Osmund or Asmund (, Aesmundus; Old Swedish: Asmuðær) was a missionary bishop in Sweden in the mid-11th century.
Born at an unknown date c. 1000, probably in England; educated at the schools of Bremen (shortly?) after 1014 (when his sponsor first became a 'bishop of the Norwegians'); served as court-bishop to King Emund the Old of Sweden (who reigned as sole king c. 1050 – c. 1060); was expelled from Sweden and travelled to England via Bremen probably in 1057; died as a monk of Ely in the abbacy of Thurstan (1066 - c.1072).Fairweather 2014, pp. 13-28.
Osmund, missionary bishop in Sweden and monk of Ely, is not to be confused with Saint Osmund, Bishop of Salisbury (d. 1099). He is also to be distinguished from Amund (d. 1082), the successor of Saint David as Bishop of VästeråsFairweather (2014) p. 22. and from the Bishop Osmund who, as a monk of Fécamp, signed a privilege in 1017.Fairweather (2014) p. 23. It is not entirely out of the question that the rune-carver Asmund Karesson, who produced Christian memorials in central Sweden in the 1020s and '30s, might have been the future Bishop Osmund, but this hypothesis has not won much favour in recent years.
Career Swedish bishopric and expulsion Bishop Osmund is best known from the hostile report on an incident in his career which Adam of Bremen derived from a memorandum on recent Swedish affairs written by Archbishop Adalbert of Hamburg-Bremen on the basis of information received from Adalward, formerly Dean of Bremen and later, Bishop of Skara.Adam of Bremen book 3, chapters 15-16
In essence, what this report tells us is that Osmund was a protégé of a bishop of the Norwegians called Sigafridus, who had sponsored his education at Bremen. By the time, in the mid-1050s, when the former Dean Adalward, along with a retinue from Bremen, travelled to Sweden with a view to his acceptance as Bishop of Skara, Osmund was serving as King Emund's court bishop and behaving as if he were the kingdom's archbishop. There ensued a clash, apparently at a public assembly, in which Osmund successfully rejected Adalward's bid to replace him in his position of primacy over the Christians of Sweden. Adalward could only supply evidence of accreditation by the Archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen, whereas Osmund claimed that his own authority came from the papacy, and presumably was able to produce convincing documentation to that effect, though it emerged from examination of the evidence that he had not actually received ordination at Rome, but from 'a certain archbishop of Poland'.
The delegation from Bremen was obliged to return home, fulminating against Osmund in the defamatory terms which were in due course introduced to the public domain in the third book of Master Adam's history of his archdiocese. However, already at the time of the original public controversy, at least one person present expressed strong disapproval of Osmund, maintaining that he was a promulgator of 'unsound teaching of our faith' and Stenkil, King Emund's son-in-law and eventual successor, thought well enough of Adalward to offer him some assistance with his return journey. Furthermore, public opinion in Sweden was to prove very volatile: the death of King Emund's son and heir by poisoning during a military expedition, combined with a disastrous harvest and famine (probably in 1056-7),Trillmich 1961, p. 347, note 1056. proved sufficient to turn the mood of the nation against Osmund, so that he was in his turn expelled from Sweden and Adalward recalled.
Bishop Osmund's first move, after expulsion, seems to have been to make peace with Archbishop Adalbert in Bremen. The archbishop adopted towards him his customary approach towards bishops 'consecrated elsewhere', keeping him in his company for a while in exchange for a promise of obedience, and then giving him a cordial send-off.Adam of Bremen 3, chapter 77 Evidently, Osmund next took ship to England, and what happened afterwards is recorded in a twelfth century chronicle, the Liber Eliensis.Liber Eliensis 2, chapter 99.
Retirement to Ely He received a welcome from King Edward the Confessor and spent a considerable period at court before deciding to enter the Abbey of Ely as a monk. There, he was received by Abbot Wulfric into the community on favourable terms which required him to exercise no office other than that of a bishop. He remained in the monastery until his death 'in the times of Abbot Thurstan', that is, between 1066 and c. 1072.Liber Eliensis 2, chapters 100-112. This abbacy was famously not a peaceful era for Ely. Soon after the Norman Conquest, the resistance-leader Hereward based his militia for a period in the monastery, which endured a protracted siege before the abbot, faced by the expected arrival of Danish reinforcements to the militia, made terms with the Conqueror.Fairweather 2014, pp. 323-6. How much of this time of trouble Osmund may have lived through is not recorded.
