Gone Medieval - How The North Turned Christian

Episode Date: August 22, 2023

Christianity's inroads into the pagan north of England began with the marriage of Æthelburh of Kent to King Edwin of Northumbria. A condition of their marriage was Edwin's conversion to Christianity. But most of the things we know about this period come from the Venerable Bede, which may hide much of the reality of the story of Æthelburh and Edwin.In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr. Eleanor Janega tries to get to the truth of how and why Christianity reached the north of England, with Florence H.R. Scott.This episode was produced by Rob Weinberg.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians including Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code MEDIEVAL. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up here > You can take part in our listener survey here. If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here: https://insights.historyhit.com/signup-form Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Eleanor Yonaga and in today's episode we'll be talking about Queen Ethelbur of Kent, the Queen Consort of Northumbria and her role in the Christianization of the North of England in the 7th century. We'll also think about how queens played an integral part in the cultural lives of their subjects and courts. I'm absolutely delighted to be joined by the brilliant Florence H.R. Scott.

They are a historian of early medieval England, currently working on a PhD on Queens and inauguration at the University of Leeds. They're also the author of the delightful substack Ethel Giff Who, which provides biographies of early medieval English women, and which I encourage you all to check out. But today, we've captured them to talk to us all about Ethelberg. I am so pleased to see you, Maid. Thank you for having me. Let's be honest. Not everyone gets to know a lot about the early English queen, so I'm going to start you off in the easiest possible way, which is to start myself off in the easiest way. Who is Ethel Burr? Okay, so Appleboro is basically an early English queen of Northumbria, and she was

originally from Kent. So she was born in the early 7th century in Kent, and she's the daughter of Queen Bertha and King Applebert. And I need to establish right now that the king is Applebert, and she is Apple Burr. And yes, these names get very confusing, and even I completely stumble over them half the time. I feel like when we have these English names, there's just only so many sounds to go around, apparently. Yeah, it must have been confusing when they were being shouted for dinner or whatever. So I think some really important context that I'm going to have to start with is that this was a period in which Christianity was just beginning to take hold in England. So we're really lucky to have a historical source that outlines this process, which is the famous Bede's ecclesiastical

history written by an 8th century monk. And there had been Christianity in Britain. during the Roman Empire, but it's not really known how much this survived the collapse of the Roman Empire. And as well, it was primarily a new class of non-Christian immigrants from Central Europe, so groups that Bede calls Saxon Angles and Jews, who were the ruling class at this point? Evel Bear is born into this context of this non-Christian ruling class as a Christian. So her mother was a Christian, her mother, Bertha, she had emigrated from Frankie across the channel to marry King Applebert, who at that point was not yet a Christian. And he had eventually converted to his wife's religion of Christianity. So it's this new religion, this new context into which Appleby was born.

So in around 625, when she must have been relatively young still, her brother Yadbald, who was now the new king of Kent, brokered a marriage alliance between the kingdom of Kent and Northumbria, which is a kingdom, as the name suggests, north of the river Humber. And it was a Greek, she would marry King Edwin of Northumbria, and a condition of this marriage was that Edwin, who was not yet a Christian, like her father when he married her mother, would allow her to practice her Christianity, that she would bring a bishop with her, who was a missionary, so somebody who was looking to convert people, and he also agreed to be open-minded to converting himself as well. This is really interesting, because we have a line here then, don't we, where her mother has this

process of Christianising Kent, and then she goes on to Christianise, Northumbria. So it seems here women are playing this really specific role in proselytized in Christianity, if even through marriage. Yeah, definitely. And I think that there is an extent to which the role granted to these women, at least how we read the narrative in Bede, is almost a kind of domestic one. It's not overtly political. So a lot of the churchmen at this time were concerned with how women must act to influence their husbands. However, the stakes are still really high in these marital negotiations and obviously the religious fate of the king and his subjects hang in the balance of these domestic conversations. And I think that marriage to Christians exposed these

