Catholic Christian belief still views saints as intermediaries between people and God. The idea is essentially that you pray to a saint hoping to get their help to obtain the ear of God, so God will then listen to, and hopefully grant, your request. Exactly what a saint was, and how this was thought to work, developed and changed from the Late Roman through to the Early Medieval period, and it came to be accepted that saints were not just holy people who had done good works in their lifetimes. Saints were expected to demonstrate their power by performing miracles, and it was believed that a saint could only have such power if their body was moved (translated) from the original place of burial and raised up above ground (elevated) in a shrine specially made for the purpose. It was commonly thought that a saint would demonstrate their approval of a translation by performing miracles, and this was then confirmation both that the translation had been a good idea and that the saint actually was an effective saint. The natural consequence of miracles being recorded was that people would want to come to the shrine and benefit from a miracle themselves. This was the basis of every saint’s cult and the reason why shrines became places of pilgrimage, some becoming extremely popular. 

It is conceivable that Queen Ethelburga, buried in her tomb at Lyminge, would have been venerated by local people as a good and holy person, and possibly her help was sought by some. But it is also the case that as she seems to have remained in her original tomb, by the end of the 8^th Century she would not have been seen as the most effective kind of saint. This may explain why, in a charter dating to 804, it is recorded that Lyminge by then had a new saint: St Eadburg. Eadburg had been abbess at Minster-in-Thanet and had died in 751. She had helped develop at Minster the cult of St Mildrith, who remained one of the most popular saints in southern England right up to the time when Thomas Becket was martyred in 1170. But because Minster had such a popular saint, it seems possible that the abbess of Minster at the end of the 8^th Century, Selethryth, felt that Eadburg was surplus to requirements, and her holy remains could be put to better use elsewhere. Selethryth seems also to have been abbess at Lyminge, for that was the name of the abbess at Lyminge at this time and it was an unusual name. If this Selethryth was abbess in both places, this could be the context for the translation of St Eadburg to Lyminge, where we can be confident her remains were elevated into a new shrine that was made to celebrate the new saint.

The charter is the only evidence for when the translation of St Eadburg may have happened. We have not located any archaeological remains of her shrine, and although some masonry was found in 2019 west of Ethelburga’s church, scientific testing suggests it dates to much later than 800, so this is unlikely to be part of a separate church housing her shrine . What we can say is that around 1000, a new book was written celebrating the life and miracles of St Eadburg of Lyminge. This seems to come from the household of the Archbishop of Canterbury, suggesting that the Archbishop was at that time promoting the cult of St Eadburg. Fragments of wall, including a freestanding tower, found in the 19^th Century in and around the area of the current Memorial Garden, may relate to renewed promotion of St Eadburg’s cult in the 11th Century. But these remains are fragmentary and it is very difficult to draw firm conclusions.

We can’t say very much about what was happening in Lyminge beyond the middle of the 9^th Century. The charter of 804 records that a refuge in Canterbury had been granted to the community of Lyminge, suggesting that this part of Kent was becoming dangerous. This is often attributed to Viking raiding, which is known to have begun in this period. There are various attacks recorded at sites across the whole of Kent and elsewhere in England, although there is no evidence for any raid specifically on Lyminge. From the middle of the 9^th Century for about a century, records have failed to survive, so it is possible the monastic community relocated to Canterbury at this time. In 2019, a silver penny minted by Archbishop Ceolnoth around 863 was found in the churchyard. Coins generally did not remain in circulation very long, so we can conclude there was someone in Lyminge at about this time in a position to drop this small amount of wealth, but whether the monastic community was still present is just unknown. 

Silver penny of Archbishop Ceolnoth found in the churchyard in 2019 (© University of Reading)

By around 1000, the estate of Lyminge seems to have passed into the control of the Archbishop of Canterbury, or possibly to the monastic community at the Cathedral. The efforts to promote, or perhaps to revive the cult of St Eadburg after it had fallen into neglect, nevertheless suggest that enough had survived to make this a viable proposition. In this very shadowy period, we can be reasonably certain that Lyminge was no longer functioning as a monastery. By the time of the Domesday Survey in 1086, the shrine of St Eadburg seems to have been in the care of a college of priests who were based at Lyminge, ministering to a group of ten local churches. Most of these churches can still be identified, such as Stelling, Horton, Stanford and Acrise, so we know the area covered. The tiny church of St Oswald’s, Paddlesworth was also part of this group of churches and it remains a chapel of Lyminge to this day.  It is well worth a visit.