Recent years have seen the royal women of Anglo-Saxon England surge to prominence in a series of significant archaeological and codicological discoveries. In December 2022, researchers at the Bodleian Library in Oxford used new photographic scanning technology to reveal the name of St Eadburg, Abbess of Minster-in-Thanet, written 15 times in a manuscript that is now believed to have been written in her own hand.
That same month, archaeologists announced the discovery of an early Christian bed burial at Harpole in Northamptonshire, in which a woman was honoured with an elaborate necklace decorated with Christian imagery, perhaps an early royal abbess and member of the newly converted royal house of Mercia.
These followed the discovery of probable bones of St Eanswythe (an early abbess and daughter of King Ethelbert of Kent) in a Folkestone church in 2020, and the exhumation of Queen Eadgyth, Æthelstan’s sister, in Magdeburg Cathedral in 2010.
England’s great Anglo-Saxon women saints, who combined royal and ecclesiastical status, are emerging from the darkness and acquiring a solidity that contrasts with the remote figures conjured by Victorian imaginings drawn from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History.
This has led to a new wave of imaginative literature that is recreating the lives and worlds of these women. England’s early royal abbesses are a source of perennial fascination as woman who defied the expectations of their society (by not marrying, or repudiating marriages) and made shrewd use of their inherited royal status in a violent, tribal society in order to advance the kingdom of Christ.
Before the Viking invasions of the ninth century, English monasteries of both men and women were more often than not led by mighty abbesses rather than male clerics. Beyond the kingdom of Wessex, where the Vikings were defeated, religious life largely collapsed in the century between 870 and 970, and when it returned it was male-dominated, under the influence of the great Benedictine Reform. Yet it is the survival of female religious life in Alfred’s kingdom that is the subject of Deborah Jones’ vivid historical novel Æthelgifu, the first in a series about important women in the history of Shaftesbury Abbey.
Little is known about Æthelgifu, the third daughter of Alfred the Great, except that she became the first abbess of a new house founded at Shaftesbury in around 893, which was destined to remain England’s greatest abbey of Benedictine nuns until the dissolution. As the librarian at Shaftesbury Abbey Museum, Jones is uniquely placed to reimagine the story of Shaftesbury’s foundress, and she has written a compelling novel which is sensitive to the particularities of place and suffused with a historian’s understanding of the religious and political realities of the time.
While it is for the reader to judge whether Jones convincingly fills the vast gaps in our knowledge of Æthelgifu’s life, the novel’s central contention that she navigated her nascent community through a violent, turbulent world is surely true to life. If Æthelgifu was afflicted by illness and very young when appointed abbess, as tradition records, then her journey to maturity, leadership and historical greatness must indeed have been the stuff of novels.
Jones is surely not far off in her portrayal of Æthelgifu as a kind of female Alfred. Not because she conquered in battle, but because she understood the centrality of learning and piety to the enduring survival of her father’s kingdom as something more than a mere warlord’s territory, but a cultural and religious beacon – and, ultimately, the nucleus of England itself.
Æthelgifu is one of many great Anglo-Saxon women remembered for the institution she founded – in her case, Shaftesbury Abbey – rather than for any details of her life. The depredations of Vikings, Normans, Reformers and Puritans mean we know little of the reality of life for these women, but their legacy endured to the dissolution and endures still in the living stones of those monastic churches fortunate enough to survive.
Shaftesbury Abbey was not so lucky; but its broken stones continue to draw tourists and pilgrims, and to inspire admirable works of historical fiction like Æthelgifu.
Dr Francis Young is a historian specialising in the history of religion and belief.
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