Anglican Commemoration
Archbishop of Canterbury & Reformer of the Church
May 19 · d. 988
Dunstan (d. 988) was Abbot of Glastonbury, Bishop of Worcester and of London, and Archbishop of Canterbury for twenty-eight years. Counsellor to five English kings, he crowned Edgar at Bath in 973 and drove the restoration of Benedictine monastic life across England. He was remembered as a craftsman: a maker of bells and church furnishings, a scribe, an illuminator. He left almost no writing. He died at Canterbury on 19 May 988.
Dunstan was born near Glastonbury in Somerset, on his father Heorstan's land, and learned his letters from the Irish scholars and monks who were living among the ruined buildings of the old abbey. He was tonsured as a boy and served in the church of St Mary there. He was also, from early on, a maker. He worked metal. He made bells and organs and furnishings for churches, and he wrote and painted in books, and the memory of his hands is the one thing about him that every account agrees on.
That skill nearly ended him. When Dunstan came to the court of King Æthelstan, kinsmen had opened the door for him and the king favoured him, and the men he had passed hated him for it. They said his craft and his strange book-learning were incantations and heathen arts. They beat him and drove him out, and threw him, so the story goes, into a cesspool. He came up out of it and fled, and fell gravely ill at Winchester, and there his kinsman Bishop Ælfheah the Bald sat with him and asked him what he meant to do with his life. Dunstan had been thinking of marrying. He took vows instead.
Back at Glastonbury he built himself a cell, said to be five feet by two and a half, and lived in it with his forge and his books. King Edmund had once been ready to banish him; then, hunting near the cliffs at Cheddar, the king's horse ran away with him toward the drop, and Edmund, certain he was about to die, vowed to make amends to the man he had wronged. He lived. He made Dunstan Abbot of Glastonbury. The disgraced courtier now had a house and a mandate.
For nine years under King Eadred he held the kingdom's treasure, its charters and its deeds, and twice refused a bishopric (Winchester in 951, Crediton in 953) because he would not leave the king while the king lived and needed him. Then Eadred died, and the young Eadwig was crowned, and on his coronation day the new king walked out of his own feast to a bedchamber with the noblewoman Æthelgifu and her daughter Ælfgifu. Dunstan and his kinsman Bishop Cynesige went in after him and found the royal crown thrown carelessly on the ground, and they took hold of him and brought him back to the hall. For that Dunstan lost his property and his country. He crossed to Flanders, where Count Arnulf I lodged him at St Peter's near Ghent, and there, in exile, he saw for the first time the Benedictine rule kept in its full strictness. Everything he did for the next thirty years began in that house.
Edgar recalled him. Worcester, then London, then in 960 Canterbury and the pallium from Rome. With Æthelwold of Winchester and Oswald of Worcester he rebuilt the monasteries the Vikings had destroyed and set one rule of daily prayer over them all. On Whitsunday 973 he crowned Edgar at Bath, fourteen years into the reign, with Oswald of York beside him and the English bishops assembled: the annalists read it as the declaration that the kingdom was one, and the English coronation rite is traced to that day still.
He outlived the peace. Edgar died; Dunstan crowned Edward the Martyr in 975 and Edward was murdered at Corfe three years later; the nobles turned on the new monasteries; the boy Æthelred, whom Dunstan crowned in 978, had slipped past his counsel by 986. So he went home to Canterbury and did the small work: he taught in the cathedral school, corrected books, wrote to monasteries overseas, and prayed by night as well as by day. He left the city only three times in those years, once in 984 to put Alphege into Winchester, choosing, though he could not have known it, the man who would hold his own seat and be killed in it.
On Ascension Day, 17 May 988, his strength began to fail. On the nineteenth he presided at Mass and preached three times, and died, and they buried him where he had asked to lie, before the altar steps at Christ Church. The words the tradition puts on his lips at the end are a psalm about being fed: "He hath made a remembrance of his wonderful works, being a merciful and gracious Lord: He hath given food to them that fear Him."
You will probably not be asked to crown a king, and you may find it hard to see yourself in a man who held the royal treasury and the archbishop's chair. But look at what he was doing in the last years, after the peace had broken and the young king had stopped listening: teaching schoolboys, correcting books, writing letters to houses overseas, praying at night. That is a man whose influence had drained away and who kept doing the small proper work in front of him anyway, and who died in the middle of it, having preached three times that morning. Most of your life is that kind of work. When the part of your life that felt important goes quiet, what is the ordinary work you will still be found doing?
