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Malcolm Guite: Poet’s Corner

04 October 2024

In the company of two of his close friends, Malcolm Guite walks St Edward’s Way

I HAVE returned from my September pilgrimage, an annual outing with two of my oldest friends. This time, we were on St Edward’s Way, which runs north through Dorset from Wareham, where the body of the young king was first interred after his murder at Corfe Castle, in 978, to Shaftesbury Abbey, where his shrine was established and flourished, until the dissolution of the Abbey in 1539.

The three of us — an Anglican, a Roman Catholic, and an agnostic — walked the way over three days, imagining, as we climbed the various Dorset hills, and descended into valleys, as we made our way through beautiful woodlands, or trudged through sludge in the drenching September rains, what it must have been like for the original pallbearers, who, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 980 attests, “fetched the body of the holy King Edward at Wareham, and carried him with great solemnity to Shaftsbury”.

Our small sodden rucksacks sometimes seemed more than heavy enough, without adding the further burden of shouldering a coffin, and I found myself reflecting again on how important such relics were to our ancestors. Their Christianity was even more thoroughly incarnational than our own. Matter mattered: the human chain of touch, of hands laid on heads that constituted apostolic succession and royal anointing, the physical contact with the bodies of the saints which put one literally in touch with holiness and balanced and complemented all our head-knowledge of the saints and their faith.

But there was more to a pilgrimage to the shrine of a saint than that. There was the storytelling and companionship celebrated by Chaucer; there were the myriad ways in which the ups and downs of the outward and visible journey became a vivid symbol, lent a language of imagery, to the inward and spiritual journey of the heart, so that, long after such outward pilgrimage had officially been banned, George Herbert could still call prayer “the heart in pilgrimage” and Bunyan could still write The Pilgrim’s Progress.

We could not share the original goal of those first pilgrims: to come close to the martyr’s physical remains; for, alas, their shrine and the abbey that enshrined them have long since fallen into ruin, and the bones themselves are now kept and venerated in the Orthodox Church of St Edward the Martyr, in Brookwood, Surrey.

But we certainly shared with those medieval pilgrims all the trials and treasures of the journey itself, and also something more; for there was a continuity that I hadn’t expected: it was a continuity of restoration and redemption. The Chronicle entry for the year of Edward’s martyrdom declares: “Men him murdered, but God him glorified. He was in life an earthly king; he is now after death a heavenly saint. . . The earthly murderers would his memory on earth blot out, but the lofty Avenger hath his memory in the heavens and on earth wide spread.”

The same might be said, now, of the ruins of the abbey itself. What was once pillaged and despoiled is now carefully tended, and the Abbey Museum and Gardens, which gave a warm welcome to three bedraggled pilgrims, have a project, aptly called “Saved”, that has galvanised the local community, to document and, as far as possible, gather back together the scattered stones of the abbey. They have marked and inscribed the high altar where the shrine once was, and have a wonderful ministry of welcome in the peaceful garden that they have made amid the ruins. This, too, like every martyr’s shrine, is a parable of redemption and resurrection.

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