Edmund: In Search of England’s Lost King 9781350986183, 9781786733610

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Born in Bury St Edmunds, and now a foremost authority on the history and culture of eastern England, Francis Young gained a PhD in history from the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He is the author and editor of nine previous books. These include English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553–1829 (2013), The Gages of Hengrave and Suffolk Catholicism, 1640–1767 (2015), The Abbey of Bury St Edmunds: History, Legacy and Discovery (2016), Catholic East Anglia: A History of the Catholic Faith in Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough (2016), A History of Exorcism in Catholic Christianity (2016) and Magic as a Political Crime in Medieval and Early Modern England (I.B.Tauris, 2017). He broadcasts regularly for the BBC on historical and religious topics, and is a key figure in the search to locate in Bury the lost coffin of King Edmund.

‘Simultaneously a sophisticated work of history, a compelling detective story and a moving meditation on what it is to be English, this is a fascinating and wonderful book.’ Tom Holland, author of Athelstan: The Making of England and of Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom

‘I hope I may live long enough to witness the rediscovery of another royal body – this time also the relics of a saint! Francis Young’s well-­researched book looks for the real man behind the legendary martyred East Anglian king. The author’s enthusiasm for his subject, and for the quest to find the mortal remains of St Edmund, everywhere shines through. Authoritative and reliable, this volume is at the same time an enjoyable and engaging read.’ John Ashdown-Hill, MBE, Honorary Senior Lecturer in History, University of Essex and Leader of Genealogical Research and Historical Adviser, ‘Looking for Richard’ Project

‘Brilliantly charting the history of Edmund’s cult from earliest days to the present day, Francis Young shows how the East Anglian martyr king has been central to English identity from the very start. He writes with a keen eye to present political developments, convincingly arguing that Edmund is more relevant now than ever.’ Levi Roach, Lecturer in Medieval History, University of Exeter, author of Æthelred: The Unready

Edmund In Search of England’s Lost King

Francis Young

Published in 2018 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright © 2018 Francis Young The right of Francis Young to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. ISBN: 978 1 78831 179 3 eISBN: 978 1 78672 361 1 ePDF: 978 1 78673 361 0 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Text design and typesetting by Tetragon, London

In loving memory of my grandmother, Idris Helen Young (1913–2017)

Contents Preface

xi

List of Illustrations

xiv

Abbreviations

xvi

Chronology

xvii

Introduction

1

1 Angelcynn: Edmund’s People

19

2 Death of a King

46

3 Invincible Martyr: The Early Cult of Edmund, 869–1066

68

4 ‘Patron of all England’: Edmund in the Medieval World, 1066–1539

93

5 A Lost King: Edmund since the Reformation

123

Conclusion: Finding Edmund?

144

Notes

159

Bibliography

183

Plates

197

Index

206

Norfolk and Suffolk Font: Myriad Pro Frame size: 110mm x 125mm 1st Proof 27 november 2017 Correct 30 november 2017

The Wash

North Sea

Wells-nextthe-Sea

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DANISH ARMY FROM MERCIA

The Broads

Breckland Little Ouse

Thetford R

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Hoxne

Southwold

R. C a

m

at O u s e

u re

Hellesdon Norwich

ne

e

en

G re

R. B

ensum

Great Ouse

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R

King’s Lynn

Bury St Edmunds

Cambridge

Hellesden Rendlesham Woodbridge

tour R. S

Sudbury

Ipswich

S

to

R. P

u r Vall e

y

t an

Colchester 0 0

5

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15 10

Fig. 1  The progress of the Great Heathen Army in East Anglia in 865–9.

20

25 km 15 miles

0

20

100

30

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Great Churchyard (public cemetery)

N

3 Site of the shrinekeeper’s house

2 Chapel of St Botolph

1 Presbytery, site of the shrine of St Edmund

(over the monks’ cemetery)

Fig. 2  Plan of the abbey church at Bury St Edmunds showing the location of the monks’ cemetery and present-day tennis courts.

10

50

Scale in metres

10

Scale in feet

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Current site of tennis courts

Preface In twenty-first-century Britain there is an earnest desire to recover long-forgotten historical figures as a means of securing local and national identities. Throughout England, obscure local saints are resurrected on new village signs, beers are brewed in the names of Anglo-Saxon kings and queens and old feast days reappear on the calendar as modern commercial opportunities. The landscape of England is dotted with towns and villages named after ancient saints, such as St Albans, St Ives, St Neots and Bury St Edmunds. Rarely can a physical link be established with these characters from a mysterious and alien English past; the dissolution of the monasteries put paid to that, destroying the shrines of the saints. Yet saints are versatile, malleable and resilient figures. Spiritual giants of almost superhuman proportions, standing at the boundary between myth and history, the saints have been invested with our hopes, fears, aspirations and identities since England first embraced Christianity in the seventh century. But not all of England’s old saints are lost forever. There is a real chance at the time of writing that the last resting place of Edmund, the patron saint of England throughout the Middle Ages, is nearing discovery. This book tells the story of the search for Edmund – both the search for his mortal remains and the historical search for the real man behind the legendary East Anglian king martyred by the Vikings in 869. It traces the process by which Edmund became England’s national saint, and argues that understanding the history and myths surrounding him may hold the key to the elusive national identity of England and the English people. The rediscovery of Edmund, the quintessentially English saint, is the rediscovery of Englishness itself, that most mercurial of national identities. This book is the outcome of many years of research into Edmund and Bury St Edmunds, and there have been many people along the

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way who have given both insight and encouragement. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Joy Rowe and Abbot Geoffrey Scott OSB, who first stimulated my interest in finding Edmund and pointed me in the direction of sources that have been essential to this book. From the very first day I met her, I shared with my wife Rachel a common interest in the saint, and without her willingness to pass on her expertise in Anglo-Saxon history this project would not have been possible. Similarly, helpful conversations with Dr Sam Newton and Dr Margaret Hilditch have advanced and clarified my understanding over the years. Many others have helped along the way, including the helpful staff of the British Library Rare Books and Manuscripts rooms, the Rare Books and Manuscripts rooms at Cambridge University Library, and the Suffolk Records Office, Bury St Edmunds. Dr Liesbeth Corens offered helpful advice on the context of the cult of St Edmund within the wider English Counter-Reformation, and I am grateful to John Trappes-Lomax for his kind advice on the translation of William Hawkins’s ‘Musae Juridicae’. I am also grateful to Dr John AshdownHill MBE, one of the few people who has successfully found a longlost king, for his insights on the use of genetics in archaeology. I am enormously grateful to Alex Wright of I.B.Tauris for his enthusiastic support for this book and his care in bringing it to publication. As part of my research into St Edmund I visited the basilica of Saint-Sernin in Toulouse, and I am grateful to its helpful staff on that occasion. I am also grateful to the Catholic Record Society for allowing me to deliver a short presentation on the subject of the post-Reformation cult of St Edmund at the Society’s fifty-sixth annual conference at Downing College, Cambridge, in July 2013. I have enjoyed a most helpful correspondence on various aspects of the Toulouse cult of St Edmund and the relics controversy with Mike Peyton and Peter Tryon. I am grateful to Fr Peter Harris and Mgr John Pardo and I acknowledge with thanks the kind permission of the Royal English College, Valladolid, to publish Plates 13 and 14. Dom Hugh Somerville-Knapman OSB kindly supplied Plate 15 and I thank Douai Abbey for permission to publish it. I also acknowledge with thanks the kind permission of the Board of Trustees of the

Preface

xiii

National Gallery to publish Plate 10 and the kind permission of the British Library Board to publish Plates 2, 6 and 11. Old English place names are distinguished from current place names in the text by the use of italics. Names of persons are given in all cases according to their Old English spelling, with the exception of Edmund himself; by the twelfth century the ‘a’ of Eadmund was usually dropped, so for the sake of convenience the subject of the book is referred to as Edmund throughout. Where translations in the text are my own I have stated this in the endnotes; otherwise they are taken from the edition of the text cited. Naturally I take full responsibility for any errors or omissions in the text.

List of Illustrations Figures 1. The progress of the Great Heathen Army in East Anglia in 865–9.  p.viii 2. Plan of the abbey church at Bury St Edmunds showing the location of the monks’ cemetery and present-day tennis courts.  p. ix

Plates

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

St Peter’s chapel, Bradwell-on-Sea (Othona), © the author. The martyrdom of St Edmund, © the British Library Board. The Edmund Jewel, © the Portable Antiquities Scheme. A memorial penny of St Edmund, © the author. Engraving of St Edmund’s head, © the author. The death of King Swein, 1014, © the British Library Board. The wooden nave of St Andrew’s church, Greensted-juxtaOngar, © the author. Reconstruction of St Edmund’s shrine by William Yates (1802), © the author. The coat of arms attributed to St Edmund as the emblem of East Anglia, © World History Archive/Alamy Stock Photo. St Edmund, St Edward the Confessor, St John the Baptist and Richard II, as depicted in the Wilton Diptych, © the Board of Trustees of the National Gallery. Henry VI at the shrine of St Edmund, © the British Library Board. The martyrdom of St Edmund (c.1450, restored 1876–8) as depicted in the church of St Peter and Paul, Pickering,

List of Illustrations

xv

North Yorkshire, © Holmes Garden Photos/Alamy Stock Photo. 13. St Edmund, painted by Juan de Roelas (c.1592) for the English College, Seville. Reproduced by kind permission of the rector of the Royal English College, Valladolid. 14. St Edmund in prayer, from the chapel of the English College, Valladolid, c.1679. Reproduced by kind permission of the rector of the Royal English College, Valladolid. 15. Angels pull arrows from St Edmund’s body, painted by Charles de La Fosse c.1677 for the Priory of St Edmund, Paris. Reproduced by kind permission of Douai Abbey.

Abbreviations Abbo, PSE

Abbo of Fleury, Passio sancti Eadmundi, in F. Hervey (ed.), Corolla sancti Eadmundi: The Garland of Saint Edmund King and Martyr (London: John Murray, 1907), pp. 6–59 Bede, HE Bede (trans. L. Sherley-Price), Ecclesiastical History of the English People (4th edn, London: Penguin, 1990) Jocelin, Chronicle J. de Brakelond (trans. D. Greenway and J. Sayers), Chronicle of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) ODNB The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 60 vols

Chronology c.855 865 869 878 886 889 c.890 917 924 927 942 945 c.951 c.985 991 1003 1010 1013 1014 1016 1020 1032

Edmund becomes king of the East Angles. Arrival of the Great Heathen Army in East Anglia. Return of the Great Heathen Army; death of Edmund. Alfred defeats Guthrum at the Battle of Edington; baptism of Guthrum. Alfred the Great takes control of London. Possible date of the translation of Edmund’s body from Hægelisdun to Beodericsworth. Minting of St Edmund memorial coinage begins. Battle of Tempsford; Edward the Elder reconquers East Anglia. Accession of Æthelstan as king of the English. Æthelstan captures York from the Vikings. King Edmund I recaptures the Five Boroughs from the Vikings. A charter of King Edmund supposedly grants territory to the community at Beodericsworth. Bishop Theodred verifies the incorruption of Edmund’s body. Abbo of Fleury writes the Passion of St Edmund. Vikings attack Maldon in Essex. Swein Forkbeard invades England. Jarl Thurkill attacks Ipswich; Edmund’s body taken to London. Edmund’s body returns to Beodericsworth. Death of King Swein at Gainsborough, reportedly killed by an apparition of Edmund. Cnut defeats Edmund II Ironside at Assandun. Traditional foundation date of the Benedictine abbey of Bury St Edmunds. Consecration of the rotunda of St Mary and St Edmund at Bury St Edmunds.

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1034 Translation of Edmund’s body to the rotunda. 1043 Edward the Confessor grants the abbey of Bury St Edmunds control of west Suffolk. 1065 Baldwin becomes abbot of Bury St Edmunds. 1066 Norman Conquest. 1070 Abbot Baldwin gives relics of Edmund to Lucca Cathedral in Italy. 1081 Abbot Baldwin begins a huge Norman abbey church. 1095 Translation of Edmund’s body to Baldwin’s Norman abbey church. 1097 Lambert of Angers declares Edmund ‘patron of all England’. 1122 Edmund added to the canon of Roman saints. 1173 Knights of St Edmund bearing Edmund’s banner defeat the earl of Leicester at the Battle of Fornham. 1190 Richard I places his crusading fleet under Edmund’s patronage. 1191 Richard I gives the captured banner of Isaac Comnenus to Edmund’s shrine. 1192 William de Burgh founds St Edmund’s Priory at Athassel, Ireland. 1198 Abbot Samson inspects Edmund’s body. 1211 Richard de Argentyne founds St Edmund’s church at Damietta, Egypt. 1214 Barons swear an oath on the high altar of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds to compel King John to confirm Magna Carta. 1222 The Synod of Oxford makes St Edmund’s Day a holy day throughout the kingdom. 1245 Henry III orders Edmund’s antiphon to be sung during the birth of his son Edmund Crouchback. 1270s Emergence of a coat of arms attributed to Edmund: three gold crowns on a blue shield. 1290 Edward I is reportedly menaced by Edmund in a dream. 1296 Edward I receives the submission of Rhys ap Rhys at Bury St Edmunds. 1300 Edward I sends his personal standard to touch Edmund’s relics.

Chronology

xix

1348 The arms of St Edmund appear on the first seal of the Order of the Garter. 1376 Richard of Bordeaux invested as Prince of Wales on St Edmund’s Day. 1377 Richard II wears St Edmund’s slippers at his coronation. 1385 Richard II allows Robert de Vere to bear the arms of St Edmund. 1415 The arms of St Edmund are displayed to celebrate Henry V’s victory at Agincourt. 1433 Henry VI arrives at Bury St Edmunds for a long stay at the abbey. 1443 First recorded claim by the basilica of Saint-Sernin, Toulouse, to possess Edmund’s body. 1449 Henry VI receives the submission of Gruffydd ap Nicholas at Bury St Edmunds. 1465 Shrine of St Edmund damaged by fire. 1520s A figure of St Edmund features on a crown made for Henry VIII. 1535 Commissioners visit the abbey of Bury St Edmunds to value its treasures. 1538 Commissioners strip St Edmund’s shrine. 1539 The abbey of Bury St Edmunds surrenders to the crown; Edmund’s body placed in an iron chest and hidden. 1570 Edmund appears in John Foxe’s Actes and Monumentes. 1583 Edmund depicted at the English College in Rome. 1621 The English Benedictine priory in Paris is assigned the ‘right and title’ of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds. 1631 The Capitouls of Toulouse vow to translate the supposed body of St Edmund in return for an end to an outbreak of plague. 1634 William Hawkins searches for the body of St Edmund in the ruins of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds. 1644 The supposed body of St Edmund is translated to a new shrine in Toulouse. 1685 The monks of St Edmund’s, Paris, are offered the site of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds but turn it down.

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1686 The monks of St Edmund’s, Paris, renounce their claim to the abbey of Bury St Edmunds. 1710 Benet Weldon hears an oral tradition about the concealment of St Edmund’s body at Bury St Edmunds in 1539. 1749 St Edmund is reinstated in the canon of Roman saints. 1794 French revolutionaries ransack the basilica of Saint-Sernin in Toulouse. 1842 Thomas Carlyle visits Bury St Edmunds and reads Jocelin de Brakelond’s Chronicle. 1845 Authentication of the supposed relics of St Edmund at Toulouse. 1848 An ancient oak tree at Hoxne is hailed as the site of St Edmund’s martyrdom. 1870 Millennium of St Edmund’s martyrdom celebrated in Suffolk. 1901 Supposed relics of St Edmund from Toulouse are brought to England but then discredited in the press. 1964 Excavations of the crypt of the abbey church at Bury St Edmunds reveal no human remains. 1965 The Roman Catholic parish priest of Bury St Edmunds attempts (unsuccessfully) to have the supposed Toulouse relics moved to Bury St Edmunds. 1969 Celebrations of the eleven-hundredth anniversary of St Edmund’s martyrdom. 1994 The commission established to examine the supposed relics from Toulouse confirms the bones belonged to multiple individuals of both genders. 2006 A petition is submitted to the prime minister calling for St Edmund to be reinstated as patron saint of England. 2013 Newspaper reports publicly suggest tennis courts on the site of the monks’ cemetery as a possible site for the concealment of St Edmund’s body. 2017 St Edmundsbury Borough Council announces that the tennis courts can be relocated, clearing the way for a potential archaeological investigation of the area.

I n t rodu c t i on

One wet evening in August 2007 I found myself trudging along a muddy track in the Suffolk countryside towards the dark trees of a small kite-shaped spinney – a tiny fragment, like nearby Bradfield Woods, of one of England’s oldest surviving coppiced woodlands. The woods around Bradfield contain ash stools that are at least 700 years old, as well as scarce species such as hornbeam and small-leaved lime, descendants of the brushwood of ancient and impenetrable forests. The place I was seeking was a minuscule island, now isolated among domesticated fields, hedgerows and clustering cottages, of an England of the distant past. This was an England where wolves roamed the woodlands and barbarian war bands infested the waterways; an England that was not yet England, where no one was safe, and where a blade or an arrow could change the destiny of the nation. As I walked I was skirting the north side of a field once known as Hellesden Ley, in the village of Bradfield St Clare. Historians have suggested that this place is Hægelisdun – where Edmund, the Vikings’ most famous English victim, met his death on 20 November 869. Under the greenish gloom of the trees it was certainly possible to imagine that the gloom of an earlier, older wood on this site gave the Danes their opportunity to humiliate Edmund, tie him to a tree for archery practice and then deny him Christian burial by hiding his decapitated head in the undergrowth. The death of Edmund of East Anglia was more than the demise of just another Anglo-Saxon regional king at the hands of the Vikings. Just as much as Alfred the Great’s victory over the Danes at Edington or William the Conqueror’s victory at Hastings, it was a nation-making moment. Somewhere in this landscape could be the very spot where an act of violence became the wellspring for the idea of England. Indeed, so fundamental is Edmund to the being of England that, I shall argue, we may only know England as England because of him.

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The legend of Edmund According to the traditional account of his death, Edmund was defeated by the Danes in battle at Thetford. Wishing to spare his warriors, Edmund retreated to a royal residence called Hægelisdun, where he awaited the Danish Viking leader Ivarr. Ivarr offered Edmund the chance to continue to rule as underking to the Danes. Edmund refused to serve a pagan ruler; he was accordingly stripped, tied to a nearby tree, used as target practice by the Danish archers and then beheaded. As a further indignity, the Danes threw the king’s head into the undergrowth so that his people would not be able to find it and give it a Christian burial. Nevertheless, the English searched the wood and found Edmund’s head cradled in the paws of a wolf, after the head itself cried out to the searchers. Head and body were buried together in Hægelisdun wood, and a small wooden chapel was built over the site. Later, the king’s body was exhumed and found to be completely undecayed (‘incorrupt’); the king’s head had miraculously reattached itself to his body, leaving only a thin red crease. The body was taken to a place called Beodericsworth, later renamed Bury St Edmunds in Edmund’s honour. Like many martyrs made famous only by their deaths, Edmund’s life is intensely obscure. He ruled as a regional king over Norfolk, Suffolk and some of Cambridgeshire in the 850s and 860s. Yet, in death, he would become the force behind the Danes’ conversion to Christianity, and later the first recognised patron saint of the English people. Edmund was one of the earliest English saints to be venerated throughout Europe. For foreigners and natives alike, he became the embodiment and symbol of Englishness, a status that would continue into the fifteenth century and, in some quarters, even later. The liturgy for the feast of St Edmund even included words in the English language. Dozens of churches in England were dedicated to Edmund, as well as churches and chapels in Ireland, Scandinavia, France, Italy and even Egypt. Two Anglo-Saxon kings of England were called Edmund, and Edmund returned as a royal name for the sons of kings of the Plantagenet dynasty between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Introduction

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Had Edmund not died as he did, he would no doubt be a footnote in Anglo-Saxon history. However, his status as a martyr king set him above other saints; his kingship lent him a patriotic appeal that clerical saints like Thomas Becket would never have. His ultimate sacrifice of martyrdom also set him above Edward the Confessor, the Plantagenet monarchy’s other favourite saint, who disappointingly died in his own bed. Edmund was not by any means the only martyr king from Anglo-Saxon England, but his cult was the one that prospered and achieved national and international status, because he died at exactly the right time. Earlier martyr kings, such as Oswald and Sigeberht, had been the victims of the pagan Anglo-Saxon king Penda, a figure whose beliefs and motivations were lost in the mists of time. The fact that Edmund was a victim of the Vikings gave him continuing relevance. Viking raids on England carried on for over two centuries after his death, occurring even after the Norman Conquest, and Edmund’s story addressed themes of invasion and resistance that continued to matter. Edmund belonged to a very small ‘elite’ group of incorrupt saints (whose bodies were supposed to remain intact and undecayed after death). He enjoyed more than just a heavenly life after death. He gained a reputation for inflicting injury and death on those who disrespected his memory, both at the site of the shrine and at a distance, and had a penchant for appearing in waking apparitions and dream visions, often dressed in full armour. The claim that Edmund spoke after his death, when his severed head called out to those who were searching for it, was unique in England. Edmund’s body became what the philosopher Jeremy Bentham called, many centuries later, an ‘auto-icon’: a symbol of a person that is in fact the remains of that person himself.1 Those who have heard of Edmund today are likely to think of him as a regional saint, ‘Edmund of East Anglia’ or ‘Edmund of Bury’, on a par with Cuthbert of Northumbria, Etheldreda of Ely or Oswald of Oswestry. Yet Edmund achieved a status far beyond any other English saint, venerated more widely and represented in art more frequently than any other. Not only does he deserve to be treated as a figure of national importance to England, but his prominence

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simply cannot be explained unless he is approached as a national (and indeed international) figure. Edmund has not so much been forgotten as lost. His incorrupt body was always central to his cult, the destination of royal pilgrimages by kings from Edward the Confessor to Henry VII, but its disappearance at the Reformation removed much of the saint’s potency as an English national symbol. In this respect Edmund fared far worse than two other English national symbols – Edward the Confessor, whose shrine was left largely undisturbed in Westminster Abbey, and St George, whose association with the Order of the Garter allowed him to survive the Reformation in an attenuated form. Yet, as this book will show, the rediscovery of Edmund’s body may be closer today than at any time since the Reformation. If Edmund is finally found, the question of his national significance as the quintessentially English national saint must once more be addressed.

Saints: bearers of identity Saints in the Middle Ages, like gods in antiquity, had a unique capacity to be bearers of local and national identities. It is impossible to apply the typical defining features of national identity in modern times – a flag, defined borders, a shared language, a common culture and a distinctive political system – to the distant past, partly because we often do not have enough information to do so and partly because people in the past did not always care about (or even recognise) these things. Saints, however, were symbols shared and venerated by rulers and ruled alike, associated with particular places and peoples and often enduring for centuries. They are one of very few cultural threads that link the earliest stirrings of Europe’s national identities with the beginnings of the modern nation state in the sixteenth century. They were the figures whose patronage kings invoked in battle or whose favour invaders and conquerors attempted to win; saints even became battle cries (such as the French ‘Montjoie Saint-Denis! ’) and came to embody entire nations. One Caucasian nation (Georgia) even named itself after its patron saint.2

Introduction

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It is a mistake to see saints as purely religious figures, of interest only to theologians and students of church history. The creation of saints in the Western church was not restricted to the papacy until the late eleventh century; until then men and women often became saints by popular ‘acclamation’, general recognition evidenced by a thriving cult surrounding a person’s tomb. That recognition was often shown by the ‘translation’ of a saint’s body from an ordinary tomb in the ground to a shrine in a church. Religion can barely be separated from other aspects of life in medieval Europe, a world where distinctions between the sacred and secular were fluid. Nor were the causes in which saints were invoked always recognisably pious. Furthermore, many saints did not die exclusively for a religious cause, and the reputations of some were ‘polished up’ by ecclesiastics in later centuries to ensure that they fitted contemporary stereotypes of piety. It is far from certain that Edmund, for example, chose to die primarily for his steadfast adherence to the Christian faith. Questions about what saints really did – and even whether they really existed – mattered little in the Middle Ages because their significance was constructed after their deaths. Because saints were constructed, by studying them we can learn a great deal about the local and national communities who did the constructing. In the modern world, it is clear that the appeal of saints goes far beyond Christianity, with many people who do not see themselves as religious prepared to identify strongly with regional and national patron saints. The entirely secular celebrations of St Patrick’s Day seen around the world on 17 March are ample evidence of this. Saints and saints’ days offer a means of asserting national identity free from the problematic trappings of twentieth-century nationalism – arguments about such things as flags, borders, languages and ethnicity. This is because the idea of saints as bearers of national identity pre-dates the advent of the ‘nation state’, the idea of a nation as a discrete sovereign entity governed centrally with established borders, which most historians argue emerged slowly in Europe between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Saints were the great survivors, their reputations and legends seemingly the one constant in times of change and cataclysm. The

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figure of Edmund survived further Danish invasions, the Norman Conquest, the near demise of the English language and even, as this book will show, the greatest disaster of all for England’s saints: the dissolution of the monasteries and the Reformation. Saints can be adopted as symbols by almost anyone, it seems. The memory of St Edmund was embraced by the very people who killed him. Today’s St Patrick – while always indelibly associated with Ireland and Irishness – is a universal saint and his feast day a universal celebration. In Lebanon and Syria, St George is venerated by Muslims as well as Christians. The impression of saints as unchanging, preserved in a holy past nobler than the decadent present, is itself an illusion. The saints were and are constantly changing, imbued with a kind of life beyond death, as their legends evolve endlessly around a core of sketchy historical information. The tangled matrix of history, tradition and literature that ensnares ancient saints like Edmund is like the borders of a bewilderingly complex medieval illumination: baroque, over-adorned, yet also beautiful. In the end, the historical Edmund is unimportant in comparison with the Edmund (or Edmunds) experienced and encountered by those who choose to anchor their national identity in this figure. This book seeks to unearth the historical Edmund and his context, but it is also a history of the many things Edmund became, where fact and fiction blur and history becomes a self-sustaining tradition of hagiography.

Edmund, bearer of Englishness Edmund was, throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, the symbolic bearer of Englishness, just as much as St Patrick is the bearer of Irishness today. The fact that Edmund was the king of East Anglia, rather than England, was frequently forgotten or overlooked outside East Anglia itself. It helped that non-English speakers easily confused East Anglia with England as a whole. In Latin the same name – Anglia – referred to both the region and the country. It remains unclear why this was so: indeed, the most basic fact about England, its name, is something of a mystery. The first kings of a

Introduction

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united England, in the tenth century, belonged to the Saxon House of Wessex, yet they did not name their kingdom after their own people but after another tribe, the Angles, whose kingdoms had already been extinguished by the Vikings. It is the argument of this book that Alfred the Great’s successors adopted the title rex Anglorum – ‘king of the Angles/English’ – primarily because it was the title borne by Edmund. Edmund’s importance to the House of Wessex is most easily seen in the two kings, Edmund I (921–46) and Edmund II Ironside (d.1016), who bore his name. As the new royal title rex Anglorum came to be accepted, so the king’s dominions were eventually called England. In addition to giving England its name, Edmund’s potent memory also ensured that later Danish and Norman kings sought to strengthen and transform rather than stamp out the kingdom’s English identity. Even if they brought different laws, languages and systems of govern­ ment, the conquerors honoured Edmund. The figure of Edmund was a mainstay of Englishness at a time when the country was ruled by foreign kings with extensive Continental interests. Indeed, on the few occasions when the notoriously absent Richard I was in England, he visited Edmund’s shrine and endowed his favourite saint with numerous gifts. Richard sought Edmund’s patronage and protection for his English crusaders, just as Edward I would solicit Edmund’s spiritual help against the Scots and Welsh. Edmund was ostentatiously adopted as a royal patron by successive Plantagenet kings, especially Richard II and Henry VI, but he was also a figure who could be used against royal power as a defender of the interests of the English people. The abbots of Bury St Edmunds, who were the custodians of Edmund’s body, used Edmund in this way against both King John and Edward I, with the result that Edmund played an unexpected posthumous role in the story of that other symbolic pillar of Englishness, Magna Carta. Yet the monks also used the figure of St Edmund against the abbot, and when local people rose up against the abbot in 1327, attempts to transfer control of the body of St Edmund from the Benedictine monks to local parish clergy may have symbolised a more widespread desire for the saint’s miraculous body to be accessible directly to the people.

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Edmund reprised his anti-authoritarian role with aplomb in the community of English Catholic exiles after the Reformation. Catholics cast Protestants as the new Vikings and missionary priests executed under Queen Elizabeth as the heirs of Edmund’s true Englishness. Protestants responded by stripping Edmund’s story of medieval ‘superstition’ and portraying him as a national hero resisting foreign influence, while mocking the monks who had believed they were guardians of Edmund’s incorrupt body. Yet Edmund continued to matter to both sides, although interest faded as the controversies of the Reformation faded from cultural consciousness. National interest in Edmund was unexpectedly rekindled in the nineteenth century by the great Victorian essayist Thomas Carlyle, and in 1901 alleged relics of Edmund came within a hair’s breadth of being enshrined at the heart of Westminster Cathedral, the headquarters of Roman Catholicism in the British Empire. The controversy that surrounded this episode meant that Edmund slipped again from national view, although vigorous local campaigns in Suffolk to reinstate him as a patron saint of England continue to this day and are slowly gaining momentum. Yet the cult of Edmund was never an exclusively English affair. Indeed, it is the fact that Edmund was recognised by foreigners as an emblem of Englishness (in a way that other English saints were not) that makes him such a compelling national symbol. The Danes may have been the first to encourage Edmund’s cult, while a French abbot first declared Edmund the patron saint of England. Like the very name ‘English’, applied by outsiders to the Germanic peoples of Britain and eventually adopted by them, the greatness of Edmund was, to some extent, fostered abroad and projected back on Edmund’s home country. Edmund the local hero went travelling in Europe and came back as Edmund, the symbol of England. The English are famously bad at being able to articulate and express their national identity. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek declared that ‘nobody is fully English […] every empirical Englishman contains something “non-English” – Englishness thus becomes […] an unattainable point which prevents empirical Englishmen from achieving full identity-with-themselves.’3 Early medieval history bears out Žižek’s point: the Danes and Normans contributed just as much

Introduction

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to modern England as the Anglo-Saxons, and pre-Viking Old English culture is no less foreign to contemporary English people than the cultures of Vikings and Normans. Even the original ‘Englishness’ of the Anglo-Saxons was a composite identity, forged from several different Germanic tribes who dominated most of Britain and formed numerous small kingdoms. As well as being composite, English identity is also without obvious markers. It is difficult – impossible, even – to identify specifically English customs or characteristics that ‘perform’ Englishness, even if it is easy enough to identify local and regional customs within England.4 England’s history as a colonial power means that language is unavailable to the English as a defining signifier of identity, because the English language has become a global lingua franca. ‘International English’ is just one way in which Englishness has fallen victim to England’s historical success. Imperial nations must surrender something of their ‘national particularity’ in order to serve a larger and more diffuse identity.5 For centuries, English governments pursued a determined campaign of propaganda to promote the union – first dynastic, then constitutional – of England and Scotland (and then Ireland) as a single state. Beginning with the Union of Crowns in 1603, when James VI of Scotland succeeded to the English throne as James I, it became fashionable to speak of ‘Great Britain’ rather than England. Since the king resided at Westminster (and never visited Scotland again), ‘Great Britain’ became a cipher for England’s rule of Scotland by proxy, which was constitutionally formalised by the Act of Union of 1707. That act created a new state, the United Kingdom of Great Britain. Many Scots were less than impressed that the act virtually abolished Scotland – but the fact that it ended the kingdom of England as well was barely remarked upon. The dissipation of national identity as a state expands its borders to become a larger entity is, arguably, the fate of all colonial powers. By the nineteenth century, George IV was styling himself on his coinage Britanniarum rex – king of Britons, wherever they might be located in the world, rather than king of Great Britain or England. Englishness continued to matter, but in the nineteenth century it jostled for position with

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‘Britishness’, a manufactured identity that attempted to synthesise the supposed virtues of both the English and Scottish nations. As the United Kingdom became a more diverse nation in the twentieth century, the concept of ‘Britishness’ seemed to matter more and more. ‘Britishness’ did not imply a nationality in the traditional sense, and therefore an ethnic origin. In contrast to the amenable ‘Britishness’, ‘Englishness’ became, if anything, associated in many people’s minds with a kind of narrow ethnic nationalism that might slip easily into racism. ‘Englishness’ seemed doomed to obsolescence as the nations of the United Kingdom grew closer together and a coherent ‘British’ identity solidified. As the second decade of the twenty-first century draws to a close, the august destiny of ‘Britishness’ does not seem as certain as it did in the late twentieth century. Scotland is champing at the bit for independence, and its political culture has diverged significantly from England’s. In the event that Scotland gains independence, it is clear that Britishness (in anything like its current sense) will become largely obsolete. However, even if Scotland chooses to remain within the United Kingdom, in the aftermath of Brexit a political rhetoric is emerging that presents the UK as an alternative union of nations compared with the European Union. The more extensive Scotland’s devolved powers become, the harder it will be for the Westminster system, in which England has no parliament of its own, to remain credible. The ‘West Lothian question’ – whether Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs should be able to vote on English laws when English MPs cannot control the devolved legislatures – remains unresolved. A United Kingdom on a federal model, in which each of the nations (including England) has its own parliament, may be the only way to hold the union together – and such a model would require England to have an identity of its own. As things stand, England often feels like the homogeneous trunk of Britain onto which two nations with proud and distinct identities (Scotland and Wales) have been grafted. Between them, Brexit and the prospect of Scottish independence have made the question of Englishness relevant once again. For some, Englishness has never gone away, and reasserting it is a matter of pride.

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For others, rediscovering an older Englishness that pre-dates English expansion is a means to escape the legacy of colonialism, allowing the English to take their place alongside other nations as equals rather than claiming an unjustified ‘particularity’. Yet the English have tried so hard, over so many centuries, to become British that they have almost forgotten how to be English. But where Englishness is celebrated in contemporary Britain it is usually focussed on a saint. Public St George’s Day celebrations funded and supported by local government have become an increasingly common feature of 23 April. The story and personality of St George are almost invisible in many of these celebrations: George is little more than a cipher, the saint who gives his name to the English national flag. St George was not always the shadowy and attenuated figure he is today; his transformation into nothing more than a signifier of English patriotism dates from the Reformation, when anxiety about the cult of saints led to the stripping of any deeper religious significance from George’s patronage of England. No English army after the Reformation went into battle calling on a saint’s protection, as Shakespeare has the English call upon St George at Agincourt. The once-powerful patron and protector was reduced to little more than a mascot. George, however, was a relative latecomer to the role of patron saint of England. Although there is no such thing as an ‘official’ patron saint and no formal process by which a saint becomes recognised as such, several saints in the Middle Ages were acknowledged by foreigners and natives alike to have an association with the whole English nation (only three of whom were actually English): St Edmund the martyr, St Gregory the Great, St Edward the Confessor, St Thomas Becket and St George. The national importance of these saints waxed and waned relative to one another, largely on the basis of the devotional preferences of particular kings. Courtiers would naturally want to curry favour by showing devotion to their monarch’s preferred saint. However, no English saint was more consistently popular with medieval kings than Edmund. William I, Richard I, Edward I, Richard II and Henry VI all showed him particular devotion, even if Edward III’s interest in St George eventually caused Edmund to be eclipsed as the nation’s

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dominant patron saint. However, it is certainly not true to say that George ‘replaced’ Edmund: every English monarch down to Henry VII understood Edmund’s symbolic significance to the construction of English royalty. The notion that a country can have only one patron saint is a very recent one, itself the product of the modern state’s tendency towards unity and uniformity.

A lost king Between 1536 and 1540, on the orders of Henry VIII and his Lord Privy Seal, Thomas Cromwell, every religious house in England and Wales was dissolved and every pilgrimage shrine destroyed. As for the bodies of the saints, one (Thomas Becket at Canterbury) may have been deliberately destroyed; another (Edward the Confessor at Westminster) was left completely unmolested; others were dismembered or hidden. But it seems likely that the majority were discreetly interred in nearby consecrated ground. The effect on his cult of the destruction of Edmund’s shrine and the discontinuation of pilgrimages was devastating, because the saint’s bodily presence in his shrine had always been central to his reputation (even if Edmund’s body was last physically inspected in 1198). The destruction of the shrine marked a decisive end to the special royal protection afforded to Edmund’s cult and an end to royal pilgrimages – and therefore an end to any official recognition for Edmund’s patronage of England. English Catholics in exile continued to regard Edmund as a patron saint of England throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If anything, the exiles’ experience of martyrdom heightened Edmund’s significance for them. They even founded a monastery in Paris to succeed the abbey of Bury St Edmunds, but without the body of St Edmund the cult of the saint had no clear focus. Then, in 1644, a French lawyer from the city of Toulouse, Pierre de Caseneuve, began to publicise a bold yet bizarre claim that Edmund was in fact buried in one of Toulouse’s churches, and developed a story to account for it. According to Caseneuve, the future Louis VIII, summoned to England by the barons to seize the throne from King John in 1216,

Introduction

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had sacked the abbey at Bury St Edmunds and stolen Edmund’s body, taking it back to Toulouse. Medieval chroniclers, inconveniently, failed to record the incident. In spite of the absence of any evidence for Caseneuve’s story it was seized upon by English Catholics in the nineteenth century, eager to believe that one of the great English saints had escaped the general catastrophe of the dissolution by being safely ensconced in France. By the 1890s the belief that Edmund was buried in Toulouse was widely accepted in the English Catholic community, prompting the archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Vaughan, to request the body of St Edmund from Pope Leo XIII as the foundation relic of Westminster Cathedral in 1901. Vaughan intended to bring the relics he believed to be Edmund’s into London in triumph and install them in the high altar of his splendid new Byzantine-style basilica. It was then that Montague Rhodes James, the leading medievalist scholar of his generation (but much better known today as the author of spine-chilling ghost stories), pointed out the lack of evidence for the authenticity of the relics from Toulouse in a letter to The Times. Cardinal Vaughan was forced to climb down; when the relics from Toulouse were properly examined, almost a century later, they turned out to be a miscellaneous assemblage of male and female bones from a variety of different sources. Edmund once again rejoined the company of England’s lost saints, with no new light on the mystery until 2013. In that year I visited Douai Abbey in Berkshire, the successor of the monastery founded in seventeenth-century Paris as a successor to the abbey of Bury St Edmunds. Here, in a monastic chronicle, I came across the first evidence of a secret burial of Edmund’s body in 1539 – not in Toulouse, but in Bury St Edmunds, where the body had resided since the reign of Æthelstan. Then, in May 2017, St Edmundsbury Borough Council announced that a set of tennis courts built over the monks’ cemetery in Bury would be relocated. The announcement raised the tantalising prospect of an excavation of the area in which it is most likely Edmund’s body was buried. Once more, after the false alarm of 1901, there seems to be a genuine prospect at the time of writing that Edmund’s body might really be found – and with it, perhaps, the

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ultimate symbol and embodiment of English identity. If Edmund is one day discovered beneath the tennis courts in Bury St Edmunds’s Abbey Gardens, such a resolution to an Anglo-Saxon mystery would not be entirely without precedent. In 1829 the body of St Cuthbert (c.634–87), complete with seventh-century vestments, jewellery and even a Gospel book in his coffin, was discovered under the floor of Durham Cathedral. It is the argument of this book that the remains of Edmund are probably located somewhere in the monks’ cemetery and that, furthermore, it might be possible to identify those remains beyond reasonable doubt as the relics venerated in the shrine at Bury.

In search of Edmund The search for Edmund is more than just the attempt to discover the last resting place of the king’s mortal remains. It is the quest to understand the first and most enduring embodiment of Englishness and the ways in which Edmund has evolved through the ages as a symbol for the English people. Many people have gone on this search for Edmund, beginning with his first biographer, Abbo of Fleury (d.1004). Since then, such famous names as John Lydgate (c.1370–c.1451), Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) and M. R. James (1862–1936) have joined in, finding versions of Edmund suitable to the ages in which they lived. This book begins by examining the context and background for Edmund’s historical reign: the AngloSaxon (or more properly Anglian) kingdom of East Anglia and the contribution its early kings made to Edmund’s story. Several puzzling elements of that story only make sense when the earlier history of East Anglia is taken into account. These include the adoption of Edmund as a national as well as a local saint; the role of the protecting wolf in the St Edmund legend; the fact that a king killed by his enemies could be venerated as a saintly martyr; the alleged incorruption of the saint’s body; and the politicisation of Edmund’s cult. In fact, Edmund followed in the footsteps of other East Anglian royal saints who came before him: the martyr king Sigeberht, the incorrupt saints Æthelburh and Æthelthryth, and the political martyr Æthelberht.

Introduction

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The second chapter reconstructs the evidence for the circumstances and location of Edmund’s death. The earliest chronicle traditions are consistent with Abbo of Fleury’s detailed narrative of Edmund’s martyr­dom, but thereafter the chronicle and hagiographical traditions about Edmund diverge, which has sown doubt in the minds of many historians about Abbo’s accuracy. Abbo’s account must be viewed in context as the product of very different standards of biography from those of today, but it is likely to contain some elements derived from genuine oral traditions about the historical Edmund. At the heart of Edmund’s story is the mystery of why he was killed in the first place: was he slaughtered in battle, killed for sport, executed for refusing to rule under the Vikings, or even sacrificed? Abbo does not answer this question satisfactorily. The site of Edmund’s martyrdom has, likewise, been much debated, with locations in Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex all staking their claims. I present new evidence for considering the site closest to Bury St Edmunds, in the Suffolk parish of Bradfield St Clare, the most likely location of the martyrdom. Chapter 3 examines the earliest evidence for the cult of St Edmund. From the very beginning, Edmund was venerated in death, and the story that his body was incorrupt drew streams of pilgrims and donations. At a time before formal canonisation, when saints were made by popular acclamation rather than official proclamation, the evidence points to something extraordinary: that the Danes occupying East Anglia and the Danelaw were among the first to venerate Edmund as a saint. Early veneration of Edmund is inseparable from the treaty agreed between Alfred the Great and Guthrum (later known as Æthelstan II), the Danish king of East Anglia, in around 879, which formally created the boundary between Alfred’s English realm and the Danelaw. The treaty marked the beginning of a composite Anglo-Danish identity for those living under Danish rule, and Danish veneration of Edmund expiated the crime of Ivarr while conferring legitimacy on the newly Christianised Danish rulers. The removal of Edmund’s body from the little wooden chapel at Hægelisdun to the church of St Mary at Beodericsworth (Bury St Edmunds) probably occurred while East Anglia was still under Danish rule, but by the early tenth century the kings of the House

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of Wessex were beginning to use the title rex Anglorum (‘king of the English’), last used by Edmund, to assert their overlordship of the entire English people. It was no accident that King Edward the Elder’s son and successor was called Edmund, nor that Edmund I of England was the earliest prominent royal benefactor of St Edmund’s shrine. Paradoxically, however, it was a Danish king, Cnut, who founded a great Benedictine abbey to care for the saint’s remains in 1020; although whether this act was done out of love or fear remains a mystery. Cnut was the son of Swein Forkbeard, king of Denmark, who fell victim to Edmund’s anger in 1014 and was killed by an apparition of the saint brandishing a spear. The death of Swein became Edmund’s defining miracle, establishing him as a defender of English rights and a fearsome adversary. Chapter 4 describes how Edmund became one of the most important saints in medieval England. By a strange twist of fate, while the Norman Conquest of 1066 almost brought an end to the English nation, the best-known English saint did exceptionally well out of William the Bastard’s invasion. The abbot of Bury St Edmunds in 1066, alone among all English abbots, was already a Frenchman loyal to William. Edmund and his rights were left largely unmolested, and William even made a pilgrimage to his shrine. It quickly became clear that the Normans’ beneficent treatment of Edmund, like the Danes’ veneration of the saint in the ninth century, was becoming a way of legitimating their rule over the English. By the end of the eleventh century the colossal Romanesque church that housed Edmund’s shrine was one of the largest in Christendom and Edmund’s cult was the foremost in England. Veneration of St Edmund spread throughout Europe and he continued to be a favoured patron of the Plantagenet kings. Those monarchs who temporarily defied or disrespected Edmund, such as King John and Edward I, learnt to repent their actions. The two kings most devoted to the saint were Richard I in the twelfth century and Henry VI in the fifteenth, although they seem to have admired Edmund for very different reasons. For Richard ‘the Lionheart’, Edmund was a patron of English warriors and of war against the infidel, although he may also have served to legitimate Richard’s rule

Introduction

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over an English kingdom that he rarely visited. Edmund’s character as a warrior saint was reinforced by Edmund’s repeated apparitions as a soldier in armour and by the practice of carrying his banner into battle – to the extent that the coat of arms attributed to St Edmund even became the symbol of medieval English overlordship of Ireland. Yet for Henry VI, Edmund was a virginal and scholarly king who reflected the hapless Lancastrian king’s own preoccupations. Edmund could be reinvented to serve almost any royal purpose. There was one royal purpose, however, to which Edmund proved an obstacle: Henry VIII’s decision to dissolve the monasteries. The dissolution provides the starting point for Chapter 5’s exploration of Edmund’s reputation after the Reformation. As a royal saint, Edmund might have been expected to escape the general destruction, as Edward the Confessor managed to do in Westminster Abbey. But the association between Edmund and the Benedictine order, and the miraculous (Cromwell would have said ‘superstitious’) stories and relics associated with Edmund were unfashionable enough to reverse six centuries of royal policy. Yet even after he was deprived of his royal significance, Edmund was eagerly snapped up by martyr­ ologists on both sides of the Reformation. John Foxe, the Protestant martyrologist, included Edmund in his Actes and Monumentes but stripped his story of its ‘superstitious’ elements. English Catholics in exile drew comparisons between Edmund’s martyrdom and those of missionary priests captured in Elizabethan England. Meanwhile, the earliest attempt to find Edmund’s body seems to have taken place in 1634. Another search would no doubt have been attempted in 1685, when the Benedictines were offered the site of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds, had they not been advised to turn down the offer by King James II. The earliest archaeological excavations in the abbey ruins, in the eighteenth century, turned up many interesting finds but not Edmund’s body. Serious excavation of the abbey began in 1902–3, when M. R. James discovered and identified the bodies of six of Bury’s medieval abbots. Thorough excavation of the site between 1957 and 1964 stopped short of one crucial area of the complex, however. The monastic cemetery, behind the east end of the abbey church, was

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hidden underneath municipal tennis courts and therefore could not be excavated. As this book will argue in its conclusion, the so far unexcavated private cemetery of the monks, separate from the enormous cemetery for the townsfolk on the north side of the abbey church, is the most likely resting place of Edmund’s body. England may be on the verge of rediscovering – quite literally – the saint who, above all others, embodied Englishness throughout the Middle Ages. But whether or not Edmund’s mortal remains are recovered from the ruins of the abbey that bears his name, the debate about his importance as a patron saint of the English people has already started. The final question this book seeks to answer is whether Edmund’s significance remains locked in the past, or whether he can still be the pre-eminent bearer of English national identity in the twenty-first century. This book makes a case for renewed national consciousness of Edmund as England’s saint. Saints can act as bearers of national identity without raising the spectre of nationalism, and an English national identity is needed now more than at any time since the seventeenth century. The rediscovery of Edmund, England’s lost king, may be the foundation on which an English national identity can be rebuilt.

Chap ter 1

Angelcynn Edmund’s People To the modern traveller, the land which gave England its name is a short drive or train journey from London, and Norfolk and Suffolk seem to differ from neighbouring counties only in their lack of motorways and their network of infuriatingly narrow and meandering small roads. The traveller of a millennium and a half ago would have encountered a very different landscape. Today’s sedate streams, such as the rivers Stour and Waveney, were wide tidal waterways, impassable for the pedestrian but navigable far inland for seagoing vessels. The area we now call the Norfolk Broads was a huge peat bog taking up almost a third of Norfolk, while the flat fields of today’s northern Cambridgeshire simply did not exist; the vast undrained Fens, peppered with occasional islands, blended into the Wash and the North Sea beyond it, so that Norfolk and Suffolk were effectively a peninsula. Finally, a series of man-made earthworks – Devil’s Dyke, Black Ditches and Fleam Dyke – protected the most vulnerable approach to East Anglia from the south-west.1 Abbo of Fleury, Edmund’s earliest biographer, knew the landscape of East Anglia first-hand during his exile at Ramsey Abbey (then one of the islands in the Fens), but the French monk also gave a useful outsider’s perspective on what the region was like in the Anglo-Saxon era: [East Anglia] is washed by waters on almost every side, girdled as it is on the south and east by the ocean, and on the north by an immense tract of marsh and fen, which starting, owing to the level character of the ground, from practically the midmost point of

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Britain, slopes for a distance of more than a hundred miles, intersected by rivers of great size, to the sea. But on the side where the sun sets, the province is in contact with the rest of the island, and on that account accessible; but as a bar to constant invasion by an enemy, a fosse sunk in the earth is fortified by a mound equivalent to a wall of considerable height.2

Well defended by the Fens and by impressive earthworks to the west, this big bump of flat land jutting into the North Sea, England’s most easterly point, has always been very vulnerable to seaborne invaders. In the late third century the Romans fortified the province of Britannia’s ‘Saxon shore’ – so-called because it faced the land of the barbarian Saxones in what is now the Netherlands and Germany – leaving behind massive yet enigmatic ruins at Burgh Castle, Brancaster, Caister-on-Sea and Walton Castle. Many centuries later, fears of invasion in the Napoleonic and two world wars also focussed on the long, flat coastline of eastern England. East Anglia’s defences were largely untested in modern times, but the Britons left to defend themselves by the departing Roman army in 410 were not so fortunate. We do not know if the Britons made any attempt to garrison or protect the forts of the Saxon shore; but whether they defended themselves or not, in the fifth century the Romanised descendants of Boudicca’s Iceni tribe faced the vanguard of a swathe of invading barbarian peoples who would one day give their name to a nation: Angelcynn, the Angles.

