The Finale and a Historical Endnote: A Real Life, Reimagined

Bertha's Tale: A Novel | Episode 20

Bertha’s Tale would usually be a paid member exclusive, but to celebrate the end of the serialisation I have made this available for everyone to read. I hope you enjoy the culmination of this year-long project!

This piece is designed to be self-contained, so you should have all the information within the instalment to keep track of the narrative. If you find yourself wanting to read the previous instalments, however, use the button below to be directed to the archive.

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Bertha’s Voice
c. A.D. 601
Canterbury, Kent

We weren’t graced with Hild’s presence again after she was banished to the furthest reaches of these islands.

For that, I was grateful.

It took many months of anxious nights, however, to convince me that she had, truly, gone.

Once, I awoke gripping Æthelberht’s chest as if trying to wrestle him from my body. She had been so vividly real in my dream that I’d mistaken his loving embrace for her deathly one. In my mind’s eye, she’d had her legs astride my hips and hands to my throat, squeezing hard. Breathing only in gasps, I’d tried to scream for help, begging my husband to wake and wrangle me free, but I couldn’t get out more than a whisper.

“Bertha! Bertha!” she’d screamed ferociously, just inches from my face, taunting me with my own name.

“Bertha! Wake up!” I couldn’t understand why she was mocking me so, calling me to wake when she was sending me to my eternal sleep.

When Æthelberht had finally managed to shake me to my senses, it being his voice I’d heard of course, I held handfuls of his nightshirt, dampened by my panicked perspiration. He’d had to hold me down by my shoulders to stop me from attacking him in my sleep, which I assume my mind had interpreted as Hild sitting astride me.

Another time, I’d convinced myself that she’d stolen our newborn son Eadbald. It was always at night that she came to me, when the world was at its darkest that she chose to terrorise me. Again, I’d awoken in the night, thinking I’d heard his cries. Heavy with sleep, I’d reached across to the basket where he slept, resting on the floor next to our bed, only to find it empty. He was gone.

I looked everywhere for him, throwing blankets and pillows from the bed frantically, screaming at Æthelberht to wake.

“She’s taken him! Æthelberht! She’s taken him. He’s gone! Eadbald is gone!”

Eyes bleary with the confusion of that liminal space between asleep and awake, he propped himself up on an elbow and rubbed his head. “What do you mean he’s gone?”

I was out of the bed by this point, searching desperately, hopelessly daring to believe he might simply be hiding somewhere in the room, as if a six-week-old could simply up and walk from his bed.

“She’s taken him, Æthelberht,” I sobbed.

He shuffled to my side of the bed, looking in the empty basket before murmuring, “Bertha, he’s here.”

I shot him a look of disbelief.

He reached into the basket and stroked his son’s face. “He’s here, and he’s sleeping so peacefully. Come back to bed darling.”

Lifting him carefully into our bed, I wrapped myself around Eadbald, head nuzzled into my chest, head so close I could kiss it. Æthelberht mirrored me. I could not, would not, allow anyone to take my baby.

When recounting this tale to Ingunda, she told me it was common for new mothers to hallucinate that the baby had gone.

“Are you being serious? I thought I was going crazy!”

She laughed, in that head-tilted-back girlish way that she used to, back when we were just teenagers. “If you’re crazy then so is every other mother I’ve spoken to! My goodness, when my first was born I spent one night desperately ripping through the pillows for fear that he’d crawled into them, and then with my next one I’d fallen asleep feeding him and though he was literally in my arms I screamed that my baby had disappeared. Honestly! It’s the lack of sleep and all the changes your body’s been through.”

She hugged me tight.

I was grateful for Ingunda, in those days when everything I thought I knew about myself seemed to have disappeared. Maybe it was tiredness; she would know, with four children of her own. Or maybe it was something else, a yearning for a life I’d left behind, one before I’d met this little bundle that owned my heart more thoroughly than anyone ever had. A life that I wanted back, but also didn’t want back at all.

Yet for the first time in our twenty-year marriage, once I trusted that my enemy had gone for good, I was able to settle into life with my husband and young son.

I was the queen I had expected to become all those years before when I’d married Æthelberht.

Queen Bertha, finally.

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Historical Endnote

Bertha’s Tale was based on the life of a real figure in history, but how much of this year-long serial was fact and how much was fiction?

