 Hello, Rebecca Rideal here. Welcome to the final event of Hist Fest 2021. It's been such a wonderful weekend and from Hist Fest and the British Library I'd like to sincerely thank you all for joining us. Please do check out future Hist Fest events via the website www.histfest.org. Now I can think of no better person to close the festival than a man whose work on screen and in print has inspired so many people to take up history. Professor Michael Wood. For those of you joining us for this event in particular I just first of all need to run through a couple of pieces of housekeeping. Using the menu above you can provide feedback to the event and also if you wish donate to the British Library. The Library is a charity so your support really does help to open up a world of inspiration and learning to everyone. Your feedback is also incredibly important in helping the Library to plan future cultural events. You can also find a tab on the menu with a link to the bookshop where you can buy buy or browse a range of titles from many of the festival authors and speakers. Also one final thing below the video there is a box for you to submit questions and there will be a short Q&A after Michael's talk and there's also information and social media links there should you wish to continue the conversation after the event on other platforms. Please do use the hashtag histfest2021. Now without further ado I am delighted to hand you over to our event sponsors to introduce our final event Ethelfled Lady of the Mercyans. Welcome to Sick to Death in Chester. We're very proud to be the headline sponsor for this talk by Michael Wood. We are a new history of medicine at the Museum in Chester where we explore the story of our human beings. I have done all I can to keep this chat about death. Say hello to death. Hello. One of our staff so you'll get to meet death and his counterpart medicine as you visit here and I'll set in the historic city of Chester which has a very special or pertinent link with the subject of today's talk, the Lady of the Mercyans, Ethelfleda. So enjoy your talk and come and visit us soon. Thanks Rebecca. Thanks everybody. Great to see you in Chester and thank you the audience for being with us tonight. Thank you for supporting the HIST Fest which has been a recent phenomenon and especially due to the drive and vision of Rebecca herself and I hope that we can all meet again in person for the next one. I hope and I hope that's not too long either. It's a wonderful place, the British Library to hold events like this and I hope we can all get together soon. I'm talking to you tonight about the Lady of the Mercyans, variously pronounced Ethelfleda, a still current name in my grandparents' time but Ethelfleda in Anglo-Saxon in old English. Let's put it that way. Just a brief note on her life. She was born in around 870 perhaps. She died in 918 and she's one of the most interesting people in British history. She reigned the Mercyan Kingdom in the Midlands for 32 years. It's astonishing in the early medieval period in the age of the Vikings, the last eight of those years on her own after her husband's death. So it's an extraordinary story and I'm going to try and tell you that story as best I can tonight but it's also a really interesting case of the erasure of women's history because were it not for a small chronicle written probably in Worcester during her lifetime which was later edited into manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. We would never know the bulk of her story so it's a truly intriguing tale and I really want to try and look tonight at the possibilities of biography if you like. For people of that period biography is a very difficult thing to manage, the inwardness of people's lives. What did they think? What did they feel? It's very hard to get at, especially when it's expressed in what the great Eric Alba called the the veil of scholarly Latin. But fortunately with people like Arthur Fladen, her father, Alfred the Great, we've got vernacular texts as well. So there's some possibility amid the fragments of reconstructing the life of this extraordinary woman and that's what I'm going to try and do today. A woman, as this text in front of you says, the Lady of the Merciums, a woman of extraordinary prudentia and justitia. These are the classic virtues of male kingship, prudentia, justitia, justice, about standing virtues, strength of character, and yet these are replied to a woman. So the possibilities of biography, but first of all, I can't resist this. Of course there's been a huge interest in her over the last few years, especially with the anniversary in 2018 of the 900 years. Is that right? 1,100 years. And Bernard Cornwell's Last Kingdom series on the BBC, there she is, the feisty modern heroine. How we imagine the people of the past is the publicity blurb. She's the daughter of Alfred and Al Swith, strong, brave and intelligent, a mind as thoughtful as her father's and a will as strong as her mother's. We don't know about the will of her mother, but the same virtues of prudentia and justitia, of constantia, firmness of purpose, we still understand those things, don't we, even though it's very difficult to enter into the lives of a woman of that period. And in the last few years, people have really tried, although there is no full-length biography or study of her in an academic sense. There's been a plethora of books. We've even got her autobiography. What wouldn't we give for that? Many ways of imagining her, consonant with our modern ideas about women of strength. Sometimes even she appears as a kind of wonder woman, vanquishing her Danish and Viking foes. Her story goes back a long way. Her myth goes back a long way. Post the Norman conquest, there were a lot of short accounts of her. This one, interestingly, the Chay Worth roll, 14th century, gives us how she was viewed in later times. I'll try and read it for you. Of course, because she was a ruler, a religious woman in an honorary. She by her knowledge and her intelligence, she participated in the rule of the kingdom with her brother. So that's the kind of person. How do we penetrate back to the world of the late 9th century and the early 10th century in which she lived in times of extraordinary danger? If the early 10th century text from Northumbria on the life of Saint Cuthbert is right, she and the family were with