Highways and Byways in Cambridge and Ely

by John William Edward Conybeare

Little is recorded of Etheldreda's life as abbess; and, after a rule of seven years, she died at the age of forty-nine, in the year 679, her death being due to an epidemic then prevalent, combined with a tumour in the neck. The death-bed scene is sculptured on one of the corbels of the Octagon Towers at Ely, where the more picturesque events of her life are quaintly set before us in stone. The saintly lady died after much suffering, which the ministrations of her devoted physician Cynifrid failed to allay; though he did for her all that the surgery of those days allowed. She bore her sickness with composure of mind, and when she knew that the end was at hand, she (as others have done before and since) summoned her whole household to her chamber to take her last farewell of them all. She told them that the time of her departure was at hand; she spoke to them of the vanity of this world's enjoyments, and recommended them to keep Heaven always in view, whereby they might in some measure have a foretaste of its joys. After this she received the Communion in both kinds from the hands of Huna, a priest devoted to her service; then, while praying for the inhabitants of the monastery, she passed from earth. It may be of interest to remember that throughout the seven years of her rule at Ely, Theodore, the great organiser of the Anglican Church, "the first Archbishop whom the whole Church of England obeyed," filled the See of Canterbury.

It was Etheldreda's wish to be buried with all simplicity in the cemetery set apart for the nuns of Ely; so we are glad to learn that this her last desire was respected by her followers, and that she was laid to rest among the nuns in a wooden coffin. Her elder sister, St. Sexburga, widow of the King of Kent, took her place as Abbess, and ruled at Ely till another generation was arising. After sixteen years had gone by, those who still remembered and loved Etheldreda wished that her body should be with them at their devotions in the church, and they resolved to translate her remains from the cemetery to the Abbey.

No common coffin was held to be a fitting casket for those precious relics; but in a waste place named Armeswerke,[207] fifteen miles up the River Cam (which may be identified as now forming part of the Fellows' garden at Magdalene College, Cambridge, between the terrace and the river), there was found a marble sarcophagus of Roman workmanship.[208] This was brought to Ely; and with careful and simple ceremony the body of the first Abbess was lifted from the wooden and laid in the marble coffin, all being carried out under the superintendence of Sexburga. On beholding the uncorrupted body of the dear sister who had died in so much pain, Sexburga was heard to exclaim, "Glory to the name of the Lord most high!" All the look of suffering had gone, and the Saint appeared as if asleep on her bed. Gently removed from the wooden to the stone coffin, the body was carried into the Abbey Church, and placed behind the high altar; and for eight centuries the shrine of St. Etheldreda was visited by troops of pilgrims, who came from far and near to worship, to leave their offerings, and to seek healing from disease and infirmity. Sexburga was followed as Abbess by her sister, Ermenilda, Queen of Mercia. Thus Ely had three sister queens as her first three Abbesses; and hence perhaps the three crowns that still form the arms of the Bishopric.

St. Etheldreda was long remembered with affection, and was commonly spoken of as St. Audrey. The popular Pilgrims' Fair held at Ely was known at St. Audrey's Fair; and the cheap fairings bought and sold there (especially the coloured necklets of fine silk known as "St. Audrey's chains") were called, from her name, "tawdry"; and thus a new word was coined for us with a strange story of its own, a word hardly worthy of the great Abbess of the Fenland to whom it owes its origin. Centuries later, St. Audrey's Fair, held in October, had grown to be one of the most important in the land, lasting for a fortnight. By the year 1248 it had become such a centre of merchandise as to interfere with the traffic of the Fair which Henry the Third had lately established at Westminster in honour of St. Edward the Confessor; the King therefore issued a warrant interdicting the fair at Ely. This suspension meant serious loss to the Bishop, Hugh de Northwold, "who made a heavy complaint to the King concerning the matter, but he gained from him nothing except words of soothing promises of future consolation," says the chronicler.

For two hundred years after the death of the foundress, the abbey of monks and nuns went on with its pious works and ways. Then, in 870, appeared the Danes, still pagans; and after working their way through Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, where they "wasted with fire and sword all that ever they came to, they brake down all the abbeys of the fens; nor did Ely, so famous of old, escape." Having laid waste Peterborough, then known as Medhampsted, they came across the fens to Ely. The abbey and all the buildings pertaining to it were burnt; the monks and nuns put to the sword. Before setting fire to the buildings the Danes had secured for themselves all they contained of value, and great was the store, for the people of the neighbourhood had brought their goods into the monastery as to a place of safety. All was seized by the invaders, and what they could not carry away they destroyed. Thus Etheldreda's Abbey, after lasting 200 years, was left a deserted ruin; but her coffin of stone escaped without injury. One of the depredators, indeed, is said to have made an attempt to break into it, with the result that his eyes started from his head, and then and there he died, as the chronicler relates. The ancient sarcophagus had proved worthy of its trust.

The hour was one of direst need; for all England lay spent and gasping beneath the bloodstained feet of the heathen pirates. But, with the need, there arose the deliverer. In 871, the year after the sack of Ely, Alfred the Great, "England's darling," succeeded to the kingship of the exhausted realm; and the life and death struggle entered on its last and most desperate phase. For one moment even he seemed to go under, and was driven to an outlaw life in the marshes of Athelney; the next, we see him shattering the invaders by his miraculous victory of Ethandune, and, with incomparable state-craft, negotiating that Peace of Wedmore, whereby the Danes had to acknowledge him as their Overlord.

As such, he shortly established a College of Priests at Ely. Eight of the clerics who had witnessed the sack of the monastery came back to their old home, and rebuilt a part of the church that it might serve again as a place of worship. These priests were not monks, and are said to have had wives and children. They lived in poverty; for all the endowments of the Abbey had been seized by Burgraed, the last King of Mercia. But gradually, as the children of Alfred won back the kingdom, the endowment of Ely began afresh. Here a fishery, and there a wood, and again a mill with adjoining pastures, was bestowed on the little College—a term which still clings to the Cathedral precincts of Ely, called to this day the College, not the Close as in most Cathedral cities.

With the accession, in 958, of the great Edgar, the first English King to be Emperor of all Britain, the monarch who, nearly a thousand years ago, gained for himself, as but one of our kings has done since, the title of "Peacemaker," brighter days dawned. Then, as now, the Catholic Church might have been well called "Cette éternelle recommenceuse," able to rise from her ashes with life renewed. From the havoc wrought by the Danes, the Abbey of Ely, as a Benedictine House, arose once more, rebuilt, refounded, and re-endowed by King Edgar, who restored to it by Royal Charter all that Etheldreda had originally bestowed; adding thereto several demesnes and sundry privileges. The re-constitution of the Abbey was carried out under the guidance of Ethelwold, Bishop of Winchester.

The monks were thus restored; but the nuns of Ely have disappeared from view. As for those secular priests who were in possession and had maintained the sacred character of the spot for well-nigh a hundred years, ever since its devastation by the Danes, they were allowed to stay on if they submitted to the Benedictine Rule, otherwise they were dismissed.

In the year 970, on the Feast of the Purification, a day that we shall again find eventful in the annals of Ely, the new and restored monastic buildings were consecrated by Dunstan, who now, as Archbishop of Canterbury, filled the highest office in the Church of the land. The chronicler, Roger of Wendover, tells us how, by Dunstan's counsel, King Edgar "everywhere restrained the rashness of the wicked, cherished the just and modest, restored and enriched the desolate churches of God, gathered multitudes of monks and nuns to praise and glorify the Great Creator, and built more than forty monasteries." This shews us that, the events taking place at Ely were in no sense isolated, but were part of a great revival going on throughout the whole country.