St Kyneburgha – 900 years young!

Illustration by Helen Wallace

Even in the UK where a lot of things are famously quite old, a 900-year anniversary is a very special occasion!
Sometimes it is the sort of thing we take for granted – and we do forget that having the opportunity of a 900th anniversary is pretty amazing! The cathedral had its 900th anniversary in 2018, of course, and there is an important link between Kyneburgha’s church and the cathedral, which is Kyneburgha and her brothers were instigators of the original Peterborough Cathedral back in the seventh century.

A powerful Saxon family who were also Christians?
Their father was King Penda, a pagan – and proudly pagan – but he was comfortable with his children being Christian, because this was a time when politics and religion were entirely tied up. Kyneburgha and her brother Peada were both married into the Northumbrian royal family, but Peada was then murdered by his wife! Once Kyneburgha’s husband was also probably murdered, Kyneburgha returned to Mercia to establish the religious community that became St Kyneburgha’s Church.

What’s now Castor, Ailsworth and Water Newton was significant back then as the location of the Roman town of Durobrivae, wasn’t it?
Kyneburgha will have established her abbey in Castor partly because it’s got this massive Roman palace, which might have been a bit crumbly, but given that bits of it were still standing when Edmund Artis (a pioneer of archaeology who carried out many digs at Castor in the 1820s) was excavating the area, it’s in pretty good shape as an established location. What we have now is centuries of history layered on top of each other.

Is this what the celebrations will be about – the community and the people who have been part of the church over the centuries?
Yes, and we’re trying to make it about the building itself, as well. For example, one of the fabulous things about it is the craftsmanship, and the people who will have designed and put all those phenomenal details into the church would have been stonemasons, carpenters – ordinary trades people we don’t often think about when we talk about historic buildings. A few years ago I got talking with a stonemason in the village, and I had a very nice picture of some of the stone carving inside the church. I showed it to him and said, ‘What would have inspired a stonemason to have made this?’ The reply was: ‘He wanted to be sure he was going to get paid at the end of the week!’