Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-mkpzs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T16:46:09.709Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

RESPONDING TO VIOLENCE: LITURGY, AUTHORITY AND SACRED PLACES, c. 900–c. 1150

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2021

Sarah Hamilton
Sarah Hamilton*
Affiliation:
READ 1 MAY 2020
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The principle that church buildings constitute sacred spaces, set apart from the secular world and its laws, is one of the most enduring legacies of medieval Christianity in the present day. When and how church buildings came to be defined as sacred has consequently received a good deal of attention from modern scholars. What happened when that status was compromised, and ecclesiastical spaces were polluted by acts of violence, like the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral? This paper investigates the history of rites for the reconciliation of holy places violated by the shedding of blood, homicide or other public acts of ‘filthiness’ which followed instances such as Becket's murder. I first identify the late tenth and early eleventh centuries in England as crucial to the development of this rite, before asking why English bishops began to pay attention to rites of reconciliation in the years around 1000 ce. This paper thus offers a fresh perspective on current understandings of ecclesiastical responses to violence in these years, the history of which has long been dominated by monastic evidence from west Frankia and Flanders. At the same time, it reveals the potential of liturgical rites to offer new insights into medieval society.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 31 , December 2021 , pp. 23 - 47
Check for updates
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Royal Historical Society

The murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, in his own cathedral on 29 December 1170 led to the closure of that church, and the suspension of all liturgical services there for almost a year.Footnote 1 Services only resumed some 357 days later on 21 December 1171, because the building itself needed to be ritually cleansed and restored from the violence which had occurred inside.Footnote 2 It took so long to reopen the church because advice about what to do in such circumstances was sought from the pope. The letter Alexander III (1159–81) wrote to his two legates on the subject is worth quoting:

We entrust to you how you are to reconcile the church of Canterbury: thus the sacrament of the original dedication ought not to be repeated, but just as it is the custom to do in the church of blessed Peter, blessed water should be splashed about.Footnote 3

The papal legates consequently wrote to the prior and the community of Christ Church which served the cathedral, instructing them to call the abbots and bishops of their province to a solemn assembly so that they could ‘consecrate your church anew’.Footnote 4 In a service conducted by Bartholomew, Bishop of Exeter, and attended by all the leading churchmen of southern England, the cathedral was, in the words of one later chronicler, ‘restored to its pristine state’ on the feast of Becket's namesake, St Thomas the Apostle.Footnote 5

Becket's murder was shocking; it was also highly unusual.Footnote 6 The texts cited above were all written close to the event and give the impression that what took place on 21 December 1171 was an unusual, even innovative, rite; advice had to be sought from the pope, who prescribed that a rite be conducted as at St Peter's in Rome. This impression of novelty is strengthened by the variation in the vocabulary used by different contemporary writers to describe the reconciliation service. The author of the Landsdowne Anonymous's account of the aftermath of Becket's murder described how the assembled clergy ‘reconciled the church of Canterbury (reconciliaverunt)’.Footnote 7 Reconciliation is also the term used by Pope Alexander III in his instructions (cited above) to his legates that the Roman rite be followed. When it came time for them to pass these instructions on to the community of Christ Church, they chose instead to refer to the service not as a reconciliation but rather a chance to ‘consecrate (the church) anew (denuo ecclesiam vestram consecretis)’.Footnote 8

The legates’ description of this rite as consecrating the cathedral ‘anew’ is reminiscent of contemporary debates in canon law about the circumstances in which a church might need to be reconsecrated. The influential twelfth-century compilation of canon law, Gratian's Decretum, included a canon that if the church has been violated, by either homicide or adultery, then it should be cleansed most diligently and consecrated anew.Footnote 9 Gratian's account provided the foundation for the late thirteenth-century interpretation of this reconciliation rite by William Durandus, the southern French bishop of Mende, in his treatise on the symbolism of divine offices. There Durandus argued that it was not necessary to reconcile the church after all forms of bloodshed, such as nosebleeds or menstruation, but only after acts of violence.Footnote 10 To date, scholarly considerations of this rite, to the extent they exist, have largely focused on the later Middle Ages. In fact, as this paper will suggest, there is good reason to suppose that the reconciliation service for holy sites polluted by violence was well known in England before Becket's murder, and indeed that the roots of this rite lie in the tenth century, if not earlier.Footnote 11 For a rite ‘for the reconciliation of altars or sacred places or cemeteries where blood has been spilt or homicide taken place or some other public filthiness (or superstition) carried out’ is already to be found in a bishop's service book associated with early twelfth-century Canterbury and now in Trinity College Dublin, which was probably made for Archbishop Anselm (1093–1109).Footnote 12 As this paper suggests, it is distinctly possible that that particular iteration of the rite was the basis for that used in Canterbury in 1171. Indeed, as will become clear, a rite for the reconciliation of violated holy places had already been a staple of southern English service books and church law for a century and a half before Anselm. All those involved in orchestrating the service after Becket's murder – the pope, his two legates, Bishop Bartholomew of Exeter, Prior Odo of Christ Church, Canterbury, and the assembled bishops and abbots – were already familiar with the rites for the reconciliation of those sacred places where blood has been spilt which are the subject of this paper.

The origins of this rite lie much earlier. Dedication rites to make a building into a church have deep roots in the early Church and were reserved to the bishop from the sixth century onwards, if not earlier.Footnote 13 Dedication rites made ecclesiastical spaces sacred and set apart from the secular world, and consequently they have been the subject of a good deal of recent attention. Scholars have identified the period from the ninth to the eleventh century as a crucial time for the development of the church building (and its surroundings) as a separate, sacred space in the Latin Christian West.Footnote 14 What has been much less noticed, however, is that the focus on developing a liturgy for making spaces holy was accompanied from at least the 790s by an interest in what to do if that space was violated by acts of violence.Footnote 15 Yet some of the earliest surviving liturgical evidence for church dedication prayers is to be found in the late eighth-century Frankish world in three sacramentaries which also include prayers to reconcile a holy space which has been violated by blood being spilt.Footnote 16

At around the same time the term ecclesia underwent a change in meaning. In late antiquity the word denoted a community of the faithful, but in the central Middle Ages it came to denote a particular physical site, enclosed and set apart from the secular world.Footnote 17 Dominique Iogna-Prat found the origins of this spatial turn in the meaning of ecclesia in the writings of ninth-century Carolingian churchmen, arguing that the idea of the church as a separate, sacred space was first fully developed in this Frankish context; Miriam Czock has pushed this back into the eighth century.Footnote 18 At the same time, the definition of ecclesia was expanded beyond the building in which worship took place to include cemeteries, the priest's house and land.Footnote 19 This changed the understanding of church buildings so they became not just places reserved for worship, but also places set apart from the secular world, symbolising the community of the living and the dead but also offering a place of refuge from secular law.Footnote 20 This change was marked by the emergence in Frankia of liturgical rites for the consecration of churches from the seventh century, and their consolidation in the ninth century, and for the blessing of cemeteries in the tenth century.Footnote 21 These were liturgical responses to a fundamental change in the ecclesiastical geography of the Latin West: the increase in local churches.Footnote 22 Central to this development is the emergence and spread of parochial structures across the West, that is, the erection and maintenance of local churches funded by those living in the locality.Footnote 23 Alongside the proliferation in local church buildings came a shift in where the dead were buried. Between the seventh and twelfth centuries, the dead moved from their traditional Roman location outside the city walls to be situated next to the local church. Michel Lauwers termed this transformation inecclesiamento to capture the significance of this change in local landscapes.Footnote 24 Although the significance of the early medieval rite for the reconciliation of holy places has not been much noticed by modern researchers, either of Frankia or England, it has a good deal to tell us about how, when and why these changes came about.

In what follows I will start by investigating the evidence for the twelfth-century Canterbury rite available to Bishop Bartholomew of Exeter in 1171. I then consider how we should interpret this liturgical evidence by uncovering how the rite evolved between the time it was first recorded and the mid-twelfth century, with a focus on southern England. Tracing when and how this particular liturgical response to violent attacks on holy places came to be recorded in church law, I then ask how far these particular changes correspond with the developments in the liturgical record. In the final part, having established when and where the twelfth-century Canterbury rite first emerged, I will investigate the wider context in which it appeared, asking why this rite was recorded when it was, and what it reveals about the interaction of developments in ecclesiastical thought with wider social changes.

Quite which rite Bishop Bartholomew used to reconcile Canterbury Cathedral after Becket's murder cannot be known. The Magdalen Pontifical (Oxford, Magdalen College, Ms 226) is one of a group of pontifical manuscripts associated with Canterbury; it was copied in the mid-twelfth century and the rite it contains is therefore broadly proximate to the events of December 1171.Footnote 25 As the initial rubric makes clear, this rite assumes that the church building has previously been made holy through the rite of church dedication, but that that holiness has been contaminated by a violent act. It runs: ‘On the reconciliation of the altars and holy places or cemeteries where blood has been spilt or homicide committed or other filthiness perpetrated publicly.’Footnote 26 The rite in the Magdalen manuscript outlines the following stages:

  • • It begins with bishop, clergy and people processing in front of the church, singing an antiphon from Psalm 76, ‘Thy way, O God, is in the holy place: who is the great God like our God’, followed by two prayers requesting the Lord put demons to flight and purify the minds of those present.

  • • They then enter the church singing the antiphon ‘Peace be in this house and on all its inhabitants’, followed by prayer.

  • • The text specifies that the clergy should then recite the same ‘litany as required in the dedication rite for an altar noted above’.Footnote 27

  • • The bishop then makes the exorcism, blessing salt, ashes, water and wine as in the rite for the altar dedication, followed by a prayer requesting the reconciliation of this holy place or cemetery, and that it be consecrated or perpetually remain consecrated.Footnote 28 The aim is to avoid a repetition of the events which led up to this rite being performed.

