Veiled Women, Volume II: Female Religious Communities in England, 871–1066 [1 ed.] 0754600440, 9780754600442

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Studies in Early Medieval Britain General Editor: Nicholas Brooks About the series: The early Middle Ages, between the withdrawal of Roman authority at the start of the fifth century and the establishment of French-speaking aristocracies in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, was a key period in the history of the island of Britain. For it was then that the English, Welsh and Scots defined and distinguished themselves in language, customs and territory; it was then that successive conquests and settlements lent distinctive Irish, Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian and Norman elements to the British ethnic mix; it was then that royal dynasties were established, that most of the surviving rural and urban settlements of Britain were created and named, and the landscape took a form that can still be recognised today; it was then too that Christian churches were established with lasting consequences for our cultural, moral, legal and intellectual perspectives. The Studies in Early Medieval Britain will illuminate the history of Britain during this defining period and reveal its roots. Books in the series will be written, individually or in collaboration, by historians, archaeologists, philologists and literary and cultural scholars and are aimed at a wide readership of scholars, students and lay people. About this volume: There is no published account of the history of religious women in England before the Norman Conquest. Yet, female saints and abbesses, such as Hild of Whitby or Edith of Wilton, are among the most celebrated women recorded in AngloSaxon sources and their stories are of popular interest. This book offers a detailed analysis of every female religious community active in England between the accession of King Alfred and the Norman Conquest. It transforms our understanding of the different modes of religious vocation and institutional provision and thereby gives early medieval women's history a new foundation. About the author/editor: Sarah Foot is Lecturer in medieval history at the Department of History, University of Sheffield. Nicholas Brooks is the Professor and Head of the Department of Medieval History, University of Birmingham.

Forthcoming titles in the series will include:

Carolingian Connections: England and Francia, 750-870 Joanna Story Alfred the Great and his World edited by Timothy Reuter Vikings and the Danelaw edited by J. Jesch, J. Graham-Campbell, R. Hall and D. Parsons

Veiled Women II

For Matthew

Veiled Women II Female Religious Communities in England, 871-1066

Sarah Foot

Routledge Taylor & Francis Croup LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2000 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 First issued in paperback 2021 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2000 by Sarah Foot The author has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Publisher's Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. British Library CIP Data Foot, Sarah, 1961Veiled Women. Vol. II: Female Religious Communities in England, 871-1006.(Studies in Early Medieval Britain). 1. Monasticism and religious orders for women-EnglandHistory-Middle Ages, 600-1500. 2. Women and religionEngland-History. I. Title. 255.9' 00942' 0902 US Library of Congress CIP Data Library of Congress Card Number: 99-054083 ISBN 13: 978-1-138-25086-4 (pbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-0044-2 (hbk)

STUDIES IN EARLY MEDIEVAL BRITAIN - 1

Contents Map of female religious communities in England, 871–1066

vi

List of female religious communities in England, 871–1066

vii

Preface Abbreviations Introduction Survey of female religious communities in England, 871–1066

ix-x xi-xii 1 15

Bibliography

261

Indexof Anglo-Saxon Charters

273

vi

VEILED WOMEN II

Corbridge Durham

Lincolm

Chester Stone Wenlock

Bodmin

Tamworth Polesworth Coventry Warwick

Peterborough

Castor

Chattens Ramsey

Ely Worcester Bury Leominster Eltisley St Edmunds Persnore Hereford Evesham Winchcombe St Osvths Standon Gloucester St Albans Woodchester Abingdon Berkeley St Pauls Barking Box well; Westminster Thanet Reading 3outhwark Sheooey Bedwyn Bradford Canterbury CheddarWherwel Lymmqe Amesbury Winchester Glastonbury Folkestone Wilton bnanesoury Homsey Lvminster West Preston Morton Wimborne Exeter Chichester Southampton Wareham Abbotsbury

0

Map

Female religious communities in England, 871-1066

50 miles

Female Religious Communities in England, 871-1066 Abbotsbury, Dorset Abingdon, Berkshire Amesbury, Wiltshire Barking, Essex Bedwyn, Wiltshire Berkeley, Gloucestershire Bodmin, Cornwall Boxwell, Gloucestershire Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk Canterbury, Kent Castor, Northamptonshire Chatteris, Cambridgeshire Cheddar, Somerset Chester, Cheshire Chichester, Sussex Corbridge, Northumberland Coventry, Warwickshire Durham, County Durham Eltisley, Cambridgeshire Ely, Cambridgeshire Evesham, Worcestershire Exeter, Devon Folkestone, Kent Glastonbury, Somerset Hereford, Herefordshire Horton, Dorset Leominster, Herefordshire Lincoln, Lincolnshire Lyminge, Kent Lyminster, Sussex

Minster in Sheppey, Kent Minster-in-Thanet, Kent Pershore, Worcestershire Peterborough, Huntingdonshire Polesworth, Warwickshire Ramsey, Huntingdonshire Reading, Berkshire Romsey, Hampshire St Albans, Hertfordshire St Osyth's at Chich, Essex St Paul's, London, Middlesex Shaftesbury, Dorset Southampton, Hampshire Southwark, Surrey Standon, Hertfordshire Stone, Staffordshire Tamworth, Staffordshire Wareham, Dorset Warwick, Warwickshire Wenlock, Shropshire Westminster, Middlesex West Preston, Sussex Wherwell, Hampshire Wilton, Wiltshire Wimbome, Dorset Winchcombe, Gloucestershire Winchester, the Nunnaminster, Hants. Winchester, Old Minster, Hampshire Woodchester, Gloucestershire Worcester, Worcestershire

Preface This, the second volume of a two-part study of the female religious life in AngloSaxon England, presents the detailed evidence out of which the argument advanced in part I evolved. There an explanation was offered for the sharp distinction between the visibility and prominence of religious women in the sources for the seventh and eighth centuries and their apparent obscurity in the historical record after the First Viking Age. It was argued that the key to understanding this evidential problem lay in the language of the contemporary (vernacular) literature which differentiated cloistered women, mynecena, from less formal groupings of devout 'vowesses' (nunnari), who adopted a life of piety while remaining within the world. The few communities of cloistered nuns of the later period were generally royal foundations, endowed with land conveyed by charter and thereby guaranteed their place both in the historical record and prominently in the secondary literature. These congregations were, however, shown to have been exceptional, not only because of their close association with the West Saxon royal house, but because the regularly constituted Benedictine nunnery was not the norm for female religious expression in the later pre-Conquest period any more than it had been before the Viking Age. Rather in the tenth and eleventh centuries pious Anglo-Saxon women chose to satisfy their spiritual aspirations nearer to home, on a model much closer to that of the early period when no single rule of life had predominated. Devout noble women chose in widowhood to live as veiled vowesses either on their own inherited land or on estates assigned for this purpose by their male kin, collecting around them small communities of like-minded women that flourished briefly, but subsequently faded from sight as their landed estates were returned to secular use. This argument is defended and exemplified here via the detailed investigation of all the written evidence for women's collective religious observance between the accession of King Alfred and the Norman Conquest. It considers in alphabetical sequence each of the sixty-one places at which a congregation of religious women can be shown to have been active in the period, analysing the primary evidence critically and drawing particular attention to antiquarian misconceptions. These accounts adhere to no uniform template since the shape of the discussion of each separate community is determined by the nature (and the date) of the written texts that refer to its existence. Each community is, however, categorised within one or more of the typological groupings defined in chapter 6 in part I; there women's religious communities were linked together either according to some common feature of their history or evidentially, in relation to the

x

PREFACE

sort of text in which their activities were first recorded. This information is designed to help scholars studying individual houses, or communities of religious women within one part of the country, to locate the places in which they are interested within a broader context. Although this volume stands alone as a first point of reference for students of the female religious life in later Anglo-Saxon England, the specialist reader will appreciate that a systematic treatment of the evidence is inseparable from the comprehensive revision of the position of AngloSaxon religious women in the Church and in the world that was voiced in part I. The two parts of this study are thus interdependent and operate organically as a single whole. University of Sheffield May 1999

Abbreviations ASE BAR BCS CCSL Dugdale, Monasticon

EETS EHD EHR GP GR HE

Harmer, ASWrits Harmer, SEHD John of Worcester, Chronicon KCD

Kelly, Shaftesbury Knowles and Hadcock, MRH Knowles et al., The Heads Leland, Collectanea Robertson, ASCharters MGH PL RCHM S Sawyer, Burton

Anglo-Saxon England British Archaeological Reports W. de Gray Birch, Cartularium Saxonicum (3 vols., 1885-93) Corpus Christianorum. Series latina Dugdale, W., Monasticon Anglicanum: A History oftheAbbies and Other Monasteries, Hospitals, Frieries and Cathedral and Collegiate Churches with their Dependencies in England and Wales (1655-73; new edn by J. Caley et al, 6 vols. in 8, 1817-30) Early English Text Society D. Whitelock, ed., English Historical Documents I, c. 500-1042 (2nd edn, 1979) English Historical Review William of Malmesbury, De gestis pontiflcum Anglorum, ed. N. E. S. A. Hamilton, Rolls series 52 (1870) William of Malmesbury, De gestis regum Anglorum I, ed. and trans. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom (1998) Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, in Bede 's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (1969) Anglo-Saxon Writs (1952) Select English Historical Documents, ed. F. E. Harmer (1914) The Chronicle of John of Worcester, II The Annals from 450 to 1066, ed. R. R. Darlington and P. McGurk, trans. J. Bray and P. McGurk(1995) J. M. Kemble, Codex Diplomatics Aevi Saxonici, 6 vols. (1839-48) Charters of Shaftesbury Abbey, ed. S. E. Kelly, Anglo-Saxon Charters, V (1996) D. Knowles and R. N. Hadcock, Medieval Religious houses. England and Wales (2nd edn., 1971) D. Knowles, C. N. L. Brooke and V. C. M. London, The Heads of Religious Houses. England and Wales 940-1216 (1972) Joannis Lelandi Antiquarii De Rebus Britannicis Collectanea, ed. T. Hearne (2nd edn, 6 vols., 1774) Anglo-Saxon Charters, ed. A. J. Robertson (2nd edn, 1959) Monumenta Germaniae Historica Patrologia latina, ed. J. P. Migne, 221 vols. (Paris, 1844-64) Royal Commission on Historical Monuments P. H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters. An Annotated List and Bibliography (1968) Charters of Burton Abbey, ed. P. H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters, 11(1979)

xii Tanner, Notitia TRHS VCH WhitelocMS0?//.s Whitelock, etal., Councils and Synods

