Unquiet Women

by Adams, Max;

  The weight and shape of the whorl, and the shape and direction of rotation of the spindle, determined the twist of the thread, its fineness or coarseness. A female head of a large household may have possessed a large set of spindles to cover the variety of yarns that she might wish to produce. Dyes were prepared from native plants like woad (for a blue colour) or madder (for red) and, occasionally, in a precious purple colour achieved by expertly processing the mucus of the Atlantic dog whelk.

  The standard loom of the Early Medieval period was a warp-weighted upright wooden frame, like that described in the story of St Brigit, leant against a wall. Warps (from Old English verb weorp, meaning ‘to cast down’) were hung from a bar at the top of the frame and, in bunches, weighted with clay, stone or bone rings – the loom weights – attached beneath the lower cross beam. Each warp or pair of warps was lifted outwards to the ‘counter-shed’ or dropped backwards to the natural ‘shed’ or hang of the loom by the positioning of horizontal ‘heddle bars’, as the skein holding the weft (from Old English verb weofan, ‘to weave’) was passed to and fro. The yarn of the weft was beaten upwards onto the existing cloth with a weaving batten or sword, and the warps were plucked with a pin beater to keep them straight and true. Just setting a loom up with warps, whose correct tensioning is crucial to the success of the weave, is a substantial, skilful and time-consuming undertaking.

  A very small number of Early Medieval fabrics remains intact, having survived in preserving burial environments: the coffin of St Cuthbert, for example, which yielded several astonishing ecclesiastical vestments that can still be seen in the Durham Cathedral treasury; the clothing of the women in the Oseberg ship burial;# and cloth preserved by the desiccating sands of deserts in North Africa, South America and China. But hundreds more samples of weaving patterns survive because men and women of the Early Medieval period were often buried in their clothes, with chosen possessions (keys, knives, spindles, whorls and brooches, for example, with women; swords, buckles, knives and spears with men). Where metal decorative fittings – brooches, pins, belt buckles or scabbard mounts – survive, the imprint of the cloth to which they were attached has often been fossilised in its corrosion products: a small miracle of preservation.

  Penelope Walton Rogers, a specialist in analysing the tantalising evidence of cloth recovered from excavations, has produced an outstanding survey, Cloth and Clothing in Early Anglo-Saxon England, in which she draws out the impressive range and technical expertise of – predominantly – women weavers. The standard weave was the tabby, a word deriving from the name of a specialist silk-weaving quarter in Islamic Baghdad, Al-Attabiya. In a tabby, each single warp and weft crosses alternately to produce a conventional flat cloth. Much more sophisticated twills, broken twills, diamond twills and variations that depended on the direction of spin of the yarn allowed weavers to create a rich variety of cloths: warm and cool, waterproof, lightweight, heavyweight and ceremonial. The addition of narrow, tablet-woven cuffs, collars, braids and bands in distinctive patterns, made using perforated wooden cards that could be rotated to cross weft over warp and back again, allowed women to dress themselves, and their men, in designs that reflected their status and kinship affiliations and their artistic and technical skills. Garments, trims, panels, braids and tapestries were agents of love, patronage or attachment, by gift, commission or sale. Walton Rogers has also been able to show regional fashions in technique and design – these, strikingly, seem to reinforce the legendary patterns of tribal immigration into eastern Britain recounted in Bede’s eighth-century Ecclesiastical History of the English People.

