1
CHRISTINA OF MARKYATE
The Introduction1
Henrietta Leyser
Christina of Markyate (c. 1096– c.1160), hermit and holy woman, was born into a world shaped and scarred by the Norman Conquest of 1066. Already in 1068 a great castle had been built in Huntingdon, her natal home, as well as another in nearby Cambridge; imposing though they were, neither was enough to quell the disquiet against the new regime. In 1069, Earl Waltheof, a major Huntingdon landholder, rebelled against William the Conqueror; in the following year, seemingly in an attempt to forestall further risings in the region, the Conqueror took savage measures against a number of ecclesiastics with East Anglian connections. Native anger and resentment against such treatment spilled over in the summer of 1070 into the remarkable and tangled attack on the monastery at Peterborough and its recently appointed Norman Abbot Turold, a man known to be unsympathetic to Anglo-Saxon sensibilities. ‘English people from all over the Fenlands’, so the Peterborough Chronicle tells us, joined Danish leaders recently arrived in Ely in the hope and expectation that this was to be the prelude of yet another conquest. Peterborough itself was sacked and burnt and its treasures taken by rebels (led by Hereward the Wake) for safekeeping to Ely. But the Danes stationed there, on learning of the approach of Turold and his band of ‘one hundred and sixty Frenchmen … all fully armed’, loaded up their boats with Peterborough’s treasures and made for home. Much of this booty was lost at sea, but relics of St Alban were amongst the salvaged treasure and it was while at prayer before these relics, on the eve of his long-planned invasion of England, that King Cnut of Denmark was murdered in 1086. At that moment the last threat to the Norman Conquest disappeared.2
Heroic stories of Anglo-Saxon resistance to the Normans were still current in Christina’s day, and up to 1154 Peterborough monks continued to chronicle events in English. In Christina’s Life there is, none the less, not even a whisper of sedition against Norman lordship. Christina’s kin had made their peace with their new rulers. Her aunt Alveva had been bedded and made pregnant by that ‘firebrand’ (as Orderic Vitalis calls him) Ranulf Flambard, right-hand man to William Rufus and one-time administrator of Ely Abbey (hence, one imagines, the opportunity of meeting Alveva).3 Even after his promotion to the see of Durham in 1099 Ranulf continued to visit Alveva and their children, and, as many of the chapters in this volume will recall, on one such occasion his lustful eye fell on Christina. The depth of the anger Christina’s parents felt at their daughter’s refusal to fall either into Ranulf ’s arms or in with his plans makes some kind of sense once their fear that they might lose Ranulf ’s favour has been taken into account. Prosperous burghers though her parents seem to have been, it is noticeable that their position in the world was far from secure. Sometime after Christina had fled from her home, financial disaster struck the family, who in their plight now had to look to Christina for help. But this is to anticipate; introductory chapters should begin at the beginning and it is high time to turn to the circumstances surrounding Christina’s birth.
Typically for a medieval birth we are not given the year (estimates put it at 1096 x 8) but we are regaled with a wealth of detail about the event; one of the pleasures of reading Christina’s Life is the light it throws, as in this instance, on lay piety. During her pregnancy, Christina’s mother Beatrix experienced a prophetic occurrence: whilst sitting in her house she had seen a white dove flying towards her from the monastery of Our Lady (this is likely to be the Augustinian priory founded within the parish church of St Mary’s in 1086 x 92, but which later moved outside the town).4 The dove stayed with Beatrix for seven days ‘nestling comfortably and with evident pleasure first in her lap and then in her bosom’. The experience is dated to a Saturday, ‘a day specially set aside by the faithful for the devotion to the Mother of God … between the Assumption [15 August] and the Nativity of our Lady [8 September]’ (Life, p. 35). Two months later, on 6 November, the feast day of St Leonard, a saint frequently invoked by women in childbirth, Beatrix went to church for Matins and Lauds and for Mass; she commended herself to God, to the Virgin and to St Leonard, returned home and went into a three-hour labour. The child was baptized Theodora.
