A Severed Hand

Rose Higham-Stainton

I met a man at Ely station; it was dusk and sun rays were streaking perpendicular through the sky, lifting the lines of the dykes and tracks around. He wore a hat—a new version of an old style—and led me to a church in a cul-de-sac. The door had been left ajar—just so, for me, he said—he’d called ahead and asked the vicar. 

We entered the church that stood beyond the gloaming but not yet in full darkness. Ahead in the north transept was a single light source—a small cylindrical glass chamber like a bell jar, set in a decorative silver base. I could see it bottled something and found in it a slight hand, fleshless, paper celluloid where skin should be, dried hard, gnarled, onto its brittle bones. The tips of each finger pointed upright, towards God or someone, like the petals of a turning crocus.

Born Etherlryth in 626 AD, Etherelda was the daughter of King Anna of East Anglia—a  princess, later a queen of Northumbria and the fenlands, later still an Abess of Ely and upon her death, an Anglo Saxon saint compared by some to the cult of Mother Mary.

The trajectory is and isn’t usual for a woman.

Rejecting routine wife-dom and motherhood and refusing to consummate either of her marriages, Etherelda sought solitude and good faith through a vow of perpetual virginity but, under threat from her second husband, fled to Ely and avoided capture thanks, in part, to the rising tide. There, at Ely—high land, an island, amid the inky marshlands—she founded an abbey.

Etherelda was a fenland queen some 1000 years before the land was dredged by the Dutch—one Sir Cornelius Vermuyden and those who followed suit—to make way for arable farming.

Before the Fens were ‘civilised’ into these fields and byways, and when the land was still rich with natural resources like eel and reeds for weaving, fen dwellers would cross the marshland on stilts—miles of it and them leggy like crows. The Romans failed to master the stilts, leaving the fenlands largely untouched for centuries.

Reaching from The Wash through Cambridgeshire and south into Norfolk, the Fens severed the coastal counties of Suffolk and Norfolk from the rest of England; it became a refuge for those fleeing from authority—a kind of hinterland—and that reticence lived on during the dredging—became a place of gangs, tigers and rebellion; and later still of industrial farming, stock-car racing and solar panels. 

But still, mythology is bred in these places.

Under that electric sky, the man in Ely told me how Etherelda’s severed hand brought him comfort when he was anxious. He’d visit it—or her—just to calm himself down. Later, at the pub he would confess to chewing his words; I sympathised. No, he said,— the actual paper—entire balls of paper sticking to the roof of his mouth. It was the first and last time I saw that man, but I was grateful to him for Etherelda.

Etherelda died from a tumour in her neck in 679 AD, surrounded by serpentine eels and hostile marsh. Much later, and likely through some act of violent reformation, her body and its relics were destroyed, save for her hand.

Etherelda’s hand is slight like a child’s; what might have once been skin is coagulated with dust, conserved in the shape of something solid by virtue of her abstinence, they say. It is the hand of the chased, the devout and the noble—divested of reproduction or domestic duty and thus a certain kind of maternal body. But it is also belongs to a time before the land—or that land—was dredged, carved up and possessed—before it became somebody’s domain;—and before the hand was made to work the land. 

Domain, de main, de mains.

Today, as in tomorrow, as in yesterday, the women of the village of Gislea—some ten miles from Ely in the Black Fen—are gathering at the edges of the field at dawn—vast windswept planes of rich peat soil deflated until roads and ways lift up like preternatural escarpments.

It is daybreak and the gleaners—gangs of women and children—hundreds and centuries of them—are waiting for the bell to toll out across the fields and begin gathering, by hand, the corn and wheat and turnips and beets that the machines and men fail to collect.

That was our summer, it was gone gleaning, said Mary Coe—a widow of 86 in 1972 or 1973 or 1974 or 1975.

Today, as in tomorrow, as in yesterday, children roam aimlessly around the women's feet babbling to one another; the younger ones are swaddled to their mother’s chest. 

The church bell used to ring at nine o’clock and then again at six o’clock at night, so everyone could get a fair share. You didn’t have to go until the bell rang and if anyone got on the field early, their sack would be emptied.. We’d be sitting with the old women until the church bell went and I was sometimes sorry to start gleaning, because the best part was before, listening to the older women’s stories.

Gleaning appears in the Hebrew bible and was practiced across Christian kingdoms as an entitlement of the poor, but it would have happened regardless of religion—at the fringes of cultivation and society. I have never been gleaning but I am drawn to its haptic quality and its residual matter. Marking the failures of machine power, it becomes a kind of dispossession. Which is to say that gleaners glean but they also glean meaning—making something from nothing—or not very much.

