Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T20:50:09.616Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Households of St Edmund

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Sarah Foot
Sarah Foot*
Affiliation:
Christ Church, Oxford
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Theodred, bishop of London, who also held episcopal authority in Suffolk and Norfolk, drew up a statement in the 940s of how he intended to leave his property after his death. Despite his German name, he was probably a native of Suffolk, for he bequeathed a number of Suffolk lands to close relatives living in the region. His most generous bequests were to his cathedral church of St Paul in London, but he made a substantial grant of four estates in Suffolk to the church of St Edmund. Theodred’s will provides one of the earliest datable references to the existence of a religious household charged with maintaining the cult of St Edmund. King of the East Angles, Edmund had died in 869, having been defeated in battle by a Danish army which went on to conquer his kingdom. Later generations remembered him as a martyr, although contemporary sources said little about the circumstances of his death. A community of St Edmund was well established at Bury by the middle years of the tenth century, inspiring not only the generosity of the local bishop, but also his confidence in the efficacy of the congregation’s prayers. Theodred bequeathed land to the church of St Edmund as the property of God’s community there, for the good of his own soul. Exactly when a religious congregation first assembled to preserve the memory of the martyred king, and when it erected a wooden church to house his shrine remains, however, debatable.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 50: Religion and the Household , 2014 , pp. 47 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2014

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Sawyer, P. H., Anglo-Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and Bibliography (London, 1968)Google Scholar, revised version by Kelly, S. and Rushforth, R., online at: <http:/www.esawyer.org.uk/>, no. 1526 ,+no.+1526>Google Scholar, AD 942x951 [hereafter: S]. All charters cited in this article are from the archive of Bury St Edmunds unless otherwise stated; full details of the manuscripts in which each survives may be found in Sawyer’s List.

2 Whitelock, D., Some Anglo-Saxon Bishops of London (London, 1975); repr. in her History, Law and Literature in toth-11th Century England (London, 1981), no. II, 17–21.Google Scholar

3 King Edmund’s death was recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under the year 870; since in this period the chronicler’s year began in September, the king’s death on 20 November actually occurred in 869. Asser, basing his narrative of ninth-century events on the Chronicle, took its report to mean that the king died in battle: Life of Alfred, ch. 33, ed. Stevenson, W. H. (Oxford, 1904, repr. 1959), 26.Google Scholar

4 For the early history of Bury, see Gransden, A., ‘The Legends and Traditions Concerning the Origins of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds’, EHR 100 (1985), 1–24;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Licence, T., ‘The Origins of the Monastic Communities of St Benedict at Holme and Bury St Edmunds’, Revue bénédictine 116 (2006), 42–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 The research for this essay forms part of the preparation for a new edition of the Anglo-Saxon charters of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, undertaken collaboratively with Dr Kathryn Lowe, for publication with the British Academy. For discussion of the archival policies of Bury’s monks, see my ‘Internal and External Audiences: Reflections on the Anglo-Saxon Archive of Bury St Edmunds Abbey in Suffolk’, Haskins Society Journal 24 (2013), 166-94.

6 Loyn, H. R., ‘Kinship in Anglo-Saxon England’, Anglo-Saxon England 3 (1973), 197–209;Google Scholar Herlihy, David, Medieval Households (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1985), 2–3, 57;Google Scholar Charles-Edwards, Thomas, ‘Kinship, Status and the Origins of the Hide’, P&P, no. 56 (1972), 3–33;Google Scholar van Houts, Elisabeth, ‘Family, Marriage, Kinship’, in Crick, Julia and van Houts, Elisabeth, eds, A Social History of England 900-1200 (Cambridge, 2011), 133–41, at 133–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Foot, Sarah, ‘Anglo-Saxon Ecclesiastical Households’, in Hudson, Benjamin. T., ed., Familia and Household in the Medieval Atlantic World (Tempe, AZ, 2011), 51–71, at 55–7, 69.Google Scholar

8 Mayr-Harting, Henry, The Venerable Bede, the Rule of St Benedict and Social Class, Jarrow Lecture 1976 (Jarrow, 1977), 16.Google Scholar

9 Foot, ‘Anglo-Saxon Ecclesiastical Households’, 60-1.

10 Cf. Rosenwein, Barbara, To be the Neighbor of St Peter: The Social Meaning of Clunny’s Property, 909-1049 (Ithaca, NY, 1989)Google Scholar, and see further below.

11 Kelly, S. E., Charters of St Paul’s, London (Oxford, 2004), 117.Google Scholar

12 O’Donovan, Mary Anne, ‘An Interim Revision of Episcopal Dates for the Province of Canterbury, 850-950: Part 1’, Anglo-Saxon England 1 (1972), 23–44, at 39–40;Google Scholar Whitelock, Some Anglo-Saxon Bishops, 20; Pestell, T., Landscapes of Monastic Foundation: The Establishment of Religious Houses in East Anglia c.650-1200 (Woodbridge, 2004), 83–5.Google Scholar

13 Beodricesworth means the ‘worb’, or homestead, of a person called Beaduric: see Ekwall, E., The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names, 4th edn (Oxford, 1960)Google Scholar, s.n. ‘Bury’.

