Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Janina Ramírez

Then when I remembered all this, then I also remembered how I saw, before it had all been ravaged and burnt, how the churches throughout all England stood filled with treasures and books, and there were also a great many of God’s servants. And they had very little benefit from those books, for they could not understand anything in them, because they were not written in their own language.51

He dedicated himself to translating those books he thought ‘most needful for all to know’ from Latin into Old English

the Alfred Jewel

Because he encouraged the translation of religious texts from Latin into English, he was (erroneously) held up by post-Reformation theologians as the originator of the break with Rome.

The Alfred Jewel, made up of gold, enamel and rock crystal, Ashmolean Museum, c. AD 871–99.

However, in Wessex she was not referred to as queen, despite the fact she was married to the king. The reason has its roots in the reign of another important Mercian woman – the daughter of Offa and Cynethryth, Eadburh.

According to Asser, Eadburh was so influential she took ‘whole power of the realm and began to rule tyrannically’. Eadburh controlled the men of the court, and if she wished to remove them, would either deprive them of their roles or their lives. Asser says she used poison, but that this technique backfired when she accidently killed her own husband. Cast out of Wessex for regicide, she took refuge with Charlemagne. But when she rejected his advances, he too banished her. Like her mother, she was given a large monastery in Frankia to control as abbess.

Æthelflæd was brought up in the court in Wessex, was daughter to its king and educated by its finest minds. But through her mother she was also half Mercian. Knowing how different the role of royal women had been north of the Thames, and seeing her own parent having to assume a subservient role,

may have increased her desire to take up a position in her mother’s kingdom where she could rule as an equal to men. Her marriage to the much older Æthelred of Mercia was politically expedient for her father, but possibly an attractive proposition for Æthelflæd too.

The Irish Annals give details of how Æthelflæd protected the city when in 907 the Wirral Vikings joined with Danish troops and attacked Chester. She ‘gathered a large army about her from the adjoining regions’. After an initial battle Æthelflæd sent messengers to the enemy troops. She stated she was ‘queen who holds all authority over the Saxons’. Through requests of loyalty and the promise of rewards, she convinced the Wirral Vikings she had treated so generously to switch their allegiances and join her forces and together they pushed back their attackers. The people of Chester used every means possible to defeat the Danes, including pouring boiling ale onto the men below, and even throwing ‘all the beehives there were in town on top of the besiegers.’64 Æthelflæd was now more than just a wife and lady; she was a military strategist, diplomat and defender of Mercia.

comparatively little information on Æthelflæd remains. The situation worsened during the rule of her brother, Edward, who actively suppressed her reputation in order to bolster his position as king of Wessex. It was important for the Wessex court to stress that Mercia was not an independent kingdom ruled by a strong woman, but rather part of the expanded domain which under King Edward constituted England. Æthelflæd’s history was rewritten, and her name removed from records to prop up the legacies of her male relatives.

text in which she is mentioned repeatedly while her husband is named only twice (on his death and on the birth of their daughter).65 The primary source for events covering her life is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

It is possible that Æthelflæd, seeing the importance her father placed on the Chronicles in his reign, had a hand in commissioning the Mercian version, now known as the Annals of Æthelflæd. This source gives insights into her reign that are not included in the other versions of the Chronicle, which emphasise Edward’s achievements over those of his sister.

She is mentioned in other sources too, particularly by Norman chroniclers, who were surprisingly favourable about her in later accounts. In the twelfth century, Henry of Huntingdon declared her to be ‘so powerful that in praise and exaltation of her wonderful gifts, some call her not only lady but even king’. In a poem, he praised her as ‘worthy of a man’s name’ and ‘more illustrious than Caesar’. Sources from the Celtic west show Æthelflæd was recognised as queen and ruler.67 The Annals of Ulster refer to her as ‘famosissima regina saxonum’ (most famous queen of the Saxons).

The great Mercian saints were being gathered up and their bones redistributed to imbue their regional potency to Æthelflæd’s new burhs.

When Æthelflæd had entered the Viking-held parts of Mercia and retrieved the body from Lindsey, she was not only acting as powerful Mercian queens had done before her. She was also echoing Constantine’s mother, Saint Helena, who travelled to the Holy Land and brought back the True Cross. To Æthelflæd the rescue of these relics was a symbol of her divine rule, and placing this Christian English saint-king at the heart of her new minster in Gloucester was an important symbolic act.