  • • Afterwards the bishop processes around the church or cemetery three times inside and three times outside, sprinkling blessed water and singing another antiphon: ‘Thou wilt sprinkle me, O Lord, with hyssop and I shall be cleansed.’Footnote 29 The prayers which follow request that the place be cleansed, restored and rebuilt: thus ‘this place will be purged of all pollution, sanctified and restored to its prior state, and reconciled as sacred’.Footnote 30

  • • The bishop then goes around the church inside and to the doors and to the cemetery with incense whilst singing an antiphon and Psalm 130, and requests that the church (or cemetery) (hanc aecclesiam uel hoc cymiterium) be sanctified as it had first been sanctified (echoes here of the legates’ injunction to the cathedral community to consecrate the cathedral ‘anew’) and requests blessing and forgiveness of sins of both those who come to the oratory and those who are buried in the cemetery.Footnote 31

  • • The bishop comes back into the church singing a psalm and antiphon, ‘and the rest is as in the dedication of the church spelt out above.’Footnote 32 He blesses the altar and commends the holy place to the Lord, requesting that all wickedness in the future be eliminated from this place. The prayers which accompany this stage again use the language of restoration and cleansing.

  • • A solemn Mass follows immediately, in which the readings specified – the passage from the Book of Revelation (21:2–5a) about seeing a holy city, a new Jerusalem, coming down out of the heavens, and the parable from Luke (6:43–6) that no good tree bears bad fruit, nor a bad tree good fruit – allude to the importance of God's grace.Footnote 33 The prayers again continue the theme of cleansing from contamination and sanctifying place.Footnote 34

The language used throughout is that of disease and pollution, including spurcitia (filthiness), sordium (filth), culpa contagii (contagion of sin), maculatam (taint) and pollutio (pollution).Footnote 35 This is a state which can only be rectified by cleansing and exorcism, hence the continuous requests that the Lord purge and purify the contamination.Footnote 36 The Canterbury rite also deliberately echoes and repeats elements from the rite for the original dedication of the church, hence the repeated cross-references to various elements in the dedication rite: the recitation of the litany, the exorcism, and the blessing of the altar.Footnote 37

The rite is a very public and collective one. It begins outside the church with a procession, led by the bishop, but also involving the clergy and people: ‘First the bishop comes before his church with the clergy and people singing this antiphon with a sonorous voice.’Footnote 38 The prayer texts repeatedly emphasise the collective nature of the service. The deacon instructs those present to genuflect after the bishop utters the initial prayer and then rise up; the prayers include a request that purity ‘rise up in this place [since] this crowd of people agree to hold fast to their vows’. The rite ends by requesting the Lord to grant the request for restoration of purity to the crowd of people making it.Footnote 39 It is also a rite which emphasises the bishop's authority. Only he can preside over the rite and reconcile this space, just as church dedication rites were reserved to the bishop.Footnote 40 Thus through this collective rite, in which bishop, clergy and people all call on the Lord to cleanse this space and make it sacred again, the church (and/or cemetery) is restored as a space suitable for the community of the living and the dead.

The rite in the Magdalen Pontifical represents the culmination of a series of liturgical changes across the later eighth, ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries.Footnote 41 The earliest evidence for a rite for the reconciliation of holy places is found in a group of three Gelasian sacramentaries compiled in France in the years around 800 ce.Footnote 42 This rite consists of two prayers under the rubric ‘Reconciliation of the altar where killing has been carried out.’ The orator requests that God restore, cleanse and purify the altar which has been polluted by this act.Footnote 43 The final request in the second prayer, that the ‘pure simplicity of your church … that has been defiled after receiving grace return to its glory’, suggests that even at this early stage the altar already represented the whole church.Footnote 44 Rob Meens recently suggested that the appearance of this rite in late eighth-century Frankia should be linked to the emergence at the same time of a rite for the consecration of an altar;Footnote 45 and that both rites are a reflection, in the liturgy, of wider developments in Latin Christian thought and law over the course of the eighth century, which was when the idea that the church building should be regarded as sacred first became firmly established in ecclesiastical thought.Footnote 46

Both Carolingian rulers and churchmen promoted two versions of the Roman liturgy: first the eighth-century Gelasian and then, under Charlemagne, in an effort to return to what they believed was a more authoritative rendering, the Gregorian sacramentary.Footnote 47 The Gregorian text was soon found wanting and a Frankish supplement to it compiled which includes blessings for the consecration of an altar. Various later ninth-century manuscripts of the Supplemented Gregorian include further prayers and ordines for the dedication of a church.Footnote 48 Whilst at least one example of the Supplemented Gregorian sacramentary includes a Mass for the reconciliation of a violated church, none of the manuscripts in this particular group includes any indication of a separate rite for the reconciliation of an altar or church which has been contaminated by an act of violence.Footnote 49

Records of a full rite for the reconciliation of an altar or church contaminated by a violent act do not in fact reappear anywhere in the Latin West until the tenth century. When they do so, it is in England, and it is possible to trace the evolution of a specifically English rite across the next two centuries, from the mid-tenth to the mid-twelfth century. There are three main stages in the development of the written record of this rite across early English pontificals; these are collections of those rites reserved only to the bishop, such as clerical ordination as well as dedication of altars and churches.Footnote 50

The earliest two English examples of the rite are to be found in two manuscripts with connections to Worcester, now known as Claudius Pontifical i and the Egbert Pontifical.Footnote 51 Claudius i is a pontifical copied c. 1000 at Worcester, but seemingly based on an early tenth-century copy compiled at Canterbury.Footnote 52 The Egbert Pontifical was probably written for Oswald, bishop of Worcester (961–71).Footnote 53 The rite found in both these Worcester pontificals from the late tenth century is on the face of it a conservative text: the eighth-century Frankish Gelasian tradition of two prayers is accompanied by a ‘Mass for the reconciliation of the church’ drawn from the ninth-century Gregorian tradition.Footnote 54 The consequence was to extend the rite out from the altar to include other ‘holy places’, and in doing so move beyond the church building to incorporate also the reconciliation of cemeteries where blood had been spilt. We can follow this development in two places in the manuscript of the Egbert Pontifical. First the text of one of the original eighth-century Frankish Gelasian prayers, Deus cuius bonitas, has been amended to allow it to be used to reconcile a cemetery polluted in similar circumstances:

God whose goodness has neither beginning nor end hear our prayers that that of yours which is polluted may be cleansed, that which is neglected restored, that which is damaged, rebuilt, so that you may accept as reconciled the shelter of this church or cemetery and your altar should be cleansed of the infestation of devilish deceit.Footnote 55

Furthermore the noun chosen is not the usual coemeterium, but rather the archaic Frankish term poliandrum.Footnote 56 Secondly, the post-communion prayer in the Mass for the reconciliation of a church which follows was similarly amended later to request that the Lord ensure that this temple or this cemetery remains holy and protected from the defilements of barbarians and the unjust.Footnote 57 The ‘Egbert Pontifical’ has been linked on palaeographical grounds to Worcester c. 970, partly on the basis of the inclusion of texts also associated with Wulfstan, bishop of Worcester and archbishop of York (d. 1023), which include several archaic elements similar to the use of poliandrum here.Footnote 58

The second stage in the development of this rite is found in the pontifical made for Archbishop Dunstan (959–88), probably at Canterbury in the 960s.Footnote 59 This example includes for the first time an instructional rubric to the bishop on how to conduct the rite ‘for the reconciliation of holy places where blood has been spilt or killing perpetrated’: ‘the primate should sprinkle blessed water three times around and inside saying these prayers’.Footnote 60 The rite itself consists of the same two prayers first found in the late eighth-century Frankish Gelasian sacramentaries, followed by a new prayer in which the minister requests God to sanctify this church or cemetery which he has already made holy previously.Footnote 61 The Latin here is the more usual cymiterium. Unlike the scribe of the Egbert Pontifical rite, that of the Dunstan Pontifical sought to include the cemetery as well as the church building in this reconciliation rite from the beginning. The Dunstan Pontifical is securely dated to Archbishop Dunstan's pontificate on grounds of script, contents (including a copy of the papal privilege granting him the pallium he collected from Rome on 21 September 960, in the same hand as the main text, and an ordo for consecrating an archbishop) and illustrations.Footnote 62

The third stage in the development of this rite is to be found in two later pontificals, both associated with Canterbury and copied c. 1000: the so-called Benedictional of Archbishop Robert and the Anderson Pontifical.Footnote 63 The Anderson Pontifical, in particular, bears various marks that it was read closely. These comprise firstly a number of marginal additions including a marginal gloss to the rite for reconciliation of holy places where blood has been spilt which extends the rite explicitly to include cemeteries violated in the same way.Footnote 64 The same annotator also made reference to the singing of litanies, and specific antiphons. The antiphons cited are those more commonly used in contemporary English rites for the dedication of a church and consecration of a cemetery.Footnote 65 These marginal additions were written in a very similar hand to that of the main text, so why were such chant texts added, and by whom? The most probable answer is a pragmatic solution: they reflect actual occasions on which this rite was staged. Similar additions were made to the rites for the reconciliation of altars and holy places and the consecration of cemeteries in a pontifical written at Canterbury or Winchester (now Cambridge, Corpus Christi College Ms 146) around the same time as Anderson.Footnote 66 Rites such as this were outside the normal temporal round of offices and Masses; the need to reconcile violated space was clearly not so routine that the community of Canterbury was able to undertake it without some planning. The cantor, the cleric tasked with staging a formal rite like this, is therefore the person most likely to have to consult the text ahead of time to consider how this rite should be enacted.Footnote 67 The later marginal notes of the antiphons to be sung – seemingly written in two stints – therefore probably signify that on at least two different occasions a cantor gave thought to how this rite should be delivered, and hint at the translation of written text into physical performance.

