Back when girls did run the world
Back when girls did run the world
... or at least part of it. IWD - Daisy Chain Flower Crown
This is a bumper, one-off post in honour of International Women’s Day, in collaboration with
and so many others. We are all sharing posts about female empowerment at 11:11am today in an effort ‘to pause and walk barefoot together on the grass a while.’Check out their posts by clicking on their names above. I am sure that they will be sharing many others too!
So great was her prudence that not only ordinary people but also kings and princes sometimes sought and received her counsel when in difficulties.1
What is it that comes to your mind when you hear the words ‘medieval women’?
Inequality?
Subservience?
Limitations?
Abuse?
Disadvantage?
What if I were to tell you that there was a time when medieval women took charge? When they were seen as authority figures that men turned to time and again for advice and leadership? When they were involved in and directing society, culture and politics?
You probably wouldn’t believe me.
For so long we have heard the narrative of the grand march of ‘progress’ through history, landing in our own time of course, from uncivilised to civilised, ‘backwards’ to modern.
We share stories of the appalling treatment of women and their relative inequality to men and assume that this was the whole picture. This certainly happened from the later medieval period onwards.
But this is not the whole story.
This International Women’s Day, I want to tell you about women’s experiences in the seventh century in England - because it was really quite a special time.
In the closing years of the sixth century, the history of eastern Britain (roughly modern-day England) begins to peek through the darkness that had enveloped it since the withdrawal of Roman forces around the year A.D. 410.2 We have really very few written sources for the years c. A.D. 410-597 (basically none), so it can be difficult to pinpoint what was going on during these years.
What emerged in the years after c. A.D. 597 was glorious.
It was a richly complex society, newly-hierarchical in nature, with a mature arts and culture tradition stretching back hundreds of years. There were kings and queens, great hall complexes (possibly adorned with gold), lavish monuments that could be seen for miles around. Beowulf often gets a bad rap - but its picture of elite culture at this time is a pretty good one. At the top of society, things were really glam and it certainly wasn’t all the living in mud huts stereotype we usually hear.3
And there were some really quite special women.
For a period of about 100 years, a group of noble abbesses and princesses seem to have wielded social and political power somewhat akin to their male counterparts.
They sat at the apex of society as peers with kings, bishops and archbishops.
Yes, peers.
Their lives are preserved in both the written and archaeological records, and we know some of their names. I want to share a few of their tales with you.
Abbess Hild
Hild was abbess first of Hartlepool and then of Whitby. These were major ecclesiastical centres in the kingdom of the Northumbrians: Bede tells us that five bishops came from the monastery at Whitby, ‘all of them men of singular merit and holiness’.4
She arbitrated one of the biggest ecclesiastical disputes of the day: the dating of Easter. This was a big deal in the seventh century, although it might seem small fry to us.5 Bede underplayed Hild’s role (for many reasons) but it is clear from his narrative that she played a big role in the discussion held at her monastery in A.D. 664:
It was decided to hold a council to settle the dispute at a monastery called Streanæshealh (Whitby) … at this time Hild, a woman devoted to God, was abbess. There came to the council two kings, both father and son, Bishop Colman with his Irish clergy, and Agilbert with the priests Agatho and Wilfrid. James and Romanus were on their side while the Abbess Hild and her followers were on the side of the Irish.6
Did you notice that Hild was right there at the centre of the action alongside the men? It mattered that she backed the Irish (although, for Bede, this means that she was on the wrong side of the dispute) because her opinion had clout.
A summary of Hild’s life is preserved in a whole chapter of Bede, one of the early saint’s lives that became popular towards the end of the seventh century and into the eighth century. To dedicate a whole chapter to her elevates Hild to a similar position that Bede afforded her contemporary Christian holy men. Only the greatest were given such a prominent place in his history: he clearly thought highly of her.
There were others too.
Too many to tell the stories of individually in this post. Holy women and secular women - all named in the written sources as being involved alongside men as counterparts in religion and politics.
