The St. Edmund Cult

After Edmund of East Anglia began to be treated as a saint, he became an important focal point for Christians in East Anglia, and as a political tool.

The Danish King Cnut (c.990 - 1035), who conquered England in 1016, was a good Christian who supported the Church. Cnut founded an abbey at Bury St. Edmunds.

The shrine of St. Edmund became famous, and fame brought wealth in the form of donations, making the abbey wealthy. (The illustration shows John Lydgate worshipping at the shrine.) King Edward the Confessor in 1044 created the Liberty of St. Edmund, placing the entire area of the County of West Suffolk under the jurisdiction of the abbot of Bury St. Edmunds. A Steward was appointed by William the Conqueror to manage the Liberty on behalf of the abbot. Although Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries eliminated the abbot's prerogative, the position of Hereditary High Steward of the Liberty of St Edmund still exists.

King John gave the abbey a great sapphire and a stone set in gold. His son, King Henry III, prayed to St. Edmund for a second son, which he eventually received, and named him Edmund. At the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the shrine was defaced and silver and gold valued at 5000 marks was taken away.

Edmund's cult was revived in, of all places, France. The city of Toulouse was spared from a plague (1628 - 1631), which they ascribed to the intercession of relics in their basilica of a saint referred to as Aymundus. They built a new reliquary to hold the saint's relics. In 1664, a Toulouse lawyer published the theory that the relics of Edmund had been taken from England by King Louis VIII of France in 1217 after the Battle of Lincoln, giving them to the basilica in Toulouse. This newly revived cult of St. Edmund flourished in Toulouse until the French Revolution (1794), but found and returned to the basilica in 1845.

The relics were offered to the Archbishop of Westminster by Toulouse in 1901 to be place in the altar of the under-construction Westminster Cathedral.

There was another Edmund connected to Cnut, the man he killed to take over England. Tomorrow we look at Edmund Ironside, often mentioned but never examined.