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Feminism and the Western in Film and Television
 Mark E. Wildermuth

Feminism and the

Western in Film and
Television
Mark E. Wildermuth
Department of Literature
and Languages
University of Texas of the Permian
Basin
Odessa, TX, USA

ISBN 978-3-319-77000-0 ISBN 978-3-319-77001-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77001-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018936577

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
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Cover credit: chipstudio/DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Images

Cover design: Fatima Jamadar

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer

International Publishing AG part of Springer Nature
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
This book is dedicated to my sister Victoria who knew the genre was hers.
 Acknowledgements

I must thank the University of Texas and the Dunagan Endowment for
gracious financial support during the writing and the researching of this
book. Special thanks also go to the Interlibrary Loan Staff at UT for
their fine performance in providing materials for researching this study.
I am also grateful to my research assistant Abigail Nau for invaluable
help provided for finishing this book. Thanks go to Amy Smith and the
editorial board of Lamar Journal of the Humanities for allowing me, in
Chapter 6 of this book, to reprint in altered form my article “Feminism
and the Frontier,” which appeared in volume XLI, No. 1, Spring 2016
of their publication. Thanks also to the late Dr. Peter Brunette, Reynolds
Professor of Film at Wake Forest University, whose scholarship and
kind guidance have taught many of us so much about film, media and
the profession. And finally, special thanks go to Dr. Annette Kolodny,
Professor Emerita of American Literature and Culture at the University
of Arizona for helpful advice given during this book’s inception.

vii
 Contents

1 Introduction: Is the Western an Inherently

Anti-feminist Genre? 1

2 Women Professionals in 1930s’ Film: Westerns

in the Context of the Progressive Age
and the New Deal Gender Politics 17

3 Women and Westerns in the Films of the 1940s 47

4 Women and Western Films in the Cold War 75

5 After the Cold War: From the 1990s’ Interregnum

to 9/11 111

6 Women and Television Westerns, 1954–2001 129

7 Conclusion: Some Reflections on Women, Violence

and Westerns 151

Index 157

ix
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Is the Western an Inherently

Anti-feminist Genre?

Critical studies of Westerns in film and fiction not uncommonly describe

the genre as anti-feminist or even misogynistic in its representation of
men and women of the frontier. John Cawelti in his monumental study
of the genre The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel says that only two types of
women appear in Westerns, the schoolmarm and the dance hall girl (31),
and that the genre rejects “interchangeability of gender” roles because
in order for the genre to “affirm the new values of mobility, competi-
tion, and individualism, the female must remain feminine” (153). “Thus,
despite some surface changes,” Cawelti says, including those seen in
Westerns like Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman featuring female main pro-
tagonists, “the Western genre has always had a basically sexist orienta-
tion” (123). In West of Everything, Jane Tompkins argues that from
their inception Westerns were “secular, materialist, and antifeminist”
(32) because they repudiated “the cult of domesticity” (41) emerging
after the Civil War as women moved “out of the home and into pub-
lic life” (42). Thus “the women and the children cowering in the back-
ground […] legitimize the violence men practice in order to protect
them” (41). Likewise, Janet Thumin concludes that with the exception
of a few Westerns such as Westward the Women and The Ballad of Little
Jo, “the western and feminism seem to be contradictory terms” (353).
To make such arguments, however, is to desert a comprehensive
description of the genre, especially in film and television, where excep-
tions like Dr. Quinn, Westward the Women, and The Ballad of Little
Jo exist in far greater numbers than these authors suggest and thus

© The Author(s) 2018 1

M. E. Wildermuth, Feminism and the Western in Film and Television,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77001-7_1
2 M. E. Wildermuth

require some explanation. Some critics, like Jenni Calder and Sandra
Kay Sohakel, have noted that there are Westerns that do present
Western women who are independent and who raise hopes that the
genre can evolve to reflect women’s changing roles in American soci-
ety. Nevertheless, even these writers suggest that masculinism is the
operative norm for Westerns. Calder says, “Occasionally the courage,
determination, independence and incredible capacity for endurance
[of frontier women] is allowed to contribute richly to the Western, but
not as a rule” (158). Indeed, women’s “positive contributions to the
[Western] myth would be a welcome experiment” (173). Likewise,
Sohakel recognizes that independent women do emerge in Westerns but
she maintains, “The male perspective dominates the genre in ways in
which women’s roles are played in accordance with male expectations of
female behavior” (196).
Nevertheless, as Blake Lucas argues, it is unwise to dismiss the impor-
tance of women characters even in more traditional masculinist Westerns.
As Lucas says, the Western is “not a masculine genre but one supremely
balanced in its male/female aspect” (301). The genre does typically dis-
tinguish the two genders: “the man is the restless wanderer and figure of
action, while the woman is physically more passive and can embody the
values of civilization while standing in the doorway of the homestead”
(304). Thus “the woman in the Western can act on its narrative with a
subtle but real forcefulness, helping the hero to his destiny while finding
her own.” Indeed, “in the process [gender] archetypes often intriguingly
merge” in the Western (310–311).
However, this process of blurring traditional gender roles is more
widespread and complex than Lucas can fully attest to in his brief essay.
This blending of gender roles, and even more radical gestures regard-
ing gender in Western films and television, has its roots in the earliest
traditions of women writers in the frontier that predate and help lay a
foundation for the Western on the large and small screen. Annette
Kolodny’s 1984 study The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of
the American Frontiers, 1630–1869, which is briefly alluded to but not
discussed in depth by Tompkins (42), provides insight to the develop-
ing cultural countercurrents in America that would formulate the matrix
for subverting the masculinist paradigm of the classic Western. If the ico-
nography of the frontier in its masculine conception represented a vir-
ginal Eden to be forcibly possessed by dispossessing its native inhabitants
and exploiting its natural resources, for frontier women writers this land
 1 INTRODUCTION: IS THE WESTERN AN INHERENTLY ANTI-FEMINIST … 3

was as an Edenic garden to be cultivated and shared by men and women

in harmony with nature. Kolodny traces a “tradition of women’s public
statements” about the frontier in diaries, letters, essays and even fiction,
including the writings of early settlers like Rebecca Boone and philoso-
phers like Margaret Fuller (xi). The women project “an idealized domes-
ticity” where gardens “implied home and community, not privatized
erotic mastery” of a virginal landscape (xiii). This new kind of human
community “invites sharing instead of competition, generosity instead of
greed” (196).1
Interestingly, Kolodny concludes that these women’s fantasies of a
better America “left no lasting imprint on our shared cultural imagina-
tion” (225). Meanwhile, Christine Bold’s more recent 2012 study The
Frontier Club: Popular Westerns and Cultural Power, 1880–1924 paints
a slightly more complex portrait of the interactions between masculine
and feminine cultures in the genesis of the Western. The Frontier Club
was a group of Eastern aristocrats including such notables as Theodore
Roosevelt, Frederic Remington, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Owen Wister
(author of the first Western, The Virginian) who, linked through the
medium of print, “created the western as we now know it, yoking the
genre to their interests in […] mass publishing, Jim Crow segregation,
immigration restriction, and American Indian segregation” (xvii).
Nevertheless, the club was less successful in excluding women than
other marginalized groups. This was partly because women married to
club members exerted their own influence on the group’s print culture.
These women “claimed and protected imaginative space in the West”
and influenced the rise of “the women-centered western” in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries in print (97) where “family remained
an organizing narrative principle” (104). Still, Bold concludes, much
as Kolodny does, that this legacy is less palpable than the masculinized
Western paradigm. In the end, the Western hero is the individualistic,
competitive male, whose “violence is represented as unavoidable” with
the women ending up “in the male’s arms” (238).
Jane Johnson Bube similarly describes this feminine culture of the
women’s Western as something lost that needs to be reclaimed. She cites
women writers of dime novels at the turn of the century whose stories
“place women’s experiences and women’s characters as agents and main
actors of westerns” (68). These writers “questioned and destabilized
conservative gender ideals” (69). They also criticized the idea of man-
ifest destiny and the “mistreatment of ” other marginalized groups like
4 M. E. Wildermuth

“Indians and Mormons” and “claimed women’s right to […] discover

careers” (82). Nevertheless, Bube also implies that these alternative
Westerns ended by the early twentieth century and left little to no impact
on our popular culture.
It is the contention of the present study, however, that these subver-
sive gestures continued to exert an influence on the Western genre in
film and television, from the inception of the sound era Western in the
1930s to the early twenty-first century. Cawelti, Thumin and Tompkins
underestimate the significance of the impact of women characters in
Westerns that so strongly emphasize the agency of women characters,
that they can indeed be called pro-feminist Westerns. As all of these
critics attest, the polarities of civilization and savagery define the ideol-
ogy, themes and values of protagonists and antagonists in the Western.
Typically, women are identified with civilization to which the frontier
hero, dwelling between these polarities, must be drawn if he is to suc-
ceed as a protagonist. Women often play a role in that process. The typ-
ically dark-haired dance hall girl will be rejected for the lighter-haired
schoolmarm who teaches the frontier hero to balance his violent savage
side with civilized attributes such as compassion and respect for the social
order that must someday prevail if law and order are to be established to
secure the domestic tranquility that the heroine stands for.
Nevertheless, there are counter gestures to this in film and television
that provide alternative ways to establish order. The masculinist Western
accepts the traditional distinction whereby the public realm is masculin-
ized and the domestic or private realm is the site of feminine influence.
The pro-feminist Western rejects this premise, arguing that even in the
world of the Western, women can function as agents in both the private
and public realms. As a result, the more progressive women Western
heroes develop and signify somewhat different sets of values from
their sisters in the traditional Western. Typically, while they sometimes
embody domestic values that women are often identified with in tradi-
tional Westerns—things like love, compassion, respect for the individual
and for the laws needed to secure their rights—they also can embrace
values embodied by the men. Many show reluctance to adopt violence
as a way to establish justice on the lawless frontier, but most will use it
in order to protect human rights and the rights to domestic peace and
security. Some (primarily in televisual Westerns) also believe in harnessing
the forces of nature but only to benefit society as a whole—not solely
for profit. In short, they often seek to extend the values of the domestic
 1 INTRODUCTION: IS THE WESTERN AN INHERENTLY ANTI-FEMINIST … 5

