Henry of Blois’s Gift Lists in Add. MS. 29436: Why the Discrepancies?
John Munns
BL, Add. MS. 29436 contains two lists of the gifts donated by Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester (1129-71) to his cathedral church. They were first discussed by Edmund Bishop in 1884 and were most recently and extensively studied by Parthenope Ward.1 Add. MS. 29436 is a composite manuscript comprising charters and other documents from the medieval cathedral-priory of St Swithun in Winchester. The history of the manuscript is uncertain, but these two lists now occupy four folios: the shorter is on f. 46v, and the longer covers the recto and verso of f. 47 and part of f. 48r.2 The shorter list (S) appears to be the later list and to date from shortly after Bishop Henry’s death in 1171, it begins ‘Obiit bone memorie Dom[i]nus Henricus Wintoniensis ecclesie episcopus’. The longer list (L), makes no reference to Henry’s death and probably dates from between 1167 (when, according to the Annals of Winchester, Henry donated and consecrated the ‘crux magna et nova’ that heads it) and his death in 1171.3 There is a remarkable level of consistency between the lists, but they are by no means identical. The earlier L contains sixty-three entries (amounting to some 190 individual items), and the later S has forty-seven entries (c. 150 individual items). The purpose of this article is to explore the discrepancies between the two lists and to consider the extent to which they can be accounted for. Before going further, it is worth noting something about the nature of the lists themselves. These are evidently sacristy lists, which is to say they consist of portable items primarily for use in the service of the liturgy – both introduce their contents as ornamenta. There are other items that Henry almost certainly donated to St Swithun’s that appear in neither list. There are no books, for example. Even if we side-step debates about the patronage of those surviving Winchester manuscripts generally assumed to have been commissioned by him, such as the magnificent Winchester Bible,4 it seems inconceivable that in a reign of over four decades a bishop as wealthy and generous as Henry did not supplement his monks’ library. We do know that he is reputed to have given over forty books to his other monastery at Glastonbury.5
1 Edmund Bishop, ‘Gifts of Bishop Henry of Blois, Abbot of Glastonbury, to Winchester Cathedral’, Downside Review, iii (1884), pp. 33-44, reprinted in Edmund Bishop, Liturgica Historica: Papers on the Liturgy and Religious Life of the Western Church (Oxford, 1918), pp. 392-401; Parthenope Ward, ‘Saint-Seducing Gold: Henry of Blois and Two Accounts of his Gifts to Winchester Cathedral’ (unpublished diploma dissertation, University of London, 2006). The lists were also briefly discussed by Barbara Carpenter Turner in ‘Henry de Blois and his Cathedral Church and City’, Winchester Cathedral Record, xxx (1961), pp. 13-20, at pp. 17-19. 2 Add. MS. 29436, ff. 46v – 48r. I am following Ward in referring to the longer and shorter lists as L and S, respectively. 3 Annales Monasterii de Wintonia, ed. H. R. Luard in Annales Monastici (London 1864-69), vol. ii, pp. 3-125, at p. 59. 4 Winchester, Cathedral Library, MS. 17. 5 James P. Carley, The Chronicle of Glastonbury Abbey: An Edition, Translation, and Study of John of Glastonbury’s ‘Cronica sive Antiquitates’ (Woodbridge, 1985), p. 167.
