by Robert Lacey
The reign of King Ethelred took its character from two powerful women. It could even be argued that the women were more powerful than Ethelred himself, who came to the throne as a boy aged only ten or twelve, thanks to the mysterious murder of his half brother Edward at Corfe in Dorset in 978 a.d. No one was ever punished for the violence, but it has generally been presumed that his death had something to do with Ethelred’s mother, the dowager queen Aelfthryth, who thus secured the throne for her own blood line, along with power for herself as regent. The church at the time drew a veil over the ugly incident, since the dead Edward’s reign had been marked by notable hostility towards the recently refounded monasteries, in notable contrast to Aelfthryth, who made herself the leading patron of church reform. So in the year 1000, both the king of England and the reforming church hierarchy owed their power to the ambition of the same dynamic woman.
In 1002 Ethelred, now in his early thirties, tried to bolster his wavering authority by marrying Emma, the sister of Duke Richard II of Normandy. It must have been an intimidating moment for the young woman when she crossed the Channel from France that spring to meet Ethelred, who had already fathered six sons, and at least four daughters, by previous liaisons. Only just a teenager, and perhaps as young as twelve, Emma spoke no English, and was required by her new husband to take the Englisc name of Aelfgifu. This alliance of convenience was a classic example of the Anglo-Saxon concept of the female “peace-weaver” - the woman whose feminine qualities were supposed to weave new bonds of family loyalty.
But Emma was to prove a personality in her own right. Before she was twenty her strength of character had made her one of the most powerful figures in Ethelred’s circle, and after Ethelred’s death his Danish successor Canute sidelined his first wife to marry her. Emma’s stature provided the authority that the foreign king knew that he needed. After Canute died he was briefly succeeded by Harold Harefoot, his son by his first marriage, but after Harefoot’s death, it was Emma’s blood that took over, first in the shape of Harthacanute, her son by Canute, and then by the son she had borne Ethelred, the half-English, half-Norman Edward the Confessor, whose links with his blood relation William of Normandy paved the way for the Anglo-Norman polity. Emma had been married to two kings of Engla-lond, and she was the mother of two more.
Anglo-Saxon kings did not succeed on the basis of primogeniture. All the king’s offspring were known as aethelings - throneworthy - and from this gene pool the royal family would select the aetheling who seemed best qualified for the job. It was the practical way to maintain the wealth and pre-eminence of the ruling clan. King Alfred was a youngest brother who became king of Wessex in preference to sons of his elder siblings, while in Ireland an extended version of the same principle circulated sovereignty around different clans on a rota basis. It was comparable to the selection by family consensus that is operated by Bedouin Arab monarchies today. In England the system produced a variegated succession of monarchs who were generally more capable than those thrown up by a rigid line of inheritance - and it also offered power to those royal mothers who succeeded in raising competent and forceful sons. Operating through the male line, the women had the chance to make themselves the key.
Nepotism was nothing to be ashamed of in the years around 1000. It was the purpose of family existence. The mother who advanced her clan’s power earned the respect of the entire community, and it is significant that this era saw the beginning in England of the cult of the Virgin Mary, the mother who raised the most powerful son of all. A tenth-century collection of blessings written for Bishop Ethelwold contains one of the first representations of Mary being crowned that survives in the West. The Virgin is shown not as a carpenter’s wife, which would have made her very easily identifiable with most of the people who prayed to her, but as a worldly queen, wearing a crown. It was another aspect of the developing alliance between crown and church, and the image was the more significant for being propagated by a church which had found natural allies in tough royal matrons like Aelfthryth and Emma. At the end of her life, Emma refused to follow tradition and retire to a nunnery, but stayed active in dynastic politics. She commissioned her own biography to make sure that her life was remembered as she wished to be - and she is remembered as Emma, not Aelfgifu.
To judge from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the most dynamic royal matron of the tenth century was Alfred’s daughter Aethelflaed, who took up the English campaign against the Danes after her fathers death, in alliance with her brother Edward, earning herself the title “Lady of the Mercians.” Aethelflaed was married to the monarch of the Midland kingdom of Mercia, but she ran the country herself for seven years after his death, pursuing her father’s policy of building fortified burhs against the Danes - and leading her soldiers in a personal capacity, according to the Chronicle entry from 913:
In this year, by the grace of God, Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians, went with all the Mercians to Tamworth, and built the fortress there in early summer and before the beginning of August, the one at Stafford. (115)
In 916 Aethelflaed sent a punitive expedition against some Welsh invaders, then turned her attention to the Vikings, from whom she won back the burhs of Derby and Leicester. “She protected her own men and terrified aliens,” wrote William of Malmesbury, a post-Conquest historian who seemed more surprised than were the Anglo-Saxon chroniclers that a woman should achieve so much. Starting her programme of fortress building in 910 a.d., Aethelflaed got ten burhs completed in less than five years, and led her Mercians to victories that made her one of the most powerful figures in early tenth-century England. We can imagine this latter-day Boadicea standing behind the shieldwall, inspiring the loyalty of her own troops and winning the awed respect of her enemies. By 918 the Vikings in York had volunteered their allegiance to Aethelflaed without a fight. Alongside her father, Alfred, the Lady of the Mercians was one of England’s folk heroes in the year 1000, remembered and respected as a tough woman in tough times, and her reputation was to grow with the retelling.