realm to the public realm to ensure that the potential for exploiting the
land and its people will not be pursued. Violence is justified only when
it unswervingly serves benevolent ends. And, increasingly, as we move
from the 1930s to the post war era, women protagonists show a capac-
ity not only for the self-sacrifice associated with the traditional Western
heroine but also for self-gratification and professional self-fulfillment
more often associated with the masculine protagonists. The quest of the
Western pro-feminist protagonist is not only one for justice and domestic
tranquility but one for public agency and subjecthood in a masculinized
landscape which seeks to deny women these things.
It should be noted, however, that not all of these pro-feminist women
protagonists associate themselves with the domestic. Visual pro-feminist
Westerns, as we will see in later chapters, evolve in three major stages
where the focus shifts over time from the domestic to the public realm.
(The televisual Western is an exception, for reasons we will explore in
depth in the chapter on TV Westerns.) In stage one, films of the 1930s
borrow from first-wave feminism of the Progressive era (late nineteenth
century to the 1920s) wherein women progressives sought to undermine
the aggressive individualistic capitalism and exploitation of marginalized
groups by bringing domestic values focusing on egalitarian cooperation
into the public realm—thereby also enabling women to be empowered in
public. In stage two, films of the 1940s maintain the earlier stance, but in
the context of so many women entering the public workforce during the
war, begin to focus on women’s individualism and need for satisfaction in
work, while also more explicitly exploring their sexuality. In stage three,
films of the post-war era and beyond, while some women protagonists still
associate themselves with domesticity even as they find agency in public,
others complete eschew their domestic identities and find agency in public
much as male protagonists, under the influence of second-wave feminism.
Interestingly, because so many of the women protagonists are white,
third-wave feminism, with its emphasis on race and gender themes, does
not represent a major influence on these Westerns. Indeed, none of the
later forms of feminism have much impact on these Westerns—mainly
because the majority of them were made before these philosophies
became a major influence in American culture. Strangely, the white fem-
inist norm in Westerns survives into the twenty-first century. Even a film
like Bandidas (2006), where the women protagonists are Hispanic, does
not take full advantage of the potential for establishing a non-white fem-
inist norm. Perhaps this has to do with the film industry’s perceptions
6 M. E. Wildermuth

of the genre’s demography. Either way, first- and second-wave feminism

remain the primary influences on these Westerns. This, of course, limits
these films to heteronormative paradigms, which, unfortunately, prevents
women protagonists in Westerns from exploring the most radical means
available for subverting masculinism.
How then are we defining the pro-feminist visual Western as a fem-
inist cultural artifact in this study? We define it as any cinematic or tel-
evisual Western that, through the actions of its plot and characters,
represents and implicitly endorses the most progressive conceptualiza-
tions of the feminine subject empowered politically and socially as an
agent in the current cultural milieu that produced that Western. These
progressive conceptualizations will sometimes be only implied by the
political and social activities of the time, while at other times they will be
more fully and explicitly articulated by feminist thinkers in public media.
On some occasions, the progressivism of earlier times may not conform
with or seem to meet the standards of feminism in the post New Left
culture of today. Nevertheless, the intention here is to trace the develop-
ment of the feminist thinking in these films as it evolved from the 1930s
to the present. The result will be a history of these increasingly progres-
sive representations of women in Westerns, which will enable us to see
how far the genre has evolved with regard to subverting the conventions
of the genre in film and television.
The definition of feminism implicit in all of these Westerns, regard-
less of their respective times and cultural contexts, is the empowerment
of women socially, economically and psychologically in the public realm
by all the means available in the culture of the time. As we will see, the
means made available in the respective cultures of these Westerns will
often pose challenges for representing feminine empowerment in these
films, but the progressive drive for agency in the public realm for women
is discernible and very much opposed to the masculinist norms of the
genre. Hence, these films do indeed embody a feminist ethos, albeit one
that continues to evolve under various cultural influences, which we will
describe in depth in the ensuing chapters.

Methodology
The intention of this study, therefore, is to avoid any presentist bias in
describing and analyzing the evolution of feminist ideology in Western
films and television. This will also enhance the book’s capacity for
 1 INTRODUCTION: IS THE WESTERN AN INHERENTLY ANTI-FEMINIST … 7

implementing a rhetoric of inclusion to enable readers with many takes

on feminist philosophy to appreciate and make use of this study. The
method reflects a post-Althusserian emphasis on the impact of ideology
on the material, political and cultural aspects of human life. Although
this book does not implement the kind of purely Marxist/Structuralist
analysis that Louis Althusser practiced, it nevertheless shares a similar
focus with his work that can allow this study to describe the material
impact of something as seemingly immaterial as ideology and informa-
tion on the lives of men and women in America.
Louis Althusser’s most famous piece on ideology entitled “Ideology
and Ideological State Apparatus” indicated that ideological state appara-
tus (ISA) such as television, radio, the press, literature and the arts, plus
institutions like the church and schools, reflected the “ideology of the
ruling class” (1343). ISAs not only defined for the culture what was eth-
ical or unethical behavior (1353–1354), but they also defined “‘truth’ or
‘error’” in cultural products like the literature human subjects imbibed
(1356). The state thereby defined the individual subject with this ide-
ology that “‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects” conforming to
the values of the state (1356). Additionally, this defines the gendered
roles of “the sexual subject” (1357). Hence ideology defines the rela-
tionship of the human subject to the state, and so the ISAs lead to “the
reproduction of the relations of production, i.e. of capitalist relations of
exploitation” of individuals by the state (1346). Althusser nevertheless
concluded that the masses can resist if they “turn the weapon of ideology
against the classes in power” (1343, n. 3).
The Westerns here show this potential for subverting norms and
presenting representations of women that theoretically have a posi-
tive impact on the culture and the individuals living in it. In order to
demonstrate this, the focus of the study is on women professionals in
Westerns. The term professional can have many meanings in our culture
today—with the general assumption being that a professional is someone
who requires some kind of education or specialized training in order to
assume some kind of public role to be performed for the benefit of the
society and the individual who performs that role. In short, laborers are
not typically included in this description.
One must use a somewhat more flexible definition of profession-
alism in the context of the Western, however. Here the term profes-
sional means someone who in the process of performing her work and
her main social function moves from the private domestic realm to the
8 M. E. Wildermuth

public realm. It does not include pioneer women who work in the home.
It does include every other kind of public profession for women exhib-
ited in the genre—and this includes everything from mule skinners to
gun slingers, and from doctors to bar maids. This is necessary to trace
the pro-feminist Western’s rejection of the public and private gendered
paradigms—something that is quite discernible in the evolution of
these Westerns. The intention here is not to inadvertently support the
gendered public/private paradigm by suggesting unintentionally that
women’s public work is somehow more important than their private
duties—far from it. But in order to see and trace how Western feminist
protagonists evolve greater agency and independence, it is necessary
to focus on these polarities of public and private that indicate how the
evolution takes place. In short, women professionals in Westerns repre-
sent a handy kind of barometer for reading cultural and social progress
for women as reflected in Westerns. This means that interesting female
protagonists in films like High Noon, True Grit and others must be over-
looked so that protagonists who better fit the profile can be discussed in
depth.
The focus here will also be on Westerns set in the nineteenth century
or at the turn of the century rather than on those set in the twentieth
century. This makes the task of stabilizing genre boundaries simpler and
avoids the confusion that can come with modern Westerns that often
seem as much like murder mysteries, action films or crime dramas as they
do Westerns. This avoids the problem of site contamination from other
genres that might distort or falsify a truer barometric reading of the fem-
inist Western and its evolution. This unfortunately means overlooking
interesting modern Westerns like Coogan’s Bluff, Wynonna Earp, and
The Electric Horseman, but the line must be drawn somewhere.
The historicity of feminism in this study is based on a sampling of
feminist historians’ writings that enable a re-telling of significant devel-
opments in American culture that supported a feminist mindset from
the 1890s to the present. Beginning in the Progressive era, covering the
period of approximately the last decade of the nineteenth century and
the first two decades of the twentieth century, we see the rise of many
progressive ideas on women during the age of reform in America. It was
a time full of paradoxes that would complicate the history of w ­ omen’s
Westerns and the feminism they incorporated within them from the
1930s to the present. This is because, as we shall see below, the progres-
sive movements identified with the rise of first-wave American feminism
 1 INTRODUCTION: IS THE WESTERN AN INHERENTLY ANTI-FEMINIST … 9

are also rooted in certain assumptions about women’s nature that was
widespread in the nineteenth century. These assumptions indicated that
women were naturally constituted to have more refined feelings than
men and were therefore more sympathetic than men and more inclined
to help those who had been victimized by society. Such assumptions
helped women become involved in the American political scene at a time
when the rise of industrial giants had raised issues about the rights of
workers who appeared in many ways to be exploited by the new capitalist
venture. Women were seen as being immanently suited to this kind of
work, just as they were seen as being more suited to working as nurses
and aids for the homeless and other unfortunates in society. Indeed,
women active in politics at the time, and many feminist separatists felt it
was the job of women to extend the domestic values of love and sympa-
thy to the public realm to protect the rights of people who were seen as
being exploited in this culture of competition and profit. Nevertheless,
this was seen as problematic because it meant that women moving into
the public realm of professionalism could only do so if they were doing
this as a matter of self-sacrifice rather than personal and professional
gratification. Hence implicit in the liberating gestures of the time were
assumptions about women that women professionals would also have
to fight in order to secure subjecthood in the professional realm, which
was dominated by men who could assume that personal and professional
gratification were, for all intents and purposes, God-given rights for
men only. Still, the insistence that men could adopt domestic values in
the public realm seemed to imply that essentialist assumptions about
­women’s inherent sensitivity were incorrect—an idea that will also be
implicitly reflected in early sound age Westerns.
As we will see, this struggle for women’s rights in the public realm
intensified for women in the 1930s when the global depression and the
American culture of the New Deal suggested that the American male,
wounded as he had been by the trauma of an unpopular World War I and
by the scarcity of work in America, needed to be protected from the fem-
inism of Progressive era America. The job shortage led many to conclude
that it was wrong for women to compete with men as professionals, and
as a result the gendered paradigm of private and public reasserted itself.
If the Progressive era had promoted an egalitarian companionship ori-
ented ideal for relationships between men and women, then the New
Deal promoted one based on what we will describe below as the com-
rade ideal. In the former, men and women pursue relationships where
10 M. E. Wildermuth

