SOURCE: “Ælfric's ‘Silent Days’,” in Leeds Studies in English, Vol. 16, 1985, pp. 118-31.

In the following essay, Hill investigates Ælfric's unusual insistence that there be no preaching during the “Silent Days”—the three days preceeding Easter Sunday.

In both series of Catholic Homilies, between the homilies for Palm Sunday and Easter Day, Ælfric included a notice to the effect that church custom forbade preaching on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday, the last three days of Holy Week, which he calls ‘silent days’. In the First Series, issued in 989 or a little later, we read:¹

… (Church customs forbid any homily to be delivered on the three silent days.)

In the Second Series, two or three years later, he states more briefly:²

… (No one may deliver a homily on the three silent days.)

Ælfric's belief that no homilies should be preached on these three days is borne out by...