Clay Lane

The Copy Book

A Library of History and Literature in English

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769

A Light to Lighten the English

Even before he was born, St Dunstan was marked out to lead the English Church and nation to more peaceful times.

In 793, Vikings swept across Northumbria and extinguished the beacon of Lindisfarne, symbol of England’s Christian civilisation. Much of the land lay under a pagan shadow for over a century, but St Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury in the reign of King Edgar (r. 959-975), helped to rekindle both Church and State.

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Picture: © The Presidential Press and Information Office, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC-BY-SA 4.0.. Source.

770

Candlemas

A February celebration for which the faithful have brought candles to church since Anglo-Saxon times.

Candlemas is the English name for a Christian feast also known as the Presentation of Christ, the Purification of the Virgin, and the Meeting of the Lord. It is kept on February 2nd, forty days after Christmas, and in Anglo-Saxon times was a night of candle-lit processions and carol singing almost on a par with Easter.

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Picture: By the circle of Andrey Rublev (1408), via the Russian State Museum in St Petersburg and Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.

771

The Setting of Edith’s Star

Edith left behind her a distraught Archbishop Dunstan, but also a legacy of love for the suffering.

Edith of Wilton died on September 16th, 984, at the age of just twenty-three. That August, the elderly Archbishop of Canterbury, Dunstan, had crowned a project dear to her, the building and beautifying of a chapel dedicated to St Denis of Paris, with a personal visit, and had taken to her right from the start.

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Picture: © Derek Harper, Geograph. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.. Source.

772

St Edith’s Rebuke

King Canute could not believe that his hard-living predecessor Edgar could father a saint.

In about 961 King Edgar took a noble lady named Wulfthryth from Wilton Abbey to be his lover. Soon after, she returned to Wilton with a daughter named Edith, who became a nun. Many years later Canute, King of Denmark and since 1016 also King of England, paid a visit to the Abbey, and expressed surprise that Edith was now regarded there as a saint.

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Picture: By Ivan Aivazovsky (1817–1900), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.

773

St Edith’s Thumb

The way Edith kept tracing little crosses with her thumb made a great impression on Archbishop Dunstan.

Edith, a nun at Wilton Abbey in Wiltshire, was a daughter of King Edgar (r. 959-975). One of her pretty idiosyncrasies was the way she made the sign of the cross by wiggling her right thumb, on herself and on anyone whom she wished to bless. It captivated St Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, who had come to dedicate a new chapel.

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Picture: © Derek Harper, Geograph. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.. Source.

774

The Character of St Edith of Wilton

Edith of Wilton may have been the daughter of King, but she did not behave like one in the Abbey or the town.

Flemish monk Goscelin spent much of his life in England just after the Conquest of 1066, researching the lives of Anglo-Saxon saints. One of his favourites was St Edith of Wilton (?961-984), a daughter of King Edgar. He often felt her presence on his visits to the Abbey where she had lived a century before.

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Picture: © Peter I. Vardy, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.. Source.