Veiled Women by Sarah Foot;

Author:Sarah Foot;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2022-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Ramsey, Huntingdonshire

Ephemeral new foundation

First attested in post-Conquest sources

King Cnut was said by Ramsey’s twelfth-century chronicler to have attempted unsuccessfully to found a second church at this place and fill it with women.

A monastery for monks was founded at Ramsey c. 969 by St Oswald with the support of the East Anglian ealdorman, Æthelwine.1 The twelfth-century Ramsey chronicle reported that King Cnut, after consultation with Bishop Æthelric of Dorchester (a former member of the community who had previously been invited to inspect the condition of the abbey), wanted to establish a second church at Ramsey, dedicated to the Holy Trinity. Cnut was said to have donated money for this purpose from the royal fisc, and to have intended to place a chorus feminarum within the new church, to match the existing collegium virorum. To the relief of the chronicler — ‘since it is clear what the proximity of the two sexes brings in both profit and in loss’ — the proposal was never implemented, although the crypt of the intended church remained in the churchyard and could still be seen at the time of his writing.2

1The charter of King Edgar of 974 confirming the foundation of Ramsey and its holdings and granting it privileges is spurious: BCS 1311 (S 798); E. Mason, ‘St Oswald and St Wulfstan’, in St Oswald of Worcester, ed. N. Brooks and C. Cubitt (1996), pp. 269-84, at p. 273. The monastery’s foundation was reported by William of Malmesbury, GP, §181 (ed. Hamilton, p. 318). See A. Wareham, ‘Saint Oswald’s family and kin’, in Saint Oswald of Worcester, ed. N. Brooks and C. Cubitt (1996), pp. 46-63, at pp. 47-53; A. Thacker, ‘Saint-making and relic collecting by Oswald and his communities’, ibid., pp. 244-68, at pp. 245-7. 2Chronicon abbatiae Rameseiensis, §81 (ed. W. D. Macray [1889], p. 126).

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