The Kentish Royal Saints: An Enquiry into the Facts behind the Legends

THE KENTISH ROYAL SAINTS: AN ENQUIRY INTO THE FACTS BEHIND THE LEGENDS K.P. WITNEY When c. 709 King Wihtred promulgated at Bapchild his charter of liberties of the Kentish Church1 he named in it five religious houses which were then ruled by abbesses but which, in accordance with the general practice of the times, were almost certainly double monasteries containing men as well as women. They were, in the order cited (which evidently took account of other considerations than age) Minster-in-Thanet.* Southminster, Folkestone, Lyminge and Sheppey. It was around these five houses, all later plundered by the Danes, that the legends of the Kentish royal saints came to revolve. The work recently published by D.W. Rollason on the growth and dissemination of those legends2 allows us to penetrate to some at least of the facts underlying them, so filling certain gaps in the early history of Kent left by Bede and the quite numerous charters dating from this period. Rollason's study of the sources concentrates upon eleven different texts, which we have listed in Appendix I in the order in which he treats them. Of these only the one incorporated in the Historia Regum of Ramsey Abbey appears to have originated as early as the eighth century, within a hundred years of the events it purports to describe, showing signs of having been first written at the monastery of Wakering in Essex, an obscure place on which, however, the legends brushed. None of the others can be dated earlier than the * Called Upminster and in later documents Northminster. A charter of 943 (CS 784) clinches the identification by giving the bounds. 1 W. de G. Birch, Cartularium Saxonicum, 3 vols. (1885-93), doc. 91. On dating, Gordon Ward, 'The Life and Records of Eadberht, Son of King Wihtred' Arch Cant., li (1939), 9-26. 2 D.W. Rollason, The Mildreth Legend. A Study of early mediaeval Hagiography (Leicester, 1982). 1 K.P. WITNEY tenth century, and a number of them are later than that. Most of the accounts appear in chronicles compiled outside Kent, such as pa halgan included in the Liber Vitae of New Minster, Winchester, but the most influential of them, Goscelin's Vitae Mildrethae, was written between 1087 and 1091 at St. Augustine's in Canterbury, which by that time had become the chief fount of the legends. The bulk of the material, wherever found, must have derived originally from Kentish sources, though there were ramifications involving other royal lines and their saintly progeny. Even when the fables have been winnowed away, the story is a complicated one, and can be properly understood only with the aid of a true genealogical table, which it thus becomes an essential part of the task to construct. The table we have arrived at, which differs in certain ways from that given by Rollason, is at Appendix II. We start our enquiry, chronologically, with the Abbeys of Lyminge and Folkestone, the first reputedly founded c. 633 for Ethelbert's daughter Aethelburga and the second for his grand-daughter Eanswith. One or other of these places has claims to be the first'of all religious houses for women in England. On the face of it, we should expect Lyminge to have been the earlier, but there was a persistent tradition in Kent that Folkestone preceded it. In order to weigh the conflicting claims, it is necessary to summarise some of the known historical background, with a keen eye to dates. The great Ethelbert died in February 616, having married twice, leaving a son of the first marriage, Eadbald, who succeeded him, and a daughter, Aethelburga,' who must, it seems, have been born of the second.* Very soon after his father's death Eadbald formed an incestuous union with his step-mother, but was brought to renounce her by Archbishop Laurentius (who died in 619) ,4 taking in her place a wife whom later accounts name as Ymma, of the Frankish royal house. In 625, Aethelburga was married to Edwin of Northumbria, and it was through her influence and the missionary work of her chaplain Paulinus that Christianity was brought to that kingdom.5 In October 633, Edwin was killed in battle by the heathen Penda of Mercia, but Aethelburga, her two children and Paulinus were brought safely to Kent,6 where according to some versions of the legend she became * On obstetrical grounds. It seems from a statement made by Gregory of Tours {History of the Franks, ix, 26) that Ethelbert was already married to his first wife Bertha before he came to the throne in 560. Bede tells us (Historia Ecclesiastica, ii, 20) that in 633 Aethelburga's second child was an infant. 3 Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica, ii, 5 and ii, 9. 4 Ibid., ii, 6 and ii, 7. 5 Ibid., ii, 9. "Ibid., ii, 20 2 THE KENTISH ROYAL SAINTS abbess of Lyminge, being eventually buried there. Her brother (or half-brother) Eadbald is said to have had two sons, of whom the younger Earconberht succeeded him in 640,7 and a daughter Eanswith, who was buried in the newly-founded Abbey of Folkestone. Relics believed to be hers were discovered in 1885 walled up in the parish church, and recent examination of them suggests that she died young, in her mid-20s.8 Tradition gave two widely different dates for her death, 640 and 673, but, as Stubbs pointed out long ago, there is authority for neither.9 Aethelburga is said to have died in 647,'" a credible date, but resting only on the late testimony of medieval chroniclers. If Lyminge Abbey was indeed founded as a convenient and edifying way of providing for the widowed Aethelburga - as later became a common practice for royal dowagers - then it cannot have been as early as 633, since it was only in October of that year that her husband was killed, but is unlikely to have been much later. But Eanswith, even if she was the eldest of Eadbald's three children, which there is nothing to show she was, cannot have been born before 617 (on the improbable assumption that she was the offspring of his incestuous union) or 619, if she was the offspring of his legitimate marriage to Ymma (as the chroniclers say, or at any rate assume). According to the Penitentials of Theodore of Tarsus (669-690) a girl did not come of age, and could not take the veil, until she was 16." It cannot be entirely ruled out that Folkestone Abbey had already been founded in order to receive her then, in the expectation that as the king's daughter she would later become its head; so that it is just conceivable that it was in existence in 635 or thereabouts. But to arrive at a date as early as this requires the acceptance of a whole combination of improbabilities, and one of around 640, or after, is much more likely. Because she was Eadbald's daughter the later writers assumed that it was he who had founded the abbey, but the chronological evidence points more to his successor, and her brother, Earconberht. 1 Ibid., iii, 8. 