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27/11/2014

The worst sin? Are you forty? A married man? You've been warned!

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The Last Judgement. British Library, Stowe 944 (Winchester, c.1031), folio 7r: lower register, an angel locks the door of Hell, while the damned are dragged off into a hell-mouth. This image is in the public domain.

What was the worst sin you could commit in Anglo-Saxon England? Surely murder, you're thinking. Perhaps, in particular, murdering your own child? But there was something even worse. And to be guilty of it, you needed to be a married man and of a certain age ...

This post was prompted by one of my blessed readers, Char, who read my post on theft and Anglo-Saxon laws, and wanted to know if homosexuality is mentioned in the earliest of those laws, Æthelberht’s Code.

Well, it isn’t. And it’s not actually referred to in any secular law in the Anglo-Saxon period.

So you might be thinking that the Anglo-Saxons were ahead of their time and tolerated, or approved of, same-sex acts or relationships. But you’d be wrong, well at least from the perspective of the Anglo-Saxon Church.

I’m not saying that there weren’t different or opposing views on same-sex behaviours in England at that time (I'm thinking c.600- c.1100).

The absence of legal punishment for male or female homosexuality may imply an absence of disapprobation within society for those things, or at least give us a sense that homosexual acts per se were not considered as damaging to society as, say, heterosexual adultery, for which there were numerous legal penalties within Anglo-Saxon laws.

It’s difficult though to argue from a position of absence. When something was not mentioned in law, does that really tell us what people generally thought?

On the other hand, the Church always had plenty to say about sin, and particularly about sexual sin.

That doesn’t mean everyone agreed with the Church. It’s very difficult to know what ordinary folk thought about ecclesiastical regulations on sex, or even if people were fully aware of the restrictions on sex.

Priests were required to teach from handbooks of confession, which
treated sexual sins, including homosexuality, in a frank manner, but how they actually went about turning this material into instruction for the laity is difficult to determine.

They may have used the confessional dialogue (the conversation between priest and penitent) as the vehicle for teaching about sexual misdemeanours,
though care would have been taken to avoid introducing fresh ideas about sin!

It was obviously a careful balancing act between winkling out the details of a person's sin and protecting
them from even worse deeds.

General preaching in church was an obvious way of educating people about the expected sexual standards.

Surviving homilies, or sermons, contain general warnings against sexual sins, and on occasion touch on homosexuality.

There are homilies that refer to biblical examples of 'forbidden love' and even the 'madness' of men lusting after other men.

How often people actually went to church to hear these things is,
again, something difficult to determine.

We do have evidence (in the form of a grumbling sermon from an abbot) that general attendance at church was a bit haphazard in late Anglo-Saxon England. So it’s quite possible that not everyone was up to date with the dos and don’ts of sex.

Of course, as the dutiful Anglo-Saxon Monk, I’m fully apprised of all things sexual. It’s my specialism!

So the following three passages are provided for you to compare. I’ve given you one on murder, one on murdering your own child, and one on homosexuality.

Now rest assured that I am not encouraging you to have a go at any of these activities.  I just thought you might like to know a little bit more about them.

(N.B. I’m using ‘homosexuality’ to mean sexual acts between persons of the same biological sex, and not in the sense of the modern ideas of ‘gay’ identities, something likely foreign to those in the Anglo-Saxon world.)

But first a little background:

The passages below are taken from various vernacular handbooks for confession, referred to above. We now call these books penitentials, though an Anglo-Saxon priest would have called his book a scriftboc.

In the earlier part of the Anglo-Saxon period (around the eighth century), penitentials were written in Latin, but later (during the tenth and eleventh centuries) new penitentials were adapted into the vernacular (Old English).

So, here we go ...

