Eadfrith of Leominster

Saint Eadfrith of Leominster, known also as Eadfrith and Eadridus, belongs to the age when the Gospel was still taking root among the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Though he is not named in the great contemporary histories, later foundation legends and medieval lists of saints preserve the outline of his life and the honor in which the Church held him.

According to the later foundation legend of the minster at Leominster, Eadfrith came from Northumbria and worked as a missionary among the Hwicce and the peoples of the western Mercian borderlands. About the year 660 he converted King Merewalh, sub-king of the Magonsæte—a contemporary, and in some accounts a son, of the powerful pagan King Penda of Mercia. With the king's support Eadfrith founded an abbey for women at Leominster, on or near the site later occupied by the priory. That house is mentioned in Domesday Book; it was destroyed in the Danish invasions of the tenth century and re-founded about 1139, thereafter associated with the royal family.

Eadfrith is known chiefly through the mid-eleventh-century hagiographic compilation called the Secgan (On the Resting-Places of the Saints), as well as notices in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Catalogus sanctorum pausantium in Anglia. He died in 675 and was buried at Leominster. Tradition assigns his feast to 26 October. Venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church and remembered also in Orthodox and Anglican calendars, he stands among those who brought the faith to the Magonsæte and helped plant monastic life in the Marches.

May Saint Eadfrith intercede for us, and may we imitate today his missionary zeal in making Christ known where He is not yet loved.