The coming of the Angles The Angles’ homeland lay far to the east, beyond the country of the Saxones. Angeln is a small protuberance on the ‘neck’ of Denmark facing the cold waters of the Baltic Sea, today located in the far north of Germany. The territory is flat, arable and cut in two by the wide estuary of the River Schlei. In fact, although it is only a fraction of the size of East Anglia, Angeln has a great deal in common with the land to which it gave its name. It is easy to see why the adventurous

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farmers of Angeln were attracted to this part of Britain. Not only was it the first land they would have encountered on crossing the North Sea, but its navigable estuarine rivers were also perfect for their fast, clinker-built ships. In 1939 the ghostly imprint of one such ship was photographed under a burial mound at Sutton Hoo before it crumbled back into the sandy soil.3 The 51-foot-long larchwood ship discovered at Ashby Dell near the Yare estuary in 1830 (and long since lost) may have been even older – perhaps one of the very ships that brought the first Angles.4 We do not know exactly when the Angles came. Judging from archaeological finds, some Germanic people were already living in East Anglia very shortly after the Roman legions left in 410 (or even before – the late Roman Empire often used barbarian mercenaries).5 Medieval chroniclers, always eager to assign every event to a definite date, settled on 527 for the Anglian conquest of East Anglia, but the archaeological evidence suggests a much earlier and more gradual settlement in the middle decades of the fifth century.6 Settlement began along the estuaries of south Suffolk and spread inland along the region’s navigable rivers. Although the name of one people group – the Angles – would give the region its name, settlers from western Norway may also have been present, judging from the survival of artefacts such as a late fifth-century Norwegian bracteate (a large flat brooch imitating the design of a Roman coin) excavated at Lakenheath in Suffolk.7 Bearing the runic legend mægæ medu (perhaps ‘mead for kinsmen’) and the apparent battle cry gægogæ, the Undley bracteate conjures up an era of roving barbarian war bands far removed from the Roman imagery it mimicked.8 The old idea, largely derived from the writings of the Dark Age authors Gildas and Bede, that the native Britons packed up and fled westwards has been discredited by the most recent genetic evidence.9 The genomes of modern East Anglians show that they are largely descended from native Britons who stayed and presumably became culturally and linguistically ‘anglicised’. Furthermore, the archaeological record yields no evidence of massacres of Britons or of a mass migration out of East Anglia. Germanic-style grave goods and cremation burials in earthenware urns appear to have replaced

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the inhumation burials of the Britons in the second half of the fifth century.10 A collection of these early cremation burials unearthed at Walsingham in Norfolk was the subject of England’s earliest ever ‘archaeological report’, Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia or UrneBuriall (1658) – although Browne mistakenly identified the urns as Roman, and his book is better known for its eloquence than for its accuracy.11 Even in this most ‘English’ of all regions the occasional reminder of the Britons still lingered, in place names such as Walpole (‘pool of the Britons’) and Walton (‘homestead of the Britons’), and in personal names such as Ovinus (Owini), the seventh-century ‘steward’ of Æthelthryth of Ely.12 Romano-British bracelets have been found at early Anglian burial sites in Cambridgeshire and Suffolk as children’s anklets, although it is unclear whether this was simply a matter of reuse or an indication that these populations clung in some way to British culture.13 Yet the Angles seem to have absorbed the indigenous people into their society at an early date rather than segregating, enslaving or expelling them. The new Angle-land may have been a bridgehead for the Angles’ expansion into other parts of Britain – westward into the Fens and east midlands, and northward into Lincolnshire, Humberside, Northumbria and even Lothian (in modern Scotland). Yet since archaeology, genetics and place names are our sole sources of information about an illiterate pagan culture, our understanding of this shadowy period of the fifth and sixth centuries is inevitably very limited. Place name evidence from Norfolk and Suffolk suggests a chaotic situation in early East Anglia, with different war bands led by Anglian warriors competing for influence over the land and the native population. There was certainly no centrally organised or personally led invasion. The suffix ‘–ing’ found in such place names as Ashbocking, Exning, Blything (the name of a hundred) and Gipping (the name of a river) referred originally to people groups or followers of a particular leader. Thus the River Gipping is probably named after the Gyppingas, either an Anglian clan name or the followers of a person called Gyppe.14 Just like the English-speaking settlers of the American West in the nineteenth century, the earliest English

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settlers of Britain loved to name new settlements after themselves and their families. Whatever the original pattern of the Anglian settlement, by the beginning of the seventh century a single dynasty dominated the East Angles – by dint of violence, ingenuity or a combination of both – and one leader had gained recognition as cyning (‘guardian of the kin’). That dynasty was the Wuffingas or Wuffings. According to a genealogy of the eighth-century East Anglian king Ælfwald (d.749), the Wuffings were (in common with all Anglian royal houses) descended from the pagan god Woden. Uniquely, however, the Wuffings also claimed descent from ‘Caser’ (Caesar), a claim to association with the Roman Empire that will be considered later in this chapter. Wehha was supposedly the first of his line to have ruled in Britain, but it was his son Wuffa (‘little wolf ’) who gave his name to the dynasty.15 The Wuffings’ centre of power was the Deben Valley in south-east Suffolk, around Woodbridge and Rendlesham, and it may have been from this area that they launched their bid to unite the East Angles into one kingdom in the 570s, when a site on the banks of the Deben estuary, Sutton Hoo, became the burial ground for their warrior elite.16

From Britain to England East Anglia – Estengle in Old English – was the only Anglo-Saxon kingdom whose name referenced the Angles. By contrast, several kingdoms (Wessex, Sussex, Essex and Middlesex) were named after the Saxons. It is curious, therefore, that the nation that eventually emerged from this jumble of kingdoms in the tenth century was called ‘England’ (and not ‘Saxony’, for example). It is likely that the early Anglo-Saxons called the island they lived on Bryten, ‘Britain’, but no Old English-speaking inhabitant of pre-Conquest England would have described him- or herself as British (a term applied exclusively to the indigenous walas who would eventually become the Welsh and Cornish). Nor would he or she have used the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’, a composite term coined by Continental writers in the

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eighth century to distinguish the Germanic people living in Britain from the Continental Saxons. In the ninth century, King Alfred the Great described himself as ‘king of the Anglo-Saxons’, but this royal title simply indicated that he ruled over both Saxon and Anglian kingdoms; it was not what his people called themselves. Historians only began writing about ‘the Anglo-Saxons’ as a people in the sixteenth century. Like the surviving ‘–sex’ suffix in Sussex, Wessex, Middlesex and Essex, the words meaning ‘English’ in the Welsh, Cornish and Gaelic languages are derived from ‘Saxon’. This is a strong indication that most of the invaders encountered by the Britons would have called themselves Saxons – which, given that the Saxons lived on the south and west sides of the country (closest to the Britons) and the Angles on the east, is unsurprising. The Angles would have referred to themselves as Angelcynn, ‘English’, and to their language as englisc, but less than half of the inhabitants of early Anglo-Saxon England were Angles.17 Only the kingdoms of East Anglia, Lindsey and Northumbria were certainly Anglian in origin.18 The ‘English’ name may have come to be applied to all the Germanic inhabitants of Britain by accident. In 573, before he became pope, Gregory the Great was taking a stroll in the Roman Forum when he caught sight of striking fair-haired slaves for sale. Gregory asked who they were, and the reply he received, Angli (the slaves were from the Anglian kingdom of Deira, a predecessor of Northumbria), produced Gregory’s famous Latin pun, Non Angli sed angeli si forent Christiani (‘Not Angles but angels, if they were Christians’).19 Gregory did not forget the encounter, and years later, in 595–6, it was to the Angli that he sent the monk Augustine bearing the Christian faith. In spite of the fact that Augustine established his see in the Jutish kingdom of Kent, he was from the beginning episcopus Anglorum, ‘bishop of the English’, and Gregory addressed King Æthelberht as rex Anglorum in spite of the fact that only one Anglian kingdom, the East Angles, accepted Æthelberht’s suzerainty.20 The future of the ‘English’ name was sealed in the eighth century when the Northumbrian monk Bede (an Angle, naturally) entitled his monumental history of the conversion process Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (‘Ecclesiastical history of the English people’).

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This traditional explanation for the dominance of the ‘English’ name, which attributes it to the influence of the church and of Bede, is not altogether without its problems.21 In the first place, Gregory and Bede were using Latin, not Old English. Names of nations and people groups vary greatly between languages; in particular, peoples often call themselves something completely different from what outsiders call them. The Welsh call themselves Cymry; the Highland Scots call themselves Albannaich. The fact that Romans and Latinspeaking churchmen called the Germanic people of Britain Angli does not mean that those people used the equivalent Old English word Angelcynn to refer to themselves,22 although the seventh-century West Saxon Laws of Ine apparently uses the term englisc to refer to any person speaking the Old English language.23 It is possible that Angli was a lazy or convenient Latin shorthand to refer to a complex ecosystem of barbarian peoples who called themselves many different things. Furthermore, Old English was not a written language until the second half of the seventh century, 60 years or so after the arrival of Augustine, and the earliest records of the English referring to themselves as English appear even later than this. The assertion that the church and Bede succeeded in coaxing all the Germanic peoples of Britain into thinking of and referring to themselves as ‘English’ needs to be treated with some caution. The ethnic name ‘English’ may simply have been adopted as an anglicisation of the Latin Angli, as earlier local ethnic names were forgotten or seemed unimportant; the outsiders’ perspective, which saw all the people as Angli, was progressively imposed on the insiders and their language. An eighth-century charter of King Æthelbald of Mercia asserting his overlordship of every kingdom south of Northumbria (including East Anglia) calls the king’s subjects Sutangli, ‘South Angles’.24 If Bede really had established the usage of Angli to refer to all English people in the eighth century it is unlikely that Alfred would have called himself rex Anglorum et Saxonum (‘king of the Angles and Saxons’) or Angul-Saxonum rex (‘king of the Anglo-Saxons’) when he made a claim to overlordship of all the English in the ninth century.25 Alfred’s choice of a composite title suggests that people in ninth-century England were still aware of the ethnic differences

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between regions and kingdoms. Yet Alfred’s successor Æthelstan (c.894–939) styled himself rex Anglorum (‘king of the English’) after 927, when he captured York from the Danes.26 The last king prior to Æthelstan to use this title had been Edmund. I shall show in Chapter 3 that a possible reason for the change of title was Æthelstan’s desire, for political reasons, to invoke the memory of the martyr king Edmund. It was because Æthelstan adopted the title rex Anglorum that the land he ruled came to be universally known as England – something for which Edmund may have been responsible.

Rædwald As we have seen, the title rex Anglorum can be translated as both ‘king of the English’ and the less impressive ‘king of the Angles’. However, one East Anglian king deserved both titles. Æthelberht, overking of the English and patron of Augustine’s mission died in 616, leaving the kingdom of Kent to his pagan son Eadbald. All might have been lost for the Christian cause, but the embattled new faith found an unlikely refuge in East Anglia. Rædwald, king of the East Angles (d.624/5), had received baptism from Augustine before the bishop’s death in around 604, although the king was far from the perfect convert.27 Bede blamed Rædwald’s wife for persuading him, after his return from Canterbury, to maintain a pagan altar next to the new Christian one, perhaps at his royal centre at Rendlesham.28 Bede’s account of Rædwald’s lukewarm devotion, taken together with the fact that he mentions no bishops or sees established in East Anglia during Rædwald’s reign, suggests that Rædwald was primarily interested in the new faith as a royal cult that could advance his own personal prestige, rather than saving the souls of his people.29 However, Rædwald was not just the only ‘Christian’ king left in England after Æthelberht’s death: he also succeeded Æthelberht as overking, the only East Anglian king to hold the title.30 Bede summed up Rædwald as ‘a man of noble descent but ignoble in his actions’, but the character that emerges from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History is rather more complex than this.31 Loyal to his

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overlord Æthelberht in accepting baptism (albeit without conviction), Rædwald proves to be uxorious as well as, perhaps, superstitiously fearful of the consequences of discontinuing entirely the traditional sacrifices to the pagan gods. His very modern (even post-modern) approach to monotheism is perhaps more comprehensible to our world than it was to the uncompromising monotheist Bede. Rædwald displays kingly nobility in granting asylum to Edwin of Northumbria, but succumbs to greed or diplomatic pressure when he finally agrees to hand Edwin back to the Northumbrians. Yet, ever the flawed hero, Rædwald recovers his sense of honour when his wife shames him into fighting the Northumbrians. Finally, Rædwald becomes the avenging and victorious ideal warrior when, at the Battle of the River Idle, grief and rage at the death of his son and heir Rægenhere send the king charging into the heart of the Northumbrian lines.32 If Rædwald was the warrior buried under Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo, then he combined a taste for foreign luxury goods with a desire to sport conspicuously the trappings of his own wealth like a barbarian chieftain. He enjoyed gaming, drinking and hunting. At once pagan and Christian, cowardly and courageous, civilised and barbaric, Rædwald of East Anglia was hardly the ‘poster boy’ for English Christianity that Bede desired, but his role as overking after Æthelberht’s death was crucial in ensuring the new faith’s survival. Indeed, Rædwald’s Christian altar at one of his royal centres may not have been the only one in East Anglia. According to the twelfth-century Liber Eliensis (‘Book of Ely’) and a related document, the Chronicle of the Abbots and Bishops of Ely, in 607 King Æthelberht of Kent had founded a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary at a place called Cradundene or Cratendune, one mile away from the future site of the great monastery of Ely on an island in the Fens.33 The source is a late one, but the appearance of an Old English place name that neither the medieval compilers nor present-day archaeologists can identify makes it plausible that the monks of Ely were relying on an ancient tradition. Bede described Rædwald as rex Anglorum, and it was presumably also the title the king himself used.34 It is unclear whether Rædwald adopted this title before or after he came to be regarded as overking.

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The title may have been an early instance of the extension of the term Angli to include the Saxons and Jutes (over whom Rædwald also ruled) as well as the Angles.35 At the very least, the title implied Rædwald’s real or symbolic authority over the other Anglian kingdoms of Lindsey and Northumbria. Rædwald’s Christianity (however halfhearted) lent him prestige and influence at a time when the idea of a unified ‘Roman’ Christendom under the symbolic leadership of the Eastern Roman emperor was still very significant. Whether or not the East Anglian leader buried in Sutton Hoo’s Mound 1 was Rædwald himself, the Sutton Hoo treasure gives an insight into the long reach and international status of East Anglian kings of the early seventh century. The Wuffings’ position as important northern European kings was underpinned by the trading port of Gipeswic (Ipswich), an enormous emporium comparable to Lundenwic (London), Eoforwic (York) and Hamwic (Southampton) that was the first port of call for many traders from the Low Countries, Germany and Scandinavia.36 Although pagan in form – burial with grave goods for the afterlife was condemned by the Christian church – the Sutton Hoo ship burial contained hints of Christianity. It would have been a fitting send-off for a king simultaneously attracted by the foreign glamour of Christianity and attached to ancestral rites and customs. Two silver spoons, inscribed with the names ‘Saulos’ and ‘Paulos’, may have been gifts the king received at his baptism, a reminder of the dramatic conversion of Saul, the persecutor of Christians in the Acts of the Apostles who becomes St Paul.37 The dead king’s purse was also filled with Merovingian Frankish gold coins marked with the sign of the cross.38 Even if these objects do not prove that the king buried under Mound 1 was ever a Christian, they suggest he was fascinated by the prestige of Roman Christianity as well as, perhaps, with the trappings of Roman authority; it has been suggested that a mysterious iron ‘stand’ found in the mound may have been intended to mimic a Roman legionary standard.39 A number of pieces of evidence suggest that the kings of the Wuffing dynasty were preoccupied – to a greater extent than any other English royal house – with the concept of romanitas (meaning ‘Roman-ness’). The attractions of romanitas had been a linchpin of

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the Roman occupation of Britain, keeping native elites in line and ensuring that loyalty was richly rewarded. Yet even after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476, the appeal of romanitas was unabated and the barbarian conquerors of the Western Empire, such as the Ostrogoths, Visigoths and Franks fell over each other to prove their ‘civilised’ cultural credentials. Furthermore, the native Britons continued to regard themselves as citizens of the Roman Empire long after 410; as late as 668 Ebroin, mayor of the palace of Neustria, tried to prevent Archbishop Hadrian from crossing to England because he suspected Hadrian was carrying messages from the emperor in Constantinople to British kings.40 The Anglo-Saxon kings, who came from lands never conquered by the Roman Empire, were latecomers to the idea of romanitas, but the East Angles led the way. The Wuffing dynasty was unique in claiming descent from ‘Caser’ (Caesar), although Sam Newton has argued persuasively that the Wuffings’ real origins may have lain in Scandinavia. Newton advanced the case that the Wuffings and the Wulfings, the rulers of Östergötland mentioned in Beowulf, were branches of the same family, and that the great Old English epic poem was composed and sung for the Wuffing kings of East Anglia.41 Uniquely among the Anglo-Saxon royal families, the Wuffings practised the Scandinavian rite of ship burial.42 If the Wuffings were originally part of a Scandinavian contingent in the fifth-century settlement of East Anglia, then the golden bracteate from southern Scandinavia depicting the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus found at Lakenheath might be evidence of the early expansion of their influence into west Suffolk.43

Kin of the wolf The name Wuffa means ‘little wolf ’, and the lupine theme recurs again and again in the meagre surviving art of the East Anglian kingdom. In the Sutton Hoo treasure, the motif of a man standing between two wolves appears twice on the splendid enamelled purse lid, and a sheet of gold in the shape of a wolf was once mounted on the slender wand

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that may have been Rædwald’s royal sceptre.44 Wuffa, the symbolic leader and father of the Wuffings, is perhaps best understood not as an actual man but rather as the personification of a totemic wolf figure, serving as a guardian spirit for the dynasty.45 The Roman motif of the suckling twins Romulus and Remus, blurring the boundaries between wolves and human beings, blended seamlessly into the Wuffings’ understanding of themselves as the people of ‘little wolf ’ – an idea which may have reached even further back, into an alien northern European world of shamans assuming the identities of animals in ritual trances. The wolf of the Wuffings was the means by which the dynasty could boldly assert its barbarian heritage while simultaneously claiming to be Romans, descendants of ‘Caser’.46 The wolf emblem, given its Roman twist by the inclusion of the suckling twins, occurs again on an eighth-century ivory plaque from a book cover or reliquary casket discovered at Larling in Norfolk, near the site of an important minster church.47 The Larling image is almost identical to one that appears on a penny of King Æthelberht II of East Anglia (d.794), who was killed on the orders of King Offa of Mercia and later venerated as St Ethelbert.48 The wolf occurs once again in one of the latest surviving objects from the old East Anglian kingdom, the seal of Bishop Æthelwold of Dummoc, found by a child near Eye church in Suffolk in 1822; wolves with garnet eyes surround the seal, suggesting that the church as well as kings were prepared to make use of the symbol.49 The adoption of the wolf image by Æthelwold – who was probably bishop when Edmund was king – speaks of a profound bond between the East Anglian kings and the church on which they depended for much of their authority. Although late Roman bronze coins featuring the Romulus and Remus motif would have been common finds in the fields of Anglo-Saxon East Anglia, there seems to be more than mindless mimicry of Roman designs going on in the Wuffings’ preoccupation with wolves. Not long after Rædwald’s death East Anglia was menaced from the west by Mercia, a confrontation that would be renewed in the eighth century, yet the East Anglians had something the Mercians did not: an old Christian pedigree going back to the baptism of one of their kings by Augustine himself.

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The dynastic symbols and titles adopted by Rædwald underlined the pretensions of the Wuffing dynasty to be rather more than just the rulers of a small kingdom on the east coast of Britain. Such symbols and claims enabled East Anglia to project its ‘soft power’ as one of the cradles of Anglo-Roman Christianity even when it was politically at its weakest. The ‘Englishness’ of the Wuffing dynasty is one way to explain the appeal of Edmund as an English national saint soon after his death – an achievement never matched by other martyr kings, who remained regional figures. Edmund was not just any Anglo-Saxon regional king: thanks to his ancestors, he was rex Anglorum, a figure who was able to incarnate a vision of English national unity even at a time of chaos, when such an idea was a distant dream.

The martyr king Although Rædwald may have prepared the ground for Edmund’s future adoption as an ‘English’ rather than merely East Anglian figure, it was one of Rædwald’s sons, Sigeberht, who would walk Edmund’s path of martyrdom and set the precedent for martyr kings. When Rædwald died in 624 or 625 he was succeeded by his Christian son Eorpwald, apparently ensuring that East Anglia would continue as a bastion of the faith. However, Eorpwald’s murder by a pagan at his court shortly after his succession meant that, in Bede’s words, ‘for three years the kingdom relapsed into heathendom’.50 The task of saving East Anglian Christianity fell to another of Rædwald’s sons, Sigeberht, who had been in exile in Francia during his brother Eorpwald’s reign. Judging from Sigeberht’s later actions and interests, it is likely that he had studied at a Frankish monastery after giving up on the thought of ruling, thereby becoming the first literate East Anglian king. At first glance, the contrast between the unworldly Sigeberht and his shrewd father Rædwald could not have been greater: Sigeberht’s two priorities were the proper incorporation of East Anglia into Roman Christendom and the furtherance of education (which meant, at that time, knowledge of the Latin language).

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However, since Bede noted that Sigeberht ‘had once been a gallant and distinguished commander’,51 it is possible that Sigeberht had to dislodge Ricberht – the pagan murderer of his brother Eorpwald – from power by force before he could assume the kingship. Alternatively, Bede may have been thinking of Sigeberht’s exploits in his father Rædwald’s army before his exile. Sigeberht’s military reputation was evidently powerful enough to enable him to return safely from exile. Shortly after Sigeberht’s return home in 627 a Burgundian bishop, Felix (whom Sigeberht may well have known in exile), visited Archbishop Honorius of Canterbury and was sent by Honorius (at Felix’s own request) to establish his see at a place on the East Anglian coast called Dummoc.52 Felix’s visit to Honorius may have been stage-managed by Sigeberht, since it was critical for the king of the East Angles to maintain his prestige and pretensions to romanitas by a close association with the see of Canterbury, directly founded by the pope in 597. Sigeberht’s priorities may have been very different from his father’s, but the son continued one aspect of his father’s work by ‘civilising’ the kingdom. Sigeberht’s probable literacy made him the ideal leader for the next phase of that ‘civilising’ process, and he set a pattern for learned Anglo-Saxon kings that would one day be followed by Alfred the Great himself. The process of converting a pagan people cannot have been easy. Early Anglo-Saxon missionaries often chose to base themselves in the ruins of old Roman forts. The stone could be used to build churches, but the walls may also have protected the bishop and monks. The resulting complexes were a little like the remote misiones of Texas and New Mexico many centuries later: little islands of Christianity set against a potentially threatening tribal hinterland. Although Suffolk’s shrinking coastline means that Felix’s church has long since disappeared under the North Sea, one church from this very early period survives a few miles further south, at Bradwell-on-Sea in the neighbouring kingdom of Essex. St Peter’s church, built on the site of the Roman Saxon shore fort of Othona (Ythancæstir), was founded in 654 by the Northumbrian missionary bishop Cedd (d.664). The church is remotely located by modern standards, at

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the easternmost point of the Dengie peninsula, but in an age when travel was faster by water than by land its location was prominent and accessible. The church is modest in size, with thick walls built of reused Roman stone in the form of a simple rectangle, although it once had porticoes on both the north and south sides imitating the design of Byzantine churches in Syria.53 In spite of the damage of centuries (it was once nearly destroyed for target practice by the US Air Force), St Peter’s still gives a good idea of what Felix’s first church may have looked like. Bede records that, in addition to spreading the Christian faith, Sigeberht also established a school, since ‘he wished to copy what he had seen well contrived in Gaul’. Felix assisted Sigeberht by obtaining teachers from Canterbury.54 Sigeberht also personally founded at least one monastery; Bede does not name it, but the twelfth-century Liber Eliensis called it Betrichesworde (Beodericsworth), the town later known as Bury St Edmunds.55 Eventually, Sigeberht retreated to his own monastery as a monk, leaving the government of the kingdom to a relative named Ecgric. Sigeberht’s retirement proved premature. In 640 the pagan king of Mercia, Penda, attacked East Anglia. Penda was the last significant pagan Anglo-Saxon ruler, and a thorn in the side of the Christian mission. It is possible that the remarkable Staffordshire Hoard, discovered in a field near Lichfield in 2009, represented war booty taken in battle by Penda or another Mercian king; the treatment of golden crosses in the collection (they were folded over and therefore desecrated) might suggest they were captured by a pagan.56 The attack must have come from the west and probably centred on Devil’s Dyke or one of the other earthworks protecting the kingdom’s western frontier in modern Cambridgeshire. The long peace meant that the East Angles were unskilled in war, and they asked Sigeberht to come out of his monastery and lead them in battle, if only for the sake of morale. This was at a time when it was considered unworthy for anyone other than the king to lead his troops in person. However, Sigeberht took his monastic status so seriously that he refused to bear arms, carrying only a staff, and both he and Ecgric were cut down by Penda’s army.57

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Sigeberht may have been a disastrous military leader – and therefore, from an Anglo-Saxon point of view, a disastrous king – but he succeeded in being a new kind of king who, in death, turned defeat into victory. After his death, Sigeberht was considered to have died a martyr’s death, because he was killed by pagans and died defending his Christian kingdom. Sigeberht’s faithfulness to his monastic vows would also have helped in his acclamation as a saint, but Sigeberht showed that it was possible for a Christian king who died in battle against pagan enemies to be considered a martyr. This deviated from the view of martyrdom generally accepted within the Roman church, derived from stories of Roman Christians martyred under the pagan emperors. The sanctity of the early Roman martyrs was predicated on their free choice of martyrdom when offered a chance to save themselves (usually by sacrificing to the genius of the emperor), but the church’s expansion into barbarian northern Europe complicated this picture. Death in battle did not really allow the martyr to choose death over apostasy: death followed as a result of military defeat, so martyr kings such as Edwin (d.633), Oswald (d.642) and Oswine (d.651) represented a new kind of sanctity adapted for the conditions of the northern world. Sigeberht of East Anglia was one of the three earliest English martyr kings, all rulers of Anglian kingdoms and all victims of Penda. Bede is silent on the fate of Sigeberht’s body and on subsequent veneration of the king – perhaps because Sigeberht’s body was lost in the general slaughter – but some historians have suggested that Sigeberht was taken back to his monastery at Beodericsworth and buried there.58 A burial site in western Suffolk makes sense if the battle took place (as is likely) near Devil’s Dyke, but the medieval abbey of Bury St Edmunds never actually claimed to be in possession of Sigeberht’s relics, even though the saint’s feast day appears (under 29 October) in an Anglo-Saxon psalter from Bury now in the Vatican Library. However, the Danes would have ransacked Beodericsworth along with every other East Anglian religious house in 869, and many treasures were lost during the period of chaos that followed. Yet if the martyr king Sigeberht was buried at Beodericsworth, he foreshadowed Edmund in more ways than one.

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Incorrupt Sigeberht established the possibility of martyrdom in battle and, perhaps, of a cult of a royal martyr, but other East Anglian royals paved the way for the most extraordinary characteristic attributed to Edmund after death: his bodily incorruption. Stories of post-mortem incorruption first entered Christian tradition in the fourth century. They gave the saints a way to witness to the power of God after their death beyond just performing miracles by their heavenly intercession. Incorrupt saints existed somewhere between life and death, and might bleed miraculously, give off a pleasant odour or even (in Edmund’s case) talk. Incorruption also gave saints the opportunity to achieve a corporeal wholeness in life that they had been deprived of in death.59 The cancerous tumour on her neck that killed Æthelthryth of Ely disappeared on her incorrupt body, and Edmund’s head rejoined his body, leaving only a thin red line. There has been much debate among historians about whether claims of incorruption should be regarded as evidence of systematic fraud by the guardians of the bodies of the saints or interpreted non-literally. The cynical view is that guardians regularly replaced the saint’s body with a new, freshly embalmed corpse whenever an inspection was likely. On this view, medieval methods of embalming were crude and often unsuccessful, and the characteristics attributed to incorrupt bodies, such as supple limbs, can only be explained by ‘pious fraud’ perpetrated by guardians anxious to ensure the continued reputation of their shrine. However, there are a number of problems with this interpretation. Even recently embalmed corpses would not have had all of the characteristics ascribed to incorrupt bodies, and it is implausible that fraud on this scale could have been successfully concealed. There can be little doubt that, on the whole, the Anglo-Saxons were deeply and genuinely religious people. While there may have been some clergy prepared to perpetrate naked fraud, the majority would have recoiled at the thought of such sacrilege. Furthermore, when the coffin of one of the incorrupt Anglo-Saxon saints, Cuthbert, was opened in 1829 he was found to be mummified. The only surviving

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portion of another incorrupt saint from Anglo-Saxon England, the right hand of Æthelthryth, likewise seems to be mummified. The best explanation for stories of incorruption is that some sort of embalming process was used on these saints and was successful up to a point, leading to mummification. Saints’ shrines were elevated above the ground and therefore away from damp, aiding the mummification process, which was little understood at the time and therefore perceived as miraculous. Furthermore, access to the bodies of incorrupt saints was highly restricted; the tiny number of people who saw them did so through the eyes of faith, and had every opportunity to exaggerate the perfection of the saint’s bodily preservation in subsequent reports. By a process of ‘Chinese whispers’, a mummified body could gain the reputation of looking like a living person who had just fallen asleep. The first East Anglian saint to be credited with incorruption was Æthelburh, a (possibly illegitimate) daughter of Sigeberht’s cousin and successor, Anna (the son of Rædwald’s brother Eni). Anna sent Æthelburh, together with his stepdaughter Sæthryth, to be educated at the abbey of Faremoûtier-en-Brie in France. Sæthryth became abbess, succeeded by Æthelburh, who died in 664. When Æthelburh’s body was exhumed in 671 it was found to be incorrupt, an event that seems to have started a trend in the East Anglian royal family.60 Another of Anna’s daughters, Æthelthryth (better known as Etheldreda or Audrey) was married first to a Fenland prince named Tondberht and then to King Ecgfrith of Northumbria. She refused to consummate either marriage and, when Ecgfrith pressed her for an heir, she fled to Elig (Ely), the largest island in the Cambridgeshire Fens, and there established a double monastery for men and women in 673. Æthelthryth died in 679; when her grave was opened by her sister Seaxburh 16 years later (in 695) it was reported that Æthelthryth’s body was found perfectly undecayed.61 It seems highly likely that the narrative of Æthelthryth’s incorruption was inspired by the example of her half-sister Æthelburh of Faremoûtier. The bodily integrity of Æthelthryth of Ely brought a Continental devotional belief to England for the first time (Cuthbert’s incorruption was not discovered until 698), and the incorrupt saints remained a very select group: Cuthbert of Lindisfarne (d.687),

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Werburgh of Chester (d.699), Witburh of East Dereham (d.743) and Edmund himself.62 If the ‘expatriate saint’ Æthelburh of Faremoûtier is included in the list, four out of the six English incorrupti of the seventh and eighth centuries were members of the Wuffing dynasty. All of the Christian dynasties of Anglo-Saxon England sought to bring lustre to their family name by having saints in their number; saints became a new kind of Anglo-Saxon hero. However, incorruption gave the most tangible possible evidence of sanctity and prolonged a saint’s ‘life’, in the sense that it endowed the place of that saint’s death and veneration with special significance. Incorruption tied saints to the land in a special way that may well have suited the Wuffings’ political purposes. It is also possible that East Anglia’s tradition of incorrupt saints was inspired by the example of Fursey, an Irish pilgrim monk who arrived in the kingdom after 633, in the wake of Bishop Felix. Sigeberht gave Fursey an old Roman fort called Cnoberesburg (perhaps Burgh Castle), where Fursey established a successful monastery and mission staffed by Irish monks.63 Fursey outlived Sigeberht and survived Penda’s first attack on the kingdom, but left East Anglia in around 644 when Penda once again threatened religious life. He died in about 650 at Mézerolles in the Somme, and was buried at nearby Péronne, where his body was credited with incorruption and became the focus of a major cult. The fact that Fursey’s life and death were recounted in some detail by Bede, in spite of his death in Francia, goes to show that Fursey was still remembered and venerated in East Anglia in the eighth century, and news of his incorruption no doubt travelled back to England as well.64 As we shall see in Chapter 3, Edmund differed from most incorrupt saints by being a martyr. The majority of incorrupt bodies (throughout Europe as well as in England) belonged to holy founders of monastic houses.65 At the time of Edmund’s death there was no precedent in England for an incorrupt martyr.66 Furthermore, incorruption was generally seen as a reward for holy virginity – and Edmund’s earliest biographer did not explicitly assert that Edmund was never married, even though later accounts made him a young, unmarried man of exceptional virtue. Edmund’s unusual incorruption

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is perhaps better explained as a ‘family characteristic’, something distinctive to holy members of the Wuffing dynasty that not only underlined Edmund’s sanctity but also his political legitimacy as a ruler, tying the land to the inviolable body of the martyr.

The political martyr By the end of the seventh century, the elements of Edmund’s cult that made it unusual had already been established in East Anglian religious culture: the significance of the wolf to the kingdom’s ruling dynasty, that dynasty’s national and international pretensions, the idea of martyr kings, and the concept of bodily incorruption post-mortem. Even the significance of Beodericsworth/Bury St Edmunds as a sacred site seems to have pre-dated Edmund. However, East Anglia was to produce one more royal martyr between the age of Sigeberht and the Viking age, whose example may have made a significant contribution to later accounts of Edmund. By the 760s East Anglia had fallen under the dominion of Mercia’s powerful King Offa (the builder of the famous dyke that protected his kingdom’s western edge from the Welsh).67 Kings of the Wuffing dynasty continued to rule in East Anglia, but with the kings of Mercia as their overlords. One such East Anglian underking was Æthelberht II (d.794), who made a powerful assertion of dynastic authority on his coinage, which bore the image of the wolf suckling Romulus and Remus. In 793 all of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were thrown into confusion when Vikings raided the eastern coast for the first time, attacking the great monastery founded by St Cuthbert on the island of Lindisfarne. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the following year Offa had Æthelberht beheaded, probably at Sutton Walls near Hereford; later accounts had Æthelberht travel to Mercia seeking the hand of Offa’s daughter in marriage, and blamed Offa’s queen, Cynethryth, rather than the Mercian king himself.68 The real reasons for Offa’s execution of Æthelberht are irrecoverable, although the self-consciously ‘Wuffing’ and ‘Roman’ imagery on Æthelberht’s coins suggests the East Anglian king may have been defying his Mercian overlords. What

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is certain is that Æthelberht’s death resulted in a ‘political cult’ of the king after his death, with numerous surviving church dedications to St Ethelbert throughout Norfolk and Suffolk.69 The politicisation of Æthelberht’s memory as a symbol of East Anglian independence was something new – not seen in Sigeberht’s cult – that anticipated the highly political nature of veneration of Edmund in later centuries.

The coming of the Vikings By around 840 East Anglia, under King Æthelstan I, had managed to throw off Mercian domination, but a new threat was looming from the north, far worse than the rival Christian kingdom.70 The heathen raiders from Denmark and the fjords of Norway, with their swiftkeeled ships and extraordinary seamanship, inspired an existential terror in the Anglo-Saxons. The Vikings were not a neighbouring people who might be brought around to the Christian faith and ‘civilised’ behaviour by persuasion, but an alien menace from a foreign land that appeared and disappeared at will, penetrating far inland by navigable rivers and with respect for neither God nor humanity. To begin with, the superior organisation of Anglo-Saxon royal armies in comparison with pirates and freebooters gave the English some respite, but the Vikings soon organised themselves into larger ‘armies’. Yet the Vikings’ motives and modes of operation were complex. They wanted to get rich quick by looting, but they also wanted to trade; they wanted to capture and enslave the native population, but they were also interested in farming and settlement. The heathen host soon understood that ‘sitting duck’ targets such as monasteries were not a limitless source of wealth, and they began to resort to more sophisticated means of extortion, contracting treaties with English kings in exchange for vast sums of protection money.71 The Vikings were not engaged in a campaign of annihilation against the English; nor did they care what religion the English chose to follow. The Danes and Norwegians were economic pragmatists, prepared to do whatever was needed to sustain the good times for as long as possible. For the Anglo-Saxons, the Viking threat may

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have been rendered more disturbing by the knowledge that, to a very large extent, the two peoples shared a common culture. Only three centuries earlier the English themselves had been the pagan barbarian raiders. The Vikings confronted the Anglo-Saxons with an aspect of their own history that they remembered with regret. A terse entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us that East Anglia was first raided by the Vikings in 841. There are no further geographical details, but their target was probably the wealthy emporium of Gipeswic, or possibly its northern counterpart at Norwic (Norwich). In 845 the two bishops of East Anglia, Wilred of Dummoc for the South Folk and Hunberht of Elmham for the North Folk, attended a meeting convened in London by Archbishop Ceolnoth to discuss the Viking threat.72 The church had more to lose than anyone else from the escalating heathen violence, since the chaos that threatened to envelop the country had the potential to disrupt or destroy systems of church government and even overturn the Christian faith itself.

Eadmund cyning At some point in the 850s Eadmund – to give him his true Old English name – succeeded a king named Æthelweard on the throne of East Anglia. In the absence of any written records for the period, we know this only from the evidence of coinage. Three of Æthelweard’s moneyers (mint managers who were in charge of striking coins), Dudda, Eadmund and Twicga, continued to strike coins for Edmund, suggesting a smooth transition. A hoard of silver pennies hidden at Dorking, which has been dated to between 860 and 862, contained a small number of pennies bearing Edmund’s name, showing that he succeeded to the throne of East Anglia before 860. However, we have no way of knowing whether Æthelweard was Edmund’s father. It is possible that he was not; Æthelweard did not use the title REX AN[GLORVM] on his coins, styling himself simply REX.73 The reappearance of the traditional title under Edmund could indicate that Edmund was a member of the Wuffing dynasty descended

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from Rædwald where Æthelweard was not, but this must remain speculation. The traditional date of Edmund’s accession, first found in the twelfth-century Annals of St Neots, was 855. Edmund was supposedly crowned on Christmas Day at a place called Burum or Burna.74 If it really happened, the Christmas Day coronation was significant, since on Christmas Day 800 Charlemagne had been crowned Roman emperor by the pope. Edmund’s Christmas Day coronation could have been yet another attempt by the East Anglian royal dynasty to borrow the lustre of imperial power. The earliest description of Edmund’s life is found in Abbo of Fleury’s Passion of St Edmund, written a little over a century after the king’s death.75 However, the vagueness of Abbo’s account and the stereotypical nature of the virtues and achievements he ascribes to the young Edmund suggest that he actually knew nothing about the king before Edmund’s confrontation with the Danes.76 Abbo tells us that Edmund was a devout Christian from his youth, that he was descended from a line of kings, and that he was elected to rule. Election was the normal method of choosing a new king in Anglo-Saxon England, although such elections did not resemble modern democratic processes in any way. Kings could only be chosen from the royal line, which meant that any ætheling (prince of royal blood) was technically eligible, but in most cases election was a formal process that conferred legitimacy on the new ruler. Election of the king did not make him legitimate because sovereignty resided in the people; instead, election was a means for the divine will to be expressed, like the choosing of Saul by lot as the first king of Israel in the Old Testament.77 Not only was Edmund elected, but according to Abbo he had to be compelled (on account of his Christian modesty) to take the throne. Abbo’s claim that Edmund was ‘not so much elected in due course of succession’ does not mean that Edmund did not have the best claim to the throne, but rather that he was chosen for his virtues rather than simply because he was next in line.78 Edmund was physically attractive, eloquent, modest, kind and free from pride. Indeed, he possessed so many virtues that Abbo claimed to be unable to name them all: ‘How beneficent he was in relation to his subjects, when

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he had been raised to the throne, and how strict in dealing with wrong-doers, it is beyond my abilities to describe.’79 It is rather more likely that Abbo had run out of information than that he had run out of words to praise Edmund. He assigned the king a suspiciously generic list of Christian virtues: justice, mercy, wisdom and generosity. Even the one piece of specific information that Abbo appears to provide – that Edmund was ‘sprung from the noble stock of the Old Saxons’80 – turns out on closer inspection to tell us nothing. Abbo mistakenly believed that East Anglia had been settled by Saxons rather than Angles, so the claim that Edmund was descended from the ‘Old Saxons’ meant only that he was an East Anglian.81 This did not stop the twelfth-century monk Geoffrey of Wells concocting an elaborate story of Edmund’s birth in Germany and even an entire fake family tree. However, it is possible that Abbo’s mistake was a deliberate one. At the time he was writing, in the 980s, the Saxon royal house of Wessex dominated England, and by ascribing a Saxon identity to Edmund he made him a kinsman of the kings of Wessex/ England. It is even possible that Edmund actually was related to the House of Wessex: in 823 an unnamed king of the East Angles had allied himself with King Ecgberht of Wessex against the Mercians, an alliance that could have been cemented with a dynastic marriage.82 Edmund is listed as a witness to a charter of King Æthelwulf of Wessex dated 5 November 855 and another of King Burghred of Mercia dated 1 August 868, but both documents were much later forgeries perpetrated by the monks of Crowland Abbey in Lincolnshire.83 We are left with the only ‘documents’ that can certainly be attributed to Edmund’s lifetime: the silver pennies struck under his authority. Edmund’s pennies all bear the legend EADMVND REX AN[GLORVM] or simply EADMVND REX, usually around a large letter ‘A’ inside the central roundel. The reverse (back) of the coin usually bears the name of the moneyer and a small cross inside the roundel. A total of 11 moneyers struck coins for Edmund in good-quality silver – a strong indication that the economy of East Anglia flourished in the early part of Edmund’s reign, since one of the few ways to control inflation in the Middle Ages was to debase the precious metal that coins were made from. The number of moneyers

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was also fairly high, indicating a healthy demand for coinage and economic success.84 Indeed, over a third of all ninth-century coins found south of the Humber were minted in East Anglia, and over 200 pennies struck in Edmund’s name have been found.85 The large letter ‘A’ on most of Edmund’s surviving coins is most likely to have stood for the Latin name of the kingdom, Anglia, or possibly for the Old English Angelcynn. Edmund’s decision to revive and use Rædwald’s old title of rex Anglorum may have been no more than tradition, but the title still contained an implicit claim to overlordship of all the Angles – including the Northumbrians and Mercians. Furthermore, since foreigners referred to all the English as Angli, Edmund would have appeared to an outsider arriving at Gipeswic and viewing his coinage to be making a claim to rule the entire English nation. In spite of the meagre information that can be gleaned from them, these thin discs of silver would go on to play a crucial role not only in the development of Edmund’s cult but also in his ascent to the role of patron saint of the English nation.

A Great Heathen Army In the autumn of 865, at least ten years into his reign, the nightmare of every Anglo-Saxon king came true for Edmund. A huge armada of Danish longships carrying an army that far outnumbered any previous Danish force arrived on the coast of Edmund’s kingdom. The size of the ‘Great Heathen Army’ (mycel hæthen here) has been a subject of debate for historians, with some pointing to the limited capacity of longships and others citing the Vikings’ ability to keep control of large swathes of territory.86 Whether large or small, the Viking army was strong enough to compel Edmund to contract a treaty under which the East Angles would allow the Vikings to overwinter in the kingdom and provide them with horses, presumably for a mounted expedition westward. In return, the Vikings would have agreed not to plunder the kingdom or kill its people. In making an agreement of this kind with the Vikings, Edmund was following an established tradition of dealing with the Danes

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and, no doubt, attempting to act in the best interests of his people. He must have realised, however, that the Vikings could not be relied on to stay out of his kingdom and could easily come back for more, especially since the size of the force that autumn was unprecedented. The reasons why the ‘Great Heathen Army’ arrived in England at all remain obscure. In 854 dynastic rivalries in Denmark exploded and Horlak, the Danish king, was slaughtered along with most of his court, initiating a period of vigorous exploration and plunder by Danish nobles newly emboldened by their independent power.87 One of the most fearsome of the Danish leaders, Ivarr, turned his attention to Ireland, where he attacked the kingdom of Munster in 857 with Olaf the White. Ivarr remained in Ireland until 863, fighting either on his own behalf or as a mercenary for one Irish king against another.88 Although Ivarr is not named in the earliest versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as the leader of the ‘Great Heathen Army’, his disappearance from Irish records at this time and the numerous later traditions concerning his activities in England mean that it is highly likely that he did take a leading role in the invasion of 865. In Abbo of Fleury’s tenth-century Passion he is named Inguar. Even later, twelfth-century Norse sagas gave Ivarr his strange epithet, ‘the Boneless’, which may have been a way of comparing him to a snake or, alternatively, a euphemistic way of saying that he was impotent or without sexual desire.89 The sagas also identified Ivarr as the son of a Danish leader named Ragnar Lothbrok and gave him two brothers, Ubbi (Abbo’s Ubba) and Halfdan. The sagas ascribed Ivarr’s attack on England to revenge, after his father was thrown into a pit of snakes to die by King Ælla of Northumbria.90 This poetic explanation is unsupported by contemporary evidence; nor does it really make sense: if Ivarr was seeking revenge against Northumbria, why did he overwinter in East Anglia first rather than attacking Northumbria directly from the sea? The economic impact of the Vikings’ arrival can be detected in Edmund’s coinage. Metallurgical analysis of pennies struck by the moneyers Beornferth and Eadmund reveals that, while Beornferth was striking coins in fairly pure silver, the moneyer Eadmund struck a coin of only 66 per cent purity, with almost a third of the coin made

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of copper.91 The most obvious explanation for this discrepancy, given the historical evidence, is that Eadmund the moneyer was striking coins that had to be debased because such large quantities of silver were being paid to the Vikings from the royal treasury; either that, or the debased coins themselves were destined for the Vikings and the East Angles were trying to include the lowest silver content they could get away with. In the autumn of 866 the Vikings finally left East Anglia and rode north. For Edmund and his subjects, relief must have been tempered with anxiety about what might happen next. For the next three years, the Great Heathen Army carried all in its path, capturing York before marching on Nottingham. There Ivarr’s army was besieged by the kings of Mercia and Wessex; much later traditions that claim Edmund was part of this force as well cannot be relied upon. The engagement was indecisive, but the Vikings went back to York for the winter of 868–9. When the fighting season came round again, Ivarr and his brothers were spoiling for war, and East Anglia was their target.

Chap ter 2

Death of a King In the shadow of ruins that were once the largest church in Christendom stands a life-sized bronze statue of a young man wearing a simple crown and clutching a cross in his right hand. He is a vulnerable figure, almost naked apart from a loincloth, his expression both enigmatic and serene. Lips pursed, eyes closed, he appears to invite passers-by to ponder what must go through the mind of someone who freely chooses to suffer death for a higher cause.1 The traditional account of Edmund’s death, elaborated in the Middle Ages, is straightforward: the martyr was a Christian king killed by bloodthirsty pagan Vikings. Probe a little deeper, however, and a murder mystery emerges. It is not a mystery because we do not know who was responsible for Edmund’s death, but because there is no clear evidence to tell us exactly why the Danes killed Edmund. There is far more information about Edmund’s death than about his life, but it remains an event shrouded in mystery and misinformation. Troublingly, there are significant inconsistencies between the earliest account (from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, written around 900) and the most detailed (Abbo of Fleury’s Passion of St Edmund, written around 985). Historians are divided on virtually every aspect of the story: how he died, why he died and where he died. Setting aside earlier, legendary elaborations, this chapter considers the earliest surviving evidence for Edmund’s death, in an attempt to produce a plausible and consistent reconstruction of the most likely sequence of events.

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The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle The earliest literary evidence for Edmund’s death dates from around 900, 30 years after the event.2 No trace survives of an earlier literary tradition: the Viking conquest eliminated monasteries, and therefore literacy, throughout eastern England, so details of Edmund’s death would have been transmitted orally in its immediate aftermath. However, 30 years is comfortably within the range of living memory and counts as recent testimony by the standards of early medieval history. The oldest manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, known as the Parker or Winchester Chronicle and today housed in the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, is a series of brief year-by-year notices of events. It was composed in Wessex, so the scribes were primarily interested in events that took place in the West Country. The Chronicle’s account of East Anglian events is sketchy, but one event outside Wessex that did attract the earliest scribe’s attention was the death of King Edmund: ‘870. Here the raiding-army rode across Mercia into East Anglia, and took winter-quarters at Thetford; and that winter King Edmund fought against them, and the Danish took the victory, and killed the king and conquered all that land.’3 Although the Chronicle gives the date of Edmund’s death as 870, the scribe dated the beginning of each year from September, so the events described actually happened in the winter of 869. The Chronicle’s account is infuriatingly concise, but it tells us that the Danes returned to East Anglia by land from the west and on horseback, presumably riding the very same horses that they had compelled Edmund to give them on their first arrival in 865. Yet what the Chronicle does not say is as revealing as what it does. If the Danes had entered East Anglia as a hostile invading force we might expect some mention of a battle at the kingdom’s western edge: the defensive dykes of Cambridgeshire. The Danes seem to have ridden into the kingdom unopposed and headed straight for Thetford, in the middle of the kingdom (today on the border between Norfolk and Suffolk). Why did Edmund not confront the Danes immediately?

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It is possible that Edmund initially expected the Danes to keep the terms of the treaty they had made with him in 865 (whatever those were), and therefore made no attempt to prevent them re-entering his lands. If Edmund had been involved in the West Saxon attack on Viking-held Nottingham, as much later sources claimed, the Vikings would surely have been resisted from the start and they would have attacked East Anglia’s defences. It is possible, of course, that the mounted Vikings moved so quickly that Edmund did not have time to raise an army against them until they were already ensconced at Thetford. Yet the Chronicle’s choice of words suggests that Edmund, not the Danes, was the aggressor in 869 (‘Edmund fought against them’, not ‘They fought against Edmund’). If so, Edmund either judged that the Danes had broken the terms of the treaty, or he decided that the treaty was never a good idea in the first place. The Danes’ sacking of monasteries as they moved eastwards, mentioned in later sources, is one likely reason for Edmund’s actions. Edmund may have decided that his duty as a Christian king compelled him to punish the Danes for their sacrilegious behaviour, irrespective of any treaty he had contracted in 865. The Chronicle tells us only that Edmund was killed by the Danes; it does not make it clear whether the killing of Edmund followed the Danish victory chronologically as a separate event, or whether the victory of the heathen army was sealed by Edmund’s death in battle. This latter interpretation was placed on events by the Welsh monk Asser in his biography of Alfred the Great, ostensibly written in 893. Asser elaborated on the Chronicle’s account, claiming that Edmund died in battle: In the year of the Lord’s Incarnation 870 (the twenty-second of the king’s [i.e. Alfred’s] life), the Viking army mentioned above passed through Mercia to East Anglia, and spent the winter there at a place called Thetford. In the same year, Edmund, king of the East Angles, fought fiercely against that army. But, alas! He was killed there with a large number of his men, and the Vikings rejoiced triumphantly; the enemy were masters of the battlefield, and they subjected that entire province to their authority.4

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It is likely that Asser’s description of Edmund’s death in battle is no more than an interpretative gloss on the concise text of the Chronicle: reading that Edmund was killed by the Danes after reading of a Danish victory in battle, Asser (being unaware of any alternative tradition) jumped to the conclusion that Edmund had died in battle. Yet he may have committed the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc: assuming that because event B happens after event A, event A is the cause of event B. The Chronicle can be interpreted either way: Edmund was killed in battle by the Danes as part of the defeat of his kingdom, or the killing of Edmund by the Danes occurred as a separate event after that military defeat. However, it is unlikely that Asser had a detailed knowledge of East Anglian oral traditions about Edmund that went beyond the knowledge of the scribe of the Chronicle. His use of the phrase ‘at a place which is called Thetford’ (in loco, qui dicitur Theodford) hints at Asser’s ignorance because it suggests he had never heard of the place. Asser is useful in confirming that the Chronicle’s version of events was known in Wessex by 893, but he cannot be relied on as a source of additional information. The only other source that may add something to the ‘chronicle tradition’ of Edmund’s death is an alternative manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle produced in the abbey of Peterborough. After repeating the words of the Parker manuscript, the Peterborough chronicle adds that the Danes did for all the minsters to which they came. At the same time they came to Medehamstede: burned and demolished, killed abbot and monks and all that they found there, brought it about so that what was earlier very rich was as it were nothing.5

This is the earliest mention of a Viking campaign of looting and destruction against churches and monasteries, which is much elaborated in later sources. It is certain that some cataclysm struck the religious life of East Anglia in the second half of the ninth century. The archaeological record shows no monastic activity during the century 870–970, when there is a break in the line of succession of the bishops of East Anglia.

