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

by Janina Ramírez

Another theory about the disturbance of the Oseberg skeletons centres on the spread of Christianity in Scandinavia. Among the Rus, there are records of rulers disinterring the bones of relatives to have them baptised.

Harald Bluetooth, the first Christian ruler of Denmark, ordered his pagan parents to be reburied in a chamber beneath the floor of his church at Jellinge. Churches in Scandinavia were often built near or on top of pre-Christian burial grounds, and the famous thirteenth-century Laxdaela Saga describes how a pagan witch buried beneath one of Iceland’s first churches appears in a dream and asks to be reinterred somewhere away from Christian tears and prayers.52

But the disruption of their burial suggests that its location was remembered for centuries, and their names, reputations and importance were passed down the generations. They prove that women could be honoured long after death as bold, strong Viking warriors.

in Birka the weights and scales usually associated with traders are found in 32 per cent of female graves, compared with only 28 per cent of male burials.

The warrior class made up the social elite, destined to be celebrated in the afterlife, so physical strength and skills at arms were prized. But these characteristics are not a definitive marker of biological sex. Fluidity could exist in both directions – towards and away from this ideal.

Gender ambiguity, based on clothing, hair, attributes and behaviour, is commonly expressed in Viking Age art and literature.

The ambiguity, however, comes from the clothing. The figure wears a floor-length dress, an apron, and four rings of beads around their neck. It also appears to have a moustache, so is wearing clothing that is recognisably female, with facial hair that is male. Various academics have taken a rigid stance: if the dress is female then the figure can’t be Odin but must instead be Freyja or his wife Frig.

fluid. If the chief of the gods can dress as a woman, and the god of thunder can dress as a woman, could other men?

A person’s hair was part of them; to cut it without permission was equivalent to assault and demanded recompense.

show that women most often wore their hair in a ponytail coiled into a knot at the top. Men are usually depicted with short hair, although a third have longer hair in a plait. Many are bearded, but there is an interesting group that appears to subvert these assumptions.

artefacts and images contribute to the evidence that men did subvert gender norms by dressing or wearing their hair in recognisably female ways.

As Viking Age law codes, sagas and religious texts all discuss what should happen if women go about dressed as men, we can assume that women would subvert gender norms in everyday life too.

Burial number Bj 581 was also full of exotic finds, suggesting that the woman interred here had either travelled widely or had come to Birka from elsewhere. It has been argued that she was not of Scandinavian descent herself but had come to Sweden from Slavic lands.

the warrior burial she received was created for her by the Swedish community who interred her. They wanted to honour her after death in the most lavish way.

The person in Bj 581 was female. She was buried with weapons, horses and a gaming set, in a large wooden chamber outside the fortifications of the town. She was seated or enthroned, perhaps even sat astride a horse’s saddle, clad in expensive garments woven with silk and silver thread. She is...

In November 2019 the reconstructed face of a woman buried at Nordre Kjølen Farm in Solør, Norway, was revealed to the public. Her skeleton indicates that she had been injured by a sword across her forehead, yet this wasn’t what killed her. The wound had healed, leaving a scar. She was buried along with a sword, spear, battleaxe and arrows, her head resting on a shield and a bridled horse at the foot of the grave. She was about 18 or 19 years old when she died

burial from Aunvollen in Nord-Trøndelag is also posing new questions. The 20-year-old woman in this burial was laid out on a quilt, with a sword, eight gaming pieces, a comb, scissors and a small box. The combination of traditional ‘male’ and ‘female’ finds again suggests we must reassess our preconceptions and see the people of this period as capable of attitudes towards sex and gender that challenge our modern-day assumptions.

Birka. If she was a leader and able to wield arms, she was likely high-status and highly trained. She

Her bones show no signs of having engaged in hand-to-hand combat. This is not unusual, as some injuries may not have left their imprint on the skeleton. There also has not been enough analysis conducted on the Birka Warrior bones to determine whether there were characteristic changes to the physique of the individual that would suggest she engaged in warrior activities.

in the challenging environments of Viking Age Scandinavia, in communities where every person’s contribution would determine the success and survival of the group, an individual would behave according to need.

There is no single narrative, and the skeleton in grave Bj 581 reminds us not to look for a collective ‘woman’ of the past, but instead to examine individuals, and what they can tell us about the particular time and place they lived in.

Mass produced, and an early example of ‘fast fashion’, the pendants – and the figures and symbols on them – would have been popular.

In one, a bearded man tears at his long hair, which was a gesture usually performed by women, while in another a woman wears a long gown, carrying a shield and a sword. But she is not a warrior, as her long dress and train would make it hard to fight in combat.

fragments of woven material discovered in the Oseberg ship. Through reconstructions, the original tapestries appear to show men and women behaving in unconventional ways.63 A strange figure wears a horned helmet (supporting the idea they were used for ritual rather than battle) while many women bear weapons.