Dunstan is unusually well served by early witnesses and almost entirely unserved by his own pen. The foundational Life was written shortly after his death, probably by 1000, by an anonymous priest known only as B., who says he knew Dunstan personally and who dedicated the work to Archbishop Ælfric of Canterbury (995 to 1005). Nearly the whole narrative outline comes from him: the family, the Glastonbury education, the expulsion from Æthelstan's court, the illness and the vows, the abbacy, the Flemish exile, the sees, the archiepiscopate, Edgar's coronation. Around him stand three further witnesses of very different weight. Adelard of Ghent, about 1006 to 1011, reworked B. into twelve liturgical lessons for the feast. Osbern of Canterbury wrote about a century after Dunstan's death, in the 1080s or 1090s. Eadmer of Canterbury wrote about 1105 to 1109, and William of Malmesbury about 1129 to 1130; both wrote explicitly to correct Osbern, whom their own generation criticised for supplementing and embellishing what he found. Outside the Lives entirely there are two colder and very valuable sources: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for datable public events, and the Old English account of King Edgar's establishment of the monasteries, written in the 960s or 970s, a contemporary administrative document rather than a saint's life, which corroborates the reform programme independently.
Some of the best known stories are late. The devil at the forge door, taken by the nose with red-hot tongs, is Osbern's, roughly a hundred years after 988, and is absent from both B. and Adelard; the earliest surviving picture of it is a Canterbury illumination of the second quarter of the twelfth century. The doom Dunstan is said to have pronounced over Æthelred at his coronation, that the sword would not depart from his house until the kingdom passed to a foreign power whose language his people did not know, is also Osbern's, written roughly two decades after 1066 had already supplied the outcome. Medieval hagiography composes prophecy after the event as a matter of course. The death scene is a subtler problem: Adelard, twenty years after, gives a spare account, while Eadmer, more than a century after, supplies white-robed crowds and an Ascension Day summons in which Dunstan negotiates to stay and feed his flock once more. These are not two witnesses to one event; the second is devotional elaboration of the first.
Several dates are genuinely contested, and the contest is worth naming rather than smoothing. B. says Dunstan "arose" in the reign of Æthelstan (924 to 939), which older reference works, including the Dictionary of National Biography, read as a birth notice giving 924 or 925. Modern scholarship generally prefers about 909, on the ground that a man born in 924 would have been under the canonical minimum age of thirty at several later ordinations that are themselves well attested; that reading requires taking B.'s verb as "rose to prominence" rather than "was born." Neither figure is secure. The year of the Glastonbury abbacy is likewise unfixed, in part because the two standard reference works work from different birth years rather than from independent evidence. The council of Calne, where the floor of the hall gave way and killed or maimed several of Dunstan's opponents while he stood on a beam that held, is firmly dated to 978, but whether it fell before or after Edward the Martyr's murder that March is disputed between the sources. And B.'s own word for the place of Dunstan's refuge in exile, the "eastern kingdom," was already opaque to nineteenth-century editors; the shelter at Ghent under Arnulf I is secure regardless of how it is read.
Dunstan is the patron of blacksmiths, goldsmiths, locksmiths and silversmiths, and he is known at a glance in Western art by a pair of smith's tongs. The tongs come from Osbern's story of the devil at the forge, and the story has outlived every correction ever made to it, which is itself a fact about how he was loved. A second wonder is told separately: that the harp he had hung on the wall of his cell was heard to play by itself, in one telling sounding the antiphon Gaudent in caelis animae sanctorum. Later writers explained it as wind across the strings; at the time, one report says, it was also raised against him as evidence of sorcery.
His body did not rest quietly. Buried before the altar steps at Christ Church, he was moved after a cathedral fire, moved again when the new choir was finished for Easter Eve 1180 and laid behind the high altar with Ælfheah opposite him, and claimed all the while by Glastonbury, whose monks said they had carried his bones home from the broken tomb during a Danish sack. In 1508 Abbot Richard Beere pressed that claim formally, and Archbishop William Warham had the Canterbury coffin opened. Inside was a lead plate about eight inches long with the saint's name on it, all the principal bones, and no sign that anyone had ever disturbed them. The skull was taken out at that point and set in silver. The medieval shrine did not survive the Reformation, and there is no Dunstan shrine to visit now, though Canterbury Cathedral, which he held from 960 to 988, is still standing and still in use. His name kept travelling: St Dunstan-in-the-West on Fleet Street, saved from the Great Fire of 1666 by a bucket brigade of Westminster schoolboys; St Dunstan-in-the-East, bombed in the Blitz and never rebuilt, now a public garden among its own walls; St Dunstan's Basilica in Charlottetown; and the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths in London, which holds him as patron, and whose Wardens for centuries took office on his feast, 19 May.
