THE SAXON CATHEDRAL AT CANTERBURY
which carried out the Rule in its purity. Odo therefore determined to go to Fleury in France, a monastery that had been reformed by a Cluniac Abbot in 930 to be initiated, from whence he returned in 942 to Canterbury a Benedictine monk, to be installed in the Metropolitical Church. Later on, amongst his other activities as Archbishop he set himself to extend the Rule of St. Benedict throughout the English religious houses.
Odo remained Archbishop throughout the reign of Edmund, until this king's tragic death at his own table in his own hall on St. Austin's Day (August 28) in 946, when he was stabbed to the heart by a robber called Liofa; and through the reign of Edred, who died in 955. He crowned Edwig, or Edwy in 956, whose marriage with Elfgifu he pronounced incestuous, after his friend and successor Dunstan, then Abbot of Glastonbury, had had an unseemly squabble with the young king at the Coronation Banquet and had torn him from the society of his wife and mother-in-law, and had carried him back to his nobles by main force.
From this time onwards till his death in A.D. 959 Odo was engaged in the restoration of discipline amongst both the secular and religious clergy, and the establishment of a higher ideal as to morality amongst the clergy and laity alike. In the reign of King Edmund he issued a set of Constitutions[1]: these concern the Freedom of the Church; the Duties of Princes; the Office of Bishops; of Priests; of Clerics; of Monks; the prohibition of irregular marriages; of Unity and Concord in the Councils of the Church; of Fasting and the Giving of Alms; and the Payment of Tithes.
In 947 he was at Ripon when it was destroyed by Edred and his army as before mentioned, in the expedition against the Northerners, and it was then that he obtained the relics of St. Wilfrid, as Edmer tells us, and translated them to his Cathedral Church.
In 957 he consecrated Dunstan to the Bishopric of Worcester; two years later he died in the odour of sanctity on June 2, 959, being generally known as "Odo Severus" on account of the stern discipline he introduced in a time of great laxity. His friend and successor Dunstan always spoke of him as "Odo the Good"; and without doubt
- ↑ Brit. Mus., MS. Cotton, Vespas, A 14, f. 173 vo.—Wilkins, Concilia, Vol. I, p. 212.
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