by Jack Lindsay
Sceaf, as they say, was brought as a child in a ship without oars to Scandza, a certain island in Germany...He was asleep and a corn-sheaf lay beside his head. He was therefore called Sceaf and was received as a prodigy by the people of that country and carefully fostered.
Sceaf, we see, is both an incarnation of the sheaf (perhaps the last one in harvest ritual) and a culture-hero making the spirit-journey from the other world with an important food-product.
Eight genealogies survive. Of these, seven (those of Kent, Wessex, East Anglia, Mercia, Bernicia, Deira and Lindsey) trace the kingly lines back to Woden. Essex starts the line with Seaxnet, a god known among the continental Saxons as Saxnet and identified as both a son of Woden and as the god Tiw (Tyr); his name, Need-of-the-Saxons, is in its second element an attribute of the Norse Odin (Othinn). The Sussex line is lost, but doubtless began also with Woden. Woden-Othinn in Scandinavia was Lord of Valhöll and god of war, poetry and magic. Woden id est Furor, says Adam of Bremen; and as the maddened and maddening war-spirit he was linked with the Berserks. He was especially the god of warrior-chiefs. The Harbardslod states, Woden owns all the gentry [iarla] that fall in fight, but Thor the thrall-kind.’ His fertility aspects helped to invest the king with similar powers. The Scandinavian King Olaf Tretelgia was sacrificed by his people to ensure good crops; Woden’s day, Wednesday, remained the lucky day for sowing or planting, though the Christians tried to link it with the devil and make it unlucky.[215]
There had thus developed a theocratic system in which church and state were largely merged, the one buttressing the other. The anointed king shared the priestly status on a high level, which in effect put him above any prelate and made him the head of the church in his realm, just as the pope had made the German emperor. The bishoprics did not make up a separate hierarchical organization so much as loose groupings like the estates of magnates, and were controlled by the king, though at times they needed to express the point of view relevant to their role in the church-state. The church, aware that it could not survive without royal support, looked on the state as expressing in a sinful world something of God’s purpose in so far as it brought about an orderly system within which the rituals of salvation could be carried on. It also recognized that only the state could guarantee its immense worldly goods and ensure the destruction of heathen and heretic.
In England then the king tended to draw to himself with considerable strength the comitatus-bond; and though the retainer of a lesser lord might feel a stronger sense of loyalty towards that lord, on the whole the process of subordinating the lesser bonds to the larger was much more successful than on the continent where the development from simpler tribal forms had been more chequered through the entanglement with survivals of Roman landlordism, and where there were more direct memories of Roman unification. Despite all the influences coming in from Gaul and the church, the English began developing state forms more organically out of the tribal bases which they had introduced. For long the attitudes that Tacitus had described among the Germanic tribes carried on almost unchanged:
It is a lifelong infamy and reproach to survive the chief and withdraw from battle. To defend him, to protect him, even to ascribe to his glory their own exploits, is the essence of their sworn allegiance. The chiefs fight for victory, the followers for their chief.[216]
The followers of Oswald of Northumbria in the seventh century and of Aethelbald of Mercia in the eighth went off with their lords into exile; not long after that Charlemagne asked the archbishop of Canterbury to intercede with Offa of Mercia to allow some exiles to return as their lord had died. Bishop Aldhelm of Sherborne tried to persuade the clergy of Wilfrid of Northumbria that it was their duty to share his exile; he pointed out that a layman who refused to go into exile with his lord would be a creature of scorn and ridicule.[217] Lillia, thegn of Edwin of Northumbria, in 625 saved his lord from a murderer by thrusting himself in the way of the poisoned dagger. Bishop Wilfrid’s retainers in 666 swore to fight to the death, if necessary, against a much superior force of heathen South Saxons; King Egfrith in 685 fell at Nechtansmere, ‘all his bodyguard having been killed’. The Chronicle under 755 (757) tells how Cynewulf of Wessex was murdered while visiting his mistress at Merton in her bur (bower, chamber):
And then from the woman’s cries the king’s thegns became aware of the disturbance and whoever there was ready and quickest ran up; and the prince offered each of them money and life, and none of them would accept it, but in fighting all the while until they lay dead, except one Welsh hostage and he was badly wounded.
Next morning the other thegns heard the news and came up, and they too died to a man, except one who had been wounded several times. They refused all offers; and when the prince (the killer) said that he had some of their kinsmen with him, ‘they replied that no kinsman was dearer to them than their lord, and they would never follow his killer’.[218] Not only warriors obeyed the ethic of loyalty. Under the same year we are told how a swineherd avenged his lord, earldorman Cumbra. In the Battle of Maldon the simple ceorl Dunnere is as ready to die for his lord as any thegn.
