Anglican Commemoration
Bishop of Dunwich & Apostle to the East Angles
March 8 · d. 648
also known as Felix of Burgundy
Felix was a bishop from Burgundy who came to Canterbury and was sent on from there to the East Angles, a kingdom that had lapsed back into paganism after its newly baptised king was killed. He received his see at Dommoc, traditionally identified with Dunwich in Suffolk, and held it seventeen years. With King Sigeberht he founded a school for boys, its masters and teachers supplied after the Kentish pattern. He died on 8 March, in 647 or 648, and Bede says he ended his days in peace.
There was a kingdom on the eastern edge of England, the kingdom of the East Angles, that had been given the faith and had lost it again. Its king, Eorpwald, was baptised; and not long after, a pagan named Ricberht killed him. Bede, who tells us this, says that from that time the province was in error for three years. Three years is not long in a chronicle. It is a long time in a kingdom, long enough for a generation of children to be born and named to the old gods, long enough for anyone who remembered the baptism to stop speaking of it.
Then Eorpwald's brother Sigeberht came home. He had been banished during his brother's life and had lived in Gaul, and while he was there he had been, in Bede's words, initiated into the mysteries of the faith. So the exile came back a Christian, took the throne, and sent for a bishop.
The bishop he got was Felix. Felix came from the region of Burgundy, and he was already a bishop when he arrived: he presented himself to Archbishop Honorius at Canterbury, and Honorius sent him on to the East Angles to preach. Nothing whatever is known of who his parents were, or where he studied, or why a Burgundian bishop should have crossed the Channel to a small, wet, half-pagan kingdom at the edge of the world. He simply arrives in the record, already ordained, already going.
Sigeberht gave him a see in the city Bede calls Dommoc, and there Felix stayed. He did not go home. He did not move on to a larger place. He presided over that province, Bede says, with pontifical authority for seventeen years.
And here is what he did with them, so far as anyone recorded it. Sigeberht had seen good institutions in Gaul during his exile and wanted the same at home, so he set up a school where boys might be taught letters, and Felix helped him: he supplied the masters and the teachers, after the manner of Kent. That is the whole of it. No healing, no vision, no sign, no confrontation with a king, no martyrdom. A bishop was sent, a bishop stayed, a school was opened, boys learned to read.
It was not a safe country. Penda of Mercia came against the East Angles, and Sigeberht, who had by then given up the throne to his kinsman Ecgric and gone into a monastery, was dragged out of it by his own soldiers to steady the army. He would not carry a weapon. He went into the battle line holding a wand, and he was killed there, and Ecgric with him. That is the same Penda who killed Oswald of Northumbria at Maserfield in 642. Felix was living and working in that kingdom through those years. Bede records no threat to him, no rescue, no drama at all.
He died on the eighth of March, in the year 647 or 648; nobody can say which, because Bede gives Felix a duration and no year. Honorius consecrated Thomas, a deacon of the Gyrwas, in his place, and after Thomas came Berhtgils of Kent, and the see went on.
The one sentence that has survived every retelling, every copyist, and every later legend is Bede's own, and it is very quiet: having presided over the same province with pontifical authority seventeen years, he ended his days there in peace. A man went to a hard place, did ordinary work there for seventeen years, and died in his bed with the work standing behind him. Bede could not resist noting that his name meant fortunate.
You may never get a story like the ones you would have chosen. Felix is remembered for seventeen years in one place, a school staffed on a borrowed pattern, and a quiet death, and that is very nearly all of it; the drama in his kingdom belonged to other people, and he lived through it doing his own small work. It is worth asking whether you would still consider a life well spent if it produced no scene anyone would retell. The evidence of Felix's usefulness is not an episode but a duration, and what he handed on was not a memory but a functioning church with a successor already in place. Where has God set you down and asked you simply to stay, and to keep supplying what the people around you need?
Everything substantial we know about Felix comes from one book: Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written around 731, roughly eighty-four years after Felix died. Bede was not an eyewitness and does not pretend to be. In his own Preface he says his East Anglian material was "partly made known to us from the writings and tradition of former men, and partly by the account of the most reverend Abbot Esi." One named intermediary, plus earlier tradition. The Felix material is testimony at one or two removes, and Bede tells the reader so.
