Saints Ewald the Black and Ewald the Fair

Everything known of the two Ewalds comes from a single chapter of Bede's Ecclesiastical History, written in Northumbria. ² The 1909 Catholic Encyclopedia retells it closely and quotes him by chapter; Butler does the same, adding the later history of their relics. ¹³ Butler notes that they were honored as saints straight away, since Bede also entered them in his Martyrology. ³

Bede tells the story as the sequel to another. Willibrord had crossed to Frisia with eleven companions, and Pepin, duke of the Franks, had sent them to preach under his protection. ² "Following their example," Bede goes on, two more English priests went into the country of the Old Saxons. ² The encyclopedia thinks they knew Willibrord and shared his zeal, and notes that some writers counted them among his eleven companions, but judges it more likely that they left England after him. ¹ The Roman Martyrology says they were formed by the example of Willibrord and his companions. ⁴

They had lived for a long time in Ireland as exiles "for the sake of the eternal country," Bede says. ² "They were alike in name as in devotion, Hewald being the name of both," and from "the different colour of their hair" one was called Black Hewald and the other White Hewald. ² Both were devout, but the Black was the more learned in Scripture. ¹²

Bede does not say they were brothers, and the encyclopedia does not either. ¹² Butler calls them "two brothers," and Nominis does too. ³⁵ The encyclopedia makes them natives of Northumbria; Bede says only that they were of the English nation. ¹²

The Old Saxons, Bede explains, had no king. ² They had many ealdormen, and when war threatened they cast lots and all followed the one the lot fell on until the war ended, when they were equal again. ¹² Butler places the country between the Rhine, the Yssel and the Wesel, in what became the dioceses of Münster, Osnabrück and Paderborn; the encyclopedia names the same three dioceses. ¹³

The two priests took lodging with the reeve of a township and asked him to take them to the ealdorman over him, because they had a message of importance for him. ² He kept them in his house for some days and promised to send them on. ²

They did not hide what they were. Bede says they gave themselves continually to psalms and prayer and offered Mass every day, "having with them sacred vessels and a consecrated table for an altar." ² The people of the place saw that they were of another religion and grew afraid that, if the priests reached the ealdorman, they would turn him from the old gods and the whole province would be made to change its worship. ¹²

So they seized them. Bede says they killed White Hewald outright with the sword but "put Black Hewald to lingering torture and tore him limb from limb in horrible fashion," and threw both bodies into the Rhine. ² The encyclopedia gives the reason for the difference: the Black was their spokesman and the bolder of the two. ¹ It places the killing at Aplerbeck, "where a chapel still stands"; Nominis gives the place, probably, as Anlerbeck in Westphalia. ¹⁵

When the ealdorman heard, Bede says, he was furious that strangers who had wanted to see him had been prevented, and he had the villagers put to death and their village burned. ² "The aforesaid priests and servants of Christ suffered on the 3rd of October." ²

The year is less certain than the day. Bede's translator, Sellar, says simply that it "cannot be fixed," noting only that the mission must have come after Willibrord's of 690. ² The encyclopedia dates their arrival to about 690 and their death to about 695. ¹ Butler has them arriving about 694 and dying between 690 and 700, "most probably in 695," and the French text of the Martyrology gives 695. ³⁵

Bede then reports the wonders. The bodies were carried upstream, against the current, for almost forty miles, to the place where their companions were, and every night a long ray of light shone over them, seen even by the pagans who had killed them. ² One of the martyrs appeared in a dream to a companion named Tilmon, who had been a thegn before he became a monk, and told him he would find their bodies where he saw the light reaching from heaven to earth. ¹² He did, and they were buried with the honor due to martyrs. ²

Bede says the day of their passion, or of the finding of their bodies, was kept in that region with veneration, and that a spring burst out where they were killed, still flowing in his day. ² Butler reflects the same uncertainty in his own way, saying October 3 "was probably either the day of their death or of some translation." ³

Pepin heard what had happened, had the bodies brought to him, and buried them with honor in Cologne. ² Sellar's note and the encyclopedia name the church as Saint Cunibert's, and Butler says they were still kept there in a gilt shrine in his day. ¹²³

The encyclopedia says that when Archbishop Anno of Cologne opened the shrine in 1074, he gave the martyrs' heads to Bishop Frederick of Münster, and that these were probably destroyed by the Anabaptists in 1534; Butler says the same. ¹³ It adds that Saint Norbert, visiting Cologne in 1121, received small vessels of relics that included bones of the Ewalds, taken either to Prémontré or to the Premonstratensian house at Florennes. ¹

The two Ewalds are the patrons of Westphalia. The encyclopedia says they "are honoured as patrons in Westphalia," and Butler calls them its tutelar saints. ¹³ The encyclopedia adds that their feast was kept in the dioceses of Cologne and Münster. ¹

Their feast is October 3, the day Bede gives for their martyrdom. ² The encyclopedia and Butler both say the Roman Martyrology names them that day, and the current Martyrology still does. ¹³⁴

They never preached a sermon that anyone recorded. ² They were found out by their prayer: psalms sung, Mass said every day on a portable altar, in a stranger's guesthouse while they waited. ² Nothing in Bede suggests they tried to hide it to make the meeting go more smoothly. ²

The story does not resolve neatly. The men who killed them were afraid of losing their gods, and the ealdorman answered the killing with more killing, burning the village. ² Bede reports it without comment, and there is no reason to soften it here. ²

What remains of them is a pair of names that differ only by the color of a man's hair, a date, and a chapter that a monk in Northumbria thought worth writing down. ² They went a long way to deliver a message and were killed before they could, and the Church has kept their day ever since. ²⁴