Adducentur regi virgines post eam: proximæ eius afferentur tibi. Afferentur in lætitia et exsultatione: adducentur in templum regis. “After her shall virgins be brought to the king: her neighbours shall be brought to thee. They shall be brought with gladness and rejoicing: they shall be brought into the temple of the king.” — Psalm 44:15-16
I. A note on this entry
St. Bertille has never had a Mass in the Roman Missal. Her cult was always local: at Chelles, where she ruled and where her body lies, at Jouarre, where she was formed, and in the churches of the region around Paris and Meaux. The present Roman Martyrology names her on the fifth of November as the first abbess of Chelles. In the universal calendar of 1962 today is a feria, and the Mass is that of the preceding Sunday. In many dioceses the fifth of November has long been kept as the Feast of the Holy Relics, and this is a fitting day to remember a woman whose own relics have been honoured for more than eight hundred years, and who sent the relics of the saints across the sea to help plant the faith in England.
She is a saint of the Merovingian Church, the Church of the Frankish kingdoms in the century after St. Clotilde and St. Cloud. It was a violent century, ruled by kings who murdered their kin and by queens who were sometimes no better. It was also one of the great ages of monastic foundation in the West. Men and women of the Frankish nobility gave up their lands and their prospects to found or enter monasteries, and the countryside of northern Gaul filled with houses of prayer. Bertille was one of those women. Her life is known almost entirely from a single Life, written at Chelles about a century after her death. It is a sober document, short on marvels, and what it remembers most about her is her obedience.
II. Soissons and the household of St. Ouen
Bertille was born in the territory of Soissons, into a noble Frankish family, probably in the reign of King Dagobert I (629–639). Her Life says that from childhood she preferred prayer to the company and amusements of her rank, and that as she grew she came to want to leave the world altogether. She did not dare tell her parents.
She told St. Ouen instead. Ouen, also called Dado, was then one of the great men of Dagobert’s court, the king’s referendary, and in 641 he became bishop of Rouen. He came from a family that had given itself to the monastic life. Jonas of Bobbio, the biographer of St. Columbanus, records that when the Irish abbot passed through the region on his way into exile, he stayed at the house of a nobleman named Authari and blessed his young sons, Ado and Dado (Vita Columbani I.26). Both boys grew up to be founders. Dado, our St. Ouen, founded the abbey of Rebais. His elder brother Ado founded Jouarre, in the valley of the Marne near Meaux, and took the monastic habit there himself.
Ouen encouraged Bertille’s vocation. When her parents finally learned of it, God inclined them, as Butler puts it, not to oppose her, and they brought her to Jouarre themselves.
III. Jouarre
Jouarre was a double foundation: a monastery of men and, beside it, a house of women that soon became the principal community. It followed the discipline that Columbanus had brought from Ireland, which in these houses was gradually combined with the Rule of St. Benedict. Its first abbess was Theodechild, a noblewoman probably formed at the abbey of Faremoutiers, which was itself a daughter of the Columbanian movement. Theodechild’s brother was Agilbert, who became bishop of the West Saxons in England, took part in the Synod of Whitby in 664, and ended his life as bishop of Paris. Brother and sister lie today in the ancient crypt of Jouarre, one of the oldest surviving buildings in France.
Bertille was received there with joy, and she was trained in the strict observance of the house. Her Life lists the offices she held, and the list is a portrait of her. She cared for the guests. She nursed the sick. She had charge of the children who were being educated in the monastery. Each of these is a work of service, and each requires patience more than talent. She did them well enough to be chosen at last as prioress, to assist the abbess in governing the house.
The Life insists on one virtue above all: obedience. It does not mean the obedience of a timid person who never thinks for herself. It means the obedience of a strong will that has learned to bend. The episode that follows shows that her will needed bending.
IV. The sister who was called back
The Life tells a story about Bertille that a less honest biographer would have left out. She had a temper.
One of the sisters at Jouarre, troubled in mind, spoke to her in anger. Bertille answered by calling down the judgment of God on her. The quarrel was patched up and the fault forgiven, but Bertille could not put her own words out of her mind. Not long afterward the sister died suddenly, choked by an attack of asthma, before Bertille had made her peace with her.
