Ermenilda of Ely

Ermenilda of Ely, whose Old English name is Eormenhild (also rendered Ermengild, Ermenildis, or Hermynhild), was a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon princess, queen consort of Mercia, nun, and abbess, later counted among the royal saints of the Isle of Ely. She was a daughter of King Eorcenberht of Kent, who reigned in the mid-seventh century and is remembered by Bede as a ruler who ordered the destruction of idols in Kent, and of Queen Seaxburh (Sexburga), daughter of King Anna of the East Angles. Through her mother she was niece of Saint Æthelthryth (Etheldreda), foundress of the monastery at Ely, and kin to other East Anglian and Kentish royal women who entered the religious life, including Saint Eorcengota, who became a nun at Faremoutiers in Francia. Her brothers Ecgberht and Hlothhere became kings of Kent. No contemporary source records the year or place of her birth; as a daughter of the Kentish king she is presumed to have been born in Kent in the middle decades of the seventh century.

In a dynastic marriage that linked two of the leading English kingdoms, Ermenilda became the wife of Wulfhere, king of Mercia. Wulfhere, a son of the pagan king Penda, restored Mercian power after a period of Northumbrian overlordship and ruled from 658 until his death in 675. He is generally presented in the sources as a Christian king who endowed churches and whose authority extended over much of southern England. Bede does not name Ermenilda, but the marriage is a central element of the Kentish Royal Legend, a genealogical-hagiographical tradition of the later Anglo-Saxon period, and of the Ely house history recorded in the twelfth-century Liber Eliensis. Their daughter Werburgh (Werburh) entered religion, was associated with houses at Ely and in the Midlands, and became one of the most widely culted female saints of Anglo-Saxon England, with a later shrine at Chester. Later medieval chroniclers, notably John of Worcester, also ascribe to Wulfhere and Ermenilda a son named Coenred (Cenred), who ruled Mercia from 704 to 709 and then resigned the crown to become a monk in Rome. Because Bede, the earliest narrative source for Coenred, does not state his parentage, modern historians treat that filiation as possible rather than certain.

After Wulfhere’s death in 675, Ermenilda left the Mercian court and took the veil. According to the Kentish legend and the Liber Eliensis, she entered the double monastery at Minster-in-Sheppey, founded by her mother Seaxburh on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. When Seaxburh went to Ely to succeed her sister Æthelthryth as abbess after Æthelthryth’s death in 679, Ermenilda is said to have become abbess of Minster-in-Sheppey in her mother’s place. She later followed Seaxburh to Ely and, upon her mother’s death, succeeded as abbess of the double monastery on the Isle of Ely in the East Anglian fenland. These careers belong to a well-attested seventh-century pattern in which royal widows and princesses governed double houses of monks and nuns. Exact years for her profession and for her abbacies at Sheppey and Ely are not preserved in contemporary annals; they fall in the last quarter of the seventh century. The original Ely community was later dispersed in the Viking period and was refounded in the tenth century as a Benedictine monastery under Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester; medieval writers nonetheless commonly described Ermenilda and her kinswomen as Benedictine nuns.

No life of Ermenilda written near her own time survives. What is known of her rests on dynastic lists, the Kentish Royal Legend, hagiographical work associated with Goscelin of Saint-Bertin in the late eleventh century, and the house history of Ely. She was believed to have died at Ely and to have been buried there beside the other foundresses. Her relics were among those translated at Ely in the tenth century and again after the building of the Norman cathedral. Her principal feast is 13 February; in some English calendars she is also remembered on 17 October with Saints Æthelthryth, Seaxburh, and Withburga. She was venerated by local cult and liturgical commemoration rather than by a formal papal canonization, in the manner later termed pre-congregation. Surviving sources do not attach to her a distinctive list of patronages beyond her place among the saints of Ely and of the Kentish and East Anglian royal lines.