both seek companionship based on intellectual and sexual compatibility,

as well as social equality. In the latter paradigm, no matter how much
responsibility the woman may take in the public and private realms, she
remains subordinate to her mate. This further complicates the problem
of women professionals and whether they can seek personal gratification
in the public realm—an issue we will see reflected in the many cinematic
Westerns.
Implicit answers and later explicit discussion of these issues came
in the years of World War II and the years following. Despite initial
attempts to maintain the New Deal anti-feminist paradigm, the war
implicitly changed everything. We see here the rise of an American secu-
rity state organized to direct the nation’s resources toward defending
America from both external and internal security threats, including pos-
sibly feminism. Nevertheless, the need for women to join the labor force
and the need for women in uniform during a time of industrial age war-
fare, where the efforts of everyone must be enlisted to secure victory,
enabled women to move decisively into the public realm as profession-
als. And interestingly, just after the war ended, women continued to play
these roles, partly because of the positive economic impact on their lives,
but also perhaps implicitly because the culture was beginning to accept
the idea that self-gratification for women in the professional realm was as
acceptable for women as the older idea of self-sacrifice. This change was
reflected in Westerns of the time, discussed below.
With the coming of the Cold War, a new security state sought to sta-
bilize gender boundaries according to the old pre-Progressive ideas on
gender with the rise of a new suburban middle class culture where the
woman was once again expected to be restricted to the private realm.
But increasing numbers of women seeking college degrees and employ-
ment seemed to undercut the thrust of this new security state culture.
Moreover, articulations of a new second-wave American feminism appear
in the Old Left philosophies of writers like Betty Friedan and the New
Left feminism that establishes power bases for itself in women’s political
organizations and in American academia. With the rise of the counter
culture and in the wake of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights move-
ment, American feminism established its ability to question and coun-
ter the gendered hierarchies re-emerging in the American security state.
In the 1980s came the first backlash against this feminism with the rise
of the New Right. This was followed by the interregnum of the 1990s
in which the security state lost some of its strength, and experimentation
 1 INTRODUCTION: IS THE WESTERN AN INHERENTLY ANTI-FEMINIST … 11

with ideas on gender was renewed. This was followed by yet another
backlash against feminism detected by feminists with the rise of a secu-
rity regime after 9/11. Nevertheless, feminism used these backlashes
as a means to refine its ideas in a cultural milieu whose ­postmodernity
allowed it to adopt many new epistemologies in order to consider
­women’s new place in the public realm.
The progressive feminist Westerns studied below reflect this his-
tory and incorporate contemporary features of feminism into their cul-
tural rhetoric. Chapter 2 describes early sound-era feminist Westerns
in the milieu of the depression. In Westerns like Cimarron, Annie
Oakley, The Plainsman, Union Pacific, and Destry Rides Again, we see
implicit critiques of the comradely ideal and support for the more pro-
gressive companionly ideal. We also see women protagonists struggling
with the complex issue of self-gratification and self-sacrifice in the pro-
fessional realm. With Chapter 3 in the 1940s, we see these issues con-
tinuing to create problems for woman protagonists in films such as The
Great Man’s Wife, The Sea of Grass, The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful
Bend, and Calamity Jane and Sam Bass. Women become increasingly
independent subjects in the context of the war, and the questions of
self-sacrifice and gratification for women professionals move toward a
resolution. Chapter 4 studies women’s progressive Westerns in the post-
war era looking at films from the Cold War that include Westward the
Women, Johnny Guitar and Hannie Caulder to name a few. Here we see
the move towards embracing self-gratification and total independence in
the public realm. Chapter 5 describes an increasingly radical postmodern
feminist stance in films after the Cold War in films such as Bad Girls,
The Ballad of Little Jo, and The Quick and the Dead (among others). The
book concludes with a discussion of women’s Westerns on television
from the 1950s to the twenty-first century. Here we will see that, unlike
the feminist Westerns preceding them in motion pictures, televisual
Westerns seek to incorporate the ideal described above by Kolodny of the
West as an egalitarian garden where not only are men and women equals
but so too are all races and the denizens of the natural world in general.
Cinematic Westerns do not always function in this capacity; racist stere-
otypes sometimes appear in depictions of African Americans and Native
Americans in these films. For reasons described in depth in Chapter 5,
the televisual women’s Western is truly a horse of a very different dis-
position, one that often leads it in some ways to be the most progres-
sive of the breed, one which in varying degrees anticipates or embodies
12 M. E. Wildermuth

post-colonial conceptions of manifest destiny in the Old West. All of

these Westerns show that feminist ideology can be productively incor-
porated into the Western film genre in such a fashion as to suggest that
there is indeed a great alternative to the masculinist vision of the West as
a site only for individualistic competition and aggression. The West can
also be a site for cooperation, unity and diversity where men and women
share responsibilities in the public and private realms.
Before we proceed with this study, however, more needs to be said
about domesticity as it is such an important concept for many of the
Westerns in this study. It should be pointed out that some postmod-
ern and post-colonial feminists like Laura Wexler and Amy Kaplan have
noted that the domestic scene can be a site for oppression and imperi-
alistic rhetoric in the writings and photography even of women in nine-
teenth century America. Kaplan says that the domestic is “related to the
imperialist project of civilizing” (25), and Wexler sees similar t­endencies
in women’s nineteenth-century domestic photography (6). Nevertheless,
Wexler also sees signs of “serious social protest” in some of that domes-
tic photography (8). Moreover, says Wexler, even if some photographers
missed the opportunity to undermine the imperialist culture of their
times, they nevertheless sometimes managed to undermine assump-
tions about gendered hierarchies, as in the case of photographer Alice
Austin (12). Hence the domestic realm was a complex site offering
opportunities for subversion as well as support for the status quo just as
the Progressive era that inspired so many of the films in this study was
dawning.
Indeed, domesticity and its relationship to feminism are more com-
plex subjects than even the scholarship of Kaplan and Wexler indicate.
Domesticity is still a significant trope for feminism even in the twenty-
first century, as some feminist writers have shown. In their introduc-
tion to a collection of essays on this subject, Domesticity and Popular
Culture (Routledge, 2009), editors Stacy Gillis and Joanne Hollows
indicate that domesticity and the values associated with it still shapes
feminism. Although second-wave feminism promulgated the idea that
“domestic life is contrary to the aims of feminism” (1), domesticity
can be productively constructed “as compatible with feminism rather
than its antithesis” (4–5). Hence even the domestic feminism of a nine-
teenth-century feminist like Catherine Beecher espousing the moral
superiority of women who seek to take domestic values into the pub-
lic realm can be seen as compatible with modern feminism, despite her
 1 INTRODUCTION: IS THE WESTERN AN INHERENTLY ANTI-FEMINIST … 13

essentialist assumptions about women and morality (4). Indeed, Gillis

and Hollows cite the theories of feminists like Leslay Johnson and
Justine Lloyd who in 2004 argued that “feminism has the responsibil-
ity to reassert the importance of these [domestic] values in the public
world in a way that challenges the [gendered] separation of home and
work life and the relegation of humane values to the home”(9). Gillis
and Hollows also cite Iris Marion Young as a feminist who in 1997
argued that “feminists need to revisit the politics of home and explore
how home might be reimagined in ways that are consistent with feminist
agenda” (16).
Likewise, in her 2016 study Extreme Domesticity, Susan Fraiman
takes issue with the notion that domesticity should be seen as “shor-
ing up capitalism, colonialism, and other structures of domination” (4).
While it can be associated with those things, domesticity can also pro-
mote “jarring juxtapositions coinciding with female masculinity, fem­
inism, queerness, and divorce,” thereby inculcating “gender rebels”
who can “represent the deviant flip side of the domestic ideal” by being
“outsiders to normative domesticity” (4–5). She questions the “tendency
in American studies to demonize the domestic” (6). She looks back
to the nineteenth-century “‘bad girl’ tradition [where] domesticity
is reconfigured as a language of female self-sufficiency, ambition, and
pleasure” (22).
This process of reconfiguration continues to this day. In her 2010
feminist treatise Radical Homemakers, Shannon Hayes argues the new
domestic feminist’s “life’s work is to create a new, pleasurable, sustaina-
ble and socially just society, different from any that we have known in the
last 5,000 years” (17). The goal is to rebuild “a life-serving, socially just
and ecologically sustainable economy while honoring the values of fem-
inism” (18–19). And this is a goal that can be shared by the professional
in the public realm who does not necessarily invest solely in the domestic
environment for “not all careers are soul sucking ventures” (31). “The
balancing act with a good career is to achieve personal fulfillment, to
contribute to society, but also to honor the four tenets of ecological sus-
tainability, social justice, family and community” (32).
Haynes’ words and the words of other domestic radicals quoted
briefly above recall the kind of imagined garden of equality and ecolog-
ical stability described in Kolodny’s study of frontier women’s writings
before 1900. And they reflect similar ideas and temperaments informing
the Westerns we are about to discuss below. While these films initially
14 M. E. Wildermuth

ignore issues about colonialism and environment, they eventually turn

to them after World War II. From their inception, all of these Westerns
will focus on feminine empowerment in the public realm. Some will see
domestic values as keys to that empowerment, some later will not. But
all of them show some compatibility with today’s feminism to the extent
that in a number of ways they shed the essentialist tendencies of earlier
forms of first-wave feminism and the cult of womanhood. Firstly, those
films that do argue for the superiority of domestic values will insist that
both men and women can share in these values and build a better society
from them. Hence there is no essentialist assumption that women alone
can embody these values. Second, all of these films will transcend essen-
tialism to the degree that all insist that women can be the equals of men
in terms of rationality, courage and mastery of empowering technologies
that include everything from the spade, to the stethoscope, to the six-
gun. Finally, because the most progressive of the women protagonists
will also achieve empowerment in the public realm, they also subvert the
gendering of the public and the private realms that lay at the essentialist
core of the cult of womanhood that these women protagonists clearly
transcend. Hence all of these Westerns will show that in varying degrees
and in varying ways, the genre is indeed capable of embracing feminist
attitudes emerging in the cultures of their respective times.
And now, let us begin.

Note
1. Interestingly, Kolodny has never retracted her argument that women in the
frontier were less complicit in supporting manifest destiny or the imperial-
ist enterprise than their masculine counterparts. In an e-mail to this author
dated August 10, 2017, she indicates that she “never wavered or retracted
anything I wrote in the book,” The Land Before Her.

