Today's modern preconceptions of “magic” and “medicine” place them at opposite poles, but these oppositions do not appear to have operated so simply among the early medieval English peoples. In instances that might approximate either term, or both, the pre-Conquest English identified the use and invocation among them of supernatural and other healing and cursing aids, some of which include material and metaphorical textile tools and processes. This chapter addresses important questions based on this evidence: do patterns exist for those who appear to have used these aids? How were textile objects and processes used in such contexts? Why might textile production, material or metaphorical, have proven resonant for magic? Are magical women related to a pattern easily attested in poetic and historical texts of seeing some women as deathweavers and binders, in contrast to the “peaceweavers” of the previous chapter? Finally, do similar patterns exist among the cultures of related people? The answers form the core of this chapter.

Magic in Context in Early Medieval England

In a discussion of magic, some definition of the term is, of course, indispensable. It is nonetheless a difficult task, as one must define “magic” in a way that would be as accurate across the early Middle Ages in England, as it is comprehensible today. The dividing lines between science, magic, and medicine are far more distinct for us today than they likely would have been for medieval peoples more generally, rendering the task additionally complex. The simplest definition for “magic” is the belief in or attempt to harness supernatural forces for the aid of a living creature, whether to curse or bless, heal or kill.

This collection of essays is united by a series of broad themes. One is that individual agency matters in history; a second is that institutions also matter; a third is that if the historian is to try to explain how and when individuals and institutions matter, he or she has to pay attention to the particular circumstances – the historical context – in which they operated. Influence is easier to wield at some times and in some situations than others. The stars can align to give individuals the chance to take power, to transform organisations, or to publicise a particularly attractive argument, but this is often only for a brief period before the opportunity is lost. Institutions can appear moribund at one moment, only to be completely revivified five years later.

These essays are written to pay tribute to David Cannadine on his 75th birthday. His remarkably prolific historical output has included many insightful books and essays illuminating the significance of both institutions and individuals. Both have featured largely in his aspiration to make history interesting and important to a broad audience. He has played a leading role in the movement through which, as he puts it, ‘an appreciation of the significance of individual human agency has been back in academic fashion’. A characteristic facet of his work is his clear-eyed ‘determination not to accept individuals and institutions at their own self-evaluation’, and to argue instead that the historian's duty is to use contextual understanding to reveal their behaviour and relevance.

Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.

Henry James, preface to Roderick Hudson

This book is about beginnings, both of human crafting and of cosmic Creation. Because of that, it is also necessarily about the processes of forming, designing, and crafting thinking – the complex of procedures involved in what is called poeisis in Greek, faciendi and poesis in Latin, and both “fashioning” and “making” in English. For Cicero and for Horace, and the many centuries of authors who followed them, ars poetica was not confined to fashioning metrical verses, but is an extensive title, including all of what we now know as “language arts” (and have come to rigidly separate from one another, as well as sharply from all the “mathematical” and “scientific” arts of the quadrivium). Aristotle remarks at the start of his Metaphysics that philosophers must also be myth-lovers (philomuthos) “since myths are composed of wonders” and therefore will set us to wondering about the world around us, a remark that certainly includes Plato as well as Pythagoras, both of whom were myth-lovers. In the Latin school manuals used for centuries to teach rhetoric, procedures for fashioning language are called dispositio, in English “Organization”; most commonly in medieval Latin they are collectively called ordo or ordinatio, and humans have invented and used their own orderings for their understandings of the ordered universe in which they find themselves.

On 27 September 1963 several detectives and a policeman steered 26-year-old Neville Alexander into the Cape Town Magistrate's Court. Wearing a dark brown jacket and fawn trousers, he carried a small suitcase and a paper-wrapped parcel, ready and hoping to go home. Arms crossed protectively against his chest, rocking gently back and forth in stress and trauma, he faced Judge H. J. Powell. His parents were there, watching, hoping.

Representing Alexander, Advocate M. J. Richman of Ress, Richman & Company, argued for bail. Alexander had been in solitary for seventy-six days. Unaware that his comrades had been arrested, he spent thirty-five days in a nine-by-five-foot cell at Caledon Square Police Station being intensively interrogated. Then he spent another forty-one days in Maitland Police Station. Despite the sabotage charge, Alexander had only distributed pamphlets, Richman pointed out. He would accept stringent conditions and refrain from seeing his associates, he promised. His parents depended on his salary, and time at home would enable him ‘to readjust mentally for his trial.’ Moreover, he added, several other Livingstone High teachers had been detained, and the students would suffer from the continued absence of their teachers. But state advocate D. B. Brunette worried that Alexander would abscond. The police were continuing their wide-ranging investigations, and there was no need for concern about Alexander's mental well-being. Bail was denied.

