6.7 The Means of Accomplishing part 7

Aethelflaed ruled as lady of the Mercians in the English Midland (911-918 CE). Eldest child of Alfred the Great, king of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex

There was a sharp change from women’s rights during the late, pagan Roman Empire to new rules that determined the English common law that the U.S. later codified. The transition from Roman, to Christian, to English rules governing women’s autonomy is surprisingly simple.¹ This single event doesn’t explain everything, things might have become similar without it, but the 1066 Battle of Hastings triggered that change.

The Romans arrived in Britain in 43 CE. It was a conquest not an alliance, but Hadrian’s Wall brought a stability. Then, from 383 to 410 CE, the Romans left Britain. Rome’s transition to Christianity (380 CE Edict of Thessalonica) was too late and far away to directly influence emerging Britain law. The Britain’s pressing issue was the frequent Saxon incursions in the south and Picts and Scots incursions from the north. Seeking protection from those invaders, the Britains hired Germanic mercenaries: Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. The mercenaries decided Britain was a good place to live and immigrated in mass – families, whole communities – who brought their legal tradition. By 838 CE there was a stable Anglo-Saxon polity. The ninth and tenth centuries brought new waves of Danish Viking invasions. These Northern Europe people, shared the Anglo-Saxon values. Consequently, from 580 CE to 1066 CE Britain’s women enjoyed autonomy and legal rights unmatched in the U.S. until the 1960s.

Women’s Anglo-Saxon Rights

Clark’s review in “Women’s Rights in Early England” identifies five issues: land ownership, family law, women’s occupations, political leadership, and the legal system. I address a sixth issue: a right to abortion.

Medieval Britain divided land ownership into three classes: bookland, laenland, and folkland. Bookland was total control of the land with the ability to sell, give away, or divide the land. Laenland and folkland could not be divided or sold. Laenland typically granted the use of land for three generations of lease holding family. The use of folkland held communal obligations.

Anglo-Saxon women could hold all three classes of land singly or jointly with a spouse by purchase, gift, or inheritance. While a husband might use the land during the wife’s life, he could not control its distribution following her death or divorce. Ownership passed according to the woman’s will to whomever she wished. Specifically, primogeniture, the estate passing to the oldest son, was not required. Control over land ownership and inheritance gave women financial self-determination comparable to men’s.

Anglo-Saxon women had significant control over whom they married and meaningful control whether to marry at all. There were strongly encouraged marriages for political reasons, “peaceweavers”, but these were rarely forced. Marriages brought a morgengifu, (“morning gift”). Rather than being bride price paid to the father, the morning gift “was payment to the woman herself, intended to guarantee her financial security and independence within marriage.”²

Anglo-Saxon women could choose whether to have children, although that often ment living in an abbey or convent. They had a right to limit the number of children, although not having children required returning part of the morgengifu. Women could initiate divorce without social condemnation. In divorce the children were presumed to belong with the mother, and along with them she will take with her half the goods. The father did have a right to make a claim for them. If she died first the children belonged with her family.

There were limited occupations women could hold: cloth making, weaving, embroidery.³ Convents, abbeys, and double houses⁴ offered resident women educational opportunities. some women used that education to teach Christianity on the continent. A number of them received Sainthood.

Politically, Anglo-Saxon women had wide liberty in public affairs. They were considered capable leaders ruling jointly with their husbands or alone after their husband’s death. Like men, women “led warriors into battle, distributed gifts, resolved dispute, granted land, and support the ecclesia.”⁵

Anglo-Saxon custom established the wergild: the value of a person’s life. The value depended on the person’s rank. Men and women of each rank held the same value. Pregnant women held their wergild and half of the father’s wergild. These payment for unjustified death went to the surviving spouse.

In court women were independent: responsible for their acts, and not their husbands’. Women could initiate litigations. In trials both men and women could be “oath givers,” swearing to their innocence, with the right to bringing in men or women to give supporting oaths.

Anglo-Saxon women used contraception and abortion.

These practices were the foundation of the English common law that Ranulf de Glanville’s⁶ placed above the written laws of kings.

In summary:

“Anglo-Saxon women had a High level of self-determination. A significant indicator of this was land ownership to the same extent as men. That women had this ability is a significant indicator of their status in society. ‘[I]t is of the greatest importance that the fair sex should possess high estimation in society; and nothing could more certainly tend to perpetuate this feeling, than the privilege of possessing property in their own right, and at their own disposal.’”

Finally, Doris Stenton cautions:

“The evidence which has survived from Anglo-Saxon England indicates that women were then more nearly the equal companions of their husbands and brothers than at any other period before the modern age. In the higher ranges of society this rough and ready partnership was ended by the Norman Conquest, which introduced into England a military society regulating women to a position honorable but essentially unimportant.”

Next: William the Conqueror

1 While I initially developed this material from multiple sources, finding this article presented it in a vetted form that requires acknowledging it as a primary source for this post. Christine G. Clark, Women’s Rights in Early England, 1995 BYU L. Rev. 207 (1995). Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/lawreview/vol1995/iss1/4

 2 Clark Id at 216

3 Clark’s article focuses on the lives of wealthy and noble women which produced court records to review. There is no reason to assume commoners would have fewer rights, just fewer resources to consider. Ordinary women engaged in work more as needed.

 4 Monastery and nunnery side by side and ruled in Anglo-Saxon Britain by an abbess.

 5 Clark Id at 220

6 Ranulf de Glanville was King John’s (reign 1199-1216) legal tutor who said the existing common law existed above the laws of kings.