CHAPTER I
One who attempts to trace through the centuries of English history evidence of the place allowed by English men to English women in the world of their day must begin investigations in Anglo-Saxon England. A dark age of disaster and destruction separates Saxon England from Roman Britain. The Saxons and Angles who overran the Roman province brought to this country their own social conceptions. To reconstruct them is impossible, but enough is known about them to suggest that the Saxon warrior of the first century after Christ had regarded his wife as his equal partner in the struggle for existence. In his famous description of the German women of this age, the Roman historian, Tacitus, may well have wished to point a moral for the lascivious ladies of the capital, but the detailed knowledge behind his account of the various Germanic peoples entitles his opinion to respect. He described the Germans as almost the only barbarians content with one wife, though he observed that women were willing to accept polygamous marriage with men of the highest nobility. The German husband gave dower to his wife, oxen, a horse and bridle, a shield, and spear or sword. She, in return, brought some piece of armour to her husband. She was warned by the very rites with which her marriage began that she came to share hard work and peril; that her fate would be the same as her husband’s in peace and in war. According to Tacitus, tradition related that some battles lost, or almost lost, were saved by the women, ‘by the urgency of their prayers and the baring of their breasts’. The Germans felt that ‘in their women was something holy which made them able to look into the future and they scorned neither to consult them nor to follow their advice’. The peoples of whom Tacitus wrote lived some four hundred years before the Angles and Saxons made any settlements in Britain, but they were the stock from which the first English women sprang.
Tacitus refers to the ancient songs which he calls the only form of record known to the Germans. The songs have perished, but some impression of their character may be gathered from English poems reflecting the conditions of an earlier time which were written in the seventh or eighth century. They are interesting to the historian of English women because they give a glimpse, if nothing more, of the great ladies of the Heroic Age, when the Germanic tribes were moving towards settlement within the borders of the Roman Empire. In their natural setting of the great hall, which was the centre of early social life, these ladies appear as figures of grace and dignity, overseeing the entertainment of the guests, or rewarding a poet who had recited acceptable verses before the company. They met tragedy with courage, and bore an honourable part in the conflict of loyalties which might arise at any time within the circle of their kinsmen. They stand for an ideal of civilized behaviour in a violent age.
In all periods of Anglo-Saxon history a great lady could take part in public affairs so effectively that her name was long remembered. Nothing beyond the name is known of the Northumbrian queen Bebbe who left her name to Bamburgh—‘Bebbe’s fort’—but only a woman who was outstanding in her day could have been permanently associated with this commanding site. The Anglo-Saxons seem to have had no fixed objection to a woman’s government, for a widowed queen of Wessex is said on good authority to have ruled her husband’s people for a year after him, late in the seventh century. Even in her husband’s lifetime a queen could behave high-handedly. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that in 722 Æthelburg, wife of Ine, King of Wessex, ‘destroyed Taunton, which Ine formerly built’. The story that must have lain behind this entry is lost, but the entry would be meaningless if the queen had not been acting on her own initiative. In contrast to these dim figures, Cynethryth, wife of Offa, King of the Mercians (757–96), stands out as an individual in her own right. Offa himself was a great king, who came near to uniting all England under his own rule. He was a dangerous enemy to all who set themselves up against his line, and his wife passed into legend as the type of a tyrannous queen. The details of her tyranny, if such it were, have vanished. She is alive today because coins were struck in her name and with her portrait—by many centuries, the earliest portrait of an English woman. She was singularly fortunate in the skill of the die-cutter who produced these remarkable profiles. Even through the medium of a small silver penny, the impression of a vivid personality is given by the delicate features, the large eye, and the abundant hair, generally unconfined by diadem or fillet. No queen consort in later centuries was ever allowed to issue coins in her own name. The only king who has recognized his consort’s existence on his own coins is Henry VIII, on whose gold crowns K R stands for Katherine of Aragon, A R for Anne Boleyn, and I R for Jane Seymour.
A reputation for tyranny far worse than that of Cynethryth became attached to her daughter Eadburg, wife of Beorhtric, King of Wessex. According to Asser, the contemporary biographer of King Alfred, she behaved in a manner odious to God and man. If she could not remove her enemies from power by accusing them to the king, she poisoned them. In the end, the poison which she had prepared for a young man high in the king’s favour was drunk in error by the king as well as by the youth so that they both died. As she could no longer remain in Wessex after her husband’s death, she went oversea, with a vast treasure, to the court of the Emperor Charles the Great. She bore many gifts to the Emperor, who in Asser’s story asked her whether she would prefer to marry him or his son, who was standing beside him on the dais. Unwisely, Eadburg chose his son, because he was the younger. The Emperor refused to let her marry him, but gave her a large monastery of nuns. Since she behaved worse as an abbess than she had behaved as a queen, the Emperor cast her out to live in poverty and wretchedness. Writing in 893, Asser said that he had spoken to many people who had seen her in her last miserable years, begging for alms daily at Pavia, attended by a little slave-boy.
Asser tells this story in order to explain what he calls a ‘perverse’ West Saxon custom which denied the title of queen to the king’s wife. The custom, he says, had arisen because of Eadburg’s evil conduct. The story has obviously been coloured by West Saxon hatred of a Mercian princess, but it cannot be a mere invention. The fact that the wife of a King of Wessex was not accorded the name of queen was known in France forty years before Asser wrote his life of Alfred. So far as can be seen, it was not until the late tenth century that the wives of the Kings of Wessex—by that time, Kings of England—once more received the name and state of queens. Until then, and occasionally for long afterwards, the king’s wife was known as the Lady, and his mother, naturally, but less happily, as the Old Lady.
While Alfred was reigning in Wessex, the midland kingdom of Mercia was destroyed by an invasion of Vikings who took its eastern half for their own settlement. The western half, which remained to the English, came to be ruled by a nobleman named Æthelred, who looked to King Alfred for support and received his daughter Æthelflæd in marriage. As ruler of Western Mercia jointly with her husband, and after his death in 911 in her own name as Lady of the Mercians, she was unswervingly loyal to her father’s house. It was the use which she made of the military forces of the western midlands which enabled her brother Edward, King of Wessex, to enforce his authority upon all the Viking armies in England south of the Humber. She may fairly be counted among the few English women who in any period have permanently influenced the course of history.
As a woman who could carry out successful campaigns in her own person she stands alone. Her method was to protect her own country by fortifying strategic points, and then to assault the nearest fortresses in enemy hands. Even before her husband died she had repaired the Roman walls of Chester. Some of the fortresses of her own building, such as Warwick and Stafford, soon became important as centres of local trade and government. But the most remarkable feature of her operations is the fact that she conducted them at the head of a military household such as had surrounded the kings of the Heroic Age. The work involved hard fighting. A contemporary records that at her capture of Derby, four retainers ‘dear to her’ were killed inside the gates, and the surrender of Leicester ‘peaceably, through God’s help’ is carefully noted in contrast. When she died, at Tamworth in the summer of 918, she was on the verge of a still more notable success, for a little while before, the men of York had solemnly promised to accept her lordship. It is not surprising that her reputation survived the Norman Conquest, to be commemorated by the Anglo-Norman chronicler Henry of Huntingdon in Latin verse. It was also natural that the Jacobean poet and dramatist Thomas Heywood, compiling a History of Women when Henry’s work had recently been printed, should paraphrase in English verse his poem in praise of Æthelflæd.
