THE CHURCH OF ST. ODO
About the same time that St. Odo brought the relics of St. Wilfrid to Canterbury, he acquired those of St. Audoen (or Owen), who had been Archbishop of Rouen and died in 686. They were first wrapped carefully in their shrouds and placed in a costly and beautiful coffer, or shrine, which he had made to contain them. St. Audoen's festival was kept at Christ Church as a Black Letter Day on August 25. He is mentioned in the Monastic Kalendar in Register K, in the Canterbury Benedictional,[1] and in the Kalendar in Hollingbourne's Psalter at Lambeth (see above), where his day is fixed for August 24, the same as it was kept at St. Austin's Abbey. His name appears in the thirteenth-century Collect used at Christ Church in De Reliquiis (see page 57) and the sacrist paid for extra music and bellringing on his Feast Day the sum of vd. According to the chronicler Gervase, he had an altar dedicated to him in the Cathedral, but this was after the fire of 1067, when Lanfranc's Church was enlarged by Ernulf (1096–1107). This chapel of St. Audoen was in the crypt, in the south-eastern transept beneath the Chapel of St. Gregory, now part of the Black Prince's Chantry.[2]
- ↑ This was a Canterbury Book of Benedictions written about 1025 by an Anglo-Saxon scribe. It does not contain a kalendar like the other MSS. mentioned in the text. It was transcribed and printed by the Henry Bradshaw Society in 1916.
- ↑ Amongst the Opuscula of Edmer, now preserved in the College of Corpus Christi at Cambridge, is a story with the following title, "De reliquis Sancti Audoeni, et quorundam aliorum sanctorum quæ Cantuariæ in Ecclesia Domini Salvatoris habentur." In the time of King Edgar (A.D. 957) there came to England four clerks, who presented themselves at his court, and asserted that they had brought with them the body of Saint Audoen. And when the King refused to believe this, they appealed to the miraculous power which the relics possessed. Whereupon the King, thinking this to be a matter rather for ecclesiastical judgment than for his own, commanded the attendance of Archbishop Odo, and when he had succeeded in performing several miraculous cures by the contact of the relics in question, the truth of the story was no longer doubted; the King munificently rewarded the bearers of this treasure, and committed it to the charge of the Archbishop, that it might be conveyed to Canterbury, and worthily deposited in Christ Church. As to the four clerks, they accompanied it thither, and were so pleased with the monastery that they became monks, and ended their days therein.
Capgrave in his Chronicles of England (edited by F. C Hingeston in 1858 for the Rolls Series) has the above in his life of St. Audoen. In the Acta Sanctorum (Bollandists), August, Tome iv, p. 803, are some remarks on the fact that there is another entire body of St. Audoen preserved at Rouen, and detached relics of him elsewhere.
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