8 Canon Scott Robertson, 'St. Eanswith's Reliquary in Folkestone Church", Arch. Cant., xvi (1885), 322-6. Also Dame Eanswythe Edwards, St. Eanswythe of Folkestone: Her Life, Her Relics and Her Monastery, (Folkestone, 1980), App. 2. 22-3. 9 William Stubbs, 'Eanswitha' in (Eds.) William Smith and Henry Wace, Dictionary of Christian Biography, ii (1880), 16. 111 See e.g. Canon Robert C. Jenkins 'On the Connection between the Monasteries of Kent in the Saxon Period', Arch. Cant., iii (1860), 19-34. " 'Poenitentiale Theodori*, Liber Secundus, XII, 36 in (Eds.) A.W. Haddan and W. Stubbs, Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents relating to Great Britain and Ireland, iii (Oxford, 1871), 173-203. 3 K.P. WITNEY So far, therefore, it looks as though Lyminge was the earlier of the two houses. But this is accepting that it was indeed founded for Aethelburga, and the more one examines the evidence for this the more dubious it appears. Bede says nothing about it, although Aethelburga features prominently in his narrative and he records a number of instances in which royal widows - including her own daughter Eanfled12 - ended their lives in charge of abbeys. This is a negative inference. The first positive statements that Aethelburga was buried in the abbey are to be found in late tenth- or early eleventh-century chronicles, all of them written outside Kent - the Vita Mildburgae, Vita Werburgae, pa halgan and Hugh Candidus' text. Although doubtless these drew on information from Kent there is a strong suspicion that in its transmission a confusion had developed between Aethelburga and another of the Kentish royal saints, Eadburga, who died in 751 or a little later, had been Abbess of Minster-in-Thanet, but is known to have been buried at Lyminge, since a charter of 804, issued within some fifty years of her death, specifically tells us so." Most significant of all, the Gotha text, written shortly after 1085 at St. Gregory's Priory, Canterbury, which had inherited the Lyminge lands, claimed that in doing so the priory had acquired the relics of Eadburga (and of St. Mildred) but made no mention of those of Aethelburga. It did, however, include the remarkable statement that Eadburga, besides succeeding Mildred as Abbess of Minster, was a daughter of Ethelbert and so her greatgreat- aunt, a supreme example of confusion with Aethelburga. Canon Jenkins, in a number of still influential articles submitted to Archaeologia Cantiana between 1860 and 187814 dealt with the whole issue in a cavalier way by the simple expedient of assuming that wherever the name Eadburga occurred in connection with Lyminge, Aethelburga was intended. This seems to be an exact reversal of the truth. Although, in conformity with his thesis, the church at Lyminge, the direct successor of the abbey, is now dedicated to St. Mary and St. Ethelburgn, throughout the Middle Ages the dedication was to St. Mary and St. £dburga and fifteenth-century wills (for information on which I am indebted to Mrs. Hendrick of the Lyminge Historical Society) show that at least here there was no confusion, since they refer to Edburga, correctly, as a virgin, which Aethelburga was not. Local tradition, therefore, was clear enough. And there is '- Bede, Hist. Ecc, iv, 26. "Birch, Cart. Sax., 317. 14 In particular, 'On the Connection between the Monasteries of Kent in the Saxon Period', Arch. Cant., iii (I860), 19-34; and 'The Basilica of Lyminge: Roman, Saxon and Mediaeval', Arch. Cant., ix (1874), 205-23. 4 THE KENTISH ROYAL SAINTS another pointer. The first record we have of the existence of Lyminge Abbey is in a charter of 697, and we know from another issued eight years previously that the place was then still a royal court,15 which is the last that we hear of it. Of course the abbey and court may have existed side by side for a time, but it is improbable. All in all, the belief that Aethelburga was the foundress of the abbey seems simply to be a mistake. We may, therefore, accept the primacy of Folkestone, setting its foundation in the context of Earconberht's reign (640-664), when, Bede tells us, numerous girls of royal and noble blood from Kent and East Anglia - including one of Earconberht's own daughters, Earcongota - entered abbeys like Brie and Chelles in northern France."' This was the period of growing rivalry in England between the Roman and Celtic Churches, when Earconberht, the most steadfast champion of the Roman cause, and himself descended through both his mother and grandmother from the Merovingian royal line of France, was determinedly reinforcing that cause through his contacts with the Gallic Church and by the example of the Kentish princesses, reared in an atmosphere of piety and born to duty. The influence of Kent, as the seat of the archbishopric, depended crucially upon this issue, in which religious and dynastic considerations were inseparably intertwined. The double house of Folkestone, based upon the Gallic model, set a notable precedent, soon widely followed elsewhere in England. The foundation of the Abbey of Minster-in-Thanet by Earconberht's son Egbert, in restitution for the killing of his cousins, Aethelred and Aethelberht, the offspring of Eormenred, became the very centre-piece of the later legends. All the early sources agree that Eormenred was the elder of Eadbald's sons and had been deliberately passed over for the throne in favour of the younger, Earconberht; it was only some of the later chroniclers, like Thomas of Elmham, who said that he had predeceased his father,17 a statement which is in any case almost impossible to reconcile with the number of his surviving children - at least five and according to one account six - and the fact that he could barely have been 20 when his father died. It seems that while there was, as yet, no settled rule of primogeniture in kingly succession there was some presumption in favour of the elder son; a conclusion supported by the names of the princes in the next two generations, when those of the elder, first Egbert and then "Birch, Cart. Sax., 73 and 97. 16 Bede, Hist. Ecc, iii, 8. 17 Thomas of Elmham, Historia Monasterii S. Augustini Cantuariensis, (Ed.) Charles Hardwick (Rolls Series, 1858), 176. 