Category Archives: East of England

Collapse and Victory

Now in July, the Ukrainian front lines are collapsing under the far superior, Russian-led military forces. The poor Ukrainians have virtually no air power, weak artillery, relatively few drones and often poorly trained and press-ganged troops, thousands of them fresh out of prison, so short is manpower. Some 14,000 of them are being killed or wounded every week. Little wonder that many are surrendering or else running away.

It is a guessing game as to how long the stumbling and unconstitutional Kiev dictatorship can continue. No-one thinks that the tragedy can continue beyond the end of this year, some say it will end before the US elections in early November, some say it will end by the end of the summer. But God knows.

Such is the situation in the Russian-led Eastern half of Europe. And what of the situation in the US-led Western half of Europe, notably among the Big Three, France, UK and Germany, each governed by a political pygmy?

In France the narcissistic ‘Jupiter’, Macron, is being deposed, even though he had imagined that French people would massively vote for him as he thought he was a genius. In reality, one of the most detested French leaders ever, who thoroughly despised the French people, he only ever loved one person, himself, and nobody ever thought he was a genius.

In the UK, formally EU-free despite the equally narcissistic Cameron who had imagined that all would support him, a Second Reformation, the first for 500 years, is under way. This Reformation sets out to defeat the corrupt Establishment and its unelected technocrats like Sunak and Starmer. Freedom and Fairness, the highest English values, are being promoted by the opposition to the Establishment, what in the USA is called ‘the Deep State’. If this protest movement in the UK eventually succeeds and if in the USA Trump defeats the present senile ‘leader of the Western world’, the dysfunctional US ‘President’, and then removes the puppeteering clique behind him, there will be a new honeymoon between the US and the UK, a real special relationship.

In bankrupted and deindustrialising Germany, the highly unpopular Scholz puppet-coalition is tottering. Its arrogant and insulting attitude towards China is catastrophic, fatal for German industry. It is doubtful if the minority Scholz regime will outlast the coming Russian victory in the Ukraine, which Scholz has got all wrong.

So much for the Big Three of Western Europe.  As for the rest, Prime Minister Orban is launching a new Sovereign Alliance of European Patriots – in Hungary, Slovakia, Austria (the Freedom Party), Germany (AdF), Czechia, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Romania, and soon France (The National Rally) and the UK. The rest will follow. Freedom is in the air.

Meanwhile, we in White Russian East Anglia live under the protection of our unconquerable saints in our holy places, in Bury St Edmunds, Hoxne, Ely, Walsingham, Sheringham and Wroxham, from the Tsar’s Kings Lynn to the Orthodox Colchester of Constantine and Helen. With our cottage culture of Suffolk farmhouses, Alfred Munnings, sweet peas, rose gardens and Royal Albert, we shall not only resist, we shall also be victorious.

On the Identity of England and East Anglia

Pre-Celts and Celts in the British Isles and Ireland

Like the rest of Western Europe, the British Isles and, from there, Ireland, have been inhabited for thousands of years. Originally, this population spread here from Asia. Possibly, the only representatives of this population in Europe today are the Basques. Some call the original people here ‘Ancient Britons’. This is wrong, as they were pre-Celts and ‘Briton’ is a Celtic name. In fact, we know little about them, though they built Stonehenge and their DNA still exists among the modern inhabitants of these isles. After them came new settlers from Western Europe, who had also ultimately come from Western Asia. These were the Celts (pronounced Kelts) and they left their name all over Europe and West Asia, from Galatia (now in Turkiye), Galicia (now in the Ukraine and Portugal), Vlachia, Wallachia, Gaul, Calais, Wallonia, Wales, Caledonia, Galloway and Galway.

They also left the name of their language, Gaelic and Welsh, or in France, Gallo.  Many Celts had settled in these isles only a few centuries before the Romans arrived in the first century AD. For the Celts too were ‘invaders’. When the Roman Army conquered what came to be called England and Wales, famously building walls to separate themselves from the Celts in what is now Scotland and not occupying but only visiting Ireland, it took control of what it called ‘Britain’. Although their numerical presence was tiny, like the British elite in India in the 19th century, the Roman elite exercised total control and exploitation and had an enormous influence on national infrastructure and later history. Indeed, the word ‘Britain’ was later used by, and the Roman project imitated by, Normans, Stuarts, Georgians and Victorians alike for their own imperialist projects.

The Coming of the English

In the third century AD, if not even earlier, the Romans in Britain began to recruit Germanic soldiers, above all from the Saxons. They settled especially on the eastern and southern coast of what is now England and manned the nine Roman fortresses there, on what came to be known ‘The Saxon Shore’. Local Celtic women called these foreign Saxon mercenaries ‘Sassenachs’ and intermarried with them. After the Roman presence grew ever weaker in the fourth century and then ceased with their withdrawal from Britain in 410, the Saxons were in the fifth and sixth centuries gradually absorbed by new and kindred Germanic settlers, notably Jutes, Frisians and above all Angles. The Angles settled all over the eastern half of what became England, from the north down as far as Essex, and into the interior in ‘the Midlands’. The Saxons remained in the south, in Essex, Sussex and Wessex. However, the other Germanic tribes were outnumbered and absorbed by the Angles, so the country came to be called ‘Angle-kin’ (that is, those who are related to the Angles), or ‘Angleland’, which became England.

The ‘Englisc’ (pronounced ENG-lish, unlike the modern French pronunciation of English as ‘ING-lish’) were so predominant that they imposed their language over the area which they had settled, whereas the Romans had utterly failed to impose Latin on the Celts. After the English, came Vikings. These were Danes and Norwegians, who settled mainly on the coasts of eastern England from the present Scottish border down through Newcastle, Yorkshire (the Geordie and Yorkshire dialects and accents are fundamentally Viking) and Lincolnshire to Norfolk and north-east Suffolk. Although the Vikings considerably modified and simplified the English language, they too were absorbed and their DNA accounts for only 6% of modern DNA in England. As for the Normans (French Vikings) who occupied England from 1066 on, their DNA is almost invisible except among the aristocracy. It may perhaps be only 0.1%. However, as the near-millennial Establishment, their cultural and linguistic influence is still felt today.

East to West: Angles and Celts

The English then settled densely only the eastern half of what we now call England. The further east the greater the English DNA, the further west the greater the Celtic DNA and the greater the Celtic population and influence. England itself is then divided between a mainly English eastern half and a mainly Celtic western half. Thus, the British Isles and Ireland are genetically an Anglo-Celtic community. Just as in France, one can see the distribution of DNA by what people drink – the Germanic north near Belgium drinks beer, the Celtic north-west drinks cider, but the vast bulk of Latinised France drinks wine – so in England to this day also.

For example, in East Anglia people refer to ale, in the East Midlands which begins after the Rivers Ouse and Cam in eastern Cambridgeshire and ends near Newark in eastern Nottinghamshire, they refer to beer, and in the West Midlands, west of Newark and ending on the Welsh border, they refer to cider. Beyond this of course, we arrive in what used to be purely Celtic areas, Cymru (pronounced ‘Kumri’, called ‘Wales’), Cornwall (the ‘Welsh’ who live in the ‘corn’ or ‘horn’), Cumbria, the Isle of Man, Scotland and Ireland. Here the Celtic languages are still today, if only among a minority, alive. English was not spoken there until recent centuries.

East Anglia and Its Character

East Anglia is the furthest east you can go in England (the actual most easterly point is Lowestoft) and therefore, racially, the most English. This is also the closest to the Netherlands, whose Dutch and Frisian languages are linguistically the closest to English. Geographically, East Anglia consists of Norfolk, Suffolk, eastern Cambridgeshire as far as the eastern bank of the River Ouse, including Ely, and of the River Cam, and of a strip of North Essex near the Suffolk border some seven or so miles deep. The extent of the East Anglian domain could once be determined by the dialects of Norfolk and Suffolk, lapping over to eastern Cambridgeshire and North Essex, though these are less and less heard today. Where East Anglia ended in eastern Cambridgeshire, there began the East Mercian (East Midlands) accent and where East Anglian ended in North Essex there began the Essex accent, which is the same as the east London accent. What can we say of East Anglians, who are always so underestimated by foreigners, newcomers and upstarts, who understand little of our history and reality?

The East Anglian character is outwardly modest and hidden, but inwardly we are sturdy, rugged and reliable. You do not mess with us, unless you are a foreign fool and you will always come off worse. We are also bluff, that is, good-naturedly frank, and our humour is very dry and wry. Here there is a similarity to our neighbours, the Dutch. Prone to invasions from Continental Europe just across the shared lake of the North Sea, we are suspicious and sceptical of others and always test them to see what they are made of. It is make or break time for them. We are practical and pragmatic, always concrete. However, there also exists among us a romantic lyricism. This can be seen by the fact that although the greatest English music in inspired in the west of England, the greatest English art is made in East Anglia. This is illustrated by the works of Gainsborough (1727-1788), Crome (1768-1821), Constable (1776-1837), Cotman (1782-1842), Munnings (1878-1959) and Seago (1910-1974). The huge skies, the rolling landscape and, above all, the characteristic light of East Anglia have here been fundamental.

 

The Situation of the Orthodox Church in 2024

Introduction

The Orthodox Church is a Confederation of sixteen Local Orthodox Churches, totalling some 200 million faithful, with about 80,000 priests and 1,000 bishops. Most Orthodox Christians live in Eastern Europe, though there are minorities in most countries in the world.

Of these sixteen Local Churches, the Greek Church of the Patriarchate of Constantinople (now called Istanbul) stands out as the historically most prestigious Local Orthodox Church. For over a thousand years of history until 1453, it was powerful and in Constantinople there lived the only Orthodox Emperor. However, today this Patriarchate is very small in numbers, with a few million faithful at most, of whom fewer than one thousand actually live in Istanbul.

Of these sixteen Local Churches, the Russian Church of the Patriarchate of Moscow also stands out, partly because many see it as the successor to the Church of Constantinople, but above all because it has, or used to have, about 70% of the total number of the faithful, 140 million. This is because it is, or used to be, multinational, with a third of its members Non-Russians of many nationalities. This is unlike the other Local Churches which are in effect National Churches. However, today, this is increasingly less the case, as we shall see below.

The Negative

As a result of the pre-eminent positions of these two Local Churches, the powerbrokers of this world have always striven to take control of their senior clergy.

Thus, after the Ottoman capture of the City in 1453, the Constantinople Church gradually fell under foreign, later French or British, control, with their ambassadors appointing the leader or Patriarch of the Church for payments of money to the Ottomans. After the fall of the British Empire at the end of the Second World War, Constantinople came under the control of the successor Empire, the USA.

In 1948 its Patriarch, Maximos V, was removed by the Americans by force and flown in President Truman’s personal plane into exile in Switzerland, dying there in 1972. He was at once replaced with a Greek-American puppet-patriarch, who proceeded to do anything the Americans wanted. Some forty years ago I got to know a Greek bishop who had been Patriarch Maximos’ personal deacon at the time and was an eyewitness to those events. He told me how the CIA thugs took Patriarch Maximos with violent threats, intimidating him with possible death if he refused to obey them. ‘We have ways of making you come with us’, were their exact words.

As for the Russian Patriarchate, after 1700 it came under the control of Protestant-style laymen, called ‘oberprokurors’, who were appointed by the government. Russian bishops were appointed by politicians, some anti-Orthodox and often strongly anti-monastic, just as in the Protestant Churches, in Germany, Scandinavia or England. For example, in the latter country the Prime Minister, who may be an atheist or a Hindu for instance, is still responsible for appointing all Anglican bishops. As for the former Russian Empire, after 1917 the situation became even worse and Soviet atheist laymen openly persecuted and controlled the Russian episcopate, most of whom it murdered and martyred. After the fall of atheism in 1991, the Russian Church revived, but its senior clergy remained with the subservient mentality of the previous three centuries.

As a result of such politicisation, Orthodox who are part of the Russian Church but who live outside the borders of the Russian Federation and are not Russians, are leaving the various parts of the Russian Church. This is most obvious in the Ukraine, but also in Moldova, Latvia and Lithuania, as well as in Western countries. They do not wish to belong to any part of the Russian Church, which is being nationalised, that is, Russianised. They want to worship Christ, not a national, political system. In other words, the Russian Church is becoming alien to them. As one of its very young but senior metropolitans, filled with ethnic hatred and conceit, said when he expelled some Non-Russian clergy and faithful from the Church recently and handed them to another Local Church: ‘Too bad for them’.

In this way, clergy and people are leaving the Russian Church because of their desire for self-determination, they are ‘voting with their feet’. As a result, the missionary work of the Russian Church has all but ceased. Who wants to belong to a Church which persecutes its own? Only a few extremists. The numbers of the faithful in the Russian Church could eventually go down to 50% of the total number of Orthodox from 70%, as a result of the foundation of new Local, or National, Churches for Orthodox, who live in independent countries or regions outside the Russian Federation. These could be formed in the Ukraine, the Baltics, Moldova, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Western Europe, South-East Asia, Africa, Australia, Latin America or elsewhere.

As a result of the acts of politicians there is at present a serious schism between the Constantinople and Russian Churches, which between them number some 72% of all Orthodox. In 2018 the Constantinople Church, egged on and very generously financed by the US State Department, was told to try and destroy the Russian Church. Therefore, Constantinople created a purely political schism with the Russian Church by opening its jurisdiction on what had for centuries been uniquely Russian territories, namely in Estonia, the Ukraine and now in Lithuania.

Consequently, since then the Russian Church has refused not only any communion with the Constantinople Church, but also with other Greek Churches or bishops who for ethnic, financial or political reasons support Constantinople. This includes the Greek Patriarchate of Alexandria, and the Russian Church has in revenge opened many parishes on African territory, which Alexandria has claimed for nearly a century. Both sides are excommunicating each other and defrocking each other’s clergy tit for tat, quoting the canons in false justification for their own purely political and punitive purposes. There is no Love, only the spirit of revenge, and so the Church is under attack and there is chaos.

