Who is Saint Edmund?
The school's patron is Saint Edmund. The school is part of the Catholic parish of Saint Edmund in Calne. This page gives some details of the life of Saint Edmund, the last Archbishop of Canterbury to be canonised.
Saint Edmund was born as Edmund Rich, at Abingdon, Oxfordshire in 1175, five years after the martyrdom of Thomas Becket. He was educated at Oxford and then Paris. He returned to Oxford as Regent in Theology. In 1222 he was appointed as the treasurer of Salisbury Cathedral, a position which also carried the responsibility of parish priest of Calne. The present cathedral was in the process of construction. On 20th September 1233 Edmund was elected Archbishop of Canterbury, he reluctantly accepted and was consecrated as such in April 1234. In 1240 on a visit to Rome, Edmund stayed at the Cistercian Abbey of Potigny in France, he fell ill and died at the nearby town of Soisy on 16th November. Six years after his death, Pope Innocent IV declared Edmund to be a saint.
This bronze statue of Saint Edmund is in the entrance area of the school. It was made by a former governor of the school, Sean Crampton FRBS, on the occasion of the twenty-first anniversary of the school's opening. Other work by Sean Crampton is displayed in Saint Edmund's Catholic Church in Calne.