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Much of the pleasure
and interest in the St Albans Psalter derives not simply from its glorious
painting but from the involvement of two outstanding personalities, the
anchoress Christina of Markyate and Geoffrey de Goreham (or Gorron), Abbot of St Albans.
Their relationship and events in their lives are crucial to understanding
the psalter; details will be referred to throughout this commentary, so
the characters need to be introduced at the start.
CHRISTINA
Christina’s
life is recorded in a fragile text, charred by the Cotton library fire
in 1731, British Library MS. Cotton Tiberius E.1, Of S. Theodora,
virgin, who is also called Christina. There was once a copy of her
Life at Markyate Priory, but the surviving copy was given by Abbot Thomas
de la Mare to Redbourne, a cell of St Albans, after 1349. The text is
fully reproduced and translated by Talbot (1st edition 1959, revised and
reprinted 1998).
The writer was a
monk of St Albans who clearly knew her: he refers to the abbey as ‘our
monastery’ and reveals many intimate moments which only Christina
could have recounted. He mentions Christina as a child scratching a votive
cross on the door at St Albans ‘with her fingernail’, and
describes the secret signals Christina used to evade her family when she
fled from home. He also mentions writing down her words in wax, as though
taking swift dictation. The text breaks off suddenly in mid sentence,
and its last dateable reference is to 1139. Talbot considered the book
was commissioned by Abbot Robert de Gorham between 1155 and 1166 (Talbot,
1998,10), but a closer scrutiny of the evidence by Koopmans (2000, 663-698)
suggests it was made c.1140-50. Abbot Geoffrey’s death in 1146 is
not mentioned in the text, and it was clearly written with his support.
Christina, the daughter
of affluent Anglo-Saxon parents, was born in Huntingdon around 1096-8.
Taken to St Albans as a sensitive teenager, she was so impressed by the
monks’ religious bearing that she made a private vow of chastity
and surrendered herself to God. She grew into a beautiful and seductive
young woman, catching the eye of Ranulph Flambard who later became Bishop
of Durham. While visiting his mistress who was Christina’s aunt,
Ranulph attempted to rape Christina in her own bedroom and was humiliated
by her wily escape (Moore, 2001, 231-5; Brooke, 1989, 144-8).
For perhaps two years,
c.1114-1116, a battle of wills raged between their stubbornly chaste daughter
and Christina’s parents who wanted to provide her with a prosperous
marriage. She was reluctantly betrothed and eventually married to Burhred
whom she repeatedly repudiated. She sat Burhred down on her bed and gave
him a lecture about the unconsummated marriage of St Cecilia. Another
night when she heard Burhred approaching, she leapt out of bed and clung
to a nail in the wall behind a tapestry. She narrowly escaped discovery
as one of his friends, summoned to seek her, groped the hanging but missed
her trembling body. Her marriage was finally annulled by Archbishop Thurstan
of York c.1122.
Eventually around
1115-1116, with the help of a network of Anglo-Saxon recluses, Christina
fled via a local hermit Edwin to Alfwyn, an anchoress at Flamstead. While
incarcerated with Alfwyn she would read and sing the psalms by day and
night. On one occasion a plague of toads invaded the cell and squatted
in the middle of her psalter ‘ which lay open on her lap at all
hours of the day for her use’ (Talbot, 1998, 99). Around 1118 she
was invited by Edwin’s relation Roger the hermit to join his cell
at Markyate, between St Albans and Dunstable.
She developed the
first of her powerfully passionate but spiritual relationships with Roger.
For four years she was immured in a tiny closet beside Roger’s cell,
barricaded in with a tree trunk, only allowed out at night to answer the
call of nature and visit the chapel where she prayed in shared ecstasy
with the old man. Roger spoke to her in Anglo-Saxon, calling her myn sunendaege
dohte, ‘my Sunday daughter’. He died c1121-22 (AP, 279-80).
After Roger’s death she stayed with another cleric who was supposed
to protect her. This was the man who finally aroused her, bringing torments
of temptation to both of them. This monk was so stricken that he would
walk naked before her while she prayed. The devil ‘assailed her
flesh with incitements to pleasure and her mind with impure thoughts’
but she resisted. After this episode, it was safer to return to Markyate
where she presided over a small group of religious women including her
sister Margaret.
