Saint
The Resting King
A martyred king slept one night among these oak walls.
See it clearly
- What's there
- Saxon-era church with walls of split oak trunks
- Legend from
- Late Saxon
- Tone
- Curious
Greensted ahead: a church of split oak logs, where a martyred king's body is said to have rested one night in 1013.
Greensted's timber church is often called the oldest wooden church in the world, with a nave dated to the late 1000s. Local tradition holds that in 1013 the body of St Edmund, the East Anglian king killed by the Danes in 869, rested here for a night while it was being carried back from London to Bury St Edmunds. An 18th-century antiquarian recorded the villagers' tradition that the body of a dead king had once lain in the church. The Victoria County History saw no reason to doubt the tradition, though a medieval account speaks only of a wooden chapel near Ongar.