Gone Medieval - Judith, England’s First Crowned Queen

Episode Date: June 7, 2022

When HM The Queen was crowned in 1953, her Coronation ceremony contained some subtle nods to another Queen who made history 1100 years earlier. Princess Judith of Flanders was the first woman to be crowned as Queen among the West Saxons. But her two royal marriages were not without controversy.In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr. Cat Jarman finds out more about Queen Judith from medieval historian Florence Scott.The Senior Producer on this episode was Elena Guthrie. The Producer was Rob Weinberg. It was edited and mixed by Thomas Ntinas.For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Mondays newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store.Join the History Hit Book Club in time for the June and July read of Charles Spencer's, The White Ship. Become part of a community of readers who are passionate about history and its thrilling lessons. Members read a new book every 2 months, and get a £5 Amazon voucher towards the cost of the book, as well as exclusive access to an online Q&A between History Hit presenters and the author in the second month."  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. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. This year, Queen Elizabeth II reached a milestone no other queen has reached before her when she became the third longest ruling monarch in all of world history, having reigned for over 70 years. But did you know that her coronation ceremony, in 1953 contained some subtle nods to another queen who made history 1100 years earlier.

In the liturgy for Queen Elizabeth's coronation, just after the crown was placed on her head, the archbishop spoke the words, God crown you with a crown of glory and righteousness. And those exact words were said for the first time at the crowning of Judith of Wessex in 856, at exactly the same point in the ceremony, but at that time in Latin. The phrase was composed specifically for Judith by Archbishop Hinkmar because she was the very first woman to be crowned as queen among the West Saxons. Previously, the wife of the king had a remarkably low status.

So why Judas? Why then? And what has it got to do with today's royals? To get answers to all of those questions, I've invited the brilliant medieval historian Florence Scott to join me today. Welcome Florence. Florence writes the popular newsletter and blog Alf Gifu, which contains biographies of early medieval women. Florence is also doing a PhD on early medieval queenship in England, so just the right sort of person to talk to about this. So this is your research then is about early medieval queenship, but also on coronation.

ceremonies, is that right? Yeah, so my research is basically on the development of a kind of Christian version of queenship. So queens have existed for a long time. The concept of a queen, as in a king's wife, not necessarily a queen who reigns in her own right, although there are a few of those. But I'm basically charting the emergence of a kind of ceremonial religious conception of queenship. and that kind of revolves around this coronation ceremony. Excellent. So let's go on to Judith specifically then and her story. So first of all, can you just give her some very basic background to her time and her place?

So she's based in Wessex. Where is that? And who's the king? And what's the sort of political situation at the time? Yeah, so Judith is quite unusual in terms of the queens that I look at in that she wasn't actually born in England. She was a Frankish princess. She was the daughter of Charles the Bold, who was the king of West Francia. And she marries the king of Wessex, which is obviously one of several kingdoms that existed in England at this time.

This is before England was a unified country. So when I use the word English, it's quite in a very general sense. And she marries this West Saxon king at 12 years old and then moves to England upon her marriage. And then she will go. on to marry another West Saxon king. But we should probably get onto that a bit later. Yeah. Yeah. So we'll start with this. So her king, the king in Wessex, is this isn't his first marriage. He's already quite well established. And in fact, he becomes the father, all he is, already, the father of several other future kings, isn't he? Yes. So when they get married,

he actually has four grown sons already. And he was married to a woman called Osbour. And we assume that his first wife had passed away by this point. But that's not necessarily a guarantee with kings in this period. There are often kings who will have a second marriage and the first wife is around somewhere, maybe in a nunnery, maybe not. But we do assume that his first wife has passed away at this point. But he does have two adult sons who are kind of vying for the kingship, kind of a little bit threatening to him.

And Judith is actually younger than a lot of. of his children. He's about 50 years old when they marry, and as I said, she's 12. So there's a huge kind of disparity in age and power there. I should probably mention also to our listeners that the king we were talking about is Ethel Wolf and his most famous son is Alfred the Great. So we are talking about people of quite some notoriety, I suppose, in later history. But if we go into Judith then, what's the first we hear of her? It's from a record from Frankeye, isn't it, that she first crops up. Yeah, so with a lot of medieval women, early medieval women, the first that we hear of her is when she first kind of encounters a king who she's going to marry is when they get betrothed in

