THE SAINTLY FEMALE BODY ANDTHE LANDSCAPE OF FOUNDATION IN

ANGLO-SAXON BARKINGLISA M. C. WESTON

,~ oward the end of the seventh century an Anglo-Saxon

~ r noblewoman named Ethelburga became the first abbess ofa new monastery. Her foundation of what would become

known as Barking Abbey-and especially the abbey's subsequentdevelopment around her tomb-effectively transformed thelandscape of the Greater London area and western Essex.

As numerous cultural geographers have argued, landscapeis an inherently social rather than a natural phenomenon. 1

That is, a landscape is created by those who live in and movethrough it. It acquires cultural meaning as it is deployed bya community to express shared ways of being in the world,shared perceptions of bodies in time and space. Replete withthe symbolism of "natural" reference points such as rivers andhillsides, and enriched by the memories that accrete to human­constructed habitations and monuments, a landscape becomes,in turn, the stage for the performance of religious, dynastic,and gendered identities. It also becomes the site of narrativesboth past and future: reciprocally shaping and being shapedby myth and memory, institution and identity, a landscape isinherently invested with historical narrative. Indeed, according toChristopher Tilley, even the names given to places constitute "anact of construction of landscape," since names, like other moreelaborate narratives of place, incorporate the experience of theevents that have taken place there. '

Narratives of monastic foundation in a period of religiousconversion involve a significant transformation-a retelling, as itwere-of the pre-Christian landscape. To say, moreover, that anAnglo-Saxon abbess founded a monastery is far from an innocentstatement: any narrative of such a founding entangles ideologiesof gender and kinship, and mystifies the transformation ofreproduction into cultural production.' Ethelburga's saintly female

M FF 43.1 (2007): 12-25 12

body helps define the Middle Saxon Essex landscape within whichher abbey was founded-but how, and to what end? Answers tothose questions may be sought in three early narratives of BarkingAbbey and its foundress within the Essex landscape. Bede'sEcclesiastical History conflates two complimentary but separableaccountSj an early charter provides yet a further story. Eachnarrative engages Ethelburga's body within a different symboliclandscape, according to a different way of perceiving and defininggendered social identity.

In what might be called Bede's frame story, Barking'sfoundation is subsumed within the larger history of theconversion of the East Saxons. In brief, Essex had originallyaccepted Christianity in the first decade of the seventh century,during the reign of Sabert; after his death, however, his pagansons had driven Bishop Mellitus of London back to Canterbury.Later, first under Sigbert and then under his successor Swidhelm,the Northumbrian Saint Cedd successfully re-evangelized Essexfrom missionary centers (at Bradwell-on-Sea and Tilbury) closerto the kingdom's traditional heartland around Chelmsford andColchester. Two kings, the apostate Sighere and the ChristianSebbi, succeeded Swidhelm, and it was with the patronage ofthe pious Sebbi that Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury,appointed Eorcenwald bishop of the East Saxons, with his seereturned to London.

According to Bede, Eorcenwald had earlier founded twomonasteries in the Greater London area: Chertsey in Surreyfor himself and other men, and Barking in Essex for his sisterEthelburga as a place in quo ipsa Deo deuotarum mater ac nutrixposset existere feminarum [in which she might become the motherand nurse of many women devoted to God]." Ethelburga is heredefined (and implicitly gendered) primarily by her blood kinshipwith Eorcenwald and additionally by her spiritual kinship, heridentification as mother to those anonymous women. Thiskinship is also inextricably linked with monastic discipline: shebehaves herself, and leads the other anonymous women to behavethemselves, condignam se in omnibus episcopo fratre [in all thingsas became the sister of the bishop her brother]. Chertseyand

