Pre-Conquest ealdormen, and their eleventh-century counterpart earls, can cut dramatic figures in the surviving Old English and Latin corpora. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle often provides terse descriptions of military leaders and royal councilors engaging in acts of heroics, cowardice, or betrayal. Surviving saints’ vitae and house chronicles frequently include these secular officials as side characters who either help or hinder the main saint or community depending on specific ealdormen's friendship to the protagonist. Close examination of these ecclesiastically centered works reveals that politics often had a more significant influence on how these secular men interacted with clerics or monastic houses than clerical authors openly acknowledge. Yet ealdormen often remain mysterious figures and the nature of their official duties, particularly in non-military situations, is often left vague or unsaid in the extant sources. To discover the possible duties of the ealdorman within the legal culture of the period, it is necessary to turn to the law codes from later pre-Conquest England (here defined as 871–1066) as well as the surviving records of litigation, some of which only survive in post-Conquest copies. These sources provide different and sometimes conflicting pictures, but taken together they offer a glimpse of the potential duties and legal responsibilities assigned to ealdormen. In the surviving laws, these secular leaders seem to be allocated a more passive role when compared with other appointed positions, specifically bishops and reeves. The litigation records, however, particularly the “dispute charters,” portray ealdormen actively as witnesses, judges, and overseers of cases. These latter sources, while undoubtedly legal texts, also contain narrative literary elements, which are particularly apparent as they attempt to establish one official story to the exclusion of other potential contending accounts. In this more expansive narrative space, details emerge to suggest that ealdormen in the tenth and eleventh centuries took on a number of official roles and participated actively in a range of legal functions.

In terms of composition, these records of litigation do not always fall into standard charter forms. Some of the cases can only be found in post-Conquest monastic chronicles, or cartulary-chronicles as they are sometimes called, which already places them closer to narrative sources and less formulaic records. Others take the form of letters or writs of personal statements providing one person's witness support of a claimant or version of the estate's history.

During the Second World War, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was tasked with creating popular, upbeat entertainment intended to boost the morale of the nation while reminding listeners of the reasons to remain committed to the fight. However, it also created a so-called BBC Religion, one that emphasized unity by stressing commonalities and consensus between all kinds of Christians while offering psychological and spiritual comfort to listeners in a time of crisis. ‘BBC Religion’ was an important site for the construction and articulation of national unity propaganda and was central to the celebration of key civil religious festivals, including the national days of prayer. The BBC’s Religious Broadcasting Department also provided worship, devotions, talks and entertainment to offer emotional and spiritual support on a day-to-day basis. Religion can be a particularly effective tool of persuasion, particularly when propaganda builds on pre-existing beliefs and loyalties; as Garth Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell have argued, in order to be effective ‘a persuader has to use anchors of belief to create new belief.’ The Ministry of Information (MOI) and the BBC deliberately used a generic, practical Christianity as an ‘ecumenical weapon’ to foster unity in Britain and among its allies and to rally global opposition to Nazism.

This chapter will explore some of the ways that religion was used as a means of persuasion during the Second World War by the BBC and the MOI. Religion and propaganda were intimately entwined during the war. Asa Briggs has argued that ‘As the war went on, it continued to prove extremely difficult to draw fine distinctions between religion as propaganda and religion as a spiritual force in its own right.’ The religious broadcasting schedule was specifically developed to cater to wartime needs. Looking back on the achievements of wartime religious broadcasting in 1945, the BBC's director of religious broadcasting, the Revd Dr James Welch, wrote that from the first Daily Service broadcast of the war,

It is with typically measured prose that Michael Lapidge concludes that Bishop Swithun of Winchester “can justly be regarded as a saint of the universal church.” Lapidge's comprehensive survey of the texts and traditions associated with Swithun's veneration amply justifies this assessment: in his Cult of St Swithun, Lapidge and his collaborators range widely from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries; from Winchester to Dublin, Helsinki, and Évreux; and from history into chronicle, hagiography, liturgy, poetry, musical composition, and artistic production, all to demonstrate the influence of Swithun's cult on medieval religious and cultural life. Indeed, there appears to be only one major area of early medieval culture omitted from this list, namely, the law. For as legal historians well know, the earliest life of Swithun, Lantfred's late tenth-century Translatio et miracula s. Swithuni, occupies an important place in the history of pre-Conquest legal practice as one of the few surviving narrative records of an Anglo-Saxon ordeal by hot iron. This chapter will focus on this episode in order to reassess the role of hagiographic narrative in both the history and practice of the ordeal and the composition of legal narratives more generally.

