DA 15)~ Myth, Rulership, Church , /l'i C\ <2' and Charters Essays in Honour of Nicholas Brooks Edited by JULIA BARROW University of Nottingham, UK and ANDREW WAREHAM Roehampton University, UK ASH GATE © Edited by Julia Barrow and Andrew Wareham 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Julia Barrow and Andrew Wareham have asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Gower House Suite 420 Croft Road 10 I Cherry Street Aldershot Burlington, VT 05401-4405 Hampshire GUI I 3HR USA England I I Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Myth, rulership, church and charters: essays in honour of Nicholas Brooks 1. Great Britain - History - Anglo-Saxon period, 449-1066 I. Brooks, Nicholas II. Barrow, Julia III. Wareham, Andrew, 1965- 942'.017 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Myth, rulership, church and charters: essays in honour of Nicholas Brooks; edited by Julia Barrow and Andrew Wareham. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0- 7546-5120-8 (alk. paper) 1. Great Britain-History-Anglo-Saxon period, 449-1066. 2. Great Britain-History, Military- 449-1066. 3. Anglo-Saxons. I. Barrow, Julia. II. Wareham, Andrew, 1965-lll. Brooks, Nicholas. DA152.M98 2007 942.0l~c22 2007008134 ISBN 978-0- 7546-5120-8 Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall. Contents List of Figures vii Notes on Contributors ix Acknowledgements xi List of Abbreviations xiii Introduction: Myth, Rulership, Church and Charters in the Work of Nicholas Brooks Julia Barrow 2 Nicholas Brooks at Birmingham 11 Christopher Dyer 3 Anglo-Saxon Origin Legends 15 Barbara Yorke 4 A Nearly, but Wrongly, Forgotten Historian of the Dark Ages 31 James Campbell 5 Anglo-Saxon Charters: Lost and Found 45 Simon Keynes 6 Reculver Minster and its Early Charters 67 Susan Kelly 7 Stour in Ismere 83 Margaret Gelling 8 Was there an Agricultural Revolution in Anglo-Saxon England? 89 Alex Burghart and Andrew Wareham 9 'The Annals of Æthelflæd': Annals, History and Politics in Early Tenth-Century England 101 Pauline Stafford 10 The First Use of the Second Anglo-Saxon Ordo 117 Janet L. Nelson VI MYTH, RULERSHIP, CHURCH AND CHARTERS 11 Where English Becomes British: Rethinking Contexts for Brunanburh 127 Sarah Foot 12 Archbishop Dunstan: A Prophet in Politics? 145 Catherine Cubitt 13 A Mass for St Birinus in an Anglo-Saxon Missal from the Scandinavian Mission-Field 167 Alicia Corrêa 14 The Saint Clement Dedications at Clementhorpe and Pontefract Castle: Anglo-Scandinavian or Norman? 189 Barbara E. Crawford 15 England and the Norman Myth 211 Nick Webber 16 What Happened to Ecclesiastical Charters in England 1066-c. l l OO? 229 Julia Barrow Nicholas Brooks: A List of Publications 249 Index 255 List of Figures Frontispiece Professor Nicholas Brooks 14.1 Map of medieval churches dedicated to St Clement in England 190 14.2 Plan of collegiate and monastic precincts in medieval York, with the site of St Clement's priory on the west bank of the River Ouse. From O.M. Palliser, T.R. Slater and E.P. Dennison, 'The topography of towns 600-1300', in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, I: 600-1540, ed. D.M. Palliser (Cambridge, 2000), 179 195 14.3 Map of routes and rivers in southern Yorkshire 199 14.4 Plan of Phases I and 2 at Pontefract Castle from Ian Roberts, Pontefract Castle (Wakefield, 1990), 402 204 14.5 The east end of St Clement's Chapel, Pontefract Castle 206 List of Abbreviations ANS Anglo-Norman Studies ASE Anglo-Saxon England BCS W. de Gray Birch, Cartularium Saxonicum (3 vols and index, London, I 885-1899) - cited by charter number BL British Library, London BM Bibliothèque Municipale BN Biblothèque Nationale, Paris Bodi. Bodleian Library, Oxford ecce Corpus Christi College, Cambridge De moribus De moribus et actis primorum Normanniae ducum auctore Dudone sancti Quintini decano, ed. Jules Lair, Société des Antiquaires de Normandie (Caen, 1865) Dudo Dudo of St Quentin, History of the Normans, tr. Eric Christiansen (Woodbridge, 1998) EHD,I English Historical Documents, I, c. 500-1042, ed. Dorothy Whitelock, 2"d edn (London, I 979) EHR English Historical Review EME Early Medieval Europe GND The Gesta Normannarum Ducum of William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis, and Robert of Torigni, ed. and tr. Elisabeth M.C. van Houts, OMT (2 vols, Oxford, 1992-1995) GRA William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum, ed. and tr. R.A.B. Mynors, completed by R.M. Thomson and Michael Winterbottom, OMT (2 vols, Oxford, 1998-1999) HBS Henry Bradshaw Society HE Bedes Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B.Mynors, OMT (Oxford, 1969) MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, in Association with the British Academy. From the Earliest Times to the Year 2000, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and B. Harrison, 61 vols (Oxford 2004) OMT Oxford Medieval Texts Origins TheOriginsofAnglo-SaxonKingdoms,ed. StevenBassett(Leicester, 1989) pd printed PL Patrologia cursus completus, accurante J.