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.

The Legatine Capitulary of 786 has often been dismissed as the product of a fleeting papal mission reflecting primarily, if not exclusively, the legislative sensibilities of foreigners who lacked a clear understanding of Anglo-Saxon law and cultural practices. Scholars have tended to disregard it as an irrelevant one-off that, while perhaps containing a few details of historical interest, possessed no bearing on local affairs, let alone matters farther afield. As a result, there has been a general lack of interest regarding its importance for early medieval Northumbrian, Anglo-Saxon, and European legal history. This oversight is entirely unwarranted, as I have argued at length elsewhere. Taking my lead from Catherine Cubitt's work in Anglo-Saxon Church Councils, c.650–c.850, I have shown in several articles that the text was composed, or at least formatively influenced by Alcuin, a native Northumbrian; and, moreover, that it draws upon language and procedures deeply rooted in English customary law. The Legatine Capitulary stands out, therefore, not merely as a rare example of a legal document composed by a Northumbrian legislating for his own people in his native country, but as a Northumbrian law code in its own right. As such, it provides an uncommon glimpse into Anglo-Saxon legal practices, both ecclesiastical and secular, during the gap of more than a century between the Laws of Ine and the Laws of Alfred to which no surviving vernacular law code bears witness. These facts demand a re-evaluation of the document's significance for Northumbrian and Anglo-Saxon legal history.

Even less appreciated is the significance of the Legatine Capitulary for continental European legal history. While I have considered its bearing on English affairs in several prior articles, this chapter will focus on its importance in Francia. The document emerged during a period when the Carolingian reimagining of the capitulary tradition was barely in its nascence. Indeed, the Legatine Capitulary would appear to have played a formative role in that transformation. Charlemagne's increased reliance on capitularies as the main expression of his reform agenda is usually traced to the Admonitio generalis of 789, a document also composed, in part, by Alcuin just three years after he drafted the Legatine Capitulary. Given this timing, it is tempting to view the Legatine Capitulary as a kind of dry run in which Alcuin first began to reimagine the capitulary as a genre specifically designed to articulate the sweeping cultural reforms of the Carolingian Renovatio.

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.

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.

A passage in the so-called Fonthill Letter, the record of a late ninth-century legal dispute, recounts that a judicial panel found in favor of one of the litigants because his testimony convinced its members that he was “nearer the oath” (aðe ðæs ðe near) than any of the other parties. This striking phrase is not unique to this text – a Latin analogue occurs in the record of a tenth-century dispute preserved in the Liber Eliensis – suggesting that, if not necessarily common, it was nonetheless a recognizable legal formula. The panel reached its judgment after each litigant “gave his account” (reahta heora ægðer his spell) and the defendant was permitted to present (geagnigean) the charters that validated his ownership. Underlying this passage is a complex interplay of narratives: the oral testimonies delivered by the litigants, the written histories recorded in the charters, and the panel's judgment concerning whose narrative would be authorized as “true” via legal ritual – that is, which narrative brought the litigant “nearer the oath.” The phrase is a potent one, evoking a courtroom setting where the stories presented are judged according to their proximity to the central oaths taken by the participants: the oaths themselves become palpable players in the drama.

This small detail from the Fonthill Letter provides just one illustration of the close relationship between the legal and the literary in pre-Conquest texts, though its recognition of the symbiotic connection between these two modes of discourse was hardly a new one. Plato's critique of the literary in the Republic represents an implicit acknowledgment of the normative power of narrative, while the discussion of the cathartic importance of tragedy in Aristotle's Poetics is founded on the belief that narrative release was essential to the maintenance of a civil society. The courtroom speeches of Demosthenes and, later, of Cicero demonstrate a nuanced understanding of the place of narrative and literary style in legal advocacy (and invective). Perhaps most influentially, the Novellae constitutiones, the fourth component of the Corpus juris civilis, incorporate narrative as precedent to justify additions to the laws of Justinian. Given this pedigree, there can be little surprise that similar connections between law and literature can be found in texts produced in England prior to the Norman Conquest of 1066.

