Unconquerable witness

One night in 1144 a nine year-old boy was caught in the depths of a terrifying nightmare. He tossed and turned under the eaves of a little one-roomed cottage in the Norfolk village of Tottington, a tiny settlement in the bleak sandy Breckland around Thetford. In the dream, he was standing under a vast stone tower; a great gate gaped beneath it, and beyond it was a cemetery filled with tombs. Out of the darkness loomed a dark figure of intense evil, its long arms outstretched to seize him; and the boy knew it was the enemy of mankind, the devil himself. The horrifying figure drew ever closer, a swirling mass of sentient darkness, and the boy felt as though dumb – unable to make any sound, although he wanted to scream. And then, suddenly, words not his own formed on his tongue. An unfamiliar name. ‘St Edmund, help me!’ he cried out, both in the dream and in the thick darkness of the smoke-scented cottage; and at that moment, when he was just about to receive the cold touch of the devil’s grasping claws, there was a glimmer of light behind him and he was seized by strong arms that pulled him close against a tall warrior’s mailed body. A feeling of comfort and safety filled him. He did not see the warrior’s face, because his mother was shaking him awake. ‘Samson! Samson! What is it?’

Samson’s mother had heard him cry out in the dark. He had never heard the name of St Edmund before, but his mother recognised it; she knew there was a great monastery, at the distance of a day’s walk, where the incorrupt body of that saint was venerated by the faithful. Convinced that Samson’s dream was significant, she yearned to discover God’s will for her son; it was already a miracle that Samson, the son of a poor villein’s widow, was learning his letters at the feet of a clerk, Master William, who saw potential in the boy. So it was that at the earliest opportunity, Samson’s mother determined to take him on pilgrimage to the great church of St Edmund at Bury. It was a hard day’s walk, and when they arrived the town was thronged for market day, but they pushed their way through the crowds as they kept their eyes on the great central tower of the abbey church, still under construction after fifty years. At last they came to the abbey’s great gate, and the boy Samson fell to his knees. ‘Mother!’ he called out, ‘It is the place – the very place I saw in my dream, when the devil would have had me!’

Immediately, Samson’s mother knew the meaning of the dream; as St Edmund had saved Samson from the clutches of the devil, so he was saving him now from his fate as a humble labourer on the land. Samson was to be St Edmund’s, and for the rest of his days he would serve God and the saint as one of the guardians of the martyr’s gleaming shrine. She would never have had the boldness in speaking to holy men that she had that day in opening the story of her son’s dream to the shrinekeeper; but the monk listened, knowing well that St Edmund had often made his will known in dreams and visions. And so it was that the boy Samson did not return to Tottington that day, but joined the company of the oblates dedicated to the saint.

The rest of Samson’s story is well known. He is the main character in the most famous document from medieval Bury St Edmunds, the Chronicle of Jocelin de Brakelond, and after a colourful career in the monastery he was finally elected abbot in 1182. A larger-than-life character, he was feared by the monks, and was a virulent anti-Semite who fomented a pogrom and eventually had the Jews expelled from Bury St Edmunds altogether. More suited to the military than the monastic life, he rashly vowed to go on crusade, and he was always embarrassed by his humble background and the thick Norfolk accent he was never able to shake off. Samson was an unattractive character. But he never wavered in his loyalty and devotion to one man: St Edmund himself, whose face he finally touched on 23 November 1198, when Samson was sixty-three years old.

Fire had ripped through the presbytery of the monastic church and damaged the shrine, and it was feared that the incorrupt body of the saint itself, the glory of the monastery, had been damaged or destroyed. So it was that Samson opened the feretory (the cover that closed the shrine) and had the monks lift out the saint’s wooden coffin and carry it to the altar. The coffin was unsinged; the body, therefore, was intact. All was well. But as Samson lay awake that night he found himself unable to let go of an intense desire to see the saint’s body itself.

The next night Samson selected twelve monks, including Jocelin, and went down into the abbey church. By the light of dozens of candles the monks prised the ancient wooden lid from the coffin and lifted it, revealing a body wrapped in silk. The abbot tenderly lifted the silk cloths until there was only a linen veil covering the face of the martyr, which the abbot dared not lift to look upon Edmund’s face. But he gently took the martyr’s head in his hands and spoke to the saint,

O glorious martyr St Edmund, blessed be the hour in which you were born. O glorious martyr, do not cast me, a miserable sinner, into perdition for daring to touch you; you understand my devotion and purpose.

Then the coffin was resealed, and the martyr placed back in his shrine. In fact, Samson was the last person ever to see the body of St Edmund, unless perhaps the monks glimpsed it on that fraught night in 1539 when, in the midst of plague and under house arrest by Cromwell’s commissioners, they hastily hid the martyr in his final – and perhaps forever unknown – resting place.

What was it about St Edmund, that Anglo-Saxon king about whom we know so little, whose only notable achievement was to have lost a battle, that so captivated medieval people like Samson? Samson had an intense personal relationship with Edmund. This was not distant admiration for the heroic virtues of a long-dead king. The details of Edmund’s life, in the end, did not matter. Because the monks were convinced Edmund was still alive with God, and that he visited both his friends and his enemies in dreams and visions, often with material consequences. Even Edward I, the Hammer of the Scots, woke up one night in a cold sweat from a dream in which Edmund threatened him with death if he did not respect the liberties of his abbey. Edmund, eerily intact and incorrupt in his shrine, was a figure who hovered between life and death. The monastery held its lands in his name, as if he were a living person, and taxes were paid to him. Every king of England was expected to pay him homage, and was compelled to put on the saint’s red slippers at his coronation – as if to remind the Plantagenets of their duty to walk to Bury in honour of a king greater than they.

What are we to make of all this? The medieval cult of saints was very different from anything that exists today, except perhaps visions and apparitions of the Virgin Mary. Outside of those, not many cults are sustained by actual communication with the saint, and indeed the Vatican would undoubtedly frown upon such ideas. We are supposed to admire saints, to emulate them, to ask for their intercession. But none of this was enough for medieval people like Samson. For them the saints were alive; they were the mighty dead still in touch with the living, and still very much able to defend themselves and their rights. And perhaps this living relationship with the saints comes closer to the Communion of Saints proclaimed in the Creed than the anaemic white-robed throng we might imagine today. The saints of the Middle Ages were fickle yet merciful, just yet vengeful, and very much a reality to be feared as well as loved.