In this episode Ellen and I discuss three "wicked" medieval women and the monastic authors who loathed them. We begin with the Anglo-Saxon Queen Ælfthryth, a champion of the Tenth-Century Benedictine Reform movement in England, who appears in the twelfth-century Liber Eliensis as a lascivious witch responsible for the murders of her stepson King Edward the Martyr and Byrhtnoth, the first abbot of Ely. We then turn to an early twelfth-century French countess, Sibyl of Porcien, a lascivious beauty whose adultery, according to Abbot Guibert of Nogent, caused a war between her first and second husbands, and who plotted the ruin and death of her stepson. We conclude with a late eleventh-century Norman female robber baron, Mabel of Belleme as she appears in Orderic Vitalis's Ecclesiastical History. In each case, Ellen and I discuss whether these women deserve their notoriety, and consider why the monks who told their stories portrayed them as wicked. The larger issue in this episode is, of course, medieval misogyny.
Listen on Podurama https://podurama.com
Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada
If you have questions, feel free to contact me at richard.abels54@gmail.com
In this episode Ellen and I discuss three "wicked" medieval women and the monastic authors who loathed them. We begin with the Anglo-Saxon Queen Ælfthryth, a champion of the Tenth-Century Benedictine Reform movement in England, who appears in the twelfth-century Liber Eliensis as a lascivious witch responsible for the murders of her stepson King Edward the Martyr and Byrhtnoth, the first abbot of Ely. We then turn to an early twelfth-century French countess, Sibyl of Porcien, a lascivious beauty whose adultery, according to Abbot Guibert of Nogent, caused a war between her first and second husbands, and who plotted the ruin and death of her stepson. We conclude with a late eleventh-century Norman female robber baron, Mabel of Belleme as she appears in Orderic Vitalis's Ecclesiastical History. In each case, Ellen and I discuss whether these women deserve their notoriety, and consider why the monks who told their stories portrayed them as wicked. The larger issue in this episode is, of course, medieval misogyny.
Listen on Podurama https://podurama.com
Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada
If you have questions, feel free to contact me at richard.abels54@gmail.com
“WICKED WOMEN” AND THE MONKS WHO LOATHED THEM
Richard: Welcome to our podcast, ‘Tis But A Scratch: Fact and Fiction About the Middle Ages, and to today’s episode: “wicked” medieval women and the monks who loathed them. I’m your host, Professor Richard Abels. Joining me to discuss medieval misogyny is the least wicked woman I know, my wife and inspiration for all things medieval, Ellen.
COVEN WICKED WOMAN PLAYS
Ellen: What was that?????
Richard: “Wicked Woman” by Coven, one of the first occult rock bands, from their 1969 album “Witchcraft Destroys Minds and Reaps Souls.” One cut on this album was an authentic Satanic black mass, or at least that is what they claimed. “Wicked Woman” seemed like the perfect musical intro for today’s episode, given that at least one of our three “wicked women” was portrayed as a lascivious witch.
Ellen: Lovely. I don’t know how I missed out on Coven. I need to emphasize that “wicked” is in air quotes. We will be talking about three noble medieval women from the tenth and eleventh centuries: an English Queen Ælfthryth,
Richard: Whom we previously encountered in our episode on the murder of King Edward the Martyr
Ellen: a late eleventh-century Norman noblewoman Mabel of Belleme; and her younger contemporary, the French countess Sibyl or Sybilla of Porcien.
Richard: Just as importantly, we will be meeting the twelfth-century monastic chroniclers who “loathed” these women and who are, at least in part, responsible for their nefarious reputations. They are, respectively, the anonymous author of the Lber Eleinsis, a composite cartulary and history of the English abbey of Ely; the highly esteemed Anglo-Norman historian Orderic Vitalis; and Guibert of Nogent, the author of the first autobiography since St. Augustine’s “Confessions” and a historian of the First Crusade.
I’m going to begin with a confession. The idea for this episode began with a comment by Ellen asking why Mabel of Belleme had such a bad reputation. My immediate response was because she had the bad fortune to be trashed by a prominent monastic chronicler. This led me to think about the other two ladies we will be discussing today and how monastic writers remembered them as wicked women. And because I am addicted to bad puns
Ellen: To which I am mercilessly subjected on a daily basis.
Richard: I thought that an episode called “Wicked Medieval Women and the Monks Who Loathed them” would be fun, simple, and educational. I was partially right. I turned out less simple and easy than I expected. My first thought was that this would be an episode about medieval misogyny—and in part it is. But as Ellen and I began to investigate the subject more, we realized that this only partially explains why these three women were portrayed as wicked. The portrayal of each had as much to do with the monastic authors’ own agendas as it did with the woman’s actual life story or even, more generally, with misogynistic monastic conceptions of women.
This is not to deny that the culture of Western Europe in the High and Late Middle Ages was misogynistic. The literature of this period is rife with anti-feminist tropes drawn from three main sources: Scripture, Patristic writers, and classical philosophy and literature. Notable examples include the works of Aristotle, Galen, Juvenal, Ovid, and the fourth-century pagan writer Theophrastus (as quoted by St. Jerome). Aristotle, a philosopher famous for being wrong about everything, as John Green observed in “Crash Course History’s” episode about slavery, characterized women as imperfect males. They can never achieve full rationality and are by nature designed to be ruled by fathers and husbands. For Aristotle and his followers, most notably the physician Galen, the role of the male is dominant even in procreation. Sperm provides the form of the offspring, which is implanted in the material supplied by the female.
Ellen: I thought that Aristotle was the philosopher who actually thought it was important to examine nature. Didn’t he notice that children often look like their mothers?
Richard: Form is the rational soul; the body is the material in which that form resides, so appearances really don’t matter. St. Thomas Aquinas used the Aristotelian conception of conception to explain how and why Jesus was born of woman without being tainted by Original Sin. The doctrine of the immaculate conception of Mary was hotly debated by the Franciscans and the Dominicans. The former argued that she herself was born free of Original Sin, while the latter said that if she were, then she would not have needed the intercession and sacrifice of her son for her salvation. St. Thomas gave the Dominicans a scientific explanation for the paradox that a woman stained by Original Sin could give birth to a son that was sinless, since God the Father supplied the form and Mary only the material. The Aristotelian idea of conception was previously used by St. Anselm to explain why, if the soul is itself sexless, we speak of God the Father and God the Son rather than God the Mother and God the Daughter. This is because, in humans, the male is dominant in procreation.
Ellen: So women have to deal with all the physical inconveniences of pregnancy for nine months and then undergo the excruciating pain of “firm contractions” for hours, while men, who devote mere minutes to the process
Richard: On behalf of all males, I object….
Ellen: Are more important????
Richard: If that pisses you off, this will really get you going. The physiological proof of the biological inferiority of women advanced by Aristotle and Galen is menstruation. From Scripture, medieval Christian writers knew that menstruating women were unclean and a pollution.
Ellen: Orthodox Jews won’t touch a female that they don’t know just in case they are menstruating. I remember the story you tell about your mother when she was a girl in a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn who blocked a nasty old man who used to yell at her and her friends from entering his brownstone by she and her girlfriend simply standing side by side in front of his steps.
