Abstract
Late in the tenth century a landowner in Kent died leaving some, if not all, of his property in the hands of his wife. His son by a previous marriage, Wulf bold, apparently took issue with the bequest and “went to his stepmother’s land and took all that he found there within and without, both small and large [ferd he to his steopmoder land [and] nam þær eal þ[æt] he þær funde inne [and] ute læsse [and] mare].”1 A complaint was made to King Æthelred, who stepped in and demanded that Wulfbold return the property, but the angry son refused and so was ordered to pay wergeld, the “man price” that Anglo-Saxon law assigned to someone of his social position, to the king. When he failed to comply, this demand was repeated three more times, but Wulfbold’s only response was to seize the estate of his kinsman Brihtmaer of Bourne as well. Finally, the king called a meeting of all his council at London, which judged that Wulfbold’s property and life were to be handed over to the king “either for life or for death [swa to life swa to deaþe].” Æthelred’s ultimate judgment is uncertain. The charter in the Book of Hyde that preserves Wulfbo ld’s story records that he had been charged wergeld for each of the king’s orders and he had not paid any restitution when he forþferd.2 The verb literally means “to depart or flee,” but it is frequently used euphemistically to mean “to die,” as it does when applied early in the charter to Wulfbold’s father.
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Notes
The Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and Middle English versions of Wulfbold’s story are edited by Edward Edwards in Liber Monasterii de Hyda, RBMA 45 (London, 1866). The Anglo-Saxon text can also be found as no. 63 in A.J. Robertson, ed., Anglo-Saxon Charters (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1956), p. 128.
On the composition, content, and dating of the Liber Monasterii de Hyda, see G. R. C. Davis, Medieval Cartularies of Great Britain: A Short Catalogue (London: Longman’s, Green, and co., 1958).
Henry Bracton, De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, ed. George E. Woodbine, trans. Samuel E. Thorne as Bracton on the Laws and Customs of England, rev. ed., 4 vols (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 352.
This process is complicated by the introduction of judicial precedent, which demands that previous interpretations and applications of the legal narrative are taken into consideration, but evidence for this does not appear in England until the thirteenth century. See Anthony Musson, Medieval Law in Context: The Growth of Legal Consciousness from Magna Carta to the Peasants’ Revolt (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), pp. 42–4.
James Boyd White, “Law as Language: Reading Law and Reading Literature,” Texas Law Review 60 (1982), 415–45.
For a summary of the debate surrounding White’s thesis and its application to the study of law as literature, see Ian Ward, Law and Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 3–27.
Paul Gewirtz, “Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law,” in Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law, ed. Paul Gewirtz and Peter Brooks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 5. See Richard Delgado, “Storytelling for Oppositionists and Others: A Plea for Narrative,” 87 Michigan Law Review 2411 (1989).
Following the structuralist pattern derived from Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics, I am imagining the legal narrative as langue and others as parole (Course in General Linguistics, Roy Harris, trans. [Chicago: Open Court, 1986], pp. 9–10). However, legal practice is not fixed but responds to its own history and in this respect can behave like parole. On the diversity of parole as a challenge to langue and the relationship of language to ideology, see the theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, especially as described and applied by Tzveten Todorov in Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, Wlad Godzich, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 41–74. While recent criticism of Bakhtin has historicized his theory as a reaction against Stalinism, the dialogical intertextuality that he describes has been usefully applied to a variety of cultural narratives.
See Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ concept of the “cultural script” in Writing Beyond the Ending (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985);
and Susan Stanford Friedman, “Spatialization: A Strategy for Reading Narrative,” Narrative 1 (1992), 12–23.
See J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, “The Blood-Feud of the Franks,” in The Long-Haired Kings (London, 1962), pp. 121–47;
Peter Sawyer, “The Bloodfeud in Fact and Fiction,” Acta Jutlandica 63:2 (1987), pp. 27–38.
Heinrich Brunner, Grundzüge der Deutschen Rechtesgeschichte (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1923) and Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte, 2nd ed., 2 vols (Leipzig: von Duncker & Humblodt, 1906–28),
and from Wilhelm Eduard Wilda’s Das Strafrecht der Germanen (Halle, 1842).
For a recent critical discussion of nineteenth-century reconstructions of early Germanic legal customs regarding feud, see Stefan Jurasinski, “The Ecstasy of Vengeance: Legal History, Old English Scholarship, and the ‘Feud’ of Hengest,” Review of English Studies n.s. 55, no. 222 (2004), 641–661.