Murder:

‘If a lay person slays another without fault, he is to fast 7 years on bread and water and then 4 years as his confessor instructs him, and after that 7 years of repentance; he is to repent his misdeeds diligently, to the extent that he may; for it is unknown how acceptable his penance was to God.’ (The Old English Handbook, translation by Allen J. Frantzen)

Slaying your own child:

‘If a woman kills her child as a murderer, she must fast for 15 years and never change that except on Sunday.’ (The Canons of Theodore, translation by Allen J, Frantzen)

Homosexuality (and bestiality):

‘The person who pollutes himself with an animal, or a male with another male, by means of an irrational thing, if he is a person of 20 years, so that he can understand that he has done that shameful and wicked thing, he should desist and confess and fast 15 years.   And if the man should have his spouse and he is forty years old and he does such a thing, he should desist and fast the rest of his life, and should not presume that he will receive the Lord’s body [i.e. the bread of communion] before his days’ end [i.e. his death]. Young men and the witless fool who do such a thing shall be beaten severely.’ (The Old English Penitential, my own translation)

As you can see, based on the amount of fasting one had to do, both murder and, specifically, a mother murdering her own child were considered very serious sins. By the way, fathers got off more lightly: just 7 years, according to one penitential.

It has to be said that the secular law may have meant you lost your life for committing such terrible crimes. The inference of the penitentials is that it was possible for you to have your life spared for some reason, but even so, you had to show remorse and repentance by undergoing severe penance.

(Can you imagine, by the way, surviving on bread and water five or six days a week for fifteen years? You probably were spared full fasting at weekends, or on Sunday, though you probably weren’t allowed to eat meat then.)

Now, when it came to a man having sex with another man (that’s what ‘pollutes himself’ means), or indeed with a beast (God forbid!), the seriousness of the sin really becomes marked.

True, if you were young or the local village idiot, then you got away with a severe beating (short, sharp shock tactics). But if you were considered old enough to understand what you were doing, i.e. 20 years old, then your fasting matched that of the murdering mother.

And for the mature man, forty years of age (the age may be read as a typical example of maturity) it was even more serious.

It’s not simply that he had to fast for the rest of his life (which, of course, might not have been that long back then) but, more significantly, that he couldn’t rely on getting absolution for his sins, not even on his deathbed.

So that meant he could be eternally damned, as if he had committed an unforgiveable sin.

We should notice that he was told to ‘desist’ from his sin, which may imply he was in the habit of having sex with another man or an animal, even perhaps that he was in a regular sexual relationship with someone (human, presumably!).

The penitential also represents homosexuality, as well as bestiality, as 'an irrational thing'. Elsewhere in Anglo-Saxon texts, males having sex with males is described as 'madness', as mentioned above.

Such irrationality was particularly relevant when it was performed by a mature married man. The logic seems to be that unlike a youth, or a 'witless fool', this man should have known better.

Moreover, he was married and therefore had a wife for sex. It's as if the penitential is saying there is no possible reason why this man would do such a thing; it is totally perverse!

Now, there are other sins that meet with similar treatment in the penitentials: specifically, the committing of ‘many evil deeds in murder and fornication’, for which a man had to enter a monastery and fast for the rest of his days; and suicide, for which a person was not to be buried in a Christian grave, nor receive the singing of mass, which probably indicated that that one was eternally damned.

But the sin of practicing homosexuality as a mature, married man seems to me to have been considered at least as, if not even more, serious than both those.

Now, where did I put my own scriftboc? I need to gem up on sexual sins for monks ...

-----------------------------------

If you want to read more on the penitentials, here's a link to Allen J. Frantzen's electronic edition. This will take you to 'Homicide', but if you follow the 'Cultural Index' tab, top right, you will see lots of other goodies available. Actually, I meant 'baddies'... sin is bad, I keep telling you that!

The Anglo-Saxon Monk would be delighted to hear your thoughts on this post, so go on ... have your say and leave a comment below.

Homosexuality is not
referred to in any of the surviving Anglo-Saxon
laws (c.600-c.1025)

The Anglo-Saxon Church
had plenty to say about sin, and especially sexual sin!

