These details are not without significance. They suggest that it was probably for the interest of the royal family that its princesses should remain in the convent in preference to contracting matrimonial alliances which might involve their relatives in political difficulties. On the other hand they suggest that life in these settlements must have been congenial in more ways than one.
As abbess of one of the royal houses the princess certainly held a place of authority second to that of no woman in the land. To gather together a few items of this power: she held the abbey of the king and from the king, which precluded a dependent relation on lords spiritual or temporal, and made her abbey what is termed a free abbey (freies reichstift). Her rights of overlordship sometimes extended over many miles, and the property of Gandersheim is described as enormous[457].
As holding the place of a feudal lord the abbess had the right of ban; she issued the summons when war had been declared and sent her contingent of armed knights into the field; and she also issued the summons to attend in her courts, where judgment was given by her proctor (vogt). In short she had the duties and privileges of a baron who held his property of the king, and as such she was summoned to the Imperial Diet (reichstag). She may have attended in person during early times, the fact appears doubtful; but in the 16th century she was only represented there[458].
Similar rights and privileges devolved on those abbesses in England who were baronesses in title of the land they held. But these abbesses never secured some of the rights enjoyed by their sisters in Saxony, for example the right of striking coin which the abbess of Quedlinburg secured under Otto I[459]. Coins also are extant which were struck by abbesses of Gandersheim, whose portraits they bear[460].
In addition to these advantages of position, the abbesses of the chief Saxon houses in the 10th and 11th centuries were in direct contact with the court and with politics. During the minority of Otto III, who was three years old when his father died in Italy (983), his mother Adelheid together with his aunt Mathilde, abbess of Quedlinburg, practically ruled the empire. Later when this emperor went to Italy for a prolonged stay in 997 the management of affairs was given to the abbess Mathilde, who is praised for the determined measures she took to oppose the invading Wends. In 999 she summoned a diet at Dornberg on her own authority[461].
The so-called free abbeys were under the obligation of entertaining the king and his retinue in return for privileges granted to them, and as the king had no fixed place of residence he stayed at his various palaces (palatia) in turn, and usually spent holiday time at one of the religious centres. Frequent royal visits to Quedlinburg are on record; the court was also entertained at Gandersheim. These visits brought a store of political information to the abbess of which she made use in her own way. Thus Mathilde, abbess of Quedlinburg, is thought to have supplied the annalist of Quedlinburg with the information which gives his chronicle its special value, and she was so far interested in the history of her own time that Widukind forwarded his history of the Saxons to her book by book for approval[462]. The abbess Gerberg of Gandersheim was similarly in contact with politics. As we shall see she supplied the nun Hrotsvith with the materials for writing the history of Otto the Great.
§ 2. Early History of Gandersheim[463].
From these general remarks we turn to the foundation and early history of Gandersheim, one of the earliest and wealthiest of Saxon houses, which claims our attention as the home of the nun Hrotsvith. It was situated on low-lying ground near the river Ganda in Eastphalia and was surrounded by the wooded heights of the Harz mountains. It owed its foundation to Liudolf himself, the great Saxon duke and the progenitor of the royal house of Saxony. At the close of a successful political career, Liudolf was persuaded by his wife Oda to devote some of his wealth and his influence to founding a settlement for women in Eastphalia, where his property chiefly lay.
Oda was partly of Frankish origin, which may account for her seeking the aggrandisement of her family in a religious foundation at a time when there were very few in Saxon lands. It is noteworthy that this foundation was to be for women and that all the daughters of Liudolf and Oda went to live there. Information about the early history of Gandersheim is abundant. There are extant a life of Hathumod, its first abbess, which was written by her friend the monk Agius († 874), and an elegy on her death in which Agius tries to comfort her nuns for the loss they have sustained; both these compositions are written in a very attractive style[464]. A century later the nun Hrotsvith was busy at Gandersheim describing the early history of the settlement in a poem in which she celebrates both it and the family of its founder[465]. In many ways this is the most beautiful and finished of the nun’s compositions; a work which reflects credit alike on her powers as a poetess, and on the settlement with which her name and fame are indissolubly linked.