3

The Peaceweaver (freoðuwebbe): A Queenly Custom?

The peaceweaver is, in essence, someone who uses her (or his) relationships to bring peace, often in an unstable environment. In early English literature and culture, this person was always of high social status, and in most instances, female. The theoretical model of the peaceweaver, derived largely from literary models, has some tensions at its core, as the woman who serves as the peaceweaving bond is a passive agent between her male relations, who are the real actors in the relationship: her husband, father and brothers. It comes as no surprise, then, that many early English queens have been considered in the light of the model of the peaceweaver, a figure based predominantly on discussions of literature, but equally visible in history, especially when one considers the contexts of royal marriages more fully. Several marriages are more obvious to spot as having a peaceweaving function, brokered in times of feud and prolonged conflict between kingdoms or branches of different dynasties, especially those between the Northumbrian and Mercian royal families in the late seventh and early eighth centuries: the marriages of Ealhflæd of Mercia, Cyneburh of Northumbria, and Osthryth of Mercia were all part of this greater dynastic attempt to cultivate a lasting peace. Others, like that of Osgyth of Essex, as discussed in Chapter 1, have to be carefully unpicked by comparing multiple sources to help reduce authorial biases which tend to downplay such functions. Such biases could be ecclesiastical, such as Bede’s treatment of peaceweaving marriages, which he regularly subordinates in conversion narratives, as in the discussions of Osgyth and Ealhflæd, or political: Eadburh of Wessex is one such queen whose marriage as a peaceweaver tends to be obscured in prejudiced vitriol against her in later West Saxon sources. Finally, using the model of the peaceweaver can be a fruitful means of posing a hypothesis for the true motives of an eighth-century regicide: as with Wigstan and his mother Ælfflæd, the murder of Æthelberht of East Anglia (d. 794) may have been highly motivated by the identity of his mother, known as Leofrun.

The Theoretical Background

Ne bið swylce cwenlic ðeaw

idese to efnanne, ðeah ðe hio ænlicu sy,

þætte freoðuwebbe feores onsæce

æfter ligetorne leofne mannan. (Beowulf, ll. 1940b–3)

[That is not such a queenly custom for a lady to do, though she be peerless: that peaceweaver deprived beloved men of life after pretended insults.]

In a digression with references to the distant, heroic past, Beowulf presents an antetype of peaceweaver: a woman who uses her uniquely high position to sow discord amongst the loyal men of her court, leading to needless deaths. The description of this woman, identified because of her later excellence as the bride and queen of Offa of Angeln, a famous heroic king, highlights the contrast between her reckless, selfish, hubristic and deadly behaviour as a princess, and her virtues as a queen once married to the praised king. Taming – and indeed, transforming – such a fierce and thoroughly wicked woman appears to factor as yet another of Offa’s virtues, in addition to his generosity and prowess in battle, and leads towards their mutual achievement in raising their son Eomer to become a worthy king and leader in his own right.¹

Yet before the poet deploys the epithet of ‘peaceweaver’, he clearly identifies this bride of Offa first by her later status – as a queen: she is referred to as folces cwen (‘queen of the people’, l. 1932a), and, just before calling attention to her later role as freoðuwebbe (‘peaceweaver’), in the half-line cwenlic þeaw (‘queenly custom’), in which the cwenlic (‘queenly’) carries the stress of the alliteration from the earlier parts of the half line, cwealmbealu cyðan (‘to make known a mortal attack’). The alliteration heightens the striking contrast between the desired effect of a queen as a woman who fosters relationships and peace, and the cwealmbealu (‘deathly aggression’) she previously wrought from her heightened and imperious position.

The peaceweaver has been a focus for much of the critical attention paid to women in early England and its literature. Much of this attention derives from its appearance in Beowulf and Widsith, where the term is used to coin a stereotype for queens; apparent resonances in the historical writings of Bede also provide impetus as to how we conceptualise the role of women as peaceweavers in this period. Recent scholars and critics, such as Jane Chance, Stacey Klein and Megan Cavell, have acknowledged the utility of such a model, both for understanding gender roles in early medieval England, but also the rhetorical tropes used by early English authors.² Yet overreliance on this one critical model has also somewhat hampered discussion of secular women’s roles in society by becoming one of the only models for conversation. This is, at least, in part understandable, as few other models for the discussion of women’s roles emerge from Old English literature.

There is a further issue in the use of the peaceweaving model of femininity or queenship: the gendering of the term. As first discussed by Larry Sklute and elaborated by Cavell, the term ‘peaceweaver’ does not refer exclusively to women: it can be and is used for masculine figures, as Cynewulf does in Elene.³ Nor are we to attribute this instance as a poetic appropriation of a traditionally feminine model: as Hollis has discussed, Bede’s gendering of the conversion in early medieval England in the Ecclesiastical History regularly downplays the role of queens as peaceweavers and converters in order to stress and elevate bishops and the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the burgeoning English church as preferable models of peaceweavers.⁴ Similarly, Klein’s reading of gender and heroism asserts that even Beowulf serves as an alternative model of masculine heroism by becoming a peaceweaver himself.⁵ Cavell’s discussion draws attention away from the over-emphasised gender component of the peaceweaving model, and rather brings to the fore the high status of the position, a reading which accounts well for the kinds of people seen weaving peace in both historical and literary accounts: bishops, heroes, angels and ultimately and foremost, queens.

The use of the term freoðuwebbe (‘peaceweaver’) in the poem Widsith illustrates both the simplified gender-based reading, as well as the status component of the concept of the peaceweaver. Widsith is thought to contain some of the most ancient of poetic material, referencing Germanic heroic kings and figures, but giving an overview of the travels of a poet among these peoples. In prefacing his tales and experiencing, the poet-persona Widsith recounts how he travelled to the Gothic court with Ealhild, whom he names as a peaceweaver:

 He mid Ealhhilde,

fælre freoþuwebban, forman siðe

Hreðcyninges ham gesohte

eastan of Ongle,  Eormanrices,

wraþes wærlogan. (ll. 5b–9a).

(For the first time, he sought the home of the glorious king, of Eormanric, of that hateful oath-breaker, east from the Angles, with Ealhhild, that faithful peaceweaver.)⁶

The contrast between the good, true and loyal Ealhhild and her oath-breaking, wretched husband Eormanric places the term again at an odd juxtaposition between women (who are in positions to foster relationships and peace), and circumstances in which such fruits are thwarted – whether by the women, or by others. These two references in heroic poetry to this concept, that of the freoðuwebbe or peaceweaver, describe what does – and what does not – make for a ‘good’ peaceweaver. These two instances in heroic poetry have inspired much discussion – a paradigm of a woman, given as a peace agreement between two nations or tribes, often warring, who, by her womanly skills of generosity and soft diplomacy, as well as her biological ability to bear children as a new sign of unity, serves to unite and mediate two former disparate elements. The model is even more salient to the discussion of early English queens. At its heart, the royal woman, the queen, creates a bond on multiple levels: between kingdoms, between peoples, between families, between dynasties. This enables her to bring together peoples, particularly in the aftermath of conflicts, and possibly even mother a child who serves as a symbolic and biological manifestation of the union between peoples and kingdoms.

Cynewulf’s adoption of the term fæle friðo-webba (‘the true peaceweaver’, l. 88a) in Elene, an identical formula to that in Widsith, seems derivative from these heroic, and likely earlier, poems. Cynewulf’s borrowing from earlier poetry is well-documented, although even here there may be some willingness to play with conventional gender expectations.⁷ The angel who is described as a peaceweaver appears to Constantine:

Þuhte him wlite-scyne on weres hade

hwit ond hiw-beorht,  hæleða nathwylc

geywed ænlicra þonne he ær oððe sið

gesege under swegle. (ll. 72–5a)

[It seemed to him that a beautiful creature appeared in the form of a man, white and bright of hue, a certain warrior more peerless than he had ever seen beneath the sky.]⁸

The initial appearance of the angel is an impression, and Constantine likens the apparition to the shape of a man – but not necessarily a man. The brilliance of the appearance is remarked before the shape, and the later comparison to the hæleða (‘warrior’) begins to solidify the supposedly masculine gender of the angel. Yet traditional religious writings regularly adopt the heroic idiom of the miles Christi for women also: Aldhelm refers to his audience of the Barking nuns in the prose De Virginitate as ‘soldiers of Christ’, among a host of other metaphors used to explore their roles.⁹ The term – and the role – of peaceweaver as predominantly feminine is a possibility, but one which does not seem to extend beyond poetry, and which is not particularly useful for understanding the complexity of the role, especially when considered in conjunction with the historical examples and the lives of the queens as known to us.

On the whole, Beowulf casts considerable doubt on the efficacy of the concept of peaceweaving, and of marriages as effective means of securing long-lasting peace. In recounting his adventures to his Geatish lord, Beowulf describes the Danish court where he had been adventuring, and how

 Hwilum mæru cwen,

friðusibb folca flet eall geondhwearf,

bædde byre geonge;  oft hio beahwriðan

secge (seald)  ær hie to setle geong. (ll. 2016b–19)

[Sometimes, the renowned queen, the pledge of peace to the people, went all about the hall, encouraged her young sons; often she gave a ring-band to a man before she returned to the throne.]

In this, the term friðusibb folca positions the queen as very clearly as essential to the peace of her people, the Spear-Danes. Using social traditions like gift-giving to encourage loyalty to her dynasty and promote a group identity, her generosity promotes her as an ideal queen.¹⁰ However, the Beowulf poet is generally critical of using women as peace-pledges. Regarded from any critical perspective, the text presents numerous comments on and examples of scenarios in which a peaceweaving marriage has gone horrifically wrong. Combined, these serve to offer a rather piercing criticism of peaceweaving marriages.

Hildeburh, a clear example of a bride in which the peaceweaving marriage has gone wrong, occupies a position in opposition to and as a foil for Grendel’s mother: Chance argues that both female figures fail as peaceweavers, but that Hildeburh’s passive reaction to the unjust loss of her son (and, thereby, her identity) is socially acceptable, whereas the vengeful response of Grendel’s mother is monstrous.¹¹ Most readings of Hildeburh’s tale, constructed by comparing Beowulf to The Finnsburg Fragment, agree that she was a princess married to the Frisian king, Finn; it is usually assumed that this was a peaceweaving marriage to attempt to solve a feud. One winter when her brother visits, the feud re-erupts, resulting in the death of her brother and son and an awkward truce as the Danish party cannot leave during the winter. In the spring, the Danish party exact revenge, killing Finn and taking Hildeburh back to her natal kingdom. In all this, Hildeburh’s primary action is to mourn.¹² If we see her status as that of queen – of a gift-giver, peace-pledge, or the producer of a flesh-and-blood union in the body of her son – we must accept that she has failed in that role, although not through any action of her own. The nature of peaceweaving is fundamentally problematic. The peaceweaver herself is a person, but the mechanisms by which the peace is intended to be maintained are relational; it is not the woman herself which enacts or enforces the peace. In fact, it is quite the opposite. The peace works by making her a nexus of relationships, which, ideally, might serve to foster peace, whether by love and esteem, or by a counterbalancing system of checks and balances of male power which might be drawn into play should the system become unbalanced.¹³ As we shall see, when the relationships of power which she serves to unite become independently unbalanced, this could have disastrous consequences, especially for the peaceweaver herself, caught in the middle of two fundamentally opposed and often feuding factions.

This concern about the efficacy of peaceweaving marriages for queens is extended into the foreseeable heroic future in Beowulf’s warning about the upcoming nuptials of Freawaru. Beowulf warns:

    Oft seldan hwær

æfter leodhryre lyte hwile

bongar bugeð,  þeah seo bryd duge. (ll. 2029b–31)

[As a rule, the murderous blood-feud will rest idle only for a short time in such circumstances, though the bride be good.]

Although Freawaru is never explicitly named as a peaceweaver, the reference to the spear, considered a metaphor for blood-feud, raises the assumption that Hrothgar has sought to allay a potential source of political friction with the hand of his daughter. Beowulf does not expect this to last, and whilst the poem benefits from the ever-clear vision of hindsight, the retroactive prophecy serves to question the efficacy of using women in marriages to weave peace.

