Memorializing Gregory the Great: the origin

and transmission of a papal cult in the seventh

and early eighth centuries
ALAN THACKER
This article examines the origins and early development of the cult of
Pope Gregory the Great (590604) in Rome, England, Gaul and
Ireland. A rst section analyses the earliest Life of the pope, written
between 704 and 714 at the Northumbrian monastery of Whitby,
arguing that it depended not upon oral tradition but upon early
writings originating among Gregory's disciples in Rome and in part
at least recorded by John Moschus. A second section relates this
material to the development of Gregory's cult in the seventh and
early eighth centuries, highlighting the activity of Archbishop
Theodore in England. Although clerical rather than popular, the cult
thus promoted established Gregory's reputation as a pastor, evangelist
and father of the Latin liturgy.
Unlike most early medieval saints, whose cults were local and focused
around their tombs, in the century and a half after his death Pope
Gregory the Great was venerated less in Rome, where he was born,
died, and was buried, than in the distant province of England. There,
remarkably, his cult reached its earliest owering with a strange Life
1
compiled c.700 by an anonymous inmate of the Northumbrian
monastry of Whitby.
2
Rome itself produced no Life before the ninth
1
For the text and recent discussion see, The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great, ed. and
trans. B. Colgrave (Kansas, 1969; reprinted Cambridge, 1985), henceforth Earliest Life
(commentary), VG (text); A.T. Thacker, `Social and Continential Background [to Early
English Saints' Lives]', DPhil thesis, University of Oxford (1976), pp. 3879; S.E.
Mosford, `Critical Edition [of the Vita Gregorii Magni by an Anonymous Member of
the Community of Whitby]', DPhil thesis, University of Oxford (1989), esp. pp. xi
lxxvi; O. Limone, `La vita di Gregorio Magno dell' Anonimo di Whitby', Studi
Medievali 3rd ser. 19 (1978), pp. 3767.
2
The location of Streoneshalh remains controversial. I do not propose to discuss the
matter here and therefore retain the conventional designation of Whitby. Cf. P. Hunter
Blair, `Whitby as a Centre of learning [in the Seventh Century]', in M. Lapidge and H.
Gneuss (eds) Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies Presented to
Peter Clemoes on the Occasion of his Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 332,
Early Medieval Europe 1998 7 (1) 5984 # Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998, 108 Cowley
Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
century.
3
What is odd is not so much the relative lack of veneration for
Gregory in seventh-century Rome, where few popes apart from those
who had been martyred achieved sainthood, but the early development
of his cult elsewhere. In fact, as we shall see, the origins of the North-
umbrian Life lie in reverence for Gregory immediately after his death
among his Roman and English disciples. That nascent cult, however,
soon lapsed, only to be revived in very different circumstances in the
late seventh century.
This article takes the Whitby Life as the starting-point for an exami-
nation of the cult's origins and early transmission. The analysis contri-
butes to the debate about the role of oral tradition in the development
of local cults, a debate of especial importance for Anglo-Saxonists
whose hagiographical literature is so sparse and whose cults are so
numerous.
4
Although the Gregorian material in the Whitby Life is
generally regarded as the product of a long process of oral transmis-
sion, that assumption is inherently implausible. While oral testimonies
may have had their role in localized cults, they can scarcely have
shaped one which, like Gregory's, was developed and recorded in a
new and alien environment. The rst section of this article contends
that the Whitby author's account of Gregory depended primarily upon
early written sources.
A second section analyses the diffusion and elaboration of those
sources in the context of the development of Gregory's cult in Rome,
England, Ireland and Gaul up to the mid-eighth century. After what
appears to have been something of a false start, in the later seventh
century the cult was revived and promoted by the papacy in Rome and
more especially by Archbishop Theodore in England, a phase of
activity which led to the reconstitution of the early material to form
the Whitby Life. In this period and the succeeding half century the
groundwork was laid for the Carolingian development of Gregory's
reputation as the father of the Latin liturgy.
5
_________________
at 912. See also P. Rahtz, `Anglo-Saxon and Later Whitby' in L.R. Joey (ed.) Yorkshire
Monasticism: Archaeology, Art of Architecture from the Seventh to the Sixteenth
Centuries, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions 16 (Leeds, 1995),
pp. 111.
3
John [the] Deacon, V[ita Sancti] Gregorii, Praefatio, P[atrologia] L[atina] 75, col. 61;
Thacker, `Social and Continental Background', pp. 702.
4
Cf. J. Smith, `Oral and Written: Saints, Miracles, and Relics in Brittany, c. 8501250',
Speculum 65 (1990), pp. 31043, esp. 31012.
5
See for example, L. Treitler, `Homer and Gregory: the Transmission of Epic Poetry and
Plainchant', Musical Quarterly 60 (1974), pp. 33372, esp. 33444. I am grateful to
Catherine Cubitt for this reference.
Alan Thacker 60
Early Medieval Europe 1998 7 (1) # Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998
The sources of the Whitby Life and their transmission
The Life was written at one of the greatest monasteries in Northum-
bria, a learned and cultured double community ruled by the inuential
princess lfd (abbess 680714).
6
The author was one of the nuns or
of the priests who served them as chaplains. Although a Latinist of
strictly limited ability, whose style and approach was ungrammatical
and often naive,
7
he or she
8
was relatively learned, well versed in the
scriptures and the works of Gregory and with some knowledge of
other Fathers, including Jerome and Augustine.
9
The promotion of
Gregory at Whitby represented a signicant move within the
mainstream of Northumbrian politics and ecclesiastical life.
The Whitby author's account of Gregory falls into two discrete
parts: the rst (chapters 111) a somewhat jejune recounting of the
pope's origins, early career and teaching, culminating in the dispatch of
the Roman mission to England; the second (chapters 2032) a brief
summary of the miracles which he performed as pontiff in Rome, and
of his later writings. The two sections are separated by a long digres-
sion (chapters 1219) on the Deiran royal family and its contribution
to the Roman mission in the person of King Edwin (61633), the
patron of Paulinus, rst bishop of York, and grandfather of lfd.
As I have argued elsewhere, this connection provides the key to the
production of the Life: Whitby under lfd and her mother, Edwin's
daughter Eanaed, became the pantheon of the Northumbrian royal
family, a shrine to Deiran kingship and the Roman mission, whose
Easter dating had already been accepted in the synod held in the
monastery in 664.
10
This article is primarily concerned with the two assemblages of
Gregorian material, the contents of which may be briey summarized.
The rst opens with a prefatory statement announcing Gregory's
universally recognized status as a saint; mention of his Roman paren-
6
Hunter Blair, `Whitby as a Centre of Learning', pp. 332; A.T. Thacker, `Monks,
Preaching and Pastoral Care', in J. Blair and R. Sharpe (eds) Pastoral Care Before the
Parish (Leicester, 1992), pp. 13770, at 1434 and 14950.
7
For discussion of the author's Latinity see Mosford, `Critical Edition', esp. pp. lvilxii;
Colgrave, Earliest Life, pp. 556. Cf. W. Goffart, Narrators [of Barbarian History]
(Princeton, 1988), pp. 2645.
8
Despite the uncertainty about the author's sex, to avoid stylistic inelegancy the masculine
pronoun only has occasionally been used.
9
Mosford, `Critical Edition', pp. xxxixxlii; Colgrave, Earliest Life pp. 534.
10
For example, A.T. Thacker, `Kings, Saints, and Monasteries in Pre-Viking Mercia',
Midland History 10 (1985), pp. 125, at 24; `Membra Disjecta: The Division of the
Body and the Diffusion of the Cult', in C. Stancliffe and E. Cambridge (eds) Oswald:
Northumbrian King to European Saint (Stamford, 1995), pp. 97127, at 1057; `Social
and Continental Background', pp. 4259.
# Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998 Early Medieval Europe 1998 7 (1)
Memorializing Gregory the Great 61
tage
11
is followed by discussion based upon his own writings of his
predilection for the monastic life
12
and of why only some saints display
their status through miracles. Gregory himself, it is claimed, is to be
acknowledged as a saint not primarily because he performed wonders
(though he did so) but because of his apostolic teaching, above all his
action in establishing the English mission.
13
The author then turns to Gregory's election to the papacy, which
was, he asserts, accompanied by wonders. Though Gregory assumed
ofce reluctantly and ed the city, the people of Rome were granted a
sign which led to the discovery of his hiding place and ensured his
unwilling return.
14
This account of Gregory's elevation serves to intro-
duce the famous story of his encounter in Rome with the Anglian
more specically Deiran boys, whose beauty (`not Angles but
Angels') inspired his determination to go in person to evangelize the
English. Though this wish was frustrated, it engendered the mission
eventually dispatched from Rome in 596.
15
At this point, the author inserts his account of Edwin;
16
when he
returns to his main subject, the setting of his stories has become speci-
cally Roman, focused upon miracles attributed to the pope. They
include the well-known vindication of transubstantiation through the
transformation of a host into a bloodstained fragment of human esh,
and a tale of relic rags authenticated when they bled at the pope's
incision.
17
Other stories describe a meeting with the king of the
Lombards, and the posthumous baptism of the charitable (but pagan)
Emperor Trajan by Gregory's compassionate tears.
18
We also learn that,
because of his eloquence, Gregory was termed `golden-mouthed', an
epithet widely used among the Greeks and among Christian saints rst
bestowed on John Chrysostom (347407).
19
Most interesting of all,
perhaps, is the brutal story of Gregory's attack upon an unnamed
successor for jealously disparaging his achievements in Rome.
Although warned by Gregory in a vision to desist, the successor
(presumably Sabinianus, 6046) repeated his jibes, and for that offence
was kicked on the head by the saint to such effect that shortly after-
wards he died of the blow.
20
Interspersed with this curious material are
11
VG, c. 1.
