The only other early societies which uniformly afforded high social status to women were the small colonies of Pythagoreans which established themselves under Pythagoras and after his death in various settlements of the ancient world. But these were very tiny groups, and the status was established on a single premise, namely that women could teach mathematics, which, for Pythagoreans, meant the same as saying that women could be priests. In no other early societies (nor indeed in many later ones) were women afforded the same level of status as in early Celtic society. Plutarch, writing in the second
Century AD, tells us that there was a long-standing Celtic tradition of women acting as mediators or judges in political or military disputes. Caesar tells us that Celtic women were free to choose their own husbands, that property was equally shared between them, and that full inheritance went to either partner after the death of the other. We know from the background to Boudica’s story that a king could bequeath his rights and property directly to his daughters, as Prasutagus (Boudica’s husband) did. Both Caesar and Dio Cassius describe types of communal marriage or polyandry, with kinsmen sharing wives and the descent becoming in effect matrilinear; Dio Cassius no doubt intended his account to be shocking to the Roman sensibility, and the accounts of polyandry have subsequently been attacked as no more than propaganda to discredit the Celts as barbarians, but it is perfectly possible that multiple marriage was common among the Celts, at least in Gaul. Votive tablets found at many Celtic shrines provide hard evidence that women owned property and businesses in their own names.
Polybius tells us that Celtic women followed their menfolk into battle, driving the supply waggons, and Ammianus Marcellinus tells us that they also took part in the actual combat, and that ‘a whole troop would not be able to withstand one Gaul in battle if he summoned his wife to his assistance’. Plutarch’s account of the life of Marius includes a description of Celtic women of the Ambrones tribe taking up arms when their menfolk retreated before the Romans, and attacking not only the Romans as the identified enemy but also their own menfolk as traitors. Both Caesar and Tacitus give us descriptions of Celtic women present at battles, usually standing on or near the supply waggons and yelling encouragement to their tribesmen, sometimes being wounded or killed in the action. We have in Cartimandua and Boudica evidence that Celtic queens could be and were supreme commanders in battle and sovereigns over the whole tribe. We know that there were women druids, women poets, women physicians and women sages.
There were at least as many goddesses as there were gods, and they were by no means subservient to their male counterparts, as they often are in the Greek and Roman pantheons; indeed, the Celtic war deities are predominantly female rather than male. Badbh, the war-goddess whose name means ‘fury’, and the Morrigan or Great Queen both appear as crows or ravens in the Irish mythological tales, and there was obviously a widespread conception of the spirit of battle as a female deity throughout the ancient Celtic world. Badbh Catha (Badbh the shape-shifter) is undoubtedly the same goddess as Cathubodua, the raven-goddess worshipped in Gaul. In Welsh folklore appears Cyhiraeth (‘hound of longing’), a goddess of streams, marshes and lonely places whose blood-freezing wails predict death, particularly death in battle. In the tales of Blathnat (Irish, ‘little flower’) and her Brythonic counterpart Blodeuwedd (Welsh, ‘flower’), we find a goddess just as capable of intrigue and murder as her male lover.
Modern Ireland is often viewed as male-dominated because of the influence of the Catholic Church, but the ancient and traditional Celtic pattern in
Ireland certainly afforded women very high status. Even the early mediaeval Brehon laws, which are generally very androcentric, explicitly state that for every nobleman ‘to his wife belongs the right to be consulted on every subject’. Under the same laws, a man could not own his wife, and her rights were safeguarded: ‘It is only contract that is between them.* A married woman was fully entitled to pursue a case at law, with or without her husband’s permission, even if his property or joint property was at risk. Legal separation and divorce were not only possible in pagan Celtic Ireland, they were also accompanied by detailed legal rights for the woman, including the right to keep all marriage portions and gifts, as well as additional amounts for damages. Although inheritance was to the eldest son, a daughter could inherit if there was no son, but she was then obliged to provide and pay for a warrior under military levies unless she herself was prepared to fight in battle, which became increasingly difficult to do after the advent of Christianity.
The Christian influence certainly altered the status of women in Ireland very rapidly. In the earliest Christian period, immediately after Padraig’s arrival, we see evidence of continuation of the older pattern: at the sixth-century school of St. Finian at Clonard there were female students, and when St. Mugint went from Ireland to found a school in Scotland in the seventh century, girls were encouraged to attend and study as well as boys. As late as AD 932, the Irish annals record the death of Uallach, chief poet of Ireland and a woman of the greatest learning. Howevei; the law known as Cain Adomnain or Cain Adanman (‘Adamnan’s law’) passed at the Synod of Tara in 697 exempted (or excluded) women from taking part in battle, and the Catholic Church, as it grew, came more and more to dominate the legal and social mores of the country, so that by the early Middle Ages the ancient Celtic pattern of high legal and social status for women in Ireland had been considerably eroded, and the more common mediaeval pattern of male dominance obtained.
In Gaul and Britain, the same erosion of female social status also took place, first under Roman influence, then later under Christian influence. Boudica and Cartimandua, however, were warrior queens in an age when the unusually high social status of women was an indisputable reality in the Celtic world.
World History
