Book Review: Medieval Studies in Memory of Patrick Wormald: Studies in Early Medieval Britain

“Through the Fire, to the Limit, to the Wall” – Remembrance

Those willing to engage in a close reading of the papers in Medieval Studies in Memory of Patrick Wormald will make the most unlikely discoveries. This Gedenkschrift contains thirty-three papers by former students, colleagues, mentors and friends of renowned Anglo-Saxon law historian Patrick Wormald who died in September of 2004. Wormald taught early medieval history at the University of Glasgow (1974 to 1988) and then in 1989 he received an appointment from Christ Church at Oxford as a Fellow and Lecturer. Wormald is best known for his monumental The Making of English Law (1999), the first of a planned two-volume work on Anglo-Saxon law from the seventh to the tenth century. Wormald belonged to the lively Bucknell Group, whose collaborative publications, beginning with The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe (1986), swept the field of medieval legal history like a prairie fire, dramatically affecting the kind of questions medieval law historians ask.

It may seem odd for a review of this Gedenkschrift to appear in The Journal of Law, Culture and the Humanities. With the exception of a very few such as Richard Helmholz or John Langbein, Anglo-American historians work from the assumption that American law is neither burdened by nor indebted to a medieval past. This axiom receives reinforcement from the current and ubiquitous lexicon of both Anglo-American legal history and medieval history theorists. “Presentism” opposes “alterity,” the “living present” contrasts with the “dead past,” and “context,” “contingency” and “indeterminacy” negates continuity.

Nevertheless Early Medieval Studies in Memory of Patrick Wormald should be considered required reading for all who work under the banner of law and the humanities. Now these medievalists do not seek to “interrogate, judge, and condemn the past in order to free the present from its grasp.” ¹ Nor do they write elegies lovingly preserving yesterday against the dreadfulness and horror of the present. Nor do they seek to use the past to serve the needs of the present. Rather this Gedenkschrift’s potentially revolutionary character lies precisely in its lack of concern about whether history serves any purpose.

Indeed, the historians in this volume offer a forceful response, albeit tacit, to the popular critical impulse challenging the notion of the historian as either a social detective uncovering ideology concealed behind illusory texts and myths or as grave diggers excavating the dead. Concomitantly they reject the caricature of memory-keepers as Dr. Frankenstein. Their rhetorical choices evince a presumptive faith in and wonderment at the interweaving of yesterday, today and tomorrow, in the scaffold branches and saddle joints that create the entanglements of a persisting continuity of family resemblances despite the capriciousness that stamps the western tradition. They write recognizing that all who pass do not perish. Their response ripples through the warm manner, usage of organic metaphors, poignant plod and occasional crazed gallop of their writing. Simon Keynes speaks of seeking “finger prints” and “foot prints” in the Anglo-Saxon charters he studies. Janet Nelson, writing of law and liturgy, reminds medievalists that they must seek an “unsentimental sense” of past traditions and practices in order to “write histories more true to the lives of medieval people.” And Scott DeGregorio in “Bede and Benedict of Nursia” presses that “by moving the question from the theoretical to the textual and letting Bede’s writings speak for themselves,” more might be gleaned that “does justice” both to “Bede and to the diverse monastic culture of his age.” (163). DeGregorio succinctly captures what these medievalists see as their ethical obligation to the organically dead born of an insight, in affinity with Wilhelm Hegel and Nietzsche, that remembering those who went before is a necessary condition of their own possibility to be, to exist as concrete particular persons.

Increasingly law and humanities folk conceive of legal history as bound up with the cultural rather than the social, with claims of meaning and traditions of belief rather than with utilitarian-based need. In this respect they share an affinity with these medievalists. Now they do not disparage, what some call, internal legal histories that focus on the continuities and ruptures in various bodies of doctrine as worked out by jurists over time. John Hudson’s paper “The Making of English Law and the Varieties of Legal History” nicely illustrates, in the context of Wormald’s disagreement with others such as S.F.C. Milsom about the import of the Anglo-Saxon period to the formation of the English Common Law, that these historians find worthiness in dramatically different kinds of legal history. Still, those in this book who do legal history, and there are many, begin from the premise that early medieval law lived naturally entangled with and inextricable from the social, political, intellectual, liturgical and theological fibers that comprised the fabrics of the cultures or era they study. Hence traditional sources of early medieval legal history, such as charters, capitularies, wills and law codes contain more than nuggets of factual information to be extracted. These historians treat such sources as linguistic treasure which when properly unlocked permit them to hear the whisperings of a world and its people.