The state and its laws

Following the Sharpeville-Langa massacres, the state brutally clamped down on civil society and political protest. Opponents to white supremacy were cast as criminals and condemned to prison in criminal trials relying on hastily passed statutes.

Athelston is extant in a single manuscript, Cambridge Gonville and Caius College MS 175, and was written for an audience of educated tradespeople.1 In this Middle English romance, four messengers become sworn brothers. One of their number, Athelston, inherits the English throne, bestows earldoms on Egelond (who marries Athelston's sister, Edith) and Wymound, and invests his third sworn brother, Alryke, as archbishop of Canterbury. In time, Wymound becomes jealous of Egelond's wife and sons, and tells Athelston that Egelond is plotting to poison him. Athelston vows to kill Egelond and his family, summoning them to the capital on a pretext, bringing them into a space of his power and authority in order to challenge Egelond. Although Edith is heavily pregnant, they travel to London and are imprisoned by the king. Athelston's wife, who is also pregnant, attempts to intercede, but her husband kicks her in the stomach, killing his unborn heir. The queen sends a messenger to Alryke, who hurries to Westminster. Alryke orders a great fire of nine plough lengths to be laid out outside St Paul's Cathedral as a trial for the accused Egelond and his family. Egelond endures the trial without harm, followed by his two sons. His wife, Edith, then walks across the fire and goes into labour. She publicly gives birth to St Edmund, whom the penitent Athelston immediately makes his heir.

Not far from the centre of the ancient Saxon city of Leipzig stands the Völkerschlachtdenkmal, or Monument to the Battle of the Nations. Begun in 1898 and fnally completed in 1913, this construction commemorates the Battle of Leipzig (1813), which, in the year of Richard Wagner's birth, had seen the routing of Napoleon's troops from German soil and with it the emperor's designs on absorbing German lands into a European super-state under French hegemony.Though it commemorates an event that took place a century earlier, the monument itself is steeped in the national hubris of the era in which it was built. The two decades on either side of the turn of the century were the high noon of the Imperial German Empire, or Kaiserreich. The Grunderzeit, the term usually given to the period of rapid industrial expansion that followed the proclamation of the German Empire in 1871, gave the emerging nation state an increasing sense of self-worth and international entitlement that was no longer held in check by the Weltpolitik of Otto von Bismarck. With the ageing Junker now dismissed from Imperial service, the young Kaiser Wilhelm II was determined that Germany should take its rightful place amongst the hierarchy of European powers.

In Charlemagne literature written outside French political space, the Charlemagne portrayed is necessarily politically different. In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Charlemagne was so firmly identified as king of France that writers from different regions of Europe had to contend with this tradition in presenting Charlemagne. This posed problems for many writers, in particular for writers in German, since the French were considered the traditional invaders of the German-speaking lands of the Empire. Such authors took pains to dissociate the French companions of Charlemagne in their tales from these traditional foes, avoiding any use of ‘French’ to describe Charlemagne's men, but rather preferring ‘Franks’ and stressing their Germanic origin. Even in the case of writers working in the French language, a political location outside the French kingdom means that their portrayal of Charlemagne will inevitably be problematized. This is less evident, as we shall see, when authors depict an idealized emperor who is still recognizably king of an idealized France, a nation which itself has a privileged role. However, when texts portray the tensions and conflicts inherent in governing, and in particular when they criticize Charlemagne as a ruler, the fact that the text was produced outside France is important to the text's interpretation.

This chapter will consider texts by two authors working within what could broadly be termed the Burgundian sphere of influence, though they do not relate to the alternative centre of power, the Burgundian Valois regime, and therefore to Charlemagne in the same way. The authors are Jean d’Outremeuse and David Aubert.

