Queen Aethelflaed of Mercia:- The Mother of All England |
Of all the heroines of British history Queen Aethelflaed (also known as Ethelfled or Ethelfleda) is I think one of the lesser known, but in many ways she is no less than the mother of modern England.
Aethelflaed was the eldest daughter of the 9th century Alfred the Great of Wessex and his wife Ealhswith.
Her dates are uncertain but according to some accounts at least she was born around 870
.
Her father according to legend 'burnt the cakes', but he was indisputably one of the greatest Saxon Kings of English history, a warrior and a scholar.
During the early part of his reign he continued the fight against the Danes until in 877, he and his army retired to the Isle of Athelney, in what is now called the Somerset Levels in southwest England.
This is the time where the two great legends about Alfred come from.
The first is that he travelled around disguised as a wandering harpist, gathering information from behind enemy lines.
The second is that while hiding in a swineherder's hut he burnt the swineherder's wife's cakes that he had been trusted to watch. Hence Alfred is still known as the King who burnt the cakes.
These battles for territory with the Danes continue for nearly 200 years, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle lists more than 80 land and sea battles between 836 and 1016, but there were many more raids and skirmishes during those turbulent times.
Wikipedia describes the conflict thus:-
During a sustained campaign of repeated attack between 865 and 878 the Danish Vikings English Kingdoms such as Northumbria, Eastern Mercia, East Anglia and even threatened the very existence of Wessex. Alfred and his descendants reconquered these lands from the Danes by 937.
The aid given him in this by Mercia had to be acknowledged. Instead of making the dominion of Wessex over Mercia seem like a conquest, Alfred married Aethelflæd to Aethelred of Mercia and gave his son-in-law the title Ealdorman or Earl of Mercia, thus allowing him some significant autonomy.
Since much of Western Mercia was never under the control of the Danes and remained strong even during the highpoint of Dane Law in other parts of Saxon England, this was a prudent move.
Further prudence prevailed when the kingdoms were finally absorbed; they were not absorbed into Wessex or greater Wessex but into the newly established England.
The term Anglo-Saxon thus reflects King Alfred's diplomatic integration of the Mercians Angles and the Saxons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86thelfl%C3%A6d
Central to that alliance that created England was the figure of Queen Aethelflaed who is also called The Lady of the Mercians.
She is reputed to have been an intelligent and beautiful woman who was also a spirited military leader and skilled tactician.
When she was travelling from her father's kingdom of Wessex to Mercia to marry local potentate Aethelred her party was waylaid by Danes determined to prevent the wedding taking place.
Half of her bodyguards were killed in the initial assault and she and the remainder of her retinue retreated to a ditch from which she led the counter attack that eventually caused her surviving enemies to flee.
This was to be Aethelflaed first victory against the Danes, but it was not to be her last, not by any means.
The Danes wanted to kill Aethelflaed to prevent the alliance between Mercia and Wessex taking place.
Towards the end of his life, Aethelred authorised his wife to exercise many of his powers, and when he died after the Battle of Tettenhall (910) she, Aethelflaed, succeeded him as ruler of Mercia.
Again Wikipedia provides an account of Aethelflaed's story:-
Aethelflæd ruled for approximately eight years (according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) from the newly fortified capital at Stafford, it is likely that the English county of Staffordshire first came into being during her reign.
She fortified her existing borders and re-took Derby. She died at Tamworth in 918, and was buried at St Peter's Church (now St Oswald's priory) in Gloucester, a city she had reconstructed from Roman ruins, and laid out the core street plan, which is still in existence today. Later Aetheflaed was joint lady of the Mercians along with her young daughter Aelfwynn.
The Battle of Tettenhall which established Aetheflaed as the first queen of what was to become England took place in what is now a suburb of the modern city of Wolverhampton in the English West Midlands, (which is incidentally, also named after a powerful Saxon noblewoman called Wulfrun, who established an estate there in 989). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wulfrun
All noble Saxon children would be expected to take weapons training, both girls and boys.
Every hand that could wield a weapon would be needed in the event of a raid and the children and women would be expected to help defend themselves when traveling.
Every free adult Saxon was permitted to carry at least the seax, a long dagger , the very icon of being a Saxon and where the name comes from, or so it is sometimes claimed.
Given the Viking Danes (no doubt exaggerated) reputation for 'rape and pillage' it was essential that Saxon women could defend themselves and their honour from the raiders.
Aethelflaed is reputed to have excelled in the martial arts as well as being a savvy diplomat.
Her last battle was to be at Tamworth in the year 918, but the record do not say how she actually died.
Her age must have been about 49 at this time, less than ten percent of women reached this age in Anglo-Saxon England, so whether Aethflaed died in battle or not, she lived to what was then considered to be a ripe old age even for a noblewoman in those days.
During her life she travelled far and wide fighting and winning battles in places as far flung as Wales and York and her armies retook Derby and Leicester from the Danes in 917.
The process of creating England began with her father Alfred, was further cemented by her husband Aethelred and completed by her brother Edward the Elder, but it was Aethelflaed's strategic marriage that made all this possible and her courage and wisdom was the foundation of the united English nation state in the 10th century CE.
If it were not for Aethelflaed the world would be a very different place, we in the British isles would be speaking Danish now and there would be no Anglosphere and indeed no England at all.
As the historical website Helium points out:-
Aelthelflaed had evidently coached her daughter, Aelfwynn, to take her place, and at the age of about 20 she was older than her mother when she in turn took power.
Unfortunately Uncle Edward was having none of it. He called Aelfwynn to his court for Christmas and then stripped her of all political power.
She
could not be allowed to marry for fear of using her husband to foment
rebellion in an attempt to regain what she might see as her inheritance.
She
was probably confined to a nunnery, but for a while the young Aelfwynn
was quite a force to be reckoned with and very much following in her
mother's footsteps.
While
the old Saxon Kingdoms no longer exist, the part of the country where I
was born (and still live today) is in West Mercia, which as a notional
entity remains in the name of the local police force for example, the
West Mercia Constabulary and also the Mercian Regiment of the British
Army.
It
is my view that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern
Ireland is no less a notional entity than Mercia and Wessex and which
(like them) is passing into history as a 'place' that once existed, but
not for much longer in historical terms.
Two
countervailing historical forces in Europe and globally militate I
think against the continued existence of the UK in its current form.
The
first is devolution of power to the Scottish Parliament, Welsh and
Northern Ireland Assemblies, the process of 'subsidiarity' as the
Eurocrats (and the Catholic Church as a matter of fact) like to call it.
Regionalism if you like? This undermines all nation states because for one thing regions and borders are not always co-terminus.
The second is globalisation which also abolishes national sovereignty and creates intra-national systems of corporate governance like that of the EU for example.
So
if alongside globalisation there is also a countervailing tendency to
regional subsidiarity, I vote for the secession of Mercia from the
United Kingdom and its repositioning as an autonomous region of the
European Union.
And that's what this is all about really, every future needs a past I think.
The
logic is that if Mercia was the place where the process of English
statehood began; then Mercia should logically be the place where the
process ends.
Makes sense to me anyway.
The Anglo Saxon Heptarchy.
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