Bishop Osmund was one of seven notable individuals from the pre-Conquest era considered by the Benedictine monks of Ely to be so worthy of commemoration as benefactors that their remains, originally entombed in the abbey-church dating from 970, were carefully exhumed for preservation in the Norman-era church which was built to replace it and in 1109 became Ely Cathedral. The remains of the so-called 'Seven Confessors of' Ely have been housed, since the late 18th century, when they were last exhumed, in caskets within a monument situated in Bishop West's Chapel, at the south-east corner of the Cathedral and Osmund is commemorated simply, in Latin, as 'a bishop from out of Sweden'.Keynes 2003
Preaching and character
What exactly Osmund may have preached that could have been considered 'unsound teaching' of the Christian faith has been much discussed, but it is not a question that can be answered with any certainty today. See Schmid 1934, pp. 61-6, Arne 1947, Janse 1958, Gustafsson 1959, Beckman 1970, Hallencreutz 1984, Janson 1998, Niblaeus 2010, pp 112-3 with note 298, Garipzanov 2012, pp. 2-3, Fairweather 2014, pp. 26-27; 158-172. Even Bishop-elect Adalward may not have been given any clear idea about what laid behind the charge, let alone Adam of Bremen. To both, it was hear-say, not something about which they could personally testify. Osmund's alleged departure from orthodoxy is not at all likely to have been connected with the Great Schism, the significance of which was as yet little understood in the northern Germanic regions of Europe.Adam of Bremen 3, chapter 72; Fairweather 2014, p. 161. The best clues to the character of the theological milieu in which Osmund operated, and for which he may have been thought responsible, are to be found in the not always very orthodox inscriptions and mythological carvings on memorial rune-stones set up in eleventh-century Sweden by members of the Christian laity.Fairweather 2014, pp. 165-71.
As regards Osmund's character, background and standing as a missionary, it is not to be assumed that the characterization of him in Adam of Bremen 3, chapter 15, as an ungrateful, heretical vagabond and acephalous pseudo-archbishop, tells the whole truth about him. Happily, there is just enough evidence extant in medieval literary sources, not least in observations made by Adam of Bremen himself, to enable us to raise serious doubts about that verdict.
The fact that Osmund's education was sponsored by 'Sigafridus, a bishop of the Norwegians' locates him, in an ancient and honourable tradition of missionaries dispatched from England, or under English leadership, to parts of continental Europe beyond the bounds of Christendom.See C.H. Talbot 1954 pp. vii-xvii. For Osmund's patron has to be identified as the Sigafridus listed as the third in a succession of bishops based in Trondheim and originating from England, a bishop known by Adam of Bremen to have worked in Sweden as well as Norway. It also seems overwhelmingly probable that he was the same man remembered in Swedish hagiography and local traditions as Saint Sigfrid 'from England'.See Fairweather 2014, pp. 176-213.
Given his close connection, and possible family relationship, with a saint known as the 'Apostle of Sweden', and his later rise to the status of a bishop in that country, it seems a near-certainty that Osmund would have spent his early career, after education in Bremen and receiving of Holy Orders, working as a junior member of Saint Sigfrid's mission team, in readiness for the day when he might prove an eligible successor to his educational sponsor.Fairweather 2014, pp.218-236. Local traditions preserved in Halland, which associate the names of 'Saint Sigfrid' and 'Saint Asmund' with holy springs, may emanate from work done by the two missionaries together in that area, which, in the early eleventh century, up until King Emund's time, was territory disputed between Denmark and Sweden. See Fairweather 2014, pp. 85-6.
Latin hagiographical sources assert that within the Swedish kingdom, Saint Sigfrid was granted land for the church at Husaby near Skara, and at Hoff and Tiurby in the vicinity of Växjö, and that he furthermore founded bishoprics for the two parts of Götaland, western and eastern, and also at Uppsala and Strängnäs. Scriptores Rerum Suecicarum Medii Aevi, vol II, part 1, pp. 344-370 This information, combined with the evidence of rune-stones datable to the earlier decades of the eleventh century, suggests the spread of 'English' missionary activity over southern and eastern-central Sweden, as far north as Uppland.see Carver 2003. It may be assumed that Osmund's work could have ranged over all these areas. The incident of his clash with Adalward happened at an assembly of the Sueones, so most probably at Uppsala.Fairweather 2014, p. 297. However, apart from Adam of Bremen's report of that incident, the only medieval literary records of Osmund's activity as a bishop in Sweden come from the bishop-lists of Skara and Växjö and so refer to his work in the southern part of the kingdom.
The Växjö list simply names him as the successor of Sigfrid, who was, understandably, honoured of the founder of Växjö's line of bishops. Scriptores Rerum Suecicarum Medii Aevi, vol. III, part 2: pp. 130-2. The Skara lists,Scriptores Rerum Suecicarum Medii Aevi, vol. III, part 2, pp. 112-115. late, confused and problematic authorities though they are, preserve some local historical traditions specifically about Osmund which have the ring of truth and may help to elucidate some problems raised by Adam of Bremen's account of the early years of the diocese of Skara.
According to Adam's account,Adam of Bremen, book 2, chapters 58 & 64; book 2, chapters 15-16; book 4, chapter 23. this diocese was founded by Archbishop Unwan of Hamburg-Bremen in the principal city of Götaland, at the behest of King Olof Skötkonung. Thurgot was its first bishop, who, however, after an unspecified length of time, was recalled to Bremen where he took sick and eventually died. After Thurgot's death, Gottskalk, Abbot of Ramesloh nominally succeeded him, but never set foot in the Swedish kingdom. Only after Osmund's expulsion, when Adalward I took up residence in his see, did Skara acquire from Hamburg-Bremen a successor for Thurgot who actually became an effective missionary-bishop. Adam says nothing about how Skara coped with the virtual vacancy-in-see between Thurgot's recall and Adalward's enthronement, a period of more than a quarter-century. Only the late-medieval bishop-lists of Skara provide clues as to what happened there in the years immediately before the accession of Bishop Adalward I.