No other woman of the Saxon time stands out so clearly at the centre of affairs. But a century later, the conquest of England and Norway by Cnut of Denmark opened an even wider career to a remarkable English woman with whom he had contracted an irregular marriage during the warfare of his youth. She was the daughter of a nobleman with a large estate in Northamptonshire and was commonly known as Ælfgifu ‘of Northampton’. Her association with Cnut survived his respectable marriage with the Duke of Normandy’s sister, and she kept Cnut’s confidence up to the end of his life. She bore him two sons, the elder of whom he made King of Norway, under her regency. She governed Norway with such severity that the years of her rule, ended at last by a successful revolt, became proverbial in the north as a synonym for an evil time. After the death of Cnut, she returned to England, and prevailed upon the leading noblemen of the country to recognize her second son, Harold, surnamed ‘Harefoot’, as king. With this her story ends; no chronicler recorded her death, nor has any description survived of the young woman from Northamptonshire who was remembered as a tyrant by the fiercest of European peoples.
The wives, daughters, and mistresses of kings had more chance of making their mark than women even a few stages lower in the social scale. Nevertheless, there were women outside the royal circle whose names are still familiar. Some of them were remembered for their religious foundations, like the wealthy Staffordshire lady, Wulfrun, who founded a minster in her heah tun, or chief manor, and is kept in memory by the name of Wolverhampton. Others have reached an undesirable form of immortality through stories which gathered round their names in the Middle Ages. Neither Leofric, Earl of Mercia, who was one of the few statesmen of his time, nor Godgifu, his wife and partner in all good works, have contributed anything beyond their names to the grotesque invention of Lady Godiva’s ride through Coventry. Now and then, though all too rarely, an epithet attached to a woman’s name in her own generation tells something of her personality. The lady named Eadgifu, with land in seven counties, whom Domesday Book describes as ‘the rich’, ‘the fair’, or ‘the fair and rich’, cannot have been commonplace, and may well have been formidable to those who knew her.
But the achievements of the ladies who have left a mark of their own upon the world tell less about the general position of women in society than the names of undistinguished women which have become attached to villages, hamlets, and farms. The intensive study of place-names during the last fifty years has produced a surprising number of examples which show women in possession of land, or anticipating the position held in later times by the lady of a manor. The relationship between the ordinary inhabitants of a village and the woman from whom its name is derived can never be defined, and probably varied widely between one place and another. Nothing definite can be said about the rights which Wulfrun enjoyed over her heah tun of Wolverhampton or the Anglo-Danish lady, Tola, over the Dorset village known from her name as Tolpuddle. What names of this kind place beyond dispute is the position of local predominance which Anglo-Saxon custom allowed to individual women in the Anglo-Saxon state1.
An interest of another kind belongs to the far more numerous names which associate women with the common features of the countryside—woods and clearings, springs and brooks. Their general meaning is clear enough. The original Goodwood must have been a piece of woodland belonging to a woman called Godgifu. Taken one at a time these names prove little beyond the bare fact that a particular woman at one time possessed a particular piece of property. But when a large collection of them has been brought together it gives an overwhelming impression of the important place which women must have held in Old English rural life. The commonest names of this type are those which end in the element ‘ley’, the modern form of the Anglo-Saxon word leah, a clearing. Many of these clearings belonged to men and were called after them, but a remarkable number bear the names of women. Audley and Balterley in Staffordshire, Aveley in Essex, Kimberley in Norfolk, Habberley in Shropshire were originally the clearings belonging to women named Ealdgyth, Bealdthryth, Ælfgyth, Cyneburg, Heathuburg, and Wilthryth. The list has been made at random, and if account were taken of fieldnames, it could be extended almost indefinitely. The reduction of woodland to cultivation was perhaps the most important of all the processes which converted the Britain of the Saxon settlements into the England of Edward the Confessor. In this work, so far as can be seen, women took part on equal terms with men.
By the end of the sixth century, the English peoples were sufficiently established in Britain for the Pope to organize a mission for their conversion. Augustine and his companions landed in Kent in 597. Before Augustine died, King Æthelbert had caused the laws of his people to be written out in the English language. It was afterwards said that he was following the example of the Romans in thus writing down his laws, which certainly give the impression of a carefully thought out code. The Kentish people were still very primitive in their ways of life. Their Christianity was new, and had hardly affected their ancient customs and outlook. Their society was extremely complicated, but if the slaves are left out of the reckoning, the differences between one class and another were insignificant in comparison with the fundamental distinction between men noble by birth or through service to the king and peasants cultivating their ancestral family-lands. A century later it was easy to tell from the speech and bearing of a man whether he were of noble or of peasant birth1. The difference must have been as clearly marked in the days of King Æthelbert. But gentle or simple, all the king’s free subjects were countrymen living simply on the produce of their estates or farms.
There is more proportionately about women and their place in society in the laws of Æthelbert than in those of any other Anglo-Saxon king2. Their virtue was protected by an elaborate scale of penalties. ‘If a man lies with a maiden belonging to the king he shall pay 50 shillings compensation. If she is a grinding slave he shall pay 25 shillings; if she is of the third class 12 shillings. … If a man lies with a nobleman’s serving maid, he shall pay 12 shillings compensation. … If a man lies with the serving maid of a ceorl’, that is a free farmer, ‘he shall pay 6 shillings; if with a slave of the second class, 50 sceattas; of the third class, 30 sceattas’3. The ‘sceatta’ was roughly equivalent to the later silver penny. In each of these cases, the money went, not to the woman, but to the person—king, nobleman, or ‘ceorl’—whose protection had been flouted. The same principle governs two laws relating to free women. The first provides that the ravisher of ‘a free woman with long hair’ shall pay to her guardian 30 shillings as compensations4. The wording of this law shows that the woman in the case was understood to have been a consenting party. The second law simply states that injury, of whatever kind, to a free maiden must be paid for at the same rate as injury to a free man5. The king at this point is looking back to a long and detailed list of injuries for which compensation has already been provided in the laws, and is making this tariff generally applicable to women as well as men.
Æthelbert’s laws make an honest, though not in all respects a successful attempt to define the law governing the relations between husband and wife. In trying to find the exact meaning of these laws it must always be remembered that the men who wrote them down were unpractised in the art of expressing their meaning in written words. To set out the rules which governed such a complex social relationship as marriage was never easy. Some of the laws seem to suggest that a wife was regarded as a man’s most valuable piece of property. She must be purchased. ‘If a man buys a maiden the bargain shall stand, if there is no dishonesty. If there is dishonesty, she shall be taken back to her home, and the money is to be returned’1. Again, ‘if a man forcibly carries off a maiden, he shall pay 50 shillings to her owner and afterwards buy from the owner his consent. If she is betrothed at a price to another man, 20 shillings shall be paid in compensation’2. This attitude is most clearly expressed in the law which declares that ‘if a free man lies with the wife of another free man he shall pay the husband his “wergild”, and buy a second wife with his own money, and bring her to the other man’s home’3. The wergild was the price a man’s kin could exact from his slayer, and the amount was dictated by the dead man’s place in the social scale. It was both convenient and usual for a serious offence to be atoned for by payment of the sum at which the offender’s own life was valued. There is something much older than Christianity in this law—which would make the adulterer buy with his own money a new wife for the man he has betrayed—something of which Christianity could not approve, but to which it must for the moment submit.