Richard: Jews were not the only ones who viewed menstruation as pollution. Galen and his followers saw menstruation as evidence of an ineffective bodily system that needed regularly to clear itself of residual “bilge water.” Aristotle and Galen provided scientific support for a truth known from Scripture: Adam was created in the image of God. Eve was a secondary creation from the rib of Adam.
Ellen: But God did create Eve as a wife for Adam, and humanity was conceived through their marriage. So women have a role in divine providence as wife and mother.
Richard: True, but several of the Patristic Fathers accepted this grudgingly. Tertullian and St. Ambrose were vehement: marriage should be avoided if a man had the spiritual strength to resist his sinful urges. Marriage is a distraction to a life of devotion to God. In this, they echoed Classical pagan writers who viewed marriage as incompatible with the life of a philosopher, since women by nature are vain, demanding, jealous, fickle, deceitful, and treacherous. St. Paul and the Patristic Fathers allowed marriage, as it is better to marry than to burn, but maintained that chastity and virginity were the superior state for both men and women. But standing in the way of maintaining this state is women’s natural sexual voracity. Just as Eve lured Adam into sin, all women tempt men sexually.
Ellen: Can you say “blame shifting”? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that a celibate clergy blamed women for their own sexual desires.
Richard: Ironically, today incels and red-pillers blame women for their lack of sexual success. Women naturally should prefer quote and unquote “real men” like themselves. That they don’t is evidence that women are unnatural.
Ellen: Yes, it is all the fault of the woman. Maybe if they actually talked to a woman ….. Nah. But, again, I shouldn’t be surprised. The traditional Muslim insistence upon the hijab and the Orthodox Ashkenazi Jewish tradition of women shaving their heads and wearing wigs is rooted in the idea that a woman is responsible if a man finds her sexually irresistible.
Richard: Denunciations of female sexuality were widespread in Christian writing in the High Middle Ages because of the insistence of the Reform papacy on clerical celibacy. The medieval Catholic Church, of course, allowed women to participate as nuns, but, citing Scripture, canon law limited holy orders to males.
Ellen: As it continues to do today. Even a reforming pope like Francis has rejected female priests.
Richard: In the early Middle Ages clerics often were married men. This changed with the so-called Gregorian Reform of the second half of the eleventh century. The Gregorian Reform, sponsored and promoted by Pope Leo IX and his successors, most notably Pope Gregory VII, aimed at enhancing the spirituality of clergy and separating them more from the secular world. By the twelfth-century, clerical marriage had become the sin of Nicolaitism. Priests, like monks, were now to be celibate.
Ellen: Nonetheless, clerics in lower orders and even priests and deacons often continued to have spousal partners, but such unions were illicit. That was to continue throughout the Middle Ages and was only to change with the Council of Trent and the Catholic Counter-Reformation of the sixteenth century. Rather than wives, these women were now considered concubines—and I am sure that critics blamed these women for leading astray good clergy!
Richard: If a priest with a concubine was sinful; a monk with one would have been an abomination, for the vow of celibacy was central to monasticism. The three monastic authors whom we will discuss in today’s episode, the author of the “History of the Abbey of Ely,” Orderic Vitalis, and Guibert of Nogent, all had limited interaction with and knowledge of women. The ranks of Benedictine monks in the twelfth century were filled with oblates, children given by their fathers to an abbey as a religious offering. The monastic world required separation of the sexes. Monasteries were masculine societies, as nunneries were female. Contact between monks and women was as infrequent as possible.
Ellen: So when do we get to our so-called “wicked” women?
Richard: Now. Let’s start with Queen Ælfthryth, since she is the earliest in time. Monks recorded her story in the Liber Eliensis, the Book or History of the Abbey of Ely. The Liber Eliensis is what historians call a cartulary-chronicle. In the twelfth century, English abbeys intent upon defending their rights to their vast landed properties copied the royal charters they possessed in collections, cartularies. The Norman Settlement that followed the Norman Conquest was filled with disputes over land, as the estates of native English landowners were confiscated by the Crown and redistributed. The new Norman lords interpreted the complexities of Anglo-Saxon lordship and landholding to their benefit, as they gobbled up as much property as they could, not only from defenseless English neighbors but from other Normans and the English Church.
Ellen: I like our friend Robin Fleming’s characterization of the Norman settlers as a “kleptocracy.”
Richard: Monastic lands held on loans or now as fiefs by tenants were particularly vulnerable. Because the new Norman rulers claimed to be legitimate successors and maintainers of the laws of King Edward the Confessor, the solution was to prove rightful ownership in shire and hundred courts, and the surest proof of that was a royal charter detailing the grant of that property to the Church.
Ellen: And if they didn’t have an original charter for a particular property they corrected the deficiency by piously forging one.
Richard: Piously, since they just knew that they had rightful possession of the land and the charter proving it had disappeared over time.
Ellen: Yeah, right.
Richard: These charters were copied into cartularies. Few original charters from the Anglo-Saxon period have survived, which makes these cartularies critical for historians.
[Ellen: And how do historians distinguish between authentic copies, forgeries, and authentic but improved copies?
Richard: Mainly through linguistic analysis of formulae and witness lists, but we are getting side-tracked.
Ellen: Okay, so get back on track.]
Richard: The twelfth century was also a period of history writing, as Anglo-Norman ecclesiastical authors tried to make sense of the history of their religious houses and how it fit into the larger history of the English and Norman peoples
Ellen: And, ultimately, divine providence
Richard: Several English monasteries produced in the twelfth century cartulary-histories both to defend their properties and to teach their monks the history of the house. The Liber Eliensis was one of these. It was a composite work, probably composed in parts. The author-compiler was a monk of Ely writing for his fellow monks in the late 1160s and early 1170s. His identity is unknown, although a couple of candidates have been suggested. In writing the history of the abbey of Ely, the author focused on two royal women. The first was the seventh-century foundress of the abbey, the East Anglian princess Saint Æthelthryth, the Old English name preserved as Audrey, the name I suggested we call our daughter Rebecca
Ellen: Audrey Abels sounds like a character from a D.C. comic—but it was better than the name you wanted for our son, Skarphedin.
Richard: The second woman was Queen Ælfthryth, the wife of King Edgar the Peace-maker, mother of King Æthelred the Unready, and, according to this monastic author, responsible for the murders both of her stepson King Edward the Martyr and of Abbot Byrhtnoth of Ely. Here is the story that he tells.
One day, while Abbot Byrhtnoth was journeying to the court of King Æthelred on behalf of the newly restored abbey of Ely, he found himself in the New Forest. Having to answer the call of nature, the modest abbot left his retinue on the road and walked into the forest to find a more private place to relieve himself. By chance he came upon Queen Ælfthryth, who stood beneath a tree. To his horror he discovered that she was concocting a magical potion that had the power of transforming her into a mare.
[Ellen: A what?
Richard: A mare, you know, a] female horse.
[Ellen: Oh, you mean a mare.
Richard: Forgive me. I’m from Brooklyn. Getting back to the story,] as our author explains, the Queen’s aim was QUOTE “to satisfy the unquenchable intemperance of her seething lust. Running around hither and thither and cavorting with the horses, she indecently exposed herself to them, in contempt of the fear of God and the honour of her royal dignity, and in this way brought reproach upon her good name.” END QUOTE
Ellen: Ewww.