Bertille heard the psalms of the funeral and asked what they meant. When she was told, she was terrified. She went to the body, laid her hand on the dead sister’s breast, and in the name of Jesus Christ begged that the soul be allowed to return long enough for the two of them to be reconciled. The sister drew breath, opened her eyes, and asked why Bertille had called her back from the way of light. Bertille humbly begged her forgiveness. The sister gave it, and asked to be allowed to go in peace. Bertille gave her leave, and she died again.
The story belongs to traditio pia, the devout memory of Chelles, and it should be received as such rather than as history in the strict sense. But we should notice what kind of story it is. It is not told to make Bertille look powerful. It is told to show that she was a sinner who took her sin seriously. The cruelty of a curse spoken in anger is a small thing in the eyes of the world. In Bertille’s eyes it was serious enough to bring her to her knees beside a corpse. Our Lord said, If therefore thou offer thy gift at the altar, and there thou remember that thy brother hath any thing against thee; leave there thy offering before the altar, and go first to be reconciled to thy brother: and then coming thou shalt offer thy gift (Matt. 5:23-24). And St. Paul: Be angry, and sin not. Let not the sun go down upon your anger (Eph. 4:26). Bertille learned that lesson in the hardest possible way, and she spent the rest of her life as a byword for gentleness.
V. Chelles
Chelles lies on the Marne a few leagues east of Paris. It was a royal estate of the Merovingian kings, and it had a dark history. In 584 King Chilperic I was stabbed to death there as he returned from hunting, as Gregory of Tours records (Historia Francorum VI.46). An old tradition holds that St. Clotilde, the wife of Clovis, had founded a small house of religious women on the estate, dedicated to St. George. Whatever its beginnings, it was the queen Bathild who made Chelles a great abbey.
Bathild’s own story is one of the most remarkable of the age. She was an Anglo-Saxon girl, sold as a slave into Gaul, who served in the household of the mayor of the palace Erchinoald. King Clovis II noticed her and married her. After his death in 657 she ruled as regent for her young son Clothar III. Her Life, written at Chelles soon after her death, credits her with forbidding the sale of Christian captives and with ransoming slaves. She was a generous patron of monasteries, and among her foundations were Corbie for men and Chelles for women. About the year 658 to 660 she refounded and richly endowed Chelles, and built there a church of the Holy Cross.
She needed nuns to fill it and an abbess to rule them. She asked Theodechild of Jouarre to send a company of the most experienced sisters of her house, women who could train novices in the monastic life. Theodechild sent Bertille at their head, and Bertille became the first abbess of Chelles.
VI. Two queens under obedience
The Life says Bertille’s reputation drew women to Chelles from far away, and some of them were royal. The two most famous were queens.
Bathild. In 664 or 665 a faction of the Frankish nobles led by Ebroin, the new mayor of the palace, pushed Bathild out of power. Her Life presents her retirement to Chelles as her own wish, long cherished. Modern historians think it was at least partly forced. Either way, the queen who had ruled the Frankish kingdom came to Chelles, received the habit from Bertille’s hands, and lived the rest of her life under obedience to the abbess she had appointed. Her biographer, who knew her, says that she served the sisters as the least among them. She worked in the kitchen, cared for the sick, and was obedient to Bertille as to a mother. She died at Chelles on the thirtieth of January, 680, and she was buried there. Her linen tunic, embroidered with a necklace and a cross, is still kept at Chelles among her relics.
It is worth pausing over this. Bertille was a noblewoman of Soissons whom Bathild had raised to her office. Now the foundress was her subject. Each woman would have been tempted, in her own way: the abbess to defer to the queen, the queen to command the abbess. The tradition of Chelles remembered that neither gave way to the temptation. Bertille governed Bathild as she governed any other sister, and Bathild obeyed her as any other sister would. He that is the greater among you, let him become as the younger; and he that is the leader, as he that serveth (Luke 22:26).
Hereswith. The Venerable Bede tells us of another queen at Chelles (Historia Ecclesiastica IV.23). Hereswith was a princess of the royal house of Northumbria, the elder sister of St. Hilda, and she had married into the royal family of the East Angles. In widowhood she went over to Gaul and became a nun at Chelles, which Bede calls Cale. Hilda intended to follow her there, and spent a year in East Anglia waiting to cross the sea. St. Aidan called her back to Northumbria instead, and she became the great abbess of Whitby. So the most famous abbess of Anglo-Saxon England very nearly became a nun under the rule of Bertille.
