A lot happened in the final three decades of the seventh century in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Archbishop Theodore arrived in Canterbury from Rome, bringing church reform and advanced education. Wilfrid, abbot and bishop, roamed Northumbria, Wessex, Mercia, Kent and the continent, navigating allegiances and quarrels with kings. Aldhelm balanced life as a scholar, abbot and political player from his base in Malmesbury. Kentish and West Saxon kings were fighting to expand and consolidate their territories, while also lavishing monasteries with land and privileges. This is the main cast involved in an exceptional moment in the history of law and writing in England: the 670s to 690s produced no less than five surviving pieces of legislation, a higher number than almost any other equivalent period before the Norman conquest. Kings Hlothhere, Eadric, Wihtræd and Ine produced decrees of royal law,Footnote 1 while Theodore was behind the decrees of two church councils.Footnote 2
The late seventh-century royal laws of Wessex and Kent have not been neglected by historians. They have attracted attention, in part, because they are so different in form, language and textual expression from the earliest written laws produced in England, those attributed to King Æthelberht of Kent (d. ?616).Footnote 3 The style of Æthelberht’s enigmatic laws is probably a result of the text’s genesis: it seems to be a record of oral law, remembered and recited before it was recorded, probably after Roman missionaries arrived in Kent in 597.Footnote 4 Two generations later, laws look different in content, structure and style, with Æthelberht’s evocative prose replaced by Hlothhere’s legalese. The traditional view – of which more later – takes these textual differences to be a result and expression of internal changes in the Anglo-Saxon legal and judicial system over the course of the seventh century.
I want to suggest a different explanation, namely that the royal laws took on this new form and style through influence from church council decrees.Footnote 5 In this article, I propose that the arrival of Theodore and Hadrian to Canterbury around 670 and the subsequent start of an English tradition of recording church council decrees was crucial both in causing the burst of royal legislation in the 680s and 690s and in shaping the new form these laws took. But other texts and traditions may have spurred on and inspired English legislation too; for instance, Ine’s laws show many points of similarity with Frankish law. The same is the case for royal diplomas, the production of which kicked off at this time. I will suggest that the late seventh century was a period of experimentation and of openness to external influences.
Explaining the seventh-century textual changes in this way has the advantage of not isolating the royal laws from their wider context. Furthermore, based on what we know about the 670s to 700 in Anglo-Saxon England, it seems unlikely that royal law-texts would have occupied their own sphere, untouched by broader intellectual, textual and legislative developments. Each section of this article will make this case in different ways. Section I brings together what we know about the people involved in secular and ecclesiastical law-writing, emphasising that they were well-connected both in England and abroad and that the people behind the royal laws were also authors of canon law, scholars with knowledge of other legal traditions and participants in charter production. This forms the context for Section II, which shows that the late seventh-century royal and ecclesiastical legal texts did not just emerge out of the same circles but that they also have formal and linguistic features in common. I argue that these arose because the royal laws were modelled on the genre of church council decrees. The personal connections set out in Section I offer a plausible scenario for such cross-fertilization as well as for the other external influences found in the laws of Ine and in royal diplomas. The section concludes that these twenty or so years represent a particular moment of innovation, experimentation and interest in law and writing. Section III places this moment within a broader context of legal knowledge and legal study. It sets out the potential ways in which Roman law, canon law and the local laws of the Franks, Irish and Lombards may have been studied or brought to England, arguing that this knowledge contributed the inspiration and ability to write law in new and different ways. It will become clear that the Anglo-Saxon royal laws – just like other textual genres in this period – were not as home-grown as they are often presented.
SECTION I: THE PEOPLE
The second oldest law text from an Anglo-Saxon kingdom survives as a joint statement by the Kentish kings Hlothhere (d. 685) and Eadric (d. 686/7). They seem an unlikely pair for joint law-making: in 685, Hlothhere was killed in battle when his nephew Eadric made a violent grab for the Kentish throne. They may have had a period as co-rulers before this point, as suggested by the laws, though the evidence is inconclusive.Footnote 6 In any case, Eadric must surely have been eager to secure the kingship for himself, given that he (and his brother Wihtræd) had been passed over for succession in favour of Hlothhere at the death of their father Ecgberht in 673.Footnote 7 But Eadric’s rule was short-lived: he died after a year and a half.Footnote 8
Whether the laws which survive in their names should be dated to before Hlothhere’s death or before Eadric’s is uncertain. The fact that Hlothhere & Eadric only survives in one twelfth-century manuscript – alongside Æthelberht and Wihtræd – makes its textual history hard to reconstruct.Footnote 9 Therefore, all we can say is that the surviving text is either a result of joint issuing or of Eadric ratifying his uncle’s laws after his death.Footnote 10 The prologue to the text may be original (if issued jointly) or added/modified slightly later (if ratification by Eadric). In either case, the text is the earliest of the late seventh-century royal laws, dating to the first half of the 680s or slightly earlier.Footnote 11 What we can date with more certainty is the oldest surviving certainly authentic English royal diploma, issued in the name of Hlothhere in 679.Footnote 12 This charter concerns a grant of land at Reculver in Kent to Abbot Berhtwald (later Archbishop of Canterbury and lawmaker), made with the agreement of Eadric and Archbishop Theodore. In fact, it has been argued that royal diplomas as a legal instrument were only introduced to England with Theodore’s arrival a decade before and that this charter may be, if not the first charter, one of the first charters ever written in an Anglo-Saxon kingdom.Footnote 13 Hlothhere is also mentioned in another textual output of the year 679, namely the decrees of Theodore’s Council of Hatfield. His name appears only in the dating clause, meaning that he was not necessarily present at the meeting itself.Footnote 14
After Eadric’s death, more trouble was in store for the family. His brother Wihtræd didn’t succeed to the throne until 690 or 691, because Kent was invaded and ruled by a series of foreigners, including Mul (a West Saxon royal), Oswine (backed by the Mercian king) and Swæfheard (an East Saxon royal), who ruled alongside Wihtræd for a while.Footnote 15 But from c. 694, Wihtræd appears to be the only ruler,Footnote 16 and shortly thereafter, in 695, he issued his laws, made at a council held with Archbishop Berhtwald of Canterbury and others. Wihtræd’s laws complete what was essentially a family project: the late seventh-century Kentish laws were produced by an uncle (Hlothhere) and his two nephews (Eadric and Wihtræd).
There are connections to our fourth lawmaker too, namely Ine, King of the West Saxons (r. 688–726). The invader Mul was the brother of Ine’s predecessor, King Caedwalla (r. 685–8). Mul was killed in 687 at the hands of the Kentish people, and in 694, Ine received a payment from Wihtræd and the people of Kent as compensation for his murder.Footnote 17 Additionally, despite subsequent tensions between the two kingdoms, both Wihtræd and Ine held on to their thrones for a long time: Wihtræd until his death in 725, and Ine until he abdicated to go to Rome in 726, where he died shortly thereafter.Footnote 18 Like Wihtræd, Ine also appears to have issued laws at the start of his long reign: his laws are traditionally dated to between 688 and 693, when the king and both bishops mentioned in its preface, Hædde and Earconwald, were alive and in office.
