Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Archbishop of Canterbury & Martyr
April 19 · d. 1012
also known as Ælfheah, Aelphege
Alphege was Archbishop of Canterbury when a Danish fleet took the city in 1011 and carried him off to their ships at Greenwich. He was killed there the following Easter season, on 19 April 1012, and buried at St Paul's. Eleven years later King Cnut had his body brought back to Canterbury. The church argued for two generations over whether such a death counted as martyrdom, and decided that it did.
Alphege was already an old man, and Archbishop of Canterbury, when the Danish army came to his city in the autumn of 1011. They got in through treachery. The Chronicle names the man who opened the gates: Ælfmar, whose life Alphege had once saved. The cathedral was plundered and burned, and the whole leadership of the church there was swept up together, Bishop Godwine, the Abbess Leofrun, Ælfweard the king's reeve, and the archbishop himself, who was led down to the ships.
For seven months they kept him with the fleet at Greenwich. The men who held him wanted money, and money was the ordinary answer in those years: the king's own councillors gathered in London that spring and paid over forty-eight thousand pounds to be left alone. The Chronicle, which is normally as dry as a ledger, stops in the middle of the 1011 annal to grieve over him: "Then was he a captive, who had been the head of the English race and of Christendom; there wretchedness might be seen where bliss had often been seen before." That is the earliest thing anyone wrote about him, and it is written the way you write about a loss.
He had met Northmen before and it had gone otherwise. Seventeen years earlier, after a raid and a peace, Alphege had confirmed the Norwegian king Olaf Tryggvason in the Christian faith, with King Æthelred himself standing sponsor, and Olaf kept his word never to trouble England again. The same authority that had turned a king did not turn the war-band at Greenwich.
On the Saturday in the octave of Easter, 19 April 1012, they were drunk on wine brought up from the south, and they were angry with the bishop because, the Chronicle says, he would not promise them any fee and forbade that anything be given for him. They took him to their assembly and pelted him with bones and the heads of oxen, and one of them struck him on the head with the butt of an axe. Their own commander, Thorkell the Tall, had tried to stop it: he offered them the gold and silver and everything he owned, everything except his one ship, if they would let the archbishop live. They killed him anyway, and Thorkell was sickened by it. In the morning the citizens of London carried the body up river, and Bishops Eadnoth and Ælfhun buried him in St Paul's.
That is nearly all the earliest sources give. What the church did with it came later, and came twice. In June 1023 Cnut, a Danish king ruling England, gave leave at St Paul's for the body to be taken up; it went by ship over the Thames to Southwark and on through Rochester, met on the way by Queen Emma and her son Harthacnut, and was carried into Canterbury and laid on the north side of the altar of Christ. Osbern, writing sixty years afterwards, says the king came up from his bath with only a cloak thrown round him when the news reached him, and that when the monks could not shift the stone over the tomb Cnut told them the holy man would make possible what was impossible for men, and the stone moved easily.
Then, two generations later, the question came up that had been waiting all along. Lanfranc, the first Norman archbishop, doubted the word martyr for Alphege: he had been killed for refusing to buy himself back, not for refusing to deny Christ. Anselm, then abbot of Bec, answered him. A man who would rather die than commit a small sin would surely refuse a great one; and Alphege died for justice as John the Baptist died for truth, and whoever dies for truth and justice dies for Christ. Lanfranc was persuaded, and said he would venerate him with all his heart as a truly great and glorious martyr of Christ.
So the church did not simply inherit him. It had to think its way to him, and having thought, it kept him. When Lanfranc pruned Canterbury's calendar of pre-Conquest names, two of the old English archbishops were left standing on it: Augustine, who had begun the see, and Alphege, who had died in it.
Alphege refused to let his own life be bought with money that was not his, and there is no sign in any source that the refusal saved anyone anything: the city was already sacked, and he was killed regardless. What the sources give you is a man holding to a trust when holding to it plainly would not work. You will not often be asked for that in so stark a form, but you will be asked for the smaller version of it, when the honest course costs something and will visibly change nothing. Where are you currently spending, on your own comfort or safety, something that was entrusted to you for somebody else?
Two witnesses stand close to the death, and they do not agree.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is the nearer of the two in language and place. Its annals for 1011 to 1013 give the siege of Canterbury (dated only to the window between the Nativity of St Mary and Michaelmas, not to a single day), Ælfmar's betrayal stated outright, the names of the other captives, the forty-eight thousand pounds of tribute, and the killing itself. It is also the source of the day. It gives three separate datings, "the thirteenth before the calends of May", Easter on the ides of April, and the Saturday in the octave of Easter, and all three converge exactly on 19 April 1012, a Saturday, with Easter that year on 13 April. This is a rare case where a saint's traditional feast date is confirmed rather than merely inherited. Its account is not neutral reporting: the 1011 annal breaks into open lament and carries an embedded verse fragment.
The other early witness is Thietmar, bishop of Merseburg, writing on the Continent between 1012 and 1018, who names his informant, a man called Sewald. Thietmar gives things the Chronicle does not: direct speech attributed to Alphege before the assembly, Thorkell's plea word for word in Latin, and a miracle in which one of the killers is struck lame. He also contradicts the Chronicle on the one point everything else rests on. Where the Chronicle says Alphege would promise them no fee, Thietmar says that, moved by human frailty, he promised them money and asked for a term in which to raise it, and that when the term ran out he told his captors that if he seemed a liar to them, it was dire want and not his own will that made him one. There is no third early witness to break the tie. It is worth saying plainly that the whole later tradition, Osbern, Anselm, Alban Butler, and every retelling since, is built on the Chronicle's version, and that Thietmar's is the harder reading, since no one had a motive to invent a bishop who promised and could not pay. What the two do independently agree on is the mob killing, the pelting with ox-heads and stones, and Thorkell's failed intervention. Thietmar's own manuscript gets the victim's name wrong, calling him Dunstan; his editor corrects it. That error is itself useful, because it shows the story reached him at one remove and not by copying any English book.