July 8, 56. And Ather Wolf at that point is going on a pilgrimage to Rome. So on the way there, he stays with Charles the Bold at his court and then goes on pilgrimage, visits the Pope, comes back and in the October marries Judith, so fulfills the bedrothal promise. And do we know what his incest? I mean, we've already talked about the fact that he's got these sons and there is a bit of rivalry

back in Wessex. But apart from that, presumably, she's 12, so this isn't a romantic thing going on. This is an alliance, isn't it? Is that the sort of motivation? Yeah, there's a few different ideas as to why this marriage took place. And I think the interesting thing

about it is that we might not ever know why the marriage took place because it was quite a short-lived marriage. So any plans that were put in place when this marriage took place never actually came to fruition. But there is an idea that it may have been some kind of military alliance, possibly, you know, against Viking raids, because that was obviously a big occupation for kings at this time. And another idea which I find a little bit more compelling is the idea that Athel Wolf was feeling a little bit threatened by his sons at this point. He was was in a little bit of a weak position and his marriage was a kind of desperate attempt to gain a little bit more prestige to kind of wield against his sons and possibly produce more airs

if he needs to as well. Yeah, so there might have been quite a lot of pressure on Judith then to fulfil that role as a sort of future mother of kings or of rulers, I suppose. Yeah, definitely, obviously, from Charles the Bold's perspective as well, he's kind of putting forward his daughter to be sent into this quite dangerous situation. And I think probably what Charles the Bold wanted to get out of that was to exert a little bit of influence in Wessex. In this period, Charles the Bold is in a mode of kind of gaining influence in other kingdoms around him. So I think he's playing a long game here and hoping that his grandson will one day be the King of Wessex and that he'll or his successes will have some influence there. So Judith is very much being used as a pawn

between these two kings and obviously being 12 years old, she probably didn't have that much say in her situation at this point. I think later on, she definitely takes things into her own hands later in her life, but at this point, she's quite vulnerable, I think. So that is such an interesting point, isn't it? But then one of the things that's so interesting about the records where we hear about her and when we hear about this marriage is exactly how it's described.

And the fact that the record actually says that in their marriage ceremony, she gets crowned as a queen and that is something unusual. Can you explain a bit more about that particular point? Yeah, so Judas's really key to my research because she's actually the earliest English queen who we can point to and say she had coronation ceremony and not only do we have evidence of that in several sources but we also have the liturgical service so the words that were actually written out at the ceremony that exists in a seventh century. manuscripts. So not only do we know that she was definitely crowned, but we can also almost recreate parts of that ceremony. And that's really, that's quite remarkable, isn't it? And quite

unusual. But, you know, so, so the record actually says this wasn't something that was the practice in Wessex. And I mean, why was that, do you think? Why was the king's wife not a queen? She was just sort of his wife. Yeah. So this is another thing that makes the marriage quite unusual, is that not only were cross-continental marriages quite rare, and not only were Frankish kings letting their daughters get married quite rare, but actually in Wessex, it was not the practice to have queens at this time. And King Alfred's biographer Asa actually, he obviously feels the need to explain this policy

when he's writing Alfred's biography, and he talks about it being, he's not very happy about this. He calls it a detestable custom, and he says that basically, because of a wicked queen in the past, Queen Iadber, and all the wicked deeds she got up to, the people of Wessex don't trust queens, they don't want to raise a woman up into that position. So Judith is obviously a special case, and I think that's probably coming from the fact that she's a Frankish princess, and she has illustrious ancestry. She's Shaliman's great-granddaughter, for example. And obviously, her father would want her to have the right reputation.

when she's going off into another kingdom where it's quite dangerous for her. He'd want her to carry a bit of status with her. So obviously, the circumstances conspired to create this queen who was actually quite unusual in lots of respects. Yeah, and I think that's such a good point, isn't it? It's the fact that you have a ruler here,

who wants to make sure that his daughter is in the best possible place. So it may well have come, I suppose, from him more than from anybody else. I do just have to pick up on this wicked queen of the past that's made situation so bad for everyone else afterwards. Can you tell us a little bit about her story as well? Because that is a quite brilliant one. Yes, it's brilliant.

And I should caveat from the start with that it might not wholly be true. So this is Asa trying to explain why Alfred would have such a regressive policy towards queen. So he talks about this queen in the past, Yadba, who's actually a woman from Mercia, in a different kingdom. She'd married a West Saxon king. And she was said to have poisoned all her enemies. She was quite scheming. And one of these schemes went quite wrong

and she ended up accidentally poisoning her husband, the king, who died. So she fled to Francia, according to Asa. And she went to Charlemagne's court. And there is this really a funny scene where Charlaman says to her that she can choose either him or his son to marry. and she says, well, you're old, I want the son.

