Ethelbert (779–94), king of the East Angles. He was venerated as a martyr because of his violent death for political reasons at the hand of Offa, king of Mercia, whose daughter Ælfthryth he visited, with a view to marriage, at Sutton Walls (Hereford and Worcester). There he was assassinated in 794, presumably on 20 May. The body was buried by the river Lugg at Marden and later translated to Hereford, where it remained until the Danes burnt it in 1050. His head was buried at Westminster. William of Malmesbury, however, said that Ethelbert's relics were still at Hereford; he clearly felt some misgiving about his cult as a martyr and invoked the authority of Dunstan as well as the witness of miracles in favour of its continuance. Ethelbert is titular of Hereford cathedral, of churches at Marden (Herefordshire), Little Dean (Glos.), and of eleven others in East Anglia. The cult flourished in medieval England: Hereford was rec koned as second only to Canterbury as a pilgrimage centre; fragments of the shrine remain. Feast: 20 May.
Bibliography
Click here for a list of abbreviations used in this bibliography.
- A.S.C., s.a. 792 in D. Whitelock, E.H.D., i. 167; G.P., p. 305; Florence of Worcester, Chronicon ex chronicis, i. 62–3; M. R. James, ‘Two Lives of St. Ethelbert, King and Martyr’, E.H.R., xxxii (1917), 214–44; AA.SS. Maii V (1685), 72*–76*; N.L.A., i. 412–18; A. T. Bannister, The Cathedral Church of Hereford, pp. 109–14; R. M. Wilson, The Lost Literature of Medieval England (1952), pp. 106–8; C. E. Wright, The Cultivation of Saga in Anglo-Saxon England (1939). See also E. C. Brooks, The Life of St. Ethelbert, King and Martyr (1995)
