Æthelthryth

"Ethelreda" redirects here. For other people, seeEthelreda (given name).

Saint Æthelthryth
Saint Æthelthryth fromBenedictional of St Æthelwold,10 CBritish Library
Virgin,Abbess of Ely
Born	c. 636 Exning,Suffolk
Died	(679-06-23)23 June 679 Ely,Cambridgeshire
Venerated in	Eastern Orthodox Church Catholic Church Anglican Communion
Majorshrine	St Etheldreda's Church,Ely Place,Holborn,London; OriginallyEly Cathedral(now destroyed)
Feast	23 June (Catholic), 17 October (Anglican)
Attributes	Abbessholding a model of Ely Cathedral
Patronage	Throat complaints

Æthelthryth(orÆðelþryðorÆþelðryþe;c. 636– 23 June 679 AD) was anEast Anglianprincess, aFenlandandNorthumbrianqueen andAbbess of Ely.She is anAnglo-Saxonsaint, and is also known asEtheldredaorAudrey,especially in religious contexts. She was a daughter ofAnna,King ofEast Anglia,and her siblings wereWendredaandSeaxburh of Ely,both of whom eventually retired from secular life and foundedabbeys.

Life

Æthelthryth was probably born inExning,nearNewmarketin Suffolk. She was one of the four saintly daughters ofAnna of East Anglia,includingWendredaandSeaxburh of Ely,all of whom eventually retired from secular life and foundedabbeys.

Æthelthryth made an early first marriage in around 652 to Tondberct, chief or prince of theSouth Gyrwe.She managed to persuade her husband to respect her vow of perpetual virginity that she had made prior to their marriage. Upon his death in 655, she retired to theIsle of Ely,which she had received from Tondberct as amorning gift.

Æthelthryth was subsequently remarried for political reasons in 660, this time toEcgfrith of Northumbria,who was fourteen or fifteen at the time. Shortly after his accession to the throne in 670, Æthelthryth wished to become a nun. This step possibly led to Ecgfrith's long quarrel withWilfrid,bishop ofYork,who was her spiritual counsellor. One account relates that while Ecgfrith initially agreed Æthelthryth should continue to remain a virgin, about 672 he appealed to Wilfrid for the enforcement of his marital rights as against Etheldreda's religious vocation. The bishop succeeded at first in persuading the king to consent that Etheldreda should live for some time in peace as a sister of the Coldingham nunnery, founded by his aunt,Æbbe of Coldingham.Eventually, in light of the danger of being forcibly carried off by the king, Æthelthryth then fled back to theIsle of Elywith two nuns as companions.They managed to evade capture, thanks in part to the rising of thetide.

Another version of the legend related that she halted on the journey at 'Stow' and sheltered under a miraculously growingash treewhich came from her staff planted in the ground. Stow came to be known as 'St Etheldred's Stow', when a church was built to commemorate this event. It is more likely that this 'Stow' actually refers toanother fair,nearThreekingham.Ecgfrith later married Eormenburg and expelled Wilfrid from his kingdom in 678. According to theAnglo-Saxon Chronicle,Æthelthryth foundedEly Abbey,adouble monasteryatElyin 673, which was later destroyed in theDanishinvasion of 870.

Death and burial

TheKingdom of East Anglia(early Anglo-Saxon period)

According toBede,Æthelfryth died of a neck tumour, which she interpreted as sent by God in his goodness to relieve her of guilt for her vanity in having worn heavy necklaces in her youth.Bede states that after her death, her bones were disinterred by her sister and successor,Seaxburhand that heruncorruptedbody was later buried in a white, marblecoffin.In 695, Seaxburh translated the remains of her sister Æthelthryth, who had been dead for sixteen years,from a common grave to the new church at Ely. TheLiber Eliensisdescribes these events in detail.When her grave was opened, Æthelthryth's body was discovered to be uncorrupted and her coffin and clothes proved to possess miraculous powers. Asarcophagusmade of white marble was taken from the Roman ruins atGrantchester,which was found to be the right fit for Æthelthryth. Seaxburh supervised the preparation of her sister's body, which was washed and wrapped in new robes before being reburied.She apparently oversaw the translation of her sister's remains without the supervision of her bishop, using her knowledge of procedures gained from her family's links with theFaremoutiers Abbeyas a basis for the ceremony.

After Seaxburh, Æthelthryth's niece and her great-niece, both of whom were royal princesses, succeeded her as abbess of Ely.

Legacy

Saint Etheldreda's statue inEly Cathedral

Etheldreda isrememberedin theChurch of Englandwith aLesser Festivalon 17 October according toBook of Common Prayertradition,and alternatively 23 June in theCommon Worshipcalendar of Saints.

St Etheldreda's ChurchinEly PlaceinHolbornis dedicated to the saint. It was originally part of the London palace of thebishops of Ely.After theEnglish Reformation,part was briefly used by a Spanish ambassador forRoman Catholicworship. The chapel was purchased by the Catholic Church in 1874 and is one of the oldest churches in England to be in current use by the Catholic Church.