This evidence of revision, amplification and glossing suggests that these rites for the reconciliation of holy spaces where blood has been spilt were amended and updated across the second half of the tenth century and into the early eleventh century at Worcester and Canterbury. Each time, provision was made to expand the rite to incorporate the possibility that the sacred space which might be violated could include the cemetery as well as the church itself. The final major change in the evolution of the reconciliation rite in England came in the mid-eleventh century in a pontifical possibly made for the last pre-Norman archbishop, Stigand (1052–70).Footnote 68 This rite included new Continental elements from the Romano-German rite for the reconciliation of a violated church which seems to have developed independently, if contemporaneously, in tenth- and early eleventh-century east Frankia.Footnote 69 But the English rite departed from the Frankish Romano-German rite in one major way. The Frankish rite specified that, having blessed the water, salt, wine and ashes for exorcism, the bishop should go around the church three times on the inside, splashing the blessed water about, singing an antiphon and a psalm, in order to wash and purify the contaminated places.Footnote 70 The English version of this rite in Archbishop Stigand's mid-eleventh-century pontifical instead specifies that the bishop should go three times inside and three times outside the church or cemetery.Footnote 71 This requirement – that the bishop go outside – reflects a peculiarity of the English consecration rites, which also specify that the bishop lead three processions around the exterior of the church, rather than the more common single occasion in the Frankish tradition.Footnote 72 Indigenous English traditions clearly remained extremely powerful, even when Frankish elements were introduced into the reconciliation rites. This fourth version of the rite was in use for more than a century. It is almost identical to that in both the early twelfth-century pontifical made for Archbishop Anselm and the mid-twelfth-century Magdalen Pontifical.Footnote 73

This review of reconciliation rites suggests first that the cathedral communities of churchmen in southern England – not just at Canterbury but also at Exeter and Worcester – in copying rites for the reconciliation of sacred places extended the remit of those rites to include violation of cemeteries from the second half of the tenth century onwards. Second, these communities reworked this material again and again across the later tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries. They incorporated new elements from the Frankish tradition and from the chant tradition; they even offered alternative singular and plural readings of sacred places – oratory/oratories, church/churches, cemetery/cemeteries – in the prayers in Cambridge Corpus Christi College MS 44; this was presumably to help readers understand the importance of correct grammar in prayer rather than for practical use, as similar changes were made to the subsequent rite for blessing the baptistery to allow for the consecration of multiple baptisteries at once, a situation which seems highly unlikely, not to say unfeasible.Footnote 74 Whatever the reason for these revisions, they are all testimony to an ongoing interest in developing the rite.

Their interest in the liturgy is echoed in church law. The medieval English church inherited a rich legacy of secular as well as earlier canon laws and penitentials.Footnote 75 The view that a place or building should be regarded as holy has deep roots in Roman tradition as well as early Christian doctrine and practice. In the Roman empire, the terms dedicatio and consecratio denoted a formal juridical procedure by which a site – a temple or a grave – was removed from secular use and became subject to divine law.Footnote 76 This idea that certain sites should be set apart as divine was carried over into early Christianity. The penitential associated with Theodore of Canterbury (d. 690) includes provision for sanctifying a church and cleansing it if a pagan is buried there.Footnote 77 At the same time, Roman law upheld the idea that such places should be inviolate; it condemned the violation of graves, for example, as a capital offence, and this teaching was taken over into medieval church law.Footnote 78 The contested nature of early Christianity also generated questions about the circumstances in which a church building might need to be reconsecrated. What happened if the building was destroyed by fire? What if the church had previously been in the hands of heretics? Was the original consecration valid? Should it be reconsecrated if the church was moved?Footnote 79

Two specific problems inform a pair of canons which are first recorded in the mid-tenth century. If the altar had been moved should the church be reconsecrated? If the church had been violated by killing or an adulterous act should be it reconsecrated? The answer in both cases was yes. The earliest surviving record of this duo is from mid-tenth-century southern Germany; they first appear in England half a century later in the early eleventh-century records of a Worcester canon law collection, seemingly made for Archbishop Wulfstan.Footnote 80 Despite their apparent novelty, they represent developments from earlier traditions. Scholars of central medieval dedication rites have shown how they evolved out of earlier customs which separated dedication rites for the placing of relics in altars from those for the dedication of a church. A canon on the need for reconsecration when an altar has been moved is therefore not surprising; indeed the issue was raised in Theodore's Penitential and remained a live issue in canonical circles four centuries later as is testified by letters written by Ivo of Chartres (d. 1115) and Archbishop Anselm (d. 1109) about whether a church should be reconsecrated when an altar was moved, or only when it was removed.Footnote 81 Similarly, reconciliation rites for altars and holy spaces polluted by bloodshed and homicide survive, as we have seen, from the eighth century and are echoed in the provisions made in royal and ecclesiastical law in England and Frankia for punishing anyone killing someone in church from the ninth century onwards.Footnote 82 What seems more novel is the reference to the need to consecrate anew a holy place after an adulterous act had been committed there; whilst this canon entered church law, appearing in two of the most popular collections in eleventh- and twelfth-century Europe – Burchard's Decretum (c. 1020) and Gratian's Decretum (c. 1140) – the focus of the liturgical rites remained on pollution from bloodshed rather than sexual acts.Footnote 83 To return to these two canons: they suggest that it is only from the second half of the tenth century that churchmen, first in Germany, then in England, became interested in prescribing that churches which had been violated by sinful acts should be cleansed and consecrated anew. When combined, the evidence of the liturgical rites and canon law indicates that English bishops and their clergy at Canterbury and Worcester became particularly interested in the rite for the reconciliation of holy spaces which have been violated in the later tenth century, and in extending this rite to include cemeteries around the year 1000. In the last part of this paper I therefore wish to consider why English churchmen began to pay attention to this rite at this time and in this way.

Bishop murder was extremely rare, but churches, the courtyards (atria) in front of them and cemeteries next to them were often sites for violent and destructive activities in the tenth and eleventh centuries. For example, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records how in 1002 King Æthelred II ordered that ‘all Danish men who were in England [were] to be slain’; this is an event known to modern historians as the St Brice's Day Massacre.Footnote 84 What this meant in specific terms is made clear in the records of St Frideswide's church in Oxford. They include a charter issued by Æthelred in 1004 in favour of St Frideswide's which records how as a consequence of his royal decree a group of Danes sought sanctuary in the church whereupon the townspeople burnt it down.Footnote 85 All the community's records were consequently destroyed, hence the need for a new charter. The discovery in 2008 in nearby St John's College of a mass grave of some thirty-four men who had died by violence sometime between 960 and 1020 has been linked by archaeologists to this massacre.Footnote 86 Their skeletons are tangible evidence of the reality of such an event. Unfortunately liturgical texts are not as amenable as bones to radiocarbon dating when it comes to dating them precisely.

Even if we cannot link rites to particular events, stories widely reported in miracle accounts, chronicles and letter collections from across England, northern France, the Low Countries and east Frankia point to how churches and their precincts were often the site of violent acts in this period. In 1060, monks from the Flemish monastery of Lobbes took the relics of their patron, St Ursmer, on a tour of Flanders in order to re-establish their authority over their scattered properties after the disruption caused by conflict between the emperor and the count of Flanders, and to raise funds for rebuilding their church.Footnote 87 In St-Omer they encountered two rival parties of armed men surrounding the church of Blaringhem:

The shields glinted red as the rays of the morning sun struck the courtyard (atrium) of the church as the steel of the weapons glistened, horses were snorting and whinnying, adding to the confusion.Footnote 88

On enquiry the monks discovered the cause of this tension: two knights had quarrelled and initially been reconciled in the presence of the local count, but one knight, still unhappy, killed the other and then sought sanctuary in Blaringhem church. The count and his men then returned intending to take the killer captive for challenging his authority, whilst the other group sought to defend him. The monks passed through the armed men, entered the church, where they celebrated Mass, and then processed outside, placing St Ursmer's relics in the midst of the crowd and provoking a mass declaration of peace in which, so the author of the Miracles of St Ursmer recorded, more than one hundred feuds were ended. Not all cases ended so peacefully. Around 1020 the sub-dean of Chartres was murdered in the atrium in front of the cathedral as he was coming to church one night; this became a cause célèbre as Bishop Fulbert of Chartres accused the Bishop of Senlis of having organised the assassination together with his mother and brother, because they thought the post should have gone to the brother.Footnote 89 This story reveals a good deal about the tensions over family control of cathedral offices, but both tales also suggest that the courtyards in front of churches were not only public spaces, but potentially dangerous ones.Footnote 90

