Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Cedd
CEDD or CEDDA, Saint (d. 664), bishop of the East Saxons, was an Angle of Northumbria. He was apparently the eldest of four brothers, all of whom became monks and priests under the influence of the great missionary movement which, early in the seventh century, radiated from Iona throughout the North. The names of his brothers were Cynibill, Caelin, and Ceadda, the last of whom, often called St. Chad, became famous as the first bishop of Lichfield [see Ceadda]. The close similarity both of the names and the careers of Cedd and Ceadda sometimes makes caution necessary to distinguish them (see Fuller's quaint remarks on this point, Ch. Hist., 1845, i. 213. They are hopelessly confused in Henry of Huntingdon and Brompton). Both were brought up at Lindisfarne, under Bishop Aidan; and if not, like Ceadda, once an inmate of an Irish monastery, Cedd's reputation for learning and sanctity was equally great in Ireland and in Britain. In 653 Peada, ealdorman of the Middle Angles under his father Penda, requested his overlord and father-in-law, Oswiu, king of the Northumbrians, to send him four priests to assist in the conversion of his subjects to christianity. Of these Cedd was one. Their mission was very successful. Every class of the Middle Angles gladly listened to their preaching, and pressed forward to receive baptism. Penda himself, whose long life of antagonism to christianity was now drawing to a close, permitted them to preach in his own dominions to any who chose to hear them. But in 653 (Flor. Wig. M. H. B. 530 d) Oswiu recalled Cedd from the land of the Middle Angles and sent him with another monk to Essex to aid Sigeberht, king of the East Saxons (himself a recent convert), in the work of converting his subjects. Again the saint's endeavours proved signally successful. His preaching tours attracted round him so large a band of followers that on his return to report progress to his master, Finan, he was consecrated bishop of the East Saxons. Two other Scottish bishops assisted Finan in the consecration (654). Essex soon became thoroughly christianised. Cedd showed great activity in building churches and ordaining priests and deacons to assist him. He founded two monasteries, one at a half-forgotten place, Ithanchester (Ythancæstir), on the river Penta, which Camden has identified with the Roman station Othona, situated on the Blackwater not far from Maldon, and the other at West Tilbury on the Thames. Here his rude East-Saxon converts strove to imitate to the best of their ability the austerities of a Columban monastery. The iron discipline established by Cedd is well illustrated by the rebuke which he hurled at Sigeberht himself for feasting at the house of a thegn who had contracted a union in violation of the christian law of marriage. In vain the king cast himself at the bishop's feet imploring pardon. ‘Because thou hast not refrained from visiting that lost and accursed man, thou wilt have death in thy own house,’ was the only answer. The murder of Sigeberht by his own kinsfolk (660) was universally regarded as the fulfilment of Cedd's prophecy. Swidhelm, the next king, was baptised by Cedd before he was permitted to ascend the throne, or even cross the East-Saxon frontier.
Cedd found time for frequent visits to his Northumbrian home. His own preaching and the influence of his brother Caelin, who was chaplain to Æthelwald, son of Oswald, the under-king of Deira, brought him into close relations with that monarch. Æthelwald requested Cedd to receive from him a site for the construction of a monastery where Æthelwald himself might worship during his life and be buried after his death. Cedd chose for his church a remote place among the wild and desolate moors of north-eastern Yorkshire. There the saint hallowed the spot by long fastings and prayers. The monastery was to follow the rule of Lindisfarne, Cedd's own old home. Its name, Læstingæu, is in its modern form Lastingham, a little village a few miles north-west of Pickering (see Raine, Fasti Eboracenses, i. 47, for an account of Lastingham at the present day).
Up to this period all Cedd's actions were based on the customs of the church from which he had received baptism and ordination. But at the council of Whitby, which he attended in 664, he played the part of a watchful mediator between the Scottish and Roman parties. When the declaration of Oswiu and the retirement of Colman secured the predominance of the Roman champions, Cedd's recognition of the catholic Easter proclaimed his conversion to the winning side. Immediately after he seems to have visited Lastingham, where the work of organising his monastery was still proceeding under reeves of his own selection. But the ‘yellow plague’ which was then devastating Northumbria (Bede, iii. 27) penetrated even to his secluded moorland retreat, and Cedd himself was one of the first victims. He died on 26 Oct. (Flor. Wig. M. H. B. 532 d). His body, at first buried in the churchyard, was afterwards removed to a more magnificent tomb on the right of the high altar of the stone church that took the place of the original wooden building. Ceadda succeeded his brother at Lastingham. Thirty monks of Cedd's earlier foundation at Ithanchester hurried to Lastingham that they might either live or die in the neighbourhood of their ‘father's’ sainted body, and were all, except one boy, cut off by the plague. Next year (665) terror of the plague drove the East Saxons back again to their old gods (Bede, H. E. iii. 30).
A successful missionary and a zealous monk, Cedd was perhaps more at home in his evangelistic wanderings and monastic seclusion than in the work of governing and organising the East-Saxon church. It is remarkable that the copious narrative of his life never speaks of him as bishop of London. Either the great city was Mercian, or at least independent of Essex, or the disciple of Aidan preferred to dwell in seclusion with his monks in the wilds of eastern Essex to fixing his bishop's see in the bustling city. Later writers have put him second to Mellitus in the long catalogue of London bishops (e.g. Flor. Wig. M. H. B. p. 617 b; Will. Malm. Gesta Pontificum, bk. ii.), but Bede only knew him as bishop of the East Saxons. Cedd soon became celebrated among the saints of the old English church. He was the pattern of life and doctrine for his more famous brother. Years afterwards, when Ceadda also ended his saintly career, an Anglian anchorite in an Irish monastery saw in a vision the soul of Cedd descending from heaven in the midst of the angel host to conduct his brother's soul back with him to the celestial kingdom.
[All we know of Cedd comes from Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, bk. iii. cc. 21, 22, 23, 25, bk. iv. 3. Bede got his information from the monks of Lastingham (Preface to H. E.). Florence of Worcester is sometimes useful in interpreting Bede. William of Malmesbury's Gesta Pontificum, bk. ii., and Capgrave's Legenda Sanctorum Angliæ, fol. 56, give nothing in addition. The Bollandist account, Acta Sanctorum, Januarii, tom. i. p. 373, comes from Bede. It gives Cedd's day as 7 Jan. on the authority of the Martyrologium Anglicanum. Of more recent writings, the article in the Dictionary of Christian Biography and Dr. Bright's chapters of Early English Church History are the fullest.]