12
Ibid. c. 2.
13
Ibid. c. 36.
14
Ibid. c. 78.
15
Ibid. c. 913.
16
Ibid. c. 1419.
17
Ibid. c. 201.
18
Ibid. c. 23 and 29.
19
Ibid. c. 24.
20
Ibid. c. 28.
Alan Thacker 62
Early Medieval Europe 1998 7 (1) # Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998
summaries of Gregory's teachings and writings on angels, on the
signicance of miracles, on pastoral care, and on the Biblical books of
Ezechiel and Job.
21
The work concludes with a bald (and highly
unusual) statement that the writer knew little of Gregory's death, and a
reassertion of his conviction that Gregory was universally acknowl-
edged to be a saint.
22
It has been commonly assumed that the bulk of this material derives
from a body of oral tradition, perhaps preserved at Canterbury from
the time of the Roman mission and taken north with Queen Eaned,
or brought back from Rome by English travellers at some later date.
23
Some passages in the Whitby Life will undoubtedly sustain such an
interpretation. At the end of his work, for example, the author excused
his inaccuracies on the ground that he had not learned about Gregory
directly from those who had seen and heard the events described, but
only `by common report', vulgata.
24
Elsewhere, however, he declared
that his sources were ancient and various, acknowledging dependence
upon narratio delium or narratio antiquorum, even a record of
Gregory's deeds, a gesta signorum.
25
Such phrases more than hint at the
existence of earlier written authorities. In any case, much of the
Whitby author's account, including some of the miracle stories,
undoubtedly derived from Gregory's own writings. The bleeding relic
rags, for example, evoke the pope's letter to the Empress Constantina
which attributed an analogous wonder to Leo the Great (44091) when
faced with some sceptical Greeks.
26
The tale of the excommunicated
physician reprieved after death through Gregory's offering of the mass
retells the story of Justus, a monk of Gregory's own foundation on the
Celian, rst related in the Dialogues.
27
The confrontation with the
21
Ibid. c. 257 and 301.
22
Ibid. c. 32.
23
Colgrave, Earliest Life, pp. 505; idem, `The Earliest Life of St. Gregory the Great,
written by a Whitby Monk', in N.K. Chadwick (ed.) Celt and Saxon: Studies in the
Early British Border (Cambridge, 1963), pp. 11937, at 131; C.E. Wright, [Cultivation of]
Saga [in Anglo-Saxon England] (Edinburgh, 1939), pp. 438, 72 and 75; J. Richards,
Consul of God: The Life and Times of Gregory the Great (London, 1980), pp. 2389;
Mosford, `Critical Edition', pp. xliiixlvii. But cf. C.W. Jones, Saints' Lives and
Chronicles in Early England (Ithaca, 1947), p. 102, n. 27; J.M. Wallace-Madrill, review of
Earliest Life, in English Historical Review 84 (1969), pp. 3767.
24
`Unde si quid horum que scripsimus de hoc viro non fuit, quae etiam non ab illis qui
viderunt et audierunt per ore didicimus, vulgata tantum habemus, de illo eius etiam esse
in magno dubitamus minime. . . . VG, c. 30.
25
VG, c. 3, 9 and 20.
26
Ibid. c. 21; Greg[ory the] G[rea]t, Regist[rum Epistolarum], IV.30, ed. P. Ewald and L.
Hartmann in M[onumenta] G[ermaniae] H[istorica], Epistolae III, 2 vols (Berlin, 1887
99), I, pp. 2645; P. Ewald, `Die alteste Biographie Gregors I', Historische Aufsatze dem
Andenken Georg Waitz gewidmet (Hanover, 1886), p. 34.
27
VG, c. 28; Greg[ory the] G[rea]t, Dial[ogi], IV.57, ed. U. Moricca, Fonti per la storia
d'Italia 57 (Rome, 1924), pp. 31720.
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Memorializing Gregory the Great 63
Lombard king seems to be based upon Leo the Great's famous
encounter with Attila, reworked to t the context of Gregory's known
meetings with Agilulf.
28
Such undoubted instances of the adaptation of
written texts, whether by the Whitby author himself or some other
unknown hand, should make us wary of postulating orally-transmitted
saga as the main source of the Roman episodes in the life.
29
There are several indications that the Whitby author had access to
reliable tradition otherwise unknown in England. In particular, he
alone among the early sources recorded the name of Gregory's mother,
Silvia.
30
We know that he was right about that because the pope's
ninth-century Roman biographer, John the Deacon, stated that she was
so named in a portrait in the family monastery on the Celian hill.
31
Other information probably obtained directly from Rome included the
identity of the pope whose permission Gregory sought for his abortive
attempt to visit England: Benedict I (5749) was not mentioned by
Bede or Paul the Deacon, author of a late-eighth-century Life of
Gregory.
32
Similarly, the circumstantial detail in the story of Gregory's
ight after his election to the papacy indicated a source acquainted
with the local topography of Rome, while the authenticity of the ight
itself was conrmed in a near contemporary report by a deacon of
Tours.
33
Although genealogical information, such as the name of Gregory's
mother, may have been transmitted orally to the Whitby author, it is
less likely that he obtained narratives set in Rome in that way. Crucial
here is the episode of Gregory and the bleeding relic rags. As already
noted, the ultimate prototype for the anecdote is a story told by
Gregory himself about Pope Leo the Great.
34
Interestingly, however,
something very like the Whitby Tale exists in two closely related
versions, one in Georgian, the other in Arabic, both in being by the
tenth century and both believed to derive ultimately from a lost Greek
28
VG, c. 23; Colgrave, Earliest Life, p. 154; Ewald, in MGH Epistolae I, p. 319, n. 2.
29
The Whitby author himself, concerned as he was with Gregory's apostolic status, perhaps
edited the story of Justus to demonstrate Gregory's special prerogative to bind and loose.
He was certainly aware of its origin `in scriptis . . . eius quoque hystoricis de exitu
animarum': VG, c. 28. The Justus story was, however, exceptional. Other anecdotes were
more probably adapted in Rome itself.
30
VG, c. 1. Silvia is not mentioned by Bede or the Liber ponticalis.
31
John Deacon, V. Gregorii, I.9 (col. 66); H.M.R. Mayr-Harting, The Coming of Chris-
tianity to Anglo-Saxon England (London, 1972; 3rd edn, 1991), p. 58; Colgrave, Earliest
Life, p. 141.
32
VG, c. 10; Paul the Deacon, Vita Sancti Gregorii, ed. H. Grisar, Zeitschrift fur katholische
Theologie 11 (1887), pp. 16273. The Whitby author was, however, wrong in assuming
that Benedict was Gregory's immediate predecessor in the papacy.
33
VG, c. 7; Greg[ory] of Tours, H[istoria] F[rancorum], x.1, ed. B. Krusch and W. Levison,
MGH, S[criptores] R[erum] M[erovingicarum I, part 1, 2nd end (Hanover, 1951), p. 478.
34
VG, c. 21; above at n. 26.
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Early Medieval Europe 1998 7 (1) # Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998
original. That original was probably once part of a celebrated collection
of anecdotes about Christian monks and clerics made in the early
seventh century by John Moschus and known to posterity as the `Spiri-
tual Meadow', Pratum spirituale.
35
Moschus' work, no part of which was translated into Latin before
the ninth century, circulated not in a denitive publication but in
various selections from his vast pool of stories.
36
It was to one such
assemblage, translated from the original Greek into Georgian, that a
version of Gregory and the relic rags was appended. Moschus,
moreover, had undoubtedly preserved two further highly approving
anecdotes about the pope, one an otherwise unknown demonstration
of his exceptional humility, the other a version of the story of Justus.
37
He also told of an irregular baptism: a Hebrew youth falling sick in the
desert tearfully sought the sacrament from his (lay) companions, who
in the absence of water effected it with sand. To justify such a depar-
ture from the norm, Moschus cited a ve-fold classication of baptism,
attributed to Gregory of Nazianzus, one category of which was, signif-
icantly, baptism of tears.
38
Embedded within his collections, then, were
versions of stories told in the Whitby Life and other matter emanating
from a Gregorian milieu. Evidently Moschus had access to, or had
himself assembled, a corpus of material derived from circles close to
the pope in Rome.
Moschus never directly revealed how he came by this corpus. For
the story of Justus he cited as his source Peter, a Roman priest, perhaps
that Peter who was Gregory's interlocutor in the Dialogues; for
Gregory's humbling of himself he named a certain Abbot John of Fars
35
J.M. McCulloh, `The Cult of Relics in the Letters and ``Dialogues'' of Gregory the Great:
a Lexicographical Study', Traditio 32 (1976), pp. 14585; idem, `From Antiquity to the
Middle Ages: Continuity and Change in Papal Relic Policy from the Sixth to the Eighth
Century', in E. Dassman and K. Suso Frank (eds) Pietas. Festchrift fur Bernhard Kotting,
Jahrbuch fur Antike und Christentum, Erganzsband 8 (1980), pp. 31324, esp. 31418;
G. Garitte, `Histoire ediantes georgiennes', Byzantion 36 (1966), pp. 396423, esp. pp.
4068; J.-M. Sauget, `S. Gregoire le Grand et les reliques de S. Pierre dans la tradition
arabe chretienne', Rivista di archeologia cristiana 49 (1973), pp. 3019; Mosford, `Critical
Edition', pp. 1078.
36
H. Chadwick, `John Moschus [and his Friend Sophronius the Sophist]', Journal of
Theological Studies, ns 25 (1974), pp. 4174, esp. 427; M. Viller et al. (eds), Dictionnaire
[de spiritualite ascetique et mystique, doctrine et histoire], 16 vols (Paris, 193774), VIII,
cols. 6334; M. Geerard and F. Glorie, Clavis Patrum Graecorum 5 vols (Turnhout,
197487), III, pp. 37981.
