A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons

by Geoffrey Hindley

  We know from original documents attested in Kent, Surrey, the kingdoms of the Wicce and the West Saxons that by the early 600s churchmen were looking to this form of (written) instrument as a guarantee of ownership of land or other property made over to them or their organizations by pious donors. The first charters are dated in the 670s; before that such grants might be written at the back of Gospel books. In addition to 300 single-sheet parchment sheets, original charters in contemporary script, we have some 1,200 later copies for attesting to such transactions in the Anglo-Saxon period. Typically drafted on behalf of the beneficiary rather than the donor, such a charter would record a grant from the king or other lord to an individual cleric or layman wishing to found or endow a monastery. Grants of land to an existing foundation could be similarly confirmed. The recipient organization certainly treasured such evidences of property to Christ or their tutelary saint as the lord of their community. The document was sometimes stored upon the high altar of the church or even bound into a Gospel book. It seems that some Gospels were bound with blank endpapers ready to receive anticipated charter texts. Since the vast majority of the lay population can be considered as living in a preliterate society, the question as to what weight such documents actually carried inevitably presents itself. What legal force could they have in the secular world?

  The property hand-over was accompanied by ceremonies and rituals that might involve, for example, an actual sod cut from the land in question. Such rituals themselves conferred recognized traditional authentication on the deed of transfer. Where a diploma or charter had been drawn up it featured as part of the ceremonies and itself remained a potent symbol of the event and thus of the ownership of the property in question by the owner of the diploma. As late as the 1970s the present writer can remember collaborating in a similar kind of ritual, in the somewhat embarrassed privacy of a country solicitor’s office. Following instructions, he placed his forefinger upon a little red disc attached to a document and uttered the words, ‘I deliver this deed as my word and bond.’

  When we come to look at literary works written in Latin, Aldhelm of Sherborne, a somewhat older contemporary of Bede’s and whose poetry and enigmata we have mentioned, was the first and remained one of the most prolific authors. Born apparently in the 640s, some five years after Birinus had first preached Christianity to Wessex, by the time he was fifteen the building of the first church at Winchester had begun and Penda, the pagan king of Mercia, had driven out the Christian king of Wessex and had himself been killed in battle. Before the boy was twenty, Theodore had taken over as archbishop of Canterbury in Kent and established the cathedral school. Here Aldhelm spent several years as a student before moving back into Wessex to become abbot of Malmesbury. The early Christian years were surely rollercoaster times for the new faithful.

  Aldhelm was no Bede. In place of the limpid clarity of the historian’s Latin his prose tended to extravagant (an unfriendly critic has said ‘pompous’) conceits, recherché coinages and elaborate grammatical constructions, though at its best it was highly influential on later writers. The anonymous Liber monstrorum, a diverting and instructive book of monstrous creatures, both human and animal, from legends about the natural world and, above all, classical literature, owes much to his style. Its authorship cannot be confidently attributed but the work is probably of English origin and by the ninth century was widely diffused throughout Europe.12 His output was voluminous and varied: a long treatise on virginity (De virginitate), in verse and prose versions; a verse travelogue through Cornwall and Devon (the British realm of Dumnonia), a lengthy letter-cum-treatise to its king, Geraint, on the Roman manner of calculating Easter; a letter to the Northumbrian king, Aldfrith; numerous dedicatory verses or tituli for new churches and altars, which he called Carmina ecclesiastica; and technical treatises on poetics and numerology. He was widely read in the Anglo-Saxon world, both in Britain and on the Continent, but he never matched the universal appeal of Bede. Accessible in style and clear in exposition, Bede’s writings including the History, despite its English theme, were studied throughout most of continental Europe almost from the moment they left his writing table.

  The laws of England in English and the uses of literacy

  The laws of England’s kingdoms were expressed in the language of England’s kings. There were varying writing styles. ‘West Saxon minuscule’ (830s–870s) differs from the minuscule practised at Alfred’s court in the 890s – and the late ninth-century charters can be said to stand for a growing tradition of lay literacy in ninth-century Wessex.

