Kingship, Legislation and Power in Anglo-Saxon England

Kingship, Legislation and Power in Anglo-Saxon England PDF Author: Gale R. Owen-Crocker
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 184383877X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
The relationship between Anglo-Saxon kingship, law, and the functioning of power is explored via a number of different angles. The essays collected here focus on how Anglo-Saxon royal authority was expressed and disseminated, through laws, delegation, relationships between monarch and Church, and between monarchs at times of multiple kingships and changing power ratios. Specific topics include the importance of kings in consolidating the English "nation"; the development of witnesses as agents of the king's authority; the posthumous power of monarchs; how ceremonial occasions wereused for propaganda reinforcing heirarchic, but mutually beneficial, kingships; the implications of Ine's lawcode; and the language of legislation when English kings were ruling previously independent territories, and the delegation of local rule. The volume also includes a groundbreaking article by Simon Keynes on Anglo-Saxon charters, looking at the origins of written records, the issuing of royal diplomas and the process, circumstances, performance and function of production of records. GALE R. OWEN-CROCKER is Professor of Anglo-Saxon Culture at the University of Manchester. Contributors: Ann Williams, Alexander R. Rumble, Carole Hough, Andrew Rabin, Barbara Yorke, Ryan Lavelle, Alaric Trousdale

Kingship, Legislation and Power in Anglo-Saxon England

Kingship, Legislation and Power in Anglo-Saxon England PDF Author: Gale R. Owen-Crocker
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 184383877X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book Here

Book Description
The relationship between Anglo-Saxon kingship, law, and the functioning of power is explored via a number of different angles. The essays collected here focus on how Anglo-Saxon royal authority was expressed and disseminated, through laws, delegation, relationships between monarch and Church, and between monarchs at times of multiple kingships and changing power ratios. Specific topics include the importance of kings in consolidating the English "nation"; the development of witnesses as agents of the king's authority; the posthumous power of monarchs; how ceremonial occasions wereused for propaganda reinforcing heirarchic, but mutually beneficial, kingships; the implications of Ine's lawcode; and the language of legislation when English kings were ruling previously independent territories, and the delegation of local rule. The volume also includes a groundbreaking article by Simon Keynes on Anglo-Saxon charters, looking at the origins of written records, the issuing of royal diplomas and the process, circumstances, performance and function of production of records. GALE R. OWEN-CROCKER is Professor of Anglo-Saxon Culture at the University of Manchester. Contributors: Ann Williams, Alexander R. Rumble, Carole Hough, Andrew Rabin, Barbara Yorke, Ryan Lavelle, Alaric Trousdale

Kingship and Consent in Anglo-Saxon England, 871-978

Kingship and Consent in Anglo-Saxon England, 871-978 PDF Author: Levi Roach
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107036534
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
This is an engaging study of how kingship and royal government operated in the late Anglo-Saxon period.

Writing, Kingship, and Power in Anglo-Saxon England

Writing, Kingship, and Power in Anglo-Saxon England PDF Author: Rory Naismith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107160979
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
This book brings together new research that represents current scholarship on the nexus between authority and written sources from Anglo-Saxon England. Ranging from the seventh to the eleventh century, the chapters in this volume offer fresh approaches to a wide range of linguistic, historical, legal, diplomatic and palaeographical evidence.

Edgar, King of the English, 959-975

Edgar, King of the English, 959-975 PDF Author: D. G. Scragg
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1843833999
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Fresh assessments of Edgar's reign, reappraising key elements using documentary, coin, and pictorial evidence.

Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England

Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England PDF Author: Tom Lambert
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191089605
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England explores English legal culture and practice across the Anglo-Saxon period, beginning with the essentially pre-Christian laws enshrined in writing by King Æthelberht of Kent in c. 600 and working forward to the Norman Conquest of 1066. It attempts to escape the traditional retrospective assumptions of legal history, focused on the late twelfth-century Common Law, and to establish a new interpretative framework for the subject, more sensitive to contemporary cultural assumptions and practical realities. The focus of the volume is on the maintenance of order: what constituted good order; what forms of wrongdoing were threatening to it; what roles kings, lords, communities, and individuals were expected to play in maintaining it; and how that worked in practice. Its core argument is that the Anglo-Saxons had a coherent, stable, and enduring legal order that lacks modern analogies: it was neither state-like nor stateless, and needs to be understood on its own terms rather than as a variant or hybrid of these models. Tom Lambert elucidates a distinctively early medieval understanding of the tension between the interests of individuals and communities, and a vision of how that tension ought to be managed that, strikingly, treats strongly libertarian and communitarian features as complementary. Potentially violent, honour-focused feuding was an integral aspect of legitimate legal practice throughout the period, but so too was fearsome punishment for forms of wrongdoing judged socially threatening. Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England charts the development of kings' involvement in law, in terms both of their authority to legislate and their ability to influence local practice, presenting a picture of increasingly ambitious and effective royal legal innovation that relied more on the cooperation of local communal assemblies than kings' sparse and patchy network of administrative officials.

