Cotton Nero A. i and the Origins of Wulfstan’s Polity

Archbishop Wulfstan’s Institutes of Polity is widely regarded as one of the most remarkable texts of the Old English prose canon. It is hailed as the archbishop’s “greatest accomplishment in the field of political theory” and a “fundamental tract . . .[of] great importance”¹ and recognized equally as a lynchpin of Wulfstan’s larger socioreligious thought, a key historical document in the formation of the medieval English state, and one of the most significant early works of vernacular political theory. Regrettably, the enthusiastic praise for the text has not been matched by a similarly eager study of it—a lack of study especially glaring on the subject of the text’s origins and development. Indeed, since at least the publication of Karl Jost’s 1959 edition of Polity, the question has been treated as definitively settled.² The version contained in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 201 (Jost’s I Polity) is universally recognized as the earliest or original version, and Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Junius 121 is accepted as the finished product (his II Polity). The version contained in London, British Library MS Cotton Nero A. i has been held to be a transitional text between the two—a more developed version than Corpus, but not quite Junius yet.³ The consensus on this point has been, effectively, universal. So, for instance, in a letter to H. R. Loyn, Dorothy Whitelock states that there is “no doubt” that Nero’s Polity lies between that of the other two manuscripts; as Wormald has it, Nero gives us texts that “reflect developments since the ‘first edition’,” on the way to the second.⁴ In this paper, I hope to sow doubts about this hypothesis, in the hopes that some of them might take root.

The near-unanimous preference for the Corpus Polity over the Nero and Junius manuscripts is supported by three interrelated arguments. The first of these is rooted in the text’s appearance in the manuscripts. Put simply, Corpus is the only version that satisfies modern editorial expectations about what a text is and how it should operate. As Jost describes it, Polity is supposed to be a unified whole, examining the duties of all the levels of society from the greatest to the least.⁵ Corpus provides this: it surveys all the levels of society, from king to eallum cristenum mannum, “all Christian people,” and maintains proper hierarchical order throughout. Moreover, the chapters occur perfectly sequentially in the manuscript, running from pp. 77–93 without interruption or interpolation. Perhaps most importantly, Corpus is the only version of Polity that preserves anything like stylistic unity in the texts it contains, and stylistic unity was one of Jost’s chief critical criteria. By his standards, a legitimate Polity chapter must preserve a dispassionate, impersonal style and avoid the conventions of competing genres; in other words, anything smacking of the homiletic or the canonical is excluded on principle.⁶ Once again, Corpus is the only manuscript that comes close to meeting the established standards, and its pristine condition certainly contributed to beliefs about its primitivity. Compared to the order and unity of Corpus, Nero and Junius are a complete shambles: Nero is a riot of disorganized chapters, on occasion repeated;⁷ Junius preserves something at least approximating the “proper” order, but its chapters are interrupted by lengthy and unrelated texts.⁸ Both manuscripts include homiletic (and therefore, by Jost’s criteria, false) passages. Interpolation argues corruption, and thus, by editorial assumptions never quite fully laid out, half of Jost’s case on the different versions of Polity is made for him.

The second major argument for the preference of Corpus rests on the simplicity and brevity of its chapters as opposed to those in Junius; on this argument, simplicity implies antiquity and originality.⁹ Since the individual chapters of Corpus are clearly simpler than those in Junius, and Nero lies between the two, Corpus is older than Nero, and Nero is older than Junius. The different versions of the chapter Be cinincge (On the King) provide the classic proof for this...