Women in Anglo-Saxon England, by Christine Fell
How French vikings popularized misogyny in England.
In 1799, Sharon Turner wrote that "the education of youth will always rest principally with women"
Most English female saints date to the first century after the acceptance of Christianity in Britian
No woman living in Norman England was named as a saint
Women had a better position in the Anglo-Saxon world than in the Celtic world
In Anglo-Saxon England had more gender equality than "at any other period before the modern age," which ended with the Norman Conquest, which "introduced into England a military society relgating women to a position honourable but essentiall unimportant"
The medieval church and feudalism both enforced subjugation
Christianity created theological rationale for the inferiority of women
Norman Conquest was followed by the Gregorian Reform, turning theology into canon law. "The combination of the new military-based civil law and the increasing effectiveness of anti-female canon lwa produced a society in which the role of women was very sharply differentiated from that in hte pre-1066 era."
Old English bicgan and agan are translated as "to buy" and "to own," but this is a different notion of ownership (a king can buy a queen) — it only really implied paying money, not necessarily dominion. An owner, agend, could be someone in charge of a community (e.g. abbess) — the person who had to take responsibility for any crimes of the members of the community and press for recompense if they were injured
Old English mann was gender neutral
One religious text say that all people are "descended from two men," Adam and Eve
Men and women were distinguished as weras and wifas or wepmen and wifmenn
Chapter 1: Myth and Legend
The Anglo-Saxons were Germanic, pagan, and non-literate
The Ango-Saxons migrated from the continent to England as families (not just warriors) and settled
The Anglo-Saxons called the locals wealisc, meaning foreign but preserved in "Welsh"
Anglo-Saxon culture changed with the advent of Christianity. The king Aelfric distinguished between getting health from stones or trees versus the holy cross and condemned the use of aphrodisiacs
Chapter 2: Daily Life
Penal servitude existed, and children could be sold into slavery
Wifman is likely dervied from "weaving," as the male word wepman comes from "weapon."
Wills and charters occasionally specify whether property is to go to the male or female line of the family distinguishing between the waepenedhand, sperehand, waepnedhealf, or sperehealf, and wifhand, wifhealf, or spinelhealf. Whether the element wif links with "weaving" or not, spinel certainly links with spinning, and these terms suggest that in the early stages of their culture, Anglo-Saxons distinguished male and female roles as those of the warrior or hunter and of the cloth-maker... many glimpses that we get of great ladies show them at occupations of weaving, spinning, or embrodery. As the Exeter gnome as it: ... "The place of a woman is at her embroidery."
The word "spinster" comes from the same root
The mistress of the house was likely a work supervisor
Unmarried young women could own land and earn a good income
Textile work was sometimes highly valued and well paid
Textiles (wall-hanging, seat covers, bedsteads, table linens) were so valued as to be bequeathed specifically in the will. They might have been given to the remaining women of the household in commong, to "enhance the comfort or luxury of the women's quarters"
Wall handing might have depicted historical events
Wall hangings were produced in great numbers and decorated accomodations
The lord was just as likely to have been female as male
Women, boys, and girls would have shared physical chores like weeding, which "did not demand maximum physical strength"
The Old English words for cook and baker (coc and baecere) are both masculine — the kitchen was for men; monastery kitchens were run by men, while gardens were likely run by women
The lady (even the queen) served drinks, but men could also be cup bearers
Advice for pregnant women:
A pregnant woman ought to be fully warned against eating anything too salt or too sweet, and against drinking strong alcohol: also against pork and fatty foods; also against drinking to the point of drunkenness, also against travelling; also against too much riding on horseback lest the child is born before the right time.
This was a ahrsh environment and a life of hard work
Chapter 3: Sex and Marriage
Between the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in England and the Norman Conquest, the church steadily gained influence over Anglo-Saxon law, "What was in the earlier period reflective of what one might loosely term Germanic attitudes, becomes more subject to Christian Roman dogma."