5 K.P. WITNEY Eadric, conformed to the alliteration of the royal line, whereas those of the younger, Hlothere and Wihtred, did not. Certainly Earconberht proved an excellent choice, but there is likely to have been more to it than that, nor can we trust the facile explanation given, for instance, in the Vitae Mildrethae that Eormenred was a pious and unworldly person, uninterested in power. Bede tells us that Eadbald had been afflicted with periodic fits of madness'8 - perhaps epilepsy - and it may be that Eormenred had inherited this. But there is another possibility that cannot be entirely discounted, which is that Eormenred, being the eldest child, was born of Eadbald's illicit union with his step-mother (and given by his still unregenerate father a name which harked back to the last heathen king of the line, Eormenric).19 Whatever the reason, and however good it seemed at the time, it stored up trouble for the future. It is not our purpose to recount in detail all the myths that came to surround the murder of Eormenred's sons, in which the irreducible kernel of fact is that the killings took place at the royal court at Eastry; that Egbert was implicated in them, even if they were carried out by his companions; that the bodies were taken for burial to the monastery of Wakering in Essex; and that in recompense Egbert gave the victims' eldest sister Domne Eafa, who had been married to Merwalh, a sub-king in Mercia, a substantial tract of land on Thanet where she founded Minster Abbey, herself becoming its head. The murder was prompted by fears that the young men had designs on the throne and, despite the emphasis in the Historia Regum and elsewhere on their purity and innocence, they may well have done so. It was a violent age, the records of which are full of athelings who stirred up trouble, with less cause than these two had. Bede, writing some seventy years after the event, seems not to have found it so out of the way or horrifying as to need mention, but he did describe Egbert as a noble king (coupling him in this with Oswy of Northumbria, who had been guilty of a very similar offence, for which Bede did indict him).2" And there is an intriguing story told by William of Malmesbury, though on what authority we do not know, that Egbert's younger brother and eventual successor Hlothere laughed at the victims being described as martyrs.21 The reason why these killings should have become so magnified by legend had probably less to do with their circumstances, which could have been the uncovering 18 Bede, Hist. Ecc, ii, 5. "' Ibid. 2,1 Ibid., iii, 14 and iii, 29. 21 William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, (Ed.) Duffus Hardy (1840), i, 13, 21-2. 6 THE KENTISH ROYAL SAINTS of a plot or merely a drunken brawl, than the politics of the time and the later celebrity of their nieces, Mildred and Eadburga, as successive Abbesses of Minster. Legend apart, there are a number of questions that we should like to see answered, the first being when the killings occurred and, connected with that, on whose counsel Egbert acted in making restitution for them. Bede tells us that Earconberht and Archbishop Deusdedit both died of the plague on the same day, 14th July, 664, and that the vacancy in the See of Canterbury was not filled until the arrival of Theodore of Tarsus in May 669.22 It seems that throughout the whole, or most, of this period there was also a vacancy at Rochester.23 The earliest version of the legends, included in the Historia Regum but apparently originating in the mid-eighth century at Wakering, and the St. Mildryd text of unknown provenance, say that Egbert was advised in the matter by Archbishop Deusdedit, which is impossible; and it was no doubt a realisation of this that led Goscelin, writing in 1087-91, and the account given in the later Bodley 285 text to substitute Theodore. But if nothing else the Wakering scribe does seem to have been conscious that the killings must have occurred early in Egbert's reign and that Theodore can have had no hand in the settlement. This is what, on general grounds, one would expect. It can be deduced that Egbert was a young man - probably a very young man - when he came to the throne,* at a time when the country was unsettled by the plague. No doubt he felt unsure of his position and in the absence of wiser counsel was over-influenced by his court companions - hence the guilt ascribed by legend to the wicked minister Thunnor, with the improbable name of a heathen god. This, too, would have been the time for his cousins, Aethelred and Aethelberht, to act, if indeed they had designs on the throne, which seems likely. Yet, the form of settlement after the killings, leading to the foundation of Minster Abbey, shows clear signs of spiritual guidance. It is here that one comes to the significant testimony of Eddius, the biographer and companion of St. Wilfrid, that on his return from ordination on the continent in 666 he landed at Sandwich - two miles from Eastry and its port - and that he was a * His father, as the younger of Eadbald's sons by Ymma, cannot have been born much before 625 or have been much, if at all, older than 40 on his death. While Egbert was the elder of his sons he is unlikely to have been the eldest of his children; Eormenhild, who married Wulfhere of Mercia, is said by the contemporary chronicler Eddius to have had a son old enough to be acting as a Mercian sub-king or reeve in 681 ((Ed.) B. Colgrave, Life of Bishop Wilfrid, 1927, 80-1.) 22 Bede, Hist. Ecc, iv, 1 and 2. 23 Ibid., iii, 20 and iv, 2. 7 K.P. WITNEY friend of Egbert, officiating from time to time in Kent during the vacancy at Canterbury.24 To this one might add that the settlement does seem to bear something of Wilfrid's stamp. All versions of the legend agree that Domne Eafa was not a widow, but parted from her husband Merwalh, when she came to take charge of Minster; which calls to mind Wilfrid's later part in persuading Aethelthryth, wife of Ecgfrid of Northumbria, to remain a virgin and abandon him for the religious life (or at any rate failing to dissuade her, as Ecgfrid had asked him to do).25 The removal of the victims' bodies to the obscure monastery of Wakering in Essex, of which almost nothing is heard later, is sufficiently remarkable to require some attempt at explanation. It seems to tie up with the events that occurred some twenty-five years later when, following the death of Egbert's brother Hlothere and elder son Eadric, the kingdom became a cockpit in the struggle between Mercia and Wessex and when, in Bede's words, 'various alien kings and usurpers' plundered it for a while'.26 Among those who held a brief authority during this time, as underlings of Mercia, were Suaebhard, a prince of the Essex royal house,27 and a certain Oswine, who claimed in one of his charters to be a near relative of Domne Eafa and in another to have been restored to the kingdom of his fathers, going out of his way to mention land that had once belonged to Eormenred.28 On the strength of these references, Gordon Ward made out a persuasive case for believing that Oswine was a son of one of the princes killed by Egbert.29 Supposing that either of the young men had married into the Essex royal house and had a son, then his widow would by custom have returned to her own country after tile murders, taking with her the boy and likely enough the bodies of the princes as well. Moreover, Essex at this time was being reduced to clienthood by Mercia,30 so that twenty-five years later Aethelred of Mercia would have had ready to hand to be foisted on a temporarily leaderless Kent a prince of its own royal blood, Oswine, through a dependent of his own. Also it was only through a 24 Eddius, Stephanus, Life of Bishop Wilfrid, (Ed.) B. Colgrave (Cambridge, 1972) xiii, 29 and xiv, 31. 