There is another story to tell from the late seventh century, closely intertwined with this royal narrative. It concerns the church, its clergy and its laws. The most important person for our purposes is Archbishop Theodore, who arrived in Canterbury in 669, having been consecrated in 668 by Pope Vitalian in Rome.Footnote 19 The abbot Hadrian was the pope’s initial choice for a replacement of the archbishop-elect, Wigheard, who died of the plague in Rome. Hadrian turned down the offer but followed as Theodore’s associate the year after, becoming abbot of St Peter and St Paul in Canterbury.Footnote 20
Among Theodore’s many achievements in England was the strengthening of Canterbury’s authority.Footnote 21 With more vacant than occupied sees in England, the situation was ripe for renewal when Theodore arrived.Footnote 22 With royal backing, he filled these sees and, in the process, strengthened Canterbury’s position.Footnote 23 These efforts were partly intended to regularize the English church and bring it into line with the rest of the organisation.Footnote 24 Further efforts are clear from the church councils convoked by Theodore: at Hertford in 672Footnote 25 attendees discussed matters of organization and discipline, while the council of Hatfield in 679 sought to confirm the orthodoxy of the English church. These assemblies produced the earliest written Anglo-Saxon council decrees, which will be discussed in depth in Section II. As mentioned, Theodore has also been linked to the introduction of another significant textual output of the late seventh century, namely royal diplomas.Footnote 26 Yet, Theodore’s main achievement in modern eyes is perhaps the school he ran with Hadrian at Canterbury. The subjects taught there included canon law and Roman law as well as grammar, patristic texts, scripture, Greek, metre, astronomy, computation and more.
Such achievements on the part of Theodore and Hadrian are perhaps unsurprising: both were well-connected, learned and somewhat significant political and ecclesiastical players. Hadrian, originally from North Africa (perhaps Libya), was at the time of the start of our story a monk near Naples, seemingly an advisor to the pope in Rome and perhaps also to the Byzantine emperor.Footnote 27 Both he and Theodore, originally from Tarsus in modern-day southern Turkey, may have fled from disruptions caused by Arab conquests, and, in any case, both ended up as monks in Italy around the 640s and 650s until their English appointments came along.Footnote 28 Their journeys to England demonstrate their many connections to the wider church and to politics. Theodore (and his English travelling companion Benedict Biscop) stayed with Agilbert, Bishop of Paris and former bishop of Wessex, who we will encounter again below. Before crossing the Channel, they were met by an emissary of Ecgbert king of Kent, brother of Hlothhere and father of Eadric and Wihtræd.Footnote 29 It is also said that he received permission to travel from the Merovingian Mayor of the Palace, Ebroin. The same Ebroin held Hadrian back in Francia, suspecting the abbot to be on a mission for the Byzantine emperor. Hadrian then spent two years on the continent, staying with the bishops of Sens and Meaux.Footnote 30
Theodore’s successor, Berhtwald, may not have been as well-connected as his predecessor, though the start of his time in office shows that there were still close ties between English churchmen and the continent. He was consecrated by the Archbishop of Lyon in 693, before travelling to Rome to receive the pallium from the pope.Footnote 31 A few years into his reign he participated in, perhaps convened, a council which produced the text we know as Wihtræd’s laws.
The two bishops named as advisors in Ine’s law-code, Bishop Hædde of Winchester and Bishop Earconwald of London, were in a similar situation. Both appear to be English, like most other bishops consecrated by Theodore in the 670s.Footnote 32 However, Earconwald’s family may have had Frankish connections, and his monastery at Barking, founded with his sister Æthelburh, looks to have been inspired by Frankish houses.Footnote 33 He may have made at least one journey to Rome.Footnote 34 Hædde, for his part, will have had strong Frankish ties through his institution: he was the successor to a long line of Frankish bishops of Wessex, which included the first ever bishop of that kingdom, Birinus, as well as Agilbert and his nephew Leuthere. Hædde honoured this heritage when he translated Birinus’s body from Dorchester-on-Thames to Winchester.Footnote 35 Hædde and Earconwald’s continental connections may account for some of the external influences we can detect in the laws of Ine and some of the features of the royal diplomas they may have produced.Footnote 36
Our next two cast members are not explicitly associated with any written legislation, though both were part of the social, political and intellectual network I have been setting out. Aldhelm, abbot of Malmesbury and later bishop of Sherborne, is best known for his extensive and complex Latin prose and poetry. But he was also a political player, a close associate of kings Caedwalla and Ine of Wessex and the Northumbrian king Aldfrith, and possibly himself part of the West-Saxon royal family.Footnote 37 The involvement in royal affairs of this ‘well-connected prince-bishop’Footnote 38 is clear for instance from the charter evidence, where Aldhelm’s name appears not just as beneficiary but also as witness, policy advisor and perhaps even scribe.Footnote 39 He is, for instance, given prominence as advisor in a charter of Ine’s granting freedom from taxation for the West-Saxon Church.Footnote 40 He seems to have travelled to Rome to obtain privileges for his monastery at Malmesbury from Pope Sergius I, perhaps while accompanying King Caedwalla who abdicated to Rome in 688.Footnote 41 His connection to other churchmen is also clear. He was a student at Theodore and Hadrian’s school – where he appears to have studied Roman law – and he may have had connections to Iona, a major centre for learning. A surviving letter suggests that he may have been present at the council of Hertford in 672 alongside Theodore.Footnote 42 He witnessed charters alongside Berhtwald, Hædde, Earconwald and Wilfrid and corresponded with Hadrian and Leuthere.Footnote 43 Aldhelm, therefore, had close connections to both our ecclesiastical and our secular cast, he travelled, and he was learned in Roman and canon law. Aldhelm may be one of the channels for transmitting legal texts and knowledge to Anglo-Saxon kings and law-writers.
The same is the case for Wilfrid, bishop of Hexham. He worked with kings across the island, including Caedwalla of Wessex, Aldfrith and Ecgfrith of Northumbria, Æthelred and Wulfhere of Mercia, Egbert of Kent and Æthelwealh of Sussex.Footnote 44 Wilfrid also had significant contacts in Francia. This included Bishop Agilbert (first of the West Saxons, later of Paris), who worked with Wilfrid at the Council of Whitby (664) and who consecrated him as priest and later bishop.Footnote 45 Other continental contacts included Aunemundus (Archbishop of Lyon), with whom he studied for three years, perhaps Roman law, as suggested in Section III. He also had several royal connections abroad. In the 660s, his consecration as bishop took place at Compiègne, a Merovingian royal vill.Footnote 46 On one of his three trips to Rome, he stayed with King Aldgisl of Frisia, King Dagobert II of Austrasia and King Perctarit of the Lombards.Footnote 47 He even seems to have organized Dagobert’s return to Francia from exile in Ireland.Footnote 48 However, as easily as he attracted royal patronage, he managed to turn kings against him. This led to much of his travelling: he spent twenty-six of his forty-six years as bishop in exile either on the continent or in various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and two of his trips to Rome were to make appeals to the pope (679 and 704).Footnote 49
We have no direct evidence that Wilfrid was involved in law-making in England (he sent legates to represent him at the Hertford council), but he seems to have set great store by formal legal documents. Not only is there evidence of his involvement in charter production for inter alia King Caedwalla and Bishop Earconwald,Footnote 50 but the biography written shortly after his death gives us a few glimpses of the importance of legal documents to Wilfrid. One episode describes Wilfrid reading out a list of lands for which he had charters at what appears to be a lavish feast with kings, reeves and abbots for the consecration of Ripon Abbey.Footnote 51 The Vita also shows us how Wilfrid twice submitted written petitions to the pope, securing papal decrees in return, which he took back to England ‘all stamped with bulls and seals’ to read out before kings, councillors and bishops.Footnote 52 On the occasion of his second written petition, he also ended up as signatory to a synodal decree produced at the Synod of Rome (680).Footnote 53 All in all, Wilfrid was no stranger to writing, reading and relying on formal legal texts and he was in a good position to have known and spread knowledge of continental, Roman and canon law to the many English kings he was associated with.
