The Setting of Edith’s Star
Edith left behind her a distraught Archbishop Dunstan, but also a legacy of love for the suffering.
984
King Ethelred the Unready 978-1016
© Derek Harper, Geograph. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.
A triumphal arch and fountain in the gardens of Wilton House, which stands on the lands of the now vanished Wilton Abbey in Wiltshire. The Abbey was destroyed in the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII, the keys being handed over by Abbess Cecily Bodenham on March 25th, 1539. ‘Methinks the Abbess’ wrote one nun ‘hath a faint heart and doth yield up our possessions to the spoiler with a not unwilling haste.’
Introduction
This post is number 3 in the series St Edith of Wilton
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.
freely translated from the Latin
SHORTLY afterwards,* this very holy man was moved to tears during the serving of the liturgy, and when his deacon asked why, his reply came with a sigh from the heart. ‘This soul beloved of the Lord,’ Dunstan said, ‘this twinkling gem, is about to be snatched up from this world of troubles into the country of the saints. This dissolute world is not worthy of the presence of such a great light. Thirty-four days from now, this dazzling star will have set.’
And so it was that, aged twenty-three, on the sixteenth of September, she departed to Christ, in the Year of our Lord 984; and was buried by St Dunstan in the church of St Denis; the holy virgin had often gone there, her mind foreboding, and said: ‘This is my resting place’, watering it with an unceasing rain of tears. In the same court of the monastery she established a hospital, in which thirteen poor persons are now supported.
freely translated from the Latin
From ‘Life of St Edith’, by Monk Goscelin (fl. 1050-1090), as given in J. P. Migne’s ‘Patrologia Latina’ MPL 155 cols 0109-0116B. Freely translated. For substantial extracts in English, see ‘A Catholic History of England’, by William Bernard MacCabe (1801-1891), and there is a life of St Edith at OrthoChristian.
Next in series: St Edith’s Rebuke
On the impression Edith had made on St Dunstan, who would live only another four years himself, see St Edith’s Thumb.
