A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (41 page)

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 Chronicl
e, 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.

10

THE HEGEMONY OF WESSEX THE ENGLISH KINGDOM AND CHURCH REFORMS

‘The creation of the English kingdom through conquest is the primary theme of the first half of the tenth century.’ So wrote Pauline Stafford in her book
Unification and Conquest
(1989, p. 29) and, despite continuing reassessment of the balance between Wessex, the Viking lordships in the north and the remnants of Mercia, East Anglia and the other English kingdoms, it seems a safe generalization. Writing in 2003, M. K. Lawson speaks of the ‘obvious scale of the forces deployed by Edward the Elder in the reconquest of the Danelaw’, comparing it with the sheer extent of his father’s military measures, in terms of manpower, ships and fortress construction. He also points out that, though the sources are scant, we must assume the presence of an ‘array of refined and important details’ in logistics and command structure. It all led to the success of the West Saxon dynasty’s ‘audacious attempt to persuade the English people at large of its leadership.’
¹
As never before, the royal court of Wessex/England developed as the focus of patronage seeking, of factional rivals and agenda pushers, whether secular or clerical: in short, of political activity. The nobleman looking for grants of land or influence in local affairs, or a royal judgement favourable to a client, attended the peripatetic household of the king
as much as possible. Here too came the bishop or abbot eager to promote reforms in the English hierarchy or initiate a building programme. As the royal house of Wessex extended its hegemony, so royal assets in both lands and patronage increased and the pull of the court became ever more powerful. During this period, too, more than one queen found suitors for her patronage, often in church matters.

Edward the Elder and Æthelflæd of Mercia: consolidators of England

When King Alfred died in October 899 leaving his kingdom to his son Edward (known to history as Edward the Elder to distinguish him from a descendant), the upper reaches of English society must have sensed change in the air. For one thing, the comparatively recent title ‘King of the Anglo-Saxons’ seemed to be becoming standard usage. For another, Edward chose Kingston upon Thames in Surrey to hold his consecration – the first of the royal house of Wessex to do so. Exactly why he made the decision we do not know, but Kingston, near to the old Kentish lands and the once Mercian city of London, may have seemed more suited for a kingship wider than Wessex.

The new reign opened dramatically with an attempted coup that won support among the enemies of Wessex and for a time seemed to threaten Alfred’s line. It was led by Æthelwold, the son of Alfred’s elder brother King Æthelred I, cousin of the new king and representative of the senior line. He was undoubtedly ‘ætheling’, that is a ‘throneworthy’ member of the royal house. Indeed, according to a strict succession by primogeniture (i.e. descent in the senior male line) it was he, and not his uncle Alfred, who should have become king on the death of his father back in 871. He had been a baby then; now a man in his early thirties, he was bent on making good his claim. With a body of supporters, he seized the royal manor of
Wimborne – the place where his own father lay buried. The bid failed. Edward, with a force of mounted levies, encamped against the barricaded manor house. His cousin refused to yield and made his escape under cover of darkness. According to the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, he ‘came to the host in Northumbria’, that is to the Viking ‘kingdom’ of York where he may even have been acclaimed king (see
chapter 7
).

In 902–4, we are told by a northern version of the
Chronicle
, Æthelwold ‘came hither from oversea to Essex’ with a large fleet. Does this mean he sailed south with York Vikings, or that he had crossed over to Denmark and recruited supporters there? Either way, he and a substantial body of allies, both Danish and English, ravaged westward into Mercia, ‘seizing all they could’ before returning ‘east homewards’. The loyalist ‘Wessex’
Chronicle
naturally calls him ‘prince’; a northern source speaks of him as ‘elected king’, and he was presenting himself as rightful king of Wessex. He would have offered those who followed him booty from the lands in Mercia and Wessex holding ‘disloyally’ for his cousins Edward the Elder and Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians. The East Anglians may even have considered him as the true continuator of their royal line. According to the
Annals of St Neot’s
he was called ‘king of the Danes’, while the annalist also called him ‘king of the Pagans’.