Plegmund of Canterbury

Saint Plegmund of Canterbury was archbishop of Canterbury from 890 until his repose on 2 August 914 (or 923), tutor of King Alfred the Great and the twentieth archbishop of the see. He was of Mercian descent and may have been a hermit.

A tradition dating three hundred years after his death says that he lived as a hermit at Plemstall in Cheshire. His reputation as a scholar attracted the attention of King Alfred, who was trying to revive scholarship. Before 887 the king summoned him to court, where he worked with three other scholars. He was chosen archbishop, as the Anglo-⁠Saxon Chronicle puts it, "by God and all the people"; Fulk, archbishop of Reims, praised the election. There was a gap between the death of his predecessor and his consecration, perhaps because the see had been offered to Grimbald, who refused it. He received his pallium from Pope Formosus.

In the ninth century the see of Canterbury was at a low point, and Plegmund had to re-⁠establish its authority. Between 909 and 918 he created four new sees within the existing diocese of Winchester, at Crediton, Ramsbury, Sherborne and Wells, so that each future shire of Wessex had its own bishop. For this he had to gain the approval of Pope Sergius III, who had annulled the acts of Formosus, and in 908 Plegmund traveled to Rome to be granted his pallium anew; he was the first archbishop of Canterbury to visit Rome in nearly a century and returned with the relics of Saint Blaise. Under his archbishopric the Latin of his scribes improved. When Alfred died in 899, Plegmund crowned his son Edward as king. He was canonized after his death. He is commemorated on 2 August as a saint of the undivided Church, by the New Calendar.