37
John Moschus, Pratum spirituale, cc. 151 and 192, ed. in Patrologia Graeca, 87, cols
301517 and 3071.
38
Ibid. c. 176 (cols 30436); T. O'Loughlin and H. Conrad-O'Briain, `The ``Baptism of
Tears'' in Early Anglo-Saxon Sources', Anglo-Saxon England 22 (1993), pp. 6583, esp.
6871.
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Memorializing Gregory the Great 65
(Persa); and for the bleeding relic rags a Cilician abbot called Paul.
39
Though he thus on occasion mentioned his informants, he never
explained the circumstances in which he encountered them. The most
attractive explanation is a sojourn in Rome. According to an early
Greek biographer, who is our only source for that period of his life,
after eeing from the Persians and taking ship at Alexandria, Moschus
did indeed travel eventually to Rome, where he remained until his
death, probably in 634.
40
Recently that has been doubted, mainly on
the grounds that by `Rome' the biographer meant not Roma antica on
the Tiber, but the New Rome on the Bosphorus: Constantinople.
41
But
while there would have been nothing particularly surprising in
Moschus encountering stories of Roman popes in a Constantinopolitan
milieu, reference to Constantinople simply as Rome would have been
highly unusual in a text such as the anonymous biography. The more
straightforward hypothesis that Moschus collected his material at rst
hand from Gregory's disciples in Rome remains therefore preferable.
42
The degree of correspondence between the different versions of the
story of the relic rags bears upon the means of transmission. It is neces-
sary, therefore, to consider them in some detail. In the Whitby version,
some men `from western parts' come to Rome to obtain relics.
Gregory gladly accedes to their request and creates relics from pieces
of cloth (panna). The process by which this is effected is obscure: the
author simply alludes to the celebrating of masses and the cutting up of
the pieces of cloth then placed in sealed boxes. The envoys carry their
trophies away but succumb to the temptation to open the caskets and
are dismayed by the absence of corporeal remains. They return to
Rome and accuse Gregory of having tricked them. The pope tells them
to attend mass with the rest of the faithful, and at that mass urges the
worshippers to pray for a sign that the relics are authentic. He then
makes an incision in one of the pieces of cloth and it bleeds. Gregory
explains that when relics (by which he means relic-cloths) are offered
on an altar they become infused with blood of the saint to which they
are assigned. The envoys are convinced and return to their master.
The story ascribed to Moschus is only slightly different. The envoys,
39
Pratum spirituale, cc. 151 and 192 (cols 301517 and 3071); Garitte, `Histoires ediantes,
p. 406.
40
For Moschus' career see Dictionnaire, VIII, cols 63240; Chadwick, `John Moschus', pp.
4174. For the revised chronology see E. Follieri, `Dove e quando [mor Giovanni
Mosco?]', Rivista di Studi Bizantini e Neoellenici, ns 25 (Rome, 1988), pp. 339, esp. 13
21.
41
Follieri, `Dove e quando', esp. pp. 313 and 2936.
42
A. Louth, `Did John Moschus Really Die in Constantinople?', Journal of Theological
Studies 49 (forthcoming, 1998). I am most grateful to Dr Louth for showing me his text
in advance of publication.
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Early Medieval Europe 1998 7 (1) # Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998
who are said to be Frankish, go to St Peter's, where Gregory puts
strips cut from an old altar cloth in a relic casket which is then sealed
and placed upon the apostle's tomb to be sanctied. He prays and
leaves them in situ for three days. On the third day the Franks return
and receive the sealed casket. Thereafter the story proceeds as in the
Whitby Life. On their return journey they open the casket, and nding
only cloths wrathfully return to Gregory in Rome. The pope orders
them to leave the relics with him. The following day after prayer in St
Peter's he opens the casket, cuts the cloth, and it bleeds.
43
There are, then, few inconsistencies in the surviving versions of the
anecdote, which almost certainly faithfully represents early-seventh-
century Roman practice in relic creation. Such divergences as there are
between the texts are best explained as the Whitby author's elaboration
of his source in the light of his own reading of Gregory.
44
That source
must surely have been written; it is in the highest degree unlikely that
such a relatively complex anecdote, and one which moreover originated
in a literate society and was preserved among literate communities,
could have been so faithfully transmitted over almost a century in
Rome itself, let alone an alien environment, by purely oral means.
45
Most plausibly the Whitby author had access to some version of the
material recorded by Moschus.
The episode of Gregory's vindication of Jerome also illustrates the
process of transmission.
46
As it stands the version in the Whitby Life is
virtually unintelligible: Jerome, a light upon a lampstand not only to
Romans but to the whole world, had been expelled from Rome
through the misjudgment of the then pope; because that pope had
extinguished a light of such distinction, he deservedly
47
suffered the
indignity of having his own light put out by Gregory. The full story
can be reconstructed from two passages, extracted from a work known
as Alfred's Dicta and copied out in a late-twelfth-century hand in the
margins of an earlier twelfth-century Worcester manuscript of the
Liber ponticalis. Since they have been published by Levison and
Colgrave, they will be only briey summarized here. In essence, the
43
In the Arab version no mention is made of incision; blood simply ows from the cloth.
44
Above all his belief that sanctication was effected by the saying of mass over the relics
could derive from Gregory's stories about the power of the mass: Greg. Gt., Dial. IV.57
62 (pp. 31525).
45
For the conditions for the transmission of oral material in non-literate societies see J.
Vansina, Oral Tradition (London, 1973), esp. pp. 1946. Cf. J. Fentriss and C. Wickham,
Social Memory (Oxford, 1992), esp. pp. 4959, 7586 and 14472. For a different view,
see Mosford, who concludes that the Whitby stores about Gregory testify to `a popular
tradition circulating in Rome in the seventh century, . . . transmitted to England by
English travellers': `Critical Edition', pp. xliiixliv and 1078.
46
VG, c. 28.
47
The phrase used is nec immerito, a favourite of Gregory himself.
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Memorializing Gregory the Great 67
rst passage tells of Jerome making insulting accusations of worldliness
against Pope Siricius (38499) and his entourage, and as a result being
expelled from Rome. The second relates that it was the custom for
lights to burn perpetually before the papal tombs in Rome, and that
when Gregory was pope he broke the lamp at the tomb of Siricius to
avenge his treatment of Jerome.
48
The metrical prose of the marginalia
contains several verbal echoes of the garbled story in the Whitby Life,
and both versions clearly derive from a common (written) prototype.
49
The Worcester Dicta probably comprised Alfred's rendering of the
Soliloquies of St Augustine and related material. The Alfredian preface
to the Soliloquies apparently introduced a compilation including
passages from the work of Augustine, Jerome and Gregory, to which
an anecdote linking Gregory with Jerome would have had obvious
relevance. The source of that anecdote is, however, uncertain. It has
been suggested that it may derive from a lost Life of St Jerome, but it
is equally possible that it belonged to material that related primarily to
Gregory.
50
In his translation of Gregory's Dialogues made in Alfred's
reign, Waerferth, bishop of Worcester, prefaced each book with a short
introduction, in two of which he termed the pope `golden-mouthed'.
That epithet, as we have seen, was applied to Gregory in the Whitby
Life, and its use by Wrferth may well indicate a knowledge of the
Life or a related text in ninth-century Worcester.
51
The contents of the manuscript in which the marginalia were
inscribed hint at the source of this material.
52
The text of the Liber
ponticalis was interpolated with a series of papal epitaphs, deriving
ultimately from a compilation of the 680s copied with one or two
additions for Milred, bishop of Worcester (7436574).
53
The manu-
script also contains the only English copy among the Leiden family of
glosses, the lost original of which was compiled at Archbishop
Theodore's school at Canterbury in the late seventh century.
54
Possibly,
48
W. Levison, `Aus englischen Bibliotheken II', Neues Archiv 35 (1910), pp. 4247;
Colgrave, Earliest Life, pp. 15961; Cambridge, University Library, Kk. 4. 6 (Worcester,
s xii), ff. 233 and 244v.
49
Thacker, `Social and Continental Background', pp. 645.
50
D. Whitelock, `Prose [of Alfred's Reign]', in E. Stanley (ed.) Continuations and Begin-
nings (London, 1966), pp. 67103, at 713; T.A. Carnicelli (ed.), King Alfred's Version of
St. Augustine's Soliloquies (Harvard, 1969), pp. 478.
51
Bischofs Waerferth von Worcester U

bersetzung der Dialoge Gregors des Grossen, ed. H.

Hecht (Leipzig, 1900), pp. 94 and 179; Whitelock, `Prose', p. 77.
52
I am indebted to Michael Lapidge for rst drawing my attention to the contents of
Cambridge, University Library, Kk. 4. 6.
53
P. Sims-Williams, `William of Malmesbury and La silloge epigraca di Cambridge',
Archivum Historiae Ponticiae 21 (1983), pp. 933.
54
Cambridge, University Library, Kk. 4. 6, ff. 41r44v; M. Lapidge, `[The] School of
Theodore [and Hadrian]', Anglo-Saxon England 15 (1986), pp. 4572.
Alan Thacker 68
Early Medieval Europe 1998 7 (1) # Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998
then, by the mid-eighth century Worcester possessed a collection of
late-seventh-century texts originating in Canterbury, among which was
hagiographical matter relating to Gregory.
Perhaps the most convincing candidate for oral transmission among
the Whitby anecdotes about Gregory is the punning story about the
pope and the Anglians, especially since Bede relates it in a rather
different form and alludes to it as traditio maiorum, the tradition of his
forefathers.
55
It should be remembered, however, that the word-play
itself, which also occurs in a different (Roman) context in the following
chapter, works in Latin rather than the vernacular, and that the agents
of transmission were almost certainly clerics.
