ABSTRACT
The relative profusion of sources relating to Anglo-Saxon religious women in the seventh and eighth centuries and their consequent prominence within the early medieval English Church contrasts starkly with the meagreness of the written record for female religious—but not for male—in the last two centuries before the Conquest. If the decline of the double house is in some way linked with a new reluctance among the Anglo-Saxon nobility and aristocracy to patronise female houses with landed wealth then answers need to be sought in contemporary aristocratic attitudes to women in religion or to women as landholders. The political power formerly exercised by seventh-century abbesses was not shared by their tenth- and eleventh-century counterparts; the close association between the West Saxon royal house and the nunneries it sponsored in the tenth century did not extend to the engagement of their inmates in contemporary political affairs.
