The Ancient Church

A Contemporary Icon of St. Ethelhard of Canterbury, A Saintly Father in Our Apostolic Succession  Collected and Edited by Bp. Joseph ( Ancient Church of the West )  St. Ethelhard (also spelled Aethelheard, or Aethilheard), fourteenth Archbishop of Canterbury, stands as a quiet yet immovable pillar of the English Church in the tumultuous days of the late eighth century. Though his cult was cruelly suppressed following the Norman conquest and remains largely forgotten in modern devotion, he was deeply venerated in his own time as a confessor and restorer of canonical order in the Anglo-Saxon Church. Very little is known of Ethelhard’s youth, save that he was first a monk and later the Abbot of Louth in Lincolnshire, a region then steeped in monastic simplicity and Northumbrian piety. Whether or not he ever served as bishop of Winchester is disputed among historians; what is certain, however, is that his elevation to the primatial see of Canterbury occurred during a time of grave...