Saint Eskil

Saint Eskil (also called Eskil of Tuna, Eskillus, or, in Swedish, Eskil) was an eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon monk, missionary, and martyr whose memory became central to the medieval Christianization narrative of Södermanland in Sweden. No contemporary charter, chronicle entry, or letter names him, and no birth year or English birthplace is recorded. What later generations believed about him comes from high-medieval legend, liturgical texts, and the cult site at Tuna, the settlement that took his name as Eskilstuna. Tradition describes him as an English Benedictine who belonged to the same missionary generation as Saint Sigfrid of Växjö and who crossed to Sweden to preach among the Svear. He is said to have made his base at Tuna by Lake Mälaren and to have worked as a missionary bishop in the region that later formed the Diocese of Strängnäs. That diocese was organized only in the twelfth century, so medieval writers who call Eskil a bishop are using the title in a missionary rather than a strictly diocesan sense.

The surviving legend, shaped in the thirteenth century and known in Latin and Old Swedish forms, places his work in a landscape where Christian preaching and older Norse sacrificial practice still overlapped. He is grouped with other Mälaren-region missionary saints such as Botvid and David of Munktorp, figures who likewise have thin contemporary documentation and rich later vitae. Eskil’s church at Tuna became the focus of local Christian life. Place-name evidence and the later medieval shrine confirm that a cult of a martyr named Eskil was established there; they do not independently confirm the detailed episodes of the passio. Historians therefore generally accept an English cleric martyred in Södermanland in the later eleventh century as a plausible historical kernel, while treating the court politics and dialogue of the legend with caution.

His death is traditionally dated to about 1080 and set in the reign of the poorly attested king Blot-Sven, who is said to have restored public pagan sacrifice after Inge the Elder. According to the passio, a great blot was held at Strängnäs. Eskil went to the assembly, denounced the sacrifices, and was seized and killed by stoning, an end hagiographers likened to that of Saint Stephen. Disciples are said to have carried the body from Strängnäs back to Tuna for burial. The year 1080 is the date given in standard ecclesiastical reference works; it is conventional rather than strictly demonstrable, because it depends on synchronizing the legend with the equally uncertain chronology of Blot-Sven. The martyrdom site is consistently given as Strängnäs; the tomb and shrine were at Tuna.

Veneration grew in the high Middle Ages. Tuna developed into the town of Eskilstuna. A church at Fors and, from the later twelfth century, a house of the Knights Hospitaller stood in close relation to the shrine. Eskil was honored as patron of Södermanland and of the Diocese of Strängnäs, and his feast was kept on 12 June, a date that remains his name day in the Swedish calendar. Relics and a local liturgical office sustained the cult until the Reformation, after which public veneration in Sweden largely ceased, though the toponym Eskilstuna and the calendar entry preserved his name. He was never the subject of a recorded papal canonization of the later formal type; his sainthood belongs to pre-congregation, locally received recognition. Modern historical writing distinguishes that durable local cult and the likely fact of an English missionary’s violent death from the unconfirmed narrative details of the Strängnäs blot, which cannot be verified outside the medieval legend.