kings to the new religion. You might argue that they would already be receptive to Christianity if they knew people who were Christian, if their wives were Christian. And even if you think about the context of Edwin, he had spent some time in his early life at a Christian court. So he would have understood Christianity, he would have experienced it. And then that leads me to think that he would have already been quite receptive to the idea of having a Christian wife and possibly being converted himself when this marriage alliance took place. So it's not like this is Christianity completely out of the blue. No one in Northumbria has ever seen it before or doesn't understand what it is. What we've got to really understand about when we talk about these kingdoms is that there was a lot of

travel between these kingdoms. England is a very travelable place. And something that's really interesting about the kingdoms that were developing at this time is that they were generally gravitated towards the East Coast. And the reason for that is that it's really travelable by ship. We looked at the ships that we knew people were going around in at this time. You could look at, for example, the Sutton Who ship, which is this famous ship burial from this same period. And Models have been generated from that ship that suggests that it would have taken about two days to travel from Canterbury to York. So this is a really travelable route. And they would have been connected.

They would have been making alliances, such as the marriage alliance between Appleby and Edwin was a marriage alliance. So it wasn't necessarily that Christianity had just hit Kent and no one knew anything about it. This is something that really strikes me about this marriage in general and this setup, because we know. that we've got a Kentish princess and she's going up to Northumbria and everyone seems to be completely fine with that. Something that makes real sense, right? So we've got this really good connection there. But it's not just a princess on her own that goes up. We also have this Bishop Paulinus who is Roman. Am I right? Yeah. So Paulinus is originally from Rome. He's a Roman monk and we think he's probably Italian by birth and he's been sent by the Pope to essentially

convert the English to Christianity. and he's the man who Bede ultimately ascribes as responsible for the conversion. So obviously we're here today to talk about how queens have a hand in conversion and how they influence it. But Bede likes to emphasise other aspects. He's never one to really give women they're due to the extent that you'd hope. So he basically, he inserts this story into the narrative, which is this moment of conversion when Edwin decides that he's going to be Christian. and essentially it's this spiritual realisation that's brought on by Paulinus.

So Paulinus reminds Edwin of this dream that he had some years before. All the power would come to him when somebody put their right hand on his head. And then Paulinus lays his right hand on Edward's head, and Edwin understands that there was this prophecy and that this dream is prophetic, and he converts. And so Bede really wants to set us up to think that there was this singular moment of spiritual conversion, and therefore he may be, be underplaying other aspects. He may be underplaying the role that, for example, Apple Burr might have

had in the domestic sphere influencing Edwin, his earlier experiences with Christianity. It's all due to this Roman monk Paulinus. And I think that is all about Beade's own allegiances, being also a Roman monk. So what Beed says about that is this. The occasion of Northumbria's reception of the faith was the alliance by marriage of their king with the kings of Kent, for he had taken to wife Ethelberg, daughter to King Ethelbert. When he first sent ambassadors to ask her in marriage of her brother Aibald, who then reigned in Kent, he received the answer that it is not lawful to give a Christian maiden in marriage to a pagan husband, lest the faith and the mysteries of the heavenly king should be profaned by her union,

with a king that was altogether a stranger to the worship of the true God. This answer being brought to Edwin by his messengers, he promised that he would in no manner act in opposition to the Christian faith which the maiden professed, but would give leave to her and all that went with her, men and women, bishops and clergy, to follow their faith and worship after the custom of the Christians. Nor did he refuse to accept that religion himself, if, being examined by wise men, It should be found more holy and more worthy of God. So, the maiden was promised and sent to Edwin,

and in accordance with the agreement, Paulinus, a man beloved of God, was ordained bishop to go with her. And by daily exhortations and celebrating the heavenly mysteries to confirm her and her company, lest they should be corrupted by intercourse with the pagans. And so came to King Edwin with the aforesaid maiden as an attendant on their union in the flesh. But Paulinus's mind was wholly bent upon calling the nation to which he was sent to the knowledge of truth, according to the words of the apostle, to espouse her to the one true husband that he might present her as a chaste virgin to Christ. Yeah, so I find that pretty interesting and telling in a lot of ways, right?

Because when we're doing the work of history, there are all these really interesting and important women who are going about their daily lives. But the trouble is, if you're a woman and you manage to convert your husband and the kingdom of Northumbria, a couple hundred years later, some monk comes in and just completely writes you out of that story. Because we're dependent on a source. It's a great source. Thanks Beed for writing it down at all. I'm not trying to say that as bad. But fundamentally, it happens a few hundred years later and he's got an axe to grind.

