Frithestan of Winchester

What is securely known of Frithestan comes almost entirely from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, from charters, and from one extraordinary pair of vestments; the rest is later tradition, identified as such below.

The Chronicle records that Denewulf, bishop of Winchester, died in 909, and that Frithestan "took to the bishopric of Winchester" (entered under 910 in Ingram's composite text). William of Malmesbury — writing two centuries later, and cited here at second hand — tells how, when the two great sees of Wessex were divided into five (Winchester losing Wiltshire and Berkshire to the new see of Ramsbury), Archbishop Plegmund consecrated seven bishops in one day, Frithestan for Winchester among them. The Book of Saints (Ramsgate) adds the tradition that he had been a disciple of St Grimbald, the learned monk of Saint-Bertin whom King Alfred had brought to Winchester; the claim is not in the Chronicle, and rests on the later martyrology tradition the Ramsgate compilers drew on.

The one contemporary monument of his episcopate is not a text but a textile. The stole and maniple found in the coffin of St Cuthbert when it was opened at Durham in 1827 — masterpieces of Winchester gold embroidery — carry the woven inscriptions ÆLFFLÆD FIERI PRECEPIT ("Ælfflæd ordered [this] to be made") and PIO EPISCOPO FRIDESTANO ("for the pious bishop Frithestan"): commissioned by Queen Ælfflæd, second wife of Edward the Elder, as a gift for the bishop, they are the earliest witness to his name and style. How they came north is not directly recorded; historians connect them with King Æthelstan's documented visit to Cuthbert's shrine in 934, when the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto records his lavish gifts, vestments among them. Modern historians (Yorke in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Foot's study of Æthelstan — cited here at second hand) read in Frithestan's charter attestations and his apparent absence from Æthelstan's coronation in 925 the traces of strained relations between the new king and Winchester; the sources used for this entry allow the observation to be reported but not tested.

In 931 Frithestan resigned the see, and Byrnstan (Birnstan) — himself venerated as a saint, kept on November 4 — "was blessed in his place," as one Chronicle manuscript puts it; the Ramsgate tradition says Frithestan himself designated him. He died shortly after: the Chronicle's manuscripts diverge, one entering his death with the succession at 931, another under 933 ("This year died Bishop Frithestan"), and modern scholarship settles on 932 or 933. The York calendar's year, 932, lies within this range.

Veneration and later cultus

A cult of Frithestan was kept at Winchester, but it remained modest: he is entered, with his feast on September 10, in later martyrology-derived compilations such as the Ramsgate Book of Saints, and modern hagiographical reference works (Farmer's Oxford Dictionary of Saints, cited at second hand) note that the cult never became widespread and that by William of Malmesbury's day the place of his tomb was no longer known. The Orthodox England list, the York calendar's named upstream, preserves the character the tradition gives him: "He was bishop for twenty-three years, loved the poor and prayed much for the departed."