The ordeal, in its foreignness and seeming barbarity, has long been a problem for those seeking to understand the mentality of early medieval law. As William Ian Miller has written, “It appalls and intrigues. We marvel at the mentality of those cultures that officialize it; we feel a sense of horror as we imagine ourselves intimately involved with boiling water or glowing irons. And we don't feel quite up to it. So our terror and cowardice become their brutality and irrationality.” For earlier historians of English law, such as T. F. T. Plucknett and Frederick Pollock, the ordeal served as a marker of the primitivism they saw as characteristic of English law before the so-called “great leap forward” of the twelfth century. More recently, following the work of Rebecca Colman and Paul Hyams, scholars have instead adopted what has been referred to as a “functionalist” approach, focusing, in Colman's words, on the “functional relationship between certain legal procedures and their particular social context.” Influenced by social anthropology, the functionalist argument highlights the ordeal's potential to generate consensus in small communities.

This project began more than ten years ago, when I received the research accreditation from CNSAS (National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives) in November 2010. I would like to thank Cristina Petrescu for (inadvertently) alerting me to the existence of Herta Müller's secret police file in her contribution to a book Bettina Brandt and I were coediting at that time, Herta Müller: Politics and Aesthetics (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010). I also owe gratitude to Dragoş Petrescu and the CNSAS Board for approving my accreditation application for the research project “Herta Müller and the Securitate.” In the summer of 2011, I was finally able to embark on this journey, as I first laid eyes on Müller's and Richard Wagner's files and began to decipher the documents sewn together and organized within solid grayish covers. I went on to read the files multiple times and to make a myriad of notes on the digitized copies, but it was not until my research leave of 2015–16 that I had the chance to put information from the files, clustered around years and events, on an evidence board to visualize it and see the connections. I would like to thank my university and its presidential committee for selecting my project and deeming it worthy of a one-year sabbatical. At the end of that research leave, I had a better understanding of the files and a rough draft of the story. I would like to thank Brigid Haines, with whom I shared this preliminary text at the time, for her interest and feedback.

My work on secret police files, which expanded to include more and more files pertaining to the German Romanian communities, has brought about my sustained and most fruitful collaboration on file writing and surveillance with my academic soulmates and beloved conference companions, Alison Lewis and Corina L. Petrescu. I will forever value their friendship, generosity, and support. They challenged and inspired me, as I continued to refine my concept of “file stories” in the books and special journal issue we coedited: Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc: Between Surveillance and Life Writing (Camden House, 2016); Im Visier der Staatssicherheit (special issue of Monatshefte, 2018), which includes my first article that deals with the gaps and contradictions in Müller's file; and Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe (Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books, 2019).

Herta Müller should share her Nobel with the Securitate.” This comment, made by the former secret police officer Radu Tinu, was in reaction to the news that Müller (b. 1953), a German writer originally from the Romanian village of Nitzkydorf, had just won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. Communist Romania's infamous secret police was indeed a protagonist in her work, though an undesired and dreaded one. Most of Müller's writings, whether fictional or essayistic, are deeply and explicitly anchored in Ceauşescu's Romania and its pernicious system of secret surveillance. In “Ode to Herta Müller,” the Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu lauds her Kafkaesque writings as “the product of an intense obsession, a unique, paranoid terror of being followed, held in suspicion, [and] persecuted.” Müller's Securitate file, discovered in 2009, does indeed trace and expose her surveillance by the secret police even after she emigrated to West Germany in 1987. The author herself reacted to reading her file in the file-based autobiographical text “Die Securitate ist noch im Dienst” (Securitate in All but Name) in 2009. In this work, Müller primarily addressed the gaps in her file; her text raises, then, the question about what information her file does, in fact, comprise.

Opening the secret police files at the end of the Cold War held out the promise of democracy and evidence of the former regimes’ repressive actions. Access to these files by ordinary citizens is “a strictly Eastern European method of reckoning with the past,” the political scientist Lavinia Stan claims in Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Romania. Yet few former Eastern bloc countries could keep pace with the government of reunited Germany, which declassified files of the East German secret police in 1992. Romania was no exception to this delay and its case exemplifies the many obstacles other former communist countries faced during the transition period, as most of the secret services remained in place even after the fall of the communist regimes. They may have been renamed, but none of the countries could produce brand new secret agencies overnight, and the existing ones were undoubtedly reluctant to come clean about their recent past. In post-1989 Romania, Stan argues, the new political leaders used (and misused) the files to discredit opposition leaders, while former secret agents realized that the information in these files could become “an efficient secret weapon, allowing them to become the new entrepreneurial elite.”

Funding was of no value to a company unless it had adequate staff, and for some observers, the quality of personnel was the key differentiator between post-war British and German business performance. In a 1988 report the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) concluded that British companies were less productive than the similar German companies which they investigated. They found, however, that R&D expenditure was not significantly less than in West Germany; plant and machines were no older; product design was not noticeably inferior. Instead, the CBI concluded that “the only area where our West German companies retain a clear-cut advantage is in the educational level attained by their employees.” Whereas 52% of German workers had a post-secondary education, only 18% of their British counterparts had; to make matters worse, the British workers had “had an inferior secondary education in the first place, particularly in subjects of a technical nature.” Furthermore, “not to be outdone by their workers, UK managers are also less qualified than their German counterparts.”

