by Adams, Max;
As the stories in the next chapter show, there is plentiful evidence that Early Medieval women were not mere passive victims or observers. Increasingly they found and negotiated means of creating their own narratives of survival, success and creativity; of influencing society at all levels and in sometimes surprising ways.
* According to the legend recorded by Ambrose, bishop of Milan, in an account of the death of Theodosius the Great.
† See pages 99, 175 and 250.
‡ See the Postscript.
§ In skeletons, even the determination of sex is not always easy. Females tend to have more pointed jawbones and wider pelvic arcs, but skeletal sex is a wide spectrum extending from the very male to the very female.
# See page 31.
∫ From medieval Latin ōrāns, meaning ‘one who is praying’.
Ω In the early church baptism involved full immersion of the body in water.
≈ As distinct from ‘deaconesses’.
∂ A supposed early fourth-century martyr of Alexandria who confounded the best efforts of pagan philosophers to refute her faith. She was tortured and condemned to death on a ‘breaking wheel’.
π Fosterage of the children of free Irish men and women is a very common theme in the early literature.
∆ St Brigit is one of several women whose stories appear in this book to have been celebrated in Judy Chicago’s controversial 1979 artwork The Dinner Party, now in the Brooklyn Museum.
** See page 17.
†† Literally, hestia in Greek and focus in Latin.
‡‡ A collection of 87 short poems of the third century CE, on themes of immortality inspired by the legendary singer Orpheus.
§§ See page 19.
Chapter Two
Legacies
✥
EMPRESS WU ZHAO ~ THE WEAVERS OF WEST STOW ~ LA SEÑORA DE CAO ~ CÁIN ADOMNÁIN: THE FIRST LAWS FOR WOMEN ~ ST ÆTHELTHRYTH ~ THE TRUMPINGTON BED BURIAL
The stories in this chapter show how women’s exercise of power – not just in political terms, but also in its artistic and spiritual expressions – was etched indelibly on the historical and archaeological record. From Imperial China in the East to the Andean empires of the West, women of the first millennium negotiated the means to affect their own destiny, and that of the world beyond. Their success is written in some surprising narrative forms – from the trappings of funerals to the ephemeral traces of their tools and crafts. In some cases, their identities are paraded on the grand stage of history. And, if we wish to look for a tangible sense of female authorship in an era when most women’s lives, if noticed at all, were described by celibate men living in segregated communities, then it is to the textiles that we must turn rather than the pages of the chronicles.
Empress Wu Zhao
The culture and society of seventh-century China may seem exotic and unfamiliar, its glories, wonders and technologies beyond compare with contemporary Europe. But in that immense state, where steppe nomad and Confucian sage, peasant, warrior and courtier were bound together by the god-like authority of the emperor, one instantly recognises a familiar set of rules by which men and women achieved, maintained and lost political power. China’s only female emperor, Wu Zhao (624–705), did not achieve greatness as the world’s most powerful woman by breaking those rules, but by mastering them. While historians of the Tang dynasty were generally kind to her memory, she was later vilified, especially by Confucian writers, for her ruthless and uncompromising ambition and so her achievement has become exceptionalised. She has become a victim of what the English Enlightenment feminist Mary Astell called the ‘men in petticoats’ fallacy.*
Huagu, ‘flower-girl’, was the second daughter from the second marriage of a wealthy lumber merchant, Wu Shiyue, whose support for the first emperor of the Tang dynasty, Gaozu, won him favour, influence and official status at court in Chang’an on the Wei River. At the age of thirteen, after her father’s death, Huagu was taken into the inner court of the second Tang emperor, Taizong, and renamed Talent Wu, one of nine fifth-rank concubines. Quick wits, accomplishments in learning and her natural physical beauty ensured her subsequent elevation to the second rank of concubines, in the role of the ‘Lady of luminous deportment’.