Yeah, so the problem with using Beed as a source is that most of the things we know about in this period come from him. and yet he is also responsible for obscuring the facts. He giveth and he taketh away. We can read between the lines of what Beed says, and we can figure, like I just have done, we can figure that there must have been a greater role for Apple Bear in this process. Beed gives us all the ingredients to draw our own conclusions about the kind of role that Apple Bear might have had there.

And yet, Beade has his own agenda, And historians for decades now have been debating whether or not Bede is somebody who has restored these women to history and recorded their names and we know about them and we can extrapolate, or whether his narrative is actually obscuring these women and that we need to dig deeper and think about what Bede isn't telling us. So when you have this new queen, she comes up from Kent to Northumbria, and she says, here I am, and I'm going to be also converting everyone I can. who wants to be Christian. Is this seen as something unusual? I would say it's certainly remarkable, but what kind of reception could we see from ordinary Northumbrians around something like this? I think that the source material doesn't really give us the right information to answer that question, but I think that in itself is really important to talk about. I think that conversion was in itself

instigated by aristocratic and royal individuals because they were the ones who could fund monasteries, they were the ones who could establish the church in its infrastructure, fund writing, and basically fund the church's influence. So the church is interested in converting kings. And there may have been a knock-on effect that meant that the king's subjects then had to convert, and this may well have been an oppressive or even violent process. And I would like to emphasize in which the Christian queens who acted as converters were complicit, but we just don't know because our sources are ultimately trying to paint this conversion to Christianity is a benevolent process.

This may well hide the reality of Christian conversion. I find that quite interesting because I think a lot of what we do here about Christian conversion is this, oh, it's a joyous process, whether we're talking about a Clovis, over with the Franks converting also as a result of his wife. Let's be honest. And, oh, wonderful, he's come to Jesus. And it's the same thing here when Bede is writing about this process. Oh, Paulinus is baptizing people day and night.

And isn't it wonderful? And they're all flocking to add Gephrin to be converted. And there's two ways of reading that, right? There's one, which is, yeah, I'm really excited to get in as a part of this new and fancy religion, right? Like, it's the religion of kings. It's the religion of Romans. It's the religion of all these really well-to-ealthy religion.

do people. Or it could be, yeah, yeah, we've rounded up every single subject we could get our hands on in the local area and said, all right, come on, you're getting baptized. And all we know is what a monk has to say about that. And it could be a mix of both. There might be some people who are really excited to be very highfalutin and enjoy a conversion. Because think about this, it does say a lot about you as a kingdom, right? As Northumbrians, when you have a bishop all the way from Rome who's come up here to say get with a new religion, right? This is a really kind of political act in a particular way. Of course, the religious aspect is there, but what does it mean to be able to say you are connected to Rome at this point in time? I think that's a really

interesting idea. I think that some important context here about how these kingdoms were set up is that basically before 600 AD we don't have much information about what was happening in Britain and how kingship operated. But we do know that in the early 7th century, English society was changing really rapidly. And there was this emergence of kingship over really large areas, much larger than had been before. And so there were more stable dynasties. And that meant that these royal families were accumulating wealth massively. Because if you think that you have basically an expansionist policy where you're trying to get more land and more land, what that means is more resources and more slaves because we have to keep reminding ourselves that in this period, one of the main parts of the

economy was trading in slaves. And so if you have a bigger amount of land, you have more people to enslave, you have more resources like leather, wool and cloth, and therefore you have more things like overseas trade, you have more things to exchange. If you think about the Sutton Who burial, you think about all this wealth that was being amassed by these kings in this period, jewels from all over the world, gold, things that were particularly Mediterranean in style, Byzantine in style, Italian in style. And so you don't just get this conversion to Christianity. It's almost an expression of power that looks back to a Roman past. And that's quite interesting because ultimately that's what it means to be really powerful over a large swath. of land is that one has Roman goods. Oh, look, this is from the Eastern Roman Empire. I have

connections all the way to Constantinople. And I am similarly Christian and very fancy. I have Roman bishops that are coming up. And this for me is a particularly interesting thing about Appleburg because she is also in really direct contact with Rome, right? Like we know that there's correspondence that's happening directly between her and the Pope. Is that correct? Yeah, definitely. So But Bede basically provides the full text of letters that Pope Boniface sent to both King Edwin and to Queen Applebur. And in these letters, first of all, he urges Edwin to become a Christian ruler like his brother-in-law and give up all the idolatrous worship.

