Eanswythe of Folkestone
Our Venerable Mother Eanswythe, Virgin and Abbess of Folkestone
Venerable · Virgin · b. c. 614, in Kent — d. c. 640–650, at Folkestone in Kent
Commemorated 31 August — Commemoration of the first abbess in England, 12 September — Western date, kept by the GB&I calendar (from the 1138 translation of the relics)
Eanswythe was a princess of Kent, granddaughter of Æthelberht, the first Christian king of the English, and daughter of King Eadbald; and she is remembered as the founder, about the year 630, of the community at Folkestone on the Kentish coast — by long tradition the first monastic house for women in England, and Eanswythe as the first English abbess. She refused a marriage offered her by a pagan Northumbrian prince, took the veil with her father's support, and died young. Almost nothing is transmitted of her life beyond that outline: she is a saint known from a cultus rather than from a biography. But in 1885 a leaden reliquary containing the bones of a young woman was found walled up in the parish church that bears her name, and in 2020 those bones were radiocarbon-dated to the middle of the seventh century and identified as those of a woman who died between about seventeen and twenty-two years of age — which makes Eanswythe one of the very few Anglo-Saxon saints whose relics can be shown to be plausibly her own.
The house of Kent
Eanswythe belonged to the first Christian generation of the English royal houses. Her grandfather Æthelberht of Kent had received Augustine at Canterbury in 597 and was the first English king to be baptised; her grandmother was the Frankish Bertha, whose chaplain Liudhard had kept the faith alive at the Kentish court before the mission arrived. Her father, Eadbald (reigned 616–640), had begun his reign as an apostate — Bede records the scandal of his taking his father's widow and his relapse into heathenism, and the near-collapse of the Kentish mission that followed — and was won back by the bishop Laurence. Her mother was Emma (Ymme), most likely a Frankish princess. Her brothers were Eorcenberht, who succeeded as king and put down the last idols in Kent, and Eormenred, whose daughters — Eormenburg, Eormengyth and Domne Eafe — begin the great "Kentish royal legend" of saintly princesses that runs on to Mildred of Thanet. She was born about 614.
The double character of that family is worth holding on to: it produced the apostasy of Eadbald and, in the same house and the same decade, the first convent in England.
Folkestone
The tradition — preserved in the Kentish hagiographical collections, in the later Folkestone material, and in the medieval calendars — is that a pagan prince from Northumbria sued for Eanswythe's hand. She refused him: some versions have her set him the condition of a miracle he could not perform, others simply record the refusal and her resolve to keep her virginity for Christ. Her father, who had his own reasons to make peace with the Church, gave her land on the cliff at Folkestone, above the Channel, and there about 630 she founded and governed a community of women.
That this was the first house of religious women in England is asserted by the whole later tradition and is not contradicted by anything in Bede — Bede's first English abbesses (Hilda at Hartlepool from 649, Æthelburh at Barking) are a generation later, and Kentish princesses before Eanswythe went overseas to Faremoutiers and Chelles in Gaul because there was nowhere at home for them to go. The claim is a claim of tradition rather than a datum of chronicle, but it is a reasonable one.
Of the life of the house nothing survives that can be trusted: the rule it kept is unknown (the later Benedictine ascription is anachronistic for 630), and the miracles attached to Eanswythe in the later legend — that she lengthened a beam that had been cut too short, that she drove away the birds that ate the crops, that she caused water to run uphill along a channel from the springs at Swetton to the monastery — belong to the standard repertory of foundation-legends. The water miracle at least corresponds to something real: a medieval watercourse serving the site is documented, and Folkestone still knows it as St Eanswythe's water.
She died young — the traditional dates run from about 640 to about 650 — and was buried at her own monastery.
The relics
The rest of Eanswythe's story is the story of her bones, and it is unusually well attested.
The cliff-top house was destroyed by Danish raids in the ninth or tenth century, and the sea took the site; the community and the relics were moved inland. A new church and priory were built in the twelfth century, and in 1138 the relics of the foundress were translated into the church of St Mary and St Eanswythe, which stands there still. At the Reformation the shrine was suppressed, and the relics disappeared from the record — hidden, it must be supposed, by someone who did not want them destroyed.
