Veiled Women

Volume I: The Disappearance of Nuns from Anglo-Saxon England

Sarah Foot

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780754600435
• eBook ISBN: 9781351963312
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

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 Anglo-Saxon sources and their stories are of popular interest. This book offers the first general and critical assessment of female religious communities in early medieval England. 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.

Chapter 1

Evidential and historiographical problems

And she grants to Ceolthryth whichever she prefers of her black tunics and her best holy veil and her best headband.

Will of Wynflæd, c. 950.¹

(…) and Edwin the priest is to be freed, and he is to have the church for his lifetime on condition that he keep it in repair, and he is to be given a man. (…) and Ælfwaru, the daughter of Wulfric the huntsman, is to be freed on condition that she sing four psalters every week within thirty days and a psalter a week every week within twelve months and Leofrun is to be freed on the same conditions and Æthelflæd.

Will of Æthelgifu, c. 990.²

[By Ælfflæd, King Edward had six daughters] the first and third took a vow of virginity and spurned the pleasures of earthly marriage, Eadflæd taking the veil and Æthelhild in lay attire; both lie at Wilton, buried next to their mother. (…) He also had by a third wife called Eadgifu (…) two daughters Eadburh and Eadgifu. Eadburh became a nun and lies at Winchester.

William of Malmesbury, De gestis regum Anglorum.³

In the middle years of the tenth century in England the boundary between the secular and the religious way of life for women appears less sharply defined than at other times in the pre-Conquest era. Female spiritual devotion found fluid and diverse modes of expression in this period — whether as a reflection of the perceived inadequacy of conventional, institutional forms, or as a mark of innovative experimentation on the part of a few energetic women — to the extent that it can be difficult to determine to which status certain pious women belonged. Several female congregations were apparently organised on regular, possibly Benedictine, lines, mirroring the activities of the male houses prominent in the reorganisation of monasticism during King Edgar’s reign. Some nunneries were rich, well-endowed, and patronised by the West Saxon royal house; a few housed women of that family, or cared for the relics of its dead. Three of the eight daughters of Edward the Elder were said to have adopted the religious life, one at Wilton, another at the Nunnaminster in Winchester, and the third apparently remaining within the world,⁴ but there may have been little to distinguish the lifestyle of the lay vowess, Æthelhild, from that of her professed sisters Eadflæd and Eadburh. The more prominent occupants and close associates of women’s monastic houses such as Wulfthryth and her daughter, St Edith of Wilton, Wynflæd (grandmother of King Edgar, who was somehow connected with Shaftesbury), or Ælfthryth, Edgar’s queen (who ejected the abbess of Barking and took direct control of the community in her stead) are depicted in the sources leading lives far removed from the ideals espoused by St Benedict.

Furthermore, beside these few notable convents with prominent aristocratic and royal members was found a larger number of smaller, poorer houses with few lands; short-lived congregations, sustaining a community for only one or two generations before fading from the record; older foundations established before the Viking Age when Benedictine observance was rare, whose way of life — if it proved sustainable in the new climate — was not necessarily dramatically divergent from that followed by the earlier community. Although no genuinely double houses are recorded beyond c. 870, there were groups of female religious who lived in the shadow and under the protection of male houses; various single, devout women whose institutional affiliation (if any) cannot be determined are also mentioned in the sources for the tenth and eleventh centuries. This apparent diversity in the female expression of the religious life might point to a vibrant and imaginative generation of aspiring nuns whose devotion inspired the invention of novel, conventual and solitary lifestyles not bound by the Benedictine ideal and seemingly specific to their gender.⁵ Yet the overwhelming emphasis on the rich and royally patronised houses found in both the contemporary literature and the subsequent historiography of the monastic life in this period has had the effect of obscuring the range of forms of the religious life open to women in this period. While efforts have been made by historians to redress that gender imbalance in recent years,⁶ none has started with the very simple questions that underlie this study: what sorts of female religious communities were there in England in the tenth and eleventh centuries? Where were houses for women located? What is the evidence for their foundation, endowment, female occupancy, and subsequent pre-Conquest history? The normative literature of the period espoused regular uniformity and thus deliberately obscures difference from our view. But it is relevant to question how varied may have been the rules or other systems employed for the internal organisation of women’s convents, and indeed whether there were any congregations of religious women not following a recognised rule. Meaningful discussion about the place of women within the structures of the Church in the later Anglo-Saxon period must be grounded in a clear and defined evidential context. This book is designed to supply that need, yet the identification of the female religious houses of the late pre-Conquest period is not a wholly straightforward exercise.

