ABSTRACT
Christina of Markyate (c. 1096-c.1160), hermit and holy woman, was born into a world shaped and scarred by the Norman Conquest of 1066. Already in 1068 a great castle had been built in Huntingdon, her natal home, as well as another in nearby Cambridge; imposing though they were, neither was enough to quell the disquiet against the new regime. In 1069, Earl Waltheof, a major Huntingdon landholder, rebelled against William the Conqueror; in the following year, seemingly in an attempt to forestall further risings in the region, the Conqueror took savage measures against a number of ecclesiastics with East Anglian connections. Native anger and resentment against such treatment spilled over in the summer of 1070 into the remarkable and tangled attack on the monastery at Peterborough and its recently appointed Norman Abbot Turold, a man known to be unsympathetic to Anglo-Saxon sensibilities. ‘English people from all over the Fenlands’, so the Peterborough Chronicle tells us, joined Danish leaders recently arrived in Ely in the hope and expectation that this was to be the prelude of yet another conquest. Peterborough itself was sacked and burnt and its treasures taken by rebels (led by Hereward the Wake) for safekeeping to Ely. But the Danes stationed there, on learning of the approach of Turold and his band of ‘one hundred and sixty Frenchmen … all fully armed’, loaded up their boats with Peterborough’s treasures and made for home. Much of this booty was lost at sea, but relics of St Alban were amongst the salvaged treasure and it was while at prayer before these relics, on the eve of his long-planned invasion of England, that King Cnut of Denmark was murdered in 1086. At that moment the last threat to the Norman Conquest disappeared.2