56
Such a mode of expres-
sion had prophetic connotations in the Hebrew Old Testament
57
and
was discussed by Jerome.
58
As Michael Richter has pointed out,
Gregory himself indulged in similar punning on the theme `gens
Anglorum in mundi angulo posita' in his letters.
59
Although, therefore,
the importance accorded the Deiran royal house in the word-play in
the Whitby Life suggests elaboration in Northumbria, there is no
reason to reject the ascription of the story, in at least its main essentials,
to the pope himself.
60
Noteworthy in this context are a number of similarities between
Bede's account of Gregory in the Historia ecclesiastica and certain
sections of the Whitby Life. Both quote from, or allude to, the same
written texts: the Liber ponticalis, Gregory's letter to Leander of
Seville, and his prologue to the Dialogues.
61
They also occasionally
close parallels in phrasing.
62
Especially striking is Bede's appendix to
his long chapter in the Historia ecclesiastica, in which he tells not only
of the Anglian boys in Rome but also of Gregory's frustrated attempt
55
Historia ecclesiastica [HE], II.1, ed. B. Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969;
revised edn, 1991), pp. 1325; VG, c. 9.
56
Cf. esp. Deira/de ira in VG , c. 9, and locusta/loco sta in VG, c. 10.
57
For example, Jeremiah I.11; Amos VIII.2; Ezechiel XXXVII.910.
58
For example, Jerome, In Heremiam prophetam, ed. S. Reiter, C[orpus] C[hristianorum],
S[eries] L[atina] 74 (Turnhout, 1960), pp. 78. Cf. In Amos prophetam, ed. M. Adriaen,
CCSL 76 (Turnhout, 1969), p. 326.
59
M. Richter, `Bede's Angli[: Angles or English]', Peritia 3 (1984), pp. 99114, at 103; Greg.
Gt. Regist. VIII.29 (II, p. 30).
60
Richter, `Bede's Angli', pp. 1005.
61
For example, Liber pont[icalis], ed. L. Duchesne, Bibliotheque des E

coles Francaises
d'Athenes et de Rome, 2nd ser. 3, 3 vols, 2nd edn (Paris, 19557), I, p. 312; R. Davis,
The Book of Pontiffs, Translated Texts for Historians, Latin Series 5 (Liverpool, 1989),
pp. ixl and 612; Greg. Gt., Dial. I, Pref. (pp. 1316); Moralia in Job, ed. M. Adriaen, 3
vols, CCSL 143, 143A and 143B (Turnhout, 197985), I, pp. 17; VG, c. 12, 32; HE
II.1 (pp. 120320).
62
For example, VG, c. 32 (p. 138): `Corpus dormit in pace; a quo resuscitandus in gloriam'
HE II.1 (pp. 1302): `Sepultus est corpore . . .; quandoque in ipso cum ceteris sanctae
ecclesiae pastoribus resurrecturus in gloria'. See Thacker, `Social and Continental
Background', p. 77.
# Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998 Early Medieval Europe 1998 7 (1)
Memorializing Gregory the Great 69
to evangelize England and his vicarious fullment of that intention
after his election to the papacy. To my mind the passage reads like an
edited and condensed version of the relevant chapters in the Whitby
Life. It prompts the suspicion that the differences in the material
common to the two works may in general be ascribed to Bede's sense
of style rather than to the variations inherent in oral transmission. That
would seem to be in accord with what we know from other sources of
Bede's working methods as a hagiographer.
63
The evidence, then, suggests that early written sources, both hagio-
graphic and homiletic, lay behind most of the Gregorian episodes in
the Whitby Life. The Whitby author himself, or some earlier writer
based at Canterbury, may have assembled the material from a variety
of texts. More probably, however, much of the work was done in
Rome, soon after the pope's death, by one of his disciples or by
Moschus. The Gregorian episodes in the Whitby Life reect knowledge
not only of Gregory's own works but even more crucially of the
thought-world of the Dialogues. Both display an especial interest in the
apostolic powers of binding and loosing, and link them with the vis
lacrimarum, the peculiar power of certain holy men (including Gregory
himself) to redeem condemned souls by their tears.
64
There is more
than a touch of the crude materialism so noticeable in the Whitby
author in the Dialogues; in particular, both works lay extreme stress on
the corporeal aspects of the Real Presence and the eucharistic sacri-
ce,
65
and present heroes who exercise their powers with the same
vigour, even brutality.
66
Perhaps the most obvious example in the Vita
is the unattractive story of Gregory and Sabinianus. In that story,
Colgrave discerned `a reminiscence of northern tales . . . told in Norse
sagas, of the frightful havoc wrought by offended ghosts upon the
living'.
67
But it is most unlikely that a story which (as we shall see) has
so much specically Roman resonance was put together in England.
Gregory himself, in his account of the nuns who perished excommuni-
63
Two Lives of St. Cuthbert, ed. B. Colgrave (Cambridge, 1940), pp. 1416; C. Plummer,
Baedae [Venerabilis Opera], 2 vols, (Oxford, 1896), I, p. xlvi. See also Thacker, `Social
and Continental Background', pp. 11636; Goffart, Narrators, pp. 2656 and 3036;
Richter, `Bede's Angli', pp. 1012. I am not persuaded that Bede would necessarily have
included the name of Gregory's mother had he known it from VG. Cf. W. Stuhlfath,
Gregor I [der Grosse], Heidelberger Abhandlungen zur mittleren und neueren Geschichte
39 (Heidelberg, 1913), pp. 723; Colgrave, Earliest Life, p. 58. Goffart, Narrators, p. 266,
n. 148 is wrong, however, to doubt the accuracy of the name supplied by VG.
64
VG, c. 289; Greg. Gt., Dial. I.12; II.1, 23; III. 33; IV.57 (pp. 679, 739, 11416, 209
12 and 31520).
65
VG, c. 20; Greg. Gt., Dial. IV.5762 (pp. 31525).
66
Thacker, `Social and Continental Background', pp. 678.
67
VG, c. 28; Colgrave, Earliest Life, p. 161, n. 121. Cf. Wright, Saga, p. 69.
Alan Thacker 70
Early Medieval Europe 1998 7 (1) # Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998
cate and ed from their graves at every mass, reveals a notion of the
unquiet dead not far removed from that in the Whitby story.
68
The development of Gregory's cult
That in the early seventh century Gregory's disciples venerated their
master may be inferred from the stories recorded by Moschus. Their
sentiments perhaps inuenced Abbot Cummean, an Irish cleric in close
touch with Rome, who lauded Gregory as `golden-mouthed' in the
630s.
69
Nevertheless, Gregory's reputation in Rome as a whole during
that period appears to have been distinctly ambiguous. Revered while
alive within a tight monastic circle, he had relatively little interest in
popular preaching and made only a limited impact upon the plebs.
70
Indeed, in some quarters he was actively disliked. Gregory had never
disguised his marked preference for the monastic life, and had proved
to be an active patron of monks from his own monastery on the Celian
and elsewhere.
71
He probably replaced some of the clergy serving the
Roman basilicas with monks, a process reversed by his successors and
one which evidently created bitter feeling. The brief entries in the
Liber ponticalis for the period immediately after Gregory's death hint
at a power struggle between the monastic and clerical parties. There
was particularly intense conict during the ponticate of Sabinianus
(6046), who was sympathetic to the clericalists, and later tradition
suggests that Gregory's good name did not escape unscathed.
72
John
the Deacon, the pope's ninth-century Roman biographer, related that
the Romans were so inamed against Gregory that after his death they
sought to burn his books in order to erase his memory (ad obliter-
andum eius memoriam).
73
The Whitby author's story of the awful
punishment meted out to Sabinianus was probably an echo of these
68
Greg. Gt., Dial. II.23 (pp. 11416). Cf. ibid. IV.32, 36, 42 and 536 (pp. 2757, 2825,
297300 and 311140).
69
Cummian's Letter `De Controversia Paschali' and the `De Ratione Conputandi, ed. M.
Walsh and D. O

Cro in n (Toronto, 1988), pp. 37 and 823. Cf. Richter, `Bede's Angli',
pp. 1078; M. Richter, `Irland und Europa: die Kirche im Fru hmittelalter', in Ireland and
Europe: The Early Church, ed. P. N Chathain and M. Richter (Stuttgart, 1984), pp. 409
32, at 428; P. O

Ne ill, `Romani Inuences on Seventh-Century Hiberno-Latin Literature',

in ibid. pp. 28090, at 2878. Columbanus refers to Gregory as sanctus in a letter which
apparently dates from 603 and cannot therefore be evidence of cult: G.S.M. Walker,
Sancti Columbani Opera, Scriptores Latini Hiberniae 2 (Dublin 1978), p. 20.
70
J. McClure, `Gregory the Great: Exegesis and Audience', DPhil thesis, University of
Oxford (1978), pp. 13174 and 2659.
71
For example, Greg. Gt., Dial. I Pref. (pp. 1315); Moralia, pp. 12.
72
Liber pont. I, p. 315; P. Llewellyn, `[The] Roman Church [in the 7th Century]', Journal
of Ecclesiastical History 25 (1974), pp. 36380, t 3637.
73
John Deacon, V. Gregorii, IV.69 (cols 2212). Cf. those qui obtrectant virum beatissimum
in the interpolated version of Paul the Lombard's Vita Gregorii, c. 28, PL 75, col. 58.
# Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998 Early Medieval Europe 1998 7 (1)
Memorializing Gregory the Great 71
controversies;
74
so too perhaps was the account of the vindication of
Jerome, the monastic doctor par excellence. The situation remained in
the balance for some time after Gregory's death in 604, and the Liber
ponticalis records monastic sympathizers and clericalists succeeded
one another on the papal throne. Boniface IV (60815) was a strong
supporter of monks, and his epitaph declared him to have been
Gregory's disciple.