Alfred laid down that a man who plotted against his lord should forfeit life and property. Christ commanded that a lord should be loved as oneself. Alcuin in 801 had praised Torhtmund who avenged King Aethelred, and declared that to avenge one’s lord in honest feud was not murder or sin. A writer states that any man who observes the proper fasts of the church need not fear hell — unless he is ‘a traitor to his lord’.[219] Alfred’s laws, while allowing a man to fight in defence of a wrongfully attacked kinsman without becoming liable to a feud, forbade his action if it meant fighting against his lord: ‘that we do not permit’. By Edmund’s reign everyone was required to swear fealty to the king ‘as a man ought to be faithful to his lord’. Wulfstan wrote, ‘It is the greatest of all treachery in the world that a man should betray his lord’s soul, and a full great treachery it is also in the world that a man should betray his lord to death or drive him in his lifetime from the land; and both have happened in this country. Edward was betrayed and then killed, and Aethelred was driven out of his country.’ The church also encouraged a man to do service to his dead lord by taking alms to Rome or making grants to a religious house. A passage in Cnut’s laws, perhaps by Wulfstan, declares, Tor all that ever we do, through just loyalty to our lord, we do to our own great advantage; for truly God will be gracious to him who is duly faithful to his lord.’[220]
But we inevitably find outstanding acts of disloyalty as well as of devotion. Aethelbald of Mercia in 757 was murdered by his own bodyguard; next year the same fate befell Oswulf of Northumbria. In 796 Aethelred of Northumbria died through the plot of one of his nobles.
We see how strongly the church supported the ethic of fealty; the death of Jesus became the great instance of a lord’s betrayal. And in the theocratic state the king became more than a priestly and anointed character; he was Christ’s deputy and approximated to Christ himself:
At God’s Judgement you will have to produce and lead forth the flock of which you’ve been made the shepherd in this life, and then give account how you held that which Christ before bought with his own blood...
Let no one dare to conspire to kill a king for he is the christus [anointed] of the Lord, and if anyone take part in such a crime, if he be a bishop or anyone of the priestly order, let him be expelled from it and cast out from the holy heritage, as Judas was ejected from the apostolic order; and everyone who has consented to such sacrilege shall perish in the eternal fetters of anathema, and, associated with Judas, be burnt in the eternal fires...[221]
So, while the premature unifications represented by Charlemagne broke down on the continent, and were followed in the eleventh century by endless conflicts of small states, with much local anarchy, which we have discussed in connection with the rise of Normandy, in England there was, despite setbacks and periods of confusion, a steady movement towards a single state. The Danish invasions, we saw, played an important part
in the final stages, breaking down old divisions and making possible a relatively complete unification as the English made their retort under Wessex leadership. The regions that had made up the more effective old kingdoms, together with Welsh and Scottish princes, acknowledged the overlordship of Edgar (959-75), the first English king crowned and anointed in a rite adapted from the consecration of a bishop.[222] He ceded Lothian to Scotland and ruled over the whole land from Wessex to the Tweed. It was because of the high degree of unification now reached that the Danes under Cnut were able to take over the whole area and rule it. England was only one of the regions that Cnut had to consider; and looking at the problems of control with the detached eye of a conqueror (as William was able to do more completely later), he imposed a system of three great earldoms which brought together big groups of shires. These earldoms were not compact constitutional units, like Anjou, nor were they like the great German fiefs of the tenth century; they were too well integrated in a single royal system. In particular they coordinated defence over big areas and collected the necessary finance. The jarl or earl got a third of the profits from the shire courts and a third of the customs rendered by the boroughs. He or his deputy (a king’s reeve, a shire-man, later the shire-reve or sheriff) presided over the shire court, acting with the bishop.[223] Lesser earldoms were made up out of the great units, usually to gratify kinsmen of the three great earls. A Danish warrior married to an Englishwoman was put over the unruly region of Northumberland; Mercia and Wessex were under Englishmen, Mercia under Leofric, Wessex under Godwin. The latter, we saw, owed much of his rise to his marriage with Gytha, sister of a jarl who had married Cnut’s sister. Wessex, Alfred’s original kingdom, which controlled the routes to the continent and contained towns like London and Winchester, was by far the most important earldom. After the creation of the great Mercian kingdom in the eighth century, many lesser dynasties had had to make submission, take gifts from the king, and promise fealty. We see, for instance, Sigered, the last king of Essex, sinking from rex to subregulus, then to dux, earldorman. The typical ealdorman of the eighth and ninth centuries was, however, a member of the king’s household, set over a shire or regio and removeable at his lord’s will. The king wanted known and trusted men to lead the district’s fyrd, enforce the decisions of its folkmoots, and impose terms on any of its nobles who let their household-men break the peace. Under Cnut the earls show a further stage in this development, foreshadowing the advent of the large provincial governments that are prominent under the Confessor.
