Today the Church celebrates the life and ministries of:

Edmund of East Anglia, who was born around 840.

Nominated as king while still a boy he became king of Norfolk in 855 and of Suffolk the following year. As king, he won the hearts of his subjects by his care of the poor and his steady suppression of wrong-doing.

When attacked by the Danes, he refused to give over his kingdom or to renounce his faith in Christ. He was tied to a tree, shot with arrows and finally beheaded on this day in the year 870.

His shrine at the town which became known as Bury St Edmunds was an important centre of pilgrimage throughout the Middle Ages.

AND

Priscilla Lydia Sellon, who born probably around 1821.

Though never enjoying good health, she responded to an appeal from the Bishop of Exeter in 1848 for workers amongst the destitute in Plymouth.

The group of women she gathered around her adopted a conventual lifestyle and, in the face of much opposition, she created the Sisters of Mercy.

Her crucial rôle in the revival of Religious Life in the Church of England was enhanced when, in 1856, her sisters joined with the first community founded – the Holy Cross sisters – thereby establishing the Society of the Holy Trinity.

She led her community in starting schools and orphanages, in addition to sisters nursing the sick in slum districts and soldiers in the Crimea.

In her last years, she was an invalid, dying in her mid-fifties on this day in 1876.