From Shadow on the Crown:

Æthelred, his black-robed queen at his side, led a procession of ealdormen and clergy, of noblemen, their wives, and as many townsfolk as could walk or hobble, in a solemn procession from the palace steps and down the dripping, tree-lined path that led to the Old Minster. Inside this, the largest church in England, beneath the massive golden shrine of St. Swithin, Bishop Ælfheah led them in prayers of supplication. Æthelred gazed in despair at the magnificent, gem-studded, gold-and-silver reliquary that his father had commissioned to honor St. Swithin.

And who, you might ask, was St. Swithin?

He was a 9^th century bishop of Winchester, a saint who was quite popular in Anglo-Saxon England. It’s claimed that he was a tutor of the young Alfred the Great. He gave gifts to the poor and needy, and was famous for building bridges and churches. He sounds a very practical man, and before his death in 853 he requested that he be buried out of doors in a humble tomb where people could walk over his grave and where the raindrops from the eaves of the church could fall upon him. Nine years after Swithin’s death the clerics at Winchester tried to move his remains inside the Old Minster, in direct opposition to his final wish. Apparently, the saint was not happy about this move and showed his displeasure by inflicting rain on England for the next 40 days. Thus the rhyme about St. Swithin’s Day and the weather:

St Swithun’s day if thou dost rain
For forty days it will remain
St Swithun’s day if thou be fair
For forty days ’twill rain no more

And so, for over a century, St. Swithin stayed out of doors.

Some 120 years after his death, though, the Old Minster in Winchester was due for a remodel. The church, dedicated to Sts. Peter & Paul, had been a site of worship and pilgrimage for hundreds of years, and had undergone several periods of rebuilding since its founding in the 7th century. St. Swithin was prayed to there, and in fact the minster was hung about on both walls from end to end with the crutches and stools of the crippled who had been healed by the sainted bishop.

In the 970s, during the reign of King Edgar (AEthelred’s father), the Old Minster was enlarged. On July 15, 971, a more determined bishop successfully translated St. Swithin’s remains into the nave where they were placed in a shrine made of gold, silver and precious gems. The church was re-dedicated, this time to St. Swithin himself. Work on the church continued, and by 1000 it was the largest church in England and possibly in all of Europe. It had a cloister, a refectory, a dormitory, a royal scriptorium, a plumbing system and a massive organ that needed 70 men to operate it. It had a vast side chapel that rivaled Charlemagne’s great octagon at Aachen. There was even an upstairs throne room where the king could view the Mass and be seen by his subjects. 

The Old Minster is the church on the right.

Some time later bits of St. Swithin were sent to other churches in England. His head went to Canterbury. An arm went to Peterborough Abbey. Most of him, though, remained within the Old Minster, and when, in 1093, a Norman cathedral was built (the one you see in Winchester today), the shrine was placed behind and above the high altar. The cathedral today is still dedicated to St. Swithin, but he has to share it with the Holy Trinity and those old stand-bys, Peter and Paul.

St. Swithin was revered throughout the Middle Ages, and there are still churches all over England dedicated to the saint. In London there was a St. Swithin’s church in Candlewick Street (now Cannon Street) from the 13^th century until modern times. The fire of 1666 destroyed it, but a new St. Swithin’s, designed by Christopher Wren, took its place. The church, alas, did not survive the bombs of WWII. At war’s end only the pulpit was salvageable, and the church’s ruins were finally demolished in 1962.

In Stavanger, Norway, there is a cathedral dedicated to St. Swithin. It is the oldest cathedral in Norway, founded in the early 12^th century by a bishop who may have hailed from Winchester and so have had a fondness for the Old Minster and his hometown saint.

And what happened to St. Swithin’s shrine with its precious gems and gold? Henry VIII happened. On 21 September, 1538, in the dark of night, Henry’s minions demolished the shrine, scattered Swithin’s bones, and made away with everything of value. And St. Swithin, it would seem, could feel the raindrops fall upon him once again.

