Yorkshire Philosophical Society

Event Information

Ethelburga

The life and after-life of a Princess of Kent and Queen of Northumbria in a newly Christian Age

Rob Baldwin

Lecture on Zoom – see below for joining information

Ethelburga was born around 605 in the Kingdom of Kent. Only a few years previously, her mother Bertha, a Christian Frankish Princess, had encouraged her father King Æthelberht to invite the Pope in Rome to send a Christian mission, and this arrived in 597 under the leadership of St Augustine. Ethelburga, as she was growing up, witnessed the first stages of the conversion, which began in Kent with the foundation of a cathedral and an abbey at Canterbury and continued initially with further dioceses created at Rochester and London.

While still a teenager, Ethelburga saw how the mission faced a crisis when her brother, and probably also her father, rejected Christianity. But the mission persisted and when her brother, now King, embraced the Christian faith, Ethelburga became a significant player in the power-politics of the time, marrying the pagan King Edwin of Northumbria on the understanding that he would himself consider conversion. In his Ecclesiastical History of the English, the Venerable Bede says that Ethelburga received correspondence from the Pope, so important was her role seen to be in seeking Edwin’s conversion. Following Edwin’s baptism in York in 627, there followed a brief flowering of Northumbrian power, and important foundations of Christian culture were laid. But this first Christian northern Kingdom was snuffed out in 633 when Edwin was killed in battle at the hands of the combined forces of Mercia and Gwynedd.

Ethelburga returned to Kent with her children and there she was granted a royal estate at Lyminge, south of Canterbury. In the last two decades, archaeology has dramatically revealed the feasting halls at the centre of the estate that Ethelburga would have known and where she probably lived, as well as the stone church she almost certainly built with the help of masons and materials from France. It was here she was buried around 650. Lyminge became a significant minster church with a monastic community in the 8th and 9th Centuries. It was a centre of pilgrimage following the translation of the relics of St Eadburg around 800, and this continued until after the Norman Conquest when the relics of both Ethelburga and Eadburg were translated to Canterbury.

This talk will draw on the tiny number of near-contemporary literary sources that describe Ethelburga’s life to show what we can reasonably know about her. It will also consider the substantial amount of new archaeological information that has become available very recently, not all of which is yet fully published. This will be utilised to amplify our understanding of how Ethelburga lived as a Christian dowager queen at Lyminge, one of the first secular patrons of the Christian church and a promoter of continental architectural style. The talk will also show reconstructions of Ethelburga’s church created by the Centre for the Study of Christianity and Culture at the University of York, which are available to view only in Lyminge Parish Church.

Rob Baldwin is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and holds a degree in archaeology from the University of Cambridge. From 2017-2022 he managed the National Lottery Heritage–Funded project that exposed the 7th Century church in Lyminge for re-evaluation. He is currently Chair of Lyminge Historical Society and editor of the society’s annual publication Lyminge a History, as well as author of numerous papers on the local history of the Lyminge area. He has also written the heritage information available for visitors on the Lyminge Parish Council website and on information panels installed around the village.

This lecture will be held on Zoom at 7.30pm (GMT) and invitations will be sent to YPS members and the general mailing list two days before the event. This is a free event but non members can help to cover our lecture programme costs by donating here:

https://www.ypsyork.org/donate-to-yps/

Creative Commons Image: Lyminge church excavation