Æthelflæd

Queen of Mercia (r. 899-918)

• Born: c. 870
• Birthplace: Wessex, England
• Died: June 12, 0918
• Place of death: Tamworth, England

Æthelflæd continued to rule Mercia and direct its armies after her husband King Ethelred’s death in 911, successfully beating back Danish incursions into Anglo-Saxon territories.

Early Life

Æthelflæd (EH-thuhl-flehd) was the firstborn child of West Saxon king Alfred the Great and Ealhswith, a noblewoman of the royal family of Mercia. Although the year of Æthelflæd’s birth is not certain, Asser’s life of Alfred says that she married Ethelred of Mercia around 890 “as the time for matrimony approached,” that is, before age twenty, placing the birth of the princess in the early 870’.

While much of Æthelflæd’s success must be due to her natural gifts, some credit should go to her early education. Most women of her class in the tenth century would have received a classical education only by pursuing a religious education as a cloistered nun. Æthelflæd, however, was educated in her father’s court alongside her brother Edward (d. 924), who would succeed his father Alfred as King Edward the Elder (r. 899-924). The sibling tie, together with their common education, made Æthelflæd and Edward a powerful political team, and the political effectiveness of Edward’s reign largely depended on Æthelflæd’s own power and influence.

The close confederacy between Wessex and Mercia was of crucial strategic importance at the beginning of the tenth century. Mercia’s eastern half was under Danish control and from eastern Mercia the Danes could assault Alfred’s kingdom of Wessex. Two factors cemented Wessex and Mercia at the end of Alfred’s reign. First, the ruler of Mercia, Ethelred, declined the title of king, claiming only those of ealdorman (earl) and Myrcna hlaford (lord of the Mercians). Second, Alfred strengthened the fealty of Ethelred by giving him Æthelflæd in marriage.

One indication of the central role played by such political marriages as Æthelflæd’s in Anglo-Saxon society is that one of the West Saxon words for “wife” was frithuwebbe (peace weaver). A chieftain could settle a feud with a rival nation or form a political union by marrying his daughter to a rival or confederate. In Æthelflæd, however, Lord Ethelred would find more than a typical peace weaver, which she would be in uniting Ethelred’s Mercia and Alfred’s Wessex. She would do more than any other political leader of her century to strengthen the defense of Mercia and win back the lands it had lost from the Danes.

Nothing is mentioned of Æthelflæd in the first decade of her marriage, aside from the birth of her daughter Ælfwynn in 898, but with the death of her father in 899 and the accession of her brother Edward, her name appears in connection with Edward’s struggle to keep the throne. Æthelflæd’s cousin Æthelwold contested Edward’s claim to kingship in Wessex and enlisted the Northumbrian Danes to aid his cause. Edward counted on his sister’s help to repel the Danes and not his brother-in-law Ethelred. The Mercian Register makes no mention of Ethelred in its accounts of Mercian military assistance to Edward, but as the tenth century began, Æthelflæd was increasingly mentioned as coordinating the Danish campaigns with her brother. An Irish chronicle known as The Three Fragments implies that Ethelred was too infirm after 902 to direct the campaigns, but Æthelflæd, half her husband’s age and educated in her father’s court, had both the strength and the military acumen to do so. One group of Irish and Danish immigrants under the Viking warrior Ingimund was given written permission to settle in Wirral in 902: The document is signed by Æthelflæd, not her husband, suggesting that she was then the de facto head of state.

Æthelflæd’s kindness to Ingimund was repaid by treachery: In 905, Ingimund attacked the Mercian town of Chester. Æthelflæd’s response would set the pattern for her activity in the disputed Mercian territories over the next decade. She turned Chester from a tun (town) to a burh (fortified city) by building walls and battlements around it in 907.

Life’s Work

Æthelflæd’s military accomplishments were primarily defensive, but she did not hesitate to direct offensive strikes early in her struggle with the Danes. In 909, she joined her brother Edward in a successful raid into East Anglia, where the pagan Danes held the body of the seventh century English king and martyr Saint Oswald, much revered by the Christian English. Returning in triumph, Æthelflæd presented the saint’s remains to Saint Oswald’s Priory in Gloucester.

Early Life

Æthelflæd (EH-thuhl-flehd) was the firstborn child of West Saxon king Alfred the Great

A year later, on the feast of Saint Oswald (August 5, 910), Edward led a daring surprise attack against the biggest Danish stronghold in York, defeating the Danes in the Battle of Tettenhall. The Battle of Tettenhall was proof of the success of Edward’s and Æthelflæd’s strategy in the border country. Danish advances in the ninth century had been gained by lightning raids followed by retreats to Danish strongholds. The highly mobile Danish army could not sustain the prolonged siege warfare that English garrisons along the border would provide. When she saw the role that English fortifications played in the victory at Tettenhall, Æthelflæd built another burh at Bremesburh in 910. Each new fort made the Danish raid-and-retreat strategy more difficult.

When Ethelred died in 911, Mercia set a new precedent in English government. Rather than declaring a new lord of Mercia, the witangemot, or parliamentary body charged with determining royal succession, hailed Æthelflæd as Myrcna hlæfdige (lady of the Mercians). This was the feminine counterpart of the title claimed by her husband: that is, the highest-ranking official of Mercia, yet acknowledging fealty to the West Saxon king (at that point her brother Edward). It was as lady of the Mercians that Æthelflæd scored her greatest achievements, both military and political.

A first glance at Æthelflæd’s earliest fortifications on the map of central England might suggest a preparation more for retreating from the Danes than for standing up to them. Her first burhs were at Chester and Bremesburh (on what is now the Welsh border) both far from the Danes. Æthelflæd’s strategy in strengthening these frontiers first, however, makes perfect sense. Away from Danish eyes, Mercia could perfect the techniques of fortification and move the construction projects closer to the Danish strongholds gradually. By the time the Danes saw what was happening, Mercian garrisons were too strong for the Danish blitzkrieg tactics to work.