Sources:
www.earlybritishkingdoms.com
www.wikipedia.com
www.newadvent.org
The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England

Gunnora de Crepon (Wikimedia Commons)

The heroine of SHADOW ON THE CROWN, Emma of Normandy, was the youngest daughter (or so we think) of Richard I, Duke of Normandy and his duchess, Gunnora de Crepon. Emma’s mother appears only in the early chapters of my novel, but she had an interesting story of her own – or, at least there were interesting stories told about her!

(Wikimedia Commons)

Robert of Tirgni, a monk writing in the twelfth century, records a mildly lascivious tale about how Gunnora and Duke Richard met. The duke, age 27, was out hunting and he sought a night’s lodging in the home of Gunnora’s married sister, Senfrie. Smitten by Senfrie’s beauty, Richard invited her to his bed. Senfrie, though, did not wish to be an adulteress. So she sent her unwed sister instead. (Let’s not look too carefully at the moral choices behind THAT particular decision.) Richard didn’t notice the switch until morning, which doesn’t say much for Richard’s powers of discernment, but never mind. Come the dawn he realized he’d been duped, but by that time he didn’t care. He and Gunnora were now an item.

Mind you, Richard already had two children from a previous liaison. Oh, and he was about to be wed to someone else altogether: Emma Capet. They’d been betrothed for fifteen years, from the time that the bride was only two years old. They must have known each other fairly well, as Richard was the guardian of Emma Capet’s brother, Hugh (future king of Frankia, but that was still decades in the future.) There is no question that Richard’s marriage to Emma Capet was a political one. Her father, another Hugh, aka Hugh the Great, was a 10^th century mover and shaker. Through his marriage to Emma Capet, Duke Richard gained some powerful relations.

But Gunnora was no slouch in the relations department either. She was of Danish descent, from a very wealthy family with lands in western Normandy. Because Richard, too, was of Danish/Norse descent, his liaison with Gunnora would have enhanced his power among the Viking crowd that had settled in Normandy in consecutive waves since his grandfather had landed in 910.

Richard’s marriage to Emma Capet produced no children; meantime Gunnora presented him with nine sons and daughters. I can’t help wondering about poor Emma Capet, wed to a man who clearly preferred another woman. How often did she see the duke? Did she live with him in Rouen while his other family dwelt in Fecamp, the coastal town that was Richard’s favorite residence? Or was she barren simply because she never saw her husband? Their marriage ended in less than a decade, when Emma Capet died.

Once he became free to marry again, did Richard wed Gunnora? No. It wasn’t until much later, about the time that their second son Robert was an adult and about to be consecrated Archbishop of Rouen that, at the urging of his noble counselors, Richard formalized his relationship with the mother of his nine children. Apparently Richard didn’t see the need. Conjugal relations were a little loose in Normandy. Even two generations later, Duke Richard’s great grandson, William (the Conqueror) was the son of a concubine, not a church-sanctioned union.

Whatever Gunnora may have felt about her husband’s French wife, she must have been confident that she held the winning hand, for she had given Richard the sons and daughters that he needed to found a dynasty. Indeed, many of the great noble families of Normandy and England are descended from Gunnora and her sisters.

When Richard died and his eldest son Richard II donned the ducal crown, Gunnora was for many years his counselor and advisor. She was a significant force in ducal politics for decades, and for her daughter Emma she must have been a living example of female power and regency.

Sources & Inspiration:
♦ Queen Emma & Queen Edith, Pauline Stafford, Blackwell Publishers, Ltd. Oxford, 2001.
♦ The Normans: The History of a Dynasty, David Crouch, Hambledon & London, 2002/
♦ Wife, Concubine, Other? The Marital Status of the Norman Ducal Women in the 10th & Early 11th Century, Charlotte Cartwright, SUNY-Oswego, Paper presented at International Congress on Medieval Studies, 2013