  Even in government business, documents never threatened to displace word of mouth, but the written word was nevertheless widely used for utilitarian or practical purposes in the ninth century, and often in the vernacular. King Alfred refers to a lord’s ‘written message and his seal’, as though it were commonplace to make one’s will known to the thegns by this means, but we also know that he commonly communicated with his ‘judges’ through his ‘trusted men’, who would report by word of mouth. A written message was, of course, also more discreet – one bishop tells a correspondent that he has taken the trouble to convey his meaning by letter (per letteras) ‘so that it may not be[come] . . . known to many’.

  The king’s trusted men themselves also used sealed documents, as we know from surviving seal matrixes – a typical example, inscribed with the words ‘Sigillum Ælfrici’ (‘Ælfric’s seal’), shows a man brandishing a sword (probably as much an emblem of lineage as of power). It certainly seemed quite natural to King Alfred, who believed that a healthy kingdom rested on Christian subjects ready and prepared to follow the sometimes unexpected, even unfamiliar, message contained in holy scripture, to illustrate his point by using an analogy involving the readiness of a local reeve or ealdorman to follow the unknown intention represented by a lord’s writ (æarendgewrit) and his seal. According to James Campbell, Alfred’s law code, including as it does the laws of Ine, amounts to 120 items; and that number, being the number of years in the life of Moses, the great biblical lawgiver, was considered sacred. Indeed this target number was so important that we find two or three seemingly unrelated provisions grouped in single numbered clauses: one, for example, deals with the law on killing a pregnant woman, the ratio between fine and restitution, and the fines for theft of gold, horses and bees.

  English was used for sermons by prelates as well as by village priests. Wulfstan, later archbishop of York and who Latinized his name as Lupus (Latin for ‘wolf’), made his name when bishop of London (996–1002) with apocalyptic sermons on the Coming Days. They would have been in tune with the times as the year 1000 approached. A French tract ‘Concerning Antichrist’, written in Latin, was well known and nowhere so more so than in an England beset by recurrent Danish invasions. Cannier than many another millenarian, Wulfstan was not insistent as to the exact year. Recalling an ancient prophesy that after a thousand years Satan would be ‘unbound’, he went on: ‘A thousand years and more is now gone since Christ was among men in a human family and Satan’s bonds are loosed and the time of Antichrist is at hand . . .’13

  In the early 1000s English law-making was largely in the hands of Bishop Wulfstan. Only the End of the World could explain why God had allowed the kingdom that the kings of Wessex had so painfully laboured to build in His name to fall into its present parlous state. Not for the first time, but perhaps with a special sense of urgency, he proposed Sunday trading laws, that people ‘eagerly’ desist from markets on that day and treat the Sunday Feast as befits it. For Wulfstan (d. 1023), who wrote laws for King Æthelred as well as Cnut, the overarching imperative was to apply the mandates of heaven to human society. People should honour God, hold to one Christian Faith, and abandon all heathen rites. For him the law of King Edgar was the model. In the ‘Winchester’ code he drew up at the behest of Cnut it was cited almost in full, as were salient points from the laws of Alfred, Æthelstan and Æthelred.