The ancient Germanic feeling that a marriage was a bargain which, like any other bargain, could be broken by the mutual consent of the contracting parties and might well be broken by one alone is expressed clearly in Æthelbert’s laws. ‘If a wife wishes to depart with her children, she shall have half the goods. If the husband wishes to keep the children, she shall have a share of the goods equal to a child’s’4. So far the meaning seems plain. The next law is particularly interesting because it touches a question which was still vexing lawyers in the heart of the Middle Ages: ‘If she does not bear a child, the father’s relatives shall have her goods, and the morning gift’5. The ‘morning gift’ was the present given by the husband to his wife in the morning after their marriage night. It was reported in a famous law-suit of about 900 that a lady had sold land in Wessex stating that it was fully in her power to do so, ‘because it was her morning gift’1. If a woman’s power in regard to land which had been given her on the morning after her marriage was so complete as this, it is not unnatural that the land should pass to her relatives if both she and her husband died without heirs.
A remarkable group of these cryptic laws relates to the position of widows. One of them runs: ‘If a woman bears a living child she shall have half the goods left by her husband if he dies first’2. Another law attempts a classification of widows, and sets out the sums due for violating the right of protecting her dependants enjoyed by a widow of noble birth, and by widows said to be of the second, the third, and the fourth class3. Yet another law regulates the compensation due from a man who ‘takes a widow who does not belong to him’ to the man who is her lawful guardian4. The importance, and, too often, the exact meaning of laws like these are disguised by their laconic wording, and by the frequent use of archaic phrases which are never found again. But they show that at the turn of the sixth and seventh centuries there existed in Kent a large body of law defining the position of women in society, protecting them from violence, and safeguarding their honour.
Other codes of law were issued while Kent was still an independent kingdom. The laws of the joint kings, Hlothhere and Eadric, belong to the winter of 684–5. In the eighty years which had passed since Æthelbert’s laws were written down considerably greater ease of expression has been achieved. The intention in the mind of the legislator is brought out much more clearly by the longer sentences of these later laws. In only one law are women concerned, but it is an important one. ‘If a man dies leaving a wife and a child, it is right that the child should accompany its mother; and one of the father’s relatives who is willing to act shall be given him as his guardian to take care of his property until he is ten years old’5. Here there is nothing primitive, except the conception that maturity was reached at the age of ten. The law suggests a singularly humane and civilized outlook; the child’s need of his mother is recognized and the woman’s need of protection in looking after the child’s land.
There is nothing specifically Christian in the attitude to women revealed in the first two codes of English laws. Augustine himself cannot have regarded some of Æthelbert’s rules about marriage with favour. But a partially converted people cannot have been expected to change their ancestral attitude to this fundamental matter in a moment. Marriage as a bond which could be broken only by death was an alien conception to the Germanic peoples. Nor had they any rigid rules against the marriage of near kinsfolk. The harsh conditions of life, the possibility that one or the other partner might be carried off by raiders into slavery, even into another country, made men regard the marriage contract as one which could be broken when need arose. One of the many problems with which the Greek scholar Theodore had to deal when he came to England as Archbishop of Canterbury in 669 was the reconciliation of native English and of Christian views of marriage. In his first general council of the English Church he forbade incest, the abandonment of wives for any other reason than adultery, and the remarriage of offenders. But he found it impossible to impose any rigorous code of marriage law on the half-converted English of his day. He allowed remarriage after one year to a woman if her husband was condemned to penal slavery, and after five years to a man whose wife, ‘despising him’, had left him. He allowed remarriage after five years to a husband or wife whose partner had been carried off into hopeless captivity. It is uncertain what he thought about the situation which would arise if the captive returned. Neither was he definite on the question whether the man or woman whose partner had entered religion might marry again. This was a burning question in the highest ranks of society, where many women felt a strong call to the religious life. In 672 Æthelthryth, wife of King Ecgfrith of Northumbria, with the encouragement of high ecclesiastics, secured from her most reluctant husband permission to lead the life of a nun. She was still living when her husband married again1.
Archbishop Theodore died in 690 and the men who succeeded him as leaders of the Church in England were less tolerant of lingering heathen marriage customs. In 695 the third code of Kentish laws was issued by King Wihtred. They relate almost exclusively to ecclesiastical matters. No less than four of them refer to unlawful marriages. Men are to abandon them and repent. Foreigners who will not do this ‘shall depart from the land with their possessions and their sins’2. Natives of the land who are recalcitrant are to be excluded from the communion of the Church without being subject to the forfeiture of their goods. Penalties were set for nobles and peasants who should in future enter into such unions. A priest who consents to such a union, neglects to baptize the sick, or is so drunk that he cannot discharge this duty is to abstain from his ministrations, pending the bishop’s decision. No definition of an unlawful union is given in the laws. That was a matter for the Church. Nor do the laws set any penalty on the woman. In one only of Wihtred’s laws is a woman directly mentioned. When appointing a penalty for a married man who has been sacrificing to devils, it exempts his wife from a similar penalty if she knew nothing of his crime1. The wife is not felt to be so much in her husband’s power that her guilt can be assumed from his.
The first laws issued by a West Saxon king come from the reign of Ine and were issued at about the same time as those of Wihtred of Kent. Ine’s code is a long one. It contains seventy-six laws, many of them with several dependent clauses, but women receive little attention. The laws of Ine contain the same assumption as the Kentish laws, that a wife is generally purchased. This is clearly shown in the law which provides that if a man buys a wife and the marriage does not take place the bride’s guardian shall return the bridal price and as much again and give appropriate compensation to the man who has given his personal security that the marriage will take place2. As in Kent the fatherless infant was left in his mother’s care: ‘If a husband has a child by his wife and dies, the mother shall have her child and bring it up, and every year 6 shillings shall be given for its maintenance—a cow in summer and an ox in winter; the relatives shall keep the family home until the child reaches maturity’3. A man who ‘steals without the knowledge of his wife and children shall pay a fine of 60 shillings, but if he steals with the knowledge of all his household, they shall all go into slavery’4. ‘If a husband steals a beast and carries it into his house and it is seized therein, he shall forfeit his share of the chattels, his wife only being exempt, since she must obey her lord. If she dare declare with an oath that she has not tasted the stolen meat, she shall retain her third share of the chattels’5. Here is the first occasion when the wife’s duty to obey her husband as her lord is openly and firmly enunciated in English law. It is not fanciful to see in this statement the first indication that the Pauline view of the relationship between husband and wife is beginning to affect the conceptions on which society rested.
