In 946, King Edmund was reportedly stabbed to death at Pucklechurch, by a thief named Leofa, after a mere seven years on the throne. The king's bloody end suggests a turbulent tenure, punctuated by lawless violence; but in fact, the reign of Edmund (r. 939–46) marked the culmination of a new era of English lawmaking, after a centuries-long hiatus in the production of written legislation. His grandfather Alfred (r. 871–899) issued the first royal lawcode since the seventh century, probably in the 890s, and Alfred's son Edward (r. 899–924) followed up with two much briefer codes of his own. Edmund's predecessor, his half-brother Æthelstan (r. 924–939), took a different approach: seven extant lawcodes are associated with his reign, including one long omnibus code, two codes focused on religious obligations, and sets of shorter decrees which revised or clarified earlier laws.

Edmund's own three lawcodes fit comfortably within this fifty-year tradition of royal legislation. His corpus was considerably briefer than Alfred's and Æthelstan’s, but it followed the same guiding principles: his laws outlined judicial procedures, established punishments for unacceptable conduct, and confirmed ecclesiastical policies, protections, and obligations. There were some important innovations in Edmund's laws, however – notably, new regulations on feud and homicide, and the earliest explicit mandate for a universal loyalty oath. Because these developments are seen as foundational to later legal initiatives, they have attracted considerable scholarly attention. Beyond these efforts, though, Edmund's laws have gotten short shrift among legal historians. This may be because his codes built so obviously upon his predecessors’ laws, or it may be because so much of his legislation focuses on religious matters. Or, perhaps, it is simply that Edmund's decrees on feuding, homicide, and loyalty have assumed an outsized role in scholarship concerned with the consolidation of royal power and the evolution of a pre-Conquest ‘state.’

The present analysis moves beyond the laws typically associated with Edmund's effort to expand royal authority. I will instead examine decrees which are frequently overlooked: those which govern religious matters.

Royal coronation ordines occupy a peculiar place in the historiography of early English law, kingship, and ecclesiastical culture. As liturgical formulae, they offer instructions for religious speech and ritual action, codifying the particulars of a rite that would be employed sporadically – perhaps as rarely as once or twice in living memory. These texts are remarkable for their preservation of ritual dialogue and choreography, as well as their particularly ecclesiastical vision of Christian kingship and royal obligation. However, the ordines as written do not capture the full nuance of a royal coronation in practice. The distance between text and ritual is largely unknowable; we cannot reconstruct the full range of speech and action taken by the principals in or witnesses to the rite. The written ordines do not reveal whether their language could be modified or expanded upon; they do not specify whether portions of their liturgical Latin were rendered into Old English; and their logistical details are far from exhaustive. Although they provide an invaluable impression of how ecclesiastical authors envisioned the coronation rite, the written formulae are textual creations which delineate the priorities, ideologies, and aspira-tions of their creators.

In their status as textual artifacts, pre-Conquest coronation ordines are remarkably similar to early English law codes. Both genres articulate instructions and ideologies which were likely enacted to some extent, even if the degree of correlation between text and practice is now irrecoverable. Both represent acts of speech and consensus: royal decrees ostensibly preserve agreements among the kingdom's governing elites, while the ordines codify verbal expressions of ecclesiastical approval and public acclamation of a new king. Both seek to define and elevate the king's authority, in part by placing royal and ecclesiastical obligations in conversation. And both emerged in the ninth century as prominent genres of political literature: Alfred (r. 871–99) revived vernacular written law after a centuries-long hiatus, while the earliest extant English ordines are associated with the reign of his father Æthelwulf (r. 839–58) and step-mother Judith. New laws and revised ordines were disseminated across the tenth and eleventh centuries, and the fact that the liturgical rites and royal decrees were both penned – and, to various degrees, formulated – by elite clergymen affirms that the two genres emerged from the same political-literary sphere.

This is not to suggest that coronation rites and royal decrees were fully aligned in their content or objectives.

For all the mutilation and execution in this volume, there has been little discussion of the people who issued and implemented judicial sentences in Anglo-Saxon England. While responsibility for the capture, imprisonment, and upkeep of offenders was occasionally assigned to specific individuals in pre-Conquest legislation, corporal penalties rarely designated an agent for the exercise of justice. Instead, the harshest punishments were often articulated with an impersonal construction: let the thieving hand be cut off (slea mon þa hond); let the adulteress lose her nose and ears (heo þolige nasa J earena); let the traitor’s life be forfeit (si he his feores scyldig). Although execution cemeteries confirm that both lethal and non-lethal penalties were in fact carried out, it is unclear who exactly oversaw these judicial tasks. The most visible face of justice was the king, who was invariably depicted as the promulgator and enforcer of law in Anglo-Saxon legislation. Even if he was only infrequently involved in the day-to-day work of judging and condemning criminals, the king was consistently portrayed as the source and keeper of the peace. In practice, however, most acts of justice would have been handled on a local level, with lesser magnates initiating legal proceedings on their own authority and imposing punishments within their jurisdictions. Yet even in these cases, the king remained the ultimate source of mercy for the condemned, retaining the right to commute or reduce sentences. Judges might choose from a range of punishments or arbitrate a settlement, but the king could always claim the final word.

So what of the individuals who were responsible for passing judgment in the first place? Whether they were royal reeves, bishops, or other local authority figures, their job cannot have been an easy one. Judges as a group were often chastised by Old English commentators, who complained regularly, if abstractly, about abuses of judicial power. While such general accusations cannot provide an accurate measure of corruption in Anglo-Saxon England, they certainly reflect a stereotype of individuals subverting justice in favor of personal gain. Authors from Alcuin to Ælfric denounced those who issued unjust judgments for their own benefit, affirming that judges who submitted to bribery would ‘endure vengeance on Judgment Day’ [in Dei judicio vindictam sustinebit] and suffer ‘eternal torments with the treacherous devil’ [mid þam swicolan deofle þa ecan susle].

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.

The Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Sutton Hoo is renowned for its prestigious seventh-century pagan burials, many of which were marked by mounds and accompanied by rich grave goods. In the centuries after the cemetery was founded, however, the site was given over to another purpose: the execution and burial of criminals. While a number of these executions may have occurred in the generations immediately following the high status burials, judicial sentences continued to be carried out at Sutton Hoo through the eleventh century, with the prevalence of decapitated, mutilated, and shamefully buried bodies attesting to the increasing punitive powers of English kings. The continuous use of an ostentatiously pagan site by later, Christian Anglo-Saxons suggests that it was no arbitrary decision to inter capital offenders at Sutton Hoo. Rather, this deliberate placement was intended to isolate the bodies of the condemned in a liminal area replete with heathen associations – an area conspicuously removed from the holy ground in which the pious were buried. The site's prominent pre-Christian monuments would have provided a visually striking inversion of burial ad sanctos, and the association of mounds with demons and spirits of the heathen damned during the late Anglo-Saxon period would have implied that those buried in such a place were unworthy of Christian salvation. While a virtuous Christian would be buried in hallowed ground, near the relics of saints and surrounded by prayers of the pious, an executed offender would be buried among heathens, beyond the Church's jurisdiction, where no prayers would be offered to help rescue his soul from hell.