Everything before 984 is thinner. The years at Deerhurst, the withdrawal as an anchorite at Bath, the abbacy there, all come from Osbern of Canterbury, who wrote his Life and his account of the translation in the 1080s, roughly seventy years after the death, at Lanfranc's commission and expressly to settle the dispute over the martyr title. William of Malmesbury, reading him within living memory, praised his style and criticised his accuracy. William's own claim that Alphege was first a monk and prior at Glastonbury is not accepted by all historians. The public career is firmer: bishop of Winchester from 984, probably through Dunstan's influence; fifteen years there, in which he built an organ, enlarged the city's churches, and in 996 translated the body of Bishop Æthelwold; then Canterbury from 1006, the pallium from Rome in 1007, and a council with Wulfstan of York in May 1008.
In art Alphege is known by the stones he carries in the fold of his chasuble, the martyr's instrument held in his own hands; less often he appears as an archbishop with an axe. There is a wrinkle worth noticing. The stones are the convention, but the Chronicle says he was pelted with bones and the heads of oxen and killed with an axe-butt. The art has quietly smoothed a squalid, improvised killing into the ordinary grammar of martyrdom.
His feast is 19 April, the day of the death, with a second observance on 8 June for the translation. Devotion to him has always been thickest in Kent. Canterbury holds twelfth-century glass in the north choir aisle showing his capture and murder, a stone north of the high altar marking where he was laid in 1023, and figures of him in the porch and cloisters; after the fire of 1174 his relics were set on the north side of the rebuilt high altar and Dunstan's on the south. St Alfege's, Greenwich, stands by tradition on the site of the killing, its present building Hawksmoor's. Churches keep his name at Solihull, Whitstable, Seasalter, Bath, and Edmonton, the last of them a twentieth-century foundation, which is its own small evidence that the name was still worth giving nine hundred years on.
His shrine was destroyed with the rest at Canterbury in Henry VIII's dissolution, and what became of the bones is not known. There is no living shrine, only the slab, and a tradition that a finger went to Westminster.
The two nearest sources stand first. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle carries the siege, captivity, killing, and the three datings in its annals for 1011 and 1012, and the translation of 1023 in the D recension; the nineteenth-century Ingram and Giles translation is freely available at the Avalon Project (https://avalon.law.yale.edu/medieval/ang11.asp) and at Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/657). The Old English of the 1011 and 1012 annals, from Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe's edition of MS C in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, vol. 5 (2001), is set out with translation at https://www.oldenglishaerobics.net/aelfheah.php. Both passages quoted above, the lament of the 1011 annal and the refusal of the 1012 annal, are given here in Eleanor Parker's translation, published on her blog A Clerk of Oxford (https://aclerkofoxford.blogspot.com/2011/04/story-of-archbishop-alphege.html).
Thietmar of Merseburg's Chronicon, book VIII (VII), chapters 42 and 43, holds the promised ransom, Alphege's speech before the assembly, and Thorkell's offer; the Latin is in Friedrich Kurze's edition, pages 217 to 219, scanned at https://archive.org/details/thietmarimersebu00thieuoft, where Kurze's own footnote corrects the manuscript's misnaming of the victim.
Osbern of Canterbury's Vita and Translatio of Alphege survive in London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius D. xvii, and were printed by Henry Wharton in Anglia Sacra, vol. 2 (1691), and reprinted in Migne, Patrologia Latina 149, cols. 371 to 393. Neither text has a modern critical edition. Both are translated: the Life by Frances Shaw as Osbern's Life of Alfege (St Paul's, 1999), and the Translatio by Rosemary Morris and Alexander Rumble in Rumble's The Reign of Cnut (Leicester University Press, 1994), pp. 283 to 315. The scene of Cnut and the tomb-stone quoted above is from the Morris and Rumble translation.
The argument between Lanfranc and Anselm, with the lines quoted above, is preserved in Eadmer's Life of Anselm, edited and translated by R. W. Southern for Oxford Medieval Texts, at pp. 50 to 54. For the shrine and its later history see Ben Nilson, Cathedral Shrines of Medieval England, pp. 33 and 66 to 67; for Lanfranc's pruning of the Canterbury calendar, F. M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, p. 672. The nineteenth-century Dictionary of National Biography entry is at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biography,_1885-1900/%C3%86lfheah, and the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia entry at https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05394a.htm.
Two things widely repeated about him should be held at arm's length. A canonisation by Pope Gregory VII in 1078 is often stated flatly, but it traces to a single modern popular reference work with no footnote and is corroborated in no scholarly or primary source; what is documented is Canterbury's own recognition after the Lanfranc and Anselm exchange, recorded by Eadmer in his Life of Anselm early in the twelfth century, and Osbern's commissioned Life. And the figure of three thousand pounds, often given as the sum demanded for Alphege personally, appears in neither of the two earliest sources.
Readings for a Martyr
Jeremiah 15:15–21Psalm 34Revelation 7:9–17Luke 12:4–12
Almighty God, you gave your servant Alphege boldness to confess the Name of our Savior Jesus Christ before the rulers of this world, and courage to die for this faith: Grant that we may always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in us, and to suffer gladly for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.