25 Bede, Hist. Ecc, iv, 19. 26 Ibid., iv, 26. 27 Birch, Cart. Sax., 35, 40-42, 73. On dating, unpublished lecture by Professor Whitelock in Kenneth Harrison, The Framework of Anglo-Saxon History to A.D. 900. (Cambridge 1976), App. I, 142-4. 28 Birch, Cart. Sax., 35 and 40. 2g Gordon Ward, 'King Oswin - A Forgotten Ruler of Kent', Arch. Cant., 1 (1938), 60-5. 30 Bede, Hist. Ecc, iii, 30. 8 THE KENTISH ROYAL SAINTS marriage connection that Suaebhard could have had any shadow of a claim to share in the rule (which he later took over from Oswine entirely, before himself being expelled by Egbert's surviving son Wihtred,31 the legitimate claimant). Finally it is of some interest to consider how large, in fact, was the grant of land made by Egbert to Domne Eafa. The legend that it was determined by releasing her pet stag and including everything it encompassed in the course of a day had already originated in the eighth century when the Wakering account was written; but more to the point is the statement made by pa halgan (which says nothing about the stag) that the compensation represented the customary wergild, or blood-money, payable by a slayer to the victims' kin. Judging from the compensation paid by Wihtred in 694 for the killing of a Wessex prince, Mul, by a Kentish mob during the preceding period of anarchy and invasion, the wergild of an atheling was 30,000 sceattas, five times that of a noble and equivalent to some 15,000 of the later silver pennies;32 and Egbert had to pay for the lives of two. The different versions of the legend give widely varying estimates of the extent of the land, sometimes expressed in the Kentish measure of the ploughland or sulung (reckoned at 200 acres in Thanet)33 or its quarter fraction the yoke, and sometimes in the more general English measure of the hide, which had different values at different times but was always smaller. Fortunately, however, we do not have to rely on any of these accounts, since a charter issued by the usurper Suaebhard in 690/91, repeating almost word for word a fragment from a charter by Hlothere dating from as early as 678, says that the estate consisted antiquo jure of 44 hides.™ It happens that Bede, in a passage recounting St. Augustine's landing on Thanet, says that the island contained 600 hides.25 which shows that the reckoning at this time was around 40 acres - the standard which we know to have been prevalent, for instance, over much of Wessex.3 " The size of the 31 Ibid., v, 8. 32 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, (Ed.) G.N. Garmonsway (paperback, 1972 edn.), 40 with n. 1. On scale and relative value of payment see also H.M. Chadwick, Studies on Anglo-Saxon Institutions (Cambridge, 1905), 17; Stewart Lyon, "Some Problems in Interpreting Anglo-Saxon Coinage', Anglo-Saxon England, v (1976), 173-224; and K.P. Witney, The Kingdom of Kent, (Chichester, 1982), 163-4. 33 See e.g. (Eds.) G.J. Turner and H.E. Salter, British Academy Records of the social and economic History of England and Wales, ii, pt. 1, The Register of St. Augustine's Abbey, commonly called The Black Book (Oxford, 1915), 25-6, 61. 34 Birch, Cart. Sax., 42 and 44. 35 Bede, Hist. Ecc, i, 25. 36 J. Tait, 'Large Hides and Small Hides', English Historical Review, xvii (1904) 282-6. 9 K.P. WITNEY original award, therefore, seems to have been around 1,750 acres, confined to the south-eastern part of the island, or Sudanaie as the charters say; a considerable but not extravagant endowment which, when compared with the double wergild, may tell us something about contemporary land values, if only in a rough and ready way. By the time of Domesday Book, the Minster estates had been swollen by later benefactions to include rather more than half the island, and in the celebrated map produced by Thomas of Elmham c. 1410 the whole of this was contained in the course supposed to have been run by the stag.37 The Abbey of Sheppey must have dated from very much the same time as Minster-in-Thanet, since all the sources agree that it was founded for Earconberht's widow Seaxburga, who came from the East Anglian royal line. They also agree that Seaxburga later left Sheppey to become Abbess of Ely, being succeeded first at the one and then at the other by her daughter Eormenhild, who had previously been married to Wulfhere of Mercia. There are, however, some curiosities in the early accounts. One would expect Seaxburga to have been installed at Sheppey shortly after Earconberht's death, and so during the reign of her elder son Egbert; but the pa halgan and Hugh Candidus's text, both apparently drawing upon tenth-century sources, ascribe the foundation to her younger son Hlothere, who succeeded Egbert within a year or two of his death in 673 and reigned until 685.3S More remarkable still, a fragment preserved in the Lambeth records, written in a late-eleventh century script and appearing on internal evidence to be derived from the traditions of Sheppey itself (though recorded after its destruction by the Danes in the ninth century), says that Seaxburga actually ruled the kingdom for thirty years before delivering it to Hlothere. This is plainly false. It would imply that she acted as regent for both her sons, whereas Bede and the other chroniclers leave no doubt of the reality of Egbert's rule, nor of Hlothere's (though after a short interregnum). None of Hlothere's charters was endorsed by her and neither they nor his code of laws39 so much as mention her. A regency of thirty years dating from as far back as Earconberht's death in 664 would have outlasted Hlothere by nine; and, in fact, the Ely chroniclers say that she left Kent to become Abbess of Ely in 679.J" 37 Elmham, Hist. Mon. S. Aug. Cant., frontispiece. 38 Bede, Hist. Ecc, iv, 26. 39 'Laws of Hlothere and Eadric' in (Ed.) F.L. Attenborough Laws of the earliest English Kings (Cambridge, 1922), 18-23. 40 Thomas of Ely, 'Historia Eliensis: prima Ecclesiae fundatione ad annum MCVII' in Henry Wharton, Anglia Sacra sive Collectio Historiarum, de Archiepiscopis et 10 THE KENTISH ROYAL SAINTS There is no need to labour the inaccuracy of this account, but the insistence in it (and others) on some particularly close association between Seaxburga and Hlothere is enough to make one believe that it contains at least some grain of truth. We suggest that the clue lies in the confused period of interregnum following Egbert's premature death in 673,41 after a reign of only nine years and while still a young man; the likely cause of the confusion being that neither of his sons, Eadric or Wihtred, was then of an age to rule. It seems that this situation was immediately exploited by Wulfhere of Mercia, already in control of London and Essex. A charter which can be assigned to this time shows that whereas Egbert had been in possession of Surrey, where he founded the monastery of Chertsey, shortly after his death this had been seized by Wulfhere.42* What happened in Kent