Pledges and Agreements in Old English a Semantic Field Study

Pledges and Agreements in Old English A Semantic Field Study Matthias Ammon Robinson College 29/10/10 This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration except where specifically indicated in the text. The dissertation does not exceed the word limit for the Degree Committee of the Faculty of English. Pledges and Agreements in Old English – A Semantic Field Study Matthias Ammon This dissertation investigates the Old English word field for the concepts of ‘pledges’ and agreements by analysing the words belonging to the field in their contextual environments. The particular focus is on the word wedd (‘pledge’), which is shown to have different connotations in different text types. The main subject of the study is the corpus of Anglo-Saxon legal texts in which pledges played an important part. Pledges occur in collocation with concepts such as oaths (að ) and sureties ( borg ), but there are important differences in function and linguistic usage between the terms. One important aspect of the language of pledging is the formulaic word pair að and wedd which comes to stand for the entirety of legal interactions, as no single word for ‘legal agreement’ is used by authors of legal prose. Possibly in part influenced by this development, the meaning of wedd , which originally denoted an object given as a pledge, becomes more abstract. The study further argues that this development is facilitated by the influence of Christianity. Old English words were required to express unfamiliar aspects of the new religion. I analyse words used to translate biblical covenants in detail. Because of its specifically legal overtones, wedd was employed by Anglo-Saxon translators and commentators to take on the functions of Latin words with a wider range of meaning, such as foedus or pactum . In its narrower sense wedd is important in the theology of sacraments. I show that the Eucharist and baptism are modelled on types of pledges from the legal social world that would have been familiar to Anglo-Saxon homilists and their audience. That this is a conscious decision on the part of Anglo-Saxon authors is indicated by the fact that this aspect is often added to their adaptations of orthodox Latin sources. An analysis of pledging in Old English poetry shows that wedd was rarely used by Anglo-Saxon poets, even in the adaptation of biblical texts which were shown to employ wedd as a deliberate lexical choice in their prose versions. In poetry, the equivalent term is wær (‘agreement’ or ‘treaty’). I argue that this difference can be explained by the fact that wedd was a technical term, belonging to the register of legal language, where wær never occurs. It is argued that wedd , possibly because of its legal connotations, was not a common word for Old English poets and is only used occasionally, mostly for purposes of poetic variation. I suggest that this is connected to the early date of some of the poems and to the traditional and possibly slightly archaic nature of Old English poetic language. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements i Abbreviations and Conventions ii Chapter 1: Introduction and Methodology 1 Aims 1 Theoretical background and previous scholarship 2 Chapter 2: Pledges in Anglo-Saxon Legal Prose 18 Part I: The law-codes – a chronological survey 18 The kings of Kent 21 Ine and Alfred 26 The tenth century 35 The Promissio Regis 46 Æthelred and Cnut 47 Anonymous codes 53 Part II: Pledges in charters, wills and chronicles 56 Pledges in word pairs 59 Confirmation through pledges 65 Chapter 3: Pledges and Covenants in Religious Prose 75 Wedd in glosses and translations 76 Wedd in translations of the Old Testament 86 Pledges in homilies 92 The Eucharist and baptism 92 Other uses of pledges 102 Conclusion 108 Chapter 4: Pledges in Old English Poetry 111 Conclusion 130 Bibliography 136 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My biggest thanks are due to my supervisor, Dr Richard Dance. His patience and good humour greatly helped this thesis on its way to fruition, and his sage advice improved my work in countless ways and saved me from many glaring errors and oversights. I am also grateful to all the staff of the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic who so successfully create an atmosphere of academic camaraderie and learning in the spirit of which this work is intended. I should also like to record my gratitude to Robinson College, my home in Cambridge for eight years, for financial support and the collegiality I found inside its brick walls. The process of writing would have been much harder without the company and counsel of Levi Roach, friend, academic neighbour and fellow-drinker, who was always more than willing to chat about Anglo-Saxon legal procedure (as well as anything else under the sun) and from whose staggering hoard of bibliographical knowledge I benefited enormously. I am also grateful to Helen