Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It

by Janina Ramírez

Christianity had been practised throughout the British Isles since the reign of Constantine the Great (AD 272–337). 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.

In AD 412, when Roman governance was withdrawn so the Empire could take care of issues closer to home, a power vacuum opened up. Over the centuries we’ve filled this void with legends of King Arthur and Merlin the wizard, but the historian Bede gives a version of accounts which archaeology largely supports.

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 influence, sliding into roles left vacant when the command structures of the Roman Empire disintegrated.

Evidence for Christianity and earlier Romano-British worship disappears from the archaeological record in the fifth century, only continuing in the so-called ‘Celtic fringes’. 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).

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

The choice to send a Roman mission to Kent was not accidental. The king was married to a Frankish Christian woman named Bertha and, thanks to its location, the heathen people of this kingdom had been interacting with the Christian continent through trade and diplomacy.

St Augustine’s sixth-century mission was a strategic attempt to bring a part of the old Roman Empire into a new ‘Christian’ Empire centred on the Papacy. Kent, Æthelberht and his wife Bertha were all key to the mission’s success.

Politics and religio

Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People – 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 might.

Clotilde wielded considerable influence. When her sons – heirs to the Merovingian dynasty – were deciding whether to overthrow the young heirs of Burgundy and take their lands under their control, they placed the decision in their mother’s hands.

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.

It has been claimed that King Rædwald may even be the individual commemorated in the Sutton Hoo ship burial.27 Bede

He also wrote that Rædwald had dabbled with Christianity, seeing its potential for providing new links with the continent. But rather than convert fully, he simply added an image of Christ alongside his collection of pagan deities.28

The finds from Sutton Hoo support this dualism. Silver bowls with incised crosses and two baptismal spoons were discovered alongside an ancestral helmet and shield.

The items from Sutton Hoo are predominantly pagan with a nod to Christianity. While clearly hedging his bets, the individual buried at Sutton Hoo chose to ride aboard an enormous ship to an afterlife in Valhalla with Woden. Across the border, however, Æthelberht of Kent was aligning himself more fully with another sacred ally.

Religion has long been used as the tool of the powerful through periods of change. When the Emperor Constantine emerged victorious from the civil wars of the early third century, he launched his reign by pinning his success on a new religion – Christianity.

He set a precedent. After him rulers would reinvent their dynasties through their ties with 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.30 From Æthelberht’s point of view, the church brought all sorts of additional benefits: international trade links, shared military concerns and powerful bureaucracy that could bolster a ruler’s administrative power.

His new wife, Bertha, was a pawn in a game of international politics, married off to create a bond between pagan Kent and Christian Frankia.

Bertha was sailing across the English Channel with a Christian bishop by her side. But she wasn’t simply a puppet on a string; she seems to have controlled her destiny to a certain extent. Bede says that Bertha insisted on being allowed to practice her Christian religion.

Like the cemetery at Street House, sixth-century English people were deliberately bringing the past into their narratives of change. Earlier Roman stones were symbolically incorporated into the first Christian church in pagan Kent.

Bertha’s church was dedicated to St Martin. Bertha was raised in Tours, where the saint had been bishop and where he was celebrated as ‘hammer of the heretics’. 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; Christianity was taking hold in Kent and heathens should watch out, as change was coming. St Martin’s remains the oldest parish church in the English-speaking world.

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. It was Christianity that brought literacy and Latin to a people who had depended for three centuries on oral tradition and memory. It could be argued that with writing came complacency, bureaucracy and rigidity.

Unlike Bertha, we don’t know exactly who the Loftus Princess was. Her jewellery is nearly all that remains to provide insights into her life and death. But we do know she was wealthy, influential and most probably had converted to Christianity.

the main jewel carved in the shape of a scallop shell. There are no surviving comparison pieces to this gemstone, but in other contexts the shell, like the cross and the fish, carried Christian symbolism.

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.

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.36

Still subtle enough to straddle both non-Christian and Christian symbolism, the wearer of the Loftus pendant had one foot in the past and one in the future. She was living through a period of religious and cultural transformation when links to the Christian world were getting ever stronger.

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.

But the goodwill shown to Augustine and his missionaries in Kent under Bertha’s influence seemingly affected the decision to found a major monastery and the cathedral in Canterbury.

