Grief Grieving and Loss in High Medieval Historical Thought

GRIEF, GRIEVING, AND LOSS IN HIGH MEDIEVAL
HISTORICAL THOUGHT
BY EMILY A. WINKLER
This article investigates how and why medieval ecclesiastical writers thought and
wrote about experiences of grief in human history. It examines the works of three
late twelfth-century Latin writers from England: a foundation history of
Waltham Abbey and its holy cross, a series of annals kept by Hugh Candidus at
Peterborough, and Gerald of Wales’s autobiographical and travel writing alongside
his De principis instructione. Drawing on biblical, literary, theological, and icono-
graphic models for grief and suffering in the western Christian tradition, the article
situates these works in the exegetical and philosophical ideas they shared, and
explains what is original and significant about their approaches to each instance
of grief. It argues that the central problem these writers pondered in their narratives
was the relationship between the universal and particular nature of grief. Grieving,
they thought, had three key qualities: it impelled a desire to act; it could not be
meaningfully measured; and it persisted in time. In prioritizing the experience
of grief over its function, meaning, or morality, these writers considered the
emotion rational, natural, and honest. The value these writers placed on human
family or family-like relationships provides the context for understanding their pri-
orities in thinking about responses to loss. Interest in grief’s endurance, rather than
its resolution in consolation, has been understood as more typical of secular, not
sacred, thought. By showing how these writers’ ideas about grief’s nature lived
alongside and within other ideas of Christian thought, this article illuminates a
greater range of medieval ecclesiastical ideas about the dignity of human history
and emotion.
“Oh you who pass along the way, pay attention, and see if there is any grief like
my grief.”1
Lamentations 1:12
The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Arts and Humanities Research Council
(grant number AH/S003673/1) funded the research for this article. I wish to thank the
editors of Traditio and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and insights. All
translations are my own.
The following abbreviations will be employed: HC = Hugh Candidus, The Chronicle of Hugh
Candidus, a Monk of Peterborough, ed. W. T. Mellows (Oxford, 1949); and WC = The Waltham
Chronicle, ed. Leslie Watkiss and Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford, 1994).
“O uos qui transitis per uiam attendite et uidete si est dolor sicut dolor meus.”
1
Lamentations 1:12.
Traditio 77 (2022), 129–183

© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fordham
University. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits
unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original
work is properly cited.
doi:10.1017/tdo.2022.8
https://doi.org/10.1017/tdo.2022.8 Published online by Cambridge University Press

130 TRADITIO
In the Middle Ages, many writers turned to the poetry of the Old Testament
Book of Lamentations in order to write of sorrow, grief, despair, loss, and lamen-
tation. It was a lament of many voices: its author was Jeremiah, his narrator a
suffering woman, his theme a personified Jerusalem now destroyed. The book
was popular because it provided a traditional, ready template for a narrative
about loss. Yet it was also important because writers of history continued to
find the themes and questions it raised helpful for understanding the experiences
of the people they wrote about. One line in particular attracted attention and
arrested thought because of the vital question it asked: is anyone else’s grief
like mine? This article examines ideas of grief, grieving and loss in the historical
thought of three late twelfth-century writers from England: a foundation history
of Waltham Abbey and its holy cross, a series of annals kept by Hugh Candidus at
Peterborough, and Gerald of Wales’s autobiographical and travel writing along
side his De principis instructione. These works by monastic and clerical writers
range across personal memoir and community, family, and regnal history. Each
wrote accounts in which bereaved individuals grieved in response to loss (real or
anticipated) of a beloved person or people without the possibility of recovery.
The emotional dimension of their narratives of loss — their ideas about past
experiences of grief, and how they plotted those experiences in prose — has not
been considered.
Ideas about grief in the Middle Ages tend to be studied in conjunction with
other emotional and spiritual experiences. Grief is often packaged with the
more glamorous emotion of anger.2 Grief by itself is studied comparatively less
because medieval reactions to parting, separation, and loss were once seen as
signs of weakness, incompatible with other, more forceful emotions.3 Grief is
also analyzed as a political performance or theological problem: a phase in a
sequence of feelings meant to be consoled and resolved.4 Grief that challenged
consolation, especially in ecclesiastical thought and writing, has received less
2
Stephen D. White, “The Politics of Anger,” in Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an
Emotion in the Middle Ages, ed. Barbara H. Rosenwein (Ithaca, NY, 1998), 127–52; and
Richard E. Barton, “Emotions and Power in Orderic Vitalis,” Anglo-Norman Studies 33
(2011): 41–60.
3
Mary Garrison, “Early Medieval Experiences of Grief and Separation through the Eyes
of Alcuin and Others: The Grief and Gratitude of the Oblate,” in Anglo-Saxon Emotions:
Reading the Heart in Old English Language, Literature and Culture, ed. Alice Jorgensen,
Frances McCormack, and Jonathan Wilcox (Farnham, 2015), 227–63.
4
For consolation, see Peter von Moos, Consolatio: Studien zur mittellateinischen Trostliter-
atur über den Tod und zum Problem der christlichen Trauer, Band 1: Darstellungsband
(München, 1971). On consolation as an “interactive phenomenon” and helping response to
grief, see Jill Anne Kowalik, Theology and Dehumanization: Trauma, Grief, and Pathological
Mourning in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century German Thought and Literature (Frankfurt,
2009), 29 and 41. For resolution, see Gerd Althoff, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter: Kom-
munikation in Frieden und Fehde (Darmstadt, 1997), 30.

GRIEF, GRIEVING, AND LOSS IN HIGH MEDIEVAL HISTORICAL THOUGHT 131
attention. This is in part because questions about medieval emotions tend to seek
after perceptions of an emotion’s propriety or morality, or its social function or
utility, more than ideas about emotional phenomena and experiences.5
I want to ask a different question: what was it to grieve, in the minds of medi-
eval writers? What did they think it felt like to experience grief — and to what, if
anything, could that experience be compared? How could any one historic experi-
ence be narrated in a valid and meaningful way? The article argues that the
central problem these writers pondered in their narratives was the relationship
between the universal and particular nature of grief. Grieving, they thought,
had three key qualities: it involved an impulse to act; it could not be meaningfully
measured; and it endured in time. In prioritizing the experience of grief over func-
tion, meaning, and morality, these writers considered the emotion rational,
natural, and honest. The key point is that they did not discuss grief in terms of
consolation, predictable trajectory, or cure. It is in grief ’s nature to persist. The
value these writers placed on human family or family-like relationships, I
suggest, provides the key for understanding their priorities in thinking and
writing about grieving.6
I begin with a brief introduction to these writers’ intellectual treasury of
thought about grief and ways of writing about it, and a short discussion of
5
On propriety, morality, social function, and utility, see, for example, Anger’s Past: The
Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages, ed. Barbara Rosenwein (Ithaca, NY, 1998). On
narratives as means for learning “the cognitive and social uses of emotions” to “suggest how
people might live well, or at least successfully,” see Jeff Rider, “Positive Emotions in the
Arthurian Lais of Marie de France,” Journal of the International Arthurian Society 4
(2016): 58–68, at 58–59. On emotion narratives as “scripts” for guiding and staging appropri-
ate behaviour, see White, “The Politics of Anger.” For emotions answering questions how one
should live and as expressions of value judgments, see Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of
Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge, 2001). On feelings as “thought about
and wielded,” see Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Angers Past and Present,” Emotions: History,
Culture, Society 4 (2020): 35–38, at 36. On how medieval writers thought gestures “should”
express emotion, see J. A. Burrow, Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative (Cambridge,
2002), 11–68. On “phénomènes émotionnels,” see Amélie Piolat and Rachid Bannour, “Émo-
tions et affects. Contribution de la psychologie cognitive,” in Le sujet des émotions au moyen
âge, ed. Piroska Nagy and Damien Boquet (Paris, 2008), 53–84, at 55. Key advances in the
direction of emotional experiences include Leslie Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies in the Ver-
nacular and Latin Traditions (Toronto, 2011); Danielle Nicole Griego, “Child Death, Grief,
and the Community in High and Late Medieval England” (Ph.D. diss., University of Mis-
souri-Columbia, 2018); and Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy, Medieval Sensibilities: A
History of Emotions in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2018). For calls to investigate the experi-
ential side of medieval emotions, see Stuart Airlie, “The History of Emotions and Emotional
History,” Early Medieval Europe 10 (2001): 235–41, at 237; and Guy Halsall, “Review of
Barbara H. Rosenwein (ed.), Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle
Ages,” Early Medieval Europe 10 (2001): 301–303.
6
On emotional understanding within early medieval communities, see also Barbara
H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 2007).

132 TRADITIO
William of Malmesbury’s twelfth-century Commentary on Lamentations as a point

of entry into the exegetical and historical thought-world they inhabited. I then
consider each text in turn, examining how their aims, personal experiences,
education, relationships, and communities informed their thinking about
grief. I conclude by assessing the implications of these ideas of grief in twelfth-
century thought and historical writing, and their significance for medieval
ecclesiastical thinking and emotion studies.
FRAMING GRIEF
Our writers inherited a long Latin tradition of highly developed thought about
grieving. In ancient reflections on grieving, especially hortatory, advisory, or
funerary writing, grief and tears were often paired with consolation.7 Writers nor-
mally emphasized mitigation or resolution of grief as a moral objective or impera-
tive. Cicero posed eloquent links between grief and consolation: he held that an
orator, in speaking well of tragedies past, was able and obliged to lessen sorrow;
and he wrote that philosophy was medicine for the grieving mind.8 Speaking or
writing about past griefs was a way to offer solace, and grief was often discussed
in relation to its diminishing, its ending, or its moral value.
For many Christian and pre-Christian thinkers, grief required resolution or
restraint. First-century writer Josephus, writing of his people and the sorrows
of the Jewish war, thought that personal grief was inevitable, but required
restraint in the business of writing history, and apology in his preface.9 Views dif-
fered as to the proper way to resolve grief: for example, through sensibility and
expression yielding to the feeling (affectus caritatis) or through philosophical rea-
soning (ratio fidei).10 Boethius (d. 524), unjustly imprisoned and facing certain
execution, adopted the latter approach as he searched for solace in writing of
past trials. His much-admired Consolation of Philosophy, written in an Ostrogothic
prison as he sought to reconcile himself to his fate, opens with the idea that tears
7
Also in poetry: for example, Statius, Thebaid 10:11. On the rhetorical tradition of con-
solatory writing and lamentation, see for example M. S. Kempshall, Rhetoric and the Writing
of History, 400–1500 (Manchester, 2011), 52, 76–78, 103, 108–13, 161, 198–216, 242, and 511.
8
Cicero, De Oratore 2.9; and Cicero, Tusculanae Disputationes 3.6, 3.13, and 3.82.
9
Josephus, De bello Iudaico, 1.9–12, ed. Bernd Bader, in Josephus Latinus, De bello
Iudaico: Buch I (Stuttgart, 2019), 51–52. This work was known to many twelfth-century
writers in a Latin version attributed to Hegesippus. See Scott G. Bruce, “The Redemption
of Flavius Josephus in the Medieval Latin Tradition,” in Litterarum Dulces Fructus:
Studies in Early Medieval Latin Culture in Honour of Michael W. Herren for His 80th Birthday,
ed. Scott G. Bruce (Turnhout, 2021), 53–69, at 57–60; and Neil Wright, “Twelfth-Century
Receptions of a Text: Anglo-Norman Historians and Hegesippus,” Anglo-Norman Studies
31 (2009): 177–96.
10
This tension discussed by von Moos, Consolatio (n. 4 above), 80–83.

and lamenting are themselves a comfort, and ends with an admonition to hope
and pray to Heaven with confidence.11
Augustine (d. 430), considered a theological authority on grief and known for
his vivid portrait of different kinds of grief for his friend and his mother,
thought grief should conform to certain moral trajectories and social norms.12
In his Confession of his sins to God, he measured grief in duration, compared it
by its object, and discussed where and when it was permissible and proper. Griev-
ing, he maintained, should end in heavenly consolation: one should aspire to
console oneself in order to bring the spirit closer to God. Any display of grief,
public or private, should be kept brief. Grief indulged for too long, or for the
wrong reasons, detracted and distracted from love of God.13 For him, grieving
was not suffering if it happened in a state of assurance that it would end.
Grief was ever a compelling subject. Why, after all, did Gregory the Great
(d. 604) devote such energy to understanding Job? The story recorded a divine
experiment in human capacity to endure grief. Job’s suffering prefigured
Christ’s, and was comparable in depth and import. For Gregory, Job’s grief was
firmly rooted in the realm of Christian counsel. He explored the nature of Job’s
suffering within a solid moral framework: grief always has meaning; in intensity,
it is balanced equally with the awe of revelation.14 The more acute one’s conscious-
ness of self, and one’s place in time’s continuum, the greater one’s capacity to feel
grief — and, thus, to know God’s power.15 Gregory’s commentary, in illuminating
the general from the particular, made Job a beacon for any suffering Christian.
To resolve grief, or to find in it meaning: these were attractive ideas. For Seneca,
knowing that personal suffering is one instance of common experience is consoling,
and time should aid recovery from grief.16 For Orosius, contemplating shared
sorrow across history lessens sorrow.17 In Gregory’s exegetical thought, the greater
the loss, the greater the grief, and the greater one’s potential to know God.18 The
11
Boethius, Philosophiae Consolationis 1.1 and 5.6.
12
Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Suffering Love,” in Inquiring about God: Selected Essays,
Volume 1, ed. Terence Cuneo (Cambridge, 2010), 182–222, at 184. For a refinement of Augus-
tine’s distinctions between different types of grief, see Paul Helm, “Augustine’s Griefs,” Faith
and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers 20 (2003): 448–59.
13
Augustine, Confessions 9.12.33–34.
14
Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, preface.5.12, ed. André de Gaudemaris and Robert
Gillet, in Morales sur Job. Première partie, Livres I et II (Paris, 1989), 156–60.
15
Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job 1.25.34, ed. Gaudemaris and Gillet, 214–16. For
similar sentiments, see Orosius, Historiarum adversum paganos 4.12.8–13, ed. Marie-Pierre
Arnaud-Lindet, in Histoires contre les païens (Paris, 1990–91), 2:41–42; and Boethius, Philo-
sophiae Consolationis 5.6.
16
Seneca, De consolatione ad Polybium 1.4; and Seneca, De consolatione ad Marciam 1.5.
17
Orosius, Historiarum adversum paganos 4.preface, 5.24.20, and 7.22.6–8, ed. Arnaud-
Lindet, 2:8–10, 2:153, and 3:58–59.
18
Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job 1.5.6, ed. Gaudemaris and Gillet, 180.

134 TRADITIO
appeal of these ideas is evident in the continued popularity of these patristic writings,
early historical narrative, and classical philosophy (from Virgil’s poetry to Seneca’s
letters) in the twelfth century.19
Yet appeals to ideals and universals had limited explanatory power for individ-
ual cases of personal grief. As guiding ideas, they were open to rethinking and
qualification by later writers. Even those offering counsel and consolation
expressed, at times, an awareness of the limits of what they offered. They saw
lost human life as impossible to restore or replace. In the twelfth century, Otto
of Freising suggested that in reading of past sorrows, present ones might be set
aside, but to a certain degree and in a certain way.20 Centuries earlier, Jerome (d.
420) counselled Heliodorus to find consolation for grief. Yet, when describing his
own grief for Julia Eustochium, he wrote in language of violence, despair, total
change, and the tyranny of old age.21 For Ambrose of Milan (d. 397), the dead
could live again in the stories written about them, but in seeming. Remembering
them could bring resolution, mostly; yet he acknowledged that such remembering
could make grief grow.22 Could one forbid grief to grow? — or did grief forbid one
to forget? — as Virgil implied of Daedalus, when the poet regretted the future that
Daedalus’s fallen son Icarus would have had “if grief had permitted” (sineret dolor).23
The writers we will meet here probed the question of grief beyond the limits of
consolation and resolution. Loss, that implacable void of human experience, was
still here, in this world, for individuals, come what might hereafter. That void was
what they wrote about. In different genres of Latin writing, all personal, intimate
tellings of past events, they confronted the nature of particular and universal emo-
tions in the lived experiences of individuals. Each reflected on grief ’s existence,
and deemed the experience of grief a valid subject for historical writing. Our
insights have the potential to be the richer because we have knowledge about
each author, his relationship to the people and events he was narrating, and the
intellectual world he explored.24
19
See, for example, René Wasselynck, “Les compilations des «Moralia in Job» du VIIe au
XIIe siècle,” Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 29 (1962): 5–32; and The Oxford
History of Classical Reception in English Literature. 1: 800–1558, ed. Rita Copeland
(Oxford, 2016).
20
Otto of Freising, Chronica, sive historia de duabus civitatibus, ed. Adolfus Hofmeister, in
MGH, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum 45 (Hannover, 1912), 2.preface,
67–68.
21
Sancti Eusebii Hieronymi Epistulae 60, 151, and 154, ed. Isidorus Hilberg, CSEL 54–56,
2nd ed. (Vienna, 1996), 1:548–75; 3:363–64; and 3:367–68.
22
Ambrose of Milan, De obitu Valentiniani consolatio, PL 16, col. 1357.
23
Virgil, Aeneid 6.31. On the idea of grief for children’s lost futures in biblical and early
English writing, see also Harriet C. Soper, “A Count of Days: The Life Course in Old English
Poetry” (Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 2018).
24
Waltham had an exceptional library of biblical, classical, and patristic writing: WC,
xxix–xxx. Peterborough was especially rich in the biblical, patristic, and contemporary

In the High Middle Ages, new intellectual currents emerging in universities

challenged individuals to discover the faith for themselves (famously, Abelard’s
Sic et Non). In their religious careers, writers like Guibert of Nogent, Heloise,
and Abelard traced in prose the pleasures and sorrows of their own lives, endea-
vouring to make sense of their emotional experiences.25 Suffering in which
writers questioned, refuted, or ignored any meaning, purpose, and resolution of
grief is normally thought to be a quality of high medieval secular or court
poetry. Even there it is considered rare. Thomas of Britain’s Tristan has been
called one of the few true tragedies in the Middle Ages because it portrayed
pain and sorrow without reward or consolation.26 This idea of grieving is
seldom associated with ecclesiastical writing in a monastic or clerical
context, as though Augustine’s guidelines about why, when, and how to grieve
always satisfied members of religious communities.27 The works examined here
inform and enhance our understanding of medieval grief, for they reveal
sophisticated thinking about grief, and of a kind not typically associated with
ecclesiastical writing. We turn now to what that thinking comprises — and
what it entails. Our way in is through one writer’s thinking about that ancient,
unanswered question in Lamentations.
LAMENTATIONS 1:12 IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY

In the mid-twelfth century, the Benedictine monk William of Malmesbury
wrote his first biblical commentary, a work of theological exegesis dedicated to
a fellow monk: Commentary on Lamentations. Lamentations, though not a
common book for exegesis, was the subject of two well-known Carolingian com-
mentaries by Hrabanus Maurus and Paschasius Radbertus. It became better
known in the twelfth century when Gilbert the Universal and William took it
up for exegesis, who perhaps saw in this less-glossed text an opportunity to
theological material: M. R. James, Lists of Manuscripts Formerly in Peterborough Abbey

Library (Oxford, 1926); and Peterborough Abbey, ed. Karsten Friis-Jensen and James Wil-
loughby (London, 2001). Gerald’s learning both abroad and in Britain is well known: for dis-
cussion, see below.
25
See, for example, Abelard, Historia calamitatum, ed. Alexander Andrée (Toronto,
2015); Constant J. Mews, The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard: Perceptions of a Dia-
logue in Twelfth-Century France (New York,1999); and Jay Rubenstein, Guibert of Nogent: Por-
trait of a Medieval Mind (London, 2002).
26
Laura Ashe, “The Meaning of Suffering: Symbolism and Antisymbolism in the Death
of Tristan,” in Writers of the Reign of Henry II: Twelve Essays, ed. Ruth Kennedy and Simon
Meecham-Jones (New York, 2006), 221–38.
27
For example, a recent view sees Augustine as both determining and typical of medieval
views before Rousseau: William M. Reddy, “The Unavoidable Intentionality of Affect: The
History of Emotions and the Neurosciences of the Present Day,” Emotion Review 12
(2020): 168–78, at 171.

