What do a pagan war god and a serpent-tailed fairy have in common? Both were claimed as ancestors by England’s medieval kings, who used myth and legend to elevate their status and reinforce their right to rule.
By James Turner
For the majority of the medieval period, Europe’s kings and princes ruled over their respective polities as the first among equals. This was because their various kingdoms and territories were politically and socially structured in such a way that royal government required the cooperation of broad segments of the aristocracy to be successfully implemented. If properly incentivised and managed, the aristocracy were their monarchs’ junior partners and local proxies, nodes that relayed and projected royal authority on the regional and local level.
Underneath the glamour and glitz of the throne, the authority of a king was an individual and personal rather than institutional construct. Medieval society was formed and functioned in such a way that even the ‘last argument of kings’—recourse to military and coercive force—still required the cooperation of a range of aristocratic subordinates to be effective.
The circumstances of the Conquest meant that the first few generations of Anglo-Norman kings of England held more land and property directly than many of their contemporary monarchs. The size of the royal demesne in England also left a considerable gap between the wealth and military capabilities of the kings and their most powerful subjects.
Yet even here the realities of contemporary administration and communication technologies meant that the kings relied upon the cooperation of a range of local deputies to meaningfully mobilise these resources.
The highly personal relationships that held such medieval polities together were often variable and subject to continual renegotiation. Royal leadership meant accommodation and compromise as much, if not more so, than it did domination and proclamation.
Kings who failed to retain the confidence of their aristocratic supporters soon found themselves embattled, and the material and political distinctions that separated them from the aristocracy quickly eroding.
Monarchs Among Nobles
The royal genealogy of Cnut, with Edward the Confessor and Harold Godwinson, and the line of the Norman ancestors of William the Conqueror: Rollo, William, and Richard I the Fearless. British Library MS Royal 14. B. V, membrane 4
It would be a mistake to look at this dynamic and assume that the relationship between Europe’s monarchs and its aristocracy were inherently antagonistic. In fact, it’s probably best to draw a distinction between the idea of rank and class.
In every important sense, the king and his family were themselves members of the aristocracy. They were just another group within a larger network of other interrelated and closely connected familial affinities.
Kings enjoyed a greater status and authority than other members of their aristocracy, even possessing additional rights and privileges. But the exact same distinctions could be drawn between the families of earls and members of the lesser baronage. Ultimately, the monarchs of medieval Europe were not a separate category but rather a local aristocrat writ large.
It is also worth considering that many medieval aristocrats owed fealty to multiple monarchs since an aristocratic family’s portfolios of lands and inheritable interests crisscrossed the borders between polities. Indeed, some European monarchs even held land from other monarchs.
Again, the classical example of this is the Anglo-Norman kings of England. In England they were sovereign monarchs and knew no master but, on the continent, their ancestral duchy, Normandy, was part of the Kingdom of France and in theory beholden to the Kings of France.
Strategies for Distinction
Medieval Europe’s royal dynasties attempted various methods and tactics to safeguard their royal status and better differentiate themselves from the remainder of the aristocracy. The first and most often attempted of these was simply judicious and effective governance.
Kings would attempt to distribute largesse and the necessary offices and positions of the kingdom’s administration in an attempt to manipulate the calculus of power within their kingdom. Ideally, a judicious king would be able to reward the loyal service of his existing supporters while tempting and incentivising others to curry royal favour.
The ruling dynasties of some kingdoms such as England, France, and Sicily attempted to imbue their ruling members with a measure of special status by anointing them with holy oils during their coronation. This was the same process used in the investiture of bishops and reflected the sacral element of kingship.
Of course, many kingdoms, such as Scotland, did not anoint their kings and seem to have managed just fine.
Legitimacy Through Lineage
Lineage, one of the key criteria for kingship, proved to be a major bastion for the legitimacy and heightened status of kings. Because of the way medieval society was structured, members of the aristocracy so inclined would have a very difficult time disputing a king’s right to rule based on lineage and hereditary principle. To do so would risk undermining their own claims and unravelling the very social order which kept them in power.
Recognising this, and the strategy’s inherent synergy with the medieval aristocratic self-perception, many of Europe’s kings sought to bolster their position and legitimacy by emphasising their reputed descent from well-regarded or legendary figures.
The kings of England were eager adherents to this pattern. What made them unusual, however, was the broad, often contradictory and mutually unintelligible sources from which they claimed descent. Rather than celebrate their descent from, or spiritual affinity with, a particular monarch from England’s past, Anglo-Norman and Plantagenet kings drew upon multiple threads of the tangled legacy that resulted from successive waves of conquest and migration.
Despite the vast changes his accession to the throne wrought upon English society and wholesale removal and replacement of its traditional aristocracy, William the Conqueror would have denied holding England by right of force of arms. As far as William was concerned, he was King of England because he was the designated heir and second cousin of the childless Edward the Confessor. From his point of view, Hastings and the defeat of Harold Godwinson were simply practical steps needed to remove a usurper and make good upon his rightful claim.
Drawing of King Henry I, with a short account of his reign, and lines from ‘verses on the kings of England from William I to Henry VI’ – British Library MS Cotton Julius E. IV fol.3
William’s youngest son, Henry I, secured rule of England upon the death of his brother, King William Rufus, by snatching two vital assets before his remaining brother, Duke Robert of Normandy, even knew the throne was vacant. These were the royal treasury and a young convent-bound woman, Matilda of Scotland.