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No manuscripts or charters survive from the period.6 Furthermore, the destruction of Medehamstede/Peterborough is confirmed by the survival in Peterborough Cathedral of the so-called Hedda stone, a piece of ninth-century sculpture that, according to the twelfth-century Annals of St Neots, was erected as a memorial to monks slaughtered by the Vikings in 869.7 Although the oldest manuscript of the AngloSaxon Chronicle does not mention the destruction of monasteries, therefore, it seems highly likely that East Anglian religious life was terminated by the return of the Great Heathen Army in 869, as the Peterborough manuscript relates.

Abbo of Fleury’s Passion of St Edmund In 985 Abbo (c.945–1004), a Benedictine monk of the French abbey of Fleury (now Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire), who was famous throughout Western Europe for his skill in computistics (the calculation of the dates of ecclesiastical festivals), decided to visit England after failing to be elected abbot of his monastery.8 Abbo was the tenth century’s nearest equivalent to a university professor, at a time when monasteries and cathedrals were the only centres of learning in Christendom. Although Benedictine monks took a vow of stability to their monasteries and were supposed to stay there, brilliant scholars such as Abbo played by a different set of rules. They travelled from country to country, communicating in the church’s universal lingua franca of Latin, preserving the literary remains of the Classical past and slowly planting the seeds that would one day blossom into the Renaissance. Abbo headed for a new, up-and-coming monastery in the Cambridgeshire Fens: Ramsey, founded in 969 by a fellow monk of Fleury, Oswald of Worcester (d.992), who had moved on to become archbishop of York. Abbo came to Ramsey in order to head the monastic school, but an event that occurred during his stay meant that he made a more significant contribution to English religious life than he had anticipated. At some point during Abbo’s time there, between 985 and 987, he visited the aged and venerable archbishop of Canterbury, Dunstan (d.988). In the presence of the bishop of

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Rochester and the abbot of Malmesbury, Dunstan told Abbo the hitherto unknown story of Edmund’s death, which Dunstan in turn had heard, many years earlier, from a ‘decrepit old man’ at the court of King Æthelstan (reigned 924–39).9 Standing before Æthelstan, probably in his royal court at Winchester, the old man swore that he had been Edmund’s armourbearer at the time of his death, at least 55 years earlier. He proceeded to give an account, which was already half a century old in Dunstan’s memory when he told it to Abbo. The armour-bearer is presumably one and the same as the ‘spectator […] of our religion’ who is an eyewitness to the martyrdom, and even sees the Danes carrying Edmund’s head into the wood, since he ‘was preserved to bring to light the traces of these events’.10 At the urging of the monks of Ramsey, who did not know the story of Edmund, Abbo wrote down a version of Dunstan’s story and sent it back to the archbishop. Abbo’s story, if true, was told at third-hand and therefore some distortion can be expected, although the fact that Abbo sent the narrative to Dunstan would have given the archbishop an opportunity to correct any inaccuracies. However, it is immediately plain from Abbo’s telling of the story that he is less interested in accuracy than in the patriotic and religious import of his narrative. Abbo makes repeated references, both overt and implicit, to the stories of other saints. First and foremost, Abbo compares Edmund to the biblical Job, whose righteousness provoked the devil into asking God for permission to test him.11 Abbo’s Edmund is a ninth-century Job, tempted, tested and proved by the emissaries of Satan, Inguar and Hubba. Abbo also compares Edmund directly to St Sebastian, the third-century Roman martyr conventionally depicted with his body full of arrows.12 One of the first indications that Abbo is a less than trustworthy source comes when his account of the Viking invasions of the 860s differs significantly from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: [Inguar and Hubba] set out in the first instance to attack the province of Northumbria, and overran the whole district from one end to the other, inflicting upon it the heaviest devastation. None of the inhabitants could resist these abominable onslaughts, but suffered

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the too well merited chastisement of the divine wrath through the instrumentality of Hubba the agent of iniquity. Having raked together their booty, Inguar left on the spot Hubba, his associate in cruelty, and approaching [East Anglia] suddenly with a great fleet, landed by stealth at a city in that region, entered it before the citizens were aware of his approach, and set it on fire. Boys, and men old and young, whom he encountered in the streets of the city were killed; and paid no respect to the chastity of wife or maid. Husband and wife lay dead and dying together on their thresholds; the babe snatched from its mother’s breast was, in order to multiply the cries of grief, slaughtered before her eyes. An impious soldiery scoured the town in fury, athirst for every crime by which pleasure could be given to the tyrant who from sheer love of cruelty had given orders for the massacre of the innocent.13

According to the Chronicle, the Vikings invaded East Anglia on horseback from Mercia; Abbo has them come by sea. Abbo seems to be conflating the original arrival of the Great Heathen Army in 865 with the Vikings’ return in 869, although no attack on a coastal town (or indeed on civilians) is mentioned in the Chronicle. Nor does the Chronicle record a Viking attack on Northumbria in 869. All the indications are that Abbo was ignorant of the Chronicle tradition (which would also explain why the monks of Ramsey did not know anything about Edmund) and invented the details of the Viking attack. The primary purpose of Abbo’s description is not historical at all; it is to produce pathos leading to sympathy for Edmund’s persecuted subjects. After sacking the unnamed coastal town, Abbo’s Inguar interrogates some of the inhabitants to find out where Edmund is, since ‘a report had reached him that the glorious King Eadmund, who was in the prime of life, and in the fullness of vigour, was a keen soldier’. Inguar then kills all of the men in the region to prevent Edmund mustering an army. There is, therefore, no battle of any sort between Edmund and the Danes in Abbo’s account, directly contradicting the Chronicle. Having found out that Edmund is at a villa regia called Hægelisdun (which Abbo tells us is near a wood of the same name),

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Inguar sends an unnamed emissary to the king with his demands: ‘to share with [Inguar] your ancient treasures, and your hereditary wealth, and to reign in future under him’.14 Abbo does not explain why a leader as merciless as Inguar, who is prepared to kill any number of civilians, should want Edmund to rule under him. From this point onwards, the action of Abbo’s Passion shifts to Hægelisdun, where Edmund confers with an unnamed bishop (identified by later tradition with Bishop Hunberht of Elmham). The clue to understanding this conversation is Abbo’s comparison of Edmund with Job. In the Bible, four of Job’s friends try to explain to him why God has allowed him to endure suffering, and in Abbo’s Passion the bishop plays a similar role, advising Edmund to accept Inguar’s demands. As in the Book of Job, the protagonist rejects worldly wisdom in favour of confronting what God demands. However, Abbo’s Edmund takes some time to make any reference to God at all; he desires to die for his country and for his people, and seems to believe (although this is never made clear) that by giving himself up he will save his people.15 Abbo brings God back into the picture when Edmund declares that he will rule under no one but God.16 This sentiment may have made sense in the England of Æthelred the Unready, but in the ninth-century world of the heptarchy it was common for regional kings to rule under the overlordship of another king. It is surprising indeed that Edmund is prepared to die for a principle of absolute sovereignty alien to the century in which he lived. Yet, at the end of the speech he gives to Inguar’s messenger, Edmund reveals that he would in fact be willing to rule under Inguar – but only if the Danish leader becomes a Christian.17 Inguar himself arrives before the messenger can convey the entire message, and orders that Edmund be taken prisoner. Edmund’s martyrdom takes place in three stages. Firstly, Edmund assumes the role of Jesus while Inguar becomes Pontius Pilate: the king is bound in chains, made to stand before Inguar, and mocked and beaten by the Danes. The second stage of the martyrdom sees Edmund taken to a tree, tied to it and scourged. Edmund’s sufferings then depart from those of Christ:

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But his constancy was unbroken, while without ceasing he called on Christ with broken voice. This roused the fury of his enemies, who, as if practising at a target, pierced his whole body with arrow-spikes, augmenting the severity of his torment by frequent discharges of their weapons, and inflicting wound upon wound, while one javelin made room for another. And thus, all haggled over by the sharp points of their darts, and scarce able to draw breath, he actually bristled with them, like a prickly hedgehog or a thistle fretted with spines.

The third and final act of Edmund’s martyrdom saw the king beheaded: The king was by this time almost lifeless, though the warm lifestream still throbbed in his breast, and he was scarcely able to stand erect. In this plight he was hastily wrenched from the blood-stained stem, his ribs laid bare by numberless gashes, as if he had been put to the torture of the rack, or had been torn by savage claws, and was bidden to stretch forth the head which had ever been adorned by the royal diadem.18

The final disgrace is perpetrated against Edmund’s dead body when the Danes deliberately go into Hægelisdun wood and throw his head ‘as far as possible among the dense thickets of brambles’ in order to deny him a Christian burial.19 Without giving any indication of a precise chronology, Abbo records that ‘when peace was restored to the churches’, the East Angles found Edmund’s body without difficulty but were unable to locate the head. They listened to the eyewitness and a council decided on a plan for the search: each individual should be accoutred with horn or pipe, so that the searchers, in their explorations hither and thither, could by calling or by the noise of their instruments signal one to another, and so avoid going twice over the same ground, or missing some localities altogether.20

The search for the martyr’s head produced Edmund’s first miracle, when the searchers heard someone calling out from the place where

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the head was hidden, in Old English, Her, her, her (‘Here! Here! Here!’). When the searchers followed the voice and found the head, ‘a monstrous wolf was by God’s mercy found in that place, embracing the holy head between its paws, as it lay at full length on the ground, and thus acting as sentinel to the martyr.’ Abbo drew on biblical comparisons for both miracles: God gave speech to Edmund’s head just as he allowed Balaam’s ass to speak in the Book of Numbers, and the wolf abandoned its ‘natural voracity’ to care for the martyr’s head just like the lions who spared the prophet Daniel.21

Myth or history? Abbo’s Passion of St Edmund has some of the characteristics of history. Abbo gives an exact date for the martyrdom (20 November), although not a year; a November date is consistent with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s reporting of events. Abbo identifies his oral sources and explains how the details of Edmund’s martyrdom were transmitted to posterity (by the mysterious eyewitness, who is presumably the armour-bearer at King Æthelstan’s court). However, Abbo appears entirely ignorant of the chronology and geography of Danish movements in 865–9, and certain parts of the narrative, such as the attack on the unnamed coastal town, seem to have been fabricated entirely for dramatic effect. The reported conversations of Edmund and the bishop and Edmund’s speech to Inguar’s messenger are, of course, literary creations that cannot have any basis in historical fact, but the fabrication of imaginary speeches was standard practice in medieval hagiography, just as it had been in the works of Roman historians such as Livy and Tacitus. The success of a text like the Passion was measured by its edification of the faithful, not its accuracy. The question of the Passion’s historical usefulness has divided historians. No one takes the entire story as historical fact, but some have been prepared to accept the basic outline of Edmund’s death as Abbo records it.22 One historian, however, described Abbo’s account as ‘little more than a hotchpotch of hagiographical commonplaces’, claiming it was entirely useless as history.23 This assessment is overly

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harsh: Abbo is evidently not lying about what Dunstan told him, since he sent the Passion to Dunstan and dedicated it to the archbishop. Dunstan may have been given to pious exaggeration, and his story about Edmund may have become more elaborate in the telling, but there is no good reason to suppose that Dunstan was lying about his encounter with the armour-bearer at Æthelstan’s court. There remains the possibility that the armour-bearer himself, assuming he existed, was a teller of tall tales. But Abbo mentions that the old man told the story on oath, and Anglo-Saxon Christians, as a rule, took oaths extremely seriously. However, a more compelling reason for the credibility of the armour-bearer is the fact that no alternative tradition about Edmund emerged to contradict him – unless we count Asser’s statement that Edmund was killed in battle. However, it is far more probable that Asser was simply elaborating on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle than that he had access to information from East Anglia. Why would Asser have had East Anglian sources that were unavailable to other people in Wessex, such as the compilers of the Chronicle? In fact, the Chronicle’s statement that ‘the Danish took the victory, and killed the king’ (in that order) is consistent with Abbo’s account. Had Edmund died in battle, we might expect the chronicler to record the events the other way round: ‘the Danish killed the king, and took the victory.’ Abbo of Fleury’s Passion of St Edmund is a third-hand account told at an immense distance of time from the events it describes, elaborated by a seasoned Christian hagiographer and peppered with biblical and Classical allusions. But, on balance, it is more likely than not that there was an armour-bearer at the court of King Æthelstan who had served Edmund and gave an account of his master’s martyrdom in the presence of the young Dunstan. The presence of particular details, such as the date of 20 November assigned to the martyrdom (which is also consistent with the chronology of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle), and the name Hægelisdun (not found in any other source) suggest that we are dealing here with a genuine tradition based on some real event. When it comes to Edmund’s talking severed head and the protecting wolf, we are in the realms of folklore and legend. However, we can have some confidence that the legend is an old one, rooted

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in an ancient East Anglian identity. Like the she-wolf in the story of Romulus and Remus, which nurtures rather than eats the baby boys, Abbo’s wolf tenderly protects the king’s head as he is born anew as a martyr. The Wuffing dynasty’s liking for lupine imagery, especially the image of the wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, was noted in Chapter 1. Whether a wolf really guarded Edmund’s head is much less important than the aura of legitimate East Anglian sovereignty with which this story invested Edmund. Edmund was not just the last of the Wuffing dynasty: his legendary incorruption, and the appearance of his dynasty’s totemic animal, made Edmund the eternal king of East Anglia, the culmination of four centuries of royal symbolism.

Why did Edmund die? The most troubling feature of the Passion of St Edmund is not, in fact, its cavalier attitude to history or its intermingling of history and legend, but rather Abbo’s failure to offer a coherent reason why Edmund died in the first place. Abbo shows every sign of wanting to have his cake and eat it. Edmund is portrayed as a fine soldier and valiant in battle, but no battle takes place and Edmund even throws down his weapons. Edmund unambiguously declares his intention to die for the sake of his people and fatherland, but is then portrayed as a martyr for the Christian faith. Edmund declares he will rule under no one but Christ, but then tells Inguar he will rule under the Danish leader if Inguar agrees to become a Christian. Abbo implies that Inguar seeks out Edmund because he wants to kill the king in order to prevent Edmund gathering and leading an army against him. But if this is the case, Inguar’s embassy to Edmund offering him the chance to rule under him is a feint. Yet if Inguar is not making Edmund a real offer to be a subject ruler, Edmund’s refusal of Inguar’s offer is empty: Inguar would have killed him anyway. Abbo is chronically unable to supply his characters with coherent and consistent motivations. Ironically, this feature of the Passion may count in favour of, rather than against, the historicity of the events Abbo is struggling to describe. Abbo seems to be trying to wrestle

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ninth-century events into the clothes of a tenth-century stereotype of sanctity and martyrdom. In the seventh century, dying in battle against a pagan enemy had been enough to secure veneration as a martyr, as the example of Edmund’s predecessor Sigeberht showed. By the late tenth century, hagiographers had begun to demand a more conventional ‘set piece’ martyrdom resembling those of the early Roman martyrs, in which the martyr is offered a clear choice between apostasy and death.24 Edmund does not face such a choice, because the pagan Danes never required Christians to renounce their faith. Abbo had to come up with something similar, and settled on Edmund choosing between subjection to Christ and subjection to Inguar. The other tension that emerges in Abbo’s Passion is between warlike patriotism and, for want of a better phrase, ‘Christian pacifism’. Abbo does not stint on Edmund’s love for his country and people, probably because he was writing at the urging of the East Anglian monks of Ramsey. (Ramsey makes a cameo appearance, although it is not named, in the reference to ‘the celibate and coenobite monks of the order of the holy father Benedict, in a spot that has now gained celebrity’.25) The important role assigned to the East Anglian landscape at the start of the Passion shows that Abbo has every intention of tying Edmund closely to East Anglia – and to England – as a national saint. Abbo ends the Passion with a passage in praise of virginity, in spite of the fact that he does not actually state that Edmund was a virgin.26 This, again, can be explained by Abbo’s audience: patriotic East Anglian monks, who wanted to hear about their country’s greatest martyr, as well as receiving reassurance that a glorious heavenly reward awaited them for their commitment to celibacy. It has been argued convincingly that the Passion was, at least in part, a bid by the Benedictine order (which was strongly supported by Archbishop Dunstan) to monopolise the figure of Edmund.27 One explanation for this is that Ramsey Abbey had already taken control of (or was in the process of trying to control) the church of St Mary at Bury St Edmunds, where Edmund was buried.28 The Benedictines had certainly gained control of Edmund’s body by 1020, the traditional date of King Cnut’s foundation of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds, and thereafter Edmund remained a saint indelibly associated with

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the Benedictine order.29 Indeed, Edmund’s association with the order may have contributed to Henry VIII’s willingness to destroy every trace of his cult, in spite of Edmund’s royal status. If the core of Abbo’s Passion, the purported eyewitness account of the martyrdom in Hægelisdun wood, can be taken as largely accurate, it raises a particularly gruesome and intriguing possibility regarding Edmund’s death. If the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is right that Edmund attacked the Danes at Thetford, the Danes must have had a reason to keep Edmund alive after the battle. Twelfth-century skaldic verses dating from after the conversion of the Danes to Christianity contain several references to a heathen rite known as ‘blood eagle’, which involved sacrificing a defeated king to Odin by severing the ribs from the spine and pulling out the lungs.30 This was the death that, according to the skalds (medieval Norse poets), Ivarr the Boneless inflicted on King Ælla of Northumbria in revenge for killing his father, Ragnar Lothbrok, in a pit of snakes. There is no reference to the practice in any ninth-century source, however: according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Ælla was killed in battle at York in 867. The final stage of Edmund’s martyrdom as described by Abbo bears some similarity to the blood eagle rite of the skalds: Edmund ‘was hastily wrenched from the blood-stained stem, his ribs laid bare by numberless gashes, as if he had been put to the torture of the rack, or had been torn by savage claws’.31 Did the eyewitness actually see the blood eagle rite, with the story subsequently becoming sanitised in the telling? The argument, unfortunately, is a circular one: Edmund’s death cannot be used to demonstrate that the blood eagle rite was a real practice just because it has a slight resemblance to medieval descriptions of the blood eagle rite.32 However, even if Edmund did not suffer the blood eagle rite (which was probably invented for dramatic effect by twelfth-century Norse poets), he may still have been a human sacrifice. When the pagan king Penda defeated Oswald of Northumbria at the Battle of Maserfield in 642, he ordered Oswald’s head and forearms to be cut off and fixed to stakes, perhaps in mockery of the cross that Oswald had set up on the battlefield before the Battle of Heavenfield in 633/4, an occasion when Penda and his British allies had been defeated.33

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Penda was creating a ‘pole of disgrace’ to shame Oswald, replacing the cross that Oswald had raised at Heavenfield, and perhaps also offering a human sacrifice to Woden.34 Subsequent legends about Oswald contain several apparent cultural references to the pagan god. Oswald’s right arm was picked up by Woden’s sacred bird, a raven, and taken to Woden’s sacred tree, a white ash; because Oswald’s arm was incorrupt, the tree was endowed with ‘ageless vigour’. A spring then rose up where the raven dropped the arm to the ground. The site of the tree became the Shropshire town of Oswestry, literally, ‘Oswald’s Tree’.35 In Norse mythology Odin sacrifices himself to himself, hanging on a tree, wounded by a spear, in order to gain knowledge of the runes. The Danes may have known that Edmund’s Wuffing dynasty, just like Oswald, claimed descent from Woden, especially if Sam Newton is correct that the Scandinavian Wulfings were one and the same family. Perhaps Penda and Ivarr were both tempted, two centuries apart, by the opportunity to ritually re-enact Odin’s sacrifice of himself to himself by impaling a descendant of the god on a real or symbolic tree. The appearance of a wolf later in Edmund’s story evokes Odin’s companion wolves, Geri and Freki, just as the raven in legends associated with St Oswald seems to be a reference to the god. Taken at face value, the ‘sacrifice’ of Edmund is not an exclusively negative act but an affirmation of Edmund’s lineage. As a sacrifice to Odin, Edmund also becomes an Odin substitute. The beheading of St Edmund, similarly, need not be seen as an exclusively negative and destructive act. Magical talking decapitated heads feature in both Celtic and Norse mythology, most notably the heads of the giants Bran and Mimir. Both the Iron Age Britons and Germanic tribes gathered head trophies of their enemies, not as a form of humiliation but in order to gain the enemy’s wisdom and power, and it has long been argued that folk tales of talking heads arose from this tradition. Indeed, the act of decapitation was thought to imbue the head with miraculous powers.36 Acephalic (‘headless’) or cephalophoric (‘head-carrying’) saints proliferate in Welsh and Irish saints’ lives, although Edmund is an unusual English example.

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Although the idea that Edmund was a human sacrifice can explain Ivarr’s eagerness to kill the king and the manner in which he chose to do so, there are many problems with this interpretation of events. There can be no certainty that Penda intended to sacrifice Oswald, and therefore any comparison of Edmund’s death with Oswald’s is speculative. We do not even know whether the pagan Anglo-Saxons told the same stories about Woden/Odin as later Scandinavians. And if Ivarr had intended to re-enact Odin’s self-sacrifice, he surely would have retained Edmund’s head as a trophy (and perhaps a source of wisdom) rather than concealing it in undergrowth. The Norse myths were not written down until much later in the Middle Ages, and we simply have no way of knowing if Ivarr’s view of Odin in the ninth century was anything like that of the later skalds.

Hægelisdun Many Old English place names occur in Anglo-Saxon records that cannot be identified with certainty with places on a modern map; Dummoc and Cnoberesburg, mentioned in Chapter 1, are two such examples. Although the vast majority of English place names derive from Old English, the Danish and Norman conquests meant that some former place names were forgotten. In medieval East Anglia, villages would often come to be named after the largest or most important of several manors located in one parish. The result was that older place names were relegated to a subordinate position, becoming the names of manors, farms and even fields. Hægelisdun, the site of Edmund’s martyrdom according to Abbo of Fleury, is one such site. The name is a combination of a personal name, Hægel, and dun, meaning ‘hill’: Hægel’s hill. It is by no means certain that the location of Hægelisdun was still known even in Abbo’s time, since the extent of upheaval in East Anglia had been so great since the Viking conquest that many old royal centres of the Wuffing dynasty may already have been forgotten.37 However, the site of Edmund’s martyrdom did not really matter to Abbo, who was interested in Edmund’s incorrupt

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body – which had been relocated, by the time Abbo was writing, to Beodericsworth/Bury St Edmunds. Debate about the site of the martyrdom was kindled by a much later dispute between the abbots of Bury St Edmunds and the bishops of Norwich. In 1101 the Norman bishop of Norwich, Herbert de Losinga, claimed that the site of Edmund’s martyrdom was Hoxne, on the banks of the River Waveney in north-east Suffolk.38 Hoxne was an ancient deer park of the bishops of East Anglia, and the superficial similarity of Hoxne’s name to Hægelisdun gave Bishop Herbert the idea of starting a rival cult of Edmund on his episcopal estate. The bishops had repeatedly tried to make the abbey church in Bury their cathedral church, tempted by its enormous size and the prestige of Edmund’s shrine; they also felt threatened by the competing power of the abbots of Bury St Edmunds within the diocese. Hoxne was already the site of a cult of St Ethelbert, judging from the dedication of the church, and it is possible that Herbert rebooted a cult of the earlier martyr king and transferred the focus to Edmund. During the course of the Middle Ages a Benedictine priory dependent on Norwich Cathedral was founded at Hoxne (around 1226), which was also the site of two chapels dedicated to St Edmund, one supposedly located on the site of the saint’s martyrdom and the other, known as Newark Chapel, supposed to be on the site where the martyr’s head was discovered.39 Traditions linking Edmund with Hoxne persisted even after the Reformation. In the early eighteenth century, a local bridge was said to be where Edmund hid and was captured by the Danes, and when an iron arrowhead was found embedded in an ancient oak tree in 1848 it was received as proof that this was the very tree against which Edmund was martyred. A local landowner, Edward Kerrison, subsequently erected a monument on the site of the oak tree, incorporated a commemorative inscription into a bridge and built a village hall whose exterior depicts Edmund hiding under the bridge.40 In spite of Hoxne’s pride in St Edmund, which continues to this day, the village’s claim to be Hægelisdun was cooked up as propaganda by the medieval bishops of Norwich and there is no connection whatsoever between the name Hoxne (which is derived from the Old

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English word for a ‘heel’ of land between two rivers41) and Hægelisdun. Only one modern village in East Anglia bears a name that could derive from Hægelisdun. Hellesdon is today a large suburb on the northwest edge of Norwich, strung out along the Aylsham and Cromer Roads, and the home of the Royal Norwich Golf Club. Hellesdon was recorded in Domesday Book as Hailesduna, essentially the same as Hægelisdun.42 On the face of it, the place is a strong candidate for the martyrdom site, but it is a very long way from Thetford, the site of the battle (over 30 miles), and even further from Bury St Edmunds (45 miles). If Edmund was killed at Hellesdon in north Norfolk and subsequently buried there, it is far from obvious why his body should have been relocated to a town in faraway west Suffolk. Hellesdon may be the only modern village name derived from Hægelisdun, but it is not the only place name. In 1978 the archaeologist Stanley West noticed that an 1843 tithe map of the Suffolk village of Bradfield St Clare named one field ‘Hellesden Ley’ (‘ley’ means a clearing in a wood). Bradfield St Clare is only six miles south-east of Bury St Edmunds, and fewer than 20 miles from Thetford. Although Hellesden is a slightly different name from Hellesdon, the –den ending could derive either from –dun (hill) or –denu (valley), so the Norfolk and Suffolk sites are equally likely to be Hægelisdun on the basis of place name evidence alone.43 Medieval people took their surnames from local place names and did not move around much, so the appearance of the name Agnes de Halisden in a survey of 1286 in a place called Brodefelde’ Stok’ Ken’ provides some support for the Bradfield St Clare hypothesis, although it is not certain whether the modern field called Hellesden Ley was located in Brodefelde’ Stok’ Ken’, which does not correspond exactly to any modern place name.44 Stanley West noticed that the road leading south towards Bradfield St Clare and Hellesden Ley from the village of Rougham was called Kingshall Street, perhaps a trace of the villa regia of Abbo’s Passion. Kingshall Street is part of the route that connects Bradfield St Clare to Thetford. West also noticed a place called Sutton Hall (on the boundary between Bradfield Combust and Cockfield). A late eleventh-century account of the beginnings of the cult of St Edmund by Herman the archdeacon claimed that the king was first buried at

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Suthtune, the Old English origin of Sutton (although Sutton is an exceedingly common place name). All of these sites were owned by the abbey of Bury St Edmunds, although this is hardly surprising, since the abbey owned vast swathes of land in west Suffolk from an early period.45 There is nothing near Hellesden Ley that much resembles the hill implied by the name Hægelisdun, but the flatness of East Anglia means that many barely perceptible eminences can be described as ‘hills’.46 However, Abbo states clearly that Hægelisdun was not just the name of a royal villa but of an entire forest, so the survival of the name in one small location does not preclude the possibility that the name was also applied to a much larger territory. A third contender for the martyrdom site, proposed as recently as 2011, is at Hazeleigh, near Maldon in Essex. A place called Halesdunam (identical with Hægelisdun) is recorded here in the ‘Little Domesday Book’ of 1086. Keith Briggs, who first put forward the theory that Hægelisdun was in Essex, noted that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle does not say that the battle between Edmund and the Danes took place at Thetford, only that the Danes had their winter quarters at Thetford. This is quite true, although almost all historians have assumed that the battle did take place in or near Thetford. If Edmund died on 20 November (which is such a specific detail that it seems likely to be correct) then his death was probably connected to an attack on the Danes’ winter encampment. There was simply no reason for the Danes to send a force 60 miles south to Maldon, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle makes no mention of Viking activity in the kingdom of Essex in 869. Briggs’s argument relies heavily on Abbo’s assertion that the Danes came by sea in 869. As we have seen, Abbo’s highly unreliable and literary account is a conflation of the two invasions of 865 and 869.47 Neither Hellesdon in Norfolk nor Halesdunam in Essex is a particularly plausible candidate to be the Hægelisdun of Abbo’s Passion, and the cumulative evidence for Hellesden Ley (its proximity to Bury St Edmunds and the occurrence of other suggestive place names in the locality) makes it the more likely of the three contenders. It is possible, of course, that other places named Hægelisdun have been lost without trace, but Hægelisdun must surely have been close to Bury

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St Edmunds. A pattern repeated over and over again in medieval saints’ cults is that outlying shrines were moved to the nearest major settlement as they became more popular. Even if Hægelisdun was near Bury, however, this does not explain why Edmund fought the Danes at Thetford (as seems highly likely) but was killed so much further south. There is a clue to this mystery in the fact that the man who told the martyrdom story to King Æthelstan claimed to have been Edmund’s armour-bearer. Neither a king fleeing a battlefield nor a king planning to surrender himself without resistance would take his armour-bearer with him. The logical conclusion is that Edmund retreated south from Thetford with the remnants of his army, perhaps intending to mount further resistance to the Vikings from the Wuffing dynasty’s heartland of south-east Suffolk. If Bradfield St Clare was indeed a royal centre, it would have made a sensible place to head for from Thetford, and perhaps the East Angles thought that they could shelter in the nearby forest (the much larger ancestor of today’s Bradfield Woods) and carry on a guerrilla campaign against the Danes. Yet the Danes may have caught up with the East Angles more quickly than they anticipated and captured and executed Edmund. In December 2014 a metal detectorist in the village of Drinkstone, whose parish boundary lies less than three miles from Hellesden Ley, made a discovery that further strengthens the case for Bradfield St Clare as Hægelisdun. The object that came out of the ground was tiny, less than three centimetres long, and consisted of a hollow gold dome attached to a small golden socket. The dome is decorated with elaborate gold filigree of beaded gold wire and set with a single pea-sized piece of blue glass.48 This remarkable object, which was acquired by Moyse’s Hall Museum in Bury St Edmunds in 2017 and named ‘the Edmund Jewel’, belongs to a select group of AngloSaxon artefacts called æstels. The most famous of these is the ‘Alfred Jewel’ in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. An æstel consisted of a richly decorated handle and socket made of precious metal, with a wooden (or possibly walrus ivory) stick held in the socket. The æstel was used to point out passages in books, although it seems likely that such objects were as much for show as for use: ostentatious symbols

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of learning that demonstrated the wealth of monastic houses that possessed collections of manuscripts.49 All of the æstels found so far date from the second half of the ninth century, the period around the Danish invasion that began in 865. The Edmund Jewel could have been dropped by accident by Vikings plundering a nearby religious house, but the problem with this interpretation is that there were no religious houses nearby – unless we accept the story that King Sigeberht founded a monastery at Beodericsworth and it was still functioning in 869. A simpler explanation is that the Edmund Jewel was associated with an important religious site which we know to have been established in the late ninth century: the chapel at Hægelisdun where Edmund’s body was buried after 869. The establishment of this first shrine will be examined in the next chapter, but the Drinkstone æstel, an object that had lost its significance in a post-Viking East Anglian society without books or a literate clergy, might have been a precious votive offering left at the earliest resting place of Edmund’s body. It could even have been deposited, as an act of expiation, by a newly Christianised Dane who had looted it from a monastery during the events of 869. Without the discovery of archaeological remains of a structure that might be the wooden chapel erected at Hægelisdun, the association of the Drinkstone æstel with Edmund remains highly speculative. However, Hægelisdun and its environs are places where we might expect valuable ninth-century ecclesiastical artefacts to turn up. Taken together with the other evidence, the appearance of the Drinkstone æstel within a short distance of Hellesden Ley makes a strong circumstantial case for the field in Bradfield St Clare as the site of Edmund’s martyrdom.

Reconstructing Edmund’s death The problematic nature of the evidence makes any historical reconstruction of the events surrounding Edmund’s death highly speculative, but two basic principles guide my attempt to distinguish fact from myth. In the first place, the events (and order of events) given in the earliest manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle are the most

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reliable evidence we have, and no reconstruction should deviate from them. Secondly, Abbo of Fleury claimed that an eyewitness (probably Dunstan’s aged armour-bearer) saw Edmund’s death in Hægelisdun wood. He does not make the same eyewitness claim for the other events he describes, and his confused account of Inguar’s invasion of East Anglia by sea can easily be discounted as inconsistent with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The historical core of the Passion is Edmund’s death. As the autumn of 869 was turning to winter, the Great Heathen Army rode from York to East Anglia, destroying and looting monasteries as they went: first the great religious houses of Mercia, including Medehamstede, and then the smaller monasteries of East Anglia. The Danes took winter quarters at Thetford where Edmund, perhaps in retaliation for their attacks on monasteries, attacked the Danes. Edmund was defeated but did not die on the battlefield. Accompanied by his faithful armour-bearer, he retreated south with the surviving remnant of his army, perhaps hoping for safety in the forest of Hægelisdun or aiming for the Wuffing heartlands of southeast Suffolk. The Danes, led by Ivarr, caught up with Edmund and he was captured. Ivarr ordered a humiliating (and possibly ritualised) death for Edmund, perhaps in revenge for breaking what Ivarr considered to be the treaty of peace concluded between the Danes and East Angles in 865. According to eyewitness testimony, Edmund was tied to a tree, used as target practice for archers and then beheaded. The beheading is especially credible, given pagan beliefs about the power invested in heads and the persistence of traditions about Edmund as an acephalic saint. So Edmund the mortal man breathed his last, and Edmund the immortal martyr was born.

Chap ter 3

Invincible Martyr The Early Cult of Edmund, 869–1066 Each year, in the early hours of the morning of 20 November, the celebration of the feast of St Edmund began in earnest in the medieval abbey of Bury St Edmunds. The monks, their faces hidden by the hoods of their black habits, processed from the cloister into the stalls of the choir, where candles struggled to light the darkness of the vast Romanesque basilica. To the east, however, the monks would have seen a blaze of light. Behind the choir altar and the high altar lay the most sacred part of the church: the presbytery, which housed Edmund’s splendid shrine. That night the light of four great candles of 12 pounds each, standing at each of its four corners, was amplified by the shrine’s shining panels of gold; 24 smaller candles formed a circle around these. The great paschal candle was joined by six others in the celebrated seven-branched candlestick next to the high altar, while a candle also burnt in the 17 windows of the presbytery.1 The air must have been thick with the sweet smell of hot beeswax as the monks intoned the antiphon: O martyr invincibilis, o Eadmunde testis indomabilis (‘O invincible martyr, O Edmund, unconquerable witness’).2 The process by which Edmund’s catastrophic military defeat at the hands of the Danes was transformed into a victory was, in one sense, what happened to every martyr. It was a process whose ultimate pattern and exemplar was the Passion of Jesus Christ himself. The martyr was born anew in heaven, more glorious than in life; his or her blood watered the Christian faith, often resulting in the conversion of the very people who had him or her slain the first place. Yet Edmund was not just any martyr, because the transformation of his defeat into a spiritual victory had very real political consequences for English

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history. Edmund was perhaps the most politicised of all English saints: his memory was exploited first by the Danish conquerors of East Anglia in the ninth century; it may then have been taken over by the English kings of Wessex striving to regain eastern England from the Danes in the tenth century. Edmund’s memory was then promoted by the Danish king Cnut in the eleventh century. Edmund offered Danes the chance to legitimate their rule by venerating a martyr of their own making, gave the House of Wessex a spiritual hero for the English under Danish rule, and allowed the Danish King Cnut to expiate the crimes of his father Swein. Yet because he was appropriated equally by Danes and Anglo-Saxons alike, Edmund was destined to become a unifying rather than a divisive figure. By the time Edward the Confessor visited his shrine in the mid-eleventh century, setting the seal on Edmund’s status as a protector of English kings, Edmund was already the nation’s pre-eminent royal saint.

The Danish conquest The scribe of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle who noted Edmund’s death used the word geodon – meaning ‘conquered’ – for the first time to describe Viking behaviour.3 By 869, Danish attacks had been occurring for 80 years; never before, however, had the Vikings come to stay. The experience of conquest can have the effect of strengthening and redefining the national identity of those conquered – if that national identity can survive the conquerors’ attempts to squeeze it out of existence. The Anglo-Saxons of East Anglia were more fortunate than many conquered peoples, because they largely shared a common culture and heritage with their conquerors. After all, the action of Beowulf, the Old English epic poem that may have been composed for the court of the Wuffing kings, is set in Denmark. It is even possible that Old English and the Old Norse of the Danes were mutually comprehensible.4 Yet there was one aspect of English culture that the Danes did not share: the Anglo-Saxons’ deeply ingrained and profoundly felt Christianity, which by the late ninth century was a defining feature

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of their culture and nationhood. Again and again, the meagre sources for the Viking invasion of the 860s and 870s describe the intruders as ‘heathens’; their paganism defined them as an ‘other’ in relation to the English. The Vikings’ paganism also made them barbarians, outside the spiritual reach of Rome and the symbolic romanitas into which the Anglo-Saxons, even if they were never under Roman rule, were engrafted by their Christianity. As we have seen, the Wuffing dynasty of East Anglia was especially keen to affirm its romanitas and ‘civilised’ credentials. The Vikings may have been barbarians, but they understood the importance of trade to their continuing wealth. Conquest brought with it responsibilities as well as opportunities, and East Anglia’s churches and religious houses were a finite source of booty. Although the Danes tended to trade in bullion (silver ingots and jewellery) at home, they maintained the minting of silver pennies in East Anglia after 869. These were issued in the names of two kings (known only from their coins), Oswald and Æthelred, who may have been East Anglian ‘quislings’ ruling under Viking authority; alternatively, these may have been the baptismal names of newly converted Danish overlords. The quality of East Anglian coinage even remained unchanged from Edmund’s reign. However, the number of coins minted under the Vikings was much smaller, and only eight bearing the names of Oswald or Æthelred survive.5 One striking feature of Oswald’s and Æthelred’s coins is that they still bear the Christian cross. This raises the question of the extent to which the Viking invasion undermined Christianity. Certainly, there is no evidence that the Vikings ever persecuted people because they were Christians, nor was there any organised structure to Viking paganism to mirror that of the Christian church. On the contrary, the Vikings had a tendency to adopt other people’s religions: the Varangian Guard in Constantinople adopted Eastern Orthodoxy, and the Norsemen who settled in northern France became the Catholic Normans. If the Vikings permitted puppet kings to rule in East Anglia, there was no reason why they would not have allowed those puppets to be Christians; indeed, their Christianity could have served to legitimate Oswald and Æthelred as underkings.

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Although the Vikings tolerated Christianity per se, the effects of the invasion on the institutional church were devastating. The bishoprics of Elmham and Dummoc ceased to exist, and the Peterborough manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle suggests that the Vikings sacked all of the monasteries in the kingdom. At the time, monasteries were not just enclosed religious institutions: in an age before small territorial parishes in the medieval sense, monasteries or ‘minsters’ acted as ‘mother parishes’, sending out clergy to preach to the people. They were the mainstay of rural Christianity, and often depended for their existence on the patronage of the bishop. However, the disruption to churches in East Anglia did not last for very long. Excavations at the ruins of the minster in North Elmham revealed evidence of a possible period of abandonment ending in around 875. The minster sites may have been reoccupied by less formally constituted groups of priests within less than a decade of the invasion, and the fact that some East Anglian minsters hung on to their pre-Viking charters and endowments suggests continuity.6

Remembering Edmund The invasion of East Anglia was just the beginning of the Viking onslaught on the English kingdoms. In the autumn or early winter of 870 an army led by Ivarr’s brother Halfdan left East Anglia and set up camp at Reading in readiness for an assault against the kingdom of Wessex. In the summer of 871 Halfdan was joined by another Danish leader, Guthrum. In 874 Guthrum made Cambridge his base, from where he attacked Wessex the following year. Thus began the famous game of cat and mouse between Guthrum and Alfred, the king of Wessex, which ended in 878 with Alfred’s defeat of Guthrum at Edington, followed by Alfred’s siege of the Viking camp at Chippenham and Guthrum’s eventual submission. Among Alfred’s terms for Guthrum’s surrender was the requirement that the Viking king accept baptism. With Alfred as his godfather, Guthrum was baptised with 30 of his foremost warriors at Aller in Somerset, taking the baptismal name Æthelstan. A few days later Alfred gave Guthrum baptismal gifts

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at Wedmore. Guthrum withdrew to Cirencester and then, in the summer of 879, to East Anglia, concluding a treaty with Alfred that established the limits of the ‘Danelaw’, the diagonal line across the country that established Danish overlordship of eastern England.7 In baptism Guthrum assumed a new ‘English’ identity: taking a name previously borne by a Wuffing king, he became Æthelstan II of the East Angles. No source associates Guthrum personally with the martyrdom of Edmund, and this may have made it easier for the Viking king to assume the trappings of legitimate East Anglian kingship. After Guthrum died in around 890 the same moneyers who had issued coinage under his English name of Æthelstan began minting an extraordinary coinage that mimicked the typical design of pennies in Edmund’s day and bore Edmund’s name in the form S[AN]C[T]E EADMVND REX. These Latin words, which can be translated as ‘O Saint Edmund the king!’ are in the vocative case and imply an invocation of the saint for help and protection. They are the earliest evidence that Edmund was being venerated as a saint, but the fact that East Anglia’s coinage thenceforth bore Edmund’s name and not that of a local Viking king means that we do not know who ruled after Guthrum. This is significant in itself; Edmund became the means by which the Vikings exercised control over their English population, eclipsing the names of the Danish rulers themselves.8 Furthermore, although the addition of the title rex after Edmund’s name may simply have been in imitation of the original coins, the title might also suggest that Edmund had a continuing political as well as religious significance. Of the 80 moneyers known to have struck coins in memory of Edmund, over 60 had Frankish names, with a smattering of Old English names and only a tiny number of Danish. The Danes had no tradition of making or using coinage in their homeland, and the evidence points to Guthrum or his successors inviting Frankish moneyers over to the Danelaw to manufacture the coinage.9 The decision to bring in outside expertise speaks to the importance this coinage held for the Danes as well as the volume in which they wanted these coins struck. Edmund’s old moneyers, even if they had survived the conquest, were too few in number to meet the demand.10

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The ‘St Edmund memorial coinage’ was far more than just an attempt to get the East Angles on side with the new Danish regime; nor was it just a bid to atone in some way for Edmund’s death. The huge number of Edmund memorial pennies minted and the sites where they have been found shows that they must have been produced throughout the Danelaw. Attempts to link the pennies exclusively to East Anglia have lacked plausibility, since there could not have been enough local mints to cope with demand. The power and influence of Guthrum and his successors, and the evident policy decision made by Danish leaders to place Edmund front and centre in their attempts to hold together their English and Danish subjects in one polity, meant that Edmund seems to have become the patron of the entire Danelaw and not just East Anglia. The English and Danes were now held together by the Christian faith for which Edmund died (presuming that Guthrum imposed his own new-found Christianity on the rest of Anglo-Danish society, which is likely), and Edmund was the symbol of that faith. It is also possible, however, that the Viking rulers of East Anglia honoured Edmund because they were aware of the Wuffing dynasty’s Scandinavian connections. If, as Sam Newton argues, Beowulf was written in East Anglia, then oral histories of heroic deeds done in the homelands of the English people may still have been in circulation in the region. The willingness of the Danes to adopt Edmund as their patron saint could be explained by a belief that Edmund was a kinsman of the Swedish Wulfing dynasty and therefore descended from Scandinavians. Both English and Danish societies were much preoccupied with genealogies, and it is possible that in the appearance of the wolf guarding Edmund’s head there was a message to the Danes that Edmund was one of their own. According to Abbo’s Passion, the earliest phase of Edmund’s cult began on the very site of his martyrdom at Hægelisdun, while East Anglia was still under Danish rule. Edmund was buried in an ‘adequate tomb’ (competenti mausoleo) and a ‘church of rude construction’ (vili opere […] basilica) was built over it. Here Edmund ‘rested for many years, until the conflagration of war and the mighty storms of persecution were over, and the religious piety of the faithful began to

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revive’. Abbo makes clear that already, at Hægelisdun, miracles were occurring at Edmund’s tomb: ‘For the Saint, from beneath the lowly roof of his consecrated abode, made manifest by frequent miraculous signs the magnitude of his merits in the sight of God.’11 Abbo offers no details of the miracles that occurred at this time, but the discovery of the æstel known as the Edmund Jewel so close to the putative location of that early wooden chapel may be evidence that precious objects were already being left as offerings at Edmund’s tomb.

Edmund and the English reconquest One consequence of the creation of the Danelaw and the extinction of the old pre-Viking kingdoms was that the kings of Wessex could claim to rule the entire ‘Anglo-Saxon’ people. After taking control of London in 886, Alfred became king of all Angelcynn not subject to the Danes.12 The divided nature of the island of Britain meant that, in spite of the ascendancy of the House of Wessex, English kingship came to be seen in terms of nationality rather than territory. Alfred’s son Edward the Elder (c.874–924) did not see himself so much as king of England as king of the Angelcynn.13 For most of his reign, Edward was engaged in the reconquest of the Danelaw. This culminated in 917 with the death of a Danish king, probably one of Guthrum’s mysterious successors as king of East Anglia, at Tempsford in Bedfordshire, which led the Danish armies of East Anglia to submit to Edward.14 Edward’s interest in the figure of Edmund may be indicated by the fact that he apparently named a son, born to his third wife Eadgifu in 920 or 921, after the saint – the future King Edmund I (c.921–46). Although it is also possible that Eadmund was simply a popular name in both Wessex and East Anglia in the ninth and tenth centuries, it is not hard to imagine a concerted effort by the English to reappropriate St Edmund from the Danes after minting of the memorial coinage ceased in around 910. Furthermore, Edmund I’s later patronage of Bury St Edmunds in the 940s suggests a personal connection to the saint. The English reconquest of the Danelaw was completed by Edward’s son (and Edmund’s half-brother) Æthelstan (c.894–939)

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in 927, when he captured York from the Danes. It was at this time that Æthelstan began to style himself rex Anglorum (‘king of the English’), adopting Edmund’s former title.15 The possibility remains that all of this was coincidence and had little or nothing to do with Edmund the martyr, but given the importance accorded to Edmund in Danish areas, the conscious reappropriation of Edmund’s memory by the House of Wessex as part of their campaign of reconquest is a plausible interpretation of the evidence. If Abbo of Fleury is to be believed, there was sufficient interest in Edmund at Æthelstan’s court for the king to hear out the man claiming to have been Edmund’s armour-bearer; indeed, it is even possible that the armour-bearer was invited to the court to tell his tale. Because of Abbo’s claim that Æthelstan heard the armour-bearer’s story, historians have generally assumed that Edmund’s body was moved from Hægelisdun to Beodericsworth in Æthelstan’s reign. However, Abbo gives no indication of a date and says only that the cumulative testimony of miracles done at the saint’s tomb at Hægelisdun made Edmund’s cult a popular one. Therefore: in the royal town which, in the English tongue, is named Bedricesgueord, but in Latin is called Bedrici-curtis, they erected a church of immense size, with storeys admirably constructed of wood, and to this they translated him with great magnificence, as was due.16

The idea that Edmund’s ‘translation’ (relocation of relics) could only have taken place after 924, when Æthelstan became king, is unlikely as well as unsupported by any evidence. Similarly, the idea that the cult of St Edmund grew out of English resistance to the Danes makes many assumptions.17 Why could the Danes not have sincerely adopted devotion to Edmund? The brief treatment Abbo gives to Edmund’s cult at Hægelisdun suggests a fairly short-lived shrine church on the martyrdom site. Guthrum’s successor began minting the memorial coinage in around 890, and it is implausible that such an honour did not coincide with other marks of favour towards the martyr, including his translation to an urban centre. Abbo identifies the translation to Beodericsworth as the moment when Edmund ‘was with reverence

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pronounced to be a Saint’, suggesting some sort of official approbation for the cult at around that time. In the absence of bishops in the Danelaw at that period, such approbation must have come from the Danish leaders. Since the memorial pennies referred to Edmund as a saint, the translation probably took place prior to (or at the same time as) their first issue, perhaps on 30 March 889.18 In the ninth and tenth centuries, before the establishment of a standard procedure for canonising a saint, the translation of a person’s body to a shrine elevated above the ground was a means of enacting his or her sanctity. Under normal circumstances, Christian burial was final, as the body rested in the ground in hope of the resurrection. When someone’s body was moved it indicated a faith in the person’s sanctity that overrode the usual concerns about disturbing the rest of the dead. A shrine differed from a tomb by being raised above ground, so that the body was not actually buried at all, an honour reserved for the saints.19 According to Abbo, the discovery of Edmund’s incorruption occurred only at this earliest translation, when the saint’s head was found to have reattached itself to his body, leaving only a thin red crease.20 However, Abbo’s claim that Edmund’s head was discovered intact in the woods some considerable time after his body suggests that a tradition of Edmund’s incorruption existed from the very beginning. We seem to be offered a glimpse here of a popular Christianity that survived the onslaught of the Danes. Edmund’s cult was rooted in ‘spontaneous lay devotion’ rather than official sponsorship.21 In Abbo’s account, Edmund is not buried in consecrated ground, but in Hægelisdun wood, making the ground holy by his presence, and a simple chapel is built over his tomb. The chapel in the woods becomes the resort of pilgrims seeking miracles. It is easy to see how this kind of ‘charismatic’ religion, centred on the miraculous and on the tombs of the saints, could survive in spite of the lack of any institutional church in Viking East Anglia. Edmund’s incorruption, as well as being a characteristic feature of the Wuffing dynasty, also belongs in the realms of folklore and folk religion. It is a self-evident, self-verifying miracle that removes the need for official approval from senior clerics.

