by Adams, Max;
Ceolthryth and Æthelflæd the White are, we understand from the context, in holy orders. They may have been collateral family members, foster-children or protégés in her favoured nunnery. Whether Wynflæd had taken holy orders too is not so certain, given the highly secular nature of her possessions and will and despite her ownership of nun’s garments; she may have been a proprietary abbess. The unspecified contents of the spinning box must have included a range of whorls and spindles, pin beaters, needles and swatches.
Then she makes a gift to Æthelflæd of everything which is unbequeathed, books and such small things, and she trusts that she will be mindful of her soul. And there are also tapestries, one which is suitable for her, and the smallest she can give to her women. And she bequeaths to Cynelufu her share of the untamed horses which are with Eadmær’s. And to Æthelflæd she grants […] the utensils and all the useful things that are inside, and also the homestead if the king grant it to her as King Edward granted it to Brihtwyn her mother. And Eadwold and his sister are to have her tame horses in common…
I think it by no means impossible that some, at least, of Wynflæd’s personal wealth was generated from the profits of running a successful weaving workshop or atelier. That women in Anglo-Saxon England could and did own large estates and the slaves that came with them carries its own ironies. Most of the women whose names and lives have made it into the pages of this book belonged to a literate, Christian elite. Wealthy women lived more privileged lives than poor men. Poor women – free or unfree – are only visible to us through their mortal remains, their crafts and their houses, and by oblique references to them in legal records and in the vitæ of their more exalted or saintly sisters.
An outstanding feature of the Early Medieval period, and beyond, is that violence and warfare, engaged in either professionally or by chance, accounted for the early deaths of men whose property and client networks might pass to their widows. There was, therefore, a distinct class of affluent widowed women enjoying extensive powers of patronage who, like Wynflæd, were able to distribute favours and possessions to carefully chosen beneficiaries and exercise moral, intellectual and creative influence in an otherwise testosterone-driven world of martial glory and court intrigue. Peasant women such as those liberated by Wynflæd – the unnamed wives of men like Bica and Gurhann – are by no means so easy to liberate from the bonds of obscurity. But, as the story of Ana de la Calle in chapter 7 shows, the modest but no less interesting lives of some of those descended from slaves would, eventually, also leave their mark in the written word.
The women from the Oseberg ship burial
Two Norwegian women, known only through their archaeological remains, were buried in great pomp during the early ninth century, lying on a splendid bed within the wooden walls of a stately ship. They, or rather those who buried them, chose a large number of possessions to accompany them into the next life: clothes, shoes, cooking utensils, farm tools, four sleighs, five more beds, two tents, a highly decorated chariot, fifteen horses, six dogs and two small cows. The burial chamber, standing just abaft the ship’s mast, was decked out in fine tapestries. The ship had been a working vessel; had seen service at sea and had been repaired. When excavated, it was found to have been ceremonially ‘moored’ to an earthfast boulder. The whole was immured beneath a great mound where it lay until 1903, when a farmer of Oseberg, on the west side of Oslofjord, reported it to museum authorities.
The set of rites chosen for this greatest of journeys, on which the two Oseberg women were to embark, served complex social and psychological functions. The ship seems an obvious physical and metaphorical means of transportation to the next world, where its regal passengers would require all the trappings of a royal household, and victuals – bread dough in a trough; apples in a bucket – to sustain them on the passage. It was fitted out with chandler’s supplies: rope, an anchor, sailcloth. And yet, no warriors, real or symbolic, sat at their oars, fifteen on each side, to power the craft towards its destination. Did it lie rocking gently at its dreamy mooring, forever awaiting a non-existent crew who would join their mistresses in their time? What motivations lay behind the enormous investment of labour and ceremonial that must have accompanied their last rites?
The identities of the two interred women have fascinated archaeologists and anthropologists since they were excavated. One may have been as old as eighty – she suffered from arthritis and there has been speculation that she died of cancer. Her companion was aged about fifty. Were they mother and daughter, dying within days or weeks of each other? Or a queen and her slave, sacrificed to accompany her mistress; and, if so, which was which? Their fabulous accoutrements speak of conspicuous wealth and comfort in life, as in death.
