The quotation will be familiar to many readers. It represents part of the famous writ of military summons directed by William the Conqueror to Æthelwig, the last Anglo-Saxon abbot of Evesham, in Worcestershire. The full text reads as follows in translation in volume II of English Historical Documents:

William, king of the English, to Æthelwig, abbot of Evesham, greeting. I order you to summon all those who are subject to your administration and jurisdiction that they bring before me at Clarendon on the octave of Pentecost all the knights they owe me duly equipped. You, also, on that day, shall...

Self-flagellation in the twenty-first century seems more masochistic than religious, and spirituality today has little place for the ascetical use of a whip or other instruments of torture.¹ Yet the practice will not quite disappear. We see it in film, and not just in medieval contexts such as Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) or Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), but also in contemporary manifestations such as Silas, the renegade Opus Dei member in Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code (2003), or the video images of Shi’ite pilgrims flagellating themselves with chains and slashing their foreheads with...

A string of recent publications has sought to emphasize the relationship between the memorial and the material in the medieval period.¹ Drawing on this body of work, this essay explores the dynamic relationship between physical objects and the memories associated with them in the Historia ecclesiastica of Orderic Vitalis. Written between c.1114 and 1141 at the abbey of St Evroul, located in the pays d’Ouche on the southern frontier of Normandy, the massive thirteen-book Historia is widely recognized by scholars as being one of the most important sources for the history of the Anglo-Norman world and beyond, and it has...

Contained in two manuscripts preserved in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana is a little-known chronicle by an anonymous writer of the mid-twelfth century which may shed more light on an epoch-making event on the eve of the Crusades: the Norman conquest of Sicily. This source, collated into a single transcription by Giambattista Caruso in 1723² and reproduced in the Rerum Italicarum Scriptores by Ludovico Muratori in 1726,³ is called the Historia Sicula a Normannis ad Petrum Aragonensem by Anonymus Vaticanus. Despite the fact that it is one of a very few sources to describe a seminal episode in Mediterranean history, the...

The study of crusading religious practices has often focused on practices undertaken at home or at the beginning of a crusade, such as liturgy or the practice of taking the cross.¹ In contrast, the religious practices performed routinely during the crusade itself have been relatively less explored.² Yet, analyzing the devotional activities of crusaders while they were actually on crusade has the potential to illuminate not only the crusading movement but also points of intersection and divergence between that movement and larger cultural trends. Furthermore, although some crusading accounts admittedly provide little information on the religious practices of crusaders, others...

Hagiography is by definition about measuring the distance between the human and the sacred: the saint’s own distance, but also the hagiographer’s and ours. Reginald of Durham’s late-twelfth-century life of Godric of Finchale, begun during the saint’s lifetime and finished not long after his death, probes all sorts of distances.¹ It is no accident that many of Godric’s feats and miracles involve clairvoyance and its auditory equivalent: feats of overcoming spatial or temporal distances in one’s seeing and one’s hearing. The Vita has a precise sense of place, centered on Godric’s cell in the forest, but within a concentric circle...

Over the seventy-five years since its publication, scholars have continued to adjust and refine Professor Charles Haskins’ classic historiographical label ‘Renaissance of the twelfth century’. Nevertheless, the concept remains a useful springboard with which to approach, understand, and explain the cultural changes, the accelerations, and the innovations that took place in Western Europe in the course of the twelfth century. Yet, like any other conceptual tool, it has limits in scope that confine its utility geographically and chronologically, as well as qualitative limitations in terms of the particular events and achievements that are its raison d’être.¹ Defining events, such as...

Violent disorder broke out in various parts of England during the political turmoil of 1326–7 and included particularly severe rioting in the monastic towns of Abingdon, St Albans, and Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. In January 1327 agitators from London roused the townspeople at Bury to conspire to attack and destroy the abbey of St Edmund. An armed mob forced entrance through the gates of the abbey on 14 January and seized and imprisoned the officials of the convent and several monks. They carried away all the treasures of the abbey, including the charters,¹ muniments, and papal bulls from...