The two earliest Lives, by the anonymous priest B. and by Adelard of Ghent, are edited and translated by Michael Winterbottom and Michael Lapidge in The Early Lives of St Dunstan (Oxford Medieval Texts, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012; clxvii + 210 pp.; ISBN 978-0-19-960504-0), the current critical standard and the first English rendering either text has received. It supersedes William Stubbs's Memorials of Saint Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury (Rolls Series, London, 1874), which remains useful for the later Lives by Osbern, Eadmer and William of Malmesbury, and which is freely readable at https://archive.org/details/memorialssaintd00stubgoog. The revised text of B.'s Life survives in London, British Library, Cotton MS Cleopatra B. xiii, copied at St Augustine's, Canterbury, in the first half of the eleventh century.
The dying words quoted in the Story are Psalm 111:4-5 (Douay Psalm 110) in the Douay-Rheims rendering, given in this form in the Catholic Encyclopedia, "St. Dunstan," https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05199a.htm, which names no medieval Life as its source for the scene. The account of the 1508 opening of the tomb, the lead name-plate and the silver-cased skull follows The Saxon Cathedral at Canterbury and the Saxon Saints Buried Therein, ch. 9, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Saxon_Cathedral_at_Canterbury_and_The_Saxon_Saints_Buried_Therein/Chapter_9. The self-playing harp, with the antiphon Gaudent in caelis animae sanctorum and the charge of sorcery, is told by Percy Dearmer in The Little Lives of the Saints (1904), https://anglicanhistory.org/dearmer/lives/09.html. For the provenance of the tongs legend in Osbern and its absence from the two earlier Lives, see "Stories of St Dunstan, 4: Dunstan and the Devil," https://aclerkofoxford.blogspot.com/2012/05/stories-of-st-dunstan-4-dunstan-and.html. The nineteenth-century life in the Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biography,_1885-1900/Dunstan_(924-988), is still the fullest discussion of the source problems, though it predates the 2012 edition and assumes the older birth year.
S. Dunstan was born in England, and our Lord showed miracles for him ere he was born. It was so that on a Candlemas day, as all the people were in the church with tapers in their hands, suddenly all the lights in the church were quenched at once, save only the taper which S. Dunstan's mother bare, for that burned still fair. Whereof all the people marvelled greatly; howbeit her taper was out, but by the power of our Lord it lighted again by itself, and burned full bright, so that all the others came and lighted their tapers at the taper of S. Dunstan's mother. Wherefore all the people gave laud and thankings unto our Lord God for this great miracle. And then there was a holy man that said that the child that she then bare should give light to all England by his holy living.
This holy child Dunstan was born in the year of our Lord nine hundred and twenty-five, that time reigning in this land king Athelstan. And S. Dunstan's father hight Herston, and his mother hight Quendred, and they set their son Dunstan to school in the abbey of Glastonbury, whereafter he was abbot for his holy living. And within a short time after he went to his uncle Ethelwold, that then was bishop of Canterbury, to whom he was welcome and was glad of his conversation of holy living. And then he brought him to King Athelstan, the which made full much of him also for his good living, and then he was made abbot of Glastonbury by consent of the king and his brother Edmond, and in that place ruled full well and religiously the monks his brethren, and drew them to holy living by good ensample giving. S. Dunstan and S. Ethelwold were both made priests in one day, and he was holy in contemplation. And whenso was that S. Dunstan was weary of prayer, then used he to work in goldsmith's work with his own hands for to eschew idleness, and he gave alway alms to poor people for the love of God.
