Anglican Commemoration
Bishop of Lichfield & Missionary
March 2 · d. 672
also known as Ceadda
Chad was a Northumbrian monk, trained at Lindisfarne under Aidan, who was made bishop in 664 under irregular circumstances and went about on foot to preach. When Archbishop Theodore questioned that consecration five years later, Chad offered to resign the office; Theodore refused the resignation, completed the ordination himself, and later gave him Mercia. From a small cell at Lichfield Chad governed that see for two and a half years, and died on 2 March 672. Almost everything known of him comes from Bede.
Chad was one of four brothers, and all four of them served the church as priests. Bede, who tells us nearly everything we know about him, thought this remarkable enough to say so outright: "as it rarely happens, the four brothers we have mentioned, Cedd and Cynibill, and Caelin and Ceadda, were all celebrated priests of the Lord, and two of them also came to be bishops." Chad was trained at Lindisfarne under Aidan, and later spent years in Ireland with his friend Egbert, the two of them young men who, Bede says, "long and zealously led a monastic life ... in Ireland, in prayer and self-denial and meditation on the Holy Scriptures."
In 664 the plague came. Chad's brother Cedd, who had founded the monastery at Lastingham, went there and died of it, and Chad took up the governing of the house in his place. That same year the plague also took Tuda, bishop of the Northumbrians, and King Oswiu needed a bishop quickly. Wilfrid had been sent by King Alchfrid to Gaul to be consecrated, and was still abroad. Oswiu, meanwhile, sent Chad south to Kent to be ordained bishop of the church of York.
Here is where the trouble began, and it was not Chad's doing. The archbishop at Canterbury had died and there was no one there to consecrate anyone. The party went on into Wessex, where Bishop Wini agreed to do it, calling in two British bishops to assist him. Those two kept Easter by the old reckoning, "from the fourteenth to the twentieth moon," which the Roman party held to be wrong. So Chad became a bishop by hands that were, by the reckoning that was winning, not quite the right hands. He seems to have given it no thought at all. He set about his work at once, and Bede's first picture of him is of a man walking: "to travel about, not on horseback, but after the manner of the Apostles, on foot, to preach the Gospel in towns, the open country, cottages, villages, and castles."
Five years later a new archbishop arrived at Canterbury, Theodore of Tarsus, on Sunday the twenty-seventh of May in 669, and he began a visitation of the whole English church, correcting what he found faulty. He came to Chad and charged him with not having been duly consecrated. Chad did not argue. He answered, with great humility, "If you know that I have not duly received episcopal ordination, I willingly resign the office, for I never thought myself worthy of it; but, though unworthy, for obedience sake I submitted, when bidden to undertake it." Theodore heard that answer, and would not take the resignation. He completed the ordination himself, after the Catholic manner.
Bede does not tell us why Chad left York, only that he retired to Lastingham, and that Wilfrid then held the bishopric. But Theodore had not forgotten him. When King Wulfhere of Mercia asked for a bishop, Theodore would not ordain a new one; he asked Oswiu for Chad. And knowing that Chad still insisted on walking everywhere, Theodore ordered him to ride on long journeys, and finding him unwilling, "he himself, with his own hands, lifted him on horseback; for he knew him to be a holy man, and therefore obliged him to ride wherever he had need to go."
So Chad came to Lichfield. He built himself a small house near the church where he prayed and read with seven or eight of the brothers. There was a lay brother there named Owini, who had once been chief officer in the household of Queen Æthelthryth and had given up his rank for manual labour; he worked outside while the others read within. One day, with the bishop alone in the oratory, Owini heard singing come down out of heaven into that little building, stay about half an hour, and go back up the way it had come. Chad called the brothers, charged them to keep love and peace among themselves and to hold to the discipline they had learned from him, and then told them the day of his death was at hand: "that gracious guest, who was wont to visit our brethren, has vouchsafed also to come to me this day, and to call me out of this world." When they had gone away sorrowing, Owini came back alone and asked what the singing had been. Chad commanded him to tell no one until after his death, and then answered him: "they were angelic spirits, who came to call me to my heavenly reward, which I have always loved and longed after, and they promised that they would return seven days hence, and take me away with them." On the seventh day, having received the Body and Blood of the Lord, he died. It was the second of March, 672.