her father Alfred during the darkest hour of the Wessex kingdom in age 78 in the marshes of Somerset. That's maybe an eight-year-old child, but what's certain is that through her life, she understood the dangers of the time and she took on the burdens of the time in the way that a male ruler did. That's the background, the Viking age. The kingdoms, the old kingdoms of England had been dismembered by Viking attacks from the 860s. Northumbria, kings had been killed, Edmund, the king of the East Angles in 869 had been killed. Mercia had been broken apart, partitioned and a puppet king installed in 874. Only father's kingdom Wessex survived. So that's the background to the story. I couldn't resist putting one or two of these pictures in. I love this one in particular. This was from a children, Edwardian children's book that my father had and I love the scene even though we regretfully part with Vikings with winged helmets and all that, but it's in the fence. It symbolizes the story that we're going to tell, really the destruction of the monasteries burning on the horizon, the destruction of learning, the destruction of rulership as these enormous, we now understand, professional armies that traversed the kingdom. The recent excavations at Torxi, for example in Lincolnshire, Viking camp 55 hectares, about a mile along the Trent, many thousands of people, the excavators think. So these were massive threats to the survival of a kingdom and that's the world she will enter into. I've put some of the sources in to show you here because we're going to grapple this evening with the possibilities of biography. So here's my first source. This is the life of Alfred the Great written by Bishop Asser, the Welsh bishop who knew Alfred and worked for him, travelled with him, saw some of the key sites of the story and this is Asser's account. The manuscript doesn't survive. This is the 1722 printed edition of the text, which miraculously we have and this is the background to Outer Flats Life. This is Alfred as a young man, about 869, 868, marrying a Mercian woman from the Mercian kingdom, the kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia that got closer and closer together over this period of enormous threat from Viking armies. Alfred's sister was married to the king of the Mercians and in 868, Alfred marries, as you can see here, a woman and Asser curiously never names her elsewhere, who is, you can see in the middle of the page, the daughter of an alderman, Ethelred of the Ganey who were a tribe of the Mercians who lived around Hanbury in Worcestershire and his nickname was Mikko, in fact the name of his father and it seems his grandfather or great-grandfather, so it's an old noble line of the Mercians but the most important thing for our story is the mother, the grandmother of Affleflad and here she's named by Asser, Eadbuch and she came as you can see from the royal line of the Mercian kings and Asser says here in brackets and we ourselves have seen her many times until her death, frequently seen her and she was a truly remarkable woman and for many years after the death of her husband she lived the life of a religious vows if you like, of a chaste widow and Eadbuch who therefore lived with the royal court in the whole time of the upbringing of her granddaughter Affleflad and the mother Elswith and to me it's the women of the Mercian royal line who are the key to this story in some ways that Affleflad who will become ruler of Mercia is the daughter of the great line of the Mercian royal family and her grandmother Eadbuch is descended from the last great king of the of the Mercians, Ken Wolf so and women in Mercia had a different status from what we can see to to what they had in Wessex, 100 years before King Offer the great king who built the dike and corresponded with Charlemagne his wife Kunathrith administered the royal household was a patron and governor of religious houses and he even had coins minted carrying her name so royal women of the Mercian clan had very high status and that's the world in which Affleflad is coming from through her mother and through her grandmother it's the Mercian female line and we don't have time tonight to really look at this but those of you who saw the the great exhibition two or three years ago at the British Library will have seen some of these manuscripts this is the Nunnaminster prayer book there are four great prayer books from the early 9th century that survived from Mercia and this one owned probably by Affleflad's mother others perhaps made for and even by women it's been suggested one of them for made for a female physician with special prayers and material on women's health these carry very characteristic prayers and texts to do with cults that were favored by the Mercian women of the royal household especially the cults of the Holy Cross very moving and powerful prayers and there's a culture there a Christian Latin culture that is transmitted down to her even though we don't know whether she was literate or not so it's worth bearing in mind that her inheritance was this great culture of Mercia which would be so important to her father in the in the translation projects that he undertook in the 890s so and so she's born into that and here's Asa's description that the first born of King Alfred and we assume born around 870 is Affleflad there she is the the primogenita and sadly it doesn't tell us about her education further down it talks about her younger brothers and their education it doesn't tell us and perhaps because she left the court by the time that Asa joined it from the the later 880s onwards but you can see there the description of her marriage briefly Affleflad when she came to the time of matrimony perhaps around 16 or 17 maybe mid 80s hate 80s married Ethelred Eadredo Asa calls him the alderman of the Mercians so she that's when she goes to leaves Wessex behind leaves her father's court behind and goes to Mercia to be the lady of the Mercians he's the Ethelred is the lord of the Mercians she is the lady of the Mercians the Domina Merciorum the Hlaftia in English Merciorum now at that time it's important to understand Alfred had won a series of tremendous victories against the the Danes and become the preeminent king of the surviving English kings and and he starts to call himself the king of the Anglo-Saxons meaning the joint kingdom of the Saxons