What Bede gives is concentrated in four chapters. Book II, chapter 15 carries the fullest account: Eorpwald's baptism and murder, the three-year apostasy, Sigeberht's return, Felix's arrival from Burgundy by way of Honorius at Canterbury, the see at Dommoc, seventeen years, a peaceful death. Book III, chapter 18 gives the school and Sigeberht's death alongside Ecgric. Book III, chapter 20 records Felix's death and the succession of Thomas and then Berhtgils. And Book III, chapter 25 names him once more in passing: Aidan, Bede says, was held in veneration "not only by less important persons, but even by the bishops, Honorius of Canterbury, and Felix of the East Angles", two bishops honouring a man with whom they differed over the date of Easter.
Outside Bede the record is thin to the point of transparency. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, at the year 636, says of Felix only this: "And bishop Felix preached the faith of Christ to the East-Angles." No Burgundy, no Dommoc, no seventeen years. A fuller notice does exist, giving all of those details, but it belongs to Manuscript F, a bilingual Canterbury epitome of about 1100 drawn from Bede itself. It is not an independent witness, and it should not be cited as confirmation of anything.
Several things commonly printed about Felix are modern reconstruction rather than record, and it is worth being plain about which. The dates are the first. Bede gives durations, not years: seventeen years for Felix, five for Thomas. To turn "seventeen years" into a death date you need a fixed starting point, and the starting point is itself uncertain, 630 or 631. If the see began in 630, Felix died in 647; if 631, in 648. That is one uncertainty stated twice, not two separate disputes. The day, 8 March, rests on two Anglo-Saxon kalendars cited in the modern reference literature and not identified there.
The second is his origin. The proposal that Felix is the bishop of that name who held the see of Châlons in 626 or 627 and lost it after the death of Chlothar II in 629 is a modern inference from a coincidence of name and timing. No source connects the two men. A second proposal associates him with Luxeuil or the neighbourhood of Autun on grounds of general Burgundian church geography, with no textual link at all. His family, his formation, his life before England: no source located makes any claim whatever. That is not a gap in the research. It is the state of the record.
Felix left no relics anyone can point to today, and no working shrine, but the medieval devotion around him is unusually well documented at one point. He was buried at his see. William of Malmesbury, writing in the 1120s, reports that the relics were later moved inland to Soham in Cambridgeshire. By the eleventh century it was believed there that Felix had himself founded a monastery at Soham; the Soham church was said to have been destroyed by Danish raiders. No date attaches to any of this, and it comes to us centuries after the fact.
Then, in about 1026, Æthelric, bishop of Dorchester and once a monk of Ramsey, obtained King Cnut's permission for his old house to take the relics. Ramsey's abbot Athelstan came by boat to fetch them from the allegedly ruined church at Soham, and on the way home evaded a party of monks from Ely sent out to intercept him. Ramsey's own chronicle adds a fog that rose and separated the two boats. It also adds something better than the fog: the chronicler tells his reader that he is not required to believe the story, provided he holds it certain that the relics came to Ramsey. A medieval writer drawing exactly the line a modern reader expects to have to draw for him.
Ramsey Abbey was surrendered to the Crown in 1539. What became of Felix's shrine or his bones then is simply not recorded anywhere that has been located; the trail ends there.
His feast is kept on 8 March. The Church of England commemorates him on that day; the Orthodox, who receive him as a Western saint whose life predates the schism of 1054, keep him on 8 March as well (21 March, New Style) under the title Enlightener of East Anglia. Suffolk still carries his name at Felixstowe, though even the place-name has a competing derivation. At Babingley in Norfolk local tradition marks his landing place and his first church; the ruin standing there now is fourteenth-century.
