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June 23

Our righteous Mother Etheldreda, Abbess of Ely

Saint Etheldreda of Ely, daughter of Anna, King of the East Angles, and wife of Egfrid, King of Northumbria, was first married to Prince Tondbert, who died soon after the wedding; she was then given in marriage to King Egfrid; and till her death, despite the efforts of the King, assisted by Bishop Wilfrid of York, she preserved her virginity untouched. After beseeching the King for a long time to allow her to forsake the world and serve the King of all as a nun, she finally won his consent and entered the convent of the King’s aunt, Ebba, who was Abbess of Coldingham (commemorated Aug. 25), where she was clothed as a nun. A year later, she was made abbess in the district called Ely, in the district of the East Angles, surrounded by water and marshes abounding in eels (thus the name Ely, which is pronounced eel-y), where she founded a convent and became the virgin mother of many consecrated virgins.

From the time of her entry into the convent she never wore comfortable linen but only rough woollen garments; seldom washed in hot water except on the eve of the greatest feasts, and that only after she had helped her sisters in Christ to wash; rarely had more than one meal a day; always remained at prayer in church from Matins until dawn unless hindered by serious illness.

She foretold the plague of which she was to die, and even the number of nuns in the convent who would die from it. She was taken to eternity seven years after becoming abbess, and according to her own command was buried in a wooden coffin. Her sister Sexburga (commemorated July 6) succeeded her as abbess, and sixteen years after Saint Etheldreda’s burial, Saint Sexburga decided to have her saintly sister’s bones exhumed, placed in a new coffin, and transferred to the church. Since Ely was surrounded on all sides by sea and fens, some of the brethren took a boat to a little ruined city nearby, where they discovered a beautiful white marble sarcophagus with its lid, which they took back to the convent. When her tomb was opened, her body, after sixteen years of lying in the grave, was found to be perfectly free of corruption, and the linen cloths in which it had been buried appeared so fresh and new that they looked as if they had been wrapped about her that very day. During the Saint’s last sickness she had had a large red tumor under her jaw, the pain of which she gladly accepted as a means of cleansing her of the vanity of the gold and pearls she had worn on her neck while in the royal courts. Cynifrid, her physician, had opened this tumor and drained it three days before her death; the wound of it had not healed when she departed this life. He also was at the convent when her grave was opened; he heard Sexburga cry out “Glory to the Name of the Lord!” when her relics were found incorrupt; he, as her physician, was called in to view the body; and he was astonished to see that the incision he had made just before her death was now healed, with only a faint scar to mark the place. At the touch of her robes, demons were cast out, and the wooden coffin in which she was first buried healed diseases of the eye and failing sight.

Besides Saint Sexburga, she had two other sisters found among the Saints: Ethelburga, who became a nun at Faremoutiers in France (where she is known as Aubièrge), who was also found incorrupt after death (commemorated July 7); and Withburga (commemorated July 8), the youngest of the four, who founded a convent in Norfolk; her body also was found incorrupt fifty years after her death; in 974 her holy relics were transferred to Ely to be buried near her sister’s; in 1106 the bodies of Saints Etheldreda and Withburga were found to be still incorrupt; the former’s was entire, the latter’s was so sound that even the limbs were flexible. Saint Etheldreda died of the plague on June 23, 679.

Over the centuries her name was corrupted to Audrey. A lace of notoriously second rate, popular in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, was known as Saint Audrey’s Lace, from which the word tawdry ([Sain-] tAudrey) is derived, though this is of course no fault of the Saint’s. The account of her life and incorrupt relics is found in the Venerable Bede’s History of the English Church and People, Book IV, ch. 19.

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