The Punishment Fits the Crime: Ownership, Gift-Giving, and Theft in Anglo-Saxon England

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The Punishment Fits the Crime: Ownership, Gift-Giving, and Theft in Anglo-Saxon England Western Michigan University ScholarWorks at WMU Master's Theses Graduate College 4-2008 The Punishment Fits the Crime: Ownership, Gift-Giving, and Theft in Anglo-Saxon England Jill Diane Hamilton Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/masters_theses Part of the Medieval Studies Commons Recommended Citation Hamilton, Jill Diane, "The Punishment Fits the Crime: Ownership, Gift-Giving, and Theft in Anglo-Saxon England" (2008). Master's Theses. 4148. https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/masters_theses/4148 This Masters Thesis-Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate College at ScholarWorks at WMU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master's Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at WMU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE PUNISHMENT FITS THE CRIME: OWNERSHIP, GIFT-GIVING, AND THEFT IN ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND by Jill Diane Hamilton • A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate College in partial fulfillmentof the requirements forthe Degree of Master of Arts The Medieval Institute WesternMichigan University Kalamazoo, Michigan April 2008 © 2008 Jill Diane Hamilton ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project began as a paper forthe Spring 2006 Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies Graduate Consortium Seminar, taught by Dr. Jana Schulman. I am indebted to Dr. Schulman for her time, guidance, and her contagious interest in Germanic laws and literatures. I would also like to thank the members of my committee, Dr. Robert Berkhofer and Prof. Paul E. Szarmach, for taking the time to review my work, as well as Dr. Andrew Rabin for his helpfulremarks as this project took shape. I am also grateful for the support of my peers who read multiple drafts and offered their insight on everything from the methodology to my translations of primary texts. In particular, I would like to thank Jason M. Clements, who provided invaluable encouragement as a sounding board from start to finish. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, whose love and support made this project possible. Jill Diane Hamilton 11 THE PUNISHMENT FITS THE CRIME: OWNERSHIP, GIFT-GIVINQ, AND.THEFT IN ANGLO-SAXONENGLAND Jill Diane Hamilton, M.A. WesternMichigan University, 2008 From the calls forthe execution of thieves in the Anglo-Saxon laws to the thrall's fateful pilfering of the dragon's cup in Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon textual corpus is far fromsilent on the problem and consequences of theft. The factthat theftis both the most frequentlymentioned crime in the laws and one of the fewpunishable by death forcesus to question the impact of illegal taking in Anglo-Saxon culture. Drawing on legal and literary evidence, including heroic and didactic poetry and homiletic texts, this study offers an explanation forthe Anglo-Saxon preoccupation with theft. I argue that the severe punishment of thieves in the Anglo-Saxon laws is the direct result of the cultural weight of theft'stwo-fold opposite: ownership and gift-giving. In a material culture such as that of Anglo-Saxon England, the right to possess an object affords one both economic power-that is, to use, trade, or barter one's possessions-as well as social potential-that is, to give away goods as giftsand thus establish a bond with the receiver. By removing goods without the owner's consent, the thief jeopardizes the owner's prerogatives and thereby commits an offenseserious enough to warrant his death. The laws of the Anglo-Saxons demonstrate, the importance of ownership to both king and commoner alike by allowing and even encouraging the execution of thieves throughout the Anglo-Saxon period. TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...................................................................................... n CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................ 1 II. THE IMPORTANCE OF OWNERSHIP AND GIFT-GIVING IN ANGLO-SAXON SOCIETY............ :................................................... 11 III. THEFT AND ITS PUNISHMENTIN THE LAWS OF THE ANGLO-SAXONS·····················:········�················································ 44 IV. THEFT AND ITS REPERCUSSIONS IN ANGLO-SAXON POETRY AND HOMILIES .............................................................. ;.. 88 V. CONCLUSION..................................................................................... 120 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..... �............................................................... ;............................. 