ABSTRACT
The Last Judgement looms so large in Anglo-Saxon religious texts that it threatens to overshadow other ideas about the fate of the soul, and the terror of the final day was given as the reason for the constant exhortations to penance and confession. In order to be included in the good and to join the communion of saints, clergymen warned, it was imperative to avoid sin; and if anyone committed sin, it was necessary that he had recourse to proper penance and confession before death, so that at the final and awful tribunal, his soul would not be found stained with sin and sent into the punishments of hell for all eternity. But the soul also faced an individual judgement immediately upon leaving the body, and this was only a foretaste of the fate to come after the Last Judgement: between death and the Last Judgement there was a space of time, an interim while the soul waited until the final day of resurrection, as suggested by the prayer quoted above from the personal prayer book of Ælfwine, dean and later abbot of the New Minster, Winchester in the second quarter of the eleventh century.2 What might happen to the soul in this interim space of time was much less clear than what would happen at the Last
1 Prayer from the prayer book of Ælfwine, dean of the New Minster, Winchester: London, British Library, Cotton Titus D.xxvi, fols. 75r-v, ed. B. Günzel, Ælfwine’s Prayerbook (London, British Library, Cotton Titus D.xxvi + xxvii), HBS 108 (London, 1993), no. 76.66: ‘Deus, qui fidelium animabus pro meritorum qualitate diuersas preparas mansiones, presta ut anima famuli/e tui/e .N. tali mansione requiescat, in qua et omnes tribulationes euadat et consolationes sempiternas inueniat, atque in die resurrectionis laetus et purgatus resurgat’.