The Positive

Some might conclude from the above that the situation in the Orthodox Church is dark and desperate, given the views of senior hierarchs of both the Patriarchates of Constantinople and Moscow and their schism. However, those outside the Church refuse to understand a vital fact: senior clergy are not the Church. This is important because senior clergy die and are replaced. There is no reason to think that the succeeding senior clergy will take the same line as before. All wars sooner or later end in negotiations.

For example, within the Patriarchate of Constantinople there are a great many pious bishops, priests, monastics and people, who remain faithful to Orthodoxy. Many there regret the anti-Russian aggressiveness of their Patriarchal authorities and their uncanonical actions under US pressure, just as they regret the equally aggressive Russian response. When asked by the faithful about those actions which have led directly to schism, such pious Greeks simply reply: ‘It is all politics. Pay no attention’.

In other words, the storm will pass, just as the storms of earlier centuries have also passed. And within the Russian Patriarchate, most also have the same viewpoint. Here there are also many pious bishops, priests, monastics and people who refuse to take part in the politicisation of any part of the Russian Church, either by the Russian secret service, the FSB, or the American, the CIA, which are both trying to undermine the Russian Church, bribing individual corrupt clerics.

As a local example we have for exactly fourteen years been greatly supported by a new White Russian family in East Anglia, Countess Benkendorf, strongly supported by Earl (to give him his English title, which neither of them uses publicly) Benkendorf. They support the Tsar and all the New Martyrs and Confessors, having a new martyr as a direct ancestor, and give no support to mere politicians in any part of the now unfree Russian Church. They are among the new White Russians who now live here in East Anglia, but are in fact relatives of the old White Russians. For the last ambassador of Imperial Russia to Great Britain was Count Alexander Benkendorf (+ 1917) who lived here with his wife Countess Sophia (+ 1928 in Ipswich), whose descendants were also friends of my late aunt in Colchester.

They are devoted to the local St Edmund the Martyr, the last King of East Anglia and have East Anglian rose-growers and sweet pea growers among their close friends. Earl and Countess Benkendorf reject all politics and extremes in the Russian Church, whether of the old politicised and money-minded White Russians, who worked for MI5 and MI6, or of the new nationalistic and secular-minded post-Soviet Russians. They remain in the centre, in the mainstream, following the golden mean, the middle way of the Fathers and the Saints. The Earl and Countess represent us all, they are our Connection, but they are just local examples of a far, far greater and worldwide movement.

Thus, apart from the majorities in both these Patriarchates who reject politicisation, most of the other fourteen Local Orthodox Churches, although slightly more or less close to one side or the other, still keep their independence. Nearly all stand somewhere in the middle, not taking sides, like the traditional Greeks and Russians described above. We note especially the position of the Romanian Church, the second largest Local Church, and of the Albanian Church, together with the Patriarchates of Jerusalem and Antioch and the Polish and Serbian Churches. They all show great independence. Here bishops and the faithful insist on the catholicity and conciliarity of the Church. We all call for a Church Council, where the Church can come to unity through depoliticisation, the rejection of bribes and political pressures from States and their secular minions, who wrongly think that they can buy the Church.

Conclusion

Non-believers, as well as those who believe only weakly, overlook Divine Providence in the history of the Church. The greatest proof that the Church is run not by human beings, but by Divine Providence, is that it has survived extraordinary human stupidity, pathological individuals and incompetence for nearly 2,000 years. Human institutions, like clerical elites, survive for a few centuries at best, and often only for a few decades or even a few years. God’s Providence protects us, for the Church belongs to Christ the Son of God, not to mere men, and Christ is always victorious.

 

The Apostasy of Western ‘Civilisation’ and Our Salvation

Introduction: The Rise and Fall of the Western Empire

It has become customary to speak of the Middle Ages in Western Europe as a ‘Papal Empire’, later of ‘the Spanish Colonial Empire’, ‘the Portuguese Empire’, ‘the French Empire’, ‘the British Empire’ and most recently of ‘the American Empire’. In fact, all these empires have only been facets of one single empire, ‘the Western Empire’. Although this has been an Empire that has covered much of the world geographically, it is also an Empire of the Mind. One day, and probably quite soon, someone will write a book called ‘The History of Western Exceptionalism’ and will show how this imperialist mentality developed. Certainly, this will mention the model of the Pagan Roman Empire that obsessed the barbarians who invaded Western Europe and how a Frankish barbarian princeling called ‘Karl’, later known as ‘Charlemagne’, wanted to ‘renew’ that Pagan Empire and failed, but how he was still ‘the first neocon’.

More interestingly than this failed forerunner, it will then go on to speak of the crucial eleventh century, of the appearance of the Western superiority complex, ‘we are right, everyone else is wrong’, or as they say now ‘West is Best’. They will speak of elitist Papism and castle feudalism, of 1054 and 1066, of the ‘formation of a persecuting society’ to persecute all others, of hatred, intolerance, genocide and ‘crusades’, on which ‘Europe’ was created and united, of the bloodshed on which the Western Empire was founded. Since then, there followed 900 years of slow but steady rise to world domination and then the dramatic and suicidal events that began in Sarajevo in 1914 and led to those in Kiev in 2014, which have led to the progressive fall of that Empire to the mess that it is in today, when we have once more reached a millennial turning-point. Below we give an outline of what is happening now.

Belief and Unbelief

A few years ago, I took part in a BBC Radio 4 ‘religious’ programme – although as with all BBC ‘religious’ programmes its direction was purely secularist and in fact anti-religious. There I was told by a former MI6 agent/BBC journalist who took part that since only 2% of Russians go to church, the Orthodox Church and Orthodox Civilisation in Russia is irrelevant. I was astonished by his total lack of understanding and limited secularist/post-Protestant view of the importance of religion. But then what else can you expect of a typical British Establishment atheist? It is values and actions that matter, not how often you go to church to gain spiritual strength. He had missed the point. They all have.

Although only 2% of the population may be in church on an average Sunday in Russian Orthodox countries (though not necessarily the same 2%), the rest do believe. This is different from the West, where only 2% go to church, and it is the same 2%, but the rest do not believe. In other words, the West has lost the roots of its Civilisation, it no longer has any Civilisation. If it had a Civilisation, it would not support Ukrainian and Israeli genocide and would not promote LGBT. Here is the difference. The West no longer believes in its roots. What remains is its profound self-delusion. Whether it is slanted to the left or to the right is irrelevant – the disease is one and the same.

The European Union Repeats the Soviet Union’s Fate

As a result of this lack of belief in civilised values and actions, the main political and economic institution in the historic European centre of the Western world, the yellow-starred European Union (EU), is corrupting, fragmenting and collapsing in exactly the same way as the old red-starred Soviet Union (SU). It is a Soviet Union II. Just as most had stopped believing in the Soviet Union by the 1970s (as I know from living there then), knowing that its unelected commissars were lieing, that it was bankrupt in every sense and had failed in its aims, so most have stopped believing in the EU, because it too has failed, is bankrupt in every sense and has failed in its aims. Indeed, the EU’s once strongest ‘locomotive’ economy, the German, is being deindustrialised, is in recession and was overtaken last year by the booming Russian economy, which is now the fifth largest in the world and is due to overtake the Japanese economy in two to three years. In front of it then will be only the expanding Chinese and Indian economies and the disastrously flagging US economy.

The EU has not only failed to make Europeans prosperous, but it has also failed in its aim to unite Europe. For instance, it has failed to unite the Western European peninsula edge with most of Europe, which is mainly in Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus. It has failed to unite with the Western Balkans and failed to keep the UK in itself, let alone getting prosperous Switzerland, Norway and Iceland to join itself. On top of that, it is now financing on a huge scale the Nazi regime in Kiev and the proxy war in the Ukraine in order to try and force that country to join it. Just as few in the SU had the courage to say that the SU was dead, so too today, for the same reasons of censorship and punishment, few in the EU have the courage to say that the EU is dead. The difference is that in the SU, all people bought the Izvestiya and Pravda newspapers, because there was no toilet paper, but in the West some people still buy newspapers and, incredibly, read them and actually believe in them, despite the availability of toilet paper. Such is the level of the delusion of some of the EU population.

Delusionists: The Western World

After the defeat of its multinational Western invasion of Russia under Napoleon in 1812 and stalemating in its invasion of Russia in 1854-6 under the Franco-Ottoman-Sardinian-British, the West tried to fight its wars using proxies, ‘colonial’ troops, as cannon fodder. For example, in the nineteenth century in its colonies and also in the First and Second World Wars, which were essentially tribal European Wars, it used millions of Indian and African troops. The Ghurkas and the Foreign Legion are the remnants. The Far West, the USA, used this proxy method too and in both those wars joined in after they had begun, hoping for easy pickings after the suicidal Europeans. In the Second World War, the Anglo-Americans hoped that the Nazis and the Russians and their allies would kill each other and then they would be able to pick up the pieces. That did not entirely happen. Nevertheless, in the 1990s the West used the same proxy technique in yet another anti-Russian war, using Chechens. However, the Chechens realised that they were being used by the West, turned on their Western masters and sided with the Russians.

In the latest Western War against Russia, being fought by proxies in the Ukraine, similar things are occurring, as Ukrainians slowly realise that they too have been deceived and betrayed by the West. Here again, the Western Ukrainian proxies, encouraged to die ‘until the last Ukrainian’, are being routed by joint Russian and Eastern Ukrainian forces. Afraid of facing reality, the delusional West is refusing to negotiate and negotiations have been banned by law by the Ukrainian puppet dictatorship, which tortures those who speak freely, has banned other political parties and democratic elections and plans to ban the Church. It has disguised this refusal to negotiate with the absurd claim that Russia wants to take over Western Europe. This laughable propaganda claim, invented by US and British PR hireling firms in Kiev, has been made in the Ukraine and duly been repeated in the Baltics, Germany, Sweden, the UK and Norway so far. It is the familiar old excuse ever since Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler in 1941, who claimed to be saving ‘Western Civilisation’ from the ‘Asiatic barbarian hordes’ of Russia, ‘better dead than red’.

Realists: Hope in South-Eastern Europe

In its current war against ‘the Asiatic hordes’ of Russia, which war the West began in 2014 with its unprovoked, full-scale invasion of the Ukraine, the West has committed suicide several times. Having given eight years to Russia to prepare a Plan B in case it had to fight a full-scale war against the ever-aggressive West, the West imposed thousands of sanctions which have helped destroy its own economies. The present revolts in Western Europe are about the impoverishment resulting from the facts that so much money has been given to the Ukraine, that there are so many Ukrainian ‘refugees’ being paid for nothing and because the USA ended by violence the supplies of cheap gas from Russia. These revolts are not only of farmers in Poland, Romania, Germany and France, but include mass strikes of millions of workers in the Dickensian UK, Germany and France. In all these countries the destitute have been forced to use food banks to survive. In Northern America too, the rulers are extremely unpopular and revolts are ongoing in Canada and in Texas.

Deluded Western leaders have actually believed their own delusions, which they call ‘PR’. Most people no longer believe in those lies, repeated ad infinitum by the State-controlled Western media and nearly all Ukrainian flags have been taken down in Western Europe – only the now panicking very rich still fly them. Many are beginning to understand the great manipulation. Nowhere is this more obvious in Hungary and Slovakia, whose leaders are the only Western leaders not to be US puppets. As the Russian victory becomes obvious, other countries will also free themselves from US/EU tyranny. Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, and even perhaps neutral Austria may enter this Union of Free Europe. In other words, the whole geographical entity of South-Eastern Europe may come to link itself with Russia and the other BRICS economies, of which Russia is the closest to them. This is the future path to peace, justice and prosperity, away from the disaster and decadence of the warmongering US-created EU vassal.

Conclusion: The Mystical Presence: North-Western Europe

Some ask: How then do you in North-Western Europe, in England, survive, as you still labour under the tyranny of the Norman-imposed British Establishment and its moral perversions and lies, and now completely under the heel of the corrupted Washington elite? Around us blow hurricanes, however we remain calm. Why? We have a secret. It is because our saints, in our case, those of Eastern England, are with us. Never have we felt the intercession and mystical presence of our saints so strongly as over the last three years, when so-called ‘Orthodox clergy’ began persecuting us. Only this week we were in Ely again and felt the prayers of and experienced a miracle of St Audrey, as we bowed before her right hand, whose fingers are still clasped in the sign of the cross after exactly 1350 years. She responds to real veneration, not to that of the pseudo-Orthodox sectarians who suffer from that selfsame American exceptionalist complex that they are right and all others are wrong, They persecute real Orthodox Christians and their families and try and steal our saints and our churches. Those outside the Church cannot feel the mystical presence of our saints, for their pretended veneration is political and sectarian and in fact is a perverted persecution of the faithful.

But we have felt the presences of St Edmund in Hoxne and Bury St Edmunds, of St Fursey in Burgh Castle, of St Botolph in Iken, of St Felix by the old fortress in Felixstowe, of St Osyth in the woods in Chich, of St Cedd in his still standing church in Bradwell on Sea, of St Eanswythe in her relics in Folkestone, of St Walstan in Bawburgh, of St Withburgh in Dereham, of St John in his holy relics in Beverley, of St Guthlac and St Theodore in Crowland, of St Huna by his hermitage-farm in Chatteris, of St Ivo in St Ives and of St Neot in St Neots. They are all present and have all resisted the great millennial apostasy of the new Western world, whose depth has become so astonishing in its present death-throes. The patience of these saints is unending, calling those who live here back to repentance, waiting for them to return, like the father the prodigal son. Victory is theirs and, because we venerate them and ask them for their protection, victory is ours too. We feel the warmth from their relics. It will not be long now. And the same presences are all over Western Europe as the First Millennium says to the finishing Second Millennium: We told you so, but we are still waiting for you to return. Herein is their witness and herein is our salvation from the devil’s yoke.

