Ælfgif-who?

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women. Good news! You can read my PhD thesis for free here. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Content note: This newsletter contains mentions of infant death and death in childbirth, as well as images of human remains.The Oakington Women: A matriarchal medieval societyYou may have seen a viral photograph making its rounds on social media, of a sixth-century medieval skeleton impaled on a large yellow pipe. The popularity of the image is down to its gruesome nature, the modern gas pipe having been bored right through the skull of the dead woman.This image has cropped up a few times on my various feeds, and each time I wondered what is known about the life of this woman, aside from her recent viral fame. So I did some investigating. It turns out that the indignity afforded this unfortunate woman in death contrasts sharply with the dignity with which she was initially buried.This woman, nicknamed ‘Piper’ by the University of Central Lancashire archaeologists who uncovered her in 2014, was buried in grave 116 in a sixth-century early medieval cemetery in Oakington, Cambridge. More interesting than the pipe, which was a pure accident of directional drilling, her grave was richly furnished. She had a brooch on each shoulder, wrist-clasps, and a large ornate cruciform brooch, indicating she had been buried in a peplos dress over a long-sleeved dress and wrapped in a pinned cloak. She also had a collection of glass and amber beads. These items in her grave indicate that she was a wealthy and important woman within her community at Oakington.The more I researched this dig, which was overseen by archaeologists Dr Faye Simpson and Dr Duncan Sayer, the more the site was revealed to be a remarkable insight into early medieval gender and society. Piper was not the only high-status woman in the Oakington cemetery. In fact, there were a large number of furnished female burials, which acted as focal points throughout the cemetery, and very few male ones.Duncan Sayer has called the Oakington dig suggestive of a ‘female-dominated matriarchal group’ in early medieval England. What’s more, around thirty percent of the 124 graves were those of infants. The high number of infant burials is disproportionate, indicating that women were in this area specifically to give birth within this matriarchal community.During the past week there has been much excitement on social media and in the press about the findings of a recent DNA study, which provide evidence for matrilocal societies in Iron Age Dorset. Matrilocal societies are groups in which women stay within family groups, marrying outsiders, while male family members join different groups. Such societies would naturally revolve around generations of women. The Oakington site might provide a comparable example, though centuries later, of a similar kind of female-dominated group.As well as Piper, the Oakington site contains a number of other completely extraordinary burials. Grave 57 reveals another wealthy female burial comparable to that of Piper, nicknamed ‘Queeny’ by archeaologists. According to the project summary, her grave goods included ‘an iron purse ring, 21 amber beads, 4 glass beads, an iron knife, wrist clasps, belt strap fittings, a large cruciform brooch and two small long brooches’. But the grave also reveals something more precious and yet tragic - a collection of tiny, foetal bones within her pelvis. Archaeologists have speculated that the woman in Grave 57 died as a result of an obstructed childbirth, as the foetus was lodged low down and sideways in the pelvic area. In modern times such obstructions can be resolved by performing a C-section, but unfortunately for Queeny and her child, this complication was fatal in medieval England.In another part of the site, archaeologists uncovered the furnished grave of a wealthy woman, buried in a mound beside a large mammal. Initially the animal was assumed to be a horse, an exciting find given that of the thirty-one previously discovered human-horse-burials, every one was a male warrior. However, excavators were surprised to find that the animal was in fact a cow. There are no comparable graves in all of Europe. Cuts at the cow’s ankles indicate that the animal had been skinned, and was included in the grave as a sacrifice. Given that a cow would have been an important source of food, this was a significant offering. The woman buried alongside the cow was buried with a full chatelaine - an iron girdle that would have held keys and other useful tools - another indication of her importance to the community.Grave 109 is a triple grave containing three female skeletons of vastly different ages - one a girl who was under 3, one a young woman of around 18-25, and one a woman aged 25-30. One might expect that this was a familial grave, but DNA analysis reveals that these women and the girl were not related to each other in the first or even second degree. We can only assume that a joint cause of death, a tragedy that befell all three, led them to be buried within the same grave.The genetic analysis of skeletons from Oakington in particular has led to some important revisions to how we understand the past. A common piece of rhetoric among racist commentators is that there is such thing as a common ‘Anglo-Saxon’ ancestry, a biologically-based ethnic group that established the religion and culture of early medieval England. However, the skeletons in sixth-century Oakington contradict and undermine this assertion - according to Duncan Sayer, the evidence shows that ‘the people of fifth- and sixth-century England had a mixed heritage and did not base their identity on a biological legacy’.Four skeletons from Oakington were examined - according to Dr Sayer, ‘one of them was a match with the Iron Age genome, two were closest to modern Dutch genomes, and one was a hybrid of the two. Each of these burials was culturally Anglo-Saxon because they were buried in the same way in the same cemetery. In fact, the richest assemblage of Anglo-Saxon artifacts came from the individual with the match for Iron Age genetic ancestry, and so was not a migrant at all’.These people did not understand themselves as ‘Anglo-Saxon’, nor was cultural identity based around ethnicity or genetics. They were all equally part of a diverse community. This evidence has led Dr Sayer to conclude that ‘Anglo-Saxon ancestry is a modern English myth—the English are not descended from one group of people but from many and that persists in our culture and in our genes’.A stray gas pipe is truly the least compelling aspect of this cemetery. Archaeological digs such as the Oakington excavation can provide all sorts of rich information about the lives (and deaths) of people who lived in the past. The insights into early medieval English society provided by this dig richly furnish our understandings of how gender, ethnicity, and culture operated in this early period, a time when written documents are limited. Oakington especially provides insights into sixth-century birthing practices, a central concern in the lives of medieval women. While the image of a woman’s skeleton with a pipe through it is shocking on a surface level, it fails to communicate the real significance of this historical woman - a respected and high-status matriarch within her community. Further reading:Duncan Sayer, ‘Ten Skeletons Bury a Right-Wing Talking Point’, Sapiens, 2018Francine Russo, ‘Archeaologists uncover the real story of how England became England’, The Smithsonian, 2024‘UCLan Students Discover Rare Find’, UCLan (Woman buried with cow)‘Individual Encounters: capturing personal stories with ancient DNA’, The Past, 2022Oakington Anglo-Saxon Cemetery - Mid-Project Summary 2010-2012 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women. Good news! You can read my PhD thesis for free here. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Gunhild: A Victim of Medieval Ethnic Cleansing? Exploring the 1002 St Brice's Day Massacre of the DanesOn this day in 1002 King Æthelred ordered a massacre of all the Danes in England. This massacre, which took place on 13 November, known as St Brice’s Day, was just one instance of tensions between the Danes and the English that spilled over into violence. Vikings from Denmark had been ravaging England since the eighth century, and had recently set up camp in Normandy, a convenient base for raiding the English coast. The St Brice’s Day massacre was by no means the end to the Viking threat in England, in fact this may have been exacerbated by it. It is understood by some as a precipitating factor in the eventual conquest of England by the Danish kings Swein and Cnut that occurred in 1013-1016 - and connecting these two events is the memory of a brave and beautiful woman named Gunhild.You may have heard of the conquest of England that took place in 1066, when William the Conqueror defeated Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings. But fewer are familiar with the earlier conquest that took place in 1013, when the Danish king Swein and his son Cnut invaded England and subjected it to their rule. The result of this invasion was that their Danish royal dynasty ruled England from 1016 until 1042.The twelfth-century chronicler William of Malmesbury describes the conquest of England by the Danish king Swein as motivated by revenge. According to Malmesbury, Swein’s sister Gunhild had been brutally murdered in England along with other Danes, including her husband and son:This woman, who possessed considerable beauty, had come over to England with her husband Pallig, a powerful nobleman, and by embracing Christianity, had made herself a pledge of the Danish peace. In his ill-fated fury, Edric [the earl of Mercia] had commanded her, though proclaiming that shedding her blood would bring great evil on the whole kingdom, to be beheaded with the other Danes. She bore her death with fortitude; and she neither turned pale at the moment, nor, when dead, and her blood exhausted, did she lose her beauty; her husband was murdered before her face, and her son, a youth of amiable disposition, was transfixed with four spears.Though he does not say so directly, the means of Gunhild’s gruesome death as outlined by Malmesbury resonate with what we understand happened during the St Brice’s Day Massacre in 1002.According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, it was on this day that ‘the king ordered all the Danish men who were in England to be slain’. This was in response to repeated Viking raids in southern England. The true extent of the fatalities in King Æthelred’s attempt to eradicate the Danish is unknown, and has been much debated by historians. Some historians refer to the St Brice’s Day Massacre in terms of ethnic cleansing and genocide, while others portray it as an action taken only against violent Viking raiders who had recently settled in England.A detailed account of the local impact of this massacre is corroborated in a 1004 charter from the church of St Frideswide, Oxford. The charter is written in first person as the king himself, and outlines the violence of the massacre, though Æthelred is more concerned with the damage done to the church itself:For it is well known to all who dwell in this country, that I set out a decree, with the advice of my nobles and magnates, that all the Danes who had emerged in this island, sprouting like weeds among the wheat, should be killed by a most just judgement […] Those Danes who dwelt in the aforementioned town [Oxford], trying to escape death, broke through the doors and bolts and entered this temple of Christ, and resolved to make asylum there, and a defence for themselves against the people of the town and suburbs; but when all the people who were in pursuit of them were forced by necessity to drive them out and did not succeed, they set fire to the boards and burnt this church, as can be seen, along with its ornaments and its books. Afterwards I renovated it with God's help.An archaeological excavation at St John’s College Oxford in 2008 may reveal more about these grisly events. Thirty-seven skeletons dating to between 960 and 1020 were unearthed from a mass grave, mostly comprising of tall, strong young men aged 16-25. The injuries to the skeletons reveal a violent attack on all sides. One had been decapitated, while, perhaps more horrifyingly, several had suffered attempted decapitation. Osteoarchaeologist Ceri Falys concluded that these injuries were inflicted on the men as they were running away, undefended. Some of the skeletons even showed evidence of charring by fire.This is the gruesome archaeological legacy of the scapegoating of an immigrant group, and the extension of responsibility for specific crimes to everyone who shares the identity of the criminals – political phenomena that are unfortunately not particular to the eleventh century. The St Brice’s Day Massacre serves as a pertinent reminder that persecution on ethnic lines has a long history, but can shift and change according to differing political circumstances.That this massacre comprised of horrific acts of violence that took place around the country on the same day, by order of the king, seems evident. But were Gunhild and her family among the unfortunate victims of this massacre in 1002?Some historians have doubted Malmesbury’s testimony about Gunhild. It is only he, writing over a century after the fact, who claims that Swein even had a sister called Gunhild - nor do any other sources corroborate her death or that of her apparent husband Pallig. More confusing is Malmesbury’s mention of Edric as the man who ordered them to be put to death. This does not place her murder on St Brice’s Day in 1002, given that Edric was made Earl of Mercia several years after this.It has been suggested that Malmesbury had his timeline mixed up, and is conflating the 1013 conquest with raids of England that Swein participated in a decade earlier, soon after the massacre. In his edition of Malmesbury’s chronicle, historian J. A. Giles commented that:Malmesbury seems to have fallen into some confusion here. The murder of the Danes took place on St. Brice’s day, A.D. 1002, and accordingly we find Sweyn infesting England in 1003 and the following year: but this his second arrival took place, A.D. 1013: so that the avenging of the murder of his sister Gunhilda could hardly be the object of his present attack.I don’t know if J. A. Giles had any siblings, but I feel it’s reasonable that Swein would still be angry about the murder of his sister and her family eleven years later. And surely a full-scale conquest would require lengthy planning and preparation. But point taken: Malmesbury’s chronology is certainly confusing.The main reason to dismiss Malmesbury’s testimony about Gunhild is that the events add up without the added dramatic flair of a brave and beautiful murdered sister. Monetary and political gain are reasons enough to explain Swein’s actions in conquering England, not least the mounting violence between Swein’s countrymen and the English. Thus, some political historians have doubted the existence of Gunhild as a later invention. With no sources available to contradict the existence of Gunhild or her violent murder, we might keep an open mind. Malmesbury’s narrative, whether confused or truthful, is ultimately enlightening because it forces us to reckon with the fact that this massacre, though distant in time, involved real people. The idea that such a massive historical event might have hinged on a woman, on a bond between siblings, on personal revenge, perhaps feels unsatisfactory to those of us trained to look for political explanations over personal ones. But in ascribing names and characteristics to some of the victims, and showing them as defiant in the face of persecution, Malmesbury humanises the victims of historical violence. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.On the eve of Blotmonath, the month of animal sacrificeIn northern Europe, Halloween occurs when the days are rapidly shortening, the first frosts harden the earth, and the trees undress to reveal their skeletons. But there have long been comparable celebrations at this time of year - in Ireland Samhain, in Wales Nos Calan Gaeaf, and in Scandinavia ‘Winter Nights’. These festivals, like many folk celebrations, occur at a time of transition. In early autumn, the hard work of the harvest season is over, and food is plentiful. But November ushers in the most deadly season, the coming Winter months when food will be scarcest and the nights coldest. For this reason, this time of year has taken on associations with evil spirits.The origin of modern halloween is in the eve of the Christian feast of All Hallows, celebrated on 1 November, when Christian saints are commemorated. This feast has its origins in ninth-century England. It is often said that All Hallows was a Christian appropriation of earlier Celtic festivals of the dead. However, folklore historian Ronald Hutton has been careful to stress that there is no evidence that earlier Celtic celebrations had any association with the dead until Christianity’s involvement.The earlier antecedent of this November festival is not concerned with the dead, so much as the act of killing. The eighth-century Northumbrian monk Bede tells us that to the pre-Christian English, November was known as ‘Blotmonath’, when the cattle were slaughtered and dedicated to the pagan gods. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.How 'English' is Saint George? The real history of England’s patron saintToday is the feast of Saint George, England’s patron saint. The official flag of England represents his most recognised symbol, the Saint George’s Cross, a red cross on a white background. A martyr saint who is now best known for his dragon-slaying, George has also become symbolic of England, ‘Englishness’, and more malevolently, English nationalism. This is despite legends placing his birth in Asia Minor hundreds of years before the nation of England existed, and his cult’s original development around his tomb in Palestine. Instances of devotion to St George’s cult can be found in early medieval England, but his status as England’s patron saint did not begin to develop until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. So how ‘English’ is Saint George really?The legend of Saint George has been developing for well over a thousand years, which means that, as is often the case, mythology and history have become intertwined. In terms of objective historical evidence, nothing is known of the real life of Saint George. Everything that has been surmised about his life and deeds has developed from a long tradition of conflicting accounts and outlandish legends.Origins in the Levant Tradition holds that it was on this date, 23rd April, in 303 AD, that George was martyred during Roman emperor Diocletian's persecution of Christians. He was apparently an officer in the Roman army, originally from Cappadocia in modern Turkey. The earliest known cult of devotion to Saint George developed in the sixth century in Lydda, Palestine, around his alleged tomb. Other sixth-century cults of Saint George were recorded in Jerusalem and Jericho (Palestine), Edessa and Constantinople (Turkey), and Bizani (Armenia), and his name is recorded in multiple inscriptions in Arabia and Syria. By the seventh century his cult was flourishing in the eastern Mediterranean: a Coptic church in Cairo (Egypt) was dedicated to St George, and the Archbishop of Crete composed a literary work in praise of him.Cults of Saint George also developed further afield in this period - the first references to him in Frankish sources begin in the sixth century, as well as multiple church dedications - according to one seventh-century source, Queen Clothild, wife of Clovis, had a church built and dedicated to St George a century earlier. His cult travelled to the British Isles in this period, and the seventh-century bishop Adomnan of Iona reports miracles he performed at the site of his tomb in Lydda.Tracing an English Saint GeorgeHis earliest appearance in an English source is in a martyrology by the eighth-century monk Bede, and it’s not until the tenth century when we find him again mentioned at Durham in a short prayer. But it is in works by Ælfric in the eleventh century that we first see attempts to Anglicise George, calling him an ‘ealdorman’ (an Old English term for a noble), and placing his origin in the ‘Shire of Cappadocia’. However, George does not make it into either of Ælfric’s volumes of saint’s lives written for the ‘English people’ - only one specifically for educating monks. Ælfric’s write-up of George’s life pre-dates any association with dragons, concentrating instead on his martyrdom.Indeed, in the pre-conquest period Saint George was a martyr-saint among many, enjoying no special status in England. It was local martyr-saints and their equally local cults that flourished the strongest - Saint Oswald, Saint Edmund, and Saint Edward the Martyr to name a few - all of whom happen to be royal saints. The first saint to come close to ‘patron’ status in England was Edward the Confessor, a king whose cult flourished in the centuries after his death in 1066, not least due to his promotion by subsequent kings. Edward the Confessor was not a martyr, but due to his building of Westminster Abbey, and his queen Edith having a saint’s life written about him soon after his death, he had acquired a reputation for piety and chastity.It was during the Crusades, the series of religious conquests undertaken by Christians aiming to expel Muslims and establish Christian dominance in the Holy Land, that George’s status as an army officer, and therefore a military saint, became particularly important. Some tales have emerged that link Saint George’s growing popularity to Crusader King Richard the Lionheart, but these are myths that originated in the Tudor period. Nevertheless, a book containing a Life of Saint George written by the Archbishop of Genoa in the 1260s soon circulated widely in England, and this popularised the story of Saint George slaying the Dragon, which had originally circulated in Georgia. George was no longer simply another Christian martyr, but had now become a symbol of both crusading and chivalry.Unlike many exalted English saints, George was not a king. Nevertheless, it is through the monarchy that Saint George became an important figure in England. King Edward I used Saint George’s cross as an emblem for his army when he invaded Wales in the thirteenth century and subjected the Welsh to English overlordship. His grandson, Edward III, wishing to replicate his grandfather’s victories, also employed the emblem in his military exploits and on his naval ships during the Hundred Years War. In the 1340s he established the Order of the Garter, the highest chivalric honour, and made George its patron saint, outranking all other saints. In 1415, Saint George became associated with Henry V’s victory at the Battle of Agincourt. It was in this way that Saint George became synonymous with the military might of the English crown.In terms of the veneration of George by the people, which was widespread, his association in the later medieval period was still less about Englishness or monarchy and more about dragons. Churches, hospitals and trade guilds were dedicated to George, with local processions on Saint George’s Day acting out his slaying of the dragon and rescue of a princess. It was this popular imagination of George, as well as his associations with military victory and chivalry, that ensured the survival of his legend post-reformation. As the English monarchy rejected Catholicism, the veneration of saints declined, but George, as a symbol, lived on.The post-medieval Saint GeorgeSince then, George has remained a symbol of England, though rising and falling in popularity as political circumstances changed. The revival of medievalist aesthetics mixed with the neo-chivalric Empire-building of the Victorian era resurrected George - so to speak - as a jingoistic nationalist figure. This continued into the First World War, when Saint George was used a symbol to recruit young men to the British Army. The prevailing relevance of George to propagandists was still the dragon - which could symbolise whichever ‘evil’ they wished to defeat. This is certainly far more persuasive an image than the reality of muddy trenches and death by machine gun.It is unsurprising that as a figure associated with crusading, empire, monarchy and British military victory, Saint George is the darling symbol of the far right in England. During the Second World War, British POWs who joined the SS named their unit The Legion of St George. The Neo-Nazi group League of St George, devoted to the racist ideals of Oswald Mosely, was founded in 1974. A poll conducted in 2012 revealed that a quarter of the English population see Saint George’s flag primarily as a symbol of racism. He is still a politically relevant figure, with the leader of the Labour Party Keir Starmer repeatedly asserting his enthusiasm for St George’s Day and the English flag, and still being doubted in his patriotism by the right wing press this week.So how English is Saint George?Really, all we can be certain of about the real George is that he wasn’t English, and that he never set foot on English soil. The early history of his mythology asserts that he is from Turkey - his cult developed in Palestine, was fostered in the Levant, and he is considered a prophet by Muslims. He is not only the patron saint of England, but is also venerated in Georgia, Portugal, Aragon, Catalonia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Russia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Ethiopia, Egypt, Armenia, Greece, etc, etc, etc. But when it comes to this saint, the ‘facts’ are almost irrelevant - he is an entirely legendary figure, whose meaning and symbolism has been transformed by those who wished to use him. With no concrete historical reality to cling to, he can only be his associations. In that way, George is an English figure as much as he belongs to anyone. He’s a symbol of nationalism and racism as much as dragon-slaying and martyrdom.That he can be claimed for anything and anyone is both the appeal and the danger with Saint George. And yet, it serves as a reminder that anyone trying to claim him for their own nefarious ends is only clinging to their own illusion. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Eostre: Pagan fertility goddess or complete fabrication?It’s often said that the modern celebration of Easter is connected to an early medieval ritual about bunnies and eggs surrounding a pagan goddess called Eostre, which the English church stole and made Christian.If you search the word Eostre on the internet out of curiosity, Google generates a ready explanation about who she is, right at the top of the search results:‘Eostre is the pagan fertility goddess of humans and crops. The traditional colors of the festival are green, yellow and purple. The symbols used are hares and eggs, representing fertility (because we all know that bunnies breed like, well, rabbits) and new life.’The explanation does not come from a particularly authoritative source, but from a staff writer at the St. Cloud Times, a small newspaper in Minnesota in the US. This article entitled ‘Traditions of Easter and cultural appropriation of Eostre’, that the Google algorithm has really decided to push for some unknown reason, makes a series of other claims about the ‘ancient’ mythology surrounding Eostre - that she mated with the solar God, that she is associated with dragons, and perhaps most controversially, that ‘Christianity should be embarrassed that it has needed to embellish its Easter tradition by appropriating pagan symbols and rituals for its own use.’The trouble with this article is that not a single one of these claims has any basis in historical evidence. Let’s explore what we can know about the mythology of Eostre, and her association with Easter.To begin with, I’ll outline all the historical evidence about pre-Christian worship of the goddess Eostre: In his book The Reckoning of Time, the eighth-century historian Bede gives an explanation as to the names of each of the months. Bede tells us that Easter used to be called Paschal, after the Hebrew word for Passover, the Jewish feast that Easter was adapted from:‘Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated ‘Paschal month’, and which was once called after a goddess of [the English people] named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate that Paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honoured name of the old observance.’And well… that’s it! These two sentences by Bede are the sum of the historical evidence for the existence of the goddess Eostre. No mentions of eggs or bunnies, fertility or anything else. We need to take the Christian monk Bede’s word for it that he was au fait with pre-Christian practices to even believe that the month was named after the goddess Eostre and not something else entirely.There are some reasons to trust Bede on this. Versions of the name Eostre were used among speakers of Germanic languages around this period and in the centuries after. Also, the Old English word ‘eastre’ shares features with words that refer to dawn goddesses in many other languages, such as the Hindu goddess Ushas, the Greek goddess Eos, and the Roman goddess Aurora.However, there are other possible explanations. Ronald Hutton, expert in pre-Christian religion, argues that:‘It is equally valid, however, to suggest that the Anglo-Saxon ‘Estor-monath’ simply meant ‘the month of opening’ or ‘the month of beginnings’, and that Bede mistakenly connected it with a goddess who either never existed at all, or was never associated with a particular season but merely, like Eos and Aurora, with the dawn itself.’Not only does being sceptical of Bede mean we can’t rely on the historicity of a goddess Eostre, but the idea that early medieval non-Christians even feasted during March and April is also uncertain. So much for Christianity appropriating a ‘Pagan’ festival then.There is one further pressing question - where did all the ideas surrounding Eostre and her connection with eggs, bunnies, etc. come from, if not from the historical sources? This is more complicated.In documents written between Bede and the nineteenth century there is no mention of Eostre. Then in 1835, Jacob Grimm (of fairytales fame) wrote about her in his book Deutsche Mythologie. Grimm connects Eostre with the Old High German word for the Easter festival, Ostara. He claims, with no evidential basis, that Ostara was a goddess, and that it is from her ancient feast that we get Easter eggs. Grimm was engaged in a nationalistic project to promote, and often manufacture, nationalistic German folk myths. Grimm’s goddess Ostara has since been treated as further evidence for Bede’s goddess Eostre, despite the fact that Ostara is made up based on the information provided by Bede!Then, in 1853, a further fabrication muddied the waters. Alexander Hislop, a Scottish protestant, published an anti-Catholic tract that claimed, again baselessly, that the word Easter came from the ancient Mesopotamian fertility goddess Ishtar! This factoid often circulates online as a meme and has entered the public consciousness, despite being completely made up.These two falsehoods have provided a springboard for much more postulating and mythmaking about Eostre, often coming from neopagan and new age sources, and leading to misunderstandings of history such as the myriad of strange information thrust at us by Google, courtesy of the St Cloud Times. Eostre has even since become associated with the ‘pre-Christian’ Easter bunny (or Easter hare), despite no such tradition appearing in recorded history until 1678! So was Eostre a pagan fertility goddess or a complete fabrication?In terms of spiritual practice, there is no harm that I can see in creating a worship practice intuitively around different springtime traditions. There is no definitive reason to disbelieve Bede about the pre-Christian worship of a goddess Eostre, even if the evidence is tentative. If you feel like honouring Eostre at this time of year, that’s great!Problems arise when baseless suppositions and fabrications are mistaken for historical facts. This can get messy, especially when the initiators of such fabrications have overt ethno-nationalist agendas, or when the falsehoods are used to sow division. Online images of Eostre overwhelmingly depict her as a human woman with pale skin and fair hair, and when taken together they present a racialised, almost aryan fantasy of this “Germanic goddess”. This depiction has nothing to do with pre-Christian beliefs, and such false ideas, especially when presented as having a historical basis, have the capacity for real harm. The truth of the matter is, we have very little historical evidence for pre-Christian practices.Accusations of ‘cultural appropriation’ in this context, such as from the author of the St Cloud Times article, would be problematic even if they weren’t based on fabrication. ‘Cultural appropriation’ is a useful concept for describing the unacknowledged adoption of elements of a minority culture by a dominant culture. Are we to suppose that the minority culture that has been wronged here is pre-Christian Britons who lived over a thousand years ago? Or is it actually ancient Mesopotamians? Neither group currently exists to be wronged in such a way. It is a misuse of the term.Of course I am not claiming that pre-Christian practices were not suppressed by Christian converts. But surely, the fact that so little is known of early medieval pre-Christian beliefs in England, and the fact that we have to turn to brief and untrustworthy Christian sources to try and understand these practices, reveals much more about the suppression of these customs by the church than the claim that a fake spring festival was the basis of modern Easter. Only through carefully surveying the evidence can we do true justice to the lost cultural practices of the past.Interested in more historical mythbusting? Read more: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Burginda: An early medieval English woman well-versed in African poetryA copy of a woman’s letter survives in an eighth century manuscript in Boulogne. The Latin letter is addressed to an ‘illustrious young man’, though his name is not supplied, and is from a woman named Burginda - possibly a Latinisation of an English name Burgyth. She was probably writing in Bath, Somerset, in around 710.Burginda’s letter is instructing the young man in his spiritual endeavours, and the contents of the (albeit short) letter reveal that she was highly educated and well-read. Written in a period that many still refer to erroneously as an intellectual ‘Dark Ages’, Burginda’s letter uses Greek words, utilises biblical exegesis, imitates Christian poetry like the fifth-century Psychomachia of Prudentius, and references both the sixth-century Italian poet Arator and the classical Roman poet Virgil. It also contains a reworking of a description of heaven found in a Latin poem from Africa that dates to c. 500. Burginda was clearly a very well-read intellectual.This letter can be used as an example to refute many popular misconceptions about the early middle ages. The first misconception is that antique texts were neglected or unknown in this period. The second misconception is that medieval women were uneducated and unintellectual. The third misconception is that there was little or no intellectual transmission between Africa and Europe in this period. Burginda’s letter proves all these assumptions false. Not bad for two paragraphs of Latin.Despite this, Burginda’s letter has not received much attention from historians, and when it has been looked at, the quality of her Latin comes under particular scrutiny. In his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry on Burginda, Patrick Sims-Williams comments that ‘Burginda herself should perhaps be located in Bath monastery: it is difficult to see why her poor letter would be copied far afield’, adding that ‘despite the weakness of its Latin, Burginda's letter is an important piece of early evidence for female education’. The text does indeed contain some grammatical errors, that Sims-Williams has drawn particular attention to in his writing on Burginda.As the scholar who has written most about this letter, Sims-Williams deserves much credit for drawing attention to Burginda and to the breadth of her education. But I identify the comments on her Latin as part of a greater trend by historians, an implicit bias perhaps, to highlight the grammatical mistakes or the use of so-called ‘poor Latin’ in women’s writing. Men are given the benefit of the doubt much more frequently when they play fast and loose with the rules of Latin grammar. The idiosyncrasies of this letter could be due to the scribe, and not Burginda as author. As I argued in my newsletter on the eighth-century author Hugeburc, who has also been similarly scrutinised:It is often assumed that the unconventional writing styles of some early female authors reflect a poor knowledge of Latin, rather than merely demonstrating a different approach to Latin composition or a different skill set.Burginda’s Latin is neither remarkably good nor remarkably bad, and in analysing its quality to the extent of being dismissive we lose some of the emphasis on the sheer range and breadth of Burginda’s literary knowledge, and what it demonstrates to us about the early middle ages as a period of intellectual endeavour.I end with Burginda’s letter in full (translation into English by Sims-Williams)Illustrious young man, you are ignorant of the future, whether glorious Felicity might bring to you the delights of the world beneath the stars, or Misery spew from her bloody mouth: so strive with all your might that the bright light might shine for you in heaven and the health-giving breeze may blow for everlasting days and unchanging time, and you may reign over God’s remote places which are exceedingly blessed and rich in lands, in the serene heights of his abode. ‘Go alone holy and blessed’ is the single message proclaimed by all.Receive in your soul what the Spirit, kindly coming twice, creates in our hearts as to keep the two commandments inscribed on the tablets of stone, ‘Love God with a fervent mind and be filled with love’ and again ‘May your neighbour be as dear to you as you yourself.’ Keep this whole law and always whenever you pour out your soul in your prayers to the living God on high and your eyes become soaked in tears, may the memory of my name, Burginda, merit your good deeds so that your prayers may deserve to be fulfilled.Patrick Sims-Williams, ‘Burginda’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)Patrick Sims-Williams, ‘An Unpublished Seventh- or Eighth-Century Anglo-Latin Letter in Boulogne-sur-Mer MS 74 (82)’ in Medium Ævum, 48, 1 (1979), 1-22.Did you enjoy this? Read more about early women writers: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Æthelswith: The Mercian queen whose gold ring was unearthed by a Victorian ploughmanFlorence H R ScottIn 1870, a man was ploughing a field in West Yorkshire, in the countryside between the towns of Aberford and Sherburn on Elmet. As his plough overturned a row of soil, he glanced a glimmer of gold. He halted his horses, and bent down to pick up the shiny object, freshly unearthed. It was a large, gold ring, with an intricate enamelled design of a lamb of God on the outside, and an inscription that read ‘EADELSVID REGNA’ on the inside. The ploughman took it home with him, and fixed it to his dog’s collar.A few years later in 1873, the ring was sold to a jeweller in York, and identified as around a thousand years old. It was purchased by an archeologist and collector of antiquities called William Greenwell for £30 (around £2700 in today’s money). In 1897 this invaluable treasure was passed into the collections of the British Museum, where it remains to this day. There is no record of how much the anonymous ploughman was compensated, nor if he even was aware of the provenance of what he had discovered - nevertheless it was due to his toil and his careful eye that this beautiful historical artefact resurfaced.But what of the ring’s original owner? The interior inscription reveals that this ring once belonged to a Queen Æthelswith. Its age and the location in which it was found both strongly suggest that it belonged to the Æthelswith who was the sister of King Alfred, and married King Burgred of Mercia in 853.Rings were associated with royalty in this period. A ring was bestowed upon the king and queen in near-contemporary coronation ceremonies. Another inscribed decorative ring has survived from this period, which belonged to Æthelswith’s father King Æthelwulf. These rings share similar designs, materials and artistic techniques.However, it has been noted that Æthelswith’s ring is very large in diameter. It was likely not worn by the queen herself, but inscribed with her name and bestowed upon a loyal subject as a gift, or as a symbol of an official title or office.That Æthelswith was the bestower of such gifts is consistent with the other things we know about her. In 868 she witnessed a West-Saxon charter, in which she made a grant of fifteen hides of her own land in Berkshire. She also witnessed all of her husband King Burgred’s charters. Though we only see glimpses of her influence, Æthelswith, like other Mercian queens before her, was a politician.It is not known when this ring was lost by its wearer - it may have been lying in a West-Yorkshire field for a thousand years before it was discovered. But while the ring clearly remained in England, its bestower did not.In 874, twenty one years after Æthelswith married Burgred, the royal couple were forced out of their kingdom by an encroaching Viking army. They fled together to safety in Rome. While Burgred died soon after they arrived, Æthelswith outlived him for another decade, which she spent in Italy.Queen Æthelswith passed away in 888 in Pavia, and was laid to rest there. She may have been undertaking a pilgrimage when she died. Her body and the ring that she once bestowed were both buried underground a thousand miles apart. And they say medieval women didn’t travel… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Æthelburh of Kent: The Queen who Converted a KingdomLong term Ælfgif-who? readers might remember Queen Bertha, a Christian woman who travelled from Francia to Kent in the late sixth century to marry a non-Christian king, Æthelberht. We explored the possibility that it was Bertha’s influence that led to the eventual conversion of the king and the people of Kent to Christianity.Recently, I was asked to be a guest on History Hit’s Gone Medieval podcast, to discuss another woman whose role in the conversion of an early English kingdom has gone rather unacknowledged: not Bertha, but her daughter, Æthelburh. Æthelburh had a similar story to that of her mother’s - raised a Christian, she married the ‘pagan’ Northumbrian King Edwin, who afterwards converted to his wife’s religion.According to our main source, the eighth-century Northumbrian monk and historian Bede, Æthelburh’s marriage to Edwin was brokered in around 725 by her brother, Eadbald, after he’d succeeded to his father’s throne. This was not a time when royal women could marry for love - they often functioned as one half of a political alliance between two kingdoms. I don’t think that this necessarily means we should view them as the passive pawns of their male relatives - though what say they had in these alliances may have been minimal. Rather, it might be more accurate to view them as diplomats, being sent to nearby kingdoms to maintain cordial relations between the two, and maintaining the interests of both kingdoms.In the early seventh century when Æthelburh was born, huge political changes were taking place in the many kingdoms of early medieval England. Large kingdoms were emerging along the east coast of England, two of these being Kent in the south and Northumbria in the north. Despite their distance these kingdoms were linked by the sea. It would have probably taken only two days to travel the 300 mile journey between these kingdoms by boat, an estimate modelled on the ship uncovered in the Sutton Hoo excavation. Such a journey was likely undertaken by Æthelburh as she made her way to her betrothed.Bede tells us that a condition of Æthelburh’s marriage to Edwin was that he would allow her to practice Christianity and that an Italian monk, Paulinus, would accompany her to Northumbria. Crucially, Edwin agreed that he would be open-minded about converting to Christianity himself. The marital conditions were very similar to those of Æthelburh’s parents, as Bertha also brought a priest with her, Luidhard, who served as the first missionary to Kent.What Æthelburh’s faith meant to her is something that Bede doesn’t tell us about. He is interested in how kings were converted to the religion of their wives, especially when it involved Roman Christian monks like himself (read about Saint Hild and the Synod of Whitby if you want to understand the difference between Roman and Irish Christianity). But we can extrapolate from the evidence a little here - Æthelburh was obviously a practicing Christian if she needed a churchman to accompany her in order to administer sacred rituals.Like her mother before her, Æthelburh’s marriage was of great concern to the Pope. Just as Pope Gregory had written to Bertha, Pope Boniface wrote to Æthelburh to express his wish that her husband Edwin would convert to Christianity, using scripture to outline his point. He told her that:For it is written, 'They two shall be in one flesh.' How can it be said, that there is unity between you, if he continues a stranger to the brightness of your faith, by the interposition of dark and detestable error?Boniface also quoted Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians 7:14 ‘for the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the believing wife’. The Pope’s message was clear - Edwin must convert in order to protect Æthelburh from being ‘defiled’ by her husband’s idolatry.Edwin did eventually convert, though according to Bede this was the doing of the missionary Paulinus. In Bede’s story of Edwin’s conversion, the king is persuaded to become Christian when Paulinus reveals a secret symbol to him, that was also shown to him when his life was saved years before in exile. Bede presents this revelation as a matter of personal spiritual realisation, and not, as perhaps was more likely to be the case, a matter of political consideration influenced by many factors - one of which being his wife and queen Æthelburh.Conversion to Christianity was appealing to non-Christian English kings in this period - it was a prestigious religion that showed continuity with the Roman Empire. Goods from wealthy graves reflect a penchant for mediterranean and Byzantine wares around the time of conversion. Roman Christianity was elite fashion.More than this though, willingness to convert seems to have been a condition of not only Edwin’s marriage to Æthelburh but also of the political alliance he made with Kent. Converting to another kingdom’s religion might be viewed as a subordinate act. In sending Æthelburh to marry Edwin, her brother may have entrusted in her a diplomatic task to ensure Northumbria’s compliance with Kent.We can only guess at how Æthelburh may have carried out this task, or indeed followed Pope Boniface’s instructions to personally influence her husband’s decision. At the very least she served as a living example of a pious Christian worshipper within his own household.Edwin’s conversion meant that his kingdom also converted, which may well have been an oppressive or violent process - but it was not irreversible. When Edwin was killed in battle in 633 the kingdom reverted to the previous religion. While Irish missionaries would continue to convert the Northumbrians, Æthelburh and Paulinus had to flee for their lives back to Kent.There is some suggestion in a later source called the Kentish Royal Legend that at this point Æthelburh founded and built a mixed-gender monastery at Lyminge. This story has been doubted by some historians, mainly because that would make this the earliest royal monastery ever founded in England. A few decades later, it was absolutely the norm that retired queens would found and run their own double monasteries (a few notable examples on Ælfgif-who? being Hild, Eanswith and Æthelthyrth).Like her mother Bertha, Æthelburh played a role in the conversion of a kingdom that may have been slightly downplayed by Bede, who was looking to really emphasise the role of churchmen. It is only reading between the lines of his narrative that we can acknowledge the roles of these early Christian queens as diplomats, politicians and converters, both within the royal household and beyond. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.The first ever Ælfgif-who? newsletter was about one of my favourite lesser-known medieval queens: Cynethryth, who was the queen of the kingdom of Mercia and flourished in the period 770-98. Today’s Ælfgif-who? newsletter revisits Cynethryth’s story, after an exciting new discovery has changed the way we think about her and one of her contemporaries - Fastrada, the wife of Charlemagne.Cynethryth was the wife of King Offa, and is a compelling figure, not least because we have dozens of surviving coins that contain her name and portrait. There are over fifty surviving coins from the mid-780s depicting Queen Cynethryth’s name and image. One side shows her face, while the other side reads ‘CYNETHRYTH REGIN[A] M[ERCIORUM]’, a Latin inscription meaning ‘Queen Cynethryth of Mercia’.Cynethryth’s coins are important because they are unique - she is the earliest medieval queen to have her own coinage, and the only early medieval woman in western Europe to have her portrait on coins. These coins also contain the earliest portrait of any English queen.I thought Cynethryth was the perfect figure to kick off the first edition of Ælfgif-who? back in March 2021. Powerful and influential in her lifetime, she left a uniquely important record of evidence for historians, and yet she has been all but forgotten, even among history enthusiasts:Now, a new discovery has been made that sheds new light on the significance of Cynethryth and her coinage. Recently, the Centre Charlemagne, in Aachen, acquired a previously unknown type of Carolingian coin: one containing the name of Charlemagne’s third wife, Fastrada.There are a number of interesting parallels between Cynethryth and Fastrada. They were both active in roughly the same period, though on different sides of the Channel. It has been well established by historians that their husbands, Offa and Charlemagne, had a close political relationship throughout their reigns.Fastrada’s coin, dating to about a decade after Cynethryth’s coinage, is different in that it does not contain a portrait, only a name - but it does include the same title as Cynethryth’s, written in the same way - ‘REGIN[A]’, with the ‘A’ abbreviated. Numismatist (coin expert) Simon Coupland has argued very convincingly that Fastrada’s coin was directly inspired by Cynethryth’s. Not only does this underline Cynethryth’s importance, but it demonstrates that the direction of influence between Offa and Charlemagne in this period was not only travelling from Francia to Mercia, but vice-versa.Historian Jinty Nelson has described Fastrada as having a ‘uniquely well-documented queenly career’, and as ‘politically important in her own right’, but she has also noted that many historical studies of Charlemagne simply leave her out. Prof Nelson has made much of the fact that Charlemagne clearly loved his wife Fastrada, addressing her as ‘our dear and very lovely wife the queen’ in a letter.The discovery of Fastrada’s coinage further suggests that, like Cynethryth, she was able to share influence with her powerful husband. Most importantly, we can still view Cynethryth as a trailblazer, but this coin demonstrates that she was not simply an anomaly.Dr Coupland’s article explaining why the discovery of this coin is groundbreaking has been published open-access, meaning that anyone can read it without a subscription or an academic affiliation. I strongly suggest taking advantage of this, not least for the fascinating discussion about the amount of forgeries and counterfeits of Carolingian coins that end up on eBay!It is my hope that the attention devoted to the exciting recent discovery of this coin can further help to bring these two remarkable eighth-century queens, Cynethryth and Fastrada, out of obscurity and into the public eye. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Coronations and Queen Consorts: An Early Medieval InventionYou might have heard that there will be a ceremony happening tomorrow at Westminster Abbey, officially titled ‘The Coronation of His Majesty the King & Her Majesty the Queen Consort’. During this ceremony both Charles and his wife Camilla will be anointed on the head with holy oil, solidifying their existing roles as King and Queen of the United Kingdom. As I am a historian of queens and early medieval inauguration ceremonies, it would be remiss not to provide you with a brief history of the coronation and the queen consort’s role within it.Queen consorts - queens who are married to kings - have been an important and constituent part of coronation ceremonies since their very beginning in the early middle ages. The purpose of anointing and crowning the king and queen is not really to officially designate them within their political roles - that happens upon the death of a previous monarch - but to add a religious and ceremonial significance to their hereditary rulership. This element of magic and ritual is what underlies royal power - otherwise, it would be very difficult to justify a political system that puts one family above all others.Both the king and queen, for obvious reasons, are equally important in establishing and furthering dynasties. While Camilla is not related to the current dynastic heirs by blood, the practice of anointing her emerges from a tradition in which the queen had an equal role in creating and perpetuating a royal line. It is for this reason that queens were central to the original meaning and purpose of coronation ceremonies.The modern coronation ceremony can trace its origins back to 751, when Pippin and Betrada were anointed King and Queen of the Franks. In 753 the royal couple were anointed again by the Pope, along with their two sons, Carloman and (the later emperor) Charlemagne. There are one or two anomalous examples of kings being anointed earlier than this date, but this was the ceremony that catalysed the existing 1300 year tradition. This ceremony emerged out of a need to establish legitimacy on shaky foundations - Pippin’s father Charles Martel had effectively usurped the previous dynasty, and though he was a powerful magnate, Pippin had no royal power until he created it. The ceremony was thus part innovation and part inspiration - kings such as Solomon had been anointed in the Bible, but not with the clear dynastic meaning of the 751 and 753 ceremonies.In the earliest royal inauguration ceremonies, the most important part was the anointing with holy oil. These ceremonies only started to become known as ‘coronations’ from the eleventh century onwards. The practice of anointing kings and heirs was adopted fairly soon across the channel in England after it was established in Francia, though there is little evidence that this involved queens. The earliest surviving inauguration liturgies from England, known as the First English Ordo, only contains a king’s ceremony, which can be partly explained by their West-Saxon origin and the fact that the West Saxons afforded the wives of kings a conspicuously low status. These early English ceremonies also use a helmet, not a crown.The earliest evident anointing and crowning of a queen of an English kingdom is that of Judith, the Frankish princess, Pippin’s great great granddaughter, who married two successive kings of Wessex. Her 856 ceremony upon her marriage to King Æthelwulf was significant, with the liturgy drawing heavily on themes of the royal couple’s joint fertility and Judith’s dynastic prowess as a Carolingian, despite the fact that Judith was only around 12 at the time of her marriage (her husband was around 50). This ceremony was heavily invested in the status that Judith had to bring to the West-Saxon royal line. It was this status that led her stepson to marry her after his father’s death - a scandalous move, but one which, if it had paid off, might have secured her dynastic prowess for his line.Around the turn of the tenth century we have our earliest evidence for an English liturgy, again likely West-Saxon in origin, which includes both a king and a queen. It is at this point that we can view the anointing and crowning of queen consorts in England as somewhat standard - though by no means was a queen included at every inauguration. In this ceremony, used until after the Norman Conquest, the queen’s rite is a shorter and less substantial than Judith’s. This version of the liturgy, known as the Second English Ordo, can be viewed as the basis for tomorrow’s ceremony.The idea of an anointed queen became a potent political tool in the years after this practice was established. There are examples of the children of anointed queens being afforded more legitimacy as heirs to the throne in succession disputes than the children of wives who had not been anointed. There are also examples of anointed queens, like Judith, marrying their husband’s successors - Queen Emma of Normandy married the conquering king Cnut after the death of her husband Æthelred II. Queens who had been anointed and crowned carried a magical sense of legitimacy and status that was appealing to kings looking to cement dynasties. While this was not a permanent sacred status - individual anointed queens could and did become irrelevant with changes in politics - having an anointed mother could be useful for an heir.Figures looking to malign certain kings and factions could even use the idea of a king’s wife interfering with the sanctity of the anointing ceremony as a political tool. Those who opposed King Eadwig accused him of having an incestuous ménage à trois with his wife Ælfgifu and her mother at his coronation, throwing his crown on the ground in the process. From this anecdote we might view the coronation as an arena in which the king’s wife can either be seen as an asset, lending her sacred status to the legitimacy of the dynasty, or a liability, reflecting a king’s unsuitability to rule.A lot of discussion around tomorrow’s coronation has focused on the legitimacy of Camilla’s queenship, which to some seems an even more pertinent question than Charles’ right to rule as king. Charles’ tumultuous time as heir to the throne was dominated in the British media by controversial stories of his infidelity, divorce, the untimely death of his first wife Diana, who was beloved by much of the British public, and his marriage to his former mistress, Camilla, a divorcee. The never-ending royal gossip mill, fuelled by recent fictional portrayals of these events in the TV series The Crown and the 2021 film Spencer, has revived these conversations.Within the project of perpetuating a magic, ritual, inequitable, hereditary, dynastic monarchy, the queen consort inevitably acts as a foundational and inextricable facet of how royal power is justified - but also how it is criticised.Ælfgif-who? is a subscriber-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Today Ælfgif-who? subscribers are in for an unexpected treat. While my expertise is women who lived in early medieval England, I have enlisted the help of my esteemed colleague Dr Chris Halsted, a lecturer at University of Maryland College Park, to tell you about a fascinating woman who lived across the sea in the kingdom of Lotharingia. Chris researches gender, ethnicity and geography in early medieval texts and is particularly interested in women who have been accused of magic and witchcraft - like Waldrada, the subject of this month’s newsletter.Waldrada: The Woman Accused of Witchcraft during a Medieval Divorce ScandalGuest Author: Dr Chris HalstedIn the middle of the ninth century, a woman named Waldrada was wrapped up in a royal divorce scandal that could rival that of Henry VIII. Waldrada was the mistress of King Lothar II, who ruled over a Frankish kingdom at the center of the former Carolingian empire. The scandal ensued when Lothar attempted to divorce his wife, Theutberga, and marry Waldrada instead. During Lothar’s campaign for a divorce these two women both faced wild and scandalous accusations from those with political and religious interests in the fate of the royal marriage. What we know about Waldrada comes almost entirely from this highly charged and high-profile divorce case, making her one of the most consequential yet mysterious figures of the middle ages.Very little is known about Waldrada’s early life. From what we can tell, her background was aristocratic but not especially distinguished. She was likely already in a relationship with Lothar when he became king in 855 at the age of eighteen. However, Lothar did not marry Waldrada, but a woman named Theutberga, the sister of a powerful magnate. Lothar would later claim that he only married Theutberga because her brother had threatened to obstruct his rise to kingship if he refused. Though Lothar married another woman, Waldrada was not cast aside. Lothar and Waldrada probably already had children by the time of his marriage, and they would go on to have at least four illegitimate children: a son and three daughters. This was of vital importance to the divorce scandal: Lothar’s marriage to Theutberga was childless, and so he had no legitimate heir.Obtaining a divorce was no simple matter. Churchmen from the time of Lothar’s grandfather Charlemagne onwards had standardized rules surrounding marriage. Not only had it been decided that the keeping of a ‘concubine’ was unlawful, but remarriage after repudiating one’s wife (which could only be done in the case of adultery) was also forbidden. By the 850s, these strict rules on remarriage had come crashing up against the realities of political life among the imperial elite: Lothar’s attempt to divorce his wife and marry Waldrada is only the most famous among several marriage scandals that engulfed his extended family, including his cousin Judith’s marriages to the Kings of Wessex.These rules motivated Lothar to levy scandalous accusations against his wife Theutberga in an attempt to secure a divorce. The young king accused her of having an incestuous relationship with her brother Hucbert before their marriage, in which they had coupled ‘as men do with men’. This had apparently resulted in a pregnancy that had then been aborted. The reasons for these extreme accusations were twofold: first, incest and ‘sodomy’ were both crimes that made a marriage unlawful; if Lothar could successfully convince the broader political community that his marriage to Theutberga had been unlawful in the first place, he would be then free to marry Waldrada. The second reason was political: by dragging Hucbert into it, Lothar made Theutberga’s most powerful ally complicit in her supposed crimes.In response to these accusations, voices from Theutberga’s camp accused Waldrada of witchcraft, saying she had bewitched the king as part of a plot to seize power. This was something of a trope in Carolingian gender discourse: a similar accusation had been levied against the Empress Judith in the 830s, for example, and it is possible that something similar befell Arnulf of Carinthia’s queen Uota.Lothar’s plan to set Theutberga aside and marry Waldrada failed. Under pressure from his bishops, his uncles who ruled the neighboring kingdoms, and Pope Nicholas II, he took Theutberga back in 858. A second attempt at divorce, in 862, was temporarily successful, and Waldrada was even presented to the court as Lothar’s queen, but in 863 her fortunes turned again. Nicholas annulled the divorce and excommunicated Waldrada.By this point even Theutberga wished for divorce, wanting to rid herself of her troublesome involvement with Lothar and retire to a convent. Both Waldrada and Theutberga’s fortunes had risen and fallen tumultuously alongside Lothar’s campaign for divorce. The political wrangling with Pope Nicholas ended with his death in 867. Nicholas’ successor, Adrian II, was more generous to the women involved, giving Theutberga permission to live without Lothar, and lifting Waldrada’s excommunication.In 869, Lothar made the journey to Italy to try to convince the pope that he should be allowed to once more marry Waldrada, but on the way there he fell ill and died, the issue of his marriage still unresolved. His uncles immediately divided his kingdom between them — Lothar still had no legitimate heirs. Lothar’s failed marriage politics had led to the failure of his kingdom.For a variety of reasons — the sensational nature of the accusations, the novelty of a royal divorce and remarriage, and the political importance of reproduction by the heirless Lothar — this crisis became possibly the best documented Carolingian scandal. Kings and popes wrote letter after letter, bishops and churchmen compiled manuscripts on church law, historians marked down their opinions both during and after the crisis. Perhaps our best source for the crisis is De Divortio, a lengthy treatise on the matter by Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims, one of the most eminent churchmen of the day. Hincmar’s work provides a primer through which modern historians can understand the issues at stake — up to and including a discussion of love potions, succubi, and other relevant supernatural issues.Although Lothar died with the issue still unresolved, it was the anti-Waldrada camp that won out in the history books. Later writers remember Waldrada as a seducer and tyrant, the archetype of the scheming woman trying to supplant the rightful queen Theutberga. The later chronicler Regino of Prüm would blame the entire downfall of the Carolingian dynasty on Waldrada and Lothar’s relationship, arguing that the sexual sin of their relationship prompted God to curse the family with sterility. The Life of St. Deicolus, written in the tenth century, blames Waldrada for the mismanagement of the monastery of Lure, implying that her sins caused it to be attacked by Hungarians some eighty years later. Over the course of the long Carolingian era, Waldrada became a scapegoat, blameable for seemingly anything that went wrong which could be even vaguely connected to her.But the person of Waldrada gets lost within the scandal that surrounded her. Among the accusations and slanders, the arguments about canon law, politics and magic, we get very little sense of her actual personality. What was her relationship to Lothar like? Was she eager to be a queen, or horrified by the continent-wide drama her relationship had catalyzed? Modern historians have often followed medieval ones in blaming Waldrada for the entire affair, portraying her as a power-hungry and ambitious woman — this is surely nothing more than misogyny, as the polemic sources surrounding the case give us very little reason to trust them. Against the backdrop of a century of royal marriage controversies, starting with Wallis Simpson and refusing to relent since, it’s worth taking a moment to consider the person in the midst of the chaos. Very shortly, we will witness the coronation of a king and queen with at least a superficially similar story — marriage, affair, divorce, and remarriage, though this one without the accusations of witchcraft. We know the players in the modern case all too well — but who Waldrada was, and the actual facts and events of the relationship at the center of her sensational case, have become swallowed up in the history.Ælfgif-who? is a reader-supported publication. 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Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Eadburg: A manuscript mystery come to lightA conversation with University of Leicester PhD student Jessica Hodgkinson, who made this fascinating discoveryIf you’re keeping your ear to the ground for big news about medieval women, you might have already heard about the recent discovery of several inscriptions of the woman’s name Eadburg in an early medieval manuscript. While working in the Weston Library’s rare books and manuscripts reading room one day in 2022, University of Leicester PhD student Jessica Hodgkinson discovered an inscription in an eighth-century manuscript, that was barely visible with the naked eye. The inscription was of the woman’s name ‘Eadburg’. After further investigation by the ARCHiOx project using state-of-the-art 3D technology, many other previously unseen instances of this name were found etched into the manuscript, as well as various other marks and drawings.Jessica was kind enough to chat to me about the significance of these discoveries, and the important question of who Eadburg might have been - including two possible candidates whose biographies have already featured on Ælfgif-who?! These discoveries have huge implications for the study of early medieval women’s book culture, which is the topic of Jessica Hodgkinson’s PhD research, funded by the AHRC Midlands4Cities consortium. Paying subscribers of Ælfgif-who? will shortly receive an extra newsletter about this fascinating research into how women owned, created and interacted with books. So if you are a free subscriber and are desperate to know more about this fascinating subject, do consider upgrading your subscription:The manuscript that contains the Eadburg inscriptions is called Bodleian Library, MS Selden Supra 30, and is a copy of the Acts of the Apostles - a book of the New Testament of the Bible. The manuscript probably originated in Kent sometime between 700 and 750, judging by the style of the script. The text was initially copied by two scribes, but their identities are unknown. These two scribes were evidently working on the manuscript at the same time, as a page was left unused at the end of the first scribe’s stint. On this page, a third person has written two prayers, and in one of these prayers has referred to herself in the Latin feminine. This clearly demonstrates female involvement in the creation and use of the book.It was because of this evidence that Jessica Hodgkinson, whose PhD research is on early medieval women’s book culture, went into the Bodleian Library in Oxford to take a look at the manuscript in person. She told me that:‘The prayer written from a woman’s perspective shows that this book was being used by at least one woman if not a group of women. Even discounting any inscriptions, what we have here is a book with clear evidence of female use.’One inscription on page 47 of this manuscript had already been noted in the 1930s - which appears to be EADB+E+. It was suggested that this could be an abbreviation of the Old English woman’s name Eadburg, but this theory had not yet been confirmed. However, this changed last year after Jessica took a careful look at the manuscript. She told me:‘I prefer to physically interact with manuscripts because that is how the women who I study would have interacted with them. This is really important when thinking about the contexts in which these books were actually used. I spend as long as I can with all the manuscripts I study. Any detail could be important, from hair follicles in the parchment to ruling patterns. When I saw Selden Supra 30 I turned all the pages and looked at it from every possible angle.’This attention to detail paid off, as Jessica soon noticed something that looked like an inscribed letter in the lower margin of page 18. Upon looking at this with a magnifying glass, she could see the name ‘Eadburg’. And fortunately, the technology was available to investigate this discovery further. Jessica said:‘At the time I made this initial discovery, the ARCHiOx project was happening at Oxford, a collaboration between the Bodleian Libraries and the Factum Foundation, funded by the Helen Hamlyn Trust. They have developed scanners that use angles of light to illuminate details that you can’t see through normal photography. Not only could we see ‘Eadburg’, but we saw that it was part of a much longer inscription that was not visible to the naked eye.’In looking at this manuscript the ARCHiOx scanners revealed multiple other inscriptions of Eadburg’s name on many different pages. Not only this, but there were also drypoint doodles of people and scenes. Without the serendipitous combination of Jessica’s careful eye and this recording technology these inscriptions may have never been discovered.The precise meaning of these engravings is still under consideration, but Jessica believes them, and their placement within a Biblical text, to be significant. She told me that:‘The inscriptions seem to be very intentional interactions with the manuscript and the text within it. While at first glance these might look like doodles, the addition of the names and drawings next to particular parts of the text are deliberate.’Perhaps the most interesting questions, especially for readers of Ælfgif-Who?, is who this Eadburg might be, and who was writing her name over and over in a manuscript. Jessica told me that:‘It’s difficult to know who wrote the inscriptions but it’s entirely possible that it was Eadburg herself interacting with the text. Some people have speculated that the inscriptions must have been made by a man, and even that he must have been in love with her, but this seems to be based, at least in part, on the false assumption that women could not have been interacting with books in this period.’There are currently three known Eadburgs that have been under consideration as the one mentioned repeatedly in Selden Supra 30. One is Abbess Eadburg of Minster in Thanet, a feasible figure given the manuscript’s probable Kentish origins. Two other candidates will be familiar to readers of Ælfgif-who?. One is Eadburga from newsletter number 18, the scribe and poet who wrote with a sliver stylus - perhaps even the kind of stylus that would have been used to make these inscriptions. The other is the notorious Queen Eadburh from newsletter number 22, who is said to have poisoned her husband and fled to the continent where she lived a debauched life. Perhaps after these inscriptions have been studied more, I will have to return to one of these women and update her biography to include her involvement with Selden Supra 30 - but Jessica stresses it’s important to keep an open mind:‘It is possible that Eadburg was one of these known figures. However, many women participated in literate culture, and it is equally possible that the Eadburg in MS Selden Supra 30 was an entirely different woman, about whom nothing is yet known. We may have a better inkling about who she is after further research into these inscriptions.’Whether the Eadburg in these inscriptions is a new figure or a known one, and whether it was her who wrote her name in the manuscript or someone else, these discoveries obviously have huge significance for understanding early medieval women and how they used and interacted with books. Paying subscribers will hear more on this subject in your inboxes soon.Further Reading:Bodleian Blog: Women in the Margins: Eadburg and Bodleian Library, MS. Selden Supra 30 by Jessica Hodgkinson and John BarrettSmithsonian: Woman’s Name and Doodles Found Hidden in 1,200-Year-Old Religious ManuscriptThe Guardian: Woman’s name and tiny sketches found in 1,300 year old medieval textUniversity of Leicester: Hidden inscriptions hint at mystery medieval woman’s identityMore on the ARCHiOx Project This is a public episode. 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Ælfgifu of Northampton married Cnut during his father Swein’s conquest of England, which began in 1013. She was part of a prominent but rebellious Mercian family, the daughter of the Ealdorman of Northumbria Ælfhelm and his wife Wulfrune. Ælfhelm had been murdered, apparently by King Æthelred, in 1006, and by 1013 the family was under suspicion again for supporting the Danish invaders, and many more of them were killed for going against the king. Ælfgifu’s brothers were blinded. Ælfgifu’s marriage to Cnut was key to the ultimate success of the conquest, as Swein and Cnut were able to establish themselves with the north midlands as a base. By 1016 Swein was dead, King Æthelred was dead, and the conquest belonged to Cnut.