  Penelope Walton Rogers’s analysis of the artefacts associated with cloth production at West Stow is highly revealing. Spindles and spindle whorls were found in and around a variety of structures from each period of occupation: women spun yarn as they went about their everyday chores, minded children and tended sheep or cattle; and occasionally they lost and failed to retrieve their spindles. Loom weights, on the other hand, are associated with many fewer buildings: generally, in the early period, the larger sunken-floored buildings in each household. But in the later decades of the settlement, only the largest and most complex structures showed clear evidence for weaving – in two adjacent buildings. It is as if production of textiles had become concentrated at the site of the largest and latest hall. This process of consolidation might reflect increased investment by the whole community in producing cloth, not just for domestic consumption but for trade – a notable feature of the seventh-century economy. If this is the case then we might suspect, as Walton Rogers intimates, the emergence of certain females in a supervisory role above the other women – and men – involved in production. From a position not unlike the mistress of a medieval manor house, the female supervisor of a textile atelier exercised artistic and technical authority over a hierarchy of warp-makers, weavers, yarn spinners, dyers and combers, right down to the humblest drudge retting or scutching flax.

  An equally fascinating study by the historian David Herlihy, called Opera Muliebria: Women and Work in Medieval Europe, records many laws and commentaries referring to women’s role in cloth production; and it is from these complex, technically demanding crafts that women’s own narratives are beginning to emerge.

  La Señora de Cao

  In another hemisphere, a thousand years before their own fatal, violent conflicts with Christianity, the arts and crafts of Andean women survive in fabulous variety to tell of their technical skills, beliefs and relations with the cosmos. A hundred years or so before the first settlement at West Stow, the mummified body of a nameless but very special Mochica woman, who has been dubbed La Señora de Cao, was interred at a ceremonial complex called Huaca Cao Viejo northwest of Trujillo in the Libertad region of northwest coastal Peru. Her sensational discovery by archaeologists in 2005 has been followed by intensive analysis of her body and grave and of the place where she was interred.

  The world view of ancient Andean culture was rich in animistic symbolism and ritual, dominated by a cyclic model of time and by special places in the landscape invested with otherworldly significance, points of contact with forces beyond the human realm. Societies that wrote gigantic pictorial messages to the skies (the Nazca lines in southern Peru are contemporary with Moche culture) to ensure favourable interventions in weather, fertility and war required intermediaries: both male and female shamans, often of exalted social status, are widely depicted in Andean art.

  Huaca Cao Viejo seems to have been a centre for ritual: its pyramid complex overlooked the boundless Pacific Ocean and was adorned with painted murals, preserved in its dry sands, which show a procession of life-sized naked prisoners, bulging-eyed shamanic figures holding decapitated heads, marvellous spiders and beasts of the imagination.

  The woman known as La Señora de Cao was buried in a tomb lined and capped with stuccoed adobe bricks, on top of which an owl-faced ceramic vessel had been laid. Archaeologists removed the tomb’s capping to reveal a cane mat, then a raft of logs. Beneath that lay an enormous multi-layered textile mummy bundle∫ surrounded by a number of ceramic vessels – one of them a stirrup cup depicting the figure of a female healer wearing a cowl ministering to a mother and sick child – and the body of a second female, who had been strangled. Whether the irony was deliberate or casual is impossible to say: to our modern sensibilities, the thought of human sacrifice and ideas of healing and caring are absolutely incompatible. In a world of cosmic cycles, the giving and taking of life were perhaps merely spokes of the same wheel.

  In very dry burial conditions, soft tissue and skin are desiccated; hair and nails survive (on male corpses you sometimes see a day’s post-mortem growth of stubble). La Señora’s hair had been plaited and braided. Tattoos on her arms in a rare blue ink were still visible: zigzag snakes and spiders, which, in the visual lexicon of Moche culture, indicate divination skills and, perhaps, the taking of blood. She was in her twenties, just under 1.5 metres (5 ft) tall, and seems to have borne at least one c
hild. With her, inside the inner wrappings, lay metal bowls, a necklace of gold face-beads, nose rings and a bundle of dart throwers wrapped in the cotton cloth that formed her shroud: trappings of wealth, prestige and power.

  La Señora’s shroud was covered in overlapping metal sheets. Above these lay a cotton blanket, then gowns; then a counterpane of gold plaques, sewn onto a cotton sheet and flanked by two metal war clubs. Above her head lay several gold crowns and other headpieces. In all, she had been encased within twenty layers of materials. The magnificence of the fittings must, one supposes, have been matched by the grandeur of the ceremony with which she was laid to rest. If she was not a supreme ruler she must, it seems, have been a priestess of very exalted dignity and ceremonial status – perhaps a great healer and shaman.

