Portal:Catholicism/Patron Archive/November 20

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Edmund the Martyr (841–20 November 869) was a King of East Anglia. He succeeded to the East Anglian throne in 855, while still a boy. The earliest and most reliable accounts represent Edmund as descended from the preceding kings of East Anglia of the Wuffing line. Other accounts state that his father was King Æthelweard and Galfridus de Fontibus recorded that Edmund was the youngest son of Alcmund, a Saxon king. Edmund was said to have been crowned by Bishop Humbert of Elmham on Christmas Day 855. In 869/70 Edmund was defeated in battle by the Great Heathen Army; he was captured, tortured and died the death of a martyr. He is venerated as a saint and a martyr in the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Anglican Communion. The king's body was ultimately interred at Beadoriceworth, the modern Bury St Edmunds, where the pilgrimage to his shrine was encouraged by the twelfth-century monks' enlargement of the church. Edmund's popularity among the Anglo-Norman nobility helped justify claims of continuity with pre-Norman traditions; a banner of St. Edmund's arms was carried at the battle of Agincourt.

Edmund the Martyr was a King of East Anglia. According to both Abbo of Fleury followed by John of Worcester, he came "ex antiquorum Saxonum nobili prosapia oriundus," which when translated seems to mean that St Edmund was of foreign origin and that he belonged to the Old Saxons of the continent. The earliest and most reliable accounts represent Edmund as descended from the preceding kings of East Anglia.

Other accounts state that his father was King Æthelweard. What is certain is that the king died in 854, and was succeeded by Edmund when the boy was a fourteen-year-old. Thus, his birthyear is 841. Edmund was said to have been crowned by St Humbert on 25 December 855. Almost nothing is known of the life of Edmund during the next fourteen years. It was recorded that Edmund was a model king who treated all with equal justice and was unbending to flatterers. It was also written that he retired for a year to his royal tower at Hunstanton and learned the whole Psalter, so that he could recite it from memory.

In the year 869, the Danes who had wintered at York, marched through Mercia into East Anglia and took up their quarters at Thetford. Edmund engaged them fiercely in battle, but the Danes under their leaders Ubbe Ragnarsson and Ivar the Boneless had the victory, killed King Edmund, and remained in possession of the battlefield. The conquerors may have simply killed the king in battle, or shortly after. The more popular version of the story, which makes Edmund die as a martyr to Danish arrows when he had refused to renounce Christ or hold his kingdom as a vassal from heathen overlords, dates from comparatively soon after the event. It is not known which account is correct.

The traditional date of his death, quoted by most reference works, is 870. However recent research has led to the claim that he actually died in 869.

Attributes: crowned and robed as a king; holding a scepter, orb, arrow, or a sword
Patronage: Douai Abbey, kings, pandemics, Roman Catholic diocese of East Anglia, the English County of Suffolk, torture victims, wolves
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