In this season of over-eating, over-drinking and over-sleeping, spare a thought for some of the more sombre holidays of the medieval church calendar. The week immediately following Christmas holds the Feasts of St Stephen and the Massacre of the Innocents, and the anniversary of the martyrdom of Thomas Becket. So after a day of larking about and singing to
Capons ibake with the peses of the row,
Reisouns of corrans, with oder spises mo,
you’ve several in which to contemplate sticks, stones, and broken skulls.
Stephen the Protomartyr, whose death by stoning is noted in the Acts of the Apostles, is commemorated on the 26th of December. The saint himself has some pretty nice associated music, although he is naturally overshadowed in this regard by Christmas. You may know the Victorian classic Good King Wenceslas, which celebrates the charity of the 10th-century Duke of Bohemia ‘on the Feast of Stephen’. St Ambrose of Milan wrote a hymn Stephano primo Martyri, ‘to Stephen the first martyr’, in which
Iste paratus vertice,
Gaudens suscepit lapides,
Rogans pro eis Dominum,
Gaudens tradidit spiritum[He, upright and fully-prepared, received the stones joyfully, praying God on their [his killers’] behalf, and joyfully gave forth his spirit.]
Others exist by Adam of St Victor and numerous anonymous composers, but my particular favourite (and I have to have a favourite) is a fifteenth-century English and Latin carol, part of Cambridge, Trinity College MS O.3.58, where we hear how
Stonyd he was wyth stonys grete
Fervore gentis impie.
[By the people’s impious violence.]
Since the high point of the Christian year was the commemoration of Christ’s violent death, the hasty move from Christ’s painless birth to Stephen’s agonising martyrdom perhaps made thematic sense to the medieval worshipper. The Feast of the Massacre of the Innocents, on the other hand, is ‘set’ (if you will) three days after the birth of Christ, and commemorates something that happens surprisingly often in the Bible: the murder of new-born children.
The murder of a child rival is a literary motif that probably reflects the realities of absolute monarchy and the need to eliminate potential future rivals: consider the death of Astyanax in legends of the Fall of Troy – although it’s worth noting that various medieval and early modern traditions tried to save him, usually by substituting him for a non-royal child. The large-scale murder of children posing no apparent threat to future regimes is, one would hope, more literary than historical. But it is certainly biblical. It happens in the book of Exodus, and since (in the medieval scheme of biblical typology) Moses is a prefiguring of Christ, it also happens here. A Latin play for the Feast, written in Fleury in the twelfth century, also uses the Old Testament figure of Rachel as the archetype of the mourning parent, and looks to passages from the Apocalypse for reassurance about the children’s fate.
Herod, a Bad Thing.
The motif of mass infanticide, as horrible as that sounds, finds its way into medieval literary works in a variety of guises, but perhaps the most famous is in the Arthurian cycle. Arthur, discovering he has impregnated his half-sister and she has given birth to a son, commands that all the new born boys in England be put into a ship and set adrift. When the unmanned ship hits a rock and sinks, the target Mordred is naturally the only survivor. Whilst not a perfect analogy to the biblical Massacre – not least because Mordred is a baddy – it is both a grandiose, gruesome gesture towards how far a king is willing to go, and swiftly removes any solid sense of Arthur’s moral exemplarity. Why it was introduced to the cycle in the first place, I have no idea.
Finally, tomorrow is the anniversary of the murder of Archbishop Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. The details are well-known, and speak as much to the complex political influence of the Church as they do to the almost customary violence of the period: the leading churchman in England, and former Lord Chancellor, was murdered in his cathedral by four knights, ostensibly on the orders of the King. Practically overnight, shipwrecked sailors were attributing miracles to the archbishop, hagiographies were being written left, right and centre, including in Icelandic, and within fifty years a shrine had been consecrated in the new Cathedral, near to the site of his death.
Along with the Shrine of the Virgin at Walsingham in Norfolk, it was one of the great pilgrimage sites of Northern Europe, and the toll of pilgrims’ knees on the Cathedral’s steps can be seen today. The popularity of the shrine shaped parts of south east England for centuries: the Pilgrim’s Way still runs through parts of Surrey and Kent, while the Tabard Inn, of Canterbury Tales fame, stood in Southwark until the 1870s. Thomas, meanwhile, was a fixture of litanies right up to the Reformation, and many a manuscript shows his name hastily scribbled over, in an attempt to erase connections to the Catholic past.
With these cheery commemorations, it could of course be suggested that everything in the Middle Ages was governed by reference to, and fear of, death. But one must assume that a certain degree of comfort was drawn from these observances, even from the Feast of the Massacre of the Innocents. By comfort, I really do mean that, even if one cannot assimilate into a culture that supports such extremes. And what extremes: as we read in British Library, Sloane MS 2593,
Wolcum be ye Stefne and Jon,
Wolcum Innocentes everychon,
Wolcum Thomas martyr on,
Wolcum yol.Wolcum yol, thu mery man,
In worchepe of this holy day.
noon auctoritee 