136 TRADITIO
meditate anew on an age-old theme.28 In his comment on Lamentations 1:12,

William distinguished the particular (proprium) essence of grief (dolor): “And it
is characteristic of grief that it knows no limit, and is ignorant of a steady
course. For just as a grieving spirit thinks on many things, so speech — the
mind’s interpreter — keeps turning through many things” (et est doloris proprium
quia modum nescit, tenorem ignorat. Sicut enim dolentis animus multa cogitat, ita
sermo mentis interpres per multa se uersat).29 William personified grief as an
active, living force. Grief, a grieving spirit, and the words that express the
feeling all shared a relentless activity, independent of bound or measure. In
William’s understanding of grief, the inability to frame the emotion is not a
human failing. Rather, grief has no experience of limit or steadiness; it has no
quantifiable aspect. In his view, to conceive of grief generally in terms of magni-
tude or duration would be specious.
The implied question in Lamentations 1:12 (si est dolor sicut dolor meus?) was
not always interpreted the same way. One way in which interpretations differed
was in the concept of quantification. Was it meaningful to frame or compare
grief in terms of degree? For some writers, in certain endeavours, it was.
Paschasius implied a connection between Lamentations 1:12 and events of the
New Testament: the ruin of the Temple, Christ’s passion, and Mary’s suffering.30
When St. Bonaventure reflected on Mary’s suffering in the thirteenth century,
he quoted the same open-ended question from Lamentations verbatim.
However, when he adapted the passage for a sermon — a more instructive,
narrative work — he introduced a comparison, writing that Mary’s experience
of grief during the passion was stronger (vehementem) than anyone else’s
because there was no grief like hers (non est dolor sicut dolor eius) except her
son’s.31 Mary felt more grief because she was Christ’s mother and did not know
he would rise again: an explicit sense that grief could be compared in its
measure. William of Malmesbury, musing on Lamentations late in life, would
not have agreed.
In writing about human history, long before he wrote the Commentary, William
also tended to give grief a quality rather than a measure. In one case, his language
for the force of grief (ui doloris) mirrored the language he used for the force with
which mourners beat themselves, suggesting a unity of spirit and body in the
28
On Gilbert and William’s exegesis of Lamentations, see William of Malmesbury, Liber
super explanationem lamentationum Ieremiae prophetae, ed. Michael Winterbottom, Rodney
M. Thomson, and Sigbjørn Sønnesyn, CCM 244 (Turnhout, 2011), xiii.
29
William of Malmesbury, Liber super explanationem lamentationum, ed. Winterbottom
et al., 69, commenting on Jeremiah 1:12.
30
E. Ann Matter, “The Lamentations Commentaries of Hrabanus Maurus and Pascha-
sius Radbertus,” Traditio 38 (1982): 137–63, at 160.
31
Robert M. Correale, “Chaucer’s Constance and the Sorrowing Mary: The Man of Law’s
Tale (MLT), 841–854,” Marian Library Studies 26 (1998): 285–94, at 289–90.

experience.32 The activity of grief produced a result: an answer to the mourners’

prayer for God’s mercy. Grief could also be passive, lacking force. Ine’s queen con-
soled her grieving husband with her single-minded strength and activity, leading
him by her example.33 William had never found ideas of measurement and com-
parison particularly useful for conveying universal, yet infinitely variable, experi-
ences of grief.
William’s Commentary is well known for its moral, didactic purpose, which was
to provide models for meditation, so that fellow monastic readers might find spir-
itual union with God. In this model, suffering matters because it has meaning, as
part of God’s purpose.34 William’s insight about suffering also reflect his curiosity
about feeling and his philosophy of human experience. William had thought and
written — like speech, another form of mentis interpres — a great deal about the
human past before he probed the meaning of Lamentations 1:12. He was unique
among most biblical commentators in drawing on pagan, classical histories for
ideas.35 He thought with classical works, seeking, in writing, to make a real differ-
ence to his readers’ lives.36 Thinking in both exegetical and historical terms, he
attempted to make a meaningful observation about individual experiences of
grief. He commented on Lamentations and he used Lamentations to think with
about timeless experience. To William, the famous line seemed to speak out for
all those who had passed, and to all those who might pass and read his words
in times to come.
We turn now to writing about grief by three authors who, like William, wrote
about history. These writers worked and wrote soon after William, in the same
realm, and in ecclesiastical environments. Two of them (Gerald and the
Waltham chronicler) were, like him, also deeply steeped in classical literature,
in which narratives of the afterlife seldom stressed resolution. All were drawn to
32
William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum 4.379.2, ed. R. A. B. Mynors, Rodney
M. Thomson, and Michael Winterbottom (Oxford, 1998), 1:674.
33
William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum 1.37.1, ed. Mynors et al., 1:54. For
other examples in which a gender paradigm did not dominate views of grief, see Bernhard
Jussen, “Challenging the Culture of Memoria: Dead Men, Oblivion, and the ‘Faithless
Widow’ in the Middle Ages,” in Medieval Concepts of the Past, ed. Gerd Althoff, Johannes
Fried, and Patrick J. Geary (Cambridge, 2002), 215–32.
34
et al., xviii–xix.
35
et al., xvi; and R. M. Thomson, “William of Malmesbury and the Latin Classics Revisited,”
in Aspects of the Language of Latin Prose, ed. Tobias Reinhardt, Michael Lapidge, and
J. N. Adams (Oxford, 2005), 383–93.
36
On William’s philosophical affinity with classical literature, see esp. Sigbjørn Olsen
Sønnesyn, William of Malmesbury and the Ethics of History (Woodbridge, 2012), 3–5, and
21–41.

138 TRADITIO
Lamentations 1:12 and the paradox it posed because it helped them understand
the losses and griefs of past people.
GRIEF AND THE WALTHAM CHRONICLE

The Waltham Chronicle is a foundation history written by a secular canon (pos-
sibly a married one) between 1177 and 1189; its sources included Waltham’s
archives, the testimony of other monks, and personal memories of the chronicler,
who had joined the community as a boy in 1124.37 The impetus for writing the
chronicle was the loss of this community. Henry II dissolved the secular college
in 1177 with full (material) compensation, replacing it with Augustinian canons
as part of his penance for his men’s murder of Thomas Becket.38 Waltham had
been the hunting lodge of Tovi the Proud, who was messenger, standard-bearer,
and chief thegn of King Cnut (d. 1035). More than 150 years later, Tovi was
still remembered for rebuilding the church after a miraculous crucifix was discov-
ered, and for the community of canons that formed around his old lodge. Waltham
Abbey had long been famous for its legendary stone crucifix and the miracles sur-
rounding it. It was among the multiple sumptuous life-sized crosses and cruci-
fixes, commissioned as gifts for late Anglo-Saxon churches, that reflected the
importance of the cult of the cross.39 Late Anglo-Saxon poems and prayers
expressed the belief that venerating the cross would protect the Christian at the
moment of death and ensure safe passage to heaven through redemption of the
soul.40 According to Gerald of Wales, the Cistercian Baldwin of Ford wrote his
Sermo de sancta cruce for the canons of Waltham in honor of their crucifix. This
occasion was probably Henry’s 1177 refoundation.41
37
WC, xxxiii and 79, n. 6. For Waltham’s post-Conquest archives, see Rosalind Rans-
ford, The Early Charters of the Augustinian Canons of Waltham Abbey, Essex, 1062–1230
(Woodbridge, 1989).
38
Roger of Howden, Chronica magistri Rogeri de Houedene, ed. William Stubbs (London,
1868), 2:118; and Ransford, The Early Charters, xxiv–xxv and 33.
39
Mary Frances Smith, Robin Fleming, and Patricia Halpin, “Court and Piety in Late
Anglo-Saxon England,” Catholic Historical Review 87 (2001): 569–602. Examples include
Leofric’s gift to Peterborough and Cnut’s to Winchester, below; Stigand’s cross gifts: Liber
Eliensis 2.98, ed. E. O. Blake (London, 1962), 168; and Bishop Æthelwold’s gift of crosses
to Peterborough: S 1448, in Anglo-Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and Bibliography,
ed. P. H. Sawyer (London, 1968), 406.
40
Barbara Catherine Raw, Anglo-Saxon Crucifixion Iconography and the Art of the
Monastic Revival (Cambridge, 1990), 62–66. Examples include the Ælfwine Prayer-book; Reg-
ularis concordia 6.72–76 (In die Parasceuae), in Consuetudinum saeculi X/XI/XII monumenta
non-Cluniacensia, ed. Kassius Hallinger (Siegburg, 1984), 61–147, at 115–19; and The Dream
of the Rood, lines 119–21, ed. Michael Swanton (Liverpool, 1996), 99.
41
John Munns, Cross and Culture in Anglo-Norman England: Theology, Imagery, Devotion
(Woodbridge, 2016), 80–81.

Not all, however, were happy with the change. The Waltham chronicler concen-
trated his history on the miracles of the image of Christ housed by the Abbey and
the legacy of its founder, Harold Godwineson, briefly King Harold II.42 Harold’s
death at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 deprived Waltham of a patron and pro-
tector.43 From the chronicler’s perspective, the community of monks at
Waltham Abbey was deprived once again in 1177 — this time not of a king,
but by a king. What the king had taken away was its existence as a community.
The chronicler looked back in sorrow. Deeply invested in his now-lost community
and its history, the chronicler reflected on the relationship between bereavements
past and present. He revived oral and written tradition that Harold was buried at
Waltham, as he probably was.44 Yet although his narrative sought to resolve the
fate of Harold’s body, it did not resolve grief.45 It communicated poignantly the
idea that grief was erratic, unfulfilled, and helpless in nature — and his expressed
desire to preserve these elements of experience in writing. In narrating personal
bereavement, the realization that certain loss is imminent, and the aftermath of
death in battle, he explored the emotional consequences of irrevocable loss.
The chronicler discussed losses of the Waltham brethren, including major loss of
property, but material loss awoke in his prose no grief or great feeling. During the
civil war between Stephen and Matilda, Geoffrey de Mandeville set fire to the
village of Waltham, and the adjacent canons’ houses burned too; the chronicler
claimed that he can give testimony because he sustained the same loss as the
rest (qui et dampna cum ceteris sustinuimus).46 This loss (dampnum) was of
damaged goods, not lives or livelihood, and our author did not treat the incident
with emotional language. It was collateral damage, shared by the community. The
chronicler thought the perpetrator duly punished; the brethren took down the
cross to make Geoffrey reconsider the compensation he has refused to give, but
in the same hour, Geoffrey received a mortal wound in battle. This loss was
resolved.
42
WC, xv. For the cross as “miracle-working” and the community’s focus, see Tracey-
Anne Cooper, “The Monastic Origins of Tovie the Proud’s Adoration of the Cross,” Notes
and Queries 52 (2005): 437–40, at 438–39. King Edward supported and added to the gift,
issuing an endowment and re-foundation charter in 1062: S 1036, in Anglo-Saxon Charters,
ed. Sawyer, 307–308. For Harold and the Chronicle, see Ann Williams, “The Art of
Memory: The Posthumous Reputation of Harold II Godwineson,” Anglo-Norman Studies
42 (2020): 29–44.
43
WC, xxv.
44
William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum 3.247.1, ed. Mynors et al. (n. 32
above), 1:460; and Simon Keynes, “Earl Harold and the Foundation of Waltham Holy
Cross (1062),” Anglo-Norman Studies 39 (2017): 81–112.
45
On the fate of Harold’s body in narrative tradition, see Nicole Marafioti, The King’s
Body: Burial and Succession in Late Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto, 2014), 116, 232–35,
and 243.
46
WC, 78–80.

140 TRADITIO
But in the closure of his community at Waltham, the chronicler was effectively
and permanently bereaved of his family. He remembered emotional experiences
acutely. He recalled his childhood at Waltham, and how he alternately laughed
and cried with the other young members of the community.47 He felt pride in
his community, past and present, and counted himself as belonging to it: God
honored us (nos), he wrote, who were brought up (educauit) and taught (instruxit)
by the church, to witness the early miracle in which blood oozed from the arm of
the Christ figure when they attempted to nail plating onto it.48 “We” the brethren,
he thought, clearly had a special relationship with God. This sort of miracle would
be unsurprising in a foundation history aimed at securing patronage, and the
chronicler may have manipulated the truth to please his patrons.49 However,
the chronicler was writing of a community already lost, and he did not write of
hope for its restoration. If he adorned some truths, he laid others bare.
Immediately after relating the miracle, he wrote poignantly of his misery on
losing the community he belonged to for fifty-three years: “My gift in this life
is to see my wretched self separated from my mother’s breast” (Me miserum
quod datum est uidere in hac uita quod separer ab uberibus matris mee).50 This is
important because it is the only time in the text we hear the author’s voice
raised in a personal lament for his own loss. Being rent from the mother’s
breast is a raw and physical image of separation from a parent — a nurturing,
educating parent church he has just remembered. This loving recollection of
this relationship impelled him to voice his lone lament. Maternal imagery (to
describe Christ’s spiritual nurturing, or to expand the familial qualities of a reli-
gious community) became more common in the twelfth century, especially
(although not exclusively) in Cistercian contexts.51 Cistercian writer Aelred of
Rievaulx, for instance, reportedly compared his love for his monks to that of a
mother for her sons.52 The Waltham chronicler referred again to the mother
church when he related the illness and suffering of a sinner, Matthew, who
became fully contrite: the moment he asked to be saved as one Jesus has “fed
from my mother’s breast with your bread in this church of your cross” (pauisti
pane tuo in eccelsia crucis tue ab uberibus matris mee), the crucifix figure intervened
and cured him.53 Matthew framed his request for salvation, like the author framed
his lament at loss, as a desire to return to the mother church. The author may have
47
WC, 76.
48
WC, 18–20.
49
Cooper, “Monastic Origins” (n. 42 above).
50
WC, 20.
51
Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle
Ages (Berkeley, 1982).
52
Walter Daniel, The Life of Ailred of Rievaulx, trans. F. M. Powicke (Oxford, 1963), 58.
53
WC, 74.

had his own unresolved grief in mind at the bitter irony of his own unwilling exile,
set against the suffering contrition of the sinner Matthew.
Waltham’s Grieving Crucifix: An Affective Miracle

A mid-fourteenth-century Harley manuscript of the Waltham Chronicle opens
with the initial “C,” in which a man kneels before a crucifix, the figure of which
has an inclined head (London, British Library, Harley MS 3766, fol. 49).54 Both
the gesture and the episode it represents suggest a direct response to the emotional
import of the twelfth-century story. Two centuries later, an artist chose to illus-
trate a moment of sorrow — and what is, in some ways, the chronicle’s most
remarkable miracle. After recounting King Harold’s noble but headstrong and
stubborn leadership in his victory at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, the chronicler
explained that, in the intervening weeks before the Battle of Hastings,
Harold came to Waltham and prostrated himself in a cross-shape on the
ground, in prayer to the Waltham crucifix. The chronicler did not say what
he prayed for — presumably, victory and the safety of his people — only that
he came devoted to the holy crucifix. The image of Christ, previously looking dir-
ectly ahead, then bowed his head “as in sorrow” (quasi tristis), a sign (signum) of
future events. The chronicler reported that the sacristan Turkill witnessed the
event, and that others nearby confirmed it.55
To interpret a nodding crucifix as a gesture of grief for a contemporary event,
and as miraculous for that reason, was unusual in medieval writing. Sculpture
with a nodding crucified Christ normally prompted rather different interpreta-
tions.56 The gesture could signal his humble submission to the will of his heavenly
father, his loving compassion (by which writers stressed gap between Christ’s self-
less love and human sin), or his invitation for a devotee to express mutual love or
mystical union.57 A nodding, drooping, crying, or bleeding crucifix was often
54
For the image as conventional, not necessarily an exact rendering of Waltham’s cruci-
fix, see Nicholas Rogers, “The Waltham Abbey Relic-List,” in England in the Eleventh
Century, ed. Carola Hicks (Stamford, 1992), 157–81, at 160.
55
WC, 44–46.
56
For a Carolingian example of a nodding crucified Christ, see Peter Lasko, Ars Sacra,
800–1200 (Harmondsworth, 1972), 100, fig. 3. For Cologne’s Gero cross, see Ornamenta eccle-
siae: Kunst und Künstler der Romanik: Katalog zur Ausstellung des Schnütgen-Museums in der
Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle, ed. Anton Legner (Cologne, 1985) 2:214, fig. E17. For a thir-
teenth-century example, see Paulus Hinz, “‘Traditio’ und ‘Novatio’ in der Geschichte der
Kreuzigungsbilder und Kreuzifixe bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters,” in Traditio–Krisis–
Renovatio aus theologischer Sicht: Festschrift W. Zeller zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Bernd Jaspert
and R. Mohr (Marburg, 1976), 606–608, at 607.
57
Signalling humble submission is the view of ninth-century Carolingian writer Candi-
dus of Fulda: Elizabeth Coatsworth, “Late Pre-Conquest Sculpture with the Crucifixion
South of the Humber,” in Bishop Æthelwold: His Career and Influence, ed. Barbara Yorke
(Woodbridge, 1988), 161–93, at 184. On signalling loving compassion, Sara Lipton, “‘The

