The Canonization of Edward the Confessor

Abstract

ENGLAND'S Edward the Confessor was noted during his life for his religious fervor and faith and, within a few years after his death in 1066, acquired among some of his subjects the reputation of a saint. His first Vita, apparently written before the end of 1075, the earliest evidence of the rumors of the deceased king's sanctity. This biography summed up the picture of Edward as a saint in its final paragraph.' That he who was proved a saint in this world, the author wrote, is now living as a saint in heaven the propitious Deity reveals through these signs at his grave; there, by his intervention, the blind are made to see and the lame to walk again, the sick are cured and the sad consoled; and God, the King of kings, allows these tokens of his piety to happen for the faith of everyone who invokes the Lord.2 In spite of this rapid canonisatio per viam cultus, the official recognition of the saint by the Church was delayed and was not pronounced until a century later. A first official sanction of the cult may have been the translation of the king's body in 1102. This was perhaps an episcopal translation performed by Gundulf of Rochester on behalf of the archbishop of Canterbury.3 But another thirty-six years passed by before a serious attempt