Works Cited
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus.” The Norton
Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York:
W. M. Norton, 2010. 1341–1361. Print.
The Ballad of Little Jo. Dir. Maggie Greenwald. Fine Line Features, 1995. New
Line Home Video, 2003. DVD.
Calder, Jenni. There Must Be a Lone Ranger: The American West in Film and
Reality. New York: The McGraw-Hill Company, 1974. Print.
 1 INTRODUCTION: IS THE WESTERN AN INHERENTLY ANTI-FEMINIST … 15

Cawelti, John G. The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel. Bowling Green: Bowling Green
State University Popular Press, 1999. Print.
Coogan’s Bluff. Dir. Don Siegel. Universal Pictures, 1968. Film.
The Electric Horseman. Dir. Sydney Pollack. Columbia/Universal, 1979. Film.
Fraimen, Susan. Extreme Domesticity: A View from the Margins. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2016. Print.
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W. M. Norton, 2009. Print.
Hayes, Shannon. Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer
Culture. Richmondville, NY: Left to Right Press, 2010.
High Noon. Dir. Fred Zinneman. Perf. Gary Cooper and Grace Kelley. United
Artists, 1952. Film.
Hillis, Stacy and Joanne Hollows, Eds. Domesticity and Popular Culture. New
York: Routledge, 2009. Print.
Kaplan, Amy. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Print.
Kolodny, Annette. E-mail to the Author. 10 August. 2017. E-mail.
Kolodny, Annette. The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American
Frontiers, 1630–1860. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press,
1984. Print.
“Pilot.” Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. Perf. Jane Seymour. A&E/CBS, 2013.
DVD.
Sohakel, Sandra Kay. “Women in Western Films: The Civilizer, the Saloon
Singer, and Their Mothers and Sisters.” Shooting Stars: Heroes and Heroines
of Western Films. Ed. Archie P. MacDonald. Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 1987. 157–215. Print.
Thumin, Janet. “‘Maybe He’s Tough but He Sure Ain’t No Carpenter’:
Masculinity and Incompetence in Unforgiven.” The Western Reader. Ed. Jim
Kitses and Gregg Rickmann. New York: Limelight Editions, 1998. 301–320.
Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992. Print.
True Grit. Dir. Henry Hathaway. Perf. John Wayne and Kim Darby. Paramount,
1969. Film.
Westward the Women. Dir. William A. Wellman. MGM Studios, 1951. Warner
Archive, 2012. DVD.
Wexler, Laura. Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism.
Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Print.
Wynonna Earp. The Sci-Fi Channel, 2016. Television.
 CHAPTER 2

Women Professionals in 1930s’ Film:

Westerns in the Context of the Progressive
Age and the New Deal Gender Politics

The sound era is an appropriate place to begin our survey of women

professionals in Westerns since silent Westerns seldom focus intently
on relationships between men and women. Sound opens up new possi-
bilities for exploring relationships between the sexes via dialogue. The
1930s are also of interest since there was an interesting tradition in the
latter nineteenth century and early twentieth century of feminism and
woman’s professionalism in America that came into question during the
Depression era as men and women began to vie for jobs as the economy
declined. The result was a New Deal paradigm, which simultaneously
evoked the progressive models of the nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies that gave rise to first-wave feminism; it also sometimes sought to
contain those models in order to promote the heroic ideal of the mascu-
line worker.
Robyn Muncy’s 1991 study Creating Female Dominion in American
Reform, 1890–1935 is especially helpful for understanding the cultural
paradigm of the Progressive era, which helped shape perceptions of
women and professionalism before and during the Depression era. She
refers to the first two decades of the twentieth century as the Progressive
era “because they constituted a period of vital response to the social and
economic changes wrought by industrialization in the previous half-
century” (29). Hence the Gilded Age Women’s Christian’s Union and
similar female-oriented reform organizations of the nineteenth century
were an antecedent to the Progressive era (28). However, if the Gilded
age reformers emphasized democratic interaction versus “laissez-faire

© The Author(s) 2018 17

M. E. Wildermuth, Feminism and the Western in Film and Television,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77001-7_2
18 M. E. Wildermuth

individualism,” the Progressives focused on “efficiency” in creating

bureaucracies and consensus to “rationalize and systematize American
life.” In the end, “both sets of ideals—democracy and efficiency—joined
to produce Progressive reform” (29).
Interestingly, the inherent conflict between individualism and cooper-
ation would prove to be part of the difficulty involved in conceptualizing
the potentially liberating ideal of the woman professional. This is because
while the idea of a woman professional emerged in this time, even as
women fought to attain voting rights, it was nevertheless made problem-
atic by certain pervasive cultural stereotypes that simultaneously provided
opportunities for women to move into the public sphere as free agents
but also hampered their progress by virtue of how they characterized
the supposedly natural characteristics of women. As Muncy indicates,
“Prescriptions for female behavior directly contradicted the solidifying
requirements of professional conduct: lingering nineteenth-century ide-
als urged women toward passivity, humility and self-sacrifice while pro-
fessionalism demanded activity, confidence and self-assertion” (xiii). The
cult of womanhood of the time “proclaimed women the natural harbors
of spiritual and moral values in the acquisitive seas of Jacksonian America
and further apotheosized women as that half of the human race moti-
vated only by concern for others.” Woman served “best through child
rearing, charitable activities, and nursing the wounds sustained by indi-
vidual men and communities in battles for political and economic advan-
tage” (3). Women in short were the private balm for the rampant, violent
individualism in the public realm.
Women were therefore excluded from professions like law and rele-
gated to professions such as nursing. Nevertheless, Muncy says there was
a middle ground between these two extremes in professions like social
work, public health and home economics that “produced uniquely
female ways of being professional” (xiv). These women could then “use
their power and patronage to socialize subsequent generations of women
into a common reform culture” (xiv). This made possible, especially
after acquisition of the vote, women eventually moving into the reform-
oriented apparatus of the government, such as the child welfare move-
ment, all the way into the 1930s.
Yet despite this evolution politically and socially, there were still con-
flicts for women professionals in the culture during the early twentieth
century. For “women, service continued to imply self-abnegation” (22).
Looking at women doctors, for example in reformist institutions like
 2 WOMEN PROFESSIONALS IN 1930s’ FILM … 19

Chicago’s Hull House in the early twentieth century, Muncy says that
those who prioritized “private practice” over “serving the needy” were
criticized as being self-serving—charges that their masculine colleagues
never had to face (22–23). Thus, success only was awarded to those
women professionals who “subscribed to the ideal of service” (26).
Nevertheless, women going into social work and health professions,
even in these conditions, were challenging the cultural perception that
the public realm belonged to men and the private domestic sphere was
solely the provenance of women. Women from the late nineteenth cen-
tury through the early twentieth century were convinced that the cul-
ture of exploitation created by industrialization must be combated in the
public realm. “‘Women’s place is in the Home,’ proclaimed one female
reformer, but Home is not contained within the four walls of an indi-
vidual house. Home is the community” (Muncy 36). Hence Muncy says
that women moving into government “maintained commitments […]
to public service […] to the […] integration of their public and private
lives” (65). From the 1890s into the 1920s, these women “were gaining
the strength of numbers and perspective needed to move these strategies
from the local to the national level” (37). In short, if the major thrust of
first-wave feminism was attaining voting rights and the right to obtain
public positions as professionals, the transportation of domestic values
into the public sphere represented, for women of this time, the ethical
underpinnings for challenging society’s new post-industrial masculine
and sexist mores.
Writing in the introduction of Gender, Class, Race and Reform in
the Progressive Era (1991), Nancy S. Dye confirms these conclusions
and sheds further light on the evolution of female professionals at this
time. While at the beginning of the era women focused on local issues,
as time went on they entered politics “at the municipal and state levels”
(2). And “In doing so, they envisioned a new, humane state, identified
with the values of the home rather than those of the market place with
powers to protect its powerless and dependent constituencies” (27).
Women had to subvert the gendered paradigm where the public was
masculine and the private was feminine because their “domestic duties
compelled their interest in municipal politics” (4). This was happening
because “with industrialization […], women exchanged the role of pro-
ducer for the less powerful role of consumer” (3–4). Unfortunately, “By
failing to challenge prevailing stereotypes, women reformers helped cod-
ify a limited public domain for women, particularly in the work place”
20 M. E. Wildermuth

(5). Women were still believed to be best suited to jobs entailing nurs-
ing and self-sacrifice. Hence, they remained barred “from the traditions
of American individualism” (5). It was as if the price women reformers
paid for fighting the rampant individualism of the corporations and rob-
ber barons was to have their own individual needs abnegated and their
own subjecthood and agency as professionals denied. Denial of self was
permissible but self-satisfaction and self-empowerment—anything even
vaguely like a masculine ego—were not.
For all that, the progress made here regarding women’s roles did,
as Dye argues, have a positive impact for feminism in America. Even
though they lacked a larger feminist theoretical perspective to work from,
Dye contends that these reformers “served to define early twentieth-
century feminism.” This is because while the earliest Progressive era
reformers born in the 1850s and 1860s focused on cultural ideals of
maternity, those born in the 1870s and 1880s “centered their under-
standing of women on the emerging roles of female workers.” For these
reformers, “Paid labor, not social mothering, represented the route to
emancipation, as well as the organizational basis for their reform efforts”
as made evident on their growing focus on women’s labor and trade
organizations (8).
Briefly then, we can sum up the import of women reformers in the
Progressive era for the changing image of the woman professional in
the context of an emerging first-wave feminist sensibility at this time.
While the culture still insisted that women were fit only for duties in the
domestic realm, owing to women’s supposed sensitivity to the needs of
the family, this philosophy ultimately served to empower them, unwit-
tingly, in the face of a rising and expanding industrialism in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If industrialists empowered
themselves through uncontrolled competition, individualism and com-
petition, then women would be seen as the antidote to the more crim-
inal and inhumane excesses of this culture due to their being supposed
to be the moral and spiritual centers of the culture via their sensitiv-
ity to human plight. Hence they were compelled to extend the values
of the domestic realm to the public realm—and therefore despite the
sexist assumptions underlying this very movement, women managed
both philosophically and through their actions, to subvert the gendered
public/private paradigm that sought to oppress them. In the process of
doing so, they became workers in the public domain and would seek
political power to secure their capacity for employment. And, as noted
 2 WOMEN PROFESSIONALS IN 1930s’ FILM … 21

throughout Dye’s and Muncy’s analyses, concomitant results were also

educational opportunities for women, advancement into men’s profes-
sions like medicine and, of course, eventually, the right to vote. Hence,
if one were to jump ahead to the first generation of American feminists
following Betty Friedan’s early second-wave definition of feminism,
these women, despite their lack of a shared, fully articulated philosoph-
ical paradigm for questioning cultural stereotypes, nevertheless man-
aged to meet Friedan’s 1962 criteria of feminism—namely a movement
toward securing equal opportunities for women and men in politics,
education and professionalism. Certainly the groundwork for a Friedan-
style emancipation was being laid here—so the woman professionals of
the Progressive era could rightly be characterized as an early embodi-
ment of values that formed the very foundation of American feminism.
By moving domestic values into the public realm and insisting men
adopt them, they also laid the groundwork for challenging the essen-
tialist assumption that compassion and sensitivity belonged solely in the
domain of the feminine. In short, while their efforts today may appear
to be only an attempt to feminize American culture, these women
were nevertheless the first American feminists because they sought
public agency for women through education, and legal and social
empowerment.
However, as our next group of feminist historians shows, this progress
would be challenged during the New Deal era. As Laura Hapke argues in
Daughters of the Great Depression (1995), there was a tremendous nega-
tive reaction to the gains feminism had made in the Progressive era due
to the fear that men and women would compete with one another for
the same jobs. Hence, “working women, especially married ones, became
the scapegoats of a movement to reassert the separate sphere thinking
of past decades.” Indeed, nondomestic work was seen as “unwomanly
and potentially emasculating” to men (xv). Even as the woman’s labor
force and union activity grew, “the working woman was discouraged
from feminist agitation—or executive board leadership—by both male
party and union officials” (xvi). Moreover, all women were “denied
equal pay for equal work under the provisions of the National Recovery
Administration (NRA) code; if married, they were strictly forbidden
from government and other employment as a section of the Federal
Economy Act; and similarly were restricted by the agenda of mainstream
periodical articles with titles such as ‘Do You Need Your Job?’” Thus
emerged “the back-to-the home-movement” (xvii).
22 M. E. Wildermuth

