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.
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.
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.
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.
An austere Bishop of Winchester scolded St Edith for her comely nun’s habit, but the young woman’s eyes saw further than his.
St Edith of Wilton was a daughter of King Edgar (r. 959-975). The nuns of the convent, which was ruled by her mother Wulfthryth, wore rather nice habits and the Bishop of Winchester did not did not think them suitable. Edith, however, was not one to judge a book by its cover.