75
His successor Deusdedit (61518) was a cleric-
alist.
76
Honorius I (62538) was a particularly enthusiastic Gregorian,
but his tolerance of Monothelitism rendered him suspect and his
monastic zeal was eschewed by his successors.
77
Thereafter no pope is
recorded as favouring monasticism in Rome until Adeodatus (6726).
78
All this helps to explain why the early interest in Gregory quickly
faded in Rome. Apart from the brief and unenthusiastic entry in the
Liber ponticalis and the work of Moschus, no account of the pope
was put together in the city before the Life of John the Deacon. John
indeed believed that stories in the Whitby Life (in particular that of
Trajan's redemption, whose orthodoxy was doubtful) originated among
the English, and expressly drew attention to the curious fact that
Gregory had achieved greater fame among foreigners than his own
people.
79
The only sign of early veneration dates, signicantly, from
the ponticate of Honorius I: a pilgrim's itinerary written then or
shortly afterwards guides its readers to Gregory's tomb in the western
portico of St Peter's and to the bed in which he died, apparently
displayed in an oratory nearby.
80
The liturgical evidence is also largely negative. Gregory's feast is
absent from the surviving Roman calendars and occurs only sporadi-
cally in the early missals.
81
Nor did Roman liturgical books provide
the Franks with an authoritative and consistent basis for the cult in the
eighth and ninth centuries. Although the papal mass-book known as
74
E. John, `The Social and Political Problems of the Early English Church', in Land,
Church and People, ed. J. Thirsk, Agricultural History Review 18 (1970), Supplement, pp.
3963, at 55, n. 4.
75
Liber pont. I, p. 317; M. Borgolte, Petrusnachfolge [und Kaiserimitation: die Grablegen
der Papste, ihre Genese und Traditionsbildung], Vero ffentlichungen des Max-Planck-
Instituts fu r Geschichte 95 (Go ttingen, 1989), pp. 778.
76
Liber pont. I, p. 319.
77
Ibid. I, p. 324.
78
G. Ferrari, Early Roman Monasteries from the Fifth through the Tenth Century (Rome,
1957), pp. 38991; Llewellyn, `Roman Church', pp. 3667.
79
John Deacon, V. Gregorii, Pref.; II.41, 44 (cols 61 and 1036).
80
Codice topograco della citta di Roma II, ed. R. Valentini and G. Zucchetti, Fonti per la
storia d'Italia, vol. 88 (Rome, 1942), pp. 989; M. Andrieu, `La chapelle de Saint
Gregoire dans l'ancienne basilique Vaticane', Rivista di archeologia cristiana 13 (1936),
pp. 6199.
81
See for example W.H. Frere, Studies in the Early Roman Liturgy, 3 vols, Alcuin Club
Collections (London, 19305), I, The Kalendar, p. 97.
Alan Thacker 72
Early Medieval Europe 1998 7 (1) # Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998
the Hadrianum includes the feast, it is omitted from a related text, the
sacramentary of Padua, a mid-ninth-century adaptation of a late-
seventh-century Roman prototype.
82
Similarly, it occurs in only some
of the eighth-century missals known as Gelasians (based on a mixture
of Roman and Frankish material) and then only in a form which differs
from that in the Hadrianum.
83
It looks as if the cult did not have a
single early focus in Rome, but developed locally in perhaps more than
one area.
84
In Rome itself an ofcially sponsored cult probably emerged in the
later seventh century.
85
Papal interest is evident in 668, when Pope
Vitalian (65772) sent relics of Gregory, along with those of other
Roman apostles and martyrs, to King Oswiu.
86
At that time, however,
the saint was apparently valued more as an element in papal diplomacy
than as a gure in the religious life of Rome. The city's liturgical books
did not include Gregory until the late seventh century; his mass, which
was closely related to that for Leo the Great, apparently composed at
the latter's translation c. 688, was introduced into the Gregorian sacra-
mentary by Pope Sergius (687706).
87
The period, in fact, saw the
emergence in Rome of a number of cults under the inuence of popes
of eastern origin or culture. The Sicilian Leo II (6823), for example,
translated the remains of Simplicius and other martyrs to the new
church of St Paul, which he had built in the east of the city next to the
ancient basilica of St Bibiana.
88
In the Velabro the same pope estab-
lished the cult of St George, whose feast entered the papal mass-book
at much the same time as Gregory's. New Petrine and Marian feasts
were also introduced.
89
Such changes marked something of a revolution
82
Padua, Biblioteca Capitolare, D 47: ed. L.C. Mohlberg, Die alteste erreichbare Gestalt
des Liber Sacramentorum anni circuli der romischen Kirche (Mu nster, 1927). See C.
Vogel, Medieval Liturgy[: An Introduction to the Sources] (Washington, 1986), pp. 927.
83
It occurs, for example, in Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, lat. 12048 and St Gall, Stiftsbi-
bliothek, 348: Liber Sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. A. Dumas, introd. J. Deshusses, 2
vols, CCSL 159159A (Turnhout, 1981), I, pp. 301; Das frankische Sacramentarium
Gelasianum in alamanischer U

berlieferung: Codex Sangallensis 348, ed. L.C. Mohlberg

(Mu nster, 1918, reprinted 1971), p. 34. Crucially, however, it does not occur in Rome,
B[iblioteca] A[postolica] V[aticana], Reginensis latinus 316, a Gelasian sacramentary of
the second half of the eighth century: A. Chavasse, [Le] sac[ramentaire] gel[asien]
(Tournai, 1957); Vogel, Medieval Liturgy, pp. 6470.
84
B. Moreton, [The Eighth-Century] Gelasian Sacramentary (Oxford, 1976), p. 103.
85
This is not to say that there was no liturgical cult of Gregory in Rome before 688,
merely that if there was it was very local and presumably primarily at the pope's own
monastery on the Celian hill.
86
HE, III.29 (p. 320).
87
Chavasse, Sac. gel. pp. 5512 and 5912; J. Deshusses, [Le] sac[ramentaire] greg[orien], 3
vols, Spicilegium Friburgense 16, 24 and 28 (Freiburg, 197182), I, pp. 506, 127 and
243; III, pp. 603.
88
Liber pont. I, p. 360 (no. 82).
89
Ibid.; Deshusses, Sac. greg. I, p. 54; III, pp. 61 and 63; Moreton, Gelasian Sacramentary,
p. 103.
# Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998 Early Medieval Europe 1998 7 (1)
Memorializing Gregory the Great 73
in conservative Roman attitudes to the cult of the saints in general and
to their own pontiffs in particular,
90
and were perhaps connected with
the consolidation of a clerical e lite, bent on the elaboration of civic
ceremonies around the person of the pope.
91
Initially it seems that it
was Leo who beneted most from this new approach. Gregory, unlike
Leo, was not translated.
92
For its full owering his cult in Rome had to
wait until the ninth century.
93
In the seventh century Gregory's reputation clearly stood higher
outside the Eternal City than within. In Gaul, for example, Gregory of
Tours accorded him a contemporary notice much warmer in tone than
the chilly entry under his name in the Liber ponticalis.
94
Again,
however, the evidence for the development of the cult dates mostly
from the late seventh century or later. By the 670s, for example, a
monk of Longoretus (Saint-Cyran, dep. Indres) could term the pope
sanctus.
95
Within twenty years the Missale Gothicum, a mass-book
produced in Burgundy, included a mass for Gregory.
96
Its distinctively
enthusiastic invocations indicate the liveliness of the cult in the centre
for which it was compiled and contrast, for example, with the consider-
ably more muted treatment accorded the pope in another surviving
Gallican massbook, the Missale Gallicanum Vetus,
97
and his omission
from a third, the Missale Bobbiense.
98
If, as seems likely, Burgundy
contained a particularly active centre of the cult, it was perhaps at
Gregorienmu nster or Gregoriental, a dependency of the metropolitan
90
The interest in previous popes is also indicated by the introduction of a mass for a dead
bishop, related to those for Gregory and Leo into the papal mass-book: Deshusses, Sac.
greg. I, p. 346.
91
P. Llewellyn, Rome in the Dark Ages (London, 1971), pp. 1236; T.F.X. Noble, `Rome in
the Seventh Century', in M. Lapidge (ed.) Archbishop Theodore: Commemorative Studies
on His Life and Inuence, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 11 (Cambridge,
1995), pp. 6897, at 823.
92
Borgolte, Petrusnachfolge, pp. 767 and 957. Note, however, the popularity of the name
Gregory among the senior clergy of Rome, including two successive popes, in the early
eighth century, evidence perhaps of the growth in Gregory's standing at that time: Liber
pont. I, pp. 396425 (nos 913), esp. p. 421; J.D. Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova et
Amplissima Collectio, 53 vols (Paris and Leipzig, 190127, reprinted 19601), XII, cols
2612 and 2656.
93
F., Homes Dudden, Gregory the Great, 2 vols (London, 1905), II, pp. 268 and 273; Liber
pont. II, pp. 7383 (no. 103); John Deacon, V. Gregorii, IV.80 (col. 228).
94
Greg. of Tours, HF X.1 (pp. 47781).
95
Visio Baronti, c. 10 and 17, ed. W. Levison, MGH, SRM V (Hanover, 1890), pp. 384 and
391.
96
Rome, BAV, Reginensis latinus 317, ff. 200v201v: ed. L.C. Mohlberg, Rerum Eccle-
siarum Documenta, Series Maior, Fontes 5 (Rome, 1961), pp. 878; H.M. Bannister, 2
vols, H[enry] B[radshaw] S[ociety] 52 and 54 (London, 191619), I, p. 100.
