Role of women in historical fiction - Anglo-Saxon England

An extended version of this article, incorporating additional evidence and some points raised in the comment thread, can be found on my website.

See also the discussions going on over on Bernita's blog and Gabriele's blog. I'm picking up five related but not identical concepts of strong women from the comment thread on my earlier post. Let's look at them in turn.

The female warrior

Otherwise known as Xena, Warrior Princess. Alex points out in the comment thread that a number of female burials accompanied by shields and/or spears are known from archaelogical excavations and also adds the important caveat that we do not know whether the presence of weapons in a burial signifies occupation, status, both or neither. However, it would be perfectly possible to use these burials as evidence to support a Xena, Warrior Princess storyline. The absence of such women from the documentary record can be explained by the extremely limited amount of documentary evidence that has survived from the period, without needing to invoke Amanda's suggestion in the comment thread that such evidence could have been deliberately suppressed by later male rulers (though this idea could add an interesting twist to the storyline).

These burials could also be used to support a story about a woman who disguises herself as a man to become a warrior for whatever reason, like Eowyn in Lord of the Rings, or along the lines of Jennifer Lindsay's recent romance The Lady Soldier. (Alex: is there a female burial known with a high-status weapon, like a sword?)

It also seems to me likely that even if female warriors (in the sense of a 'professional' skilled fighter) were not a part of society at the time, there could have been a different attitude towards women who fought in defence. It doesn't seem out of place to me that the women would weigh in to defend their homes or villages against raiders as a matter of course, just as a modern woman might hit a burglar with a frying pan or knee a mugger in the groin. This is where I part company with Peter Jackson in the film Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (the culture of Rohan in the films is quite clearly based on an amalgam of Anglo-Saxon and Norse cultures). I'd have expected at least some of the women at Helm's Deep to be up on the battlements with their old fathers and under-age sons, throwing rocks at Orcs, or collecting spent arrows for the archers, or tending the wounded, or bringing round water for the fighters (fighting in metal armour is extremely hard work and you get very sweaty and very thirsty; this isn't often mentioned and it was a nice touch to see it in Manda Scott's Boudica: Dreaming the Eagle). Perhaps a woman who fought like this might have been commemorated by a weapon burial when she died, even if she spent the rest of her life in the domestic sphere.

The ruling queen

Bernita reminded me in the comment thread that there is one documented example of a ruling queen, Sexburga, who ruled Wessex for one year around AD 495 according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Thank you, Bernita, I had forgotten about her. I should say that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is not thought to be a contemporary record until much later than AD 495, perhaps not until Alfred's reign in the 870s, and is not considered necessarily reliable in its earlier entries. However, let's take it at face value. Sexburga may have been ruling in her own right, or on behalf of a male relative (see below), or perhaps she might have been acting in a kind of caretaker role if the chosen male candidate for king was away or temporarily incapacitated at the time of his succession. If one takes the date at face value, AD 495 is about the time of Arthur's (legendary?) great victory over the Saxons at Badon Hill. I don't think we know whether the Gewissae (the kingdom that later became Wessex) fought there, or on what side. Perhaps they fought against Arthur and Sexburga was the last surviving royal adult after the battle? Perhaps they fought with Arthur and were away plundering the defeated lands all year, leaving her to manage the kingdom as regent? Who knows? And why did she rule for only one year, and did she step down, or die, or was she deposed? Again, who knows? If you wanted a ruling queen storyline, you could tell Sexburga's story. As we have genealogies and/or king lists for most of the other substantial kingdoms, I personally would be reluctant to intrude a ruling queen into one of them and argue that she was later expunged from the records. However, there are the tiny territories listed in the Tribal Hidage about which we know little or nothing, and it would be possible to use Sexburga as evidence to tell a story about a ruling queen of one of those, perhaps in the context of absorbing her territory into a larger unit (as with Duchess Anne of Brittany, who married into France in the 16th C and took her duchy with her).

Behind-the-throne queen as regent for an under-age heir or absent husband

There are powerful women like this in medieval and Renaissance Europe, e.g. Catherine de Medici ruling 16th C France through her sons, Mary of Guise as Regent of Scotland. In the Anglo-Saxon period, I would argue that Aethelflaed Lady of the Mercians fits into this category. She was the daughter of Alfred the Great and married to Aethelred of Mercia. She seems to have organised the defence and government of Mercia, first as her husband's equal and later on her own as his widow. She worked closely with her brother, Edward the Elder (King of Wessex), and between them they won Mercia back from the Danes and laid the foundations for the unification of England, rather like Ferdinand and Isabella's reconquista in 15th C Spain. However, Aethelflaed was always referred to as Lady of the Mercians, not queen, and I'd count her as ruling on her brother's behalf rather than in her own right. It may be that they considered themselves joint rulers of a united England, and she was running Mercia while he managed Wessex.

Women with dynastic or advisory influence

Universal agreement that there is abundant evidence that high-born women could and did play this kind of role.

Women with strength of character who remain within traditional female roles

Universal agreement that women can be strong characters without being involved in warfare or high politics. (Arguably the entire genre that is often unfairly dismissed as 'clog-and-shawl-sagas' comes under this heading).


Rick
- for the unfavourable change in women's status after the Norman Conquest, see Gabriele's post. She has covered everything I was going to say and the medieval period isn't my territory.
- regarding Matilda (or Maud), she was certainly hopeless at politics and diplomacy. But many kings were equally inept and managed to retain their thrones. It's a pity we can't go back and do the control experiment to see if a woman who was good at politics could have made her claim stand. My own opinion is that the prejudice against women rulers was too deeply ingrained at the time. Don't forget there had been no ruling queen in England for at least 500 years (if you count Sexburga) or 1000 years (if you go back to Boudica and Cartimandua in the 1st C AD), and we don't even know if their stories were remembered at the time. My feeling is that Matilda couldn't have overcome that cultural barrier even had she been a consummate politician. So when I told that story I did it in an invented world, where I could create a culture that had a tenuous tradition of female rule that was sufficient for a capable woman to build on.