ABBREVIATIONS T. Tanner, Notitia Monastica or an Account of all the Abbies, Priories and Houses of Friers formerly in England and Wales (1695, rev. edn J. Nasmith, 1787) [without pagination] Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Victoria County History Anglo-Saxon Wills (1930) Councils and Synods with Other Documents relating to the English Church, ed. D. Whitelock, M. Brett and C. N. L. Brooke (2 vols., 1981)

Introduction Since the logic of this volume is to offer proof of the argument articulated in part I of this study, via a place-by-place analysis of the evidence for congregations of religious women in England between the accession of King Alfred and the Norman Conquest, it seems advisable to offer some discussion of that evidence by way of introduction. This is intended primarily for readers whose interests focus on specific institutions, or groups of places, explored here and who are using this volume in isolation, rather than for those asking more widely directed questions about the nature of the religious life in later Anglo-Saxon England, for whom the first part of this study will be more useful. The first chapter of part I devoted a good deal of space to the nature of the extant sources for the study of the female religious life in later Anglo-Saxon England and drew attention to the qualitative and quantitative disparity between the evidence that has survived for nunneries associated with the West Saxon royal family and that available for the residue of women's congregations. It is not intended that the same information should be repeated here. However, just as it proved revealing in chapter six to group together congregations of religious women 'sharing a common fate',1 to categorise communities according to the time at which they had been founded, the longevity of their association, or the identity of their patrons, so it is profitable to draw links between otherwise unconnected women's communities that are represented in the extant historical record in sources of the same kind. (a) Groups of religious women attested in pre-Conquest sources2 The pre-Conquest sources, as was often mentioned in part I, focus particularly on the group of nine houses patronised by the West Saxon royal house; those congregations were discussed as a group in part I, chapter 6, §c.3 These are the institutions for which supposedly authentic charters have survived, the houses mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in the earliest extant list of saints' resting-places, or (in the case of the Nunnaminster at Winchester) in a pre1

The phrase is Stephanie Hollis's, used as a subtitle for her book Anglo-Saxon Women (1992), although this argument is not hers. 2 These places have been mapped in part I, map 9, p. 190. 3 These are the communities at Amesbury, Barking, Horton, Romsey, Shaftesbury and its cell at Bradford-on-Avon, Wherwell, Wilton, and the Nunnaminster at Winchester.

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VEILED WOMEN II

Conquest saint's Life. Charter-evidence could be adduced (with varying degrees of plausibility) in support of the proposition that there were communities including some women (or small groups gathered around a single vowess) at Bedwyn, Cheddar, Standon, conceivably at Tamworth, at Wenlock, and at Winchcombe. The community of St Mildrith was also mentioned in a charter of the mid-tenth century, although the women may no longer have been living on their original island home on Thanet. King Alfred's biographer, Asser, referred to a monasterium sanctimonialium inside the castellum of Wareham and wrote also about the 'excellent minster' established on the island of Sheppey, implying that both institutions were functioning in his day.4 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle mentioned the abduction ofanunne from Wimborne in 900 and that of the abbess of Leominster in 1046; the chronicler mentioned also the death of an abbess of Wareham in 982. The earliest of the Lives of St Dunstan described the behaviour of a single vowess who apparently lived on the estates of the male abbey at Glastonbury, although whether there was a community of religious women there is not clear (and cannot be demonstrated on the evidence of pre-Conquest charters preserved with the monks' archive5). The Liber Vitae of Hyde Abbey (compiled early in the eleventh century) included the names of abbesses of Berkeley and of Reading. No other congregation of religious women beyond these twenty-three is reported in a text datable to before 1066 to have been functioning at any time between the accession of King Alfred and the Norman Conquest. There are other pre-Conquest texts that mention single religious women active during our period and attempts have been made by some scholars to place female communities at some of the places with which these women may have had connections, but claims for the presence of a group of religious round the individual vowess arise only in the modern literature and are not supported by contemporary witnesses.6 (b) Groups of religious women first attested in Domesday Book7 In addition to its usefulness as evidence for the extent and distribution of the landholdings of the larger English nunneries, Domesday Book provides valuable information about groups of religious women and single vowesses whose

4

Asser, Life of Alfred, chs. 49 and 3 (ed. Asser, Life of Alfred, ch. 98 (ed. W. H. Stevenson, Asser's Life ofKing Alfred [1904], pp. 36 and 5). 5 Contra P. Halpin, 'Women religious in late Anglo-Saxon England', Haskins Society Journal, 6 (1994), 97-110, at p. 104. 6 On these grounds the supposed communities at Abingdon, St Paul's in London, Westminster, and the Old Minster at Winchester have all been omitted from this category; see part I, chapter 6, §f. 7 These places have been mapped in part I, map 10, p. 192.

INTRODUCTION

3

existence during the reign of the Conqueror would otherwise be unknown.8 Whether any of these should strictly be called 'nunneries' in the sense of enclosed, self-determining religious communities living under the authority of an abbess is unclear, but for the sake of completeness those apparently supporting congregations of more than two persons are given their own entries in the survey of women's congregations. Estates attributed to the ownership of single religious women have not, in the absence of other corroborating evidence, been deemed to have been occupied by communities of vowesses. Some of these estates may represent the private land-holdings of women belonging to otherwise well-attested communities; others may fall rather into the same category as those religiosae feminae who received individual grants of land from West Saxon kings in the second and third quarters of the tenth century and other single vowesses whose case-histories were explored in chapter 6, §f. Nine English nunneries had lands sufficiently extensive to warrant separate listing by the Domesday commissioners: the pre-Conquest foundations of Amesbury, Barking, Chatteris, Romsey, Shaftesbury, Wherwell, Wilton, and the Nunnaminster at Winchester, as well as the post-Conquest abbey of St Mary's, Elstow.9 The value of the holdings of these communities was estimated by Knowles, and has now been discussed in greater detail by Julia Crick.10 Independent pre-Conquest sources survive for all the Anglo-Saxon foundations other than Chatteris, which finds mention in no text earlier than Domesday Book.11 Five further towns would seem to have housed communities of religious women at the Conquest: Bury St Edmunds, Canterbury, Hereford, Worcester, and possibly Leominster; at a sixth — Chester — the memory, at least, of a women's conjuration was preserved. The congregations at the first three of these places may 8

It is worth mentioning at this point the misleading impression as to the frequency of references to 'nuns' in Domesday Book presented by the 'Index of Titles' (in J. McN Dodgson and J. J. N. Palmer, Domesday Book 37: Index of Persons [1992]) to the Phillimore Domesday. After references to the title 'nun' in that index occurs the unusual search field 'of [a named place]'; those entries consist of mentions of personal names identified by association with a particular placename. Misleadingly, and erroneously, the running head over these forty or so pages of references reads 'Nun/nuns of [a place-name]'. No nuns are mentioned in Domesday Book beyond those that are discussed in this section. (My reasons for rejecting the implicit suggestion made in the same index to the Phillimore Domesday that there were nuns at Threekingham in Lincolnshire at the time of the Domesday survey are spelt out in full at the end of §e, below, and in the footnotes to the entry for Chester below, n. 3.) 9 St Mary's, Elstow, Bedfordshire, falls outside the scope of our survey having been founded by Judith, niece of William the Conqueror and widow of Waltheof, earl of Huntingdon, after her husband's execution in 1076. Its lands are listed Domesday Book, I, fo 217ra; see Knowles and Hadcock, MRH, p. 258; S. Thompson, Women Religious (1991), pp. 167, 221. 10 D. Knowles, The Monastic Order in England (2nd edn., 1963), pp. 702-3; J. Crick, 'The wealth, patronage, and connections of women's houses in late Anglo-Saxon England', Revue benedictine, 109 (1999), 154-85, at pp. 162-3. 11 Domesday Book, I, fos 136rb; 193ra; 197ra (Hertfordshire, 12; Cambridgeshire, 11, 1-6; 21, 5), II, fo 389r (Suffolk, 24, 1).

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VEILED WOMEN II

in some manner have been attached to a male religious community in the same town, or as was discussed above, without there having been formal association between the women and the men, the former may have chosen to locate their houses close to churches staffed by priests able to satisfy their sacramental needs.12 The evidence offered by Domesday Book in relation to Worcester is that of the presence of individual vowesses in the area rather than a community of female religious.13 Leominster is a more difficult case. Other evidence suggests that the nunnery at Leominster was disbanded in or after 1046, but there was reference in the Herefordshire Domesday survey to 'one free hide' at Fencote, held by the Abbess of Leominster before 1066 and at the time of the survey; further, a portion of the manor of Leominster itself was said to be ear-marked for the supplies of the nuns.14 The nunnery of St Mary's Chester was also probably no longer functioning in 1086, but the Domesday survey refers to the lands of St Mary's monastery beside St John's church, in which lay '2 bovates of land which were and are waste'.15 The reference in the Domesday survey for Sussex to a place in Poling hundred called Nonneminstre has been interpreted as an allusion to the existence of a community of religious women either at Lyminster (the site of a twelfth-century nunnery) or at West Preston, but the place-name can more plausibly be differently understood as referring to a minster founded by a man called Nunna.16 A handful of further references in Domesday Book relates to estates given to individual women's religious houses by laymen on behalf of their daughters who were members of the benefiting community. St Edmund's Church at Shaftesbury was said to hold Kilmington in Somerset from Serlo 'for his daughter who is there';17 the Nunnaminster at Winchester held an estate at Coleshill in Berkshire which Walter of Lacy had given to the church with his daughter, and Kennett in Wiltshire which the nunnery held from Hugh Donkey for his daughter.18 Among the lands of the church of Wilton were listed two hides which a certain Thored was said to have given to the church with his two daughters, from which they were always clothed 'until the Bishop of Bayeux wrongfully took them away from the church'.19 Nuns from three Norman abbeys at La Trinite, Caen,

12

Bury: Domesday Book, II, 372ra (Suffolk, 14, 167); Canterbury: ibid, I, fo 12rb (Kent, 7, 11); Hereford: I, fo 181vb (Hereford, 2, 17). 13 Domesday Book, I, fos 173va-b (Worcestershire, 2, 54, 67). 14 Domesday Book, I, fo 180rb (Herefordshire, 1, 14); no monetary value is given; ibid, I, fo 180ra: this manor [of Leominster, held by Queen Edith] is at a revenue of £60 besides the supplies of the moniales (Herefordshire, 1, lOa-b). 15 Ibid., I, fo 263ra (Cheshire, B. 11). 15 Ibid., I, fo 24vb (Sussex, 11, 63). See below, p. 11 and n. 48. 17 Ibid., I, fo 98ra (Somerset, 37, 7). 18 Ibid., I, fos 59vb (Berkshire, 14, 1), 73ra (Wiltshire, 50, 5). 19 Ibid, I, fo 68rb (Wiltshire, 13, 22).

