Edmund the Martyr

King of East Anglia as a boy — the Annals of St Neots say fourteen, on no earlier authority — he came to the throne in 855 and reigned fourteen years; the Great Danish Army landed in 865. In 869, refusing to share his kingdom with pagan chiefs or to renounce his faith — the sources differ on the exact ground — he was taken. Abbo of Fleury's account, written a century later from the reported testimony of his armour-bearer, says he was bound to a tree, shot full of arrows “like a hedgehog with quills”, then beheaded, the head thrown into a wood; his men found it guarded by a wolf holding it between its paws untouched. The abbey raised over his tomb gave the town of Bury St Edmunds. He was patron of England until Edward the Confessor supplanted him in the eleventh century, and St George from the fourteenth.