She was a woman of power, principle and piety, who established a double monastery in Ely for monks and nuns, writes Charles Moseley.
Travelling to Ely, and seeing the great Tower and Octagon of Ely Cathedral rising above the level fen, it looks as if it has always been there. But it hasn’t. The building we see was not even started until 400 years after the death of that remarkable woman, Etheldreda, who in 673 founded a double monastery for monks and nuns on the rich island her first husband had given her as a wedding present.
Her world was so different from ours. Forget the soaring stone of Gothic: that came centuries later. Think of a wooden church, a collection of huts for the monks and nuns, and lots and lots of hard work. A monastery had to be a farm (and all that that entails) as well as a place of prayer and self-denial and communal worship. Even the landscape was so different we would not recognise it, and the old gods were still honoured by many – even, only a generation before, by Ethedreda’s own family.
Who was this woman who all those years ago built something that grew and endured and still echoes to prayer and worship in a world she could never imagine? She was the second daughter of Anna, King of the East Angles, and great-niece to Raedwald, the most powerful ruler in the Britain of his time. He is almost certainly the man in the Sutton Hoo ship burial. Her family were major players in the politics of the Seven Kingdoms that made up Not-Yet-England. We can know very little about her personally, for she left no writings, no letters. The Venerable Bede, writing some 40 years after her death, when she was already revered as a saint, is our main source of knowledge. But we can look at what she did.
Women – noble women especially – then had much more clout and independence than we imagine. She and her sisters all became powerful politically, and like many royal women of their time, all ended as abbesses: her sister Saexburh, second Abbess of Ely, had been Queen of Kent and ran that kingdom for her young son after her husband died. Ely’s third abbess was Saexburh’s daughter, once queen of Mercia. Etheldreda had been queen of Northumbria: hence the three crowns on Ely’s coat of arms.
The 2022 population of England was 56.5 million. In the 600s, the same area had at the outside two million. How few people there were in Not-Yet-England needs stressing. Everybody who was anybody knew anybody else who was anybody. The Seven Kingdoms, sometimes on friendly terms, sometimes at each others’ throats, had ruling families who were all closely related. Indeed, the success of St Augustine’s and Paulinus’s missions to the Anglian and Saxon princes depended much on links between ruling families: for example, Augustine (aided, perhaps, by the Christian queen Bercta) converted Aethelbert of Kent, and his daughter Aethelburh was sent to Northumbria to cement an alliance by marriage with the pagan Edwin. The agreement specified she should be free to practise her own religion, and her presence sparked that epoch-making council at York that decided that Edwin’s kingdom would become Christian.
Noble marriage was an extension of diplomacy, and Etheldreda and Aethelburh would have shared that ideology with everyone else: it was just the way things were. We should not waste sympathy. So when Anna, needing to cover his western flank against an increasingly aggressive Mercia, arranged for Etheldreda to marry Tondberct, the prince of the Southern Gyrwas – the people of the Fenland – she went along with it. After Tondberct died her nephew, now king, needed her, again diplomatically, to marry the heir to the throne of Northumbria, Ecgfrith. She went along with this too. But – and this must have taken some force of personality – she persuaded both husbands to respect her youthful vow of virginity. (But after they had been married some years Ecgfrith did get restive and try to get her to relax and think of Northumbria… He was not successful.) She was a devout daughter of a devout family: St Felix converted her father, and his daughters must themselves have known Felix.
Etheldreda unquestionably had vision and the authority to implement it. After she left Ecgfrith, (with the connivance of St Wilfrid) she planned the double monastery on her very rich estate of Ely. The fact that she was revered as a saint almost as soon as she died suggests she was held in enormous respect while living.
Being a nun then wasn’t as the popular view nowadays would imagine, all solemn peace and scenic quiet and a discreet background of plainsong. The Benedictine Rule was only just becoming common as the model for religious life.
But just as in the monasteries of the Lindisfarne family Etheldreda knew firsthand, there would be a strict routine of private prayer, self-denial and communal worship.
For men there was much hard physical work in the fields, in the brewhouse, in the tannery, processing food, and for all the other things we buy unthinkingly from shops. For women there was work at the essential everyday crafts like spinning wool, weaving, embroidery.
Moreover, running a monastery means a lot of admin. An abbess has to know her flock well: she must be firm and stern when needed as well as charitable and sympathetic, and she has to draw up the rotas. What has not changed is the passion inherent in the religious life for closeness to God, the desire we all feel for that which we cannot name but without which we shall never find peace and true joy.
Pilgrimage to her remains started almost as soon as Saexburh reinterred her uncorrupted body in a marble sarcophagus the monks had found for it in the remains of Roman Cambridge. Bede speaks of her with great reverence, of miracles at her shrine, and of her self-discipline and asceticism – but then, he would, wouldn’t he? His elaborate poem – the only one in his long book – praises her as perpetual virgin, and has a subtext already that she is second only to the Blessed Virgin herself. Saexburh, who could have had a fine career today in marketing, got the cult off to a very good start indeed, and by the high middle ages, pilgrims of all sorts and conditions were visiting her shrine in numbers almost equal to those going to Canterbury to Thomas Becket’s shrine, or Walsingham or Bury St Edmunds.
The Reformation put a sudden cruel stop to that, of course, and the relics of the saints, so long revered, were burned or scattered. But some brave souls were able to hide portions, and while Etheldreda’s whole body was lost, a hand was secreted away, to be found by chance early in the 1800s in Sussex. Most of it is an object of reverence in St Etheldreda’s RC church in Ely, and the remainder is in St Etheldreda’s in Ely Place off Holborn.
Pilgrimage under other names never quite stopped. Nowadays the numbers going on pilgrimage even in supposedly secular England are growing rapidly: Walsingham is often bursting at the seams. Many find the discipline of pilgrimage of enormous benefit: a chance to take stock, to stand aside for a while, to recalibrate, to rediscover what really matters. I have walked several pilgrimages myself, and wrote about my experience in Crossroad (2022).
In pilgrimage, don’t expect answers: the questions and the search are the meaning. It is not the arrival, for we never truly arrive in this life, but the journey that matters. Etheldreda’s monastery was never planned to be an abiding city, but a staging post on the Way.
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.