Richard: Yes, ewww. (15:43) The abbot rushed away, but not before the Queen saw him. Byrhtnoth continued on to the royal court, was received warmly by King Æthelred, and successfully carried out the business of his church with dispatch. Being a man of discretion and not wishing to gain the enmity of the powerful Queen, he answered a summons to meet her in her hall before departing for Ely. She received him privately and, much to his shock and distress, tried to seduce him. She reckoned that if she could entice him into breaching his vow of continence, she could guarantee his silence about her magical wrongdoing. But Byrhtnoth, putting up both physical and verbal resistance, refused and shrank back.
Her advances spurned, Ælfthryth angrily summoned the serving-women of her evil household and ordered them to kill the holy man who might one day expose her iniquity. Realizing that the abbot had to appear to have died of natural causes, she had her serving women stab him under the arms with red hot daggers. When the abbot fell dead, she and her serving-women cried out loudly as if in mourning. Her ploy worked.
Ellen: Are you telling me that being stabbed in the arm pits with red hot daggers doesn’t leave marks?
Richard: No, I’m not telling you that. Our monastic author is. At any rate, the monks assumed that their abbot had died of natural causes and, deeply grieving, they took his body back to Ely for burial.
(17:24) Ellen: Okay, but if Ælfthryth managed to kill Byrhtnoth without exposing herself, how does the author know all this?
Richard: He had the most reliable source possible, Queen Ælfthryth herself. Because she was the king’s mother, no one presumed even to mutter anything sinister about her, and she would have gotten away with her crimes and sinful behavior had it not been that QUOTE “she herself, by God’s mercy conscience-stricken, made a confession about her wrong doings: about her sorceries, and abominable activities, and particularly about the death of the glorious King Edward, her step-son, whom she openly entrapped by all her trickeries and unlawfully killed, so that her own son Æthelred should be raised to the throne …. And with groans and trepidation she revealed by what manner of death she had killed Byrhtnoth, Abbot of Ely.”
Ellen: How convenient. And is this confession known by other medieval authors?
(18:24) Richard: Apparently the monks of Ely had kept that information to themselves until now.
Ellen: Right.
[Richard: By the 1160s Ælfthryth had already been transformed into the wicked stepmother of fairy tales and was held responsible for the murder of her stepson King Edward the Martyr. The monastic author of the Liber Eliensis was building upon that foundation.]
(18:30) Ellen: I remember that in the episode “Martyrdom Most Foul” you thought that she might have had a hand to play in the killing.
Richard: I wouldn’t rule it out. The circumstantial evidence is pretty strong. King Edward’s succession to the throne was contested, and after he beat out his younger half-brother, Ælfthryth lost her place at court and political clout. With her son the only possible heir to the childless king, she had motive. She also had opportunity. King Edward was murdered while on a visit to an estate that belonged to her and his half-brother, and it is possible that the men who actually killed the king were Ælfthryth’s servants. What is certain is that the murderers were never publicly identified or punished, which implies that they had the protection of the new rulers of England, and those rulers were a regency made up of Queen Ælfthryth, her political supporter Ealdorman Ælfthere of Mercia, and Bishop Æthelwold. What is equally certain is that of the three, Ælfthryth was the one whom a later generation of ecclesiastical writers fingered as responsible for the murder. By the early twelfth-century, a tradition had arisen that she not only planned the killing but executed it. The ordinarily reliable Henry of Huntingdon wrote that he had heard tell that Ælfthryth personally stabbed her stepson to death while offering him a cup of wine. The author of the Liber Eliensis piled on by turning the pious Queen Ælfthryth into a witch and harlot guilty not of one but two murders.
Ellen: Okay, but why make her also responsible for the murder of Abbot Byrhtnoth?
Richard: Our friend and sometime co-host Dr. Jennifer Paxton, who is the expert on the Liber Eliensis, suggests that the abbey at this time was hurting for revenues and wanted to attract more pilgrims. The best way of doing that was to turn their first abbot into a martyr and saint. If Byrhtnoth had died while at court, it would be natural to gin up a story in which Ælfthryth, the evil murderer of King Edward the Martyr, would have the abbot killed under circumstances that would make him a martyr to the faith.
(20:04) Ellen: I’m surprised that the author ended his story by having Ælfthryth confess and repent all her sins and retiring into a nunnery which she founded to do penance. That is a surprisingly happy ending for a woman he portrayed as a harlot, witch, and murderer.
Richard: I can only speculate about the reason, but Ælfthryth’s confession was needed to answer your question how the monks of Ely knew that their first abbot had been martyred—and explained how and why the notorious wicked woman responsible for the deaths of a kinsman, a king, and an abbot could also have been a benefactor of the abbey. The author knew from the abbey’s charters that Ælfthryth was both a donor to the church and a friend of Bishop Æthelwold. He also knew that she founded the nunnery of Werwell, where he supposed that she spent her last days “in sorrow and penitence.”
Ellen: What do we know about the real Queen Ælfthryth?
Richard: Actually a lot. She was the most fervent lay advocate for monastic reform with the possible exception of her husband King Edgar the Peace-keeper. Ælfthryth was either Edgar’s second or third wife. Her father was the ealdorman of Devon and her mother belonged to the royal family. When Edgar married her, she was the widow of Ealdorman Æthelwald of East Anglia, the scion of one of the most powerful noble families in England. As Edgar’s queen, she became a friend and ally of Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester in his promotion of Benedictine monasticism. With her husband’s approval, she ordered her household officers to drive out the secular clergy of the New Minster, Winchester, and replace them with monks. She was so great a supporter of Benedictine monasticism that Bishop Æthelwold mentioned her by name in the preface to his Regularis Concordia. The Regularis Concordia, the common rule sanctioned by the Council of Winchester in 973 for all English Benedictine monasteries, is the most important document of the tenth-century English Benedictine Reform movement. So it is really significant that Bishop Æthelwold named Queen Ælfthryth in its preface. The bishop wrote that King Edgar, having himself assumed the role of legal protector of the lands and rights of monasteries for men, ‘wisely ordained that his wife, Queen Ælfthryth, should defend communities of nuns like a fearless sentinel, so that naturally a man might aid men and a woman might aid women without a breath of scandal’. She was to serve as the legal advocate for nuns and their houses, and to ensure that they adhered to the strictures of Benedictine monastic life.
(23:43) Ellen: But all that was overshadowed by her possible complicity in the murder of Edward the Martyr. That seems so unfair.
Richard: No argument from me about that. If Ælfthryth was complicit, she was one of many who thought the kingdom would be better off without the irascible and violent teen-age Edward as king. Based on his actions during his brief reign, Edward was no more deserving of the title of Christian martyr than Ælfthryth deserved being called a harlot and witch. Fortunately, enough contemporary evidence survives to counter the highly negative portrayal of Ælfthryth in later medieval sources. That isn’t true for either of our next two “wicked women,” Sibyl of Porcien and Mabel of Belleme.
(24:29) Ellen: The portrayal of Queen Ælfthryth as voraciously lustful and treacherous is straight out of the medieval misogyny handbook. Is that true for our second “wicked” woman, Sibyl of Porcien?
