Medieval Women in March

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.)

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.*

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.

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.

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.

In Search of St Tysilio

 Many readers will know that my happy place is North Wales, and that all of my novels feature Welsh characters. This is no indulgence; I write about the erstwhile midlands kingdom of Mercia, and Mercia shared a border with Wales. And today I want to talk about a little connection I found on a recent visit.

In the dark days of January I took myself off for a mini-break, just over the Menai Strait onto Ynys Môn (Anglesey). Usually I travel all over the island, but this time I stayed at Menai Bridge and also decided to leave my car in the hotel car park and explore - on foot - a place that I usually just drive through on my way to other spots on Môn.

Menai Suspension Bridge

I'm sure everyone is familiar with the two famous bridges, Menai Suspension Bridge itself (designed by Thomas Telford) and the newer Britannia Bridge, designed by Robert Stephenson (son of George). I've driven over both, plenty of times, but never explored underneath.

Walking through the town of Menai Bridge I popped into a shop, POM, made a few purchases, and got chatting to Phil who kindly gave me directions to Church Island.

What a delight this place is. Although it's called an Island, there is a permanent causeway so you don't get your feet wet. It's just off a section of the Wales Coastal Path, and I have rarely been in such a peaceful place.

Looking out towards Church Island and beyond to the Britannia Bridge

The information board told me that regular services are still held in the church, which was founded by St Tysilio and actually in Welsh this place is not called Church Island but Llandysilio Island or, I imagine, more correctly Ynys Tysilio .

What struck me most, aside from how beautiful this church is, was the date it was supposedly built: 630AD. This would mean that it has been there since around about the middle of King Penda of Mercia's reign - a man about whom readers of my blog and books will know I've written a great deal. However, as far as I can discover, the present building actually dates to the 15th century, but may well have been built on the same spot as Tysilio's hermitage.

Sadly the church was locked so I was unable to look inside, and had to wait until I came home to research St Tysilio. His name seemed familiar, somehow... (I'll come back to that).

It seems that, as is often the case with early Welsh saints, Tysilio was royal, said to be the son of Brocmail, a prince of Powys. His genealogy is mentioned in the Bonedd y Saint (The Descent of the Saints), compiled in the twelfth century.

There is no 'Life' for him that still exists. It doesn't mean there wasn't one, of course, and I'm aware of plenty for English Saints - Felix's Life of St Guthlac - a Mercian hermit - for example. He was mentioned in the 'Life' of another saint, Beuno, and I like this link because my first ever visit to Wales was when I stayed at Clynnog Fawr, location of the beautiful church of St Beuno. (We also know that Ælfhere, real life character on which my Alvar the Kingmaker was based, was in Clynnog Fawr in 978.)

St Bueno's Clynnog Fawr - Commons attribution link

St Tyslio came to be associated with the community at St Suliac in Brittany and his story became entwined with Suliac's. In this legend, it is said that after Tyslio had founded his church of Llandysilio he went home to Meifod in Montgomeryshire, but was pestered mercilessly by his sister-in-law and fled to Brittany where he founded St Suliac's. It does seem as if these two saints' stories have been conflated and there is no evidence that Tyslio ever left his native Wales. 

And in fact, he's more famous that you might suppose, and not in the way you might think. I said I'd come back to his name...

Drive over the Menai Suspension bridge and turn right, and you come into the town of Menai Bridge. Drive over the Britannia bridge and turn left and you soon come to probably the most famous of all Welsh places:

Commons attribution link

As you might already know, this isn't strictly speaking a 'genuine' name, but was made up as a sort of marketing ploy in the 19th century. But whilst it's a difficult word to say, and hard to understand if you don't speak Welsh, let's break it down, in its most usual translation:

The church of St Mary (Llanfair) [of the] pool (pwll) of the white hazels (gwyn gyll) near to (go ger) the fierce whirlpool (y chwyrn drobwll) [and] the church of St Tysilio (Llantysilio) of the red cave (gogo[f] goch).

So next time you're practising saying this out loud (you don't? Just me then!) remember that it incorporates Llantysilio*, and it refers to the beautiful building on Church Island in the Menai Strait, built when King Penda was at the height of his powers just over the border!