142 TRADITIO
thought to express Christ’s own pain. Writers used these images to admonish
devotees and stimulate affective devotion through empathy with Christ’s long-
ago physical suffering.58 In the Waltham Chronicle, Tovi responded in this way
to the miracle of discovering Waltham’s crucifix. When he saw the Christ figure
bleeding on the stone cross (its head as yet upright), Tovi experienced an epiphany.
He claimed that the bleeding crucifix “‘represents for me a present likeness of your
passion’” (michi representat presens istud exemplar tue passionis), and that it
offered a reminder of his unworthiness.59
High medieval stories about a crucifix coming to life — speaking, acting, or
intervening in earthly affairs — tended to illustrate a belief in, or hope for,
Christ’s power to effect a miraculous change.60 For example, the eleventh-
century Vita S. Swithuni, formerly attributed to Goscelin of St-Bertin, recorded
that the statue of Swithun from Winchester (brought by Ælfwold, bishop of Sher-
borne to 1048) performed miracles.61 Chronicler Thietmar of Merseburg, who
understood Christ’s body as consolation, related that when Archbishop Gero
put relics in the cracked head of the crucifix, wept, and prayed for it to be restored,
Sweet Lean of His Head’: Writing about Looking at the Crucifix in the High Middle Ages,”
Speculum 80 (2005): 1172–1208, at 1188 and 1201. On signalling an invitation to express
union, see Lieke Smits, “Wounding, Sealing, and Kissing: Bridal Imagery and the Image
of Christ,” Medium Ævum 88 (2019): 1–22, esp. 1–3; and Kunstliteratur in Antike und Mitte-
lalter: Eine kommentierte Anthologie, ed. Arwed Arnulf (Darmstadt, 2007), 110–11.
58
For example, Anglo-Saxon homilies: Wulfstan of York, The Homilies of Wulfstan no. 2,
ed. Dorothy Bethurum, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1998), 121. For examples, see Raw, Anglo-Saxon Cru-
cifixion Iconography (n. 40 above), 39 and 65–66; Christopher L. Chase, “‘Christ III,’ ‘The
Dream of the Rood,’ and Early Christian Passion Piety,” Viator 11 (1980): 11–33, at 11–
16; and Die Vercelli-Homilien: I.–VIII. Homilie, ed. Max Förster (Darmstadt, 1964), 154–
55. See also S. J. Shoemaker, “Mary at the Cross, East and West: Maternal Compassion
and Affective Piety in the Earliest Life of the Virgin and the High Middle Ages,” Journal
of Theological Studies 62 (2011): 570–606; Thomas H. Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin Devo-
tional Literature and Medieval Society (Philadelphia, 1996); Sarah Macmillan, “Imitation,
Interpretation and Ascetic Impulse in Medieval English Devotional Culture,” Medium
Ævum 86 (2017): 38–59, at 38–40; Anglo-Saxon Emotions: Reading the Heart in Old English
Language, Literature and Culture, ed. Alice Jorgensen, Frances McCormack, and Jonathan
Wilcox (Farnham, 2015); and Giles Constable, “The Ideal of the Imitation of Christ,” in
Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (Cambridge, 1995), 145–248, at
164–65 and 169.
59
WC, 18–22.
60
Raw, Anglo-Saxon Crucifixion Iconography (n. 40 above), 18. English records of
miracle-working crucifixes may reflect authentic Anglo-Saxon legend, but are first recorded
in the twelfth century. See Jacqueline E. Jung, “The Tactile and the Visionary: Notes on the
Place of Sculpture in the Medieval Religious Imagination,” in Looking Beyond: Visions,
Dreams, and Insights in Medieval Art and History, ed. Colum Hourihane (University Park,
2010), 203–40, at 215–24. On the transactional relationship between prayer and miracle,
see Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–
1200 (Ithaca, 2002), 146 and 176–91.
61
Michael Lapidge, The Cult of St Swithun (Oxford, 2003).

the Lord miraculously fixed it.62 In the 1170s, Herbert of Clairvaux wrote that
when Bernard of Clairvaux prostrated himself in prayer before a crucifix, the
figure seemed to come to life and embrace him in a miraculous act of love.63
These were effective miracles: they restored damage, helped the faithful, and
consoled the devoted.
Why is the Waltham Chronicle’s miracle special? The chronicler called it
“pitiable to tell” (miserabile dictu) and incredible from an earthly perspective (a
seculis incredibile).64 In these regards it was a “cause of wonder,” and contrary
to what one would expect of stone in nature.65 In saints’ miracles, any interven-
tion was ultimately, if not directly, made by God. Most miracles intervened in
earthly affairs: they influenced the course of events, often offering a moral reso-
lution to prayer and contrition (for example, most frequently by bringing
healing), and at times punishment for sin or failure to repent.66 Miracles
brought gifts of aid, or help in war; they brought freedom or punishment.
Saints appeared to offer aid, reproof, and advice.67 These miracles cured, fixed,
or solved a problem; as such, they performed a function.
The Waltham Chronicle’s story of the portentous, sorrowing Christ-figure is
important because it highlights, instead, the limits of intervention, and of
power to intervene. Unlike most miracles, it effected nothing, no material
change: it expressed and shared a feeling of empathetic sorrow. In an inversion
from the more typical route of affective piety, the chronicler told a story not of
an individual seeking to experience Christ’s sorrow in the past, but rather of
Christ on the cross seeming to experience sorrow in the present for the coming,
inevitable loss of Harold, and for the grief of the English in conquest. The
figure bowed his head quasi tristis when the king prostrated himself before the
62
Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon 3.2, Die Chronik des Bischofs Thietmar von Merse-
burg, ed. Robert Holtzmann, MGH, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum n.s.
9 (Berlin, 1935), 98–100; and Hanns-Ulrich Haedeke, “Das Gerokreuz im Dom zu Köln
und seine Nachfolge im XI Jahrhundert,” Kölner Domblatt 14–15 (1958): 42–60.
63
Herbert of Clairvaux, Liber Visionum et Miraculorum Clarevallensium 44, ed. Gian-
carlo Zichi, Graziano Fois, and Stefano Mula, CCM 277 (Turnhout, 2017), 98–99 retold by
Conrad of Eberbach, Exordium magnum Cisterciense, sive, Narratio de initio Cisterciensis
Ordinis 2.7, ed. Bruno Griesser, CCM 138 (Turnhout, 1997), 78–79. See also Anthony
N. S. Lane, Bernard of Clairvaux: Theologian of the Cross (Collegeville, 2013), 230–31.
64
WC, 46.
65
For discussion of the meaning of miracles with examples, see Robert Bartlett, Why
Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reforma-
tion (Princeton, 2013), 333–409; and Benedicta Ward, “Miracles in the Middle Ages,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Miracles, ed. Graham H. Twelftree (Cambridge, 2011), 149–64.
66
Bartlett, Why Can the Dead, 349–65; and Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval
Mind: Theory, Record, and Event, 1000–1215 (London, 1982), 192–200 (for miracles in a
monastic context) and 214–16.
67
Bartlett, Why Can the Dead, 372–73.

144 TRADITIO
crucifix in prayer.68 There was sympathy in mirrored action, but the crucifix’s
imitation of Harold did not copy or gloss an action, in the way that late medieval
devotees copied Christ’s wounds onto themselves (like Bridget of Sweden) or imi-
tated his crucifixion (like Elizabeth of Spalbeek).69 The same gesture meant dif-
ferent things. Harold has bowed in respect and prayer; the vivified Christ figure
has bowed his head in grieving for Harold and the English. The figure participated
in Harold’s story, the motion of his bowing head mirroring a movement of the
spirit (motus animi) and a futile impulse to act.70 Barbara Raw has stressed the
“theme of compassion for Christ’s sufferings” in crucifixion iconography.71
Here, the story’s theme is Christ’s compassion for the suffering of another.
This affective miracle is unique in the Waltham Chronicle because every other
miracle in the chronicle was an effective miracle: it effected some material or phys-
ical change or altered the course of events. One of these effective miracles was a
punishment that caused permanent physical harm: one would-be female thief
was punished by divine intervention and crippled for life.72 The other effective
miracles were all restorative, helping the Waltham community materially or
curing illness. The story of the discovery of the Waltham crucifix is the most
prominent example. A divine messenger appeared to a smith in three visions,
each time giving instructions for finding the crucifix. After disobeying twice,
the smith heeded the third vision only when the messenger prodded him with
physical pain. The smith led the community to dig up the crucifix, a revelation
of divine grace and sign of Christ’s passion, destined to belong to Waltham.73
When Cnut’s thegn Tovi tried to relocate the cross and larger relics, he was phys-
ically unable to do so. The wagon refused to move, so preserving Waltham’s assets,
in a sign of divine favor for Waltham.74 The crucifix figure healed the foot ulcer of
the penitent sinner, Matthew, prompted first by his mother’s grief and then by the
man’s contrition.75 The final three surviving chapters recounted other “effective”
miracles. The chronicler called it “marvelous to tell” (mirabile dictu) that would-be
robbers, blinded in mind or eye, had their sense or sight restored by God’s mercy.76
The chronicler referred to many unrecorded miracles, and of the wider need for
68
WC, 46.
69
Macmillan, “Imitation, Interpretation and Ascetic Impulse” (n. 58 above), 39. On
inclined heads as a gesture relationship, see Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the
Virgin Mary (London, 2009), 129–30.
70
On signs (here, meaning names) for showing the soul’s inner workings, see Augustine,
De doctrina Christiana 2.2.3.
71
Raw, Anglo-Saxon Crucifixion Iconography (n. 40 above), 66.
72
WC, 26–29.
73
WC, 2–10.
74
WC, 14–16.
75
WC, 70–74.
76
WC, 82.

God, through Thomas Becket, to heal the illness of sin in the present age. In these
stories, miracles healed, fixed or redressed an unwanted state in the world.77 They
resolved something.
The sorrowing crucifix, as an affective miracle, is unique in the Chronicle. It
marked the story’s dramatic turning point, whence the losses of a king, the
English, and the Waltham community will follow, never to be restored. In
bowing its head in grief, the crucifix acted miraculously, but effected no reso-
lution, change, or event. A fellow mourner powerless to avert Harold’s fate by
working miracles because that fate was already destined, the figure expressed
sympathy rooted in a shared experience of suffering. The chronicler ascribed
virtues and vices to Harold, but this miracle involved no moral judgment of the
king.78 The behavior of the Waltham chronicler’s crucifix illustrated not the
earlier medieval theme of triumphing over death, nor the Carolingian develop-
ment of accepting death, nor the sweet, summoning affection of high medieval
devotional literature. Instead, it emoted likeness with a human wish to avert
irrevocable loss. This miracle of a responsive crucifix sorrowing with a present
grief reveals a variation on a wider theme of interest in Christ’s humanity,
written by one who well knew the feeling of futility at the impossibility of averting
human loss.
Waltham’s miracle bears comparison with another twelfth-century account of
recent events in England, wherein an animate crucifix miraculously expressed
suffering (emotion or physical pain) without a narrative of return, relief, or
consolation. It occurred in one chronicler’s account of the 1141 burning of
Winchester — then Empress Matilda’s stronghold in the civil war against
Stephen — on the orders of Henry, bishop of Winchester. In the conflagration,
the large, bejeweled cross given by Cnut (the famous frontispiece of the Liber
Vitae) to Hyde Abbey (the church of St. Grimbald) caught fire, fell to the
ground, and was later stripped of its jewels by the king’s men.79 The Gloucester
continuator of John of Worcester related how Cnut’s crucifix, before meeting its
end, displayed miraculous evidence of awareness: “With the fire now closing in
on it (it is remarkable to say), just as if perceiving beforehand the threatening
danger, with the brothers there looking on, the cross responded by sweating and
blackening — nay, rather, by expressing the blackness of the arsonists.” (Hec
77
WC, 64.
78
Virtues: strong character, build, leadership, and a wealth of stunning treasure
bestowed on Waltham; based on Waltham’s relics, the latter is no exaggeration: Rogers,
“The Waltham Abbey Relic-List” (n. 54 above); and Williams, “The Art of Memory” (n.
42 above). Vices: losing God’s favour through pride (stubbornness, rashness, and excessive
self-reliance), WC, 46–8.
79
The Liber Vitae frontispiece: British Library, Stowe MS 944, fol. 6r. On the Winchester
fire, Edmund King, “Henry of Winchester: The Bishop, the City, and the Wider World,”
Anglo-Norman Studies 37 (2015): 1–24, at 11–12.

146 TRADITIO
iam sibi approximante incendio, quod mirum dictum est, quasi imminens sibi
presentiens periculum, intuentibus qui aderant fratribus, cepit sudare, nigrescere
immo comburentium nigrendinem exprimere). As it caught fire, thunder sounded
thrice — as though (quasi, again) from heaven.80 The emotional tenor of the
response differs: whereas the Waltham chronicler described the figure’s bowing
head in terms of sorrow, the Gloucester continuator claimed that the Hyde
figure seemed sentient and conscious of danger. By blackening the cross revealed
the evil of the arsonists.81
In comparison with medieval interpretations of other animated crosses and cru-
cifixes, what is significant is that these responsive crucifixes exhibited, rather than
invited, a human emotional response. This miracle story is like the Waltham
chronicler’s account in that neither is transactional, and both concern crucifixes
given during Cnut’s reign — an era that appeared to these twelfth-century
writers, by contrast with the Norman Conquest and the civil war, as a golden
age of lavish generosity to ecclesiastical centers. These likenesses are significant.
Both authors recounted disasters that befell their respective communities
because of warfare, and from these disasters there had been no earthly reprieve.
Both stories featured a responsive crucifix: an animated Christ figure who
expressed not his own ancient pain and passion, but a physical and emotional
response to contemporary human events. The two crucifixes portended and
seemed to perceive disaster, reacted to an earthly event, and were powerless to
intervene and avert doom. For these authors, this seeming (quasi, used as a con-
junction to introduce a comparison) humanity signalled the genuine emotional
content of the situation.82
A later reader, less invested in eleventh- and twelfth-century tragedies, read
Waltham’s miracle in an entirely different way. The writer of the Vita Haroldi,
composed at Waltham early in the thirteenth century, used the Waltham Chron-
icle as a source for Harold’s deeds. This author elaborated on the spectacular
nature of this bowing-crucifix story, remarking on the unusual event of Christ
deigning to acknowledge a king. But this later author had no vested interest in,
or emotional connection to, the community of brethren broken apart in 1177.
On the contrary, the Vita’s author approved whole-heartedly of Henry II’s deci-
sion to replace them with regular canons.83 Whereas the Waltham chronicler
80
John of Worcester, The Chronicle of John of Worcester, ed. Reginald R. Darlington,
P. McGurk, and Jennifer Bray (Oxford, 1998), 3:298–301.
81
For a different interpretation, that the crucifix lamented the suffering of the arsonists’
victims, compare Edmund King, King Stephen (New Haven, 2010), 168–69.
82
For an example of quasi used differently, associated with feigned (simulatam) emotion,
see Barbara H. Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700 (Cam-
bridge, 2016), 64–65.
83
Alan Thacker, “The Cult of King Harold at Chester,” in The Middle Ages in the North-
West, ed. Tom Scott and Pat Starkey (Oxford, 1995), 155–76, at 156.

told a tale of painful loss or rending asunder, the Vita was an encomium of Harold,
even asserting he was a saint and evoking his and Christ’s shared roles as kings.84
The Vita’s miracle was the mutual salutation: it was marvelous that the Christ
figure was seen returning the greeting of the wretched mortals’ king (resalutare
videretur regem mortalium miserorum salutantem se), and marvelous that a stone
figure deigned — and had the power — to do so.85 The two bows collapsed into a
single meaning of greeting, no longer prayer and sorrow. Whereas the Waltham
chronicler marveled that the cross should appear to emote sorrow (for trying to
avert inevitable loss would be futile), the Vita’s author marveled at its self-humbling
ability to effect material change.86 The two miracles meant different things. The ref-
erence to emotion vanished; the story was now about honor, not grief.
The Waltham Chronicle’s emotional tenor is unique. The author conceived of
grief as limitless, compounded, and unending, but not as dissolute, wild, or unciv-
ilized.87 Throughout the Waltham Chronicle, the author displayed an elevated
confidence in the dignity of human emotion. By dignity I do not mean nobility
(in the sense of a moral good, or something that should be emulated), but the
idea that emotion — even enduring, uninhibited, or boundless emotion — was
a rational and normal quality of human experience: and, crucially, neither
immoral, nor excessive, nor in need of restraint.88 Unlike the tenth-century
prayers that were his model, which expressed fear of divine judgment, the author
conveyed emotional concord between the crucifix as the human Christ and the
Waltham community. This change of emphasis is visible in the chronicler’s rework-
ing of Regularis Concordia, which was essentially the handbook for Benedictine
monks, widely promoted by Bishop Æthelwold during the tenth-century Benedic-
tine reform in Anglo-Saxon England. The chronicler wrote a prayer to the crucifix
— supposedly written by Tovi in the eleventh century, but more likely our chroni-
cler’s twelfth-century rendering — based in part on the prayer to the crucified
Christ in Regularis Concordia.89 Unlike the speaker in the Regularis Concordia
prayer, Tovi feared no condemnation, nor did he pray to Christ for forgiveness
instead of judgment. The Regularis Concordia speaker fervently wished that
Christ would forgive, and used the subjunctive voice with several ut-clauses to
84
Vita Haroldi, ed. W. de Gray Birch (London, 1885), 20.
85
Vita Haroldi, ed. de Gray Birch, 58.
86
See also Thacker, “The Cult of King Harold,” 156–58 and esp. 162 for a different view,
that the miracles were described in similar terms.
87
See also Ingeborg Lechner, “Die Macht der Chronisten: Berichte über Tod und Repu-
tation englischer Könige im Mittelalter” (M.A. thesis, University of Vienna, 2008), 136.
88
In contrast with nobility as in C. Stephen Jaeger, Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost
Sensibility (Philadelphia, 1999).
89
In contrast with Cooper’s view that Tovi wrote the prayer: see Cooper, “Monastic
Origins” (n. 42 above). The relationship between the prayer and Regularis Concordia is
demonstrated by Cooper, which transcribes the two texts in parallel; WC, 20–22.

148 TRADITIO
express this state of uncertain, hopeful wishing. Tovi, on the other hand, thanked
Christ for having already done these things: the passage is replete with past parti-
ciples. He was confident that forgiveness had already happened. The tone of
Tovi’s first word is adoration (adoro), not the self-deprecation or fear of reproach
that the crucified Christ seemed to expect of devotees in other Anglo-Saxon
poems, homilies, and sermons. This new twelfth-century prayer affirmed the confi-
dent and affectionate relationship the chronicler imagined between sharers of
human suffering: Christ and the brethren of Waltham.
The Search for Harold

The Waltham chronicler developed the theme of grieving in his narrative of the
events after the Battle of Hastings. He attempted to conjure the feelings and
activities of two men, Osgod Clapa and Æthelric Childemaister, who went in
search of Harold’s body. The portentous, grieving crucifix left the canons
“seized by intense grief ” (multo dolore correpti).90 Their grief impelled action: in
this emotional state, they entrusted two of the brethren with responsibility for
the king’s body should things go ill. The Waltham chronicler expressed the two
men’s grief and tried to elicit sympathy for them, not by defining the emotion,
but by referring to that story of grief universal in the Christian world, the
passage from Lamentations 1:12:
The aforementioned brethren Osgod and Æthelric had followed these fatal events
for the king from afar in order to see [his] end. After the pitiable events of battle,
and the inauspicious omen for its contenders, what were their feelings, their
anguish, their supreme grief? — one will be able to ponder in spirit by fixing
the mind on this verse: “Oh you who pass along the way, pay attention, and
see if there is any grief like my grief.”91
The analogy was meaningful and considered in every particular. Like the speaker
in Lamentations, Osgod and Æthelric had to endure at a distance, across a separ-
ation. The speaker called to passers-by travelling another road. Likewise, the two
men walked apart (a longe) from Harold in his last days, and could not follow him
in death. This chronicler invoked Lamentations 1:12 not by answering the ques-
tion, but by suggesting that reflecting on the question was, itself, a form of under-
standing another’s grief. The Waltham chronicler invited the reader to meditate
on grief ’s nature, and on the more recent grief of two men on a battlefield full
of faceless, nameless corpses.
90
WC, 46.
91
“Post miserabiles belli euentus et infaustum omen certantium, quid animi, quid
angoris, quidue suppremi doloris fuerit fratribus predictis Osegodo et Ailrico qui fatales
hos regis euentus secuti fuerant a longe ut uiderent finem, pensare poterit cuius animo hoc
fixum sit, ‘O uos qui transitis per uiam attendite et uidete si est dolor sicut dolor meus.’”
WC, 50–51.

