'Gather his worms to your bosom': the 1094 letter of Anselm to Gunhilda

In the hunt for early medieval nicknames throughout my PhD research, I’m forced to leaf through a number of sources that I’m less familiar with. I’ve worked through a number of ecclesiastical sources, hagiographies, and accounts of royals and heroes. But the time eventually came to tackle those dreadful and mysterious sources: letters.

In this process of wading through early medieval epistles, I came across an example that, although well-known to most historians, I had never read. It’s dated 1094 and written by Anselm (saint and Archbishop of Canterbury) to Gunhilda (nun and daughter of short-ruling king Harold, of 1066 fame). Today I’m not going to provide you with an extensive study of the letter (we’re all busy), but provide you with access to the text, and to point out what I see as its most interesting features, and uses for the historian.

The letter represents a rather sordid state of affair, and reads a little like an early medieval soap opera. Gunhilda had fled her life as a nun and married Alan Rufus (‘the Red’), Lord of Richmond. In 1093 Alan Rufus had died, and Richmond had been inherited by his brother, also called Alan but distinguished by the byname Niger (‘the Black’). This letter is an attempt by Anselm to redirect Gunhilda away from marrying Alan Niger, who she now appears to have been cohabiting with, and abandoning the life of a nun.

The wonderful folks over at Epistolæ have published the letter online in its entirety, in both its original Latin and in translation, which can be found here. The letter itself is printed in: Anselm, Sancti Anselmi Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi, Opera Omnia, ed. F.S. Schmitt (6. vols, Edinburgh, 1946-63), iv.46-50. You can find the translation in: Anselm, The Letters of Saint Anselm, ed. and trans. W. Fröhlich (Kalamazoo, 1993), 69-74.

I’ll let you read through it at your own leisurely pace (there will be no test). There are a wealth of interesting avenues of discussion arising from the letter - contemporary perceptions of gender and its norms, the lay/ecclesiastical divide, questions of dynastic power following the Conquest etc. But today I want to point out just two interesting features. The first is the alarming visual quality of Anselm’s prose, in which a rather extreme set of imagery (worthy of a heavy-metal band) is employed, no doubt intended by Anselm to scare Gunhilda into ‘obedience’. Note, for example, Anselm’s reminder of how Gunhilda and Alan Rufus’ relationship ended:

‘Go now, sister, lie down with him on the bed in which he now lies; gather his worms to your bosom; embrace his corpse; press your lips to his naked teeth, for his lips have already been consumed by putrefaction. Certainly he does not now care for your love, in which he delighted while alive, and you shrink from his rotting flesh, which you longed to possess.’ (Fröhlich 1993, 69-64)

There’s an alarming vividness here that’s perhaps absent from some of the drier source-types (charters, I’m looking at you). It’s an interesting chance to further humanise individuals of the past, particularly the ‘great and the good’. As such, the letter is a useful pedagogical tool, perhaps for exploring those deeper themes we mentioned above, through an arresting (and mercifully short) sample of text.

The second is the interesting evidence that the letter provides for the study of nicknames. Here we find the pairing of Alan ‘the Black’ and Alan ‘the Red’, in what appears to be a reference to hair colour. So, we’re probably dealing with a rather sweet attempt to distinguish between the two brothers by reference to a stand-out feature, something we saw also (far more explicitly) in Bede’s account of the two Hewalds. This is a far more functional - some might even say ‘boring’ - embodiment of nicknaming than the colourful, creative, and sometimes shocking nicknames we see elsewhere (Alfred ‘Toad-Tesicles’, I’m looking at you).

It’s also interesing to note that we know next-to-nothing about the role of nicknaming in early medieval life-cycles, and at what stage of an individual’s life they were most likely to pick up a nickname. Alan Rufus’ nickname is attested elsewhere by Alan Niger’s is not; perhaps here it is invented out of necessity by Anselm as a tool to distinguish them? Or did these two brother gain their nicknames in childhood, and they followed them throughout their careers? Sadly, we will probably never know the answer.