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, ambassadors and naval officers; by the launch of the HMS King Alfred; and by the assembling in Winchester of the National Home Reading Union. Alfred was also hailed as the founder of these institutions in numerous Victorian texts and in works of art. And he was equally credited at different times during the nineteenth century with attempting to abolish slavery; with establishing the English law-code and trial by jury; and with forging a proto-union of the British Isles. Each of these notions can ultimately be traced to an over-reading or misreading of an Anglo-Saxon source
By expanding the geographical scope of the history of violence and war, this volume challenges both Western and state-centric narratives of the decline of violence and its relationship to modernity. It highlights instead similarities across early modernity in terms of representations, legitimations, applications of, and motivations for violence. It seeks to integrate methodologies of the study of violence into the history of war, thereby extending the historical significance of both fields of research. Thirteen case studies outline the myriad ways in which large-scale violence was understood and used by states and non-state actors throughout the early modern period across Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Atlantic, and Europe, demonstrating that it was far more complex than would be suggested by simple narratives of conquest and resistance. Moreover, key features of imperial violence apply equally to large-scale violence within societies. As the authors argue, violence was a continuum, ranging from small-scale, local actions to full-blown war. The latter was privileged legally and increasingly associated with states during early modernity, but its legitimacy was frequently contested and many of its violent forms, such as raiding and destruction of buildings and crops, could be found in activities not officially classed as war.
’s thought can be seen in the works he produces during this period, including the law-codes VII–X Æthelred, the first version of the Institutes of Polity , as well as such homilies as the Sermo ad Populum (Bethurum 13) and Wulfstan’s most famous work, the Sermo Lupi ad Anglos (Bethurum 20). These writings are characterised by a movement away from the general admonitions and eschatological
makes it impossible to assess the situation there, but some historians have heard the echo of Roman indirect taxation in later dues such as the charges levied on salt production. 20 The late appearance and long formative stage of kingdoms in England would, however, argue against the survival of widespread taxation from the late Roman period, but the fact that the Tribal Hidage appears to list tributes suggests that the raising of tribute was part and parcel of state formation. A law code from Wessex in the 690s ( The Laws of King Ine) talks of food rents, that is
, ius civis , which governed the lives and regulations of citizens. These were the customs, statutes, and forms of procedure that were meant to protect property, lives, and reputation of citizens, and to give satisfaction to victims of injustice. Roman law was originally oral only; you were at the mercy of the law courts to read and interpret the law fairly in your favour. In the fifth century BCE , however, the plebeians insisted on more rights as there was no written law code, and they were aware that court decisions and penalties were weighted in favour of the
-Saxon law-codes, supplemented by the Modus tenendi parliamentum, which offered most of the fuel for the argument on the antiquity of parliament. In their search for precedents, MPs turned to the rolls of parliament and the Year Books. In a discussion on free speech in 1571, Fleetwood noted that he thought that ‘what he had learned in the parliament rolles’ was ‘convenient the knowledge and consideracion’. His contribution to the debate on 28 May 1572 as to how they should respond to Elizabeth’s message closing off further discussions about executing Mary, queen of Scots
. Corresponding developments in Byzantine territory are harder to discern. Law codes selectively reprise the Augustan lex Iulia de vi publica prohibiting private citizens from carrying weapons in public, though exceptional circumstances and legal ambivalence periodically militated enforcement of penalties. 15 Justinianic legislation prohibited private manufacture, transportation and sale of all but the most rudimentary weaponry. From the mid-seventh century, although production of arms and armour
cattle: chattel in early medieval Britain The argument that the imagery of these riddles alludes to both slaves bound by Welsh raiders and cattle herded by Welsh labourers draws support from the frequent equivalence of slaves and animals in both the Anglo-Saxon textual corpus and Welsh law codes, which makes their parallel captivity in these riddles a natural one. It has long been noted that slaves were ‘bought and sold as cattle’16 in Anglo-Saxon England based on sources such as the 85 Writing the Welsh borderlands Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which equates the two as
appeals on the rulings of local assemblies to kings. 50 However, the law codes do not envision reeves as enforcers of rulings if there was resistance – armed action was apparently not part of their duties. 51 When kings granted their estates to other lords, reeves passed into the service of these bishops, abbots or lay aristocrats, such as ealdormen, and they seem to have continued to fulfil the same duties, including, at least in the early tenth century, the legal tasks. With the emergence of the hundred system in the second half of the tenth century, reeves seem to
. This was a revealing lapse in Grousset’s scholarship. In the 1920s, Maurice Grandeclaude had subjected the thirteenth-century law codes of Jerusalem, the Assises, to careful analysis to try to determine the survival of any of the pre-1187 legal procedures.2 Thirty years earlier, Munro had insisted that such law codes could not simply be used to describe twelfth-century circumstances, as Dodu had imagined. In his Lowell lectures at Harvard in 1924, Munro himself had sketched a picture of how Outremer society worked based on sources not sentiment and covering wide