Of Bayeux and Domesday

Secular women are much less visible than their religious counterparts in medieval literature, and even less so in the visual arts. In an age of warring tribal elites, the unique embroidered panel known as the Bayeux Tapestry is a cartoon-strip epic of royal, courtly, clerical, martial and artisanal men, inhabiting a man’s world of action, valour, oath and betrayal.

Sixty times more horses are depicted in the tapestry than women; but three females intrude into this almost exclusively male preserve: Queen Edith, weeping at the feet of her dying husband, King Edward the Confessor; an unnamed mother fleeing a burning house with her child – a collateral newsreel victim of war; and a third, ?lfgyva: its most enigmatic figure.

?lfgyva’s single cameo appearance takes place just as Duke William (later William I) has escorted the shipwrecked Duke Harold (later Harold II, the last Anglo-Saxon King of England) to his palace in Normandy where, we understand, some deal is to be struck concerning the succession to the English throne when King Edward dies. Harold’s subsequent failure to honour this supposed agreement is the casus belli of the invasion of 1066. Other contenders are, we know, watching with more than passing interest, from the shores of Norway. In the scene after the palace negotiations, in a tall but indeterminate building, a woman stands, her hands before her in… what? Supplication? Invitation? From outside the building a tonsured male figure, left hand on hip, reaches in and touches her face.

Since an influential article by J. B. McNulty was published in 1980, the mysterious woman has generally been identified with ?lfgyva of Northampton, first the mistress and then the wife of King Cnut (who ruled in England 1016–35). She was said to have presented the king with two children, one conceived of a cleric, the other of a humble workman, and neither of them biologically hers – both stories that appear to be alluded to, in the ?lfgyva panel, by the woodsman and his cocky mate. On the face of it, her presence ought to reflect an agreement between William and Harold that Cnut’s descendants were illegitimate and that, therefore, the succession to Edward, who had no issue, should be decided between the two of them. Well, perhaps; ?lfgyva was certainly dead before Harold’s visit to Normandy in 1064. But I wonder, given the very frequent Early Medieval depiction of queens as inciters of men’s actions, if she wasn’t credited with some more direct role in propelling the two – or three – countries to war, a role now lost to understanding.

If women are barely portrayed in the historic events leading up to Hastings, it seems that they were largely responsible for the Bayeux panel’s production. It is usually cited as a commission of Bishop Odo of Bayeux, half-brother to the Conqueror; and it may have been produced in or close to St Augustine’s abbey at Canterbury, since Odo was given the earldom of Kent after the Conquest. Opus Anglicanum, the name given to the work of English women weavers and embroiderers, was prized across Europe and this may be its finest product: a real-life counterpart to the grisly battle-weaving tale in Njal’s Saga.^† The nine sewn panels are of tabby-woven linen, with two kinds of woollen yarn stitching creating its tituli – the text and the figures’ outlines – and their coloured infills.

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Women’s fortunes in the last decades of the eleventh century depended on their birth and married status and on the fickle whims of chance. Most women, tending sheep and pigs, spinning and weaving cloth, carrying corn to the mill, bearing children, fostering social networks and brokering peace among their menfolk, existed far below the radar of Norman lords or their chroniclers; their lives after the Conquest must have been substantially similar to those of previous generations. Few find their way into the Domesday survey of 1086 – a list by county of lands held by and of the king and his dependants; what they owed in service and rents and their relations with the land they inhabited. Even if, as historians estimate, one in seven to ten landowners in 1086 was a woman, many of them are not even named except as the wives, widows or sisters of men. Exceptionally, as a study of Domesday women by Professor Pauline Stafford shows, women might belong to a profession: Adelina, a jester belonging to the household of Earl Roger; an anonymous brewster of Chester; and Leofgeat, a Wiltshire embroideress who also held land – about 400 acres – as a widow.

Stafford highlights four women as typical of those whose names are preserved in the survey. The most modest of these is Asa of Lowthorpe, a Yorkshirewoman, whose claim to three small parcels of land was disputed, and therefore of interest to royal administrators, after she separated from her husband. She held her land independent of him, so it must have passed to her directly as inheritance. Generally, free women brought property – a dowry – with them to a marriage from their family, while their dower was a portion contributed by prospective husbands intended to provide for them as widows. Most Domesday women landowners were widows. Christina of Markyate, had she not been so stubbornly virtuous, would have acquired both dower and dowry by her marriage to Beorhtred.

The grandest of women in 1066 was Gytha Thorkelsdottir, the Danish mother of King Harold and widow of Earl Godwine. Prior to the Conquest she had held land across no fewer than ten counties but, after playing an active role in the rebellions against William that followed the Conquest, she forfeited her estates and was forced to flee for her life. By the time of the survey the wealthiest woman landlord was Judith, widow of the Northumbrian earl Waltheof, whom William had executed in 1076. She might have expected to forfeit her lands too, but she was the Conqueror’s own niece.

The law had, for centuries, tried to rationalise property rights, the cause of so many wars and disputes. By the time of Domesday, the protection of dower lands against forfeiture by a husband’s disgrace is a common theme of wills and court proceedings. Men dying early deaths through violence or physical drudgery left their wives and children tragically bereft, if possibly happier. But women who eschewed the new opportunities to marry into the conquering nobility, or for whom marriage to Christ and celibacy was a more attractive career, may ultimately, by forgoing their future rights as widows, have enjoyed more prosperous and secure lives on ecclesiastical estates, which could not quite so easily be disputed or alienated.