# Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Ostrith

​OSTRITH or OSTHRYTH (d. 697), queen of Mercia, was the daughter of Oswy [q. v.], king of Bernicia, the brother and successor of St. Oswald (605?–642) [q. v.] She was therefore sister of Egfrid, king of Northumbria, St. Etheldreda's husband, and of Elflad, who succeeded St. Hilda [q. v.] as abbess of Whitby. Ostrith became the wife of Ethelred, king of Mercia, who had succeeded his brother Wulfere [q. v.] in 676. He was the third son of Penaa [q. v.l, king of Mercia, the fierce old pagan who had killed five kings in battle, including Ostrith's maternal grandfather Edwin, and her sainted uncle Oswald. But 'out of the eater came meat.' Penda's sons and daughters were as earnest in the support of the Christian faith as he had been in its destruction. Ostrith and her husband were largely instrumental in building up the church in their kingdom, especially in the endowment of monastic houses, which in those early times were, as missionary centres, the chief instruments in the propagation of religion. The matrimonial alliance of the two royal houses was ineffectual to put an end to the long-standing feud between Mercia and Northumbria. Once more Lindsey ​was the battlefield. In 679 Egfrid crossed the Mercian border, and a battle took place near the Trent, in which Ostrith's young brother Alfwin, dearly loved in both kingdoms, fell (Bæda, Hist. Eccl. iv. 21). Peace was eventually made through the wise counsels of Archbishop Theodore. As one of the conditions, Ostrith and her husband insisted on the immediate banishment from Mercia of Wilfrid, whom in 681, on his expulsion from Northumbria by Egfrid, Ethelred's nephew, the son of Iris brother Wulfere, the sub-king Berhtwald had received into his province, and bestowed land to found a monastic house. Subsequently Ostrith removed the bones of her uncle St. Oswald to the great abbey of Bardney, near Lincoln, which, if not actually founded by her husband, had been largely enriched by him and his queen. The monks, however, who could not forget or forgive the wrongs Lindsey had received from Northumbria, refused to admit the remains of a member of the royal house from which their province had suffered so much. The wain containing Oswald's relics was stopped at the abbey gates. But in the night a bright pillar of light appearing above it testified to the sanctity of the martyred king, and convinced the monks of their error, which they atoned for by the ready admission of the coffin the next morning (ib. iii. 11). The vindictive spirit of the Mercians was more fatally exhibited in 697 in the murder of Ostrith by the nobles of the northern part of the kingdom, on the south bank of the Humber, ' a primatibus Merciorum interempta' (ib. v. 24; Flor. Wig. sub ann. 696; Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, sub ann. 697; Matt. Westm. 'crudeliter necaverunt'). Seven years later, in 704, Ethelred abdicated the throne, and retired to Bardney, where he was 'shorn as a monk,' became abbot, and died in 716. The name of one son of Ostrith and Ethelred is recorded, Ceolred, who succeeded his cousin Cenred in 709, and died in 716, the same year with his father.
[Bæda, as referred to above; Bright's Early English Church, pp. 159, 311-95; Lappenbergs England under the Anglo-Saxon Kings, i. 222.]
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