There is a difficulty here, and it is better to name it than to hide it. Bede places Hilda’s plan to join her sister in about 647. Bathild did not refound Chelles until about ten years later. Either Hereswith first entered the older and smaller house of Clotilde’s tradition and lived on into Bertille’s time, or Bede, writing eighty years afterward, gave the abbey the name by which it was famous in his own day. The older lives of Bertille, following Butler, solve the problem by placing her appointment in 646 and her death in 692. The chronology of Bathild’s reign makes that difficult to accept, and modern historians place her death about 704 or 705.
VII. Across the sea
Bede tells us in another place why English women were found in Frankish monasteries at all (Historia Ecclesiastica III.8). In the first generations after the conversion there were few monasteries in England, and many English men and women crossed to Gaul to enter religion. Bede names three houses in particular: Faremoutiers in Brie, Andelys, and Chelles. Daughters of the kings of Kent and East Anglia took the veil in these houses, and some of them ruled them as abbesses.
Bertille’s Life tells the other half of the story. When the faith was established and English kings wished to found monasteries of their own, they sent messengers across the sea to Chelles. They asked the abbess for disciples who could teach the monastic life. Bertille sent them sisters and brothers, and with them relics of the saints and many books. The house that had received English women now returned the gift.
This is a small detail in a short Life, but it is a significant one. Historians of the period have long recognised Chelles as one of the great centres of learning in Frankish Gaul. In the time of Charlemagne its abbess was his sister Gisela, and its nuns copied books in a distinctive script of their own, which palaeographers can still identify. That scriptorium belongs to a later generation. But the Life written there remembered that the abbey’s first abbess had already been sending books over the sea, along with the relics of the saints and the women who would teach the English to pray. Every scribe instructed in the kingdom of heaven, is like to a man that is a householder, who bringeth forth out of his treasure new things and old (Matt. 13:52).
VIII. Death and cultus
Chelles under Bertille became a double monastery like Jouarre. Men, too, came to put themselves under her direction, and a community of monks grew up beside the nuns. She ruled both for forty-six years.
Her Life says that in old age she did not relax her discipline. She increased it. She prayed more, fasted more, and kept vigil more as her strength failed, as though she were hurrying to finish a task before the light went. She died at Chelles on the fifth of November, about the year 705, and she was buried in her abbey.
The community kept her memory, and about a century later one of its members, probably a nun, wrote her Life. In 1185 her relics were solemnly raised and translated, and the anniversary of that translation, the twenty-sixth of May, was kept at Chelles as a second feast. The abbey survived for more than eleven hundred years. It was suppressed at the Revolution and its buildings were pulled down. The faithful of Chelles saved the relics of their saints and carried them to the parish church of Saint-André, where those of Bertille and Bathild rest today. Her head is kept at Jouarre, the house where she first received the veil.
Because she lived before the schism of East and West, she is also venerated among the Western saints by some of the Orthodox.
IX. What her life teaches
That the virtue of a superior is the virtue of a subject. Bertille spent half her life in obedience and half in command, and her Life praises her for the same virtue in both. She was a good abbess because she had been a good nun. She had learned in the guest-house, the infirmary, and the schoolroom that authority in the Church is service. St. Benedict tells the abbot that he should strive to be loved rather than feared, plus amari quam timeri (Rule, ch. 64), and that he must give an account to God for every soul in his care (ch. 2). Obey your prelates, says the Apostle, for they watch as being to render an account of your souls (Heb. 13:17). Bertille knew she would give that account, and she governed accordingly.
That a sin of the tongue is a real sin. The saints did not think anger was a small matter, and Bertille’s story shows why. She spoke a curse in anger, the sister died, and the chance to be reconciled seemed lost. We are rarely given such a dramatic lesson, but the lesson is the same for us. The angry word we refuse to take back may be the last word we ever speak to someone. Reconcile quickly.
That rank is nothing in the cloister. Bathild, who had been a slave and then a queen, finished her life as a nun under obedience. Bertille, who had been placed in office by Bathild, governed her without flattery. Chelles was a place where the great of the world learned that before God they were neither great nor small. The daughters of kings have delighted thee in thy glory (Ps. 44:10), and the glory they found at Chelles was the glory of obedience.