Delaying the Apocalypse: The Implosion of the West and the World of the Future

It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.

Henry Kissinger

The Beginning: The End

The Western Political Establishment and its vassal media still live in their ‘Ukrainian Fantasy’. This was scripted in Washington and starred an actor and clown who had already played and practised as President of the Ukraine in a TV serial, also scripted by Washington. After 24 February 2022 Russia could have conquered the Ukraine in two weeks. It did not – it never wanted to. Instead, it sent a small group of armed forces to intimidate the Kiev regime into negotiating, which is what it did want. Russia was never defeated, it relieved the military pressure because after five weeks, Kiev had signed the agreement to be neutral, long-desired by the Russians, and to grant Russians in the Ukraine their human rights and to stop massacring them. However, the criminal Washington elite through its messenger boy Johnson forbade the Ukraine to make peace, thus bringing 500,000 Ukrainian dead and 625,000 seriously wounded so far. The West wanted to keep the Ukraine as a military bastion, a battering ram against Russia, a tool to create regime change in Russia and make it into a colony ready for asset stripping, as it had been in the 1990s. And also to make the rest of Europe entirely dependent on the USA, cutting it off from Russian natural resources, oil, gas, grain and fertiliser.

So the West, on orders from that same Washington elite, began supplying tens of billions of dollars of arms, tens of billions of dollars to pay to run the Ukrainian State from day to day and still more billions to pay for tens of thousands of Ukrainians to receive very basic military training. The scriptwriters have now had to rewrite their script (‘the narrative’), for the Ukraine has been routed by the far superior Russian forces, unlike in their original Fantasy. So now they have written the ‘Frozen War’ chapter of the Fantasy, that the Russians will be willing to negotiate with the losing side, granting the losers all that they want, so that Biden can be re-elected next November despite Kabul II. This too is delusional. Russia is not going to negotiate again. That was already done in spring 2022, when Washington forced Kiev to renege on its agreement, as peace had not been in the script. Russia now trusts none of those who have made themselves into enemies of Russia, neither Kiev, nor the EU, nor the US, so it will annex everything that is really the Ukraine, that is, everything except a Non-Ukrainian sliver in the west which belongs to other countries. Washington is now disposing of the Ukraine like a rusty tool. For Washington the Ukraine is a failure which has let it down.

The Present Tragedy

At this very moment, the world is clearly the victim of the disease of the ‘chosen people syndrome’, of the zealot sectarianism of Zionism. This spiritual disease contaminates Zionist Jews (as opposed to anti-Zionist Jews), Evangelicals, Calvinists and Lutherans (the ‘I have been saved’ sects). Some of these latter have even infiltrated into parts of the Orthodox Church in the USA (‘we are the True Church and so have the right to threaten you and bully you’) and made them authoritarian and schismatic, despite the moderation of their Mother Churches. For the sake of this sectarian exceptionalism, American bombs are being dropped by ultra-intolerant occupying Israelis, backed by US Evangelicals, who are massacring tens of thousands of Palestinians and thousands of their children. And because of this ideology nearly a thousand Ukrainian soldiers have vainly been dying in the Ukraine every day for the last 660 days. The hands of the US and the EU elites are dripping with blood.

This ideology of intolerant sectarian zealotry is inherently disrespectful of the freedom of others. It is therefore the enemy of the broad, multipolar, polycentric world, whose age we have entered, despite the opposition to it of the Western Establishments. The adoption of sectarian exceptionalism by the West is simply a repetition of the ‘divide and rule’ ideology of Pagan Rome, so well imitated by the British Empire and by the American Empire (the situation of the US Empire is now very similar to that of the British Empire in 1939, as its stands on the brink of its fall). Moreover, US exceptionalism has suicidally been adopted by unelected EU commissars, who are destroying the prosperity of the EU countries. The solution to this is a new concert of the nations, a harmony which would make the continuation of the Western ‘divide and rule’ ideology impossible. At present its ideology survives only by punitive threats, which separates the globalist cabal of the West in a schism from the rest of humanity.

The Collapse of the American Empire

The American Empire was founded out of the ruins of the British Empire, whose bankrupted mother-country has been occupied by US forces since 1942. However, the British Empire was only the most successful of many overseas European empires, such as the French, the Italian, the German, the Belgian, the Dutch, the Spanish and the Portuguese. In 1945 the US decided to exploit the downfall of all of them, posing as ‘the world’s policeman’, thus becoming hated by all. Like the British Empire (1), the American Empire was long in its making, but its downfall has been swift, especially since the Ukraine in 2014.

Having reached its apogee in 1945, the US became hubristic, thinking it could do everything and would never repeat the mistakes of the British. Thus, there came the US war in Korea, which with its millions of victims turned into an unwinnable frozen war. In 1975, after twenty years of fighting and millions of victims, the US lost its futile war in Vietnam, then also after twenty futile years the war in Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban taking back power. Then there were the US disasters bringing death, destruction and chaos to Iraq, Libya and Syria, which it called ‘the Arab Spring’, but which in fact was the Arab Winter.

The Ukraine

Having orchestrated a coup d’etat and overthrown the democratically-elected government in the Ukraine in 2014 and then armed the new Nazified regime to the teeth, in December 2023 the US dumped the Ukraine, breaking all its promises and betraying its puppets there. The US illegal sanctions of Russia had backfired, its destruction of Nordstream had brought US-controlled Germany into recession. With Eastern Europe now blocking the Ukrainian borders, a bankrupt Washington defeated, and the EU denying that the Ukraine is an ally, the Ukraine today is, unsurprisingly, bitterly anti-Western.

The US abuse of the Ukraine as a battering ram to destroy Russia has failed miserably. The future of the Russian Federation, the New Ukraine (or whatever it will be called) and Belarus is as a Union State of three in one. Moreover, it will be a Union State which faces east and south, not west, for the West has betrayed it again and again and so destroyed all trust in itself. This threefold Union State was prophesied decades ago in the song, ‘My Russkie’ by Zhanna Bichevskaja, with lyrics like: ‘Discussions with the enemy are over’; ‘Risen up with crosses and icons, we shall go and crown the Russian Tsar’ (2).

The Meaning of BRICS

All of this is against the background of a China, which has outstripped the deindustrialised and highly indebted USA by 20% economically, a Russia which has outstripped the US diplomatically and militarily by 100%, and an India, Africa and Latin America which no longer wish to be exploited as Western colonies. The US has also lost the support of its former allies, inherited from the British, in the Middle East (West Asia). The US backing of Israeli genocide of Palestinians was the last straw for them. Thus, on 6 December, the ‘isolated’ (!) President Putin was greeted as a Russian Tsar in the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

Clearly, Russia and those countries are preparing something big, which must surely concern oil and gas and further steps in the process of dedollarisation. After this triumph, the Iranian President flew to Moscow to sign an agreement. There is now trade unity stretching from the Arctic Ocean to the Indian Ocean. The Russian-founded BRICS, which already outstrips the G7, will on 1 January become BRICS +. Next October, under the Russian Presidency, BRICS + will consider the applications of 40 countries to join it at its summit in Kazan. The Non-Western world has united – against the tired old Western world.

The Liberation of Eurasia

This final catastrophic defeat of the Western world in the ultra-corrupt Ukraine (even more corrupt than the unaudited EU), a world which had foolishly backed it to the hilt, is a once in a millennium event. It means that the US and all its G7 and NATO vassals such as the EU and the UK, indeed the whole Western world, have lost all moral respect and are now imploding. As the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, said on 15 November 2023: ‘Wherever Americans come to a region of the planet, they bring chaos’. This includes in Europe and in the US, for Americans are the first victims of their own elite.

The US has only ever managed to control islands in the Eurasian heartland – Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand (the latter two of which it is already losing to China) – and peninsulas – Korea, Vietnam (lost after twenty years in 1975), Western and Central Europe, and a tiny strip of coastland in the Middle East, called Israel. All these fragile toeholds will soon disappear from US control and already are disappearing, though the last to disappear will be the North-West Eurasian peninsula of Western and Central Europe, conquered and occupied by the US between 1942 and 1992.

The Future of Europe

After the defeat of the West in the Ukraine, the US-run military alliance of NATO will be dissolved. Why does it even still exist? The USSR no longer exists. NATO is an aggressive relic of the 1940s. It is already divided, with member-countries like Hungary and Turkey highly critical of it, and even the last US President declaring that it had outlived its purpose – and it also costs the US far too much. As it has catastrophically failed to prevent the Russian victory in the Ukraine, its money wasted and its antiquated but much-vaunted and poor-quality military equipment burning on the steppes, NATO has no future.

In a US-liberated Europe, NATO’s political and economic wing, the EU, will at the same time also be dissolved. Some kind of co-operative European organisations should replace it. Perhaps the ex-Catholic Western part, the ex-Protestant part and the Orthodox part (Romania, Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Moldova, Macedonia, Montenegro and Cyprus) with the traditional Catholic part (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia) should become Confederations. All three Confederalised groups could then join BRICS, which is clearly the future as a worldwide body for political co-operation, trade, peace and prosperity.

The Church and Christianity

Although it can be said that the whole tragic adventure of the Western world dates back to Pagan Rome, in fact it only began with its desire to revive and imitate that Pagan Rome. That process was gradual, but by 1054 its desire had culminated in action and at once set Western Europe against the Church and therefore against the Scriptures, deviating it and isolating it from the Church. After a near-millennial process, Western Europe and above all its greatest colony in North America have now been brought to a state of spiritual and moral decadence, equalled only by that of Pagan Rome just before it fell.

The decadence of Pagan Rome is being repeated. We conclude that we should be careful about whom we take as our model and imitate. The remnants of Christianity in Western and Central Europe survive, if only just. There is talk that the present highly controversial Pope of Rome is the last Roman Catholic Pope and that most Protestant groupings will have died out by 2050 (3). Certainly, they are dying out, having been diluted into their child of Secularism. By 2054 it could be over and the remnants of Christianity in Western and Central Europe – and elsewhere – will be absorbed back into the Church (4).

The Theology of Multipolarity: Sovereignists versus Globalists

The world proposed by the Western elites is unipolar. This owes its origin to the ideology of universal union, which first appeared in a mature form in centralising Roman Catholicism. However, this ideology had already begun to evolve at the end of the eighth century under Charlemagne, most of whose advisers had been taught by Jewish intellectuals in Spain. It was Charlemagne who wanted to revive or renew (‘renovatio’) Pagan Rome, invented the self-justifying myth of what became known as the ‘Holy Roman Empire’, although it was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire. This ideology of universal union was deeply unChristian, inasmuch as Orthodox Christianity is not an ideology of a universal union, but Trinitarian, which is the model for unity in diversity. It is then no surprise to learn that Charlemagne decried Orthodox Christianity as ‘heretical’ – just as its successor ‘Empire’, the anti-Holy European Union, enforcing secularism, denounces Orthodoxy as ‘heretical’.

It is then precisely the Trinitarian model of Orthodox Christianity which is at the root of contemporary multipolarity. For multipolarity stems from the Orthodox Church, which is a Confederation of Local Churches, not one single Universal Church. Whenever one single Local Orthodox Church, like Rome, Constantinople or Moscow, has tried to dominate the others, it has always ended in other groups, the Non-Western ruling class and Non-Westerners, Non-Greeks or Non-Russians, leaving them and gaining their freedom from oppressive and racist centralism. Similarly, in secular life, the Fascistic ideology of universal union, unipolarity, is promulgated by Non-Christian Western elites. Their ideology is ultimate Trotskyite, for Trotsky, also an atheist Jew, also wanted universal union. Theologically, it is universal union which will bring Antichrist, the One World Dictator, to power. Thus, multipolarity, derived from Trinitarian theology, is delaying the Apocalypse, for it opposes Oneworldism.

The End: The Beginning

Born and bred in Eastern England, my life has been patterned by the divisions in the Russian Orthodox Church, into which its infighting exile groups in the Western world fell after 1917. The smaller Paris part, consisting largely of Westernised aristocrats from Saint Petersburg who had already betrayed the Tsar in 1917, fell into Protestant modernism. Firstly, we had to fight against this left-side deviation from Orthodoxy in England, where the Knightsbridge/Oxford group was strongly coloured by Paris modernism, leading indeed to a serious division in 2006, when some 50% of the group left it to continue in their modernism without hindrance. Secondly, we had to fight for Orthodoxy in the Parisian itself. This combat was successful in 2018, although nearly 50% of the group also left it to continue in their Paris modernism without hindrance. However, the largest part of the exiled Russians was called ROCOR, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. This continually fell into deviations from the right-hand side, leading to extremist right-wing nationalism, ritualism, self-justifying and self-righteous phariseeism and schism, a sort of Old Ritualism or Russian old calendarism, made far worse by Protestant neophytes to it in the USA.

Then there came the post-Soviet problems in the huge Russian Church itself, based in Moscow. These were caused by a Statist mentality and dated far back, over 300 years, to Imperial Russian times, of which the Soviet Imperial period was just a continuation, though a hundred times worse. Though some Russian exiles blamed all Moscow’s problems on ‘Sergianism’, the name for the Soviet deviation of loyalty by supposedly Christian bishops to the militant atheist State of Stalin, the selfsame exiles in the 1930s and 1940s had supported the Brown Nazis, calling themselves ‘White’ Russians! They too were going to ‘save the Church’ by supporting another atheist State, just as many of them had supported compromises by the pre-1917 Russian State, which is why they had for the most part betrayed the reforming Tsar Nicholas, who had long ago rejected those compromises, right-wing extremism (one of the extremists had helped murder a servant of the Tsar) and civil war. Today the administration of the Church, centred in the post-Soviet Russian Federation, is chronically disunited, as its leadership has taken a national, indeed nationalist, line, when its destiny is to be international, whether in the former Soviet Union, in the Western world, in Asia and in Africa.