The detail of their equipment suggests care and planning, like the manifest of a serious expedition: two oil lamps, a stool and three large chests; axes and a quern stone; no fewer than five looms, with a spindle and distaff and assorted weaving equipment; a pouch containing cannabis leaves; combs, bedlinen and a feather mattress speak of more than mere symbolic preparation. It looks, in fact, for all the world like a house-clearance, and it may be that those who buried these women – their relatives and functionaries – intended just that: the possessions belonged to the dead; they were unclean or tainted, not fit for the survivors to enjoy and profit from. Perhaps we should see the ship not as a metaphor for the greatest journey, but as a skip: a refuse facility.
In contrast, Wynflæd, were we to find and excavate her mortal remains, would have been buried in a plain tunic with, perhaps, little more than a knife and chatelaine to identify her as the head of a noble household; possibly with a pendant cross, like the woman in the Trumpington bed burial; brooches at her shoulders and her little box of spinning and weaving essentials. As a Christian woman, she must leave all other material possessions, all trappings and evidence of her wealth and power, behind on her prospective journey as a companion of Christ. The Oseberg women were, ironically, supposed to stay where they were put, equipped for departure but trapped in a netherworld. In the Scandinavian imagination dwelt a dread of revenance – the idea that the dead might return to haunt the living: so, after the tender goodbyes, the door was slammed shut.
The textile fragments retrieved from the burial give us an idea of not just the mercantile reach of wealthy Norwegian traders, but also of the kaleidoscopic variety of yarns, fabrics and patterns produced by workshops across Europe and beyond. Tent coverings, drapery and bedlinen were made of coarse wool fabrics on looms set up like the reconstructed example from Pakenham, some using desirable diamond twills for their lozenge effect. Fragments of embroidered cloth, some of them likely to have been produced in English workshops, show spiral and tendril motifs or animals. More than a dozen silk fabrics were recovered, possibly liturgical cloths from churches inside the Frankish empire – the silk thread itself imported from Asia or the Mediterranean. Patterned, multi-coloured tablet-woven bands might have been produced by the Oseberg women themselves. Two ornamental tapestries had been woven using wool for the warp and a finer linen yarn for the weft, the patterns portraying people, animals and carts, perhaps in a ceremonial procession that reminds one of the Mochica images found in South America.
There is something more, perhaps, to say about the burial rites of two broadly compatible Germanic societies that, from the seventh century onwards, had chosen diverging cultural paths even if they shared much of the same heritage. The Christian Anglo-Saxon state was the product of an overtly rational ideological relationship between the material and spiritual, as the Venerable Bede had so eloquently but pejoratively pictured it in the moment of conversion. The ‘pagan’ life was brief, like the flitting of a sparrow into and out of the light and life of a great hall in winter: beyond, all was darkness and uncertainty. The Christian state invested in freehold property on earth and in a parallel set of eternal relations with the world hereafter; it sought permanence, stability, accumulation: the everlasting. Material possessions were not only unnecess
ary on the great journey beyond, but to bury or burn them was a waste. Wynflæd was able and determined to invest the fruits of her successful life in a new generation, worthy to succeed and build on the foundations that she laid in her will. Those who buried the Oseberg women with such apparently profligate waste and consumption must wipe the slate clean and begin again. Their daughters must weight the warps on their own newly built looms and quarry new millstones to grind corn. How ironic that those cultures who discard their objects with such enthusiasm provide the richest resources for the archaeologist seeking to understand them.