INTRODUCTION

5

Montivilliers, and at Almenesches were also mentioned in the Domesday survey, holding estates respectively in Gloucestershire, Dorset, and in Sussex.20 The ten single religious women who were named as the holders of land in Domesday Book were discussed in part I with the other instances of solitary vowesses. Their geographical distribution through the counties of England does not entirely mirror that of the larger communities which form the heart of this survey. Only one of the ten was reported in Wessex (the Edith who held twelve acres in Somerset); in Mercia there were two religious women holding land in Worcestershire, one in Gloucestershire and one who held two separate estates in Warwickshire; further east, one vowess had held land in Hertfordshire in King Edward's day, and a certain poor vowess claimed four acres in Norfolk. Most interesting, in view of the exclusively southern distribution of all the nunneries attested in documentary sources, is the mention of two religious women in Lincolnshire;21 both had very small holdings, and one had relinquished hers to a male community (at Peterborough) by the time of the Domesday survey. None of these women can with any confidence be associated with any known religious community (male or female), other than perhaps the two Worcestershire nuns, Eadgyth and Aelfeva. (c) Groups of religious women first attested in post-Conquest sources22 A few places (Chester, Chichester, Durham, Ely, Evesham, Exeter, Polesworth, St Albans, Southampton, and Tamworth) are thought to have housed religious women in the later Anglo-Saxon period solely on the evidence of a medieval historian or hagiographer writing after the Norman Conquest. In most of the references cited here the allusion made is to 'nuns', sanctimoniales; in the light of the discussion in part I, chapter four of the language of the religious life in tenthand eleventh-century Old English texts, it would be unwise to place undue reliance on the particular terms used by these authors. The niceties of the distinction between the Old English nunne and mynecenu may well have escaped them, and the nouns they chose to denote the inmates of these houses cannot be taken to signify any presumption on the part of these post-Conquest writers as to the specific mode of communal living practised by these women. That any of the congregations described here were following the Rule of St Benedict cannot be demonstrated; that many would have considered themselves communities not of cloistered women but of vowesses is more than likely, if now unproveable. 20

Holy Trinity, Caen: Domesday Book, I, fo 166va (Gloucestershire, 23, 1-2); St Mary's, Montivilliers: ibid, I, fo 79ra (Dorset, 23, 1); Almenesches: ibid, I, fo 24vb (Sussex, 11, 63). The Sussex estate held by the last abbey was said to lie at a place called Nonneminstre, discussed above. 21 R. Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture (1994), p. 34. 22 These places have been mapped in part I, map 11, p. 194.

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VEILED WOMEN II

The eleventh-century hagiographer Goscelin of St Berlin suggested in his life of the West Saxon saint Wulfhild of Barking that there was a community of some sort (domus familiarum) at Southampton (Hamtunid) in the early years of King Edgar's reign, but this cannot be confirmed from any other medieval or antiquarian source.23 It is not entirely clear what Goscelin meant when he reported that the king gave Wulfhild five domos familiarum (literally 'houses of households', not domos famularum, 'houses of female servants of God'), each with its own church; the nounfamilia encompassed families, or households, of all sorts, secular and ecclesiastical and was widely used in Anglo-Latin writing to denote monastic congregations.24 The word has conventionally been understood here to relate to 'nunneries', perhaps erroneously. Goscelin is again the authority for the statement (made only in the first of his versions of the Life of St Edith of Wilton, being removed from his revision of that text) that an Edith, sister to King Edgar, had founded a monasterium at Tamworth, where she had lived an exemplary life.25 In later versions of that Life the place of Edith's nunnery was said to be not Tamworth but Polesworth. William of Malmesbury in his Gesta pontificum Anglorum cited two eleventh-century instances of the ejection of sanctimoniales from a church in order to make way for male religious, one in connection with the relocation of the see of Crediton to Exeter in 1050, and the other relating to a church at Chester, filled with monks by the earl of Chester in 1093. In the context of the moving of the South Saxon see to Chichester, William also alluded to a congregation of sanctimoniales which had, antiquitw, been found in that town.26 There is no further evidence to support William's reference to religious women at either Chester or Chichester, although both were repeated by Leland, who also reported the presence of nuns at Exeter. Other evidence has been adduced by modern scholars for the existence of a nunnery at Exeter, but it is not wholly convincing.27 Another place at which it might be possible from a late eleventh-century text to sustain a case for the presence of a single vowess during our period is Durham, where a twice-married woman called Ecgfrith was said by the author of the De obsessione Dunelmi to have taken the veil, although not necessarily to have taken up residence there; it is doubtful whether this sole 23

Goscelin, Vita sanctae Wulfliildae, ch. 4 (ed. M. Esposito, 'La vie de Sainte Vulfhilde par Goscelin de Cantorbery', Analecta Bollandiana, 32 [1913], 10-26, at p. 17). 24 Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, ed. R. E. Latham et al., (1975-), fascicule IV, s.v. familia. On the changing meanings oifamilia in the early medieval period see D. Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge, MA and London, 1985), pp. 2-3 and 57; and on the language of religious families in Anglo-Saxon England see my 'The role of the minster in earlier Anglo-Saxon society', in Monasteries and Society in Medieval Britain, ed. B. Thompson (1999), pp. 35-58, at pp. 38-44. 25 Goscelin, Vita sanctae Ediths, ch. 8 (ed. A. Wilmart, 'La legende de Ste Edithe en prose et vers par le moine Goscelin', Analecta Bollandiana, 56 [1938], 5-101 and 265-307, at pp. 53^1). 26 William of Malmesbury, GP, §§94, 172, 96 (ed. Hamilton, pp. 201, 308, 205). 27 See below s.n. Exeter.

INTRODUCTION

7

mention is sufficient to argue for a congregation of religious women at this place.28 The twelfth-century Liber Eliensis described a small congregation gathered round a religious woman called jEthelswith, who lived on an estate she had received from the male abbey engaged, with her companions, in embroidering liturgical vestments; the same text made reference also to two widows jEthelflaed and Wulfflaed, benefactors of Ely abbey, who had taken vows of religion on their husband's death.29 The Evesham cartulary referred to the presence of religious women at that male abbey, during the time of Abbot Robert; his tenure of the abbacy, however, dates from the early twelfth century thus placing these vowesses outside our period.30 In his Life of St Wulfstan, William of Malmesbury gave an account of the cure of a young girl at Evesham who took the veil on her recovery and might have lived near Evesham as a vowess.31 Matthew Paris is the sole authority for the statement that sanctimoniales semi saeculares dwelt formerly in the almonry of his own house at St Albans;32 he also followed an earlier historian from his abbey, Roger of Wendover, in arguing for the presence of religious women at Polesworth in Warwickshire in the mid-tenth century.33 Neither assertion can confidently be confirmed from other pre-Conquest sources, although a St Edith was reported in the eleventh-century list of saints' resting-places to lie at Polesworth, and the conflated eleventh-century life of St Modwenna did allude to a congregation of religious women established at a place called Streneshalen in the forest of Arderne (?Arden in Warwickshire), which has been identified by some as Polesworth.34 These references all bear witness to the survival of traditions of female religious occupancy of these sites to the post-Conquest period, and that none can certainly be confirmed from contemporary sources does not necessarily indicate that the testimony of these authorities is to be rejected. Some of these communities may have failed to acquire permanent record of their history or endowment because they supported women for a relatively short period, or were sustained on estates only alienated from a founding member's kin for a generation or so. The congregation at Southampton (Hamtunia) referred to by Goscelin may have been 28

De obsessione Dunelmi, ch. 3 (ed. T. Arnold, Symeonis Monachi Opera [2 vols., 1882-5], I, 215-20, at p. 217). 29 Liber Eliensis, II, 88 (ed. E. O. Blake [ 1962], pp. 157-8): ^Ethelswith; ibid., II, 64 (pp. 136-7): vEthelflaed; ibid., II, 10 (p. 84): Wulfflaed. 30 Dugdale, Monasticon, II, 37. 31 William of Malmesbury, Vita sancti Wulfstani, II, 4 (ed. R. R. Darlington, The Vita Wulfstani of William of Malmesbury [1928], pp. 27-8). 32 Matthew Paris, GestaAbbatum (ed. H. T. Riley [3 vols., 1867-9], I, 11, 59). 33 Roger of Wendover, Flares historiarum, s.a. 925 (ed. H. O. Coxe [5 vols., 1841^1], I, 385-6); Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora (ed. H. R. Luard [5 vols., 1864-9], 1,446-7). 34 Die Heiligen Englands, 11.18 (ed. F. Liebermann [Hannover, 1889], p. 13). Vita sanctae Monenne, I, ch. 15, III, chs. 3 and 9 (ed. and trans. Ulster Society for Medieval Latin Studies, Seanchas Ard Mhacha 9.2 [1979], pp. 270-3 and 10.2 [1982] pp. 432-5, 440-1).

