poems.
Still, language tells its own story, and it’s significant that the Old English word mann can also be used of women. A charter from 969 that relates to a grant of land near Worcester concludes: ‘Aelfweard was the first man, and now it is in the hands of his daughter and she is the second man.’ As we in the twenty-first century tussle over gender-neutral toilets, our Anglo-Saxon ancestors might have wondered what on earth all the fuss was about.
Anglo-Saxon marriage, too, sounds almost progressive, especially compared to the bond of misery endured by many Victorian women. A husband had to pay his prospective wife a morgengifu or ‘morning-gift’, often a considerable amount of money or land, over which she had total control. Finances were the joint responsibility of husband and wife. According to the laws of Aethelbert, a woman could walk out on a marriage if she was unhappy, and if she took her children with her then she was entitled to half the marital home. How very equitable.
‘Cunning women’ had considerable power in Anglo-Saxon communities, practising folk magic, using their powers to heal, hex and hunt down stolen goods. Pendants, crystal balls, shells and other amulets thought to have magical properties have been found in the graves of female Anglo-Saxons. And although we might bridle when we read, in the tenth-century anthology of Anglo-Saxon poems and other literature known as the Exeter Book, that ‘the place of a woman is at her embroidery’, cloth-making and embroidery were in fact high-prestige occupations. In the households of large-estate owners, many of whom were women, the mistress of the house and her daughters would have worked making adorned gifts or, after the arrival of Christianity, church vestments. More mundane soft furnishings such as wall-hangings, table linen and bed clothes were handed down as heirlooms, and more commonly mentioned in the wills of women than men, suggesting they were thought of as female property.
The needle was by no means the only tool in women’s armoury. Female warriors wielded more traditionally masculine weapons to great effect. We know that a strong tradition of female warriors existed in pre-Anglo-Saxon Britain from Tacitus’ account of the Iceni queen Boudica’s rebellion against the Romans. He puts into her mouth a rousing speech in which she assures her troops that it is ‘customary … with Britons to fight under female captaincy’. Boudica rides in a chariot with her daughters in front of her and fights not as a queen but as a ‘woman of the people’ to avenge ‘her liberty lost, her body tortured by the lash, the tarnished honour of her daughters’.
High-born Anglo-Saxon women, too, could be every bit as blood-thirsty as the men. Queen Cynethryth, wife of Offa of Mercia, is a Lady Macbeth figure who not only had coins struck in her name, but is supposed to have encouraged Offa to kill Aethelberht II of East Anglia. Aethelflaed, daughter of King Alfred (of cakes infamy) assumed power after her husband Aethelred, Lord of the Mercians, died in 911. A formidable warrior who ‘protected her own men and terrified aliens’ (according to William of Malmesbury), she ruled for the next seven years, implementing an ambitious programme of fortification and fending off attacks from marauding Vikings and Danes.
The arrival of Christianity in the British Isles is usually dated to 597, the year Augustine became the first Archbishop of Canterbury and baptised the first Christian Anglo-Saxon king, Aethelberht of Kent. Many of the monasteries that subsequently dotted the landscape were ‘double monasteries’ where an abbess ruled over both monks and nuns, who lived in separate buildings.
Thanks to good old Eve, notions of female inferiority are hardwired into Christianity. Nevertheless, women emerge in this period as effective religious leaders, not least because of their apparent gifts for diplomacy and realpolitik. Medieval historian Henrietta Leyser thinks women adapted to Christianity more easily than men because they were better at reconciling new demands with old codes: ‘[Women] take up its challenges with alacrity and with evident success. They become saints apace, exercising power in life and in death: in life in positions of influence as abbesses, in death through miracles worked at their shrines.’4
Most of what we know about these abbesses comes to us via my old friend from the history class, the Northumbrian monk Bede, aka ‘the godfather of history’. His favourite seems to have been Hilda of Whitby, who founded Whitby Abbey and was famously wise: according to Bede, ‘not only ordinary people but also kings and princes sometimes sought and received her counsel when in difficulties.’ One of her most celebrated feats was her discovery and encouragement of the cowherd-poet Caedmon, composer of one of the earliest known vernacular poems, ‘Caedmon’s Hymn’.
These ‘brides of Christ’ could be flamboyant, glamorous figures, their celebrity an important source of local pride. St Edith, abbess of Wilton Abbey in Wiltshire, was famous for dressing in ornate, golden clothes (albeit with a hair shirt worn underneath). William of Malmesbury tells how, when she was ticked off for this by Aethelwold of Winchester, she retorted that this opulence didn’t matter because God could see through superficial trappings to the soul beneath: ‘For pride may exist under the garb of wretchedness; and a mind may be as pure under these vestments as under your tattered furs.’
After 1066, many (though not all) historians agree, a lot of that girl power withered on the vine, in the church and beyond. Freedoms taken for granted in Anglo-Saxon society were undermined by new canon (religious) law and the Normans’ insistence on making land ownership a condition of military service to a lord. From 1066, the number of female land-owners drops. Women can no longer make wills. Husbands are permitted to beat their wives. Primogeniture transforms inheritance law so that first-born sons are valued over daughters. If a woman kills her husband, it’s classed as treason and punished accordingly by burning at the stake.
The idea that women are second-class citizens, physically and mentally inferior to men, becomes a commonplace as medieval Catholic theology sets up new and troubling archetypes that remain with us – on the one hand, Eve; on the other, the Virgin Mary.
Consider the Bayeux Tapestry, the 230-foot long piece of embroidered cloth thought to have been commissioned by William the Conqueror’s brother. As all schoolchildren know, it tells the story of the Norman conquest, culminating in the Battle of Hastings. Although it was made by English women – women whose needlework skills were so famous throughout Europe that their work had a special name, Opus Anglicanum (‘English work’) – it depicts only three women: Queen Edith of Wessex, wife of Edward the Confessor and sister of the slain Harold; a mysterious figure called Aelfgyva, whose presence seems to be a reference to some unknowable contemporary sex scandal; and finally, an anonymous war refugee fleeing with her child from a burning building. Notice the way these women fall neatly into three categories: inheritors of and revellers in wealth and status; sources of gossip and intrigue; and helpless victims. Is the Bayeux Tapestry a precursor of the Daily Mail Online’s notorious ‘sidebar of shame’?
Still, our medieval sisters struggled on. They oversaw births and deaths as midwives and layers-out of bodies. Some ran businesses from their houses. If they were married they could and often did declare themselves unmarried in order to escape the common-law disadvantages of being wives. (Their husbands were happy to be complicit in this as it absolved them of liability for any debts.) This was known as trading feme sole and gave women a bit of economic independence, especially in areas like the silk trade; in trades less female-dominated they probably fared worse.
Alice Chester carried on her husband’s business after his death in 1473. She used her own ships to trade in cloth, wine and other commodities with Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Flanders and made enough money to afford a town house in Bristol and to lavish expensive gifts on her local church, which included elaborate carved figures and a new rood loft. Margaret Paston ran her lawyer husband John’s malt and wool business when he was away, as well as defending the family estates in Norfolk from armed bandits. When they were separated, Margaret kept in contact with John by letter, many of which have survived to provide us with arresting insights into life in England during the War of the Roses. In 1449 she wrote to John demanding crossbows, grappling irons and shooting bolts for use in defending the Paston castle at Gresham against an attack by Lord Molynes. Margaret and her twelve comrades-in-arms never stood a chance against Molynes’ thousand-strong army, and she was duly evicted and the castle sacked. But she didn’t lack courage or resourcefulness.
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