Cult of saints in Anglo-Saxon England

A cult of saints played a key part within Anglo-Saxon Christianity, a form of Roman Catholicism practiced 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.

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.

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.

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 interned 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.

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