Women like Queen Bertha and her daughter Queen Æthelburh, who between them influenced the conversions of the kingdoms of Kent and Northumbria, the two powerhouses of seventh-century England, changing the course of their histories forever.
Women like King Rædwald’s seductive wife, who convinced him not to kill the future King Edwin of the Northumbrians (the aboveÆthelburh’s husband) and to have a dual altar to the pagan and Christian gods in his temple. How different might the politics of East Anglia have been if she had been quiet, meek and mild? She sounds a feisty character, not afraid to intervene at the highest level and clearly had the king’s ear.
Janina Ramirez has written two excellent books that are well worth a read if you would like to find out more about early medieval women:
Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It
The Private Lives of the Saints: Power, Passion and Politics in Anglo-Saxon England
There were also powerful women whose names have not been passed down to us.
Their final resting places have, however, been discovered - and the spectacular ways in which they were buried tell us all we need to know about their status in life.
A reasonably large number of high-status female burials have been discovered across eastern Britain, dating to the mid-seventh century. These tend to contain gold-and-garnet jewellery (the diamonds of the day) and sometimes lie under huge burial mounds.
Though not quite as lavish as the ‘princely’ burials of the preceding quarter century, they stand apart from contemporary female burials in the wealth interred alongside the individuals. They were meant to be a spectacular display when viewed by the burying community - and they still are today.
A stunning recent example was the burial of a woman at Harpole, Northmaptonshire, described as a ‘once in a lifetime’ find. Her grave contained this extraordinary necklace: these were reserved for the highest of elites.
Written records tell us that elite women owned significant landholdings, both secular and ecclesiastical: the jewellery at Harpole certainly belonged to a wealthy woman and it may be that this wealth was entirely her own.
It is likely that the women buried in these burials were the social equivalents of the individuals buried initially in ‘princely’ burials and then latterly in churches, the new funerary monuments for the most devoted of Christian kings. These women may have been the sisters of abbesses and kings, whose secular roles meant that church burial (which had not yet become the norm) wasn’t appropriate for them.
These were strong, powerful women living in a unique time that allowed them to flourish and shine through the pages of history.
Eastern British culture had essentially been rebuilt in the two centuries after the end of Roman rule. It hadn’t yet acquired the gender inequality that crept in during the later medieval period.
Women were celebrated and written about, and they were involved alongside men across politics, society and culture.
The seventh century was something of a golden age for elite women in Anglo-Saxon England - and it’s important that we tell their tales so that we don’t fall into the trap of flattening out the narrative of women’s history into one simply of oppression. It’s undeniable that women have been oppressed at many times in history: but that’s not the whole story of the seventh century.
Who are your favourite strong women in history? What is it about them that particularly draws you to them? Where did their strength lie?
Share their stories in the comments below!
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Bede, HE, IV.23 (21), tr. McClure & Collins, p.211.
The end of Roman rule in Britain is far more complicated than this - but this is the date typically ascribed the ‘end’ of Roman Britain.
I’m focusing on the top as I want to show, in line with my title, that women did (kind of) rule the world. But, it wasn’t too bad for women at the bottom of society either. It can be difficult to get a clear picture of ‘ordinary’ women at this time - although I was so appalled by Philippa Gregory’s recent book Normal Women and its complete ignorance of the pre-Conquest picture that I am tempted to write my own book in response…! The sources we have, however, indicate that there was quite a lot of protection in law for women, that they were held in high esteem within local society, and that they contributed heavily to local economies.
Bede, HE, IV.23 (21), tr. McClure & Collins, p.211-2.
For reasons too detailed to go into here!
Bede, HE, III.25, tr. McClure & Collins, p.154.
This is the kind of history syllabus I needed at school!
I fucking hated history at school, I realise decades later that I had no care for stories about men fighting!
Thank you for inspiring a rewriting of history in my own mind, perhaps I’ll read this book! X
I’m reading this wonderful book at the moment. Borrowed it from the library- but I need my own copy.