by Adams, Max;
Christina’s eventual escape and subsequent life in hiding introduces us to a landscape teeming with devoted ascetics, spiritual descendants of the desert fathers seeking out remote, edgy places: marshes, woods, borderlands. Among these misanthropic and eccentric hermits, some of them ragged-clothed and half-starving, Christina found admirers – many of whom seemed to have lusted after her physically even as they plotted her deliverance from the secular, oppressive world of family and ecclesiastical authority. Her liberation from domestic captivity was engineered – and is narrated – with all the tension and suspense of a thriller: secret messages passed under the noses of her guards; disguises, hooded cloaks, guides waiting nervously with horses in the small hours. She was first offered shelter by an anchoress at Flamstead, some miles northwest of St Albans along Watling Street; then hidden in a tiny cell in an outbuilding belonging to a renowned hermit called Roger, whose followers lived in a wood at a place called Markyate under the protection of the powerful abbots of St Albans. Since the earliest days of Christianity in Britain, and probably long before, solitary holy men had been revered, their wisdom and advice coveted, their visions and prophecies the currency of divine favour or displeasure. The most powerful secular and religious lords held them in high regard; they were something of a protected species.
Christina’s new life, for all its physical insecurity and discomfort, frequent periods of illness, the fear of being found and taken back to her family, the mental torment of hunger-induced visions and extreme isolation, nevertheless offered her a refuge from abuse, if not temptation. Her relationship with Roger, initially suffused with mistrust on both sides, blossomed into one of spiritual, bordering on physical, intimacy. He recognised, in her, special attributes of mental strength and foresight; in her visions, an absolutely authentic expression of God’s and the Virgin Mary’s favour. She seems to have become something of a celebrity. On Roger’s death she was taken under the protection of the Archbishop of York and, finally, her marriage was annulled. Her family fell on hard times; a brother took monastic vows and her sister, Margaret, ever-complicit in their parents’ oppression of Christina but now seemingly reformed, joined her in the small community that gathered at Markyate.
Released from solitude and free of family threat, Christina now cultivated the friendship of Geoffrey, the Norman abbot of St Albans. The Life credits her with deflecting him from a path of secular indulgence; with becoming his spiritual advisor. He, in turn, invested gifts and financial support in her community at Markyate. He supported and sponsored her profession as a nun in 1131 when she was, it seems, in her mid-thirties. He also very probably commissioned and dedicated to her the enigmatic manuscript known as the St Albans Psalter in whose illustrated pages she appears; and his hand is detected by several scholars in the commissioning of her Latin Life. Years later, she is recorded as the first prioress of an orthodox Benedictine convent at Markyate, founded under Geoffrey’s authority, where many religious women were drawn into her orbit. Such was her fame in those years that gifts of three mitres and a pair of sandals, embroidered by her, were carried and presented to Adrian IV (the only English Pope: he died 1159) in Rome.
Christina’s story, one of oppression overcome by faith and unshakeable spirit, stands out among hagiographies. She was an openly sexual – if abstinent – being, attractive to and attracted by many men. Her experiences were recorded by an admiring male scribe and yet they exhibit a strong sense of female authorship and advocacy that is largely unsentimental and worldly.2 For all her spiritual transcendence, Christina is an authentic presence in a society struggling with tensions and contradictions between duty and freedom, inclusion and exclusion, God and Mammon, convention and individuality.
Of Bayeux and Domesday
Secular women are much less visible than their religious counterparts in medieval literature, and even less so in the visual arts. In an age of warring tribal elites, the unique embroidered panel known as the Bayeux Tapestry is a cartoon-strip epic of royal, courtly, clerical, martial and artisanal men, inhabiting a man’s world of action, valour, oath and betrayal. The wounded and dying, severed body parts, fabulous mythical beasts and flashing weapons enliven its borders. Movement is brilliantly dramatic or portentous. The history of the Norman Conquest comes alive in its bold stylised figures and backdrops, a continuous 68-metre (224-ft) narrative whose curtain call is King Harold’s death and the terminal breath of Anglo-Saxon England in the autumn of 1066.