Earlier recorded traditions reported that Harold’s mother pleaded for his body,
possibly borrowing the idea of a parent pleading for a child from Priam pleading
for Hector.92 In giving the task to Osgod and Æthelric, the Waltham chronicler
may have wished to give Waltham a more prominent place in the tragedy. Regard-
less of what really happened, the chronicler imagined what these intercessors
would have felt, and what their experience of recovering a body would have
been like. When the two brethren persuaded King William to permit them to
recover their dear king and patron for proper burial, they comforted the difficulty
of their charge:
Thus the brethren, cheered by inestimable joy, ran to the corpses and, turning them
over this way and that, [were] unable to recognize the king’s body, because a person’s
dead, bloodless body is seldom accustomed to exhibit the appearance of its prior
healthy state. Only one solution was acceptable: that Osgod himself should
return home and lead back with him the woman whom Harold had loved before
assuming rule of the English: Edith, known as “Swanneshals,” meaning “Swan
Neck.” Once the intimate companion of the lord king, she — admitted farther
than anyone to his most intimate secrets — knew the distinctive marks on his
body better than anyone. By her knowledge they might be certain with private
proof, who could not be certain with external evidence. [This was] because, as
soon as he was pierced with his lethal wound, whatever royal insignia he wore
were borne away to the duke as a sign the king was slain.93
Why were the men inestimably joyful at this moment? The urge to act in grief,
and recover the lost person, had now been given both sanction and outlet. The
men then pursued that desire, even if success was inevitably hollow.
In this passage, the chronicler invited the reader to join Osgod and Æthelric,
sharing in their search and their keen awareness of their own uncertainty. In
this way he used narrative to draw attention to their suffering, similar to
writers of passion narratives in his concern to narrate not only past events, but
also the emotional reality of that past. In Marian devotion and affective piety,
ignorance fueled anguish and enhanced despair. One of the reasons Mary could
not be consoled in her grief, when she witnessed Christ’s passion, was that she
92
On Harold’s mother making the plea, see James Plumtree, “‘How the Corpse of a Most
Mighty King . . .’: The Use of the Death and Burial of the English Monarch (From Edward to
Henry I)” (Ph.D. diss., Central European University, 2014), 65.
93
“Gaudio igitur inestimabili fratres confortati, currunt ad cadauera, et uertentes ea huc
et illuc, domini regis corpus agnoscere non ualentes, quia corpus hominis ex[s]angue non con-
sueuit mortuum formam prioris status frequenter exprimere; unicum placuit remedium,
ipsum Osegodum domum redire et mulierem quam ante sumptum regimen Anglorum dilex-
erat, Editham cognomento Swanneshals, quod gallice sonat ‘collum cigni,’ secum adducere
que, domini regis quandoque cubicularia, secretoria in eo signa nouerat ceteris amplius, ad
ulteriora intima secretorum admissa, quatinus ipsius noticia certificarentur secretis inditiis
qui exterioribus non poterant, quia statim letali uulnere confosso, quicquid in eo regalis
erat insignii duci deportatum est, signum scilicet prostrationis regie,” WC, 52–54.

150 TRADITIO
did not know her son would rise again. Maximus the Confessor, in the seventh
century, claimed that Mary suffered more than Christ precisely because she
did not yet know about the Passion’s mystery.94 Likewise, if the
Waltham brethren could have been assured in advance that they would find
Harold, they could have taken some consolation in their search. The
chronicler detailed instead, with graphic precision, the problems the brethren
faced in identifying and recovering Harold’s body, how Harold must have
been robbed as he lay dead, how corpses appeared after death in physical
state and in dignity.
The chronicler was aware of the key question: grief is universal, but can one
share another’s suffering and know exactly what it is like (sicut)? Lamentations
was quoted often; the way in which he deployed this passage is special for two
reasons. First, in preserving the “if ” (si) from Lamentations, the chronicler pre-
served that open question. Rather than comparing degrees of grief, the
Waltham chronicler sought to convey the specific feelings of two men by appealing
to a story universal in Christendom, and evoking their uncertainties and doubts.
Second, in reflecting on the basis on which the reader will understand the men’s
emotions — fixing the mind, or meditating, on the verse — he differed from
those writers who quoted Lamentations silently or adapted the words to a new
purpose.95 He cited explicitly the affective power of recalling the Lamentations
passage, which is important: he thought that musing on a story of grief well
known to his readers would best realize the emotion for a reader, even though
they could experience the speaker’s grief only in the imagination.96 When he
paused his story to think “out loud” about how to share an emotion across
time and space, we glimpse candor in his desire to find the right words for what
he thought they felt.
The chronicler did not see earthly grief as having a function, nor could it be con-
trolled; where it was present, it was a perfectly reasonable thing to continue
feeling. If formal mourning ended with Harold’s burial, grief did not: the relation-
ship with Harold continued. The chronicler prayed to Harold as “consolation of
the desolate” (consolatio desolatorum) — an epithet for the Virgin Mary in the
prayer Obsecro te in which she, too, is crowned — and as “glorious king” (rex
94
Discussed in Shoemaker, “Mary at the Cross, East and West” (n. 58 above), 580.
95
On fixing the mind or meditating on a verse, see Thomas H. Bestul, “Meditatio/Medi-
tation,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, ed. Amy Hollywood and Patri-
cia Z. Beckman (New York, 2012), 157–66; and Mary J. Carruthers, The Craft of Thought:
Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge, 1998).
96
On late twelfth-century writers using the biblical past to illuminate the present (and
not vice versa), see Michael Staunton, “Did the Purpose of History Change in England in the
Twelfth Century?,” in Writing History in the Anglo-Norman World: Manuscripts, Makers and
Readers, c. 1066–1250, ed. Laura Cleaver and Andrea Worm (Woodbridge, 2018), 7–28; and
idem, The Historians of Angevin England (Oxford, 2017).

gloriose).97 He highlighted Harold’s virtues and deeds for the faith, and wished
that the Lord do him justice in hearing the prayers of Waltham’s sons (filii
Walthamensis cenobii). “I doubt not what awaits you,” he said to Harold, “for
if our tongues were silent, your gifts would pray for you, as would the emotions
of those whom God esteems more highly than those same gifts” (Quod quidem
futurum non ambigo, si enim sileat lingua nostra, orant pro te benefitia tua, et
eorum affectus quos ipsis benefitiis magis pensat Deus).98 In his view, the canons’
emotions — their enduring feelings of love, loss and grief for Harold — articulated
their prayers and hopes for keeping Harold in heaven. Grieving for a person did
not supplant or detract from spiritual feeling for God. God admired the canons’
emotions (affectus) more than prayers or gifts because affectus were as genuine
as feelings for God: the true feelings of the soul.99 Material goods were of no
value to God; prayers were just words if not meant. Neither goods nor prayers
assured sincerity, but emotions did.
There was one hopeful element in the author’s preoccupation with the two
men’s suffering: shared grief, although unresolved and unconsoled, could create
a community of sympathetic affinity. The purported reburial of Harold, he
claimed, was the first occasion on which Normans and English paid respect to
the former king: “never before had the English known the fellowship of the
Normans” (nunquam fuit Anglis cognata Normannorum societas).100 This occasion
for shared sorrow diminished mutual enmity. Grief, however, had augmented its
reach with time. The chronicler ended his story of Harold with grief and separ-
ation, without consolation: despite the legends that he lived on, Harold reigned
only very briefly and is now dead, lost, and will never return.101
Osgod and Æthelric had argued to King William that, if he returned Harold’s
body, they would be consoled (confortatus). But, in the end, they were not. They
used the idea and hope of consolation to argue that this generous deed would
bring a felicitous outcome, and so move the king to act with justice and compas-
sion.102 The body consoled no one. The quality (quale) of the time of desolation, he
97
In the Obsecro te prayer, Mary can respond because she has experienced pain. For an
edition and comment, see Roger S. Wieck, Time Sanctified: The Book of Hours in Medieval
Art and Life (New York, 1988), 42–43 and 163–64.
98
WC, 48–50.
99
On ideas about emotions as virtues in ecclesiastical communities, see Lauren Mancia,
Emotional Monasticism: Affective Piety in the Eleventh-Century Monastery of John of Fécamp
(Manchester, 2019), 8; and Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History,”
American Historical Review 107 (2002): 821–45.
100
WC, 54–55.
101
WC, 54–56. Compare Plumtree, “How the Corpse” (n. 92 above), 67, for the view that
narrating Harold’s end was intended to win Norman support.
102
Grief was sometimes considered a stimulus to clemency in late Anglo-Saxon England.
See Nicole Marafioti, “Unconsecrated Burial and Excommunication in Anglo-Saxon
England: A Reassessment,” Traditio 74 (2019): 55–123, at 99.

152 TRADITIO
wrote, was unknown since the beginning. Like William of Malmesbury, he did not
think grief could be measured or quantified. Its quality could be conveyed in
words and shared stories. “Yet in what time remains, mourn, Waltham, and
grieve” (Set quid restat, plange, Waltham, et luge), wrote the chronicler; and,
remarking that God had deprived Waltham of the promise of delight (sponso
iocunditatis), he quoted Jeremiah and Lamentations yet again to say: let the
eyes not cease from weeping (Jeremiah 14:17 and Lamentations 2:18).103 In this
passage, the author, moving from specific to general, was deliberately imprecise
about which loss — the disasters of 1066, or Henry II’s closure of the community
in 1177 — gave Waltham reason to grieve ever after. In so doing he merged his own
regret at losing Waltham altogether, creating a narrative of augmented grieving
that mirrored, in form, grief ’s persistent nature.
Grief endured: and the seeming grief of the crucifix confirmed this quality visu-
ally. No transient portent, the figure’s nodded head remained inclined forever. The
chronicler wrote to the reader, “you can still see it with its head bowed” (quam
cernere potestis obstipo sic capite).104 The chronicler was neither detached nor
impartial.105 He lamented absence of parity as the Normans, a “savage race”
(effere genti), triumphed over a weaker, nobler force led by his community’s
patron. In his own words, “It was not possible to contend on equal footing”
(Non potuit de pari contendere).106 He addressed God (quoting Ps. 73 74:1),
asking why God punished his flock.107 He reported no answer. In his story, the
English did not submit to Norman rule: the Normans submitted to English grief.
The idea of grieving gave his work a thematic unity, in which his own loss resonated
with the losses of Lamentations, of child and mother, canon and church, the
Waltham community, Harold, and the English lost or oppressed in conquest. For
him, grief was a universal experience with individual variation. One could
imagine it, and empathize, by thinking with well-known stories in new contexts.
Yet neither burial, nor consolation, nor time could be relied on to diminish it.
THE MANY PARTINGS OF HUGH CANDIDUS

Hugh Candidus (d. ca.1160), a monk of the abbey of Peterborough, joined the
community in his childhood when Ernulf (d. 1124) was abbot, and served as
sub-prior during the abbacies of Martin de Bec (d. 1154) and William de
103
WC, 48.
104
WC, 72. The phrase obstipo capite appears in Persius, Satires 3.80, in which the gesture
is associated with philosophers who despair of knowledge.
105
Compare WC, xxv, for the view the chronicler was detached from the Norman Con-
quest. For the view that the chronicler was balanced in spite of grief, see Lechner, “Die
Macht der Chronisten” (n. 87 above), 136–39.
106
WC, 48.
107
WC, 48–49.

Waterville (d. 1175).108 While still a young monk he became seriously ill, but
recovered and went on to write a history of his monastic house covering the
period from its foundation to the mid-twelfth century.109 Hugh’s chronicle resem-
bles the Peterborough chronicle (a version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles), which
was written and revised at Peterborough while Hugh was a monk there. It is likely
that the two chronicles were created independently of one another, but shared
common sources.110 Hugh’s original chronicle, which included several additions
by other monks after his death, was destroyed in the fire of 1731, but transcripts
survive. Later emendations appear to have left intact Hugh’s own observations
and remarks, so to distinguish Hugh’s chronicle from these later changes, we
will call the author of the pre-ca.1160 version “Hugh.”111
Hugh was, unsurprisingly, fiercely loyal to the community of monks at Peter-
borough, more so than to English rulers or to the cause of English resistance. In
this regard he differed from the Peterborough Chronicle’s more palpable anti-
Norman tone in its local and national despair.112 He evaluated abbots and
rulers alike in relation to his community: did they aid, or did they threaten, his
monastery? He took a negative tone towards King Edward the Confessor and
his wife Edith for trying to take Peterborough’s lands away.113 And Hereward,
whose Fenland-composed life made him a became a symbol of heroic English
resistance in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, appeared in Hugh’s work as a
thug because he raided the monastery.114 Robbers were robbers: Hugh doubted
that Hereward raided only to protect stolen objects from King William.115 On
108
Edmund King, “Hugh Candidus [Hugh Albus] (c. 1095–c. 1160), Benedictine Monk
and Chronicler,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004); and HC, xv–xvi.
109
For the story of Hugo monachus and his illness, see HC, 92–95.
110
The Peterborough Chronicle is preserved in the Laud manuscript Misc. 636, known as
MS E, the first section dating to ca. 1121–1131, with additions made around the time of
Martin de Bec’s death, and again in the thirteenth century. For a detailed account of the rela-
tionship between it and Hugh Candidus’s chronicle, see Susan Irvine, The Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, MS E (Cambridge, 2004), xc–ci; HC, xxiii and xxix;
and also Pauline Stafford, After Alfred: Anglo-Saxon Chronicles and Chroniclers, 900–1150
(Oxford, 2020), 302. Malasree Home, The Peterborough Version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:
Rewriting Post-Conquest History (Woodbridge, 2015), 146–71, at 152, argues that Hugh trans-
lated directly from the Peterborough Chronicle. In my view there is not enough evidence to
support this conclusion.
111
For Hugh’s version, see HC, xvii–xx.
112
See, for example, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (E) 1066, ed. Irvine, 86–87.
113
HC, 67.
114
On Hereward as a heroic symbol, see Liber Eliensis, ed. Blake (n. 39 above); and Here-
ward, the Siege of the Isle of Ely and Involvement of Peterborough and Ely Monasteries: Together
with De Gestis Herwardi Saxonis, ed. Trevor Allen Bevis (March, Cambs., UK, 1982).
115
HC, 76–82. See also Peterborough Chronicle — Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (E) — which
describes him assaulting and raiding the abbey in 1070 and refusing Earl Morcar’s courageous
surrender to William I in 1071 (ed. Irvine), 88–90. See also Home, The Peterborough Version,

154 TRADITIO
the other hand, he honored Edgar Ætheling as being of royal stock, claiming the
monks summoned Edgar to make Brand their new abbot. Hugh also mentioned
their expectation that Edgar would be king, and their awareness of the prospect
of more material gains, namely, land.116 Although some twelfth-century writers
defamed Edgar, Hugh saw no reason to obscure the memory of the monks invest-
ing him with their hopes.117
In Hugh’s eyes, the real wealth of his community was its relationships. The
most recent extended discussion of Hugh’s chronicle has argued that Hugh
focused consistently on “valuable things” — “material resources” like money,
gifts, land, and relics — and asserted Peterborough’s identity by writing about
documents and possessions.118 As Jennifer Paxton has noted, the proof for
Hugh that Peterborough “was much loved and admired” was that even bishops
who were not wealthy chose to be buried there.119 Hugh had an interest in the
abbey’s assets, but it was by no means his only concern, nor his most distinctive.
The occasions on which his account differs markedly from the Peterborough
Chronicle share an important feature: Hugh elaborated on stories of loss and a
grieving response to loss. As a survivor of a near-death experience supported by
his surrogate family, a chronicler of a community’s history, and a preserver of
memories, Hugh Candidus was intrigued by the personal consequences for the
individuals involved in or affected by desperate circumstances, anguish, and
grief. Hugh’s chronicle shifted historical focus away from recording the events
of a crisis, to recording the feelings and memories events it stirred.
Illness and the Prospect of Bereavement

We encounter grief beyond measure (nimio dolore and dolentes nimium) twice in
Hugh’s autobiographical account of his near-death experience and miraculous
recovery.120 This story related grief in anticipating loss. Hugh wrote as an eyewit-
ness to events, but chose to tell the story of his illness in the third person, and from
his fellow monks’ point of view.121 The narrative focused not on Hugh’s experience
151–52, noting Hugh’s greater detail on stolen goods, but attributing absence of details to the
Peterborough chronicler’s ignorance rather than to different historical priorities.
116
HC, 76.
117
For other twelfth-century views of Edgar, see Emily A. Winkler, “1074 in the Twelfth
Century,” Anglo-Norman Studies 36 (2014): 241–58.
118
Home, The Peterborough Version, 146–71, esp. at 150–57, 161–62, and 165.
119
Jennifer Paxton, “Textual Communities in the English Fenlands: A Lay Audience for
Monastic Chronicles?,” Anglo-Norman Studies 26 (2004): 123–38, at 133. See also HC, 72.
120
For the case that Hugh wrote this himself, as he refers to an event that took place in
his lifetime, see HC, 93; and Charles Mellows et al., The Peterborough Chronicle of Hugh Can-
didus, 2nd ed. (Peterborough, 1966), 49.
121
On Hugh as eyewitness, see King, “Hugh Candidus” (n. 108 above). It might be
quibbled that the chronicle was transcribed; however, other first-person claims are left in

of physical suffering, but on the brethren’s experience of witnessing his illness,

their suffering on Hugh’s behalf and at the prospect of losing him, and their
agency in appealing to save his life with despairing prayer. When the Peterbor-
ough brethren saw (quod uidentes fratres) the amount of blood Hugh had lost,
they anointed him “with grief beyond measure and lamentation” (cum nimio
dolore et fletu). Their prayer and vigil were constant; again, wrote Hugh, they
were “sorrowing beyond measure” (illi dolentes nimium).122 The brethren
prayed for Hugh’s recovery not directly to God, but to saintly sufferers —
humans like themselves — who lived through Christ’s passion: Mary and Peter.
One monk, Æthelbert, said as others did likewise (alii similiter) before they
entered the chapel: “Brothers, let us all go swiftly into the church, that we may
implore the Lord’s help; and he will not refuse us one man” (Eamus omnes
fratres cicius in ecclesiam, imploremus domini auxilium, et non negabit nobis
unum hominem).123
One purpose of the story’s ending might have been to highlight the ultimate
effectiveness of the Peterborough community’s prayer. After all, Hugh recovered.
But Hugh’s story as a whole had another purpose: to show that the nature of the
monks’ human experience of grief was not one of calm, assured trust in divine
providence, but of desperate action and worry. There are three key points about
how Hugh narrated the experience of grieving. First, it is highly unusual that
Hugh’s Chronicle employed direct speech: he reserved it for moments of high
drama and desperation. The only other occasion was during another near-disaster,
the 1114 fire, when through carelessness the whole monastery burned (per incur-
iam combustum).124 With direct speech he sought to capture the acuity of their
despair. The quality of the feeling might be beyond measure, but he did not
think it beyond the reach of prose. Second, the monks tried to act in their grief
by speaking as though there were a systematic method for averting loss, or a cal-
culable way to bargain for a life. If all (omnes) implore, one (unum) will be saved.
This bargaining behavior has been observed among those facing bereavement or
death in other eras.125 Within its monastic narrative context, the way the
monks rationalized God’s imagined response denied the ineffable and marvelous
quality normally attributed to divine justice. Third, Æthelbert’s fervent plea
expressed absolute certainty that God will let Hugh live. Yet this verbal certainty
directly contradicted the foregoing narrative: the monks were already grieving and
despairing. Furthermore, Æthelbert’s call to act swiftly (cicius) conveyed a feeling
place, and other glossing comments refer to his narrative as a discrete piece, so there is no
reason to doubt Hugh’s authorial voice.
122
HC, 92–93.
123
HC, 93.
124
HC, 97–98, discussed below.
125
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying (New York, 1969), 66–68.