Given the exceptional size of its ringwork, scale of imposition in the landscape, and the remarkable symmetry between its central motte and concentric multivallate form, it is somewhat surprising that Old Sarum has garnered only passing commentary in general studies of Norman castles. Considered by its stewards to have elements of international and national significance, and as one of very few ‘urban’ castles in Wiltshire and Somerset, it was evidently intended to be of regional administrative importance (Fig. 1), with a case for constitutional significance in its connections to Domesday Book. A recent review of the substantial but problematic archaeological records has established that the form the monument takes today is largely the result of the Iron Age hillfort being extensively refashioned in the half-century or so following 1066 and this study seeks to develop that analysis to explore what the monument tells us of the Norman Conquest and its aftermath in the following century. In light of the shortcomings of the archaeological data and scarcity of historical detail, this study will draw on nearly four decades of scholarship that has convincingly established that grounded assertions can be made about the world view and cultural aspirations of aristocratic and royal elites through the reading of the physical, structural, and topographical alterations they made to fortifications and their landscape settings in the symbolic projection of power. The approach offered here seeks not only to set Old Sarum in a new light but, in so doing, provide a fresh perspective on the Norman Conquest and its longer-term impacts, interpreted through the statement in earth and stone made by the Norman elite in central southern England.

Introduction

On 6 August 1457 John Copuldyk, priest and vicar choral of Lincoln Cathedral, made an oath before the dean and chapter which was copied into the Chapter Acts in the first person. promising that ‘if it should happen in future that I am convicted of any crime or excess then I wish and consent that then I should be completely removed both from my vicarage and chantry which I hold in the said church and from any other office of ministering by the said dean and chapter, forever and ever, suspended by these words’. The repetition of this oath upon John's institution as a chantry chaplain provides an example of what a chantry founder and the dean and chapter believed that a good chantry chaplain ought to be, and that failing in their moral and spiritual obligations or committing a crime rendered a vicar unworthy of carrying out their duties.

This chapter, intended as a companion piece to that by Hanna Nüllen, does not pretend to constitute an authoritative discussion of record-making and recordkeeping in thirteenth-century English boroughs and the English-held city of Dublin. Instead, it presents a broad-brush and simplified survey of surviving municipal documentary culture created in England and Ireland between c.1190 and 1300, principally to facilitate a comparison with similar phenomena occurring simultaneously in German-speaking towns. The comparison illustrates, in effect, that civic governments across all three regions of northern Europe were affected by wider thirteenth-century trends that promoted the production and accumulation of written records: urbanisation, demographic expansion, personal mobility, and the rise of an administrative elite of trained clerks and scribes. When English and Irish civic governments began routinely creating and preserving their own archives, and even what kinds of records they chose to make and keep, roughly followed the same patterns that Nüllen finds in her survey of German-speaking urban authorities. Key contrasts between the form of these records – with an almost total absence of municipal records in book form surviving for thirteenth-century English and Irish towns – may suggest, however, that these urban governments perhaps diverged from their German counterparts in their idea of the functions that an archive should perform, or at the very least used and accessed their records in different ways. The emergence of the municipal codex in England and Ireland in the years immediately after 1300 – notably, to supplement but not to replace rolls and single sheets – shows not that towns in the king of England's dominions had caught up with the more ‘advanced’ documentary practices of precocious continental towns, but perhaps instead reveals an under-appreciated shift in how English and Irish urban authorities understood the purpose of record production and preservation.

Justice van Heerden gave his judgment on 15 April 1964. The courtroom was packed. The Cape Argus’ front-page photo showed a crowd on the court's steps, women in dresses and cardigan sweaters, with kerchiefs on their heads, men in jackets and fedora hats. The defendants had been charged with contra¬vening the Sabotage Act and so with conspiring to commit wrongful and wilful acts, Justice van Heerden reminded the court. They were also charged with inciting, instigating, commanding, advising or encouraging others to commit wrongful and wilful acts and with contravening the Suppression of Communism Act. At various meetings they were alleged to have wrongfully and unlawfully conspired so that they would have endangered public safety, law and order and property, and overthrown the government by violent revolution, guerrilla warfare and sabotage, in the process killing, murdering, damaging and destroying property and stealing arms and ammunition. Moreover, it was alleged, each of the accused had identified themselves with the Yu Chi Chan Club (YCCC)'s and the National Liberation Front (NLF)'s aims, and Don Davis had distributed their literature.

The judgment rested on two claims. First, Justice van Heerden equated sabotage and high treason. Under the Sabotage Act, he observed, any person conspiring to commit acts whereby public safety and maintenance of law and order and property would be endangered, damaged or destroyed is guilty of sabotage. A person who conspired to aid or procure the commission of a wrongful act is guilty of sabotage, unless he or she can prove the offence was not calculated, the judge stated. Any hostile intent against the state is high treason.