itself is more obscure, and has been the subject of a good deal of debate; but the salient fact is that Hlothere himself dated the start of his reign anything from nine to eighteen months after Egbert's death.4' Kenneth Harrison has suggested that during this period Wulfhere could have been the effective ruler;44 and it is in any case clear that when Hlothere did assert his claim it was in opposition to the Mercians, with whom he was shortly embroiled. Although Wulfhere fell in battle against Northumbria in 67545 (upon which his widow Eormenhild returned to Kent to join her mother Seaxburga at Sheppey) in the following year Hlothere had to withstand an invasion, accompanied by widespread devastation, by his successor Aethelred4" - whom he encountered to such effect that not only did he maintain his hold upon Kent but by the end of his reign appears actually to have ousted the Mercians from London, where his laws show that he had established a royal hall and a port-reeve.47 The element of truth in the story of Seaxburga's regency may be that, in the critical period following Egbert's death, she acted as a rallying point against the Mercians, using her influence as dowager queen to secure the acceptance by the people of Hlothere's leadership, Episcopis Angliae a prima Fidei Christianae susceptione ad Annum MDXL, Pars Prima (1691), 596. * Egbert's presence in Surrey may account for Goscelin's extravagant statement that he gained control of all the southern and eastern kingdoms. In fact, judging from persistent similarities of custom, Surrey had been part of the Kentish dominion from very early times. (J.E.A. Jolliffe, Pre-Feudal England: The Jutes, Oxford, 1933,90-3.) 41 Bede, Hist. Ecc, iv, 5. 42 Birch, Cart. Sax., 34. ,3 Ibid., 36. 44 Kenneth Harrison, Framework of Anglo-Saxon History, App. I, 145. 45 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; and Eddius, Bishop Wilfrid, xx, 43. 46 Bede, Hist. Ecc, iv, 12. 47 Hlothere and Eadric, Laws, cap. 16. 11 K.P. WITNEY perhaps on the understanding that he would, in due time, associate his nephew Eadric with him on the throne, as he did. She had no reason to love the Mercians, who had trampled down her own country, East Anglia, and twenty years previously had killed her father Anna.48 It is noteworthy that Bede, in recounting the Mercian invasion of 676, in which Rochester was destroyed, speaks also of the profanation of churches, of which there were very few at this time, other than the cathedrals and abbeys. He may well have had Sheppey particularly in mind. It was the nearest to Rochester; its restoration by Hlothere would account for the belief that he had actually founded it; and if, as seems probable, Seaxburga had helped to inspire the resistance to Mercia this would have invited attack on it. We can be sure of none of this, but it ties together. Hlothere has never received the recognition that he deserves. He was not a favourite of the later chroniclers; but their verdict that he was a cruel man seems to rest on no better foundation than William of Malmesbury's statement that he laughed at hearing the princes murdered by his brother Egbert described as martyrs - a story which, if there is any truth in it at all, tends if anything to show a commendable distaste for humbug. The chroniclers do not go so far as to suggest that he actually had a hand in these killings (he can only have been a boy at the time), but they nevertheless contrive to spatter him with some of the guilt from them. What little we know of him is to his credit. He dealt scrupulously with Eadric, and Bede describes how he redeemed a Northumbrian thegn who had been sold by his Mercian captors to a slave dealer in London,4" of which Hlothere had then won control. One is bound to wonder whether some of the prejudice attaching to him may not derive from the time, a few years later, when the Mercians were using Oswine as their tool and had every reason to exaggerate the virtues of his murdered father and to blacken the reputation of Hlothere and the rival branch of the Kentish royal family. It is from such germs as these that legends grow. None of this should be allowed to obscure Hlothere's achievement in foiling the first Mercian attempt upon Kent and restoring the kingdom after the crisis through which it had passed. As it happens the legends throw some light on this, though in an oblique way. They do so by naming Domne Eafa's sisters, among whom the key figure, for present purposes, is a certain Eormenburga. In a number of the versions she is actually confused with Domne Eafa herself, but not in Bede, Hist. Ecc, iii, 18; and Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, sub. A.D. 654. Bede, Hist. Ecc, iv, 22. 12 THE KENTISH ROYAL SAINTS most, nor in that of Goscelin, and a Kentish charter of 699 names both as abbesses, so clearly distinguishing them.50 Hers was not a common form of name, except in the Kentish royal house, and there is little doubt that she was identical with the Eormenburga who appears in Eddius' account as the second wife of Ecgfrid of Northumbria and whom he tells us later became an abbess.51 The dates are significant. Her marriage to Ecgfrid must have taken place at some time between 672, when his first wife left him,52 and 678 when she played a major part in the expulsion of Wilfrid from Northumbria53 (even if we allow for some bias on Eddius' part, and the provocation of Wilfrid's overbearing attitude, she seems to have been an hysterical and vindictive woman). In accordance with established custom, she would have returned to Kent on Ecgfrid's death in 685.54 The dates therefore coincide closely with Hlothere's reign. Moreover Eddius also tells us that a sister of this Eormenburga was married to the king of Wessex, Centwine,55 and although he does not name her it can be deduced that this was the one whom the hagiographers call Eormengyth, and who would also have returned to Kent when widowed in 686,5" being eventually buried (so we are told) near Minster. Both girls had been orphaned before their marriages and so would have become the wards of their paternal kin, first Egbert and then Hlothere. The marriages have the appearance of having been arranged by Hlothere, shortly after he claimed the throne, with the object of sealing alliances with the ancient enemies of Mercia, to either side of it. In the light of this the attack launched upon Hlothere by Aethelred in 676 no longer appears a distraction from more serious theats to the north; he was striking at the very centre of the hostile coalition, against a determined adversary poised on the threshold of London. It was the disruption of this alliance caused by the treachery of Eadric, whom Hlothere had taken as co-ruler,57 which precipitated the evils that befell Kent ten years later. Bede says that Eadric called in a Sussex army against Hlothere, who was mortally wounded in a 50 Birch, Cart. Sax., 99. 51 Eddius, Bishop Wilfrid, xxiv, 49 and xl, 81. 