Geoffrey became abbot
of St Albans in 1119 but it took a while for Christina to meet him. Talbot
(1998, 15) suggests they met around 1124 (because in her Life the meeting
is narrated some time after the death of Robert Bloet, Bishop of Lincoln
in c1123) but an obvious occasion must have been the funeral of Roger
c.1122 when his body was taken to St Albans and buried in a fine tomb
within the abbey. Christina would surely have accompanied the cortege
and the solicitous abbot perhaps enquired who was going to be her next
protector.
Geoffrey had a reputation
for being worldly and haughty, ignoring the advice of his chapter. Thus
it was with great presumption that Christina, a woman of low status unconnected
with abbey, intervened to thwart one of Geoffrey’s private schemes,
asking him to desist. With the help of dreams and divine intervention
Geoffrey decided ‘From now on I will obey her messages promptly’.
To the end, she affectionately kept him in check ‘sensibly reproving
him when his actions were not quite right’. Their relationship developed
fruitfully with Christina acting as spiritual advisor to the abbot and
Geoffrey providing materially for the convent. Geoffrey’s regular
visits caused gossip and jealousy: ‘the abbot was slandered as a
seducer and the maiden as a loose woman’. She called him her beloved
and he called her his girl and beloved maiden. When Geoffrey was supposed
to travel to Rome in 1136 he begged Christina to make him a couple of
vests ‘not for pleasure but to mitigate the discomfort of the journey’.
She was obviously a skilled needlewoman as she later embroidered three
mitres and sandals of outstanding workmanship to be presented to Pope
Adrian IV in 1155 (GA, 127).
Christina’s
Life, while refreshingly short on miracles, explains many of
her decisions and experiences in terms of heavenly visions and portents.
Of these, the most significant for the psalter are the visitations of
Christ who once appeared as a pilgrim in her cell, sharing a meal together
with her sister Margaret; and another occasion when he joined in her chapel
service as a pilgrim and then vanished (Talbot, 1998, 183, 189). In another
vision she was able to bring Geoffrey into the presence of God and Christ,
while the dove of the Holy Spirit flew around the abbot’s head (Talbot,
1998, 157).
Under Geoffrey’s
tutelage the informal gathering of holy women flourished around Roger’s
old cell: Christina took her monastic profession at St Albans in c. 1131;
and Markyate Priory was officially founded in 1145, dedicated to the Holy
Trinity. The charters of dedication by Alexander Bishop of Lincoln (B.L.
MS Cotton Ch.XI.8) and donation of land by the dean and chapter of St
Pauls Cathedral (B.L.MS Cotton Ch. XI.6) still survive (AP, pl 169, 172).
Christina was still
alive in 1155 when King Henry II paid for her support (Pipe Roll, 2-4
Henry II, 22) but is not mentioned after that date. Koopmans (2000) has
shown that, far from inspiring a cult, Christina’s memory was methodically
eradicated. Under Geoffrey’s protection she had been venerated on
a par with St Alban as joint intercessors for the abbey (Talbot, 1998,
126). After his death in 1146, a rival faction led by Prior Alchinus took
over at St Albans. Geoffrey’s scandalous liaison with Christina
was despised and his financial support for external foundations like Markyate
was terminated. Christina was awarded no fine burial at the abbey, her
Vita was abandoned half finished, and her foundation left short
of funds. Apart from the one surviving copy of her life, an interpolation
of this text in the St Albans Gesta Abbatum, and the evidence
of her psalter, she would have disappeared from history as the Alchinus
faction at St Albans intended.
GEOFFREY
Information about
Geoffrey derives from three sources. He is mentioned extensively in the
Gesta Abbatum (GA, 72-96). This part of the text was
compiled by Matthew Paris whose source material was a roll made by Adam
the cellerer in about 1138. His relationship with Christina is described
in her Vita by the St Albans scribe who knew both of them personally.
Another part of the Gesta Abbatum (GA, 97-106) contains
an interpolation from the Vita, a text almost identical to the
Tiberius copy, but with sufficient differences to indicate it was derived
from another version, the copy which was kept at Markyate itself.
Geoffrey came from
Gorron, near Le Mans in Maine. He was working as a secular clerk at Le
Mans when Abbot Richard asked him to become head master of the school
at St Albans. He arrived too late and instead began as schoolmaster at
Dunstable. Here he was producing a miracle play of St Catherine when the
costly copes he had borrowed as props from St Albans were destroyed in
a fire. In compensation he offered himself as a monk at the abbey.
