Table Of ContentDA
15)~
Myth, Rulership, Church
, /l'i C\ <2'
and Charters
Essays in Honour of Nicholas Brooks
Edited by
JULIA BARROW
University of Nottingham, UK
and
ANDREW WAREHAM
Roehampton University, UK
ASH GATE
© Edited by Julia Barrow and Andrew Wareham 2008
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Published by
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I I
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Myth, rulership, church and charters: essays in honour of Nicholas Brooks
1. Great Britain - History - Anglo-Saxon period, 449-1066
I. Brooks, Nicholas II. Barrow, Julia III. Wareham, Andrew,
1965-
942'.017
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Myth, rulership, church and charters: essays in honour of Nicholas Brooks; edited by Julia
Barrow and Andrew Wareham.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0- 7546-5120-8 (alk. paper)
1. Great Britain-History-Anglo-Saxon period, 449-1066. 2. Great Britain-History, Military-
449-1066. 3. Anglo-Saxons. I. Barrow, Julia. II. Wareham, Andrew, 1965-lll. Brooks,
Nicholas.
DA152.M98 2007
942.0l~c22
2007008134
ISBN 978-0- 7546-5120-8
Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall.
Contents
List of Figures vii
Notes on Contributors ix
Acknowledgements xi
List of Abbreviations xiii
Introduction: Myth, Rulership, Church and Charters in the Work of
Nicholas Brooks
Julia Barrow
2 Nicholas Brooks at Birmingham 11
Christopher Dyer
3 Anglo-Saxon Origin Legends 15
Barbara Yorke
4 A Nearly, but Wrongly, Forgotten Historian of the Dark Ages 31
James Campbell
5 Anglo-Saxon Charters: Lost and Found 45
Simon Keynes
6 Reculver Minster and its Early Charters 67
Susan Kelly
7 Stour in Ismere 83
Margaret Gelling
8 Was there an Agricultural Revolution in Anglo-Saxon England? 89
Alex Burghart and Andrew Wareham
9 'The Annals of Æthelflæd': Annals, History and Politics in Early
Tenth-Century England 101
Pauline Stafford
10 The First Use of the Second Anglo-Saxon Ordo 117
Janet L. Nelson
VI MYTH, RULERSHIP, CHURCH AND CHARTERS
11 Where English Becomes British: Rethinking Contexts for
Brunanburh 127
Sarah Foot
12 Archbishop Dunstan: A Prophet in Politics? 145
Catherine Cubitt
13 A Mass for St Birinus in an Anglo-Saxon Missal from the
Scandinavian Mission-Field 167
Alicia Corrêa
14 The Saint Clement Dedications at Clementhorpe and
Pontefract Castle: Anglo-Scandinavian or Norman? 189
Barbara E. Crawford
15 England and the Norman Myth 211
Nick Webber
16 What Happened to Ecclesiastical Charters in England 1066-c. l l OO? 229
Julia Barrow
Nicholas Brooks: A List of Publications 249
Index 255
List of Figures
Frontispiece Professor Nicholas Brooks
14.1 Map of medieval churches dedicated to St Clement in England 190
14.2 Plan of collegiate and monastic precincts in medieval York, with
the site of St Clement's priory on the west bank of the River Ouse.
From O.M. Palliser, T.R. Slater and E.P. Dennison, 'The topography
of towns 600-1300', in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain,
I: 600-1540, ed. D.M. Palliser (Cambridge, 2000), 179 195
14.3 Map of routes and rivers in southern Yorkshire 199
14.4 Plan of Phases I and 2 at Pontefract Castle from Ian Roberts,
Pontefract Castle (Wakefield, 1990), 402 204
14.5 The east end of St Clement's Chapel, Pontefract Castle 206
List of Abbreviations
ANS Anglo-Norman Studies
ASE Anglo-Saxon England
BCS W. de Gray Birch, Cartularium Saxonicum (3 vols and index,
London, I 885-1899) - cited by charter number
BL British Library, London
BM Bibliothèque Municipale
BN Biblothèque Nationale, Paris
Bodi. Bodleian Library, Oxford
ecce Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
De moribus De moribus et actis primorum Normanniae ducum auctore Dudone
sancti Quintini decano, ed. Jules Lair, Société des Antiquaires de
Normandie (Caen, 1865)
Dudo Dudo of St Quentin, History of the Normans, tr. Eric Christiansen
(Woodbridge, 1998)
EHD,I English Historical Documents, I, c. 500-1042, ed. Dorothy
Whitelock, 2"d edn (London, I 979)
EHR English Historical Review
EME Early Medieval Europe
GND The Gesta Normannarum Ducum of William of Jumièges, Orderic
Vitalis, and Robert of Torigni, ed. and tr. Elisabeth M.C. van Houts,
OMT (2 vols, Oxford, 1992-1995)
GRA William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum, ed. and tr. R.A.B.
Mynors, completed by R.M. Thomson and Michael Winterbottom,
OMT (2 vols, Oxford, 1998-1999)
HBS Henry Bradshaw Society
HE Bedes Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Bertram
Colgrave and R.A.B.Mynors, OMT (Oxford, 1969)
MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, in Association with the
British Academy. From the Earliest Times to the Year 2000, ed.
