I have spent a week in the little village of Giggleswick in the Yorkshire Dales, close to Settle, and about 60 miles by road from the Coptic Orthodox Church of St Mary and St Mina in Stockport.The Church is named for St Alkelda, almost entirely unknown outside these mountain valleys. She was from a noble family in the 9th century, and took up the monastic life in the village of Middleham across the moorland from Giggleswick. She came to Giggleswick to evangelise the local people, and to establish a Church here.
The people were baptised in the waters of the local stream, and in the churchyard there is part of an ancient Anglo-Saxon cross that would have marked the location of a simple wooden chapel.In Middleham, at the Church which is also named for St Alkelda, she was martyed by two Danish/Viking women who strangled her to death in about 866 A.D. She was buried in her simple Church, which may have also been the location of a small convent which she cared for. Inside the Church is a great treasure.
Despite the efforts of those who wished to destroy ever shrine and every relic, she is still buried there. A plaque on one pillar identifies the area where her tomb was found during restoration, and a piece of Anglo-Saxon stonework set into the floor just outside the chancel marks her holy grave.I took the blessing of praying here for a while standing where she is buried, asking her blessing.
I feel a strong connection to her and have asked for her intercessions throughout this week. Before the Protestant Revolution it would have been entirely normal to find such shrines and holy tombs in churches all around the country. But early all have been destroyed, and the holy relics burned or thrown out with the rubbish. But St Alkelda remains, in her own Church.
May her intercessions be with us all, and all those who make pilgrimage to her place of rest.
Really cool history here! The worse things that King Henry VIII did was when he destroyed churches and monasteries even though he supported the Latin Pre-Tridentine Liturgy and format of the Sarum Latin Mass actually ending the Hereford, York, Bangor, and Aberdeen Missals in a consolidation. He even destroyed the Shrine of St Thomas Becket which was uniquely English who had nothing to do with his issue with the Pope, per se in 1538!
The Sarum Missal itself was a consolidation that the Normans led by William the Conqueror brought upon the much more Anglican Missals that were essentially Orthodox Anglican versions of local Orthodox Rites pertaining to local, regional jurisdictions after their victory at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Had Norse heir of the Danes, Orthodox Crusader Harold Hardrada backed by Tristan Godwinson , brother of Anglo-Saxon King Harold Godwinson been willing to come to an agreement and united against William the Conqueror, Orthodox Anglican U.K. might have rejected the final Schism between East and West along with Papal supremacy in 1204 with the failed Latin Patriarchate of Constantinople! The Agreed Statements of 1993 with the Oriental Orthodox would have probably brought the Oriental Orthodox in Communion with the autonomous Church of the Orthodox Anglicans as they could have seen the point in healing the breach of Chalcedon in 451!
Axia Axia Axia!
By the way Father, would not the British Christians in St. Alkelda’s time have accepted chalcedon?
If that is the case, am I allowed to venerate St. Alkelda.
Pray for me.
The saints do not belong to local communities within the Church but to the whole Church. We have already agreed that accepting Chalcedon does not make a person in error in itself, and so all of the saints of all of the Orthodox Churches belong to us all.