Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Byrnstan
BYRNSTAN, BIRNSTAN, or BEORNSTAN (d. 933), bishop of Winchester, was in early life a king's thegn or minister of Eadward the Elder, in which capacity he attests charters of the years 900–2 (Codex Diplomaticus, mlxxvi. and mlxxvii.; cf. Liber de Hyda, pp. 97, 101, 116). In 902 he became a priest, and very probably a secular canon in the new minster of Winchester, which Ælfred the Great had projected, and Eadward himself established under the headship of Grimbald. Between 902 and 910 Byrnstan frequently appears as attesting charters, including especially the series of grants made by the king to the churches of Winchester (Cod. Dipl. mlxxxiv–mccvi.; Liber de Hyda, p. 105). After this we have no trace of his activity for twenty years. Whether an increasing fervour of devotion drove him from the court to those ascetic practices for which he became celebrated, and whether, as the later monastic writers assert, he forsook the secular life of a canon for the regular obligations of a monk, cannot be determined. The fact that the most zealous champion of the monks revived his cultus makes the latter very probable. The charters of the twenty years are too few to enable us to base any inference upon them; but in 931 the resignation of the bishopric of Winchester by the saintly Frithestan was succeeded by the election of Byrnstan to rule over the diocese with which he had been so long connected. On 29 May he was consecrated by Frithestan, but he only ruled over the church two years and a half, dying on All Saints' day 933 (Anglo-Saxon Chron. s.a.). Florence puts his death in 934, and his consecration in 932; but the attestation of a charter of 933 by Bishop Ælfheah, his successor (Cod. Dipl. mcix.), and the definite statement of the chronicle as to the length of his government of his bishopric, make the earlier date preferable. The only acts of Byrnstan as bishop that have survived are his attestation of a few charters (ib. mciii–viii.) Byrnstan had been bishop so short a time that his saintliness and charity were almost at once forgotten, until his memory was revived, a generation later, by Bishop Æthelwold. Henceforward he received the honours due to one of the holiest of the early bishops of Winchester. William of Malmesbury commends his sanctity, his humility, and his care for the poor, whose feet he daily washed, and whose needs he supplied with a lavish hand. He also tells how Byrnstan said every day a mass for the repose of the souls of the dead, and how by night, regardless of the terrors that haunt churchyards, he perambulated the cemetery in the midst of which the new minster was built, reciting psalms for the same pious purpose. In 1150 his relics were translated to a nobler sepulchre, along with those of Birinus, of Swithun, and the most famous of the occupants of the see.
[Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; Florence of Worcester; Annales de Winton (Annales Monastici, vol. ii. in Rolls edition); William of Malmesbury's De Gestis Pontificum; Liber Monasterii de Hyda; Rudborne's Historia Major Wintoniensis in Anglia Sacra; Codex Diplomaticus, vol. v.; Dugdale's Monasticon, vol. ii.]