Holy and Right-Believing Berhte, Queen of Kent; and the 79 Monastic Martyrs of Sînâ’ and at-Tûr

Saint Berhte of Kent

A very happy Bright Wednesday and International Workers’ Day to one and all! It is also the feast day for two great and saintly women of the Orthodox Church: formally for Saint Queen Tamara the Great of Georgia, and informally for Saint Queen Berhte of Kent (also Perchta in her own tongue, or Bertha in the modern spelling).

Berhte was born, probably around 560, to a woman of uncertain background named Ingoberg, and King Charibert I of the Franks. According to the historian Saint Gregory of Tours, her parents’ marriage was not a particularly happy one, on account of King Charibert’s rather abusive and adulterous habits:

Moreover king Charibert married Ingoberga, by whom he had a daughter who afterwards married a husband in Kent and was taken there. At that time Ingoberga had in her service two daughters of a certain poor man, of whom the first was called Marcovefa, who wore the robe of a nun, and the other was Merofled. The king was very much in love with them. They were, as I have said, the daughters of a worker in wool. Ingoberga was jealous that they were loved by the king and secretly gave the father work to do, thinking that when the king saw this he would dislike his daughters. While he was working she called the king. He expected to see something strange, but only saw this man at a distance weaving the king's wool. Upon this he was angry and left Ingoberga and married Merofled. He also had another, a daughter of a shepherd, named Theodogild, by whom he is said to have had a son who when he came from the womb was carried at once to the grave.

In the midst of this unhappy family situation, when she was about fourteen or fifteen years old, Berhte was given in an arranged marriage by her parents to a heathen prince of Kent named Æþelberht, howbeit with the understanding that she would retain her Christian faith and also be allowed the company of Bishop Léodheard (or Létard) in England, to counsel her and to administer the Gifts to her. As Saint Bede relates:

For [Æþelberht] had already heard of the Christian religion, having a Christian wife of the Frankish royal house named Berhte, whom he had received from her parents on condition that she should have freedom to hold and practise her faith unhindered with Bishop Léodheard whom they had sent as her chaplain.

Her new heathen husband gave his Queen Berhte and Bishop Léodheard thereafter the old Roman Church of Saint Martin for their personal religious devotions. We know that she had two children with Æþelberht King: Saint Æþelburg, the wife of the saintly Éadwine King of Northumbria; and Éadbald, himself later King of Kent and a latecomer to the faith, of whom something has been mentioned before on this blog in connection with Saints Laurence and Mellitus of Canterbury. According to Bede, she also had significant sway over Æþelberht’s decision in 597 to welcome to English shores Saint Augustine of Canterbury, who then began the process of bringing the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the English people. Queen Berhte herself indeed showed great hospitality to Augustine and his party of monks, giving them her own chapel for their housing and use in preaching.

The other source by which we know something of Queen Berhte’s life is a letter she received from Pope Saint Gregory the Dialogist in 601, who of course took a deep and intense personal interest in the successes of the mission to England. In this letter, Pope Gregory commends Queen Berhte’s personal faith and welcomes joyfully the news of her help and hospitality to Augustine and to the monks Laurence and Peter who were with him. He compares her, flatteringly, to Saint Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine. (This may be one of the several sources of the later pious tradition that holds Saint Helena herself to have been a Briton.)

However, he does – gently and with most careful diplomatic language – reprove her for being a Christian wedded to a heathen and not having brought her husband to the faith earlier. His reasoning is that her formidable intelligence, book-learning and zealous faith ought to have overwhelmed her husband into accepting Christ long before Augustine arrived. He thereupon encourages her to make up for this slowness by being all the more zealous in converting her husband’s people, and assures her that the fame of her zeal in spreading the Christian faith is known even by the Emperor in Constantinople. Again, this is a highly diplomatic letter. Also, this epistle suggests some noteworthy parallels here in the personal lives of mother and daughter. Like Berhte, her daughter Æþelburg was married young, partially at her family’s behest, to a foreign heathen king. Also like Berhte, she was apparently a bit too slow in getting him to convert for Rome’s liking. (And Pope Boniface is notably less diplomatic in his letter to her, as he accuses Æþelburg of essentially letting her physical attraction to her husband get the better of her.) Both women, however, did exert influence upon their husbands to get them to convert; and both were notably successful.

