Queen Seaxburh of Wessex

Unfortunately, there is very little recorded about Queen Seaxburh and her reign, however, I very much wanted to include her here because she is the only Anglo-Saxon Queen Regnant on record.

 

Seaxburh was the Queen consort of Wessex after her marriage to King Cenwalh. She was also known as the Queen of Ġewisse, which was the early Anglo-Saxon name for the tribe located around modern-day Dorchester.

We have no records of her family or where she came from, so it is unknown whether she originated in Wessex, or whether her marriage to Cenwalh was a match made through negotiations of neighbouring Kingdoms.

 

The year of Seaxburh's marriage to King Cenwalh is unknown, but we do know that she was his second wife.

Before her, he had married a sister of King Penda of Mercia, but at some point, either before or during his reign, he repudiated his marriage to her and took Seaxburh as his wife. Some people, including the monk and chronicler, Bede, viewed her marriage as illegitimate. Whether this was due to the repudiation of Cenwalh's first wife or because there was a level of consanguinity is unclear. However, it was not uncommon at this time for marriages to be repudiated. Though Bede was a Christian monk, the formalisation of marriage in the Christian church was not so very concrete at this time and so handfasted marriages and repudiations were common.

 

There are no reported children from Seaxburh's union with Cenwalh and after the death of her husband in 672, Seaxburh succeeded him as Queen Regnant of Wessex. Unlike with the previous Celtic society, in the Iron Age, women were seen as inferior and unnatural rulers by the Middle Ages. As such, it was extremely rare for a woman to be able to rule in her own right in Anglo-Saxon England. This misogynistic view had possibly come about due to the conversion to Christianity of the English people, as Christian Rome, during the time of the Roman occupation of Briton, had viewed the female chieftains of the Celtic tribes as unnatural. However, this is not a definite reason and some of England was still pagan well into the Low Middle Ages. Regardless, Seaxburh was one of the only women to appear in a regnal list of Anglo-Saxon England, as a ruler in her own right.

 

It has been suggested that she was not in fact Queen Regnant, but was actually ruling only as Regent for an unnamed son. While Queen Regnants were in short supply in the Anglo-Saxon period, and beyond, it was not too uncommon to see a woman ruling as Regent for a son who was not yet of age, as can be seen in the Frankish Empire, where Queens such as Brunhilda of Austrasia and Fredegund of Austrasia ruled as Regents for their young heirs.

However, Seaxburh only reigned for 2 years before her death at the age of around 53 years old. If Seaxburh had had a surviving son, he had to have been at least in his teenage years by this point and thus, would definitely have been somewhere recorded. The fact that there is no record implies that she was indeed the Queen of Wessex in her own right and not a Regent.

She died in 674, but we know nothing more of her, other than that she was succeeded by a man named Æscwine, a descendant of Cenwalh's great-uncle, Ceolwulf of Wessex, and this we only know from the records that show he led the West Saxons against King Wulfhere of Mercia in 675.

 

I wish we had more information on this remarkable woman, the first official Queen Regnant on record, but alas this is all I could find on her.