Queen Cynethryth of Mercia's Lost Abbey

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Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval by History Hit. I'm Dr Kat Jarman. This summer saw the announcement that a previously lost monastery dating to the 8th century had been discovered in Berkshire by a team from the University of Reading. The monastery is associated with a very unique and powerful queen of the kingdom of Mercia, Cunithrith, who is the wife of the slightly more familiar name King Offa.

This week, I'm talking to the archaeologist in charge of those excavations and asking him not just what he discovered, but also to tell me more about Cynothry's remarkable career as a Mercian queen. and also the roles of these monasteries, which are far more than just places for monks and nuns to hide out and pray.

I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast today Dr. Gabor Thomas, who is an Associate Professor in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Reading, and he specialises in the early medieval period and particularly settlements and religious sites. So thank you so much for joining us today, Gabor. Thank you for inviting me. Now, congratulations on your big discovery on excavations this year. That's really great news.

Yeah, yeah. Well, this is the sort of stuff that I'm really into. So it's a great privilege to be back on the trail of an Anglo-Saxon monastery. Yeah, fantastic. We're all so excited to hear about it. So we're going to get to that later on. But I was hoping that before we talk about the actual dig and what you found.

to get a bit more context for our listeners and sort of bring us back to 8th century Mercia. And so I wanted to ask you a little bit more about this Queen Cunithris, first of all. Can you tell me, who was she?

She was a big cheese. We know that women could attain power in early medieval societies, but she's a particularly good example. She is the queen consort of Offer of Mercia, the most powerful of all the Mercian kings, who expanded the Mercian kingdom to its greatest extent. and who tried, and in some ways successfully, to emulate the great Carolingian, Frankish rulers at the time on the continent, in particular Charlemagne himself, who was in correspondence with.

We know a fair amount about her from contemporary historical sources. They speak about her in very high terms, if somewhat generic. So she's described as a very... pious person perhaps isn't too unexpected we suspect we don't know for sure but she probably was from the mercy and royal line sort of that went back into the earlier part of the the 8th century so she was drawn from

royal stock. So it was a very, if you like, it was a dynastic marriage. I mean, the other sort of snippets we get about her, she's mentioned or she's the signatory to important documents. She's mentioned as the recipient of estates and charters. I mean, one thing that really signals her out as being special is that she's the only queen.

to have coinage minted in her name for all of Northwest Europe. This is truly, truly exceptional. And that's telling us something very important about the power that she wielded. equal to contemporary kings and archbishops. So yeah, yeah, she's an important player, definitely. Do we know why? I mean, because it's so unusual that she has this coin, especially. I mean, do we know why this happens or have any sources that suggest that at all?

We don't. We don't. I mean, we don't have it be lovely if we had some kind of a timeline that showed us or sources that enabled us to track the trajectory, if you like. But, you know, we just got this gap. We only really hear about her in the sources once she's attained that level of power and she's married to Offa and subsequently she continues to be a powerful person beyond his death. So it's impossible to know. you know, the contingent circumstances that led her to rise to that level.

And can you say a little bit more about Mercia at this time? This is a really powerful kingdom and it's got connections to the continents, does it as well? Or is this a very sort of...

Is all the activity, everything just very much localised or is it more a wider sort of network of contacts and connections at this time? Yeah, very much the latter. So by this period, certainly by... you know, the second, third of the eighth century, Mercia is the major political power in Anglo-Saxon England. And for, you know, decades, it's been expanding its borders. It's been...

trying to capture or successfully captured strategic arteries that gave it access to international trade and contact. That's why when we come on to discuss it, you know, we get... involvement of Mercians on the Thames using monasteries as a way of gaining control of the Thames. So they control London, ultimately. That's a huge prize.

They annex and subjugate neighbouring kingdoms that provide them with access to the eastern seaboard, including East Anglia. We can see them controlling monasteries in those areas. So really, by this point, it is a kingdom with international aspirations and under its rulers. It's very, very much taken in that direction. And do we know if they had any children offer an consensus? That's an excellent question.

that I don't know the answer to. That is the first time I've ever been asked that question. And I now know that's some homework I need to follow up on. But that's a great question, but I don't know the answer. So I'm sure listeners out there will be Googling as this goes out. Fantastic. Well, in that case, let's move swiftly on to the next topic. Okay, so she was clearly then involved in politics at the time. She has these coins to show us that she was someone of significance. And, I mean...

