Christina of Markyate
A number of contemporary works by and about medieval religious women survive. Hildegarde of Bingen (1098–1179), the writer, composer, natural historian, artist and mystic visionary, and the anchorite and theologian Julian of Norwich (1342–c.1416), author of The Revelation of Divine Love, are outstanding examples of holy women whose lives have attracted modern readership, and both are well known; in this first story, however, I want to explore the life of a much more obscure figure: obscure, but absolutely tangible.
The shattering effects of the Battle of Hastings in 1066, its long, brutal aftermath and its profound political and social legacies are the outstanding landmark in British history. Chronicles tell of failed rebellion and the savage wasting of the countryside; the Domesday survey records widespread depositions of landowners and the loss of rights of those dependent on them;* misty-eyed historians look back fondly on the Anglo-Saxon period as if at a green field across a moat. Under the new regime of William I of Normandy, men of native noble houses lost their possessions and rank, served new lords and sometimes did well out of it. High-born women were encouraged by their parents to make themselves available to the barons of the new Norman state, to preserve the family’s rank and fortunes. Occasionally they resisted. Heroes were martyred; legends of English resistance were born.
Saints’ lives, the hagiographies, are difficult to read, especially for the cynical modern mind accustomed to rational explanations for apparent miracles and prophetic visions. On one level, they must be taken at face value: these were genuine people undergoing deep spiritual experiences and fully convinced of divine providence as literal truth. Some events are literally incredible; but from the pages of the manuscripts material lives emerge nonetheless.
There is no doubting that the woman known as Christina of Markyate (c.1096–c.1155) led an extraordinary life, that she was subjected to extreme abuse, suffering and privation; that she was both feared and honoured; that she was at once a mystic, a woman of great sexual and spiritual energy and a pragmatic, compassionate mentor to many who sought her wisdom. Her life was lived against a vivid backdrop of power politics, social tensions and ecclesiastical landscapes.Christina’s family were wealthy burghers of Huntingdon, a town founded by Scandinavian warrior lords in the tenth century at a crossing point on the River Great Ouse, close to the Roman Ermine Street. Her father was called Auti (a Danish name); her mother was Beatrix (Norman French). Christina seems to have been given the birth name Theodora, while her maternal aunt was called ?lfgifu – a solidly elitist Anglo-Saxon name. A family sensitive to the politics of culture, then.
As the eldest daughter, Theodora constituted political capital for her family, and they raised her accordingly. She accompanied them on visits to the long-venerated shrine of St Alban, two days’ travel to the south, where the grandest of Norman churches had recently been completed; she bore the mead cup and played hostess at Guild feasts; she learned to weave, sew and embroider and she was expected to marry a suitable man of her family’s choice. It was her aunt who first caused the pious young girl trouble. ?lfgifu was the mistress of a powerful Norman prelate, Ranulf Flambard, at that time a senior minister in the court of King William II (reigned 1087–1100), and later Bishop of Durham. His failure to seduce Theodora – who escaped from the chamber where he had cornered her with her aunt’s connivance, and bolted the door on him – set him against her. He seems to have been complicit in plans to have her betrothed to a man called Beorhtred.
Theodora, inspired by the life of devotion and contemplation she had seen at St Albans and by the example of the monastic community in her home town, which she could see from her window, refused the marriage and instead took a vow of chastity.
At first her parents lavished gifts on her, promised her a handsome dowry and exposed her to the admiration of secular society. When flattery failed, they threatened and bullied her. Theodora acquiesced and consented to the betrothal, but quickly regretted it. Twelfth-century marriage was a complicated affair and it is not clear that she submitted to any formal ceremony – but it is certain that she refused the act of consummation. Emotional blackmail failed to move her; confinement and beatings failed, too. Her father, despairing, submitted her to the authority of the Bishop of Lincoln who, at first, took her side. According to the anonymous Life – seemingly the work of an intimate associate or friend of hers – Theodora’s father gave in, with bitter words of reproach:‘Well, we have peace today since you are made mistress over me. By his praises the bishop has exalted you above us all and pronounced you freer than ever. So come and go as I do and live your life as you please, but do not expect any comfort or help from me.’1
Theodora, perhaps by now calling herself Christina – in itself an act of rebellion against her family – at least won support from her chaplain and from a canon called Sueno who had befriended her, not without his own ulterior motives. They persuaded Beorhtred to release her from her betrothal. Virtue seemed to have won its reward; but a collective change of heart and a hefty bribe to the bishop saw Christina once more a prisoner in her own household. She was stripped; her mother thrashed her and sought the services of local crones, who tried spells and potions on her, to no avail. Sustained by holy visions and by the support of her few friends, she maintained her virtue.