These were not the only people travelling between England and the continent in the late seventh century. Wilfrid’s early travel companion, Benedict Biscop, made six trips to Rome. On these occasions, he also spent time at Frankish monasteries and he accompanied Theodore from Rome through Francia. Footnote 54 He seems to have been close to the West Saxon king Cenwalh and later the Northumbrian king Ecgfrith, who granted him land where he set up the famous Wearmouth monastery in 674.Footnote 55 Biscop was a major channel for continental influences in England: he brought back Frankish and Roman books, relics, builders, art, someone to teach Roman chants and his own monastic rule based on seventeen of those he had come across while travelling.Footnote 56
Another group who may have transmitted continental legal ideas and texts are the many Franks who took up posts in the English church. The first bishop of the East Anglians in the 630s, Felix, was from Burgundy, and around the same time Birinus, an Italian or Frank, became the first bishop of the Gewisse (later West Saxons).Footnote 57 His successor Agilbert we have already met: born into an important family in Neustria, he seems to have been educated in Ireland before becoming bishop of the West Saxons after 646 at the invitation of King Cenwalh.Footnote 58 He fell out with the king, departed from Wessex and ended up in Northumbria in the 660s, where he ordained Wilfrid priest and participated at the Council of Whitby in 664.Footnote 59 Agilbert returned to his native Francia, and by 668 he was bishop of Paris.Footnote 60 Agilbert was invited back to Wessex as bishop in the 670s, which he declined, but he sent his nephew Leuthere, who held the bishopric under Kings Centwine, Caedwalla and Ine. Leuthere was present at Theodore’s council of Hertford, alongside other bishops of Kent and Mercia, and was involved in charter writing, possibly introducing Frankish conventions to both genres.Footnote 61
SECTION II: ENGLISH LEGAL TEXTS IN THE SEVENTH CENTURY
The fact that seventh-century Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastics were cosmopolitan and learned is well-known. But the previous section aimed to show that this is relevant to the royal laws, a point which is well worth repeating given our tendency to treat these laws as mostly home-grown. By itself, the existence of these learned networks does not solve the problem this article started with, namely how the textual changes between Æthelberht and the late seventh-century laws came about. But in this section, we will see how it is relevant: I argue that textual and formal changes took place because of influence from other legal traditions, which came from the knowledge and connections of law-makers and their circles. My first argument is that the late seventh-century royal laws were written after the model of church council decrees, seemingly introduced in England by Theodore in the 670s. The second example of external influence are the Frankish features of Ine’s laws, which are found in its form, language and content. Towards the end of the section, I will show how royal diplomas offer us a further way to understand and think about the boundaries between legal genres in this period.
Church council decrees
In 664, the Council of Whitby set out to decide the correct keeping of Easter. There are no surviving decrees from this council and descriptions in narrative sources make it seem as though there never were any.Footnote 62 What is more, these accounts describe a council ruling on the basis of scripture, custom and patristic examples – not the written laws of the church.Footnote 63 Less than a decade later, this had changed. Theodore’s councils at Hertford (672) and Hatfield (679) relied heavily on other written documents. For instance, the Hertford decrees consist in discussion of topics Theodore had ‘marked in certain places’ in his book of canons and both decrees make frequent references to councils of the past, the texts of which seem to have been present.Footnote 64 Most importantly, both councils also resulted in written decrees in Latin written in the form and style of council decrees of the wider church.Footnote 65
Before turning to the English texts, let us first look at the conventional features of this genre. By Theodore’s day, this type of text had been produced in the church for almost four hundred years. Its purpose was to record the decisions reached by consensus in a council, usually as discrete chapters following a preface giving context of that meeting. There were many variations within this type of text, most notably between those texts that were complete minutes of the whole council and those texts that recorded only the final decisions.Footnote 66 The latter form is most common amongst surviving decrees and it has several different sub-genres. One of these is what Hamilton Hess has labelled the statutum form. It is characterised by terse renditions of the final decisions, leaving out the discursive accounts of proposals, opinions and consensus that other types of decrees include.Footnote 67 This is the form we observe in, for instance, the sixth- and seventh-century councils of the Visigothic and Frankish kingdoms, as well as our English decrees.Footnote 68 These usually include a preface with information on the time, place, participants, convenors and occasion of the council; a list of canons reported as final decisions; sometimes a penalty clause or sanction for breach of any of the included canons; and a list of subscriptions.Footnote 69 Instead of a list of canons, some texts treat just a single issue, usually doctrinal or disciplinary.Footnote 70
These conventional elements are all present in the surviving texts of Hertford and Hatfield, as Katy Cubitt has shown.Footnote 71 Their prefaces set out the time, place, convenors and main participants, including relevant rulers (who may have supported or allowed the gathering).Footnote 72 Hertford contains some procedural descriptions – not unknown in the statutum type of text – in its description of Theodore getting each participant to confirm that they will observe previous canons.Footnote 73 This section renders the direct speech of Theodore and participants (recording their consensus), as we see elsewhere too.Footnote 74 There are also other such textual expressions of consensus and deliberations, another characteristic of the genre of church councils.Footnote 75 Both council texts say that they include a list of subscriptions, which do not survive, though there is no reason to doubt that the originals had these attached.Footnote 76 In Hertford, the main body of the decree consists of ten canons on clerical discipline and matters of church organization; each canon is in straightforward prose, rendering a decision without justifications or discussion, a style found in many other council texts, including Frankish.Footnote 77 Hatfield has no chapters: it is an example of a single-issue decree, setting out the doctrinal stance of the church and its confirmation of previous councils. The English councils thus conform to the characteristics of the well-established genre of church council decrees, and they are especially close in form, scope, and style to Frankish councils of the sixth and seventh centuries.Footnote 78 Clearly, the Hertford and Hatfield texts did not find their form accidentally.
It makes sense that Theodore would make sure the English decrees conformed to formal standards, because these decrees were not written purely for internal use. The Hatfield decree was written as a preparatory document – confirming the orthodoxy of the English church – for a synod at Rome (680) (the one where Wilfrid participated).Footnote 79 This council was itself held in preparation for what would be the sixth ecumenical council (Council of Constantinople, 680–1), called by the Byzantine emperor Constantine IV to deal with the monothelete controversy.Footnote 80 Bede tells us that the Hatfield text was brought to the pope.Footnote 81 Following a standard form and textual convention made sure that the texts would fit within the wider corpus of ecclesiastical legislation. Producing texts in this venerable genre – texts that would not look out of place in a book of canons – must have seemed like a significant step to the churchmen (and perhaps kings) involved. The royal laws that appeared only a few years thereafter may owe both their existence and form to this innovatory step.
Royal law
The Kentish laws: Hlothhere & Eadric and Wihtræd
The argument might already be clear by now. Many of the features of Hlothhere and Wihtræd that distinguish them from Æthelberht correspond to the conventional characteristics of church decrees. These features are exactly the ones that have been set out by Wormald and others already: the late seventh-century laws have prefaces; their chapters are more detailed and more grammatically complex; topics appear to be judgments made by kings, adding to an existing body of law.
