Nobility in Pre-Norman England. the Evolution and Transformation of the Thengly Class, 900-1066
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Nobility in pre-Norman England. The evolution and transformation of the thengly class, 900-1066. The study of the role of aristocracy in Anglo-Saxon society has a long and rich ongoing tradition, the roots of which can be traced back into the 19th century. Alongside general trends in medieval history, the strong, undiminishing interest can be explained by prevalence of a certain class of nobility throughout the whole Anglo-Saxon period. Though changing names, this stra- tum never left the historic arena. Scholars agree that Anglo-Saxon society was never static, but by a unanimous consensus, self-understanding as a being composed of ‘noblemen’ versus ‘com- moners’ was its inherent feature. Hence, no work, be it strictly academic or more accessible, that touches this problem, can avoid a chapter, that has, typically, King Alfred’s alliterated phrase ge ceorle, ge eorle (‘the highborn and the lowborn’) in its title (Alfred, 4,2). Early essays on this problem, as a part of wider projects, appeared as early as the 19th century. Following the general enthusiasm for social studies, the major fields in that time were those of Constitutional History (formulated by Sir W. Stubbs) and agrarian history, but both em- ployed nobility as an important argument for one standpoint or the other. This can be revealed, for instance, by the classical dispute between ‘romanists’ and ‘germanists’ and the most famous representative of the latter, F. Seebohm, who argued for the existence of a manor among Ger- manic tribes in the age of Tacitus1. 20th century historians also researched the topic of Anglo-Saxon nobility. Such famed scholars as F. Stenton, E. John, H. Loyn defined the very nature of the Anglo-Saxon state as ‘aristocratic’, following the idea of a class of military nobility, deliberately created by Germanic kings.2 The next generation, represented by such respectable historians as D. Whitelock, P. Blair, H. Richardson, paid special attention to the role of the aristocracy in local government and to the formation of feudalism in England.3 From the 60’s onward, more narrow topics, such as the po- litical, military and economic functions of noblemen, were approached. A major research by S. Keynes, ‘The diplomas of King Aethelred 'The Unready' 978-1016: A study in their use as historical evidence’ (1980), was an important milestone among other works of the second half of the 20th century.4 It is noteworthy that in the centre of the most studies so far there used to stand the role of the thegns in political structures of the time. The enquiry below is a claim for a short, but comprehensive examination of the position of the so-called ‘thegns’ (OE þegn, ‘a servant’) in late Anglo-Saxon society, with a special atten- tion to the emergence and development of this social group in time. The chronological period examined commences in 899 with the death of King Alfred and concludes in 1066 with the notorious Battle of Hastings. Alfred’s immediate successors repelled the Scandinavian threat, emerged in the previous century, thus gradually uniting the country un- der their sceptre by 954 with the annexation of the Viking kingdom of York and securing peace for the following three decades in the newly formed Englalond. With the death of king Edgar in 975, the murder of his elder son, Edward the Martyr, and the accession to the throne of his 1 See: Seebohm F. The English village community. London, 1883. 2 See: Stenton F.M. Anglo-Saxon England. Oxford, 1942; John E. Land tenure in early England. Leicester, 1960; Loyn H.R. Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest. London, 1970, et. al. 3 Richardson H.G., Sayles G.O. The governance in medieval England. Edinburgh, 1963; Blair P.H. An introduction to Anglo-Saxon England. Cabridge, 1956; Whitelock D. The Beginnings of English society. Baltimore, 1952, et al. 4 Due to the format of the current work, only a short abstract of relevant literature was included. The actual amount of bibliography, touching the thegnly class, is much larger. 