Æthelflæd: ‘Lady of the Mercians’
If people have heard of just one Anglo-Saxon woman, the chances are that they will think of Æthelflæd (died 918) – no relation to her namesake, Wynflæd’s daughter – known to contemporaries as Myrcna Hlæfdige, or Lady of the Mercians. She was the eldest daughter of a Mercian noblewoman, Ealhswith, and of King Ælfred of Wessex, he of the carelessly burned cakes and epic victories over Viking invaders. Since Ælfred married her mother in the year 868, Æthelflæd is likely to have been born no later than 870, before the birth of her brother Edward and her father’s accession as king in 871 at a time of desperate insecurity in the kingdom.
At the age of seven or eight she must have fled with her mother, father and his few loyal warriors into exile on the Isle of Athelney in the Somerset marshes and spent a cold and frightening winter there. The kingdoms of East Anglia, Northumbria and Wessex, and much of Mercia, had been overrun by a great army of Scandinavian warriors; Ælfred was almost the last king standing. From Athelney he fought back, won a great victory at Edington in 878, and was able eventually to consolidate power in the south, after many tribulations.
Æthelflæd might, in common with many young royal women, have been dedicated to the church in thanks for victory. The alternative was a career in dynastic politics, as the bride of one of her father’s allies: as a ‘peace-weaver’; and in about 886 Æthelflæd was duly married to the de facto ruler of Mercia south and west of Watling Street:‡ Ealdorman Æthelred, her father’s key military ally. The marriage seems to have sealed a treaty that marked the refounding of London as a defended town and cemented an alliance of the two great southern Anglo-Saxon kingdoms against further Scandinavian aggression.
The Mercian royal couple produced a daughter, Ælfwynn. More significantly, as it turned out, they fostered Æthelflæd’s nephew Æthelstan, future overlord of all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. After Ælfred’s death in 899, his son Edward succeeded him as king in Wessex until 924. With her husband apparently debilitated by illness, and Æthelflæd the effective ruler of Mercia, brother and sister now embarked on an aggressive programme of military campaigning and political consolidation, first defending the line of Watling Street against expansionist Danish warlords, then taking the offensive into the lands of their settlements north and east of Watling Street: into the Danelaw.
But Æthelflæd also found herself at the sharp end of a great social and military crisis: the expulsion in 902 of the Viking kings of Dublin. From across the Irish Sea the flotsam and jetsam of refugee warlords, warriors and settlers washed up on Mercia’s northwest shores: on the Wirral peninsula and on the lands around the ancient Roman fortress of Chester. Æthelflæd’s skilled diplomacy and mastery of military geography ensured that the menace was contained. She refortified Chester and began a programme of burh (fortified town) construction that reflects, I think, something of her father’s influence on her development as an independent ruler and commander, and as a strategic military thinker.
From about 910, the pace of the campaign to push back the frontier of Danish settlement was breathtaking. Æthelflæd and her brother planned and co-ordinated operations across the whole of central England and if the record of these events, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, diminished her role to that of handmaiden to her brother, the modern historian can read between the lines and see Æthelflæd working as a co-operative but proactive and independently minded strategic partner.
Defensive deployment turned to offensive action. In a daring raid of about 909, Æthelflaed was able to retrieve the precious holy relics of the celebrated Northumbrian king and martyr Oswald from the monastery of Bardney in Lincolnshire and install them in the royal minster mausoleum at Gloucester, which she and her ailing husband had founded. With his death in 911 the Myrcna Hlæfdige was immediately accepted as de facto queen by the Mercian people, without opposition. That fact alone says much about her reputation. For seven years she campaigned against the forces of the Danelaw northeast of Watling Street. She had forts built at 16 sites, including Tamworth and Stafford, Warwick and Runcorn, and used them as bases to attack the Danish towns known as the Five Boroughs. In 916 she sent or led an army into Brycheiniog in South Wales to punish its king for murdering an abbot under her protection. In 917 she forced the submission of Derby – the first of the Five Boroughs to fall – while her brother Edward, in a pincer movement, took control of Danish forts in the south and east. This was integrated national policy, each party absolutely dependent on trust, loyalty and the execution of careful planning along a broad front between London and the River Mersey.
