Saint Bathilde
Queen-Consort, Child-Slave Liberator
626-680

 

THE TIME IN WHICH Bathilde lived was long called the Dark Ages by historians. This referred to the period between the end of Imperial Rome in about 475 CE and unification of territories and kingdoms into the Holy Roman Empire with the crowning of Frankish king Charlemagne as Emperor by Pope Leo III, in 800 CE. That label has somewhat given way to the designation of the Early Middle Ages. Record keeping was scarce then compared with modern times, with the exception of activities associated with the royal houses. We are lucky those limited records go back so far into history.

 

I wanted to interview Bathilde because of her fascinating journey from a teen sold into slavery in a royal household, to marriage to a king, to a force behind ending slavery in her kingdom, to establisher of an abbey, to proclaimed saint. She is also the most ancient of documented powerful women in my genealogy.

 

“What was it really like for a girl to grow up during this period of the Dark Ages when so much was changing all around you?” I asked Bathilde, my 43rd great grandmother.

 

“Female children throughout much of history — even in the aristocracy and nobility — were regarded as not much higher on the biological ladder than a prized horse or ox. We were seen as the possession of the male head of household, which often was not even our father, if father was a member of a high-born house. In those circumstances, we belonged to the noble. Basically, we were like chattel, property to be bred, bartered, sold, or otherwise disposed of as men wished.

 

“Girls were seen as inconsequential because it was becoming increasingly common in my day that we could not inherit land nor rulerships in many kingdoms. To the extent we had a substantial dowry, we were valued mainly as bargaining chips to solidify political alliances with other kingdoms.

 

“Things were even worse for peasant girls who most of the time were taught nothing but how to harvest a crop, launder the stinking garments of men and children, and sew the busted seams of ragged clothes. I at least was taught to read, instructed on a bit of history and geography. Only a few times was I caught listening in to the discussions of politics and strategy that was so entertaining to me. I used to hide behind the heavy draperies in my father’s council room and listen to his advisors and ambassadors discuss the problems of the day.”

 

“That interest in history, geography, and foreign affairs may have carried down through the centuries,” I interjected, making this early connection between my 43rd great grandmother and myself. “And I too found political systems entertaining for a while in college.”

 

“I know, child. Where did you think those interests came from?” Bathilde replied.

 

“Never really thought about it,” I said, feeling slightly ashamed and offering up a lame excuse. “At the time, I didn’t know we were related.”

 

“Doesn’t matter,” Bathilde dismissed the reasoning with a wave of her hand. “You are interested now, and that’s good enough,” she said, smoothing her heavy golden yellow, velvet gown with a brush of her hand down her torso with a move that looked like the garment was feeling too tight.

 

She continued with her story. “It was the unusually aggressive mother who had any power or influence over the head of household. Most bore their daughters in sorrow, knowing they were likely destined to be used, abused, and discarded when men saw fit. And some mothers, like my own, had no choice but to relinquish daughters when it seemed they would be escaping the starvation of the poor.

 

“These facts of life in the 7th century were how I ended up being sold into slavery. Mother had brought us far from our home in Anglo-Saxon Anglia to the realm called, at the time, Neustria, a kind of sub division of the kingdom of the Franks. I think it was, in fact, Gaul — the name we Pagans still called the Frankish lands — after the death of my father Ricberht, an Anglo-Saxon ruler.

 

“As I read more about your time period, I’m learning that there was much more travel in your time than I realized.” Having made the trip across the English Channel from the continent to the British Isles, I had experienced it as a long and rough journey when the weather and water were uncooperative, even on a 1970s ferry. But it was surprising to realize there has been a more robust trade economy requiring arduous travel for much of the past 2000 years than I had imagined.

 

“Why did you leave your homeland?” I didn’t expect Bathilde’s answer.

 

“It wasn’t safe for us in Anglia after father killed King Eorpwald for converting to the papist religion. Our clan were strong and good Pagans, and he saw the conversion as a betrayal of our people. The papists were intent on wiping out our sacred ways and beliefs, you see. So father was trying to hold on to our ancient way of life.

“But, after the assassination, Mother thought it best for us to leave Anglia. She had heard of a sect of Druids still thriving in Gaul and took the family there for protection and education. She didn’t realize that life was in as much turmoil there. She didn’t know how much the Romans had destroyed sacred sites or built over them. She didn’t know how much of our way of life was already gone.