156 TRADITIO
of urgency, which belied his spoken assurance of a positive outcome. By juxtapos-

ing word and behavior in this way, the narrative implied that he spoke to inspire
his fellow monks, in denial of the grief he felt, and in stubborn hope of Hugh’s
recovery.
These narrative choices show that, in Hugh’s mind, the monks were not recon-
ciled to the prospect of their brother’s death, even though religion provided both
their vocation and the promise of heaven. In his account of their grieving and
acting, they did not think philosophically, nor with the virtues of prayer in
mind, nor in hopes of spiritual consolation. They exhibited a desperate desire to
act and, paradoxically, to prevent what they already felt was inevitable. For
Hugh, these behaviors — avoiding the topic of death, denial, and bargaining —
were sometimes part of how people experienced grief for others. Rather than
judging boundless grief as moral or excessive, Hugh’s story suggested a sense of
shared endeavor among humans suffering grief now and in the biblical past.
There are important parallels with devotional attention to Mary’s suffering as
witness to Christ’s passion. Her suffering was acute because she faced the death
of a child and unrelenting grief, whereas Christ’s pain would end.126 He knew it
would: his mother did not. Mary and Peter, the honored and ancient saints to
whom the Peterborough monks prayed, were well placed to understand what
they the monks felt and why they wished to keep their friend with them on
earth for as long as possible.
Losing Spiritual Fathers

Hugh’s narrative stressed another realm of grief: the feelings, desires and
actions of the monks on losing their abbots — fathers to the monastic family.
First he asserted effusive affection for Leofric (d. 1066), abbot before Hugh’s
time. One of Peterborough’s best and brightest abbots, he claimed, Leofric
acquired and gave many lands to the church, which enriched it “beyond belief ”
(incredibiliter). Hugh singled out one of Leofric’s many gifts: a great cross “with
wondrous working of silver and gold” (mirabili opere de argento et auro) that still
hung above the altar. No one before him had done more, nor will his successors,
Hugh concluded.127
Hugh reported that grief for Leofric’s loss after the Battle of Hastings was, like
the brethren’s for him, without measure. As in the Waltham Chronicle, grief
created a new community of shared feeling by joining two existing ones: there,
English and Norman; here, lay and monastic:
126
Shoemaker, “Mary at the Cross, East and West” (n. 58 above); and Rubin, Mother of
God (n. 69 above).
127
HC, 65–66.

The same Abbot Leofric was in the battle and there he became ill; having returned
home, he died on 1 November on the night of the feast of All Saints, much
mourned and wept over as much by monks as by laymen, and scarcely anyone
was found who would place him in a tomb, because of grief beyond measure.128
Hugh’s paratactic structure left ambiguous both Leofric’s role in the battle and
the cause of his illness. Given Leofric’s office, he should not have taken part in
the fighting. Whether the abbot died of a wound sustained in battle or as custo-
dian of souls, Hugh considered Leofric a casualty of war. Compared with the
Peterborough Chronicle’s account of the battle, Hugh more explicitly related
Abbot Leofric’s death to the illness he contracted while at the battle, and stressed
the emotional suffering of those who did not wish to part with him by highligting
their refusal to bury him.129 Hugh left the story unresolved: it did not end with
consolation or acceptance. The final word is, literally, dolore.
The claim that none wished to bury Leofric conveyed the quality of the grief
Hugh imagined. Laymen and monks alike knew that burial was crucial. Needed
to ensure the safety of the soul, burial permitted the deceased to rest in peace
and brought closure for the living.130 Hugh described some losses as moving seam-
lessly into consolation: he claimed that death brought peaceful rest for Saint
Cynesige (d. 1060), the archbishop of York buried at Peterborough, whom the
community claimed as a former monk.131 Yet the unwillingness to bury Leofric
revealed the impulse to “do something” to be reunited with the lost one. Resisting
the loss, not accepting it, was an event worthy of record for Hugh. Hugh commu-
nicated the idea of limitless grief by narrating the people’s resistance to the Chris-
tian ritual for parting. It resembled lamentation lyrics that asked where the lost
person was, or expressed a wish to embrace the body.132 In the context of Hugh’s
admiration for Leofric and devotion to his community of monks, this grief-
stricken behavior showed the people’s affection for Leofric.
In writing of Abbot Martin de Bec in his own time, Hugh contrasted the monks’
joy on welcoming him with a fourfold reaction in grief (dolor) to the death of their
father: mourning, lamenting, weeping, and crying out.133 Hugh described
128
“In illo exercitu fuit ipse Leuricus abbas et ibi infirmatus est; domumque reuersus
mortuus est, kalendis Nouembris in nocte solennitatis omnium sanctorum, multum lugenti-
bus et flentibus tam monachis quam laicis, et uix inuentus est aliquis qui eum in sepulchro
poneret pre nimio dolore.” HC, 75.
129
HC, 75; Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (E) 1066, ed. Irvine (n. 110 above), 87. See also
Stephen Baxter, The Earls of Mercia: Lordship and Power in Late Anglo-Saxon England
(Oxford, 2007), 190–92.
130
Christopher Daniell, Death and Burial in Medieval England, 1066–1550 (London,
1997).
131
HC, 73. Compare William of Malmesbury, Vita Wulfstani, ed. Michael Winterbottom
and Rodney M. Thomson, in William of Malmesbury, Saints’ Lives (Oxford, 2002), 146–48.
132
von Moos, Consolatio (n. 4 above), for comprehensive discussion of lamentation lyrics.
133
HC, 120–21.

158 TRADITIO
responses to loss not only through death, but also through separation, that stress
wishing to prevent parting (though in vain) and the frustrating powerlessness of
the feeling. When their Abbot Ernulf (leader of the monastery when Hugh joined,
and probably a close friend) was compelled by King Henry I to accept the post of
bishop of Rochester, Hugh wished that Ernulf had been less favored (Et utinam
nunc [non] tantum dilectus esset) by the king. He then recorded the monks’
lament: “Nevertheless, when the monks of Burch [Peterborough] heard that
their father and pastor was borne away from them, they wept and added tears
to tears, because they could not do anything else” (Monachi autem Burgenses
cum audissent patrem et pastorem suum sibi ablatum esse, flebant, et lacrimas lacri-
mis addebant, quia nichil aliud agere poterant).134 This was no conventional expres-
sion meaning torrents (or an effusion) of tears, because the verb addebant suggests
increase over time. The point was not that there were many tears, but that they
accumulated. Hugh’s image suggested that time compounded the monks’ experi-
ence of loss, rather than bringing acceptance or consolation. Hugh associated
grieving with doing (agere), consistent with feelings of unwanted separation and
a desire to recover Ernulf. Tears were a frustrating substitute — but crying
was, at least, something the monks could do. By presenting weeping as a last
resort, chosen in the absence of other options, Hugh portrayed the monks as fru-
strated agents trying to act in their own grief.
These episodes of losing spiritual father-like figures are worth comparing to an
episode in William of Malmesbury’s Vita Wulfstani. This is because William (a
fellow Benedictine monk, whose thoughts on Lamentations we have already
encountered) wrote with different words about a like situation, in a similar
community, to the same effect. As St. Wulfstan’s body was prepared for burial,
his followers gathered to grieve and to lament his loss. William conveyed the
idea that, for these bereaved mourners, their experience of grief was special,
unique, and new. They wept, he wrote, “as though there had never been
weeping before” (quasi nichil ante fletum esset).135 He did not compare their griev-
ing in degree, but tried to describe their experience in terms of what it felt like to
them — and without compromising it by associating it with grief and lamentation
in general. His point was that even if grieving is universal, these people experi-
enced it as something new: their feeling was not dulled in individual intensity
for being common to human experience.
First, William narrated the behaviors that accompanied grieving for Wulfstan
only as magnifying and compounding: never as fading or subsiding. These verbal
and physical actions included groaning, weeping, and calling out. In the vault, the
tumult (turba) of their outcry both reverberates and multiplies (quem repercussum
134
HC, 93.
135
Vita Wulfstani 3.24, ed. Winterbottom and Thomson, 146.

testudinum conuexa multiplicabant).136 One imagines the cries subsided. But, cru-
cially, William did not narrate that part of the story. William was not interested in
the decay of an echo, but in its ability to multiply sounds. His theme, likewise, was
not the passing of grief, but its increase.
It is a story without an ending. William wrote that they interred (sepulchro)
Wulfstan’s bones, “but [his] memory was never interred in their spirit” (sed
memoria numquam in eorum sepulta est animo). To refer to a state of the spirit
shared by many, William used the singular for spirit (animo), but the plural for
them (eorum). William explained that the people maintained their reverence
(cura . . . reuerentia) for the saint after his death, evidence for the enduring rela-
tionship.137 The story then cut directly to Wulfstan’s saintly miracles, in which
he tried to make his faithful happy and to solve their problems. Burial and rever-
ence did not resolve the loss. Yet at no point was their grieving for him said to end,
nor consolation to follow. In spirit, Wulfstan was still unburied.
Second, William made the explicit point that these grieving behaviors were
genuine, and consistent with true grieving and suffering: “Not only was it
weeping neither ingenuous nor feigned, but also the tears were squeezed out by
genuine sobbing — [tears] bearing witness to the ruin of religion and the suffering
of the country in one human being” (Nec erat simplex fletus aut simulatus, sed
exprimebantur ueris singultibus lacrimae, religionis ruinam, patriae miseriam in
uno testantes homine).138 The word simplex matters to William’s thinking,
because it was a charge William thought he might have to answer. It means
“naïve/ingenuous” or “uncompounded,” and both senses are present here. This
weeping showed compounded grieving, for they wept for the loss of Wulfstan,
the state of religion, and the nation’s suffering. William wrote of their grieving
as knowing — not naïve or ingenuous — in stating that those assembled were
well aware of, and were at that moment thinking of, the wider losses embodied
in this one human loss. Furthermore, the awareness and consciousness with
which the mourners acted in grief shows that William thought of their grief as
a multi-layered experience. Their weeping was genuine, but not in the sense of
being an automatic physical reaction to an external trigger: hence weeping accom-
panied, rather than manifested, an emotion. He made the point that their knowl-
edge of wider problems affected how they felt about, and responded to, Wulfstan’s
death. This gathering of memories and thoughts explicitly shaped their experience
of loss. He thought they had agency in their own experience of grief.
136
137
Vita Wulfstani 3.24, ed. Winterbottom and Thomson, 146–48.
138
Vita Wulfstani 3.24, ed. Winterbottom and Thomason, 146. Compare the edition’s
translation of simplex as “superficial(?)” (147). William had already established the depth
of true feeling for Wulfstan; he had no reason to do so again.

160 TRADITIO
Third, and most critical, William — here addressing the reader directly —
considered these behaviours to be just, rational, and reasonable. He wrote:
“And you would have found it difficult to determine who could plead a more
just cause for his weeping” (Difficulterque discerneres qui iustiores fletus sui
causas allegarent).139 In framing his comment in terms of just cause, William
assigned to the reader the office of judge hearing a plea almost legal in tone.
The question was not whether this quantity of crying was rational, but how to
distinguish among, and to judge, what were equally just causes and rational
reasons. His point was that everyone had lost something of great value, and
that to compare their emotions would be an experientially invalid way of
writing about the past.
Fire and Feeling

The specter of fire was a solid, present danger in medieval monasteries. Whether
planned arson (as in Winchester in 1141, discussed above) during warfare, or mys-
terious in origin (as in Glastonbury in 1184), fire devastated monks’ lives, dwell-
ings, wealth, and records. A fire might be considered a reason for grief, a cause of
rebuilding a better monastery, an incentive for material and spiritual reform, an
occasion for discovering the true Christian generosity of patrons, and a stimulus
for rewriting a community’s past. Although monastic communities shared the
experience of loss in fire, these similar catastrophes yielded different interpreta-
tions depending on each writer’s historical priorities.
Hugh Candidus gave a detailed account of the monks’ personal experience of
grief in the fire of 1116 that ravaged the monastery. His account was more expan-
sive here than the Peterborough Chronicle in detail and in Hugh’s observations
about how he, as author, wanted to discuss it. He first alluded to the fire indirectly
when he recounted the prophecies of future troubles reportedly made by the Devil
(in the fateful year 1066) to Bishop Æthelric, the former bishop of Durham who
retired to Peterborough. Hugh wrote that he does not wish (nollem) to record the
third prophecy — which is, we learn, the fire.140 Hugh, of course, knew what hap-
pened, and could not change it; his remark evokes the brethren’s denial, a wish the
loss had not occurred. Hugh attributed the fire to two causes: the work of the
Devil (who called on the Lord to punish their sins) and negligence (per incuriam
combustam). He listed the damage, and outlined how the story of damage unfolded
as news over time: the church and estate were wholly burnt, all the crosses broken;
the fire in the tower lasted nine days. On the ninth day, wind blew live cinders onto
the abbot’s abode. Only at this moment did the monks (“we”) think all was lost.
139
140
HC, 75–76.

The distinctiveness of Hugh Candidus’s account emerges sharply in comparison

with his peer who had recorded the same fire of 1116. The fire is prominent in both
accounts, but each understood and treated it in different emotional registers. The
day of which Hugh wrote “that day was a day of sadness and grief ” (Dies tristicie
et doloris erat dies illa) was not the day the fire broke out, but this ninth day, on
which all the monks came to believe they would lose all remaining buildings: in
particular, their homes.141 The Peterborough chronicler dated the nine-day 1116
fire to its beginning on August 4, the day on which flames were first witnessed:
“All this happened on a Friday, 4 August” (Eall þis belamp on an Frigdæg. þæt
wæs ii Nonæ Augusti).142 For Hugh, the day seared into emotional memory —
the day he named — was not the fearful day of dramatic burning and destruction,
but the day the monks felt loss. The emotional tenor of Hugh’s fire story was
highest when they felt despair at the prospect of irrevocable loss. Even though
he explained that these buildings were saved, he thought these feelings of commu-
nal grief worthy of record. In his view, the most significant event of the fire was
not a flame, but a feeling.
Writers of annals in mid-twelfth-century Peterborough considered loss, and
human responses to loss, the most important events to record. Where they differed
was in purpose and perspective. The Peterborough chronicler adopted a historical
standpoint toward loss more external and visual in orientation than Hugh’s
internal, emotional perspective. The Peterborough chronicler dwelt on losses of
men, land, and chattels after 1066. Hugh Candidus mused on the nature of emo-
tional responses to loss within the community of monks.
In this respect, Hugh’s account of the 1116 fire at Peterborough merits com-
parison with that of the Glastonbury fire in 1184. Both described loss and grief
as consequences, but portrayed them in markedly different ways. In the twelfth
century, the Glastonbury monks commissioned William of Malmesbury to write
De antiquitate ecclesiae Glastonie in order to confirm the community’s long
history to critics who doubted it.143 After Glastonbury’s 1184 fire, a Glastonbury
141
HC, 98.
142
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (E) 1116, ed. Irvine (n. 110 above), 118–19. This date is
consistent with that given in the Peterborough Easter table (likely written between 1122
and 1135 by the same scribe) preserved in British Library, Harley MS 3667, fols. 1r–2v, at
fol. 1r. See also Cecily Clark, “Notes on MS. Laud Misc. 636,” Medium Ævum 23 (1954):
71–75, at 71.
143
The Early History of Glastonbury: An Edition, Translation, and Study of William of
Malmesbury’s De Antiquitate Glastonie Ecclesie, ed. John Scott (Woodbridge, 1981), 27,
29, and 34–35; Antonia Gransden, “The Growth of the Glastonbury Traditions and
Legends in the Twelfth Century,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 27 (1976): 337–58, at
342; William Page, “Houses of Benedictine Monks: The Abbey of Glastonbury,” in A
History of the County of Somerset (London, 1911), 2:82–99; William Wells Newell, “William
of Malmesbury on the Antiquity of Glastonbury,” Publications of the Modern Language

162 TRADITIO
monk (or monks) made several interpolations into De antiquitate that described
the experience of the fire and its meaning. The writer enfolded the monks’ grief
into a moral narrative of material loss and divine punishment that yielded
clemency, consolation, and better times for Glastonbury.
The Glastonbury monk detailed the buildings the fire consumed (consumpsit
incendium) and reduced to a mound of ashes (in tumulum cineris rediguntur).
The author made a point of crediting the lost building’s lofty history, noting
that their abbot (from 1126) Henry, bishop of Winchester (d. 1171), had built
them. The relics and other precious objects lost, he explained, merited the lamen-
tation they received. He described the tears and laments which followed as some-
thing endured to a complete degree (with the verb perpetior), which implies that
the monks’ suffering, though full, did have a limit. Indeed, in this story, it had
both limit and moral function. Although “grief choked the monks violently”
(dolor angebat uehemencior), the monk read it as part of divine castigation for
their sins. God, in his clemency, transmuted this sentence by bringing them
great gifts and “consolation in their grief ” (doloris sui . . . solacium). The story
illustrated the nature of these consoling gifts by turning to praise of the generosity
and support of Henry II, who helped Glastonbury financially with its
rebuilding.144
According to this writer, the emotions and expressions of grief responded pri-
marily to the loss of chattels and relics, rather than buildings. This emotional
emphasis might well reflect the monks’ attachment to precious things as evidence
of their community’s historic identity and integrity. Glastonbury had neither an
ancient patron nor wealth in relics, and the fire increased the monks’ incentive to
acquire evidence of these. After the fire, the Glasonbury monks helped to stage the
discovery of a powerful patron saint and relics, in the person and body of King
Arthur, exhumed there (the stories went) in 1191. The fire even prompted a
later Glastonbury chronicler to concoct a story about another fiery rescue, in
which Glastonbury monks rescued the relics of St. Dunstan from a destructive
fire in Canterbury in 1012.145
Monastic writers differed on what a fire meant, if it had a meaning. The
Glastonbury writer stressed grief for material losses, but these were losses
closely wrought up in the community’s threatened relationship with its own
past. He read the fire in a moral way: of his own accord God punished sins, of
which grief was a full but short-lived phase, and then showed mercy. In Peterbor-
ough, the fire had at most a tenuous connection to morality: for Hugh, the Devil
Association of America 18 (1903): 459–512; and J. Armitage Robinson, “William of Malmes-

bury ‘On the Antiquity of Glastonbury,’” in Somerset Historical Essays (London, 1921), 1–25.
144
Adam de Domerham, Historia de rebus gestis Glastoniensibus, ed. Thomas Hearne
(Oxford, 1727), 2:333–34.
145
Gransden, “The Growth of the Glastonbury Traditions,” 347.

