Saint Edmund of East Anglia November 20

 Saint Edmund of East Anglia

Also known as

• Edmund the Martyr

• King of the East Angles

Additional Memorial

29 April (translation of relics)

Profile

King of East Anglia at age 14, crowned on Christmas Day 855 by Bishop Saint Humbert of Elmham. Edmund was a model ruler, concerned with justice for his people and his own spirituality; he spent a year sequestered at Hunstanton learning the Psalter by heart. Following one of a series of armed engagement with invading Danes, he was captured. He was ordered to give his Christian people to the pagan invaders; he refused. Martyr.

Born

c.841 probably at Nuremburg, Germany

Died

• beaten, whipped, shot with arrows "until he bristled with them like a hedgehog", and beheaded at Hoxne, Suffolk, England 20 November 870

• buried at Hoxne

• relics moved to Beodricsworth, England (modern Bury Saint Edmunds (Borough of Saint Edmunds)) in the 915

• relics moved to the Cathedral of Saint Paul in London, England in 1010 ahead of an invading Viking force

• relics returned to Bury Saint Edmunds in 1113

• relics re-enshrined in a new church in a Benedictine monastery built by King Canute in 1020

• relics re-enshrined in a new Norman church in Bury Saint Edmunds in 1095

• following a fire, the relics re-enshrined in a new church in 1198

• following a battle in Lincoln, England in 1217, French troops claim to have taken the relics, but modern testing has disproved this; the real relics may have been hidden, destroyed, looted - we just don't know, and no authentic relics exist today

Patronage

• against plague

• diocese of East Anglia, England

• kings

• torture victims

• wolves

Representation

• arrow

• king tied to a tree and shot with arrows

• wolf

• bearded king with a sword and arrow

• man with his severed head between the paws of a wolf

• sword