1066 and Little Else

I have always thought it the height of twattery to quote 17th-century Frenchmen, even more so than to quote Bernard of Clairvaux, or Cicero, or Abraham Lincoln. This is because 17th century Frenchmen can be accepted as so urbane, witty and glamorous – even Racine – that anyone who quotes them clearly thinks of themselves as such, and can therefore bugger off.

We do not need to know that La Rochefoucauld drew the distinction between thinkers and doers. It is for anyone to reason that it would be nice if, for example, government ministers took the advice of experts who actually know the field into which said minister has been parachuted, or if know-it-all theorists would practice what they preach. We are all heroes in our own imaginations. Marcus Aurelius observed as much. But aside from heralding the creeping grumpiness of a new term, what do these thoughts have to do with anything?

Today is the traditional Feast of Edward the Confessor, that’s what.

Edward occupies a strange place in the English historic imagination. He is an interim figure, someone poised between more interesting periods and dynamic characters. He is a patient, abstemious, possibly celibate man in a world of bastards and Vikings. We generally have no idea what a Confessor is, and it’s a saint who, rather than having a cinematic martyrdom, dies rather quietly. If he had lived today, he would probably collect stamps.

He was emphatically not a doer. Indeed, the most interesting thing he did, many would agree, was to die, because the most seismic shift in English social history closely followed his death. Certainly, Edward functioned as a patron saint for several centuries, but even in this he didn’t do anything, being already dead. (To give credit where it’s due, he also founded quite a nice abbey.)

#squadgoals

Part of the development in history teaching in the past half century or so has been to move away from the idea of history being strung together by a few heroes (usual military) who forced the rest of us into progress, and more towards history within a narrative of flux, deriving from wider social forces as much as the actions of an elite. The heroes are retained only to be picked apart. The problem with the reign of Edward the Confessor from this perspective is that it is dominated by a military and ecclesiastical elite. The problem with Edward the Confessor is that he appears to have taken a back seat on pretty much everything.

So in the absence of much action to judge, what impression might we have of Edward’s character? Clearly he was religious; the Pope is a Catholic. He seems not to have been particularly keen on patronising literary efforts, unlike his mother Emma. He married a member of the most powerful family in the country, and was effectively ruled by them thereafter. Does this make him weak, apathetic, or just quite zen?

My inclination would be to see Edward as a sort of vegan pacifist geography teacher, like Merlin in the third Shrek movie. Non-confrontational and not terribly interested in status. Keen on growing his own vegetables, like a latter-day Noggin the Nog. He probably had a repertoire of jokes that he never told but which amused him greatly in long meetings. He may have had a favourite song that he requested of every scop he met, and it was never as good as the first time he heard it but he still made admiring faces and gave several coins. He was perhaps embarrassed by his coin portrait, thinking it showy-off. He almost certainly apologised to every rock he stubbed his toe on. He was undoubtedly fond of his too-glamorous wife, and mildly saddened that she hated his favourite tunic. He definitely had a beard.

Edward the Confessor was Jeremy Corbyn. You heard it here first.

Rainbows and Smiles

Of the two major memorials taking place in Europe this week, both speak to the absolute necessity of reconciliation, of casting off old enmities to ensure peaceful futures. Since they concern twentieth-century events, there’s not much I intend to say about them – except that at times like this the increasingly blinkered separatism of sizeable swathes of the English population strikes an especially jarring chord.

A memorial that we won’t read about is the anniversary this Thursday of the St Brice’s Day Massacre of 1002. It’s hardly a famous occasion, and despite being marked vaguely at its millennium twelve years ago, holds little interest to those outside the field of Anglo-Saxon history. But it is a particularly dishonourable event in the years of skirmishes and strong-arming that preceded the Danish conquest of England, and a hideous aperçu into the ethnically-motivated violence and animosity of the period.

Scholars differ in their reactions to them, but these are the events as reported in the C-text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, now British Library MS Cotton Tiberius B.i:

In that year the king ordered all the Danish men who were in England to be slain. This was done on St Brice’s mass-day, because it was made known to the king that they would treacherously bereave him of his life, and afterwards all of his Witan, and after that have his kingdom without any gainsaying. (trans. J.A. Giles, 1914)

Thus the scribes of the Abingdon Chronicle attribute the massacre of the Danes in England to the vengeful edict of a paranoid king. This king, incidentally, was the hapless Æthelred the Unready.

Give peace a chance.

