The miracles of Eric IV Ploughpenny
Creators: name: Clausen, Svend
Publisher: name: Database of Religious History (DRH)
Year: 2023

description: Although never formally canonized, Eric IV Ploughpenny, king of Denmark, was regarded as a saint by some. When the ageing King Valdemar II of Denmark died in 1241, he was succeeded by his son Erik IV Ploughpenny. Due to conflicting power ambitions, however, relations were strained between Erik and his two brothers Abel and Christoffer. The following years were therefore marked by civil wars between Erik and Abel, especially. The conflict culminated in 1250, when Erik was murdered by the henchmen of his brother Abel acting, apparently, on his brother´s orders. Abel managed to escape any earthly punishment and thus became Erik´s successor on the throne. Many therefore saw it as god´s own punishment when Abel himself was killed on the battlefield merely two years later in 1252. The third brother Christoffer then took the throne. By this point, a local saint´s cult centered around Erik´s changing burial sites in the Danish town of Slesvig seems most likely to have begun already. The cult probably didn´t really gather strength, though, until king Christoffer with much pomp had him reburied in Ringsted monastery in 1258. King Christoffer had probably tried to gain formal recognition of the cult from the pope in Rome already while Erik was still buried in Slesvig, although this was in vain. Being interested in using the cult to strengthen his own position, the reburial in Ringsted most likely was part of Christoffer´s attempt to promote and strengthen the cult even more. Christoffer himself never benefitted much from this, though, dying very suddenly in 1259 amidst circumstances highly controversial. His plans for the reburial had more success, though, and over the decades that followed upon the reburial of Eric´s body at Ringsted monastery in 1258, the Benedictine monks at the abbey wrote down a text that collected the many miracles that king Eric performed there. Their list of miracles were added to continously and between the years 1258 and 1274 they recorded no less than 46 miracles happening. The pace of the cult seems to have slowed down after that, but a few more miracles were still added. The last of the 50 miracles mentioned were recorded in 1309. The text is structured chronologically starting out by introducing the Ringsted reburial and then mentioning the miracles one by one in the order that they occurred. The cult seems to have gathered much pace in the first few decades after the murder and after the reburial, especially, although by around 1309 the cult seems to have been at the end of it´s tether. No formal papal canonization of Erik´s cult was ever achieved and high-level political interest in the cult possibly also declined at some point. When its initial strength apparently didn´t hold in the long run, from c. the 14th c. onwards his cult generally seems to have been overshadowed by the saint´s cult of the Danish duke Canute Lavard (d. 1131) who was also buried in the monastery church, but whose cult had already achieved that same much-desired papal recognition. The miracles recorded tell stories about people being cured, people woken from the dead etc. A notable feature of the text is that much weight are put on having the miracles documented properly by often describing their formal circumstances such as e.g. the time or the year that it occurred, where it happened, to whom it happened and who this person was, how long time this person was sick, in which way this person was sick, mentioning the names of people who witnessed the miracle happening etc.