When he was made
first prior and then abbot in 1119, he began with a vigorous and worldly
regime, enhancing supplies to the kitchen. He was a lavish patron of the
arts, providing jewelled copes, a chalice, paten, gold altar frontal,
censer, three ampullas, a silver candlestick, arm reliquary, a great dorsal
on which was woven the Invention of St Alban on a bronze coloured field.
He commissioned the goldsmith Anketil, moneyer to the king of Denmark,
to rebuild St Alban’s shrine, completed in great splendour in 1129.
He updated the liturgy,
introducing the Feast of the Conception of the Virgin and raising the
status of the feast of St Catherine. To accompany the liturgy he commissioned
service books: a missal adorned with gold; another in two volumes, decorated
throughout with the finest gold, written in large well-spaced letters;
and a precious psalter, similarly illuminated throughout with gold; a
book of blessings and episcopal services; and a book containing exorcisms
and a collectar (GA, 94). In the scriptorium he altered the existing generous
endowment of money and food established by Abbot Paul of Caen, giving
the money to the poor and providing simply three meal allowances. Nonetheless,
many volumes have survived from his abbacy, including a number which were
clearly created for export elsewhere, either as gifts or commissions (Thomson,1982,
23-25).
During Geoffrey’s abbacy there seems to be a gradual shift from
worldliness and materialism towards greater care for the poor, particularly
through his patronage of nuns and hermits. Perhaps this was due to Christina’s
influence: the monks of St Albans resented his heavy investment and commitment
to Markyate which he founded as a priory in 1145 (GA, 103). Thus, he diverted
scriptorium funds and even stripped part of St Alban’s new shrine
for the poor. He founded a leper hospital in the town, and converted a
small hermitage into the dependent nunnery of Sopwell. ‘What he
had expended formerly on worldly ostentation, he now sought to bestow
as unostentatiously as possible on hermits, recluses and others who were
in need…All this he attributed to.. the watchful care of the maiden’
(Talbot, 1998, 151).
On two occasions Geoffrey was summoned to undertake long journeys of which
Christina disapproved. In 1136 he was asked by King Stephen to seek approval
of the king’s election from the pope. Just before he left for Rome,
he went to bid farewell ‘ shedding tears as a proof of his grief’.
Christina was also ‘bathed in tears, her heart torn with sighs’
(Talbot, 1998, 161). Ultimately the trip was called off, and the cosy
underwear which Christina had made for Geoffrey’s journey was given
to the poor in thanksgiving. Another trip to Rome was proposed in 1139
but ‘in her heart [Christina] did not approve of the undertaking’,
and ‘she who knew how to love to supreme advantage gained the day’
(Talbot, 1998, 164-5), so again Geoffrey remained at home.
He died in 1146 (Knowles,
1972, 67)
ROGER
Roger is mentioned
in both Christina’s Life, the Gesta Abbatum and William
of Malmesbury’s Gesta Pontificum but the information is
scanty. He was a deacon and monk of St Albans, living under obedience
to the abbot, but isolated in his cell Markyate. He had been led to Markyate
by angels who accompanied him all the way from Windsor, on his return
from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Unlike his contemporary hermit Sigar of
Northaw who walked to the abbey each night to attend services, Roger seems
to have retained a rugged independence and stayed away from the abbey.
He was held in high esteem by the monks of St Albans, praised for his
rigorous discipline (‘Who could have been more cruel to his own
flesh? He allowed himself no pleasure’), his gifts of prophesy and
his compassion for the poor (Talbot, 1998, 83).
He must have been
an influential example of the Anglo-Saxon eremitical movement. Before
Christina joined him, Leofric and Azo were already with him. Under his
spiritual direction were Alfwen the recluse at nearby Flamstead; Eadwin,
his cousin, near Huntingdon; Godescalc and his wife from Caddington; while
Archbishop Thurstan of York considered him a familiaris et fidus amicus.
On the other hand, he was reproached by the Bishop of Lincoln Robert Bloet
for maintaining a religious life outside episcopal control (Willliam of
Malmesbury, lib iv, 314). He died in 1121/2 (AP, 279-80). He was buried
at St Albans abbey c1122 and part of his tomb still survives along the
south wall of the nave aisle.
All these factors
and incidents selected from the lives of Christina and Geoffrey and Roger
have an impact on the production of the St Albans psalter.
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