Sæthryth

Sæthryth, whose name is also rendered Saethryth, Sæthryd, Sethrida, or Sedrido in later sources, was a seventh-century princess of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of East Anglia and an abbess of the Frankish monastery of Faremoutiers-en-Brie. Almost all that can be said of her with historical confidence rests on a brief notice in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in the early eighth century. Bede identifies her as the daughter of the wife of Anna, king of the East Angles, and therefore the king’s stepdaughter rather than his child by blood. Anna, who ruled East Anglia in the mid-seventh century and was killed in battle around 654, was celebrated for piety and for a family that produced several saints, among them his daughters Seaxburh, Æthelthryth of Ely, and Æthelburh of Faremoutiers. Bede does not name Sæthryth’s mother; later East Anglian tradition sometimes calls Anna’s queen Sæwara, but that identification is not contemporary and cannot be verified from seventh- or eighth-century sources.

In the middle decades of the seventh century few monasteries yet existed among the English, and royal families commonly sent daughters to the Continent to receive a monastic education and to be consecrated to the religious life. Bede names the houses of Brie (Faremoutiers), Chelles, and Andelys as the principal destinations. Faremoutiers, in the Brie region east of Paris, had been founded about 620 by Burgundofara under the influence of the Irish abbot Columbanus and observed a mixed Columbanian rule; the community was later counted among Benedictine houses. Sæthryth entered this monastery as a foreigner. Bede states that, notwithstanding her origin, she was appointed abbess of the monastery of Brie on account of her virtue. After she had held the office for some years she died, and was succeeded by her stepsister Æthelburh, Anna’s own daughter, who according to Bede was still living, in great abstinence and regularity of life, at the time he wrote.

No vita, miracle collection, or charter survives that would illuminate Sæthryth’s government of the abbey, her date of birth or death, or the circumstances of her passing. She must have died before Bede completed his history around 731, and her career belongs entirely to the seventh century. She is presumed to have been buried at Faremoutiers, where other English royal women connected with the house, including Eorcengota of Kent (a granddaughter of Anna through Seaxburh), were also commemorated. Medieval calendars and martyrologies came to honour Sæthryth as a saint, though her cult remained modest beside those of Æthelthryth and Seaxburh, and no formal papal canonization is recorded.

Sæthryth’s life, so far as it can be recovered, illustrates the close dynastic and religious connections that linked the Christian kingdoms of eastern England with the Columbanian monasteries of Neustria in the seventh century. Royal women who crossed the Channel both received a formation then scarce at home and in some cases rose to govern the houses that had received them. Beyond Bede’s few sentences the historical Sæthryth remains obscure; later hagiographical embellishment is slight, and no reliable chronology of her birth, profession, or death can be established from the sources that survive.