Alfred Chandler argues that German universities and technical education were a key enabling factor in Germany's economic development from the beginning of the twentieth century, “providing the best technical and scientific training in the world”, which “pioneered in institutionalizing the acquisition and transfer of knowledge.” Whereas in Britain in 1913 there were only 1129 students of engineering in all English and Welsh universities, there were 16,568 engineering students just in Germany's Technische Hochschulen, without considering its universities. Engineering training was not the only differentiator. In international trade, for all Britain's success over centuries, “it was generally believed that German commercial education was superior to that available in Britain”: embarrassingly, “Anglo-German merchants were in the vanguard of the movement to improve technical education in England.”

The educational historian Michael Sanderson sees evidence of educational failings across all areas of business. In his Education and Economic Decline in Britain, 1870 to the 1990s he argues that there was no sustained success in any educational initiative after 1914 which effectively allowed Britain to compete comprehensively against Germany and other leading economies. Sociologist Christel Lane analyses the system of vocational education and training which existed in both countries during the 1980s, concluding that “in Germany industrial training [was] regarded as a matter of public interest and as a valuable societal resource”.

The scramble for the Mau Forest began with the colonial government's need for fuelwood, especially for their newly built railway, by the end of the 19th century [1/021]. After forest reservation had begun as early as 1911 in some parts of the country (Bassett & Crummey, 2003), most of the Mau Forest was gazetted in 1932 (GoK, 2009e), which allowed the colonial government to define the forest as an exploitable commodity. The Eastern Mau Forest, specifically, was gazetted in 1941 (Republic of Kenya, 2016b). The primary purpose of creating this forest reserve was to produce timber and wood, two of the most critical resources needed during the construction and expansion of the new colonial economy, and the sprawling railway line particularly [1/021]. After Independence, the Government's approach to forest management continued relying on forestry-based perspectives that had concentrated on commercial wood and timber production since colonial times (GoK, 2009e).

The central paradox of the politicised environment: The state's roles as both developer and protector

The features of the politicised environment of forest governance in Kenya were discussed in detail in the previous chapter. Additional features introduced here focus specifically on commercial forest exploitation as an important sector of the national and local economy, its principal actors, and its ties to the Government.

Structural focus on forest production and development rather than protection

The state is the most influential actor in defining environmental and land-use management priorities, practices, and policies in Kenya, as in most countries. Yet, the state's role in terms of shaping the environment is fundamentally influenced by a ‘central paradox’, ‘an inherent, continuing potential for conflict between the state's roles as developer and as protector and steward of the natural environment on which its existence ultimately depends’ (Walker, 1989, p. 32). This paradox is often particularly evident in forest management policies since forests are primarily framed as a renewable source of forest products, including wood, timber, and non-timber forest products (NTFPs), also called non-wood forest products (NWFPs), despite encompassing primary natural and secondary plantation forests, and despite the recognition that forests play various other roles.

The opening folios of MS Junius 11 shape and direct our reading of the poetry found on them, while setting in motion the story the codex seeks to tell. Despite the blank spaces where illustrations were never drawn, which suggest that some of the goals of the manuscript makers were never fulfilled, Junius 11 did have at least some contemporary readers. Revisers reveal themselves across the book: from the corrector amending vocabulary to later West Saxon in Genesis B and Christ and Satan, possibly for the purpose of re-copying, for example, to the artwork of a second artist and other, later illustrators. Those who took up the manuscript-making project after a possible slow down or halt in production on ‘Liber I’ and saw through the writing out of Christ and Satan might also have performed an act of response to the poems and images set down before they came to work on Junius 11. This is suggested by the ways ‘Liber II’ echoes or returns to events, such as the fall of the angels, or themes, such as the might of the creator, that were prominent in ‘Liber I’. ‘Liber II’ also offers audiences the chance to re-read the other poetry in the manuscript with its impressions of the impending Judgement as well as its exhortation and the counsel it offers in mind. Christ and Satan will detail the laments of the fallen angels after the rebellion in heaven, the event that also structures the beginning of the manuscript, where the most prevalent thematic oppositions that will recur through the codex are first explored – specifically, these are the themes that circulate around those Old English words ræd and unræd, and it is the conflict relating to these in the opening passages of Junius 11 that lays the foundations for the compilation's representation of salvation history in vernacular poetry.

Genesis A, the first poem in Junius 11, adheres to the sequence of events found in the biblical Genesis up to the account of the rescue of Isaac from sacrificial flames (Genesis 22.13). But this poem, like its partners in the manuscript, reworks biblical material through Old English poetic diction. Moreover, Genesis A begins with an extra-biblical prologue (lines 1–111) describing the rebellion of Lucifer and his sect of angels.