With the little-known network of real White Russian Orthodox in Eastern England, with whom I have lived, thought and prayed all these many long decades, we await the day of freedom. In villages and towns in Eastern England, in Kedington, Felixstowe, Helmingham, Polstead, Withermarsh Green, Hoxne, Bury St Edmunds, Kersey and a mysterious village in mid-Suffolk, in Rivenhall, Chalkney, Skye Green and Abbess Roding in Essex, in Ely, Witchford, Swaffham Prior in Cambridgeshire, in Reedham, Oxborough, Hevingham and Sheringham in Norfolk, we have been waiting. We know that there will be no freedom until our White Tsar comes. We are outside all three Russian groups, for we will have nothing more to do with mafias, whom we have seen come and go, for we know that everything will come aright despite them. They understand little of any of this, for they are too concerned with their own persons, their properties and their income. When the new Tsar does come, he will cleanse the Church of all the oath-breakers, sectarians, the impure and unrepentant, who wound the Body of Christ through their unfaithfulness and cause so much harm. The day he comes will be the Beginning, for so we shall delay the Apocalypse and gain more time for repentance for all.

 

Notes:

  1. See for example:

https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780191737541.timeline.0001#:~:text=British%20empire%3A%201583%20%2D%201997%20%2D%20Oxford%20Reference

  1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZMtZ3H3C3w

 

У нас с врагом окончена дискуссия,

Мы вновь воспрянем, к подвигам горя.

Россия, Украина, Белоруссия –

Племён славянских три богатыря!

 

Наполнив мир малиновыми звонами,

Взойдёт победы Русская Заря,

И мы, восстав с крестами и иконами,

Пойдём венчать Российского Царя.

 

Мы – Русские, мы – Русские, мы – Русские,

Покаемся – поднимемся с колен!

  1. https://covenant.livingchurch.org/2021/01/11/the-episcopal-church-in-2050/
  1. And how would millions of Roman Catholics be received into the Church in one go? In the same way as hundreds of thousands of Roman Catholics were received into the Church in Belarus and the Ukraine in the 19th and 20th centuries: by confession and communion.

 

 

Beyond the Three Romes: The People’s Orthodoxy

Part One: The Three Temptations of Roman Imperialism

The Temptation of the First Rome

Seeing the oppression of the Church by barbarian chiefs in Old Rome and by unworthy Emperors in New Rome, the capital of the Roman Empire, which was later called Constantinople, in the 11th century the leaders of Old Rome took a decision. This was to make their part of the Church, in what is now called Western Europe, into a State. The leader of their part, or Patriarchate, of the Church, called the Pope of Rome, would be placed above all leaders and dubbed ‘the Head of the Church’ and ‘the Vicar of Christ’. Their new filioque ideology would claim that the Holy Spirit, the source of all truth, authority and spirituality in the Church, proceeds from their Popes.

In other words, the solution to the problem of State oppression as proposed by Roman Catholicism is that the Church becomes greater than any State. It becomes a worldwide Super-State, inherently secularising and centralising, more secular than the secular. This was, put simply, a power grab. This ‘easy way out’ was, is and always will be, a spiritual suicide. Christ did not call on legions of angels to protect Him when He was under arrest (Matt. 26). He accepted His Cross and said: ‘Put away your sword’. And that is what He still says to all those who attempt to impose the outward ways of the Church by intimidation and violence.

Naturally, in the 11th century, the remaining Orthodox Christians, at that time, the vast majority of Christendom, at once rejected this novel ‘theology’, or rather ideology. The latter became known, contradictorily, as ‘Roman Catholicism’ – for you cannot be Roman and Catholic (universal). Today Roman Catholicism remains a ‘Church-State’, an example of papoceasarism, a very secular form of Christianity, and has split into a myriad of sects protesting against the centralism which the hundreds of millions of sectarians condemn as ‘Papism’. However, those sects, now dying out through secularisation, are also subject to the ways of the world and even more deeply than Roman Catholicism, which they have rejected for the last 500 years.

The Temptation of the Second Rome

The problem of State interference in Church life remained for the rest of the Church. This is clear from the later history of New, or the Second, Rome, Constantinople, which finally fell in 1453. The elite of Emperors and State-appointed bishops was always ready to sign away their souls, and those of their flocks, in exchange for military aid from Roman Catholic Western Europe. The history of the Council of Florence and the resistance to the imposition of the Western ideology by such Christian heroes as St Gregory Palamas (1296-1359) and his spiritual successor St Mark of Ephesus (c. 1392-1444), by the monasteries and unmercenary parish priest-pastors and the faithful, demonstrates our principled opposition to the corruption of the elite, always ready to compromise the Faith of Christ.

In more recent times, several Constantinople Patriarchs have appeared to want to imitate the centralist Popes of Rome, envying and admiring their power, riches and prestige, and so their policies are sometimes called ‘Eastern Papism’. As a result, a whole series of Local Churches, protesting against Constantinople centralism, has been born, in Serbia, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and Macedonia in what is literally a Balkanisation of the Church of Constantinople. However, unlike the saintless Protestant sects which rejected the First Rome and justified their separations by changing the teachings of the Church, these Local Churches have in no way changed or compromised the teachings of the Church and have kept the Faith, as proved by their many saints.

However, like the National Protestant Churches, these new Local Churches have been oppressed by the national, or rather nationalist, ideologies of the States which they represent. They have accepted the Cross of Christ. Today, the Second Rome in what is now Istanbul remains, but as a shadow of its former self, for the last three generations as a tiny, compromised and highly politicised puppet of the US State Department. Its leaders have been highly engaged in unionist talks with Old Rome. No surprise here: birds of a feather flock together. Most recently, its subjection to US politics has been used to foment a violent Church schism in the Ukraine. This is the fruit of Constantinople Papism.

The Temptation of the Third Rome

This story has been repeated in the Third Rome, Moscow, which after persecution by Emperors and Empresses, especially in the 18th century, fell in 1917. And then the Third Rome became the Third International and the Gospel of Christ was exchanged for the Gospel of Soviet atheism – ‘the easy way’ to establish paradise on earth. Only the promised paradise was more like hell on earth because that ‘paradise’ was without and against Christ. The Third Rome, in Moscow, remains very large on paper, but it has a stubbornly nominal flock, who resist and resent the exploitative business model of the Church proposed in post-Soviet times.  As its righteous, like Matushka Alypia, prophesied: ‘Their golden domes will shine, but it will not be possible to worship in those churches’.

Just like Constantinople, Moscow to appears to want to imitate the centralist Pope of Rome, envying and admiring his power, riches and prestige. Its leaders have been highly engaged in unionist talks with Old Rome. No surprise here: birds of a feather flock together. This Muscovite Papism first appeared under Metropolitan, and later Patriarch, Sergius of Moscow (1867-1944), who considered that any compromises with the atheist State were justified because he had to ‘save the Church’, that is, to preserve its material assets, whatever the cost. This error became known as ‘Sergianism’ and was condemned, since it appeared to deny that Christ is the Saviour and that the Church does not need saving, only people need saving – and by the Church. This Sergianist Papism is still the model admired there today.

As a result, a whole series of National Churches, protesting against Muscovite centralism, has been born, in Poland, Czechoslovakia and today, being born in agony, in the Ukraine and in many other countries such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and very probably elsewhere. For the Russian Church too is compromised, but this time by the post-Soviet (and often purely Soviet) mentality, that is, the Church is compromised by the not very Orthodox State heir to both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. In other words, the spectre of the centralist Roman Empire haunts both centres of the Orthodox Church. And until there is repentance everywhere, the return to Orthodoxy everywhere, there is little hope of seeing a properly functioning Orthodox Christian world in either the Second or Third Romes, let alone in the First Rome, which wandered off from the Holy Spirit 1,000 years ago.

Part Two: The People’s Orthodoxy

The Third Way

What remains? Is there an alternative? Where is there authentic Orthodox Christianity? Is there another way? Of course, there is, and none of the Roman Imperialism of the Second and Third Romes, let alone of the First Rome, is necessary. There is the other way, beyond the superficiality and pomp of the Three Romes, the path of the People’s Orthodoxy, of authentic monasteries, parish pastors and simple faithful, the way between and beyond the Imperialisms of Constantinople and Moscow. We can call this the way of the Orthodox Commonwealth, or of ‘Carpathian’ Orthodoxy, of ‘Carpathian’ spirituality, though this simply means the Orthodox Christian way, the royal way. We can use this expression because the Orthodox of the Carpathian mountain range live in Carpatho-Russia (currently mostly in south-western Ukraine and miscalled ‘Transcarpathia’), south-eastern Poland, eastern Slovakia, south-western Ukraine and northern Romania and ‘Carpathian Orthodoxy’ spills over easily into Serbia, Moldova, Bulgaria and northern Greece to Mt Athos.

As examples, two contemporary righteous Churchmen come out of this Carpathia, the Carpatho-Russian-speaking Metr Laurus (Shkurla) (1928-2008) and the Romanian-speaking Metr Onufry (Berezovsky) (1944- ) of Kiev. They are heirs of the Orthodox Renaissance of hesychasm (unceasing prayer), our Christian reply to the neo-pagan Western Renaissance. Hesychasm was spread into this huge area by a very international group of fathers from the Holy Mountain of Athos by St Gregory of Sinai (c. 1260-1346), a contemporary of St Gregory Palamas (1296-1359), and his many followers, such as St Kallistos the Patriarch (+ 1363) in what is now Greece, St Roman of Tarnovo (c.1310-1363) and St Theodosius of Tarnovo (1310-1370) in Bulgaria, St Romil of Ravannitsa (+ 1376), St Athanasius of Meteora (1305-1383), St Sisoes the Sinaite (+ c. 1400), St Gregory of Gornjak (c.1300-1406) and others in Serbia, St Sergius of Radonezh (1314-1392) and his Thebaid of followers in Russia, and St Nicodemus of Tismana (1320-1406) in Romania. In the 18th century, this ‘Carpathian’ spirituality gave birth to the Ukrainian-Moldavian St Paisius (Velichkovsky) of Neamt in Romania, in the last century to St Alexis of Carpatho-Russia (1877-1947) and in our own times to St Job of Ugol (1902-1985), Fr Cleopa (Ilie) (1912-1998) and the Romanian elders of Moldavia in the living tradition.

There is nothing new in this Real Orthodoxy beyond the Romes, which could be termed ‘Carpathian Orthodoxy’. It began with St John the Baptist in the Palestinian desert, it blossomed in the deserts of Egypt and Palestine in the 3rd, 4th and 5th centuries, was taken to both Constantinople and then northwards to the Balkans and then to the forests of Russia and Siberia, but also to Gaul and then to the wild coasts of Ireland and the Hebrides in the 6th and 7th centuries, from where it was taken to both England and Iceland. It is also this spirit of Orthodoxy that was once so alive in the Russian emigration, though now all but dead in the dead hands of the State mentality and the property-thirsty princes of this world. Carpathian Orthodoxy is simply Christianity in life, the uncompromised Christian way of life, Orthodox spirituality. Carpathian Orthodoxy is not Constantinopolitan or Muscovite, not Imperial, but ours, the people’s, that of families, guided by spiritual fathers, by our monasteries and hermits.

The Attack on ‘Carpathian’ Orthodoxy by the Sergianism of the Russian Emigration

The 2001 usurping of power in the emigre Russian Church, ROCOR, and the expulsion of its leader, Metropolitan Vitaly, gave rise to a series of schisms in 2007, which were only limited in Australia and Germany because those in power had made as sure as possible that local church properties belonged to them. Elsewhere the losses were far more serious, especially in South America, North America, France and England. There followed the sidelining of the next ‘Carpathian’ Metropolitans of ROCOR, Laurus and Hilarion, who succeeded Metr Vitaly, and were turned into mere figureheads by the clique that had taken charge.

The clique appeared to have little interest in Church life, in real and, not token, monasticism and pastors and prayer, only in being ‘princes of the Church’ (one of their favourite expressions), in power and riches, property and prestige. Church was no longer about the salvation of souls, but about the ‘salvation’ of property by bishops, who wanted to take property away from monastics, pastors and the people. Thus came about the quite unjust 2016 expulsion from London of an excellent priest, the 2018 excommunication from Geneva of lifelong devoted ROCOR Orthodox trustees who had controlled the Cathedral, the closure of a parish near Saint Louis in the USA in a property dispute, and the loss of the church in Miami (it too did not belong to the ROCOR administration), in yet another property dispute.

There followed in exactly the same way the attempt to destroy Church life in parishes in England and close their churches (those properties too did not belong to ROCOR bishops). None of this left anyone in any doubt as to the utter ruthlessness of the US-financed business clique in charge of the Russian emigration Church. And the situation is continuing in the USA today, as more leave. All of this was caused by the desire of the ruling clique to imitate the Sergianism of the Church inside Russia, of the Third Rome. That clique too was going to ‘save the Church’, that is, to seize and preserve power and riches, property and prestige. In their worldliness they too confused the salvation of the soul with the preservation of empty buildings beneath golden domes and soulless property portfolios.

The Failed Attempt to Close Down the People’s Churches in England

In our own cases, after insisting on keeping our church open, despite covid regulations and aggressive and bullying intimidation, we were at various points in 2020 and 2021 the only Orthodox priests in England celebrating normally. For this defiance of death and our will to keep our churches, bought with the people’s money, open, the elite clique in charge had to punish and try to destroy us. As a result, they initiated a schism with the Archdiocese of Western Europe of the Moscow Patriarchate in December 2020. As the senior priest in the Diocese, I, with all the others, was forced to seek canonicity away from schismatic bishops. We applied Canon XV of the First and Second Council under St Photius the Great and 317 other Fathers, that those who ‘have been diligent to rescue the Church from schisms and divisions’….’shall be deemed worthy to enjoy the honour which befits them among Orthodox Christians’.

