Æthelthryth

Æthelthryth (also known as Etheldreda, Ediltrudis, or Audrey) was a seventh-century East Anglian princess, queen of Northumbria, and abbess of Ely, whose life is known principally from the account given by Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. She was a daughter of Anna, king of the East Angles, a ruler remembered for his Christian piety and for the number of his children who entered the religious life. Her sisters included Seaxburh, who became queen of Kent and later abbess of Ely, and Æthelburh, abbess of Faremoutiers in Francia; later tradition also associates Wihtburh of East Dereham with the same family. Medieval Ely tradition, recorded in the twelfth-century Liber Eliensis, places her birth at Exning in Suffolk. As a young woman she was married to Tondberht, a prince or ealdorman of the South Gyrwe, a fenland people whose territory lay near the later Isle of Ely. Bede and later hagiographers state that she remained a virgin throughout this marriage. Tondberht died after a short time, leaving her in possession of the Isle of Ely as part of her dowry.

She was subsequently married to Ecgfrith, son of King Oswiu of Northumbria. The marriage took place while Ecgfrith was still a young ætheling; he succeeded to the Northumbrian throne in 670. Bede, who obtained his information from Bishop Wilfrid of York, records that Æthelthryth lived with Ecgfrith for twelve years without consummating the union. Wilfrid later testified that the king had offered him land and money if he would persuade the queen to accept her marital duties, but that she remained steadfast in her resolve. Eventually Ecgfrith granted her wish to enter the religious life. She received the veil from Wilfrid and spent about a year as a nun at Coldingham, a double monastery on the Northumbrian coast governed by Abbess Æbbe, Ecgfrith’s paternal aunt. She then withdrew to her own estates and founded a double monastery of monks and nuns on the Isle of Ely, in the East Anglian fens, which she ruled as abbess.

Bede portrays her years at Ely as marked by notable austerity. She wore woollen clothing rather than linen, bathed only on the eves of the greater festivals, and seldom ate more than once a day. After seven years as abbess she developed a swelling on the neck, which her physician Cynefrith lanced; she is said to have regarded the tumour as a just penalty for the necklaces she had worn in her youth. She died on 23 June 679 and was buried, at her own request, in a simple wooden coffin in the monastic cemetery. Sixteen years later her sister Seaxburh, who had succeeded her as abbess, arranged a solemn translation of the body. According to Bede the corpse was found incorrupt, the wound on the neck healed, and the linen grave-clothes fresh. A white marble sarcophagus of Roman workmanship, discovered at Grantchester near Cambridge, was used as her new tomb. Bede composed a hymn in her honour, and her feast on 23 June, together with the feast of her translation on 17 October, was widely observed in the English church.

The shrine at Ely became one of the principal pilgrimage centres of medieval England. After the original community was destroyed during the ninth-century Danish invasions, the monastery was refounded in the late tenth century as a Benedictine abbey for men by Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester, with Æthelthryth remaining its patron. Her cult was further promoted by the Liber Eliensis and by numerous church dedications, especially in East Anglia and the Fens. The popular English form of her name, Audrey, became attached to an annual fair at Ely at which inexpensive jewellery and lace were sold; from Saint Audrey’s lace derives the later adjective tawdry. At the Reformation the shrine was demolished and the relics dispersed, though a relic has been claimed in modern times by Saint Etheldreda’s Church in Ely Place, London, formerly a chapel of the bishops of Ely. She is invoked as patron of Ely and against diseases of the throat and neck. Her historical reputation rests on Bede’s carefully sourced narrative and on the enduring memory of a royal woman who combined high birth with a determined commitment to monastic life and perpetual virginity.