ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 



had won for them a reputation for sanctity, and brought to them the 

 ungrudging and liberal offerings of people upon their borders. The fen 

 monasteries had become very rich, and the fame of their riches attracted to 

 them the pirate bands who had no scruples and great greed. It was in 870 

 that the host of Danes poured in upon these famous religious houses. The 

 unhappy inmates were wholly incapable of defending themselves. The 

 houses were given over to the flames, the plunder seems to have been 

 enormous, and the ruin of the fen monasteries was complete. It looks as if 

 the East Anglians, with their King Edmund at their head, horrified by the 

 terrible sacrilege, were determined to avenge it. When the Danes returned 

 to Thetford they found themselves besieged in their stronghold. The end of 

 it was that the East Anglian army suffered a crushing defeat. King Edmund 

 was captured, and on his resolutely refusing to abjure the Christian faith was 

 cruelly slain in cold blood,' martyred in fact, and ever after accounted a 

 saint — the saint of East Anglia. With him was slain Humbert, bishop of 

 Elmham, whom Roger of Wendover calls his inseparable friend. And at the 

 same time, too, it seemed that Ethelwald, bishop of Dunwich, came to his end.' 



The work which St. Felix began and his successors had carried on was 

 evidently continued among the Danish settlers, who utilized the old inhabitants 

 as tenants or serfs, but the faith of the subject people never changed ; so far 

 from it, the Danes themselves accepted the religion of the people upon whom 

 they had quartered themselves.' It is evident that they embraced the 

 new creed with some enthusiasm, but the East Anglian kingdom was, 

 during the ninth century, an independent kingdom, and its church as 

 little united with the English church as the church of Scotland or Wales was ; 

 the absence of recorded history in the one case proves no more than it does in 

 the others ; while, on the contrary, when the period of obscuration comes to 

 an end, in the middle of the tenth century, there are abundant indications that 

 during all this dark time — dark, that is in the lack of chronicles or annals — 

 the East Anglian church was still doing its work, with its successive bishops 

 exercising their influence and authority over clergy and people. How en- 

 tirely the Danish folk in England had absorbed the faith of those among 

 whom they settled is shown by the fact that in 942 Odo ' the good,' a Dane 

 of high birth and of a lofty and devout character, was persuaded, not without 

 hesitation, by Edmund, King Alfred's grandson, to accept the archbishopric 

 of Canterbury. 



It is significant that sixteen years later we hear of Odo's consecrating a 

 certain Eadulph as bishop of Elmham, and from this time the succession of 

 East Anglian bishops is uninterrupted down to our own days. 



The primacy of Odo was a period of great revival of religious life, and 

 was especially memorable for the awakening of a new zeal for monasticism. 

 Ailwin the ' ^Idorman ' of East Anglia was regarded as the leader of 

 the monastic party and took a prominent part in founding the abbey of 

 Ramsey in 968.* 



Before this, however, there seems to have grown up in the district of the 

 Broads, among the marshes and fenland through which the sluggish Bure 



' Roger de Wendover (Engl. Hist. Soc), i, 303-12. ' Stubbs, Reg. Sacr. Jnglk. 21. 



' Green, Conq. of Engl. 124 ; Hunt, Hist, of the Engl. Ch. xiii, 267. 



* Historia Rtjmcieieniii (Rolls. Ser.), 40. Mr. Hunt has given an admirable account of Odo and his primacy. 

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