Feast Day of Rasyphus and Ravennus

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July 23 is the feast date of fifth century Christian martyrs Rasyphus and Ravennus.

Supposed by Middle Ages legends to be British natives who fled to Gaul as Rome abandoned the island to onrushing Anglo-Saxons, they found martyrdom on the continent via some different horde — possibly the Goths.

Today, these historically unreliable characters have been deprecated to the Vatican’s minor league “local cult” circuit, but in their day they were the pride of Bayeux, whose cathedral held the honor of the saintly relics

Despite the repose of their bones, Rasyphus and Ravennus were not associated with Bayeux in life; they are said to have been decapitated at instead at the town of Mace.

This reliquary relocalization was consequence of a widespread shuffling of religious treasures during the Viking age — like the century-plus posthumous journey of St. Cuthbert as Danes put his various resting places to the sack. Bayeux’s native saint, the 4th-5th century bishop Exuperius (Exuperius of Bayeux is not to be confused with his contemporary and fellow-bishop, Exuperius of Toulouse), had had his bones moved for safekeeping from the Northmen to Corbeil, near Paris. Relics, especially very old ones, bestowed reverential prestige on their surroundings during the Middle Ages and having lucked into this bounty Corbeil afterwards refused to return Exuperius — which was a very common (mis)behavior. At one point Corbeil even humiliatingly shammed Bayeux by sending it the skeleton of some peasant after accepting a bribe for Exuperius.

So much for Bayeux’s homegrown holyman, but no problem: the Vikinger threat had also driven Rasyphus and Ravennus on from Mace to Bayeux, and two late antiquity corpses being even better than one, these British refugees now became patrons of a home they had never known.

(In later years the Rasyphus and Ravennus relics would be uprooted yet again, by the Wars of Religion; today, they’re not to be found in Mace or in Bayeux, but in Grancey.)

And thanks to their domicile, R+R perhaps make a cameo appearance on medieval Europe’s most famous narrative textile, the Bayeux Tapestry.

The tapestry pictures events leading up to the Norman conquest of England, culminating with the epochal 1066 Battle of Hastings. The Anglo-Saxon king who lost that battle, Harold, is a key character on the tapestry, and in the 23rd scene Harold swears an oath to his eventual foe at Hastings, William the Conqueror.

Although it’s not explicitly labeled as such in the threads, according to Trevor Rowley in An Archaeological Study of the Bayeux Tapestry: The Landscapes, Buildings and Places, we can plausibly identify the setting for that oath as the altar consecrated to Rasyphus and Ravennus in the Bayeux Cathedral. (The artifact was commissioned by William the Conqueror’s powerful half-brother Odo, who was also Bishop of Bayeux — hence both the tapestry’s name and its prospective interest in broadcasting the Bayeux cults. The 22nd scene preceding it appears to overtly situate the action at Bayeux (“Bagia”).)

Rasyphus and Ravennus provided a high-status devotional focus. Their feast day was celebrated in the cathedral and their altar was second only to the high altar, dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Bishop Odo’s centrepiece for the shrine was a new reliquary, which is described in an inventory of 1476 as a large architectural shrine, richly decorated with gilding and enamel work.

The back side [of the shrine] is of gilded silver or worked in beaten metal; and all the rest of it, that is to say the front side, the two ends, and the top is made of fine gold, with raised golden images, and decorated with large and expensive enamels and precious stones of various kinds.

The reliquary was installed on an especially dedicated altar in the apse of Bayeux Cathedral just behind the primary altar and was described by a sixteenth-century antiquarian as ‘a miniature version of Bayeux Cathedral that was taller than a ten-year-old girl’.

Although the cult of the brothers did not spread outside Bayeux, at the time Harold swore his oath their perceived sanctity would have been at its height and their fine new reliquary would have provided an appropriately holy shrine for the purpose. It is also clear from what we know of Odo in other contexts that he would not have hesitated to use the opportunity of the Tapestry to advertise the Bayeux cult to an audience outside his own diocese.

On this day..

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