Ironically, as we have said, this Archdiocese of Western Europe with which the clique began a very public schism, is under the Moscow Patriarchate. However, the then ROCOR First Hierarch, Metr Hilarion (Kapral), was far too ill to contain the sectarians of ROCOR and its mini-Synod which had for 20 years been running everything. Therefore, individuals with power in New York refused to listen to what was happening and rejected our request for stavropegia in early 2021, using the electronic signature of the ‘Carpathian’ Metr Hilarion to justify themselves. We had known Metr Hilarion since 1988 and he came to us twice, ordaining clergy and celebrating in our church before he fell ill. Persecution of us was not his will. After his illness came the end. After this and the rejection of our application to join the Moscow Patriarchate, which was frightened of New York, we had to move to another Local Church.

We had to find canonicity against the schism of the bullies and to protect our churches from their attempts to close them. They accused us of being ‘criminals’, of stealing money (!), slandered us, tried to put us on trial and then sentenced us uncanonically and illegally behind our backs. They repeated all the oldest tricks in the book, using their naïve, new followers and yesmen. This was the Golgotha that the new Sanhedrin had prepared for us. God was testing our patience and humility. So we accepted our Cross and so God led us to spiritual freedom in another Local Church and so they lost everything. The New York schism endures to this day, but many clergy and people have left ROCOR. Though we have gone to the Church of Romania, several others, controversially, have joined the Patriarchate of Constantinople, especially in the USA and the Netherlands (as also in the Ukraine and now Lithuania), and a few elsewhere. Meanwhile, in the USA all free churches are continuing to leave ROCOR one after the other.

Part Three: Survival and Victory

The Orthodox Way

Certain Greeks wanted us to join their local Archdiocese. This was not Divine destiny. We believed that the Constantinople leadership is compromised by its modernist history of ecumenism, new calendarism and other practices, and especially by its treacherous activities in the Ukraine and the persecution of our dear friends in the Czech Lands. True, Moscow has also acted uncanonically in Africa, just as Constantinople has done in the Ukraine. However, the Greek vengeance on simple Africans who want to see an African, and not Greek, Orthodoxy, with the help of Moscow has been quite as vicious as the New York vengeance on us and as the Moscow vengeance on those seeking political freedom outside the controls of Soviet nationalism, whether in the Netherlands, Lithuania or elsewhere.

Then, we have many parishioners from the much-suffering Ukraine. They are faithful to Metr Onufry of Kiev, who has been so mistreated both by Constantinople and by Moscow. This double persecution from both extremes, from Constantinople and Moscow, is a sure sign of his righteousness. True, in the US, there is a (Russian/Ukrainian) Slavic Vicariate for persecuted refugees from ROCOR, but in the US context, with others refusing to take refugees from ROCOR, there may be no alternative to this. We are free to do otherwise. Similarly, we do not judge those seven priests in Lithuania, forced to join Constantinople because of their mistreatment by Moscow. We are free to do otherwise.

Others called us to old calendarist groups. However, for us, schisms and sects of any sort are the unthinkable. That is the precise reason why we left ROCOR – because it suffers from the sectarian, old calendarist illness of schism. Being on the old calendar is very different from old calendarism, just as being on the new calendar is very different from new calendarism. For within the Romanian Metropolia of Western and Southern Europe, our ex-ROCOR group of six parishes is on the old calendar. We are following the Third Way between and beyond the Second and Third Romes. For we are turned towards St John of Shanghai (as also is the Romanian parish in Birmingham) and the New Martyrs and Confessors, and the local saints of the early centuries, to Moldovan spirituality and the heritage of St Paisius (Velichkovsky) (1722-1794) and Fr Cleopa Ilie, the great Carpathian elder (1912-1998), as well as to contemporary Ukrainian figures like Elder Iona of Odessa (1925-2012) and Metr Onufry of Kiev (1944 – ).

‘Carpathian’ Orthodoxy Survives in England

Thus, in February 2022, 6 parishes, 16 clergy, including 7 priests, and 5,000 laypeople moved away from the local ROCOR diocese. Nearly all went to the Patriarchate of Romania and not a single one returned to serve in ROCOR. The departure of over three-quarters of the ROCOR Diocese in England to the Patriarchate of Romania, left ROCOR with mainly a few new and untrained Non-Russian-speaking convert clergy, a tiny group of about 100 core faithful and 1500 nominal Orthodox. Moreover, our move took place eight days before the present phase of the conflict in the Ukraine in 2022 and the further tragic politicisation and disruption of Russian Church life.

A spiritual son of, and ordained priest by, the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, the successor in that see to St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, I believe that the positive heritage of the old ROCOR has to be saved. It was Archbishop Antony who had stopped the spread of sectarianism in ROCOR in the US already in the 1970s. We followed him. We are ever loyal to the memory and practices of St John of Shanghai and Western Europe and his successor Archbishop Antony, to the Presov Rusyn Metr Laurus (Shkurla) and to the west Ukrainian Metr Hilarion (Kapral) (1948-2022). We see in the politically free Autonomous Romanian Metropolitan of Western and Southern Europe, with nearly 3 million faithful, 700 parishes and several monasteries, the greatest hope for a future Local Church of Western Europe.

After nearly fifty years of faithfulness to the Russian Church and over 36 years of unpaid service at the altar, this marked a new beginning, but one to which all had been moving in the recent period of the Sovietisation of ROCOR, which sees the Church as a Business. We twelve, five priests, two deacons and five readers who joined the Romanian Church, are an international group, profoundly opposed to the sectarian trends coming from the new ROCOR in the USA. We do not want to belong to the ghettoes of egomania or the sects of pathology. They are not the way forward. These trends were exported to England during the critical illness and loss of control of ROCOR by the ever-memorable Metropolitan Hilarion (Kapral). He was the last ROCOR First Hierarch able to keep ROCOR unity, before being struck down by his dementia and cancer well before his repose in 2022. We honour his memory, as also that of Metr Laurus.

Our Parish and the Future

On 20 May 2022, in one of her last acts, the late Queen Elizabeth made my native town a City. Its coat of arms, depicting St Helen and the three crowns of St Edmund, declares: No Cross, no Crown (of martyrdom). Our churches in the City of Colchester, the main one dedicated to St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, and the other dedicated to All the Saints of these Isles, have become a spiritual centre for Moldovans, Ukrainians, Romanians and all patriotic, but non-nationalist, Russians. We consider that we have only one passport and under ‘Nationality’ that passport says ‘Orthodox Christian’. We have trilingual services and an emphasis on personal confession and communion and the prayer of the heart, as well as rejecting the money-making mercenary spirit of marble and gold, so evident in so many churches, especially in London and other capitals.

For us the Patriarchate of Romania, which is in communion with all Orthodox, is the royal way forward, between the extremisms of Constantinople and Moscow, which are scandalously out of communion with one another, both effectively in schism with one another. Ignoring politics and nationalism, the Colchester parish has good relations with the Greek monastery at Tolleshunt Knights, where I often met the now St Sophrony in the 1970s and early 1980s, when the monastery was still poor. Attended on Sundays by between 200 and 400 faithful, communions at St John’s number between 100 and 300 on Sundays, with between 50 and 100 children, making it one of the three largest Orthodox parishes in England. We are followers of ‘Carpathian’ spirituality. The Carpathians are on the Western edge of the Orthodox world. So are we.

We continue in the path of the everyday spirituality of the people, of Carpathian Orthodoxy, outside the Romes, with their Spirit-quenching politics, soul-destroying bureaucracies and anti-spiritual ‘protocols’. This is the same as Hebridean, Ionan and Lindisfarnian spirituality of old, practised in these isles some fourteen centuries ago. It is the one and the same ‘Spiritodox’ world, the world of ordinary families who go to their pastors, monks and hermits for spiritual orientation, making pilgrimages to Mt Athos, Moldavia, Diveevo and Ekaterinburg, and St Spyridon and St Nicholas. This is not some sort of ‘neo-hesychasm’, for hesychasm never died. Last year at the Ascension the large icon of St John of Kronstadt in the Colchester church began to give off a fragrance, noticed by all, and the Icon of Christ on the iconostasis gave out a large droplet of myrrh. So does heaven reply to the persecutors of the Church, with Love, not with the aggressive bullying and attempted intimidation of the pharisees. We pray for them all, that they may be relieved of their burden of hatred and come to know Christ.

Part Four: The Future

Rejecting the Temptation of the Romes

There are those who ask how the present stand-off between Constantinople and Moscow, the Second and Third Romes, will end. Those pessimists who see only the acts of sinful men should know that there will not be an everlasting schism. Political personalities come and then they die. True, too many harsh words have been said and too many injustices have been committed by both sides. The use of ‘defrocking’ for purely political, and not canonical, purposes is absurd. All political ‘defrockings’ are reversible, as they have been reversed so many times before, when the injustices of previous regimes are overturned, just as the tables of the money-changers in the Temple were overturned by the Saviour, Who said: ‘My house shall be called the house of prayer; but you have made it a den of thieves’ (Matt 21, 12-13). Bishops who misapply the canons, those who themselves receive clergy without releases but then condemn others for receiving clergy without releases, because those selfsame bishops have instituted schisms, and in places as far apart as the USA, the Netherlands, England, Lithuania and Africa, only discredit themselves and make themselves into laughing-stocks.

There will have to be negotiations between them on territory. Moscow cannot go on behaving as though countries like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, like Finland, Poland, the Czech Lands or Slovakia, are any different from the other countries of Roman Catholic and Protestant cultural background in Western and Central Europe. Those countries too are de facto shared territory like Western Europe. On the other hand, as regards Africa, perhaps Hellenist Alexandria will have to return to holding only the territory of Egypt and Libya, as a century ago, and leave the rest of Africa to missions from the Russian Church. And Hellenist Constantinople will have to abandon the domain of the East Slavs, Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine, to the jurisdiction of the Russian Church – for a moment.

For the coming political takeover of the Ukraine as a result of the Russian military operation against the US on the battlefield of the Ukraine and the conferring of the status of a pro-Russian Protectorate on the New Ukraine, will make no difference in the Russian Church sphere. Though the Russian State will surely win militarily in the Ukraine, as it is already winning, the Russian Church is already the great loser. It has lost through its involvement in politics and is discredited outside the Russian Federation, its churches in Western Europe often reduced to little more than embassy churches. If other Local Churches recognise the self-declared autocephaly of the canonical Ukrainian Church, this will hasten the inevitable end. The Russian Church will have to cede long-overdue autocephaly, both to the New Ukraine and then to Belarus. The three brother-peoples will belong to three Sister-Churches.

Thou Hast Conquered, O Galilean

As for us, we continue to stand in the centre. Some will say that we in East Anglian England are provincials, ‘rustics’. Well, we are provincials – but we are not ashamed of it. Though standing in the centre means that we are attacked by both extremes, this is the only valid position, for Christ was also crucified between two thieves. However despised provincial Galilee was, it was Galilee that defeated the Capital of Jerusalem, with its Sanhedrin of high priests, scribes and pharisees. Why? Because in fact Galilee was the centre, just as a cave in Bethlehem, not the Senate in Rome, was also in its time the centre. The People’s Orthodoxy is controversial to the Imperial elite, just as Christ was controversial to the scribes and pharisees. But woe unto them.

And so our ‘Carpathian’ Orthodoxy stands at the centre. We stand outside the politics of capitals, old and new. We reject the Three Romes and their Imperialism and Papism, both Phanariot and Muscovite, which are supported only by their readiness to compromise on everything with States. We reject both the Church-State of Old Rome and the State Churches of the Second and Third Romes. It is Imperial Orthodoxy, not ‘Carpathian’ Orthodoxy, that is marginal, because the Imperial Church is not the Faith of the people, of pastors, parish priests and monasteries, but of intriguing oligarchs, hard-hearted politicians and self-tortured ideologues.

In the 4th century the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate (331-363), born in Constantinople and finishing his poisonous life in what is now Iraq, returned to persecuting the Church. He became known as ‘the last Pagan Emperor’, though, alas!, that is not true. Julian wrote an attack on Christianity, ‘Against the Galileans’. The trickery of the ‘Galileans’—his usual term for Orthodox Christians – had nothing divine in it, he claimed, it appealed to ‘rustics’ only, and it was made up of fables and irrational falsehoods. Here can be seen his intellectual snobbery, like that of our present persecutors, who claim to have some worldly academic qualifications. Julian’s plan to rebuild the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem had to be abandoned. He lost his fight against Christ, humiliated by ‘the rustics’. It is said that his last words were: ‘Thou hast conquered, O Galilean’. The provincial Galileans had even then won.

Towards a Local Church

Our Church is already a Local Church. Indeed, other Local Churches already exist. They begin not in capitals, where there is a separate church for each nationality, often de facto embassy churches, but in the provinces, where Orthodox of all nationalities are brought together and have to be together, living with one another. In the greater picture beyond this, there is the whole problem of Western Europe, the Americas and Oceania, where the absence of four Autocephalous Local Churches is absurd, despite over a century of Orthodox presence there and despite the presence there of some 10% of the Orthodox episcopate of 1,000 bishops.

We have always opposed those who tried to undermine the inevitability of new Local Churches in these Diaspora lands. They ruin all hope for them through extremism, whether of the modernist/secularist/new calendarist, or the pharisaic/ghettoist/old calendarist, variety. If your only selling-point is that you are like the whole secular world around you, whose values you share, then you have nothing to give to create a new Local Church. But if your only selling-point is your differences, or, worse still, that your differences make you ‘superior’ to all others, then you are a pharisee and you too are working against a new Local Church.

