Saint Etheldreda

When she was of marriageable age, her father, who had for her all the tenderness one can have for a well-born daughter, gave her in marriage to Tonbercht, prince of the South Gyrwe. These two spouses lived in continence and separated to better attend to the service of God. She withdrew to the Isle of Ely, which had been given to her as a dowry; there she led, for the space of five years, a truly angelic life. Full of contempt for all that enchants the worldly, she made her glory consist in the practice of voluntary poverty and humiliations. Her greatest pleasure was to sing the praises of the Lord night and day. In vain did Etheldreda seek to live hidden in solitude; the radiance of her virtues pierced the veil with which her humility tried to cover them. When her first husband was dead, Egfrid, King of Northumbria, pursued her w ith th Egfrid King of Northumbria and persecutor of Wilfrid. e most urgent entreaties until she consented to marry him. She knew, in the second marriage as in the first, how to keep intact the flower of her virginity.

We have as guarantors of this wonder two great Saints who assure us of it: Saint Wilfrid, Arc saint Wilfrid Bishop present at the court of Dagobert II. hbishop of York, and the Ve nerable Bede, vénérable Bède Hagiographer whose martyrology attests to the antiquity of the cult. distinguished Doctor of the Church; and God Himself willed to give a great proof of it, by preserving her body incorruptible several years after her death. Twelve years having elapsed, Etheldreda, who, like Esther, had a sovereign aversion for all the splendor of royal majesty, urgently begged the King her husband to allow her to leave the court and retire to a religious house. The King loved her tenderly, as he was perfectly loved by her, which makes their continence even more admirable; nevertheless, he finally allowed himself to be swayed by her prayers, and consented that she follow the attraction of God who was calling her to a life more perfect than that of the court. She therefore ent ered the monastery of C monastère de Coldhingam Monastery where Æthelthryth took the veil. oldingham, and received the nun's veil from the hands of the holy Archbishop of whom we have just spoken, under the Ebbe Superior of the monastery of Coldingham and aunt of King Egfrid. guidance of Aebbe, the King's aunt, who was its superior. Her life, in this place of penance, was a model of all virtues, and although she was still a novice, she appeared so consummate in the observance of the Rules of the Congregation that, after one year, she was made an abbess herself, on the Isle of Ely, where she had returned in 672, and where she founded two monasteries, for both sexes.

Thus, this great princess saw herself much more happily a mother than if she had given many children to her husband; and as she had allied, in the world, virginity with marriage, she allied in her retreat spiritual fruitfulness with virginity. She also joined a great mortification of her body and all her senses to the continuous cares that her office as superior gave her. From then on, she gave up linen and used only wool tunics. It rarely happened that she ate more than once a day, and for that, it was necessary either that she be notably indisposed, or that a great solemnity, such as that of Easter, Pentecost, Christmas, or the Epiphany, obliged her to moderate her fast. Her prayer was continuous, and she performed it, especially in the morning, with such fervor that, although she had attended the offices in the middle of the night, the sunrise always found her in prayer.

She thus spent the rest of her life, which lasted another seven years, in entirely exemplary innocence and piety; and, while still quite young, but full of good works and merits, she died of the plague in her monastery on June 23, 679. Her death had not been unforeseen. God had made it known to her beforehand that her house would be attacked by a contagious disease; that a certain number of her daughters would die from it, and that she herself would accompany them in this passage to eternity. When she felt a burning tumor on her neck that was consuming her, she showed extreme joy and suffered with heroic patience the pain of the incisions that the surgeon made there. "I have no pain," she said, "that I have not justly deserved; I remember that when I was very young, I wore heavy pearl necklaces on this neck that served as a superfluous ornament. God shows me great mercy by wishing to punish in this life the vanities and frivolities of that age, so as not to punish them in the next life." She is represented with a crown at her feet, to show that she knew how to despise the grandeurs of the world.

## CULT AND RELICS. Her body, as she had ordered, was placed in a coffin and buried in the nuns' cemetery, so as not to be separated, after her death, from those she had so tenderly loved throughout the course of her prelacy. Sexburga, her sister, wife of Ercen berht, K Sexborge Sister of Etheldreda and her successor as abbess of Ely. ing of the Kentish, and who, following her example, had left everything to embrace the religious life, was elected abbess in her place, and continued to govern her monastery with great holiness. At the end of sixteen years, she thought to raise this precious treasure from the earth to place it in a more honorable location, and for this purpose, took religious men to find a stone to make a tomb. Their commission was not difficult to execute; for, having traveled to a place quite near, they immediately found, in the fields themselves, a tomb of white marble, very ingeniously worked, with a large slab of the same material to cover it. They saw well that it was divine Providence that had prepared this coffin to honor the purity and humility of His spouse; thus, they brought it with joy to the holy abbess. She no longer expected to find anything but the bones of the queen, her sister, especially since the place where she had been buried was extremely damp, and her body, as we have said, besides not having been embalmed, had been enclosed only in wood. However, she found her in the same state as she was on the day of her death, without her flesh, her clothes, or the shrouds that wrapped her having contracted any corruption; and what appeared even more admirable was that the large wound that had been ma de in her neck to aucune corruption Miraculous phenomenon observed on a body after death. cure her of the contagious tumor from which she had died had perfectly closed, and one could see only a slight scar. Her body was placed in the marble tomb, where it remained until Richard, Abbot of Ely, made a solemn translation of it into the church in the year 1106. Many miracles were performed by the touching of her clothes, which had remained incorruptible for so long in her tomb, and the demons could not bear their approach. Her cult became public in the Church of England shortly after her death. The Roman Martyrology, as well as those of Bede, Ado, and Usuard, mark her feast on June 23. Bede: Ecclesiastical History, Book IV, ch. 19 and 20. — Cf. Godescard, etc.