And he sends him some gifts, I think, gold robes and things like that, the kind of things that you'd use to seduce a king. And he also writes to Appleburr, and he's basically appealing to her own fortunes. He creates this idea that it's a personal matter. So he talks about their twain shall be one flesh. If you're married to someone who isn't Christian, and yet he is your flesh, then you have this kind of element that's defiling you.

And this is a matter of error between husband and wife. And he also quotes Paul's first letter to Corinthians 714. The unbelieving husband is sanctified by the believing wife. So you have these two competing ideas of the believing wife sanctifying the husband and yet the unbelieving husband defiling the wife. And it's very compelling stuff, and you can imagine being a Christian at this point, reading this letter and thinking,

oh God, am I being defiled merely by being married to this person, especially because Avalborough may have not had any decision-making process when it came to her marriage to Edwin. She may well have been very young when this took place. It may well have been entirely arranged for her, and so you have to think about the mental process, of receiving this letter and thinking, oh God, I have to make sure that my husband converts because this is defiling me. I think that this is such an incredible note on what it's like to be a woman

and a powerful woman in the medieval period, right? Because on the one hand, you've got this marriage, which, I mean, what Bede says about it is that it's largely meted out by her brother, and she doesn't have much say about it, which is fairly standard practice for Royals, nothing too odd there. On the one hand, it's your job, your secular job, is go and marry this guy, lots of kids and hopefully cross your fingers he will become Christian as well. And then at the same time the Pope is telling you if you don't pull this off, actually you're gross and this is a stain on you personally and your own fate. And the stress of that is really quite evidence of me. Being pulled in these opposite directions where you don't really have a lot of say in your personal

life but you're meant to at the same time. Very kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't. Absolutely. And I think it's worth contrasting these two letters about what's been said to Edwin is you have to convert for your people. And this is a kind of political acknowledgement that this is going to be a political process, whereas for the Queen it's more you have to convert for yourself. You have to do your wifely duty. And it's a very personal role that she's been put in. And I see this constantly with the expectations that are put on queens, especially in the early medieval period, this idea of influencing things from the marriage bed, from the domestics, that's where your influence lies. And whether that is the case or not, that is an idea that churchmen particularly tend to really focus on.

And you have biblical figures who have this same kind of influence. People like Esther and Judith, who influence things by going into the bedroom of the person who they're trying to influence, or in the case of Judith, the head. And they're saving their people by being sexual companions. It's not overtly stated in those terms, but that's almost what's being implied here. And it's really interesting that the full quote there in Paul's first letter to Corinthians is not just the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the believing wife.

It also goes on to say, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the believing husband, and yet that's very rarely repeated or even seems relevant. This is all the weight is being put specifically on the wife here. And also, this is a really interesting thing. this, the emphasis on how you can sort of sexually convert one's husband is really interesting within a Christian context, right? Because we know that women are really seen in this period as being seductresses. Within the Christian cosmology, women are responsible for sexual sin, but here we're supposed to understand that also, oh, but you can turn that around for good.

You don't have to just be a no-good hussy. Again, it's this very confusing kind of moral tightrope to be walking. Or it's like, why don't you do something good with your sexual powers for once and use that in this particular way? Yeah, definitely. And I think that some really interesting work has been done on this by the historian Maury McCarren, where she discusses how Bede himself is having this same kind of moral dilemma, because when he's writing about this, he is dealing with the fact that there is

a kind of moral objection to a Christian woman marrying a non-Christian man. And yet Bede is describing the conversion narrative. And there are four of these narratives where Christian women marry non-Christian men in Bede. And he's very concerned with it. But he's also walking this moral tightrope where he's trying to express this idea that converting is good, whilst also dealing with the fact that he is uneasy with the idea that a Christian woman would be defiled by a non-Christian man like that. I'm Professor Susanna Lipskin. And on not just the Tudors from History Hit, my guests and I, Ron, Ron,

through the full gamut of human emotion and experience. From the heartbreak of the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth, not being able to marry, arguably the only man in the world she ever really wanted to marry, may have, for that reason, not married anyone else. To a prenatal battle of the sexes. A male and a female seed meet in the womb at conception, and whichever one is stronger determines the sex of the unborn child.

