Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses

THIS book, which forms part of the series ‘Women, Power and Politics’ (edited by June Hannam and Pauline Stafford), is notable for its clarity both of expression and of purpose, and for its freedom from the sort of feminist jargon which so marred, for example, Stephanie Hollis, Anglo-Saxon Women and the Church (Woodbridge, 1992). Yorke's principal aim is clearly enunciated at the outset: to explore ‘the interrelationship of nunneries with the royal houses which supported them, and the consequences of that relationship for their operation as religious communities’ (p. 9). Although there have, of course, been other studies of Anglo-Saxon nunneries, Yorke's is, as she comments, the first to embrace the whole Anglo-Saxon period, especially with such single-minded commitment to a particular line of questioning. The argument throughout proceeds with admirably detailed and learned attention to the sources, especially the hagiographic and diplomatic sources, which are handled with skill and sensitivity to the considerable problems they pose. Another admirable feature of the book is its author's awareness of the Continental background, both as a source of comparisons and definitions, but also as an influence on the development of Anglo-Saxon nunneries, although some readers may be left wondering as to the wisdom of dealing with the English development separate from the Continental. Yorke's first three chapters constitute a survey, albeit a very thought-provoking and probing one. She tackles first the conversion period, in which, despite her efforts, the reader is left feeling that there is still a problem as to why England embraced ‘double monasteries’ so enthusiastically, especially as Yorke emphasises that most foundations of these took place in or after the time of Archbishop Theodore who, to judge from his Penitential, disapproved of them. Part of the explanation clearly lies in Continental influence, and Yorke rightly follows Mary Bateson's excellent paper of 1899 in which she shows that the institution originated in northern Gaul. But underlying all this discussion is the question of how far the ‘true double monasteries of the conversion period’ as Yorke calls them (p. 130) really were as evenly balanced in the gender of their inmates as Yorke believes it possible to prove. Might they not simply have been nunneries with priests and other necessary men attached? Yorke's use of A. Hamilton Thompson's paper about male prebendaries in otherwise quite conventional late medieval nunneries underlines the possibilities. The issue of the validity of the ‘double monastery’ concept could perhaps have been confronted more directly both in a Continental and an English context. Be that as it may, Yorke uses hagiographic texts in particular to considerable effect in exploring the extent to which royal women, bound as she argues by property-holding conventions, returned to their parental kingdom to found nunneries and to become abbesses. Her argument is a very interesting one, and, aside from helping to make sense of what often appears a confused mass of hagiographical texts, it illuminates in an important way the integration between monasticism and social norms. In her second chapter, Yorke tackles the often neglected, yet clearly very important, period of the late eighth and ninth centuries. Although the importance of Viking attacks on nunneries is not neglected, Yorke is really concerned with other processes which were detrimental to the status of those houses. Following Nicholas Brooks's important analysis of the role of Archbishop Wulfred in the fate of the Kentish nunneries (set out in his The Early History of the Church of Canterbury (Leicester, 1984)), Yorke examines further the role of the bishops and archbishops in bringing nunneries within their control, and thus paradoxically removing their raison d'être as institutions devoted to the royal houses. Moreover, she argues convincingly that dynastic conflicts were also detrimental, since they often resulted in the replacement or removal of the dynasty which had founded and patronised particular nunneries. Indeed, such political developments often prompted abbesses to place their houses under the protection of bishops, who then had no interest in continuing them as nunneries. The decline was further hastened by the eventual political dominance of Wessex, in which kingdom nunneries had not been especially important, perhaps (as Yorke conjectures) because of the relatively low status of the king's wife in early West Saxon history. Yorke is equally interesting on the development of nunneries in the later Anglo-Saxon period when ‘a pattern of royal foundation and support for nunneries identified with the ruling house can be traced with greater confidence from the reign of Alfred’. She argues that the reason the English kings promoted them, despite their situation in Wessex noted above, was in part the influence of Carolingian and Ottonian contemporaries, for which this was ‘an established aspect of court culture’. Equally interestingly, she notes the possibility that it might have been an aspect of the influence of Mercian queens on their royal West Saxon husbands. Yorke then embarks on two chapters of synthesis, one devoted to the religious functions of nunneries, the other to their broadly family functions. In the first, she examines their roles in intercessory prayer, as offerings for military success or to make amends for guilt, as places of burial and commemoration, and as centres for the promotion of saints’ cults. Her discussion is always interesting, but there must be some question here as to why nunneries are being discussed separately from other religious houses. The problem of the nature of, and reasons for the popularity of, the early ‘double monasteries’ rather hangs over this discussion. The same is true of Yorke's balanced discussion of the role of nunneries in pastoral care, where the problem of how nunneries differed in function from male houses is all the more acute because of the inability of women to be priests. Yorke's final chapter on the family functions of nunneries explores the relationship between nunneries and royal families and politics, confronting issues arising from the practice of royal visits to nunneries, and exploring very interestingly the conventions in later Anglo-Saxon England governing women being taken from nunneries for marriage. The consideration she begins of the relationship between these nunneries and Continental houses of canonesses is clearly a very promising line of research. If there are inevitably problems to pursue further, Yorke's book is a masterly, authoritative and, most importantly, thought-provoking treatment of its subject, which makes a major contribution to bringing nunneries into the mainstream of early medieval research. Yorke hints at still deeper issues as to the role of royal women arising from her research; clearly much might be learned from a wide-ranging comparison, using Yorke's agenda, of the Anglo-Saxon nunneries with their counterparts across Christendom, and with their counterparts in later centuries

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