In “King Æthelred’s Charter for Eynsham Abbey (1005)” Simon Keynes suggests that Æthelred’s charter confirming the authority of Aethelmaer, one of his counselors, to found a monastery at Eynsham is, perhaps, the most imposing and symbolic of his reign. Anglo-Saxon royal charters overflow with religious language. Legal historians, however, tend to give it scant attention on the ground that it is irrelevant from the standpoint of legal history. Keynes, however, keeping company with Pauline Stafford and Susan Reynolds, refrains from imposing categorical distinctions between types of diction on charters derived from modern linguistics. His focus is on the proem, a familiar section of late Anglo-Saxon charters where the king gives his reasons for a grant of land or privileges. As written deeds, charters had obvious practical use when disputes over rights tied to land arose. And the advantage of the written deed over memory, and what the Anglo-Saxon church’s preference for a written record signifies about developing ideas concerning proof, literacy, and land rights in Anglo-Saxon law, is usually what catches a law historian’s eye. But Keynes’ interest in this legal record is different. He remarks that it offers much to the “historian hungry for any insight” into the “hopes and fears of the English people in a time of stress” (456).

He astutely observes rather than mere creations of legal title, the outpouring of charters in the last decade of the tenth century including the Eynsham charter of 1005 are best understood “as a concerted effort to secure divine assistance in a time of trouble” (458). These charters issue during the fourteen years when the English suffered devastating Viking raids. And the Eynsham charter comes on the heels of a year-long famine. The proem’s voice is that of the king addressing his witan. Æthelred speaks of God’s wrath at the English people, the importance of doing good works, of praising God and specifically of the Viking raids observing that the English are living at the “ends of the world” and hence “we” must “share our riches” to earn a place by Christ’s side. Without doubt the reason for the formal writing of the previous endowment is desperately spiritual. Keynes also considers the charter’s authenticity and the significance of Aethelmaer’s declaration that he is retiring to the monastery being recorded in the charter.

This paper illustrates the foolhardiness of the all too common practice of culling portions out of Anglo-Saxon law documents based on presumed distinctions between specialized dictions that serve discreet purposes. While the charter for Eynsham abbey surely is a record of legal title, in memorializing Aethelmaer’s endowment, King Æthelred established a prayer on behalf of his people for mercy. As Marianne Constable observes, different historical recording practices, the kind of materials, the usage of symbols, and manners of preserving themselves shape “forms of law.” ² Keynes’ work not only exemplifies her point, but intimates the underlying ethical obligation it places upon law historians.

These medievalists assiduously avoid reductive or conceptual language that pulls attention away from the concrete interlaced unique character of a thing, person or event. They do not employ the generic term “text” so ubiquitous in legal theory. And the choice not to do so increases the ethical heft of any question about how we ought to read a particular writing. The density and potential inaccessibility of Joanna Story’s “After Bede: Continuing the Ecclesiastical History” for a law and humanities scholar unfamiliar with manuscript studies and the two recessions of Bede’s “Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum” cannot be overstated. The paper looks at two versions of the manuscript focusing on the “chronicle” in the last “chapter” which also contains Bede’s “autobiography,” “bibliography” and final “prayer” (167). Her concern is with the interpolation of extra “annals” in one version of the manuscript, for the annals in both manuscripts “repay close attention” not only to content but to the manuscript layout, for they prefigure and shape the habit of chronicle writing that is such an “important vehicle of later Anglo Saxon and medieval English history” (183). Story’s continual specifying, detailing and situating the nature of the two manuscripts, in accord with the tradition of manuscript studies, makes all talk about unhinging a text, disturbing and disordering its integrity sound childishly malicious and, well, ignorant. The seeming inaccessibility of the paper is good for us. So too, Story’s specificity reminds us that we would not rummage through the language of a friend’s autobiography, prayer or ancestral history to gleefully destroy its comprehensibility, expose what it latently knows but suppresses, brutally forcing it, like a police interrogator gone berserk, to confess all. By the bad habit of reducing all to “text,” we tempt ourselves to forget that all writing is one or more person(s) conversing with other persons. Even in law. Abstractions such as “the state” do not talk: we do.

