Germanic power structures: The early english experience

Power and the Nation in European History

Volumn , Issue , 2005, Pages 105-124

  Wormald, Patrick ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84922356487     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511614538.005     Document Type: Chapter

References (52)

1. It would of course be fatuous to try to cite all the innumerable studies of this theme, especially since the 1980s, which is why these notes are largely restricted to References required by the text or to other work of mine addressing these problems and their literature. I must here acknowledge an abiding debt to Professor James Campbell: especially-but far from exclusively-to his ‘Observations on English government from the tenth to the twelfth century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th ser. 25 (1975), 39-54, repr. in his Essays in Anglo-Saxon History (London: Hambledon, 1986), pp. 155-70; and latterly his ‘The late Anglo-Saxon state: a maximum view’, Proceedings of the British Academy 87 (1994), 39-65, repr. in his The Anglo-Saxon State (London: Hambledon, 2000), pp. 1-30. I must also gratefully recognise the help-and patience-of my editors and fellow-contributors, in particular Dr Susan Reynolds, to whom this essay is respectfully and affectionately dedicated.
2. M. Foucault, ‘The subject and power’, Critical Inquiry 8 (1982), 777-95
3. M. Foucault and in general, ‘Two lectures’, in Power/Knowledge, tr. C. Gordon (Brighton: Harvester, 1980), pp. 78-108, with Gordon’s ‘Afterword’, pp. 233-6.
4. The breakthrough study (anyway for me) was the magisterial work of F. Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World (31 BC-AD 337) (London: Duckworth, 1977).
5. I remember Denis Mack Smith telling a group of young Balliol idealists in the summer of 1968 (of all years) that the Mezzogiorno supported the existence of an Italian state because government service was its main employer: corruption itself creates a stake in government. The seminal inspiration, as for so much twentieth-century historiography (mine included), was of course Max Weber: e.g. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, tr. A. M. Henderson and T. Parsons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947).
6. W. Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England in its Origin and Development (revised edn, 3 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1880)
7. H. M. Chadwick, The Heroic Age (Cambridge University Press, 1912)
8. F. M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England (3rd edn, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
9. This defect is the target of my The Making of English Law. King Alfred to the Twelfth CenturyI (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999).
10. D. Scragg (ed.), The Battle of Maldon AD 991 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), with authoritative ‘facsimile’, text and translation by Professor Scragg, pp. 2-36; and further discussion of historical themes in J. Cooper (ed.), The Battle of Maldon. Fiction and Fact (London: Hambledon, 1993), particularly by Professor Campbell, ‘England c. 991’, pp. 1-17 (repr. Campbell, Anglo-Saxon State, pp. 157-78).
11. Most glowing illustration, perhaps, J. Backhouse et al. (eds.), The Golden Age of Anglo-Saxon Art (London: British Museum, 1984), pl. 4, no. 26, p. 47.
12. I discuss this episode and its implications in ‘In search of King Offa’s “lawcode”’, in my Legal Culture in the Early Medieval West (London: Hambledon, 1999), pp. 201-23
13. J. Nelson, ‘The earliest surviving royal Ordo: some liturgical and historical aspects’, in her Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe (London: Hambledon, 1986), pp. 341-60
14. C. Cubitt, Anglo-Saxon Church Councils c. 650-c. 850, Studies in the Early History of Britain (London: Leicester University Press, 1995), ch. 6.
15. Wormald, Making of English Law, pp. 445-8.
16. K. Leyser, Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society. Ottonian Saxony (London: Edward Arnold, 1979), pp. 77-107, at p. 105, and
17. K. Leyser, ‘Ottonian government’, English Historical Review 96 (1981), 721-53
18. repr. in his Medieval Germany and its Neighbours (London: Hambledon, 1982), pp. 69-101.