Both discoveries reinforce the idea that, rather than simply assign an individual from the past ‘male’ or ‘female’, we have to consider cultural context. DNA may determine an XY or XX chromosome configuration, but the way that person lived, dressed, behaved, self-identified and the roles they assumed within their societies are all much harder to reconstruct over a thousand years

Battle of Hastings of 1066, culminating in William the Conqueror’s defeat of King Harold.

Hôtel du Doyen, its home for the past forty years, and a custom-made museum is being built inside the destroyed interior of the former Grand Seminary. Here, the 900-year-old linen will have a safe long-term home, protected behind glass to be showcased to 400,000 tourists a year – visitors keen to see a treasure adored not just in Normandy, but across the whole of France as well as in England.

During the French Revolution it was confiscated as public property and used to cover munition loads.3 Napoleon moved it to Paris, but it eventually ended up back in Bayeux on a winding contraption which did terrible damage to the final scenes. The biggest threat to its survival came during the Second World War, when Himmler requested its removal to Germany as an example of ‘Germanic Art’.

When Himmler made his last-ditch attempt to take the Bayeux Tapestry, Allied forces had already stormed the beaches of Normandy and the Louvre was back in French hands. The tapestry was found safe in the museum’s basement and returned to Bayeux.

ten colours of wool were used, there were nine rather than eight sections sewn together, and the embroidery had only been repaired once in the nineteenth century. But one mystery unravels when examined from the back. It relates to the most famous scene on the tapestry: King Harold’s death and whether he was shot in the eye with an arrow.

But close examination of the Bayeux Tapestry over the winter of 1982–3 reveals clues that the figure always thought to be Harold – reaching for an arrow that sticks awkwardly out from his helmet – is not the king at all.6 The Latin inscriptions, which appear above the images and give context of what the scenes present, provide a good starting point for unpicking this myth.

the person we know as Harold is not the standing figure with the arrow in the eye, but the individual lying at the end of the scene with a man looming above him about to hack into his leg. Turning to the back of this section of the tapestry, seventeen small holes are revealed, suggesting that at one point this figure too may have had an arrow stitched in his eye.7 Although the symbolism has been lost or removed, these tiny holes divulge that this man on the ground was also once considered to be King Harold.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states simply that he fell and was slain.

the Normans were victorious not through a fortuitous arrow, but through the strength and skill of the knights.

In later medieval texts an arrow in the eye was symbolically the appropriate death for a perjurer; someone who had broken an oath. Harold is shown earlier in the tapestry swearing on relics, so the arrow has always been interpreted as his just deserts.

there is another line of tiny holes, this time extending from the arrow in his eye. Even more shockingly, the wool of this arrow was nineteenth century, not eleventh.

An earlier drawing made in the 1720s shows not an arrow in the eye, but a lance in the hand. This makes much better sense. The angle of the arrow had always been problematic since it bends

The stitches, lost for centuries but revealed in these investigations, prove that the figure is not King Harold but another soldier in the last line of defence for the king. The arrow was once a spear, but the reworked design is how it has been reproduced for over a century.

The figure on the floor is in fact the king, wounded in the thigh as the early sources state. If incorrect assumptions have been made about the most famous and reproduced image of the king’s death, then it’s likely there are other issues that also need readdressing.

with the ancient stones reworked in walls and cobbles reminders that Bayeux was once an important Roman settlement, full of sanctuaries to ancient gods.

But while their ancestors who came from the Scandinavian north and settled in Normandy wore the hammer of Thor, these Christianised warriors carry the sign of the cross around their necks.

handful of English men are scattered through the crowd, distinguished from the Normans by their moustaches and hair worn long, rather than shorn up the back of the neck.11

Women wear flowing gowns fitted to their figures dyed with woad, madder or dyer’s rocket in vibrant shades of red, blue, green and yellow. Some also have fragments of an exotic material – silk – woven into their trimmings. Golden threads shimmer in the stitches of the wealthier ladies, jewels dangling from their neck and headdresses influenced by fashions of the imperial court in Byzantium.

have returned from campaigns in Sicily, bringing luxury goods and foreign slaves to Bayeux. Every sector of society has been drawn together for a...

Moving into the nave of the cathedral, you see a vaulted ceiling reaching high...

This new type of architecture allows for powerful statements in stone to be erected quickly; church and State now govern all aspects of life and a new era has begun.

He has led troops across Europe, smashing through territories from the toe of Italy to the tip of the British Isles. As this legendary figure approaches the steps of the cathedral he appears strong and stern, covered in the regalia of both Duke of Normandy and King of England. With him is his brother Odo, Bishop of Bayeux. He bears himself less like a cleric and more like a warrior, happier wielding a club than a crosier.

Hanging from ropes and stretching around the central space, a roll of fabric runs the full length of the nave.

The songs of the Battle of Hastings have been sung in the courts and parroted in the alehouses since that famous day in October 1066 when Norman troops defeated King Harold and his English army, and Duke William seized the throne. Tens of thousands of minute stiches have captured that historic moment, proudly on display in the cathedral at Bayeux.

The events of the embroidery remind all inside the church that this victory has ushered in an age which will bind France and England together for centuries. A group of English female embroiderers has guaranteed these immortal images a central place in the pages of history.