The paradigm of the peaceweaver seems to be one of the clear roles available to high-status women, such as queens, in Old English literature. It is also one which seems to feature highly in multiple historical sources, whether or not they are named as such. In applying this critical model to several of the queens in the period 650–850, we begin to understand more about their lives and the circumstances in which they lived. For most of these women, their matches were political, but the extent to which these marriages served to broker peace, and the relationships they had with their husbands and their subjects, the people of the kingdom, seems to have been fundamental to their lived experiences as queens. This is often most apparent in the clear examples of failed peaceweavers, queens whose marriages failed to assuage the conflicts which motivated their matches, whether as a direct result of their actions or otherwise, as with Osthryth of Mercia. Conversely, there are also queens whose marriages are not marred by the resumption of hostilities or kin-murder which tend to blatantly mark the careers of failed peaceweaving queens. Often, when examined more closely, the circumstances of these matches do appear to resemble those seen in the catastrophic failures of peaceweaving marriages, which begs the question of what led to these unions serving as successful mediators of identity and relationships. The answers are rarely straightforward, but do bring us closer to realising the contexts in which these women led their lives, and thus, closer to something like biography.

Figure 3.1Seventh-century Mercian and Northumbrian intermarriages

Sister-swap: Ealhflæd and Cyneburh

In certain extreme circumstances, one bride was not considered sufficient to ensure peace: nothing less than two would do. Such was the case in the marriages of Ealhflæd, a princess of Northumbria married to Peada of Mercia (r. 653–56) and Cyneburh, of royal Mercian stock, married to Ealhfrith of Northumbria (r. c. 655–64). Arguably, neither union represents a successful weaving of peace: in Cyneburh’s case, the lack of evidence makes it difficult to ascertain whether she had any clear role in the relative success of her marriage, whereas it is abundantly clear that Ealhflæd’s own actions directly contributed to a breakdown of peace.

As princesses of Mercia and Bernicia (later Northumbria), respectively, both Cyneburh and Ealhflæd’s families were accustomed to long-standing conflict between their kingdoms. For the previous 50 years, through a series of dynastic marriages and battles, the kings of Mercia and Northumbria contested land boundaries, booty and power, drawing in alliances with other rulers from Wales and East Anglia, among others, in attempts to tilt the balance of power in their favour. Whilst battles with neighbouring kingdoms were typical, the enmity between Mercia and Northumbria was particularly acrimonious: it claimed the lives of at least three kings, several princes and other æthelings, princes and men descended from the royal line who were suitable candidates for the throne.

Internal dynastic rivalries further complicated the political situation in the period leading to the middle of the seventh century in both kingdoms. From the reign of Æthelfrith, who descended from the Bernician dynasty, the king of Northumbria tended to be powerful enough to wield control over all Northumbria, including its two sub-kingdoms, Bernicia and Deira. Internecine violence between the royal families resulted in political assassinations and exiles, as well as marriages, such as that between Oswiu of the Bernician royal line, and Eanflæd of the Deiran, resulting in a tenuously unified Northumbria. The situation is less well-documented in Mercia, where the main documented royal dynasty was associated with Penda and his ancestors and descendants, apart from one king mentioned by Bede known as Cearl, who does not figure in genealogies of later Mercian kings (HE, II.14). It is possible that Cearl’s lineage represented a rival dynasty which died out as the Pendings, the descendants of Penda, rose to power and consolidated the kingdom of Mercia.

The first recorded intermarriage between the Northumbrian and Mercian dynasties was in fact between a daughter of Cearl, whose name is recorded as Cwenburg, and Edwin of the Deiran dynasty of Northumbria (r. 616–32/33). Seen as a political threat by the current ruler of Northumbria, Æthelfrith, Edwin spent much of his life in exile, first in Gwynedd, later with the Mercians, and finally with Rædwald of East Anglia. There is little record of Cwenburg’s life: Bede mentions that she was the mother of Osfrith and Eadfrith, but there is no further note of her. Edwin’s later marriage to Æthelburh of Kent could imply that Cwenburg had already previously died, or that she had returned to Mercia, perhaps put aside in favour of a new wife.

The marriages of these two princesses, Ealhflæd and Cyneburh, took place during the reign of Oswiu. Royal marriages, especially ones in which a religious conversion was at stake, were rarely a meeting between equals, something particularly evident in this case.¹⁴ Bede notes how Oswald’s reign was not particularly secure compared to that of his older brother, despite sharing his brother’s mixed Northumbrian heritage, born of a Bernician father, Æthelfrith, and a Deiran mother, Acha:

After Oswald had been translated to the heavenly kingdom, his brother Oswiu succeeded to his earthly kingdom in his place, as a young man of about thirty, and ruled for twenty-eight troubled years. He was attacked by the heathen people, the Mercians, who had slain his brother, and in addition, by his own son Alhfrith and his nephew Oethelwald, the son of his brother and predecessor.

(HE, III. 14)

While earlier in the History, Bede confirmed Oswiu as one of the bretwaldas, the overkings of Britain with wide-ranging rule, this detail paints a clearer summary of the tenuous nature of Oswiu’s overlordship, beset by his own close relations and troubled by powerful military rulers to the south. As such, he had to use his offspring tactically to expand, conciliate and forge connections.

The first such conciliation must be the marriage between his son Ealhfrith (the Alhfrith mentioned in Bede’s account) and Penda’s daughter Cyneburh. According to Bede’s chronology, this must have taken place sometime before 653, as in recounting the later marriage of Peada to Ealhflæd, Bede establishes that Ealhfrith had already been married to Cyneburh. While some readings suggest that this was done at Oswiu’s request, given the success of Penda’s attacks, it seems equally possible that the union between Ealhfrith and Cyneburh was rather one of Penda’s ploys to expand his influence – one which must be regarded being possibly successful. Though Ealhfrith’s influence is detectable in prompting his father to hold the synod of Whitby in 664, in part owing to Ealhfrith’s friendship with the persuasive and feisty young cleric Wilfrid, Bede also notes how Ealhfrith later attacked his own father, probably in alliance with the Mercians (HE, III.14). As such, it seems most likely their marriage took place sometime between 642 and 653, after Penda’s victory at the battle of Maserfield, at which Oswald was killed. An incursion in 651 in which Penda besieged Bamburgh, a royal Northumbrian city, may have been part of the occasion.

There is very little said of Cyneburh in Bede’s narrative: his focus is on the male friendship between Ealhfrith and Peada which their marriages engendered. Bede says Peada was ‘his brother-in-law and friend, having married Penda’s daughter, Cyneburh’ (HE, III.21). This is typical of Bede’s treatment of marriages, especially ones involving any degree of peaceweaving or possible conversion: he downplays the relationships between kings and their wives to emphasise the network of male relationships that these women fostered through their marriage.¹⁵ However, a marriage of Oswiu’s daughter by his first wife Rhiainfellt of Rheged, a Brittonic kingdom, to the eldest son of Penda would appear to have drawn the two warring kingdoms into a closer relationship. In marrying one of his elder daughters to Ealhfrith, one of Oswiu’s elder sons, Penda may have been seeking to draw some of his rival’s traditional power structures into his own orbit, and also possibly expand his influence and territory. This must be regarded at best as a partial victory. Bede records that Ealhfrith fought alongside his father against Penda at the battle of Winwæd in 655, and, despite their smaller force, the Northumbrians defeated and killed Penda. Nevertheless, Mercian loyalties – or Cyneburh – may have succeeded in the long term. Bede later notes how Ealhfrith attacked his own father, possibly in alliance with Mercian allies, or perhaps in alliance with his Northumbrian cousin, Œthelwald. Ealhfrith disappears from the historical record after 664; it is impossible to know whether this is a result of his treacherous attack and a subsequent fall from grace, or because of his death.

Cyneburh’s marriage to Ealhfrith was most probably part of a peaceweaving effort. It seems more likely to have been made as part of a Mercian attempt to maintain a political and diplomatic hold over Oswiu, the newly appointed king of Northumbria. This may have been successful, although ultimately it does not seem to have benefited Penda, his successors as king, or Cyneburh herself: Bede’s reference to Ealhfrith’s treachery against his father raises the possibility that either he aligned his interests with those of his wife’s family, or gesture to a growing divide between father and son. In either case, Ealhfrith’s disappearance from the historical record, as well as the promotion of Oswiu’s son from another marriage, Ecgfrith, as the heir apparent and sub-king of Deira, eclipsed the Mercian connections in Northumbria made by the marriage of a Mercian princess to the Deiran sub-king. On the other side, Cyneburh’s relative success as a peaceweaver was fundamentally tied to the mirror match between one of her brothers, Peada, to a sister of her husband. Whilst Cyneburh’s peaceweaving marriage may have been arguably at least somewhat successful from the perspective of her family, the marriage between Peada and Ealhfrith’s sister Ealhflæd must be considered a disaster in the promotion of peace.

What became of Cyneburh? There are some difficulties in establishing anything for certain. There are no recorded children from the union, although the absence of evidence cannot be taken unequivocally as evidence of absence. What can be said is that by 664, the political landscape had altered considerably in both Northumbria and Mercia. Following the death of Penda in 655, Mercia entered a period of Northumbrian overlordship, which was only ended by the revolt of Mercian nobles, who placed Wulfhere, one of Penda’s younger sons, on the throne, in 658. Two pieces of evidence suggest that, either before or after the disappearance of her husband from the historical records, Cyneburh returned to the kingdom of her birth. The first is generic: many queens in this era, when retiring from the secular office of queen, whether as a widow or parting from her marriage, returned to her natal homeland, usually to enter monastic life. Examples of this include Æthelthryth of Ely, who returned from Northumbria to East Anglia after leaving her marriage to Ecgfrith; Eormenburg of Northumbria, who returned to Kent and became a notable abbess after being known as a thoroughly unpleasant and rancorous queen for her squabbles with St Wilfrid; Cuthburg of Wessex, who returned to her homeland and to the minster at Wimborne following her parting from Aldfrith of Northumbria, and Eormenhild, who returned to Kent following the death of her husband Wulfhere of Mercia, before following in her mother’s footsteps to become abbess of Ely. Any return to Mercia by Cyneburh, then, would be consistent with contemporary queenly behaviour. Secondly, traditions associate her with a foundation at Castor, near Peterborough: the Secgan record her translation to Peterborough in the late tenth century.¹⁶ She is usually mentioned in the same breath as her sister Cyneswith, who is regarded as a virgin saint. William of Malmesbury notes a tradition that both were abbesses and known for their ‘inviolate chastity’; an early modern English life drawing on earlier sources such Capgrave’s Nova Legenda Angliae (1516) and Matthew of Westminster, who was mistakenly thought to be the author of the Flores Historiarum now attributed to Matthew Paris and later continuators at Westminster, also continue this tradition.¹⁷ The text of the early modern life suggests that she parted from Ealhfrith mutually.¹⁸ Ealhfrith’s proximity to Wilfrid, who was known for encouraging and mediating Æthelthyrth and Ecgfrith’s marriage later, would certainly support this tradition. Ultimately, nearly a millennium spans between the written record of this tradition and the life of its subject, and in the absence of any additional evidence, it cannot be entertained as biographical. What can be said with relative certainty is that Cyneburh was associated with founding the monastery at Castor with her sister Cyneswith, and helping to raise and educate another family member, Tibba. They were revered as saints, and their remains translated to Peterborough in 963.¹⁹

The primary source for Ealhflæd’s life is, again, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, and he devotes quite a bit of attention and includes unusual amounts of detail in comparison to other royal marriages in the text. This is because this marriage had a clear conversionary dynamic: as part of the negotiations for Ealhflæd’s hand, Peada was compelled to accept baptism to Christianity, becoming effectively the first Christian king of Mercia.²⁰ Although there is no explicit confirmation of Ealhflæd’s mother, based on the similarity in their names, it seems most likely that she was the full sister of Ealhfrith by Oswiu’s second wife, Rieinmelth. In writing her biography, especially centred around her marriage and its scandalous aftereffects, what Bede does say is almost as useful as what he omits. While he mentions that Peada sought Ealhflæd’s hand, he shifts the focus from the conjugal relationship to the fraternal relationship that Peada and Ealhfrith cultivated as brothers-in-law, and on their budding relationship as part of the expanding Christian Church.²¹ Since it is one of the few well-documented marriages of the seventh century, its ultimate failure as both a marriage and as a peaceweaving union is notable, and helps to explain the lingering feud between the royal families of Mercia and Northumbria. Furthermore, just how marginalised Ealhflæd is in the narrative serves almost to protect and excuse the unfortunate conclusion to her match:

At this time the Middle Angles, that is the Angles of the Midlands, accepted the faith and the mysteries of the truth under their chief Peada who was the son of King Penda. As he was a most noble youth, worthy both of the name and office of king, he was placed by his father on the throne of the kingdom of the Middle Angles. He thereupon went to Oswiu, and asked for the hand of his daughter Alhflæd. But his request was granted only on condition that he and his nation accepted the Christian faith and baptism. When Peada heard the truth proclaimed and the promises of the kingdom of heaven, the hope of resurrection and future immortality, he gladly declared himself ready to become a Christian even though he were refused the hand of the maiden. He was earnestly persuaded to accept the faith by Alhfrith, son of King Oswiu, who was his brother-in-law and friend, having married Penda’s daughter, Cyneburh.