 

“So when she saw the impact of papist conversions on our people, she could see our Pagan culture vanishing before her eyes. That’s how she justified allowing me to be bought by the palace of Neustria — by deciding I would have a safer, better life in a household that was more settled and refined, even though by then it was even more papist than Anglia. She was a realist.”

 

“I’ve read that the practice of enslaving conquered people was a long held method the Romans used as a way of replenishing their military, and of subduing the people.”

 

“Oh it wasn’t just the Romans. Nearly every culture had the practice in the early middle ages. And for various reasons, but the mostly likely were that they refused to bend to the rule of the invading conquerors. In some cases their mother was a slave so it was an inherited status, or they offered themselves into slavery to pay a debt. Children were often offered as a debt bargain. That may have been my case, for times were very hard for my mother after we went to Gaul.”

 

Not meaning to trivialize her experience of being sold into slavery, it nonetheless occurred to me that this transition from a mother who couldn’t adequately care for Bathilde, to a royal palace was perhaps not that qualitatively different from my own biological mother relinquishing me to adoption. My mother had even said this to me in our first phone call. She had the hope of giving me a better life. How interesting that such a motivation would echo through the centuries.

 

Bathilde had seen the puzzlement on my face as I listened to her casual recitation of her father’s politico-religious murdering of a tribal chieftain. It is one thing to read about such a thing, but another to hear it spoken of. Part of my wrinkled forehead was also about trying to remember geographically where Anglia was, and who exactly were the Franks. Had it really been so long since these peoples and territories were in the living consciousness of ordinary people?

 

A quick search for maps of the ancient world yielded pictures locating Anglia where the English counties of Norfolk and Suffolk are now. Neustria was one of the several divisions of the Frankish kingdom that we’d recognize today as Germany, France, the Benelux, and bits of Italy. Neustria itself was roughly between the Rhine and Loire Rivers.

 

I am stunned to locate these areas because they are not unfamiliar to me. I had traveled through Norfolk and Suffolk when I visited England in the 1970s. I thought the area picturesque with stately homes, lush countryside, quaint villages, steeped in Anglo-Saxon history.

 

“In my day, this Neustria area was all part of the Merovingian dynasty lands that extended across much of continental Europe. This connection between England and France has been going on since before England and France even existed. Fascinating, yes?”

 

I nodded. I had never heard of Neustria before researching Bathilde, and didn’t want to admit it. But I marveled at how I had felt so at home there. How strange. Could people actually inherit feelings of home or empowerment from long ago ancestors?

 

Bathilde sensed this question but chose not to address it in the moment. Instead she kept narrating her own history for me.

 

“Records of my true parentage have been lost. I tell you these details to try to shed light on my life. Some have speculated that I was a relative, but not the daughter, of the last Pagan king of East Anglia. Others think I was from the Celtic lands of Gaul because that’s where the mayor of the palace to the Neustrian king, Clovis II, was employed.”

 

“Mayor of the palace?” I didn’t understand this term.

 

“It’s like your present day chief of staff,” Bathilde clarified, then continued. “Either way, I like that history remembers that in some way I had Pagan roots. It makes my story more interesting to have taken place in that period when the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic Pagans were suffering forced conversion at the hands of what I thought of as the marauding papists.

 

“That desecration of Pagan sites and beliefs was happening everywhere, and had been since the Romans conquered Gaul and Britannia hundreds of years before. Some of us had held on, determined not to let our way of life disappear. But you can read all about that later.”

 

“I will,” I vowed, eager to learn more about how Paganism had been forced underground for the most part of the following 1500 years. I thought that was a particularly sinister turn of events for my ancestors, both those who had been victim to it, and those who perpetrated and enforced it through the ages. That part of my history I am not proud of.

 

“At the palace, it soon became a matter of survival for me to not speak of my beliefs, to not practice Pagan ways when I was around young King Clovis II in Neustria when I was still a teenager. So outwardly I began to take on the customs of my captors, feigning piety until it became my own habit. It was a matter of survival.”

 

“What was your life like after being enslaved in the palace? I can only imagine it as frightening and terrible,” I said, hoping her situation wasn’t as terrible as it sounded.

 

“It was of course quite sad to be taken away from my family and friends, and to be suspected constantly of wanting to escape and return. And the mayor of the palace was an old lech. He wanted to bed me, so I learned where I could hide, and which women of the palace wouldn’t make me available to him. It soon became clear that what he really wanted me for was to offer me to the king in order to gain royal favor, thus securing his position in the palace.”