A Church of and for ‘incels’ and right-wing pharisees is not a Church. A Church of military rigidity, of the straitjacket and Stalinist conformism is not a Church. A Church of and for intellectuals is not a Church. A Church of wokeism, of anything goes, swimming with the tide and secularist conformism is not a Church. The Church is for all who accept Her as She is, the Church for all generations and all nationalities, for all who wish to live better lives and know that this is possible only through Christ. Our Church is the Church of the spiritual, not of the material and its obsessions with power and riches, property and prestige. Our Church is not the Church of politicians and businessmen, but the Church of the Saints. We too say: No Cross, No Crown. And again we say: Christ is Risen!

Archpriest Andrew Phillips,

City of Colchester, England,

Eastertide 2023

(The above is available as a printed brochure)

The Mystical Meaning of Walsingham

O England, thou hast great cause to make glad.

Thou attainest my grace to stand on a level

To be compared to the promised land of Zion

Through this glorious Lady’s support

And to be called in every realm and region

The holy land, Our Lady’s dowry;

Thus art thou named from old antiquity.

 The Pynson Ballad, Verse 19, in Modern English

 Introduction: Norman Walsingham

An Orthodox visitor to the tiny village of Little Walsingham in Norfolk will discover there a shrine to the Mother of God, which clearly reflects the mentality of High Church Anglicanism, known as Anglo-Catholicism. Recreated as recently as the 1930s, after being destroyed 400 years before at the Reformation, the shrine feels artificial, contrived and even rather alien to Orthodox. The birettas and general imitation of old-fashioned Roman Catholicism by High Church Anglicans seems fake. Orthodox have no desire, or need, to imitate old-fashioned or, for that matter, new-fashioned, Roman Catholicism. On the other hand, no-one can deny that there is a genuine atmosphere of sincere piety, peace and, most significantly, great grace, within the shrine. This must be recognised, whatever the offputting externals, which we must learn to see beyond.

Yet despite this, those with a sense of history will still be put off by the official version of the story of the shrine to be found in the guidebook. This openly states that the shrine originated in 1061 when a ‘Saxon’ (sic!) noblewoman ‘Richeldis de Faverches’ (sic!) had ‘a vision’ of the Mother of God. This is clearly nonsense. ‘Saxon’ noblewomen did not exist in England in 1061, English noblewomen did. Also you will not find any English noblewomen in 1061 with the clearly French Norman name of ‘Richeldis de Faverches’! Either the vision took place in 1061, but was granted to an Englishwoman and not to ‘Richeldis de Faverches’, or else it did not take place in 1061 at all, but during the Norman Occupation following 1066. Either one or else the other. It cannot be otherwise.

After a little research it is not difficult to discover that the name Faverches (then the name of a tiny village near Lisieux in Normandy) does indeed occur in connection with Little Walsingham. A historical document known as ‘The Norfolk Roll’ refers to the foundation of a Priory of ‘Augustinian Friars’ in Little Walsingham in 1130-1131, and precisely by a widow called Richeldis de Faverches, who died in 1145. She left her estate to her son, Geoffrey de Faverches, who took part in the Second Crusade, setting out in 1147. And one of the sponsors of that Crusade was the then Bishop of Lisieux.

Does this simply mean that the date 1061 is nonsense and the whole story belongs to twelfth-century Norman Roman Catholicism, to 1131? Where does the 1061 date come from? This is important for Orthodox. Although after the half-Norman Edward ‘the Confessor’, who promoted the new Roman Catholic religion, became King of England in 1042, a spiritual decline occurred in England, nevertheless until 1066, England was still in communion with the rest of the Orthodox Church. Thus, a vision of the Mother of God in 1061 has a meaning for Orthodox. Supposing the 1061 date is correct and, quite simply, it was someone else, an Englishwoman, who had a vision of the Mother of God? Clearly, we have to examine the origin of this 1061 date.

Orthodox Walsingham

The 1061 date comes from one particular source, that of the respected Norman-born royal printer and poet Richard Pynson (c. 1449 – c. 1529). Pynson was employed by the Tudor kings Henry VIII and before him Henry VII (reigned 1485-1509). The latter made a three-day pilgrimage to Walsingham in 1487, after which he commissioned Pynson to write a Ballad about its history. Pynson’s Ballad was written at the very latest in 1494, when it was printed, but its lost sources presumably go back centuries before and include ancient oral traditions.

It surely cannot be some invention, as it mentions specifically 1061 and no other date. Indeed, the Ballad specifically states that the vision at the origin of the shrine occurred in the reign of ‘Edward the King’ (= the Confessor), that means before 1066.  Moreover, the 1061 date was later confirmed by the very reliable antiquarian, royal archivist and poet John Leland (1503-1552). And the date is also confirmed by an earlier 14th century manuscript of the Book of Hours in the University Library in Cambridge (Ms. 1i. Vi. 2.Fo. 71r). This too maintains that the chapel in Walsingham was founded in 1061.

Writing in 15th century English, reminiscent of Chaucer, Pynson names the seer as a mysterious ‘Rychold’, the then Lady of the Manor. Now, according to the Domesday Book, the Lord of the Manor of Walsingham in 1061 was none other than Harold Godwinson (or Godwineson), King of England from 6 January 1066, and the Lady of the Manor was his wife Edith. This manor had come to Harold precisely by his marriage to Edith on 23 January 1045 when he was Earl of East Anglia, as recorded by the Little Domesday of Norfolk, compiled in 1088. Edith (c. 1020 – c. 1086) is given several names in the Domesday Book, among them precisely ‘Rychold’, meaning ‘Rich’ or ‘Fair’, and more poetically ‘the Gentle Swan’ (Another title, the ‘Swan-Neck’, comes from the Old English ‘swann hnecca’, probably a corrupted form of swann hnesce, ‘Gentle Swan’). Edith is recorded in the Domesday Book as Edfgifu the Rich, her name latinised as ‘Edeva’.

Edith had inherited Walsingham from her mother Wulfgyth, daughter of the King of England, Ethelred the Unready (+ 1012) and half-sister of King Edward the Confessor. Although Edith’s mother Wulfgyth, also called Wulfhilda, had married Ulfkytel the Brave, who died in battle in October 1016, Edith was almost certainly her daughter by her second husband, Thorkell the Tall, advisor to King Canute (Knut) and Earl of East Anglia until 1021.

Very much a Patroness of East Anglia, the Anglo-Danish Edith was rich and held a great many properties in East Anglia, notably in Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Essex, as well as in Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, notably in Chesham, and dwellings in Canterbury, as is recorded by The Domesday Book. Her brothers owned property in Norfolk, specifically in Great and Little Walsingham. In 1045 Edith married Harold (c. 1022-1066), son of Godwin (also spelled Godwine) of Sussex. Harold had become Earl of East Anglia and inherited the East Anglian lands of Edith. Only in 1053, on his father’s death, did he inherit the title of Earl of Wessex.  In turn he became King of England on 6 January 1066 on Edward the Confessor’s death.

As a devout noblewoman Edith had received an education and was recorded by the Abbot of ‘Eastholm’ as ‘keen and wise in her understanding’. One of the richest noblewomen in England, she employed a personal goldsmith, called Grimwald. She donated a valuable Gospel to the Monastery at Thorney in Cambridgeshire and was the benefactress of St Benet’s Monastery at Holme in Norfolk in 1046. Both she and her pious husband Harold were spiritual children of the saintly pastor Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester (c. 1008-1095). He was the only English bishop who was allowed to retain his Diocese by the Norman invaders, though he greatly regretted the Norman rebuilding of Cathedrals which favoured quantity (size) over quality (prayer).

Like King Canute (c. 990 – 1035), Edith and Harold were married in the customary way of the age in England by solemn promise, typical of the time all over Northern Europe. This was known as a ‘hand-fast marriage’. A number of dowry bequests were made at the time of Edith’s union to Harold, including Walsingham Manor, making Edith ‘the Lady of the Manor’ before 1061. They had six known children, Godwin (named in honour of Harold’s father), Edmund, Magnus, Gytha (named after Edith’s grandmother), Gunnhild and Ulf (the last four with Danish names; any East Anglian even today has Danish blood, an East Anglian myself, my DNA says that I am 11% Danish).

The importance of these children is indicated by the fact that Gunnhild was abducted after the Battle of Hastings. In 1068 Gytha was taken by her grandmother to Denmark in 1068 and then married the Prince of Smolensk, Vladimir Monomakh. She had some eleven children by him and so brought the bloodline of St Alfred the Great into the Russian royal family. Gytha reposed on 7 May 1107. One of her sons had a double name, the Slav Mstislav, and Harold, in memory of his grandfather.

It is said that Edith identified Harold’s mutilated body after his death at Hastings. It was because of Edith’s identification of Harold’s body that he could be buried, either by the monks of Waltham in Essex, which Harold had founded, or else at his family home in Bosham in Sussex, inside the pre-Conquest church. After the Battle, Edith disappears from the historical record. By 1086, her lands had passed to an invader. Possibly she joined Harold’s mother Gytha in Exeter, from where she may have been exiled after the siege in the winter of 1068. Perhaps she joined her exiled sons in Ireland, or joined Gytha in Denmark, as some suggest, and then Kiev. Others suggest that she may have set out on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, from which she did not return. We wonder if she did not arrive in Nazareth and there repose. After all her vision had been of the house in Nazareth where the Most Holy Virgin had received the Annunciation from the Archangel Gabriel.

Conclusion: The Future of Walsingham

If, as seems very likely, the Walsingham vision of the Mother of God took place in 1061 and was granted to Edith, the wife of Earl and then King Harold Godwinson, then we can now see that the Normans stole Walsingham from England, overlaying it with their anti-English myths. It was all part of their mythology that they had brought Christian civilisation to England and that before them there had been nothing and certainly no vision of the Mother of God to the benighted English. That is why they deleted the enemy King Harold and his Queen Edith from the history of Walsingham, assigning the vision to a later Norman woman, Richeldis de Faverches, who lived nearly three generations later. That is why they disguised Edith with the title ‘Rychold’, in order to confuse her with the much later Richeldis.

Clearly, having killed King Harold, his wife and children were still enemies and threats to the Norman usurpers. Harold had replaced his father Godwin as the focus of patriotic opposition to Norman influence in England under Edward the Confessor, who had spent more than 25 years in exile in Normandy. That is why the Norman clergy slanderously made out that Edith was Harold’s mistress and that the couple were not married, even making out that he married again in 1066, when he had made a political pact with a certain Alditha. Their fully legitimate ‘handfast’ wedding is still part of the Orthodox wedding ceremony today, when the newly-wed couple are led around the central lectern by the priest, their hands placed together on the priest’s stole. That is also why the Lombard Archbishop of Canterbury Lanfranc, appointed by William the Bastard in 1070, railed against the local English saints, who were often royal. It was a purely political and indeed racist move. Anything fine and noble in pre-Norman English culture had to be overlaid, buried and cancelled. Indeed in later times paid, Normanised scholars even gave the strange name ‘Anglo-Saxon’ to the English to try and alienate the English from their very own blood and kin.

As a result of her vision, Edith wished to do something special to honour the Mother of God, who appeared to her in 1061. In that threefold vision Edith was shown the house of the Annunciation in Nazareth, the place of the Incarnation, and was instructed to build a replica of the house in Little Walsingham as a place of pilgrimage where people could honour her. Mary is said to have promised, ‘Whoever seeks my help there will not go empty away’. That is what Edith did. This Annunciation was surely an announcement of consolation to the English before the defeat at Hastings and ensuing Norman Occupation that has lasted to this day, that Christ would always be with us.

Today, the shrine at Little Walsingham does have a tiny staircase chapel big enough only for half a dozen Orthodox. In the village itself there is also a tiny Orthodox chapel in a temporarily rented building, where a liturgy is held once a year, mainly for converts to Orthodoxy from Anglicanism. However, there is no church that is owned by Orthodox and there are very few Orthodox living, that is, who are incarnate, in the area. However, 25 miles away there is the historic port town of Kings Lynn which has strong Orthodox connections. Here there is no Orthodox church building, though there is a community of Orthodox. Could it be that an Orthodox church, dedicated to the Annunciation of the Mother of God, could be established in Little Walsingham, for the service of Orthodox and in memory of the piety of Edith, the last Orthodox Queen of England? From this tiny rural hamlet in Norfolk, the Mother of God reigns over England.

O gracious Lady, glory of Jerusalem,

Cypress of Zion and Joy of Israel,

Rose of Jericho and Star of Bethlehem,

O glorious Lady, reject not our askings

Thou dost excel all women in mercy

Therefore, blessed Lady, grant Thy great grace

To all that devoutly visit this place.

The Pynson Ballad, Verse 21, in Modern English

Notes:

  1. In writing the above, we acknowledge a great debt of gratitude to the late Bill Flint, the author of a most interesting book called Edith the Fair, Visionary of Walsingham, Gracewing 2015. Although there are the mistakes of the amateur historian, this book has great merit.
  2. We are also indebted to the work Harold the Last Anglo-Saxon (sic) King, by Ian W. Walker, The History Press, 2010
  3. In our church in Colchester we have a very beautiful and very iconographic panaghia of the Mother of God of Walsingham. We had this made in the Ukraine three years ago for a worthy bishop. It is soon to be gifted to His Grace Metropolitan Joseph, who so keenly wishes his local Diocese of over 60 parishes to become incarnated into English life and tradition.

Archpriest Andrew Phillips,

Felixstowe, Suffolk,

1 September 2022

 

 

 

The First 250 Years of Orthodox Suffolk (619-869)

Introduction: After the Romans

Already in Roman times south-eastern Britain was the first area to be settled by mercenaries and then traders (and pirates) of Germanic origin. This was natural as this region neighbours North-Western Europe. Already in the late third century the coastal areas of the south-east were called the ‘Saxon Shore’. For ‘Saxon’ (Scottish ‘Sassenach’) was then a generic term for all Germanic peoples, Saxons, Angles, Frisians, Swabians, Franks, Jutes or Danes, simply because the Saxons were the first to be encountered by others. These peoples had all moved down to the shores of what is now northern France, Belgium and Holland, seeking to cross the narrow sea and settle new land, mainly as a result of the rising sea levels where they had previously lived.

