Matthew Firth

Flinders University · College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences

Ships and seafaring were intrinsic to early English cultures, identifiable in the origin story of the adventus Saxonum , in the material cultures of 6th‐ to 10th‐century England, and in later portrayals of good kingship. However, effective control of the sea only became critical to Anglo‐Saxon kings in the 10th century, serving to legitimate their...

Free eprint: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/K9ZICD5SZ2PGYZTKIHSJ/full?target=10.1080/0013838X.2021.1997477 The clerical author known as B provides the earliest account of one of pre-Conquest England’s more infamous tales: the coronation scandal of 955. In his Vita S. Dunstani, written 995 × 1005, B recounts that King Eadwig (955–959) absconded...

(Eprint: https://academic.oup.com/nq/advance-article/doi/10.1093/notesj/gjac009/6519495?guestAccessKey=5d16649a-6eae-442d-999f-31e36942618e) There is only one account of the Norse siege of Chester, found in Fragmentary Annals of Ireland (FAI). FAI does not provide a date for the siege (it rarely provides dates at all) but does place it within the r...

Queens were important figures within the court communities of pre-Norman Eng-land, their status defined by their relationship to the king, whether as queen-consort, queen-mother, queen-regent, or queen-dowager. These were positions with an attendant degree of prestige and authority, but a vulnerability to the vicissitudes of the king's fortunes. Of...

Trap feeding and tread-water feeding are cetacean hunting strategies first recorded in the 2000s in two whale species at opposite sides of the globe. In both behaviors, whales sit motionless at the surface with their mouths open. Fish are attracted into the whale's mouth and are trapped when the jaw is closed. We identify striking parallels with th...

Æthelflæd is an interesting character in the story of England’s pre-Norman history. Not just because of her status as female ruler, or for her seven years of sole-rule in Mercia, or for her establishing of a network of defensive fortifications in Mercia, or even for her military successes in Wales and the Danelaw. But for the mythos that has grown...

Tenth-century England was home to a number of extraordinary royal women. One of the more enigmatic of these was Eadgifu, third consort to the king and serial monogamist Edward the Elder († 924). Edward, who was round thirty years older than his consort, pre-deceased Eadgifu, leaving her in precarious position. She could benefit from the legitimacy...

By the year 927, Æthelstan († 939) had claimed the crowns of Mercia, Wessex and Northumbria. While his grandfather Alfred the Great († 899), father Edward the Elder († 924), and aunt Æthelflæd († 918) had laid the groundwork for this expansion of West Saxon authority, Æthelstan was the first ruler to achieve the unification of the various early med...

The English historical record is clear on the presence of Scandinavians on English shores during the period known as the Viking Age (c.793–c.1060). As that name implies, the English perspective of Anglo-Scandinavian interaction is often characterised by conflict with viking raiders, armies, and settlers in England’s east and north. This is, however...

Book review

In the years 850–1000, English queenship was increasingly defined by a set of traditional prerogatives, lands and revenues. Though the evidence is fragmentary and, at times, inconclusive, these are, nonetheless, an important aspect of the transition of queenship from a conceptually nebulous role for which we have little extant diplomatic evidence,...

October 14 1066 marks a conceptual disruption to England’s history that looms large in English cultural memory. The Norman Conquest brought with it new lords, a new language, strange names, and imposing architecture. There is, no doubt, an extent to which this was indeed a disruption. Yet to what degree did those writing the history of pre-Conquest...

According to the earliest Vita S. Dunstani, the short-lived reign of the English King Eadwig (955-959) began in ignominy. On the day of his coronation, Eadwig absented himself from the event, only to be found shortly after by Abbot Dunstan, ‘disporting himself disgracefully in between two women as though they were wallowing in some revolting pigsty...

The women of the West Saxon dynasty had long-standing connections to the female religious houses of southern England. Queens-consort served as founders, patrons and advocates. Often this patronage led to their residence at their favoured religious house in retirement from the royal court, whether as repudiated consort or as queen-dowager. Likewise,...

The motif of the ‘wicked queen’ is an inter-cultural literary archetype with ancient precedents: Jezebel’s persecution of Elijah, Herodias seeking the head of John the Baptist, rumours that Livia Drusilla poisoned Augustus, of Theodora’s sexual promiscuity. Such allegations are rarely supported by historical evidence, more often serving political i...

