Hello everyone and welcome to the History of England, episode 147 women in Anglo-Saxon, England.

I remember vaguely as if through a glass darkly, ranting slightly in-moderately against the mild but

constant pressure by you lot to cover all that social history stuff and to abandon for a time at

least the glorious role of one of it is the history of kings, battles, dates and such like.

As you know I have a few times bowed to that pressure.

Now I have to tell you that I have the very same trouble over the topic of women.

After all the pages of history are written for much of it mainly by blokes and it would therefore be

a bit more balanced to find some way of getting the odd female character on the stage and to

leaven the historical bread with a bit more female flower. All this flowery language if you're

pardoned the poem probably tells you that there's a problem. The problem is as my wife will confirm

that what I know about women could be written on the inside of a ping pong ball and I had to tell

me I have large handwriting. And so I tremble, I tremble with fear at the potential for error in

this PC wilderness. I will without doubt say the wrong thing in the wrong way. The number of people

who listen to this podcast will fall by 50%, I will be the butt of scathing jokes.

Worse, my words stand to be measured and judged by my daughter's gentle listener it is a minefield

in which I walk a valley of death and fear where I bear no staff, no rod to comfort me.

But look I am by nature compliant. So I do what I'm told, I heartily repent of my sins,

I'm truly sorry for any previous bad behaviour. So despite the sweat, fear, pain and despair,

I'm going to proceed. So where to start with a job of building a picture of the lives of women?

And the answer I thought might be to start at the very beginning of the history of England that is

with the sacks and invasions of the six-century. At this point I should come clean.

Normally I do my very best to make sure I've got a variety of different views on a topic,

...