St Margaret in Kent: Two Eleventh-Century Anecdotes

ST MARGARET IN KENT: TWO ELEVENTHCENTURY ANECDOTES DIANA WEBB In his study of early Kentish settlement, Alan Everitt remarked on the numerous early church dedications to St Margaret of Antioch. He reckoned that there were twenty-two in the County, amounting to four per cent of all Kentish church dedications and one-tenth of the English total for the saint. 1 They included five in the 'Original Lands', the areas of primary English settlement, and thirteen in what Everitt classifies as 'the Wilderness parishes', including the Weald. The churches of Rainham and High Halstow were examples of the former, Broomfield (where there is still a spring known by the saint's name where 'offerings' may be left) and Addington of the latter. St Margaret was in fact among the most popular saints of medieval England and Europe, attaining the status of one of the 'Fourteen Holy Helpers', an omni competent group on whom the believer could call in any extremity, until she suffered the indignity of being expunged from the calendar, along with many other saints, in 1969. Her undoubtedly apocryphal legend depicted her as a noble virgin who was rejected by her parents when she became a Christian; carried off by the governor of Antioch, who wished to marry her, she proclaimed her faith and resisted all manner of incredible tortures (including being swallowed by a dragon which burst open to release her) before being beheaded. These remarkable events supposedly took place during the persecutions of the Emperor Diocletian. The story was known earlier in the east (where the saint was called Marina) than in the west. Margaret made her first appearance in a Latin martyrology, that of Rabanus Maurus, in the ninth century, and it was also in this century that her relics were supposedly brought to central Italy; in the twelfth century they came to rest in the cathedral ?f Montefiascone, near Lake Bolsena. In England, her name appears in seventh-century litanies, but there is no eighth- or ninth-century evidence for the further diffusion of her cult. Her name appeared in a late tenth-century calendar which was subsequently incorporated into 335 DIANA WEBB the Leofric Missal: the church of Exeter apparently claimed relics of her head, perhaps given by King Athelstan. Margaret's popularity, indicated by the composition of both Latin and Anglo-Saxon treatments of her life, grew thereafter, and it is a plausible though disputed tradition that Edward the Confessor founded the church which bears her name at Westminster.2 Everitt connects Margaret with what seems to have been a Kentish predilection for female saints, ranging from the Virgin Mary to distinguished natives such as Mildred and Sexburga, but there is rarely any obvious way of establishing specific connections between a saint's legend and supposed characteristics and his or her popularity in a certain region. The problem is aggravated in the early medieval centuries because we do not usually know either exactly when or by whom a church was founded. We must presume that the Kentish founders of churches of St Margaret had some reason for their choice, whether this was the possession of relics, some knowledge of the saint derived from the east or from Italy, or the imitation of an earlier dedication, in Kent or elsewhere. Clearly, the boost given to Margaret's popularity in the West after about 1100 as a result of the First Crusade, which focussed attention on Antioch, cannot account for dedications to her in pre-Conquest England. Specifically, it cannot account for the fact that, as Domesday Book records, the canons of St Martin at Dover in 1086 possessed a church of 'Sancta Margarita', now (and indeed already in the thirteenth century) known as St Margaret's at Cliffe.3 There was one rusticus here and the church rendered the sum of £8 annually, as much as the canons had received before 1066 from their moiety of the customs of the port of Dover. Other land at St Margaret's, amounting to well over 1,000 acres, was held either by individual canons in prebend, or by tenants, among them Robert Black, who held one sulung which Edward the Confessor's chaplain, Smelt, had held before him. Another tenant was Nigel the Doctor, one of the Conqueror's physicians, who held land in several English counties. At St Margaret's, as elsewhere, his land had once been in the hands of Spirites, a favourite of Cnut's sons Harald and Harthacnut, who was later sent into exile.4 In addition, the egregious Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, had taken 50 acres at St Margaret's from the canons, and, according to one entry, had given them to the archdeacon Ansketel. The church of St Margaret stood (and stands) little more than half a mile from the cliff above the bay to which the saint has also given her name. Within a century of the Domesday survey it had been grandly rebuilt, an event which Newman connects with the refoundation of St Martin's itself, c. 1140.5 The scale of the rebuilding 336 ST MARGARET IN KENT: TWO ELEVENTH-CENTURY ANECDOTES (which substantially produced the church to be seen today) was remarkable. The new church was aisled and had both an elaborate west door, dated by Newman to around 1150, and a north door, also decorated, of somewhat later date. Its pre-Conquest predecessor was also stone-built, on the evidence primarily of a course of masonry at the junction of the present nave and chancel which 'still stands to this day in marked contrast to the work of both periods of Norman rebuilding', but which cannot be dated to 'any particular part of the pre-Conquest period'. 