Julius Goebel, Jr., Felony and Misdemeanor: A Study in the History of Criminal Law (1937; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), p. 7–25.
Until recently the only thorough history of the practice of outlawry in early medieval England was Frederic Liebermann’s “Die Friedlosigkeit bei den Angelsachsen,” in Festschrift für Heinrich Brunner zum siebzigsten Geburtstag dargebracht von Schülern und Verehen (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1910), pp. 17–37.
See, for instance, Katherine Fischer Drew’s introduction to The Laws of the Salian Franks, trans. Katherine Fischer Drew (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), pp. 20–7;
Patrick Wormald, “Lex Scripta and Verbum Regis: Legislation and Germanic Kingship, from Euric to Cnut,” in Early Medieval Kingship, ed. Peter Sawyer and I. N. Woods (Leeds: The Editors, 1977), pp. 105–38;
J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic Kingship in England and on the Continent (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), pp. 148–9.
Rochester Cathedral Library ms. A.3.5; for a recent and thorough discussion of dating and other issues regarding the composition of the these laws, see Lisi Oliver, The Beginnings of English Law (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), pp. 3–20.
Janet Bately, ed., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, vol. 3: Ms. A (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1986).
Ms. F for 995; G. P. Cubbin, ed., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, vol. 6: Ms. D (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1996), p. 63 [1017]; for Earl Godwin, see discussion in chapter two.
See discussion by Simon Keynes, “The Fonthill Letter,” in Words, Texts and Manuscripts: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Culture Presented to Helmut Gneuss, ed. Michael Korhammer et al. (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1992), pp. 53–97;
and Patrick Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, Vol. I: Legislation and its Limits (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 144–8.
F. E. Harmer, ed., Select English Historical Documents of the Ninth and Tenth Centuries (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1914), p. 32.
See Theodore Ziolkowski, The Mirror of Justice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 74–97.
William Stubbs, Select Charters and Other Illustrations of English Constitutional History, 8th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), pp. 144–5.
The frequency of the flight option is established by court records that indicate that as many as ten men were outlawed for every one that was hanged. See Frederick Pollack and Frederic Maitland, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1898), 1.478, I I.557.
J. G. Bellamy, Crime and Public Order in England in the Later Middle Ages (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 30;
Claire Valente, The Theory and Practice of Revolt in Medieval England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).
Three late tenth-century documents employ the term, although all three are preserved only in twelfth-century copies. See Patrick Wormald, “A Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Lawsuits,” Anglo-Saxon England 17 (1988), 247–81, nos. 43, 50, and 51.
For a full discussion of the term utlah, see Elisabeth van Houts, “The Vocabulary of Exile and Outlawry in the North Sea Area around the First Millenium,” in Exile in the Middle Ages, eds. Laura Napran and Elisebeth van Houts, International Medieval Research 13 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), pp. 13–28.
For the linguistic evidence for this relationship, see Michael Jacoby, Wargus, vargr ‘Verbrecher’ ‘Wolf: Eine Sprach-und rechtsgeschichtliche Untersuchung, Studia Germanistica Upsaliensia 12 (Uppsala: Almquist and Wiksell, 1974), especially pp. 46–77;
and Mary Roche Gerstein, “Germanic Warg: The Outlaw as Werewolf,” in Myth in Indo-European Antiquity, ed. Gerald Larson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 131–56.
See Barry Lopez, Of Wolves and Men (New York: Scribners, 1978), p. 145.
These and other examples are collected by J. G. Millais in The Mammals of Great Britain and Ireland, 3 vols (London: Longman’s, 1904), pp. 185–99.
It was applied as well to delinquent clergy, heretics, and prostitutes. See Beryl Rowland, Animals with Human Faces: A Guide to Animal Symbolism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1973), p. 162.
On the ancient origins of this connection, see Mircea Eliade, Zalmoxis, The Vanishing God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 3–5.
Ed. George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie in The Exeter Book. ASPR 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), p. 163.
Regarding Cain and the monstrous races, see John Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), especially pp. 87–107.
On Jews and negroid races, see Ruth Mellinkoff’s short treatment in The Mark of Cain (Berkeley: University of California, 1981), pp. 92–8.
On Cain and heresy, see Pearl F. Braude, “‘Cokkel in oure Clene Corn’: Some Implications of Cain’s Sacrifice,” Gesta 7 (1968), 15–28. On late medieval interpretations of Cain in general,
see Gilbert Dahan, “L’exégèse de l’histoire de Caïn et Abel du XIIe au XIVe siècle en Occident. Notes et texte (à suivre),” Recherches de Théologie ancienne et médiévale 49 (1982), 21–89.