From Lady Jane Gray facing her executioner. You can't help but face it. just the utmost sympathy for this young girl. To why the laughing cavalier is, well, laughing. He strikes me as someone who goes off on a sort of swaggering booze up. Subscribe now to not just the tutors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. I find that this is such an interesting topic because you have this real kingly and queenly relationship that's being mediated through Roman bishops and then written about hundreds of years later

by another guy completely who doesn't know about it. And I think that one of the things that this really serves to remind us about is that whilst we have a tendency to think, oh, wow, the medieval world is really big. Things are very far apart. It takes a long time to travel. This whole story is a real proof of the connectivity, I think, of the world at the time. Even in Northumbria, you can have Roman bishops. Even in Northumbria, you can have the Pope concerned about these small kingdoms

that, you know, what does Northumbria produce? They're a cattle state. They have a lot of leather. I know that. And these sorts of things. And the Pope is, yeah, we've got to get up there. That's an interesting thing to me. So we have on display here the real connectivity.

But then at the same time, it's interesting how little we know about the regular people involved, right? All we really have is this royal story and this story about, you know, what is acceptable for queens to do in Beed's opinion. But what this means for the regular old people on the ground doing all the fun. farming. We don't really know, do we? No, and it's all got to be extrapolated from the source material. If you're reading Beed and expecting to hear him talk about anyone other than Kings, Royals, bishops, and important figures, you're going to be at a loss.

He's not setting out to do that. I wish that I could know more about what this meant for the local cattle herders, but I'm afraid we're just going to have to live without knowing this forever. But what we do know a little bit about Appleberg and what happens with her afterwards because her husband dies, right? And then she goes and does the most perfect Christian queen thing possible, which is she establishes a nunnery, maybe, right? Yeah, perhaps.

There is a source that tells us that she establishes a nunnery. And this sounds on the surface quite feasible. I don't want to say that this is an unfeasible thing for a woman to do. In this period, a little bit later, women were doing this constantly. Queens were constantly retiring and then setting up, monasteries. And yet, the dating on this and the spuriousness of the sores suggest that perhaps, if this was the case, this would be the first established royal monastery. And so she would have established the first monastery in England. And it's not necessarily that it's completely untrue.

I think that the important thing to talk about here, she could have been confused with another Queen Appleberry is one suggestion, because there are two and everyone's got the same name. But I think What I really want to stress here is that this isn't not the case because it would be impossible for a woman to go off and do something like that. And I think that monasteries are really important centres of production. They're basically the closest thing in this period that you would have to towns. Towns didn't really exist. Monastries in the 7th century, these early monasteries that cropped up just after conversion, they were funded by royal money, they were trade posts, they minted their own coins. there are tales of Abbas as having their own ships.

Like a CEO might have a chopper. It's like that. They would have their local ship docked. And this would attract secular communities. And this would be a political and administrative role. And these houses were often double monasteries, meaning that they had monks and nuns. And there are countless examples of royal women going off

and establishing these places and becoming these administrative political figures. in the century after Applebur is claimed to have set up the monastery at Liminch. So it's not necessarily untrue because it's unfeasible. It's just that it's a little bit early for this to have already become established. And it may be somebody retrospectively thinking that's something that a royal woman would have done and attributing this to her. Does it matter whether it's real that she established an unnery or is the idea that a queen has this kind of power and is setting something up like, this good enough for us? I think that the reason why this was attributed to her is because it's entirely feasible. It's because this is something that royal women were doing. And you have figures

