A new piece in an old jigsaw?

 In the Times of 20/6/2023 is a news item I find most intriguing.

A grave excavated in 2012 is one of a number of 'bed burials' found in Britain ... all of women; two of them from the Cambridge area. This particular Cambridge inhumation has now yielded 'isotopic' information showing that the lady concerned had lived, until she was seven, close to the Alps. These results match those of 18 other women, who, similarly, were buried on beds. A Newnham don who has researched the question  says that the evidence really does seem to suggest the movement of a small group of young elite women from a mountainous area in continental Europe to the Cambridge region in the third quarter of the seventh century.

When I read about noble Saxon Ladies, daughters of Saxon kings, acting as abbesses in Saxon England (naturally, my mind turns to our S Frideswide of Oxford, and S Osyth of Chich in my own corner of Essex), I wonder ... who were the other women who lived with them in their religious community? Of course, local women from elite families probably participated or were 'offered' for this role. But it is surely likely that, to provide a suitable group or pool of 'civilised' and Christian ladies, the early Anglo-Saxon Church may have shipped across surplus girls from upper-class Christian families on the mainland, to assist and to accompany the christianisation of the Saxon ruling class. (This young lady was wearing, incidentally, 'a rare gold and garnet cross as a brooch'. There are at least two comparable crosses in Ashmole, one from Yorkshire and another from Ixworth in Suffolk.)

Since the Cambridge girl came to England aged seven, she will remind us of S Bede the Venerable, who tells us that he began his monastic life at about that age. There is, of course, later Saxon evidence about pueri oblati (or nutritii) and, suggestively, about the adaptation of similar conventions to females. This appears to have included production of copies of the Regula with the grammatical genders adapted to females.

If your resources ran to dowries for fewer daughters than God had granted you, giving some of your girls to the Lord Christ was perhaps a respectable, even a meritorious, way of providing for them. And if you could send a girl off with a gold-and-garnets brooch or the means to acquire one, perhaps that enabled her, throughout her future life, to demonstrate that--although she had not secured by dowry the position of a great man's spouse--she nevertheless had retained social status.

And the beds? Surely, they imply the existence of women of lower status who would not be sleeping in beds! In many socially stratified societies, there might be divisions within monastic contexts like those which, very much later, distinguished 'choir nuns' from 'lay sisters'.

This is great fun, isn't it?