Eanswythe was the daughter of King Eadbald of Kent and his Frankish Queen Ymme, and thus she was the granddaughter of Queen Bertha and niece of Queen Æthelburh. There is a tradition that she founded a monastery at Folkestone in or around 630, but this date is now thought very unlikely. Her parents were not married until around 624, so she can only have been born in the years from around 625 up to 641, the end of this period falling after her father’s death. Any church she founded is most likely to have been built two or even three decades after 630.
The source
for the life of St Eanswythe is a collection of saints’ lives put together by John
of Tynemouth, a monk of St Alban’s Abbey in the mid 14th Century. John
travelled extensively around the monastic houses of England collecting stories
about the many saints he encountered, some of whom were very localised, in
order to create a great national compendium of the Lives of the Saints.
We know from surviving manuscripts that he copied from his sources reasonably accurately. This gives us some confidence that where
John is the only surviving source for some of the stories, as he is with St
Eanswythe, his account is likely to be close to the original. However, we
have no idea how old this original source was.
Based on
John’s account, it would seem that King Eadbald had ambitions to use his
daughter in much the same way as he had used his sister Æthelburh to promote
the conversion of pagan areas of the country to Christianity. Given the
likely date of Eanswythe’s birth around the time her father died, if there is
any truth in this story, it may better be attributed to her brother King
Eorcenberht who succeeded their father as King of Kent in 640. However, whoever it was who had plans for Eanswythe,
the story goes that she was having none of this and rejected her pagan suitor,
demonstrating a remarkable independence of mind and a strong will.
Instead, she opted to found a monastery. At the time, this was a radical
act, but within a few years, the role of royal women as abbesses became very
well-established.
The purpose of abbeys, which were almost all led by women, was to pray for the King, the royal family and the Kingdom as a whole. In this intensely spiritual age, prayer was seen as fighting against the forces of darkness to protect the interests of the kingdom, a parallel activity of equal importance to the conflict that the King might wage on the battlefield with his warriors. Eanswythe’s choice to found a monastery rather than marry a pagan prince can be seen very much as a political act in which she dedicated herself to the interests of the kingdom, protecting it through the prayer and devotions of her community at Folkestone.
Eanswythe’s original foundation of a monastery was probably on the promontory cliff where the parish church of Folkestone still stands, but most likely further south and thus long-since lost to erosion. In fact the current church was built in the years after 1137 and is the third church in this area to be dedicated to St Eanswythe. We can imagine that Eanswythe’s original church looked very like the church built by her aunt Aethelburh at Lyminge, which was uncovered during the summer of 2019.