Christianity was an eastern religion and the subjection of the woman to the man was preached with conviction by its most important early convert, St. Paul. To him women were temptation. ‘He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord: but he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife’. To St. Paul marriage was the means of preventing sin. ‘Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every husband have his own wife, and let every wife have her own husband’. ‘It is better to marry than to burn’. To St. Paul the woman was without question subject to her husband and every woman must live in subjection. ‘The head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God’. ‘Let your women keep silent in the churches for it is not permitted to them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also says the law. And if they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church’. ‘Let women learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence’. ‘Wives submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord’. To St. Paul the marriage bond was indissoluble. ‘And unto the married I command, yet not I, but the Lord, let not the wife depart from her husband: but, and if she depart, let her remain unmarried, or be reconciled to her husband: and let not the husband put away his wife’. Such teaching was alien to the traditions of the primitive society of the Anglo-Saxon world.
The Pauline conception of the place of women in society was fortunately slow to impress itself on the minds of English men and women. Anglo-Saxon women were for a time undoubted gainers by the conversion. Christianity opened to the English people new worlds of the mind as well as of faith. Many of the men who preached the Christian faith were eminent scholars. The establishment of schools was part of their duty, for men must be trained for the service of the Church. Archbishop Theodore is the last known pupil of the schools of Athens. He brought to England a living tradition of Greek learning. Hadrian, his companion, was a learned monk from the schools of North Africa. Some fragments of ancient learning had been preserved in the Irish Church when Britain fell to the Saxon invaders, and were brought to England by Irish missionaries. That many women came to share in this new learning is proved by the writings which some of them have left to the present day, and by the traditions which have been preserved of others. Learning in this age could only be pursued in communities united by a religious purpose. By the middle of the seventh century women had begun to take vows of religion, and within a generation, monasteries governed by women had become a characteristic feature of English religious life. So far as can now be seen, none of these houses was founded exclusively for women. The association of communities of men and women in a single monastery raised many problems of organization and discipline. It is a tribute to the efficiency with which they were faced that only one house of this kind—Coldingham beyond the Tweed—is known to have given grounds for scandal. The one principle observed everywhere in the government of these double monasteries was the subjection of both communities to the rule of an abbess. The authority thus allowed to a woman is a remarkable illustration of the respect in which women were held in Anglo-Saxon society, and it was unshaken by criticism aimed at it from the highest quarters. Archbishop Theodore declared that it was unseemly for men to rule women in religion, or women, men, but he added ‘let us not destroy that which is the custom in this country’1.
The most famous of these women was a Northumbrian lady of royal descent named Hild, the foundress and ruler of a large double monastery at Whitby. Few English women have ever exercised a more far-reaching influence on the world they knew. Her reputation brought her visitors from far and wide for advice and help. But it is the educational work carried out under her direction which sets her apart from other women of her rank and calling. In an age when the spread of Christianity in England was hindered by the fewness of priests, many of Hild’s monks were brought to a degree of learning adequate to the priesthood. Bede, the greatest of Anglo-Saxon historians, states that he had known five bishops, each of whom had been educated at Whitby in her time2. No record of her personality has survived, but it is at least clear that she was sensible and sympathetic when Cædmon, a cowherd on her estate, suddenly found himself capable of composing sacred verse. It was with her encouragement that he became the first religious poet in the English language3.
The organization of these double monasteries differed from one to another. In some, the nuns and monks seem to have had a common church but in others each community was rigidly separate from the other. A description of Wimborne in Dorset under the Abbess Tette, sister of King Ine of Wessex, has been preserved in the life of the most famous daughter of that house, Leofgyth, or Leoba, Abbess of Tauberbischofsheim. From its beginnings the foundation at Wimborne had consisted of two monasteries, each surrounded by high stout walls, one monastery for men and the other for women. A woman was never allowed to enter the monastery of the men, nor a man that of the nuns, except only the priests, who entered the nuns’ church to perform the office of mass, but left the church to return to their own house immediately the service was over. Once a nun had retired from the world into the nunnery she was never allowed to go out into it again save for a good reason with the abbess’s advice. The abbess herself, when she needed to make arrangements or give orders about outside affairs, spoke through a window1.
A story told in this life about a harsh prioress of Wimborne gives a sinister glimpse of life within the walls of the monastery. On account of her zeal for discipline this nun was often made prioress and frequently appointed dean. She maintained so rigid a discipline that she aroused the hatred of most of the nuns and particularly of the younger nuns. Even to the last hour of her life she never made any amends to them, but died as unyielding as she had lived. After she was buried a mound was raised in the accustomed manner above her grave. As soon as the young nuns saw the place where she was buried they cursed her cruelty, nay more, they leaped on to the mound and, trampling it as if it were the dead corpse, they reproached the dead woman with the most bitter insults to relieve their mortification. The Abbess Tette restrained them, but was shocked to see that the mound heaped over the grave had sunk to about half a foot below the top of the grave. She regarded this as a sign of God’s judgment against the woman buried there. She called the nuns together and admonished them and implored them to join her in prayer for the dead woman. She enjoined on them a fast of three days. When the fast was over the abbess went into the church with the nuns and prayed for the dead nun. As she prayed the tomb gradually filled up with soil and when she ceased it was level with the top2. This must have been one of the stories of her youth that Leoba liked to tell in old age when she was an abbess in Germany.
Leoba came of a noble West Saxon family and from birth was dedicated to the religious life. She was educated not at Wimborne, as the author of her life says, but at Minster in Thanet, another double monastery, at that time ruled over by an abbess named Eadburg. At the time when Leoba was growing up the zeal of a people whose own conversion was scarcely beyond living memory was moving many Englishmen to work as missionaries among the heathen of Germany and the Low Countries. The most eminent of them was the West Saxon, Wynfrith, known in religion as Boniface. He was born shortly before 675 and began his work as a missionary in 716, when he was already one of the best-known churchmen in Wessex. In 722 the Pope consecrated him bishop to the Germans and ten years later he received the title and office of archbishop. Throughout his life Boniface kept in touch with his English friends and many of them followed him to Germany. Leoba wrote to Boniface soon after he became archbishop, describing herself as ‘the lowest handmaid of those who bear the light yoke of Christ’. She reminded him of his former friendship with her father, Dynne, now eight years dead, and asked that he would pray for Dynne’s soul. She also commended to his memory her mother, Æbbe, his kinswoman, who was still alive, but in poor health. Leoba herself, she reminded him, was her parents’ only child, and she desired that she might have Boniface as her brother. She had ‘taken care to send this little gift’, not that it was worthy of his attention, but to remind him of her. She asked him to correct the ‘rusticity’ of her letter and sent him four lines of Latin verse. She has learned the art of verse, she says, from Eadburg, ‘who unceasingly searches out the divine law’1.
Boniface asked Tette, Abbess of Wimborne, to send Leoba to him in Germany and he made her abbess of a monastery which he had established at Tauberbischofsheim in Bavaria. Under her rule the house prospered. Women taught by her were sought as teachers by other houses in those parts and many of her pupils themselves became abbesses. Before Boniface set out on his last mission to Frisia in 754, a mission from which he did not expect to return, he sent for Leoba to come to him at Fulda, and asked her to stay in Germany to the end. He commended her to the bishop ‘and the older monks who were present, admonishing them to care for her with honour and reverence, and affirming it to be his wish that after death her body should be laid next to his bones in the same grave, so that they might await together the day of resurrection who had in their lives served Christ with like vow and zeal’1. Leoba lived until 780 and was buried near Boniface at Fulda.
