Marching through history – meet Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians

A few days ago, Annie Whitehead visited with a post about a Northumbrian queen. Today, she introduces us to Æthelflæd, a lady very, very close to her heart as is evidenced by her beautiful novel, To be a Queen. A must-read for any Anglo-Saxon afficionado, IMO. So, with no more ado, let’s hear it from Annie!

Æthelflæd, a force to be reckoned with

I think, not least because of the popularity of Bernard Cornwell’s The Last Kingdom, most people have now heard of Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians. They might, however, assume that she was a warrior woman who personally headed the armies who fought off the Viking invaders of the ninth and tenth centuries. This, in my view, is not who she was, but let me tell you the known facts about her, and you can make up your own mind!

Æthelflæd was born around 869/870, the eldest child of Alfred the Great of Wessex and his Mercian wife. Her marriage was an arranged one, to the leader of Mercia, Æthelred, who had fought alongside Alfred and was probably nearer her father’s age than Æthelflæd’s. Marriage of alliance it may have been, but it was a success, and the pair of them ruled Mercia together for a number of years, issuing charters in their own names, with him fighting the Vikings, alongside first his wife’s father and then her brother, Edward.

Mysteriously, his name drops somewhat from the record in around 902 and we see Æthelflæd issuing charters in her own name and cited by some sources as being the driving force behind kicking the Vikings out of Mercian Chester in 907, using such wiles as loosing bees on the enemy and throwing boiling ale over them.

In a pivotal battle of 910, the combined West Saxon and Mercian forces were led by Edward, and Æthelred died the following year. It is clear, when we piece the information together, that he had been ailing for a number of years and she had been ruling in his stead.

After his death though, in a turn of events almost unheard of for these times, she took on the role of sole ruler of Mercia and continued the campaign to drive the Vikings out of Mercia. She and Edward worked in harmony, building defensive towns known as burhs from which to launch the next push. When you pinpoint all these burhs on a map, you can see brother and sister working in a pincer-like movement, one shoring up one area while allowing the other to push on in another direction. In this warrior society, both Edward of Wessex and the Mercian noblemen appear to have been absolutely comfortable with a female ruler. But the story doesn’t end with her because, briefly, she was succeeded in Mercia by her daughter. I say briefly because after six months or so, Edward took over. But, as I’ve pointed out numerous times, here we have a case of a female succeeding a female and you’d have to fast forward to Tudor times to find another example in England.

So it’s not surprising that I felt the story of this extraordinary woman was crying out to be fictionalised and, when I came to writing my novel, To Be A Queen, I was astonished to find that it hadn’t already been done.

My imagined Æthelflæd spends some of her formative years in her mother’s land, living with her aunt and uncle who were the last king and queen of Mercia. She is sent back to Wessex when Mercia is overrun by the Vikings and then gets caught up in the Viking raiding there, too, when Alfred’s court is attacked at Chippenham on Twelfth Night. She grows up with a fear of Vikings whom she has never actually seen, and is heartbroken to be sent back to Mercia when she becomes a reluctant bride. Though she is half-Mercian herself, she struggles to adapt and to be adopted by the Mercians.

From what I had researched of her life, this seemed to me entirely plausible. But the facts speak for themselves; something must have happened for these two to become formidable joint rulers – and therein lies the magic for fiction writers – a nice gap to fill in!

Æthelflæd famously only had one child, so here again was a nice opportunity for me to guess why, and to work that into her story. An Anglo-Norman chronicler said that she swore off all marital relations after the difficult birth, but I find it odd that he should have known such a thing and I’m pretty sure he made it up.

I said at the beginning that my view is that she was not a warrior woman. I have looked and looked but I can find no evidence of females fighting in this period in ‘England’. We have contemporary details of the education and upbringing of Alfred’s children, and nowhere does it mention that the girls were taught to fight. We know, too, how Edward educated his own daughters and they were taught literacy, embroidery, etc. Archaeological evidence gives us a grave with a skeleton buried with weapons which turned out to be female, but this was in the pre-Christian era, hundreds of years before our Æthelflæd was born.

I recently spoke to an author and podcaster about this and we agreed that there’s no real reason for us to need to believe in warrior women. Women like Æthelflæd were trail-blazers in their own way, and wielded significant power and influence in other ways than fighting. We must, when writing fiction set in other periods, keep our characters true to that period, and make sure they operate within their own society in an era-appropriate way.

