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  • The Myth of the Feud in Anglo-Saxon England
  • John D. Niles

“Every student of the Anglo-Saxons accepts the existence of feud as a feature of society before the Norman Conquest,” writes Paul Hyams in his 2003 book Rancor and Reconciliation in Medieval England.1 Emphasizing that “feud was quite central to Anglo-Saxon political culture,” Hyams identifies the Anglo-Saxons’ means of resolving disputes through private warfare—that is, through means grounded in the Old Germanic code of blood vengeance—not just as an essential feature of the society of that time, but also as a continuing legacy at least into the thirteenth century, before the ascendancy of a more modern-looking set of legal practices based on the state’s centripetal power. Such a conceptual framework nuances, without essentially changing, a deep-rooted historiographical tendency to distinguish the people of Anglo-Saxon England (often characterized as a fierce, independent people of Germanic stock) from their later medieval counterparts (often portrayed in terms of a civilization of powerful kings and mature feudalism). Though such a dichotomous view of the English Middle Ages rarely finds direct expression today, it has an undeniable basis in the shifts of power and perspective that followed the Conquest, and its influence is still strong. Thus it seemed natural to Richard Fletcher, as well, in his 2003 book Bloodfeud: Murder and Revenge in Anglo-Saxon England, to represent northern England at the end of the Anglo-Saxon period as [End Page 163] locked in a culture of self-perpetuating, revenge-driven cycles of violence: of having been a feud culture, in short.2

Such views have not gone without questioning. The historians Guy Halsall and John Hudson, in particular, have expressed skepticism about the existence of a feud culture in England, whether during the period before the Conquest (Halsall) or either before or after the Conquest (Hudson).3 Still, historiographical debates along such lines have had little impact as yet among literary scholars, who have traditionally seen Anglo-Saxon heroic literature as anchored in a culture where feud was a fact of life. Stanley J. Kahrl, for example, wrote forty years ago of intertribal feuding as a theme whose dark tones undermined the heroic mood of Beowulf.4 Martin Camargo has read the interlude in Beowulf known as the “Song of Finn and Hengest,” which tells of two spasms of violence involving ancient Frisians and Danes, as a critique of the hopeless cycles of violence that characterize a feud culture.5 Similarly, David Day has seen the feud as a source of the tragic irony that permeates Beowulf. “The feud through its pervasiveness and unending nature,” writes Day, “provides the poet with a strong literary device for heightening the tragic feel of his poem, and also creating a range of deeply ironic effects.”6 New studies relating to the feud culture of the peoples depicted in Beowulf appear with some frequency in the critical literature.7 The reception of the late tenth- or early eleventh-century poem The Battle of Maldon, too, is permeated with references to a feud culture (in a loose sense of that term) where acts of intertribal violence are presented as a heroic imperative.8 At least one literary scholar, however, Stefan Jurasinski, has questioned the basis of long-standing assumptions about the feud culture of Anglo-Saxon England [End Page 164] by showing how such notions as “the sacred duty and right of revenge” often attributed to the Anglo-Saxons and other early Germanic peoples are rooted in nationalistic nineteenth-century German legal-historical scholarship, the legacy of which continues to influence the critical reception of such works as Beowulf.9

The view that the feud was central to Anglo-Saxon culture may seem to gain in plausibility when one takes into account the generally violent tenor of life at that time.10 When the Anglo-Saxons first settled Britain, they came as conquerors, organized into one or another folc. Significantly, this is an Old English term that, in the early Germanic period, had the sense of “army cohort.” In this heavily militarized era, that same word designated “the people” as a whole, a usage that later came to...

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