6 The indications are that the earlier church had no aisles, and that the new chancel extended further to the east than its predecessor. The guidebook produced in 1960 to celebrate the church's octocentenary comments of the imposing chancel arch that it was built slightly off-centre, perhaps because it was raised on the foundations of an earlier arch in a smaller aisleless church. 7 The Domesday entry is, it seems, the first known reference to St Margaret's. The church evidently gave its name to the settlement, which was often distinguished from the neighbouring 'Westcliffe'. Our ignorance of the date and circumstances of its foundation, or dedication, is, of course, a handicap. Sally Harvey has argued that certain features of the Domesday entries for the lands of St Martin's - for example, the persistent and exclusive use of the old Kentish units of land measurement, sulung and yoke - suggest that they were reproduced from an older survey, perhaps one carried out by the royal servant Ranulf Flambard while he was master of St Martin 's.8 Even if this be so, it tells us no more than we would know by other means, that there was a church on the site before the Conquest. The evidence, as we have seen, is also that, whatever its exact date, this church was of stone. Whether two unconnected eleventh-century anecdotes which relate to the cult of St Margaret in Kent can safely be associated with the church at Cliffe is a matter for speculation, but the possibility is worth exploring. The first comes from Hariulf's chronicle of the great abbey of Saint-Riquier in Picardy. 9 Abbot Gervinus of Saint􀁼Riquier, so Hariulf related, was much beloved by Edward the Confessor, who received him kindly whenever he visited England. A noble called Ralph, a favourite of the king, endowed the abbot with lands and rents in England. 10 In the second year of William I's reign, Gervin us set out to make a tour of inspection of his English properties, and, as the narrative later reveals, to seek confirmation of his rights over them from the new king. He proposed to embark at Witsand, and was accompanied by abbots and monks numbering more than a hundred, together with 'a great 337 DIANA WEBB multitude of soldiers and merchants' (militarium virorum et negotiatorum plurima multitudo) who also wished to make the crossing. It was however February (presumably of 1068), and the party was held up by foul weather - wind, rain, snow - for fifteen days .. Money and supplies ran low and the feeling among the party was that they must abandon the attempt and return home, but they were reluctant to do so without first consulting the abbot. When his advice was sought he urged the company that on the following day they should come to the church of Witsand and there hear Mass and humbly seek God's help. Then they should go barefoot to a nearby church of St Peter to beg for the intercession of the apostle. Everyone agreed to this. The church of Witsand was dedicated to St Michael the Archangel (a great patron of headlands). After Mass every individual who wished to make the crossing offered a penny. Gervinus spent the money on two huge tapers (duos permagnos cereos), of which he offered one to the archangel and St Nicholas (renowned for his patronage of seafarers; presumably he had an altar in the church). The other he reserved, vowing it to 'Christ's virgin and martyr Margaret', who 'possessed a church citra mare'. The phrase citra mare might mean 'on this side of the sea' and it was presumably for this reason that Ferdinand Lot in 1894 seems to have thought that the church in question must have been on the Picardy coast. 11 Citra can however mean simply 'near' or 'close to', and more recently Pierre-Andre Sigal, in a passing reference to the story, took it, surely rightly, to be in southern England. 12 It will be seen that the rest of the narrative only makes sense on this assumption. The party now made their barefoot pilgrimage to the church of St Peter, where Gervinus himself celebrated Mass. After a night's sleep everyone returned to him, to find that the sea and the weather were calm. They embarked and made a swift crossing. The following passage clearly describes what happened when they had landed in England: 13 Leaving the ship they sought the church of the aforementioned virgin, and having offered the taper in thanksgiving, they d ispersed and made swiftly for whatever destination they desired. In Gervin us' s case this meant the royal court, although it is not stated whether this was in London or elsewhere at the time. Where then was the church of St Margaret? We are given no topographical indications to enable us to place it, except that we are looking for a site within a short distance of a harbour at which a ship could plausibly land, presumably after the shortest possible crossing, from Witsand. It seems highly probable that the harbour was Dover; if so 338 ST MARGARET IN KENT: TWO ELEVENTH-CENTURY ANECDOTES the question becomes what better candidate there can be than St Margaret's at Cliffe. The little pilgrimage involved would have taken the party uphill from the harbour at Dover for something like five miles across land belonging to the canons of St Martin. They could then very easily have proceeded inland via Canterbury to London, as many of them, probably including Gervinus, doubtless wished to do. As to how Gervinus knew about the church, it does not seem too fanciful to suppose that he might have enjoyed the hospitality of St Martin's on his previous landings in England. It was, after all, the most considerable religious community in Dover. The second story requires even more interpretation, not least because the essential action takes place not in reality but in a dream vision. It was told by Goscelin of St Bertin, freelance hagiographer and later monk of St Augustine's Canterbury, in the account he wrote, c. 1090, of the miracles of St Mildred. This forms part of his narrative of the saint's translation to St Augustine's from her original burial place at Minster in Than et in l 035. 