Tag Archives: pre-Christian England

Telling the girls from the boys in Anglo-Saxon England

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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.

Wassailing and English traditions

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If you dig a shallow trench into English traditions, you’ll find wassailing and Christmas snuggled up together. Dig the trench deeper, though, and wassailing’s lying by itself: It’s pre-Christian and like many things was taken over by England’s early Christians–possibly because it was easier to convert people if you let them carry over some of their beliefs and possibly because no one had a ability to stop them. What the hell, Christmas itself was folded into Christianity from earlier belief systems, so why not wassailing as well.

 

Wassailing

What do you do when you wassail? It depends where you are, and when, but basically on the twelfth night of Christmas you go to the orchard (of course you have an orchard, or someone does) and make noise. Maybe you sing songs. Maybe you bang pots and pans. Maybe you pour some cider on the trees as an offering. What you want to do is scare off the evil spirits (or wake the sleeping tree spirits, or possibly both; take your pick) to make sure the orchard’s owner has a good harvest next year. 

Almost surely, you’ll have a drink of some warm cider from a shared cup–cider being an alcoholic drink, in case that isn’t clear. The orchard’s owner would supply the drink. Because you scared the evil spirits away and made sure she or he will have a good crop next year. 

Thanks, folks. Really appreciate your help. But before you go, don’t forget to leave some booze-soaked toast on the branches. I expect that symbolizes something or offers something to someone. Your guess is as good as mine.

Irrelevant photo: Sunrise, January 22. 

But if you don’t live in an orchardy part of the country, you and your fellow wassailers will follow a different tradition and go house to house, wishing good health to the people in each one and being offered a drink before you move on–very likely ale. 

By the time you reach the final house, you might be grateful that the village isn’t any bigger.

A lot of England’s door-to-door singing traditions mixed entertainment and aggressive begging, and this strand of wassailing did as well. A wassailing song that’s become a Christmas carol starts out by saying, “Here we come a-wassailing among the leaves so green,” and goes on to demand, “Give us some figgy pudding.” The singers threaten not to leave until they get some. From which we learn (a) that they might be given food as well as or instead of drink and (b) that when some singers threaten to give you another song, you’ll give them whatever they ask for.

The song also mentions that the singers aren’t “daily beggars that go from door to door.” They’re neighbors’ children. 

The “daily beggars” line tells us a lot about the period. Beggars are everywhere. People learn to dismiss them. But neighbors children? Bring out the pudding. That line, by the way, is the only place I’ve found wassailing mentioned as a children’s activity. Everything else is about adults. 

At this distance in time, it’s easy to think wassailing meant a community came together in perfect equality and serious inebriation. Everyone gave their neighbors drinks and was there for them again in the morning with era-appropriate hangover remedies. It’s doubtful, but what the hell, it’s a nice thought. It’s more likely that the poor sang for the wealthy and the better-off, who could afford to dish up figgy pudding and booze.

Whether they gave out ale or cider, it would’ve been warmed and spiced, possibly with honey and egg added. When you get to the egg, it sounds horrible, but I’m not going to try the recipe. My commitment to this blog only goes so far. 

 

Anglo-Saxon wassailing

The word wassail may come from the Anglo-Saxon waes hael–”good health,” or “be healthy.” We can hear the echo of that in the modern English word hale. That’s modern English as in the version of the language we speak these days. The word hale itself isn’t used much anymore, making it antiquated modern English.

Don’t think about it too much. Or at least make sure you’re sitting safely when you do.

Wassailing dates back to the Anglo-Saxons, to the time before they converted to Christianity. The lord of the manor would greet the–well, Historic UK calls them his followers, because Anglo-Saxon society involved a strong bond between the lord and his whatevers. Followers is as good a word as I can come up with. The bond would have been both military and economic. I’ve read that it was more of a two-way bond than the relationship between England’s feudal lords and their tenants after the Norman invasion. 

But before we decide that Anglo-Saxon England was a jolly place of glorious equality, remember that it had slavery. Whether the slaves were part of this greeting and drinking I don’t know.

But back to the lord and his followers: He’d say waes hal. And the followers would say drink hael–drink well. Because drinking and good health? What could be more tightly intertwined? 

Again, whatever they drank would’ve been warmed. It’s winter, remember. And they’d pass the bowl around instead of everyone having a cup of their own.

 

Twelfth night

When Christians absorbed wassailing into their own traditions, they pegged it to twelfth night, which falls on January 5. But nothing is ever simple, because when this happened they were using the Julian calendar. Later, they moved to the Gregorian calendar because over the course of centuries the Julian had gone out of whack with reality and the Gregorian–

Think of it as resetting a clock. They reset the calendar and fine-tuned the mechanism, and that happened under Pope Gregory, hence the word Gregorian. 

In the Julian calendar, though, twelfth night was January 17, so if you want to make a show of your purity–or your stash of not very useful knowledge–you can go wassailing on the 17th.

Later wassailing

After the Norman conquest, wassailing continued, and the lord of the manor would be expected to show some generosity in exchange for the peasants’ songs and good wishes. I like to imagine it as one of those rare moments when the peasants got to shake down the lord instead of the other way around.

While they’re drinking, let’s skip well ahead and land in the time when Oliver Cromwell and his band of super-Protestants ran the country. They banned wassailing, along with caroling and Christmas itself. It all smacked of paganism and fun, which weren’t a good fit in the Christian paradise they were trying to build. 

With the Restoration–that’s when the monarchy was cemented back into place and the super-Protestants put back in their box–Christmas and fun took on an intense level of thumb-your-nose-at-the-Puritans joy, and wassailing was in fashion again. I’m tipping into guesswork here, but it wouldn’t surprise me if a certain amount of invented tradition didn’t creep in at this point. When there’s a break in a culture, reconstructing the old one can be an act of the imagination.