Richard: In spades, although she apparently only attempted to murder her stepson. Almost everything we know about Sibyl comes from an exceedingly biased source, Abbot Guibert of Nogent. Guibert introduces Sibyl of Porcien—whom he never names—in this way. He tells us that she was the youngest child of Roger, Count of Porcien, by a second wife, a woman of common birth.
Ellen: Which I guess he thought significant.
Richard: Count Roger arranged that his daughter be married to neighboring nobleman, Godfrey, and gave the county of Porcien as her dowry. While her husband, Count Godfrey, was off at war, his kinsman Enguerrand, who lusted after the beautiful Sibyl, carried her off to his castle at Coucy. Guibert wasn’t sure whether this was seduction or abduction, though he suspected the former. In his words, “Her husband had been fulfilling his marriage debt far less than she would have liked. Whether or not this figured into her behavior, one thing is sure: she would never have gotten involved in such a monstrous public scandal had she not descended there, one step at a time, through clandestine acts of wickedness, especially considering that when she first came to her husband, she was already pregnant from intercourse with another man. Everyone is in such agreement about her past debaucheries that I am ashamed to tell about them or even to remember them.” The result was a bloody war between the two men who claimed to be Sibyl’s husbands. It ended up with Godfrey renouncing his marriage to Sibyl, but retaining half of her dowry.
Ellen: It sounds like a debased version of the Iliad.
Richard: Sibyl certainly is represented by Guibert as beautiful, and hers was the face that launched a thousand sallies against castles. But she was even less faithful than Helen. Seven years later, she ceased having marital relations with Enguerrand. She pretended that this was for the sake of continence, but Guibert confides that that the real reason was that she had become disgusted with her husband’s weight and age. Sibyl, however, couldn’t do without a lover, and found a bright prospect in a young knight named Guy. Enguerrand tried and failed to prevent the affair. Rather than lose face with a public scandal, he invited the young man to join his household and betrothed him to their very young daughter, so his wife and her lover could meet in private. So, yes, Sibyl is also represented as a harlot.
Ellen: Okay, so what’s her story?
Richard: It’s probably best to begin with the story of the monk who loathed her, Guibert of Nogent. Guibert is one of the shining lights of the first stage of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, a revival of the study of Latin Classical literature, rhetoric, and philosophy by Churchmen. He was born in 1055 into a noble family of Clermont-en-Beauvaisis, in northern France. Because of a distressed delivery, his father made a vow to the Virgin Mary that if the child should survive, he would be dedicated to the Church. Guibert survived, but his father died eight months after his birth. Guibert’s pious mother refused to remarry despite being pressured by her late husband’s kinsmen, and brought her son up alone. When Guibert was six, his mother appointed a tutor who would educate the child for a career in the church. Six years later, she withdrew from the world to live a life of prayer in a house outside the monastery of St Germer de Fly, and Guibert’s tutor became a monk of that house. The twelve year old Guibert was left on his own, but when his mother heard news about how he was being led astray by his cousins, she persuaded the abbot of St Germer to allow the boy to live in the abbey and to continue his lessons with his tutor. Guibert’s mother initially hoped that her son would become a secular cleric who might one day become a bishop, and Guibert took holy orders and became a priest. But he was drawn to the monastic life. As a monk of St Germer, he gained a reputation for his mastery of Latin and erudition, which led to his election as abbot of the small northern French abbey of Nogent in 1104. He composed for his monks a history of the First Crusade, “The Deeds of God performed through the Franks,” based largely on an existing history of the Crusade written in much simpler Latin. More significantly, in 1115 he wrote an autobiography/slash/local history, which he called the Monodiae, or “Solitary Songs.” Historians tend to refer to this work as the “Memoirs of Guibert of Nogent.” This is the first autobiography known to have been written in Western Europe since The Confessions of St. Augustine, composed seven hundred years earlier.
Like Augustine’s Confessions, Guibert’s “Solitary Songs” is intended to be a work of spiritual guidance. Again, his audience was the monks of Nogent. Guibert presents himself as a youthful sinner who, through the guidance of his saintly mother and monastic discipline, learns to check his pride and devote himself humbly to God.
The work is divided into three books. Only the first is really a memoir. The second concerns the history of the abbey of Nogent and contains stories about good and bad monks. The third, which is a history of the see of Laon, is for historians the most interesting part of the “Solitary Songs,” in particular Guibert’s dramatic account of the commune of Laon, Bishop Gaudry’s attempt to suppress it, and the rising of the town against its unworthy bishop, culminating in the killing of Gaudry. Sibyl of Porcien makes her appearance in book three.
Guibert personally knew Sibyl; her second husband Enguerrand de Boves, lord of Coucy; and Enguerrand’s son, Thomas of Marle—and hated and despised them all. Guibert characterized Thomas of Marle as the worst man that he had ever known, and substantiated that assertion with a series of atrocity stories.
(31:44)Ellen: I know I am going to regret asking, but such as?
Richard: Yes, I am sure you are. Rather than paraphrase, I’ll use Guibert’s own words: “”His cruelty surpassed anything that our times had ever head of; in fact some people with a reputation for cruelty seem gentler in killing cattle than Thomas was in killing people. … To force certain prisoners to pay ransom he would hang them by the testicles, sometimes by his own hand; and often the body’s weight would rip off the victim’s parts, and the guts would spill to the ground.” That was only one of his many atrocities, he also….
Ellen: Enough! Moving right along.
Richard: Sorry. Guibert does seem to relish giving a litany of Thomas’ cruel and inhuman acts. As I said, Guibert thought that Thomas was the worst man he ever met. The main role Sibyl of Porcien plays in Guibert’s account is as Thomas of Marle’s rival and mortal enemy.
Ellen: Given what Guibert says about Thomas of Marle, I would think that’s a positive.
Richard: It isn’t. Guibert has nothing good to say about Sibyl. She is as promiscuous and cruel as her stepson. In Guibert’s view, these two deserved each other, though God help all those who were collateral damage. QUOTE “I have never in my time seen two persons come together and by their common action produce so much evil. If Thomas was the fire, one might say his stepmother was the oil. There morals were such that after indulging in their promiscuous sexual acts they could still be just as cruel, even more, so, when the opportunity arose. Just as the laws of marriage never held her back, so also neither of Thomas’s wives could ever deter him from consorting with prostitutes.” END QUOTE
Ellen: At least Guibert here is slut shaming a man as well as a woman.
Richard: He was a monk, after all.
Ellen: If Sibyl and Thomas were so alike, why were they enemies? What did Sibyl hope to gain from ruining Thomas?
Richard: Sibyl’s dispute with Thomas was over land and power. As the second wife of Thomas’ father, Enguerrand de Boves, she was intent upon disinheriting her stepchildren, and in particular Thomas, whose power and ability she feared. To this end, she persuaded her husband to deny his parentage of Thomas, declaring him to be a bastard conceived through adultery. Given that father and son already hated each other, Enguerrand was more than willing to accede to his wife’s request.
Ellen: From what you said, Sibyl’s own marriage to Enguerrand was of doubtful legitimacy.