The Anglo-Saxons probably didn't think of homosexuality in the way we do today, with the sense of 'gay' identities.

The Anglo-Saxon penitentials handed out 15 years for a mother killing her son and the same for a twenty-year-old male having sex with another man or an animal.

If young or the village idiot, then you got away with a severe beating if you had sex with another male or a beast.

A forty-year-old married man having sex with another man risked committing an unforgiveable sin and being damned forever!

The Life of Guthlac. British Library, Harley Roll Y.6 (England, possibly Crowland, late 12th- or early 13th-century), roundel 7: Bartholomew (left) appears to a tumbling Guthlac (looks a bit drafty there!). Note the damned inside the hell-mouth. This image is in the public domain.

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25/11/2014

The Anglo-Saxon monk gets on the train

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No, I haven't decided to give up completely my normal mode of transport ...

(donkey/cart)

This train is the @communitytrain at North Manchester Radio FM 106.6.

Please note: FM 106.6 (@normanfm1066). Those bloody Normans get everywhere!

I'm being interviewed by Hannah Kate, local poet, publisher, mystery games designer, teacher, entrepreneur, academic, and ... well, she just about does everything. I'm on air between 14:00-16:00 (UK).

UPDATE:
You can now listen to the interview online, in two parts: First hour and Second hour. You may just want to fast-forward through the twentieth-century musical interludes ... and I was told we'd have some Anglo-Saxon organ music!

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22/11/2014

Merlin's magic words were actually Mark's

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Colin Morgan as Merlin (or is it Moses?) performing spectacular lightning spells and even more spectacular linguistic feats. Click on the still to take you to YouTube.

Sorry to have to disabuse all you Colin Morgan fans, but Merlin needed a little help with his magic spells ... from a 21st-century linguist!

A few weeks ago I posted something on medieval dragons, with an intro on Colin Morgan's Merlin... well I have to be creative, you know, in my attempts to incentivise my blessed readers.

As it happened, it triggered a little bit of Twitter excitement (yes, of course the Medieval Monk is on Twitter), which led to me finding out who was behind Merlin's magic spells, linguistically speaking.

And here he is ... Dr Mark Faulkner!

I wanted to know how this blessed one got to put words into Merlin's mouth (not a hint of jealousy, here), but also what he gets up to in his real job.

So enjoy the interview below.

By the way, it's really not fair! No one ever asks me to perform any medieval magic. I know I've read a few Anglo-Saxon laws and penitentials in my time. But it would've been nice to have done a bit of magic, and meet Merlin... well, Colin Morgan. OK, I'm a Colin Morgan fan. I admit it! Get over it!

Interview

MM: How did you come to be involved as a language consultant for BBC’s Merlin?

Mark: One of my friends on my MA course (a late medievalist) had worked on the first series of Big Brother, and still retained a number of media contacts. She was asked if she could provide Old English translations for Merlin, and referred this inquiry on to me. It went from there.

MM: Did the producer/writers say what it was they were aiming for in the programme, particularly with Merlin’s link to the ‘old ways’ and the ancient language of magic? Did they want to give an air of authenticity, perhaps?

Mark: There was never any explicit guidance about the affect the producer and writers were seeking. I was simply sent the phrases from the script that the script writers had decided should be in Old English.

That said, I learned a certain amount about the programme makers’ aims from the feedback I received about particular translations.

For example, several of the spells that I was asked to translate used words that could essentially be transliterated into Old English, for example, by supplying eorð for ‘earth’. This technique did not find favour, because the Old English did not sound appropriately alien, old or strange.

MM: There were lots of magic spells cast by Merlin. Often, it sounded like he was speaking something akin to Old English: lots of imperatives concerning fire, if my memory serves me right. Can you enlighten us?

Mark: Most of the spells were indeed imperatives to do with fire. Their sounding ‘something akin to Old English’ is probably a consequence of the procedure adopted for relaying the spells to the actors.

