Someone must have had the initial idea of bending a coin over an ill person, just as someone had to have been the first to think of asking the dead Dunstan for help. How a new cluster of stories started to coalesce is not usually easy to perceive in our sources, but Benedict of Peterborough’s collection provides a remarkable glimpse into the first clustering of stories describing the use of the “Canterbury Water,” or just the “Water”: a mixture of water and Thomas Becket’s blood people drank in hopes of healing.18 When Becket was murdered in December 1170, he lay for some time on the floor of the cathedral in his own blood. People from Canterbury dipped bits of cloth and clothing into this blood. Later, when the monks came to tend to Becket’s body, they gathered the remaining blood, apparently into some kind of vessel. Drinking water that had come in contact with a saint’s relic or tomb was a time-honored practice.19 But drinking blood was different. As Benedict later commented, the monks were fearful of endorsing this idea, “and with no wonder, for it was an unusual thing for people to drink human blood.”20 The monks later diluted the blood partly to prolong its use but also, in Benedict’s words, “lest the taste or color of blood produce horror in the drinker.”21 A bigger problem than the disgust factor, though, was how drinking Becket’s blood mirrored the Eucharistic ritual. When Christ’s blood was drunk in liturgical celebrations, was it right to experiment with drinking Becket’s blood?
A Canterbury citizen was probably the first person who decided that it was. At the close of his vita for Becket, William FitzStephen writes that some hours after the murder a Canterbury man, who had acquired a cloth stained with Becket’s blood, washed the cloth, gave the water to his paralyzed wife to drink, and cured her.22 Whether or not FitzStephen got this right, it does seem highly likely that it was a Canterbury citizen who took this first step rather than the Christ Church monks themselves. But though the monks did not start the practice, they did have to decide for themselves whether they would participate. When people like Atheldrida, a Canterbury woman suffering from fevers, “asked the custodian monk of the tomb if she might drink of the martyr’s blood,”23 what would they do? “This was not begun without great fear,” Benedict writes after telling of William of London’s cure, the blood miracle he claims to have been the first, “but seeing that it gave profit to the ill, our fear receded, little by little, and security came.”24 Later Benedict again comments on the nervous tension this “experiment” [experimentum] produced: “although many had already experienced the efficacy of this medication, yet it was not given without fear to those seeking it.”25
What eventually overcame all objections was that drinking Becket’s blood so often worked. “O marvelous water,” Benedict exclaims, “that not only quenches the thirst of drinkers, but also extinguishes pain! O marvelous water, that not only extinguishes pain, but also reduces swellings!”26 Set as the invocation in untold numbers of stories, stories told and repeated in many different places, the use of the water was solidly established. In fact, in the second miracle collection for Thomas Becket, started by William of Canterbury in 1172, drinking the water is already mentioned as casually as any other invocation method, such as bending a coin, with no discussion of its development. William’s only comment concerns his awe at the fact that Thomas’s blood was a safer option than the Eucharist: you could eat and drink the Eucharist to your damnation, but even Becket’s enemies could seek healing through his blood.27
The success of the blood and water mixture appears to have drowned out other incipient invocation strategies. In the early days of Becket’s cult in Exeter, a man had a vision in which he was told how to cure an outbreak of disease: boiled eggs were to be cut into quarters, Thomas’s name written on them, and then eaten.28 Perhaps this inventive and apparently effective invocation practice was continued in the region, but it is never heard of again. In another story, told by Benedict, a London priest named Roger became ill with a fever, but did not have the water, nor the means to travel to Canterbury. Roger came up with the idea of sleeping in a place where he heard Thomas had once slept, and after he woke up healed, he had another idea. He collected some of the dust from that place, mixed it with water, and when he gave this mixture to others to drink (no doubt with a telling of his story), “he gave happiness to many ill people.”29 Yet although Roger’s idea was an initial success, nothing more is heard about drinking dust-laden water in the rest of the Becket collections. Benedict decided to recount Roger’s narrative, he says, because it shows “how much virtue must be in his blood, when the dust from his bed is able to do such things.”30
Once stories about drinking the water had ballooned to such a degree that they overrode all objections, what made them frightening at the beginning—their overtones of Eucharistic sacrifice—were their biggest asset, the blood overwhelming mere dust, and the narrative line linking into other strong currents at large in medieval culture.31 The proactive experimenting process that initiated these stories continued. In addition to drinking the water, people found successful resolutions when they tried sprinkling it on swellings or bathing suffering limbs with it. One woman even poured some of the water into a beer mash in the hopes of making it ferment. From the story, it worked wonderfully well.32
In this manner, then, variations on the theme “I drank the water and Becket healed me” materialized and were repeated in many hundreds, even thousands, of personal stories circulating in the late twelfth century. New invocation strategies that appeared to work well could reproduce themselves in other stories as quickly as fruit flies, both within and across cults. Other new invocation strategies, such as quartering eggs, could die off entirely if conditions were not right for their increase. Invocation practices would have risen and fallen in conversational popularity in the same vacillating and often inexplicable manner as one sees with the figures of saints. Invocation strategies tied to specific saints, such as the Canterbury water and Becket, would rise and fall in rhythm with the saint’s own popularity, but most strategies, such as coin bending, or drinking something that had come in contact with a saint’s relics, did not depend for their continuance on a specific cult.
Success counted the most. Stories circulated, people based their attempts to resolve their own problems on what they had heard, successful experiments created new stories that reinvigorated the conversation, leading to more imitation and experimentation and still more new stories. This continuous process produced stories that could sound strikingly the same, even in terms of the types of problems being solved.
Patterns of Problems
In the abstract, one could ask a saint for help with anything. The variety of problems discussed in medieval miracle collections is often impressive. Unfermenting beer, a lost cheese, a dead goose, a cancerous toe: Becket helped with all these difficulties, and more. Still, when the stories in collections are totted up and categorized, it is clear that they do not represent the whole spectrum of human problems in equal proportions. In almost all rankings of the stories in medieval miracle collections, for instance, cures of blindness and of paralysis lead the lists.33 Blindness and paralysis were no doubt more common then than they are today, but I doubt that these were the top two afflictions suffered by medieval people or that they appear in large numbers because the collectors were imitating exemplars. Rather, the high numbers are best understood as reflecting, though not with any precision, how often these particular problems were offered up for saintly aid and how frequently a solution was forthcoming.
Blindness and paralysis are problems very well suited for the miracle plotline. Both are severe and debilitating problems that, even for those not suffering them, induce a horrified awe: the lightless eyes, the groping hands, the useless limb, the frozen tongue. As appalling as they are, though, neither condition is usually fatal in itself, leaving a sufferer time to seek solutions. The causes of blindness and paralysis, as we now know, are manifold, including nutritional deficiencies, disease, shock, mental illness, and multiple kinds of trauma. We tend to think of them as permanent,