Erkembode

Saint Erkembode (also found as Erkembodo, Erkembaut, Erkembold, or Latin Erkembodus) was bishop of Thérouanne, the early medieval see of the Morini in what is now the Pas-de-Calais in northern France. He belongs to the first half of the eighth century. Later medieval tradition presents him as a monk of Irish origin who had entered the Benedictine community linked with the abbey of Sithiu (Saint-Bertin) near present-day Saint-Omer before being chosen bishop. Almost nothing about him can be controlled from eighth-century evidence. His recorded name is Germanic rather than Gaelic, and the Irish origin, together with the details of a monastic career at Sithiu, rests on later hagiography and episcopal catalogues rather than on contemporary charters or a near-contemporary vita. He is nonetheless consistently remembered as a monk-bishop in the Benedictine orbit of the monasteries that had evangelized the Channel coast in the preceding century.

The diocese of Thérouanne had been organized in the seventh century, above all under Saint Audomar (Omer), in a region whose conversion was still recent and uneven. Episcopal lists of the Morini assign Erkembode an episcopate of some nineteen years, conventionally placed from about 723 until his death in 742. In that setting a bishop’s work would have been the ordinary labour of a missionary-era see: pastoral government of a large coastal territory, oversight of clergy and rural churches, and cooperation with the neighbouring abbeys of Sithiu and Saint-Omer. No authentic letters, synodal acts, or dated diplomas survive that would permit a closer reconstruction of his administration. He stands in the succession of those northern Frankish bishops who consolidated the Christian topography created by Audomar, Bertin, and their companions, but his individual acts have left no independent documentary trace.

Tradition holds that he died in 742 and was buried at Thérouanne. The city and its cathedral were completely destroyed in 1553 by the army of the Emperor Charles V; the see was afterwards suppressed and its territory partitioned among new dioceses. A Merovingian or early medieval stone sarcophagus identified as Erkembode’s is preserved in the former cathedral of Notre-Dame at Saint-Omer, which became the principal centre of his cult. Whether the body was moved from Thérouanne in the Middle Ages or only after the sixteenth-century destruction is not established with certainty. By the early modern period, however, the tomb at Saint-Omer was firmly associated with him and attracted local pilgrimage.

Erkembode is commemorated on 12 April in the local calendars of Saint-Omer and the former diocese of Thérouanne. His popular cult is distinctive for the custom, still practised, of placing shoes on or beside the sarcophagus, especially by parents of children who are slow to walk or who suffer from deformities or weakness of the feet and legs. A later legend explains the practice by claiming that the bishop, worn out by missionary journeys on foot, himself suffered in his feet; that story cannot be verified historically. He is accordingly invoked as a patron of children with walking difficulties and of those afflicted in the feet and legs. He was never the object of a formal papal canonization of the later medieval or modern type. His sainthood belongs to the older pattern of local episcopal and popular recognition of cult that is typical of early medieval bishops in northern Francia.