The Hanged Man: A Story of Miracle, Memory, and Colonialism in the Middle Ages (review)

Robert Bartlett has previously devoted scholarly attention to medieval legal procedure (trial by ordeal) and to English (and European) expansionism and attitudes to peoples regarded as subject or inferior. These interests meet in this compact study of one of the many stories included in the canonization dossier of Thomas Cantilupe, bishop of Hereford. In November 1290 William Cragh, a Welshman variously described as brigand and rebel, was sentenced to be hanged by William de Briouze, lord of Swansea Castle; for some reason he attracted the compassionate interest of the lord's wife, Mary, and, although to all appearances satisfactorily dead, was "measured" to St. Thomas and resuscitated. The story was first reported by the canons of Hereford Cathedral in their compilation of Cantilupe's miracles, and in 1307 it was painstakingly investigated by the papal commissioners appointed to conduct the official enquiry into his sanctity. Their inquisitorial procedure is in itself an important part of Bartlett's story. The testimonies they elicited from witnesses conflicted both with one another and with the story previously told by the Hereford canons, but Bartlett does not attempt to resolve all these contradictions in order to achieve an impossibly authoritative version of events. He is more interested in letting the dead speak. How did the witnesses (including the Hanged Man himself) remember and date past events, and what did they reveal under questioning about their own beliefs and behavior? A wealth of context (for example, about the late thirteenth-century Welsh background) and discussion (for example of concepts of time and space) is contained in the book's succinct chapters. We are told what can be known from other sources about William and Mary de Briouze and the other actors in the story; we learn about death by hanging and about current devotional practices.

If there is anything missing, it might be a fuller discussion of Cantilupe's Welsh miracles, for the revival of the Hanged Man was by no means the only one. The saint responded to the supplications of both English persons in Wales and native Welshmen, including individuals of both nationalities who had been imperiled during the wars. William Cragh's case was conspicuous inasmuch as he was clearly regarded by several witnesses as a very dubious character; he was also solely Welsh-speaking. The papal commissioners investigated another miracle which interestingly resembles one performed by Thomas Becket over a century before. A boy from Ludlow, mute because he had no tongue, went at least twice to the shrine, on each occasion obtaining a little more tongue, which enabled him to speak mingled Welsh and English. Becket's Welsh client had gone to Canterbury, which was a long way away, but when relics of Becket were installed at Whitchurch in Shropshire, specifically as a shield against the marauding Welsh, they seem to have become a focus for Welsh and English pilgrims alike. The efficacy of English saints in such a context might be thought to underline English political authority; did recourse to the saint imply acceptance of the establishment which possessed and presented his relics? Another Welshman who had been dumb for four and a half years came to the shrine "against the will of his kin and friends," but it is not clear what their objections were. For the canons of Hereford Cathedral it was of course entirely desirable that their saint should be all things to all men, and many native Welsh fell within the geographical range that the shrine might reasonably hope to cover (Swansea was three days' journey away). Perhaps William Cragh was playing shrewdly to his audience when he claimed to have been a pilgrim to Cantilupe's shrine before his arrest and...