52 Florence of Worcester, Chronicon ex Chronicis, (Ed.) B. Thorpe, i (1848), sub. A.D. 672; and (Eds.) Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, Dictionary of National Biography, vi (Oxford, reprint 1921-22), 883-5. 53 Eddius, Bishop Wilfrid, xxiv, 49. 54 Bede, Hist. Ecc., iv, 26. 55 Eddius, Bishop Wilfrid, xl, 81. 56 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. 57 E.g. Laws of Hlothere and Eadric. 13 K.P. WITNEY battle fought on 6th February, 685.5S Sussex was an ally of Mercia, which had been using it as a lever against Wessex,5" so that this was a complete realignment, and one that aroused the fury of the new king of Wessex, Caedwalla, who had spent much of his youth warring against Sussex."' In the following year Caedwalla, having crushed Sussex, invaded Kent and swept Eadric aside, only to provoke a rebellion by his savagery,61 driving the now leaderless nation into the waiting arms of its old adversary Aethelred of Mercia, who could at least offer it in Oswine the sop of a ruler from its own royal line. The Mercian domination, exercised through Oswine and Suaebhard, lasted for four years until Wihtred, Egbert's younger son, who had been keeping himself we do not know where but perhaps in the sanctuary of Sheppey governed by his own branch of the royal family, emerged to claim the throne,62 rally the people to him and, having made his peace with Wessex,63 restore the independence of the kingdom by his 'devotion and diligence', to use Bede's words. The task must have been accomplished by 695, when he summoned a council at Bearsted (near Maidstone),64 a central position directly on the boundary between the Sees of Canterbury and Rochester and so a suitable venue for those from all parts of a reunited kingdom. It is at some time during this obscure and unhappy period that we can best place the foundation of Southminster, itself the most obscure of the double monasteries, to the extent indeed that we cannot even be certain where it was. What evidence there is suggests that it was an off-shoot, almost an annex, of Minster-in-Thanet and as such was used as a preserve of Domne Eafa's kin, the descendants of Eormenred and connections of the murdered princes. We have seen how her sister Eormenburga, who had been widowed in 685, later reappeared with her as an abbess in Kent; and that Eormengyth (so called in the legends) also returned to the family base in Kent and was buried near Minster. There is a strong likelihood that Oswine, who was ruling in east Kent at about this time (687-90), founded Southminster in agreement with Domne Eafa to help provide for these aunts of his. And yet another sister, Aethelthryth, is named in the Genealogia Regum Cantuariorum compiled at Worcester (though 58 Bede, Hist. Ecc, iv, 26. y> Ibid., iv, 13. '•" Eddius, Bishop Wilfrid, xiii, 85. 61 Bede, Hist. Ecc, iv, 15; and Anglo-Saxon Chronicle sub. A.D. 685-87. 62 For dating of reign sec Birch, Cart. Sax., 99. '''Anglo-Saxon Chronicle sub. A.D. 694. 64 Wihtred, Laws, in (Ed.) Attenborough, Laws of the earliest English Kings, 24-30. For identification of site, J.K. Wallenberg, Kentish Place-Names, (Uppsala, 1931), 18. 14 THE KENTISH ROYAL SAINTS in it alone). This might be dismissed as pure error and confusion, for instance with Aethelthryth the first, virgin, wife of Ecgfrid of Northumbria, but for the fact that a Kentish abbess of this name does appear in the record of the Bapchild Council, and if the order in which she is entered there is compared with that in which the abbeys are cited it seems that it was of Southminster that she was then the head. The Worcester chronicles add one other piece of information lacking in the others, and which may provide a clue to the whereabouts of this elusive place. It is that one of Domne Eafa's three daughters, Mildgyth, the least celebrated of them, lived for a time as a nun at Eastry.65 The village is only some six miles from Minster-in- Thanet, due south. If we are right in thinking that it was Oswine who founded Southminster for the benefit of his aunts and in memory of his murdered father - or even if it was founded later by Wihtred in further expiation of his own father's crime - there could have been no more fitting site than Eastry, the scene of the murder. This later ranked as one of the 'old minsters', or mother churches of the diocese,66 most of which were one-time abbeys destroyed or plundered during the Danish wars. Eleventh-century records show the existence there of an almonry with lands close to the old court and evidently carved out of its demesnes,67 and as late as Tudor times there was a property here still known as the Nunnery, though William Francis, the antiquary and author of the Liber Estriae could not discover why.68 It looks as though the Worcester chroniclers (whose interest stemmed from the fact that Domne Eafa's daughters were also those of Merwalh, once ruler of a neighbouring part of Mercia) had in some way had access to early traditions of Southminster which others had missed. This brings us to the culmination of the legends in the lives of St. Mildred and St. Eadburga. Mildred had been schooled as a girl at the Abbey of Chelles in France, but was marked out to succeed her mother at Minster, as the charters show that she had done by 69669 - though they also show that Domne Eafa was still alive three years 65 Florence of Worcester, Chronicon ex Chronicis, i, sub. A.D. 675. 66 Domesday Monachorum in VCH (Kent), iii (1932), 256-77. Also David C. Douglas, The Domesday Monachorum of Christ Church Canterbury, 1944, 5-15. 67 Margaret M. O'Grady, 'A Study of some of the Characteristics of the Holdings and Agriculture of Eastry Manor, East Kent, from c. 1086-1350', (unpublished M.Phil, thesis, University of London, 1981, 27-9). Also R.A.L. Smith, Canterbury Cathedral Priory: A Study in monastic Administration (Cambridge, 1943), 32. 68 William Francis, Liber Estriae: Or Memorials of the Royal Ville and Parish of Eastry in the County of Kent, (1870), 43. ""Birch Cart. Sax., 88. 15 K.P. WITNEY later,™ having presumably resigned her charge as she grew older. This is the last we hear of her. We do not know exactly when Mildred died. The last charter addressed to her was in 73371 when she must have been 70 or approaching it. It is difficult to penetrate the miraculous elements in her story to the true person beneath; but the legends ascribe to her a great solicitude and sweetness of character, and no doubt it was around this time that the cult began to form. There is nothing indistinct about her successor Eadburga, a highly articulate person, the close friend and correspondent of St. Boniface.72 The legends relegate her to a secondary role, concentrating mainly upon her removal of Mildred's relics to a new site; but the letters reveal her as a very human, indeed vulnerable, person, subject when young to acute fits of loneliness and depression, and with a great warmth of affection, largely expended upon Boniface. With her intimates she often used the familiar diminutive Bugga.