Richard: It was, at least to Guibert. To Guibert’s disgust, Enguerrand…..
Ellen: From what you say, he seems to have been in a state of perpetual disgust
Richard: Or self-loathing, his other go to mode. Anyway, to Guibert’s disgust, Enguerrand was able to persuade his kinsman the bishop of Laon, also confusingly named Enguerrand, to annul his first marriage and sanction his union with Sibyl.
Ellen: If Sibyl was refusing to have sex with Enguerrand and was flaunting her affair with a young knight in front of him, why was he so willing to disavow and disinherit his son Thomas on her behalf?
Richard: Guibert simply tells us that father and son passionately hated each other. The odd thing is Enguerrand and Thomas went on the First Crusade together.
Ellen: Say what? These two robber barons were crusaders?
Richard: Thomas of Marle apparently was one of the first men to enter Jerusalem during the siege of 1099. He is remembered as a hero in the Jerusalem cycle of crusading chansons de geste. On the other hand, Abbot of Suger paints a similar portrait of him in his Life of King Louis the Fat. Historians over the last generation have emphasized that the great attraction of crusading was not the prospect of wealth and land but spiritual benefits and adventure. Thomas of Marle and Enguerrand de Boves were both in great need of remission of sins.
Back to the story. Sibyl was intent upon destroying Thomas, and Thomas was equally intent upon destroying her and his father. In the words of Guibert, QUOTE “Every day that vicious woman would devise new strategies to raise up enemies who could overthrow Thomas, and he in turn wasted no effort in using pillage, fire, and murder to even the score with Enguerrand.” END QUOTE.
Ellen: It’s interesting that the methods they used are gendered. Sibyl manipulates men to attack Thomas. Thomas responds by waging war and murder.
Richard: Good point. I guess that Thomas was too wary of Sibyl ever to allow her close enough to poison him, which in the chronicles was the woman’s choice of murder weapons.
Ellen: As we are going to see when we talk about Mabel of Belleme—although, to be fair, men also used poison.
Richard: Sibyl was intent upon killing her stepson. She had a supporter watch his movements and plan an ambush. The ambush nearly succeeded. Thomas fought his way out, but was riddled with wounds. He was carried back to Marle to convalesce.
One good ambush deserves another, and when Thomas learned that Sibyl’s brother, an archdeacon, was traveling to visit her, he intercepted the party and killed the cleric. The archbishops and bishops of northern France had had enough. Thomas had murdered a cleric, supported the burghers of Laon who had murdered their bishop, and had seized a nunnery in Laon and its lands. This was the heyday of the Peace and Truce of God, which the Church had devised to protect noncombatants, in particular churchmen. The northern French prelates met in council at Beauvais, excommunicated Thomas, and threatened King Louis VI with an interdict upon the royal domain lands unless he punished Thomas.
(38:17) Ellen: For the benefit of our non-Catholic listeners, an interdict is the suspension of divine services. Basically the bishops were threatening an ecclesiastical strike.
Richard: The bishops followed that up by preaching what amounted to a crusade against him. They urged the common people to storm Thomas’ castle of Crecy as a form of penance for which they would receive forgiveness of sin.
Ellen: So a crusader became the target of a crusade.
Richard: Yeah. With king, clergy, and the commoners united against him and he himself still convalescing from his wounds, Thomas was compelled to seek peace and make amends. He paid a money ransom to King Louis, made reparation to the churches he destroyed, and returned ecclesiastical lands. In this way, he procured (in Guibert’s words) “peace on one side and readmission to Holy Communion on the other.” Guibert concludes his story with a moral: “Thus the proudest and most wicked of men was punished by the hands of the poorest people, whom he had so often punished and despised.” The end.
Ellen: The end? That’s all that Thomas had to do to appease King Louis the Fat and the Church? He got to keep his lands??? And did Enguerrand actually disinherit him?
Richard: Yes, he kept his lands, and no, Enguerrand didn’t end up disinheriting him. Enguerrand needed Thomas’ support to suppress a commune in his city of Amiens. When Enguerrand died in 1116, Thomas, as his only surviving son, became lord of Coucy. For the rest of Thomas’ story, we have to turn to Abbot Suger’s The Life of King Louis the Fat. He continued to attack the lands of his neighbors and the Church, and seized merchants and held them for ransom. In 1130, the Churchmen had had enough—and again called upon the king to punish him. Thomas was struck down in an ambush that backfired on him. He was allowed last rites, but as the priest extended the consecrated host to his mouth, the host twisted back, and Thomas died without being shriven of his sins.
Ellen: What happened to Sibyl?
Richard: She disappears from Guibert’s memoirs along with Thomas of Marle.
Ellen: Okay, it is an interesting story, but what does it tell us about the status of women?
Richard: Mostly what it tells us is about Guibert of Nogent’s attitude toward women. And to appreciate exactly what it tells us, we have to place Sibyl in the context of the other women in Guibert’s memoirs. Guibert’s conception of women is conventional for a twelfth-century monk. It is essentially binary. There is the Virgin Mary, and there is Eve. Based on Scripture, monks promoted the idea of a female spiritual hierarchy: the voluntary virgin, the faithful married mother, the chaste widow, and the harlot. The only perfect woman was, of course, Mary, virgin and mother of God—a literally impossible ideal. Eve was a more complicated figure. On the one hand, she was the first mother and wife. But on the other hand, she was the temptress through whom Adam and hence all mankind fell. Sibyl plays the role of Eve the temptress. As the sexual temptress she is the cause of war. But she also has agency, manipulating males to carry out her nefarious plans. Opposed to her is Guibert’s mother. He assures her that she was a great beauty and as a young widow was most desirable.
Ellen: He comments on her beauty? Why?
Richard: He actually devotes an entire chapter to her beauty. Guibert’s emphasis upon the sexual desirability of his mother and the stories he tells featuring castration seem to cry out for a Freudian reading, and two historians, Robert Benton and Jonathan Kantor answered that call in 1976, the former tentatively and the latter enthusiastically. Most historians today view this as reductionist.
Ellen: I would think so.
Richard: Guibert emphasized his mother’s physical beauty to make a point that his monks would appreciate. Poverty, like chastity, is a Christian virtue, but it is only a virtue if one embraces poverty from choice rather than out of necessity. The same thing with chastity. Guibert tells us that the beauty of his mother was checked by the severity of her countenance. “The seriousness of her whole bearing,” he tells us, “was enough to show her contempt for all vanity. A sober look, measured word, modest facial expression hardly lend encouragement to the gaze of would-be suitors.” Guibert adds that one rarely finds such self-control among women of her social rank. Her self-control was greatly tested, as her marriage to Guibert’s father remained unconsummated for seven years because of a curse placed upon the marriage by a kinswoman who wished Guibert’s father to marry one of her nieces. When this became known, the beautiful young wife came under siege, but withstood all temptation,
This leads Guibert to ruminations about the state of women in his day. In earlier times women’s modesty was so great that no marriage was ever tarnished by any public rumor.” Now among married women the reality and even the appearance of reserve have disappeared. In their conduct, Guibert complains, “they display nothing but coarse humor: nothing but jokes, winks of the eye, wagging of the tongue. They walk provocatively and show only silliness in their behavior. Their way of dressing couldn’t be further removed from old-fashioned simplicity: their broad sleeves, their skin-tight tunics, the curling toes of their Cordovan shoes—in every detail they proclaim that they have cast all modesty to the winds. Any one of them would imagine she has reached the rock bottom of misery if she is presumed to be without a lover. Nobility and worldly glory are directly related to the number of suitors who follow in her footsteps.” And Guibert goes on and on about the shamelessness and corruption of the modern world. Sibyl may be egregious in her promiscuity and deceit, but she is more typical of the women of the age, according to Guibert, than his sainted mother.
