The Hidden History of Female Bed Burials in Early Medieval England

Trust me - this is an important read!

Thank you to everyone who contributed to my thinking on this post through engagement with a Note (linked below) on cultural identity. I found it particularly interesting contrasting modern with historic experiences. It seems that many of us nowadays are shaped by multiple heritages, often not feeling at home in our countries of birth or most recent residence - yet I think something different might have been going on with the Anglo-Saxon women we’re discussing today.

Carmen Luisa

Monica Nastase

Elin Petronella

Tansie Bennetts-Slater

Ingrid Haring-Mendes

Christina Lynn Wallace

THANK YOU!

The topic of early medieval burial rituals is a bit of a conversation-ender. I’ll admit that.

But can I ask you to bear with me just a little longer? I’d like to convince you that this is a really important topic for early medieval history.  

Why write an article on something I know most people find a bit weird?

In early medieval England (we’re talking specifically about the seventh century today), writing was pretty non-existent. We have a handful of written sources, but they were very restricted in their content and readership. If we attempt to mine them for information about any beyond the ruling political and ecclesiastical groups, our efforts will not be richly rewarded.

We have to adopt a different approach.

Archaeological evidence is key to accessing the lives of ‘ordinary’ men and women. If we want to learn anything about them, it is material evidence that gives us a fighting chance. And it is in their burials that ordinary early medieval people are most visible.

Decorated bronze fittings on a wooden cup. Image from Google.

For the century or so before we start to get written accounts emerging from the mist, people in eastern Britain adopted the habit of furnished burial.¹ They carefully dressed their loved one in the costume that best reflected who they were in life (or, perhaps, how they wanted them to be remembered), and deposited a range of artefacts around the body. These included everyday objects such as knives, brooches, and pottery vessels, but also – for the elite – more prestige items: gold and garnet jewellery, swords, and glass cups, for example. There was variety across the kingdoms that occupied early medieval England, and within individual cemeteries, but generally furnished burial had become the most common burial rite by the late sixth century.

Gold crosses placed over the eyes of the individual interred in the ‘princely’ burial at Prittlewell, Essex. Image from Google.

It is these artefacts that have produced the greatest body of evidence for early medieval life, as the rest of their material culture has not survived well. This was a time when buildings were made from wood and wattle, leaving very little trace, and pottery was poorly-made, leading to low survival across the centuries.

Reconstructions and originals of the gold and garnet jewellery and armour pieces found at the ‘princely’ burial at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk. Image from Google.

There is a lot that can be said about early medieval burials in general.

Today, however, I’d like to zoom in to one particular burial rite: the phenomenon of female bed burials.

This article forms the final piece in a three-part miniseries exploring the obscuring of women’s voices in early medieval sources and subsequent histories. The first piece shared Dark Queens, a book that chooses to tell the history of sixth-century Francia through its queens, rather than its kings, showing how their involvement and reputations have been manipulated by later writers. The second piece delved into the role played by women in the conversion of early medieval England – a significant contribution that is most often ignored in the histories published today.

Rewriting History: Women's Unique Influence on the Christianization of England

Unveiling 'Dark Queens': Why Powerful Medieval Women Deserve the Spotlight in History Books

What are bed burials?

They are, really, exactly what they sound like.

Across Continental Europe from modern-day Slovakia to Scandinavia, from the fifth century to the tenth century A.D., a diverse group of men and women were buried on wooden structures that seem to have been beds.² Some were rich, some were not; some graves included Christian imagery, while others did not; some beds had been used in life, whereas others were purpose-made.³

Examples of the beds used in these burials, in England and Continental Europe. Image from Brownlee (2022: 3).

In England, however, almost all of the bed burials were for women who lived in the seventh century.⁴ In fact, it is a remarkably restricted funerary rite.

Had the practice simply diffused across the sea on networks forged by trade and travel, one might expect, from the Continental evidence, to find this style of burial afforded to English individuals across the social spectrum and gender divide.

But that is not what we see in England. Something different must have been going on.

This practice must have travelled to England in a very specific context.

This has led Emma Brownlee, the first researcher to compare the English and Continental phenomena, to argue the following:

At the same time as burials of women in beds appeared in England, the continental Church was rapidly growing in influence. Bed burials appeared in England alongside the appearance of other richly furnished female burials … This appearance of rich feminine burials has been linked to a wider change in the role of women associated with Christianity. In conversion narratives across the early medieval world, queens and elite women played an important role by marrying into non-Christian families. It is possible that the women’s bed burials in England represent migrants in a Christian context, who were buried according to a rite which was common in their place of origin.⁵

So, these burials may well represent the elite women who travelled from the Continent to marry foreign, pagan men (a practice known as exogamy). The very women, in fact, that I have written about before as being central to the conversion of early medieval England – yet weren’t given a central place in the contemporary written sources or later histories.

Their power lay in their bodies

Why write an article, therefore, on something that I know people will find a bit weird?

Well, because the stories of these women who were buried on their beds were not recorded in contemporary written sources, so if we do not consult the archaeology, we cannot uncover their lives. And we cannot, without including their lives, write well-rounded, nuanced histories of early medieval England.

Their burials suggest, firstly, that the practice of exogamy in the seventh century wasn’t just restricted to kings and queens, as might be gleaned from Bede. These women, though elite for sure, weren’t queens. And yet they were sent from their homes to marry foreign men.

More than that, though, their burials indicate that they were able to maintain something of their own heritage and identity in death. The restriction of the bed burial rite to these women was, in all likelihood, deliberate: it may not have been afforded to local women.

For them, this meant adhering to the culture of their birth, their homeland, as opposed to the culture of their adopted home. It seems to have been important that they were marked out as different, as foreign, in their deaths. Was this of their own doing? Were they proud of their birthplace? Or was this a sign of something more sinister, of the culture they had become part of rejecting them in death? I think, given the care and respect shown in these burials, that it is likely that it was the first option, but it is an interesting question to end on.

Had they been able to maintain their cultural identity in life, too? And was early medieval England, therefore, a vibrant mix of cultures and identities?

I’d love to know: have I convinced you that, though the topic may seem macabre at first, we can learn so much about obscured female voices through analysis of their burials? Comment below to share something you learnt today!

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1. Furnished burial is the practice of burying the dead fully-clothed and accompanied by a number of artefacts. It contrasts with the practice of unfurnished burial, which became more common in England after the late seventh century.

2. Brownlee, Emma (2022). ‘Bed Burials in Early Medieval Europe’. Medieval Archaeology, 66/1, p.1.

3. Ibid, p.20.

4. Ibid, p.18.

5. Ibid, p.24.