-P Migne. Series !atina (221 vols, Paris, 1844-1865) s P.H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters: an Annotated List and Bibliography, Royal Historical Society Guides and Handbooks, 8 (London, 1968) - cited by charter number XIV MYTH, RULERSHIP, CHURCH AND CHARTERS s.a. sub anno (annís) s.v. sub verba tr. translated TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Vatican Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City Vita Æthelwoldi Wulfstan of Winchester, Vita Sancti Æthelwoldi, ed. Michael Lapidge and Michael Winterbottom, OMT (Oxford, 1991) Chapter 1 Introduction: Myth, Rulership, Church and Charters in the Work of Nicholas Brooks Julia Barrow Nicholas Brooks has, for more than 40 years, been reshaping our understanding of the Anglo-Saxons. The four principal themes of this book, myth, rulership, the Church and charters, are all central to his scholarship and all represent areas within which he has been able to open up new lines of enquiry and to establish new bases of knowledge. The aim of this introduction is to provide an overview of Nicholas' contribution to each of these four themes and to link this up with the papers which follow, showing how he has inspired and influenced his friends and pupils. Myth, our opening theme, was not one of Nicholas' earliest interests, but had become one of his areas of study by the mid- l 980s, by the time he moved from St Andrews to take up the chair of Medieval History at Birmingham.' For a scholar whose work has been rooted in the history of Kent and its early kingdom, the issue of the creation and development of myth was inescapable: Hengist, Horsa and Vortigern occur in many different sources and an important task for historians of early Kent is to confront them. Nicholas' solution was to work out the development 2 of the myth from the differences appearing in each retelling of the story, leading him to suggest that the original story could have been invented for Æthelberht of Kent to bolster the identity of his kingdom and give his ancestry a much longer and grander past than those of contemporary Anglo-Saxon dynasties. In providing a 3 pair of adventurous brothers as the co-founders of the kingdom of Kent, the creator of the myth made use ofa widely-found motif in Indo-European origin myths and, by naming them 'Stallion' and 'Horse', linked them up with the cult of Woden, in which horses seem to have played a role. In this collection of essays Barbara Yorke 4 makes use of this approach to re-examine all the Anglo-Saxon origin myths to see if further light can be shed on the circumstances of their production, and she also I Dyer, this volume. 2 Nicholas Brooks, 'The Creation and Early Structure of the Kingdom of Kent', in The Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, ed. S.R. Bassett (Leicester, 1989) 55-74; repr. in Nicholas Brooks, Anglo-Saxon Myths: State and Church 400-1066 (London and Rio Grande, 2000), 33-60, at 37-46. 3 Nicholas Brooks, 'The English Origin Myth', in Brooks, Anglo-Saxon Myths, 79-89, at 85. 4 Ibid., 88-9. 2 MYTH, RULERSHIP, CHURCH AND CHARTERS surveys burial evidence to show how that, too, allowed those who buried the dead to make statements about their identity. 5 Nicholas' earliest published comments about myth are to be found in his inaugural lecture at Birmingham, given in 1986: at the start of this he referred to the thesis of his predecessor at Birmingham, R.H.C. Davis, that the Normans deliberately created a myth to give themselves an identity, and proceeded to illuminate this with an insight from one of his own areas of study, the iconography of warriors in the Bayeux Tapestry. The Normans shaved the backs of their heads in a conscious attempt to look different from their neighbours. Norman identity was the subject 6 undertaken by Nicholas' pupil Nick Webber for his doctoral thesis;' his paper in this volume deals with the role of Engiand in the Norman myth, and shows that although England occurs frequently in the narrative of Norman history from the time ofDudo of St-Quentin onwards, it was not 'incorporated into Normannifas' until the twelfth century. 8 Angio-Saxon kingship, of which origin myth was a vital component, has been one ofNicholas Brooks' main areas ofresearch from the outset. In particular it is the range of resources available to Anglo-Saxon rulers and the ways in which they could enforce demands for these on their subjects that have aroused his interest: above ali the three 'common burdens' of fortresses, bridges and army service. Already in 1964 Nicholas had begun to work on the identification of the forts of the Burghai Hidage; 9 much more recently, for a Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies conference on 'The Defence of Wessex' (published in 1996), he returned to the subject to explore the administrative problems faced by Alfred and his successor in setting up the system.'