The imperial harem was a complex environment. Its women were confined within the inner court of the palace, their only intermediaries with the outside world carefully chosen eunuchs who ran errands for them and ensured – or attempted to ensure – their sexual isolation. They constituted the personal and exclusive sexual retinue of the emperor as secretaries, ladies-in-waiting on the empress, conduits for intelligence and scandal and objects of unattainable desire for the unmarried male elite in the emperor’s service. Their hopes for gaining influence and prestige at court relied on skilful diplomacy, on influential advocates and on attracting the personal attention of the emperor, or his heir, among so many competitors. Background and lowly family rank counted against the ‘Lady of luminous deportment’; but she became a favourite of the crown prince, Gaozong, and, despite the proscriptions of court protocol, his lover.
After Emperor Taizong’s death in 649, Gaozong became third Tang emperor and his father’s concubines were, by tradition, sent into monastic retreat – a sort of purdah – after which they might marry and re-enter society. The ‘enchanting Miss Wu’, as she was now known, was sent to a Buddhist convent where her hair was shorn and she was stripped of all material adornments. But not all contact with her admirer was severed. A wonderfully evocative love poem, which she sent to the new emperor, survives:
I look upon your disc of jade and my thoughts scatter in disarray
As, haggard from grief, sundered and separate, I so keenly miss my sovereign.
If you do not believe this endless litany of tears
Then open my chest and examine my tear-stained pomegranate-red dress.
On a contrived visit to her convent, Gaozong openly wept when he saw her. Within two years he had brought his lover back into the imperial court, in scandalous and direct competition with both his childless Empress Yang and with his ‘Pure consort’, or favourite concubine. In 652 Wu Zhao bore the first of six of his children, precipitating a series of intrigues, manoeuvrings and scandals that culminated in the deposition of her rivals and her eventual enthronement as empress consort three years later.
Wu Zhao’s political victory was won through the careful cultivation of those lesser women of the court who had been excluded from the empress’s circle of intimates, and by her assiduous loyalty to the emperor. Now unsurpassed in her access to power, she had both her rivals killed and, a year later, her son Li Hong was designated crown prince, heir to the imperial throne. But in the eternal rules by which power is gained and maintained, winners make enemies. Wu’s elevation alienated a so-called ‘old guard’ of male officials, courtiers and great families, isolating the emperor from the vast network of patron–client ties on which his power rested. Now, the new imperial couple must work to widen social and familial access to the ranks of the huge Chinese bureaucracy; to persecute their enemies; to broaden public support for their rule.
In a state relying heavily on elaborate ceremony, on the cultivation of revered gods and goddesses and on the maintenance of a careful balance between Confucian, Taoist and Buddhist interests, Wu Zhao consciously embraced her role as earthly mother of the nation. She was an enthusiastic sponsor of Buddhism. She performed public rituals at the shrine of Leizu, goddess of silk and patron of women and weaving. She enlisted the services of a Taoist shaman: to divine the future; to bring luck to her friends; to cast spells and curses against her enemies. After the emperor suffered a stroke in 660, Empress Consort Wu was an increasingly active participant in state affairs alongside a husband whom later historians have branded as correspondingly weak.
Ambitious, mould-breaking dynasts they may have been, but Gaozong and Wu were by no means insensitive to the politics of tradition. In 666 the imperial couple embarked on a ceremonial pilgrimage to the sacred t
emples on Mount Tai in northeast China, where they performed ancient rites of Feng and Shan, expressions of imperial might and cultural harmony: a celebration and honouring of heaven and earth.
In the following decade, the empress consort spent the fruits of her accumulated political capital. She issued a series of edicts in which taxes were lowered, the imperial army shrunk, the burden of enforced imperial service reduced and agricultural reforms enacted. She gathered around her a group of low-born scholars, poets and intellectuals whose collective writings acted as both propagandist tracts and statements of her own cultural ideology. The North Gate scholars, as they were called, became her unofficial, personal cadre of counsellors. On her behalf, they began also to compile a new edition of a celebrated Han Dynasty work Lienü Zhuan, or Biographies of Exemplary Women.1
On the death of the emperor in 683, Wu effectively ruled as regent on behalf of successive sons, both of whom she deposed during the next seven years. In 690 she declared herself emperor. In 705, at the age of eighty, she was herself dethroned in a palace coup and died shortly afterwards; but her oldest surviving son, Zhongzong, succeeded to the imperial throne and the Tang dynasty, thus restored, survived for another 200 years.
