Bury St Edmunds and King Edmund’s Relics

As part of series of our blog posts on pilgrimage on Walsingham, Professor Katy Cubitt writes on the site of Bury St Edmunds, another focus of pilgrimage in East Anglia.

One of the great pilgrim centres of East Anglia, predating the shrine of Walsingham by many centuries, was the Abbey church of Bury St Edmund’s in Suffolk. It housed the relics of the last East Anglian king, Edmund (c.855–869), who was killed by the invading vikings. He was rapidly hailed as a saint and martyr. Within twenty years of his death, silver coinage for East Anglia was issued by the conquering Scandinavians bearing the inscription, ‘O St Edmund, king’. Legends swiftly accumulated: although contemporary histories suggest that he was killed in battle, the earliest narrative of his life and miracles, written in the late tenth century by the French monk, Abbo of Fleury, portrayed him as a Christian martyr who followed Christ’s injunction to renounce violence, and was killed by the vikings who tied him to a tree and shot him with arrows—recalling the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (c.255–c.288)—before beheading him. As recounted in the Nara to Norwich exhibition, the story tells how his head was separated from his body after his decapitation: the two were only reunited when local people searched for his remains, guided by a friendly wolf whose cries of ‘Here, here, here’, led them to the head. It is believed that Edmund’s remains were moved from his initial resting place to a new wooden church at Bury in the late ninth or early tenth century.

The martyrdom of King Edmund of East Anglia, Morgan Library MS M.736. ff.14&16r; 869; EXH53: MS M.736

The prestige of the royal martyr saint caused the Abbey church at Bury St Edmund to become one of the most important relic shrines in England, attracting huge benefactions of land and other gifts. By the time of the Norman Conquest, a French monk, Baldwin (d. c.1087), had been elected as Abbot: his medical expertise had first won the favour of King Edward the Confessor (c.1003–1066) and then William the Conqueror (c.1028–1087). On William’s orders, Baldwin organised a further rebuilding of the church. Constructed in the new Norman style of Romanesque architecture, it continued to be extended. Edmund’s body was placed in a casket alongside other relics such as the bloodstained garments in which he was killed. These were translated to a shrine in a new church in 1095, the procession thronged by crowds.

St Edmund’s attracted pilgrims from all over England, and further afield continental Europe. Abbot Baldwin had gifted relics to the community at St Martin’s Lucca, in Italy, when he stayed en route to Rome to secure privileges for his church. Miraculous cures at the shrine were recorded in two late eleventh-century miracle collections, one by a Bury monk, Hermann the Archdeacon (d. c. 1089) and one by a visiting Flemish scholar, Goscelin of St Bertin (d. c. 1107). The latter tells a story of Hermann which vividly illustrates the fame and popularity of St Edmund’s relics and underlined their formidable sacred power.

According to this, Hermann was punished by a fatal illness for his irreverent treatment of the saint’s relics. On one occasion, when the monk was preaching in church, standing before the shrine, he had briefly revealed to the congregation the casket containing the bones and the saint’s garment. News of this remarkable display travelled quickly and Hermann was asked to give a second showing. This time he obliged not only by producing the casket from within the shrine but also by taking the saint’s blood-stained shirt out of its box so that the people could see the arrow holes. He allowed those assembled to kiss the garment, as long as they made a donation (apparently at the going rate of 2d).

The remaining stone of the Abbey as it appears today, with the Millennium Tower of St Edmundsbury Cathedral in the background. Photograph: Olivia Butler.

Goscelin records that there was a great scramble to take advantage of this offer. But Hermann had removed the shirt from its box without due care and reverence and fragments of the dried holy blood of Edmund consequently fell onto the ground and perished. On the same day Hermann was afflicted with a terrible illness because of his irreverence towards these sacred relics. The cause of Hermann’s illness and his inevitable death was revealed in a vision to another monk: even penance could not remedy so grievous a sin.

This anecdote offers a window into the drama of the cult of relics, vividly depicting the rush of the crowd to see and kiss the relics themselves, unmediated by the shrine, and Hermann, fatally swayed by the people’s devotion, over-enthusiastically carried away by their clamour to his cost. It also shows the financial gains to the church even from the poorer people. Goscelin’s account reveals the desire of those who looked after the shrine to demonstrate the sacred power of the martyr, not removed and distant in heaven, but present in the church and sensitive to disrespectful treatment.

The Abbey continued to be extended: by the turn of the 13th century extensions under Abbot Samson (1182–1211) made it the fourth longest in Christendom. But under Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries it was stripped of its treasures, demolished for its building stone, surrendered to the king in 1539, and, in 1560, sold by Queen Elizabeth I.

Further Reading