Common Ground

Someone has been google-searching ‘Anglo Saxon customs in Australia’. Now, I happen to think we in Australia have some common cultural ground with our Anglo-Saxon forbears, and it is this: booze. Anglo-Saxons liked booze. Australians like booze. Australian social culture revolves around boozing far more than some of us would like.

I give you Wulfstan’s Admonition to Bishops:

And hit is egeslic gewuna, Þæt we eac habbað: sylfe we bysniað oft and gelome Þæt we geornost scoldan ægwær forbeodan… we oferdrucen lufiað to georne and mid ðam huru ðencað, Þæt we us sylfe weorðian wide, Þe we oðre men drecan to swyÞe.
And it is (a) dreadful custom, which we each have: we (our)selves set an example often and frequently which we should most eagerly forbid everywhere… we love drunkenness to eagerly. And certainly think upon that, which we ourselves praise widely, so that we make other men too greatly drunk.¹

Now, to the best of my knowledge neither the Anglican nor Catholic Archbishop of Sydney has lately been accused of ’staying too long on the bench of the ale-house’, as were Wulfstan’s fellow-bishops. I have known a good few ministers of the Word in my time who happily trot down to the pub after church for a beer or two- a perfect example of the moderation Wulfstan advises.

I’m quite sure, however, that Wulfstan would consider the other book-learned members of our society- the politicians and the lawyers, the doctors, the students, and yes, quite definitely the medievalists- likewise responsible for setting a good moral example to the degenerate footballers of the nation. Wulfstan would not be encouraging students to drink their stresses away. Wulfstan might even argue that the inebriated examples of those who should know better are in some way responsible for the antics of, say, Shane Warne. He would certainly have some choice alliteration to describe the kind of drunken embarrassments to the country (let me have a stab at this) which one may find here:

Hooligans and hoons, racists and rioters, misogynists and misanthropes, criminals and crooks, lushes and lechers, and those who, all too often, embarrass the establishment, with drunkenness, which they should defend.²

In conclusion: one Anglo-Saxon custom we cling to very eagerly, O Google Searcher, is that of social drinking, often to excess. Drunkenness as group bonding. Convivial imbibing as the key to ‘networking’. Whether or not this is a good thing, I leave to your discretion.

Finally: when next you’re having a glass before knucking down to write, remember to:

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1. For the persnickety: the Admonition is in Jost’s edition of the Institutes of Polity, p. 262ff, and if from the MS London, British Library, Cotton Nero A.i: f. 100v.ff. The translation is mine and shouldn’t be trusted.
2. OK, it’s nigh impossible to keep one’s syntax straight and alliterate a sentence. I am suddenly more tolerant of convoluted Anglo-Saxon expressions.

Myltestran 7 myrðran: infanticides and stillbirths in Anglo-Saxon England

‘Prostitutes and killers of children’. The two form part of a long list of alliterating pairs of social dangers in Wulfstan’s Sermo Lupi Ad Anglos. They can be found with man-slayers and woman-slayers, priest-destroyers and church-haters, and so on.

I remarked to the Bocera this afternoon that it was a bit harsh, equating prostitutes with killers of children. Some early form of ‘but think of the children!’ hysteria? The Bocera looked over his glasses at me and pointed out that ‘killers of children’ is probably referring to abortions or child abandonment- and who would be in a worse economic or social position to raise children than prostitutes?

He then went on to tell me that in excavations of Anglo-Saxon settlements, it is not uncommon to find the bones of newborns in the rubbish heap, and that presumably these were the successful abandonments, since they weren’t discovered and given a proper burial.

But what about still-births, I asked. Still-births, he informed me, were always given a proper burial. In the excavation of Anglo-Saxon churches and cemeteries, the graves of children who died before baptism are usually found under the eaves of the church, in the hope that they would be ‘baptised’ by the water running off the sanctuary.

I learn something new every time I see the Bocera.¹ Today: one gruesome, one sweet, and both sad…

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1. Did you know that Neil Ker died by falling out of an apple tree? The Bocera tells me, with his impenetrable Bocera expression, that this is not an uncommon way for scholars to die.

Happy Fact on a Sunday

Wulfstan was a puntuation nerd. According to Neil Ker’s article ‘The Handwriting of the Archbishop Wulfstan’, in MSS which were not produced under his direction, where Wulfstan’s handwriting is present in the margins, the punctuation has been edited in places to match the dominant scheme of punctuation in Wulfstanian MSS. You can’t tell for sure, but it is to be assumed that Wulfstan did it himself.

Wulfstan was a punctuation nerd. And, on a more practical note, this is a good indication that the punctuation in Wulfstanian MSS is a scheme designed for reading aloud- why else would it be important to synchronise older texts which you were also using with your personal scheme of punctuation?