And Charlemagne says, ah, if you'd chosen me, you could have married the son. But because you chose my son, you're not getting either of us. And he's quite offended. So he sends her off to be an abbess in a nunnery. And Asa tells us that even then she can't behave herself and she ends up committing debauchery with a man, an English man, apparently. So she flees again and she goes to Pavia

and she dies begging on the streets of Pavia with nothing. So she kind of gets her mummuppance in the end. But it's not unusual for being a very kind of defamatory, exaggerated story about a queen. A lot of the queens that we have evidence for is in these quite insulting anecdotes. And we have to be kind of critical about what's going on behind this story. You know, why is Asa telling us this? Well, he wants to justify Alfred. and why would Alfred want this story to be told?

Well, there's all sorts of politics going on behind it where the king who her father had kind of persecuted Alfred's grandfather. So there's a lot of politics going on behind this story. We shouldn't take it at first value, but it's still quite entertaining. It is a brilliant story. But it does also really point out, doesn't it? There's sort of the situation that these women end up finding themselves because they are, you know, as you're describing Judith,

a bit of a porn earlier on, really, just being created into this alliance between the two kingdoms, and that's very much often the role. And then, of course, their sons might have a claim to the throne. And so there are so many complexities behind there. And, you know, Judith obviously finds herself in all sorts of similar situations, doesn't she in a way? But sort of going back to her then, so they get married, she's crowns.

And we have this ceremony. And this is where we have that link, isn't it? That actual ceremony there we've got to Queen Elizabeth, because part of that was actually reused, I believe, in the coronation ceremony. Is that right? Yeah, so some of this liturgy that was basically compiled for this ceremony was actually composed from scratch by the Archbishop of Rance Hinkmar. So he's kind of composing this coronation prayer for her. Now, a lot of the, interestingly, a lot of the liturgy actually comes from a West Saxon right for crowning kings. So they've adapted a king's right for her, borrowed quite a lot of it just verbatim.

And then he's written this coronation prayer for her. And some of the wording of that actually has survived over time, been adapted and adapted. And the most recently that it was used was in 1953 at the coronation of Elizabeth II. So that's really remarkable, isn't it, the reuse of it? And was that very specifically talking about queens then, as opposed to kings? Is that why it was reused for her? The particular prayer that's used, it's the Coronet de Dominus formula, so it's basically she's being crowned by the Lord, is the phrasing.

I don't think it's gender-specific, I think, and that's what I find with a lot of the liturgy that I look at is actually that they're quite happy to adapt, you know, liturgy for kings and put it in the queen's thing and vice versa. They're not very strict about whether they're crowning a king or a queen, and, you know, I'm not an expert in the modern. liturgical ceremonies of the Church of England, but the formula that was used was basically just describing the process of actually the Lord crowning. So it's that kind of divine

intervention in the ceremony that it's describing that they're appealing to. Fantastic. Throughout June on not just the Tudors, we're honouring Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee by focusing on queenship in the 16th and 17th centuries. I'm Professor Sazan. Lipscomb and all this month with my guests, I'll be exploring the coronations of Tudor queens, queens in Shakespeare, Queens Regnant and Queen's Consort. Then there's the Queen who ruled over the Spanish Netherlands and the female Swedish king. You heard that right. So for a month of all things, magisterial and monarchical, look no further than not just the Tudors,

wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so going back then, so Judith is 12 years old and she then goes, over to Wessex and she becomes the queen. But you've already hinted at this study. It wasn't exactly very long-lasting. What happens to her when she arrives in England? Well, we don't know much detail, but what we do know is that her marriage didn't last very long because her husband actually died. And what happens then is that, so she's at this point probably about 14, maybe 15, on her own probably in this kingdom and what happens is her stepson who we should establish is a lot older than her the son who has kind of been vying with Applewulf

for power in Wessex decides that he now wants to marry her and they get married and the appeal of that situation is probably that she is this crowned queen she's probably carrying this status of queenship that has there's no other woman who carries this stint. She has been told that the Lord has crowned her. So she has this sacred queenship that she's bringing with her and that she will therefore bestow into any heirs that she has. And her stepson obviously decides that's what he wants for his wife. And it's quite a controversial move. It's not acceptable at this point to marry your stepmother, even if she is much younger than you. And Assa has a lot to say about this. He talks about it,

and not even a practice that the pagans would do. You know, he's very disgusted by this. Yeah. Yeah, but I suppose it is his decision. So they get married, but that also doesn't last very long, does it? No, so again, the marriage only lasts about two years, and during both these marriages, Judith remains without children, as far as we know from the sources,

and that she doesn't have any children. and she ends up being kind of 17 and twice widowed and, you know, ends up going back to her father. Still a very young. Still a very young woman. She ends up going back to her father's court. Yeah. And because, yeah, it's not really a reason for her to stay.

