There is more information available about the dress of King Edward “the Confessor” than any other person from Anglo-Saxon England. The evidence includes contemporary or near-contemporary descriptions, depictions of the king from within living memory of his reign, and textile fragments from his tomb. Apart from depictions of the king on coins and his seal – normal and usually stylised images of a monarch – the later development of St. Edward's cult led to a profusion of images of him as well as additions to, and removals from, his tomb in the form of textiles and royal regalia. Interestingly, images of the king himself became a decorative element on textiles, a subject for depiction on wall hangings and embroidered vestments. Yet almost all, possibly all, of these can be seen as refashionings, posthumous reimaginings of the saint-king, reflecting ideals of kingly magnificence (different at different times), and illustrating implausible miracles.

THE LIFE AND CULT OF KING EDWARD

Edward was an unlikely candidate for both kingship and sainthood. Born ca. 1002/1005, he was one of the youngest sons of Æthelred “the Unready,” King of England, by his second wife, Emma of Normandy. Widowed, Emma married the Danish usurper, King Cnut, and her children by Æthelred remained exiled in Normandy. However, in 1042, aged about 40, Edward succeeded his younger half-brother, Harthacnut, to the English throne. He married Edith, daughter of the powerful Wessex Earl Godwin and his wife Gytha, sister-in-law of King Cnut. The marriage was childless.

Little is known about Edward personally, except that he loved hunting and falconry. With no immediate rivals for the throne, his reign was relatively calm, giving later hagiographers the opportunity to construct him as a Man of Peace. He never went into battle, his Godwin brothers-in-law, Earls Harold and Tostig, campaigning successfully on his behalf against the Welsh, and Earl Siward against the Scots. The great religious gesture of Edward's life was the re-endowment and rebuilding in stone of St. Peter's Church (Westminster Abbey), consecrated on 28 December 1065, the week he died; yet there is no evidence that he was particularly reverenced at Westminster immediately after his death.