A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons

by Geoffrey Hindley

  For us, the most startling element of Æthelberht’s innovation appears if we reverse the order of Bede’s priorities. Though they follow the pattern of the Alaman and Bavarian customary codes on the Continent, it was, so far as we know, the first time a European vernacular was used for a legal code – by a matter of centuries. The other Germanic codes, like the Visigothic, Lombard or Burgundian, were in Latin.

  Talking of Æthelberht’s code, the editors of one edition of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History comment ‘These Kentish laws in their original form seem to be the earliest documents written down in the English language.’9 If they are right, it is reasonable to assume that the research and development needed to create a written vehicle for English was initiated by King Æthelberht, and for this purpose. The Italian church scholars now at his court presumably led the project, but they themselves had no need of it in their own work – after all, the language of the Church and of their service books, being in Latin, already used the Latin alphabet.

  Why did Æthelberht issue his code? Personal prestige was presumably part of the point. Following the example of other European barbarian kings, he had decided, wrote H.M. Wallace Hadrill, ‘to have his people’s customs written down and attributed to himself’.10 But, since the Continental laws were in Latin, if these Kentish laws were actually the traditional customs of the people, the use of English rather than Latin surely made it harder for the king and his council to claim authorship. Unsatisfactory as it may be to attribute honourable intentions to any executive or legislature, however ancient, one must consider it a possibility that the king of Kent and his council may have been aiming, in however limited a way, at ‘open government’.

  The code started with provisions dealing with the theft of ecclesiastical property, because, Bede tells us, the king ‘wished to give protection to those whose persons and teachings he had received’. This is followed by compensation to be made for damage to the king’s property or for injury caused in the king’s presence, for instance where he is drinking; then come compensations owing to the higher and lesser ranks of free society: commoner and noble, in the legal jingle from Alfred’s laws ‘ge ceorl ge eorl’, ‘both husbandman and noble’. Payments due in compensation for injury are itemized, from limbs to teeth. A large number of clauses deal with the law relating to women and remarriage. Although issued in a council including clerics and recorded in a script and orthography that they may have invented, Æthelberht’s code, apart from the compensation clauses at the top, ‘is best seen as the law of the Cantwara’.11 For the killing of a freeman payment is made to the king as ‘lord ring’, ‘obviously an ancient term, belonging to a time when payment was made in rings’.12

  A century later Kent’s lawmakers seem to be contemplating a far heavier role for religion, attempting to enforce infant baptism and Sunday observance. Clause 6 of the code of King Wihtred (d. 725) prescribes the penalty due for a priest so drunk that he cannot perform his duties at baptism. One wonders whether such priests were accommodating their practice to popular religion like those Alcuin protested against: ‘conventicles that leave the church and seek out hillsides where they worship not with prayers but with drinking bouts’.13 Or was it just a case of wetting the baby’s head in advance? In more general terms, Patrick Wormald, the great authority on Anglo-Saxon law, proposed that with Wihtred the law code is no longer just a record of custom but ‘is becoming an arena for the making of new law’. Wihtred had come to the throne after a period of anarchy set off by raiding campaigns by Cædwalla of Wessex; Ine of Wessex (688–726) is the earliest non-Kentish legislator. Kentish clauses on the punishment of thieves follow similar wording in the two codes and both speak of laws ‘abounding in godly purpose’.

  Structure of society – king, thegns, ealdormen, ceorls, slaves

  At this time, warfare was more or less endemic and slave trading was an inevitable by-product; after all, according to Bede, Gregory the Great’s Christian mission to England was conceived in a Roman slave market. About the year 640 an English girl named Balthildis was bought in by the household of Erchinoald, chief minister of the Frankish king, Clovis II. Since the church forbade traffic in Christians, and supposing that the Christian king Clovis observed such niceties, she must have been a pagan and therefore, quite possibly, from Sussex – the conversion of the kingdom was still forty years in the future. Sussex girl or not, Balthildis was, one assumes, beautiful and certainly a woman of spirit and ambition since Clovis married her. When he died a few years later, Queen Balthildis became regent for their son Chlotar III and, incidentally, a campaigner against the slave trade. She was a generous benefactor of the monastic movement and in particular the convent of Chelles, near Paris, which she richly endowed and where she may have retired when ousted from the regency in 665. It became a favourite nunnery with English novices of noble birth.

