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

27/11/2014

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.

9 Comments

Nic McNeil

28/11/2014 03:04:43 am

I've read some of these prescriptions from the penitentials before, but was really surprised to discover that 20 was considered the age of mental maturity. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that life expectancy in Early Medieval England was somewhere around 35. This guidance on is definitely in line with modern thinking on maturity and seems quite sensible, but it's quite disproportionate with the average life span. It seems to contradict some of the archaeological evidence from the earl period that associates even young boys with weapons and therefore some social responsibility. I wonder if this was a change in thinking brought about through Christian teaching. Have you come across any Christian doctrine which would support this?

Josiah

10/6/2017 06:41:30 am

That was an old average it counts infant death (which was common) modern estimates put the common age of death at around 64 once you reached 21

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23/7/2018 07:52:36 pm

That is completely preposterous! Why is being a homosexual worse than being a murderer? It amazes just how horrible people can be. I do not understand why murder is acceptable and yet being a homosexual is not? There is nothing wrong with being gay. It is not stated in the Bible that Jesus hates gay people. People came up with that absurd idea because of their own selfish reasons and unreasonable judgment and I find it sick that people will criticize someone over that person's preference of gender.

Chris *The Anglo-Saxon Monk

28/11/2014 05:22:00 am

Thanks Nic for the comment. The age of 20 as the age of maturity is fairly typical of a monastic viewpoint. The archaeological evidence for young boys using weapons is not necessarily at odds. Perhaps what we are seeing here are two distinct, but concomitant, perspectives: a societal/cultural one where boys are old enough to wield a weapon, and an ecclesiastical one where moral/mental maturity is not arrived at so early in life. The penitentials evolved out of monastic life - their Irish origins indicate that quite clearly -- but they were adapted for lay life too. There are fairly consistent ideas about the relevance of various ages in male monastic environments throughout the early medieval period. Rob Meens article, ‘Children and Confession in the Early Middle Ages’, is helpful in this regard. It's found in the book, The Church and Childhood, ed. Diana Wood, Studies in Church History 31 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 53-65, at pp. 53-55. If you wish, I can also send you a section of my PhD thesis that deals with the age twenty, and provides an overview of various Irish and Anglo-Saxon penitential material on this. Just drop me an email (go to Contact Me) and I'd be happy to forward that to you.

Chris *The Anglo-Saxon Monk

2/12/2014 06:43:17 am

I meant to comment, Nic, on life expectancy in early medieval England. The assumption is sometimes made that the very low average life expectancy at birth meant that middle-aged or older people were either rare or even non-existent. However, a few things need to be born in mind: 1. High infant mortality rates bring down the average figure; 2. Population models indicate that even where mortality rates were severe, there would still have been significant numbers of people living past the age of life expectancy (e.g. even if 50% died by age thirty, 20% of a current poulation would be aged fifty or more); 3. Archaeological methods for dating adult human remains are not without their problems, so all life expectancy figures based on these should be understood to be approximate.

Char link

1/12/2014 08:53:30 pm

Great post, Chris. Fascinating examples of penitentials. Women always seem to get the shaft from these…ahem…male clergymen passing down the penance! Still blaming Eve for leading Adam astray.

It is amusing that priests had to be cautious about mentioning the 'irrational' behavior - young minds can easily be led down that naughty path.

Given the stance of the Church and that secular laws went to great detail to describe crime and punishment as you noted in your earlier post, it's still surprising that there are no laws against homosexuality in this time period in England. Does that signify toleration? or that it wasn't a crime because no one got hurt?

