A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons Read Online Free Page B

The Italian church scholars now at his court presumably led the project, but they themselves had no need of it in their own work – after all, the language of the Church and of their service books, being in Latin, already used the Latin alphabet.
    Why did Æthelberht issue his code? Personal prestige was presumably part of the point. Following the example of other European barbarian kings, he had decided, wrote H.M. Wallace Hadrill, ‘to have his people’s customs written down and attributed to himself’. 10 But, since the Continental laws were in Latin, if these Kentish laws were actually the traditional customs of the people, the use of English rather than Latin surely made it harder for the king and his council to claim authorship. Unsatisfactory as it may be to attribute honourable intentions to any executive or legislature, however ancient, one must consider it a possibility that the king of Kent and his council may have been aiming, in however limited a way, at ‘open government’.
    The code started with provisions dealing with the theft of ecclesiastical property, because, Bede tells us, the king ‘wished to give protection to those whose persons and teachings he had received’. This is followed by compensation to be made for damage to the king’s property or for injury caused in the king’s presence, for instance where he is drinking; then come compensations owing to the higher and lesser ranks of free society: commoner and noble, in the legal jingle from Alfred’s laws ‘ ge ceorl ge eorl ’, ‘both husbandman and noble’. Payments due in compensation for injury are itemized, from limbs to teeth. A large number of clauses deal with the law relating to women and remarriage. Although issued in a council including clerics and recorded in a script and orthography that they may have invented, Æthelberht’s code, apart from the compensation clauses at the top, ‘is best seen as the law of the Cantwara’. 11 For the killing of a freeman payment is made to the king as ‘lord ring’, ‘obviously an ancient term, belonging to a time when payment was made in rings’. 12
    A century later Kent’s lawmakers seem to be contemplating a far heavier role for religion, attempting to enforce infant baptism and Sunday observance. Clause 6 of the code of King Wihtred (d. 725) prescribes the penalty due for a priest so drunk that he cannot perform his duties at baptism. One wonders whether such priests were accommodating their practice to popular religion like those Alcuin protested against: ‘conventicles that leave the church and seek out hillsides where they worship not with prayers but with drinking bouts’. 13 Or was it just a case of wetting the baby’s head in advance? In more general terms, Patrick Wormald, the great authority on Anglo-Saxon law, proposed that with Wihtred the law code is no longer just a record of custom but ‘is becoming an arena for the making of new law’. Wihtred had come to the throne after a period of anarchy set off by raiding campaigns by Cædwalla of Wessex; Ine of Wessex (688–726) is the earliest non-Kentish legislator. Kentish clauses on the punishment of thieves follow similar wording in the two codes and both speak of laws ‘abounding in godly purpose’.
    Structure of society – king, thegns, ealdormen, ceorls, slaves
     
    At this time, warfare was more or less endemic and slave trading was an inevitable by-product; after all, according to Bede, Gregory the Great’s Christian mission to England was conceived in a Roman slave market. About the year 640 an English girl named Balthildis was bought in by the household of Erchinoald, chief minister of the Frankish king, Clovis II. Since the church forbade traffic in Christians, and supposing that the Christian king Clovis observed such niceties, she must have been a pagan and therefore, quite possibly, from Sussex – the conversion of the kingdom was still forty years in the future. Sussex girl or not, Balthildis was, one