Ellen: It sounds like Guibert was well up on the standard anti-feminist tropes. Would you classify him as a misogynist?
Richard: Certainly by modern American standards, but he is surprisingly nuanced when it comes to sex and even female sexual desire. His mother’s glory is not that she lacks sexual desire. Her husband’s failure to consummate the marriage is not a blessing but is literally the result of a curse. Guibert does not reject marital sex. Interestingly, he doesn’t even condemn priests who are faithfully married, which warns us against exaggerating the influence of the Gregorian Reform movement. Guibert praises his mother’s chastity as a widow. Because she was young, beautiful, and rich, she attracted the attention of many young men. But she was able to control and resist her natural urges and turn them away, preferring the religious life.
What makes her restraint the more impressive, is that Guibert bought into the idea that women are more sexual than men. Sibyl exchanges spouses because her first husband can’t fulfill the marital debt to her satisfaction. Earlier in the book, Guibert tells us about a tired, old nobleman who escaped the sexual demands of an insatiable wife by retiring into a monastery.
Ellen: Sounds like the type of joke a monk would tell.
Richard: I would like to think that is a joke, but Guibert doesn’t strike me as having much of a sense of humor. But to answer your question, I think that Guibert was more misanthrope than misogynist. Sibyl’s wickedness is more than matched by Thomas of Marle’s. Guibert criticizes a number of men, including relatives, as womanizers. A true misogynist would blame Sibyl entirely for Enguerrand’s abduction of her from her first husband. He doesn’t. Enguerrand, in Guibert’s eyes, was a much a slut as was Sibyl. And for Guibert this was as much a matter of culture as biology. A theme of the memoirs seems to be that the world have gone to hell. Both women and men in his generation are worse than they were in earlier times. This was also true of monasticism, which is why reforming movements such as the Carthusians were so necessary and so rare. It is also why Guibert felt it his duty as an abbot to write a confessional as moral instruction for young monks.
(48:35) Ellen: The thing I find most puzzling about Guibert’s story about Sibyl of Porcien is her husband Enguerrand’s apparent indifference to her sexual affair with a younger man. He even enables it rather than face public humiliation. That doesn’t track with what I learned about marriage among the medieval nobility. I was taught that key role played by women in medieval noble society was as wives and mothers. The essential purpose of marriage was to produce heirs, preferably male, to perpetuate a noble bloodline through which familial property could descend. Marriages were arranged by parents with an eye toward improving the wealth and status of the respective families. Children could be betrothed before they reached their teens, although the marriage itself could only be consummated when a girl had reached the age of thirteen. Noble marriages were more like the merger of corporations than romantic unions. Love had nothing to do with it.
Richard: Once marriage was accepted as a sacrament in the twelfth century, the voluntary consent of the couple became a requirement for a valid union. In theory, a girl could refuse her parents’ choice of a husband for her. In practice, the preferences of the prospective bride and groom were subordinate to the designs of their respective families---As eloquently expressed by Monty Python’s Lord of Swamp Castle to his reluctant son Prince Herbert:
MONTY PYTHON CLIP
Ellen: I’m impressed that you managed to slip in a Monty Python sound clip.
Richard: Couldn’t have done it without your help. [Noble marriage was about procreation, not sexual desire or romantic love. Perhaps the one saving grace was the notion that a woman could only get pregnant if she had an orgasm, although I don’t know of any Western medieval versions of “The Joy of Sex.”
Ellen: That is an idea that is still used by some willfully ignorant right-wingers to push bans on abortion without exception for rape. As Todd Akin, the Republican candidate for Senate in Missouri in 2012, explained QUOTE “If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
Richard: Very medieval of him. Akins was paraphrasing a law in a late thirteenth-century English common law text called Fleta.
Ellen: Thankfully, the majority of Missouri voters were not impressed by Akins’ knowledge of medieval biology. He lost.
Richard: Back to adultery. Because marriage was the mechanism for the survival of male noble lineages, female sexuality was something to be feared and controlled. Adultery was not only an insult to a nobleman’s honor
Ellen: And, to be clear, the only adultery that mattered was the infidelity of a wife. Canon law condemned husband’s cheating on their wives, but in practice medieval noblemen could have as many liaisons as they wanted without consequence.
Richard: Unless that liaison was with the wife of another noble or, worse, his own lord. As I was saying, adultery was not only an insult to the husband, it was an existential threat to a nobleman’s bloodline. There was no greater insult or injury than to be cuckolded and unknowingly raising someone else’s son as one’s heir. The practical and businesslike character of aristocratic medieval marriage left little room for romantic love. A twelfth-century baronial court must have been a hotbed of sexual desire and frustration, both for neglected ladies and for household knights and noble boys in training. The genre of medieval romance was a response to this desire.
Ellen: Okay, but if adultery was so dangerous and feared, why are the two most famous medieval romances, those of Lancelot and Guinevere and Tristan and Isolde, about adultery?
Richard: They are, but note that neither has a happy ending. In the romances of the late twelfth-century northern French trouvere Chretien de Troyes, happy ending are reserved for knights-errant who marry the beautiful and wealthy heiresses with whom they fall madly in love. As I mentioned in an earlier episode, a household knight who mistook romance for reality and turned his public reverence for his lord’s lady into a sexual affair risked his life. Philip of Alsace, count of Flanders in the late twelfth century, was one of the great patrons of chivalry. Chretien de Troyes dedicated his romance “Perceval, or the Tale of the Grail” to him. But when he discovered his wife Elizabeth in an affair with a knight, he had the knight hunted down, systematically beaten by the kitchen staff, and then hung upside down in a latrine until he suffocated. He beat Elizabeth but neither killed nor repudiated her, because she was the daughter of the Count of Vermandois. To do so would mean war with her family and the loss of her dowry. Instead, he used the adultery to claim complete control over her dowry.
In the early middle ages it usually meant the deaths of the adulterers. When marriage became a sacrament, adultery became a matter for canon law, and canon law did not have a death penalty. In thirteenth-century France, the penalty for an adulterous wife was public humiliation: her head would be shaved, then she would be whipped and paraded naked through the streets, before being enclosed in a monastery, unless her husband accepted her back.
Ellen: Like Cersei in “The Game of Thrones.”
Richard: Yeah, like Cersei. The aristocratic male fear of being cuckolded was intensified by male assumptions about female sexuality. In the literature of the High and Late Middle Ages, women are represented as sexually insatiable—
Ellen: I’ve noticed that women, rather than men, seem to be the sexual aggressors in medieval romances like Chretien de Troyes’ Perceval. Knights-errant always seem to be fending offers from the damsels they rescue.
