Remembering, forgetting and inventing: Attitudes to the past in England at the end of the first viking age

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

Volumn 9, Issue , 1999, Pages 185-200

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EID: 2442439420     PISSN: 00804401     EISSN: 14740648     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3679399     Document Type: Review

References (70)

1. Alfred, prose preface to the Cura pastoralis, transl. S. Keynes and M. Lapidge, Alfred the Great: Asser's 'Life of King Alfred' and Other Contemporary Sources (Harmondsworth, 1983), 125.
2. See D. A. Bullough, 'The Educational Tradition in England from Alfred to Ælfric: Teaching utriusque linguae', La Scuola nell'Occidente Latino dell'alto medioevo, Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi Sull'alto medioevo, 19 (1972), 453-94, at 455-63.
3. King Alfred's Old English Version of Boethius De Consolatione Philosophiae, XLII (ed. W.J. Sedgefield, Oxford, 1899, 148;
4. transl. Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, 136).
5. For discussion of these issues in a Carolingian context, see M. Innes, 'Memory, Orality and Literacy in an Early Medieval Society', Past and Present, 158 (1998), 3-36.
6. Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record(2nd edn, Oxford, 1993), 26-32;
7. Patrick Wormald, 'The uses of literacy in Anglo-Saxon England and its neighbours', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 27 (1977), 94-114;
8. Simon Keynes, 'Royal Government and the Written Word in late Anglo-Saxon England', in The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe, ed. Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge, 1990), 226-57.
9. The fullest discussion is by Susan Kelly, 'Anglo-Saxon lay society and the written word', in The Uses of Literacy, ed. McKitterick, 36-62.
10. An early tenth-century charter of King Edward the Elder explains succinctly the purpose for which written record of an oral conveyance was made: because the Church had long ago resolved 'that the gifts of most pious kings should be delivered with the records of charters on account of the changeable vicissitudes of the times and concluded with the testimony of a title-deed, lest the source of truth should be brought to nothing by the assault of misty oblivion'. S 362 [S: P. H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and Bibliography (London, 1968)];
11. transl. English Historical Documents, I, c.500-1042, ed. D. Whitelock (2nd edn, 1979) [hereafter EHD], no. 100.
12. Most notable in the pages of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica, where the testimony of named oral witnesses is accorded privileged status in comparison with vulgar report; for discussion of Bede's network of informants, see D. P. Kirby, 'Bede's Native Sources for the Historia ecclesiastica', Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 48 (1966), 341-71.
13. The formulaic phraseology of early Anglo-Saxon charters always attributed pious motives to secular donors to churches and monasteries, but some texts spelt out in some detail the spiritual benefits anticipated from the gift; for example, the Kentish ealdorman Oswulf and his wife Beornthryth gave land early in the ninth century to Christ Church, Canterbury, on condition that they might be in the fellowship of the community there and that their anniversay be celebrated each year with religious offices [on godcundum godum] and with the distribution of alms: S 1188; transl. F. E. Harmer, Select English Historical Documents of the Ninth and Tenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1914), no. 1, 39.
14. The concept of 'collective' memory was defined by Maurice Halbwachs (Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris, 1925);
15. La Mémoire collective (Paris, 1950, English translation, New York, 1980).
16. His ideas about the ways in which memory is structured by group identities have been developed in a slightly different direction by James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford, 1992). See also Patrick Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton, NJ, 1994), especially 3-22.
17. The revisionist position was first articulated by Peter Sawyer, The Age of the Vikings (1962), and has acquired numerous adherents since then.
