Two Ewalds

The Two Ewalds, also known as the Two Hewalds, were late seventh-century Northumbrian priests and missionaries, both bearing the same name and distinguished by hair colour and complexion as Ewald the Black (or Dark) and Ewald the White (or Fair). The principal and nearly sole early account of them is that of Bede in Book V of his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Bede states that they were of the English nation and had lived for a long time in Ireland in order to study the Scriptures. Ireland was then a major centre of Christian learning, and many English clerics went there for that purpose. White Ewald was the more learned in sacred letters; Black Ewald was noted for greater bodily strength. Bede calls them priests (presbyteri) and does not name a religious order or state that they were blood brothers.

In the last decade of the seventh century, in the same generation as Willibrord’s mission to Frisia, the two priests set out to preach to the still-pagan Old Saxons east of the Rhine, in the region of what is now northwestern Germany. They lodged with a local steward or village reeve and asked to be taken to the ealdorman or chieftain of the district so that they might announce the Christian faith. The pagan Saxons feared that if the missionaries reached their ruler he might convert, and that conversion would mean the abandonment of ancestral gods and customs. They therefore seized the priests before they could be presented to the chieftain.

White Ewald was killed at once with the sword. Black Ewald was subjected to a slower death: he was tortured and his body torn to pieces. The remains of both men were thrown into the Rhine. Traditional martyrologies date the event to 3 October, commonly given as about 695; Bede himself does not supply a year. Bede records that a miraculous light appeared over the place where the bodies lay, allowing them to be found. Pepin of Herstal, mayor of the palace of the Franks, had the relics recovered and buried with honour in a church in Cologne. Later tradition associates the relics especially with the church of Saint Cunibert (Kunibert) in that city. A local Westphalian tradition, not found in Bede, places the martyrdom at Aplerbeck, now a district of Dortmund.

Their cult is ancient and they appear in the Roman Martyrology on 3 October. They came to be honoured as patron saints of Westphalia. Almost all that can be said of their lives and deaths with historical caution rests on Bede’s brief eighth-century narrative; later details of exact birthplace, religious profession, and the precise Saxon village of their death remain unverified by early sources. They belong to the first wave of Anglo-Saxon missionaries who carried Christianity from Britain to the Germanic peoples of the Continent.