The Anglo-Saxon Chancery

The Anglo-Saxon Chancery PDF Author: Ben Snook
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1783270063
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
An exploration of Anglo-Saxon charters, bringing out their complexity and highlighting a range of broad implications.

Crime and Punishment in Anglo-Saxon England

Crime and Punishment in Anglo-Saxon England PDF Author: Andrew Rabin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108944515
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 137

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Book Description
Arguably, more legal texts survive from pre-Conquest England than from any other early medieval European community. The corpus includes roughly seventy royal law-codes, to which can be added well over a thousand charters, writs, and wills, as well as numerous political tracts, formularies, rituals, and homilies derived from legal sources. These texts offer valuable insight into early English concepts of royal authority and political identity. They reveal both the capacities and limits of the king's regulatory power, and in so doing, provide crucial evidence for the process by which disparate kingdoms gradually merged to become a unified English state. More broadly, pre-Norman legal texts shed light on the various ways in which cultural norms were established, enforced, and, in many cases, challenged. And perhaps most importantly, they provide unparalleled insight into the experiences of Anglo-Saxon England's diverse inhabitants, both those who enforced the law and those subject to it.

The Reigns of Edmund, Eadred and Eadwig, 939-959

The Reigns of Edmund, Eadred and Eadwig, 939-959 PDF Author: Mary Elizabeth Blanchard
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1783277645
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Essays highlighting the importance of three kings - Edmund, Eadred and Eadwig - in understanding England in the tenth century. Much scholarly attention has been devoted to both the expanding kingdom of Alfred the Great, Edward the Elder, and Æthelstan, and to the larger and integrated realm of their more distant successors, Edgar and Æthelred II. However, the English kingdom in the 940s and 950s, and its three kings, Edmund (939-946), Eadred (946-955), and Eadwig (955-959), the men who inherited and held together the kingdom created by their immediate predecessors, have been somewhat neglected, with little research being dedicated to these men as kings, or the era in which they ruled. This volume offers a variety of approaches to the period. Its contributors bring to light royal legal innovations to ecclesiastical law, oaths, heriot, complex factional politics, including the crucial role of queens, differing perspectives on the final era of an independent northern kingdom of York, and developments in literary culture outside the domineering trend of the later monastic reformers.

The Formation of the English Kingdom in the Tenth Century

The Formation of the English Kingdom in the Tenth Century PDF Author: George Molyneaux
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192542931
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
The central argument of The Formation of the English Kingdom in the Tenth Century is that the English kingdom which existed at the time of the Norman Conquest was defined by the geographical parameters of a set of administrative reforms implemented in the mid- to late tenth century, and not by a vision of English unity going back to Alfred the Great (871-899). In the first half of the tenth century, successive members of the Cerdicing dynasty established a loose domination over the other great potentates in Britain. They were celebrated as kings of the whole island, but even in their Wessex heartlands they probably had few means to regulate routinely the conduct of the general populace. Detailed analysis of coins, shires, hundreds, and wapentakes suggests that it was only around the time of Edgar (957/9-975) that the Cerdicing kings developed the relatively standardised administrative apparatus of the so-called 'Anglo-Saxon state'. This substantially increased their ability to impinge upon the lives of ordinary people living between the Channel and the Tees, and served to mark that area off from the rest of the island. The resultant cleft undermined the idea of a pan-British realm, and demarcated the early English kingdom as a distinct and coherent political unit. In this volume, George Molyneaux places the formation of the English kingdom in a European perspective, and challenges the notion that its development was exceptional: the Cerdicings were only one of several ruling dynasties around the fringes of the former Carolingian Empire for which the late ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries were a time of territorial expansion and consolidation.

The Languages of Early Medieval Charters

The Languages of Early Medieval Charters PDF Author: Robert Gallagher
Publisher: Brill's the Early Middle Ages
ISBN: 9789004428119
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 548

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Book Description
"This is the first major study of the interplay between Latin and Germanic vernaculars in early medieval records. Building on previous work on the uses of the written word in the early Middle Ages, which has dispelled the myth that this was an age of 'orality', the contributions in this volume bring to the fore the crucial question of language choice in the documentary cultures of early medieval societies. Specifically, they examine the interactions between Latin and Germanic vernaculars in the Anglo-Saxon and eastern Frankish worlds and in neighbouring areas. The chapters are underpinned by an important comparative dimension on account of the two regions' shared linguistic heritage and numerous cross-Channel links."--