Richard: Thank you for giving me another excuse to play a Monty Python clip. This celebrates Galahad’s perilous adventure in Castle Anthrax
SOUND CLIP
Romance writers and the kings, counts and barons who were their patrons were as suspicious and wary of female sexuality as were the Christian clergy.
Ellen: Okay, but how do you explain the exalted position women had in the love poetry of troubadours and medieval romances?
Richard: I’m not sure how exalted it is to be the object rather than the subject of love. The main function of women in medieval romances and chansons de geste is to be objects through which a knight could demonstrate courtliness and perform chivalric deeds.
Ellen: Like the “The Song of Roland” introducing Roland’s fiancée Aude only to have her swoon and die from grief when she learns of his death.
Richard: The beautiful and noble Helois plays a similar role in the chanson de geste, Raoul of Cambrai. She too responds to the death of her fiancée by swooning. Although she doesn’t die of grief, she nonetheless swears that she will never marry because no man can match her dead lover. The only reason that Aude and Helois appear in these two very masculine poems is to the poems to emphasize the courtliness and chivalry of the knight.
Ellen: Helois apparently didn’t know her fiancée very well. He was a complete jerk.
Richard: This was the poet’s way of saying that there was more to Raoul than the hotheaded pride that characterizes him throughout the poem. The poet introduces Raoul to his audience as a handsome youth, skillful with lance and sword, and an excellent horseman. “If there was but a little restraint in him,” the poet concludes, “there would have been no better vassal than he.” Helois’ love for him confirms this.
Ellen: Okay, but we are running out of time, so let’s turn to our third wicked woman, Mabel of Belleme.
Richard: Here we turn from sex to power. Lay society and culture in the High Middle Ages were profoundly shaped by hierarchy, class, and gender. From the moment of birth, the life paths for both men and women were dictated by tradition, custom, and familial expectations. Lay medieval misogyny had a different foundation than clerical misogyny. The male medieval aristocracy defined itself as a military elite. Its ethos, chivalry, was exclusively male and emphasized the qualities and values of the warrior, courage, physical strength and endurance, mastery of arms, and loyalty. The virtues of good wives and mothers were praised by male authors but were secondary to the chivalric virtues of their male heroes.
Ellen: Although the High Middle Ages was a traditional, male-dominated society, that does not mean that women—at least noblewomen—were powerless. The aristocracy was also a landholding elite, and noblewomen exercised power over their households and, in the absence of their husbands or as widows, over familial estates and their free and unfree tenants.
Richard: Which brings us to the story of Mabel of Belleme as told by the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman monk Orderic Vitalis. Ellen, why don’t you do the honors.
Ellen: Begin briefly with Orderic Vitalis; Ecclesiastical History written for the monks of his Norman monastery of Saint-Evroul. Story of Mabel
Richard: El, why don’t I tell our listeners about the monk who loathed Mabel of Belleme, Orderic Vitalis, and then you can tell them about Mabel?
Orderic Vitalis was the son of a French priest Odelarius of Orleans, who was a chaplain in the household of Roger II of Montgomery, a powerful Norman noble and the husband of Mabel of Belleme. Odelarius accompanied Roger of Montgomery to England, was given a church in Shrewsbury, and married an Englishwoman. Yes, I know I said that the Church had forbidden clerics from marrying, but England in the 1070s were a bit behind the times in this. Orderic Vitalis was their eldest son. Like Guibert, Orderic was entrusted at the age of 5 to a learned priest for instruction. Five years later, his father sent him as an oblate to the monastery of Saint-Evroul in southwestern Normandy. There he became first a deacon and then a priest, and spent the rest of his life as a cloistered monk. He never became prior or abbot. His major contribution to the monastery was literary. Around 1115 the abbot of Saint-Evroul ordered Orderic to write a history of the abbey. Orderic responded by spending the next quarter century writing what he entitled the Historia Ecclesiastica, the Ecclesiastical History, which began as a history of the abbey but expanded in scope to become a religious and political history of Normandy and Norman England. The story of Mabel of Belleme appears in Book IV.
Okay, El, your turn. Tell us about Mabel of Belleme.
Ellen: (Tells about the parentage and marriage of Mabel and of the feud between the Belleme family and the Giroie, founders of the abbey of St. Evroul. Explains that Mabel had ten children, among whom one, Robert of Belleme, had the reputation of being especially vicious)
Richard: the notorious Robert of Belleme, who apparently could have given Thomas of Marle a run for his money. Orderic Vitalis in Book XI of his Historia Ecclesiastica, calls Robert "grasping and cruel, an implacable persecutor of the Church of God and the poor ... unequalled for his iniquity in the whole Christian era.” Then, again, Orderic never met Thomas of Marle.
Richard: The obvious explanation for Orderic Vitalis’ disapproval of Mabel was that she was a woman who acted like a man—a “virago”—and that made her “unnatural.” This is how generations of medieval historians read the story of Mabel of Belleme.
Ellen: Obvious, but oversimplified, even wrong. Orderic Vitalis writes about a number of other powerful women who maintained and defended their lands in the absence of their husbands. He praises William the Conqueror’s wife Mathilda who acted as regent for his duchy of Normandy while he was in England. Adela of Blois, daughter of William the Conqueror and wife of Count Stephen of Blois, was as active politically as Mabel and was one of Orderic’s heroes.
Richard: The reevaluation of the agency of noblewomen in the politics of the period is one of the major changes in the historiography of the period over the last few decades.
Ellen: When Richard and I were undergraduates, the accepted view of the position of women in the High Middle Ages was well summarized in an article by my mentor Suzanne Wemple and Jo Ann McNamara. Before the twelfth century, there was no really effective barriers to the capacity of women to exercise power; they appear as military leaders, judges, castellans, controllers of property. But in the eleventh and twelfth centuries women lost their ability to exercise political and economic power because of a fundamental transformation of the aristocratic family in the eleventh century into a patrilineage in which the eldest son inherited virtually the entire patrimony.
Richard: Many historians in the 1970s and 1980s, believed that the process you just described is the reason that women in the High Middle Ages lost the political and economic power they had enjoyed in earlier centuries. Georges Duby, the most prominent French medieval historian of the late twentieth century, claimed that French nobles families in the twelfth century responded to the concentration of power in the hands of kings, dukes, and counts, and the threat it offered to their own power, by adopting the practice of primogeniture. Women’s rights to inheritance were restricted in favor of a single male heir. This was justified by the male aristocracy’s self-definition as a military caste. If the only heir to a noble estate was female, her husband would exercise authority over her lands. If she were unmarried, her lord chose her husband, a right that was used to reward the faithful service of knights and to create political alliances. The main if not sole role of women in noble society was now to produce a male heir. To protect the purity of the bloodline, wives and daughters were confined to the inner chambers of castles, from which they were trotted out for display on ceremonial occasions. In this way, Duby claimed, women were excluded from the exercise of public authority.