* She was a highly gifted woman, who seems to have made a deeper impression upon her own times than Mildred did. The date given for her death by the later chroniclers is 751," three years after the last charter addressed to her as Abbess of Minster,74 but they may have been judging simply from the time when her successor took over. The correspondence with Boniface shows that, like Domne Eafa, she retired from her charge before her death, which probably accounts for why she came to be buried not at Minster but at Lyminge. There is no need to look for any closer connection between the two houses than that the archbishop of the time, Cuthbert, another of Boniface's circle, had once been abbot of the double monastery of Lyminge75 and may well have suggested and prepared the way for her reception there. One thing the legends fail to tell us is Eadburga's parentage; but a poem preserved among the papers of Alcuin (who died in 804) says that she was the daughter of Entwine (sic), whom Stubbs and most scholars following him have identified with Centwine of Wessex.76 * As for instance in a letter sent to Boniface c. 720 in which she described herself as Heaburg (sic), called Bugga. Any doubt this may leave over the identity of Bugga with Eadburga, properly so called, is dispelled in a letter c. 750 from Aethelberht II of Kent which in recounting a visit to Bugga described her in such a way as to make it patently clear that Eadburga was intended, the circumstances of the two exactly matching. 70 Ibid., 99. 71 Ibid., 149. 72 (Ed.) Edward Kylie, English Correspondence of St. Boniface (New York, 1966). "Thomas of Elmham, Hist. Mon. S. Aug. Cant., 220. 74 Birch Cart. Sax., 177. 15 Ibid., 160. 76 William Stubbs in Dictionary of Christian Biography, i (1877), 355-6. sub. 'Bugga'; and ii (1880), 16 sub. 'Eangitha'. 16 THE KENTISH ROYAL SAINTS This fits perfectly. If we are right in our previous deductions, it would mean that she was Mildred's cousin and had been brought to Kent by her mother - the Eormengyth of the legends - on Centwine's death in 686, and it would also explain her association with Boniface, a Wessex man. It also puts a new complexion on the charter addressed to her by Aethelbald of Mercia in 74877 which, in referring to her translation of Mildred's relics, mentions a consanguinity that has usually been read as meaning between Mildred and Aethelbald himself, although in fact the passage is ambiguous. Certainly, if there was any relationship between Aethelbald and Mildred, it was a remote one. According to the legends her father Merwalh was a son of Penda of Mercia, of one of whose brothers Aethelbald was a grandson.78 Stenton, however, believed that Merwalh was not Penda's son at all but of an independent dynasty;7'' and even if the legends are right, it is odd that Aethelbald should have referred to his tenuous connection with Mildred in a charter addressed to Eadburga but not in a previous one which he had addressed to Mildred herself in 733.80 It is much more likely that the consanguinity intended was between Mildred and Eadburga. Finally, there are a few other points, which amount to little more than footnotes. It appears from the correspondence with Boniface that the name of Eadburga's mother, whom we have identified with the Eormengyth of the legends, was in fact Eangyth.si It is understandable that the legends should have got this wrong, given that Eormen- was such a common element in the names of this branch of the family. The letters show that c. 720 Eangyth was an abbess in charge of a poorly endowed double monastery, where her daughter Eadburga was helping her.82 One's thoughts turn again to Southminster. They also refer to another daughter called Wethburg or Wiethburg who was at that time living in Rome, where she was known to Boniface.83 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us of a Wihtburg whose remains, miraculously uncorrupted, were discovered at Dereham in 798, having lain in the earth for 55 years. These were later taken to Ely, the resting place of Seaxburga and of Aethelthryth the first (virgin) wife of Ecgfrid of Northumbria, both daughters of the pious king Anna of East Anglia, as the legends - perhaps influenced by this 77 Birch, Cart. Sax., 177. 78F.M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd edn. (Oxford, 1971), 203. 19 Ibid., 47 with n. 1. 80 Birch, Cart. Sax., 149. 81 Kylie, English Correspondence of St. Boniface, 61-7. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid., 57-60 and 68-70. 17 K.P. WITNEY association - say that Wihtburg also was. Since, however, she died in 743 and Anna had been killed by the Mercians in 654s4 this is barely possible; and indeed Bede, who laid much emphasis on Anna's saintly daughters, naming three of them and one step-daughter,85 made no mention of her. She seems to have belonged to a later generation altogether. From the date of her death she could well have been the child of Eangyth and Centwine, which would explain why the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a Wessex document, should have recorded the discovery of her remains in an otherwise somewhat unexpected entry. All we can be sure of is that, like all the other saints named in the legends, she was of royal lineage. The legends uncover a deep cleavage in the Kentish royal family, originating in 640 when Eormenred was passed over for the throne in favour of Earconberht, aggravated in the next generation by the killing of Eormenred's sons, exploited by the Mercians through the adoption of Oswine as their tool, and (apparently) not fully healed until Wihtred's death in 725, since a letter sent by Eangyth and Eadburga to Boniface a few years earlier complained of the hostility of the king and his dislike of their race.86 There is a marked contrast between the concentration of the later hagiographers upon Eormenred's kindred, and especially upon Mildred, and the total neglect of them by Bede, who had a good deal to say, usually with approval, of the ruling branch of the family but named not a single member of this other, not even Mildred, who was his exact contemporary, nor the Eormenburga who was queen for a time in his own Northumbria, nor Oswine whom he merely subsumed among the anonymous usurpers and plunderers of Kent before the emergence of Wihtred. The appearance, therefore, is that he regarded Eormenred and his descendants as of little account; but mixed up with this there may have been an element of positive disapproval, for instance of Eormenburga's behaviour towards Wilfrid, of which he must have known although he did not choose to mention it, and of Oswine's subservience to Aethelred of Mercia, whose assault upon Hlothere in 676 he roundly condemned.87 There is no doubt where Bede's sympathies lay; it was with the ruling line, descended from the revered Ethelbert through Earconberht, that staunch champion of the Roman cause, down to the 'devoted and diligent' Wihtred, the disciple of Theodore of Tarsus and benefactor of the Kentish Church. These to him were the figures that mattered; he can have had no 84 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, sub. A.D. 654 and 798. 