1 younger, Æthelred, there soon started a period of a deep decay, caused by the second wave of Viking raids in c. 980-1016, culminating in a full-scale conquest by King Swein the Forkbeard and his son, Cnut. The last fifty years before the Battle of Hastings saw a continuous crisis of the throne succession, concluded by the restoration of the West Saxon dynasty, but at the same time these events were not that harmful for the majority of the population. This relatively peaceful period was then interrupted by the destructive Norman invasion and the irreversible end of the Anglo-Saxon age.1 According to the long-established view of thegns in earlier historiography, during the pre- Alfredian period, the elite of the early Anglo-Saxon society was referred to as gesiths, a conclu- sively presumed synonym of thegns, and denoted noblemen, whose weregild2 exceeded that of a commoner (ceorl) by six times: 1200 shillings against 200. Yet by the 9th century, due to its ar- chaism, the word gesith went out of use, and the term thegn replaced it for the same social group from then on. This concept originates from ‘Studies on Anglo-Saxon Institutions’ by H. Chadwick3. It is also widely accepted that any free holder of five hides4 was awarded the rank of a thegn. However, this view seems to be a generalized perspective, composed of uneven and in- consistent sources. Many authors tend to mix up pieces of evidence from different periods and geographical regions, thus creating a synthetic and anachronistic portrait of an ‘average thegn’, because throughout the whole Anglo-Saxon age, the country had never reached a monolithic po- litical entity, and, even after the uniting by West Saxon monarchs, there remained strong local features, which varied from region to region and prevailed as late as the early 12th century.5 Moreover, in the case of Danelaw, we have to deal with a synthesis of Anglo-Saxon and Scandi- navian institutions. To better understand the complex process of the evolution of the thegnly class, we need to turn to thegns’ position in the pre-Alfredian age, thoroughly examined by H.R. Loyn on the evident material of narrative sources.6 He revealed that despite the disappearance of the word gesith from legal lexicon by the reign of King Alfred,7 it still occured in Anglo-Saxon transla- tions of Latin works alongside with the term thegn. By gesiths translators usually denoted aristo- crats, more or less independent of the royal authority and in some cases even able to oppose it; a thegn in their interpretation was a servant of a free origin of any kind, and if such person found himself in the service of a king, he was usually a closer member of his retinue than a gesith. Loyn didn’t express himself explicitly, why the word gesith went out of use, but his observations 1 For regnal dates and genealogical support, see Fig. 9. 2 A weregild was a fine for murder, widely spread among Germanic peoples throughout Europe during the Dark Ages. 3 Chadwick H.M. Studies on Anglo-Saxon Institutions. Cambridge, 1905. P. 325–326. 4 A hide (hida or rarely hiwisc) was a measure of land in Wessex, supposed to be enough to provide for one family during a year, depending on soil’s fertility; it could vary from 40 to 120 acres. See: Charles-Edwards T.M. Kinship, Status and the Origins of the Hide // Past & Present. 1972. №. 56. P. 5. 5 Campbell J. Observations on English Government from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century // Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, (Fifth Series). 1975. Vol. 25. P. 43; Runciman W. G. Accelerating Social Mobility – The Case of Anglo-Saxon England // Past & Present. 1984. № 104. P. 7. 6 Loyn H.R. The Term Ealdorman in the Translations Prepared at the Time of King Alfred // The English Historical Review. 1953. Vol. 68. №. 269 PP. 513-525; Gesiths and Thegns in Anglo-Saxon England from the Seventh to the Tenth Century // The English Historical Review. 1955. Vol. 70. №277. P. 529–549. 7 With the only exception of Norðleoda lagu (see below). 2 incline us to think that gesiths ceased to exist as a social group due to the Viking invasion of the 9th century and ‘the revival of West Saxon monarchy’1. The royal legislation of the 10th century reveals a significant change to thegns as a social stratum at the time. Prior to any thorough analysis of this process, a short exposition and critics of our source must be proposed. To the present day we have a massive corpus of Anglo-Saxon laws, written in vernacular or translated into Latin, and preserved in approximately 80 extant texts before 1200, two of which particularly stand out as the most complete: the Textus Rofensis and the Cambridge, Cor- pus Christi College 383. These compilations cover most of the Dark Ages, with the earliest law code coming from King Æthelbert of Kent (602) and the latest – from King Cnut (c. 1027- 1034).2 Aside from these, there has been preserved a collection of non-royal codes, recorded in the first quarter of the 11th century and commonly associated with the voluminous literary herit- age of archbishop Wulfstan of York (1002-1023).3 Nevertheless, the vast majority of these sources correspond only with the last 150 years before the Conquest, which means that though records of thegns in legal materials are numerous (51 over the whole period), their distribution in time is far from even: 40% of them originate from non-royal legislation, and that 2/3 of such records in royal codes derive from the latest period (978-1066).