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How can a word that means trashy, vulgar and shabby be derived from a saintly virgin?

Saint Etheldreda, or Aethelhtryth, was one of the most famous saints of early Christian England. Her life story was written in ancient books and sculptures and, as with all such saints, some liberties were taken with her tale, not least by the Venerable Bede, chronicler supreme and legendarist of Ye Olde Englande.

A 7th-century Saxon princess, Saint Etheldreda’s father Anna (sic) was king of what is now East Anglia, and was supposedly descended from Odin, the chief Norse god. Like her father and three sisters who also all became saints, Etheldreda was an enthusiastic convert to Christianity. She wanted to become a nun, however, and vowed to remain celibate.

This proved a trifle problematic. For dynastic reasons, her father married her off to two royal princes in succession, the first a Prince Tonbert, who never demanded his conjugal rights.

The second, Prince Egfrith, was just a boy when they married, but grew up to be a lusty man and also the King of Bernicia, or Northumbria as we know it.

Egfrith eventually begged his father-in-law to order that Etheldreda be ‘fully’ a wife to him, but she resisted and ran away. Miraculously prevented from following her – the sea off East Anglia rose up between them and the tide stayed high for seven hours, or so it is alleged – Egfrith concluded that God was on her side and allowed Etheldreda to enter a convent.

Having acquired the Isle of Ely as a dowry for her first marriage, Etheldreda founded a monastery there for both monks and nuns and became its first Abbess. She was renowned for her piety and took cold baths to mortify her flesh, though she did allow herself four warm baths a year at Festival times – but only if the other nuns had used the water first.

Etheldreda died of a throat tumour in 679, a fate which in typical fashion she blamed as a sort of Christian karma on her past as a royal princess who had once loved good clothes and fine necklaces. An operation to remove the tumour failed, and left a gaping wound on her dead throat.

According to Bede, when her coffin was opened 17 years after her death, her face had been restored to youthful bloom and the wound had healed. Not surprisingly, with such a story doing the rounds, a cult grew up around the Abbess who by popular acclaim became not only a saint but also patroness of those with throat problems. The male patron saint of throats was St Blaise, whose feast day is 3 February – the author well recalls as a child taking part in the ceremony of the Blessing of the Throats when two candles lashed into the form of a cross were placed around his throat and the blessing intoned.

The most famous Blessing of the Throats ceremony in the UK takes place each year on St Blaise’s Day at St Etheldreda’s Church in Ely Place in London, which has survived reformations, civil war and being bombed by the Nazis to be the second-oldest Catholic church in England.

It seems almost pitiful that this remarkable woman is remembered by such a word as ‘tawdry’, but that’s the English language for you; during the transition from Anglo-Saxon to modern English, the name Etheldreda somehow became Audrey, as it remains to this day.

As a mark of respect to the story of Etheldreda/Audrey and her throat, and seeking her Heavenly protection, pilgrims to Ely were the first to wear St Audrey’s Laces, scarf-like lace neckties which were worn around the time of the annual St Audrey’s Fair on 17 October. Typical English elision soon made them ‘t’awdry laces’.

In time, as with most souvenirs, these laces became somewhat adulterated, cheap and nasty. When the Puritans came along – they were particularly strong around the Isle of Ely where Oliver Cromwell made his home – they banned all such dressiness and poured disdain on ‘tawdry laces’, so that ‘tawdry’ became a description for things that are tacky and tasteless, which the holy and virginal St Etheldreda never was.