The Quiet Woman

Until a few years ago, the village of Halstock in the English county of Dorset was served by an inn called the Quiet Woman. The sign outside showed a colourful portrait of a headless, but otherwise Hardy-esque maiden in a pastoral landscape, holding her head under one arm.

Juthware, oddly, is not the only female head-carrying saint, or cephalophore. Gwenffrewi was the only child of a seventh-century Welsh warrior with an estate in what became Flintshire.

The legendary life of a third-century cephalophoric martyr and patron of musicians, St Cecilia of Trastevere, prefigures many medieval stories of female sainthood. She was forced into an arranged marriage with a pagan nobleman, despite a vow of virginity (she sang in private meditation throughout the wedding ceremony), but succeeded in converting him, prophesying that an angel would be revealed to him. The couple were martyred during a campaign of persecution under Emperor Alexander Severus (208–235). Cecilia survived her decapitation for three days and became a popular subject for Renaissance artists, while her church in Trastevere became a sanctuary for musicians.

These stories have a common theme: jealousy, or at least resentment, that the women concerned had dedicated their lives to a spiritual rather than secular lord. In each case, the woman’s virtue is expressed by a miracle. Their lives also bear comparison with celebrity martyrs like St Denis of Paris, a cephalophoric victim of Roman persecution in the third century, and St Oswald of Northumbria, traditionally depicted as a severed head crooked in St Cuthbert’s protective arm.

In the case of Juthware, there may be something else. More than one scholar has commented on the possible transformation of some Romano-British villas, with their large, well-managed estates and ample accommodation, into the earliest British monasteries of the fifth century – Lullingstone Villa in Kent, mentioned earlier in this chapter,^§§ is a good candidate for precisely this sort of transformation. In such a context, Juthware’s story might distantly reflect the life of a woman who, inheriting her father’s estate, dedicated it to the service of a shrine and suffered the vengeance of a grasping stepmother.

As the stories in the next chapter show, there is plentiful evidence that Early Medieval women were not mere passive victims or observers. Increasingly they found and negotiated means of creating their own narratives of survival, success and creativity; of influencing society at all levels and in sometimes surprising ways.

^* According to the legend recorded by Ambrose, bishop of Milan, in an account of the death of Theodosius the Great.

^† See pages 99, 175 and 250.

^‡ See the Postscript.

^§ In skeletons, even the determination of sex is not always easy. Females tend to have more pointed jawbones and wider pelvic arcs, but skeletal sex is a wide spectrum extending from the very male to the very female.

^# See page 31.

^∫ From medieval Latin ōrāns, meaning ‘one who is praying’.

^Ω In the early church baptism involved full immersion of the body in water.

^≈ As distinct from ‘deaconesses’.

^∂ A supposed early fourth-century martyr of Alexandria who confounded the best efforts of pagan philosophers to refute her faith. She was tortured and condemned to death on a ‘breaking wheel’.

^π Fosterage of the children of free Irish men and women is a very common theme in the early literature.

^∆ St Brigit is one of several women whose stories appear in this book to have been celebrated in Judy Chicago’s controversial 1979 artwork The Dinner Party, now in the Brooklyn Museum.

^** See page 17.

^†† Literally, hestia in Greek and focus in Latin.

^‡‡ A collection of 87 short poems of the third century CE, on themes of immortality inspired by the legendary singer Orpheus.

^§§ See page 19.