This chapter lays the foundation for understanding the lives of early English queens in the context of the most dominant cultural influence of the early Middle Ages: Christianity. It starts by exploring the depiction of Mary as Queen of Heaven in the Old English poem, The Advent Lyrics, which serves as a metaphor to understand how the sources relate to the biographical information available about the queens in this book. Many of the queens whose names survive from this era do so in explicitly Christian sources, where they feature as saints and advocates for the religion, in many cases helping to spread the faith in the conversionary era of the mid- to late seventh century. Many of these queens were saints, and belonged to an extended network of sanctity and royalty. St Seaxburh, queen of Eorcenberht of Kent (r. 640–64), and St Æthelthryth, twice queen and divorced from Ecgfrith of Northumbria (r. 670–85) were sisters. St Domne Eafe was a niece to Seaxburh on her father’s side, married to Merewalh of the Magonsætan in the seventh century. St Osgyth, married to Sighere of Essex (r. 664–?80), appears to have been descended from the Mercian royal line, making her a niece to Domne Eafe via the maternal line. St Cuthburh was queen to Aldfrith of Northumbria (r. 685–704/5), Ecgfrith’s half-brother and heir. Other queens were not remembered as saints, but their piety and generosity to the Church was memorialised in various ways in the historical record. Eafe was a Christian queen baptised in the kingdom of her birth, among the Hwicce, but whose marriage to Æthelwealh of Sussex (d. 695) was only partially successful in converting her husband and his kingdom. In contrast, Frithugyth of Wessex, who may have been related to the family of Osgyth’s father, Frithuwald, was memorialised for taking among the most pious choices in going on pilgrimage to Rome in 737. The details of these lives are largely Christian in nature, but so too are the sources in which this information is documented.
Queen of Heaven: Mary in The Advent Lyrics
The most prominent aspect that emerges in the documentary sources for the lives of the queens of England 650–850 is that of their Christianity. The lives of these women are contained within sources that are overwhelmingly Christian in nature: the text-based and Latinate nature of Christianity aided the documentation of the era, yet at the same time, the tendency of early hagiographical material to adopt and adapt previous material at times obscures the authentic biographical information in their narratives.
The Christian nature of the sources aptly reflects the culture in which early English queens led their lives. Christianity was pervasive, and shaped the practice of queenship across early medieval Europe. There were a variety of Christian models of queen to emulate, either as a living queen, or for a writer seeking to portray a queen in words – whether for praise or for censure. There were numerous biblical queens, such as Esther, Jezebel and the Queen of Sheba, whom Stacy Klein has examined the reception of in early England in her Ruling Women; but of all the biblical queens, Mary, as Queen of Heaven, occupied pride of place in the depictions of women.1 Yet, although there was a range of biblical queens to emulate, many queens sought rather to imitate other Christian saints – both male and female. Perhaps the most highly lauded female saint to emerge from this era, virgin queen, abbess and saint, Æthelthryth, led her life of asceticism, piety and virginity in the pursuit of sanctity rather than earthly fame. Other, historical queens could have also served as models of how to be a queen, Christian, and possibly also a saint, both for the women leading these mediatory lives, and for the writers who documented them. The Life of Eormenhild, discussed in Chapter 2, draws heavily on parallels from another saintly queen: her own mother, Seaxburh.
An inherent tension between the office of queen and the heavily Christian nature of the sources underpins much of the discussion of these queens. On the one hand, the conversion to Christianity in England started with the rulers and aristocracy, and, along with allied fellow kings serving as sponsors for fellow converting monarchs, marriages across borders were a key mode of evangelisation across the island, as seen with Peada of Mercia and his queen, Ealhflæd, in Chapter 3. As such, queens carried out important work, spreading the good word and helping to promote the organisation and structure of the Church in its nascent phases. On the other hand, queens had always occupied an important role in the court as advisor to the king, offering her perspective and using her position and material resources to curry favour and foster alliances. Unfortunately, bishops and queens often found themselves as rivals for the king’s ear, a tension best observed in The Life of Wilfrid, where the rivalry between Wilfrid and Ecgfrith of Northumbria’s new queen, Eormenburg, erupted across the whole island. Thus, queens were always both inherently allies and rivals, both advocating for and competing with the hierarchy of the Church.
