pupils or fellow-teachers; the soul of the French commission was the Archbishop of Armagh, who claimed that Edmund had cured him of an illness when the most skilled physicians of Paris had failed. The matter was taken up by Cardinal John of St. Laurence in Luciana, who sent Stephen of Lexington on a final mission to England and France to bring the recipients of Edmund's favour before the court in person. The evidence was then admitted to be incontrovertible, or the opposition had slackened, and the decree for canonisation was issued at Lyons (11 Jan. 1247, 28 Feb. 1248). Six years later Henry III and his queen were both worshipping at the shrine of the persecuted archbishop in Pontigny (December 1254).
Edmund's is one of the most attractive of mediæval characters, not so much in its political as its private aspect. As an archbishop he preserved all the virtues of his private life. He would spend the ‘amercements’ of his archiepiscopal manors in providing dowers for the portionless daughters of his tenants, holding it, we are told, a good thing for the young to marry. Once he restored a fine of 80l. to the daughters of an offending knight. His bailiffs had seized a heriot from a poor widow, who came to him complaining of her hard lot. Addressing her in her native English he told her he was powerless to alter the law of the land, to which he as well as she was subject; but, turning to his companions, he expressed his own conviction in French or Latin that this custom was one of the devil's making and not of God's: the heriot was then restored nominally as a loan, but really as a present. His horror of bribery was so intense that he refused to accept any gifts whatever. ‘Prendre’ and ‘pendre,’ he said, differed by but one letter. He was a careful steward of the archiepiscopal estates, which came to him weighted with a debt of seven thousand marks and almost bankrupt; but he would not be a niggard host. On his journeys he would turn aside to hear the confession of any chance traveller however humble, and though he would not listen to idle songs himself he never refused the minstrel a place at his table. After his elevation he increased his old austerities, but was more particular as regards the neatness of his exterior clothing. He would not, however, wear purple and fine linen like other prelates; a cheap tunic of white or grey was all he needed. Nor did he ape the usual pride of bishops in those days. ‘The primate of all England,’ says his biographer, ‘did not blush to take off his own shoes or to bear the cross from chapel to study with his own hands.’ But that which most impressed the imagination of his own generation was his absolute purity. ‘If,’ he once said when certain people reproached him for over-intimacy with a lady friend—‘if all my sins of this nature were written on my forehead, I should have no need to shun the gaze of man.’
It seems that Edmund lectured both at Paris and Oxford in the ‘trivium’ and the ‘quadrivium.’ Logic and dialectics are specially mentioned. According to Wood he was the first to read Aristotle's ‘Elenchus’ at the latter university. But of this there seems no good proof; nor is Wood's reference to Bacon's ‘Compendium’ accurate. In later years, of course, Edmund lectured on divinity. His most famous pupils, besides Walter Gray, were Richard, bishop of Bangor, and Sewal Bovill, afterwards dean and archbishop of York. According to Matthew Paris, Bovill was Edmund's favourite scholar, and strove to model his life on the example of his great teacher, though he never died the martyr's death which his master foretold would be his lot. There seems, however, to be no authority for making Grosseteste or the Dominicans, Robert Bacon and Richard of Dunstable, his pupils. The story that Roger Bacon was his pupil seems to originate with Bale. One of his principal clerks, his ‘special counsellor’ and chancellor, was Richard de la Wich, afterwards bishop of Chichester, from whom and from Robert Bacon Matthew Paris gathered the materials for Edmund's life (Vita Bertr. cc. 23, 51–4, &c.; Chron. of Lanercost, pp. 36–7; Trivet, sub ann. 1240; Epp. Universit. Oxon. Rob. Sarisb., Ric. de Wicho, Ric. Bangor. &c. ap. Martène).
Edmund's writings include ‘Speculum Ecclesiæ’ (Bodley MS. Laud 111, f. 31, &c., printed in ‘Bibliotheca Patrolog. Mag.’ vol. xiii., and at London in 1521). Other writings attributed to him are a French treatise to be found in Digby MS. 20 (Bodley), which extends over several leaves of very close writing. According to Tanner (from Bale) it was turned into Latin by William Beufu, a Carmelite of Northampton. The same writer also enumerates a French prayer, ‘Oratio’ (cf. MS. Omn. Anim. Oxon. No. 11), ‘Orationes Decem’ (Latin), and ‘Speculum Contemplationis,’ with other fragments or translations from his larger work. His constitutions are printed in Lyndwood (Oxford, 1679). Of Richard's two sisters, Margaret, the prioress of Catesby, died in 1257; and if the entry is not wrong, the other, Alice, also prioress of Catesby, died in the same year (Matt. Paris, v. 621, 642).
[Matthew Paris, Robert Bacon, and Robert Rich (according to Surius) all wrote lives of St. Edmund. So far as can be ascertained the first
