Book Title: The Royal Women Who Made England:
The Tenth Century in Saxon England
Author: MJ Porter
Publication Date: 30th January 2024 hardback UK/epub direct from publisher/4th April 2024 US and kindle edition
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Page Length: 237
Genre: non-fiction
The Royal Women Who Made England:
The Tenth Century in Saxon England
MJ Porter
Throughout the tenth century, England, as it would be recognized today, formed. No longer many Saxon kingdoms, but rather, just England. Yet, this development masks much in the century in which the Viking raiders were seemingly driven from England’s shores by Alfred, his children and grandchildren, only to return during the reign of his great, great-grandson, the much-maligned Æthelred II.Not one but two kings would be murdered, others would die at a young age, and a child would be named king on four occasions. Two kings would never marry, and a third would be forcefully divorced from his wife. Yet, the development towards ‘England’ did not stop. At no point did it truly fracture back into its constituent parts. Who then ensured this stability? To whom did the witan turn when kings died, and children were raised to the kingship?The royal woman of the House of Wessex came into prominence during the century, perhaps the most well-known being Æthelflæd, daughter of King Alfred. Perhaps the most maligned being Ælfthryth (Elfrida), accused of murdering her stepson to clear the path to the kingdom for her son, Æthelred II, but there were many more women, rich and powerful in their own right, where their names and landholdings can be traced in the scant historical record.Using contemporary source material, The Royal Women Who Made England can be plucked from the obscurity that has seen their names and deeds lost, even within a generation of their own lives.
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Author Bio:
MJ Porter is the author of over fifty fiction titles set in Saxon England and the era before the tumultuous events of 1066. Raised in the shadow of a strange little building and told from a young age that it housed the long-dead bones of Saxon kings, it’s little wonder that the study of the era was undertaken at both undergraduate and graduate levels.
The Royal Women of the Tenth Century is a first non-fiction title. It explores the ‘lost’ women of this period through the surviving contemporary source material. It stemmed from a frustration with how difficult it was to find a single volume dedicated to these ‘lost’ women and hopes to make it much easier for others to understand the prestige, wealth and influence of the women of the royal House of Wessex.
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Book Excerpt:
The royal women of the tenth century.
The royal women of the long tenth century is an opportunity to delve into what is known about these women and the time in which they lived and ensure that their story is told, as well as that of their slightly better-known male counterparts. It is also an opportunity to place them into this context of seeming stability and to assign them a part other than that of mothers and grandmothers to the next generation in the proceedings of this long and turbulent period, although, admittedly, it is as mothers and grandmothers that they seem to have truly discovered their abilities to govern.
There is no surviving contemporary image of any of the royal women of the tenth century. These women are not only difficult to ‘find’ in the written sources, but they are also entirely faceless, apart from in the words of their contemporaries or near contemporaries. But, as far as is known, there are only images of King Athelstan that survive, in manuscript 183, folio IV Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, and also King Edgar, in London, British Library Cotton Vespasian A.viii, fol. 2v. And we seem to have only one physical item associated with these women: priestly vestments which may well have been stitched by Lady Ælfflæd’s hands (the second wife of Edward the Elder) and that survive in Durham as part of the collection of items linked with the tomb of St Cuthbert, the Northumbrian saint associated with Lindisfarne.
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