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I would like to thank the AHRC for funding my doctoral studies, during which I wrote this article. Thanks must also go to Dr Alan Thacker and this Journal's anonymous expert reader for their comments on earlier versions of this article. Any remaining mistakes are my own.
At Ramsey abbey in the late eleventh century, the decaying blood, pus and gore of a cancerous growth were siphoned off the jaw of the monk Eadwacer into the cup of St Oswald.1This contact relic was the very cup that St Oswald drank from whilst he lived, and the monastery of Ramsey had kept it there ever since. According to Eadmer's Miracula s. Oswaldi, on Oswald's feast day they would fill it with wine, and the brothers in the refectory would drink from it, hoping that it would bestow upon them the blessing of the renowned bishop. A fourteenth-century custumal from the monastic cathedral of Winchester enjoins that on St Æthelwold's feast day his cup should be carried around the refectory with a pitcher of wine and all the brothers should kiss it. These two monastic rituals are strikingly similar, and yet were recorded three centuries apart. The Winchester custumal belongs to the family of monastic obedientiary rolls: documents that recorded the financing, organisation and duties of monastic offices. Although the obedientiary offices themselves (the sacrist, cellarer etc) were probably established by the early eleventh century, these documentary accounts of their duties, incomes and expenses only developed in the later medieval period, brought on by the gradual tendency to assign certain monastic estates to certain offices.2Now responsible for specific estates and with a fixed income to support their offices, the officers had to demonstrate that they were spending the money responsibly and discharging their duties. Whilst this manuscript is the only evidence of this ritual on the feast of Æthelwold's deposition, it is possible that it had been performed for centuries, but only recorded in the fourteenth century.
Items such as these cups were contact relics: objects that had been in contact with the saint during their life or after their death.3The holy power that the saint had commanded in life was believed to have instilled such items. More common variants...