Sixty times more horses are depicted in the tapestry than women; but three females intrude into this almost exclusively male preserve: Queen Edith, weeping at the feet of her dying husband, King Edward the Confessor; an unnamed mother fleeing a burning house with her child – a collateral newsreel victim of war; and a third, Ælfgyva: its most enigmatic figure.
Ælfgyva’s single cameo appearance takes place just as Duke William (later William I) has escorted the shipwrecked Duke Harold (later Harold II, the last Anglo-Saxon King of England) to his palace in Normandy where, we understand, some deal is to be struck concerning the succession to the English throne when King Edward dies. Harold’s subsequent failure to honour this supposed agreement is the casus belli of the invasion of 1066. Other contenders are, we know, watching with more than passing interest, from the shores of Norway. In the scene after the palace negotiations, in a tall but indeterminate building, a woman stands, her hands before her in… what? Supplication? Invitation? From outside the building a tonsured male figure, left hand on hip, reaches in and touches her face. We are to understand that this is a gesture with sexual overtones, for in the border below, two naked males are busy: one with axe upon timber; the other aping the gesture of the cleric with his erect member in full view. The caption above the scene says Ubi unus clericus et Ælfgyva. It is an incomplete sentence: ‘Where a certain cleric and Ælfgyva…’ There is no verb. We are supposed to know who they are and what they get up to, or what William and Harold say about the pair.
Since an influential article by J. B. McNulty was published in 1980, the mysterious woman has generally been identified with Ælfgyva of Northampton, first the mistress and then the wife of King Cnut (who ruled in England 1016–35). She was said to have presented the king with two children, one conceived of a cleric, the other of a humble workman, and neither of them biologically hers – both stories that appear to be alluded to, in the Ælfgyva panel, by the woodsman and his cocky mate. On the face of it, her presence ought to reflect an agreement between William and Harold that Cnut’s descendants were illegitimate and that, therefore, the succession to Edward, who had no issue, should be decided between the two of them. Well, perhaps; Ælfgyva was certainly dead before Harold’s visit to Normandy in 1064. But I wonder, given the very frequent Early Medieval depiction of queens as inciters of men’s actions, if she wasn’t credited with some more direct role in propelling the two – or three – countries to war, a role now lost to understanding.
If women are barely portrayed in the historic events leading up to Hastings, it seems that they were largely responsible for the Bayeux panel’s production. It is usually cited as a commission of Bishop Odo of Bayeux, half-brother to the Conqueror; and it may have been produced in or close to St Augustine’s abbey at Canterbury, since Odo was given the earldom of Kent after the Conquest. Opus Anglicanum, the name given to the work of English women weavers and embroiderers, was prized across Europe and this may be its finest product: a real-life counterpart to the grisly battle-weaving tale in Njál’s Saga.† The nine sewn panels are of tabby-woven linen, with two kinds of woollen yarn stitching creating its tituli – the text and the figures’ outlines – and their coloured infills. It is the most brilliant surviving example of women’s skills in visual narrative depiction: their signature at the end of the final chapter of Anglo-Saxon history.
*
Women’s fortunes in the last decades of the eleventh century depended on their birth and married status and on the fickle whims of chance. Most women, tending sheep and pigs, spi
nning and weaving cloth, carrying corn to the mill, bearing children, fostering social networks and brokering peace among their menfolk, existed far below the radar of Norman lords or their chroniclers; their lives after the Conquest must have been substantially similar to those of previous generations. Few find their way into the Domesday survey of 1086 – a list by county of lands held by and of the king and his dependants; what they owed in service and rents and their relations with the land they inhabited. Even if, as historians estimate, one in seven to ten landowners in 1086 was a woman, many of them are not even named except as the wives, widows or sisters of men. Exceptionally, as a study of Domesday women by Professor Pauline Stafford shows, women might belong to a profession: Adelina, a jester belonging to the household of Earl Roger; an anonymous brewster of Chester; and Leofgeat, a Wiltshire embroideress who also held land – about 400 acres – as a widow.
