REMEMBERING 1066 AND THE WOMEN OF ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND

featuring a story by Annie Whitehead

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Edith of Wilton

Women Of Power 

by Annie Whitehead

Author and Historian BA(Hons) FRHistS

My first full-length nonfiction book was Mercia: The Rise and Fall of a Kingdom. Mercia’s history is full of interesting characters but it seemed to me that there were many powerful women, not just in Mercia but in all the early English kingdoms, whose stories had not been told, and I wanted to write about them.

I’d already written about a few of these women. My first novel, To Be A Queen, tells the life story of Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians and my second, Alvar the Kingmaker, features Queen Ælfthryth, said to be the first crowned consort of an English king and who was also accused of murder, and Queen Ælfgifu, who reportedly romped in her marriage bed with her husband and her own mother. My third novel, Cometh the Hour, also has some strong, influential women in it, from King Penda’s wife, who was left in charge of a kingdom, to various queens and abbesses who made important policy decisions and had direct influence on the men in charge; women like St Hild, for example, founder of Whitby Abbey. The follow-up novel, The Sins of the Father, features some of these strong women and introduces a few more.

The idea of Women in Power in Anglo-Saxon England was to tell the real stories of these women, with minimal reference to the men, and discover all I could about them. There are over 130 named women in the book, most of them royal wives, sisters and daughters, and some of them women who are familiar to us – Lady Godiva, for example – who weren’t royal but still left their mark on history.

The hardest challenge when writing the book was tracking them down! The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle sometimes mentions them but, up to the arrival on the shores of Emma of Normandy in the eleventh century, there are fewer than 20 instances in that chronicle where the women are named. However, a lot can sometimes be deduced: Wulfrun is named as a hostage taken by the ‘Vikings’ and from this it’s clear that she was high status. Luckily we don’t have to rely on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and through other sources we discover that she was the lady after whom Wolverhampton was named and that her son was known as Wulfrun’s son, rather than his father’s. So there’s a whole other story: was his father somehow disgraced? Of lesser status than Wulfrun? When doing this kind of research it’s as well to be prepared to drop down plenty of ‘rabbit holes’!

The other challenge is keeping pace with the archaeological discoveries, of which there were more than a few while I was writing the book. Often I had to add details to footnotes, because the editing process was too far advanced to allow me to alter the main text. All were truly exciting discoveries, including the siting of the original Anglo-Saxon abbeys at Coldingham, and at Lyminge in Kent, the possible identification of Queen Emma’s bones in Winchester and the fascinating tale of the blue-toothed nun, who, it’s believed, stained her teeth by licking her paintbrush whilst working on illuminated manuscripts. Here was yet more evidence that women worked as scribes.

Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians,

I’m often asked if I have a favourite amongst these women, and the answer is that there are too many to choose from, really. Because I’ve written so much about her already, I suppose most people might expect me to say Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, but there are some others whom I grew to like and/or admire. Among them would be Eanflæd, Queen of Northumbria, for sheer determination and overcoming personal loss. She travelled north from Kent, no small undertaking (around 380 miles), to marry a man who then murdered one of her kinsman. She demanded, and received, recompense for that. She outlived most of her children, which must have been heart-breaking (although mercifully she had died by the time her adult daughter was murdered) and most probably had to tolerate her husband’s infidelity and fathering of at least one illegitimate child. She sponsored the career of St Wilfrid and it’s clear that she ran her own, separate, and highly influential household.

Other women brought a wry smile to my face, such as Queen Æthelburh who arranged for her servants deliberately to trash the royal residence while she and the king were out one day, so that she could demonstrate to him the transience of earthly pleasures. She gets the briefest of mentions in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but what a mention – she razed a town to the ground. We’re not told the circumstances, but I think it’s fair to assume she was a woman with a lot of personality and determination!

Another lady who intrigued me was Siflæd. We know about some noblewomen because their wills are extant. Siflæd is unusual because she left not one, but two wills. It seems as if one was made before she went off on her travels “across the sea”. I’d love to know where she went, and what sort of adventures she had. I think of her as the original ‘merry widow’, setting her affairs in order at home before going off gallivanting. Clearly she survived, returning to make the second will.

There’s also Saint Edith, who defied a bishop who dared to castigate her for her dress sense, and Judith of Flanders who married a king much older than herself, then married his son, then got put under close supervision by her father and escaped to elope with yet another husband. Many of the women were also accused of murder, often by the later, Anglo-Norman chroniclers, and many of these were, in fact, supremely capable royal abbesses, managing and controlling multiple abbeys which were vast and lucrative estates. These were business women, not killers, and would have to have been literate. In fact, I devote quite a lot of pages in the book to the many examples we have of women’s literacy.

The kings might be the ones who rule, start and end wars, make the headlines, but the women’s stories are there, too, and they’re fascinating. One myth which I hoped to debunk was the tale of Lady Godiva and the naked horse ride through Coventry. (I did have fun with her as a character, though, in my short story for the collection 1066 Turned Upside Down, in which nine authors, including mine host, Helen, re-imagined the events of 1066. Lady Godiva featured in my tale as the elderly matriarch of a powerful Mercian family.) She’s often only thought of as that young woman riding naked on horseback, but she lived to a ripe old age and was a witness to many extraordinary events.

Lad Godiva

[Helen: apart fro the fact that women would not have ridden 'side-saddle' back then, if she had ridden as depicted inthis statue she would have fallen off as soon as the horse took one step! She is perched somewhat precariously!)

I’ve often said that we can’t really understand history without looking at the women’s stories. True, women did not wield power in the traditional sense, but the book shows that many of them had the king’s ear, and were able to influence policy. From the seventh-century wife of King Rædwald of East Anglia (he of the Sutton Hoo burial fame) who dissuaded him from turning over a guest to would-be assassins, to the eleventh-century Margaret, who married Malcolm of Scotland and radically altered not only her husband’s attitudes and beliefs, but changed the laws in her adopted country, these women had influence, and our understanding of history is not complete without their stories.

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Two men. One crown.

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In 1066 England falls vulnerable to the fate of these two men: one, chosen to be a king, the other, determined to take, by force, what he desires. Risking his life to defend his kingdom from foreign invasion, Harold II led his army into the great Battle of Hastings in October 1066 with all the honour and dignity that history remembers of its fallen heroes.

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Harold the King (UK title) https://viewbook.at/HaroldTheKing

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 1066 Turned Upside Down: Eleven alternative 'what if' short stories by nine different authors

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For the story of Emma of Normandy:

The Forever Queen (US title) A USA TODAY BESTSELLER

https://viewBook.at/ForeverQueen

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