Writing the Welsh borderlands in Anglo-Saxon England

Lindy Brady

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781784994198
• eBook ISBN: 9781526115751
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This is the first study of the Anglo-Welsh border region in the period before the Norman arrival in England, from the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Its conclusions significantly alter our current picture of Anglo/Welsh relations before the Norman Conquest by overturning the longstanding critical belief that relations between these two peoples during this period were predominately contentious. Writing the Welsh borderlands in Anglo-Saxon England demonstrates that the region which would later become the March of Wales was not a military frontier in Anglo-Saxon England, but a distinctively mixed Anglo-Welsh cultural zone which was depicted as a singular place in contemporary Welsh and Anglo-Saxon texts. This study reveals that the region of the Welsh borderlands was much more culturally coherent, and the impact of the Norman Conquest on it much greater, than has been previously realised.

1

Introduction: the Dunsæte Agreement and daily life in the Welsh borderlands

Sometime in late Anglo-Saxon England, a territory called the Dunsæte was having problems with cattle theft. Men skilled at law from within this community sat down together and drew up a document outlining an agreement that addressed the situation. They thought about what ought to happen in a variety of circumstances. If a man sees the tracks of his stolen cattle leave his own property and cross into his neighbour’s land, who is responsible for following the trail and trying to recover the animals at that point? What type of oath is sufficient to prove someone’s innocence? What is the monetary value of the stolen cattle, or of other commonly pilfered animals such as horses, pigs, sheep or goats? Who in the community should arbitrate between the parties involved in these disputes? (The Dunsæte Agreement refers to man/mon and men, and it seems almost certain that those who wrote it down were men. However, mon can also mean ‘anyone’ and it is clear that the agreement applied to the whole community. If I write about a man tracking down his cattle, that is because it almost always was a man, but women too might have owned cattle and made use of the agreement.)

The types of problem faced by the men who wrote the Dunsæte Agreement were not unusual in early medieval Britain,¹ and neither were most of the solutions they decided upon.² What sets the Dunsæte Agreement apart from other Anglo-Saxon law codes grappling with cattle theft is that the men who created this document, and the community that it concerns, included both Anglo-Saxons and Welsh. The text’s prologue states that ‘Þis is seo gerædnes, þe Angelcynnes witan and Wealhþeode rædboran betweox Dunsetan gesetton’ (this is the agreement which the advisers of the English and the counsellors of the Welsh put in place among the Dunsæte).³

We know nothing about this community apart from the information in the Dunsæte Agreement itself, but the details it reveals are intriguing. The territory of the Dunsæte was centred on a river,⁴ which cattle thieves seem to have been using to their advantage, to judge from the text’s outlining of the proper procedure ‘Gif mon trode bedrifð forstolenes yrfes of stæðe on oðer’ (if a man follows the track of stolen cattle from one riverbank to the other).⁵ We know that the community’s Welsh and Anglo-Saxon inhabitants lived on opposite banks of the river from the proviso that ‘Nah naðer to farenne ne Wyliscman on Ængliscland ne Ænglisc on Wylisc þe ma, butan gesettan landmen, se hine sceal æt stæðe underfon, and eft þær butan facne gebringan’ (a Welshman is not allowed to travel into English territory, nor an Englishman into Welsh territory either, unless men who live in that territory are put in place who will receive him at the bank and bring him back without deceit).⁶ Men living in these English and Welsh districts appear to have had few reservations about colluding with one another in cattle theft, as the document outlines the penalty for ‘ælc þe gewita oððe gewryhta si, þær utlendisc man inlendiscan derie’ (anyone who knows or engages when a stranger harms a native).⁷ Finally, we can narrow down the approximate location of the Dunsæte territory (see Map 1) to the River Wye between Monmouth and Hereford,⁸ from the Agreement’s final clause stating that ‘Hwilon Wentsæte hyrdon into Dunsætan, ac hit gebyreð rihtor into Westsexan’ (at one point the people of Gwent belonged to the Dunsæte, but that territory belongs more rightly to the West Saxons).⁹