(HE, III.21)

Stripped of Bede’s evangelical bias, Ealhflæd is actually the key object of this whole episode. Peada, raised to the status of king of the Middle Angles, has clearly sought a bride to establish his own line and dynasty, as well as possibly to bolster an alliance with the rising profile of Oswiu, whom Bede names as one of his famous kings to hold imperium over much of England (HE, II.5).²² In addition, Peada may have viewed the match as yet another opportunity to promote peace between the two warring nations, using Ealhflæd as a peaceweaver to balance out the strife and deaths of her kinsmen at the hands of his own father.

It does not seem, however, that Ealhflæd herself viewed the marriage in such terms. Bede’s account presents the response to Peada’s request for her hand solely in terms of Peada – neque aliter quod petebat inpetrare potuit (‘he would not otherwise have been able to obtain what he asked’) – as the entire situation. As a result, it is unclear who it is that lays out the conditions for acceptance: that Peada – and his entire kingdom – accept Christianity and baptism. The terms of the marriage are not particularly unusual, but they are perhaps relatively higher in stake than comparable matches. For example, in the marriage between Bertha and Æthelberht of Kent, who later converted under Augustine, the match was made on the condition that she would be able to practice Christianity, and she brought a bishop with her to tend to her faith (HE, I.25). Similarly, their daughter, Æthelburh of Kent, was sent as a bride for Edwin of Northumbria with her own bishop, Paulinus (HE, II.9). Her marriage precipitated the first Northumbrian king to convert to Roman Christianity: initial marriage negotiations were refused as ‘it was not lawful for a Christian virgin to be given in marriage to a heathen.’ Even so, after assurances of allowing Æthelburh and her retinue to continue practising her religion, signifying his willingness to consider conversion himself, Edwin was able to secure the match. It was not until 627, two years after their marriage, that he was baptised, and many of his subjects as well. In neither of these previous marriage negotiations, each clearly viewed as opportunities for conversion, was conversion before the marriage stipulated – or indeed upheld as a condition of the marriage. It is important to remember that Bede’s account is one of conversion facilitated by a marriage negotiation, rather than an engagement which fostered conversion: the opening lines of the chapter reference the whole kingdom accepting the faith: ‘At this time, the Middle Angles … accepted the faith and mysteries of the truth under their chief Peada’ (HE, III.21).

In the account of the negotiations regarding Peada’s marriage to Ealhflæd, Bede depicts Peada as being far more agreeable and willing to convert: in the lead-up to the engagement, he is presented as noble and, following the downright aggressive terms of agreement, he demonstrates himself to be willing to convert, regardless of whether he is successful in attaining Ealhflæd’s hand. At least some of this presentation must be considered part of Bede’s bias, presenting kings who convert to Christianity as virtuous and worthy leaders. It also removes Ealhflæd herself from the discussion. This is possibly a calculated move on the part of Bede, whose agenda to promote the sanctity and general moral superiority of the Northumbrian royal dynasty, flows through the History.²³ It is difficult for Bede to maintain this preferential treatment given Ealhflæd’s later reported complicity with murder of her husband Peada.

Bede’s account of Ealhflæd is restricted to these two incidents: her marriage and the death of her husband, the two moments which bookend her career as a queen. And, unusually for Bede, he is reluctant to inculpate Ealhflæd in what seems to be a popular opinion: that she was responsible for her husband’s death. Shortly after the death of Penda, Oswiu, as the new major source of power in both the Midlands and Northumbria, appointed his son-in-law Peada as a sub-king of traditional Mercian lands in the south. Ealhflæd’s role as wife to Peada, and peaceweaver between the two formerly feuding kingdoms, is central to Bede’s description of Peada’s relationship with Oswiu, calling him cognatus suus, ‘his kinsman’. Neither relationship, however, was long-lived: ‘But Peada was most foully murdered in the following spring by the treachery, or so it is said, of his wife during the very time of the Easter festival’ (HE, III.24).

Framed in a discussion of the final defeat of Penda, Oswiu’s ascendancy, missionary efforts in Mercia and the overthrow of Northumbrian rule in Mercia, the murder of Peada appears as a temporary obstacle to the conversion of the Midlands. In the account of the murder, something as scandalous as treachery is acknowledged, but Bede attempts to obscure Ealhflæd’s role in it, distancing it as a reported rumour in ut dicunt (‘so it is said’).

What cannot be obscured is that this is a clear instance of a peaceweaving marriage that has failed. It is not a failure in Bede’s perspective: his objective is telling the history of the conversion and faith of the English peoples, and in that teleological worldview, the marriage – and death – of Peada is of less consequence than his conversion. In comparison, a summary of the kings of Mercia in the Liber Eliensis simply records that Peada ‘held the kingdom of the Southern Angles, but he was very foully murdered, through treachery on the part of his wife, at the very time of the Easter festival’ (LE, I.17). The similarity in phrasing suggests not an independent tradition that more clearly blames Ealhflæd, but rather merely the absence of any need to distance her from it. The reasons behind Ealhflæd’s treachery will have to remain speculation. Bede’s History is the only nearly contemporary source, and he has chosen to remain ambiguous about her role and motivations. Nevertheless, when considered against a backdrop of the changes between their marriage and the murder, it is clear that revenge and politics may have been key motivating factors.

When Ealhflæd married Peada in 653, Penda of Mercia was the overlord of a growing Midlands kingdom in Mercia and a formidable military leader prone to meddle in foreign kingdoms to suit his own needs. It is unclear which king, Oswiu or Penda, was the instigator behind the matches between Ealhfrith and Cyneburh, and later between Peada and Ealhflæd.²⁴ Regardless of which king initiated these unions, which may have had the intention of calming the rancour between the two ruling families, until Penda’s death at Winwæd in 655, the Mercian king was the principle power broker. In 655, Penda had held Ecgfrith, who appears to have been a favoured son and heir of Oswiu, hostage at the tender age of ten years old. By contrast, Peada’s murder at Easter in 656 took place in a vastly altered political landscape. The rulership of Mercia had passed directly into Oswiu’s hands, and Penda’s offspring were hidden or protected, whether by the Church or by loyal nobles, as with Wulfhere. Even though Oswiu seems to have been prepared to invest more power in Peada by granting him additional lands in South Mercia, Ealhflæd does not appear to have held her husband in similar esteem. There is no record of any offspring from the marriage, and no documentation of the nature of their relationship. What is assured, nonetheless, is that in the power vacuum in the Midlands following Penda’s death, Ealhflæd’s murder of her husband would be unlikely to be punished.

There is no record of what became of Ealhflæd. The majority of widowed royal women returned to the kingdom of their birth and entered monastic life, often eventually as an abbess. It is therefore possible that Ealhflæd returned to Northumbria, still under the reign of her father, after murdering her husband. Yet nothing like the name of Ealhflæd (Alchflæd, Alhflæd) appears amongst the list of queens and abbesses in the Northumbrian Liber Vitae, which is somewhat surprising given the appearance of her mother Rhiainfellt, at the first position in the list which starts on folio 13 recto (written in gold in capital letters, ‘RAEGNMAELD’), step-mother Eanflæd, half-sister Ælfflæd and other relations; there are several ‘Osthryth’s in the list, and her brother Ealhfrith appears in the list of kings and dukes.²⁵. One thing that seems certain is that Ealhflæd did not stay in Mercia: a brief initial monastic foundation at Fladbury has theoretically been linked with her half-sister, the famous abbess Ælfflæd of Whitby, before a refoundation orchestrated around 697, but almost certainly cannot be connected with Peada’s queen.²⁶

This was clearly a peaceweaving marriage gone awry. Oswiu’s intention to invest his son-in-law with more land and authority can only be seen as a sign of faith between the two, despite the feud and hostilities on both sides. Peada’s admiration for the sister of his friend and brother-in-law Ealhfrith, at least as presented in Bede’s account, suggests a willingness to transcend feud culture and usher in a new, peaceful relationship. Ealhflæd’s murder of Peada is a determined rejection of that. We must see her as a figure that destroys peace, disrupting value and traditional relationships, much as Cavell reads Offa’s bride Fremu in Beowulf, or how Chance sees Grendel’s mother as a masculinised, and therefore monstrous, avenger.²⁷ Rather than weaving peace, she sows discord. In the aftermath of Penda and Peada’s deaths, the balance of power swung clearly and definitively north for roughly the next twenty years, although these actions would continue to have repercussions for the families of the Mercian and Northumbrian royal lines.

Unfinished Business: Osthryth of Mercia

Osthryth is perhaps the classic example of the peaceweaver gone wrong.²⁸ Where Cyneburh’s relationship with Ealhfrith may have soured, possibly due to the shifting lines of political power between her birth nation and her husband’s kingdom, Ealhflæd is an active disrupter of peace, something that likens her to the monstrous mother of Grendel in seeking revenge. Osthryth was yet another daughter of Oswiu, and appears to have been married in yet another attempt to both extend control and foster peace with the Southern Angles in Mercia. One of the youngest offspring of his relationship with Eanflæd, Osthryth is known for her marriage to Æthelred of Mercia, yet another son of Penda.

There are suggestions that Osthryth had a previous marriage before her union to Æthelred. Nowhere is it explicitly stated, but an earlier marriage between Osthryth and Eanhere, ruler of the Hwicce, would be a logical explanation for several details that are otherwise difficult to explain. Firstly, in the context of the conversion of the South Saxons, Bede records that Eanfrith was already Christian: Eanfrith’s niece Eabe was queen there, although she too had apparently failed to convert her people (HE, IV.13). Unlike with Peada, where conversion to Christianity was a condition for the engagement of Ealhflæd, Eanfrith’s religion would place him in the orbit of the ruler of Northumbria. As has also been seen, Oswiu appears to have made several matches between his children and other kingdoms, whether as an attempt to sow peace or to spread his influence: a neighbouring or subordinate kingdom to the Mercians, such as the Hwicce, could have fit with a policy of making key alliances in order to help control the region, especially in the aftermath of Penda and Peada’s deaths, and the re-emergence of Mercian independence under Wulfhere in 658. Ecgfrith may have emulated his father in this respect: such a marriage was sensible statecraft. Secondly, a late charter hints at a connection between the rulers of the Hwicce and Osthryth’s known husband, King Æthelred of Mercia, which is possibly best explained by their union being a second marriage. A late charter, purportedly of Æthelred of Mercia, refers to an Osric, a ruler of the Hwicce (fl. 676–82) as myne welbylyfod Osric (‘my well beloved Osric’).²⁹ Whilst this particular charter may be a forgery, another issued by Æthelred to Osric has a more sound basis.³⁰ In addition, the sixteenth-century antiquary John Leland in his Collectanea observes that Osric and his brother Oswald were nepotes of Æthelred.³¹ Nepotes can mean grandson or nephew, but also can be used of male descendants more generally, and therefore here could refer to them as stepsons. Understanding Osric and Oswald as Osthryth’s sons, and therefore Æthelred’s stepsons, could be a useful way of understanding the naming practices and some of the disputes over lands in the kingdom of the Hwicce. Their first-name element, os-, meaning ‘god’ or ‘deity’, would reflect the name of their Northumbrian mother, Osthryth. Finally, this connection would also explain the contention between Æthelheard, Oshere’s son, over land at Fladbury, inherited by Osthryth from her sister Ælfflæd, that Æthelred granted away, which is reclaimed in a largely authentic charter.³² Eanhere’s death would have made Osthryth once again a useful pawn for promoting the interests of her father, brothers and birth kingdom abroad, in the form of becoming queen.