97
Rome, BAV, Palatinus latinus 493, ff. 1999: ed. L.C. Mohlberg, Rerum Ecclesiarum
Documenta, Fontes 3 (Rome, 1958), pp. 556. Dated by E.A. Lowe to the later eighth
century: C[odices] L[atini] A[ntiquiores] I (Oxford, 1934), no. 93.
98
Paris, BN, lat. 13246, ed. E.A. Lowe, 3 vols, HBS 53, 58 and 63 (London, 191724).
Dated by Lowe to the eighth century: CLA V (1950), no. 653.
Alan Thacker 74
Early Medieval Europe 1998 7 (1) # Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998
of Besanc on near Munster in Alsace. The church there, which claimed
to have been founded by disciples of Gregory, was dedicated to SS
Gregory and Mary by the ninth century.
99
In England, Gregory's missionaries venerated their sender. Bede, in
his account of Augustine's translation into the north porticus of the
monastery, which he founded outside the walls of Canterbury, implied
that ab initio it contained an altar dedicated to the pope; the epitaph
thereafter inscribed upon Augustine's tomb alluded to beatus
Gregorius. Outside Canterbury, however, such early evidence is
lacking. Although a porticus at York and an altar at Whitby dedicated
to Gregory were associated respectively with the head and corporeal
remains of Edwin, they need not antedate the royal cult with which
they were linked and probably originated in the late seventh century.
100
Almost certainly it was Archbishop Theodore (66890) who rmly
established the cult in England after its tentative early beginnings in
Canterbury. The Whitby author writes as if it was an accomplished fact
that in his day Gregory was invoked as a saint in the litanies, which
probably formed a distinctive element in the Anglo-Saxon liturgy from
Theodore's time.
101
Michael Lapidge has very plausibly linked the
archbishop with a litanic prayer in the book of Cerne which invoked
Gregory after the archangels and angels, the apostles, the Virgin, John
the Baptist, the Holy Innocents, and the martyrs, naming the pope as
representative of the holy priests (sacerdotes) and confessors.
102
That
Lapidge is right, and the Cerne payer is indeed early, is suggested by
the fact that it invoked Gregory alone and did not couple his name
with Augustine's as was required by the council of Clofeshoh in 747.
103
Vitalian's choice of Theodore to succeed Wigheard, the dead English
archbishop-elect, was preceded by the despatch of relics, including
some of Gregory, to Northumbria. The contents of the Worcester
manuscript already discussed
104
indicate that the new archbishop and
his circle continued to promote the pope's cult in the school which
they founded at Canterbury. Very possibly, Theodore used Gregory's
99
G. Morin, `Sur la provenance du Missale Gothicum', Revue d'histoire ecclesiastique 37
(1941), pp. 2430.
100
HE. II.3 and 20 (pp. 144 and 204); VG, c. 19.
101
M. Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Litanies [of the Saints], HBS 106 (London, 198990), pp. 256;
VG, c. 32.
102
A.B. Kuypers, The Prayer Book of Aedeluald the Bishop, commonly called the Book of
Cerne (Cambridge, 1902), pp. 812; Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Litanies, pp. 257.
103
A.W. Haddan and W. Stubbs, Councils [and Ecclesiastical Documents], 3 vols (Oxford,
186978), III, p. 368; below.
104
Above at nn. 4654.
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Memorializing Gregory the Great 75
name to give authority to his decrees:
105
one of the versions of the
penitential which bears his name and which apparently represents a
record of his judgements (iudicia) goes under the title Canones Sancti
Gregorii, and was already so termed by the late eighth century; in the
manuscripts it is closely linked with the Libellus responsionum, Pope
Gregory's replies to Theodore's predecessor Augustine.
106
An echo of
the archbishop's views occurs perhaps in the work of his pupil
Aldhelm, one of the rst to credit Gregory with the composition of the
canon of the Roman mass. Aldhelm, who styled the pope `pervigil
pator et pedagogus noster', is in fact the earliest known exponent of St
Gregory as the especial apostle of the English, his claims predating
those of the Whitby author by some twenty years.
107
Theodore's interest in Gregory's cult was not purely altruistic. He
seems to have interpreted his role as archbishop expansively, in accor-
dance with certain eastern models, most notably Alexandria, where the
archbishop could approve and consecrate all bishops made within the
six Egyptian provinces over which he presided.
108
Unlike Augustine,
he did not see himself simply as the southern metropolitan, and by 679
had adopted the style `archbishop of the island of Britain', exercising
authority over both English provinces.
109
The fact that Gregory
provided the English church as a whole with an apostolic patron not
localized upon Canterbury would therefore have rendered his cult
especially attractive to Theodore. It is also, of course, the explanation
of its appeal to the Northumbrians after 664 and to the Whitby author
himself. Signicantly Theodore's links with Whitby were close. Of the
ve pupils of Abbess Hild who became bishops, two at least, Oftfor of
Worcester and John of Beverley, had also studied under the archbishop;
105
Even though those decrees in some instances ignored or contraverted Gregory's own
prescriptions: R. Meens, `Ritual Purity and the Inuence of Gregory the Great in the
Early Middle Ages', Studies in Church History 32 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 3143, at 356;
Thacker, `Monks, Preaching and Pastoral Care', pp. 1556.
106
Meens, `Ritual Purity', pp. 378; P.W. Finsterwalder, Die Canones Theodori und ihre
uberlieferungsformen (Weimar, 1929), pp. 2253 and 25370.
107
Aldhelm, De virginitate (prosa), c. 42 and 55, ed. R. Ehwald, MGH, Auctores
Antiquissimi [AA] XV (Berlin, 1919), pp. 293 and 314; E. Bishop, Liturgica Historica
(Oxford, 1918), pp. 42 and 1045. On Aldhelm's education see Aldhelm: The Prose
Works, ed. M. Lapidge and M. Herren (Ipswich, 1979), pp. 79; Aldhelm: The Poetic
Works, ed. M. Lapidge and J. Rosier (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 78.
108
R. Bingham (ed.), Works of Joseph Bingham, 10 vols, (Oxford, 1855), I, pp. 94, 171, 201
3 and 2067. In sixth- and seventh-century Alexandria the dignitary known in the west
as the patriarch was apparently styled archbishop: F. Cabrol and H. Leclercq (eds),
Dictionnaire d'archeologie chretienne et de liturgie, 15 vols (Paris, 190752), I, part 2,
cols 27323. Cf. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, VII.xii.610, ed. W.M. Lindsay, 2 vols
(Oxford, 1911), I, p. 299.
109
HE IV.17 (p. 384); C.P. Wormald, `Bede, Bretwaldas and the Origins of the Gens
Anglorum', in C.P. Wormald, D.A. Bullough, and R.J.H. Collins (eds) Ideal and Reality
[in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society] (Oxford, 1983), pp. 99129, at 1209.
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another, Bosa, was his candidate for the key see of York after Wilfrid's
rst expulsion in 678.
110
When he settled the feud with Wilfrid in 686,
Theodore singled out Abbess lfd as the means of making peace.
111
The archbishop's teaching probably inuenced the Whitby author in
several ways. That Theodore discussed `baptism by tears', a crucial (if
misconstrued) factor in the Trajan story, is apparent from a sentence in
his Iudicia which cited Gregory of Nazianzus as an authority for the
concept.
112
Interestingly, too, he may have provided the Whitby author
with the latter's curious Trinitarian glossing of `Alleluia', in which `alle'
is held to signify the Father, `lu' the Son, and `ia' the Holy Ghost. One
of the earliest occurrences of that etymology is in the Leiden glossary,
which as Lapidge has shown, reects the teaching of the school of
Canterbury in the archbishop's time.
113
It looks, then, as if Theodore
promoted Gregory at both Whitby and York. To make good his claim
to be archbishop of Britain he had to court the Northumbrians, and
the exaltation of Gregory as apostle of England and the diffusion of
material replete with attering allusions to the Angli were clearly good
ways of doing that.
We have already seen that there is an eastern context for the trans-
mission of some, perhaps much, of the Gregorian material in the
Whitby Life, including the stories ascribed to Moschus, and the epithet
`golden-mouthed' applied to the pope at a very early period.
114
Theodore's origins, his long sojourn in Rome, and his interest in
Gregory render him the obvious means of making such material acces-
sible to the Latin culture of seventh-century England. Interestingly,
Lapidge has recently suggested that Theodore may have known
Pratum spirituale, the source perhaps of the quotation from Gregory of
Nazianzus in the Iudicia.
115
Theodore's patronage was undoubtedly effective. Although no early
mass has survived, the establishment of altars and chapels at Canter-
bury, York and Whitby, and the production of the Whitby Life suggest
that full liturgical honours were paid to Gregory at those centres by
110
HE IV.12 and 23; V.3 (pp. 370, 408 and 460).
111
Eddius Stephanus, V[ita Sancti] Wilfridi, c. 43, ed. B. Colgrave (Cambridge, 1927), p. 88.
112
B. Bischoff and M. Lapidge (eds), Biblical Commentaries [from the Canterbury School],
Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 10 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 1523 and 2256;
O'Loughlin and Conrad-O'Briain, `Baptism of Tears', 6873; above, at n. 38.
113
VG, c. 13; `The Leiden Glossary', ed. J.H. Hessels, [Late Eighth-Century] Latin-Anglo-
Saxon Glossary (Cambridge, 1906), p. 3; Lapidge, `School of Theodore', pp. 4572, esp.
5460. The etymology has been discussed by Jane Stevenson, who argues that it origi-
nates in `an erroneous English tradition': review of Hisperica Famina II, in Cambridge
Medieval Celtic Studies 16 (1988), p. 102. See below, at n. 118.
114
See above at n. 19.
115
Bischoff and Lapidge, Biblical Commentaries, pp. 2256, esp. n. 110; O'Loughlin and
Conrad-O'Briain, `Baptism of Tears', pp. 6871.
