[My wife, who is an Episcopal parish administrator, occasionally needed some fillers when the parish sent out its monthly newsletter.  I wrote these silly “lives of the saints” to fill in the blank spaces.]

Alphege of Canterbury, born of a noble family about 953, gave up the worldly life at a young age to enter the monastery of Deerhurst.  So devout was he, that he later moved on to a life of even greater austerity and seclusion as a hermit near the hot springs of Bath.

Somewhat like Jefferson and Washington, who would have preferred to be left alone but were continually called to public service, Alphege was persuaded, first by Dunstan (now St. Dunstan) and then by Aethelwold (still just Aethelwold) to become, respectively, the Abbot of Bath and the Bishop of Winchester.  This latter post he held for more than twenty years.

Interestingly, the greatest problem of this era in England was terrorism.  Indeed, modern readers may take some consolation in remarking that the terrorism came from Danes and Norwegians, people who, after they got over their Viking phase, went on to become generally quite liberal and civilized.

In Alphege’s day, though, their invasions were regular and horrific, and King Aethelred the Unready (i.e. the Headstrong) tried vainly to placate the Vikings with bribes (Danegeld).  In 994 King Olaf of Norway, forced to retreat from an attack on London, went on to plunder the south of England.  (King Olaf was a Christian, it is worth noting, but in his defense, he had not had the benefit of Confirmation.)  Alphege sought peace through the power of the Gospel. By his intercession, he persuaded Olaf to be confirmed.  Aethelred adopted Olaf as a son, and Olaf vowed never to invade England again, a promise that, doubtless to the surprise of the locals,  he actually kept.

The Danes were not so cooperative.  They invaded in 1011.  At this point, Alphege, who presumably still wanted to be a hermit, nonetheless found himself to be the Archbishop of Canterbury.  Taken and held captive in Greenwich for a ransom that would ruin his already poor parishioners, Alphege refused that it should be paid.  This riled the rank and file Vikings who, over the protests of their chief, Thorkell the Tall, began pelting Alphege in a drunken rage.  A blow on the head with an axe finally killed Alphege, though some accounts make this out to have been a  coup de grace by a sympathizer with typically Scandinavian views on euthanasia.  The tiny church of St. Alphege still stands on the place in Greenwich where he was murdered, standing up to terrorists for the protection of his flock.