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Barking stand together as twinned monuments to Eorcenwald'sinstitution of regularibus disciplines optime [the best and mostregular monastic discipline] and as exemplary sites for thesubmission of the Thames Estuary and Greater London areas to

orthodox Christianity.Indeed, regularity of discipline is the thematic core of

Book IV of the Ecclesiastical History: preceded by discussionof the 673 Synod of Hertford and its resulting resolutions onecclesiastical organization, Eorcenwald's installation as bishopregularizes the episcopal succession disrupted by Mellitus'expulsion earlier in the century. Similarly, in enclosing hissister's body in her monastery, Eorcenwald-or at least Bede'snarrative of Eorcenwald-encloses Essex within Canterbury'ssphere of influence. And both do so despite the fact that Londonis by no means central to its diocese: it is arguably not evenactually in Essex but rather on the frontier between and amongEssex, Mercia, Wessex and Kent. Even Barking lies on Essex'sfar western boundary. As an originary myth of community, thisframe story ties this spiritual and political (re)colonization ofEssex with the replacement of traditional blood kinship linesby a new Christian lineage in which Archbishop Theodore ofCanterbury ritually and narratively "begets" Eorcenwald, who asbishop becomes as it were a father to the daughters to whom hissister stands as mater ac nuctrix.

It is thus significant that Eorcenwald's own monastery atChertsey has a definite, local name and history as well as a specifictopographical reality in the regio of Surrey-the geographicalterm implies Surrey's existence as a sub-kingdom of Kent-in aplace vocatur [which was called] "Cerota's Island." Ethelburga'sBarking, by contrast, lies within the provincia, the independentkingdom, of the East Saxons, in a place nuncupatur [whichwas given the name] in Berecingum. Despite the implicationof political autonomy, however, the site is denied a local nameand history. In Berecingum describes not a specific place withprevious meaning, but a relatively amorphous expanse inhabitedby relatively anonymous "people who live among the birchtrees." They have no name, no history until Ethelburga's body-

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constructed through her spiritual kinship with Eorcenwald andTheodore-provides a focal point for a Christian landscape.

A second and far more localized narrative of Barking'sfoundation appears in the so-called Hodilred Charter (BritishLibrary, Cotton Augustus ii.29). The charter's explanation ofthe reverse metonymy by which the name of a territory comesto devolve upon a specific monastic site defines Ethelburgaprecisely through her secular kinship as much as, if not morethan, through her Christianity. In doing so, the charter deploysEthelburga's body not to create a new place so much as to reaffirmthe dynastic landscape of the long-inhabited Essex in a time ofcultural and political transition. Dating probably from the secondhalf of the eighth century, the charter manuscript has beengenerally accepted as an accurate copy of an earlier, late seventhcentury original." Even that postulated original, however, seemsto represent the textual trace of an originally oral and likely ritualdonation (or perhaps serial donations) made a generation or soprior. According to a marginal note from around the year 1000, pisis sea boc to Beorcingon, [this is the "book," the deed, for BarkingAbbey] and as such it writes into history the creation of a placethrough the transformation of secular, dynastic folelond intomonastic boeland.

Like many another Anglo-Saxon charter, this onebegins with a brief, prayer-like prologue, invoking the ultimatepower and authority of God, and constructing the monastery asalready established: locis vestris aliquid offerre uidemur vestra vobisreddimus non nostra largimur. [Whenever we seem to rendergifts to your sacred and venerable places, we only restore thatwhich is your own, and not ours to give.] Of course, in order to"restore" property to God, one must first possess it in this world:in giving the land away the grantor paradoxically demonstrates,quite dramatically, his own continuing wealth and power. Thus,if a strategic redefinition of spiritual kinship and ecclesiasticallineage characterizes Ethelburga's entrance into Bede's History,this charter, by contrast, emphasizes her blood-kin and deploysher body as a conduit for secular dynastic memory. Alliterationsuggests that the grantor of the lands, Hodilred (or Ethelred) is

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more than likely bound by close kinship to Ethelburga (in thecharter, Hedilberga)-and to Eorcenwald, who appears in thecharter not as the abbey founder but only as a witness. Hodilredidentifies himself, however, primarily as parens Sebbi provincia EastSexanorum [kinsman of Sebbi of the province of the East Saxons].His grant of land to Ethelburga-or rather to God throughEthelburga-is also at least in part a political act, strengtheninghis alliance to the Christian Sebbi rather than the pagan Sighere.

