r hand-maiden, and then sent me
to the royal larder to refresh myself."

Ethelwyn, another royal lady, and a friend of Archbishop Dunstan,
was accustomed to decorate the ecclesiastical vestments, and the art
needlework of herself and her companions became celebrated. On
account of his well-known skill in drawing and designing, Dunstan was
frequently called into the ladies' bower to give his views in such
matters. While they worked, he sometimes regaled them with music from
his harp.

These pleasing views of the character and the employments of the
royal ladies in Anglo-Saxon times, seen in their simple pursuits, are
more agreeable than the stories of those who were engaged in court
intrigues, to relate which would necessitate a history of the
political movements of the day. We shall later have ample opportunity
to see woman as an influence in affairs of thrones and dynasties. For
the present, it will suffice to regard royal woman in the way in which
she is prominently presented to us in Anglo-Saxon annals--as the lady
of refined domesticity.

CHAPTER IV

THE WOMEN OF THE ANGLO-NORMANS

A picture of the social life of England during the Norman period is
a picture of manners and customs in a state of flux. But amid all the
instability of the times, when political institutions, laws, customs,
and language were inchoate, the tendencies were so marked that it is
quite possible to watch the emergence of a solidified people. The two
great social factors to be considered are the baronial castles and the
women of those castles. The castle was the characteristic feature of
the Anglo-Norman period; its conspicuousness increased as time went
on, until, in the reign of Stephen, there were no less than eleven
hundred of these units of divided sovereignty scattered over the
country.

During the period of national unsettlement which followed upon the
Conquest, these frowning castles arose; they owed their existence
to the lack of adequate laws for the safeguarding of life and of
property, and to the absence of the machinery of government for the
enforcement of law. But, principally, they represented the mutual
jealousies of the Norman barons, to whom had been apportioned the
lands of the Saxons--jealousies which found a common attraction in an
aversion to the centralizing of power in the hands of any monarch who
had ambitions to be more than a superior overlord.

This social insecurity was intensified during the reign