Saint Edmund of Abingdon – Co-Patron with Our
Lady of the Diocese of Portsmouth
It has been said that whereas we revere Thomas a
Becket for the manner of his death, we revere Edmund
- who was born five years after Becket’s martyrdom –
for the manner of his life.
The Early Years
 Edmund was born in Abingdon in 1175, in a house
that today is known as St Edmund’s Lane. The house
no longer exists, nor does the chapel built over it
in memory of him – but the lane does. It is an
extraordinary thing to be able to walk the streets
of Abingdon and look at the sights and some of the
buildings with which Edmund would have been
familiar.
Edmund was the eldest of a fair sized family. We
hear quite a bit about his brother Robert - who
accompanied Edmund through all the different stages
of his life - and his two sisters Margaret and
Alice, who became nuns at Catesby in
Northamptonshire. Edmund’s father, called Reginald
(given the nickname Rich), was a merchant who owned
various properties in Abingdon, and was possibly
employed for certain tasks by the Abbey.
In those days Abingdon was dominated by its
Benedictine Abbey. Tradesmen and craftsmen were
utterly dependent on it. The abbey controlled
market, fishing and mill rights. It was a huge
landowner and was mentioned in the Doomsday Book.
(William the Conqueror’s son was educated there.)
Edmund’s formidable mother – Mabel (from the
French “Belle Marie”) – was originally buried at her
death in St. Nicholas Church, a church which still
stands today at the entrance to the Abbey Grounds.
Mabel was the chief influence in Edmund’s young
life. She possessed an iron will and strong
character. Everyone who wrote of her mentioned her
ascetic and disciplined way of life – which she
imposed on her family.
Her husband ended his days a monk. It was
laughingly said that he found life in a monastery
less strict than living with his wife Mabel! As a
boy Edmund was sent with his brother Robert to a
school in Oxford – near the present day chapel of
Brasenose College - and then when they were about
fifteen Mabel sent them to study in Paris. As a
farewell gift she gave them both a hair shirt!
Encountering Christ
Legend has it that - as a child - Edmund
encountered the Christ child at Milham Ford near
Magdalen bridge - and that he also placed a ring on
a statue of Our Lady in the church of St Mary the
Virgin and a ring on his own finger which he never
removed - as a pledge of his commitment to her.
After Paris he returned to Oxford (which in those
days numbered about 1500 students) where he became
renowned as a teacher or Master of such subjects as
grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry,
music and astronomy.
He taught his students – “Study as if you were to
live forever, live as if you were to die tomorrow.”
Then he was reputed to have had a vision of his
mother urging him to study theology. Edmund did so
and was ordained a priest. Now he was chiefly famed
for his austerities, his compassion and his
preaching.
In Oxford he lived on the site of the present day
St Edmund Hall, and indeed is said to have built the
Lady Chapel at the church of St. Peter in the East
next door.
He wrote his famous book – Speculum Ecclesiae or
Mirror of the Church – describing the various levels
of contemplation.
From 1222 to 1233 Edmund became a Canon, Prebend
and Treasurer at Salisbury, at the time when the new
Gothic cathedral was being built. However, he
chiefly enjoyed ministering to the needs of the
people of Calne in Wiltshire where he lived 9 months
of the year.
Then in 1233 he was chosen by the Pope to be the
Archbishop of Canterbury on account of the moral
inspiration of his lecturing and preaching and for
his asceticism.
He was genuinely reluctant to accept the post but
obeyed, reflecting:
“He who knows all things, knows that I would
never consent to this election unless I thought that
I should sin mortally by refusing it.”
His seven-year tenure of Canterbury came at a
difficult and desperate time for the country.
England was on the brink of civil war between the
King Henry III and the Barons. But Edmund brokered a
peace. It was said that people listened to him
because of his virtue.
He preached that there are two things which make
a man holy – knowledge of the Truth and love of
goodness. He used to say, “If you want to be loved,
show yourself to be loveable.”
Edmund’s Passing
Edmund died on the 16th November 1240 at Soissy
in France on his way to see the Pope in Rome. His
body was taken to the Cistercian abbey of Pontigny,
where his shrine above the high altar remains to
this today.
On account of his holy life and the miracles that
occurred after his death, he was canonized seven
years later. On his Feast Day, November 16th, we
remember and seek the prayers of St. Edmund,
Co-Patron with Our Lady of our Diocese.