Matilda was a princess, the daughter of Malcolm III of Scotland. More importantly to Henry, though, she was descended on her mother’s side from the Confessor’s elder half-brother, Edmund Ironside, and the House of Wessex—the historic rulers of the Saxon kingdom of Wessex and the family that had first united England under one king.
Matilda was an important source of legitimacy to Henry because their children and subsequent descendants would be both members of the Norman ducal family, inheritors of the Conquest, and of the traditional line of English kings.
In the longer term, such considerations massively increased intangible but crucial factors such as the dynasty’s prestige and legitimacy. In the short term, it meant that Henry was able to mobilise considerable support from the kingdom’s native English population, which he was able to use to overcome opposition within the cross-Channel Norman aristocracy.
The Wessex Myth
This legacy extended beyond prestigious and celebrated figures such as King Æthelstan, the first ruler of a united England, and his grandfather Alfred the Great of Wessex, and deep into the mythological.
The Kings of Wessex traced their lineage back to the semi-mythological Cerdic, the king of the Gewisse tribe. Geoffrey of Monmouth, in his Historia Regum Britanniae, identifies Cerdic as an incoming Saxon warlord who vied with the native Britons for control of Bath.
Cerdic of Wessex, depicted in John Speed’s Saxon Heptarchy map in 1611.
Similarly, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that Cerdic, with his son Cynric, arrived in Britain in 495 and immediately began to compete with the Britons for territory. According to the same source, in 508 they succeeded in defeating and killing the Brittonic king, Natanleod.
Interestingly, Cerdic is depicted as a warlord and reaver rather than the ruler or even a member of an incoming population. In the Chronicle, the West Saxons—the people of Wessex—first arrived in Britain in 514, landing on a stretch of coastline controlled by Cerdic. Yet it was not until five years later in 519 that Cerdic became king of these West Saxons, immediately leading them into another war with the Britons.
Most historians and linguists who have studied the subject now believe that Cerdic’s name, and that of several of his more immediate descendants, are actually Brittonic rather than Germanic. This raises the interesting possibility that, rather than a member of the incoming Germanic migration, Cerdic’s family were regional aristocrats or warlords in post-Roman Britain who had some connection with or otherwise created an alliance with the West Saxons.
Geoffrey of Monmouth was writing in the twelfth century, while the relevant portions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle were written in the mid-ninth century, creating plenty of opportunity for misunderstanding and confusion.
The important thing, of course, is that both the kings of ninth-century Wessex and their twelfth-century Plantagenet descendants firmly believed that they were descended from Cerdic, a West Saxon warlord who had carved a kingdom out from a hostile land.
Descent from the Gods
Cerdic’s legacy as the founder of a royal dynasty was all very well, but Plantagenet kings of England were more likely to look to more recent kings for inspiration. After all, their purview and dignity had grown far beyond the relatively humble boundaries of the Kingdom of Wessex.
Indeed, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw the widespread proliferation of a cult of sainthood centred around Edward the Confessor, the last pre-Conquest English king, which his Plantagenet cousins eagerly embraced.
More important to Cerdic himself was the fact that the genealogies of the kings of Wessex extend beyond him and the founding of the kingdom. Following Cerdic’s line beyond the blurring borders of history and into the mythology, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and other contemporary sources—such as Bishop Asser’s Life of Alfred (the Great)—trace the royal bloodline back another half-dozen generations to a god.
Cerdic, the House of Wessex, and through them their Plantagenet descendants were the descendants of Woden. Known to his Scandinavian worshippers as Odin, he was an ancestor truly worthy of royalty.
The beginning of the De primo Saxonum adventu, with a portrait of Woden, ancestor of Anglo-Saxon royal lines. British Library Cotton MS Caligula A VIII f. 29r
The chief of the gods, Woden was simultaneously a wise ruler, cunning magician, and bloodthirsty warrior. According to scholars, his name—and the numerous variations used by interrelated Germanic peoples—translates in their common Proto-Germanic root language as “Lord of Frenzy” or something along those lines. A bellicose name that captures both his warlike nature and facility with profane magics.
According to surviving fragments from the Scandinavian tradition, Odin was one of the primary architects of creation, fashioning the world alongside his brothers from the corpse of the slain giant Ymir.
In fact, Cerdic traced his descent from Woden through one of his favoured sons, the regal Baldr, meaning that Henry II and Richard the Lionheart could boast of the presence of two pagan deities in their family tree.
Clearly, being able to claim descent from a god would go some way to emphasise and justify a royal line’s special status and privileges. Indeed, it was such an effective tactic, the lineage so beguiling, that almost all of the pre-unification kingdoms of England employed it.
Only the royal genealogy of Essex, the Kingdom of the East Saxons, eschews this trend, instead maintaining that their kings were the descendants of Seaxnēat, a mysterious figure whose name shares the same root and origins as the term “Saxon.”
In fact, the genealogy connecting Cerdic to Woden seems to have been copied wholesale from the northern kingdom of Bernicia. Encompassing the eastern coast of what would later become Northumbria, Bernicia was allegedly founded by the Anglian hero-king Ida Flamebringer.
