Ælfflæd spent the whole of her life from infancy within a monastery . It was not unusual in the 7th century for royal women to become nuns; sometimes queens did so on the deaths of their husbands: Ælfflæd's mother Eanflæd is a case in point; sometimes other women of the royal house who were not married in political alliances: Æbbe, sister to Ælfflæd's father, was Abbess of Coldingham. Ælfflæd's case is unusual only in that she entered at such a young age: scarcely a year old, writes Bede.
Ælfflæd born in 654 the daughter of the Northumbrian King Oswiu and his Queen Eanflæd She was therefore descended from both the Bernician and Deiran royal houses: through her father, she was a granddaughter of King Æthelfrith; through her mother, a granddaughter of King Edwin. She was born at a critical time in her father's reign, just before Penda the great warrior-king of Mercia led an army into Northumbria. Oswiu's attempts to buy him off by diplomacy and bribes failed and battle ensued in which, against the odds, Oswiu emerged victorious and Penda dead. In gratitude for the victory, Oswiu endowed twelve new monasteries and gave his infant daughter to be consecrated to God in perpetual virginity. She was placed in the care of Abbess Hild, a relative on her mother's side, in the monastery at Hartlepool. Hild soon after transferred to Whitby which became Ælfflæd's home for the rest of her life.
It is hardly possible to write a biography of Ælfflæd in the normal sense: so little is known of the course of her life. Yet, such details as we do have show that in her monastery she was far from isolated from the wider world, but that she was in touch with the religious and dynastic politics of the day and that she made some decisive interventions.
As a child at Whitby, she was under the tutelage of one of the most able figures of the age and when her father called the great conference there in 664 she was, no doubt, able to observe the leading figures of the day in church and state. After Oswiu's death in 670, Eanflæd joined her daughter in the monastery; and when Hild died ten years later they jointly succeeded her as abbess, with Ælfflæd then in her mid-twenties.
Twice in her lifetime her family's hold on the Northumbrian throne was in doubt and on both occasions, we can see that from within her monastery she was able to influence the outcome, though details elude us. First time was in the reign of her brother Ecgfrith (670-685) when she saw that he had no obvious successor in the direct line. She consulted Cuthbert, calling him from Lindisfarne to a meeting on Coquet Island. They had a wide-ranging discussion and then Ælfflæd raised the problem of the succession. Cuthbert's response was to remind her of her half-brother Aldfrith (she had probably never met him) who was in the Irish kingdom of Dal Riata in Western Scotland. In due course, after Ecgfrith's death in battle against the Picts, Aldfrith did indeed succeed to the throne. Quite how this happened we do not know; but Northumbrian monastic contacts with Iona may have been decisive and this was the network within which Ælfflæd was able to operate.
This was not Ælfflæd's only contact with Cuthbert who was an intimate advisor to the royal household. The biographies record an incident at which he gave a prophecy concerning the death of someone in Ælfflæd's monastery. They were together at a meal and, if indeed they sat down together convivially, as one account puts it, we might suppose that table talk was not all solemn pieties. On another occasion, when Ælfflæd was ill she attributed her recovery to wearing a girdle which Cuthbert had provided. Behind the biographers' interests in prophecy and healing miracles there are signs of trust and a close working relationship.
The second crisis came at the end of Aldfrith's life in 705 when his son Osred was only 8 years old. A rival claimant to the throne, Eadwulf, who was presumably from a different branch of the royal house, came forward to challenge. In the event, Osred's party succeeded in securing the throne for the boy king and Bishop Wilfrid had emerged as his patron. The intricacies of all this are beyond recovery, but it seems that two crises had become intermingled: the succession to the throne and the restoration of Wilfrid.
Wilfrid had incurred the hostility of both Aldfrith and a Council of the church and had been expelled. He appealed to the Pope who exonerated him, wrote to the kings of Northumbria and Mercia and instructed the Archbishop of Canterbury to call a church synod to resolve matters. Aldfrith refused to reconsider Wilfrid's case and he died before the synod met. Some years before, at the beginning of Aldfrith's reign, the previous Archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore, had enlisted Ælfflæd's support in rehabilitating Wilfrid after an earlier expulsion. Now, at the Synod of Nidd in 706, Ælfflæd announced that King Aldfrith had relented on his death-bed and expressed the will to restore Wilfrid in line with the Pope's directions. She argued effectively on his behalf: Wilfrid's biographer called her 'the best of advisers and a constant source of strength'. We see signs of a party at work in church and state politics with Ælfflæd as both the voice of the ruling dynasty and as champion of Wilfrid, just as her mother had championed Wilfrid at the beginning of his career nearly 60 years earlier.
Whitby developed as a monastery for the Deiran branch of the royal house, in much the same way that Lindisfarne was a Bernician house and Ely an East Anglian one. With Eanflæd and Ælfflæd succeeding Hild, we see the post of abbess being kept within the household; and Oswiu, after distancing himself from Lindisfarne, turned to Whitby where in due course he was buried. During their joint rule, mother and daughter installed the remains of King Edwin in the monastery church after they had been found at the site of his last battle. There was perhaps a competitive edge here in relation to Lindisfarne-Bamburgh which held relics of King Oswald and possibly also in relation to Ælfflæd's sister Osthryth, Queen of Mercia, who had enshrined some of Oswald's remains at Bardney.
Bede disapproved of hereditary tenure of abbacies, and this was not the practice in his own monastery; but it was not uncommon and there is no suggestion that Ælfflæd was not fit for the post. In fact, the composition at Whitby during her tenure of a Life of Pope Gregory suggests that she maintained the tradition of learning which Hild had established; and Bede offers her the accolade that the nobility of her royal pedigree was enhanced by the more potent nobility of her great virtues. Ælfflæd died aged about 60 around 714 and was buried in the monastery church in Whitby alongside her mother, father and maternal grandfather.
