Happy St. Catherine's Day!

Ely Cathedral.  http://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-st-catherine-medieval-stained-glass-ely-cathedral-saint-catherines-31707697.html

This post is about Katherine Roet's name-saint, Catherine of Alexandria, who was reportedly a noblewoman who converted to Christianity in the early years of the fourth century of the common era, and then made the bad move of converting others, including the Emperor's wife and the good pagan officials who tried to show her the error of her spiritual ways.  She was broken on a wheel, this wife and holy woman, patron saint to both married as well as unmarried women, whose feast day is celebrated November 25; by the end of the medieval period, there were more than 60 English churches dedicated to St. Catherine.

This is the day likely celebrated by Katherine Roet annually as many people were unaware of the actual day of their birth and many others would be named for the closest saint days to their own birth, though one of her own sons not only knew the date of his birth but also celebrated it.  Thus we celebrate the 'birth' of Katherine Roet Swynford on November 25.  The year of her birth is commonly given as 1350 but there is no evidence to support this date and she may have actually been born up to 10 years earlier. For both Katherine and her sister Philippa, it makes for a much less harrowing consideration of the births of their daughters, Margaret Swynford and Elizabeth Chaucer, who were of age to enter holy orders on occasion of Richard II's 1377 accession. 

Saint's Lives can make for gruesome reading; one main standard is Jacob de Voragine's Golden Legend aka Lives of the Saints. Of Catherine's martyrdom, de Voragine has this to say, by the Emperor, for Catherine's crimes: 

...commanded that she should be despoiled naked and beaten with scorpions, and so beaten to be put in a dark prison, and there was tormented by hunger by the space of twelve days...

When Catherine still won't submit to the Emperor's no doubt considerable personal charms (and this seems to be one of those running themes for female martyrs -- it's always that they won't submit sexually to some heathen), he threatens her with still more bodily harm, to which she reportedly replies:

Tarry not to do what torments thou wilt, for I desire to offer to God my blood and my flesh like as he offered for me; he is my God, my father, my friend and mine only spouse

This really did her in, and the Emperor commands that his chief henchman

make four wheels of iron, environed with sharp razors, cutting so that she might be horribly all detrenched and cut in that torment, so that he might fear the other christian people by ensample of that cruel torment. And then was ordained that two wheels should turn against the other two by great force, so that they should break all that should be between the wheels... then the sergeants brought her out of the city and erased off her paps with tongs of iron, and after smote off her head.

Fast forward to medieval England. St. Catherine becomes an increasingly popular saint. By the mid-twelfth century she has a chapel dedicated to her at Bury St. Edmund's, and in the thirteenth century she has a manorial chapel in Whaplode (Lincs.) as well as a chapel in Lincoln Cathedral itself, which also boasted ownership of two relics of the saint: a finger kept in a long purse decorated with pearls as well as the curious relic of a section of chain with which Catherine is sometimes said to have bound the devil. (Walsh, Christine.  The Cult of St Katherine of Alexandria in Early Medieval Europe, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2007, pp. 123; 134-5).

By Katherine Swynford's time, Catherine of Alexandria, often identified in manuscripts and stained glass depictions by or with her signature symbol of a spiked wheel, had entered a super-pantheon of 14  Catholic saints who were the subject of increasing entreaties by victims of the Black Death, which is said to have decimated Europe's population by at least one-third.  Using religious imagery of the time, St. Catherine's wheel was further understood to associate with spinners (or, in the case of women, spinsters, as the -ster ending often denoted a female of a profession, whereas the -er ending indicated a male of the profession. From this we get our surnames of Brewer as well as Brewster; Webber as well as Webster, etc.), lace-makers, and wheel-wrights. She furthermore was a favorite saint of unmarried women 25 years of age or older (now we know where we get the term spinster, right?!), one of the few positive examples of an educated woman (medieval women could not attend the new universities that were popping up across medieval Europe), and I believe I've read that both in England as well as at Katherine Roet's sister's hometown of St. Waudru, Mons, St. Catherine's feast day was a day off for students attending school.

By Queen Catherine of Aragon's time (early/mid-16th Century), the Cult of St. Catherine had grown to encompass the making of Cattern Cakes (carroway-spiced things) and choir boys preaching sermons and begging for money.  