Nor were the insides of churches safe places for members of the clergy and their households. In a case which shocked the north Italian clergy and the Ottonian court, Arduin, Margrave of Ivrea, killed Peter, Bishop of Vercelli, in his cathedral on 18 March 997, and burnt Peter's remains, incurring a sentence of excommunication.Footnote 91 But, as we have already seen at Chartres, churchmen might also be responsible for perpetrating violence within the church itself. Some sixty-five years later, violence erupted as a consequence of a seating-plan dispute between two important Ottonian churchmen: Abbot Widerad of the wealthy Rhineland monastery of Fulda and Bishop Hezelo of the Saxon see of Hildesheim. The incident took place at the Whitsun royal court at Goslar. The bishop of Hildesheim was unhappy about an incident which had occurred the previous Christmas, in which his claim to sit closest to the leading churchman in the east Frankish Church, the archbishop of Mainz, at vespers had been dismissed in favour of the abbot of Fulda. In order to prevent the same seating plan being enacted again, the bishop therefore arranged for one of his counts, a certain Ekbert, to hide behind an altar with several knights. When it became clear that the bishop's claims were again being challenged by the abbot of Fulda, Ekbert and his men leapt out and began fighting the abbot's men with cudgels and drove them out of the church. The men of Fulda then gathered their weapons and returned, bursting into the church during vespers as the brethren were singing psalms in the choir, and started fighting, this time with swords, causing ‘rivers of blood’ to run through the church. Two men, one on each side, were killed in the ensuing melee: the standard-bearer of the abbot and one of the bishop's knights. The bishop's men were again victorious, and again the Fulda men regrouped occupying the churchyard drawn up in a battle line; only night led to an end to the stand-off. The next day an investigation was held under royal auspices. The abbot was blamed, being accused of having come prepared for a fight with a large force; he and his men were forced to pay punitive fines to the king to retain their offices, and these were so steep that they impoverished the abbey for years to come. This account comes from the monk Lampert of Hersfeld; he used the language of the Romano-German liturgical reconciliation rite, describing how the bishop ‘with so much bloodshed … avenged the injuries of the violated church (violatae aecclesiae)’, hinting at the ecclesiastical discourse which presumably followed these events.Footnote 92

These five cases are indicative of how in the tenth and eleventh centuries churches across the Latin West were the location for different sorts of violent clashes between armed men, attacks on unarmed men and attacks by angry mobs. Nor were such clashes confined to laymen; as both the Chartres and Goslar incidents suggest, churchmen themselves, even if they did not take part in the violence directly, could be accused of being its instigators. Stories such as these therefore provide one context for this ecclesiastical interest in recording and developing, if not creating, a liturgy for the reconciliation of such violated places. To put it simply, through administering such a rite, bishops were able to reassert their authority as arbiters of sacredness where it had been challenged by the violation of sacred space. The bishop's position as spiritual leader of the diocese was articulated from the moment he processed with the crowd in front of the church at the beginning of the rite, and reinforced as he physically cleansed and purified the boundaries of the holy spaces with holy water. Doing so helped him to reassert his own authority in setting the church and cemetery apart from lay society at a time of friction. Scholars have noted that other rites – the chrism Mass, public penance, church dedication rites, excommunication – which similarly articulated and promoted episcopal authority over the diocesan clergy and laity evolved around the same time (the later tenth and eleventh centuries) as that for the reconciliation of places polluted by violence, most noticeably in England, but also in north-east France, the Reich and Italy.Footnote 93

This interest in promoting episcopal authority over what constituted sacred space and how it should be restored following violent bloodshed in late tenth-century England fits with the model which Tom Lambert has recently proposed for the overall judicial landscape of post-Alfredian England:

We should, I believe, think of Anglo-Saxon England as a society in which violence … was regulated not by prohibitions imposed by a single central authority, but by a network of protections emanating from numerous different sources …Footnote 94

The tenth and eleventh centuries, in Lambert's view, witnessed an expansion of claims to royal protection, and at the same time, kings reserved the most heinous offences, including homicide within a church building, to their own jurisdiction. But this world of overlapping lordly protections, in which different authorities claimed jurisdiction over different spaces, and in which kings often asserted their jurisdiction in ecclesiastical spheres for the church's protection, provides a suitable context for, and explains, the seemingly precocious English interest in documenting – in law and liturgy – bishops’ control over reconsecrating spaces violated by violence.

To date, modern researchers’ focus has largely been on the ways in which west Frankish tenth- and eleventh-century churchmen responded to violent attacks. They have traced how monks responded to attacks on, and invasions of, church property both through the recitation of long, elaborate liturgical curses – the monastic clamor – and through an elaborate ritual in which they humiliated saints’ relics;Footnote 95 how bishops had recourse to excommunication of enemies in defence of their property;Footnote 96 and how bishops and monks came together in the Peace of God councils from the end of the tenth century to articulate and defend the defenceless – clergy and the poor, women and children – from violent attack on persons and property.Footnote 97 The rite for the reconciliation of sacred places where blood has been spilt therefore needs to be added to this list. The extent to which other ecclesiastical defensive actions are a result of, and reaction to, political transition and the weakness of royal authority – particularly because so many of them are concentrated in west Frankia – has been the subject of considerable debate.Footnote 98 The marked monastic bias of much of this evidence has been less discussed. Research on other forms of ecclesiastical defence against theft and violence relies on charter, legal and narrative evidence, or exceptional liturgical texts for the clamor and humiliatio, rather than texts routinely copied in liturgical collections. The rites for the reconciliation of sacred places where blood has been spilt help, therefore, to provide a useful corrective to this picture: for these rites are usually copied next to rites for the dedication of churches in sacramentaries and pontificals written across the Latin West.Footnote 99 They are thus normative and routine elements of these collections, but this should not mean they should be ignored. Rather their existence is a consequence of particular points in time in the legal and social history of the Latin medieval West. Additionally, the precocious evolution of this rite in late tenth-century southern English cathedrals offers a new perspective on a picture too long dominated by the experience of French monasticism.

Liturgy's formulaic and apparently timeless nature has for too long been regarded as an obstacle to its use as meaningful historical evidence, when in fact it is a strength as it allows, as we have seen, for the systematic comparison of changes in ecclesiastical thought and practice over both time and space.Footnote 100 Moreover we should not ignore a genre which constitutes the most plentiful category of texts to survive from England in the tenth and eleventh centuries.Footnote 101 That entire codices, such as those considered above, represent only the visible surface of a large iceberg is indicated by the plentiful fragments preserved in later medieval and early modern book bindings and record wrappings which are still coming to light. But in a world in which parchment was expensive, and writing highly skilled, the decision to record any rite was always a self-conscious one. Asking why, in what was still a predominantly oral world, any rite was written down is an obvious, but curiously neglected, question. In a society which valued memory, these written records were not simple scripts for conducting worship, but instead served different and overlapping purposes: as instruments for meditative reflection on a theme, for instruction, and for the articulation of claims to authority.Footnote 102 Tracing how particular rites such as this one were recorded and revised by anonymous copyists allows modern scholars to trace the evolution of ideas and the development of intellectual culture for the many known and unknown churchmen whose daily lives were shaped by the liturgy.

But let us return to where we began, with the reconciliation of Canterbury Cathedral eleven months after Becket's murder. That rite was not a Roman import but rather the latest iteration of a much longer tradition of a rite in which bishops reasserted their authority when church buildings were desecrated. The churchmen of the southern English province would already have been familiar with some form of this rite. The reason why this service was so delayed was because papal guidance was sought about what should be done in the absence of an archbishop to administer the rite. The legates and Canterbury community asked advice not because they did not know what to do when a church was desecrated by a killing, but rather because they were unclear as to who should lead the rite in this particular case; this rite was so indelibly linked in their minds to the articulation of episcopal authority that they were unclear who should conduct it in Becket's place.

References

1 The most comprehensive modern account of Becket's life and death remains that of Frank Barlow, Thomas Becket, 3rd edn (1997).

2 The ‘Landsdowne Anonymous’: ‘in die tertia ante natale Domini ecclesiam Cantuariensem reconcilaverunt, et officia sua celebrare apostolica auctoritate monachis eiusdem ecclesiae indulserunt.’ Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, ed. J. C. Robertson and J. B. Sheppard, Rolls Series 67 (7 vols., 1875–85) (hereinafter MHTB), iv, 169. The cathedral's crypt, the site of Becket's tomb, had been opened to the crowds of pilgrims already flocking to the site some nine months earlier around Easter (4 April 1171): Benedict of Peterborough, Miraculae S. Thomae Cantuariensis, 2.6, MHTB, ii, 60; on Benedict's account and the timetable for the development of a cult around Becket see Rachel Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England (Philadelphia, 2011), 139–58, particularly 144–5.

3 ‘Mandamus vobis quatenus ecclesiam Cantuariae faciatis reconciliari, ita tamen ut sacramentum pristinae dedicationis non debeat iterari, sed, sicut solet fieri in ecclesia beati Petri, tantum aqua benedicta aspergatur. Bene valete.’ No. 787, MHTB, vii, 551.

4 ‘convocatis episcopis et abbatibus provinciae vestrae qui vobis ad hoc idonei visi fuerint, cum solemnitate congrua, adhibito solemnitatis ecclesiasticae, sicut majoribus visum fuit, moderamine, denuo ecclesiam vestram consecretis.’ No. 788, MHTB, vii, 552.

5 ‘sed tandem ad matris suae Dorobernensis ecclesiae vocationem in festo Sancti Thomae apostoli suffraganei convenerunt episcopi, ut ecclesiam, longa suspensione consternatam, juxta mandatum domini papae in statum pristinum reformarent.’ Roger of Wendover, Liber qui dicitur Flores Historiarum, ed. H. G. Hewlett, Rolls Series (3 vols., 1886–9), i, 89. Roger's account of the years up to 1202 is based on an earlier text compiled probably at St Albans, which was itself based on earlier texts. This account is not to be found in any surviving earlier sources. For a helpful account of Roger see David Corner, ‘Roger of Wendover (d.1236)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online.

6 Unusual but not unknown: on this phenomenon, and its chronological and geographical contours, across the medieval Latin West see the contributions in Bischofsmord im Mittelalter. Murder of Bishops, ed. Natalie Fryde and Dirk Reitz (Göttingen, 2003).

7 ‘The Landsdowne Anonymous’, MHTB, iv, 169; see n. 2 above.

