Feast day: April 19

St. Alphege

Archbishop, Martyr · c. 953–1012

Patron of —

Archbishop of Canterbury taken captive by a Viking army, who forbade his people to pay his ransom rather than burden the poor, and was killed by his drunken captors.

Alphege — also spelled Ælfheah or Elphege — was an English monk who became bishop of Winchester and, in 1006, archbishop of Canterbury. Austere and charitable, he was famous for his personal poverty and his generosity to the poor, and was much loved by the people of his see.

His archbishopric fell during the renewed Viking onslaught on England. In 1011 a Danish army besieged and sacked Canterbury and took Alphege prisoner, holding him for a huge ransom. The aged archbishop, refusing to let so crushing a sum be extorted from his already impoverished people, forbade anyone to pay it.

Held captive for months, he was brought in April 1012 before his drunken captors at Greenwich. Enraged that no ransom would be paid, they pelted him with the bones and skulls of oxen from their feast, until one of them, in what some accounts call a stroke of mercy, killed him with the blow of an axe.

He was at once honoured as a martyr — the first archbishop of Canterbury to die for the faith. A century and a half later St. Thomas Becket, on the eve of his own martyrdom in that same cathedral, is said to have commended himself to St. Alphege.

He refused to let a ransom be raised for him, knowing it would crush the poor; his furious captors pelted him to death with ox bones at a feast.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/05394a.htm