130 111 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION In a 2005 study of medieval law and literature in Ireland and Wales, Robin Chapman Stacey remarks that "One of the most interesting trends in contemporary legal scholarship has been the increasing tendency of specialists to treat law and literature as 1 related, or even inter-related, genres." The popularity of such "law ands" has emerged · fromthe view that studying the law in tandem with other disciplines and genres will provide freshapproaches to both ancient and modem law-producing cultures. This popularity is visible in both the recent interdisciplinary research of legal scholars as well 2 as the curricular requirements of well-rounded law students. The Law and Literature . branch of this larger movement has generated an ongoing debate among scholars regarding the ideological correlation between law and literature and how one reads these two textual genres side-by-side. The debate centers on such questions as: Are legal and literary texts both narrative sources? Can literary theories and methodologies be appropriately applied to laws? Does law lack a sense of "humanity" that literature fulfills?3 For those scholars studying the Middle Ages-especially early medievai cultures, where the textual sources are both limited and less confidentlydated-such questions are critical �ince the laws are oftenamong the body of written sources that have 1 Robin Chapman Stacey, "Law and Literature in Medieval Ireland and Wales," Medieval Celtic Literature and Society(Dublin: Four Courts, 2005) 65. 2 Jane Baron, "Law, Literature, and the Problems oflnterdisciplinarity," Yale Law Journal 108.5 (1999): 1059-85. 3 Baron notes that one of themore sensitive trends in the "law-and-literature enterprise" holds that "literature is a source of values otherwise missing fromthe law" (1078). 2 survived the centuries. Chapman observes that medievalists joining this conversation about law and literature are in some cases drawing on literature to enlarge their understanding of practices glimpsed only dimly in the legal documents, in others using law to resolve cruxes of plot or motivation. To date, their studies have been predicated on the idea that law and literature share a common cultural background and can thereforebe used to elucidate or expand upon one another.4 Working fromthis notion of a "common cultural background," the present study reads medieval laws alongside contemporary literary texts in order to understand better certain aspects of the community that collectively produced these writings. This research uses · texts froman exclusive geographic region (England) and period of time ( ca. 500 CE to 1066 CE) in order to expand our present understanding of specificcultural concepts (theft,ownership, and gift-giving)that are amply treated in each textual genre. When examined side-by-side, these medieval texts are forthe modern researcher mutual cultural informants regarding the deeply-rooted value and defenseof material culture in Anglo­ Saxon society. In essence, these texts reveal the public concernsand troubles of the Anglo-Saxons as well as their long-held values., including the significance of object ownership and transfer as a cornerstoneof their social relationships. According to the corpus of extant legal texts, the Anglo-Saxons reserved capital punishment forcrimes considered heinous enough to require the elimination of the perpetrator fromsociety. Generally speaking, these crimes were limited to cases of treason, fightingor drawing a sword in the king's house, absconding frompenal slavery, practicing witchcraftor sorcery, wandering offthe highway unannounced, and, finally, involvement in theft-including the thief himself and, in some cases, anyone who 4 Stacey 65. 3 harbored, rescued, or avenged him. Not only was theftamong the most severely punished crimes in the laws of the Anglo-Saxons, it was also the most pervasive: as Dorothy Whitelock notes, "theftis the crime that occupies the biggest place in the codes."5 Moreover, the laws are not the only texts that demonstrate the overt concern in the Anglo-Saxon mind regarding theft: fromthe gnomic "Maxims" to the thrall's ill-fated theftof the dragon's cup in Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon literary corpus is far fromsilent on the subject and consequences of theft. Based on its recurrence in these texts, theftis a major theme in both the laws and the literature of the Anglo-Saxons. The aim of my research is to explore a possible reason forthe Anglo-Saxons' emphasis on, or perhaps their preoccupation with, theftand its punishment. I argue that the concernfor theft demonstrated in both the volume and severity of the laws is the direct result of the cultural weight of theft'stwo-fold opposite: ownership and gift-giving. Theftis essentially a violation of ownership: a thief takes that which is neither in . his possession nor bestowed upon him voluntarily. As one of the few crimes deserving of capital punishment in Anglo-Saxon law, theft forcesus to question both the social and economic impact of all acts that undermine the ownership
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