Women’s Rights in Anglo-Saxon England ~ Why They Were Much Greater than You Think
Two Saxon Ladies
Here in the 21st century it is easy, and even natural, to believe in an ever-improving continuum of human rights. We look back to the banning of slavery in Britain in 1834, the signing of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States in 1865, the granting of the vote to women in the US in 1920 and in Britain in 1928, the passing of Civil Rights laws in the 1960’s, recent legal recognition of same sex marriage in many nations, and feel: “This is the natural progression of things. People gain more rights as time goes on.”
But you might be surprised to learn that if you are of English descent, your maternal ancestors of 1000 years ago enjoyed more legal rights than did your great grandmother. Shocking, but true.
Women’s legal rights under, say King Ælfred the Great (King of Wessex 844-899 CE) were far greater than under Queen Victoria (reigned 1837-1901). (Indeed, the Victorian era was the nadir of women’s rights in Britain, as women were reduced to the state of near-complete legal dependence on fathers and husbands, and divorce required an act of Parliament until 1857. The most powerful woman in the world repeatedly claimed her own sex unfit to win suffrage. But that is another essay…)
The fact is that women enjoyed legal rights under Anglo-Saxon law that they were to lose after the Battle of Hastings (1066) and for many hundreds of years afterwards. So let us return to the more congenial 9th century, and learn more.
Ælfred’s 9th century law code has survived, and provides us with valuable insight into women’s legal status. His laws were predicated upon those of earlier kings, particularly Ine, King of the West Saxons (688-726). In his preface, Ælfred explains that he examined many existing law codes from the Old Testament to those of previous Anglo-Saxon kings in neighbouring kingdoms:
Then I, King Ælfred, gathered them together and ordered to be written many of the ones that our forefathers observed – those that pleased me; and many of the ones that did not please me I rejected with the advice of my councillors, and commanded them to be observed in a different way. For I dared not presume to set down in writing at all many of my own, since it was unknown to me what would please those who should come after us. But those which I found either in the days of Ine, my kinsman, or of Offa, king of the Mercians, or of Ælthelberht (who first among the English people received baptism), and which seemed to me most just, I collected herein, and omitted the others.
Crimes are categorised along class lines. Here are penalties owed by men for adultery:
If anyone lies with the wife of a twelve-hundred man, he is to pay 120 shillings compensation to the husband; to a six-hundred man, he is to pay 100 shillings compensation; to a ceorl, he is to pay forty shillings compensation.
A “twelve-hundred man” refers to the individual’s wergild (man-gold), or valuation. Twelve hundred shillings would signify a nobleman, or at least a thegn (the forerunner of the later knight). The ceorl (“churl”) was a common free man, usually an agricultural worker, but possibly a skilled craftsman as well. The ceorl’s wergild was set at 200 shillings. We do not know the exact figure of Ælfred’s own wergild, but it is thought to have been 6,000 shillings.
Wergild was an important legal concept, for without it all feuds were settled “eye for an eye”: If you killed my kinsman, I killed your kinsman. If you raped my daughter, I raped yours. Wergild, the notion of a cash valuation for each person’s life, allowed the ruling noble to command that grievances be redressed not by violence but by silver or gold payments, thus limiting the escalation of vendetta.
All persons (except slaves) had a wergild, and Ælfred’s laws spell out reparations for the loss of bodily parts as well, even unto the loss of the little fingernail (one shilling fine).
Don’t kidnap this nun…
Ælfred’s laws cover penalties owed for kidnapping (or luring) a woman from a nunnery; for assault, sexual and otherwise, of a woman; rape of a slave woman; rape of underage girls; and for the death of a pregnant woman. While it is true that the financial penalties exacted from the wrongdoer typically went to the women’s father or husband, it is also true that crimes against women were treated with as much seriousness as crimes against men. And no woman of any age could be forced into marriage:
No woman or maiden shall ever be forced to marry one whom she dislikes, nor be sold for money.
Other rights that Anglo-Saxon women enjoyed were the right to own land in her own name, and to sell such land or give it away without her father’s or husband’s consent; the right to defend herself in court; and the right to act as compurgator in law suits; that is, to testify to another’s truthfulness. She could also freely manumit her slaves. Her morgen-gifu, or morning-gift, that gift of land, jewellry, livestock or such that a bride received from her new husband the morning after their wedding, was hers to keep for life. (Compare these rights to those of your great grandmother in London, the chattel of her father until marriage and then the legal “property” of her husband afterward.)
I’m taking this loom with me when I go
One of the greatest indicators of women’s rights is the women’s ability to end an abusive or otherwise unsatisfactory marriage. Divorce was extremely common amongst upper-class Anglo-Saxons; indeed (and to the chagrin of the Church), both men and women practised serial “marrying up” as a form of social climbing. (More humble folk simply separated without ado, to take up with another or remain single as they wished.)