This is precisely what Osthryth appears to have done as queen of Mercia. Early medieval queens occupied a fundamentally medial position: socially, the queen interceded between her people and the king; she bridged the gap between her birth kingdom and the kingdom where, by virtue of her relationship with the king, she could work to foster peace and a sense of community and belonging for their nobles. Yet with queens, there was also an inherent tendency to view her with suspicion. Klein observes how

the queen’s intermediary capacity for different peoples, institutions, and ideologies is accompanied by a dangerous ability to destroy the very bonds she fosters. Thus, unlike evil, tyrannical kings, who are often permitted to exist within their communities, queens who refuse to work toward the bridging of differences are usually forcibly reformed, exiled, or killed.³³

The foreignness of a queen could remain a barrier to her acceptance in a court, especially when such foreignness was promoted ahead of domestic concerns. Queens who were clearly intended to serve as peaceweavers, furthermore, inherently faced an even more challenging and complex situation. As discussed earlier in the example of Hildeburh, peaceweaving brides faced incredibly difficult situations. Hildeburh’s marriage to Finn of Frisia, perhaps in order to settle a blood feud, and recounted in Beowulf, results in the deaths of her husband and at least one son, as well as many of her kinsmen of the Half-Danes.

By the succession of Æthelred, the last of Penda’s sons, in 675, Osthryth was the last remaining marriageable daughter of Oswiu: Ælfflæd had been consecrated as a child oblate to the Church and Ealhflæd disappears from the historical record following her murder of her husband. As a regicide, Ealhflæd could hardly have been seen as a suitable match for another of Penda’s sons. The marriage of Osthryth to the Mercian monarch may have been one final attempt to broker an uneasy peace, as well as to exert some influence in increasingly powerful and independent Mercia: Æthelred led a raid into Kent, possibly to avenge the fates of his martyred nephews, and ravaged the see of Rochester in 676; charter evidence suggests an enlarged sphere of influence in the region of the Hwicce, among others.

The marriage of a princess from a different kingdom to become queen often brought in new connections and influences. Æthelburh of Kent brought Paulinus with her to Northumbria at her marriage in 625; Eanflæd’s return to Northumbria saw her maintain Roman traditions about the calculations of Easter despite her husband Oswiu’s Celtic Christianity, a situation not resolved until the Synod of Whitby in 664. In this respect, Osthryth was not unusual. She appears to have maintained strong connections with her natal family. While ultimately it is only conjecture, most theories regarding the foundation of Fladbury in Worcestershire involve the participation of Ælfflæd, Osthryth’s sister. Osthryth is also known for her promotion of the cult of her uncle St Oswald in newly Mercian territory. Bede recounts several miracles relating to the admission of his relics at Bardney in Lindsey. This was particularly politically significant, as Lindsey had once been an independent region, but passed between Northumbrian and Mercian control and was Mercian territory following the Battle of the Trent in 679. The imposition of Oswald’s relics could be seen as a political reassertion of Northumbrian boundaries and identity in a liminal space, like Lindsey; equally, in a recently converted dynasty, it could be read as an act of hostility by reasserting the sanctity of the Northumbrian dynasty against the descendants of Penda, who slew Oswald. In such actions, Osthryth promoted the interests of her natal family, at times in a way which may have been at odds with the interests of her subjects in Mercia. Whether such behaviour was intentionally grating and actively hostile, or merely a failed negotiation of a particularly complex and volatile situation is beyond our ability to discern. What does seem obvious, however, is that in clinging to her birth identity, Osthryth failed to foster the kind of loyalty expected of a queen, whether by not distributing treasure or land among Mercian nobles, or by overly favouring her own faction at their expense.

This represents yet another failed peaceweaving experiment, and, like others recorded by Bede, the account figures the queen as an object, rather than an active subject. Bede promotes the Church as a more successful source of peace than marriages. Following the Battle of the Trent, in which her husband Æthelred was responsible for the death of Osthryth’s brother Ælfwine, Bede celebrates how Archbishop Theodore was able to create peace:

In the ninth year of King Ecgfrith’s reign a great battle was fought between him and Æthelred, king of the Mercians, near the river Trent, and Ælfwine, brother of King Ecgfrith, was killed, a young man of about eighteen years of age and much beloved in both kingdoms; for King Æthelred had married his sister whose name was Osthryth. Although there was good reason for fiercer fighting and prolonged hostilities between the kings and between these warlike peoples, Archbishop Theodore, beloved of God, trusting in God’s help, completely extinguished this great and dangerous fire by his wholesome advice. As a result, peace was restored between the two kings and between their peoples and no further lives were demanded for the death of the king’s brother, but only the usual money compensation which was paid to the king to whom the duty of vengeance belonged.

(HE, IV.21)

The settling of a wergild to prevent further hostilities may have settled an uneasy peace for a time between the two kingdoms, but Bede glosses over the transfer of power over Lindsey to Mercia, which was also affected. Furthermore, whilst Theodore may have been able to settle the matter of Ælfwine’s death, he did not fully extinguish the enmity which the Mercian nobles felt towards the Northumbrians, and in particular, their queen. In his annalistic summary of his history in V.24, Bede records very succinctly: ‘697. Queen Osthryth was murdered by her own Mercian nobles.’

It is impossible to say what it was precisely that so incensed the Mercian nobles to rise against their own queen, but the shifting political landscape had very tangible ramifications for her life. Her marriage likely took place after her brother’s succession in 670, and possibly after the death of Eanhere in 675, but before 679 (the Battle of the Trent). By 697, when her ‘own’ Mercian nobles rebelled and murdered her, power structures had altered in an ultimately deadly way for Osthryth.

At least of some of Osthryth’s own power and standing derived from her male relations, and especially those who were still alive. Her father Oswiu may have been one of the most powerful kings in all of early England: his territory was extensive, and, combined with alliances with other neighbouring kingdoms, his influence even more so. When Ecgfrith succeeded to the Northumbrian throne at age 25, he was already a well-established sub-king, allied with the dynasty of East Anglia through his wife Æthelthryth. Osthryth’s nearest male relations were, at the time of her marriage to Æthelred, among the most formidable and powerful.

This was decidedly not the case in 697. Her closest male relations were either dead or had suffered major defeats which reduced their status and power. Ecgfrith suffered a major defeat to her husband Æthelred, at the Battle of the Trent in 679, which also claimed the life of her brother Ælfwine and occasioned the intervention of Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury. Ecgfrith’s alliance with the East Anglian dynasty also suffered a blow with the divorce of his queen Æthelthrth; this was replaced with his marriage to Eormenburh of Kent, but the tendency of Kentish kings in this era to share rule made them a less powerful and more distant ally. Finally, Ecgfrith himself perished during an ill-advised campaign against the Picts in 685. He was succeeded by a half-brother, Aldfrith, whose reputation was for learning and piety, not warfare.

Osthryth married Æthelred as part of a clear attempt to forge an uneasy peace between the two warring kingdoms and dynasties, where previous attempts had not succeeded. The strength of her brother’s rule provided a compelling reason to the Mercian nobles to respect and protect Osthryth. Kings in this era were known to intervene with considerable military force when their sisters were repudiated or dishonoured as queens in neighbouring kingdoms. Bede records how Penda intervened in the kingdom of the Gewisse, deposing Cenwealh from the throne for repudiating his wife, Penda’s sister. Up until Ecgfrith’s death, then, Osthryth could rely on protection from her male relations. Their deaths meant that she could no longer call upon them to assist – or protect – her.

This change in circumstances alone would not have been reason to murder Osthryth. Nevertheless, it is clear from the sources that remain that her policies as queen were very closely aligned with those of her brother and her birth family. Promoting the cult of Oswald in the kingdom responsible for his martyrdom may not have been the most politic of choices. The trend in saints with their own, Mercian backgrounds may have further compounded this: many of Penda’s female offspring seem to have been starting to be culted as saints themselves. After Cyneburh’s death around 680 at Castor, her sister, the virgin and saint Cyneswith, is said to have become abbess; other saints springing from Penda’s lineage tend to have later death dates, and even later cults. Osthryth appears to have failed to negotiate the delicate balance in bridging her Northumbrian identity and combining it with her status as queen of the Mercians. There are no records of her having brought any of her own retinue at her marriage, although there is good reason to suppose that she would have: her own mother maintained connections with the Kentish court, where she was mostly raised. She kept a Kentish chaplain who followed the Roman rite, rather than the Celtic rite then practised in Northumbria, and she recommended Wilfrid to relatives in Kent on his way to Rome. From what can be seen with the daughters of Cynethryth of Mercia later in the eighth century, it seems that royal daughters tended to emulate the practice of their queenly mothers when setting up their own households in new kingdoms. If Osthryth were pursuing policies which favoured her own retinue and birth kingdom at the expense of Mercian interests and nobles, that could help to explain the resentment that developed to such an extent as to occasion her murder.

In addition, the role of her own sister Ealhflæd in the murder of Peada of Mercia seems unlikely to have helped Osthryth’s reputation with her Mercian subjects. The cultural norm to demand revenge for unjust killings had not been settled by the conversion to Christianity. Theodore had to intervene in the death of Ælfwine at the Battle of the Trent to prevent a more serious feud breaking out. There is no record of any such payment, restitution, or any attempt at justice following the death of Peada. Just as Beowulf warned of the likely failure of Freawaru’s marriage to settle the peace between the Spear-Danes and the Heaðobards, Osthryth’s marriage does not seem to have quelled the feud between the Mercian and Northumbrian royal houses. She may have made a good bride, and allied Mercia with Northumbria well in the late seventh century. In addition, Osthryth’s dedication to the cult of her uncle Oswald seems to have matched Æthelred’s own piety well: he retired from the kingship to become a monk in 704 at the monastery they co-founded at Bardney. Nevertheless, clearly something about Osthryth – whether her identity, her actions, or merely her reputation – compelled Mercian nobles to murder her.³⁴ Through a combination of factors, most of which were outside of her control, Osthryth’s marriage to Æthelred of Mercia was ultimately a failure as an attempt to weave peace. Her attempts to foster familial cults may have contributed to her rejection by ‘her own’ Mercian nobles, who appear to have viewed her as remaining a Northumbrian princess, rather than a Mercian queen. Her failure to integrate and her retention of her agnatic identity in many ways anticipates the rejection of Eadburh, queen of Wessex, whose reputation remained coloured by her connections to the Mercian royal dynasty under Offa and Cynethryth in the late eighth century.

‘A tyrant after the manner of her father’: Eadburh

Ultimately, Eadburh must be regarded as a partner in yet another failed peaceweaving marriage. Her marriage to the West Saxon king Beorhtric occasioned a nearly century-long rejection of the office of queen among the West Saxons. Unlike the tales of Osthryth and Ealhflæd, who are recorded in a source that is fundamentally biased towards their dynasty, Eadburh’s story exists in an account informed by the most polemical of sources: a rival dynasty’s interpretation.

As one of the children of Offa of Mercia and his celebrated queen Cynethryth, Eadburh inherited an elevated view of queenship. Both Offa and Cynethryth’s origins are relatively obscure: a pedigree for Offa exists among the collection of Anglian genealogies but it appears to be largely fabricated.³⁵ As discussed in the previous chapter, little is known of Cynethryth’s background, but the similarity between her name and the name of Penda’s only known named queen, Cynewise, has led to some speculation that Cynethryth may have come from a similar family. If this were the case, it would help to explain the extent to which Offa promoted his wife. Cynethryth is the first queen of early England to have coinage issued in her own name and is highly visible in no fewer than 25 surviving charters, some as queen, some as mother of her son Ecgfrith, and some as abbess. A canon produced by the 786 visit of the Papal Legates further increased the power of the queen by stipulating that kings must be descended from legitimate unions.³⁶ By the time of Eadburh’s marriage, the office of queen was developing into something more akin to the position recognised in the 973 Regularis Concordia, which recognised queens with their own anointing ceremony and made them, like the king, protectors of monastic houses.³⁷ The queenship Eadburh had modelled to her in the person of her mother was influential, involved in the everyday running of the court, and possessed considerable independent power.

Eadburh’s marriage to Beorhtric does not usually crop up in discussions of conventional peaceweaving marriages because she is most usually considered in terms of political biases reacting poorly against women: her story is recorded in a history written by the victors, in which she is both nemesis and victim.³⁸ Nevertheless, when considered closely, her marriage does appear to fit the characteristics of a peaceweaving marriage. Her union with Beorhtric seems to have been intended to draw the two peoples more closely together, especially considering the adverse history between the two kingdoms. The West Saxon king Cynewulf took Berkshire from Mercian rule in 758, taking advantage of the disorganisation following the murder of the Mercian king Æthelbald, and replacement of his immediate successor Beornred in the previous year. Although Offa did not exercise nearly the same degree of control in Wessex as he did in other kingdoms like Kent, the Hwicce and Sussex, there are suggestions that he may have exercised some control, perhaps in a relationship that was mutually beneficial, with Beorhtric. In 776, Offa fought at ‘Benesingtun’ (Bensington) and seized control of the town.³⁹ Eadburh was married to Beorhtric in 789. Yet the hostilities with the later dynasty of Wessex descending from Ecgberht, and the connection between Offa’s ambitions and Beorhtric’s accession to the throne may have gone back earlier.

The annal for 755 in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is famous for containing the saga-like prose account of the internecine strife between two claimants for the West Saxon throne, Cynewulf and Cyneheard, but it ends with the succession of Offa to the Mercian throne.⁴⁰ The entry is listed in the year 755, but tells of the end of Cynewulf’s reign in 786. Some copies of the Chronicle also include an account of the Mercian transition in power, now traditionally dated to 757, in the same annal, thereby linking the two stories: two kings murdered, at least one of which was embroiled in a feud. The Chronicle reiterates this again at the entry for 784, resituating and retelling an abbreviated version of the story in the 755 annal entry, but this time introducing the lineage of Beorhtric, who seized the West Saxon throne following the feud:

[784] An. .dcclxxxiiii. Her Cyneheard ofsloh Cynewulf cyning, 7 he þær wearð ofslægen 7 .lxxxiiii manna mid him, 7 þa onfeng Behtric Westseaxna rice, 7 he ricsode .xvi. gear, 7 his lic ligeð æt Werham, 7 his rihtfederencyn gæð to Certice.

[The Year 784: in this year, Cyneheard slew king Cynewulf, and he was slain together with 84 men, and then Beorhtric succeeded to the rule of Wessex. And he ruled for 16 years, and his body lies at Wareham. His traces his ancestry to Cerdic.]⁴¹

The peaceweaving aspect of the marriage becomes more apparent when the considering the relationship between Offa and his son-in-law. Beorhtric’s succession to the West Saxon throne seems to have ushered in a spirit of cooperation between the two traditionally rival kingdoms. In 789, Offa banished Ecgberht, later king of Wessex, and the grandfather of King Alfred. Although he clearly also benefited from the removal of a rival for the throne, Beorhtric enforced this exile as well. There are no formal documents outlining what the relationship between Beorhtric and Offa constituted, although S.E. Kelly detects ‘some hint of subservience … betrayed in the three surviving charters of Beorhtric, where the royal styles are curiously humble and tentative’.⁴² Asser’s text similarly confirms the close political relationship between Offa and Beorhtric – which, according to traditions handed down by Ecgberht’s line, is attributed to Eadburh. Asser writes how Offa made the match: ‘Beorhtric, king of the West Saxons, received in marriage [Offa’s] daughter, called Eadburh. As soon as she had won the king’s friendship, and power throughout almost the entire kingdom, she began to behave like a tyrant after the manner of her father’ (V. Alfredi, c. 14).

The account given by Alfred to Asser is designed to discredit Eadburh and explain why the office of queen had been abandoned in Wessex, and does so by undermining the wife of a dynastic rival. There is considerable bias in seeking to discredit both Beorhtric and Eadburh, but the account fails to conceal that Eadburh probably was, at least at first, a rather effective queen. Before her marriage, she had witnessed charters as the daughter of the king and queen of Mercia.⁴³ To be able to muster power of the sort attributed to her suggests that she had good relationships: she won the friendship of the king, her most important relationship. For Eadburh to have power throughout the kingdom, she must have maintained a good relationship with her father and brother to protect her, but possibly also forged new relationships by a mixture of patronage and promoting their interests at court. These are skills she may have learned from her mother Cynethryth, who had the distinct advantage of having a Mercian background herself, and as a result did not have to negotiate the difficult position of mediating between her natal family and identity and her status as queen of a different kingdom in quite the same way.

The West Saxon traditions handed on by Ecgberht’s descendants clearly blame Offa and his tyrannical ways for influencing his daughter’s practice of queenship. On closer consideration, Eadburh is far more likely to have emulated her mother’s practice. Unusually, Asser and Alfred ascribe Eadburh’s monstrous behaviour as deriving from her father’s model of kingship. Other texts tend to emphasise feminine monstrous and overly assertive behaviour, especially where Offa’s queen Cynethryth is concerned. The Passio Æthelberti ascribes the murder of the East Anglian martyr and king to Cynethryth, rather than to Offa, despite clear historical indications that he benefited directly from the death. The later tradition at St Albans noted that at Æthelberht’s death without an heir, ‘thus legally, [Offa’s] realm was considerably extended’, but blame the machinations of Offa’s greedy and evil wife, Queen Thryth.⁴⁴ In this, the St Albans tradition implicitly acknowledges how the proposed marriage to Æthelberht, and the two prior marriages of his daughters Eadburh and Ælfflæd were designed to bring peace and unity.

Misogynistic leanings influenced the way that both Cynethryth and her daughter Eadburh are portrayed. Traditions at St Albans blamed Cynethryth for the murder of Æthelberht, drawing on a biblical tradition associated with John the Baptist.⁴⁵ It is hardly surprising, therefore, when Eadburh herself was blamed for the deaths of unnamed nobles as well as Beorhtric and a well-loved West Saxon noble, probably Worr, as recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 800 [recte 802].⁴⁶

The accounts of Eadburh following the death of Beorhtric come solely from the West Saxon dynasty hostile to her husband and father, but other independent sources may corroborate certain details. The account of her behaviour at Charlemagne’s court in Asser’s text may contain some kernels of truth, but seems to be a wild attempt to further discredit Eadburh and her Mercian heritage. After her husband’s death, Eadburh fled with a quantity of treasure, which may have either been her own treasure, or the royal treasury.⁴⁷ The West Saxon tradition states that Eadburh later sought refuge in Francia, where she came to Charlemagne’s court and was offered a choice of husbands – either Charlemagne, or one of his sons. In the story, Eadburh selfishly chose the younger option, and as punishment for her selfish choice, was given neither, but instead received a nunnery (V. Alfredi, c. 15). There is a kernel of truth at the core of this tradition: Offa and Charlemagne had been in negotiations for one of the Mercian princesses to wed to one of the Frankish king’s sons. The talks broke down, reportedly, because Offa insisted on a reciprocal Frankish princess bride for his son Ecgfrith.⁴⁸ The attribution of Beorhtric’s death to Eadburh is difficult to either confirm or deny: Ealhflæd’s involvement in Peada’s death demonstrates that a queen could be involved in her husband’s death, and poison was a favoured accusation to use against unpopular queens from antiquity into the modern age.⁴⁹ The account contains yet one more kernel of truth: Eadburh’s geographic peregrinations. Asser’s account in Chapter 15 of his Life of Alfred records that Eadburh spent some time as an abbess in a Frankish abbey before being ejected for having an affair with one of her countrymen, and ended her life begging in Pavia. Janet Nelson’s analysis of this information points out that there are some reasons to believe Asser’s version: Frankish abbesses tended to be royal appointments, and an entry in the Reicheneau Liber Vitae has an ‘Eadburg’ who was abbess of a convent in Lombardy. Pavia was on the traditional pilgrimage route to Rome, which was popular with early English pilgrims.⁵⁰ Eadburh’s continental peregrinations also fit with the developments in Mercia following her marriage. In 796, Offa died, leaving the throne to his son and heir Ecgfrith. Unfortunately, Ecgfrith passed away within months, ending the dynasty. With the passage of the throne to a relatively distant relative in Coenwulf, there was little to offer Eadburh on her return. Like Osthryth, the collapse of her family caused by the deaths of her nearest male relatives weakened her options to a delicate situation, thereby obliging her to seek assistance abroad.

Eadburh does seem to have been a peaceweaver in the traditional sense. Her marriage fostered an alliance and peace between two traditionally antagonistic powers among the Southumbrian kingdoms. What is more difficult to articulate is the degree to which Eadburh herself was a failed peaceweaver, in the manner of Osthryth or Ealhflæd, and the degree to which West Saxon bias has discredited her in an origin myth which explains the dynasty’s rejection of the office of queen. Joanna Story’s analysis notes how Asser’s placement of the Eadburh story is politically charged, and plays off both the story of Judith and Alfred’s own humble Mercian wife, Ealhswith.⁵¹ Judith, who was the second wife of Æthelwulf, Alfred’s father, was anointed at her marriage in her home kingdom of Francia against the traditions of her husband’s kingdom. There were a number of anxieties about Judith’s position as the potential mother of a new, rival line of sons for the West Saxon throne, which were only somewhat allayed at her marriage to her own stepson, Æthelbald of Wessex in 858.⁵² Asser’s sparse treatment of Alfred’s wife, Ealhswith, confirms that she was never accorded the title of ‘queen’. Yet both Eadburh and Ealhswith may have been familiar with the status of queens from their Mercian background and exposure to de luxe manuscripts like the Book of Nunnaminster (London, British Library, Harley MS 2965).⁵³ Where Osthryth is largely seen as blameless, her story told sympathetically by Bede as part of the saintly Northumbrian dynasty, Eadburh’s story is part of a clear slander designed to discredit Beorhtric, Eadburh and the Mercian royal family from which she came. The source material never explicitly labels her as a failed peaceweaver, but implicitly does so by blaming her for the death of her husband by accidental poisoning. It is impossible to say whether or not Eadburh was responsible for Beorhtric’s death, in this or any other manner, but given the antagonism and bias in the source, the conclusion cannot be accepted without at least some scrutiny. If it is the case that her misdeeds have been invented or amplified, the failure of Eadburh’s status as a peaceweaver may lie less in her own actions and more in the failure of her dynasty and its replacement with a thoroughly hostile one which defined itself in opposition to Offa and Beorhtric.

The account’s interfaces with the Thryth/Fremu episode in Beowulf are also striking. Eadburh, who is depicted by Alfred as injurious to the noblemen of the court on account of her pride and imperiousness, is very similar to how Offa of Angeln’s queen is presented. The poet recounts how, although she is beautiful and ‘peerless’ (ænlic), her habit of pretending injury, probably here merely insult or perhaps a reaction against the male gaze in the court, leads to the deaths of many men before she is tamed by a better king, Offa of Angeln (not to be confused with Offa of Mercia).⁵⁴ Eadburh is also accused of denouncing men, to either demand their dismissal or their death. To make the historical woman even worse, if she cannot achieve her ends via male power structures through her husband, Eadburh further resorts to poison. She is, therefore, comparatively worse than Thryth/Fremu of legend. The accusation is, however, even more a criticism and insult to her husband Beorhtric. Offa of Angeln, a famed warrior, is able to tame Thryth/Fremu into an ideal queen:

    … ðær hio syððan well

in gumstole, gode mære,

lifgesceafta lifigende breac,

hiold heahlufan wið hæleþa brego,

ealles moncynnes mine gefræge

þone selestan bi sæm tweonum,

eormencynnes … (Beowulf, ll. 1951b–7a)

[There she later prospered on the throne, enjoyed her fated life, was held in high love by the lord of warriors, he who I have heard was the best of all mankind between the two seas.]

The episode in Beowulf offers a transformation, comparing the counterexample of the imperious princess Thryth/Fremu with the generous queen she becomes under her husband’s guidance. The episode is one of the three surviving instances of the poetic term freoðuwebbe, which is notable because of how obviously it is assessed against the model of the peaceweaver. In terms of the men involved, the episode in Asser’s Life of Alfred carries the implication that had Beorhtric been a better king, he too would have transformed his wife into a docile and generous queen. The whole episode is designed to discredit Beorhtric and those descended from Offa’s dynasty, and serves to define the line of Ecgberht in opposition to their wicked ways. Yet its resonances with the Thryth/Fremu episode – the proud princess, the pretended insults, the murderous aftereffects, and her latent identity as a peaceweaver – perhaps bear greater scrutiny in precisely which details are biographical, and which drawn from legend to serve the needs of its tellers. These attacks do obscure the extent to which Eadburh was a peaceweaver. She clearly helped to draw the two kingdoms of Mercia, where she was born, and Wessex, where she was wed, together during her lifetime: in a charter documenting the exchange of land for money between Ecgfrith of Mercia and Malmesbury Abbey in 796, both Beorhtric and Eadburh witness.⁵⁵ This may be because of Malmesbury Abbey’s position within traditionally West Saxon lands, but speaks to a general greater degree of unity between Wessex and Mercia – the lands in question had been seized from the abbey by Offa. Eadburh’s ability to influence her husband and gain power throughout the kingdom reveal that she understood how to build relationships effectively and wield influence through her office of queen. Although the nearly contemporary sources portray Eadburh as a wicked queen as part of a programme of dynastic defamation, the details in the narrative – her relationships, her character, and her later travels – may have a kernel of truth at their core, which becomes more apparent when carefully considered in context

A Hypothetical Peaceweaver: Leofrun

The paradigm of the peaceweaver, largely drawn from poetic and heroic instances, clearly seems to apply in Bede’s accounts of lives of queens such as Cuthburh, Ealhflæd and Osthryth in his Ecclesiastical History. In Asser’s Life of Alfred, Eadburh is presented as a counterexample of a peaceweaver; yet, when examined carefully, it appears more likely that she was an effective queen and peaceweaver, whose reputation as queen was diminished and slandered as a propagandistic myth that helped to define the dynasty which replaced her husband’s in Wessex. In these instances, there is enough information to glean how these women may have been married as peaceweavers, and to perhaps offer an assessment of how successful they were: where Osthryth appears to have made some less than judicious choices and been a victim of circumstances, Ealhflæd seems to have intended to have woven discord and death, rather than peace.

In each of these instances, the paradigm of the peaceweaver – that is, a woman who seeks to draw her birth kingdom and her marital kingdom into greater peace and unity, often against a backdrop of previous strife or discord – has been applied to extant material. In this section, the paradigm of the peaceweaver informs a hypothesis to help understand the dynamics between Mercia and East Anglia in the late eighth century. Seeing the marriage between Æthelred I of East Anglia and his wife, named in later sources as Leofrun (which we shall use to refer to her here), as a peaceweaving marriage may help to explain several factors, and especially the actions of Offa of Mercia regarding the murder and martyrdom of her son Æthelberht of East Anglia in 794. If Leofrun had been a descendent of the Mercian royal family, and her marriage to Æthelred I a peaceweaving union, it may go some way to explain Offa’s later seizure and inheritance of East Anglia, as well as the murder of Æthelberht as a threat to the Mercian throne itself.

East Anglia was a wealthy and powerful kingdom, enriched by its trading links with the Continent, its fertile soil and connections with several powerful dynasties. Edwin of Northumbria took refuge with Rædwald during his exile from Northumbria in the early seventh century; later, Anna, the father of Æthelthryth and Seaxburh, was considered a powerful military leader, although he was killed in 654 by Penda of Mercia. Anna’s brother and successor, Æthelhere, was either allied to Penda or compelled by him to join in the ill-fated campaign into Northumbria in 655, and both perished at the Battle of Winwæd. Other æthelings seeking refuge from powerful Mercians sometimes found peace either in the East Anglian court, or in its fens. The Mercian war-leader turned saint and ætheling, Guthlac, settled in the fens around Cambridgeshire to found a hermitage around 699. Guthlac himself may have had family relatively local to the area – his hagiographer, Felix, mentions that he was descended from a tribe called the Guthlacingas among the Middle Angles (VsG, c. 10). Guthlac also hosted other Mercian exiles, such as the future king Æthelbald, whose succession he prophesied.

If we look only at kings and queens, there appear to be few connections between East Anglia and Mercia formally in the century between 650 and the succession of Offa, and the proposed match between one of his daughters and Æthelberht of East Anglia in 794 which led to the junior monarch’s death. Anna’s daughters married Northumbrian and Kentish kings; Penda’s daughter Cuthburg married a Northumbrian. There is no record of the name or identity of the wives of either Ealdwulf (r. 663–713) or Ælfwald (r. 713–49) of East Anglia, to whom the Life of St Guthlac is dedicated, although the similarity between his name and that of Æthelberht’s father Æthelred suggests that there may have been from the same dynastic branch as Anna and his brothers.

Nevertheless, there are a few connections between Mercia and East Anglia which may suggest a narrative more of cooperation than of conflict in the 150 years leading up to Æthelberht’s death. Much of the evidence consists of single bits of information without much clear connection or context; yet as a whole, and connected to the identity of Leofrun as a Mercian noblewoman, they may help to explain precisely why and how Æthelberht was such a threat to the Mercian succession. Firstly, there is a connection between the Mercian monastery at Repton and the East Anglian royal dynasty. Repton was founded by around 675 by the abbess Ælfthryth, who was presumably a member of the Mercian royal family.⁵⁶ Repton was where Guthlac entered monastic life (VsG, c. 20), and later launched his expedition to establish a hermitage in the fens in East Anglia. By the year of Guthlac’s death, the monastery, which had intimate connections with the royal family of Mercia, was headed by Ecgburh, the daughter of King Aldwulf of East Anglia (r. c. 663–713) and sister of Ælfwald (r. c. 713–49). Repton was later favoured as a royal mausoleum, hosting the remains of Æthelbald, St Wigstan (Wystan) and possibly also later Wiglaf, as discussed in Chapter 2. Queens, as well as other royal women, tended to enter, and become abbesses of, foundations with which they had some sort of family connection, especially along the maternal line. A marriage between a woman of the extended royal family not closely related to Ceolred, who was on the throne and hostile to Æthelbald, might help to explain how Ecgburh came to be abbess at one of the most important and influential early Mercian monasteries. This might also help to explain the choices of Mercian æthelings in seeking exile in territory traditionally allied with East Anglia. A family connection between a branch of the royal family, descended from Penda, but perhaps with a different mother than that of Æthelred or from a line associated with Eowa, Penda’s brother and ancestor of both Æthelbald and Offa, may have offered a relationship and thereby also some closer form of protection than previously considered.

Furthermore, during the reign of Æthelbald, there seems to have been a relative peace between East Anglia and Mercia. It is unclear whether Æthelbald demanded tribute of the kingdom, or had any formal agreement. His rule can be characterised as an overlordship, allowing several sub-kings to exist under him without any more formal agreement.⁵⁷ However, things seem to have changed during the reign of Offa, both in terms of how the Mercian supremacy came to be administered, and the nature of kingship in East Anglia. Beonna, one of the sub-kings of East Anglia in the period between 749 and roughly the 770s, started minting coinage in his name, and, where Æthelbald had been content as an overking to allow subordinate administrations to continue largely unimpeded, Offa systematically reduced and drew what had once been independent kingdoms into principalities and regions ruled by ealdormen rather than kings.⁵⁸ The Beornred whom Offa put to flight in 757 to take the Mercian throne may be related to the Beonna ruling East Anglia after Ælfwald’s death in 749.

In addition, Offa was known for ruthlessly purging possible rivals for the Mercian throne. Alcuin comments on Offa seems to have murdered any close male relations in order to smooth the way for his son’s success, and how Ecgfrith seems to have died an early death as some sort of divine punishment for it.⁵⁹ This is only noted in retrospect, and so it can be difficult to date the purges. If, however, Æthelberht of East Anglia were eliminated as part of the purges, this would imply that Æthelberht himself had some ancestry from the Mercian royal family. The most obvious source of this lineage would be his mother Leofrun, who may have herself been a Mercian noblewoman.

The fragmentary state of the survival of many of the documents and records from East Anglia, sacked heavily in Viking raids and in the following Danelaw, as well as the later damage during the dissolution of the monasteries, limits the information available for such analysis. Consequently, for those not closely related to the family of Anna and his saintly daughters, whose lives and tales were also preserved in other regions as well, documentation is patchy. This is certainly the case for the ancestry of Æthelberht of East Anglia, and, in particular, that of his mother, to whom we shall refer as Leofrun. What little is known is from later sources, which may have a kernel of truth at their core.

These later sources are lives, passions and miracles of Leofrun’s son, King Æthelberht of East Anglia. The earliest of these date from the twelfth century in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 308, sometimes attributed to Osbert of Clare. As M.R. James observed in the early twentieth century, it seems to be used as a source by later authors of similar material, and the names it cites have been less massaged to agree with Latin conventions; it may even have been composed in or near Hereford, where Æthelberht was interred and culted by as early as the early ninth century.⁶⁰ This account names her as Leofruna; later accounts name her as Leoveromia or Leoverina, both clearly variants of the earlier name, attested nine times from the tenth century in England. It seems, therefore, entirely plausible that the mother of Æthelberht and wife of Æthelred I of East Anglia was indeed called Leofrun.

There is little detail regarding Leofrun’s own background. However, what there is appears to be consistent with a royal, Mercian background. The earliest manuscript sources offers a brief account of Æthelberht’s ancestry, including the name of his mother; of his mother’s side, it is more sparse, but perhaps no less accurate: ‘The father of this king, the preceding magnificent king stood out, as his mother, LEOFRUNA, stood out, begotten by her high blood’ (VsÆthelberhti, c. 1).

Later details arise in Richard of Cirencester’s Speculum historiale de gestis regum Angliae, a fourteenth-century history. At first, such a late source could appear rather suspect. Even so, Richard’s probable connection with the remnants of Æthelberht’s cult first-hand gives us pause to reconsider the value of his information. The earliest accounts of Æthelberht’s cult detail his resting places as first Bedford, then (or perhaps concurrently) Hereford, the major site of his cult.⁶¹ However, later traditions state that Æthelberht’s head, admittedly removed from the body within hours of his death, occupied a costly reliquary at Westminster.⁶² Two of the later authors of these lives were associated with Westminster: Richard of Cirencester was a monk there, and another author, Osbert of Clare, was prior there. This makes Richard of Cirencester’s detail about Leofrun’s origins (and account of her premonitions before his death) worthy of some consideration. Osbert’s account claims that ‘His mother truly descended from illustrious Mercian kings and dukes, with nobility of mind and nobility of flesh, also adorned the dignity of her mind with her habits.’⁶³

This account, that his mother was of noble Mercian stock, chimes with hagiographic convention, as well as what is known of most early English saints, which more often than not were noble, if not royal, in ancestry. Yet there is another account that suggests that there may be some truth to this tale.

Æthelberht’s role in the story is as an innocent victim, but the details surrounding the deceit and treachery make the actions of Cwenthryth, the St Albans’ text’s rendition of Cynethryth, utterly reprehensible. It introduces Æthelberht:

There was also a certain young man to whom King Offa had conceded the kingdom of the East English because he was close to him by bloody relationship, by the name of Æthelberht, about whose virtues a certain lyrist, accustomed to singing the praises and deeds of kings, eloquently said:

The young man Æthelberht was a king, militarily powerful,

Devoted to peace, lovely in body, wise in mind. ⁶⁴

Æthelberht, by the occasion of this text’s composition, was a well-known saint, and in seeking to elevate the founder of St Albans, praises Offa and commends Æthelberht’s reputation, thereby casting further blame and castigation on the wicked queen who murders him. However, the detail that ‘Offa conceded the kingdom of the East English because he was close to him by blood relationship’ is tantalising. Could it be that Leofrun was of Mercian extraction, and therefore the blood relationship between Offa and Æthelberht was matrilineal?

This is where using the concept of the peaceweaver, and hypothesising that Leofrun was of Mercian background may help to explain the events. Such an explanation must remain theoretical, as there is no additional material available by which it could be confirmed. However, it does offer several advantages as an explanatory theory. Firstly, hypothesising one or more marriages between Mercian royal women (one in the early eighth century to Ealdwulf; one in the mid-eighth century, to Æthelred I) helps to explain some other documented relationships that seem at first to be a little awry. The earlier match helps to explain the relationship between Ecgburh and the Mercian royal monastic foundation at Repton; another, later union could potentially justify Offa’s anxieties regarding Æthelberht’s legitimacy and threat to Ecgfrith on the Mercian throne.

