Category Archives: Ancient Western Holiness

The Glory of the Isles

Written from an Orthodox standpoint and intended primarily for older children and teenagers, this booklet, first printed in 2009, sold out and now reprinted, can also be read by adults. In simple language, it explains the history of the first thousand years of Christianity in Great Britain and Ireland. Giving the lives of the main saints of Britain and Ireland, it is abundantly illustrated with a map, eleven line drawings and thirteen icons, all printed on glossy paper.

Its chapters explain the Glastonbury legend of St Joseph of Arimathea, the stories of St Alban and the Celtic saints, Patrick, David, Columba, Aidan, the Italian Archbishop of Canterbury St Augustine, the Greek Archbishop of Canterbury St Theodore, then St Bede and other English heroes like St Edmund, St Alfred (with his unique icon) and St Alphege. It considers the Norman Invasion with sadness and looks forward to a potential rebirth of native Orthodoxy under the spiritual guidance of St John the Wonderworker and St Elizabeth the New Martyr. It concludes:

‘For we have a spiritual secret weapon buried in our Isles, which can deliver us from the fury of the Northmen, from whom we have suffered for a thousand years. This secret weapon, which the world cannot see, understand or take from us, is the prayers of the saints of the Isles – our True Glory. The Glory of the Isles is not in the pride of the past and its crimes. It is in the humility of the Saints. And this is what makes sincere Orthodox Christians different from others’.

Printed on high quality paper, with the 2012 icon of All the Saints of Britain and Ireland on the cover, this is an ideal resource for Orthodox church schools.

Bury St Edmunds, 2014. 38 pages. £4 (6 euros/$12) postage included.

The Gathering of the Nations

Fear not, for I am with thee: I will bring thy seed from the east, and gather thee from the west.

Isaiah 43, 5

What is astonishing to the still loyal and uncompromised Orthodox heart and mind is not that the Western world lovingly cherishes its illogical prejudice that the Russian Orthodox Church is wild, backward and lacking in culture, as it so clearly expressed in local media coverage of the 2006 Sourozh schism. What is astonishing is rather that the Western world lovingly cherishes Antichrist and unstintingly and at every turn consistently advances his cause. For his primary aim is the destruction of the integrity of the Orthodox Church, a cause already advanced by the venality of some in many smaller Local Churches outside the canonical territory of Rus, and which he is desperately trying to advance inside that territory, especially on its outer fringes, using as his tools the madcap schemes of his Western and Westernised dupes.

What the Western world does not understand here is that the downfall of Orthodoxy would lead automatically to the last stage of its own spiritual and so cultural suicide, followed by the eradication of all Christian Faith universally. This is because the Western world, like the rest of the world, is wholly dependent on the rays of light that shine, as if from the Sun, from the Orthodox Church, the One and Only Church, the One and Only Spiritual Sun.

The Western world has long been enslaved to Antichrist, worst of all, without even noticing it. This is the most perilous of states because it indicates total self-delusion. This is the self-delusion of him who says ‘the devil does not exist’, so proving not only that the devil does exist, but also that he is his main servant. The destruction of Russian Orthodoxy, attempted, but by not attained by the Western world from 1917 on, would mean that the forces engulfing it would then engulf the Western world and the rest. Russian Orthodoxy sees the fate of the Western world in its latest foolish outburst of short-sighted self-destructiveness, called consumerism, and knows that thus it dooms itself to destruction – unless it repents before the end, so redeeming itself from its repeated sinful attempts to destroy Sovereign and Imperial Rus since 1917.

If this repentance is weighty enough, then there is still even the chance before the end of gathering together the remnants of all the nations, Orthodox, heterodox and even pagan, and bringing them under the spiritual reign of a restored Sovereign and Imperial Rus. If not, then we will be forced to take refuge, fleeing ‘into the mountains’ from the floods of iniquity and the tides of destruction, our last hope remaining only in the Second Coming.

Suffolk Restores St Edmund

The county of Suffolk was buzzing with activities yesterday in celebration of (the new style) St Edmund’s Day. Downpours failed to dampen the spirits as different events honoured the King of East Anglia, who was martyred by Viking invaders on 20 November 869.

Greater Anglia’s St Edmund train was rededicated at Ipswich railway station yesterday morning by the Precentor of St Edmundsbury Cathedral. In Bury St Edmunds, Greene King marked the day by opening its new £750,000 St Edmund Brewhouse at its headquarters in the town. Elsewhere, St Edmundsbury Cathedral hosted a performance of Courage of a King and held a special communion service. Author Mark Taylor was at the Cathedral and at Waterstones signing copies of his new book Edmund: The Untold Story of the Martyr King and his Kingdom, and prizes in the St Edmund’s Day Awards were handed out yesterday evening. Thousands of schoolchildren across Suffolk took part in activities to promote the Saint. And finally councillors from Suffolk and Norfolk, the bulk of the old East Anglian Kingdom, met to discuss uniting several of their services.

St Edmund has always been the patron saint of England, even though St George the Great-Martyr eclipsed him from the 14th century on. In the last few years, however, throughout East Anglia, St Edmund has been promoted and begun to eclipse St George as the local favourite. The Bury St Edmunds MP, David Ruffley, and The East Anglian Daily Times have backed a campaign to get him reinstated as the nation’s patron saint, which has been led by BBC Radio Suffolk.

Our Hope

Arise, O saint-haunted Europe, the one thousand years have passed!