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Similarly, there is no mention of architectural developments or furnishings, so no mention of the Tournai marble font generally attributed to him, or the treasury, feretory, or Holy Sepulchre chapel, all of which were almost certainly built, and probably decorated, on his watch. These absences need not concern us because these are not comprehensive lists: they are lists of portable gifts, generally related to the sacristy. There is only one item that appears in S that is not in the earlier L: the foot of St Agatha. On one level, the explanation for this discrepancy is likely to be a simple one. Presumably this was donated by Henry after the first list was compiled, perhaps his final sacred benefaction to his monks before his death. Otherwise, we are dealing entirely with items that appear in L but are absent from S. Henry’s donation of a substantial relic of the third-century Sicilian martyr St Agatha is interesting in its own right. The precise nature of the bishop’s connections with Sicily remains obscure and it is not clear that he ever visited the kingdom. The links between objects produced in Winchester during his episcopate and Sicilian art, however, are well-established. One scholar has opined that ‘if, as seems probable, [the foot of St Agatha] was a new acquisition, it is likely to have been brought to England by Bishop Henry on his return from Rome in 1152’.6 John of Salisbury’s oft-quoted vignette of Henry hurrying around the Roman markets encourages us to be confident that this was an acquisitive visit for him, and Rome is a likely place to pick up such a relic.7 The greater part of Agatha’s body, however, was in Catania, having been returned there from Constantinople in 1126. If Henry travelled through Sicily on his return to England and acquired the relic there, that would also help account for the Sicilian influence on so much of the art produced in Winchester in the third quarter of the century. Alas, there is no evidence for such a visit either way.8 Wherever he acquired it, the probability that Henry’s possession of the relic dates from his travels of 1150-52 is strengthened by the fact that shortly thereafter Henry built and dedicated a church in honour of St Agatha at Brightwell near Wallingford, in his diocese.9 The manor of Brightwell belonged to Henry and a castle was built there to provide a stronghold for his brother Stephen during the battles with Matilda, and subsequently with her son, the future Henry II, over Wallingford Castle. The otherwise unusual dedication in Agatha’s honour of what was probably intended as the garrison church may point to her foot relic initially being enshrined there, or at least to a new or renewed devotion to the saint on Henry’s part.10 The importance of Brightwell having dwindled by the end of his life, Henry ultimately translated this important relic into the care of his cathedral monastery.
6 Mark Spurrell, ‘Containing Wallingford Castle, 1146-1153’, Oxoniensia, lx (1995), pp. 257-70, at p. 258. 7 John of Salisbury, Historia Pontificalis, ed. Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford, 1965), pp. 79-80. 8 M. J. Franklin suspects a route across the sea from Rome to Marseilles is more probable. Such evidence as we have for this journey comes from John of Salisbury, who tells us that Henry travelled via Compostela in Northern Spain arriving home ‘at last, safe and in style’ (tandem incolumis et opulentus; although, as Franklin says, ‘the more pejorative connotation “laden with riches” is inescapable’). Had he come through the Norman kingdom of Sicily, John might be expected to have mentioned it; M. J. Franklin, ‘Causa Dei et ecclesie Cluniacensis: Henry of Blois and Cluny’, in William Kynan-Wilson and John Munns (eds), Henry of Blois: New Interpretations (Woodbridge, forthcoming). 9 Spurrell, ‘Containing Wallingford Castle’, p. 258. The church sits within the enclosure of the twelfth-century siege castle and was probably first built as the garrison church; the castle was destroyed by the forces of Henry of Anjou in 1153. 10 The only other known twelfth-century examples are both near Richmond in North Yorkshire: St Agatha’s Abbey at Easby, a Premonstratensian house also founded in the early 1150s, and the neighbouring parish of St Agatha, West Gilling.
2 Henry of Blois’s Gift Lists in Add. MS. 29436: Why the Discrepancies? eBLJ 2019, Article 10
