St Erkenwald is a fourteenth-century alliterative poem in Middle English, perhaps composed in the late 1380s or early 1390s. It has sometimes been attributed, owing to the Cheshire/Shropshire/Staffordshire Dialect in which it is written, to the Pearl poet who probably wrote the poems Pearl, Patience, Cleanness, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

St Erkenwald imagines an encounter in the seventh century between the historical Erkenwald, Bishop of London 675 to 693, and a corpse from an even earlier period, the period before the Roman conquest of Britain. The poem's themes revolve around the complex history of Britain and England, and the possibility in fourteenth-century Christian thought of the salvation of virtuous pagans.

Manuscript

<!-- Deleted image removed: thumb|right| Priorslee Hall, an address in Shropshire occupied by Sir Humphrey Pitt from whom the only known copy was recovered -->

St Erkenwald survives in only one manuscript, British Library MS Harley 2250. The document was discovered in 1757 by Thomas Percy; the manuscript had been in the possession of Sir Humphrey Pitt of Balcony House, Shifnal, and Priorslee, Shropshire. Other important ancient literary materials narrowly avoided being burnt as kindling by household staff in the circumstances in which Percy was discovering this important cultural survival.

This is a composite manuscript, created by binding together two pre-existing manuscripts which were originally unrelated. One of the other texts in the part which contains St Erkenwald, copied by the same scribe, ends with a scribal colophon noting the year, 1477; since this note is by the same scribe, the copy of St Erkenwald therefore dates from in or around 1477, roughly a century after the poem's probable composition.

The rest of the related part of the manuscript contains many other works of a pious and devotional sort, including at least ten other stories about saints in Middle English verse (albeit rhyming verse rather than alliterative verse): although St Erkenwald has usually been edited or anthologised in isolation, the surviving copy appears to have been transmitted as part of a collection of saintly writings.

A typical line divides into two half-lines, each containing two primary beats; the beats are usually the lexical stresses of open-class words. The first three beats—that is, both beats of the first half-line and the first beat of the second half-line—normally alliterate together, while the fourth beat normally does not alliterate with the others. Sometimes the fourth beat may alliterate with the first three beats of the following line, possibly as a point of deliberate construction. The miracle in the poem is not in these materials, suggesting the story post-dates this manuscript.

It is possible the plot of the poem is a development of an (in its time) well-known story relating to the discovery of the head of a dead judge and John de Beromyarde, a famous Dominican of the later 1300s; a source being Summa Praedicantum.

The poem is also engaged with fourteenth-century England's sense of its own complicated religious history, as a land which was thought to have been pagan (before the coming of the Romans and for much of the Roman period), Christian (in the late Roman period), pagan (under the earliest English) and then Christian again (after evangelisation by Augustine of Canterbury).

thumb|right|The Curfew Tower of Barking Abbey The Curfew Tower was one of the three gateways to Barking Abbey, founded in 666 by Erkenwald, later Bishop of London.

Sources

There is no direct source for this poem. The known lives of Erkenwald do not contain a miracle concerning the salvation of a pagan judge. The closest analogue is the story of Pope Gregory the Great and the Roman Emperor Trajan. In several versions of the story, Gregory learns of Trajan's just life, and is able to help Trajan's soul enter heaven. This might be the inspiration for St Erkenwald.

The story of Trajan was popular, and can, for example, be found in Langland's Piers Plowman and in an early commentary on Dante's Divine Comedy.

thumb|right|Shrine of St Erkenwald in St Paul's Cathedral, relics removed 1550, lost as a monument in the Great Fire of London

Language and dialect

Past scholarship agrees that the language of the circa 1477 manuscript copy of St Erkenwald can be placed somewhere in the north-west Midlands. The evidence at least strongly suggests that it can be more precisely placed in Cheshire.

thumb|Needlework in Barking Church showng St Erkenwald

Contemporary engagement with the material

The poetry has been engaged with in current culture and scholarship in the several ways, including:

  • a 1997 play staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company;
  • An episode of the podcast "Pop Medieval"
  • 3 May 2023: A sung eucharist at St Paul's Cathedral conducted by the Bishop of London
  • in April, 2025 there was a reading of the ancient poem at Soulton Hall by Harry Frost.

References

Manuscript

  • from the British Library

Editions

  • J.A. Burrow and Thorlac Turville-Petre. A Book of Middle English, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996)
  • Clifford Peterson (ed.) and Casey Finch (trans.). In The Complete Works of the Pearl Poet (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1995) (with facing page Modern English translation).
  • Ruth Morse. St. Erkenwald (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer Ltd, 1975) .
  • Henry L. Savage. St. Erkenwald (Hampden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1972)
  • Clifford Peterson. St. Erkenwald (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977)

Commentary and criticism

  • Larry D. Benson, 1965 “The Authorship of St. Erkenwald.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 64: 393–405.
  • Christine Chism, Alliterative Revivals (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2002) .
  • Seeta Chaganti, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary: Enshrinement, Inscription, Performance (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 47 - 71.
  • J. R. Hulbert, 1918 - 1919 “The Sources of St. Erkenwald and the Trental of Gregory,” Modern Philology 16: 485 - 93.
  • T. McAlindon, 1970 “Hagiography into Art: A Study of St. Erkenwald.” Studies in Philology 67: 472 -94.
  • Ruth Nissé, "'A Coroun Ful Riche': The Rule of History in St. Erkenwald." ELH 65.2 (1998): 277–95.
  • Monika Otter, "'New Werke': St. Erkenwald, St. Alban's, and the Medieval Sense of the Past," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies. 24.3 (1994): 387–414.
  • William A. Quinn, 1984 “The Psychology of St. Erkenwald.” Medium Aevum 3, No. 2: 180 - 93.
  • G. Whatley, “Heathens and Saints: St. Erkenwald and its Legendary Context.” Speculum 61.2 (1986): 330–63.
  • Helen Young, 2007 "Refusing the Medieval Other: A Case Study of Pre-Modern Nationalism and Postcoloniality in the Middle English "St Erkenwald"." 'The Politics and Aesthetics of Refusal.' Eds Caroline Hamilton, Michelle Kelly, Elaine Minor, Will Noonan. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 140 - 65.
  • St. Erkenwald's Harrowing of Hell
  • The Sacrament of Baptism in St. Erkenwald
  • Online edition
  • PDF version of long-form essay discussing the poem