Henry of Blois's Gift Lists in Add. MS. 29436
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
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. 1 eBLJ 2019, Article 10 Henry of Blois’s Gift Lists in Add. MS. 29436: Why the Discrepancies? eBLJ 2019, Article 10 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.