That holiness is passed on. Bertille received her vocation through St. Ouen, whose family Columbanus had blessed. She was formed by Theodechild, herself formed in the school of Faremoutiers. She formed in turn the nuns of Chelles, and through them the first monasteries of English women. The saints come in chains of this kind. Each one hands on what was received, together with relics, books, and the habits of prayer.
That age is no excuse for slackness. Bertille did not treat her old age as a well-earned rest from penance. She treated it as the last stretch of a race. Forgetting the things that are behind, and stretching forth myself to those that are before, I pursue towards the mark (Phil. 3:13-14).
Practice
Examine. Is there someone to whom I have spoken in anger and never made it right? Have I told myself the matter was too small to mention? How do I obey those placed over me: willingly, or with resentment and complaint? If I have authority over others, at home or at work, do I exercise it as a service for which I will render an account to God? Do I treat people differently according to their rank or importance? As I grow older, am I growing more fervent, or am I letting go?
Do. Before this day ends, go to someone you have hurt with words and ask forgiveness, plainly and without excuses. If that person has died, pray for him or her, and have a Mass offered if you can. Take on one task of service this week of the kind Bertille did at Jouarre: care for a guest, visit someone sick, or spend real time teaching a child. Give a good Catholic book to someone who would benefit from it, as Bertille sent books across the sea.
Pray. St. Bertille has no Collect in the 1962 Missal. Pray instead the Collect of today’s Mass, which asks release from the bonds of sins contracted through our frailty, the very bonds Bertille felt so keenly at the deathbed of her sister:
Absolve, quæsumus, Domine, tuorum delicta populorum: ut a peccatorum nexibus, quæ pro nostra fragilitate contraximus, tua benignitate liberemur. Per Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum Filium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus, per omnia sæcula sæculorum.
“Absolve, we beseech Thee, O Lord, the offences of Thy people: that by Thy bountiful goodness we may be set free from the bonds of the sins which we have contracted through our frailty. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end.”
Aspiration. Irascimini, et nolite peccare: sol non occidat super iracundiam vestram. “Be angry, and sin not. Let not the sun go down upon your anger.”
Devote. It is the week of the holy souls and, in many places, the Feast of the Holy Relics. Pray today for the souls of those with whom you parted in anger, and for all religious women who have died, especially abbesses and superiors, who must render an account for many souls. Ask St. Bertille to obtain for you a meek tongue and an obedient heart.
If you wish to go deeper: the Lives of the Saints path sets Bertille among the holy women of Merovingian Gaul: St. Clotilde, St. Bathild, St. Theodechild of Jouarre, St. Fara of Faremoutiers, and St. Gertrude of Nivelles. It also traces their bonds with the abbesses of Anglo-Saxon England, from St. Hilda of Whitby to the daughters of King Anna. The Church History path follows the Columbanian movement in Gaul, the rise of the double monasteries, and the exchange of monks, nuns, relics, and books between Francia and England that would one day bring St. Boniface and his English helpers back across the sea to evangelise Germany. The Theology and Doctrine path treats St. Thomas on obedience (II-II, q. 104), on meekness (II-II, q. 157), and on anger (II-II, q. 158). The Spiritual Practices path takes up the custody of the tongue, the practice of quick reconciliation, and fraternal charity in community life.
Sancta Bertilla, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: the Holy Scriptures in the Douay-Rheims version with the Vulgate; the Vita Bertilae abbatissae Calensis (ed. W. Levison, MGH, Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum VI, 1913), in the English translation of J. A. McNamara and J. E. Halborg, Sainted Women of the Dark Ages (Durham, N.C., 1992); the Vita Domnae Balthildis (MGH, SRM II); Jonas of Bobbio, Vita Columbani I.26; Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum VI.46; St. Bede the Venerable, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum III.8 and IV.23; the Rule of St. Benedict; Mabillon, Acta Sanctorum Ordinis S. Benedicti III; Butler’s Lives of the Saints*; the* New Catholic Encyclopedia*; the Roman Martyrology; R. McKitterick, “Nuns’ Scriptoria in England and Francia in the Eighth Century,”* Francia 19/1 (1992). The words of her Life are given in paraphrase. The episode of the sister recalled from death is given as the tradition of Chelles.