Cloud of Witnesses: Dining with Royalty

I imagine that very few visitors who enjoy the culinary delights of the Cathedral refectory are aware that they are dining in the presence of royalty. 

But if they raise their eyes from their coffees and lunches and look up to the great east window, they will see a regal assembly of kings, queens and princesses gazing down upon them. These royal figures take us back to a very early stage in British history, before England became a unified nation, when the land was a patchwork quilt of independent Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, each bent on defending its own borders while trying to grab as much as possible of its neighbour’s land. In the process, the larger and more powerful kingdoms (Mercia, Wessex, Northumbria, Kent and East Anglia) expanded their territories while the smaller kingdoms (among them Bernicia, Deira and Magonsæte) disappeared.

In the centre of the refectory east window is Werburgh – princess, abbess and patron saint of Chester. Born in about 650, she is depicted in the window as a young woman dressed in the blue habit of a nun. Werburgh was the daughter of the Christian King Wulfhere of Mercia and his wife Ermengilda. In 675 Werburgh entered the abbey convent of Ely where she was prepared for the life of a nun by the abbot, Chad, who was later canonised and is himself depicted in a window in the east walk of the Cathedral cloister. Werburgh remained at Ely for most of her life, eventually becoming the abbess of the convent there. When she died in 700 she was buried at Hanbury, in what is now Staffordshire, where she was revered as a saint. But when her shrine at Hanbury came under threat from Viking invaders in the late 9^th century, her relics were moved to Chester where they were buried in the church of St Peter and St Paul, now the site of the Cathedral. In time, the church and its associated abbey were rededicated to St Werburgh and St Oswald, and when the present Cathedral was begun in the 13^th century, Werburgh’s relics were moved to a shrine that became a focus of pilgrimage throughout the medieval period until its destruction in 1540.

Surrounding Werburgh in the refectory window are members of her close family. As well as her parents, King Wulfhere and Queen Ermengilda, there are images of her maternal grandmother, Queen Seaxburgh of Kent, and her putative brothers, St Ruffin and St Wulfhad. In the window too are her father’s siblings from the royal family of Mercia: her uncles Merewalh and Ethelred, kings of Mercia, and her aunts, St Kyneswitha and St Kynesburgha. These were pious men and women at a crucial time for religion in Britain when the austere traditions of Celtic Christianity were being challenged by a new and much more opulent form of Christianity that had been brought from Rome by St Augustine in 597. The tension between these two versions of the faith came to a head at the celebrated Synod of Whitby in 664, the outcome of which saw the demise of Celtic Christianity and the establishment of Roman Catholicism as the accepted religion of England for the next 900 years.

A striking feature of this story is the influence of strong and faithful women. These Saxon queens and princesses were, of course, in uniquely privileged positions as members of royal families, and their experiences cannot be generalised to those of ‘ordinary’ women in Anglo-Saxon Britain. Yet the fact remains that in a society where men were in charge of most things of any importance, the women in Werburgh’s family were significant monastic leaders in the fledgling Roman Catholic Church. Werburgh herself was the abbess of the important convent at Ely, as also were her mother Ermengilda and her grandmother Seaxburgh; and her aunts Kyneburgha and Kyneswitha were abbesses of convents in Kent and the Fenlands. These women, all of whom were later revered as saints, managed to combine their lives of royal privilege with a faith that was strong enough to sustain them in their later seclusion from the world.

So, the next time you are in the refectory, take time to look up at the east window and ponder the lives of these remarkable royal figures. Their world was fundamentally different to ours, but we can identify with them in their quest for a faith to sustain them through the upheavals and insecurities of life in Anglo-Saxon Britain. They are witnesses to our lives as much as we are witnesses to theirs.