±66), it marks at once

132 A Wilmart, Ùn teÂmoin anglo-saxon du calendrier meÂtrique d'York', Revue BeÂ neÂ dictine46 (1934), pp. 41±69, at 66; Alcuin, Bishops, [ Kings, and Saints of York], ed. P. Godman,Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, 1982), pp. 10±11.

133 Alcuin, Bishops, p. xlix; I.T. Wood, `The Mission of Augustine of Canterbury to theEnglish', Speculum 69 (1994), pp. 1±17, at 2; D.A. Bullough, `Hagiography as Patriotism:Alcuin's York Poem and the Early Northumbrian Vitae Sanctorum', in Hagiographie,cultures et socieÂ teÂ s, IVe±XIIe sieÁcles, (Paris, 1981), pp. 339±59.

134

Dialogus Ecclesiasticae Institutionis a Domino Ecgberto Archiepiscopo Eburacae CivitatisCompositus, ed. Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, III, pp. 411±12; Deshusses, Sac. greÂg. I, p.50. Aldhelm, however, had already attributed the canon of the mass to Gregory some®fty years earlier: De virginitate ( prosa), c. 42 (p. 293); Bishop, Liturgica Historica, pp.42 and 104±5.

135 Boniface, Epistolae, ed. M. Tangl, MGH , Epistolae Selectae I (Berlin, 1916), p. 57.136 For example, St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, 348: ed. Mohlberg, Das fraÈ nkische Sacramentarium,

p. 238; Liber Sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. A. Dumas, CCSL 159 (Turnhout, 1981), p.253. Cf. Paul the Deacon's Life, dependent upon Bede, Gregory of Tours, the Liber ponti®calis, and the pope's own works: ed. Grisar, above at n. 32; Stuhlfath, Gregor I , pp.74±6 and 98±108; Goffart, Narrators, pp. 370±3.

137

Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, III, p. 368.138 For the best recent account of the council see C.R.E. Cubitt, Anglo-Saxon ChurchCouncils, c . 650±c. 850 (Leicester, 1995), pp. 97±152.



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a de®nite retreat in the senior metropolitan's claims from the high

water mark of Theodore, and a break with any attempt to appropriateGregory's cult for Northumbrian Romanitas.The Whitby Life did not prosper; it survives in only one manuscript

and that written on the Continent at St Gall.139 Although it circulatedoutside Whitby, perhaps at Worcester140 and in the Hiberno-Northum-brian milieux which associated Gregory with the Àlleluia' gloss, theLife can never have achieved a wide distribution. No doubt in part thatis to be explained by the dif®culties of the text. More telling, however,

must be the suspicion that by the end of the eighth century it hadoutlived its usefulness. The attempt to enlist the Gregorian cult in theservice of the Northumbrian church, the Deiran royal house and aneastern archbishop of Britannia had lost its relevance, and no furthercopies were made.

Conclusions

This article has argued against the idea that Gregory's cult was trans-mitted primarily by oral means. The fact that in Rome veneration forthe pope virtually lapsed for a long period makes it very unlikely thathis memory was preserved there, and what is more handed on toAnglo-Saxon pilgrims, in complex ecclesiastical `sagas' of the kindenvisaged by some commentators. More probably, some record of hisdeeds and miracles was put together in the early seventh century by afollower or by John Moschus. Thereafter a version was brought to

England ± perhaps in the early days of the Roman mission, moreplausibly by Theodore ± and used by the Whitby author, whosegarbling of its contents may be the result of incompetence or perhapsbecause he relied on memory or the report of a third party.

The cult thus nourished had a curious history. It ®ts most uneasilyinto the classic early medieval pattern, with its emphasis on the venera-tion of the corporeal relics, above all the tomb, of a local patron,commemorated at an elaborate festival which marked the high point of

his community's liturgical year. Although in the late ninth century thepeople of Rome were in the habit of repairing to Gregory's new altar-tomb and paying reverence to various relics there displayed, includingthe pope's silver phylactery, pall and girdle,141 they offered no suchtribute in the seventh century. Nor is there anything to suggest high-grade liturgical commemoration of Gregory's feast before the 680s.

139

St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, 567, pp. 75±110; Colgrave, Earliest Life, pp. 63±70.140 Above, at nn. 46±54.141 John Deacon, V. Gregorii, IV.80 (co. 228).

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Apart from the display of tomb and death-bed in the time of

Hononius, the record tells only of secondary relics destined primarilyfor English kings or for incorporation in English altars.142

The cult apparently developed in a limited way at an early dateamong Gregory's friends and admirers in Rome, and was transmittedthence to fresh centres in England, Gaul and perhaps Ireland. It onlyreally took off both in England and in Rome in the later seventhcentury. Presumably that is not fortuitous; the Holy See, and itsemissary Theodore, may well have seen reverence for the apostolic

Gregory as a useful unifying factor in holding together a church whosedivisions had been brought home to them by Wilfrid's ®rst appeal toRome in 680.143 To serve such purposes the cult required liturgicalexpression. The tomb at St Peter's was less crucial, and in fact no trans-lation in Rome focused attention upon it. In England, too, the mainconcern was to claim virtue by association; no miracles took place atthe altars and, signi®cantly, the Whitby author gave enthusiastic assentto Gregory's own teaching that a saint's standing was not necessarily to

be gauged by the number of his miracles.144

All this points clearly in one direction: Gregory's cult was neither inorigin nor in later development popular. Although unusual in beingwidely diffused in a period when the great majority of cults were local,it was the preserve of an international, largely clerical or monastic,eÂlite, and found its primary expression in the liturgical of®ces of theirmost prestigious communities and dynastic centres.

Such qualities are re¯ected in the character of the Whitby Life.

Although, like Vitae from seventh-century Gaul, it perhaps providedlections for the of®ce on the vigil of Gregory's feast or to supplementthe Epistle at the mass on the day itself,145 it was scarcely designed forpublic reading. Its main purpose was in fact polemical, to presentGregory as a universal, apostolic saint, who could authenticate thecredentials of a British patriarchate or of the Northumbrian church androyal house. Neither the author nor, presumably, the other inmates of Whitby made much effort to promote cultic activity at Gregory's altar.

The cult was, then, transmitted by the traditional resources of the

142 In seventh-century Rome, unlike Gaul, it was essential to deposit relics in an altar: M.Andrieu,[Les]ordines [Romani du haut moyen age], 5 vols, Spicilegium SacrumLovaniense, II, pp. 23±4 and 28±9 (Louvain, 1931±61), IV, pp. 353±402 (Ordo XLII). Inthe case of the altars at Canterbury, York and Whitby Roman practice was probablyfollowed; at Ripon, however, Wilfrid used a Gallican rite: Mayr-Harting, The Coming,pp. 180±1.

143 V. Wilfridi, c. 29±32 (pp. 56±60).144

VG, c. 30.145 For a good summary of this dif®cult matter see Andrieu, Ordines, III, pp. 29±30. Cf.ibid . II, pp. xl±xli; III, p. 148.



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clerical eÂlite: the liturgy and the Latin tract. Although in the long run

that conferred the strengths of wide diffusion and a coherent tradition,the striking neglect of corporeal relics rendered the cult unusual in itstime, and undoubtedly meant that it would have played little if anypart in the spiritual formation of the common people. In its early formand transmission, it represents a remarkable example of almost exclu-sively clerical enterprise.146

146 Drafts of this paper were read in 1995 at a conference, `Hagiography and the Cult of the

Saints in England, 600±1600', organized by Robert Bartlett at St Andrews, and at theEarly Middle ages Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research in London; the authoris grateful to participants at both for their helpful comments

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