ABSTRACT
In the middle years of the tenth century in England the boundary between the secular and the religious way of life for women appears less sharply defined than at other times in the pre-Conquest era. Female spiritual devotion found fluid and diverse modes of expression to the extent that it can be difficult to determine to which status certain pious women belonged. Recognition of the disproportion in the historical record is not, however, in itself an explanation for the relative silence of the sources about the activities of female religious in general. The witness of historians and hagiographers of the post-Conquest period can permit the identification of a few additional religious houses for women in the later Anglo-Saxon period at Chester, Chichester, Exeter, Polesworth, St Albans and Southampton. Historians of other periods and places have noted a similar relative neglect of female religious houses among both contemporary and modern writers.
