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 replan
ning 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.
The first instance of the portrayal of a king’s crowned head on the coinage, as opposed to a chaplet, wreath or helmet, comes in the reign of Æthelstan.16 The Grately code, given at Grately in Hampshire as II Æthelstan in the late 920s, contains the earliest piece of Anglo-Saxon legislation to refer to the administration of the coinage. It specifies that there is to be one coinage over all the king’s dominion; that moneyers are licensed to operate only in towns; and that any found breaching this rule, or guilty of false moneying and unable to clear himself by the ordeal shall have the hand that committed the offence struck off and set on the mint. The code details the number of moneyers to be licensed in various centres: seven in Canterbury, for example, comprising four for the king, two for the archbishop, one for the abbot; in Rochester one for the king and one for the bishop; London eight; and Winchester six. There would also be a dozen or more in other named boroughs: Exeter was an important mint continuously from the reign of Alfred, Oxford from the reign of Æthelstan to the end of the period and in the east the importance of Lincoln as a die-cutting centre and mint was exceeded only by York.17
The practice of naming the mint lapsed for the most part until the early 970s when King Edgar seems to have made it obligatory. As Mark Blackburn notes in his work on the Grately code and the coinage on which much of this section is based, this means that it is possible not only to date the great majority of coins of the late ninth century and the early tenth, and to date them to specific periods within reigns, but also to suggest regions in which they were struck, in some cases identifying the actual mints.18 Moneyers, who were highly regarded as craftsmen, were appointed by the crown. For the best part of a century, from 973 to 1066, the national coin-types were changed every six years or so and all money had to be brought in and reminted. The succeeding types varied in weight in a way that suggests a systematic monetary policy. During this period there were at least forty and perhaps as many as seventy minting places in England and there was hardly a village south of the Trent that would have been more than a day’s walk from one of them. In medieval terms the Anglo-Saxon state operated a monetary system that was exceeded in its complexity and controls only by the Byzantine empire.19 In fact, the English king’s monopoly of minting rights was almost unique in Europe and the enforced integrity of the coinage respected at home and abroad. For generations, sterling was the currency of choice in much of northwestern Europe, where many mints copied the designs of the English coinage.
The English state
When King Alfred sought to administer his kingdom he was working within an old system of lordship, of courts and territories. In the twelfth century William of Malmesbury wrongly believed that Alfred had invented the hundreds and tithings of England; nor does it seem that he gave any new shape to the West Saxon shires whose origins date back long before his day. But by getting boroughs built and garrisoned, whether or not with market-friendly street plans, as excavated at Winchester, he opened the way to England’s urban future. The shiring of England was largely a tenth-century programme. ‘The creation of many of the midland shires’, it has been said, ‘cannot have occurred much earlier than the reign of Edward the Elder or later than that of Æthelred II.’20 It is reasonable to suppose that much of the work was done in the reign of King Edgar. It was well done. When British local government was reorganized in 1974 just three of England’s historic shires were dissolved: Cumberland, Westmoreland and Rutland, all three ‘Johnny-come-lately’ post-Conquest creations.
The basic, all-purpose tool of Anglo-Saxon administration, evolving at least from the reign of Alfred, was the administrative letter or ‘writ’. It was adopted and adapted for instructions to reeves, directives to ealdormen, and announcements in the shire court of land transfers, grants of privilege and official appointments. The document known as VI Æthelstan, although related to the king’s business in requiring every reeve to exact a pledge from his shire to observe the king’s peace, was issued in the name of the bishops and reeves of the ‘peace guild of London’. Given that the language of the people was the common means of communication in all official as well as social contexts, it is not surprising to find that the use of messages in written form was not confined to the royal government.
The king’s writ, then, authenticated by his seal, was a simple and effective means of conveying the royal will nationwide and of instructions to regions and individuals. The evolution of this brilliant tool of Anglo-Saxon administration during the transition from English to Norman is detailed by Richard Sharpe in his fascinating article (2003). He contrasts it with the large-format diplomas, written in an imposing script and in ponderous Latin, although, a significant detail this, breaking into English for the practical specifics of the boundary markers if a piece of real estate was the matter in hand. In the vernacular from the start, the gewrit uses an informal script even though, thanks to its seal, it was every bit as authoritative as the diploma. A kind of hybrid, the writ charter, first found in the reign of Æthelred II and in English up to the year 1070, opened with a general address to the thegnas summoned by the sheriff; later this official is to be designated subordinate to the comes (count), the Latin equivalent of the earl. As to the document itself, it was issued by the king at the request of the beneficiary, who paid for it, to be read aloud in the shire court. Up to 1066 it was, of course, read in English; for the next four years in English with a French translation, and then from 1070 onwards in Latin with translations into English and French.
The use of written documents was not, of course, unique to England, but the idea of using the vernacular in government always had been. In the opinion of Elton, there was nothing to match the writ – characteristically brief, concise, exact and highly authoritative. After the Conquest, once the English bureaucracy had trained its replacements in the mechanics of government, writs were turned into Latin. ‘The central organization built up by the Normans and Angevins – and by them bequeathed to later ages – grew upon those little scraps of parchment with their pendant seals.’21
Queens, questions of policy and an ominous intervention
With the death of Æthelstan, the ageing dowager Queen Eadgifu, widow of Edward the Elder, had used her position at the courts of her sons Edmund and Eadred to push the interests of her favourite reformers. She helped advance Dunstan and Æthelwold, bishop of Winchester. Queen Ælfthryth, third wife of her son Edgar, would occupy a similar position in court religious policy, her support going especially to Bishop Æthelwold. She used her influence with the king to settle land disputes in favour of Winchester and to cooperate in the foundation of her nunnery at Wherwell.
When Edgar died two court factions would face each other. On one side were supporters of Edward, the son of his first wife, led by Dunstan, archbishop of Canterbury, and the ealdorman of East Anglia; on the other stood Æthelred, championed by his mother Ælfthryth, patron of Æthelwold, bishop of Winchester, and who in addition could call upon her relative Ælfhere, ealdorman of Mercia, and probably on her brother Ordulf, a substantial lord of southwest England. Edward was the older claimant but his mother had not been consecrated Queen, whereas Ælfthryth had been consecrat
ed with her husband at the time of King Edgar’s ‘imperial’ coronation at Bath in 973. A century earlier the Carolingian princess Judith had been anointed queen on her marriage to King Æthelwulf. This had apparently been the first time Wessex had known a full queen in the technical, consecrated sense. Had she had sons their ‘throne worthiness would have been superior to that of their younger brothers’. So, more than a century later, Æthelred’s party now argued that he enjoyed a privileged status by virtue of his mother’s coronation, though at that time she was a wife of eight years standing and her son probably about five years old.
The ritual used for the queen recalled the ceremony used in West Francia when coronation was part of a queen’s marriage, so Ælfthryth received a ring as a sign of faith and, as the bishop poured the oil on her head in the presence of the great nobles, he blessed and consecrated her for her share in the royal bed. The crown used was considered the crown of eternal glory and it is tempting to think that we may have a sight of the actual headpiece in the depiction of the crowning of the Blessed Virgin Mary as the Queen of Heaven in the sumptuous Benedictional of St Æthelwold, Ælfthryth’s favoured churchman.22
A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons Page 33