  Among other surviving Andean art from the period are depictions of women in magnificent costumes leading processions of attendants and victims in ceremonies involving blood offerings. Female sexuality, healing and midwifery skills were openly displayed in brilliant varieties of materials and designs.Ω Details of backstrap looms drawn on ceramics, and the preservation of superb examples of weaving with very high thread counts, dazzling patterns and rich dyes, give us a sense of women’s place at the heart of South American culture and at the apex of technical brilliance. The backstrap loom is still very much a part of the domestic equipment of Andean women, a living connection to the ancestors and both a social and communal means of expressing solidarity with their maternal lineage and their broader cultural inheritance.

  Cáin Adomnáin: the first laws for women

  Women’s access to power through status and profession among tribal societies was circumscribed by custom and ideology and by physical and legal oppression. But there is substantial evidence that women’s rights, before the rediscovery of classical patriarchal literature≈ in the medieval West after the twelfth century, were protected by law. The ways in which male lawmakers developed their ideas about women is revealing of both their prejudices and the difficulties they encountered in trying to characterise the value and meaning of women’s lives in a culture ostensibly driven by war, masculinity and kinship rivalry over land rights.

  A ninth-century Irish story tells how Adamnán (died 704), a celebrated abbot of Iona and author of the Life of St Columba, incurred the displeasure of his mother, Rónnat. He had thought himself a good and dutiful son until she told him that her desire was:

  ‘…that you should free women for me from encounter, from camping, from fighting, from hosting [raiding], from wounding, from slaying, from the bondage of the cauldron’.3

  Rónnat took her son to see the aftermath of a bloody battle, a field of slaughter strewn with the bodies of female combatants cut down in the fighting. Here they came upon a woman whose head had been severed, but whose baby still lay upon her breast. Adamnán replaced the woman’s head on her body and made the sign of the cross with his staff over her breast, whereupon she rose up∂ and said to Adamnán:

  ‘Well now… to thee henceforward it is given to free the women of the Western world. Neither drink nor food shall go into thy mouth until women have been freed by thee.’4

  In case the saintly abbot did not get the message, his mother had him chained up and deprived of food for eight months (a symbolic endurance of privation, so that, perhaps, he should know what mothers suffer during pregnancy); but women were still not free. Then she buried him in a stone chest until worms devoured his tongue; and then she again deprived him of food for eight months. After four years, the tortured Adamnán was released from his sarcophagus and taken to the Plain of Birr.

  ‘Arise now out of thy hiding place’, said an angel to Adamnán. ‘I will not arise, [he replied] until women are freed for me.’5

  This myth of the creation of women’s rights in ancient Ireland has a solid basis in fact. At the Synod of Birr in County Offaly in the year 697, according to the Annals of Ulster, Adamnán promulgated the Lex Innocentium or Law of Innocents, which conferred non-combatant status on clerics, males under fighting age – and all women. Reading between the somewhat fanciful lines of the Cáin Adomnáin – an amalgam of all sorts of accounts of the synod composed at least a hundred years after the fact – it is evident that Adamnán’s law provoked considerable opposition among many of the kings present. In response, the saintly abbot cursed them and their offspring: they, in turn, agreed to pass his law. The list of witnesses to the final decree is impressive and convincing: more than thirty abbots and bishops and no fewer than fifty kings, whose contemporaneity and authenticity is guaranteed by the various genealogies and notices in the Irish annals in which they appear.

