The Medieval Murderers: The False Virgin

‘What… what do you mean?’

Wulfred felt the trembling grip of his brother’s fingers on his arm and knew that Cynwulf was not going to be able to face what must be done.

‘Stay here on guard and swear to me, little brother, that whatever happens you will not set foot inside the church again tonight.’

Another flash of lightning cleaved the darkness and as the thunder answered it, the first heavy drops of rain began to fall. The storm had broken at last.

The young priest did not make his way to the church until mid-afternoon. The downpour had beaten the vegetables and fruit in his little patch into the mud, and now that the sun was shining hot and strong again, he’d spent several hours salvaging what he could and laying them out to dry before they rotted in the mud. The daily offices he’d said in haste and with a good deal of ill humour as he worked. But only when he’d saved as many of his crops as he could did he finally toil up to the church to check that the wind had not wreaked more damage than usual there.

He knew something was wrong when he saw the door half hanging from its hinges, though he tried to convince himself that the wind must have battered it open. But he smelled the stench of blood and shit before he even set foot inside.

He had taken no more than a pace into the church before his legs buckled and he sank to his knees. He didn’t even have the strength to crawl outside before he vomited. It was a long time before he could steel himself to look again. A severed head with long brown hair was impaled on the top of the wooden cross on the altar. The limbs had been hacked from the corpse and hung at each corner of the church – north, south, east and west. The feet and hands had been cut off and dangled like bizarre fruit from the windows. Blood had dripped onto the sandy-coloured stones below.

Beornwyn’s flayed skin lay draped over the stone altar like an altar cloth and a buzzing cloud of flies crawled over the skinned torso, which had been dumped beneath the smashed image of St Oswald. Even as the priest stared in horror, a single blue butterfly fluttered drunkenly in through the open door and alighted on the mutilated corpse among the flies. It uncurled its long proboscis and delicately sucked the juices of the dead. The priest vomited again.

AD 864

Mildryth holds out her hand for the coin that the pimple-faced young monk proffers. She examines it carefully before sliding it away in her scrip. Satisfied, she nods and leads him up the path towards the small stone chapel that has been built a little way from the church. She gestures to him to enter and follows him in, keeping a close watch as he kneels in reverence. Thieves are always ready to steal holy relics, and monks are the worst of them all. Mildryth guards her saint as fiercely as any she-wolf protects her cubs.

A long wooden box lies upon the stone altar, surrounded by the burning candles offered by the villagers and strangers who come to pray to the saint. There have been many more strangers coming to the shrine of late. There are rumours the Vikings are preparing to come across the seas in force, not just a raiding party, but huge fleets of longboats full of warriors ready to slaughter and burn the whole kingdom. People are terrified that they will die unshriven. They come to the shrine to pray to the saint who was slain by the Vikings, for surely she has the power to save them.

The monk leans forward and presses his lips to the box containing the mortal remains of the blessed martyr. He touches his fingers to it, and then to his forehead, mouth and breast as if anointing himself with her holiness. Finally he clambers to his feet and backs out of the shrine as if leaving the presence of a great queen.

He turns and gazes earnestly at Mildryth, then seems to remember she is a woman and averts his eyes. ‘They say you actually knew her. You were her closest companion, her disciple. Tell me of her death,’ he begs, closing his eyes as if preparing himself for a moment of ecstasy.

Mildryth has been waiting for this. They all ask for that tale, the strangers who come to her shrine. She recites again how the virgin Beornwyn was praying alone to the blessed St Oswald when the Vikings attacked, striking her down before the very altar as she was kneeling in prayer. How, like St Oswald, she was dismembered as an offering to the god Odin, but even when the saint’s head was struck from her body, her lips had continued to pray for the souls of men. The heathens had flayed her skin from her body, but the Virgin Mary had sent a cloud of butterflies, as blue as her own heavenly mantle, to cover her, so no man might look upon the saint’s private parts to her shame.

It has been more than fifteen years since the night her mistress was slain and now Mildryth herself can no longer remember what is true. Sometimes in her dreams she sees her own hand stabbing the knife into that bare back, over and over again in such a murderous rage of hatred she cannot seem to stop. But when she wakes she knows it was the Vikings who slaughtered her beloved Beornwyn; everyone told her it was and how could she say otherwise?

The young monk kneels before her, takes her hand and kisses it. They think if they touch the hand of the woman who touched Beornwyn, her blessing will pass to them. She is the living link to the blessed saint, as the Bishop is the living link to St Peter and to Christ Himself. Mildryth’s touch will save them.

‘Ask Saint Beornwyn to pray for me,’ the monk pleads.

And Mildryth will, for she is the virgin saint’s guardian and protector now, just as she has always been.

Historical Note

Lythe means ‘on a hill’, and the church and graveyard of St Oswald are situated on a hill overlooking the sea on the Yorkshire coast. From there you can see the ruins of Whitby Abbey, several bays further along the cliffs. It is believed that the present St Oswald’s church occupies the site of an ancient Anglo-Saxon church.

By AD 848, this Anglo-Saxon church was all that remained of a Celtic double monastery that was probably built around the same time as the nearby abbey of St Hilda in Whitby (Streanæshalch), housing both nuns and monks in AD 657. Unlike St Hilda’s abbey, the Lythe monastery had fallen into ruins long before the time of the Prologue and only the church remained in use.

From AD 793 there were an increasing number of Viking raids on the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. The raiding parties often targeted churches and monasteries, because of their rich store of gold and silver treasures, but raids increased dramatically from AD 835 with a full invasion being launched in AD 865. In AD 867 the Vikings destroyed the abbey of St Hilda in Whitby. The Vikings settled and eventually converted to Christianity, burying their dead at Lythe and building a wooden church on the site. This church was replaced with a stone Norman church after 1066.

During the remodelling of St Oswald’s church, Lythe in 1910, builders discovered that thirty-seven carved stones from a much earlier period had been built at random into the later Norman church walls and buttresses. Two of the stones have been dated to the eighth century. These carved stones were restored in 2007 and are now housed in a permanent display at the beautiful St Oswald’s church.

Whitby Abbey, Winter 1199

It was a pity that Reinfrid and Frossard were friends. Reinfrid was clever, and might have risen high within the Benedictine Order if Frossard had not been there to lead him astray with mischief; and Frossard might have accepted his lot as a lay brother if Reinfrid had not been constantly telling him that a son of Lord Frossard, albeit an illegitimate one, deserved better than life as a labourer.