Prefaces are one of the most conspicuous differences to Æthelberht. Footnote 82 That of Hlothhere reads: ‘Hlothhere and Eadric, kings of the people of Kent, increased the laws that their ancestors made before with these decrees [domas], which are stated hereafter’.Footnote 83 It is not long and gives little detail compared to Theodore’s council decrees. Nevertheless, just the fact that it sets out the kings responsible for making these laws marks a change. In the preface, dom ‘decree, judgment’ is set in opposition to æ ‘the law’, conveying law that is being made, in this case by kings, perhaps at a meeting.Footnote 84 The similarity to conciliar prefaces is most obvious in Wihtræd, which resembles almost word-for-word the preface of Hertford. It states that the laws were made at a gathering, which it dates by indiction year and season, and it names the place and participants of the council.Footnote 85 Wihtræd’s name opens the text as part of the dating clause and the preface later says that he was present at the meeting, alongside Archbishop Berhtwald of Canterbury, Bishop Gebmund of Rochester and other churchmen. The preface also tells us that ‘each order of the church … spoke with a single mind’ and that the council ‘devised, with the consent of all, these decrees’.Footnote 86 These are exactly the kind of terms, as we saw above, in which consensus was expressed in church council decrees. Not only do these sentiments and themes in Wihtræd echo church decrees, but they are often in Latinate language too.Footnote 87 The preface was surely written from the model of a Latin church council decree.Footnote 88
Other differences between Æthelberht and the later Kentish laws include the level of detail of each topic and their content, as Wormald and others have highlighted. Most sentences in Æthelberht are short and there are few exceptions or complicating factors.Footnote 89 In fact, Æthelberht’s c. 1000 words are spread over about seventy clauses, most of them single sentences without any exceptions or follow-ups.Footnote 90 In contrast, Hlothhere and Wihtræd, each just over 600 words, cover no more than respectively twelve and twenty clauses. Hlothhere’s laws, especially, is full of exceptions, further conditions and concerns arising.Footnote 91 Furthermore, these laws are, like church council decrees, presented as an itemised list of decisions, with few grammatical and thematic connections between clauses, which is to some extent different from Æthelberht, which occasionally relies on a notional syntax set up by previous sentences.Footnote 92 There is also a wider spread in topics and less obvious structure in Hlothhere and Wihtræd than in Æthelberht, with its relatively neat organisation and long head-to-toe injury list.Footnote 93 These things suggest that each law (chapter) in Hlothhere and Wihtræd may have arisen from individual judgements or discussions of discrete issues. All in all, as Wormald pointed out, the late seventh-century Kentish laws look like made law, records of decisions reached by kings and advisors.Footnote 94
To Wormald, this textual change from Æthelberht arose at this time because kings’ role in justice and in law-making had changed. In his view, a king like Æthelberht was only indirectly involved in the judicial settlement of disputes and the laws written down in his reign were largely traditional.Footnote 95 As a contrast, kings in the later seventh century were more actively involved in justice. Crucially, to Wormald, it seemed that these kings recorded judgments made in response to cases, to promote their own new policies, and in reaction to particular circumstances. This made the late seventh-century laws fundamentally different from the laws contained in Æthelberht, which were written representations of custom.Footnote 96 These laws also saw the emergence of fines to the king for offences that did not involve his person directly, another sign of active intervention on kings’ part.Footnote 97 Wormald argued that kings’ more active role in making and enforcing law was a new practice and that this change in the king’s role manifested itself in textual form.Footnote 98
But a more persuasive reason why these features suddenly appeared at this time was that kings and their advisors were handed a model for how to record their decisions as legislation. It seems too much of a coincidence that only a few years previously, English conciliar decrees were first written down and that the characteristics of these ecclesiastical laws correspond so closely to those of the new royal laws: there are prefaces giving context for the law-making, followed by lists of itemised rules on a variety of topics, not necessarily connected to each other in content or grammatically, because they are the result of deliberations. Wihtræd’s law is the clearest example of the conciliar decree form being fully adopted and adapted by a king,Footnote 99 but Hlothhere has close parallels too. The choice of Old English for these royal laws – as opposed to the Latin of church council decrees – could simply be because deliberations happened in English or because the language of Æthelberht guided them. All in all, this kind of external textual influence is more persuasive than endogenous explanations that isolate the Anglo-Saxon royal laws from the wider textual and personal contexts.
How may the influence from church council decrees have come about? If kings were present at church council meetings – and it is not certain that they wereFootnote 100 – we could imagine that they became directly motivated to commit their own assembly decisions to writing in a similar form. Alternatively, we can imagine influence via the churchmen who were present at council meetings or worked closely with Theodore and who also functioned as advisors to kings. As we saw above, such connections were numerous. One such person is Berhtwald, who as archbishop would undoubtedly have been very familiar with Theodore’s innovatory decrees. Berhtwald presided over the meeting that produced Wihtræd’s laws and he also acted as policy advisor on other matters for Wihtræd later (e.g. S 20). He was the recipient of Hlothhere’s 679 charter, and witnessed several charters for Wihtræd, Caedwalla, Ine and others. We do not know who – if anyone – advised Hlothhere and Eadric on their laws, though if any churchmen were involved, it may have been Theodore, who appears elsewhere advising Hlothhere (e.g. S 8). Another candidate is the bishop of Rochester, which could have been Putta (d. 676), one of the attendees at Hertford, or, after 678, Gebmund, who was also present for the making of Wihtræd’s laws. Perhaps Earconwald, bishop of London c. 675–693, was involved, given that Hlothhere’s laws suggest that the kings of Kent had interests in London.Footnote 101 As we will see shortly, Earconwald did not just have a hand in making Ine’s laws, but may have been behind several charters too. Other possible advisors include the several unnamed bishops mentioned as participants at Hertford and Hatfield.
Parallels elsewhere allow us to imagine how such co-operation and influence might have worked. In Francia there were close connections between church councils and the issuing of royal law. Childebert I’s edict may have been issued in connection with the council of Orleans (538). Guntram’s edict of 585 was not only issued at the Council of Mâcon of that year, but the edict itself emphasises how canons and worldly law must work together to ensure justice.Footnote 102 Clothar II’s edict was issued shortly after the Council of Paris (614) and was based on material from this council.Footnote 103 In fact, two English clerics attended the Paris council, which serves as a reminder that Anglo-Saxon kings may have been aware of other types of text in the conciliar form too, such as these Merovingian council decrees and royal decrees, and that this may also have played a part in their adoption of this form of law-writing later in the seventh century.Footnote 104 Even so, there is nothing quite like the Frankish situation in England. But these parallels make it easier to imagine a situation where Anglo-Saxon kings were intimately familiar with the Church’s council decrees, perhaps even witnesses to their promulgation, and could thus have been influenced by such occasions and their texts when it came to recording their own laws.
Another parallel is found in Ireland. As in Kent and Wessex, the late seventh century in Ireland appears to be a period of particularly active legislative efforts, both in Latin ecclesiastical law and in vernacular worldly law.Footnote 105 A new form appeared, the cáin (pl. cánai), a decree promulgated at assemblies of both ecclesiastics and secular leaders.Footnote 106 The earliest surviving cáin is in the name of Adomnán, abbot of Iona, dating to 697.Footnote 107 This vernacular decree was issued with the assent and seemingly presence of several kings.Footnote 108 In a legal text from around 700, Cáin Adomnáin is described both as recht Adamnáin ‘the law of Adomnán’ and rechtgae rig ‘royal edict’, suggesting that it was closely connected to both ecclesiastical and secular powers.Footnote 109 This makes the Irish decrees a close equivalent to Wihtræd in particular, which was written only two years before Cáin Adomnáin. Footnote 110 Robin Chapman Stacey has suggested that the cánai were an ecclesiastical innovation, ‘something suggested to kings by ecclesiastics interesting in building up the royal office … rather than a native genre appropriated for clerical use’.Footnote 111 Perhaps this is what we should imagine for England too. The Irish and Frankish situations allow us to see not just how ecclesiastics had a hand in law-making – as we know they did in Anglo-Saxon England too – but that ecclesiastical councils could play an important role in the writing and promulgation of royal law.