85 Bede, Hist. Ecc, iii, 8 and iv, 19. 86 Kylie, English Correspondence of St. Boniface, 61-7. 87 Bede, Hist. Ecc, iv, 12. 18 THE KENTISH ROYAL SAINTS inkling of how the legend of Mildred, the murdered princes and all connected with her, was liable to grow. We have seen the genesis of that legend at Wakering in Essex, which had received the princes' bodies and had every reason to magnify their virtues, and we have suggested that some further impulsion was given to it by the Mercians as a means of denigrating their enemy Hlothere and prejudicing the claims of Wihtred. Up to this point, however, it seems to have made relatively little impact. There was nothing especially meritorious, by itself, in the number of Eormenred's children and grandchildren who became abbesses. By the close of the seventh century that was the common lot of women of royal blood, the accepted method of providing for those who had been widowed (as in this violent age many were) in conditions of decent comfort and vested with an authority befitting their station. It was those who had not married - virgins dedicated to God - who were particularly revered and liable by reason of that dedication to be accounted saints, and it was around these that tales of miracles tended to accumulate, first in small and often transparent ways and then with increasing elaboration. In the earliest account of Mildred, written at Wakering shortly after her death, all that was specifically reported was that an angel had appeared to her in the form of a dove to guard her against evil spirits. It seems unlikely, nevertheless, that the body of legend connected with Minster would ever have prospered but for some special quality in Mildred, difficult to recapture now but not inappropriately described as saintliness, and the impressive talents of her successor Eadburga. Even so it was not until the tenth century that the legends, as a whole, had any marked resurgence. We can see in this the influence of the Danish wars, during which Thanet suffered particularly severely, being fought over and at times occupied and virtually isolated from the mainland88 - precisely the circumstances to foster the cult of the gentle and solicitous Mildred, with its strong element of nostalgia. Indeed, at this time all the double monasteries of Kent, in their coastal positions, were being extinguished one by one, releasing old memories of the royal saints and yearnings for what was thought of as a more blessed age. It has not, however, been our purpose to dwell upon the growth of the legends, which others have studied, but by rendering them down to arrive at something of the truth of seventh- and early eight-century Kent; to try to get the feel of that society, with its violence and compunctions, in which the Christian ethos was infused with values from a still recent heathen past; and to do justice to personalities and E.g. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, sub. A.D. 851 and 865. 19 K.P. WITNEY events during a formative stage of history when already control over the stronghold of Kent was beginning to be seen as crucial to the mastery of England, in which the final contest was to lie between Mercia and Wessex and the Kentish people were to have the casting vote. APPENDIX I PRINCIPAL SOURCES EXAMINED BY D.W. ROLLASON IN 'THE MILDRITH LEGEND' 1. The Historia Regum Text An insertion into the Text compiled at Ramsey Abbey in late tenth or early eleventh century but based on an earlier account written at the monastery of Wakering in Essex in the second quarter of the eighth century. 2. The Bodley 285 Text A thirteenth-century text representing a version prepared at St. Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury, A.D. 1035-59, which had been obtained by and modified at Ramsey Abbey. 3. The Vitae Mildrethae Written by Goscelin at St. Augustine's Abbey, A.D. 1087-91, drawing upon Minster Abbey sources. 4. The Gotha Text Amalgamation at St. Gregory's Priory, Canterbury, of two papers written after the priory had received the lands of Lyminge Abbey in A.D. 1085 and representing traditions preserved at that abbey. 5. The Vita Mildburgae: Genealogia Composed at the monastery of Much Wenlock, Salop, at some time between A.D. 963 and 1101. 6. The Vita Werburgae: Genealogia Composed at the monastery of Hanbury, Staffs., after A.D. 963, but with material drawn from an unknown ninth-century source. 7. The Genealogia Regum Cantuariorum Composed at Worcester after A.D. 1100 and associated with the Chronicon ex Chronicis ascribed to Florence of Worcester. 8. pa halgan Included after A.D. 1031 in Liber Vitae of New Minster, Winchester, but drawing upon earlier tenth-century Kentish sources. 20 THE KENTISH ROYAL SAINTS 9. Hugh Candidus' Text Incorporated in Peterborough chronicle of mid-twelfth century and originating at some time after A.D. 907-58. 10. S. Mildryd Document of unknown date and provenance, but written in mid eleventh-century script from material of pre-A.D. 1035 origin. 11. The Lambeth Fragment Written in late eleventh-century script from material apparently derived from Sheppey Abbey after its destruction by the Danes in the ninth century. 21 APPENDIX II THE KENTISH ROYAL FAMILY FOLLOWING ETHELBERT (1) Bertha (of ihe Merovingian line) Eilielbert = (2) Am (k. 560-616) 12) Ymma = (of ihe Merovingian line) Eadbald =())-" (A.. 616-640) Aethelburga (reputedly abb of Lyminge) Edwin (k v& Northumbnu d 633) Eormenred (passed over for kingship 640) Earconberht = (k. 64l>-664) ' Seaxburga (d. of Anna of E. Ang)ia abb. of Sheppey and Ely) d Eanswith (abb. of Fotkestoi Eanfled = Oswy Wuscfrea (li.. ot Nuithumbiiu (d in childhood) d 670) d. Eormcnhild (abb. of Sheppey and Ely) Wulfhere Egbert = (k. of Mcxcia tk. 664-67M I d. 675) Hloihere = ? {fe. 67+-685J I I d Earcongota (I) Aethclihryih = (nun m France) (d. of Anna of E. Anglia. abb of Elv) - 1 Ecgfrid = (2) Eormenburga (k of Northumhria d. ASS) d. Wcrburg Cocnrcd (abb. in McTCia) (k. of Mercia 7(H-7(W) 1 I Eadric (1) Aelhclburga = Wihtred = (2) Wcrhurga '• Richard ffc. 685-686) (k. 691-7251 (reputedly priest in Italy) Anhelberht 11 (k. 725-761) H3 H Z m < Eadberlu = Anon. Alnc (sub. k. (sub k. 725-'' 725-762) Eardulf (sub L 747 d before 762) Merwalh = d. Domne Eafa Acthclrcd ; (sub. ! Mercia) "? Anon? • Acthclbcrht (abb. of Minslcr c. 666-696) (murdered by \ cj of Essex /(murdered by Egbert c. 665) \ royal line)/ Egbert c- 665) / d. Eormenburga = Ecgfrid (ahh. 699 (k. of Northumhria ? of Southminster) d 685) (ahb. ".* of Southminster Eangyth = Cenlwine (k of Wessex d. 686) 1 Mildburg (abb. in Mercia) •l • d. Mildred. ;abb. of Minslci 696-c, 735) 1 d. Mildgyth (nun at Eastry - '.' Southminster) i Mcrcfin (died in childhood) \ / Oswme