The Lady of the Mercians

English Mercia in AD 900

Alfred the Great died in 899 and was succeeded as king of Wessex by his son Edward. At that time the Vikings held sway over much of northern and midland England, having toppled the old kingdoms of Northumbria and Mercia. The western part of Mercia still lay under English rule but its leaders now called themselves ealdormen rather than kings and acknowledged the authority of Wessex. When Edward succeeded his father the Mercians were ruled by Ealdorman Aethelred whose wife Aethelflaed was Alfred’s firstborn child and Edward’s sister.

Aethelred assisted his overlord King Edward against the Vikings but fell ill in c.902 and withdrew from political life. In his stead Aethelflaed, herself half-Mercian by blood, became the effective ruler of Mercia. When Aethelred died in 911 the people accepted his widow as their sole leader, calling her Myrcna hlaefdige, “The Lady of the Mercians”. She continued her husband’s anti-Viking policies and supported the campaigns of her brother Edward. Together the siblings built a line of fortresses, running diagonally across England from the Thames to the Dee, to serve as military bases for future campaigning.

Aethelflaed was no armchair general and took an active part in warfare, leading her Mercian warriors on successful expeditions in the east midlands. In 917, for example, she enhanced her reputation at home and abroad by capturing the Viking stronghold of Derby. Her military policies were not, however, confined to the frontiers of Mercia. She was acutely aware of the threat posed by Scandinavian settlements in northwest England – in what are now the counties of Cumbria and Lancashire – and across the Solway Firth in the coastlands of Galloway. But her principal source of anxiety in the North was the powerful Viking warlord Ragnall who had appeared in Northumbria with his warband in 914.

English sources shed little light on Aethelflaed’s northern policy. Their authors were evidently keen to highlight Edward’s successes by downplaying those of his sister. Only among the Celtic peoples were her achievements in North Britain duly acknowledged. According to Irish traditions preserved by the 17th century chronicler Duald mac Firbis she formed a military alliance with the Scots and Strathclyde Britons, her aim being to offer a unified challenge to Ragnall. She seems to have been recognised as leader of this tripartite coalition and, when the allied forces met Ragnall’s Vikings at Corbridge in 918, she either took part in the battle or – perhaps more likely – sent a contingent of Mercian troops. English sources noted her death in the same year, at Tamworth in Mercia, on June 12th. Her brother Edward maintained the impetus of her northern policy and, two years later, he finally secured the homage of Ragnall. This was not Aethelflaed’s only legacy to the North: her nephew Athelstan, a fosterling at her court, may have learned how to deal with the Scots and Britons by watching her methods of diplomacy. This knowledge would have been crucial in later years when, as ruler of Wessex, he found himself facing a powerful Celtic-Scandinavian coalition which included his aunt’s former allies.

I end this post with a brief epilogue or epitaph on Aethelflaed. A measure of the respect in which she was held by the Celtic nations can be gleaned from the Annals of Ulster which noted her death in June 918 by praising her as famosissima regina Saxonum (a most famous queen of the Saxons) while ignoring the passing not only of her brother Edward but also of her father Alfred the Great. The fact that she was singled out for such fullsome praise by the Ulster annalists adds weight to the traditions preserved in Duald’s text which – being a rather late and controversial source – needs all the support it can get.

 

References

F.T. Wainwright, “Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians”, pp.53-69 in P. Clemoes (ed.) The Anglo-Saxons; some aspects of their history and culture presented to Bruce Dickins (London, 1959)

Pauline Stafford, “Political women in Mercia, eighth to early tenth centuries”, pp.35-49 in M. Brown and C. Farr (eds.) Mercia: an Anglo-Saxon kingdom in Europe (Leicester, 2001)

Stephanie Hollis, “Aethelflaed”, pp.5-7 in R. Pennington (ed.) Amazons to fighter pilots: a biographical dictionary of military women. Vol.1 (Westport CT, 2003)

English translations of the “Three Fragments” or “Fragmentary Annals” compiled by Dual mac Firbis can be found in:

Alan Orr Anderson (ed.) Early sources of Scottish history, AD 500 to 1286. Vol. 1 (London, 1922)

Catraeth and Gwen Ystrat

Edinburgh Castle, site of the Gododdin stronghold Din Eidyn.