19. The demolition of this model as a government ‘mode’ was the central achievement of Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals (Oxford University Press, 1994).
20. This much at least may be adduced from the emergent critique of the hitherto prevalent ‘dislocated pagus’ model: D. Barthe´lemy, La mutation de l’an mil a-telle eu lieu? (Paris: Fayard, 1997); see also n. 40.
21. M. Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard (eds.), African Political Systems (Oxford University Press, 1940), pp. 5-6.
22. M. Gluckman, ‘The Kingdom of the Zulu’, pp. 29, 31-2, 33, 34, 38, 46, 54.
23. K. Oberg, ‘The Kingdom of Ankole in Uganda’, pp. 137, 139, 142-3.
24. S. E. Hutchinson, ‘Death, memory and the politics of legitimation: Nuer experiences of the continuing second Sudanese civil war’, in R. Werbner (ed.), Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power (London: Zed Books, 1998), pp. 58-70, gives a broadly very similar account of the now traumatised Nuer, though in less evocative language. I owe this reference to Mr Tom Wormald; and I am also much obliged for generally supportive enlightenment at the symposium itself by Robert Layton. It will thus be evident that I do not entirely share the reservations as to this approach expressed by Professor Patrick Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton University Press, 2003), esp. pp. 157-72.
25. N. Brooks, ‘The development of military obligations in eighth-and ninthcentury England’, in P. Clemoes and K. Hughes (eds.), England Before the Conquest. Studies in Primary Sources Presented to Dorothy Whitelock (Cambridge University Press, 1971), pp. 69-84
26. in his Communities and Warfare 700-1400 (London: Hambledon, 2000), pp. 32-47. Recent work by Professor Brooks, e.g. ‘European medieval bridges: a window onto changing concepts of state power’, Journal of the Haskins Society 7 (1995/7), 11-29
27. also in Brooks, Communities and Warfare, pp. 1-31, in which see pp. 13-21, further opens up these possibilities; and see now his Church, State and Access to Resources in Early Anglo-Saxon England, Brixworth Lectures, 2nd series 2 (2002/3). A most important pointer in this direction is J. Campbell, ‘The age of Arthur’, Studia Hibernica 15 (1975), 177-85, repr. in his Essays in Anglo-Saxon History, pp. 121-30, at pp. 125ff.
28. I refer particularly to a one-day conference held in Oxford’s Institute of Archaeology on 18 March 2000, which I was privileged to chair; its proceedings have been published as A. Pantos and S. Semple (eds.), Assembly Places and Practices in Medieval Europe (Dublin: Four Courts, 2002), and I am especially indebted to the papers by Richard Warner, Elizabeth Fitzpatrick, Stefan Brink, and Timothy Darvill, and by Dr Pantos and Dr. Semple themselves. See also n. 39.
29. K. F. Drew (tr.), The Laws of the Salian Franks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), i, xlvi, pp. 65, 110-11
30. Paul Barnwell’s ‘The Early Frankish mallus: its nature, participants and practices’, in Pantos and Semple (eds.), Assembly Places.
31. See my ‘Introduction’ to S. Airlie, W. Pohl and H. Reimitz (eds.), Der Staat im Früh-und Hochmittelalter. Traditionen, Konzepte, Legitimationen, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters (Vienna: O ¨ sterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2005).
32. The essential introduction to these matters is E. Benveniste (tr. E. Palmer), Indo-European Language and Society (Paris, 1969; Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1973), esp. Bks 2-4; it is written in ‘laymen’s language’, which has not endeared it to the author’s fellow-philologists; it also has an extremely useful etymological index, grouped by language. Professor Colin Renfrew’s celebrated assault on Indo-European notions, Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987), should be compared with J. P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans. Language, Archaeology and Myth (London: Thames & Hudson, 1989).
33. Benveniste, Indo-European Language, pp. 296-8.
34. I am guided here by my old comrade, Professor Michael Prestwich.
35. F. Liebermann (ed.), Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen (3 vols., Halle: Niemeyer, 1903-16), Iii, Wörterbuch, pp. 219-20, s.v.; and note its compounds. Angelþeod was used alongside Angelcynn, especially in the Alfred-period translation of Bede: cf. A. Healy et al. (eds), A Dictionary of Old English (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1992-), fascicule ‘A’, s.v.