After the Romans had been forced to withdraw completely from Britain by 410, many more from these Germanic peoples sailed across the southern stretches of the North Sea and the Channel in the day or two it took. They had been invited to settle the newly vacated lands, some intermarrying with the descendants of the Ancient Britons, as well as of the various Celtic tribes, who had invaded Britain some 500 years before the Romans. Thus, the Jutes settled in Kent and southern parts of Hampshire, the minority Saxons settled in the south in what became Essex (the Saxons of the East), Sussex (the Saxons of the South) and Wessex (the Saxons of the West) and the majority Angles, who gave their name to the new land, settled most of the country in what became Mercia (the Midlands), Northumbria and East Anglia (Suffolk, Norfolk and eastern Cambridgeshire up to the Rivers Ouse and Cam, though these county names only came into being in the tenth century).

By the sixth century seven English kingdoms, four small (Kent, Essex, Sussex, East Anglia) and three large (Northumbria, Mercia, Wessex), had been formed. In time these would be united and create the united Kingdom of England, though this only really took shape in the tenth century thanks to the foundations laid by the heroic defender of Christian Civilisation, King Alfred the Great (+ 899). Thus, in the mid-sixth century the Kingdom of East Anglia was formed, under a royal dynasty named the Wuffings, named after King Wuffa (+ 578). It had royal centres along the Suffolk coast and the rivers of the ‘Wicklaw’, the territory  subject to the law of the ‘wick’ or trading centre, called Gippeswic (Ipswich), known as ‘the first English town’. The Wicklaw is represented today by south-east Suffolk and includes the Wuffings’ famous burial ground at Sutton Hoo and their ‘hall’ or palace at Rendlesham.

The Baptism of Suffolk

Faith in Christ came northwards to Suffolk from Kent through Essex. Sutton Hoo and the archaeological finds made there bear witness to this. For this location is most probably the site of the burial of King Raedwald, who ruled from 599 to 625 and was the first King of East Anglia to be baptised, though he was hardly practising, as his pagan wife persuaded him otherwise. His baptism took place in the early seventh century in Canterbury, as is recorded by St Bede. His burial site was famously uncovered in 1939.

King Raedwald was succeeded by his surviving son Eorpwald (+ 627), then by an interloper called Ricbert (+ 629) who had murdered Eorpwald directly after his baptism. Ricbert was succeeded by King Raedwald’s stepson, Sigebert, the future saint (+ 635), who had become a Christian in Gaul, where he had been driven into exile by Raedwald. Next came the short-lived King Aethilric (+ 636), a nephew of Raedwald, for both Sigebert and Aethilric were murdered by the pagan Mercian ruler and invader, Penda. St Sigebert was the first practising Christian King of East Anglia and in 631 he welcomed to his Kingdom from Gaul the Burgundian Bishop Felix (+ 647), whom he had met there. Felix was a disciple of the Irish missionary St Columban and would become the Apostle of East Anglia.

It has now been established that Bishop Felix most likely began his mission in south-east Suffolk at the old Roman fortress (called ‘Burgh’ in Old English and ‘Dommoc’ in Celtic). This is now Felixstowe, the town much later named after the saint. This is not far from the royal centre in Rendlesham, where the Kings of East Anglia lived and where a church, probably founded by Bishop Felix, was dedicated to St Gregory the Great, the Apostle of the English. From here Bishop Felix worked along the rivers. First, he sailed north-westwards along the valley of the River Orwell/Gipping in Ipswich (with a church dedicated to St Peter), and westwards along the River Stour in Sudbury (a church dedicated to St Gregory) in south Suffolk.

A second area of coastal mission was at the north-east Suffolk royal centre in Blythburgh, dedicated to the Holy Trinity, and then further north by the  Suffolk border near Flixton. He also established a church dedicated to the Mother of God in nearby South Elmham, others dedicated to St Michael at Oulton and to St Andrew at a second place called Flixton, this one near Lowestoft. Next he founded another church at Reedham across today’s border in Norfolk. (Both Flixtons were probably named after St Felix). Thirdly, he founded a monastery in the fens at Soham, now in Cambridgeshire, near the royal centre in Exning in Suffolk and perhaps also found a church in what is now Cambridge (also dedicated to St Peter?). Finally, he established churches along the rivers in north-west Norfolk at Babingley (now dedicated to St Felix) and Shernborne (Sts Peter and Paul).

King Anna and Family

From 636 to 654 there came the rule of King Anna, King Aethelric’s brother, whose wife was probably a relative (a grand-daughter?) of the earlier King of Essex, Saebert (+ c. 615). Anna lived mostly at the royal centre at Exning, guarding the Suffolk border of East Anglia against the Mercians. Anna was the father of a dynasty of saints who, following on from Bishop Felix, Christianised East Anglia. The most famous of these is St Audrey (Aethelthryth) (+ 679), baptised by Bishop Felix in Exning. She became famous as the Abbess of Ely just across the Suffolk border in what is now Cambridgeshire, and had fenland disciples there like the priest St Huna of Chatteris and St Owin of Haddenham.

St Audrey had other saintly sisters. These were: Seaxburgh, Abbess of Minster in Sheppey in Kent, Withburgh, the hermitess of Dereham in Norfolk (+ 743, aged about 90), and Ethelburgh and a stepsister, St Saethrith, who both lived in the convent of St Fara in what is now France. She also had a brother, St Jurmin (Eormen). He was murdered in Blythburgh in Suffolk and his relics were enshrined in Bedricsworth, later called Bury St Edmunds. Another saint, Wendreda (Cwendrith), to whom is dedicated the church in fenland March, may have been connected to the family.

St Felix was succeeded by Bishop Thomas and then Bishop Boniface. After King Anna, killed in battle by Penda of Mercia, together with his son Jurmin in 654, came briefly Anna’s brother King Aethelhere (654). He was also killed in battle by Penda, though Penda died in the same battle. Next came King Aethelwald (654-664), the fourth and last nephew of Raedwald. He assured the Church bonds with the kingdoms of Essex and Kent. Indeed, in about 660 St Cedd of Essex baptised the King of Essex at Rendlesham, King Aethelwald perhaps standing as godfather.

It was in this year of 654 that St Botolph (Botwulf) (+ 674) founded a monastery on a promontory or ‘hoo’ (as in Sutton Hoo) at Iken by the River Alde near the Suffolk coast. From here he went out and founded other churches both dedicated to Sts Peter and Paul, possibly these are the churches at Eye and Hoxne, which also later became church centres in their own right. The village of Botesdale in Suffolk is also named after the saint. This is not far from where the Irish ascetic St Fursa (Fursey) and his disciples, like St Foillan, St Utan and St Dicul (of Dickleburgh in Norfolk), had earlier laboured in a monastery, probably at Burgh Castle by the south-eastern coast of Norfolk. Fursa had made his way to France before 651 when all the remaining monks with Foillan were driven out by the long-lived pagan Mercian invader, Penda.

Consolidation and Missionary Work (664-749)

With the death of King Aethelwald in 664, there came to an end the 35-year long reigns of the four nephews of King Raedwald. There now came a long period of peace and consolidation under two East Anglian rulers, father and son, the two reigns totalling 85 years, so giving continuity. The first was King Aldwulf (664-713), son of King Aethilric (+ 636), with a reign of 49 years. During the reign of King Aldwulf, East Anglia was divided into two dioceses, with a see in south-east Suffolk at what is now Felixstowe, and in north-east Suffolk, probably at what is now South Elmham (then called Helmham). Probably in the ninth century this centre was transferred to what is now called North Elmham, not so far away in south Norfolk.

It was in this period that the port of Gipeswic (Ipswich) developed as a great trading centre, facing the northern Continent, the Rhine and Scandinavia across the North Sea. In fact, this Sea could perhaps better be viewed as a lake, on whose western shore lies Ipswich. Two more churches, dedicated to the Mother of God and St Augustine, were built here. Pottery, now known as ‘Ipswich Ware’, was made, ships were built and textiles, jewellery, leatherware, antlerware and baskets were manufactured. Frisian merchants were very active, as Ipswich was the commercial centre of East Anglia. ‘Gipeswic’, the third biggest English port and trading centre (‘wic’) after London (‘Lundenwic’) and York (‘Eoforwic’) and situated between them.

In this way East Anglia also became one of the most important centres for missionary work for north-western Europe. Thus, the local veneration for St Botolph was taken there and later reached Scandinavia and from there Kiev, making him a patron saint of travellers. Later an English missionary to Utrecht called St Eadwulf (later deformed into Adulf), possibly related to St Botolph (Botwulf), also reposed at Iken.

During the reign of King Aldwulf’s son, King Aelfwald (713-749), developments went further. East Anglia controlled its economy, developed international trade and towns, promoting churches, monasteries and literacy, sending forth its light into the world, breathing the Gospel both into Mercia to the west and to north-western Europe, to the east. Thus, in 714 Aelfwald’s sister, Edburgh, who may have been identical with St Edburgh, Abbess of Minster in Thanet in Kent, provided a coffin for the great fen ascetic, the Mercian Guthlac of Crowland. Aelfwald himself commissioned the Life of the saint, written by a certain monk Felix, the name suggesting his East Anglian origins. At the same time King Aelfwald of East Anglia, with its two bishops in Felixstowe and South Elmham, helped the Mercian King Aethelbald to power after the death of the evil King of Mercia, Ceolred, in 716.

His sister Edburgh continued to play an important role and is believed to have become Abbess of Ely and then went to Minster in Kent, if she is indeed identical to the Abbess of Minster. In any case in the thirteenth century a chapel dedicated to her, St Edburgh, is recorded at Thornham in north mid-Suffolk. Abbess Edburgh came under the influence of the great English missionary Boniface of Crediton and became one of his most devoted disciples. Boniface, born in c. 675, had first gone to Friesland as a missionary in 716 and was to spend most of the next almost forty years in what is now western Germany, Luxembourg and Holland, totally reorganising the Church of the Franks and becoming the ‘Apostle of the Germans’.

King Aelfwald’s Achievements And After

Under King Aelfwald, East Anglian mints began to issue more and more coins. Ipswich, facing north-western Europe, became even more important, as Aelfwald laid out a new town on a rectangular grid pattern, the plan of which is visible today. Potteries were in full production and long continued this production, being the most important pottery centre in south-east England. There was a busy market, butchers and bakers’ shops and workshops for making clothing, saddlery, bagpipes, shoes and combs, as well as for metalwork and timber construction, of carts for example. In the centre of the town (where now stands the Town Hall) a church dedicated to St Mildred of Minster in Thanet in Kent was built. The link to her would be through King Aelfwald’s sister, Abbess Edburgh, who we believe succeeded St Mildred as Abbess of MInster in Kent. About this time a church in Utrecht was also dedicated to St Mildred, and this must also have been the result of the direct connection with the port of Ipswich.

Ipswich, between the ports of London and York, presented East Anglian commerce and culture directly to the Rhine mouth ports, among them Utrecht. Abbess Edburgh of Minster maintained her close friendship with St Boniface throughout his correspondence. As Abbess of Minster in Thanet, as we believe, she was the teacher of his closest companion, Leoba, who was buried with St Boniface in Fulda in what is now Germany. If Abbess Edburgh (+ 751) is synonomous with the East Anglian King’s sister, she represents the high point of East Anglian royal culture in Kent, through her knowledge of the Scriptures, poetry, calligraphy and her connections with Ely. She had a command of Latin and a good understanding of theology, like her brother, as is witnessed to by a surviving letter from him, probably taken to St Boniface by ship from Ipswich. Thus, Aelfwald’s kingdom had one of the major ports of the North Sea coastal rim, a new urban centre with a pottery quarter and industry, a minting organisation, several monasteries and two dioceses, all under royal patronage.

However, King Aelfwald had no successor and little East Anglia began to slip under the dominance of a much larger Anglian Kingdom, that of Mercia, the Midlands. Thus, Aelfwald was succeeded by a certain Beonna and Aethelberht who divided the Kingdom between them, perhaps one in what we now call Suffolk and the other in what became Norfolk. Then came a King Aethelred who was based in what later became Bury St Edmunds. However, all this time real power lay in the hands of King Offa of Mercia (c.765-796). Nevertheless, at this time the monastic centre in Brandon assumed importance, perhaps with Offa’s patronage.

Next there appeared the figure of the son of King Aethelred, King Aethelbert (Albright). He seems to have come to power after his father in the 780s and pursued a line, independent of Mercia. However, in 794 this King Aethelbert was beheaded outside Hereford in western Mercia, presumably by King Offa, and ever after venerated as a martyr with many dedications of churches in Suffolk, especially at Hoxne and near Ipswich at Albrighteston (named after him) and near Felixstowe, but also across the Suffolk borders, to the north in Norfolk and to the south in Essex. After this royal murder, Offa invaded East Anglia and subdued it after a battle at Blood Hill, near Claydon outside Ipswich.

St Aethelbert was succeeded by a new puppet of Mercia, King Edwald, who reigned at least into the 810s. The next shadowy figures who emerge are a King Athelstan (c. 821-845), still it seems under Mercian patronage, who had faced an attack from the Danish Vikings in 841, and then a King Athelwerd (c. 845-855). Viking attacks were to be faced again, this time by the greatest East Anglian of them all, King Edmund (841-869).