8 No. 788, MHTB, vii, 551–2. See n. 4 above.

9 ‘ Si homicidio uel adulterio ecclesia uiolata fuerit, diligentissime expurgetur et denuo consecretur.’, Decretum Gratiani, c. 19, de Cons, d. I, Corpus iuris canonici i: Decretum magistri Gratiani, ed. E. Friedberg (Leipzig, 1879), digitised at https://geschichte.digitale-sammlungen.de//decretum-gratiani (last accessed 28 February 2021). On Gratian see Anders Winroth, The Making of Gratian's Decretum (Cambridge, 2000).

10 William Durandus, Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, i.vi.40–6, ed. A. Davril and T. M. Thibodeau, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 140, 140A, 140B (Turnhout, 1995–2000), i, 80–4.

11 William Maskell, Monumenta Ritualia Ecclesiae Anglicanae. The Occasional Offices of the Church of England According to the Old Use of Salisbury, the Prymer in English and Other Prayers and Forms with Dissertations and Notes (Oxford, 1882), cccxxxviii–cccxlvi; John Theophilus Gulczynski, The Desecration and Violation of Churches: An Historical Synopsis and Commentary (Washington, DC, 1942); Derek A. Rivard bases his account of the continental rites for reconciliation of violated churches on those edited by Michel Andrieu, beginning with the eleventh-century ‘Romano-German’ rite, in his study of the role of liturgical blessing in the lives of central medieval Christians, but does not investigate their origins: Blessing the World: Ritual and Lay Piety in Medieval Religion (Washington, DC, 2009), 112–30. The rites identified by Edmond Martène in the early eighteenth century remain fundamental to any student: De Antiquis Ecclesiae Ritibus Libri, ed. E. Martène (Antwerp, 4 vols., 1736; repr. Hildesheim, 1967), Lib. ii, c. xv, ii, 793–803. A.-G. Martimort's identification of the manuscripts edited by Martène reveals that his examples, where known, are all later tenth- and eleventh-century: La documentation liturgique de Dom Edmond Martène (Vatican City, 1978), 400–2.

12 ‘In reconciliatione altaris uel sacri loci seu cymiterii ubi sanguis fuerit effusus aut homicidium factum aut aliqua spurcitia publice perpetrata.’ Dublin, Trinity College, MS 98, ff. 29v–35r. For a description of this manuscript see M. L. Colker, Trinity College Library Dublin: Descriptive Catalogue of the Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Manuscripts (Aldershot, 1991); for a digitised copy see Digital Collections, the Library of Trinity College Dublin: https://digitalcollections.tcd.ie/concern/works/d504rq89v?locale=en (last accessed 14 June 2021). For the argument that it was made for Archbishop Anselm in the late eleventh century, see Malcolm Gullick and Richard W. Pfaff, ‘The Dublin Pontifical [TCD 98 [B.3.6]: St Anselm's?’, Scriptorium, 55 (2001), 284–94, plates 58–60.

13 Synodus Bracarensis prima, c. 18, Edition der falschen Kapitularien des Benedictus Levita, ed. G. Schmitz, http://www.benedictus.mgh.de/quellen/chga/chga_057t.htm (last accessed 23 June 2021); Thomas Kozachek, ‘The Repertory of Chant for Dedicating Churches in the Middle Ages: Music, Liturgy, and Ritual’ (Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University, 1995), 2. For further discussion of the sixth-century Gallic evidence for church dedications see Rob Meens, ‘Reconciling Disturbed Sacred Space: The Ordo for “Reconciling an Altar Where a Murder Has Been Committed” in the Sacramentary of Gellone in Its Cultural Context’, in The Merovingian Kingdoms and the Mediterranean World: Revisiting the Sources, ed. Stefan Esders, Yitzhak Hen, Pia Lucas and Tamar Rotman (2019), 103–12.

14 Lauwers, Michel, Naissance du cimetière. Lieux sacrés et terre des morts dans l'Occident médiéval (Paris, 2005)Google Scholar; Iogna-Prat, D., La Maison Dieu. Une histoire monumentale de l’Église au Moyen Âge (Paris, 2006)Google Scholar and his ‘Churches in the Landscape’, in The Cambridge History of Christianity: Early Medieval Christianities c. 600–c.1100, ed. Thomas F. X. Noble and Julia M. H. Smith (Cambridge, 2008), 363–79; Mises en scène et mémoires de la consécration de l’église dans l'occident médiéval, ed. Didier Méhu (Turnhout, 2007); Helen Gittos, Liturgy, Architecture, and Sacred Places in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 2013).

15 On the eighth-century context for the earliest records of this rite see now Meens, ‘Reconciling Disturbed Sacred Space’.

16 Liber Sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. A. Dumas and J. Deshusses, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina (hereinafter CCSL) 159 (Turnhout, 1981), 351–2, 360–4 (nos. 352, 356); Liber Sacramentorum Augustodunensis, ed. O. Heiming, CCSL 159B (Turnhout, 1989), 165–70 (nos. 340–2); Liber Sacramentorum Engolismensis, ed. P. Saint-Roch, CCSL 159C (Turnhout, 1987), 301–5 (nos. 32–4). On the Gellone Sacramentary's evidence see Meens, ‘Reconciling Disturbed Sacred Space’.

17 Late antiquity witnessed the emergence of Christian ideas of holy place: Sabine MacCormack, ‘Loca Sancta’, in Roman Religion, ed. Clifford Ando (Edinburgh, 2003), 252–72 (originally published in The Blessings of Pilgrimage, ed. R. Ousterhout (Urbana, IL, 1990), 7–40); R. A. Markus, ‘How on Earth Could Places Become Holy? Origins of the Christian Idea of Holy Places’, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 2 (1994), 257–71.

18 Iogna-Prat, La Maison Dieu. For a wider investigation of written discourse on church buildings in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages and the emergence of the idea of the church building as a holy site in Carolingian Frankia see Miriam Czock, Gottes Haus. Untersuchungen zur Kirche als heiligem Raum von der Spätantike bis ins Frühmittelalter (Berlin, 2012).

19 For example, Regino of Prüm in his early tenth-century collection of canon law, compiled for the archbishops of Trier and Mainz, included this question in his prescription as to how the bishop should conduct the visitation of a local church: ‘Investigandum, si habeat ipsa ecclesia mansum habentem bonoaria duodecim praeter cimiterium et curtem, ubi ecclesia et domus presbyteri continetur et si habeat mancipia quatuor?’ (Investigate if his church has a courtyard of 12 bonoaria [measure of land roughly equivalent to a quarter of an acre] beside the cemetery and a courtyard in which the church and priest's house are contained and if he has 4 slaves’): Libri Duo de Synodalibus Causis et Disciplinis Ecclesiasticis, ed. F. G. A. Wasserschleben, rev. W. Hartmann (Darmstadt, 2004), i.1 (q. 14), 26.

20 For a summary of medieval sanctuary's legal history see Karl Shoemaker, Sanctuary and Crime in the European Middle Ages, 400–1500 (New York, 2010). Sanctuary's early medieval roots are complex, as revealed by Meens, Rob, ‘Sanctuary, Penance and Dispute Settlement under Charlemagne: The Conflict between Alcuin and Theodulf of Orléans over a Sinful Cleric,’ Speculum, 82 (2007), 277–300CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Gittos, Liturgy, 212–56; on Frankish rites see also Polanichka, Dana, ‘Transforming Space, (Per)forming Community: Church Consecration in Carolingian Europe’, Viator, 43 (2012), 79–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On rites for the consecration of cemeteries as an early tenth-century English development see Gittos, Helen, ‘Creating the Sacred: Anglo-Saxon Rites for Consecrating Cemeteries’, in Burial in Early Medieval England and Wales, ed. Lucy, Sam and Reynolds, Andrew (2002), 195–208Google Scholar. Cécile Treffort has shown that there is no evidence for the consecration of cemeteries before the tenth century: ‘Consécration de cimiètere et contrôle episcopal des lieux d'inhumation au Xe siècle’, in Le Sacré et son inscription dans l'espace à Byzance et en occident, ed. Michel Kaplan (Paris, 2001), 285–99; she argues against Élisabeth Zadora-Rio's suggestion that this practice was only popularised in Francia in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries: ‘Lieux d'inhumation et espaces consacrés: le voyage du pape Urbain II en France (août 1095–août 1096)’, Lieux sacrés, lieux de culte, sanctuaires, ed. A. Vauchez, Collection de l’École française de Rome 273 (Rome, 2000), 197–213.

22 Major works include Aubrun, M., La paroisse en France. Des origins au XVe siècle (Paris, 1986)Google Scholar; Blair, John, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford, 2005)Google Scholar; Hamilton, Sarah, Church and People in the Medieval West, 900–1200 (Harlow, 2013), 31–59Google Scholar; Iogna-Prat, ‘Churches in the Landscape’, and La Maison Dieu; Miller, Maureen C., The Formation of a Medieval Church: Ecclesiastical Change in Verona, 950–1150 (Ithaca, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wood, Susan, The Proprietary Church in the Medieval West (Oxford, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. part iii. As these authors emphasise, this was a gradual process grounded in much earlier developments. For a summary of research on the early medieval period see Men in the Middle: Local Priests in Early Medieval Europe, ed. Steffen Patzold and Carine van Rhijn (Berlin, 2016), and now Fouracre, Paul, External Light and Earthly Concerns: Belief and the Shaping of Medieval Society (Manchester, 2021)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 On tithes see J. Semmler, ‘Zehntgebot und Pfarrtermination in karolingischer Zeit’, in Aus Kirche und Reich. Studien zu Theologies, Politik und Recht im Mittelalter. Festschrift für Friedrich Kempf, ed. H. Mordek (Sigmaringen, 1983), 33–44; La dime, l’église et la société féodale, ed. M. Lauwers (Turnhout, 2012); John Eldevik, Episcopal Power and Ecclesiastical Reform in the German Empire: Tithes, Lordship, and Community, 950–1150 (Cambridge, 2012).