8

VEILED WOMEN II

one such. It is not inconceivable that the houses that were later supplanted by male congregations had such archives as they had amassed deliberately destroyed or revised in order to support a longer history for the new foundation; it is quite clear that a good deal of 'improvement' was undertaken within the Exeter archive in the time of Bishop Leofric, for example.35 The post-Conquest writers on whose authority these accounts rest could well have been confused by what Anglo-Saxon materials they could find. I have suggested below that William of Malmesbury may in locating a female congregation at Chester, have muddled the legends of St Werburg, to whom a tenth-century male house in the city was dedicated. The complicated legends of St Edith, intertwined as they are with the life of the Burton saint, Modwenna (Monenna), are as likely to have perplexed Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris as they do modern scholars; that the accounts of the St Albans' historians apparently provide a different explanation for the survival of relics of St Edith at Polesworth in the eleventh century from that given elsewhere does not necessarily invalidate their versions. The difficulty of disentangling the evidence for these eight putative communities does, however, reinforce many of the points made in the first chapter of part I about the relative inadequacy of reliable contemporary evidence for the female experience of the religious life in the period under discussion. (d) Groups of religious women attested only by antiquaries36 Certain women's religious houses included in the appendix of pre-Conquest foundations to Knowles and Hadcock's Medieval Religious Houses find place there only on the evidence of antiquarian authorities. Most frequently, the authority cited is that of the sixteenth-century John Leland, although his testimony is often concealed behind references to Tanner's Notitia Monastica, Dugdale's Monasticon Anglicanum or to individual volumes of the Victoria County History. Various antiquaries attested to the possible existence of congregations of women's religious during the period between King Alfred's accession and the Conquest located at the following places: Bodmin, Boxwell, Castor, Coventry, Eltisley, Lincoln, Pershore, Southwark, Stone, Warwick, and Woodchester. Discerning the sources for antiquaries' statements about the presence of 'nuns' in these places can be extremely difficult and sometimes impossible. For Eltisley there is independent evidence of a nunnery there in the twelfth century, associated with a steward of Roger de Mowbray, a certain Roger de Cundy, but for a pre-Conquest house Leland had recourse to the sermons of a vicar of Eltisley in the fourteenth century, who translated the relics of the patron saint of the parish 35

P. Chaplais, 'The authenticity of the royal Anglo-Saxon diplomas of Exeter', Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 39 (1966), 1-34, at pp. 4-9. 36 These places have been mapped in part I, map 12, p. 196.

INTRODUCTION

9

church in 1344.37 Information about Stone may also have been derived by Leland and Dugdale from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century legends about the saints Wulfhad and Ruffinus to whom the later Augustinian priory church at Stone was dedicated.38 That there was a convent on the site of the later deanery within the Close at Lincoln, Leland purported to know from certain physical tokens surviving to his own day, but these are no longer apparent.39 It is not possible to discover whence Leland derived his information that a house of 'nunnes' at Boxwell was destroyed by the Danes; that nuns at Pershore had been expelled by King Edgar to be replaced by monks; or that a nunnery at Coventry had been founded by King Cnut.40 It is similarly uncertain on what basis Leland thought there had ever been nuns at Bodmin or when he believed them to have lived at that site.41 Since Leland's uncorroborated testimony has so often been reproduced by later authorities, all of these houses merit inclusion in this survey of the evidence for late Anglo-Saxon nunneries, but none, as can be seen, stands up to close scrutiny. The sixteenth-century Augustinian priory of Southwark preserved a confused notion of its own origins which held that the community of secular canons that the Augustinians had replaced was itself preceded by a 'house of sisters founded by a mayden named Mary'; this tale was reported in John Stow's Survey of London first published in 1598) and repeated by the seventeenth-century antiquary Thomas Tanner.42 Tanner was also responsible for advancing the notion that the pre-Viking Age minster for women at Castor in Northamptonshire had continued to function into the eleventh century, only being destroyed by Danish attack in 1010;43 this view runs counter to that of thirteenth-century Peterborough historians, and cannot be confirmed. The idea there was a women's religious house at Woodchester in Gloucestershire in our period seems to have arisen from a misreading by Camden of the entry for this place in Domesday Book, that was

37

Leland, Itinerary, I, 1 and V, 218; the same information was repeated on Leland's authority by Dugdale, Monasticon, IV, 388. Leland's report also underlies the accounts of Eltisley and the priory of Hinchingbrooke in the Victoria County Histories for Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire: G. R. Duncombe, 'Eltisley', VCH, Cambridgeshire, K(1973), 46-59, at p. 56; Sister Elspeth, 'The priory', VCH, Huntingdonshire, 7(1926), 389-90; also E. E. Power, Medieval English Nunneries (1922), p. 688; and Knowles and Hadcock, MRH, pp. 258-9. 38 Leland, Collectanea, I, 64; Knowles and Hadcock, MRH, pp. 175, 266, 483. 39 Leland, Itinerary, V, 123; Knowles and Hadcock, MRH, pp. 429,476. 40 For Boxwell see Leland, Itinerary, IV, 133; Tanner, Notitia, Gloucestershire, iii; Dugdale, Monasticon, VI, 3, p. 1618. For Pershore: Leland, Collectanea, III, 160; Knowles and Hadcock, MRH, pp. 73 and 480. For Coventry: Leland, Collectanea, I, 50; Itinerary, II, 107; Dugdale, Monasticon, HI, 177. Also Knowles and Hadcock, MRH, pp. 63, 471. 41 Leland, Itinerary, I, 180; Knowles and Hadcock, MRH, pp. 60, 468. 42 John Stow. A Survey of London, Reprinted from the Text of 1603, ed. C. L. Kingsford (2 vols., 1908, reprinted 1971), II, 56; Tanner, Notitia, Surrey, xx [St Mary Overy]. 43 Tanner, Notitia, Northamptonshire, xiv.

10

VEILED WOMEN II

repeated by Tanner.44 Dugdale's report of the presence of nuns at Warwick before his time similarly inspires little confidence but once again lies behind Tanner's identification of a nunnery in the town.45 In the absence of evidence securely to confirm or deny any of these propositions (other than that relating to the putative house founded by Godwine's wife at Woodchester) nothing more can be done with these allusions to supposed women's houses. Bearing in mind some of the more doubtful grounds on which modern scholars have chosen to base arguments relating to communal female religious observance during the last two centuries before the Conquest, it would be a brave historian who elected to dismiss this antiquarian testimony out of hand.

(e) Dubia To complete this survey of nunneries in later Anglo-Saxon England there remains to be discussed a small group of places which can lay only tenuous claim to have supported communities of female religious during our period. Some of the houses placed in this category did house religious congregations in the tenth or eleventh centuries, but their members seem never to have included women. The houses at Abbotsbury in Dorset (a male community of Benedictines at the Conquest, apparently founded by a certain Ore and his wife Tola) and at Tamworth in Staffordshire (a secular community, beneficiary of the will of Wulfric Spott) are examples of this kind. It is highly unlikely that women were ever associated with St Peter's Abbotsbury beyond the involvement of Tola as the abbey's benefactor; this seems to have been a purely male establishment.46 Determining the early history of Tamworth (in the later middle ages a college of priests dedicated to St Edith) is more difficult. Goscelin stated that Edith, sister of King Edgar had founded a monasterium at Tamworth, and some sources place the relics of a St Edith at Tamworth, but it is most likely that this saint has been confused with the woman of the same name commemorated at Polesworth and that there was never a nunnery at Tamworth.47 On quite other grounds a case has been made for the possible existence of a single vowess (daughter of Wulfric Spott) on leased land 44

Camden's Britannia, ed. and trans. E. Gibson (1695), col. 247; Tanner, Notitia Monastica, Gloucestershire, xxxiv. 45 W. Dugdale, The Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656, 2nd edn. 1730), p. 376; Tanner, Notitia, Warwickshire, xxxi. 46 Contra M. A. Meyer, 'Patronage of West Saxon royal nunneries in late Anglo-Saxon England', Revue benedictine, 91 (1981), 332-58, at p. 336, n. 1. 47 Goscelin, Vita sanctae Edithe, ch. 8 (ed. Wilmart, pp. 53^t); Hugh Candidus, Chronicon, ed. W. T. Mellows (1949), p. 62; J. Speed, The History of Great Britain Under the Conquests of ye Romans, Saxons, Danes, and Normans (3rd enlarged edition, London, 1650), VII, ch. 37, p. 379. See C. Hohler, 'St Osyth and Aylesbury', Records of Buckinghamshire, 18 (1966), 61-72, p. 72, n. 27.