Another female category of mann who had no option but to be tough were the women who ran the monasteries of early Anglo-Saxon England. Some fifty of the religious communities founded in the seventh century were double houses, where men and women lived and worshipped side by side, and the records indicate that all of these double houses were under the direction of a female. Everyone answered to the abbess, not the abbot. (116) It was evidently not a problem for a community of educated men to submit to the authority of a woman thirteen hundred years ago, though the documents do show that the abbesses in charge of double houses were all aethelings - members of royal families. Among these pioneering female missionaries the most famous was the abbess Hilda, who founded (or possibly refounded) the abbey of Whitby on the Yorkshire coast, where in 664 she hosted the famous Synod of Whitby, at which Celtic and Rome-supporting Christians met to argue over the date of Easter.
“All who knew her,” wrote the Venerable Bede, “called her mother.’“ (117)
It was under Hilda’s encouragement that the Whitby cowherd Caedmon produced the first Christian poems and songs in English, and Hilda got her monks to learn and propagate the poet’s evangelising songs. According to Bede, she also “compelled those under her direction to devote time to the study of the holy scriptures” with such success that no less than five of her monkish pupils went on to become bishops. (118) Within a few years of her death in 680 a.d. Hilda was being hailed as a saint, and to this day pious tradition has it that the migrating geese who fly down from the Arctic to rest on the headland near the site of Whitby’s old abbey are pilgrims paying homage to her memory. By the year 1000 there were at least fifteen English churches dedicated to St. Hilda, where her feast was celebrated every year on November 17.
By the year 1000, however, the sacred Hilda and the pioneering double monasteries run by royal women were a three-hundred-year-old memory. Of the new religious houses founded in the tenth century, some thirty were monasteries, and only half a dozen were n
unneries. There were no double houses and the brother-sister relationships of Hilda’s day had been replaced by a more rigid segregation. The church was tightening up on matters sexual. Until the middle of the tenth century it had been quite routine for priests to be married. The records show that in the early 960s the cathedral at Winchester was administered by a group of canons, every one of whom was married. But Dunstan, Ethelwold, and the new church reformers disapproved of this. Celibacy was the way ahead for the modern canon, and Ethelwold fiercely confronted the happy husbands of Winchester in 964 a.d. He gave them the choice between their wives and their jobs, and when they all chose their wives, they were drummed out of the cathedral to be replaced by a team of celibate monks from Abingdon.
One cannot imagine the pious bishop Ethelwold deriving much amusement from riddles about hairy onions or the pleasures of vigorous butter churning. The buildup to the millennium saw a new element of puritanical asceticism claiming control of religion - the Nanny Church. The censorious Ethelwold took it upon himself to rebuke young St. Edith of Wilton for a style of dress which he considered too grand.”Christ,” he said “asked for the heart.”
“Quite so, Father,” responded Edith. “And I have given my heart.” (119)
Edith, who died aged only twenty-two after a blameless life, may have felt able to stand up to the old priest because she was a king’s daughter, albeit the product of King Edgar’s union with Wulfrida, his Kentish mistress. By the end of the tenth century, Edith’s humility had inspired a cult of holy wells in Kent, Staffordshire, and Herefordshire. Their waters were deemed efficacious for eye conditions.
Generally, the church met no resistance as it claimed more control of everyday life - and as it sought, in particular, to shape the marriage arrangements which it had hitherto been content to leave to local custom. Anglo-Saxon weddings were traditional folk ceremonies which went back to pagan times. A couple might stop at the church porch for a blessing from the priest, but the essence of the ceremony was the ritual of secular toasts, vows, and speeches enjoyed with the rest of the village. Such a secular bonding could also be broken in a secular fashion, and though the records are scanty, thanks to filtering by the church in later years, it does seem that Anglo-Saxons separated and divorced when they had to, without any particular ethical complications. The only concern of the community was practical - the proper partitioning of property and the care of the children. One Anglo-Saxon law code makes clear that a woman could walk out of her marriage on her own initiative if she cared to, and that if she took the children and cared for them, then she was also entitled to half the property. (120)
The Old English law codes were concerned to shield women against the hazards of life in a rough, male-dominated society. If the epic poetry of the time embodied the aggressive male ethos of the warrior band, the law codes stood for the opposing rights of the physically frailer sex. This might seem an unlikely consequence of a lawmaking process that flowed through the confabulations of male monarchs with their male advisers, but it directly reflected the values enshrined in the language of Englisc: men were called waepnedmenn, “weaponed-persons,” while women were wifmenn, “wife-persons,” with wif being derived from the word for “weaving.” In a world where order was uncertain and shops virtually nonexistent, the man’s job was to provide protection, while the woman provided clothes, and this division of responsibility was reflected in the grave goods with which pagan Anglo-Saxons were buried: male skeletons are found with their swords, spears, and shields; women are buried with spindles, weaving batons, and small, symbolic sewing boxes that contain needles, thread, and even minute samples of cloth.