24 Lauwers, Naissance du cimetière, 269–76, quotation at p. 273.

25 For dating the copying of this manuscript to the second quarter of the twelfth century as part of a group of manuscripts made at Canterbury see Helen Gittos, ‘Sources for the Liturgy of Canterbury Cathedral in the Central Middle Ages’, in Medieval Art, Architecture and Archaeology at Canterbury, ed. Alixe Bovey, Transactions of the British Archaeological Association 35 (2013), 21–58, at 53.

26 The Pontifical of Magdalen College, ed. H. A. Wilson, Henry Bradshaw Society (hereinafter HBS) 39 (1910), 127–32 (hereinafter PMC): ‘In reconciliatione altaris uel sacri loci seu cymiterii ubi sanguis fuerit effusus aut homicidium factum aut aliqua spurcitia puplice perpetrata’, 127.

27 ‘Postmodum faciat clerus letaniam quae supra notata est in dedicatione altaris.’ PMC, 128; compare that in the rite for the consecration of ‘the house of the lord’ (i.e. church, not altar), ibid., 99–102. On the relationship of rites for consecration of the altar with those for the church see summary in Gittos, Liturgy, 215–19 and pp. 37–8 and 45 below.

28 ‘Deinde dicat episcopus ter Deus in adiutorium meum intende. Et faciat exorcismum et benedictionem salis cineris aquae et vini ut supra usque. Quatinus consecrate sis aqua sancta ac proficias ad reconciliationem huius sacri loci uel cymiterii….uel hoc cymiterium diuinitus per gratiam spiritus sancti consecretur et perpetualiter ad inuocandum nomen domini consecrata permaneat et spiritus sanctus habitet in hoc loco seu in hoc cimiterio.’ PMC, 128.

29 This antiphon is generally found in rites for the dedication of a church, consecration of a cemetery and that of a cross: Cantus: A Database for Latin Ecclesiastical Chant: Inventories of Chant Sources (cantus.uwaterloo.ca; last accessed 7 March 2021).

30 ‘Cuius maiestatem precamur ut hic locus fiat ab omni pollutione purgatus et sanctificatus atque in priorem statum restitutus et reconciliatus ac sacratus.’; see also ‘Deus cuius bonitas nec principium nec finem habet cuius est polluta purgare neglecta restaurare uiciata reaedificare exaudi orationes nostras.’, PMC, 128–9.

31 PMC, 129.

32 ‘Deinde reportentur reliquiae ad aecclesiam psallendo. Ant. Sanctum est uerum lumen. Ut supra. Et reliqua sicut in dedicatione aecclesiae superius dictum est.’ PMC, 129.

33 PMC, 131; e.g. for a summary of traditional interpretations of the passage in Revelation see Bede, Commentary on Revelation, ed. and trans. F. Wallis (Liverpool, 2013), 260–1 nn. 1028–33.

34 PMC, 130–2.

35 PMC, 127, 128, 129.

36 See n. 30 above.

37 PMC, 128, 129, 131.

38 ‘Primum ueniat episcopus ante ipsam aecclesiam cum clero et populo hanc sonora uoce canendo antiphonam’, PMC, 127.

39 ‘Et diaconus. Flectamus genua. Leuate’; ‘Resurgat quesumus huius loci pura simplicitas et candore innocentiae restitutus dum pristinam recipit gratiam inuiolabilem reuertatur ad gloriam ut populorum huc turba conueniens dum petitionis hic ingerit uota uotorum se sentiat obtinuisse suffragia.’ PMC, 128, 130. See also a reference to the requests of the crowd of people (‘populorum turba’) in one of the prayers to be said whilst processing three times around the inside and outside of the church or cemetery: PMC, 129.

40 Gittos, Liturgy, 215.

41 The history of the rites for reconciliation of defiled holy spaces has attracted much less attention than that for church dedications; for example, it is mentioned only in passing in Kozachek's helpful overview, ‘Repertory of Chant’.

42 Copied at Meaux c. 790–800 ce, Paris, BNdeF, Ms Lat. 12048: Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. Dumas and Deshusses, 351–2; copied near Trier c. 800, Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, MS Phillipps 1667: Liber sacramentorum Augustodensis, ed. Heiming, 165–6: ‘cccxl: Recontiliatio altaris ubi homicidium perpetrator.’ The same sequence appears under the same heading in the Angoulême Pontifical as well: Paris, BNdeF, Ms lat. 816, Liber sacramentorum Engolismensis, ed. Saint-Roch, 304–5. For an overview of eighth-century Gelasian sacramentaries, which seem to have circulated widely in the late eighth- and ninth-century Frankish kingdoms, see Cyrille Vogel, Medieval Liturgy: An Introduction to the Sources, rev. and trans. W. G. Storey and N. K. Rasmussen (Washington, DC, 1986), 70–8; Bernard Moreton, The Eighth-Century Gelasian Sacramentary: A Study in Tradition (Oxford, 1976). A sacramentary is a book which includes only those prayer texts a priest (or bishop) needs to celebrate the Canon of the Mass and specific liturgical rites including church dedications; directions on how a particular rite should be conducted were reserved to a separate text, the ordines: Éric Palazzo, A History of Liturgical Books from the Beginning to the Thirteenth Century, trans. M. Beaumont (Collegeville, MN, 1998), 21–61; Vogel, Medieval Liturgy, 64–105.

43 ‘Ita auctoris nostri est lapsa restituere, mutantia stabilire …’, ‘… et altarem tuum quam insectantis est inimici fraude pollutum, per infusionem gratiae caelestis purificis, purificatumquem possedeas’, Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. Dumas and Deshusses, 351–2 (nos. 2398–9).

44 ‘Resurgat aecclesiae tuae pura simplicitas et candor innocentiae, hactenus maculatus dum recipit gratiam reuertatur ad gloriam’, ibid., 352 (no. 2399).

45 Meens, ‘Reconciling Disturbed Sacred Space’.

46 Czock, Gottes Haus.

47 On Gelasian and Gregorian sacramentaries see Vogel, Medieval Liturgy, 64–106; Palazzo, History, 35. For a revisionist account of their circulation and the limits of royal liturgical patronage see Yitzhak Hen, The Royal Patronage of Liturgy in Frankish Gaul to the Death of Charles the Bald (877), HBS Subsidia iii (Woodbridge, 2001).

48 Le Sacramentaire grégorien. Ses principals formes d'après les plus anciens manuscrits, 3rd edn, ed. J. Deshusses, Spicilegium Friburgense 16, 24, 28 (3 vols., Fribourg, 1988, 1992), i, 420–2, iii, 176–94.

49 ‘Missa in reconciliatione ecclesiae’, Le Sacramentaire grégorien, ed. Deshusses, iii, 212, no. 461 (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, n.a.l. 1589); this sacramentary is from late ninth-century Tours Cathedral and contains numerous additional texts.

50 On early pontificals see N. K. Rasmussen, Les Pontificaux du haut moyen âge. Genèse du livre de l’évêque, ed. M. Haverals (Leuven, 1998).

51 For the suggestion that these two pontificals ‘evidently descend in parallel from a common ancestor’ at Worcester see The Sacramentary of Ratoldus (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 12052), ed. N. Orchard, HBS 116 (2005), cii.

52 London, BL, MS Cotton Claudius A. iii, ff. 77r–78v: The Claudius Pontificals, ed. D. H.Turner, HBS 97 (Chichester, 1971), 65–6.

53 Paris, BNdeF, Ms Lat. 10575: Two Anglo-Saxon Pontificals (the Egbert and Sidney Sussex Pontificals), ed. H. M. J. Banting, HBS 104 (1989), 60–1. Nicholas Orchard summarises the scholarship concluding the ‘Egbert’ Pontifical was ‘associated with Oswald, bishop of Worcester (961–71)’ in his edition of another tenth-century manuscript with strong textual links: The Sacramentary of Ratoldus ed. Orchard, cii.

54 The text for the ‘Missa in reconciliatione aecclesie’ precedes the reconciliation rite prayers in Claudius i (The Claudius pontificals, 65) but succeeds them in the Egbert Pontifical (Two Anglo-Saxon Pontificals, 61).

55 ‘Deus cuius bonitas nec principium nec finem habet cuius est polluta purgare neglecta restaurare uitiata readificare exaudi orationes nostras ut huius aecclesiae siue poliandri receptaculum placatus accipas et altare tuum quod infestantis diaboli fraude fuit pollutum’: Two Anglo-Saxon Pontificals, 60; for an image of this text in the manuscript see Paris, BNdeF, Ms Lat. 10575, f. 77r on Gallica (https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b105422032/f159.item.r=latin%2010575, last accessed 23 June 2021); a second reference to the need to purify the poliandrum as well as the church was added to this prayer above the line by a second, more informal hand.

56 On its use in Merovingian texts see J. F. Niermeyer, Mediae latinitatis lexicon minus (Leiden, 2001), 811. It is not ranked in the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, meaning it appears fewer than fifty times in the corpus: dmlbs.ox.ac.uk (last accessed 7 March 2021). I am aware of only one other English usage: in a manuscript of the canon law collection often attributed to Archbishop Wulfstan: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, Ms 265, p. 123, edited in Michael Elliot, ‘Canon Law Collections in England, ca. 600–1066: The Manuscript Evidence’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto, 2013), 877; the text of this canon is a direct copy of an early ninth-century Carolingian text, Theodulf of Orléans's Capitula i, c. 9 (MGH Capitula Episcoporum, i, ed. P. Brommer (Hanover, 1984), 109).

