Anglo-Saxon Keywords by Allen J. Frantzen

Author:Allen J. Frantzen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-03-07T16:00:00+00:00

AGRICULTURE, DIET, GENDER, NORMAN CONQUEST, PENANCE, SLAVERY, TRIFUNCTIONAL MODEL, VIKINGS

Law

Anglo-Saxon law codes are “artefacts of their own time,” and, according to Patrick Wormald, the last century’s greatest authority on them, must be read “through the eyes of their own time,” so far as that is possible (Wormald 1999b: xii). Wormald regarded the laws as being “among the most distinctive and important memorials of Old English history” (1999a: 279). His research followed two paths. First, as he traced the development of law as both text and concept from the code of Æthelberht, the earliest long prose document in English, to the laws of the eleventh-century Danish kings of England, Wormald stressed change where others had seen continuity. Second, as he moved OE law from the shadow of twelfth-century common law and freed it from nineteenth-century views of pre-Conquest legislation, Wormald demonstrated that codes were partly about enforcement and partly about establishing the visibility of royal will, a function of literacy (see Literacy).

The laws comprise not only the great codes of Æthelberht (from the late seventh century) and Alfred (from the end of the ninth century), but also numerous short treatises on individual subjects, some of them unofficial. Hence the law speaks in several voices through several genres. Even this ample evidence does not yield a complete image of Anglo-Saxon society, for most law was customary and was handled orally, its history kept alive in the memory of officials trained for the purpose (Whitelock 1972: 135). But as Wormald argued, the fact that little was written does not explain why anything at all was written. His own inquiries widened the focus from the content of the laws, their regulation of the social mechanism, to their form (their language, their formulae), and to other evidence, including rhetorical and stylistic, that might help identify what kings and their councilors were doing when they issued their laws (1999b: 28).

If OE law was overshadowed by post-Conquest legal developments on one side, it was also associated too closely with Germanic law on the other. The name “Germanic” refers, paradoxically, to various codes governing tribes from Lombardy to Frisia, all of them written in Latin. The chief concern of these codes is the feud and the containment of acts of hostility within communities. Redress of wrongs was left to kin, with the king taking the part of those with no kin to protect them. The aim was not only to punish violence but also to prevent its outbreak. As the OE codes developed, crime became defined more broadly as an offense to the culture, not just to a person or group. Compensation was paid both to victims and to the king, and disputes had to be submitted to a series of courts. Thus Anglo-Saxon law had less and less to do with its Germanic precedents.

English law was not codified during the Anglo-Saxon period. The first comprehensive code was begun late in the eleventh century, by which time, Dorothy Whitelock noted, “much was forgotten or misunderstood” (Whitelock 1972: 135). This project, known as Quadripartitus (literally, in four parts), translated the OE laws into Latin.

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