ST/JD/176

Cynehelm/Kenelm

Gender

Male

Floruit (period)

Early medieval

Floruit date range

? - ?

Description

Cynehelm or Kenelm, martyr, is the subject of a passio written in 1045x75. According to this text, he was the son of King Cenwulf of Mercia (d. 821), to whose throne he succeeded as a boy of seven years. His sister Cwenthryth instigated his tutor Æscberht to kill him. While hunting with the child in a wood on 17 July, Æscberht beheaded and buried him at Clent (Worcestershire). Cwenthryth acceded to the kingdom; but a dove miraculously delivered to Pope Leo III (r. 795--816) a parchment inscribed in English to the effect that Cynehelm was buried decapitated under a thorn tree at Clent. The pope accordingly sent legates to Wulfred, archbishop of Canterbury, and the other English bishops to have Cynehelm's body recovered and enshrined. In the event, the body was taken to Winchcombe and, as the procession bearing it approached that church, Cwenthryth stood at a window reciting the psalter backwards by way of a curse, for which she was punished by having both eyes drop out on to the page, the blood-stained psalter being later displayed at Winchcombe. Although the passio is facutally unreliable, there was a person called Cynehelm who appears in the witness lists of reliable early charters. If this is the same Cynehelm who inspired the legend of the child-martyr, the details of his life no not coincide with those recounted in the passio. The documents, which designate Cynehelm princeps or dux, date from 803--811 and so make it impossible that he could have succeeded Cenwulf at the age of seven. That Cynehelm was venerated as a saint by the early 11th cent. is shown by an entry in the list of saints' resting places, Secgan be þam godes sanctum þe on Engla lande oerost reston (‘Concerning God's saints who formerly rested in England’), which dates from that period. The entry states that Kenelm, referred to as ‘royal child’ (cynebearn), rests at Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, a monastery founded by the Mercian kings in the late 11th cent. Winchcombe was restored as a Benedictine monastery by Oswald, bishop of Worcester (961--92), and it is likely that he was responsible for promoting Cynehelm's cult there. The martyr's feast day on 17 July appears in kalendars from the third quarter of the tenth century, and in the sacramentary of Fleury (Orléans, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 127 (105)), which was probably written at Winchcombe at about the same time, he has proper prayers and mass and is prominent among the martyrs. The saint's passio was in existence by the mid-eleventh century, and a series of versions is found in later manuscripts and compilations as well as in the works of 12th-cent. historical writers such as William of Malmesbury and John of Worcester. From that time onwards, Cynehelm became a widely known saint, commemorated at various ecclesiastical centres, and more popularly by an OE couplet relating to his place of burial: ‘In Clent Cow-valley, Kenelm king's son lies under a thorn-bush deprived of his head’. By the 14th century, his cult was sufficiently familiar to be alluded to in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. See D. Rollason, 'Cynehelm', ODNB.