LAKE JAMES

NORTH CAROLINA

 

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Saint Alphege, Archbishop and Martyr

  Born in 954, Alphege gave his witness in the troubled time of the second wave of Scandinavian invasions and settlement in England.  After serving as a monk at Deerhurst, and then as Abbot of Bath Abbey, at the age of thirty, through the influence of Saint Dunstan, then the Archbishop of Canterbury, Alphege was made Bishop of Winchester.  He was instrumental in bringing the Norse King Olaf Tryggvason, only recently baptized, to King Aethelred in 994 to make his peace and to be confirmed at Andover.

      Transferred to Canterbury in 1005, Alphege was captured by the Danes in 1011.  He refused to allow a personal ransom to be collected from his already over-burdened people.  Seven months later he was brutally murdered despite the Viking commander Thorkell’s effort to effort to save him by offering all his own possessions – except his ship – in return for the Archbishop’s life.

    The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle relates that the Danes were “much stirred against the Archbishop because he would not promise them any fee, and forbade that anyone should give anything for him.  They were also much drunken…and took the Archbishop, and led him to their hustings on the eve of the Saturday before Easter.  Then they shamefully killed him.  They overwhelmed him with bones and horns of oxen; and one of them smote him with an axe-iron on the head so that he sunk downwards with the blow.  And his holy blood fell on the earth, whilst his sacred soul was sent to the realm of God.”  He died in the year 1012 and his feast day is kept on April 19th.

 

[ from “Lesser Feasts and fasts” – A. T. K. Z.+]

 

A Collect for the Feast of St. Alphege, Archbishop and Martyr

    O loving God, your martyr bishop Alphege of Canterbury suffered violent death when he refused to permit a ransom to be extorted from his people: Grant that all pastors of your flock may pattern themselves on the Good Shepherd, who laid down his life for the sheep, and who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

 

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To learn more about Saint Alphege from Wikipedia.org, click here.

 

 

This page last modified on Friday, April 11, 2008 10:09 PM