In any event, his donations found Ethelburga's monasterywithin a net of dynastic political affiliations worked out uponthe landscape of southwestern Essex and its small rivers, risingin forested uplands and running south through fields andmarshlands toward the Thames. To augment her monasterycalled Beddanbaam, Hodilred grants to her terram quae appellaturRicingahaam Budinhaam Deccanhaam Angenlabeshaam et campo insilua quae dicitur Uuidmundes felt [the land]s] called Ricingabaam,Budinbaam, Deccanhaam, Angenlabeshaam and the open countrywithin the forest which is called Widmundesfelt]. The charter'sWidmundesfelt is probably to be identified with the Wyfields northofIlford, within the once extensive forest of Essex. Deccanhaam,the modern Dagenham, lies on the later Barking District'seastern border, the west bank of the River Beam. Barking Abbeyitself stands on the district's western border, on the east bankof the Roding, the course ofwhich still divides Barking fromEast Ham. The original core of Ethelburga's nascent monastery,Beddanhaam, probably lay west of the extant ruins of BarkingAbbey, perhaps between two channels of the river; if the charter'sgrant of land in the similar-sounding Budinhaam augments theearlier, original donation, it is tempting, albeit highly speculative,to identify this "new" land as the site of the later abbey.

That some sort of high status settlement stood there bythe early eighth century is argued by archaeological evidence fortimber structures, perhaps including at least one chapel alignedwith the later abbey church, as well as by a quantity of spinningand weaving equipment, fragments of gold thread, combs,manicure sets, tuning pegs from a musical instrument, highquality insular and imported pottery, and coins. The presence of

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three styli would be consistent with a monastic site, or at leastwith a population for whom the tools of literacy constitutedmarkers of status." Like other Middle Saxon monastic sites suchas the contemporary East Saxon women's house at Nazingbury,the earliest Barking Abbey at Beddanhaam seems to haveconstituted a cluster of buildings within a larger enclosure oruallum distinguished from the aristocratic estate out of which itwas founded primarily by the presence of one or more chapels,"C. P. Loveluck also underscores the difficulties in distinguishingfemale monastic and secular aristocratic settlements on the basisof archaeological remains alone in his discussion of anotheranalogous foundation at Flixborough (Lincolnshire)."

Beddanhaam's (and Barking Abbey's) location may,moreover, hint at the appropriation of a pre-existing cultural(and perhaps even ritual) significance that the abbey could exploitfor Christianity. Place-names like Beddanhaam formed from apersonal name (Bedda) plus -baam indicate central or core places,estate centers of some perceived antiquity." Whoever Beddamay have been, and whatever his affiliation with Hodilred andEthelburga, he seems to have lent his name also to the oede wylie,a small stream flowing east into the Roding just above the site ofthe oldest Barking Abbey." Excavations in and around Barkingtown have revealed both Iron Age and Roman pottery and coins.'!

North of Barking, a scatter of Bronze Age pottery also indicatesthat a substantial settlement, perhaps even an important regionalcenter, occupied the rising ground in the angle between theRoding and the stream known as Loxford Water; by the MiddleIron Age this settlement had become Uphall Camp. Signs oflater Roman and Early Saxon occupation document later reuseof the hill-fort's defenses and its strategic command of boththe river crossing along the main London-Chelmsford road,and the secondary road south and east to Tilbury via Barking.Early Roman occupation at Uphall, however, focused rather on arectangular enclosure, possibly a shrine, relatively rich in flagons,beakers and other objects possibly indicative of some sort offunerary cult activity.12

In Anglo-Saxon England, land on the boundaries ofterritories often seems to have been selected as a proper site

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for cemeteries or the administration of justice." HowardWilliams has argued for deliberate Saxon reuse of an inheritedlandscape marked by prehistoric and Roman sites, particularlyburial sites, in order to forge relationships with a powerful,sacred history: "each new burial would have re-inscribed suchmeanings upon old monuments." In this way, "early Anglo­Saxon communities were constructing and reproducing theiridealized visions of past and present, their mythical origins andtheir social identities, through the placing of the dead at oldmonuments."14 Barbara Yorke has argued more specifically thatthe foundation of Barking Abbey represents the last in a seriesof experiments enabling the continuity of local political power bycommemorating (and redefining) the ancient sacral authority ofthe ancestors in an anxious age of change and conversion frompaganism to Christianity. 15

