Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Bishop of Worcester
January 19 · d. 1095
also known as St. Wulfstan, Wulstan of Worcester, Wulstan
Wulfstan of Worcester, born about 1008 and bishop from 1062 until his death in January 1095, was the last English-born prelate left in England after 1075. He governed one see for thirty-three years across the Norman Conquest, rebuilt its cathedral while weeping over what the rebuilding destroyed, and preached week after week in the port of Bristol until its trade in slaves to Ireland was given up. He was canonized in 1203.
Wulfstan was born at Itchington in Warwickshire, around the year 1008, to Æthelstan and Wulfgifu. Coleman, who later served as his chaplain and knew him better than anyone, said his parents made his name by joining halves of their own: Wulfgifu and Æthelstan. Both of them, in old age, entered religion at Worcester, in their son's own city.
He was schooled at Evesham and then at Peterborough, under a master named Ervenius who was a fine scribe and illuminator. Brihtheah, Bishop of Worcester, ordained him deacon and then priest. He served for a time at Hawkesbury in Gloucestershire, and it was there that the goose happened. A goose was roasting for his own dinner, and the smell of it caught him and held him; then urgent business called him away before he could eat a bite of it. Afterward he did not congratulate himself on having missed the meal. He reproached himself for the pleasure he had taken in the smell, and vowed never to eat that food again. He kept the vow.
Then he entered the monastery at Worcester and climbed the whole ladder of it: schoolmaster, precentor, sacristan, treasurer, prior. As prior he began to preach to the people, and a learned monk from overseas named Winric told him to his face that he had no business doing it. Preaching belonged to bishops. Silence and the cloister suited a monk. This showy business of gesture and speech looked less like piety than like a man angling for promotion. Wulfstan, armed (says his biographer) with the shield of patience, answered in two sentences: nothing is more pleasing to God than to call a people going to ruin back into the way of truth, and so he would not stop; but if he could learn of anything more pleasing to Christ, he would do that instead without hesitation.
In 1062 Ealdred, moving up to York, left the see of Worcester to him, and Wulfstan was consecrated on the eighth of September. His first trouble came not from Normans but from Ealdred, who took Worcester's revenues and twelve of its manors with him and kept them. It took Wulfstan until 1070 to get them back.
By then everything else had changed. The Normans had come, the English bishops were being replaced one by one, and Wulfstan submitted to King William and kept his see. In 1075 Siward of Rochester died, and from that year Wulfstan was the only bishop of English birth left alive in England. He did not spend that singularity in protest. He took no part in the English rising of 1075 and helped put it down; in 1088 he armed his household and held Worcester castle for William Rufus. Lanfranc, the Norman archbishop, gave him the vacant see of Lichfield to administer, which is what an archbishop does with a man he trusts.
Some of the Normans found him quaint. Geoffrey, Bishop of Coutances, asked him gently why he wore lambskins when a bishop might have sable, or beaver, or fox. Wulfstan answered that men versed in worldly cunning ought to wear the skins of cunning animals; he himself, conscious of no craftiness, was content with a little lambskin. Geoffrey pressed: at least cat, then. And Wulfstan said, "Believe me, the Lamb of God is chanted far more often than the Cat of God." Geoffrey laughed out loud, delighted, it is said, that he could be mocked and the other man could not be bent.
Bristol was in his diocese, and Bristol bought men and women from all over England and shipped them into Ireland for profit. It bought slave-women, used them, and sold them pregnant. Neither the love of God nor the fear of King William, his biographer says, had been able to end the custom. So Wulfstan went and stayed. Often two months at a stretch, often three, lodging near the traders, coming every Sunday to preach at them. He did not do it once, brilliantly. He did it until they stopped.
In 1084 he began to pull down the church St Oswald had built at Worcester, to raise a greater one in the Norman manner. He stood in the graveyard while it came down and said nothing for a while, groaning now and then; and then it broke out of him with a rain of tears. "We wretches," he said, "are destroying the works of the saints, thinking pompously that we make better ones. How much greater than us was St Oswald, who built this church, how many holy and religious men served God in it!" The bystanders told him he had it backwards, that God had spared him to see the church magnified and he ought to rejoice. He went on weeping anyway. The crypt he built stands today, the oldest part of the cathedral.
He grew very old. In 1091, witnessing a charter at Dover, the record notes he was past eighty. And in 1094, when Anselm, the new Archbishop of Canterbury and the finest mind in the Norman church, needed to know how the English church had done a thing before the Conquest, he wrote to Wulfstan, because there was no one else left to ask. Eadmer, who was Anselm's own biographer and had no Worcester loyalties to serve, called him the one and only survivor of the ancient fathers of the English, a man conspicuous in all religion and deeply learned in the old customs of England. Wulfstan's reply to Anselm survives. So does the written profession he made to Lanfranc in 1070, in which he explains, in his own first-person voice, exactly why he had been consecrated by York while Canterbury was held uncanonically.
