The human condition is the same for everyone and the Bible does not discriminate, it does however acknowledge the differences between the genders and for us to say that we are not different is really stupid. Please do not confuse the difference in personality and the male/female roll in society as being discriminatory for all are equal in the sight of God.
The Old English for a human being was mann. All human beings were menn, the term being used for both sexes, in the same way that women are today supposed to be included in the meaning of such words as "mankind" One eleventh-century document talks of the descendants of Adam and Eve as "descended from two men" meaning two people of equal status. One charter of 969 AD, discussed land near Worcester that had been held by a man called Elfweard:
"Elfweard was the first man..." ran the document. "Now it is in the hands of his daughter, and she is the second man."
Thirty wills survive today from the late Anglo-Saxon period and ten of those are the wills of women, each of whom was a significant property owner, with the same rights of ownership and bequeathal as any man* In the year 1000 the role that women played in English society was more complex than surface impressions might suggest.
The reign of King Ethelred took its character from two powerful women. It could even be argued that the women were more powerful than Ethelred himself, who came to the throne as a boy aged only ten or twelve, thanks to the mysterious murder of his half brother Edward at Corfe in Dorset in 978 AD. No one was ever punished for the violence, but it has generally been presumed that his death had something to do with Ethelreds mother, the dowager queen Aelfthryth, who thus secured the throne for her own blood line, along with power for herself as regent. The church at the time drew a veil over the ugly incident, since the dead Edwards reign had been marked by notable hostility towards the recently re founded monasteries, in notable contrast to Aelfthryth, who made herself the leading patron of church reform. So in the year 1000, both the king of England and the reforming church hierarchy owed their power to the ambition of the same dynamic woman.
In 1002 Ethelred, now in his early thirties, tried to bolster his wavering authority by marrying Emma, the sister of Duke Richard II of Normandy. It must have been an intimidating moment for the young woman when she crossedthe Channel from France that spring to meet Ethelred, who had already fathered six sons, and at least four daughters, by previous liaisons. Only just a teenager, and perhaps as young as twelve, Emma spoke no English, and was required by her new husband to take the Englisc name of Aelfgifu. This alliance of convenience was a classic example of the Anglo-Saxon concept of the female "peace-weaver" --the woman whose feminine qualities were supposed to weave new bonds of family loyalty.
But Emma was to prove a personality in her own right. Before she was twenty her strength of character had made her one of the most powerful figures in Ethelreds circle, and after Ethelreds death his Danish successor Canute sidelined his first wife to marry her. Emma's stature provided the authority that the foreign king knew that he needed. After Canute died he was briefly succeeded by Harold Harefoot, his son by his first marriage, but after Harefoots death, it was Emma's blood that took over, first in the shape of Harthacanute, her son by Canute, and then by the son she had borne Ethelred, the half-English, half-Norman Edward the Confessor, whose links with his blood relation William of Normandy paved the way for the Anglo-Norman polity. Emma had been married to two kings of Engla-lond (old spelling), and she was the mother of two more.
Anglo-Saxon kings did not succeed on the basis of primogeniture. All the kings offspring were known as aethelings - throneworthy - and from this gene pool the royal family would select the aetheling who seemed best qualified for the job. It was the practical way to maintain the wealth and preeminence of the ruling clan. King Alfred was a youngest brother who became king of Wessex in preference to sons of his elder siblings, while in Ireland an extended version of the same principle circulated sovereignty around different clans on a rota basis. It was comparable to the selection by family consensus that is operated by Bedouin Arab monarchies today. In England the system produced a variegated succession of monarchs who were generally more capable than those thrown up by a rigid line of inheritance - and it also offered power to those royal mothers who succeeded in raising competent and forceful sons. Operating through the male line, the women had the chance to make themselves the key.
Nepotism was nothing to be ashamed of in the years around 1000. It was the purpose of family existence. The mother who advanced her clans power earned the respect of the entire community, and it is significant that this era saw the beginning in England of the cult of the Virgin Mary, the mother who raised the most powerful son of all. A tenth-century collection of blessings written for Bishop Ethelwold contains one of the first representations of Mary being crowned that survives in the West. The Virgin is shown not as a carpenters wife, which would have made her very easily identifiable with most of the people who prayed to her, but as a worldly queen, wearing a crown* It was another aspect of the developing alliance between crown and church, and the image was the more significant for being propagated by a church which had found natural allies in tough royal matrons like Aelfthryth and Emma* At the end of her life, Emma refused to follow tradition and retire to a nunnery, but stayed active in dynastic politics. She commissioned her own biography to make sure that her life was remembered as she wished to be - and she is remembered as Emma, not Aelfgifu.
To judge from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the most dynamic royal matron of the tenth century was Alfreds daughter Aethelflaed, who took up the English campaign against the Danes after her fathers death, in alliance with her brother Edward, earning herself the title "Lady of the Mercians." Aethelflaed was married to the monarch of the Midland kingdom of Mercia, but she ran the country herself for seven years after his death, pursuing her fathers policy of building fortified burhs against the Danes - and leading her soldiers in a personal capacity, according to the Chronicle entry from 913:
"In this year, by the grace of God, Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians, went with all the Mercians to Tamworth, and built the fortress there in early summer and before the beginning of August, the one at Stafford."
In 916 Aethelflaed sent a punitive expedition against some Welsh invaders, then turned her attention to the Vikings, from whom she won back the burhs of Derby and Leicester. "She protected her own men and terrified aliens." wrote William of Malmesbury, a post-Conquest historian who seemed more surprised than were the Anglo-Saxon chroniclers that a woman should achieve so much. Starting her programme of fortress building in 910 AD, Aethelflaed got ten burhs completed in less than five years, and led her Mercians to victories that made her one of the most powerful figures in early tenth-century England. We can imagine this latter-day Boadicea standing behind the shieldwall, inspiring the loyalty of her own troops and winning theawed respect of her enemies. By 918 the Vikings in York had volunteered their allegiance to Aethelflaed without a fight. Alongside her father, Alfred, the Lady of the Mercians was one of England's folk heroes in the year 1000, remembered and respected as a tough woman in tough times, and her reputation was to grow with the retelling.
Another female category of mann who had no option but to be tough were the women who ran the monasteries of early Anglo-Saxon England. Some fifty of the religious communities founded in the seventh century were double houses, where men and women lived and worshipped side by side, and the records indicate that all of these double houses were under the direction of the female. Everyone answered to the abbess, not the abbot. It was evidently not a problem for a community of educated men to submit to the authority of a woman thirteen hundred years ago, though the documents do show that the abbesses in charge of double houses were all aethelings --members of royal families. Among these pioneering female missionaries the most famous was the abbess Hilda, who founded (or possibly re founded) the abbey of Whitby on the Yorkshire coast, where in 664 she hosted the famous Synod of Whitby, at which Celtic and Rome-supporting Christians met to argue over the date of Easter.
"All who knew her" wrote the Venerable Bede, "called her mother." It was under Hilda's encouragement that the Whitby cowherd Caedmon produced the first Christian poems and songs in English, and Hilda got her monks to learn and propagate the poet's evangelising songs. According to Bede, she also "compelled those under her direction to devote time to the study of the holy scriptures" with such success that no less than five of her monkish pupils went on to become bishops. Within a few years of her death in 680 A.D Hilda was being hailed as a saint, and to this day pious tradition has it that the migrating geese who fly down from the Arctic to rest on the headland near the site of Whitby's old abbey are pilgrims paying homage to her memory. By the year 1000 there were at least fifteen English churches dedicated to St. Hilda, where her feast was celebrated every year on November 17th.
From "The Year 1000" by Robert Lacy and Danny Danziger.
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