'Cesare splendidior': Anglo-Norman Memories of Æthelflæd of Mercia

Among all of pre-Norman England’s royal women, only Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians (d.918), moved Henry, the archdeacon of Huntingdon, to panegyric verse. The poem, found in his compendious early-twelfth-century Historia Anglorum, is a remarkable composition that emphasises the singularity of the Mercian ruler’s reputation. When Henry does compose poems about other English royal women, they focus on queens who belong to the century after the Conquest and employ strikingly different rhetoric. Whereas Matilda of Scotland (d.1118) and Adeliza of Louvain (d.1151), the consorts of King Henry I (d.1135) are remarked on for their beauty and humility, Henry of Huntingdon’s praise for Æthelflæd focuses on her political and military effectiveness. The poem suggests that these traits placed her within traditionally male spheres of power – she is a king who is comparable to Caesar – yet she is still lauded as praiseworthy. Few other politically active tenth-century women were so approvingly judged. Yet, for all his praise, it seems that Henry did not wish for Æthelflæd to be viewed as a model for queenship. The verse is clear that the agency that Æthelflæd wielded was appropriate to her alone. Henry’s contemporaries, the monks William of Malmesbury and John of Worcester (or the Worcester chronicler), likewise saw in Æthelflæd a unique and extraordinary figure, though each brought his own idiosyncratic historical approach to her depiction. For Henry she was near-unparalleled in ambition and achievement, a pre-eminent figure in her time; for William she was a virago and a didactic exemplar, but a peripheral character in England’s political narrative; while, for the Worcester chronicler, she was central to that narrative, one integral part within the broader history of the tenth century.