King Edmund

Of royal origin, Edmund was born on Christmas Day 841 and was brought up in piety. ‘From his earliest youth, he followed Christ wholeheartedly’. In particular the young Edmund learned to love the name of Christ, which was to go with him all his life. He learned to read and began to learn the Psalter by heart. Edmund was called to become King in 855, aged only fourteen. Chosen King at what is now Caistor St Edmund, just to the south of Norwich, in 856 Edmund was probably anointed and crowned King of East Anglia at Bures on the border of Suffolk and Essex. This town commanded the strategic crossing-place over the river between East Anglia and Essex.

‘Edmund the blessed, King of the East Angles, was wise and honourable, and always glorified by his noble conduct before Almighty God. He was humble and devout, and continued so steadfast that he would not yield to shameful sins, nor in any way did he bend aside his conduct, but was always mindful of the true teaching…. He was bountiful to the poor and to widows even like a father and always benignly led his people to righteousness, and controlled the violent and lived happily in the true faith’. So reads the Life of St Edmund written in the tenth century, which concludes: ‘He was raised up by God to be the defender of His Church’.

It was into this world that in 865 the storm broke. The storm consisted of a full-scale Viking invasion, some twenty-thousand strong, which landed on the Suffolk coast, but then went north towards York. It may be that at this time Edmund rebuilt the great earthworks to the south-west of his Kingdom near Little Abington, now in Cambridgeshire, a stretch of which is known as ‘St. Edmund’s Ditch’ and at its northern end there is an area called ‘St. Edmund’s Fen’. In any case, he fought alongside his friend, the future King Alfred the Great, in Nottingham. In 869 the Vikings reappeared and in the late autumn a pitched battle took place between them and Edmund’s forces at Thetford in southern Norfolk.

Edmund was victorious, but at great cost. Now outmatched, Edmund retreated almost certainly towards the centre at Hoxne in north Suffolk. The Vikings offered peace – at a price. A messenger came with the offer, an offer which meant the Christian Edmund becoming an under-king to the pagans. It is clear that he would neither see himself become the puppet ruler of pagans, nor would he flee from possible martyrdom. His reply to the messenger was: ‘I shall not submit to a pagan master for the love of earthly life; first you must accept our holy faith’. ‘I have vowed to live under Christ, to live under Christ alone, to reign under Christ alone’.

It would also seem that Edmund saw the possibility that in his own death his Kingdom might find peace: ‘I alone should die for my people, that the whole nation should not perish’. The Vikings now advanced on Hoxne. They surrounded Edmund who wished to imitate Christ, Who forbade Peter to use arms. The Vikings ‘bound Edmund and shamefully insulted him, beating him with clubs’. They tried to make Edmund renounce his Faith: ‘Living or dead, nothing shall separate me from the love of Christ. Christ’s Faith was his mighty shield’. ‘Then they led the faithful King to a tree and bound him to it tightly. Afterwards they whipped him for a long time and he always called with true faith on Christ the Saviour.

Saint Edmund

As a result of his faith and his calling on Christ to help him, the pagans became furious. They shot at him with arrows as if for their pleasure until he bristled with them, like St Sebastian. When the seamen saw that the noble king would not deny Christ but called on Him with steadfast faith, they beheaded him’. ‘His soul departed joyfully to Christ’. His last words were ‘Jesus! Jesus!’. It was Monday 20 November 869. Edmund was not yet twenty-eight years old; he had reigned for less than thirteen years. Thus he exchanged an earthly crown for a heavenly one, exchanging Kingdom for Martyrdom. After killing the King at Hoxne, the Vikings returned to their ships, throwing into thick brambles the head, which they had taken ‘that it might not be buried’. The story continues: ‘Then some time after they had gone, country folk came and were very sad, especially because they had not the head with the body’.

According to tradition, forty days later, on 30 December 869, their search was rewarded. In their desperation the searchers cried out, ‘Where are you?’ Incredibly they received an answer, which to them sounded like, ‘Here, here, here’. Following the sounds they found a grey wolf (Edmund’s own wolfhound?) guarding the head between its paws: ‘They were astonished…and carried the head home with them….; but the wolf followed on with the head, as if he were tame, and then turned back again into the wood’. Symbolically the wolf had been converted by St Edmund’s sacrifice, just as the sea-wolves, the Vikings, would also be converted by their victim. ‘Then the country folk laid the head by the holy body, and buried him with haste as best they could, and full soon built a church over him’.

The miracle of Edmund’s sacrifice was that within nine years the ‘sea-wolves’ who had martyred him were accepting the Christian Faith. Miraculously, the first Christian King of East Anglia after St Edmund was a former Viking, baptised Athelstan – the blood of martyrs had triumphed over enmity. Meanwhile, the lowly wooden chapel in Hoxne, where Edmund’s remains had been buried, witnessed miracles. ‘Wonders were often worked at the chapel where he was buried. At night some of the faithful would notice a column of light hovering over the shrine from evening until dawn. Then, one night a blind man and a boy who led him came through the woods. Lost, they saw a building, which they were glad to enter for the night. But once inside, they stumbled onto the grave and realised that this building contained a tomb. Nevertheless, they decided to stay. Hardly had they fallen asleep when they awoke, a column of light shining before them. At dawn the blind man awoke and for the first time in his life he saw day break. The miracle was told to others – a man blind from birth had regained his sight.

Already by 895 King Alfred had minted coins bearing the image of ‘St Edmund the King’. Other coins had also been struck, through the ironies of Providence, by Vikings, styling Edmund ‘Saint’. But it was not until 902, according to some traditions, that the Bishop who was responsible for war-torn East Anglia resolved to move the body of St Edmund to a more worthy place, to Bedricsworth, now called Bury St Edmunds. It lay and lies exactly at the centre of a cross drawn over the four counties of Eastern England, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Essex.

The Bishop with his clergy proceeded the twenty-five miles to Hoxne to fetch the relics. On opening the coffin, they were amazed for they saw not bones and dust, but their martyred King Edmund, his body incorrupt as if asleep and his head united with his body – only a threadlike seam around the neck bore witness to his beheading. The arrow wounds had also healed. ‘The devout multitude carried the body to the shrine in the new church, there to await in the same peaceful sleep the joys of the resurrection. In this manner took place the first translation of St Edmund, thirty-three years after his burial.

Conclusion: King and Martyr

As regards the church at Bedricsworth we are told that it was enriched with gold and silver in the saint’s honour. Indeed such was the veneration of the Royal Martyr Edmund at Bedricsworth, that the town was variously called ‘St Edmundstowe’, ‘Edmundston’ and ‘Kingston’ before becoming Bury St Edmunds. From this time on the monastery of St Edmund became richer. By 1044 its ‘liberty’ or patrimony came to include a third of Suffolk, including all of West Suffolk. Pilgrims began to come in great numbers and pilgrim ways developed, especially the road to Newmarket and the London road. Later, pilgrims brought in a pious custom of kneeling as soon as they caught sight of the monastery and then walking the last mile barefoot.

St Edmund became a national hero and his name, meaning ‘blessed protection’, became a reality as he was adopted as England’s Patron Saint, ‘a terrible defender of his own’, as we have seen again and again in recent times also, including in Little Abington, where now stands an Orthodox church in his honour. He was a very popular saint, with over sixty churches dedicated to him. Both after the First Reformation of the Roman Catholic Norman Conquest in 1066, when men became less sincere and righteous in their faith and miracles fewer, and also after the Protestant Second Reformation in the sixteenth century, when they tried to erase Edmund’s name from the land, there have still been those who keep St Edmund in their hearts and minds.

St Edmund’s martyrdom ended the periods of foundation and then of the consolidation of the Faith which had been brought to Suffolk two and a half centuries before, with the baptism of King Raedwald. After the Martyr-King of East Anglia, Christianity developed anew as the Faith of England and the English, unchallenged for 200 years until the fateful year of 1066, after which all changed. Edmund King and Martyr is the culminating example of the greatest era of English Orthodox Christianity and his martyrdom is the consecrated symbol of its passing. For the Church is confirmed by the blood of the martyrs.

Archpriest Andrew Phillips

St Felix Orthodox Church,

Felixstowe,

Suffolk

4 November 2021

 

Towards a Network of Twelve Multinational Orthodox Churches in the East of England

The Past

Non-Orthodox Western Europe is divided into 79 (NUTS-1) regions. Each has a population of between 3 and 7 million. Of these, nine are in England and our own region is the East of England, with a population of 6.2 million and consisting of six counties. In the east there are the large counties of Essex (1,417 square miles and 1.83 million people), Suffolk (1,466 square miles, but only 758,000 people) and Norfolk (2,074 square miles, but only 904,000 people), and in the west; the small counties of Hertfordshire (only 634 square miles, but 1.18 million people) and Bedfordshire (only 477 square miles and 670,000 people), followed by the large county of Cambridgeshire (1,309 square miles, but only 852,000 people).

A number of basically mononational, new calendar Orthodox missions exist in the East of England, some have existed for over five decades. These have largely catered for now mainly older Greeks or else, in much smaller numbers, for mainly older ex-Anglicans. Among them are for example Greek parishes in Great Yarmouth, Cambridge, Norwich and Southend and missions for ex-Anglicans in Norfolk, Essex and Cambridgeshire. There are also two new calendar Romanian missions in the region now and two old calendar Serbian missions have existed for several decades in Bedford and Letchworth.

A number of small and sometimes temporary Russian Orthodox missions have also existed. Notably, there was one which opened in the village of Walsingham in Norfolk in the 1960s and lasted for over 30 years (thanks to the pioneering work of a former Anglican, Fr David (Meyrick)). Much more recently, in order of date, there have been, or still are, small missions in Bury St Edmunds (2000-02 and 2017-18), in the village of Mettingham (founded in 2009 and with very regular services), a chapel outside Clacton (occasional services since 2010), and services in Ipswich (occasional services since 2015) and Wisbech (occasional services since 2016).

The Present

Apart from the above, from 1997 on permanent, multinational, old calendar and public-access Orthodox churches have also opened. These are, together with their dedications:

1997 – Felixstowe, Suffolk – St Felix

2002 – Kings Lynn, Norfolk – The Nativity of the Mother of God (and holding in special memory the Tsar-Martyr Nicholas who visited the town in 1894).

2008 – Colchester, Essex – St John of Shanghai (also with a winter church dedicated to All the Saints of the Isles).

2015 – Norwich, Norfolk – St Alexander Nevsky.

2015 – Peterborough, Cambridgeshire – St Olga.

2021- Cambridge-Little Abington, Cambridgeshire – St Edmund (and holding in special memory the other local saint, St Audrey of Ely).

All the above are in Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire and three of these churches, Colchester, Norwich and Cambridge-Little Abington, have their own churches. Although the three other churches are yet to obtain their own premises for the moment, it is still time to think of working elsewhere also.

The Future

We can think of founding and dedicating churches as a priority, in:

Bedford. This could be dedicated to Sts Peter and Paul, following the dedication of its first ever church to St Paul, founded in the eighth century, situated centrally on the banks of the River Ouse. This church would look after all Orthodox in the small county of Bedfordshire.

St Albans. The dedication must be to St Alban the Protomartyr and a large church here would look after all Orthodox in the small but densely-populated county of Hertfordshire.

Romford (formerly Essex, now Essex in east London). In a working-class area of great and multinational immigration, we suggest that a large church here be dedicated to St John of Kronstadt.

Lowestoft, Suffolk. The dedication in this former fishing port could be to St Nicholas. It would look after all Orthodox on the Suffolk and east Norfolk coast.

Southend. In the largest town in Essex, with a densely-populated catchment area, and as a former fishing port, we suggest a dedication to the fisherman St Andrew.

Thetford, Norfolk. Here in the centre of this whole network of churches, we suggest a dedication to the Resurrection.

Such a list of churches, open, about to open and possibly to open, does not exclude the existence of old and new chapels and churches, both present and future, in places in addition to these centres. Obvious choices would be in the large town of Harlow in Essex, a town on the north Norfolk coast such as Wells-next-the-Sea and, albeit outside the East of England, Boston in Lincolnshire. Similarly, there should be both a monastery and a convent in the East of England, perhaps one near the Suffolk coast and one in the west on the opposite side of the region.

However, this network, with three churches in the most populous county of Essex (if we include Romford as still in Essex), three in the largest county of Norfolk, two each in the very similar counties of Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, and one each in the small counties of Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire, would meet the needs of most Orthodox. It would bring all within a maximum 25-mile or 25-minute range of a church, the expression of our pastoral responsibility. Now we await the hand of Providence, the blessing of a bishop and the work of the people.

On Edmund the Martyred King

Men become devils and all dreams overthrown,

Shadows of moonlit trees and faces unknown.

Hope itself, with Edmund’s England, here lies slain.

Be warned: He will haunt you and come back again.

 

Bury King Edmund beneath the arrow shower.

Bury King Edmund beneath the fading hour.

Bury King Edmund beneath the stubble ground.

Bury King Edmund beneath the forest mound.

 

Bury King Edmund beneath the failing light.

Bury King Edmund beneath the thick of night.

Bury King Edmund beneath the stars that stand.

Bury King Edmund beneath his gentle land.

 

Bury King Edmund beneath the autumn bough.

Bury King Edmund beneath the snow and plough.

 

Edmund’s spirit is in little market towns,

Where we’d live as simple souls and win our crowns.

As a Saint, Edmund has shone forth through our tears,

Edmund’s prayed for us through all the clouded years.

 

Bury King Edmund beneath the spring green born.

Bury King Edmund beneath the standing corn.

 

Bury King Edmund beneath the hearts that cower.

Bury King Edmund beneath the lust for power.

Bury King Edmund beneath the greed for gold.

Bury King Edmund beneath the mind grown cold.

 

Bury King Edmund beneath the old faith lost.

Bury King Edmund beneath the darkness crossed.

Bury King Edmund beneath Empire that lied.

Bury King Edmund beneath the proud mind’s pride.

 

We who are Edmund’s people know only this:

There’s no help but in Edmund and his God’s bliss

And on the last day he will rise from his grave:

Edmund the Martyred King, risen bright to save.