There was once a Europe where peoples were still free to follow Christ and their own innocent ways, a Europe where Englishmen played cricket, Portuguese sang fado, Carinthians dressed in folk costume, French people tasted wine from all over, Italians sang opera at work, Scottish people wore kilts, Spaniards were noble, Germans were helpful and Dutch people were informal; as for Russians, they named their children Nicholas and Alexandra. And it seemed that this would continue until Kingdom come…

But then there came a grey Europe, a homogenous Union, in which centralised bureaucrats try to regulate and control every detail of our lives. This is an anti-Europe which plays at Hitler’s game of divide and rule, which now attempts to balkanise and provincialise the next victims of EU debaptism and gay parade colonisation, the weak countries of the soft underbelly of the Orthodox world, Montenegro, Macedonia, the Ukraine and, if only it were possible for the eurocrats, Moldova, Georgia and even Belarus.

But there is coming a Rus of all the East Slav peoples, reunited in a single Tsardom, opposed to the electronic concentration camp of the New World Order in formation. This will be a Rus where the media are not controlled, as now, by foreign, anti-Orthodox propaganda, which brainwash, debauch and zombify the people, where the families with many children will be protected from countries that have renounced Christ and seem to be crawling towards hell, of their own so-called free but indoctrinated and conditioned will.

This is yet to be a Rus under a Tsar chosen by the Queen of Heaven, as Elder Nikolai Guryanov foretold, a Romanov by his mother, as the prophecies tell us, where Siberia will be transformed, the Church cleansed and joined by many peoples, including the Greek, as Elder Joseph of Vatopedi foretold. Rus will be the Ark for all faithful Orthodox when Orthodoxy will have faltered elsewhere. And there, from Europe, Asia and America, people will gather to live according to the Church and preach the Orthodox Gospel to the ends of the earth.

Let us pray to Christ, the Mother of God and the holy, martyred Tsar Nicholas, his family and all the New Martyrs and Confessors that this may soon be so.

St Edwin

In recent years, God has revealed to us more about several saints of these Isles, most notably St Edward the Martyr, but there have been other miracles too, concerning St Alfred, St Edmund, St John of Beverley, St Botolph and St Birinus, for example. The Lord seems to be speaking through the local saints of old to a modern society that has utterly lost its way in unsaintliness. The latest in this series of revelations may concern St Edwin (584-633), whose feast day it is today according to the Orthodox calendar (12/25 October).

With the help of a professional archaeologist, a group from a village called Cuckney near Mansfield in Nottinghamshire may be about to find the true site of the martyrdom of England’s first Christian king. Cuckney could soon have a place in St Edwin’s story, with the possibility that this village, and not the town of Hatfield, located to the north east of Doncaster some 40 miles away, is the actual site of the Battle of Hatfield of 633. There have been clues before – at the time of the battle, the Cuckney area was known as Hatfield, while nearby Edwinstowe mean’s ‘Edwin’s shrine’. Then there is St Edwin’s Cross, which marks the site of a chapel erected in 1201, where a hermit prayed to Edwin, who had been proclaimed a saint by the people in the years after his death.

Tradition has it that St Edwin’s relics were taken from the battlefield by his own men and secretly buried to protect his remains from his pagan conquerors. But it was a discovery by a group of workmen at St Mary’s Church in Cuckney in 1951 that interested historians. As they dug down through the floor of the church to support the Norman structure against recent mining activity, they discovered skeletons. Not one or two, but hundreds – maybe up to 200, all laid out in rows, all with their feet facing east. Villagers who remember the discovery have described skulls being piled up in the corner of the church for weeks before their reburial.

This is the first problem for archaeologists and the Battle of Hatfield Investigation Society, who have joined up to try and prove that St Edwin was martyred in Cuckney and not in Yorkshire, as official history tells us. Andrew Gaunt, the director of Mercian Archaeology, who is working with the group, believes that the bodies represent the site of a massacre. He also believes that the most likely explanation for their current whereabouts is that they were simply put back where they were found. He said: ‘Often churches were built on the sites of burial mounds and it is reasonable to assume at this stage that the bodies pre-date the church. Where you get a lot of bodies buried together, it can suggest that they’ve been caught in a bottle neck during a battle, as people were typically buried close to where they fell’.

St Mary’s Church sits at the foot of a gentle valley, quite close to the river, and Mr Gaunt believes that the men were possibly driven down the hill in the battle and slaughtered, trapped between the invading force, steep hills and the river. A church at the site is mentioned in the Domesday Book in 1086, but the present building dates from the twelfth century. Joseph Waterfall, from the Battle of Hatfield Investigation Society, said: ‘We believe King Edwin was slain in the fields near Cuckney, hence the reason for the 200 or so skeletons. But the history books state that he was slain north-east of Doncaster, but no evidence was ever produced to support this claim’.

With modern carbon dating technology, access to the skeletons would allow archaeologists to date them to a specific period – perhaps dating the remains to the approximate time of King Edwin’s death. And more importantly, along with the other evidence from the local area, it may pinpoint the site of the death of England’s first Christian king to Nottinghamshire. ‘Edwin is England’s first Christian king and he was killed by pagans, so historically that makes him hugely significant’, said Andrew Gaunt. ‘We know from the records that bodies were discovered from about 18 inches down and they may have gone down to about seven feet deep. If we can gain access to the bodies and date those bodies to the time of Edwin’s death, then with all the other evidence around us, we can reasonably conclude that Cuckney is the actual site of the Battle of Hatfield’.