The intimate scenes of Beatrix’s pregnancy and labour immediately pose a question which will re-surface throughout any reading of the Life and in many of the chapters in this volume. It is this: what is this Life? Is it a record of events told to the author by the actual participants and faithfully recorded by him? A romance (possibilities considered by, among others, Douglas Gray in Chapter 2 and Neil Cartlidge in Chapter 5) or a skilfully constructed piece of hagiography (as Samuel Fanous argues in Chapter 4) we were never intended to take primarily as literal truth? The twenty-first-century reader is likely to want to know, but we need to remember that this is not a twelfth-century question. A medieval reader would always have expected any narrative to have, as did the Bible, at least three meanings: a literal, an allegorical and an analogical; at any one moment one meaning might have precedence over the other and the distinctions might become blurred.5 Do we, for instance, really know that Christina was born on 6 November, or did this simply seem to be a suitable date, given that St Leonard was frequently invoked by women in childbirth?6 Are we to believe that her later, momentous visit to St Albans was also on 6 November, as the Life avers, or are we to take this as a symbolic way of marking Christina’s spiritual re-birth? Was the course of Beatrix’s pregnancy actually framed in some way by Marian feasts, or should we take these references to the Virgin as pointers to the relationship Christina will later develop with her and a sign of the protection the Life assures us she gave her? All these readings are possible; and it may even be that we do not have to choose between them. Rather more puzzling is the information that Christina’s baptismal name was Theodora. It is not hard to imagine that our heroine might have taken for herself a new name once she left the world, and Christina would have been an appropriate choice (St Christina having allegedly been persecuted for her piety by her well-to-do father), but was her baptismal name really Theodora? On the one hand, it is an unusual name for this period; on the other, there is a Theodora in the thirteenth century Golden Legend and this Theodora is indeed courted by a rich man offering gifts.7 There are shades here of our ‘Theodora’ being offered presents by Flambard. Were oral precursors of the Golden Legend already in circulation in twelfth-century England? Or is the name simply the first of a number of signs provided by the Life of a certain pretentiousness on the part of Christina’s parents or even perhaps of inventiveness on the part of Christina, a mark of her special destiny (following the etymology of the name) as ‘a gift of God’?
Let us return to the Life. Christina, we are told, was a pious child, strongly aware of her own shortcomings and unusually conscious of the presence of Christ to whom she would sometimes talk ‘as if she were speaking to a man’ (Life, p. 37), a pointer, perhaps, to the later scene when Christina would welcome Christ to her monastery unaware that he is other than a passing pilgrim with ‘well-shaped features and a handsome beard’ (Life, p. 185). Christina’s innocence is contrasted with the rather doubtful morals of Canon Sueno, her first mentor (‘someone said to her that he was still so stimulated by lust that unless he were prevented by the greater power of God he would without shame lie with any ugly and misshapen leper’ (Life, p. 39)) and with the frivolous behaviour of her elders. Their party-going, with lots of alcohol, forms an important backdrop to the first part of the Life; once Christina has left the world she can put such things behind her. A more enduring problem is Christina’s relationships with men which, for better and for worse, form an important theme throughout the Life and with which several chapters in this book are concerned (see in particular Chapter 6 by C. Stephen Jaeger and Chapter 10 by Dyan Elliott).
The Life gives us the names of over twenty men who in one way or another were important players in Christina’s story (and then there is the one who behaved so shamelessly that his name had to be withheld). We should remember also those who had walk-on parts, notably the monks of St Albans. For it was, according to her Life, while on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St Alban where her parents had taken her – ‘to beg protection’ for themselves and for their child (another instance of lay piety) – that Christina decided to become a religious (Life, p. 39). The expedition cannot have been lightly undertaken – St Albans is over 40 miles from Huntingdon – but a trip to St Albans would have been an exciting event in the first decades of the twelfth century. St Albans had recovered quickly from the traumas of 1066 and by then was flourishing. In 1101, at Pentecost, King Henry I had worn his crown there; Henry was present also at the consecration in 1116 of the new abbey church built in place of its demolished Anglo-Saxon predecessor. It is probable that Christina’s visit took place just a few years before the consecration, but the building will already have been complete. It is not hard to guess how great an impression it might have made on any pilgrim. The new abbey was enormous – far bigger than contemporary Canterbury – and richly decorated with Romanesque carving.8 ‘When [Christina] had looked carefully at the place and observed the religious bearing of the monks who dwelt there, she declared how fortunate the inmates were, and expressed a wish to share in their fellowship. At length, as her parents were leaving the monastery, having fulfilled all the things they had come to do, she made a sign of the cross with one of her fingernails on the door as a token that she had placed her affection there’ (Life, p. 39). The next day Christina performed a further ritual. The family had broken their journey at Shillington, and there Christina went to Mass. ‘After the gospel [she] approached the altar and offered a penny, saying in her heart “O Lord God, merciful and all powerful, receive my oblation through the hands of Thy priest. For to thee as a surrender of myself I offer this penny. Grant me, I beseech thee, purity and inviolable virginity, whereby thou mayest renew in me the image of thy Son … ” ’ (Life, p. 41).