The ease with which Cnut asserted his rule was then a sign of the general acceptance of an over-all kingship, even if the large numbers of Danes in the Danelaw helped him. What is as significant is the effect of such a situation on Cnut himself. King of England in 1016 at the age of twenty-two, he succeeded his brother in Denmark three years later, and in 1028 got Norway by bribery and war — thus gaining as dependencies Greenland, the Orkneys, the Shetlands, the Hebrides, and the Isle of Man. No system at this time could hold together such an empire and this had broken up by 1049. Apart from an increase of trade with the Baltic, England showed few signs of being affected; but the way in which the people had been drawn suddenly into a wider range of politics could not but bring about many changes, which ultimately facilitated the Norman conquest. Cnut himself developed from a war-chief with a piratic host into a ruler seriously pondering forms of government; he who had been a merely formal Christian became a keen supporter of the church. In 1018 he told an assembly at Oxford that he would enforce the English laws of his predecessors; in 1020 he announced that he would govern in accordance with the counsel of the bishops. His comprehensive law code was indeed based on English tradition; and his firm control ensured twenty years of peace, order and internal development, and in turn made possible Edward’s secure reign.[224]
*
Now let us look at what class differentiations existed side by side with what we may call the exaltation of tribal kingship, aided by the church. In general the social divisions in England were similar to those we find elsewhere in western Europe in this epoch; but just as the differentiations in Scandinavia had taken on their own specific colourations, so the English ones had developed their own unique characteristics.
Lowest were the many slaves or theows. In all the stages of feudal society we find an attempt to distinguish the free and unfree. Looking back to a Roman law-maxim, a Carolingian cartulary could declare, ‘There is none other than free and unfree [servus, serf]’; but the shadings between the two levels were always complicated. At that early phase we find the unfree in administrative posts, ministrales, and carrying on industrial work; but the mass of them were on the land. Serf came from servus, slave, while slave seems to be derived from Slav, since Slavonic areas were in early medieval times the main source of slaves, especially after the eastward expansion of the Germans had begun. Slaves were mere chattels, instruments for production on the land or in a workshop, provided by masters with food, clothes and shelter; they owned nothing. Serfs possessed the means of producing their own livelihood, even if they didn’t legally own them: farm-buildings, tools, land and common rights, which together constituted the peasant holding. Some may have gone to a lord for grants, but many had held from time immemorial and fell under the lord’s power only in difficult periods. The serf was thus distinct from the slave of ancient society or the wage worker of capitalism with whom the market system is the means of compelling him to work and of regulating wages and profits. Under feudalism the lord deals with the producer in an open way, taking products, money or services directly by means of his superior power, whether that power is expressed nakedly through his retainers or in a legal and political form through feudal courts. As Bloch has put it, the feudal system implied the existence of ‘a subject peasantry’; it meant ‘the rigorous economic subjection of a host of humble folk to a few powerful men’. The land was ‘valued because it enabled a lord to provide himself with “men”.’ It followed that ‘whatever the source of a noble’s income, he always lived on the labour of other men’.[225]
The existence of this non-economic compulsion in a society where the main source of wealth comes from the land is what we have claimed is the distinguishing factor of feudalism: the one constant factor in many varying stages, each of which needs to be marked with a qualifying phrase. The early stages, when old tribal forms are breaking down, when the war-chief becomes king, when he finds his main support in companions or lesser lords, whose military value is rewarded by gifts of land (without necessarily any clearcut relation between tenures and services), we may call tribal feudalism. It contains many aspects of the old tribal society and also of the more mature feudalism where the fief, its burden, duties, and privileges are precisely defined. Other terms would be needed to characterize the phases from the period when the fief had developed to that of what have been described as the absolutist monarchies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For the moment it is enough to note that the England of Cnut and Edward represented the highest possible level of what we have called tribal feudalism. We see a complex society of varying levels, which has been developed under a rule that embodies the characteristics of the tribal kingship in an extended form, with a system of law based on local, popular courts and yet centred in the person of the king. On the other hand in Normandy we saw a society moving rapidly towards the feudalism of the explicit military tenure or fief.
In early feudal days there was no simple division between slave and serf. In the late Roman period and the first stages of the barbarian kingdoms, there were various forms of subjection and various ways of becoming subjected, which were reflected in the many terms for a servile class of peasants. Some serfs came from the coloni of the late Empire, who, though suffering legal disabilities, were not rated as slaves. They kept on sinking, however, through the burden of obligations imposed by the state and the estate-owners. In so far as the estate structure of the late Empire carried on into the successor states, the story of the coloni is f
airly clear. They had not changed much in status when the polyptyques or surveys of the big Carolingian estates were made. But other peasants came from families that had been slaves proper in Roman times or who were enslaved during the wars. Now these were servi cassati, provided with holdings. Other serfs were originally free men who entered into some sort of dependence under a lord; such men turned to a lord or to the church for security of tenure. On the whole there was a tendency to depress and equalize the status of all peasants, though at any one moment there was much variety among the enserfed — as indeed also among the remaining free men. After the tenth century private jurisdictions grew stronger in the west. In a world of failing central controls it was easy for the landlord’s economic power to become political and judicial; pouvoir banal became pouvoir domanial. By the twelfth century the lord’s demesne, worked by forced labour, was, however, beginning to lose its importance; the mansus, the traditional peasant tenure, had been much subdivided; labour services were dying out and money rents losing their value. But private jurisdiction still brought in much profit, as did various land services reimposed as a subject’s duty rather than as a tenant’s rent, and as did the exploitation of seigneurial monopolies: oven, mill, winepress, and the like. Our investigation here is essentially into the period between the lapses of central control and the great changes in feudal relations in the twelfth century.[226]