Saint Edmund the Martyr

Saint Edmund was king of the East Angles. He died at the hands of pagan Danish invaders and has been venerated as a martyr for more than a thousand years. The Church commemorates him on November 20, the day of his death.

Little is known about his origins and youth. He reigned in East Anglia, a kingdom covering the present-day counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. Tradition holds that he came to the throne in 855 as a boy in his teens. Abbo of Fleury, the author of the earliest account of his martyrdom, presents him as a gentle and just ruler, generous to those in need, a father to widows and orphans.

In his time England was being ravaged by a great Danish army. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, written down within the same century, speaks of Edmund’s death briefly: the invading army crossed Mercia into East Anglia and took up winter quarters at Thetford, that winter the king fought a battle against it, the Danes won, killed the king, and occupied the whole land. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him as a king captured in battle against pagan invaders and martyred for the faith of Christ.

The details are known from the account that Abbo wrote down more than a hundred years later. He appealed to Archbishop Dunstan, who in his youth had heard it from an old man who swore that he had been the king’s armor-bearer. According to this tradition the Danish leader Ivar demanded that Edmund hand over part of his treasures and from then on reign as his subordinate. The king replied that he would not submit to a pagan leader unless the latter first accepted the Christian faith. He was seized, beaten, tied to a tree, scourged, and pierced with arrows, and when he still kept calling on the name of Christ, he was beheaded.

The same account says that the Danes threw the king’s head into a forest thicket. Those who searched for it heard a cry of “Here, here, here!” and found it between the paws of a wolf that was guarding it. This is why Saint Edmund is depicted with arrows and a wolf. Abbo calls that wood Haegelisdun. The place has not been identified, and an old tradition pointed to Hoxne in the county of Suffolk.

Veneration of the martyr king spread quickly: before the end of the ninth century, coins bearing the name of the holy king Edmund were being struck in the lands occupied by the Danes. In the tenth century his body was moved to Beodricesworth, today’s Bury St Edmunds. Around 1020 Benedictines settled there, and their abbey became one of the richest in England and a destination of pilgrimages. In the Middle Ages Edmund was regarded as one of the patrons of England. The abbey was dissolved in 1539, and what became of the relics afterward is not certain.

The day of his death, November 20, is given by Abbo. As for the year, the sources differ: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the king’s death under the year 870, and many older works give the same year, but historians today refer this entry to November 869. Edmund was not canonized in a formal process: his veneration, already alive at the end of the ninth century, is older than such processes.