Interestingly, Hapke sees forms of rebellion against this culture in

the fiction written at his time—and this includes radical fiction and even
the popular fiction of writers like Margaret Mitchell. Women writers like
Olsen and Smedley “revise the proletarian family by challenging the era’s
orthodoxies about housework and women’s work alike.” Indeed, their
fiction explores women’s “new roles as self-supporting or family bread
winner” even as other writers succumbed to the “misogynistic laboring
(or writing) environment of the 1930’s” (xx). Women, in short “longed
for a feminine new deal” (8) as they watched their proportion in the
work force decline “by the end of the depression to a level hardly higher
than it had been twenty years earlier” (8).
Hapke’s comments are especially interesting in the context of Barbara
Melosh’s study Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in
New Deal Public Art and Theater (1991), which focuses on New Deal
era representations of men and women in the visual arts and drama.
Melosh confirms the repressive nature of the period for women and fem-
inist thinking: “The New Deal stands as the single example of a liberal
American reform movement not accompanied by a resurgence of femi-
nism. Instead, the strains of economic depression reinforced the contain-
ments of feminism that had begun after the winning of suffrage. As men
lost their jobs, women became the targets of public hostility and restric-
tive policy.” Indeed, the youth culture that had sanctioned the postwar
version of the New Woman “seemed to disappear overnight” (1).
According to Melosh, during the Progressive era, “new ideas about
sexuality found their way from psychoanalytic theory to more popu-
lar forms. Advice literature attacked Victorian sexual morality and sup-
ported a more positive view of female sexuality.” Hence cultural ideals
of marriage shifted from nineteenth-century notions of duty to aspira-
tions for friendship, mutuality, and sexual expression. “Hence emerged
the ideology of the ‘companionate marriage,’ which even entertained the
idea of trial marriage to test the viability of marriages based on friend-
ship and sexual desire.” Nevertheless, in the 1930s the ‘comradely ideal’
emerged, a revision of the companionate marriage, “one that deempha-
sized its privatism and instead made marriage a trope for citizenship.”
The comradely marriage “offered some accommodations to feminist
aspirations and bolstered an image of manhood battered by a discredited
war [WWI] and a demoralizing economic depression” (4).
The result is that as the iconography shifted from the Progressive era’s
companionate marriage to the comradely ideal, woman were demoted to
 2 WOMEN PROFESSIONALS IN 1930s’ FILM … 23

second class citizen status in public art and in drama such as that pro-
moted by the Federal Theater Project. While we see “sturdy proletarian
women of the 1930s’ fiction, photography and visual art” the images
were also “instantly maternal and familial” (3). Even though women
were “promoted to partners of the manly workers […] overall, women
occupied a somewhat subordinate place in the characteristic imagery of
art and stage, outnumbered by their male counterparts and overshad-
owed by the heroic imagery of manhood” (236). Even as character types
such as the rebellious young girl and the pacifistic mother emerged in
the iconography of the time, these images of women too were demoted
to “supporting players in male narratives of work and politics” (232).
In light of the crisis of masculinity evoked by the horrors of WWI and
the Depression, “the public art and drama registered the rechanneling
of female activism and weakness of feminist politics during the New
Deal” (231).
The cinematic Westerns of this time, however, proved to be even
more complex in their representations of the female professional. Like
the public art and drama Melosh describes, they will sometimes reflect
the comradely ideal that simultaneously evokes the feminism of the
Progressive era even as women were subordinated to the professional
men in their lives. But other films, similar to the works of fiction Hapke
describes, will question the reigning paradigm and more strongly evoke
the gender paradigms of the Progressive era. Indeed, some of these
Westerns will go so far as to suggest that women professionals can inte-
grate the public and private realms in such a fashion as to extend the
values of the domestic realm to the public realm. Moreover, these rep-
resentations of women will sometimes at least suggest that women can
enjoy satisfaction for themselves as individuals without succumbing
completely to the cultural norms of both the Progressive era and the
Depression that suggest women professionals can engage only in pro-
fessional activity involving total self-abnegation and self-sacrifice. And
even in those films where the comradely ideal is supported, we will see
that there are signs that this paradigm was under great stress as the com-
panionate ideal and its attendant feminist assumptions about the nature
of work and relationships seem to show the inherently problematic and
unstable nature of the reigning gendered hierarchical paradigm of the
New Deal. In short, these Westerns will show that at least in the pub-
lic imagination, hopes still existed for a feminine Progressive style New
Deal even as the social, legal and political circumstances worked to deny
Another random document with
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 “Your reverend love should know that the lord Ep. 58. a.d. 796.
King Charles has often spoken to me of you in a
loving and trusting manner. You have in him an entirely most faithful
friend. Thus he sent messengers to Rome for the judgement of the
lord apostolic and Ethelhard the archbishop. To your love he sent
gifts worthy. To the several episcopal sees he sent gifts in alms for
himself and the lord apostolic, that you might order prayers to be
offered for them. Do you act faithfully, as you are wont to do with all
your friends.
“In like manner he sent gifts to King Æthelred and his episcopal
sees. But, alas for the grief! when the gifts and the letters were in the
hands of the messengers, the sad news came from those who had
returned from Scotia[111] by way of you, that the nation had revolted
and the king [Æthelred] was killed. King Charles withdrew his gifts,
so greatly was he enraged against the nation—‘that perfidious and
perverse nation,’ as he called them, ‘murderers of their own lords,’
holding them to be worse than pagans. Indeed, if I had not
interceded for them, whatever good thing he could have taken away
from them, whatever bad thing he could have contrived for them, he
would have done it.
“I was prepared to come to you with the king’s gifts, and to go
back to my fatherland.” This was from three to four years later than
his latest visit to our shores. “But it seemed to me better, for the sake
of peace for my nation, to remain abroad. I did not know what I could
do among them, where no one is safe, and no wholesome counsel is
of any avail. Look at the very holiest places devastated by pagans,
the altars fouled by perjuries, the monasteries violated by adulteries,
the earth stained with the blood of lords and princes. What else
could I do but groan with the prophet,[112] ‘Woe to the sinful nation, a
people laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers; they have forsaken
the Lord, and blasphemed the holy Saviour of the world in their
wickedness.’ And if it be true, as we read in the letter of your dignity,
that the iniquity had its rise among the eldermen, where is safety and
fidelity to be hoped for if the turbid torrent of unfaithfulness flowed
forth from the very place where the purest fount of truth and faith
was wont to spring?
 “But do thou, O most wise ruler of the people of God, most
diligently bring thy nation away from perverse habits, and make them
learned in the precepts of God, lest by reason of the sins of the
people the land which God has given us be destroyed. Be to the
Church of Christ as a father, to the priests of God as a brother, to all
the people pious and fair; in conversation and in word moderate and
peaceable; in the praise of God always devout; that the divine
clemency may keep thee in long prosperity, and may of the grace of
its goodness deign to exalt, dilate, and crown to all eternity, with the
benefaction of perpetual pity, thy kingdom—nay, all the English.
“I pray you direct the several Churches of your reverence to
intercede for me. Into my unworthy hands the government of the
Church of St. Martin has come. I have taken it not voluntarily but
under pressure, by the advice of many.”
Offa died in the year in which this letter was written, and his death
brought great changes in Mercia. Excellent as Offa had in most ways
been, we have evidence that the Mercian people were by no means
worthy of the fine old Mercian king. In reading the letter which
contains this evidence, we shall see that Offa had a murderous side
of his character. In those rude days, chaos could not be dealt with
under its worse conditions by men who could not at a crisis strike
with unmitigated severity.
 CHAPTER VI
Grant to Malmesbury by Ecgfrith of Mercia.—Alcuin’s letters to Mercia.—Kenulf
and Leo III restore Canterbury to its primatial position.—Gifts of money to the
Pope.—Alcuin’s letters to the restored archbishop.—His letter to Karl on the
archbishop’s proposed visit. Letters of Karl to Offa (on a question of discipline) and
Athelhard (in favour of Mercian exiles).

