IS THE BODY OF England’s original patron saint buried under a tennis court? I rather think it is, after reading Francis Young’s account in Edmund: In Search of England’s Lost King .

St Edmund, King and Martyr, is less familiar than Richard III, the car-park king, since Shakespeare wrote no play about him and he died in AD 869. We seldom bother with English history before 1066, apart perhaps from a nod to Alfred the Great.

The story of St Edmund’s martyrdom is quite memorable, he being shot so full of arrows by what we call Vikings (and they, in those days, called Heathens) that he resembled a hedgehog. Then a good wolf guarded his head after it was cut off until it (the head) could cry out to those seeking him, “Here! Here! Here!”