Saint Radegund (her story)

 

Saint Radegund (518–587)

Queen of France & Saint — Feast Day: August 13 

Stained-glass window of Saint Radegunde
to be seen in the church of Giverny
(left transept)

The parish church of Giverny is dedicated to Saint Radegund. We invite you to discover the extraordinary story of this woman, as recounted by the great writer Henri Pourrat.

The first stained-glass window (shown here) can be seen in the church at Giverny. The other two stained-glass windows are located in the Poitou region.

The pictures show her as a queen, beneath a mantle strewn with fleurs-de-lis. Or else she is there behind a field of oats that have sprung up in an instant, hiding her from the king who is racing after her…

There is something like a swell of Merovingian oats — murders, tortures, calamities, sorceries — growing up to hide the saintly queen from us today. Too rank with green, the chronicles of those days seem like the tales of some dreadful village, where quarrels over inheritances  and vendettas always end badly.

What a novel is the story of this girl from Thuringia. Her father, with all his people, is massacred by her uncle. This murderous uncle, who has called in the Frankish kings, Thierry and Chlothar, and then tries to deceive them, is himself massacred by them. Only Radegund and her little brother escape these butcheries.

She is only eleven; but already she is beautiful. Chlothar tells himself that one day he will take her for his wife. He has her brought to his house at Athies, near Péronne. He entrusts her to Saint Medard, bishop of Noyon. Saint Medard baptizes her and teaches her to read the Scriptures in Greek and Latin.

And so there she is, in the villa at Athies, nobly brought up. To the poor she gives alms and care; she tends their wounds, washes them, prepares strengthening drinks for them to take when they come out of the baths—for Christian patricians still live in the Roman fashion. The children she teaches to sing hymns and form processions—we even know the name of the boy who carried the wooden cross. She refreshes them with a little meal made from what she has taken away from her own table; she gives them the clothes she has cut out; and, in the end, she invents the “youth movements.” And for herself, she feels that it is through deprivation and prayer that one comes to live a higher life, a life in which the soul truly becomes queen.

But Chlothar, who has already had three wives, fully intends to marry her. She escapes from the villa. He has her caught in a village. He marries her at Soissons. The people light great bonfires of rejoicing, hoping much from such a queen, who might soften a king somewhat rough in his ways.

Chlothar will soon complain that he has married nothing but a nun, an hospital servant!—She has founded a hospital in the village of Athies.—It angers him to see her running off to these houses to gather up the miserable, as though she took more pleasure in being with these stinkers than with ladies and princesses. And when he asks her to supper, the answer he gets is that she is at prayer.

He, for his part, sticks to his trade as king, which is first of all to preserve his kingdom. One day he tells himself that the queen’s young brother might well take it into his head to claim his rights. The safest thing would be to get rid of him. He gets rid of him.

Radegund, then, how could she remain his companion in life? The wife of the man who had slaughtered her brother? She asks permission to withdraw into a monastery. He grants it.—She hastens to Saint Medard at Noyon. But lords arrive from the court, quoting the Gospel—*What God has joined together, let no man put asunder*. They point out to the bishop that if he deprives the king of his wife, he is offending the king.

Then she enters the sacristy, cuts off her hair, puts on the nun’s habit, and comes back before Medard.

“If you fear men more than God, and if you delay in consecrating me, it is to the supreme Shepherd that you will have to give account of His sheep.”

And Saint Medard rises and lays his hands upon her. 

Stained-glass window of Saint Radegund 
in the Church of Saint-Hilaire-de-Poitiers

She set out for an estate Chlothar had given her, at Saix, in Poitou. She went by way of Tours, to pray at the place where, the year before, Queen Clotilde had died—she too had fled from that red-handed Chlothar…

Radegund was scarcely twenty-five, and she was very beautiful. Soon word spread that the king meant to take her back.

Greatly alarmed, she withdrew into the church of Saint Hilary and wrote to Chlothar, asking him to leave her her freedom. As a recluse had foretold her, she saw the king change his mind and give up all thought of taking her back.

At Saix, Radegund had already been living a monastic life. A holy priest of the country had given her an iron chain to wear against her flesh, and she had given him, in return, garments woven by her own hands.—It is for the man to teach that austerity by which alone one rises; for the woman, to practise that gentle charity by which one remains human.

But as soon as she could, she went to settle at Poitiers. Near Ligugé, she had a monastery built. Behind the walls with their crenellated towers—for she knew how full the age was of violence—she shut herself in with two hundred young women. And it is then that she would have the bonfires lit! She knows the court, its bloody tales. For her, life is here, in the monastery where every day two hours are given to the study of letters; and the nuns who are best learned copy these books so that they may be spread abroad. Outside study and reading, they sing the offices; or, like the women on the estates, they spin, weave, and sew.

The years pass. Chlothar has become sole master of the Frankish monarchy. His son Chramn has rebelled; they catch him and his people in a fisherman’s hut: Chlothar has the hut set on fire. After this he goes to Tours on a pilgrimage of devotion. And when people think he may go as far as Poitou, the rumor spreads once again that he will take Radegund back.

She, more alarmed than ever, writes to Saint Germain of Paris. He comes to Tours. He throws himself at the king’s feet before the tomb of Saint Martin. By dint of prayers, he persuades him to abandon the idea of going to Poitiers. And the king, in turn, throws himself at the bishop’s feet. At least, let Radegund never cease, as she did when she was near him, to commend him to God; he knows only too well how easily he follows the counsels of evil men and yields to wickedness.

Radegund had no wish to become queen again. Nor even to remain abbess any longer. She wants more: to make herself the least of her sisters. She carries wood to the kitchen, washes the herbs, sets the pot upon the fire, prepares the soups and cleans the dishes. Venantius Fortunatus wrote that she scraped the dirt from her sisters’ shoes and greased them; she had even taken it upon herself to keep the latrines clean. Humility with a beautiful smile.

She died thus, among her sisters, on August 13, 587.

She remembered that she had once been a queen only in order to ask the emperor of Constantinople for a fragment of the True Cross—from which the monastery has ever since taken the name of Sainte-Croix. It was to welcome the relic that Fortunatus composed the Vexilla Regis  prodeunt.

What great and delicate artists those men were—the makers of enamels, goldsmiths and embroiderers. These Merovingians seem somewhat shaggy and hairy in their heavy, deeply folded robes. Yet their weighty fabrics may have been more astonishing than the Bayeux Tapestry, their wooden churches than the Russian churches of the Middle Ages, some of which, beautiful as dreams, have survived deep in the forests, beyond the birch trees.

Stained-glass window of Saint Radegund
Abbey of Notre-Dame-de-Beauchêne
Poitou

Little remains of their works. But we still have some of those admirable church songs, born then in the monasteries. Such is the office for Good Friday, the Adoration of the Cross.

Rome would shorten it, set it right: the fact remains that Rome would adopt this Gallican liturgy in many respects. So it was that the universal Church often found its voice in some Merovingian abbey, lost among meadow-orchards and patches of rye.

In the centuries of that monarchy, which was a great agricultural monarchy, this country was already breathing its spirit over Europe through its liturgy, just as it would do in the twelfth century through courtly poetry, and later through its literature, its manners, and its arts.

Henri Pourrat, Saints of France (1951)