Before proceeding to examine Alcuin’s letter to a Mercian

nobleman on the death of Offa and his son Ecgfrith, it should be
remarked that we of the diocese of Bristol must not allow the
mention of this poor young king Ecgfrith to pass without our
acknowledgement for a deed of justice done. When Offa defeated
the West Saxon king at Bensington, he took possession of a good
deal of the border land, including two tracts of land which King
Cadwalla of Wessex had given to Malmesbury, namely Tetbury in
Gloucestershire and Purton in Wilts. William of Malmesbury naturally
reports the iniquity of Offa in thus pillaging the abbey which was the
home of William’s life and studies. Offa gave Tetbury to the Bishop of
Worcester. Purton was the subject of a deed by Ecgfrith during his
reign of a few months. The deed has remarkable interest for us in
this diocese, in that it is doubly dated; first as in the seven hundred
and ninety-sixth year from the Incarnation, and next, with a very
interesting recognition of our own Aldhelm, due to the fact that the
theft had been from Aldhelm’s own Malmesbury, “in the eighty-
seventh year from the passing of father Aldhelm.” The deed restores
land of thirty-five families at Piritune, on the east side of Braden
Wood, to the abbat and brethren of Malmesbury, for the repose of
the soul of his father Offa who had taken it from them, and in order
that the memory of Ecgfrith might always be preserved in their
prayers. As a sort of unimportant afterthought he adds that the abbat
and brethren have given him two thousand shillings of pure silver,
probably as many pounds of our money. The deed was signed by
Athelhard of Canterbury, not by Lichfield. The reason no doubt is that
Tetbury and Purton are south of the Thames, and so outside the
Province of Lichfield and within the diminished Province of
Canterbury.
When the death of Offa’s son, the youthful Ecgfrith, king of Mercia,
occurred in this same year 796 in which year his father Offa had
died,[113] and a distant cousin Kenulf succeeded, Alcuin, as has
been said, wrote a very serious letter to one of the chief officers of
Mercia.
“These are times of tribulation everywhere in the Ep. 79. a.d. 797.
land; faith is failing; truth is dumb; malice
increases; and arrogance adds to your miseries. Men are not content
to follow in the steps of our early fathers, in dress, or food, or honest
ways. Some most foolish man thinks out something unsuited to
human nature, and hateful to God; and straightway almost the whole
of the people set themselves busily to follow this above all.
“That most noble youth [Ecgfrith] is dead; not, as I think, because
of his own sins alone, but also because the vengeance of his father’s
bloodshedding has reached the son. For you know best of all how
much blood the father shed that the kingdom might be safe for the
son. It proved to be the destruction, not the confirmation, of his reign.
“Admonish the more diligently your new king [Kenulf], yes, and the
king of Northumbria [Ardwulf] too, that they keep in touch with the
divine piety, avoiding adulteries; that they do not neglect their early
wives[114] for the sake of adulteries with women of the nobility, but
under the fear of God have their own wives, or by consent live in
chastity. I fear that Ardwulf, the king of my part of the country, will
soon[115] have to lose the kingdom because of the insult which he
has offered to God in sending away his own wife, and, it is said,
living openly with a concubine. It seems that the prosperity of the
English is nearly at an end; unless indeed by assiduous prayers, and
honest ways, and humble life, and chaste conversation, and keeping
the faith, they win from God to keep the land which God of His free
gift gave to our forefathers.”
 With this letter we may fitly compare the letter which Alcuin wrote
to the king himself, Kenulf, who had thus unexpectedly succeeded. It
begins in a complimentary manner, but it is a very faithful letter. It
carefully recognizes the inconsistencies of Offa’s life, inconsistencies
which appear to have characterized the best rulers in those times,
very rude and violent times, when one occasion and another seemed
to demand ruthless treatment.
“To the most excellent Coenulf, King of the Ep. 80. a.d. 797.
Mercians, the humble levite Albinus wishes health.
“Your goodness, moderation, and nobility of conduct, are a great
joy to me. They are befitting to the royal dignity, which excels all
others in honour, and ought to excel also in perfectness of conduct,
in fairness of justice, in holiness of piety. The royal clemency should
go beyond that of ordinary men, as we read in ancient histories, and
in holy Scripture where it is said[116]—Mercy and truth exalt a throne;
and in the Psalms it is said[117] of Almighty God—All the paths of the
Lord are mercy and truth. The more a man shines forth in works of
truth and mercy, the more has he in him of the image of the divine.
“Have always in mind Him who raised thee from a poor position
and set thee as a ruler over the princes of His people. Know that
thou art rather a shepherd, and a dispenser of the gifts of God, than
a lord and an exactor.
“Have always in mind the very best features of the reign of your
most noble predecessor Offa; his modest conversation; his zeal in
correcting the life of a Christian people. Whatever good
arrangements he made in the kingdom to thee by God given, let your
devotion most diligently carry out; but if in any respect he acted with
greed, or cruelty, know that this you must by all means avoid. For it
is not without cause that that most noble son of his survived his
father for so short a time. The deserts of a father are often visited on
a son.
“Have prudent counsellors who fear God; love justice; seek peace
with friends; show faith and holiness in pious manner of life.
 “For the English race is vexed with tribulations by reason of its
many sins. The goodness of kings, the preaching of the priests of
Christ, the religious life of the people, can raise it to the height of its
ancient honour; so that a blessed progeny of our fathers may
deserve to possess perpetual happiness, stability of the kingdom,
and fortitude against any foe; that the Church of Christ, as ordained
by holy fathers, may grow and prosper. Always have in honour, most
illustrious ruler, the priests of Christ; for the more reverently you are
disposed to the servants of Christ, and the preachers of the word of
God, the more will Christ, the King pious and true, exalt and confirm
your honour, on the intercession of His saints.”
When Kenulf, this distant cousin of Ecgfrith, came to the throne,
he looked into the matter of the archbishopric of Lichfield, and he
took a view adverse to Offa’s action. He wrote to Pope Leo III a
letter,[118] in which he put the points very clearly. His bishops and
learned men had told him that the division of the Province of
Canterbury into two provinces was contrary to the canons and
apostolical statutes of the most blessed Gregory, who had ordered
that there should be twelve bishops under the archbishop of the
southern province, seated at London. On the death of Augustine of
Canterbury, it had seemed good to all the wise men of the race, the
Witangemote, that not London but Canterbury should be the seat of
the Primacy, where Augustine’s body lay. King Offa, by reason of his
enmity with the venerable archbishop Jaenbert and the people of
Kent, set to work to divide the province into two. The most pious
Adrian, at the request of the said king, had done what no one before
had presumed to do, had raised the Mercian prelate to the dignity of
the pallium. Kenulf did not blame either of them; but he hoped that
the Pope would look into the matter and make a benign and just
response. He had sent an embassy on the part of himself and the
bishops in the previous year by Wada the Abbat; but Wada, after
accepting the charge, had indolently—nay foolishly—withdrawn. He
now sent by the hands of a presbyter, Birine, and two of his officers,
Fildas and Cheolberth, a small present, out of his love for the Pope,
namely, 120 mancuses,[119] some forty to fifty pounds, say not far off
£1000 of our time.
 Pope Leo addressed his reply to king Kenulf, his most loved
bishops, and most glorious dukes. It was a difficult letter to write, for
Kenulf had been very frank about the uncanonical action of Hadrian
the Pope. Leo answered this part of Kenulf’s letter by stating that his
predecessor had acted as he had done (1) because Offa had
declared it to be the universal wish, the petition of all, that the
archbishopric should be divided into two; (2) because of the great
extension of the Mercian kingdom; (3) for very many causes and
advantages. He, Leo, now authorized the departure from Pope
Gregory’s order in so far as this, that he recognized Canterbury, not
London, as the chief seat of archiepiscopal authority. He declared
that Canterbury was the primatial see, and must continue and be
viewed as such. I cannot find in his letter a definite declaration that
he annuls the act of his predecessor, but that is the effect of the
letter; nor does he declare that Lichfield is no longer an
archbishopric. Kenulf, as we have seen, had sent him, out of his
affection for him, a gift of 120 mancuses. But he reminded the king
that Offa had bound his successors to maintain the gift to the Pope,
in each year, of as many mancuses as there are days in the year,
namely, he says, 365, as alms to the poor, and as an endowment for
keeping in order the lamps [in the churches]. This is much more
likely than the shadowy gifts of Ina, king of Wessex, to have been
the origin of Peter’s Pence, a sum of money collected in England, at
first fitfully and eventually year by year, and sent out to the Pope.
The money was collected in the parishes of each diocese down to
the time of the Reformation. It is a regular item in the
churchwardens’ accounts of the earlier years of Henry VIII. Only a
fixed amount of the whole sum collected was sent to the Pope, the
balance being used for repairs in the several dioceses. We have a
list prepared by a representative of a late mediaeval Pope giving
£190 6s. 8d. as the amount received by him for the year,
corresponding roughly to a normal 300 marks a year.
Offa’s money for the Pope went of course from Mercia. When
Wessex became predominant, Ethelwulf, the son of Ecgbert and
father of Alfred, made large gifts to Rome, and left by will 300
mancuses, 100 in honour of St. Peter, specially for filling with oil all
the lamps of his apostolic church on Easter Eve and at cock crow,
100 in honour of St. Paul, in the same terms and for the same
purpose in respect of the basilica of St. Paul, and 100 for the Pope
himself. King Alfred also sent presents to Rome. From 883 to 890
there are four records of gifts from Wessex. After 890 we have no
such record in Alfred’s reign; and in Alfred’s will there is no mention
of the spiritual head of the Church of the West.
We learn from our own great historian, William of Malmesbury, that
Kenulf wrote two later letters to Leo on this subject, and he gives us
Leo’s reply.[120] Athelhard, the Pope says, has come to the holy
churches of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul, to fulfil his vow of
prayer and to inform the Pope of his ecclesiastical mission. He tells
the king that by the authority of St. Peter, the chief of the apostles,
whose office though unworthily he fills, he gives to Athelhard such
prelatical authority that if any in the province, whether kings, princes,
or people, transgress the commands of the Lord, he shall
excommunicate them till they repent. Concerning the jurisdiction
which the archbishops of Canterbury had held, as well over bishops
as over monasteries, of which they had been unjustly deprived, the
