The Hidden Saints of Seventh-Century England

When I share the Saints of the day from Fr Butler's Lives, I often share one of these "Hidden Saints" to keep their memories alive.

From Crisis

By Joseph Pearce

This is the thirty-third instalment of Mr Pearce's series on the Unsung Heroes of Christendom. The other parts are, from previous to first, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

There is a little-known English saint who shares March 17 with St. Patrick as her feast day, even though she is never invited to the party. This is St. Withburga.

Over the centuries, the English have been something of a curse to the Irish. English rulers, such as Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and Oliver Cromwell, have sought to impose their will on the people of Ireland, often through the tyrannical use of terror on a defenseless population. There is, however, one sense in which the Irish have conquered not only the English but the whole English-speaking world.

This is through the towering figure of St. Patrick who reigns supreme on March 17, his feast day eclipsing even the feast of St. Joseph two days later. It is true that the English might claim, with patriotic petulance, that the great Irish saint was actually born in what is now England, but their plaintive protests fall on deaf ears. St. Patrick is the very epitome of Catholic Ireland, its patron saint and the very paterfamilias of the nation.    
Considering the great Irish saint’s conquest of the world, it is clear that he does not belong among the unsung heroes of Christendom. There is, however, a little-known English saint who shares March 17 with St. Patrick as her feast day, even though she is never invited to the party. This is St. Withburga, an Anglo-Saxon princess, who was the youngest daughter of the king of East Anglia and the sister of the better-known St. Etheldreda. After living a reclusively religious life, she founded a religious community, dying before the building of the convent was completed. Fifty years after her death, her body was exhumed and found to be incorrupt.
Very little else is known about St. Withburga, but she serves as a representative of the numerous hidden saints of Anglo-Saxon England who should be much better known than they are.

The period of what might be called Anglo-Saxondom began with St. Gregory the Great’s sending of St. Augustine of Canterbury to England in 597. This holy monk, with a handful of companions, began the spiritual conquest of Englaland, the land of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. Anglo-Saxon England, which lasted until the Norman Conquest in 1066, would be a land of saints, most of whom are unknown to the modern world, forming part of the hidden history which is the focus of this series. Playing the game of historical hide-and-seek, we will now discover some of the hidden saints who graced the newly-baptized country in the century following St. Augustine’s arrival.

In 627, King Edwin converted to the Faith, making Northumbria a Christian kingdom. With all the zeal of a new convert, he then persuaded King Earpwald of East Anglia to accept Christ in baptism, also in 627, so that in one glorious year the east and the north of England embraced the Faith. In that same year, a veritable annus mirabilis, St. Honorius became Archbishop of Canterbury. 

During his 25 years as Primate, he would oversee the transformation of England into an avowedly Christian country. He sent St. Felix to evangelize East Anglia and lived to see the apostolate of St. Aidan in Northumbria; he replaced St. Birinus of Wessex with another saint, Agilbert, as Bishop of Dorchester; and he had the joy of seeing the conversion of King Peada and his kingdom of the Middle Angles. It was also during St. Honorius’ time that the first English convent of Benedictine nuns was founded, in 630, by St. Eanswith at Folkestone in Kent, beginning a monastic tradition of religious sisters in England that would span 900 years until Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in the 16th century.       

In 642, St. Oswald, the king of Northumbria, fell in battle against the pagans of Mercia. St. Bede reports miracles at the site of his death, including the healing of a paralyzed girl. Miracles were also reported nine years later—after the death of St. Aidan, the Irish monk who was the first bishop and abbot of Lindisfarne (Holy Island), off the coast of Northumbria.

Two of Aidan’s students, St. Cedd and St. Chad, who had received their education at Lindisfarne, would become great evangelists for the Faith in the struggle to wrest the soul of England from the grip of paganism. St. Cedd preached to the East Saxons, in what is now Essex, and proved so successful that he was appointed bishop and subsequently founded monasteries. St. Chad, his brother, would become the first bishop of Mercia, in the English midlands.

One of the most colorful characters of the mid-seventh century was St. Etheldreda, whom we have already noted as the sister of St. Withburga. A princess by birth and later a queen, she became a nun, living an austere and holy life of penance and prayer, eating only one meal a day and wearing clothes of coarse wool instead of linen. She died in 679. Her body was discovered 17 years later to be incorrupt, and the tumor on her neck, the presumed cause of her death, was found to be healed. According to those who witnessed the exhumation of her body, including St. Wilfrid, the linen cloths in which her body had been wrapped were as fresh as they were on the day of her burial. 

Another great abbess of the Church and a contemporary of St. Etheldreda was St. Ethelburga, foundress of Barking Abbey in Essex, to the east of London. The abbey would become one of the most prominent religious houses in England, surviving until its destruction by Henry VIII. The abbey had been founded for St. Ethelburga by her brother, St. Erkenwald, sometime before the latter had become bishop of the East Saxons in 675. Such was the rise to prominence of Barking Abbey and such was the reputation for holiness of its foundress that St. Bede, writing only a few decades after St. Ethelburga’s death, spends several chapters on the events of her life, including accounts of several miracles, such as visions of the afterlife and the healing of a blind woman while praying in the convent burial ground.

A saint of an altogether different sort was Caedwalla, a pagan king of Wessex, who had a reputation for ruthlessness and violence until he fell under the benign and holy influence of St. Wilfrid. Experiencing a dramatic conversion, he abdicated in 688 and travelled to Rome on penitential pilgrimage, desiring to be received into the Church. He was baptized on Holy Saturday 689 by Pope Sergius and given the name of Peter. 

Although he was only 30 years old, he was taken ill suddenly and died. It is said that he was still wearing his white baptismal robes at the moment of death. He was buried in the crypt of St. Peter’s and his epitaph, written by Crispus, Archbishop of Milan, is quoted by Bede. Caedwalla would be the first of four Anglo-Saxon kings, two of whom became monks upon their arrival in the Eternal City, to end their days in Rome. 

The late seventh century was also a time of great scholarship and culture. St. Adrian of Canterbury established a school, teaching Greek, Latin, Scripture, theology, law, and astronomy, at which many future bishops and abbots were educated. St. Adrian had a reputation for sanctity as well as scholarship, and when his body was exhumed in 1091, almost 400 years after his death, it was found to be incorrupt. Similarly, the body of St. Cuthbert, the Bishop of Lindisfarne, was found to be incorrupt in 698, eleven years after his death, and miraculous healings were reported at his tomb and in association with his relics.

Much of what we know about these little-known saints is due to St. Bede, who wrote his Ecclesiastical History of the English People in 732, only a few decades after the events he recounts. It is to this great saint and venerable Doctor of the Church, whose praises hardly need singing, that we owe our knowledge of the hidden saints of seventh-century England. May we be grateful for his scholarship, and may we pray for his intercession and for the intercession of the many hidden saints of seventh-century England. 

Pictured: St Withburga, depicted in St Nicholas's Anglican Church, Dereham, Norfolk