ABSTRACT
Ethelbert1, king, or sub-ruler (regulus), of the East Angles, was brutally murdered in 794 as the result of an obscure intrigue at the court of King offa of Mercia (757-96),2 whither he had come seeking the hand of offa’s daughter Ælfthryth (Ælfþryð) in marriage.3 There seems to have been a family connection with offa, according to Gerald of Wales, the author of a life of the saint, who connects Ethelbert with the Mercian royal line.4 offa’s queen, Cynethryth, apparently for no other reason than jealousy, falsely informed her husband that it was Ethelbert’s intention to depose him and rule in his place, insinuating that this had long been the aim of the treacherous East Anglian rulers (tyrrani).5 Gerald relates that Cynethryth was attracted to the handsome Ethelbert
1 Festum 20 May, BHL 2626-30; NLA i, 412-18; ODNB 8903. For the saint’s life the Bollandists follow the fifteenth-century chronicle of John of Brompton (AA. SS. Maii, iv (1740), 703-7), using Gerald of Wales for the miracles (ibid., 707-8). Gerald’s text derives from Lbl MS Cotton Vitellius E. vii, which had been transcribed by Dugdale previous to damage by the British Museum fire of 1731 (James, ‘Two lives of St Ethelbert, king and martyr’, EHR xxxii, 1917 [henceforth James, ‘Two lives of St Ethelbert’], 214-44 (translation by Brooks, The Life of St Ethelbert, king and martyr, repr. 1996), at 215). Forms of the name in pre-Conquest sources include ‘Æþelbryhte’ and ‘Æðelbryhte’. The post-Conquest ‘Ethelbert’, found usually in the liturgy (‘Sanctus Ethelbertus’), is preferred in this account of the saint and his cult.
