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Even today, power still looks, sounds and feels overwhelmingly male. Back then, there was no question in contemporaries' minds about the order of God's creation. Men ruled and their women obeyed. In fact, the Anglo Saxon word for "queen" didn't mean a female King, it meant the wife of a King and as a King's wife, a Queen could advise her husband, or even represent him, but her authority always depended on his. And it was this limited kind of queenship, as royal wife to a royal husband, for which Matilda had been prepared since birth. When she was a small child, her father sent her to a foreign land to be married to a complete stranger. |
