5.

From the moment that he had grasped Oswald’s bones in the reliquary and felt their sacred dry clatter against his chest, John resolved that he would never speak again. His blood was high and he reveled in the great catastrophe he had sparked with his words at the monastery at Colman. He had chosen a tall thin monk named Dunstan, who had proved a man of incredible violence during the first raid, as his second in command and gave him the duty of speaking for him from then on. He then took a lifelong vow of silence. Although he refused to speak, John’s soul burst forth in great effusion during his restless sleep when angels and stars crossed paths harmonically in the immense perfect darkness. Turning in the hard bunk, he would whisper and talk and shout all the things he could not say when awake. Dunstan would listen eagerly to John’s dreaming accounts of the heavenly orders and of golden-winged angels preying upon the unfaithful, torturing the beautiful, pouring boiling water on illicit lovers as they slept, sewing shut the anuses of sodomites, piercing the eyes of the lucky with hot needles. Dunstan recorded everything until he had filled a hundred leaves of paper with John’s dreams. The monks rallied around these pages, and Dunstan would read openly from his unbound sheaf before John, who soon grew content with this. It fortified his men, gave them courage. After months of wandering and looting through unmapped provinces, his small force, sustained by its raids on unprotected villages, came to Heavensfield, where John slipped upon the fateful rock and declared it the site of his monastery. He sent his most eloquent monks to consult the nearest lord, the zealous Dennis the Inflictor of Berkhamshire. He was aware of the monks’ approach, and had assembled a force of men-at-arms to destroy it, but when his advisors told him of the devastation the monks had wreaked in the neighboring regions, which were controlled by his enemies, he welcomed them in and promised them support and protection. They would be allowed to build a monastery at Heavensfield and deposit Oswald’s bones there if they agreed to discontinue their attacks on the local peasantry. The monks read to the illiterate king from the book of John’s dreams, and he found it so compelling that he dispatched his own builder, who had visited the Benedictine Abby at Cluny, with his band of private builders to assist in the construction of the monastery. John’s descriptions of the digestive workings of the angels matched the king’s own beliefs exactly. He too had dreamed of angels chewing their luminous leeks a thousand times each bite and excreting the miraculous and mellifluous winds of Heaven from their divine bowels.
Over the following year, when the weather was mild enough to allow for outdoor work, the monastery rose from the rocky hillside and soon rivaled any in Britain. A great reliquary was built in the narthex of the long chapel and Oswald’s bones, aside from a femur, which had mysteriously disappeared, were placed inside. Aisdian of Brixhall eventually abandoned his attempts at justice against John, whose security was guaranteed by Denis the Inflictor, and left Britain for Rome, a ruined man. He made it as far as Compostela, a remote Galician village in northwestern Iberia, burial place of St. James the Greater, Jacobus Major, the first martyr. There, broken in body and spirit, he expired. Gerald the Apologetic died soon after, impaled by the antler of a muscular young buck on one of his drunken hunting expeditions. With their deaths, the incident at Brixham Abbey was forgotten. Although John remained the nominal head of Heavensfield, others, particularly Dunstan, began to gain power within the monastery, which had grown to a considerable size, with large land holdings. John became frail, and rarely left his bed. His nightly proclamations became more intense, and his visions, interpreted with some freedom by Dunstan, were bound into the first of a series of books that would gain the monastery the reputation it would enjoy for the next two hundred years. It was as though he were dying from the burden of silence, and, as his dream confessions increased in ardor, his waking self grew more devastated and pale. Arrangements were made for his replacement.

On a night in April, when the sky was clear and the countryside still, John rose from his bed and let himself out into the cool spring darkness. He wandered to the crest of the hill above the monastery and raised his arms to the moon, preaching aloud to the star-scattered firmament. Only one person saw him that evening, a young monk named Lawrence, named after St. Lawrence the Archdeacon of Rome, whom the Emperor Valerian roasted on a gridiron and who sighed like an angel in his suffering and purportedly told his persecutors to turn him when he was done on one side. Lawrence, unable to sleep that night, was watching the sky for signs. He saw John mount the hill and spread his arms. What Lawrence claims happened next was taken immediately as fact and spun into legend overnight. A multitude of golden-winged angels, thousands of them, repulsively ugly, fell upon him and lifted him up into the sky, leaving only his musty robe and his wet glistening bones on the hilltop. Lawrence claimed that a chorus of angels sang a hymn of indescribable beauty during the episode and that the heavens opened up for a moment to take John in, then the thick back fabric of night rolled back to cover the hill in ancient starlight.

