St. Bertha, Queen of Kent
Died circa 612.
Stained glass window of St. Bertha at St Martin’s Church, Canterbury. Photo taken by Clerk of Oxford.
She was a Frankish princess, daughter of Charibert and the pious Ingoberga. In marrying the pagan King Ethelbert of Kent, she brought her chaplain Liudhard with her, and restored a Christian church in Canterbury, which dated form the Roman occupation, dedicating it to St. Martin. The present St. Martin’s at Canterbury occupies the same site. St. Augustine, who was sent by Gregory the Great to preach the Gospel in England in 596, no doubt owed much of his favourable reception to the influence of Bertha. St. Gregory in 601 addressed to her a letter of thanks, which is still preserved. It is printed in Haddan and Stubbs, III, 17. Ethelbert himself was baptized on Whitsunday in 597, and Canterbury became the mother-church of England. Bertha was sometimes styled “Saint”, but there is no clear evidence of cultus. (See, on this point, the poems of Reginald of Canterbury in the “Neues Archiv”, xiii.) Fuller accounts of Bertha will be found in Lingard, “Anglo-Saxon Church;” “Dict. Nat. Biog.”, Plummer, “Bede”, and Routledge, “Church of St. Martin”.
Dunbar, Dictionary of Saintly Women (London, 1904); Chevalier, Repertoire des sources historiques: Bio-Bibliographie (Paris, 1905).
HERBERT THURSTON (Catholic Encyclopedia)
