Tales from the Crypt: Death, Dying, and Communal Mourning in St Erkenwald
by Sarah Wilson
Late medieval literature and visual art abounds with cultural signifiers of death. Like a modern-day Halloween block decked out with 12-foot skeletons, severed zombie heads, faux tombstones, gauzy spider webs, and grinning jack-o-lanterns, medieval manuscripts proliferate with grisly depictions of death and dying to remind audiences of their own mortality. Revenants and wraiths return to settle outstanding debts, tortured souls lament their entrapment in purgatory and beseech the living to pray on their behalf, and ubiquitous skeletons and corpses emphasize the transience of earthly life and the need to repent before it is too late.
The anonymous poem St Erkenwald, written in the late fourteenth century, exemplifies this morbid trend. The poem uses the discovery of a tomb and the reanimated corpse within as a touchstone for thinking through death, dying, and communal loss during a period of immense social unrest. In the aftermath of plague, labor unrest and inequality, ongoing warfare, and political turbulence, St Erkenwald depicts a collective experience of grief that serves to unify, however briefly, a fractured community in a time of great crisis.
The poem begins with a group of laborers uncovering an elaborate tomb deep beneath their reconstructive work on St. Paul’s cathedral in London. The tomb is delightfully macabre: “garnished” “with gargoyles” (“wyt gargeles garnysht” [48]) and inscribed with strange gold runes they cannot understand (“enbelicit wyt brygt golde lettres / Bot roynyshe [runelike] were the resones that there on row stoden” [51–52]). To their horror and amazement, they uncover an unnaturally preserved body entombed within, which looks so pristine and regal that they are mystified as to how it has escaped historical record and physical decay. Finding no answers to the corpse’s identity within the archives, the growing crowd awaits the intercession of Bishop Erkenwald, who arrives after hearing “such a commotion about a corpse” (“such a cry aboute a cors” [110]).
Erkenwald commands the cadaver to speak to him, and the dead man describes his life as a judge in pre-Christian Britain who sought always to live and work as virtuously as possible. Despite his great virtue, he was denied eternal rest in heaven because he died 462 years prior to the birth of Christ and now dwells “in that dark death where the dawn never comes” [in that derke dethe þer dawes neuer morowen] (307). This revelation prompts the crowd to weep, with Erkenwald sobbing “so forcibly” that he “had no space to speak” [hade no space to speke so spakly he ȝoyskyd] (312). He sheds a single tear on the pagan judge’s face that facilitates, accidentally, his baptism and the decay of his long-preserved body. Having received an explanation and theoretically satisfactory conclusion to the enigma of the tomb, the crowd proceeds collectively from the cathedral still weeping “with much mourning and mirth mingled together” (350).
Part of what sustains my abiding interest in St Erkenwald is this emphasis on the collective sorrow that accompanies the discovery of the judge’s tomb and which endures after Erkenwald’s miraculous intercession, the “mourning and mirth mingled together.” Though the problem of the righteous heathen’s damnation is solved by Erkenwald’s baptism, the focus on the bystanders’ devastation and Erkenwald’s desolate weeping directs the reader more so to its depiction of suffering. The ambiguous lack of resolution to the disordered tumult at the poem’s outset, and the grief that lingers after the body dissipates, complicates what would otherwise be a straightforward saint’s life.
Moreover, the sense of grief is figured as a deeply communal experience. Once the tomb is discovered, the cathedral swells with people from all walks of life who metonymically represent the entire world:
There came there so many sorts of people
That it seemed as though all the world had gathered there in an instant[Ther commen thider of alle kynnes so kenely mony
That as alle the worlde were thider walon wytin a honde-quile] (57–64).
As the judge relates his story, the crowd falls into a silence akin to that of tomb itself:
There sprang in the people
In all this world no word, nor wakened no noise
But they stood as still as stone and listened,
Seized with much wonder, and very many of them wept.[Þer sprange in þe pepulle
In al þis worlde no worde, ne wakenyd no noice
Bot al as stille as þe ston stoden and listonde
Wyt meche wonder forwrast, and wepid ful mony.] (217–20).
