Yarrow. _Achillæ multifolium._
Dedicated to _St. Gall_.
[352] Blount by Beckwith.
~October 17.~
_St. Hedwiges_, or _Avoice_, duchess of Poland, A. D. 1243, _St.
Anstrudis_, or _Anstru_, A. D. 688. _St. Andrew_ of Crete, A. D. 761.
~St. Etheldreda.~
She was daughter of Annas, king of the East Angles, and born about 630,
at Ixning, formerly a town of note on the western border of Suffolk,
next Cambridgeshire. At Coldingham Abbey, Yorkshire, she took the veil
under Ebba, daughter of king Ethelfrida, an abbess, afterwards
celebrated for having saved herself and her nuns from the outrage of the
Danes by mutilating their faces; the brutal invaders enclosed them in
their convent and destroyed them by fire.
Notwithstanding Etheldreda’s vow to remain a nun, she was twice forced
by her parents to marry, and yet maintained her vow; hence she is
styled, in the Romish breviaries, “twice a widow and always a virgin.”
On the death of her first husband Tonbert, a nobleman of the East
Angles, the isle of Ely became her sole property by jointure, and she
founded a convent, and the convent church there; and for their
maintenance endowed them with the whole island. She married her second
husband Egfrid, king of Northumberland, on the death of Tonbert, in 671,
but persisted in her vow, and died abbess of her convent on the 23d of
June, 679. On the 17th of October, sixteen years afterwards, her relics
were translated, and therefore on this day her festival is commemorated.
In 870, the Danes made a descent on the isle of Ely, destroyed the
convent and slaughtered the inhabitants. By abbreviation her name became
corrupted to Auldrey and Audrey.[353]
_Tawdry--St. Audrey._
As at the annual fair in the isle of Ely, called St. Audrey’s fair,
“much ordinary but showy lace was usually sold to the country lasses,
St. Audrey’s lace soon became proverbial, and from that cause _Taudry_,
a corruption of St. Audrey, was established as a common expression to
denote not only lace, but any other part of female dress, which was much
more gaudy in appearance than warranted by its real quality and value.”
This is the assertion of Mr. Brady, in his “Clavis Calendaria,” who, for
aught that appears to the contrary, gives the derivation of the word as
his own conjecture, but Mr. Archdeacon Nares, in his admirable
“Glossary,” shows the meaning to have been derived from Harpsfield, “an
old English historian,” who refers to the appellation, and “makes St.
Audrey die of a swelling in her throat, which she considered as a
particular judgment, for having been in her youth much addicted to
wearing fine necklaces.” There is not now any grounds to doubt that
_tawdry_ comes from St. Audrey. It was so derived in Dr. Johnson’s
“Dictionary” before Mr. Todd’s edition. Dr. Ash deemed the word of
“uncertain etymology.”