These are the words of the Chronicle:—
A.D. 741. Now Cuthred succeeded to the West-Saxon kingdom, and held it sixteen years, and he contended hardly with Æthelbald, King of the Mercians.
A.D. 742. Now was a great Synod gathered at Cloveshou, and Æthelbald, King of the Mercians was there, and Cutbert, Archbishop [of Canterbury], and many other wise men.
A.D. 743. Now Æthelbald, King of the Mercians, and Cuthred, King of the West-Saxons fought with the Welsh.
We have in these three Annals a specimen of that condensed form and style, that is common to this ancient text and still more venerable primæval records; and which invites and justifies attempts to interpret them by the help of any existing external monuments.
There are still known in England thirteen dedications of churches or chapels in the name of St. Werburgh, although, perhaps, not more than half of them are any longer above ground.[9] Seven, however, out of the thirteen are within the counties of Stafford, Chester, Shropshire, and Derbyshire: that is, they are within the original kingdom of Mercia, wherein, as the posthumous renown of the saint never extended beyond a nation, or rather a dynasty, that long since has been extinct and forgotten, we might have expected to have found them all. But the other six are extraneous, and three of them great stragglers. These must have owed their origin to political and military extensions of the influence of that kingdom, and these, it is intended to show, are found in places where Æthelbald, one of the three Mercian aspirants for English empire, has made good a conquest. This dedication may, therefore, be believed to have been his usual method of making his mark of possession.
St. Werburgh was the daughter of Wulfhere, the second Christian King of Mercia, who was the son of Penda, the last pagan King. Æthelbald was the grandson of Eawa, a brother of Penda, probably the Eoba, who, in the Annales Cambriæ, A.D. 644, is himself called “rex Merciorum;” so that Æthelbald and Werburgh were what we should call second cousins.[10] Wulfhere, A.D. 675, was succeeded by his brother Æthelred, who placed his niece Werburgh at the head of three great convents of women, with a sort of general spiritual charge of the female portion of the newly christianised kingdom. She is said to have died about A.D. 700, for it is noted that on opening her coffin in the year 708, her body, after eight years, was found unaltered, and her vestments undefiled; and from this time, sealed by this reputed miracle, the renown of her sanctity soon grew to beatification; and when, eight years afterwards, her kinsman Æthelbald began his reign, she had achieved the reputation and precedence of the latest national saint. She was, however, one of a family of whom many of the women have transmitted their names, from immediately after their deaths to our own times, attached to religious foundations. Among these, that of her aunt, St. Audry, still lives in Ely Cathedral: and this example may serve as a crutch to those who find it hard to realise the unbroken duration of churches, with these names, direct from the very ages in which the persons who bore them lived; for the continuity of this name at Ely is a matter of open and undisputed history, unaided by mere inference, such as our less conspicuous case requires. There are some, also, who stumble at finding all the female saints of particular provinces to have been members of one royal family. But of this we have an analogy pervading the entire area of our own every-day life, in the active assistance in all benevolent purposes, received by the clergyman of nearly every parish, from the leisured daughters of the more wealthy families. In those missionary days, the kingdoms of the newly-converted rulers were the only parishes, and the king and his family were as the squire and his family are now; and the greater lustre, which then shone out around the name of each, was as that of a little candle, in their wider world, compared with what would be its effect in a general illumination now. The earlier British churches have presented us with the same phenomenon. The numerous progeny, of children and grand-children, of Brychan of Brecknock, have nearly all left their names in many churches in South Wales, and even in the opposite promontory of Cornwall and Devon.
The historical facts of the name and local fame of this royal personage are all that we are concerned with. Otherwise, in some later times, it has been adorned with the usual amount of miraculous fable. The most notable of the miracles credited to her is, that one of her corn-fields being continually ravaged by flocks of geese, at her mere command they went into voluntary exile. As this is said to have happened near Chester, it is easy to refer the story to the monks there, who alone were interested in gilding her shrine with it; and her relics were not translated there till nearly two hundred years after her death. At any rate, the citizens of Bristol are living witnesses that her name is no safeguard of her heritage against the devastations of wasteful bipeds, who are not only unwise, but also unfledged. This imputed miracle is more transparent than is always the case with such embellishments of the lives of those who were the first to accept the new faith, and to promote it with active earnestness. In it may, at once, be discerned an ordinary incident of her pastoral or predial economy, exaggerated to a miracle in an age which preferred supernatural to natural causes.
The career of Æthelbald is, of course, more widely known, holding, as it does, a prominent place in the general history of the times. His reign extended from A.D. 716 to 755, and was chiefly employed in extending his sovereignty by the subjugation of neighbouring kingdoms, and by his munificent patronage of the church. In the first year of his reign, he at once showed a disposition to commemorate his own friends, by dedicating churches in their names, by using this method of perpetuating, at Croyland, the recent memory of Guthlac, his kinsman and protector in exile. It seems, however, that the pagan manners of the northern mythology are not purged for several generations after conversion: but, as appears from another example, of the practical paganism of the Dukes of Normandy, down to our William the Mamzer, unless attended with more than the average cruelty and injustice of the times, meet with only a qualified reproach, until they are in conflict with church discipline and law. The celebrated severe, but friendly and respectful epistolary rebuke from Bonifatius,[11] Archbishop of Mainz, contains a heavy indictment against both Æthelbald and his predecessor Coelred, and their courts, while it acknowledges his prosperity, munificence to the church, and his just administration.