The view from Rome
Our earliest descriptions of Germanic women come from men who were fighting their husbands.
The fullest is the Germania of the Roman historian Tacitus, written about 98 CE. Tacitus, as far as we know, never crossed the Rhine. He wrote from reports and earlier books, and he had a purpose: to hold up the northern peoples as a mirror to what he saw as Roman decadence. His Germans are sometimes more a sermon than a portrait. But he is early, he is detailed, and much of what he says is supported by other evidence.
Something holy and prophetic
Tacitus's most famous remark on the subject is this:
They believe that there is in women something holy and prophetic, and so they neither scorn their advice nor disregard their answers.
Tacitus, Germania, chapter 8 (our translation)
He gives examples. In his own lifetime the seeress Veleda had been treated almost as a goddess by her people, and before her there had been Albruna and many others. We tell their stories in Seeresses of the Germanic World. Julius Caesar, a century and a half earlier, reports that a Germanic army refused battle before the new moon because the married women of the tribe, reading lots and omens, had declared that it would not be lucky.
Tacitus also says that women went with the armies. They stood close behind the battle line, where their voices could be heard; the wounded were carried back to them; and they brought food and encouragement to the fighters. More than once, he claims, a wavering line was rallied by its women.
Marriage as he describes it
According to Tacitus, gifts at a wedding passed from the husband to the wife, not the reverse: oxen, a bridled horse, a shield, a spear, and a sword. She in turn brought him a gift of arms. The meaning, he says, was that she came as a partner in toil and danger, to share the same fortune in peace and in war.
He praises Germanic marriages as strict and faithful. He also reports, without disapproval, that a wife found guilty of adultery had her hair cut off and was driven from the house and flogged through the village by her husband. He names no such penalty for men. The partnership he admires was not an equal one.
Guardianship: the mund
When the Germanic kingdoms wrote down their laws, from the fifth century onward, a clearer and harder picture appears. Central to it is the institution the laws call the mund or mundium: protection, and with it legal authority.
A woman was ordinarily under the mund of a man: her father, then her husband, and as a widow her son or nearest male kinsman. Her guardian represented her at law and had a say in her marriage. The duty ran both ways, for he was bound in honor and in law to defend her and to pursue any wrong done to her.
The laws of the Lombards, set down in 643, put it most bluntly: no free woman may live under her own authority, but must always be under the mund of some man or of the king. Not every people was so strict, but the principle was widespread.
What a husband paid for
At marriage a payment passed from the groom to the bride's family. It is often called a bride price, but the laws are clear that what he acquired was the mund, the guardianship, not the woman as a possession. Much of what was given, and especially the morning gift presented by the husband on the day after the wedding, became the wife's own property, secured to her if she was widowed.
Property, protection, and worth
Within guardianship, women had rights that the laws took care to protect.
- Property. A wife's morning gift and marriage portion were hers. Widows in particular could control substantial wealth.
- Leaving a marriage. The earliest English laws, issued in Kent around the year 600, provide, as the clause is usually read, that a wife who wishes to leave with her children shall have half the household goods.
- Compensation. Every free person had a wergild, the sum owed to the family if he or she was killed. In the law of the Salian Franks, a free woman of childbearing age was valued at three times the wergild of a free man.
- Redress. A woman who was wronged could call on her kin to prosecute the offender at the assembly. If she was mistreated by her husband, her own family had the right and the duty to intervene.
What women did not have, in any of these codes, was a public voice of their own. They did not vote in the assembly, hold office, or plead cases in person. Their influence was exercised through kin, through property, through counsel, and through religion.
A story the Lombards told
How much weight a woman's counsel could carry is shown in the legend the Lombards told about their own name. When they were still a small people called the Winnili, they were led by two brothers and by their mother Gambara, a woman of deep wisdom. Threatened by the Vandals, who had already asked the god Godan for victory, Gambara went to the goddess Frea.
Frea advised that the Winnili women should tie their long hair under their chins like beards and stand at sunrise beside the men. She then turned her husband's bed to face them. When Godan woke he asked, "Who are these long-beards?" Frea answered that since he had given them a name, he must give them the victory as well. So the Winnili became the Langobards, the Long-beards.
It is a legend, written down by Christians. But it is a legend in which a people owes its existence to the wit of a mother and a goddess, and the men are grateful for it.
What we can fairly conclude
The early Germanic world was no paradise for women, and those who say so are not reading the laws. It was a society of male guardianship, and for the many women who were enslaved it offered almost nothing.
Yet for free women the picture is not one of simple subjection either. Their property was protected, their kin stood behind them, their lives were valued highly, and their judgment, especially in matters touching the holy, was sought and heeded in a way that astonished Roman observers. That standing did not vanish. It runs forward into the Viking Age, where we can see it in much sharper detail.