Clearly, she was the wife of Offa, so that was one of the key parts of that. What happens when Offa dies? Does she then continue to be in power or does she move on to another role? Well, I mean, it's very characteristic that royal widows enter monasteries. It's a traditional path, if you like. You know, although she had... a lot of power I mean one must suspect that

A certain amount of that was by dint of her marriage to offer. And when a really powerful ruler like that dies, inevitably there's instability. There's a certain amount of turmoil as people... to gain power for themselves and to succeed. Again, you really need to speak to a... I'm sure that an Anglo-Saxon historian would be able to give you a much more subtle answer to that question in terms of the complicated power dynamics.

that followed Offa's death. But we do see her relatively swiftly entering the monastery at Cookham, so within a year of his death. You know, that's a familiar pattern. So it's not... unusual, but at the same time, it's a way that royal widows manage to continue to play an active role in politics. to continue to exercise political and dynastic agency. Monasteries provided a framework for that to happen.

When you say she enters the monastery, does she become the abbess and she becomes in charge of it, essentially? That's right. She is in charge of this institution. From that, we have to assume that it is either... a nunnery at this point. So it's an all-female community, or it could be one of these quite characteristic institutions or monasteries that flourish in the...

In the earliest phases of Christianity in England, it could be a so-called double house or a double monastery. So with a mix of monks and nuns. So either or, but... She's heading it, irrespective of its precise composition. She is the de facto person in charge. And do we have much information about...

that monastery in terms of well so obviously you've already said right now that we don't know some of those basic details but in terms of the fact that this was lost to us and this location was lost do we just not have that many sources that give us those details? We have some. The reason we have these sources is that there was a great tussle for a period. It was actually a three-way tussle between Mercia, Wessex and the Archbishops of Canterbury over Cookham.

which demonstrates its strategic importance. So we kind of get sidelights on it. in respect of disputes that were held at various church councils over the monastery there, but nothing detailed. I mean, there's snippets of information. that tell us of its general importance, its strategic and political significance. But, I mean, we know it was very wealthy and it was certainly regarded...

And highly prized because there was an exchange between the kings of Mercia and the archbishops who exchanged the monastery. It was exchanged for a huge amount of land in, you know, the historic heartlands of Kent. I think it was 100 hides. I mean, that's a huge valuation to place on Cookham. So that just gives you an impression that, you know, just...

how highly prized this monastery was. So, but beyond that, so we knew it was there, we knew it was a valuable, important site and vaguely the location, but not the exact details and not...

finding any evidence of it until this summer when your excavations come in so tell me about that discovery yeah um i've kind of made a A lot of my career in terms of fieldwork has been, you know, based around going into currently occupied settlements because... they often don't see development in the same way that suburbs of towns and other areas where a lot of commercial archaeology happens. And often it's the case when you go into a community that has an understanding of its ancestry.

and its heritage. Often there'll be quite firm views on what they think, you know, the significant as a site may or may not be. It's quite interesting. And sometimes there's real debate within the community as well. And that's very much what happened at Cookham. Because we started investigating this site next to the churchyard.

that to my eyes looked like this is just an absolute dead cert for where the early medieval monastery is likely to be. But there's quite a lot of resistance to that locally. There were people that were saying, no, actually there's some... place name evidence that it's you know A couple of miles behind us up the hill on higher ground. You know, that's more of a defensive situation. It's more likely to be where the early medieval monastery was located. So it was quite interesting to go.

going to go into that sort of environment where you know things were quite contested but you know when we started recovering um occupation of the right date on on the site that that we were looking at that just to my mind confirmed that you know Actually, we are correct in believing that that was really the correct site. So what sort of material did you find in the excavations? So... I mean, the important thing before discussing that is really the location is prime.

We're sandwiched between the medieval church of All Saints in Cookham, but we're right on the river itself. I mean, and that's just a clear reflection of the fact that monasteries at this period were incredibly well connected. And you see this... pattern repeated. I mean, they're either located on major rivers or on coastlines, like dint of the fact that... to function as monasteries in the way that they were supposed to at this period, they had to be connected, and very highly so.

The occupation that we're finding is in this really strategic location, just on the edge of a gravel island, sort of rising up out of the floodplain, beside the river, and... All that you would want to hope for, you know, in terms of what an archaeologist might call Middle Saxon occupation. Buildings, metal trackways, middens. Pits, hearths, production going on, metalworking, carpentry, you know, lots of evidence for spatial layout, ditched boundaries, you know, it's...

