Erconwald

Saint Erconwald, also known as Erkenwald or Eorcenwald, was a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon bishop of London and monastic founder. He came from a noble family, and later medieval tradition regarded him as being of royal blood, though no contemporary source records his parentage, birthplace, or year of birth. His sister, Saint Ethelburga (Æthelburh), shared his religious vocation. Before he became a bishop, Erconwald used his own resources to establish two monasteries in the 660s: a house for monks at Chertsey in Surrey and a house for nuns at Barking in Essex, where he installed Ethelburga as first abbess. These foundations became important centres of Christian life in the Thames valley and are among the better-attested monastic houses of the conversion-period English church.

Around 675 Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury consecrated Erconwald as bishop of the East Saxons, with his seat at London, in succession to Bishop Wine. He held the see until his death nearly two decades later. The Venerable Bede, writing within a generation of Erconwald’s death in the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, described him as a man of outstanding holiness. Bede related that in later life the bishop was often carried in a litter because of infirmity, and that the faithful attributed miraculous healings to contact with that litter. Erconwald’s episcopate coincided with the reign of the pious King Sebbi of Essex, and the bishop appears as a witness in surviving charters of the period. He belonged to the generation of churchmen who consolidated Roman liturgical and disciplinary practice in England after the Synod of Whitby.

Erconwald died in 693, the date traditionally assigned to 30 April, at Barking Abbey while visiting the community ruled by his sister. He was buried in St Paul’s Cathedral in London. In the Middle Ages his shrine in the cathedral became one of the most frequented pilgrimage sites in the city; his relics were translated to a new shrine in the twelfth century, an event commemorated in some calendars on 13 May. The cult remained strong in London until the Reformation, when the shrine was destroyed. A late fourteenth-century Middle English alliterative poem, Saint Erkenwald, shows that his legend remained current in London literary culture long after his death. His principal feast day is 30 April. He is venerated as a patron saint of London.