By emphasizing blood-kinship, then, and by selectingprecisely this site-Beddanhaam, Barking-the charter constitutesthe saint's female body and the monastery around it as a conduitfor dynastic memory. Ethelburga's presence in the landscapeasserts and consolidates a heritage of both sacral and politicalpower. Accordingly, the charter concludes by restating the grantnot as a series of separate estates but as one unit. In effect, thecharter creates out of a small monastery at Beddanhaam the morepowerful Beorcingon by (re)defining the boundaries and limitsof the land and all that belongs to it: ab oriente writola burnaab aequilone eentinees treow et hane hem stede ab australe JlumenTamisa. That is, on the east the Writolaburna, the modernRiver Beam; on the north Centinees triow, Becontree Heath, themeeting place of hundred court; and Hemstedes, probably FulwellCross in Ilford on the northwest; and then finally, on the souththe river Thames.

In both the Hodilred Charter and Bede's frame narrative,Ethelburga's body within her abbey provides a focus for theappropriation and renaming of a landscape by and for men(Hodilred and Sebbi in the one and Eorcenwald and Theodorein the other) for whom Ethelburga's body is constructed andgendered within analogous regimes of blood and spiritual kinship.

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Not so the third early narrative of Barking's foundation. Drawn,according to Bede, from a libel/us, a collection of the saint'smiracles as experienced, remembered, and written down inBarking Abbey itself within a generation of her death, perhapsin conjunction with the translation of her body by her successor,Abbess Hildilith, the Ecclesiastical History's embedded narrativeof Et helburga and her Barking also foregrounds the act ofcreating a focal point for history. In both frame story and charter,Ethelburga's specifically female body remains for both bloodand spiritual kin-groups the means of cultural (if not biological)reproduction. Although edited and enclosed within Bede's framestory, the libel/us implicates a variant narrative of the saintlyfemale body and the landscape around it. In the libel/us narrative,her gender is defined by her kinship with neither bishop nor maleancestors, but rather with the frame story's anonymous womenconsecrated to God. Her female body consequently transforms thelandscape around it in a radically different way.

Significantly, this landscape transformation involves actsof ritual such as those that would have defined Barking as anecclesiastical rather than aristocratic site. As Jonathan Z. Smithargues, "ritual is, first and foremost, a mode of paying attention;"and since the sacred and the profane "are not substantivecategories, but rather situational ones," it follows that "sacralityis, above all, a category of emplacernenr.?" In Smith's terms,the miracles of the libel/us "place" Ethelburga and her abbeywithin and through a new mode of perception, enacted throughChristian ritual. Liturgical ceremonies and processions betweenand among the new abbey's probably multiple chapels over thecourse of the day-the movements of female bodies throughthe landscape-would have been one of the most visible actionsdelineating Barking as a religious site. Just such a procession isthe setting of the first miracle Bede cites.

In that first miracle, Ethelburga prompts her spiritualdaughters to choose the site of their future graveyard, a prudentenough response to a time of pestilence, but more importantlyalso an act which defines Barking as a sanctified place in thefullest sense of the word. After singing Matins early one morning,

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just before daybreak, the women leave their chapel and process tothe graves of the monks who had died recently. (Although Bedeintroduces Barking as a house for women, it becomes clear, as itssecond, inner story continues, that it actually housed both menand women, under the governance of a woman, like the Frankishfoundations which Bede cites elsewhere as the earliest modelsfor Anglo -Saxon female monasticism.) As Ethelburga guides theother women, ecce subito lux emissa caelitus, veluti linteum magnumvenit super omnes, tantoque eas stupore perculit. [Behold suddenlya light sent from heaven like a great sheet came upon them andstruck them into a stupor, so that they stopped singing for veryfear.] Eventually the light rises up and leads them in meridianammonasterii partem, hoc est, ad occidentem oratorii secessit, ibiquealiquandiu remoratus et ea loca operiens, sic videntibus cunctis adcaeli se alta subduxit. [To the south part of the monastery, thatis, to the west of the chapel, and staying and covering that placea while, finally withdrew back into the heights of heaven.] Thesupernatural answer to the women's dilemma echoes Peter's vision(in Acts 10.11) of a similar sheet of light-and subsequently ofa myriad of animals, clean and unclean, being offered to him asfood. The occasion of Peter's vision is his visit to the Romancenturion Cornelius: the intertext's focus on converting thegentiles has particular relevance to the transformation of a paganlandscape into a Christian one.