We know one more thing about how he lived, and we know it from a man named Trumbert, who was raised in Chad's monastery and who later taught Bede the Scriptures. When a gust of wind blew up while Chad was reading, he would stop and ask God's mercy for all mankind. If the wind rose, he closed the book and lay down on his face. If it came on to thunder and lighten, he went to the church and prayed and sang psalms until the sky was quiet again. His brothers asked him why. Because, he said, "the Lord moves the air, raises the winds, hurls lightning, and thunders from heaven, to rouse the inhabitants of the earth to fear him; to put them in mind of judgement to come."
He was buried by St Mary's church at Lichfield, and people came for the dust of his tomb. Egbert, his friend from the Irish years, said long afterwards that the company that came for Chad's soul had Cedd among them, his own brother, come to fetch him home. Bede, careful as ever, adds that he does not know for certain whether Egbert saw this himself or heard it from another; but "because it was said by so great a man, there can be no doubt of the truth thereof." The singing that came down on the little oratory at Lichfield was a company of angelic spirits, Chad told Owini, come to call him to a reward he had always loved and longed after; and on the seventh day they came back for him, as he had said they would.
Chad had every reason to defend his office. He had held it since 664, he had walked the length of a kingdom preaching in it, and the defect in his consecration was not his doing but an accident of a vacant see. When the archbishop challenged him he did not explain, or plead the circumstances, or point out whose fault it was. He said that if the thing was not rightly done he would give it up, and that he had never thought himself worthy of it anyway. What is it that you would defend if it were challenged tomorrow, not because you are certain it is right, but because you have held it a long time and it would cost you to let it go?
Chad is known through one book. Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica, completed in 731, some sixty years after Chad's death, supplies effectively everything: the four brothers, the Irish years, the 664 consecration and its irregularity, Theodore's correction, the Mercian appointment, the horse, the storm habit, the death, the tomb. Bede identifies his informants for the Lastingham material in his Preface only collectively, "we learned from the brethren of the monastery, which was built by them, and is called Laestingaeu," and names one man in the text: Trumbert, "one of the brothers who instructed me in the Scriptures, and who had been bred in his monastery, and under his direction." That is a short chain, a man taught by Chad teaching Bede, and it is why so much of Chad's life survives as personal detail rather than as a list of sees.
The corroboration is thin. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, compiled in stages from the late ninth century, records the ordinations of Chad and Wilfrid under the year 664 alongside Deusdedit's death, which agrees with Bede; whether that annal drew on Bede or on a separate annalistic layer has not been settled, so 664 is well attested rather than demonstrably attested twice. For 2 March 672 the Chronicle is silent, and the date rests on Bede alone, consistent with his own arithmetic of two and a half years from a 669 consecration. Bede calls the office Chad received in 664 the bishopric "of the church of York," but his usual habit is to describe seventh-century bishops by people rather than by city, and whether York was yet a fixed episcopal seat is contested.
One thing commonly said of Chad is not in Bede at all. Bede nowhere says that Theodore deposed him or ordered him to step down: at IV.2 Theodore refuses the resignation and completes the ordination himself. What Bede does record is the outcome. At IV.3 Chad is living in retirement at Lastingham "while Wilfrid administered the bishopric of York, and of all the Northumbrians"; and at V.19 Bede sets the three years at York and the withdrawal in one sentence: "having nobly ruled that church three years, he retired to take charge of his monastery of Laestingaeu, and Wilfrid was made bishop of all the province of the Northumbrians." Bede gives the succession but no cause, and makes Chad the subject of his own withdrawal. His three years at York and the five years between the consecration of 664 and Theodore's visitation of 669 are not easily squared, and Bede does not reconcile them. The familiar modern sentence, that Theodore removed him and restored York to Wilfrid, supplies a motive Bede does not. Nor does Bede date the death of Jaruman, Chad's Mercian predecessor; Sellar's note puts it around 667. Bede's own succession list at III.24 makes Chad the third Mercian bishop of Wulfhere's reign, not the first.
There is one near-contemporary account of the same Northumbrian quarrels from the other side, Stephen of Ripon's life of Wilfrid, written by a partisan of Wilfrid within a generation. The nineteenth-century notes that it and Bede diverge on particulars and judges Bede the more trustworthy. It was not consulted for this page, and nothing here is corroborated by it. A second, non-Bedan life survives in Old English, in a single copy written into a Bodleian manuscript in the second quarter of the twelfth century and edited by R. Vleeskruyer in 1953, who argued from its Mercian dialect for a much earlier composition. Its text has not been read against Bede here. It is the one potentially independent devotional tradition, and it remains unopened.