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If the cult of St Edmund was as much a Danish as an English creation, as seems highly likely given the ‘official’ approbation accorded the cult by the memorial pennies, the English reconquest must have involved a conscious effort to reappropriate the saint. This may be seen in Edward the Elder’s decision to name his son Edmund in around 920 and in Æthelstan’s adoption of the title rex Anglorum and encouragement of the cult (if Abbo’s armour-bearer story is to be believed). The House of Wessex’s claim to rule over the Angelcynn was in competition with a composite Anglo-Danish identity in the Danelaw that was held together by common Christianity and, perhaps, veneration of St Edmund. One way to explain why Edmund became the epitome and embodiment of Englishness is that he was in danger, before 917, of becoming as much a Danish as an English saint, and a determined effort had to be made to recover him for the English. A short Old English poem interpolated in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and known as ‘The Capture of the Five Boroughs’ gives an insight into the power of the Anglo-Danish identity that may have been held together by Edmund’s memory. The five boroughs were the Viking strongholds of Leicester, Lincoln, Derby, Nottingham and Stamford, captured by Æthelstan but then overrun in 939 by Olaf Guthfrithson, the Viking king of Dublin. In 942 Æthelstan’s half-brother and successor Edmund I recaptured the five boroughs and ‘redeemed’ the anglicised Danes from the rule of Olaf and the heathen Norwegian Vikings.22 The idea that the Danes of the five boroughs welcomed King Edmund I may be nothing more than West Saxon propaganda, but it could also be true. The identity of the Danes had become invested in their Christianity, perhaps through their veneration of King Edmund’s namesake, and they preferred to live under English rule.23

Edmund: a Nordic saint There is no doubt some truth in the idea that the Danes made use of the memory of Edmund – exploited it, even – in order to maintain

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control of their English population in the Danelaw and particularly in East Anglia.24 However, the later popularity of Edmund in the Nordic world strongly suggests that there was a genuine Danish cult of Edmund in late ninth-century England. The twelfth-century Icelandic chronicler Ari Thorgilsson even dated the entirety of Icelandic history from the death of ‘Edmund, the holy king of the English’.25 An Old Norse saga based on the death of Edmund, now lost, may once have existed, and one reason for the prominence given to Edmund in Icelandic history was the Icelanders’ interest in associating themselves with the dynasty of Ragnar, the supposed father of Edmund’s killer Ivarr.26 The apparently perverse adoption by the Vikings of a martyr they themselves had killed makes more sense in the thought-world of the early Middle Ages than might at first appear. Ivarr may have been despicable, but he was also the man chosen by divine providence to elevate Edmund to the ranks of heaven, and therefore Edmund was in some sense the patron of Ivarr’s dynasty.27 The argument was not a new one: in the fourth century Augustine of Hippo had famously argued in his City of God that God destined Rome to play a role in the death of Jesus so that it would become the Christian empire that spread the faith to the farthest corners of the earth. Put simply, pagans did the church a favour by providing it with its martyrs. Although it is difficult to judge the extent to which knowledge of Edmund was transmitted to the Nordic world via Anglo-Danes (as opposed to later medieval English missionaries), three churches in medieval Norway were dedicated to St Edmund and the personal name Jetmund derived from the saint.28 By the fourteenth century there was a statue of Edmund at Lögmannshlíð in northern Iceland, and Iceland’s thirteenth-century ‘Book of Settlements’ claimed that Jàtmundr Englakonings (‘Edmund, king of England’) was the father of a daughter named ‘Ulfrun the unborn’, who married a King Oswald.29 Although this is a very late tradition, the extent to which it diverges from the traditional portrayal of Edmund as a virgin saint is intriguing. It seems to be evidence of Norse anxiety to fabricate a genealogical link with the famous saint, and perhaps also a trace of Norse popular traditions about Edmund that differed from the official account.

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Ulfrun’s marriage to a king called Oswald – the name of one of the underkings who succeeded Edmund in East Anglia – is probably no more than coincidence, but hints at the intriguing possibility of the Wuffing dynasty’s survival.

Edmund at Beodericsworth The town of Beodericsworth was located in a valley between gentle hills at the conjunction of two rivers known today as the Lark and the Linnet. It may have been the site of King Sigeberht’s monastery, founded in the 630s, and the existence of a church dedicated to St Mary at the time when Edmund’s body was moved there suggests a religious site important enough to have survived (or been revived shortly after) the Viking onslaught. The discovery of a fragment of Ipswich ware, a distinctive kind of pottery produced at Ipswich between the seventh and ninth centuries, certainly suggests some sort of occupation of what later became the abbey precincts before Edmund’s arrival.30 However, within a short time of becoming the resting place of the martyr, Beodericsworth’s earlier identity was eclipsed almost entirely as it became ‘St Edmund’s byrig’, St Edmundsbury or Bury St Edmunds.31 Whether the translation of Edmund’s body from Hægelisdun to Beodericsworth occurred in the 890s or the 920s, Edmund was almost certainly installed in his new shrine by 926, when Theodred became bishop of London and began trying to impose some order on the church in East Anglia, which was still without a bishop of its own.32 At an unknown date (but probably in 95133) Theodred, who spent some of his time on an episcopal estate at Hoxne, verified the incorruption of Edmund’s body. In those days the body was displayed to public view every year on Maundy Thursday so that a devout woman named Oswen could cut the saint’s hair and fingernails.34 The shrine at Beodericsworth, in the pre-existing wooden church of St Mary, attracted rich votive offerings which in turn attracted the attentions of thieves.35 One night, a gang attempted to break in, but each one of them was frozen in mid-activity by the saint’s miraculous power;

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for good measure, Edmund paralysed the custodian of the shrine so that his power would be clearly seen in the morning. The burglars were apprehended and handed over to Bishop Theodred, who had them all hanged for sacrilege. Theodred deeply regretted his rash decision, which violated the prohibition against the shedding of blood by clerics, and as part of his penance he determined to improve the shrine of St Edmund. Theodred handled, washed and clothed the saint’s body ‘with new robes of the best’ and put it in a wooden coffin. Others, however, failed to show as much reverence as Theodred and suffered the consequences. Abbo relates that a young thegn called Leofstan demanded to see the body of St Edmund. Although the young man was warned against doing so, when the shrine was opened he looked at the martyr’s body and was immediately struck with madness. His father Ælfgar turned him out of doors and Leofstan fell into poverty, dying devoured by worms.36 Theodred’s interest in Edmund is directly confirmed by the bishop’s surviving will, in which he bequeathed land at Nowton, Horringer, Ickworth and Whepstead to sancte Eadmundes kirke (‘St Edmund’s church’).37 The will, alongside the fact that Theodred died only three decades before Abbo was writing, makes it highly likely that Abbo’s account of Theodred’s involvement in the saint’s early cult is accurate. These final two miracles recorded by Abbo – the madness of Leofstan and the paralysis of the thieves – present Edmund in a somewhat frightening light. Traditionally, the healings associated with the tombs of the saints were benign: physical healing from illnesses and deliverance from possession by evil spirits. Abbo hints at such benign miracles, without giving us details, but chooses to place in the foreground of his narrative Edmund’s miraculous protection of his own bodily integrity. Edmund’s determination to punish wrongdoers in death even seems at odds with his willingness, in life, to lay down his arms. Abbo’s presumptuous thegn, Leofstan, has an English rather than a Danish name, and Abbo does not imply that the thieves who attempted to break into the shrine were Danes or heathens. Edmund’s violence is not directed, at this stage, against the Danes in particular but against any violator of his sanctity.

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One explanation of these aggressive miracles is that they allowed Edmund to vindicate his honour by violence in a way that the martyr­ dom narrative itself did not permit. By recording these miracles, Abbo may have unwittingly preserved a more visceral and aggressive Edmund, a figure of folk religion rather than elevated piety. However, there is another, more straightforward explanation for Abbo’s emphasis on Edmund’s anger against any unworthy person trying to gain access to his body. It ensured that access to Edmund’s body was tightly controlled and that the myth of his incorruption was maintained. Edmund was one of only two incorrupt male saints in AngloSaxon England, along with Cuthbert. Cuthbert’s cult was notoriously hostile to women: after Cuthbert was moved to Durham in 995 women were banned from entering the monastic church altogether. The story of Oswen clipping the nails of St Edmund shows that Edmund’s cult was quite different. It seems unlikely that Oswen was nothing more than a literary device, since Abbo makes quite clear that Oswen had died only a short while before he was writing; she would therefore have been well remembered.38 There is nothing intrinsically implausible about a woman caring for Edmund’s shrine at Beodericsworth, especially before the English reconquest, when religious life in East Anglia was a makeshift affair. The priests who looked after St Mary’s church could have been married (clerical celibacy was not imposed in England until the eleventh century), with their wives taking on some roles at the shrine. Later, some of Edmund’s most famous healings would concern women, and he appeared in visions to women as well as men.39 Even after the church at Beodericsworth became a Benedictine monastery, some women continued to live within the monastic precinct under religious vows.40 As well as the episcopal patronage of Theodred, it is possible that Beodericsworth received its first official royal patronage from the House of Wessex in the mid-tenth century. A surviving charter supposedly issued by Edmund I in 945 has been the subject of much historical debate.41 The charter describes the limits of a territorial zone surrounding the shrine church called the banleuca (literally, ‘suburbs’), which remained unchanged until 1934.42 The accuracy of

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the charter’s delineation of the banleuca has led some to see the charter as genuine.43 Others have been inclined to view it as a forgery – but a forgery that may have been based on a genuine tradition of land grants from King Edmund – not least because a king named after the saint was likely to have favoured the cult.44 It is certain that King Edmund’s father-in-law Ælfgar and son Eadwig were benefactors of Bury St Edmunds.45 Instead of a single impressive royal foundation charter (even a forged one), the later abbey of Bury St Edmunds preserved a collection of land grants from local individuals.46 This set the cult of St Edmund apart from that of many other saints, suggesting that it was a grassroots, popular movement rather than something imposed from above. The high-status individuals who donated to the community at Bury St Edmunds may have thought of themselves as a ‘household’ of the saint, symbolically linked to Bury but also to the other aristocratic donors.47 When, in the eleventh century, Abbot Baldwin of Bury St Edmunds forged an entire battery of charters he refrained from creating a single royal foundation document – something that other English monasteries had no qualms about forging. This suggests that a very powerful tradition existed that Bury St Edmunds had no royal founder, but was instead the creation of the local aristocracy.48 This in turn points to a very early foundation, before the House of Wessex began patronising religious houses. Bury St Edmunds, uniquely among religious houses in East Anglia, emerged not from Dunstan’s tenth-century reform but from the murky religious chaos of the Viking conquest period. The absence of a named founder, combined with Abbo’s narrative in which ‘great numbers of the inhabitants, high and low alike’, decide en masse to install Edmund’s body at Beodericsworth on account of his miracles, creates the impression that no particular person other than Edmund himself can be credited with the foundation of the community.49 Edmund remained, symbolically, the king of the East Angles, and his people remained loyal to him;50 no later king could presume to ‘found’ Bury St Edmunds because St Edmund himself, by enabling them to assume his title of title of rex Anglorum, conferred the right to rule East Anglia on the kings of Wessex.

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Popularising Edmund: Abbo and Ælfric King Edmund I appointed Dunstan abbot of Glastonbury in the 940s, creating an important bond between Dunstan and the king that may have encouraged Dunstan to promote the cult of King Edmund’s namesake.51 As archbishop of Canterbury from 960, Dunstan spearheaded a wide-ranging programme of ecclesiastical reform, focussed on re-erecting dioceses and reconstructing monasteries destroyed by the Danes in eastern England. The establishment of Ramsey Abbey by Oswald of Worcester in 969 was one plank in Dunstan’s reform programme, which involved encouraging religious communities to adopt the Benedictine rule. It is highly significant that the earliest life of St Edmund emanated not from Bury St Edmunds but from Ramsey; the community of priests at Bury was an irregular religious community of the kind Dunstan did not favour, so the request of the monks of Ramsey for a life of St Edmund from the pen of Abbo of Fleury represented a bid by the Benedictine order to manage and control the memory of East Anglia’s greatest saint.52 Whether Ramsey’s attempt to refashion the religious history of East Anglia also coincided with a Benedictine attempt to take over Bury St Edmunds is unclear. According to one theory, the composition of Abbo’s Passion coincided with Ramsey turning Bury St Edmunds into a ‘satellite’ or dependent priory, but there is no direct evidence for this.53 However, Abbo’s description of the people and land of the East Anglian nation in the opening section of his Passion shows that the monks of Ramsey viewed Edmund as a saint for all East Anglians – for all English people, even – and the narrative is strikingly patriotic. Abbo is insulting towards the Danes, describing them as cannibals incapable of human empathy: ‘from the north comes all that is evil.’54 He portrays Edmund as one who rules by consent. ‘By general acclaim of […] the people at large, I acquired the sovereign power of this realm,’ Edmund recalls, and: ‘I have determined to be the benefactor rather than the ruler of the English Commonwealth (Anglorum reipublicae).’55 The Latin term respublica did not have the same meaning in the ninth century as the English word ‘republic’ has today: it did not

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mean a country ruled without a monarch, and is better translated as ‘commonwealth’ or ‘polity’. However, the term was still loaded with the historical connotations of the Roman Republic, and meant a polity that belonged in some sense to the people. Why did Abbo not use the less loaded term Anglorum regni (‘the kingdom of the English’)? Edmund’s East Anglia, in Abbo’s Passion, seems to be a sort of ‘monarchical republic’, where the king rules as a representative of the people. Although Edmund is at the centre of the story, the king is elected and he listens to (but does not accept) the counsel of his bishop. The democratic theme continues even after Edmund’s death: a council is called to consider the best way to search for his body, and his translation to Beodericsworth occurs by popular acclaim. Abbo’s emphasis on the role of the people in Edmund’s story may have been his way, and Ramsey Abbey’s way, of channelling East Anglian anxieties about being ruled by the House of Wessex and being incorporated into a larger English kingdom. Under the Vikings, the East Angles were ruled by foreigners – but at least they still had had their own kingdom. After 917 they were forced to seek a new identity as part of a greater England. It is possible, as Sam Newton has noted, that Abbo’s mistaken remark about Edmund’s descent from the ‘old Saxons’ was deliberate.56 By making Edmund a Saxon, Abbo made him a kinsman of the House of Wessex and thereby legitimated West Saxon rule over East Anglia. That rule is further legitimated by Æthelstan’s cameo appearance as the audience of the armour-bearer’s tale. Even Edmund’s implied virginity may have served a political purpose, ensuring there was no possibility of a legitimate successor to Edmund other than the House of Wessex (which might suggest, in turn, that there were people who could claim descent from Edmund).57 However, Abbo’s Passion also seems to contain an implicit warning that kings rule by merit with the consent of the people. In this sense, the Passion plays the role of a political assertion of East Anglian rights and privileges within the larger England of the tenth century. Abbo’s Passion, because it was written in Latin, would have been largely restricted to a monastic and clerical audience, but soon after Abbo another leading Benedictine, Ælfric of Eynsham (c.950–c.1010), produced an Old English verse paraphrase. Ælfric’s Passion differs

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slightly from Abbo’s in some respects. Ælfric’s Edmund expresses a desire to fight the Vikings but is told by his bishop that he does not have sufficient forces, and Ælfric conflates Edmund’s burial at Hægelisdun with his burial at Beodericsworth, naming neither place.58 Ælfric also states explicitly that Edmund was a virgin, and alludes to ‘many wonders in the popular talk about the holy Edmund’, suggesting he may have been aware of grassroots traditions about the saint not recorded by Abbo.59 Most significantly of all, Ælfric’s Passion explicitly portrays Edmund as an English rather than an East Anglian saint. He omits Abbo’s summary of the history of East Anglia and his geographical description of the region (as well as Abbo’s abusive remarks about the Danes), and ranks Edmund among the great English saints: The English nation is not deprived of the Lord’s saints, since in English land (engla-landa) lie such saints as this holy king, and the blessed Cuthbert, and Saint Æthelthryth in Ely, and also her sister, incorrupt in body, for the confirmation of the faith. There are also many other saints among the English, who work many miracles, as is widely known, to the praise of the Almighty in whom they believed.60

Although Ælfric’s Old English narrative was probably intended, in the first instance, for high-status lay patrons, the fact that it was in the English language meant that it could have been read aloud to the ordinary people, and its short length made it suitable sermon material.61 Ælfric seems to have been more comfortable than Abbo with the idea of Edmund as a universal saint for England (indeed, Ælfric’s use of engla-landa is an early instance of the term). Edmund is identified as king of the East Angles at the beginning of Ælfric’s Passion, but thereafter becomes a more generic representative of resistance to the Vikings.

Protector of England Ælfric was writing his paraphrase of Abbo’s Passion in the 990s, shortly after the Vikings returned to attack Essex and defeated the

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ealdorman Byrhtnoth at Maldon in 991. Viking raids intensified, and in 1002 King Æthelred II (‘Ethelred the Unready’) ordered the St Brice’s Day Massacre, the slaughter of all Danes in the kingdom. The Danish king Swein Forkbeard attacked East Anglia in 1003, perhaps in retaliation. In 1010, when the Danish jarl Thurkill attacked Ipswich, the community at Bury St Edmunds decided that the body of St Edmund was no longer safe in East Anglia and entrusted it to the sacrist Æthelwine (sometimes called Aylwin, Ailwin or Egelwin in later sources), who took the body south to London for safekeeping.62 On the way, Edmund set on fire the house of a priest who refused to host his feretory (the removable part of the shrine containing the saint’s coffin) for the night and the wagon containing the body miraculously traversed a bridge too narrow for its wheels. For three years Edmund’s body lay in the tiny church of St Gregory, in the churchyard of St Paul’s Cathedral. Edmund performed no fewer than 18 miracles for the people of London, and the bishop of London, Ælfhun, was so impressed with Edmund that he attempted to translate the saint’s body to St Paul’s. However, Edmund made his feretory so heavy that it could not be moved. Finally, in 1013 conditions were sufficiently peaceful for Æthelwine to bring the body back to Bury.63 There can be no doubt that Edmund’s peregrination to London, which was then in the process of supplanting Winchester as England’s capital, raised Edmund’s national profile. Londoners continued to feel a special connection with Edmund as late as the fifteenth century, and two London churches were dedicated to the saint in the thirteenth century, St Edmund’s, Lombard Street, and St Sepulchre-withoutNewgate (whose original dedication was later forgotten).64 The saint’s peregrination allowed new legends to be created and offered many churches the opportunity to claim an association with the saint, since Edmund’s body rested overnight in several of them. One of these churches, remarkably, partially survives as it was in 1013. St Andrew’s church at Greensted-juxta-Ongar in Essex, where the bier carrying Edmund’s body is supposed to have rested for one night, is the oldest wooden church in Europe, probably dating from the ninth or tenth century. Only the nave remains from this period, its ancient oak staves

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standing as mute witnesses to the body of the saint. Greensted, as the sole survivor of England’s wooden Anglo-Saxon churches, also offers a hint of what the original wooden church at Beodericsworth may have looked like. Just as Edmund’s body returned home, Swein invaded Lincolnshire and set up camp at Gainsborough. King Æthelred, terrified, fled to Normandy while Swein moved south and carried all before him, compelling the English to recognise him as king. If Herman the archdeacon’s later account of events (written down in around 1095) is to be believed, Edmund’s moment had come. Swein heard that the men of Beodericsworth, on account of the privileges of St Edmund, were exempt from taxation. He swore to impose his taxes on them. The people of East Anglia fled to Edmund’s shrine for protection and implored Edmund to help them. Edmund appeared to Swein in a vision, warning him that if he did not give up his claims over Bury St Edmunds, ‘you shall soon see that you displease God and me on behalf of the people.’ Swein then received a personal visit from the sacrist Æthelwine, who gave him the same warning, but Swein took no notice. Then, on 3 February 1014, when Swein was in bed, Edmund appeared to him in armour, carrying a lance: And calling the king by his own name [Edmund] said, ‘Do you want to have a tribute, O King, from the land of St Edmund? Rise up, behold, take it.’ He who was rising up sat down again in his bed, but soon began to cry out dreadfully when he saw the weapons. As soon as the soldier made the attack, he left him, pierced through with a lance, dying. Stirred up by his shout, we ran to it and found him defiled with his own blood, his soul belched forth.65

Although it is possible that Herman made up the story of Edmund’s killing of Swein in order to enhance the prestige of Bury St Edmunds at the end of the eleventh century,66 it seems unlikely that the miracle that came to define Edmund’s subsequent reputation could have been the fabrication of one author. Herman could hardly have got away with a story that did not correspond in some way to an existing tradition. Indeed, the killing of Swein develops the theme of a vengeful

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saint begun by Abbo of Fleury and probably represented a piece of long-standing folklore. For M. R. James, ‘the story of Sweyn’s death redounded more than anything else to St Edmund’s glory.’67 In later centuries it would be depicted on the shrine of the saint itself as his pre-eminent miracle. In killing Swein, the apparition of Edmund took action where the living king, Æthelred, had failed to do so. Edmund was forced to step in as protector, urged by the prayers of ‘the whole people’ (tota plebs) at his shrine. Although the initial reason for Edmund’s anger was the unjust tax being levied on Bury St Edmunds, Herman makes clear that Edmund’s miraculous action relieves the whole English people. Edmund is simultaneously the defender of his parochial interests and of England as a whole. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that Edmund was already regarded as the patron saint of the English before 1014 – the naming practices of the House of Wessex and their adoption of Edmund’s kingly title, for example – but the death of Swein was Edmund’s ‘coming of age’ as a paramount national saint.68 This new Edmund is a terrifying figure, determined not just to defend the inviolability of his incorrupt body and the church in which it lies but also the integrity of England itself. Never before had any miracle of St Edmund taken place at such a distance from his shrine, and the idea that an apparition of the saint wielding an ethereal lance could cause a real wound added to the sense that Edmund, although technically dead, was very much alive – and spoiling for a fight.

Royal patrons On Swein’s death his son Cnut, known to later history as Canute the Great, succeeded him as king. On 18 October 1016 Cnut was confronted in battle at Assandun (an unidentified site in Essex) by another King Edmund, Æthelred’s son Edmund II ‘Ironside’. Edmund II was defeated, and although Cnut initially agreed to allow Edmund to keep control of Wessex, the English king’s death a few months later led Cnut to claim all of England. Given St Edmund’s association with

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his father’s death as well as his most determined adversary, Cnut might have been expected to ignore (or even suppress) the cult of the East Anglian martyr king. Instead, Cnut was instrumental in founding a great Benedictine monastery at Bury St Edmunds. Cnut’s motives for doing this are unrecorded; it is possible that he was genuinely afraid of Edmund and wanted to avoid his father’s gruesome fate. Alternatively, he may have realised, like the earlier Danish rulers of East Anglia, that devotion to St Edmund was a sure-fire way to get the English on board with his rule. One of the leading Anglo-Saxon magnates killed at Assandun was the abbot of Ramsey, which has led some to theorise that Bury St Edmunds was freed at this time from Ramsey’s influence and able to become an abbey in its own right.69 The earliest evidence for the abbey can be found today in the Vatican Library, where a note next to a liturgical table for the years 1020–4 in the Bury St Edmunds Psalter tells us that ‘Bishop Ælfwine, under Earl Thorkil and at the wish and with the permission of King Cnut established the regular rule in St Edmund’s monastery’.70 A charter of Cnut founding the abbey in 1020 is a forgery, but contains some elements that indicate it may be derived from a real charter.71 Ælfwine was the bishop of Elmham, while Thorkil was probably an ealdorman of East Anglia. The ‘foundation’ of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds was essentially a matter of bringing an existing foundation (which was already of considerable significance) under the discipline of the Benedictine rule. Whether this involved the priest custodians of the body of St Edmund becoming Benedictine monks, or a transplant of Benedictine monks from elsewhere, is unclear. The Benedictine order, as we have seen, had been attempting to appropriate the memory of St Edmund since the 980s. Benedictine monasteries were popular with kings, bishops and other wealthy founders because they were self-contained communities dedicated to prayer, including prayer for the founder’s soul. The high standards of religious life implied by adherence to a rule were attractive to patrons seeking to make an investment that was both financial and spiritual. Ultimately, Bury St Edmunds could only attract the patronage it needed by becoming a Benedictine house. That funding began to

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pour into the new abbey is suggested by the consecration of a new stone basilica on 18 October 1032, the sixteenth anniversary of the Battle of Assandun – a piece of timing that suggests Cnut may have regarded the building of the new church as a thank offering for his victory.72 Two years later Edmund was translated from the old wooden church of St Mary to the new church, although there is no record of his body being inspected on this occasion. The form taken by the new church was politically suggestive. Edmund’s new shrine stood in the centre of a circular martyrium or rotunda, surrounded by an ambulatory. Suffolk has a long tradition of round-towered churches, partly because stone is scarce in the county and a tower without corners precludes the need for dressed stone, but Edmund’s circular shrine church seems to have been designed deliberately to send a message about his saintly and royal status. The most famous round church of all was the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and a church outside Jerusalem containing the supposed tomb of the Virgin Mary also took this form.73 Closer to home, the round mausoleum church of the Emperor Charlemagne at Aachen echoed the shape of the Emperor Constantine’s round church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople.74 Round churches, therefore, were associated with imperial power and romanitas, and surviving small ‘moulded balusters’ from the ambulatory of Edmund’s church were copied from Roman models.75 The symbolism of Edmund’s rotunda was clear: Edmund was staking a claim to nothing less than imperial authority as the Wuffing descendant of ‘Caser’ as well as rex Anglorum. In addition to the rotunda of St Mary and St Edmund, the new abbey accumulated a collection of other churches over the course of the eleventh century. This was unusual, and Bury St Edmunds seems to have been imitating the French abbey of St Denis rather than modelling itself on other English abbeys, which generally consisted of one large church.76 The abbey of St Denis, located north of Paris, had been the mausoleum of many of the kings of France from the very earliest days of the Merovingian dynasty, and St Denis was the patron saint of France. If Bury was making a bid to become the English abbey of St Denis then Edmund, implicitly, was the English St Denis and therefore the patron saint of England and English kings.

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Although St Denis and St Edmund had little in common with one another other than their martyrdom, both saints suffered beheading. Edmund’s patronage of royalty was given a further boost in 1043 or 1044 when the new English king, Æthelred’s son Edward the Confessor, granted the abbey complete control of the western half of Suffolk, which had previously belonged to his mother Emma.77 This grant, along with the right to mint his own coins (also granted by Edward) made the abbot of Bury St Edmunds one of the great magnates of the realm.78 At an unknown date King Edward visited Bury, showing great devotion to St Edmund, whom he described as his ‘kinsman’. When he came in sight of the monastery, Edward dismounted and walked the last mile on foot, a symbolic gesture of humility that recognised Edmund’s royal authority over the immediate environs of the shrine (the banleuca).79 Edmund displayed his power during Edward’s visit when Osgod Clapa, the king’s Danish majo-domo, was sent mad by the saint after entering the church wielding an axe.80 Edward’s belief that Edmund was a ‘kinsman’ was historically incorrect, but may have been encouraged by Abbo’s claim that Edmund had Saxon heritage. It also suggests a deliberate attempt by the House of Wessex to assimilate Edmund into their genealogy, thereby making Edmund an ‘English’ rather than merely an East Anglian saint. King Edward’s visit may have been one stimulus for another inspection of the saint’s incorrupt body, which no one had examined since Bishop Theodred in the tenth century. Edmund appeared in a vision to a dumb woman from Winchester named Ælfgeth, who had come to the shrine seeking healing, in which the saint complained that his tomb was covered in spiders, cobwebs and flies.81 Edmund healed Ælfgeth, allowing her to speak and giving her story credibility, so Abbot Leofstan opened the shrine for cleaning, and a sweet, aromatic smell came out of the tomb. Æthelwine, the sacrist of the original community who had taken the body of St Edmund to London in 1010 and was still alive, recognised a cross around Edmund’s neck and confirmed the authenticity of the saint’s body. Unfortunately for him, Leofstan was not content to stop at verifying the body. Having heard the story of St Edmund’s head

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miraculously uniting with his body when the saint was first translated to Beodericsworth, Leofstan was curious about how firmly the head was attached. Taking hold of the head while another monk, Thurstan, held on to the feet, Leofstan pulled. St Edmund instantly paralysed Leofstan for his impiety, and he was later struck blind and dumb.82 Edmund was temporarily removed from the shrine while it was cleaned, and the saint’s reinstallation was later celebrated on 9 June as the Feast of the Representation of St Edmund.83 The story of Abbot Leofstan sent the same message as other stories about Edmund’s willingness to protect his bodily integrity: no one, not even the abbot, had the right to be curious. Thus the myth of Edmund’s incorruption was perpetuated. If Leofstan’s lack of care and reverence for Edmund’s body is taken at face value, it may suggest that the cult was being kept alive by devout laypeople (Ælfgeth took vows and spent the rest of her life tending the shrine, like Oswen before her). However, it is likely that Herman the archdeacon, who recorded the story, was trying to besmirch the last Anglo-Saxon abbot, Leofstan, in order to enhance the reputation of his own abbot, the French Baldwin.84 Edward the Confessor, the last Anglo-Saxon king, died on 5 January 1066, but before his death, quite unwittingly, he did something which ensured Edmund’s lasting influence as England’s patron saint. On 16 July 1065 Edward chose to appoint his French royal physician, Baldwin, a native of Chartres, as abbot of Bury St Edmunds in succession to Leofstan.85 Baldwin was a monk of St Denis who had run a dependent priory of the great French monastery at Leberau (Lièpvre) in Alsace, and at Edward’s court he managed lands held by St Denis in England.86 Baldwin was the first foreigner ever appointed abbot of an English monastery. As it turned out, however, having a Frenchman in charge put Bury St Edmunds in the best possible situation as the dramatic and epoch-making events of 1066 unfolded.

Chap ter 4

‘Patron of all England’ Edmund in the Medieval World, 1066–1539 In the winter of 1096–7 Lambert, abbot of the French abbey of Angers, set out to visit some properties owned by his abbey in England and collect the crucial revenue. A winter crossing in the eleventh century was always a risky business: foolhardy, some might say. When Lambert reached the port of Barfleur he found that storms were preventing any ship sailing into the English Channel. Lambert was close to despair; but then an aged monk named Natalis advised him to pray to St Edmund, assuring the abbot that Edmund’s patronage of England was so powerful that it extended even to the country’s surrounding waters. Lambert prayed, and his ship made it safely through the storm. As soon as he reached England, Lambert went to give thanks at Edmund’s shrine. There, in the presence of the monks, he declared Edmund to be totius Anglie patronum, ‘patron of all England’ – the first time anyone called Edmund by that title.1 It is important that the first person to call Edmund the patron saint of England was a foreigner. People in different parts of England frequently made impressive claims in favour of their preferred regional saint. East Anglians had no doubt regarded Edmund as the patron saint of England for years, and, as I argued in the preceding chapter, the kings of the House of Wessex may have thought the same. But a saint only truly becomes the patron of a country when acknowledged as such by foreigners. Just as it had been foreigners who first called all the English Angli, and thereby encouraged the English to call themselves by that name, so international recognition of Edmund’s status made it possible for the English to unite around the figure of Edmund as never before. The great shrines of medieval Europe were

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engaged in a perpetual spiritual ‘arms race’, trying to persuade pilgrims to visit and part with their money. Foreign pilgrims sometimes drew lots to decide which English saint to visit – the possibilities included St Cuthbert, St Thomas Becket and St Etheldreda, but St Edmund was always on the list.2 Accounts of miracles wrought at Edmund’s shrine tried to portray Bury St Edmunds as a rival to Rome and even Jerusalem.3 Edmund was fortunate, in comparison with many medieval saints, in having as richly detailed and eloquent a narrative underpinning his cult as Abbo’s Passion. However, Abbo’s account of Edmund’s reign was very sketchy, since he focussed only on the saint’s sufferings and death. In the twelfth century, probably as a response to the demand from pilgrims, monastic writers began to flesh out the details of the saint’s earlier life. The Annals of St Neots offered an account of Edmund’s coronation in 855, while in the 1150s Geoffrey of Wells crafted an elaborate romance based entirely on Abbo’s claim that Edmund was descended from the ‘old Saxons’, Liber de infantia sancti Edmundi (‘The book of the childhood of St Edmund’).4 Over the course of the Middle Ages St Edmund’s legend was retold in more than 30 versions in both prose and poetry across three languages – Latin, Middle English and Anglo-Norman French.5 A huge compilation of hagiographical material, probably made by Prior Henry of Kirkstead in the fourteenth century, became the source for John Lydgate’s Middle English poem The Lives of Saints Edmund and Fremund in the fifteenth century.6 These legends added such characters as Edmund’s parents Alcmund and Siwara, his brother Edwold of Cerne, and his obscure nephews Fremund (venerated at Dunstable) and Ragener (venerated at Northampton).7 Edmund’s rise to international prominence in the Middle Ages was, on one level, bizarre. The patron saint of the English people became a great European saint at a time when the English people were marginalised and oppressed. The defeated English may well have called on Edmund to defend them after the Norman Conquest, but Edmund’s ‘Englishness’ also proved irresistible to the Norman conquerors themselves. Their devotion to Edmund legitimated them as ‘English’ and placated England’s fearsome spiritual defender. For

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almost a century after the Conquest, Edmund occupied his status as England’s patron saint without a rival, even though he was not formally ‘canonised’ until 1122.8 The canonisations of Edward the Confessor and Thomas Becket in 1161 and 1173 gave pilgrims alternatives, but Edmund was very far from being eclipsed by these new English saints. The medieval cult of St Edmund is a vast subject, so this chapter traces the process by which Edmund became consolidated as a patron saint of England, concentrating on his relationship with the English monarchy and his development as a national symbol.

Edmund and the Norman Conquest In almost every respect, the Norman Conquest was a devastating event for the English people. Virtually all land in the kingdom was seized and given to Norman and Breton nobles and knights; English earls, bishops and abbots were replaced by Norman ones; and even the English language was relegated to the status of a despised peasant vernacular. But if the Normans were unafraid of the living English, they were more wary of their saints. Just as the pagan Romans had offered sacrifices to the gods of a foreign country before invading it, so the Normans made an effort to get the English saints on side by flattering them with rebuilt and beautified shrines and churches.9 William the Conqueror was more devoted to Edmund than to any other English saint. On his visit to Bury St Edmunds, William approached St Edmund’s shrine with head bowed, granting two important manors to St Edmund. Many French religious houses gained lands in England as a result of the Conquest, but Bury St Edmunds was the only religious house to acquire property in Normandy.10 Furthermore, Bury was the sole Anglo-Saxon abbey in which a senior member of the Norman elite – Alan Rufus (c.1040–93) – was buried.11 William’s reasons for honouring Edmund were both political and personal. On a political level, the Conqueror must have realised that conspicuous devotion for St Edmund had the potential to win round the English people; it also strengthened his claim to be the legitimate successor of Edward the Confessor, who described Edmund as a

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‘kinsman’. It is also possible that Edmund’s reputation as a ‘warrior saint’ made him intrinsically attractive to the Normans.12 However, Abbot Baldwin of Bury St Edmunds was also William’s personal physician. Baldwin had been present at Edward’s deathbed and therefore knew the truth about William’s claim that Edward had named William as his successor. It is conceivable that Baldwin exerted an influence on William because he was privy to this knowledge, and therefore received as much favour for himself and his monastery as he wanted.13 So devoted was William to St Edmund that he tried to forge a link between the patron saint of France, St Denis, and St Edmund the patron saint of England. William paid for a tower at St Denis (which eventually collapsed) containing an altar dedicated to St Edmund, and a cycle of carved capitals depicting the life of St Edmund was installed in the crypt at St Denis.14 Baldwin, who was a monk of St Denis, seems to have seen Bury St Edmunds as an English version of the great French monastery. Bishop Walkelin of Winchester granted indulgences to anyone who visited Edmund’s shrine – the first time this had ever occurred in England.15 An indulgence was a remission of the penance someone owed for their sins, granted from a ‘treasury of merit’ that the church claimed to have inherited from Christ. In around 1081 Baldwin began work on a vast Romanesque church that was not only the largest in England but also the largest in Western Christendom. With a floor area of around 13,648 square metres, the abbey church of St Edmund was overtaken only at the very end of the Middle Ages by the new St Peter’s Basilica in Rome (15,160 square metres), which is still the world’s largest church today.16 The church was the earliest in England to have an ambulatory around the apse (a free walkway all the way around the edge of the interior), a design feature developed in France to facilitate the flow of pilgrims around a shrine. The east end of the abbey church was the most elaborate ever built, with no fewer than seven chapels attached to it.17 St Edmund’s shrine church was purpose-built to handle colossal numbers of pilgrims surging into the building at major festivals, with the ambulatory acting as a crowd-circulation system. On 29 April 1095 the east end of the church was sufficiently complete for the solemn translation of

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Edmund’s body to take place, from the old rotunda of St Mary and St Edmund to a new shrine in the presbytery of the Norman basilica.18 Edmund’s migration from the tiny round Anglo-Saxon church to a new building in the height of French style was symbolic of his changing role as the figure who held together Anglo-Saxon and Norman in a new ‘English’ identity. Baldwin was interested in promoting popular devotion as well as royal and elite patronage, however, and he pioneered an innovative ‘multimedia’ approach to Edmund’s cult that included sermons, displays of relics and a painted board depicting Edmund’s story (probably based on Abbo’s Passion) for the benefit of illiterate visitors.19 Not everyone, however, was as deferential to Edmund as King William. Norman magnates resented the exemption from confiscation of the patrimony of St Edmund (the half of Suffolk given to the abbey by Edward the Confessor) secured by Baldwin. Some, supported by the bishop of Norwich, began to claim that Edmund’s body was not really in Bury St Edmunds but at Hoxne.20 St Edmund, the killer of King Swein, did not take kindly to such contemptuous behaviour. According to Herman the archdeacon, a marauding Norman nobleman, intent on transgressing against the privileges of Bury St Edmunds, received a threatening vision of St Edmund and was so repentant he joined the monastery. Another nobleman who invaded a manor was afflicted with headaches and a lump on one eye, and when he sent a candle to the abbey it broke into nine pieces – an indication that Edmund refused to accept his gift. Robert de Curzun ignored a thunderstorm sent by the saint to prevent an incursion into the abbey’s territory at Southwold, and was afflicted with ‘mental dullness’, while his steward went insane.21 The cult of St Edmund may have been patronised by the Norman elite, but it also had the potential to chasten them. Edmund may have become a symbol of English resistance to the Normans as well. In 1070 the foremost leader of the English resistance, Hereward ‘the Wake’, sacked Peterborough Abbey in alliance with the king of Denmark, Swein Estrithson. Hereward received a vision of an angry St Peter who told him to stop the looting, so he left with his men but got lost in the dark Bruneswold, the forest that then covered parts of Northamptonshire, Huntingdonshire and Bedfordshire. A

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huge white wolf appeared and led the English warriors to safety in Stamford, where the wolf vanished again at the edge of the town.22 The appearance of the wolf in a wood, which lays aside its savage nature to help human beings, has an obvious parallel with Edmund’s story.23 The story offers a tantalising hint that popular anti-Norman folk traditions about Edmund may have existed alongside the official version presided over by Abbot Baldwin.

Going global Abbot Baldwin successfully managed a determined propaganda campaign to project the greatness of St Edmund as a saint who would steadfastly protect his rights. However, Baldwin also managed something even more spectacular: he inaugurated an international cult of the saint.24 By a strange irony it turned out that Abbot Leofstan, portrayed by Herman the archdeacon as neglectful of St Edmund and his shrine, provided the means by which Edmund’s cult became a European phenomenon. When he opened Edmund’s shrine, Leofstan reclothed the saint’s body and removed the old bloodstained garments (supposedly those in which Edmund was originally buried – already over 150 years old by Leofstan’s time), which were placed in a chest. The incorruptibility of St Edmund was an impressive asset from the point of view of attracting pilgrims, but it was also a problem: the cult of a saint was usually spread by handing out parts of the saint’s body. If a saint was famous for having an intact, incorrupt body, then actual relics of the saint were unavailable by definition. However, Baldwin realised that he was in possession of the next best thing: the chest of old bloodstained clothes. Items like this, which had come into contact with a saint’s body, were known as ‘contact relics’.25 Baldwin was a brilliant ‘spiritual entrepreneur’. Before him, no abbot of an English monastery or bishop of an English see had ever come up with the idea of spreading a saint’s cult beyond England by means of contact relics. In 1070–1, when Baldwin went to Rome in order to obtain a bull of exemption from episcopal control for Bury St Edmunds, he took contact relics of St Edmund on tour with him.26

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Baldwin turned up at St Martin’s Cathedral in the Italian city of Lucca on 6 October 1070 with a relic; it was probably no accident that the reigning Pope Alexander II had been bishop of Lucca before his papal election. An altar was dedicated to St Edmund in the portico and, before long, miracles were being reported and the feast of St Edmund was added to the city’s calendar.27 By 1239, when an inventory of the sacristy at Lucca was drawn up, the Luccans had both forgotten Edmund’s name and were exaggerating the nature of their relic – they claimed to possess a silver reliquary containing capud sancti Almondi (‘the head of St Almondus’).28 Contact relics also made their way to the great French abbey of Rebais after a monk from the abbey named Garnier (or Warner) visited Baldwin at Bury, and it is likely that there was also a contact relic in the altar consecrated to St Edmund at Saint-Denis.29 Where other abbots feared the dilution or attenuation of the cult of their titular saint by the distribution of relics, Baldwin was ahead of his time in seeing relics as an opportunity rather than a threat. He was equally enterprising at home, and Bury St Edmunds was the first shrine in England to allow pilgrims to touch relics in public ceremonies: on great festivals the bloodstained garments were held out to the hands of the faithful.30 Baldwin even encouraged the idea that oil was miraculously appearing from the marble slab supporting the shrine.31 Most crucially of all, however, Baldwin recruited the learned Herman the archdeacon to write an account of Edmund’s miracles, coinciding with the translation of 1095, which portrayed Edmund as a specifically English saint.32 Herman did this by drawing particular attention to Edmund’s defence of the whole English people by killing Swein and the miracles performed by Edmund in London in 1010–13.33 In the fourteenth century a hostel dedicated to St Edmund was founded for English pilgrims in Rome, on the Via Genovese in Trastevere.34 The tiny hostel remained open even after the Reformation, when the flow of English pilgrims to Rome dried up. By 1615 the pilgrims were exclusively Italian, although priests from the English College (the old hostel of St Thomas of Canterbury) were responsible for saying mass in the chapel. The hostel of St Edmund was finally dissolved and amalgamated with the English

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College in 1664, but a fresco of St Edmund and the saint’s emblem of the three crowns was still visible on the outside of the building as late as 1817.35 Altars dedicated to St Edmund could also be found in the Augustinian priory of St John the Evangelist at Bard-le-Régulier near Dijon, France, as well as in St John’s church in Dijon itself.36 The feast of St Edmund on 20 November was observed throughout the diocese of Toulouse as well as by the Benedictine monks of Fécamp and Saint-Maur in Normandy.37 Although there does not seem to be any historical record of contact relics reaching Bard-le-Régulier, Dijon, Fécamp or Saint-Maur, they may have acquired such relics second-hand, as this seems the only plausible way to explain why Edmund was venerated in these places. The most curious of all Continental Edmund cults, however, was at the basilica of Saint-Sernin in Toulouse, where to this day there is a chapel dedicated to St Edmund in the church’s Carolingian crypt. The basilica prided itself on its enormous collection of relics, and in 1443 an inventory recorded for the first time that the church possessed the body of ‘Aymond confessor of the King of England’, which seems to have been a garbling of St Edmund, since the feast of this mysterious saint was celebrated on 20 November.38 However, the Tolosans seem to have forgotten even that Edmund was a martyr, and it is likely that their claim to possess the saint’s body was an inflated belief derived, by a process of Chinese whispers, from an original contact relic. However, as we shall see in Chapter 5, the cult of St Edmund flourished in Toulouse in the seventeenth century, complete with a fabricated story about how Edmund’s body had arrived in the French city in the thirteenth century.

Edmund the warrior By the late Middle Ages Edmund was recognised throughout Europe as a warrior saint who specifically protected English people and English interests, whether against the infidel, the Flemings, the Irish, the Welsh or the Scots. The largest religious house in medieval Ireland, founded by the Anglo-Norman adventurer William de

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Burgh in 1192, was the Augustinian Priory of St Edmund at Athassel, County Tipperary (often called an abbey because of its huge size).39 Athassel’s dedication probably commemorated de Burgh’s defeat of the local Irish kings, as well as asserting his family’s Englishness and English dominion over Ireland. Indeed, so closely was Edmund associated with the English conquerors of Ireland that his arms (three gold crowns on a blue shield) were adopted as those of the English king as Lord of Ireland, perhaps because in 1385 Richard II allowed Robert de Vere, marquess of Dublin, to bear the arms of St Edmund (differentiated with a white border) as duke of Ireland.40 Henry VIII discontinued the use of these arms when he declared himself king of Ireland in 1542, adopting the harp, but the three crowns survived as the arms of Munster, perhaps because the province’s coastal towns were dominated by Anglo-Irish people who continued to consider themselves English. During the Fourth Crusade in 1211, after the Egyptian city of Damietta fell to the crusaders, an English knight named Richard de Argentyne, who was a kinsman of the then prior (later abbot) of Bury St Edmunds, Richard of the Isle, founded a church dedicated to St Edmund in a former mosque, endowing it with ‘three chaplains and attendant clerks for the service of our Lord Jesus Christ and of St Edmund’. Edmund, it seemed, was even able to work miracles in Egypt. In a letter to Prior Richard in 1220, Argentyne recounted how a Fleming had entered the church in Damietta, seen a painting of St Edmund recently commissioned by Argentyne, and started cursing the saint because he blamed Edmund for the defeat of Flemish mercenaries at the Battle of Fornham in 1173. On the way out of the church a beam above the doorway fell on the Fleming’s head.41 The idea that Edmund defended the English against foreigners was not an entirely new one, of course (his killing of the Danish Swein was his defining miracle). However, the defeat of Flemish mercenaries in the service of Robert de Beaumont, earl of Leicester (who rebelled against Henry II) at Fornham St Genevieve, in sight of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds, reinforced this aspect of the saint’s personality. According to the chronicler Jordan of Fantosme, the Flemish mercenaries were weavers uninterested in war but keen to plunder Bury St

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Edmunds and its abbey, ‘because there is no better victualler than St Edmund in the world’.42 The Flemings were defeated by Roger Bigod, later created earl of Norfolk, who rode out from Bury at the head of the Knights of St Edmund (the abbot’s personal army), carrying the banners of the abbot and St Edmund, and the victory was won ‘with the help of God and His most glorious martyr Edmund’.43 This victory gained Edmund and his banner a reputation that would last for centuries. Medieval English kings did not give their patronage to Edmund just because they liked the idea of a royal martyr; rather, they expected Edmund’s military support in return for their devotion. Richard I was convinced that Edmund would give him victory over his enemies, and (with the exception of the unwarlike Henry VI) he was the most devoted of all English kings to the saint, staying at Bury St Edmunds on virtually all of his brief visits to England. In 1190 he dedicated his crusading fleet to the saint, and the following year he sent the banner ‘all woven in gold’ of Isaac Comnenus, a pretender to the Byzantine Empire who ruled Cyprus, to be displayed at Edmund’s shrine.44 Richard defeated Isaac in retribution for his capture of Richard’s queen Berengaria of Navarre and his sister Joan. At a time when the old distinctions between Normans and English were starting to fade, over a century after the Conquest, Richard’s devotion to Edmund enabled him and his noble followers to legitimate themselves as ‘English’. However, Richard also saw Edmund as a warrior against the infidel just like himself.45 In 1157, while campaigning for Henry II against the Welsh, the king’s standard-bearer, Henry of Essex, was accused by another knight, Robert de Montfort, of having thrown down the royal standard. Henry of Essex was already involved in a legal dispute with the abbey of Bury St Edmunds: he had tried to appropriate a rent of five shillings and refused point-blank to make any offering to Edmund’s shrine. In 1163 Robert de Montfort challenged Henry to a trial by combat on an island in the River Thames near Reading. Henry was winning the duel when he saw an apparition of St Edmund: Henry looked round and was astonished to see, at the water’s edge, the figure of the glorious king and martyr, Edmund, dressed

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in armour and apparently floating in mid-air. He was looking at Henry sternly, shaking his head repeatedly, and gesturing angrily and indignantly in a threatening fashion.

Edmund was accompanied by the ghost of a man whom Henry had put in chains and tortured to death, Gilbert de Ceriville. Henry was so thrown by the apparitions that he was almost killed by Robert, and after he had recovered under the care of the monks of Reading Abbey he took the tonsure and became a monk.46 What is unclear from Jocelin’s account of this incident is whether Edmund was taking revenge on Henry for his contempt for Bury St Edmunds, or whether he was also punishing the standard-bearer for failing in his duty to uphold the royal standard in battle. Another great warrior king, Edward I, was also convinced that Edmund was on his side and that of his English soldiers. Edward visited Bury six times between 1296 and 1300.47 On St Edmund’s Day 1296, during a parliament at Bury St Edmunds, Edward received the submission of the Welsh prince Rhys ap Rhys, marking the end of his long campaign to subdue Wales. The symbolism spoke for itself: Edmund, the protector of the English, was the true vanquisher of the Welsh, and the monks lost no time in attributing Edward’s victories to Edmund’s intercession.48 The future Richard II may have been invested as Prince of Wales on St Edmund’s Day 1376 in order to reinforce England’s subjugation of the Welsh, and Henry VI may also have been attempting to retrieve this symbolism when he received the submission of the defeated Welsh rebel Gruffydd ap Nicholas at Bury St Edmunds in February 1449.49 Edward frequently stayed in the abbey at Bury on the way to campaign in Scotland. In 1300 he sent his personal standard to be touched by Edmund’s relics and instructed that none of the liberties and privileges of Bury St Edmunds be infringed, declaring: ‘I have no doubt that [St Edmund] will be in Scotland to protect me and mine, and to conquer the enemy; he will come brandishing his weapons, ready for battle.’50 Edward I invariably displayed his banner alongside the banners of St Edmund and St Edward.51 By 1300 a banner of St Edmund was displayed in Westminster Abbey alongside banners of St George

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and St Edward and a special standard bearing a golden dragon commissioned by Henry III.52 Even Henry V, famous today for the invocation of St George at the Battle of Agincourt put into his mouth by William Shakespeare, regarded Edmund as the patron of his wars against France. On the occasion of Henry’s triumphal return to London after Agincourt in 1415, the arms of St Edmund were displayed alongside those of St Edward, St George and England on the tower of the conduit on Cornhill.53 The royal arms were understood in the Middle Ages as the personal arms of the king rather than a symbol of the nation as a whole, and thus the coats of arms of St Edward and St Edmund were important as ‘national-royal’ symbols that transcended even the Plantagenet dynasty.54 Richard’s Edmund was an emblem of ‘English regal nationalism’,55 but Edmund never embodied an isolationist strain of nationalism; if anything, he represented expansionist nationalism.

