Dunstan

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Dunstan (c. 909–988) was an Anglo-Saxon churchman — abbot of Glastonbury, later archbishop of Canterbury — who became, in the centuries after his death, the patron saint of goldsmiths, blacksmiths, and bell-founders, and the subject of a small cycle of legends in which a man of the forge gets the better of the Devil. Two figures answer to the one name. There is the reformer whose career is fixed by charters and a near-contemporary Life; and there is the trickster of the anvil, who belongs to a current of folktale far older than tenth-century Wessex. They overlap at a single true detail — the saint really did work metal — and from that grain of fact the second figure grew.

The man and his century

The historical Dunstan is firmly attested. He was born near Glastonbury, at Baltonsborough in Somerset, into a West Saxon landholding family with kin among the high clergy; an uncle, Athelm, held Canterbury before him. Educated by Irish scholars who frequented the old Glastonbury sanctuary, he passed through the court of King Æthelstan, made his monastic profession, and returned to live under rule at Glastonbury, where King Edmund installed him as abbot about 940. He served as counsellor to a sequence of West Saxon kings — Æthelstan, Edmund, Eadred, the young Eadwig, and Edgar — and the relationship was not always smooth. Under Eadwig he was charged with insolence and, by some accounts, with sorcery, stripped of his estates, and driven into exile across the Channel to the reformed Benedictine house of Mont Blandin at Ghent. The accusation is a small historical irony: a churchman accused of magic in his lifetime would, a thousand years on, be best remembered for besting the powers of darkness with a pair of tongs.

The exile mattered, because Ghent showed him Continental monasticism running at full strength, and that observation fed the movement on which his historical fame rests. When Edgar became sole king the disgrace reversed: Dunstan was recalled, made bishop, and from 959 archbishop of Canterbury. With Æthelwold of Winchester and Oswald of Worcester he stood at the center of the tenth-century English Benedictine reform, the campaign that rebuilt monasticism in England on the strict observance practiced at Fleury and in the Lotharingian houses. Its charter document, the Regularis Concordia, was drawn up under royal sanction around 973 to bind every religious house in the kingdom to a single customary — a national church reordered from the cloister outward, in an age when Christianity in the West was being re-disciplined house by house across the Middle Ages. Dunstan was its senior figure and its enduring name.

The reform was political as much as devotional. It restored estates and books to the cloisters, it expelled the secular clergy who had held many great houses, and it set learning and discipline at the heart of a kingdom newly unified under one West Saxon dynasty — work that left a permanent mark on the English church and on the manuscripts it produced. Dunstan also stood close to the crown at its most solemn moment: the ordering of Edgar’s great coronation at Bath in 973, the rite that fixed the shape of English royal consecration, is associated with him and his circle, and the anointing of a king by an archbishop is itself a claim about where authority comes from. He died on 19 May 988 and was venerated as a saint within a generation — his relics translated, his feast kept, an office composed — and for a century or more he was the most popular of England’s native saints, until the murdered Thomas Becket eclipsed him as Canterbury’s great name. The later Lives, written when his cult was secure, reshaped the reformer into a wonder-worker; the earliest, written when men who had known him were still alive, kept closer to the ground.

The craftsman in the record

That Dunstan worked with his hands is part of the documentary record rather than the legend. The earliest Life — written within living memory of him by an author known only as “B.,” probably in the 990s, and edited in our own day by Michael Winterbottom and Michael Lapidge — describes a young man skilled in writing, painting, and the working of metal, who studied scripture and labored at his crafts and played upon his harp. A bishop who could cast a bell, illuminate a psalter, and set a jewel was no curiosity in an Anglo-Saxon monastery, where the making of sacred objects was itself an act of devotion; but the breadth of Dunstan’s skill, and the closeness of the early witness, made him stand for the whole class of holy artisans. From this the metal trades drew their patron: the goldsmiths, blacksmiths, jewelers, locksmiths, engravers, and bell-founders who took the smith-saint for their own, and whose calendars long kept his feast on 19 May. London’s Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths made Dunstan its patron, choosing its wardens in spring and installing them on his day with a procession to church and a feast to follow; the bond is old enough that the Company’s hall carries his name. For founders of bells the patronage was especially apt — the great bronze voices of the parish church were poured in the same fire and metal as the saint’s own legendary work, and a saint of the furnace was a fitting guardian for men who worked at the edge of a molten pour.

A single object anchors the reputation. The volume now called St Dunstan’s Classbook — Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Auct. F. 4. 32 — carries on its first leaf a drawing of a small monk kneeling at the feet of an enormous Christ. A heading on the page attributes both picture and script to Dunstan’s own hand. The attribution itself is a sixteenth-century addition, not a contemporary one, and modern scholarship — Mildred Budny’s study of the frontispiece in particular — treats the autograph claim with care; what is not in serious doubt is that the drawing is a fine and early piece of Anglo-Saxon draftsmanship bound up with his memory. The kneeling figure, real or ascribed, became the image of the saint as maker: a man who illuminated, who wrought, who built.

Music belongs to the same composite. The early Lives carry an episode in which Dunstan hangs his harp upon a wall in the house of a noblewoman, Æthelwynn, and the instrument sounds of itself while no hand touches the strings — the company struck with dread, for they did not know that wind can draw music out of taut strings as it does from an Aeolian harp. The story is reported as wonder, not trickery, but it carries the same charge that would later cling to the legend: the holy craftsman whose works behave as though alive, on the uncertain border where skill shades into the uncanny.

