Myth, Rulership, Church and Charters

Essays in Honour of Nicholas Brooks

Andrew Wareham, Julia Barrow, Julia Barrow

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351916066
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Histoire
• Categoria: Histoire du monde

For more than forty years Nicholas Brooks has been at the forefront of research into early medieval Britain. In order to honour the achievements of one of the leading figures in Anglo-Saxon studies, this volume brings together essays by an internationally renowned group of scholars on four themes that the honorand has made his own: myths, rulership, church and charters. Myth and rulership are addressed in articles on the early history of Wessex, Æthelflæd of Mercia and the battle of Brunanburh; contributions concerned with charters explore the means for locating those hitherto lost, the use of charters in the study of place-names, their role as instruments of agricultural improvement, and the reasons for the decline in their output immediately after the Norman Conquest. Nicholas Brooks's long-standing interest in the church of Canterbury is reflected in articles on the Kentish minster of Reculver, which became a dependency of the church of Canterbury, on the role of early tenth-century archbishops in developing coronation ritual, and on the presentation of Archbishop Dunstan as a prophet. Other contributions provide case studies of saints' cults with regional and international dimensions, examining a mass for St Birinus and dedications to St Clement, while several contributions take a wider perspective, looking at later interpretations of the Anglo-Saxon past, both in the Anglo-Norman and more modern periods. This stimulating and wide-ranging collection will be welcomed by the many readers who have benefited from Nicholas Brooks's own work, or who have an interest in the Anglo-Saxon past more generally. It is an outstanding contribution to early medieval studies.

Chapter 1

Introduction Myth, Rulership, Church
and Charters in the Work of
Nicholas Brooks

Julia Barrow

Nicholas Brooks has, for more than 40 years, been reshaping our understanding of the Anglo-Saxons. The four principal themes of this book, myth, rulership, the Church and charters, are all central to his scholarship and all represent areas within which he has been able to open up new lines of enquiry and to establish new bases of knowledge. The aim of this introduction is to provide an overview of Nicholas’ contribution to each of these four themes and to link this up with the papers which follow, showing how he has inspired and influenced his friends and pupils.

Myth, our opening theme, was not one of Nicholas’ earliest interests, but had become one of his areas of study by the mid-1980s, by the time he moved from St Andrews to take up the chair of Medieval History at Birmingham.¹ For a scholar whose work has been rooted in the history of Kent and its early kingdom, the issue of the creation and development of myth was inescapable: Hengist, Horsa and Vortigern occur in many different sources and an important task for historians of early Kent is to confront them.² Nicholas’ solution was to work out the development of the myth from the differences appearing in each retelling of the story, leading him to suggest that the original story could have been invented for Æthelberht of Kent to bolster the identity of his kingdom and give his ancestry a much longer and grander past than those of contemporary Anglo-Saxon dynasties.³ In providing a pair of adventurous brothers as the co-founders of the kingdom of Kent, the creator of the myth made use of a widely-found motif in Indo-European origin myths and, by naming them ‘Stallion’ and ‘Horse’, linked them up with the cult of Woden, in which horses seem to have played a role.⁴ In this collection of essays Barbara Yorke makes use of this approach to re-examine all the Anglo-Saxon origin myths to see if further light can be shed on the circumstances of their production, and she also surveys burial evidence to show how that, too, allowed those who buried the dead to make statements about their identity.⁵

Nicholas’ earliest published comments about myth are to be found in his inaugural lecture at Birmingham, given in 1986: at the start of this he referred to the thesis of his predecessor at Birmingham, R.H.C. Davis, that the Normans deliberately created a myth to give themselves an identity, and proceeded to illuminate this with an insight from one of his own areas of study, the iconography of warriors in the Bayeux Tapestry. The Normans shaved the backs of their heads in a conscious attempt to look different from their neighbours.⁶ Norman identity was the subject undertaken by Nicholas’ pupil Nick Webber for his doctoral thesis;⁷ his paper in this volume deals with the role of England in the Norman myth, and shows that although England occurs frequently in the narrative of Norman history from the time of Dudo of St-Quentin onwards, it was not ‘incorporated into Normannitas’ until the twelfth century.⁸