  From the date of the synod onwards, fines, penances and punishments were to be meted out to any who broke the law; and these are no mere tokens of clerical disapprobation:

  For whoever slays a woman shall be condemned to a twofold punishment, that is, his right hand and his left foot shall be cut off… and his kindred shall pay seven full cumals [literally a female slave: a cumal had the value of three milch cows].6π

  Women were to be protected, not just against wanton murder and involvement in men’s wars: fines were to be imposed on men who placed a hand on a woman’s girdle or who put a hand under her dress or caused a blemish on any part of her body, let alone those who might force intercourse on her. Even the imputation of lewd behaviour or the denial of paternity were to be punished. Adamnán’s argument in favour of this radical departure from Irish tribal custom, in which women were valued by lawyers and the clergy largely for their reproductive energies, was to appeal to a universal: all men had mothers, to whom they owed a duty of protection:

  Thou shalt establish a law in Ireland and Britain for the sake of the mother of each one, because a mother has borne each one, and for the sake of Mary mother of Jesus Christ, through whom all are.7

  In a brilliant and insightful analysis of the experience of women in Early Irish society, The Land of Women, Lisa Bitel argues persuasively that the Lex Innocentium, and the moral status of motherhood promulgated in the Cáin Adomnáin, are both explicable in the broad context of Early Medieval tribal society, set against the extensive literature that survives from Ireland to tell us about the often troublesome relations between men and women.

  Men in Early Medieval Ireland (and by that one means specifically literate men, almost exclusively professional lawyers and theoretically celibate churchmen) thought of women in relation to what they knew themselves to be: that is to say, whatever men were like, women were not. For the most part, women were mysterious, having some of the characteristics of animals, children, the mentally defective and the inescapably sinful. Even so, they were desirable, useful, complex, occasionally holy and gifted. They were to be evaluated for their propensity to fidelity, to bear children and to give wise counsel. In myths they were complicit in elopement and seduction, if also sometimes victims of evil men. Whatever frustrations and ambiguities they posed for men, no one thought that the world could do without them. Lisa Bitel writes:

  The debate over woman’s nature helped confine real women to traditional social roles, exclude them from formal politics, and deprive them of property, all on account of their theoretical inferiority. Nonetheless, as the very existence of the debate suggests, men believed that women still, somehow, astonishingly, exercised a fearful influence over them. Despite the literati’s repressive laws and misogynist invective, men continued to consort, collaborate, and negotiate with all kinds of women. And this led them to a genuinely pressing dilemma: how could a man decide which woman to marry, which to do business with, which to pray to, which to avoid altogether, if he could not guess her type and nature? Men needed to know. To protect themselves, men had to predict the behaviour and understand the character of women. Yet, as the literati themselves sometimes acknowledged, their desperate efforts were doomed from the start. Woman remained, to the literati at least, unknowable.8

  As the Life of St Brigit∆ reveals, society was under extreme stress in Early Med
ieval Ireland, threatened by warfare, famine and disease. To sustain order and to ensure the survival of each generation, rules for the inheritance of property and the resolution of disputes were minutely negotiated. Reproduction and child-rearing were essential to maintain social relations among kinfolk and to provide labour that owed service and loyalty to the family and their lords. Adamnán, with his unique authority as scholar, holy man and successor to St Columba, found himself in a position to elevate the legal position of women as mothers and, as mothers to all, to raise them above the subordinate status that the lawyers and clerics had previously granted them. How women’s lives changed materially after the Synod of Birr is by no means so clear; but as a unique expression of an attempt to redress their invidious position in a patriarchal society, the Cáin Adomnáin is a unique and valuable milestone.

  St Æthelthryth

  In early Christianity, the virtue of a holy man’s or woman’s life was expected to be mirrored in death: the resurrection of the corpse by miracle, in the case of cephalophores; the homeopathic healing powers of their relics; or the incorruptibility of their mortal remains. St Cuthbert’s body, exhumed eleven years after his burial on Lindisfarne in 687 and found to be perfectly preserved, is the most famous fulfilment of St Paul’s revelation:

  Behold, I shew you a mystery.

  We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,

  in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump

  for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised

  incorruptible, and we shall be changed.