From Lawmen to Plowmen: Anglo-Saxon Legal Tradition and the School of Langland by Stephen M. Yeager (review)

Over the past thirty years, the conventional wisdom that the events of 1066 marked a clean break between an Old English past and a Middle English future has been called increasingly into question. Scholars such as Patrick Wormald, Bruce O’Brien, and Elaine Treharne, among others, have shown that the origins of many of the literary, legal, and cultural phenomena hitherto attributed to the “renaissance” of the twelfth century can be found well before the Norman Conquest. With From Lawmen to Plowmen: Anglo-Saxon Legal Tradition and the School of Langland, Stephen M. Yeager adds his voice to this chorus, though with a far more ambitious goal: observing a series of stylistic similarities between legal and homiletic texts of the later Anglo-Saxon period and the poetry of the alliterative revival of the fourteenth century, Yeager suggests that the genealogy of the latter can be traced directly to the former. Yeager rejects the idea that the alliterative revival grew out of “an undocumented oral tradition of vernacular alliterative poetry and stressed prose” (p. 3); instead, he argues, the seeming recurrence of Old English legal and homiletic features in late medieval alliterative verse reflects what he calls “the ideological conditions of literate formalism” (p. 4). In other words, the poetry of the alliterative revival appropriates, not just the stylistic conventions of earlier texts, but also many of the ideological investments that influenced the authors’ treatment of their materials. As Yeager writes, “Langland and his followers are in fact the writers who engage most directly with the themes and concerns manifest in the Anglo-Saxon texts that were most widely circulated in the later medieval period” (p. 7). Yeager is explicit about the way in which he views this engagement as having occurred, basing his argument on the claim that Old English legal and homiletic texts “were continuously copied and studied at the same time and in the same places that ‘Middle’ English literature first emerged” (p. 99). For Yeager, the connection between Langland and his Old English predecessors hinges upon something he calls “sententious formalism,” noting that “proverbs, commonplaces, and maxims draw their authority not only from their familiarity and their self-evidently true content, but from their patterned regularity and structural parallelisms” (p. 7), and “sententious formalism” consists of “the strategies of formalizing claims to make them sound proverbial and therefore self-evident” (p. 14). The core of Yeager’s claim is thus that this mode of sententious formalism that originated among Anglo-Saxon lawmakers and homilists of the eleventh century came to be appropriated by later poets, including the alliterative poets of the late Middle Ages, for reasons related to their ideological objectives as much as (if not more than) their stylistic conservatism.

Yeager opens his argument with a lengthy theoretical discussion interrogating the categories of “orality and “literacy.” This chapter largely follows recent scholarship in rejecting the view that these categories exist as discrete entities operating in a clearly defined binary relationship. For the purposes of the argument, this discussion paves the way for a reading of a late copy of an Anglo-Saxon charter falsely attributed to Aldhelm that shows, in Yeager’s words, “how legal and homiletic modes coexist in the traditions of the Anglo-Saxon charters, so that modern legal-historical and literary-critical methodologies can quickly run into problems when they attempt to rely on a priori distinctions between literary texts and legal documents” (p. 60). In his second chapter, Yeager turns to a detailed discussion of the writings of Archbishop Wulfstan of York, with special attention to the Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, the laws of Cnut, and the later Latin appropriations of Wulfstan’s legal writings in the twelfth-century Quadripartitus and the Leges Henrici Primi. His focus is on the ways in which Wulfstan deploys the techniques of...