St. Etheldreda of Ely

Æthelthryth, twice married, remains a virgin by her own stubborn vow, founds Ely, dies of a tumor on the neck. In 695 the translation: dry linen, a living colour, the incision healed. A Roman sarcophagus, found conveniently on the shore, becomes the shrine.

The shrine is smashed in 1541. A hand, claimed as hers, is at St. Etheldreda’s in Ely Place, London — a Catholic chapel in the city’s legal heart. “Tawdry” comes from St. Audrey’s fair, cheap lace at her feast. The language kept her when the shrine did not.

Bede (Ecclesiastical History IV.19) is the witness, and he names his sources: the abbess Sexburg, who was Etheldreda’s sister, and the physician Cynefrid, who had lanced the tumour on her neck in her last illness. At the translation in 695, sixteen years after her death, the linen was clean, the body undecayed, and the incision healed to a scar. A Roman sarcophagus found at Grantchester was used for the new shrine. Ely grew up around her. In 1541 the shrine was destroyed. A hand said to be hers survived in Catholic keeping and is now in the church of St. Etheldreda, Ely Place, in Holborn — a thirteenth-century chapel of the bishops of Ely, restored for Catholic worship in the nineteenth century and still the shrine of that relic. The English word “tawdry” is a worn-down “St. Audrey,” from the cheap lace sold at her fair. The language remembered a queen who had refused a second marriage-bed and founded a monastery of women on an island in the fens.