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St Erkenwald | |
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by ? The Pearl Poet | |
![]() Saint Erkenwald, statue in St Albans Cathedral | |
First published in | Mid to late 15th century |
Country | England |
Language | Early Modern English |
Subject(s) | Theology and statecraft |
Genre(s) | alliterative verse |
Meter | or |
St Erkenwald is a fourteenth-century alliterative poem in Middle English, perhaps composed in the late 1380s or early 1390s.[1][2] It has sometimes been attributed, owing to the Cheshire/Shropshire[3]/Staffordshire Dialect in which it is written, to the Pearl poet who probably wrote the poems Pearl, Patience, Cleanness, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.[4][5]
St Erkenwald imagines an encounter in the seventh century between the historical Erkenwald, Bishop of London 675 to 693, and a corpse from an even earlier period, the period before the Roman conquest of Britain. The poem's themes revolve around the complex history of Britain and England, and the possibility in fourteenth-century Christian thought of the salvation of virtuous pagans.