9 - Disability Networks in the Campsey Manuscript

Summary

A paralyzed woman from distant Wales arrives at the shrine of St Osith in southern Essex, at the end of a long sequence of pilgrimages by which she has sought a cure at cult sites all over England. Even at the great Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, the last site she knew of, the Welsh woman has learned in a dream from St Edmund himself that she will be cured only if she makes yet one further journey, to watch and pray at the church of St Osith. She thanks her dream counselor, but adds:

‘Icest respons trop mei desheite,

Kar cher sire, ceo sachiez bien,

De seinte Osith ne say jeo rien,

Ne sai u est ne en quele terre …’

(‘This answer greatly discourages me, for, dear sir, you may know that I have never heard of St Osith nor do I know anything about her. I don't know where she is, nor in what country, nor do I know where to seek St Osith’; lines 1161–64)

The next morning, though, some chance passers-by are able to tell her the way to this apparently obscure site, and the crippled woman convinces her exhausted circle of care-givers to make a last, eight-day journey to St Osith's church at Chich, where the pilgrim is, indeed, cured after a night praying at the shrine.

This crucial episode, to which this essay will return, occurs in the Life of Saint Osith, Virgin and Martyr (La Vie Seinte Osith, Virge et Martire), its unique copy surviving in a collection of thirteen saints’ lives now widely called the Campsey manuscript (London, British Library, MS Additional 70513); all of them are written in the French of England. The crippled woman's story provides one particularly dense node in a rich, surprisingly varied network of disabilities and cures that ramifies among the Campsey saints’ lives. The anecdote may also serve as an initial emblem for the overlapping lost-and-found histories that have led to our current, still emerging knowledge of the French of England, and of the medieval disability culture that permeates so much of medieval art and literature.