Come and join us at Morning Prayer and Holy Rosary tomorrow 19 April, at 10.00, as we celebrate the feast day of St Alphege. After a time as a monk and then a hermit, he became Bishop of Winchester in 984 AD. In 994 he was sent by King Ethelred the Unready to negotiate with the Danes who had raided London and Wessex. Tribute (Danegeld) was paid to the Danes, but it did not keep them away for long. When Alphege became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1005 the Danes were marauding all over southern England. Canterbury was besieged and captured through the treachery of Archdeacon Aelfmaer. Alphege was imprisoned for seven months with others. The Danes wanted a £3000 ransom for the archbishop – a massive sum of money! - but Alphege refused to pay and forbade his people to do so; as a result of this, at a drunken feast in Greenwich in 1012 Alphege was murdered with the bones of oxen, an axeman delivering the coup de grâce. He was buried in St Paul’s Cathedral and became a national hero. Cnut became king of England in 1016, and tried after a period of violence to reconcile Anglo-Saxons and Danes. At this time Alphege’s remains were translated to Canterbury and buried to the north of the high altar.
All are welcome, either in person or on the livestream.