Le Puy Cathedral, Auvergne, France, Sacred Destinations' Photo Stream on Flickr

How this relates to Katherine Swynford -- well, she may well have been born sometime in November of a year we don't have even a clue. Then there's the novelist Seton's portrayal of how Katherine Swynford came by her coat of arms... I'd quote it if I had the book handy, but it's a nice little moving scene in which John of Gaunt, already taken with La Swynford, invents the double canting coat idea of Catherine wheels for a Katherine Swynford -- doubly punning in that Roet = Wheel in Latin, Katherine's name being, well, Catherine, and St. Catherine's symbol being a spiked wheel.

A few other bits of trivia: the Church apparently liked playing a musical chairs sort of game in assigning the feast day for this particular St. Catherine (why??? I don't know...); also, poor St. Catherine of Alexandria is among those saints who received some sort of demotion in 1969 (but is in good company with the revered St. Christopher, who also got demoted) when her feast day was taken off the Church's calendar. Also, among the voices Jeanne d'Arc heard -- yup, St. Catherine of Alexandria (bonus points to anyone who knows that Henry Beaufort presided over her execution).

Oh, and by the way, there was at least one other St. Catherine -- that of Sienna, who was a contemporary of Katherine Swynford, but she's a St. Catherine for a different day.

Expensive Roet arms glass at Ewelme.

As popular as Catherine the saint had become, adoption of her device in medieval English heraldry is slight at best:  There is the brass to the 2nd (?) wife Mercy De La Mare (or Roet?) on the Surrey tomb to the wife of the late 14th Century Speaker Sir Nicholas Carrew

The Death of the Duchess: Katherine Swynford (1350? - May 10, 1403)

Life was a whirl and a blur following Katherine's 1396 marriage to John of Gaunt, a marriage which made the great ladies of the land positively aghast with sputtering indignation (including, improbably, her daughter-in-law Mary de Bohun, wife of Gaunt's son Henry of Derby and Bolingbrook:  Froissart had a habit of getting things like names wrong, unfortunately, as in this instance; dear Mary de Bohun had died two years prior, as had Richard II's beloved Queen Anne of Bohemia).

Katherine's town house near Lincoln Cathedral, with its fine oriel window, a still largely medieval structure on Pottergate where she retired following the death of John of Gaunt in 1399.  (Photo (c) Carolyn Rust)

After the death of Richard II's first queen, Katherine found herself first lady in the realm.  As such, she was the leading lady to provide welcome to the little child-bride of Richard, Isabella of Valois, to England, giving the new queen expensive gifts that were child-sized.

Richard II tenderly displays affection for his young French bride.

The new bride was married to Richard in Calais, on all Saints Day; Katherine Swynford, Duchess of Lancaster, was on hand to greet and accompany Isabella to her wedding to Richard and Isabella soon spent time shuttling between the households/courts of Eleanor de Bohun, Duchess of Gloucester, and the Lady Katherine, Duchess of Lancaster for the duration of her queenly childhood.

Isabella's marriage, at the tender age of 5 or 6, to Richard was not popular in England.  Clearly before the canonical age of consent for marriage and intercourse, and despite Richard's being charmed by her such that the child was formally crowned queen in January of 1397, she would obviously not be bearing an heir to the English throne anytime soon.  Her fairy tale wedding carried in a litter with cloth of gold accompanied by the great Duchess of Lancaster in a magnificent tented city in which Richard and Isabella's father strove to out-do the other, despite her coronation shortly after both Katherine's own marriage to the Duke an hers to the King, Isabella would be a widow at ten years of age.

Perhaps Katherine, who clearly knew something of unpopular royal unions, was of assistance in consoling the girl and providing her charge with the knowledge she herself had learned as a long, hard price of marrying a prince.  Isabella's trousseau included her French dolls.  Yet she was of strong mind in her marriage to her prince, reportedly saying she was happy for it (at the age of six!) because she had been told that she 'would be a great Lady then.'

Richard's internal political affairs disrupted what might have been a long, mutually affectionate and productive union.  But he had his sights set on his uncle John of Gaunt's heir -- Henry of Derby/Bolingbrook, whom he'd banished and then changed the terms of the banishment and forfeiture of inheritance to life.  Suddenly, life for everyone around him had changed.

Richard II:  A True King's Fall
Froissart's Chroniques