of Wessex and the Anglians of of Mercia so he's the preeminent king and Ethelred and Affleflad his wife never take the title king or queen in in official documents although that's how they're seen by people abroad for instance in irish chronicles but they rule Mercia still in on the understanding that it is a kingdom here's a a charter from issued Shrewsbury in 901 quite far into their joint reign in which they are with God's grace holding in an with honor governing and defending the monarchy of the Mercians so even though they're not presumably allowed by Alfred to hold the title of king or queen they are as it were in a regal position they're holding the monarchy of the Mercians now rulership what did it involve well we'll see as we go along from leading armies to fighting battles but especially to protecting the kingdom what Alfred was faced with after his victory of 878 was the necessity to fortify the land to build fortified places that enabled the population to take refuge nobody in any major center of population would be more than 15 miles away from a from a fortified place here's a map which shows you the the fortified borgs as they were called b u r h borgs constructed by Alfred and we'll see the ones that alfalflade constructed in Mercia so they she and her husband are following on this this alfredian plan which essentially was to to renovate they would have used the word in latin renovate you the kingdom of the anglo saxons by building towns building fortresses being building a network of obligations by which the the country could be defended and let me give you one example it happens to survive in detail in a really wonderful and important document in which after flat and our husband fortified with alfred's agreement the old town of Worcester and here we are looking across the cathedral to the the northern part along the seventh which is where she extends the the the town probably in the eight nineties and the document survives with detailed attention to not only the creation of the new fortifications but uh the market area and the high street they're laying out a new part of the town with building plots with specific provisions for for the market and for commerce and tolls as well as for defense the beginning of the document says that the at the request of their friend the bishop warfare of Worcester alderman athelred and alfalflade have ordered the building of the bull at Worcester for the protection of all the people fortunately again the manuscript was virtually destroyed in the cotton fire in 1731 still survives as you can see but it was well edited before the fire so we know what it what it said and and this is a sketch map just to show you what she did what she and her husband did because this pattern of constructing fortresses building new towns creating market areas new churches this pattern will be replicated in the astounding series of entries in what we can call the alfalflades chronicle there's Worcester the red line is the roman defenses the green line the mercy and addition so it's a major addition 20 acres perhaps i can't remember the black line is the later medieval wall so you've got the high street a new high street being laid out with plots for the settlers the market is being specially laid out and also you'll notice i've put in three very significant churches all of which are ancient churches and all of which are cults that are really important to the mercy and royal family above all saint helen the finder of the true cross it's the oldest church in Worcester it's the mother church of Worcester it existed before the the old english takeover of Worcester it's probably late roman and we're going to see the alfalflade probably is involved with manuscripts of the finding of the true cross and the story of saint helen are being produced the cults are very important to most in royal women and saint margaret of antioch was same we'll come to that as well but there you can see the model for urban construction in the viking age we have to defend we have to lay plans for the future and it's a systematic long-term plan which is following on from what alfred does she and her husband and then she on her own will continue just a stress though that they are still subordinates to the king of the anglo-saxons here's a document from 903 which actually has her brother there you see the trans i've not transcribed all the names at the bottom but there's her brother edward there's her husband ethyl red herself below the bishops of moa feth of worcester aful we are the king's brother osfair the king's close kinsmen and below alphuin the one child of alfalflade she's she's the one child who at least grew to adulthood of of alfred and alfalflade and she's going to be important part of the story because we talk of alfalflade as the lady of the mercenaries but there was a second lady of the mercenaries the daughter we'll come back to her so it's at this point that we can start to tell her story in some detail because of this extraordinary survival it's in the british library both these manuscripts of cotton tiberius manuscripts are digitized so you can look at them at the wonderful british library digitized manuscripts files online and you can go in closely on the pages and really interrogate them in a way that has never been possible before and here um is the beginning in 902 of the annals of alfalflade let's call it that you can see the red square is where the annals begin and curiously enough in the previous chronicle text before it ends in 915 and then this this new set of annals has been inserted going back to the year 902 so it's an intrusion and the earliest of the two manuscripts of this is from 977 and the manuscripts follow an exemplar an earlier version of it so we don't have the original but we can see here that somebody in wuster began to make notes and gradually these notes get more and more expansive and once alfalflade is the sole rule of the mercenaries uh somebody is anxious to commemorate her story uh i've not transcribed everything because the page would get too busy but maybe there's a clue in the fact that the very first entry of these annals is the death of her mother else with both fared and then a few smaller entries eclipses of the moon a comet and so on and then a series of annals which begin to tell a story which will run down until the death of ethyl red her husband