INTRODUCTION

11

in the immediate vicinity of a secular minster church at Tamworth, but the case rests on a questionable interpretation of a single adjective in the will of Wulfric Sport on which airy foundation no fantastical nunnery can be built.48 The place Nonneminstre given in the Domesday survey for Sussex is even more doubtfully eligible for inclusion in this study; whether this is identifiable with Lyminster (site of a female priory from at least c. 1201) or West Preston, it is more probable that the place-name related to a minster founded by a man called Nunna than that it denoted the presence of a nunnery in Poling hundred in 1086.49 The supposition that Corbridge in Northumberland housed a nunnery in the later tenth century rests on ever thinner ground. An early eleventh-century satirical poem by Warner of Rouen referred to a nunnery at Corbric, which has been identified with Corbridge in Northumberland, but the form in which this legend survives is highly dubious and the tale does not inspire confidence.50 Mention might also be made here of those places which had been homes to religious women in the pre-Viking Age and where the religious life was still (or once more) sustained in the tenth and eleventh centuries, but no longer by women. The early Kentish double house at Lyminge, for example, would appear not to have supported a female congregation beyond the early ninth century, although there was apparently a congregation of clergy there in the eleventh century, one which may conceivably be traced back to the time of King Edgar.51 Another Kentish royal minster, at Sheppey, also appears not to have housed women beyond the first half of the ninth century, but it was again the site of a nunnery in the twelfth century.52 The lands of the minster at Folkestone were owned by Earl Godwine in 1066 and although Christ Church Canterbury claimed in forged charters to have revived the religious life there after the viking wars, these estates had almost certainly in fact been in royal hands throughout the eleventh century,

48

P. H. Sawyer, Charters of Burton Abbey (1979), no. 29 (S 1536). Nunna is recorded as the pet form of the name of the late seventh- and early eighthcentury South Saxon king, Nothhelm (S. E. Kelly, Charters ofSelsey [1998], nos. 4, 5 and 6, S 43, 44, 42); it does not follow that this putative minster must have been founded by that king. Domesday Book, I, fo 24vb (Sussex, 11, 63). Contra S. Elkins, Holy Women of Twelfth-Century England (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1988), p. 14. See A. H. Allcroft, Waters ofArun (1930), pp. 101-5. 50 Warner of Rouen, Moriuht, lines 81-140 (ed. and trans. C. J. McDonough [Toronto, Ontario, 1995], pp. 76-81). 51 The female congregation is last attested by a charter of 804: BCS 317 (S 160); the members of the Lyminge community who witnessed BCS 445 (S 1439) were all male. There was a minster church at Lyminge in the late eleventh century: The Domesday Monachorum of Christ Church, Canterbury, ed. D. Douglas (1944), p. 79. 52 For the early history of Sheppey see Brooks, The Early History, pp. 201-6; D. W. Rollason, The Mildrith Legend (1982), pp. 29-31. The refoundation of the nunnery has been discussed by Thompson, Women, pp. 201-2. 49

12

VEILED WOMEN II

probably since the ninth.53 It is thus difficult to sustain a case for female religious observance at this place during our period. The status of St Osyth's at Chich in Essex is rather different from any other church considered under this head. Meyer saw this as one of a small group of early Anglo-Saxon double houses that late in the Anglo-Saxon period were occupied only by 'communities of chaplains',54 but the evidence for the presence of a minster for women at Chich in the pre-Viking Age is highly dubious. Although record of Chich as the resting-place of a St Osyth dates back to the early eleventh century, information about this saint is only found in hagiographical material compiled in the twelfth century by members of an Augustinian priory at Chich dedicated to St Osyth concerning their patron saint.55 There was apparently a religious community of some kind at Chich in the mid-eleventh century, but there is no indication that this comprised women. Woodchester in Gloucestershire similarly defies easy categorisation; the supposition that there was a congregation of female religious here arises apparently from a misunderstanding of the Domesday entry for this place (which refers rather to the destroyed nunnery of Berkeley) made by Camden and repeated by Tanner in his Notitia Monastica.56 These putative congregations of women have found place in this survey of the female religious life in later Anglo-Saxon England solely in order that all those places which might ever be thought to have housed cloistered women or vowesses within our period can be shown to have been considered; close examination of the surviving pre-Conquest and later medieval sources reveals that none of this group can be shown to have supported women during the period encompassed within this volume. Too tenuous to merit separate entry is the case of Threekingham in Lincolnshire. This house was supposedly associated with the seventh-century Mercian saint Werburg, who was said to have died at Threekingham and to have been buried at Hanbury; both the latter two places were said by Tanner to have been destroyed by the Danes c. 870, and Werburg's remains were later culted at Chester.57 There would be no reason to mention this community here were it not that the index of titles found in the Index of Persons to the Phillimore edition of Domesday Book has included Threekingham under the heading 'abbess/abbey of, citing a number of allusions to the church of St Mary at that place.58 That these are 53

Domesday Book, I, fo 9va; BCS 660 (S 398) and Robertson, ASCharters, no. 85 (S 981); N. Brooks, The Early History of the Church of Canterbury (1984), p. 205. 54 M. A. Meyer, 'Women and the tenth century English monastic reform', Revue benedictine, 87 (1977), 34-61, at p. 34, n. 3. 55 D. Bethell, 'The Lives of St Osyth of Essex and St Osyth of Aylesbury', Analecta Bollandiana, 88 (1970), 75-127. Die Heiligen Englands, II, 22 (ed. Liebermann, p. 13). 56 Camden's Britannia, ed. and trans. E. Gibson (1695), col. 247; Tanner, Notitia Monastica, Gloucestershire, xxxiv. 57 Die Heiligen Englands, 1,24 (ed. Liebermann, p. 7); Tanner, Notitia, Cheshire, vii.2; Knowles and Hadcock, MRH, pp. 474, 484. 58 Domesday Book, I, fos 341 va, 365vb, 370rb-va (Lincolnshire, 3, 55; 48, 7; 67, 11).

INTRODUCTION

13

to be seen as references to a female congregation at Threekingham in 1066 and 1086 is not suggested by the entry for Threekingham in the survey, nor the notes to the Lincolnshire volume in the Phillimore edition, and does not constitute sufficient historical grounds for including Threekingham as a separate women's house here.59

Conclusion Several historians have demonstrated in recent years how misleading is the conventional focus of the historiography of the tenth-century Benedictine reform on the small cluster of royally patronised nunneries in Wessex.60 This brief survey of the range of sources to witness to the activities of female religious communities shows that there were indeed many devout women living outside that small group of West Saxon houses, but that these were not cloistered nuns.61 It was apparently more common for women — widows and the unmarried — to express their devotion as vowesses, nunnan in the vernacular literature, than as nuns, mynecena.62 Women who chose to live thus can be found more evenly distributed through England south of the Humber, although there are still few houses reported in the sources as active in the kingdom of Northumbria. The relative invisibility of such congregations within the contemporary and later medieval sources may in part be a consequence of their seldom having sought to acquire permanent landed endowments. This volume is designed to be used as a work of reference, not to be read from cover to cover. It supplies an analysis, in alphabetical sequence, of the evidence for every place that I have found at which an Anglo-Saxon, later medieval, antiquarian, or modern writer has witnessed to the presence of cloistered women or of more than one vowess living at any point between the accession of Alfred of Wessex and the Norman Conquest.63 Others with more expert knowledge of specific areas will surely have more instances to cite than I have 59

John Blair points out that Threekingham was almost certainly a significant minster church, with a large middle Anglo-Saxon cemetery, but there is no evidence that this congregation included any women. 60 Notably Meyer, 'Women' and 'Patronage'; Halpin, 'Women', Gilchrist, Gender; Crick, 'The wealth'. For a thorough discussion of the historiography see part I, chapter 1, pp. 5-10. 61 For a summary of the conclusions to be drawn from the categorisation of these religious communities according either to their history or the sources in which they are represented, see part I, pp. 189 and 198. 62 The linguistic evidence was addressed in part I in chapter 4, the position of widows and other vowesses in chapter 5. 63 Women's houses of the seventh and eighth centuries that ceased to function before the start of the First Viking Age have deliberately been excluded. Further discussion of the criteria on which houses have been included, particularly in relation to those that apparently ceased to function during the First Viking Age, may be found in part I, chapter 3.

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VEILED WOMEN II

contrived to collect, but sufficient examples are offered here to support the proposition advanced in part I that it is the vowess living a devout life on familial lands outside the confines of the cloister who is more typical of female devotion in the later Anglo-Saxon church than is the cloistered nun confined within one of the West Saxon royal nunneries.64

64

chapter seven.

Readers are reminded that there is a summary of the argument advanced in part I in

Abbotsbury, Dorset Vowess beside a male community? Dubious The abbey ofSt Peter at Abbotsbury was reputedly founded by a certain Ore, steward to Cnut, and his wife Tola, who continued to take an interest in the monastery after her husband's death. There is, however, no reason to suppose any association between Tola and the abbey other than that of benefactor: there is no evidence that there were ever religious women attached to this male community. Abbotsbury was identified by Marc Anthony Meyer as one of the places where nunneries may have been located at the close of the Anglo-Saxon age, although he did note that the evidence for the existence of these houses for women was often unreliable.1 Even bearing this caution in mind, it is difficult to see how Abbotsbury can be thought ever to have housed female religious. At the Conquest there was a male Benedictine house dedicated to St Peter, which traced its origins to the generosity of a certain Ore, steward of Cnut,2 and his wife Tola;3 after Ore's death Tola retained an interest in the foundation, and received the permission of King Edward to bequeath her land and possessions to St Peter's at Abbotsbury as best pleased her.4 This cannot be taken as an indication that Tola ever lived at the

1

M. A. Meyer, 'Patronage of West Saxon royal nunneries in late Anglo-Saxon England', Revue Benedictine, 91 (1981), 332-58, at p. 336, n. 1. 2 Ore (Urki, probably representing a Scandianvian, Urkir) founded a guild at Abbotsbury, the statutes of which have survived; these are translated and discussed by Whitelock, EHD, no. 139. 3 Domesday Book, I, fo 78rb-va (Dorset, 13, 1-8). Conflicting versions are given in the antiquarian sources as to how this foundation was established. Some report a secular community was founded by Ore c. 1026 which was in the tune of King Edward changed to a monastery of Benedictines: Tanner, Notitia, Dorset i. Leland's account was that Ore had expelled a community of secular canons and introduced monks at Abbotsbury: Collectanea, IV, 149; Dugdale reported that Ore had founded a monastery to St Peter (Monasticon, 1,276). Yet another version had it that there was a much earlier foundation at Abbotsbury, fallen into decay in the eleventh century as a consequence of Danish raiding, which Ore restored, building a Benedictine house and filling it with monks from Cerne Abbey: J. Coker, A Survey of Dorsetshire (1732), pp. 221-2 (quoting an earlier survey of the county by Thomas Gerard). On these various versions of Abbotsbury's origins see S. Keynes, 'The lost cartulary of Abbotsbury', ASE, 18 (1989), 207^3, at pp. 221-3. 4 Harmer, ASWrits, no. 2 (S 1064).