  Such a career was, of course, sensational. Few slaves became queens! And many people, even modest husbandmen, might own slaves. War was not the only route to slavery. It might be imposed as a sentence for a criminal offence: Clause 7 of the Laws of Ine of Wessex provides that if a man’s wife and family connive at his thieving they may all be sent into slavery. In times of famine people might render themselves voluntarily into servitude. But slaves could gain their freedom. And in the laws of Alfred they even had some privileges; they were allowed holidays on four days of the year so that they might sell, if they wished, any gifts they had received as charity. The ceremony of manumission marked the transition by the giving of weapons. Freedom brought obligations as well as privileges; the freeman had the right to take his oath, he was ‘law-worthy’; he might also be called upon to give his oath as an oath helper to support his lord at law. He also had the right to defend himself and his own, as well as the duty to defend his lord when called upon to do so. But if a kinsman or his lord were killed a freeman had not only the legal right, but also the moral obligation, to exact a life in revenge or settle for the blood money, the ‘wergild’, awarded by the law. However, even the ties of kinship and the pursuit of a blood feud took second place to the obligations of lordship.

  Slavery was the big divide and wergild (literally ‘man price’) was the big test as to which side of it one stood. On either side there were degrees of social standing but one thing does seem to have been absolute: to whom was a person’s wergild paid in case of injury or death? If you or your kin received the payment you were free. If the money was paid to your lord or master you were a slave (theow). The list of charges found in the laws of Ine for the king’s British subjects (wealhs) has, at the bottom of the heap, the landless man valued at no more than 50 shillings. He was taken to be the equivalent of a slave. Above him the scale rises to a landowner with a value of 600 shillings, the highest British rating. The equivalent figure for his English subjects would be twice that.

  The West Saxons were pushing back the frontiers of British Dumnonia, which meant enlarging the British population within their frontiers and subject to their authority. In modern terms, discrimination against these new subjects by wergild values may seem unacceptable; however, insofar as a man without a wergild had no standing at all in law, the Welsh/British population was now in principle within the system.

  Wergild was basic to that system in all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Not only was it the blood money due to a victim or his or her family in case of injury or death, it was also the measure of compensation payable by him/her in the case of serious breaches of the law and the value of the oath required to clear him/her of the accusation. In short it was his/her value at law; if charged with some major offence, one had the right to vindicate oneself by finding ‘oath helpers’ of sufficient standing to swear to one’s innocence.

  Above the unfree we find a broad swath of social ranks in the loose category of the ‘ordinary free man’ or ceorl. Historians disagree over the exact extent of the freedoms he enjoyed, the degree of his economic and judicial obligations to his lord and his actual economic standing. His standing seems to
have varied according to time and place. In early eighth-century Wessex, the ceorl who accepted a cottage from his lord was no longer free to leave his land holding and might find himself facing a heavy fine if he tried to flee. On the other hand, under Alfred a ceorl with a wergild of 200 shillings seems more like a prosperous yeoman farmer. He attended the local meeting of freemen as of right; fought when called for in the royal army and might well be better off than the young landless nobleman, feasting and sleeping at the king’s expense in the king’s hall. Such a man might be a royal companion or gesith, to use the old-fashioned term, but was still awaiting the essential land grant that would enable him to set up his own family establishment.

