Peace-Weavers & Shield-Maidens
Women in Early English Society
Kathleen Herbert
Anglo-Saxon Books, 1997 - 2013
The recorded history of the English people did not start in 1066 as popularly believed but almost one-thousand
years earlier. The Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus noted in Germania, published in the year 98, that the
English (Latin Anglii), who lived in the southern part of the Jutland peninsula, where members of an alliance
of Goddess-worshippers. Kathleen Herbert has taken that as an appropriate opening to an account of the earliest
English-women, the part they played in the making of England, what they did in peace and war, the impressions
they left in Britain and on the continent, how they were recorded in the chronicles, how they came alive in
riddles and verse.
Some cultures have created legends about immortal females while their own flesh-and-blood womenfolk get
sexually bullied and mentally stunted. There is enough material from early England for readers to make up
their own minds about what the English women of that period were like, their fates and their fortunes.
(The text above comes from the back of the book)