The position of the queen in early English culture is well-represented in the depiction of Mary as the Queen of Heaven in The Advent Lyrics. The poem, and Mary’s position within it, shares many affinities with many of the subjects of this chapter. The poem, now the first work in the collection of poetry in the great Old English poetic miscellany dated variously to the late tenth or early eleventh century known as the Exeter Book (Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3501), has been known by many names: Christ I, Advent, or The Advent Lyrics.2 Like the poem, it is sometimes difficult to know how to refer to individual queens, as their names do not have standardised orthographies, or sources disagree on the name of the queen, or there is simply an absence regarding the status of any queen at all, including a name – a complication illustrated in the discussion of Leofrun in Chapter 3. The poem is in something of a fragmentary state: Mary Clayton notes frankly how ‘the beginning of the poem is missing; the first folio of the manuscript has been damaged by slash marks, is worn and stained and has holes, making it very difficult to read in parts.’3 The record from which to retrieve the biographical details of these queens’ lives is also fragmentary, damaged and partial, making it necessary for us to extrapolate thoughtfully using the information around to inform and shape our conjectures, as with the queens of Wihtred of Kent explored in Chapter 4.
Just as direct access to the entirety of the poem is now impossible, direct access to the lives and experiences of these queens is impossible. We may be able to approximate what may have been there, but it is fundamentally beyond recovery. We must mediate through the representations of these women, like Æthelthryth and Eadburh, through the lenses of their authors’ views. Also like the poem, we can often identify possible material the creators of these sources drew on – whether earlier hagiographies, chronicles, or typological models. But it can be difficult – or simply impossible – where earlier sources have not been identified or, even worse, lost, to work out what might be ‘original’ or particular to a specific queen.
Finally, the opening of the poem as it survives begins in much the same way as every queen is defined: in relation to a king. The remainder of opening line now reads: ‘cyninge’. The line is, by itself, a hint of what is to come: the rest of the antiphon appears to correlate with the Great ‘O’ Antiphon which is the work’s probable source: ‘O king of the nations, and their desire, the cornerstone who makes both one: come and save man, whom you fashioned from clay.’4
The poem, as it now survives, opens with a king. The queens of this period hold that office solely by their relationship with a king, whether as wife, or, less frequently, mother. Thus, it is a fitting metaphor that The Advent Lyrics, too, begins with a king. Yet the poem is clearly not solely about kings. The form cyninge, which Clayton translates as ‘the king’ is the masculine singular strong dative form of the noun – some action is being performed by some other subject, to some other direct object, to which the king stands as an indirect object.5 The kings serve as objects in this study, too: because they are the most direct means of identifying many of these queens, and tend to have more identifiable information available, much discussion will relate to the kings of these queens.
The presentation of Mary in The Advent Lyrics builds up through the progression of the poem, to the moment when her royal identity becomes more explicit:
Eala þu mære middan-geardes,
seo clænest cwen ofer eorþan
þara þe gewurde to widan feore,
hu þec mid ryhte ealle reord-berend
hatað and secge ðhæleð geond foldan
bliþe mode þæt þu bryd sie
þæs selestan swegles Bryttan.
Swylce þu hyhstan on heofonum eac,
Cristes þegnas, cweþað ond singað
þæt þu sie hlæfdige halgum meahtum
wuldor-weorudes ond world-cundra
hada under heofonum ond helwara. (The Advent Lyrics, ll. 275–86)
[O you glory of the world, purest queen of those who have ever existed on earth, how rightly all speech-bearing people throughout the world, with joyful minds name you and say that you are the bride of heaven’s most generous Lord! Likewise the highest in heaven, Christ’s attendants, also declare and sing that you, with your holy virtues, are the lady of the heavenly host and of the earthly orders under the heavens and of the inhabitants of hell.]6
Drawing on Latinate sources, she is first identified as a fæmne geong / mægð manes leas / þe him to meder gecease, ‘The virgin was young, a girl without sin, whom he chose as his mother’ (ll. 35b–36). Virginity was valued as a spiritual concept, although queens, who were often also mothers, did not necessarily privilege biological virginity over the obligations of their office. The virgin and queen, Æthelthryth of Ely, was celebrated as one of the most popular saints in early England, whereas her sister, Seaxburh, queen of Eorcenberht of Kent, has a less illustrious reputation. It is also possible that the cultural value of virginity is overstated in the sources, as Bede’s main models for female saints tended to be virgin martyrs. Other titles afforded Mary in The Advent Lyrics building up to her identity of queen praise her exceptional, noble virginity (fæmne freolicast, l. 72) among all the other women on earth. Like an early English queen, Mary is exceptional for being chosen by the king for her special role.
