[6][7] The earliest reliable occurrence of the name is in Bede's Ecclesiastical History, where it is mentioned in the genitive Latinised form "Medeshamstedi", in a context dateable prior to the mid-670s.
[8] However the area had long been inhabited, for example at Flag Fen, a Bronze Age settlement a little to the east, and at the Roman town of Durobrivae, on the other side of the River Nene, and some five miles to the west.
[9] Also found is "Medelhamstede", in the late 10th century Ælfric of Eynsham’s account of the life of St Æthelwold of Winchester, and on a contemporary coin of King Æthelred II, where it is abbreviated to "MEĐEL" /ˈmiːðəl/.
Located in Mercia, near the border with East Anglia, Medeshamstede was described by Sir Frank Stenton as "one of the greatest monasteries of the Mercian kingdom".
[13]Hugh Candidus also reports that Medeshamstede was founded in the territory of the "Gyrwas", a people listed in the Tribal Hidage, which was in existence by the mid-9th century.
[15] What is known of Sexwulf, combined with the identities of these local saints, suggests strongly that Medeshamstede was a major religious centre in the kingdom of Mercia, with an especially royal character.
Documents preserved at Peterborough Abbey indicate that Medeshamstede played a central role in spreading and consolidating Christianity in Mercia and elsewhere, for example through the pastoral care provided by a string of daughter churches.
[6] While this claim for Medeshamstede is derived from the Peterborough version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and from Hugh Candidus, both of which are 12th-century sources, destruction of churches by Vikings is a common feature in post-Conquest historiography.
It is part of a consensus, developed from the time of the English monastic reformation of the 10th century, that Danish Vikings had been responsible for a long period of religious decline in England.
[35] However, aspects of Medeshamstede's history, including the apparent survival of some of its pre-Viking archive, suggest that it did not suffer the same fate as other sites which were not so fortunate.
Kelly, [the] survival of a handful of genuine documents from the pre-tenth-century period [at Medeshamstede] might be better explained by the hypothesis that there was some kind of institutional continuity between the ninth century and the refoundation of c. 970, with the story of total destruction a convenient fiction.