in the middle of the page the author's year stasia for ethyl red mirshna harford and then she starts to be called the lady of the mercenaries and she's on her own and she starts to act on her own she starts to direct military forces on her own she sends expeditions into wales she leads armies as you can see there in the bottom quote her go to for gifendum with the help of god for alfalflade mirshna harford she went with elum mirshaw with all the mercian people to time our way off to tamworth and she built the book there in the early summer the annal goes on to tell us more things but i'm giving you a flavor of what this remarkable text does without it we wouldn't know so let's just look at one or two of the things that have singled out there uh first of all uh 907 the restoration of chester there's chester great roman great roman city with a great bend of the river d around it and what we know that she did in the restoration of chester perhaps um after a heavy biking north irish attack which is recorded in the irish sources so she's repairing it as well as restoring it the roman circuit is the rectangle that's marked on two sides there by the blue and the red is the huge expansion that she and her husband create and the city will become a major center of commerce and trade 25 monayers in within 20 years you know the largest number in in in in england partly on the trade with across the irish sea which is a kind of free trade zone really and coins are issued they don't bear her name but uh they show the great building work in the right hand side of the coin is the great tower is probably a representation of the restoration of the roman city of chester so um the renovatio begins 909 st oswald's bones were taken from barney in mercia and brought back took lost and uh if you drive around the inner bypassing gloss to today you can still see a fragment of the arcade of the beautiful little dynastic church the apple flat and our husband built there for st oswald to hold his remains the excavators um believed that the dug out depression at one end of this building had been the remains of a of a square pillar to crypt and they compared it to what they found in the ground to the surviving mercene crypt at repton in darbyshire with the relic ledges on three sides which would have contained the bones of the saints that saint oswald's remains and were intended to receive the bones of apple flat and our husband so this was a dynastic morselium and a really important statement in the former roman city of blosta one of the most important centers that again she'd restored they're creating well it almost sounds dynastic doesn't it it's so reeks of the mercene past and there's a little interesting little side light to this story um lost annals lost chronicle lost poem recounting the life of king athelstein tells us one or two rather important things that before his death alfred the greater designated athelstein as a little boy as future king and decked him with the regalia of knighthood the scarlet cloak and the dual belt and scabbard and the sword but um all that came to naught because his father edward who's i presume in the right upper right of this beautiful picture and that must be alfred flat in the upper left his father um booted out athelstein's mother to me presumably was not married and married a queen a woman who was consecrated as queen so the children of that marriage would be the designated heirs and athelstein was packed off to be raised by his aunt athelflad in mercy and we'll come back to this story at the end because of where those annals of athelflad leaders but athelstan never forgot his links with mercy and a remarkable document here which is in the national archive tells us that when athelstan was probably in his mid teams sometime 909 now 910 presuming when the relics of oswald have been brought back to to gluster athelstan swore a pact of paternal piety with his foster father athelflad's husband a pactum paterni pietatis can you see it's lit it's illuminated on the picture so you can imagine the teenage athelstan with his aunt and uncle in that beautiful church a tiny little church the bones of st oswald with this solemn pact which he would fulfill he came back to gloster in the first year of his kingship to affirm that pact and there are other little hints of the importance of his his time as a as a young prince in athelflad's court you'd found a church in gloster he'd made his pact of paternal piety there he even died in gloster so these connections bear them in mind mercy at that time is is um open to attack um wessex by now the network of boroughs was fortifications was right across towards kent and the river valleys were defended the estuaries were defended the big towns like winchester had rebuilt but the heartland of western mercy beyond waddling street that red line which is the frontier between the dain law and the and the english was open to attack and around the time of that um pact of piety in 910 a great invasion came down from north fumbria burning and looting as they crossed bottling street down into the heartland of mercy of the seven valley all the way to the bristol avan then up on the crossing over to the the western side of the seven before it was intercepted near tetan hall in staffordshire and suffered an absolutely crushing defeat we don't know who the leadership were there's a joint mercy and west sacks and army presumably the leadership was athelflad and her husband but it's possible that by now her husband was in very poor health maybe through wounds or through sickness or through age and she was taking the lead in all these things because that same year in response to this attack if we go back to the animals we discover um in the middle of the page the battle and the same year the il chan year afofladya timb rada tambor at bremsburg um a husband isn't mentioned anymore although he's still alive she ordered the fortification to be made at bremsburg and the and the fortification i think if you look at the two great roads that lead out of mercia the fosway going up to lester and iknell street going from wuster to darby that main that line down which is probably the line taken by the army in 910 the invading army goes through bromsgrove bremes graf and to me that's much the likeliest place for afoflads first soul construction it's got all the characteristics of a late saxon