In 918 Æthelflæd captured Leicester without force and received the submission of the Men of York, the heart of Scandinavian trade and military might. She seems, at the same time, to have been active in organising a coalition of northern kingdoms against a new Norse campaign from across the Irish Sea. Then, in her moment of triumph, Æthelflæd died at Tamworth, just shy of her fiftieth year. Her daughter, Ælfwynn, perhaps in her late twenties, was immediately seized by her uncle and removed to the ‘safety’ of a monastery. Edward, grasping the moment, was able to consolidate all of southern England under his sole rule and cement the military successes jointly conceived and undertaken with his sister. Æthelflæd’s body was taken to the royal minster at Gloucester to be buried next to her husband; in time, her foster-son and nephew Æthelstan (reigned 924–39) would succeed his father.
History has not forgotten the life of this extraordinary woman. A statue of her stands beneath the castle walls at Tamworth and historians credit her with political and military skills the equal of Edward. She was as much the child of Ælfred as he was. Her acceptance as effective queen by the Mercian elite at a time of great crisis reinforces a sense that in Anglo-Saxon society powerful women were a fact of life. Queen she may have been; she was also a military leader, consort, mother, daughter, sister, aunt and widow; a patron of the church and inspiration for a Mercian revival against all odds.
Of al-Andalus and Gandersheim
While Ælfred’s descendants were considering the idea of unifying the peoples of Anglo-Saxon England, of expanding its few small towns and reviving a monastic culture devastated by secularism and the effects of 150 years of Viking raids and conquest, far to the south a cultural Golden Age was in full swing. Córdoba in Andalusia, or al-Andalus as its Islamic caliphs knew it, was a thriving city of perhaps a hundred thousand people during its heyday in the tenth century. A succession of powerful rulers had created a minor super-power on the Iberian Peninsula from very modest beginnings in the eighth century, holding fast against Charlemagne’s aggressive southern expansion of Francia and Berber incursions from North Africa.
Al-Andalus was connected across the known world: with Constantinople, with Damascus and the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, the greatest city of its day; news of its glories spread as far north as Germany. Córdoba had concentrated huge wealth from success in war, from the fruits of trade and the natural fertility of Spain’s many plains, irrigated with networks of canals driven by cunning waterwheels and aqueducts. Trade with the Atlantic states, across the Strait of Gibraltar and along the length of the Mediterranean and beyond, brought paper (and the technology to make it), rice, wheat, silk, figs and other exotica. An immense palace stood aloof from the city on the north side of the Guadalquivir River, on the slopes of the Sierra Morena. It hosted, among other glories, a zoo, an aviary, fishponds and a large b
owl of pure liquid mercury, which reflected the sun’s light against its brilliantly vibrant mosaic walls. At the heart of the city stood a great mosque, which survives today along with a magnificent Roman bridge of sixteen arches.
The caliphate of al-Andalus was broadly tolerant of Christians and Jews, both long settled in Spain: they, too, were ‘Peoples of the Book’, to whom God’s truths had been revealed in writing. In such a hybrid culture, scholarship, poetry, art and language thrived. Córdoba’s most valuable treasure, certainly its most enduring legacy, was the fruit of its caliphs’ enthusiastic, not to say obsessive, collecting of scholarship from the ancient world. It was said that the libraries of the city housed 400,000 volumes – an exaggeration, surely, but even so… Of these, a substantial number were Arabic translations of the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle; of physicians and botanists like Dioscorides; of mathematicians and scientists of the calibre of Euclid and Archimedes. Such works were otherwise unknown in Western Europe and, without their curation and reintroduction through Arabic Spain at the beginning of the second millennium, there would – there could – have been no Renaissance.
Into this dazzling, polyphonic world of restless intellectual and aesthetic energy, Caliph al Hakam II (ruled 961–76) recruited a woman called Lubna as either a scribe or librarian, perhaps both. The novelist and broadcaster Kamila Shamsie has assembled what little evidence there is for her life.§ She tells us that a twelfth-century biographical dictionary says this of Lubna:
