When I chat to people about my ‘Chosen Sisters’ project, they often ask how far back in history I’ve gone in my research. The answer always comes as a surprise: the first poem in my sequence, ‘A Summoning’, is inspired by an Anglo Saxon text written in the late 7th or early 8th century.

Tracing lesbian history often involves working with tiny scraps of evidence, and the further back in time you go, the harder it is to them. I thought I had gone as far back as I could when I wrote a poem inspired by the fifteenth century brass depicting Agnes Oxenbridge and Elizabeth Etchingham in a parish church in East Sussex, and I was pleased that my sequence spanned women living across a period of almost 500 years.

However, re-reading Jacqueline Murray’s ‘Twice Marginal and Twice Invisible: Lesbians in the Middle Ages’ drew my attention to The Penitential of Theodore, an early medieval handbook based on the judgements of Theodore, who was Archbishop of Canterbury from 668 until his death in 690. A penitential is a set of rules concerning the Christian sacrament of penance, and this is one of a very few texts from that era that make specific and separate mention of female homosexual activity. The text says:

If a woman practises vice with another woman, she shall do penance for three years… The penance of a widow and of a girl is the same. She who has a husband deserves a greater penalty if she practises fornication.

Reading that text brought me to a moment of epiphany: rules aren’t written for things that nobody is doing.

And from there, the first poem in my collection formed itself, with that epiphany crystallising into its central three lines:

where there are rules

there must be

unruly women

We have coins, combs, weapons and jewels from the Anglo Saxon era. We can piece these objects together and work out what lives were like for people living in early medieval Britain. But it’s thanks to this text – albeit a prohibitive one – that we can prove that there must have been women living outside heterosexual conventions many hundreds of years ago. Who these women were, what exactly their lives were like, and where they were buried, will almost certainly remain a mystery, but I’m glad to have been able to summon their spirits at the start of my new collection.