A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (44 page)

Since the time of Bede the Angelcynn had recognized themselves in the Latin term
gens Anglorum
, which derived ultimately from the usage ‘Anglii’, adopted by Gregory I. Once the decision had been made at Whitby to adopt Christianity, the still strong current of Celtic Christianity and Irish traditions would eventually flow into a common channel of establishment religion. The distinction that apparently seemed important in 662 in some sense faded. This meant that saints from various provinciae or kingdoms came to be venerated as the common spiritual ancestry of the entire English nation. So Saints Chad and Cedd, trained by Aidan of the Irish/Celtic tradition at Lindisfarne on Holy Island, became venerated as the founding fathers of Christianity in Mercia and East
Anglia, and those two patriarchs of Northumbrian Celtic tradition, Cuthbert and King St Oswald, found devotees and patrons of their cults across Southumbria. Even Wilfrid of Ripon, that most northern of saints, came to have a shrine at Canterbury.

No doubt the rituals and creeds of the Roman church’s tradition, the authority of its bishops and the local allegiances built on England’s evolving parochial structure knitted the Christian church into the fabric of English life. Whereas in the eighth century the founding and endowment of religious buildings had been largely the business of kings and nobles, John Blair has noted that 300 years later such patronage was increasingly the work of people of ‘middle-ranking’ status. The actual local church building was treated as community property in a way that modern parish clergy might envy, though clergy at the time could have mixed feelings on the subject. Pastoral letters complain of thoughtless behaviour in church, careless talk, eating and sometimes excessive drinking – the building was clearly a popular venue! In the Canons of Edgar, priests are warned not to carry arms on the premises – certainly not in the altar enclosure. But at the deep level of magic where pagan and Christian blend, the English saints – some of Irish antecedence, others, like Wilfrid, with Roman allegiance – provided a structural network, like the rafting laid down to receive the foundations of a fenland abbey, for the church in England and in the community as ‘nodes and links in a network which connected royal power to local piety over most of [the country]’. To this we can add the conviction of Anglo-Saxon churchmen that saw themselves and their compatriots as ‘a people of God, a new Israel’. For such an elite, ‘whose predecessors had passed through the desert of the Viking invasions’, the long tenth-century vernacular poem based on the book of
Exodus
would have been full of resonance.
¹²
Sadly for them, many would live to see the return of the wilderness years with the renewal of the Danish raids after the reign of Edgar the Peaceable.

The monastic revival

About the year 950 an upheaval began in the English church that would last for the next thirty years as reforms were introduced that would reshape monastic life and so the cultural life of the country at large. This followed reforms heralded on the Continent by the founding of the abbey of Cluny in 910 and most powerfully expressed in the monasteries of Flanders and Lotharingia/Lorraine.

The English reform was managed by three men: Dunstan (924–88), a Somerset man, from a rich landed family with estates near Glastonbury; Æthelwold (?905–84), Winchester-born and in his youth at the court of Æthelstan; and Oswald (d. 992), son of a rich family of Danish descent; all three were subjects for important near-contemporary biographies. Less prominent but nevertheless important was Oda, archbishop of Canterbury from 942 to 958 and Oswald’s uncle.

Dunstan spent his early years at Glastonbury exploring a library still rich in classical as well as ecclesiastical texts and, so said the envious, too interested in the pagan texts for the good of his soul. Being bright, he naturally had enemies. A copy of the works of the Roman poet Ovid, then at Glastonbury, now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, contains a finely drawn monumental figure of Christ with the monk Dunstan crouching at his feet. A note on the page tells us it was drawn by Dunstan himself and there are claims that he designed metalwork. In addition he was renowned as a singer and musician and seems to have exploited the effect of the aeolian harp (the sounds caused by the wind blowing through the strings of a free-standing instrument). Versatile, gifted and well born, he was prominent at the court of King Edmund and entered the church only at the urgings of an uncle, Ælfheah, bishop of Winchester. About 943 the king appointed him abbot of Glastonbury and it was now that Dunstan inaugurated a new era in English church life, rebuilding the monastery and introducing a revised Rule of
St Benedict. Some time later Æthelwold joined Dunstan at Glastonbury, before going on at the request of the new king, Eadred, to reform the dilapidated monastery at Abingdon.