Æthelflæd was intending this church in Gloucester as her dynastic burial place. There she and her husband would lie alongside one of England’s greatest saints.

Three Viking kings were killed in the battle and Æthelflæd had proved that she could head up an army.

The following year her husband died. Æthelflæd had already been the primary decision maker in Mercia for nearly a decade, following the example of influential Mercian queens, but in an unprecedented move, the noblemen of Mercia elected her as ruler – a rare occurence indeed in early medieval history.

Four prayer books dating from the ninth century were written by and for women here, with one containing a gynaecological prayer.

thegns

the United Kingdom as we know it today was forming through her diplomacy.

The twelfth-century historian William of Malmesbury records that she declined to have sex after bearing a daughter because it was ‘unbecoming of the daughter of a king to give way to a delight which, after a time, produced such painful consequences’. He also suggests that she shied away from ‘marital obligations’ because of the risks it posed her life. It may be that Æthelflæd had suffered physical difficulties through the birth and pregnancy. True to the Mercian queens that had gone before her, however, she believed a female heir was as capable of ruling as a male one. She put in place insurances, securing the promises of the Mercians lords that her daughter, Ælfwynn, would succeed her.

Ælfwynn

Cynethryth had more influence than almost all other women from the sixth to ninth centuries, and this mantle was carried over by the Lady of the Mercians, Æthelflæd. In the knowledge that women had achieved so much in their own right before her, Æthelflæd was able to rule with ‘strength of character’ for two decades at the turn of the tenth century, a pivotal point in English history. The story of how, in the space of just two generations, England went from a single marshy island in Athelney under Alfred to what it is today has been repeated down the centuries. It is also at the heart of an imperialist historical narrative where England became Master of the Seas. But the men of this period have always overshadowed the influence of Æthelflæd. She was wife, daughter, sister and aunt to the most important men of the ninth and tenth centuries, but she was also a ruler herself, whose decisions shaped the fortunes of kingdoms. She deserves recognition, not just as Alfred’s daughter and Athelstan’s aunt, but in her own right

this twelfth-century poem a testament to how she was perceived a quarter of a millennium after her death: Heroic Æthelflæd! Great in martial fame, A man in valour, though a woman in your name: Your warlike hosts by nature you obeyed, Conquered over both, though born by sex a maid.

an English Joan of Arc, a warrior woman who deserved fame.

She was a victim not of medieval prejudice, but of modern attitudes towards female leadership.

Osteoarchaeologist Anna Kjellström has finally been proved right. A year earlier she laid out the full set of 42 surviving bones, each marked ‘Bj 581’ in Indian ink.

But for over a century this individual has been known as the ‘Birka Warrior’. Found with an axe, quiver of arrows, spears and a sword, the skeleton was surrounded by ‘masculine’ objects, so archaeologists assumed the bones had to be male too. Now the XX chromosomes overturned these assumptions. The warrior was a woman.

Far from a rigid patriarchal society, the tenth-century world of Birka was a place where gender was more fluid than we might imagine, and women could assume a wide spectrum of roles. Perhaps a warrior, and certainly important and influential, the individual buried in grave number Bj 581 gives us a glimpse of Viking-age women in all their variety and complexity.

The huge sails of these ships could cover 70 miles per day carrying 20 tons of goods as well as livestock and a 20-strong crew.

Vikings make the ‘prima signatio’, or sign of the cross, to indicate to Christian traders that they are free to do business.10 As was the case in sixth-century England, Christianity is exerting an influence on this Viking town, with a small ninth-century church tucked away to the south. Men and women wear pendants around their necks, alternating between Thor’s hammers and individually shaped crosses. The Muslim world is evident in Birka too, with Islamic coins providing a rich source of silver.

but recent analysis has discovered was the rarer material of coloured glass; a substance produced in the eastern world in the tenth century. Carved into the glass in ancient Arabic script are the words ‘for Allah’ or ‘to Allah’. It is impossible now to say with any certainty why this woman was buried wearing it.

The fact it was chosen to accompany her to the afterlife suggests it meant something to her and to those burying her, and also indicates how cosmopolitan and international this medieval town was.