The Wessex genealogy simply replaces Ida with Cerdic, leaving the remainder unchanged, even though Ida’s reign was reputed to have started in 546—several decades after Cerdic’s own.
It is easy to see why the various royal lines of pre-Christian English royalty would eagerly promote their descent from the chief of their pantheon and how this would help to elevate their status above that of their subjects.
It’s perhaps initially less clear why, following the English’s conversion to Christianity in the seventh century, kings and chroniclers still proudly trumpeted this connection. The Church typically characterised pagan gods as demons that had led their foolish worshippers astray. If descent from such entities was even possible within a Christian cosmology, then surely it should have been a mark of shame?
Part of the answer is revealed to us in Bishop Asser’s Life of Alfred. Throughout the account, Asser stresses Alfred’s extreme piety and its role in his success as a monarch. Much, for instance, is made of his childhood trip to Rome, where he was confirmed and supposedly anointed as a future king by Pope Leo IV.
Yet Asser also takes the time to expound upon Alfred’s legendary descent, including his distant familial link to Woden. However, in the bishop’s version of events, Woden was a great Germanic king of antiquity who later Germanic peoples mistakenly worshipped as a god—perhaps misremembering his legacy due to their lack of written records.
This process of ascribing myth to misremembered history is known as Euhemerism and was named after the Greek philosopher Euhemerus of Messene, who suggested that the god Zeus had in fact been an ancient king of Crete. Many of the leading scholars and intellectuals of the early Christian Church had previously advocated this theory to explain away the cults of rival religions before the demon theory gained ascendancy.
Alfred had spent his reign locked in a struggle for control of England with revolving coalitions of pagan Viking invaders and settlers. Asser probably recognised the inherent propaganda value in simultaneously denigrating and usurping one of the primary icons of pagan worship. It was a strategy that would have fed into the embattled sense of righteousness and cultural superiority of the English.
Myth, Memory, and Christian Kingship
On the other hand, if Woden was just a misremembered king from the Germanic forests, lost in the mists of time, why celebrate descent from him? This mortal version of Woden had no achievements or legacy other than being a king and fathering other kings.
Stripped of his divinity, his only real role is to show that the kings of Wessex and their English descendants were kings because their family had always been kings, going back to the limits of recorded history. Functionally, he could have been replaced in the genealogical and regnal lists with virtually any other name. This approach probably would bolster the special status of the English royal family, but it rings somewhat hollow. It certainly isn’t the full story.
The people of the medieval era were, like us, entirely capable of simultaneously holding two mutually contradictory ideas or beliefs at once. Between the ninth and late twelfth century, the various incarnations of the English royal family and their biographers and scribes had plenty of opportunity to sweep their forebears’ heathen and heretical genealogy under the table.
Instead, it was preserved and celebrated. This was because successive kings of England could both believe themselves to be good Christians and enjoy the notoriety that came with being the heir of a bloody-handed pagan war god. Such claims did not have to be fully articulated or rationalised for English kings to derive a measure of personal satisfaction and political capital from them.
Successive reiterations of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gradually expanded the genealogical lists of the kings of Wessex beyond Woden to include Noah and his sons, before finally reaching all the way back to Adam, the first human.
On one level, this was an extension of the Euhemeristic strategy adopted by Bishop Asser in the early tenth century. By connecting the line of Wessex and Woden to figures more firmly rooted in Christian tradition, these scribes were sanitising and rehabilitating such myths.
Similar works of retroactive genealogy were increasingly common throughout the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries as numerous writers attempted to reconcile classical works and the increasingly popular works of Arthurian romance within an acceptable Christian cosmology.
Caesar, Arthur, Beowulf, and Aeneas were all woven in various ways into biblical genealogies. Of course, in doing so they also enabled and justified the kings of England’s continued reference to and promotion of this familiar link.
The Arthurian legend played a complementary role in this process. As Geoffrey of Monmouth’s works gained popularity, so too did the idea that England had once been ruled by a divinely favoured king who would one day return. While Arthur himself was not a direct ancestor of the Plantagenets, his legend infused the political imagination of twelfth- and thirteenth-century England.
Kings like Henry II and Edward I associated themselves with Arthur’s legacy, funding expeditions to “locate” his grave or linking their military campaigns with a renewal of Arthurian grandeur. Just as descent from Woden lent a sense of pagan majesty, association with Arthur evoked Christian heroism and imperial ambition.
These layers of myth coexisted—Woden for ancient strength, Arthur for righteous rule, and Edward the Confessor for spiritual legitimacy. Taken together, they offered a web of identities that could be activated depending on circumstance. A king could be god-born in one moment, Christ-anointed in the next, and the heir of Arthur in another.
In doing so, chroniclers gave monarchs a vast mytho-historical inheritance. The kings of England could be heirs to Woden and Adam, to Alfred and Arthur. These blended lineages reinforced royal authority while satisfying a desire for continuity between the sacred and the heroic.
The Demonic Ancestor: Melusine and the Devil’s Brood
The depiction of Woden as a mere mortal and his successful absorption into a Christian world cleared the kings of England from any potential scandal. Nevertheless, even within a largely monotheistic society, gods cast a long shadow, and old superstitions clung on in dark recesses of culture.
No matter the rationalisations they had in place, when people talked of Woden the man, they could not help but be thinking about the god.
