The Old English prose translation of the first fifty Psalms survives only in the manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds latin 8824, known as the Paris Psalter. The text has been attributed to the translation project that appears to have been foundational to King Alfred's larger educational agenda to ensure that the nobility were able to read English, that clergy knew Latin, and that civil and ecclesiastical office-holders considered themselves to be doing divine service in upholding law and suppressing sin. However, the prose Psalms have received limited scholarly attention, often being eclipsed by the poetic translation of the Psalms. What scholarship exists has been focused largely on issues of vocabulary and translation, on manuscript studies, or on the relationship of the Psalms in English to the larger place of the Psalms and the liturgy in early England. Yet the prose Psalms deserve attention for how they work with Alfred's laws to participate in establishing a vocabulary that connects English law in the reign of Alfred to Scripture, and for how they offer a model ideology of Christian English kingship.

Bringing together the only two Alfredian texts that directly translate Scripture and that are roughly contemporary, I argue that the prose Psalms and the prologue to Alfred's laws are key texts in Alfred's educational project. These two texts merit discussion together not only because they both make use of biblical translation, but also because reading them in tandem sheds light on Alfred's educational agenda. I explore the ways that they use Old Testament kings as models of kingship and textual authority, the common structural logic of the introductions to the Psalms and the prologue to the laws, and similarities of vocabulary choice in the two texts’ translations from Latin to English. On this basis, I demonstrate their shared concerns with law, judges, identification with the king, and a sense of belonging to a common people. Moreover, the two texts would have functioned as guides for English nobles who would have been the beneficiaries of Alfred's educational agenda in how to think about their own roles as leaders in the face of foreign invasion and as judges under West Saxon hegemony.

Alfred's preface to the Old English translation of Gregory the Great's Pastoral Care has commonly been read as a statement of the guiding concerns and principles of Alfred's educational program and it offers a framework for the consideration of Alfredian texts.

Initially depicted as a traitor and a villain during Cnut’s conquest of England in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Eadric Streona has inspired those who have recorded his role in history to enumerate his many crimes, if not to attribute new ones to him, and to provide great detail to the scene of his execution. After the Chronicle, there are seven eleventh- and twelfth-century accounts of Eadric’s story: the Encomium Emmae Reginae, Hemming’s Cartulary, John of Worcester’s Chronicle, William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum, Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum, Aelred of Rievaulx’s Genealogia Regum Anglorum, and Geffrei Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis. In these narratives, Eadric is variously killed, killed and thrown over the walls of London, strangled in private and dumped from a window into the Thames, beheaded, publicly beheaded and dumped in the Thames, beheaded with his head displayed on the highest tower in London, and beheaded with his head displayed on the highest gate in London. While the variation suggests that the sources have limited value as witnesses to what actually happened historically, the presence of a common narrative core that is repeatedly developed invites attention. It has been noted that twelfth-century sources in England show a trend toward greater detail in the development of stories and so ‘can yield useful insights into the times in which they were written through close analysis of nuances of detail and shifts of emphasis in their representations of the distant past.’ I suggest that the details of Eadric’s crimes under Æthelred and Edmund ‘Ironside’, and his judgment and execution under Cnut, are intended as focal points for the ideological elaboration of kingship and community. Such elaboration takes place within the context of a flourishing twelfth-century historiography that was interested not only in maintaining English traditions and a sense of community, as Richard Southern has suggested, but was also continuing an English tradition of using history writing as a means of constructing community identity in the face of social disruption.

The Anglo-Norman accounts of Eadric fall into two narrative strands.

For the post-Conquest historians Eadric Streona was ‘the destroyer of many monasteries and the savage oppressor of all.’ He was inherited as a narrative figure from Anglo-Saxon sources as the great English traitor during Cnut’s conquest, a synecdoche for the English nation during the Danish conquest, and a figure emblematic not just of a failure by the nobility to fulfill their social responsibilities, but also of a predatory aristocracy and the consequences of their actions for the nation. As such, he proves a useful model for the critique of bad practices in the Anglo-Norman period without necessarily having to call out contemporaries by name. Eadric was made ealdorman of Mercia in 1007, was one of Æthelred’s closest counselors, and was married to Æthelred’s sister Eadgyth. As ealdorman, he was a powerful figure able to muster an army, and although his responsibility was to raise his army in support of the English king, he is recorded as repeatedly switching sides during the Danish invasions between 1009 and 1016. In fact, in 1015, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that he raised an army to challenge the rebellious Edmund Ironside, not in defense of the king, but in his own interests. Although it is tempting here to see him contemplating a bid for the throne, he did not, in the end, battle Edmund, but he did take his army and forty of the king’s ships and submitted to Cnut. Then in the entry for 1017, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that with Cnut’s accession to the throne the new king made Eadric ealdorman of Mercia, and within a year ordered that he be killed (ofslægen).

The post-Conquest authors who address Eadric do not simply repeat the story as it appears in their sources; they elaborate it, especially his betrayal of king and country, his execution, and the disposal of his body. In fact, the Anglo-Norman sources that mention Eadric divide neatly on how they depict his execution. Most make graphic Eadric’s crimes and display him both figuratively as a political actor, and literally as an executed body. However, there are exceptions in two sources produced at Worcester as a part of St Wulfstan’s historiographical project. Hemming’s Cartulary and the Worcester Chronicle erase Eadric’s identity.

In the early eleventh century, Archbishop Wulfstan of York was confronted with the problem of reconciling principles of Christian mercy with the earthly obligation to punish criminals. The alignment of secular and spiritual priorities had long been an element of English law, as Christian clergy had been drafting English royal legislation since the turn of the seventh century. Yet it was only with Wulfstan’s codes for Kings Æthelred and Cnut that the rhetoric of salvation was fully and explicitly integrated into Old English law. In contrast to the laws of previous Anglo-Saxon kings, which required capital punishment for a range of offenses, Wulfstan’s legislation prescribed non-lethal penalties ‘so that God’s handiwork and his own purchase, which he dearly bought, not be destroyed for small offenses.’ Whereas an immediate death sentence might place the soul of the condemned beyond redemption, if he lacked the opportunity or inclination to repent before his execution, a life-sparing punishment allowed even the worst offenders enough time to make their peace with God. Whether or not they chose to be reconciled with the Church, under Wulfstan’s program of punishment, it would not be the judge or executioner determining the condemned’s fate in the afterlife, but the criminal himself.

A volume of essays taking up the theme of castration invites an exploration of the relationship between the biological and the social, the private and the public. Indeed, the ‘private parts’, those which are kept hidden, are by their very nature not private but social: they can only perform their biological, generative function with another person. A focus not just on the body, but on the male generative organ, raises a number of questions about the human, sexed body and the interpretation of the social role of the biological body: what is its value, how should it be used, who may act on it, what does its presence or absence signify, and what does it indicate about an individual's social function? Taking the male member by itself provides an opportunity for a pars pro toto response to a long-standing conundrum in social theory: ‘Is the person merely a collection of roles or is the person the organizing principle which integrates and orchestrates given social roles?’ Evidence from the Anglo-Saxon period indicates that the body was valued for the functions it could perform. The individual gave a means for recognizing a collection of functions; but the evidence depicts the individual primarily in terms of how a larger social matrix incorporated, and therefore valued, him rather than the individual holding inherent value. However, there is no single social matrix for the Anglo-Saxon period, but a changing vision of social order, how the individual fit into it, and the part the individual played in maintaining it.