Edmund: In Search of England's Lost King

by Francis Young

Overview

What buried secret lies beneath the stones of one of England's greatest former churches and shrines? The ruins of the Benedictine Abbey of Bury St Edmunds are a memorial to the largest Romanesque church ever built. This Suffolk market town is now a quiet place, out of the way, eclipsed by its more famous neighbour Cambridge. But present obscurity may conceal a find as significant as the emergence from beneath a Leicester car-park of the remains of Richard III. For Bury, as Francis Young now reveals, is the probable site of the body - placed in an ‘iron chest' but lost during the Dissolution of the Monasteries - of Edmund: martyred monarch of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of East Anglia and, well before St George, England's first patron saint. After the king was slain by marauding Vikings in the ninth century, the legend which grew up around his murder led to the foundation in Bury of one of the pre-eminent shrines of Christendom. In showing how Edmund became the pivotal figure around whom Saxons, Danes and Normans all rallied, the author points to the imminent rediscovery of the ruler who created England.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781788311793
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	06/28/2018
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Francis Young is Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and achieved his PhD in History from the University of Cambridge, UK. He is the author of The Gages of Hengrave and Suffolk Catholicism, 1640-1767 (2015) and The Abbey of Bury St Edmunds: History, Legacy and Discovery (2016), amongst others.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

List of Illustrations xiv

Abbreviations xvi

Chronology xvii

Introduction 1

1 Angelcynn: Edmund's People 19

2 Death of a King 46

3 Invincible Martyr: The Early Cult of Edmund, 869-1066 68

4 'Patron of all England': Edmund in the Medieval World, 1066-1539 93

5 A Lost King: Edmund since the Reformation 123

Conclusion: Finding Edmund? 144

Notes 159

Bibliography 183

Index 196

Editorial Reviews

Simultaneously a sophisticated work of history, a compelling detective story and a moving meditation on what it is to be English, this is a fascinating and wonderful book.” —Tom Holland

“The author's enthusiasm for his subject, and for the quest to find the mortal remains of St. Edmund, everywhere shines through. Authoritative and reliable, this volume is at the same time an enjoyable and engaging read.” —John Ashdown-Hill, MBE

From the Publisher