36. Folclic glosses publicus, popularis, vulgaris, etc., as may be seen in the ‘F ’ fascicule in the Toronto Dictionary. It is becoming a nostrum that early medieval westerners made no clear distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’; I dissent, not least on etymological grounds, in my Introduction to Airlie et al., Staat in Früh-und Hochmittelalter. 28 I discuss this at further length in ‘Kings and kingship’, in P. Fouracre (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 1 (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
37. Superbly argued out by D. H. Green, The Carolingian Lord (Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 59-401
38. his Language and History in the Early Germanic World (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
39. I discuss this text at length in ‘Giving God and king their due: conflict and its regulation in the early English state’, Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’ alto medioevo 44 (1997), 549-92; repr. in Wormald, Legal Culture, pp. 333-57.
40. W. Davies and P. Fouracre (eds), The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 217-24.
41. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in D. Whitelock (ed.), English Historical Documents, vol. 1, c. 550-1042 (2nd edition, London: Eyre Methuen, 1979), pp. 240-1. For a quite startlingly lurid depiction of such a monster, see P. McGurk et al. (eds), An Eleventh-Century Anglo-Saxon Illustrated Miscellany: BL Cotton Tiberius B.v, Part I, Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile XXI (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1983), f. 87v.
42. Those known as ‘VI Æthelstan’ and the ‘Hundred Ordinance’: best consulted in Whitelock (ed.), English Historical Documents, vol. 1, pp. 423-30; explanation in Wormald, Making of English Law, pp. 296-304, 378-9.
43. The process can be seen at work in the ‘Northamptonshire Geld-Roll’, a post-Conquest document but in Old English and consistently allotting liabilities ‘as was the case in King Edward’s time’: D. C. Douglas (ed.), English Historical Documents, vol. 2, 1042-1189 (2nd edition, London: Eyre Methuen, 1980), pp. 517-20; cf. (very important, if on some medieval details risible) T. Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan (Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 216-17.
44. J. R. Maddicott, ‘The County community and the making of public opinion in fourteenth-century England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th ser. 28 (1978), 27-43, at 29-30
45. P. Wormald, ‘Charters, law and the settlement of disputes in Anglo-Saxon England’, in Davies and Fouracre (eds), Settlement of Disputes, pp. 149-68, at pp. 159-60, repr. Wormald, Legal Culture, pp. 289-311, at p. 301.
46. J. Gillingham, ‘Thegns and knights in eleventh-century England: who was then the gentleman’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th ser. 5 (1995), 129-53;
47. repr. in his The English in the Twelfth Century (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000), pp. 163-85.
48. Note that when the franchise was first established, 499 years before the Great ReformAct, the qualification was lower: Maddicott, ‘County community’, 30.
49. I return to this argument in chapter 10 of Making of English Law, vol. 2.
50. E. A. Thomson, The Early Germans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 41-8: it should be noted that this thoroughly convincing picture of social and political change in a barbarian society through the first centuries BC and AD was the work not of a ‘Germanist’ but of a distinguished Marxist historian.
51. S. Driscoll, ‘The archaeological context of assembly in early medieval Scotland-Scone and its comparanda’; and Barnwell, ‘Early Frankish mallus’, in Pantos and Semple (eds.), Assembly Places. See also my ‘Kings and Kingship’.
52. This is demonstrated as never before by Dr S. Baxter-like Dr Driscoll a pupil from whom I have learned much-in his soon-to-be-published Oxford doctoral dissertation, ‘The Leofwinesons. Power, Property and Patronage in the Early English Kingdom’ (2002).