Ælfgifu and her remaining family had backed the winning horse, but after the conquest events become more complex. Though Ælfgifu had quickly provided Cnut with two sons - Swein and Harald, named after Cnut’s father and grandfather - in 1017 he decided to make a second advantageous marriage. His connection to Ælfgifu had provided a platform for conquest, but a marriage to Æthelred’s widowed queen Emma would help him consolidate it.With this marriage Ælfgifu’s situation became complicated. Emma, a consecrated queen who represented continuity with the conquered regime, became foregrounded in Cnut’s rule. She ranked high on the witness lists of his charters, often jointly alongside Cnut, and as ‘regina’. Conversely, Ælfgifu is missing from the source record for decades after.It was not unusual in both Scandinavia and England for kings to have concubines. But in Cnut’s own law codes issued in 1020, he stresses the illegality and un-Christianness of polygamy, especially for foreigners such as himself:…If anyone has a lawful wife and also a concubine, no priest is to do for him any of the offices which must be done for a Christian man, until he desists and atones for it as deeply as the bishop directs him, and desists from such for ever. Foreigners, if they will not regularise their marriage, are to depart from the land with their goods and their sins.It is not easy to square the basis of Cnut’s marital relations with his own laws. What must be remembered is that marriage in this period was not a cut-and-dry, regulated process. This law about concubinage being a matter for a bishop to deal with is certainly not as harsh as the law about women’s adultery, which prescribes for them to have their property removed and given to their husband, as well as having her nose and ears cut off. It is possible that Cnut did not consider himself to have a concubine, but two lawful wives. There is no reason to assume that just because Cnut married Emma, that he repudiated his first wife or that Ælfgifu’s status was lowered to concubine. Nor is there evidence that he and Ælfgifu continued to have an intimate relationship after his second marriage; by 1020 he’d had a son and a daughter with Emma, but as far as we can see Ælfgifu did not have any more children.Arguments must have been made to justify Cnut’s multiple concurrent marriages. Cnut’s situation precipitated an acknowledgement of Ælfgifu’s status. If he had repudiated her - denied that their marriage ever had legitimacy - that would have necessitated a refusal to acknowledge her sons as heirs. But by 1028 Cnut was a king of three countries, and it was in his advantage to have as many heirs as possible to manage his small empire.In 1030, Cnut sent Ælfgifu and their teenage son Swein to co-rule Norway, which Cnut had recently acquired, like England, through conquest. By sending Ælfgifu and Swein, Cnut was able to indirectly rule Norway through his own dynasty instead of leaving the running of things to the Norwegian lords. This action makes it certain that Cnut intended for his sons from his first marriage to remain legitimate after his second marriage. It also demonstrates a continuing trust and political alliance between Cnut and Ælfgifu - her ongoing influence in her husband’s rule after he had married someone else is unusual.Ælfgifu and Swein ruled Norway for four years. This period became known as ‘Alviva’s time’, and she gained a reputation as tyrannical ruler who taxed the population heavily, causing the Norwegians to rebel against her. Ælfgifu and Swein were driven out, with Swein dying soon after in Denmark.Ælfgifu made it back to England, however, around the time that Cnut died in 1035. This was advantageous for her, as it allowed her to participate in the ensuing succession dispute and act on behalf of her living son Harald. Succession disputes were arenas in which mothers could exert a great deal of influence, and in turn face harsh defamation.Initially, a meeting of all the powerful men of the realm was held in Oxford to decide who should be king. The outcome of this meeting was that Harald should rule Mercia and Northumbria while Emma’s son Harthacnut should rule Wessex.A letter, sender unknown, sent to Emma’s daughter Gunnhild at the German court where she was the queen of Henry III, informed her that Ælfgifu was working on her son’s behalf to undermine Harthacnut’s rule, by holding feasts, sending gifts, and flattering nobles. Harthacnut was losing his grip on Wessex as opinion swung towards Harald.By 1036, due partly to Harthacnut’s absence while he was attempting to consolidate rule in Denmark, and partly to Ælfgifu’s northern support and campaign against Harthacnut, Harald won the succession dispute for the English throne.There has even been some speculation that Ælfgifu, as the figure with allies, ruled on behalf of her son, but little evidence survives of his reign. Harald died in 1040 and was buried at Westminster, and his brother Harthacnut succeeded him, then had him exhumed, beheaded and thrown into the marshes.Ælfgifu’s fate is unknown after fortunes turned against her. Her reputation was in tatters in both Norway and England. It was during Harthacnut’s reign that Emma had a literary work written about the events since the Danish conquest, a work which has been named the Encomium Emmae Reginae. A political justification of Emma’s actions lies behind every word. Its narrative casts aspersions on the parentage of the late King Harald, stating that Ælfgifu was a mere concubine, and that Harald was secretly the child of a servant placed into her bed. It even implicates Ælfgifu in the murder of one of Emma’s sons from her marriage to Æthelred.All evidence indicates that these accusations do not reflect reality - but unlike Emma, Ælfgifu seemingly did not get chance to produce a work telling her side of events. Because of this, the formidable Emma is the more famous queen, while Ælfgifu has been sidelined in history. That does not mean Ælfgifu was not a rival for Emma, and every bit her match.Ælfgif-who? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Osburh: When is a king’s wife not a queen?Osburh, who lived in the first half of the ninth century, was the mother of one of the early medieval period’s most famous rulers: King Alfred of Wessex. Often known as ‘Alfred the Great’, her son is well known for fighting against Viking invaders. Osburh was married to Alfred’s father King Æthelwulf, and it’s assumed that she was also mother to his siblings, making her the mother of four successive West-Saxon kings. Despite being married to a king and bearing his royal children it is perhaps surprising that Osburh herself had no role in rulership, nor was she ever considered a ‘queen’. Her life is not well-documented - she is only mentioned in a single surviving early medieval source. With so little source material on Osburh, telling her life story is not possible, but we can recreate some of her biography with the information that survives.The one surviving source that tells us about Osburh is actually a biography of her son Alfred, written by a Welsh monk named Asser at his court in 893, four decades after Osburh’s likely date of death. In this source what we have is a snapshot of Osburh from the perspective of someone who did not know her, but whose purpose in writing was to aggrandise her son.From Asser’s Life of King Alfred we know that it was not the practice in the West-Saxon court to allow a queen to sit beside the king, or allow her to be called queen - instead she must be called ‘king’s wife’. This might explain why Osburh is not mentioned in any other sources. Asser tells us that this is because of the stigma one particular tyrannical queen of Wessex called Eadburh had brought upon the role a century ago, after she poisoned her husband and committed all sorts of debauchery. Despite this, Asser himself certainly thinks this custom for kings to have low-status wives is conspicuous, and he calls it ‘detestable’. Asser briefly discusses Osburh directly twice. His first mention of her occurs in a section about Alfred’s family background. Asser writes in his Life of King Alfred that:Concerning his mother’s family, Alfred’s mother was called Osburh, a most religious woman, noble in character and noble by birth. She was the daughter of Oslac, King Æthelwulf’s famous butler. Oslac was a Goth by race, for he was descended from the Goths and Jutes, and in particular, from the line of Stuf and Wihtgar, two brothers - indeed, chieftains - who, having received authority over the Isle of Wight from their uncle King Cerdic and from Cynric his son (their cousin), killed the few British inhabitants of the island whom they could find on it...Aside from calling Osburh religious and noble, descriptors that might well reflect what Alfred himself said of his mother, there is little here in Asser’s writing that speaks to her actual life or character, concentrating instead on her genealogy.Royal genealogies are not uncommon in early English sources, but maternal genealogies are rare. In fact, Osburh’s is the most detailed woman’s genealogy in any surviving source. Historian Alex Traves has argued recently that the inclusion of such a detailed snapshot of Osburh’s ancestry does not necessarily reflect her importance as an individual. It was included because emphasising her heritage helped secure Alfred’s rulership over areas that has been recently subsumed into his kingdom, most notably the Isle of Wight. So while we can view this anecdote as an acknowledgement of the importance of Alfred’s maternal family, we must also view it as a calculated appeal to Alfred’s ancestral right to rule over certain areas.Ælfgif-who? is a reader-supported publication. To keep it running, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.The other mention of Osburh in Asser’s Life of King Alfred is a much more personal story. Asser tells us that:One day … when his mother was showing him and his brothers a book of English poetry which she held in her hand, she said: ‘I shall give this book to whichever one of you can learn it the fastest.’ Spurred on by these words, or rather by divine inspiration, and attracted by the beauty of the initial letter in the book, Alfred spoke as follows in reply to his mother, forestalling his brothers (ahead in years, though not in ability): ‘Will you really give this book to the one of us who can understand it the soonest and recite it to you?’ Whereupon, smiling with pleasure she reassured him, saying: ‘Yes, I will.’ He immediately took the book from her hand, went to his teacher and learnt it. When it was learnt, he took it back to his mother and recited it.This story paints the picture of a tender scene from Alfred’s childhood, in which Osburh is reading a book to her children, and encouraging them to learn to read. But again the main purpose of this anecdote is probably not to reveal much about Osburh herself, but to show how gifted Alfred was in learning, even in his very early life, and especially compared to his brothers. It is intended to foreshadow King Alfred’s later interest in a revival of education and vernacular literature. However, what this also shows is that Osburh herself was likely an educated woman, and that royal mothers would have had a personal role in the education of their children. Whether or not this story is true, it is interesting that Asser thought it most appropriate to use a personal, maternal moment of a young boy relating to his mother to illustrate the intellect of the king.This is unfortunately the extent of source material that mentions Osburh directly. She attested no charters, none of her letters survive, and she does not appear in contemporary annals such as those of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. Everything about her life must be surmised using information about the people around her.We know from Asser that Osburh was Alfred’s mother, and as no record survives of King Æthelwulf having a wife before her, we might assume she was the mother of Alfred’s older siblings: he had at least four brothers and one sister. From this, we can calculate some rough dates for milestones in Osburh’s life. In 839 when Æthelwulf became king, his eldest son Æthelstan became sub-king of Kent. If we assume he was at least 15 when he became sub-king, that puts Osburh and Æthelwulf’s marriage to before 824. This means she was already of childbearing age when they married, and still of childbearing age when Alfred was born in around 849. Taking these approximations into account, she could feasibly have been age fifteen in 824 and age forty in 849, which would mean she was born around 809. We must remember this dating is only a possibility, and is reliant on her being mother to all of Alfred’s siblings, which is not a certain fact.Her death date also has to be worked out from the historical context. From Asser’s Life of King Alfred we know that Osburh was still alive during Alfred’s early childhood in the 850s, but King Æthelwulf married his second wife Judith, a twelve year old Carolingian princess, in 856. Judith’s marriage to Æthelwulf was performed during a religious ceremony written by Hincmar, the Archbishop of Rheims. Given Hincmar’s very strict views on remarriage, we can be certain Osburh was dead by this point. It is worth noting that during this ceremony Judith was crowned and anointed the Queen of Wessex, due to her illustrious family - breaking West-Saxon custom by receiving an honour poor Osburh never enjoyed, even in spite of her own noble ancestry.So here we have a possible outline of Osburh’s life but nothing more: she was born into a noble family, married a king, bore his royal children, taught them to read, and died in her forties when her youngest was still a young boy. She would never know that her husband went on to marry a twelve year old princess and give her the honour that he never allowed his first wife - perhaps for the best.It is only because of Asser, writing decades later, perhaps acting on the wishes of Alfred himself, that Osburh’s name was ever entered into the historical record, along with something about her noble background, and a touching personal story.Recommended Reading:Alex Traves, ‘Genealogy and Royal Women in Asser’s Life of King Alfred: Politics, Prestige and Maternal Kinship in Early Medieval England’, Early Medieval Europe (2022)Asser’s Life of King Alfred, ed. By Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge (affiliate link) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women.The Trumpington Girl: Buried in her bedSometime in the late seventh century, a teenage girl died. She had been in chronic ill health for some time before she passed away, perhaps since early childhood. A high-status member of the community, she was laid to rest in an ornate bed at the bottom of a grave. This grave was dug among three or four other graves at the edge of a small settlement consisting of a few pit-houses, a wooden hall and some wells, situated around an existing Beaker burial mound in what is now Trumpington Meadows, just south of Cambridge. Some of her most precious belongings were placed beside her, including an antler comb, some glass beads, an iron knife, a chatelaine, and two gold garnet-encrusted pins that secured a veil around her head. A beautiful ornate gold and garnet cross, which was sewn to the front of her clothes, expressed her religious beliefs as an early Christian. Laid there in her bed, she must have looked as if she were asleep. Her community said a final goodnight and covered her over with soil. Her grave was unmarked and ultimately forgotten.The settlement was abandoned and the girl laid undisturbed for over 1300 years before she was discovered once again by archaeologists in 2011 when the cluster of seventh-century graves was excavated. One of the graves, Grave 1, was more elaborate than the others and originally assumed to be the focal point of the group, until radiocarbon dating found this grave to be the newest addition to the cluster. The burial of a person in her bed, one of only a handful of English ‘bed burials’ known to us, indicated by fragments of wood and metal cleats, made the discovery remarkable. But it was perhaps her beautiful cross, known as the Trumpington Cross - one of five such pectoral crosses from this period - that received the most attention.Everything we know about the Trumpington girl must be gleaned from this single snapshot of her grave site. No written sources identify her. Any biography is bound to be incomplete. However, it is interesting just how much information was uncovered and continues to be uncovered by the archaeologists, scientists and historians who investigated this burial.It is a common misconception that it’s easy to determine the sex of historical human remains. Sex can only be estimated, based on a number of factors, with the most reliable (but still indefinite) sign being the size of the pelvis. However, all of the graves at the Trumpington site contained poorly-preserved skeletons due to harsh soil conditions. The skeleton in Grave 1 was missing hand and feet bones and the pelvis was too degraded to estimate the sex. Without a pelvis to measure, isotopic analysis can be used to determine the levels of copper and iron in the bone, which tends to correlate with pelvis size and indicate a probable sex. Analysis of a rib bone revealed that the skeleton in the grave is probably female. A combination of dental and bone analysis revealed a likely age of the person when they died of 14-18 years.Grave goods provide a more illuminating indication of the gender of the person buried in Grave 1. In the seventh century, although Christian beliefs were taking hold in England, the pre-Christian custom of burying people with grave goods was still practiced. Grave goods can be a good indicator of the social position someone occupied and the type of clothing they were wearing when buried, and they arguably say more about the actual role and lifestyle of the occupant of the grave than a simple pelvic measurement. The grave goods buried with the Trumpington girl, such as the beads, comb, knife, the bejewelled veil pin and chatelaine (a type of utility belt worn around the waist by women) are typical of female graves in this period.The most remarkable of the grave goods buried with the Trumpington girl is the gold and garnet pectoral cross. This cross serves as the sole indication that the Trumpington girl was an early convert to Christianity. The cross measures just over an inch in diameter, and was designed in the cloisonné style, with individual metal cells holding beautiful garnets. These garnets, which were usually originally from India or Bohemia, would have been brought to England by merchants. The combination of rare, high-value materials and craftsmanship makes the cross a very high-status item. There are five such garnet crosses surviving from seventh-century England, and metal crosses are strongly associated with female burial, with one notable exception being the famous Cuthbert cross buried with Saint Cuthbert. Three of these crosses have been found in bed burials, suggesting a strong link between women buried in their beds, early Christianity and this distinct form of jewellery. The presence of such an unusual and high-status indicator of Christianity in the grave of a young girl marks her out as exceptional, though for what exact reason remains unknown.Probably the most interesting feature of the Trumpington girl's grave is the elaborate carved wooden bed in which she was laid to rest. A handful of such burials exist in England, and again all in the seventh century. The meaning of such a burial is complex - while it could be understood along with the comb and knife as a grave good that may be useful in the afterlife, it could also represent a distinctly Christian belief about death simply being a state of sleep until the resurrection. A study of 72 bed burials across Europe in the early medieval period conducted by Dr Emma Brownlee concluded that the custom of bed burials, relatively rare in England compared to the rest of Europe, may have been introduced specifically by Christian women who migrated to England to marry non-Christians. Paying subscribers will remember my newsletter about the role of women in Christian conversion in this period; these marriages could create a space in which Christian and non-Christian beliefs were held and practiced simultaneously in the same context. The Trumpington girl's grave is also representative of this time and space.There is one other factor to take into account that adds to the context of this burial. As well as revealing her age, dental analysis suggests a childhood illness and iron deficiency, which was possibly caused by a parasite, a disease such as leprosy, or even heavy blood loss. It is not known whether any of these specific factors resulted in her death, but it is apparent that the girl in Grave 1 likely suffered chronic ill health from early childhood. As a disabled and chronically ill person myself, I experience periods of bed-rest and even long periods of being bed-bound. I find myself feeling empathy for the Trumpington girl and wondering whether she spent some of her life, just as her death, in bed. Beds were extremely high-status items of furniture, and the fragments of wood found of the Trumpington bed indicate the bed in Grave 1 was even decorated with carving. There is mixed evidence as to whether the beds found in graves were constructed especially for the burial of if they were the bed used by the occupant of the grave in their lifetime. The narrow size of many of them suggests they were purely built for funerary purposes, while modifications made to some beds indicate they were not built to specifically fit the grave. In the case of Grave 1, the bed has largely decayed, but the positioning of the rivets indicate it was 24 inches wide, two thirds the size of a standard modern single bed. Could the Trumpington girl have rested in this bed while experiencing ill health? Could she have even died in this very bed? Might a bed burial have seemed fitting for those who knew her as bedbound in life? It is all conjecture, but it is certainly possible.While the circumstances of this inhumation and the archeological techniques used to investigate it are fascinating, it’s useful to remind ourselves of the human that lies at the centre of it. From the archaeological record, we can glean something of what this girl’s life might have been like. She was clearly an important figure, set apart from others in status by the glinting garnet jewellery pinning her veil and sewn to her chest. This chest ornament did not only signify her wealth, but also her religion. It marked her out as a convert. But she was also ailing, and though her cause of death is unknown, her life was cut very short. In death, she was set apart once again by the presence of her cross and the extravagance of her burial in a narrow carved bed. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Wynflaed: A Whole Life Recorded on One Piece of ParchmentIn the archives of the British Library is a single sheet of parchment. On this eleventh-century parchment is a copy of a will, composed a century earlier, and recorded in Old English. It records all the possessions of a woman named Wynflaed. This document is about half a metre wide, and creases indicate that it has been folded several times. A prominent tear lies down one of these creases. This copy of the original will was probably made by an interested party to record the transition of lands between hands, and the legal document that results is the only written record we have of Wynflaed’s life - a whole human existence captured in ink on animal skin. This list of possessions is rather a lot more than we have for most women of the early tenth century, and gives us a well-rounded picture of who she was and what kind of social position she occupied.The will begins ‘Wynflaed declares how she wishes to dispose of what she possesses, after her death.’ It was drawn up in the 940s. Wynflaed probably went to a local churchman to have it recorded, somewhere in the south west of England. The will indicates that she was a very wealthy woman - a landowner, with seven estates in Hampshire, Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire. We don’t know at what age she decided to draw up her will, but it’s clear from the list of beneficiaries that she was already a widow and a grandmother. She has both children and grandchildren to whom she bequeaths her possessions, but clearly no living husband. It’s feasible to imagine that Wynflaed had this will drawn up soon after a change of circumstances like the death of her husband, from whom she may have inherited land.At least one of her estates was granted to her by her husband upon her marriage - the will calls her estate at Faccombe a ‘morning-gift’ (marriage gift). The manor that existed at Faccombe in Wynflaed’s lifetime was excavated by archaeologists in the 1970s and 80s, and so we can get a sense of how Wynflaed lived on her estate there. The farmhouse was large - 45 feet by 25, with stables attached in which to keep her animals (the will mentions both tamed and untamed horses, oxen, and cattle) as well as workshops and kitchens. That this was possibly one of seven such properties brings her wealth into perspective. Her will also includes a ‘red tent’, which she would have slept in while travelling around southern England to her various estates. Wynflaed’s will does not only deal in land and material possessions, but also in people. Wynflaed owned a large number of enslaved people, who would have worked for her on her estates. Although Wynflaed’s will is perhaps unusual in its detail and naming of individual enslaved people, that they are bequeathed is not at all uncommon. The early medieval economy was reliant on slave labour, with perhaps 30% of the population being enslaved, and landowners such as Wynflaed and her family were wealthy because of the work of the people they have enslaved. The will makes it clear that Wynflaed primarily owned people that she herself has enslaved as punishment (indicated by the word witeþeowas) revealing her powerful position as someone who could legally condemn others to slavery. Wynflaed’s slaves are both men and women, some with very specific skills: a weaver, a seamstress and a cook. Wynflaed gives specific enslaved people to specific recipients, in one instance even splitting up a family unit to do so. That some of the enslaved people in her will have children who she also has power over indicates that slavery was a hereditary social status. Wynflaed does not only bequeath the enslaved people in her will, but she also frees many of them. The will reads:Wulfflaed is to be freed on condition that she serve Æthelflaed and Eadgifu. And she bequeathes to Eadgifu a woman-weaver and a seamstress, the one called Eadgifu, the other called Æthelgifu. And Gerburg is to be freed, and Miscin […] and the daughter of Burhulf at Chinnock, and Ælfsige and his wife and elder daughter, and Ceolstan's wife. And at Charlton, Pifus and Eadwyn […] are to be freed. And at Faccombe Eadhelm and Man and Johanna and Sprow and his wife […] and Gersand and Snel are to be freed. And at Coleshill Æthelgyth and Bica's wife and Æffa and Beda and Gurhann's wife are to be freed; and Wulfwaru's sister, Brihtsige's wife, and […] the wright, and Wulfgyth, Ælfswith's daughter are to be freed. And if there be any penally enslaved man besides these whom she has enslaved, she trusts to her children that they will release him for her soul's sake.The key phrase here is ‘for her soul’s sake’. Wynflaed, who wished to hold these people enslaved while she was alive, wanted them to be freed only afterwards, as an act of piety. While some might interpret Wynflaed’s act of freeing these people as charitable or moral, this ‘moral’ act only applied to some of her slaves, and was delayed until after she died. Another interpretation is that even in death, Wynflaed wanted to continue to use these people: after their labour is no longer useful to her, she exchanges them for redemption.Piety is a prevalent theme in Wynflaed’s will. She gives her estate at Chinnock to the nunnery at Shaftesbury and also many of her belongings, including offering-cloths, her cross, and two silver cups. She gives a gold coin to every nun there, and one more each to three women, Ceolthryth, Elsa, an Æthelswith, presumably nuns at Shaftesbury. She also has a substantial wardrobe of clothes, some of which she bequeaths to the nuns:And she grants to Ceolthryth whichever she prefers of her black tunics and her best holy veil and her best headband; and to Æthelflaed the white gown and cap and headband, and afterwards Æthelflaed is to supply from her nun's vestments the best she can for Wulfflad and Æthelgifu and supplement it with gold so that each of them shall have at least sixty pennyworth: and for Ceolwyn and Eadburg it shall be thirty pennyworth. And there are two large chests and a clothes chest, and a little spinning box and two old chests.That she owned nun’s vestments indicates she may have been associated with the community at Shafesbury, though it is unlikely she was consecrated a nun herself while she has ownership over such estates, possessions and enslaved people.Though Wynflaed’s will shows her to be concerned with her soul, her clothing and other luxurious possessions reveal that she was certainly no ascetic. As well as the gowns and veils and headbands she also bequeaths a ‘twilibrocenan’ gown, which has been translated as ‘double badger skin’, from the Old English word for badger ‘broc’, but it is more likely that it refer to a style of embroidery that uses two contrasting colours. She also bequeaths an engraved bracelet and a brooch to her daughter, as well as a filigree brooch to a woman named Eadgifu. Her will rounds off with all the things that her daughter should inherit but are too small to mention:Then she makes a gift to Æthelflaed of everything which is unbequeathed, books and such small things, and she trusts that she will be mindful of her soul. And there are also tapestries, one which is suitable for her, and the smallest she can give to her women. […] And to Æthelflaed she grants her […] the utensils and all the useful things.The mention of books, which would have been luxury items in this period, indicate that Wynflaed and her daughter Æthelflaed may have been literate - it is frustrating that the contents of these books are not specified, but we might image them to be psalters.There have been some attempts to identify Wynflaed and link her with other known individuals. She has been associated with King Edgar’s grandmother Wynflaed, who can also be linked to Shaftesbury, though nothing in her will indicates this connection. Her identity and family connections may never been known in any more detail. Ultimately, we have a much greater understanding of who she was and what kind of life she lived from her will than from any reconstructed family tree. Rather than trying to link her with royalty, I think it’s more interesting to focus on what her will tells us about every day life in this period. And as well as painting a well-rounded picture of Wynflaed’s life, it also allows us glances towards the lives of the people she enslaved, which we otherwise never get to see. We know their names, something of their family structures, and in some cases their occupations and skills. Finally, I must point out that every royal or landowning woman in this newsletter owned and exploited slave labour - of that I have no doubt. Wynflaed is only different because her will records their names for posterity.Further Reading (and Listening!):Wealthy Wynflaed’s Wonderful Will by Kate H Thomas (For the Wynn Blog)Wynflaed’s Will (British Library)Of Pots and Pins: The Households of Late Anglo-Saxon Faccombe Netherton by Katherine WeikertFull text of the will (Electronic Sawyer) S 1539Michael Wood, ‘Anglo-Saxon Portraits’: Wynflaed (BBC Radio 3) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Raedwald's Queen or the Mound 14 Dowager: The Woman Responsible for the Burial at Sutton Hoo?For the first time in twenty seven Ælfgif-who? biographies, I’ve reluctantly had to title this one with a man’s name, and not a woman’s. Raedwald was the first king of East Anglia in the early seventh century, and a likely candidate for the East Anglian ship burial at Sutton Hoo. His wife features in two stories in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, but she is never actually named. While unfortunate, that probably tells us something important about the way the women in Bede’s narratives often exist to elucidate stories about ‘great men’. There are some exceptions to this - and see my biographies of Hild and Æthelthryth if you don’t believe me - but these are saintly Christian women. According to Bede, Raedwald’s wife was a pagan.Indeed, in one story, Raedwald's pagan wife is portrayed by Bede as dissuading him from Christian worship after his conversion:He was seduced by his wife and by certain evil teachers and perverted from the sincerity of his faith, […] serving both Christ and the gods whom he had previously served. In the same temple he had one altar for the Christian sacrifice and another small altar on which to offer victims to devils.Though Raedwald's wife is portrayed as a corrupter, this narrative reveals to us that during the conversion process Christian and non-Christian worship could be practiced simultaneously.In another episode in Bede's Ecclesiastical History we see Raedwald's wife in a different and more positive light. She dissuades her husband from dishonourably murdering a young Edwin of Northumbria, who is taking refuge at the East Anglian court, a merciful and politically astute act which leads to King Edwin's eventual conversion to Christianity by Paulinus.As Bede's intention wasn't to shed light on the roles of royal women, we must extrapolate from the evidence. In one story, she is the pagan wife persuading her husband to return to his pre-Christian religious practices, which for the monk Bede is a corrupting influence. In the other story, she is the merciful wife who saves a man and allows him to convert. Although Bede’s portrayal of her is complex, in both instances she is a persuasive figure who exerts a great degree of influence over her powerful husband.King Raedwald has gained some fame in recent years for his association with Sutton Hoo. Sutton Hoo, in modern Suffolk, is the location of an early seventh-century cemetery that contains around twenty burial mounds (see below) and dozens of other burials. This site is famous for its two ship Burials, probably the most elaborate burials in the history of Britain. The richest of the burials at Sutton Hoo is the 90ft Ship Burial in Mound 1. While some of the burial mounds had been robbed over the centuries, Mound 1 remained intact. This mound was excavated in 1939, which was recently depicted in the 2021 film The Dig (which I will be reviewing for paid subscribers in a few days time). This burial also contained luxurious grave goods, some of which were Byzantine and North African, demonstrating that seventh-century society was advanced in both trade and craftsmanship. While no human remains have survived in the acidic soil, it has been deduced that this huge burial ship contained the body of a powerful and wealthy figure. The combination of non-Christian ceremonial practice and Christian finds at this site suggest that whomever was buried there existed between two belief systems; paired with the dating of the site determined by coins in the mound, Raedwald is a likely candidate. But what of Raedwald’s queen? A theory has been put forward, most notably by Professor Martin Carver in his 2017 book The Sutton Hoo Story (affiliate link), is that Raedwald’s wife and queen may have been the orchestrator of the elaborate burials at Sutton Hoo. As Carver puts it:…One can imagine that Raedwald’s queen was the person responsible for the direction and composition of the funeral. Judging by Mound 1, this would have been an occasion when power politics, international relations, a nod to the ancestors and a confrontation of fate were combined in a material eulogy that must have been unforgettable to those that saw it. The spectacle was devised in weapons, feasting equipment and regalia, shimmering with gold and silver, ornamented with rampant animals, real and unreal. But the burial also contained fine cloaks, spare shoes, clean linen and a shaving kit. The person who devised it was concerned to maintain both the independence and dignity of the new kingdom and the intimate memory of a man.Only one mound at Sutton Hoo has been deduced as the burial of a woman. Mound 14 is unfortunately one of the mounds that has had its goods ransacked, but archaeological evidence suggests that the robbery was cut short by a torrent of rain, which prevented some of the goods from being taken. A key chain left behind, typical of female graves in this period, demonstrates the grave belonged to a wealthy woman. She was buried lying on some sort of bed, in a grave lined with timber, and her other surviving grave goods include dress fittings, buckles, a bowl and a cup. Fragments of textile also survive, indicating that she was dressed luxuriously - linen with woollen embroidery, similar to that found on the Frankish Queen Balthild - as well as evidence of a linen chemise and linen gown, both with embroidered cuffs. Notably, unlike in Mound 1, in which some items were decorated with Christian symbols, there is nothing that would suggest the burial is Christian. If we consider that the woman buried in this mound could be Raedwald’s wife, the respective dating of both mounds allows for her to have outlived him and died at around 60-70 years old. While hypothetical, this is feasible.Admittedly, the queen and the Mound 14 dowager mentioned in the title of this biography may be two separate historical women, but they also may be the same person. Raedwald is the most likely candidate for the man in Mound 1, and though evidence of his wife’s involvement rests on conjecture, Raedwald’s wife is the only candidate put forward for the woman in Mound 14. Moreover, if Raedwald’s queen is not the high-status East Anglian woman in the grave, it was surely someone she knew or was connected to. And there is certainly a strength of character reflected in Bede's portrayal of this unnamed queen that demonstrates she would have been capable of putting together such a political event as this burial.Recommended Reading:The Women of Sutton Hoo (Informative online article by The Past) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Bebba: The queen who gave her name to the fort of Bebbanburg (Bamburgh, Northumbria)In his Ecclesiastical History, the seventh-century historian Bede twice mentions a royal city that was named after Queen Bebba. This place, Bebbanburg, has been known as Bamburgh (or other variations) since the twelfth century. Next to nothing is known about this mysterious Queen Bebba, as if often sadly the case with such early medieval women, but in small scraps of evidence we might piece together a bigger story.You may be aware of Bamburgh through the fictional character of Uhtred of Bebbanburg, the protagonist in the popular TV series The Last Kingdom. Alternatively, you might be familiar with the small Northumbrian village of Bamburgh due to its beautiful castle overlooking the sea, and if you’re from the north of England like I am, chances are you’ve visited it on holiday or a school trip. While picturesque, historically it has been an important place of defence, due to its sea location and elevation. Bamburgh was a strategic fort in the early middle ages, but its significance pre-dates the the period usually covered by this newsletter by a long way. The castle is built on the Whin Sill, a huge igneous rock formation that stretches over the North East of England from the Northern Pennines to the Scottish border. This natural geographic landmark formed almost 300 million years ago during the collision of two continents, Euramerica and Gondwana, which created the supercontinent of Pangea. Movement in the earth’s plates during this event caused magma to escape through the crust, crystallising under the earth’s surface in the form of a ridge of dolerite rock.Bamburgh Castle, Lindisfarne Castle, Dunstanburgh Castle and parts of Hadrian’s wall take all advantage of the naturally strategic high ground created by this geological event, which has certainly shaped geopolitics ever since. This has made Bamburgh a place of prehistoric ancient significance: evidence of human settlement there has been found from the Mesolithic, the Neolithic, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age.Apart from Bede, our earliest written evidence about Bamburgh comes from two sources: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Historia Brittonum, a dubious history of the Brittonic people written by an unknown author in Wales in the ninth century. According to this latter text, the Britons had a fort there called Din Guarie before the migration of the Saxons, Angles and Jutes into Britain from northern Europe. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s E text says that in 547 the King of Bernicia, Ida, built his own fort there, which was ‘first enclosed by a hedge and then after by a wall’. The Historia Brittonum tells us that it was Ida’s grandson, King Æthelfrith, who gave the fort of Din Guarie to his wife Bebba, after whom it was then named.Æthelfrith was a pre-Christian king who has been credited with the creation of Northumbria: he was the first king to unite the smaller kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira. He was the father of the famous Saint-King Oswald, though according to Bede Oswald’s mother was not Bebba, but a woman named Acha, a princess of Deira. It is certainly possible that Æthelfrith could have had two wives in his lifetime, but it is noteworthy that Bede mentions Bebba twice and never in conjunction with Æthelfrith.This is the entire extent of the available information on Bebba: a cursory mention in Bede and another in the Historia Brittonum. Neither of these sources are contemporary, though they could feasibly have been based on earlier sources now lost to us. The truth is, it is difficult to confirm or refute this origin of Bamburgh’s place name. Any attempt to recover Bebba from history would rely heavily on conjecture. We might conclude that Bebba must have been a very significant figure indeed to have a fort named after her, and we might put her, along with Æthelflaed, in the category of female military rulers of early medieval England. We could imagine her as a warrior-queen defending her fort, or as a beloved wife who Æthelfrith immortalised in the name of his kingdom’s most important settlement. On the other end of the scale, we must acknowledge that perhaps there is little truth in either Bede’s account or the account of the Historia Brittonum.Whoever Bebba was, her name will forever be associated with Bamburgh. We might never find out another scrap of information about her, but through a place name many of us are familiar with, her legacy lives on almost 1.5 millennia after her death. It’s also interesting that the significance of Bamburgh to the royalty of early medieval Northumbria relies on an event that took place 300,000 millennia before Bebba was born. History is a funny thing, isn’t it.If you’re interested in the politics and history of place names, you might want to hear about what I was getting up to while I was meant to be having a rest from the newsletter. I wrote an article debunking the false medieval etymology of the name of my home town, Goole in East Yorkshire, highlighting the negative impact that false meanings can have on the reputation of a place. My campaign has had some success already, being covered by the BBC and The Times as well as local press, and I have been in contact with Goole Town Council who are moving to to remove the false etymology from their website. Is that ‘impact’? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women every two weeks. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Æthelthryth, Part 2: A warrior saint who slaughtered Vikings and Normans with her sisters-in-armsPart 1 looked at what we know about Æthelthryth’s life and what happened in the decades right after her death. Born a princess of East Anglia in the early seventh century she was married to a nobleman, widowed, and went on to become the Queen of Northumbria. She refused to consummate her two marriages and entered into the monastic life, becoming the Abbess of Ely in 670 and serving for seven years until her death from the plague. Sixteen years after she died her body had not decomposed. She was transferred into a new marble coffin which was miraculously the right size for her.Usually a historical biography takes into account what happened during someone’s life, from their birth until their death. The word biography comes from the Ancient Greek βίος (bios), ‘life’, + γράφω (grapho), ‘to write’. It’s difficult to fit many early English saints into this genre, as sainthood by definition is something that happens after death, when miracles are reported and a cult is fostered by a church or a local community. The lives of many figures who feature in Ælfgif-who? are not well documented in sources from when they were alive, but new stories about them emerged in the sources many years after their deaths. This is not only the case with saints like Hild and Eanswith, but also women who became the subjects of retrospective scandals and controversies, like Queen Eadburh, and Queen Ælfgifu. When dealing with early medieval history, biography necessarily becomes not just about life, but legacy.While Æthelthryth’s life is fairly well documented through Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, her posthumous legacy is so extensive that I’ve had to write a Part 2 to explore it. The Liber Eliensis, or ‘Book of Ely’, compiled by a monk in the twelfth century, elaborates on Æthelthryth’s life and her legacy in some detail using older source material. Looking at how Æthelthryth was regarded in the centuries after her death reveals a lot about those who wished to remember her and keep her legacy alive. Most importantly, it gives us an opportunity to think about the many female relatives of Æthelthryth - sisters, half-sisters, nieces and great-nieces - who became involved and implicated in her sainthood. In the century after her death she was remembered by Bede primarily for her virginity and incorruptible body, but by the twelfth century she had also become a warrior saint, a symbol of protection and resistance against Vikings and Norman invaders.Fostering a Female Family Cult:Part 1 touched upon the translation of Æthelthryth’s body from her wooden coffin to a marble one sixteen years after her death, how she was found to have not decomposed, and her doctor’s testimony that her wounds had healed. It is worth re-focusing this incident on the woman who decided to have Æthelthryth reburied - her sister Seaxburh. Seaxburh’s life shared some features of that of her sister: she was also a queen, having been married to King Eorcenberht of Kent, and she became abbess of Ely in widowhood after her sister died. Unlike Æthelthryth she was not a virgin - evidence suggests she had two sons who became kings of Kent, and two daughters who became saints, which is probably why she receives considerably less praise from Bede. She was also not a reluctant queen like Æthelthryth, and sources point to her acting as queen regent for her sons Ecgberht and Hlothere - though this political experience would have set her in good stead for managing the monastery at Ely.Æthelthryth was not the first of her sisters to have her body translated to a new resting place and found to be in perfect condition. Æthelthryth and Seaxburh’s sister Æthelburh, and their half-sister Saethryth, had both become nuns and then abbesses at Faremoutiers-en-Brie. Bede tells us that seven years after Æthelburh’s death in 664, her body was moved and found to be incorrupt. Seaxburh’s daughter Eorcengota was also a nun at Faremoutiers, and may have written to her mother to tell her of this miracle. The incident likely provided the inspiration for Seaxburh’s translation of Æthelthryth and the reports of her miraculous incorruption. This action should not be underestimated as an astute political move by Seaxburh as abbess of Ely - this miracle cemented Æthelthryth’s saintly reputation and led to the development of her cult, which endured for centuries. Fostering saints’ cults could be a huge boon for monastic sites, earning them a prestigious reputation and establishing them as important pilgrimage sites.Seaxburh may have also been considering her own posthumous reputation and that of her family. The move led to her becoming part of a group of saintly sisters, which eventually extended to saintly nieces and granddaughters. Saints’ cults must be fostered, and these female familial networks loom large in Æthelthryth’s legacy at Ely. There is evidence that Seaxburh’s other daughter Eormenhild succeeded Seaxburh as abbess at Ely in widowhood, after the death of her husband King Wulfhere of Mercia. It is likely that during this period the cult of Saint Æthelthryth of Ely began to expand within Mercia, with two new foundations set up dedicated Æthelthryth in Lindsey, in modern Lincolnshire. Bede tells us that days after her death, Eormenhild’s body did not putrefy, but gave off a sweet smell. Eormenhild’s daughter Werburh was also reputedly an important religious figure in Mercia, heavily involved in Ely, and she was apparently put in charge of Mercian religious houses by her uncle King Æthelred. This may have also encouraged the growth of her great aunt’s cult. Werburh became a saint herself, and she was the subject of yet another miracle story involving her body being found not to have decayed when being translated to a new resting place.Æthelthryth as Ely Icon:By the early tenth century, monasteries in general were in decline due to sustained Viking attacks. According to Ælfhelm, a priest at Ely writing in the tenth century, the Vikings attacked Ely and dispersed Æthelthryth’s cult in the late ninth century. This doesn’t seem to have had a long-lasting impact, and the shrine survived the Viking looting. By the mid tenth century a community of married priests was again active in promoting her cult. Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester was a leading figure in revitalising monasticism in the Benedictine tradition in the second half of the tenth century, and he took a particular interest in Æthelthryth’s cult. Æthelwold was interested in Bede’s view of the seventh century church, which could be seen as a kind of golden age of monasticism. He refounded Ely in c. 970, expelling the married priests who were maintaining Æthelthryth’s cult, and replacing them with Benedictine monks. Æthelthryth’s portrait and her saints day (on the 23 June) is included in a lavishly decorated Benedictional belonging to Æthelwold, with an inscription stressing her chastity and her ‘intact’ body in life and ‘incorruptible’ body in death. The virginal and incorruptible Æthelthryth was the perfect figure to symbolise the displacement of the unchaste priests at Ely in favour of Benedictine monastic custodians, and Æthelthryth’s inviolate body was the perfect metaphor for the endurance of the monastery of Ely through Viking raids. But this posed a problem for Æthelwold and the new community. It was common to display saints relics in order for them to be seen and worshipped by pilgrims. However, removing Æthelthryth from her tomb hundreds of years after her burial and putting her remains on display could have risked shattering her reputation as incorrupt. To solve this problem, Æthelwold made the white marble sarcophagus itself the focal point of her shrine, holding a ceremony in which her coffin was brought into the church. This emphasis on her entombment created yet another layer of Æthelthryth’s impenetrability. It was probably at this time that miracles were first recorded warning of the dire consequences of trying to open Æthelthryth’s tomb. The Liber Eliensis, using Ælfhelm’s earlier text, records that when the Vikings plundered Ely, one fierce raider attacked Æthelthryth’s tomb with an axe, hoping that there would be treasure inside. As soon as he had chipped off enough marble to create a small window into the tomb, he went blind and then he dropped dead. When the priests who had been dispersed by the Vikings returned eight years later, Ælfhelm witnessed one of them poke Æthelthryth’s body, through the hole made by the Viking, with a stalk of fennel, to try and see if she remained incorrupt. Finding that she was, he then attached a lit candle to a stick and poked this inside to see better, but as soon as he did this he went blind. The candle fell inside the tomb, and kept burning without setting her burial clothes alight. The blinded priest then pulled her undamaged clothes away from her body with a sharpened stick and cut at them with a knife, and his companions took hold of the cloth. A tug of war began between the men and the coffin, and Æthelthryth’s clothes were wrenched back into the coffin by a mysterious force back through the hole. In the following days, the text says, the priest’s entire family were killed by a plague, and his offending companions either died or went mad. Ælfhelm himself, a witness to these events, became paralysed and only regained his health when his parents took gifts to Æthelthryth’s tomb. The story of these men poking phallic objects through the hole in her coffin, removing and tearing at her clothes, is not a subtle metaphor for Æthelthryth’s preservation of her virginity. Nevertheless, these miracles justify the continued decision of the abbot of Ely not to allow anyone to open or look inside Æthelthryth’s tomb under any circumstances; a decision that enabled the monks of Ely to continue her reputation as incorrupt. The relics of two other abbesses of Ely, Æthelthryth’s sister Seaxburh and her niece Eormenhild were put beside her, as well as another incorrupt virgin saint, Wihtburh, whose body was stolen from another monastery, and the claim was made that she was Æthelthryth’s other sister. This created a shrine not just to Æthelthryth but to a family of royal women associated with saintliness and incorruption. The new abbot of Ely had gold and silver jewel-encrusted statues of these four women made to display at the shrine.Post Conquest Æthelthryth: Warrior SaintIn the years after the Norman Conquest of 1066, the leader of an anti-Norman rebellion called Hereward the Wake made Ely his base, which led to it being besieged. During this time, Saint Æthelthryth was transformed again into a symbol of resistance and protection. Rebels who joined Hereward would have to swear an oath to the cause on her tomb. The Liber Eliensis records miracles that demonstrate her continuing in this role in the decades after the Norman Conquest. One particular incident shows Æthelthryth not only to be a protector of Ely, but as an avenging assassin accompanied by her sisters. When a Norman noble called Gervase was particularly harsh in his treatment of Ely, condemning or imprisoning anyone who spoke against him:…St Æthelthryth appeared in the form of an abbess with a pastoral staff, along with her two sisters, and stood before him, just like an angry woman, and reviled him in a terrifying manner as follows: 'Are you the man who has been so often harassing my people - the people whose patroness I am - holding me in contempt? And have you not yet desisted from disturbing the peace of my church? What you shall have, then, as your reward is this: that others shall learn through you not to harass the household of Christ.' And she lifted the staff which she was carrying and implanted its point heavily in the region of his heart, as if to pierce him through. Then her sisters, St Wihtburh and St Seaxburh wounded him with the hard points of their staves. Gervase, to be sure, with his terrible groaning and horrible screaming, disturbed the whole of his household as they lay round about him: in the hearing of them all he said, "Lady, have mercy! Lady, have mercy!" On hearing this, the servants came running and enquired the reason for his distress. There was a noise round about Gervase as he lay there and he said to them, "Do you not see St Æthelthryth going away? How she pierced my chest with the sharp end of her staff, while her saintly sisters did likewise? And look, a second time she is returning to impale me, and now I shall die, since finally she has impaled me." And with these words he breathed his last.Despite Æthelthryth and her sisters becoming symbols for resistance against Norman oppression, the Normans themselves were keen to keep her cult alive at Ely. Norman abbots took over the monastery, and in 1106 the relics of the four women were moved to new shrines in the rebuilt choir, with Æthelthryth placed in the position of honour. In the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries many more texts about her and her miracles were produced, especially in the time of the first bishop of Ely, Hervey (1109–31), who is believed to have commissioned the Liber Eliensis.St Æthelthryth's cult continued to be promoted at Ely throughout the medieval period. About a dozen churches other than Ely were dedicated to her. A fair was held there in June to celebrate Æthelthryth’s feast day, where ribbons and lace necklaces that had touched the shrine were popular mementos. It is thought that the items sold at Saint Æthelthryth’s fair, who is known as Saint Audrey, gave rise to the term ‘tawdry’, a contraction of Saint and Audrey, which describes something that is showy but cheap. That she would become best known for cheap necklaces is ironic given that, as explored in Part 1, wearing expensive necklaces weighed heavily on her conscience, and she believed this caused the bubonic tumour that was to kill her.Saint Æthelthryth’s shrine at Ely was finally destroyed during the dissolution of the monasteries. It is not known what state her body was in when it was finally removed from its coffin, but I’m sure that her and her sisters ensured those responsible met grisly ends.Ælfgif-who? has a new facebook page where you will see posts about women in the early middle ages! Please give it a like! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women every two weeks. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Æthelthryth, Part 1: A Virgin Queen who Died and Didn’t DecomposeLast month we learned that Æthelgifu wasn’t a major saint after all, but the same cannot be said for Saint Æthelthryth. Æthelthryth was a seventh-century queen who was married twice, refused to consummate her marriages, and left her second husband, the King of Northumbria, to become the Abbess of Ely. An important English figure both before and after the Norman Conquest, Æthelthryth has been written about by medieval authors more than any other English female saint. One of the earliest sources we have for Æthelthryth’s life is Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, which devotes a whole chapter to her (and if you’d like to join an online reading circle I’m leading on this chapter, see below). She is also included in the tenth-century Ælfric's Lives of Saints and Goscelin of Saint-Bertin's Lives of Female Saints. The twelfth-century Liber Eliensi (Book of Ely), fleshes out her life further, while another twelfth-century text, written in Anglo-Norman by an author named Marie, is the earliest example of a woman authoring a text about Æthelthryth. Æthelthryth is also the only early English saint for whom we have a portrait: there are two portraits of her in the tenth-century Benedictional of Æthelwold.Early Life and Queenship:Æthelthryth was the daughter of Anna, King of East Anglia. Her exact birth date is not known, but she must have been born within a few decades of the East Anglian Sutton Hoo burials - indeed one possible candidate for the body in the ship burial mound is King Rædwald, Æthelthryth’s great uncle. She was married to a nobleman called Tondbert, though he died about three years into their marriage. After five years as a widow, in Bede’s words she was ‘given to’ her second husband, Ecgfrith, heir to King Oswiu of Northumbria, in 660. Ecgfrith was around fifteen years old at this point, and the widowed Æthelthryth was likely much older. She doesn’t seem to have had much choice in either of her marriages, both of which would have been political. The East Anglian royal house already had connections with Northumbria: Anna’s brother had married a Northumbrian princess Hereswith, Hild of Whitby’s sister.Æthelthryth was a less than willing bride, as Bede tells us that she remained a virgin through her first marriage and her second. He learned this from Bishop Wilfrid, who was apparently begged by Ecgfrith, who had inherited his father’s throne in 670, to persuade her to consummate the marriage in exchange for land and money. Wilfrid seems to have been on Æthelthryth’s side in this matter, and around twenty years after her first marriage, Æthelthryth finally got her wish when Wilfrid made her a nun. She seems to have repaid him by giving him the huge estate of Hexham, on which he founded a monastery - so Wilfrid ended up with the land he was promised anyway. A year later Æthelthryth had founded her own monastery on her huge estate at Ely and became its abbess: it was a mixed monastery, admitting both men and women, which was common in this period. Bede praises her for her monastic lifestyle: she only wore wool, never linen, never washed and only ate once a day, with the exception of major feast days like Easter.Æthelthryth’s Death:Bede tells us that Æthelthryth prophesied a plague which was to kill her and a number of others in the monastery, and indeed she died during this epidemic after seven years as abbess. She was suffering from a large painful tumour on her neck which Bede says she took pleasure in, telling everyone that she deserved the affliction because of all the heavy gold and pearl necklaces she wore when she was younger. Archaeological surveys have found that jewellery was an important signifier of a woman’s status and identity in this period, and different types of jewellery were bestowed at significant stages in life. By revelling in her ironic neck affliction, Æthelthryth is rejecting the wealth she once enjoyed - though a further irony could be seen in the fact that it was Æthelthryth’s queenly wealth and land ownership that allowed her to build Ely and become its abbess in the first place.She wished to be buried in a simple wooden coffin like the others who died. She was succeeded by her sister Seaxburg, a widow of the King of Kent, and she also had three other sisters who became saints, Æthelburh, Wihtburh and Sæthryth, as well as two nieces, Eormenhild and Eorcongota. Sixteen years after Æthelthryth died, her sister Seaxburg decided to have her reburied inside the church in a stone coffin. She ordered some of the monks to travel out of Ely, which at the time was an island, to find a stone to make a coffin. When they reached Grantchester, they found a white marble coffin already made among Roman ruins outside the city walls. When they opened her grave ready to move her body into this new coffin they found that Æthelthryth had not decomposed in sixteen years.Bede includes a testimony by Æthelthryth’s doctor Cynifrid, who was present both when she died and when her remains were revealed. He had drained her neck tumour by an incision a few days before she died, but after her death the wound had completely healed. The doctor says that her body was as fresh as the day she was buried. Not only this, but Bede goes on to say that Æthelthryth miraculously fit into the repurposed coffin perfectly, as if it had been made to her measurements. He goes on to include a hymn dedicated to her virginity, which invokes the names of six early Christian virgin martyrs. Bede is careful to stress repeatedly that the miracle of Æthelthryth’s incorruptible body, the earliest known instance of the claim that someone’s entire body had not decayed in England, was due to the fact that she was not corrupted by having sex with a man in her lifetime.Part 1 has looked at Æthelthryth’s life and the years immediately after her death. Part 2 will look at her legacy: the cult that emerged after her death that transformed her into one of England’s major saints. We will also look closer at the role of her sisters and nieces in her legacy. We will see her transformed from an incorruptible virgin queen into a warrior saint, protecting Ely along with her sisters and using her crook to impale bad men - really!Further Reading? Join my Bede Reading Circle!While you’re waiting for the second instalment, you can join my reading circle! Last week, I gave my paying subscribers the chance to read through Bede’s chapter on Æthelthryth with me and discuss it using an app I’m working with called Threadable. The app is still in development but allows users to create reading circles where members can create comment threads within texts for free. This reading circle will be active for the next 10 days and I’m now opening it up to all my subscribers! If you have an Apple device you can download Threadable and use the code in your email to enter my circle and join in the discussion or ask questions about Æthelthryth!PS: If you join the circle, I would love to get your feedback on the app and whether you enjoy using it to discuss historical texts like this. I love getting comments and questions on my posts and am hoping to use Threadable more in future to connect with the Ælfgif-who? subscriber community. Keep in mind that the app is still in early development and your feedback will help improve it! If you have any technical issues or need support, you can contact me by replying to this email or email [email protected]. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women every two weeks. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Balthild: From Enslaved Captive to Powerful QueenSome Ælfgif-who biographies have been constructed around one main piece of historical evidence: Breguswith was mentioned by Bede in a single paragraph; Hugeburc is only known to us because she wrote her name in a secret cypher; we have the remains of the North Elmham and Fairford women but their stories have been lost.Balthild, on the other hand, is probably the most attested seventh-century European woman. A saint’s life written about her soon after her death in 680 tells us her life story from her early life as an enslaved captive, to her rule as queen of Neustria, to her retirement at the abbey of Chelles. She is mentioned by no fewer than nine other sources. A number of objects survive that are associated with her, including a gold seal-ring which was found in Norfolk with the name ‘Baldehildis’ inscribed on it backwards. Relics stored at Chelles Abbey include several items of clothing, jewellery, and her bodily remains that reveal her height and hair colour. Though separated from us by over 1300 years, Balthild feels relatively close. But even with all this evidence, Balthild is a complicated figure whose story is still contradictory and uncertain.Early Life as an Enslaved CaptiveWe don’t know when or where Balthild was born. According to her hagiographer she was a Saxon, and she arrived in Francia from ‘lands across the sea’. From this detail we can deduce that she was English, as opposed to being from Saxony in Germany. She was ‘sold at a low price’, and acquired by the Mayor of the Franks, Erchinoald. She was apparently very beautiful, slender, dignified and pious, which Erchinoald found pleasing, and he made her his cupbearer. Her hagiographer praises the honour with which she washed and dried the feet of Erchinoald and his guests, she fetched their water, washed their clothes, and she did all of this without complaining! Despite Balthild having been sold to Erchinoald as an enslaved captive and forced to serve him, the hagiographer does nothing to criticise these circumstances, or her male captor, instead using it as opportunity to stress her dignity and virtue.She was so virtuous that Erchinoald decided he wanted to marry her. Balthild hid herself in a pile of rags in the corner instead. While a modern audience might read this as an act of resistance, to avoid the trauma of being forced to marry her captor, the hagiographer casts it as an act of humility. Balthild simply wanted to remain a humble virgin rather than marry someone with high status. When Erchinoald miraculously couldn’t find her buried under rags in a corner of his own house, he married someone else. She was eventually found when it was too late, and by the will of God she came to marry King Clovis instead of Erchinoald - her humility and renouncing of status was rewarded with even higher status. The question of whether Balthild wanted to marry the king is not raised.As as is often the case with saints’ lives, we must take this narrative with a large pinch of salt. The purpose of the hagiography is to make her the model of female saintly virtue, which involves casting her as lowly, humble, forbearing, and reluctant to marry for status. The hagiographer uses phrases taken from the Book of Esther, another queen who had lowly origins, to emphasise this narrative.Narrative convenience aside, the idea of an enslaved English captive marrying a Frankish king is not unfeasible. The Franks did trade in captives from England in this period, and the Merovingian royal dynasty, of which Clovis was a part, often made low-status women their wives or concubines. However, the author of the Life is not specific about Balthild’s background. That she was a captive does not mean that she came from a low-status family: she may have been a noble or even royal captive. The Liber Historiae Francorum, an eighth-century anonymous chronicle, states that Balthild was from Saxon nobility. Moreover, it was rare to see low-born women, even those who were married to Merovingian kings, exercising the kind of power that Balthild would come to have - and a previously enslaved person doing so is unheard of. The discovery of a Frankish-style seal ring in Norfolk bearing the name BALDEHILDIS has been taken as evidence that she was from this area and of high status; indeed, her captor Erchinoald seems to have had contacts in East Anglia. However, this ring, which appears to depict Christ and a cross on one side and a man and woman having sex on the other, presents many more questions than answers. Did the ring belong to this Balthild? At what point during her career was it made? Why does it apparently depict a sexual encounter? Why would the ring be in a Frankish style, yet found in East Anglia? Is the ring really from the seventh century? None of these questions have been sufficiently answered.Queen of NeustriaBalthild’s husband, Clovis II, was born in 633, and was king of Neustria from the age of five. His father Dagobert had split the kingdom of Francia between his two sons: Neustria in the west for Clovis and Austrasia in the east for his younger brother Sigibert. Clovis married Balthild as soon as he was fifteen, though it is not known how old Balthild was. Her hagiographer puts much emphasis on her royal offspring as the continuing royal line stemmed from her. She gave birth to three future kings: Clothar III, Theuderic III, and Childeric II. Despite being a mother and a married woman, her hagiographer is keen to stress that she still served the Lord through worship, charity and caring for the poor: she even had her own almoner, Abbot Genesius, who was in charge of distributing her donations.After Clovis II died in 657 at around age 24, the young Clothar III inherited the kingdom of Neustria, while Childeric inherited Austrasia from his uncle Sigibert. The hagiography states that the installation of Childeric was instituted by Balthild. Balthild and the Sigibert’s widow queen, Chimnechild, arranged for the betrothal of their young children, who were first cousins. The Liber Historiae Francorum tells us that Balthild became regent for her young son Clothar, and although the Life does not mention this directly, it does describe Balthild’s involved role in the ruling of the kingdom. According to her hagiographer she stopped the practice of simony (paying to be made bishop) and quashed infanticide. She gave away much gold and silver, including her own belt. She donated royal lands to the church to construct monasteries, and had a huge nunnery built at Chelles, near Paris. Perhaps most fittingly, Balthild apparently made it illegal for Christians to be kept as captives or traded in the kingdom of Neustria, and personally paid for many captives ‘of her own race’ (presumably enslaved people from England) to be freed or sent into monasteries.However, while Balthild’s interference in church matters was presented as charitable by her hagiographer, it was seen differently elsewhere. In Stephen of Ripon’s Life of Saint Wilfrid, Balthild is accused of having had nine bishops put to death: this is repeated by Bede in the Ecclesiastical History. Stephen compares her to the ‘most impious queen’ Jezebel, and cites the case of Bishop Aunemund as an example of such a martyrdom. In fact, Aunemund, who gave Wilfrid patronage in his early ecclesiastical career, seems to have died as a result of a local conflict. Balthild’s complicity lies in having her own almoner, Genesius, replace him as the Bishop of Lyon. As Stephen has no other examples and a clear reason to dislike Balthild, we might be sceptical of this picture of her as a bishop murderer.Retirement at Chelles Abbey and SainthoodConversely, according to her hagiographer, the Neustrian nobles killed a bishop called Sigobrand in an insurrection, against Balthild’s will, and were frightened of how she would react. Presumably Sigobrand was another bishop who Balthild had appointed into his role. As a result, Balthild was ‘permitted’ to retire to the monastery she’d had built at Chelles, though to what extent this retirement was voluntary is highly questionable. The Life describes her time at the monastery fairly predictably: she gave up her queenly power and lived a life of piety and humility, serving her sisters in the kitchen and even cleaning out the latrines. She became ill, and when her life was coming to an end she had a dream that she would ascend a staircase into heaven, to be crowned with an eternal reward. When she died on the 30th January 680, everyone at the monastery grieved her. There are reports of miracles at her tomb, including a boy being cured of demonic possession.Her cult was established soon after her death, as her Life was written within a decade of 680. A number of relics associated with Balthild have survived. The most famous of these relics is her chemise, the front panel of a tabard that has been embroidered with necklaces and medallions in coloured silks. This garment probably represents Balthild’s transition from the luxury of queenship into a more monastic life. The Life of St Eligius reports that Eligius appeared to one of Balthild’s courtiers three times to warn Balthild to give up her gold jewellery. Apparently she obeyed, keeping only two gold bracelets. The chemise is a visual representation of the luxurious jewellery she used to wear, replaced with less lavish silk (though silk was still an imported luxury good) that may have been embroidered by Balthild herself. In 1983 more relics were rediscovered at Chelles that are presumed to have belonged to Balthild. Among these relics, which are of the right date, are skeletal remains of a woman that show she was 5 feet tall, and even a plait of her hair survives - blonde, though greying. Other items include a pink and yellow silk semicircular cloak about 2.5 metres wide, a tiny brooch, and silk woven straps decorated with animals. For a woman who lived so long ago, we have an extraordinarily clear picture of what she might have looked like.Finding BalthildBut while Balthild is extensively attested by both written sources and material finds, especially in comparison to other women from the same period, we still have to be very careful in reconstructing her life. There are a number of reasons for this caution. First, there are so many unknowns not covered by the source material, including her origins and background pre-slavery, and even her own perspective. Second, although we have a number of relics and archaeological finds that we can assume belonged to Balthild, including bodily remains, it is difficult to prove definitively. Third, the majority of written sources have clear and obvious biases. The Life of Balthild, though likely written by someone who knew her, is written purely to emphasise her sanctity, a process which inevitably involves relying on restrictive feminine tropes and suppressing her actual persona in favour of an ideal. The Life of Wilfrid, with its own agenda, presents a completely opposing picture of her as a murderous Jezebel. We have to accept that neither of these sources gives us a true picture of a real woman.However, such contrasting depictions point to a controversial figure. Her interventions in politics, whether for good or for evil, and whether the reason for her downfall, were clearly extensive and disruptive. All the evidence points to the conclusion that Balthild was a figure who was at one point enslaved, but who went on to wield great power in her time as queen, so much so that she became a threat who had to be removed.Interested in the medieval clothing mentioned here? If you haven’t already, consider becoming a paid subscriber to access all exclusive posts including a two-part post about what early medieval women wore: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Eadburh: The Truth about the ‘Wicked Queen’ who Poisoned her HusbandAccording to King Alfred’s biographer Asser, the kings of Wessex would not allow their wives to be called ‘queen’ because of the stigma one particular tyrannical queen of Wessex had brought upon the role. This wicked queen, a daughter of King Offa and Queen Cynethryth of Mercia, was called Eadburh. Asser tells us the story of her evil and debauched life.He writes that as soon as Eadburh married King Beorhtric of Wessex, she began to behave as a tyrant like her father Offa. She used trickery to deprive her enemies of power, and when this didn’t work, she poisoned them. Eventually her scheme went wrong, and while she was poisoning a young friend of the king, Beorhtric himself accidentally took her poison. Both men died, and Eadburh fled across the sea, taking the royal treasure with her.When she arrived at the court of Charlemagne, she offered him gifts. According to Asser, Charlemagne said to her: ‘Choose, Eadburh, whom you wish between me and my son, who is standing with me on this throne.’ She foolishly replied without thinking, said: ‘If the choice is left to me, I choose your son, as he is younger than you.’ Charle­magne smiled and replied to her: ‘Had you chosen me, you would have had my son; but because you have chosen my son, you will have neither him nor me.’Asser’s Life of King Alfred, translated by Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge.Charlemagne gave her a convent in Francia and she became an abbess. This only lasted a few years before she was caught engaging in public debauchery with an English man. Charlemagne ejected Eadburh from the monastery and she apparently fled again to Pavia in Italy, dying a poor and miserable beggar.Eadburh was certainly a real queen, as she is mentioned in one other source. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 789 tells us that ‘In this year King Beorhtric married Offa’s daughter Eadburh’.If you are a seasoned Ælfgif-who reader you’ll know that when a medieval writer tells us a sensational story about a woman’s sin and debauchery, there’s often a political motive behind it. Like in the case of Æthelgifu and Ælfgifu, the mother and daughter whose historical legacy became a sex scandal involving a ménage à trois at a king’s coronation, the condemnation of Eadburh by Asser has a purpose which could have little to do with the actions of Eadburh herself.So why tell this story at the beginning of Alfred’s biography? Asser’s immediate purpose was to explain why West-Saxons did not customarily have queens: a custom that Asser himself says is ‘detestable’. He tells us that an exception was made for Judith, Alfred’s stepmother. The low status of West-Saxon royal women is corroborated in the surviving evidence. In the entry for the year of Judith’s wedding and coronation in 856, the Frankish Annals of St Bertin state that consecration of queens was ‘not customary’ for the West-Saxon people. The wives of West-Saxon kings in this period are also conspicuous by their absence in written material and charters; Alfred’s own wife Ealhswith is not even mentioned by name in his biography, despite Asser disapproving of her low status! Asser needed to explain why West-Saxon kings would have a policy that seemed - even in the eyes of a ninth-century monk - regressive.Another clue as to Asser’s purpose in telling this story is found in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The entry for 839 reads:In this year King Ecgberht died. Earlier, before Ecgberht became king, King Offa of the Mercians and King Beorhtric of the West Saxons had driven him from England to France for three years. Beorhtric helped Offa because he had married his daughter.This annal reveals that Ecgberht, Alfred’s own grandfather, had been exiled in his youth by Beorhtric and Offa because of their alliance made over Eadburh. Alfred’s grandfather was thus an enemy of the two men, and Alfred’s family line had displaced the previous one after Beorhtric died. The story about Eadburh uses her to cast aspersions on the two men: it makes Beorhtric look weak and Offa look like a tyrant, while condemning the very marriage alliance which caused both men to unite against Alfred’s grandfather.It is difficult to surmise to what extent, if any, this story is based in historical truth. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle does record the death of an Ealdorman Worr alongside that of King Beorhtric, though does not state how they died. Might Queen Eadburh have actually poisoned two men?While we can’t be sure, it does seem as though there was a preoccupation with the idea of women using poison during Alfred’s reign. Alfred’s Law Codes include an Old English translation of a Latin Biblical law that states ‘thou shalt not permit poisoners/magicians to live’. However Alfred’s own translation makes an adjustment, stating that it is specifically women who consort with magicians, not the magicians themselves, who should be killed. Perhaps the story of Eadburh inspired this law, or vice-versa.While the historicity of Eadburh’s wicked nature and debauchery is doubtful, it must be stressed that her journey and mobility in Asser’s story are entirely feasible. A neighbouring ruler’s court, a Frankish monastery, and a pilgrimage to Italy are all perfectly reasonable places where a displaced English queen might end up. Alfred's own sister Queen Æthelswith went to Rome in exile. She died while on pilgrimage to Pavia and was buried there. The Liber Vitae (Book of Life) of a convent in Brescia includes a list of names that demonstrates both English men and women visited there in the 850s, including a young Alfred. An early ninth century entry into the Liber Vitae of Reichenau has an entry for an English woman named Eadburg, abbess of a convent in Italy.A first read of Asser’s story about Queen Eadburh presents us with a wicked and tyrannical murderer who lost the chance to marry Charlemagne or his son through bluntness, who couldn’t keep chaste in her own convent, and who died poor and humiliated. A second consideration might lead us to the conclusion that poor Eadburh’s historical reputation was used as collateral, as history was re-written to favour the victors of a factional dispute. A third examination of the story might lead us to consider it as evidence that the real Eadburh, and widowed queens like her, had options for how they might live the rest of their lives - options that took them to illustrious royal courts, put them in positions of influence, and enabled them to travel thousands of miles. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women every two weeks. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Wait, Saint Æthelgif-who? The real history of two medieval women revived in 21st century political discourseOn the 9th December, Conservative MP and Leader of the House of Commons Jacob Rees-Mogg referenced a medieval woman during Business Questions. After being faced with a question from Scottish National Party MP Anum Qaisar about the UN’s International Corruption Day and several of the British government’s recent corruption scandals, Rees-Mogg said:Today is also the feast day of St Æthelgifu, who is the daughter of Alfred the Great and who became an abbess; I am more tempted to offer a debate to celebrate the virtues of one of England’s leading saints.Rees-Mogg then went on to praise Britain’s reputation on corruption and its corruption laws. While this probably isn’t the best place to delve into a lengthy discussion of corruption, it is the perfect place to discuss Æthelgifu: what Rees-Mogg got right about her, and (most importantly) what he got wrong.There was a woman called Æthelgifu who was the daughter of King Alfred. We know about her from a mention in Alfred’s biography, written by a monk called Asser. Asser tells us that Alfred had five children who survived infancy: Æthelflæd, Edward, Æthelgifu, Ælfthryth, and Æthelweard. Asser then tells us that:Æthelgifu, devoted to God through her holy virginity, subject and consecrated to the rules of monastic life, entered the service of God.Alfred’s will, which survives, leaves two estates to his ‘middle daughter’, who we can assume is Æthelgifu even though she is not named. There is also a charter that states Alfred gave Shaftesbury to his daughter because she was ill or infirm, but this has been found to be a later medieval forgery and its contents are therefore questionable. Unfortunately, that is the extent of the contemporary historical information we have about Æthelgifu. While the main biographical details Rees-Mogg stated are corroborated by the historical sources, any claim of her sainthood is very questionable. In this period there was no formal canonisation process - saints were simply figures who came to have miracles associated with them after they died, and who were worshiped because of it. We have no Saints Life written about Æthelgifu, no documents that state she is a saint, no reports of miracles, and no evidence of a cult celebrating her.This is not to say that she was not regarded as a saint in the decades after her death - it was common for abbesses, especially those who were the first abbesses of their institution, to go on to be celebrated as a patron saint. But with no information either way, to claim that she is a one of ‘England’s leading saints’, is misleading. To claim that somebody could lead a debate about her virtues, when all we know of her is a cursory mention in a single book, is plain wrong.Despite Æthelgifu’s relative obscurity in the historical record, Queen Ælfgifu, who had been married to Æthelgifu’s nephew King Edmund, did become patron saint of Shaftesbury after her death in 944. Is it possible Rees-Mogg confused the two women? Is Ælfgifu the leading saint to whom he refers? Let’s explore what we know about Ælfgifu.Little is known of Ælfgifu’s life or career as Queen of England. Charter evidence suggests her mother was a woman named Wynflaed, who seems to have been associated with Shaftesbury. The date of her marriage is not known, and she seems to have played a negligible role in her husband’s rule of the kingdom according to charter evidence. She died in around 944, possibly in childbirth. It is only after her death that she becomes notable in the source material. The late tenth-century chronicler Æthelweard reports that miracles had taken place at her tomb in Shaftesbury Abbey, hence her becoming its patron saint. Even after she was replaced as Shaftesbury’s patron saint by Edward the Martyr after his body was reburied there in 979, her cult continued to flourish. This is indicated by her inclusion in around a dozen pre-conquest liturgical calendars and saints litanies. Despite the details of Ælfgifu’s life not surviving in the extant source material, the number of sources from this period that do mention her illustrate just how much she eclipsed Shaftesbury’s founder, Æthelgifu.It would be understandable if someone were to confuse these two women. Both royal, both connected to Shaftesbury, and with two similar names. “Ælfgif-who” itself is a joke about just how confusing and common pre-conquest English names can be. You may even remember that the last edition of this newsletter was also about a completely different pair of women called Æthelgifu and Ælfgifu, from the same period!However, given the biographical details provided by Rees-Mogg and the fact that Ælfgifu was a queen and not an abbess, I don’t think a simple confusion of the two is possible. More likely is that Æthelgifu’s name made it into some modern compilation of saints somewhere along the line along with the date 9th December. She is not included in the major collections of saints, including the Roman Martyrology. Her name is included in the 1921 Ramsgate Book of Saints, and comes up along with the date 9th December on some Catholic websites, though none substantiate her inclusion or provide any sources about her life or deeds. The reason for her inclusion remains a mystery.All this demonstrates that when evoking Æthelgifu during his parliamentary statement and espousing her importance as an English saint and her virtuous deeds, Rees-Mogg couldn’t have had knowledge of these things. I think it’s important to point this out. Not because people aren’t allowed to make mistakes about history, but because Rees-Mogg’s ultimately insubstantial evocation of Æthelgifu was political grandstanding. Æthelgifu’s supposed saints day, her virtue and crucially her ‘Englishness’ were contrasted with a negative criticism of the British government, and used to deflect it. This deflection was ultimately a misuse of a historical figure.PS: I discussed Rees-Mogg and Æthelgifu on BBC Woman’s Hour last week. Have a listen here, the interview begins at 48 minutes.***Correction - a previous version of this post (and the podcast) says that the two women were sisters-in-law. This was a mistake caused by my brain falling out. Ælfgifu married Æthelgifu’s nephew. Glad I didn’t say that in parliament…Not finished Christmas shopping yet? Don’t forget you can purchase a gift subscription of Ælfgifu-who for a friend or loved one! Paying for a subscription means you can support the newsletter and makes sure I can keep writing. Have a lovely December and I can’t wait to see you all again in the New Year! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women every two weeks. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Æthelgifu and Ælfgifu: A Mother and Daughter Embroiled in a Medieval Sex ScandalThe Life of Saint Dunstan, written in around 1000, describes a scandalous incident that took place at the coronation of King Eadwig in 956.According to the anonymous author of this saint’s life, the teenage Eadwig suddenly rushed out of his coronation ceremony after he had been anointed and crowned. Archbishop Oda ordered for Eadwig to be found, and he was discovered by Abbot Dunstan cavorting with two women, a mother and her adult daughter, ‘as if they were wallowing in a revolting pigsty’. His crown had been tossed on the ground, and after Dunstan had told the women off, he picked up the crown and placed it back on Eadwig’s head, and marched him back to his coronation feast.The text names the mother as the noblewoman Æthelgifu, and says that she and her daughter sought for the king to marry one of them. Comparing her to Jezebel, it says that after the incident at the coronation ceremony, Æthelgifu worked against Abbot Dunstan, using her influence with the king to get him sent into exile.From charter evidence, we know that in 956 Eadwig was married to a woman named Ælfgifu, whose mother was a noblewoman called Æthelgifu. We might therefore infer from this Saint’s Life that it was these women who are accused of having a ménage à trois with Eadwig at his coronation. Although this story is amusingly scandalous, it is worth exploring what motives there might be to embroil King Eadwig and these women in scandal decades later.In the last edition of Ælfgif-who, we looked at Eadgifu, a dowager queen and King Eadwig’s grandmother, who was close to Dunstan and who was dispossessed of her land and wealth by the king at the same time as Dunstan was exiled. After Eadwig died in 959 his younger brother Edgar restored the positions of both his grandmother Eadgifu and Abbot Dunstan.From these events, it seems clear that two rival factions existed: supporters of Eadwig, and supporters of Edgar. Edgar went on to reign until 975, and during this time Dunstan was promoted to bishop and then archbishop, his influence in ecclesiastical politics leading to his sainthood. It is easy to imagine that during Edgar’s reign a substantial rewriting of history took place that maligned the losing faction, and led to a story being constructed that glorifies Dunstan as the hero, as he chastises the debauched women and sends the shameful king back to face his nobles and clergy. Ælfgifu and Æthelgifu have thus been vilified in the historical record, becoming maligned symbols for Eadwig’s immorality and Dunstan’s saintliness.This retrospective rewriting of history during Edgar’s reign makes it difficult to write the biographies of either Ælfgifu or her mother Æthelgifu. Little is known of their background, though Eadwig’s marriage to Ælfgifu before his coronation may indicate that she came from a powerful family that helped him secure power. That she is associated with her mother Æthelgifu in the sources, as opposed to her father, indicates that this influence was from her maternal family. In 958, Archbishop Oda dissolved the marriage of Eadwig and Ælfgifu, on the grounds of consanguinity - being blood related. This may have been a distant relation that was leveraged to dissolve the marriage during a time in which power was moving in favour of Eadwig’s brother and rival Edgar, who was accepted as king of Mercia in this year. It seems Ælfgifu was exiled for short time at this point, indicating her capacity to be a political problem.She seems to have returned to England by the 960s and her name was included in the 966 New Minster Winchester refoundation charter. Between 966 and 975 Ælfgifu died and left a will. This will leaves a large amount of land to the king, and it is unknown if this was her own land inherited from her family or land she was given while queen. The Death Duty paid to the king on her death was the largest of any surviving tenth-century will. She was buried at Winchester alongside her former husband Eadwig.The noblewoman Æthelgifu and her daughter, Queen Ælfgifu, are two of many examples of influential women who ended up on the wrong side of history. Dunstan’s hagiographer reduced these two powerful women to sexual objects that exist purely to reflect the morality of the men around them. Paradoxically, that they were so diminished in this misogynistic anecdote of sexual debauchery only speaks to their actual influence and the threat they once posed.Suggestions for further reading: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women every two weeks. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Eadgifu: The Queen who Outlasted Five KingsQueen Eadgifu, third wife of Edward the Elder, had a career spanning five decades. She outlived her husband and saw at least six different kings of England during her lifetime, and her fortunes rose and fell numerous times within these years as various kings took the throne. Her biography tells the story of her life, but also the story of English politics in the first part of the tenth century.Following the death of King Alfred in 899, his son Edward became king, but a rival bid for rulership came from Edward’s cousin Æthelwold. This bid was supported by the Danes who ruled Northumbria, and the Battle of the Holme was fought in December 902 by supporters of Edward against Æthelwold and his Danish army. Edward and the English army were not present, having retreated, leaving the Kentish army to fight alone. The Danes had the upper hand, and though Æthelwold was killed and his bid for the throne was ended, Sigehelm the Ealdorman of Kent who was fighting for Edward’s cause was also killed in the battle.Sigehelm had a daughter, Eadgifu. It is not known when she was born, but taking into account Sigehelm’s death date it must have been before 903. She inherited ancestral lands from her father, making her an extremely wealthy woman. In 919, Eadgifu married the man for whom Sigehelm had died, King Edward.Edward was probably in his forties when he married Eadgifu. This was not his first marriage, or indeed his second. In the 890s he had a wife called Ecgwynn, who was the mother of the future King Æthelstan and his sister Edith, who married Sihtric, Viking King of York. By 901 he was married to Ælfflæd, who was the daughter of Æthelhelm, Ealdorman of Wessex, with whom he had at least six daughters and two sons. It is not known what happened to his first wife - she may have died or been set aside.Indeed, Edward seems to have put aside his second wife by 919 when he married Eadgifu, as by 920 or 921 their son Edmund, the future king of England, had been born. They also had Eadred, another future king, and at least two daughters: Eadburh, who became a nun at Winchester, and possibly Eadgifu, named after her mother.As a young third wife to a middle-aged king who already had at least eight children when they married, Eadgifu was in a somewhat tentative position. After only five years of marriage Edward died in 924, and his oldest son Æthelstan, of his first wife Ecgwynn, took the throne. At this time, Eadgifu disappeared from court, no longer part of the royal family.In 939, after reigning for 15 years, Æthelstan died, childless. With Eadgifu’s sons the only living male-line descendants of King Edward, it was their turn to rule. Edmund took the throne and Eadgifu returned to court as the mater regis (king’s mother). In charters, Eadgifu and her two sons King Edmund and Eadred were presented as a ruling trinity, showing her influential position at this time. Eadgifu is unrivalled by any other pre-conquest queen in the frequency and prominence of her appearance in witness lists during this time. This is in contrast with Edmund’s two wives, Ælfgifu and Æthelflaed, who seem to have played a negligible role in his reign, according to charter evidence. It seems Eadgifu’s prominence at court did not allow for another queenly figure to flourish. Edmund died in a fight in 946, and his children were very young, so his brother Eadred inherited the throne.Eadgifu’s fortunes changed dramatically in 955 when Eadred died, childless, from a digestive illness. His elder brother Edmund’s children, Eadgifu’s grandchildren Eadwig and Edgar, were now candidates for the throne. Eadwig became king, and one of his first acts was to dispossess his grandmother of her land and wealth. This indicates that Eadgifu may have supported her other grandson’s claim to the throne, or it may be that Eadwig intended to give the queen’s estates to his own wife, and having a dowager queen hanging onto them was an inconvenience. After four years when Eadwig died in 959 and Edgar took the throne, he restored some of her lands, but Edgar’s own marriages meant she never returned to her previous position of being the most important queen at court. Her next and last appearance in the sources is her name listed on the New Minster Winchester refoundation charter of 966 (shown below). By this point she was in her sixties at least, and possibly older. It is not known when she died, but it’s likely she lived out her advanced years at a religious institution rather than at court.Eadgifu’s status as a wealthy landowner is well-attested, both before and after she became Edward’s queen. It is difficult to paint a clear picture of the extent of her economic position, but an impression can be gained from documentation of her landholdings. She was one of the wealthiest people in England, and certainly the wealthiest woman. Her economic position cannot be separated from her political influence. Her curation of land throughout her life likely contributed towards her multi-generational position at the royal court.But her influence did not end with property; Eadgifu also had important allies, including relationships with prominent Benedictine bishops Dunstan and Æthelwold, whose careers she supported. In 955-56, just after Eadwig’s inauguration, when Eadgifu was deprived of her wealth, Dunstan was also forced into exile. It seems that Eadwig saw Dunstan and Eadgifu as his political enemies, and both were restored upon Edgar’s accession to the throne. The later Life of St Dunstan would accuse Eadwig of scandalously having a ménage à trois with his wife and her mother at his own coronation, in an attempt to discredit his kingship retrospectively. These two maligned women will be the subjects of the next edition of Ælfgif-who?.Queen Eadgifu was a woman whose fortunes rose and fell dependent on who occupied the English throne. Unlike with kingship, many queens can co-exist at the same time, and this can create tensions. Eadgifu was able to eclipse her son’s wives, but not the wives of her grandsons. The prominence of her position during the reigns of her sons suggests that she was a formidable and unrivalled presence as mater regis in the royal court. It was perhaps this presence that led to her downfall upon the reign of her grandson, who saw that Eadgifu would not easily share the limelight with his wife and queen. She was a woman who ultimately had to be removed to make way for others, and it is not certain whether this says more about the nature of queens or the nature of Eadgifu.Suggestions for further reading: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women every two weeks. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Eadburga: A Scribe and Poet who wrote in Gold Ink with a Silver PenIn newsletter number 16 we looked at Abbess Leoba, who became a leading female figure in Saint Boniface’s mission to convert non-Christians in Germany. A surviving letter from Leoba to Boniface written in around 732 when she was a nun at Wimborne contains a poem, and she explains that she studied the art of writing poetry under the guidance of a woman named Eadburga.Four letters written by Boniface and addressed to Eadburga survive, as well as one from Boniface’s successor as Archbishop of Mainz, Lull. These letters reveal Eadburga to be a trained scribe, and include many interesting details about the items that were passing between Eadburga in England, and the missionaries in Germany.The first letter was written in around 716, when Boniface, who was from Devon, was still going by his given name Winfred. This letter is well known, as it contains Boniface’s detailed recounting of the Vision of a Monk of Wenlock. He writes to Eadburga: ‘you have asked me, my dear sister, to describe to you in writing the marvellous visions of the man who recently died and came to life again'. He explains that the visions were first recounted to him by an Abbess Hildelida, and he then spoke to the monk himself who explained his vision in his own words. The letter then recounts that an ill monk was taken from his body and guided by angels to a place where angels and devils fought over his soul. The vision is full of frightening images of the afterlife. He saw hell, which was full of pits vomiting flames, with souls being led over a bridge over a pitch-black boiling river, with Jerusalem, shining and gleaming, at the other side. He saw the King of Mercia, Ceolred, being tortured by thousands of demons. After he was returned to his body, he woke unable to see for a whole week, and he had bleeding tumours in his eyes. The purpose of this vision was to warn him about the punishments of the afterlife if he and others did not repent their sins and live a good life. The letter tells us a great deal about the disturbing vision and not much about Eadburga, though the fact that she requested to hear about it in such detail is interesting in itself.Two letters survive which were written in around 735, which give us more information about Eadburga. In one, Boniface thanks her for sending him holy books while he is on his mission in Germany. In another, he thanks her again for books she sent as well as garments, presumably vestments. He then adds:And I beg you further to add to what you have done already by making a copy written in gold of the Epistles of my master, St. Peter the Apostle, to impress honour and reverence for the Sacred Scriptures visibly upon the carnally minded to whom I preach… I am sending by the priest Eoban the materials for your writing.In this letter, Boniface is requesting that Eadburga copy up the Epistles of St Peter in gold ink, indicating that she is a skilled scribe. Boniface requires this beautiful book to help him in his preaching in Germany, to show those he is attempting to convert. He wants his presumably illiterate audience to see that the words are physically beautiful. For him to write to Eadburga, who is far away in England, and to send a priest to travel there with the materials, indicates that her talents are highly sought after. This does invite the question of whether the ‘holy books’ she had sent to Boniface mentioned in the other letter were ones she herself had inscribed.A fourth letter, written by Boniface between 742 and 746, asks Eadburga to pray for him while he is facing danger in his mission, as well as treachery from his own colleagues. He asks her to also pray for those who he is trying to convert, so that they will stop worshipping idols. He tells her that ‘the way of our wandering is beset by tempests of many kinds. On every hand is struggle and grief, fighting without and fear within’. This is the last letter that survives from Boniface to Eadburga. In 754, while conducting a mission to convert the Frisians, Boniface and his retinue were set upon by bandits and murdered. The bandits were disappointed to find that the luggage the retinue were carrying was not full of treasure, but manuscripts. Later sources claim that Boniface attempted to shield himself from the bandits by holding a gospel book over his head.When Boniface went to Frisia his trusted messenger and archdeacon Lull was appointed as his successor as Archbishop of Mainz. Earlier in Lull’s career, while he was a deacon, he was also in touch with and exchanging gifts with Eadburga. A letter from 745 or 746 from Lull to Eadburga says that:I have sent very small gifts to your venerable love, that is a silver style, and some incense and cinnamon, that you might know from these little things how grateful I am for the gifts of your greeting. The ‘silver style’ is a stylus, which is a pen-like tool used in writing, and would be an extremely thoughtful gift for a scribe, and one made of precious metal even more so. The other items, the incense and cinnamon, were also luxury gifts. Despite this, Lull calls her greetings to him ‘munera’ (gifts), but uses the diminutive form of the word ‘munuscula’ (small gifts) to describe what he is sending back to her. Through this he is saying that what he sends her, though luxury items, are insignificant compared to their friendship. This is the last piece of correspondence we have addressed to Eadburga, and it is unfortunate that none of her replies survive.There are some issues with writing a biography of Eadburga using these letters. Eadburga was a common name at the time. We cannot be completely certain that the Eadburga in these letters are all the same woman. The Eadburga in these letters is often assumed to be the same Eadburga who became the Abbess of Minster in Thanet, in Kent, who lived at the right time. I think that the Eadburga in all these letter is one woman, but that she was not Eadburga from Thanet - she was actually a nun in Wessex. Leoba’s mention of Eadburga in her letter to Boniface suggests that Boniface also knows her, which links her to his other correspondent of the same name. If this was Eadburga of Thanet, this would raise the question as to why she had moved from Wessex to Kent, especially in the political climate of the first half of the eighth century. Boniface himself was from Wessex, and living in Wessex when he wrote his first letter addressed to Eadburga. Moreover, there is good reason to think that a woman who is revealed to have worked as a scribe in the letters from Boniface and Lull also composed poetry and taught Leoba. These are related skills, and show a woman who is talented in the art of writing. Historian Barbara Yorke argues that the Eadburga in Boniface’s correspondence was likely the abbess of Wimborne, where Leoba was a nun. It is reasonable to imagine that such a learned woman would be in such a position, probably with her own scriptorium at the monastery.There is a common yet false idea that in the early middle ages women were not educated, and that they were unable to work. While the medieval nun might be a familiar image, this role for women is often viewed as a retreat from public life, not a route into a career. In Eadburga we see an example of a woman who was skilled in writing and calligraphy, who created books and sent them across Europe. She wrote letters in Latin and Latin poetry that she taught to the other women she knew. While Eadburga had remarkable talents, it’s less useful to view her as an exception, than as an exemplification of what high-status monastic women were able to achieve in this period. Alongside other monastic women like her student Leoba, who became Boniface’s second in command, and her near-contemporary Hugeburc, who wrote an account of Saint Willibald’s pilgrimage to Jerusalem and hid her name in a secret cypher, Eadburga can be viewed as one of the intellectual elite of the early medieval period in Europe. Suggestions for further reading:I cannot recommend the following book enough for people who want to know more about early medieval women writers: Diane Watt, Women, Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650-1100, 2019And I also really recommend: Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages (affiliate link), 1984Epistolae is a wonderful and useful online collection of Latin letters written by medieval women, with translations. The letters to Eadburga are listed as ‘Eadburga/Eadburg, abbess of Minster in Thanet’, though for the reasons described above I do not agree with this attribution. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women every two weeks. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Edith: Wife of Sihtric, Viking King of YorkWhen Lady Æthelflaed’s daughter Ælfwyn was deposed as ruler of Mercia, King Edward of Wessex brought the kingdom under his authority. After Edward died in July 924, it is not known whether he intended his heir to inherit both kingdoms, or whether the realm would be split among his sons. The death of his son Ælfweard, only sixteen days after his own, meant that his other son, Æthelstan, who had been raised at the Mercian court, inherited the two kingdoms as a single entity. He was crowned after some delay on the 4th September 925.One of Æthelstan’s first acts as king was to arrange a marriage for his sister to the King of Northumbria. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle D reports that in 926:King Æthelstan and Sihtric, king of the Northum­brians, met together at Tamworth on the 30th of January and Æthelstan gave him his sister in marriage.A later tradition, recorded at Bury St Edmunds in the twelfth century, and later in the writings of Matthew Paris and Roger of Wendover, states that the sister who married Sihtric was named Edith, and that she was his full sister - a daughter of Æthelstan’s mother Ecgwynn. A variation of this tradition says that she was his half-sister, a daughter of his father’s second wife Ælfflaed. This information is difficult to rely upon - indeed another sister of Æthelstan’s was called Edith, which begs the question whether the Bury tradition got them mixed up.This marriage was likely representative of a non-aggression pact between the two rulers. In the ninth century Scandinavians had established political power in the north of England, ruling over Northumbria from York. Its rulers were closely associated with the Vikings who ruled Dublin. Throughout much of the later ninth and early tenth centuries these Scandinavian settlers were the biggest threat to the rulers of Wessex and Mercia, with rulers such as Alfred and his daughter Æthelflaed famously going to battle with them. Sihtric was probably the son of King Sihtric of Dublin, who reigned from 888 until his death in 896. He and his cousins were expelled from Ireland in 902, and he became King of York in 920. Kings of adjoining kingdoms looking to make peace usually meet at the border. The meeting between Sihtric and Æthelstan at Tamworth suggests one of two things about their relative power: either Sihtric had to travel very far into the heart of Æthelstan’s kingdom, putting him on the back foot in the meeting, or Sihtric’s kingdom extended further south than the river Humber, including much of what was once Mercia. Some have suggested that coins bearing his name were struck in Lincoln, which may indicate that this city was in his jurisdiction. The Bury tradition tells us that it was a condition that Sihtric convert to Christianity upon his marriage to Æthelstan’s sister, but he soon reverted to his old beliefs and practices. We know that Sihtric died only around six months after this marriage, after which Æthelstan took control of Northumbria. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports this with the usual phrasing when a king succeeds to a kingdom: he feng to rice, or ‘took the kingdom’. The twelfth-century chronicler William of Malmesbury states that Northumbria came to Æthelstan lawfully, as it was his by right due to this marriage alliance.However, the process of regime change was probably not smooth. In 2007 metal detectorists near Harrogate found a previously undisturbed buried hoard, that contained 617 silver coins and 65 other objects, including ornaments and an arm-ring, buried inside a silver cup lined with gold. The Vale of York Hoard has been dated to 927, and the prevailing theory is that the hoard likely belonged to a Scandinavian who buried their wealth in the turmoil of Æthelstan’s accession. It is noteworthy that the hoard was never retrieved by the person who buried it. Æthelstan remained king of Northumbria for the rest of his life, but the kingdom slipped from Wessex control under his successor Edmund.Image of Vale of York Hoard reproduced from Portable Antiquities Scheme under the Attribution 2.0 Generic LicenseSo what of Æthelstan’s sister in all these tumultuous events? It is not known how old she was when she was sent by her brother to marry Sihtric, nor indeed do we have any details of how their marriage progressed. If Sihtric did lapse in his conversion to Christianity, this suggests that their marriage was not a success. It is not known if they had any children. Edith may have fled his court upon his death, or perhaps earlier when he renounced her religion.The Bury tradition tells us that Edith returned to Mercia and became a nun at a monastery called Polesworth, near Tamworth, the centre of Mercian power. Indeed, there is a Saint Edith listed as enshrined at Polesworth in a late Old English list of where saints are buried. Her death date, and thus her feast day, was 15 July, though it is not know which year she died.Edith, if that was indeed her name, was almost lost to history. In the contemporary sources, she is but a nameless feature in an annal explaining a meeting between her brother and her husband. Her feast day only occurs in a few post-Conquest calendars, and most of our information on her has been recorded by later writers with sources that are now unknown and difficult to verify.However, what we do know of her is a rather remarkable story. She was sent off to marry a Viking king in a potentially hostile neighbouring kingdom, with a different culture, language and religion. She acted as the hinge on which the annexation of Northumbria by Wessex took place - the first time that all three kingdoms were unified. If the Bury tradition that links her with Edith of Polesworth is correct, she also had an impressive monastic career after she returned home, even becoming a saint. Even if we’re unable to flesh it out, the skeleton of Edith’s story is quite extraordinary.Suggestions for Further Reading: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women every two weeks. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent. Content note: Reference to infanticide.Saint Leoba: Leading figure in the Christianisation of GermanyLeoba was born in Wessex in the early eighth century. She became the leading female figure in Saint Boniface’s mission to convert non-Christians in Germany, and became the abbess of Tauberbischofsheim. Her saints life was recorded half a century after her death by Rudolf, a monk of Fulda, after he spoke to many of her contemporaries, including four nuns who were under her authority as abbess. According to Rudolf’s life, Leoba was born to elderly parents, Dynne and Æbba, who had almost given up hope of having a child. They promised that if God gave them a daughter, they would give her over to a monastic life. When they miraculously had Leoba in their old age, they honoured their promise and gave her to a nunnery at Wimborne under the supervision of Abbess Tetta. It was at Wimborne that the young Leoba had a prophetic dream. According to Rudolf:She had a dream in which one night she saw a purple thread issuing from her mouth. It seemed to her that when she took hold of it with her hand and tried to draw it out there was no end to it; and as if it were coming from her very bowels, it extended little by little until it was of enormous length. When her hand was full of thread and it still issued from her mouth she rolled it round and round and made a ball of it.The dream was interpreted by one of the older nuns, who had the gift of foresight, who saw the purple string as a sign that Leoba would speak wise counsel from the heart, and her rolling it in her hand suggests that she will set her deeds in motion. In telling this story, Rudolf indicates that Leoba was destined for greatness. While Leoba was at Wimborne, the English bishop Boniface, a relative of her mother and friend of her father, began recruiting English religious figures to join him on his mission in Germany, converting the non-Christians there. In 731 he was made an archbishop with considerable authority east of the Rhine. At some point after 732 Boniface and Leoba began corresponding. In on of their surviving letters, Leoba writes about her father’s death eight years earlier and her mother’s poor health. She asks if she may consider him as her brother, and goes on to tell him that she has been studying the art of writing poetry under the guidance of a woman called Eadburga. She then signs off with a poem that she has written for Boniface, which reads:Farewell, and may you live long and happily, making intercession for me.The omnipotent Ruler who alone created everything,He who shines in splendour forever in His Father's kingdom,The perpetual fire by which the glory of Christ reigns,May preserve you forever in perennial right.This poem can be considered alongside the work of Hugeburc, another eighth-century English nun at a German monastery, who wrote the earliest full-length literary work that can be ascribed to an English woman, in the form of a saints life. This short verse by Leoba, written a few decades before Hugeburc’s longer literary endeavour, and inspired by the teaching of another abbess, Eadburga, indicates that women’s literary culture in the evangelising monastic communities of Germany may have been a much more flourishing phenomenon than this important but limited source material can reveal. While Leoba’s poetry has been dismissed by scholars as derivative or basic, her Latin is fluent and fits the tone of her letter, which is designed to cement her relationship with Boniface.Their relationship was seemingly strengthened by their correspondence. Boniface invited Leoba to join him in Germany, and though it is not known when she made the journey, she was almost certainly there by 748. Not only did Boniface found a monastery for Leoba to preside over as abbess at Tauberbischofsheim, but she was also granted the power to oversee all nuns involved in Boniface’s mission. She was effectively Boniface’s second-in-command, along with Sturm, the abbot of Fulda, who had similar authority over all monks. Boniface gifted Leoba his cowl, before he set off in 754 to undertake missionary work in Frisia, where he and his companions would ultimately be murdered by thieves. Their bodies were taken to Fulda, where Leoba would regularly visit in the coming years, the only woman allowed into the monastery due to Boniface’s wishes that she be buried by his side in his tomb when she died.Leoba continued as abbess of Tauberbischofsheim for almost another three decades, in which she oversaw its transformation into an important centre of learning. At least four abbesses were trained under Leoba’s authority there. Her hagiographer Rudolf paints her as the protector of her monastery’s good reputation: suspicion fell on the nuns when a drowned newborn was found in a nearby millpond. Leoba responded by organising a number of prayers and processions that caused a vision of flames to appear around the real culprit: a disabled beggar who had previously sought food and clothing at Tauberbischofsheim. The nuns were relieved to be absolved of the crime, but there is no mention of the fate of the beggar.Leoba was active in the Frankish court under Pippin and Charlemagne, and she was close to Charlemagne’s wife Hildegard. Nevertheless, her hagiographer Rudolf makes it clear that her heart was in her monastic career and not the glamour of the royal court, which she ‘detested like poison’. After twenty eight years as abbess at Tauberbischofsheim, Charlemagne granted her a royal estate near Mainz, and she retired there as an old woman with a group of nuns. She died there on the 28th September 782.Though Boniface had requested for her to be buried beside him, the monks of Fulda did not wish to disturb his tomb, and she was buried in the crypt there. Her bones were translated to a new location in the church twice, the latter time in the 830s, possibly coinciding with the writing of her Saints Life by Rudolf of Fulda, in 836. The Life is dedicated to another abbess called Hadamout, possibly Abbess Hathumod of Gandersheim, likely intended to serve as a good example for her.Leoba was certainly one of the most prominent figures in the English Bonifacian mission to Germany. She was so intimately connected with Boniface that she considered him a brother and he wished for her to share his tomb for eternity. Though her kinship with Boniface contributed to her meteoric rise, her correspondence to him suggests that she was an educated woman interested in cultivating her relationship with him and his mission. While acting as second-in-command to Archbishop Boniface, and presiding over the activity of all the nuns involved in the mission, Leoba became a leading church figure. Her status was so high that her realm of influence even extended to the Carolingian court. While her saint’s life highlights her personal piety and her monastic activities, Leoba also operated as a politician and administrator, planning and controlling the missionary activity amongst the institutions she oversaw, and advocating for her cause in the highest circles imaginable. Suggestions for further reading:Medieval Sourcebook: Rudolf of Fulda, Life of LeobaDiane Watt, Anglo-Saxon Women Writers and their Manuscripts in the Bayerische StaatsbibliothekDiane Watt, Women, Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650-1100, 2019Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages (affiliate link), 1984A letter from Lioba/Leobgytha/Leoba, abbess of Tauberbischofsheim (c.732) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women every two weeks. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Saint Margaret, Queen of Scotland: A Life Shaped by ConquestThe eleventh century in England was a tumultuous period, seeing two disruptive conquests by foreign kings that displaced the English royal line. The life of Margaret, granddaughter of an English king and a descendent of this line, was shaped by her family being forced into exile twice. She started life in Hungary and ended up as the queen of Scotland. Though forced to marry King Malcolm III of Scotland against her will, the detailed sources we have regarding her life describe a woman who excelled at being a Christian queen, and was regarded as a saint because of it. To understand why Margaret was raised at the Hungarian royal court and how she ended up Queen of Scotland, we have to go back all the way to the Danish conquest of England in 1016.In 1016 King Edmund Ironside died suddenly after only five months on the throne. His rule had been partial and punctuated by battles, the Danish King Cnut making significant territorial gains. Edmund’s death led to Cnut becoming the king of all England, and he sent Edmund’s surviving infant sons, Edmund and Edward, into exile. They seem to have been given refuge by the King of Sweden, who sent them to the court of the Prince of Kiev. Edward, known as ‘the Exile’, married a noblewoman called Agatha, and they had at least one son, Edgar, and two daughters, Margaret and Christina. At some point before 1046 Edward travelled to the Hungarian court, where Margaret and her siblings were raised. In 1056, when Margaret was 11 years old, the family travelled back to Edward’s country of origin, perhaps with the intention of Edward becoming heir to his uncle, the childless King Edward the Confessor, who had taken the throne after the death of Cnut’s sons. However, Edward the Exile died soon after his arrival in England, and his family seems to have been protected at court by Edward the Confessor and his queen Edith. In a charter of 1060 Edward the exile’s son Edgar was given the Latin title ‘clito’, indicating someone throne-worthy, of royal blood. But when Edward the Confessor died in 1066, the throne did not pass to the teenaged Edgar, but instead went to Harold Godwinson, Edward’s brother-in-law. After Harold was defeated and killed by the army of William the Conqueror at the battle of Hastings, there was some support for Edgar from the northern English earls Edwin and Morcar. This did not come to fruition, and Edgar submitted to William in December 1066.Now seen as an agitator against Norman rule and a potential threat to William’s newly-gained throne, Edgar, his mother Agatha, and his sisters Margaret and Christina fled to the Scottish court in 1068. Soon after in either 1069 or 1070, Margaret, now around 25 years old, was married to the Scottish king Malcolm III at Dunfermline. This was Malcolm’s second marriage: presumably his first queen, the Norwegian Ingibiorg, had passed away. From this point onwards, Margaret’s life is very well-documented compared to other women of the period. The D manuscript of the so-called ‘Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’ takes a special interest in her life, with an angle that shows particular sympathy to her and her family. It seems as though the English chronicler was writing with sympathy for the descendants of the English line, now exiled for a second time. There is debate about when this text was written: entries about Margaret in this source were almost certainly inserted into the text retrospectively, and some, if not all, might have been written after her death in 1093.In an entry for 1067 the D manuscript has this to say on Malcolm’s marriage to Margaret:Edgar went abroad with his mother Agatha and his two sisters, Margaret and Christina […] and came to Scotland under the protection of King Malcolm, and he received them all. Then King Malcolm began to desire his sister Margaret for his wife, but he and his men all opposed it for a long time; and she also refused, saying that she would have neither him nor any other if the heavenly mercy would graciously grant it to her to please the Lord in virginity […]. The king pressed her brother until he said ‘yes’, and indeed he dared not do anything else, because they had come into his control.This annal demonstrates how little agency Margaret had as a young woman in exile. Though she would have preferred to remain unmarried and enter a religious life, her brother saw no other choice but to submit to Malcolm’s wishes, to ensure their continuing protection at his court. The annal continues:It then turned out as God had foreseen […] she was destined to increase the glory of God in the land, and set the king right from a path of error, and turn him to the better way, and his people as well, and put down the evil customs that this nation had practised, just as she afterwards did. Then the king received her, though it was against her will, and her behaviour pleased him, and he thanked God who by his power had given him such a consort. […] The aforesaid queen afterwards performed many useful acts in that country to the glory of God, and she also prospered in the state, even as was natural to her. She was descended from a believing and a noble family.The picture is one of a reluctant queen. Though she had intended to become a nun, the chronicler is clear that God had a bigger plan for Margaret. Indeed, she seems to have overcome her initial reservations and flourished in her role as queen of Scotland.More detail about Margaret’s time as queen can be found in her saint’s life, which was commissioned about ten years after her death by her daughter Edith, who was Queen of England from 1100 and changed her name to the more Norman-sounding Matilda, having married King Henry I, the son of William the Conqueror. This saint’s life was written by a monk called Turgot of Durham, who was close to Margaret having been her chaplain for many years. Like the D chronicler, Turgot concentrates mostly on Margaret’s life after she became queen. It is likely that the function of this work was to serve as an example to Edith/Matilda, to teach her how to be a good queen like her mother. According to Turgot, Margaret was a pious woman, who lived a life of personal deprivation. She abstained from drink and regularly fasted, to the point where she became ill with acute stomach pain. Despite her malnourishment, she had eight children who survived to adulthood. Turgot describes how Margaret had a strict routine of prayer and worship, much of which was based on charitable work and helping the poor, especially children. She would wash the feet of the poor, feed orphaned babies, and host feasts for hundreds of poor people in the kingdom, who she and Malcolm would personally serve food. She set up a lodging house and a free ferry for pilgrims crossing the Firth of Forth to visit St Andrews. She also converted the church in which she was married, Holy Trinity at Dunfermline, into a Benedictine monastery. When she travelled in the kingdom orphans and widows would come to her for alms. Some of her charitable works were also politically charged: she used a spy network to seek out and ransom English people in Scotland who had been enslaved as a result of the Norman Conquest. The life tells us that Margaret was literate and well-read. She herself spoke English as her native language, with her husband Malcolm acting as translator into his native Gaelic at court. However, she was likely also able to read in Latin, and possibly write in Latin too. It is known that she was in correspondence with Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury, though only his letters to her survive. Turgot describes how as her chaplain he went to great trouble to obtain the books she requested, suggesting that she required a wide range of reading materials. Not only did she often quote great works and scriptures, but she also used her knowledge to debate churchmen on legal and theological matters. The life tells of a three-day long argument she had with prominent Scottish churchmen over church observances. She used her knowledge to influence Scottish observance of Christianity to bring it in line with the rest of the Western church, standardising how mass was celebrated, and urging that her subjects receive communion at Easter, which they had previously refused to do because they believed themselves sinners and unworthy. She stressed that they should observe Lent from Ash Wednesday instead of the following Monday, as they were breaking fast on Sundays and thus only fasted for thirty six days instead of forty. She encouraged them to cease work on Sundays, and had the church forbid men to marry their stepmothers or sisters-in-law.Despite her personal piety, Margaret was of the belief that royal courts should show wealth and splendour. She encouraged her husband King Malcolm and their courtiers to dress splendidly in bright colours and fine clothing, as befitted a royal court. She introduced tableware made of precious metals like gold and silver for feasts. She also encouraged Malcolm to ride out with a much larger retinue to accompany him. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle D echoes this facet of Margaret’s queenship. When her brother Edgar travelled to the Scottish court in 1074, Margaret…gave him and all his men great gifts and many treasures, consisting of skins covered with purple cloth, and robes of marten’s skin and of grey fur and ermine, and costly robes and golden vessels and silver, and led him and all his naval force out of his jurisdiction with great honour.Margaret also had a gospel book, bound in gold and jewels, which she would carry with her for personal devotion. This gospel book is the focus of the only one of Margaret’s miracles to occur during her lifetime. Turgot tells us that while Margaret and her retinue were crossing a river ford, the book accidentally fell into the water. Nobody noticed its absence for some time, after which it was sought and found with its pages open at the bottom of the river. When it was retrieved it was found to be completely undamaged, despite the river current having torn away the protective silk covering the images. When it was returned to Margaret, she thanked God for its safe return. In 1887, a young scholar named Lucy Hill identified a gospel recently purchased by the Bodleian library for £6 as this miraculous book. It contained an introductory poem that recounted these events. It no longer has its original binding, but we can assume it looked something like the ornate treasure bindings of the gospel books of Margaret’s contemporary, Judith of Flanders. Turgot tells us that despite her belief that splendour was key to royal dignity, Margaret remained aware that under the finery she was ‘nothing but dust and ashes’.On the 13th November 1093, King Malcolm and Margaret’s eldest son Edward were both killed in a military ambush in Alnwick, Northumbria. They were raiding in retaliation for an insult against them by the English king William Rufus, who had invited Malcolm all the way to Gloucester only to refuse to see him. The news was relayed to Margaret, who was in Edinburgh. Though only 46 years old, she herself died three days later on 16th November, presumably grief-stricken but also severely malnourished from her fasting. She was buried in Dunfermline Abbey.The narratives of Margaret’s life provided by both the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s D manuscript and the Life of St Margaret are idealised. The D chronicler has both praise and sympathy for Margaret, utilising her ideal queenship as a symbol of English resistance to the Norman Conquest. Likewise, a primary purpose of Turgot in his composition of the life was to create an ideal example of queenship for her daughter Edith/Matilda to live by. In creating this ideal queen, both texts mould Margaret into a civilising influence on the Scots, which in turn creates a vision of the Scottish royal court as unrefined and backwards, practising Christianity the wrong way and needing to be told how to dress. Despite her European mother, her childhood at the Hungarian court and her mere twelve years spent in England before having to flee to Scotland, Margaret’s Englishness (that is, her blood connection to the pre-conquest English royal line) is at the fore of her story in these late eleventh-century sources - it is the reason for her exile, it puts her in opposition to her Scottish subjects, and it shines through in her sympathy for the English people who had been enslaved and displaced by the events of 1066. The telling of her story, like her life, was also shaped by conquest.Suggestions for further reading:Lisa Hilton, Queens Consort: England’s Medieval Queens (affiliate link)Rebecca Rushforth, St Margaret’s Gospel Book (2007)Full digitised version of St Margaret’s Gospel BookFull text translation of The Life of St Margaret This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women every two weeks. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Saint Eanswith: First Abbess of Folkestone, Found After 1400 YearsEanswith (or Eanswythe) was a Kentish princess, thought to be the founder of Folkestone Abbey, who has been a local saint since her death in the seventh century. Her Feast Day is on the 12th September. Like Lady Godiva or Saint Bega, she is a woman whose story is part history, part legend. While we have evidence that she was a real woman, her story has been filled in over the centuries with details that are difficult to trace back to the historical Eanswith. Textual sources provide few clues to Eanswith’s life, but a recent archaeological find has brought her into the twenty-first century.The major historical source for her existence is the Kentish Royal Legend, a list of Kentish saints. This text is believed to be from the eighth century, though the original is now lost. A tenth-century version mentions Eanswith in passing, when it says: Then was Imma, daughter of the king of the Franks, Eadbald’s queen; and she begot Saint Eanswith, who rests at Folkestone, and Earconberht, king of Kent, and aetheling Eormenred.A later version from the mid-eleventh century contains the added detail that Folkestone is ‘the minster [Eanswith] herself founded’. Though these are only cursory mentions, they allow us to place Eanswith in a historical context. She was a Kentish royal woman: the granddaughter of the Frankish Christian Bertha and her husband the Christian convert King Æthelberht. Bede tells us that Eanswith’s father, King Eadbald, was not a Christian when he acceded to the Kentish throne, and went on to scandalously marry his own stepmother, presumably Æthelberht’s second wife after Bertha. This controversial act against Church law caused a crisis in Kent, which was in the process of being converted to Christianity by missionaries from Rome – the bishops of London and Rochester both left England in response. Bede says that in 624, after suffering fits of insanity and demonic possession as divine punishment for his actions, he had a change of heart, repudiated his wife and was baptised into Christianity. Eanswith and her brothers were the result of a second marriage to Imma, so we can date Eanswith’s birth to some time after 624, and before 640 when Eadbald died. Eanswith was thus born at a time when Christianity was beginning to take a permanent hold at the Kentish court. Crucially, if the eleventh-century source is correct about her being the founder of Folkestone, this would make her one of the first English abbesses. Some have posited that Eanswith was the first English abbess, although this is difficult to prove. According to Kentish tradition Lyminge was founded by her aunt Æthelburg in 633 when Eanswith could have been no older than nine. Kentish women such as Eanswith’s niece Eorcengota were still travelling across the channel to become nuns a generation later, implying there may not yet have been a nunnery they could enter. The evidence for these early Kentish houses is simply too patchy to make any firm conclusions about which came first.There is one other piece of evidence that could corroborate that Eanswith founded Folkestone: a charter, dated 799 but forged in the tenth century, includes a clause that refers to the ‘land of Saint Eanswith’. Forged charters, designed to back up or create historical claims to land, often replicated some of the wording of original charters to create a sense of authenticity – this clause may well have been copied from an earlier charter. Even if this wording is not from an earlier charter, the strong association between Eanswith and Folkestone that clearly existed in the tenth and eleventh centuries is an indication that she was remembered as its founder.This association between Eanswith and Folkestone endured. In the thirteenth century, a monk of Folkestone collected all the known stories about the now legendary Eanswith and put them together in a saint’s life. This only survives in an abridged and edited version included in a fourteenth-century collection of saints’ lives, which was damaged in the Cotton Fire of 1731. This Life tells us that Eadbald built Folkestone for Eanswith. While the monastery was being built, it is said that she was courted by a non-Christian king of Northumbria. She challenged him to ask his gods to make one of the roof beams that had been cut too short longer, and he failed. She then prayed to her Christian God and the beam grew. It seems unlikely that this story provides much factual detail about Eanswith’s life – there is no explanation as to why she should agree to court a king while having a monastery built for her. Her story is likely being cross-pollinated with that of her aunt, Æthelburg, who married King Edwin of Northumbria, and who had a monastery founded for her by her brother in her widowhood. The miracle of the growing beam is also a common story, most notably in the Apocryphal Gospels denoting the life of Jesus as a boy. There are a number of other miracles: Eanswith makes water flow uphill, brings a goose back to life from the bones of its carcass, and cures a blind woman’s sight. The author tells us that some time after her death, due to the cliff subsistence of the cemetery, her bones were moved inside the church. After this she performed a number of posthumous healing miracles - a fairly standard account of an early medieval saint.The written source material does not tell us much that we can trust about Eanswith or her life. The Kentish Royal Legend’s comments are brief and not contemporary, the charter is spurious, and the monk’s Life of Eanswith was written centuries later and has been abridged by a third party. With no contemporary account of her life, her biography might be little more than an acknowledgement of her existence, her family, some later miracle stories and her connection with Folkestone. Very little in the textual sources is concrete.However - in 1885, workmen removing plaster in the church of St Mary and Eanswythe in Folkestone found a twelfth-century lead reliquary in a wall of the church. This reliquary was full of bones that made up about half of a human skeleton. While some suspected these bones might belong to the church’s namesake and Folkestone’s founder Eanswith, there was a possibility they were fake medieval relics. The Diocese of Canterbury recently permitted scientific analysis on the bones as part of the Finding Eanswythe project. They could not be removed from the building due to their religious significance, so researchers set up a lab in the church, even sleeping there overnight. Analysis concluded that the bones were from a female skeleton, a woman who died when she was between 17 and 20 years old, sometime between the years 653 and 663. Given that the date and age fit Eanswith’s likely birth date, and given there are no other possible candidates in the historical record for a female saint from this time in Folkestone other than Eanswith, it can be concluded that this is her skeleton. These are the earliest verified remains of an English saint. Church records suggest her bones were translated into the church in the twelfth century. It is also known that there was a shrine to her there in the 1530s - these bones were likely hidden in the wall to protect them during the reformation. The community at Folkestone ensured their survival, and will continue to do so.Despite Eanswith’s relative obscurity in the written record, her memory has been kept alive by the people of Folkestone for more than 1400 years. The discovery of what are almost certainly her bones brings her even more concretely into our modern world. After all this time, Saint Eanswith’s history is still being written.Suggestions for further reading:More information about Eanswith can be found on the website of the Finding Eanswythe website, which provides information about the historical woman, the legends that have built around her, as well as her significance to the locality of Folkestone. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women every two weeks. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Emma, Part 2: A Queen Mother of England Twice Over (1035-52)Queen Emma cuts such an important figure in eleventh-century politics that I took the decision to publish her biography in two parts. The first part looked at Emma’s early life and her two marriages: to King Æthelred II and King Cnut. This second part covers her widowhood in 1035 until her death in 1052, including her involvement in the succession crisis following Cnut’s death, her role as the mother of two kings of England, and her commissioning of a literary work written in her political defence.The Succession Crisis of 1035-37Emma’s second husband King Cnut died in November 1035, sparking a succession crisis for the English throne. While the famous succession crisis following Edward the Confessor’s death in 1066 was caused by a lack of suitable heirs, this earlier crisis in 1035 was caused by a surplus. Cnut had two sons by Ælfgifu (Harold and Swein), and one by Emma (Harthacnut), and Emma’s sons by her first husband Æthelred (Edward and Alfred) were still living in Normandy. It is not known what arrangements, if any, Cnut made for the succession: if he designated a single successor this was certainly not reflected in the complex dispute that followed. This succession dispute placed Emma at the very centre of eleventh-century politics, as she worked to retain her position as queen. In 1041/2, she would later commission a political work known as the Encomium Emmae Reginae (In Praise of Queen Emma) that is an important source for this period, along with the C, D, and E manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.Harthacnut was away ruling Denmark on his father’s behalf when Cnut died in 1035. Harold, Cnut’s eldest son, took the throne just two weeks after his father’s death. One of his first acts as king was to go to Winchester, where Emma resided, and deprive her of the treasures she held. Despite this, a meeting of all the powerful men of the realm was held in Oxford to decide who should be king. The outcome of this meeting was that Harold should rule Mercia and Northumbria while Harthacnut should rule Wessex. But by 1036, Harthacnut had still not returned, and Emma likely held his part of the kingdom from her base at Winchester on his behalf. In this period of absence, Harthacnut’s position was reliant on supporters in England, not only his mother but also the powerful Earl Godwine, and Archbishop Æthelnoth of Canterbury, who the Encomium tells us refused to consecrate Harold as King of England. However, a letter, sender unknown, sent to Emma’s daughter Gunnhild at the German court where she was the queen of Henry III, informed her that Ælfgifu, Harold’s mother, was working on her son’s behalf to undermine Harthacnut’s rule, by holding feasts, sending gifts, and flattering nobles. Harthacnut was losing his grip on Wessex as opinion swung towards Harold, which meant that Emma was also losing her grip on queenship.It was at this point in 1036 that Edward and Alfred travelled to England to their mother. They embarked separately, and while Edward made it to his mother at Winchester safely, Alfred was intercepted by Earl Godwine. Many of his retinue were violently murdered, and Alfred was taken to East Anglia where he was blinded, and then died. It may be that Godwine felt he was acting in the interest of Harthacnut, or that he had by then swapped his allegiance in response to the rising tide of opinion towards Harold. Emma would later claim in her Encomium that Edward and Alfred were lured to England by correspondence that falsely claimed to be from her. It is likely that Emma did make the miscalculation of inviting them to England to claim the throne, and wanted later to be dissociated from the responsibility of her son’s murder by pretending her letter was forged. By 1037, Edward had safely returned to Normandy, and Harthacnut was still in Denmark, waylaid by the political crisis ensuing after his half-brother Swein was expelled from his rulership of Norway. Emma had inadvertently caused the death of one son, alienated another, and her other son was nowhere to be seen. Harold now took the English throne with little obstacle, and Emma ‘was driven out without any mercy to face the raging winter’, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. She found refuge in Flanders, crucially not Normandy, perhaps revealing how her Norman relatives felt about her after Alfred’s murder. A Return to Prominence? 1039-42In 1039 Harthacnut sailed a fleet of ships to meet his mother in Bruges, indicating both that he was planning an invasion, and that Emma was involved in the plans. It was ultimately Harold’s premature death in 1040 that allowed Emma to return to prominence as queen of England, as Harthacnut now took the throne. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us that Harthacnut had his brother’s body dug from its grave and threw it into a marsh. His rule was seemingly unpopular, with high taxation needed to maintain his large fleet of ships. It is perhaps for this reason that he invited his half-brother Edward to return from Normandy to rule alongside him in 1041.Having been Queen Consort twice over, Emma was now Queen Mother twice over, to two unmarried sons. After living through a tumultuous period in which one of her sons was murdered, her future was consistently uncertain, and she was deprived of her land and wealth twice and sent into exile, Emma must have felt in 1041 that she had finally found some stability. It is in this year that she commissioned the writing of her Encomium from a monk at St Bertin in Flanders, in order to tell the story of these events from her perspective. The frontispiece of Emma’s own manuscript of this work (see below) is an unambiguous show of power. While Emma is depicted centrally, enthroned, crowned, and being gifted the book by its author, her two sons, both kings of England, peer in from the periphery, looking almost like afterthoughts. She is the focus of this scene, in a way that contrasts with the depiction of her and Cnut as joint rulers on the Winchester Liber Vitae (see Part 1). The Encomium does not overtly centralise Emma in the same way, beginning its narrative with Swein’s conquest of England in 1013. But a justification of Emma’s actions lies behind every passage. As well as putting her in the driving seat of her marriage to Cnut and exonerating her from blame for the murder of Alfred, its narrative casts aspersions on the parentage of the late King Harold, stating that Cnut’s first wife Ælfgifu was a mere concubine, and that Harold was secretly the child of a servant anyway. The text ends by describing the rule over England as a trinity – Emma and her sons. She places herself as the third part of their joint rulership.Fall from Power? 1043-52Until relatively recently, it was thought that Emma’s version of the Encomium was the only one to survive. However, in 2008, a second version was discovered. This appears to have been updated in 1043, adapting to a new political context. Harthacnut, like Harold, died relatively quickly after his reign began, after having a seizure at a wedding feat in June 1042. Edward was consecrated full king of England at Winchester in April 1043. The second version of the Encomium places Edward in a much more central position, likely reflecting Emma’s reliance on him for her political position. This rewriting to flatter Edward was apparently not enough. In November 1043, Edward had Emma once again deprived of all her wealth and land. She was attacked, without warning, by not one but three of Edward’s most powerful Earls – Godwine, Leofric, and Siward. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, this is because Emma had kept her wealth from him, and was ‘very hard to her son, in that she did less for him than he wished, both before he became king and after’. Later sources would explain these events by constructing a story in which she was accused of having an affair with a bishop, and was forced to undergo a trial over hot ploughshares to prove her innocence. Her fall from grace was short-lived and she was able to return to court in 1044, but her return to court was not a return to power. She made her last known public appearance in 1045 – the year Edward married Edith, the daughter of Earl Godwine, his brother’s murderer, with whom he would never have children. Edith took up the vacant role as queen. With most of her children dead, and with no grandchildren in England, Emma most likely retired to Winchester as a solitary widow. This is where she died in 1052, aged in her 60s or 70s. She was buried there with Cnut and Harthacnut.In the 16th century, during the English Civil War, Roundhead soldiers scattered the bones held at Winchester. They were collected up and put into mortuary chests, though the skeletons were no longer identifiable. In 2012 a project began in which the bones were analysed, carbon-dated and reassembled. Though the remains of 23 individuals were discovered, only one skeleton, distributed among several chests, belongs to a woman. As she was mature when she died, and of the right period, this skeleton is believed to be that of Emma.Emma’s actions appear quite ruthless – in 1017 she married her late husband’s conqueror, and in her widowhood she probably put her sons lives at risk in order to ensure one of them succeeded to the English throne. Rather than being motivated by motherly love, she arguably had a pragmatic approach to pressing her various sons’ claims to the throne, and yet seemed to favour Harthacnut over Edward. But her actions as wife and mother must be viewed in context. She probably had little to no say in either of her marriages. She also likely never had very close personal relationships with her children, who were all, for various reasons, sent away from her in childhood. Her safety, her wealth, her land, and her position, all depended on her continued career as queen. Of course, it is expected that a powerful man like Godwine would murder a rival to his favoured candidate for the succession, that Harold would take the throne and send Emma into exile, that Harthacnut would have his rival’s body dug up, and that Edward would deprive his own mother of her position. Ruthless actions are expected of powerful men who want to hold onto power. Emma, in fighting for her own political ends, was not as ruthless as many of the men around her. Our instinct might be to judge Emma primarily as a wife and mother rather than as a politician, while it might not even occur to us to judge Edward primarily as a son, or Harthacnut as a brother.It was undeniably her family relationships that placed Emma in the position to become the individual around whom most of the events of the first half of the eleventh century transpired. But it was her actions as a politician, her reluctance to let go of power, and her will to influence events, that ensured that she became this individual. Despite her eventual fade into a quiet widowhood, her actions ensured that she has not faded in the historical record. To quote Professor Pauline Stafford: ‘Not all widows required three earls and a king to make them go gracefully. Nothing measures Emma’s power like her leaving of it’.Suggestions for further reading:Pauline Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith: Queenship and Women's Power in Eleventh-Century England (affiliate link)Ed. Alistair Campbell, Encomium Emmae Reginae (affiliate link)Lisa Hilton, Queens Consort: England’s Medieval Queens (affiliate link) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women every two weeks. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Emma, Part 1: A Queen of England Twice Over (c.980-1035)Queen Emma cuts such an important figure in eleventh-century politics that I took the decision to publish her biography in two parts. This first part looks at Emma’s early life and her two marriages: to King Æthelred II (1002-1016) and King Cnut (1017-1035). Part 2 (the next edition of Ælfgif-who?) will cover her widowhood in 1035 until her death in 1052, including her involvement in the succession crisis following Cnut’s death, her role as the mother of two kings of England, and her commissioning in 1041 of a literary work written in her political defence: the Encomium Emmae Reginae.BackgroundEmma was born in Normandy some time in the 980s to Count Richard of Normandy and his wife Gunnor. Her birth date can be calculated backwards from the assumption that she was probably no younger than 12 at the time of her first marriage in 1002, and no older than 40 when she had her youngest child in 1020. Emma was born at a time when the ‘North Men’ that Normandy was named after were still a very recent memory: the legendary Rollo, the first Scandinavian ruler of Normandy, was her paternal great grandfather. Count Richard had allowed Vikings to use Normandy as a base in order to raid Britain and northern France, and British and Irish enslaved people captured by the Vikings were being sold through the market in Rouen. Emma’s mother, Gunnor, was also Scandinavian: Danish by birth, she was Richard’s concubine after the death of his first wife, and their union was legitimised sometime in the 980s to secure Emma’s brother Richard’s position as his father’s heir. Richard II succeeded in 996, when Emma was certainly still a child, and their mother Gunnor continued to exert considerable influence in the Norman court ruled by her young son. It was at this time that Gunnor and Richard II commissioned Dudo of St-Quentin to write a history of the Norman counts that took pride particularly in Richard II’s Scandinavian ancestry. It is unknown if Emma grew up within this court context, but if she did it is likely that she was imbued at a young age with examples that, as we will see, would benefit her in later life: she would have been witness to her mother’s matriarchal power at court, her family’s assertion of political power through the written word - and crucially, she would have learned to speak Danish.Marriage to Æthelred II (1002-1016)It is the context of Viking raids which brings Emma into the historical record, as the young bride of King Æthelred II of England in 1002. Around the first millennium, Vikings who raided southern England were spending the winter in Normandy with Richard’s permission. This did not endear Æthelred to Richard, and in 1001 he sent a fleet to Normandy, probably in the hope of overthrowing the Duke. This attempt apparently failed, and England and Normandy seem to have come to a cooperative agreement in the marriage of Richard’s sister Emma to Æthelred. Circumstances had conspired to make this union possible: Æthelred’s wife Ælfgifu had either died or been repudiated by 1001, and perhaps more importantly, his mother, the powerful dowager queen Ælfthryth also died around this time. This left a vacuum of female power and room for a new queen. Æthelred used this opportunity to broker the first marriage of an English king to a foreign bride since his great-great-great grandfather Æthelwulf married the Frankish princess Judith in 856. And there are parallels. Emma may have been, like Judith, a child bride, though she could have been as old as 22 when she married Æthelred. Like Judith, her new husband already had a clutch of sons from a previous marriage, to whom her presence was a threat. It is difficult to imagine how it must have felt for Emma when, upon arriving in a new country, her name was changed from the Norman ‘Emma’ to the English name ‘Ælfgifu’, the name of her new husband’s grandmother and his previous wife. While her usefulness to Æthelred was rooted in her own family background (an annalist at the time remarks that ‘in the spring the Lady, Richard’s daughter, came to this land’), this was an identity she had to shed upon arrival.The marriage did not put an end to the violence between the English and the Vikings. In November of that same year, on St Brice’s Day, Æthelred ordered the massacre of all Danes living in England. A royal charter by Æthelred for the rebuilding of an Oxford church mentions without remorse that it was burned down during the massacre, after the Danes of the town fled inside for safety. The same charter says that the Danes had ‘sprouted like cockle [a weed] among the wheat’ and that their extermination was just. One of those said to have been killed in the St Brice’s Day massacre was Gunhilde, sister of Swein Forkbeard, king of Denmark. In the following year in retaliation for this massacre, and likely also for the marriage designed to put an end to Viking overwintering in Normandy, Swein attacked Exeter, part of the new queen’s dower lands. Though Emma’s lands were the target of this attack, she also received some of the blame: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s annalist for 1003 holds Emma’s French reeve Hugh responsible for the massacre, whom she herself appointed. The assimilation of Emma into Englishness signalled by her name change did not absolve her from blame placed on foreign scapegoats.In c. 1005, Emma had her first child, who would later be known as Edward the Confessor. By 1013 she had another son, Alfred, and a daughter, Godgifu. Though throughout her marriage to Æthelred she was prominent in the signatory lists of charters, this was no guarantee that Emma’s young sons were destined for the throne. Æthelred’s sons from his previous marriage were adult men, who were increasingly involved in military planning as the Viking threat loomed larger throughout the 1010s. In 1013, Swein Forkbeard conquered England, and Emma and her sons were sent to Normandy. Æthelred followed while his adult sons remained in England. After Swein died in 1014 they were able to return, though with Æthelred’s position weakened it was Swein’s son, Cnut, who now claimed the throne. By June 1015 Æthelred’s eldest son Æthelstan was dead, and his other son Edmund Ironside was rebelling against him. While Cnut continued his military campaign for the English throne, Æthelred died suddenly in April 1016. Though Edmund attempted to fight Cnut he was ultimately defeated in 1016, and died in November of that year. By Christmas 1016 Edward and Alfred were safe back in Normandy, but Emma remained in England. It is likely that she was prevented from fleeing to safety by Cnut. Marriage to Cnut 1017-1035Though Emma would later present this union as a consensual one, in which she had bargaining power, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us that in 1017 Cnut ordered her to be ‘fetched’, and they were married. Whether forced or consensual, this marriage presented certain advantages to both parties. For Cnut, he could benefit from the continuity that Emma could provide as the ‘English’ queen Ælfgifu, while somewhat neutralising the threat of her sons by Æthelred. It may also have been something of a personal advantage to Cnut that Emma was herself of Scandinavian ancestry, and likely spoke Danish. For Emma, marrying Cnut allowed her to continue in her position of queen, while keeping her lands in England, and she probably hoped that neutralising her sons would help to protect them. There were complicating factors, though, not least that Cnut had already married an English woman, Ælfgifu of Northampton, in 1014, and she had two sons by him, Harald and Swein. There is no evidence that Cnut had repudiated his first wife, and it is likely that he remained married to both women - though Emma would later claim that her rival was merely a concubine. Once again Emma had found herself in a situation where she was the second wife of a king, vying for the favour of herself and her progeny: by 1018 they’d had a son, Harthacnut, and by 1020 a daughter, Gunnhild.But Emma was not in a position of total weakness. She had now been in England for 15 years. By the time of her wedding to Cnut she would have been intimately acquainted with court politics and the nobility. If Cnut hoped to push for legitimacy through continuity, he was to rely on her. While Emma was a political tool in both of her marriages, her role had been transformed from the symbol of an agreement between two rulers, to an active participant in a political regime. This new role afforded her more importance. She was crowned as Cnut’s queen as a symbol of their partnership. She ranked high on the witness lists of his charters, often jointly alongside Cnut, and as ‘regina’, queen, not as Emma but as Ælfgifu. The clearest symbol of the ‘joint rule’ of Cnut and Emma is their 1031 portrait on the frontispiece of the New Minster Liber Vitae, showing them donating a cross to the Minster - of course she is labelled Ælfgifu. This is the earliest surviving contemporary portrait of a queen apart from Cynethryth’s coin. By the time of her death, Emma would have a second portrait, which will feature in part 2.Despite this partnership in rule, the peripatetic Cnut was often absent in the 1020s, as a king of England, Denmark and Norway by the 1030s. The expanse of Cnut’s dominion and the involvement of Ælfgifu of Northampton and her sons remained complicating factors for Emma. Cnut’s son by Emma, Harthacnut, was sent to Denmark in 1028. After acquiring Norway, Cnut sent his first wife Ælfgifu and Swein to rule over the kingdom in his absence in 1030. This left Harald, his eldest son by Ælfgifu, his likely successor in England. Such an arrangement would not guarantee Emma’s continued prominence or safety in England, nor would it bode well for her sons from her first marriage, who were both still in Normandy. Edward and Alfred were another complicating factor. In 1033, a charter was written by Emma’s brother Duke Richard proclaiming Edward as ‘king’. He gathered a navy with the apparent intention of attacking England on Edward’s behalf, and restoring him to the kingship, though the fleet never made it to England.By the early 1030s we see Emma in a complicated position. Though now presented unambiguously as a sharer in Cnut’s rule, affording her more influence than in her marriage to Æthelred, she had remained once again unable to assert the claims of her own sons over those of her husband’s previous marriage. Though she has queenly legitimacy, her eldest son has been sent to Denmark. The complexity of this burgeoning situation is compounded by the continuing survival of Emma and Æthelred’s sons in Normandy. After the death of Cnut in 1035, covered in part 2 of this biography, we will see the fallout from this excess of possible heirs come to fruition.Suggestions for further reading:Pauline Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith: Queenship and Women's Power in Eleventh-Century England (affiliate link)Ed. Alistair Campbell, Encomium Emmae Reginae (affiliate link)Lisa Hilton, Queens Consort: England’s Medieval Queens (affiliate link) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women every two weeks. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Saint Bega: Begu, Heiu, Beyu or beag? A legendary Irish saint who may have been many women... or a braceletThe ‘Life of St Bega’ is a literary work that apparently describes the life and miracles of a seventh-century female saint named Bega. It was written by an anonymous monk in around 1200 at the priory of St Bees, Cumbria. The Life tells us that Bega is the daughter of an Irish king - beautiful, virtuous and skilled. Despite having many potential suitors who were attracted to these qualities, she vowed to remain a virgin. One night, an angel appeared to give her a bracelet, as a token of her betrothal to Christ. However, against her wishes, her father had her betrothed to the son of the king of Norway in exchange for a peace treaty. (This is the main historical anachronism in her story, as the first Scandinavian raid on Ireland did not take place until 795.) After the prince and his retinue arrived in Ireland and everyone was drunk at a feast, a holy voice helped Bega to escape before her wedding, and her bracelet magically unlocked all the doors in the palace. Bega crossed the sea to St Bees where she lived for several years in safety as a hermit. When St Bees became plagued by pirates, she fled, fearing for her safety and her virginity, which she had pledged to Christ. She left her bracelet behind in Cumbria. She then became the first nun in Northumbria after being consecrated by Saint Aidan of Lindisfarne, establishing a community at Hartlepool. When St Hild took over as abbess she retired to Tadcaster. Bega saw Hild's death in a vision while at the monastery of Hackness, and shortly afterwards she died and was buried there. Bega's bones were translated from Hackness to Whitby in the twelfth century. The anonymous author then relates a series of nine miracles centred on her holy bracelet and her shrine at St Bees.Though St Bega likely never existed as the woman in the story, her legend has a number of different possible origins. Some features of the story are clearly a conflation of two women discussed in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History: Heiu and Begu. Both women feature in the section of the Ecclesiastical History that discusses the life of St Hild. Heiu’s life maps onto Bega’s: she is said to be the first nun in Northumbria, after she was ordained by Aidan, and she was the founder of the abbey at Hartlepool. She retired soon after, to Tadcaster, and was replaced by Hild. Nothing is known of her early life, and it is uncertain whether she was born in Northumbria or Ireland. Begu was a nun at Hackness, who had been a nun for over thirty years, when she saw her miraculous vision of St Hild rising to heaven. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History tells us that:….She seemed to see the roof of the house rolled back, while a light which poured in from above filled the whole place. As she watched the light intently, she saw the soul of the handmaiden of the Lord being guided by angels. Then awakening and seeing the other sisters lying around her, she realised that what she had seen had been revealed to her either in a dream or a vision... With many tears and lamentations she announced that the Abbess Hild, mother of them all, had departed from the world…Whoever compiled and composed the ‘Life of St Bega’ likely took Heiu’s connection with the Irish Saint Aidan and Begu’s similar name and conflated these two women to embellish her story. The origin of the story of St Bega herself remains unknown, but there are a few main theories: one is that at the base of her legend is a real Irish woman, possibly Begu at Hackness, or possibly St Beyu, a saint who was venerated on the island of Little Cumbrae in the Clyde estuary, who is also said to have crossed the Irish sea to be a hermit. Conversely, Beyu’s cult could derive from Bega’s. It has been argued that Bega’s cult began life in Ireland and travelled across the sea during the so-called ‘Viking Age’. Bega could be an Irish name related to the attested names Beya, Begga, Begnat or Becóc. In a charter from 1199, St Bees is called Kirkebibeccoch, a hybrid of Norse and Gaelic meaning ‘the church town of Becóc’. This name would eventually become St Bee’s. Indeed, the ‘Life of St Bega’ likely draws on Irish literary models like the Life of St Sunniva, a similar twelfth-century Irish life about a princess who crosses the sea to enter the religious life in order to escape from a Scandinavian suitor. There are several other tales in medieval Irish literature that overlap with the features of St Bega’s Life. For this reason, historian Clare Downham argues that the development of Bega’s literary Life is complex, and ‘can be interpreted within a network of political and religious links connecting Ireland, Scandinavia, and Britain in the middle ages’.Another widely discussed idea is that Bega was never a woman who wore a miraculous bracelet at all: she started out as the bracelet itself. The Old English for ‘ring’ or ‘bracelet’ is beag. A venerated bracelet used as a relic may have gradually taken on origin stories in which it became associated with a human woman - there are other cases where this has happened, such as with Amphibulus, who began life as the cloak of St Alban but probably took on a human persona when Geoffrey of Monmouth confused the Latin word for cloak, amphiboles, with a name. Some have speculated that the bracelet could have been a pre-Christian Scandinavian altar ring that took on a Christian meaning, though the ‘Life of St Bega’ does state that the bracelet, likely a real relic held by St Bees, was inscribed with a cross.The example of St Bega demonstrates how complicated it can be to surmise the historical truth behind a historical legend. Whether Bega’s origins are as a real seventh-century woman, a Viking-age Irish tale, or a Scandinavian bracelet relic, by the thirteenth century her legend had certainly transformed in a way that incorporates all three of these elements in some way. She was certainly conflated with Heiu and Begu, the bracelet relic at St Bee’s certainly had importance, and her story certainly shares main elements with Irish tales. Bega is a product of her geographical location around the Irish sea, where Irish, Northumbrian and Scandinavian influences met and converged in the early middle ages. Often the meaning that a story has, and the way it develops, has just as much historical significance as the reality. For St Bee’s, Cumbria, the cult of St Bega and the miracles associated with her shrine and bracelet would have had huge importance for the community.Suggestions for further reading:Dr Clare Downham’s excellent article ‘St Bega – myth, maiden, or bracelet? An Insular cult and its origins’ is available open-access online on Academia.edu.If you want to read the full account of Begu and Heiu there is an excellent affordable translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, translated by Colgrave and Mynors (affiliate link), which I use for all my English quotations of Bede. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women every two weeks. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Gundrada de Warenne: Landowner before and after the Norman ConquestGundrada was born in the mid-eleventh century, and her family history has been a topic of much historical debate. In the nineteenth century, it was claimed that she was the daughter of William the Conqueror and his wife Matilda of Flanders. It was also posited that she could be a daughter of Matilda from a previous marriage. It has since been established that these were myths based on a misunderstanding of the evidence, and that she was actually from a Flemish noble family, the daughter of Gerbod, the hereditary advocate of the monastery of St Bertin - a member of the nobility who looked after the secular interests of the abbey.Though she was not the daughter of William and Matilda, Gundrada and the queen did apparently have a close relationship, with Matilda granting her the manor of Carlton in Cambridgeshire, perhaps as a wedding gift. It has been suggested that Gundrada could have been a lady in waiting to Matilda, and she may have spent time at her family’s court in Flanders and was possibly even her kinswoman.Around the time that William the Conqueror defeated Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, when she was around seventeen years old, Gundrada married the Norman baron William de Warenne. William benefitted from the Norman Conquest, receiving royal estates in Sussex from the new king. However, according to the Domesday book, Gundrada and her brother Frederic already held estates in Sussex before the Norman Conquest. It is not known how the children of a Flemish noble came to own land in England, but there were certainly political ties between England and Flanders before the conquest: the court of Flanders is where Queen Emma of Normandy, mother of Edward the Confessor, fled after the death of King Cnut. Frederic was murdered in 1070 during the rebellion of Hereward the Wake, an English noble who rebelled against the Normans. Frederic’s estates, worth over £100 per year, were inherited by Gundrada.With the estates confiscated from Harold Godwinson and given to William de Warenne, as well as the land inherited from Frederic, Gundrada and William now owned large parts of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and south Cambridgeshire. He remained in favour with William the Conqueror and continued to be given estates, and ended up with land in eleven English counties. The couple soon rebuilt a pre-conquest castle at Lewes in Sussex, making it their main residence, and they also had a stone manor house built at the centre of their estates in Castle Acre. The masons for this building may have been brought from the continent, since stone buildings were not common in England at this time. In 1077 the noble couple founded a Cluniac monastery at Lewes, on the land granted to Gundrada by Queen Matilda. The foundation charter of this abbey was co-signed by King William, Queen Matilda, William de Warenne and Gundrada. They went on to construct a sister-house at Castle Acre.Gundrada’s decision to build Cluniac monasteries was due to her older brother, Gerbod. Gerbod accidentally killed his liege lord, Arnulf III, in battle in Flanders. He fled to Rome and then to Cluny, where he became a monk. Gundrada and William travelled to Cluny and apparently made an agreement with the Abbot that in repayment for her brother’s misdeed, the noble couple would establish religious houses. Gundrada and William had at least two sons, including William II de Warenne (d. 1138). Gundrada died during childbirth at Castle Acre on the 27th May 1085, and was buried in the chapter house of Lewes Priory. Having inherited his wife’s lands, William was the fourth richest tenant-in-chief in England. After remarrying for a short time, he died in 1088 and was buried with his first wife at Lewes.When new monastic buildings were constructed at Lewes Priory in around 1145, Gundrada and William’s bones were moved to two lead chests. Gundrada’s featured an intricately carved black marble tombstone, with foliage intertwined with the heads of lions. The tombstone was removed from the Priory during the dissolution under Henry VIII, but it survives in the nearby parish church of St John, Southover. The two lead chests containing the remains of Gundrada and William were rediscovered in 1845 and also placed in Southover church in 1847.While those interested in the events surrounding the Norman Conquest are familiar with the idea of the loyal Norman nobles benefitting from William’s victory with grants of English land and titles, women are rarely included in this narrative. However, in the case of the rise of the de Warenne family, who continued to be influential into the twelfth century, it is clear that women were central to these developments. The position of Matilda of Flanders as the new Queen of England allowed her to raise other Flemish women, Gundrada and also her cousin Beatrice of Valenciennes, into prominent positions by arranging for them to marry the new Norman-English lords. Even more interesting in this case is that Gundrada seems to have already had land and ties in England before the conquest, suggesting that her marriage to William de Warenne was mutually beneficial, and helped to establish William in Sussex. The idea of militarily victorious men carving up England after the conquest in their own interest does not allow for the influence of elite female networks. Women were also complicit in using this redistribution of power and land amongst the nobility in their own favour.Suggestions for further reading:Karen Dempsey’s excellent chapter, ‘Herstory: Exploring the Material Life of Gundrada de Warenne’ (2021), is available open-access online.The prolific Elisabeth van Houts wrote about Gundrada in her article about Matilda of Flanders: ‘When the First Queen of England Came from Flanders’ (2019) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women every two weeks. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Bertha: A Christian Queen Instrumental in Converting her KingdomBertha, a queen of Kent in the late sixth century, is known to us via two main contemporary sources. The first of these is Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, while the second is a letter written to her by Pope Gregory the Great. Both of these sources are concerned with the topic of the conversion of the English to Christianity, and so it is as a converting queen that Bertha is remembered.Bede’s Ecclesiastical History describes the process of the conversion of the English political elites to Christianity. British inhabitants had been introduced to Christianity through the Roman Empire, and although it is not known how total conversion was, evidence suggests that some Britons were still practising Christianity in the fifth century when non-Christian central-European immigrants arrived in England. These immigrants, who according to Bede comprised of three ‘German peoples’ – Saxons, Angles, and Jutes – reshaped the culture of the politically dominant class, despite probably being vastly outnumbered by Britons already living in England. During the late sixth century and the seventh century Christian missionaries arrived to convert these political elites: Roman Christians converted in the southern kingdoms and Irish missionaries from Iona converted the Northumbrian royalty.According to Bede, the first recorded missionary was Liudhard, who arrived in England in c. 580, accompanying Bertha, a Frankish princess who was to marry the non-Christian King Æthelberht of Kent. At this time, Bede tells us, the Kingdom of Kent was so large that its northern border was the river Humber. Bertha’s family, including her father the Merovingian King Charibert, had agreed to the marriage on the stipulation that Bertha would be permitted to practise her Christian faith, and so she brought Liudhard with her as her own priest.In 597, missionaries sent by Pope Gregory, including the man who would come to be known as Saint Augustine of Canterbury, arrived on the Isle of Thanet. Bede explains that when the Gregorian mission landed, King Æthelberht already had some knowledge of Christianity because he had a Christian wife. The king permitted their stay there and went to meet them, though suspicious of their Christianity he refused to see them indoors for fear of their magic. Seeing that they meant no harm, he permitted them to stay in Canterbury and preach their religion. Bede mentions that the missionaries used an old Roman church, that Queen Bertha had used to pray in, to deliver their message. This church, which has since been rebuilt on the same site, is said to be the oldest church in the English-speaking world where Christian worship has taken place continuously since Bertha occupied it in 580.Bede tells us that after much preaching, the missionaries successfully converted the king and he was baptised along with others from his kingdom. Bertha is not mentioned by Bede again, though our understanding of her role in the conversion can be supplemented with the letter written from Pope Gregory to Bertha in 601. Bede does not appear to be aware of this letter (at least he does not utilise its contents in his narrative). The letter begins by applauding Bertha for extending charity towards Augustine. After a flattering comparison between Bertha and Helen, the mother of Constantine, it follows: …As a true Christian you should have already inclined the heart of our glorious son your spouse to follow the faith that you cherish for the salvation of his kingdom and his soul, so that both from him and through him by the conversion of the whole race worthy recompense might arise for you in heavenly joys.In this letter, Gregory is urging Bertha to convert her husband. Though in Bede’s account Bertha’s ultimate role in the conversion is never specified, it is clear that Pope Gregory sees a possible role for her in Æthelberht’s conversion and by extension the conversion of his kingdom. Gregory almost certainly has in his mind Paul’s first letter to Corinthians 7:14: For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the believing wife; and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the believing husband: otherwise your children should be unclean; but now they are holy.Gregory believed that Bertha had a religious imperative to encourage her husband to convert, and it is likely that Bertha took the message of this letter very seriously.Bede’s primary motivation in his recounting of Kent’s conversion is to stress the importance of Gregory’s mission to England, and unfortunately not to tell us of Queen Bertha’s importance. Though Bede tells us little about Bertha’s role in the conversion of her husband or the kingdom to Christianity, reading between the lines of his narrative might reveal more about her influence.We know that Æthelberht had to promise to make concessions to Christianity before he could even marry Bertha. We know that the earliest known Christian missionary arrived in Kent accompanying her. Bede implies that Æthelberht allowed the missionaries to stay in Thanet because he already had some familiarity with Christianity from his wife. We also know that it was Bertha’s own church that these missionaries used. A gold medal inscribed with ‘LEUDARDUS EP(iscopu)S’ survives from this period, thought to have been given by Liudhard to an early Christian convert in Kent. While Bede wanted to praise Pope Gregory’s mission, it is clear that Bertha and Liudhard’s presence in Kent had already laid important groundwork for the conversion.In another of Pope Gregory’s letters to the kings of Burgundy and Austrasia, he remarks that he has learned that the English wish to be Christianised. Some historians have speculated that this means the Gregorian mission was initiated by the English themselves, and Gregory was merely responding to their request by sending Augustine to Kent. Given we know that Bertha was in correspondence with Gregory, it is possible that it was Bertha, with the help of Liudhard, who initiated this process, having already made inroads at the Kentish court. Far from the passive role granted to her by Bede, it is entirely feasible that the ‘Gregorian’ mission was actually a ‘Bertharian’ one.Suggestions for further reading:Bede’s Ecclesiastical History is our principal source on Bertha. There is a very good paperback edition which is excellent value: Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People trans. Colgrave and Mynors (affiliate link).Some interesting work on converting queens in Bede has been done by Máirín MacCarron, for example: Royal Marriage and Conversion in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum.You can read the full letter from Gregory to Bertha online. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women every two weeks. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Hild of Whitby: Politician, Religious Leader, Teacher, SaintHild (also known as Hilda, a modern feminisation of her name) was the abbess of Whitby during a period known as the ‘Northumbrian Golden Age’, in which Northumbria was the most powerful kingdom in Britain, and one of the most important and connected cultural centres in Europe. She was born in the early seventh century. Bede tells us that she died in 680 at age 66, which would put her birth in 614. However, Bede’s assertion that Hild became a nun at age 33 and died age 66 is likely an allusion to the convention that Christ died at age 33, creating a symmetry in her life that likens her entry into the church to Christ’s resurrection. Though we might take these perfectly symmetrical dates with a pinch of salt, they are still useful guidelines. In a previous newsletter, I wrote about Hild’s mother Breguswith, and an incident recounted in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History that reveals something about the circumstances surrounding Hild’s early life. Hild was connected to the royal family of the kingdom of Northumbria through her father Hereric, who was the nephew of King Edwin. While Hereric was in exile during Hild’s infancy, he was poisoned and died, and Bede recounts how his wife Breguswith had a portentous dream in which her necklace began emitting light, which prefigured her daughter’s future greatness. Bede tells us that Hild was baptized with her great uncle King Edwin on Easter day 627, when he converted to Christianity. We do not know much about the first half of her life, and it is quite likely that Hild had been a married woman. She decided to enter the religious life around age 33, perhaps having been widowed, and originally intended to go to a Frankish monastery. However, she was persuaded by Bishop Aidan of Lindisfarne to instead lead a religious house in Northumbria, and so she became abbess of the monastery of Hartlepool, the first royal monastery in Northumbria. Hild kept in contact with other members of the Northumbrian political and religious élite throughout her career. In 655 King Oswiu of Northumbria made a vow that if he won a battle against the Mercians, he would give his infant daughter to a nunnery, and give ten hides of land to found a new monastery. Oswiu won the battle, and gave Hild custody of his daughter Ælfflaed. Two years later Hild founded a new double monastery, ‘Streanaeshalch’, on the estates given by the king.Streanaeshalch is understood by historians as the same location as Whitby in North Yorkshire. The name ‘Whitby’ is a Scandinavian one that cannot have developed earlier than the ninth century. The likelihood that these places are one and the same is compounded by both geographical and archaeological evidence. Some have put forward Strensall in North Yorkshire as a possible site for Streanaeshalch, as they are clearly derived from the same name compound. However, Bede mentions a nearby site also founded by Abbess Hild, Hackness, which he says is located nearly thirteen miles from Streanaeshalch. This distance fits the location of Whitby, whereas modern Strensall is much too far to be considered a likely site. Moreover, the fact that the Whitby site contains an excavated monastery from the right period, with evidence of somewhat advanced cultural production, fits with the image that Bede creates of Streanaeshalch as a focal point of culture and learning.Whitby's importance as a centre of learning is reflected in the success of the pupils in the school that Hild established there, five of whom went on to become bishops. After 669 the monastery also developed close links with the school established at Canterbury by Hadrian, an abbot who brought books and expertise from Africa. During Hild’s abbacy, the earliest named English poet, Caedmon, lived at Whitby, and his talents were fostered and supported by Hild and the monastery. Caedmon’s story, as conveyed to us by Bede, is a miracle story. Caedmon was a cowherd at the monastery, and he was very shy and hated to perform. He would leave parties when others asked him to sing. One night he was sleeping in the cowshed and he woke up from a dream singing the most beautiful poetry. He performed his religious poetry for abbess Hild, who was so impressed she invited him to become a monk. Bede tells us he continued to write many important religious poems. Unfortunately, none of these survive apart from one: Caedmon’s Hymn. Along with the poem on the carved stone Ruthwell cross, and the inscription on the Franks Casket, a carved whalebone box that may have been created at Whitby, Caedmon’s Hymn is one of the earliest examples of English poetry. It’s worth noting that all three of these early English poems are Northumbrian in origin.In 664 Whitby was the location of the famous Synod of Whitby. This was a church council held to decide whether Northumbria should follow Roman Christian practices, like the south of England converted by missionaries from Rome, or Irish Christian practices like the monks at Lindisfarne. The two types of Christianity had different liturgical calendars, and while King Oswiu followed the Irish calendar, his queen Eanflaed followed the Roman calendar, meaning that the king and queen celebrated Easter on different days! Hild took the side of Irish Christianity and the Lindisfarne community, while the Roman cause was championed by Abbot Wilfrid (later bishop Wilfrid), a friend of Queen Eanflaed. It was decided at the synod that Northumbria would follow the practices of the Roman church.Hild began to suffer from an illness in 674. When she eventually died in 680, Bede reports that a nun at nearby Hackness saw her ascending to heaven, accompanied by angels. The reports of such miracles were the beginning of a saint’s cult for Hild. Her feast day, 17 November, was observed at least until the early eighth century, and she appears in the Old English Martyrology, an entry that has been considered evidence of a lost saint’s life dedicated to her. Hild’s relics were translated to Glastonbury in the tenth century, though Whitby continued to commemorate her.There are a number of local legends about Hild. One is that she forbade seagulls from flying over the abbey, and another is that the seagulls that do fly over dip their wings in reverence to her. Another is the Whitby Snake Ammonite Myth, referred to in Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion. Those who have spent time in Whitby will know that the beaches are often full of fossils. I myself have acquired dozens of spiral ammonites from Saltwick Bay. The myth is that Hild turned a plague of snakes into stone, and that this is what ammonites are. This led to a local tradition of carving snakestones, ammonites with the heads of snakes, that are meant to bring good luck. There is even a superfamily of ammonites named after Hild: the Hildoceratoidea!Hild had an integral role in the politics, religion and culture of early medieval Northumbria, and her influence in each of these areas is comparable to any man’s at that time. She was one of many important women with a central role in Northumbria’s flourishing during this period. The princess given to Hild’s monastery by King Oswiu after his victory, Ælfflaed, became her successor as abbess at Whitby, and continued to run Whitby as an important royal house and centre of learning. To this day, Hild is synonymous with the community at Whitby in the early Middle Ages. In Whitby itself, her legacy extends far beyond her own time. It is time that the gravity of her role is appreciated in a much wider vicinity.Suggestions for further reading:There is a fictional novel about Hild’s life: Hild, by Nicola Griffith (affiliate link). While this book is still on my to-read list, I have heard that it’s wonderfully written and got rave reviews.The fullest account of Hild’s life, career and death is in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. There is a very good paperback edition which is excellent value: Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People trans. Colgrave and Mynors (affiliate link). This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women every two weeks. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Hugeburc: The Earliest English Woman Writer, Who Hid her Identity in a Secret CodeIn 1931, a scholar named Bernhard Bischoff decoded a cypher placed between two saints’ lives in an early ninth-century manuscript from Eichstätt, Germany. The lives were written about Saints Willibald and Winnebald, two English brothers who in the eighth century became, respectively, the Bishop of Eichstätt and Abbott of Heidenheim, both in the modern day region of Bavaria.The cypher reads:Secundumgquartum quintumnprimum sprimumxquartumntertium cprimum nquartummtertiumnsecundum hquintumgsecundum bquintumrc quartumrdinando hsecundumc scrtertium bsecundumbprimummBischoff worked out that all vowels had been replaced by ordinal numbers - ‘second, g, fourth, fifth, n, first, s…’ and so on. Each of these numbers could be replaced with the corresponding vowel, to make the Latin sentence:Ego una Saxonica nomine Hugeburc ordinando hec scribebamI, a Saxon nun called Hugeburc, have written thisThus, it was only in 1931 that Hugeburc’s name was revealed, and could finally be attributed by scholars to these important texts.The two texts tell us more than just her name. Saints Winnebald and Willibald had a sister, Saint Walburga. When Winnebald, Abbot of Heidenheim died in 761, Walburga inherited the monastery, at which point it became a double monastery, admitting both men and women. Abbess Walburga brought a group of nuns with her from England: Hugeburc tells us that she was one of these nuns, and that she is a ‘humble’ kinswoman of these three English saintly siblings. She witnessed first-hand some of the posthumous miracles of Winnebald at Heidenheim, which she wrote about in her saints life.In June 778, Willibald, now in his seventies, who was visiting his sister’s monastery, dictated his life experiences to Hugeburc, giving a particularly detailed account of his pilgrimage from Southampton to Jerusalem in the 730s. Hugeburc enthusiastically recorded the details of this journey, paying particular attention to his arrival in the Holy Land, and his visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. This text became her Life of Willibald. Hugeburc is the earliest known English woman author of a full-text literary work. Unlike her name, her femaleness is not hidden in the text, but it is not celebrated either. Hugeburc writes:And yet I especially, corruptible through the womanly frail foolishness of my sex, not supported by any prerogative of wisdom or exalted by the energy of great strength, but impelled spontaneously by the ardour of my will, as a little ignorant creature culling a few thoughts from the sagacity of the heart, from the many leafy, fruit-bearing trees laden with a variety of flowers, it pleases me to pluck, assemble and display some few, gathered – with whatever feeble art, at least from the lowest branches – for you to hold in memory.While this self-deprecating introduction is not the most feminist statement for the earliest known English woman writer to make, it must be put in context of a tradition in which hagiographic writers often stress their own unworthiness to write their saints lives, in order to emphasise the superior saintliness of their subjects. Hugeburc was likely using her sex as a convenient way to present herself with humility. Hugeburc has an unusual and overly complex writing style, which frequently employs rare words and phrases, alliteration and similes, and this has been interpreted by some scholars as flawed Latin or evidence of the ‘feeble art’ she claims. However, others have seen her style as ambitious and innovative. Indeed, it is often assumed that the unconventional writing styles of some early female authors reflect a poor knowledge of Latin, rather than merely demonstrating a different approach to Latin composition or a different skill set.Hugeburc demonstrates her skill at cryptography by hiding her name in a secret code. This hidden authorial statement is also consistent with the humility she shows throughout her texts. For all her protestations about her own ability, in her own unconventional way Hugeburc laid claim to the texts she produced, ensuring that her name lives on over 1200 years later, and indicating at least a little pride in her accomplishments.Suggestions for further reading:I cannot recommend the following book enough for people who want to know more about early medieval women writers: Diane Watt, Women, Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650-1100, 2019And I also really recommend: Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages (affiliate link), 1984 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women every two weeks. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Æthelflaed and Ælfwyn: The Women who Ruled Mercia in the Viking AgeÆthelflaed was born in the 870s, at the height of Viking invasions in England. She was the eldest child of King Alfred of Wessex and his wife Ealhswith. Though born into the West-Saxon royal house, her maternal grandmother Eadburh was of Mercian royalty. Æthelflaed was raised in a court that did not support powerful women. Asser, who wrote the Life of Alfred, tells us that:The West Saxons did not allow the queen to sit beside the king, nor indeed did they allow her to be called ‘queen’, but rather ‘king’s wife’.However, by 887 Æthelflaed was no longer at the West-Saxon court, having married the ruler of Mercia, Æthelred. This marriage cemented a political alliance between Alfred and Æthelred, helping them to work together against Scandinavian conquest. Mercia had a history of powerful queens like Cynethryth (fl. 770-798), queen of Offa. However, much had changed in the century between the period of Mercian power over the other kingdoms during Offa’s reign and the time of the marriage of Æthelflaed to Æthelred. Mercia’s power and area of influence had declined due to political instability and ravaging attacks from Scandinavian invaders. The southern kingdom of Wessex had been relatively protected from these attacks compared to the northern kingdoms of Mercia and Northumbria, and as such Wessex had become the more powerful kingdom. Historians generally agree that in this period Æthelred of Mercia was not a king, but a ruler under the overlordship of King Alfred. Understanding this relationship is complicated by the fact that most of our source material for this period is West-Saxon in origin.At some point during the 890s Æthelred started to suffer from ill health, and Æthelflaed began ruling on his behalf. When he eventually died in 911, she appears to have taken over ruling in her own right: something no other woman hitherto had done in early medieval England. A collection of annals describing the years 902-924, with a concentration on 909-919, referred to as the ‘Mercian Register’ or sometimes the ‘Annals of Æthelflaed’, have a particular interest in Æthelflaed’s activities, and in royal women in general. They appear to be of Mercian origin, and they survive in three manuscripts containing what are known as the ‘Anglo-Saxon Chronicles’. References to women are rare in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, but frequent within this small collection of Mercian annals.These annals describe Æthelflaed as ‘Myrcna hlaefdige’ (Lady of the Mercians), the equivalent of her husband’s title of ‘Myrcna hlaford’ (Lord of the Mercians). The annals tell us how Æthelflaed built defensive fortifications in ‘Bremesbyrig’ in 910 while her husband was still alive, then after his death she built fortifications in ‘Scergeat’ and Bridgnorth in 912, Tamworth and Stafford in 913, Eddisbury and Warwick in 914, Chirbury, ‘Weardbyrig’ and Runcorn in 915, and recaptured the burhs of Derby and Leicester from the Scandinavians in 917 and 918. It also recounts how she sent an army into Wales and destroyed Brecon, capturing the king’s wife and thirty-three other hostages, and in the year of her death in 918 she also convinced the people of York to give pledges and oaths that they would support her leadership. Apart from a few astronomical events and a notice of the translation of Saint Oswald’s body into Mercia (a move instituted by Æthelflaed), the overwhelming contents of these annals is concentrated on Æthelflaed’s military, defensive and strategic deeds in order to protect Mercia and undermine Scandinavian rule. A later medieval Irish account corroborates this, also stating that she led an army against the Viking Ragnall at the second battle of Corbridge in 918 and that she made an alliance with the Picts and the Scots against Viking aggressors in Northumbria.Æthelflaed’s deeds are recorded in the Mercian Register as any male ruler’s would be. By all accounts she was a strong ruler with a strong military influence. There is no evident demarcation of her gender apart from in the use of her title, ‘hlaefdige’. Her brother Edward the Elder, King of Wessex (r. 899-924) is hardly mentioned, and her husband is mentioned only twice. Though these annals prioritise Æthelflaed’s deeds and ignore Edward’s, a collection of West-Saxon annals for the same year does the exact reverse, prioritising Edward’s deeds and mentioning Æthelflaed only once as ‘Edward’s sister’. These two texts, recording the same period of history but from very different viewpoints, perhaps reveal an ongoing struggle between Mercia and Wessex during Æthelflaed’s reign. Edward of Wessex appears to have tried to gain some West-Saxon control over Mercia. After Æthelred died, Edward took control of London and Oxford, towns previously under Mercian power. He had also sent his son Æthelstan to be brought up by Æthelflaed and Æthelred at the Mercian court, perhaps envisaging a future unification of the two kingdoms. After Æthelflaed died, her daughter Ælfwyn succeeded as ruler of Mercia. Ælfwyn was almost thirty but still unmarried, an unusual situation for a woman of this period to be in (apart from in the case of nuns), which suggests her succession as ruler may have been planned long in advance. This is the only woman-to-woman succession of rulership recorded in English history, until Queen Elizabeth I succeeded after her sister Mary in 1558. The extent to which either Æthelflaed or Ælfwyn can claim queenship is complex, but worth considering. While West-Saxon sources referred to Æthelflaed as ‘hlaefdige’ (lady), Welsh and Irish sources regarded her as a queen. The charters she signed and co-signed, and the Mercian register, describe her rulership as being undertaken ‘with the help of God’ or ‘by the grace of God’, strong terms that bring her into the context of a growing ideology of Christian (royal) rulership.However, the political reality did not support Ælfwyn’s position. After ruling Mercia for only six months, she was deposed by her uncle King Edward. The Mercian Register states that she was ‘deprived of all authority in Mercia and was led into Wessex three weeks before Christmas’. It is not known what became of her. Ælfwyn’s deposition was instrumental in the eventual creation of a unified England that happened under her cousin Æthelstan, who had been raised perhaps with Ælfwyn by Æthelflaed at the Mercian court. It is worth questioning why a sub-ruler such as Ælfwyn, if that is indeed all she was, would need to be deposed and physically removed from Mercia in order for Edward to take control. Æthelflaed’s position as a woman whose identity was as Mercian as it was West-Saxon certainly complicates how we should view these developments. If she had stayed in Wessex where royal women had low status, her life would certainly have played out very differently. But as the daughter of the most powerful king in England, Æthelflaed’s marriage to Æthelred may have been designed to cement an overlordship of Wessex over Mercia. Perhaps this, along with her strong, military rulership, is why her rule in the kingdom was tolerated by Edward – she was a West-Saxon ruler. After her death, Edward could not afford an independent Mercian ruler, instead preferring to create in his own son and heir a dual identity comparable to Æthelflaed’s.Æthelflaed and Ælfwyn, as women who ruled in their own right, are certainly anomalous in the history of medieval England, but Æthelflaed’s identity, as a woman between two kingdoms on the verge of unification, arguably placed her in the perfect position to rule.Suggestions for further reading:Asser’s Life of Alfred, ed. By Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge (affiliate link)I would recommend Mercia: An Anglo-Saxon Kingdom in Europe (2005) edited by Michelle Brown and Carol Farr. It’s an academic book, so may be expensive to buy, but you could try requesting it from your local library or seeing if your nearest university library has a copy. Alternatively, a lot of it is available on the Google Books preview. It contains, among other interesting chapters, an essential article about ‘Political Women in Mercia’ written by Pauline Stafford. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women every two weeks. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Judith: The First Crowned and Anointed Queen of Wessex… At Twelve Years OldJudith, the daughter of the Frankish king Charles the Bald, is around twelve years old when she first appears in the historical record in a Frankish annal for the year 856, where it is stated that:In July, Æthelwulf king of the western English, on his way back from Rome, was betrothed to King Charles’s daughter Judith. On 1 October, in the palace of Verberie, he received her in marriage. After Hincmar, bishop of Rheims, had consecrated her and placed a diadem on her head, Æthelwulf formally conferred on her the title of queen, which was something not customary before then to him or to his people. When the marriage had been sealed by mutual exchange of royal gear and gifts, Æthelwulf sailed with Judith to Britain where his kingdom lay.At the time of this ceremony Æthelwulf had already been the king of Wessex for twenty-seven years and he was around fifty years old. He had four living sons, two of whom were adults. He’d had a previous wife, Osburh, who was almost certainly dead by the time he married Judith in 856.In this ceremony Judith became not only Æthelwulf’s wife, but his queen, undergoing a formal anointing and crowning ceremony in order to cement her status. This ceremony is the earliest record we have for the inauguration of an English queen. The liturgy that was performed in 856 is referred to as the Judith Ordo, and it survives to us in seventeenth-century printed books. The liturgy for Judith’s inauguration is incredibly valuable to historians because, unlike a lot of liturgical sources, it can be pinned to a very specific single event. The source has an enduring legacy: some of the text composed for Judith’s inauguration ceremony was used as recently as 1953, during the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. However, it was not all composed afresh for Judith. Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims part-composed and part-compiled the text for the ceremony. The main textual model for the inauguration of Judith was the First English Ordo, a liturgical text for the coronation of an English king. This suggests that there was no existing queen’s Ordo for Hincmar to utilise, and that the Judith Ordo was the first queenly inauguration ritual to be formalised in writing. The part of the Ordo concerning marriage includes a blessing over the bride, the veiling of the bride, followed by a prayer over the gifts, a giving of a ring to Judith signifying the marital bond, a pledge that evokes a number of wives and widows from the Old Testament, and finally a prayer concerning the fertility of both the bride and groom. Then follows the part concerning the inauguration, partially adapted from the king’s Ordo, which begins with a blessing over the queen, an anointing prayer, the coronation prayer, and then blessings for the fertility of the royal couple.For any young girl who must travel overseas where she has no allies, marriage to a foreign king would be an unsettling prospect. But Judith’s situation was particularly precarious. She was being shipped off to Wessex, where the status of a king’s wife was typically low. As explained by Asser in his Life of Alfred, written in c. 893, it was not a custom of the West Saxons to confer the title of ‘queen’ on the king’s wife, either in practice or in religious ceremony. Not only this, but Judith’s existence and her capacity to deliver Æthelwulf a new heir was a direct and ongoing threat to his adult sons who sought to inherit his kingdom.Æthelwulf died after only two short years of marriage, and there is no evidence this marriage produced any heirs. Æthelwulf’s eldest son Æthelbald, upon inheriting the kingdom after his father’s death, controversially married his stepmother. Asser tells us that:Once King Æthelwulf was dead, Æthelbald, his son, against God's prohibition and Christian dignity, and also contrary to the practice of all pagans, took over his father's marriage-bed and married Judith, daughter of Charles, king of the Franks, incurring great disgrace from all who heard of it.The appeal of marrying Judith, despite the controversy, was surely her prestigious family and her status as an anointed and crowned queen. Likewise for Judith, marrying her stepson would ensure her ongoing protection in Wessex. However, this marriage again apparently produced no heirs and Æthelbald died only two years later, at which time Judith, twice widowed and only around seventeen years of age, sold the lands she had acquired in England and returned to her father Charles the Bald in Francia.Charles kept Judith under a royal guardianship at his castle in Senlis, with ‘all the honour due to a queen' according to a Frankish annal, but presumably little personal freedom. She was expected to wear widow’s clothing and remain chaste, unless her father permitted her to marry. In 862, against her father’s authority and with the help of her brother Louis (later King Louis the Stammerer) she eloped illegally with Baldwin, count of Flanders, and married him. Furious that this marriage had been engineered without his knowledge, Charles the Bald had Frankish bishops excommunicate the couple. Judith and Baldwin appealed to the Pope for support, and even asked Rorik, the Viking king of Frisia, for refuge. Charles eventually forgave his daughter and Baldwin, who settled down in Flanders and had children together. Baldwin died in 879. In the 890s Judith and Baldwin’s son, Count Baldwin II, married the daughter of King Alfred of Wessex, Ælfthryth. We have no certain death date for Judith, and no knowledge of her activities in widowhood, but if she was still alive at this time she would have been instrumental in these marriage negotiations due to her knowledge of the Wessex court.When we first encounter her, Judith is child bride, anointed in a sacred ceremony as the queen of a people across the sea, and taken by her middle-aged husband to an unknown land. As an instrument of the dynastic politics of her father and her husband, this was a precarious and even dangerous start to life for her. The sources do not tell us to what extent Judith played a part in each of the turns of her life, instead concentrating on the powerful men around her. However, her survival, subsequent marriage to her husband’s successor, and her elopement with Count Baldwin against her father’s wishes demonstrate a capacity for resilience, resourcefulness and even ambition on her part.Suggestions for further reading:Asser’s Life of Alfred, ed. By Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge (affiliate link)I have written previously about the relationship between gender and sex in Judith’s inauguration liturgy for Leeds University Medieval Society’s LGBT history month event: Florence H R Scott, The King’s Womb and the Queen’s Semen? Debunking Essentialist Views of Fertility in Early Medieval Royal Inaugurations This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women every two weeks. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.The North Elmham and Fairford Women: Two Black Women in Tenth-Century England: Two female skeletons dated to around the tenth century, one found in North Elmham, Norfolk, and one in Fairford, Gloucestershire, have been deemed ‘African’ by archaeologists after analysis was conducted on their skulls. Much of the speculation about these women has not afforded them agency or their own stories: they have been othered and dehumanised in the interpretations of how they came to be in medieval England. A racist belief that Black women do not ‘belong’ in early medieval England has pervaded some interpretations of who these women were and how they fit into the society around them. The purpose of this newsletter is to critically examine the existing interpretations and then to re-focus on what kind of lives these two women might have led.What evidence do we have about the North Elmham Woman?Note: The following section contains racist quotations from a 1980 archaeological report.In 1967-72 an archaeological excavation was conducted on a cemetery in the village of North Elmham, Norfolk. One of the human burials investigated, of a person aged 35-45, was deemed to belong to a woman from Africa based on analysis on her skull. The archaeological report was published in 1980 and the use of language by its authors, Wells and Cayton, is extremely racist. They state that she is Black, although a different (offensive and dehumanising) term is used, and they make comments that present her as an outsider. They call her a ‘cuckoo in an Anglo-Saxon nest’, creating the image of her as a parasitic intruder. Her very presence in the cemetery is repeatedly called a ‘problem’. She is heavily sexualised and exoticised by the authors, as they contrast her exoticism with the ‘homespun’ community in which she was found. They speculate that:Perhaps she was a full-time branded slave girl. Perhaps she was a waif bought by a local magnate who hoped that the charms of this little black pearl… would give him status as a collector of living ‘Faberge’ jewels by titillating the curiosity of his neighbours. Or maybe she was the fancy of a merchant bringing home ‘A Souvenir from Cordoba’ for his wife.In these interpretations of this woman’s life she is merely a fanciful object, the victim of someone’s whims, with no story of her own. She is racialised and objectified and assumed to be a slave or victim. It is important to note that apart from her small stature compared to the other women in the cemetery (she was 4ft 8), there is nothing in the archaeological report that indicates her burial was any different from anyone else’s. What evidence do we have about the Fairford Woman?In 2013 two children found a human skull from the tenth century in the River Coln in Fairford, likely a regular early medieval burial accidentally disturbed by the changing course of the river. The rest of her remains (apart from the small bones of the hands and feet) were uncovered, and a forensic anthropologist concluded that the skeleton belonged to a woman aged 18-24 from Sub-Saharan Africa.There is no archaeological report available on her remains, but there are a handful of news reports available online. In an interview, local historian Richard Martin tells the IB Times that:Slavery was quite common back then, along with bonded servitude. It will be interesting to know which barons were living in the area at the time who might have employed her or owned her. If she was a sub-Saharan African then she was almost certainly a bonded servant, as it's highly unlikely she came here only to travel. At the time people believed that bodies needed to be treated reverently to achieve an afterlife. If her remains were thrown into the water, it's unlikely she had any status.Like with the North Elmham woman, interpretations of the Fairford woman’s life have regarded her as potential property, even though nothing about her burial indicates that would be the case. It has been assumed that both women were low-status or slaves, with the only evidence being used to support that interpretation being that they appear to be Black women. With very little published material on either of these women, these racist interpretations have undue influence on how their place in history and their lives are understood.So what does the evidence really show?Firstly, it’s important to remain critical of the methods used to determine the ‘African’ origins of these two women. In both cases it appears that cranial measurement (the shape of their skulls) was used to determine their African origin. This is a highly interpretive and problematic method of analysis, though it is still widely practiced in archaeology in lieu of more involved forensic methods such as isotopic or DNA analysis. Without this more accurate and indicative analysis on the remains of either women, and with a lack of clear written evidence about how conclusions were reached, it is difficult to conclusively say whether they are indeed from Africa. Cranial analysis on the so-called ‘Black Viking’ (Skeleton 3379) found at the St Benet’s churchyard site in York, concluded that he was African, prompting interpretations by the Yorvik Centre that he was a foreign Arab merchant, with a display of such a man being constructed in the museum. However, isotopic analysis on his bones demonstrated that he was entirely local. It is important to stress that the fact this man did not grow up in Africa does not mean that he was not a Black person. It simply means that if the cranial interpretations are correct, and he was indeed Black, he was a Black man from York. Like the North Elmham woman, this man had a burial typical of others in the same cemetery, with a similar coffin. Nothing about the burials of any of these people sets them apart, and yet the interpretations have consistently been of a foreign, othered existence purely because they appear to be Black people. Isotopic and DNA analysis has not been conducted on the North Elmham woman or the Fairford woman. However, it would be a mistake to conclude these women were necessarily immigrants, slaves, of low status, or somehow disconnected from the communities in which they were buried, based purely on modern racist presumptions. The simplest solution seems to be that some members of the communities in these areas just happened to be Black. How diverse was Early Medieval England?There is some evidence to indicate there may have been ninth-century raids by Vikings on the coast of North Africa, with slaves being taken from this area. But Vikings raided in many places, and traded in slaves from many regions. There is no reason to associate the Viking slave trade with Black people specifically. If Vikings did bring slaves from North Africa to Britain in the ninth century, it’s possible their descendants would also have mixed into the population of medieval England. However, this evidence does not conclusively point to our two tenth-century women being slaves or descendants of slaves! If we recognise the possibility that early medieval England was a diverse and internationally-connected society there are a whole range of other possibilities.There is evidence to suggest that in the Roman period, 11-12% of burials in York are people of African descent based on cranial analysis, while nearly half of all Roman British sites that have undergone isotopic analysis have revealed at least one person who grew up in Africa. These people did not simply vanish when the medieval period began, and we should expect that they had many descendants who made up a large portion of the population in early medieval England. We also know of particular notable examples of Africans in Britain, such as the influential seventh-century scholar and teacher St Adrian of Canterbury. If there were indeed such established trade routes in existence in the tenth century between Britain and Africa that would have supported a slave trade, it shows rather a lack of imagination to conclude that these women must have been slaves or descendants of slaves - they may well have been migrants or merchants or the descendants of migrants or merchants!How do we find the real stories of the North Elmham and Fairford women?Accepting that early medieval England was probably a diverse and connected society can stop us from falling into the racist trap that Wells and Cayton fell into when they wrote the archaeological report on the North Elham woman: treating her as a ‘problem’. Early medieval England was the location of many waves of immigration, from central Europe, Scandinavia and beyond. We do not go to pains to solve the problem of how skeletons that seem to be typical of white Europeans came to be where they are - even though in some instances the answer may be fascinating - we just accept they were part of their community.In order to find the North Elmham woman or the Fairford woman’s true place in history we must reassess the false preconceptions we might hold about the inherent whiteness of early medieval England. These two Black women probably had networks of friends and family members in their communities, they knew the landscape, they worked hard at their daily chores like preparing food, and they held and practiced religious beliefs alongside other members of their community. They were likely wives and possibly mothers. They were simply people, with no idea that one day they would be treated like a problem to be solved.My thanks to Dr Paul Edward Montgomery Ramírez for his helpful correspondence on this subject.Some suggestions for further reading:Paul Edward Montgomery Ramírez, ‘Colonial representations of race in alternative museums: The 'African' of St Benet's, the 'Arab' of Jorvik, and the 'Black Viking'', International Journal of Heritage Studies (2021)Meg Hyland, ‘The Parishioner of North Elmham’, Women of 1000 AD (2021)Caitlin Green, ‘A Great Host of Captives? A Note on Vikings in Morocco and Africans in Early Medieval Ireland & Britain’, Dr Caitlin R. Green’s Blog (2015)Mary Rambaran-Olm and Erik Wade, ‘Race 101 for Early Medieval Studies’, Medium (Ongoing bibliography: updated 2021) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Godgifu: The Bare Truth Behind the Lady Godiva LegendMany of you will be familiar with the legend of Lady Godiva, a medieval noblewoman who rode through the streets of Coventry naked, covered only by her long hair. The story goes that Godiva’s greedy husband was exacting punitive taxes on the townspeople, and she plead with him to lower them. He agreed, though on the absurd condition that she ride her horse naked through the town. Godiva defiantly called her husband’s bluff. To maintain her modesty, she issued a request that the residents of Coventry avert their eyes, though one man, a tailor named Tom, violated this request and was miraculously struck blind. So arose the phrase ‘peeping Tom’. The compassionate Godiva gained the triumph over her greedy husband and secured tax relief for the people of the town.Less well known are the life and deeds of the real medieval woman on whom this story was based, who lived centuries before the fictitious legend of ‘Godiva’ was ever recorded. ‘Godiva’ is a Latinisation of the Old English name Godgifu. Godgifu, who lived from c.990-1067 was the wife of Earl Leofric of Mercia, and she was a major and influential female landholder in England before the Norman Conquest. Godgifu is perhaps less romantic, less miraculous, and less appealing to the male gaze than the iconic Lady Godiva - but she’s real. It’s time to revisit Godgifu’s life, her reputation, and her relationship to an eventual mythology that she never could have imagined. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? is a newsletter and podcast about the lives of early medieval English women. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.Breguswith: Portents and PendantsBreguswith, who lived in the seventh century, was the mother of two powerful and saintly Northumbrian women: Hild, the Abbess of Whitby and Hereswith, Queen of East Anglia. Though she had illustrious daughters, Breguswith herself has survived history only in one short anecdote. From the few sentences recorded by a monk a century after her death, a surprising amount can be gleaned about the circumstances of her life.We know of Breguswith through one historical source alone: The Northumbrian monk and historian Bede, writing his magnum opus, the Ecclesiastical History, in the eighth century. Bede was very interested in Hild’s religious significance, and included many pages about her career as abbess of Whitby, though her mother Breguswith only gets a cursory mention. Bede records the story of a dream that Breguswith had when her daughter Hild was an infant, and her husband Hereric was murdered in exile. The anecdote begins:While her husband Hereric was in exile under the British king Cerdic, where he was poisoned, [Breguswith] had a dream that he was suddenly taken away, and though she searched most earnestly for him, no trace of him could be found anywhere.This first sentence alone prompts a number of important questions. Firstly, when exactly did Breguswith have her dream? That Hild was in her infancy (infantia) suggests that this occurred when she was under the age of seven, according to the stages of life laid out in Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, a text with which Bede would have been very familiar. Bede tells us that Hild died in 680 at the age of 66. That would put Hild’s birth date in 614 and this incident, assuming Bede has a relatively accurate knowledge of events, between around 614 and 621. However, Bede’s assertion that Hild became a nun at age 33 and died at 66 has almost too perfect a symmetry and is likely an allusion to the convention that Christ died at age 33. This is probably meant to emphasise Hild’s Christian virtue and likeness to Christ, rather than biographical fact. On this basis we can’t be certain exactly when Bede places Breguswith’s dream, but we can place it somewhere in the early seventh century.And what of Hild’s father, Hereric? Who was he, why was he in exile, and why was he poisoned? Bede informs us elsewhere that Hereric was the nephew of King Edwin of Northumbria (reigned c.616-32), making him the grandson of the late King Ælle of Deira (reigned c.560-88). This means that Hereric would have been a contender for the Deiran throne, and this may give us insight into firstly, why he was in exile, and secondly, why he was poisoned. In 604 the Bernician king Æthelfrith annexed Deira, uniting the two kingdoms into what became Northumbria, having married Edwin’s sister Acha, a Deiran princess. In 616 King Æthelfrith was killed in battle and King Edwin, Hereric’s uncle, took the throne. Hereric’s mere existence would have been a threat to either of these men, placing a large target on his head, and it is no wonder he was forced out of his own kingdom to seek safety with Cerdic, likely King Ceredic of Elmet. It seems he was not safe here after all, and he was disposed of as a possible rival to the throne.That Bede has Breguswith lose Hereric in her dream indicates that he was killed during Hild’s infancy, and that she found out through this vision. It is clear that at this point Breguswith and her young daughter Hild, as well as her other daughter Hereswith, were not with Hereric in exile. Where were they? Did Breguswith stay in Deira with her two young girls, on the understanding they would be safe as they were girls, and thus not competitors for the throne? Did Breguswith flee to safety with her own family? Was she elsewhere in exile? Bede does not tell us explicitly of the personal trials that Breguswith faced during this period, how she felt or how she responded, but we can assume from these few sentences that her separation from her husband, first by exile and then by death, and the matter of her and her children’s safety, were her primary concerns.Bede continues and completes the story of Breguswith’s dream, which prefigures the future success and saintliness of her daughter Hild:But suddenly, in the midst of her search, she found a most precious necklace under her garment and, as she gazed closely at it, it seemed to spread such a blaze of light that it filled all Britain with its gracious splendour. This dream was truly fulfilled in her daughter Hild; for her life was an example of the works of light, blessed not only to herself but to many others who desired to live uprightly.Though elsewhere in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History necklaces are used as symbols of worldliness (for example, Æthelthryth Abbess of Ely has a red sore tumour where she used to wear necklaces in her previous life as a queen), Breguswith’s necklace here is a portent of Hild’s future virtue and influence. In his commentary on the Song of Songs, Bede states that the neck is a fitting symbol for the teachings of the church and says that jewels worn around the neck can signify the divine scriptures and holy virtue. Some have speculated that although Bede tells us this dream took place when Hild was an infant, it is drawing from saintly narratives where the coming of a saint is predicted before their birth.Although this dream narrative is almost certainly a conventional story used by Bede to praise the saintly Hild, archaeological surveys have found that jewellery could be an important signifier of a woman’s status and identity, and that different types of jewellery were bestowed at significant stages in life such as puberty or marriage – perhaps even the birth of a child. Necklaces would certainly have been important social signifiers to an elite woman like Breguswith.Even with only one anecdote of a couple of sentences, we can glean that Breguswith was a young woman, with a young family, who was likely in a very precarious situation, separated from her exiled husband who had now been murdered. From very little evidence we know her name, her status, that she was widowed, and that she raised at least two daughters who grew up to be politically active and religiously devoted. Much of the historical discussion surrounding this short anecdote about Breguswith has focused on what it says about how Bede wanted to present Hild, who rightly cuts an important figure in the Ecclesiastical History and in modern histories of early medieval England. Less attention has been paid to Breguswith. Historians are often at the mercy of Bede’s whims, and he rarely tells us everything we’d want to know about the early medieval English women who appear in his narratives. However, I think it’s worth trying to paint a picture of those women for whom we have little evidence – and in Breguswith’s case a cursory mention with a bit of added context can be expanded into a portrait. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe

Ælfgif-who? is a newsletter and podcast about the lives of early medieval English women.Cynethryth: Mercia’s Forgotten Queen?Cynethryth, the queen of King Offa of Mercia, flourished in the period 770-98, though her exact birth and death dates are uncertain. She was one of England’s most extraordinary queens, but now, very few know her name. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe