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)

Queen Tomnat

The documentary sources for early medieval Scotland represent the historical record of a patriarchal society and therefore mention few women. The small number of females whose existence was acknowledged by the annalists and chroniclers were usually of high status like the kings and clerics with whom they were associated as wives, mothers or sisters. In a previous post (Two Pictish Princesses) I turned the spotlight on an obscure royal lady called Eithne whose father ruled the Picts in the late 8th century. Here I draw attention to another woman of royal status, this time of Scottish rather than of Pictish origin.

My starting-point, as with Princess Eithne, is an entry in the Irish annals:

695  Tomnat, Ferchar’s wife, died.

This is the only mention of Tomnat so she is usually overlooked by historians and omitted from modern studies of the period. A clue to her identity, however, is provided by a later entry:

697  Ferchar Fota died.

The proximity of these two entries suggests that the Ferchar mentioned in each is the same man: Ferchar Fota (Ferchar the Tall), a powerful king and warlord of Dal Riada. Ferchar is an interesting figure because his career was played out against a backdrop of dynastic upheaval among the Scots. He rose to power as king of Cenel Loairn, one of the great royal kindreds of Argyll, whose heartland lay around the modern town of Oban. His ambitions led him to challenge Cenel nGabrain, the most powerful kindred, for paramount kingship over the whole of Dal Riada. A series of fierce battles was fought until, in 696, Ferchar defeated his rivals to attain overall sovereignty. His reign as over-king of the Scots was brief and within less than two years he was dead.

We should probably regard Tomnat as Ferchar Fota’s queen. An alternative view, namely that she was the wife of an earlier Ferchar who died in 651, requires that her death-notice in the annals is a misplaced entry that belongs in the middle of the century. There seems no justification in relocating her to this earlier generation. Identifying her husband as the great warlord of Cenel Loairn seems more logical, especially as Ferchar Fota’s importance in Dal Riadan politics may have attracted the annalists’ attention to other aspects of his life. His marriage may thus have been worthy of note and, when his wife died, news of her death would have reached the monastery on Iona where the annals were being compiled.

Sadly, Tomnat passed away a short time before her husband gained the over-kingship of Dal Riada so she missed her chance to be an early ‘Queen of Scots’. Nevertheless, she left a significant legacy to her people by bearing two mighty sons who grew up to be great war-leaders of Cenel Loairn in the early years of the 8th century. These men were Selbach and Ainfcellach, both of whom would eventually continue their father’s struggle against his Cenel nGabrain rivals. Their own sons, the grandchildren of Ferchar and Tomnat, carried the fight into the following generation before being finally overwhelmed in a disastrous conflict with the Picts.

 

Two Pictish princesses

In recent years a major archaeological project has unearthed evidence of an important Pictish monastery at Portmahomack in Easter Ross. The story of the site can be seen in the nearby Tarbat Discovery Centre and in Martin Carver’s book about the excavations (see reference below).

Visitors to the Discovery Centre are greeted by the life-size bronze image of a Pictish princess. Here she is….

  

Whenever I look at this evocative sculpture I consider how little we really know about Pictish noblewomen, many of whom were the wives, sisters, mothers and daughters of great warrior-kings. As a supporter of the matrilinear theory of Pictish royal succession I find it regrettable that the historical significance of these women was disregarded by the contemporary sources. Regrettable, yes, but not altogether surprising: such disregard was the norm in societies where literacy and the recording of history were controlled by patriarchal elites. Indeed, females of the Pictish royal kindreds would have been astonished if their names and deeds had appeared in contemporary chronicles.

Our main documentary sources for Pictish history are Bede and the Irish annals. Bede mentions Pictish royal women in passing but does not refer to any of them individually. To locate a specific female Pict we have to turn to the annals, where we find the following entry:

AD 778: Eithne, daughter of Cinadhon, died.

The name Eithne has a proud heritage. It was borne by a pagan lady whom Saint Patrick converted to Christianity and also by the mother of Saint Columba. These two women were Irish princesses and both were later elevated to sainthood. A famous bearer of the name today is the musician Eithne Brennan who uses the phonetic spelling Enya for the benefit of non-Gaelic speakers such as myself. But who was the Eithne of 778? Why is she the only Pictish woman named by the annalists?

The first question can be answered by going back three years to an earlier entry:

AD 775: The death of Cinadhon, king of the Picts.

In the Welsh Annals and in the Pictish king-list Cinadhon is called Ciniod, a variant of the name Cinaed (Kenneth). He is usually regarded as the Cinadhon mentioned in 778. His daughter Eithne was therefore a Pictish princess. She may have borne a Gaelic name because of her ancestry: her paternal grandfather was an exiled Scot from the Lorn dynasty of Argyll.

The second question is less easy to answer. Why did the Irish annalists mention Princess Eithne alone of her countrywomen? The Picts had no ruling queens so she was certainly not mentioned because of some Boudicca-like achievement on the battlefield. She might have been the mother of a renowned king but so were other Pictish women and this would not have been enough to get her noticed by the annalists. Perhaps a solution can be found by considering the primary purpose of the annals?

First and foremost, the annalists were keen to record important events affecting the great monasteries of Ireland and North Britain. They were accustomed to noting secular items such as major battles and the deaths of kings but they themselves were monks and their primary interests were therefore ecclesiastical. They rarely mentioned women but those whom they did identify by name were usually noted in religious contexts. An example is Kentigerna, daughter of an Irish king, who went to Scotland and who eventually became a devout Christian hermit on an island in Loch Lomond. The annalists noted her death in 734 and later Scottish tradition made her a saint. Could the Pictish princess Eithne have followed a similar path of religious devotion, perhaps as a nun renowned for her piety, and been accorded the honour of an obituary notice in the annals?

Book reference: Martin Carver, Portmahomack: Monastery of the Picts (Edinburgh, 2008)

Pictish warrior women?

“It is plausible to conclude that, prior to 700, the Picts allowed and/or required women to fight.”  Paul Wagner, Pictish warrior, AD 297-841 (Osprey, 2002), p.63

I find this statement difficult to reconcile with what we know of the Picts. It is based chiefly on Adomnan’s Law of Innocents (AD 697) which established a code of conduct for protecting non-combatants (women, children and monks) from military service and from the ravages of warfare. The code was ratified by nearly every Celtic kingdom in the British Isles and was reinforced by a system of fines. Wagner is not alone in assuming that Adomnan’s plea for women to be exempt from military service means that they were routinely recruited as soldiers prior to 697. Like others before him he supports his view by pointing to Irish legends of female warriors and to historical figures such as Boudicca. He cites no examples from the early medieval period because none exist.

There were, no doubt, many desperate occasions when individual Pictish women took up arms to defend their homes and families against marauders. From here it is a big leap to imagine formal recruitment of weapon-bearing females into the warband of a Pictish king. Neither the Picts nor their neighbours operated egalitarian societies where everyone got involved and did their bit for the wider community. On the contrary, these societies were strictly hierarchical. At the top of the social structure stood a rich aristocracy from whose ranks the king and his family were drawn. These aristocrats also provided an exclusive warrior class and were the only social group permitted to engage in warfare. There was no middle class and – in Celtic society at least – no free, weapon-bearing peasantry akin to the later Anglo-Saxon fyrd. The gulf between nobles and peasants – in terms of wealth and status – was huge and insurmountable.

Early medieval societies were not only unequal but patriarchal as well. They were male-dominated and gave little real authority to women. This is why the Pictish regnal lists show a long line of kings but no queens. It also explains why only one female Pict, a princess called Eithni, is mentioned by name in early medieval sources. In this context it is important to note that Pictish royal matriliny – the selection of a king by his maternal ancestry – is not the same as Pictish matriarchy. Female Picts, even aristocratic ones, were denied access to the upper levels of power and authority. In patriarchal societies women are normally excluded from warfare and are not expected to fight alongside their menfolk except in dire circumstances.

The notion of Pictish female warriors is, in fact, highly implausible. Aristocratic Pictish women were excluded from military service by reasons of gender. Peasant women were excluded by reasons of gender and social class. These exclusions were mirrored across the whole of Europe and were not confined to Northern Britain alone. The same restrictions applied also to Boudicca of the Iceni, though she seemingly bucked the trend and led her people to war. We should nevertheless regard her as an exception to the norm, just as the later Anglo-Saxon warrior queens Aethelburh (who besieged Taunton in 722) and Aethelflaed (the “Lady of the Mercians”) were exceptional in their own times. Whether any of these charismatic and resourceful women ever actually fought in combat is a different matter.