This theory could clarify even further details regarding the martyrdom. One is what happened to Æthelberht’s body after his death. The Secgan, a list of resting places of saints compiled by the ninth century, notes that Æthelberht was buried at Bedford before his translation to Hereford.⁶⁵ There is no official documentation that there was any such foundation until 971, and Rollason expects that the earliest date of foundation would have been following Edward the Elder’s recovery and fortification of the town in 919. Yet two separate traditions surrounding Æthelberht converge to suggest that both Offa and Æthelberht were interred for some time at Bedford, and John Blair’s wide-scale reassessment of the early English landscape in Building Anglo-Saxon England readily entertains the view that St Paul’s at Bedford was ‘an important royal minster’ by the close of the eighth century.⁶⁶ The Lives of the Two Offas, produced by the community of St Albans, who had a clear desire to bury Offa as their founder, suggests that it was Ecgfrith’s interference which allowed such a disappointment as Offa’s body being interred elsewhere.⁶⁷ Even so, again proposing that Leofrun shared her ancestry with Offa’s royal line could help to explain how these two apparent royal rivals – one murdered, one murderer – came to lie in such proximity. Barbara Yorke has noted how the Mercian kings particularly opted to be buried at royal nunneries, whose abbesses were usually members of the royal family.⁶⁸ Royal nunneries in the seventh and eighth centuries frequently had an explicit function to help promote the line’s cultic status, as can be seen with the daughters of Anna, as well as later abbesses. Alan Thacker has noted how, among the pre-Viking saints of Mercia, Æthelberht’s cult is ‘unique … in being fostered at episcopal churches rather than minsters’ and wonders whether it implies ‘that the saint was associated with resistance to Mercian overlordship in both provinces [Hereford and Hoxne, Suffolk] or, at the very least, that Offa, to save face after his crime sponsored or tolerated the cult in politically sensitive areas?’⁶⁹ Yet, if Leofrun had been of royal Mercian descent, she may have had a connection with Hereford. Equally, Offa’s behaviour in apparently espousing the cult of a political rival would have a clear and obvious parallel in the behaviour of two other kings who had murdered closely related male rivals and whose mothers’ female relations (often queens) helped to address the wrongdoing: Oswiu of Northumbria and Ecgberht of Kent. Oswiu murdered his political rival, Oswine (of Deira), the brother of Eanflæd, Oswiu’s queen. As wergild and to appease his wife, Oswiu donated land for a foundation at Gilling (HE, III. 24). Similarly, as recounted in the Kentish Royal Legend, Ecgberht of Kent summoned their sister Domne Eafe from her queenship in greater Mercia to work out an agreement, which led to the foundation of Minster-in-Thanet. Offa’s tolerance of hostile cult centres in greater Mercia, as well as his burial at presumably the same location in Bedford, all make sense if Leofrun is considered to be of royal Mercian descent and married to help weave peace between East Anglia and Mercia in the early to mid-eighth century.

There does seem to have been an extended period of peace between Mercia and East Anglia in the eighth century, which could be at least partially explained by a peaceweaving marriage that yielded Æthelberht. As we have seen, the sheer number of attested failed peaceweaving marriages indicates that they were no guarantee of peace between previously feuding kingdoms. However, there are other examples of women whose relationships as queens do seem to have fostered greater union. For example, Osgyth appears to have been married in order to draw the kings of Essex into closer orbit with Mercia. While Offa of Mercia seemed to be at great pains to increase his territory and status, much of this seems to have taken place to the south and west, and a later Mercian king, Beornwulf, was killed in conflict with East Anglia in 825.⁷⁰

Finally, the elevated position of Cynethyrth in Offa’s rule may also help to explain how, if Leofrun were of Mercian royal extraction, Æthelberht posed a credible threat to Ecgfrith’s rule, and why it was politically expedient to purge him. Cynethryth’s ancestry has been theorised to trace to the dynasty associated with Penda. Choosing a queen from a powerful family, whether domestic or foreign, could muster support for the king, as well as any offspring and heirs from their union. For Offa, who may have had ancestry from among the Hwicce, an alliance with a family tied to Penda may have been particularly important.⁷¹ If Cynethryth had her own male relatives, who would have also had a claim to the throne as æthelings descended from Penda, her marriage may have been crucial in securing their support for both her husband and her son as his heir.

Furthermore, developments in the eighth century enhanced the position of the queen. The Legatine Canons produced and witnessed in 786 by the Mercian and Northumbrian courts included a particular emphasis on promoting legitimate marriages, and debarring the children of illegal marriages from inheriting. These canons had particularly important ramifications on the Mercian succession, as seen in Chapter 2 with the late eighth- and ninth-century queens and their offspring. The report explicitly stipulated that kings must descend from legitimate unions.⁷² If Offa’s son, Ecgfrith stood to benefit from this canon, then so did Æthelberht, and particularly if his mother, Leofrun, the queen of Æthelred I of East Anglia, were of a royal Mercian background herself. Mercian royal women in the eighth century arguably occupied an unusually prominent position. From the issuing of coinage in Cynethryth’s own name, to the relatively high frequency of Mercian queens and princesses witnessing charters, to the ambitions of wily monastic women disputing with powerful kings and even the archbishop of Canterbury, royal women in Mercia were developing resilient and robust means of accessing power. Hypothesising that Leofrun was of Mercian extraction offers more compelling reason to rationalise Offa’s assassination of an upcoming political rival. Any legislation that promoted the status of Ecgfrith was likely to also benefit Æthelberht.

There is remarkably little material to work with when attempting to discuss the life of Leofrun, the queen of Æthelred I of East Anglia. The life of her son has been shaped into material to present him as a martyr and saint, and so adopts many of the hagiographical motifs regarding mothers of saints. According to the sources, she was nobly born, and raised him well. Richard of Cirencester’s suggestion that her name was some form of Leofrun may or may not be based in tradition; whilst there are over a thousand names that begin in the prototheme Leof-, only one can be said to date to the mid-to-late eighth century in which Leofrun is said to have lived: a Leofwine, a bishop who wrote along with Boniface to urge Æthelbald of Mercia to reform his behaviour, who is known from only one manuscript from the twelfth century.⁷³ There are more from later centuries, where there are simply more records of names.

However, applying the model of the peaceweaver to the information that does exist, including the information about the death of her son Æthelberht, can provide a useful hypothesis and explanation for many of the details that do survive regarding his death. Firstly, as a late eighth-century king, it is most likely that Æthelberht’s father, himself a king, was legitimately married to his mother, Æthelred I’s queen. Traditions suggesting that Leofrun was of Mercian extraction help to explain how Æthelberht may have been eliminated as part of Offa’s dynastic purges in order to smooth the succession for his anointed heir, Ecgfrith. They also help to rationalise apparently conflicting but early details about how and where he was buried, as well as the attempts by Offa and his successors to incorporate East Anglia into the greater Mercian hegemony as dynastic heirs of their last king, Æthelberht.

Conclusion

The paradigm of the peaceweaver is one frequently applied to high-status women in early England, derived from a mixture of literary sources and anthropological studies. The peaceweaver is, in the broadest sense, someone who uses his or her relationships to bring peace in an often unstable environment. She (or he) is also usually in a high-status position, such as queen. Still, there is a fundamental tension in the person of the peaceweaver. The queens explored as peaceweavers here often married in circumstances riddled with active conflict, as with Cyneburh and Ealhflæd, or in which a clear imbalance of power existed between the two parties, as with Osthryth, Eadburh, and possibly Leofrun. There were certain actions a queen could take to foster a sense of unity between her peoples, including giving patronage, and promoting her own retinue. The most important aspect of a growing unity, however, was the production of an heir, a flesh-and-blood representation of the unifying relationship of marriage. Of the queens examined in this section, only two are known to have had offspring: Osthryth and Leofrun. Yet the dynamics of the union and the peace brokered by it fundamentally lay within the control of a queen’s male relations: her father, brothers, cousins, husband, sons and nobles. As such, it is almost a misnomer entirely to call these women themselves peaceweavers, freoðuwebbe, as they appear to be more like the friðusibbe used to describe Wealhtheow in Beowulf, a peace pledge: an object, rather than an agent. This may be, in part, a consequence of the types of written sources we must rely upon, which often reflect the biases of their authors and contemporary audiences, and tend to devalue the position of women in society.

The concept of the peaceweaver seems to be evident in historical texts like Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, although not all authors wished to draw the status of the peaceweaver into the forefront of their discussions. In Bede’s case, his systemic devaluation of the role of queens as peaceweavers is part of his bias privileging ecclesiastic and male relationships; in the case of Eadburh in Asser’s Life of Alfred, her queenship has been devalued in its peaceweaving features as part of the biases of his source Alfred, whose dynasty was set up in opposition to that of her husband Beorhtric. However, by reading the sources carefully against the model of the peaceweaver, we learn more about these women and their experiences as queens.

The concept can also be useful as a theory to explore and explain other circumstances. The details known about the mother of Æthelberht of East Anglia, Leofrun, are few and often of questionable veracity. Yet, when these details are combined with what is known of Æthelberht’s story, especially in light of Mercian succession politics in the late eighth century, the theory of the peaceweaving bride offers an explanation that helps to unify and account for many of the extant details.

The relationship a queen had between her birth kingdom and that of her marriage was one of the most essential and significant components of her lived experience as a queen. The relationship she had with her court could literally be a matter of life and death, as it was for Osthryth. As a natural mediator across boundaries, peoples and identities, the queen was well situated to resolve fractious situations and broker peace by forging meaningful relationships across traditional borders, whether geographic, racial, or religious. In some instances, these could be successful. Osgyth’s marriage to Sighere of Essex appears to have secured a lasting peace and friendly relationship between their two royal families, which lasted at least another generation. In the others, the factors which had led to a contentions relationship in the first place – whether prolonged, intergenerational revenge plots or territorial disputes – more often than not overcame the efforts of the individual queen, and she, and her offspring, became victims of the conflicts they were intended to quell.