57 ‘ut templum hoc /uel poliandrum\ a barbarorum inquinamentis emundatum tua benedictione maneat’, Two Anglo-Saxon Pontificals, 61; Paris, BNdeF, Ms Lat. 10575, f. 77v (Gallica, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b105422032/f160.item.r=latin%2010575, last accessed 23 June 2021).

58 Palaeography: D. Dumville, ‘Anglo-Saxon Books: Treasure in Norman Hands?’, Anglo-Norman Studies, 16 (1994), 83–99, at 95 n. 59 (style of script is similar to a charter written at Worcester 969, S 1326; see n. 85 for details). Textual links to Wulfstan: C. A. Jones, ‘Wulfstan's Liturgical Interests’, in Wulfstan, Archbishop of York: The Proceedings of the Second Alcuin Conference, ed. M. Townend (Turnhout, 2004), 325–52, at 327–8, 343 (archaic); idem, ‘The Chrism Mass in Later Anglo-Saxon England’, in The Liturgy of the Later Anglo-Saxon Church, ed. Helen Gittos and M. Bradford Bedingfield, HBS Subsidia 5 (2005), 105–42 at 114–15, 120, 142; idem, ‘The Origins of the “Sarum” Chrism Mass at Eleventh-Century Christ Church, Canterbury’, Mediaeval Studies, 67 (2005), 219–315, at 234–5. Helen Gittos has suggested that the Egbert scribe selected materials from different sources and adapted them to accord with contemporary practice: Liturgy, 223.

59 Paris, BNdeF, Ms lat. 943, ff. 62v–63v; a digitised copy of the manuscript is available through Gallica (gallica.bnf.fr, last accessed 7 March 2021); there is a transcription by M. A. Conn, ‘The Dunstan and Brodie (Anderson) Pontificals: An Edition and Study’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Notre Dame, 1993), 107–12.

60 ‘Reconciliatio loci sacri ubi sanguis fuerit effusus aut homicidium perpetratum. Primitus ter aspergat aquam benedictam in circuitu et intus et dicat has orationes …’, Paris, BNdeF, Ms 943, f. 62v.

61 ‘ut hanc aecclesiam uel hoc cymiterium quod prius tua sanctificatione sanctificari uoluisti’, Paris, BNdeF, Ms 943, f. 63v; Conn, ‘The Dunstan and Brodie (Anderson) Pontificals’, 108.

62 Script: David Dumville, Liturgy and the Ecclesiastical History of Late Anglo-Saxon England: Four Studies (Woodbridge, 1992), 82; Jane Rosenthal, ‘The Pontifical of St Dunstan’, in St Dunstan: His Life, Times and Cult, ed. N. Ramsay, M. Sparks and T. Tatton-Brown (Woodbridge, 1992), 143–63, at 151.

63 Rouen, Bibliothèque municipal, MS 369 (Y.7): The Benedictional of Archbishop Robert, ed. H. A. Wilson, HBS 24 (1903), 110–13; London, British Library, Additional Ms 57337; a digitised copy is available from the British Library (www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Add_MS_57337, last accessed 21 February 2021), and a transcript in Conn, ‘The Dunstan and Brodie (Anderson) Pontificals’, 257–62.

64 ‘Benedictio cimiterium ubi sanguis effusus’, London, BL, Additional Ms 57337, f. 53v.

65 For example, the antiphon ‘Asperges me’ added in the margin to Anderson's rite (London, BL, Additional Ms 57337, f. 53v) is also found earlier in Anderson's rite for the consecration of a cemetery (ibid., f. 34v) and in the rites for the dedication of a church, the consecration of a cemetery and of a cross in the Dunstan Pontifical (Paris, BNdeF, Ms lat. 943, ff. 16v, 42v, 75v) (Cantus ID 001494). Similar associations can be traced using the Cantus database for other antiphons mentioned in the marginal glosses to the Anderson reconciliation rite.

66 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 146, pp. 93, 95; on its date see Gittos's summary in her Liturgy, 287–8.

67 Margot Fassler, ‘The Office of the Cantor in Early Western Monastic Rules and Customaries: A Preliminary Investigation’, Early Music History, 5 (1985), 29–51; Medieval Cantors and Their Craft: Music, Liturgy and the Shaping of History, 800–1500, ed. K. A.-M. Bugyis, A. B. Kraebel and M. Fassler (Woodbridge, 2017).

68 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, Ms 44, pp. 174–86. For the dating and attribution to Stigand, see the summary in Gittos, Liturgy, 282, who makes clear that its rites for consecrating churches and cemeteries revise those present in two pontificals linked to Canterbury: London, British Library Ms Cotton Vitellius A.vii (>1030, Ramsey/Exeter) and British Library, Additional Ms 28188 (s. xi3/4, Exeter copy).

69 Le Pontifical romano-germanique du dixième siècle, ed. C. Vogel and R. Elze (3 vols., Vatican City, 1963, 1972), i, 182–5: ‘Ordo L: Reconciliatio violatae ecclesiae’. Formerly dated to mid-tenth-century Mainz, the Romano-German pontifical is now attributed to early eleventh-century Bamberg: Henry Parkes, ‘Henry II, Liturgical Patronage and the Birth of the Romano-German Pontifical’, Early Medieval Europe, 28 (2000), 104–41; see 113 n. 34 for a summary of the development of this scholarly revision of the dating and origin of this compilation; Parkes describes the Romano-German pontifical as a ‘collection of spolia’, 128, but dates the church dedication rites in this compilation to the early eleventh century, 116–18.

70 Le Pontifical romano-germanique, i, 183.

71 ‘In reconciliatione altaris uel sacri loci seu cimiterii … Postea circumeat tribus uicibis intrinsecus et extrinsecus aecclesiam vel cymiterium …’ Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, Ms 44, pp. 174, 176–7.

72 Gittos, Liturgy, 226.

73 The only major difference is that the eleventh-century copyist of CCCC Ms 44, pp. 184–6, includes the commendatio at the end of the Mass following the rite, whilst his twelfth-century successors copied that commendatio at the end of the rite before the Mass; Dublin, Trinity College, Dublin, Ms 98, ff. 32v–33v; PMC, 130.

74 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, Ms 44, pp. 176, 178–9, 180, 181, 183–5, 186.

75 Patrick Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century i: Legislation and Its Limits (Oxford, 1999); Richard Helmholz, The Oxford History of the Laws of England i: The History of the Canon Law and Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction, 597–1649 (Oxford, 2003), 1–143; Elliot, ‘Canon Law Collections in England’.

76 MacCormack, ‘Loca Sancta’, 257.

77 ‘Discipulus Umbrensium’, ii.1, 4–5, in Die Canones Theodori Cantuariensis und ihre Überlieferungsformen, ed. P. W. Finsterwalder (Weimar, 1929), 311–12.

78 Dylan Elliott, ‘Violence against the Dead: The Negative Translation and Damnatio Memoriae in the Middle Ages’, Speculum, 92 (2017), 1020–55, at 1029–30.

79 The historical summary in Gulczynski, The Desecration, 12–21, should be used with extreme caution as his identification and dating of canon law collections is now very outdated.

80 ‘Decreta Vigilii Papae. Si motum fuerit altare denuo consecratur aecclesia. Si parietes motantur et non altare exorcizetur salibus tantum.’ Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (BSB), Clm 6241, f. 33r (digitised at Münchener DigitalisierungsZentrum Digitale Bibliothek, www.digitale-sammlungen.de/en/view/bsb00078562?page=66,67, accessed 7 June 2021); this collection of extracts from the sixth-century Epitome Hispana collection was compiled in the last third of the tenth century in Freising: Lotte Kéry, Canonical Collections of the Early Middle Ages (ca.400–1140): A Bibliographical Guide to the Manuscripts and Literature (Washington, DC, 1999), 59; the pair also appear in other tenth/eleventh-century copies of this collection: Munich, BSB, Clm 3852, f. 65v (digitised at www.digitale-sammlungen.de/en/view/bsb00106135?page=130,131, accessed 7 June 2021) and Munich, BSB, Clm 3853, f. 134v (www.digitale-sammlungen.de/en/view/bsb00060190?page=272,273, accessed 7 June 2021). Collectio Wigorniensis A.3 (London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.i, f. 148r, digitised at British Library Digitised Manuscripts, www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=cotton_ms_nero_a_i_f070r, accessed 7 June 2021): ‘Virgilius Papa. Si motum fuerit altare denuo consecretur ecclesia. Si parietes tantum mutantur, et non altare sane [sic] et aqua exorcizetur. Si homicidio vel adulterio fuerit uiolata diligentissime expurgetur et denuo consecretur.’ For edition see Elliot, ‘Canon Law Collections in England’, 1025. The false attribution to Vigilius is perhaps related to Vigilius's letter to the Bishop of Braga on the circumstances in which a church should be reconsecrated, found in the ninth-century collection of Pseudo-Isidore: Decretales Pseudo-Isidorianae et Capitula Angilramni, ed. P. Hinschius (Leipzig, 1863), 711.

