Edmund (Eadmund) (841–69), king of East Anglia and martyr. Born of Saxon stock, Edmund was brought up as a Christian and became king of the East Angles before 865. In 869–70 the Great Army of the Vikings, under Ingwar, invaded East Anglia. Edmund led his army against them, but was defeated and captured. He refused to deny the Christian faith or to rule as Ingwar's vassal. He was then killed, whether by being scourged, shot with arrows, and then beheaded, as the traditional account relates, or by being ‘spread-eagled’ as an offering to the gods in accordance with Viking practice elsewhere. His death took place at Hellesden (Suffolk); his body was buried in a small wooden chapel near by. In c.915 his body was found to be incorrupt and was transferred to nearby Bedricsworth (later called Bury St. Edmunds). In 925 King Athelstan founded a community of two priests and four deacons to take care of the shrine. The landing of another Danish army at Ipswich in 1010 placed it in danger, so its custodian removed it to London, where it remained for three years. In spite of local resistance it was returned to Bury.
By now the cult, which, like those of Oswald and Ethelbert, fulfilled the ideals of Old English heroism, provincial independence, and Christian sanctity, had grown considerably. The earliest evidence for it is on 9th-century East Anglian coins inscribed ‘Sc Eadmund rex’, while the Life by Abbo of Fleury based on the memoirs of Edmund's armour-bearer transmitted by Dunstan, was written at Ramsey in c.986. King Cnut in 1020 ordered a stone church to be built at Bury and the clerks to be reformed by Benedictine monks. His policy of reconciliation between Danes and Anglo-Saxons through reparation for his compatriots' misdeeds found expression in 1028, when he gave his abbey a charter of jurisdiction over the town which was growing up around the abbey, together with notable land endowments. Edward the Confessor continued this policy and extended the jurisdiction over most of West Suffolk in 1044. Bury soon became one of the most important and powerful of the English Benedictine abbeys.
In 1095 Edmund's body was translated to the large new Norman church; in 1198 it was re-enshrined, as was vividly described by Jocelin of Brakelond. By the 11th century Edmund's feast figures prominently in monastic calendars in southern England and later in that of Sarum. More than sixty churches in England are dedicated to Edmund.
His cult has left notable artistic record. A fine illustrated Life, written at Bury c.1130, survives at New York (J. P. Morgan Library, MS. 736). A later verse Life, written and illustrated by John Lydgate, monk of Bury, is in the British Library (MS. Harley 2278); it was presented to King Henry VI in 1439. There are also notable paintings of Edmund in the Albani Psalter and the Queen Mary Psalter, but the most famous representation of him is in the Wilton Diptych (National Gallery, London), where he and Edward the Confessor are depicted as two royal patrons of England who present King Richard II to the Virgin and Child. In East Anglia ten screen-paintings of Edmund survive, as do several mural paintings in different parts of England. His most usual emblem is an arrow, the supposed instrument of his passion, or else a wolf, who was believed to have guarded his head after death. It was also claimed that his head and body were miraculously rejoined, but if he was never beheaded there is no extraordinary phenomenon to explain.
After the battle of Lincoln in 1217, the defeated French soldiers claimed to have removed his body to France. Some of these relics (from Saint-Sernin, Toulouse) were offered to Westminster Cathedral in 1912. M. R. James and other scholars protested that these relics were not authentic and that Edmund's body remained at Bury until the Reformation, where it was reburied on a site at present unknown. The proposed translation was therefore abandoned. There are no clear Bury documents about his body after 1198: the cult at Toulouse is supported by documents and a mural painting from the 15th century onwards. Following the deliverance of Toulouse from the plague (c.1630) these relics were re-enshrined and Edmund's cult flourished there for over 250 years. Feast: 20 November; translation, 29 April.
Bibliography
Click here for a list of abbreviations used in this bibliography.
- A.S.C., s.a. 870; Life by Abbo of Fleury with later Legends in T. Arnold (ed.), Memorials of St. Edmund's Abbey, i (R.S., 1890), 3–209; Life by Ælfric in W. W. Skeat (ed.), Lives of the Saints, ii (E.E.T.S., 1900), 958–64; texts and versions of the principal sources in Lord Francis Hervey, Corolla S. Eadmundi (1907); id., The History of King Edmund the Martyr and of the early years of his Abbey (1929); M. Winterbottom (ed.), Three Lives of English Saints (1972). For the translation H. E. Butler (ed.), The Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond (1949), pp. xv–xxiv, 109–16; for the development of the legend, G. Loomis, ‘The growth of the St. Edmund Legend’, Harvard Studies and Notes in Phil. and Lit., xiv (1932), 83–113 and especially D. Whitelock, ‘Fact and Fiction in the Legend of St. Edmund’, Proc. Suffolk Inst. of Archaeology, xxxi (1969), 217–33 and A. Gransden, ‘The legends and traditions concerning the origins of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds’, E.H.R., xcix (1985), 1–24; examples of his iconography in O. Pächt, F. Wormald, and C. R. Dodwell, The St. Albans Psalter (1960) and Sir G. F. Warner, The Queen Mary Psalter (1912); R. M. Thomson, ‘Geoffrey of Wells. De Infantia S. Edmundi’, Anal. Boll., xcv (1977), 25–34; id., ‘Two Versions of a Saint's Life from St. Edmund's Abbey’, Rev. Bén., lxxxiv (1974), 383–408. See also A. P. Smyth, Scandinavian Kings in the British Isles, 850–880 (1977), pp. 201–13 and S. Ridyard, The Royal Saints of Anglo-Saxon England (1988)
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