It is unclear as to how many died; it has been sensibly suggested that the victims all lived outside the Danelaw, in towns whose foreign populations indicate a size like to or larger than Oxford, where a mass grave was discovered in the last few years. Chillingly, the Danes of Oxford had sought refuge in the church of St Frideswide, which was then burned to the ground by the local population. As evidenced by a charter issued two years later, Æthelred’s primary concern was over the loss of the church’s books, and he even claimed that the Danes had burned down the church with themselves in it.

Reprisals throughout the country were bloody, not least because amongst the dead in the West Country had been a Danish royal hostage, Gunhild. Exeter was sacked, and within ten years the Danes had exacted over thirty thousand pounds of tribute payment, ransacked at least fifteen counties, and murdered the Archbishop of Canterbury. While the massacre invoked by Æthelred may have seemed just at the time, and was taken up by the English people, the result was decades of tension, violence and political instability.

I usually object in the strongest terms to the use of the word ‘medieval’ as shorthand for backwardness and barbarism. But the violent character of the decades around the turn of the first millennium reinforces the idea that murder, rape and pillage were the only order of the medieval day. These sorts of events are now reported every day by the news media, and commentators are perhaps mostly correct to describe their perpetrators as medieval. Æthelred gives us few ideas as to how to remedy this violence. But following the example of his warrior ancestor Ælfred, via Tina Fey,

I wish I could bake a cake made of rainbows and smiles, and we could all eat it and be happy.

Keeping It In the Family

It is a trope of every American high school movie that the jock whose father wants him to progress to his alma mater before returning home to run the family business secretly dreams of being a poet, or something. Said jock is usually surprisingly sporty, given how sensitive he is, and some variety of recreational showdown tends to be the catalyst for the pushy father to realise how much of a stereotypically pushy father he was being, and allow his son to go to that other Ivy League place (that he secretly got into, and hid the letter, before it was found, despite being hidden; they should definitely switch to the UCAS system – it’s password protected and everything) and become a poet, or something.

Familial occupations were, we have to suppose, fairly common in the Middle Ages, and while there is evidence from later periods to suggest that apprentices may have come from outside the family unit, there would have been nothing irregular in millers’ sons becoming millers, smiths’ sons becoming smiths, and so on. This is, after all, how many European surnames became fixed.

Much of this tradition would of course have depended upon ideas of socioeconomic class, but the rules generally seem to apply across the scale: a farm labourer’s son would most likely have been a farm labourer, while there is a very strong chance that a prince’s son would have been a prince. And while those who became clerics, for the most part, were not the offspring of clerics, one has to assume that for many in the medieval period, a profession was effectively inherited.

Now imagine that your family ‘business’ is sainthood.

This may sound silly, not least because much medieval sainthood is associated with virginity, and virgins don’t tend to have many offspring. However, particularly in the period directly following the Christianisation of Britain, large numbers of Anglo-Saxon royalty were canonised – and not usually for martyrdom. It has been argued that the creation of royal saint-cults aided the transition from pagan rites in which the king would play a priestly role, to Christianity, but as ever there was a great risk of over-egging the pudding.

King Anna of East Anglia is the prime example. The Venerable Bede records the remarkable saintliness of this 7^th century ruler’s immediate family: his son, Saint Jurmin; his daughters Saints Æthelburh, Seaxburh, Wihtburh, Sæthryth and Æthelthryth; his granddaughters Saints Eormenhild and Eorcengota; and his great-granddaughter Saint Werburh. Of these, Æthelthryth and Werburh are the most important, the former being the patron saint of Ely, the latter of Chester, and Bede composed a lovely elegy to Æthelthryth (lat. Etheldreda, Fr. Audrey) – but even by the standards of the day, this is verging on the ridiculous.

‘Why can’t you be more like Æthelthryth?’

I’ve tried to imagine how this family dynamic must have worked. King Anna comes home after a long day of kinging, smiles at his daughter Seaxburh and says, ‘Darling, I’ve found you a husband.’

‘But I want to be a nun.’

‘Well I’m sorry, darling, but can’t you put that off for a bit? This Eorcenberht chap’s awfully nice, and I’m afraid I’ve rather promised you to him.’

‘I say, what rotten luck,’ says Seaxburh, not aware that Enid Blyton wouldn’t be born for 1300 years. ‘Well, alright then. As long as I don’t have to sleep with him.’

‘That’s really between a man and his wife.’

‘But Æthelthryth hasn’t slept with either of her husbands!’

Æthelthryth, the favourite daughter whom no one likes, is scowling in the corner. ‘Don’t bring me into this,’ she says.

So Seaxburh marries Eorcenberht of Kent and they have four children. One day, King Eorcenberht comes home after a long day of kinging and says to his daughter Eormenhild, ‘Darling, I’ve found you a husband.’

