Among the saints celebrated by the major vernacular Anglo-Saxon hagiographer Ælfric of Eynsham, one interesting group that has not received much scholarly attention is his warrior saints. In his lives of these saints Ælfric the monk, who has abjured violence, proclaims the spiritual achievements of men who have been military leaders and of ordinary soldiers serving in the ranks. The most famous of Ælfric's soldiers, St. Martin, was an unwilling one, but others commended by him were not unhappy to embrace the military life, even indeed when serving under pagans. Warrior saints were a distinctive and popular class of saints in the earlier Christian Mediterranean world. In the writings of Ælfric, as in Anglo-Saxon hagiography generally, they are a small group, but they are a group that illustrates strikingly Ælfric's approach to writing about saints, and study of them helps to throw light on the work he intended vernacular hagiography to perform. Part of that work, as argued below, was to provide ideologically suitable spiritual heroes for the faithful. But how should the potentially problematic group of warrior saints be presented, whose lives combine sanctity and violence and whose exploits might have disconcerting associations with the world of secular heroism?