Anglo-Saxon kingship, of which origin myth was a vital component, has been one of Nicholas Brooks’ main areas of research from the outset. In particular it is the range of resources available to Anglo-Saxon rulers and the ways in which they could enforce demands for these on their subjects that have aroused his interest: above all the three ‘common burdens’ of fortresses, bridges and army service. Already in 1964 Nicholas had begun to work on the identification of the forts of the Burghal Hidage;⁹ much more recently, for a Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies conference on ‘The Defence of Wessex’ (published in 1996), he returned to the subject to explore the administrative problems faced by Alfred and his successor in setting up the system.¹⁰ These were also problems for Alfred’s daughter Æthelflæd in the West Midlands in the early tenth century, the subject of Pauline Stafford’s article below, on which more shortly.¹¹ More generally on the topic of Anglo-Saxon reactions to Viking attacks in the ninth century, in 1978 Nicholas delivered a powerful rebuttal of Peter Sawyer’s thesis that the size of Scandinavian fleets and armies in the ninth century had been greatly exaggerated by contemporary chroniclers and subsequent generations of historians: rather, as Nicholas demonstrated, the smaller Viking fleets of the earlier ninth century had amalgamated to form the large fleet carrying the ‘Great Army’, leaving most of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms unable to cope.¹²

The second of the three common burdens, bridge-building, became one of Nicholas’ interests rather more recently, when he was invited to contribute to a volume on the history of Rochester Bridge (published in 1993). Here a charitable trust founded in the late fourteenth century took over the task of building and maintaining a bridge which earlier in the middle ages had been a responsibility shared out among local landowners; a document copied into the twelfth-century Textus Roffensis explains how manpower was organised in the Anglo-Saxon period to work on each of the piers.¹³ From the Medway, Nicholas’ bridge-inspecting remit has extended across Europe to other examples of bridges with ancient pasts and continuity of use.¹⁴ In this volume, Barbara Crawford examines the significance of the cult of St Clement to comment on the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman fear of dangerous river-crossings: at Pontefract (as its name suggests, a ‘broken’ and thus a failed bridge in a part of England where Anglo-Saxon royal administration was markedly less efficient than it was in the area south of the Humber) a dedication to Clement may reveal William the Conqueror’s gratitude for a successful passage over the River Aire.¹⁵

The last of the three common burdens, army service, has been a particular interest of Nicholas throughout his academic career. Nicholas’ interest in armour and weapons was aroused when he was a pupil at Winchester College. Together with his history teacher at Winchester, H.E. Walker, he explored the evidence of the Bayeux Tapestry for body armour and weapons, in the process comparing the portrayal of Anglo-Saxon byrnies in the Tapestry with a fragment of relief sculpture, probably dating to the reign of Cnut, from Old Minster, Winchester, and this was published in an early volume of the proceedings of the Battle Conference on Anglo-Norman Studies.¹⁶ Also in the late 1970s, through analysis of heriots recorded in wills and those stipulated in law codes, he was able to show that Æthelred greatly increased the quantity of military equipment that earls, bishops and king’s thegns were expected to provide;¹⁷ subsequently, in the millenary volume for the Battle of Maldon, he provided an explanation for this – references to Anglo-Saxon weapons and armour in the Battle of Maldon suggest that the Anglo-Saxons were ill-equipped, and above all ill-protected, and it was probably as a delayed reaction to this that Æthelred insisted in the early eleventh century that the higher-ranking members of the Anglo-Saxon forces should own helmets.¹⁸ The study of heriots is only one of several areas (bridges form another) in which Nicholas has pointed to closely contemporary parallel developments across in Europe;¹⁹ similarly he has always encouraged his pupils to look at Anglo-Saxon developments within a comparative European framework.²⁰

More generally on the three common burdens it is to Nicholas that we owe a full understanding of the significance of the charter issued by Æthelbald of Mercia at the Synod of Gumley in 749, the earliest Anglo-Saxon charter to reserve a king’s right to the common burdens even when granting immunity from other duties to churches: thanks to Nicholas we can see that Offa introduced the three common burdens into Kentish charters once he had finally taken power in Kent and then, in the ninth century, the system was adopted by the kings of Wessex, some time after they in their turn had brought Kent under their rule, once they recognised the necessity of building fortifications.²¹ Discussion of the theme of the three common burdens has an ancient history and Jame...