Female graves outnumber those of males,

But one in particular was ‘perhaps the most remarkable of all the graves in the field’, as Stolpe scrawled in a Royal Academy report. It stood out to him because of the wealth of finds accompanying the skeleton, and he called it Bj 581.

Rules for the Scandinavian game of hnefatafl have not survived but marked boards and poems referring to the game help to reconstruct it. Hnefatafl involves two armies: one defensive and one aggressive. A king piece is centrally placed, and the aim is to safely reach the edge of the board. Meaning ‘game of the fist’, it involves concentration and forward planning.

Jorvik (modern day York),

The comic-book version of Vikings as wild, ignorant barbarians has its roots not in the facts of the distant past, but in the propaganda of the last century and a half.

Far from ancient, the Viking horned helmet is only 150 years old. In 1876, German designer Carl Emil Doepler created the stage costumes for a production of Wagner’s Ring cycle. Wanting the Viking-age characters to appear more impressive on stage, he put horns on the headdresses of the evil characters, while the heroes wore headdresses with wings. The popularity of this visual image – ancestors harnessing the strength of animals in a form of supernatural shapeshifting – meant it became a way of celebrating all things ‘Germanic’. The hijacking of Viking culture by German nationalists was a deliberate strategy, and in just twenty years the horned helmet was reproduced on everything from cruise menus to children’s books. Tying Germany to a perceived Viking ancestry only intensified under the Nazis.

The runic Sowilo symbol inspired the SS lightning bolt insignia, and the Ahnenerbe, Heinrich Himmler’s think tank, searched for proof of the racial superiority of Germans through Aryan and Nordic links.22 The ‘horned helmet’ version of Viking history is not simply something to be laughed off or ignored; it has been misappropriated and misused in the most damaging ways.

The Germans were not alone in creating a mythic version of the Vikings to suit their ideological agendas. As the twentieth century loomed, the British and Germans raced to gain control of the seas and to lay claim to their most famous historical seafarers. The painting by English painter Frank Dicksee from 1893, called The Funeral of a Viking, presents a view that is still firmly embedded in modern consciousness.

As texts of the Scandinavian sagas were rapidly being translated into English and devoured by a public keen for adventure and tales of conquest, an image of unbeatable, unfettered warriors emerged. The British Empire was still ‘master of the seas’ and there was a symbolic potency in harking back to Viking origins.

There is an unrestrained romantic otherness about the men – these are not dignified Victorian gentlemen; these are their pagan forefathers. We’re led to believe that inside the refined and sophisticated Victorian man lies the passion and power of earlier ancestors. But this is empire-fuelled fantasy. The real world of the Vikings was very different, as was the idea that nineteenth-century men were restrained and upstanding.

The ‘Vikings’ were not simply a race of barbaric warriors who raided, raped and robbed their way across the known world. They were not pagan, ignorant, unhygienic bearded men.

The very idea of the Vikings being a unified race, or even a distinctive group, is problematic. The term ‘Viking Age’ is only used from 1873 onwards. In early medieval texts, the Old Norse word ‘víking’ describes an activity a group of ‘víkingr’ (explorers, merchants, travellers) would carry out as they took to the seas on expeditions. These could include raiding, trading, diplomacy, settlement and intermarriage. And when their violent attacks were recorded, their victims never called them ‘Vikings’. Instead, they were Norse, Swedes or Danes. If written about in a damning way they were ‘pagans’, ‘heathens’ or

wolves’.24

Their religion was polytheistic, with the greatest gods and goddess displaying vices and virtues aligned to a warrior society. Their language, social structure and legal codes were loosely related, and their legacy in material culture – zoomorphic art, metalwork and armoury – can be seen as a unifying factor. But they were not a distinctive race and their movements from as far afield as Newfoundland to the edges of the Silk Road were on the whole not part of a coordinated mission, but rather the result of travel, settlement and integration.

There is the assumption that Vikings were bearded, dirty barbarians. The evidence remarkably comes down to a single, and distinctly unfavourable, account by the tenth-century Arabian writer Ahmad ibn Fadlan. He describes the ‘Rus’ (Vikings who settled along the river routes between the Baltic and Black Seas) as being ‘the dirtiest creatures of God’. Then he relishes in the extent of their hideous hygiene: ‘They have no shame in voiding their bowels and bladder, nor do they wash themselves when polluted by emission of semen, nor do they