Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Janina Ramírez

If sources are to continually reinforce an idea of a past where women haven’t contributed, women will feel they have always been invisible. We need a new relationship with the past, one which we can all feel a part of.

The first of its kind to have been found, it suggests that the person honoured in grave 42 was very important – most probably a member of royalty or nobility. It also suggested that she was a woman.

When examining other sites with skeletal remains, the gendering of objects is sometimes reversed. For example, at the nearby cemetery of Norton, Cleveland, a man was found buried with a bead as well as weapons, and women have been interred with knives or swords.9 There have also been discoveries across the North Sea where the finds are gendered male, while the bones are female. However, it is generally accepted that women were more likely to be buried with jewellery.

As groups of Angles, Saxons and Jutes crossed the seas and settled across England in the centuries after the Fall of Rome, so they brought their clothes and cultures with them. The many surviving pieces of cloisonné jewellery tied their owners back to an earlier Germanic world. They were symbols of identity as well of power and wealth.

In the seventh century smiths were seen as powerful and important members of society. This was a hangover from the Germanic pagan religion practised across England before the arrival of Christian missionaries. One celebrated mythical figure was the smith Wayland. The Poetic Edda tells his story. Wayland was such an impressive worker of jewellery that King Niðhad wanted him enslaved so no one else could have the pieces he created.

the Franks Casket,

For a society organised around a warrior elite often on the move, small, personal, portable pieces of art – namely jewellery – were more valuable than large-scale paintings, sculpture or architecture.

The epic poem Beowulf frequently mentions gold, given from lords to secure the loyalty of followers, with ancient heirlooms used to secure treaties and oaths. Hrothgar says he gained trust from Beowulf’s father by sending ‘old treasures to the Wylfings over the sea’s spine; he swore oaths to me’.

The small garnets from the Staffordshire Hoard, for example, came from Eastern Europe, while the larger ones originated around India.

The collection of 37 Merovingian coins found at Sutton Hoo were worthy of being placed in a royal burial, perhaps to provide payment to the ferryman for the crossing of the deceased’s soul.16 Using antique or imported coins to make a new piece of jewellery would capture some of that power in the very medium of gold.

When royal jewellers Garrard were asked in 2009 about creating a piece like the Sutton Hoo shoulder clasps – the most exceptional examples of early medieval jewellery to survive – they estimated that, with electricity, running water and 24-hour lighting, it would take a month of continuous work and £200,000 to produce just one.

Eccles buckle.

Christian symbol, which visually represents the phrase ‘Jesus Christ Son of God Saviour’ (the first letters of which in Greek spell ICHTHYS/Fish),

Gildas

We’re taught that Christianity disappeared with the Romans, only to return on that date

drummed into English schoolchildren; the ‘arrival of Christianity’ in AD 597. This was when St Augustine led a conversion mission on the instruction of Pope Gregory the Great and landed on the Isle of Thanet in Kent.

Woden

Some of the most important pieces of Christian art – including the earliest depiction of Christ, the first representation of the crucifixion and the oldest liturgical items – have been found in England, suggesting the new religion was firmly embedded in the third and fourth centuries.

Bede

He describes how, following the upheaval from the collapse of Roman rule, groups from territories now roughly coinciding with Denmark and Northern Germany arrived in England and brought about wholesale change. Certainly, the language transformed. Before the fifth century,

Romano-British people would have spoken a form of Celtic dialect. This practice continued in Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Cornwall, but in England, Old English became the vernacular. The impact of the incomers from German lands was huge, affecting the very language used by people in their day-to-day lives. The immigrants assumed positions of power and influ...

In England, new place names dominated, celebrating Germanic gods.23 Woden, Thor and Freyja exerted a significant influence on the landscape, even influencing the names of the days of the week to the present day (Woden’s day, Thor’s day, Freyja’s or Frigg’s day). Because this religion endorsed an active afterlife where warriors would feast and fight for all eternity in Valhalla, or live alongside the goddess Freyja in the ‘people’s field’ Folkvangr, they started to bury their dead with grave goods.

In place of Romano-British infrastructure, a warrior-elite

elite assumed rulership and distinctive kingdoms emerged. At first these were small, with one leader securing the loyalty of followers and centring their control on great halls.24 As individual rulers gained more prestige and greater armies, they extended the boundaries of their territories through war and subjugation until, by the end of the century, there were seven major kingdoms: Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex, Wessex, Sussex and Kent.

bret...

the bretwalda was the ruler of that very kingdom – Æthelberht of Kent.

Bertha features more prominently. Through Bede we learn that she was not only of royal, but also of saintly, lineage. Her grandparents were the founder of the Merovingian dynasty, Clovis I, and the celebrated Burgundian Princess, Saint Clotilde.

