When the antiquary William Dugdale visited Tamworth castle in the earlier seventeenth century, he copied out a late medieval story relating to Polesworth Abbey (Warws.), a few miles away to the south-east. According to this account, the abbey was founded by an Anglo-Saxon king for his daughter Edith and the nuns were still there when dispossessed by Robert Marmion, the post-Conquest lord of Tamworth castle; having found refuge at nearby Oldbury, they were later restored after the saint had chastised Marmion in a dream. Although Edith is indeed recorded at Polesworth in a pre-Conquest list of saints’ resting places, charter evidence shows that it was not until the earlier twelfth century that Robert Marmion together with his high-born wife established the abbey, doing so as a new foundation, with the nuns almost certainly having formerly been an independent group of holy women at nearby Oldbury. But the Marmions were clearly exploiting the survival of Edith's cult, and the story preserved in Dugdale's transcription shows how her memory was kept alive at Tamworth, where the parish church was also dedicated to the saint. Although not widespread, the cult is found elsewhere in the Midlands but seems to have been only moderately popular and it barely survived up to the Reformation. The purpose of this article is to discuss who Edith might have been and how her cult was promoted and used.
The late medieval story
The story copied by the Warwickshire-born antiquary and herald William Dugdale from an ‘old manuscript roll’ (‘ex rotulo pervetusto’) when he visited Tamworth castle in 1636 relates mainly to the alleged expulsion and restoration of the Polesworth nuns by Robert Marmion of Tamworth castle not long after the Norman Conquest.Footnote 1 It starts, however, with the foundation of the religious house there by a King ‘Egbright’, evidently as ruler of Mercia,Footnote 2 for his daughter Edith. On the advice of a visiting Irish bishop the king's leprous son ‘Arnulfe’ had been sent to Ireland, where he was healed by a holy woman named Modwen, who then came over to Egbright's kingdom and was given land for a nunnery at ‘Trensale’ in the forest of Arden. Having been veiled by the ‘bishop of Chester’, Edith was entrusted to Modwen for religious training and then given land for her own house ‘undyr a revar that was callyd Ancur upon a depness of watur that was callyd Poll and Worth’, a reference to the River Anker which flows a short distance to the south of Polesworth church.
Egbright endowed the abbey with lands which descended ‘from abbess to abbess’ up to the Norman Conquest and were recorded ‘in a booke that is callyd Domisdey’,Footnote 3 the abbey being included in the extent (‘pursute’) of the estates granted to Robert Marmion allegedly by William the Conqueror: namely, Tamworth castle and its foreign (‘forren’) and the town. Marmion then ‘chased away’ Abbess Oseyth and all ‘the ladies’ of Polesworth, forcing them to retreat to their cell at Oldbury (‘Woldbyry’) some six miles to the south-east in Mancetter parish, but only for ‘well nigh a year’. Then, on the occasion of a great assembly (‘gedryinge’) of earls (‘yourlys’) and barons at the castle, including his ‘sworne brodyr’ Walter de Somerville, lord of Wychnor (on the southern edge of Needwood forest in Staffordshire), and after Marmion had gone to bed after a feast, St Edith appeared to him in a dream. Attired as a nun with a cross in her hand, she said: ‘Yelde to me and to my sisturs my londys and my tenements, the wech the King Egbright my fadyr me gaffe, or you shall have an evill ende, soe schall you goe into hell.’ To enforce her message she struck her cross into his side, so that Marmion awoke in great pain on blooded sheets. He was advised to confess to a priest and vow to restore St Edith and her nuns to the lands that he had taken from them, and having done this his wound was healed. The next day he rode out to Oldbury with Somerville and the rest of his men and escorted Oseyth and her sisters back to Polesworth, asking for pardon and absolution. Moreover, he requested that he and Somerville might be ‘bredur and mytenars’ (brother[s] and maintainers) of the house, and that he and Somerville and their heirs might be buried there, Marmion in the chapter house and Somerville in the cloister.
