God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Yet Aelfric’s own vernacular Lives of the Saints (mid-990s), aimed at a secular, aristocratic audience, contains laudatory homilies of St Oswald, St Edmund of East Anglia and Judas Maccabeus. There was no pacifist metaphor here. Following Abbo of Fleury’s widely popular Passio sancti Edmundi, Aelfric’s King Edmund is a martyr for Christ at the hands of the Danes. Even though the king was shown as throwing away his weapons, his resistance is made explicit; as Abbo put it, ‘I have never fled a battlefield, thinking it a fine thing to die for my country (pro patria mori)’; Edmund, a keen warrior, is ‘a martyr for Christ’. Aelfric copied Bede in showing Oswald using force to win power and protect his people and faith; Judas Maccabeus is ‘godes thegen’, waging bloodthirsty war, his troops supported by angels and the prospect of remission of sins. Aelfric makes clear that unbelievers will be slain ‘for their hardheartedness against the Heavenly Saviour’. Of course, as a monk Aelfric insisted on the primacy of the spiritual conflict inherent in the New Covenant but he admits that Judas Maccabeus, through his temporal wars

is as holy, in the Old Testament

as God’s elect ones, in the Gospel-preaching.²⁴

Both Aelfric and Abbo employ the image of a secular warrior, in battle or not, aspring to martyrdom to point to their respectability.

These warrior saints were rulers who, in a sense, validated their own wars. Abbo of Fleury made great play with Edmund’s status as an anointed monarch, vested with authority to defend his people. In his version of the Passio, Aelfric refers to Alfred of Wessex, another protector of his people against pagans. This concentration on kings ceased to match contemporary reality as both the political and ecclesiastical worlds increasingly revolved around princes, counts, even castellans and seigneurs, whose military strength supplied social control and church patronage. From the tenth century the church’s express support was extended more widely to soldiers in public wars and against pagans, even their swords, arms and banners beginning to be blessed in formal liturgies. In his Vita Geraldi Comitis Aurillac (Life of Gerald, count of Aurillac), Abbot Odo of Cluny, one of the most influential ecclesiastical figures in western Christendom in the early tenth century, depicted a man of action, a saintly knight who fought in God’s cause for the common good in a just war. However removed from actual life – Gerald’s sword never shed blood – Odo’s portrait allowed for morality in martial culture. This was particularly important as monasteries more than ever relied on the protection of just such local military bosses. Thus, in the eleventh century, Odo of St Maur-les-Fosses, called Burchard, count of Vendôme, a count ‘faithful to God’ because he defended churches, monks, clergy, widows and nuns: his protection of St Maur itself counted for much. This pious layman nevertheless engaged in private warfare against his neighbours and, ‘confidently trusting in the Lord’, killed people.²⁵ However, this idealized picture of the pious warrior was, in many cases, no less than the truth, as evinced in the level of lay funding and donations to monasteries. The spiritual anxieties attendant on violence as a way of life were not confined to the cloister.