Happy New Year!
January already and the start of 2025. January in several languages is pretty much instantly recognisable:
French: Janvier
Italian: Gennaio
Spanish: Enero
These of course are 'Romance' languages.
What of the Teutonic?
German (and Danish): Januar
Not much change there, really.
How about Welsh then?
That's Ionawr, so again, you can see the similarity.
In Anglo-Saxon times, though, January was Æfterra Gēola "After Yule", or "Second Yule" and it makes sense, doesn't it?
The Old English months of the year are not so much names as descriptors, and a lot of Old English seems to be a case of 'say what you see', so that we have earmboga for elbow - literally 'arm bow', ēagduru for window - literally 'eye door', and mereswīn for dolphin or porpoise - literally 'mere swine' (mere being a body of water).
The lovely image of the snowdrops at the top of the post reminds me too how many Old English names for flowers/plants are almost identical to our modern words. See if you can work out what these are: cūslyppe, grundswylige, īfig, oxanslyppe, rōse
[they are: cowslip, groundsel, ivy, oxslip, rose]
The Old English Martyrology gives us some dates for January: January 9th is the Feast of St Pega, the sister of Guthlac the Hermit. He was the son of a Mercian warrior and he lived in a hermitage at Crowland in Lincolnshire and was great friends with the then-exiled Mercian king, Æthelbald. You can read about those two men in my book Mercia: The Rise and Fall of a Kingdom, about Pega in Women of Power in Anglo-Saxon England, and there is a blog post about Crowland HERE
January 20th is the Feast of St Sebastian, famously shot through with arrows. When the emperor, Diocletian, found that this had not killed Sebastian, he then had him battered with poles until he gave up the ghost.
An equally gruesome tale is that of St Agnes, whose Feast day is 21st January. The OE Martyrology tells us that she was martyred aged just thirteen. A Roman reeve tried to force her to become his son's wife and when Agnes refused he took her, naked, to a brothel, where she was given a garment by an angel so fine no 'fuller, that is no cloth-worker, could ever have produced on earth.' The reeve's son tried to rape her in the brothel but he was attacked by devils. She was not safe, however, for she was then accused of witchcraft and had a sword thrust down her throat.
On 30th January, 926, the Viking leader of York, Sihtric Cáech, married the sister of Athelstan of Wessex at Tamworth in Mercia. That sister was probably Edith of Polesworth, and you can read a blog post about her HERE.
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| The gatehouse at Polesworth Abbey - my photo |
But perhaps the most famous event in January is one that happened early on in the month, in the year 1066. The death of Edward the Confessor on January 5th really sounded the death knell for Anglo-Saxon England. He had no children, and the witan, the king's council, elected his brother-in-law, Harold Godwineson, as king. Perhaps all would have been well, perhaps Harold would have died in his bed and been succeeded by his legitimate son (he had a whole family with his hand-fast partner, known as Edith the Swan-neck but actually called Eadgifu) who was said also to be called Harold. We are told that, at the time of the battle of Hastings, the king's official wife was pregnant and later gave birth to this young Harold. That wife was Ealdgyth, a Mercian, granddaughter of Lady Godiva. But of course even if the stories of her bearing a son are true, she became a widow, for her husband died in the battle which is probably the most famous in English history. Certainly almost everyone can remember the date: 1066. (It's also a great piece of quiz knowledge, 1066 being a year which saw three kings on the English throne.)
As this new year begins, I'm hoping for a bit of 'quiet' time, before things ramp up next month with the publication of my new book, Murder in Anglo-Saxon England 626-1076: Justice, Wergild, Revenge. More about that in next month's blog post, but for now, it's up for pre-order HERE