The Plantagenet kings’ continued reference to this distant familial link—and enjoyment of the dark charisma it imbued their family line—was strangely not an entirely isolated incident.
As touched upon earlier in this article, Henry II and his royal children and grandchildren were descended from the House of Wessex through his mother, Empress Matilda, and her mother, Matilda of Scotland. There were persistent stories that the family’s paternal line, the Counts of Anjou, also had a sinisterly demonic ancestor.
According to the twelfth-century historian and royal clerk Gerald of Wales, King Richard the Lionheart frequently and with considerable relish told visitors of the court about his supposed descent from the she-creature Melusine.
The tale goes that one of Richard’s ancestors, an early Count of Anjou, came across Melusine one day while travelling through the forest. Instantly taken by her extraordinary beauty and force of will, the Count took her home and married her, overlooking her mysterious origins.
Illustration to folio CXLI of L’Histoire de la Belle Mélusine published by Steinschaber in 1478 , depicting the scene of Remondin’s discovery of his wife’s animal-human hybrid form. The wall has been removed so that the reader, who knows she takes this form once a week, may see what is going on inside. Note that Mélusine is dressed as a noble lady and clearly has both human and animal body parts.
Years went by and the marriage thrived, with Melusine producing a number of healthy sons. However, the Count had slowly become aware of the great reluctance with which Melusine would attend church and her habit of slipping out of Mass without taking communion.
Growing suspicious, and perhaps belatedly recalling that she was a strange woman he had met in the woods, the Count resolved to press the issue. The next time his wife attempted to leave the church, the Count ordered his men to seize her, with the intention of forcing her to take communion. The seemingly trapped Melusine then revealed her true inhuman nature and flew out of the church with her two youngest children, never to be seen again.
According to Gerald’s tale, this maternal revelation did not prevent one of her remaining sons from eventually succeeding his father as Count, and that their mother’s infernal blood was the source of the family’s legendary foul temper and propensity for violence.
In fact, there are several versions of the story of Melusine, and the Plantagenets were far from the only medieval family to claim descent from her. Both the Lusignan family and the Count of Luxembourg had their own variations of the tale.
Melusine remained a popular subject in chivalric romance literature well into the fourteenth century, with later artwork commonly depicting her with the lower half of a sea serpent.
Before their eventual intermarriage and merger with the Anglo-Norman royal family, the Counts of Anjou had enjoyed a dark reputation amongst their neighbours for vindictiveness and ruthless opportunism.
Gerald was an intimate and long-time associate of the Plantagenet court and the royal family. His suggestion that Richard was willing to openly play upon his family’s dark reputation and boast of his allegedly demonic heritage is highly illuminating.
Richard I was a poet as well as a warrior, and like many of his contemporaries, an avid fan of Arthurian romance literature. The genre presented deliberately exaggerated models of chivalry and modes of contemporary aristocratic behaviour—a heightened reality which was blended seamlessly with fantastical and mythological elements.
Neither Richard nor his guests seriously believed that he was descended from some sort of flying demon lady. Yet the story retained a sort of power.
Walter Map was another royal clerk turned chronicler writing at around the same time as Gerald. Despite, or perhaps because of, his employment history within the royal court, Walter’s writings include a viciously polemic attack on Henry II, whose court he presents as a den of vice and sin.
Elsewhere, he is bitingly satirical about the king, his family, and the whole edifice of royal power. Indeed, Walter referred to Richard and his siblings as “the Devil’s Brood” because of their lust for power and propensity to fight amongst themselves.
Myth, Legacy, and the Weight of Blood
Thirteenth-century Europe was a society in which ancestry and identity were highly politically charged. It should be little surprise, then, that Richard’s apparently enthusiastic promotion of the Angevin family’s reputed devilish ancestry was a political stratagem—one which arguably turned a potential weakness into a strength.
As we explored back at the very beginning of this article, a medieval king had to be willing to make compromises and find common ground with members of the aristocracy.
Richard understood that aristocrats were more likely to be amenable to such compromises if they believed the alternative would place them in danger. Richard was not a king known to abhor violence. Indeed, he was a highly experienced soldier who gave every indication that he revelled in a martial lifestyle.
Again, it is very unlikely that either Richard, Gerald of Wales, or any of his guests seriously believed that the king had demonic ancestry. What the story did do, however, was remind the listener of his family’s dark reputation for bellicose behaviour.
This penchant for tyranny and warfare may not have been Melusine’s legacy, but it probably helped to convince Richard’s guests that he was not a man to be crossed lightly.
European kings during this period could not hold their kingdoms through force of arms alone, but Richard weaponised his already formidable reputation to dissuade individual aristocratic affinities from being the first to break ranks and challenge his position.
If tales of demonic ancestors helped support this strategy while also reminding his subjects of the special status and lineage of kings, then that was all to the good.
History has demonstrated again and again that, despite their most fervent wishes, kings are fundamentally wrought from the same mortal clay as their subjects. Legacy and lineage are somehow both tougher and more malleable.
Descent from Woden and Melusine were not integral to the legitimacy or authority of the Plantagenet kings of England. Yet they retained some semblance of power—imparting an ephemeral sheen, perceivable in the glinting of the crown.
It is telling, after all, that such claims were never repudiated and continued to be painstakingly preserved and replicated in successive iterations of the illustrious genealogies of the kings of England.
