Holy Hierarch Iþamar of Rochester

Rochester Cathedral and Priory

Today in the Orthodox Church, we celebrate a relatively obscure saint, the first native Englishman to be consecrated as a bishop in the British Isles: Iþamar of Rochester. Saint Bede mentions Iþamar twice in his History of the English Church and People. In the History Iþamar is cited as the successor of Bishop Saint Paulinus of York and Rochester, consecrated by Archbishop Saint Honorius of Canterbury. Two passages in the History allude to him:

In [Paulinus’s] place Archbishop Honorius consecrated Iþamar, a man of Kent, who was as worthy and learned as his predecessors.

And:

After a vacancy of eighteen months, Deusdedit, a South Saxon, was elected to the archepiscopal see and so became the sixth Archbishop. He was consecrated by Iþamar, Bishop of Rochester, on the twenty-sixth of March (655), and ruled the see until his death nine years, four months and two days later. And on the death of Iþamar, Deusdedit himself consecrated Damian, a West Saxon, in his place.

Those two snippets from Holy Bede are pretty much all we know about Bishop Iþamar for sure, other than that, as a monk, he (rather unusually) took for his patron an Old Testament figure – Ithamar the youngest son of Aaron the High Priest and the ancestor of Eli, the caretaker of the Prophet Samuel.

Saint Iþamar’s cult was fairly dormant from Bede’s time all the way until the 1100’s, during the first English Civil War, or ‘the Anarchy’, between King Stephen and his cousin Empress Maud, when a compilation of nineteen miracles ascribed to Saint Iþamar appeared as part of the textual tradition of the Priory at Rochester and Rochester Cathedral with which the Priory was associated, to generate a local cultus. The author of this compilation notes with admirable sincerity that ‘nothing was handed down to us from his lifetime’, leaving the reader to wonder exactly what prompted this compilation to begin with. Later historians have speculated that it was part of an advertising campaign on the part of the monks at Rochester to attract pilgrims to their church.

Saint Iþamar, in these posthumous accounts of his miracles, showed particular compassion upon the rural poor. One farmer who had lost all but two of his oxen to plague brought his prayer to the church at Rochester and was answered with a wonder: when he returned home he saw his sick animals restored to health, and his dead ones to life. Another miracle recounts a young girl, deaf-mute from birth, whose hearing and speech were given to her by the saint on the day of his commemoration. Saint Iþamar seems to have preferred to bestow the graces of healing upon God’s poor – those who were ‘poor of things’ but ‘rich of faith’.

Saint Iþamar also seemed to have a penchant for healing the blind and those with afflictions of the eyes, along with those suffering from fevers and insomnia, head complaints, deafness, and ‘women endangered by labour pains’. He cared for families as well, curing both a woman and her husband who were afflicted by chronic illness. Given the time at which the Miracles were compiled as well, many of Saint Iþamar’s miracles have a political dimension – or rather, one which was critical of the conditions of the English Anarchy then prevailing. He swayed the heart of Queen Matilda – King Stephen’s wife – to release a man who was then in Empress Maud’s service.

It was apparently not so uncommon in the British Isles for a saint who had been for several centuries neglected, to be rediscovered and venerated again during times of political turmoil or poor ecclesiastical leadership. But it must be remembered that the Norman priests and bishops who ruled the English Church after 1066 had a penchant for quashing just such local saintly cults, particularly those surrounding Old English saints (who were seen to be politically subversive). In this sense the revival of the cultus of Saint Iþamar is particularly remarkable. Holy bishop Iþamar, first-chosen among the English flock as shepherd, we beseech you pray to Christ our God to save our souls!