It's really, really characteristic settlement archaeology of the 8th and 9th centuries, but in this very strategic location besides a medieval churchyard. What did Tudor men like their women to look like? They should have broad shoulders, fleshy arms, fleshy legs and broad hips. What did 17th century Londoners think of coffee? A syrup of soot and the essence of old shoes. And what did executioners wear?

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And is some of that that you found reflective of this kind of high status site? Or is it just any generic settlement? Or is there really evidence in what you've found so far that this was something of importance? Yeah, I mean, it's certainly... produced enough, although what we've done so far has been pretty small scale, to show that it was performing the role of a central place. So there's lots of consumption going on there in terms of food and diet.

There's a lot of preparation of foodstuffs. There's metalworking. There's other types of production and other materials. There's stuff being imported to the site from... east anglia and the continent we can see that coming through in the pottery so it's got these extensive it's plugged into extensive networks there's evidence of wealth on the site in relation to contemporary coinage. There's a really nice but small but significant assemblage of personal adornments, dress.

with a very female flavour to it, so very delicate dress pins. May have been used for securing the headdress of the nuns. So some gendered aspects coming through from the finds as well. I mean, overall, this is not the range of material that you would expect to find on a run-of-the-mill type of settlement.

Yeah, I mean, it sounds very much like this sort of material culture that we get from other sites, other monastic sites like that as well, I think, which is fantastic. One thing I want to just pick up on that you said, you talked about craft working and metal working and things.

I think it's easy to have an idea that these monasteries were literally just religious sites where you'd sort of come and sit and pray quietly. And that's what you did. But that's not actually the case at all. I mean, can you say something a bit more about what would happen? What was life like in an early medieval?

monastery that's a really good question and it's a question that kind of intersects with a much wider debate about how we should go about characterising monasteries in this part of Anglo-Saxon England because there's an interesting duality in Anglo-Saxon England in the type of archaeology you get from monastic sites. So you go up into Northumbria or into Northern Britain or Western Britain and Ireland and...

the signatures for a monastery are often much clearer. So you might get, for example, evidence for the production of sculpture, sculpture being used whether for the furnishings of a monastic church or in relation to funerary practices. you might get the evidence for the production of shrines and other liturgical metalwork. On sites in those locations, we've been able to excavate over the sort of liturgical core.

of these early monasteries. So they produce evidence that is quite clear-cut and meets our expectations of what a monastery should look like. When we move further south, however, The evidence is more ambiguous because it crosses over quite strongly with secular settlements of high status character, which also produce evidence for... production, metalworking, lots of consumption drawing upon a wide range of resources, formalized spatial layouts using bit ditched boundaries.

timber buildings of various kinds. So there's a number of sites, I can mention some of them, Flixborough, Brandon, for example, where there's been a lot of debate about, well, were these monasteries or not? Now, what's interesting is that a lot of of these contested sites lie in eastern England, places like East Anglia, where we have absolutely no historical records.

If monasteries existed in this area, very few are actually documented, and that's just an accident of the survival of written records. But what's interesting, when we turn to areas where we have excellent documentation... including the Thames Valley, Cookham itself, Kent.

We find when we excavate these sites, and there are some problems because we don't always get the opportunity to excavate the liturgical cause, so we're working around the periphery of that, we find occupation that's very similar to what we see in secular. context. So I know that's a bit of a digression and a long answer, but going back to your original question, what was life like? What were monasteries like? Well, part of the answer to that is they were central places.

And in many respects, they overlapped with secular central places that existed at this time. But albeit with some distinctions, and I think... To see those distinctions more clearly, you need to be able to sort of excavate within the liturgical cause of these places. That's when you start recovering, for example, monastic churches. I mean, what's an interesting question that remains to be answered is whether in this part of the Thames churches of the 8th century were wood or stone.

We don't know because we've never excavated one in this area. A big research question. We would definitely expect to find evidence for the monastic burial grounds, and it might be multiple. We know on other sites that you had burial areas. that were reserved for the brethren and other funerary zones that were used for lay people that were buried there. It may be that there's other sort of liturgical structures that are located in and around.

the cemeteries. But once you start moving beyond that zone... In effect, you're moving into areas that are very similar to what you would expect to find on a secular settlement. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't call these monasteries. I think... There's some aspects of the debate or some commentators who've almost gone too far and they've become, even when we have the documented evidence for a monastery existing, they're going, well, we found no evidence for sculpture on this site.

using really Northumbrian, they've got a sort of template. But I think we've just got to accept what the evidence is telling us. In this part of England, monasteries look very similar to secular settlements, albeit with some important distinctions. So that means then perhaps also that...