*Llandysilio/Llantysilio - I've seen both versions of this in the course of my research and I'm not sure why. I know enough Cymraeg (Welsh) to understand that this shift from Tysilio to Dysilio is probably because of a mutation. Nine Welsh letters mutate in certain grammatical instances, but I'm not competent enough to explain all that just yet. You see the same thing with Llandudno, where you'll find the church of St Tudno on the Great Orme. 

Animals in Anglo-Saxon England

Once they’d settled on these shores (and there’s a long debate about how that settlement came about) the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and all the other folk who’d come over from Europe worked the land. They farmed and, with one or two notable exceptions, we’d recognise the processes today by which they brought food from the fields to the table, although their methods were more labour-intensive. They did not milk and have fresh dairy produce all year round. The cows and other milking animals - goats, sheep - went ‘dry’ over winter, so there was no fresh milk or cheese (though they did smoke the surplus summer cheese, so hard cheese was available in the ‘dry’ months). Still, the basic idea of keeping animals for meat, dairy, and by-products is fairly standard. Would we, though, recognise the animals?

A Dexter eating hay. Photo Annie Kavanagh

Sheep bones have been found in abundance and it’s clear that they were used for milk and meat. Even today there are many different sheep breeds but the sheep of Saxon England would, like the cows, have been smaller than their modern-day counterparts and certainly would have been hardy. The Soay sheep of St Kilda remained isolated and therefore unaffected by later breeding improvements, so perhaps their Saxon counterparts resembled them, or the Manx Loaghtan. Wool was, of course, a valuable by-product of sheep farming. 

Manx Loaghtan (public domain image)

Goats were also used for milk and meat, with the milk perhaps used for invalids, being easier to digest. Skins were used for parchment, as were sheepskins and of course calf skin, which was specifically known as vellum. (As you’d expect, calves would not have been killed just for their skins and it’s been suggested that young animal meat, when available, was considered a treat, a bit of a luxury.)

Pigs were kept, but were semi-feral, living not on the farms but in woodland and were often kept more for commercial purposes, rather than in small numbers for individual families. They foraged in the woodland, and there are many - slightly later - images depicting them eating acorns. 

Public Domain Image

Few foot bones have been found, suggesting that while the main joints of ‘pork’ might have been salted, the trotters might have been disposed of, perhaps even fed back to the pigs although there is a possibility that they were sold as delicacies. [Ann Hagen - Anglo-Saxon Food]

Pigs, again, would not have looked like their modern-day counterparts, something which was recently bemoaned in this blog post 

We should perhaps think more in terms of the Tamworth pig or even, of course, the wild boar, which were plentiful. 

Tamworth pig (public domain)

What did the meat taste like? Well, again, here the animal husbandry differed from modern practices, in that the beasts were mostly killed at the end of their useful life (although see vellum, above), so might have been quite tough. The majority of meat was boiled or stewed. 

What about smaller, ‘domesticated’ animals? Well, they had chickens and geese, but not domesticated ducks at this point, though they might have eaten them, catching them perhaps with nets. Eggs, like milk, were seasonal, and hens did not lay all year round. Perhaps the spring glut added to the association of eggs with Easter. 

In the tenth-century Colloquy of Ælfric, the king’s hunter says that with swift hounds he hunts down wild game. He takes harts and boars, bucks and roes, and sometimes hares. These dogs were working dogs, probably kept in kennels. But there is some evidence of dogs being buried in human graves, suggesting a role as faithful companions, or perhaps even personal guard dogs, but much more evidence of dogs being buried in middens, or rubbish pits, which suggests a less friendly relationship. We should perhaps imagine these dogs as predominantly deer hounds and greyhounds. 

A scene from the Bayeux Tapestry depicting hawking

Since pests needed to be kept out of the grain stores, and mice and black rats were certainly present in Saxon England, it stands to reason that some kind of animal was employed for pest control, and remains of cats have been found on numerous sites. But what might be more surprising is that there is evidence that weasels and polecats were also used for this task and tamed and trained specifically to catch rats and mice. 

Were even these small furries pets? No. Any animal would need to earn its keep. But I’m sure that human nature being what it is, there must have been some young children who had their favourites and perhaps tried to cuddle them from time to time. What is not clear is how ‘tamed’ these beasts were. Watch your fingers!