town it's first in doomsday book with many subsidiary holdings and estates it's a classic late saxon borough and and i think that's the that's the place and she did it in specific response to the attack of of 910 uh and now the annals start to get more particular she's described as the lady of the mercians and the adjectives used by the analyst uh uh the the descriptions the the the almost breathless additions to the text it was with god's grace it was with god's help she went with all the mercians to tamworth now tamworth was over the tamworth as you can see there is just over the waddling street in danish territory and presumably have been held by the danes since 874 but it was the old capital the old residence of offer and aflbald and the great mercene kings so it's almost a kind of redemption and she goes with the army that's she went with all the mercies so by 913 she's actually leading these expeditions and she restores tamworth and indeed the excavations at tamworth have been able to show the line of her defenses and then it opens up and uh i've constructed this map to give you a sense of her campaigns between 913 and 915 it's an amazing image isn't it don't you think i've got her coming back for christmas to wooster i of course it could have been lost her but wooster was her her main center i think intellectually her closeness to the bishops there she had her own house in a big haga in the northern part of the circuit that she built so let's put her in wooster and just see now what's happening 913 she crosses waddling street takes tamworth re fortifies it garrisons it the same campaign she goes up to stafford and creates a fortress there she comes back for christmas then in 914 she heads all the way up to the north cheshire plain and fortifies re fortifies an old iron age hill fort at edisbury and a very strategic place looking out towards the in between the valleys of the d and the mercy and then as you can see she comes all the way down later in the year to the other side of english mercia to warwick close by the fosway where another huge fortifications built is still the basis of the fortifications of warwick today she presumably came back again for the heartland to of wooster to to of mercy to enjoy christmas and then in 915 she goes out to the welsh border so she's looking three ways really she and her commanders my friends as she called them the men who are named in her charters she's looking towards the waddling street frontier with warwick tamworth and stafford she's looking north towards the vulnerable point of the d and the mercy and incursions there she's also looking to the welsh borders and in 915 she constructs a boar at cherbury and shortly afterwards one at a place which has not been identified called the watch fort we'll come back to that and then goes all the way back up to the mercy to construct a boar at roncorn on the narrows where the mercy estuary closes in in the landscape there the very narrow point let's just look at one or two of those give you a sense of what she's doing there's the fort at edisbury near the forest of delaware and the north cheshire plain big iron age hill fort re fortified sizable garrison needed to fortify that and they probably leave garrisons behind as well as reorganizing the local militias there's the there's the narrows coming from the you know mercy stretching away to the left and coming down from the right the narrows at roncorn where any of you traveled up by train you remember the famous bridge goes right over the river at that point with the church which she founded and then down with saint's bones of saint betel in right there on the edge of the river they may even have done what they did in carolingian frankia which is to have another fort on the other side and link it with chains and weird bore i mentioned out in the welsh borders i think that it's the watch boar is this place coast castle near westbury a few miles west of schroesbury on the great road tradeway into wales this book although it's not been identified would be a mint under afelstan probably under edgar and so it was a substantial urban settlement on the welsh border and this fits all our requirements i think and westbury below it is where doomsday where the anglo-saxon chronicles sorry says that the weird men the watch men on the welsh border were based in in the 11th century so this this looks like the place to me and if it is then imagine her there with her army and her leaders in the the late summer of 915 because the entry in the the annals of afel flood three entries down so it's just below halfway you can see weird beer weird book and the same year she goes up to rum colf and ronkorn and we can pick her up september the 9th 915 because again miraculously given how few documents survive here in this wonderful cartillary from the british library is there she is a beautifully painted picture of her is her charter issued at the fortress of weird book if we're looking at the left hand column we're looking at the date right in the middle the 9th of september in the place called weird book and there she is with her thanes and her nobles the the bottom four names with crosses by them are the four bishops of of mercy the sixth name is you can see his ego afel flared confirming the document and not requiring the permission of her brother to do it and below her missus signed as a bishop in the abbreviation but we've already got the four bishops of mercy her daughter alfuin and probably in her late 20s by now but now being groomed as the successor one would imagine so it's a really crucial document brilliant document she is constructing a new borough she's refurbishing an iron age hill for new defences establishing settlers in it and probably has a dedication ceremony this is only days before the ceremony of the the holy cross one of the most important ceremonies for the mercy and royal women so everything comes together in that document out of all this what can we imagine well first of all of course in medieval chronicles they're always anxious to attribute the to give the credit to actions and deeds and battles and wars to the ruler but this set of annals is very distinctive it tells us she sent an expedition to langos lake to the punisher wells raid she herself went with the army to tamworth and so on these are specific it allows us perhaps to conjecture that she is the leader