Elevated by the land and God and chastity—and contained behind glass for perpetuity—Etherelda’s hand is not the hand of this hard labour—not Mary’s hand, nor Maggy’s hand, Aida’s or Meg’s—rough from the corn chaff.

Etherelda’s hand is the hand of a mortal woman immortalised by legend—and by the writer Bede who dedicated a rare verse to her, in Latin, recounting how—16 years after her death—Etherelda’s sister Seaxburgh, translated her remains from a common grave to the new church in Ely, and when they opened the coffin, found Etherelda immaculate and unmarked; her clothing white like chastity…This was Thy work, O Christ, that her very garments were bright and undefiled even in the grave; O Christ, this was Thy work.

A gleaner’s hand is the hand of a mortal women immortalised by no one; hundreds of them—centuries of them—in rows,— breaking their backs, rheumatic knees, heavy with child; who remembers them? Mary, Violet and Alice with their deft hands like the claws in an amusement arcade, except nothing slips. See them there, calloused skin, muscle and flesh, clutching at something—the threads of a beet or contours of a swede.

Long before handwork became artisanal—before we paid double for someone’s touch—, work by hand was distinguished from labour; labour meant machines and feats of engineering—or at least, an education.

When men worked the land, it was called ‘labour’ and they were paid a fair and annual wage for it. But ‘fieldwork' like gleaning, weeding, herb gathering and binding was ‘women’s work’—was ‘hand work’, or ‘broad work’ predicated on the idea of domesticity—of nurture, of a womanly touch.

From land to hand to mouth.

There were no unions for women then—in 1975—or 1875, or 1775,—no land alliance; horizons were broad but limited. Women in Gislea married, bore children, fed the workforce and performed domestic duties. Ain’t got nowhere to go, so I got married, said Alice Rushmer in 1972 or 1973 or 1974 or 1975.

But land work and marriage were at odds with one another— 

'All gregarious employment,’ by which he means paid employment, ‘gives a slang character to the girl’s appearance and habits,’ wrote Dr Henry Hunter in his report to the privy council in 1864, ‘while dependence on the man for support is the spring of modest and pleasing deportment,’ …… land work would ‘almost unsex a woman’, he continued. 

Women did it anyway.

Down on the land, writes Marjory Reeves in 1975, seeds, seeing them grow and come out—that fascinates me. It’s a fulfilment. I’ve set them. Well, some of them I have—by hand—but some of them a man sets; but I tend them and that helps me a lot—to go down on the land.

I tend to vegetables and leaf crops for wage work on a small farm. Like Marjory Reeves, I tend more than I grow; have not mastered nor am I master of cultivation. I work with other women straddling crop beds, harvesting, deadheading, weeding. We sweat into our shirts and caps in Summer and listen to the snow feather the tunnels in early spring. We learn how to navigate the land when it is waterlogged or rasping for water. This is not critical sustenance for us—as it once was or would be for a woman or a gleaner in Gislea. But our relationship to the ground begins to mean something; it is like living with context.

I must be outside, said Janet Hornigold in 1972 or 1973 or 1974 or 1975—then twenty three and a farm worker. We have a drill (for setting flowers), but it doesn’t work very well….so I do them all by hand and then I am sure.

The uncorrupted flesh and virginity of Etherelda earned her cult status, but I wonder about the violence of preservation—to not live and let live but die and be suspended there in time, perpetually ascending, lo she who never knew the rich peat of the soil or how the worms squirmed in holes. While all around—and centuries on—women knelt, not in prayer but in soil.

The women in the fen wore huge bonnets that came right round, with a brim, and a long frill at the back and those kept the wind off and the sun, said Gladys Otterspour. And we could also see. Because we are very flat around here, and you put your hand up to see. But these bonnets would come out in front and you could see all the way round.

While the fenwomen roamed out on foot, with a hand or a bonnet to guide them, Etherelda contented herself to an island and was later contained in a glass jar. We seem a bit cut off here, said Eileen Woolnough of Gislea, with its bad connections and lack of provision; but so too does Etherelda, severed, venerated and adored.

Because, what is worse—to be severed from society or from one’s body or from the ground it walks on, works on, turns on?

Slowly, very slowly, and despite efforts to prevent it, Etherelda’s hand turns towards the grave, corrupting or complicating ideas about chastity, virtue, preservation, alienation.

Soon she meets these women—these fenwomen, these field-women— there, faltering under the weight of time and of expectation—living in and outside of them; or at the edges of the field at dawn.

The hand becomes their gathering ground—their gleaning ground—you can trace an entire life there—in the broad palm of it.

Domain, demain, de mains.