A SCHOLAR who has studied a Fifteenth-century manuscript suggests that a former Archbishop of York, Thurstan (1114-40), was more highly venerated than historians have generally thought him to have been: in reality, a saint’s day would have been observed for him by monks in the primary week of February.
The senior properties historian for English Heritage, Dr Michael Carter, made the invention within the archives of King’s College, Cambridge. In a reference in a manuscript from Pontefract Priory, St Thurstan appears in a calendar of saints’ days observed on the monastery (King’s College MS 31 fol 3v).
The entry for six February, translated from Latin, reads: “Death of Saint Thurstan, archbishop of York, yr of grace, 1140” It has also been written in red ink — an indication of its significance to the monks at the moment.
Dr Carter said on Sunday that this represented “unambiguous proof that Thurstan was indeed a saint, and that his name must be seen alongside other religious contemporaries in northern England, including St William and St Aelred of Rievaulx, St Waldef of Kirkham and Melrose, and St Godric of Finchale”.
He described Thurstan as being “well-known amongst medieval historians and students as a figure of immense political and social significance in the course of the early half of the Twelfth century, but all have denied that he ever achieved sainthood”.
Thurstan, who was born in Normandy in 1070, visited the Abbey of Cluny in his youth where he vowed to someday change into a Cluniac monk, Dr Carter said. “On 25 January 1140, aged nearly 70, and in failing health, he fulfilled this vow by resigning from his position as Archbishop of York and retiring to the Cluniac priory at Pontefract. He died lower than two weeks later, on 6 February, and, as befitted his status and importance, was buried before the high altar at Pontefract Priory.”
Other accounts have been given of his sanctity, English Heritage reports.
A couple of days after Thurstan’s death, the Archdeacon of Nottingham was said to have experienced a vision of Thurstan in a dream, by which he appeared in heaven among the many saints. Other sources report that, after Thurstan’s death, the monks at Pontefract opened his tomb to search out that neither his body nor the vestments by which he had been buried had decayed, and that a sweet smell — considered an “odour of sanctity” in medieval times — emanated from the grave. A Life of Thurstan, written at about this time, refers back to the “Blessed Thurstan”.
“Saintly cults of this sort, largely restricted to a single monastery and its immediate surroundings, didn’t at the moment require papal approval,” Dr Carter writes.
A professor of medieval history on the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, Professor Janet Burton, specialises in medieval monastic and non secular orders. She included Thurstan’s entry in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
“Dr Carter’s discovery has added an additional dimension to our understanding of Thurstan’s legacy and his place within the religious culture of the medieval north,” she said. “A person of European dimensions, Thurstan spent the primary five years of his period of office on the Continent, where he enjoyed contact with popes and cardinals, and the leading lights in recent emergent monastic movements.
“He was imbued with all the most recent reforming ideas that were sweeping the Church. He transformed his vast diocese, introducing administrative change, fostering pastoral care, and above all encouraging recent monastic foundations.”