‘But I want to be a nun.’

‘That’s what your mother said. Look, darling, Wulfhere’s a jolly decent sort, and Mercia’s not a bad place, and what is it anyway with girls and wanting to be nuns?’

‘A woman can only have full bodily autonomy if she removes herself from the objectifying sexual circulation of the marriage market.’

‘That’s nice, dear. Can’t it wait?’

‘Well, alright then. As long as I don’t have to sleep with him.’

‘Have you been talking to your auntie Æthelthryth?’

So Eormenhild marries Wulfhere of Mercia and they have three children. Wulfhere dies and is succeeded by his brother Æthelred. One day, Æthelred, growing tired of kingship, says loudly, ‘I say, I’m pooped with all this king malarkey. I want to be a monk.’

His nephew Coenred overhears this and says, ‘What an excellent plan. I’ll succeed you.’

‘Don’t you want to be a monk?’

‘Well, I’ve been thinking a bit about it, and since my grandmother and all her sisters, and my mother and aunt, and my sister are all nuns, and they don’t get to do any ruling or bashing of skulls – I might put it off a few years.’

Which he does. Then one day he turns to his cousin Ceolred and says, ‘I say, Ceolred, I rather fancy reverting to the fold now. Do you think you might take over this whole kinging business?’

Ceolred is snorting mead off a dancing girl and doesn’t hear the question. Coenred takes his silence for acquiescence.

‘Awfully decent of you, old man. It’s jolly good experience too, and you’ll get to retire to the monastery of your choice.’

Ceolred does hear this. ‘I don’t want to be a monk,’ he says.

The housecarls collectively gasp. The sceop’s harp dwindles tunelessly away. A drinking horn is smashed on the rushes, and the hall falls silent.

‘What do you mean, you don’t want to be a monk?’

That Which We Call Ælfwaru…

It may surprise you to learn that, according to the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England project, run by Kings College London, there was not a single landowner in England in 1066 by the name of Æthelred. This oh-so-characteristic Anglo-Saxon name was evidently suffering a massive dip in popularity, only 50 years after the death of the chronically inept king Æthelred the Unready (Ill-Advised). Christopher Lewis, who took part in the project, has likened this to the unlikelihood of any German boys born post-1945 being called Adolf.

Common names give a pretty good indication of the cultural sensibilities of a period. Something as cataclysmic as the Norman Conquest inevitably had an effect on the names of people from all social strata – initially within the landowning classes, but eventually across the whole of England. One of the multiple reasons for my concentrated hatred of Ken Follett’s World Without End is the author’s lack of distinction between Anglo-Saxon, Welsh and Anglo-Norman or French names. Are we really to believe that, two and a half centuries after the Conquest, Elfrics, Wulfrics and Godwins really live cheek-by-jowl with Alices, Cecilias and Matildas? What is the statistical likelihood of aristos Gerald and Maud calling their sons Ralph and Merthin?

But more generally, there is an unfortunate lack of medieval-sounding names in use in the English-speaking world. At one end, the market is being heroically supported by Thorlac Turville-Petre and Scyld Berry, but for obvious reasons they are in a tiny minority. One of the younger fellows in the Medieval English department here has joked that her children will be given gratuitously medieval names – Æthelfleda was one suggestion – and someone in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic shortlisted names of Irish saints for her recently-born son. As these cases may suggest, is the use of such names to be restricted to academics?

Amongst the many names I’ve ‘promised’ to call my future offspring, I count ‘Banjo’, ‘Turtle’, ‘Endymion Oberon Amadeus’, ‘Marco’, ‘Aurelio’, ‘Marcus Aurelius’, ‘Mary Tokyo Banjo Iphigenia’, ‘Saint Thomasina Cantilupe’, ‘Wulfstan’, ‘Æthelthryth’, ‘Carmina Burana’ and ‘Constantine’. Many of these names were approved when drunk, but obviously I am more likely than most to give a medieval name if inspiration were to be sought. If a daughter should be named after a feminist icon, Hildegard and Hrotsvitha are as likely to occur to me as Emmeline and Gloria. You may pity the fool who names a son Chrodegang, but in the grand scheme of crap names I don’t see this as any worse than Brayden.

All of this may speak of an unconscious snobbery on my part, that children with obscurely intelligent names must have intelligent parents and that, in the brave new world where Katie Hopkins is our vampire overlord, these names will confer automatic social cache. But really I just happen to like certain medieval names. People I think worthy of admiration had these names, and that is as good a reason as any to bestow them on a child. After several generations of Elizabeths in my family, I don’t see why Mechthild can’t get a look-in.