St Edward the Martyr

Today is the feast day of St Edward the Martyr, and this year is the 1,035th anniversary of his murder early in the evening of March 18th 978 at Corfe in Dorset. The killing of the teenage King, who had succeeded to the throne in 975, appears to have been so as to place his younger half-brother Ethelred, then a child, and not himself involved in any such conspiracy, on the throne. As King Ethelred II he was the most assiduous proponant of his half-brother's cult, but historians have seen the regicide of 987 as undermining from the very beginning the moral basis of King Ethelred's authority.

St Edward the Martyr

A modern icon of the martyr King

Image:catholic.org

There is an illustrated online account of  St Edward's life and reign here and of his cult here.

The excellent account of his life in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography by Cyril Hart can be read here.

Following rather ignominious burial at Wareham his body was translated to Shaftesbury and the great abbey of nuns there housed his relics and was a place of pilgrimage until the sixteenth century. There is an online account of the abbey here. Only foundations remain of the church, but the relics themselves were re-discovered during excavations in 1931, and confirmed as being of the right date and character in 1970. I recall seeing them - or possibly  pictures of them - on my visit to the abbey site in 1972.

A plan of the abbey at Shaftesbury

Image:British History online

Following a protracted legal dispute over custody of the relics, during which they were held in a bank vault, they are now with the St Edward the Martyr Orthodox Brotherhood at Brookwood Cemetary in Surrey. I did not manage to accompany friends on past visits at Easter from Ascot Priory when I used to spend the Triduum there.  The website of the Brotherhood has a section about St Edward which can be viewed here. It is good that the relics are once again a focus of devotion, but it is rather sad that after so many centuries at Shaftesbury that they should be removed elsewhere.

St Edward's cult survived in the Church of England in that he remained in the Calendar of the Book of Common Prayer. Here in Oxford the Tractarian Thomas Chamberlain as Vicar of St Thomas' in the nineteenth century founded a number of schools for both boys and girls, the only one of which survives is St Edward's under the patronage of the boy-martyr King. It was the association of St Edward with the monastic reforms of St Dunstan which probably inspired Canon Chamberlain, as well as the Tractarian attempt to recover devotion to English medieval saints. The school incorporates in its arms the heraldic bearings assigned in later centuries to the Kings of the house of Wessex and uses as a badge the dagger and cup symbols of St Edward's martyrdom.

St Edward the Martyr

Were today not a Sunday it could be observed as the feast of St Edward the Martyr, the young King murdered, apparently with the connivance of his step-mother, at Corfe in Dorset on this day in 978.

A modern Orthodox icon of St Edward the Martyr

Image: Wikipedia

As a royal, youthful victim of an assassin his cult developed rapidly, and his shrine at Shaftsbury became a popular place of pilgrimage. The circumstances of his murder may well have helped weaken and undermine the authority of his younger half-brother and successor King Ethelred II, who himself presumably had no part in the crime.

There are online articles about the history and background to the life and death of King Edward, the second English King to bear that name, but one who, being pre-Conquest, has failed to enjoy the proper numerological placing as King Edward II, here, here and here.

The Oxford DNB life of King Edward by Cyril Hart can be read here and it provides a detailed analysis of the events that played out in his brief life and reign. Whatever the circumstances of these years, and Hart explores them as fully as is possible, Edward the Martyr's vindication lay in the hands of martyrologists and hagiographers, and they saw important issues in the events surrounding the murder at Corfe.

The violent death of the King and his subsequent veneration illustrate both the vulnerability of and also the sacrality of Kings in that period. A feud in the royal house could easily result in murder and the violent seizure of power, but the murder victim was likely to return as a Saint - and tenth-century saints could prove to be wreckers of vengeance, or at least attain posthumous vindication, esteem and devotion. This was all the more likely if their cause was identified with that of the Church. Thus did St Edward and so did St Wenceslaus in Bohemia, and rather like St Edmund of East Anglia in the preceeding century. In the eleventh century one can think of figures such as St Olav of Norway, St Cnut of Denmark and St Magnus of Orkney as being in the same tradition. Touching the Lord's Anointed had spiritual as well as temporal consequences.

St Edward's cult survived at Shaftesbury until the dissolution of the great nunnery there in 1539. What are beleived, with good reason, to be his relics were rediscovered in the twentieth century on the site of the abbey, and, as is outlined in the Wikipedia article linked to above, are now in the care of a Russian Orthodox community at Brookwood Cemetary in Surrey. Their website article about him is here, and there is another article from the Brookwood Cemetary Society here.

It was nineteenth century devotion to a St Edward remembered as a pious youth and patron of the Church that inspired Thomas Chamberlain, the great Victorian vicar of St Thomas' in Oxford, to place the one of his various attempts at establishing a school to actually survive and prosper, under his patronage. Thus St Edward's School in north Oxford, with its arms derived from those ascribed to the Anglo-Saxon kings and a badge of a dagger in a cup, perpetuates his memory.

One of my friends, who has imbibed the cult of St Edward, has been known to opine that the country has been going downhill ever since his murder - which may, or may not, be going a bit far, but it demonstrates the power of the idea of sacred authority in national life.

May St Edward pray for England.

Church of St Frideswide Oxford

Whilst I was churchwarden at St Thomas the Martyr here in Oxford the church was linked in a single benefice with the church of St Frideswide in the Botley Road. As today is the feast of St Frideswide and I recently found this drawing of the proposed design I thought I would post about it.

St Frideswide's originated in the remarkable ministry of the great Canon Thomas Chamberlain as vicar of St Thomas the Martyr from 1842 until 1892. Concerned that the Nonconformists might establish a foothold in the community that had been built on Osney Island in the western part of his parish he built a mission church which was replaced, largely I believe at his expense and indeed impoverishment, by St Frideswide's, and a separate parish established.

The church as it stands was designed by S.S. Teulon (1812-73) and built between 1870 and 1872.There are biographies of this interesting, if not particularly well-known, architect here and here. Presumably following his death the Oxford architect Harry Drinkwater (1844-95), of whom there is a biography here, built the vicarage including the connecting corridor which links it to the church and is a feature of interest and character.

In 1878 Drinkwater produced this design to complete the church with an impressive tower. I was given to understand that the reason this was not carried out were concerns about the weight involved given the position of the church close to the Thames. This is borne out in the picture below from the floods in 2007. Nevertheless this is another instance where one very much wishes it had been possible to complete the building as designed.

Harry Drinkwater's design for St Frideswide's 1878

Image:http://archiseek.com/2009/1878-st-frideswide-osney-oxfordshire/

St Fridewide's during the summer floods of 2007.

Image: Daily Mail

The church is handsome, and solemn in a rather severe way both inside and out - not so much beautiful as substantial.

Inside the church is a wooden door from the only other nineteenth century church dedicated to St Frideswide. The church, in London, was bombed and destroyed in the Second World War, but the door, carved by Alice Liddell, Alice of Alice in Wonderland, with the story of St Frideswide, was rescued and found a home in her other church.