Telling the girls from the boys in Anglo-Saxon England

Posted on by

We seldom know less than when we’re sure of ourselves, and since we all know that the men in Anglo-Saxon England were warriors and the women were, um, you know, women, a recent article revisiting those assumptions makes for good reading.

What did it mean to be an, um, you know, woman in Anglo-Saxon England? Oh, hell, we all know the answer to that. They pottered around the house, fussing over whether it needed new curtains. In their spare time, they birthed children and kept them from falling into the fire or the lake or the river, and they spun, wove, dyed, sewed, embroidered, cooked, baked, healed, fed, cut hair, made fires, sharpened blades, worked in the fields, churned butter, chopped wood, and basically didn’t matter one little bit to the economy or the culture.

I don’t sound sour, do I? I don’t have any reason to be.

Irrelevant photo: I’m reasonably sure these are  honeysuckle berries. Some species of honeysuckle have edible berries and some don’t, although as someone or other said about mushrooms, “They’re all edible, but some of them only once.” So beautiful as they are, I won’t be making jelly out of them. Especially since I don’t make jelly.

So what’s with this new study?

It re-examines pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon burials, focusing on the ones that were dismissed as outliers because they didn’t fit the expected pattern.

The pre-Christian part of that sentence is important, because people buried stuff with their dead–the things that mattered to them; the things they used in life–so they tell us a good bit about how people lived. Christian cemeteries don’t give us that gift. 

As a general rule, weapons, horse-riding equipment, and tools (as in, not household tools) are associated with men. Jewelry, weights for spinning yarn, sewing equipment, and beads are associated with women. But that’s not an absolute. The exceptions are those outliers, and for years archeologists dismissed them because they messed with their expectations. 

A study by James Davison looks at what’s been swept aside, arguing that the Anglo-Saxon approach to gender may have been more fluid than we’ve assumed. Working with burials that took place between the fifth and eighth centuries in Buckland, Dover, he finds that grave goods don’t always align with the sex of the skeleton, and in an article about his work he talks about two burials in particular, both of people who had high status in the community.

How does he know their status? From how much effort went into digging the graves. Digging graves is hard work. I haven’t dug any myself, but I’ve planted plants and dug a drainage ditch, both of which are easy by comparison, and I can testify that the earth we live on is heavy and full of rocks and roots and clay and other fun stuff. People put more effort into the graves of people they considered important.

And then there are teeth. Cavities indicate that the person had access to sugar, which was a luxury, and an absence of horizontal lines on the teeth (enamel hypoplasia, in case you care) indicates that the person didn’t go short of food. All of that plus rich grave goods will tell a clear story about a person’s standing in the community.

With that bit of background tucked under our gender-appropriate haircuts, let’s consider Grave 30, which holds the skeleton of a person who was somewhere between 35 and 40 years old. The skeleton’s definitely male and the grave was particularly deep for the period–0.61 meters–so figure high status. Other markers of status are the teeth (five cavities, so a taste for sugar, and if we still measured status by cavities, I’d be a fucking queen) and no markers of malnutrition. 

If you’re still not convinced by that, you can run your virtual fingers through the grave goods: a bone comb, a silver-gilt brooch and a silver pin (standard parts of a woman’s clothing, but upscale ones), 84 beads, a silver pendant, a buckle, a knife, and a set of iron keys. High status. 

Keys? They were important markers of women as keepers of the home. Some women were buried with actual keys and some with symbolic ones–presumably because the real ones couldn’t be spared.

Hang on, though: this is a male skeleton. With the kind of things that would typically mark a woman’s burial. And they were held in high esteem by the community.

What can we make of this? It’s hard to know, since the people who could’ve explained it are dead and nobody seems to have thought it was worth documenting. Should we decide the person was a transexual? That strikes me as importing a twenty-first-century interpretation onto a seventh-century life. So should we say this was a man who was accepted as a woman? Or who was accepted as a man but lived the way women typically lived. After all, you don’t have to renounce one sex to live in a way that’s more typical of the other one. 

Basically, we can’t know. What we can know is that the picture of Anglo-Saxon culture that we’ve been given is oversimplified. 

 

Grave 93

Now let’s wend our morbid way to Grave 93, where we’ll find a skeleton of about the same age that’s written up as possibly female, since it’s not as well preserved as the one in Grave 30. The grave isn’t as deep, but it’s large, so the person was of high status, if not quite as high. The teeth are interesting: they show some evidence of cavities but also of occlusal fissures, which are often caused or exacerbated by feminizing hormones, particularly during pregnancy. 

Hoping to move our skeleton from the Possibly Female category into the Probably Female one, I asked Lord G about hormones and occlusal fissures and ended up trolling through a series of articles about dental sealants. In other words, I learned nothing of any use. So we’ll have to leave our friend in the Possibly Female file. 

Sorry. I liked the story I was building, but we’ll be boring and stick with the few facts we have at hand.

Whatever sex the person was, they were buried with a sword, a spearhead, fragments of a decorated shield, one glass bead (it was probably attached to the sword, and I could spin you a good story around that too, but we’re trying to stay with fact, remember), an iron rod, a bronze band, iron fragments from a buckle, and a bronze ring. Swords were associated with the burials of men, but not just any men. Swords were for (sorry to keep using the phrase) a high-status men. Of the seventeen graves excavated, only this one contained a sword.

If the skeleton was female, what do we make of what was buried with it? Maybe that this person lived and fought as a man and was considered a man. Maybe that women–or at least this woman–fought as a man without having to be considered a one. In other words, women could be accepted as warriors. A person doesn’t have to be transexual to mess with gender roles. It’s also possible that this woman was the last survivor of her family and was buried with the family heirlooms, although if that had been true I’d expect her to have had the traditional woman’s goods as well. 

 

C’mon, though, give us a conclusion

Sorry, I can’t. Archeologists are amazing in their ability to unearth bits of the past, but they’re frustrating creatures who refuse to give us details they don’t actually know. Or the good ones are, anyway. So hats off to the ones who refuse to oversimplify the picture of how people lived in the past, and a boot up the backside to the ones who left us with the neat and inaccurate images we’ve carried in our heads for so long.

46 thoughts on “Telling the girls from the boys in Anglo-Saxon England”

    • Ah, those! Well, the one glass bead was her mother’s, and it was supposed to have been buried with her but she kept it as a way to keep her mother with her.

      That’s as far as we go. Sorry. And I’ll skip the hat. I read one Dan Brown novel and didn’t much like it. And I have my own knit cap–given to me by my mother, in fact. It’s ancient by now but still wearable. I wore it just this morning when we walked the dog.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply ↓

  3. Female warrior. And why not? Sometimes it would be all hands to the pump in an emergency, after all. I think I’m right in saying archaeologists now reckon in the Iron Age the women would have fought alongside the men for much of the time.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓

    • I’ll quibble with you over it being a question of all hands to the pumps, which makes it sound like women fought only when the ship was going down. That’s possible, but it’s also possible that women–or some women–fought when there was fighting going on. We’re not likely to ever have a definitive answer, sadly, so we can quibble over this to our hearts’ content.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply ↓

      • No need to quibble – that wasn’t quite what I meant, although it’s possible that was what did happen, of course. Perhaps the answer lies in what you said there – some women fought whenever there was fighting, and some only in extremis.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply ↓

  4. I very much like that modern experts in such fields are revisiting and reinterrogating assumptions that were made about gender and gender roles in the past. We all know that people bring their own baggage, including prejudices, to their interpretation of things so it is certainly worth reviewing the research again. I personally find it impossible to believe that humans only became more diversified in terms of gender in more recent centuries. What feels more likely is that there were lengthy periods of gender conformity because of legality and safety rather that caused people to conceal their authentic identities. And doesn’t that feel relevant in the present context?

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓

    • It sure does feel relevant. I’m struck, over and over again, by how hard our society works to stuff people into the roles it claims are natural. I remember a neighbor, once, saying to his 4-year-old, “You can’t climb that fence. You’re not a boy.”

      Yeah. Our natural roles.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply ↓

  6. Some honeysuckles appeal to cats, who might chew on the twigs. But, as you say of the berries, not all of them, so still better keep a sharp eye on them.

    There are ample examples of female warriors …Buffalo Calf Road Woman at Little Big Horn and, right there in Britain Queen Boudica. Thanks for pointing out that science is catching up with reality.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓

    • Science has had a hell of a fight to escape the knots the Victorians (and the folks that followed them, right up to the present day, I expect) tied it in. It’s a hard battle to escape other people’s pre-existing conclusions, and a harder one to escape our own. I don’t know about Buffalo Calf Road Woman. Thanks for mentioning her.

      As far as I know, our cats have left the honeysuckle alone, but–well, the truth is I don’t know what they get up to when they’re out. Whatever they chew on, though, they’re healthy as cats.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply ↓

  9. Girlyboys and viragines – never ever came something good from Saxonia !

    Some years ago (2020 ?) Amazons were unearthed in Russia, four (?) heavily armed ladies, as I remember near Tscherkassy, Scythians.

    The historical sciences are Romantic sciences. And every science, especially the humanities, IS its own history. The 19th century historians did not believe that, they thought that there is “the” history, and one day it is told (“Historismus”, Herder, Ranke, this kind of guys). Just read your effing sources, and slapbang – there it is.
    But there is no objectivity, never was, never will be. We can (and serious people actually do) try to reach it, to come as close as we can. Our ideas, our live, our present defines our questions, and our answers. Hence history as science never ends, simply because any new generation tells it a new. (One could call it a circulus vitiosus, or Diltheys “hermeneutischer Circel”, as one pleases.)

    Archaeology is fascinating, and they made grandiose progress over the last forty years. All this scientific progress nevertheless can not change the fact that there are no written sources, that the “transmission” (Fundüberlieferung) is absolutely random / arbitrary, that from a certain point onwards interpretation of all & everything becomes speculation. Speculation or “feeling” is not knowledge. This line may be fine, and sometimes it may be missed, but we should try to at least realise that it is there.

    And ?
    Nothing more. We just should be careful with interpretations. And btw, these people in Dover were just like us, only without indoor plumbing.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓

    • Or the internet. Or–since it’s January–central heating. On the politive side, they didn’t know how to wreck the climate, so let’s not get snobbish about what they didn’t have.

      Agreed about objectivity and interpretation in history. Even where written source exist, they’re far from objective, which is one problem with the history of early medieval (or Dark Ages as it used to be called) Britain. We have a few written sources, but they’re pretty dodgy. As long, though, as we don’t through reality out the window after acknowledging the impossibility of certainty, as a few people do once they say, “It’s all interpretation anyway,” then we’re good.

      Like

      Reply ↓

  10. Nah, the bloke was just mending those girly things for some girl or other when he died, and they thought he’d want to finish the job in the afterlife. Similarly, the woman was probably inattentively dusting her fella’s sword for him (cough) and got a nasty cut.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓

  11. Maybe the woman was one who would not take guff from anyone. Maybe she needed to fight to protect their community. She proved her skills and went with it. The men accepted it. When you have to deal with attacks and threats I would think stereotypes might have to go by the wayside and you would have to supply all hands on deck so to speak.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓

    • It’s interesting, though, how much we see her–if she was a her–through the lens of our culture’s assumptions. We (and I’m including myself in thsi) feel a need to explain a woman warrior. It’s entirely possible that they didn’t. I wish we could know for certain.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply ↓

      • Were gender roles passed down through eternity? Did they have a starting point? If is is not written down we will never know. I would think if all the men went out to war or defending the community, they would come up short eventually through battle losses. Perhaps the woman would rather fight to the death than give up their local abode. Even during the Revolutionary War in the Us and other subsequent wars women stepped in. They fired canons, were spies, etc. The female Paul Revere was Sarah Ludington, etc. In Korea there is a place I visited twice where women in mass jumped off a cliff- mass suicide -rather than being taken away by invaders. I think they knew the outcome. I guess they did not want to bend gender roles of the time or couldn’t.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply ↓

        • Beyond the unchangeable–men aren’t good at giving birth or nursing; women tend to be smaller–I expect a lot of variation grew out of what each society did within those limits. So much of what we believe about this, though grows out of, um, what we believe, or what historians and anthropologists and archeologists have believed. It’s interesting that in the article that started me down this path, the author was drawn to reconsider graves that had been dismissed because they didn’t fit the pattern earlier generations had expected to find.

          Maybe to some extent we all recreate the past in our image, but if we can just stay open to the evidence at hand we’ll do less of that.

          Liked by 1 person

          Reply ↓

  12. In the Norman era some women had important social roles through their connection with men – wives were regularly left in charge of castles whilst their husbands were away. William the conqueror’s wife Matilda was regent whilst he was in Normandy. So women ocassionally being buried with swords or men with keys isnt that surprising but not typical. I have buried a cat with a bag of cat treats, a dog with part of a fire grate – not because I believed that they would need these things in an afterlife but because they loved them (treats/fire) in life and that thought comforted/s me.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓

  14. Pingback: Telling the girls from the boys in Anglo-Saxon England – Urban Fishing Pole Cigars

  15. Interesting as usual. It seems to me that historically, the south of the Mediterranean, up to the Greeks and Romans were more inclined to keep women under lock. Litterally.
    Northern tribes, Germans, Alamands, Franks (yes, those) et al might have more women taking arms.
    I seem to remember a “founding” battle (if any battle can be founding. Or found(l)ing maybe.
    Lemme see. Les Champs Catalauniques. Sorry it’s in Frog…
    In Anglo-SAxon kikipedia it says: battle of the Catalaunian plains. Opposing the Romans and a large coalition of Goths against Attila…
    Well. No. Ain’t the one. (Took me five belledin’ minutes to find out)
    Anyway, there was a battle around that time where the women took to arms and beat the ennemy. If ever it comes back I’ll let you know. Need to find my memory pills somewhere…
    Anyway. Hope you and yours are are well. Happy New Year of the Dragon.-
    Brian

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply ↓

    • Here be dragons indeed.

      Thanks in advance if you do manage to dredge up the name of that battle. Interesting, in any case, to know there was one on record. I could spin theories about why tribal societies might be less inclined to disempower half the tribe, but they’d be spun from thin air and candy floss, so I’ll resist the temptation. Your observation about early Mediterranean history is interesting. As far as I know (which isn’t far), it doesn’t hold true for the early Egyptians.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply ↓

      • Well tribal societies in Africa, as I recall generally left the agricultural work to women, while men assembled all day under thatched roofs to discuss the important issues…
        About Egypt, you might be right. It’s been a while since I read anything about Ancient Egypt.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply ↓

          • True. Allow me to… qualify. I’ve lived most of my childhood in Africa, West and East. I’ve even worked there. In most the countries (which means a lot of tribes) that was the case. I wouldn’t dare generalize to Angola for instance where I’ve never been. Allow me to make a special case for cattle in East Africa. Maasaï specifically. Cattle is serious business there. A man’s job… (or watoto = children).
            The Defence rests Your Honour. (I wonder whether I should put a U in your Honour? Maybe if the Honour wears a wig?)

            Liked by 1 person

            Reply ↓

Leave a reply to cat9984 Cancel reply