The West-Saxon laws: Ine
Ecclesiastical involvement is in no doubt in the case of Ine, where bishops Hædde and Earconwald are mentioned in the preface as the kings’ advisors, alongside the king’s father Cenred. The preface also mentions preparatory meetings of ecclesiastics and secular leaders. Such strong clerical involvement may account for its conciliar features: Ine’s laws follow the model of a contextual preface followed by a list of decisions. The same argument therefore holds for Ine as it did for the Kentish laws regarding inspiration from church council decrees, although Ine’s laws (688 × 693) may well have been prompted by the legislative activity and legislative tradition in Kent rather than by church councils directly.Footnote 112 The 680s and 690s had seen tensions between the two kingdoms and such rivalries may have led Ine to provide Wessex with its own written laws.Footnote 113 Or perhaps the impetus to law-making came to West-Saxon kings through Aldhelm, who studied with Theodore at Canterbury and may thus have been familiar both with Theodore’s decrees and Kentish royal law.
However, Ine’s laws have some significant differences from the Kentish laws, too. The text is much longer, at over 2700 words, and it deals with a greater variety of topics. There are clauses on animals, field management, trees, family and inheritance, theft, Sunday work, baptism, enslaved people, church dues, fighting and much more. This makes it different from the ecclesiastically focused Wihtræd and the trade- and procedure-dominated Hlothhere & Eadric, each about a fifth of Ine’s length. It is closer in its contents to some continental texts, including Pactus legis salicae, Pactus pro tenore pacis of Childebert I and Clothar I (c. 525 × 555), the Decretio of Childebert II (594–596) and Excerpta de libris romanorum et francorum. Footnote 114
I have set out my theories about Ine elsewhere, the most important of which are that it was originally written in Latin and that it contains some near-verbatim parallels to continental laws.Footnote 115 Ine’s laws suggest that the bishops and the king of Wessex were inspired by Frankish leges and edicts, perhaps because Wessex was in a different sphere of influence than Kent when it came to legal writing. In fact, textual influence from across the Channel has long been recognised in early West Saxon charters issued in Ine and other kings’ reigns.Footnote 116 For both charters and laws, influence from Frankish texts and genres may be attributed to Wessex’s succession of Frankish bishops. In Ine’s case, influence may also have come from Earconwald, who, as Ian Wood has argued on other grounds, was ‘an agent of Frankish influence in England’.Footnote 117
Some would disagree that Ine and his bishops set out to make a continental-style law-code of seventy-six clauses. Wormald proposed that Ine’s laws were made up of up to six decrees issued at different times in Ine’s – or even his successors’ – reigns.Footnote 118 This argument is based on the lack of apparent logic in the laws’ structure, the nature of some laws and repetitions across the code.Footnote 119 Wormald thought that ‘it is hard to see how Ine’s laws could appear in the order that they do, were the code in any way pre-planned’.Footnote 120 But, as he saw it, it would make sense if the code consisted of decrees that had been added to an original core, and that these decrees stemmed from legislative sessions where the law-makers responded to issues brought to them.Footnote 121 Others have agreed on various parts of this theory. Stefan Jurasinski found it difficult to imagine Ine and his advisors legislating on ‘minutiae of agricultural practice and other obscurities’, Tom Lambert has seen it as ‘inconceivable’ how certain laws in Ine would have come into being if not as real-world cases, and John Hines commented ‘redundant repetition can be taken to be the surest sign of layered traditions’.Footnote 122
I am not convinced that these features point to Ine being an accumulation of decrees nor that it is mostly based on issues ‘coming up from the ground and forcing themselves on the legislator’s attention’.Footnote 123 Most obviously, the clauses that have near-verbatim equivalents in Latin law-codes are good candidates for laws that did not arise this way. Other overlaps with continental laws also suggest that kings took inspiration from external written sources. These include clauses on assaults and fighting;Footnote 124 the distinctions made between groups of more and less than seven;Footnote 125 laws that make certain ethnic distinctions (Romanus/Francus and wealh/englisc);Footnote 126 laws on fencing, fields and trees;Footnote 127 and Ine’s concepts of hereteam, gafoldgylde and ceac. Footnote 128 Knowledge of Lex Salica or Merovingian royal decrees might have led Ine and his advisors to discuss and legislate on topics like these. Some of these could then have made it into the king’s own code – perhaps in the same way that Theodore marked out chapters here and there in his canon book, which were then discussed and formed the basis of the canons of the Hertford council.Footnote 129 This would then account for some of Ine’s haphazard structure. The repetitions in Ine mostly do not strengthen the argument either: they are few and can be explained in other ways.Footnote 130
There may have been an element of inherited practices that led to some of the similarities between Ine and continental law and, undoubtedly, some of Ine’s clauses will stem from issues brought to the king’s attention. But my argument is the same as before. Explanations for the form, content and development of Anglo-Saxon royal law in the late seventh century that isolate these laws from the wider legal, textual, intellectual and cosmopolitan context are unlikely to capture the whole story. Any account of the oddities of Ine – from its legal puzzles to its language to its topics – must take into consideration the knowledge and connections of people associated with the West Saxon court, such as Agilbert, Leuthere, Aldhelm, Wilfrid and Earconwald. As with Hlothhere and Wihtræd, we should look beyond endogenous explanations to explain the form and content of Ine’s laws.
Royal diplomas
Ine’s differences in form and language from the Kentish laws are testament to experimentation within law-writing or at least that it was a ‘genre’ still finding its form. The same is the case for the third legal written output of this period, the royal diplomas. This is not the place to go through the long debate about the introduction of charters to Anglo-Saxon England. It has been suggested that they were introduced with Augustine,Footnote 131 TheodoreFootnote 132 or gradually in between.Footnote 133 As mentioned above, a charter in Hlothhere’s name (S 8) survives on a single sheet original from 679 and is therefore the earliest charter we can authenticate.Footnote 134 But, more importantly, the practice of issuing charters only really kicked off after the 670s. This is further evidence of a boom in legal writing and of external influences – whether Frankish or Italian or British – in the late seventh century, right around the time that church council decrees and royal laws were being recorded.Footnote 135
There are, in fact, some similarities between some early charters and these other legal texts.Footnote 136 The opening formula of the Hertford and Hatfield councils (‘In nomine Domini nostri Jesu Christi Salvatoris…’) is found in charters of the same period, including Hlothhere’s 679 charter (S 8) and charters associated with Ine, Hædde and Leuthere.Footnote 137 The Hertford text names the scribe (one Titillus), a practice known from Frankish charters, and which we see in a small number of late seventh-century charters, including one in which Aldhelm names himself (S 237).Footnote 138 More general similarities include the presence of invocation, sanction and dating clauses as well as a witness list.Footnote 139 It has been suggested that Theodore’s English church council texts influenced the form and phrasing of early charters.Footnote 140 This suggests that various types of documents were finding their form, their makers drawing on other types of texts actively.