Men paid a morgengifu, a morning gift to the bride; this was given to the woman herself and she kept it to donate, sell, or bequeath as she wanted
Many place names originally included the word morgengifu, revealing that they were originally part of one (Mayfield, Morgay Farm, Morgay Wood)
Husband and wife jointly held the household finances
Women could leave a marriage freely, and if she took the children she was entitled to half the property, "She seems to have had reasonable independence and security"
The woman's kin assisted in writing the marriage agreement as counsel
Virtually every clause of the agreement is concerned with protecting and safe-guarding the woman's interests. The marriage must be 'agreeable to her.'
Women weren't held accountable for their husband's crimes, the couple is not an economic unit, their goods were not held in common — the wife was independent
If a husband stole with the knowledge of his family, they could all go into slavery
It was a woman's responsibility to "carry the keys", which was a significant repsonsibility whereby the woman was in charge of all locked spaces in the home (such as chests) and could be held criminally responsible for any abuse of that responsibility; this status was so important that women wore their keys on a girdle hanger, which they were buried with
The law said that a woman could not be "hastily" consecrated as a nun after the death of her husband, nor a woman forced to married a man she disliked
Anglo-Saxon England was a class society
Women were not property, and if a woman was injured she herself would receive recompense
In Beowulf, the queen is a woman of "poise and assurance," but her name means "foreign slave"; it was imaginable that a slave could become a noble or a saint
A woman from a defeated tribe could be made a slave
Anglo-Saxons enjoyed sex
An Anglo-Saxon riddle describes a "boneless object which increases in size under the skilled handling of a proud bride"
Relationships between lords and retainers were characterized by friendship, with friend coming from a root verb freogan, meaning "to like" or "to honor"
The missionary Boniface wrote the following letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury in the 700s:
Further, I would like your advice as regards a sin which I have unwittingly committed by allowing a certain man to marry. It happened in this way. The man, like many others, had stood as godfather to the child of another man and then on the father's death married the mother. The people in Rome say that this is a sin, even a mortal sin, and state that in such cases a divorce is necessary. They maintain that under the Christian emperors such a marriage was punishable by death or exile for life. If you find that this is considered so great a sin in the decrees of the Fathers and in the canons or even in Holy Scripture, tell me so, because I would like to understand and learn the authorities for such an opinion. I cannot understand how spiritual relationship in marriage can be so great a sin, when we know that through Baptism we all become sons and daughters, brothers and sisters in the Church.
We are entitled to assume that the average Anglo-Saxon wife was both valued and respected, enjoying economic and marital rights, her independence safe-guarded and her interests protected.
Understood romantic love
Chapter: Family and Kinship
Women often acted as "peace weavers" between families, but this wasn't always necessary
Women retained a sense of loyalty to her natal family (she doesn't lose that association) and the morgengifu reverts to her natal family if she dies childless, making her less vulnerable to her husband's control and greed
There are no records of women repudiated for barrenness and no emphasis on primogeniture
There is no preference for male heirs in the wills
Women inherited property independently from their husbands or fathers
Families likely fostered children from households of a higher rank
Even bastard children had wergild, but it was not paid to the father who hadn't acknowledged the child, but rather to the lord or the king
Wergild was the same for men and women in the same class
Pregnant women would receive half wergild for their unborn child
Sometimes estates that were divided up in wills would be brought back together in later generations
Anglo-Saxons had strong bonds of kinship, "friend-kin"
Chapter 5: Manor and Court
History forgets peacetime rulers and valorizes wartime ones; we remember wartime worldviews
There are many crofts, cottages, fields, woods, and streams with female names: fields were probably owned by women; woods likely women who collected wood there; settlements likely had a female estate holder; glades were likely agricultural land run by women
Both men and women could be literate
Men and women would pass messages written in runes
One will shows a woman leaving a small library to her daughter, which would have been worth a fortune
Some say that women were more learned than men in secular life (as opposed to religious life)
As the Christian era dawned, grave goods became less common
Chapter 6: Religious Life
Famous Anglo-Saxon women: Bucge, Leoba, Hild
Aldhelm's description allows us to visualise the church. It was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the light of the sun illuminated it through windows of glass, the altars were covered with gold-embroidered cloths, there was a golden chalice and silver paten, the cross gleamed with gold, silver and jewels, and there was fragrance from incense-burners. Bede told us that Benedict had to send to Gaul for glassmakers, since the craft was unknown in England. We are not told how Bucge obtained these valued craftsmen. Aldhelm, as well as giving us the smell of the incense and the gleam of light and gold gives us the music, the voices of throngs of brothers and sisters rising in worship, in hymns and psalms and responses. He also writes of the ten-stringed lyre, which is of course an echo of the thirty-second psalm, but presumably indicates that stringed instruments were a normal musical accompaniment to worship. It is clear from the mention of brothers and sisters that this too was a double monastery of monks and nuns.