In their horror and amazement at the judge’s story, the people are metaphorically transformed into a mirrored image of the tomb, standing in stony silence and participating in the judge and Erkenwald’s expression of devastation as they empathize and identify with the plight of the unsaved man. The tears Erkenwald sheds are simultaneously penitential, sympathetic to the plight of the unsaved, and figuratively baptismal. The tears of the crowd accord as well to these uses, but they also suggest several different kinds of mourning: mourning for the loss of a sense of historical continuity, mourning for a time in which justice was administered as equitably as the judge describes, and mourning for the contemporary plight of a country in dire need of healing and restoration.
Immense social unrest surrounded the probable 1386 date of this poem’s production: labor shortages in the decades after the Black Death (sound familiar?) led to mass uprising in 1381, the ineffectual child king Richard II was on the throne, and ongoing skirmishes with France in the Hundred Years War contributed to a sense of political disarray. In my larger project, I consider how expressions of communal grief and sorrow signaled a medieval politics of mourning, through which identification with the sorrow of another or lament at the state of the world can inform ethical habit and disposition. Instead of being something to work through quickly in an elusive quest for closure, lingering within the space of grief deepens communal bonds and relational ties towards others, forging a new sense of relationality and empathy to others within both the secular nation and the more broadly conceived kingdom of God.
Although the depiction of mourning in St Erkenwald follows a fairly orthodox arc of lamenting the dead judge’s unfortunate timing in being born before Christ, the grief that lingers after his baptism, in the context of the failures of historical record and the incomplete assimilation of England’s pagan past, accentuates its lack of resolution. It becomes its own poetic mirror of mortality, wherein the people bearing witness to the judge’s second death are reminded that they too are dying in life, simultaneously grieving his death alongside their own.
The past few years have brought our contemporary politics of mourning into sharp relief alongside the systemic and institutional failure to provide adequate opportunities to grieve collectively in the ongoing wake of the pandemic, to cope meaningfully with the trauma felt by so many. Our grief, like that in St. Erkenwald, stems from numerous losses coinciding simultaneously: not only from the ongoing COVID pandemic, but also from climate change, racial injustice, the opioid crisis, and absolute political disarray, to name but a few. Our grief similarly exceeds the available resources for catharsis and resolution. Writing on the politics of grief, Nouri Gana states that:
when in tension with the prescribed strategies of its fulfillment, mourning becomes a political force that forces the reconfiguration of those strategies. Far from being just a mode of adapting to a changed reality (after the loss of the other), mourning here is a threshold force of sociocultural change.
Given the dramatic sociocultural transformations occurring in late-medieval England, it’s worth paying careful attention to moments where mourning is inscribed in communal contexts in the literature from this period. How might we read negative emotions such as grief, despair, anger, and fear as indexes of shifting ideas around governance, ethics, and politics? How might these emotions play a role in building and sustaining affective communities, even as they carry the risks of greater isolation and fragmentation?
St. Erkenwald depicts an ambiguous grief that spills out from the containment of the cathedral space during a historical moment of social and political turbulence, loss, and transformation. Through the restitution of the pagan, the poem grapples with the irreducibility of an abyssal past. That past permeates the present, reckoning with the present threshold of sociocultural change we are experiencing today. Despite its morbidity and lachrymal flourish, the poem’s co-mingling of mourning and mirth spins a small tale of hope from the depths of the crypt.
Sarah Wilson earned her PhD in medieval literature from Northwestern University in 2020. She is currently working on a book project on mourning and consolation in the late medieval literary imagination. Her primary research interests include the politics of grief, penitential literature, dream visions, and medieval death culture writ large. She works as the Program Manager for Adult Education at the Newberry Library in Chicago.
