A Call to Alms: Ælfric’s Condemnation of Hoarding in Catholic Homily II.7

Though the Benedictine monk and Old English homilist Ælfric (ca. 950-ca. 1010) was not rich, he was well acquainted with those who were. Indeed, the monastic reform movement of which he was a product and the monasteries in which he wrote (Cerne Abbas) and over which he ruled (Eynsham) depended on the patronage of wealthy landowners such as his benefactors Æthelweard and Æthelmær, both ealdormen (ruling men) of Wessex.¹ As Malcolm Godden has shown, Ælfric in his sermons tended to be solicitous toward those whose social status in the late tenth century had come to be largely defined by great monetary wealth.² To offer them moral support, he naturalized, justified, and rationalized their existence and purpose, going so far as to qualify and contravene patristic exegesis and the Bible itself to make his case in their favor. In light of such interpretive exertions, it is surprising to discover in the Second Series of Catholic Homilies a departure from Ælfric’s usual attitude toward the wealthy as outlined by Godden. In a sermon for the First Sunday in Lent (CH II.7), Ælfric rearranges his main source and rewrites scripture to counter the false assumptions by which wealthy English Christians rationalized hoarding their riches. To be sure, he mounts the critique with characteristic care, and his reproach accords with his usual distinction between the virtuous and dishonorable rich. Unusually, and unusually boldly, however, he dramatizes the consequences of the wealthy’s specious reasoning and stingy almsgiving in a final Judgment Day scene wherein Christ singles out for damnation the avaricious rich.

The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate the surprising specificity and urgency of the charge of hoarding that reflect Ælfric’s anxiety over this worrisome symptom of greed. Analyses of his treatment of his source and of a near-contemporary homilist’s different use of that same source bring to the fore the sermon’s timeliness and Ælfric’s present distress. First, comparisons of his vernacular discussion of almsgiving with its Latin source, the Sermo de Misericordia (Sermon concerning mercy), demonstrate that his editorial changes highlight hoarding as his particular concern. Second, comparisons of his use of the Sermo with that of an older contemporary, the author of Vercelli X, throw into sharp relief Ælfric’s comparatively narrow and unwavering focus on the uncompassionate use of accumulated wealth. Both analyses emphasize the force of his unease when he issued the Second Series in the early 990s. By that time an increasingly commercialized economy had broadened access to monetary wealth and had accelerated conspicuous consumption, display, and accumulation among growing ranks of wealthy Anglo-Saxons. Although Ælfric’s outcry against the unvirtuous rich would reach its highest pitch a decade later when he would rail against the ruling class for its treachery fueled by greed, the homily for the First Sunday in Lent stands as the earliest articulation of his unease regarding the accumulation of wealth.³ To judge by the multiple copies that survive, his only open denunciation of stockpiling riches at the expense of caring for the poor struck a chord among his contemporaries and their successors well into the twelfth century, but its perceived applicability and utility in the last decade of the tenth century will concern us here.

I. HOARDING CONDEMNED: ÆLFRIC’S ADAPTATION OF THE SERMO DE MISERICORDIA IN CATHOLIC HOMILY II.7

Because the criticism of hoarding occupies the majority but not the whole of the sermon for the First Sunday in Lent, an overview of its structure demonstrates that Ælfric arranges his reproof to pack the greatest rhetorical punch. His First Series homily for this Sunday (CH I.11) had expounded the standard gospel reading for the occasion (Christ’s temptation in Matthew 4), so he is free in the Second Series to compose a general sermon tailored to address a specific problem.⁴ We can divide the sermon into three sections: one dealing with general principles of Lenten observance (ll. 1–37), a second taking up the virtue of almsgiving (ll. 38–128), and a [End Page 414...