Some of this experimentation is evident in two charters of the late seventh and early eighth centuries, namely Wihtræd and Ine’s tax relief charters (S 20, S 245).Footnote 141 These charters grant universal freedom of taxation to the churches of respectively Kent and Wessex, making them unusual in the context of Anglo-Saxon royal diplomas, which almost always have specific foundations or people as beneficiaries. Wihtræd also stated the same law – that the church is exempt from taxation – in his law-code (Wi 1). This could suggest that there was no fixed textual form for this kind of legal content, not necessarily a go-to genre for every legal message.Footnote 142 There is some possibility that these charters were drafted by Hadrian (for Wihtræd) and Aldhelm (for Ine), two authors with the knowledge and experience to experiment.Footnote 143
As this suggests, charter production too was a sphere where ecclesiastics and royals mixed and where learned ecclesiastics may have contributed their knowledge to legal writing. Archbishop Berhtwald was present for Wihtræd’s tax exemption charter (S 20), and he was listed first among the participants of the 695 council that produced Wihtræd’s laws. As abbot of Reculver, he was also the beneficiary of the first extant charter, Hlothhere’s 679 grant. Aldhelm’s aforementioned scribal attestation to S 237 may well indicate that he was responsible for drafting the text; and if so, it was probably not the only charter he produced, given his close associations with the West Saxon court. He may also have been present at Hertford and may have been tasked with spreading its message in writing to Wessex’s western neighbours.Footnote 144 Another named scribe is the abbot Wynbert of Nursling – a learned contemporary of Aldhelm and teacher of the missionary Boniface – who seems to have been influential at the West Saxon court.Footnote 145 He can be added to the ranks of learned clerics, involved in legal writings and royal affairs. Hædde, Ine’s advisor, is also named as scribe in one charter (S 236), though this is considered spurious by most scholars.Footnote 146 And while Ine’s other named advisor, Bishop Earconwald, is not explicitly named as scribe anywhere, he may have written a handful of charters.Footnote 147 One of these ‘correspond[s] startlingly’ with a 587 charter of Gregory the Great, suggesting that Earconwald was open to continental textual models in his charter writing as well as in his law-writing.Footnote 148
Wormald connected Earconwald to another characteristic stylistic feature of some early charters, that is proems expressing the importance of writing.Footnote 149 In a charter granting land to Aldhelm in 685, it is phrased like this:
…although speech alone should suffice, yet, because of the uncertain nature of future times, should be confirmed with public writings and documentary records. Footnote 150
This topos is found in other charters of our period too, including one of Ine’s, where witnesses included Berhtwald, Hædde and Aldhelm.Footnote 151 This is one sign among many, then, that kings and ecclesiastics involved in charter writing and law writing took a particular interest in the written word in the late seventh century. This seems to have resulted in a spurt in the writing of charters, in addition to the appearance of new forms of royal and ecclesiastical law.
SECTION III: THE INTELLECTUAL MILIEU
The innovation and experimentation we can observe in legal writing is only one part of the story. The late seventh century was a period of legal learning too. The school run by Theodore and Hadrian at Canterbury saw the study of both canon law and Roman law. The many travellers to Rome, Ireland and Francia encountered other legal systems, law-makers and law-texts. In this section, I will give a brief overview of the types of texts that might have been read, studied and brought to England in this period. This offers plausible routes of transmission for the external influences I have suggested above, but it also reveals the broad intellectual horizons of ecclesiastics and kings and suggests that there was a wider legal sphere in Anglo-Saxon England beyond what we can observe in domestic texts.
There are a few relevant manuscripts from the seventh century in England that can tell us which texts were known though more can be gleaned from textual clues. As we saw above, the Hertford decrees were written using Theodore’s ‘canon book’, and we know that a text of the 649 Lateran Council was present at Hatfield, brought by the papal legate John the Archcantor, who had travelled with Benedict Biscop. Since this council also confirms the five ecumenical councils, perhaps a collection containing these was present too. Other texts associated with Theodore, Hadrian and their school at Canterbury – such as Iudicia Theodori (or ‘Canons of Theodore’) and the Biblical Commentaries – reveal further canon law sources.Footnote 152 None of this evidence is unproblematic. However, Michael Elliot’s comprehensive review of the evidence – building on studies by Martin Brett and Michael Lapidge – allowed him to conclude that Collectio Dionysiana (an enlarged version), Collectio Quesnelliana and Collectio Sanblasiana may have existed in Canterbury and/or Northumbria in the late seventh century.Footnote 153 He suggested further that Quesnelliana – which had relevance to the monothelete controversy – may have played a role at Hatfield or perhaps been acquired by Wilfrid on his visit to Rome in 680.Footnote 154 Collectio Sanblasiana, which survives in an early eight-century manuscript with connections to England, may also have been used or acquired by Wilfrid.Footnote 155
The evidence for Roman law is of a similar kind.Footnote 156 Iudicia Theodori seems to have drawn on the Digest of Justinian,Footnote 157 and there are legal terms with ‘very close (often verbatim) parallels in the Justinianic corpus’ in the Biblical Commentaries. Footnote 158 While there isn’t enough evidence to argue for the existence of any one text,Footnote 159 the existence of some form of Roman law-text at Canterbury is more or less confirmed by a letter written by Aldhelm, where he said he had studied Roman laws and the ‘secrets of the jurisconsults’ there.Footnote 160 Other texts may also have given access to knowledge of Roman law, including Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae, which can be detected in works by Theodore, Hadrian, Aldhelm and others.Footnote 161 The text Instituta regularia divinae legis, by Junillus Africanus, Emperor Justinian’s chief legal minister in the 540s, has survived in what may be a late seventh- or early eighth-century manuscript copied in the south of England, and Aldhelm seems to have known it.Footnote 162 This exegetical work is a guide to biblical law, but it also deals with issues such as the governance of the world and secular law-giving, presenting ‘the biblical and exegetical foundation for the emperor’s lawgiving’.Footnote 163 The Canterbury school and its students may thus have come across several different kinds of texts dealing with canon law, Roman law and the relationship between divine law and worldly.