would be there when these these boroughs were laid out when the streets were laid out perhaps she herself went into the field with her generals and her surveyors as documents describe late sacks of kings doing can't be sure she dressed like this i'm using to help your imagination here illustrations from the the hexateuch of a great biblical manuscript of about the year 1000 and and the experts like gailo and crocker on women's clothing think that things got things changed during the 10th century is as the upper class driven by the monastic reformers were became more religious in the outward appearance as well as in their behavior and that women perhaps were more constrained in some of their roles by that time and and their clothing possibly but it it helps us imagine she may not have appeared like this with her army at weird book but and also she's in the charters with her wise men she's thanking her friends she uses that term my friends and she therefore is chairing these these meetings she's the ruler of the mercenaries she's with honor holding and defending the monarchy of the mercenaries so we can only conclude that she was there in those discussions and perhaps leading them as a very experienced daughter of a king daughter of the royal line of mercy she had it both ways and she sends messages that that was much important messages ambassadors to no doubt the the annals describe her negotiating with emissaries from from york and from lester and sending missions into wales so all those things we can fairly imagine her doing the very things that male rulers are supposed to do that's what she does and also going back to that document from weird book and the fifth name up on the left hand side her daughter is with her at this point now and in her late 20s a mature woman experienced in rulership already for 10 years before this document in 915 so there's the picture of the the the defensive network which is being created i'm not saying she dreamed it all up but it was evolved with close knowledge of conditions on the ground by her and her generals and her advisors and her wise men and so on and she is seen as the valued leader and loved leader in this respect and and when you look at that picture i've highlighted with a yellow marker pen forgive my haste here you can see the cluster of burrows around the mercy in the d the the cluster of burrows that look towards the waddling street frontier and those on the welch border we're probably missing one or two herford may well have been the reconstruction of herford down at the bottom towards towards the left done at the same time as some of her early burrows there must be something in the middle around wigmore south of chirbury along office dyke and there's probably two a couple between shoesbury and chester the the great iron age hillford of oswestry masbury the masburg the bull on the on the border i would imagine was refurbished at that time because the cult center of saint oswald the the white minster looks like a 10th century minster so it's a very wide ranging and far-sighted set of administrative arrangements to protect the kingdom of mercy but also to prepare for the conquest of the danelaw the lands beyond the red line and you can see the two great roads the one between stafford and tamworth ignals street going to darby and the one fosway going to lester and that's where she's going to go in 917 first of all darby the expedition to darby and you can see their day or ruby in the third line down and this memorable entry in the annals which gives us a tiny insight into the way that that the links the feelings the relationships between her and her warriors and her leaders the battle for darby she took darby and she took the territory dependent on it and in the battle there the warren itch off sling and here a thingia for who were much beloved the four things were killed fighting inside the gates warren bin unfun guttle four of her things who she much loved i always find this entry very touching and illuminating we all know about the bond between the the male lord and the warriors you think of the great anglo-saxon poems of exile you know the seafarer the wanderer how the relationship with the beloved lord is so intense that to be deprived of it causes almost paroxysms of depression i wish i could lay my head on my lord's lap again the loss of the lord's love is so great and the warriors as in the battle of maldon poem are prepared to lay down their lives for their lord and there in that one annal you've got a suggestion of have the mercy and warriors the heavily armed warriors the the spearhead of the army the things fighting inside the gate and being and losing their lives it's a it's a powerful little insight into the link which keeps being suggested in her charters when she refers to them not as my my ministers or my but my friends and that asks all sorts of questions about also about the court culture and women's culture before we move on to the final year of her life and the final year of her campaigns there are many many things that we don't know about this period as i'm sure many of you will know a lot of the translations sponsored by alfred the great were done by mercians the mercene element in the alfredian translation program was the most significant bishop wafeth the priest afelstan the priest warelth plegmund who became archbishop of canterbury these people were the intellectual bodyguard the cometatus if you like the the native english cometatus of after the great the people who provided his translations and translations that came after his his death because most of them lived long lives warelth died in 914 well into afelflads times a soul ruler afelstan the priest certainly to the time when her husband died warelth is still by afelstan's side in 925 so the translation project there's no reason to think that it ended with alfred and in fact we can be sure that it didn't the whole drive of it continued and in mercy or above all it was very powerful and continuing and there are many mercene manuscripts which have yet to be analyzed dated and really understood let me just give you one or two hints if we think about the fragments that are possible for a future biography this is a fascinating and important manuscript of aldhelm west sacks and saints a famous treatise on chastity a crucial manuscript in the whole tradition the the stem of the