The Dunsæte Agreement raises intriguing questions. When so few historical documents from Anglo-Saxon England survive, how can we tell whether the circumstances of this mixed Welsh and Anglo-Saxon community were typical or extraordinary? What was everyday life like in the Dunsæte territory? What language did the ‘Angelcynnes witan and Wealhþeode rædboran’ use to communicate – Old English, Welsh, Latin or a lingua franca? For that matter, what language did they use to draft this document? The Dunsæte Agreement is preserved in one copy in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS, 383, an important early twelfth-century compilation of Anglo-Saxon legal material, and it later became one of the many Old English legal documents translated into Latin as part of the Quadripartitus.¹⁰ Could there have been an original Latin copy of the Dunsæte Agreement, or perhaps a Welsh version parallel to the Old English? The Agreement describes how ‘XII lahmen scylon riht tæcean Wealan and Ænglan, VI Engliscne and VI Wylisce’ (twelve lawmen shall proclaim what is just for Welsh and English: six Englishmen and six Welshmen).¹¹ Who were these lahmen? The word is a Scandinavian borrowing known only from this text, although its Latin equivalent, lagemanni, appears in a few legal documents written after 1066.¹² Were they the same people as the ‘Angelcynnes witan and Wealhþeode rædboran’ who drafted the Dunsæte Agreement? It is unclear if the text implies any practical difference between the witan and rædboran – both terms were used throughout the Old English corpus to indicate counsellors, often legal ones, with rædbora glossing jurisperitus.¹³ Could anyone living within the Dunsæte territory be a lahmann, or did these men hold permanent positions as legal advisers to their community?

These fascinating questions lead to deeper observations that challenge modern critical assumptions about the relationship between the Anglo-Saxon and Welsh peoples in early medieval Britain, which has been understood as one of warfare and mutual hostility. The community that we can glimpse through the Dunsæte Agreement is, of course, not a multicultural utopia – cattle theft appears rampant, there is distrust between neighbours, and provisions for the amount of wergild due ‘Gif Wealh Engliscne man ofslea’ (if a Welshman were to slay an Englishman) or vice versa hint at violence far darker than cattle rustling.¹⁴ Yet at the same time, the Dunsæte Agreement reveals a community that worked together to solve its problems, had a system of legal rights and responsibilities for all its members, and possessed a functional level of both linguistic and legal comprehension between its Anglo-Saxon and Welsh inhabitants. Most significantly, even though the surviving text is written in Old English from the perspective of the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of this region, the Dunsæte Agreement reflects complete Anglo-Welsh equality at every turn – its penultimate clause, after laying out the procedure for warranty, takes care to emphasise that ‘Gelice þam Ænglisc sceal Wyliscan rihte wyrcean’ (likewise must an Englishman undertake what is right for a Welshman).¹⁵ The Dunsæte territory was a community where Anglo-Saxons and Welsh lived together, treated one another as equals, and worked together to sustain peace.

This book explores communities in early medieval Britain like the territory of the Dunsæte that were part of a broader region where Anglo-Saxons and Welsh lived in close proximity for hundreds of years. This region has a different story to tell about the relationship between these peoples than most historical narratives from the Anglo-Saxon period, which were in large part written by educated elites, at a geographical and temporal remove from the events they described and with the benefit of hindsight. The arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain looks like a military conquest when viewed from the perspective of ninth-century Wessex, where the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was likely begun, or eighth-century Northumbria, where Bede wrote his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum. But for those in the region inhabited by both Welsh and Anglo-Saxons for several centuries – the western territories of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia and the eastern portions of the northern Welsh kingdoms of Gwynedd and Powys – warfare was not a daily reality. Even in those texts that have been understood to exhibit Anglo/Welsh conflict on a broad scale, this region – the Welsh borderlands – can be seen functioning differently.¹⁶

