St Edward the Martyr

Today is the feast of the martyrdom of  St Edward the Martyr. Having been King since the death of his father King Edgar in 975 he was murdered at Corfe on this day in 978.

There is an online account of  him at Edward the Martyr and my previous posts about him, with other links, can be seen at St Edward the Martyr from 2012 and at St Edward the Martyr from 2013.

  Image: orthodoxwiki.org

Today in this country devotion to him appears to be strong amongst Orthodox believers and congregations. There he is venerated as a passion bearer, and perhaps fits in to their equivalent of the link or union of throne and altar. His relics are now enshrined at the Orthodox community at Brookwood in Surrey. In consequence there are several modern icons of him which I have used to illustrate this post.

  Image: catholic.org

There is an Orthodox account of him, and of devotion to him, and which also includes pictures of various historic English churches under his patronage here

 

Image:pravoslavie.ru

Given recent developments in reconstructing the appearance of the deceased, including ones I have featured - King Richard III, King Henry of Scots and the two priest martyrs from Yorkshire - maybe something similar could be attempted with the scull of St Edward.

St Edward the Martyr pray for us 

The death of King Edgar

It was on July 8th 975 that there occurred the death of King Edgar. Allowing for the shift from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1752 the exact anniversary can therefore be held to fall today. 

A contemporary portrayal of King Edgar in the Winchester New Minster Charter of 966

Image: Wikipedia

The death of King Edgar 1040 years ago is important for two reasons.

His reign is important for his consolidation of what may well be described as an imperial kingship - something his uncle King Athelstan had developed in his reign between 924 and 939 as he expanded his realm - and most notably by his coronation in 973 at the abbey in Bath. This was fourteen years after his accession - though he may have had a coronation at that time - and took place when he had reached the age of ordination and took place on Whit Sunday. This was sacral kingship, celebrated in a Roman spa town, analogous to Charlemagne's Aachen. The Rite used in 973 remains the basis of the English Coronation ceremony, used most recently for the present Queen in 1953, 980 years later.

The King's subsequent visit to Chester where he was ceremonially rowed along the river Dee from the city to St John's church by several tributary kings became celebrated as an assertion and exemplification of English hegemony over Britain,

Described in the early twelfth century as having been "extremely small both in stature and bulk" by that, careful historian William of Malmesbury he was anything but slight in importance as a monarch and as a key figure in the development of the institution of the monarchy and of monasticism, exemplified in the Regularis Concordia of 973, to which there is an introduction here.

King Edgar seated between St Æthelwold and St Dunstan. From an eleventh-century manuscript of the Regularis Concordia 

British Library, Cottonian MS Tiberius A III, f2v

Image: Wikipedia

There is an online account of his reign at  Edgar the Peaceful, which has a bibliography of recent studies of the reign. The Oxford DNB life by Ann Williams can be accessed here and provides a more detailed and academic account.

The sacrality of King Edgar's monarchy is recalled in this thirteenth century illumination in an anonymous Life of King Edward the Confessor
Cambridge University Library, MS Ee.3.59: fol. 3v

Image: Wikipedia

The second reason for the significance of the death of King Edgar was that it brought about the accession of his elder son as King Edward, who was to go down in history as the Martyr, he appears to have been illegitimate or of doubtful legitimacy, and only a boy or teenager at the time. His murder three years later and replacement by his younger, legitimate half-brother King Æthelred II, seemingly with the involvement of the new king's mother, set in motion those elements of instability and lack of political legitimacy that were to haunt King Æthelred the Unready [Unraed signifying No Counsel, a pun on his name which means Good Counsel] and his reign.

There is an online account at of King Edward the Martyr at Edward the Martyr, and the Oxford DNB life, by Cyril Hart can be seen at Edward [St Edward; called Edward the Martyr] (c.962–978); this again provides a more detailed account of his life and reign.

King Edgar died at Winchester, but he was not buried there with so many of his family, but at the abbey at Glastonbury. The abbot was St Dunstan, who as Archbishop of Canterbury was a major player in the King's reign, and the compiler and celebrant of the 973 coronation. By choosing to be buried at Glastonbury - and it seems right to assume that the King did that - he maintained his identification with the Dunstanian monastic reform and confirmed its alliance with the monarchy.

There appears to have developed something of a cult around King Edgar at Glastonbury, and on the eve of the dissolution of the abbey Under the last two abbots the Edgar Chapel was built on to the east end of the monastic church to contain his remains.

 

Reconstruction model of Glastonbury Abbey on the eve of the dissolution.

The Edgar Chapel is on the extreme left.

Image:skyscrapernews.com/All rights reserved. Copyright Holder - GNU License 

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.