Tales of English Minsters: Hereford

by Elizabeth W. Grierson

It must have been almost a relief when one day Eadwulf, Bishop of Lichfield, came to him and said: ‘What is this that thou hast done? Killed a defenceless man in thine own Palace, and taken possession of his Kingdom. Hadst thou killed him in open battle, no one could have blamed thee, but to murder him in secret when he came as a friend was not worthy of thee, O King.’

‘I know it, I know it,’ replied Offa, who was now thoroughly sorry for his deed; ‘but it was the wine which I drank, which my wife gave to me. It inflamed my brain so that I knew not what I said.’

Now, at that time people had the idea that they could atone for any wicked act that they had done by giving money or lands to the Church, or going on some pilgrimage; so Eadwulf told King Offa that he thought that first of all he had better see that King Ethelbert’s body had Christian burial—you remember it had just been thrown into a hole—and that after that he must go a pilgrimage to Rome, and tell the Pope the whole story, and do whatever he told him to do as a punishment.

Then he added some words which were very solemn, but which turned out only too true. This was what he said: ‘Because thou hast repented of thy evil deed thy sin will be forgiven; nevertheless, the sword shall not depart from thine house. It was in thine heart that Mercia should be the greatest of English Kingdoms, and so it might have been. But now the glory shall depart from thee, and another King, even the King of Wessex, shall be greater in power and shall become the first King of the whole of England.’

Offa did as he was bid. He had the body of the young King taken from its rude grave, and buried in the little church of reeds and wattles at Fernlege, near which Ethelbert had sat and mused on the night before his death.

S. B. Bolas & Co.

HEREFORD CATHEDRAL: THE NAVE.

Then he went to Rome and told the whole story to the Pope, and said how penitent he was, and how gladly he would do anything in his power to atone for his sin; and the Pope, who wanted to have more churches built in England, told him to go home again, and show his sorrow by building a really fine church at St. Albans—where the first English martyr Alban laid down his life for the Faith—and another at Fernlege, where there was only the plain little Cathedral Church of wood.

Offa promised that he would do these things, and when he returned to England he gave orders that the two buildings should be begun without delay. Very soon afterwards he died, and it fell to the lot of one of his Viceroys, whose name was Milfred, to carry out his plans at Fernlege, and to build an ‘admirable stone church’ there.