was the prime instigator of the fire. The Peterborough chronicler recorded loss
without ascribing meaning to it, but placed a premium on hope and prospect of
recovery. Hugh Candidus gave priority to the fearing, despairing experience of
loss. Each writer’s narrative of grief depended on what they thought the monks
valued most, and on what kind of story each wished to tell.
Hugh wrote about his community, but not with the same institutional motives
as his peers. This helps to account for the lack of direct borrowing between the
chronicles of Peterborough and Hugh. Neither chronicler had cause to duplicate
or rewrite key events in the other, because their aims differed. Hugh was most
interested in thinking about the personal experiences of the monks in times of
crisis. He might have had a more intimate audience of Peterborough monks in
mind than his fellow annalist. Yet he may have thought these emotional elements
of experience were those aspects of past loss most worth recording and remember-
ing for anyone.
GERALD OF WALES AND THE WOUND OF GRIEF
Gerald of Wales (d. 1223), born in Pembrokeshire, studied at Gloucester Abbey

and at the University of Paris; he worked as an archdeacon and a royal clerk;
among his many works were saints’ lives, an account of his travels to Wales and
Ireland and a history of the conquest of Ireland.146 Throughout his travels he
observed people, formed opinions, and shared them in dramatic language.
Unlike Hugh Candidus and the Waltham chronicler, the better part of Gerald’s
life was not given to a single community abiding by one rule. As a secular
cleric, Gerald set himself apart from such communities, and pursued a court
career as a diplomat and mediator which involved extensive travel. He returned
often to study and teach at the university in Paris.147 Later in life, he described
himself wandering between centers of learning, seeking always whatever place
would be, at a given moment in time, best suited to be his intellectual home in
its rigor of study and remoteness from war.148 Gerald felt he belonged to a commu-
nity of learning with ecclesiastics across institutions, and with his lifelong compa-
nions: books.
Most of Gerald’s autobiographical writing detailed episodes of his successes: his
rhetorical victories in debate, his political victories over ecclesiastical rivals, and
his moral victories over himself. Gerald dealt little in loss when recounting and
Georgia Henley and A. Joseph McMullen, “Gerald of Wales: Interpretation and

146
Innovation in Medieval Britain,” in Gerald of Wales: New Perspectives on a Medieval Writer

and Critic, ed. Georgia Henley and A. Joseph McMullen (Cardiff, 2018), 1–16.
147
Gerald of Wales, De rebus a se gestis 1.2, ed. J. S. Brewer, in Giraldi Cambrensis opera
(London, 1861–91), 1:23.
148
For example, Gerald of Wales, De rebus a se gestis 3.1, ed. Brewer, 1:89.

164 TRADITIO
defending own career and causes. The few personal and biographical griefs he
retold, however, he narrated with ardor. Gerald’s attitude towards his own experi-
ences of grief and those of others offer an insight into what he valued, and how he
understood the nature of earthly loss.
Enduring Wounds and Personal Loss

Gerald was interested in the enduring nature of serious wounds. Because Gwen-
wynwyn of Powys (d. 1216) refused to honor St. David, and had allied with the
English against peaceful Welsh kings, Gerald claimed, the prince suffered divine
vengeance: an injury to his foot. Gerald was writing to defend the metropolitan
rights of the see of St. David, the cause about which he was most passionate,
and he viewed Gwenwynwyn as an obstacle.149 Gerald described the experience
of the prince’s suffering (dolens) in terms of its resistance to either improvement
or treatment: the injury (laesionem) was so great “that he met with serious lame-
ness and infirmity hardly able to be treated” (ut claudicationem incurreret gravem et
imbecillitatem vix curabilem).150
The pain of loss, Gerald thought, could be felt in a similar way. Gerald described
another experience of personal loss — that of a friend and of his own reputation —
through treachery. He framed the whole episode in terms that equated grievous
losses with wounds that do not heal. In a response to an insulting letter from
Hubert Walter, archbishop of Canterbury, Gerald defended himself against accu-
sations of treason made by a monk, whom he once thought was his friend. The
surest way to corrupt someone’s life is in the guise of friendship, wrote Gerald.
In his own defense, Gerald explained (with the support of classical authorities)
of his initial misplaced trust that it would have been preferable to have avoided
injury, rather than to seek treatment after a wound (laesionem vitasse, quam
post vulnus acceptum remedia quaerere). The point here was that there is no guar-
antee that wounds can be healed or cured. The monk’s defamation so harmed
Gerald’s renown and reputation “that the wound to him [Gerald] may hardly
be fully overlaid with scar tissue in any period of time” (ut vix ei ad integrum
ullo cicatrix tempore possit obduci).151 Applying the maxim to his own case,
Gerald argued that his loss was so acute that the injury was permanent. Even a
149
David Stephenson, Medieval Powys: Kingdom, Principality and Lordships, 1132–1293
(Woodbridge, 2016), 75.
150
Gerald of Wales, De iure et statu Menevensis ecclesiae, dist. 4, ed. J. S. Brewer, James
F. Dimock, and George F. Warner, in Giraldi Cambrensis opera (London, 1861–91), 3:226.
151
Gerald of Wales, Symbolum Electorum (ep. 28), ed. J. S. Brewer, James F. Dimock, and
George F. Warner, in Giraldi Cambrensis opera (London, 1861–91), 1:295–96. Cicero, in his
short treatise on grief, viewed scars as evidence that the wound of grief heals with time, atten-
tion, and care: Tusculanae Disputationes 3.54.

full scar would not erase the wound; here, the scar may never finish forming
because the damage is so great.
There was a strong and consistent sense across Gerald’s works that grief does
not go away, and cannot be healed. The best one can hope to do is to “be
strong enough to mitigate the intensity of a present instance of grief ” (doloris
instantis uehementiam uel sic mitigare ualeret), for example by avoiding solitude
(following Ovid’s advice in Remedia Amoris), or sometimes by thinking on other
things (aliud et aliud . . . interdum cogitare), as Gerald had tried to do when he
thought his books and writings lost.152 The mind might temporarily divert atten-
tion from the pain of a wound, but the wound remained. Similarly, he related the
story told by the priest Elidyr, who reported meeting with a dwarvish folk as a
child but, after he betrayed their friendship and stole a golden ball from them,
he could never find them again despite searching. They were, as in death,
utterly lost to him. This story caused Gerald to step outside narrative and
reflect on what the experience of sorrow is like. Rational thinking, in his view,
had little effect on forgetting or diminishing sorrows. Whenever Elidyr was
asked about the story and retold it, he wept. Gerald marveled at the acuity of
the aged Elidyr’s memory of these people so late in life. Thinking about an experi-
ence again did not assuage sorrow, but caused the person to experience it anew.153
The personal losses on which Gerald dwelt most were not of material goods, or
of beloved friends and family, but of books. In substance, books were things; in
Gerald’s relationship to them, like living loved ones.154 When Gerald’s packhorse
(bearing his books) was caught in quicksand during his journey through Wales,
Gerald noted that servants risked their lives to rescue it.155 Gerald described a
theft in which three categories of thing, each a loss more severe than the last,
were taken from him. Silver and gilt cups could be replaced; but books — espe-
cially books he had written — were a grievous loss because he could not regain
the time he had spent writing them, nor the study he had devoted to them.156
It was like he had lost a year of his own life, a small death of self.
In the episode of loss he recorded with most fervor, Gerald he explained how he
had entrusted his collection of books to the monks of Strata Florida.157 The monks
took his books under false pretenses, for they then claimed they could only buy his
152
Gerald of Wales, De rebus a se gestis 2.21, ed. Brewer, 1:83. Ovid advises avoiding soli-
tude to treat love in Remedia Amoris, lines 579–608.
153
Gerald of Wales, Itinerarium Kambriae 1.8, ed. James F. Dimock, in Giraldi Cambren-
sis opera (London, 1861–91), 6:75–78.
154
See also Gerald of Wales, De rebus a se gestis 2.1, ed. Brewer, 1:45.
155
Gerald of Wales, Descriptio Kambriae 1.8, ed. James F. Dimock, in Giraldi Cambrensis
opera (London, 1861–91), 6:72.
156
Gerald of Wales, De rebus a se gestis 2.21, ed. Brewer (n. 147 above), 1:82–83.
157
Gerald of Wales, Speculum Ecclesiae 3.5, ed. Brewer et al., 4:154–5; and Brynley
F. Roberts, Gerald of Wales (Cardiff, 1982), 31.

166 TRADITIO
books, not keep them for him: they paid him money, but refused to return the
books. Gerald wrote that the monks were perverted and intentionally evil, but
was silent on his own feelings towards them. He described no emotions of anger
at them or their treachery. The only emotional experience he chose to narrate
here concerned his relationship not with the treacherous monks, but with his
beloved books. He described the experience of having to leave his books behind
as just like having his guts drawn out of his stomach (tamquam extractis a
uentre suo uisceribus). Here again, Gerald found an intimate similarity between
mental and physical pain. In being forced to take money for such an inestimable
treasure gathered with such diligence, Gerald “did what he could” (fecit quod
potuit) — an expression of futile acting in grief that resembles the monks of Peter-
borough deciding to weep because there was “nothing else they could do.” Then,
“grieving and in permanent anguish beyond what could be believed” (dolens enim
et ultra quam credi posset anxius), Gerald seized upon (arripuit) his journey. Anxius
refers to an enduring mental state of anguish or mental distress (angor): the
English word “anxious” has too mild a connotation for Gerald’s metaphor of dis-
embowelment and irrecoverable loss. He found the loss of books an occasion for
grief because he considered them his spiritual companions, so much so that
they were — like loved ones — part of himself. In describing a personal experience
of grief, Gerald resisted comparison, and noted no limit in measure or time. The
limit it surpassed was rather that of belief, and his anguish never left him.
Grieving Parents
In Gerald’s stories of grieving parents, he highlighted the enduring nature of
grief without imbuing it with any meaning. When an escaped prisoner took
hostage the son of the lord of Chateauroux, the prisoner threatened the lord
three times that he will kill the lord’s son unless the lord cut off his own testicles.
Although the lord did so, the prisoner reveled in the lord’s suffering and his inabil-
ity to have any more sons, then leapt to his own death, bringing the lord’s son with
him. The father built a monastery on the spot to save his son’s soul. This obser-
vation seems to strike a note of consolation to conclude the tale. Gerald’s next edi-
torial remark as narrator, however, struck a minor chord instead. He remarked
that the monastery still stands to this day, and bears the name De doloribus.158
In his narrative, what lingered was the testament to a father’s enduring sorrow.
In his account of a mother weasel who believes her baby weasels lost (a man has
carefully moved them elsewhere), Gerald ascribed to her a very great amount of
grief (tandem mota dolore). Gerald described her acting in grief in two ways.
First, she searched in vain: “driven to seek the babies everywhere, she found
none” (undique quaerendo nec inveniendo). Then, she poisoned the man’s milk,
158
Gerald of Wales, Itinerarium Kambriae, 1.11, ed. Dimock, 6:85.

planning to take revenge by killing his son. Lastly, she repeated the fruitless search,
which Gerald described as a sign of maternal care (maternal solicitudine) in being
anguished amidst hope and dread (inter spem et metum anxia). Though she had
no evidence they might be there, nor reason to return, she continued to seek
them. This time, she found them, the lord having returned them, and called off
her revenge. Gerald described another weasel’s grief as characteristic of a
mother’s grief. This weasel took revenge on a bird who stole one of her babies by
playing dead and then poisoning the bird. The impulse to act and the subtlety
of the revenge, evident in the degree of her grief and depth of planning, is what
Gerald thought made these stories worth recounting.159 In both examples, he
suggested that a parent’s grief was singularly great, when compared (from his
outside perspective) with others who grieved.
The quality of the first weasel’s intended revenge on the man is important,
because her goal was to make him feel what she feels — to create a grief like
her own, as a parent. In his interpretation of the Crusades, Gerald also related
revenge with a desire to create a like grief “like my grief,” but to very different
effect. Gerald thought Christ wanted to incite the heavenly court to take ven-
geance (on the heathen) by making Christians feel “in sympathy” (per compassio-
nem) with a display of his great suffering (tanti doloris).160 Grief and suffering
might yield an impulse to act: but for mortals bound in their mortal relationships
— not called by some cause distant and divine — grief sometimes had no function
beyond self-perpetuation.
The Grief of a Father and King

Gerald’s ideas about grief seemed, to him, united — and most clearly manifest
— in Henry II, king of England and suffering father. When Gerald retired from
court life in 1191 to pursue his studies, he probably composed the first draft of
his De principis instructione, which he completed in 1216–1217. Gerald knew the
key figures of court personally. In this work, steeped in his clerical education
and long experience, he gave moral advice for rulers and reflected on the reign
of Henry II. Gerald of Wales’s comments about kings are normally read as evalua-
tions and judgments: to what extent and why did he praise, or attack, rulers? His
account of the invasion of Ireland, De expugnatio Hibernica, is famous for its
admiring portrait of Henry II. De principis, written later, has been classed as a
personal attack on Angevin rulers that reveals his deep hatred for them.161 The
second and third books of Gerald’s De principis criticized Henry for lacking
159
Gerald of Wales, Itinerarium Kambriae, 1.12, ed. Dimock, 6:91.
160
Gerald of Wales, Expugnatio Hibernica 2.30, ed. F. X. Martin and A. Brian Scott, in
Expugnatio Hibernica: The Conquest of Ireland (Dublin, 1978), 216.
161
Robert Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 1146–1223 (Oxford, 1982), 69 and 71–91.

168 TRADITIO
good judgment and other moral failures (including failing to go on crusade), and
Gerald has been seen as telling a gleeful tale of a tyrannical king cut down by
divine justice.162 The tragedy of Gerald’s tale — how Henry’s rebellious sons
and enemies drove him to death — tends to be read based on how it ended,
rather than how it happened.163 What, exactly, is the nature of this tragic story?
Gerald indicted the king, but also chose to show what Henry suffered. A key
element of the tragedy that has not been discussed is how Gerald imagined
Henry’s emotional experience. Gerald reflected on how Henry felt the loss of his
rebellious sons in death, and accounted for how that feeling drove the father’s
futile wish to restore these broken relationships and reclaim his sons. Alongside
his loud and many judgments, Gerald thought and wrote about what people tried
to do in grief, and how they sought to counter impassive and impersonal fortune.
In De principis even their unfulfilled desires are, like their actions, events of history.
Henry II was a man who, by all accounts, knew grief of different kinds:
betrayal by his family, the gross competitive misunderstanding and loss of
former friend Thomas Becket, and the deaths of his children (including his first-
born son, William, who died aged three). Henry had crowned king his eldest sur-
viving legitimate son, Young Henry, during his own lifetime, a move that back-
fired because of the Young King’s growing resentment about being denied not
only important rites of passage to adulthood, but also any real financial auton-
omy or regal responsibility.164 King Louis VII of France (d. 1180) was only too
happy to support the Young King (along with the Young Henry’s brothers and
mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine) in leading a rebellion against Henry II in the
Great Revolt of 1173–1174. The family was reconciled, but another rebellion fol-
lowed in 1183, this time led by the Young King and his younger brother, Geoffrey,
duke of Brittany, with the support of France’s King Philip Augustus. Young
Henry died at the age of twenty-eight that year; three years later, Geoffrey fol-
lowed. Gerald, like his contemporaries, compared Henry II and the Young King
to the Old Testament figures David and Absalom. In both cases, the rebellious
son died before a reconciliation could occur, and writers interpreted rebellious chil-
dren as instruments of divine vengeance for the king’s sins.165 According to Gerald
of Wales, the anger and enmity between father and sons did not lessen the father’s
grief in losing them.
162
Henley and McMullen, “Gerald of Wales” (n. 146 above); and Laura Slater, Art and
Political Thought in Medieval England, c.1150–1350 (Woodbridge, 2018), 1–2 and 41–43.
163
Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 88.
164
Matthew Strickland, Henry the Young King, 1155–1183 (New Haven, 2016).
165
Gerald of Wales, De principis instructione 2.2, ed. Robert Bartlett (Oxford, 2018), 448;
and Gerald of Wales, Expugnatio Hibernica 1.45, ed. Martin and Scott, 120–24. See also
Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium 4, prologue and 4.1, ed. M. R. James et al. (Oxford,
1983), 278–82; and Staunton, The Historians of Angevin England (n. 96 above), 79, 181–
84, and 185–215.

For Gerald, grief was a shared experience that transcended enmity, and was dis-
tinct from the judgments of reward and punishment. Gerald interpreted the battle
of Colehill (1157) between English and Welsh forces as God punishing Henry II.166
Yet he dwelled longer on an experience of grief after the conflict than he did on the
battle. After a young man was killed in battle, his loyal dog stayed with him and
stopped eating food, though neither would bring the man back to life. Although
not a rational response, Gerald presented it as an understandable one, and he
praised it in classical, heroic terms of loyalty. It inspired English and Welsh to
join together to bury the man. The dog’s devotion — characterized by neglect
of self, and unwillingness to accept the man’s death — and the event of loss
caused an empathetic response that transcended cause or identity, as in the
Waltham Chronicle, where Normans and English joined in grief for Harold. As
Gerald portrayed it, grief, though futile in its activity, created an impulse to
share sorrow.
In two cases of the deaths of Henry II’s sons, Gerald claimed that opposing
sides shared the feeling of grief, an idea of emotional fellowship common to the
chronicles of Waltham and Hugh Candidus, and his own account of Colehill in
Itinerarium Kambriae. When the Young King died, both armies (exercitus utrius-
que) grieved in no small measure (dolore non modico) for the virtuous Young King’s
premature death.167 When Geoffrey died, all of France, chiefly the king, experi-
enced the utmost grief (dolore permaximo). He imagined in more detail the per-
sonal grief of the French and English kings, characterizing it as immeasurable,
isolated, and unresolved. Gerald expressed King Philip’s grief by telling a story
of his impulse to act to recover the lost person. Philip sorrowed so at Count Geof-
frey’s death, and grieved so severely (uehemenciam doloris) that he would have
leapt into the grave with Geoffrey, were he not violently restrained by his men
(nisi uiolenter a suis retractus fuisset).168 Gerald never suggested that Philip’s
grief was resolved in his spirit. The restraint was violent, physical, and external;
Philip exhibited no self-restraint nor mental effort to overcome or manage grief.
This story resembles Hugh Candidus’s tale of the reaction to Leofric’s death, in
that both stories showed the fervent, impulsive action of the bereaved, the reluc-
tance to part, and the desire to cross that ineffable boundary between life and
death — to rejoin the lost one, whether above or below ground. Both writers
showed the bereaved attempting to forestall or deny the feeling of isolation and
loss by clinging to the lost one’s body.
Gerald engaged readily with the universal-particular paradox in thinking about
one person’s grief: Henry’s. The experience of the father, Gerald maintained, was
166
Gerald of Wales, Itinerarium Kambriae 2.10 and 2.7, ed. Dimock, 6:138–39 and 130,
respectively.
167
Gerald of Wales, De principis instructione 2.10, ed. Bartlett, 472.
168
Gerald of Wales, De principis instructione 2.10, ed. Bartlett, 478.

