Holy Hierarch Æþelwold, Bishop of Winchester

Saint Æþelwold of Winchester,
illumination from the Benedictional

Today in the Holy Orthodox Church we celebrate Saint Æþelwold of Winchester, one of the three great hierarchical champions of the Benedictine reforms in England, alongside and in concert with Saint Dúnstán of Canterbury and Saint Ósweald of Worcester.

Saint Æþelwold was probably born to a goodly family of Winchester in the year 909 or 910; his parents loved the Church and raised him to do so as well. From childhood he sought a life close to Christ; though he was for some time a courtier of Æþelstán King. He was ordained a priest on the same day as Saint Dúnstán in 938, by Bishop Saint Ælfhéah ‘the Bald’ of Winchester (not to be confused with the later Saint Ælfhéah of Canterbury). He retired to the holy site of Glastonbury together with Saint Dúnstán, where he was tonsured a Benedictine monk. He gave away all his worldly possessions and his entire patrimony away, and would persist even in the office of bishop in breaking up whatever was given to him and distributing it among the poor and needy. While at Glastonbury under the rule of Saint Dúnstán his abbot, Æþelwold spent the better part of ten years in study of the Holy Scriptures and the Psalms, as well as the writings of Venerable Aldhelm and the Rule of Saint Benedict. He also laboured in the kitchens as a servant of the abbey cook; one of the miracles attributed to him involves the multiplication of the monks’ meat by his prayers. Æþelwold was very soon made prior in the abbey under Dúnstán.

Saint Dúnstán ruled with a fairly gentle and tolerant hand at Glastonbury. He was tolerant of married priests – who were at that time the norm in England – and pursued monastic reforms with a prudent and careful eye. The slightly-younger Æþelwold, however – zealous in his personal austerities and hard physical labour – did not yet possess this patience. He wished to undertake a much more drastic and sweeping reform of the Church. He had wanted to visit the reformed monastery on the Continent in Cluny, but was prevented from doing so by both Dúnstán and Éadred King. Their desire was rather that the priestmonk take charge of renovating the run-down monastery at Abingdon, which housed a chapel erected in honour of Saint Helena the mother of Constantine, the holy patroness of both city and abbey. Since that time, it had been repeatedly sacked by the Danes, and the lands belonging to it had been taken over by Ælfrǽd King.

Having been given this holy charge by both his abbot and his earthly king, Æþelwold did not dare to disobey. Bringing with him several brother-monks of Glastonbury, including Ósgár, Foldbriht and Friþegar, together with Æþelwold as their abbot they rebuilt Abingdon on the model of Glastonbury. For some time it was, apart from Glastonbury, the sole site in England after the Danish ravages where the Benedictine life was pursued with any kind of gravity or rigour. Æþelwold later sent Ósgár to the Abbaye de Fleury in France to report on the state of monastic life there; when Ósgár returned, he brought with him a wealth of spiritual insights and practices that Æþelwold was eager to institute at Abingdon.

Æþelwold was also able to restore the church buildings – which he did in the rotunda style of older Greek and Roman churches to honour the patroness – and also to regain a sizeable portion of the lands that the monastery had lost through war and politics. (He seems to have had a fondness for Byzantine church architecture – a similar style was used in another monastic church he renovated at Thorney.) He invited masters of Gregorian chant – then not yet common in England – to teach singing at Abingdon. Even as an abbot, he did not bear himself proudly, but laboured alongside his brother-monks growing vegetables in the abbey garden. Like his friend Saint Dúnstán, too, and Saint Bernward on the continent, he was skilled at crafting exquisite things out of precious metals for the Church; yet he regarded these things as secondary. At one time during his bishopric, when there was a famine, he had these works of his own hands broken down, melted and sold to give bread to the poor: ‘What is lifeless metal,’ he said, ‘against the bodies and souls of human beings created by the Lord?’ The Abbey at Abingdon was indeed a centre of learning and holy life; and it was patronised by the royal family: for a time, even the saintly Éadgár King was educated there.

After Éadgár ascended the throne, he appointed Æþelwold as Bishop of Winchester. The outspoken Benedictine reformer instantly made his presence felt when, after a particular incident with one of the infamously-lax sæcular canons of Winchester Cathedral, he drove out the lot of them and replaced them with monks from his former abbey at Abingdon. Thus he established Winchester Cathedral as a Benedictine house, and founded the tradition of monastery-cathedrals in England. Some of these expelled canons later rued their ill-discipline and penitently took the tonsure at Winchester, and Æþelwold welcomed them back with open arms. Saint Æþelwold thus established his reputation as a ‘lion’, fierce and terrible against those who stubbornly persisted in error – but mild as a dove with those who repented.

Saint Æþelwold took a number of political stances that proved unpopular in the later church. For example, he supported the infamous Éadwig King in his marriage to his third cousin Ælfgifu, who was a close family friend, even after Saint Dúnstán was exiled to the mainland – and also supported the succession of Æþelræd unræd over that of Saint Éadweard. He even survived one apparently politically-motivated attempt on his life by poison: Æþelwold apparently ingested the atter but his body was utterly unharmed, and this was taken as a wondrous sign of his holiness. In all, one may consider Æþelwold to have been something of a patron and builder of an English symphonía.

As Bishop of Winchester, Saint Æþelwold translated the relics of Saint Swíþhún from his wonted rainy spot under the eaves and inside the church. He also encouraged the popular veneration of his relics and maintained his own devotions to his humble and self-effacing predecessor. His love for learning was also evident, in that he had built the first scriptorium in Winchester and himself commissioned a great number of breathtakingly-beautiful illuminations, including the Benedictional which bears his name. He made invaluable contributions to sacred literature, commissioning full and accurate translations of psalms and other holy Scripture from Latin into the (Old) English vernacular. Even the Rule of Saint Benedict was thus translated. Winchester under Æþelwold also produced one of the earliest collections of polyphonic sheet music in Europe: the Winchester Troper. The endeavours of Saint Æþelwold were many, spectacular and successful – not least of which the great undertaking shared between him, Saint Dúnstán and Saint Ósweald, which resulted in a great last flourishing of monastic life and high culture in Old England.

Saint Æþelwold reposed in the Lord on the first of August 984, being seventy-four years of age. His strict asceticism and his relentless work on the Church’s behalf left his body emaciated and in great pain in his last years of life, but he bore this with equanimity. He was known as a saint very quickly after his rest, as wonders were wrought around his relics and through intercessory prayers. Saint Ælfhéah (the other one, the Archbishop of Canterbury) had his relics translated to Winchester and interred there with great honour. Holy Hierarch Æþelwold, loving father of monks, stern teacher of virtues and exemplary archpastor, pray unto Christ our God for us that our souls may be saved!

By vigilant prayer and ascetic endeavour,
Thou didst make thy passions subject to thy reverent soul,
O holy hierarch Æþelwold, man of noble desires;
Wherefore, thou didst uproot evil wherever thou didst find it,
And in thy humility hast shown thyself to be a true model of Christian virtue.
O saint of God, by thy supplications entreat Him to have pity on us all.