[2] He is the eponymous subject of one of the most important poems in the foundations of English literature[3] (thought to be by the Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Pearl Poet).

[6] Peter Ackroyd has said of him, "we may still name him as the patron saint of London, [his]... cult survived for over eight hundred years, before entering the temporary darkness of the last four centuries".

[16] A charter states that in the late 7th century, he and Frithwald gave land in Streatham and Tooting Graveney to Chertsey Abbey; this grant was confirmed in the time of Athelstan in 933.

[21] Earconwald was an important contributor to the reconversion of Essex, and the fourth Bishop of London since the restoration of the diocese, and he was present at the reconciliation between Archbishop Theodore and Wilfrith.

[24] Bishopsgate, one of the eastern gates on London's largely lost Roman and medieval city wall, was said to have been repaired by Earconwald, and to have taken its name from him.

Earconwald was the subject of the alliterative St Erkenwald Poem, written in the 14th century[30] by a poet from the Cheshire/Shropshire/Staffordshire area.

[34] The document was discovered in 1757 by Thomas Percy; the manuscript had been in the possession of Sir Humphrey Pitt of Balcony House, Shifnal, and Priorslee, Shropshire.

[29] Within pictorial art, the Berne tapestry (copied from paintings by Roger van der Wayden of the Brussels Town Hall in the mid-1400s, which were lost in the conflicts of the 1600s) and apparently repeated in the Cologne Town Hall in the High Medieval period, provides a visual expression of the themes.

[39] Prior to the Reformation, the anniversaries of his death as well as his translation were observed at St Paul's as feasts of the first class, by an ordinance of Bishop Braybroke in 1386.

[20] The following Antiphon and Collect for the Feast of St Erkenwald is recorded: "De Sancto Erkenwaldo Episcopo.

Antipho: O decus insigne, nostrum pastorumque benigne, O lux Londonie, pater Erkenwalde beate, Quem super astra Deum gaudes spectare per eum, Aspice letantes tua gaudia nos celebrantes, Et tecum vite fac participes sine fine.

Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, apud quem est continua semper Sanctorum festivitas Tuorum, presta, quesumus, ut qui memoriam beati Erkenwaldi pontificis agimus, ab hostium nostrorum eruamur nequitia: et ad eternorum nos provehi concedas premiorum beneficia.

"[4] On the journey to London with the body, the River Lea is said to have parted to make way for the dead saint.

[42] In 1314, Bishop Gilbert de Segrave laid the first stone of a new shrine to which the relics of Erkenwald were translated twelve years later.

[43] By accounts,[clarification needed] the relics were sealed in a leaden casket fashioned in the form of "a gabled house or church".

[4] By the time his relics were placed behind the high altar of St Paul's they were supposed to have been with the couch in which he was carried in his declining years, fragments of which were associated with miracles.

[44] It is recorded that the servants of the church could only move the relics of St Erkenwald "clandestinely at night" because to do otherwise would have created hysteria among the crowds.

1448 per manus Stephani Clampard, fabri, sumptibus Decani et Capituli elevati ibidem vi.

(The weight of the iron chancel in front of the Altar of St. Erkenwald made AD 1448 by the hands of Stephen Clampard, carpenter, at the expense of the Dean and Chapter raised there on 6 June of the aforesaid year, 3438 lb.

The sum of £8[6] Ackroyd notes[45] that: "successful lawyers of London…on nomination as serjeants of law, would walk in procession to St Paul’s in order to venerate the physical presence of the saint.

[50] In late 1549, at the height of the iconoclasm of the Reformation, Sir Rowland Hill altered the route of his Lord Mayor's day procession and said a de profundis at the tomb of Erkenwald.

"[55] One commentator has observed that "destruction of this major shrine, located behind the high altar, severed the last connection between St Paul’s and its Saxon predecessor ... (the precise whereabouts have yet to be discovered).

This local mania for miracles and relics has been described as the first evidence that Londoners were becoming enthusiastic about Christianity and that newly returned religion had found its footing in the area.

[57] After the Great Fire of London, Christopher Wren made archaeological investigations into the ruins to St Paul's Cathedral looking for the Saxon building Erkenwald had had built.

[58] There were other examples of statecraft being associated with St Erkenwald in the Tudor period: in 1522, there was a state visit to London by Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, hosted by Henry VIII.

[citation needed] The British children's writer Abi Elphinstone chose "Erkenwald" as the name of a mythical kingdom in her 2021 book Sky Song.