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Households of St Edmund

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Sarah Foot
Sarah Foot*
Affiliation:
Christ Church, Oxford
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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

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References

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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

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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.

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44 Pestell, Landscapes, 118-19.