Æthelflæd’s next two fortifications, in 912, were also on the Welsh border country, along the Severn River. The first, Bridgenorth, was aptly named. The narrowest and shallowest point of the Severn for miles around, it was literally the “bridge north,” the point at which the Danes liked to cross into Wales on the relatively few occasions they ventured that far. Æthelflæd’s second fort was at Scergeat, whose location is unknown in modern times, though it was probably upriver north and west from Bridgenorth. At the same time Edward moved east to the already fortified town of Hertford, where a second fort was built. Thus, by the end of 912, Æthelflæd had an impenetrable line, a fall-back position in case Danish belligerence increased before the more eastern and northern borders could be secured.

Danish aggression came the following spring (913) when Danish forces at Leicester looked west to find two new English forts, one at Tamworth and another at Stafford. Thus cut off, they marched south to the English village of Banbury, joining forces with the Danes of Northampton for a coordinated attack on the hapless English town. This would be one of the last of the successful destroy-and-retreat raids of the Danes. Æthelflæd moved in immediately, fortifying the largest town south of Danish Northampton, Buckingham, in 914. At Buckingham, Æthelflæd upped the ante, building not one but two forts, one on each side of the River Ouse. The show of force worked: The Danish armies of Northampton and Bedford submitted to Æthelflæd’s army at Buckingham, allowing King Edward to establish a fort at Bedford in 915, directly across the Ouse from the former Danish camp.

Æthelflæd’s string of forts now formed a nearly straight southeast line from Chester to Hertford, with only two significant gaps: the midlands between Tamworth and Buckingham and the mouth of the Mersey River, just out of reach of Æthelflæd’s first fort at Chester. Æthelflæd closed the Mersey gap with two burhs, Eddisbury (914) and Runcorn (915), and fortified the midpoint between Tamworth and Buckingham at Warwick. Developments on the Danish side helped shift the momentum toward both the Mercian and the West Saxon English. A Danish Viking named Ragnald, who had seized power after the Battle of Tettenhall, solidified his power in the lands that remained to him, defeating the Scots in the First Battle of Corbridge in 914. It was largely his army against which Æthelflæd fortified Mercia. However, in defeating Scots and Irish in the north, Ragnald turned possible allies against him and sent them over to the English.

Æthelflæd took full advantage of this development, and in 917, she signed a treaty with two Scottish kings, both named Constantine, ensuring their alliance against the Danish York. The Danes, unwilling to face Æthelflæd’s forces, attempted a Second Battle of Corbridge, defeating the Scots again but cutting their forces in half in the effort. This weakening of the Danish forces allowed Æthelflæd to take offensive action. In July of 917, while Edward was fighting the Danes in the east (Towcester, Bedford, Wigingamere, and Tempsford), Æthelflæd’s troops marched into the major Danish center of Derby (in north-central England) and took it handily. The following year, which would be the last year of Æthelflæd’s life, marked the final, crushing defeat of the Danes by the tandem of Edward and Æthelflæd.

The 918 campaign began in mid-May with Edward building a burh in Stamford, causing the Danes there to submit to him without a fight. To the west, Æthelflæd marched into Leicester, where the Danes surrendered, again without bloodshed. The only remaining Danish enclaves, at Nottingham and Lincoln, would fall to the West Saxons by the end of summer, but Æthelflæd would not live to see it. Falling back to Tamworth after her victory at Leicester, she died on June 12, 918. She was buried in Saint Oswald’s Priory in Gloucester, where a decade earlier she had celebrated her victory over the East Anglian Danes.

Significance

If part of Æthelflæd’s legacy is demonstrating a woman’s military and political leadership, then that legacy lived on in Mercia for a few months after her death. Again faced with choosing a leader for the former kingdom, the Mercian witangemot that had named Æthelflæd lady of Mercia bestowed the same title on her twenty-year-old daughter Ælfwynn. By the spring of 919, however, Ælfwynn’s uncle, King Edward, had called her to his court and officially annexed Mercia. No one would claim either title, lord or lady of Mercia, again.

Anglo-Saxon Kings of England, 802-1016

Reign

• Ruler

802-839

• Egbert

839-856

• Æthelwulf

856-860

• Æthelbald

860-866

• Æthelbert

866-871

• Ethelred (Æthelred) I

871-899

• Alfred the Great

899-924

• Edward the Elder (with sister Æthelflæd)

924-939

• Æthelstan

939-946

• Edmund the Magnificent

946-955

• Eadred

955-959

• Eadwig (Edwy) All-Fair

959-975

• Edgar the Peaceable

975-978

• Edward the Martyr

978-1016

• Ethelred (Æthelred) II, the Unready

1016

• Edmund II Ironside

1016

• Ascendancy of Canute the Great (Danish line begins)

Bibliography

Hadley, D. M. The Northern Danelaw: Its Social Structure. London: Leicester University Press, 2000. A useful resource on Æthelflæd’s central England from the point of view of the English Danes.

Nelson, Janet L. “Anglo-Saxon England.” In The Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval England, edited by Nigel Saul. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Offers complete background not only to Æthelflæd’s reign but also to the development of West Saxon power that preceded and followed her.

Stafford, Pauline. “The King’s Wife in Wessex, 800-1066.” In New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, edited by Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennesey Olsen. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Gives a thorough picture of the nature of queenship in Æthelflæd’s time.

Wainwright, F. T. “Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians.” In The Anglo-Saxons, edited by Peter Clemoes. London: Bowes and Bowes, 1959. A complete source of information on Æthelflæd. Includes a map of fortifications.