 

The words yenta and pimp came into my sarcastic brain but I refrained from offering those into the conversation. Nonetheless, Bathilde smiled slyly without commenting on reading my thoughts.

 

“I was fortunate that Clovis was almost still a child himself — 15 to my 22 years — when we married. Clovis had noticed me on many occasions trying to avoid Mayor Erchinoald, and I think at first he thought it was a fun game. Sometimes he hid with me, to avoid his lessons. It was no secret that I had my own royal roots and that my parents were as dead to me as his were to him, for all practical purposes. We formed a bond.

 

“So when Clovis became my husband, and thus due to regaining overt royal status, I was able to show mercy and compassion — but secretly of course — for those who still practiced the old ways, or who were converting out of fear and outright threat.

 

“With Clovis, I had three sons: Clotaire (also called Chlothar III), Childeric, and Theuderic, the latter becoming your 42nd great grandfather. Now Clotaire was still a child, only 5, when Clovis died, and that meant I became queen regent. Funny how history repeats, is it not? I believe you have several other queen regents in your family tree.

 

“Yes, and I’ll be speaking with Anna of Kiev in a little while. She was also a queen regent.”

 

“It was a common occurrence among royalty,” Bathilde acknowledged. “I could barely believe how fortunate I was to have all that power and ability to change things in Neustria. And the first thing I set about changing was the practice of slavery. With the help of Austrasia’s chief counselor Eligius, all the children in slavery were set free. Dagobert was Clovis’s father, and Austrasia, you see, was another of the sub divisions of the kingdom of the Franks. So father-in-law Dagobert was quite cooperative.”

 

I looked up Austrasia as soon as Bathilde mentioned it, and felt chills run across my chest. I had lived smack in the middle of this kingdom in the 1970s, which encompassed the northern part of today’s France and extending north past Cologne, Germany. I had spent a comfortable and exciting four years in Bitburg, more or less half way between Aachen and Metz on the map of Austrasia. This went a long way towards explaining why I was so at home in a region that much more recently had been filled with WWII Nazis (with whom I have traumatic and terrorizing associations). The old region of Austrasia had never felt foreign to me, not even when I couldn’t communicate fluently in the modern languages.

 

“Of course,” Bathilde went on,” there was a lot about Eligius I had to overlook, for he was one of those awful people who was on a mission to convert as many Pagans as he could. He was a terrible social climber, and rarely a truth teller, although he pretended to be an honest broker for the several kings and others with power that he worked with, including my son Clotaire. Look him up and you’ll see what I mean. Slimy bastard, but useful to my purposes of abolishing child slavery.”

 

I was a bit shocked by her language. It was both modern and more coarse than I’d expected from a proclaimed saint of the church. “What an exciting life you had, Bathilde, and abolishing child slavery was no small accomplishment. Was that why you came to be named a saint?”

 

“Oh, who knows why the Popes do anything,” she laughed. “Personally, I think it was because I gave money to establish the Chelles Abbey as a place of seclusion and learning for women. Because of spending a short amount of time under the influence of the Druids in Celtic Gaul, the practice of learning as a way of life appealed to me. It was a way to honor that important aspect of my Pagan roots in a sense without being accused of heresy.

 

“And, I had a feeling — as my son Theuderic came into power and warred against his cousin Dagobert II — that I would be better off out of the royal spotlight. The Abbey had actually been a former villa in the Merovingian family and it just made sense to make it comfortable, bring more women wanting education to it, and surround myself with like minds out of the stress of politics. And when I retired there, I brought another endowment with me.

 

“I guess the Pope liked my money. Seems they had a habit of handing out sainthoods to the wealthy who helped them build their religious empire. But that sainthood thing didn’t happen until 200 years after my death, so it didn’t really affect me. At the Abbey I carried on ensuring that the sick were cared for. Now they say to pray to me when you’re sick, or if you are a widow, or while a child. I don’t mind, although as a Pagan at heart, it’s rather strange to be prayed to,” Bathilde said, still puzzled about it more than a millennia later.

 

“Thank you for your story, Great Granny.”

 

Bathilde laughed heartily. “Few have called me that. I think I like it better than being called Saint,” she said as she disappeared into the ethers.