Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 16.djvu/413

 his cathedral ‘propter illiteraturam,’ it is just possible that he may have attended St. Edmund's lectures at a later period (Vita Bertrandi, ap. Martène, cc. 2, 16; Epp. Archiep. Ebor. et Univ. Oxon.; Rot. de Fin. p. 368;, Lives of Archbishops).

Edmund was born at Abingdon. His father's name was Edward or Reinald Rich; his mother's Mabel. Reinald Rich withdrew to the monastery of Evesham, or more probably to Ensham, near Oxford, before his wife's death, but apparently not till some years after Edmund's birth; for Edmund seems to have been the eldest of a family which consisted of at least three brothers and two sisters (Vita Bertrandi, cc. 1, 7). The care of the children devolved upon Mabel. It was in imitation of her practice that Edmund all his life wore sackcloth next his skin, and pressed it closer to his flesh with one of the two iron plates his mother used to wear, and dying left to him and his brother Robert. As a child Mabel would entice her son to fast on Fridays, by the promise of little gifts suited to his age; and it was she who taught him to refuse all food on Sundays and festivals till he had sung the psalter from beginning to end.

The early years of Edmund's life were probably spent at Abingdon and Oxford (cf. Chron. of Lan. p. 36), and it is perhaps in the fields near Oxford that we must localise the beautiful legend which tells how on one of his lonely walks Christ appeared to him in the likeness of a little child, and expressed his surprise at not being recognised. It was seemingly in memory of this vision that, as Bertrand tells us, he was wont to write ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ on his forehead every night before going to sleep—a practice which he recommended to his biographer (Vita Bertr. c. 6).

The two brothers were probably still boys when their mother sent them to study at Paris (?1185–1190). Though in easy circumstances herself, Mabel would only give them a little money to take with them. She used to send them fresh linen every year, and for Edmund, ‘her favourite,’ a sackcloth garment too. While on a visit to his mother he seems to have suffered from a violent headache, and, in order to cure it, was shorn like a monk. As her end drew near Mabel sent for Edmund to receive her last blessing. She entrusted his sisters to his care; nor was his tender conscience satisfied before he had formed at Catesby in Northamptonshire a monastery where they would be received out of christian charity alone, and without any regard for the dower they brought with them.

Edmund must have been studying at Oxford about this time as well as at Paris, for it was by the advice of an Oxford ‘priest of great name’ that he vowed his special service to the Virgin; and it was at Oxford that, in the middle of the thirteenth century, the Lanercost chronicler saw that famous statue of the ‘glorious Virgin’ on whose finger the future saint, while still ‘puerulus intendens grammaticalibus Oxoniæ,’ had placed his betrothal ring (Chron. of Lan. p. 36; Vita Bertr. c. 10; cf. Ep. Univ. Oxon.)

As Edmund drew towards manhood his austerities grew more rigid. The details of the novel tortures of knotted rope-cloth and horsehair thongs that he devised may be read in his contemporary biographers, to whom they seemed a marvel of self-discipline. From the time he began to teach in the schools, so his most intimate friends declared soon after his death, he rarely if ever lay down upon his bed. He snatched a scanty sleep without undressing, and spent the rest of the night in meditation and prayer. For thirty years, said Bishop Jocelin of Bath, perhaps referring to a later period of his life, he had taken rest sitting or on his knees at prayer (Epp. Oxon. Jocel. Ricard).

After the usual course of study he was called upon to teach (? c. 1195–1200). His life for the next six years seems to have been divided between Paris and Oxford. Though he refused to take deacon's or priest's orders, he was constant in his attendance at early mass. He even built a little chapel in the Oxford parish where he lived, and induced his pupils to imitate his own example in the matter of punctual attendance (Vita Bertr.; Ep. Oxon.) His austerity towards himself was balanced by extreme tenderness towards others. He would carelessly throw the fees his pupils brought him into the window, and cover them up with a little dust, saying as he did so, ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’ For five weeks, on one occasion, he watched by the bedside of a sick scholar, performing the most menial offices at night, but never intermitting his usual lecture on the morrow. His friends fabled that he had once transferred the ailment of another pupil to himself.

After six years of secular teaching a vision turned his attention to theology. He dreamt that his mother appeared to him as he was teaching geometry or arithmetic to his class, and, drawing three circles emblematic of the three Persons of the Trinity, told him that these were to be the object of his study henceforward. Edmund devoted himself to theology; returned to Paris and entered upon a new course of life. Every midnight the bells of St. Mederic's Church called him out to matins, after which he would remain weeping