THE Norman antagonist to the Anglo-Saxon saints is a familiar figure. His portrait is most strikingly drawn by David Knowles in his masterly 1940 study of The monastic order in England. The attitude of the Normans towards the English Church, Knowles observes, gave rise to complaints on three counts. First, the English monasteries claimed to have been robbed by the Normans of land and wealth. Second, there were complaints about the imposition of knight service on monastic lands. Finally, ‘A third grievance, quite as widespread, is more curious. The Norman abbots, it seems, frequently outraged the feelings of their monks by their disrespectful attitude towards the old English saints.’ Among the offenders are cited the abbots of St Albans, Abingdon, Malmesbury and Evesham; St Cuthbert is said to have been an object of Norman scepticism; and attention is drawn to Archbishop Lanfranc’s initial hostility towards the English saints. To other writers on the history of the post-Conquest Church, Norman scepticism – or worse — is simply an assumed condition of the time. Thus Barlow writes generally of the scepticism of the Norman abbots; Southern boldly of ‘the contempt in which these saints were held by the Norman conquerors’; and Rollason with more restraint of ‘the scepticism of certain late eleventh-century churchmen towards the genuineness of the Anglo-Saxon saints’. It is my purpose in the present paper to propose a radical reinterpretation of the relationship between Norman churchman and English saint.

The complexity and importance of that relationship cannot be recovered either by the anecdotal approach of Knowles or by the generalising approach of the other writers. The interaction of Norman monk or abbot with the loog-dead heroes of the Anglo-Saxon Church can be understood only by detailed analysis of the individual cults and by the location of these within the context of the post-Conquest history of the religious communities on which they were centred. Only rarely, however, do the sources permit such detailed analysis. I begin, therefore, with studies of two abbeys whose records are of exceptional value. And I move on to a reconsideration of those incidents cited by Knowles as examples of Norman disrespect for the English saints.