Notes

1. Francis Leneghan, The Dynastic Drama of Beowulf, Anglo-Saxon Studies 39 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2020), 78–83; Francis Leneghan, ‘The Poetic Purpose of the Offa-Digression in Beowulf’, Review of English Studies, New Series, 60, no. 246 (2009): 538–60, argues that the vignette is to ‘provide context and meaning’ to the hero of the main plot line; Megan Cavell offers an overview of the term in conjunction with its other appearances in the Old English poetic corpus in Weaving Words and Binding Bodies: The Poetics of Human Experience in Old English Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016).
2. Jane Chance, Woman as Hero in Old English Literature (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986); Stacy S. Klein, Ruling Women: Queenship and Gender in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2006) 100–105; Cavell, Weaving Words and Binding Bodies.
3. Larry M. Sklute, ‘Freoðuwebbe in Old English Poetry’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 71, no. 4 (1970): 534–41; Cavell, Weaving Words and Binding Bodies, 290.
4. Stephanie Hollis, Anglo-Saxon Women and the Church: Sharing a Common Fate (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1992), 225–27.
5. Klein, Ruling Women, 122–23.
6. George Philip Krapp and Elliot Van Kirk Dobbie, eds, The Exeter Book, vol. 3, 6 vols, Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1936), 149–53.
7. Cynewulf’s borrowings are a key part of how he has been dated and localised: see Robert Denis Fulk, ‘Cynewulf: Canon, Dialect, and Date’, in The Cynewulf Reader, ed. Robert E. Bjork, Basic Readings in Anglo-Saxon England 4 (London: Routledge, 2001), 3–26; Andy Orchard, ‘Both Style and Substance: The Case for Cynewulf’, in Anglo-Saxon Styles, eds Catherine E. Karkov and Brown George Hardin (Binghamton, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003), 271–305; Andy Orchard, ‘Alcuin and Cynewulf: The Art and Craft of Anglo-Saxon Verse’, Journal of the British Academy 8 (2020): 295–399, especially pages 324–45.
8. Robert E. Bjork, The Old English Poems of Cynewulf, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 23 (London: Harvard University Press, 2013). All translations will be taken from this edition, unless otherwise noted.
9. On the ‘soldiers of Christ’ metaphor, see Michael Lapidge and Michael Herren, Aldhelm: The Prose Works (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1979), 161; Hollis, Anglo-Saxon Women and the Church, 82–97; Clare Lees and Gillian R. Overing, Double Agents: Women and Clerical Culture in Anglo-Saxon England, Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), 150–64.
10. Not all readings recognise Wealhtheow as an ideal queen. For a summary of views see Leneghan, The Dynastic Drama of Beowulf, 72–6; Jane Chance, ‘The Structural Unity of Beowulf: The Problem of Grendel’s Mother’, in New Readings on Women in Old English Literature (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 248–62; Joyce Hill, ‘ “Þæt Wæs Geomuru Ides!” A Female Stereotype Examined’, in New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, eds Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 235–47; Klein discusses Wealhtheow as a potential peaceweaver in Ruling Women, 103.
11. Chance, ‘Structural Unity of Beowulf’, 250–57.
12. Leneghan, Dynastic Drama, 68–72; Chance, ‘Structural Unity of Beowulf’, 251–2, 255–7.
13. Alaric Hall, ‘Hygelac’s Only Daughter: A Present, a Potentate and a Peaceweaver in Beowulf’, Studia Neophilologica 78, no. 1 (June 2006): 81–7, https://doi.org/10.1080/00393270600774719; Peter S. Baker, Honour, Exchange and Violence in Beowulf, Anglo-Saxon Studies (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2013).
14. Klein discusses religious conversions generally, following the earlier work of Mayr-Harting and Wallace-Hardill, Ruling Women, 26; Hollis evaluates the dynamics of these two marriages, Anglo-Saxon Women and the Church, 237.
15. Klein, Ruling Women, 23–5, 37, 45; Hollis, Anglo-Saxon Women and the Church, 226–42; Máirín MacCaron, ‘Royal Marriage and Conversion in Bede’s Historia Gentis Anglorum’, The Journal of Theological Studies, New Series, 68 (2017): 650–70.
16. D.W. Rollason, ‘Lists of Saints’ Resting-Places in Anglo-Saxon England’, Anglo-Saxon England 7 (December 1978): 61–93, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0263675100002866, at 68; Patrick Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature in Western England, 600–800, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 239–42.
17. William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum: The History of the English Kings, eds R.M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom, trans. R.A.B. Mynors, vol. 1, 2 vols, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), I. 64 62; Carl Horstmann, ed., The Lives of Women Saints of Our Contrie of England, and Also Some Other Lives of Holie Women Written by Some of the Auncient Fathers, Early English Text Society, Original Series 86 (London: Truber, 1886), viii–xiii.
18. Horstmann, Lives of Women Saints, 71–2.
19. Rollason, ‘Lists of Saints’ Resting-Places in Anglo-Saxon England’, 66; the notice of their translation is also in the ‘E’ manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
20. For a further discussion of Ealhfrith, see Hollis, Anglo-Saxon Women and the Church, 227–8 and 236.
21. On the representation of conversionary marriages in Bede’s Historia, see Hollis 224–30; Klein, Ruling Women 37, 45–8; MacCaron, ‘Royal Marriage and Conversion in Bede’.
22. Bede’s list excludes many other noteworthy kings, probably as a result of a mixture of a lack of sources and his own political biases, on which see Stephen Fanning, ‘Bede, Imperium, and the Bretwaldas’, Speculum 66, no. 1 (1991): 1–26.
23. Walter Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550–800): Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede, and Paul the Deacon (Guildford: Princeton University Press, 1988), 240, 252–3; Nicholas J. Higham, (Re-)Reading Bede: The Ecclesiastical History in Context (London: Routledge, 2006), 145–6.
24. Craig, ‘Oswiu’, suggests the match was part of Oswiu’s policy of expanding his circle of influence, much as with his own match to Eanflæd in 642; it is also possible that the marriage, which took place with Penda very much in the ascendent, was in fact brokered, or at least accepted, by the Mercian king, at least initially.
25. David Dumville, ‘ “The Northumbrian Liber Vitae”: London, British Library, MS. Cotton Domitian A.Vii, Folios 15–24 & 25–45, the Original Text’, in Anglo-Saxon Essays, 2001–2007, Studies on Anglo-Saxon Culture (Aberdeen: The Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies, 2007), esp. 123.
26. Della Hooke, The Anglo-Saxon Landscape: The Kingdom of the Hwicce (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 11, 84–5, 134, 136; Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, 92–3, 118–19.
27. Cavell, Weaving Words and Binding Bodies, 292–5; Chance, ‘Structural Unity of Beowulf’, 251–7.
28. The scenario surrounding Osthryth is also discussed in detail in Klein, Ruling Women, 46–7 and 51; Hollis, Anglo-Saxon Women and the Church 230–37.
29. H.P.R. Finberg, The Early Charters of Wessex, Studies in Early English History 3 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1964) at 252–4; further discussion and text also available at S74 in Peter Sawyer et al., eds, Anglo-Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and Bibliography, revised and digitised (London: Royal Historical Society, 1968), https://esawyer.lib.cam.ac.uk/about/about.html.
30. Finberg, The Early Charters of Wessex, 58.
31. John Leland, Antiquarii de Rebus Britannicis Collectanea, vol. 1, 6 vols (London: Gvl. & J. Richardson, 1770), 240.
32. H.P.R. Finberg, The Early Charters of the West Midlands, 2nd edn (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1972), no. 72; see also Sawyer et al., Anglo-Saxon Charters, S1252; the date of Eanhere’s death is unknown, but by around 675, Osric attests charters and is followed by Oshere around 680. For an alternative discussion connected with Bishop Oftfor, see Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, 33–8 and 92–3.
33. Klein, Ruling Women, 5.
34. Pierre Chaplais advocates the theory that Guthlac was involved in the murder, ‘The Letter from Bishop Wealdhere of London to Archbishop Brihtwold of Canterbury: The Earliest Original “Letter Close” Extant in the West’, in Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts and Libraries: Essays Presented to N.R. Ker, eds Malcolm B. Parkes and Andrew G. Watson (London: Scolar Press, 1978), 3–24; see further argument regarding Guthlac’s involvement in Osthryth’s regicide in Stefany Wragg, ‘The Early Texts of the Cult of Saint Guthlac’, English Studies 100, no. 3 (2019): 253–72.
35. David N. Dumville, ‘The Anglian Collection of Royal Genealogies and Regnal Lists’, Anglo-Saxon England 5 (December 1976): 23–50, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0263675100000764; for further discussion of Offa’s genealogy, see Francis Leneghan, ‘Royal Wisdom and the Alfredian Context of “Cynewulf and Cyneheard” ’, Anglo-Saxon England, no. 39 (2011): 71–104, esp. 80–81.
36. Ernst Dümmler, ed., Epistolae Merowingici et Karolini Aevi, vol. II, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Berlin: Weidmann, 1892), 23–3; for discussions of the various implications in different kingdoms, see Catherine Cubitt, Anglo-Saxon Church Councils, c. 650–c. 850 (London: Leicester University Press, 1995), 167; Pauline Stafford, ‘The Political Women of Mercia, Eighth to Early Tenth Centuries’, in Mercia: An Anglo-Saxon Kingdom in Europe, eds Michelle Brown and Carol A. Farr. Studies in the Early History of Europe. (London: Leicester University Press, 2001), 37–41; Leneghan, ‘The Alfredian Context of “Cynewulf and Cyneheard” ’ .
37. Pauline Stafford, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1983), 121–34 and 145–7; Barbara Yorke, Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses (London: Continuum, 2003), 169; Klein, Ruling Women, 173–4; Janet L. Nelson, ‘Early Medieval Rites of Queen-Making and the Shaping of Medieval Queenship’, in Queens and Queenship in Medieval Europe, ed. Anne Duggan (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1997), 301–16.
38. Pauline Stafford, ‘The King’s Wife in Wessex 800–1066’, Past and Present 91, no. 1 (1981): 3–27, at 3–4; Stafford, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers, 134; Joanna Story, Carolingian Connections: Anglo-Saxon England and Carolingian Francia, c. 750–860, Studies in Early Medieval Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 110–12; Stephanie Hollis discusses Eadburh as “an inverted peaceweaver” in Anglo-Saxon Women and the Church, 152–3 and 188.
39. G.P. Cubbin, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Vol. 6 MS D, vol. 6 (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 1996), 15.
40. For more detailed discussion of the connection between the Mercian and West Saxon material, see Leneghan, ‘The Alfredian Context of “Cynewulf and Cyneheard” ’.
41. Cubbin, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Vol. 6 MS D, 16.
42. The charters in question are Sawyer et al., Anglo-Saxon Charters, S267, S268 and S269. Susan E. Kelly, ‘Offa (d. 796)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004; for further discussion, see Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge, trans., Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources (London: Penguin, 1983), 235–6; Pauline Stafford, ‘The King’s Wife in Wessex 800–1066’, Past and Present 91, no. 1 (1981): 3–27.
43. Eadburh witnesses in three charters, S127, S149 and S269; each of these are controversial in their authenticity and there is no consensus on the accuracy of the material in the text. In S127, dated before her marriage, she witnesses as ‘Eadburga virgo’; in S269, she witnesses as ‘Eadburga regina’. See Sawyer et al., Anglo-Saxon Charters.
44. Michael Swanton, ed., The Lives of the Two Offas (Crediton: The Medieval Press, 2010), 85–100.
45. Matthew Firth, ‘The Character of the Treacherous Woman in the Passiones of Early Medieval English Royal Martyrs’, Royal Studies Journal 7, no. 1 (2020): 1–21, at 5.
46. Cubbin, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Vol. 6 MS D, 18; Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, 72.
47. Stafford, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers, 104–5.
48. Joanna Story, Carolingian Connections, 110–12, 188; Barbara Yorke, Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England (London: Routledge, 1990), 115–18.
49. Jo Eldridge Carney, ‘Poisoning Queens in Early Modern Fact and Fiction’, in Scholars and Poets Talk about Queens, eds Carole Levin and Christine Stewart-Nuñez, Queenship and Power (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), 269–84.
50. Janet L. Nelson, ‘Eadburh [Eadburga] (Fl. 789–802)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004.
51. Story, Carolingian Connections, 110–12.
52. Stafford, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers, 168–70.
53. Michelle P. Brown, ‘Mercian Manuscripts? The “Tiberius” Group and Its Historical Context’, in Mercia: An Anglo-Saxon Kingdom in Europe, Continuum Studies in Medieval History (London: Continuum, 2001), 278–94, at 288.
54. Leneghan, ‘The Poetic Purpose of the Offa-Digression in Beowulf’, 547–53; Leneghan, Dynastic Drama, 79–83.
55. Sawyer et al., Anglo-Saxon Charters, S149.
56. On Ælfthryth, see David Parsons, ‘The Mercian Church: Archaeology and Topography’, in Mercia: An Anglo-Saxon Kingdom in Europe, eds Michelle P. Brown and Carol A. Farr, Continuum Studies in Medieval History (London: Leicester University Press, 2001), 50–68, at 56; Chaplais, ‘Letter from Bishop Wealdhere’; Dorothy Whitelock, ed., English Historical Documents c. 500–1042, 2nd edn, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1996), 843–5.
57. Frank Merry Stenton, ‘The Supremacy of the Mercian Kings’, English Historical Review 33 (1918): 433–52; David N. Dumville, ‘Essex, Middle Anglia and the Expansion of Mercia in the South-East Midlands’, in The Origins of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, ed. Stephen Bassett, Studies in the Early History of Britain (London: Leicester University Press, 1989), 123–40, at 132.
58. Williams, ‘Mercian Coinage’; Kelly, ‘Offa (d. 796)’.
59. Dümmler, Epistolae Karolini Aevi 178–80, trans in Alcuin, Alcuin of York, trans. Stephen Allott (York: William Sessions, 1974), 57–9 at 58.
60. M.R. James, ‘Two Lives of St. Ethelbert, King and Martyr’, The English Historical Review 32, no. 126 (1917): 214–44, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/XXXII.CXXVI.214.
61. Alan Thacker, ‘Kings, Saints and Monasteries in Pre-Viking Mercia’, Midland History 10, no. 1 (1985): 1–25; D.W. Rollason, ‘The Cults of Murdered Royal Saints in Anglo-Saxon England’, Anglo-Saxon England 11 (1983): 1–22.
62. James, ‘Two Lives of St. Ethelbert, King and Martyr’, 216.
63. Brian Briggs, ‘The Life and Works of Osbert of Clare’ (PhD, University of St Andrews, 2006), 217.
64. Swanton, The Lives of the Two Offas, 89–90.
65. Rollason, ‘List of Saints’ Resting Places’, discussion at 64, 90.
66. John Blair, Building Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018), 238.
67. Swanton, The Lives of the Two Offas, discussion at c–ci and 123–5.
68. Barbara Yorke, ‘The Burial of Kings in Anglo-Saxon England’, in Kingship, Legislation and Power in Anglo-Saxon England, eds Gale R. Owen-Crocker and Brian W. Schneider, Publications of the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies 13 (Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2013), 237–58, at 248–50.
69. Thacker, ‘Pre-Viking Mercia’, 16–18.
70. For a discussion of the charters documenting Offa’s interest in the region, see Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, 159–68.
71. Kelly, ‘Offa (d. 796)’.
72. Dümmler, Epistolae Karolini Aevi, 23–4; see discussion in Cubitt, Anglo-Saxon Church Councils, c. 650-c. 850, 158–9 and 167.
73. ‘Leofwine 7 – [746] x [747]’, in The Prospography of Anglo-Saxon England, http://pase.ac.uk/jsp/pdb?dosp=VIEW_RECORDS&st=PERSON_NAME&value=11097&level=1&lbl=Leofwine, accessed 2 May 2021.