What a wonderful month March can be, when Spring flowers bloom, the days grow longer and the earth - in the northern hemisphere - warms up.
There is much to celebrate in March as it's Women's History Month, and contained within those 31 days are both Mother's Day (in the UK at least), and International Women's Day.
In this blog post I thought it would be timely to look at the lives of some notable women from the Anglo-Saxon era who either died in March - after long lives - or are associated with people who died in that month. These women were formidable, and perhaps their stories should be better known.
On March 5 1095 Judith of Flanders died. She's probably most remembered as the wife of Tostig Godwineson, brother of Harold, who brought new meaning to the phrase 'sibling rivalry'. Judith was born somewhere between 1030 and 1035, and was the daughter of Baldwin IV, Count of Flanders. She was married to Tostig in 1051. Her husband was killed fighting opposite his brother's forces at Stamford Bridge. One of her four gospel books still survives. The story I love most about her may or may not be true, but it comes from the twelfth-century history of the Church of St Cuthbert. Along with her husband, she had made gifts to this church in Durham but on the condition that she be able to enter the church and worship at his tomb. There was a problem. Cuthbert had banned women from setting foot inside the church. (St Cuthbert, incidentally, also died in March, on 20th in 687.)
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| Cover of one of Judith's Gospel Books Image accreditation: https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/magnificent-gems |
Judith's plan was to send a maidservant in to the church ahead of her and, if the maid was unharmed, she would then follow. Sadly the maid was killed by a violent force of wind which traumatised her whole body. Judith was full of remorse and made amends by commissioning an elaborate cross to be made to be presented to Cuthbert's shrine. It is no surprise that this account was written in the twelfth century, a time were Church attitudes to women were changing and here's an example of how women should definitely not break the rules (according to the men who wrote the histories...) [1]
March 6 1052 saw the death of another woman who had scant regard for rules. Emma of Normandy was married first to Æthelred the 'Unready' and then to his eventual successor, Cnut. She probably didn't have much say in either of her marriages but we can deduce perhaps that her first wasn't great because she wiped the record clean and in innovative style.
Æthelred had been battling Cnut for England when he died, and Cnut subsequently reigned for nearly twenty years. He'd had a relationship - probably a marriage - with a Mercian woman, Ælfgifu of Northampton, whom he did not put aside when he married Emma and by whom he had two sons. He also had a son by Emma and when he died at a relatively young age, both of his widows began a war of words to help secure the English throne for their own sons by Cnut.
Emma commissioned a work in her own honour, the Encomium Emmae Reginae, which sought to paint Emma in the best possible light, cast slurs about the paternity of Ælfgifu's son, Harold 'Harefoot', and completely omitted to mention the fact that Emma had ever been married before. It is a wonderful piece of early political 'spin' and its cover gives us a portrait, albeit stylised, of Emma herself.*
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| Cover of the Encomium |
The succession war was complicated, with first Harold and then Emma's son, Harthacnut, ruling for around two years each. At some point Emma remembered she had other sons and they sailed from Normandy, one coming to a rather sticky end** and the other eventually ruling and being remembered as Edward the Confessor. There seems not to have been much love lost between Edward and his mother, for one of his first acts was to deprive her of her treasure (and make her stay put!)***
The feast day of Bosa, bishop of York On March 9 is perhaps at first glance a curious one to include in this post about formidable women. But Bosa was one of five bishops said to have been educated by St Hild of Whitby. This remarkable woman had an influential kinswoman, Ælfflæd, who also had links with the afore-mentioned Cuthbert. Their astonishing careers deserve a separate blog post, and you can read it HERE (opens in new window).
On March 18 978, Edward the Martyr - his epithet kind of gives it away - was murdered at Corfe on the orders, some said, of his stepmother, Ælfthryth. She was the widow of King Edgar, was a consecrated queen, and charter evidence suggests that her sons (one died in infancy) took precedence over Edward, but he was nevertheless elected king. He comes across in contemporary texts as a petulant and bad-tempered teenager, but that's not a reason for murder. It does appear though that the killing was carried out by supporters of the claim of the queen's surviving son, the very young afore-mentioned Æthelred the 'Unready' who was around twelve years old at the time of the murder.
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| Edward is greeted by his stepmother at Corfe. Note her henchman waiting to strike... |
His mother got a bad press, also being accused of murdering an abbot and indulging in witchcraft, but she's also remembered in legal documents as being a fore-spreaca (fore-speaker) advocating on behalf of woman bringing a law suit, and she was fondly mentioned by a leading bishop of the time, who wrote the Regularis Concordia, a rule book for monks, and charged the queen to be guide for all nuns in England. It acknowledged her status as queen. You can read more about this work HERE. These last two positive points come to us from contemporary sources, the accusations from later ones. Make up your own minds, but I prefer to believe that she was more sinned against that sinning. You might be interested in a blog post I wrote about her and other 'evil' women.
And all these women's stories - and more - are in my book Women of Power in Anglo-Saxon England
There's one more March 'anniversary' and it's a curious one. March 28 is the feast of Alkeda, said to have been strangled by Viking women. Although there are churches associated with her, she remains a mystery. It's not even clear where the story of her murder originated. I visited one of her churches, at Giggleswick in North Yorkshire, and I included what little information we have about her in my book Murder in Anglo-Saxon England.
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| Church of St Alkeda, Giggleswick - author's own photo |
[1] William M. Aird, The Boundaries of Medieval Misogyny: Gendered Urban Space in Medieval Durham: https://scispace.com/pdf/the-boundaries-of-medieval-misogyny-gendered-urban-space-in-16l23z8k3j.pdf
*Off the top of my head as I write this, I can't think of another surviving contemporary image of an Anglo-Saxon queen, unless we count the - again stylised - image of Queen Cynethryth on her coins.
**For the full story of what happened to Alfred, see my book Murder in Anglo-Saxon England
***He did not, however, as a recent television series suggested, bludgeon her to death with his crown.
