Eadwold of Cerne

Saint Eadwold of Cerne (also spelled Edwold or Eadwald) was a ninth-century Anglo-Saxon hermit venerated as a saint in the medieval English church. Almost nothing about his life can be confirmed from sources contemporary with him. The principal narrative of his career comes from a Latin Life composed in the late eleventh century by Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, a professional hagiographer then working in England, together with a short notice in William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Pontificum Anglorum. According to Goscelin’s account, Eadwold belonged to the royal family of East Anglia and was the brother of King Edmund, who was killed by a Danish army in 869. After the martyrdom of his brother, Eadwold is said to have renounced the world. Guided by a heavenly sign or vision, he journeyed to the west of England and settled as a hermit in the neighbourhood of Cerne in Dorset.

There he made his dwelling beside a spring called Silver Well (later Silverwell), living in poverty, prayer and ascetic discipline. The vita attributes various miracles to him during his lifetime and after his death. Local people came to regard him as a holy man, and a cult developed around his tomb. In 987 the ealdorman Æthelmær the Stout founded a Benedictine monastery at Cerne. The relics of Eadwold were translated into the new abbey church, where they remained an object of veneration throughout the Middle Ages. William of Malmesbury, writing in the 1120s, mentioned the tomb of the hermit saint Eadwold among the notable features of Cerne Abbey.

Modern historians treat the claim of royal East Anglian kinship with caution. It may have been a later hagiographical embellishment intended to associate the Cerne cult with the famous martyr-king Edmund. Independent of that genealogical detail, the existence of a hermit named Eadwold who lived and was buried near Cerne in the later Anglo-Saxon period is generally accepted on the strength of the twelfth-century notices and the subsequent liturgical cult. No reliable dates of birth or death have been transmitted; he is customarily placed in the ninth century. His feast day is kept on 29 August.

The cult of Saint Eadwold remained essentially local, centred on Cerne Abbey until the monastery was dissolved in 1539. He continues to be listed among the saints of the Catholic Church and is commemorated in some Anglican calendars, though he is one of the lesser-known figures of the Anglo-Saxon sanctorale. No writings by Eadwold himself survive, and the details of his eremitical practice are known only through the later, conventional language of hagiography.