Every historian quotes Bede's tale of the double monastery at Coldingham under the abbess Ebbe where the inhabitants filled the cells designed for reading and praying with 'feasting, drinking and talking' instead; where the women wove themselves elaborate garments, and where divine vengeance came in the form of fire that burned the entire monastery to ashes. It is worth noting that of all the great double monasteries of the period it is the only one of which scandal is related, but Aldhelm also is concerned with the pleasure that consecrated men and women take in worldly finery. "This sort of glamorization for either sex consists in fine linen shirts, in scarlet or blue tunics, in necklines and sleeves embroidered with silk; their shoes are trimmed with red-dyed leather; the hair of their forelocks and the curls at their temples are crimped with a curling iron; dark-grey veils for the head give way to bright and coloured head-dresses which are sewn with interlaces of ribbons and hang down as far as the ankles. Fingernails are sharpened after the manner of falcons or hawks..' I am not perfectly sure at what point the description ceases to be relevant to 'either sex' and concentrates on women, but such attacks were commonly directed at both men and women in religious orders. Elfric in a later century specifies priests who wear rings and elaborate clothing. It is, however, a particular pleasure to note the reply that St Edith of Wilton is reported to have given on such an occasion. It is even possible that since she herself lived in the late tenth century the story told by her post-Conquest biographer preserves a genuine anecdote. Edith was apparently accustomed to dress more richly than was common to nuns or abbesses and Bishop Eelwold of Winchester took it upon himself to rebuke her, pointing out that Christ takes no delight in external appearances, it is the heart he asks for. 'Quite so, Father, and I have given my heart' William of Malmesbury has a slightly different version of the story, including a disparaging reference by Edith to the Bishop's 'ragged furs'. According to William, the Bishop blushed and was silenced.
There were two phases of Anglo-Saxon religious life: the seventh and eight centuries, a period of serious Christian development, and the later centuries, when Christian philosophy ebbed and women disappeared from most religious houses, and the clergy stopped speaking latin "out of... the incompetence of bishops" and "the equality of the sexes which flourished in the eighth century in learning and in literacy, was replaced in the tenth century by equality in ignorance"
Chapter 7: Viking Women in Britain
From the 900s, the kings (especially in response to Viking raids and settlements) insisted that everyone in England should abide by chirch law, including bans on heathen practices and observation of sexual morality: "We forbid that any man should have more women than one; and she is to be legally betrothed and wedded"
"It is true that the church from the beginning attacked the sexual laxity of the Anglo-Saxons"
The Vikins presented a new challenge, a new pagan people to convert
In the 900s, church law started to restrict divorce, first banning remarriage
An Arab chronicler visiting the Vikings said "A woman stays with her husband as long as it pleases her to do so, and leaves him if it no longer pleases her."
