Presenting Claudia

The Cathedral Church of St. Nicholas in Newcastle has a rich history. Founded in the eleventh century, it was positioned near Hadrian’s Wall. The current building was completed in the 1350s after earlier structures were destroyed by fire; the church was later caught up in border warfare and Civil War conflict. The 1882 refit, coinciding with its cathedral status, drew on this eventful history through visual allusions to the Roman, Scottish and medieval heritage of the site. This chapter focuses on the oak statuettes of St. Margaret’s Chantry, carved in the 1880s by local craftsman Ralph Hedley, which distil the Church’s history into four representative figures. Most cryptic is the figure of ‘Claudia’, an otherwise unnamed Roman matron. This chapter offers a reading of her presence in the cathedral and proposes her identification as Princess Claudia of Britain. Princess Claudia, well-known in the nineteenth century through her appearance in lists of famous historical women and in moralising poetry, was created by Church scholars out of a similarity between characters mentioned by Martial, St. Paul and Tacitus. Soon afterwards, she vanished from the history books; but her brief existence illuminates the cultural connections between Rome and Britain in the Victorian North East.