Pope had made full inquiry, and now placed all ordinations and
confirmations on their ancient footing, and restored them to him
entire. Thus did Pope Leo III condemn the injustice of Pope Hadrian
I. We had better have managed our own affairs, instead of paying to
foreigners infinite sums of money to mismanage them.
Before we leave this strange episode of the creation of an
archbishopric of Lichfield, it is of special local interest to us in Bristol,
and to the deanery of Stapleton, that the chief Mercian prelate,
Higbert of Lichfield, signed deeds relating to Westbury upon Trym
and Aust on Severn, above the archbishop of Canterbury. This was
in 794. Offa the king signed first, Ecgferth, the king’s young son,
second, and then Hygeberht; Ethelhard of Canterbury coming fifth in
one and fourth in the other. The first deed gave from the king to his
officer Ethelmund, in 794, four cassates of land at the place called
Westbury, in the province of the Huiccians, near the river called
Avon, free of all public charges except the three which were common
to all, namely, for the king’s military expeditions, for the building of
bridges, and for the fortification of strongholds.[121] The other deed
restores to the see of Worcester (Wegrin) the land of five families at
Aust, which the duke Bynna had taken without right, it being the
property of the see of Worcester. To make all safe, six dukes made
the sign of the cross at the foot of this deed, which is, as we all know,
the origin of the modern phrase ‘signing’ a deed or a letter. The
dukes included Bynna himself.
Alcuin wrote a very wise letter to Athelhard of Ep. 85. a.d. 797.
Canterbury on the occasion of the restoration of the
primacy. He advised that penance should be done. Athelhard and all
the people should keep a fast, he for having left his see, they for
having accepted error. There should be diligent prayers, and alms,
and solemn masses, everywhere, that God might wipe out what any
of them had done wrong. The archbishop was specially urged to
bring back study into the house of God, that is, the conventual home
of the monks and the archbishop, with its centre, the cathedral
church. There should be young men reading, and a chorus of
singers, and the study of books, in order that the dignity of that holy
see might be renewed, and they might deserve to have the privilege
of electing to the primacy.
“The unity of the Church, which has been in part cut asunder, not
as it seems for any reasonable cause but from grasping at power,
should, if it can be done, be restored in peaceful ways; the rent
should be stitched up again. You should take counsel with all your
bishops, and with your brother of York, on this principle, that the
pious father Higbert of Lichfield be not deprived of his pall during his
lifetime, but the consecration of bishops must come back to the holy
and primal see. Let your most holy wisdom see to it that loving
concord exist among the chief shepherds of the churches of Christ.”
With regard to the remark of Alcuin that Ep. 171. a.d. 801.
Athelhard should do penance for having left his
see, it may be explained that Alcuin had in vain advised Athelhard
not to leave England on the restoration of the primacy to Canterbury.
Athelhard persisted in visiting Rome, and informed Alcuin that he
had commenced the journey. Alcuin thereupon wrote this:—“Return,
return, holy father, as soon as your pious embassy is finished, to
your lost sheep. As there are two eyes in the body, so I believe and
desire that you two, Canterbury and York, give light throughout the
breadth of all Britain. Do not deprive your country of its right eye.”
Then Alcuin gives a very significant hint that the ways of the clergy
of England are not good enough for France, and they had better not
let Charlemagne see anything of that kind.
“If you come to the lord king, warn your companions, and
especially the clergy, that they acquit themselves in an honourable
manner, in all holy religion, in dress, and in ecclesiastical order; so
that wherever you go you leave always an example of all goodness.
Forbid them to wear in the presence of the lord king ornaments of
gold or robes of silk; let them go humbly clad, after the manner of
servants of God. And through every district you must pass with
peace and honest conversation, for you know the manner and
custom of this Frankish race.”
Nothing could make more clear the commanding position held by
Alcuin than this exceedingly free counsel from a deacon to the
Primate of England. We may quote portions of yet another letter
giving the same impression.
In a letter to Athelhard after his safe return to Ep. 190. a.d. 802.
England and a favourable reception which he had
reported to Alcuin, Alcuin congratulated the archbishop on the
restoration to its ancient dignity of the most holy see of the first
teacher of our race. By divine favour, the members now once more
cohered in unity with the proper head, and natural peace shone forth
between the two chief prelates of Britain, and one will of piety and
concord was vigorous under the two cities of metropolitans. “And
now,” he writes, “now that you have received the power to correct
and the liberty to preach, fear not, speak out! The silence of the
bishop is the ruin of the people.”
It is an interesting fact that we have a letter which Alcuin wrote to
Karl, introducing to him this same archbishop on the very journey of
which he so decidedly disapproved.
“To the most greatly desired lord David the king, Ep. 172. a.d. 801.
Flaccus his pensioner wishes eternal health in
Christ.
“The sweetness of your affection, and the assurance of your
approved piety, very often urge me to address letters to your
authority, and by the office of syllables to trace out that which bodily
frailty prevents my will from accomplishing. But novel circumstances
compel me now to write once more, that the paper may bring the
affection of the heart, and may pour into the ears of your piety the
prayers which never have been in vain in the presence of your pity.
Nor do I believe that my prayers for your stableness and safety are
vain in the sight of God, for the divine grace gladly receives the tears
which flow forth from the fount of love[122].
“I have been informed that certain of the friends of your Flaccus,
Edelard to wit, Metropolitan of the See of Dorobernia and Pontiff of
the primatial see in Britain, and Ceilmund[123] of the kingdom of the
Mercians, formerly minister of king Offa, and Torhcmund[124] the
faithful servant of king Edilred, a man approved in faith, strenuous in
arms, who has boldly avenged the blood of his lord, desire to
approach your piety[125]. All of these have been very faithful to me,
and have aided me on my journey; they have also aided my boys as
they went about hither and thither. I pray your best clemency to
receive them with your wonted kindness, for they have been close
friends to me. I have often known bishops religious and devoted in
Christ’s service, and men strong and faithful in secular dignity, to be
laudable to your equity; for there is no doubt that all the best men,
approved by their own conscience, love good men, being taught by
the example of the omnipotent God who is the highest good. And it is
most certain that every creature that has reason has by His
goodness whatever of good it has, the Very Truth saying, ‘I am the
light of the world. He that followeth me walketh not in darkness but
shall have the light of life.’ John viii. 12.”
Before we leave Mercian affairs and the relations between Karl
and Offa, it may be of interest to give a letter[126] from Karl to Offa
which will serve to show the extreme care he took in order to
maintain ecclesiastical discipline, and the severity of that discipline.
That a man with all the affairs of immense dominions on his hands
should have made time to produce such a letter on such a point
seems very worthy of note. Karl’s statement of his titles shows that
this is an early letter.
“Karl, by the grace of God king of the Franks and Defender of the
Holy Church of God, to his loved brother and friend Offa greeting.
“That priest who is a Scot[127] has been living among us for some
time, in the diocese of Hildebold, Bishop[128] of Cologne. He has
now been accused of eating meat in Lent. Our priests refuse to
judge him, because they have not received full evidence from the
accusers. They have, however, not allowed him to continue to reside
there, on account of this evil report, lest the honour in which the
priesthood is held should be diminished among ignorant folk, or
others should be tempted by this rumour to violate the holy fast. Our
priests are of opinion that he should be sent to the judgement of his
own bishop, where his oath was taken.
“We pray your providence to order that he transfer himself as soon
as conveniently may be to his own land, that he may be judged in
the place from which he came forth. For there also it must be that the
purity in manners and firmness in faith and honesty of conversation
of the Holy Church of God are diligently kept according to canonical
sanction, like a dove perfect and unspotted, whose wings are as of
silver and the hinder parts should shine as gold.
“Life, health, and prosperity be given to thee and thy faithful ones
by the God Christ for ever.”
A letter which Karl wrote to Athelhard of Canterbury begging him
to intercede for some exiles, sets forth his style and title very
differently[129], evidently at a later date.
It bears very directly upon one of the complaints which, as we
have seen, Offa had made in letters to Karl; namely, the shelter
afforded at Karl’s court to fugitives from Mercia.
“Karl, by the grace of God king of the Franks and Lombards and
Patrician of the Romans, to Athilhard the archbishop and Ceolwulf
his brother bishop, eternal beatitude.
 “In reliance on that friendship which we formed in speech when we
met, we have sent to your piety these unhappy exiles from their
fatherland; praying that you would deign to intercede for them with
my dearest brother king Offa, that they may be allowed to live in their
own land in peace, without any unjust oppression. For their lord
Umhrinsgstan[130] is dead. It appeared to us that he would have
been faithful to his own lord if he had been allowed to remain in his
own land; but, as he used to say, he fled to us to escape the danger
of death, always ready to purge himself of any unfaithfulness. That
reconciliation might ensue we kept him with us for a while, not from
any unfriendliness.
“If you are able to obtain peace for these his fellow tribesmen, let
them remain in their fatherland. But if my brother gives a hard reply
about them, send them back to me uninjured. It is better to live
abroad than to perish, to serve in a foreign land than to die at home.
I have confidence in the goodness of my brother, if you plead
strenuously with him for them, that he will receive them benignantly
for the love that is between us, or rather for the love of Christ, who
said, Forgive and it shall be forgiven you.
“May the divine piety keep thy holiness, interceding for us, safe for
ever.”
It was a skilful stroke of business on Karl’s part to send the men
over to the charge of the archbishop, which amounted to putting
them in sanctuary. If he had kept them in France and written to beg
that they might be allowed to return, it would have been much easier
for Offa to say no. And if he had sent them direct to Offa in the first
instance, they would probably never have got out of his clutches at
all.
 CHAPTER VII
List of the ten kings of Northumbria of Alcuin’s time.—Destruction of Lindisfarne,
Wearmouth, and Jarrow, by the Danes.—Letters of Alcuin on the subject to King
Ethelred, the Bishop and monks of Lindisfarne, and the monks of Wearmouth and
Jarrow.—His letter to the Bishop and monks of Hexham.

