17
October. Etheldreda, V. 1662
Book of Common Prayer.
Wikibio.
Life
Æthelthryth made an early first
marriage in around 652 to Tondberct, chief or prince of the South 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 the Isle of Ely, which she had
received from Tondberct as a morning gift.
Æthelthryth was subsequently remarried
for political reasons in 660, this time to Ecgfrith of
Northumbria. Shortly after his accession to the throne in 670,
Æthelthryth became a nun. This step possibly led to Ecgfrith's long quarrel
with Wilfrid, bishop of York. One account relates that while Ecgfrith initially agreed that Æthelthryth
should continue to remain a virgin, in about 672 he wished to consummate their
marriage and even attempted to bribe Wilfrid to use his influence on the queen
to convince her. This tactic failed and the king tried to take his queen from
the cloister by force. Æthelthryth then fled back to Ely with two faithful nuns
and managed to evade capture, thanks in part to the miraculous rising of the tide. Another version of the legend related that she halted on the journey at
'Stow' and sheltered under a miraculously growing ash
tree which 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 to another fair,[1][2] near Threekingham.[3][4] Ecgfrith later
married Eormenburg and expelled Wilfrid from his kingdom in 678. According to
the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle, Æthelthryth founded a double
monastery at Ely
in 673, which was later destroyed in the Danish invasion of 870.
Legacy
The
kingdom of East Anglia (Early Saxon period)
Bede told how after her death,
Æthelthryth's bones were disinterred by her sister and successor, Seaxburh and that her uncorrupted body was later
buried in a white, marble coffin. In 695, Seaxburh
translated the remains of her sister Æthelthryth, who had been dead for sixteen
years,[5] from a common
grave to the new church at Ely. The Liber Eliensis describes these
events in detail.[6] When her grave was
opened, Æthelthryth's body was discovered to be uncorrupted and her coffin and
clothes proved to possess miraculous powers. A sarcophagus made of white marble was taken from the Roman ruins at Grantchester, which was found to be the right fit for Æthelthryth. Seaxburh's
supervised the preparation of her sister's body, which was washed and wrapped
in new robes before being reburied.[7] 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
the abbey at Faremoutiers as a basis for the
ceremony.[8]
After Seaxburh, Æthelthryth's niece
and her great-niece, both of whom were royal princesses, succeeded her as
abbess of Ely.
The modern shrine of St. Æthelthryth
containing the relic of her hand is at the RC Parish church in Ely, St. Etheldreda's
The common version of Æthelthryth's
name was St. Awdrey, which is the origin of the word tawdry, which derived from the fact that her admirers bought modestly concealing lace goods at an annual fair held in her name in Ely.
By the 17th century, this lacework had become seen as old-fashioned, or cheap
and of poor quality, at a time when the Puritans of eastern England looked down on any form of lacy dressiness.[9]
Hagiography
There are a number of accounts of
Æthelthryth's life in Latin, Old
English, Old French, and Middle
English. According to Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, "more medieval
vernacular lives [about Æthelthryth] were composed in England than any other
native female saint".[10] Æthelthryth
appears in Bede's Historia ecclesiastia, Ælfric's Lives of Saints, Goscelin
of Saint-Bertin's Lives of Female Saints, the Liber
Eliensis, Marie
de France's La vie seinte Audree, the South English
Legendary, and a Middle English life in BL Cotton Faustina B.iii,
among others. A modern fictional account has been written by Moyra
Caldecott.
See
also
References
- Virginia Blanton (2007) Signs
of Devotion: the cult of St Aethelthryth in medieval England, 695-1615.
University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press ISBN 0-271-02984-6[12]
- McCash, June Hall & Judith
Clark Barban, ed. and trans. (2006) The Life of Saint Audrey; a
text by Marie de France. Jefferson, NC: McFarland ISBN 0-7864-2653-5
- M. Dockray-Miller (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 Publishers ISBN 978-2-503-52836-6.
- 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 the South English Legendary," Anglia
128.1 (2010), 83-101.
- Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn,
"Rerouting the Dower: The Anglo-Norman Life of St. Audrey by Marie
(of Chatteris?)", in Power of the Weak: Studies on Medieval Women,
ed. Jennifer Carpenter and Sally-Beth Maclean (Champaign: University of
Illinois Press, 1995), 27-56.
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