170 TRADITIO
altogether unique and warranted separate treatment. At the same time, he

thought the intensity and duration of Henry’s grief embodied wider truths
about human suffering. Not only did Gerald outline a story of unresolved grief,
but he also described a Henry who did not want that grief to be resolved.
Henry’s grief for both sons Gerald called “incomparable” in how Henry felt it:
Indeed such great, limitless grief came upon the father, with mourning wholly
incomparable, that he spurned all consolation; caught between two evils, he by
far rather wished that his son should triumph over him than that death should
triumph over his son.169
Here Gerald ascribed a key quality to grief: active rejection of consolation. Henry
did not want to be consoled or cured. Gerald may have thought this was because
Henry felt he deserved to suffer (contemporary commentators agreed his com-
punction and sorrow on account of Becket’s death were genuine); or because
Henry believed that accepting consolation would admit his already vast emo-
tional distance from his son.170 In describing Henry’s longing, Gerald attempted
to communicate a moving point about Henry’s personality, visible primarily in his
grief: he was a father before he was a king.
Gerald of Wales employed the Lamentations 1:12 passage in describing Henry’s
isolation in feeling grief on the death of his son, Count Geoffrey, in 1186. Gerald
eliminated the speculative, querying tone of the biblical passage, definitively
claiming that Henry II, as a father, felt incomparable grief because there was
no grief like his (Porro pre omni dolore patris dolor incomparabilis erat; non enim
erat “dolor sicut dolor” eius).171 Gerald had already used the word permaximus
(“thoroughly greatest”) to characterize the grief of Philip and the French. To dis-
tinguish between these personal experiences of grief by ally (Philip) and father
(Henry), he had nowhere left to go but to the realm of the incomparable, with
the aid of Lamentations.
Gerald stressed the profound resilience of grief, inferring a general truth from
Henry’s experience, in a way that belied any sense that grief was short-lived,
repetitively-felt, or easily quelled by meditation:
169
“Patri uero pre omnibus incomparabili m[a]erore tantus dolor et tam immoderatus
accessit, quod solacium respuens omne, inter duo mala perplexus, longe maluerit filium de
se quam mortem de filio triumphasse.” Gerald of Wales, De principis instructione 2.8, ed. Bar-
tlett, 472.
170
For contemporary views that Becket was genuinely contrite after Becket’s death, see,
for example, Roger of Howden, Chronica (n. 38 above), 2:35–39 and 61–62.
171
Gerald of Wales, De principis instructione 2.10, ed. Bartlett, 478, but see Judith
Everard, Brittany and the Angevins: Province and Empire, 1158–1203 (Cambridge, 2000),
145, for the view that Gerald wrote that Henry grieved mainly because Geoffrey’s death
reminded him of the Young Henry’s.

Truly, the former grief for his son [Young Henry], by now put to sleep by time’s
kindness, this following grief revived; for then the wounds, over which long dur-
ation had drawn emotional scars, began to worsen. Naturally, the most recent
blow still rips open most former wounds with grief: for remembering causes a
wound of the spirit, which time and reasoning have tended, to fester again.172
Gerald was explicit: Henry’s grief for his elder son, Young Henry, had never been
healed or cured. He emphasized grief ’s persistence, strength and omnipresence by
animating it, showing it behaving, as William of Malmesbury did, like a living
entity: it was put to sleep (sopitum), then revived (resuscitauit) by a fresh
injury. Furthermore, in writing of grief as “a wound of the spirit,” he drew ana-
logies to festering, long-term, deep wounds liable to be reopened by new pain
and suffering. The scars were not healing tissues of a flesh wound, but sheaths
over an affliction very much alive. He thought of Henry’s physical wounds
this way, too: he wrote about Henry’s ulcer worsening over time, and thought
that Henry’s lifestyle increased the ill effects of an injury and accelerated the
aging process.173 Gerald’s analogy between bodily and spiritual suffering
reflected his wider learning and thinking. He was no stranger to medical knowl-
edge, even recommending doctors, and appears to have upheld the humors,
believing the body behaved predictably.174 The same, he thought, was true of
the soul.
In Gerald’s view, the episode highlighted a wider truth about the limitations of
the consolatory powers of time and reasoning. At most, they could mollify an
incomparable grief; emphatically, they could not cure the wound. Curare, which
can in some contexts mean “to heal” or “to cure,” here means “to treat” or “to
tend”: a “cured” wound would not still be living, nor could it return revived.
Indeed, most of the verb’s variant meanings (among them “to attend to,” “to
take up,” “to care about”) stress an ongoing undertaking rather than its reso-
lution. Gerald’s view of the persistence of profound wounds was not original.175
The key point about Christ’s wounds on the cross, often invoked in medieval
172
“De priori nempe filio dolorem, beneficio temporis iam sopitum, dolor iste sequens
resuscitauit; quoniam et tunc crudescere uulnera ceperunt quibus cicatricem diuturnitas
obduxerat. Ictus quippe nouissimus eciam ueteres plerumque plagas dolore rescindit;
uulnus enim animi, quod tempore et racione curatum est, commemoracio rursus exulcerat.”
Gerald of Wales, De principis instructione 2.10, ed. Bartlett, 478–80.
173
Gerald of Wales, De principis instructione 2.29 and 3.13, ed. Bartlett, 544 and 618–20.
174
Owain Nash, “Elements of Identity: Gerald, the Humours and National Character-
istics,” in Gerald of Wales, ed. Henley and McMullen (Cardiff, 2018), 203–19, at 208–10.
175
On the spread of awareness and precision about types of wounds and their treatment,
see for example Larissa Tracy and Kelly DeVries, “Introduction: Penetrating Medieval
Wounds,” in Wounds and Wound Repair in Medieval Culture, ed. Larissa Tracy and Kelly
DeVries (Leiden, 2015), 1–23, at 10–12.

172 TRADITIO
devotion to move the faithful to prayer, was that they did not heal.176 As the
context of Gerald’s story made clear, Henry never recovered from the loss of the
Young King. According to Gerald, the earlier experience of grief in losing a son
left Henry more vulnerable to greater suffering. In the same way as Elidyr’s child-
hood loss tormented him yet, time had only covered Henry’s wound. Repeated
suffering, rather than deadening or inuring the bereaved, compounded the long-
term effect of living with grief. Grief remained a powerful driver of action. This
redoubled grief directly caused (effectiuum) Henry to be unable to live without
his sons, whereas until recently he had refused to do so.177 His actions may
have shown him atoning, but his urge to act showed him seeking to overcome
his isolation by recovering his sons, both lost and living.
Gerald’s characterization of Henry’s grief as an incurable wound is significant
because other contemporaries ascribed, or proscribed, restraint in grief to Henry.
After reporting Henry’s desperate mourning, Roger of Howden wrote a speech for
Henry in which the king began by excusing his tears as a father, and then exhorted
his followers not to grieve for too long because everyone dies, because death is an
occasion for rejoicing in God’s aid, and because this energy is better spent on pur-
suing the enemy.178 In his later chronicle, Roger wrote (or adapted) a text that
counselled Henry not to mourn at all, even as a father, because the Young
King, as a would-be parricide, was not really the king’s son.179 Another contem-
porary and diplomat, Peter of Blois, wrote to Henry expressly to console him. He
encouraged the king to replace grief with joy: that his son died penitent and was
with Christ, should inspire the king to reform himself. Peter conceded that
weeping for the dead is “devoted” (pius), and as natural as the fatherly griefs of
Job and Jacob, or the spousal grief of Abraham. Thus he would not chide
Henry for the emotion of grief (doloris affectum) but for excessive grieving
(dolendi excessum). He begged Henry to have moderation in grieving “lest grief
seize you beyond measure” (ne vos dolor rapiat ultra modum).180 Although with
these latter words Peter characterized grief as an active, aggressive force, he never-
theless perceived it as something that could, and should, be measured and con-
trolled. For Gerald, even if God meant Henry to suffer, the vengeance play was
played out. The father’s experience of grief had to be lived with, and knew
176
Anne Kirkham and Cordelia Warr, “Introduction: Wounds in the Middle Ages,” in
Wounds in the Middle Ages, ed. Anne Kirkham and Cordelia Warr (Farnham, 2014), 1–16,
at 1–6, esp. 5.
177
Gerald of Wales, De principis instructione 2.10, ed. Bartlett (n. 165 above), 480.
178
Roger of Howden, Gesta Regis Henrici Secundi Benedicti Abbatis, ed. William Stubbs
(London, 1867), 1:300–302.
179
Roger of Howden, Chronica (n. 38 above), 2:279–80; on which, see Staunton, The His-
torians of Angevin England (n. 96 above), 62–66 and 205–206.
180
PL 207, cols. 4–7. On Peter’s hortatory words, see Staunton, The Historians of
Angevin England (n. 96 above), 210–11.

neither function nor limit. Gerald moralized about Henry’s sins, but not about the
emotion of grief itself, as Peter did.
The sense that the experience of grief is meaningless and deceptive was consist-
ent for Gerald in cases of actual or imagined loss. In his first mother-weasel story,
Gerald had described the quality of grief as vain and deceptive because the mother
weasel’s children were later proved to be alive.181 The loyal dog refused to leave
his master and to accept his death. Henry really did lose his sons, and his self-
deception (that he can restore his relationships with his sons or recover them)
was, for Gerald, a natural part of the experience of grieving. Like a wound, the
feeling had neither meaning nor purpose.
Critical as Gerald was of Henry for what he thought the king brought on
himself, he attempted to understand and to convey what, and how, Henry suf-
fered. In his general comments about how new wounds — like dolor, physical or
spiritual — affect old ones, he also extrapolated from Henry’s experience a
wider observation about human experiences of grief. Henry appeared, in heart
and animus, as a human man who had lost two sons. As a human, he was vulner-
able to deep wounds of body and spirit. Gerald shows us a Henry who was not only
a sinning king and tyrant suffering at the tribunals of God and Fortune, but also a
mirror of human experience and suffering. Thus in his De principis instructione,
Gerald offered a lesson of how one ruler’s experience illustrated an instructive
truth about emotional experience. Grief is isolating, incomparable, incurable, fes-
tering; something one learns to live with, that nonetheless drives one to action,
futile or no; it compounds itself; it can get worse.
In creating a moral tragedy around the deeds and death of Henry II to please
the king’s successors, Gerald shaped the past for present ends. He could, and did,
draw a moral lesson out of what he considered Henry’s faults. This was not all he
did. He loved a well-put idea, and he tried to shape present perceptions to illumin-
ate what he thought of the past. He wrote about emotion in empathetic and
experiential terms, for he construed what he thought kings felt in terms not of
their public office, but of their personal and familial relationships. In so doing,
he related the unique and intimate qualities of an experience in terms he
thought meaningful for wider humanity. Here, in narrating the loss of two
young leaders — and two young sons — he sought to guide his readers’ imagina-
tions so they might better understand the feelings of the dramatis personae of the
past. Gerald’s philosophy was that grief remained. Time could remove it from the
sphere of immediate attention, but any question, suggestion, or act of memory
(willing or unwilling) could quicken the original feeling with the same intensity.
Sorrow and loss lingered, leaving scars and open wounds.
181
Quoting Ovid’s Amores 2.19.11 (mentita dolores). On Gerald’s classical borrowings, see
Georgia Henley, “Quotation, Revision, and Narrative Structure in Giraldus Cambrensis’s
Itinerarium Kambriae,” Journal of Medieval Latin 24 (2014): 1–52.

174 TRADITIO
GRIEF WITHOUT CONCLUSION
Lamentations 1:12 raised the key philosophical question about grieving, and
how to think and write about it. In their stories of loss, the question that inter-
ested these twelfth-century writers most — Lamentations’s question — was
how to navigate the gulf between grief ’s universal aspects and the particular
nature of one individual’s feeling. The Waltham chronicler, Hugh Candidus, and
Gerald of Wales wrote narratives of loss that resonated with William of Malmes-
bury’s idea of grief ’s nature. Grief ’s individual course was dynamic, unpredict-
able, capricious. As a facet of human experience, grieving was worth
remembering and commemorating, often more than details of battles, means of
death, and dates of flames. As writers who imagined the past for their ecclesias-
tical and unknown future readers, they found the emotional quality of the past
a subject of historical value. Feelings of loss were a part of history that ought
not to be lost. Doing justice to grief meant conjuring the feeling. These writers
sought to communicate meaningful ideas about grief ’s nature, and to give a
valid account of experiences of grief in a way that invited both understanding
and sympathy from readers. In order to create that shared understanding, they
appealed to common knowledge (as of Lamentations), common experience (as
in injury), and an ability to imagine (as with Christ’s passion).
The works examined here illuminate a greater range of ideas about grief in high
medieval ecclesiastical circles, and its theological and historical implications, than
previously thought. Readers have studied how Christian morality framed ecclesi-
astical thinking about the “oughtness” of grief, and attitudes of restricting or pro-
scribing grief in certain degrees and durations. This article has shown that, in
these twelfth-century accounts, grief wound its own way independent of these
strictures. This interest in the reality of grief did not supplant beliefs about an
afterlife, consolation, justice, or the meaning of suffering. Such beliefs did,
however, fade into an indistinct background in these stories, reappearing
neither as grief ’s ends nor endings.
Grief, they thought, formed communities of grieving. It brought together
different mourners (William’s Vita Wulfstani), lay and ecclesiastical (Hugh),
political allies and enemies (Waltham chronicler, Gerald), and, if only in
wishful thinking, estranged families (Gerald). It could even bring authors,
readers, and past people together in empathetic understanding across time.
To this end, the Waltham chronicler paused in the telling of Osgod and Æthel-
ric’s grief, and he invited the reader to muse with him on the insight of Lamen-
tations 1:12. However, although they thought people experienced fellowship in
grief, this fellowship did not cure the soul or have any palliative effect on grief
itself. It did not console. The bereaved had been separated from those held dear,
and they continued to remember and suffer. Grief was powerful only in aug-
menting itself.

These writers valued human relationships, which provides context for their
interest in precise experiences of human grief. William, the Waltham chronicler
and Hugh Candidus belonged to close-knit, mutually dependent communities,
which they described in familial terms.182 For Gerald, Henry’s parental and pol-
itical hopes were wound up in his sons’ lives. To be torn from family members,
these writers thought, was devastating in prospect or reality, a form of endless,
earthly exile. The griefs they described followed unexpected, unwilling loss of
family (Henry and his sons) or those like family (the houses of Hugh and the
Waltham chronicler, or William’s Wulfstan). In these cases the predominant feel-
ings described were suffering and futile desires, not assurance, consolation, or
peaceful trust. They suffered, whatever they believed about the afterlife.
This keen focus on human loss, as opposed to divine salvation, made the
bereaved no less Christian in the eyes of these writers. The twelfth-century
writers wrote about, and for, family-like communities. They shared these commu-
nities’ cares, and embraced grieving experiences without reserve. Augustine, by
contrast, wrote evocatively about his own experience of grief, but self-critically,
and in the context of a confession to God, not a history for human readers. It
was filled with regret for his own mistakes and failed relationships. Further
study of how regrets and relationships framed thinking about emotional experi-
ences is a promising avenue for future work, and may help to illuminate why medi-
eval writers wrote about grief to such different effect.
The Impulse to Act

Grief involved an impulse to act, despite the impossibility of recovering the
person lost. Grief thus had qualities both of agency and powerlessness. One
could be struck with grief by an external factor, as a result of God’s will (when
Harold was out of favor) or arbitrary circumstance (as in Leofric’s 1066 illness,
or the deaths of Henry’s sons). An internal act of the spirit — remembering,
remembrance, meditation — could also reawaken grief, as when Gerald’s Henry
II thought of his first son’s death, or when the Waltham chronicler remembered
the responsive miracle and his own loss. This is important because it shows that
meditation was perceived not only as a strategy for consolation, but also as a
trigger, involuntary or willfully chosen, for compounded grief.
These medieval writers’ explorations of grieving included both spontaneous
and deliberate aspects of emotional experience. They did not view an emotion
as an internal response to an external stimulus.183 Remembering could be a con-
scious act of will, as it was for Wulfstan’s mourners, or involuntary. The bereaved
182
Rosenwein, Emotional Communities (n. 6 above).
The “hydraulic” model and criticisms of it are summarized in Rosenwein, “Worrying
183
about Emotions in History” (n. 99 above), 834–37.