like St. Hilda of Whitby, who was a royal woman herself, who in widowhood set up Whitby and ran it as an administrative hub. And again, you know, what we're doing here is we're extrapolating from what Bede tells us, because Bede wants to tell us all about how holy and pious and saintly these women were, and yet he will add in little details like she trained five bishops. Five people came to her monastery who became bishops afterwards. And then you start to think what has to be in place for people to leave witty and become bishops. It's got to be a centre of learning. It's got to be a centre of culture. This is something that is being overseen by a woman. And so we have to, again, extrapolate from Bede and think, obviously, this is somebody who is managing something massive and

important and it's completely realistic that women were doing that in this period. And actually, I think Christianity really did bring opportunities for women to do things like that in a way that in the later medieval period, that's not really the case. I think that's quite interesting too as because if we think about Bede as, let's say slightly women hostile, I think that would be fair. And if even Bid is saying, this is something that women can do, this is something which is in the realm of possibility for your average woman to have a look at, I think that really tells us a lot because it really shows that this is something that he expects or wants women to do at the very least. So even one of the more hostile guys in the world is saying, yeah, this is a thing that queens do.

Queens establish nunneries. Queens train bishops. Queens get Christianity kind of moving out in the world. So again, it's this sort of balancing act that Beat is doing. On the one hand, he's ladies, please make out with your husband and turn him into a Christian. And then on the other, oh, you could train a few bishops here and there. You know, who hasn't, right? Absolutely.

I think Bede has ideas about what women should be doing. And he's not hostile to the women who are doing things that he thinks they should be doing. And he's very interested in painting really flattering portraits of these important abbesses. But what he's not going to tell you about is what they were doing politically, administratively. He's going to tell you that they were praying a lot and that there were all these miracles that happened after their deaths because they were amazing and they were saintly. and he's not particularly interested in extrapolating on these women's political roles. And I would assume that is because he's fundamentally uncomfortable with the political roles that these women must have had, but they must have had them.

Another thing about establishing a nunnery or a monastery, if you do, as a royal woman, is this is also kind of something you might do for yourself, isn't it? Like a really popular form of retirement for very powerful and wealthy women is to go to a nunnery when, I don't know, your husband dies and your children are grown, right? I would say it's almost the opposite of retirement. Establishing a nunnery is very different from joining a nunnery. We might have this idea of the cloistered nun having her quiet prayer time,

but what is being claimed here is that she built a monastery. She had it built. She got the money. She secured the funds. She had it built. She ran it, which is probably one of the most involved things people could have done at this point. And yes, there would be women coming and retiring in these places.

as royal women or very wealthy women would come and retire. But what is being claimed is that she built it, she made it, she ran it, which I think is slightly different. That's interesting. It's a real girl boss vibes, right? So it's kind of, she goes, she graduates from being, beads idealized, meek Christian, sister and wife and mother, and then transforms after her marriage into the real kind of structured woman who is

creating something and making a big stand. So it's almost, oh yeah, ladies, you're allowed to do political things in the name of Christianity in a really big way if your husband's day. Yeah. So interestingly, Bid does not mention her founding this monastery. This is in other sources. And you have to ask, is it because it's not true or is it because B left it out? But Bid does definitely talk a lot about women founding monasteries. He loves talking about women founding monasteries. In fact, he will completely gloss over the lives of women before the point that they established monasteries. So going back to the example of St. Hild, we are told that she had these 33 years in the secular life, and then these 33 years as an abbess.

And he tells us nothing about her secular life. We have to assume she was possibly married. Who knows? He's not interested. Question mark. He is interested in women at the point at which they become saintly pirate. figures that he compares. I think that it's interesting in the case of otherberg then because we have a fair amount on her in comparison with other women at this age.

So it's showing us that if you're Christian early enough, he's, oh yeah, let's get that down. She was born Christian because her mom was really good, yes. So get that down on paper. You can catch a glimpse of her as a person through Beads' hostility. And I think that is useful and important because we are a lot. allowed to see a little bit more of women in a secular role, provided they already have a kind of Christian sheen to them, I suppose. So it's like when are women presented to us versus not

in these particular pieces of writing? Yeah, definitely. I think one really interesting example of a non-Christian woman who he discusses. So he has these four conversion narratives where Christian women marry non-Christian men. There's one conversion narrative he discusses where a non-Christian woman marries a Christian man. So basically Radwald has converted to Christianity and this is the king who we associate with Sutton who was probably buried in the Sutton Who mound, right? Now there's a story in Bede of his wife who didn't bother to convert, tempting him back into worshipping idols. And it's really interesting that out of all the five narratives in Bede of people being converted, it's always the women who win out. No matter which direction it is, it's always the