The threat of divorce gave women power. In one saga, a man accuses his wife of infidelity; she tells him to keep quiet or else "I shall call witnesses at once and declare my divorce from you, and I will have my father claim back my marriage-gift and my dowry; and if this is your choice you will never have my bed-company again". He husband desists.
Free-born viking women were born with textile tools
Viking women were responsible for food
Viking women were key-holders
Viking women were cup bearers
Chapter 8: After 1066
Post-Conquest England saw nearly all the native aristocracy and gentry dispossessed by 'Norman' settlers, who for a generation or two remained somewhat apart.
The role of women changed dramatically; one medieval theorist divided the world into three orders, "Those who fight, those who till the earth, and those who pray," omitting women as their role is to "marry and to serve" the fighters and the workers
Post-Conquest society was based upon, indeed obsessed with, land-tenure. How this coloured the view taken of marriage by the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman or English aristocracy is clear from one administrative document: the Rotuli de dominabus et pueris et puellis compiled in 1185. Translating the title as 'A Register of Rich Widows and of Orphaned Heirs and Heiresses' gives an inkling of its content: it lists widows 'in the king's gift' and orphans "in wardship', giving brief accounts of their family circumstances but detailed ones of their property, down to the last pig. Because all land belonged ultimately to the king, to be granted by him according to military or political expediency, familial inheritance - male primogeniture being the preferred Norman custom - suffered constraints, with heirs obliged to seek and to pay for royal approval of their succession. If a baron died before his heir was of age the lands reverted meanwhile to the Crown, the widow and under-age children being taken into the wardship of the king, who saw to the arranging of marriages for them: the position of the 'widows and orphans' in our Register. That was simply a special case of the regular royal control of nobles' marriages, including any that a baron might in his lifetime plan for a daughter or other kinswoman, because of the way that marriage affected land-holding. In this system based (at least theoretically) on 'military' tenure, a woman land-holder was an anomaly. Because military duties could (as when a male land-holder was aged or disabled) be vicariously performed or commuted for a money-payment, a female could, in the absence of a male heir, inherit her family's land, but her rights in respect of it remained circumscribed. When an heiress married (not "if': no woman of property was likely to be left single) her husband acquired for as long as the marriage lasted full control of her properties and, if he fathered a live child, retained it all his life. A widow's remarriage likewise conveyed all her holdings, including the 'dower' due from her late husband's estate, to her new one. A union contracted without prior royal approval incurred a fine, and might entail forfeiture of the lands. A register of heiresses and of propertied widows could thus assist royal clerks charged with collecting the fees due either from would-be suitors or, alternatively, from ladies anxious to keep their freedom. That fees and fines were in fact exacted is proved by surviving account-rolls. The system gave widows of an age to assert themselves and with money to hand fair freedom of choice, for their orphaned children as well as for themselves. But the fees were substantial and accordingly resented; a main freedom laid down in Magna Carta was that thenceforth no widow wishing to remain single should have to suffer financial penalty. Young girls' wishes were another matter. Children of both sexes, whether orphaned or not, were married off at the tenderest ages: the Register notes one 'widow' as aged ten and her brother's 'wife', aged five, as already living in her mother-in-law's household. Rank and riches were no protection - rather the reverse. Heiresses' marriages, with their tenurial consequences, were saleable commodities, to be purchased by the highest bidder or granted by the king, as favour or reward, to a courtier or a captain. Thus, in the late ri8os Henry u rewarded William the Marshal, a landless younger son of minor nobility, with the hand of the orphan heiress of the great Clare family, such a match being what William needed to add wealth and rank (the earldom of Pembroke) to his personal distinction. Nowhere are the girl's feelings mentioned, even though it was she who, as a middle-aged widow, commissioned William's extant verse-biography; her acquiescence in a marriage to a man twice her age was seemingly taken for granted by all parties, herself included.