There aren’t many sources for Bertha - written or archaeological.

Of course there aren’t. She was a woman!

I don’t say that to be unnecessarily sensationalist or cynical. It’s simply an unfortunate feature of early medieval culture that, for a long time at least, only the actions of men were deemed worthy of using precious parchment, ink, and man hours recording.

We know of Bertha from two main written sources:

• Gregory of Tours, who wrote a history of the Franks that serves as a major source for the kingdom during this period

• Bede, whose Ecclesiastical History of the English People forms the only near-contemporary account of early Anglo-Saxon England

Even within these sources, however, she is barely mentioned, and rarely for her own actions. See what Gregory says of her, for example:

‘King Charibert married Ingoberga, by whom he had a daughter [she’s not even named] who afterwards married a husband in Kent and was taken there.’

Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks, IV.29.

And then the way that Bede introduces her:

‘At that time [c. A.D. 597] Æthelberht, king of Kent, was a very powerful monarch. The lands over which he exercised his suzerainty stretched as far as the great river Humber, which divides the northern from the southern Angles … Some knowledge about the Christian religion had already reached him because he had a Christian wife of the Frankish royal family whose name was Bertha. He had received her from her parents on condition that she should be allowed to practise her faith and religion unhindered, with a bishop named Liudhard whom they had provided for her to support her faith.’

Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica, I.25 (ed. McClure & Collins, p.39).

It was pertinent to Bede’s aims, more than Gregory’s, to include a little more detail on her background: he had to admit that her arrival in Kent likely played a role in his hero’s conversion to Christianity.

But notice how in both sources she is described only in relation to the men around her:

• Charibert’s daughter

• Æthelberht’s wife

• Liudhard’s disciple

These sources don’t afford her the space to be herself. To be Bertha, a whole individual irrespective of those she lived alongside.

Which is why I decided to tell her story.

Being such a small figure in the written sources, however, I had to allow quite a large degree of creative license when reconstructing her life. Unlike some of the women who lived at later times, we have none of her own words surviving, for example, or contemporary biographies written about her. She does not appear in charters or court records; there are no paintings of her; and she didn’t leave behind any personal belongings.

So, I used what I knew about early Anglo-Saxon Kent (which I wrote a thesis on, a long time ago) and early kingship (which I wrote a thesis on much more recently) to build a likely, though not certain, picture of what she might have been like.

In the interests of historical clarity, I’ve laid out below the facts and the fiction, and I leave it up to you, the reader, to determine how effective you feel I’ve been in honouring this tremendous woman who lived 1400 years ago.

The facts

Bertha really was a Frankish princess.

Born c. A.D. 565, Bertha’s father was Charibert I, king of Paris. Charibert’s grandfather, Clovis I, had been the first king of a unified Frankish people, though the kingdom fragmented once more upon his death. Clovis is perhaps most famous for his conversion to Christianity, which began a line (though incomplete) of Christian kings in the Frankish region down to the time of Bertha and beyond.

Little is known about Bertha’s early childhood; this was a time when writing was scarce and tended to record only events relating to the Church or kingdom history. It is known that her father, though he claimed to be a Christian, had four concurrent wives, for which he was excommunicated. Charibert died in A.D. 567, and it’s likely that Bertha’s life changed quite significantly once she became the daughter of a dead, disgraced, excommunicated monarch, rather than a living, breathing, powerful one.

Bertha really did marry a pagan Kentish king.

Bertha married Æthelberht of Kent in c. A.D. 580, when the latter’s father, Eormenric, was still on the throne. Though she connected the family to the Continental political arena, it is unlikely that this was seen as a prestigious marriage in Frankish circles, owing to Bertha’s minor position within the royal dynasty.

Eormenric’s name gives an indication that the family might have hailed originally from Francia, as the ‘Eormen-’ part is similar to other names in the region in the sixth century. There were also suggestions, preserved in papal letters, that some in Continental Europe considered at least part of the British Isles to be under Frankish rule, though the nature of this is hotly debated.

Æthelberht did not convert to Christianity until Augustine’s mission, A.D. 597, and so though he likely had some exposure to the faith before this, it is reasonable to assume that he was pagan. What this looked like in terms of worship is difficult to describe, because very little evidence of pre-Christian belief survives.

