Page:The Saxon Cathedral at Canterbury and The Saxon Saints Buried Therein.djvu/119

ST. ELFRIC

folk in Kent, and another to Wiltshire. And with respect to other things besides, if there be aught, he has prayed that Bishop Wulfstan and Abbot Leofric would order so as to them seem best. And the land in the West at Filtington and at Newton, he has bequeathed to his sisters and their children. And let Aelfheah Esne's son's land go ever in his kin. And he has bequeathed to Archbishop Wulfstan one neck-rood and one ring and one psalter; and to Bishop Aelfheah one rood. And he has forgiven under God's favour, to the Kentish people, the loan which they owe to him; and to the Middle Saxons and the Southerns the money he advanced to them. And he wills that after his day, every penal serf, who had been condemned in his time, be freed. If anyone prevent this, let him have to account with God. Amen."

Upon the translation of the body of the Archbishop from Abingdon to Canterbury by Canute, it was buried in the church of St. John. After the fire of 1067, the remains were placed in a coffin and removed to the upper vault in the north transept; and after the choir of the Cathedral was enlarged in the time of St. Anselm, they were deposited about 1121 at the altar of St. John the Evangelist in the northern apse of the south-eastern transept. In the inventory made in the time of Prior Henry of Eastry (1321)^[1] the remains, probably only bones in a chest, lay where it had been deposited nearly two centuries before.^[2] And in a MS. of the time of Archbishop Warham in the sixteenth century now amongst the Parker MSS. at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, it is stated that the relics of Elfric "lie upon a beam before the altar of Saints John the Baptist and Evangelist in the south part of the Choir." At this time the relics were certainly in a chest or shrine and placed upon the beam which went across the apse, where they remained until the Dissolution. Upon the issue of the Injunctions put forth in the name of Edward VI in 1547, they were taken down and probably buried beneath the pavement at this spot.

The name of St. Elfric does not occur in any extant Canterbury Kalendar, possibly he was commemorated with others on All Saints Day only.

1. British Museum, Galba, E. IV.
2. Legg and Hope, Inventories of Christ Church, Canterbury, p. 35.

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