This involved me transliterating the Old English phonetically, not into IPA [International Phonetic Alphabet] but into a phonetic spelling based on RP [Received Pronunciation], this phonetic spelling being read into a dictaphone by my contact on the production team, and this recording eventually making its way to the actors in rehearsal.

MM: Similarly, when Merlin called out to the dragon, he also used an ‘ancient’ tongue, appearing to command the dragon with a Latinized word of sorts, not quite draco, but something similar, perhaps dracon. Do you remember anything about this?

Mark: I don’t remember this particular instance, but Latin draco was borrowed into Old English (and quite widely used there, both in prose and poetry, for example, in Beowulf at line 2085) as a weak masculine noun, with dracan as its oblique form.

MM: I guess wyrm wouldn’t have cut it?

Mark: Again, I can’t recollect the precise instance, but given the concern with otherness, perhaps wyrm (> WORM) would have been judged bathetic.

MM: What languages have you engaged with in your academic research?

Mark: I routinely work with texts in Old and Middle English, Old French and Latin. In comparativist work, I also touch on other Germanic languages like Gothic, Old Saxon, and Old Norse.

MM: Have you been/are you involved in any other ‘non-academic’ ventures other than Merlin?

Mark: I’ve been involved with several public engagement projects, including (as part of the Mapping Medieval Chester project) reading a Latin encomium to the city on its shopper-filled High Street, and more recently a couple of events at the University of Sheffield designed to bring medieval manuscripts and research archives to a wider public.

MM: More broadly, is it important for you to take your research to a wider than academic audience?

Mark: Medieval texts require a particularly high knowledge threshold to appreciate them: a reader needs to be able to read what is effectively a foreign language, and to have an understanding of a culture very different from our own.

This means it’s more difficult to communicate research about medieval texts, than research about, say, films from the 1960s.

For this reason, I do worry about whether the impact and public engagement agenda will lead to more abstruse kinds of research being disadvantaged because they are not as easily communicable to the public.

That said, I think medievalists do have a role as public intellectuals. For me, the compelling reason to teach and research the Middle Ages is that, by virtue of what Chris Jones has called its ‘strange likeness’, they are an unparalleled mirror for the present.

The first step to allowing it to claim this place will be to unpick the Renaissance rhetoric of the barbarous Middle Ages which underpins, for example, David Cameron’s recent description of Islamic State as ‘literally medieval’.

MM: What is your main area of academic research?

Mark: I work on the twelfth century. This is a period of dramatic change in both literature and language. In linguistic terms, it is the period that Old English ends and Middle English begins.

In literary histories, it has until recently been described as a vacuum, a period in which no original texts were produced, and which therefore serves to insulate the Old English tradition from the rest of English literary history.

In crude terms, my work is thus about explaining how we got from Beowulf to Chaucer. The main output of this work will be a book, hopefully out in 2017.

I’m simultaneously working on a number of articles looking at how far processes of linguistic change, of interest to scholars working on contemporary languages, can be traced in medieval texts.

The one I’m working on at the moment concerns language attrition (how speakers who relocate to a new country gradually lose mastery of their native tongue), using the twelfth-century historian Orderic Vitalis, who moved from England to Normandy aged ten, as a case study.

I’m also preparing a study of destandardisation in twelfth-century English.

Dr Mark Faulkner, The University of Sheffield. Update: now Trinity College, Dublin.

My technique didn't
always find favour, because the Old English didn't always sound appropriately
alien, old or strange.

Young Merlin does his first bit of dragon calling. The person posting this on YouTube (click the still) reckoned Morgan looked 'really, really stupid'. Well, no one ever said shouting out Old English to an imaginary dragon was cool, did they!

I've been involved
with several public engagement projects, including reading a
Latin encomium
on the shopper-filled
High Street of
Chester!

I worry that the
more abstruse kinds of research, like medieval literature, will become disadvantaged because they are not easily communicable to
the public.

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17/11/2014

A heavy price for light fingers

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The Eadui, or Arundel, Psalter. British Library, Arundel 155, fol. 9r, detail. Image public domain.

