Blickling Homilies

The Blickling Homilies is the name given to a collection of anonymous homilies from Anglo-Saxon England. They are written in Old English, and were written down at some point before the end of the tenth century, making them one of the oldest collections of sermons to survive from medieval England, the other main witness being the Vercelli Book. Their name derives from Blickling Hall in Norfolk, which once housed them; the manuscript is now Princeton, Scheide Library, MS 71.

The homilies in the collection deal primarily with Lent, with items for Passion Sunday, Palm Sunday and Holy Week, as well as homilies dealing with Rogation Days, Ascension Day and Pentecost. The rest of the homilies in the collection are saints’ feast days.

As numbered in the first edition of the homilies, by Richard Morris, the contents are:

Little is known about the origin of the homilies of their intended audience. In the assessment of D. G. Scragg, the manuscript

There is little overlap with the homilies of the Vercelli Book, from south-eastern England, suggesting that the Blickling Homilies were gathered in a different regional and intellectual milieu; the language of the Homilies suggests a Mercian origin'. The collection does have some overlaps with another homily collection, MS Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 198, whose origins are also poorly understood, but which are likely to have been in the West Midlands.

Meanwhile, although it is surely significant that the homilies were in Old English rather than Latin, 'little sense of a specific congregation or reading audience prevails in this collection of ancient and commonplace materials for the instruction of Christian folk', and the intended audience of the material is essentially unknown.

The most famous and extensively studied of the Blickling Homilies is XVI (XVII in the numbering of Morris's edition), 'To Sanctae Michaeles Mæssan' ('On St Michael's Mass', generally celebrated on September 29 in tenth- to eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon England). The homily is not noted for being well composed, but for its relationship with Anglo-Saxon pilgrimage to Italy on the one hand, and some striking similarities with the Old English poem Beowulf on the other.

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