Besides the problem of identifying ‘Egbright’ and his daughter, the story cannot be taken as an historical record of events that took place in William the Conqueror's reign, as the Robert Marmion being referred to was active in the earlier twelth century; the anachronism was presumably the result of confusion with Marmion's predecessor at Tamworth, the Conqueror's household officer Robert dispensator (d. 1090s).Footnote 4 Indeed, rather than being preserved by the nuns themselves as a foundation legend, the story seems to emphasise Marmion, first as the nuns’ persecutor and then his redemption following St Edith's personal intervention, and it most probably originated with later owners of Tamworth castle keen to associate themselves with him as their ancestor. Written in English (in a Warwickshire dialect) sometime in the early or mid-1400s,Footnote 5 the text may have been commissioned by Thomas Ferrers who acquired the castle in 1423 as husband of the heiress Elizabeth Freville.Footnote 6 He had its great hall rebuilt in the late 1430s to an exceptional standard,Footnote 7 perhaps decorating it with scenes from the Polesworth story. Certainly, later in the century, his grandson Ralph Ferrers, as dean of Tamworth collegiate church (1479 × 1504),Footnote 8 was attributed with inserting stained glass in the church's east window: as recorded by William Dugdale on a visit in 1640, one panel depicted William the Conqueror assigning lordship of the castle to Robert Marmion, and another the nuns being driven from Polesworth by Marmion (with the inscription: ‘Per Rob’ Marmion monache fugantur de Polesworth’).Footnote 9 Possibly there had been a third panel, depicting the nuns’ return to Polesworth.
St Edith of Polesworth
The first evidence that links a saint named Edith (Eadgyð) with Polesworth is a pre-Conquest list of saints’ resting places known as the Secgan, whose earliest surviving copies date from the first half of the eleventh century:Footnote 10 ‘sancte Eadgið on ðare stowe þe is gehaten Polleswyrð neah þare ea Oncer’; and a near contemporary Latin translation gives ‘sanctaque Eadgyth in loco qui vocatur Polleswyrð prope amnem Oncer’Footnote 11 (‘St Edith in the place called Polesworth near the River Anker’). The Anker was the river which flows past Polesworth church and on to Tamworth where it joins the River Tame underneath the castle, but reference to it was not special to Edith as other entries in the early part of the list (where Edith appears) also refer to topographical features, especially rivers.
Edith's identity remains uncertain, with none of the three candidates suggested by medieval chroniclers being likely.Footnote 12 She appears in the section of the Secgan that relates to saints up to and including Edmund, the martyred king of the East Angles (d. 869), but as the list was later amended to take account of translations of relics to new sites, the relevant section could possibly date from the early tenth century. If so, this would allow for her identification as the sister whom King Athelstan (d. 939) gave in marriage at Tamworth in 926 to Sihtric, the Scandinavian ruler of York.Footnote 13 She is unnamed in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry that records the marriage,Footnote 14 and nor did the twelfth-century chronicler William of Malmesbury know her name, although he does give her as Athelstan's full sister (the daughter of Edward the elder and his first, Mercian, wife Ecgwynn).Footnote 15 The name Edith was supplied by Roger of Wendover, a thirteenth-century chronicler of St Albans Abbey,Footnote 16 and following him by the fellow St Albans monk Matthew Paris,Footnote 17 albeit now giving her as Athelstan's half-sister. Both chroniclers have her founding the nunnery after Sihtric's apostasy and early death.Footnote 18
Another Edith was suggested (in passing) in the late eleventh century by Goscelin of St Bertin in his Life of her namesake Edith, abbess of Wilton (d. 984 × 987), a daughter (by his second marriage) of King Edgar (d. 975): Goscelin refers to Edith of Polesworth as Edgar's sister (germane), so making her Edith of Wilton's aunt.Footnote 19 This identification was copied by the mid fourteenth-century chronicler John of Tynemouth in his rendering of Goscelin's account of Edith of Wilton in his Sanctilogium Angliae, Walliae, Scotiae et Hiberniae,Footnote 20 but it was evidently forgotten at Wilton itself. The English verse ‘Wilton Chronicle’, a history of the abbey with a life and miracles of Edith of Wilton composed in the earlier fifteenth century, has Polesworth as one of five abbeys founded by a ‘King Alured’; along with ‘Whitby’, it was allegedly founded for ‘St Modwen's sake’ and was the home of the king's aunt St Edith.Footnote 21