manuscripts that run through the 10th century and were so important in the reform period and the root manuscript is this one from her circle from wuster um under what conditions was this commission uh when we think of the life of her mother and her grandmother as religious widows when we think of the tradition of afelflad herself a later tradition says that after the birth of her only child alfuin the birth had been so traumatic and so difficult that she renounced sexual relations with her husband and made vows of chastity herself um what do these signify how far can we go in terms of biography when we when we look at texts like this um then there's the question of manuscripts concerning the mercy and royal family a translation of the mercy and royal saint guthlack comes from her time and a latin manuscript survives from her time and a translation which is again with vernacular poetry these these texts have not been closely dated and one hopes with big collection on guthlack coming out soon we may understand what the relationship is of these texts latin and old english and vernacular poems what relation do they have to the mercy and court at that time and most interesting perhaps is this manuscript um paris latin bibliotheque nationnel 5574 uh almost unknown to specialists in old english history uh until very recently it's she's only recently been digitized but here's a manuscript done in her Worcester presumably but surely related to the ideals of her court circle and women's culture because it contains a series of texts all of which are about heroic women um martyrs religious women who became martyrs because of their exceptional courage and heroism in the face of suffering in the face of male violence uh saint juliana uh an important saint in if you're praying for health and against disease and illness um saint helena the the finder of the true cross i've already referred to you the the importance of that cult to mercy and royal women and the striking fact of the mother church of Worcester being probably pre-english but dedicated to saint helen still there today go and see it um and saint margaret of anteok um saint of childbirth um and again really remarkable text this uh which even contains um exhortations to visit churches to um to have the life copied anybody who copies this story and carries it with them will be blessed um the special um protection for the pregnant women and so on um it's a very these are women's texts and although these stories of course are are um stories of these saints are you'd almost say fairy tales the horrible uh the dragons being swallowed by a dragon um the the awful tortures that these women like margaret endured before their their deaths um you could see them as fairy tales but actually for women of this time one suspects there was great consolation to be had in these texts which validate their experience and their suffering uh at the hands of male violence in a world of extraordinary violence especially towards women so um those texts which are about health and about pregnancy about bravery and courage and steadfastness are um are very interesting products of what might what might guess was the female court culture of athelflav which we know nothing um and interestingly enough the relics of st margaret of antioche came to the came to italy in 908 and here's a relic list of king athelstan his gifts to exeter and there on the right hand column just above halfway you'll see the head kaput of st margaret the virgin given to exeter the life that they're translating then is um is translated into old english it actually says that the head nobody knew where the head was but clearly athelstan's relic purchasers were able to get hold of that but um there's a tiny possible connection here and i i i offer this with great diffidence but this is the church of east wellow in hampshire and uh it's dedicated to st margaret of antioche and although it's a 12th century church it had a pre-conquest predecessor um no guarantee that dedication goes that far back but in the will of alfred the great there he is alfred west sacks and up cuny um he leaves one estate to my eldest daughter and some of these some of these bequests are one can only imagine sentimental he gives wanted his birthplace an effan done the sight of his greatest victory to his wife and to my eldest daughter one estate the ham at wellow at east wellow why does he give this one estate to alfred of course he gives her nothing else because she's been married and left his court long ago and she's living in mercy but one estate what's her connection with east wellow was she born there was the dedication important to her it only underlines so many stories that lie behind the text that are part of the real lived life the very the breath of their lives that we can't answer so i leave that little thought with we're nearly at the end um this is the situation by uh 9 17 9 18 the kingdom of the anglo-saxons under edward the elder with athelflad as the lady of the mercenaries has now pushed its way up to the mercy and the trend and the welland uh lincoln just remains part of the the rule of the kingdom of northumbria at that time and now the attacks begin concerted attacks with edward going up towards stanford and the welland and athelflad pushing the mercy armies across to uh lester and and further and now the mercenaries by now as you can see really detailed texts um if only we had this for the whole the whole decade our knowledge would be transformed but um lester surrenders peaceably the the danish army based in lester the men of york then send ambassadors to athelflad uh offering to take her overlordship they will accept by making promises and giving solemn oaths to her they will have her as they lord just imagine how the history of the next few years might have gone had she not died so this is a kind of revolution in the north and indeed irish sources suggest that uh she actually took forces into northumbria to fight a battle against a north irish army helping the king of the scots at that time near core bridge it's very hard to believe that that story is true but it's a measure of the reputation that she had by then in the irish sources she's referred to as the most famous queen of the saxons but after that incredibly busy first six months of the year first five months of the year she dies sudden we don't know why um in the middle