Jocelyn Wogan-Browne has noted that the cemeteriesespecially of monastic houses like Barking "were places of holyconnection, channels of intercession and negotiation with thesacred."? Certainly, in this as in the other Barking miraclesthat Bede cites, death at daybreak-that is, coinciding withthe liturgical Office of the Dead after Matins, a time evokinga temporalliminality consonant with geographical opennessconstitutes a defining element. Almost as common is theassociation of light and movement with the transfiguration ofthe earthly body. When Ethelburga herself dies, for example, anumber of miracles foreshadow the event, but the vision grantedto Torhtgyth, her assistant in maintaining regular disciplinewithin the community, is especially telling." On a certain night,

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just as day begins to break, Torhtgyth leaves the building inwhich she had been staying and sees clearly what seems to be acorpse wrapped in muslin, brighter than the sun, being carriedupward out of the sisters' dormitory. Both the visionary and hervision are in motion, Torhtgyth moving out of her chamberas the light-shrouded corpse rises outwards and upwards fromanother. As her vision unfolds, Torhtgyth sees that species corporisgloriosi [glorious body] being drawn by cords brighter thangold further and further up into the caelis patentibus [wide openheavens] until it vanishes from earthly sight .

Moving thus freely between this world and the next, thetransfigured Ethelburga herself then returns in visions (oftenat daybreak) to guide her dying sister-daughters into the samelight of heaven. Just as when Et helburga dies she is ergastulocarnis educta [led out from the prison of the flesh], having leftthis life on earth caelestis patriae patuerit ingressus [to enter intothe country of heaven], so too an anonymous nun who prays byEthelburga's body for her own good death is educta ex carne [ledout of her body]. And so too, three years later, Torhtgyth enjoysa prolonged visionary conversation with carissima mea matre

.Aedilburge [her most dear mother Ethelburga] who announcesthe time of her greatly desired death, her transmigrationis[transmigration] after having been soluta carnis et infirmitatisvinculis [delivered from the shackles of illness and the flesh], andher subsequent entry ad aeternae gaudia salutis [into the joys ofeternal salvation].

The site of the miraculous light, the focus of Barking'ssanctity and sacral power, literally grounds the monastery'sexistence within its own particular symbolic landscape. Yetthroughout these narrated miracles this landscape comes intobeing precisely in those moments in which it paradoxically exceedssecular location: Barking becomes through ritual and miraclea place that transcends earthly emplacement, a place at oncespecifically localized (at least within the monastery itself) andsimultaneously otherworldly in its separation. Moreover, becausethe miracles happen to and for the women, arguably indeedin response to their ritual activity, and despite the presence of

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of monks, the libel/us narrative constructs a female landscape, onein which women situate and define themselves in kinship onlywith each other, through their "mother" Ethelburga. Whoevermay also have been responsible for founding the abbey, whetherEorcenwald or Hodilred, and whoever consecrated them toGod in this place, Barking's women claim the responsibility forproducing both their own history and their own geography.