He died in the night, at Worcester, in January 1095, in about his eighty-seventh year, the last of his kind and still, at the end, the man everyone sent to when they wanted to know what the truth had been.
Wulfstan went to Bristol and stayed there, two months at a stretch and often three, preaching every Sunday at men who were making a fortune selling human beings, until they stopped. Not one sermon; a residency. And when Winric told him that preaching was above his station, he did not defend his right to it, he defended the work itself, and left the door open to being shown something better. Most of what needs doing in your life will not yield to a single decisive act, and you probably already know which thing it is: the conversation you keep having, the person you keep returning to, the habit that has outlasted three of your resolutions. What would it look like to stop waiting for the one right moment and simply keep showing up, every Sunday, until it gives?
Almost everything known about Wulfstan comes through a single chain of two writers, and the shape of that chain matters more than any one fact in it. Coleman, his chaplain and chancellor and later prior of Westbury, wrote a Life in Old English sometime between Wulfstan's death in 1095 and his own in 1113. He had been at the bishop's elbow, and every intimate detail we have (the lambskins, the weeping, the goose, the household habits) is his. That book is entirely lost. By the second quarter of the twelfth century the Worcester monks could no longer read Old English easily, and they had William of Malmesbury turn Coleman into Latin. William did so during the priorate of Warin of Worcester, whose tenure Darlington places at roughly 1124 to 1143, and dedicated the result to him. He says he follows Coleman's order of events, but he compressed and reworked rather than translating word for word. So the reader stands at two removes: an eyewitness, refracted through a translator-adapter a generation later, in a genre whose purpose is honour.
William's Vita Wulfstani survives in one manuscript only, British Library MS Cotton Claudius A.V, folios 160v to 199v, copied late in the twelfth century. That copy loses a leaf exactly at the goose story, so Wulfstan's vow of abstinence survives only through one of the five or so later abridgments. William also treated Wulfstan twice more, in the Gesta Pontificum Anglorum (which tells the demolition scene more fully, and the Geoffrey of Coutances exchange) and in the Gesta Regum (which supplies his part in the rising of 1088, a political episode the monastic Vita passes over). Outside William stand Hemming's Worcester cartulary and brief Life, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Florence of Worcester, Domesday Book for the Oswaldslow exemption of 1086, and, valuably because it is a Canterbury source with no Worcester interest to serve, Eadmer's Historia Novorum. Two documents preserve Wulfstan's own first-person words: his profession of obedience to Lanfranc in 1070, and his letter of reply to Anselm, which Eadmer copied out.
Three points are contested, and two of them are now settled. The date of death: the unique manuscript gives 19 January under a corrupt year, Florence gives Saturday 18 January 1095, and Hemming, the earliest witness, implies the 19th. Darlington observed that both the Vita and Florence agree Wulfstan died on a Saturday night, and that in 1095 neither the 18th nor the 19th was a Saturday. The 20th was, and an eleventh-century hand entered his death under 20 January in a calendar that had been his own. The feast is nonetheless kept on the 19th. The canonization: 21 April 1203 is the act, and 14 May 1203 is the date of the bull announcing it to the bishop and convent of Worcester; sources printing the May date as the canonization have printed the letter's date. The birth year is genuinely uncertain: about 1008, triangulated from the "over eighty" of the Dover charter of 1091 and from his dying in about his eighty-seventh year; the Victorian offered "1012?" with its own question mark.
Veneration began at Worcester immediately and locally, and his tomb survived a cathedral fire in 1113. At Easter 1158 Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine came to the shrine and laid their crowns on it. An attempt at canonization under Eugenius III, between 1145 and 1153, failed. The successful attempt came half a century later and not by accident: the cathedral burned on 17 April 1202, and the petition was pursued with a rebuilding to fund. Bishop Mauger went to Rome in person, with a delegation of monks headed by Walter of Broadwas and Randulf of Evesham; a papal commission (John Comyn, Archbishop of Dublin, among the examiners) weighed the miracles reported at the shrine; and Innocent III canonized him on 21 April 1203, the bull following on 14 May with a collect for his commemoration appended.
King John was buried beside the shrine in 1216, having answered, when asked where he wished to lie, "To God and St Wulfstan I commend my body and my soul." On 7 June 1218 Bishop Silvester translated the relics to a new shrine on the day the rebuilt cathedral was consecrated, before the young Henry III and a great concourse of prelates and magnates; portions were given to those present so that the saint might be honoured in many places, and a rib reached St Albans in gold and silver. In 1538 the shrines of Oswald and Wulfstan were dismantled under Bishop Hugh Latimer. The bones were not scattered but encased in lead and reburied within the cathedral, and exactly where is unknown. The Church of England keeps him as a Lesser Festival on 19 January, and the Episcopal Church commemorates him in Lesser Feasts and Fasts.