Narrative is fundamental to the transmission of a culture’s memory and experience across generations. Cultural memory theory states that the retelling of narratives, of history, is fundamentally a creative process: a group’s recollection of a past beyond living memory, shaped by their social identity and interpreted in the act of remembering. This...

Book review.

Book review.

Book review.

The thematic parallels of the sagas of warrior poets (skáldasögur) have often been noted, among these the propensity of the skáld to travel to the various courts of the tenth- and eleventh-century North Sea world. Yet, for these similarities, antagonists have very different experiences of kingship and their fates are, in part, shaped by their respo...

Royal Studies Journal (2020) 2057-6730 Early medieval England is well-known for its assortment of royal saints; figures who, though drawn from nearly five centuries of pre-Conquest Christianity, are often best known from eleventh-century hagiography. Common among these narratives is the figure of the “wicked queen”–a woman whose exercise of politic...

Episodes of travel to foreign courts are a feature of Íslendingasögur — Icelandic family sagas. It is a trope particularly ubiquitous of the skáldasögur — poets’ sagas — where a skáld’s reputation as warrior and hero is augmented through interactions with historical figures of the Scandinavian world. The resultant depictions of various cultures and...

Book review.

Book review.

All cultures engage in storytelling. Narrative is fundamental to the transmission of a culture’s memory and experience across generations. But to what extent can such accounts of the past be understood as sources of history, especially when recounting events beyond living memory? That is the question at the centre of both this paper, and my thesis....

The links between the Anglo-Saxon king Æthelstan (924/7-939) and Malmesbury Abbey (Wiltshire) are well attested. Reputedly a particular devotee of St Aldhelm, the abbey’s founder, Æthelstan donated lands, numerous holy objects (including a portione ligni Domini), and wealth to the monks of Malmesbury. After the Battle of Brunanburh in 937, two of h...

King Æthelred II ‘the Unready’ (978-1013/1014-16) reigned for 38 years, longer than any other Anglo-Saxon king. However, Æthelred’s remarkable longevity as King of the English is often lost within the narrative of a reign infamous for political discord driven by a fractious nobility and a resurgence of viking aggression. A narrative that portrays a...

Cerae 5 (2018) 2204-146X The term 'empire' is frequently applied retrospectively by historians to historical trans-cultural political entities that are notable either for their geographic breadth, unprecedented expansionary ambitions, or extensive political hegemony. Yet the use of the terminology of empire in historical studies is often ill-defin...

Cerae: An Australasian Journal of Medieval Studies 2204-146X (vol 5, 2018)

‘In those days’, Gunnlaugs saga relates of the eleventh‐century, ‘the language in England was the same as that spoken in Norway and Denmark’. It is an assertion which raises some compelling questions around perceptions of England in saga literature. Gunnlaugs saga, like many of the Íslendingasögur, is thirteenth‐century in composition, yet recounts...

Cerae: An Australasian Journal of Medieval Studies 2204-146X (vol 5, 2018)

Book review.

Dragons are rare within the Íslendingasögur (Icelandic family sagas), a genre of Old Norse saga usually associated with a constructed historical realism. The appearance of a dragon in Bjarnar saga Hítdælakappa, therefore, is one of its more remarkable features. In the tale, our hero, Bjorn, finds himself at sea as a member of the peripatetic Englis...

Cerae: An Australasian Journal of Medieval Studies 2204-146X (vol 6, 2019)

The skàldasögur are a highly structured subset of the Icelandic sagas featuring, as their protagonists, young Icelandic men famed equally for skill in verse and with the sword. These twin skills lend themselves to the skàlds being portrayed as troublesome characters who struggle to navigate the social expectations of Icelandic culture, invariably l...

Anglo-Scandinavian literary and legal texts give evidence of two cultures which shared similar attitudes to punitive acts of violence; whether as literary trope or legislative recourse, deliberate mutilation was a familiar form of retribution. Why this is the case is not always clear within the context of the texts in which such episodes are narrat...

Book review.