Foxhall Forbes, who, like Levi, read a draft of this thesis and offered generous advice on matters Latin and theological. There are a number of people who have not read a word of this thesis but without whom it could not have been written. In place of the large number of people who made the entire experience of being a PhD student in Cambridge so rewarding, I would like to thank Lizzie Boyle, Adam Collins, Paul Gazzoli, Helen Imhoff, Matt Ironside, Debbie Potts and Sandra Samulski for their advice and friendship over the years. Finally, I owe a debt that I will never properly be able to repay to two people without whom I would, quite literally, never have made it to this point. For encouraging intellectual curiosity, for all their support over the years, in ways too numerous to count, and for keeping the faith I say thank you to my mum and dad – this is for them. i ABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS This dissertation follows the ASNC stylesheet, though for the sake of clarity of referencing and consistency I have adapted it in certain parts: thus in Chapter 2 I prioritize the name of the editor over the title of the primary source in footnotes, as references to texts are usually made in the main body. I have also indented a number of quotations shorter than the recommended 60 words. The discussion of these examples forms the main part of the study, so I felt it would be convenient for the reader to set them apart from the main text. Since the stylesheet was designed primarily with historical scholarship in mind, and this dissertation is a philological and linguistic investigation, some changes have been necessary but I have endeavoured to stay true to its spirit. Abbreviated references to Anglo-Saxon law-codes follow the conventions established by Liebermann, Gesetze der Angelsachsen I, ix–x. To improve readability, I have used H&E to refer to the law-code of Hloþhere and Eadric. For ease of discussion and reference, Old English words are given in their late West Saxon, i.e. standard dictionary, form unless explicitly stated otherwise. Words in capital letters denote word fields. In longer Old English quotations, I have highlighted words of interest in bold. All Latin quotations from the Bible refer to the Vulgate: Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam versionem , ed. R. Weber et al., 5th ed. (Stuttgart, 2007). Unless otherwise specified, all translations are my own, though I have of course taken into account previous translations. I have tried to keep the translations as literal as possible, though for the sake of comprehensibility some allowances had to be made. Abbreviations ASC Anglo-Saxon Chronicle BCS (with number Birch, Cartularium Saxonicum of document) BT Bosworth, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary , ed. Toller DOE Dictionary of Old English , ed. Healey ii MED Middle English Dictionary , ed. Kurath et al. ON Old Norse S (with number Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters of document) TOE Roberts et al., Thesaurus of Old English iii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION AND METHODOLOGY Aims The aim of this thesis is to analyse the Old English word field for concepts such as ‘pledges’ and ‘agreements’. In order to achieve this, this study was originally conceived as primarily lexicological, incorporating aspects of both semasiology and onomasiology. As will be detailed in the introductory remarks, it has been necessary to adapt previous methodologies used in lexical semantics for the purposes of the investigation. The approach taken might best be described as contextual analysis, as the main focus is on detailed analysis of occurrences of PLEDGE words throughout the corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature. The words are first analysed in their immediate syntactic and semantic context, taking into account date, text type and originality (that is whether a text in which a PLEDGE word occurs is derived or translated from another source). Through this, a range of collocations will be established which lead to a wider analysis of the word field. ‘Collocations’ is meant to have as broad a meaning as possible: it subsumes other words of the word field (established through linguistic and extralinguistic factors of similarity), as well as other lexical items, in particular verbs, that are commonly used in relation to PLEDGE words. In addition to an analysis of what one might call the linguistic environment of the words investigated, contextual analysis includes a consideration of the literary and historical aspects of PLEDGE words and their occurrences. This is difficult to quantify in theoretical terms but an essential part of the methodology employed and, I believe, fundamentally necessary for a study of a word field based on a comparatively limited corpus of writings in a language which does not allow access to contemporary native speakers.

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