14 The miracles Goscelin recounts are presumably supposed to date from between 1035 and his time of writing, not more than a year or two after the Domesday survey. A merchant of Canterbury had lost all his worldly goods and was overcome by sorrow and ignominy. His wife played the true part of a pious woman and urged him to put his trust in God. The feast-day of St Margaret (20 July) was approaching, and the merchant made a resolution. A link is established between Margaret and Mildred because 20 July was the 'octave' (the eighth day after) the feast of St Mildred on the 13th. On the preceding evening, he vowed, with his wife's approval, that at dawn of the following day, the solemnity of the blessed Margaret, he would set out barefoot to her church, twelve miles distant from the city, so that he might obtain the martyr's well-known favour; innumerable curative miracles had attracted crowds of people there. The night before, however, he was forestalled by divine providence, and St Margaret herself became the victim of a pre-emptive strike by St Mildred. The merchant had a dream: It seemed to him that he was carrying out his proposed journey in the morning and that he was coming to the hill which is called Barham Down. As he was proceeding barefoot, as he had determined, over that ample expanse he saw three resplendent virgins, in the garb of nuns, approaching him, of such beauty and grace that the poets could not fabricate the like in their Nymphs and Graces. 339 DIANA WEBB Of these the most beautiful (in the middle of the group, of course) bore a gold cross and a golden chalice, and also a flowered cloth of wondrous whiteness. The pilgrim was struck by fear and would have run away, had it not been that the laces of his leggings came undone and impeded him Uust like the works of the flesh, Goscelin adds sententiously). The chief virgin asked him whither he was going in so grief-stricken a manner and he replied that he was going to seek consolation (refrigerium) for his poverty from the holy virgin Margaret. The virgin told him that he must go instead to Rome to seek the aid of the apostles. 'How,' he asked, 'can I undertake such a journey when I do not even have a day's sustenance at home?' She thereupon gave him the dazzling white cloth, assuring him that it would suffice for his travelling expenses (viaticum) Already reassured in his spirit, the merchant asked her name. To this she replied: Remember whose feast-day you last celebrated, on the day a week ago whose octave this is, and know that I am she who is remembered today, Mildred. When the dreamer awoke he evidently still had the cloth, for on the credit it secured he raised the money for a horse and his travelling expenses and successfully made his pilgrimage, indeed returning a profit. Margaret is conspicuously sidelined in this story, which has many of the fa miliar features of what may be termed the 'competitive' miracle, one in which a pilgrim is either unsuccessful on his visits to rival shrines or, as in this instance, is diverted before he even gets there. 15 It is told for the glory of Mildred, who indeed goes so far as to imply that 20 July should be remembered as her octave rather than as Margaret's festival. The dreamer is in effect being told that as a Canterbury man he should place his reliance on a Canterbury saint, as Mildred now was; it was the whole point of Goscelin's work to substantiate this assertion. Had Margaret been named as one of the group, she would at least have had the opportunity to defer gracefully to Mildred, but there is no clear indication that she was even imagined as present: there is no reason to think that she would be represented as a nun, and the other two virgins are unnamed. 16 The story is nonetheless of considerable interest for our present purpose. We need not suppose that Goscelin totally invented his mise en scene and we must therefore presume that there was in the mideleventh century a church of St Margaret, accessible from Canterbury, to which miraculous cures had recently been attracting pilgrims. Whether there had been a sudden flurry of miracles, or a steady flow and a regular pilgrimage, is impossible to tell. It may have been sufficiently considerable, at least, locally and temporarily, for it to seem 340 ST MARGARET IN KENT: TWO ELEVENTH-CENTURY ANECDOTES worthwhile to Goscelin to employ diversionary tactics on Mildred's behalf. The question now arises where this church of St Margaret was. David Rollason interpreted the account of the merchant's dream journey to mean that the church he was making for was on Barham Down and that it must therefore have been Womenswold, the only church in the area dedicated to St Margaret. Clearly this is a possibility but it is not, perhaps, a necessary deduction. It seems equally plausible from the text that the merchant was crossing (or more precisely expected to cross) Barham Down on his pilgrimage and that it was while he was on his way, in his dream, that he encountered St Mildred. The path from Canterbury to St Margaret's at Cliffe would run straight across Barham Down and it is therefore a possibility worth considering that this was the pilgrim's destination. Goscelin's note that the church was twelve miles from Canterbury, which might be thought decisive, is not in fact very helpful. Wornenswold is just over seven modern miles from Canterbury, St Margaret's at Cliffe a little under seventeen, and there is no church of St Margaret twelve miles from Canterbury in the direction indicated by the reference to Barham Down. It is hard to know which of the two candidates nominated here has the better case on this basis. 