The devotion began at the graveside and Bede describes it plainly. The tomb was "a wooden monument, made like a little house, covered, having a hole in the wall, through which those that go thither for devotion are wont to put in their hand and take out some of the dust. This they put into water and give to sick cattle or men to drink." It is one of the earliest concrete accounts of English relic practice we have. Bede also reports one man, out of his senses and wandering, who slept the night there and went away in the morning restored. His bones were later moved into the church of St Peter built on the same site; Bede gives no year for the move.
At medieval Lichfield there were two focal points, the shrine itself and the head, kept separately: in a painted wooden box in 1345, and encased in a gilt reliquary by 1445. Bishop Langton gave a shrine, Bishop Stretton improved it in 1378, and in 1538 the reliquaries were destroyed and the statues, jewels and other ornaments seized by the Crown, the cathedral keeping the shrine's stone fabric. The saint's bones were smuggled away by Canon Arthur Dudley; some were taken to Flanders in 1669 and were in Liège by 1671, while others remained in England and are now kept in the Roman Catholic cathedral in Birmingham. Pugin's cathedral of St Chad in Birmingham was consecrated on 21 June 1841 to house what had survived, and remains the archbishop's seat. In 1995 Archbishop Couve de Murville sent the six bones kept there to Oxford for examination: five were dated to the mid-seventh century and one to the century after. Two of the six are left femurs, so they cannot all be one man.
On 7 and 8 November 2022, four hundred and eighty-four years after the first shrine was despoiled, a shrine of St Chad was consecrated and reinstated at Lichfield Cathedral, with a relic translated over from the Roman Catholic cathedral at Birmingham. Two cathedrals, two communions, one saint between them.
The single source for Chad's life is Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England, completed in 731; Books III to V carry it, with the four brothers and Lastingham at III.23, the 664 consecration and the foot-travel at III.28, Theodore's visitation and the resignation exchange at IV.2, the Mercian episcopate, the horse, Owini and the singing, Chad's answer about the angelic spirits, the storm teaching reported from Trumbert, the death and the tomb at IV.3, and Chad's consecration to York, his three years there, his retirement and Wilfrid's succession at V.19. All quotations above are from A. M. Sellar's revised translation (London: George Bell and Sons, 1907), available at Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/38326/38326-h/38326-h.html, with per-chapter anchors `#Book_III_Chap_XXIII`, `#Book_III_Chap_XXVIII`, `#Book_IV_Chap_II`, `#Book_IV_Chap_III` and `#Book_V_Chap_XIX`. The account of the man restored to his senses at the tomb is also given in the Stevens and Jane translation, at Wikisource in the 1910 Dent and Dutton issue, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ecclesiastical_History_of_the_English_Nation_(Jane)/Book_4. Alban Butler's Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs and Other Principal Saints (1756-59) is the vehicle by which the resignation exchange reached English readers generally, and Edwin Burton's article on St Ceadda in the Catholic Encyclopedia (1908), https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03470c.htm, carries its own rendering with the same citation. For the medieval shrine and the head reliquary see the Victoria County History, Staffordshire vol. 14, on Lichfield Cathedral, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/staffs/vol14/pp47-57; for the 2022 reinstatement, Lichfield Cathedral's own announcement, https://www.lichfield-cathedral.org/news/news/post/582-reinstate-shrine-st-chad; for the Birmingham relics and the 1995 examination, the Archdiocese of Birmingham's own account, The Relics of St Chad. The judgment on Bede against Stephen of Ripon is that of the Dictionary of National Biography (1885-1900), s.v. Ceadda, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biography,_1885-1900/Ceadda. The Old English homiletic life survives in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 116, edited by R. Vleeskruyer as The Life of St. Chad: An Old English Homily (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1953). A scholarly treatment of the medieval devotion, not used here, is David Lepine, "Glorious Confessor: The cult of St Chad at Lichfield Cathedral during the Later Middle Ages," Staffordshire Archaeological and Historical Society Transactions 52 (2021), 29-52.
Chad himself wrote nothing. The illuminated gospel book that bears his name, the Lichfield or St Chad Gospels, dates from around 730, was in Welsh hands at the church of St Teilo in the ninth century, may have been at Lichfield by the late tenth century, and was almost certainly there by the early eleventh. The name is the cathedral's, not the author's.
Almighty and everlasting God, you called your servant Chad to preach the Gospel to the people of Mercia: Raise up in this and every land evangelists and heralds of your kingdom, that your Church may proclaim the unsearchable riches of our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
British (Received Pronunciation): Lindisfarne /ˈlɪndɪsfɑːrn/
Readings for a Missionary
Isaiah 49:1–7Psalm 98Romans 10:11–18Luke 5:1–11