Presumably she won't have anywhere near the same protection. She'll be quite an insecure situation here if she stayed in England. Yeah, definitely. I think she will have had some lands and well. wealth, as queens did. At that point, she would have probably had some land that she would have had to sell off and go back because she just had no reason to stay in England. And it would obviously have been quite a dangerous situation for her. Yeah. And one thing I want to pick up on that, we sort of touched upon a little bit earlier on. So we were talking, and that Frankish Annal talking

about her being crowned queen is, it's quite specifically talking about, you know, among the West Saxons or, you know, in Wessex. What was the situation like in other kingdoms? So places like Mercia, for example, were queens of higher status there? Is this sort of a very particular Wessex thing? Yeah, it's an interesting comparison with Mercia. I think we don't have any evidence of a coronation like we do with Judith, but what we do have is evidence of queens obviously having a much higher status than in Wessex. And there are some disparities with source material, and I think that part of that stems from the fact that King Alfred mixed. that his reign is quite well documented.

So we have things like Asa's biography of Alfred that's telling us all this stuff, and we don't really have an equivalent source for Mercia. But what we see in Mercia is queens, being called queens, having mentions in charters and in documents, co-signing charters for land grants and things like that, along with their husbands, they're just more visible in the documentary record.

And although we don't know that they did definitely have some kind of inauguration ceremony. Maybe it wasn't an anointing or a coronation, but we don't necessarily know that they didn't have that either. So you have to be quite open-minded when you're dealing with such an early period is that we just don't have the source material to say definitely, yes, I know this is what was happening at that time. It's definitely quite contrasted between the two kingdoms. Yeah, that's quite interesting, isn't? And I think a lot of the, a little bit later, you got quite some other strong characters and some strong queens come out of Mercia especially as well, haven't you?

So there's, you know, who knows, if it's a sort of circumstance or if it's a bigger thing. I suppose it's probably difficult to tell. Yeah, I think that there's a stronger legacy of women having power in Mercia. I mean, even earlier than this, you have figures like Queen Kenneth Reth,

who was married to King Offer of Mercia at the time when Mercia was a hugely dominant kingdom within England. And that power shifted over time towards Wessex, but actually in the 8th century, Mercia was the dominant kingdom. And Kenneth Rath offers Queen, she had her own coinage, and that's almost unprecedented. Pretty much is unprecedented that a Queen consort would have her own coinage

with her face on, with her name on, and she's quite well attested in Sources as well. To suggest that she probably had a lot of power and influence, definitely if you compare it to Wessex where they weren't even call their wives queens. And it's interesting that Iyadba, this wicked queen that Asa talks about, is actually Kinithris' daughter. So you have that link, that's quite interesting. And I think Asa, when he talks about Alfred's wife, I think, he doesn't even mention by name in the entire biography. He just sort of says the king's wife without even naming her, which is quite telling, I think, in a big piece of work like that.

Yeah, he doesn't name Alfred's wife at all. Even though he says that he thinks it's a detestable custom that they don't have queens, he doesn't actually name her. She's quite an obscure figure. It's quite telling. But let's just go back to Judith again, because I do want to just get our listeners to hear the end of her story. So she goes back to her father and she stays there for a bit, but that's not quite the end of it. She has a link back to Wessex later on, doesn't she? Because she meets someone back in Frankeye eventually. Yeah. So what happens when she goes back to her father's court as far as we can tell is that he pretty much puts her under house arrest, and he wants her to live the life of a kind of royal widow under her

father's protection. And what seems to happen is that her brother helps her solicitor marriage with the Count of Flanders. So she basically goes off and marries Count Baldwin and Flanders without her father's permission. And he's absolutely furious. And Charles the bald basically has the couple excommunicated by the Pope. So he's really mad. And there's all stories about them having to kind of shelter with a Viking king because they were social priorities basically. And her son eventually becomes the Count of Flanders. Her son marries somebody back in Wessex, is that right? Yeah, so her son actually marries Alfred's daughter, Alfred. So Alfred being Judith's stepson at one point, now her son is marrying his daughter.

and we don't actually know at this point what kind of life Judith is living, whether she is actually still alive. I think it's fair to say that she probably is still alive because this connection between the West Saxon court and Flanders indicates that somebody is creating this marital match and brokering it and Judith is a very likely candidate for that.