  Wulfstan was one of the most influential stylists in Old
English, idiosyncratic, florid and elaborate, but also one of the most thoughtful, as may be seen, for example, in the work known as the Institutes of Polity. He was a ‘social idealist’ whose aim was to engineer a reformed social order: in a preamble to a law code he spoke of the English as one people under one law. But he stirred his contemporaries above all as a preacher and moralist of passion and power. His famous ‘Words of the Wolf to the English’ (Sermo Lupi ad Anglos) was a declamation against sin, but also a passionate plea to his countrymen for repentance. One senses, from the law preamble just quoted, that under the pressure of the Danish threat people, perhaps especially in the Danelaw territories, were defecting back to pagan practices to placate the old gods of their invading kinsmen. In his famous sermon, Wulfstan reminded his listeners that a ‘councillor’ called Gildas had written that the Britons of those days had so angered God by their sins that He finally let the army of the English (Wulfstan used the word here, the common term in his day for the Danish raiding army) conquer the land from them. He warned his own contemporaries that they should seek to come to terms with God. The English had acquired their land even when pagans through the sins of the Britons and they could as easily lose it to another pagan people. Indeed, for Wulfstan his fellow Englishmen were more at fault than had been the Britons because, he said, they, like the ancient people of Israel, had been favoured by a special covenant with God.14

  Whereas on the Continent late Roman bureaucracy and the use of Latin continued under the new regimes of invading barbarian lords, in England spoken Latin seems to have disappeared and the imperial bureaucracy to have collapsed; as a result, in the words of Susan Kelly, ‘Latin was remote from the secular side of society.’ This presumably is one reason, among others, for the adoption of the vernacular as a vehicle for legal documentation. Another may be that the process of law-making or, better, the business of law promulgation was different from the way we understand the process. Patrick Wormald distinguished in technical terms between lex scripta and verbum regis, between ‘written law’ and the ‘word of the king’. It has been argued that it was the word (verbum) rather than the actual written text that gave it the force of law.15

  The first English laws, those of Æthelberht I of Kent, were promulgated at very nearly the same time as Italian churchmen were introducing Latin literacy into England (see chapter 2). Kent had close ties with the Merovingian court at Paris; surviving Merovingian written law is in Latin. But if it was the word of the king that gave force to the law and if the laws that he spoke were the traditional rulings of the people, then, if they were to be written down, ways had to be found of writing the English language.

  Indeed the relationship of the English language to royal law does not seem to have been a straightforward business of promulgation and application. Following the concept of lex scripta and verbum regis, even King Alfred’s great code may have ‘represented more of an attempt to express the king’s ideological aspirations than to provide the judges with a practical work of reference’. Even in the tenth and eleventh centuries it may be that what counted was not the written ‘code’ but the king’s oral pronouncement. (In a celebrated case, as we have noted, judgement was given by the king by word of mouth while washing his hands in his private apartment.) Thus ‘legislation was not formally promulgated by the king in written form and those who produced the texts were doing so on their own initiative.’ Often, it seems, ‘the actual recording in writing was left in a surprisingly casual way to ecclesastics and individual or [even] local enterprise.’16

  The language of administration: officialese

  The fact that the English clerical bureaucrat came to use his own language, in preference to the idiom of imperial or papal curia, did not make his practice any less effective than elsewhere in Europe. Across the Continent, the ninth and tenth centuries witnessed the development of legal formulations and documents relating to land tenure and land grants. In England, too, the Latin diploma or charter, pioneered by church proprietors to protect their rights, was increasingly adapted to secular requirements. Unlike folcland (land held by traditional rights), which was liable to the render of various rents and dues and was subject to the normal claims of succession by the kindred, bocland, which was held by charter or ‘book’, could be disposed of at will by the landowner and book holder. The charter, generally drawn up in Latin, identified the territory and guaranteed its owners right to alienate it while the document itself ‘could be transferred together with the land to a new owner’. This being England, by the early 800s ‘charter scribes [were regularly including] a detailed boundary clause in English’, so that the charter, or boc, was on the way to becoming a true written record standing independent of any physical ceremony or token as a conveyance of right and definition of territory. The encroachment of the vernacular into the domain of the law may have been a measure of declining standards of Latinity, but it would surely have been a welcome development for the English landowner. As the ninth century advanced English legal documents multiplied – agreements of all kinds, leases and wills. Of the fifty-eight wills to survive from this period, fifty-three are in English. An example dated between 832 and 840 has a Kentish reeve named Abba making elaborate disposal of his lands and bequeathing a sword – a reeve had military as well as civil duties.