There were other nuns among the ‘very great multitude’ of people who followed Boniface to Germany. It was an English nun named Hygeburg of the monastery at Heidenheim who wrote down the recollections of Willibald, Bishop of Eichstätt, the first Englishman known to have travelled in the Near East. Her work has been described as ‘the earliest extant book of travel written by an English pen’2. It is also the first book written by an English woman. Willibald, a West Saxon and a kinsman of Boniface himself, made a pilgrimage to Rome in 720 and carried out from there a greater pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the Holy Land. His adventures, told in his old age to his fellow country-woman, give a unique picture of the relations between Christians and Moslems in the generation after the conquest of Syria by the Arabs.
Despite the dangers and difficulties of travel many English women desired to make the pilgrimage to Rome in the eighth century. In the course of a long letter to Boniface written between 719 and 722 the Abbess Eangyth, ‘unworthy servant of the servants of God, undeservedly bearing the name of abbess’, and Heaburg, called Bucge, her only daughter, lamented the difficulties in the way of their pilgrimage to Rome. Poverty pressed upon them and the king’s hostility, because they were ‘accused before him by those who envied’ them. They were burdened also with ‘the service of the king and queen, of the bishop and the reeve, and of great men and their companions’. They complained that they had no son nor brother, no father nor uncle. Eangyth had no kin save one sister and a mother, very old, and a brother’s son, who was unhappy ‘because our king holds his people in hatred’. For all these and similar causes their life was hard to live. They had sought long for a familiar friend and had found one in Boniface. ‘And if God should give, as by his angel, … that we should come into those lands and make that pilgrimage to the place where thou dwellest, and if we could hear the living words from thy mouth, how sweet would thy eloquence be, my lord, beyond honey or the honeycomb in our mouths’. They go on to say how much they desire to visit Rome and there seek ‘pardon for their sins as many have done and still do; and I especially’, that is, Eangyth, ‘who am bowed down with age and have committed many sins in my life. And of this my desire and plan, Wale, formerly my abbess and spiritual mother, knew, but my only daughter’, that is, Bucge, ‘is still young and has not yet found this desire’. Like Leoba, the writers were diffident about their Latin style, which they called ‘rustic and uncultured’1.
Bucge herself, in due course, became an abbess in Kent, and wrote to Boniface for advice about making the pilgrimage to Rome. In his reply, written before 738, he addressed her as ‘most loved lady and sister, in the love of God to be preferred above all other women’, and continued ‘I do not presume myself either to forbid you to journey abroad or strongly urge it. But I will tell you how it strikes me.… If you cannot in any way find peace of mind at home because of worldly cares, you may perhaps find it on pilgrimage, as our sister Whitburg has done. She has written to tell me that she has found at St. Peter’s threshold the peace that she long desired. But she advises me—for I wrote to her about you—that you should wait until Rome is free from the attacks of the Saracens, and until she, God willing, has invited you. And this seems best to me. Make ready the things you will need for your journey and wait to hear from her, and then do what the goodness of the Lord commands’2. In course of time Bucge visited Rome and there talked with Boniface himself. When she returned to her own monastery she bore messages from Boniface to the King of Kent, whom she summoned to speak with her there. Between 748 and 754 the king wrote to Boniface, sending him gifts and asking in return for two falcons of a sort which were very difficult to acquire in Kent3.
Before the end of his work in Germany Boniface had come to doubt the wisdom of encouraging women to go on pilgrimage. In the course of a long letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury he asked him to forbid women to undertake pilgrimages, and further suggested that secular princes should also forbid the practice ‘because for the greater part the pilgrims perish, few remaining unharmed’. There were, he said, very few cities on the road to Rome ‘in which there is not an adulteress or harlot of the English race; which is a scandal and shame to your whole church’4.
But no fears of pirates or of the manifold dangers of the way could prevent Englishmen and women from journeying to Rome. Two kings of Wessex, Cædwella (689) and Ine (725), had gone there to die, and more than a hundred years later Burgred of Mercia retired there with his wife, driven from his country by the invasion of the heathen Danes. His widow died at Pavia some twenty years after their flight from Mercia. Frithugyth, the wife of King Ine’s successor, went on pilgrimage to Rome with Bishop Forthhere of Sherborne in 737. Since they both witnessed a royal charter to the bishop himself in 739 it is clear that, like Bucge, they went and came in safety1. Several documents survive showing individuals making arrangements for their pilgrimage. The women who wrote of it to Boniface were members of noble West Saxon families. Like Frithugyth herself, they would not have made the journey without adequate escort and a sufficiency of money to pay the cost of travel and food.
Early in the ninth century a Kentish nobleman, Æthelnoth, with Gænburg his wife, made a joint will before the Archbishop of Canterbury, his priest, and a representative of the king. They recorded that whichever of them should live the longer should have the estate at Eythorne, Kent, and that if they had a child, the child should succeed to it, but that otherwise the land should go to the archbishop, who should pay for it, distributing its value for the good of the testators’ souls. They added that if one or both of them should ‘wish to go south’, that is, should go on pilgrimage to Rome, the archbishop should buy the land2. This Kentish nobleman clearly saw nothing incongruous in the possibility that he or his wife might wish to go on pilgrimage separately. That women could make their own arrangements for financing a pilgrimage is shown by a ninth-century charter recording that a widow named Werthryth had sold for this purpose an estate which had come to her under her husband’s will3.
Up to the end of the Anglo-Saxon period women as well as men were setting out on pilgrimage. An East Anglian nobleman named Ketel made his will between 1052 and 1066. His wife, Sæflæd, was dead and he was about to set out to Rome with his stepdaughter, Ælfgifu. They had made an agreement about the land they both owned at Onehouse, Suffolk; ‘whichever of us shall live the longer, is to have as much land as the two of us have there. And if death befall us both on the way to Rome, the estate is to go to Bury St. Edmunds for me, for Sæflæd and for Ælfgifu, but all the men are to be free’4. The last surviving Anglo-Saxon will was made by a Lincolnshire nobleman and his wife, Ulf and Madselin, after the battle of Hastings had been fought. They made their will at the moment of their departure for Jerusalem. It is possible that they were moved to go so far by conditions in their conquered land. The phrase ‘if I do not come home’, which occurs twice in this short will, shows that Ulf and Madselin had no illusions about the perils which faced them1.
The dangers of pilgrimage were the less intimidating in that life in England itself was never safe for long together. In reading the singularly humane writings of Bede and the letters of the highly articulate men and women which passed between England and Germany in the eighth century, it is hard to believe that the writers are separated from us by more than twelve hundred years. In the ninth century their civilization was on the defensive against the heathen which surrounded Europe on the north, east, and south. If it had not been for King Alfred it would have been destroyed altogether in England before the attacks of the Danish invaders. His defence of Wessex and his determination to provide books for his people and see that they could read them saved something on which future generations could build again. The demoralization which resulted from the presence of a heathen army in England for years on end forms the background of a letter of 878 from the Pope to the Archbishop of Canterbury. ‘Touching those whom you affirm to leave their own wives against the command of the Lord, we enjoin that no man leave his wife or wife her husband, except for the cause of fornication. If anyone separates for this cause, he or she is to remain unmarried or they are to be mutually reconciled; since, as our Lord says, “what God hath joined let not man put asunder”. If a man does this and is not ready to make amends by due penance, let him remain separated from the fellowship of the Church. Neither are you to permit anyone to marry within his own kindred’2. Such injunctions were not readily observed.
