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/aural culture of early medieval England would undoubtedly not have been the same for everyone, and to assume so is to participate in what Lennard Davis has referred to as ‘one of the foundational ableist myths of our culture’. 9 Maren Tova Linett places the growth of ‘these cultural biases in favor of hearing and speech’ as reaching their height ‘during the modernist period’, 10 and indeed in early medieval England we find a situation with arguably less imbalanced assumptions. Law codes from the period provide particular
. That society proves imperfect and that its bonds prove weak is not Beowulf’s fault – the tendency to murder and destruction present in the myth of Cain is to be found even in Hrothgar’s Heorot, and undoubtedly was there in the hall of every Anglo-Saxon Christian ruler. The poet’s presentation of the myth of the Flood does not articulate any law code or any offer of salvation, though the simple
instance, the threat of total confiscation (both of titles and inheritances) ensured absolute loyalty. From Alfred on, we can see changing notions of kingship and power in early medieval England. Charters narrativise how all land comes from the king with the possession of such lands demanding obligations. Moreover, the law codes reveal that the bonds between a king and his thane can be forever undone through especially heinous crimes. In numerous places, we also read that sovereigns revoke privileges and transfer ownership to fortify their realm. All this would suggest
English state emerged in the tenth century, roads became established in law as directly under royal oversight and travellers upon them became subject to the special protection afforded by the king’s peace, fixing them as ‘the king’s highways’ in popular and legal tradition.11 Maintenance of the roads themselves is not stipulated in the early law codes but the specific reference to technically more difficult and expensive bridge repair duties offers circumstantial evidence that the maintenance of the communications network in general was an obligation imposed by kings on
’s Ecclesiastical History (items 8 and 11). At the opposite extreme, such copies of the laws as have survived are regularly small (items 96, 99, 100 and 102), exceptions being where law-codes are added to other material, as in the Parker Chronicle (item 15). It is possible that copies of particular sorts of material traditionally have a uniform size, or it may be that these are of like size because the copies are in some way related in their transmission history, for example the copies of Ælfric’s Grammar in items 51, 54, 59, 65, and 66, and again 92 and 94, 17 or copies of
experience, a tendency reflected in the period’s archaeological record, historical texts, and law codes as well. Lastly, with no healer to be found, the endlessly suffering speaker of the riddle Anhaga elicits deep empathy for its trauma, both the pain of endless attacks and also the excruciating loneliness of a solitary warrior. Collectively these analyses have shown both the payoff and the limits of this close-reading approach, and before closing I want to acknowledge explicitly and directly that this ‘conclusion’ is in
centuries, which interdict infant abandonment, with the exception of deformity, arguing that ‘[p]hysically impaired children … if reared, would present too great a demand on resources and in the future would be limited in providing for themselves and contributing to the community's economy’. 28 In addition to the sagas and law codes, which mention child abandonment with some frequency, archaeological evidence supports this practice as a fact of early medieval life. Archaeologists have, for several decades, discussed the
understanding of early medieval England as a largely oral/aural culture, and evidence from surviving medical texts, law codes, and the archaeological record indicates a range of sensory perception that seems to have been widely recognized. The entries in Bald’s Leechbook suggest a worldview in which the capacity for hearing, though important in many contexts, was not assumed. Rather, the faculty of hearing itself is described as changing and changeable, in terms of experience rather than identity. Accordingly, the Old English
and, eventually, inheriting the heavenly territories forfeited by rebels. Replacement, in this sense, becomes a vehicle of lordly compensation, a way to restore what was lost. As I will demonstrate, by framing replacement as a kind of legal transaction echoing the patterns of many contemporary law codes, the poet replicates the power structures of the Anglo-Saxon world in his literary representations of divine power. Dorothy Haines’s important work on the replacement doctrine similarly reveals telling nuances in the ways Anglo-Saxon poets and homilists adapted
at the forefront of engaging with these challenges, especially when Cnut ascended the throne. Joyce Tally Lionarons suggests that, for Wulfstan, the coming of Cnut ‘signaled a reprieve and a chance to rebuild the English nation into Wulfstan’s vision of a holy society’. 39 Like Ælfric, Wulfstan demonstrates a highly developed sense of authorship. While my interest in this chapter lies mainly in Wulfstan’s homiletic corpus, it is important to note that he also wrote numerous legal tracts, law codes, social prescriptions, a commonplace book, and paraliturgical