In Norman England, women were property
Widows were expected to remarry, and would pay a large fee for the privilige not to
In the harshest view villeins formed part of a manor's livestock, and could be conveyed along with their land from one lord to another. For a villein girl to marry away from the lordship of her birth robbed the lord not only of her work but also of any villein children she might produce, and therefore she had to seek the lord's approval of any proposed marriage and pay for this a fee called 'merchet', liability for which was proof of servile status. This was not mere form: cases are recorded where women who had married without leave were taken back to their original homes. On widows, too, custom could bear hard. Sometimes a widow succeeded automatically to her late husband's holding. In other cases a lord, deeming only an adult male equal to working the land and performing adequately the labour services due from it, might force a widow lacking a grown son either to remarry or else to move out; the lord himself might choose the prospective husband, who was for his part liable to be fined if (as some did) he refused the match despite the land that went with it.
While noble girls were married off as small children, peasant girls had to wait — perhaps well into their twenties — for a holding to open up so they could form a new household
Even in Norman England, peasants still married of their own wishes and had sex outside of wedlock
Canon law applied universal prescriptions, unlike customary and civil law
Marriage and moral law was taken over by the church and modified popular opinion
The canon law of marriage rested on a particular concept of woman's basic nature. Despite Christian protestations that all human souls were equal, anti-feminist attitudes inherited from Graco-Roman society had early come to dominate the Church. Excluded from every priestly office, women found themselves enjoined to public silence. These restrictions the churchmen justified by reference to the Bible, especially as interpreted by the Fathers of the Church. Genesis was held to show Eve, and all her daughters with her, as essentially inferior to Adam, having been created after him, from one of his ribs, and explicitly as a 'help' to him, not as an equal partner. It depicted her as readier than Adam to succumb to temptation and therefore, unless strictly disciplined, a moral danger to him; as instigator of the Fall, she had justly (it was claimed) been set under Adam's authority. Such a view of women, as inferior to men in morals and in intellect, underlay the Pauline pronouncements on marriage: "Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband" ... the horror of the flesh felt by so many male clerics inspired condemnations of sexuality and consequent restrictions upon the role of women.
Searching for insight on marriage in religious texts, theologians saw Paul's view — that marriage emulates Christ's reltionship with the church — as the idea of spiritual of love, and that it should be contaminated as little as posible by fleshly passions
Marriage acquired a prerequisite of free and full consent from both parties, and marriage contracts made under duress were void while those between consenting parties were binding, even clandestine or unauthorized
Age of consent was twelve
Whole families' welfare often rested on a young girl's marraige
Theology said women were inferior to men
The tighter the grip of canon law grew on secular affairs, the further women's already limited rights were eroded, always under pretext of affording their weakness a necessary protection.
A woman could not make a will without her husband's consent
Gregorian Reforms insisted on clerical celibacy
Henry of Huntingdon wrote that the church's prohibition onf clerical marriage would promote vice, "he related, almost with glee, that the Papal legate inveighing against clerical marriage had himself been caught with a whore" (Huntingdon also wrote about private property)
Few women (except the poorest) eluded the fate of marriage or nunhood
Villein girls without a household sought a living as a servant; women were more in-demand because they commanded lower wages
A woman could become a head dairymaid (the cheesemaker was the only female specialist on the farm), but could also work as nurses, nursemaids, ladies-in-waiting, or in the city as a dancer (hopster), washerwoman, or brewer (women domainated brewing), breadmongster, textile work; a widow might take up her husband's trade, and women were influential in the London silk trade
Spinning was, in town and country alike, so specifically and universally women's work that medieval knockabout farce allowed the distaff a role like that more recently given to the rolling=pin.
