Capital and Corporal Punishment in Anglo-Saxon England ed. by Jay Paul Gates and Nicole Marafioti (review)

This volume demonstrates both the promises and the challenges associated with an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the legal past. During the last decade or so, scholars have brought into print or digital form critical editions of several of the law codes that survive from the period between the early seventh and the early eleventh centuries.¹ The editors’ introductory essay—well worth a second reading after completion of the collection—argues that among the achievements of a precocious Anglo-Saxon monarchy was the gradual development of a judicial program that had several aims beyond merely punishing violence. Early English rulers sought also to deter disruptive behavior, to maintain the peace of the king and the church, and to reinforce the authority and power of the divinely inspired social order.

The introduction also identifies several themes that run through the book’s ten chapters: first, a clearly discernible shift in late Saxon England from a culture of feud—sometimes described by legal historians as the “private” justice of the kindred—to a system in which punishment became the prerogative of a third party (the “public” justice of the king); second, the gradual articulation of a theory of punishment that reconciled the ambitions of secular rulers with the tenets of the Christian church; and third, the elaboration of a theory of justice that accorded uncontested legislative authority to the king in regulating the punishment of serious offenders. Each of the chapters that follows addresses one or more of these themes; collectively, they make compelling arguments for understanding the critical role of the Anglo-Saxon kings and their ecclesiastical mentors in generating a penal system unrivaled in Europe for its ability to give tangible expression to complex notions of social control.

Each of the ten chapters begins with a useful summary of recent scholarship intended to situate their authors’ findings within their fields before demonstrating precisely how approaches that move well beyond the texts of extant law codes have the potential to offer exciting new interpretations of royal and ecclesiastical authority in the Anglo-Saxon period. The ten essays bring to the methodology and theoretical underpinnings of conventional legal scholarship perspectives that reflect recent work in sociology, anthropology, Anglo-Saxon poetry, medieval penitential literature, and archaeology. Particularly noteworthy for their innovative use of documentary, visual, and material sources are the contributions by Jo Buckberry, which examines skeletal remains from execution cemeteries; by Valerie Allen, which explores in new ways the messages imprinted on coins; and by Jay Paul Gates, which posits the existence of a landscape of severed limbs deeply imbued with messages about royal and ecclesiastical ideas of right and wrong.

The ghost of the late Patrick Wormald, whose studies set the stage for recent scholarship in the fields of medieval social and legal history, looms large in this collection.² All but one of the chapters adopts as its premise a “maximalist” view of the later Anglo-Saxon period that emphasizes the power and reach of the Crown, the strength of centralized institutions of law and governance as early as the tenth century, and the maturation of a close and effective partnership between king and church in matters of justice. Alone among the contributors to this volume, Andrew Rabin cautions against attributing to the judicial system of the period greater sophistication than it was capable of exercising, and to rulers such as Æthesltan (d. 939) and Cnut (d. 1035) greater control over their subjects than either textual or archaeological evidence permits. The editors’ failure to allot greater space to the many scholars who take issue with Wormald’s state-centered perspective is the weakest feature of this otherwise exemplary collection.