*
In the West, on a more modest political scale, women who achieved high rank and executive power were generally portrayed – by contemporary male historians – as either devious, scheming femmes fatales or seasoned, tough-skinned dowagers. Strategies that might, in the male exercise of authority, have been characterised as pragmatic, were condemned as manipulative. The disposal of rivals was vindictive. Political decisions made by women were cold-blooded; ambition unshakeable.
The Empress Theodora (500–548), wife of Justinian I who ruled the Eastern Roman empire in the sixth century, was a principled, courageous saviour; or, according to the historian Procopius, who knew her, a scheming ex-prostitute. Gregory of Tours, bishop and chronicler of the notoriously plot-ridden Frankish state at the end of the sixth century, characterised Queen Fredegunda (died 597), the consort of Chilperic I and regent for her sons, as an adulterous upstart and murderer. A servant of the Frankish king, she persuaded him to repudiate his first wife. She was deposed in her turn, but strangled her replacement. She was also said to have ordered the assassination of King Sigebert, precipitating a long-running feud with his widow, Brunhild. Like Wu Zhao, she plotted her way to the top and, in expiation of her sins, enacted liberal domestic policies, becoming a notable patron of the church.
Such one-dimensional depictions of women who sought to exercise power in patriarchal cultures of courtly amorality, political excess and ruthless expediency tend to overshadow more nuanced careers. In seventh-century Northumbria, a number of outstanding women played pivotal roles in the development of an emerging Christian Anglo-Saxon state. Æthelburh, a Frankish/Kentish princess, was instrumental in the conversion to Christianity of her husband, King Edwin of Northumbria. Her daughter Eanflaed (626–685) married King Oswiu of Northumbria and with him initiated a series of monastic foundations of considerable political significance. She later became abbess of the royal monastery at Whitby. Her predecessor there, St Hild (614–80), was raised in Queen Æthelburh’s court after the murder of her exiled father. She first founded a monastery on the banks of the River Wear before governing a community at Hartlepool. In 657 she became the founding abbess of Whitby, where she ruled over both female and male communities and was charged with organising the epoch-making synod held there in 664.† She is also credited with talent-spotting the celebrated singer and poet Caedmon, a lay brother at Whitby where he looked after the community’s livestock. In his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the monk and chronicler the Venerable Bede describes her as a woman of great industry and virtue, and has this to say of Hild and her church:
…no one was rich, no one in need, for they had all things in common and none had any private property. So great was her prudence that not only ordinary men and women but also kings and princes sometimes sought and received her counsel when in difficulties.2
Hild was succeeded as abbess at Whitby by the former queen, Eanflæd,‡ then by Eanflæd’s daughter, Ælfflæd (654–714). The latter played a prominent role in arranging the succession of her half-brother King Aldfrith to the throne of Northumbria after the death in battle in 685 of her brother, King Ecgfrith. Her negotiations with St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne on this delicate political and dynastic issue show her to have been astute and diplomatically effective.
Not all Anglo-Saxon queenly careers were so fruitful. Ælfflæd’s sister Osthryth married a king of Mercia named Æthelred (reigned 675–704). She played the role of ‘peace-weaver’ between her brother, Ecgfrith of Northumbria, and her husband. The term is poetic, while the politics of royal women’s lives, sacrificed to the needs of political alliance, are only too real.§ Her loyalties were tested when her brother made war against Mercia in 679; another brother, Ælfwine, was a fatal casualty. Despite such distractions, the royal Mercian couple were enthusiastic patrons of the church and endowed a monastery at Bardney, in Lincolnshire, with the mortal remains of Osthryth’s martyred uncle, the cephalophoric King Oswald, slain by Æthelred’s father, King Penda. Her divided loyalties may have made Osthryth a target of the Mercian elite: she was murdered in 697. Playing for high stakes, Early Medieval women of power were as likely to fall foul of the political fates as they were to profit from them.
