https://doi.org/10.31261/SPiP.2026.22.02
This paper examines an episode recorded by the Venerable Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, in which the newly converted priest Coifi destroys a pagan temple during the Christianization of Northumbria under King Edwin. The study explores the taboos against riding a stallion and bearing arms – prohibitions which, according to Bede, were observed by pagan priests and which Coifi transgressed in an act of profanation. Critical scholarly interpretations, which treat Bede’s account as a Christianizing fiction and explain these taboos by analogy with norms governing Christian clergy, fail to account for all elements of the story. While acknowledging Bede’s literary creativity, the article argues that the account was based on an authentic oral tradition. When compared with other medieval sources on Scandinavian paganism and the practices of other Indo-European peoples, it is plausible that Northumbria under King Edwin maintained an institution of the sacred horse, whose desecration at the onset of Christianization became the basis of an oral tradition that Bede creatively adapted a century later.
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2026
Published: 2022-11-23
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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