This third Edith, as recalled in the ‘Wilton Chronicle’, had already been identified in the early twelfth century in a source written much closer to Polesworth: the Life of St Modwen of Burton (Staffs.) composed by the new abbot there, Geoffrey, formerly prior of Winchester. Wanting to know more about the saint venerated at Burton, Geoffrey undertook research and discovered what he considered to be an earlier account of her career: the Life of an Irish saint named Monenna by Conchubran, itself a synthesis of at least three sources, one of them incorporating episodes set in the English Midlands which clearly related to Modwen.Footnote 22 Directly following Conchubran's account of Monenna's activities in England,Footnote 23 Abbot Geoffrey in his re-working has Modwen arriving in the English kingdom of the father of the ‘Alfred’ whom she had earlier cured of leprosy in Ireland, and in gratitude the king commended his sister Edith to her care and religious instruction. As Alfred is elsewhere identified by Geoffrey as the son of King Æthelwulf (d. 858), so making him the famous Alfred who died in 899, Edith would have been Æthelwulf's sister.Footnote 24 This in turn would make her a daughter of King Ecgberht of the West Saxons (d. 839), presumably the ‘Egbright’ given in the Tamworth castle manuscript: the late medieval story preserved in that source implies that Edith's father ruled Mercia, and indeed Ecgberht did conquer the kingdom in the late 820s and on coins styled himself as its king.Footnote 25
Still drawing on Conchubran's account, Abbot Geoffrey's version in the same chapter continues with the king giving Modwen land by the Forest of Arden (in Warwickshire) as the site of two monasteries: Polesworth and ‘Streneshale’, one of them for Edith together with one of Modwen's companions, whilst Modwen herself stayed in the other one ‘for some days’. At this point in his version, however, Conchubran had just had one monastery, at ‘Streneshalen’ where the king had his villa; presumably that place-name was no longer current in Geoffrey's time, and he therefore has the king founding two monasteries in order to include Polesworth where Edith's cult was evidently still active or at least remembered.Footnote 26 The king's sister is not named in this section of Conchubran's Life but elsewhere she is called either ‘Ede’ (or ‘Eda’) or ‘Ite’, a name which Geoffrey took as referring to Edith.Footnote 27 Geoffrey's identification of her as King Æthelwulf's sister was retained in the mid-fourteenth century by John of Tynemouth in his copy of the Life of St Modwen in his Sanctilogium Angliae,Footnote 28 and if the ‘King Alured’ given in the fifteenth-century ‘Wilton Chronicle’ was taken to be Alfred (d. 899), then that source too (having her as Alured's aunt) accords with Edith of Polesworth as Æthelwulf's sister.
The lack of certainty among the chronicle sources, however, renders them unreliable and recently Andrew Sargent has argued for Edith being an otherwise unknown Mercian princess of the mid- to late seventh century.Footnote 29 Although the first part of the Secgan list was updated to take account of the translation of some relics from their original resting-places,Footnote 30 there seems no certain reason to consider the entry for Edith at Polesworth a later interpolation, and a pre-869 date would rule out both Athelstan's and Edgar's sisters. It could allow for Æthelwulf's sister, with their father Ecgberht establishing a house for a daughter at Polesworth during his brief ascendancy in Mercia. The main problem, however, is that the identification of Æthelwulf and his son Alfred in Geoffrey of Burton's Life of St Modwen is drawn from Conchubran's Life of St Monenna, which names only ‘Alfred’: Geoffrey merely assumed that he was the heroic king of the West Saxons who died in 899, so enabling him to give the father's name. But as Conchubran had drawn his information about his saint's alleged activity in England from a lost source, Sargent has speculated that his ‘Alfred’ represented the earlier source's Alhfrith, the son of Oswiu of Northumbria (d. 670) and husband of Cyneburh, daughter of Penda of Mercia (d. 655). The lost source, therefore, might have had a connection with the Mercian royal court in the seventh century.Footnote 31
