TRINITY · 12 OCTOBER King & Martyr
Saint Edwin of Northumbria
King & Martyr · First Christian King of Northumbria · c. 586–633
Edwin — ED-win · Æthelberht — ETH-el-bert · Æthelburga — ETH-el-BUR-ga · Paulinus — paw-LY-nus · Coifi — KOY-fee · Yeavering — YEV-er-ing
O God, who didst prepare thy servant Edwin to receive the light of thy Gospel through the long years of his exile, and didst bring him at last to the waters of baptism; Grant that we, like him, may not despise the time of waiting, but may find thee in the darkness as well as the light, and come at last to the faith for which thou hast been preparing us all our days; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
The conversion of Edwin of Northumbria was not a sudden event but the conclusion of a long preparation, and Bede understands it as such. Before Edwin there was Bertha — the Frankish Christian princess who married Æthelberht (ETH-el-bert) of Kent on the condition that she keep her faith, and who worshipped in the old Romano-British church of St Martin’s at Canterbury for years before Augustine arrived. It was Bertha who made the soil ready; Æthelberht who received Augustine; and their daughter Æthelburga (ETH-el-BUR-ga) who carried that inheritance northward into Northumbria when she married the pagan Edwin. Every conversion in the early English Church is preceded by a woman who kept the faith alive in a pagan court, and Edwin’s conversion is no exception. The missionary queens are the Church’s hidden foundation — the root beneath the root.
Æthelburga brought Paulinus (paw-LY-nus) north as her chaplain, and Paulinus spent years at Edwin’s court before anything happened. He was not idle — he prayed, he preached, he spoke privately to the king — but Edwin was a man who thought carefully and would not be hurried. He consulted his council. He wrote to Pope Boniface. He deliberated. And Bede, who might have been impatient with this slowness, is not: he reads Edwin’s deliberation as a form of seriousness, the response of a man who understood that what was being asked of him was not a private religious preference but a decision that would shape his kingdom and his people for generations. The council scene at Yeavering (YEV-er-ing) is the hinge of the entire narrative. The high priest Coifi (KOY-fee) speaks first — bitterly, honestly — admitting that a lifetime of serving the old gods has brought him nothing. Then an unnamed thane rises and speaks the words that Bede has kept for this moment, the words that every reader of the Ecclesiastical History remembers long after everything else has faded.
The present life of man upon earth, O King, seems to me, in comparison with that time which is unknown to us, like the swift flight of a sparrow through the mead-hall where you are sitting at dinner on a winter’s day with your thanes and counsellors. In the midst there is a comforting fire to warm the hall; outside, the storms of winter rain or snow are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall, and out through another. While he is inside, he is safe from the wintry storm; but after a few moments of comfort he vanishes from sight into the wintry world from which he came. Even so is the life of man; but of what went before or what is to follow, we know nothing at all.
The thane then says: if the new teaching brings more certain knowledge than the old, it seems right to follow it. And Edwin was baptised at York on Easter Day 627 by Paulinus, along with his household, among them a thirteen-year-old girl named Hild. What makes the sparrow speech endure is not merely its beauty but its honesty. The thane does not argue that Christianity is demonstrably true, or that the old gods are demonstrably false. He argues from the human condition itself — from the darkness that presses in on either side of the brief lit passage of a life — and says: if there is a teaching that illuminates what lies beyond those doors, we should attend to it. It is an argument for the Gospel made on purely human grounds, from the experience of mortality and unknowing, without any recourse to miracle or authority. Bede preserves it because he understands that this is how most human beings actually come to faith: not by logical demonstration but by the recognition that the darkness is real and the light is needed. Edwin was killed by Penda (PEN-da) of Mercia six years later at the Battle of Hatfield Chase, his kingdom shattered, the mission of Paulinus undone. But the sparrow had already flown through the hall, and what it had seen there could not be unseen. The head of Edwin was brought to York and laid in the church he had built, the first stone church in Northumbria. Bede calls him a martyr. So does the whole subsequent tradition, and so should we.
O Almighty God, who by the preaching of thy servant Paulinus and the faithful witness of the queens Bertha and Æthelburga didst prepare thy servant Edwin to receive thy Gospel; Grant that we may never despise the slow and hidden ways of thy grace, but may trust thee to bring to completion the work thou hast begun in those for whom we pray, and in ourselves; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.