St. Edmund the Martyr

Biography

St. Edmund (d. 869) was king of the East Angles, in eastern England, from about 855. Very little is known of his reign from records of his own time; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle notes only that in 869 the Danish Great Army, which had been raiding England for several years, wintered at Thetford, that King Edmund fought against them, and that the Danes killed him and conquered his kingdom. Our fuller account comes from the Passion of St. Edmund written around 985 by Abbo of Fleury, a French monk who heard the story from St. Dunstan, archbishop of Canterbury, who had heard it as a young man from an old man who said he had been Edmund's armor-bearer. According to this tradition, Edmund was captured and ordered to share power with the pagan Viking leader and give up his faith. He refused, saying he would not abandon Christ. He was bound to a tree, shot with arrows, and finally beheaded, calling on the name of Jesus. Legend adds that a wolf guarded his head until his people found it. Edmund was venerated as a martyr within a few decades, and his body was later enshrined at the town now called Bury St. Edmunds, whose abbey became one of the great pilgrimage sites of medieval England. For centuries he was honored as a patron of England.

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