Sanctus Eduinus, Rex Northanhymbrorum et Martyr — for his dies natalis, the twelfth day of October
Et adorabunt eum omnes reges terræ: omnes gentes servient ei. “And all kings of the earth shall adore him: all nations shall serve him.” — Psalm 71:11
I. The exile of Deira
Edwin was born about the year 586, a son of Ælle, king of Deira, the southern of the two kingdoms that would together be called Northumbria. He was a child when his father died and the throne of Deira was taken by the Bernician king Æthelfrith, a pagan warrior whom Bede, writing a century later, compares to Saul: a great king, but one who did not know the true God. Æthelfrith married Edwin’s sister Acha, joined the two kingdoms, and spent the next years trying to have his brother-in-law killed.
So Edwin grew up as an exile, passing from one friendly court to another, never long safe in any of them. The tradition is that he found shelter for a time among the Britons of Gwynedd, and certainly at last he came to Rædwald, king of the East Angles. There Æthelfrith’s envoys followed him, first offering silver for his death, then threatening war if he was not surrendered. Rædwald wavered and agreed to give him up.
II. The stranger in the night
It is here that St. Bede places the story on which the whole of Edwin’s later life turns (Historia Ecclesiastica II.12).
A friend warned Edwin that he had been sold and offered to lead him out of the kingdom. Edwin refused: he had given his word to Rædwald, and he would not be the first to break faith. If he was to die, it was better to die at the hands of a king than at those of lesser men. He went out alone into the night and sat on a stone before the palace, not knowing where to go.
A stranger came to him in the darkness and asked why he sat awake while others slept. Then he asked three questions. What would Edwin give to the man who freed him from his danger? What would he give to the man who made him a king greater than any of his fathers? And would he heed the counsel of the man who could show him a way of life better than any his people had known? Edwin promised all three. The stranger laid his right hand on Edwin’s head and said: when this sign comes to you again, remember this hour and keep your word. Then he was gone.
Bede presents the visitor as a messenger from beyond this world, and the tradition has always read it so. What may be said with confidence is that Bede had the story from Northumbrian memory within living reach of the event, and that it was told as the reason for everything that followed. And what followed is history: Rædwald’s queen shamed her husband out of betraying his guest; Rædwald marched north; and in 616 or 617, at the River Idle, Æthelfrith was killed. Edwin was king of all Northumbria, and Æthelfrith’s young sons, among them Oswald, fled into exile in their turn.
III. The queen from Kent and the bishop who came with her
Edwin’s first wife, Cwenburh of Mercia, bore him two sons, Osfrith and Eadfrith. After her death he sought the hand of Æthelburh, daughter of St. Æthelberht of Kent, the first English king to receive the faith from St. Augustine. Her brother Eadbald, now king, answered that a Christian woman could not be given to a pagan husband. Edwin replied that he would place no obstacle in her way, that she and her household might practise their religion freely, and that he himself would consider it and receive it if, on examination, wise men judged it holier and more worthy of God than his own.
On those terms she came north in 625, and with her came Paulinus, a monk of the Roman mission sent by St. Gregory the Great, consecrated bishop by Archbishop Justus for this purpose. Bede describes him as tall, a little stooped, with black hair, a thin hooked nose and a lean face: an appearance both venerable and formidable.
For two years nothing happened, and the delay is the most instructive part of the story. Then, on Easter night of 626, at a royal hall by the River Derwent, an envoy of the West Saxon king Cwichelm drew a poisoned dagger and sprang at Edwin. A thegn named Lilla, having no shield, threw his own body in front of the king and was killed. The blade passed through him and still wounded Edwin.
The same night the queen gave birth to a daughter. When the king gave thanks to his gods, Paulinus gave thanks to Christ, and told him that the child had been born safely because of the queen’s prayers. Edwin made a conditional promise. If God gave him life and victory over the king who had sent the assassin, he would serve Christ; and as a pledge he gave his newborn daughter to be baptized. At Pentecost Eanflæd was baptized with twelve of the household, the first of the Northumbrians to be made a Christian.
He won his war in Wessex. He gave up the worship of idols. And still he did not ask for baptism.
IV. Deliberation, and the sign remembered
Bede is frank about this. The king, he says, was by nature a man of great wisdom and would not act hastily; he sat alone for long hours, turning the matter over in silence. During these months Pope Boniface V wrote to him, urging him to abandon his idols, and wrote also to the queen, asking her to work on her husband’s heart (HE II.10–11).
What broke the delay, by Bede’s account, was not argument. Paulinus, having learned by revelation of the night at Rædwald’s court, came to the king, laid his right hand on his head, and asked whether he knew that sign. Edwin, trembling, would have fallen at his feet. Paulinus raised him and reminded him of his three promises. Two had been fulfilled by God: he had been delivered from his enemies and given a kingdom. The third remained.
Edwin answered that he was willing, but that he would first confer with his counsellors, so that if they agreed they might all be consecrated together in the font of life.
