But since the saving common-sense of the Englishman can never again permit him to deliver up his soul into another's keeping, and since it follows naturally from this that the Romanising tendencies of our clergy must of necessity lead nowhere and bear no fruit, it becomes possible to look with a dispassionate eye upon these architectural relics of discredited beliefs.
Why was the Cathedral built here? That is a long story. It originated in the monastery founded on this spot in A.D. 673 by Etheldreda, daughter of Auna, King of the East Angles. Etheldreda has long since been canonised, and it behoves us to deal as gently as may be with a saint; but she was, if the chroniclers tell truth, an eccentric and original creature, twice wed by her own consent, and yet vowed to a life-long chastity. Her first husband was one Tondbert, a kinglet of the Gyrvians or Fen-folk, a monarch of the mudlarks, ruling over many miles of reed and sedge, in whose wastes Ely was centred. He gave his Queen this Isle, and died. For five years she remained a widow and then married again; this time a sturdier and less manageable man, King Egfrid of Northumbria. He respected her vows for twelve years, but when at last she took the veil in the north of England and fled from her Northumbrian home he took the only way open in the seventh century of asserting conjugal rights, and pursued her with an armed force. When, however, he arrived at the monastery of Coldingham she was gone, and I do not think Egfrid ever saw her again, or wanted to, for that matter. We will not follow Etheldreda in her long and adventurous journey to Ely, whither she had fled, nor recount the many miracles that helped her on the way. Miracles were cheap at that period, and for at least four hundred years to come were freely invented and elaborated by monkish chroniclers, who were the earliest novelists and writers of fairy tales, in the scriptorium of many a monastery.
IN the year 673, then, behold the ecstatic Etheldreda come out of many perils to Ely. Here, where she thought the Isle lifted its crest highest above the waters, she founded a mixed monastery for monks and nuns. At this point the ground is one hundred and nine feet above sea-level: at Haddenham, the crowning crest is but thirteen feet higher. Here she ruled as Abbess for six years, when she died, and was succeeded by her sister, the sainted Sexburga. It was Sexburga who, sixteen years from this time, determined to honour Etheldreda to the best of her ability, bethought her of translating the body from the humble graveyard of the monastery to the church itself. She sent forth a number of the brethren on a roving commission to find a block of stone for a coffin, and as stone of any kind is the least likely thing to find for many miles around Ely, theirs looked to be a long and difficult quest. They had, indeed, wandered as far as the ruins of Roman Cambridge before they discovered anything, but there they found a magnificent sarcophagus of white marble, which they joyfully brought back, and in it the remains of Etheldreda, entire and incorrupt, were laid.