There are other ways in which knowledge of law made its way to England, namely with the period’s many travellers and expats. We have already come across an example of how law-texts travelled: John the Archcantor brought the decrees of the 649 Lateran council from Rome to Hatfield, and a copy of these decrees was made at Jarrow.Footnote 164 John took the text of the Hatfield council back to Rome, which was then used to confirm the orthodoxy of the western church at the Synod of Rome (680), which produced a synodal letter, which was incorporated into the records of the Council of Constantinople (680–681). And while John was on a special mission, legal knowledge and texts may also have been acquired by those travelling on other business, some of whom, we are told, had a habit of bringing books back from their travels.Footnote 165
The big destination for travellers at the time was Rome, where Wilfrid, Benedict Biscop, Ceolfrith, Aldhelm, Ine, Caedwalla and others went, and where Theodore and Hadrian had come from. But just as important were the places they stayed along the way, sometimes for years. This includes monastic and ecclesiastical foundations such as Lyon (Wilfrid, Biscop), Vienne (Biscop), Lérins (Biscop), Paris (Wilfrid, Theodore, Biscop) and Meaux (Wilfrid, Hadrian). The Paris travellers stayed with Agilbert, whose family also had close associations to Meaux and Jouarre, as well as Chelles and Faremoutiers-en-Brie, where several English royal women resided, including Hlothhere’s sister Eorcengota.Footnote 166 Personnel might have been sent from Chelles to populate and found monasteries in England.Footnote 167 These foundations in the Paris basin were important for their royal connections too; as Wood pointed out, ‘it surely brought Wilfrid, Theodore, Hadrian and Biscop as close to the Merovingian court as one could come’.Footnote 168 At other times, travellers came even closer to kings, such as Aldhelm (if he did accompany Caedwalla to Rome), who stayed with the Lombard king Cunicpert, and Wilfrid, who stayed with Dagobert II and the Lombard king Perctarit.Footnote 169
Manuscript evidence from the sixth and seventh centuries suggests what would have existed at such monasteries, cathedrals and royal courts, though bear in mind that dates and provenances are tentative, and I am merely suggesting the kinds of texts which may have been in the kinds of places our people visited. Travellers to Rome would have come across, used and perhaps brought back various canon law collections.Footnote 170 Biscop and Ceolfrith are explicitly said to have learnt church law (ecclesiae statuta) in Rome and Wilfrid may have interacted with canon books when participating in the synod of Rome and when preparing his cases for the pope.Footnote 171 The same may be the case for travellers in Francia, from which thirteen canon law manuscripts have survived from the sixth and seventh centuries, perhaps produced in places such as Lyon and Corbie.Footnote 172 There are also several manuscripts of Roman law made in southern France in this period, especially (parts of) Theodosius’ Code and Lex Romana Visigothorum (extracts from Roman law with interpretations, also known as the Breviary of Alaric).Footnote 173 We shall come back to these shortly. No Merovingian worldly law – whether Lex Salica, Lex Ripuaria or other texts – have survived in manuscripts from the sixth or seventh century, though a couple of the Merovingian royal decrees do.Footnote 174 For instance, a decree of Childebert I and a decree of Clothar I or II are found in a sixth- or seventh-century canon law manuscript from southern France.Footnote 175 There is also a seventh-century manuscript of Rothari’s edict, the Lombard law issued in the 640s, a text which may have been available at the Lombard courts and perhaps monasteries where some of our travellers stayed. Footnote 176
It seems relatively certain that our ecclesiastical travellers would have come across canon law while travelling, but it’s clear that different types of law did not exist in isolation from each other. As we just saw, a Merovingian royal decree survived in a canon law manuscript; the same is the case for Clothar II’s Paris decree, which is found next to the Paris church council decree in a collection of canon law from the eighth century.Footnote 177 Eighth-century manuscripts also suggest that texts such as Lex Salica – to which several royal decrees became attached – could appear in manuscripts alongside versions of Roman law.Footnote 178 David Ganz has found further connections in annotations in sixth- and seventh-century legal manuscripts, concluding that ‘it is evident that the line between the secular government of the Merovingian palace and the theological and canonical learning of Merovingian bishops and abbots is not so hard and fast’.Footnote 179 Some canon law manuscripts have annotations in a hand with features of chancery script, including the manuscript containing Clothar and Childebert’s decrees.Footnote 180 And it seems that clerics studied, annotated and corrected Roman law, sometimes in centres with close connections to the royal court.Footnote 181 Manuscript evidence thus points to a single shared legal sphere.
There is textual evidence too. We have already seen that there was close collaboration between kings and bishops in the sixth and early seventh centuries, which resulted in royal decrees made or issued in connection with church councils. Some of these texts also show influence from external sources. For instance, the royal decrees of Childeric and Clothar show influence from Roman law, which may be due to clerical involvement, since Roman law seems to have been copied, studied and annotated at ecclesiastical centres.Footnote 182 The council of Mâcon (585) shows influence from Roman law and Merovingian royal law; in fact, this occasion may also have played a role in the preservation of the collection of Roman imperial laws known as the Sirmondian Constitutions.Footnote 183 Such crossover was not limited to the late sixth and early seventh centuries. In the 670s – a ‘period of considerable legal activity’ in Francia – Bishop Leodegar of Autun in Burgundy revised the laws of earlier kings, perhaps including a version of Lex Salica. Footnote 184 He may also have edited the canon law collection Collectio Vetus Gallica and his biographer tells us that he was learned in Roman law.Footnote 185 Native law, canon law and Roman law could be found in the same manuscripts and in the same centres and seem to have been known and read by the same people, both secular and ecclesiastic. Our travellers, who were mainly ecclesiastics, may therefore have come across and studied not just the laws of the church, but also those of the Romans and Franks.
This seems especially likely on one particularly important journey: Wilfrid’s three years of studying in Lyon in the 650s.Footnote 186 Lyon was a centre for book writing, book trade and legal learning,Footnote 187 and in particular, it appears to have been a place for the ‘collection, adaptation and reconfiguration of Roman law’.Footnote 188 Since Wilfrid was ‘in iudiciis Romanorum eruditissimum’,Footnote 189 according to his biographer, Lyon may well be where he gained this knowledge. Surviving manuscripts from the sixth and seventh centuries probably from Lyon suggest that he may have come across Codex Theodosianus,Footnote 190 Lex Romana Visigothorum, Footnote 191 the Sirmondian ConstitutionsFootnote 192 and more.Footnote 193 The canon law manuscript containing Clothar I/II’s decree and the Collectio Vetus Gallica, a systematic collection of ecumenical and Gallic councils, may also originate from Lyon.Footnote 194 As Ganz has observed, Merovingian cursive notes in several of these Lyon manuscripts demonstrate that the same people were working with texts of exegesis, liturgy and Roman law.Footnote 195 Wilfrid surely then took part in similar work. What is more, Wilfrid’s patron and teacher in Lyon, Archbishop Aunemundus, had been fostered at the court of King Dagobert and was godfather to King Clothar III. Though he fell out of favour with the royal family later, his library or teachings may have held some secular law-codes and royal decrees too.Footnote 196
The things Wilfrid learnt in Lyon could easily have spread to his many clerical and royal friends (and enemies). But his education is just as important as an example of what was possible for travelling ecclesiastics in the seventh century. We lack detailed evidence for the other churchmen who may have been more closely involved in the production of Anglo-Saxon royal law, such as Aldhelm and Eorcenwald, but it seems entirely possible that they too may have acquired knowledge of other forms of law when they studied and travelled.
Another place with ‘a single legal culture, embracing the Latin and vernacular laws’ was Ireland, a popular destination for other students and travellers.Footnote 197 Agilbert is said to have joined the West-Saxon clergy after a period of study in Ireland,Footnote 198 and Aldhelm may have been there too.Footnote 199 From various sources we know that other Englishmen were students in Ireland, and there may have been Irish students at Canterbury.Footnote 200 This is in addition to any number of links between Ireland and various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the seventh century, from Aidan in Northumbria to Fursey in East Anglia to Diuma in Mercia.Footnote 201
It is, however, difficult to say what impact this may have had on legal writing in England. Although Aldhelm’s writings display knowledge of Hiberno-Latin texts, there is no direct evidence of secular legal knowledge derived from Ireland in Aldhelm’s writings.Footnote 202 Agilbert has not left us with any writings. But we cannot rule out that they or their fellow students came across law-texts, both ecclesiastical and secular, in Ireland and that they brought knowledge and/or texts back with them to Wessex and elsewhere. As in Francia, monasteries appear to have been sites of legal study and production of both ecclesiastical and worldly law.Footnote 203 It has been suggested that ‘the law tracts, in Latin and in the vernacular, are the work of a single class of learned men who were as well versed in scripture as in the legal lore of their ancestors…’Footnote 204 It is possible, then, that English students in Irish monastic schools may have come across law-texts of all kinds, perhaps written by or used for teaching by clerics.Footnote 205 While there are more obstacles to establishing knowledge of Irish worldly law in England than there is for Roman or Frankish,Footnote 206 it is worth considering the possibility of influence, because, as we saw above, there are intriguingly similar developments in Ireland and England. Both places experienced a flourishing of law-writing around the same time and both places saw the emergence of new types of text, taking the form of council statutes issued as a result of close cooperation between ecclesiastics and kings. Some of these similarities may well be related to the many scholarly, royal and ecclesiastical contacts of the period.