I am also a punctuation nerd. This makes me feel that I have some kind of affinity with our favourite grouchy Archbishop. I own a teapot mat decorated with ampersands. Sadly, it was not available with Tyronean Notes on it, otherwise I could fondly imagine that that Archbishop Wulfstan would have appreciated it too.

Better than a stress ball.

Since everyone liked the idea of drunkenness as a coping method, this week, I shall share with you a stress management tactic I actually practice.

Stuffed Toys. Fabulous things, in their own right. I happen to own a (small) collection named after Patristic theologians, but that’s another story.¹

The newest addition to my collection is a fluffy puppy by the name of Wulfstan. He lacks the fearsome expression you might expect, but is a satisfyingly floppy creature. He can be picked up and shaken in frustration; his limbs can be twisted around and his stomach squeezed, as one would a stress ball; he can be hurled across the room in moments of great distress; he will lie on top of piles of books and guard them devotedly; he will listen intently to the most boring study related monologue; he will maintain his expression of eternal floppy optimism in the fase of all crises; he can be shoved in a handbag and taken on another tedious trip to the library; and in addition to all this, he is fluffy and soothing to stroke.

Best of all, being a stuffed toy, he is unlikely (and really, unable) to object to being the object of re-directed Thesis Angst. This is a saintly quality not possessed by the general public around one.

Accordingly, I recommend everyone invest a stuffed toy or two with the spirit of their academic work.

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1. Well, a pair. But I’m working on it.

Getting off Scot-free

Ever wondered what was so free about Scots, anyway? If escaping over the border into Scot-land exempted you from punishments?
Or, having learnt that the Old English “sc” makes “sh” sounds, perhaps you wondered if in fact those getting off ’scot-free’ had escaped bowfire somehow?

The etymological wonders of the English language await you. Scot is in fact a fee, tax or imposition. It appears as an Old English term (apparently derived from a Germanic root word, which gives us ON skot and OF escot); in fact, the idiom scot-fre(o) occurs five times in the Old English Corpus online database. I wonder how many English language idioms have survied that long or longer?

The Middle English ’scot’, according to the OED online, shows more Scandinavian influence than Anglo-Saxon- which is how we’re now pronouncing ’scot’ rather than ’shot’.

Some of the scots which you could be charged, according to the various law codes in Cotton Nero A.i, include:

*Church-scot, which, according to the OED, is

in OE. times a custom of corn collected on St. Martin’s day; extended to other contributions in kind and money made for the support of the clergy, or demanded as a traditional ecclesiastical due

* Soul-scot- a mortuary tax, the price you pay to be buried on consecrated ground.

*Romscot, or ‘Peter’s Pence’- an annual household tax, or hearth-penny, sent to the papal see in Rome.

All of these are attested in Middle English sources on the OED as well as Old. Exactly when any of them originated is a fuzzy question, because consientious characters like the Archbishop Wulfstan, when compiling collections of laws (like Cotton Nero A.i), could retro-actively adapt past law to current, inserting calls for plough-alms and Peter’s Pence in passages which already called for tithes and church-scot, for example. Wormald, in his ‘Making of English Law’, uses the calls for scots in different versions of individual codes to help map out a picture of their development. Invariably, those codes in Wulfstanian texts show greatest evidence of adaptation- even the codes he originally wrote evidence later developments; for example, AEthelred’s codes were being retro-actively adapted as Wulfstan worked on Cnut’s comprehensive codes.

How does ’scotfre(o)’, ie, free of taxes, become ’scot free’, free from punishment or sanction? The OED doesn’t have a suggestion regarding the semantic shift- it could be a modern shift, as the word ’scot’ lost meaning. I wonder, though, if perhaps somewhere along the line ’scot’, taxes, picked up a little semantic contamination from ‘weregild’, fines levied for crimes against individual men according to status?

W.W.W.D?

As I’m sure you’ve heard from Jonathan Jarrett and Brandon, the newest thing in medieval blogging is here: What Would Wulfstan Do?

Which is my question for the day: Would Wulfstan spend the day arsing around with tables? Would Wulfstan spend the afternoon commenting upon Sir Gawain? Would Wulfstan spend the day translating sermons? Would Wulfstan get dressed and go and examine Cotton Nero A.i?

(Answers: no- lived in a fortunate age before MS word; no- lived in a fortunate age before courtly poncing around; yes- quite often; yes- presumably, it being his MS and all. But WHY, oh why, would he be examining it? If I knew that, I’d have a whole chapter written already.)

Would Wulfstan have breakfast and a cup of tea first? Yes, yes he would.