We must now turn to Alcuin’s native kingdom of Northumbria, over

whose evil fortunes he grieved so greatly in the home of his
adoption.
I do not know how better some idea can be formed of the political
chaos to which Northumbria was reduced in the time of Alcuin than
by reading a list of the kings of that time. It is a most bewildering list.
All went well so long as Eadbert, the brother of Archbishop
Ecgbert, reigned. He was the king of Alcuin’s infancy and boyhood
and earliest manhood. His reign lasted from 737 to 758, when he
retired into a monastery. He was the 21st king, beginning with Ida
who created the kingdom in 547. He was succeeded by (22) Oswulf
his son, who was within a year slain by his household officers, July
24, 759, and was succeeded on August 4 by (23) Ethelwald, of
whose parentage we do not know anything. In 765 he was deprived
by a national assembly, and (24) Alchred was placed on the throne,
a fifth cousin of the murdered Oswulf, and therefore of the royal line.
In 774 he was banished, and went in exile to the king of the Picts,
being succeeded by (25) Ethelred, the son of his deprived
predecessor Ethelwald. Ethelred reigned from 774 to 779, when in
consequence of cruel murders ordered by him he was driven out,
and (26) Alfwold, son of (22) Oswulf, and therefore of the old royal
line, succeeded. Alfwold was murdered in 788, and was succeeded
by (27) Osred, the son of (24) Alchred, sixth cousin of his
predecessor, and therefore of the royal line. After a year he was
deposed and tonsured, and was eventually put to death in 792 by
(25) Ethelred, who had recovered the throne lost by his expulsion in
779. He was killed in 796 in a faction fight, after he had put to death
the last two males, so far as we know, of the royal line of Eadbert,
Ælf and Ælfwine, sons of (26) Alfwold. Simeon of Durham tells us
(a.d. 791) that they were persuaded by false promises to leave
sanctuary in the Cathedral Church of York; were taken by violence
out of the city; and miserably put to death by Ethelred in
Wonwaldrenute. He was succeeded by (28) Osbald, of unknown
parentage, but a patrician of Northumbria; he only reigned twenty-
seven days, fled to the king of the Picts, and died an abbat three
years later, in 799. He was succeeded by (29) Eardulf, a patrician of
the blood royal,[131] who had been left for dead by (25) Ethelred, but
had recovered when laid out for burial by the monks of Ripon. He
had the fullest recognition as king; was consecrated at the great altar
of St. Paul in York Minster on May 26, 796, by Archbishop Eanbald.
In his reign Alcuin died. In 806 he was driven out by (30) Elfwald, of
unknown parentage, but by the help of the Emperor Charlemagne he
was restored in 808. He died in 810, and was succeeded by his son
(31) Eanred, who was the last king but one of the royal house, and
the last independent king of Northumbria, dying in 840, and being
succeeded by his son (32) Ethelred II, expelled in 844, restored in
the same year, and killed sine prole in 848.
This, as has been said, is a most bewildering list. It is, however,
convenient to have it stated at length, inasmuch as several of these
kings are named in a noteworthy manner in the letters of Alcuin. To
emphasize the view that Alcuin took of the state of Northumbria, the
list just given may be summarized thus, it being borne in mind that
every king who reigned in Alcuin’s time after Eadbert’s death in 758
is included in the summary. Oswulf, murdered 759; Ethelwald,
deprived 765; Alchred, banished 774; Ethelred, expelled 779;
Alfwold, murdered 788; Osred, deposed 789; Ethelred, killed by his
own people, 796; Osbald, expelled 797; Eardulf, expelled 806.
The Venerable Bede had said in his letter to Archbishop Ecgbert in
735 that unless some very great change for the better was made in
all walks of life in Northumbria, that country would find its men quite
unable to defend it successfully if an invasion took place. We have
seen that so far as the reigning persons were concerned, the change
was for the worse; we have now to see how bitterly true Bede’s
prophecy, or rather his calculation of the necessary consequences,
proved to be. We are taken in thought to the year 793, not quite sixty
years after Bede’s letter. One excellent reign had lasted twenty-one
years, the next eight reigns averaged four and a half years, and all
ended in violence.
Higbald, the eleventh Bishop of Lindisfarne, 780-803, takes us
back nearly to the best times of that specially Holy Isle. Ethelwold,
724-40, his next predecessor but one, was the bishop under whom
King Ceolwulf, to whom Bede dedicated his famous work the
Ecclesiastical History of the English Race, became a monk. It was
this king-monk that taught the monks of Lindisfarne to drink wine and
ale instead of the milk and water prescribed by their Scotic founder,
Aidan. His head was preserved in St. Cuthbert’s coffin. Ethelwold’s
immediate predecessor was Eadfrith, 698-721, who wrote that
glorious Evangeliarium which is a chief pride of England, the
Lindisfarne Gospels. To Bishop Eadfrith and his monks Bede
dedicated his Life of St. Cuthbert, between whom and Eadfrith only
one bishop had intervened. The entry at the end of the Lindisfarne
Gospels connects Ethelwold and Eadfrith with the production and
binding of that noble specimen of the earliest Anglian work. Put into
modern English it runs thus:—
“Eadfrith, bishop of the church of Lindisfarne, he wrote this book at
first, for God and St. Cuthbert and all the saints that are in the island,
and Ethelwald, the bishop of Lindisfarne island, he made it firm
outside and bound it as well as he could.”
The entry proceeds to tell that Billfrith, the anchorite, wrought in
smith’s work the ornaments that were on the outside with gold and
gems and silver overlaid, a treasure without deceit. And Aldred, the
presbyter, unworthy and most miserable, glossed it in English, and
made himself at home with the three parts, the Matthew part for God
and St. Cuthbert, the Mark part for the bishop—unfortunately it is not
said for which of the bishops, the Luke part for the brotherhood. Only
one bishop came between Ethelwold, who bound this priceless
treasure, and Higbald, to whom we now turn.
 The Saxon Chronicle has under the year 787 this entry:—“In this
year King Beorhtric [of Wessex] took to wife Eadburg, daughter of
King Offa. In his days came three ships of the Northmen from
Haurthaland [on the west coast of Norway]. And the sheriff rode to
meet them there, and would force them to the king’s residence, for
he knew not what they were. And there they slew him. These were
the first ships of Danish men that sought the land of the English
race.”
They soon came again, this time not to the coast of Wessex, but to
the coast easiest of access from their own land. In 793 this is the
entry in the Saxon Chronicle:—
“In this year dire forewarnings came over the land of Northumbria
and pitifully frightened the people, violent whirlwinds and lightnings,
and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. These tokens mickle
hunger soon followed, and a little after that, in this same year, on the
sixth of the ides of January [January 8] the harrying of heathen men
pitifully destroyed God’s church in Lindisfarne through rapine and
manslaughter.”
In the next year, 794, it is said:—
“The heathen ravaged among the Northumbrians, and plundered
Ecgferth’s minster at Donmouth [Wearmouth]; and there one of their
leaders was slain, and also some of their ships were wrecked by a
tempest, and many of them were there drowned, and some came to
shore alive and men soon slew them off at the river mouth.”
Wattenbach and Dümmler make the ruin of Lindisfarne take place
not on January 8 but on June 8. The Saxon Chronicle has Ianr. in
both of the MSS. which name the month. There is only one other
entry in the year 793, and it follows this,—“And Sicga [who had
murdered King Alfuold] died[132] on the 8th of the Kalends of March,”
that is, February 22. It is clear that these two events took place at the
end of 793, the years at that time ending with March, and January,
not June, was the month of ruin.
The twin monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow are described as
Ecgferth’s minster, because King Ecgfrith of Northumbria, 670-85,
gave land to Benet Biscop to found a monastery at the mouth of the
Don, now called the Wear, and some years later another portion of
land for the twin monastery of St. Paul, Jarrow. Later in Biscop’s life
he purchased two additional pieces of land from the next king,
Aldfrith, giving for the first two royal robes, or palls, made all of silk,
worked in an incomparable manner, which he had bought in Rome.
For the second, a much larger piece, he gave to the king a
manuscript collection of geographical writings, of beautiful
workmanship. We in the south-west must always remember that
Benedict Bishop first brought his vast ecclesiastical treasures to the
court of Wessex, but finding his royal patron dead went up north with
them. But for the death of the King of Wessex, we should have had
Wearmouth and Jarrow here as well as Malmesbury, Bede as well as
Aldhelm, and it may be Alcuin too.
We have letters of Alcuin to King Ethelred, to Higbald the Bishop
of Lindisfarne, and to the monks of the twin monastery of
Monkwearmouth and Jarrow, on this catastrophe. The letter to
Ethelred comes first:—
“To my most loved lord King Ethelred and all his Ep. 22. a.d. 793.
chief men the humble levite Alchuine sends
greeting.
“Mindful of your most sweet affection, my brothers and fathers and
lords honourable in Christ; deeply desiring that the divine mercy may
preserve to us in long-lived prosperity the fatherland which that
mercy long ago gave to us with gratuitous freedom; I therefore,
comrades most dear, whether present, if God allow it, by my words,
or absent by my writings under the guidance of the divine spirit, do
not cease from admonishing you, and by frequent repetition to
convey to your ears, you who are citizens of the same fatherland,
those things which are known to pertain to the safety of this earthly
realm and to the blessedness of the heavenly home; so that things
many times heard may grow into your minds with good result. For
what is love to a friend if it keeps silence on matters useful to the
friend? To what does a man owe fidelity if not to his country? To
whom does a man owe prosperity if not to its citizens? By a double
relationship we are fellow-citizens of one city in Christ, that is as
sons of Mother Church and of one native country. Let not therefore
your humanity shrink from accepting benignly what my devotion
seeks to offer for the safety of our land. Think not that I am charging
faults against you: take it that I aim at warding off penalties.”
We should here bear in mind that Ethelred had fourteen years
before this been expelled for cruel murders, and that he was now in
the first year of his restored reign and had already sent away his first
wife and taken another, a scandal so great in those days—bad as
they were—that the Saxon Chronicle with remarkable particularity
gives the month and the day of the gross offence, September 29. He
afterwards murdered the two surviving members of the royal house.
Alcuin’s letter to the king proceeds:—
“It is now nearly 350 years that we and our fathers have dwelt in
this most fair land, and never before has such a horror appeared in
Britain as we now have suffered at the hands of pagans. And it was
not supposed that such an attack from the sea was possible.[133]
Behold, the church of the holy Cuthbert is deluged with the blood of
the priests of God, is spoiled of all its ornaments; the place more
venerable than any other in Britain is given as a prey to pagan races.
From the spot where, after the departure of the holy Paulinus from
York, the Christian religion took its beginning amongst us, from that
spot misery and calamity have begun. Who does not fear? Who
does not mourn this as if his fatherland itself was captured?”
We should note Alcuin’s recognition of the fact that the restoration
of Christianity in Northumbria was due not to persons of the Anglo-
Saxon race and Church, but to Aidan and his monks of the Irish race
and Church.
“My brethren, give your most attentive consideration, your most
diligent investigation, to this question,—is this most unaccustomed,
most unheard-of evil, brought upon us by some unheard-of evil
custom? I do not say that there was not among the people of old the
sin of fornication. But since the days of King Alfwold[134] fornications,
adulteries, incests, have inundated the land to such an extent that
these sins are unblushingly perpetrated even among the handmaids
dedicated to God. What shall I say of avarice, rapine, and judicial
violence, when it is clearer than the light how these crimes have
increased, and a despoiled people are the evidence of it. He who
reads the Holy Scriptures, and revolves ancient history, and
considers the working of the world, will find that for sins of this nature
kings lose kingdoms, and peoples lose their father-land. He will find
that when men in power have unjustly seized the property of others,
they have justly lost their own....
“Consider the manner of dress, the manner of wearing the hair, the
luxurious habits of princes and of people. Look at the way in which
the pagan manner of trimming the beard and cutting the hair is
imitated. Do you not fear those whom you thus copy? Look at the
immoderate use of clothes, beyond any necessity of human nature.
This superfluity of the princes is the poverty of the people. Some are
loaded with garments, while others perish with cold. Some flow over
with luxuries and feasts like the rich man in purple, while Lazarus at
the gate dies of hunger. Where is brotherly love? Where is that pity
which we are bidden have for the wretched? The satiety of the rich
man is the hunger of the poor. That Scripture saying is to be
dreaded, ‘He shall have judgement without mercy that hath shewed
no mercy’[135]; and we have the words of the blessed Peter the
Apostle[136], ‘The time is come that judgement must begin at the
house of God.’ Judgement has begun, and with terrible force, at the
house of God where rest so many lights of the whole of Britain. What
is to be expected for other places, if the divine judgement has not
spared this most holy place? It is not for the sins of only those who
dwelled there that this has been sent.
“Would that the penalty that has come upon them could bring
others to amend their lives. Would that the many would fear what the
few have suffered, and each would say in his heart, groaning and
trembling, ‘if such men, if fathers so holy, did not save their own
habitation, the place of their own repose, who shall save mine?’
Save your country by assiduous prayers to God, by works of justice
and of mercy. Be moderate in dress and in food. There is no better
defence of a country than the equity and piety of princes, and the
prayers of the servants of God.”