All these medievalists are well versed in historical linguistics and comparative philology. Lisi Oliver, an outstanding historical linguist, contributes “Royal and Ecclesiastical Law in Seventh Century Kent.” She asks if the penitential handbook of Theodore of Canterbury (c 696) influenced the “laws” of Wihtred of Kent (696). Was it perhaps a source? Oliver translates and compares clauses in each text relating to lay and clerical wrongdoing. She finds no direct linguistic tie suggesting that one functioned as a source for the other. She does find, however, striking differences between Wihtred’s dooms and Theodore’s handbook. Although Wihtred sanctions drunken or neglectful priests and those who perform unlawful marriages, he remains silent about priests who commit homicide or theft. Conversely, while Theodore’s penitential addresses clerical homicide, it remains silent about priests who perform an unlawful marriage. Both texts speak about refraining from labor on the Sabbath, but Theodore is far milder than Wihtred. Oliver raises a crucial question overlooked in most Anglo-Saxon legal history.

Wihtred governs, what she calls, internal matters (i.e. belonging to the Church) but not “public” matters such as homicide or theft committed by a priest. She wonders why. Oliver rightly notes what she finds likely bespeaks the interpenetrating of the spiritual and temporal realms. But she also notes Allen Frantzen’s historical judgment that Anglo Saxon “law required compensation for crimes while the [penitential] handbooks served the nobler goal of restoring the soul to grace” (99). Frantzen’s remark weakens the notion that the overlap of the two realms suffices to solve the puzzle. Oliver, admirably, does not rush to propose a resolve. Instead she carefully turns over its pieces. Her paper adds much needed wood to a low burning fire. Richard Helmholz, Stephen Kuttner, Richard Fraher, Greta Austin and Abigal Firey all quietly broke rank with those law historians who isolate questions of moral theology from criminal law touching in their work upon the varied interlaces of the pastoral and punitive in early medieval temporal and spiritual, and secular and ecclesiastical law. Oliver adds to this critical work.

Oliver’s paper, as do the other papers in this volume centered on translating Old English or Latin materials, brings to light dressing gowns of western law that, while over a thousand years old and unknown to contemporary legal theorists, lay stored in the attics of Anglo-American criminal law’s imagination. “Lordship and Justice in Late Anglo-Saxon England,” by Stephen Baxter revisits Wormald’s bold self-described heresy against what he called the “Maitlandian orthodoxy” regarding the strength of private courts in late Anglo-Saxon England on the one hand and the weakness of the commendation bond at law on the other which together undermined the growth of royal courts and a distinctive English juridical tradition. Wormald concentrated on Maitland’s treatment of soke whereas Baxter looks instead at the judicial features of commendation, the bond wherein a man vows to be the man of a lord and the lord, in turn, pledges protection and care. He exhaustively considers the “legislative” evidence and looks at a small group of land suits finding that Maitland’s judgment regarding the weakness of the commendation bond was “dramatically erroneous” (418). He mistook formulae he read as weighing the relative quality of the commendation bond (in comparison to soke and dependent land tenure) when it was only drawing distinctions between various forms of lordship in order to clearly identify pre-conquest antecessors. The life of this paper flows from Baxter’s attentiveness to the normative meaningfulness of commendation. He lays it out by juxtaposing Old English phrases (with tentative loose parenthetical translation into contemporary English) taken from the laws pertaining to the bond. In quick succession we learn “lord-seeking” is permitted for the freeman who has “acted rightly,” the plight of “lordless men” is that they cannot obtain “justice,” and a man must be “loyal and true” and “love his lord as himself.” Baxter of course carefully distinguishes in his discussion between duties of loyalty, the lord’s obligation to judicially protect his men, and his obligation to guarantee their good conduct in the community. But, by essentially pouring the Old English word-horde of commendation over his reader’s head, Baxter succeeds in placing him at the center of a living vibrant world tasting bits as its phrases swirl around him.

