Poor Little Kenelm

Come with me if  you will, to the pretty Cotswold town of Winchcombe. But this is not an ordinary journey, far from it. Today we are going back to the abbey that thrived there in the ninth century and was, if legend can be believed, the scene of a hideous murder and the most spectacular divine punishment.

Kenelm's Well, where his funeral cortege is
said to have rested

The abbess was the daughter of a king, and as well as being in charge of Winchcombe Abbey, where the royal family archive was housed, she also presided over two further abbeys in Kent. She could not possibly have overseen all of these abbeys in person, for these were vast, lucrative estates and whilst she must have had an astute head for business, she must also have had deputies. On that basis, we must also assume she was literate, at least able to read, for she would not wish to conduct business nor her affairs generally if she had to trust someone else to read documents for her.

Statue of Cwoenthryth's father,
King Cenwulf, at Winchcombe

But according to some chroniclers, this privileged life was not enough for our Cwoenthryth (for that was her name). She was envious that when her father died, in 821, the crown of the midlands kingdom of Mercia had passed not to her, but to her little brother, who goes by various names, but we shall call him Kenelm.

Perhaps we should call him Poor Little Kenelm, because this child was no match for his scheming elder sister. She paid a henchman (in some  versions of the story, it is her lover) to take him out to the woods, kill him, and bury the body.

Well, if that were the end of the story, we probably never would have heard about it. And of course, it wasn’t, and we have. Because a dove (said by some to be carrying the soul of the dead boy) flew to Rome and dropped a message upon the altar of St Peter’s, saying where the body could be found.

The boy’s body was brought back to Winchcombe for burial. Cwoenthryth, reading from a psalter, heard the commotion and saw the funeral procession. Fearing discovery, she began to recite a psalm backwards as a spell, whereupon her eyeballs fell out. Again, according to some versions of the tale, she and her lover died soon afterwards. The 12th-century chronicler, William of Malmesbury, said that in his day the blood spatters on the psalter were still visible. 

Stones from the Anglo-Saxon Winchcombe Abbey,
now at nearby Sudeley Castle

Another horrendous murder from the ‘Dark Ages’ that barely warrants a mention?

Actually, no. When I set out to write my new book, Murder in Anglo-Saxon England, I was aware of this, and many other similar stories. Throughout the writing process, I had to constantly fact-check, because in so many cases, including this one, the earlier, sometimes even contemporary sources, differ widely from the later, largely Anglo-Norman sources. It also seemed to be the case that the later sources, all clerics, were overly keen to blame women for murder wherever they could.

So, in true crime-detective style, now that we’ve listened to what can only be described as hearsay, and not from reliable witnesses, let’s examine the facts.

Firstly, Anglo-Saxon women enjoyed more freedoms than many of their later medieval counterparts, but our Cwoenthryth would never have expected to inherit and rule Mercia. One woman did, in the tenth century (Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians) but she was an exception.

Secondly, there is no evidence that Kenelm, if he even existed, was a small boy when he died. Rather we have charter evidence – contemporary evidence – that a man by that name, if indeed he was definitely the son of the king, was still alive and witnessing charters in 821. We have a letter, allegedly from the pope, naming Kenelm and giving his age in 798 as 12. Therefore if this man was indeed the king’s son, he was still alive in 821 and perhaps thereafter, and would have been 35 at the youngest when he died.

Not one even vaguely contemporary source claims that Kenelm was murdered, much less that it was on the orders of his sister.

Why then, might she have been accused? 

As I mentioned, not only was she abbess and essentially owner of Winchcombe, but she was also in charge of two abbeys in Kent, Minster-in-Thanet and Reculver. She found herself in dispute with the archdiocese of Canterbury over these latter two, and was forced to give up all rights.

Minster-in-Thanet, showing the original Anglo-Saxon
brickwork. Photo kind permission of the sisters.

Could this be why the legend grew up; monks writing about a powerful abbess who had locked horns with the Church at Canterbury? As historian Matt Lewis has pointed out, Church attitudes to women changed markedly in the 12th century and on a more general note, the Anglo-Norman Chroniclers had very little reason to say anything positive about pre-1066 England.

Researching this and many other murder stories for the book, I found time and again that the descriptions of the reported murders were much more pedestrian in the more contemporary sources than in the later versions of the tales.

Historical research always involves a fair of amount of metaphorical digging. But it’s the first time I’ve really thought about it as detective work. But when it comes to murder, you really do have to look not just only at the circumstances, but the reliability of the witnesses. I don’t believe much of the later versions of Cwoenthryth’s tale, but they do make for fascinating reading!

Murder in Anglo-Saxon England: Justice, Wergild, Revenge is published by Amberley Books. Available online and in book shops.

Universal Link: https://mybook.to/MIASE

Amberley Books: https://www.amberley-books.com/murder-in-anglosaxon-england.html

[photos by and copyright of the author unless otherwise stated]