Edmund, Saint

Related Category: Saints

(Edmund Rich), 1170?–1240, English churchman, archbishop of Canterbury, b. Abingdon. He taught at Oxford. A forceful preacher, he successfully preached (1227) the crusade against the Saracens. Edmund was made archbishop in 1234 and mediated the peace between Wales and England. His zeal for reform antagonized Henry III who, to isolate St. Edmund, secured from Rome a papal legate sympathetic to himself, with jurisdiction over the archbishop. His episcopacy thus neutralized, St. Edmund retired reluctantly to Pontigny, a Cistercian abbey in France, where he died soon after. Feast: Nov. 16.

See C. H. Lawrence, St. Edmund of Abingdon (1960).