During these years Archbishop Oda had explored the reform movement on the Continent, already some four decades old, with a visit to the abbey of Saint-Benoît-de-Fleury, which held relics of St Benedict and was a hub of the reforming movement. At the same time Dunstan, who had been forced into exile by King Eadwig, was a refugee guest at the newly reformed monastery of Ghent in Flanders, while the third member of our reforming trio, Oswald, had made his way to Fleury at the suggestion of Oda, his uncle.

After the hiatus of Eadwig’s reign, the reform movement resumed under Edgar from 959. Dunstan was installed at Canterbury where he seems to have devoted himself to the affairs of the archdiocese rather than general monastic reform. However, Æthelwold, installed as bishop of Winchester in 963, and Oswald, now bishop of Worcester, pushed things along with vigour. At Winchester the monks in charge at both the Old Minster and the New Minster were unceremoniously expelled, possibly with violence, on the orders either of the king or, as one of his acolytes was later to claim, by Bishop Æthelwold. The same happened at other houses under his control. He then began the resettlement, so to speak, of church territories deserted since the Viking raids of a century or so before, notably in the Fens and East Anglia. Not only were the buildings in ruins or completely razed – at Peterborough sheep grazed the foundations – but both there and at Ely and Thorney the lands of their former endowments had mostly been expropriated. Æthelwold refounded all three and ensured their future endowments. All were to revive and extend their influence with sister houses.

Today the saint, in his lifetime seemingly tough and unloved, is remembered for the important customary for the reformed monastic life, the
Regularis Concordia
, that he compiled and above all for
the majestic and exquisitely adorned manuscript he commissioned, the Benedictional of St Æthelwold. The
Regularis
drew on mostly Continental models for its rule, but it also made provision for election procedures that in England tended to favour monks above secular clergy and, in acknowledgement of the encouragement the reformers had received from King Edgar, enjoined that prayers be said for the monarch and the royal family. With his Benedictional, Æthelwold oversaw the production of the acknowledged masterpiece of the Winchester school of illumination.

One Fenland abbey, the great house at Ramsey, was indebted to St Oswald for its foundation. The community had been inaugurated as a dependency of the see of Worcester at Westbury on Trim near Bristol. But now, with land granted by Ealdorman Æthelwine of East Anglia and interested help from Fleury in the person of the renowned scholar Abbo, he set up a major teaching centre there.

The making and giving of law

Discussions of Anglo-Saxon law-making are liable to be dogged by the question of the extent to which the law books were actually used as legal texts and to what extent they were, rather, statements of principle or records of traditional provisions. According to Patrick Wormald, it seems that there is no instance of a judgement in which a law book was actually cited. An act from the reign of King Edgar (
IV Edgar
), however, carries an instruction that what ‘is made known in this document’ shall be written in ‘many documents’, and these are to be sent to two named ealdormen who in their turn shall send them in all directions, so that the measure ‘may be known to both poor and rich’. As always, the paucity of surviving records means that it is difficult to be certain of the conclusion to be drawn. It is the only act with such explicit instructions as to procedure. Are we to assume that it was standard procedure that many other documents now lost would confirm. Or, just the
reverse, is it the only one to survive because very few such acts were issued? In any case, Ælfric commented ‘One thing is the ordinance which the king commands through his ealdormen and reeves; quite another is his own decree in his own presence.’
¹³

In his chapter ‘Royal Government and the written word’, to which this section is heavily indebted, Simon Keynes noted that King Edgar commanded that Sundays be observed as a solemn festival from Saturday noon until dawn on Monday ‘under pain of the fine that the law book (
domboc
) prescribes’. While he adds that ‘we may not have the dog-eared copies that the judges actually used’, it seems pretty obvious that tenth-century law-makers could rest easy that when they issued laws judges, that is those presiding over public courts, often ealdormen, would have easy access to written codes where they were recorded, though probably not as an enduring frame of reference. The important thing was always the king’s ‘oral decree’, what he actually said. Professor Keynes proposes that it was a basic function of tenth-century law codes, at least, ‘to assist in the process of bringing knowledge of the king’s decrees into the localities’.

