Stow Minster and the Staff of Etheldreda

St Etheldreda — also known as Audrey — was a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon princess who chose the religious life over the court marriages her royal status required. Promised successively to two kings, she made each marriage in name only, and around 660 she fled her second husband, King Egfrith of Northumbria, crossing the fenland on foot toward Ely. Local tradition in Lincolnshire adds that her route passed through Stow, and that here, exhausted, she planted her ash-wood staff in the ground beside the road and slept.

When she woke before dawn, the staff had taken root and burst into full leaf overnight: a miracle in the Lincolnshire clay that she took as a divine sign. A chapel was raised on the spot, and later replaced by the great Saxon minster that still stands. Stow Minster, built primarily in the eleventh century by Earl Leofric and his wife Lady Godiva, is celebrated for possessing the largest Saxon arches in existence. The building sits on a site of continuous Christian use reaching back to the miracle of the growing staff, and its extraordinary scale — vast for a village church — reflects its origins as a minster serving a wide hinterland.

The tradition is first recorded in the Book of Ely, a twelfth-century compilation, placing it within the great cycle of early Mercian and East Anglian saint-legends. Neither the ash tree nor any early chapel survives, but the minster continues to serve as a parish church and receives visitors drawn by both the Etheldreda legend and the remarkable quality of its Saxon stonework. Etheldreda went on to found Ely Cathedral and became one of the most widely venerated female saints of medieval England.