The whole documentary base for Felix is four chapters of one book. Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, completed about 731, carries the account at Book II, chapter 15 (Felix's arrival, the see at Dommoc, the seventeen years and the peaceful death, and the pun on his name), Book III, chapter 18 (the school, the masters and teachers after the Kentish manner, and the deaths of Sigeberht and Ecgric), Book III, chapter 20 (Felix's death and the succession of Thomas and Berhtgils), and Book III, chapter 25 (Felix named with Honorius of Canterbury among those who held Aidan in veneration despite the dispute over Easter). Bede's own account of his East Anglian sources, including Abbot Esi, is in the Preface. All quotations above are from A. M. Sellar's translation of 1907 (Project Gutenberg #38326). Bede's mention of his own Life and Passion of St Felix, Confessor, which concerns Felix of Nola rather than this Felix, is at Book V, chapter 24.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle notice quoted above is from annal 636 in J. A. Giles's translation (Wikisource); the same bare clause stands in the Old English of Manuscript A, the Parker Chronicle, s.a. 636. The fuller Chronicle notice, giving Burgundy, Dommoc and the seventeen years, is Manuscript F, the bilingual Canterbury epitome of about 1100, and derives from Bede.
For the translation of the relics to Ramsey in about 1026, including Æthelric, abbot Athelstan and the interception by the monks of Ely, see the Victoria County History, A History of the County of Cambridge and the Isle of Ely, vol. 10, pp. 533–542 ("Soham: Churches"), and Huntingdonshire, vol. 1, pp. 377–385 ("The abbey of Ramsey"); the underlying source is Ramsey's own house chronicle, the Chronicon Abbatiae Ramesiensis, ed. W. D. Macray (Rolls Series 83, 1886), chapter LXXXII, pp. 127–8, where the chronicler's caution about his own story also stands. William of Malmesbury's report of the removal to Soham is in the Gesta Pontificum Anglorum II.74, ed. N. E. S. A. Hamilton (Rolls Series 52, 1870), p. 147; Preest's translation (Boydell, 2002) renders the same passage at p. 96.
For the disputed identification of Dommoc, see S. E. Rigold, "The Supposed See of Dunwich", Journal of the British Archaeological Association 24 (1961), 55–59, and "Further Evidence about the Site of Dommoc", JBAA 37 (1974), 97–102; the debate is set out in John Fairclough and Steven Plunkett, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History XXXIX.4 (2000), pp. 449–450. The Châlons proposal and the feast date reach this page through the modern reference literature (Higham; McClure and Collins; Pestell; M. Costambeys in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004) rather than from the monographs directly.
The third is the location of the see. Dommoc is traditionally identified with Dunwich in Suffolk, and that identification is old and holds the majority. A minority position, revived by S. E. Rigold in 1961 and 1974 and taken up in the later archaeological literature, places it instead at Walton Castle, a Roman Saxon Shore fort near Felixstowe. The question is open. Either way the site is under water: Dunwich has been eaten by the North Sea since the thirteenth century, and Walton Castle slid into it in the 1740s and shows only at low tide.
Two smaller corrections belong here because they circulate widely. Bede did write a Life and Passion of St Felix, Confessor, as he says in Book V, chapter 24, but that is Felix of Nola, the third-century Campanian confessor whose verse life was written by Paulinus of Nola; it is not our Felix, and no dedicated early life of the East Anglian Felix has been identified. And Felix did not found Cambridge University. That claim is a late reading-back of Bede's one sentence about Sigeberht's school for boys, and there is nothing in Bede to support it.
One last point of interpretation. Bede writes that Felix delivered "all that province (according to the inner signification of his name) from long iniquity and unhappiness." It is the most quotable line about him and the most misleading, because it is a Latin pun on felix, "fortunate," and not a documentary claim that the conversion of a kingdom was completed within one episcopate. What can be said without qualification is smaller and firmer: he was sent, he stayed seventeen years, he helped found a school, he died in peace, and the see continued after him.
Almighty and everlasting God, you called your servant Felix to preach the Gospel to the people of East Anglia: 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): Honorius /həˈnɔːriəs/
Readings for a Missionary
Isaiah 49:1–7Psalm 98Romans 10:11–18Luke 5:1–11