Saint Cynehelm of Winchcombe
Today in the Orthodox Church we venerate a martyred young prince, slain treacherously by the will of a wicked elder sibling in pursuit of political power and office, who offered himself up willingly and without resistance to his killer. No, this prince is not Boris and not Gleb, but in the legends surrounding him he does bear a certain spiritual resemblance to these two great quintessentially-Russian Orthodox passion-bearers, as well as to the later martyred Éadweard King. The saint we venerate today is indeed Cynehelm of Mercia, who was slain violently in the year 811.
Cynehelm was one of two children of Cœnwulf King of Mercia, the other being his elder sister Cwénþrýð. The earlier and more reliable records we have indicate that Cynehelm was born in 786, which would have made him twenty-four years of age at the time of his death. Given that his name appears on several official charters, deeds and proclamations of the time both as beneficiary and as witness, it can be safely assumed that he had reached his majority well before 811. However, he is portrayed both in his hagiographical legend and in Orthodox iconography as a young child of seven years. One historical record relates that he fell in battle against the Welsh, possibly the result of a deliberate betrayal on his own side similar to the fate of Uriah the Hittite in Scripture. Another record makes him the direct victim of a Mercian court intrigue involving Cwénþrýð and several accomplices who desired to take power in the kingdom. Later hagiographical versions of Cynehelm’s death, such as that written by William of Malmesbury, embellish the latter history. This version of Cynehelm’s tale, however, is the most popular – and it even appears in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, where it is placed in the mouth of Chauntecleer in the ‘Nun’s Priest’s Tale’.
In the hagiographical legend, the young boy Cynehelm was given the kingdom of Mercia as an inheritance at the behest of his father Cœnwulf. The legend also makes Cynehelm’s aunt Burghild (historically the sister of Cœnwulf King) into a kind and loving elder sister as a foil to the jealous Cwénþrýð. Cwénþrýð, hating her brother in her heart, conspired with her lover Æscberht, who was also the tutor of Cynehelm. Giving him money, she told Æscberht to find some opportunity to slay Cynehelm that she might rule.
Cynehelm was not witless to what was about to happen to him. He knew his sister’s temperament and intentions. He was given to see in a dream a premonition of his own death. In this dream, Cynehelm climbed a tall tree from which he could see the four corners of Mercia. Three of the corners bowed to him and paid him homage as king. The fourth rushed toward the tree and began to hack it down with axes. As the tree fell, Cynehelm changed into a dove and flew heavenward in bliss. He told this dream to his nurse, Wulfwynn, who both wept that Cynehelm was to die at the hands of the wicked, and rejoiced that he was to join the throng of the blessed in martyrdom.
Æscberht led the young Cynehelm on a hunt into the woods near Worcester. Cynehelm wearied in his ride, and lay down beneath a tree to sleep. While he slept, Æscberht busied himself digging a grave for the boy. However, Cynehelm awoke and chided Æscberht: ‘You think to kill me here in vain. I shall be slain somewhere else.’ Then he took a dead ashen branch and stuck one end of it into the open grave. Wondrously, the upright end of the branch began to blossom into living leaves and flowers, and the downward end took root in the grave. This branch grew into a great tree that was called Saint Cynehelm’s Ash.
Instead of being shamed and chastised by this saintly wonder from the young boy he was to kill, Æscberht took the boy upwards into the Clent Hills and murdered Cynehelm by beheading him with a sword, as the boy knelt singing the Hymn of Ambrose, and buried him in another hasty grave on that spot. He returned to Cwénþrýð and told her that the deed had been done, and that she was now queen. Cwénþrýð ruled with equal jealousy as she had pursued rule: she forbade any mention of her brother’s name in Mercia.
In the meanwhile, in the Church of Saint Peter in Rome, a white dove descended from heaven with a scroll, which landed in the palm of the Pope of Rome (who, in 811, would have been Leo III). He unfurled it, and it bespoke a murder of one of God’s saints that had happened in the Mercian kingdom in England. The Pope dispatched the contents of this message with great urgency to Wulfred, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Wulfred despatched a party from Winchcombe to seek the body of the unjustly slain. They were guided as they went by an unearthly pillar of light coming from the Clent Hills, which arose from the spot where the murdered boy had been hastily buried. At the graveside they found a white cow, which stood there as though at vigil. As the relics were borne up out of the ground, wondrously a spring of clean, fresh water bubbled up from the grave.
Wulfred’s party bore the bones back from the Clent Hills to Winchcombe, but they were pursued along the way by an armed party sent from Worcester to take the relics of the saint for themselves. They rode at a fast pace to baffle pursuit, but soon wearied. As they rested nearby Winchcombe in Gloucester, another well sprang up where they lay their staffs. They drank of this water and were refreshed enough to bear the bones of the saint the rest of the way home.
What happened after Cynehelm’s murder was brought to light is a matter of disagreement among the stewards of the Cynehelm legend. Some hagiographers hold that the wicked queen Cwénþrýð’s eyes were put out as she was reading the Psalter, and that she was later done to death ignominiously along with her paramour Æscberht. Others hold that she was stricken with remorse at seeing her brother’s body, renounced her queenship and Æscberht, and retired to a nunnery. The latter seems more historically likely, given that a Mercian Cwénþrýð is listed among the abbesses of Minster.
Although there are multiple historical problems with this legend in its popular form, not least of which is the matter of dates, Cynehelm: a.) was a real historical personage; b.) was killed at a young age in an unjust manner; and c.) was already venerated locally as a saint by the Mercians during the ninth century. However, the historicity of the Cynehelm legend is, in the broad scheme, not so important. It must be stressed that the tale of Cynehelm puts the lie to culturally-essentialist arguments that Eastern, or specifically Russian, Orthodoxy is somehow uniquely (or, as some are again charging, genetically) predisposed to what Americanists are now calling ‘submission to tyranny’. When England too was united to the undivided Church, her saints – including Cynehelm and Éadweard (who is still particularly venerated by the Russian Orthodox!!) – embodied the exact same kind of kenotic nonresistance that Saints Boris and Gleb did. Their hagiographers (in Cynehelm’s case, even after the Great Schism!) clearly even celebrated this nonresistance. The Russian spiritual ‘type’, though it remains strongly unique in its kenotic and God-bearing simplicity, nonetheless bears common features with all the Orthodox peoples, including the pre-Schismatic English. Dearest Cynehelm, believing prince and passion-bearer, pray to Christ our God that our souls may be saved!
O passion-bearer and follower of Christ,
Young and guileless Cynehelm –
When thou wast murdered by thine own kin,
The secret iniquity could not be hidden.
A miracle revealed the truth to all the world,
And justice was restored.
Pray to Christ our God to save our souls!
Saint Cynehelm’s Well and Church, Worcester
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