18. On the panic-stricken mood of many of the Frankish sources in particular, see J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Early Medieval History (Oxford, 1975), 218-20.
19. That the Danes were notably more violent than their contemporaries has been questioned, for example by G. Halsall, 'Playing by whose Rules? A Further Look at Viking Atrocity in the Ninth Century', Medieval History, 2.2 (1992), 2-12.
20. For a contrary view, see David N. Dumville, The Churches of North Britain in the First Viking Age, Fifth Whithorn Lecture (Whithorn, 1997).
21. Space does not permit the cataloguing of these largely familiar details; for summaries, see Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, introduction, 11-26;
22. D. P. Kirby, The Earliest English Kings (1991), 210-20.
23. That the effects of the vikings in England were 'very serious indeed' was argued by Patrick Wormald, 'Viking Studies: Whence and Whither', in The Vikings, ed. R. T. Farrell (1982), 128-53, at 139.
24. Anxieties about the provision of pastoral care were expressed in Northumbria long before the start of the Viking Age (Bede, Epistola ad Ecgbertum, ed. C. Plummer, Venerabilis Baedae Opera Historica, 2 vols, Oxford, 1896, 1, 405-23); the contention here is not that such problems were new, nor that they were solely prompted by Danish warfare, but that they were felt more acutely in this period.
25. No bishop of Hexham is recorded beyond Bishop Tidferth who died in 821: Simon Keynes, 'Episcopal succession in Anglo-Saxon England', in E. B. Fryde et al., Handbook of British Chronology (3rd edn, 1986), 209-24, at 217.
26. D. Whitelock, 'The pre-Viking Church in East Anglia', Anglo-Saxon England, 1 (1972), 1-22, at 17-19.
27. The see of Elmham was revived in the later tenth century, following a century of interruption after the death of Bishop Hunberht in 845 or 856X? or? November 869: Keynes in Fryde et al., Handbook, p. 216;
28. Whitelock, 'The pre-Viking Church, 21-2.
29. For Leicester, see Mary Anne O'Donovan, 'An Interim Revision of Episcopal Dates for the Province of Canterbury, 850-950: Part 1', Anglo-Saxon England, 1 (1972), 23-44, at 27, 43-4.
30. Keynes in Fryde et al., Handbook, 219;
31. A. P. Smyth, Scandinavian York and Dublin (2 vols, Dublin, 1975-9). 1, 41-4, 96-103.
32. Mary Anne O'Donovan, 'An Interim Revision: part 2', Anglo-Saxon England, 2 (1972), 91-113, at 91-6. It is, of course, possible that men were still performing the role of bishop across this period when their names were not recorded, the dislocation being simply one of record-keeping, but this seems distinctly implausible in cases where the episcopal seat was relocated.
33. For example, the congregatio tlericorum at Horningsea mentioned in the Liber Eliensis, 11, 32 (ed. E. O. Blake, 1962), 105;
34. A list of sorts may be found in David Knowles and R. Neville Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses: England and Wales (2nd edn, London, 1971), appendix 1, 463-87.
35. See, however, David N. Dumville, Wessex and England from Alfred to Edgar (Woodbridge, 1992), 33-49.
36. Demonstration of the generally parlous state of Latin learning in ninth-century England is given by Michael Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Literature, 600-899 (1996), 409-39.
37. See C. Cubitt, 'Universal and Local Saints in Anglo-Saxon England', in Local Saints and Local Churches, ed. Richard Sharpe and Alan Thacker (Oxford, forthcoming).
38. E. Craster, 'The Patrimony of St Cuthbert', English Historical Review, 69 (1954), 177-99.
39. Historia regum Anglorum, part I, s.a. 875 (Symeonis Monachi Opera Omnia, ed. T. Arnold, 2 vols, Rolls Series, London, 1882-5, 11, 82) reports a nine-year wandering;
40. See Durnville, The Churches, 24, and n. 68,
41. and E. Cambridge, 'Why did the Community of St Cuthbert Settle at Chester-le-Street?', in St Cuthbert His Cult and His Community, ed. G. Bonner et al. (Woodbridge, 1989), 367-86, at 379-86.
42. the one-time presence of Cuthbert's relics at Norham finds mention in the earliest surviving list of saints' resting-places: Die Heiligen Englands, 11.4 (ed. Felix Liebermann, Hanover, 1889, 10).
43. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 934, BCDE 933;