  In addition to the wills we have records of more than a hundred leases, no doubt only a small fraction of those drawn up. These documents were mostly in Latin but with key passages, and almost always the date, rendered in English and mostly in the form of a chirograph. An ingenious solution to the problem of making reliable copies before carbon paper or photocopier, such a document carried the text of the agreement in duplicate or triplicate on a single sheet, with the word CYROGRAPHUM printed in large letters in the space(s) between the copy texts. The parchment was then cut through the word CYROGRAPHUM and each party to the agreement given one of the parts. In case of dispute the copies could be compared and matched along the join to validate their authenticity. It seems that chirographs were regularly appealed to: sophisticated English secular society was quite comfortable with the use of documents – and English language documents at that. The language was used as a teaching medium as well as by the royal government for its writs and laws, and of course by the religious establishment. Often religious texts have English equivalents jotted down for difficult Latin words. The approach is the typical English way, pragmatic. No doubt church people should know their Latin, but the priority was for them to know the meaning of what they were doing and saying.

  A pioneer vernacular

  It was not just that the English habitually used their own language in literature of all kinds; it seems they introduced the notion to others. It would certainly catch the imagination of the country’s invaders – at least in the second generation. The first effect of Hastings and its aftermath was the destruction of the English clerks’ tradition. Apart from Coleman’s Life of Wulfstan, the revered bishop of Worcester who remained in office until his death in 1095, and the Peterborough continuation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘Old English book production came to an end . . . [the] finest manuscripts, high-status books, were treated as plunder and sent abroad.’17

  But there were those among the Continental incomers impressed by England’s literary culture. The Flemish monk Goscelin of St Bertin, who had settled in England in 1058 in the household of the bishop of Ramsbury and Sherborne and ended his days some time after 1107 in the community of St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury, made his own notable contribution with a number of Latin hagiographies of English saints, such as King Edgar’s daughter Eadgyth of Wilton (d. 984), singing the praises of the abbey where she spent her life. During his years as an itinerant writer he lodged as a guest at other great English houses, including Ely and Winchester. For him, it was the Normans who were the barbarians.

  A sign that change was in the air came with the bilingual Latin/English version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle compiled at Canterbury (possibly by Goscelin) about the year
1100, presumably for the Norman churchmen of all ranks who were flooding into English institutions, at the expense of native clerics. Then, some time in the 1140s, Geoffrey Gaimar, possibly a native of Normandy, produced a ‘History of the English’ for Constance, the French wife of a Lincolnshire landowner, Ralph Fitzgilbert. The settler population, though mostly retaining family and family lands in the home country, was developing a taste for the history of the conquered people and cultivating an interest in the days of Good King Edward and his ancestors. Gaimar’s ambitious project was in fact a verse translation of the story of their past – in short, of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It was, of course, not written in the language of its subject, which, after all, was a conquered people, but nor was it written in Latin, the natural choice for a Continental writer on a serious theme. No, with his verse L’Estorie des Engleis Geoffrey produced the earliest historical work in the French language. Paradoxically his work, so innovative in the history of French literature, appeared in the decade that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, kept up in English since the 890s, was coming to an end.

  Anglo-Norman writers achieved a number of other literary ‘firsts’ in French. Philippe de Thaon, through his Cumpoz/Comput (a calendar/chronology of the church year) and his allegorical works on animals and precious stones (lapidary), pioneered the use of the language in science-related topics. Benedit, a talented poet, produced one of the first saints’ lives in French with his Vie de Saint Brendan. The French vernacular drama called the Jeu d’Adam (‘The Play of Adam’), the first mystery play with French dialogue throughout, though with stage direction in Latin, survives in just one copy found in an Anglo-Norman manuscript. The play itself may actually have originated in England. Even in defeat, England seemed to encourage the spirit of innovation in others.