ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY had won for them a reputation for sanctity, and brought to them the ungrudging and liberal offerings of people upon their borders. The fen monasteries had become very rich, and the fame of their riches attracted to them the pirate bands who had no scruples and great greed. It was in 870 that the host of Danes poured in upon these famous religious houses. The unhappy inmates were wholly incapable of defending themselves. The houses were given over to the flames, the plunder seems to have been enormous, and the ruin of the fen monasteries was complete. It looks as if the East Anglians, with their King Edmund at their head, horrified by the terrible sacrilege, were determined to avenge it. When the Danes returned to Thetford they found themselves besieged in their stronghold. The end of it was that the East Anglian army suffered a crushing defeat. King Edmund was captured, and on his resolutely refusing to abjure the Christian faith was cruelly slain in cold blood,' martyred in fact, and ever after accounted a saint — the saint of East Anglia. With him was slain Humbert, bishop of Elmham, whom Roger of Wendover calls his inseparable friend. And at the same time, too, it seemed that Ethelwald, bishop of Dunwich, came to his end.' The work which St. Felix began and his successors had carried on was evidently continued among the Danish settlers, who utilized the old inhabitants as tenants or serfs, but the faith of the subject people never changed ; so far from it, the Danes themselves accepted the religion of the people upon whom they had quartered themselves.' It is evident that they embraced the new creed with some enthusiasm, but the East Anglian kingdom was, during the ninth century, an independent kingdom, and its church as little united with the English church as the church of Scotland or Wales was ; the absence of recorded history in the one case proves no more than it does in the others ; while, on the contrary, when the period of obscuration comes to an end, in the middle of the tenth century, there are abundant indications that during all this dark time — dark, that is in the lack of chronicles or annals — the East Anglian church was still doing its work, with its successive bishops exercising their influence and authority over clergy and people. How en- tirely the Danish folk in England had absorbed the faith of those among whom they settled is shown by the fact that in 942 Odo ' the good,' a Dane of high birth and of a lofty and devout character, was persuaded, not without hesitation, by Edmund, King Alfred's grandson, to accept the archbishopric of Canterbury. It is significant that sixteen years later we hear of Odo's consecrating a certain Eadulph as bishop of Elmham, and from this time the succession of East Anglian bishops is uninterrupted down to our own days. The primacy of Odo was a period of great revival of religious life, and was especially memorable for the awakening of a new zeal for monasticism. Ailwin the ' ^Idorman ' of East Anglia was regarded as the leader of the monastic party and took a prominent part in founding the abbey of Ramsey in 968.* Before this, however, there seems to have grown up in the district of the Broads, among the marshes and fenland through which the sluggish Bure ' Roger de Wendover (Engl. Hist. Soc), i, 303-12. ' Stubbs, Reg. Sacr. Jnglk. 21. ' Green, Conq. of Engl. 124 ; Hunt, Hist, of the Engl. Ch. xiii, 267.
- Historia Rtjmcieieniii (Rolls. Ser.), 40. Mr. Hunt has given an admirable account of Odo and his primacy.
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