A similar hint of demoralization appears in the laws of King Alfred which penalize the abduction of nuns and the raping of girls under age. An attack on the chastity of a nun was punished by the exaction of twice the amount of money due for a similar attack on a lay woman3, Alfred declared that if a man took a nun from a monastery without the permission of the king and the bishop he should pay 120 shillings, half to the king and half to the bishop and the lord of the church to which the nun belonged. If the escaped nun outlived her abductor the king refused to allow her to inherit anything of his property, nor should their children inherit. If any of their children were slain the ‘wergild’ due to the mother’s kin should go to the king, but the father’s kin should be paid the share due to them1. It may fairly be taken as a sign of King Alfred’s care for youth that a man who raped a girl under age should henceforward pay the same amount of money as he would have paid for a similar offence had she been of full age2.
Throughout the Old English period the laws show that it was the king’s duty to protect the widow and the fatherless. There was, indeed, general commiseration with their sad lot. Under King Athelstan (924–39) the men of London exempted ‘poor widows, who have no land and no one to work for them’ from a yearly tax of four pence that was being levied for the common purposes of the city and its neighbourhood3. The royal attitude was clearly expressed by King Æthelred II (979–1016), who declared that ‘all widows who lead a respectable life shall enjoy the special protection of God and the king. And each of them shall remain without a husband for a year, after which she may decide as she herself pleases’4. The laws imply that the widow, even though she might need protection, was free to make her own decisions as to her future life.
In contrast to these passages which stress the widow’s need of protection, there may be set a narrative which shows a widow defying the law and all the power of the state. A Kentish gentleman named Wulfbold had for many years kept possession of an estate which did not belong to him, in spite of a peremptory summons from the king to surrender it, four times repeated. At last the king in council passed a sentence of forfeiture upon him, but he disregarded it, and died in possession of the property, leaving his whole estate to his widow. After this, a cousin of Wulfbold took possession of one of the properties which he had been holding, whereupon Wulfbold’s widow with her child ‘went there and killed him and his fifteen companions’. The story ended in 996 with a renewed sentence of forfeiture, and a grant of all the property to the king’s mother5. The name of Wulfbold’s widow is never mentioned in the story.
From a time which by then was immemorial kings had been co-operating with the Church in developing a law of marriage which should be consonant with Christian principles. In seventh-century Kent King Wihtred had imposed ecclesiastical penalties on those guilty of unlawful unions, although he had ruled that the goods of the guilty should not be confiscated1. The so-called laws of Edward and Guthrum, which can now be attributed to Æthelred II, declare that ‘in the case of incestuous unions the king shall take possession of the male offender and the bishop of the female offender, unless they make compensation before God and the world, as the bishop shall prescribe according to the gravity of the offence. If two brothers or two near relatives lie with one woman, they shall pay as compensation, with all promptness, whatever sum may be approved … according to the gravity of the offence’2. Elsewhere, Æthelred more than once admonishes ‘all Christian men carefully’ to ‘avoid unlawful unions and duly observe the law of the Church’3. Legislation in this sense was by no means a dead letter. The village of Helperby, Yorkshire, is known to have been forfeited to the Archbishop of York by two brothers who had one wife4.
When Cnut of Denmark had made himself king of both the Danish and English peoples in England (1016–35), he issued a great code of law covering the whole land. Whenever possible he based his laws on those of his English predecessors, but he dealt with many matters which they had not touched, and he carried further many subjects with which they had already dealt. He strengthened with heavy penalties the law by which Æthelred had forbidden widows to marry within a year after their husbands’ death5. Even if the widow had been married by force she is to lose all her possessions, unless she will leave her second husband ‘and return home and never afterwards be his’. No widow is to be too hastily consecrated as a nun6. The king had a financial interest in preventing the hasty remarriage of widows or their immediate withdrawal from the world, for at least in aristocratic circles the widow was responsible for the ‘heriot’ due to the king from her late husband’s estate. In origin, the heriot was the equipment for war given by a lord to a retainer and returnable to the lord on the retainer’s death. Its military origin was still apparent in the eleventh century. The heriot of an earl, for example, was eight horses, four saddled and four unsaddled, four helmets, four coats of mail, eight spears and eight shields, four swords, and two hundred gold coins1. But it was already beginning to take on the character of a death-duty upon the property of men with no particular responsibilities in war. Among the peasantry it survived the Middle Ages themselves, to become one of the incidents of copyhold tenure2. Before the Norman Conquest it was graduated in accordance with the dead man’s rank, but it was everywhere a heavy charge on the property which he had left. In emphasizing the widow’s responsibility for the payment, Cnut allows her to meet it at any time within twelve months, ‘if it has not been convenient for her to pay earlier’3.
The king’s acceptance of a heriot was a visible sign that the dead man had ended his life in the king’s full peace and favour. A remarkable document written shortly before 999 shows a widow proffering her husband’s heriot to the king in order that his name might be cleared from a charge of treason. An Essex gentleman named Æthelric of Bocking had died under suspicion of plotting to receive King Swein of Denmark into England some years before. In his will, Æthelric had set out the heriot—sixty gold coins, a sword with its belt, two horses, two round shields, and two spears—which should pass at his death to King Æthelred. He also left estates to the cathedral monastery of Canterbury and to other churches. When he was dead, his widow—whose name is never given—brought his heriot to King Æthelred, who was then holding a great council at Cook-ham in Berkshire, but before accepting it, the king reopened before the council the charge under which Æthelric had lain. At last, persuaded by the Archbishop of Canterbury who acted as the widow’s advocate, and by a prominent nobleman, the king allowed her to grant her own morning gift to the church of Canterbury ‘for the sake of the king and all the people’, and then withdrew the charge of treason against her husband, so that his will might stand. The document was written while the council was in session. To a modern reader, its interest does not lie in the estates which were its chief concern, but in its picture of a widow defending her husband’s reputation before an assembly drawn, as the document itself records, ‘from far and wide, from West Saxons and Mercians, Danes and Englishmen’1.
The greatest of all authorities on the Anglo-Saxon laws has described Cnut as ‘setting himself on the side of the oppressed; strangers, men without kindred, the unfree, and women’2. The most striking illustration of his attitude to women is the law which reads: ‘No woman or maiden shall ever be forced to marry a man whom she dislikes, nor shall she ever be given for money, unless the suitor wishes to give something of his own free will’3. For the first time, the law denies the right of anyone to sell a woman. Cnut is also careful to define the legal position of a woman whose husband has been proved guilty of theft. The wife shall be clear of guilt unless the stolen goods had been put under her lock and key. ‘But’, the law continues, ‘it is her duty to guard the keys of the following:—her storeroom and her chest and her cupboard. If the goods have been put in any of these, she shall be held guilty’4. Cnut points out that a wife cannot forbid her husband to bring anything into his cottage. But there is no unqualified assertion such as Ine had made three hundred years before that a woman must obey her husband as her lord.