In the introductory chapters to his radical reconstruction of the Old Welsh poem Y Gododdin John T. Koch suggested that the sixth-century battle of Catraeth, described in the poem as a defeat for the warriors of Gododdin (Lothian), was a victory for their fellow-Britons of Rheged. Koch believed that a poem known as Gweith Gwen Ystrat (The Battle of Gwen Valley) attributed to Rheged’s court-bard Taliesin was composed to celebrate the event from the victors’ perspective. He suggested that Catraeth and Gwen Ystrat were different names for the same place. In adopting this radical stance he challenged the conventional view of the Gododdin defeat which has long seen it as a triumph by the English kingdom of Bernicia over one of her British neighbours.

I was sceptical about Koch’s theory as soon as I saw it, not least because I don’t see any need to conflate the two battles. In Y Gododdin, Catraeth is clearly stated to be the location of the Gododdin defeat: there is no mention of the Gwen Valley. In Taliesin’s poem, Catraeth is mentioned as a territory associated with Rheged but is not described as the site of a battle. My unease about these and other aspects of Koch’s vision (or revision) of sixth-century history prompted me to discuss his book in the first issue of The Heroic Age back in 1999.

Recently, I looked again at a 1998 paper by Graham Isaac in which the Catraeth-Gwen Ystrat conflation was subjected to detailed linguistic scrutiny. When I first read Isaac’s analysis some years ago I welcomed his rejection of Koch’s theory – having no expertise myself in the complex field of Old Welsh literature I was glad to see a scholar from this area putting the theory under the microscope. Since returning to this topic in the past few weeks I was reminded of something I had forgotten, something quite significant for anyone with an interest in Rheged, namely Isaac’s belief that Gweith Gwen Ystrat should not be regarded as a poem composed in sixth-century North Britain.

In his paper Isaac questions the long-held view that the poem contains archaic linguistic features indicative of an early date of composition. Instead, he proposes that it was composed not by the northern bard Taliesin but by a Welshman of the period 1050 to 1150. If Isaac is right, the implications could be very severe, not just for Koch’s conflation of the two battles but also for conventional perceptions about other poems attributed to Taliesin. As Isaac observes near the end of his analysis: “It may be regarded as regrettable in some quarters that Gweith Gwen Ystrat in particular probably tells us nothing about sixth-century North British history” (p.69). If the poem is a product of eleventh- or twelfth-century Wales, then how confident can we be that any of Taliesin’s poetry about Rheged was composed in the sixth-century North? If one or more of these poems were composed centuries later by a Welsh “antiquarian” poet, how much of their political and geographical information about sixth-century Rheged can be trusted?

References

 John T. Koch, The Gododdin of Aneirin: text and context in Dark Age North Britain (Cardiff, 1997)

G.R. Isaac, “Gweith Gwen Ystrat and the northern heroic age of the sixth century” Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 36 (1998), 61-70

 My review of Koch’s book for the online journal The Heroic Age can be found here.

Additional note: The place Gwen Ystrat has never been satisfactorily located, nor (in my opinion) has Catraeth. I am unconvinced by the conventional identification of Catraeth as Catterick in Yorkshire, which I believe is too far south to be considered part of the Gododdin borderlands. Similar techniques of “sounds like” etymology have been employed to identify Gwen Ystrat with places in northern England such as Wensleydale, Winster, etc, but these are nothing more than wild shots in the dark.

Some of my early doubts about the Catterick hypothesis can be found in an article published sixteen years ago:
Tim Clarkson, “Richmond and Catraeth” Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 26 (1993), 15-20