Gregory the Great in a papal letter (Register 11.37) of 22 June 601, to Æthelbert, 'king of the Angles' (Kent, southern Britain) remarks that he is sending the king gifts with the 'blessing' (benedictio) of *Peter (the Apostle, S00036), possibly contact relics of some kind; later reproduced in the Ecclesiastical History of Bede, writing at Wearmouth-Jarrow (north-east Britain), 731. Written in Latin in Rome.
Evidence ID
E07402
Type of Evidence
Documentary texts - Letter
Major author/Major anonymous work
Gregory the Great (pope)
Pope Gregory the Great, Register of Letters, 11.37
Extract of Gregory's final remarks to King Æthelbert, following a long letter praising him for his conversion to Christianity
GREGORIUS ADILBERTO REGI ANGLORUM
[...] Parua autem exenia transmisi, quae uobis parua non erunt, cum a uobis ex beati petri apostoli fuerint benedictione suscepta. Omnipotens itaque deus in uobis gratiam suam quam coepit perficiat uitam uestram et hic per multorum annorum curricula extendat et post longa tempora in caelestis uos patriae congregatione recipiat [...]
'Gregory to Æthelbert, King of the Angles
... I have also sent you some small gifts, which to you will not be small, since they will be received as a blessing (benedictio) of the blessed Apostle Peter. And so let Almighty God perfect in you his grace as he has begun, and extend your life, here for the course of many years, and after a long time receive you into the congregation of the heavenly fatherland...'
Text: Norberg 1982, vol. 2, 932.
Translation: B. Savill.
RelicsContact relic - unspecified
Protagonists in Cult and NarrativesEcclesiastics - Popes
Contact relic - unspecified
Transfer/presence of relics from distant countries
Protagonists in Cult and NarrativesEcclesiastics - Popes
Monarchs and their family
Source
Gregory's Register is a collection of some 854 of his letters as pope, collected into 14 books (each book representing an indictional year of his pontificate, from 1 September to 31 August) of varied length and deriving from the file-copies that were made in Rome and kept in the papal archive. The original copies survived into the ninth century, but were subsequently lost; from the late eighth century onwards, however, because of the exceptional stature that Gregory had by then attained, various collections of his letters were assembled from the original copies (the largest under Pope Hadrian I at the end of the eighth century), and these constitute the Register as we have it today.The Register does not contain all the letters that Gregory despatched as pope, since in some of those whose text survives there are references to other letters, wholly lost; but the collection we have is unique from the late antique period, and only matched in quantity and range of subjects by the registers of high-medieval popes. Recipients range from papal administrators, through prominent churchmen and aristocrats, to kings and the imperial family, and treat a wide variety of topics, from mundane administrative affairs of the papal patrimony to deep theological and moral considerations.
In 731 Bede also included a version of this letter in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (1.32). He states in his preface to the History that Nothhelm, a priest of London (and, after Bede's death, archbishop of Canterbury, 735-9), had provided him with copies of 'some letters of Saint Gregory and other popes', following a period of research in the Roman archives (sanctae ecclesiae Romanae scrinio) with the permission of Pope Gregory II (715-31). There has been some debate, however, about whether all Bede's papal letters were copied from Roman registers, rather than English archives (see further Story, 2012, 785 ff.).
Since Bede's version of this particular letter includes a farewell address and extended dating clause which are not found in the later continental tradition of Gregory's correspondence - and which are very unlikely to have been copied into the register of the papal archive in Gregory's time - then it is most probable that the copy to which he had access derived from the original letter sent to England (perhaps archived at Canterbury, in Æthelbert's kingdom of Kent).
Discussion
Gregory's remark that his gifts will come to Æthelbert with the 'blessing' of Peter may well indicate that these were contact relics, since the word benedictio is used in this sense in similar contexts elsewhere by Gregory - compare for example his letters to Empress Constantina (E06351), King Reccared of the Visigoths (E06410) and Bishop Eulogius of Alexandria (E06336) (see further Thacker 2002, 17-18; note also the Greek use of the equivalent term eulogiai: Wiśniewski 2019, 3)Bibliography
Edition and translation of Bede:Colgrave, B., and Mynors, R.A.B., Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).
Editions of Gregory's letters:
Ewald, P., and Hartmann, L., Gregorii I papae registrium epistolarum, 2 vols (Berlin, 1881-99).
Norberg, D., S. Gregorii Magni, Registrum epistularum. 2 vols. (Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 140-140A; Turnhout: Brepols, 1982).
Translation of Gregory's letters:
Martyn, J.R.C., The Letters of Gregory the Great, 3 vols. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2004).
Further reading:
Mommsen, T., "Die Papstbriefe bei Beda," Neues Archiv der Gesellschaft für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde 17 (1892), 387-96.
Story, J., "Bede, Willibrord and the Letters of Pope Honorius I on the Genesis of the Archbishopric of York," English Historical Review 127 (2012), 782-818.
Thacker, A., 'Loca Sanctorum: the Significance of Place in the Study of the Saints,' in idem and R. Sharpe, eds, Local Saints and Local Churches in the Early Medieval West (Oxford, 2002), 1-43.
Wiśniewski, R., The Beginnings of the Cult of Relics (Oxford, 2019).
Record Created By
Benjamin Savill
Date of Entry
30/08/2022
| ID | Name | Name in Source | Identity | S00036 | Peter, the Apostle | Petrus | Certain |
|---|
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