St. Edward the Martyr

King of England.  Born in 962, the son of King Edgar, the succession to whom was disputed.  Edward was chosen in 975 at the tender age of 13 through the influence of a group of magnates influenced by St. Dunstan, the Benedictine Archbishop of Canterbury.  Other nobles, who resented monastic influence, proposed his even younger half-brother Ethelred as a rival claimant and procured the murder of Edward at the gate of Corfe Castle (Dorset) as he returned from a hunt.  The perpetrator of the crime was none other than his stepmother, Aelfryth, second wife of King Edgar, who lured him into bending forward on his horse for a kiss, thereby putting him within range of an attendant’s dagger.  He was buried ‘without ceremony’ at Wareham, but in 980 his relics were transferred to Shaftesbury; as early as 1001 he was called ‘a saint’ and his nation-wide celebration was ordered in 1008.  His stepmother, in remorse, became a nun at Wherwell in the Test Valley.  Pilgrimages to his shrine were encouraged by the description of him as ‘the ideal of a Christian prince’.   Some of his remains are now, surprisingly, in the hands of the Russian Orthodox Church at Brookwood, near Woking.