St. Edmund the Martyr was a Christian martyr and the king of East Anglia in the 9th century. Facts concerning the life of St. Edmund are few and far between, as the kingdom of East Anglia was devastated by the Vikings, who destroyed any contemporary evidence of his reign. A popular cult emerged after Edmund's death, and he was canonised by the Catholic Church sometime in the 10th century. This work, composed by the French monk Abbo, attempts to chronicle his life and acts about a century and a half after his death.