Research Notes:

Seaxburh founded the abbeys at Milton Regis and Minster-in-Sheppey, where her daughter Ermenilda was also a nun. She moved to the double monastery at Ely where her sister Æthelthryth was abbess and succeeded her when Æthelthryth died in 679. According to Bede, in 695, Seaxburh organised the movement (or translation) of Æthelthryth's remains to a marble sarcophagus, after they had lain for sixteen years in a common grave. On opening the grave, it was discovered that her body was miraculously preserved. The legend is described in Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which celebrates the saintly virtues of Æthelthryth, but speaks less highly of Seaxburh, referring only to her marriage, succession as abbess and translation of her sister's relics. The date of Seaxburh's death at Ely is not known. The surviving versions of the Vita Sexburge, compiled after 1106, describe her early life, marriage to Eorcenberht, retirement from secular life and her final years as a nun and abbess at Ely....

[After her husband died in 664], Seaxburh remained in Kent to bring up her children. She played an important political and religious influence in the kingdom: she acted as regent for her son Ecgberht, ruling Kent until her young son came of age, and was the founder of Kent's first abbey for women at Milton.Thereafter, Seaxburh became a nun and founded the abbey of Minster-in-Sheppey. According to the Liber Eliensis, a 12th-century chronicle and history written at Ely, an English source related that Seaxburh received "the veil of holiness" from Theodore, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in her church on the Isle of Sheppey and that her daughter Eormenhild also became a nun there. Seaxburh is said by her hagiographer to have sought refuge as a nun after living a secular role that she had found hard to tolerate: having reluctantly submitted to marriage, she hastened from queenhood to "a timely widowhood and a hasty withdrawal to the religious life", according to Susan Ridyard.

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