14 Mostert, Marco, ‘Le séjour d’Abbon de Fleury à Ramsey’, Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 144 (1986), 199–208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 Abbo, Passio sancti Eadmundi 15, ed. Winterbottom, Michael, Three Lives of English Saints (Toronto, ON, 1972), 83;Google Scholar Hervey, F., Corolla Sancti Eadmundi (London, 1907), 47.Google Scholar

16 Abbo, Passio 15, ed. Winterbottom, 84-5 (Hervey, Corolla Sancti Eadmundi, 47-51); for the first mention of the body’s incorruption, see. ibid. 14, ed. Winterbottom, 82 (Hervey, Corolla Sancti Eadmundi, 45).

17 I am grateful to my graduate student Richard Purkiss for discussion of the implications of this close reading of Abbo.

18 S 1489, 1499.

19 See Licence, T., ‘The Norwich Narrative and the East Anglian Bishopric’, Norfolk Archaeology 45 (2007), 198–204;Google Scholar idem, ‘Herbert Losinga’s Trip to Rome and the Bishopric of Bury St Edmunds’, Anglo-Norman Studies 34 (2012), 151-68; Foot, S., ‘The Abbey’s Armoury of Charters’, in Licence, Tom, ed., Bury St Edmunds and the Norman Conquest (Woodbridge, forthcoming 2014).Google Scholar

20 The ‘Bury Psalter’, BAV, MS Reginensis lat 12, fol. 17V: ‘Hic sub Cnutono rege constructam basilicam beate memorie archipresul Aegelnoous consecrauit eam in honoure Christi et sancte Marie sanctique Eadmundi’; the same note occurs also in Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 197, fol. 105r: discussed by Dumville, David. N., English Caroline Script and Monastic History: Studies in Benedictinism (Woodbridge, 1993), 31–5.Google Scholar

21 S 1483; P. Stafford, ‘Women and the Norman Conquest’, TRHS 6th ser. 4 (1994), 221-49, at 232.

22 S 1494, 1486; Pestell, Landscapes, 149. Æthelflæd had links with the nunnery at Barking, a community of nuns at Damerham, and Glastonbury Abbey, while Ælfflæd and her husband Byrhtnoth (who died at Maldon in 991) were notable benefactors to Ely: Wareham, A., Lords and Communities in Early Medieval East Anglia (Woodbridge, 2005), 46–60 Google Scholar. For the significance of female decisions to bequeath to particular religious houses and specifically the choices of this family, see Crick, J., ‘Women, Posthumous Benefaction, and Family Strategy in Pre-Conquest England’, JBS 38 (1999), 399–422, at 401–3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 S 1516.

24 S 1519.

25 S 1213; see Wareham, Lords, 29-45.

26 e.g. S 1219, 1225.

27 S 1224, 1537.

28 Ælfric: S 1490; Thurstan: S 1531.

29 S 1528.

30 S 1527.

31 S 1501.

32 S 1525-1525a.

33 Bury was only ecclesiastical beneficiary of the wills of Ulfketel (S 1219), Stigand (S 1224) and Thurketel (S 1225), and of the reversionary grants made by Thurkil and Æthelgyth (S 1529) and Wulfgeat and his wife (S 1470). For general discussion of all these wills, see Pestell, , Landscapes, 119–22.Google Scholar

34 Rosenwein, , To be the Neighbor of St Peter.Google Scholar

35 Liber Eliensis, ed. Blake, E. O. (London, 1962).Google Scholar

36 Used by William of Malmesbury to write his history of that abbey: Scott, John, The Early History of Glastonbury: An Edition, Translation and Study of William of Malmesbury’s De antiquitate Glastonie ecclesie (Woodbridge, 1981).Google Scholar

37 For discussion of monastic foundation legends as the fruits of imaginative memory, cf. Remensnyder, Amy. G., Remembering Kings Past: Monastic Foundation Legends in Medieval Southern France (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1995).Google Scholar

38 S 703 survives as a single-sheet apparent original written by the charter scribe ‘Edgar A’; the others – S 483, 507, 980, 995, 1045, 1046 – all display suspicious features.

39 Bates, David, Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannnnorum: The Acta of William I (1066-1087) (Oxford, 1998), no. 39.Google Scholar

40 Abbo, Passio, ch. 11, ed. Winterbottom, 79-80; Herman, De Miraculis Sancti Eadmundi, eh. 1, ed. Arnold, T., 3 vols (London, 1890–6), 1: 27 Google Scholar. See Whitelock, D., ‘Fact and Fiction in the Legend of St Edmund’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute for Archaeology and History [hereafter: PSIAH] 31 (1969), 217–33;Google Scholar Ridyard, Susan, The Royal Saints of Anglo-Saxon England: A Study of West Saxon and East Anglian Cults (Cambridge, 1988), 218–21;Google Scholar and, for a radical suggestion, Keith, Briggs, ‘Was Hægilsdun in Essex? A New Site for the Martyrdom of Edmund’, PSIAH 42 (2011), 277–91.Google Scholar

41 Cf. Blair, John. ‘A Saint for every Minster? Local Cults in Anglo-Saxon England’, in Thacker, A. and Sharpe, R., eds, Local Saints and Local Churches in the Early Medieval West (Oxford, 2002), 455–94, at 486.Google Scholar

42 Blunt, C. E., ‘The St Edmund Memorial Coinage’, PSIAH 31 (1969), 234–55.Google Scholar

43 Crick, ‘Women’, 402-3; Wareham, Lords, 59-60.

44 Pestell, Landscapes, 118-19.