The most public and physical embodiment of this pressurizing of the saint was the ritual known as “humiliation of relics” – literal humiliation, in the original sense of “placing on the ground (humus).” The customs of Farfa, from around 1030, describe how, when there is need, a cry should be raised to God, with the crucifix, Gospels and relics of the saints placed on a piece of sacking on the ground before the altar, where the monks lie prostrate reciting the psalm beginning, “O God, why has thou cast us off for ever?” When the abbot of Burton upon Trent, in the English midlands, became involved in a violent dispute with a neighboring noble, he had recourse to this tactic, going straight to the virgin saint enshrined in his church: “he and the monks entered the church, barefoot and groaning greatly, and placed the shrine of the blessed virgin, where her most holy bones lay, upon the ground. All together called out to the Lord with their whole heart.” A similar episode is recorded during a dispute between the canons of St. Osyth’s in Essex and the bishop of London in the early twelfth century, when the canons decided “to take their complaint to God and to their lady, St. Osyth, whom they had served so well.” They first took her image outside the church and then covered her shrine with a piece of course sacking. They were reminding her that “she ought to defend them against their enemies,” and reproaching her for tolerating the wrongs they were suffering. The device worked. At the very hour that the canons were humiliating her image, the hostile bishop was struck with paralysis.