No Plantagenet king of England experienced an entirely peaceful reign. At one point or another, all had been compelled to personally take to the battlefield. Many did so frequently and with great relish.
Perhaps in those moments they felt the blood of Woden, Lord of Frenzy, singing in their veins.
James Turner has recently completed his doctoral studies at Durham University before which he attended the University of Glasgow. Deeply afraid of numbers and distrustful of counting, his main research interests surround medieval aristocratic culture and identity. You can follow James on X/Twitter @HistorySchmstry
What do a pagan war god and a serpent-tailed fairy have in common? Both were claimed as ancestors by England’s medieval kings, who used myth and legend to elevate their status and reinforce their right to rule.
By James Turner
For the majority of the medieval period, Europe’s kings and princes ruled over their respective polities as the first among equals. This was because their various kingdoms and territories were politically and socially structured in such a way that royal government required the cooperation of broad segments of the aristocracy to be successfully implemented. If properly incentivised and managed, the aristocracy were their monarchs’ junior partners and local proxies, nodes that relayed and projected royal authority on the regional and local level.
Underneath the glamour and glitz of the throne, the authority of a king was an individual and personal rather than institutional construct. Medieval society was formed and functioned in such a way that even the ‘last argument of kings’—recourse to military and coercive force—still required the cooperation of a range of aristocratic subordinates to be effective.
The circumstances of the Conquest meant that the first few generations of Anglo-Norman kings of England held more land and property directly than many of their contemporary monarchs. The size of the royal demesne in England also left a considerable gap between the wealth and military capabilities of the kings and their most powerful subjects.
Yet even here the realities of contemporary administration and communication technologies meant that the kings relied upon the cooperation of a range of local deputies to meaningfully mobilise these resources.
The highly personal relationships that held such medieval polities together were often variable and subject to continual renegotiation. Royal leadership meant accommodation and compromise as much, if not more so, than it did domination and proclamation.
Kings who failed to retain the confidence of their aristocratic supporters soon found themselves embattled, and the material and political distinctions that separated them from the aristocracy quickly eroding.
Monarchs Among Nobles
It would be a mistake to look at this dynamic and assume that the relationship between Europe’s monarchs and its aristocracy were inherently antagonistic. In fact, it’s probably best to draw a distinction between the idea of rank and class.
In every important sense, the king and his family were themselves members of the aristocracy. They were just another group within a larger network of other interrelated and closely connected familial affinities.
Kings enjoyed a greater status and authority than other members of their aristocracy, even possessing additional rights and privileges. But the exact same distinctions could be drawn between the families of earls and members of the lesser baronage. Ultimately, the monarchs of medieval Europe were not a separate category but rather a local aristocrat writ large.
It is also worth considering that many medieval aristocrats owed fealty to multiple monarchs since an aristocratic family’s portfolios of lands and inheritable interests crisscrossed the borders between polities. Indeed, some European monarchs even held land from other monarchs.
Again, the classical example of this is the Anglo-Norman kings of England. In England they were sovereign monarchs and knew no master but, on the continent, their ancestral duchy, Normandy, was part of the Kingdom of France and in theory beholden to the Kings of France.
Strategies for Distinction
Medieval Europe’s royal dynasties attempted various methods and tactics to safeguard their royal status and better differentiate themselves from the remainder of the aristocracy. The first and most often attempted of these was simply judicious and effective governance.
Kings would attempt to distribute largesse and the necessary offices and positions of the kingdom’s administration in an attempt to manipulate the calculus of power within their kingdom. Ideally, a judicious king would be able to reward the loyal service of his existing supporters while tempting and incentivising others to curry royal favour.
The ruling dynasties of some kingdoms such as England, France, and Sicily attempted to imbue their ruling members with a measure of special status by anointing them with holy oils during their coronation. This was the same process used in the investiture of bishops and reflected the sacral element of kingship.
Of course, many kingdoms, such as Scotland, did not anoint their kings and seem to have managed just fine.
Legitimacy Through Lineage
Lineage, one of the key criteria for kingship, proved to be a major bastion for the legitimacy and heightened status of kings. Because of the way medieval society was structured, members of the aristocracy so inclined would have a very difficult time disputing a king’s right to rule based on lineage and hereditary principle. To do so would risk undermining their own claims and unravelling the very social order which kept them in power.
Recognising this, and the strategy’s inherent synergy with the medieval aristocratic self-perception, many of Europe’s kings sought to bolster their position and legitimacy by emphasising their reputed descent from well-regarded or legendary figures.
The kings of England were eager adherents to this pattern. What made them unusual, however, was the broad, often contradictory and mutually unintelligible sources from which they claimed descent. Rather than celebrate their descent from, or spiritual affinity with, a particular monarch from England’s past, Anglo-Norman and Plantagenet kings drew upon multiple threads of the tangled legacy that resulted from successive waves of conquest and migration.
Despite the vast changes his accession to the throne wrought upon English society and wholesale removal and replacement of its traditional aristocracy, William the Conqueror would have denied holding England by right of force of arms. As far as William was concerned, he was King of England because he was the designated heir and second cousin of the childless Edward the Confessor. From his point of view, Hastings and the defeat of Harold Godwinson were simply practical steps needed to remove a usurper and make good upon his rightful claim.