Parallels, overlaps and entanglement between (what we in contemporary English call) religious and judicial rituals have long captivated law folk. Three of the papers here center on the relation between medieval Christian liturgical practices and law. A fourth asks after the theological meaningfulness of the sculptural reliefs on the Ruthwell Cross in light of liturgical spirituality in the age of Bede. A constant feature of work in law and ritual drawing on the history of Christian theology is an assumption that religious ritual by definition is symbolic, that it always points to an immaterial other-worldly realm of truth existing self sufficiently and apart. ³ The broad outline of intellectual history in the western tradition surely encourages the assumption: from Plato’s forms, to Innocent III’s De contemptu mundi, to Kant’s noumenon, onward to Cartesian dualism. The loose joints of the popularly known story tempt us to think of “pre-modern religious ritual” as allegorical. A book review is not the place to think about the subtleties and nuances of early medieval liturgy or sacramental theology. Still in thinking about the papers briefly discussed below it is helpful to caution the reader that this assumption is terribly mistaken. Early medieval liturgical spirituality rests on an understanding of the physical, sensible and material as participating in and necessary to the actuality of the Divine. These papers offer much knowledge and insight to the interdisciplinary law scholar who wishes to think about ritual, law and justice both historically and philosophically.

Éamonn O Carragáin’s “Chosen Arrows, First Hidden Then Revealed” explores the theological coherence of the Ruthwell Cross through the liturgical practices associated with the relief sculptures of holy persons and events that adorn it. As O Carragáin stresses elsewhere coherence should not be confused with unitary meaning, for “central to liturgical spirituality was multivalence, the idea that one perspective co-existed quite naturally with several other ones.” ⁴ Historians of early Anglo-Saxon art and early medieval Christianity heatedly debate the theological cohesiveness of the eighth century Cross which stands an impressive eighteen feet high in a region that was once part of Northumbria. The Cross has four sides, two which contain figurative reliefs separated in panels, and two that are narrower containing lines in both Latin and the runic alphabet taken from the Old English poem, The Dream of the Rood. O Carragáin explores the relation between the Archer and the Visitation panels focusing on the paradoxical meanings of the Archer’s arrow aiming at Mary and Elizabeth who both swollen with child are visiting in the Visitation panel below. O Carragáin finds detailed overlaps between the reliefs and the liturgical chants and lectionary during the fourfold solar cycle of the early medieval church. Of particular note is the seventh century liturgy’s emphasis upon humility in the linking of Christ’s and John the Baptist’s conception and birth in the four feasts comprising the cycle and in the Scriptural depictions of the greater coming to the lesser that order the liturgical year. Situating the two panels against their liturgical backdrop, O Carragáin discovers a hidden pointing to, indicating of, the “supreme humility of God in His kenosis (self-stripping, self-emptying, self-giving) at the Incarnation” (187).

Nelson’s “Liturgy or Law: Misconceived Alternatives?” challenges those who balkanize the early medieval era from the central. As she notes, Richard Southern’s The Making of the Middle Ages and Ernst H. Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies contributed much to the erecting of this divide. The paper’s title plays on Kantorowicz’s terribly influential claim that whereas kingship in the early middle ages was liturgical and Christ-centered, after the advent of legal science in the twelfth century it became juridical and law-centered. Concentrating on the liturgy of royal coronations, Nelson dramatically refines Kantorowicz’s thesis clarifying that from the top down early and late medieval kingship was simultaneously sacral and juridical. Regarding the pre-Norman period, Nelson notes the juridical implications of the sacrament of the coronation whereby God confers the status of king upon a ruler as manifested by the king’s oath of fidelity to his people that preceded his crowning. She reminds historians that “ritual ways of thinking and acting,” informed the way legal science was received pointing to Henry III and Louis IX (among others) who resolved legal and political conflicts by procedures nearly indistinguishable from those between a penitent and her confessor in the internal forum of penance. Her paper nicely underscores how shared interrelated perceptions of “right, rights and righteousness” permeated the entire medieval era.

John Niles’ “Trial by Ordeal in Anglo-Saxon England” looks at the ordeal of cheese and barley, given only to accused clerics to test the integrity of their oaths of cleanliness. Successful swallowing signified the Lord accepted the “truth” of their oath and choking (and/or dying) indicated He did not. Niles asks, why barley? Niles looks for answers from within the juridical-spiritual tradition that practiced this ordeal. He finds: wheat simply is not as available as barley in England, the English Saint Cuthbert ingested barley and his life was saved after his wheat crop had failed, the English Saint Guthlac sustained himself on barley rather than pridefully fasting, English monks ate it as their daily fare, Jesus multiplied five barley loaves to feed the many at Galilee, and in Anglo-Saxon medical manuals barley is said to contain medicinal properties. Niles’ paper illuminates and vivifies the cultural rhyme and reason of barley’s usage allowing the judicial ordeal its cogency.