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abbey or that she had any relationship with its members other than that of benefactor; her position certainly does not seem equivalent to those instances that have been found of women religious living beside or in association with male congregations.1 Dugdale reported that when they established this monastery Ore and Tola found an existing church at that place, manned by a single priest and his wife, but this cannot be verified, nor can it be thought that the priest's wife was living as a vowess.2 There are thus no grounds for including Abbotsbury among those places that housed religious women in later Anglo-Saxon England.

1 2

Discussed in part I, ch. 6, §e . Dugdale, Monasticon, I, 276; Keynes, 'The lost cartulary', p. 208.

Abingdon, Berkshire Short-lived new foundation? Vowesses beside a male community It has been argued both that an earlier minster for -women was revived at Abingdon in the mid-tenth century, and that the male community there had some unofficial arrangement with religious women in the same period, but both arguments depend on grants from tenth-century kings to individual religiosae feminae, which cannot be used to support such interpretations.

Arguments have been advanced both for the revival in the mid-tenth century of a minster for women at Abingdon dedicated to St Helen, and for female religious there in the tenth century having had some unofficial arrangement with the male monastery at Abingdon.1 These suggestions are supported by the preservation in Abingdon's archive of three charters relating to land in Berkshire in favour of a kinswoman of King Edmund's called jElfhild and of two religious women, Eadwulfu and Sasthryth.2 This putative community cannot, it is argued, have survived for more than a few years after Edmund's grants in 940 and 942, and certainly not beyond his death in 946, which may have represented the end of royal interest in the Abingdon 'nunnery'.3 The estates granted by King Edmund to these religious women are assumed eventually to have come into the possession of jEthelwold's abbey.4 The earliest of these charters, dated 940, records King Edmund's gift of 15 hides at Culham in Oxfordshire to his kinswoman, ^Ifhild, for her to enjoy without paying secular dues, and to bequeath at will.5 Abingdon's later possession of this document might suggest that the abbey ultimately obtained this estate, but it need not; the archive contains a number of title deeds for lands in which the 1

M. A. Meyer, 'Patronage of West Saxon royal nunneries in late Anglo-Saxon England', Revue benedictine, 91 (1981), 332-58, at pp. 345-6; "The queen's "demesne" in later Anglo-Saxon England', in The Culture of Christendom. Essays in Medieval History in Commemoration of Denis L. T. Bethell, ed. M. A. Meyer (1993), pp. 75-113, at p. 94 and n. 79; P. Halpin, 'Women religious in late Anglo-Saxon England', Haskins Society Journal, 6 (1994), 97-110, p. 104. 2 DCS 759 (S 460), BCS 743 (S 448), BCS 778 (S 482). 3 Meyer, 'Patronage', pp. 345-6. 4 Meyer, 'The queen's "demesne"', p. 94, n. 79. 5 BCS 759 (S 460).

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VEILED WOMEN II

abbey had no interest.1 There is no obvious reason to interpret Edmund's gift to .ifslfhild as other than a straightforward donation to a lay beneficiary; ^Elfhild is not even described in the text of the charter in in such a way as to suggest that she aspired to the religious life. Meyer's inference about the recreation of a 'nunnery' here is based on a more convoluted series of presumptions. The male community at Abingdon (refounded by ^Ethelwold c. 954) did in fact lay claim to Culham; it was presumably the lack of any charter in its own favour, and the omission of Culham from the Domesday Survey, which led to Abingdon's creation of the memorandum about the Culham estate preserved in one manuscript of the abbey's cartulary. This stated that Culham was merely leased to vElfhild by Godescalc the abbot on the same terms on which it had previously been held by Cenwulf s sisters, namely with reversion to Abingdon.2 The Abingdon Chronicle included a long narrative account of the sisters of Cenwulf of Mercia (796—821) and the king's lease to them of Culham;3 a forged charter surviving only in an inspeximus of 1336 purports to represent a grant of 15 hides at Culham from Cenwulf of Mercia at the request of his sisters Kenefuwit (?Cyneswith) and Burgenilde.4 Meyer took these rather unsatisfactory references as evidence that a community of religious women was established at Abingdon by Cenwulf s daughter; he argued further that their church at Culham escaped the ravages of the Danes in the ninth century.5 According to his interpretation, Edmund's gift of Culham to jElfhild in effect restored the estate to the abbey 'as the king placed ^Elfhild in possession of it and most likely of the defunct nunnery itself.6 In fact, none of these records indicate more than that the abbey was concerned to bolster its title

1

F. M. Stenton, The Early History of the Abbey of Abingdon (1913), pp. 40-3. Susan Kelly, who is editing the Abingdon charters for the British Academy Anglo-Saxon Charter project, will demonstrate that our understanding of this abbey's early history is flawed; her analysis of the early charters suggests that these represent the archive of a lost minster at Bradfield in Berkshire, about fifteen miles south-east of Abingdon. 2 Chronicon Monasterii de Abingdon, ed. }. Stevenson (2 vols., 1858), I, 92. This memorandum is recorded only in the version of the cartulary found in London, British Library, MS Cotton Claudius B vi. 3 Chronicon Monasterii de Abingdon, ed. Stevenson, I, 18-21. 4 Dugdale, Monasticon, I, 514 (no. 7) (S 184; S. E. Kelly, The Charters of Abingdon Abbey [forthcoming], no. 10). 5 Meyer, 'Patronage', p. 345, n. 2. The information about Danish raiding (Chronicon Monasterii de Abingdon, ed. Stevenson, II, 276) Meyer has derived from a narrative of Abingdon's early history preserved in the thirteenth-century manuscript London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius A. xiii and can have little historical value. Meyer's association of this supposed community with St Helen's seems to rest on the allusion in the same narrative to /Ethelwold's excavation of the crypt of the church of St Helen at Abingdon and his finding of an ancient cross there. A sketch of this cross in the Chronicle reveals it to be an eighth-century cruciform discheaded pin, resembling those found at Whitby and Flixborough: i. Blair, Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire (1994), p. 65 (with illustration). 6 Meyer, 'The queen's "demesne"', p. 94, n. 79.

ABINGDON

19

to Culham;1 they certainly offer no evidence for the presence of a congregation of cloistered or avowed women at Culham in the 940s, nor do they afford any grounds for associating this estate with the supposed early women's minster of St Helen's.2 The second charter of King Edmund's from which Meyer has argued for a revival of a nunnery at Abingdon in the 940s is a grant dated 942 by which a religiosa femina, Saethryth, received 11 hides at Winkfield from the king, the text of which is preserved in Abingdon's archive.3 The same grant has also been used by Patricia Halpin in support of her proposition that Abingdon was one of a number of male communities to have some kind of arrangement with women religious in the tenth and eleventh centuries.4 Abingdon held a ten-hide estate at Winkfield in 1066 and 1086,5 but the house's history offers contradictory evidence as to how this land came into the abbey's possession. Introducing its record of Edmund's charter for Sasthryth, the Abingdon Chronicle reported that the religious woman had confirmed the estate to God and St Mary and the monastery of Abingdon with the monks serving God there. A yet more explicit account of the donation from Sasthryth to the abbey in the time of Abbot jEthelwold was given in the later of the two thirteenth-century manuscripts of the abbey's history.6 However, the abbey's chronicle reported elsewhere that Abingdon had received the estate only in the reign of Jithelred the Unready, from a noblewoman called Eadflaed.7 In view of Abingdon's undoubted later possession of this estate, it might be surmised that Sasthryth's charter had represented the abbey's first title to the estate. What Edmund's charter to Saethryth does not permit us to do is to argue, as Meyer has, that it suggests that a 'nunnery' was established at Abingdon by King Edmund. Furthermore, if the ancient 'little minster' at Abingdon had become, by the time King Eadred granted it to jEthelwold, 'neglected and forlorn',

1

Stenton (The Early History, pp. 45-6) was inclined to place more reliance on the allusion to Cenwulf and his sisters, on the grounds that 'unless it were pure invention' some record of a gift of Cenwulf of Mercia to his sisters must have been kept by the abbey. 2 Susan Kelly's work on the Abingdon charters sheds more light on the focus of the earliest community at the church of St Helen, on a site about 100 yards north-east of the later medieval abbey at Abingdon and on the fact that this was a double house; for archaeological support for the presumption that the earliest minster was here see Blair, Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire, p. 65. It was, however, deserted in the mid-tenth century when .flithelwold and his monks acquired the site. 3 BCS 778 (S 482). 4 Halpin, 'Women', p. 104. 5 Domesday Book, I, fo 59rb. (Berkshire, 7, 31). 6 Chronicon Monasterii de Abingdon, ed. Stevenson, I, 113-14, and p. 114, n. 1. 7 Chronicon Monasterii de Abingdon, ed. Stevenson, I, 429; Stenton, The Early History, p. 2.

20

VEILED WOMEN II

it is unlikely that Saethryth would have tried to live as a religiosa femina in the shadow of a male community at this place.1 There is one further mid-tenth-century charter in favour of a religious woman preserved in the Abingdon archive, to which Patricia Halpin also referred: a grant dated 939 of 15 hides at Brightwalton, Berkshire, from King ^thelstan to Eadwulfu, religiosa femina.2 Recorded in the abbey's history, the text of the charter is prefaced there by a statement that Eadwulfu later transferred the estate to Abingdon. Brightwalton was, however, held by Battle Abbey in 1086; in the time of King Edward it had been held by Earl Harold and before him by a thegn, who had paid tax at 15 hides.3 Stenton suggested that it was highly probable that the woman Eadwulfu was a member of a monastic community, an opinion with which one need not necessarily concur. Certainly there would seem no reason to presume that she were directly associated with Abingdon, and it must be doubted whether the estate granted her by iEthelstan was ever held by Abingdon. Eadwulfu and Saethryth might both more plausibly be linked with that group of single vowesses discussed in part I, who may have lived at the margins of a male monastic house but cannot convincingly be shown to be part of any known monastic congregation. If they were in any way connected with one another, or had either or both of them tried to accumulate a congregation of vowesses, this cannot now be determined. Meyer's case for the short-lived attempt to restore a women's religious house at Abingdon in the 940s must be discounted. There is no evidence that there was any sort of congregation of women religious at Abingdon before it was reestablished as a male community by yEthelwold in the 950s. Nor can Halpin's hypothesis that women were informally associated with the male house at Abingdon in the mid-tenth century be very effectively sustained on the basis of the evidence that she has cited. All that can be said with confidence is that during the tenth century religious women occupied estates to which Abingdon Abbey laid claim at the Conquest.