Chris *The Anglo-Saxon Monk

2/12/2014 06:36:22 am

Thanks, Char! Your questions at the end of your comment are certainly important ones. Particularly interesting is the issue of whether homosexuality may have been seen as not harming anyone. Laws against heterosexual adultery appear to emphasize the important status of the marriage union within society, and the importance of legitimate children within each union. Bearing children was, of course, one of the primary functions of married life. Even the Anglo-Saxon Church acknowledged that procreative sex within marriage was important, and not a sin. In fact, the Church even allowed a woman to abandon a husband who was found to be impotent (this is referred to in the penitentials). She had a right to bear a child, it would seem. Presumably, also, a man would want to ensure that any child his wife gave birth to was his own. The act of adultery by the wife could very well call into question the legitimacy of the child, and thus heterosexual adultery can be seen as potentially destabilising within a community. Perhaps, if we were to take the position that homosexual acts were tolerated, it may possibly be because homosexual sex does not relate to procreation, and thus it wasn't seen by itself as a threat to the stability of a procreative union. What do you think? What do others think?

Char link

3/12/2014 05:52:01 pm

Does this show the forward-thinking Anglo-Saxons exhibiting a separation of Church and State? (Is that more an American concept?) The Church condemned the act because the only 'natural' sex was for for procreation within a marriage. Church and State both punished heterosexual adultery for the reasons you note. But the government chose not to address homosexual behavior until the late 12th century - I certainly can't think of any other plausible explanation, but would love to hear others thoughts too.

Chris *The Anglo-Saxon Monk

4/12/2014 01:00:56 am

The relationship between Church and State in Anglo-Saxon England is complex. Certainly by the late AS period, we see very close ties. Wulfstan, the Archbishop of York, actually wrote several laws for both King Æthelred and King Cnut. Many of these have an ecclesiastical focus, showing concern for the security of the Church. In Cnut’s Oxford Code of 1018, Wulfstan emphasizes the duty of Christians ‘towards God and the world’, and incorporates very specific duties towards both the Church (e.g. keeping Sunday holy, holding to fasting on religious festivals, tithe payments, attending mass at least three times a year) and the community. On sexual matters, he legislates against prostitution, polygyny (having more than one wife) and marrying a kinsperson within six degrees of relationship. He reiterates the Church’s stand for priestly celibacy (this was a big issue for the Church at the time), and also requires a widow to wait a year before she decides to remarry. Notably, he includes adulterers (literally ‘marriage-breakers’; I personally think this is specifically referring to what we would now call bigamists) amongst those to be exiled if they do not make amends. Thus we can see that Wulfstan/Cnut’s lawcode is quite specific about certain sexual matters. But there are also some more general laws against sexual impropriety: abstaining from ‘unlawful/improper sexual unions’ (probably harking back to marrying close kin and bigamy) and ‘fornication’. The latter may have been interpreted by those enforcing the law as including the prohibition of homosexuality, but we can’t really state that for sure. What I find interesting about Wulfstan is that he is closely associated with one of the penitentials (known as the Old English Handbook for a confessor), which does stipulate against ‘foully polluting oneself in unnatural ways through any practice’. It’s clear that this is an allusion to things such as homosexuality and bestiality (in fact this penitentials does also have another canon specifically referring to bestiality); and it’s pretty clear Wulfstan knew what same-sex intercourse was, and most certainly he would have seen it as unnatural (as did other AS theologians). But perhaps when it came to writing Cnut’s laws, he was reluctant to be specific, and perhaps (who knows?) Cnut was too. Presumably he actually got to look over his own law!! I think we have to remember that Anglo-Saxon laws in general do not always stipulate everything in very exact terms; certain individual points of law are sometimes general and quite vague. In that way, they are unlike modern English (or US) law. It may be, in terms of secular law, that homosexual acts were not seen specifically as a major (or widespread) problem as was bigamy or marrying someone too close in kinship. Penitentials, the priests’ handbooks, on the other hand are quite often on sexual matters painfully specific, and this is because penitentials were all about sin. So, to sum up (sorry for going on so long), the ‘Church and State’ were at times tied at the hip, we might say, particularly late on in the Anglo-Saxon period, so I don’t see their relationship as the direct reason for the absence of legislation against homosexuality. I’m wondering as I conclude this whether the theological idea of inter-male sex as the ‘unspeakable sin’ filtered down into the psyche of Wulfstan, the legislator. But that’s for another time!

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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 ...

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