The Devil at the forge

What scholarship can establish stops short of the most famous story. The best-known tale holds that the Devil came to tempt Dunstan at his forge — in one telling disguised as a beautiful woman, betrayed by the cloven hooves showing beneath her gown — and that the saint seized him by the nose with a pair of red-hot tongs and held on until he howled for release; in a Sussex coda the demon leapt clear across the Weald to cool his nose in the spring at Tunbridge Wells. A related strand makes Dunstan the origin of the lucky horseshoe: asked to shoe the Devil’s own cloven hoof, he drove the nails so cruelly that his victim swore never again to enter a house with a horseshoe over the door.

These stories are not in the early Lives. They surface in later medieval and post-medieval English folklore, fastened to a saint whose trade made him a natural hero for them, and they were localized in particular to a forge at Mayfield in Sussex. Dunstan is credited with founding the church there and the archbishops of Canterbury afterward held a country seat beside it, which gave the parish a long claim on his memory; a pair of tongs is still shown as the very ones from the tale — tongs that cannot, on the evidence of their make, predate the thirteenth century, some three hundred years after the saint they commemorate. Other local accretions cluster around the same site, the way folklore thickens at a fixed point: a beam said to have been stretched straight by the saint’s hand, a spring blessed by him. The arithmetic of the tongs is the telling detail. The legend is a deposit laid down long after the man, attached to a figure already shaped to receive it — a holy craftsman with a forge and a quarrel with the Devil was a story waiting for a hero, and Dunstan fit the slot.

The smith who cheats hell

The pattern is older and wider than Dunstan, and older than England. The clever holy man who routs a duped and comic Devil belongs to a vast body of European folk narrative, in which the adversary of the tales — whether named the Devil, Beelzebub the prince of the flies, or no particular fiend at all — is less a theological power than a creature to be outwitted, sent home to hell yelping. The smith who bargains with or cheats the powers below is a recurrent figure in his own right. Folklorists catalog the core of it as a single tale type, “The Smith and the Devil” (ATU 330), in which a blacksmith trades his soul for a craftsman’s gift and then uses that very gift — the power to fix anything fast — to pin the Devil where he cannot move and so escape the bargain. Comparative phylogenetic work by Sara Graça da Silva and Jamshid Tehrani has traced the tale’s spread along the branches of the Indo-European language family and argued that its root reaches back toward the Bronze Age — a story already ancient when the first churches rose at Glastonbury.

The horseshoe strand draws on a belief older than the saint as well. Iron itself was held to repel the unclean and the fey, and a horseshoe — iron, made by a smith, shaped like a protective arc — was nailed above thresholds across northern Europe long before anyone credited Dunstan with the custom. The legend does not invent the charm; it supplies an origin story, threading an existing apotropaic habit onto the biography of a metalworking saint, so that a practical superstition acquires a sacred founder. That is how such tales work: they explain a thing people already do.

The forge supplies the rest. Fire that bends iron, the hiss of quenched metal, the lone worker awake while others sleep — the smithy was always a place where ordinary craft carried a charge of the otherworldly, near kin to the transformations claimed by alchemy, and the smith a man half-suspected of commerce with what he could not see. A saint who happened to have been a metalworker was the perfect anchor for that older suspicion turned to comedy. The motif is broad enough that other smith-saints carry versions of it across Catholic Europe, and the duped Devil who flees a holy man with a scorched nose or a singed tail is a stock comic turn of medieval preaching and the carved misericord alike — the fearsome adversary of the sermon reduced, in the popular imagination, to a butt for a clever monk. Dunstan’s tongs say less about a tenth-century archbishop than about a long habit of imagining sanctity as a kind of cunning, and evil as something that can be gripped, shod, and sent off howling — the same impulse that, in a harsher key, drove the demonologies of later writers from the schoolmen to Cotton Mather, who took the Devil at his most literal. The folk Dunstan keeps it light: his Devil is real enough to burn, and beatable.

Texts and scholarship

The primary witnesses are the two earliest Lives, edited, translated, and annotated together as The Early Lives of St Dunstan by Michael Winterbottom and Michael Lapidge (Oxford Medieval Texts, Clarendon Press, 2012): the Life by the otherwise unidentified “B.,” composed within a few years of Dunstan’s death, and the later Life by Adelard of Ghent, both giving close-to-eyewitness detail on the reformer while preserving nothing of the tongs. The classbook frontispiece and its disputed autograph are examined in Mildred Budny’s study of the manuscript and its frontispiece (in St Dunstan: His Life, Times and Cult, ed. Ramsay, Sparks, and Tatton-Brown, 1992), with the manuscript itself viewable through the Bodleian’s digital catalog. For the figure of the saint and his feast, see David Hugh Farmer’s Oxford Dictionary of Saints. The folklore is set in its long comparative frame by Eleanor Parker’s writing on the early stories and, for the deep history of the smith-and-Devil motif, by Graça da Silva and Tehrani, Comparative phylogenetic analyses uncover the ancient roots of Indo-European folktales (Royal Society Open Science, 2016). The Victorian-era Catholic Encyclopedia entry records the harp and handicraft tradition in the older devotional voice.

The reformer left a rebuilt English monasticism and the shape of a coronation rite; the relic case at Mayfield holds a pair of tongs, forged some three centuries after his death, for the blacksmith who caught the devil by the nose.

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