This is the first book-length study of the four penitentials composed in Old English. This book argues that they are also important to our understanding of how written law developed in early England. This book considers their backgrounds and shows how they illuminate obscure passages in better-known Old English texts.
Some of the earliest examples of medieval canon law are penitentials - texts enumerating the sins a confessor might encounter among laypeople or other clergy and suggesting means of reconciliation. Often they gave advice on matters of secular law as well, offering judgments on the proper way to contract a marriage or on the treatment of slaves. This book argues that their importance to more general legal-historical questions, long suspected by historians but rarely explored, is most evident in an important (and often misunderstood) subgroup of the penitentials: composed in Old English. Though based on Latin sources - principally those attributed to Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury (d.690) and Halitgar of Cambrai (d.831) - these texts recast them into new ordinances meant to better suit the needs of English laypeople. The Old English penitentials thus witness to how one early medieval polity established a tradition of written vernacular law.
Oakley, Thomas Pollack. English Penitential Discipline and Anglo-Saxon Law in Their Joint Influence. New York: Columbia University Press, 1923. 226 pp. Reprinted 2003 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. ISBN 1-58477-302-2. Cloth. $65. * Penitentials are manuals for confessors that outline penances and their fines. They originated in the Celtic church and their use spread throughout the British Isles during the early middle ages. Though restricted to church discipline, they often influenced secular law. Beginning with a history and discussion of the penitentials, Oakley examines the legal traditions that influenced their development and their reciprocal influence on the development of the common law. Originally published as Volume CVII, Number 2 in Columbia's series, Studies in History, Economics and Public Law.
Alfred the Great's domboc ('book of laws') is the longest and most ambitious legal text of the Anglo-Saxon period. Alfred places his own laws, dealing with everything from sanctuary to feuding to the theft of bees, between a lengthy translation of legal passages from the Bible and the legislation of the West-Saxon King Ine (r. 688–726), which rival his own in length and scope. This book is the first critical edition of the domboc published in over a century, as well as a new translation. Five introductory chapters offer fresh insights into the laws of Alfred and Ine, considering their backgrounds, their relationship to early medieval legal culture, their manuscript evidence and their reception in later centuries. Rather than a haphazard accumulation of ordinances, the domboc is shown to issue from deep reflection on the nature of law itself, whose effects would permanently alter the development of early English legislation.
Law and Language in the Middle Ages investigates the relationship between law and legal practice from the linguistic perspective, exploring not only how legal language expresses and advances power relations but also how the language of law legitimates power.
Penance in the ancient church -- The penitentials -- The condition of the texts -- Early Irish penitential documents -- Early Welsh penitential documents -- Penitentials of the Anglo-Saxon church -- Penitentials by Irish authors which were apparently compiled on the continent -- Anonymous and pseudonymous Frankish and Visigothic penitentials of the eighth and ninth centuries -- Penitentials written or authorized by Frankish ecclesiastics -- Selections from later penitential documents -- Penitential elements in medieval public law -- Synodical decisions and ecclesiastical opinions relating to the penitentials -- An eighth-century list of superstitions -- Selections from the customs of Tallaght -- Irish canons from a Worcester collection -- On documents omitted -- The manuscripts of the penitentials.
Arguably, more legal texts survive from pre-Conquest England than from any other early medieval European community. The corpus includes roughly seventy royal law-codes, to which can be added well over a thousand charters, writs, and wills, as well as numerous political tracts, formularies, rituals, and homilies derived from legal sources. These texts offer valuable insight into early English concepts of royal authority and political identity. They reveal both the capacities and limits of the king's regulatory power, and in so doing, provide crucial evidence for the process by which disparate kingdoms gradually merged to become a unified English state. More broadly, pre-Norman legal texts shed light on the various ways in which cultural norms were established, enforced, and, in many cases, challenged. And perhaps most importantly, they provide unparalleled insight into the experiences of Anglo-Saxon England's diverse inhabitants, both those who enforced the law and those subject to it.