Stafford highlights four women as typical of those whose names are preserved in the survey. The most modest of these is Asa of Lowthorpe, a Yorkshirewoman, whose claim to three small parcels of land was disputed, and therefore of interest to royal administrators, after she separated from her husband. She held her land independent of him, so it must have passed to her directly as inheritance. Generally, free women brought property – a dowry – with them to a marriage from their family, while their dower was a portion contributed by prospective husbands intended to provide for them as widows. Most Domesday women landowners were widows. Christina of Markyate, had she not been so stubbornly virtuous, would have acquired both dower and dowry by her marriage to Beorhtred.
The grandest of women in 1066 was Gytha Thorkelsdóttir, the Danish mother of King Harold and widow of Earl Godwine. Prior to the Conquest she had held land across no fewer than ten counties but, after playing an active role in the rebellions against William that followed the Conquest, she forfeited her estates and was forced to flee for her life. By the time of the survey the wealthiest woman landlord was Judith, widow of the Northumbrian earl Waltheof, whom William had executed in 1076. She might have expected to forfeit her lands too, but she was the Conqueror’s own niece.
The law had, for centuries, tried to rationalise property rights, the cause of so many wars and disputes. By the time of Domesday, the protection of dower lands against forfeiture by a husband’s disgrace is a common theme of wills and court proceedings. Men dying early deaths through violence or physical drudgery left their wives and children tragically bereft, if possibly happier. But women who eschewed the new opportunities to marry into the conquering nobility, or for whom marriage to Christ and celibacy was a more attractive career, may ultimately, by forgoing their future rights as widows, have enjoyed more prosperous and secure lives on ecclesiastical estates, which could not quite so easily be disputed or alienated.
Chambres des dames – women’s workshops
Women as landowners were exceptions to the lives of the overwhelming majority, and it is easy to envision the medieval landscape as populated exclusively by a few wealthy folk immured within the walls of fortresses, but otherwise peopled by a sea of undifferentiated peasants with a few scattered islands of monastic contemplation. The reality was much more diverse. Across its territories, the Roman state had maintained imperial workshops, gynaecea, where women worked at dyeing, spinning, weaving and finishing cloth – largely, it seems, for the military. Many of these women must have been slaves, but the workshops might also have functioned to accommodate poor widows, spurned wives, the disabled, unmarried free women, slaves, criminals and orphans – in other words, those women with no access to, or who had rejected, the security of marriage, independent wealth or paternal investment.
The Roman gynaecea survived, or evolved, into the Early Medieval period when law codes began to attempt to regulate them and Christian women’s communities inherited some of their economic and social functions, often faintly echoed in the vitæ of saints. David Herlihy’s fascinating 1990 study of women’s work in medieval Europe, Opera Muliebria, teases out the fragmentary evidence to paint a chiaroscuro of servitude and opportunity, skill and drudgery, oppression and liberty, where small-scale factory met finishing school, brothel, orphanage and convent: the backdrop to an irresistible theatre of narrative, scandal and moral fable.
Archaeological evidence from excavations and burials, particularly from continental Europe, shows that women were responsible for the dyeing, spinning and weaving of woollen cloth and linen in every settlement, to meet the immediate needs of their families. But cloth and clothing were also subject to lordly renders. As courts grew larger and as small trading settlements evolved into towns, production became increasingly specialised and long-distance trade allowed for surplus goods to be turned into profit. Women, habituated to the communal labour and craft of textile manufacture from childhood, were able, for a time, to meet increasing demand; and at the same time the social and economic threat posed by the existence of women outwith the orthodox family unit might be contained. Such institutions were termed chambres des dames, a precise equivalent of the ‘women’s room’ in Njál’s Saga.‡
There seems to have been a spectrum of management practices. A Carolingian law known as Capitulare de Villis – a sort of estate administration directive – provides the following:
• Let the members of our household be well cared for, and let no one impoverish them.