William’s youngest son, Henry I, secured rule of England upon the death of his brother, King William Rufus, by snatching two vital assets before his remaining brother, Duke Robert of Normandy, even knew the throne was vacant. These were the royal treasury and a young convent-bound woman, Matilda of Scotland.
Matilda was a princess, the daughter of Malcolm III of Scotland. More importantly to Henry, though, she was descended on her mother’s side from the Confessor’s elder half-brother, Edmund Ironside, and the House of Wessex—the historic rulers of the Saxon kingdom of Wessex and the family that had first united England under one king.
Matilda was an important source of legitimacy to Henry because their children and subsequent descendants would be both members of the Norman ducal family, inheritors of the Conquest, and of the traditional line of English kings.
In the longer term, such considerations massively increased intangible but crucial factors such as the dynasty’s prestige and legitimacy. In the short term, it meant that Henry was able to mobilise considerable support from the kingdom’s native English population, which he was able to use to overcome opposition within the cross-Channel Norman aristocracy.
The Wessex Myth
This legacy extended beyond prestigious and celebrated figures such as King Æthelstan, the first ruler of a united England, and his grandfather Alfred the Great of Wessex, and deep into the mythological.
The Kings of Wessex traced their lineage back to the semi-mythological Cerdic, the king of the Gewisse tribe. Geoffrey of Monmouth, in his Historia Regum Britanniae, identifies Cerdic as an incoming Saxon warlord who vied with the native Britons for control of Bath.
Similarly, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that Cerdic, with his son Cynric, arrived in Britain in 495 and immediately began to compete with the Britons for territory. According to the same source, in 508 they succeeded in defeating and killing the Brittonic king, Natanleod.
Interestingly, Cerdic is depicted as a warlord and reaver rather than the ruler or even a member of an incoming population. In the Chronicle, the West Saxons—the people of Wessex—first arrived in Britain in 514, landing on a stretch of coastline controlled by Cerdic. Yet it was not until five years later in 519 that Cerdic became king of these West Saxons, immediately leading them into another war with the Britons.
Most historians and linguists who have studied the subject now believe that Cerdic’s name, and that of several of his more immediate descendants, are actually Brittonic rather than Germanic. This raises the interesting possibility that, rather than a member of the incoming Germanic migration, Cerdic’s family were regional aristocrats or warlords in post-Roman Britain who had some connection with or otherwise created an alliance with the West Saxons.
Geoffrey of Monmouth was writing in the twelfth century, while the relevant portions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle were written in the mid-ninth century, creating plenty of opportunity for misunderstanding and confusion.
The important thing, of course, is that both the kings of ninth-century Wessex and their twelfth-century Plantagenet descendants firmly believed that they were descended from Cerdic, a West Saxon warlord who had carved a kingdom out from a hostile land.
Descent from the Gods
Cerdic’s legacy as the founder of a royal dynasty was all very well, but Plantagenet kings of England were more likely to look to more recent kings for inspiration. After all, their purview and dignity had grown far beyond the relatively humble boundaries of the Kingdom of Wessex.
Indeed, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw the widespread proliferation of a cult of sainthood centred around Edward the Confessor, the last pre-Conquest English king, which his Plantagenet cousins eagerly embraced.
More important to Cerdic himself was the fact that the genealogies of the kings of Wessex extend beyond him and the founding of the kingdom. Following Cerdic’s line beyond the blurring borders of history and into the mythology, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and other contemporary sources—such as Bishop Asser’s Life of Alfred (the Great)—trace the royal bloodline back another half-dozen generations to a god.
Cerdic, the House of Wessex, and through them their Plantagenet descendants were the descendants of Woden. Known to his Scandinavian worshippers as Odin, he was an ancestor truly worthy of royalty.
The chief of the gods, Woden was simultaneously a wise ruler, cunning magician, and bloodthirsty warrior. According to scholars, his name—and the numerous variations used by interrelated Germanic peoples—translates in their common Proto-Germanic root language as “Lord of Frenzy” or something along those lines. A bellicose name that captures both his warlike nature and facility with profane magics.
According to surviving fragments from the Scandinavian tradition, Odin was one of the primary architects of creation, fashioning the world alongside his brothers from the corpse of the slain giant Ymir.
In fact, Cerdic traced his descent from Woden through one of his favoured sons, the regal Baldr, meaning that Henry II and Richard the Lionheart could boast of the presence of two pagan deities in their family tree.
Clearly, being able to claim descent from a god would go some way to emphasise and justify a royal line’s special status and privileges. Indeed, it was such an effective tactic, the lineage so beguiling, that almost all of the pre-unification kingdoms of England employed it.
Only the royal genealogy of Essex, the Kingdom of the East Saxons, eschews this trend, instead maintaining that their kings were the descendants of Seaxnēat, a mysterious figure whose name shares the same root and origins as the term “Saxon.”
In fact, the genealogy connecting Cerdic to Woden seems to have been copied wholesale from the northern kingdom of Bernicia. Encompassing the eastern coast of what would later become Northumbria, Bernicia was allegedly founded by the Anglian hero-king Ida Flamebringer.
The Wessex genealogy simply replaces Ida with Cerdic, leaving the remainder unchanged, even though Ida’s reign was reputed to have started in 546—several decades after Cerdic’s own.
It is easy to see why the various royal lines of pre-Christian English royalty would eagerly promote their descent from the chief of their pantheon and how this would help to elevate their status above that of their subjects.