Meaning ‘famous in battle’, Clotilde’s name reflects the idea that early medieval rulers – male or female – primarily held power through military

m...

She also influenced the Franks in the way Bertha would influence the people of Kent, persuading her husband to convert to Christianity and establishing a new Christian dynasty which would rule for over two centuries. She is still celebrated as a Roman Catholic saint.

But rather than convert fully, he simply added an image of Christ alongside his collection of pagan deities.

The items from Sutton Hoo are predominantly pagan with a nod to Christianity.

Pope Gregory wrote to King Æthelberht about the ‘fame’ Constantine secured by accepting Christianity, and even compared Bertha to Helen, the Emperor’s mother, who was dedicated to supporting the newly empowered religion.

Bede says that Bertha insisted on being allowed to practice her Christian religion. She brought her chaplain, the Frankish Bishop Liudhard, with her and stated that Æthelberht had to provide her retinue with a church in which to worship.31 An older Romano-British building in Kent’s capital of Canterbury was reappropriated.

Earlier Roman stones were symbolically incorporated into the first Christian church in pagan Kent.

In selecting a saint honoured as a military bishop dedicated to destroying pagan practices, Bertha and Æthelberht were sending a clear message to the other rulers of the English kingdoms;

Today the word ‘illiterate’ is associated with a lack of education. But the methods of passing down information in the non-literate communities of early medieval England were incredibly sophisticated.34 Individuals could recite poems from memory over the course of many hours, if not days. They had to retain information on bloodlines, land possession, law codes, as well as a vast body of stories, myths and history. To be illiterate was not to be ignorant, but rather to utilise more of the memory actively.

By the ninth century it had become associated with St James, peppering the route of pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. But the symbol’s associations can be traced back even earlier. In the classical Roman religion shells were connected to Venus, goddess of love and fertility.35 She emerged from the sea fully formed when the titan Chronos castrated his father Uranus and tossed the genitals into the sea. Venus was not born from a woman but was miraculously incarnated in the waters. As is common in early Christian symbolism, an older meaning is replaced with a new one. The shell Venus rode on became a symbol of baptism, new and eternal life.

The famous portraits of Justinian and his wife Theodora at the Basilica of San Vitale also feature a scallop shell, this time above the empress’s head. She had probably died by the time this mosaic was completed, with the shell signifying her resurrection and new life in heaven.

A necklace found in Desborough, Kent, dating to almost the exact same time as the Loftus pendant, is similar to that worn by Theodora in the Ravenna mosaic. A taste for the empress’s cabochon – i.e. shaped and polished – gemstones and Byzantine jewellery spread far, and both the owner of the Desborough necklace and the Loftus Princess were following this fashion with their own cabochon jewels.

Just as the religion travelled to England with a woman, it was women who aided the quick and effective spread of Christianity across the country. The role of women in the early church is consistently underplayed, but when it came to the conversion of the English, wives and mothers were the ultimate tools of influence. The reason the archbishop of Canterbury is

the head prelate of the church of England today is largely down to Bertha.

Æthelburg also brought a bishop with her as part of her marriage arrangements. Edwin had

to accommodate the Roman missionary Paulinus, and Bede describes how this fervent individual set about converting the women of the Northumbrian court. Æthelburg’s daughter, Eanflæd, was the first person baptised by the Roman mission in Northumbria. Eanflæd would go on to play an important role in the newly emerging northern church, marrying her father’s successor and then becoming the first abbess of the freshly founded double monastery at Whitby. This princess’s baptism set a precedent that other noblewomen of the north would follow.

The earlier burials with weapons, buckets of food, and fine clothing slowly gave way to simple Christian burials, with bodies wrapped in just a shroud. The idea of an afterlife where material wealth was needed, was

replaced by systems of inheritance, whereby beautiful and prized possessions would be left to the next generation rather than buried in the ground to serve the dead.

Most significantly, however, is the fact the woman was buried in a bed. Even today, a bed is one of our biggest expenses when furnishing a house. To put such a well-made piece into the ground, rather than reuse it, was a commitment by the people of Loftus to honour this important woman.

But the Loftus Princess is not sailing on the eternal seas like the royal buried in East Anglia. Rather she is laid out to sleep for all eternity. The word ‘leger’ in Old English meant both ‘bed’ and the grave – ‘a place where one lies’ – so a bed burial would give an individual the ritual and ceremony of a Germanic burial with grave goods, while honouring the new beliefs introduced by Christianity.

It only seems to be noblewomen in the seventh century who were given the honour of a bed burial.

Edix Hill in Cambridgeshire. This young woman, who was between 17 and 25 years old and had leprosy, was buried with a collection of curiosities, including swords, knives, a spindle whorl, a sea-urchin fossil and some sheep anklebones.41