Early divorce laws granted the wife half the household goods, including any goods she had brought into the union, and full custody of the children. As only women’s wills from the era mention the disposition of things such as linens, furniture, plate, and so on, there is reason to assume that the majority of household furnishings by default followed the woman in case of divorce. Instead of impoverishing women, divorce laws ensured an equitable sharing of goods and property.
In the 9th century daughters inherited goods or land from either parent, or both, and these bequests were theirs without challenge or question. One exception was that of heathens: in the opening of The Circle of Ceridwen the eponymous character is denied her inheritance from her uncle because as a heathen she had no standing in the eyes of the law. Her rightful lands were given to a nearby priory for its maintenance, and she became their ward.
The relative liberality of women’s rights came to a crushing end after the catastrophe of October 1066. The Normans (“northmen”) carried across the Channel with them the vestiges of their earlier mores towards property and women. A legal “golden age” for English women had come to an end.
For more about Anglo-Saxon law and society, I highly recommend The Beginnings of English Society by Dorothy Whitelock, Penguin Books 1974; and Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources, translated by Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge, Penguin Books 1983, from which I excerpted portions of Ælfred’s law code.
Thank you for a really interesting essay and also for the incisive comments. Last year, I visited the Bar Convent and learnt about the Venerable Mary Ward. It is a fascinating part of our history (and present) that I should have known more about.
Although all the legal prerogatives were stripped away from women with the coming of the Normans, I suspect that a strong, fiesty, independent spirit lived on in the psyches of English women, especially northern ones. i belong to a religious community founded by a Yorkshirewoman (Mary Ward) who took on the whole Roman church with her desire to establish a congregation for women that would be ffee from enclosure, from singing office in common and from religious ‘habit’. Her earliest companions and followers were Enlgish women who simply refused to accept the kinds of restrictions imposed on them by Rome, and for 70 years or more, bold English women carried on and found ways “around the system’, by “holy subterfuge”, until, finally, in spite of declarations of heresy and suppression, we came to be accepted and approved. So I think the independent spirit survived in underground ways. She was born near Ripon in 1585 and died in York in 1645, and there are about 2000 of her feisty women still working for women’s rights and women’s education around the world. So English women continued to believe in themselves and their abilities long after their legal privileges were removed. It just takes a little ‘courage’ which English women have in abundance, as history has shown us. Grandmothers passed on the wit and wisdom to their granddaughters, to become the women needed for the times.
This is a long and proud heritage you hail from, and as we woman are by nature survivors, shining example of thriving in the face of persistent adversity. It is a matter of quiet delight to me that the audio book versions of my novels are narrated by London-based actor Nano Nagle, direct descent of Venerable Nano Nagle of Cork, who risked her liberty and belongings in righteous defiance against the prohibition of Catholic education of children in the 18th century. Such a strong similarity to one aspect of the Venerable Mary Ward’s life, there, the dedication of the education of girls! Feisty women indeed. Long may we thrive.
I’ve also read that reforming the church for allowing the ‘unnatural’ rights of Saxon women was one of the ostensible reasons that Pope Alexander II supported William the Conqueror’s invasion of England. (Well that plus half of the booty.)
Fascinating conjecture and I would not be surprised, John! Thank you.
weell, I’ve read that women had only limited rights in ancient Rome even in pre-christian times ( though having more rights than women in ancient greece – a center of misogyny, according to historians) ) THEN christianity slowly became more prominent in Rome, bringing with it old testamentic middle eastern gender values that were increasingly embedded in western (as well as eastern) christendom, and also in much of of islam into our days… disenfranchising women was firmed up for centuries wherever the two mainstream brands of christianity (roman and byzantine) took hold/ ,/ the roman flavor of the chr. creed spread into Merovingian Frankia, became firmly established in Carolingian times and since then ‘french’ women’s rights (including those in normandy) would’ve been less than those enjoyed iearlier in the pre-christian world of germanic tribes, including Angles, Frisians, Saxons, Franks, and the peoples of Scandinavia/ in Aelfred’s england, christianity at that time still had strong roots in the earlier christian world of the celtic people, — where married men could be priests…in other words, lacking the requirement (slowly established) of the church of Rome for a priestly class of ‘celibate’ men, who over time came to regard women as a somewhat alien species/…history throws LONG SHADOWS
Thank you for this insightful article!
I am wondering if, shortly after the Norman conquest of 1066, an unmarried Norman woman could inherit her parent’s land in England? She is an orphan.
I am writing historical fiction and this information would be very helpful. Thanks!
A very important piece of information,ThankYou for sharing.
octavia I am writing an essay on the Anglo-saxon era questioning if it was a golden era or not. One of my key points is concerning women rights. May I ask were this information comes from(what is the source)
What an interesting article, thank you! Great research ???
You are so welcome, Claudia. Glad you found it interesting!
Interesting to note that New Zealand gave women the right to vote in 1900 and Australia in 1901 (the year after federation).
This is something truly to be proud of! Of course Queen Victoria was very much against women’s suffrage – fancy the most powerful woman in the world persistently denying her sisters AND HERSELF the right to vote… No progress could be made until her death. But good on NZ and Australia for not waiting another 20 years!
Thanks for sharing this, Louise – and all the best.
Actually, the Norse women enjoyed rights very similar to those of the Anglo Saxons; the two cultures seem to be far more similar with their shared Germanic background than with the French. Women could initiate a divorce as well as men; and a divorce was done simply by saying “I divorce you!” three times, in front of witnesses. If a woman divorced a man she kept all the goods she brought into the marriage; if the man divorced a woman she kept not only all of hers, but also half of his (the idea being that he could more easily replace them via raiding or trading). And while a woman may be forced into a disagreeable marriage by her family, divorce was simple, and if a first marriage did not work out, she alone determined who she would marry for any subsequent weddings.
I am less familiar with Norman laws; but considering that they had occupied Normandy for several generations by 1066, and seem to have largely (although not necessarily completely) integrated into French society, I strongly suspect the resultant loss of legal standing in William’s England was a result of the French influence rather than the Norse.
Kryss, it is true that Norse men and women could easily separate, but that repudiation statement of “I divorce thee” three times is from the Quran, not Norse custom. And you must admit that plural marriage in which a man is allowed to take as many wives as he can support, but the woman is ALWAYS limited to one husband is far from an equitable set-up!
Glad you are enjoying the site.
Really? Thanks for the correction! Hm, now I need to try and track down my original source, because it was definitely given as a Norse custom in it. Have to see where it originated from!
Yes, I have no problems with plural marriages in the context of poly relationships, where it’s three or more individuals who want to be married, and the genders of the people involved are irrelevant. I don’t support the “It’s okay for men to have multiple spouses but not women” concept of traditional polygamy, because, really?
And of course when the relationship is poly there aren’t the same issues around consent and/or “ownership” of the wives, which is just all kinds of wrong.
I think Kryss is correct about where the influence came from that made the Normans such misogynists; it came not from the older Norse traditions, but rather from the continental Roman traditions that were passed down through civil and canonical law to the French. The Normans were not transplanted Norwegians, but were indigenous French with a superficial layer of Franco-Norwegian elite, which set the stage for how the conquest of Britain was done: a group of bandit warriors racially different from the people over whom they ruled as an almost foreign power. This also was the case with the Kievan Rus. However, there are also examples of the Norse integrating themselves into an indigenous society as more-or-less equals, such as in the Norse settlements in Ireland and the Danemark in England, so the practice of setting up an occupation over a local populace and then maintaining a segregated racial social order of exploitation was not a universal pattern for the Norse. The Normans were descended partly from brigands and pirates, not from the more sedentary and agrarian Scandinavians who migrated to England to settle down and build a farm. As such, the Normans were basically rapists and despoilers, and whatever civilization they brought with them, no matter what it might appear to be from the surface, was designed to maximize the profits and the power of the Normans over all whom they subjugated; almost exactly like the later Conquistadores behaved in the Americas, and the various colonial European powers later still. It was this culture of piracy and brigandage that contributed greatly to the stripping of rights from indigenous people and women, more than any other influence.
Thank you for that interesting and concise essay on women’s rights. Unfortunately, apart from Queen Victoria, we do seem to be subject to the whims of the male species. Thank goodness that in Britain things have improved though I feel nervous regarding the upsurge of Islamic fanatics all over the world. I am a Christian and accept other religions but abhor the way they are twisted out of recognition in pursuit of total domination. Is it really too much to ask that people live peacefully together acknowledging and accepting differing beliefs.
And yet Sue, Victoria – the most powerful woman in the world – repeated expressed her abhorrence of woman’s suffrage! If she had been sympathetic women in Britain (and the US, by example) would have had the vote perhaps decades earlier… The interesting part is seeing what was lost in legal protection after the Norman Conquest, rights which took nearly a thousand years for women to regain… And yes, we all need to accept our differences… That time will come!
Great and recognizable blog post! We happen to have written a similar post about a similar people in a similar time: https://frisiacoasttrail.blog/2020/10/11/women-of-frisia/