It is Sargent's close examination of Conchubran's Life of St Monenna, indeed, which provides the strongest argument for a date for Edith of Polesworth in the later seventh century. The Life recounts a miracle performed by Monenna when she restored to life a maid (puella), ‘Osid’, who had been drowned in a river near ‘Streneshalen’, having been sent on an errand by ‘Ite’. In Geoffrey's re-working for his Life of St Modwen, it is Modwen who performs the miracle and the players are named as Osyth and Eadgyth, with Geoffrey adding the detail that Osyth had fallen into ‘Nun's Pool’.Footnote 32 Quite possibly the pool which still in the earlier nineteenth century formed part of the course of the River Anker immediately south of the church, it seems to have occasioned a re-naming of the settlement: Polesworth probably means ‘enclosure (worðig) at the estate called Pool’.Footnote 33 Although there may well have been more than one holy woman named Osyth in the Anglo-Saxon period, she might be the same as St Osyth, a grand-daughter of the Mercian king Penda (d. 655) who was venerated at Chich (Essex),Footnote 34 and who with other sainted Mercian princesses was listed alongside an ‘Eadgyð’ in the mid ninth-century Durham Liber Vitae.Footnote 35
Finally, it is worth drawing attention to recent archaeological investigations at Little Carlton (Lincs.), one of several churches around Louth that are dedicated to St Edith.Footnote 36 This work has revealed a high-status settlement dating from at least the eighth century and possibly a female religious house, and finds from a nearby pool formed by the confluence of two streams strongly suggests ritual activity of some kind.Footnote 37 Although Little Carlton church itself probably dates from the late Anglo-Saxon period, given the survival of a tenth-century grave cover perhaps belonging to its founder, the dedication to Edith may have been in respect of an existing cult. The similarity between Little Carlton and Polesworth is striking, and would support the suggestion that Edith could date from the seventh century, although how the two places are linked remains unclear.
The cult at Polesworth and Tamworth
Being venerated at Polesworth suggests that Edith was connected with a pre-Conquest religious community of some kind. Burials of the ninth or tenth century have indeed been found a short distance west of the surviving medieval church, but it could not be determined whether the skeletons were of men or women, and the cemetery's association with a lay settlement is equally possible.Footnote 38 Polesworth, indeed, seems to have been an important estate: as at Tamworth, the place-name incorporates the Old English word worðig, apparently referring to royal ‘retreats’ as coined under West Saxon influence in the ninth century,Footnote 39 with the first element presumably referring to the ‘pool’ in which Edith's maid Osyth was drowned, only to be restored to life by saintly intervention. Given the circumstances, therefore, the settlement evidently had an earlier name – quite possibly the ‘Streneshalen’ given as the site of Edith's monastery by Conchubran, and in turn the ‘Trensale’ recorded in the Tamworth castle manuscript story.Footnote 40 Also the early name for Whitby (Yorks. North Riding), an even more important religious site, the place-name incorporates as its second element the Old English halh, a word difficult to translate precisely, but usually having a topographical meaning as a ‘recess’ (either a hollow or otherwise a raised area) in the landscape, although also, by extension, in some way referring to land with a distinct administrative purpose.Footnote 41 The first element is from OE (ge)-streon, ‘gain’, ‘increase’ or ‘wealth’, but also with a basic sense of ‘work’ or ‘business’, and the Whitby example has been interpreted as meaning ‘the halh of the meeting or discussion’.Footnote 42 Such an explanation would also fit for what later became known as Polesworth, where the medieval church was overlooked on the east by Stipershill, whose ritual significance can perhaps be traced back to the pagan Anglo-Saxon period, given its characteristic standing-post and square enclosure (which elsewhere contained shrines): the hill's name is probably derived from an Old English word meaning a post (stipere),Footnote 43 and when the antiquary William Dugdale visited the site in the mid-seventeenth century he noted an ‘old entrenchment’ on the hill