The record of a marriage settlement from the earliest years of Cnut’s reign shows the kind of arrangement that could be made for this purpose between two families of high rank. ‘Here in this document’, it runs, ‘is declared the agreement which Godwine made with Brihtric when he wooed his daughter. In the first place, he gave her a pound’s weight of gold to induce her to accept his suit, and he granted her the estate at Street and whatever belongs to it, and a hundred and fifty acres at Burmarsh and also thirty oxen and twenty cows and ten horses and ten slaves’. The agreement was made at Kingston in Surrey before King Cnut, and attested by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Abbot of St. Augustine’s with the monastic communities of which they were the heads, and by the sheriff and a number of other Kentish gentlemen whose names are recorded in the deed. ‘And when the maiden was brought from Brightling’ eleven men whose names are given came forward as security for the agreement. The terms of the settlement were written out three times, and a copy was laid up in each of the two great churches at Canterbury. Brihtric, the maiden’s father, had the third copy1. The essential fact at the heart of all this formality is the financial independence assured to the bride by the bridegroom before the marriage ceremony had taken place.
This settlement is one among many personal records written in Old English—deeds, reports of law-suits, and wills—which illustrate the position of women in society. The most important, though by no means the earliest of them, is the will of King Alfred. In a long document, written as though the king himself were speaking, he set out his intentions in regard to the vast estate in land which was at his own disposal. He named the properties which should go to each of his sons and daughters, his other kinsmen and his wife. He desired those to whom he was bequeathing land not to leave it away from his own family on their death unless they themselves had children. In that case, he expressed a preference for the land to pass to a male child ‘so long as there be any capable of holding it’. ‘My grandfather’, he said, ‘bequeathed his land to the spear-side, not to the spindle-side. If therefore I have given to any woman what my grandfather acquired, and my kinsmen wish to have it while the woman lives, they are to buy it back from her. My kinsmen must pay for such land because they are taking other property of mine which I may give to the female line or the male line as I will’2. It was King Alfred’s grandfather, King Egbert, who set Wessex on the way towards supremacy in England. It seems probable that Egbert, wishing to secure the dominance of his own line among the noble families of Wessex, sought to consolidate the lands of the house in the male side. The extreme care with which King Alfred tried to bring his own bequests into conformity with his grandfather’s wishes suggests that King Egbert had at this point been departing from traditional West Saxon practice.
More than fifty wills written in English have survived from this last period of the Anglo-Saxon state. These documents are not wills in the modern sense. They are rather post-obit gifts made with the consent of the king. Only the very greatest families were allowed to dispose of their land in this way, and each will is the result of a special concession on the king’s part. Dr. Dorothy Whitelock has printed thirty-nine of these wills in one volume with translations and notes to each document3. Of these no less than ten are made by women and three more of them are made jointly by a man and his wife. In none of these wills is there any indication that the testator has any preference for land to go to the male rather than the female line. Nor is there any hint that in leaving land to a woman the testator is leaving it to a religious house of which the woman named is the head. Land is bequeathed to a woman as though it were the most natural thing in the world to leave it in that way. The bequests to women are not subject to the failure of male heirs. The impression these wills give is that men and women were equally concerned to provide for all their children without regard to sex. Many of these wills have survived because some church was made the residuary legatee and therefore had an interest in preserving a copy of the will. There must have been many similar dispositions of which no evidence has survived.
A widow of noble birth named Wynflæd made her will about 950. She owned many estates in Wessex, in Berkshire, Wiltshire, Hampshire and Dorset. She left the better of her offering cloths and her cross to the church, and two silver cups to the community for use in the refectory, but it is not clear which church. She had a nun’s vestments, but she had other clothes, caps, gowns, a bracelet, a brooch, and headbands. It is possible that after her husband’s death she had taken a vow of chastity and lived in close association with a religious community. She still held her lands and could dispose of them at her will. Some estates she left unconditionally to her daughter Æthelflæd: others to her son Eadmer. An estate at Faccombe, Hampshire, which was her morning gift, she left to her son Eadmer for his life. If his sister, Æthelflæd, outlived him it was to go to her for her life and afterwards to Eadwold, Eadmer’s son. Wynflæd requested her son to relinquish either the estate at Coleshill or that at Adderbury to his son Eadwold as soon as he was old enough to hold land. Both estates were to go to Eadwold after Eadmer’s death. Her engraved bracelet and brooch Wynflæd left to Æthelflæd. Eadmer had a daughter Eadgifu, as well as a son. No estates in their entirety were left to her, but Wynflæd left her two skilled slaves, a woman weaver and a seamstress. She left her the stock and bondmen on two estates and certain household goods. Eadgifu also was to share all the broken horses with her brother Eadwold. Other people appear in the will as recipients of bequests, but whether they were of Wynflæd’s family is uncertain. Wynflæd arranged for many people, mostly women who are mentioned by name, to be set free after her death and she expressed the hope that for her soul’s sake her children would free any other people of hers who had fallen into slavery as a punishment for crime. She left to Æthelflæd everything which was not specifically bequeathed, ‘books and such small things’, and she hoped that Æthelflæd would be mindful of her soul1.
At some time between 984 and 1016 a lady named Wulfwaru made her will leaving certain goods ‘to St. Peter’s monastery at Bath for my poor soul and for the souls of my ancestors from whom my property and my possessions came to me’. Nothing is known, apart from the will, of Wulfwaru or of her two sons, Wulfmer and Ælfwine, or of her two daughters, Goda and Ælfwaru. To her elder son she left two estates ‘with meat and with men and all tilth’. She divided another estate equally between her elder son and her younger daughter: ‘and they are to share the principal residence between them as evenly as they can, so that each of them shall have a just portion of it’. To her younger son she left three estates and to her elder daughter one estate; all were left ‘with meat and with men and all tilth’. She divided her goods—gold, brooches, cups, tapestry, women’s attire, and bedclothes—between her children, indicating what each was to have. To her four menservants she left a band of twenty mancuses of gold and to her household women, in common, ‘a good chest well decorated’. This will is well drafted and gives the impression that the woman who made it was eminently fair and just. If she left less land to her daughters than to her sons, it was probably because their husbands had land of their own2. A woman who inherited land seems to have been free to leave it among her children as she wished and in accordance with their need.
It was not even incumbent upon a woman to leave any of her land to her sons. One of the most revealing documents which has survived from Cnut’s reign is the account of a lawsuit in the shire court of Hereford. The bishop and the earl were present and several of the greatest men in the kingdom at that time, Thurkil the White, who was concerned in the case, and Tovi the Proud, who had come there on the king’s business. The sheriff and all the thegns—that is, all the men of position—in Herefordshire were also present. A certain Edwin came and sued his own mother for land, namely Wellington and Cradley. The bishop asked whose business it was to reply for his mother, and Thurkil the White spoke up and said that it was his business, if he knew her case. Since he did not know the case, three thegns were instructed to ride from the meeting to the place where the lady was and ask her what claim she had to the lands for which her son was suing her. ‘Then she said that she had no land that in any way belonged to him, and she was very angry with her son, and she called before her Leofflæd, Thurkil’s wife, her kinswoman, and before the three thegns, said “Here sits Leofflæd my kinswoman, to whom, after my death, I give both my land and my gold, my robes and my raiment and all that I have”. And she then said to the thegns: “Be thegns, and duly announce my message to the meeting before all the good men, and tell them to whom I have given my land and all that I have, and to my own son nothing; and ask them to be witnesses of this”. And they did so; they rode to the meeting and told all the good men what she had laid upon them. Then Thurkil the White stood up in the meeting and asked all the thegns to give his wife the land, free and quit, which her kinswoman had granted her, and they did so. Then Thurkil rode to St. Æthelbert’s minster at Hereford, with the consent and witness of all the people, and had it recorded in a gospel book’1. It is curious that this dominant lady remains anonymous.