Scholars who periodize hypocrisy tend to associate it with early modern Europe; however, by examining homiletic, legal, and hagiographic rep-resentations of hypocrisy across the early English corpus, this chapter will explore how discourses on the vice underpin their authors’ visions of moral and legal behavior in public life. The nature of hypocrisy as both a moral and political ill make it a useful vehicle for covering this legal and spiritual terrain. As a social disruption, the vice forces creative reflections on the ramifications of a society's legal breaches at the essential levels of trust and truth. As the authors examined here present it, moreover, hypocrisy reveals the institutional interplay of the early English literary, legal, and homiletic traditions. Texts from each genre concern themselves (each with respect to their particular sphere of interest) with individuals’ failure to consistently align their thoughts, intentions, and actions; what emerges is a vision of the world in which the integrity of the laity depends on that of the Church, and in which both seek to establish order and achieve resolution through legal prescriptions. I leave open the extent to which the exhortations and examples found in these textual traditions translated into actual social practice, even in the case of written law. Although pre-Conquest legislators from Alfred onward prescribed how local people should behave, sheriffs, reeves, and other authorities would not necessarily have enforced these prescriptions consistently or efficiently. And one imagines that the vaguely-phrased moral crimes of the later law codes would have posed considerably greater problems for practical detection and enforcement than the usual run of local crimes.

To tease out the practicability of legislating a moral idea, I turn to two ecclesiastics whose rhetorically-rich spiritual writings envisioned a society standing on divinely-sanctioned legal ground: Ælfric (d. c. 1010) and Wulfstan (d. 1023). My focus on these figures is not intended to delineate the peculiarities of their several approaches to the moral issue here examined; rather, my interest lies more broadly in the textual channels of the tenth and eleventh centuries. The eclectic flow of sermons, sacred histories, and saints’ lives to which these men were significant and influential contributors mixed legal, spiritual, and poetic languages, and addressed a range of audiences, from royal patrons, to church masters and students, to lay audiences. On the whole, then, I present their writings as similarly sourced if contextually discrete manifestations of church concerns at the turn of the eleventh century.

Thus the famous presentation of circumstantial evidence to the modern imagination in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventure of the Silver Blaze. Following this exchange, Holmes deduces from the circumstance of the dog's nocturnal silence the fact that it must have known whomever entered the stables when a prized horse went missing; he is therefore able to narrow his field of suspects. His less perspicacious foil Detective Gregory fails to appreciate the full consequence of this curious circumstance – for Gregory, as Holmes laments, is not “gifted with imagination.” As is typical of circumstantial evidence, the issue here turns on the discernment of acts no longer to be seen: the truth of what happened can only be constructed from inferences made after the event. The problem posed by the fate of the horse with the silver blaze is one that the Old English law-writers would have appreciated, concerned as their codes are with animals stolen, straying, or disappearing only to re-appear in the form of their butch-ered and hidden remains. But (in the absence of a reliable witness to the moment of disappearance) how would the pre-Conquest English subject and legal process have gone about solving this or an equivalent crime? Were public oaths or recourse to oath-helpers, and submission to the hot iron or boiling water, their only practical methods of arriving at the truth? Or might they have made use of our modern detective's methods – the application of reasoning, logic and imagination to what material evidence remains (or is significantly absent)? This chapter makes an argument for the importance of the role of circumstantial evidence in the truth-seeking endeavors of the Old English legal system, and finds traces even in the decrees of the law codes to suggest that this approach to discovery was a widespread and accepted one in the legal field, adapted to a range of criminal and legal circumstances. The same interest in deliberate observation and telling inference emerges too in Old English poetry, which reveals in some of its narratives a dramatic reliance upon analogous truth-finding processes – Beowulf is the chosen exemplar here.