17 It is hardly decisive that Goscelin does not himself name the church; the pilgrim after all only set out in his dreams and even in his dreams never arrived at his destination. Furthermore Goscelin had no interest in advertising it. Yet this apparent silence might still be significant. As already noted, Goscelin was writing only a few years after the Domesday survey, and Domesday shows that in the late eleventh century the church and settlement at Cliffe could simply be designated by the name of the saint. The least that can be said of these two stories, from very different sources, is that they add some detail and colour to the shadowy picture of the veneration of St Margaret in eleventh-century England and Kent. There is no positive guarantee that either refers to the church of St Margaret's at Cliffe. That this was where Abbot Gervin us' grateful party went on their landing in England is at the very least consistent with their likely route, and it is hard to identify a better candidate. If in addition we are prepared to entertain the possibility that Gosceli n' s merchant was thinking of this church, it would suggest that it was in the eleventh century a place of local pilgrimage, and this might even shed some light on its splendid twelfth-century rebuilding. It would undoubtedly not be the only such pilgrimage in England around 1100 which has left little or no trace of its existence. 341 DIANA WEBB NOTES 1 Continuity and Colonization: the evolution of Kentish settlement (Leicester 1986), pp. 228, 235-37, 241. According to these figures there were 239 dedications to St Margaret in England generally. Everitt noted that in Kent 'St Margaret was also associated with many subsidiary chapels and altars and with places like St Margaret's Crouch in Hawkhurst'. 2 This information is summarised from the introduction to Seinte Marherete, The Meiden ant Martyr, ed. F. M. Mack (Early English Text Society, 193, I 934, reprinted 1958), pp. ix-xi. See also the Oxford Dictionary of Saints. 3 VCH, Kent, 3, pp. 205-07; in the slightly later Domesday Monachorum the place appears as 'Clive' (p. 256), which is taken to embrace Westcliffe as well. See also G. Ward, 'The lists of Saxon churches in the Domesday Monachorum and White Book of St Augustine', Archaeologia Cantiana, XLV (I 933), 71. 4 See, for example, VCH, Worcestershire, I, pp. 289, 308. 5 J. Newman, The Buildings of England: North East and East Kenl, 3rd edition (Harmondsworth 1983), pp. 435-7. 6 H. M. Taylor & J. Taylor, Anglo-Saxon Architecture (3 vols, Cambridge 1965-78) 2. pp. 531-2, citing but amplifying F. Brock, 'The Saxon Church at Whitfield', Archaeologia Cantiana, XXl (1895), 302. 7 Sr Margaret-at-Cliffe: The story of the Church compiled on the occasion of the Octocentenary Festival, 20 July 1960, p. 5. 8 S. Harvey, 'Domesday Book and Anglo-Norman Governance', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 25 (1975), 191-92. 9 Chronique de l'Abbaye de Saint-Riquier, ed. F. Lot (Paris 1894), pp. 237-43. 10 Lot ( Chronique, p. 241 n. l ) tentatively identified this Ralph as the son of Gautier (recte Drogo) of Mantes and Goda, sister of the Confessor, who was made Earl of Hereford in 1050, but it was in fact Ralph 'the Staller' (for references see A. Williams, The English and the Norman Conquest, Woodbridge, 1995, p. 61 n.70). Hariulf later relates how Ralph and his son (Ralph Guader) seconded Gervinus' plea to the Conqueror for confirmation of his possessions (Chronique, pp. 244-45), which were located in East Anglia. 11 The supposition may well have been Lot's, but the identification actually occurs in the index (Chronique, p. 242): 'S. Margarete, 6glise a Wissant'. 12 L 'homme et le miracle (Paris 1985), p. 222. 13 Chronique, p. 243. 14 D. W. Rollason, 'Goscelin of Canterbury's account of the translation and miracles of St Mildrith (BHL 5961/4): an edition with notes', Medieval Studies, 48 (1986), 139-210. The story examined here is told on pp. 186-87. The writer first ventured this interpretation of it in her Pilgrimage in Medieval England (London 2000), p. 270 n.75. Goscelin followed this work with a specific refutation of the claims of the monks of St Gregory at Canterbury that they possessed the saint's relics, translated, they said, from Lympne whe􀃆e they had been taken for safe-keeping at the time of the Danish raids on Thanet early in the century: M. L. Colker, 'A hagiographical polemic', Medieval S111dies, 39 (1977), 60-108. 15 For some examples of 'competitive miracles' involving Thomas Becket, see Webb, Pilgrimage in Medieval England, pp. 52-58. 16 Two possible candidates are Eadburga (Mildred' s successor as abbess of Minster in Thanet) and her kinswoman Sexburga; alternatively the figures could be intended simply as two nuns acting as an appropriate escort to the abbess. 17 There would be multiple possibilities of transcription errors between 'vii', 'xii' and 'xvii', were the figure written as a Roman numeral. 342