Edmund Rich of Abingdon was educated at Oxford and Paris and became one of the first masters of the new schools of Oxford, lecturing on the Sentences of Peter Lombard there from about 1195. He was treasurer of Salisbury cathedral, preached the Sixth Crusade in England in 1227, and in 1233 was elected Archbishop of Canterbury — accepting only with reluctance.
His seven-year primacy was dominated by conflict with King Henry III over royal interference in episcopal elections, royal favouritism toward foreign clerics, and royal taxation of the Church. He successfully forced the king to dismiss his Poitevin advisors at the Council of Westminster in 1234. He also continued his teaching tradition: the Speculum Ecclesiae (Mirror of the Church) is a manual of contemplative theology that became one of the most-copied spiritual books of the late medieval English Church.
In 1240, in despair at the king's encroachments on the freedom of the Church, he went into voluntary exile to Pontigny Abbey in Burgundy — the same Cistercian house that had sheltered Thomas Becket seventy years earlier. He died at the small priory of Soisy-Bouy on the journey, was buried at Pontigny, and was canonized by Innocent IV in 1246. His shrine at Pontigny remained the principal pilgrimage destination for English Catholics on the Continent until the French Revolution.