A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (40 page)

The study of the evolution of both literary style and fashions in handwriting is an academic specialization all of its own. For example, if we look at the ‘Parker’ manuscript of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, we find that the long first section, which starts with the year 494 and ends in the year 891, is written in a single hand. The records for the next 180 years down to the last entry in 1070 are made in a succession of hands, more or less contemporary with the events they describe, which makes it possible to trace the changes in official script and the introduction of new vocabulary. As to pronunciation, refined comparative studies of variant patterns of spellings and mis-spellings led one scholar to the conclusion that they were probably the result of dictation and, moreover, the result of a ‘Welshman dictating to an English scribe’.
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Runic characters, it is believed, were originally devised for engraving on wood. If so they take us back to what one might call the prehistory of book production. As is well known, both the English word ‘book’ and the German word
Buch
share a common root with the word for the beech tree (
Buche
in German). What is perhaps not so generally remembered is that the Latin word
liber
, ‘a
book’ (French
livre
), has as its primary meaning ‘the inner bark of a tree; from the use of this in writing’.
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Thus the ancestors of Caesar appear to have used the same basic writing support as did the ancestors of Bede. However, their Mediterranean alphabet was utterly different from the Norse script, even though this in fact originated in the south. The decision, taken presumably about the year 600 in Kent, to render the language of the newly converted Germanic peoples of Britain into written form, for recording in Roman style the Laws of King Æthelberht, meant devising a written alphabetic equivalent of Anglo-Saxon. This in turn ‘involved the transformation of sound into writing and required informed decisions on spelling and grammar’.
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Some clerics may of course have taken the trouble to master runes and there is some evidence for familiarity with the runic script among the lay educated classes of society. Runic inscriptions are found on a few Anglo-Saxon coin issues and there are runic signs scribbled in the margins next to some of the Exeter Book riddles, as if intended as clues to the solutions. But at a time when, as Robert Runcie observed, ‘everyone wanted to be Roman’, the Latin alphabet was bound to prevail.

Latin: learning and literature

Anglo-Saxon men and women of letters produced a wide range of works in Latin, the language of the Church and Continental officialdom. In fact, it was one specialized item in this category, namely ‘the Latin land charter (technically, diploma) and the associated vernacular documents dealing with land and property’, that, in the words of Susan Kelly, provided ‘the primary and most accessible record of the interaction between early Anglo-Saxon society and the written word’.
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Compared with the veil of printed matter – books, newspapers, public notices, advertisements, DIY instructions, football programmes, legal documentation, etc. – through which we tend to see our world, in Anglo-Saxon England even an educated layman or woman could pass from one year’s end to the next with barely sight of a page of script. And when one did confront the written word it was more likely to be a land deed, or perhaps a relative’s last will and testament, than a book of verse or a page of history. Few if any outside the church read for business or pleasure. There were (worldly) churchmen too, one suspects, for whom documents of law might hold greater treasures even than Holy Writ. For ‘unlike its Italian models which originated in lay society . . . the early Anglo-Saxon diploma is essentially an ecclesiastical document’ drafted in a bishop’s or monastery’s scriptorium.

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.
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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 . . .’
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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.
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