St Etheldreda's Church, Hatfieldis 13th century and was originally Anglo-Saxon. It was named for St Etheldreda because it was adjacent to a palace of the Bishops of Ely who held her as their patron saint.

St Etheldreda'sis a Roman Catholic parish church in Ely, Cambridgeshire. It is part of the Diocese of East Anglia within the Province of Westminster. The church contains the shrine and relics of Æthelthryth, including her hand.

Site of shrine inEly Cathedral

St Etheldreda's Church inWhite Notley,Essex, is a Church of England parish church, of Anglo-Saxon construction, built on the site of a Roman temple, with a large quantity of Roman brick in its fabric. The church has a small Mediaeval English stained-glass window, depicting St Etheldreda, which is set in a stone frame made from a very early Insular Christian Roman Chi Rho grave marker.

The church of St EtheldredaHistonwas demolished, it is commemorated in a stained glass window.

The common version of Æthelthryth's name was St Audrey, which is the origin of the wordtawdry,which derived from the fact that her admirers bought modestly concealinglacegoods at an annualfairheld in her name in Ely. By the 17th century, this lacework had become seen as old-fashioned,vain,or cheap and of poor quality, at a time when thePuritansof eastern England disdainedornamentaldress.

Hagiography

There are a number of accounts of Æthelthryth's life inLatin,Old English,Old French,andMiddle English.According to Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, "more medieval vernacular lives [about Æthelthryth] were composed in England than any other native female saint".Æthelthryth appears inBede'sEcclesiastical History of the English People,Ælfric'sLives of Saints,Goscelin of Saint-Bertin'sLives of Female Saints,theLiber Eliensis,Marie de France'sLa vie seinte Audree,theSouth English Legendary,and aMiddle Englishlife in BL Cotton Faustina B.iii, among others. A modern fictional account has been written byMoyra Caldecott.

See also

• List of Anglo-Saxon saints
• Saint Æthelthryth, patron saint archive
• Wuffingas
• The hymn "Aethelthryth" by the VenerableBede

Sources

• Bede (1994). McClure, Judith; Collins, Roger (eds.).The Ecclesiastical History of the English People.Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.ISBN978-0-19-953723-5.
• Blanton, Virginia (2007)Signs of Devotion: the cult of St Aethelthryth in medieval England, 695–1615.University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University PressISBN0-271-02984-6
  • "Table of contents forSigns of Devotion".Library of Congress.Retrieved27 November2010.
• Dockray-Miller, B. (2009)Saints Edith and Æthelthryth: Princesses, Miracle Workers, and their Late Medieval Audience; the Wilton Chronicle and the Wilton Life of St Æthelthryth,Turnhout: Brepols PublishersISBN978-2-503-52836-6
• Fairweather, Janet, ed. (2005).Liber Eliensis: A History of the Isle of Ely from the Seventh Century to the Twelfth.Translated by Fairweather, Janet. Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press.ISBN978-1-84383-015-3.
• Farmer, David (2011).The Oxford Dictionary of Saints(5th revised ed.). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.ISBN978-0-19-959660-7.
• Maccarron, Máirín, "The Adornment of Virgins: Æthelthryth and Her Necklaces," in Elizabeth Mullins and Diarmuid Scully (eds),Listen, O Isles, unto me: Studies in Medieval Word and Image in honour of Jennifer O’Reilly(Cork, 2011), 142–155.
• Major, Tristan, "Saint Etheldreda in theSouth English Legendary,"Anglia128.1 (2010), 83–101.
• McCash, June Hall & Judith Clark Barban, ed. and trans. (2006)The Life of Saint Audrey;a text byMarie de France.Jefferson, NC: McFarlandISBN0-7864-2653-5
• Ridyard, Susan (1988).The Royal Saints of Anglo-Saxon England.Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.ISBN978-0-521-30772-7.
• Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, "Rerouting the Dower: The Anglo-Norman Life of St. Audrey by Marie (of Chatteris?)", inPower of the Weak: Studies on Medieval Women,ed. Jennifer Carpenter and Sally-Beth Maclean (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 27–56.

Further reading

• Rosser, Susan (Autumn 1997). "Æthelthryth: a Conventional Saint?".Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester.79(3): 15–24.doi:10.7227/BJRL.79.3.4.
• Ælfric of Eynsham(1881)."Of Saint Æðeldryða".Ælfric's Lives of Saints.London, Pub. for the Early English text society, by N. Trübner & co.

External links

• Æthelthryth 2atProsopography of Anglo-Saxon England
• Richard John King,1862.Handbook of the Cathedrals of England(Oxford) (On-line text)
• Thacker, Alan (8 October 2009)."Æthelthryth [St Æthelthryth, Etheldreda, Audrey] (d. 679)".Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.Oxford University Press.doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/8906.ISBN978-0-19-861412-8.(subscription orUK public library membershiprequired)