And it's quite usual for women to have that kind of hand in their son's marriage and especially because she will obviously have connections with the Wessex court. She will know people in the West Saxon court even after this time. So it's quite likely that it was Judith, who was, she was the pawn at the beginning, and now she's kind of manoeuvring other people like the pawns. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, exactly, because she would have had exactly those contacts because actually this is her own former stepchildren, actually, isn't it? It's all of its complex. Thanks. And just to sort of round up a little bit, this whole change in status that Judith has, her being crowned queen, did that have a very significant impact in the future on future queens in, well, in Wessex and then later on in England as well? I would say that there's definitely a growing power. If you kind of look towards the 10th century, it doesn't stay the case that West Saxon queens, especially after the unification. of England. It doesn't remain the case that they have no power and they're not called queens. So during the 9th century, a West Saxon right actually emerged a liturgical right, which again

survives like Judas' right does, although it survives in much more varied versions and was obviously used for much more varied occasions, that includes a right for the crowning and an an anointing of a queen. So there is an emergence of this practice, obviously, not necessarily becoming what happens every time with every queen, but there has to be some regularity in order for it to exist in all these existing liturgical sources that we have. So obviously it becomes standard practice, if not regular practice, to crown queens. And in a way, I'm not sure what influenced Judith in particular had on that. And I think that there's an argument to say that the unification of Wessex and Mercia had an impact on how much power queens had and how they were viewed

as well as Judith. But it definitely, it sets a precedent that this had been done before. So if we were going to sort of take it forward again, so going from Judith and back to the coronation of Elizabeth and the fact that we said earlier on about those actual words being reused, thinking a little bit about what we can learn about these creams and their roles from these litter juice and things. I mean, is that something that we can do? I mean, does the fact that those words are reused, does that tell us something valuable? Can we learn something about it from that? Or how does that all work?

I think that royal ceremonies almost always appeal to a tradition. They almost always appeal to something bigger and wider. I think that ceremonies help cement's royal rule in a world. a way and that being royal kind of relies on convincing everybody that you're special and different and you're different from everybody else. And I think that ceremonies are actually the key, you know, whether through divine power or huge shows of wealth, which are both huge components of these coronation ceremonies, they help set royals apart from everybody else. And I think it's interesting to think about, you know, in modern British society, obviously, we don't live in a

medieval society where royals have the political power. But we do in Britain live in a constitutional monarchy. And much of the relevance that royals have to the general public is through public ceremonies like jubilees and funerals, weddings, official birthdays, that kind of thing. And even actually recently, the opening of parliament was discussed a lot. And a lot of these ceremonies have these elements of being either religious or kind of shows of wealth or just shows that there's something special and different about being royal. And, you know, I think that it's a way for royals to assert themselves as having this exalted status. And I think that it's quite telling that that seems to be the thing that has

survived most pertently from the early Middle Ages is this appeal back to the early Middle Ages in things like liturgy is this idea that we're going back. to a time where these ceremonies were first developing, it was being used. Obviously, there was kingship before anointing, but it was definitely something that was kind of employed to cement power, to show how powerful somebody was, or even sometimes from weakness, from a position of weakness, to try and create some kind of legitimacy where there isn't any. So I think that it's interesting that that seems to be the thing that has survived, that people must, when people, when people, people encounter the royal family is usually through these kind of ceremonies.

Fantastic. Well, I think there's a really nice way of sharing some of those connections and some of that. I'm not going to use the word relevance, but some of the connections that we have, our current royals have to those 11 hundred years ago. Florence is absolutely brilliant. Thank you so, so much for sharing all your knowledge and coming along. Thanks very much. And can I just remind people of your newsletter? How do they find that if they want to subscribe and find everything you've written, find out more about this. So it's on Substack.

It's called Alf Give Who, and you can get there by typing in florenceh-r-S dot substack.com. Fantastic. Do check that out. Some absolutely brilliant stories. I really love it myself, so I can recommend it heartily. Thanks again so much. And thank you, everyone, for listening to today's episode. This has been Gone Medieval from History Hit,

and we also have a newsletter Medieval Mondays that you can support. to just look in the episode notes where you found this podcast and that tells you how to subscribe. We hope to see you again next week. Join us here a Saturday. We've got a new episode with my co-host Matt Lewis and I'm back again next Tuesday. Thank you all for listening.