He has no medieval iconographic tradition. Where he appears in art he holds a mitre and crozier, which mark a bishop and nothing more. The broken chains, the goose and the vegetables in the window at St Mary the Virgin, Hawkesbury, are the work of the artist Caroline Pederick, dedicated in 2011.
The one indispensable book is R. R. Darlington's edition, The Vita Wulfstani of William of Malmesbury, to which are added the extant abridgments of this work and the Miracles and Translation of St Wulfstan, Camden Third Series volume 40 (Royal Historical Society, London, 1928), freely readable at archive.org under the identifier `in.ernet.dli.2015.188113`. It prints the Latin Vita, the abridgments, the miracles and translation narrative, Wulfstan's profession of obedience to Lanfranc (Appendix 7), the bull of canonization, and an introduction that adjudicates most of the disputed dates. The quotations in this article are drawn from it and translated here unless otherwise noted: Winric's challenge and Wulfstan's reply at Book I chapter 8 (pages 14 to 15); the Ratcliffe prophecy at page 45; the Agnus Dei and Cattus Dei exchange at Book III chapter 1 (pages 46 to 47); the weeping over St Oswald's church at Book III chapter 10 (page 52); the Bristol chapter at Book II chapter 20 (pages 42 to 44); the crozier legend, which belongs to the thirteenth-century abridgment and not to William, at page 77; and Eadmer's phrase for Wulfstan, from the Historia Novorum in Anglia, at page xliv of Darlington's introduction, with Wulfstan's letter to Anselm at pages 45 to 46 of Rule's edition of Eadmer. William's fuller telling of the demolition scene stands at section 141 of the Gesta Pontificum Anglorum, edited and translated by Michael Winterbottom and R. M. Thomson, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, 2007), volume 1, pages 437 to 439, from whose translation the phrase about piling up stones while neglecting souls is taken. The Vita has been Englished twice before the modern edition: by J. H. F. Peile, a former Archdeacon of Worcester, as William of Malmesbury's Life of Saint Wulstan (Blackwell, Oxford, 1934), and by Michael Swanton in Three Lives of the Last Englishmen (Garland, 1984). The current authoritative text is Winterbottom and Thomson's William of Malmesbury: Saints' Lives, Oxford Medieval Texts (Clarendon Press, 2002), with facing English. For a biographical article, see Emma Mason's entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004); the older Dictionary of National Biography article of 1885 to 1900 is dense and useful on dates but repeats the crozier legend with dialogue of its own invention.
The one thing modern scholarship removes outright is the story everybody tells first. In the legend, William the Conqueror and a synod move to depose Wulfstan for want of learning, and Wulfstan refuses to surrender his staff except to the king who gave it, drives it into the stone of Edward the Confessor's tomb, and no Norman hand can pull it out. That episode is in no early authority. It is not in the Vita, not in the Gesta Pontificum, not in Florence. It first appears in Osbert de Clare's Life of Edward the Confessor, written in 1138, forty-three years after Wulfstan's death, by a writer who freely composed long speeches for his characters; Ailred of Rievaulx retold it about 1163, and a thirteenth-century abridger folded it back into the text of William's Vita, which is why it reads today as though it belonged there. There is no attested attempt to depose him at all: the council at the Parret concerned York's claim on the diocese of Worcester, not Wulfstan's competence, and Lanfranc had just entrusted him with the vacant see of Lichfield. The legend's afterlife, however, is real history. The Burton Annals record King John citing it to the papal legate Pandulf in 1211 as proof that the king alone had the right to appoint bishops.
Two other corrections are worth carrying. He is not Wulfstan the homilist, Archbishop of York, who died in 1023, wrote the Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, and confusingly held Worcester himself; the two were traditionally kinsmen, and Emma Mason's modern account has our Wulfstan named after that kinsman rather than after his parents. And the tension a modern reader will feel is not manufactured: the man whose entire later significance is that he was the last Englishman, keeper of the old customs, was in practice a capable administrator aligned with the Norman regime, who helped suppress an English rising in 1075 and held a castle for a Norman king in 1088. Both halves are true, and the twelfth-century framing of him as the wistful last survivor was, as Eleanor Parker has noted, already somewhat patronizing in its own time.
O God, our heavenly Father, you raised up your faithful servant Wulfstan to be a Bishop and pastor in your Church and to feed your flock: Give abundantly to all pastors the gifts of your Holy Spirit, that they may minister in your household as true servants of Christ and stewards of your divine mysteries; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings for a Pastor
Isaiah 6:1–8Psalm 71:16–23v1 Peter 5:1–11 or Acts 20:24–35Matthew 24:42–50