Ultimately, these three narratives of monasticfoundation compliment even as they contradict one another.Frame and libel/us narratives together tell Barking's story inBede's Ecclesiastical History; the charter would be accepted byEthelburga's successors as their boc to Beorcingon. Like theEthelburga of the libel/us narrative, "taking place" within liminaltime and space, the Ethelburgas of the charter and Bede's framestory similarly mediate between this world and the next, thesecular and the eternal. But they mediate as much betweenand among men as between men and God: in the charter herbody in her monastery facilitates her family's consolidation ofpower by claiming an ancestral landscape and transforming itwithin a new cultural regime; in Bede's frame story her body isdeployed to colonize Essex for Christianity. Whether implicitlyexchanged between Hodilred and God or explicitly enclosedby Eorcenwald, in the charter and the frame story Ethelburga'sbody rests passively, a still reference point in space. In the libel/usnarrative, by contrast, where Ethelburga's body is defined andgendered by reference not to male kinship lines and alliancesbut self-referentially to the women who join her in liturgicalprocession, female bodies create a landscape by inhabiting andmoving through it. Read together, then, these three narratives ofmonastic foundation reveal the complexities of Barking's eighth­century East Saxon landscape and the saintly female body onwhich it depends.

California State University, Fresno

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END NOTES

1. The literature of cultural geography grows ever more extensive, but see,for example , Denis Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape(London: Croom Helm, 1984); Richard Muir, Approaches to Landscape (NewYork: Barnes and Noble, 1999); Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (NewYork: Knopf, 1995); and Yi-Fu Tuan, "Language and the Making of Place:A Narrative-Descriptive Approach," Annals of theAssociation ofAmericanGeographers 81 (1991): 684-696. For the application of cultural geographicaltheory to medieval landscapes, see particularly the essays in Clare A. Lees andGillian R. Overing, eds., A Place to Believe In: Locating Medieval Landscapes(Un iversity Park : Penn sylvania State Up, 2006).2. Chri stopher T illey, A Phenomenology of Landscape:Places, Paths andMonuments (Oxford : Berg, 1994), p. 33.3. Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing, DoubleAgents: Women and ClericalPower in Anglo-Saxon England (Philadelphia: U Penn sylvania P, 2001),especially pp. 17-39.4. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, eds., Bede's EcclesiasticalHistory ofthe English People (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969). All quotations and translationsof Bede's narrative of Barking Abbey's foundation (IV.6-10) are taken fromthis edit ion .5. P. H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters:An Annotated List and Bibliography(London: Royal Hi storical Society, 1968) dates the origin al of Charter # 1171between 685 and 694, probably more precisely 690-693. According to DorothyWhitelock, EnglishHistoricalDocuments (1955; 2nd ed., Oxford : Oxford UP,1979), 1.446- 447, this is possibly the earliest extant East Saxon charter. Fordiscussion of the manuscript features that argue for its transcription at alater date, see Cyril Hart, TIJe Earliest Charters of Barking Abbey (Colche ster:Benham, 1953). All citations of the text are from this edition, pp. 27-28,transl ation p. 29.6. Kenneth MacGowan, "Saxon Timber Structure s from the Barking Abbe yExcavations 1985-1986," Essex journal ZlL (Summer 1987): 35- 38; MarkRedkn ap, "The Saxon Pottery from Barking Abbey: Part 1, Local Wares,"LondonArchaeologist 6.13 (Winter 1991): 353-36 0; Mark Redknap, "TheSaxon Pottery from Barking Abb ey: Part 2, the Continental Imports,"LondonArchaeologist 6.14 (Sprin g 1992): 378-381; Kenneth MacGowan,"Barking Abbey," Current Archaeology 13.5 (1996): 172-178. An extensivereinterpretation of both published and unpublished archaeological materials isoffered by Grah am Hull, "Barkingwic? Saxon and Medieval Features Adjacentto Barking Abbey," Essex Archaeology and History 33 (2002): 157-1 90.7. P.J. Huggins, "Excavat ion of Belgic and Romano-British Farm withMiddle Saxon Cemetery and Churches at Nazingbury, Essex, 1975-6 ," EssexArchaeology and History 10 (1978): 29- 117, and "Excavations at Nazingbury,"