The Dunsæte Agreement illustrates how the Welsh borderlands were different from other Anglo-Saxon and Welsh kingdoms in more ways than their reflection of Anglo-Welsh equality. As Michael Fordham and George Molyneaux have independently argued, this document places a high value on compromise and peacekeeping.¹⁷ In so doing, the Dunsæte Agreement distinguishes itself from contemporary Anglo-Saxon and Welsh law codes, lacking many of their common features. Another strikingly unique feature of this text is its fusion of Anglo-Saxon and Welsh legal customs. In its legal singularity, the Dunsæte Agreement appears most analogous to the post-Conquest Law of the March of Wales, a hybrid system of frontier law. Within the Dunsæte Agreement, we can see some of the qualities that made the Welsh borderlands region distinctive during the Anglo-Saxon period.

The Dunsæte Agreement is an unofficial memorandum of understanding drawn up within a community, not an official royal law code. Nonetheless, its careful emphasis on Anglo-Welsh equality sets this text apart from other contemporary Anglo-Saxon legal practices.¹⁸ We do not know precisely when the Dunsæte Agreement was written. It has traditionally been dated to the first quarter of the tenth century by Felix Liebermann and most subsequent scholars, but George Molyneaux has recently made a convincing argument for a late tenth- or eleventh-century date instead.¹⁹ Yet despite its origins in the late Anglo-Saxon period, the Dunsæte Agreement shows no evidence of influence by Ine’s laws, even though they were still valid in the tenth century via their preservation in Alfred’s domboc and the Norðleoda laga.²⁰ Ine’s laws are notorious for an ethnically tiered system of wergilds, in which Britons appear to be valued significantly less than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts in social rank. They are most often interpreted as casting the Britons in an ‘inferior social position’, creating a ‘sense of ethnic superiority on the part of the Saxons’ in which ‘the “otherness” of the Britons’ is emphasised ‘in order to manufacture a more unified West Saxon society’.²¹ The Dunsæte Agreement is unlike contemporary Anglo-Saxon law codes influenced by Ine’s laws in reflecting Anglo-Welsh equality, rather than disparate wergilds based on ethnicity. Indeed, the same holds true from a Welsh perspective, since the legal status of an alltud (alien or foreigner, literally ‘someone of another people’) was likewise distinguished from that of a native.²² The distinctions between ‘foreigners’ and ‘natives’ in other Welsh and Anglo-Saxon law codes and the lack of such differentiation in the Dunsæte Agreement set it outside evident contemporary legal norms.

The Anglo-Welsh equality in the Dunsæte Agreement is also one of several indications that this community placed a higher value on peaceful resolution of conflicts than on reaffirming social status. While it is easy to see how codified inequality like that of Ine’s laws could lead to Anglo/Welsh resentment and conflict, the impartiality of the Dunsæte Agreement underscores the structure of this community as one of equitable coexistence. Further indication that the Dunsæte territory prioritised peacekeeping comes from the Agreement’s ‘deliberately modest’²³ penalties, which are significantly less than those in contemporary Anglo-Saxon and Welsh legal codes. Clause 4 of this document lays out a penalty for a failed defence that by its own admission is lighter than normal: ‘Þeah æt stæltyhtlan lad teorie, Ængliscan oððe Wiliscan, gylde angyldes þæt he mid beled wæs. Þæs oðres gyldes nan þing, ne þæs wites þe ma’ (Even when a defence against a charge of theft should fail, for an Englishman or for a Welshman, let him pay a single compensation for what he was charged with; there should be no additional payment at all, nor a penalty either).²⁴ The penalty for killing someone is also lighter than usual, regardless of the victim’s ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of maps
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: the Dunsæte Agreement and daily life in the Welsh borderlands
• 2 Penda of Mercia and the Welsh borderlands in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica
• 3 The Welsh borderlands in the Lives of St Guthlac
• 4 The ‘dark Welsh’ as slaves and slave raiders in Exeter Book riddles 52 and 72
• 5 The Welsh borderlands in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
• 6 The transformation of the borderlands outlaw in the eleventh century
• 7 Conclusion: Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon in the Welsh borderlands
• Bibliography
• Index