Early Middle Ages

The Early Middle Ages (c.400–1100 AD) was time of great social change, where Cumbria became melting-pot of different ethnicities: Britons, Angles, Norsemen and Gaels. Although each of these cultures may have had their own ideas of gender and sexuality, the growing dominance of Christianity created a backdrop of increasing intolerance.

Britons and the Church

The culture that emerged in post-Roman Cumbria, as native Britons re-established control after AD 400, was largely a continuation of the pre-Roman Iron Age culture, characterised by kings, warbands, cattle raids and bards. We know too little about this period to say whether older attitudes to sex and gender survived, but the signs are not positive. There were notably no queens recorded for this period — men seem to have dominated society, as they had under the Romans, and women tend to feature in the records only as mothers, daughters or wives, if at all. The scathing 6th-century Christian writer Gildas did refer to sodomy among the contemporary British kings but doesn’t seem to suggest it was widespread.

Although the long Roman occupation may have established new ideas about sex and gender here, it was the introduction of Christianity to Cumbria from the 4^th century that made them stick. Early church leaders condemned as unnatural and impure any sexual activity that couldn’t produce children within the confines of heterosexual marriage. Sex became a sin, which anyone could fall prey to. As a result, Christian emperors began to pass laws against male-male sex with severe punishments from the 4th century.

Although Christianity was present before the Romans left Britain and it is thought to have continued afterwards, we cannot know the extent of the church’s control over the population in this period. Both secular and church power are likely to have varied by time and place and many ordinary people must have lived effectively beyond the reach of either. Even if the church did condemn certain acts, its ability to instil its moral teachings into the average person, or to punish transgressions of its laws, was probably fairly limited.

A Pagan Relic?

Sin and Penance

This confusing text tells us that same-sex activity was occurring and that churchmen had a detailed understanding of it, but there was obvious uncertainty about how seriously it was to be taken. It seems strange to modern eyes that male-male ‘fornication’ should be ranked alongside bestiality (and incest and murder), but that oral sex should be described as the ‘worst of all evils’. Women were treated less harshly than men for same-sex activities because the medieval concept of sex had to involve penetration by a man. Punishments for men having sex with women, even if they were married or in the clergy, were generally less severe.

The reference to ‘effeminate men’ and ‘sodomites’ goes back to the Bible (1 Corinthians 6:9–10) which says that ‘soft or effeminate men’ (Latin molles, Greek malakoi) and ‘male bedfellows’ (Latin masculorum concubitores, Greek arsenokoites) would not inherit God’s kingdom. Although ‘effeminate’ here has a wider meaning, referring to behaviour and appearance, it is intimately connected to the idea of being sexually passive, while ‘male bedfellows’ are active partners. This distinction would continue through the Middle Ages with the use of ‘catamite’ (passive) and ‘sodomite’ or ‘bugger’ (active), and up to our own day. The connection between the broader sense of effeminacy and male homosexuality would also continue to be made.

The Law Codes

Secular law codes from the Early Medieval period are mainly interested in maintaining peace, protecting property (including humans) and compensating harm, not in policing morality. Neither the law codes of Wales or of Anglo-Saxon southern England had much interest in sexual offences, although it’s possible that the Old English phrase unriht hǣmed ‘illicit intercourse or marriage’ was used to cover all bases. Since same-sex acts didn’t carry the risk of pregnancy (which could cast doubt on the legitimacy of heirs) and didn’t really affect a man’s rights over his wife or daughters, the laws had little need to condemn them. That doesn’t necessarily mean they were tolerated.

The law codes make clear that men and women had fairly rigidly defined roles and statuses in Early Medieval Britain, with women having fewer rights and lower value than men of the same class. The Laws between the Britons and Scots, which contains fragments of the laws covering northern Cumbria in the 10th and 11th centuries, say that a married woman’s galnys (compensation for killing) and kelchin (compensation for insult or injury) were a third less than her husband’s. People of different classes had even greater variation in value.

In a society where people were expected to stay in their lane, it’s easy to assume that gender variation hardly ever occurred. Archaeology seems to confirm this, as men and women are often buried with distinctively gendered items. But since the items themselves are often used to assume the sex of the grave’s inhabitant (especially where bodies don’t survived), then many cases of gender non-conformity might have been overlooked. This is exactly what happened with a grave from Portway in Hampshire, in which a male skeleton was found with ‘female’ jewellery, reminding us that non-conformity was possible in this era.

The Vikings

Notes

1. McNeill, J.T. & H.M. Gamer (1938). Medieval Handbooks of Penance, New York: Columbia University, 184-198 ↩︎