which he interpreted as possibly a ‘little fortification’.Footnote 44 Attention should also be drawn to Conchubran's reference to a royal villa at ‘Streneshalen’. Although the absence of the place-name in later documentary sources must make the association with Polesworth speculative, the latter's importance as a secular meeting-place none the less survived the Norman Conquest. After the Marmion lords of Tamworth castle established nuns in Polesworth church in the mid-twelfth century, the tenants of their Tamworth honor met in a court held at Stipershill, rather than in the castle. In the early 1350s a tenant owed suit there, paying a pair of golden spurs on St Edith's day.Footnote 45
Although the existence of an Anglo-Saxon nunnery at Polesworth has been doubted,Footnote 46 the ‘community’ (hired) at ‘Tamworth’ to which in about 1000 the Mercian nobleman Wulfric Spot leased an estate may have been religious, perhaps the refuge of his ‘poor (or wretched) daughter’ (‘earman dehter’) who was assigned the lordship of land also ‘at Tamworth’.Footnote 47 ‘Tamworth’ need not mean the Anglo-Saxon burh itself, as it was evidently at the centre of a larger tenurial complex, and the community may well have been at Polesworth, its members being guardians of St Edith's relics.Footnote 48 For Geoffrey of Burton to have referred to a religious house at Polesworth in his early twelfth-century Life of St Modwen implies that Edith was at least still remembered there,Footnote 49 and when in about 1140 Robert Marmion of Tamworth castle and his wife established nuns in the church there, it was dedicated to St Edith.Footnote 50 Indeed, it can be argued that the survival of her cult was used by Marmion for claiming that he was ‘restoring’ the nuns, the action being a good example of an Anglo-Norman lord making use of the Anglo-Saxon past to bolster his authority.Footnote 51 Later grants to the abbey were invariably made to ‘St Edith of Polesworth’.Footnote 52
Edith was certainly buried at Polesworth: an annual 3s. rent given probably in the late twelfth century was for a light burning at her tomb (‘lampadi de sepulchro sancte Eadith’).Footnote 53 The word sepulchrum could also be used for a shrine,Footnote 54 part of whose decoration may be the surviving early thirteenth-century effigy of a veiled woman.Footnote 55 Now resting on a late medieval table tomb in the nave of the church,Footnote 56 it may represent an abbess but the iconography would fit a representation of the saint: the figure holds a staff or crozier in her left hand and a prayer book in her right, the same as on the abbey's fourteenth-century seal.Footnote 57 Polesworth was evidently a cult centre, and writing about Edith in the mid-thirteenth century the chronicler Matthew Paris noted that miracles were still taking place there (‘ubi usque hodie divina miracula non desinunt celebrari’).Footnote 58
Edith was also associated with Tamworth, the earliest connection being made in the late eleventh century by the hagiographer Goscelin of St Bertin in his Life of her namesake, King Edgar's daughter Edith, abbess of Wilton (d. 984 × 987). In an early part of the Life, in a passage that he later rejected and where she is given as Edgar's sister, Goscelin noted that she ‘shone in the monastery of Tamworth in Staffordshire with signs of merit’ (‘in monasterio Tamword[i]e provincie Staffordensis meritorum signis … refulsit’), as did the other Edith at Wilton;Footnote 59 a later version has her ‘being celebrated in the monastery at Tamworth and in Staffordshire with signs of merit’ (‘monasterio Tamwordie provincieque Staffordie meritorum signis … precluit’).Footnote 60 If not evidence for yet another Edith, Goscelin's account suggests that in the immediate post-Conquest period Edith's cult was also (perhaps mainly) preserved in the minster church at Tamworth (in Staffordshire).Footnote 61 The same conclusion can be drawn from a version of the Old English list of saints’ resting-places written up in the later twelfth century by the Peterborough monk Hugh Candidus, who places Edith ‘in Tamworth’.Footnote 62 Part of Hugh's text was probably taken from a revision compiled in the late eleventh century, and so contemporary with Goscelin's reference to Edith at Tamworth, but in noting the removal of relics to new churches after the Conquest, Hugh shows a particular knowledge of churches in the Midlands, notably Derby and Stafford, and so the information might have been something known to him personally.