1

Wulfstan, Vita S. Athelwoldi, ch. 11 (ed. M. Lapidge and M. Winterbottom [1991], p. 18): 'quendam locum uocabulo Abbandoniam, in quo modicum antiquitus habebatur monasteriolum, sed erat tune neglectum ac destitutum'. 2 BCS 763 (S 448). Halpin, 'Women', p. 104. 3 Domesday Book, I, fo 59vb (Berkshire, 15, 1); Stenton, The Early History, p. 39.

Amesbury, Wiltshire New tenth-century foundation Patronised by the West Saxon royal family Attested in pre-Conquest sources Estates listed in Domesday Book The nunnery at Amesbury was reputedly founded by King Edgar's •widow, jElfthryth, as an act of penance for her involvement in the murder of Edward the Martyr. It may, early in the eleventh century, have shared an abbess with the house at Wherwell, also founded by JElfthryth.

Among the royal nunneries of tenth-century England, that at Amesbury in Wiltshire apparently had one of the closest relationships with the royallysponsored movement for the renewal of monastic observance, having reputedly been founded by jElfthryth, Edgar's queen, under whose direct protection all the reformed houses for women were placed.1 Amesbury is, however, also one of the least well attested later Anglo-Saxon nunneries; there are no surviving charters relating to the abbey's endowment, nor does any text earlier than Domesday specifically mention the presence of a women's religious house at the site where there was already a royal vill.2 The first account of Amesbury's origin was given by the twelfth-century historian, William of Malmesbury, who viewed its foundation (together with that of Wherwell in Dorset) as an act of penance on ^Elfthryth's part for her role in the murder of Edgar's elder son, Edward the Martyr.3 Earlier legends, preserved by Tanner, gave Amesbury as the site of an ancient monastery for 300 monks founded by Ambrosius (or an eponymous abbot, Ambrius) but later destroyed; Tanner also reported, but rejected, the notion that

1

Regularis concordia, proem §3 (ed. and trans. T. Symons, Regularis Concordia

[1953], p. 2). 2

The Wiltshire lands of the church of Amesbury were assessed Domesday Book, I, fo 68va (Wiltshire, 16, 1-6); and their Berkshire lands fo 60ra (Berkshire, 16, 1-3); see ]. Crick, 'The wealth, patronage, and connections of women's houses in late Anglo-Saxon England', Revue benedictine, 109 (1999), 154-85, at pp. 162-3, table 1. Several entries referred to the abbess of Amesbury, and some estates were said to be 'for the supplies of the nuns'. 3 William of Malmesbury, GP, §87 (ed. Hamilton, p. 188).

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VEILED WOMEN II

Amesbury might have been one of the two monasteries given by King Alfred to Asser.1 In the ninth and tenth centuries land at Amesbury was in the possession of the West Saxon royal house. Estates at Amesbury were willed by Alfred to his younger son ^thelweard, and by Eadred to his mother, Eadgifu, widow of Edward the Elder;2 assemblies were held at Amesbury in 858, at Christmas 932, in 977 and at Easter 995.3 At the time of the Domesday survey Amesbury was held by the king.4 Meyer has suggested that the estate at Amesbury on which the women's house was founded might have been acquired by jElfthryth from Eadgifu (Edward the Elder's queen), but he has offered no explanation as to how royal family lands might have passed directly from dowager to queen, or from dowager to dowager; this supposition is further brought into question by the recent suggestion of David Dumville's that Eadred's will was never in fact executed.5 William of Malmesbury stated that in his time there were three monasteries in Wiltshire: Malmesbury for men and Wilton and Amesbury for women; Amesbury he reported to have been founded by 'Elfrida, murderess of St Edward, as an act of penance'.6 The first source to attribute Amesbury's foundation to c. 979 appears to be the Melrose Chronicle (compiled by a monk of Melrose soon after 1236, and drawing for the period before 1129 mainly on Simeon of Durham). The foundation of Amesbury was not mentioned in the Historia Regum, and the date 979 may well have been derived from William of Malmesbury's statement, since the foundation of Amesbury and Wherwell was reported by the Melrose chronicler immediately after his account of Edward's martyrdom in that year.7 The general presumption that Amesbury was founded 1

Tanner, Notitia, Wiltshire, i; Knowles and Hadcock, MRH, p. 466. Asser's own account (Life of Alfred, ch. 81, ed. W. H. Stevenson, Asser's Life of King Alfred [1904, reprinted 1959], p. 68) was that he received the minsters of Congresbury and Banwell; see S. Keynes and M. Lapidge, Alfred the Great (1983), p. 264, n. 192. 2 Harmer, SEND, nos. 11 and 21 (S 1507 and 1515). 3 BCS 495 (S 1274, A. D. 858); BCS 692 (S 418, A. D. 932) and Kelly, Shafiesbury, no. 8 (S 419, A. D. 932); both the latter two charters made reference to the royal vill at Amesbury. The royal council of 977 was reported by John of Worcester, Chronicon, s.a. 977 (ed. and trans. Darlington, et al., II, 428-9), but in no other source. The Easter meeting of 995 was mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, s.a. 995 F. 4 Domesday Book, I, fo 64vb (Wiltshire, 1, 3); see P. H. Sawyer, 'The royal tun in pre-Conquest England', in Ideal and Reality in Prankish and Anglo-Saxon Society, ed. P. Wormald et al. (1983), pp. 273-99, at p. 290. 5 M. A. Meyer, 'Patronage of West Saxon royal nunneries in late Anglo-Saxon England', Revue benedictine, 91 (1981), 332-58, at p. 343. D. Dumville, 'The will of King Eadred' (unpublished). 6 William of Malmesbury, GP, §87 (ed. Hamilton, p. 188). 7 Chronica de Mailros, s.a. 979 (ed. J. Stevenson [1835], p. 36); R. B. Pugh, 'The abbey, later priory, of Amesbury', VCH, Wiltshire, III (1956), 242-59, p. 242, and following Pugh, B. L. Venarde, Women's Monasticism and Medieval Society (Ithaca, New York and London, 1997), p. 26. The date of 979 was given by Leland (Collectanea, I, 67 and IV, 74); Tanner (Notitia,

AMESBURY

23

during the reign of vEthelred, and not rather during Edgar's lifetime is dependent solely on William's testimony that the houses were founded after the death of Edward the Martyr.1 At an exchequer suit in the fifteenth century, the then prioress of Amesbury produced in support of her case a document purporting to be a charter from King ^thelred in favour of the nunnery. From the account of this document given in the record of this case, Finberg succeeded in partially reconstructing jEthelred's document, which appears to be closely related to a charter of the same king's in favour of Wherwell dated 1002.2 The reconstructed text reveals nothing about the nunnery's estates, but merely confirms the house in its title to the site of the abbey and its other possessions, establishes its liberty from temporal obligations, and makes provision for the election of abbesses.3 No surviving contemporary sources name any tenth- or eleventh-century abbesses of Amesbury, but an Abbess 'Heahpled' (presumably for Heahflasd) was apparently named in the lost ^Ethelred charter in the abbey's favour, in which it was said that the community might, with the diocesan bishop's permission, elect a successor to their current abbess on her death.4 The names of two abbesses Hehahfleda abbatissa and Rachenilda abbatissa were included in the list of names from the church of St Mary and St Melor at Amesbury which was entered into the mortuary roll of Matilda, daughter of William I and abbess of Holy Trinity, Caen, who died in 1113.5 Nothing is known of the abbess Rachenilda named in Matilda's mortuary roll,6 but it has been suggested that Heahflaed of Amesbury might be identified with the abbess of that name known to have been abbess of Wherwell in 1002, in which year she was named in King ^Ethelred's grant of that Wiltshire, i) gave c. 980. Knowles and Hadcock, MRH, p. 104 and Knowles et al., The Heads, p. 207 also accepted William's date. Simon Keynes has taken the foundations of both Amesbury and Wherwell to date from jEthelred's reign: The Diplomas of King/Ethelred 'the Unready', 978-1016 (1980), p. 172. 1 David Hinton has speculated ('Amesbury and the early history of its abbey', The Amesbury Millennium Lectures, ed. J. Chandler [1979], pp. 20-31, at p. 22) about whether Wherwell and Amesbury might have been founded during Edgar's reign because of their association with Edgar's queen. 2 H. P. R. Finberg, The Early Charters ofWessex (1964), pp. 103^t (no. 331); the Wherwell document that this reconstructed text closely resembles is KCD 707 (S 904). The Amesbury diploma bears some similarities also to Kelly, Shaftesbury, no. 29 (S 899) and Sawyer, Burton, no. 28 (S 906). 3 For the liberty of the abbey compare Kelly, Shaftesbury, no. 29 (S 899) and Sawyer, Burton, no. 28 (S 906), and for the election of an abbess compare the provisions made in KCD 707 (S 904): see Keynes, The Diplomas, p. 107, n. 66. 4 Finberg, The Early Charters ofWessex, no. 331. 5 L. Delisle, Rouleaux des Marts du ix' au xv'siecle, Societe de 1'histoire de France (Paris, 1866), pp. 188-9 (no. 36, §13). 6 Knowles et al. (The Heads, p. 207) dated Rachenilda's abbacy 'probably' to the eleventh century, but she could also have been abbess at the time of Matilda's death. Matilda's mortuary roll would seem to have been unknown to Pugh ('The abbey', p. 258), who named only one pre-Conquest abbess: Heahflasd 979-1013, on the basis of the Exchequer suit.