Iceland’s governance at the time of its conversion to Christianity was unique within western Europe. A highly litigious society, distrustful of kingship, the governance of the island was quasi-parliamentary with matters of island-wide importance resolved at the annual Alþingi [assembly]. In the year 1000, it was the topic of conversion to Christian...

Few late Anglo-Saxon kings are as poorly-served in the chronicles of England, either before and after the arrival of the Normans, as Æthelstan (r. 924 – 939). Though charters, law-codes, and the famous Old English poem The Battle of Brunanburh speak to a vigorous king, personally active in the government of his realm, there is little by way of cont...

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[Review]

[Review]

[Review]

Book review.

In part faithful record of transmitted oral narratives, in part authorial invention, the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Íslendingasögur relate the histories and legends of Iceland in the ninth- and tenth-centuries. The narratives are complex documents. Authored to preserve national narratives, the Íslendingasögur were also designed to meet the...

The unique character of the treacherous woman in Anglo-Norman hagiography is an evident product of the social and religious milieu in which the hagiographical narrative was constructed. The Passio S. Æthelberhti and Vita et miracula S. Kenelmi record the martyrdoms of Anglo-Saxon royal saints at the hands of shallowly drawn, yet powerful, female an...

Gesta regum Anglorum, written by William of Malmesbury in the twelfth century, is a key source for the life of the tenth-century Anglo-Saxon king, Æthelstan (924–939). Contemporary narrative histories provide little detail relating to Æthelstan’s kingship, and the account of Gesta regum Anglorum purports to grant an unparalleled insight into his li...

The 927 AD conquest of Scandinavian Northumbria by the ascendant Anglo-Saxon king, Æthelstan, seems a straightforward action of military annexation. Yet Æthelstan's actions, both leading into, and subsequent to, his annexation of York, demonstrate a nuanced strategy of assimilation of which military dominance formed only a part. Examining chronicle...

Cerae: An Australasian Journal of Medieval Studies 2204-146X (vol 4, 2017)

Cerae: An Australasian Journal of Medieval Studies 2204-146X (vol 4, 2017)

[Review]

The abbies of Post­-Conquest England produced numerous histories and chronicles attempting to make sense of an Anglo­Saxon past alien to a rapidly evolving Anglo­Norman culture. It was in this milieu that William, a monk of Malmesbury abbey, wrote the 'Gesta regum Anglorum' in the early twelfth century. William’s history chronicles events between 4...

This collection of essays builds on an already extensive body of literature examining the depiction of the desecrated body in medieval and early modern European art. Comprising case studies from nine art historians, the collection does not adhere to a strict periodisation framework and avoids a near-sighted focus upon art in isolation. Exploring th...

In a book that is as much a product of a fascination with representations of death and dying as it is an exploration of contemporary cultural attitudes these representations display, Amy Appleford traces the evolution of mortality in London during a ‘long’ fifteenth century. Defining the period as bracketed by the Black Death and the Reformation, A...

In his first full-length authored book, John S. Ott draws together his career-long research into the bishoprics of north-western France in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, their power structures, and the execution of episcopal authority. While this topic itself is not innovative—both Giles Constable and R. I. Moore, among others, have written ex...

In 1016 the young Danish prince who was to become Cnut the Great, King of England, Denmark, and Norway, laid siege to the city of London as part of a program of conquest that would see him crowned as King of England by 1017. This millennial year is an appropriate time to reflect on the consequences of London's defiance as a city that was rapidly ev...

Cerae 3 (2016) 2204-146X The practical necessity of sight to effective participation in Anglo-Saxon life is reflected in the multifaceted depictions of punitive blinding in late Anglo-Saxon literature. As a motif of empowerment or disempowerment, acts of blinding permeate the histories and hagiographies of the eleventh and twelfth centuries and eac...

This edited collection of fourteen essays ambitiously seeks not only to apply the study of the history of emotions to Old English and Anglo-Latin literature, but also to set the terms of reference for its future study. The collection admirably fulfils its stated aim to bring emotion to the forefront of Anglo-Saxon studies and harness the current in...

Early European settlers in Australia needed to become self-sufficient to establish viable colonies thousands of miles from Britain, requiring a disciplined, productive workforce. With workers drawn entirely from a convict population, the colonial administration faced considerable challenges in extracting profitable labour. This article explores the...