The problem

To start with the veiled women themselves, the instances quoted at the head of this chapter may be seen as paradigmatic of the problems presented by the extant sources. These examples provide an apt entry to the difficulty of categorising female status and of identifying and locating congregations of religious women in the later pre-Conquest period. When William of Malmesbury stated that the Edward the Elder’s third daughter, Æthelhild, lived in the ‘lay habit’ (in laico tegmine), he offered no clues as to how she should be distinguished from her elder sister Eadflæd who was said to have lived as a monastic (in sacrata tegmine), or her younger half-sister, Eadburh, whom he called a ‘virgin dedicated to Christ’ (sacrata Christo uirgo).⁷ Wynflæd (whose will has survived as a single-sheet — possibly a stray from Shaftesbury’s archive — dating from the mid-tenth century) is generally held to have had a close association with the abbey at Shaftesbury, although whether as a professed member of the congregation is unclear.⁸ Æthelgifu had no obvious connection with any known religious community, yet the terms of her will (also a single-sheet, from the turn of the tenth century) suggest an interest in the religious life beyond the piety to be expected of a secular noblewoman.⁹ Wynflæd’s bequests included her ‘nun’s clothing’ (hyre nunscrude) and veil, plus gifts made ‘to the refectory’, while Æthelgifu not only bequeathed garments that might be thought appropriate to a religious woman, but had, among the slaves whom she intended to manumit on her death, more than one woman apparently capable of reciting the Psalter as well as a priest.¹⁰ These two wills raise questions about the status of these female testators: neither appears to have been living a wholly secular life, yet both are equally hard to place within the institutionalised world of organised monasticism. Would William of Malmesbury have considered them, like Æthelhild, to have been celibates in lay habits, or did their position as widows afford them a different status?

The search for the female expression of religious devotion might be made more effectively if it were pursued via the institutions that housed religious women together; however, as will become apparent, the identification of later Anglo-Saxon nunneries is hampered by the paucity of extant contemporaneous sources relating to their activities. Further, beyond the difficulty of determining women’s religious status, there is an equal confusion among historians as to what does and does not constitute a ‘nunnery’ in this period. This can be illustrated from the example of the early history of the female community at Wherwell. Frank Barlow has argued that Wherwell already housed a congregation of religious women a generation before its supposed ‘foundation’ by Ælfthryth as part of her penance for her alleged involvement in the murder of Edward the Martyr.¹¹ Barlow’s supposition was based on his reading of the life of St Wulfhild, a nun of Wilton who in fleeing the unwanted advances of the youthful King Edgar escaped to her aunt, a woman called Wenflæd, living at Wherwell. At her aunt’s house, however, instead of finding the safety she expected, the young nun found the king invited to dine; so she escaped through an underground passage and returned to Wilton, where the relics at the altar of the abbey church provided her with a secure sanctuary.¹² As I argue in detail in my discussion of the evidence for Wherwell in part II, the language used of the aunt’s dwelling at Wherwell in the Latin Life of St Wulfhild strongly suggests that it is more probably the dwelling of a private noblewoman than a convent of religious women, but the very fact that Barlow’s reading should have proved persuasive suggests that these boundaries are not easily drawn in the mid-tenth century.¹³

Even where it does appear that a group of women was living a religious life of some sort in common, it is remarkably difficult to draw distinctions between congregations of professed nuns and other groups of women religious: communities of secular canonesses, or vowesses and widows who may have chosen to join with other women in a similar position.¹⁴ If one were to take a strict definition of a nunnery as being an exclusively female community of enclosed religious who, following a recognised rule of monastic organisation, were united in their acceptance of chastity and individual poverty, it would be hard to identify mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• A note on language
• Abbreviations
• List of maps
• 1 Evidential and historiographical problems
• 2 Religious women in England before the First Viking Age
• 3 The disappearance of the early Anglo-Saxon nun
• 4 Women and the tenth-century monastic revolution
• 5 Widows and vowesses
• 6 A typology of congregations of women religious in later Anglo-Saxon England
• 7 Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index