Tetta of Wimborne

Everything that is known of Tetta comes, in substance, from one source: the Vita Leobae of Rudolf of Fulda (completed c. 836), which opens with a chapter on the spiritual mistress of its heroine. What follows is Rudolf's account; no earlier or independent record of her life was found.

Wimborne ("Winestream," Rudolf explains, from the clearness and sweetness of its water) held two monasteries of ancient royal foundation, one of men and one of women, each ringed with strong high walls, and ruled from the beginning by strict mutual enclosure: no man entered the women's community and no woman the men's, save only the priests who came to celebrate the Liturgy in the church and withdrew at once when it was ended. A woman entering the cloister entered for life, and the superior conducted the monastery's outside business speaking through a window.

Over this monastery, in succession to earlier abbesses, was set Tetta, a woman of noble family — for she was a sister of the king — but nobler in her conduct and virtues (Rudolf does not name the king). She ruled both communities with prudence and discretion, teaching by deed rather than by word, and kept the enclosure so jealously that she denied entry to the nuns' community not only to laymen and clerics but even to bishops. Rudolf, who says the discipline of Wimborne was stricter than anywhere else, preserves the two stories of her that Lioba used to tell:

• The sunken grave. A prioress who had enforced discipline harshly and died unreconciled with the younger nuns was cursed by them even at her tomb — they climbed upon the grave-mound as if to trample her corpse. Tetta, finding the earth of the grave sunk six inches below the ground around it, read in it God's judgement on the dead woman, rebuked the young nuns for their hardness of heart, and set the whole community to three days of fasting, vigil and psalmody for her soul. On the third day, as Tetta prayed prostrate before the altar, the grave filled and rose level with the ground — a sign, Rudolf says, that by her prayers the dead sister had been absolved.
• The keys and the fox. The sister-sacristan lost the whole bunch of church keys in the dark after Compline, so that at the hour of Matins the church could not be opened. Tetta, judging it the devil's work, gathered the sisters, sang the night office in another building, and set them to prayer — whereupon a little dead fox was found at the chapel doors with the keys in its mouth. The community that went in to give thanks numbered at that time about fifty nuns.

Under Tetta's care the girl Lioba, offered by her parents, was formed in the Scriptures and the monastic life. When St Boniface, needing superiors for the monasteries of his German mission, sent messengers and letters to Tetta asking that Lioba be sent to him, the abbess — "exceedingly displeased at her departure, but unable to gainsay the dispositions of divine providence" — agreed, and sent her. Orthodox England adds that the sending was in 748 and that Lioba travelled with a group of nuns, among whom was Thecla (later abbess of Kitzingen); Rudolf gives no year.

Nothing is recorded of Tetta's own death. The date c. 772 carried by the modern digests (Orthodox England; so too Wikidata) is transmitted without a source naming its origin, and is flagged here accordingly.