In the act referred to above, known as the
Wihtbordesstan
, Edgar made a ruling that would prove of fundamental importance decades later, namely that the Danes of his kingdom should follow ‘such good laws as they best prefer’. It was surely this that led the Danish king Cnut to promulgate the observance of the laws of King Edgar. For his English subjects, Edgar provided that they should observe the provisions that he and his ‘wise men . . . have added to the judgements (
domum
) of my ancestors’. The code is particularly stringent on the matter of theft and the disposal of stolen goods and describes a complex strategy, especially on cattle rustling, and prescribes extremely brutal punishment (
steor
) for English offenders.
¹⁴

The previous chapter looked at the use of the English language in the law and officialese; here we turn to more specifically tenth-century legal technicalities and particularly in relation to land.
A celebrated case shows the use of written evidence of title, whether diploma or charter. In a sheet of parchment addressed to King Edward the Elder and now held in the archives of Christ Church, Canterbury, Ealdorman Ordlaf explains how an estate in Fonthill, Wiltshire, came into the possession of the bishop of Winchester, and how at one point in the dispute a former owner had produced a written document ‘that was duly read and found to be in order’. In fact, Ordlaf himself abandoned his suit, for, although a dispute could turn on the possession of a diploma or other type of document, at this time the written word was just one among various modes – witness evidence or oath – of establishing or maintaining one’s right. The admissibility of written material in a court of law or other tribunal was still a matter for debate, perhaps in the same way as certain types of forensic evidence and phone tap records are today. In code
I Edward
(of King Edward the Elder) there is a specific injunction to all the king’s reeves that ‘judgements should be made in accordance with the law books (
dombec
) and “compensations paid as has been previously written”,’ which clearly implies that the regime was in the habit of issuing written injunctions to its officials on the ground.
¹⁵

With the reign of Æthelstan the use of the written word in the proclamation and enforcement of the laws seems really to have taken off. The so-called
Ordinance of Charities
is written injunctions from the king specifically to his reeves. Three out of his six codes are in the first person. And there is evidence that the king’s ordinances could be available to officials of the shire court in written form – the Grately decrees (II
Æthelstan
) are referred to in one source as a
scriptum
, for example, as is the code
III Æthelstan.

The coinage of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom

We have seen something of the development of the coinage under King Alfred; here we can trace it further. Up to the 850s England
had half a dozen mints or so situated in or near the major seaports for Continental trade, though we have seen that archbishops of Canterbury might mint their own coins. The second and third quarters of the ninth century, with the mounting number of Viking incursions, saw a dramatic debasement of the currency both in England and on the Continent. The fineness of the English penny was restored by Alfred in a major monetary reform, which has been recently dated to c. 875–6, that is even before the victory over the Danes at Edington of 878. There is evidence to suggest that the king minted coins in 874 at London, the principal Mercian mint from the seventh century, and that the Winchester mint was established (or re-established?) in the 870s during the replanning of the city, dated to this period by archaeologist Martin Biddle. Alfred implemented his second and last currency reform about 880, adjusting the weight of the penny and introducing a new denomination, the round halfpenny.

With Alfred, followed by Edward the Elder, the network of mints was extended and deepened, apparently in step with the programme for the creation of defended burhs, though unfortunately few of their coins carry any mint signature. In the later 920s and early 930s there was a sharp rise in production, as a result perhaps of increased silver supplies from Viking Northumbria and the Irish Sea area, or possibly from increased production by Welsh mines. During the reign of Æthelstan (924–39), when the number of mints south of the Humber grew to about 40 nationwide, it became common to name the mint. No fewer than twenty-five moneyers operated in Chester alone, at least seventeen of them concurrently.