Let us now imagine Christina back at home. Enter the wicked Ranulf. The story of his attempted seduction of Christina, of how she thwarted him and of his revenge, needs here only the briefest of summaries; for a full discussion, see Chapter 8 by R. I. Moore. Ranulf, on a visit to his erstwhile mistress, Alveva, lures Christina to his bedroom. Christina escapes and spurns all further advances; Ranulf, in fury, arranges for her to be married to a local lad, Burthred. Christina rejects him. For her, the vow she made at Shillington is sacred. Her family and friends gang up against her; her girlfriend, the fashionably named Melisen,9 suggests how grand it would be for her to have her own household; finally, in a moment of weakness, Christina yields and accepts Burthred. But does this amount to a betrothal or a full marriage? Thomas Head, in Chapter 7, unravels the complexities of twelfth-century marriage laws, but whatever the uncertainties about Christina’s position this much is clear: Burthred seeks consummation, Christina an annulment. Christina tries persuasion and argument, Burthred and Christina’s family try every trick in the book – drink, force, sorcery – but all to no avail. For a moment it seems as if Christina may get her way, but her parents are rich and the bishop of Lincoln, in charge of the annulment appeal, is venial. Christina has no alternative but to escape.
Christina’s getaway alerts us to a whole network of highly influential hermits scattered around her neighbourhood and beyond; the challenges of classifying such holy men and women is the subject of Chapter 14 by E. A. Jones. The hermit Edwin masterminds the escape, settling Christina at Flamstead with the recluse Alfwen, but not before he has consulted the archbishop of Canterbury about the ethics of the whole venture and has spoken on his way back with
hermits ‘at various places’ (Life, p. 85). Ironically the day chosen for the escape is a day when Christina’s parents were away visiting ‘as was their custom’ the hermit Guido (Life, p. 89). When they return and find Christina gone, one of the first places they think of looking for her is ‘among the recluses of Huntingdon’ (Life, p. 95). (They are thrown off-track only because Alfwen deliberately misleads them.) Two years later Christina moves from Flamstead to Markyate to live in the hermitage of Edwin’s cousin, Roger, formerly a St Albans monk. Five other hermits live with Roger but it is also clear that Roger (perhaps like Guido) had a much wider following; at one point we meet Godescalc of Caddington and his wife, ‘people … of good family, who lived a happy married life under Roger’s direction’ (Life, p. 111). Christina herself is described by Roger, in the one vernacular expression in the text, as ‘myn sunendaege dohter’ (my Sunday daughter) ‘because just as Sunday excels the other days of the week in dignity so he loved Christina more than all the others whom he had begotten or nursed in Christ’ (Life, p. 107). By all accounts, Roger was a particularly charismatic leader, a supporter of local vocations who had enough authority to be able to protect his followers from outside interference. In Chapter 3, Stephanie Hollis and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne show just how rich and complex the relationship between holy women and their male patrons could be.
Her successful escape to Flamstead to live with Alfwen did not mean that Christina lived happily ever after. In a sense her trials had only just begun. Her relationship with Alfwen seems to have been fraught; her move to Roger’s cell, while it brought her spiritual solace, was none the less a time of considerable physical discomfort, confined as she was to a tiny room ‘no bigger than a span and a half ’ (Life, p. 103). The fear of being discovered hung heavily over her; perhaps she would yet be ‘snatched away’, ‘handed over to her husband to do as he liked’ (Life, p. 107). Even after Burthred had at last released her from her marriage vows Christina lived in fear and dread of her old opponent, the bishop of Lincoln, and indeed after Roger’s death it was to avoid this bishop’s anger that Christina, on the recommendation of the archbishop of York, went to live with the cleric whose name the author of the Vita claims to be ‘under obligation not to divulge’ (Life, p. 115). In no time at all the cleric and Christina fall in love. As Kathryn Kelsey Staples and Ruth Mazo Karras make clear in Chapter 11, what is especially interesting about this episode is the frank discussion of Christina’s own sexual yearnings; this is no stoical and unfeeling virgin assaulted by some lecherous male. Christina was hersel...
