In mid-June, 918, a woman’s corpse was carried a hundred kilometres across the West Midlands, from her death-bed in Tamworth to her grave in Gloucester.¹ The body was that of Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians (c. 870–918), eldest child of Alfred the Great, but there is little more to be said with certainty about this funeral.² We do not know exactly how old she was, how she died or what kind of medical treatment she may have had, whether her body went by ox-cart or barge, whether she was embalmed or shrouded, carried in a coffin or on a...

Æthelflæd was the daughter of Alfred, king of Wessex, and wife of Æthelred, ealdorman of Mercia. She was unusual in being a female politician and warleader, but she was also representative of her class and gender, as aristocratic daughter, sister, wife and mother. She was extraordinary, in her ability to order the building of a minster-mausoleum, to fund intercessory masses and to translate saints’ relics, but ordinary in that her investment in these bones, buildings and ceremonies typified the behaviour of great laymen and women in the decades around 900, not just in England but also in continental Europe.¹ With...

Æthelflæd and her circle are recorded as model Christians in their attitudes to death, but our sources define many other inhabitants of these islands as imperfect Christians or not Christians at all. Before going any further, we need to look more closely at these words. This chapter will first consider the wider context of the different cultures of Anglo-Saxon England, and how their interaction in fields such as politics, belief, land-holding and ethnicity might affect people’s responses to death. It then looks closely at Vercelli Homily IX, one of the most elaborate and considered attempts to define death in surviving...

Chapter One concentrated on the years around 900, a period of exiguous evidence. This chapter, in contrast, considers material from the later tenth and eleventh centuries in which the theories and practices surrounding death and dying are much better attested, and the bulk of the chapter is a close study of one source in particular. This is a mid-eleventh-century liturgical, confessional and penitential anthology (Oxford, Bodl. Laud Miscellaneous 482), which returns continually to the theme of the relationship between a priest and the soul in his care, especially at these moments of crisis. This manuscript has never been considered as...

The Newent Stone Book (discussed at the end of Chapter Three) represents one means of trying to protect the vulnerable body and soul. In this chapter we look at many others, ranging from medical recipes and charms to coffins and grave structures. A wide range of sources represent the body and soul as under constant attack from a host of invisible assailants, whose effects are perceived as sin, disease and decay. However, contemporary literature often shows a reluctance to assume that disease is the direct consequence of sin. In the poem Christ III, the narrator bewails the fact that we...

Many Anglo-Saxon texts and images attest to a heightened awareness that the body, living and dead, is threatened with being eaten at every stage of its existence before the Last Judgement, after which the damned body will continue to be devoured in perpetuity. These threats may come from creatures of the air (eagles and ravens), creatures that walk on earth’s surface (wolves), and creatures that slither and crawl on or beneath the soil, and it is the last of these, the wyrm, that is most continually linked to the condition of both body and soul, before and after Judgement. Wyrm...

In an influential passage of his Moralia in Job, Gregory the Great draws together relevant biblical texts to construct a Doomsday narrative. He identifies four groups of people: the very good and bad, who will not come to judgement, and the ordinarily good and bad, who will be called to God’s tribunal.¹ Gregory’s fourfold schema of ultimate human destinies is a useful one against which to measure the complexity of burial practice in later Anglo-Saxon England and to assess its purpose. He first deals with those to be judged and damned, associating them with the dismissal of those who have...

Late Anglo-Saxon ideas about dying and death formed a coherent system, albeit one in which the many constituent parts were often in tension or conflict. Ideas about the sacred, neutral and profane, the body and its boundaries, sexuality, the living, dying and dead, the present life in linear time and the future life beyond time, all of these worked continuously to structure each other, and affected social and cultural experience at every level. This study has integrated different kinds of source and methodology to demonstrate this underlying coherence, it has oscillated between the experiences of an individual woman in Chapter...