V. The council, the priest and the sparrow
The council that followed is perhaps the most famous scene in the early history of the English (HE II.13), and it is worth telling honestly, because it is not edifying in every part.
Coifi, the chief of the pagan priests, spoke first, and his argument was frankly self-interested. No one, he said, had served the gods more faithfully than he, and yet many men received more favour from the king and prospered more. If the gods were worth anything, they would have rewarded him. Therefore, if the new teaching proved better, let it be accepted at once. This is not a conversion of the heart. It is the reasoning of a man disappointed in his patrons.
Then one of the king’s chief men spoke, and Bede gives him the most beautiful words in the Ecclesiastical History. The present life of man on earth, he said, compared with the time that is hidden from us, is like this. The king sits at supper in winter with his captains and thanes, a fire burning in the middle of the hall, while outside the storms of rain and snow are raging. A sparrow flies in at one door and quickly out through another. For the moment it is inside, the winter storm does not touch it; but after a brief interval of calm it passes from winter back into winter and vanishes from sight. So the life of man appears for a little while; of what came before, and of what follows after, we know nothing at all. If this new teaching tells us anything more certain, it deserves to be followed.
The pagan counsellor did not reason his way to the truth of the faith. He reasoned his way to the edge of what natural reason can reach, and stood there honestly. It is the confession of a soul that knows it needs a revelation. St. Thomas teaches that even truths about God which reason can in principle discover had to be revealed, since otherwise they would be known only by a few, after a long time, and with many errors mixed in (Summa Theologiae I, q. 1). The sparrow is the image of that need.
Paulinus then preached to the council. When he had finished, Coifi asked who should first profane the altars and temples of the idols, and answered his own question: he would, who had worshipped them in folly. A pagan priest was forbidden to bear arms or to ride any animal but a mare. Coifi asked the king for weapons and a stallion, rode out to the shrine at Goodmanham, east of York, and hurled his spear into the temple. The people thought he had gone mad. He ordered his companions to burn the enclosure to the ground.
VI. Easter at York, 627
Edwin was baptized by Paulinus at York on Easter Day, the twelfth of April, 627, in a wooden church hastily built and dedicated to St. Peter. With him were baptized his sons, many of his nobles, and a great number of the people. Among them, Bede tells us elsewhere (HE IV.23), was a girl of thirteen named Hild, the king’s great-niece, who would one day be abbess of Whitby. Soon after, the king began to build a stone church around the wooden one, square in plan, enclosing the oratory where he had been baptized: the first beginning of the minster of York.
The six years that followed were the springtime of the Northumbrian Church. At the royal residence of Yeavering, in the Cheviot Hills, Paulinus spent thirty-six days catechizing from morning to night and baptizing the people in the River Glen. In Deira he baptized in the Swale near Catterick. He preached in Lindsey and built a stone church at Lincoln. Edwin persuaded Eorpwald, son of his old protector Rædwald, to bring the East Angles to the faith. Pope Honorius I wrote to the king, encouraging him to read the works of St. Gregory, and sent the pallium to Paulinus, making York a metropolitan see (HE II.17–18).
Bede records that the peace of Edwin’s kingdom became proverbial. It was said that a woman with her newborn child could walk the island from sea to sea without harm. Where clear springs ran beside the roads, the king had posts set up with bronze drinking cups hung on them for travellers, and no one dared steal them, either out of fear of the king or out of love for him (HE II.16). He governed, in other words, as Christian rulers are meant to govern: with the protection of the weak as the measure of his strength.
VII. Hatfield, the twelfth of October, 633
Then came Cadwallon, king of Gwynedd, in alliance with Penda of Mercia. Penda was a pagan. Cadwallon was a Christian, but Bede, who had little love for the Britons, says that he was more savage than any heathen, sparing neither women nor innocent children (HE II.20). On the twelfth day of October, 633, at a place Bede calls Hæthfelth, traditionally identified with Hatfield Chase near Doncaster, Edwin’s army was destroyed. The king was killed, in his forty-eighth year and the seventeenth of his reign. His son Osfrith died beside him. His son Eadfrith surrendered to Penda and was later murdered by him.
What followed was not merely a defeat. It was a collapse. Northumbria was again divided, and the two princes who took the thrones of Deira and Bernicia both gave up the faith they had received and returned to idolatry. Both were killed by Cadwallon within the year. Bede says that the year was so hateful to all good men that those who reckoned the reigns of the kings struck it out of the record entirely (HE III.1). Paulinus judged the north lost. He took the queen, the young Eanflæd and the other royal children by sea to Kent, where he finished his life as bishop of Rochester. Only one man of the mission stayed: James the Deacon, who remained near Catterick, baptizing and teaching the chant of the Roman Church, a single lamp in a dark country.
Edwin’s head was brought to York and laid in the church of St. Peter that he had begun, in the side chapel of St. Gregory, the pope from whose mission his faith had come. His body was later found and carried to Whitby, where his daughter Eanflæd and her daughter Ælfflæd ruled the abbey in turn, and there he was buried among his kin. A local tradition in Nottinghamshire holds that his body rested first in the forest at the place still called Edwinstowe.
