St Edmund's Memorial, Hoxne is a memorial which claims to mark the spot where St Edmund was killed by the

Viking Vikings ; non, víkingr is the modern name given to seafaring people originally from Scandinavia (present-day Denmark, Norway and Sweden), who from the late 8th to the late 11th centuries raided, pirated, traded and se ...

s in the

Suffolk Suffolk () is a ceremonial county of England in East Anglia. It borders Norfolk to the north, Cambridgeshire to the west and Essex to the south; the North Sea lies to the east. The county town is Ipswich; other important towns include Lowes ...

village of

Hoxne Hoxne ( ) is a village in the Mid Suffolk district of Suffolk, England, about five miles (8 km) east-southeast of Diss, Norfolk and south of the River Waveney. The parish is irregularly shaped, covering the villages of Hoxne, Cross Street a ...

. The monument is a

Grade II listed building In the United Kingdom, a listed building or listed structure is one that has been placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Historic Environment Scotland in Scotland, in Wales, and the Northern Irel ...

located in a field 95m east of Abbey Hill. The monument refers to an oak tree which fell under its own weight in the mid nineteenth century.

The legend

Edmund was King of

East Anglia East Anglia is an area in the East of England, often defined as including the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. The name derives from the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of the East Angles, a people whose name originated in Anglia, in ...

and in 865 faced an invasion by a Viking force known as the

Great Heathen Army The Great Heathen Army,; da, Store Hedenske Hær also known as the Viking Great Army,Hadley. "The Winter Camp of the Viking Great Army, AD 872–3, Torksey, Lincolnshire", ''Antiquaries Journal''. 96, pp. 23–67 was a coalition of Scandin ...

. The ''

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle The ''Anglo-Saxon Chronicle'' is a collection of annals in Old English, chronicling the history of the Anglo-Saxons. The original manuscript of the ''Chronicle'' was created late in the 9th century, probably in Wessex, during the reign of Alf ...

'' simply notes that King Edmund fought the Vikings while they wintered at

Thetford Thetford is a market town and civil parish in the Breckland District of Norfolk, England. It is on the A11 road between Norwich and London, just east of Thetford Forest. The civil parish, covering an area of , in 2015 had a population of 24,340 ...

in 869 and was defeated and killed. However subsequent documentation offers greater detail and contributed to the medieval Cult of St Edmund. In the 10th century

Abbo of Fleury Abbo or Abbon of Fleury ( la, Abbo Floriacensis; – 13 November 1004), also known as Saint Abbo or Abbon, was a monk and abbot of Fleury Abbey in present-day Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire near Orléans, France. Life Abbo was born near Orléan ...

wrote the '' Passio Sancti Eadmundi'', which the local legend to some extent matches. According to Abbo, Edmund chose not to fight the Vikings, but rather chose the role of a martyr.

The oak

An oak, considered by many to be this

royal oak The Royal Oak is the English oak tree within which the future King Charles II of England hid to escape the Roundheads following the Battle of Worcester in 1651. The tree was in Boscobel Wood, which was part of the park of Boscobel House. C ...

, collapsed in September 1848.

Sir Edward Kerrison, 1st Baronet General Sir Edward Kerrison, 1st Baronet, (30 July 1776 – 9 March 1853) was a British Army officer and politician. Kerrison was a Lieutenant-Colonel in the 7th Light Dragoons, saw service during the Peninsular War and commanded his regim ...

, the then owner of Hoxne Hall, on whose land the oak stood, informed the

Bury and West Suffolk Archaeological Institute The Bury and West Suffolk Archaeological Institute was a victorian organisation established in 1848 in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. It had a lively existence for five years until 1853, when the local activities concerning antiquaries and natural hi ...

of the event, relating how an arrowhead found in the tree had been exhibited by his son-in-law Lord Mahon at the Society of Antiquaries, of which Mahon was president. :"King Edmund's Oak fell on the 11th September, 1848, apparently in the vigour of health; but the foliage this year was probably beyond the weight of the trunk to support. The trunk was shivered in the middle, and was 20feet in circumference. The tree contained 17 loads of timber; the branches being the size of ordinary oaks, and spread over 28 yards in width. An enquiry from Bury being made respecting the arrows, search was immediately made in the truffle, about a man's height from the ground, when, in a sound piece of wood, an arrowhead or spike was found, covered a little more than a foot thick with sound material, the rest of the trunk being warted nearly two feet quite through the inside, and perfectly decayed, as saw dust. The annual ring, or layer, of this magnificent tree, is considered by competent judges to shew the growth of more than a thousand years. In Hoxne church there is still a poppy-head of a pew, with King Edmund's head, surrounded by a crown, supported by wolves' paws."

The monument

The current monument is not the original monument which collapsed during a storm 27th June 1905. It was rebuilt by Agnes Burrell Bateman-Hanbury, the daughter of Sir Edward Kerrison, 1st Baronet. She had inherited Oakley Park, as Hoxne manor was then known following the death of her brother

Sir Edward Kerrison, 2nd Baronet Sir Edward Clarence Kerrison, 2nd Baronet (2 January 1821, Brighton – 11 July 1886) was a British Conservative Party politician and the Member of Parliament for the borough of Eye. Biography Kerrison was the eldest son of General Sir Edward ...

who had died in 1886. Faulty instructions given to Richard F. Perfitta, a stone mason based in Diss, led to errors in the inscription.

References

{{reflist Grade II listed buildings in Suffolk Hoxne