SHORTER NOTICES

577

Pastoral Care in Late Anglo-Saxon England , ed. Francesca Tinti (Woodbridge:

Boydell P., 2005; pp. 152 . £45).

This book comprises an introduction by Francesca Tinti, the editor, and seven
essays on the pastoral work of the clergy in England at the end of the Anglo-
Saxon period. Most of the essays are longer versions of papers delivered in four
sessions dedicated to pastoral care at the International Medieval Congress
held in Leeds in July 2002 . Dr Tinti excellently sets the scene: the proliferation

EHR, cxxi. 491 (April 2006)

578

SHORTER NOTICES

of small churches in the English countryside due largely to the emergence of a
new class of small landowners interested in their own private local churches,
and also in the towns due to a new prosperity. At the same time, at a higher
level, reform of the Benedictine monasteries drew a sharper line between ‘ true ’
monasteries and secular minsters. Everywhere churches were being built or
reconstructed in more durable materials. This architectural side, however,
receives little attention here. Except for one essay on the archaeology of burials,
the dominant interest is in the learning, activity and teaching of the parish
clergy. Julia Barrow, in a well-researched and erudite essay on the secular
clergy c . 900–1066, examines their family backgrounds, how they obtained
churches and how they were disciplined before the arrival of archdeacons.
Francesca Tinti investigates the early history of church dues in England,
church scot and tithes, a very diffi cult subject which she handles magisterially.
Jonathan Wilcox looks at the Catholic Homilies composed by Ælfric ‘the
homilist between 987 and 995 when he was a monk at Cerne Abbas, a small
Dorset monastery. They are two sequences, each of 40 homilies, for the use of
a priest on the Sundays and festivals throughout the church year. Comprising
passages translated from the Latin, they make up 14.65 per cent of the surviv-
ing corpus of Old English. Copies of these collections were disseminated
throughout Anglo-Saxon England; and Wilcox considers what light this
throws on the learning of the clergy, the composition of the congregations,
and the general religious scene. The red book of Darley (Cambridge, Corpus
Christi College 422 ), produced about 1061 at either Sherborne or New Minster,
Winchester, is the kind of book that, Helen Gittos considers, a good pastorally-
minded priest would take with him as he ministered to parishioners in the
villages, and also is good evidence for the liturgy of the parish churches at that
time. Moreover, it shows that by 1061 Old English was a perfectly respectable
language for the rubrics of the liturgy and even occasionally for the liturgy
itself. Gittos pays special attention to the rite of baptism. The ceremony starts
with an exorcism, the priest blowing on the child three times and saying (in
Latin), ‘ Depart from him, unclean spirit, and make room for the Holy Ghost,
the Comforter, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit ’ .
The distribution of the holy water receives detailed instruction: the priest
should sprinkle it over himself and the people standing around. And some of
it should be taken in a vessel home with the child and used to sprinkle its
house and wherever seems appropriate. Sarah Hamilton looks at penance,
which the higher clergy in the late Anglo-Saxon church strove hard to ensure
played a regular part in the life of every Christian, and also at the means used
to force contumacious sinners to repent. Secret confession of sins to a priest
should be regular and at least annual, and culminate with death-bed repentance.
In return the priest imposed a secret penance. Old English texts of penitentials,
rites for administering confession and imposing penance, survive, and are
analysed and discussed by Hamilton. There was also public penance restricted
to a public services on Ash Wednesday and reconciliation with the penitent on
Maundy Thursday. More drastic was excommunication, the expulsion of the
sinner from the church, a penalty reserved for recalcitrant public sinners. The
evidence for this penalty in the Anglo-Saxon period is scanty and has been
controversial: but Hamilton, using especially charter evidence, establishes
excommunication as an important aspect of the pastoral life of the church in
the late Anglo-Saxon period. Victoria Thompson maintains that Oxford

EHR, cxxi. 491 (April 2006)

SHORTER NOTICES

579

Bodl. MS Laud Misc. 482 , a mid-eleventh-century anthology of quotations,
which ‘ underpin and give force to the performative language of the litany ’ , allow
us to glimpse the questions that troubled the minds of the mid-eleventh-century
Worcester clergy as they confessed the sick and the dying. She thinks that
Worcester cathedral was its provenance and that it was probably produced in
the episcopate of either Ealdred (1046–62) or Wulfstan (1062–95). It contains
one comparatively simple penitential and one more complex compilation,
and the purpose may have been to promulgate them as ‘ the standard set texts ’ .
Thompson describes the manuscript and its contents. Apart from the Latin of
the ordines it is entirely in English. Its vernacular entries are the longest extant
and are unparalleled in their detail and precision. Finally, Dawn M. Hadley
and Jo Buckberry consider the light thrown by the archaeology of funerary
practice on attitudes towards the dead. Their description of a large number of
excavations of burials throughout England is adorned by eight illustrations.
They conclude, because of the variety in locations for burial and the great
variety in form (coffi ns, shrouds, etc., etc.), that, although funerary arrange-
ments may have become increasingly under the direct control of the church,
there was still opportunity for localised and individual traditions and beliefs
to be expressed through the medium of burial. This is a relatively short
volume. But it deals with aspects of Anglo-Saxon history which are not often
encountered and is full of interest. For once we are brought into the company
of the priest, hesitantly, but also zealously, ministering to his parishioners in
their houses as well as in the church, and sometimes we meet the parishioners
as well. †

Kenton, Exeter

FRANK BARLOW

EHR, cxxi. 491 (April 2006)

† doi:10.1093/ehr/cel041