It’s perhaps initially less clear why, following the English’s conversion to Christianity in the seventh century, kings and chroniclers still proudly trumpeted this connection. The Church typically characterised pagan gods as demons that had led their foolish worshippers astray. If descent from such entities was even possible within a Christian cosmology, then surely it should have been a mark of shame?
Part of the answer is revealed to us in Bishop Asser’s Life of Alfred. Throughout the account, Asser stresses Alfred’s extreme piety and its role in his success as a monarch. Much, for instance, is made of his childhood trip to Rome, where he was confirmed and supposedly anointed as a future king by Pope Leo IV.
Yet Asser also takes the time to expound upon Alfred’s legendary descent, including his distant familial link to Woden. However, in the bishop’s version of events, Woden was a great Germanic king of antiquity who later Germanic peoples mistakenly worshipped as a god—perhaps misremembering his legacy due to their lack of written records.
This process of ascribing myth to misremembered history is known as Euhemerism and was named after the Greek philosopher Euhemerus of Messene, who suggested that the god Zeus had in fact been an ancient king of Crete. Many of the leading scholars and intellectuals of the early Christian Church had previously advocated this theory to explain away the cults of rival religions before the demon theory gained ascendancy.
Alfred had spent his reign locked in a struggle for control of England with revolving coalitions of pagan Viking invaders and settlers. Asser probably recognised the inherent propaganda value in simultaneously denigrating and usurping one of the primary icons of pagan worship. It was a strategy that would have fed into the embattled sense of righteousness and cultural superiority of the English.
Myth, Memory, and Christian Kingship
On the other hand, if Woden was just a misremembered king from the Germanic forests, lost in the mists of time, why celebrate descent from him? This mortal version of Woden had no achievements or legacy other than being a king and fathering other kings.
Stripped of his divinity, his only real role is to show that the kings of Wessex and their English descendants were kings because their family had always been kings, going back to the limits of recorded history. Functionally, he could have been replaced in the genealogical and regnal lists with virtually any other name. This approach probably would bolster the special status of the English royal family, but it rings somewhat hollow. It certainly isn’t the full story.
The people of the medieval era were, like us, entirely capable of simultaneously holding two mutually contradictory ideas or beliefs at once. Between the ninth and late twelfth century, the various incarnations of the English royal family and their biographers and scribes had plenty of opportunity to sweep their forebears’ heathen and heretical genealogy under the table.
Instead, it was preserved and celebrated. This was because successive kings of England could both believe themselves to be good Christians and enjoy the notoriety that came with being the heir of a bloody-handed pagan war god. Such claims did not have to be fully articulated or rationalised for English kings to derive a measure of personal satisfaction and political capital from them.
Successive reiterations of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gradually expanded the genealogical lists of the kings of Wessex beyond Woden to include Noah and his sons, before finally reaching all the way back to Adam, the first human.
On one level, this was an extension of the Euhemeristic strategy adopted by Bishop Asser in the early tenth century. By connecting the line of Wessex and Woden to figures more firmly rooted in Christian tradition, these scribes were sanitising and rehabilitating such myths.
Similar works of retroactive genealogy were increasingly common throughout the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries as numerous writers attempted to reconcile classical works and the increasingly popular works of Arthurian romance within an acceptable Christian cosmology.
Caesar, Arthur, Beowulf, and Aeneas were all woven in various ways into biblical genealogies. Of course, in doing so they also enabled and justified the kings of England’s continued reference to and promotion of this familiar link.
The Arthurian legend played a complementary role in this process. As Geoffrey of Monmouth’s works gained popularity, so too did the idea that England had once been ruled by a divinely favoured king who would one day return. While Arthur himself was not a direct ancestor of the Plantagenets, his legend infused the political imagination of twelfth- and thirteenth-century England.
Kings like Henry II and Edward I associated themselves with Arthur’s legacy, funding expeditions to “locate” his grave or linking their military campaigns with a renewal of Arthurian grandeur. Just as descent from Woden lent a sense of pagan majesty, association with Arthur evoked Christian heroism and imperial ambition.
These layers of myth coexisted—Woden for ancient strength, Arthur for righteous rule, and Edward the Confessor for spiritual legitimacy. Taken together, they offered a web of identities that could be activated depending on circumstance. A king could be god-born in one moment, Christ-anointed in the next, and the heir of Arthur in another.
In doing so, chroniclers gave monarchs a vast mytho-historical inheritance. The kings of England could be heirs to Woden and Adam, to Alfred and Arthur. These blended lineages reinforced royal authority while satisfying a desire for continuity between the sacred and the heroic.
The Demonic Ancestor: Melusine and the Devil’s Brood
The depiction of Woden as a mere mortal and his successful absorption into a Christian world cleared the kings of England from any potential scandal. Nevertheless, even within a largely monotheistic society, gods cast a long shadow, and old superstitions clung on in dark recesses of culture.
No matter the rationalisations they had in place, when people talked of Woden the man, they could not help but be thinking about the god.
The Plantagenet kings’ continued reference to this distant familial link—and enjoyment of the dark charisma it imbued their family line—was strangely not an entirely isolated incident.
As touched upon earlier in this article, Henry II and his royal children and grandchildren were descended from the House of Wessex through his mother, Empress Matilda, and her mother, Matilda of Scotland. There were persistent stories that the family’s paternal line, the Counts of Anjou, also had a sinisterly demonic ancestor.
