Dear Elena, Otfried, and other fellow list-members who may be able to help
I'm especially grateful for your learned comments since I am about to submit the
final text of a chapter on St Arilda (and two other 'undiscussed' saints' cults
in Gloucestershire) for publication later this year in a book on _Authority and
Community in the Middle Ages_. Indeed, Otfried and Bill will remember helping me
with the text of a Latin _oratio rythmica_ composed in Arilda's honour c. 1220.
Both names, that of Arilda and her alleged murderer Muncius, have given me
problems, not least because other than the version _Arildis_ in the _oratio_ and
_Arild_ in a (?mason's) graffito, neither name is recorded earlier than the
early sixteenth century, when the tale was written down at Gloucester Abbey (now
Gloucester Cathedral) by the antiquarian John Leland, apparently from a
notice-board at her shrine.
I have taken Arild to be a abbreviation of an Old English name such as
Aethelhild, and thus in line with a number of cults in the English Midlands
celebrating local saints with names which have such A- proto-themes. But perhaps
I am mistaken.
Similarly, I may be taking the wrong tack with Muncius. _Mund_ does appear to be
on record as a proto-theme, so I had thought it possible that a name beginning
_Mund_ had been hypochoriscised (gosh, hope I've spelled that correctly),
perhaps distorted, and then Latinised.
Arilda was translated to Gloucester from her local place of veneration 'in
Norman times' according to Leland, but there was good reason for supposing her
cult to be much older and _very_ local and thus the details of the saint's
story (including the names) to have been vunerable to distortion in the course
of oral transmission.
But dear me! If Muncius is on record as a Latin cognomen, and your various
objections to the suggested etymology weaken my previous train of thought,
should I be looking in a different direction entirely? Not Old English, but...
But what? First it should be said that the story line is the very common one of
murder by rejected suitor (Leland says M killed A 'because she would not lie
with him'), so the motif could have come from any of a number of sources,
insular or continental. Ditto the line that a well sprang up at the place of
martyrdom. Ditto that the location of the church dedicated in honour of A there
was determined by a divinely-inspired cow.
Two points occur to me, and I should be glad to be knocked down on either or
both. First, the location of A's cult is not far from Bath, which received a
Frankish abbess for its monastery in the (?seventh) century. Indeed, Bath Abbey
was given a royal manor (and its mother church) in the immediate vicinity in the
mid-tenth century, and there was a marked interest in female martyrs at Bath.
Second, one context for the transmission of Arilda to Gloucester is the
acquisition of the place of her veneration by William the Conqueror's wife
Matilda. Alternatively the saint may have been given to Gloucester by the
previous owner, a wealthy English noble named Beorhtric. Tradition had it that
Matilda confiscated Beorhtric's widespread estates because he had spurned her as
a marriage partner when visiting Flanders where her father was Count. (A nice
piece of irony, given the Arilda story.)
So, could this be a story that originated in Francia, or in Flanders, and became
attached to the Gloucestershire locale by conflation or confusion? Do the names
Muncius and Arild[is] make any better sense in a continental context?
Graham Jones
Leicester
PS to Mary, who asks what the connection might be between a toft and a munt:
After the addition of a rock garden? ;-)
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