Eadburh of Winchester

Saint Eadburh (or Edburga) (died June 15, 960) was the daughter of King Edward the Elder of England and his third wife, Eadgifu of Kent. There is little contemporary information for her life, but in a Winchester charter dated 939, she appears as the beneficiary of land in Hampshire granted by her brother King Athelstan.^[1]

She was a nun at, and possibly abbess of, the Nunnaminster in Winchester where she was buried. Following her canonisation in 972, some of her remains were transferred to Pershore Abbey in Worcestershire, which is dedicated to her. Her feast is celebrated June 15.

In the twelfth century, a Latin Life was written for her by Osbert de Clare, who became prior of Westminster in 1136 (and who also wrote a Life of King Edward the Confessor).^[2] Her cult continued to flourish to judge by the Lives written in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Notes

Sources

• Sawyer no. 446
• Osbert de Clare, Vita Edburgae, MS. Laud Misc. 114, f. 85–120 (Bodleian, Oxford), ed. S.J. Ridyard, The Royal Saints of Anglo-Saxon England. A Study of West Saxon and East Anglian Cults. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought 4. Cambridge, 2008. 253 ff (Appendix).
• Anonymous, De vita sanctae Edburgae virginis, preserved in the early fourteenth-century MS Lansdowne 436, f. 41v-43v (British Library, London), ed. Laurel Braswell, "Saint Edburga" (see below). 329-33.
• Lectiones in Breviary of Hyde Abbey (late 13th century), Rawlinson liturg. E I and Gough liturg. 8 (Bodleian, Oxford)
• Middle English Life (late 13th century), Egerton 1993, f. 160-1 (BL, London); Eng. Poet. A I f. 32-32v and Bodley 779, f. 282-293v (Bodleian, Oxford), ed. Laurel Braswell, "Saint Edburga" (see below). 329-33.

Further reading

• Ridyard, S.J. The Royal Saints of Anglo-Saxon England. A Study of West Saxon and East Anglian Cults. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought 4. Cambridge, 2008.
• Braswell, Laurel. "Saint Edburga of Winchester. A study of her cult, A.D. 950-1500, with an edition of the fourteenth-century Middle English and Latin lives." Mediaeval Studies 33 (1971): 292-333.