Agatha was an important saint, and Henry’s claim to have acquired her foot is a significant one. Of undoubted importance for the sometime legate was the fact that she provided a tangible link with the Holy See: as the dedicatee of one of the ancient churches of Rome, her name appears in the Canon of the Mass. As a virgin martyr, Agatha also evoked the ethos of Benedictine reform that Henry constantly impressed upon his monks.11 As a final benefaction to his cathedral-priory, therefore, her relic would have resonated on more than one level. There is some evidence that the gift led to the establishment of a chapel of St Agatha within the cathedral. The only direct mention of it, however, comes from the much later cathedral sacrist’s accounts of 1537, which record that no offerings had been received that year from, inter alia, ‘the chapels of St Agatha and St Æthelwold’.12 The memory of Henry’s gift was still alive in the mid-fifteenth century, when Thomas Rudborne gives it as his first example of the late bishop’s generosity.13 Of those objects that appear in L but are absent from S, the vast majority belong to three distinct groups. The exceptions are two small incidental items: a silver paten and an ivory pyx. There is no very obvious explanation for the loss of either, although it is tempting to associate the ivory pyx with a similar object given by Henry at an unknown point to Glastonbury Abbey, the principal contents of which appear to have been the relics of several important Winchester saints.14 The Winchester pyx is described as being for use in the Good Friday liturgy; the Glastonbury pyx as ‘large’ and containing relics. The two descriptions are not entirely incompatible, but neither do they link the two in a very obvious way. Everything else that appears in L can also be identified inS . Interestingly, very few of those objects that disappear between the compilation of the first list and the second could be ranked amongst their principal treasures. The vast majority of the objects of real material value – those in gold or silver or decorated with precious stones – appear in both lists. So, what does not? The first group of items is easy to define. ListL explicitly contains both items that Henry ‘gave to’ and items that he ‘redeemed for’ the church: in other words, it includes objects that were not originally his gifts but which the monks had been caused to pawn or otherwise alienate, and which Henry had bought back for them.15 These objects are all absent from S, which itemizes only those gifts that originated with Henry. This accounts for the disappearance
11 The significance here pre-dates the Conquest: Agatha is one of the virgin saints favoured by Ælfric in his homilies with regard to monastic reform. Henry made numerous gifts of the relics of virgin saints to both Winchester and Glastonbury, the latter receiving from him, inter alia, ‘seven unnamed bones of the eleven thousand virgins’; James P. Carley and Martin Howley, ‘Relics at Glastonbury in the Fourteenth Century: An Annotated Edition of British Library, Cotton Titus D.vii, fols. 2r-13v’, Arthurian Literature, xvi (1998), pp. 83-129, at p. 90. 12 G. W. Kitchin (ed.), Compotus Rolls of the Obedientiaries of St. Swithun’s Priory, Winchester (London and Winchester, 1892), p. 108. A pre-Conquest claim to several relics of St Agatha, including her mamillae, is made for the monks of the New Minster in the Liber Vitae (Stowe MS. 944; c. 1031) but nothing is heard of this subsequently; John Crook, The Architectural Setting of the Cult of Saints in the Early Christian West, c. 300-c. 1200 (Oxford, 2000), p. 7. 13 Thomas Rudborne, Historia Maior Wintoniensis, published in Henry Wharton (ed.), Anglia Sacra (London, 1691), vol. i, p. 285: ‘Pedem S. Agathæ, magnam crucem cum imaginibus de auro purissimo … suæ Ecclesiæ contulit’; see also Ward, ‘Saint-Seducing Gold’, p. 24. 14 The pyx is mentioned as Henry’s donation in a fourteenth-century Glastonbury relic list preserved in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS. R. 5. 33 (ff. 104r-105v). Its principal contents are relics of Saints Æthelwold, Swithun (both bishops of Winchester), Birinus (the first bishop of Dorchester, whose relics resided in Winchester), and Wulfstan. This last probably refers to the saintly sometime bishop of Worcester but, given the context, may just point to an otherwise unattested cult of Æthelwold’s disciple and biographer, Wulfstan of Winchester (otherwise Wulfstan Cantor), who is the probable author of epanaleptic poems in honour of Æthelwold, Swithun and Birinus; see Michael Lapidge, ‘Wulfstan Cantor [Wulfstan of Winchester] (fl. 996)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
of four book covers, a gold and enamelled chalice, and two silver candlesticks. None of the ‘redeemed’ items in L make it to S. There is just one anomaly: L mentions a silver ewer which it does not describe as redeemed. This ewer does make it onto S, but here it is the only object that is described as redeemed. It is possible, of course, that this was an original gift of Bishop Henry which the monks nevertheless pawned at some point and the bishop then recovered for them. A second small group of items listed in L but not S is as follows: a gold and enamelled box (a later interlinear addition to the list on f. 47v to which, unusually, no specific function is ascribed), two small candlesticks, nine ivory horns, and a griffin’s claw. In contrast to the majority of items on the lists, there is no obvious sacred purpose for any of these. The candlesticks are described as each being ‘in the image of a man’,16 which suggests a secular