Æthelburh of Kent: The Queen who Converted a Kingdom?

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Æthelburh of Kent: The Queen who Converted a KingdomLong term Ælfgif-who? readers might remember Queen Bertha, a Christian woman who travelled from Francia to Kent in the late sixth century to marry a non-Christian king, Æthelberht. We explored the possibility that it was Bertha’s influence that led to the eventual conversion of the king and the people of Kent to Christianity.Recently, I was asked to be a guest on History Hit’s Gone Medieval podcast, to discuss another woman whose role in the conversion of an early English kingdom has gone rather unacknowledged: not Bertha, but her daughter, Æthelburh. Æthelburh had a similar story to that of her mother’s - raised a Christian, she married the ‘pagan’ Northumbrian King Edwin, who afterwards converted to his wife’s religion.According to our main source, the eighth-century Northumbrian monk and historian Bede, Æthelburh’s marriage to Edwin was brokered in around 725 by her brother, Eadbald, after he’d succeeded to his father’s throne. This was not a time when royal women could marry for love - they often functioned as one half of a political alliance between two kingdoms. I don’t think that this necessarily means we should view them as the passive pawns of their male relatives - though what say they had in these alliances may have been minimal. Rather, it might be more accurate to view them as diplomats, being sent to nearby kingdoms to maintain cordial relations between the two, and maintaining the interests of both kingdoms.In the early seventh century when Æthelburh was born, huge political changes were taking place in the many kingdoms of early medieval England. Large kingdoms were emerging along the east coast of England, two of these being Kent in the south and Northumbria in the north. Despite their distance these kingdoms were linked by the sea. It would have probably taken only two days to travel the 300 mile journey between these kingdoms by boat, an estimate modelled on the ship uncovered in the Sutton Hoo excavation. Such a journey was likely undertaken by Æthelburh as she made her way to her betrothed.Bede tells us that a condition of Æthelburh’s marriage to Edwin was that he would allow her to practice Christianity and that an Italian monk, Paulinus, would accompany her to Northumbria. Crucially, Edwin agreed that he would be open-minded about converting to Christianity himself. The marital conditions were very similar to those of Æthelburh’s parents, as Bertha also brought a priest with her, Luidhard, who served as the first missionary to Kent.What Æthelburh’s faith meant to her is something that Bede doesn’t tell us about. He is interested in how kings were converted to the religion of their wives, especially when it involved Roman Christian monks like himself (read about Saint Hild and the Synod of Whitby if you want to understand the difference between Roman and Irish Christianity). But we can extrapolate from the evidence a little here - Æthelburh was obviously a practicing Christian if she needed a churchman to accompany her in order to administer sacred rituals.Like her mother before her, Æthelburh’s marriage was of great concern to the Pope. Just as Pope Gregory had written to Bertha, Pope Boniface wrote to Æthelburh to express his wish that her husband Edwin would convert to Christianity, using scripture to outline his point. He told her that:For