Feast Day: March 25 Canonized: Pre-Congregation — venerated from the eleventh century; Acta Sanctorum March 25; feast in English martyrologies Order / Vocation: Order of Saint Benedict — monk of Winchester; Bishop of Sherborne, 1045–1058 Patron of: Sherborne · Dorset · Those devoted to the saints · Those who die in prayer
The Antiphon He Could Not Finish
He had been singing the antiphon of Saint Cuthbert — the song of praise to the great Northumbrian bishop and hermit whom he had loved since his years at Winchester — when death came for him. He got partway through it. He could not finish. He made signs to his attendants to complete it on his behalf.
This is the image that William of Malmesbury preserved from the testimony of a priest who had personally known Alfwold: the dying bishop, still singing, not willing to let the last act of his life be silence when there was still praise to give. His attendants sang it for him. He died.
It is, as deaths go, entirely consistent with the life. Alfwold was not a spectacular saint — William of Malmesbury calls him rather obscure, and the Catholic Encyclopedia echoes this honestly. He was a monk of Winchester who became a bishop, governed his diocese with frugality when frugality was unfashionable, loved two saints with a devotion that shaped his whole episcopate, and died singing.
He is for those whose holiness is simple enough to be described in a paragraph and deep enough to be worth remembering for a thousand years.
Monk, Brother, Bishop
He was a monk of Winchester — the great Benedictine cathedral priory attached to the cathedral church of Saint Swithun, one of the most important ecclesiastical houses in Anglo-Saxon England. Winchester was the old capital of the kingdom of Wessex, and its cathedral had been rebuilt and enlarged by Saint Aethelwold in the tenth century as a center of the Benedictine reform that transformed the English Church. It was the house of Saint Swithun, whose relics were the most venerated in southern England.
In this house, under the patronage of Swithun, Alfwold was formed as a monk. He absorbed the daily round of the Divine Office, the Benedictine austerity, the culture of the Winchester scriptorium, and a devotion to Saint Swithun that he would carry with him when he left. He also, somewhere in these years, acquired a devotion to Saint Cuthbert — the seventh-century hermit of Farne Island and bishop of Lindisfarne whose shrine at Durham was already one of the greatest pilgrimage centers in England.
In 1045 his brother Brithwine died in office as Bishop of Sherborne. Alfwold succeeded him — an unusual succession, brother following brother, that speaks to the interconnection of family and ecclesiastical appointment in eleventh-century England. The see of Sherborne covered Dorset and part of Somerset. He governed it from 1045 until his death in 1058.
Frugality in a Riotous Age
William of Malmesbury, writing approximately seventy years after Alfwold's death, emphasizes one thing above all: the bishop's frugality stood in sharp contrast to the habits of his time. The Danish monarchs — Cnut and his successors — had introduced into English court culture a style of lavish banqueting that had filtered down through the aristocracy and into the ecclesiastical world. Bishops entertained. Bishops feasted. Bishops gave great dinners. Alfwold used wooden platters and bowls.
This is not a small detail. In an age when the table was a statement of status and generosity, the choice to eat plainly from wooden vessels was legible to everyone who observed it. It was not penury — Alfwold had the resources of the see. It was deliberate asceticism, the monk's habit persisting into the bishop's palace, the refusal to let the episcopal dignity replace the monastic discipline.
He brought from Winchester to Sherborne an image of Saint Swithun, which he placed in his cathedral church. The Oxford Dictionary of Saints records that he "awakened a great devotion to that saint in his diocese" — the bishop transmitting his own love of the Winchester patron to a new community that had not previously known it.
And he continued, throughout his episcopate, the devotion to Cuthbert that had marked his years at Winchester. He made the long journey to Durham — three hundred miles north, across the Midlands and into Northumbria — to visit the shrine. William of Malmesbury records, through the priest who knew him, that he had the shrine opened when he arrived, and spoke to Cuthbert as to a friend, leaving an offering as a token of his love.
He had one recorded conflict: a disagreement with Earl Godwin of Wessex — the most powerful nobleman in England — who fell suddenly ill after the dispute and recovered only when Alfwold pardoned him. The miracle, modest and localized, is the only supernatural event in his biography. It is enough.
After his death the see of Sherborne was united with that of Ramsbury; in 1070 both became the see of Salisbury. Alfwold was, as the Catholic Encyclopedia notes, strictly speaking the last Bishop of Sherborne. The see ended with him. He was, in that sense, the concluding chapter of a very old institution — and he concluded it singing.
Prayer to Saint Alfwold
O God, who gave to Saint Alfwold the frugality of the monk within the palace of the bishop and the love of the saints that carried him to Durham and kept the antiphon on his lips at the moment of death, grant through his intercession that those who govern the Church may be formed less by the standards of their age than by the company of the saints they love, and that we may have something worth singing when we come to our own end. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Saint Alfwold of Sherborne, pray for us.
| Born | Unknown — Winchester, England |
| Died | March 25, 1058 — Sherborne, Dorset, England — natural death while singing the antiphon of Saint Cuthbert |
| Feast Day | March 25 |
| Order / Vocation | Order of Saint Benedict — monk of Winchester; last Bishop of Sherborne (1045–1058) |
| Canonized | Pre-Congregation — Acta Sanctorum March III; English martyrologies |
| Patron of | Sherborne · Dorset · Those devoted to the saints |
| Known as | Γlfwold · Aelfwold · Alfwold of Sherborne |
| Primary source | William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum Anglorum, Book II §83 |
| Connected saints | Saint Swithun (patron at Winchester; placed his image in Sherborne Cathedral) · Saint Cuthbert (pilgrim to his shrine at Durham; died singing his antiphon) |
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