Goscelin came to England as a protégé of Herman, a distinguished Lotharingian whom Edward the Confessor had made the bishop of Wiltshire in 1045. In 1055, Herman resigned this post, left England, and stayed some years at St.-Bertin. Around 1062, Herman was appointed bishop of Sherborne and went back to England to take up this new position. At this point or shortly thereafter, Goscelin joined him there.9 Goscelin would speak of himself as being a “youth” [adolescentulus] when he arrived in England. Since he appears to have lived past 1107, he may have been in his late teens when he left St.-Bertin.10 He had already experimented with hagiographic composition by this time. His first known text is his Life and Translation of Amelberga, a text about a nun some three hundred years dead whose relics were housed in Ghent. In the preface, Goscelin terms himself a “boy” [puer] who has never attempted such a project before. Rosalind Love describes the text as “truly the work of youth.”11 Perhaps Herman wished to secure Goscelin’s nascent talents as a hagiographer when he invited him to join his retinue, or perhaps he simply thought of him as a promising young man. Goscelin would later comment that his lodgings on arrival in England were shocking to him, “more like a pigsty than a human habitation,” though later, “what I had first abhorred I now loved.”12 Nowhere in his works does he say why he decided to leave home.
After he arrived in England, Goscelin appears to have spent at least a decade in Herman’s company without producing much, if any hagiography.13 In the silent period between the early 1060s and late 1070s, it appears that Goscelin identified Sherborne, the initial seat of Herman’s bishopric, as his home monastery. In the prologue of his Life of Wulfsige, Goscelin describes a monk of Sherborne as “a fellow monk [confrater] I knew, saw and heard,” and speaks of how he learned about Wulfsige’s life and death “from the brothers’ most truthful testimony.”14 As a member of Herman’s retinue, Goscelin made many trips to London and undoubtedly other places as well. In his Translation of Edith, Goscelin mentions being at Salisbury during Herman’s lifetime, a stay that was probably connected with Herman’s transfer of the see from Sherborne to Salisbury in 1074–75.15 Wilton looks to have been Goscelin’s most frequent stopover. Located not many miles from Sherborne, Wilton was an ancient and prosperous nunnery patronized by the royal house of Wessex. It was used as something of a safehouse for princesses, widows, and other noblewomen. Goscelin is frequently termed a “chaplain” of Wilton, but he does not describe himself as such and did not necessarily have a formal connection with the nunnery.
Under whatever terms he visited Wilton, Goscelin came to know its inhabitants well. The Life and Translation of Edith is shot through with references to sisters and senior nuns at Wilton telling stories about Edith and their other saints.16 It could be too that the Life and Miracles of Kenelm was inspired, at least in part, by conversations he had at Wilton. In the prologue to the work, Goscelin names Queen Eadgyth, widow of King Edward the Confessor, as a “most learned” informant, someone who told him about what she had read concerning Kenelm. Eadgyth probably went to Wilton after Edward’s death in 1066; in a charter dated 1072 she is said to be at Wilton.17 At some point in the 1070s, Goscelin became emotionally involved with his “most dear,” “most sweet,” and “most beloved” Eve, a young woman at Wilton probably ten years or so younger than himself.18 We know of this relationship from Goscelin’s most well-known work: the Book of Consolation, an extended treatise intended for Eve’s eyes.19 In the Book, Goscelin describes how he annoyed Eve with his attentions, received books from her, taught her to revere St. Bertin, wept at her consecration ceremony, accompanied her to church dedications presided over by Herman, and grieved with her over Herman’s death in 1078. Sometime after this death, Goscelin came to Wilton with plans of visiting Eve as usual, and was devastated to find that she had left, forever, to take up life as a recluse in Normandy. She had not told him she was going.20
Goscelin’s charged friendship with Eve may not have lasted long, but her departure (exact date unknown, but assumed to have been c.1080) coincided with other major changes in his life. Herman’s death in 1078 left Goscelin without a patron. Osmund, the Norman chancellor of King William, was appointed as Herman’s replacement in 1078. Goscelin seems to have finished his Life of Wulfsige shortly after Herman’s death, as he dedicates the text to Osmund, speaks of Herman’s death, and describes at the text’s close how Osmund translated Wulfsige and the relics of another saint, Juthwara, to silver reliquaries.21 But if the text was read by the new bishop, it did not persuade him to retain the Flemish monk in his service. Bishop Osmund seems to have been the one who, in Goscelin’s words in the Book of Consolation, “forced [me] to wander far” because of “the envy of vipers and the cruelty of a stepfather.”22 The date of Goscelin’s departure from the region of Sherborne and Wilton is not known, but scholars have speculated that Goscelin’s passion for Eve incurred Osmund’s condemnation, and that Eve herself may have been ordered to leave Wilton rather than setting out for Normandy voluntarily.
Whatever happened, after some fifteen years in England in Herman’s service, and now probably in his early thirties, Goscelin lost his standing in the bishop’s household as well as his dear Eve, “the sweetest child of my soul.” It was at this point that texts began to pour out of him. Goscelin wrote the Book of Consolation c.1080–82. The Life and Miracles of Kenelm could not have been written before 1066: it is likely a composition of the late 1070s or early 1080s.23 Goscelin states that he began both the Life of Wulfsige and the Life and Translation of Edith while Herman was alive and with his encouragement, but he did not finish either of them until after his death: they are usually dated c.1080. In the prologue to the Life and Translation of Edith, the most ambitious work of this early hagiographic corpus, Goscelin dedicates the work to Archbishop Lanfranc and declares that “it is your part to accept the votive offerings of all those bringing gifts to the tabernacle of the Lord … I seek to offer a previous jewel.”24 By the jewel, Goscelin meant Edith herself, “famous throughout the whole land,” but Goscelin’s texts themselves bear comparisons to gems. In early Norman England, miracle collections like these were actually a good deal rarer than precious stones, and it is to those texts that I now turn.
Wulfsige, Edith, and Kenelm died in different centuries and would seem to be quite different saints, but in the 1070s all three were lodged in Benedictine monastic houses and were viewed as active miracle-working saints. Wulfsige, the most recently dead, was a bishop at Sherborne. Within a decade after his death in 1002—from what Goscelin tells us—Wulfsige had been translated to a shrine near an altar.25 Edith, an illegitimate daughter of King Edgar, was probably born in the 960s. She was enclosed at Wilton from the time she was a young girl. Wulfthryth, Edith’s mother, became abbess at Wilton, but though Edith was appointed the abbess of three nunneries, she refused these posts. She died a virgin in 984 or 987.26 Kenelm, possibly a wholly fictitious figure, was supposedly a young Mercian prince killed through the machinations of an evil sister in the early ninth century. At some unknown point, his relics were translated to Winchcombe. The place of his supposed martyrdom also served as a cult site. Kenelm was widely celebrated in Anglo-Saxon litanies by the eleventh century.27
Swithun’s healings were what fascinated Lantfred and impelled him to write his collection at Winchester. In the years he spent at Sherborne and Wilton, Goscelin probably did not see a cult of the magnitude of Swithun’s in the 970s, but Wulfsige and Edith were certainly both revered as healers. Goscelin describes how the water used to wash the relics of Wulfsige and Juthwara was “a source of healing for many sick people.”28 Monks of Sherborne, servants of the monks, and relatives of the monks were all claiming healing from this drink at the time he wrote his miracle collection.29 Edith, too,