MIRACULOUS MIRACLES™

Saint — Plegmund of Canterbury

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St. Plegmund of Canterbury
c. 840 AD, Plemstall, Cheshire, Mercia — August 2, 914 AD, Canterbury
Archbishop of Canterbury 890–914; Alfred the Great's scholar-archbishop
Canterbury Cathedral, Kent — his archiepiscopal see; the mother-church of the Anglican Communion and the pre-Reformation Catholic primatial cathedral of England, United Kingdom
Feast
August 2
Canonized
Pre-congregation
Life

Plegmund was born around 840 in Cheshire, Mercia (the Anglo-Saxon Catholic Mercian kingdom). He spent his early ecclesiastical life as a hermit on a small island in the river Gowy near Chester — the site that still bears his name as Plemstall ('Plegmund's stall/hermitage').

Recognized by King Alfred the Great for his learning, he was summoned to the royal court at Winchester and became one of the principal scholars of the Alfredian renaissance — the late-9th-century revival of Anglo-Saxon Catholic learning that Alfred had launched in response to the devastation of the Viking onslaught (the famous lament of Alfred's preface to the Pastoral Care: 'so completely fallen away in England, that there were very few on this side of the Humber who could understand their service-books in English').

Plegmund was one of the principal collaborators on Alfred's Old English translation programme — assisting in the translation of Latin theological texts (Gregory the Great's Pastoral Care, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy) into Old English for the instruction of the Anglo-Saxon priesthood.

In 890 Alfred appointed him Archbishop of Canterbury — succeeding Æthelred. He travelled to Rome to receive the pallium (the symbol of metropolitan archiepiscopal authority) from Pope Formosus in 891, and again to Rome in 908 under Pope Sergius III. He crowned Alfred's son Edward the Elder as king of the Anglo-Saxons in 899.

He established the five new dioceses of Wessex in 909 (Wells, Crediton, Ramsbury, Sherborne, Selsey) — reorganizing the southern English Catholic diocesan structure for the expanding Wessex Catholic kingdom. He died on August 2, 914 at Canterbury, having served as Archbishop for 24 years through the reigns of Alfred and Edward the Elder.

Miracles & Phenomena

  • The Alfredian translation programme

    Plegmund's collaboration with King Alfred the Great on the Old English translation programme — producing the Pastoral Care, Boethius's Consolation, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the vernacular Old English — produced the largest pre-Norman corpus of Old English prose translation. The Alfredian English vernacular tradition preserved and shaped the Anglo-Saxon Catholic literary culture that would produce the Wulfstan, Ælfric, and the Lindisfarne-Hatton tradition of vernacular Catholic Christian formation.

  • The reorganization of Wessex dioceses (909)

    Plegmund's 909 erection of the five new Wessex dioceses (Wells, Crediton, Ramsbury, Sherborne, Selsey — to replace the two over-large existing dioceses of Winchester and Sherborne) is the institutional re-foundation of the southern English Catholic diocesan structure for the late-Anglo-Saxon era. The Plegmund diocesan boundaries (with medieval modifications) substantially survive in the current Catholic and Anglican diocesan-architectural structures of southern England.

Relics
  • Body
    Tomb of St. Plegmund
    Canterbury Cathedral, Kent — the medieval shrine destroyed in the Reformation (1538); the cathedral survives as the mother-church of the Anglican Communion

    His medieval shrine at Canterbury Cathedral was destroyed under Henry VIII; the cathedral survives as the primatial seat of the Anglican Communion.

Iconography
  • Plegmund collaborating with Alfred the Great

    The late-9th-century Mercian-Anglo-Saxon archbishop in archiepiscopal vestments at the scriptorium of the Wessex royal court of Winchester, the King Alfred the Great beside him, the Old English translation of Gregory's Pastoral Care unfolding on the parchment — the iconography of Catholic Anglo-Saxon Alfredian renaissance tradition.

Patronages
Catholic Anglo-Saxon Alfredian-revival traditionDiocese of Chester (Catholic and Anglican)Catholic scholars and translators of the Anglo-Saxon English tradition
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