This section has taken us away from the more restricted idea of the church decrees, Frankish law and their influence on early Anglo-Saxon royal laws. But it is an important context to that argument. It offers a background to the interest and boom in legal writing in this period, and it also suggests that the intellectual horizons of churchmen – and the kings they advised – were broad. And it reminds us that when they contributed to putting law into writing or advising kings, they would have done it with the awareness of the various ways it was done elsewhere and had been done in the past, and they would have been familiar with many different legal genres and forms. The Kentish and West-Saxon royal laws were not written in a vacuum.
CONCLUSION
It is nothing new to suggest that the start of law-writing in England had something to do with Christianity. The arrival of Roman missionaries in Canterbury in 597 is often seen as a catalyst for the writing of Æthelberht’s laws.Footnote 207 Wormald’s famous argument is that the laws of the Church and the Bible provided a model and inspiration to Christian kings in the early Middle Ages.Footnote 208 In this article, I have made the case for a more concrete way in which the Church shaped worldly law, namely through genre and textual form. In addition, I have showed that the late seventh century was a distinctive moment in the legislative tradition in Anglo-Saxon England, characterised not just by this ecclesiastical influence on kings’ laws, but also by an interest in law and writing, experimentation with written law and legal documents, and knowledge of external legislative traditions.
In fact, it is not just in the legal sphere that things were happening in Anglo-Saxon England, which led John Blair to ask: ‘why did so much change in the seventh century?’Footnote 209 Among the developments of the late seventh century are the appearance of emporia (e.g., at London, Southampton and Ipswich), of silver coins, of the social and economic consequences of the plague,Footnote 210 of new royal building and burial practices, and, not least, of the boom in monastic foundations, made possible by royal land grants and privileges, and the resulting transformation of the episcopate.Footnote 211 Blair argued that it was no coincidence that monastic sites and trading sites started to appear in the ‘brief three decades of circa 670s–700’ and that ‘we should simply locate the formation of these places in the cosmopolitan cultural milieus that leading ecclesiastics shared with kings’.Footnote 212 The appearance of a new form of land title, charters, at this time was also an effort ‘directed by highly educated and cosmopolitan religious leaders and supported by kings’.Footnote 213 Seen within this broader context, our royal laws is yet another thing to have come out of this new and close relationship between the royal and ecclesiastical spheres.
Another aspect of this relationship manifested itself in the short-lived phenomenon of kings who ‘opted out’: kings who abdicated to become monks or to go on pilgrimage to Rome.Footnote 214 One of them was King Ine, who in 726 followed in the footsteps of his predecessor Caedwalla (d. 689) by abdicating to Rome. Oswiu of Northumbria had planned to retire to Rome the 670s, but died before he could go. An early adopter of monastic retirement was King Sigebert of East Anglia in the 630s and several others followed him: King Centwine of Wessex in the 670s, King Sebbi of the East Saxons in the 690s, King Æthelred of Mercia in c. 700 and a couple of more in the early eighth century.Footnote 215 Barbara Yorke saw this as part of the same pattern that produced the saintly kings of Northumbria in the late seventh century (e.g., Oswald), the royal princesses and widows who became nuns and abbesses on the continent, and the twenty-five to thirty royal nunneries established in England in the late seventh and early eighth century.Footnote 216 Yorke located these developments in the ‘transition point’ from the first to second phases of conversion around the 660s, when Christianity had become the only option for kings. Royal families wanted to demonstrate their links to the new supernatural power and ensure that the royal line maintained its sacrality.Footnote 217 Law-making and law-writing could be another aspect of this new relationship between kings and their religion, which appears to be quite different to the conversion context that may have led to Æthelberht’s laws being written down.
Clearly, there were many relatively sudden changes between 670 and 700. I have argued that the developments we see in the form of royal law-texts in the late seventh century were directly inspired by church council decrees, but the appearance of both forms of law at this time may well be the result of these wider changes caused by new relationships between kings and ecclesiastics and a new relationship between the English Church and the continental.
This takes us back to Wormald, who argued for close connections between Christianity and the commitment of early medieval law to writing, suggesting an ideological and cultural debt to Christian law (as well as Roman).Footnote 218 My response to this (simplified version of Wormald’s) view is that we are also looking at more concrete Romano-Christian influence through the adoption and adaptation of an ecclesiastical law-genre to royal needs. This influence could happen because courts and monasteries shared the same cosmopolitan and legally learned milieu. A second response follows from this. If the form of royal law in the late seventh century was modelled directly on the conciliar laws of the Church, then we have reason to suspect that this new genre did not develop endogenously because of new modes of kingship. In this case, changes in text do not necessarily reflect changes on the ground in the way that Wormald proposed. But this textual adoption does nevertheless tell us about realities on the ground in terms of seventh-century learning and legal knowledge and about the permeability of the legal system.
The experimentation and innovation in the forms of royal law of the late seventh century is also relevant to our understanding of the following two centuries. The seventh-century laws are usually seen as part of a distinct vernacular tradition of Anglo-Saxon written law which started with Æthelberht in the seventh century and ended with the law-code of King Cnut in the eleventh century.Footnote 219 But the late seventh-century burst of legislative activity is better seen in the context of the legal, political and ecclesiastical changes and innovations of that century, rather than as part of the later Anglo-Saxon tradition of written law. Of course, the seventh-century texts were integrated into the later tradition, especially by King Alfred, who drew on both Æthelberht and Ine for his ninth-century law-code.Footnote 220 But while the early period may have sowed the seeds for the later tradition, there is little reason to think of it as a continuous tradition, with all that implies for our scholarly methods (e.g., using evidence for the production of later laws to speculate about earlier ones and vice versa).
This acknowledgment helps us to understand what appears to have been almost two hundred years of legislative silence following the seventh century. In fact, we do not necessarily need to think of it as a period of silence. Rather, the 670s to 690s was the exception in a period when law was not committed to writing. Alternatively, it encourages us to think differently about what counts as ‘an Anglo-Saxon law’ in the eighth and (most of) the ninth century. Wormald famously argued that the ‘lost’ eighth-century law-code of Offa survived only in the form of a church council decree – an intriguing suggestion in light of the argument presented in this article.Footnote 221 Texts such as the eighth-century Dialogues of Ecgbert offer examples of further experimentation with the form of written law, which Kristen Carella has drawn attention to recently.Footnote 222 That is to say, we should not be looking for something that resembles the seventh-century laws or the tenth-century laws, because there was no established convention for how law ought to look. The experimentation we see in the late seventh century could have continued into the eighth or it may have dwindled.
The seventh-century laws should be seen as part of a wider intellectual and legal sphere of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and their neighbours in the seventh century. This means that we can and have to use evidence from other textual genres and other types of law, from England and from other places, to understand the royal laws of Hlothhere, Eadric, Wihtræd and Ine. This opens up our source-base: the seventh century is not as well attested as we should like but claims about how little we can know about these laws are unnecessarily pessimistic and seemingly based mostly on the lack of other Anglo-Saxon secular sources.Footnote 223 When we acknowledge that these laws emerged out of a cosmopolitan and intellectual milieu that was both royal and ecclesiastical and closely connected across the Channel, the world that produced them does not look quite as hazy.Footnote 224
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