And on a time as he sat at his work his heart was on Jesu Christ, his mouth occupied with holy prayers, and his hands busy on his work. But the devil, which ever had great envy at him, came to him in an eventide in the likeness of a woman, as he was busy to make a chalice, and with smiling said that she had great things to tell him, and then he bade her say what she would, and then she began to tell him many nice trifles, and no manner virtue therein, and then he supposed that she was a wicked spirit, and anon caught her by the nose with a pair of tongs of iron, burning hot, and then the devil began to roar and cry, and fast drew away, but S. Dunstan held fast till it was far within the night, and then let her go, and the fiend departed with a horrible noise and cry, and said, that all the people might hear: Alas! what shame has this carle done to me, how may I best quit him again? But never after the devil had lust to tempt him in that craft. And in short time after died king Athelstan, and Edmond his brother reigned king after him, to whom S. Dunstan was chief of counsel, for he gave to him right good counsel to his life's end; and then died Edmond the king, and after him reigned his son Edwin, and soon after S. Dunstan and he fell at strife for his sinful living. For S. Dunstan rebuked the king sharply therefor, but there was none amendment, but always worse and worse. Wherefore S. Dunstan was right sorry, and did all that pain he might to bring the king to amendment, but it would not be. But the king, within a while after, exiled S. Dunstan out of this land, and then he sailed over the sea and came to the abbey of S. Amand in France, and there he dwelled long time in full holy life till king Edwin was dead. And after him reigned Edgar king, a full holy man. And then he heard of the holiness of S. Dunstan, and sent for him to be of his council, and received him with great reverence, and made him again abbot of Glastonbury. And soon after the bishop of Worcester died, and then S. Dunstan was made bishop there by the will of king Edgar. And within a little while after the see of London was void, to which king Edgar promoted S. Dunstan also, and so he held both bishoprics in his hand, that is to wit both the bishopric of Worcester and the bishopric of London. And after this died the archbishop of Canterbury, and then king Edgar made S. Dunstan archbishop of Canterbury, which he guided well and holily to the pleasure of God, so that in that time of king Edgar, and Dunstan archbishop, was joy and mirth through the realm of England, and every man praised greatly S. Dunstan for his holy life, good rule, and guiding. And in divers places, whereas he visited and saw curates that were not good, ne propice for the weal of the souls that they had cure of, he would discharge them and put them out of their benefices, and set in such as would entend and were good men, as you shall find more plainly of this matter in the life of S. Oswald.
And on a time as he sat at a prince's table, he looked up and saw his father and mother above in heaven, and then he thanked our Lord God of his great mercy and goodness that it pleased him to show him that sight. And another time as he lay in his bed he saw the brightness of heaven, and heard angels singing Kyrie eleison after the note of Kyrie rex splendens, which was to him a full great comfort. And another time he was in his meditations, he had hanging on the wall in his chamber an harp, on which otherwhile he would harp anthems of our Lady, and of other saints, and holy hymns, and it was so that the harp sounded full melodiously without touching of any hand that he could see, this anthem was, Gaudent in celis animæ sanctorum, wherein this holy saint Dunstan had great joy. He had a special grace of our Lord that such heavenly joys and things were showed to him in this wretched world for his great comfort. And after this he became all sick and feeble, and upon holy Thursday he sent for all his brethren and asked of them forgiveness, and also forgave them all trespasses and assoiled them of all their sins, and the third day after he passed out of this world to God, full of virtues, the year of our Lord nine hundred and eighty-eight. And hls soul was borne up to heaven with merry song of angels, all the people hearing that were at his death. And his body lies at Canterbury in a worshipful shrine, whereas our Lord shows for his servant S. Dunstan many fair and great miracles, wherefore our Lord be praised, world without end. Amen.
Two errors circulate widely enough to be worth contradicting. Dunstan was not canonised in 1029 by Pope John XIX. No centrally controlled papal canonisation process existed at that date; it was not reserved to Rome until the 1170s. What the careful sources describe is a synodal and royal decree that his feast be kept, which is a different kind of act and a far more plausible one for an English saint of this period. And Dunstan did not write the Regularis Concordia, the customary of about 973 that standardised Benedictine observance in English houses. Æthelwold of Winchester drafted it; Dunstan's authority as archbishop stands behind it. He is not, in fact, an author at all: no sermons, no letters, no verse that can be confidently assigned to him. The modern critical baseline is the 2012 Oxford Medieval Texts edition of the two earliest Lives by Michael Winterbottom and Michael Lapidge, which rests on a wholly new reading of the manuscript evidence and carries the first English translations either Life has ever had.
O God, your blessed Son became poor for our sake, and chose the Cross over the kingdoms of this world: Deliver us from an inordinate love of worldly things, that we, inspired by the devotion of your servant Dunstan, may seek you with singleness of heart, behold your glory by faith, and attain to the riches of your everlasting kingdom, where we shall be united with our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
British (Received Pronunciation): Concordia /kənˈkɔːrdiə/
Readings for a Monastic or Religious
Lamentations 3:22–33Psalm 1Hebrews 4:1–13 or Acts 2:42–47Mark 10:23–31