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VEILED WOMEN II

year of privileges and land to Wherwell abbey.1 The obit of an abbess Heahflasde was commemorated in the Liber Vitae of Hyde Abbey on the date 6 May; she has been tentatively identified as the abbess of Wherwell.2 There are other precedents for the governance of two distinct houses by the same woman, for example the Abbess Selethryth who had charge of both Lyminge and Minster in Thanet in the early ninth century,3 or the alleged instance of three nunneries over which St Edith of Wilton was set in charge.4 That Amesbury and Wherwell were both founded by Queen jElfthryth might make their sharing an abbess plausible, and Heahflasd does not appear to have been a common name, but there are no other particular reasons for thinking the two houses to have been ruled as one.5 A quite different account of the governance of Amesbury was proposed by Wilmart on the basis of a passage in Goscelin of Canterbury's Life of St Edith of Wilton. There it was stated that King Edgar, towards the end of his life, placed his reluctant daughter in charge of three nunneries: the Nunnaminster at Winchester, Barking and a third house of which Goscelin did not know the name.6 Wilmart wondered whether that third house might have been Amesbury,7 but other than that this was another royal foundation in Wiltshire (and close to Edith's own house at Wilton) there seems no particular reason to accept Wilmart's identification. Amesbury's own legends do not associate Edith with the nunnery. While Wilmart accepted the story given in Goscelin's Life of Edith at face-value, interpreting it as an attempt by Edgar shortly before his death to increase his daughter's landed endowment, Susan Ridyard has argued that the tale might rather be 'nothing more than an anecdote designed to emphasise the saint's extreme reluctance to accept a position of authority and influence'.8 1

KCD 707 (S 904). The possible connection between this charter and that in Amesbury's favour is noted above. See below, s.n. Wherwell. That the two abbeys shared an abbess was suggested by Finberg, The Early Charters ofWessex, p. 104. Finberg appears to have taken Jilfthryth to have been the first abbess of both the nunneries she founded at Amesbury and Wherwell, but it is difficult to sustain this argument at least in the case of Amesbury. Compare Knowles et al., The Heads, pp. 207. 2 Hyde Abbey, Liber Vitae, Kalendar (ed. W. de G. Birch, Liber Vitae. Register and Martyrology of New Minster and Hyde Abbey, Winchester [1892], p. 270): May 6, 'Obitus Heahftedae abbatissa'. 3 See below, s.n. Minster-in-Thanet. 4 Goscelin, Vita sanctae Edithe, ch. 16 (ed. A. Wilmart, 'La legende de Ste Edithe en prose et vers par le moine Goscelin', Analecta Bollandiana, 56 [1938], 5-101 and 265-307, at pp. 76-7). 5 W. G. Searle, Onomasticon Anglo-Saxonicum. A List of Anglo-Saxon Proper Names (1897), p. 283, cited only one Heahflsd, the abbess whose obit is found in the Hyde Abbey Liber Vitae. Knowles et al. did not equate these two abbesses: The Heads, pp. 207 and 222. 6 Vita Edithe, ch. 16 (ed. Wilmart, 'La legende', pp. 76-7). 7 Wilmart,'La legende', p. 77n. 8 S. Ridyard, The Royal Saints of Anglo-Saxon England (1988), pp. 41-2. See also below, s.n. Barking, Wilton, and Winchester, the Nunnaminster.

AMESBURY

25

At the time of the Domesday survey, Amesbury held manors in Wiltshire and Berkshire; its recorded income placed it above Wherwell and Chatteris in terms of wealth but well below the richer nunneries of Wilton, Shaftesbury and Romsey.1 The vill of Amesbury itself had remained in royal hands after the founding of the nunnery and was still held by the king at the Conquest.2 It is quite possible that Amesbury already had a church before the nunnery was created, and that the abbey lay a little outside the vill, just as the nunnery church of St Laurence at Bradford-on-Avon was separate from the parish church there.3 The list of saints' resting-places preserved with the Liber Vitae of Hyde Abbey reports the presence of the relics of a St Melor confessor at Amesbury, and the abbey church was dedicated to St Mary and St Melor. This saint's legend is obscure (having been most probably invented at Amesbury to explain the dedication); William of Malmesbury reported his inability to discover anything about the saint.4 Despite the paucity of surviving pre-Conquest documents for this abbey, its relative wealth at the time of the Domesday survey must be attributed to its association with the West Saxon royal house, which economic security helped to ensure its survival beyond the Conquest.5

1

Domesday Book, I, fos 68va, 60ra (Wiltshire 16, 1-6; Berkshire, 16, 1-3); Pugh, 'The Abbey', p. 242; D. H. Farmer, 'The refoundation of Amesbury Abbey', in The Amesbury Millennium Lectures, ed. J. H. Chandler (1979), 47-57, at p. 49; D. Knowles, The Monastic Order in England (2nd edn., 1963), pp. 702-3; see further Crick, 'The wealth', pp. 161-2. 2 Domesday Book, I, fo 64vb (Wiltshire, 1, 3); Hinton, 'Amesbury', pp. 27-8. 3 Hinton, 'Amesbury', p. 24. 4 Die Heiligen Englands, II, 51 (ed. F. Liebermann [Hannover, 1889], p. 19); D. Rollason, 'Lists of saints' resting-places in Anglo-Saxon England', ASE, 1 (1978), 61-93, p. 66. William of Malmesbury, GP, §87 (ed. Hamilton, p. 188). For St Melor's legend see D. H. Farmer, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints (3rd edn, 1992), s.v. 'Mylor', and Pugh, 'The abbey', pp. 242-3. 5 Amesbury was refounded in 1177 at the instigation of Henry II, and recolonised with nuns from Fontevrault: S. Thompson, Women Religious (1991), pp. 121-3. It is possible that this refoundation also had a penitential element; that it was allegedly part of Henry's penance for Becket's death was suggested by Whitelock et al., Councils and Synods, II, 947-8. For a different interpretation of the nunnery's refoundation see S. Elkins, Holy Women of Twelfth-Century England (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1988), pp. 146-7 and Venarde, Women's Monasticism, pp. 155-6.

Barking, Essex Pre-Viking-Age minster active beyond 871 Patronised by the West Saxon royal family Attested in pre-Conquest sources Estates listed in Domesday Book A community at Barking was mentioned in the will of Ealdorman JElfgar (946x951) and received a grant from King Eadred in 950, but its history between the time of Bede and the mid-tenth century is unknown. Late eleventh-century hagiographical accounts associated the tenth-century community with King Edgar, although no charters in his name have survived in Barking's archive and there is no evidence to associate the house directly with the Benedictine revival. At the time of the Domesday survey this was the third richest nunnery in England. The history of the abbey of Barking between the time of Bede and the mid-tenth century is obscure. In his Ecclesiastical History Bede gave an account of the foundation of the double house by Eorcenwald, bishop of London 7675-693, for his sister ^thelburh, its first abbess, and recounted certain details of her abbacy and that of her successor Hildelith.1 Hildelith was among the dedicatees of Aldhelm's De virginitate and was apparently still alive in c. 716 when she was mentioned in a letter from Boniface to Eadburg, abbess of Thanet.2 Beyond this point nothing can be known with certainty of the minster's history until the 940s;

1

Bede, HE, IV, 6-10 (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 354-64). John of Worcester dated ^ithelburh's death and Hildelith's succession to 664 (Chronicon, s.a. 664, ed. and trans. Darlington et al., II, 112) which is clearly impossible for the abbess of a minster founded by Bishop Eorcenwald; he mentioned her again in 675, but in a passage derived from William of Malmesbury which refers to events occurring both before and after that year: Darlington et al., The Chronicle of John of Worcester, II, 112-13, n. 9. See also C. Plummer, Venerabilis Baedae Opera Historica, ed. C. Plummer (2 vols., 1896), II, 219; M. Lapidge and M. Herren, Aldhelm. The Prose Works (1979), p. 51. The relatively good charter evidence (BCS 81, S 1171; BCS 87, S 1246) suggests a foundation in the later 680s. John may have confused Barking's abbess with the jEthelburh of Lyminge who may have died (of the plague or due age) in that year. I am grateful to Nicholas Brooks for advice on this matter. 2 Aldhelm, De virginitate, preface (ed. R. Ehwald, Aldhelmi Opera [Berlin, 1919], p. 228). The difficulties of dating the De virginitate were discussed by Lapidge and Herren, Aldhelm, pp. 14-15. Boniface, Epistola 10 (ed. M. Tangl, Die Briefe des Heiligen Bonifatius undLullus, MGH, Epistolae selectae I [Berlin, 1916], pp. 8-15).

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VEILED WOMEN II

no ninth- or tenth-century sources refer to Barking's fate during the First Viking Age.1 That some charters relating to the minster's early history have survived makes the community's complete dispersal in this period unlikely,2 but conventional orthodoxy, as represented by Knowles and Hadcock, has it that the whole community of women was burnt in the church in 870.3 The authority for Barking's destruction at the hands of the Danes is a late eleventh-century hagiographical work, the Lecciones de Sancta Hildelitha, written by the Flemish hagiographer, Goscelin of St Berlin, at the commission of Abbess ^Elfgyth, who was responsible for the rebuilding of a new church and the translation of the relics of three of Barking's most celebrated virgin abbesses.4 In his readings for St Hildelith, Goscelin stated that the nunnery at Barking had been burnt together with the nuns and their abbess by the Danes in the same year in which King Edmund of East Anglia was martyred by the Danes, namely 870.5 It is not impossible that the congregation might have vacated the Barking site in 1

Antiquarian histories offer no assistance here either: Leland reported nothing of Barking's history beyond the foundation of the house by Eorcenwald (Collectanea, I, 26, 47; IV, 70; Itinerary, V, 207); Tanner asserted that the early nunnery continued until the general dissolution of the Order of St Benedict: Notitia, Essex v. 2 D. N. Dumville, Wessex and England from Alfred to Edgar (1992), p. 33, n. 16. Charters surviving from Barking's archive are BCS 81 (S 1171, datable to 685x694); C. Hart, The Early Charters of Eastern England (\