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Abstract: Historians have speculated for centuries over the fate of the lost magical works known to have been produced at Wherwell Abbey in the era prior to and into the Aureate. Recent excavations at the site of the Abbey may have finally provided us with an answer as to why none of these works has been preserved to the modern day.
Wherwell Abbey was famously founded towards the end of the tenth century by Ælfthryth the Cunning, the disgraced widow of King Edgar and mother of the future King Æthelred. Her undoubtedly misogynistic epithet originates from her suspected assassination of both her first husband, Æthelwald, and then subsequently Edgar himself; the story goes that her famous beauty was the result of a spell, cast upon hapless men whom she married for power and then murdered once her position was secure. The political machinations which dictated life at court during this tumultuous period were often marred with betrayal, murder, and ignominy, so it is perhaps more accurate to suggest that Ælfthryth was frequently acting in line with the established methods of the day.
It is therefore difficult to say whether her choice to found Wherwell was (as some would have it) an attempt to launder her reputation, or whether it was simply a sensible and appropriate choice for a devout member of the English nobility. Her rival for power, Alphege, later Archbishop of Worcester, founded Saint Guthlac’s Priory in Hereford at around the same time, a decision which is usually framed as a shrewd consolidation of power in his future seat.
The Abbey at Wherwell is first attested in the records of King Æthelred’s court in around 990. The Abbey’s own records do not begin until a year or so later, likely rising from the necessity to divine their contribution to the gafol imposed by the Danes in the aftermath of the Battle of Maldon. From these early financial records, we begin to get a sense of everyday life among the women residing at Wherwell. We can see the monies set aside for the keeping of private chambers for now-Queen Mother Ælfthryth and her oldest and only daughter, the future famed magistrix Æthelgifu the Shrewd, though only Æthelgifu was in residence before 993 while Ælfthryth acted as Æthelred’s regent. There are also the usual accounts describing the necessities acquired for maintenance of religious services in the Abbey, including candles, sacramental wine, and biannual fresh straw for the floor.
It is here that we meet our first conundrum in seeking out the lost works of Wherwell. Nowhere in the accounts are there any hints of procuring the writing equipment that would be necessary for creating magical manuscripts. In other contemporary accounts these materials are easily identifiable; consider the reams of parchment and the pots of ink listed in the books at Kintbury, Hexham, and Repton, to name but a few. So why did the inhabitants of Wherwell not purchase these same items to create their own magical works, if indeed they were writing them?
Before addressing this question, it is perhaps worth establishing our existing information about these lost works of magic. Wherwell emerges frequently in written accounts across the next few centuries, but this has recently been explored in an excellent paper by Renée Pritchard, so for the sake of brevity I will only highlight a few of the significant examples here. The Wherwell works are of course mentioned in that pinnacle of financial records, the Domesday Book. On several occasions the scribes record the operae magices Wherwellae in the possessions of aristocratic families across England. Later, following the destruction of the Abbey under Henry VIII, we read that “those ityms ben remainin in the craftinge-roome” were given to Henry’s half-fae advisor, Trickspot Mitchell, himself a prominent writer of magical works. Indeed, Mitchell’s writing on the methods for ensuring everlasting blooming of flowers (and other similar spells to embellish ornamental gardens, a particular interest of his) heavily references ideas gleaned from the “Ladies of Wherwell”. Our final reference is found, somewhat oddly, in the survey of Cornwall carried out by Richard Carew in the early seventeenth century, when he writes that “a certaine work of divers colours, full of blasphemie and other such impietie, come from Wherwhelle” is kept by the Earl of Penryn.
It seems likely therefore that these magical works did exist and were not the invention of later writers, as has been claimed by some skeptics; a fairly reliable chronology suggests that they survived well into the Middle Argentine, and that they were well enough known to be referred to in such a passing fashion. So where are they now?
There are of course several possible solutions to this problem. Their absence from Wherwell’s accounts has been interpreted by some historians as a deliberate one, meaning that separate lists were kept for the procurement of more expensive items, either overtly or covertly, to reduce the Abbey’s required contribution to the gafol and other later methods of taxation. These accounts could therefore have been lost or destroyed while leaving the more humdrum accounts intact; they, like the manuscripts themselves, existed once, but are no more. The manuscripts’ subsequent disappearance is then easily explained by the insistence that again they, like many other lost tomes of English magic, disappeared with the rest of Norrell’s library.
I would here like to propose an alternative theory. Over the past two decades, extensive excavation works have been carried out at the site of Wherwell as part of a collaboration between the University of Abergavenny and the Royal Archaeological Society of Magic. The full publication of this excavation is still forthcoming, but following the recent articles on the cloister and the chapter house I am thrilled to be able to foreshadow here some of our findings from the calefactory and the adjacent muniment room.
Over the course of our excavations, we uncovered over a thousand identical metal objects weighing between 100 and 300 grams. These items were all torus-shaped, i.e. circular with a hole pushed through the centre. They are easily identifiable as loom-weights, a common and very ancient method of ensuring tension is maintained during weaving. That the mostly-female residents of Wherwell occupied their time with weaving is by no means surprising, but it is extremely unusual to find loom weights in this quantity. Similarly, while some of the rougher examples from Wherwell are made of lead and other cheaper metals, one extraordinary example is cast from solid gold.
More noteworthy is what emerged when the items were cleaned and examined under electron microscopes. Though in many cases the item is too badly damaged to preserve its original surface, on a substantial number of the weights we were able to identify a complex system of braids, glyphs, and runes woven together across the metal. The weights no longer emit any detectable thaumaturgical energy, but the symbols closely correlate with preserved architectural examples from the era used, for instance, to bewitch the famous vaults at Chester Cathedral, and some of the markings even appear in Maitland’s Graphicon of magical symbols.
It seems therefore that these loom weights had some sort of thaumaturgical purpose. This revelation invites the following question: where, in all of our sources, does it say that the works of Wherwell were books? It is obvious for us to assume that they were written manuscripts, as writing is the only method of the modern magician which has proven a stable means of relaying and executing reliable magic. But to state that all magic in early Mediaeval England was written is absolute speculation, and to categorise the famous works of Wherwell in this regard is wholeheartedly an assumption. What if these pre-Aureate magicians knew of a method of conveying spells through fabric, not parchment? Might we imagine that perhaps they even invented one?
This solution is, of course, purely hypothetical. We have no evidence of magical tapestries from this era, but we would be unlikely to have such ephemeral materials still extant if they were made over a thousand years ago. It is an often-discussed aspect of women’s history how little study is carried out into traditional crafts which are more usually the remit of women, which includes weaving, embroidery, and other ‘lesser’ arts. Perhaps here we have the ultimate combination of two poorly-understood fields: that of Mediaeval textiles and pre-Aureate magic.
I will finish with a nursery rhyme still used as a skipping song in parts of Hampshire. These forms of folk tales often preserve narratives otherwise lost to history; perhaps here we see yet another clue hiding in plain sight.
“Beware the Wherwell witches
Who with their tricky fingers
Twitch spells at little children
And tie them up in stitches!”