Today, I'm going to ask you to put aside your twenty-first century misplaced compassion and that overarching let-the-punishment-fit-the-crime sense of justice you have and, instead, get into the spirit of Anglo-Saxon England!

You see, when you listen to the readings about thievery (please follow the link below), I think you might just wonder what would have happened had you been an Anglo-Saxon struggling to make ends meet.

What if the reason you helped yourself to your neighbour's sceats (Old English currency) or, God forbid, the bishop's blessed belongings, was because you were struggling to feed your six kids?

Well, mercy isn't a word mentioned in these legal texts, though it has to be said that the London ruling by King Æthelstan (video 4) represents an emendation to the age of accountability.

Ah, God bless him: he obviously thought age 7 was a bit too young for slaying a thief, so he was compassionate enough to raise it to 12.

I hope you enjoy the sample readings in the video link below. They are not all about thievery. They were produced as promotional material for the Rochester Cathedral's 'Hidden Treasures, Fresh Expressions' project, for which I'm the academic research consultant.

The first is an introductory film to the Textus Roffensis, the manuscript that contains all the texts from which I read.

Video 2 has a few lines from Æthelberht's Code, written around the year 600, and surviving only in the Textus Roffensis. So this law code is actually a copy of the earliest surviving piece of written English! A monastic WOW!

As well as its opening decrees against thievery, I also give you a few on sexual crimes.

The third video is a reading of part of King Alfred's preface to his famous Domboc (Book of Judgements). It might surprise you that it owes a great deal to the Old Testament, which suggests Alfred wanted his people to be thought of as God's people.

Video 4 is the opening of Æthelstan's London Code, mentioned above.

The fifth video is also about thievery, but specifically what Anglo-Saxons should do if livestock is stolen. You needed a strong voice and plenty of spare candle wax, apparently.

And to round off the selection, we have none other than Michael Wood reading out a rather earthy excommunication curse. My sincere apologies if your sensibilities don't quite stretch to religious profanity ...

I reckon this curse would have been a good one to shout at those nasty little thieves who nicked your maniple, bishop!

Well, who'd have been a thief in Anglo-Saxon England? Whether paying back twelve-fold for filching from the bishop in the seventh century, or paying with your life for pinching twelve pennies in the tenth, it was tough being a crook ...

Justice tempered with mercy isn't all that obvious in Anglo-Saxon laws against thievery.

Libra, zodiac symbol of justice. British Library, Arundel 60 (Winchester, probably after 1073), fol. 6, detail. Image is in the Public Domain.

Video link

'Textus Roffensis Film Project', courtesy of Rochester Cathedral and produced by Phil Smethurst for Manchester Lights Media.

Enjoy! And if you'd like to share your thoughts on any of the readings or their content, please leave a comment below.

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13/11/2014

Female monastics ... that's nuns to you!

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Apparently, I have competition. From tenth-century German nuns, no less. Well, more precisely, from a really interesting website by Sarah Greer, whose specialist interest is female monasteries, particularly early medieval ones in Germany. Her posts are really worth a read, and she tells me she has a new post due soon ... I'd better watch out.

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The worst sin? Are you forty? A married man? You've been warned!

What was the worst sin you could commit in Anglo-Saxon England? Surely murder, you're thinking. Perhaps, in particular, murdering your own child? But there was something even worse. And to be guilty of it, you needed to be a married man and of a certain age ...

The Anglo-Saxon monk gets on the train

Merlin's magic words were actually Mark's

Sorry to have to disabuse all you Colin Morgan fans, but Merlin needed a little help with his magic spells ... from a 21st-century linguist!

A heavy price for light fingers

Well, who'd have been a thief in Anglo-Saxon England? Whether paying back twelve-fold for filching from the bishop in the seventh century, or paying with your life for pinching twelve pennies in the tenth, it was tough being a crook ...

Female monastics ... that's nuns to you!

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