Anglo-Saxon Church and Society c. 1000

About the year 1001, a peasant ploughing a field at Slepe, in a manor belonging to the abbey of Ramsey, stumbled upon the bones of four bodies hidden in the soil. One set of bones was extravagantly identified in a dream as those of St Ivo, a Persian bishop, no less, who had spent his last days in England as a hermit. A great crowd witnessed the translation of these relics from Slepe to the abbey. So that the relics would be accessible for public veneration, the sarcophagus containing them was allowed to protrude through the abbey walls into the world outside. A spring gushed from the sepulchre and became the source of many cures. Some people were sceptical: a foreign monk suspected the cult to be nothing more than the product of silly, superstitious rustics, who were habitually deceived out of heathen error into making cults of springs and bones. But his objections were stilled by the spring’s miraculous powers.1