Ed. G. P. Krapp in The Junius Manuscript. ASPR 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), p. 33.
Cain’s lack of repentance and despair are further recorded by Jerome as the sixth and seventh of Cain’s seven sins. The list was widely known, appearing, for instance, in the Irish Reference Bible, ed. James E. Cross in Sources of Anglo-Saxon Culture, ed. Paul Szarmach, Studies in Medieval Culture 20 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1986), pp. 92–100: “vi. dis-peravit ut maior est iniquitas mea; .vii. non penetivit ut vagus” (93). On other examples of this list in early England, see Charles D. Wright, The Irish Tradition in Old English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 57, n.41.
Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Parson’s Tale,” ed. Larry D. Benson, The Riverside Chaucer (Cambridge: Houghton & Mifflin, 1987), 1.1015.
Hayden White, “The Forms of Wildness: Archeology of an Idea,” in The Wild Man Within. An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Edward Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), p. 4.
See Fritz Kern, Kingship and Law in the Middle Ages, trans. S. B. Chrimes (1956; Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 100–103.
John of Salisbury , Frivolities of Courtiers and Footprints of Philosophers, trans. Joseph B. Pike (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1938), 204–205.
W. W. Skeat, Specimens of English literature from the “Ploughmans crede” to the “Shepheardes calender,” A. D. 1394-A.D. 1519 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1887), pp. 96–107.
For an account of the origins of this bifurcation, see Max Oelschlager, The Idea of Wilderness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).
Peter Brown, The Making of Fate Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 89.
Stanza 198; R. B. Dobson and J. Taylor, eds., Rymes of Robin Hood: An Introduction to the English Outlaw (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 1976), p. 93.
A statute of 1389 (13 Ric II c.20) designated Dover and Plymouth as exit ports for criminals. St. Mary’s Hospital at Dover, Holy Trinity at Portsmouth, and St. John’s at Southhampton provided facilities for such emigrants. See George Ives, History of Penal Methods (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1914), p. 100.
Brocardus, Descriptio Terrae Sanctae, translated in the Library of the Palestine Pilgrims Text Society 12 (London, 1897), pp. 102–103; Latin text edited by J. C. M. Laurent, Peregrinatores medii aevi quatuor (Leipzig, 1864).
Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum II.12; ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), pp. 176, 177. The Anglo-Saxon translation of the Historia reads “he monigra geara tide flyma wæs” and at this point and elsewhere identifies Edwine as a wrecca, “exile.” The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Thomas Miller, EETS 95–6 (1890–1; Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus Reprint, 1978), I.127.
Bruno Bettelhiem, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Knopf, 1976), p. 94.
Hans Peter Duerr, Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary between Wilderness and Civilization, trans. Felicitas Goodman (London: Blackwell, 1985), p. 64.
Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 125–30; and Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), pp. 231–71.
William of Malmesbury, Historia Regum Anglorum II.106; trans. Joseph Stevenson, The History of the Kings of England, and of His Own Times, by William of Malmesbury, The Church Historians of England 3.1 (London: Seeleys, 1854), p. 84.
Reidy , Epic in Medieval Society: Aesthetic and Moral Values, Harald Scholler, ed. (Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag, 1977), pp. 399–402.
Policraticus 8.20; Summa Theologica II.2, q 42, a 2. See Cary J. Nederman, “A Duty to Kill: John of Salisbury’s Theory of Tyrannicide,” The Review of Politics 50 (1988), 365–89.
Beowulf, 11. 1143–4; ed. Frederick Klaeber, Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, 3rd. ed. (Lexington: D. C. Heath, 1950), p. 43.
For a discussion of this event, see William Ian Miller, “Choosing the Avenger: Some Aspects of the Bloodfeud in Medieval Iceland and England,” Law and History Review 1 (1984), 159–204,
but see reservations in Stefan Jurasinski, “The Ecstasy of Vengeance: Legal History, Old English Scholarship, and the ‘Feud’ of Hengest,” Review of English Studies n.s. 55, n. 222 (2004), 654–7.
See R. James Goldstein, The Matter of Scotland: Historical Narrative in Medieval Scotland (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), pp. 215–49.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 48.
Edward Powell, Kingship, Law, and Society: Criminal Justice in the Reign of Henry V (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), pp. 69–71.
R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), p. 110.
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© 2010 Timothy S. Jones
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Jones, T.S. (2010). Law and the Narrative of Outlawry. In: Outlawry in Medieval Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230114685_2
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