According to the twelfth-century historian and royal clerk Gerald of Wales, King Richard the Lionheart frequently and with considerable relish told visitors of the court about his supposed descent from the she-creature Melusine.
The tale goes that one of Richard’s ancestors, an early Count of Anjou, came across Melusine one day while travelling through the forest. Instantly taken by her extraordinary beauty and force of will, the Count took her home and married her, overlooking her mysterious origins.
Years went by and the marriage thrived, with Melusine producing a number of healthy sons. However, the Count had slowly become aware of the great reluctance with which Melusine would attend church and her habit of slipping out of Mass without taking communion.
Growing suspicious, and perhaps belatedly recalling that she was a strange woman he had met in the woods, the Count resolved to press the issue. The next time his wife attempted to leave the church, the Count ordered his men to seize her, with the intention of forcing her to take communion. The seemingly trapped Melusine then revealed her true inhuman nature and flew out of the church with her two youngest children, never to be seen again.
According to Gerald’s tale, this maternal revelation did not prevent one of her remaining sons from eventually succeeding his father as Count, and that their mother’s infernal blood was the source of the family’s legendary foul temper and propensity for violence.
In fact, there are several versions of the story of Melusine, and the Plantagenets were far from the only medieval family to claim descent from her. Both the Lusignan family and the Count of Luxembourg had their own variations of the tale.
Melusine remained a popular subject in chivalric romance literature well into the fourteenth century, with later artwork commonly depicting her with the lower half of a sea serpent.
Before their eventual intermarriage and merger with the Anglo-Norman royal family, the Counts of Anjou had enjoyed a dark reputation amongst their neighbours for vindictiveness and ruthless opportunism.
Gerald was an intimate and long-time associate of the Plantagenet court and the royal family. His suggestion that Richard was willing to openly play upon his family’s dark reputation and boast of his allegedly demonic heritage is highly illuminating.
Richard I was a poet as well as a warrior, and like many of his contemporaries, an avid fan of Arthurian romance literature. The genre presented deliberately exaggerated models of chivalry and modes of contemporary aristocratic behaviour—a heightened reality which was blended seamlessly with fantastical and mythological elements.
Neither Richard nor his guests seriously believed that he was descended from some sort of flying demon lady. Yet the story retained a sort of power.
Walter Map was another royal clerk turned chronicler writing at around the same time as Gerald. Despite, or perhaps because of, his employment history within the royal court, Walter’s writings include a viciously polemic attack on Henry II, whose court he presents as a den of vice and sin.
Elsewhere, he is bitingly satirical about the king, his family, and the whole edifice of royal power. Indeed, Walter referred to Richard and his siblings as “the Devil’s Brood” because of their lust for power and propensity to fight amongst themselves.
Myth, Legacy, and the Weight of Blood
Thirteenth-century Europe was a society in which ancestry and identity were highly politically charged. It should be little surprise, then, that Richard’s apparently enthusiastic promotion of the Angevin family’s reputed devilish ancestry was a political stratagem—one which arguably turned a potential weakness into a strength.
As we explored back at the very beginning of this article, a medieval king had to be willing to make compromises and find common ground with members of the aristocracy.
Richard understood that aristocrats were more likely to be amenable to such compromises if they believed the alternative would place them in danger. Richard was not a king known to abhor violence. Indeed, he was a highly experienced soldier who gave every indication that he revelled in a martial lifestyle.
Again, it is very unlikely that either Richard, Gerald of Wales, or any of his guests seriously believed that the king had demonic ancestry. What the story did do, however, was remind the listener of his family’s dark reputation for bellicose behaviour.
This penchant for tyranny and warfare may not have been Melusine’s legacy, but it probably helped to convince Richard’s guests that he was not a man to be crossed lightly.
European kings during this period could not hold their kingdoms through force of arms alone, but Richard weaponised his already formidable reputation to dissuade individual aristocratic affinities from being the first to break ranks and challenge his position.
If tales of demonic ancestors helped support this strategy while also reminding his subjects of the special status and lineage of kings, then that was all to the good.
History has demonstrated again and again that, despite their most fervent wishes, kings are fundamentally wrought from the same mortal clay as their subjects. Legacy and lineage are somehow both tougher and more malleable.
Descent from Woden and Melusine were not integral to the legitimacy or authority of the Plantagenet kings of England. Yet they retained some semblance of power—imparting an ephemeral sheen, perceivable in the glinting of the crown.
It is telling, after all, that such claims were never repudiated and continued to be painstakingly preserved and replicated in successive iterations of the illustrious genealogies of the kings of England.
No Plantagenet king of England experienced an entirely peaceful reign. At one point or another, all had been compelled to personally take to the battlefield. Many did so frequently and with great relish.
Perhaps in those moments they felt the blood of Woden, Lord of Frenzy, singing in their veins.
James Turner has recently completed his doctoral studies at Durham University before which he attended the University of Glasgow. Deeply afraid of numbers and distrustful of counting, his main research interests surround medieval aristocratic culture and identity. You can follow James on X/Twitter @HistorySchmstry
Click here to read more from James Turner
Top Image: Genealogical diagram of English monarchs – British Library MS Harley 838, fol.38
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