In 1885, during restoration work, workmen breaking into the north wall of the chancel found a niche containing a battered leaden casket of twelfth-century type, and in it the bones of a young woman. The find was reported at the time, the identification with Eanswythe was made at once on the obvious grounds, and the relics were replaced in the wall behind a grille, where they remain.
In 2019–2020 the "Finding Eanswythe" project, working with the parish, examined the remains scientifically. Osteological analysis found the bones to be those of a female aged about 17 to 22, showing no signs of malnutrition — consistent with a well-fed person of high status. Radiocarbon dating placed the death in the middle of the seventh century, between about 650 and 680 at the outside. The results were announced in March 2020. They do not prove that the bones are Eanswythe's — nothing could — but they establish that the reliquary walled into a Kentish church contains a young high-status woman who died in exactly the generation and place the tradition assigns to her, which is as close to confirmation as the evidence of the seventh century ever comes. Very few Anglo-Saxon saints can say as much.
Feast and commemoration
August 31 (church date; New Calendar civil August 31, Old Calendar civil September 13), the last day of the church year — where she shares the day with Aidan of Lindisfarne, the two great Anglo-Celtic saints of the date, and with the Byzantine commemorations of the Cincture of the Theotokos, Cyprian of Carthage and Gennadius of Constantinople.
Eanswythe is a saint of the undivided Church received into Orthodox usage through the calendars of the British Isles; she has no office in the Greek or Slavonic Menaia and is served, where she is served, from the common of a venerable woman. Her cultus is local and intense: the parish church of St Mary and St Eanswythe at Folkestone keeps her as patron and holds her relics, and she is the patron saint of the town, which has celebrated her with unusual enthusiasm since the 2020 investigation. In the West her feast is 12 September.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable woman)
In thee, O mother, was preserved unimpaired that which is according to the image: for taking up thy cross, thou didst follow Christ; and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, for it passeth away, and to care for the soul, which is a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Eanswythe, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Original translation from the Greek
Kontakion — Tone 2 (common)
Refusing an earthly bridegroom, thou didst take the Bridegroom who dieth not, and on the cliff above the sea thou wast the first mother of the daughters of the English: O venerable Eanswythe, entreat Christ God for our souls.
Iconography
Eanswythe is shown as a young abbess: crowned or veiled — commonly both, a princess's circlet over the monastic veil, to mark her royal birth — in a dark habit, holding an abbatial staff and a small church or model of her monastery, the ordinary attribute of a foundress. English depictions sometimes give her a fish (from a Folkestone tradition), or show her with the watercourse at her feet. The Folkestone church has her in glass and in modern carving, and modern Orthodox icons written for the parishes of Kent follow the Byzantine type of a venerable woman with the scroll.
No pre-1900 image of Eanswythe has been located for this collection. The surviving representations are Victorian and later — the nineteenth-century glass and fittings of St Mary and St Eanswythe, and modern icons — and none is free at the level of the underlying work. She is accordingly entered in the the list of icons still being sought list.
Disputed questions
- Dates. Her birth (c. 614) and death (c. 640, or c. 650, or later) are both inferred from her father's reign and from the foundation date; no source gives a year. The radiocarbon range for the relics, mid-seventh century, is compatible with the whole span of the traditional dates and does not narrow them decisively.
- "The first nunnery in England." The claim rests on tradition and on the absence of any earlier candidate; it is very probably right, but it is not documented by a contemporary source, and Bede — who is not interested in Kent after the first generation — never mentions Eanswythe at all. Bede's silence is the principal difficulty with the whole dossier, and it should be stated rather than explained away.
- The miracles. The beam, the birds and the watercourse are late, and are of a kind found in the foundation-legends of many houses. The watercourse alone has an archaeological correlate.
- The feast day. The Orthodox calendars and the OCA keep her on August 31; the Western calendars, including the Church of England, keep her on 12 September, the day of the 1138 translation. Both dates are in use; this repository follows the Orthodox reckoning and records the other.
- Not to be confused with the several other Anglo-Saxon royal women of similar name — Eanflæd of Northumbria, Eanswith of Brenzett — nor with the Kentish princess-saints Mildred, Mildburh and Mildgyth, who are of the following generation of the same house.