So in a charter of King Knut to St. Edmundesbury, his wife, Alfgwa, signs, “Ego Alfgifa Regina” (Selden’s “Titles of Honour”).
There had been amid the Saxons, Queens Regnant as well as Queens Consort. William of Malmesbury writes in admiration of Sexburga, the Queen Dowager of Cenwalch, King of the West Saxons, 672, A.D., “that there was not wanting to this woman a great spirit to discharge the duties of the kingdom. She levied new armies, kept the old ones to duty, governed her subjects with clemency, kept her enemies quiet with threats, in a word, did everything at that rate that there was no other difference between her and any King in management except her sex” (“Malmesb. Gest. Reg.,” b. i.). Ethelfleda, too, the daughter of the great Alfred, called the Lady of Mercia, ruled that kingdom after the death of her father and her husband for eight years, and completed the work that her great father had begun in finally defeating and subjugating the intruding Danes. Women landowners sat in the Shire Gemote, or held Motes of their own; women Burgesses were present at Folkmotes, or at Revemotes. In short, the privileges of women in the Saxon times were nearly equal to those they held in British times.
The Abbess Hilda presided over the monastery at Streneshalh, Whitby, where was a man’s wing, and a woman’s wing, the church coming between them. Among her disciples were educated many learned bishops. An ecclesiastical synod met at her abbey (664), at which she presided, that the calm of her presence and the influence of her control might soothe excitement on the vexed questions of the day, chiefly those regarding Easter. There were delegates from Rome, from the Scots, from the Angles, and the Britons (see lib. 3, c. xxv., and lib. 4, c. xxiii., xxiv.). Also Spelman’s “Concilia” (p. 145) describes “Synodis Pharensis rogatu Hildæ illic Abbatissæ celebratæ.” The earliest British writer still extant, Gildas of Alcluid (now Dumbarton), reports this fact without comment or surprise. Spelman preserves also (p. 205) “Epistola Johannis Pa. VII.,” to “Ethelredum Regem Merciorum.” “Episcopus suo more obnitentibus beatissima virgo Elfleda soror Alfridi, Abbattissa post Hildam de Streneshalh, terminum negotio fixit dicens Dimissus ambagibus testamentum fratris mei, cui præsens interfui, profero,” etc. Other women held similar positions in England, as well as St. Bridget of the Abbey of Kildare in Ireland.
The Norman invaders swept like a whirlwind over old institutions, yet some of the strongest stood firm. They were, after all, of the same Church, and Church and Cloister preserved the records of Saxon liberties, and the customs of Saxon times. The clerical and lay powers of many Abbesses were handed down unimpaired to their successors in Norman times. The conquest was not one of extermination but of superposition. The great mass of the people remained Saxon in heart. The Normans were, too, of a kindred race, though they had come from a long sojourn in a land where language, thought, and custom had become Latinised, a land that already held the principles of the Salic Law. William promised to respect the laws of the country, but there is no appeal against a conqueror’s will, or a soldier’s sword.
The lands they wrested from the Saxons, the Normans held of the King by Feudal Tenure or by Military Service. Their laws, customs, and language dominated the Saxons, as did their swords. But only for a time. The struggles with France formed, through a common antagonism, a united nation of the varying races in the island. To complete the union, the nation went back to the language of the Saxons, and, when opportunity for freedom called, went back to their old laws as a basis of the new. That women suffered more than men did from the Norman invasion might only have been expected. But that they did not do so nearly to the extent that it is commonly supposed, can be proved by reference to competent authorities, by whom the limitations of their privileges are shown to proceed on definite and comprehensible lines.
CHAPTER II.
THE MODERN BASES OF PRIVILEGE.
“All rights arise out of justice.... Justice is a constant and perpetual will to award to each his right.... Jurisprudence is the knowledge of divine and human things, the science of what is just and unjust.”—Bracton. De Legibus Angliæ.“Of acquiring the dominion of things.”—Temp. Hen. III.
The relation between property and privilege has been the determining principle in Constitutional Evolution, and the distinction between the sexes in the matter of Property has been the radical cause of the distinction between them in regard to Privilege. It is necessary to trace this. The custom of Military Tenure made male heirs more valuable to the Crown than female heirs, inasmuch as personal service was more effective and reliable than representative service; and, therefore, in early Norman days, when all lands lay in the King’s gift, he was eager to confirm each succeeding son of the last owner in his possessions, before any of the daughters. But the principles of justice, the customs of the land, and the springs of human nature, combined in opposition to a further exercise of the Royal will, so that all the daughters succeeded before any of the collateral heirs, before uncle, cousin, or nephew. Husbands and fathers would not have risked their lives freely in the King’s wars, if they knew that wives and daughters were to lose their estates, at the same time as they lost the protection of their strong right arms. A survival of Saxon opinion strangely affected further the position of daughters, when the chaos of custom took form in law. An eldest-born son could inherit to the detriment of his younger brothers, following the Norman custom of primogeniture, but the eldest-born daughter held no privilege over her younger sisters, who were all co-parceners with her as regarded the inheritance, in the manner that children of both sexes inherited among the Saxons, and among the representatives of the Saxons, the free men of Kent. An indivisible inheritance, such as a title, fell in abeyance among daughters until decided by the selection of the Crown, though it was generally granted to the eldest daughter.[[i].] Unless a woman, therefore, was an only child, she did not succeed to the entire advantages of “the heir,” but as only child, and sole heiress, she inherited to the full the rights and privileges of her father, brother, or ancestor. Sex-in-itself did not disqualify a woman from anything. There was no excusing a woman a duty, and consequently no denying her a privilege. “Essoin de servitio regis lyeth not where the party is a woman” (Statutes 33, Ed. I.). The only advantage granted her, that of “sending a deputy,” she was allowed in common with men, frail or infirm, or over the age of bearing arms.
The Feudal System has been credited with limiting Personality and Privilege to males; therefore it startles some students of history to find that it was only on the extinction of the Feudal System, and the translation of service-payments into money-payments, that women lost the definite place assigned to them. Women’s rights came second in Feudal Times, because they had to be protected by men’s swords; women’s rights came nowhere in later times, when freedom towards property would have made them able to protect themselves. The encroachments naturally took place first in regard to married women. In ancient times even a married woman could be “free,” both as an inheritor and as an earner. In the very highest ranks she remained so. She was free to contract, to sign, to seal, to act as a feme sole. On her marriage she conferred her title on her husband, as men did theirs upon their wives. The lands were held in common. The responsibilities she could not undertake herself, he fulfilled as her representative. When she died he lost his representative character; his tenure of her lands was only “by courtesy,” and that only if he had a child by her; if not, they reverted at her death to the donor. (See “Statutes of Realm,” vol. i., p. 220.) But a widow also could hold her husband’s lands under certain conditions, either by her marriage settlement, her husband’s will, the King’s gift, or “the courtesy of England.” Many examples of widows doing so are given later. Even where there were heirs, and her husband died intestate, a widow had a legal right to the third part of her husband’s property. In Kent she had a right to the half till she married again, as a man held the half of his wife’s property till he married again. (See “The Customal of Kent.”)