By the year 1000 people were no longer being buried in this fashion. The church told believers that they had no need of physical adornment or accessories for the next world. The church way was taking hold, and a moralistic tone was entering the legal equation. “If a woman during her husband’s life commits adultery with another man . . .” read Law 53 of Canute, “her legal husband is to have all her property, and she is to lose her nose and her ears.” (121)
This gruesome regulation - which enjoined no similar penalty for the male adulterer - proved short-lived. It died with Canute in 1035. The only other English law ever to treat adultery so brutally was passed six hundred years later as part of Oliver Cromwell’s attempt to make England godly. The underlying legal principles of Anglo-Saxon life were essentially uncensorious. Every man - and woman - had their price, the so-called wergild, and even morally loaded offences were regulated according to its pragmatic terms: “If a freeman lie with a freeman’s wife,” read one code of Kentish law, “let him pay for it with her wergild, and provide another wife out of his own money.” (122)
This money-based attitude to public morals was applied remorselessly down the social scale. If a man lay with a virgin who was a slave in the royal household, he owed compensation of fifty shillings; if she was one of the slaves working in the royal flour mill, the compensation was twenty-five shillings - and if she was of the lowest class of slave, the payment was twelve shillings. (123)
At the end of the ninth century, the enlightened King Alfred worked on the same principle when it came to sexual harassment: a man who fondled the breast of a freewoman, uninvited, incurred a fine of five shillings, while throwing the woman down, though not actually violating her, cost ten shillings. Rape was six times more serious. The violation of a freewoman demanded compensation of sixty shillings - payable, like all the other fines, directly to her.
This was another principle of Anglo-Saxon law that had become established by the year 1000. Marriage law was essentially about the allocation of property, and marriage contracts usually involved negotiations between male heads of households over the morgengifu, literally the morning gift, paid over by the husband after the satisfactory completion of the wedding night. But the payment, which could involve substantial amounts of money and land, went to the woman herself, which gave a girl a solid financial interest in maintaining her virginity until marriage.
The laws did not specifically require that the bride should be a virgin. If the husband had no complaint, the law saw no need to get involved. But King Aethelbert did provide that the morning gift should be repaid by the wife in cases of deception, thus protecting the bridegroom who had paid out his morning gift for a woman who turned out to be carrying another man’s child, (124) while one of Alfred’s laws made a certain allowance for crimes of passion: a man who found “another man with his wedded wife, within closed doors or under the same blanket; or if he finds another man with his legitimate daughter or sister or with his mother, if she has been given in wedlock to his father, can fight the intruder with impunity. If he kills the man, his kin will not be allowed to avenge him.” (125)
There is a stocky, matter-of-fact tone to these Anglo-Saxon laws. From the earliest date the principle was clearly established that a woman could not be held responsible for the criminal activity of her husband - though she was judged as guilty as he if the facts proved that she had been his accomplice: “If anyone shall steal in such a way that his wife and children know nothing of it,” ran the seventh-century law of King Ine of Wessex, “he shall pay sixty shillings as fine. But if he steals with the knowledge of all his household, they are all to go into slavery.” Four hundred years later Canute refined the principle: a woman could not be held guilty for her husband’s theft, he decreed, unless the stolen property was found in one of the specific places for which, as keeper of the household keys, she was responsible - the house’s storeroom, any large chest, or any small chest of the sort used to store jewellery. (126)
The calendar drawing for the month of November could possibly depict the grisly penalty inflicted on those who were suspected of theft. It shows a figure heating an iron in the fire, and the obvious presumption might be that he is a blacksmith forging something like a horseshoe. This interpretation, however, makes no sense of the surrounding figures in the picture, who are better explained by another scenario.
To the left of the picture stands a neat pile of carefully cured and planed wooden planks and it could well be that the figure beside them, captured by the artist in the act of bearing away a stack of wood, is up to no good. He is suspected of being a thief, and as such he is brought to the ordeal by the two ceremonially clothed agents of justice on the right of the drawing, one of whom is carrying a rolled legal scroll. The suspect is now barefoot, and he holds his hands up ready for the ghastly test. He will be required to grasp the red-hot iron and step out nine paces, after which his wounds will be dressed and kept covered for a week. If, when the bandages are unbound, his wounds clearly appear to be healing, he will be judged not guilty. But if the wounds have gone septic, which could well be the death of him in any case, he will suffer the penalty for theft in the year 1000 - hanging until dead.
The gallows stood outside every medieval town and at rural crossroads, displaying its grisly cargo, which would twist in the wind until the birds picked the bones clean. It was not a pretty sight, and it was not intended to be. Along with trial by ordeal, hanging was the most effective deterrent that could be devised in an age without police or prisons. Don’t mess with justice, ran the message. It is not worth the risk.