176 TRADITIO
acted in grief, or chose to weep because they could not “do” anything about a loss
(Hugh). Grief, too, acted: it could know and move (William of Malmesbury), or
fester and reopen as a wound (Gerald). Metaphors are powerful for suggesting
ways of thinking about an idea, and these medieval metaphors for grief (a
living being, an idea, an action, an event, a wound) suggested a clear, but
rather more complex, philosophy of emotion.184
One implication is that they did not perceive grief in binary terms, in which the
bereaved person either wielded grief or was overcome by it. This matters, because
their ideas of grief do not conform to the common idea that medieval ecclesiastical
writers viewed grand passions as abnormal, unrestrained, and dominant forces in
need of curbing, nor to the idea that grief could be used. In the essence of William
of Malmesbury’s metaphor, a passion was a dynamic phenomenon with which a
person had an ongoing relationship. Two entities were involved, two entities
acted, two entities reacted — and the course of that relationship could be as
stable or as unpredictable as any human relationship.
This intimate association of grief and action suggests that they did not find it
meaningful to make a sharp distinction between grief and mourning. Mourning
was part of the experience of grieving, not the public face of a private, inner
turmoil. The relationship between agency and powerlessness in the narratives
examined here merits further study. There are, for example, intriguing analogies
with the views of some modern appraisal theorists, building on psychological
theory, who have noted that the stimuli for “phénomènes émotionnels” may be
both external and internal to the organism.185 This article’s findings suggest
there may be value in re-thinking existing ideas about private and public grief,
thought and action, and will and control in the Middle Ages.
Boundless Grief
When attempting to compare grief, authors adopted the perspective of an
external observer comparing relationships, and estimating the probable depth
of feeling involved in each loss based on intimacy. They were not trying to see
through the eyes of one mourner, to capture the particular quality of that grief.
The idea of measuring grief related more to the standpoint and aims of the
184
On the power of metaphors to shape emotional experience, see Laura Otis, Banned
Emotions: How Metaphors Can Shape What People Feel (Oxford, 2019); and Lockett, Anglo-
Saxon Psychologies (n. 5 above).
185
Piolat and Bannour, “Émotions et affects” (n. 5 above). On action and motivation,
see Carolyne Larrington, “The Psychology of Emotion and Study of the Medieval Period,”
Early Medieval Europe 10 (2001): 251–56; Alexander F. Shand, The Foundations of Character:
Being a Study of the Tendencies of the Emotions and Sentiments, 2nd ed. (London, 1920); and
John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, 3: Sadness and Depression, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth,
1991), 28, 30, and 85–93.

writer: was the writer thinking about grief, or with it? Narrative choices like these
are subtle, closely connected with an author’s chosen perspective; and they offer
evidence for a range of medieval sensibilities and ways for thinking about grief.
Yet the question of whether or not grief was a measurable thing divided inter-
preters, and the issue had significant philosophical import for how any writer nar-
rated an experience of grief.
Some medieval writers, looking on from the outside, compared depths or degrees of
emotion. Grief invited the same superlatives, or comments that superlatives insuffi-
ciently expressed the true nature of grief.186 The Carolingian commentaries on
Lamentations made implicit comparisons between Old and New Testament
sorrows. A parent’s grief, in particular, might be singled out. Bonaventure’s
sermons considered Mary’s grief for Jesus incomparable; Gerald dwelt on the
father’s experience of grief. Neither Gerald nor his contemporaries discussed here
described anyone person’s experience as “less” in any meaningful way. They perceived
a problem: a comparative or quantitative approach to emotion could easily trivialize
what an individual historical person felt. This was Lamentations 1:12’s puzzle. Com-
paring griefs might do no justice to any one experience of loss. By describing each
experience as exceptional, they tried to adopt the perspective of the bereaved.
For these twelfth-century writers, “beyond measure” was an experientially
valid way of describing grief. Grief felt like that. Thus, as an inherent quality of
real human grief, it was not and could not reflect a failure of human control. A
narrative of unmeasured grief sought not to rebuke or disparage, but to state
what seemed a true quality of real feelings of loss. Grief was like people:
human, but universally variable. Gerald both compared and refused to
compare: the grief of the king of France as Geoffrey’s ally was greatest; but in
Henry’s own experience as father, grief was incomparable. To William of Malmes-
bury, who personified grief, to ask “How much grief do you feel?” or “How much
grief is too much?” would be an irrational act, and as meaningless as asking, “How
much a person are you? Are you too much?”
In their thinking, grief was not a scalable or limited emotion: and that very
essence could be communicated. Their confidence that their narratives and
descriptions had purchase on reality is intriguing, because it deviates from
another contemporary discourse about grieving. These writers ignored the “inex-
pressibility” convention, unlike many of their contemporaries who wrote that
words could not convey the feelings after disaster like the Fall of Jerusalem
(1187). Heraclius, the patriarch, wrote that it was barely possible to describe
the scale of suffering and grief, while Templar Terricius found the disasters impos-
sible to recount.187 Hugh Candidus commented on the difficulties of expressing
186
That grief is incomparable is a common remark, from the earliest stories of grief. See,
for example, Kowalik, Theology and Dehumanization (n. 4 above), 41–56.
187
Staunton, The Historians of Angevin England (n. 96 above), 221–22.

178 TRADITIO
acute joy as well as grief, but did not claim it impossible (Illuc autem ueniens, non
est nostre paruitatis explicare cum quanto susceptus sit gaudio).188 In their historical
projects, or William’s commentary, these writers did not think valid ideas about
grief surpassed the limits of textual expression: they thought they could write
meaningfully about the emotion in a way that invited empathy. Through narrat-
ing they could render in prose the twists and turns (versare) of each unique
instance of a universal experience.189 This is important, because it suggests a phil-
osophy behind literary conventions that placed a high premium on the explana-
tory and empathetic power of well written words.
Enduring Grief
In these accounts, it was grief ’s nature to persist. Grief was a continuum,
not an episode. The experience of grief was not a function of time: it followed
no terminal rise-and-fall trajectory, as has been argued was the case in the
French response to Agincourt.190 Grief compounded grief, as wound worsened
wound — a connection Gerald made explicitly.191 For the royal father of his
account, grief temporarily retreated from conscious awareness without healing
the spirit. The Waltham chronicler, who cared for his lost Waltham family, saw
grief for Harold and the English growing in reach over time. For the Waltham
chronicler and Henry, grief got worse. Not once did these writers say that grief
reached an end or ran its course. Grief could be managed (curare), but not cured.
One consequence of these writers’ idea that grief persisted (and could increase
its reach) is that human grief, though it had an effect, had neither function nor
purpose in their minds. It was an experience: lifelike, willful, and unpredictable,
not an inert device they could always reliably control. Gerald of Wales, in a differ-
ent context, cited classical wisdom that it is useful in life (in uita utile) to have
nothing beyond measure (ut ne quid nimis).192 But grief, as we have seen, was
not one of these measurable things. Henry’s grief served no function: it was a
188
HC, 120–21.
189
Liber super explanationem lamentationum, ed. Winterbottom et al. (n. 28 above). On
the close relationship between experience and narrative, see David Carr, Time, Narrative,
and History (Bloomington, 1986). On genuine feeling in medieval writing and tropes, see
Mary Garrison, “The Study of Emotions in Early Medieval History: Some Starting
Points,” Early Medieval Europe 10 (2003): 243–50.
190
Megan Cassidy-Welch, “Grief and Memory after the Battle of Agincourt,” in The
Hundred Years War (Part II): Different Vistas, ed. L. J. Andrew Villalon and Donald
J. Kagay (Leiden, 2008), 133–50. On emotional sequences, see Rosenwein, Generations of
Feeling; Elina Gertsman, ed., Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History (New York, 2012).
191
For a different view, of a later grief as “recapitulating” an earlier, see Garrison, “Early
Medieval Experiences of Grief and Separation” (n. 3 above), 230.
192
Gerald of Wales, De principis instructione 2.29, ed. Bartlett (n. 165 above), 544–5.

wound. It was neither good nor evil, neither tool nor fault, nor the mechanism of
divine justice. It existed.
In many ways, the notion of function is not relevant to a good deal of medieval
thought about what grief felt like. Many thought the dead continued to interact
with the living, and that the human Jesus, Mary, and the saints were intercessors
more powerful than the living.193 The rise of an interest in refining the state of
Purgatory in the eleventh and twelfth centuries shows the persistent interest in
the fate of the dead, and in maintaining a relationship with them.194 Where
grief had the effect of inspiring action or formed communities of grieving,
solace was not a corollary of that outcome.
These writers did not think that frequent loss or repeated experiences with
grief, as through disease or child mortality, inured or toughened people against
grief, nor that grief traumatized sufferers and inhibited meaningful expression
of emotion.195 These findings suggest that studying ideas of grief in qualitative
terms has the potential to offer new insights into medieval ideas about whether
loss and grieving were experienced in relation to scale. The fervor of the language
medieval Jewish communities used to express and communicate loss after the
Black Death, for example, did not map in a quantitative or scalable way onto
the numerical size of the death toll.196 Grief was grief, but no two griefs were
alike, and neither time nor the number of deaths could affect or predict the
course of this feeling with a mind of its own.
These writers did not think people became inured to grief: nor that they became
resigned to it. Writers might have accepted, intellectually, the theory that all
forms of suffering could be explicable by divine justice. The inevitability of suffer-
ing did not make it easier to bear. Despite trusting in divine providence, William
admitted he could not intuit the justice of God’s plan.197 He thought suffering had
a meaning; but it was a curious phenomenon, one worth understanding on its own
terms, as a facet of human experience. These writers did not apply a tone of justice
or solace to their narratives of grief because these ideas were irrelevant to the emo-
tional dimension of the experiences they wrote about. Even though the dead were
ultimately interred, these writers highlighted the enduring reluctance of the living
to part with the dead. To the Waltham chronicler, the still-sorrowing crucifix did
not appear to bow in humble acceptance of God’s justice. Harold was surely in
193
Bartlett, Why Can the Dead (n. 65 above).
194
Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory (Chicago, 1984).
195
For the view that trauma did inhibit expression, see Catherine A. M. Clarke, “Signs
and Wonders: Writing Trauma in Twelfth-Century England,” Reading Medieval Studies 35
(2009): 55–77.
196
Susan L. Einbinder, After the Black Death: Plague and Commemoration Among Iberian
Jews (Philadelphia, 2018).
197
William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum 3.245, ed. Mynors et al. (n. 44 above),
1:458–60.

180 TRADITIO
heaven, yet Waltham would weep forever. Hugh Candidus’s fellow monks denied
what appeared to be Hugh’s inevitable death. The seeking, clinging actions and
eternal laments of the bereaved monks and canons for their spiritual fathers per-
sisted along with their belief in divine justice. Gerald thought Henry II wanted his
sons back. These experiences, they thought, were frustrating and emotionally dif-
ficult for the people whose histories they narrated—and, at times, for them as
authors of history and memoir. These ecclesiastical chroniclers were not resigned
to the misery they wrote about, nor were they peaceful and content in the cer-
tainty that it would be useful to obtain an end.198
These writers implied that one could sympathize with, or encourage, people
who did not accept grief, and who resisted emotional suffering and bereavement
even when those losses and feelings were ordained by God’s decree. In their histor-
ies, the people who grieved were not following Paul’s exhortation to rejoice in suf-
fering (for example, Rom. 5:3–4). In Thes. 4:13, Paul distinguished between the
grief of the hopeful (aware of divine salvation) and the grief of the despairing
(those ignorant of divine salvation). These twelfth-century writers knew all
about divine salvation. So, they thought, did the people they wrote about. Yet
the grief they described was far more despairing than hopeful in tenor, and
they neither reprimanded nor gently rebuked it. In the late eleventh century,
Anselm argued that God chose to have a human son, Jesus, so that the divinity
might participate in, and so understand, human suffering; and to save people spir-
itually.199 Not all of that human suffering was construed as salutary: it was
thought to endure, and to be endured. It may be significant that some writers
searched for meaning and insight not in the promise, hope, and revelations of
the New Testament, but in the unresolved struggles and plangent voices of the
ancient Old Testament — of Job, of Elijah, of Jeremiah.
The absence of consolation and a neat moral framework from their accounts of
grief suggests that their thinking had an intellectual affinity with tragic narrative,
normally seen as a primarily secular phenomenon. In true tragedy, the experience
of suffering is a valid and valuable subject for writing independent of ideology. The
writer’s interest in the experience was simply because it happened — a phenom-
enon separate from the goal, function, purpose, or meaning of suffering. The
responsive miracle of Waltham’s crucifix is the best example of how this tragic
tone coexisted in the same thought-world as heavenly prayer. The chronicler ima-
gined a compassionate Christ figure sorrowing for an earthly human loss he was
powerless to prevent. The chronicler also imagined Tovi’s fervent devotion to
198
For the view that medieval ecclesiastical thought embraced and accepted suffering,
see George W. McClure, Sorrow and Consolation in Italian Humanism (Princeton, 1991), 9.
199
Anselm of Canterbury, Cur Deus homo, ed. Franciscus Salensius Schmitt, in
S. Anselmi Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi Opera Omnia (Edinburgh, 1946–61), 2:37–133. See
also Fulton, From Judgment to Passion (n. 60 above).

the Christ figure of ultimate power, whose sufferings had saved human souls.
These two ideas coexisted in the same thought-world. The tone of both episodes
is supremely confident, both in Christ’s compassion and in the tenacity of grief.
The chronicler’s narrative strengthened the theological idea that Christ was, in
some way, still present, sorrowing over present griefs of present people. It also
shows that worldly, human-oriented tragedy had a valid place in ecclesiastical
thinking about grief. This article has demonstrated that the boundary between
sacred and secular thought about worldly grief was by no means clear. An appre-
ciation of a consolation-resistant experience of human grief lived — however
unhappily — alongside belief in God’s justice and providence.
These medieval works reveal a wider range of thinking on the emotion of grief in
an ecclesiastical context beyond a discourse of consolation and divine hope of
heaven. One implication of these writers’ thinking was that consolation may actu-
ally be impossible, because grief behaves with the caprice of a living being, or the
occluded festering of a deep wound. Not all stories had ends. Neither rituals of
mourning and commemoration, nor philosophical consolatio and belief in an after-
life, nor even the knowledge of a person’s final resting place really assuaged the per-
vasive sense of loss.200 In these chroniclers’ thought, providence and fortune could
not give a full account of the experience suffering and grief. Theories about consola-
tion, as in other eras, often had little direct relevance to ideas about experience.
The Dignity of Human Suffering

These writers perceived enduring grief as natural and rational. Grief was a
meaningful feeling, rational in the sense not of rational numbers — capable of
being counted or measured — but of perfect consistence with reason, judgment,
and human experience and learning. And, thus, grief was not evidence of
madness or deviance on the one hand; and not in need of moral correction or
control in duration on the other. They valued the earthly experience of grief, treat-
ing it with an empathetic dignity that matched its depth without moralizing,
rationalizing, or sweetening the brutality of suffering. Their narratives empha-
sized that the experiences of ignorance, confusion, and desperation were related
to suffering, but without condemning grief as excessive or a distraction from
God. Healing was not an inevitable, natural, or even (in some cases) desirable
outcome of loss and grief.
The dignity of grief lay in its honesty — however, and whenever, it might
appear. Human loss of other humans mattered to these writers. The idea of sincer-
ity was important to their thinking about grief. Grief was worthy of attention
200
On crusader families and the uncertainty of the lost person’s fate as compounding the
experience of loss, see, for example, Nicholas L. Paul, To Follow in Their Footsteps: The Cru-
sades and Family Memory in the High Middle Ages (Ithaca, 2012).

182 TRADITIO
because it was sincere. It exposed truth in a spirit. William of Malmesbury

defended the sincerity of mourners’ tears. The brethren’s grief for Harold —
because as an emotion, it could only be sincere — was worth more to God than
prayers or gifts, about which there was no such guarantee. In Gerald of Wales’s
mind Henry’s fatherly grief was not a king’s staged political event, but a
father’s festering wound, which could neither be faked nor wished away.201 For
these writers grief was not an earthly emotion felt at the expense of a spiritual
one, even if there was dissonance between the two; nor was acute and impulsive
personal feeling necessarily a reason to feel humiliated, as their relative contem-
porary Aelred of Rievaulx claimed he did.202 On the contrary. If ecclesiastical
writers renounced the world, they still felt its human losses acutely. The
Waltham chronicler wrote of his personal sorrow for his religious community,
and sorrows for Harold and the fate of the English, in similar ways. In the
abbey of Peterborough, grief for other humans kindled an outpouring of divine
devotion — not the other way round.
In these narratives of loss we have encountered a grief of many guises: a living
entity, a festering wound, a feeling that can neither be averted nor healed. For
early medieval writer Alcuin, grief was raw, complex, verging at times on
madness.203 Grief, as the writers discussed here portrayed it, was sound and
rational. The Waltham chronicler’s experience of separation led him to reflect
on how to convey, and how to understand, historical experiences of grief. It was
in a state of grief, not hope, that the Peterborough monks knew their desire
and gathered in strong and defiant prayer for Hugh’s life. And for Gerald of
Wales, Henry II was most human, most sympathetic, and most honest, in his
enduring grief. These stories of grief offered no moral. Instead, they offered a
lesson in the sincerity of human experience. These writers perceived sanity in
grief, for grief put the bereaved in touch with their own agony and mortality,
the reality of their relationships with others, and the priority of their own
values. Grief, in its very rawness and turbulence, demanded that the animus
express candor and clarity — or emotional sanity and honesty, as we might
201
For a different view, that medieval writers did not distinguish between genuine and
performed emotions in public, see Gerd Althoff, “Gefühle in der öffentlichen Kommunikation
des Mittelalters,” in Emotionalität: Zur Geschichte der Gefühle, ed. Claudia Benthien, Anne
Fleig, and Ingrid Kasten (Cologne, 2000), 82–99.
202
Aelred of Rievaulx, De spirituali amicitia, ed. A. Hoste, in Aelredi Rievallensis Opera
Omnia, ed. A. Hoste and C. H. Talbot, CCM 1 (Turnhout 1971), 287–350; and David Knowles,
“The Humanism of the Twelfth Century,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 30 (1941): 43–
58, at 53. On medieval emotional humanism, see Boquet and Nagy, Medieval Sensibilities (n.
58 above); compare Richard C. Dales, “A Medieval View of Human Dignity,” Journal of the
History of Ideas 38 (1977): 557–72, for a medieval view of human dignity framed in terms
of Christian perfection.
203
Garrison, “Early Medieval Experiences of Grief and Separation” (n. 3 above), 229.

choose to view it. Feigning indifference would be the madness, the delusion, the
true isolation — the choice that, in the minds of these medieval ecclesiastical
writers, would lead a human farther from Christ’s model of humanity, suffering,
and compassion.
University of Oxford
emily.winkler@history.ox.ac.uk
Keywords: grief, grieving, loss, separation, emotions, suffering, ecclesiastical, monastic, history
of ideas, Christian piety and devotion

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GRIEF, GRIEVING, AND LOSS IN HIGH MEDIEVAL

Traditio 77 (2022), 129–183

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William of Malmesbury’s twelfth-century Commentary on Lamentations as a point

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In the High Middle Ages, new intellectual currents emerging in universities

LAMENTATIONS 1:12 IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY

theological material: M. R. James, Lists of Manuscripts Formerly in Peterborough Abbey

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meditate anew on an age-old theme.28 In his comment on Lamentations 1:12,

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experience.32 The activity of grief produced a result: an answer to the mourners’

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GRIEF AND THE WALTHAM CHRONICLE

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Waltham’s Grieving Crucifix: An Affective Miracle

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The Search for Harold

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THE MANY PARTINGS OF HUGH CANDIDUS

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Illness and the Prospect of Bereavement

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of physical suffering, but on the brethren’s experience of witnessing his illness,

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of urgency, which belied his spoken assurance of a positive outcome. By juxtapos-

Losing Spiritual Fathers

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Fire and Feeling

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The distinctiveness of Hugh Candidus’s account emerges sharply in comparison

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Association of America 18 (1903): 459–512; and J. Armitage Robinson, “William of Malmes-

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GERALD OF WALES AND THE WOUND OF GRIEF

Gerald of Wales (d. 1223), born in Pembrokeshire, studied at Gloucester Abbey

Georgia Henley and A. Joseph McMullen, “Gerald of Wales: Interpretation and

Innovation in Medieval Britain,” in Gerald of Wales: New Perspectives on a Medieval Writer

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Enduring Wounds and Personal Loss

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