Once and Future Saints

Three prophecies for England

The Martyrdom of St Edmund, by Brian Whelan

Today is England’s national day, and by tradition I usually feel I ought to write something about my homeland on this date. This year though, I haven’t been able to manage the kind of essay I wrote two years ago. I’m busy finishing up my Book of Wild Saints, I’m still not fully recovered from my winter burnout, and my spring garden is calling me in my spare moments. There is wood to be cut and beehives to be set out and weeds to be uprooted and endless wooden structures to be endlessly painted. Nature moves fast in April.

Besides, how much can be said about England in these times? Almost too much is being said everywhere, it seems to me, and the world is moving so fast and so unpredictably that an old man like me is not sure what he can add.

I don’t know much about the future of England - who does? - but I do know quite a lot about its past. So instead of an essay, I am going to offer up three prophecies from English history, all of which relate to the country’s Christian soul (more about that here). All of them are still ongoing concerns. History is always being written.

1. The Tree

In the winter of 1066, the King of England lay dying. Edward, last monarch of the House of Wessex, had no children, and had not named an heir. He was better suited to a monastery than a royal palace, as his nickname, ‘the Confessor’, suggested. He would later become the only English monarch to be canonised by a Pope. But now he lingered between life and death. And as he did so, he was granted a vision. He later related it, we are told, to his attendants, and it was recorded for posterity:

Just now, two monks stood before me, whom I had once known very well when I was a young man in Normandy, men of great sanctity, and for many years now relieved of earthly cares. And they addressed me with a message from God.

‘Since,’ they said, ‘those who have climbed to the highest offices in the kingdom of England, the earls, the bishops and abbots, and all those in holy orders, are not what they seem to be, but, on the contrary, are servants of the devil, on a year and one day after the day of your death God has delivered all this kingdom, cursed by Him, into the hands of the enemy, and devils shall come through all this land with fire and sword and the havoc of war.’

Then I said to them, ‘I will show God’s design to the people, and the forgiveness of God shall have mercy upon the penitents. For He had mercy on the people of Nineveh, when they repented on hearing the Divine indignation.’ But they said, ‘These will not repent, nor will the forgiveness of God come to pass for them.’ ‘And what,’ I asked, ‘shall happen? And when can a remission of this great indignation be hoped for?’

‘At that time,’ they answered, ‘when a green tree, if cut down in the middle of its trunk, and the part cut off carried the space of three furlongs from the stock, shall be joined again to the trunk, by itself and without the hand of man or any sort of stake, and begin once more to push leaves and bear fruit from the old love of its uniting sap, then first can a remission of these great ills be hoped for’

Edward died on the 5th of January 1066. A year and a day later, on 6th January 1067, Duke William of Normandy - known to posterity as ‘the Conqueror’ but to his contemporaries as ‘the Bastard’ - had himself crowned King in Westminster Abbey, which was surrounded by a phalanx of Norman knights to ensure that the populace did not rebel against its new foreign overlords.

William’s reign was revolutionary in numerous ways: he oversaw a massive transfer of land from the English nobility to his Norman cronies; he instituted what would later become known as feudalism; he introduced many Norman innovations to England, including castles, hereditary monarchy and the legal ownership of wives by their husbands. He unleashed mass violence on any parts of his new country which resisted his military rule. If you want to know more about what this looked like, I once wrote a book which told the story.

He also changed English Christianity, which may be what this curious prophecy refers to. William’s invasion of England was blessed by the Pope - controversially - and he carried the Papal banner on the battlefield at Hastings, which put the willies up some of the Anglo-Saxon soldiers. This was a period when the Pope was working to centralise and more tightly control the Western church, and the Normans, in England and elsewhere, are sometimes referred to as his ‘shock troops’. William’s reign coincided with that of Pope Gregory VII, perhaps the most revolutionary Roman Bishop in history, who was intent on asserting the power of the Church over the claims of the Holy Roman Empire in the West. Gregory introduced numerous innovations, such as priestly celibacy and the notion of ‘secularism’, a radical idea designed to distinguish church from state and holy from profane, which the West still uses to define itself today.

As part of these reforms, the Roman church wanted more control over its outlying provinces and their practices, and in England the Normans were its vehicle. William’s reign saw the mass demolition of wooden Anglo-Saxon churches and their replacement with the great stone Romanesque buildings which can still be found all over England today (here’s one I wrote about earlier.) It saw the end of the period of the wild saints, the importation of continental religious orders like the Benedictines to replace indigenous monastic practices, and a far greater degree of oversight from Rome. Within twenty years of the Conquest, there were no Anglo-Saxon Bishops left in the country.

Is this what the prophecy is referring to? The wild card is that, just twelve years before the Normans raged across the English Channel, the Great Schism between the Eastern and Western Christian churches had taken place. The Christian tree had been cut in two, and its two halves carried far away from each other. They have not been re-united yet.

2. Greeks Bearing Gifts

There is a prophecy you will often come across if you begin to research the saints of England, and Britain. It’s from the Greek saint Arsenius of Paros, though I’ve not been able to find the original source for it. It is very simple, and it seems very true:

The Church in The British Isles will only begin to grow when she begins to again venerate her own Saints.

I relate to Christianity through the lives of the saints - certainly not exclusively, but as a reliable and regular guide. It seems to me that if a religious practice can reliably create holy men and women, then this is evidence of its truth and efficacy. I’ve spent quite a few years now looking into the saints of England and Ireland especially. England has a great wealth of holy men and women, most of whom are unknown today. Once upon a time, their shrines and relics were embedded in the landscape and in the lives of English Christians. The Taliban-like violence of the Tudor ‘Reformation’ put paid to the holy landscapes of England, but saints don’t need shrines to be examples and intercessors, after all.

Will the English begin to rediscover their history through the lives and adventures of their saints? Perhaps when the chips are down we will turn to them again. The hour is late.

3. The Once and Future Saint

Finally, since this is the day of England’s national saint, let’s talk about England’s national saint. George is a very curious saint to be representing the English, given that he never visited the country, had no connection with it and is also the national saint of numerous other nations, cities and principalities. I have written before about how this happened and what it means, so I won’t repeat myself.

What I will do, though, is repeat something I have also written before: that England’s true national saint is not George, but Edmund the Martyr. This early medieval Christian king, murdered by Vikings, was one of the greatest saints of medieval England, with his shrine at Bury St Edmunds becoming one of the major pilgrimage sites of Western Europe. That shrine was also destroyed by the English Taliban, and the saint’s bones scattered to the four winds.

But where did they go? Nobody knows. Rumours abounded that Edmund’s relics were spirited away before the Taliban could get their hands on them. It has also been suggested that they lie still under the ruins of the Abbey at Bury St Edmunds: excavations are soon to take place to determine whether this is true. Other legends suggest that Edmund’s bones lie in France, awaiting the right time to return, or that they lie quietly in Arundel Castle, kept hidden from public view.

Which brings us to our final prophecy: that when the relics of St Edmund finally return to Bury St. Edmunds, the spiritual regeneration of the English nation will begin. This is one of those ‘ancient prophecies’ that seems to have very dim origins. I haven’t been able to find out where and when it originated. But I want it to be true. If there is one thing England needs, it is spiritual regeneration. The good news is that the saints are still waiting, quietly, for us to begin.

I’ll be talking about some of the saints of England, and that spiritual regeneration, at the British Saints Convention next month in Walsingham. Come along and join in.

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