Yielding to the cogency of another’s world takes guts and acumen. These medievalists are acutely aware that the interpenetrating of secular and spiritual, law and faith in the early medieval period frequently requires a rethinking of intellectual frameworks that determine what kind of questions appear to us. Henry Mayr-Harting’s “Alcuin, Charlemagne and the Problem of Sanctions” looks at the long standing question of whether Charlemagne and Alcuin could and did sanction disobedient and/or corrupt churchmen and lay nobles. He shows that the answer is theologically draped notwithstanding that it is a question of legal practice. At stake is not whether Charlemagne possessed the power to inflict pain on the powerful, but whether his and Alcuin’s understanding of their obligations as Christians permitted it. In an era where an immanent God punishes sins, and good Christians are instead obligated to exhort and persuade wrongdoers to right, royal patronage as opposed to outright sanctions resolves in an equitable and authentic way the tension between Charlemagne’s spiritual duty as a Christian King and his practical need to govern the unruly. Similarly, Stuart Airlie’s “‘For it is Written in the law’: Ansegis and the Writing of Carolingian Royal Authority” changes the terms of the debate among historians about whether Abbot Ansegis of St-Wandrille who compiled a small collection of capitularies in 827 did so as a private act of piety or as a public service to the Court. Airlie offers a rich discussion that places Ansegis in a world of “Carolingian dynastic Christian piety” (228). By re-framing the contour of the debate, Airlie shows that in compiling the collection, the Abbot engaged in an act of personal piety and in act of service to the court.

Liturgical spirituality’s faith in the body and physicality as a source of meaning is difficult to fathom in our era where “meaning” is assumed to be the province of language while raw sensory experience flows from the body’s contact with the “real.” Yet with one exception, these medievalists do not doubt that the liturgy, charters, histories, sermons, chronicles, letters or laws they read speaks to the “real” meaningfulness of their world.

John Blair’s “The Dangerous Dead in Early Medieval England” is a brilliant study and an engrossing tale about the undead in eleventh–thirteenth century England. The paper centers on unhallowed graves where villages buried the executed and social outcasts. Drawing on chronicles, church records, recorded legends and miracles, Blair recounts the turmoil English villages confronted due to the wanderings of the “undead,” those who refused to remain confined in their graves. Most fascinating is archeological evidence that suggests as far back as the sixth century the early English had ways of ensuring the dead remained put. Dismemberment, securing and repositioning of the body or removal of a corpse’s heart and burying it elsewhere prevented the dead from walking. As Blair reports, such preventive rituals had the air of judicial processes wherein folk-beliefs intersected with Christian thought regarding wrongdoing and punishment. A significant question arises, as Blair points out, about whether the world of the dangerous dead which “only very occasionally rises above the parapet of literate record” may have informed late Anglo Saxon law’s perception of the outlaw and exile (555).

What is striking about this Gedenkschrift is that no particular theory of history governs these medievalists’ work. They consider themselves interdisciplinary historians, but their excitement pertains to learning about substantive knowledge that they lack, not methods. Indeed, these medievalists do not think about paradigms and analytical categories at all! This deeply impacts their diction and style of writing. Many legal theorists, seemingly more intellectually secure with concepts that are inert and colorless, give them arms, legs and vocal chords permitting them to walk upon the earth. Nor, however, do these medievalists cling to empiricism and materialism. Rather, they discern history as the story of worlds, that is to say of worldly-being, which is humanity-clothed. In both contemporary English and Old English worold derives from wer + ald, “age of man,” which loosely may be translated as “human existence” or “human-life.” A dramatic difference exists between the warmth, immediacy and fluidity of these papers that yields the surprise of humanity pride of place and the mechanical dead maze of formulaic phrases that cunningly removes humanity from our world’s horizon which dominates current work in legal theory.

Trisha Olson Independent Medieval Law Historian filpriros@aol.com