Some of Edith's relics could have been taken to Tamworth by the lords of Tamworth castle after the Conquest, but it is as likely that they were already there: a recent study of the church fabric argues for a pre-Conquest porticus or ‘west work’ designed for the public display of a saint's relics, and suggests a translation from Polesworth of some of Edith's remains by Æthelflæd, lady of the Mercians, when she refortified the burh at Tamworth in 913.Footnote 63 Such a translation can be paralleled by the removal by Æthelflæd (along with her husband Æthelred) of the relics of other saints to newly-established burhs in Mercia, a deliberate policy intended to bolster their rule: namely, those of Oswald to Gloucester, Werburh to Chester, and most probably Bertelin to both Runcorn and Stafford.Footnote 64 The porticus at Tamworth seems to have survived until the church was damaged by fire in the mid-1340s, after which a building on the south side of the church was remodelled as the present ‘crypt’ perhaps to house the saint's reliquary. Although no documentary or architectural evidence survives for a shrine or reliquary, there are mentions of an altar dedicated in Edith's name in the mid-fourteenth century and of a statue (imago) in the early sixteenth century.Footnote 65
Uncertainty about Edith's resting-place, however, may be more apparent than real, as both Polesworth and Tamworth almost certainly lay within a single estate in the late Anglo-Saxon period, forming part of a wider sacred landscape, and the names ‘Tamworth’ and ‘Polesworth’ may have been to some extent interchangeable.Footnote 66 Of course, Edith could have been venerated at more than one place or at different places at different times; and if relics were displayed in the church at Tamworth from the early tenth century, then Polesworth may have languished as a cult centre until revived by the Marmions in the earlier twelfth century. Indeed, her neglect could have played a part in the appropriation of one of her miracles for St Monenna in Conchubran's version of the latter's Life itself reassigned in the early twelfth century to St Modwen in Abbot Geoffrey's Life of the Burton saint.Footnote 67 Besides ‘Nun's Pool’, as recorded by Geoffrey, the religious landscape also included a chapel at Pooley, a short distance north of Polesworth church and perhaps beside the River Anker, and suitable for solitary contemplation. First mentioned in the mid-twelfth century, when Abbess Osanna assigned rights in the chapel to a man in return for an annual payment on St Edith's day and his body at burial,Footnote 68 it was evidently re-possessed by the nuns probably in the mid-thirteenth century, when described as ‘the chapel built beyond the spring of St Edith in the wood of Pooley’ (‘capella ultra fontem sancte Edithe in bosco de Pouele est edificata’).Footnote 69
Edith's cult lingered on at Polesworth and she was presumably responsible for the miracles recorded as taking place at Oldbury (in the neighbouring parish of Mancetter) in the later thirteenth century. A chapel there had been the site of a community of holy women, almost certainly drawn on when Robert Marmion and his wife settled nuns in Polesworth church in about 1140, the women's leader Osanna becoming the first prioress (and later abbess).Footnote 70 Osanna is likely to have been a native Englishwoman who took her name ‘in religion’,Footnote 71 and the community of holy women which she led may have represented a group which had preserved Edith's cult after the Conquest. Possibly some relics had been taken to Oldbury, which was certainly a centre for popular devotion: when in 1284 the abbess of Polesworth came to an agreement with the rector of Mancetter regarding oblations and tithes from Oldbury chapel, particular care was taken that whenever omens, signs or miracles (‘prodigia, signa vel miracula’) should occur there, resulting in offerings from a crowd of people (‘concursum populi’), the money was to be divided equally.Footnote 72 No name is given for the miracle-worker, but if Edith is meant, the failure to name her may have been a deliberate attempt to disassociate her from Oldbury, and perhaps not long afterwards the chapel there was suppressed and in 1316 the lord of Mancetter gave ‘the whole site (citum)’ of Oldbury to the abbess of Polesworth.Footnote 73