Most of the wills and charters which have survived from the last age of the Anglo-Saxon state come from the English part of Anglo-Saxon England. The Scandinavian peoples who had settled in the further midlands and the north in King Alfred’s time were heathen barbarians. Their descendants could only be absorbed by slow degrees into the Christian society of the land. The sagas which come from Iceland and the Scandanavian homeland indicate that the women of the Viking world could be as fierce and masterful as their men. For a long time there were Englishmen who spoke of the Danes in England as barbarous, and of their women as people of disgusting social habits. Even so, the critics imply that there were many in England who did not scorn to copy the filthy habits of the Danes. Little is known at first hand about the women of Danish England. Women of Danish name and undoubted Danish descent appear, though rarely, as ladies of villages in those parts. Raventhorpe in Lincolnshire takes its name from a woman named Ragnhildr, and Gunthorpe by the Trent, from a woman named Gunnhildr. It may be added that the most uncompromising assertion of a married woman’s independence that has survived from Anglo-Saxon England comes from the East Riding of Yorkshire. In 1086, a Yorkshire jury recorded that a woman bearing the Danish name Asa ‘had her land separate and free from the lordship and power of Bernulf her husband even while they lived together, so that he could make neither gift nor sale of it, nor could he forfeit it. Moreover, after their separation she withdrew with all her land, and possessed it as lady’.
Enough has been said to show that in Anglo-Saxon England men and women lived on terms of rough equality with each other. Inevitably for a period so remote from today, the evidence available to historians is incomplete and patchy. The women whose wills and letters have survived all belonged to noble families. But the women who had personal control of their store room, their box, and their cupboard were the wives of the free farmers of the countryside. The Anglo-Saxon way of life was broken by the Norman Conquest. William the Conqueror was concerned neither to destroy nor to protect ancient English habits of life. Nevertheless, feudal law enforced by a conqueror meant the end of many things in England, not least among them the independent status of the noble English lady.
1 See F. M. Stenton, ‘The Place of Women in Anglo-Saxon Society’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th series, vol. xxv, 1943, pp. 1–13.
1 Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica, lib. iv, cap. xx.
2 They can be studied most conveniently in The Laws of the Earliest English Kings, edited and translated by F. L. Attenborough, Cambridge, 1922. Many of the laws can be read in translation in English Historical Documents, vol. i, ed. Dorothy Whitelock, London, 1955.
3 Laws of Æthelbert, 10, 11, 14.
4 Ibid., 73.
5 Ibid., 74.
1 Laws of Æthelbert, 77.
2 Ibid., 82 and 83.
3 Ibid., 31.
4 Ibid., 79 and 80.
5 Ibid., 81.
1 Select English Historical Documents, ed. F. E. Harmer, Cambridge, 1914, pp. 31 and 61. See also below, p. 22, for a widow granting her morning gift to Christ Church, Canterbury.
2 Æthelbert, 78.
3 Ibid., 75.
4 Ibid., 76.
5 Hlothhere and Eadric, 6.
1 See Dr. Plummer’s note in his edition of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, vol. ii, p. 236.
2 Wihtred, 4.
1 Wihtred, 12.
2 Ine, 31.
3 Ibid., 38.
4 Ibid., 7.
5 Ibid., 57.
1 Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, vol. iii, p. 195.
2 Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica, ed. Plummer, lib. iv, cap. xxi.
3 Ibid., lib. iv, cap. xxii.
1 English Historical Documents, vol. i, ed. Whitelock, p. 719.
2 Ibid., pp. 720–1.
1 Letters of Boniface and Lull, ed. M. Tangl, Berlin, 1916, pp. 52–3.
1 English Historical Documents, vol. i, p. 724.
2 W. Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century, Oxford, 1946, p. 43.
1 Letters of Boniface, pp. 21–6.
2 Ibid., p. 48.
3 Ibid., pp. 229–31.
4 Ibid., p. 169.
1 Crawford Charters, ed. A. S. Napier and W. H. Stevenson, No. 1, pp. 1–3. The editors accepted the date 739 and regarded the charter as genuine, note, pp. 37 ff.
2 Anglo-Saxon Charters, ed. A.J. Robertson, Cambridge, 1939, pp. 4–7.
3 Birch, Cartularium Saxonicum, vol. ii, no. 537, p. 155.
4 Anglo-Saxon Wills, ed. Dorothy Whitelock, Cambridge, 1930, pp. 90 and 91.
1 Anglo-Saxon Wills, pp. 94–7.
2 English Historical Documents, vol. i, p. 812.
3 Alfred, no. 18.
1 Alfred, no. 8.
2 Ibid., no. 29.
3 VI Athelstan, 2. Attenborough, pp. 158, 159.
4 The Laws of the Kings of England from Edmund to Henry I, edited and translated by A. J. Robertson, Cambridge, 1925, pp. 84, 85, V Æthelred, 21.
5 Anglo-Saxon Charters, pp. 128–31.
1 Above, pp. 10–11.
2 Attenborough, pp. 104, 105.
3 V Æthelred, 10. Robertson, pp. 82, 83, and VI Æthelred, 11. Ibid., pp. 94, 95.
4 Birch, Cart. Saxon, vol. iii, p. 578.
5 V Æthelred, 21, 1, Robertson, pp. 84, 85.
6 II Cnut, 73 and 73a, Robertson, pp. 210–13.
1 II Cnut, 71a, Robertson, pp. 208, 209.
2 See below, p. 88. An example of the heriot paid by a woman customary tenant in the manor of Sonning, Berkshire, in the seventeenth century can be given: At the court held on 20 April 1621, the jurors reported the death of ‘Margaret Palmer, widow, a customary tenant by copy of court roll of one messuage and one virgate of land called Hatch house … whence there falls due as heriot, one cow worth 23s. and 4d.’ Court Rolls of the manor of Sonning, in private hands.
3 II Cnut, 73a, 4. Robertson, pp. 212, 213.
1 Anglo-Saxon Wills, pp. 42–7.
2 F. Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, vol. iii, p. 197.
3 II Cnut, 74.
4 II Cnut, 76.
1 Anglo-Saxon Charters, pp. 150–1.
2 Select English Historical Documents, ed. F. E. Harmer, no. xi.
3 Anglo-Saxon Wills, Cambridge, 1930.
1 Anglo-Saxon Wills, pp. 10–15.
2 Ibid., pp. 62–5.
1 Anglo-Saxon Charters, pp. 150–3.