The power of Edmund During the course of the Middle Ages 67 English churches and one hospital (in Gateshead) were dedicated to St Edmund (not including the abbey church of Christ, the Virgin Mary and St Edmund in Bury St Edmunds).56 Of these 67 churches, 22 were located in East Anglia (five in Suffolk and 17 in Norfolk). At least 90 medieval images of Edmund survive in the churches of Suffolk and Norfolk – and these, of course, are only the rare survivors of the iconoclasm of the Reformation.57 Eamon Duffy has shown that Edmund was, in fact, the most frequently represented native saint in English churches.58 After Norfolk, the county with the highest number of church dedications to St Edmund (seven) was Yorkshire. One village, Edmundbyers in County Durham, even took its name from the dedication of the church to St Edmund, and a church dedicated to St Edmund can even be found in Wales, at Crickhowell.59 Nor were pilgrimages in honour of St Edmund confined to Suffolk: the Benedictine abbey at Abingdon, then in Berkshire, claimed to be in possession of Edmund’s bloodstained camisia (shirt).60

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It is clear, therefore, that Edmund was much more than just an East Anglian saint. Dedications of chapels to St Edmund, either free-standing or inside larger churches, were common. The chapel of St Edmund in Westminster Abbey was located next to the chapel of St Edward the Confessor, containing Edward’s shrine, and so close was the association between the two royal saints that an altar in Gloucester Abbey was dedicated to them both.61 The highest concentrations of medieval pilgrim badges depicting Edmund have been found not in East Anglia but in London and Southampton, then the gateway to England for Continental travellers.62 Figurative depictions of St Edmund were not the only allusion to the saint found in medieval art. Just as a coat of arms was retrospectively created for Edward the Confessor, so a coat of arms for St Edmund appeared in the thirteenth century (three gold crowns on a blue shield). The same arms were attributed to King Arthur, however, and it is unclear which king bore the imaginary arms first. One legend associated the three crowns with St Helena of Colchester, and the device appears in the arms of several towns that received royal privileges from Edward I. The arms were also associated with the Norroy King of Arms (a royal heraldic official) as early as 1276.63 It is difficult to establish whether, at this early stage, the so-called ‘arms of St Edmund’ were a fairly generic symbol of royalty that happened to be used for St Edmund and other royal figures lacking arms, or whether they were specifically associated with St Edmund. The earliest instance of the arms being associated explicitly with St Edmund may be a manuscript depicting coats of arms known as the Segar’s Roll (c.1282), where the arms of Sey[n]t edmun le rey appear alongside the arms of England and the arms of St Edward the Confessor as emblems of England.64 In 1275 identical arms were adopted by King Magnus Ladulås of Sweden, and the three crowns remain the emblem of Sweden to this day.65 It is conceivable that Magnus was deliberately referencing St Edmund – given the involvement of English missionaries in the conversion of Scandinavia, Norse devotion to St Edmund, and the fact that both Edmund and St Erik (the patron saint of Sweden) were killed by Danes.66 But it is also perfectly possible that Magnus

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came up with a fairly generic emblem of royalty quite independently of any reference to the English saint. The three crowns that appear on the blue shield of the University of Oxford, on the other hand, may have been an attempt to lay claim to fictitious Anglo-Saxon origins by association with a famous Anglo-Saxon king.67 When the crowns in the arms are augmented by the addition of arrows, as in the arms of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds, they refer unambiguously to St Edmund. Similarly, when the three crowns motif occurs in an English royal context, especially alongside the coats of arms of Edward the Confessor and St George, it is obviously a reference to Edmund. Edmund, along with Edward the Confessor, was one of the two royal patrons of the Plantagenet dynasty, and this was reflected in naming practices within the royal family. As we have seen, Edmund was the name of two Anglo-Saxon kings of the House of Wessex, Edmund I and Edmund II ‘Ironside’. The last Edmund of the House of Wessex was the second son of Malcolm III of Scotland and Margaret of Wessex, who ended his life as a monk of Montacute Priory after an unsuccessful rebellion against the Normans. The Plantagenets did not adopt the name until the thirteenth century, beginning with Edmund Crouchback, 1st earl of Lancaster (1245–96), the second surviving son of Henry III. Other royal Edmunds included Edmund, 2nd earl of Cornwall (1249–1300), a grandson of King John; Edmund of Woodstock, 1st earl of Kent (1301–30), the sixth son of Edward I; Edmund of Langley, 1st duke of York (1341–1402), the fifth son of Edward III; Edmund Mortimer, 3rd earl of March (1352–81); Edmund Beaufort, 2nd duke of Somerset (1406–55), a grandson of John of Gaunt; and Edmund Tudor, 1st earl of Richmond (1430–56), the son of Catherine of Valois (widow of Henry V) and the father of Henry VII. People of non-royal status naturally followed the royal example, and Edmund was a common name in medieval England. However, Edward became an increasingly popular royal name after 1350, with Henry, Edward and Richard largely displacing other royal names by the fifteenth century. Following the French fashion, the later Plantagenets came to settle on a small number of dynastic forenames, and Edmund was not one of them.68 However, the European reach

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of Edmund’s cult can be perceived in the existence of variants of the name in several languages: French Edmond and Edmé, Italian Edmondo or Edmundo, Irish Éamon, Gaelic Etmond, Icelandic Jàtmundr, Norwegian Jetmund, and even Hungarian Ödön. Edmund was strongly associated with English royalty, perhaps more so than any other saint apart from Edward the Confessor. A visit to the shrine of St Edmund to give thanks for his preservation at sea was the only pilgrimage Henry I ever made.69 Henry II visited in 1177 and 1188, Richard I in 1189 and 1194, and King John in 1199, 1201, 1203 and 1214.70 However, Edmund’s reputation as a warrior, avenger and protector also made him a focus of opposition to monarchs. John of Salisbury ascribed the death of Prince Eustace, the son of King Stephen, to the revenge of St Edmund after Eustace attempted to infringe the liberties of St Edmund’s abbey.71 In 1192–4 Abbot Samson of Bury St Edmunds told the Barons of the Exchequer, who wanted the gold and gems stripped from Edmund’s shrine to pay Richard I’s ransom: Take it for a certainty, that this shall never be authorized by me, nor is there any man who would get me to agree to it. But I will open the doors of the church – let anyone enter who will, let anyone come near who dare.

One of the barons replied, ‘St Edmund vents his rage on the distant and the absent: much greater will his fury be on those close at hand who seek to rob him of his clothing.’72 The presence of St Edmund’s incorrupt body in his shrine at Bury was the foundation of the quasi-royal sovereignty exercised by the abbots over the immediate surroundings of the town and, to a lesser extent, the whole of west Suffolk (where the abbot had the powers of a sheriff ). In Domesday Book, the lands of the abbey were indicated by the words habet sanctus (‘the saint has […]’); the abbey’s possessions were held not in its own name but in that of St Edmund himself.73 The monks described themselves as Edmund’s ‘sons and executors’.74 Furthermore, the abbey’s feudal subjects were the ‘men of St Edmund’, a fact that was used by Abbot Samson in 1190 as an excuse to eject Bury’s Jewish community,

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who could never be Edmund’s men. As early as the tenth century, Ælfric had disparaged the Jews in his version of Abbo’s Passion, and in 1181 the Jews were blamed for the murder of a young boy named Robert who was enshrined as a martyr in the abbey church at Bury, perhaps in the hope of attracting pilgrims to venerate a latter-day victim of ‘infidels’.75 Paradoxically, Edmund’s royal status meant that kings who honoured the abbey’s freedom from royal authority were actually reinforcing their own royal authority and legitimacy, because they were associating themselves with an illustrious predecessor by their conspicuous piety. Kings simply could not afford to ‘cancel their subscription’ to St Edmund’s cult, even if it required them to hand over some power to the abbots of Bury St Edmunds.76 In 1290 Edward I woke up in terror after receiving a dream vision of St Edmund, who threatened to treat him as a second Swein if he refused to restore a privilege he had taken from the abbey.77 The abbots of Bury St Edmunds never showed any reluctance to use Edmund’s reputation to get their way with successive monarchs, but Edmund could also be used against the abbot by his own monks. In 1198, after a man received a vision of St Edmund lying outside his shrine and complaining his clothes had been stolen from him, Abbot Samson accused the monks of not being sufficiently charitable to the poor, but the monks came up with an alternative explanation: We […] are the naked limbs of St Edmund, and the convent is his naked body, because we have been robbed of our ancient customs and liberties. The abbot has everything – chamber, sacristy, cellary – and we are dying of hunger and thirst.78

The most historically important instance of Edmund being used against a monarch, albeit implicitly, was when Abbot Hugh of Northwold played a decisive role in securing King John’s agreement to Magna Carta. In contrast to his brother Richard, John had an awkward relationship with St Edmund. On his first visit to the shrine he caused anger when the only gift he offered was a silk cloth he had just borrowed from the abbey’s sacrist. On another visit John gave

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only 13 shillings as an offering at mass – a rather small sum for a king. However, John’s relations with the abbey deteriorated still further in August 1213 when the monks elected their new abbot at Bury rather than in the king’s chapel at Westminster, which offended the king.79 John’s abuses of royal authority were becoming unbearable, and at some point in the last week of October 1214 a group of disgruntled barons gathered at Bury under the cover of pilgrimage and swore an oath on the high altar that they would compel John to agree to their terms curbing royal power – terms that would become known as Magna Carta.80 On 4 November 1214, probably after he heard about the barons’ meeting, John arrived suddenly in Bury, entering the abbey’s Chapter House with a drawn sword carried in front of him by the sheriff of Northumberland, and followed by the earls of Winchester and Norfolk, Robert Fitzwalter and Geoffrey de Mandeville. John took his seat and began to speak: Although I have not formed the habit of visiting the chapter-houses of monks […] I have made my pilgrimage here to St Edmund […] and I felt I should visit you in your chapter-house. In the matter of your election, which was not managed tactfully, I must ask you to proceed in accordance with my customary rights. If you do this, and abide by my advice, then – without dangerous delay – I will receive, as your pastor, whoever you choose, and admit him to my favour.

Hugh replied, firmly yet tactfully, ‘I will cheerfully obey the Lord King’s will in all things – saving the law of the Church.’81 In January 1215 the pope ordered John to accept Hugh’s election, and as a final humiliation, Hugh cornered John in the meadow at Runnymede where he was about to set his seal on Magna Carta, and forced him to formally confirm Hugh’s appointment as abbot.82 Although St Edmund is not mentioned directly by any of the chroniclers who describe the events leading up to Magna Carta, there can be no doubt that Hugh of Northwold would have seen John’s disrespect for the abbey as an affront to the saint. So devoted was Hugh to St Edmund that, even though he later became bishop of Ely and was

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buried in the cathedral there, a Purbeck marble relief on his tomb depicts Edmund’s martyrdom.83 As Hugh’s predecessor Abbot Samson had made clear, the interests of the abbey and of St Edmund himself were one and the same. When the bishop of Ely tried to limit the number of horses abbots could own at an ecclesiastical council in 1190, Samson declared, ‘My task is to protect the Barony of St Edmund and his rights’ (my italics).84 Abbot Hugh’s task was the same. What is less clear, however, is why the barons (whom we cannot identify as individuals) came to Bury St Edmunds to swear their oath. It may simply have been because they knew they could rely on the support and protection of Abbot Hugh, a man engaged in his own long-running dispute with King John. On the other hand, the barons may have deliberately sought out the defender of the rights of the English people, St Edmund, as the patron of their attempt to curb royal power – and if they did so, their pilgrimage was real rather than pretended. St Edmund had an established record of humbling and resisting kings; after all, Samson had refused to strip the saint’s shrine even for his devout client Richard I, and when Abbot Hugh defied King John in his Chapter House he did so in full knowledge that Edmund’s punishment of King Swein was his best-known miracle. Against the power of St Edmund, King John did not stand a chance.

Patron of England Few countries in the Middle Ages had a single recognised patron saint. Rather, countries gradually came to accumulate a number of accepted patrons who were popular with particular rulers and whose cult also found favour with the people at large. Thus France had a number of patrons, including St Denis, St Louis and (much later) Joan of Arc. The patron saints of England likewise began as saints favoured by royalty, of whom Edmund was the first. However, the adoption of other royal patrons, such as St Edward the Confessor and St George, did not diminish Edmund’s significance. Indeed, with the passage of ages Edmund became a shorthand with which kings could summon

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up, in one image, an idea of old-fashioned English monarchy. With every royal reuse of his image Edmund became a more potent figure, until he even came to feature on the crown of England itself. The earliest explicit reference to Edmund as patron saint of England, as we have seen, was by a French abbot in the eleventh century. Another eleventh-century French monk also made a crucial contribution to reinforcing Edmund’s national role. Garnier of Rebais, the monk from Normandy who visited Abbot Baldwin and took back a contact relic of the saint to his own monastery, was also responsible for composing the earliest surviving liturgy for the feast of St Edmund. A strident and beautiful Latin plainchant antiphon opened the service: Ave rex gentis Anglorum, miles regis angelorum. O Ædmunde flos martyrum, velut rosa vel lilium, Funde preces ad Dominum, pro salute fidelium. Hail, king of the English, soldier of the king of angels! O Edmund, flower of martyrs, like a rose or lily, Pour out prayers to the Lord, for the salvation of the faithful.85

The words Garnier chose ensured that there was no doubt about Edmund’s Englishness: by the eleventh century, it is highly unlikely that anyone would have understood rex Anglorum as ‘king of the Angles’. Garnier was deliberately playing on Gregory the Great’s famous pun, non Angli sed angeli (‘Not Angles, but angels’), with the difference that Angli now referred unambiguously to the whole English people. In spite of its French authorship the antiphon was adopted at Bury and everywhere else Edmund’s feast was celebrated, and served to link Edmund explicitly to the English monarchy. The feast of St Edmund was adopted as a holy day of obligation (meaning that attendance at mass was compulsory) throughout the kingdom at the Synod of Oxford in 1222.86 In January 1245, while Queen Eleanor was giving birth to Henry III’s fourth son, Edmund Crouchback, the king’s clerks sang the antiphon to ensure a safe delivery. Henry later wrote to the abbot of Bury St Edmunds, informing him that the boy

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was to be called Edmund. Later, in the fifteenth century, although it was not the feast of St Edmund the monks sang the antiphon as a processional hymn as Henry VI arrived at the abbey, implying a symbolic spiritual equivalence between Edmund and the living king.87 The liturgical sequences for St Edmund’s Day – essentially a segmented and abbreviated retelling of Abbo’s Passion sung in plainchant – contained one of the few examples of English in the pre-­Reformation Latin liturgy: Rex her dicens in deserto (‘the king saying “Here!” in the wilderness’). This further reinforced Edmund’s Englishness.88 Foreigners celebrating the feast of St Edmund assumed, quite naturally, that Edmund had been king of England, and he was soon known as such at Lucca and Toulouse. Even people in England may have made this assumption: few in the Middle Ages would have had even a basic knowledge of Anglo-Saxon history. In both music and art, Edmund’s story began to be portrayed as a national rather than a local one.89 Even Reginald of Durham (d.1190), the most vigorous promoter of the cult of St Cuthbert, always listed Edmund as the second greatest English saint.90 One medieval Latin poet, writing at the Cistercian Rufford Abbey in Nottinghamshire, compared Edmund with other national patrons: As Denis, by his blood, adorns France, And Demetrius the Greeks, each one the glory of each; So for us Edmund, second in virtue to none, Shows forth the light, and is the great glory of his fatherland. The sceptre adorns his hand, the crown his head, the purple his body, But so much more do bonds, sword and blood adorn him.91

Although many kings before him had been devout clients of St Edmund and regular pilgrims to his abbey, Richard II (reigned 1377–99) was the first to make overt use of the image of St Edmund in royal propaganda. The Anglo-Saxon saints, and Edmund in particular, were the beneficiaries of a ‘revival in national self-consciousness’ at this time.92 Perhaps the most famous depiction of St Edmund in art is his appearance in the Wilton Diptych, the exquisite double-panelled altarpiece that portrays Richard kneeling in adoration of the Virgin

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Mary holding the Christ Child and surrounded by 11 angels. Behind Richard stand St John the Baptist, St Edward the Confessor and, on the extreme left of the painting, St Edmund. St George is also referenced in the painting, since one of the angels holds his banner. It has been suggested that Edmund is a portrait of Richard’s father, the Black Prince, while St Edward has the features of Richard’s grandfather, Edward III.93 Another interpretation of the painting sees Edmund, Edward and Richard as the Three Kings of Matthew’s Gospel (Richard was born on 6 January).94 As a childless king later credited with virginity, Edmund (along with Edward the Confessor) was an appropriate patron who deflected attention from Richard’s failure to produce an heir.95 Edmund is the most richly dressed of the two royal saints, wearing a green velvet cloak lined with ermine over a blue robe embroidered in gold with what appear to be stylised peacocks in pairs, their heads ringed by a crown. The gold crowns on the blue robe may allude to Edmund’s traditional coat of arms, while one historian sees the peacocks as ‘symbols of alchemical transmutation and resurrection’.96 Edmund wears fashionable red shoes, a gold brooch studded with pearls and a jewelled crown surmounted by both crosses and fleurs-de-lys. In his left hand he holds his instrument of martyrdom, an arrow, while his right hand gestures towards the kneeling figure of Richard. Both Edmund and Edward were saints who embodied and represented Englishness,97 and by including Edmund in the painting Richard was promoting the cult of his own Plantagenet lineage.98 At his coronation in 1377 Richard even wore a pair of embroidered slippers, part of the relic collection of Westminster Abbey, which had allegedly been Edmund’s – although one fell off after the ceremony and Richard donated a replacement pair blessed by Pope Urban VI in 1390.99 A chronicler hostile to Richard, Adam Usk, interpreted the loss of St Edmund’s slipper as ‘the rise of the common people’ (a prophecy of the Peasants’ Revolt), perhaps because Edmund was the patron of the English people.100 The fact that items supposedly belonging to St Edmund became part of the coronation regalia meant that medieval kings were in some sense assuming Edmund’s identity in the coronation ceremony. Edmund may also have been one of the

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‘three great kings’ who was represented with a massive sculpture on the towers of Westminster Hall, along with Edward the Confessor and Richard II himself.101 The extent of Richard’s devotion to St Edmund may be indicated by the fear he showed when rumours circulated that the head of Richard FitzAlan, earl of Arundel (whom Richard had executed in 1397), miraculously rejoined with his body after death. Richard was so worried that he ordered the earl’s body to be exhumed and inspected ten days after burial.102 The miracle of a severed head rejoining the body was specifically associated with the cult of St Edmund. Richard II planted Edmund firmly at the centre of Plantagenet royal iconography as the ultimate embodiment of legitimate English kingship. It was to be expected, therefore, that Richard’s successor Henry IV, whose claim to the throne was tenuous at best, would do his best to associate himself with Edmund. Edmund appears alongside other English royal saints on Henry IV’s second seal (c.1408–13), apparently as part of a particular effort by Henry to emphasise his descent from Henry III, a king renowned for his devotion to Edmund.103 The most devoted of all English kings to St Edmund, however, was Henry VI. The 12-year-old king’s stay at the abbey of Bury St Edmunds, between 24 December 1433 and 23 April 1434 (from Christmas Eve to St George’s Day) was the longest of any English monarch. This can be explained partly by the fact that Henry was not governing personally at the time: the country was being ruled by a regency led by his uncle the duke of Bedford, leaving Henry at leisure. Nevertheless, the movements of the young king were immensely important to the image of the monarchy that was projected to the nation at large, and Henry was accompanied by a large court just like a ruling monarch. Henry’s first act on arriving at the abbey was to visit the shrine of St Edmund.104 Before he left, the king, together with his uncle the duke of Gloucester and other nobles of the court, was enrolled in the confraternity of St Edmund, ‘on account of the singular and special devotion they had towards the king and martyr St Edmund’. This meant that Henry became a symbolic member of the community and was prayed for by the monks. So grateful was

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Henry that ‘on leaving, he prostrated himself before St Edmund and poured out devout and humble prayers to God and the blessed martyr’.105 One of the monks, the poet John Lydgate, presented Henry with a richly illuminated manuscript of his poem The Lives of Saints Edmund and Fremund during or shortly after the king’s visit.106 One of the illuminations depicts Henry at prayer before Edmund’s shrine. As well as being a valuable record of the shrine’s appearance in the fifteenth century, the image is evidence of the extent to which Henry VI wanted to identify himself with St Edmund, who according to medieval elaborations of his legend became king when only a boy. Henry had become king at nine months, and he was probably genuinely desperate for spiritual support from St Edmund at a time when he was being controlled by powerful magnates and deeply unsure how to rule. Like the weak and unstable Richard II, who felt the need to put on Edmund’s shoes at his coronation, Henry VI may have been attempting to become Edmund – hence the singing of Ave rex gentis Anglorum when he processed in the abbey, and the monks’ decision to refer to Henry as the abbey’s fundator (founder).107

Edmund’s body Edmund’s body was viewed only five times during the Middle Ages: on the occasion of its translation to Beodericsworth in the late ninth century; in around 951 when it was inspected by Bishop Theodred; in the 1040s when it was inspected by Abbot Leofstan; in 1095 when Edmund was translated to the new Norman abbey church; and in 1198 when a disastrous fire forced Abbot Samson to check whether the saint’s body was still unharmed.108 The translation of 1095 was the only occasion when Edmund’s body was exposed to general public view. The inner coffin inside the shrine in the old rotunda was opened as Edmund was carried on a bier through the crowd into the new church. Later, the open coffin was taken outside and put in a high place so the people could see it, in an attempt to end a drought that had been afflicting the countryside. Based on later depictions, the

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body was probably wrapped in a shroud inside the coffin and would not have been fully visible.109 People noticed that the saint’s coffin was unusually long, but no formal inspection of the body is recorded. The new clothes placed on the body by Leofstan would only have been 50 years old. However, a woman named Seietha later claimed that the abbey’s sacrist, Toli, along with another monk named Sparhowech and a goldsmith called Hereward secretly touched the body, all suffering unpleasant deaths as a result. One historian has speculated that Abbot Baldwin also inspected the body, placing an effigy or a newly embalmed cadaver in the coffin for the purposes of public display.110 Baldwin was one of the leading physicians of his age and he may well have known how to embalm a body, but it seems highly unlikely that Baldwin would have dared to place a body in the coffin that was not Edmund’s, given the saint’s reputation for punishing those who violated his sanctity. Forging documents was one thing, and an accepted practice in many religious houses, but counterfeiting an incorrupt body was an egregious impiety. There had been a body in the shrine in Leofstan’s time, half a century earlier, so there is no particular reason to suppose that Edmund crumbled to dust in the interval. Indeed, there is evidence that other saints were embalmed or mummified with some success for longer than Edmund was. ‘The Rites of Durham’, an account of Durham Cathedral in the sixteenth century written by a former monk, recorded that when Henry VIII’s commissioners opened St Cuthbert’s coffin in 1537 they found the saint ‘incorrupt’ after eight and a half centuries.111 Similarly, a hand attributed to the incorrupt St Etheldreda, preserved today in a Roman Catholic church in Ely, shows signs of having come from a mummified body. The most detailed record of an inspection of Edmund’s body took place as the result of a potentially disastrous fire during the reign of Abbot Samson. On the night of 22 June 1198, a wooden structure for candles behind the abbey’s high altar caught fire from a poorly maintained candle. By the time the fire was discovered by the monks, at matins, the wooden feretory of the shrine, which was covered in silver panels and jewels, was alight; the monks had to throw their

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cowls over the shrine to put out the flames. When water was poured on the still-smouldering feretory it cracked the gems, and the silver plates fell off onto the floor, although the gold image of Christ in majesty attached to the shrine was undamaged. The monks did their best to cover up the damage to the feretory, but it was obvious to pilgrims that something was amiss, and rumours began to circulate that the body of the martyr had been damaged. Abbot Samson had been away at the time; when he returned he declared that he intended to adorn the feretory in gold instead of silver and raise it on a new foundation of marble. On 23 November the feretory was lifted off its marble base and placed on the high altar while Samson proclaimed a three-day fast for the town’s inhabitants.112 Edmund’s coffin remained in its original position on the foundation of the old shrine, and after lauds Samson and a small number of other monks unwrapped the coffin (or loculus) from its silk and linen coverings. The abbey’s chronicler, Jocelin de Brakelond, described the process: On the outside, covering the coffin and everything else, there was a linen cloth, which they found tied on top with cords. Underneath was a silk cloth, and then another linen cloth, and then a third, and so at last the coffin was uncovered, standing on a wooden tray so that it could not be damaged by the marble. A golden angel, the length of a man’s foot, was attached to the outside of the coffin over the martyr’s breast. The angel had a golden sword in one hand and a banner in the other, and immediately below there was an opening in the coffin-lid, through which, in the past, wardens of the shrine used to put their hands to touch the holy body. Written above the figure was the line: ‘Behold, Michael’s image guards the sacred corpse.’ There were iron rings at the two ends of the coffin, like those usually found on a Norse chest. Lifting up the coffin with the body, they carried it to the altar.113

However, Samson wanted to see the body itself; so, on the night of 25 November, after compline, he selected 12 monks to assist him. The monks lifted the coffin off the marble shrine base and onto a

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small table, where they removed 16 long nails from the coffin lid and opened it: The coffin fitted the holy corpse so perfectly, both in length and in breadth, that a needle could scarcely have been inserted between the wood and either the head or the feet, and the head was joined to the body, a little raised on a small cushion. The abbot, then, looking closely, first came upon a silk cloth covering the whole body, and after that a linen cloth of wonderful whiteness, and over the head a small linen cloth, and then another fine-spun silk cloth, like the veil of a nun. And after that they found the corpse wrapped in linen, and then at last all the features of the Saint’s body were visible.114

Samson ordered the monks not to remove the final linen cover, ‘saying that he dare not proceed further and see the Saint’s naked flesh’. Instead, Samson cradled Edmund’s head in his hands and declared, ‘O glorious martyr St Edmund, blessed be the hour in which you were born. O glorious martyr, do not cast me, a miserable sinner, into perdition for daring to touch you; you understand my devotion and purpose’. Samson then touched the body’s eyes, nose, breast and arms, putting his fingers between those of Edmund’s left hand. He then inspected the saint’s feet, and summoned six more monks to witness the event (another six also came without his permission, bringing the number of witnesses to 24 in addition to Samson himself ). The monks then replaced the wrappings exactly as they had found them and resealed the coffin, putting a document in a silken bag on top of the coffin which recorded Samson’s inspection.115 In spite of the rich detail of his account, Jocelin de Brakelond does not seem to have been personally present at the last inspection of Edmund’s body, and only Samson himself actually touched the corpse. Some of the features described by Jocelin – the final layer of linen through which the features could be clearly seen (probably a cerecloth) and the corpse’s prominent nose and upturned feet – suggest some sort of embalming process. However, the suppleness of the saint’s arm and the fact that Samson could place his fingers between Edmund’s go against this (an embalmed body would be rigid). Yet

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only Samson actually handled the body, and he may have been exaggerating.116 However, it seems very unlikely that Samson staged the inspection by planting a fake body in advance. Samson’s devotion to St Edmund comes across as very real and sincere in Jocelin’s Chronicle, whatever other criticisms Jocelin may have had of the abbot. The surviving historical sources permit a fairly detailed reconstruction of the splendour of St Edmund’s medieval shrine.117 Originally the shrine base was nothing more than a simple slab of marble, although we know there was space to crawl beneath it because Samson, as a young man, once hid from the then abbot under the shrine.118 After 1198 Samson replaced this simple slab with a stone coffin raised on a decorated slab and supported on three wide piers. In the fourteenth century the base, which had cavities to allow pilgrims to get as close as possible to the saint by climbing into them, was refaced with purple and green marble. The feretory, a wooden casket plated with gold, sat inside (but projected above) the stone coffin. The west end of the feretory was decorated with a relief of Christ in glory in beaten gold, known as the ‘majesty’, which survived the fire of 1198. Sixteen panels depicted the miracles of St Edmund; a single panel survives, repurposed as a monumental brass in a Norfolk church. It depicts Edmund killing Swein, although this is one of the gilded brass panels that replaced the gold panels damaged by fire in 1465.119 The feretory was surmounted by a cresting of gold given by Abbot Samson and a golden cross given by Henry Lacy, earl of Lincoln; a second jewelled golden cross, also a gift from Lacy, was hung on the right-hand side of the shrine with a huge carbuncle suspended under it. A furnus, a richly decorated wooden canopy, was suspended by ropes above the feretory. Above this canopy, and almost touching it, a rood beam carried reliquary boxes containing the bloodstained camisia (shirt), spear, sword and nail clippings of St Edmund. Somewhere close to the shrine was displayed the banner of St Edmund, depicting Adam and Eve eating from the tree of knowledge, which was supposedly borne by St Edmund into battle against the Danes and was carried by the Knights of St Edmund. Next to this banner was the golden imperial standard of Isaac Comnenus captured by Richard I and given to St Edmund.

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The shrine was surrounded by metal railings, with four candles weighing three pounds each burning perpetually at the four corners. On great feasts these were joined by 24 candles of one pound each. At the east end of the shrine, between the tops of two columns, were three reliquary chests containing the bones of Abbot Leofstan (d.1065), Oswen (who clipped the martyr’s nails and hair) and Æthelwine the sacrist. Stained-glass windows around the presbytery depicted the story of Edmund’s punishment of Swein, and a series of rich fabric hangings depicting nine scenes from Edmund’s life concluded with the same miracle. Altars dedicated to St Thomas the Apostle and the East Anglian saints Botolph and Jurmin were also located close to the shrine. Edmund’s body was never inspected again after Samson’s nocturnal investigation, although the fire of 1198 was not the last to menace the shrine. On 20 January 1465 plumbers working on repairing the lead roof of the nave left their brazier burning during their lunch break; the wind caught the flames and the brazier set light to the wooden nave roof inside the church. The fire moved eastwards into the central tower, whose spire caught light and collapsed. The fire consumed the choir and moved towards the presbytery: This enormous pyre now directed all its flames and all its force against the shrine of the martyr. Hither and thither it darted, licking up the presses and seats, the projecting images of the angels, and the huge hanging crucifix that almost touched the holy martyr, and reduced them all to glowing embers. The wooden cover of the shrine, when the rope that held it up was burnt through, fell down upon the shrine, in flames: so that the martyr, though walled about on every side with fire, as in an oven, remained scatheless […] At this point some daring souls made a rush for the Church, broke through the windows, cast water upon the flames, and seeing that the shrine was intact, raised a cry of joy to those without; whereupon all gave thanks to God and to the holy martyr.120

No record survives of any inspection of the body after the fire. The consolation that the shrine slammed shut at just the right time may

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have been enough; furthermore, after more than two and a half centuries an inspection of the body might have been too much of a break with tradition. Samson only inspected the body in 1198 because a rumour was circulating that the saint’s head had been burnt. There is no indication that such rumours circulated in 1465, and so Edmund remained undisturbed – for the time being, at least.

Edmund eclipsed? The idea that George dramatically supplanted Edmund as ‘patron saint of England’ when Edward III founded the Order of the Garter in 1348 is a modern myth. Medieval England never had one single patron saint. In fact, the arms of St Edmund and St Edward flank the arms of St George on the Order of the Garter’s earliest seal.121 However, it is undeniable that Edmund’s influence as patron saint was diluted by the addition of other saints as national patrons. Yet the three saints who joined Edmund as patrons of England from the late twelfth century onwards each shared an important characteristic of the martyr king. Edward the Confessor was royal and, moreover, had played a key role in the establishment of the Plantagenet dynasty by nominating William the Conqueror to succeed him. Thomas Becket, like Edmund, was a focus for defiance of royal power. George was a warrior saint associated with the struggle against the infidel who (like Edmund) invariably appeared in armour. However, each of these saints also lacked something that Edmund had. Edward fell short of the supreme status of a martyr. Becket died just for the rights of the church, and not for the nation at large. George, worst of all, was not an Englishman. Edmund remained in view as a royal and national patron until the very end of the Middle Ages, but increasingly as a supporting player in a larger cast. The faithful were always seeking novelty; a new saint meant new miracles, and miracles actually wrought at Edmund’s shrine had already begun to dry up by 1100.122 The proximity of Edward the Confessor’s shrine in Westminster Abbey to England’s centre of power meant that Bury St Edmunds would never attain the same

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significance for the English royal family as the abbey of Saint-Denis had for the Capetians in France. No king was ever crowned in the abbey and only one queen was buried there – Henry VIII’s sister Mary Rose Tudor, queen of France, in 1533.123 On the other hand, there is evidence that royal interest in Edmund continued almost to the dissolution. Henry VII visited the shrine twice, and even in the 1520s, St Edmund’s royal symbolism remained potent enough for a tiny figure of the saint to be included in Henry VIII’s crown, along with the Virgin and Child, St Edward and St George, each figure standing in one of the five golden fleurs-de-lys that alternated with crosses.124 The slowdown of miracles at Edmund’s shrine after 1100 seems to have done nothing to impede the saint’s influence, since his ‘signature’ miracle, the killing of Swein, was done at a distance. So too was his defeat of the Flemings at Fornham and his menacing of Edward I, and Edmund operated most commonly in dream visions. As Chapter 5 will show, St George did not truly come to replace Edmund as England’s patron saint until after the Reformation. The success of Edmund as England’s foremost patron saint in the Middle Ages is better judged by appearances of Edmund or his coat of arms in royal iconography than by the popularity of pilgrimages to Bury St Edmunds, although these remained important for royalty and commoners alike. However, the later Plantagenets’ claim to the French throne made them increasingly international figures, eager to co-opt saints such as St Denis and St Louis associated with the French royal family.125 Edmund did not disappear; he just slipped to the edge of a growing and noisy crowd of royal patron saints.

Chap ter 5

A Lost King Edmund since the Reformation On 26 July 1901 an extraordinary procession made its way from the Fitzalan Chapel at the east end of St Nicholas’s church in Arundel into the grounds of Arundel Castle, the home of the premier peer of England, the duke of Norfolk. Children dressed in white from a local primary school were followed by acolytes holding large brass candlesticks. Behind them walked priests carrying a small casket on a bier, flanked on either side by men bearing burning torches. The leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England, Cardinal Herbert Vaughan, followed behind the bier with the duke and five other bishops. The procession made its way to the tiny domestic chapel inside the castle.1 The casket contained the alleged remains of St Edmund, which had arrived at Newhaven from Toulouse on 25 July. Cardinal Vaughan intended to install them in the high altar of Westminster Cathedral, the huge Roman Catholic mother church of the British Empire that he was in the process of building. One writer enthusiastically hailed the event as the fulfilment of prophecy, declaring that the entry into London of ‘so glorious a national hero’ would be marked with a triumphal procession ‘which shall rival that which in the year 1010 met St. Ailwin when he fled from St. Edmund’s Bury with the coffin and its sacred treasure’.2 It would be another 90 years before osteologists definitively showed that the bones in the casket were not Edmund’s, but the supposed relics never received their triumphal entry into London because there was enough doubt about their authenticity to make the episode something of an embarrassment for Cardinal Vaughan. Edmund lost out, on this occasion, on the chance to recover his status as England’s

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principal patron saint, but an extraordinary sequence of events led up to Vaughan boldly appropriating the relics and bringing them to England. They began with the dissolution of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds in 1539, which was followed later in the sixteenth century by Edmund’s transformation into a saint of renewed relevance for England’s marginalised and exiled Roman Catholic community, along with the remarkable emergence of an important cult of St Edmund in the French city of Toulouse. This chapter traces Edmund’s story after the Reformation and the quest to recover England’s lost king.

Dissolution Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries began in 1536, but larger abbeys such as Bury St Edmunds survived the longest, lingering into the final months of 1539 and even the beginning of 1540. Henry seems to have been motivated by a characteristic mixture of mercenary greed for the immense wealth of the monasteries and a pious desire to stamp out false relics and ‘superstition’, inspired by the sceptical writings of Erasmus.3 The cult of St Edmund at Bury had long since fallen away from the height of its popularity by 1539. Bequests to the abbey had been dwindling since 1500, and although no financial records from Bury survive from the period, the shrine of St Edmund at Hoxne was receiving few gifts from pilgrims in the sixteenth century.4 Relics and incorrupt bodies were declining in popularity compared with miraculous images, especially statues of the Virgin Mary. Many pilgrims came to Bury only because they were passing through on their way to the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk. Bury tried a number of strategies to compete, setting up its own shrine of the Virgin Mary at Woolpit, as well as promoting a fertility cult around St Edmund for the benefit of childless women.5 It may be significant that when the reformist preacher Thomas Bilney incited riots against shrines in East Anglia in August 1531 the mob ignored St Edmund and instead targeted miraculous roods, crosses and images.6 Henry VIII’s commissioners, likewise, were not interested in destroying the bodies of saints. A later claim that the commissioners

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publicly destroyed the mortal remains of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury in September 1538 seems to have been propaganda invented by Catholics and directed against Henry VIII.7 Surviving commissions issued for the dismantling of shrines at Chichester, Lincoln and Winchester do not at any point suggest that the bones of saints should be destroyed. Instead, they instruct, in vague terms, that relics should be taken away.8 Treasures from shrines were taken to the Tower of London, and some relics may have found their way there too if they were inside precious reliquaries, but the commissioners were sometimes accommodating. The monks of Durham were allowed to rebury the body of St Cuthbert after the destruction of his shrine, and the monks of York Minster may have been allowed to do the same with St William.9 As a royal patron saint, Edmund held a special significance even for reformers; along with St Edward the Confessor, he was the only English saint whom Archbishop Thomas Cranmer considered including in a stripped-down liturgical calendar in 1549.10 Two other royal saints, St Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey and Henry VI at Windsor (venerated as a saint since the reign of Henry VII) were allowed to remain in situ. Although no contemporary documentation from Bury mentions Edmund’s body, therefore, the idea that it was deliberately destroyed is not only unlikely, but preposterous. The commissioners’ first visit to Bury came in November 1535, when their aim was to assess the behaviour of the monks and to catalogue and remove superstitious relics. They came away with the coals that St Laurence was toasted withal, the paring of St Edmund’s nails, St Thomas of Canterbury’s penknife and his boots, and divers skulls for the headache; pieces of the holy cross able to make a whole cross of; other relics for rain and certain other superstitious usages, for avoiding of weeds growing in corn, with such other.11

The nail parings mentioned were those which, according to Abbo of Fleury, the devout woman Oswen cut every Maundy Thursday when Edmund’s body first lay at Beodericsworth. Reports of this kind were ‘mocking inventories’ designed to humiliate the monks by listing the

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relics the commissioners found most ridiculous, rather than exhaustive lists of the relics in each monastery.12 The commissioners did not touch the shrine of St Edmund itself in 1535, which they returned to strip of its precious stones and metals early in 1538. They complained that it was hard work to destroy a shrine that was almost five centuries old: we have been at St Edmund’s Bury, where we found a rich shrine which was very cumbrous to deface. We have taken in the said monastery in gold and silver 5,000 marks and above, over and besides a well and rich cross with emeralds, as also divers and sundry stones of great value.13

Once again, however, there was no indication that the commissioners actually opened the shrine. On 4 November 1539 the abbot, John Reeve, finally surrendered the abbey to Sir Richard Riche; within three days, Riche had written to Cromwell asking for instructions on whether to begin pulling down the abbey.14 Scaffolding went up and, probably within weeks, the largest Romanesque church in the world had largely been demolished and the stone sold for a little over £400.15 On 31 March 1540 Abbot Reeve, who had received a very handsome pension, died of grief.16 King Henry did not suffer immediately the fate of Swein for his sacrilege, but it was rumoured that he died on 28 January 1547 ‘In mortal agony […] with the names of churchmen and monks on his lips’.17 Another story told of how Henry’s corpse exploded in the coffin before his funeral in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. The king’s blood flowed onto the floor.18 As Herman the archdeacon wrote of King Swein, ‘we […] found him defiled with his own blood.’19

The end of Edmund? Although it may have seemed like it, the dissolution did not mark the end of the cult of St Edmund. St Edmund’s Day continued to be celebrated in every English church on 20 November for another ten years, and then again between 1553 and 1559. A stained-glass image of the

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saint was placed in the church of St Peter Parmentergate in Norwich as late as 1558.20 At Snettisham in Norfolk, a procession in honour of St Edmund, probably on the feast of his translation on 29 April, persisted as late as 1581 or 1582.21 Yet the destruction of Edmund’s shrine did mark a significant change. The body of the saint was no longer a public presence. Thenceforward, Edmund would have to be venerated and commemorated in the abstract. The destruction of his shrine was a symbolic barrier separating a medieval world of bodily saints from a modern world of abstract concepts.22 Furthermore, the destruction of the abbey church removed the connection between Bury St Edmunds and royalty. There would be no more royal pilgrimages, and monarchs no longer had any need to legitimate themselves by reference to St Edmund or the privileges of his abbey. Apart from Cranmer’s brief attempt to insert Edmund into the new English prayer book in 1549, the saint disappeared as a royal patron after the Reformation. Because Westminster Abbey remained standing as a royal church and mausoleum, Edward the Confessor remained unmolested in his shrine – albeit that shrine was demoted to the status of a mere tomb. George, too, survived in an attenuated fashion owing to the ongoing significance of the Order of the Garter; although George was removed as patron of the Order in Edward VI’s reign (1547–53) and the cross of St George abolished,23 he returned under Mary I in 1553–8 and Elizabeth chose not to revert to the reformed statutes of Edward VI. The cross of St George survived as a symbol of the Protestant nation.24 Deprived of his role as a royal patron, St Edmund became a marginal figure in England after the Reformation. The miraculous elements of his legend – the saint’s talking head, the rejoining of his head to his body and his bodily incorruption – were targets of ridicule after the Reformation, although the Protestant martyrologist John Foxe did include a stripped-down legend of St Edmund in the 1570 edition of his Actes and Monumentes.25 To a certain extent, Edmund’s death at the hands of pagans made him an acceptable figure in the eyes of Protestants. Edmund could be considered a national hero, but the superstitious veneration of his relics for so many centuries tainted his reputation in Protestant eyes.

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Nevertheless, in his Poly-Olbion (1612) the poet Michael Drayton still acknowledged Edmund’s status as a patron saint when he asked rhetorically, ‘What English hath not heard Saint Edmond Buries name?’26 Interest in Edmund was also sustained by antiquaries, beginning with John Leland at the time of the dissolution itself. The antiquaries were less interested in religion than in preserving and recording the past; for them, Edmund was just one among several famous people buried at Bury St Edmunds. Leland took notes on ‘the little book of the funerals of noble men and abbots buried in the monastery of St Edmund’ during one of his visits, as well as writing a brief life of St Edmund and a list of benefactions to the abbey.27 Laurence Nowell, the father of Anglo-Saxon studies, mentioned St Edmund in a note on the town of Thetford compiled in the 1560s, and in the 1580s John Stowe copied Lydgate’s Lives of Saints Edmund and Fremund and annotated the existing manuscripts of the poem.28 A fragment of a prose life of St Edmund begun but not finished by Stowe survives on the back of an envelope among Stowe’s papers.29 In his Survey of London (1598) Stowe even recorded the miraculous cures of the lame that were wrought at the tomb of St Edmund when the saint’s body was moved to London in the eleventh century.30 In 1586 William Camden, the author of the first complete countyby-county survey of England, Britannia, included an account of St Edmund under the village of Hoxne, but made no mention of the saint in relation to Bury St Edmunds.31 Accounts of St Edmund were also provided by the seventeenth-century antiquaries John Weever and William Dugdale.32 The group that showed the greatest interest in St Edmund after the Reformation, however, were English Catholic exiles, forced to flee the country after the restoration of Protestantism under Elizabeth I in 1559. Edmund, as England’s foremost royal martyr, became the lay counterpart of St Thomas Becket as an emblem of the suffering and persecuted English Catholic Church. In the 1560s the former archdeacon of Canterbury, Nicholas Harpsfield (1519–75), incarcerated in the Fleet Prison for his persecution of Protestants in Mary’s reign, included an influential account of Edmund’s martyrdom in his Historia Anglicana ecclesiastica (‘English ecclesiastical history’), which

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circulated widely in manuscript before it was finally published in 1622.33 Harpsfield took care to compare Edmund, whenever possible, to other ancient martyrs – an indication that he was writing for an international as well as an English audience. Other Catholics who published accounts of St Edmund included Richard Verstegan in 1605 and John Wilson in 1608, although Wilson’s narrative included basic errors, such as the claim that Edmund died at Hexham in Northumberland.34 Wilson’s errors were not unusual. The Reformation disrupted medieval England’s hagiographical tradition, leaving Catholics to compose slightly garbled accounts of England’s great saints. Yet Catholics made strenuous efforts to recover Edmund’s patrimony. In 1621 a small priory of English Benedictine monks founded in Paris in 1615 was assigned the ‘right and title’ of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds by the General Chapter of the English Benedictine Congregation, making the priory the abbey’s legal descendant and entitling the monks to take back the abbey’s lands in the event of England becoming a Catholic country.35 In 1626 one of the monks of St Edmund’s Priory, Clement Reyner (1588–1651), highlighted Edmund’s ‘Englishness’ by explaining that King Cnut established the shrine as an abbey of English Benedictine monks because they were ‘fellow-citizens of their king, and most attached to the glory of the same martyr, so that the English might be more grateful [to Cnut] through such a benefit accrued through the monks’.36 Reyner argued that ‘The monks of St Edmundsbury were great in the estimation of England on account of the sacred body of Edmund, king and martyr, to which our kings often came on pilgrimage by reason of religion’.37 Even though the body of St Edmund had disappeared, privileges bestowed on Bury St Edmunds and the Benedictine order by successive English kings remained, in Reyner’s view, intact. As we have seen, in the Middle Ages the abbot did not hold west Suffolk and the abbey’s other lands in his own name, but in the name of St Edmund, who was treated in law as a living person. Reyner was setting out to prove that the newly reorganised Benedictine monks had inherited all of the ancient rights of the original monasteries, including Bury’s right to be exempt from all episcopal jurisdiction.

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Another Benedictine, Hugh Paulinus Cressy (c.1605–74), vociferously defended St Edmund’s talking head against sceptical critics and traced the process by which Edmund became patron saint of England.38 In the eighteenth century the leader of the Catholic Church in England, Bishop Richard Challoner, made strenuous efforts to promote the veneration of English saints and retold the story of St Edmund in two of his works.39 Even more importantly, in 1749 Challoner successfully persuaded Cardinal Henry Benedict Stuart to reinstate St Edmund in the Roman canon of saints.40 The cardinal was the brother of Charles Edward Stuart, the ‘Young Pretender’, and was recognised as King Henry IX by Jacobites after Charles’s death in 1788. This was not the first mark of favour shown to St Edmund by the Stuart dynasty: during his exile at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, King James II reportedly venerated St Edmund because he thought of himself as a martyr for the Catholic faith, and he certainly turned the Priory of St Edmund in Paris into a sort of royal church for the exiled court.41 James’s body – which like Edmund’s was reputedly incorrupt – remained unburied at St Edmund’s until it was removed by French revolutionaries in 1794.42 As well as retelling the legend of St Edmund for a new era, English Catholics in exile also produced or commissioned new images of the saint. Most late medieval representations of St Edmund that still survive in English churches, either on the dados of rood screens or in stained glass, depict Edmund as a glorified martyr dressed in royal robes and holding his instrument of martyrdom. However, the wall painting of Edmund’s martyrdom in St Peter and St Paul, Pickering, in North Yorkshire, dating from around 1450, is a gory depiction of the saint’s semi-naked body pierced by arrows. Likewise, an unusual painting of the saint on wood dating from around 1500 once displayed at Greensted church – but tragically stolen in 2012 – depicts the martyrdom as well as subsequent events in the background. Edmund appears semi-naked with arrows sticking from his body, in a pose resembling St Sebastian.43 Edmund is depicted in much the same way in a painting by Niccolò Circignani for the English College, Rome, in 1583; the emphasis in these paintings has moved from the saint in glory to the pathos of his martyrdom.44

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The shift of emphasis was no accident: the Englishmen being trained for the Roman Catholic priesthood at the English College could realistically expect to die a martyr’s death if captured in Elizabethan England. The altarpiece of the college chapel, painted in 1580 by Durante Alberti, depicted the road to England (Rome’s northern Flaminian Gate) flanked on either side by St Edmund, here dressed in royal robes, and St Thomas Becket. Becket and Edmund made a potent combination: both stood for defiance of a pretended worldly authority, and together they were Catholic symbols of church and state.45 Edmund’s status as a martyr and an Englishman meant that he was a more meaningful figure to English Catholics after the Reformation than St George or St Edward the Confessor. The fact that two Elizabethan Catholic martyr priests were named Edmund, Edmund Campion (1540–81) and Edmund Gennings (1567–91), may have further enhanced Edmund’s importance. We can glimpse the power of the figure of St Edmund for Catholics in Protestant suspicions that Catholics prayed to St Edmund to advance their treasonous designs.46 One Catholic pretender to the English throne was Edmund Pole, a descendant of George, duke of Clarence, who attempted unsuccessfully to marry Mary, Queen of Scots in 1562.47 In around 1592 the English College at Seville commissioned a painting of St Edmund from the Spanish mannerist painter Juan de Roelas (c.1570–1625) surmounted by the Tudor royal arms.48 The inclusion of the arms and the description of Edmund as Angliae rex (‘king of England’) sent a clear message that Edmund embodied an ideal form of Catholic kingship. English Catholics in exile were cultural exiles who felt a powerful need to assert their Englishness; otherwise they were in danger of being subsumed into a generic culture of Counter-Reformation Catholicism. Edmund was the perfect vehicle for the reaffirmation of Catholic Englishness. His significance in English Catholic art continued into the seventeenth century, even after the risk of martyrdom diminished. In around 1677 the monks of St Edmund’s, Paris, commissioned an altarpiece depicting angels removing arrows from Edmund’s body by the court painter Charles de La Fosse.49 Statues of both St Thomas Becket and St Edmund

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flanked the altarpiece of the English College at Valladolid, installed in 1679.50 Edmund also appears in a wall painting at Valladolid as a kneeling king wearing a rich red robe trimmed with ermine, with a broken arrow embedded in his chest.51 Curiously, this depiction of Edmund bears a striking facial resemblance to the final English royal martyr, King Charles I. Charles died a Protestant, but many Catholics were intensely loyal to him, so it is possible the resemblance was intentional. Even in Protestant England, memories of Edmund lingered in folklore and in the landscape. Earthworks in Norfolk and Suffolk were often associated with Edmund and his battle with the Danes, and Devil’s Dyke (the earthwork running across Cambridgeshire to protect access to Suffolk) was known interchangeably as St Edmund’s Dyke.52 Indeed, the Danes’ tendency to turn up in English folklore as all-purpose adversaries and the builders of enigmatic prehistoric monuments may have owed a great deal to the prominence of the Danes in the legend of St Edmund in the Middle Ages.53 At Hoxne in Suffolk a new legend about St Edmund even emerged after the Reformation, and throughout the county 20 November was known as ‘Deadman’s Day’ (a corruption of ‘St Edmund’s Day’).54 It is even possible that some of the many sites associated with Robin Hood, the legendary archer, had been associated with St Edmund, patron saint of archers, before the Reformation. For example, at Castor near Peterborough a local legend has it that two standing stones mark the place where two arrows landed, having been shot by Robin Hood from Alwalton church across the river in Huntingdonshire. The legend grew because the tops of the stones were marked with arrows; this was because they marked out an area of land on the bank of the River Nene belonging to the abbey of Bury St Edmunds, and they were originally called St Edmund’s Stones.55

Edmund in Toulouse? In August 1631 the French city of Toulouse was reeling from three summers in succession when bubonic plague had ravaged the town.