44. Historia de Sancto Cuthberto, ch. 26 (ed. Arnoold, I, 211);
45. Craster, 'The Patrimony', 191-2;
46. G. Bonner, 'St Cuthbert at Chester-le-Street', in St Cuthbert, ed. Bonner et al., 387-95, at 389-92.
47. S. Keynes, 'King Æthelstan's Books', in Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss (Cambridge, 1985), 143-201, at 170-85.
48. For other examples of relics moved (sometimes only temporarily) by their guardians away from Danish attack, compare Ermentarius, Miracula S. Philiberti, ch. 1 (ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH, SS XV.1, Hanover, 1887, 298-9);
49. A. T. Thacker, 'Kings, Saints and Monasteries in pre-Viking Mercia', Midland History, 10 (1985), 1-25, at 8-12.
50. A. T. Thacker, 'Chester and Gloucester: Early Ecclesiastical Organisation in two Mercian Burhs', Northern History, 18 (1982), 199-211, at 203-4, 209-10;
51. D. Rollason, 'Relic-Cults as an Instrument of Royal Policy c. 900-1050', Anglo-Saxon England, 15 (1986), 91-103, at 95;
52. Thacker, 'Kings', 18.
53. William of Malmesbury, De gestis pontificum Anglorum, §91 (ed. N.E.S.A. Hamilton, Rolls Series, London, 1870, 198).
54. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 948. Rollason, 'Relic-cults', 94.
55. Æthelwold, 'Account of King Edgar's establishment of ministers', ed. and transl. D. Whitelock et al., Councils & Synods with other Documents Relating to the English Church: 1871-1204, 2 vols, part I, 871-1066 (Oxford, 1981), no. 33, 148-9.
56. The only nunnery explicitly to be mentioned in any contemporaneous account of the process by which the precepts of the Rule of St Benedict were introduced was the Nunnaminster at Winchester: Wulfstan of Winchester, The Life of St Æthelwold, chs 16-18 (ed. and transl. M. Lapidge and M. Winterbottom, Oxford, 1991, 30-3).
57. It is not, however, necessary to believe the late eleventh-century account of Goscelin of St-Bertin's that the abbess and nuns were burnt to death by the Danes in 870: Lecciones de sancta Hidelitha, ch. 2 (ed. M. L. Colker, 'Texts of Jocelyn of Canterbury which Relate to the History of Barking Abbey', Studia Monastica, 7 (1965), 383-460, at 455).
58. Goscelin, Libellus contra inanes sanctae uirginis Mildrethae usurpatores, ch. 4 (ed. M. L. Colker, 'A Hagiographic Polemic', Mediaeval Studies, 39 (1977), 60-108, at 74-5). Lyminge was granted a refuge from the Danes at Canterbury in 804: S 160.
59. EF have wrongly 'Leofwine'. The Chronicle of John of Worcester, II The Annals from 450 to 1066, s.a. 1011 (ed. R. R. Darlington et al., Oxford, 1995. 468-9).
60. Asser, Life of King Alfred, ch. 83, ed. W. H. Stevenson, Asser's Life of King Alfred (Oxford, 1904; new impression, 1959), 69;
61. transl. Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, 98.
62. S. Foot, 'The making of Angelcynn: English identity before the Norman Conquest', TRHS, 6th series 6 (1996), 25-49, at 27-37.
63. S. Keynes, 'King Alfred and the Mercians', in Kings, Currency and Alliances: the History and Coinage of Southern England, AD 840-900, ed. M. A. S. Blackburn and D. N. Dumville (Woodbridge, 1998), 1-45, at 24-6;
64. S. Keynes, 'The West Saxon Charters of King Æthelwulf and his Sons', English Historical Review, 109 (1994), 1109-49, at 1147-9.
65. Foot, 'The making of Angelcynn', 28-9 and 35-7;
66. the relevant texts are Bede's Historia ecclesiastica, Orosius, Seven books of histories against the pagans, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. See also A. P. Smyth, 'The Emergence of English Identity, 700-1000', in Medieval Europeans: Studies in Ethnic Identity and National Perspectives in Medieval Europe, ed. Smyth (1998), 24-52, at 39-44;
67. and for historical writing, A. Scharer, 'The Writing of History at King Alfred's Court', Early Medieval Europe, 5 (1996), 177-206.
68. Compare the fabrication of a collective past by the Carolingians, discussed by Innes, 'Memory', 11, and particularly by R. McKitterick, 'Constructing the Past in the Early Middle Ages: the Case of the Royal Frankish Annals', TRHS, 6th series, 7 (1997), 101-29, at 113-17 and 125-9.
69. The Chronicle of Æthelweard, prologue (ed. and transl. A. Campbell, 1962, 1-2): 'in quantum memoria nostra argumentatur et sicut docuere parentes'.
70. Pat Barker, Another World (1998), 84-5.