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Memorializing Gregory the Great 77
the late seventh century. The cult's success is apparent from its promi-
nence in the earliest surviving Insular calendar, that of Willibrord (c.
700), which, most unusually, includes two Gregorian feasts, one in the
original hand commemorating the pope's deposition (12 March), the
other, added shortly after compilation, his ordinatio (29 March).
116
Willibrord, a Northumbrian long resident in Ireland before he estab-
lished himself in Frisia, had a wide network of contacts in both his
native and adopted lands, and his calendar indicates the regard in which
Gregory was held in contemporary Hiberno-Northumbrian milieux.
117
In those circles there appears to have been an urge to attribute works
to Gregory not unlike that among Theodore's pupils. A number of
early Hiberno-Northumbrian glosses, for example, ascribe the
`Alleluia' gloss to Gregory, although there is no evidence that the pope
did in fact invent this fanciful piece of exegesis.
118
Such evidence raises the question of veneration for Gregory in
Ireland itself. There, undoubtedly, the admiration of the Romani for
the pope had had its effect. That is apparent in one of the early-eighth-
century notulae appended to Tirechan's collections on St Patrick,
which contains a prayer from the canon ascribed to Gregory, written
out in full, together with some obscure notes about the pope's age
when he died and the length of his ponticate.
119
Yet, despite such
interest, it does not look as if the liturgical observance of Gregory's
cult was especially advanced among the Irish. Signicantly, the earliest
116
Calendar of Willibrord, ed. H.A. Wilson, HBS 55 (London, 1918), plate III, pp. 5 and 26.
Cf. Gregory's inclusion in the Echternach martyrology in the early eighth century:
Martyrologium Hieronymianum, ed. Acta Sanctorum, Nov. II.2 (Brussels, 1894), p. 31.
117
Thacker, `Membra Disjecta', pp. 11415; D. O

Cro in n, `Rath Melsigi, Willibrord and the

Earliest Echternach Manuscript', Peritia 3 (1984), pp. 1749.
118
The etymology is ascribed to Gregory in, for example, Pseudo-Bede, Collectanea, PL 94,
col. 548, on which see N.R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon
(Oxford, 1957), no. 388 (pp. 4578); Glossa in Psalmos, ed. M. McNamara, Studi e Testi
(Vatican City, 1986), p. 216; `De alleluia', in London, British Library, Harley 3271, f. 92r.,
ed. H. Henel, Englische Studien 69 (19345), p. 349, on which see Ker, Catalogue, no.
239 (p. 320). It is not attributed to Gregory in Latin-Anglo-Saxon Glossary, ed. Hessels,
p. 3; anonymous gloss in London, British Library, Cotton Cleopatra A.iii, ed. T. Wright
and R.P. Wulcker, Anglo-Saxon and Old English Vocabularies (London, 1884), I, col. 411.
`Ia' is glossed as spiritus in Vocabularius Sancti Galli, ed. G. Baesecke (Halle, 1933), p. 9.
`Alle' is glossed as pater in a mid-eleventh-century manuscript of the Hiberno-Latin
poem Adelphus adelpha, Cambridge, University Library, Gg. 5. 35, f. 420r., on which see
Hisperica Famina, II, ed. M. Herren (Toronto, 1987), p. 171. A short Old English text on
`Alleliua' in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 321, f. 139, is also indebted to the
etymology: ed. M.R. James Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1912), II, p. 138, and see Ker,
Catalogue, no. 59 (p. 106). I am most grateful to Peter Jackson for supplying the refer-
ences to these texts.
119
Patrician Texts in the Book of Armagh, ed. L. Bieler, Scriptores Latini Hiberniae 10
(Dublin, 1979), pp. 183 and 238; E. MacNeill, `Dates in the Texts of the Book of
Armagh', Journal of the Royal Society of the Antiquaries of Ireland, 58 (1928), reprinted
in St. Patrick (Dublin, 1964), p. 151.
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surviving missal, which dates in its nal form from the late eighth
century, provided no special mass for his feast but merely included him
in the litany, and perhaps the Memento of the dead.
120
The martyrolo-
gical tradition is also instructive. Although the Felire Oengusso (c. 800)
correctly records the pope's deposition, the date ascribed by Willibrord
to his ordination is given to Gregory of Nazianzus;
121
in the Martyr-
ology of Tallaght (826 6 833) the references to Gregory appear, like
other entries in that text, to derive from an English exemplar.
122
The Gregorian cult reached its apogee in eighth-century England.
Although difcult to interpret, early dedications suggest that by then it
was fostered at a number of early minster centres. Chief amongst those
is London, where a group of early dedications, focused upon St Paul's
and aligned along Watling Street, included St Pancras, St Martin, and St
Gregory. The arrangement undoubtedly recalls Canterbury's early
churches, and is an indication, as Tim Tatton-Brown has pointed out,
that the church or oratory of St Gregory, which lay very close to the
minster itself, dates from the eighth century if not before.
123
Another
dedication which may well go back to this period is Kirkdale, a minster
parish which had a stone-built church in pre-Viking times, and which,
signicantly, is not far from Whitby.
124
At Northampton a church of St
Gregory, which dates from at least to the eighth century, appears to
have been part of an important complex including early timber and
stone halls and another church dedicated to St Peter. It too may have
been the site of a minster.
125
Other ministers with possibly early
120
Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, D. II. 3; Stowe Missal, ed. G.F. Warner, 2 vols, HBS 3132
(London, 1906, 1915), I, pp. 1415. It seems likely therefore that despite his stay in
Ireland, Willibrord's commemoration of Gregory's two feasts derives from his Northum-
brian background. For the cult of Gregory in Ireland see J.F. Kenney, Sources for the
Early History of Ireland: Ecclesiastical (New York, 1929), pp. 45, 219, 265 and 789; J.
Szo ve rffy, `Heroic Tales, Medieval Legends and an Irish Story', Zeitschrift fur celtische
Philogie 25 (19556), pp. 18398, esp. 197. Szo verffy's argument that the story of
Trajan's baptism by tears inuenced stories in Tirechan's collections has been effectively
refuted by L. Bieler, `Ancient Hagiography and the Lives of St. Patrick', in Forma Futuri.
Studi in onore del Cardinale Michele Pellegrino (Turin, 1975), pp. 6505.
121
Martyrology of Oengus the Culdee, ed. Whitley Stokes, HBS 29 (London, 1905), pp. 82
and 84.
122
P. O

Riain, Anglo-Saxon Ireland: The Evidence of the Martyrology of Tallaght, H.M.

Chadwick Memorial Lecture, 3 (Cambridge, 1993), esp. pp. 1617. Cf. J. Hennig,
`Ireland's Contribution to the Martyrological Tradition of the Popes', Archivium
Historiae Ponticiae 10 (1972), pp. 923, esp. 203.
123
T. Tatton-Brown, `The Topography of Anglo-Saxon London', Antiquity 60 (1986), pp.
218, at 223; C.N.L. Brooke and G. Keir, London, 8001216: the Shaping of a City
(London, 1975), pp. 1401.
124
H.M. and J. Taylor, Anglo-Saxon Architecture, 3 vols (Cambridge, 196578), I, pp. 357
61; J. Lang, York and East Yorkshire, Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture (Oxford,
1991), pp. 15866, esp. 1613; Thacker, `Monks, Preaching, and Pastoral Care', p. 144,
and references there cited. See now L. Watts, J. Grenville and P. Rahtz, Archaeology at
Kirkdale, Ryedale Historian 18 (Helmsley, 1996).
125
Personal communication from John Blair.
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Memorializing Gregory the Great 79
dedications to Gregory include Wye in Kent (where again there is a
link with St Martin), Tredington (Warwickshire) and Sudbury
(Suffolk).
126
All this indicates a cult rst established at the major
churches associated with the Roman mission in Kent and Northumbria,
and then fostered in a secondary phase at ecclesiastical centres
throughout England.
Gregory's standing is especially apparent in the work of Bede, who
allotted him an exceptionally long and detailed chapter in the Historia
ecclesiastica, and whose late commentaries such as De tabernaculo, De
templo, and In Esdras were particularly inuenced by his teaching.
127
Bede expressed his view of the Gregorian mission's contribution to the
Northumbrian church most plainly in the Chronica maiora (725),
which mentions Edwin and Paulinus but not Oswald, Aidan and
Iona.
128
Curiously, however, his attitude to Gregory's plan for a metro-
politan see at York, which he might have been expected to approve
without reservation, was distinctly ambivalent. While he drew attention
to the plan in both the Chronica maiora and the Historia ecclesiastica,
and expressly commended it to Archbishop Ecgberht in 734,
129
he
nevertheless accepted its subversion by Theodore without question.
His approval of Theodore manifests itself in his inclusion of the latter's
dispatch from Rome in his chronicle and in his proclaiming in the
History that the archbishop was the rst to whom the whole English
church submitted.
130
Bede clearly supported Theodore's division of the
Northumbrian diocese, and more especially his establishment of Berni-
cian sees separate from Deiran York.
131
Only when that had been
accomplished could Gregory's plans for a northern metropolitan be
revived.
At York itself, the tradition that Gregory alone was the peculiar
apostle and patron of England not surprisingly died hard. The saint's
feast was still kept there with especial reverence in the late eighth
126
Mosford, `Critical Edition', p. xxv. I am grateful to John Blair for drawing my attention
to the status of these churches.
127
P. Meyvaert, Bede and Gregory the Great, Jarrow Lecture 1964 (Jarrow, 1965); A.T.
Thacker, `Bede's Ideal of Reform', in Wormald et al. (eds) Ideal and Reality, pp. 13053,
at 1336.
128
Bede, Op[era] Didasc[alica], 3 vols, CCSL 123123B (Turnhout, 197580), II, p. 525.
