Saint Edmunds Church Salisbury
St Edmunds Church is in the centre of Salisbury – it is one of the three old central Salisbury parishes, the other two being Saint Thomas’ and Saint Martin’s.
Edmund Rich was born in Abingdon, near Oxford, in 1175. He studied at Oxford, where he had a vision of the baby Jesus.
He made a vow of chastity, and symbolized this with two rings – he wore one and he put the other on the hand of the statue of the Virgin in St. Mary’s in Oxford. To me, the rings might symbolize a marriage of Edmund to the church, but I don’t know whether rings were seen as symbols of marriage in the 12th Century.
In 1222 he was appointed treasurer of Salisbury Cathedral, and then in 1234 the was consecrated as Archbishop of Canterbury.
He had a series of disagreements with Henry III, and eventually retired to Ponigny in France in 1240. He died in 1240, and was canonized in 1246.1
St Edmunds Church and the original college were founded by the Bishop of Salisbury Walter de la Wyle in 1269. The bishop had known Saint Edmund personally Helen Wilcockson, “College to Council House”, Sarum Chronicle : the history of Salisbury and its district. Issue 7 Published Hobnob Press, 2007 ISBN/RCN 0946418691
It must be a fairly unusual circumstance for the founder of an English church to have known the Saint to which it is dedicated.
