With these words, St Cecilia in Ælfric’s rendition of her vita sums up how everyone will suffer from pain, heat, hunger, poverty, sorrow and old age. Since these factors affect everyone in this life, Cecilia maintains, everyone should want to be a Christian and attain Heaven, where such things are absent.

Naturally, old age did not affect everyone in equal measure and much depended on a person’s way of life, occupation and social standing. After the discussion of the general merits and drawbacks of old age in chapters 2 and 3, the present chapter and the three following take into account some of these more specific parameters. These four chapters show how old age affected the lives and representations of four specific groups: saints, warriors, kings and women, respectively. How were older members of these groups portrayed in the cultural record, and what does this reveal about the expected roles of the elderly in Anglo-Saxon England? Since the representation of a person’s old age is also influenced by the conventions and traditions of the particular text type in which their lives were recorded, due attention will also be given to the nature of the source material used in each chapter.

Anglo-Saxon hagiography

The lives and deeds of saints were chronicled in hagiography. This genre enjoyed great popularity in the Anglo-Saxon period; around a hundred saints’ lives survive in Old English and still more in Latin.