More evidence survives for Edith's continued importance at Tamworth, where the collegiate church was dedicated to her by the late thirteenth century,Footnote 74 and her feast day on 15 July, as recorded by the chronicler Matthew Paris,Footnote 75 was used to date sessions of the borough court.Footnote 76 A fair whose profits in 1266 belonged to the church was probably held on her feast day,Footnote 77 a date given (albeit in reference to St Swithin, whose translation was also commemorated on 15 July) in the borough's 1588 charter of incorporation,Footnote 78 and it was presumably the occasion of celebrations: when in 1318 Ralph Basset, lord of Drayton manor (adjoining Tamworth parish on the south) leased Lady mill on the River Tame, he reserved the right to pasture animals on the adjoining meadows on Edith's feast day and the two preceding days.Footnote 79 The feast day was clearly of symbolic importance. When not long after 1200 Robert Marmion of Tamworth castle issued a charter at Tamworth assigning manors in Oxfordshire to William Marmion, he did so on St Edith's day,Footnote 80 and the feast (or its morrow) was a rent day for property in Tamworth and its environs: at Amington in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century;Footnote 81 in Tamworth itself in the mid-thirteenth century;Footnote 82 and in the Marmion family's manor at Middleton (Warws.) in the 1280s.Footnote 83 The rent owed for holding the dower portion of Middleton manor was paid on St Edith's day, in 1314 at the high altar of Tamworth church but in 1349 at St Edith's altar.Footnote 84 Moreover, given the saint's association with the River Anker at Polesworth, it may be significant that meadow land bore her name. ‘Edith meadow’ in Amington is recorded in 1319,Footnote 85 and an island of meadow in the Wigginton stretch of the River Tame near Timmor (in Fisherwick), downstream from Tamworth, was called ‘Edith holm’ by the late twelfth century, its rent being paid on the saint's feast day in 1328.Footnote 86
The cult elsewhere
For the most part Edith's cult was very localised. She is not included in any surviving Anglo-Saxon calendar or litany, nor in any post-Conquest Benedictine calendar, but does appear in two secular psalters of the later thirteenth century, both now in the British Library:Footnote 87 one (the ‘Oscott’ psalter) also notes the two feasts of St Modwen of Burton, whilst the other (the ‘York’ psalter) has an entry for another Mercian saint, Werburh. Possibly written for a patron in the North Midlands, the latter psalter may support her identification as the patron of some Lincolnshire churches that were dedicated to a St Edith. Of particular interest are the references to Edith at Shrewsbury Abbey, where a relic was included in a list written up in a mid twelfth-century lectionary:Footnote 88 its presence can be directly linked with the attendance of the abbot and prior at the ceremony in about 1140 when Robert and Milisent Marmion established nuns in Polesworth church.Footnote 89 Edith also appears in a later thirteenth-century litany at Shrewsbury,Footnote 90 and in a contemporary martyrology for Ribe cathedral (Denmark), which records other English saints (such as Chad) and was presumably written in England.Footnote 91
Church dedications to St Edith in the south of England are presumably for Edith of Wilton,Footnote 92 but some in the Midlands are probably for Edith of Polesworth, such as Shocklach (Ches.), Orton-on-the-Hill (Leics.) and Monks Kirby (Warws.).Footnote 93 Any link for these churches still has to be proved, but there is strong evidence that the dedication at Pulverbatch (Shrops.) was for the Polesworth saint, perhaps influenced by the cult at Shrewsbury Abbey some seven-and-a-half miles to the north-east. Pulverbatch manor was acquired by Philip Marmion of Tamworth castle in 1244,Footnote 94 and in 1254 he was granted a fair on the eve, day and morrow of the feast of St Edith the Virgin:Footnote 95 presumably this was St Edith of Polesworth, although the chancery clerk wrongly assigned it to St Edith of Wilton.Footnote 96 There was, however, an earlier link with Polesworth as about 1190 the lady of the manor, Emma daughter of Reynold of Pulverbatch, gave the abbey a half virgate of land for the souls of her father and mother.Footnote 97 Also in Shropshire, some twelve miles south-east of Pulverbatch, the twelfth-century church at Eaton-under-Heywood was dedicated to Edith, although first recorded as such only in the eighteenth century.Footnote 98 The church belonged to the nearby Wenlock priory, originally a pre-Conquest double (male and female) house dedicated to the late seventh-/ early eighth-century St Milburg,Footnote 99 but whether an association with Edith of Polesworth dates back so far cannot be determined: in 901, however, Æthelflæd, ‘lady of the Mercians’, together with her husband Ealdorman Æthelred, gave Wenlock a golden chalice in Milburg's honour, and she might also have given some of Edith's relics following their possible translation (at least in part) to Tamworth church after her refortification of the burh there in 913.Footnote 100 Otherwise, a twelfth-century connection between Wenlock and Polesworth could have led to Eaton church's being dedicated to Edith: having in course of time become a minster church served by secular canons, Wenlock was re-founded in about 1080 by Roger, earl of Shrewsbury, as a male Cluniac priory, and Polesworth too when founded by the Marmions in about 1140 had close links with Cluny.Footnote 101