  Canterbury and the organization of the church in England

  As Christianity gradually extended across England, the ecclesiastical power centres, the bishoprics, came to exert ever more influence. By 604 there were three bishops in England: Augustine at Canterbury, the archbishop; Justus at Rochester (also in Kent); and Mellitus at London, in the kingdom of the East Saxons, whose cathedral of St Paul’s was already being built under the protection of Æthelberht of Kent. But the archbishop was so uneasy about the future that he consecrated his own successor, Laurentius. This was strictly against church law, but it was a good decision. When Æthelbehrt died in 616 and his son Eadbald followed the pagan practice of marrying his father’s widow, some thought it meant the end of the Roman mission. Both Justus and Mellitus retreated back to Gaul. Laurentius stood his ground and persuaded Eadbald to convert; his two timorous colleagues returned to their duties in England. The archbishop died in 619 but less than a decade later the king agreed the marriage of his sister to the pagan King Edwin of Deira. Rome had reason to be grateful to Laurentius, for with this marriage its presence was to be established north of the Humber (see chapter 3). For five years Canterbury was in the hands of Mellitus, of whom the best Bede could say was that he was sound of mind; after him the ageing Justus headed the province, dying in 627. With the twenty-year archiepiscopate of Honorius (c. 630–53), who had come over with the second wave of the Roman mission, the Christian presence in England was consolidated, though not always at the initiative of Canterbury.

  In the 630s a monk named Birinus, of whom almost nothing is known, although he may have been of Italian origin, converted the equally shadowy King Cynegils of Wessex. King Oswald of Northumbria, the sixth in Bede’s list to wield the imperium, stood as his sponsor at his baptism and presided over his donation of the old Roman fort of Dorchester-upon-Thames to Birinus as his see. (The Wessex see was later moved to Winchester.) In the other major zone of paganism in the south, the kingdom of the East Angles, Archbishop Honorius played a major role in the establishment of Christianity.

  Around the year 630 there was a stand-off between the old and new religions. Rædwald’s successor adopted Christianity on the persuasion of Edwin of Deira, but he was murdered by his subjects. His brother Sigeberht, who had been baptized while an exile on the Continent, now returned. He was evidently intent on restoring Christianity, but without promoting what one might anachronistically call the ‘religious colonialism’ of the Northumbrian ruler. In fact, he had probably found his man during his exile. Bede tells us that ‘Bishop Felix’, a man born in Burgundy and apparently already consecrated there, ‘came to Archbishop Honorius and expressed his desire’ for missionary work. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that he and King Sigeberht had already discussed the project. At any rate, Honorius gave him the job and Sigeberht gave him a place, called Dommoc, for the seat of his diocese. This was probably the then coastal town of Dunwich.

  Employing scholars and teachers whom he recruited at Canterbury, Felix built up a cathedral school on the Continental model, with the help of the king. But there is a mystery about Sigeberht. His devotion to his new religion seems obvious – he abdicated the throne in favour of a kinsman to enter a monastery – but among the people at large, it seems equally obvious, he retained something of the aura of a pagan war leader. A few years into his retirement the kingdom came under attack from Penda, the great pagan king of Mercia. Courtiers begged Sigeberht to take command of the battle and, when he refused, dragged him from the monastery to the front line. Even then he refused to fight and, carrying only a staff (virga) in his hand, died on the battlefield if not in battle.14 Such is the legend and it will find echoes over two centuries later in the legends of King St Edmund. When Peada, son of Penda and his father’s sub-king in the east Midlands, married a Christian princess and converted to her religion as part of the deal, the days of paganism seemed numbered.

  Honorius died in 653. The Roman church’s position in southern England seemed at last well established. In addition, Honorius had consecrated the first native Anglo-Saxon bishop and was succeeded by the first native Anglo-Saxon on the throne of Canterbury, Deusdedit, a West Saxon. In 664, the year of his death, developments of immense importance for the whole church establishment in England were unfolding at the Synod of Whitby, in the kingdom of Deira (see chapter 3). Here we round off the story of seventh-century Canterbury with an improbable appointment and its astonishing consequences.

  Theodore of Canterbury: a Greek in charge of the English Church 668–690

  Like Pope John Paul II, Theodore of Tarsus was about sixty when appointed to his high office and, also like the late pope, he lived well into his eighties. He was born about 602 in south-eastern Turkey and was appointed to Canterbury almost by chance, dying in office in 690. By bringing the English churches under a single authority, he laid the groundwork for the church in England (for centuries the country’s premier organ of state as well as of religion). He shared a third characteristic with John Paul: Theodore was a considerable scholar. The cathedral school he founded at Canterbury became a major factor in the development of Anglo-Saxon learning, including in its curriculum studies in law and astronomy as well as the composition of Latin metrical verse. In one department, that of hagiography, it was indebted to its founder’s Greek background. A basic text for English hagiographers (saints’ biographers) was the Life of St Antony (d. 356) by the Greek writer Athanasius, a young contemporary of his subject, in a Latin translation of the 380s that Theodore introduced into the school at Canterbury. Among the many books modelled on this was the first life of the northern saint Cuthbert.

