Sexburga of Ely
Our Venerable Mother Sexburga, Queen of Kent and Abbess of Ely
Venerable · Queen · b. c. 620 — d. 6 July 699
Commemorated 6 July — Repose at Ely, 17 October — Translation of the relics at Ely
Sexburga was a daughter of Anna, King of the East Angles, one of the most remarkable saint-bearing families of the English Church, and became Queen of Kent by her marriage to Eorcenberht. Widowed in 664, she founded the monastery of Minster-in-Sheppey on the Thames estuary and took the veil there. She afterwards went to Ely, where her sister Æthelthryth (Etheldreda) was abbess, and on her sister's death succeeded her in the rule. In 695 she carried out the translation of Æthelthryth's body, which was found incorrupt sixteen years after burial — the episode Bede records at length, and one of the foundation narratives of English monastic veneration. She reposed at Ely on 6 July 699.
The royal house of East Anglia
Sexburga was born about 620, the eldest daughter of Anna, king of the East Angles (killed in battle against Penda of Mercia in 654) — a household from which came an extraordinary number of saints. Her sisters were Æthelthryth, foundress and abbess of Ely; Æthelburh, abbess of Faremoutiers in Gaul; Sæthryth, her stepsister, likewise abbess of Faremoutiers; and, by the later tradition, Wihtburh of Dereham. Bede, who is the primary and nearly contemporary witness, treats the family as a standing example of what the conversion of the English kingdoms had produced within a single generation.
Queen of Kent
About 640 Sexburga was married to Eorcenberht, king of Kent, the grandson of Æthelberht whom Augustine had baptised. Eorcenberht is remembered as the first English king to order the destruction of idols throughout his kingdom and to require the keeping of the Lenten fast by law; his queen was, in Bede's account, a partner in that policy rather than an ornament of it. Their children were Ecgberht (king of Kent, †673) and Hlothhere (†685), and two daughters who both became saints: Eormenhild, who married Wulfhere of Mercia and afterwards became a nun and in time abbess of Ely herself, and Ercengota, who took the veil at Faremoutiers under her aunt and died young.
Sexburga is credited with founding the monastery of Milton Regis during her husband's lifetime, and with the endowment of churches; the pattern of her later life was already set.
Minster-in-Sheppey
Eorcenberht died in 664 — the year of the Synod of Whitby and of the great plague. Sexburga is said to have governed Kent for a period on behalf of her son, and then to have laid the kingdom down. She founded on the Isle of Sheppey, at the mouth of the Thames, the monastery of Minster, a house of some seventy nuns by the tradition, and there received the veil herself and ruled as abbess. Her daughter Eormenhild entered the same house.
Ely and the translation of Æthelthryth
After some years at Sheppey — the tradition says she had determined from the first that she would end her life under obedience rather than in rule — Sexburga went north to Ely, the double monastery in the East Anglian fens which her sister Æthelthryth had founded in 673 on land that was her own dower. Æthelthryth died in 679, and Sexburga was chosen abbess in her place.
Sixteen years later, in 695, Sexburga determined that her sister's bones should be taken up from the common cemetery and laid within the church. Bede tells what followed with unusual circumstantiality, having it from Ely itself. Brethren were sent out to find stone for a coffin; in the ruined Roman town of Grantchester they found a white marble sarcophagus with a fitted lid, as though made for the purpose. The grave was opened in the presence of the community, with a tent pitched over it and the sisters singing, and the body of Æthelthryth was found entire and undecayed, the linen cloths as fresh as on the day of burial, and even the wound of the surgeon's incision in her neck — made in her last illness — healed to a scar. The physician who had made the incision was still living and testified to it. The relics were washed, newly clothed, and laid in the marble coffin, and Ely became from that day one of the great places of English pilgrimage.
The scene is the classic English instance of the Orthodox understanding of incorruption as a divine testimony, and it was Sexburga who ordered it and presided over it.
Repose and relics
Sexburga ruled at Ely until her death on 6 July 699. She was buried in the church beside her sister; her daughter Eormenhild succeeded her in the abbacy, and Eormenhild's daughter Werburgh after that, so that four generations of the one family ruled Ely in succession. Her relics were later translated within the church — the commemoration kept on 17 October, the day on which the Ely translations were observed together — and remained a focus of veneration until the destruction of the shrines in the sixteenth century. Minster-in-Sheppey preserves her memory as its foundress, and the parish church there stands on her monastery's site.
Feast and commemoration
July 6 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 19), her day of repose, with a second commemoration of the translation of her relics on October 17. She belongs to the undivided Church of the West and is kept in Orthodox usage among the saints of the British Isles — in the ROCOR and Antiochian Western Rite calendars of pre-schism western saints, and in the local observance of Orthodox parishes in England — rather than in the Byzantine synaxaria, which do not carry her. She shares the day with St Sisoes the Great.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable woman)
In thee, O mother, was the divine image preserved unimpaired; for taking up the cross thou didst follow after Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, which passes away, and to care for the soul, which is a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Sexburga, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Iconography
Sexburga is painted, in the modern icons of the English saints, in the habit of a nun — dark tunic and veil — with the crown of her queenship either worn beneath the veil, set aside at her feet, or held in one hand, to signify the kingdom laid down; her other hand holds a cross or a scroll, and she may carry a model of the church of Minster-in-Sheppey. Where she is shown with her sister Æthelthryth, the two abbesses stand together over the white marble sarcophagus of the translation, which is her particular attribute. Medieval English representation of her was almost wholly destroyed at the Reformation; nothing pre-1900 has been identified for this repository, and the surviving iconography of the English saints on this day is entirely modern and in copyright.
Disputed questions
- The regency. Whether Sexburga in fact governed Kent as regent for her son Ecgberht is asserted by later Kentish tradition and by the Liber Eliensis but is not in Bede; the point is disputed among historians.
- Milton Regis. The foundation there is a later attribution and is not securely evidenced.
- The date of her removal to Ely is variously given; the succession to the abbacy is usually placed about 679, immediately on Æthelthryth's death, but some accounts allow an interval during which another ruled.
- Not to be confused with the other Seaxburh, the queen who ruled Wessex in her own right after the death of her husband Cenwalh in 672 — a wholly distinct woman, not a saint, whose name has occasionally been merged with this one.
- Sources. Bede's Ecclesiastical History is contemporary and sober; the twelfth-century Liber Eliensis, which supplies most of the circumstantial detail of Sexburga's own life, is a house chronicle written to glorify Ely and is to be used with corresponding caution.