Among those who sought the help of Saint Guthlac (c. 674–714) in his fenland hermitage were, according to his biographer Felix, the parents of a young man named Hwætred. “Vexed for four years by an evil spirit” (per quadrennium a maligno spiritu vexatum), emaciated and devoid of strength, the boy had previously been brought by his mother and father to “the holy places of the saints so that he might be washed in holy water by priests and bishops” (ad sacratas sedes sanctorum adductus est, ut a sacerdotibus episcopisque sacratis fontibus lavaretur). Without exception, these remedies had afforded no relief, and the parents nearly despaired until word reached them of the miracles wrought by “a certain hermit who dwelt in the midst of the fen on an island called Crowland.” And so they undertook the journey to Crowland where, after receiving his guests warmly, Guthlac immediately led the afflicted boy by the hand to his oratory. Three days of fasting and prayer followed. Then, at sunrise on the third day, Guthlac “washed him in the water of the sacred font and, breathing into his face the breath of healing, he drove away from him all the power of the evil spirit” (tertia vero die, orto sole, sacrati fontis undis abluit, et, inflans in faciem eius spiritum salutis, omnem valitudinem maligni spiritus de illo reppulit). Not again for the rest of his life would Hwætred be so afflicted.

Accounts of saints’ healings of demoniacs are, of course, very much to be expected in works of hagiography, demonstrating as they do how the heroes of these narratives shared in the “power over unclean spirits” Christ granted his apostles (Matthew 10:1). But it has not gone unnoticed that the cure just described is not wholly in keeping with the conventions of this tradition. Felix's divergences from prior examples, the present essay will suggest, indicate not only his occasional independence from them, but also something of the tensions between secular and regular clergy manifest in the conciliar legislation of this period; tensions that Felix does not manage wholly to conceal in his accounts of Guthlac's meeting with Bishop Headda and subsequent ordination. (It is notable, as we will see, that a later recasting of Felix's Vita removes outright the details that Felix had narrated with seeming evasiveness.).

Wulfstan, archbishop of York between 1002 and 1023, held his office during an incredibly tumultuous time in English history. Beginning in the 980s and continuing intermittently until the reign of Cnut in 1016, England suffered serious devastation at the hands of the Vikings. These attacks had reached their pinnacle of destruction and brutality during the last decade of Æthelred II's reign, and with the English resistance amounting to something altogether ineffective, enormous sums of money were paid to the Danes in tribute on several occasions. Contemporary sources suggest that this was a period when the people of England were plunged into despair and fear, with diminishing faith in their state and the ability of the king to defend it and its people. As archbishop of York and close advisor to two kings, Wulfstan was well positioned to articulate measures intended to improve England's dire situation. Wulfstan was deeply concerned for the state and wellbeing of the English people. The disasters they faced in the form of Viking attacks he viewed as a result of their having fallen away from God and Christian conduct; accordingly, Wulfstan believed it necessary to reform English society if it were to endure, and to regain God's favor. Wulfstan's writings suggest that the archbishop saw the restoration of order to society as the key to solving England's crises. He attempted, in his homiletic and legal works, to create prescriptions for an ordered, holy, Christian society in order to redeem the English in the eyes of God, and to ensure lasting peace and prosperity. The vision of an ordered, “holy society” that emerged from these works was multifaceted and its execution involved the work of both secular and ecclesiastical entities. This chapter demonstrates that the work of royal officials figured prominently in Wulfstan's vision of reform. In the centralization of these officials (and especially of the secular figure of the reeve) can be seen not only the archbishop's recognition of the importance of secular figures to the support of the Church within a holy society, but the varied legal and literary means by which Wulfstan wove the persuasions, exhortations, and regulations through which he sought to realize his vision.

Wulfstan, Reformer and Writer

Wulfstan first makes an appearance in the historical record in 996, when he was appointed as the bishop of London, though nothing about him prior to that year is known.

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.