The weavers of West Stow
The geography of elite women’s lives was necessarily played out in grand spaces and over great distances. Women like Osthryth were professional exiles, forced to adapt to the mores of a foreign court, often on the move touring their husband’s estates. At the local level, very different geographies were expressed in the workings of small settlements and farms and here we find evidence of women inhabiting more intimate social landscapes. The archaeologist, trowel in hand, liberates their stories from the earth’s chains.
At West Stow, on the north bank of the River Lark a few miles northwest of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, visitors can experience something of the social and working spaces of Anglo-Saxon women in a series of reconstructions largely based on excavations at the site in the 1960s and 1970s by the archaeologist Stanley West. The settlement, a small village of perhaps four households and a cemetery, was first occupied during the fifth century – the so-called Migration Period of Anglo-Saxon settlement – and lasted into the seventh century, when its timber halls reached their most elaborate form. Each hall was associated with a number of more modest buildings, many of them with the sunken bases so diagnostic of early Anglo-Saxon settlement. These seem to have been used to store grain, possibly also wool, and many examples have yielded telltale rows of doughnut-shaped clay loom weights. These, and the discarded spindles and spindle whorls that littered the site, allow us to glimpse what women were doing, and where, in their daily routines.
The humble loom weight, ironically, is the best clue to the social space that weaving occupied in settlements. They might seem relatively easy to make, but they must be absolutely consistent for the sake of correct tensioning, and the clay of good quality or they fracture or flake, potentially ruining the cloth. Fragile, then, unless fired, and prone to breakage, loom weights were often discarded; and when the weaving sheds in which they stood burned down or were abandoned, lines of loom weights, perhaps stored on perishable wooden rods, were often left behind. Sometimes, the presence of more than one set lying on the floor of a structure shows the excavator that different weights were required to set the warp tensions for different sorts of cloth.
Two almost parallel lines of loom weights were recovered intact from an excavation at Pakenham in Suffolk in the 1950s. From their design and position in the soil, a working model of the loom from which they had hung – just before fire consumed the work in progress and the shed in which it stood burned down – has been reconstructed by archaeologists. It seems that the original loom and, therefore, the maximum width of the fabric that could
be produced, had been an impressive 95 inches across – almost 8 feet or 2.4 metres. Comparison of its width with the number of loom weights allowed a thread count of thirty warps per inch to be calculated – giving a coarse cloth like a blanket or rug.
All the evidence available to us suggests that it was for the most part women who processed, dyed, spun, wove and finished cloth, both during the Roman empire and throughout the Early Medieval period. Women were buried with spindles and spindle whorls, beating pins and needle cases; they are often depicted with shears, for fleecing sheep and cutting cloth. They operated looms, designed new and complex weaves, shaped their own and their families’ identities through colour, pattern and design. In legends, women wove their own stories into tapestries and it would be surprising if grandmother did not pass on her own unique methods and designs to daughter and granddaughter.
Cloth production was a vital domestic industry in the tribal societies of Europe, as it seems to have been globally. Cloth was made from a variety of yarns: principally wool and flax (for linen) but also hemp and very occasionally imported silk. Each type of yarn required specialist treatment to prepare its fibres for spinning and weaving; flax processing, in particular, is a messy, dirty, physically demanding and long drawn-out task. Yarns were spun using a drop spindle and whorl: a very ancient form of rotating axle and flywheel whose pedal-powered medieval successors survive as household devices around the world. Combed wool was held in one hand and teased with the other while the spindle was deftly rotated. When a length of wool had been drawn out, the spindle was released, imparting its rotation to the yarn and giving it exactly the right amount of twist and tension to make it consistent for weaving. It is a marvellous process to watch in skilled hands.