More ordinary people were sort of there. They were taking part in what was going on there. These weren't these sort of very secluded, just for monks and nuns, but actually they were part of the local community, presumably. Absolutely. You would have had a social spectrum represented in one of these places. I mean, yes, at the heart of it, you've got a bunch of aristocratic women. Fundamentally, that's what nunneries were.

But you would have had populations supporting the brethren because they were spending most of their time doing the liturgical rounds and doing what monks and nuns do. They need to be fed. They need to be sustained. You would have had dependents. residing at monasteries, you know, they would have been tied to these places for their lives. You know, a very unequal relationship. But that was the nature of early medieval society. Yeah, that's a really...

interesting points. But if we go back then to the beginning, so then go back to who we were talking about here and Kenneth Ruth and her sort of link to this. Do we know what happened? Do we know... When she died, did she die there? Did she get buried there? Do we have the answer to any of those questions? We don't. She's not mentioned in any lists of the resting places of royal members of the Mercian line.

I think we have to assume, and that's another question for historian, why haven't you got a direct line to a historian? I don't know how old she was when she entered the monastery at Cookham. It'd be interesting to find out. That's another thing I have to find out, actually. But I think we have to presume, because that was pretty standard, that had she died while as abbess at Cookham, she would have been buried there as one of its most important members.

And the remaining brethren would have prayed for her soul. You know, that's where members of the royal family ultimately were buried in monasteries just like Cookham. So it would have made sense for him to be buried. there as its abbess. So somewhere in the monastic burial grounds, I would imagine, lie Cunithrith's remains.

That would be brilliant to find, wouldn't it? But presumably somebody like that, it'd be difficult to identify because they wouldn't necessarily be given a burial that was sort of unique enough to sort of single her out, do you think? Yeah, that's an interesting one. I mean, it's not impossible that...

you know, that she was translated. It's not impossible that as an important royal... She wasn't the foundress of the monastery. That's quite interesting, actually, because she comes along, it's already up and running. when she enters it. So often it was the case that members of the royal line that founded monasteries were subsequently enshrined and these places became an important focus for royal cults.

It's not impossible that that happens at a later stage in the trajectory of this monastery at Cookham. It certainly can't be ruled out. And do you think there's hope of finding a cemetery there in your future work when you continue? I think there's certainly a possibility of that.

I mean, the site that we're investigating goes right up to the boundary of the medieval cemetery. And what we know is that early medieval cemeteries... were often more extensive than their medieval successors on sites where you've got monasteries that become parish churches. you often find almost like a penumbra of early medieval burials beyond the boundaries of the medieval churchyard. So it's quite possible that we'd find something similar at Cookham.

And are you planning to go back next year to do more? Yes, we are. We very much hope to return and run the excavations as a field school for the department of archaeology at the University of Reading. I think it would offer great... training for students. It's also not very far from the department. It's only about half an hour away, which helps. And the other thing is we've got a wonderful support from the local community.

and voluntary organisations who have been heavily involved, who are heavily involved last summer. So it's a great focus for collaborating with local communities in the Thames Valley area. So yeah, for that reason as well, it works. very effectively as field school. Fantastic. And the final question, what do you hope you're going to find in the next season? What would be the ideal outcome?

That's a really, that's a really interesting question. I tend not to try and sort of, you know, get my hopes up and just, I mean, it would be lovely to find some of the sort of... The liturgical zone of the monastery, including a bit of the monastic cemetery, who knows, there might be remains of... Perhaps one of the churches that lay at the core of the monastery as well. Often there were multiple churches at these sites. So, you know, that would be fantastic. Fantastic. Well...

Fingers crossed for you. And I hope I can come and visit in the summer. But thank you so much, Gabor, for coming along to Gone Medieval today. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. So that was Dr. Gabor Thomas from the University of Reading.

This has been an episode of Gone Medieval by History Hit. Don't forget that you can also subscribe to our newsletter, Medieval Mondays. Just look in the episode notes and you can find out how to do that. And tune in for our next episode. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman and I will be back soon.

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