81 Ep. LXXII, PL 162, 101–2; Ep. CLIX, PL 159, 194–5; Gulczynski, Desecration, 16–17.

82 Frankia: Ansegis, Collectio Capitularium, iv.13, Die Kapitulariensammlung, ed. G. Schmitz, MGH Capitularia nova series 1 (Hanover, 1996), 625–7 (completed before 827); Regino of Prüm, Libri Duo de Synodalibus Causis et Disciplinis Ecclesiasticis, ed. F. G. A. Wasserschleben, rev. W. Hartmann (Darmstadt, 2004), ii.31, 264 (completed c. 906). England: Laws of Alfred (c. 885 × 899), c. 5, and viii Æthelred (1014), c. 1.1, Councils and Synods with Other Documents Relating to the English Church i: ad 871–1204, ed. D. Whitelock, M. Brett and C. N. L. Brooke (2 vols., Oxford, 1981), i, 24–5, 387–8.

83 Burchard of Worms, Decretum, iii.11–12, PL 140, 675; Gratian, Decretum, Pars iii, D.I, c. xix (https://geschichte.digitale-sammlungen.de//decretum-gratiani, last accessed 10 March 2021). On the latter see the exploration of this trope and its later medieval history in Dyan Elliot, ‘Sex in Holy Places: An Exploration of Medieval Anxiety’, Journal of Women's History, 6 (1994), 6–34.

84 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (C, D, E versions), a. 1002: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle Ms C, ed. K. O'Brien O'Keeffe, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition 5 (Cambridge, 2001), 89; for a recent account see Levi Roach, Æthelred the Unready (New Haven and London, 2016), 187–200.

85 S 909, The Electronic Sawyer: Online Catalogue of Anglo-Saxon Charters (https://esawyer.lib.cam.ac.uk, last accessed 18 February 2021); trans. English History Documents i: c. 500–1042, 2nd edn, ed. and trans. D. Whitelock (1979), no. 127, 590–3.

86 Sean Wallis, The Oxford Henge and Late Saxon Massacre: with Medieval and Later Occupation at St John's College, Oxford (Reading, 2014); Roach, Æthelred, 198–9.

87 Miracula S. Ursmari in itinere per Flandriam facta, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH SS 15.2 (Hanover, 1888), 837–42; this is an abbreviated version of the text edited by G. Henschen in Acta Sanctorum quotquot toto orbe coluntur, ed. J. Bolland et al. (Antwerp, 1643–1971), 2 April, 573–8, trans. G. Koziol, in Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology, ed. T. Head (New York and London, 2001), 341–58. On this text see G. Koziol, ‘Monks, Feuds, and the Making of Peace in Eleventh-Century Flanders’, in The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France around the Year 1000, ed. T. Head and R. Landes (Ithaca, 1992), 239–58.

88 English translation by Koziol, in Medieval Hagiography, ed. Head, 348: ‘Rubebat scutis totum atrium repercussione matutini solis splendebat acies armorum, confusior erat fremitus et hinnitus equorum.’: Miracula S. Ursmari, ed. Holder-Egger, c. 6, 839.

89 ‘in ipso atrio principalis ecclesiae trucidarunt’: The Letters and Poems of Fulbert of Chartres, ed. and trans. F. Behrends (Oxford, 1976), no. 29, 54; E. Peters, ‘The Death of the Subdean: Ecclesiastical Order and Disorder in Eleventh-Century Francia’, in Law, Custom and the Social Fabric in Medieval Europe: Essays in Honour of Bryce Lyon, ed. B. S. Bachrach and D. M. Nicholas (Kalamazoo, 1990), 51–71.

90 Fear of the consequent violence may be a hitherto unnoticed feature of the 1023 east Frankish Council of Seligenstadt's prohibition against people holding colloquia in church atria, instead of prayers and divine office; a colloquium generally refers to a court or synod: Die Konzilien Deutschlands und Reichsitaliens, ed. D. Jasper, MGH Concilia viii (Hanover, 2010), 39.

91 Ursula Brunhofer, Arduin von Ivrea und seine Anhänger: Untersuchungen zum letzen italienischen Königtum des Mittelalters (Augsburg, 1999), 80–5; For a recent account of this case see Levi Roach, Forgery and Memory at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton, 2021), 193–255.

92 ‘Tum vero urgebat et ille apostolicae sanctitatis ac Mosaicae mansuetudinis episcopus, qui tanti sanguinis effusione manus suas Deo consecraverat et violatae aecclesiae iniurias truculentius atque inmitius quam rex suas persequabatur’: Lampert of Hersfeld, Annales, a. 1063, Lamperti monachi Hersfeldensis Opera, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH SRG 38 (Hanover and Leipzig, 1894), 83. Compare: Le Pontifical romano-germanique, i, 182–5. Sixty years later William of Malmesbury, writing in southern England, presumed that the cathedral was cleansed (purgatam), although he only described the Mass for Pentecost which followed in detail: ‘Sed statim episcopis conuolantibus pace inter reliquias dissidentium statuta templum purgatum, missa festiuis clamoribus acta’: William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum anglorum, ii.192, ed. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom (2 vols., Oxford, 1998), i, 344.

93 C. A. Jones, ‘The Chrism Mass in Later Anglo-Saxon England’, in The Liturgy of the Late Anglo-Saxon Church, ed. H. Gittos and M. Bradford Bedingfield, HBS Subsidia 5 (2005), 105–42, especially his observation that ‘A heightening of liturgical and canonical emphasis on the consecration of oils can be seen as a kind of episcopal insurance policy, or guarantee of sustained control over proliferating smaller churches’, ibid., 131; S. Hamilton, ‘Rites for Public Penance in Late Anglo-Saxon England’, in The Liturgy, ed. Gittos and Bedingfield, 65–103, at 87–8; S. Hamilton, ‘The Early Pontifical: The Anglo-Saxon Evidence Reconsidered from a Continental Perspective’, in England and the Continent in the Tenth Century: Studies in Honour of Wilhelm Levison (1876–1947), ed. D. Rollason, C. Leyser and H. Williams (Turnhout, 2010), 411–28; Gittos, Liturgy, 212–56; S. Hamilton, ‘Medieval Curses and Their Users’, Haskins Society Journal, 30 (2018), 21–51. On these developments in continental Europe at the same time see N. K. Rasmussen, ‘Célébration épiscopale et célébration presbyterale: une essai de typologie’, Segni e riti nella chiesa altomedievale occidentale: 11–17 aprile 1985, Settimane 33 (Spoleto, 1987), 581–603; idem, Les Pontificaux; Éric Palazzo, L’Évêque et son image. L'illustration du pontifical au Moyen Âge (Turnhout, 1999), 17–35; idem, ‘La liturgie de l'Occident médiéval autour de l'an mil: État de la question’, Cahiers de civilisation médiéval, 43 (2000), 371–94; Louis I. Hamilton, A Sacred City: Consecrating Churches and Reforming Society in Eleventh-Century Italy (Manchester, 2010).

94 T. B. Lambert, ‘Royal Protections and Private Justice: A Reassessment of Cnut's “Reserved Pleas”’, in English Law before Magna Carta: Felix Liebermann and Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. S. Juranski, L. Oliver and A. Rabin (Leiden, 2010), 157–75, at 169.

95 Lester K. Little, Benedictine Maledictions: Liturgical Cursing in Romanesque France (Ithaca, 1993); Patrick Geary, ‘Humiliation of Saints’, in his Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, 1994), 95–115 (originally published in French in Annales: ESC, 34 (1979), 27–42); idem, ‘Living with Conflicts in Stateless France: A Typology of Conflict Management Mechanisms, 1050–1200’, in his Living with the Dead, 125–60 (originally published in French in Annales: ESC, 41 (1986), 1107–33).

96 Hamilton, ‘Medieval Curses and Their Users’; eadem, ‘Absoluimus uos uice beati petri apostolorum principis: Episcopal Authority and the Reconciliation of Excommunicants in England and Francia, c. 900–1150’, in Frankland: The Franks and the World of the Early Middle Ages. Essays in Honour of Dame Jinty Nelson (Manchester, 2008), 209–41; eadem, ‘Law and Liturgy: Excommunication Records, 900–1050’, in Using and Not Using the Past after Carolingian Empire, c. 900–c. 1050, ed. S. Greer, A. Hicklin and S. Esders (Abingdon, 2020), 282–302.

97 The Peace of God, ed. Head and Landes (Ithaca, 1992); Geoffrey Koziol, The Peace of God (Leeds, 2018).

98 For summaries of this debate see Charles West, Reframing the Feudal Revolution: Political and Social Transformation between Marne and Moselle, c. 800–c. 1100 (Cambridge, 2013), 1–4, and D. Barthélemy, ‘Revisiting the “Feudal Revolution” of the Year 1000’, in his The Serf, the Knight and the Historian, trans. G. R. Edwards (Ithaca, 2009), 1–11.

99 As is clear from the examples of early Frankish and English pontificals described by Rasmussen, Les Pontificaux, 53, 147, 198–9, 267–8.

100 M. Fassler, ‘The Liturgical Framework of Time and the Representation of History’, in Representing History, 900–1300: Art, Music, History, ed. R. A. Maxwell (University Park, 2010), 149–71.

101 For example, some 36 per cent of the entries in the most recent handlist of early English manuscripts, 464 out of a total of 1,291, pertain to liturgical books: Helmut Gneuss and Michael Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A Bibliographical Handlist of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to 1100 (Toronto, 2014); I used Gneuss and Lapidge's definition of liturgical books in their index.

102 Parkes, Henry, The Making of Liturgy in the Ottonian Church: Books, Music and Ritual in Mainz, 950–1050 (Cambridge, 2015), 2–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 218–23; Gittos, Helen, ‘Researching the History of Rites’, in Understanding Medieval Liturgy: Essays in Interpretation, ed. Gittos, Helen and Hamilton, Sarah (Farnham, 2016), 13–37Google Scholar, at 20–23; Sarah Hamilton, ‘Interpreting Diversity: Excommunication Rites in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries’, ibid., 125–58.