This account was added to the ninth and final book of John’s visions, and Dunstan assumed the role of abbot the next morning. His first decision was to place John’s bones into the reliquary with Oswald’s so that they would mingle with the great saint’s. To this day, no archaeologist or hagiographer has been able to determine which bones belonged to which saint, except that one of them is missing a now-infamous femur.
Thus ends one history.

6.

So far as anyone is concerned with such matters today, that mingling was at once the end and the beginning of confusion. Histories, like skies, can be clouded or clear, sometimes threatening, sometimes opening in brilliant light for a mere instant, and even children know in their own ways that some histories are less reliable than others.
A brief and enchanting account of St. John of Heavensfield’s life, utterly unlike the better-known version, appeared in a now-lost hagiography written by the gentleman scholar Sir Arthur Brockhampton in 1884. Its printing was tastefully limited to one hundred lavish calf-bound volumes presented as gifts to his friends. The last extant copy, according to the London antiquarian book trade, was destroyed in the Second World War, when the British Library was smashed with incendiary bombs that screamed down from German HE-111 bombers. The London Blitz claimed the last known copy, as it did so many other works of general irrelevance to our lives today. According to Brockhampton—who evidently took considerable liberties—St. John of Heavensfield

was a Northumbrian and one of the three priests sent by Bishop Julian to enlighten and properly baptise the primitive Mercians. This was financed by the newly baptised King Hadran, but unbeknownst to him St. Cecil actually set out to visit the East Saxons instead, where he was told the women were most buxom and it was there that his most significant work was done. The East Saxons had relapsed into heathendom after their conversion by Mellitus, but they were not particularly opposed to Christianity. He won the East Saxons over not with faith alone [. . .] but with his Epicurean ingenuity. In addition to being a powerful orator, it seems that Cecil was also a superb chef. Using locally-available foodstuffs, he created dishes that were considered gourmet in an age and region unsuspecting of such things. So great was Cecil’s moral energy and culinary dexterity that the East Saxon king once knelt and begged for more spiced mutton during a dinner held in the home of an exommunicant. Cecil visited his homeland often and founded the Abbey of Lastingham, renowned for its well-stocked libraries and kitchens. After a particularly pungent soup course, Julian made him bishop to the East Saxons. On his last visit there, he died. Thirty of his monks resolved to live near his body until death. Within one year, they had all moved on to new prospects of their own, carrying his recipes and copying them secretly for their own ends. Some have suggested that it is here that one finds the origins of many dishes popular in the British Isles today.

So it would seem that by another account John of Heavensfield was a benevolent figure, whose gifts in the kitchen may persist in many ways to the present. How would one square the two disparate histories? Were there two  Johns? Is one invented? Did an absent-minded monk store a short history under the wrong heading one afternoon? This second history is taken verbatim from an interview conducted in 1963 with Ellery Mandlestam, who claimed to have read the green leather-bound book the year before it was lost in the blaze. His testimony would be virtually worthless if he had not also laid claim to having a photographic memory, a medical phenomenon too perverse and dubious to enter into at any length. As evidence, he recited entirely from memory the headlines from the London Times for 12, 13, and 14 December 1932 and went on to cite details from advertisements and stock reports from the same. Chosen vessels assume many forms.

Most would protest that Brockhampton’s account has no bearing at all on accepted history of the colorful and sometimes violent monk. But even if it contains nothing so fantastic, nothing so miraculous as St. Duncan of Osprey’s ascent into blue lightning-veined clouds in a swirling ruby storm or St. Clapham’s drunken daybreak sermon to invading hordes of Magyars on the Vistula, there is one thing that distinguishes Brockhampton’s entry. As far as is known, it is the only hagiography to employ the word “buxom.”

To the final point, the last stage of the history: we are all familiar with St. John of Heavensfield, if through no other agency than his appearance on bottles of St. John’s liquid soap, the labels of which display a hunched eyebrowless monk stirring lye. One might feel at first compelled to ask: how did he get from a remote Medieval English village, where he should by all rights have died a young and anonymous death, to the bottle beside my sink? But after careful consideration of, one might also conclude that it does not really matter, so long as one’s hands are clean.