  Theodore himself had long studied in the libraries and at the university of the imperial city Constantinople, where, in addition to biblical studies, he would have attended lectures on philosophy, medicine and astronomy. Then in 648 we find him working at Rome with others to refute the doctrine of ‘monotheletism’, that Christ had only one (divine) will, proposed by Emperor Heraclius years before and a fiercely contentious issue between empire and papacy.

  That same year the eighteen-year-old Emperor Constans II had forbidden debate on the topic with an imperial typos, or edict. He was surely influenced by the advance of Islam. Five years before, in the second year of his reign, the teenage emperor and defender of the Faith had seen the Muslim armies conquer Christian Egypt and threaten Constantinople, capital of the Christian world. Islam’s unswerving monotheism was a direct challenge to the Christian idea of a Three-in-One deity – it would seem even more of a challenge to the concept of a Trinity not united by a single Divine Will. Islam was triumphing.

  The bishop of Rome, the pope, condemned the doctrine on theological grounds. In 649, twelve months after the imperial ban on the debate, Pope Martin I presided over the Lateran Council that repudiated the monothelete doctrine. Emperor Constans ordered Martin’s deposition and exile. Theodore of Tarsus had been party to the Lateran deliberations; some twenty years later that fact would shape a decisive moment in his career. Vitalian, the pope at that time, had been ratified in his position by Constans, following his election in 657, only on condition that he swore not to raise the issue of monotheletism. But the pope’s theological objections remained. Then, with tension between pope and emperor still high, Wigheard, the Anglo-Saxon archbishop of Canterbury elec
t and Deusdedit’s successor, arrived in the Holy City to receive his pallium (the scarf-like vestment of office worn by senior members of the church hierarchy), but died of plague. Theodore was, by chance, also in the city at this time.

  Rather than send to England for another candidate to be elected, Vitalian decided to seize the moment and promote his friend and champion of orthodoxy. In March 668 Theodore, having had his hair tonsured in the Roman manner, was consecrated and left for England in the company of the Anglo-Saxon nobleman Biscop Baducing, a frequent visitor to Rome and patron of the church in Northumbria (see chapter 3). For the pope, the moment was opportune. With Theodore at Canterbury, Christendom’s newest province was secure in the faith and Rome’s influence strengthened. That year Emperor Constans died.

  Installed at Canterbury in 669, Theodore launched a programme of change and centralization in the English church. A number of bishoprics were vacant; these he filled. He convened the first nationwide synod of the English churches at Hertford in 672 or 673. This provided for regular synods in the future at a place called Clofesho. We do not now know where this was: the case has been put for, among others, Brixworth in Northamptonshire, where there is still what is arguably the finest seventh-century church north of the Alps, and Hitchin, in modern Hertfordshire. Both exhibit the topographical feature indicated by the name, ‘a cleft or cloven hill spur of land’.

  The second general synod of the English church, convened by Archbishop Theodore for 17 September 679 at Hatfield, was a great occasion on the international stage. It was a decade since the death of Emperor Constans but the monothelete controversy was still unresolved. No one was better qualified than Theodore to bring matters to a head. Hatfield was convened specifically to endorse the decrees against the heresy. The ceremony was designed to impress. Following the practice of the early Church councils, the proceedings were presided over, so to speak, by a great illuminated Gospel book ‘enthroned’ on a special book stand and displayed to the synod as the assembly affirmed the decrees of five previous oecumenical councils. The following year the Sixth Oecumenical Council of the universal church adopted those acta against monotheletism so solemnly promulgated at Hatfield with full papal approval.