Christina’s eventual escape and subsequent life in hiding introduces us to a landscape teeming with devoted ascetics, spiritual descendants of the desert fathers seeking out remote, edgy places: marshes, woods, borderlands. Among these misanthropic and eccentric hermits, some of them ragged-clothed and half-starving, Christina found admirers – many of whom seemed to have lusted after her physically even as they plotted her deliverance from the secular, oppressive world of family and ecclesiastical authority.
Her liberation from domestic captivity was engineered – and is narrated – with all the tension and suspense of a thriller: secret messages passed under the noses of her guards; disguises, hooded cloaks, guides waiting nervously with horses in the small hours. She was first offered shelter by an anchoress at Flamstead, some miles northwest of St Albans along Watling Street; then hidden in a tiny cell in an outbuilding belonging to a renowned hermit called Roger, whose followers lived in a wood at a place called Markyate under the protection of the powerful abbots of St Albans. Since the earliest days of Christianity in Britain, and probably long before, solitary holy men had been revered, their wisdom and advice coveted, their visions and prophecies the currency of divine favour or displeasure. The most powerful secular and religious lords held them in high regard; they were something of a protected species.Christina’s new life, for all its physical insecurity and discomfort, frequent periods of illness, the fear of being found and taken back to her family, the mental torment of hunger-induced visions and extreme isolation, nevertheless offered her a refuge from abuse, if not temptation. Her relationship with Roger, initially suffused with mistrust on both sides, blossomed into one of spiritual, bordering on physical, intimacy. He recognised, in her, special attributes of mental strength and foresight; in her visions, an absolutely authentic expression of God’s and the Virgin Mary’s favour. She seems to have become something of a celebrity. On Roger’s death she was taken under the protection of the Archbishop of York and, finally, her marriage was annulled. Her family fell on hard times; a brother took monastic vows and her sister, Margaret, ever-complicit in their parents’ oppression of Christina but now seemingly reformed, joined her in the small community that gathered at Markyate.
Released from solitude and free of family threat, Christina now cultivated the friendship of Geoffrey, the Norman abbot of St Albans.
The Life credits her with deflecting him from a path of secular indulgence; with becoming his spiritual advisor. He, in turn, invested gifts and financial support in her community at Markyate. He supported and sponsored her profession as a nun in 1131 when she was, it seems, in her mid-thirties. He also very probably commissioned and dedicated to her the enigmatic manuscript known as the St Albans Psalter in whose illustrated pages she appears; and his hand is detected by several scholars in the commissioning of her Latin Life. Years later, she is recorded as the first prioress of an orthodox Benedictine convent at Markyate, founded under Geoffrey’s authority, where many religious women were drawn into her orbit. Such was her fame in those years that gifts of three mitres and a pair of sandals, embroidered by her, were carried and presented to Adrian IV (the only English Pope: he died 1159) in Rome.Christina’s story, one of oppression overcome by faith and unshakeable spirit, stands out among hagiographies. She was an openly sexual – if abstinent – being, attractive to and attracted by many men. Her experiences were recorded by an admiring male scribe and yet they exhibit a strong sense of female authorship and advocacy that is largely unsentimental and worldly.2 For all her spiritual transcendence, Christina is an authentic presence in a society struggling with tensions and contradictions between duty and freedom, inclusion and exclusion, God and Mammon, convention and individuality.