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Out of sheer desperation, the Capitouls (consuls) of the city made a vow to translate the relics of one of the many saints entombed in the great basilica of Saint-Sernin into a new and splendid reliquary. The plague ended, apparently thanks to the saint’s intervention. The only problem was that no one was quite sure who the saint was. Inventories of the relics of the basilica taken in 1443, 1489, 1504 and 1534, as well as a history of the city written in 1517, called him Aymundus.56 A painting on one side of a hexagonal pillar in the choir of SaintSernin, executed in around 1540, called him S. EADMVNDVS REX ANGLIAE, ‘St Edmund, king of England’.57 Since the feast day of this mysterious saint was celebrated on 20 November he was clearly one and the same as the St Edmund venerated at Bury St Edmunds, even if Toulouse’s information about Edmund was so garbled that he had ended up as a confessor (rather than a martyr) by the fifteenth century. Although there is no record of Abbot Baldwin bestowing contact relics on Saint-Sernin, the basilica was renowned for its relic collection and could have acquired such items from another French church at any point in the Middle Ages. Lucca Cathedral claimed to be in possession of St Edmund’s head in the twelfth century after receiving a contact relic from Baldwin in the eleventh, so it is not difficult to imagine how, over the course of centuries, a minor relic of St Edmund at Toulouse became ‘inflated’ into the saint’s entire body.58 Whatever the truth about how Edmund came to be venerated at Toulouse, by the seventeenth century the origins of the cult were forgotten. Yet the city urgently needed to recover them if St Edmund was to be properly honoured with a formal translation, as the Capitouls had vowed. In order for such a translation to be permitted by the ecclesiastical authorities, it was necessary to establish that Edmund had been continuously venerated at Saint-Sernin for a long time and to confirm the authenticity of the relics. Before the translation took place on 13 November 1644 a local notary, Pierre de Caseneuve, was commissioned to compose a life of St Edmund for the occasion. Caseneuve confidently identified Toulouse’s Aymundus as St Edmund the martyr, and was responsible for the earliest printed life of the saint, Histoire de la vie et des miracles de Saint-Edmond, roi d’Angleterre.

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Caseneuve provided a convenient explanation for how an East Anglian king came to be venerated in the south of France: Louis VIII was elected King of England, by the deposition of King John, and made war for a long time in that kingdom; and Matthew Paris writes, that his army pillaged all the churches of the county of Suffolk, amongst which were, as I have already mentioned, the Abbey where the body of St Edmund lay. And since at this time Christians gloried in removing, by a devout theft, the relics of the saints, and since it was by this means that part of the Levant was acquired for us; it is credible that the French did the same to those [relics] of St Edmund, and that Louis VIII, having come to lay siege to the city of Toulouse a little after his return from England […] made a present of those [relics] of St Edmund to the Church of Saint-Sernin.59

Caseneuve pointed out that the kings besieging Toulouse in 1218 stayed at Saint-Sernin, and concluded by declaring that the ultimate proof lay in the silence of the English historians regarding the body of St Edmund after 1216: ‘by their silence they admit that his body had been carried off and transported elsewhere.’60 Caseneuve gave no sign that he was drawing on an earlier Toulouse tradition associating the relics of Aymundus/Edmund with Louis the Dauphin; the speculation was an original one. But Caseneuve’s theory was just that – speculation, not evidence, and the idea that the theft of the body of England’s patron saint in 1216 would have gone unrecorded by history (or that such a triumphant French theft could have been successfully concealed) is nothing short of preposterous. If anything, the royal cult of St Edmund redoubled in intensity in the thirteenth century. In his dedicatory letter to the archbishop of Toulouse, Charles de Montchal, Caseneuve spoke of giving ‘a new life to these precious relics’ and declared that, by translating Edmund, the archbishop was ‘going, in a certain way, to revive the bones of this illustrious martyr’.61 The cult of St Edmund at Toulouse after 1644 was not focussed on any aspect of the martyr’s life or death but on his role as a protector

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from plague. The retable commissioned in 1645 by the Capitouls for the chapel of St Edmund (which was completed in 1665) depicted the translation of the relics in 1644, as did a painting commissioned to decorate the annals of Toulouse in 1646.62 Likewise, a silver-chased reliquary by Jean Chalette (1581–1644) featured generic scenes of military combat and a sick man lying in bed to indicate Edmund’s role as a saint against plague.63 None of the imagery of St Edmund at Toulouse depicted Edmund holding an arrow, the instrument of martyrdom with which he invariably appears in England. The first Englishman to become aware of Toulouse’s claim to possess the body of St Edmund may have been the traveller Edward Brown, who visited Toulouse in the early 1680s and saw St. Sernine, or St. Saturnine’s Church in Tholouse in France, which is a Church abounding with Relique-Rareties, and where they also think they have the Bodies of seven of the Apostles, of St. George, of our King St. Edmund, and of forty Saints.64

Brown showed no further interest, which is hardly surprising for a seventeenth-century Protestant brought up to believe that relics were superstitious vanities and that Catholics indiscriminately invented and attributed relics to whichever saints they chose. John Battely (1647–1708), who wrote the earliest history of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds at the end of the seventeenth century, was well aware of Caseneuve’s claims about Toulouse, noting that he ‘thinks that the churches of Suffolk were despoiled by Louis VIII and the body popularly (popularate) carried off and given to the Church of St Sernin at Toulouse’.65 On 27 February 1794 the basilica of Saint-Sernin suffered a fate similar to that of the abbey at Bury. It was visited by revolutionary commissioners who removed the relics from their rich reliquaries, which were taken away to be sold for the benefit of the people. Efforts were made, notably by a Franciscan named Casé, to recover the relics and ensure their integrity and authenticity, and in 1802 Saint-Sernin was restored to public worship. However, it was not until October 1845 that the supposed relics of St Edmund were transferred to a

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new reliquary, which along with other reliquaries was exposed for the veneration of the faithful in the nave of Saint-Sernin on several occasions in the second half of the nineteenth century.66 In 1867, in preparation for the millennium of the martyrdom of St Edmund in 1869, the archbishop of Toulouse opened the supposed tomb of the saint and extracted some relics, which he divided into four portions that were sent to different recipients in England.67 In 1874 Cardinal Manning, archbishop of Westminster, requested further relics from Toulouse and received portions of the scapula and groin.68 In the fervid atmosphere of revived Catholicism in late nineteenth-­ century England (both Roman and Anglo-Catholicism) the tantalising possibility that the body of one of the great Anglo-Saxon saints might have somehow survived by being spirited away to France proved irresistible to many. Edmund was the only patron saint of England – apart from St Edward, whose body was under Anglican control in Westminster Abbey – whose relics might be found and venerated. Caseneuve himself expressed the thoughts that many in England would come to share: Divine Providence, which foresaw that in a few centuries heresy would separate England from the unity of the Church, just as nature has separated her from the rest of the world, happily wished to save the bones of this illustrious martyr from the profanation to which those of so many other saints were abandoned.69

As one Victorian Catholic writer declared, ‘Better far that [St Edmund’s] bones should be held in honour and respect in a foreign land, than be in his own, hidden away and unworshipped.’70 The earnest persuasion of a number of Catholic writers that Edmund’s body had found its way to Toulouse proved so convincing to Cardinal Vaughan that he approached the archbishop of Toulouse to ask for the relics. The archbishop naturally refused, but Vaughan was determined. He took the only action he could and appealed directly to Pope Leo XIII.71 The pope instructed the archbishop of Toulouse to part with the relics, much to the chagrin of the church and people of Toulouse, who regarded St Edmund as the protector

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of their city. Saint-Sernin was allowed to keep St Edmund’s head, but the rest of the bones were taken to Rome and presented to the pope. Leo then gave them into the hands of archbishops Merry del Val and Stonor, representing the English clergy, who took them to England.72 The solemn installation of the relics in the chapel of Arundel Castle on 26 July 1901 was widely reported in the press, and on 2 August The Times printed a lengthy letter from M. R. James, the leading authority on the abbey of Bury St Edmunds. James showed that Louis the Dauphin’s alleged raid on Bury St Edmunds was a fictitious event based on nothing more than conjecture, and argued that the commissioners would certainly have reported the absence of a body from the shrine – as they did in the case of St David – in order to mock the monks.73 There followed a war of words in the pages of The Times between James and his Oxford counterpart Charles Bigg on one side, and the Benedictine monk Joseph Mackinlay on the other.74 Another antiquary, Sir Ernest Clarke, then weighed in with his own theory that the body of St Edmund had been incinerated in the fire of 1465.75 Whatever the arguments and counter-arguments, the damage to the reputation of the relics at Arundel was done. Cardinal Vaughan could not place a set of doubtful relics at the heart of his new cathedral, and on 9 September 1901 he publicly announced to the Catholic Truth Society conference at the Olympia Hall in Newcastle that Clarke’s arguments had convinced him of the questionable authenticity of the relics.76 Vaughan may also have been influenced by a psychic medium who held the relics and informed the Cardinal that they were not Edmund’s.77 The archbishop of Toulouse was less than impressed: the English cardinal had used guile and manipulation to acquire the bones of one of his city’s patron saints and then decided he did not want them. Toulouse wanted the relics back, and on 14 November 1901 the archbishop convened a commission to examine their authenticity.78 Although the report’s conclusions were favourable, for reasons that remain unclear the archbishop gave up on the attempt, perhaps because political circumstances made it too difficult to demand the return of the relics.

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The relics from Toulouse remained in the chapel of Arundel Castle, where they still are to this day. In the 1950s the duke of Norfolk contemplated burying the doubtful and troublesome relics, but in 1964 the French author Edmond Bordier obtained a copy of the archbishop of Toulouse’s commission on the relics from 1901–2 and passed it to the Roman Catholic parish priest of Bury St Edmunds, Bryan Houghton.79 Houghton managed to obtain the agreement of the bishop of Northampton (who then had jurisdiction over Bury) and the archbishops of Westminster and Southwark to have the relics moved to Bury, where he intended to enshrine them in the Catholic parish church of St Edmund, King and Martyr.80 However, shortly after Houghton announced his plans the Lord Lieutenant of Sussex intervened to ask the duke of Norfolk not to release the relics, apparently because the Anglican St Edmundsbury Cathedral (the former church of St James) wanted the relics as well. Fearful of a row between the churches, the Roman Catholic bishops withdrew their permission for the translation.81 Instead, Houghton wrote to the archbishop of Toulouse in 1966 and received three loose teeth from the upper jaw of the skull that remained at Saint-Sernin. In the presence of these relics Houghton celebrated a solemn mass in honour of the eleven-hundredth anniversary of the martyrdom of St Edmund on 20 November 1969. All attempts to persuade the duke of Norfolk to permit examination of the bones at Arundel were rebuffed until 1985, when initial discussions were held on forming a committee to investigate them. The committee met for the first time on 20 November 1990, and the bones were transferred to the Institute of Archaeology on 6 February 1991. Examination of the relics began on 20 December. The committee met for the last time on 20 November 1992, when a draft report was prepared. This report was presented to the Conference of the British Archaeological Association at Culford Hall in April 1994 and published in 1998.82 It concluded that the assemblage of bones at Arundel contained the remains of at least 12 individuals, both male and female, some of which had spent time buried in the ground. The committee made no attempt to date the bones, nor did any DNA testing take place, but it recommended

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a more detailed study of the ‘architectural setting’ of the relics at Saint-Sernin. It is not certain that the supposed relics of St Edmund at SaintSernin were always this miscellaneous assemblage: it is possible the original bones became mixed with others after French revolutionaries emptied and stole the original reliquary. On the other hand, the archbishop of Toulouse authenticated the relics in 1845, which suggests that they had not been jumbled with other bones at the Revolution. The major discrepancy highlighted by the 1992 report was that St Edmund apparently had two heads, since Toulouse retained the skull yet there was also a skull among the bones at Arundel.83 The long cul-de-sac of Toulouse, in which so many had been searching for St Edmund’s body, appeared to have finally come to an end.

Looking for Edmund It is supposed to be an amusing trick question in pub quizzes: ‘Where is St Edmund buried?’ – the answer is ‘Bury St Edmunds’. As we have seen, the issue of Edmund’s last resting place has never been quite that simple. However, it remains the case that most people, since 1539, have assumed that Edmund’s body ended up somewhere in the town that bears his name. The earliest evidence of someone searching the site is a licence issued by King James I to Mary Middlemore, a lady-in-waiting to Queen Anne of Denmark, ‘to inquire concerning treasure trove within divers monasteries’, including power and authority to enter into the Abbeys of St. Albans, Glastonbury, Saint Edmondsbury and Ramsay; and into all lands, houses and places within a mile belonging to such Abbeys, there to dig and search after treasure supposed to be hidden in those places.84

At the time, there was a prevailing popular belief that the monks hid a great deal of treasure at the dissolution, and old monastic sites were routinely ransacked by treasure-hunters.85 The permission Middlemore received to search monastic properties within a mile

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is indicative that rumours existed of monastic property hidden in manors belonging to England’s major abbeys. Two relics of St Edmund may have survived. One was the psalter from which the young Edmund was supposed to have learnt his psalms during a stay at Attleborough in Norfolk. The book made its way into the parish library of St James’s church, where John Speed identified it before 1611 as the relic once venerated as St Edmund’s psalter.86 The book was still there in 1805.87 In 1677–8 Titus Oates claimed to have seen ‘Part of the Blood of St. Edmund the Martyr, with his Hose, Shirt, and Pillow’ displayed either at the English College in Valladolid in Spain or the English Jesuit College at St Omer in the Low Countries.88 This seems to be a reference to the camisia of St Edmund, which was always kept separately from the body itself, but the famous perjurer Oates can hardly be considered a reliable witness.89 It does not matter whether these relics were authentic or not – the fact that they were said to be relics of St Edmund means that narratives must have existed to explain how they came to be rescued from the abbey at the time of the dissolution. In 1634 William Hawkins, the master of Hadleigh Grammar School, was summoned to act as a juror at the Bury St Edmunds Quarter Sessions, which were then held in the former chapel of St Margaret at the south-east corner of the Great Churchyard. During a lull in the proceedings, Hawkins took a stroll in the ruins of the abbey, which he later described in Latin verse, referring to himself in the third person: Meanwhile […] as often as he calls away an unoccupied hour and mind from the crowd, he strolls into the nearby area of the enclosed open space […] The squalor of wretched stones and lamentable destruction strike the eye […] ‘This once flourished,’ he said, ‘as the most revered among the honoured seats of the monks.’ Behold, what remnants of a seat so conspicuous, so powerful with land and wealth […] fragments that would not give admission to the stone-breaking pickaxe. So great a task was it to demolish the close-knit mass. Along with the entrances but little else remains, but it does survive

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so that the spectator may estimate the limbs of Hercules from his foot […] instead of columns constructed with such Daedalean art, instead of so many tombs of noblemen and abbots [lit. wearers of the mitre], he finds nothing but nettles. Above all, he seeks what is the place of the bones of King Edmund. The bones, visited by so many prayers of their worshippers and enriched by so many gifts are nowhere […] Flame has devoured them: the winds that sweep all things away have blown them away.90

Hawkins’s account of his musings in the abbey ruins was part of a larger satirical Latin poem on the proceedings of the case for which he was acting as a juror. It is the earliest reference to a post-Reformation attempt to discover the body of St Edmund, but it is unclear whether Hawkins was really searching seriously for the body. Hawkins’s poem is liberally sprinkled with Classical literary allusions, primarily to Virgil and Homer, such as his comparison of the abbey ruins to the ruins of Troy. This may have been no more than a literary exercise for Hawkins’s students to disentangle. Yet Hawkins’s poem does suggest that it was locally accepted fact, 95 years after the dissolution, that Edmund was somewhere in the abbey precincts. The first archaeological exploration of the abbey ruins, involving rather more than just searching among stinging nettles, took place in 1772 when a group of workmen accidentally discovered the body of Thomas Beaufort, duke of Exeter (d.1427), an uncle of Henry V.91 Later that year surface excavations by Edward King discovered what may have been part of the tomb of John Lydgate at the east end of the abbey, but there was no sign of St Edmund.92 National interest in the saint was rekindled quite by accident as a result of a visit to Bury St Edmunds by the essayist Thomas Carlyle in 1842. Carlyle read an edition of Jocelin de Brakelond’s Chronicle recently published by a local antiquary, John Gage Rokewode.93 Carlyle was inspired by the Chronicle to write his book Past and Present (1843), which focussed on Edmund as well as the figure of Abbot Samson. Carlyle related Edmund’s story to contemporary politics, portraying Edmund as a just and responsible ‘landlord’ and suggesting that the Danes were either ‘Heathen Physical-Force Ultra-Chartists’ with no respect for

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the established order of things or ‘Ultra Tories, demanding to reap where they had not sown’.94 Carlyle’s portrayal revived awareness of Edmund as one of the heroes of English history and brought the saint to a national audience. On 11 September 1848 an old oak close to Abbey Farm in Hoxne collapsed under its own weight. An inspection of the tree revealed an ancient iron arrowhead embedded in the trunk, which was taken to Bury St Edmunds and inspected by members of the Royal Archaeological Society. They pronounced the arrowhead to be ‘Danish’ and took it as proof that it was against this very oak tree that St Edmund had been shot.95 The conclusion was typical of the Victorian tendency for romantic myth-making. However, the discovery was widely publicised and served to revive public interest in St Edmund even further than Carlyle had already done. In 1857 Frederick Mant included Edmund’s story in a series of ballads based on English history, and when the millennium of Edmund’s martyrdom came round in 1870 (the date of the martyrdom was then thought to have been 870) it was marked by a new life of the saint written by one of the country’s leading popular historians, Agnes Strickland.96 After the authenticity of the relics from Toulouse was questioned in 1901, the old belief that Edmund was buried somewhere in the abbey precincts revived. In 1907 a pageant in the abbey ruins celebrated the history of Bury St Edmunds; in the dissolution scene, Abbot Reeve announces to his monks that Cromwell’s commissioners are on their way. One monk suggests that they ‘bestow the shrine in some hidden place’, suggesting the crypt; another monk suggests they bury it under the floor of the crypt. Abbot Reeve approves this plan: ‘We will bury the shrine. So the Saint’s bones shall not be scattered, nor again exiled from the home he loves!’ Stage directions then instructed: ‘The MONKS reverently remove the shrine. OTHERS take the pedestal to pieces and carry it off.’97 In the 1930s a local clergyman went beyond mere imagination and engaged the services of a psychic medium to locate the body of St Edmund, whose concealment he later described in a historical novel about Abbot Reeve.98

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In March 1905, after successfully excavating and identifying the bodies of six abbots in the Chapter House, M. R. James conceived the idea of excavating the crypt at the east end of the abbey church (under the presbytery where the shrine once stood) in the hope of finding St Edmund’s body, but he was unable to carry out the investigation.99 In 1930 he still believed Edmund might be buried under the floor of the crypt.100 James was not quite right that the crypt had never been investigated before: in the summer of 1772 an inscription was dug up there which was thought to come from the tomb of John Lydgate.101 However, the first modern excavation of the crypt took place in 1934 and there was another in 1957–64, but neither turned up any burials under the floor of the crypt.102 One architectural historian, however, is confident that pieces of the shrine of St Edmund – if not the saint’s body – may yet turn up, as they have at other sites.103 Others have suggested that the monks took the body of St Edmund to one of the many properties owned by the abbey, for safekeeping, and stories about St Edmund being hidden in a particular house or hall abound, most of them probably romantic Victorian folklore.104 In 1953 an amateur treasure-hunter, Charles Quarrell, announced he was searching for Edmund’s body at an unnamed manor house close to Bury.105 Quarrell falsely believed that Edmund had been buried in a ‘golden coffin’: his primary motivation seemed to be financial gain. More recently, a historian has speculated that Abbot Reeve could have arranged for Edmund to be buried in the Clopton Chantry attached to Holy Trinity, Long Melford.106 In fact, in 1539 it was not possible for the monks (not even the abbot) to leave the monastic precincts at Bury; this was one of the conditions laid down by the commissioners on their first visit to the abbey in 1535.107 But one crucial piece of evidence – overlooked by generations of scholars, archaeologists and treasure-hunters searching for Edmund – has the potential to solve the mystery of the lost king’s resting place once and for all.

Con c lu s i on

Finding Edmund? The first-time visitor to the ruins of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds will probably be disappointed. One guide to Britain describes the remains of the vast Romanesque basilica as ‘petrified porridge’, although the rubble cores of variegated flint left over from the removal of all dressed stone from the site are perhaps more reminiscent of giant sculptures made of congealed muesli.1 Thomas Carlyle described the appearance of the ruins more poetically: ‘Alas, how like an old osseous fragment, a broken blackened shin-bone of the old dead Ages, this black ruin looks out, not yet covered by the soil; still indicating what a once gigantic Life lies buried there!’2 The ‘gigantic Life’ was Edmund himself, the unconquered martyr whose body was the sacred heart of England itself – and whose body, we have good reason to believe, still lies close to the place where it was once venerated and feared by kings. Strolling through the massive yet inchoate remains of the abbey, the most striking experience for the modern visitor is the opportunity to descend some steps into a large hollow in the ground that was once the crypt under the presbytery, excavated completely in 1957–64. The crypt’s east end features three radial chapels, but the more observant visitor may notice that the easternmost chapel is unexcavated, because at the top of a steep slope the wire fencing of a set of three rather tired and slightly overgrown tennis courts intrudes above the ruins. These tarmac courts were built directly above the cemetery in which five centuries of monks were laid to rest by their brethren – and where, this chapter will argue, the mortal remains of England’s patron saint were probably translated for the last time as the abbey faced catastrophe in 1539.

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The last translation? Douai Abbey, in spite of its name, is located not in northern France but in the village of Woolhampton, on the bank of the River Kennet between Reading and Newbury. This abbey of English Benedictine monks was established in Paris in 1615 and dedicated to St Edmund in 1621. Until 1686, the monks of St Edmund’s claimed the right to reoccupy the site of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds, considering themselves the legal successors of the monks of Bury.3 The monks came closest to regaining possession of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds in 1685, when the then owner offered them the chance to buy the ruins and the abbot’s palace (still standing at that time), but they were dissuaded from the purchase, for political reasons, by King James II.4 Such sensitivities are long forgotten; in November 2015 the Anglican bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich even preached at Douai Abbey on St Edmund’s Day, and the abbey maintains cordial relations with the town whose patron it shares. Memories of the dissolution of the abbey were still fresh in the seventeenth century. One of the founders of the Priory of St Edmund in Paris was born in Bury St Edmunds, and the prior of St Edmund’s between 1697 and 1701, William Hitchcock (c.1617–1711), who presided over the exequies of King James II, was probably the great-grandson of an ex-monk of Bury.5 The seventeenth-century monks of St Edmund’s, who considered themselves the inheritors of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds and, as Clement Reyner put it, Edmund’s ‘fellow citizens’, were in a strong position to be the guardians of oral traditions about the dissolution that did not make it into the mainstream historical record. The year 2013 marked the millennium of St Edmund’s return to Bury St Edmunds after three years in London in 1010–13. The anniversary was marked with celebrations in Bury St Edmunds, and interest in the saint was once again rekindled in the local press. In February a volunteer guide at St Edmundsbury Cathedral speculated that St Edmund’s body might have been buried after the dissolution in the monks’ cemetery, which is now covered by the tennis courts at

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the east end of the abbey church.6 I was already engaged in a study of the cult of St Edmund when this story appeared, but the idea prompted me to reconsider the question of where St Edmund’s body ended up after the dissolution. I recalled a conversation I had in July 2007 with the abbot of Douai Abbey, Geoffrey Scott; the abbot had mentioned a source that claimed to describe a secret burial of the saint’s body. I decided to make my way to the abbey and inspect the original, in the hope of perhaps settling the question of Edmund’s last resting place once and for all. Between 1707 and 1711 Ralph Benet Weldon, a monk of St Edmund’s, Paris, wrote a comprehensive chronicle of the monastery, known as the ‘Memorials’, which has not yet been published. In March 1710 Weldon recorded that he was speaking to the other monks about Pierre de Caseneuve’s theory that the body of St Edmund was translated to Toulouse. Weldon was interrupted by another monk. He ‘was told it was a false story, that Fr Hitchcock’s grandfather or great grandfather had seen his body put into an iron chest at the fall of religion in England and knew where it was put’. Weldon did not record which monk passed on William Hitchcock’s story, but he was interested enough to ask another monk, Hugh Frankland, to seek out the aged Hitchcock at St Gregory’s Priory, Douai, and interview him. Frankland reported back: I have discoursed Fr Hitchcock upon the affair of St Edmund’s body, and whatever he might formerly, remembers not a syllable of it now, nor is it any wonder, his memory being quite lost and gone, to that degree that he retains not the least notion of any person or thing that he actually sees not with his eyes […] By intervals his memory returns concerning some points happening when he was a boy, but seldom of any later date, and amongst the rest he told some of us the other day, that he came over to study at St Omer in the reign of James I and had the occasion of seeing him at London taking the city in his way, and that he saw also the prince his son Charles I, but then a youth, and actually playing a game at tennis, but indeed he had forgot his own age, but left it to us to judge of, and for me cannot imagine how he should be less than a 100 [sic]

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being now 85 years since James I died, and this he said happened some small time before.7

Hitchcock died on 10 August 1711, without having shed any more light on the mystery of St Edmund’s body.8 We are left with a tantalising fragment of the only information of any kind about what happened to St Edmund at the dissolution, an actual oral tradition rather than mere speculation like Caseneuve’s story. Since Hitchcock was born in 1617 or 1618 it must have been his great-grandfather rather than his grandfather who witnessed the last translation of St Edmund: ‘the fall of religion’ was the dissolution of 1539, 78 years before Hitchcock’s birth. Weldon’s informant did not specify whether it was Hitchcock’s maternal or paternal great-grandfather who saw the translation, nor whether the great-grandfather was a monk at the time of the dissolution. It seems overwhelmingly likely that he was: there would hardly have been many witnesses to a secret translation, and those who were there would have been monks. The earliest Bury St Edmunds parish registers contain no Hitchcock or Hobbs families (Hobbs was the surname of William Hitchcock’s mother), but when William Hitchcock was ordained he took the alternative surname Needham. This was standard practice among Catholic priests who might be sent as missionaries to England and needed a false name, but priests did not usually pick a name at random, and often named themselves after relatives. It is quite likely, therefore, that some of Hitchcock’s relatives were named Needham. As it happens, Robert Nedeham, alias Bronyon or Brunning, was one of the Bury monks pensioned off after the dissolution in 1539.9 In 1577 Nedeham was a schoolmaster in Lavenham;10 in all likelihood he was a married man with children by that point. However, even if the monk Robert Nedeham was Hitchcock’s great-grandfather, it is important to remember that Weldon did not hear the story from Hitchcock himself – and even if he had, he would have been hearing a family tradition passed down through three generations. The story may well have become distorted in the telling. However, the essential idea at the heart of it – that the body of St Edmund was put in an iron chest and relocated – is eminently plausible. There is just one

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problem: Hitchcock’s story gives no indication of where Edmund’s body was put.

Finding a saint The discovery of William Hitchcock’s story about the removal of the body of St Edmund was a breakthrough. Up until that point, no knowledge of any kind regarding the fate of the saint’s body had been known to exist. The commissioners of 1535, 1538 and 1539 made no mention of the body, an omission that made it possible for supporters of the idea that St Edmund ended up in Toulouse to claim that the shrine was empty. Others speculated that the body might have been incinerated during the fire of 1465, or simply discarded while the shrine was stripped. Prior Hitchcock’s account, however, is consistent with what happened at several other shrines. St Cuthbert at Durham and St William at York were quietly and discreetly reburied, while St Edward the Confessor at Westminster and Henry VI at Windsor were left undisturbed in their tombs.11 Elsewhere people seem to have been allowed to take relics away: bones of St Chad from Lichfield Cathedral were preserved in the bedstead of a Catholic man in Staffordshire until the seventeenth century, when they were removed to St Omer in Flanders, before returning to their final resting place in St Chad’s Catholic Cathedral in Birmingham.12 In 1931 a body claimed as that of St Edward the Martyr (d.978) was excavated in the ruins of Shaftesbury Abbey. The bones were later given to the Russian Orthodox Church, although they were subsequently the subject of a legal dispute and ended up in a bank vault.13 This body, if it really was Edward’s, would have been removed from a shrine and reburied at the dissolution. The bodies of other saints survived in part. In 1811 renovations on an outbuilding on the duke of Norfolk’s estate at Arundel led to the discovery of a withered hand mounted on a seventeenth-century silver plate inscribed Manus S[an]c[t]ae Etheldredae 679 (‘The hand of St Etheldreda, 679’). It was presumed that someone removed the hand from the body as a relic at the time of the dissolution in 1539, when Etheldreda’s shrine was

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opened in Ely Cathedral. This last remaining relic of the incorrupt body of St Etheldreda was finally returned to Ely and enshrined in the Roman Catholic church there in 1953.14 At some point after the surrender of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds, and before the complete destruction of the abbey church, Henry VIII arranged for the body of his sister Mary Rose Tudor, queen of France, who had been buried in 1533, to be exhumed and moved to the nearby St Mary’s church.15 No documentation survives regarding the exhumation, but if Henry took the trouble to relocate his sister, it is possible that he also arranged the quiet burial of England’s royal patron, St Edmund. It is extremely unlikely that Henry or the commissioners would have hindered the dignified disposal of the mortal remains of a royal saint, whether or not such an event took place with royal approval. When John ap Rice wrote to Cromwell on 5 November 1539, a day after the formal surrender, he informed the Lord Privy Seal that the monks had ‘confedered and compacted before our coming, that they should disclose nothing’.16 Exactly what the commissioner hoped the monks would disclose is unclear; probably he was referring to the location of treasures that the monks may have hidden. If the monks were willing and able to hide treasures of the monastery before the surrender, they would also have been prepared to hide the body of St Edmund. Abbot Reeve showed some degree of foresight with regard to the dissolution, selling off the abbey’s enormous library as early as 1535 – an act that allowed many of the volumes to survive.17 Even without the (admittedly problematic) testimony of William Hitchcock, it is almost certain that steps would have been taken by the monks, or possibly even by the commissioners themselves, to ensure that the body of a royal saint was decently buried. The one detail Hitchcock’s story does give us – that the body was buried in an iron chest – may yield more information than at first appears. The fact that the monks placed the body – or more likely the entire coffin – in an iron chest suggests that they may have been hoping to recover it later. If the chest was buried (albeit Weldon’s informant did not specify burial) and its location remembered, it would have been immediately distinguishable from other burials. Rather like hoards

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of treasure buried at times of distress, the monks may have hoped that the body of St Edmund would be recovered and restored to a shrine in better times. Such times did come again in 1553 with the accession of Mary I, but Mary made no effort to restore any Benedictine abbeys other than Westminster. Mary, by all accounts, had little interest in saints, and although she appointed the former sacrist of the abbey, Edmund Rougham, as archdeacon of Bury St Edmunds in 1555, Rougham was in office for less than a year before his death.18 He may not have had time to exhume the saint’s body, even if (as seems likely) he knew where it was hidden; but he may also have chosen not to do so. Without a religious community, at a time when pilgrimage had gone out of fashion, there was little point to a shrine. Obtaining a large iron chest around the time of the dissolution would have presented little difficulty. In 1538, the commissioners ransacked the sacristy, where sacred vessels and other ornaments would have been secured in safe-like iron chests. The chests themselves would have been left empty. The likelihood of the entire coffin being placed in the iron chest, rather than just the contents of the coffin, is based on the omission by the commissioners of any mention of the golden angel that, according to Jocelin de Brakelond, rested on top of the coffin above the martyr’s heart. An iron chest may even have been chosen because the decayed nature of the coffin meant that the monks decided that an outer receptacle was needed to protect the body. The use of the iron chest also tells us that the body could not have been taken far from its resting place in the presbytery, owing to the weight of such an object. The presbytery’s closest exit was located on the south side of the ambulatory and led to the chapel of St Botolph, which was connected in turn to the shrinekeeper’s house.19 To the north, the abbey church was hemmed in by monastic buildings, which means that the monks are most likely to have sought a hiding place for the iron chest on the southern or eastern sides of the church. As luck would have it, there were cemeteries located on both sides. The monks’ cemetery adjoined the extreme east end of the abbey church, surrounding the three ambulatory chapels of St Saba, St Nicasius and St Peter. To the south lay the great cemetery, which survives to

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this day as the common burial ground of the parish churches of St James and St Mary, just as it was in the Middle Ages. If the chest containing Edmund’s body was buried (and it is hard to see what else could have been done with such a heavy and bulky object), the most likely location was in the monks’ cemetery. This was a private space where, even if monks were seen burying a body, their actions would arouse no suspicion; after all, there was an outbreak of plague in the abbey at the time of the surrender. The cemetery was also consecrated ground, an important consideration for any medieval burial; it is highly unlikely that the monks would have placed Edmund’s body in an unconsecrated space. M. R. James’s suggestion that the monks might have hidden Edmund’s body under the floor of the crypt was a sensible one, but this can be ruled out since no burials were discovered when the crypt was thoroughly investigated in 1957–64. Furthermore, there was no direct access to the crypt from the presbytery; the two sets of stairs to the crypt were located in the north and south transepts. Overall, the most likely location for a burial of the iron chest containing St Edmund’s body is the monks’ cemetery. The site was close to the presbytery and the nearest exit, via the chapel of St Botolph and the shrinekeeper’s house; it was consecrated ground; and it was private. No recorded excavation has ever taken place on the site. In the twentieth century the three tennis courts built over the monks’ cemetery even cut off the easternmost radial chapel of the crypt, so that the excavation of the crypt chapels could not be fully completed in 1964. Since the tennis courts were a public amenity, excavation of the area was not an option until, in May 2017, St Edmundsbury Borough Council announced that an alternative site for the tennis courts had been found.20 The announcement came as a result of ongoing plans by the Abbey of St Edmund Heritage Partnership – a collaborative venture between several organisations in the town – to improve the heritage presentation of the site. Although obtaining permission to excavate a scheduled monument is complex, at the time of writing it is highly likely that such an excavation will take place in the next few years, perhaps even before the millennium of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds in 2020.

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What are the prospects, then, of locating and identifying the body of St Edmund? The area can be expected to be full of monastic burials, dating from the eleventh to the sixteenth century. It is here that the one detail Weldon’s informant gives us – that St Edmund was put in an iron chest – turns out to be especially useful. Medieval monastic burials were typically in a coffin of stone (in the early Middle Ages), wood or lead. Although the iron chest would have rusted after burial, archaeologists ought to be able to detect the presence of iron oxide in the soil, and the different phase response given off by iron should make it distinguishable from lead. Furthermore, if the entire coffin was placed in the iron chest it is likely that the golden angel on the outside of the coffin, described by Jocelin de Brakelond, joined it as well. Archaeologists would therefore be looking for gold as well as iron (it is also worth noting that the coffin described by Jocelin had iron rings at each end ‘like those usually found on a Norse chest’). The possibility of identifying St Edmund’s body by means of DNA is unlikely. In the case of Richard III, whose body was discovered under a Leicester car park in 2012, it was possible to trace a living person who shared the same mitochondrial DNA as the king (a direct descendant of his sister, Anne of York). No living descendants of Edmund or his relatives are known, nor is there any way to trace them in the historical record. Genetic material from another member of the Wuffing dynasty may survive, if the mummified hand of Æthelthryth in St Etheldreda’s church in Ely is genuine.21 Æthelthryth and Edmund may have shared a common paternal ancestor in Eni, the brother of Rædwald; but Æthelthryth lived two centuries before Edmund, and it is almost impossible to establish genetic relationships through mixed male and female lines of descent.22 However, the remains of individuals from the Anglo-Saxon era have been identified before without the need for DNA evidence. In 2008 the body of Eadgyth (d.946), the sister of King Æthelstan, was discovered inside a much later tomb in Magdeburg Cathedral. The body was identified as Eadgyth’s by establishing the woman’s age at death and studying the isotopes in the corpse’s teeth to show that she enjoyed a high-status diet and grew up in southern England.23 Similarly, a skull fragment excavated from a site close to the high altar

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of Hyde Abbey in the 1990s was carbon-dated and identified in 2014 as belonging either to Alfred the Great or Edward the Elder, since these were the only two people known to have been buried in front of the altar in the ninth and tenth centuries.24 Once again, no DNA was involved. Although identifications of this kind are difficult (if not impossible) to prove beyond all doubt, they can be established beyond reasonable doubt when they appear to be consistent with the known historical evidence. If an iron chest – or its rusted remnants – were found containing human remains on the site of the monks’ cemetery in Bury St Edmunds, that would be conclusive to most observers. The discovery of the golden angel, or indeed minute fragments of textiles or other materials that may have been inside the coffin, would surely clinch the identification.

A saint for today On 20 November 2006 BBC Radio Suffolk presenter Mark Murphy, together with the then MP for Bury St Edmunds, David Ruffley, delivered a petition to 10 Downing Street calling on the government to recognise St Edmund as patron saint of England. The government’s reply, sent on behalf of prime minister Tony Blair, reported that the government had no plans to change England’s patron saint.25 In fact, the government has no power to make or unmake patron saints, because no law on the matter has ever been enacted. Patron saints are cultural artefacts who gain their status by common consent over a long period of time, although the role of royalty in creating patron saints is undeniable. As we have seen, until the Reformation England never had a single patron saint. The campaign to reinstate St Edmund as patron saint of England has gathered pace since 2006 and has had a good deal of local success in Bury St Edmunds and Suffolk, but it is difficult to see it as anything more than an expression of local pride that appeals primarily to people with an existing connection with the saint. Advocates of St Edmund as the patron saint of the English nation are invariably keen to see ‘their’ saint in the top position, but rarely can they give

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any reason why Edmund should have this status, other than the fact that he was English and has previously been recognised as a national patron saint. To claim that Edmund should be England’s patron on the grounds of his ‘indigenous’ status carries with it the danger that Edmund is seen as a symbol of ‘ethnic Englishness’. In June 2017 the far right group Britain First attempted to appropriate Edmund for its own ends, a reminder of where this ‘indigenous’ emphasis can lead.26 In reality, the figure of Edmund can never supplant that of St George, so deeply rooted in England’s post-Reformation culture and literature. Edmund and George played remarkably similar roles in medieval English culture – so much so that the similarity may even have aided George’s triumph as the last patron saint left standing after the Reformation; the need for the figure of St Edmund as well was not obvious. Both saints were martyrs; both appeared in visions and apparitions wearing armour; and both were considered patrons of warfare. But it is not impossible that, in the future, Edmund could regain his position as a patron saint of England alongside St George. An event catapulting Edmund to national (rather than merely local) fame would be needed for this to occur. Such an event very nearly happened in 1901 when Cardinal Vaughan was ready to install supposed relics of St Edmund in the high altar of Westminster Cathedral. The discovery of remains plausibly identified as Edmund’s – or at least as those venerated in the medieval shrine at Bury – on the site of the monks’ cemetery would be just such an event. But it is not enough to hope for the literal rediscovery of St Edmund to rekindle interest in him. Those who would like to see Edmund resume his place as a national patron must make a cogent case for that status that is relevant to the present day, rather than simply relying on past precedent. A patron saint is an internationally recognised symbol who is capable of acting as a focus for the articulation of a people’s national identity. In spite of efforts by local and national government to promote the annual celebration of St George’s Day on 23 April, it has become apparent that symbols associated with St George are tainted, in the minds of many, by their association with the Crusades and the contemporary far right. The fact that St George only became a popular saint in England as a result of the Crusades

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compounds the problem: even celebrating St George’s Day as a civic event can seem divisive in a multicultural society. In contrast to the potentially divisive effect of St George, Edmund has historically been a unifying rather than a dividing symbol. As I have striven to show in this book, veneration for Edmund’s memory united English and Dane, English and Norman and even Catholic and Protestant at the time of the Reformation. Historically, the figure of Edmund served as the guarantor of a composite national identity for the English, legitimating the Norman blood of the Plantagenets and even the Welsh blood of the Tudors. The last king of the East Angles, the original rex Anglorum, embodies an ultimate and unattainable Englishness – unattainable, because he lived and died at a time before England even existed. From the very beginning, the idea of England as a single nation presupposed compromise and coexistence between different peoples. Edmund is a reminder of the complex process by which England became England, defying any attempts to reduce Englishness to a facile ethnic nationalism. In the final years of the second decade of the twenty-first century, the United Kingdom stands on the brink of deep constitutional change. That the UK will leave the European Union seems certain; that Scotland may become an independent country, at some point in the fairly near future, is a realistic possibility. In the aftermath of Brexit, the need for the UK to reinvent itself as an alternative economic and political union of equal nations is acute if Scotland and Northern Ireland, whose populations voted against Brexit, are to be appeased. Yet the UK has never been an equal union: England, with the largest population by far of the four nations, has been so dominant since the Act of Union of 1707 that it has struggled to formulate a separate identity of its own. Since the 1990s, the lack of an English parliament to balance out the devolved administrations of the other nations has frustrated many, with some calling for a federal UK to replace an outdated model of unequal constitutional union. If England is to forge a distinct identity within the UK it requires meaningful, unifying and inclusive national symbols. As a saint with controversial connections with the Crusades and the contemporary far right, St George would seem to fail the test of inclusiveness. Edmund

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is a relative unknown to most English people outside East Anglia, but that may be an advantage. Crucially, although Edmund has been venerated for centuries in the Christian church, his Christian significance is arguably incidental to his cult. Abbo of Fleury’s Edmund dies not just for the Christian faith and the prerogatives of kingship but for the respublica Anglorum – ‘the commonwealth of the English’, an inclusive phrase that highlights the unity of the English people. Every saint is a construction of the time and place in which he or she is venerated; past Edmunds have been the constructions of deeply religious societies, but an Edmund who reflects a secular society is equally possible. Indeed, the original sources positively invite a secular interpretation over a religious one. In fact, the development of Edmund as a ‘secular saint’ can be discerned in the evolution of local commemoration of the martyr in the twentieth century. Large-scale public pageants held in the ruins of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds in 1907, 1959 and 1970 downplayed the religious significance of Edmund’s story. The focus of the 1959 pageant was on Magna Carta, with Edmund’s resistance to the Danes recast as an anticipation of the hunger for liberty that would later draw the barons to swear their oath on the high altar of St Edmund’s abbey in 1214. This theme was even more marked in the 1970 ‘Edmund Year’ pageant, in which St Edmund was portrayed as a defender of liberty alongside Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and even Jan Palach, the student who burnt himself to death in protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1969.27 A local furniture company even placed an advertisement in the pageant programme implying that Edmund died for the sake of free trade.28 No saint in English history lends him- or herself to secular reinvention more readily than Edmund, the king who died for his people. In one recent fleeting appearance in popular culture, in the 2015 song ‘Barbarian’ by rock band The Darkness, Edmund’s death is stripped of all religious significance, and the lyrics and music video appear to portray him as dying in battle.29 Edmund has even been subject to reinvention by contemporary pagans, with one author identifying his shrine as the holiest site in eastern England, the centre of the cult of

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a ‘divine king’ and a collection of ‘magic objects’ and ancestor cults where Christian and pagan rites coexisted. Edmund, according to this view, is the unifying figure between land and people.30 The historical credibility of such an interpretation matters less than the fact that Edmund is sufficiently malleable to appeal to both contemporary Christians and pagans. Stripping away the accretions of later medieval hagiography may not reveal much of the historical Edmund, who remains an extremely shadowy figure, but it does allow the original character of the cult of St Edmund to emerge more clearly. The evidence strongly suggests that the early cult originated in popular religion and was a grassroots movement of the respublica Anglorum rather than something promoted by royalty. In this respect Edmund stands apart from the Plantagenet royal saints, Edward the Confessor and George; he represents something older, more popular and more amenable to becoming a symbol of dissent as well as loyalty. Edmund is a saint waiting to be rediscovered – perhaps literally, under Bury’s tennis courts, but certainly metaphorically, as an embodiment of Englishness and an undeservedly forgotten symbol of the English people.

Notes Introduction 1 See R. A. Yelle, Semiotics of Religion: Signs of the Sacred in History (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 106. 2 For the argument that saints are a unique access point to culture see S. Ditchfield, ‘Thinking with saints: sanctity and society in the early modern world’, in F. Meltzer and J. Elsner (eds), Saints: Faith without Borders (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 157–89. 3 Quoted in A. Easthope, Englishness and National Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 22. 4 Ibid., p. 27. 5 Ibid.

Chapter 1 1 Archaeologists remain uncertain whether these earthworks are prehistoric (marking out older Iron Age tribal boundaries) or the work of the AngloSaxons (see S. Plunkett, Suffolk in Anglo-Saxon Times (Stroud: Tempus, 2005), p. 48). 2 Abbo, PSE, pp. 12–15. 3 On the Sutton Hoo ship see A. C. Evans, The Sutton Hoo Ship Burial (2nd edn, London: British Museum, 1994), pp. 23–9. 4 Plunkett (2005), p. 31. 5 Ibid., p. 28. 6 Ibid., p. 32. 7 Ibid., pp. 33–5. 8 See J. Hines and B. Odenstedt, ‘The Undley bracteate and its runic inscription’, Studien zur Sachsenforschungen 6 (1987), pp. 73–94. 9 See S. Oppenheimer, The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story (London: Constable, 2006). 10 B. Yorke, Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England (London: Seaby, 1990), p. 7. 11 P. Schwyzer, Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 188–9. 12 K. Briggs and K. Kilpatrick (eds), A Dictionary of Suffolk Place-Names (Nottingham: English Place-Name Society, 2016), pp. 147–8; Plunkett (2005), p. 11.

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13 J. Hines, ‘The origins of East Anglia in a North Sea zone’, in D. Bates and R. Liddiard (eds), East Anglia and Its North Sea World in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013), p. 39. 14 Briggs and Kilpatrick (2016), p. 168, identified 54 place names deriving from ‘group-names’ in Suffolk. See also W. W. Skeat, The Place-Names of Suffolk (Cambridge: Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 1913), pp. 71–5. 15 For a reconstructed family tree of the Wuffing dynasty see S. Newton, The Origins of Beowulf and the Pre-Viking Kingdom of East Anglia (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993), p. xiii. 16 Plunkett (2005), p. 61. 17 For a discussion of the terms ‘Anglo-Saxon’, ‘Saxon’ and ‘Anglian’ see N. J. Higham and M. J. Ryan, The Anglo-Saxon World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), pp. 7–9. 18 The Mercians also claimed to be Angles, but their origins are uncertain. 19 B. Colgrave (ed.), The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great (2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 91; Bede, HE II.1 (pp. 103–4). 20 N. J. Higham, An English Empire: Bede and the Early Anglo-Saxon Kings (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 251–2. 21 For the traditional argument see S. Foot, ‘English people’, in M. Lapidge, J. Blair, S. Keynes and D. Scragg (eds), The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of AngloSaxon England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 170–1; C. Hills, Origins of the English (London: Duckworth, 2003), pp. 14–15. 22 Linguists and anthropologists call these two kinds of names endonyms (what a people call themselves) and exonyms (what outsiders call that people); see K. Hildebrandt, ‘Manange’, in C. Genetti (ed.), How Languages Work: An Introduction to Language and Linguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 407. 23 F. L. Attenborough (ed.), The Laws of the Earliest English Kings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), p. 50. 24 See Colgrave (1986), p. 15. 25 D. Cronan, ‘Beowulf and the containment of Scyld in the West Saxon royal genealogy’, in L. Neidorf (ed.), The Dating of Beowulf: A Reassessment (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), p. 134. 26 G. Molyneaux, The Formation of the English Kingdom in the Tenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 207. 27 R. Hoggett, The Archaeology of the East Anglian Conversion (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010), p. 28. 28 Bede, HE II.15 (pp. 132–3). 29 Hoggett (2010), p. 29. 30 Bede, HE II.5 (p. 111). 31 Ibid. II.15 (p. 133). 32 Bede, HE II.12 (pp. 125–8). 33 J. Fairweather (ed.), Liber Eliensis: A History of the Isle of Ely from the Seventh Century to the Twelfth (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), pp. 4–5. 34 Bede, HE II.12 (p. 125).

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35 Plunkett (2005), p. 70. 36 Ibid., pp. 76–7, 129–33. 37 Evans (1994), pp. 59–63. 38 Ibid., pp. 88–9. 39 Ibid., p. 85. 40 Bede, HE IV.1 (p. 204). 41 See Newton (1993), pp. 132–46. 42 Ibid., pp. 109–10. 43 Plunkett (2005), p. 35. 44 Evans (1994), pp. 87–8, 93. 45 Newton (1993), p. 106. 46 The Iceni tribe who occupied Iron Age Norfolk and Suffolk also had a particular veneration for wolves and were the only tribe whose gold staters featured a wolf ( J. Davies, The Land of Boudica: Prehistoric and Roman Norfolk (Oxford: Heritage, 2009), p. 116). An alternative explanation for Wuffa’s name is that it could have been influenced by the native Britons. 47 Plunkett (2005), p. 174. 48 Ibid., p. 172. 49 R. Pinner, The Cult of St Edmund in Medieval East Anglia (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2015), pp. 222–5. 50 Bede, HE II.15 (p. 133). 51 Ibid. III.18 (pp. 171–2). 52 Ibid. II.15 (p. 133). Dummoc was traditionally identified with the Suffolk coastal town of Dunwich, now almost completely lost to the sea, but some scholars have suggested Walton Castle as a more likely location. For a discussion of the location of Dummoc see Hoggett (2010), pp. 36–40. Note that a later tradition makes Felix bishop of Châlons-sur-Marne (ibid., p. 31). 53 J. Godfrey, The Church in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), p. 171. 54 Bede, HE III.18 (p. 171). 55 Hoggett (2010), p. 32. 56 For the argument that the Staffordshire Hoard may be associated with Penda see D. Starkey, Crown and Country: A History of England through the Monarchy (London: Harper, 2010), p. 35. 57 Bede, HE III.18 (pp. 171–2). 58 Newton (1993), p. 134. For a discussion of Sigeberht’s possible cult at Beodericsworth see F. Young, The Abbey of Bury St Edmunds: History, Legacy and Discovery (Norwich: Lasse Press, 2016), pp. 122–4. 59 On England’s incorrupt saints see J. Crook, English Medieval Shrines (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011), pp. 13–16. 60 Bede, HE III.8 (p. 157). See also S. J. Ridyard, The Royal Saints of AngloSaxon England: A Study of West Saxon and East Anglian Cults (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 60–1. Æthelburh was later venerated in France as Sainte Aubierge; there was a church dedicated to her in Paris

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before 1700 ( J. Corblet, Hagiographie du diocèse d’Amiens, ii (Paris: J.-B. Dumoulin, 1870), p. 321). 61 On Æthelthryth’s incorruption see Fairweather (2005), pp. 56–61. 62 The arm of St Oswald, kept at Peterborough, was also reputedly incorrupt (see J. Higham, ‘The cult of St Oswald at Peterborough’, Peterborough’s Past 3 (1988), pp. 15–22). Another incorrupt saint, Archbishop Ælfheah of Canterbury (St Alphege), who was murdered by the Danes in 1012, significantly post-dates Edmund. 63 On the identification of Cnoberesburg with Burgh Castle see Hoggett (2010), pp. 45–6. 64 Bede, HE III.19 (pp. 172–6). 65 C. T. Camp, Anglo-Saxon Saints’ Lives as History Writing in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), pp. 43–6. 66 The incorrupt arm of St Oswald the martyr was unconnected with the king’s martyrdom and derived from a blessing pronounced upon the arm by Aidan when Oswald was still alive. See Bede, HE III.6 (p. 152). 67 Plunkett (2005), p. 160. 68 Ibid., pp. 172–3. 69 Ibid., p. 174. 70 Ibid., p. 190. 71 D. M. Wilson, The Northern World (London: Thames & Hudson, 1980), pp. 169–71. 72 Plunkett (2005), p. 194. 73 Ibid., p. 197. 74 Ibid., pp. 203–4. This place has not been satisfactorily identified; both Bures and Sudbury have been suggested. 75 Abbo, PSE, pp. 14–17. 76 A. Gransden, ‘The legends and traditions concerning the origins of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds’, English Historical Review 100 (1985), p. 6. 77 1 Samuel 10. On the election of Anglo-Saxon kings see W. A. Chaney, The Cult of Kingship in Anglo-Saxon England: The Transition from Paganism to Christianity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1970), pp. 15–17. 78 Abbo, PSE, pp. 14–15: non tantum eligitur ex generis successione. 79 Ibid., pp. 16–17. 80 Ibid., pp. 14–15: ex Antiquorum Saxonum nobili prosapia oriundus. 81 Ibid., pp. 12–13. 82 Newton (1993), p. 140. 83 M. Laing (ed.), Catalogue of Sources for a Linguistic Atlas of Early Medieval English (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993), p. 66. Both documents are printed and translated in F. Hervey (ed.), Corolla sancti Eadmundi: The Garland of Saint Edmund King and Martyr (London: John Murray, 1907), pp. 582–7. 84 Plunkett (2005), p. 204. 85 Higham and Ryan (2013), p. 248; R. Naismith, ‘Coinage in pre-Viking East Anglia’, in D. Bates and R. Liddiard (eds), East Anglia and Its North Sea World in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013), p. 149.

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86 On this debate see N. P. Brooks, ‘England in the ninth century: the crucible of defeat’, Proceedings of the Royal Historical Society 29 (1979), pp. 2–3. 87 Plunkett (2005), pp. 207–8. 88 M. Costambeys, ‘Ívarr’, in ODNB, xxix, pp. 443–4. 89 For the snake comparison see ibid. For the suggestion of impotence see Plunkett (2005), p. 206. 90 G. Jones, A History of the Vikings (2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 218–19. 91 D. M. Metcalf and J. P. Northover, ‘Debasement of the coinage in southern England in the age of Alfred’, Numismatic Chronicle 145 (1985), pp. 152, 170.

Chapter 2 1 Elizabeth Frink’s statue of St Edmund in front of the ruined west front of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds was erected in 1974 to commemorate the county of West Suffolk, which was abolished and absorbed into Suffolk County Council in that year. 2 The very earliest evidence of Edmund’s death is non-literary: the ‘memorial pennies’ issued by Viking mints in York and East Anglia from around 890. These pennies will be considered in Chapter 3. 3 J. M. Bately (ed.), The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, iii (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1986), pp. 47–8. 4 S. Keynes and M. Lapidge (eds), Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), p. 78. 5 S. Irvine (ed.) The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, vii (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), p. 48. Medehamstede is an old name for Peterborough. 6 N. P. Brooks, ‘England in the ninth century: the crucible of defeat’, Proceedings of the Royal Historical Society 29 (1979), p. 12; N. J. Higham and M. J. Ryan, The Anglo-Saxon World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 256. 7 F. Young, Peterborough Folklore (Norwich: Lasse Press, 2017a), pp. 64–5. 8 See A. Gransden, ‘Abbo of Fleury’, in ODNB, i, pp. 10–11. 9 Abbo, PSE, pp. 6–9. 10 Ibid., pp. 38–9. 11 Ibid., pp. 16–17. 12 Ibid., pp. 34–5. 13 Ibid., pp. 20–1. 14 Ibid., pp. 24–5. 15 Ibid., pp. 26–7. 16 Ibid., pp. 28–9. 17 Ibid., pp. 32–3. 18 Ibid., pp. 32–5. 19 Ibid., pp. 36–7. 20 Ibid., pp. 40–1. 21 Ibid., pp. 42–3.

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22 D. Whitelock, ‘Fact and fiction in the legend of St Edmund’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History 31 (1969), pp. 221–2; N. Scarfe, Suffolk in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1986), pp. 55–72 (Scarfe was sceptical about the role of the archers). 23 A. Gransden, ‘The legends and traditions concerning the origins of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds’, English Historical Review 100 (1985), p. 6. For further details of Gransden’s assessment of Abbo see A. Gransden, ‘Abbo of Fleury’s Passio sancti Eadmundi’, Revue Bénédictine 105 (1995), pp. 20–78; A. Gransden, ‘St Edmund’, in ODNB, xvii, pp. 754–5. 24 On this issue see C. Phelpstead, ‘King, martyr and virgin: Imitatio Christi in Ælfric’s Life of St Edmund’, in A. Bale (ed.), St Edmund, King and Martyr: Changing Images of a Medieval Saint (York: York Medieval Press, 2009), pp. 27–44. 25 Abbo, PSE, pp. 14–15. 26 Ibid., pp. 54–9. 27 See M. Faulkner, ‘“Like a virgin”: the reheading of St Edmund and monastic reform in late tenth-century England’, in L. Tracy and J. Massey (eds), Heads Will Roll: Decapitation in the Medieval and Early Modern Imagination (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 39–52. 28 C. Hart and A. Syme, ‘The earliest Suffolk charter’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History 36 (1987), at p. 165. 29 See F. Young, The Abbey of Bury St Edmunds: History, Legacy and Discovery (Norwich: Lasse Press, 2016), pp. 27–9. 30 The theory that Edmund suffered the blood eagle rite was first suggested in A. P. Smith, Scandinavian Kings in the British Isles, 850–880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 189–94, 201–13. 31 Abbo, PSE, pp. 34–5. 32 For a critical view of the blood eagle theory see R. Frank, ‘Viking atrocity and skaldic verse: the rite of the Blood Eagle’, English Historical Review 99 (1984), pp. 332–43. 33 Bede, HE III.13 (p. 163), III.2 (pp. 144–5). 34 M. Dunn, The Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons c.597–c.700: Discourses of Life, Death and Afterlife (London: Continuum, 2009), p. 73. 35 G. Klaniczay, Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic Cults in Medieval Central Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 168. On ‘pagan’ elements in the cult of St Oswald see also D. Rollason, ‘St Oswald in post-conquest England’, in C. Stancliffe and E. Cambridge (eds), Oswald: Northumbrian King to European Saint (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1995), p. 170; A. Jansen, ‘The development of the St Oswald legends on the Continent’, in C. Stancliffe and E. Cambridge (eds), Oswald: Northumbrian King to European Saint (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1995), p. 239. 36 L. Tracy, ‘“So he smote of hir hede by myssefortune”: the real price of the beheading game in SGGK and Malory’, in L. Tracy and J. Massey (eds), Heads Will Roll: Decapitation in the Medieval and Early Modern Imagination (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 211–13.

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37 R. Pinner, The Cult of St Edmund in Medieval East Anglia (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2015), p. 177. 38 On Herbert de Losinga’s claims regarding Hoxne see A. Gransden, ‘Baldwin, abbot of Bury St Edmunds, 1065–1097’, Proceedings of the Battle Conference on Anglo-Norman Studies 4 (1981), p. 70; T. Licence, ‘The cult of St Edmund’, in T. Licence (ed.), Bury St Edmunds and the Norman Conquest (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014), p. 119; S. Edgington, ‘The entrepreneurial activities of Herbert Losinga, abbot of Ramsey (1087–91) and first bishop of Norwich’, in S. Keynes and A. P. Smyth (eds), Anglo-Saxons: Studies Presented to Cyril Roy Hart (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), p. 274. 39 See M. Carey Evans, ‘The contribution of Hoxne to the cult of St Edmund King and Martyr in the Middle Ages and later’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History 36 (1988), pp. 182–95. 40 F. Young, ‘St Edmund, King and Martyr in popular memory since the Reformation’, Folklore 126 (2015a), pp. 167–70. 41 K. Briggs and K. Kilpatrick (eds), A Dictionary of Suffolk Place-Names (Nottingham: English Place-Name Society, 2016), p. 73. 42 Whitelock (1969), p. 220. 43 K. Briggs, ‘Was Hægelisdun in Essex? A new site for martyrdom of Edmund’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History 42 (2011), p. 279. 44 For Agnes de Halisden see ibid., p. 281. 45 S. E. West, ‘A new site for the martyrdom of St Edmund?’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History 35 (1983), pp. 223–5. 46 Briggs (2011), p. 280. 47 Ibid., pp. 281–6. 48 See the website of the Portable Antiquities Scheme Database, finds.org.uk/ database/artefacts/record/id/659704 (accessed 4 June 2017). 49 On æstels see L. Webster and J. Backhouse, The Making of England: Anglo-Saxon Art and Culture AD 600–900 (London: British Museum, 1991), pp. 281–3.

Chapter 3 1 R. W. Pfaff, The Liturgy in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 179. 2 H. Parkes, ‘St Edmund between liturgy and hagiography’, in T. Licence (ed.), Bury St Edmunds and the Norman Conquest (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014), pp. 133–4. 3 N. J. Higham and M. J. Ryan, The Anglo-Saxon World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 260. 4 On this issue see M. Townend, Language and History in Viking Age England: Linguistic Relations between Speakers of Old Norse and Old English (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002). 5 R. Naismith, ‘Coinage in pre-Viking East Anglia’, in D. Bates and R. Liddiard (eds), East Anglia and Its North Sea World in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013), pp. 149–50.

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6 J. Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 317–18. See also J. Blair, ‘Parochial organisation’, in M. Lapidge, J. Blair, S. Keynes and D. Scragg (eds), The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of AngloSaxon England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 356–8. 7 M. Costambeys, ‘Guthrum’, in ODNB, xxiv, p. 322; Higham and Ryan (2013), p. 262. 8 R. Liddiard, ‘Introduction: the North Sea’, in D. Bates and R. Liddiard (eds), East Anglia and Its North Sea World in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013), at p. 8. 9 Naismith (2013), p. 150. On the St Edmund memorial coinage see also C. E. Blunt, ‘The St Edmund memorial coinage’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History 21 (1969), pp. 234–55; R. J. Eaglen, The Abbey and Mint of Bury St Edmunds to 1279 (London: British Numismatic Society, 2006), pp. 13–16; R. Pinner, The Cult of St Edmund in Medieval East Anglia (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2015), pp. 5–6. 10 An alternative interpretation of the St Edmund memorial coinage is that it was minted on the orders of Alfred the Great to assert his dominance of East Anglia, but if this was so we could expect to find the coins only in East Anglia and not throughout the Danelaw. For this view see A. Chapman, ‘King Alfred and the cult of St Edmund’, History Today 53/7 ( July 2003), pp. 37–43. 11 Abbo, PSE, pp. 42–5. 12 S. Foot, ‘English people’, in M. Lapidge, J. Blair, S. Keynes and D. Scragg (eds), The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 170. 13 Higham and Ryan (2013), pp. 266, 297. 14 C. Hart, The Danelaw (London: Bloomsbury, 1992), p. 34. 15 G. Molyneaux, The Formation of the English Kingdom in the Tenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 207. 16 Abbo, PSE, pp. 44–5. 17 S. J. Ridyard, The Royal Saints of Anglo-Saxon England: A Study of West Saxon and East Anglian Cults (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 214. 18 Two feasts of the translation of St Edmund appear in early calendars from Bury St Edmunds for 30 and 31 March, but with no accompanying years. A. Gransden, ‘The alleged incorruption of the body of St Edmund, King and Martyr’, Antiquaries Journal 74 (1994), p. 139, argued that translations usually took place on a Sunday and identified the 31 March feast as commemorating the translation of St Edmund to the rotunda in 1034. 30 March was a Sunday in 872, 878, 889, 895 and 900. A translation from Hægelisdun to Beodericsworth on Sunday 30 March 889 best corresponds to the beginning of the memorial coinage. 19 Pinner (2015), pp. 122–3. 20 Abbo, PSE, pp. 44–5. Since St Etheldreda’s neck was said to have healed from a surgical operation after her death, this detail may represent an attempt at ‘one-upmanship’ on behalf of St Edmund (Pinner (2015), p. 118).

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21 On the popular nature of cults of Anglo-Saxon royal saints see C. Cubitt, ‘Sites and sanctity: revisiting the cult of murdered and martyred Anglo-Saxon royal saints’, Early Medieval Europe 9 (2001), pp. 53–83. 22 Higham and Ryan (2013), p. 304. 23 On the significance of the capture of the five boroughs see S. Foot, ‘Where English becomes British: rethinking contexts for Brunanburh’, in J. Barrow (ed.), Myth, Rulership, Church and Charters: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Brooks (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 127–44. 24 Ridyard (1988), pp. 216–17. 25 A. Finlay, ‘Chronology, genealogy and conversion: the afterlife of St Edmund in the north’, in A. Bale (ed.), St Edmund, King and Martyr: Changing Images of a Medieval Saint (York: York Medieval Press, 2009), pp. 45–6. 26 Ibid., pp. 47–8. 27 For a discussion of this theory see ibid., p. 50. 28 Ibid., p. 58. 29 Ibid., p. 60. 30 M. Statham, ‘The medieval town of Bury St Edmunds’, in A. Gransden (ed.), Bury St Edmunds: Medieval Art, Architecture, Archaeology and Economy (London: British Archaeological Association, 1998), p. 98. 31 A very early source for the presence of St Edmund at Beodericsworth (the town is not yet called Bury St Edmunds) is the Secgan or ‘On the Resting-Places of Saints’, a manuscript dating from the early eleventh century but derived from much earlier sources (Gransden (1994), p. 137). 32 Gransden (ibid., p. 139), questions whether Theodred should be identified as bishop of London and notes that two Theodreds were bishop of Elmham in the second half of the tenth century. 33 Gransden (ibid.) proposes this date on the grounds that 30 March (one of the later feasts of the translation of St Edmund) occurred on a Sunday that year. 34 Abbo, PSE, pp. 46–7. 35 On the early origins of St Mary’s church see A. Gransden, ‘The cult of St Mary at Beodericsworth and then in Bury St Edmunds Abbey to c.1150’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 55 (2004), pp. 627–53. 36 Abbo, PSE, pp. 46–53. 37 F. Hervey (ed.), Corolla sancti Eadmundi: The Garland of Saint Edmund King and Martyr (London: John Murray, 1907), pp. 594–5. 38 The suggestion that Oswen was a literary device is made in A. Gransden, ‘The legends and traditions concerning the origins of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds’, English Historical Review 100 (1985), p. 7. 39 A. Gransden, ‘Baldwin, abbot of Bury St Edmunds, 1065–1097’, Proceedings of the Battle Conference on Anglo-Norman Studies 4 (1981), pp. 73–4. 40 E. Van Houts, ‘The women of Bury St Edmunds’, in T. Licence (ed.), Bury St Edmunds and the Norman Conquest (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014), p. 53. 41 For the text of the charter see Hervey (1907), pp. 588–93. 42 M. Statham, The Book of Bury St Edmunds (2nd edn, Whittlebury: Baron Birch, 1996), p. 11.

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43 C. Hart and A. Syme, ‘The earliest Suffolk charter’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History 36 (1987), p. 165. 44 Gransden (1985), p. 12. For a discussion of this charter see S. Foot, ‘The abbey’s armoury of charters’, in T. Licence (ed.), Bury St Edmunds and the Norman Conquest (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014a), pp. 47–8; S. Foot, ‘Internal and external audiences: reflections on the Anglo-Saxon archive of Bury St Edmunds Abbey in Suffolk’, Haskins Society Journal 24 (2012–13), pp. 173–4. 45 Hart and Syme (1987), p. 169. 46 S. Foot, ‘Households of St Edmund’, Studies in Church History 50 (2014b), p. 48. 47 Ibid., pp. 51–3. 48 Ibid., p. 56. 49 Abbo, PSE, pp. 44–5. 50 Foot (2014b), pp. 56–8. 51 For the date, see Higham and Ryan (2013), p. 314. 52 There is disagreement among scholars on whether Abbo wrote the Passion at Ramsey or on his return to Fleury. On this issue see P. Cavill, ‘Analogy and genre in the legend of St Edmund’, Nottingham Medieval Studies 47 (2003), pp. 21–45. 53 See Gransden (1985), pp. 15–19. 54 Abbo, PSE, pp. 18–19. 55 Ibid., pp. 28–9. 56 S. Newton, The Origins of Beowulf and the Pre-Viking Kingdom of East Anglia (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993), p. 140. 57 Ridyard (1988), p. 226. 58 Hervey (1907), pp. 64–7, 72–3. 59 Ibid., pp. 74–5, 78–9. 60 Ibid., pp. 78–9. 61 For the view that it was intended for high-status lay patrons see C. Phelpstead, ‘King, martyr and virgin: Imitatio Christi in Ælfric’s Life of St Edmund’, in A. Bale (ed.), St Edmund, King and Martyr: Changing Images of a Medieval Saint (York: York Medieval Press, 2009), pp. 30–1. 62 A sacrist cared for the property and valuables of a church. 63 S. Yarrow, Saints and Their Communities: Miracle Stories in Twelfth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 35–6. 64 On St Edmund and London see A. Bale, ‘St Edmund in fifteenth-century London: the Lydgatian miracles of St Edmund’, in A. Bale (ed.), St Edmund, King and Martyr: Changing Images of a Medieval Saint (York: York Medieval Press, 2009b), pp. 145–62. 65 Quoted in Pinner (2015), p. 56. 66 Gransden (1981), p. 68. 67 M. R. James, On the Abbey of S. Edmund at Bury, i (Cambridge: Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 1895), p. 137. 68 Pinner (2015), p. 57. 69 Gransden (1985), pp. 15–19.

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70 Gransden (2004), pp. 632–3. On the Bury St Edmunds Psalter see W. Noel, ‘The lost Canterbury prototype of the 11th-century Bury St Edmunds Psalter’, in A. Gransden (ed.), Bury St Edmunds: Medieval Art, Architecture, Archaeology and Economy (London: British Archaeological Association, 1998), pp. 161–71. 71 Gransden (1985), p. 11. 72 W. B. Bartlett, King Cnut and the Viking Conquest of England 1016 (Stroud: Amberley, 2016), p. 242. 73 Gransden (2004), pp. 637–8. 74 J. Freely and A. S. Çakmak, Byzantine Monuments of Istanbul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 32–5. 75 R. Gem and L. Keen, ‘Late Anglo-Saxon finds from the site of St Edmund’s Abbey’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History 35 (1981), pp. 3–26. 76 D. Bates, ‘The Abbey and the Norman Conquest: an unusual case?’, in T. Licence (ed.), Bury St Edmunds and the Norman Conquest (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014), p. 10. 77 Gransden (1981), p. 66. 78 Eaglen (2006), pp. 36–9. 79 Gransden (1981), p. 66; Pinner (2015), p. 115. 80 Yarrow (2006), p. 40. 81 Gransden (1981), p. 67. 82 I. Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking about Physical Impairment during the High Middle Ages, c.1100–1400 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), p. 147. 83 Hervey (1907), p. 641. A ‘representation’ was a temporary removal of a saint from a shrine rather than the installation of the saint in a new shrine, which was a translation. 84 T. Licence, ‘The cult of St Edmund’, in T. Licence (ed.), Bury St Edmunds and the Norman Conquest (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014), p. 105. 85 Gransden (1981), p. 65. 86 Bates (2014), p. 8.

Chapter 4 1 T. Licence, ‘The cult of St Edmund’, in T. Licence (ed.), Bury St Edmunds and the Norman Conquest (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014), pp. 117–18. On Edmund as a patron of seafarers see S. Yarrow, Saints and Their Communities: Miracle Stories in Twelfth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 54–8. 2 B. Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record and Event (London: Scolar Press, 1982), pp. 105–6. 3 C. Hahn, ‘Peregrinatio et Natio: the illustrated life of Edmund, King and Martyr’, Gesta 30 (1991), pp. 124–5. 4 On Geoffrey of Wells see P. A. Hayward, ‘Geoffrey of Wells’s Liber de infantia sancti Edmundi and the “anarchy” of King Stephen’s reign’, in A. Bale (ed.), St

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Edmund, King and Martyr: Changing Images of a Medieval Saint (York: York Medieval Press, 2009), pp. 63–86. 5 On the textual development of the cult of St Edmund see R. Pinner, The Cult of St Edmund in Medieval East Anglia (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2015), pp. 63–88. 6 A. Bale, ‘Introduction: St Edmund’s medieval lives’, in A. Bale (ed.), St Edmund, King and Martyr: Changing Images of a Medieval Saint (York: York Medieval Press, 2009a), pp. 5–6. 7 For Alcmund and Siwara see Pinner (2015), p. 86. For Edwold of Cerne see F. Hervey (ed.), Corolla sancti Eadmundi: The Garland of Saint Edmund King and Martyr (London: John Murray, 1907), p. xli. For Fremund see Pinner (2015), pp. 107–9. For Ragener see J. H. Williams, ‘From “palace” to “town”: Northampton and urban origins’, in P. Clemoes et al. (eds), Anglo-Saxon England 13 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 126–7. 8 Bale (2009a), p. 4. ‘Canonisation’ in this case does not mean that Edmund was proclaimed a saint (something that occurred shortly after his death) but that he was added to the canon of saints by Rome. 9 D. Bates, ‘The Abbey and the Norman Conquest: an unusual case?’, in T. Licence (ed.), Bury St Edmunds and the Norman Conquest (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014), p. 7. 10 Ibid., p. 12. 11 Ibid., pp. 12–13. 12 C. Harper-Bill, ‘Searching for salvation in Anglo-Norman East Anglia’, in C. Harper-Bill, C. Rawcliffe and R. G. Wilson (eds), East Anglia’s History: Studies in Honour of Norman Scarfe (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002), p. 28. 13 Bates (2014), p. 6. 14 For the tower at St Denis see ibid., pp. 8–9. For the carved capitals at St Denis see P. Z. Blum, ‘The St Edmund cycle in the crypt at SaintDenis’, in A. Gransden (ed.), Bury St Edmunds: Medieval Art, Architecture, Archaeology and Economy (London: British Archaeological Association, 1998), pp. 57–68. 15 Hahn (1991), p. 124. 16 E. Fernie, ‘Abbot Baldwin’s church and the effects of the Conquest’, in T. Licence (ed.), Bury St Edmunds and the Norman Conquest (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014), pp. 78–9; F. Young, The Abbey of Bury St Edmunds: History, Legacy and Discovery (Norwich: Lasse Press, 2016), p. 1. 17 R. Gilyard-Beer, ‘The eastern arm of the abbey church at Bury St Edmunds’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History 31 (1969), p. 260. 18 A. Gransden, ‘Baldwin, abbot of Bury St Edmunds, 1065–1097’, Proceedings of the Battle Conference on Anglo-Norman Studies 4 (1981), pp. 74–5. 19 See E. Cownie, ‘The cult of St Edmund in the eleventh and twelfth centuries: the language and communication of a medieval saint’s cult’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungun 99 (1998), pp. 177–97. 20 A. F. Wareham, ‘Baldwin (d.1097), abbot of Bury St Edmunds’, in ODNB, iii, pp. 441–2.

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21 Gransden (1981), p. 68. 22 T. D. Hardy and C. T. Martin (eds), Gesta Herwardi incliti exulis et militis, in Geoffroy Gaimar, Lestorie des Engles, i (London: HMSO, 1888), p. 396. 23 A. Pluskowski, Wolves and the Wilderness in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), p. 187. 24 Licence (2014), p. 107. 25 Ibid., p. 108. 26 A. Gransden, ‘The alleged incorruption of the body of St Edmund, King and Martyr’, Antiquaries Journal 74 (1994), p. 143. 27 Gransden (1981), p. 76. On Baldwin in Lucca see also A. Gransden, ‘Abbo of Fleury’s Passio sancti Eadmundi’, Revue Bénédictine 105 (1995), pp. 20–78; G. Concioni, ‘San Martino di Lucca: La cattedrale medioevale’, Rivista di archeologia, storia, costume 22 (1994), p. 311. 28 Gransden (1995), p. 78. 29 Licence (2014), p. 109. 30 Ibid., p. 112. 31 Ibid., p. 118. 32 Ibid., pp. 113–14. 33 Ibid., pp. 114–15. 34 Miscellanea II (London: Catholic Record Society 1906), p. 95. 35 J. Ibbett, ‘The hospice of St Edmund in Trastevere’, in The English Hospice in Rome (Leominster: Gracewing, 2005), p. 91. 36 J. B. Mackinlay, Saint Edmund: King and Martyr (London: Art & Book Co., 1893), p. 325. 37 Ibid., p. 331. 38 E. Bordier, Des reliques de saint Edmond, roi et martyr (Paris: Éditions du Cèdre, 1971), pp. 14–20; B. R. S. Houghton, St Edmund: King and Martyr (Lavenham: Terence Dalton, 1970), pp. 60–1. 39 B. De Breffny and G. Mott, The Churches and Abbeys of Ireland (Thames & Hudson: London, 1976), pp. 67–9. 40 A. Ailes, ‘Heraldry in medieval England: symbols of politics and propaganda’, in P. Coss and M. Keen (eds), Heraldry, Pageantry and Social Display in Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002), p. 98. 41 Hervey (1907), pp. 628–33. 42 J. Fantosme (ed. R. Johnston), Jordan Fantosme’s Chronicle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 72. 43 A. Gransden, A History of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds 1182–1256 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2009), pp. 58, 63. 44 Ibid., pp. 63–4. 45 N. Saul, The Three Richards: Richard I, Richard II and Richard III (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2005), p. 170. 46 Jocelin, Chronicle, pp. 61–3. 47 Bale (2009a), p. 13. 48 Gransden (2009), p. 83. 49 For Richard II see Bale (2009a), p. 16. For Henry VI see R. A. Griffiths, King

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and Country: England and Wales in the Fifteenth Century (London: Hambledon, 1991), p. 191. 50 Gransden (2009), pp. 84–5; Bale (2009a), p. 13. 51 P. Coss, ‘Knighthood, heraldry and social exclusion in Edwardian England’, in P. Coss and M. Keen (eds), Heraldry, Pageantry and Social Display in Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002), p. 52. 52 N. Morgan, ‘The signification of the banner in the Wilton Diptych’, in D. Gordon, L. Monnas and C. Elam (eds), The Regal Image of Richard II and the Wilton Diptych (London: Harvey Miller, 1997), p. 183. 53 F. Taylor and J. S. Roskell (trans.), Gesta Henrici Quinti: The Deeds of Henry the Fifth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 106–7. 54 J. Watts, ‘Looking for the state in later Medieval England’, in P. Coss and M. Keen (eds), Heraldry, Pageantry and Social Display in Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002), p. 258. 55 Bale (2009a), p. 16. 56 A list is given in Hervey (1907), pp. 624–6, although Hervey omits St Sepulchrewithout-Newgate in London, which was once dedicated to St Edmund and the Holy Sepulchre (C. R. Forker, Skull beneath the Skin: The Achievement of John Webster (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), p. 14). 57 Pinner (2015), p. 194. On images of St Edmund see ibid., pp. 193–226, and R. Pinner, ‘Medieval images of St Edmund in Norfolk churches’, in A. Bale (ed.), St Edmund, King and Martyr: Changing Images of a Medieval Saint (York: York Medieval Press, 2009), pp. 111–32. 58 E. Duffy, ‘“Holy maydens, holy wyfes”: the cult of women saints in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England’, in W. J. Sheils and D. Wood (eds), Women in the Church: Papers Read at the 1989 Summer Meeting and the 1990 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 178–9. 59 Bale (2009a), p. 13. 60 Ibid., p. 14. Abingdon also claimed to have wood from Edmund’s coffin and from the tree where he died. It is possible that Abingdon acquired these relics from the Bury monk Spearhafoc, who became abbot of Abingdon in 1047 ( J. Blair, ‘Spearhafoc (fl. 1047–1051), abbot of Abingdon’, in ODNB, li, pp. 761–2). 61 Hervey (1907), p. 627. 62 Bale (2009a), pp. 14–15. 63 G. J. Brault, Early Blazon: Heraldic Terminology in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries with Special Reference to Arthurian Heraldry (2nd edn, Woodbridge: Boydell, 1997), pp. 44–5. 64 J. A. Goodall, ‘Rolls of arms of kings: some recent discoveries in the British Library’, Antiquaries Journal 70 (1990), p. 84. 65 Brault (1997), p. 45. 66 W. B. Steveni, Unknown Sweden (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1925), p. 322. 67 L. W. B. Brockliss, The University of Oxford: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 25. 68 Saul (2005), p. 2. 69 Hahn (1991), p. 132.

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70 Gransden (2009), p. 133. 71 Harper-Bill (2002), p. 32. 72 Jocelin, Chronicle, p. 86. 73 Yarrow (2006), p. 48. 74 N. Scarfe, Suffolk in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1986), p. 118. 75 For Ælfric’s disparaging of the Jews see Hervey (1907), pp. 78–81. For the martyr Robert see H. Copinger Hill, ‘S. Robert of Bury St Edmunds’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History 21 (1932), pp. 98–107. 76 Yarrow (2006), p. 53. 77 A. Gransden, A History of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds 1257–1301 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2015), pp. 58–60. 78 Jocelin, Chronicle, p. 97. On the dispute between the abbot and monks see A. Gransden, ‘A democratic movement in the abbey of Bury St Edmunds in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 26 (1975), pp. 25–39. 79 Gransden (2009), p. 151. 80 D. Carpenter (ed.), Magna Carta (London: Penguin Classics, 2015), pp. 292–5. 81 Quoted in Scarfe (1986), pp. 117–18 (my italics). 82 Ibid., pp. 118–19; Gransden (2009), p. 156. 83 Young (2016), pp. 73–4. 84 Jocelin, Chronicle, p. 49. 85 Quoted in Mackinlay (1893), p. 332 (author’s translation). 86 M. Patterson, Lives of the English Saints: Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury (London: James Toovey, 1845), p. 118. 87 L. Colton, ‘Music and identity in medieval Bury St Edmunds’, in A. Bale (ed.), St Edmund, King and Martyr: Changing Images of a Medieval Saint (York: York Medieval Press, 2009), pp. 92–3. 88 Ibid., pp. 93–5. 89 See Pinner (2015), pp. 65–7. 90 Ward (1982), p. 105. 91 Quoted in Mackinlay (1893), p. 137 (author’s translation). 92 N. Saul, Richard II (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997a), p. 309. 93 Morgan (1997), p. 186. 94 J. Hughes, The Rise of Alchemy in Fourteenth-Century England: Plantagenet Kings and the Search for the Philosopher’s Stone (London: Continuum, 2012), pp. 129–30. 95 Pinner (2015), p. 20. 96 Hughes (2012), p. 181. 97 N. Saul, ‘Richard II’s ideas of kingship’, in D. Gordon, L. Monnas and C. Elam (eds), The Regal Image of Richard II and the Wilton Diptych (London: Harvey Miller, 1997b), p. 27. 98 C. M. Barron, ‘Introduction’, in D. Gordon, L. Monnas and C. Elam (eds), The Regal Image of Richard II and the Wilton Diptych (London: Harvey Miller, 1997), p. 11. 99 Saul (1997a), p. 310.

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100 Hughes (2012), p. 204. 101 C. Wilson, ‘Rulers, artificers and shoppers: Richard II’s remodelling of Westminster Hall, 1393–99’, in D. Gordon, L. Monnas and C. Elam (eds), The Regal Image of Richard II and the Wilton Diptych (London: Harvey Miller, 1997), p. 53. 102 Hughes (2012), p. 195. 103 J. Steane, The Archaeology of the Medieval English Monarchy (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 29. 104 C. Ord, ‘Account of the entertainment of King Henry the Sixth at the abbey of Bury St Edmunds’, Archaeologia 15 (1806), p. 68. 105 Ibid., pp. 70–1. 106 Young (2016), pp. 105–6. 107 Ord (1806), pp. 68, 71. 108 Edmund was also translated from the old wooden church of St Mary to the stone rotunda of St Mary and St Edmund, perhaps on 31 March 1034 (A. Gransden, ‘The cult of St Mary at Beodericsworth and then in Bury St Edmunds Abbey to c.1150’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 55 (2004), p. 637) but no inspection is recorded. Gransden (1994), p. 139, proposed, although on the basis of no evidence, that another translation took place on 31 March 967. 109 Gransden (1994), pp. 143–4. 110 Ibid., pp. 144–9. 111 Quoted in C. Eyre, The History of St Cuthbert (London: James Burns, 1849), pp. 183–4. 112 Jocelin, Chronicle, pp. 98–9. 113 Ibid., p. 99. Since Abbot Leofstan left Edmund in the same coffin as before, this was the coffin in which Theodred had placed Edmund’s body in around 951. 114 Ibid., p. 100. 115 Ibid., pp. 100–1. 116 Gransden (1994), pp. 153–5. 117 See M. R. James, On the Abbey of S. Edmund at Bury, i (Cambridge: Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 1895), pp. 127–50; J. Crook, ‘The architectural setting of the cult of St Edmund at Bury 1095–1539’, in A. Gransden (ed.), Bury St Edmunds: Medieval Art, Architecture, Archaeology and Economy (London: British Archaeological Association, 1998), pp. 34–44; Pinner (2015), pp. 138– 66; Young (2016), pp. 181–2. 118 Jocelin, Chronicle, p. 44. 119 Pinner (2015), pp. 157–60. The gilded brass plate was turned around and engraved as a memorial to George Duke (d.1550) in St Andrew’s church, Frenze, Norfolk. 120 From a contemporary document transcribed and translated in James (1895), i, pp. 208–12. 121 E. Danbury, ‘English and French artistic propaganda during the period of the Hundred Years War: some evidence from royal charters’, in C. Allmand (ed.), Power, Culture and Religion in France c.1350–c.1550 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989), p. 94.

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122 Licence (2014), p. 130. 123 Young (2016), pp. 122–3. 124 Steane (1993), p. 36. 125 Danbury (1989), p. 93.

Chapter 5 1 ‘Ecclesiastical intelligence’, The Times, 27 July 1901, p. 7. See also ‘The body of St Edmund: removal to Arundel’, The Tablet, 3 August 1901, p. 180. 2 [ J. B. Mackinlay], ‘St Edmund’, The Tablet, 3 August 1901, pp. 164–5. 3 M. Heale, ‘Training in superstition? Monasteries and popular religion in late medieval and Reformation England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 58 (2007), pp. 420–2. 4 D. MacCulloch, Suffolk and the Tudors: Politics and Religion in an English County 1500–1600 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 135; R. Yates, An Illustration of the Monastic Antiquities of the Town and Abbey of St Edmund’s Bury (1805; London: J. B. Nichols & Son, 1843), p. 429. 5 For the shrine at Woolpit see C. Paine, ‘The chapel of Our Lady at Woolpit’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History 38 (1996), pp. 8–12. For the fertility cult see F. Young, ‘St Edmund, King and Martyr in popular memory since the Reformation’, Folklore 126 (2015a), pp. 163–5. 6 MacCulloch (1986), pp. 154–5. 7 J. Butler, The Quest for Becket’s Bones: The Mystery of the Relics of St Thomas Becket of Canterbury (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 120–3. 8 Ibid., pp. 114–15. 9 Ibid., pp. 116–17. 10 F. A. Gasquet, Edward VI and the Book of Common Prayer (London: John Hodges, 1890), p. 33. 11 John Legh and John ap Rice to Thomas Cromwell, 5 November 1535, quoted in M. R. James, On the Abbey of S. Edmund at Bury, i (Cambridge: Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 1895), pp. 169–70 (spelling modernised). 12 E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 384. 13 John ap Rice, John Williams, Richard Pollard, Phillip Parys and John Smyth to Thomas Cromwell, undated [1538], quoted in James (1895), i, pp. 170–1 (spelling modernised). 14 W. Page (ed.), The Victoria History of the County of Suffolk, ii (London: Constable, 1907), p. 67. 15 R. Gilyard-Beer, ‘The eastern arm of the abbey church at Bury St Edmunds’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History 31 (1969), p. 257; A. B. Whittingham, ‘Bury St Edmunds Abbey and the churches of St Mary and St James’, Archaeological Journal 108 (1952), p. 168. 16 F. Young, The Abbey of Bury St Edmunds: History, Legacy and Discovery (Norwich: Lasse Press, 2016), pp. 131–2. 17 P. de Ribadeneyra (ed. S. J. Weinreich), Pedro de Ribadeneyra’s Ecclesiastical

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History of the Schism of the Kingdom of England: A Spanish Jesuit’s History of the English Reformation (Leiden: Brill, 2017), p. 317. 18 S. Lipscomb, A Visitor’s Companion to Tudor England (London: Ebury, 2012), p. 66. 19 Quoted in R. Pinner, The Cult of St Edmund in Medieval East Anglia (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2015), p. 56. 20 Ibid., p. 114. 21 Ibid., p. 250. 22 A. Gillespie, ‘The later lives of St Edmund: John Lydgate to John Stowe’, in A. Bale (ed.), St Edmund, King and Martyr: Changing Images of a Medieval Saint (York: York Medieval Press, 2009), p. 185. 23 D. MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London: Allen Lane, 1999), pp. 32–4. 24 On the cult of St George in England see H. Summerson, ‘George’, in ODNB, xxi, pp. 775–92. 25 For the ridiculing of the legend see F. Burton, The Fierie Tryall of Gods Saints as a Counter-poyze to I. W. Priest His English Martyrologie (London, 1611), p. 16; T. Fuller, The Church-History of Britain (London, 1656), p. 115; T. Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England (London, 1662), pp. 56–7; E. Pettit, The Visions of the Reformation (London, 1683), p. 4. For Foxe’s version of the legend see J. Foxe, The First Volume of the Ecclesiasticall History Contaynyng the Actes and Monumentes (London, 1570), pp. 185–6. On Foxe’s reinterpretation of St Edmund see Young (2015a), p. 163. 26 Quoted in A. A. Chapman, Patrons and Patron Saints in Early Modern English Literature (London: Routledge, 2013), p. 105. 27 J. Leland (ed. L. Toulmin Smith), The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the Years 1535–1543, ii (London: G. Bell, 1907), pp. 148–50; J. Leland (ed. T. Hearne), Joannis Lelandi antiquarii de rebus Britannicis collectanea, i (London, 1770), pp. 220–6. See also vi, pp. 138–45. 28 On Nowell’s note see R. Brackmann, The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England: Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde, and the Study of Old English (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), p. 86. For Stowe see Gillespie (2009), p. 182. Annotations by Stowe appear on the Arundel Castle MS, BL Harley MS 372 and Oxford Bodleian MS Ashmole 59, and he transcribed sections of the poem into his notebook (BL Harley MS 367). 29 BL Harley MS 247, fol. 45r; see Gillespie (2009), pp. 182–3. For Stowe’s treatment of St Edmund see also J. Stowe, The Annales of England (London, 1592), pp. 75–6. 30 J. Stowe (ed. A. Fraser), A Survey of London Written in the Year 1598 (Stroud: Sutton, 2005), p. 50. 31 W. Camden, Britannia siue Florentissimorum regnorum, Angliae, Scotiae, Hiberniae, et insularum adiacentium ex intima antiquitate chorographica descriptio (London, 1590), p. 366. 32 J. Weever, Ancient Funerall Monuments (London, 1631), pp. 721–5; W. Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, ii (London, 1655–73), pp. 284–5.

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33 N. Harpsfield, Historia Anglicana ecclesiastica (Douai, 1622), pp. 165–7. 34 R. Verstegan, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (Antwerp, 1605), pp. 159–61; J. Wilson, English Martyrologe (St Omer, 1608), pp. 319–20. 35 S. Marron, ‘The early years at St Edmund’s, Paris’, Douai Magazine 3/4 (1925), p. 258; P. Arblaster, ‘Paris 1615–1676’, in G. Scott (ed.), Douai 1903 Woolhampton 2003: A Centenary History (Worcester: Stanbrook Abbey Press, 2003), p. 18. 36 C. Reyner, Apostolatus Benedictinorum in Anglia (Douai, 1626), p. 142. 37 Ibid., p. 163. 38 H. Cressy, The Church-History of Brittany from the Beginning of Christianity to the Norman Conquest (Rouen, 1668), pp. 727–36. One Catholic author, Samuel Johnson, attempted to use the story of St Edmund’s head to prove the existence of purgatory (S. Johnson, Purgatory Prov’d by Miracles Collected out of Roman-Catholick Authors (London, 1688), pp. 26–7). 39 R. Challoner, Britannia Sancta (London, 1745), pp. 293–6; R. Challoner, A Memorial of Ancient British Piety (London, 1761), pp. 161–2. 40 See R. Luckett, ‘Bishop Challoner: the devotionary writer’, in E. Duffy (ed.), Challoner and His Church (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1981), pp. 71–89. In 1755 the calendar of the English Benedictines mistakenly commemorated the feast of St Edmund on 1 December and significantly cut down the liturgical sequence composed by Garnier of Rebais. The erroneous feast day was corrected in 1784. See Calendarium Congregationis AngloBenedictinae (Douai, 1755), pp. 18–19; Calendarium a Congregatione Anglicana Ordinis S. Benedicti observandum (Paris, 1784), p. 19. 41 J. B. Mackinlay, Saint Edmund: King and Martyr (London: Art & Book Co., 1893), pp. 408–9. 42 G. Scott, ‘Paris 1677–1818’, in G. Scott (ed.), Douai 1903 Woolhampton 2003: A Centenary History (Worcester: Stanbrook Abbey Press, 2003), pp. 54–5. 43 On the Greensted painting see W. G. Benham, ‘The picture of St Edmund at Greensted church’, Essex Review 47/186 (April 1938), pp. 78–81; J. Bettley and N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Essex (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 436. 44 B. Foley, ‘The English College and the martyrs’ cause’, in N. Schofield (ed.), Roman Miscellany (Leominster: Gracewing, 2002), pp. 60–1. The painting was engraved in G.-B. Cavalieri, Ecclesiae Anglicanae Trophaea (Rome, 1584), plate 84. 45 K. Gibbons, ‘Saints in exile: the cult of Saint Thomas of Canterbury and Elizabethan Catholics in France’, Recusant History 29 (2009), p. 323. 46 R. Bolron, The Papists Bloody Oath of Secrecy and Letany of Intercession for the Carrying on of This Present Plot (London, 1680), p. 11. 47 F. Young, Magic as a Political Crime in Medieval and Early Modern England (London: I.B.Tauris, 2017b), p. 100. 48 F. Young, ‘Portrayals of St Edmund, King and Martyr after the Reformation’, Douai Magazine 177 (2015b), pp. 66–7. 49 Scott (2003), pp. 39–40.

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50 P. Davidson, ‘Recusant Catholic spaces in early modern England’, in R. Corthell, F. Dolan, C. Highley and A. F. Marotti (eds), Catholic Culture in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), p. 25. 51 P. Harris, ‘Our Lady Vulnerata and the early history of the English College at Valladolid’, paper delivered at the fifty-seventh Catholic Record Society Conference, Downing College, Cambridge, 30 July 2014. 52 Young (2015a), pp. 166–7. 53 J. Westwood and J. Simpson, The Lore of the Land: A Guide to England’s Legends, from Spring-Heeled Jack to the Witches of Warboys (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 530–1. 54 Young (2015a), pp. 167–9, 171. 55 F. Young, Peterborough Folklore (Norwich: Lasse Press, 2017a), pp. 84–5. 56 B. R. S. Houghton, St Edmund: King and Martyr (Lavenham: Terence Dalton, 1970), pp. 60–1. 57 Ibid., pp. 58–9. For a black-and-white photograph of the painting see plate vi (between pp. 24 and 25). The painting is best viewed from the north side of the Basilica’s ambulatory. N. Scarfe, ‘The body of St Edmund: an essay in necrology’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History 31 (1969), p. 304, reported that an earlier painting was found beneath this in 1968. On the dating of this painting see R. Gem and P. Waldron, ‘A scientific examination of the relics of St Edmund at Arundel Castle’, in A. Gransden (ed.), Bury St Edmunds: Medieval Art, Architecture, Archaeology and Economy (London: British Archaeological Association, 1998), p. 51. 58 Such an ‘inflation’ of relics would account for the mixed assemblage of male and female bones examined in 1995 (Gem and Waldron (1998), p. 49). 59 P. de Caseneuve, Histoire de la vie et des miracles de Saint-Edmond, roi d’Angleterre (Toulouse, 1644), p. 101 (author’s translation). 60 Ibid., p. 102 (author’s translation). 61 Ibid., sig. aiiv–sig. aiiir (author’s translation). 62 P. Julien, D’ors et de prières: art et dévotions à Saint-Sernin de Toulouse, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, 2004), p. 270. 63 For a reproduction of Chalette’s sketch see P. Julien, ‘A design by Jean Chalette for the silver reliquary of St Edmund’, Master Drawings 34 (1996), p. 419. On the construction of the reliquary see Julien (2004), pp. 262–3. 64 E. Brown, A Brief Account of Some Travels in Divers Parts of Europe (London, 1685), pp. 138–9. 65 Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk Record Office, MS Collectanea Buriensia, FL541/13/4, fol. 187 (author’s translation). 66 E. Bordier, Vivant saint Edmond, roi et martyr (Paris: Éditions du Cèdre, 1961), pp. 95–8. 67 Mackinlay (1893), pp. 256–7. 68 Gem and Waldron (1998), p. 51.

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69 Caseneuve (1644), p. 100 (author’s translation). 70 Mackinlay (1893), pp. 228–9. For similar sentiments see J. R. Thompson, Records of Saint Edmund of East Anglia King and Martyr (Bury St Edmunds: F. T. Groom, 1890), pp. 48–63; J. A. Floyd, Saint Edmund, King and Martyr (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1898), pp. 1–2. 71 Houghton (1970), p. 78. 72 For a discussion of the commission’s report see E. Bordier, Des reliques de saint Edmond, roi et martyr (Paris: Éditions du Cèdre, 1971). A complete account of the controversy surrounding the relics is given in M. P. Peyton and D. W. Allerton, ‘The little box from Toulouse: the relics of St Edmund’, Christian Order ( January 2013), pp. 54–71. 73 M. R. James, letter to The Times, 2 August 1901, p. 4. 74 J. B. Mackinlay, letter to The Times, 9 August 1901, p. 6E; C. Bigg, letter to The Times, 13 August 1901, p. 8B. See also [ J. B. Mackinlay], ‘St Edmund’, The Tablet, 24 August 1901, p. 284. 75 E. Clarke, ‘The bones of St Edmund’, Bury and Norwich Post, 3 September 1901, p. 5. 76 The Times, 10 September 1901, p. 6; The Tablet, 14 September 1901, p. 401. 77 Houghton (1970), p. 79. 78 Bordier (1971), pp. 14–20. 79 On the duke of Norfolk see Houghton (1970), p. 80. 80 ‘St Edmund’s relics may be moved’, The Times, 1 February 1965, p. 14F; ‘Will relic of St Edmund come back to Bury?’, Bury Free Press, 5 February 1965, p. 1. 81 Houghton (1970), p. 83. 82 Gem and Waldron (1998), pp. 45–56. 83 Ibid., pp. 47–8. 84 J. Dillinger, Magical Treasure Hunting in Europe and North America: A History (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), p. 44. 85 Ibid., pp. 24–5. The treasure hunt may have been initiated by Queen Anne herself, who was desperate for money at the time. See C. Quarrell, Buried Treasure (London: MacDonald & Evans, 1955), p. 98; A. Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, v (London: John Colburn, 1851), p. 124. 86 J. Speed, The History of Great Britaine under the Conquests of the Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans (London, 1611), p. 64. 87 Yates (1843 [1805]), p. 30. 88 T. Oates, The Popes Ware-house, or, The Merchandise of the Whore of Rome (London, 1679), p. 40. 89 On the camisia of St Edmund see Mackinlay (1893), pp. 256–7. A fragment of the camisia was preserved in a crystal reliquary in St Edmund’s church, Norwich (R. Pinner, The Cult of St Edmund in Medieval East Anglia (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2015), p. 28). 90 W. Hawkins, ‘Musae Juridicae’, in W. Hawkins, Corolla varia (Cambridge, 1634), pp. 47–50 (author’s translation). I am grateful to John Trappes-Lomax for his comments on my translation.