women who are influencing and who are able to bring their husband either to the good side or the dark side from Beed's point of view. See, that's very interesting because I think one of the things, you know, the term that I'm not even sure I like it, but it comes up all the time, I think, when you discuss queenship, which is soft power. So these forms of soft power, which are cultural or social ways of changing people. And what Beid, I guess, is saying is he's ultimately religion is up to women. And I would argue that religion is not soft power.

Religion is just power. It's power with a capital P. It's as powerful as you can get in the medieval period. So I think that really troubles our understanding of women as the guardians, as soft little guardians of cultural things that happen in the marriage bet. When Bede is ultimately, the women are just going to get their way. So I hope you married a Christian, right? Because if you marry a pagan, then you're in trouble.

I think something that's really interesting about the way Bede discusses women and Christianity is that none of these conversion narratives deal with women converting to Christianity. He is not interested at all in the process of deciding to convert to Christianity of women's own religious beliefs, of the way that their piety is expressed in these narratives. He is only interested in how they influence the decisions and ideas of kings. And I think that's interesting. It really says everything. I suppose I'm so glad that we are in a period of.

where we're finally attempting to bring these women to life because ultimately this is a really interesting story, right? It's interesting for a woman to be the daughter of an immigrant queen who's brought a new religion to Kent, to then get married into North England, be surrounded by Romans and in contact with them, to go up to north, change everybody's religion up there, and then, I don't know, maybe or maybe not,

founding a nunnery. Let's just say that. that she did for fun. But this is an incredibly fascinating woman. And Bede is I don't care about her. Ultimately, I don't particularly care about this. She's a deus ex machina to explain how it is that the North becomes Christian.

And even then, he puts all of this on the shoulders of Paulinus, puts it all on the shoulders of the bishop and not the woman who brings the bishop along. You couldn't just send the bishop up to Northumbria and say, there you go, get cracking, make me some Christians. The woman is necessary in this story, but ultimately, early medieval people are not particularly interested in telling that story. Absolutely. And again, you can extrapolate from what

is saying between the lines. And we can read this narrative and think she was probably a really important person. She probably had a lot of influence. If we want to discuss what her personal Christianity would have looked like, we can think about how it was stipulated that she should be able to practice her religion in the marriage alliance. And that suggests that she was actively partaking in rights and rituals of the Christian church. The fact that she had Bishop Paulinus come along with her to administer these rights, creates the impression that it was very important to her to be constantly practicing her religion. And yet this isn't really something that's emphasized this is something that we're having to dig around for. What was her own experiences of

being a Christian? Not really sure. The only facts we get about that are when they pertain to the matters of kings, essentially. It's this old thing of looking at everyone around the woman in order to get some idea of her. It's the absence of any kind of characterization that we have to look into to get some clues. Yeah, definitely. And I think that there are other things that Bede does this with. And we've already discussed how he does not give us an idea

of how the normal person in a kingdom would have been affected by conversion, the cowherd or whoever. And also, one thing that Bede really neglects to discuss in this narrative, which I think is a really important thing to bring up, is that there were two versions of Christianity that were present in early 7th century, Northumbria. There was the Roman kind that had been brought by Paulinus and brought by Applebert. And then there was also an Irish Christianity in the early 7th century monks from Iona,

setting up on Lindisfarne. This is also another influence of Christianity that would have definitely had an effect on how people converted, how quickly they converted. We know that there was a prevalence of this Irish Christianity. in Northumbria later because they have a synod, the Synod of Whitby, later on, to decide which form they're going to follow, because it's so prevalent. And you actually get this scenario where the king and the queen of Northumbria both are practicing different forms of religion. The king is practicing the Roman religion. The queen is practicing the Irish form, and they both end up celebrating Easter on different

days. So while one of them still fasting, the other one's doing the feast. So they have this synod to sort this out and be it's quite quiet on how much this I own in Christianity was also a factor in the conversion of the kingdom. That's quite interesting because we're presented with this idea that this is a Roman Christianity that's coming up, that Ethelbur is 100% down with her Romanness, her Roman bishop, her Roman connections to spread particularly that. And yeah, what about Lindisfarne? The place in Northumbria that everyone talks about, I think more often, than any other place when we want to discuss the early medieval period. It's interesting these gaps.