What we do know, from Bede, is that Æthelberht, despite being ‘overlord’ of the English south of the Humber, did not want to enforce conversion on anyone. This seems to have been his major failing for Bede, who otherwise hails him as a hero of the faith: by comparing Bede’s treatment of Æthelberht with later Christian kings, it is clear that Bede wished he had done more to extend the church beyond the borders of Kent.

Bertha really did endure childlessness for the majority of her marriage.

Bertha married in A.D. 580 - but it is unlikely that she had her first child much before the late 590s, and her daughter Æthelburh probably wasn’t born until c. A.D. 601. This means that there was almost twenty years of childlessness for the couple, which got me thinking about the possible causes for this (this, though, strays into fiction - so check out that section below…)

Bertha really was buried alongside her husband.

I didn’t include Bertha’s death in the final chapter. Though I had intended to, when it came to it I just found it too painful to write. That’s the funny thing about history, isn’t it? We all know that they died because nobody lives forever. And yet, when it comes time to learn about or write about their deaths, it can be intensely emotional to say goodbye to these characters we’ve loved, laughed, and grieved alongside.

I just couldn’t write the ending that way.

I wanted her to have her happily ever after.

We do know, however, that she likely died in c. A.D. 601, shortly after the birth of her daughter Æthelburh. Though Æthelberht remarried, he chose to be buried with Bertha upon his own death in 616, in the church he’d designed with Augustine to be something of a dynastic mausoleum.

His second wife, to our knowledge, was not buried with him.

It can be difficult to ascertain the decisions and thought processes that lay behind funerary decisions. I’d love to say that Æthelberht was buried with Bertha because she was his enduring love, and there may well be truth in this. It must be acknowledged, however, that his place of burial may well have been chosen by those burying him, rather than the king himself. They might, therefore, have buried him with Bertha in a church because it seemed pertinent for the survival of the Church at a time when his successor was living in flagrant repudiation of his father’s faith.

The fiction

Bertha’s husband wasn’t already married and didn’t have an affair - probably.

This was the main fictional element of the story, though there were countless micro-interactions that I created where they couldn’t possibly have been recorded (conversations between the married couple in bed, for example).

The idea for the storyline around Hild (who, confusingly, is not the same Hild who will feature in the next serial - I should have planned ahead better when choosing my characters’ names…) was the fact that Æthelberht was in his late teens when he married Bertha. Part of a culture without the monogamous constraints of Christianity, it struck me as odd that he would have ‘waited for marriage’. Why? What would have stopped him from indulging his lustful teenage passions? I couldn’t help but wonder whether he might already have had a lover and children, as so many would have done by his age.

I thought that a storyline about a love tangle might create an additional layer to the story that otherwise might be a little two-dimensional (though admittedly, it is a historical fiction cliché, though undoubtedly an enduring feature of the human experience). Our lives, generally, are complex and multi-faceted, but the story we’ve received about Bertha and Æthelberht is simple and linear: they married and he eventually became a Christian king with power beyond his borders. Though undeniably the tale of their lives, it’s a little dull to string out for twenty chapters… Imagine if the only problem in all that writing was their conflict of belief?

Enter Hild - a living, breathing problem determined to wreck the marriage of her once-lover and his new wife.

It was a bit of a fun, and could be a plausible explanation for their decades-long childlessness too, though I would never claim it to be history. Merely speculation, and a creative response to the facts.

The enduring message of Bertha’s Tale? Let’s give women back the central role they played during their lifetimes.

It frustrates me so much that many, many history books currently in stores focus on the men, kings, battles … just the same old ideas, ignoring the majority of the population.

Why are we not inviting people to learn about the stories of these other, important individuals through ‘fiction-based-on-fact’ (as described by

Kate Baker

in a recent discussion thread)? Sure, we couldn’t write a whole non-fiction tome on them in the way we could about Alfred the Great, for example, but we can creatively reimagine their lives in such a way that we share the incredible people that they were.

Consider this, then, my open plea to the publication world to commission more stories that open up the lives of medieval individuals who weren’t kings. Please, please, please: those stories are so overdone.

Give the spotlight to others worthy of having their tales told.

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This was the final instalment of our year-long serialised novel! I have begun the process of editing and improving the completed novel; as this was my first novel-length fiction work, there is much to do on the first chapters especially! Once it is complete, it will be available for paid subscribers as an ebook download, included in the price of your subscription.

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Coming soon to

Telling Their Tales

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