• Let [our stewards] set apart each year what is necessary for the workers and for the women’s workshops, and let them supply this fully at the proper time…
• Let [our stewards] give materials to our women’s workshops at the proper time, as is usual, that is, wool, woad, vermilion, madder, wool-combs, teazles, soap, oil, vessels and any other small items which are necessary for their work.
• Let our women’s workshops be well-ordered, with houses, heated rooms and cottages; and let them be enclosed by good fences and strong doors, such that they may do our work well.3
Sometimes the laws and ordinances of the Early Medieval kings reveal glimpses of the workings of such chambres des dames through their sanctions against crimes. The Alamanni of the Upper Rhine collected fines from men who had sex with the women of their workshops, listed as vestiaria (a wardrobe-keeper), ancilla (slave girl) or genitiaria (probably the senior girl, or supervisor). Transgressions with the senior girl attracted double the fine for the others. Men were occasionally able, then, to gain access to women in the workshops; and Herlihy cites evidence for communities that functioned as royal harems or as brothels. I wonder, also, if a single man in possession of a greater or lesser fortune, in search of a wife, might see the chambres des dames as likely recruiting grounds; and it is conceivable that the governors of some institutions might profit from such an arrangement.
Women’s specialist skills, not to mention their hard labour, were in demand: they required protection, the right tools and good working conditions – at least in theory. Some of the buildings associated with the various processes of preparation, weaving and finishing might be very large: a tenth-century royal palace excavated at Tilleda in Germany included a structure more than 24 metres (80 ft) long containing vertical looms at which perhaps a score or more of women worked side by side. Often, it seems, they slept in rooms above dye works, which, if smelly, might at least be kept warm by their furnaces. In the summer, looms and flax-scutching posts were erected under canopies outside, to take advantage of long daylight hours.
Saints’ vitæ, in particular, allow us to sketch a credible picture of what life in these women’s workshops was like. St Liutbirg was a ninth-century native of Saxony, a lowly servant in a convent where she was famed for her unsurpassed skills, energy and beauty. She seems to have been an orphan, or the child of very humble parents; she had no protection outwith the religious community in which she was raised. Her vita tells of a childhood sin – a lie about a broken needle when she was learning the art of weaving – for which she later repented. Liutbirg came to the attention of Gisla, the widow of a Count of Saxony, who adopt
ed her and took her to work in her own household. Gisla was a woman of considerable power, with administrative authority over a large tract of territory. As a patron with substantial wealth she founded monastic houses and promoted missionary work on her own initiative. It was Liutbirg’s lucky fate to become her protégé. Through hard work and skill, she rose to become the head of Gisla’s household…
She possessed such talent that she surpassed all others in the places where she lived and was reckoned to be a lady Dædalus of the diverse arts…§ she had such a grasp of the administration of affairs that the governance of the palace rested almost entirely with her…4
After the countess’s death, Liutbirg served her son Bernhard in turn, helping to raise his children. Later, seemingly yearning for a more contemplative life, she retired to a cell from which she nevertheless still managed a dyeing furnace and schooled younger girls in the arts. The workshops allowed some women the chance of a better life, a passage from powerless dependence towards the huge benefits of noble patronage within a professional career structure.
A starkly different picture of the fortunes of those raised in chambres des dames emerges from a chivalric tale of the twelfth century: Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain: The Knight with the Lion, a tale often regarded as a forerunner of the modern novel.# It’s a vivid and beautifully constructed fable of heroic valour and the deferred consummation of love. It contains, as a subplot, the description of a palisaded enclosure, the Castle of Dire Adventure, in which Yvain encountered
…three hundred maidens doing various kinds of needlework. Each one sewed as best she could with threads of gold and silk; but they were so poor that many among them wore their hair loose and went ungirded. Their dresses were worn through at the breasts and elbows, and their shifts were dirty at the collar, their necks were gaunt and their faces pale from hunger and the deprivation they had known.5