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Essex Archaeological N ews 10 (Winter 1977): 16-18. For the charter describingNazingbury's late seventh- century foundation , see Herbert Hop e Lockwood,"One Thing Leads to Another-The Discovery of Additional Charters ofBarking Abbey," Essex Journal 25.1 (Spring 1990): 11-13; and for discussionof that charter 's usefulness in the interpretation ofNazingbury's history, seePeter Huggins, "Nazingbury 20 Years On, or Whe re Did the Royal Ladies Go?"LondonArchaeologist 8 (1997): 108-11.8. C. P. Loveluck, "A High-Status Anglo-Saxon Settl ement at Flixborough ,Lincolnshire," Antiquity 72 (1998): 146-61.9. See two essays in Paul Everson and Tom Williamson, eds., TIJe Archaeologyof Landscape (Manchester: Manchester Up, 1998): Andrew Fleming,"Prehistoric Landscapes and the Quest for Territorial Pattern," pp. 42-66;and Tony Brown and Glenn Foard, "The Saxon Landscape: A RegionalPerspective," pp. 67-94.10. P. H. Reaney, The Place-Names of Essex (Cambridge: Cambridge Up,1935), p.94.11. VCH Essex III, 46-47.12. Patricia Wilkinson, "Uphall Camp," Essex Archaeology and History 10(1978): 220-22 1; Jane Sidell, John Giorgi and Alan Pipe, "EnvironmentalArchaeology in London 1995-1998, Part 1," London Archaeologist 9.3 (Winter1999): 67-76; and especially Pamela Greenwood, "Uphall Camp, Ilford," EssexJournal 23.1 (Spring 1988): 19-20, and "Uphall Camp, Ilford-An Up-Date,"LondonArchaeologist 9.8 (Spring 2001): 207-2 16.13. See David Griffiths, Andrew Reynolds and Sarah Semple, eds., Boundariesin Early MedievalBritain (Oxford: University School of Archaeology, 2003),especially the essays by Nath alie Cohen , "Boundaries and Settlement: TheRole of the River Thames," pp. 9-20; Aliki Pantos, '''On the Edge ofThings':The Boundary Location of Anglo-S axon Assembly Sites," pp. 38-49; AndrewReynolds, "Boundaries and Settlements in Later Sixth- to Eleventh-CenturyEngland," pp. 98-106; Sarah Semple, "Burials and Political Boundaries inthe Avebury Region, North Wilt shire," pp. 72-91; and Victoria Thompson,"T he View from the Edge: Dying, Power and Vision in Late Saxon England,"pp. 92-97. Kelley M. Wickh am-Crowley, "Living on the Ecg: The MutableBoundaries of Land and Water in Anglo-Saxon Contexts," in Lees andOvering, Place, pp. 85-110, is also enlightening.14. Howard Williams, "Ancient Landscapes and the Dead: the Reuse ofPreh istoric and Roman Monuments as Early Anglo-Saxon Burial Sites,"MedievalArchaeology 41 (1997): 1-32; p. 25.15. Barbara Yorke, Nunneries and theAnglo-Saxon Royal Houses (London :Continuum, 2003), p. 29.16. Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago: UChicago p, 1987), pp. 102-103.17. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, "Dead to the World? Death and the MaidenRevisited in Medieval Women's Convent Culture," in Guidance for Women

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Twelfth-Century Convents, ed. and trans. Vera Morton (Woodbridge: Boydelland Brewer, 2003), pp. 157-180; p. 160. On the centrality of death andcommemoration to monastic life, see also Patrick]. Geary, Living Witb theDeadin theMiddle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell Up, 1994); Megan McLaughlin ConsortingWitb Saints: Prayer for theDead in Early Medieval France (Ithaca: Cornell Up,1994); and Bonnie Effros, Caringfor Bodyand 50111. Burialand theAfterlife intheMerouingian World (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2002).18. I have written elsewhere about the relationship between the two womenas an exemplary spiritual friendship and emblem for female community, butas translated with attendant anxieties as Bede appropriates the Barking libellusinto his Ecclesiastical History: "Sanctirnoniales cum Sanctimoniale: ParticularFriendships and Female Community in Anglo-Saxon England," in Sex andSexuality ill Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Carol Braun Pasternack and Lisa M.C. Weston (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies,2004): 35-62; p. 33.

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