Of course, I think a Kentish princess would probably be inclined to be on the kind of Roman end of things. So again, we may have legions of really interesting Irish Christian women doing really cool work and we're never going to get to hear about it just because Bede's got a team, doesn't he? I suppose that's what we could say about Bede. Bede is ultimately chatting the triumph of Roman Christianity because, yeah, that is his team. That's what he's advocating for. That's what he sits down to write. And in a way, we can't fault him for sitting down to write his particular story from his

particular point of view. I think that it's quite frustrating that we don't have that many other points of view. He's such a dominating force in the source material of early medieval Northumbria that it's very hard to see other perspectives sometimes. But you have to keep thinking about what the other perspectives might be, I think. I think that's a really good point. also I think that one of the things here that's ultimately quite interesting is it does show the foreignness of Kent at the time. Kent can be in a completely different sphere of influence than Northumbria at the time.

And now we tend to say, oh, it's all England, isn't it? It's all like one shared history. But you can have these cultural differentiations, even with a shared religion at the time, because they are different kingdoms. These are different places. Yeah. I would emphasize the way that these places could be quite easily, traveled around and would have alliances with each other, but at the same time, this is not

anywhere near a unified England. And you have to constantly keep that in mind when you're talking about people do discuss early medieval England. And this does not mean that there was one kingdom called England and there were different people ruling up here. These were different kingdoms under different realms of power. I love this about Ethelboro. She's really straddling these two worlds. Like, what does it mean to be a southern princess versus a northern queen? And what does it mean to be someone who's Christianising versus someone who is always working within a Christian context. Yeah, and also I think it's really interesting to note that in a way you could see somebody accepting the religion of another kingdom being a kind of political subjugation.

So Kent's a really important influential kingdom at this point. And Edwin has united the two separate kingdoms in Northumbry. You've got Daera to the south, which is basically modern Yorkshire and Benissia to the North. which incorporates a bit of Southern Scotland and Northern England. And he has basically united them, and he's trying desperately to hold on to power. And eventually he does get killed in battle. His dynasty is deposed.

His wife and Paulinus have to flee back to Kent because his grasp on power is fairly weak. And if you think about this context, he wants powerful allies. He wants Kent to be his ally. And Kent is possibly saying, and Bede would never tell us this, because Bede wants us to think that Edwin had this spiritual transformation that Paul Inus

initiated in him, but what this might be is a political negotiation. You convert to our religion and we'll be your friend. Yeah, and here's what you get in return for it. It's and Kentish Queen. Like, we are clearly very fancy up here in Northumbria because we get these foreign princesses who have fancy things like bishops. And look at this, here's my gold robe from Rome. You can't say that it doesn't work. Yeah, definitely. One thing I didn't really, mention as well that's quite funny is that I think the paper letter to Appleby came with a comb. So the king got a rub and a other got a toiletry kit, basically. Love that for him. Love it.

See, there you go. Soft power happens everywhere and sometimes it can be as simple as just saying, like, why don't you smarten yourself up a bit? Exactly, yeah. It's the kind of way that these biblical women would anoint themselves before going into the royal bed chamber. It's like that. It's smarten yourself up and go persuade the king to do something. It's really prevalent. Yeah. I think that we're going to have to leave it there. If I go into any more, we're going to be here for another 45 minutes.

Florence, thank you so much. That was great. Thank you. Thanks for listening, and thank you so much to Florence for joining me. This has been Gone Medieval by History Hit. And if you've liked what you heard, don't forget to rate review, follow the podcast and tell your friends about it. If you're looking for more medieval goodness in your life, you can subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter by following the link in the show notes below. If you fancy suggesting an episode, you can drop us an email at gone medieval at historyhit.com.

Otherwise, I'll be back again next Tuesday for another episode, and my co-host, Matt Lewis, will be back on Friday. Until next time.