? These were also problems for Alfred's daughter Æthelflæd in the West Midlands in the early tenth century, the subject of Pauline Stafford's article below, on which more shortly. More generally on the topic of Anglo-Saxon reactions to 11 Viking attacks in the ninth century, in 1978 Nicholas delivered a powerful rebuttal of Peter Sawyer's thesis that the size of Scandinavian fleets and armies in the ninth century had been greatly exaggerated by contemporary chroniclers and subsequent generations of historians: rather, as Nicholas demonstrated, the smaller Viking fleets 5 Yorke, this volume. 6 Nicholas Brooks, History and Myth, Forgery and Truth (Birmingham, 1986), repr. in Brooks, Anglo-Saxon Myths, 1-19, at 3. 7 Nick Webber, 'The Evolution ofNorman Identity, 911-1154', Ph.D. thesis, University of Birmingham (2002), now published as The Evolution of Norman Identity, 911-1154 (Woodbridge, 2005). 8 Webber, this volume. 9 'The Unidentified Forts of the Burghai Hidage', Medieval Archaeology, 8 (1964), 74-90, repr. in Nicholas Brooks, Communities and Warfare 700-1400 (London and Rio Grande, 2000), 93-113. 10 'The Administrative Background to the Burghai Hidage', in The Defence of Wessex: the Burghai Hidage and Anglo-Saxon Fortifications, ed. David Hill and Alexander Richard Rumble (Manchester, 1996), 128-50, repr. in Communities and Warfare 700-1400, 114-37. 11 Stafford, this volume. INTRODUCTION 3 of the earlier ninth century had amalgamated to form the large fleet carrying the 'Great Army', leaving most of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms unable to cope. 12 The second of the three common burdens, bridge-building, became one ofNicholas' interests rather more recently, when he was invited to contribute to a volume on the history of Rochester Bridge (published in 1993). Here a charitable trust founded in the late fourteenth century took over the task of building and maintaining a bridge which earlier in the middle ages had been a responsibility shared out among local landowners; a document copied into the twelfth-century Textus Rojfensis explains how manpower was organised in the Anglo-Saxon period to work on each of the piers." From the Medway, Nicholas' bridge-inspecting remit has extended across Europe to other examples of bridges with ancient pasts and continuity of use. ln 14 this volume, Barbara Crawford examines the significance of the cult of St Clement to comment on the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman fear of dangerous river-crossings: at Pontefract (as its name suggests, a 'broken' and thus a failed bridge in a part of England where Anglo-Saxon royal administration was markedly less efficient than it was in the area south of the Humber) a dedication to Clement may reveal William the Conqueror's gratitude for a successful passage over the River Aire. 15 The last of the three common burdens, army service, has been a particular interest of Nicholas throughout his academic career. Nicholas' interest in armour and weapons was aroused when he was a pupil at Winchester College. Together with his history teacher at Winchester, H.E. Walker, he explored the evidence of the Bayeux Tapestry for body armour and weapons, in the process comparing the portrayal of Anglo-Saxon bymies in the Tapestry with a fragment of relief sculpture, probably dating to the reign of Cnut, from Old Minster, Winchester, and this was published in an early volume of the proceedings of the Battle Conference on Anglo Norman Studies. Also in the late 1970s, through analysis of heriots recorded in 16 wills and those stipulated in law codes, he was able to show that Æthelred greatly increased the quantity of military equipment that earls, bishops and king's thegns 12 'England in the Ninth Century: the Crucible of Defeat', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser. 29 (1979), 1-20, delivered 3 February 1978, repr. in Communities and Warfare7 0()-/400, 48-68; for Peter Sawyer's thesis on Viking numbers, see The Age of the Vikings (London, 1962), and its 2nd edn (London, 1971 ). 13 Nicholas Brooks, 'Rochester Bridge, AD 43-1381 ', in Traffic and Politics: the Construction and Management of Rochester Bridge AD 43-1993, ed. Nigel Yates and James M. Gibson (Woodbridge, 1994), 1-40, repr. in Communities and Warfare 700-1400, 219-65; idem, 'Church, Crown and Community: Public Work and Seigneurial Responsibilities at Rochester Bridge', in Warriorsa nd Churchmen in the High Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Karl Leyser, ed. Timothy Reuter (London, 1992), 1-20. 14 'Medieval European Bridges: a Window onto Changing Concepts of State Power', Journal of the Haskins Society, 7 (1997 for 1995), 11-29, repr. in Communities and Warfare 700-1400, 1-31. 15 Crawford, this volume. 16 N.P. Brooks and H.E. Walker, 'The Authority and Interpretation of the Bayeux Tapestry', ANS, 1 (1978), 1-34 and 191-9, repr. in Communities and Warfare 700-1400, 175-218.