Ellen: I found Duby’s brief biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine maddeningly condescending. He turns her into a complete cypher. He dismisses contemporary and posthumous accounts of her as a political actor as ideological and misogynistic literary fictions. The only ‘power’ that Eleanor or any of her female contemporaries had in this age of men, according to Duby, came through exploiting their feminine wiles. In his words,
the nature of women made them unsuitable to the exercise of public power. Some, nevertheless, managed to snatch a few crumbs, but discreetly, and by exploiting their feminine resources. When they were young, they played on the desire that the sight and the touch of their body aroused in the bodies of men, that of their husband and those of the knights of the court. In old age, they relied on the tender regard of their sons.”
I don’t think that Duby realized how misogynistic his own assumptions about women were.
Richard: This isn’t what most medieval historians now think. One of things the hardest things to wrap one’s mind around is that history changes. This doesn’t mean that the past changes. What was, was. But what we know about the past, the questions we think to ask about it, and how we interpret evidence changes generation to generation.
The lack of evidence for women’s activities in the Middle Ages was an assumption rather than a fact. It was repeated so often that there was no need to challenge it by actually doing research. That changed in the 1970s and 1980s. While Suzanne Wemple revolutionized our understanding of Frankish women, Theodore Evergates, Kimberly LoPrete, Amy Livingston, Heather Tanner, and Frederic Cheyette overturned Duby’s pessimistic view of the role of women in aristocratic society of the High Middle Ages. They demonstrated that noblewomen, even those below the ranks of queen and countess, continued to exercise power and hold land, although the extent of their legal power varied by region. Noblewomen, particularly widows and women whose husbands were off on crusade or simply away from home, served as the lords of their estates and bore the responsibility of defending their property and fulfilling military obligations upon it. Upon inheriting property, a female heir was required to perform homage and swear fealty to a lord just as a male would. That was equally true for widows on receiving their dower lands. The case of Nicola de Haye comes to mind
Ellen: Who???
Richard: That’s my point, Nicola de Haye should be a familiar name to people who study or love medieval English history. Nicola de Haye was arguably the most powerful baron in Lincolnshire during the reigns of Richard the Lionheart and King John. She inherited from her father the hereditary offices of constable of Lincoln Castle and sheriff of Lincolnshire. She and her husband supported Prince John against King Richard’s justiciar Bishop William de Longchamps, during the civil war that erupted while Richard was away on Crusade. Nicola personally led the defence of Lincoln castle against two sieges. The first was in 1191 in support of Prince John while King Richard was on crusade; the second was in 1216 against a composite army of French invaders and rebel English barons.
Orderic Vitalis had no problem with good wives protecting their family’s lands, or even wearing armor and riding among the knights. He writes admiringly of Sybil, wife of Robert Bordet, lord of Tarragona. “She was as brave as she was beautiful. During her husband’s absence she kept sleepless watch; every night she put on a hauberk like a knight and, carrying a rod in her hand, mounted on the battlements, patrolled the circuits of the walls, and kept the guards on the alert for the enemy’s stratagems.” He wrote of another noblewoman, Isabel, the wife of Ralph of Conches, “Isabel was generous, daring, and light-heated; and therefore lovable and estimable to all around her. In war she rode armed as a knight among the knights; and showed no less courage among the knights in hauberks and sergeants-at-arms than did the maid Camilla among the troops of Taurus.”
Ellen: Maybe we should have an episode on medieval women warriors?
Richard: Good idea. Still, we shouldn’t get carried away. For the most part, warfare was considered the province of men, and women who fought in armor were enough of an anomaly to warrant comment by chroniclers as such.
Ellen: And those chroniclers were men. Female authors whose works have survived are just about as rare as women warriors. There are few female voices in the medieval sources that are not mediated through males.
Richard: As a generalization, men were responsible for the public sphere and women for the domestic sphere. But because the boundary between private and public was fuzzy and fluid in medieval society, noblewomen exercised authority and power. They brought with them into their marriages dowries that often consisted of large tracts of lands. As widows, they acted as the sole lords of their dower lands. Medieval society was traditional not only in its assigning of gender roles but in its rigid social hierarchy. What makes it particularly difficult to generalize about women in the Middle Ages is that noblewomen had much more in common with men of their class than they did with peasant women. The “domestic” functions of the lady of a court included dispensing patronage and gifts, receiving guests, supervising the upbringing of children and helping to arrange marriages.
Ellen: Which bring us back to Mabel of Belleme. Mabel was a powerful noblewoman in the southern and eastern borderlands of the duchy of Normandy. She and her husband were among the more successful predators in the turbulent and chaotic world of eleventh-century Normandy. Mabel took an active role in this and was as much a ‘robber baron’ as her husband.
Richard: But if other contemporary noblewomen could act politically without incurring Orderic Vitalis’ disapproval, what was so special about Mabel?
Ellen: I would say two things. Orderic distinguished between wives who gave good advice to their husbands and tempered their aggressive dispositions. Mabel of Belleme, in his opinion, was a bad influence upon her husband, Roger II of Montgomery, and an even worse one upon their son Robert de Belleme, who earned a reputation for cruelty and viciousness. The second reason was more personal, or should I say institutional. Mabel’s family was engaged in a feud with the Giroie family, and the Giroie family were the founders and patrons of Orderic’s abbey of Saint-Evroul.
Richard: So Orderic loathed Mabel not because she was a virago, a woman acting like a man, or even because of her aggressive attacks upon the properties of her neighbors, but because of a feud between her family and the family of the patrons of his abbey.
Ellen: Orderic also focused his criticism on Mabel and her son, rather than Mabel’s husband, because the Bellemes had fallen, but the Montgomeries were still powerful.
Richard: We really have run out of time. I would love to be able to sum up this episode with some pithy generalizations, but the cases of these three wicked women make it difficult. Medieval male misogyny was real and did influence the portrayal of all three women—but it doesn’t sufficiently explain why they in particular were singled out by the monastic authors for trashing. In each case, the monastic author used the woman for his larger narrative purposes. The author of the Liber Eliensis inherited an image of Queen Ælfthryth as a wicked woman who had had murdered her stepson King Edward the Martyr. He expanded on this image to make her into the instrument for a second martyrdom, that of the first abbot of Ely, probably in an attempt to increase the attraction of the abbey for pilgrims. He then had this wicked woman confess, so that he could square the circle and acknowledge her also as a benefactor of the abbey and a woman who had died as a nun. Guibert of Nogent knew or at least had met Sibyl of Porcien. For Guibert, Sibyl was a key player in a story of three bad people doing very bad things to one another. But Guibert also used Sibyl’s wickedness to highlight the goodness of his sainted mother. Both were beautiful and desired, but unlike Guibert’s saintly mother, Sibyl gave into her lusts and used her feminine wiles to free herself from a lukewarm marriage and then engineer the destruction of her even more wicked stepson. And Mabel of Belleme was trashed by Orderic Vitalis because he was writing a history of his abbey of Saint-Evroul for his fellow monks and Mabel and her family were feuding with the founding family of that abbey.
Ellen: Nothing is ever simple in the study of medieval history.
Richard: In the study of history in general. But if it was, it wouldn’t be as challenging or interesting.
I hope that you will be able to join us for our next episode that answers the question: was King Æthelred really unready, with my very special guest co-host Dr. Levi Roach of Exeter University in the U.K.
If you are enjoying our podcast, please let friends know about it, and if you are listening to it on Apple podcasts and have the time and inclination, please vote and review it. Until next time, bye for now.