Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women. Good news! You can read my PhD thesis for free here. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent.
Content note: This newsletter contains mentions of infant death and death in childbirth, as well as images of human remains.
The Oakington Women: A matriarchal medieval society
You may have seen a viral photograph making its rounds on social media, of a sixth-century medieval skeleton impaled on a large yellow pipe. The popularity of the image is down to its gruesome nature, the modern gas pipe having been bored right through the skull of the dead woman.
This image has cropped up a few times on my various feeds, and each time I wondered what is known about the life of this woman, aside from her recent viral fame. So I did some investigating. It turns out that the indignity afforded this unfortunate woman in death contrasts sharply with the dignity with which she was initially buried.
This woman, nicknamed ‘Piper’ by the University of Central Lancashire archaeologists who uncovered her in 2014, was buried in grave 116 in a sixth-century early medieval cemetery in Oakington, Cambridge. More interesting than the pipe, which was a pure accident of directional drilling, her grave was richly furnished. She had a brooch on each shoulder, wrist-clasps, and a large ornate cruciform brooch, indicating she had been buried in a peplos dress over a long-sleeved dress and wrapped in a pinned cloak. She also had a collection of glass and amber beads. These items in her grave indicate that she was a wealthy and important woman within her community at Oakington.
The more I researched this dig, which was overseen by archaeologists Dr Faye Simpson and Dr Duncan Sayer, the more the site was revealed to be a remarkable insight into early medieval gender and society. Piper was not the only high-status woman in the Oakington cemetery. In fact, there were a large number of furnished female burials, which acted as focal points throughout the cemetery, and very few male ones.
Duncan Sayer has called the Oakington dig suggestive of a ‘female-dominated matriarchal group’ in early medieval England. What’s more, around thirty percent of the 124 graves were those of infants. The high number of infant burials is disproportionate, indicating that women were in this area specifically to give birth within this matriarchal community.
During the past week there has been much excitement on social media and in the press about the findings of a recent DNA study, which provide evidence for matrilocal societies in Iron Age Dorset. Matrilocal societies are groups in which women stay within family groups, marrying outsiders, while male family members join different groups. Such societies would naturally revolve around generations of women. The Oakington site might provide a comparable example, though centuries later, of a similar kind of female-dominated group.
As well as Piper, the Oakington site contains a number of other completely extraordinary burials. Grave 57 reveals another wealthy female burial comparable to that of Piper, nicknamed ‘Queeny’ by archeaologists. According to the project summary, her grave goods included ‘an iron purse ring, 21 amber beads, 4 glass beads, an iron knife, wrist clasps, belt strap fittings, a large cruciform brooch and two small long brooches’. But the grave also reveals something more precious and yet tragic - a collection of tiny, foetal bones within her pelvis. Archaeologists have speculated that the woman in Grave 57 died as a result of an obstructed childbirth, as the foetus was lodged low down and sideways in the pelvic area. In modern times such obstructions can be resolved by performing a C-section, but unfortunately for Queeny and her child, this complication was fatal in medieval England.
In another part of the site, archaeologists uncovered the furnished grave of a wealthy woman, buried in a mound beside a large mammal. Initially the animal was assumed to be a horse, an exciting find given that of the thirty-one previously discovered human-horse-burials, every one was a male warrior. However, excavators were surprised to find that the animal was in fact a cow. There are no comparable graves in all of Europe. Cuts at the cow’s ankles indicate that the animal had been skinned, and was included in the grave as a sacrifice. Given that a cow would have been an important source of food, this was a significant offering. The woman buried alongside the cow was buried with a full chatelaine - an iron girdle that would have held keys and other useful tools - another indication of her importance to the community.
Grave 109 is a triple grave containing three female skeletons of vastly different ages - one a girl who was under 3, one a young woman of around 18-25, and one a woman aged 25-30. One might expect that this was a familial grave, but DNA analysis reveals that these women and the girl were not related to each other in the first or even second degree. We can only assume that a joint cause of death, a tragedy that befell all three, led them to be buried within the same grave.
The genetic analysis of skeletons from Oakington in particular has led to some important revisions to how we understand the past. A common piece of rhetoric among racist commentators is that there is such thing as a common ‘Anglo-Saxon’ ancestry, a biologically-based ethnic group that established the religion and culture of early medieval England. However, the skeletons in sixth-century Oakington contradict and undermine this assertion - according to Duncan Sayer, the evidence shows that ‘the people of fifth- and sixth-century England had a mixed heritage and did not base their identity on a biological legacy’.
Four skeletons from Oakington were examined - according to Dr Sayer, ‘one of them was a match with the Iron Age genome, two were closest to modern Dutch genomes, and one was a hybrid of the two. Each of these burials was culturally Anglo-Saxon because they were buried in the same way in the same cemetery. In fact, the richest assemblage of Anglo-Saxon artifacts came from the individual with the match for Iron Age genetic ancestry, and so was not a migrant at all’.
These people did not understand themselves as ‘Anglo-Saxon’, nor was cultural identity based around ethnicity or genetics. They were all equally part of a diverse community. This evidence has led Dr Sayer to conclude that ‘Anglo-Saxon ancestry is a modern English myth—the English are not descended from one group of people but from many and that persists in our culture and in our genes’.
A stray gas pipe is truly the least compelling aspect of this cemetery. Archaeological digs such as the Oakington excavation can provide all sorts of rich information about the lives (and deaths) of people who lived in the past. The insights into early medieval English society provided by this dig richly furnish our understandings of how gender, ethnicity, and culture operated in this early period, a time when written documents are limited. Oakington especially provides insights into sixth-century birthing practices, a central concern in the lives of medieval women. While the image of a woman’s skeleton with a pipe through it is shocking on a surface level, it fails to communicate the real significance of this historical woman - a respected and high-status matriarch within her community.
Further reading:
Duncan Sayer, ‘Ten Skeletons Bury a Right-Wing Talking Point’, Sapiens, 2018
Francine Russo, ‘Archeaologists uncover the real story of how England became England’, The Smithsonian, 2024
‘UCLan Students Discover Rare Find’, UCLan (Woman buried with cow)
‘Individual Encounters: capturing personal stories with ancient DNA’, The Past, 2022
Oakington Anglo-Saxon Cemetery - Mid-Project Summary 2010-2012
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