The date of Saint Berhte’s death is unclear; it is not given by Bede or by any other proximate work of history. It does, however, seem to have been sometime between 604, where she is associated with the founding of Saint Augustine’s Abbey, and her husband Æþelberht’s death in 616, whom Holy Bede believed she predeceased. The Catholic Encyclopædia gives her death date as c. 612, which is probably as good a guess as any.

Since the actual date of her repose seems unfortunately lost to historical record, it is unclear how Queen Berhte became associated with 1 May as her festival. The fact may simply be that May Day was the date of her repose; that the Church’s traditional memory is better and more trustworthy than sæcular record-keeping; and that Henry VIII’s destructive rampage destroyed records about her life that might have proven it to modern eyes. Though I have to wonder also if there isn’t a connexion between her veneration – as the first Christian queen of England, and a beautiful one at that – and the præ-Christian folk custom of appointing a young and beautiful maiden as ‘May Queen’ to open and lead the festivities of the heathen rites to Freya, which fell around the first of May. Let it be borne in mind that it was Pope Gregory’s own explicit approach and directive to Saint Mellitus, not to ban and curse such festivities, but instead to bless them and redirect their energies toward Christian themes instead of idolatrous ones; and this approach met with a great deal of success among the English people.

Nonetheless, regardless of the reasoning, I do feel that it is meet and right after the Paschal feast, when the women were the ones who went out from the tomb of Christ to spread the word of His Holy Resurrection, to remember a good and great woman who bore the exact same news to the people of a chilly island in northern Europe five and a half centuries later. Holy and righteous Berhte, queen, mother and forerunner of the faith in England, pray to Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

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I note also, that Bright Wednesday is, as per the custom of the Russian Orthodox Church, one of the commemorations of the 79 Ægyptian monastic fathers who were killed by brigands, 40 at Sînâ’ and 39 at [EDIT: at-Tûr], in the year 312: including the saints named in the Liturgy as Ashi‘yâ’, Sâbâ, Mûsâ the Teacher, Mûsâ the Disciple, Irmiyâ’, Bûlus, ’Âdam, Sarjûn, Dumna, Baruqlus, ’Ibatiyyâs, Ishâq, Maqâr, Marqus, Bilsamin, Yûsâbiyyûs and ’Iliyâs. These monastics, as we discover from the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, had much in common with the fallâhîn of the countryside that surrounded them, and indeed aspired to the virtues that they associated with the peasant lifestyle. They ate only dates and drank only water; and they held long vigils on Saturday to prepare for the Liturgy on the following day; many of them were wonderworkers in life. Today, indeed, Sînâ’, the holy place is still home to monks who make a living working with their hands, after much the same manner as the ascetics of old, and who (thankfully) enjoy a notably closer and more friendly relationship with their Bedouin neighbours now than they did in the 300s.

As for Rafah, the situation there is quite sad. It is divided, today, between a portion in Ægypt, and a portion in Gaza, where the Israeli and Ægyptian governments have erected between them a barbed-wire fence that runs straight through the city. The barrier at the border is causing great suffering and health problems for the Palestinians of Gaza, it creates complications between Palestine and Ægypt, and indeed people are still dying there from violence inflicted upon them by the Israeli armed forces. The border crossing is closed for May Day. So, my fellow Orthodox Christians – for the sake of the saints who shone forth in glory in that city and whom we in the churches of the Slavic tradition remember on this Bright Wednesday, please do remember to say a prayer for suffering Gaza, and to ask God to remember the Palestinian people in His kingdom.

EDIT: The Orthodox Church in America claims that the first city where the Sinaitic monastic martyrs were slain was not Rafah (Raphia), but rather at-Tûr (Raithu), and after a bit further research I am now inclined to believe that the OCA is correct. There was indeed a contemporary Orthodox monastic community in Rafah which is now abandoned, but the desert-monastic communities of the Peninsula, including Saint Catherine’s, were mostly clustered in the Sinaitic southwest, along the as-Suways. My apologies for the error. However, it could hardly be inappropriate still to ask the Sinaitic monks’ intercessions for their poor brethren to the north.

The Monastic Martyrs of Sinai and Palestine