By 1200, a child might have inherited their father's surname
Monasteries were still male-oriented spaces, assuming male clothes and dietary needs; nunneries were mostly for aristocrats anyway
In the 1100s, the Cistercian Order met men's yearnings for a more austere religious life, which barred women
Monasteries minimized contact between men and women with systems of hatches to pass through food and clothes
A signal instance of the problems that could arise occurred during the later twelfth century in the Gilbertine double house at Watton in Yorkshire. A girl's 'impudent' eye caught that of a brother. When their clandestine affair and her consequent pregnancy could no longer be concealed, the other nuns thrashed the girl and cast her, fettered, into a cell. The young man fled, but was decoyed and captured by his former brethren, then delivered to the nuns, who forced the girl to mutilate him with her own hands (in itself castration was then a conventional enough punishment for many offences). The guilty nun, now fully contrite, was reconciled with her sisters through a miracle by which angel-midwives spirited away her newborn child, struck off her fetters and restored her to virginity. Such a story, related with great rhetorical display by Ailred of Rievaulx, helps to explain the dread so many monks felt of any association with nuns.
About 10% of property owners were women — they were probably mostly widows; a married woman could not sell or give away her own property
Even when women had influence, they still lacked authority:
Female tenants-in-chief did not figure at royal councils, nor abbesses at ecclesiastical ones (by this time all nuns were subject to rules of enclosure far stricter than were ever imposed upon monks); 'sisters' of merchant- or craft-gilds did not become officials, still less have any voice in local government. It went without saying that no woman was eligible to serve as knight of the shire, or on a criminal or civil jury. In the twelfth century no woman could appear in a criminal court as plaintiff, let alone witness, except concerning her husband's murder or her own rape. In order to bring a charge of rape the victim had to raise an immediate hue and cry, exhibiting at once to a law-officer torn garments and bodily injuries; even so, such charges were commonly dismissed.
Despite frequent pregnancies, most families were small because of high infant mortality
Among humble folk, the chaotic interpentration of farm and family is pictured in Holy Maidenhood (in one of its few passages so far untraced to any source): returning home, the woman finds her baby screaming, the cat gnawing the bacon and the dog worrying a hide, her loaf scorched, the calf suckling its mother, the cooking-pot boiling over - and her husband in a fury.
Working class had a shorter life expectancy than men, even though they could reach ages above seventy; health was poor
Doctors generally thought that women's health was irrelevant to them; medical texts ignored obstetrics and gynaecology; but medical trainign was barred to women; women sought healthcare less than men; many physicians were monks, who didn't want to treat women; shrines (which promised medical miracles) sometimes barred women and were (somehow) more effective for men
Court records show peasant women as dishonest, bold, and violent
Chapter 9: After 1066 The Literary Image
In France in the 1100s, the chivalric romance emerged, replacing the heroic epic
Old epic values transformed into something more socially complex
The role of the woman changed
A new interested in male-female relationships emerged, displacing the male-male relationships of the heroic world
A new language developed to describe the subtle range of emotions, "as love and womanly tenderness emerge as proper subjects for full-scale literary treatment"
This was the genre of courtly love
In courtly love, love was to be taken seriously and lovers should commit themselves to one another fully
Courtly love was aristocratic; the working class was too crude for it
The role of the woman was elevated, and the man is dependent on her for his emotional well-being, "Inferiority thus becomes standard for the male lover, whatever his social rank, while the woman becomes a remote, unattainable ideal of beauty and virtue."
The radiant young virgin holds the power
These stories end with marriage
In courtly love, women were either of the same class as their male lover or else above him
In late medieval literature, women are often seen as dishonest, watering their ale and cheating in commerce
The social advantages of marriage for a woman were much the same at the beginning of the nineteenth century as at the end of the fourteenth. If it could be based on love so much the better, but if not, the instant rise in status and independence which wifehood brought was clearly worth a little emotional sacrifice.
Women exist on a spectrum between Eve (frail, seducible, temptable, temptress) and Mary (virginal, maternal, compassionate)
Eve "behaved like a man" according to the bible
The courtly heroine is a secular Mary
Mary alone fulfill's the woman's two most important roles: virgin and mother