origin. These may have been valuable gifts to the priory, but their disposal in the church or sacristy was probably a temporary one. That leaves a final group of objects, all of which are textiles: one silk alb; a dalmatic and tunical, both plain; two stoles with maniples;17 a pair of sandals (sanctuary slippers); a funeral pall (which at the time of the composition of L lay over William Rufus’s tomb); two linen cloths; two silk curtains;18 and a silk cushion. This is an almost complete list of the items that would have been required for the ceremonial burial of a bishop. The only vestments obviously missing are a chasuble and mitre, of which a bishop of Henry’s wealth would presumably have had his own. Is it possible, therefore, that this latter group of discrepancies between the two lists could be attributable to the fact of Henry’s death: that the monks used a selection of his own gifts to them to clothe and cushion his body for burial? The full ceremonial vesture for a bishop would include alb, stole and maniple, and the vestments of his major orders: the sub-deacon’s tunical, the deacon’s dalmatic and the chasuble of the priest. Henry himself is depicted vested just so in an early thirteenth-century window in Chartres cathedral.19 The body would then have been laid on, and possibly wrapped in, cloths, maybe with a cushion under its head.20 A generation later, Hubert Walter, archbishop of Canterbury (1193-1205), was buried in silk buskins or sanctuary slippers that survive.21
16 ‘Duo alia argenta minora in effigie hominis conposita’; Ward, ‘Saint-Seducing Gold’, p. 51. 17 Interlinear correction from ‘Alia stola’ to ‘Due stole’; valuable (pretiosis) and from Germany (de Alimannia). The entry follows that for two gold-embroidered stole and maniple sets, which appears in both lists (further described in L as Venetian). 18 These are described as one ‘for the pilgrims’ (ad peregrinos) and one ‘for the chrism’ (ad crisma); what this actually means is unclear, but they may have been overlooked by the compiler of S simply because they were in use. Henry’s donations of rich textiles remained famous in the decades after his death, as witnessed by Gerald of Wales’s record that ‘Item cathedralem ecclesiam suam palliis purpureis et olosericis, cortinis et aulaeis pretiosissimis textis […] usque ad regum etiam invidiam exornavit’; Vita Sancti Remigii, in Geraldi Cambrensis Opera, ed. J. F. Dimock (London, 1877), vol. vii, p. 47. 19 The fact that the dalmatic and tunical are explicitly described as being ‘without gold’ (sine auro) may indeed point to them being lightweight versions intended to be worn by the bishop beneath his chasuble. The bishop blessing Thomas Becket at his consecration in the Becket window at Chartres (bay 18, panel 8) must be intended as Henry, who was Thomas’s principal consecrator. Both bishops are shown vested in chasuble, dalmatic and tunical, with stole and blue buskins; Thomas is also wearing a maniple. 20 Alternatively, the cushion could have been lost, moved, or simply not considered worthy of inclusion. It should be admitted that Henry’s tomb as described in the nineteenth century might not have had room for it, the stone being ‘shaped to receive the head’; J. G. Joyce, quoted in John Crook, ‘The “Rufus Tomb” in Winchester Cathedral’, Antiquaries Journal, lxxix (1999), pp. 187-212, at p. 192. 21 See N. Stratford, P. Tudor-Craig and A. M. Muthesius, ‘Archbishop Hubert Walter’s Tomb and its Furnishings’, in Medieval Art and Architecture at Canterbury before 1220, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions, v (Leeds, 1982), pp. 71-93.
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This is speculative, but the range of items excluded from S (once redemptions and secular objects are discounted) does add up suggestively. John Crook has written about the Purbeck marble tomb in the choir of Winchester Cathedral, long thought to have been that of William Rufus but now re-attributed to Bishop Henry.22 The re-attribution depended in part on the reassessment of the remains discovered when the tomb was last opened in 1868. These include a wide range of valuable textiles: ‘silk twills of “Byzantine, Syrian, or Persian” origin, including a red compound silk fragment […] gold braids probably of English origin’ (something ‘found mainly in ecclesiastic pieces’) and ‘cloth of gold’, as well as ‘three kinds of muslin’.23 Whether any of these fragments belonged to the vestments and other textiles listed in L but absent from S cannot be proven, but it is possible that many of the discrepancies between the two gift lists could be accounted for by the Winchester monks’ desire to furnish appropriately their great benefactor’s own burial.
22 Crook, ‘Rufus Tomb’. 23 Crook, ‘Rufus Tomb’, pp. 193, 196, also citing F. W. Richards, William Rufus: His Tomb (London, c. 1870) and E. Crowfoot, ‘Textiles’ in Martin Biddle (ed.), Object and Economy in Medieval Winchester (Oxford, 1990), vol. ii, p. 477.
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