129
HE I.29; II.1718 (pp. 1046 and 1948); Epistola ad Ecgbertum, c. 9, ed. Plummer,
Baedae, I, pp. 41213. It is extremely curious that Wilfrid did not exploit these provi-
sions. We must assume ignorance, even though his biographer Stephen twice described
the see of York as metropolitan: V. Wilfridi, c. 10 and 16 (pp. 20 and 32). Cf. W. Levison,
England and the Continent (Oxford, 1946), pp. 1819; M. Gibbs, `Decrees of Agatho
and the Gregorian Plan for York', Speculum 48 (1973), pp. 21346.
130
Bede, Op. Didasc. II, p. 527; HE IV.2 (p. 332).
131
Cf. the active co-operation of Lindisfarne, where Theodore eventually established a
bishopric and consecrated the church of St Peter: HE III.25; IV.12 (pp. 294 and 370).
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century,
132
when, ignoring Augustine, Alcuin presented the conversion
of Northumbria as the achievement of Gregory, Edwin and
Paulinus.
133
Interestingly, it was in eighth-century York that Gregory
was rst explicitly credited with the authorship of the sacramentary for
which he later became famous throughout the Latin West.
134
The extraordinary authority which the Responsiones commanded in
Insular tradition conrms Gregory's dominance. Boniface's request for
a copy of the text and for authentication that it was by Gregory
himself,
135
suggests an outlook dominated by veneration of the apostle
of England in person rather than the papacy as an institution. Presum-
ably such attitudes were disseminated quite widely by English mission-
aries in the eighth century, and helped to consolidate Gregory's cult on
the continent. By then the pope's standing was such that he could be
named along with Ambrose, Augustine, and Jerome in the Communi-
cantes section of the canon in a number of Gallican massbooks.
126
In England, the council of Clofeshoh conrmed Gregory's special
status in 747, ordering the whole country to keep his feast.
137
By then,
however, a new orientation was emerging. The cult was being ostenta-
tiously coupled with that of Augustine of Canterbury: the council not
only required the general observance of Augustine's feast, like
Gregory's, but also the invocation of the bishop immediately after the
pope in the litanies. That perhaps is only to be expected from a
council, which though concerned to secure uniformity of Roman obser-
vance throughout England, was essentially a Mercian gathering
presided over by the southern metropolitan.
138
Following upon the
revival of York under Archbishop Ecgberht (73266), it marks at once
132
A Wilmart, `Un temoin anglo-saxon du calendrier metrique d'York', Revue Benedictine
46 (1934), pp. 4169, at 66; Alcuin, Bishops, [Kings, and Saints of York], ed. P. Godman,
Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, 1982), pp. 1011.
133
Alcuin, Bishops, p. xlix; I.T. Wood, `The Mission of Augustine of Canterbury to the
English', Speculum 69 (1994), pp. 117, at 2; D.A. Bullough, `Hagiography as Patriotism:
Alcuin's York Poem and the Early Northumbrian Vitae Sanctorum', in Hagiographie,
cultures et societes, IVeXIIe siecles, (Paris, 1981), pp. 33959.
134
Dialogus Ecclesiasticae Institutionis a Domino Ecgberto Archiepiscopo Eburacae Civitatis
Compositus, ed. Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, III, pp. 41112; Deshusses, Sac. greg. I, p.
50. Aldhelm, however, had already attributed the canon of the mass to Gregory some
fty years earlier: De virginitate (prosa), c. 42 (p. 293); Bishop, Liturgica Historica, pp.
42 and 1045.
135
Boniface, Epistolae, ed. M. Tangl, MGH, Epistolae Selectae I (Berlin, 1916), p. 57.
136
For example, St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, 348: ed. Mohlberg, Das frankische Sacramentarium,
p. 238; Liber Sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. A. Dumas, CCSL 159 (Turnhout, 1981), p.
253. Cf. Paul the Deacon's Life, dependent upon Bede, Gregory of Tours, the Liber
ponticalis, and the pope's own works: ed. Grisar, above at n. 32; Stuhlfath, Gregor I, pp.
746 and 98108; Goffart, Narrators, pp. 3703.
137
Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, III, p. 368.
138
For the best recent account of the council see C.R.E. Cubitt, Anglo-Saxon Church
Councils, c. 650c. 850 (Leicester, 1995), pp. 97152.
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Memorializing Gregory the Great 81
a denite retreat in the senior metropolitan's claims from the high
water mark of Theodore, and a break with any attempt to appropriate
Gregory's cult for Northumbrian Romanitas.
The Whitby Life did not prosper; it survives in only one manuscript
and that written on the Continent at St Gall.
139
Although it circulated
outside Whitby, perhaps at Worcester
140
and in the Hiberno-Northum-
brian milieux which associated Gregory with the `Alleluia' gloss, the
Life can never have achieved a wide distribution. No doubt in part that
is to be explained by the difculties of the text. More telling, however,
must be the suspicion that by the end of the eighth century it had
outlived its usefulness. The attempt to enlist the Gregorian cult in the
service of the Northumbrian church, the Deiran royal house and an
eastern archbishop of Britannia had lost its relevance, and no further
copies were made.
Conclusions
This article has argued against the idea that Gregory's cult was trans-
mitted primarily by oral means. The fact that in Rome veneration for
the pope virtually lapsed for a long period makes it very unlikely that
his memory was preserved there, and what is more handed on to
Anglo-Saxon pilgrims, in complex ecclesiastical `sagas' of the kind
envisaged by some commentators. More probably, some record of his
deeds and miracles was put together in the early seventh century by a
follower or by John Moschus. Thereafter a version was brought to
England perhaps in the early days of the Roman mission, more
plausibly by Theodore and used by the Whitby author, whose
garbling of its contents may be the result of incompetence or perhaps
because he relied on memory or the report of a third party.
The cult thus nourished had a curious history. It ts most uneasily
into the classic early medieval pattern, with its emphasis on the venera-
tion of the corporeal relics, above all the tomb, of a local patron,
commemorated at an elaborate festival which marked the high point of
his community's liturgical year. Although in the late ninth century the
people of Rome were in the habit of repairing to Gregory's new altar-
tomb and paying reverence to various relics there displayed, including
the pope's silver phylactery, pall and girdle,
141
they offered no such
tribute in the seventh century. Nor is there anything to suggest high-
grade liturgical commemoration of Gregory's feast before the 680s.
139
St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, 567, pp. 75110; Colgrave, Earliest Life, pp. 6370.
140
Above, at nn. 4654.
141
John Deacon, V. Gregorii, IV.80 (co. 228).
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Apart from the display of tomb and death-bed in the time of
Hononius, the record tells only of secondary relics destined primarily
for English kings or for incorporation in English altars.
142
The cult apparently developed in a limited way at an early date
among Gregory's friends and admirers in Rome, and was transmitted
thence to fresh centres in England, Gaul and perhaps Ireland. It only
really took off both in England and in Rome in the later seventh
century. Presumably that is not fortuitous; the Holy See, and its
emissary Theodore, may well have seen reverence for the apostolic
Gregory as a useful unifying factor in holding together a church whose
divisions had been brought home to them by Wilfrid's rst appeal to
Rome in 680.
143
To serve such purposes the cult required liturgical
expression. The tomb at St Peter's was less crucial, and in fact no trans-
lation in Rome focused attention upon it. In England, too, the main
concern was to claim virtue by association; no miracles took place at
the altars and, signicantly, the Whitby author gave enthusiastic assent
to Gregory's own teaching that a saint's standing was not necessarily to
be gauged by the number of his miracles.
144
All this points clearly in one direction: Gregory's cult was neither in
origin nor in later development popular. Although unusual in being
widely diffused in a period when the great majority of cults were local,
it was the preserve of an international, largely clerical or monastic,
elite, and found its primary expression in the liturgical ofces of their
most prestigious communities and dynastic centres.
Such qualities are reected in the character of the Whitby Life.
Although, like Vitae from seventh-century Gaul, it perhaps provided
lections for the ofce on the vigil of Gregory's feast or to supplement
the Epistle at the mass on the day itself,
145
it was scarcely designed for
public reading. Its main purpose was in fact polemical, to present
Gregory as a universal, apostolic saint, who could authenticate the
credentials of a British patriarchate or of the Northumbrian church and
royal house. Neither the author nor, presumably, the other inmates of
Whitby made much effort to promote cultic activity at Gregory's altar.
The cult was, then, transmitted by the traditional resources of the
142
In seventh-century Rome, unlike Gaul, it was essential to deposit relics in an altar: M.
Andrieu,[Les]ordines [Romani du haut moyen age], 5 vols, Spicilegium Sacrum
Lovaniense, II, pp. 234 and 289 (Louvain, 193161), IV, pp. 353402 (Ordo XLII). In
the case of the altars at Canterbury, York and Whitby Roman practice was probably
followed; at Ripon, however, Wilfrid used a Gallican rite: Mayr-Harting, The Coming,
pp. 1801.
143
V. Wilfridi, c. 2932 (pp. 5660).
144
VG, c. 30.
145
For a good summary of this difcult matter see Andrieu, Ordines, III, pp. 2930. Cf.
ibid. II, pp. xlxli; III, p. 148.
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Memorializing Gregory the Great 83
clerical e lite: the liturgy and the Latin tract. Although in the long run
that conferred the strengths of wide diffusion and a coherent tradition,
the striking neglect of corporeal relics rendered the cult unusual in its
time, and undoubtedly meant that it would have played little if any
part in the spiritual formation of the common people. In its early form
and transmission, it represents a remarkable example of almost exclu-
sively clerical enterprise.
146
146
Drafts of this paper were read in 1995 at a conference, `Hagiography and the Cult of the
Saints in England, 6001600', organized by Robert Bartlett at St Andrews, and at the
Early Middle ages Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research in London; the author
is grateful to participants at both for their helpful comments.
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