Finding Stories in Legends: The Anglo-Saxon World

A royal son, in defiance of his frail and useless father, released the king’s prisoner from jail and married her, before leading the kingdom in an heroic fight against the invaders. A king went to war because his sister had been mistreated. A princess was accused of killing her little brother and her punishment was that her eyeballs fell out. A teenaged king was found in bed on his wedding night with his wife and her mother…

These are all tales worthy of books. Even Films maybe. But they’re tales of Anglo-Saxons, so you might not have heard of them. 

It’s less true now, thanks to The Vikings TV series and The Last Kingdom – TV series and books - but the Anglo-Saxon period has at times suffered from a lack of interest. 

But why? A bit of shameless name-dropping here: over lunch one day, Fay Weldon told me that she thought it had a fair bit to do with the costumes. The Tudors, for example, had exquisite clothing and accurate paintings which can be used to reproduce the garments for telly shows. The Anglo-Saxons left only drawings which lacked perspective and detail and yes, it’s fair to say that in comparison, their clothes were a shade less flamboyant.

There’s a big line, too, drawn across history and making a cultural and documentary barrier: 1066. For a long time, the Anglo-Saxons were separated from us by that line, seen as a people from a far-off, almost mythical world. The ‘Dark Ages’ is now termed the ‘Early Medieval’ period but that tends to mean that the Anglo-Saxons are presumed to have had the same medieval ideas as the Normans, when in fact their laws, particularly relating to women, were a lot more enlightened.

I’m a historian, so I like to sift and sieve, trying to tease the facts from a jumble of chronicles written by people who had a political agenda and told the stories from their own point of view. But I’m an author, too – so I like to get behind the facts and envisage the real people.

Athelstan, from St Bede's Life of 
St Cuthbert

Scenarios described in the opening paragraph have already formed the basis of two of my novels. 

Penda was a pagan warlord who fought against the Northumbrian kings. Bede, a Northumbrian, naturally enough didn’t have much in the way of pleasant things to say about him. But tucked away in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People are a couple of nuggets about Penda: he was tolerant of Christians and he went to war because a neighbouring king repudiated his wife, who happened to be Penda’s sister. Two short sentences allowed me to build up a picture of a man whose motives for war were much less clear-cut and not necessarily driven by bigotry. A man loyal, above all else, to his family. This man intrigued me.

The Venerable Bede

To miss out on Anglo-Saxon history is to miss out on a treat. Such a wealth of stories, such an array of characters…

That three-in-a-bed romp? Well, it may or may not be completely true, but as an opening chapter it served me well. The alleged incident caused widespread fall-out and shaped the politics of tenth-century England. And the novel it inspired also includes the next king’s wife who just happened to be accused of murdering an abbot, colluding with the king in the killing of her first husband, oh, and that of her stepson too. Those women made rather sumptuous ‘bookends’! Behind the fruity gossip though, were a young woman whose reputation was besmirched, and a queen who had to give up two of her children when she married the king, and then lost another when he was still an infant.

King Edgar, from the New Minster
Charter, 966

Another woman whose life story packs a metaphorical punch is Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, daughter of Alfred the Great. She ruled a country in all but name and was instrumental in holding back the Viking onslaught. She probably never wielded a sword yet her story is fascinating none the less. How did she, who was only half-Mercian and a woman, manage to command the loyalty of the Mercian troops? I’ve pondered the paradox of her status many times, in fiction, nonfiction, and even on the ‘stage’.

I still have questions. Why was this remarkable woman so little remarked upon? Her leadership of a kingdom, whether as a politician or a sword-swinging warrior-woman, was unprecedented. Yet the chroniclers either took this completely in their stride, or, with a couple of exceptions, ignored it all together. I couldn’t not write her story.

Æthelflæd, from a 14thC
Genealogical Chronicle

All of my fiction happens to be set in Mercia, the ancient kingdom of the Midlands. So, having written three novels, I realised that I had enough material, along with my original undergrad notes and research books, to undertake the telling of the story of Mercia itself. Here I was able to search for the truth behind such legends as:

Offa – not just a dyke-builder but a major player on the international stage, getting himself involved in a trade war with the emperor, Charlemagne. (Okay, there was a little bit of murder, too…)

Also from Mercia were Lady Godiva - did she really ride naked through the streets of Coventry? – and Eadric Streona, whose name means ‘The Grasper’ and who turned round and changed sides so often during the wars with Cnut that he must have got positively dizzy. In the end, Cnut ordered that Eadric should be paid what was owed him, and one can imagine how he then drew his finger across his throat as he gave the command.

My photo of the Godiva Statue in Coventry

Exciting as these tales are, the Anglo-Saxons were so much more than this. Their world was not one of ‘sword and sorcery.’ They weren’t illiterate heathens (well, Penda was, but this didn’t make him bad); they were real people, whose laws were sophisticated and whose metal-working skills were exquisite. (Think Staffordshire Hoard or the Sutton Hoo treasures.) Their love of tales and drama means that there is a wealth of material from which to draw. Some of those tales are indeed lurid, but it doesn’t take much scratching to reveal the human stories underneath. 

So many of the stories seemed to concern women that I soon had enough to write another nonfiction book, this time concentrating on those women and trying to separate the facts from the fiction of the later chroniclers.

Sometimes it is merely a footnote: the main character of one of my novels had no recorded wife. But a woman is mentioned as having been deprived of property by his successor. Was she his widow? If they weren’t married, did they have a relationship? Writing historical fiction means being guided by the facts, but sometimes it requires reading between the lines, too. Look closely and there you’ll find the stories.

You can find all my books and stories HERE

[A version of this article first appeared on the blog of Mary Anne Yarde  in 2019]