St Wulfstan
William the Conquerer’s only Anglo-Saxon bishop
19th January is the saint’s day for Wulfstan who was the Bishop of Worcester at the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066.
Wulfstan was born in about 1008 and was educated at the monasteries of Evesham and Peterborough. He became a monk at Worcester in 1038, where he served as treasurer and prior, and was noted for his dedication to prayer and study.
In 1062 he was appointed Bishop of Worcester and had therefore been in post for only four years before the Anglo-Saxon monarchy was brutally suppressed by the Normans.
Medieval bishops were not just church leaders but also wealthy men in their own right because the church owned large tracts of land from which rents were extracted. The Normans were therefore keen to replace English bishops with their own men, especially as a number of churchmen had fought alongside Duke William at the Battle of Hastings and were on the lookout for a rich diocese as their reward. One very prominent fighting bishop, for example, was William’s brother Odo, the extremely rich and greedy Bishop of Bayeux.
As a result, by the year 1075 every bishop in England was a Norman, with one exception. This was Wulfstan, whose saintliness had impressed even William, one of the least saintly men imaginable. It may well have been…
