Dhuoda: a mother’s handbook for her son
…I was given in lawful marriage on June 29, 824, in the palace of Aachen, to my lord Bernard, your father. And again, in the thirteenth year of that reign, on November 29, 826, with God’s help as I believe, you were born, issuing forth out of me into the world, mostly dearly desired first-born son.6
So begins the text of a very unusual document: a precious autobiographical window onto the life of a secular woman who lived through a tumultuous period in the Carolingian Francia of the ninth century.
Dhuoda was a younger contemporary of the women interred in the Oseberg ship far to the north, a Christian noblewoman living in isolation from her husband and sons and far from happy with her lot. Almost all we know of her life is contained in a brief reflective preface to the extended letter in which she exhorts her son William to be obedient to his father, his lord and his God, and to pray for his mother’s soul.From her own pen we read that Dhuoda had a second son, to whom she gave birth in the town of Uzès, a little north of Nîmes in the then southern border province of Septimania; but she does not even know his name, because:
He was still a baby and had not yet received the grace of baptism, when your lord and father to both of you had him brought to Aquitaine…
I have [she writes to William] been long deprived of your company, and I dwell in this town because my lord commands it. Though I am happy about the success of his campaigns, I am driven by my longing for you both… Despite the many cares that consume me, this anxiety is foremost in God’s established design – that I see you one day with my own eyes, if such is the Lord’s will.
Towards the end of the tremendously long text, full of biblical allusion, numerology, admonition and advice on morals, courtly behaviour and much more, we learn that Dhuoda is, or believes herself to be, nearing the end of her own life, having suffered many periods of illness and strife.
She wishes her son to acknowledge the sacrifices she has made on behalf of her family and, perhaps, to make recompense for them:In fulfilling my usefulness to my seigniorial lord Bernard, I am fearful that my feudal duties may falter in the March [the lands bordering the caliphate of Cordoba to the south] and in many other places. And to prevent his separating from you and me (as is the custom with many men) I feel I have gone heavily into debt.
In fact, to obtain many necessities I have frequently borrowed great sums with my own hands, not only from Christians but also from Jews. I have repaid what I could and will continue from now on to repay as much as I can. But if after my death any debts remain outstanding, I beg and beseech you to inquire thoroughly after my creditors.
Dhuoda, then, despite her elevated status as the wife and effective viceroy of a Frankish borderland state, suffered the fate of grass widows; what Jane Austen, in Persuasion, called ‘the tax of quick alarm’: deprived of company, affection and conversation, constantly fearful that she might be widowed or lose her estranged sons to the world of violent ambition and martial adventure to which they belonged.
What more, then, can we say of her circumstances, and of the fortunes of the men she loved? The venue for her marriage, Aachen, in what is now western Germany, hard against the borders of the Netherlands and Belgium, had been Charlemagne’s capital, from where he prosecuted wars against Saxons and Danes and administered the vast imperial machinery of a new Holy Roman Empire before his death in 814. Dhuoda is a Frankish name, so her background and milieu may have been northern. Her husband, Bernard, inherited lands around Toulouse and rose to prominence at the court of Louis the Pious, Charlemagne’s son. As Count of Barcelona and Septimania, he found himself policing the front line between an aggressive Islamic caliphate on the Iberian Peninsula and an empire in a state of fragile equipoise between factions wishing to succeed to parts of Louis’s bloated empire.
Bernard’s competent handling of southern affairs won him a privileged and powerful position as chamberlain at Louis’s court in about 829. From this time, with sons aged respectively five and three, Dhuoda must have found herself living an estranged life – as her husband’s deputy; as estate manager and feudal lord across large tracts of southern Francia; as absent mother to young children.
Bernard’s first reverse came when he was denounced for engaging in an adulterous affair with Louis’s famously desirable queen, Judith. In the competing factional conflicts that occupied the next decade, two of his brothers and his sister were killed. Somehow he survived, seemingly keeping his loyalties divided and avoiding direct conflict with the emperor until Louis’s death in 840. Thereafter, his position in the court of Charles the Bald, the Empress Judith’s son, was weak and in 841 he was forced to send his son William to court to join the royal household: as a warrior-in-training and noble foster-son, effectively a hostage. In the aftermath of the ensuing civil war between Louis’s sons, Bernard picked the wrong side and, a year after his wife had finished her letter to their son, he was executed on the orders of the king. His son William, taking up arms in vengeance, first allied himself with Pippin II, a grandson of Louis; then with Abd al Rahman II of Cordoba. By 850 he too was dead; his mother may not have lived to learn his fate.
Dhuoda left a poignant but hardly uplifting epitaph, which she hoped might be inscribed on a tomb enclosing her mortal remains, wishing that ‘passers-by who read it may worthily pray to God for me, unworthy woman that I am’.
Dhuoda’s body, formed of earth
Here lies buried in the tomb
Great king, receive her
Her frail body’s filth this ground enfolds
In the depths of the pit.
Kind king, grant her mercy
Ulcerous, humid her body lies now,
For her there is only the crypt’s dim shade
You, king, absolve her faults
On your journeying to and fro,
Men, women, of any age, pray thus I beg:
‘Great and holy, unbind her chains.’
Deep in the cave of the sepulchre’s dire wound
She has reached the end of her sullied life.
You, king, pardon her sins
And lest the worm of darkling gloom
Should seize her spirit, say this prayer:
‘God of mercy, succour her.’
No wayfarer shall pass this way
Without reading this. I beg all to pray:
‘Grant her rest, kindly one.’
Eternal light shall illumine her
With the saints. Decree, loving one.
May the amen welcome her after death.
The first letters of each verse, in her own Latin and in the modern English translation by Marcelle Thiebaux, spell her name as she would have written it, Dhuodane. With this last epigraphic play, she ends her letter to her son. We have no record of the site of her tomb. We can only say that in her loneliness and anguish, writing seems to have been her consolation.