The explicit identification of Mary as queen occurs about halfway through the extant text. The antiphon opens with the typical eala and repeats a title which, at first, appears to continue the strain of the previous antiphon and describe Christ – Eala þu mæra middan-geardes, ‘O you glory of the world’, but for the ending on mæra, would appear to refer primarily to Christ himself and not his mother, Mary. Yet the second line announces her instead, opening with the feminine demonstrative, seo, and, further rearticulating the essentiality of her innocence and purity, clænest. The Lyricist again expands on the exceptionality of Mary’s virtues, this time with the superlative added to a geographical marker of her office, cwen ofer eorþan, ‘queen over the earth’.
It is at this point that Mary’s identity as queen of heaven and earth emerges explicitly. The noun cwen can simply mean woman, or a noble woman; yet we are justified in reading it here as ‘queen’ for several reasons. Firstly, as the etymological ancestor of the modern-day term ‘queen’, it contains within it the kernel of what is later recognised as queenship semantically. And, as has been built up throughout the poem, the presentation of Christ as a prince in the preceding lines, as well as the reference to Mary’s own royal ancestry (in lines 87b–103), brings us to this articulation of her status as queen definitively. The poem represents a significant departure from the source material, a Latin antiphon: ‘O lady of the world, born from a royal seed, Christ has now come forth from your womb, like a bridegroom from his chamber: he who rules the stars lies in a manger.’7
The poet has rejected a more literal translation to draw out Mary’s high esteem. Rather than hlæfdige, a more traditional translation of Domina (‘lady’), the translation picks up on the idea behind regio ex semina orta, in Latin a reference to Christ (a royal seed), and reapplies the royalty to Mary: she has been transformed into a queen of the world. The Lyrics then extrapolate Mary’s influence, naming her þæt þu bryd sie / þæs selestan swegles Bryttan (‘the bride of heaven’s most generous Lord!’). Then, as if to consolidate further Mary’s elevated status among the holy hosts in heaven, the poem declares her to be
Swylce þa hyhstan on heofonum eac,
Cristes þegnas, cweþað ond singað
þæt þu sie hlæfdige halgum meahtum
wuldor-weorudes ond world-cundra
hada under heofenum ond helwara. (The Advent Lyrics, ll. 282 – 86)
[Likewise, the highest in heaven, Christ’s attendants, also declare that you, with your holy virtues, are the lady of the heavenly host and of the early orders under the heavens and of the inhabitants of hell.]
Again, the superlative, hyhstan, ‘the highest’, outlines how those praising Mary are the highest and most exceptional, and in turn elevates Mary: if the highest of the high praise her, she must be even more exceptional, even higher; she is of heroic merit equal to the soldiers of Christ, his apostles. The tripartite reference of Mary’s ladyship over three groups of dwellers (the inhabitants of heaven, of earth, and of hell) repeats and reinforces both Mary’s exceptionalism and her might. Here the poet deploys the traditional term hlæfdige, lady, before exploring the peoples over whom she reigns. They represent a sum totality of all knowable and perceivable worlds, making her effectively the queen of everything. She is unique – ana ealra monna – ‘alone among all of mankind’; Nan swylc ne cwen ænig oþer ofer ealle men, ‘no other like her has ever come’.
Although Mary is presented as unique and exceptional among all women throughout the Lyrics, she is also presented as a queen as a means of approximating her high status to an earthly audience. It also outlines some of the key characteristics of how its audience understood queenship. From the earliest parts of the conversion, Mary served as a model of queenship. Theresa Earenfight has observed how contemporary Frankish queens took the Virgin Mary as a model; as well as this, Jo Ann McNamara has noted that chaste virgin queens in early medie...
