Audrey: Name Day and Patron Saint

St Audrey, called Etheldreda (Æthelthryth) in the old English books, was a daughter of King Anna of East Anglia, a family that gave the Church several saints. She was married first to Tondberht, a prince of the fen country, and after his early death to Egfrith, the young king of Northumbria. In both marriages, St Bede tells us, she kept her virginity, and she asked the king again and again to let her give her life to Christ. At last she received the veil from St Wilfrid at the monastery of Abbess Ebba at Coldingham. About the year 673 she went home to the Isle of Ely, among the marshes, and founded a double monastery of monks and nuns, ruling it as its first abbess. Bede remembers her plain woollen clothing, her single daily meal and her long prayers in church from the night office until dawn. She died of the plague in 679, after a painful swelling on her neck which she accepted humbly as a penance for the jewels she had worn in her youth. Sixteen years later her sister St Sexburga opened the grave and found her body incorrupt, the wound healed. The Church keeps her memory on 23 June (6 July on the Old Calendar). The faithful ask her prayers for purity of heart, for widows and those in hard marriages, and for the sick, especially with ailments of the throat and neck, for many healings were recorded at her shrine.

What the faithful pray for

• purity of heart and a life given to God
• widows and those in difficult marriages
• the sick, especially with throat and neck ailments
• those who long for the monastic life
• humility and freedom from vanity