Edmund was man of intelligence and deep
spirituality, who was respected and loved by all.
Unrelenting in defence of liberty and truth, he was
unafraid to rebuke kings and stand up to Popes. He
was a scholar and renowned preacher.
He was the first Oxford man to become Doctor of
Divinity, Archbishop of Canterbury and Saint. He was
heroic in self-discipline and compassion. He was a
man of faith and deep prayer.
St. Edmund of Abingdon pray for us!
Our Lady of Abingdon - Musings
Going over from the Convent to the Church on a
Sunday morning, and taking a short cut through the
cemetery, I sometimes pause by a grave where the
headstone reminds us to pray for the repose of the
soul Elsie Annie Emerton, who died on 9th October,
1971, aged 88 years. Mrs Emerton, her husband and
their 2 daughters became Catholics in 1918. They
were received into the Church by the Parish Priest,
Father James Doran, having been impressed by a
sermon preached by him at an outdoor Benediction,
when, by chance, they stood to watch a Corpus
Christi Procession. Leaving the graveside I muse on
the possibility that the family might be given the
gift of Faith through the intercession of Our Lady
of Abingdon.
When the Benedictine Monastery was demolished in
1538, the stones were carried away for building, as
far out as Culham. There in 1883 in the village inn,
called the ‘Sow and Pigs’, Mrs Emerton was born,
Elsie Annie Lewington, the only daughter of the
proprietors, George and Mary Lewington. The inn was
pulled down in 1913 and, in the gable end of the
building was found a very large stone, which was
placed on a rockery in the grounds of Culham House.
Some years afterwards that property was acquired by
Mr. Geoffrey Houghton-Brown, who realised that the
large stone was a mutilated statue of Our Lady,
which came from Abingdon Abbey. He gave the statue
to Father Doran, who put it standing in the side
chapel of the Church and there it stood for 13 years
with a notice hanging round the remains of its neck,
giving something of its history.To commemorate the
centenary of the re-opening of the Abingdon Mission,
Canon Michael Sexton, the then Parish Priest, had
the statue restored. This restoration was undertaken
by a well-known sculptor, Mr Philip Lindsay Clark,
in conjunction with a Benedictine monk from
Farnborough Abbey, Dom Theodore Bailey, an expert in
medieval art.The statue was then fixed to the wall
of the chancel. Beneath the statue an altar was
later erected, the cost of which was defrayed by a
legacy bequeathed to the Canon, the life-savings of
a faithful parishioner, Mary Ann Fisher, who died at
the age of 90 and remembered every priest during the
first 100 years. At the age of ten Mary Ann was
present at the funeral of Doctor John Paul O’Toole,
the first priest of the Mission.
In her old age when asked about Dr O’Toole she
would say in her Berkshire dialect: "Yes, I know’d
‘im well, I know’d ‘im well, everyone loved ‘im".
The relics enshrined in the altar were encased in a
silver jewel casket donated by a convert, Miss
Josephine Dockar-Drysdale, of Wick Hall, Radley, in
thanksgiving for her Faith, which, she said, after
God, she owed to the example of a servant maid. Mrs.
Emerton presented a pair of vases, 2 silver
tankards, once used in the ‘Sow and Pigs’, with the
name engraved underneath.
On May 1st 1954, the centenary year, the ceremony
of blessing the statue and the inauguration of the
Shrine of Our Lady of Abingdon took place. It was
performed by Archbishop John Henry King, Bishop of
Portsmouth, whose family kept the Faith right
through the Reformation. An appropriate sermon was
preached by the Archbishop, and the ceremony was
concluded with the Victorian hymn ‘This is the Image
of Our Queen’. One could never forget seeing the
Archbishop – ‘that piece of English oak’ – standing
erect and singing lustily in his sonorous voice:
"In this thine own sweet month of May
Dear Mother of my God, I pray,
Do thou remember me."
Back in Winchester that evening, seated, with the
proverbial pipe, in his favourite armchair, and with
his prodigious memory, did the Archbishop muse, I
wonder, on his schooldays in Abingdon over 60 years
earlier, when he used to attend May Devotions and
serve at Benediction in the Church on Sunday
evenings, going over from the convent, through the
orchard and along the cloister, or perhaps,
sometimes, taking a short-cut through the cemetery.
Sister M. Catherine
Our Lady’s Convent, May. 1990
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