Elizabeth Elstob (1683-1756)

Bishop’s Chaplain Lindsay Llewellyn-MacDuff introduces the life of the Anglo-Saxon scholar behind the annotation of Saxon characters at the opening of Textus Roffensis, produced during the copying of her facsimile now to be found in the British Library.

Elizabeth Elstob’s copy of the Textus is a feat of scholarship but also of determination. The 16th century dissolution of the monasteries was a disaster for women's education and intellectual credibility. Although in the initial fervour the Renaissance women like Anne Boleyn and Margaret More were well educated, this inclination faded away through the next century. By the seventeenth century fully 90% of women were left illiterate or semiliterate, equipped to follow the household accounts and the Prayer Book and no more. Many of them were discouraged from even discussing God, as a subject out of their sphere.

Enter Elizabeth Elstob. Although she had an education for her early childhood, EE and her brother, William, are orphaned when Elizabeth was only eight years old. Elstob was sent to live with her uncle Charles Elstob, a Prebendary at Canterbury Cathedral. He immediately put a stop to her studies, having Views on the education of women. Nevertheless his Francophone wife, Matilda continued to give her French literature to read and Elstob extracts what learning she can from an arid environment.

While Elstob was cloistered with her uncle, her brother went to Oxford with a view to ordination. There he encounters George Hicks, the famous non-juror and, more importantly, a scholar of things Anglo-Saxon. This is crucial for sister Elizabeth. William becomes part of a little Oxford sect of Saxon scholars. In 1703 William became the rector of a joint benefice of St Swithin's and St Mary's in Bothow, London, and Elizabeth joined him there. Her studies began afresh in the new context her brother’s Oxford set. She quickly mastered Old English and the Elstob house became a Saxonist gathering house.

The younger sister made a name for herself translating the Old English Life of Pope Gregory the Great by the Benedictine monk Ælfric of Eynsham (that same who translated OEIH). This is a truly beautiful work, with ornaments and engraved initials. It's an outstanding book, full of textual notes and a complete translation on the facing pages. What makes it really remarkable is the preface that Elstob wrote. In it she plots a spiritual genealogy of women, a line of authoritative female figures through the English church. Using her dedication to Queen Anne as a springboard she lists a line of queens she describes as pivotal to the English faith. The opening initial "I" is illustrated with portraits of saints Helena, Bertha, and the Virgin Mary as well as Queens Elizabeth and Anne, whose significance she lauds extensively.

This enables her preface vigorously to defend female learning, quoting from the Church Fathers' defence of the same. She argues that learning is good for the soul of both men and women, as well as equipping them with logical, ordered thought for the undertaking of their duties however lofty or domestic. She also accuses men of being "Admirers of Ignorance," who are not able to bear any woman to be better educated than themselves.

She goes on, as well as emphasising the 'liberties' of the English church given by Gregory to Augustine (carrying this through to look at the Synod of Whitby), to connect Gregory's purchase and liberation of the Anglian slaves with slavery practised by British plantation holders. These slaves, too, she says, should be liberated both from their literal shackles and also the figurative ones of ignorance and paganism. She is adamant that the slaves in the New World ought to be freed and educated both academically and in the faith of the people who had bought them.

(Her critic Thomas Hearne managed at the same time to condemn the work as a "farrago of vanities" – how dare she address both politics and religion – but also to allege that the work is too well researched to be hers, and must be the work of her brother.)

Of more interest to us here, however, is the work she did with her brother creating a copy of the Textus Roffensis - a copy so good that the scholar Humphrey Wanley pays her five guineas for it. Today it is still generally considered one of the finest examples of its kind. (In 1753, nearly 35 years later, it was part of a collection sold on to the Nation for £10,000.) The Textus Roffensis was an ancient law code spliced onto a thorough inventory of Rochester Cathedral. It is a very beautiful window onto Anglo-Saxon and early Norman Kent. It’s one of only four books listed in the Rochester collection as a “textus”, one of only two to survive to this day. Like the other surviving textus (Goda’s Gospel) this is described as textus de ecclesiae (Church) rather than the more usual textus de claustro (cloister). Textus sets it apart as a precious text; de ecclesiae suggests that it was kept, not in the library or the scriptorium, but in the church proper, in a place of honour.

Elizabeth Elstob’s facsmile copy of the illuminated foundation charter in Textus Roffensis, folio 119r. British Library, Harley 1866.

This precious text we have better access to because of Elstob. In fact, so keen was she to improve access to this manuscript that was already half a century older than and then some, that she thoughtfully added to the original manuscript a text a key to the Anglo-Saxon script!

Dr Christopher Monk takes a look at the 'Saxon Characters' Elstob left behind in the cathedral's manuscript, Textus Roffensis, one of the most important books to preserve the law codes of early medieval England. Open folio in new tab.

This is, in fact, something of a feature of her work. Throughout her heyday works consistently improve access to the language and learning of the old English church. She set out to encourage and assist other women to discover the joy she has in the old Anglo-Saxon texts. Her grammar written in 1715, just before her brother died, is a response to a conversation with the daughter of the Dean of Canterbury, Mary Stanhope. Stanhope expressed an interest in learning Old English so Elstob, without blinking, immediately produced a grammar accessible to those without a classical education. She wrote,

"Our Earthly Possessions are truly enough called a Patrimony, as derived to us by the Industry of our Fathers; But the Language we speak is our Mother Tongue; And who so proper to play the Criticks in this is the Females?"

This export of the Canterbury precincts is a woman who not only participated in the revival of Anglo-Saxon studies in this country, she was a crucial part of it. Moreover, she applied her studies to the issues of the day, to her understanding of herself as a woman of faith and conscience. In her writings she is generally trying to connect the life of her own church in her age with that of the oldest church tradition in her country. She is almost as much of a church historian as a linguist.

In the space of a dozen years she publishes the Old English Life of Pope Gregory the Great, as well as an edition of the Latin Athanasian Creed with Old English notes, the first ever Old English grammar written in modern English, the copy of the Textus Roffensis for Humphrey Wanley, a further pamphlet on women's scholarship and begins the extensive work of attempting to produce a complete edition of Ælfric's Homilies.

She is prolific and brilliant. But in 1714 Queen Anne dies, and Elstob is not the only woman whose academic credibility is severely crippled by her loss. Then the following year her brother dies, taking with him her economic and social viability, and finally her principal academic patron also dies, the last straw for her academic career. She never completes her work on Ælfric's Homilies.

Hereafter, Elstob vanishes into the shadows. The fragility of her place at the edge of male patronage is exposed. She goes from being at the heart of an academic project in the centre of the London intelligentsia, to a shabby genteel woman, scratching a living. She dies a nobody, in 1758.

"Why therefore should these few among us, who are Lovers of Learning, although no better account cou'd be given of it then it's being a Diversion, be denied the Benefit and Pleasure of it, which is both so innocent and so improving?"  (Elizabeth Elstob, Preface to Old English Life of Pope Gregory the Great)

Lindsay Llewellyn-MacDuff
Bishop’s Chaplain

Extract from Bertha's Daughters: A History of the Church in Kent