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91 C. Collignon, ‘Some account of a body lately found in uncommon preservation, under the ruins of the abbey, at St Edmund’s-Bury, Suffolk; with some reflections upon the subject’, Transactions of the Royal Society 62 (1772), pp. 465–8; C. J. S. Thompson, ‘The hands of Thomas Beaufort, third son of John of Gaunt’, British Medical Journal 1/3562 (13 April 1929), pp. 701–2. 92 E. King, ‘Remarks on the abbey church of Bury St Edmund’s in Suffolk’, Archaeologia 3 (1775), p. 312; E. King, ‘An account of the great seal of Ranulph Earl of Chester; and of two ancient inscriptions found in the ruins of St Edmund Bury Abbey’, Archaeologia 4 (1786), pp. 119–31. 93 J. Symons, Thomas Carlyle: The Life and Ideas of a Prophet (2nd edn, St Looe: House of Stratus, 2001), p. 203. The edition of the Chronicle Carlyle read was J. de Brakelond (ed. J. Gage Rokewode), Chronica Jocelini de Brakelonda, de rebus gestis Samsonis abbatis monasterii sancti Edmundi (London: Camden Society, 1840). 94 T. Carlyle, Past and Present (London: Chapman & Hall, 1843), pp. 65–71. 95 Young (2015a), pp. 169–70. 96 F. W. Mant, Ballads and Lays Illustrative of the Events in Early English History (London: Bell & Daldy, 1857), pp. 77–82; A. Strickland, The Royal Christian Martyr: St Edmund, the Last King of East Anglia (London: Harrison & Sons, 1870). 97 L. N. Parker, St Edmundsbury Pageant 8th to 13th July 1907: Book of Words (Bury St Edmunds: Bury and Norwich Post, 1907), pp. 57–8. 98 A. F. Webling, The Last Abbot (Leicester: Edmund Ward, 1944), pp. 164–5. On Webling’s psychic investigations see A. F. Webling, The Two Brothers (Leicester: Edmund Ward, 1948), pp. 113–30. 99 R. W. Pfaff, Montague Rhodes James (London: Scolar Press, 1980), p. 140. 100 M. R. James, Suffolk and Norfolk: A Perambulation of the Two Counties with Notices of Their History and Their Ancient Buildings (London: J. M. Dent, 1930), p. 36. 101 King (1786), pp. 119–31. The east end of the abbey was also excavated in 1849; see Whittingham (1952), p. 169. 102 Pfaff (1980), pp. 139–40; H. J. M. Maltby, ‘Excavations of the abbey ruins, Bury St Edmunds’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History 24 (1948), p. 256; Gilyard-Beer (1969), pp. 256–62. 103 J. Crook, ‘The architectural setting of the cult of St Edmund at Bury 1095–1539’, in A. Gransden (ed.), Bury St Edmunds: Medieval Art, Architecture, Archaeology and Economy (London: British Archaeological Association, 1998), pp. 42, 44n. 104 Houghton (1970), p. 70. 105 ‘Manor ghost seen 5 times’, Daily Telegraph, 8 December 1953, p. 8; ‘Ghost story for Christmas’, The Tablet, 26 December 1953, p. 619; Quarrell (1955), pp. 93–7. 106 ‘Could St Edmund be buried in Long Melford?’, Suffolk Free Press, 26 May 2017, suffolkfreepress.co.uk/news/could-saint-edmund-be-buried-in-longmelford-1-7980883 (accessed 22 June 2017). 107 Young (2016), p. 128.

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Conclusion 1 The ‘petrified porridge’ description is from R. Andrews, The Rough Guide to Britain (London: Rough Guides, 2001), p. 439. 2 T. Carlyle, Past and Present (London: Chapman & Hall, 1843), p. 42. 3 The English Benedictine Congregation formally renounced its claims to the old monastic sites on 13 December 1686 (D. Lunn, The English Benedictines 1540–1688 (London: Burns & Oates, 1980), p. 139). 4 F. Young, ‘“An horrid popish plot”: the failure of Catholic aspirations in Bury St Edmunds, 1685–88’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History 41 (2006), p. 213. 5 On the founder of the Priory of St Edmund in Paris see G. Scott, ‘Three seventeenth-century Benedictine martyrs’, in D. H. Farmer (ed.), Benedict’s Disciples (2nd edn, Leominster: Gracewing, 1995), pp. 275–8. 6 M. Ghaemi, ‘Bury St Edmunds: should we launch a fresh search for St Edmund’s body?’, East Anglian Daily Times, 6 February 2013, www.eadt.co.uk/ news/bury-st-edmunds-should-we-launch-a-fresh-search-for-st-edmund-sbody-1-1866700 (accessed 30 June 2017). 7 Hugh Frankland to Benet Weldon, 10 March 1710, in Douai Abbey MS Weldon, ‘Memorials’, vol. 6, fol. 600. 8 A. Allanson (ed. A. Cranmer and S. Goodwill), Biography of the English Benedictines (Ampleforth: Ampleforth Abbey, 1999), pp. 126–7. 9 R. Yates, An Illustration of the Monastic Antiquities of the Town and Abbey of St Edmund’s Bury (1805; London: J. B. Nichols & Son, 1843), p. 237. 10 G. Blackwood, Tudor and Stuart Suffolk (Lancaster: Carnegie, 2001), p. 311. 11 J. Butler, The Quest for Becket’s Bones: The Mystery of the Relics of St Thomas Becket of Canterbury (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 116–17. 12 A. Butler, Butler’s Lives of the Saints: March (London: Burns & Oates, 1999), p. 14; A. Walsham, ‘Skeletons in the cupboard: relics after the English Reformation’, Past and Present 206, suppl. 5 (2010), p. 127. 13 J. Bentley, Restless Bones: The Story of Relics (London: Constable, 1985), pp. 167–8. 14 P. Bright, A History of the Catholic Church of Saint Etheldreda in Ely (Ely: privately published, 1987), p. A2. 15 F. Young, The Abbey of Bury St Edmunds: History, Legacy and Discovery (Norwich: Lasse Press, 2016), p. 131. 16 John ap Rice to Thomas Cromwell, 5 November 1539, quoted in Yates (1843 [1805]), pp. 232–4. 17 Young (2016), pp. 128–9. 18 On Mary’s lack of interest in saints, see D. Loades, ‘Introduction: the personal religion of Mary I’, in E. Duffy and D. Loades (eds), The Church of Mary Tudor (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006), p. 21. On Rougham see Young (2016), p. 141. 19 A. B. Whittingham, Bury St Edmunds Abbey (London: HMSO, 1971), p. 12. Whittingham’s ground plans of the abbey and abbey church are the most accurate in existence.

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20 M. Reason, ‘Plan for Bury St Edmunds Abbey tennis courts dig in hunt for St Edmund’s body’, East Anglian Daily Times, 1 May 2017, www.eadt.co.uk/ news/plan-for-bury-st-edmunds-abbey-tennis-courts-dig-in-hunt-for-stedmunds-body-1-4997426 (accessed 30 June 2017). In October 2017 St Edmundsbury Borough Council announced plans to grass over the tennis courts. 21 The remains of Æthelthryth’s half-sister Æthelburh, preserved at Faremoûtieren-Brie until 1792, seem to have disappeared at the French Revolution. 22 I am grateful to Dr John Ashdown-Hill for his advice on this question. 23 ‘German cathedral bones “are Saxon queen Eadgyth”’, BBC News, 18 June 2010, www.bbc.co.uk/news/10332975 (accessed 28 June 2017). 24 ‘Bone fragment “could be King Alfred or son Edward”’, BBC News, 17 January 2014, www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-25760383 (accessed 28 June 2017). 25 For an image of the letter see bbc.co.uk/suffolk/content/image_galleries/ backing_st_edmund_gallery.shtml?7 (accessed 29 June 2017). 26 ‘Video: St Edmund the Martyr’s Story’, 11 June 2017, www.britainfirst.tv/ video-st-edmund-the-martyrs-story-2 (accessed 29 June 2017; link no longer working). 27 [O. Ironside Wood], Edmund of Anglia (Bury St Edmunds: privately printed, 1970), pp. 21–5. 28 Ibid., p. 7. 29 ‘ The Darkness – Barbarian (Official Video)’, youtube.com/ watch?v=GR35pRz7JQ8 (accessed 30 June 2017). 30 N. Pennick, Secrets of East Anglian Magic (2nd edn, Milverton: Capall Bann, 2004), pp. 12–17. For a similar view see M. Taylor, Edmund: The Untold Story of the Martyr-King and His Kingdom (n.p.: Fordaro, 2013).

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Skeat, W. W., The Place-Names of Suffolk (Cambridge: Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 1913). Smith, A. P., Scandinavian Kings in the British Isles, 850–880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Speed, J., The History of Great Britaine under the Conquests of the Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans (London, 1611). Starkey, D., Crown and Country: A History of England through the Monarchy (London: Harper, 2010). Statham, M., The Book of Bury St Edmunds (2nd edn, Whittlebury: Baron Birch, 1996). ——— ‘The medieval town of Bury St Edmunds’, in A. Gransden (ed.), Bury St Edmunds: Medieval Art, Architecture, Archaeology and Economy (London: British Archaeological Association, 1998), pp. 98–110. Steane, J., The Archaeology of the Medieval English Monarchy (London: Routledge, 1993). Steveni, W. B., Unknown Sweden (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1925). Stowe, J., The Annales of England (London, 1592). ——— (ed. A. Fraser), A Survey of London Written in the Year 1598 (Stroud: Sutton, 2005). Strickland, A., Lives of the Queens of England, 8 vols (London: John Colburn, 1851). ——— The Royal Christian Martyr: St Edmund, the Last King of East Anglia (London: Harrison & Sons, 1870). Summerson, H., ‘George’, in ODNB, xxi, pp. 775–92. Symons, J., Thomas Carlyle: The Life and Ideas of a Prophet (2nd edn, St Looe: House of Stratus, 2001). Taylor, F., and J. S. Roskell (trans.), Gesta Henrici Quinti: The Deeds of Henry the Fifth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). Taylor, M., Edmund: The Untold Story of the Martyr-King and His Kingdom (n.p.: Fordaro, 2013). Thompson, C. J. S., ‘The hands of Thomas Beaufort, third son of John of Gaunt’, British Medical Journal 1/3562 (13 April 1929), pp. 701–2. Thompson, J. R., Records of Saint Edmund of East Anglia King and Martyr (Bury St Edmunds: F. T. Groom, 1890). Townend, M., Language and History in Viking Age England: Linguistic Relations between Speakers of Old Norse and Old English (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002). Tracy, L., ‘“So he smote of hir hede by myssefortune”: the real price of the beheading game in SGGK and Malory’, in L. Tracy and J. Massey (eds), Heads Will Roll: Decapitation in the Medieval and Early Modern Imagination (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 207–34. Van Houts, E., ‘The women of Bury St Edmunds’, in T. Licence (ed.), Bury St Edmunds and the Norman Conquest (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014), pp. 53–73. Verstegan, R., A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (Antwerp, 1605). Walsham, A., ‘Skeletons in the cupboard: relics after the English Reformation’, Past and Present 206, suppl. 5 (2010), pp. 121–43.

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Ward, B., Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record and Event (London: Scolar Press, 1982). Wareham, A. F., ‘Baldwin (d.1097), abbot of Bury St Edmunds’, in ODNB, iii, pp. 441–2. Watts, J., ‘Looking for the state in later Medieval England’, in P. Coss and M. Keen (eds), Heraldry, Pageantry and Social Display in Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002), pp. 243–68. Webling, A. F., The Last Abbot (Leicester: Edmund Ward, 1944). ——— The Two Brothers (Leicester: Edmund Ward, 1948). Webster, L., and J. Backhouse, The Making of England: Anglo-Saxon Art and Culture AD 600–900 (London: British Museum, 1991). Weever, J., Ancient Funerall Monuments (London, 1631). West, S. E., ‘A new site for the martyrdom of St Edmund?’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History 35 (1983), pp. 223–5. Westwood, J., and J. Simpson, The Lore of the Land: A Guide to England’s Legends, from Spring-Heeled Jack to the Witches of Warboys (London: Penguin, 2005). Whitelock, D., ‘Fact and fiction in the legend of St Edmund’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History 31 (1969), pp. 217–33. Whittingham, A. B., ‘Bury St Edmunds Abbey and the churches of St Mary and St James’, Archaeological Journal 108 (1952), pp. 168–89. ——— Bury St Edmunds Abbey (London: HMSO, 1971). Williams, J. H., ‘From “palace” to “town”: Northampton and urban origins’, in P. Clemoes et al. (eds), Anglo-Saxon England 13 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 113–36. Wilson, C., ‘Rulers, artificers and shoppers: Richard II’s remodelling of Westminster Hall, 1393–99’, in D. Gordon, L. Monnas and C. Elam (eds), The Regal Image of Richard II and the Wilton Diptych (London: Harvey Miller, 1997), pp. 33–59. Wilson, D. M., The Northern World (London: Thames & Hudson, 1980). Wilson, J., English Martyrologe (St Omer, 1608). Yarrow, S., Saints and Their Communities: Miracle Stories in Twelfth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Yates, R., An Illustration of the Monastic Antiquities of the Town and Abbey of St Edmund’s Bury (1805; London: J. B. Nichols & Son, 1843). Yelle, R. A., Semiotics of Religion: Signs of the Sacred in History (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). Yorke, B., Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England (London: Seaby, 1990). Young, F., ‘“An horrid popish plot”: the failure of Catholic aspirations in Bury St Edmunds, 1685–88’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History 41 (2006), pp. 209–55. ———‘St Edmund, King and Martyr in popular memory since the Reformation’, Folklore 126 (2015a), pp. 159–76. ———‘Portrayals of St Edmund, King and Martyr after the Reformation’, Douai Magazine 177 (2015b), pp. 62–80.

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Newspapers ‘Ecclesiastical intelligence’, The Times, 27 July 1901, p. 7. James, M. R., letter to The Times, 2 August 1901, p. 4. [Mackinlay, J. B.], ‘St Edmund’, The Tablet, 3 August 1901, pp. 164–5. ‘The body of St Edmund: removal to Arundel’, The Tablet, 3 August 1901, p. 180. Mackinlay, J. B., letter to The Times, 9 August 1901, p. 6E. Bigg, C., letter to The Times, 13 August 1901, p. 8B. [Mackinlay, J. B.], ‘St Edmund’, The Tablet, 24 August 1901, p. 284. Clarke, E., ‘The bones of St Edmund’, Bury and Norwich Post, 3 September 1901, p. 5. The Times, 10 September 1901, p. 6. The Tablet, 14 September 1901, p. 401. ‘St Edmund’s relics may be moved’, The Times, 1 February 1965, p. 14F. ‘Will relic of St Edmund come back to Bury?’, Bury Free Press, 5 February 1965, p. 1. ‘Manor ghost seen 5 times’, Daily Telegraph, 8 December 1953, p. 8. ‘Ghost story for Christmas’, The Tablet, 26 December 1953, p. 619.

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Plates

Plate 1  St Peter’s chapel, Bradwell-on-Sea (Othona), built in 654 by St Cedd, is the sole survivor of eastern England’s early missionary churches.

Plate 2  The martyrdom of St Edmund, depicted in John Lydgate’s Lives of Saints Edmund and Fremund (c.1434), British Library MS Harley 2278, fol. 61.

Plate 3 The æstel found at Drinkstone, Suffolk, by a metal detectorist in December  and known as the Edmund Jewel.

Plate 4  A memorial penny of St Edmund, minted in Danishcontrolled East Anglia between around 890 and 910.

Plate 5  St Edmund’s head. Engraving from Richard Yates, An Illustration of the Monastic Antiquities of the Town and Abbey of St Edmund’s Bury (1843), plate facing p. 44 (depicting a surviving fragment of stained glass from the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds).

Plate 6  The death of King Swein, 1014, depicted in John Lydgate’s Lives of Saints Edmund and Fremund (1461–75), British Library MS Yates Thompson 47, fol. 83.

Plate 7  The wooden nave of St Andrew’s church, Greensted-juxta-Ongar (tenth century).

Plate 8  Reconstruction of St Edmund’s shrine by William Yates (1802). Engraving from Richard Yates, An Illustration of the Monastic Antiquities of the Town and Abbey of St Edmund’s Bury (1843), plate facing p. 39.

Plate 9  The coat of arms attributed to St Edmund as the emblem of East Anglia. Detail from Jan Jansson’s map of the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy (1646), based on John Speed’s earlier map of 1627.

Plate 10  St Edmund, St Edward the Confessor, St John the Baptist and Richard II (kneeling), as depicted in the Wilton Diptych.

Plate 11  Henry VI at the shrine of St Edmund, depicted in John Lydgate’s Lives of Saints Edmund and Fremund (c.1434), British Library MS Harley 2278, fol. 4v.

Plate 12  The martyrdom of St Edmund (c.1450, restored 1876–8) as depicted in the church of St Peter and Paul, Pickering, North Yorkshire.

Plate 13  St Edmund, painted by Juan de Roelas (c.1592) for the English College, Seville.

Plate 14  St Edmund in prayer (second from left), from the chapel of the English College, Valladolid, c.1679.

Plate 15  Angels pull arrows from St Edmund’s body, painted by Charles de La Fosse c.1677 for the Priory of St Edmund, Paris (now at the Irish College, Paris).

Index Abbreviations Berks. Berkshire Cambs. Cambridgeshire Gloucs. Gloucestershire Herefs. Herefordshire Hunts. Huntingdonshire Lincs. Lincolnshire Norf. Norfolk Northants. Northamptonshire Notts. Nottinghamshire Shrops. Shropshire Suff. Suffolk Wilts. Wiltshire Yorks. Yorkshire Aachen, Germany 90 Abbo of Fleury 14–15, 19–20, 41–2, 44, 46, 50–5, 56–9, 62, 63, 64, 67, 73–4, 75, 76, 77, 80, 81, 82, 83–5, 88, 91, 94, 97, 112, 125, 156 Abingdon, Berks. 104, 172 n.60 Ælfgar 80, 82 Ælfgeth 91, 92 Ælfhun, bishop of London 86 Ælfric of Eynsham 83–5, 108 Ælfwald, king of the East Angles 23 Ælfwine, bishop of Elmham 89 Ælla, king of Northumbria 44, 59 æstels 65–6, 74 see also Alfred Jewel; Edmund Jewel Æthelbald, king of Mercia 25 Æthelberht, king of Kent 24, 26–7 Æthelberht II, St, king of the East Angles 14, 30, 38–9 Æthelburh, St, abbess of Faremoûtieren-Brie 14, 36, 37, 161 n.60, 182 n.21 Æthelred, king of the East Angles 70 Æthelred II (‘the Unready’), king of England 53, 86, 87, 88, 91

Æthelstan, king of England 13, 26, 51, 55, 56, 65, 74–5, 77, 84, 152 Æthelstan I, king of the East Angles 39 Æthelstan II (Guthrum), king of the East Angles 15, 71–2, 73, 74, 75 Æthelthryth, St, abbess of Ely (St Etheldreda) 3, 14, 22, 35–6, 85, 94, 116, 148–9, 152, 166 n.20, 182 n.21 Æthelweard, king of the East Angles 40–1 Æthelwine 86, 87, 91, 120, 123 Æthelwold, bishop of Dummoc 30 Æthelwulf, king of Wessex 42 Agincourt, battle of 11, 104 Alan Rufus, 1st lord of Richmond 95 Alberti, Durante 131 Alcmund 94 Alexander II, pope 99 Alfred the Great, king of Wessex 1, 7, 15, 24, 25–6, 32, 48, 71–2, 74, 153, 166 n.10 Alfred Jewel 65 Aller, Somerset 71 Alwalton, Hunts. 132 Angeln, Denmark 20–1

Index Angles 7, 20–3, 24, 25, 26, 28, 42, 43, 111, 160 n.18 see also East Angles Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 38, 40, 44, 46, 47–50, 51–2, 55, 56, 59, 64, 66–7, 69, 71, 77 Annals of St Neots 41, 50, 94 Anne of Denmark, queen of England 139 antiphons 68, 111–12 antiquaries 128, 137, 141 Ap Nicholas, Gruffydd 103 Ap Rhys, Rhys 103 Ap Rice, John 149 apostasy 34, 58 apparitions 3, 17, 88, 102–3, 154 see also dream visions archery 132 armour-bearer, Edmund’s 51, 55–6, 65, 67, 75, 77, 84 arms of St Edmund 17, 101, 104, 105–6, 113, 121, 122, 131 art, St Edmund in 62, 96, 97, 104, 105, 110, 111, 112–13, 119, 120, 126–7, 130–2, 135, 172 n.57 Arthur, king 105 Arundel, Sussex 123, 137, 138, 139, 148 Ashbocking, Suff. 22 Ashby Dell, Suff. 21 Assandun, battle of 88–9, 90 Asser 48–9, 56 Athassel, Ireland 101 Attleborough, Norf. 140 Augustine of Canterbury, St 24, 25, 26, 30 Augustine of Hippo, St 78

207

Berengaria of Navarre, queen of England 102 Bigg, Charles 137 Bigod, Roger, earl of Norfolk 102 Bilney, Thomas 124 Birmingham 148 Black Ditches 19 Black Prince, Edward the 113 Blair, Tony 153 blood eagle, rite of 59, 164 n.30, 164 n.32 Blything Hundred, Suff. 22 Bordier, Edmond 138 Botolph of Iken 120, 150, 151 Bradfield Combust, Suff. 63 Bradfield St Clare, Suff. 1, 15, 63, 65, 66 see also Hellesden Ley, Suff. Bradfield Woods, Suff. 1, 65 Bradwell-on-Sea, Essex 32–3 Brancaster, Norf. 20 Brexit 10, 155 Britain First 155 Britishness 9–11, 23 Britons 20, 21–2, 24, 29, 60, 161 n.46, 59 Brown, Edward 135 Browne, Thomas 22 Bruneswold, forest of 97–8 Burgh Castle, Norf. 20, 37, 162 n.63 Burghred, king of Mercia 42 Bury St Edmunds, Suff. 2, 15, 33, 38, 62, 63, 65, 74, 79, 82, 86, 87, 88, 94, 102, 107, 109–10, 122, 123, 127, 133, 139, 142, 154, 156, 157 abbey of 7, 13, 16, 17, 34, 64, 68, 83, 89–91, 92, 95–6, 97, 98, 99, 102–3, 106, 108–9, 111–12, 114, 121, 129, Baldwin, abbot of Bury St Edmunds 16, 132, 135, 137, 145 82, 92, 96–7, 98–9, 111, 116, 133 abbey church 62, 68, 96–7, 104, banner of St Edmund 17, 102, 103, 119 108, 128, 144, 149, 150 Bard-le-Régulier, France 100 abbot’s palace 145 Barfleur, France 93 dissolution 124–6, 143, 146–9 Battely, John 135 excavations at 13–14, 139–41 Beaufort, Edmund, 2nd duke of Somerset monastic cemetery 144, 151, 153 106 rotunda of St Mary and St Beaufort, Thomas, duke of Exeter 141 Edmund 90 Becket, Thomas, St, archbishop of banleuca 81–2, 91 Canterbury 3, 11, 12, 94, 95, 121, 125, St Edmund’s Roman Catholic church 128, 131 138 Bede 21, 24–5, 26–7, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37 Great Churchyard 18, 140, 150–1 Benedictines 7, 16, 17, 50, 58–9, 62, 81, 83, St Edmundsbury Cathedral (St James’ 84, 89, 100, 104, 129–30, 137, 145, 150 church) 138, 140, 151 Bentham, Jeremy 3 St Margaret, chapel of 140 Beodericsworth St Mary’s church 15, 58, 79, 81, 90, 149, see Bury St Edmunds, Suff. 151, 167 n.35, 174 n.108 Beowulf 29, 69, 73 uprising of 1327 7

208

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Bury St Edmunds Psalter 34, 89 Byrhtnoth, ealdorman of Essex 86 Caister-on-Sea, Norf. 20 Cambridge 71 Cambridgeshire 2, 19, 22, 33, 36, 47, 50, 132 Camden, William 128 camisia of St Edmund see relics of St Edmund Campion, Edmund 131 canonisation 95, 170 n.8 by acclamation 15 by translation 76 Canterbury, Kent 12, 26, 33, 125 Carlyle, Thomas 8, 14, 141–2, 144 Casé, Fr 135 Castor, Northants. 132 Catholicism 8, 12, 13, 17, 70, 116, 123–4, 125, 128–32, 135–8, 147, 148, 149, 155 Cedd, St 32 celibacy 58, 81 Ceolnoth, archbishop of Canterbury 40 Chad, St 148 Chalette, Jean 135 Challoner, Richard, bishop of Doberus 130 Charlemagne, emperor 41, 90 Charles I, king of England 132, 146 charters 25, 42, 50, 71, 81–2, 89 Chartists 141 Chichester, Sussex 125 Chippenham, Wilts. 71 Christianity 1, 2, 5, 6, 15, 24, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 46, 48, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 66, 68, 69–70, 71, 73, 76, 77, 78, 134, 156, 157 see also Catholicism; Protestantism Circignani, Niccolò 130 Cirencester, Gloucs. 72 Clapa, Osgod 91 Clarke, Ernest 137 Cnoberesburg, Suff. 37, 61 Cnut, king of England 16, 58, 69, 88–9, 90, 129 Cockfield, Suff. 63 coinage 9, 21, 28, 30, 38, 40, 70, 91 of Edmund 40, 42–3, 44–5 memorial 72–3, 74, 75 see also moneyers coffin of St Edmund 80, 86, 115–16, 117–18, 119, 123, 143, 149, 150, 152, 153, 172 n.60, 174 n.113

Colchester, Essex 105 Comnenus, Isaac, despot of Cyprus 102, 119 Confraternity of St Edmund 114 Constantine, emperor 90 Constantinople 29, 70, 90 contact relics 98–9, 100, 111, 133 see also relics of St Edmund conversion 2, 24, 26, 28, 32, 59, 68, 70, 105 Counter-Reformation see Catholicism Cranmer, Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury 125, 127 Cratendune, Cambs. 27 Cressy, Hugh Paulinus 130 Crickhowell, Powys 104 Cromwell, Thomas 12, 17, 126, 142, 149 Crouchback, Edmund, earl of Lancaster 106, 111 Crowland, Lincs. 42 crowns 46, 111, 113, 122 see also arms of St Edmund Crusades 7, 101, 102, 154, 155 Culford, Suff. 138 Curzun, Robert de 97 Cuthbert, St 3, 14, 35, 36, 38, 81, 85, 94, 112, 116, 125, 148 Cynethryth, queen of Mercia 38 Damietta, Egypt 101 Danelaw 15, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 166 n.10 Danes 1, 2, 6, 7, 8–9, 15–16, 26, 34, 39–40, 41, 43–5, 46, 47–50, 51–4, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71–3, 74–8, 80, 83, 85–6, 89, 91, 105, 119, 132, 141, 142, 155, 156, 162 n.62 Darkness, the (rock band) 156 De Argentyne, Richard 101 De Beaumont, Robert, earl of Leicester 101 De Brakelond, Jocelin 103, 117, 118, 119, 141, 150, 152 De Burgh, William, seneschal of Munster 100–1 De Caseneuve, Pierre 12–13, 133–4, 135, 136, 146, 147 De Ceriville, Gilbert 103 De Halisden, Agnes 63 De la Fosse, Charles 131 De Losinga, Herbert, bishop of Norwich 62 De Mandeville, Geoffrey 109

Index De Montchal, Charles, archbishop of Toulouse 134 De Montfort, Robert 102 De Roelas, Juan 131 De Vere, Robert, duke of Ireland 101 Deben, river 23 decapitation 1, 60, 114 dedications of churches 2, 27, 39, 62, 78, 79, 86, 96, 99, 100–1, 104–5, 120, 145, 161–2 n.60, 172 n.56 Demetrius, St 112 democracy 41, 84 Denis, St 4, 90–1, 96, 110, 112 Denmark 16, 20, 39, 44, 69, 97 Derby 77 Devil’s Dyke 19, 33, 34, 47, 132 Dijon, France 100 DNA 138, 152, 153 Domesday Book 63, 64, 107 Dorking, Surrey 40 Douai, France 146 Douai Abbey see St Edmund, Priory of (founded 1615) Drayton, Michael 128 dream visions 3, 108, 122 Drinkstone, Suff. 65, 66 Dugdale, William 128 Dummoc, Suff. 30, 32, 40, 61, 71, 161 n.52 Dunstable, Beds. 94 Dunstan, St, archbishop of Canterbury 50–1, 56, 58, 67, 82, 83 Durham, Reginald of 112 Durham Cathedral 14, 81, 116, 125, 148 Eadbald, king of Kent 26 Eadgifu, queen of England 74 Eadgyth, empress 152 Eadwig 82 East Angles 23, 24, 26, 29, 32, 33, 42, 43, 45, 48, 54, 65, 67, 72, 73, 82, 84, 85, 155 East Anglia, kingdom of 14, 15, 19–20, 23, 24, 25, 26, 29–31, 33, 38–9, 42–3, 45, 57, 70, 72–4 Ecgberht, king of Wessex 42 Ecgfrith, king of Northumbria 36 Ecgric, king of the East Angles 33 Edington, battle of 1, 71 Edmund, St, king of the East Angles accession 40–1 coinage see coinage, of Edmund coronation 41, 94

209

death 1, 2, 3, 15, 31, 35, 41, 46–67, 69, 73, 78, 84, 94, 127, 134, 156, 163 n.2, 170 n.8 election 41, 84 family 40, 78–9, 94 see also arms of St Edmund; coffin of St Edmund; feast days of St Edmund; feretory of St Edmund; head, St Edmund’s; incorruption; miracles of St Edmund; relics of St Edmund; shrine of St Edmund; translations of St Edmund; virginity Edmund I, king of England 74–5, 77, 81–2, 83 Edmund II Ironside, king of England 7, 88, 106 Edmund, 2nd earl of Cornwall 106 Edmund Jewel 65–6, 74 Edmund of Langley, 1st duke of York 106 Edmund of Woodstock, 1st earl of Kent 106 Edmundbyers, Co. Durham 104 education 31, 33, 36, 50 Edward I, king of England 7, 11, 16, 103, 105, 106, 108, 122 Edward III, king of England 11, 106, 113, 121 Edward VI, king of England 127 Edward the Confessor, St, king of England 3, 4, 11, 12, 17, 69, 91, 92, 95–6, 97, 103–4, 105, 106, 107, 110, 113, 114, 121, 122, 125, 127, 131, 148, 157 Edward the Elder, king of England 16, 74, 77, 153 Edward the Martyr, St, king of England 148 Edwin, St, king of Northumbria 27, 34 Edwold of Cerne, St 94 Elizabeth I, queen of England 8, 127, 128 Ely, Cambs. 3, 22, 27, 35, 36, 85, 109–10, 116, 149, 152 Emma of Normandy, queen of England 91 English College, Rome see Rome Englishness 2, 6, 7, 8–9, 10–11, 14, 18, 31, 77, 94, 101, 111, 112, 113, 129, 131, 134, 154, 155, 157 Eni, king of the East Angles 36, 152 Eorpwald, king of the East Angles 31, 32 Erasmus, Desiderius 124 Erik, St, king of Sweden 105 Etheldreda, St see Æthelthryth, St, abbess of Ely

210

Edmund

Eustace, prince 107 Exning, Suff. 22 Eye, Suff. 30 Faremoûtier-en-Brie, France 36, 37, 182 n.21 feast days of St Edmund 2, 68, 92, 99, 100, 111–12, 120, 127, 133, 166 n.18, 167 n.33, p. 177 n.40 see also translations of St Edmund Fécamp, abbey of 100 federalism 10, 155 Felix of Burgundy, St 32, 33, 37, 161 n.52 Fens 19, 20, 22, 27, 36, 50 feretory of St Edmund 86, 116–17, 119 fires of 1198 115, 116–17, 119, 120 of 1465 119, 120, 137, 148 FitzAlan, Richard, earl of Arundel 114 Fitzwalter, Robert 109 Five Boroughs 77, 167 Fleam Dyke 19 Flemings 100, 101–2, 122 Fleury Abbey 50 folklore 56, 76, 88, 132, 143 forgeries 42, 82, 89, 116 Fornham, battle of 101, 122 Fornham St Genevieve, Suff. 101 Foxe, John 17, 127 France 2, 13, 31, 33, 36, 37, 70, 90, 96, 100, 104, 110, 112, 122, 134, 135, 136, 145, 149, 161 n.60 Francia see France Fremund, St 94 Frenze, Norfolk 174 n.119 Frink, Elizabeth 163 n.1 Fursey, St 37 Gage Rokewode, John 141 Gainsborough, Lincs. 87 Garnier of Rebais 99, 111, 177 n.40 Garter, Order of the 4, 121, 127 Gateshead, Co. Durham 104 Gaul see France Gennings, Edmund 131 Geoffrey of Wells 42, 94 George, St 4, 6, 11, 12, 103, 104, 106, 110, 113, 114, 121, 122, 127, 131, 135, 154–5, 157 George IV, king of Great Britain 9 Georgia 4 Germany 20, 28, 42

Gildas 21 Gipeswic see Ipswich, Suff. Gipping, river 22 Gloucester Abbey 105 Great Heathen Army 43–5, 47, 48, 50, 52, 67 Greensted-juxta-Ongar, Essex 86–7, 130 Gregory I, St, pope 11, 24, 25, 111 Guthfrithson, Olaf, king of Dublin 77 Guthrum see Æthelstan II (Guthrum), king of the East Angles Hadleigh, Suff. 140 Hadrian, archbishop of Canterbury 29 Hægelisdun 1, 2, 15, 52–3, 54, 56, 59, 67, 79, 85 cult of St Edmund at 73–4, 75, 76 location of 61–6 hagiography 6, 15, 55, 56, 58, 94, 129, 157 Halfdan 44, 71 Harpsfield, Nicholas 128–9 Hastings, battle of 1 Hawkins, William 140–1 Hazeleigh, Essex 64 head, St Edmund’s 1, 2, 3, 35, 51, 54–5, 56–7, 60–1, 62, 67, 73, 76, 91–2, 99, 114, 118, 121, 127, 130, 133, 137, 139, 177 n.38 Heavenfield, battle of 59–60 Hedda Stone 50 Helena, St 105 Hellesden Ley, Suff. 1, 63–6 see also Hægelisdun Hellesdon, Norf. 63, 64 Henry I, king of England, 107 Henry II, king of England 101, 102, 107 Henry III, king of England 104, 106, 111, 114 Henry IV, king of England 114 Henry V, king of England 104, 106, 141 Henry VI, king of England 7, 11, 16, 17, 102, 103, 112, 114–15, 125, 148 Henry VII, king of England 4, 12, 106, 122, 125 Henry VIII, king of England 17, 59, 101, 116, 122, 124, 125, 126, 149 Henry of Essex 102–3 Henry of Kirkstead 94 heptarchy 53 Hereward the Wake 97 Herman the archdeacon 63, 87, 88, 92, 97, 98, 99, 126

Index Hexham, Northumberland 129 Hitchcock, William 145, 146–8, 149 Honorius, archbishop of Canterbury 32 Horlak, king of Denmark 44 Horringer, Suff. 80 Houghton, Bryan 138 Hoxne, Suff. 62, 79, 97, 124, 128, 132, 142 Hugh of Northwold, abbot of Bury St Edmunds 108, 109 Humphrey, duke of Gloucester 114 Hunberht, St, bishop of Elmham 40, 53

211

Larling, Norf. 30 Laurence, St 125 Lebanon 6 Leicester 77, 152 Leland, John 128 Leo XIII, pope 136–7 Leofstan, abbot of Bury St Edmunds 91–2, 98, 115, 116, 120, 174 n.113 Leofstan, thegn 80 Lichfield, Staffs. 33, 148 Lièpvre, France 92 Lincoln 77, 125 Iceland 78, 107 Lincoln, Abraham 156 Iceni 20, 161 n.46 Lindisfarne 36, 38 Ickworth, Suff. 80 Lindsey, kingdom of 24, 28 incorruption 2, 3, 4, 8, 14, 15, 35–8, 57, Linnet, river 79 60, 61–2, 76, 81, 85, 88, 91, 92, 98, 107, liturgy 2, 89, 111–12, 125 116, 124, 127, 130, 149, 161 n.62 see also antiphons indulgences 96 Lögmannshlíð, Iceland 78 Ine, king of Wessex 25 London 13, 19, 28, 40, 74, 91, 99, 104, Inguar 105, 123, 128, 145, 146 see Ivarr the Boneless St Edmund, church of 86 Ipswich, Suff. 28, 40, 43, 86 St Gregory, church of 86 Ipswich ware 79 St Paul’s Cathedral 86 Ireland 2, 6, 9, 17, 44, 100–1, 155 St Sepulchre-without-Newgate, church Ivarr the Boneless 2, 15, 44, 45, 51–2, 53, of 86 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 67, 71, 78 Tower of 125 Westminster, Palace of 9, 10, 114 James I, king of England 9, 139, 146–7 Westminster Abbey 4, 12, 17, 103–4, James II, king of England 17, 130, 145 105, 109, 113, 121, 125, 127, 136, 148, James, M. R. 13, 14, 17, 88, 137, 143 150 Jerusalem 90, 94 Westminster Cathedral 8, 13, 123, 154 Jews 107–8 Long Melford, Suff. 143 Joan of Arc 110 Lothbrok, Ragnar 44, 59, 78 Job, Book of 51, 53 Louis VIII, king of France 12, 134, 135, John, king of England 7, 12, 16, 106, 107, 137 108–9, 110, 134 Louis IX, St, king of France 110, 122 John of Gaunt 106 Lucca, Italy 99, 112, 133 John of Salisbury 107 Lydgate, John 14, 94, 115, 128, 141, 143 Jordan of Fantosme 101 Jurmin, St 120 Mackinlay, Joseph 137 Jutes 28 Magdeburg Cathedral 152 Magi 113 Kennedy, John F. 156 Magna Carta 7, 108, 109, 156 Kerrison, Edward 62 Magnus Ladulås, king of Sweden 105 King, Edward 141 Malcolm III, king of Scots 106 King, Martin Luther 156 Maldon, Essex 64, 86 Knights of St Edmund 102, 119 Manning, Edward, cardinal 136 Mant, Frederick 142 Lacy, Henry, earl of Lincoln 119 martyrdom 2–3, 12, 31–4, 37, 38–9, 46, Lakenheath, Suff. 21, 29 51, 53–4, 57–8, 60, 68, 78, 81, 91, 102, Lambert, abbot of Angers 93 110, 111, 121, 128–9, 130–2 landscape, St Edmund in 132 Mary, Queen of Scots 131 Lark, river 79 Mary I, queen of England 127, 128, 150

212

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Maserfield, battle of 59 mediums, psychic 137, 142 Mercia, kingdom of 30, 38, 39, 42, 43, 45, 47, 48, 52, 67, 160 n.18 Merovingians 28, 90 Merry de Val, Rafael, cardinal 137 Mézerolles, France 37 Michael, St 117 Middlemore, Mary 139 minsters 30, 49, 71 miracles of St Edmund 16, 54–5, 74, 75, 76, 80–1, 82, 86, 87–8, 94, 99, 101, 110, 114, 119, 120, 121–2 moneyers 40, 42, 44–5, 72 see also coinage Montacute Priory 106 Mortimer, Edmund, 3rd earl of March 106 Murphy, Mark 153

Östergötland 29 Oswald, king of the East Angles 70, 78–9 Oswald, St, king of Northumbria 3, 34, 59–60, 61, 162 n.62, 162 n.66 Oswald of Worcester, St, archbishop of York 50, 83 Oswen 79, 81, 92, 120, 125 Oswestry, Shrops. 3, 60 Oswine, St, king of Northumbria 34 Othona see Bradwell-on-Sea, Essex Ovinus 22 Oxford, Synod of (1222) 111 Oxford, University of 65, 106, 137

paganism 2, 3, 22, 23, 26, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34, 40, 46, 58, 59–60, 61, 67, 70, 78, 95, 127, 164 n.35 Neopaganism 156–7 Natalis 93 pageants 142, 156 nationalism 5, 10, 18, 104, 155 Palach, Jan 156 Nedeham, Robert 147 Paris, France 12, 13, 90, 129, 130, 131, Netherlands 20, 28, 140 145, 146, 161 n.60 Newcastle-upon-Tyne 137 Paris, Matthew 134 Newhaven, Sussex 123 Patrick, St 5, 6 Newton, Sam 29, 60, 73, 84 patriotism 3, 11, 51, 58, 83 Norfolk 2, 15, 19, 22, 30, 39, 47, 63, 64, patron saints 2, 4–5, 7, 8, 11–12, 16, 18, 104, 119, 124, 127, 132, 140, 161 n.46, 43, 73, 74, 78, 88, 90–1, 92, 93, 94–5, 174 n.119 96, 104, 106, 110, 111, 112, 113, 121, Norfolk, dukes of 123, 138, 148 122, 124, 125, 127, 128, 130, 132, 134, Norman Conquest 3, 6, 16, 61, 94–5, 102 136, 137, 144, 145, 149, 153–4, 169 n.1 Normandy 87, 95, 100, 111 Peasants’ Revolt 113 Norroy King of Arms 105 Penda, king of Mercia 3, 33, 34, 37, North Elmham 71 59–60, 61, 161 n.56 North Sea 19–20, 21, 32 Péronne, France 37 Northampton 94 Peterborough, Cambs. 49–50, 71, 97, 132, Northumbria, kingdom of 22, 24, 25, 27, 162 n.62 28, 32, 36, 43, 44, 51, 52, 59, 109, 129 Pickering, Yorks. 130 Norway 21, 39, 78 pilgrimage 4, 12, 15, 16, 76, 94, 95, 96, 98, Norwegians 39, 77, 107 99, 104, 105, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112, Norwich 40, 62, 63, 127 117, 119, 122, 124, 127, 129, 150 Nottingham 45, 48, 77 plague 132–3, 135, 151 Nowell, Laurence 128 Plantagenet dynasty 2, 3, 7, 16, 104, 106, Nowton, Suff. 80 113, 114, 121, 122, 155, 157 Pole, Edmund 131 Oates, Titus 140 Protestantism 8, 17, 127, 128, 131, 132, Odin 59–61 135, 155 see also Woden Provence, Eleanor of, queen of England Offa, king of Mercia 30, 38 111 Olaf the White 44 Old English 2, 6, 9, 22, 23, 25, 27, 29, 43, Quarrell, Charles 143 55, 61, 62–3, 64, 69, 72, 75, 77, 84, 85 Old Norse 44, 59, 60, 61, 69, 78, 105, Rædwald, king of the East Angles 26–9, 117, 152 30–1, 32, 36, 41, 43, 152

Index Ragener of Northampton, St 94 Ramsey Abbey 19, 50, 51, 52, 58, 83, 84, 89 Reading, Berks. 71, 102–3, 145 Rebais, abbey of 99 Reeve, John, abbot of Bury St Edmunds 126, 142, 143, 149 Reformation 4, 6, 8, 11, 17, 62, 99, 104, 122, 124, 127, 128, 129, 131, 132, 141, 153, 154, 155 see also Protestantism relics of St Edmund 8, 13, 14, 17, 75, 97, 98–9, 100, 103, 111, 123–4, 125–6, 127, 133, 134–9, 142, 154, 172 n.60 camisia 104, 119, 140, 179 n.89 nail-clippings 79, 81, 119, 125 psalter 140 slippers 113 spear 119 sword 119 see also contact relics Rendlesham, Suff. 23, 26 Revolution, French 130, 135, 139, 182 n.21 Reyner, Clement, abbot of Lambspringe 129, 145 Ricberht, king of the East Angles 32 Richard I, king of England 7, 11, 16–17, 102, 107, 108, 110, 119 Richard II, king of England 11, 101, 103, 104, 112–14, 115 Richard III, king of England 152 Richard of the Isle, abbot of Bury St Edmunds 101 Riche, Richard 126 River Idle, battle of 27 Robin Hood 132 Roman Catholicism see Catholicism romanitas 28–9, 32, 70, 90 Romans 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 28–9, 30, 33, 34, 37, 38, 51, 55, 58, 70, 84, 90, 95 Rome 24, 70, 78, 94, 98, 137 English College 99–100, 130–1 Flaminian Gate 131 St Edmund, hospice of 99–100 St Peter’s Basilica 96 St Thomas of Canterbury, hospice of 99–100 Romulus and Remus 29, 30, 38, 57 Rougham, Edmund 150 Rougham, Suff. 63 Ruffley, David 153 Rufford, Notts. 112 Runnymede, Surrey 109

213

sacrifice, human 15, 59–61 Sæthryth, St, abbess of Faremoûtier-enBrie 36 Saint-Denis, abbey of 90, 92, 96, 99, 122 St Edmund, Priory of (founded 1615) 13, 145, 146 Saint-German-en-Laye, France 130 Saint-Maur, abbey of 100 Saint-Omer, France 140, 146, 148 Samson of Tottington, abbot of Bury St Edmunds 107–8, 110, 115, 116–19, 120, 121, 141 Saxon Shore 20, 32 Saxons 7, 20, 23–4, 25, 28, 42, 84, 91, 94 Saxony 23 Schlei, river 20 Scotland 7, 9, 10, 11, 22, 103, 106, 155 Scott, Geoffrey, abbot of Douai 146 Seaxburh, St, abbess of Ely 36, 85 Sebastian, St 51, 130 Seeley, Martin, bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich 145 Seietha 116 Seville, Spain 131 Shaftesbury, Dorset 148 shrine of St Edmund 3, 7, 12, 14, 16, 62, 66, 68, 69, 75–6, 79–80, 81, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91–2, 93–4, 95, 96–7, 98, 99, 102, 107, 108, 110, 114–16, 117, 119–20, 121, 122, 124–6, 127, 129, 137, 142, 143, 148, 150, 154, 156 Sigeberht, St, king of the East Angles 3, 14, 31–4, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 58, 66, 79 Siwara 94 skalds 59, 61 Snettisham, Norf. 127 Southampton, Hants. 28, 105 Southwold, Suff. 97 Speed, John 140 Staffordshire Hoard 33 Stamford, Lincs. 77, 98 standing stones 132 Stephen, king of England 107 Stonor, Edmund, bishop of Trapezus 137 Stour, river 19 Stowe, John 128 Strickland, Agnes 142 Stuart, Henry Benedict, cardinal 130 Suffolk 1, 2, 8, 15, 19, 21, 22, 23, 29, 30, 32, 34, 39, 47, 62, 63, 64, 65, 67, 90, 91, 97, 104, 107, 129, 132, 134, 135, 153, 161 n.46, 163 n.1 Sutton, Suff. 63–4

214

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Sutton Hoo, Suff. 21, 23, 27, 28, 29, Sutton Walls, Herefs. 38 Swein Estrithson, king of Denmark 97 Swein Forkbeard, king of Denmark 16, 69, 86, 87, 88, 97, 99, 101, 108, 110, 119, 120, 122, 126 Syria 6, 33 Tempsford, battle of 74 Theodred, bishop of London 79–80, 81, 91, 115, 167 n.32, 174 n.113 Thetford, Norf. 128 battle of 2, 47, 48–9, 59, 63, 64, 65, 67 Thomas, St 120 Thorgilsson, Ari 78 Thorkil, earldorman 89 Thurkill, jarl 86 Toli 116 Tondberht 36 Toulouse, France 12–13, 100, 112, 123, 124, 142, 146, 148 Saint-Sernin, basilica of 100, 132–9 translations of St Edmund 5, 167 n.33, 169 n.83 of 889 75–6, 79, 84, 115 of 1010 86, 91, 99, 123, 145 of 1034 90, 166 n.18, 174 n.108 of 1095 96–7, 99, 115–16, 127 of 1539 144, 145–8 of 1644 133, 134–5 of 1965 (proposed) 138 Tudor, Edmund, 1st earl of Richmond 106 Tudor, Mary Rose, queen of France and duchess of Suffolk 122, 149 Ubbi 44, 51, 52 Ulfrun the unborn 78–9 Undley bracteates 21 Urban VI, pope 113 Usk, Adam 113 Valladolid, Spain 132, 140 Valois, Catherine of, queen of England 106 Varangian Guard 70 Vaughan, Herbert, cardinal 13, 123, 124, 136–7, 154 Verstegan, Richard 129 Vikings see Danes virginity 17, 37, 58, 78, 84, 85, 113

Wales 7, 10, 12, 23, 24, 25, 38, 60, 100, 102, 103, 104, 155 Walkelin, bishop of Winchester 96 Walpole, Suff. 22 Walsingham, Norf. 22, 124 Walton Castle, Suff. 20, 22, 161 n.52 warrior saint, St Edmund as 16–17, 96, 100–4, 107, 121 Waveney, river 19, 62 Webling, A. F. 142 Wedmore, Somerset 72 Weever, John 128 Wehha, king of the East Angles 23 Weldon, Ralph Benet 146–7, 149, 152 Werburgh of Chester 37 Wessex, kingdom of 7, 16, 23, 24, 42, 45, 47, 49, 56, 69, 71, 74, 75, 77, 81, 82, 84, 88, 91, 93, 106 West, Stanley 63 Whepstead, Suff. 80 William I, king of England 1, 11, 16, 95–6, 97, 121 William of York, St, archbishop of York 125, 148 Wilred, bishop of Dummoc 40 Wilson, John 129 Wilton Diptych 112–13 Winchester 51, 86, 91, 125 Hyde Abbey 152–3 Windsor, Berks. 125, 126, 148 Witburh, St, abbess of Ely 37 Woden 23, 60–1 see also Odin wolves 1, 2, 14, 23, 29–30, 38, 55, 56–7, 60, 73, 98, 161 n.46 women, and cult of St Edmund 79, 81, 91, 116, 124 Woodbridge, Suff. 23 Woolhampton, Berks. 145 Woolpit, Suff. 124 Wuffa, king of East Angles 23, 29–30, 161 n.46 Wuffing dynasty 23, 28, 29–31, 37–8, 40–1, 57, 60, 61, 65, 67, 69, 70, 73, 76, 79, 90, 152 Wulfing dynasty 29, 60, 73 York 26, 28, 45, 59, 67, 75, 125, 148 Žižek, Slavoj 8