Bertha’s son, Eadbald, was problematic. He didn’t continue his father’s support for the church, instead reverting the kingdom back to the Germanic religion when he succeeded Æthelberht.

The new faith was constantly gaining and losing ground through the first half of the seventh century as individual rulers accepted it, only for their children to reject it once they died. But while her son didn’t follow her grand plan, Bertha’s daughter Æthelburg did.

Æthelburg was sent away in marriage to a pagan king. In AD 625 she travelled north, past the firmly pagan territory of East Anglia, into Northumbria. Here she married Edwin, whose successful reign saw him unite the two kingdoms of Deira and Bernicia into one large and dominant northern powerhouse.

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.

We know that Christian burials don’t tend to include grave goods, but it takes time for dearly held practices to be replaced. If someone has spent their life thinking about death and the afterlife one way, then are expected to bury their own loved ones in a different way, there will be periods of transition with older traditions still persisting.

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. The cemetery at Loftus is a final flicker of the old ways; a moment in time captured in the earth.40

Described as a ‘Final Phase’ burial, grave 42 at Street House has Christian symbolism, continental fashion, and Germanic goods all wrapped up together. 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.

It would have taken physical exertion to dig a large enough hole and lower down the bed. This sort of dedication to burial reaches its peak in the spectacular ship burial of Sutton Hoo, where alongside the cloisonné jewellery and Merovingian coins, a whole ocean-ready boat 27 metres long was put in the ground.

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.

only seems to be noblewomen in the seventh century who were given the honour of a bed burial. Over a dozen have been found across England, with Loftus as the most northern example. All fit the cast of ‘Final Phase’ burials which include both pre-Christian and Christian elements. At Shrublands Quarry in Suffolk, a woman was buried in a bed wearing a necklace wh...

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 A more explicit association between Christianity and female bed burials is found in the delicate pectoral cross discovered alongside iron cleats in Ixworth.

Few individuals received such adulation in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History as St Cuthbert (c. 634–687). In fact, the historian wrote two separate works, one in prose and one in poetry, on the life of this famous Northumbrian bishop.

Many of them, indeed, disgraced the faith which they professed by unholy deeds; and some of them, in the time of mortality, neglecting the sacrament of their creed, had recourse to idolatrous remedies, as if by charms or amulets, or any other mysteries of the magical art, they were able to avert a stroke inflicted upon them by the Lord.

Bede’s caution against ‘amulets’ is ironic, since nestled within Cuthbert’s coffin, under many layers of burial shrouds, one such talismanic object was discovered. In the ninth century his body, hidden inside his wooden coffin covered with Christian carvings, Latin inscriptions and runes, was carried from Cuthbert’s heartland – the monastery of Lindisfarne – via Chester-le-Street, to escape the attacks of Viking raiders.

Only when the bones were taken from their shrouds did it appear. Already old and repaired when it went into the ground, Cuthbert’s pectoral cross sits well alongside those buried with women in Ixworth and Trumpington. The first wave of English converts to Christianity expressed their new-found faith through these personal possessions.

Cuthbert lived as a hermit and a monk but hid this high-status piece of Germanic jewellery inside his robes.

Northumbria was a particularly interesting melting pot in terms of Christianity. Paulinus’s mission attempted to bring Roman Christianity to the royal house of Northumbria through the conversion of Edwin. But some time before this, Irish missionaries had been working their way across the northern borders, establishing Celtic institutions and exerting considerable influence over individual rulers.

All along the northern part of England, Irish missionaries were making inroads and setting up monasteries that were different to the Benedictine ones spread by the papacy. They were unique powder kegs of seemingly unorthodox practices, even differing in how they calculated the date of Easter.

The different worlds reconciled in the person of Cuthbert. He combined a Germanic warrior youth with an early religious career in the Celtic monastery of Melrose, then later a commitment to Roman Christianity during his time as Bishop of Lindisfarne. But it would take a woman – Hild of Whitby – to finally embed Roman Christianity in the north.

Clotilde, Hild of Whitby’s name means ‘battler’. She was born around AD 614 into the royal family of Northumbria.

Her great-uncle and aunt were King Edwin and Æthelburg, Bertha’s daughter, and she was brought up at their court. She was a princess and would have been a useful pawn in the marriage plans of the Northumbrian royal houses.