VIII. Why the Church calls him martyr
Honesty requires a plain statement here. Edwin did not die in the arena, nor by a sentence pronounced in hatred of the faith, but sword in hand on a field of battle, and one of the two kings who killed him was baptized. Bede, who loved his memory, does not give him the title of martyr.
The Church gave it to him nonetheless, and early. Within seventy years of his death, the calendar of St. Willibrord, written at Echternach on the continent by a Northumbrian monk, already marked the fourth day before the Ides of October as the feast of Edwin the King, and noted Paulinus two days earlier. The English Church kept his memory through the Middle Ages, and when the persecuted Catholics of England painted their own martyrs on the walls of the English College in Rome, Pope Gregory XIII allowed Edwin to be set among them.
The reasoning of that ancient instinct is not hard to see. He fell defending a newly Christian people against an alliance whose pagan member was the chief enemy of the faith in Britain, and his fall did in fact bring the immediate ruin of the Church in his kingdom. The Anglo-Saxons honoured several such kings, of whom his own nephew Oswald is the most famous, men whose deaths in battle against the heathen were understood as a laying down of life for the people of God. Edwin has no Mass in the General Calendar of 1962; his memory belongs to the older, local cult of England, kept on the day of his death.
IX. Wisdom did not leave him
The victory of 633 was not the end of the story, and the manner of its undoing shows how Providence works.
In 634 Oswald, Æthelfrith’s son and Edwin’s own nephew through his sister Acha, returned from exile on Iona, raised a wooden cross on the field of Heavenfield, and destroyed Cadwallon. He sent to Iona for a bishop and received St. Aidan. The son of Edwin’s persecutor completed the work Edwin had begun. Edwin’s daughter Eanflæd came back to Northumbria as queen, married to Oswald’s brother Oswiu. Edwin’s great-niece Hild, baptized beside him on that Easter at York, became the mother of a great abbey and of a school of bishops, and at Whitby in 664 the Northumbrian Church was settled in the Roman observance that Paulinus had first brought north. And at Whitby, under the abbesses of his own blood, Edwin’s bones were laid to rest.
X. What the life teaches
That slow conversion is not insincere conversion. Edwin delayed for two years after his wife’s arrival and for more than a year after his own conditional promise. The delay was not cowardice but deliberation. He would not take a step he did not understand, and when at last he took it, he took it completely and never turned back. The Church does not ask for haste in the things of God. She asks for honesty, and then for fidelity.
That grace runs through households. Today’s Gospel, in the Sunday Mass repeated on this weekday, tells of a royal officer whose son was healed, and who “himself believed, and his whole house” (John 4:53). Edwin’s story is the same story on a larger scale: a queen’s prayer, a daughter’s baptism, a king’s conversion, a great-niece who became a saint, and a whole people brought to the font. No one is converted alone, and no one who is converted is converted only for himself.
That ruin is not the last word. In 633 everything Edwin had built was destroyed in a single afternoon, and within months his successors had apostatized and his bishop had fled. One deacon stayed. A year later the faith returned. God’s work does not depend on the survival of any one king, but He uses the faithfulness of each one, even the faithfulness that ends in apparent defeat.
Practice
Examine. Is there a truth of the faith I have assented to in principle but am still “deliberating” about in practice, as Edwin deliberated after his promise? What would it cost me to keep my word?
Do. Pray this week for the conversion of one person in your own household or family by name, and, like Æthelburh, let your own fidelity be the argument.
Pray. From the Common of a Martyr not a Bishop:
Præsta, quæsumus, omnipotens Deus: ut, qui beati Eduini Martyris tui natalitia colimus, intercessione eius in tui nominis amore roboremur.
“Grant, we beseech Thee, almighty God, that we who celebrate the birthday of blessed Edwin Thy Martyr may, by his intercession, be strengthened in the love of Thy name.”
Aspiration. Adveniat regnum tuum. “Thy kingdom come.”
Devote. It is October, the month of the Holy Rosary. Pray the Glorious Mysteries, lingering on the first, the Resurrection: Edwin was baptized on Easter Day, and passed from the winter of his fathers’ religion into the light of the risen Christ.
If you wish to go deeper: the Lives of the Saints path continues with the Northumbrian saints whose lives are bound to his: Paulinus of York, his nephew Oswald, Aidan of Lindisfarne, and Hild of Whitby. The Church History path treats the conversion of the English from St. Gregory’s mission of 597 to the Synod of Whitby in 664, and the uneasy meeting of the Roman and Irish missions in the north.
Sancte Eduine, rex et martyr, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: St. Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum II.9–20, III.1 and IV.23 (ed. Plummer); the anonymous Whitby Life of St. Gregory the Great; the Calendar of St. Willibrord (Paris, BnF lat. 10837); the Catholic Encyclopedia (1909), s.v. “St. Edwin”; and Butler’s Lives of the Saints. Bede is given in paraphrase throughout.