A cult of saints played a key part within Anglo-Saxon Christianity, a form of Roman Catholicism practised in Anglo-Saxon England from the late sixth to the mid eleventh century.
Ecclesiastical authors produced hagiographies of many of these saints. These texts were aimed largely at an ecclesiastical audience, although some were also aimed at royalty and nobility, and outlined how to live an ideal Christian life.
Definition
With a few exceptions, there was no "absolute definition" of what constituted a saint in Anglo-Saxon England. In some cases, particularly from the ninth century onward, designation of a deceased individual as a saint was authorised by a bishop or church council, although in other cases they were only designated as a saint by certain churches or religious communities. Blair suggested that it would often have been "rather vague" as to whether a revered individual was actually a saint or not in this period. While the Pope came to play an increasing role in deciding who was declared a saint from the tenth century onward, it was only in the twelfth century that they took control of canonization. From that point on, specific criteria were set out for who could be considered a saint: they had to have either been martyred or lived a particularly virtuous life, and to have produced posthumous miracles.
Evidence
A series of catalogues were produced in the period between circa 1000 and 1200 which listed the resting-places of various English saints; the earliest of these, Secgan, incorporates what may be a list from the pre-Viking period.
Origins and development
Antecedents
The Anglo-Saxon local saint was a development in a wider and older Roman tradition. The cult of saints had become a centrally important aspect of Christianity from at least the fourth century, when it was criticised by the final pagan Emperor of the Roman Empire, Julian the Apostate. Extramural cemeteries where individuals deemed to be saints were interred became prominent sites for Christian communities; St. Peter's Basilica in Rome was for example erected atop an extramural cemetery believed to house the remains of St Peter. Connected to this cult of saints was the cult of relics; in the eastern Roman Empire, the practice of breaking up the original remains for distribution among various churches began, and soon spread to elsewhere in Christendom. As a theoretical justification for this, several Christian thinkers — notably the Archbishop of Rouen, Victricius — argued that the saints produced such power that it even exuded from fragments of their bodies. The Church of Rome was concerned by the dispersal of human remains and so encouraged the veneration of secondary relics — objects that had been in contact with the remains of a saint — as an alternative.
The historian David Rollason suggested the possibility that some Romano-British saints' cults survived the Anglo-Saxon migration of the fifth century and continued to exist amid the growth of Anglo-Saxon paganism. One of these may have been the cult of St. Alban, and another associated with Sixtus, a figure later mentioned in a letter written by Pope Gregory the Great but about whom nothing is known.
The conversion of the Anglo-Saxons
Saints' relics began to appear in Anglo-Saxon England soon after the arrival of the first Christian missionaries. At the beginning of the seventh century, Pope Gregory the Great wrote to Augustine — who was leading the Gregorian mission to convert the Kingdom of Kent to Christianity — informing him that he was sending not only manuscripts, vestments, and sacred vessels, but also "relics of the holy apostles and martyrs" to aid the conversion process. Later in that century, Pope Vitalian sent the 'benefits' (beneficia) of the saints — relics of Peter the Apostle, Paul the Apostle, Lawrence, John and Paul, Gregory, and Pancras — to King Oswiu of Northumbria, also sending Oswiu's queen "a cross with a golden key, made from the holy fetters of the apostles St Peter and St Paul". These gifts likely reflected the Papal desire to link the burgeoning Anglo-Saxon Church with that in Rome.