We know that she issued charters in her own name, again pretty rare for such times, that she arranged for the relics of St Oswald to be removed from Viking territory and translated to Gloucester (she was later buried at the same site). If we can believe the sources, she carried out her (by now ailing) husband’s instructions and orchestrated the ejecting of the enemy at Chester, and she took her daughter on campaign with her (her daughter witnessed a charter at Weardbyrig, one of the new burhs built by her mother).

She promoted the cult of St Werburgh at Chester, and she sent an army into Wales to avenge the death of an abbot who was dear to her, there capturing a Welsh queen. In my novel I had her accompany the army because otherwise all this action would have taken place ‘off-stage’ but the sources only say that she sent the army to Wales.

At Derby, wrested back from Viking control, she lost four thegns who were ‘dear to her’ and I think she was present this time; I’m still not convinced that she was fighting, but she could well have ridden at the head of her army and been unique in doing so.

I always say that she remains something of a paradox: on the one hand achieving what few, if any, women had done before, and yet hardly meriting a mention in the main part of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles which only call her ‘Edward’s sister’. On the one hand, the sources are somewhat dismissive of her, on the other, men were clearly willing to be led and ruled by a woman. When we look elsewhere though, we see that the Welsh and Irish annals called her a queen, even though she did not have that title officially.

Which is why I called my novel To Be A Queen, because although she never had that title, she knew what it took to be one.

Excerpt from  To be a Queen:

She slept, but only in short bursts. She would turn, and wake, remember that Wulfnoth stood guard outside her tent and she settled down, lying on her right side and drifting off for a while,only to wriggle onto her left and wake up again. The noise from the walls was ever present, like bird song. For weeks she had lived with the shouting, hammering, scraping and banging. Shouts to muster were commonplace, as were the yelled curses in the foreign tongue from within the walls. As with the dawn chorus, it would wake her once in a while, she would acknowledge it for what it was, and sleep on again through the disturbance. She had lain on top of the bed, too hot to sink under the covers, and now, having slept for a while, she woke up feeling chilly. Grabbing at a blanket, she settled down again, not yet refreshed enough to consider rising. She lay down and closed her eyes once more. Then it came to her. There was no battle noise, no sound of machinery. Trundling cart wheels, digging spades and thudding boulders; all had stopped moving.

She sat up, pulled on her boots and left the tent. Wulfnoth had disappeared. She was not concerned; he would not have left her unless he knew it was safe to do so. With a growing sense of hope, she walked through a camp which was now near deserted. Dear God, they must have breached the walls, or the gates, or both. Coming to the edge of the encampment she saw the gates of the town hanging open, one almost off its great hinges. Beyond the open gateway, the Danes, surrendered and surrounded, had been herded together. A Mercian banner fluttered from the watchtower. A thegn on the tower pointed his sword at her and began a victory chant. It was taken up by those below, who all joined in, shouting their triumph in the name of their lady. But Æthelflæd was looking at Frith, who walked towards her with his sword still in his hand, hanging low, dragging. He had blood on his face and his long hair was matted. He had his mail coat on and she gave thanks for his innate tendency to be sensible at such times. But he walked like a wounded man, though she could see that he was whole.
He bowed on one knee before her. “Lady, Derby is yours.”
She put a hand on his shoulder. “Tell me. Who do we mourn?”

To be a Queen

One family, two kingdoms, one common enemy …
This is the true story of Aethelflaed, the ‘Lady of the Mercians’, daughter of Alfred the Great. She was the only female leader of an Anglo-Saxon kingdom.
Born into the royal house of Wessex at the height of the Viking wars, she is sent to her aunt in Mercia as a foster-child, only to return home when the Vikings overrun Mercia. In Wessex, she witnesses another Viking attack and this compounds her fear of the enemy.
She falls in love with a Mercian lord but is heartbroken to be given as bride to the ruler of Mercia to seal the alliance between the two Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.
She must learn to subjugate her feelings for her first love, overcome her indifference to her husband and win the hearts of the Mercians who despise her as a foreigner and twice make an attempt on her life.
When her husband falls ill and is incapacitated, she has to learn to rule and lead an army in his stead. Eventually she must fight to save her adopted Mercia from the Vikings and, ultimately, her own brother.

Buy it HERE

Annie is an author and historian and an elected fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She has written four novels based on real Mercian characters, and three nonfiction books, also about the Anglo-Saxon era. She has been the winner of several fiction and nonfiction prizes and the judge of three prestigious writing awards.

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Check out the previous Marching Through History post HERE!