Polesworth Abbey was certainly the means by which Church Eaton church in the west of Staffordshire was dedicated to St Edith, following the grant of the church by one Edelina, a relation of the manorial overlord, Robert de Stafford, who in his confirmation noted that she had wished to become a nun (‘vitam mutare et habitum religionis assumere querit vel intendit’).Footnote 102 Either the Edelina whose son Hamo (d. by 1166) inherited the manor or a daughter of the same name, she must have been the Edelina whose brother Robert the butler gave the Polesworth nuns some land on condition that they celebrated anniversaries for the souls of ‘her lord’ Walter de Somerville (a close companion of Robert Marmion) and (his son) Roger.Footnote 103 Edelina was to be buried at Polesworth, the nuns having promised that when she died they would carry her body to their house (‘ad domum suam’) and honourably bury her with due exequies in their cloister (‘in claustro’). Besides the church itself at Church Eaton, Edith was also commemorated in the name of a well in the parish.Footnote 104
Several churches dedicated to St Edith in Lincolnshire have been associated with Edith of Polesworth, although perhaps only because the Marmion family had an estate at Scrivelsby, south-east of Lincoln. The dedications are at Anwick (south of Lincoln), Coates-by-Stow (to the north), and a cluster around Louth (to the north-east): Grimoldby, Little Carlton, Little Grimsby, North Reston and South Reston. The presumed association with the Marmions, however, is by no means secure, especially as Scrivelsby church was dedicated to St Benedict, although it may be significant that the church at Coates-by-Stow was appropriated to the Premonstratensian house at Welbeck (Notts.) and that Philip Marmion (d. 1291) tried to establish a house of that order at Tamworth in the 1280s.Footnote 105 If anything, however, the link between Polesworth and the Louth group of churches most probably pre-dates the Marmions by several centuries. Recent archaeological investigations at Little Carlton have revealed a high-status settlement dating from at least the eighth century, possibly a female religious house associated with a nearby ritual pool,Footnote 106 and it seems not at all unlikely that it was a cult which originated around Louth that later migrated to Polesworth.
The end of the cult
Although the early fifteenth-century ‘Wilton Chronicle’ has Edith still ‘enshrined’ at Polesworth, where ‘anyone who wishes may find her’,Footnote 107 the cult seems never to have been popular, and few local girls were christened Edith: a rare Tamworth example occurs in the later 1370s,Footnote 108 and there is only one Edith among the scores of names given in a 1530s list of families in Tamworth parish.Footnote 109 No income from pilgrims was entered for either Polesworth or Tamworth churches in the Valor Ecclesiasticus of 1535,Footnote 110 although the dedications to St Edith remained current at both places.Footnote 111 In 1459 the dean of Tamworth's brother Thomas Bate had requested burial in the ‘choir of St Edith of Tamworth’,Footnote 112 and in 1508 Sir John Ferrers of Tamworth castle wished to be buried in the chancel before a statue (‘image’) of the saint,Footnote 113 but none of the handful of surviving pre-Reformation wills for Polesworth includes a bequest to her. Yet Edith was not entirely forgotten, and as late as the 1630s the stint for cows on common land in Wilnecote (in the south-east of Tamworth parish, adjoining Polesworth) was calculated ‘in the Edith time’, presumably a period starting around her feast day in July.Footnote 114
This study reveals Edith, or Eadgyð in her probable seventh-century incarnation, to be less shrouded in mystery than has been supposed. Whatever her actual identity, she was venerated not only at Polesworth but also at Tamworth, an important centre for the rulers of Mercia, and her cult there may have been promoted as part of the process of consolidation of Mercian (and West Saxon) power during the reconquest of the Danelaw, as happened elsewhere with Oswald and Werburh and other lesser known saints. Similarly for political reasons, Edith was used in the earlier twelfth century by the Marmion lord of Tamworth castle to add antiquity and prestige to his foundation of a nunnery at Polesworth, and the adjacent ritual site at Stipershill continued to be the symbolic centre of the honor centred on the castle. Perhaps because Tamworth did not become a county town and because the Marmions were never prominent barons, Edith's cult remained very localised and gradually faded away, although not entirely. Like Bertelin at Stafford and Wulfhad at Stone, she lingered on, albeit only as a church dedication.