of these things sudden as you can see there twelve nights before mid-summer benantaman worthy the eighth year that she had held the rule of mercy with right lordship with just lordship note the stress this is a murcian writer she was the legitimate ruler of the kingdom of the murcians and her body lies in glosta in the porticus of the church of saint peter the little church i showed you and the verdicts i'd love to know where this came from for a long time i persisted in charles plumber's idea that the original behind these annals had been written in latin clearly clearly it was vernacular by somebody who imitated latin forms in the old english and so my long-held belief that this this fantastic salute to her from the chronicle of text may not be right but it's it's full of what i would call carolingian terms of rulership and uh this is what a wuster chronicle in latin said about her death the lady of the murcians woman of outstanding prudentia judgment that is and justice of extraordinary virtus that strength of character that means feminine in the eighth year that she on her own had ruled the kingdom of the murcians the kingdom of the murcians with strength and justice she had ruled moderaminne um but it's difficult word to translate but steering it carefully and she left her daughter as the heir to the kingdom they keep using the word kingdom and and implied to in the old english it's the first and only time i think in british history that a daughter succeeded a mother as ruler and it begs all sorts of questions half when um uh well probably in the early 30s now she becomes the second lady of the murcians and 18 months later it seems the dates are not absolutely clear in december 919 her uncle edward the elder moves into murcia effectively enacting a coup and removes her from power and takes her into wessex on west sacksa i led a trim wukan midwinter three weeks before midwinter seawas hatan alphuin she was called alphuin so the threat of murcian separatism possibly is it the strength of murcian feeling how are we to read this the answer is we don't know all we know is that the daughter was removed from power by the uncle uh and uh that's the last we hear of her or is it here's a charter from 948 maggie bailey drew attention to this um and uh very interesting charter given by king aadred um nephew of afoflan at the behest of the queen mother can you see in the third line down a adge fu aostem rajus mathe on behalf of a holy woman a woman of religious persuasion called alphuin uh and it would be very interesting it's a rare name only two women in the first half of the 10th century as far as i know have it uh it would be extraordinary if this were presumably now in a 60s and resident in an honorary somewhere in the south of england never allowed back into murcia never allowed to marry um if only we knew mother and daughter then um the two lages of the murcians and so much still to be discovered from i believe from the clusters of vernacular texts and the dating of vernacular poetry um and some of these latin texts that have never really been explored there's a footnote to the story before i finish you remember the tale of little afelstan the five or six year old his aunt looking down from the top left his mother booted out of the court replaced by a consecrated queen afelstan himself booted off the succession order in favor of his slightly younger half brother alphuid was born in the purple um afelstan must have been murcian in temperament if you spent a lot of time there he must have understood murcian traditions and loved his his um his aunt so murcia is under west saxon rule we've reached 924 so five years after the abduction of afelflad's daughter and you'll see here this is from the textus refensis this is the nearest we have to an authoritative official west saxon king list and in the middle of the page you can see it after alfreda fun edward his son to tharicia after alfred edward his son succeeded to the kingdom and he reigned for you can see it there 24 winters and then alphuid edward's son came to the throne and held it for four weeks can you see there on field four weekend and then afelstan his brother fun fun to reach it on to wigleshire thus thus reaches world and he succeeded to the kingdom and he held it warlike he was a great king and what happened after the death of the the young king afelstan's half brother was this which we know from the end as far as we can tell of the annals of afelflad whoever wrote that account of afelflad between 902 and 925 perhaps um ended it with what is almost a perfect turning of the circle because um after the death of edward suppressing a murcian revolt in the summer of 924 then the death of the acknowledged heir the west saxon prince alphuid the murcians elect afelstan king there you can see it four lines from the bottom and afelstan was your core into king of mirchon not as king of the anglo saxon there's not a king of wessex but king of the murcians so all those hints that we've seen in the documents of the monarchy of the murcians the regnum of the murcians that afelflad and her husband so carefully tended um suddenly came to pass in this constitutional crisis and the murcians elect afelstan as their guide the foster son the nephew of the of the lady of the murcians so um that's the story then in brief and i hope you'll agree there is real food for biographical material in this speculation with so many still unexamined manuscripts afelstan becomes the first king of the english he only becomes first king of the english because he's acceptable to the murcians he bridges the the gap between the murcians and the west saxons and i'm sure all his life looked to his aunt as his great inspiration and as soon as he became king goes back to glosta to redeem that promise he made to her and her husband when he was a teen engine and indeed he dies there aged 44 15 years later so um there's two ways of telling this story of the creation of the kingdom of of all the english and uh there's the the version that we get in our history books and then there's the version that was almost erased the official version of the west saxon version of the anglo-saxon chronic or doesn't mention her at all except at her death when she is described as simply the king's sister so um it always pays to look at these sources from different points of view doesn't it thank you very much