H.C.G. Matthew and B. Harrison, 61 vols (Oxford 2004)
OMT Oxford Medieval Texts
Origins TheOriginsofAnglo-SaxonKingdoms,ed. StevenBassett(Leicester,
1989)
pd printed
PL Patrologia cursus completus, accurante J.-P Migne. Series !atina
(221 vols, Paris, 1844-1865)
s
P.H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters: an Annotated List and
Bibliography, Royal Historical Society Guides and Handbooks, 8
(London, 1968) - cited by charter number
XIV MYTH, RULERSHIP, CHURCH AND CHARTERS
s.a. sub anno (annís)
s.v. sub verba
tr. translated
TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
Vatican Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City
Vita Æthelwoldi Wulfstan of Winchester, Vita Sancti Æthelwoldi, ed. Michael
Lapidge and Michael Winterbottom, OMT (Oxford, 1991)
Chapter 1
Introduction: Myth, Rulership, Church
and Charters in the Work of
Nicholas Brooks
Julia Barrow
Nicholas Brooks has, for more than 40 years, been reshaping our understanding
of the Anglo-Saxons. The four principal themes of this book, myth, rulership, the
Church and charters, are all central to his scholarship and all represent areas within
which he has been able to open up new lines of enquiry and to establish new bases
of knowledge. The aim of this introduction is to provide an overview of Nicholas'
contribution to each of these four themes and to link this up with the papers which
follow, showing how he has inspired and influenced his friends and pupils.
Myth, our opening theme, was not one of Nicholas' earliest interests, but had
become one of his areas of study by the mid- l 980s, by the time he moved from St
Andrews to take up the chair of Medieval History at Birmingham.' For a scholar
whose work has been rooted in the history of Kent and its early kingdom, the issue
of the creation and development of myth was inescapable: Hengist, Horsa and
Vortigern occur in many different sources and an important task for historians of
early Kent is to confront them. Nicholas' solution was to work out the development
2
of the myth from the differences appearing in each retelling of the story, leading
him to suggest that the original story could have been invented for Æthelberht of
Kent to bolster the identity of his kingdom and give his ancestry a much longer and
grander past than those of contemporary Anglo-Saxon dynasties. In providing a
3
pair of adventurous brothers as the co-founders of the kingdom of Kent, the creator
of the myth made use ofa widely-found motif in Indo-European origin myths and,
by naming them 'Stallion' and 'Horse', linked them up with the cult of Woden, in
which horses seem to have played a role. In this collection of essays Barbara Yorke
4
makes use of this approach to re-examine all the Anglo-Saxon origin myths to see
if further light can be shed on the circumstances of their production, and she also
I Dyer, this volume.
2 Nicholas Brooks, 'The Creation and Early Structure of the Kingdom of Kent', in The
Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, ed. S.R. Bassett (Leicester, 1989) 55-74; repr. in Nicholas
Brooks, Anglo-Saxon Myths: State and Church 400-1066 (London and Rio Grande, 2000),
33-60, at 37-46.
3 Nicholas Brooks, 'The English Origin Myth', in Brooks, Anglo-Saxon Myths, 79-89,
at 85.
4 Ibid., 88-9.
2 MYTH, RULERSHIP, CHURCH AND CHARTERS
surveys burial evidence to show how that, too, allowed those who buried the dead to
make statements about their identity.
5
Nicholas' earliest published comments about myth are to be found in his inaugural
lecture at Birmingham, given in 1986: at the start of this he referred to the thesis
of his predecessor at Birmingham, R.H.C. Davis, that the Normans deliberately
created a myth to give themselves an identity, and proceeded to illuminate this
with an insight from one of his own areas of study, the iconography of warriors in
the Bayeux Tapestry. The Normans shaved the backs of their heads in a conscious
attempt to look different from their neighbours. Norman identity was the subject
6
undertaken by Nicholas' pupil Nick Webber for his doctoral thesis;' his paper in this
volume deals with the role of Engiand in the Norman myth, and shows that although
England occurs frequently in the narrative of Norman history from the time ofDudo
of St-Quentin onwards, it was not 'incorporated into Normannifas' until the twelfth
century.
8
Angio-Saxon kingship, of which origin myth was a vital component, has been
one ofNicholas Brooks' main areas ofresearch from the outset. In particular it is the
range of resources available to Anglo-Saxon rulers and the ways in which they could
enforce demands for these on their subjects that have aroused his interest: above ali
the three 'common burdens' of fortresses, bridges and army service. Already in 1964
Nicholas had begun to work on the identification of the forts of the Burghai Hidage;
9
much more recently, for a Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies conference
on 'The Defence of Wessex' (published in 1996), he returned to the subject to
explore the administrative problems faced by Alfred and his successor in setting up
the system.'? These were also problems for Alfred's daughter Æthelflæd in the West
Midlands in the early tenth century, the subject of Pauline Stafford's article below,
on which more shortly. More generally on the topic of Anglo-Saxon reactions to
11
Viking attacks in the ninth century, in 1978 Nicholas delivered a powerful rebuttal
of Peter Sawyer's thesis that the size of Scandinavian fleets and armies in the ninth
century had been greatly exaggerated by contemporary chroniclers and subsequent
generations of historians: rather, as Nicholas demonstrated, the smaller Viking fleets
5 Yorke, this volume.
6 Nicholas Brooks, History and Myth, Forgery and Truth (Birmingham, 1986), repr. in
Brooks, Anglo-Saxon Myths, 1-19, at 3.
7 Nick Webber, 'The Evolution ofNorman Identity, 911-1154', Ph.D. thesis, University
of Birmingham (2002), now published as The Evolution of Norman Identity, 911-1154
(Woodbridge, 2005).
8 Webber, this volume.
9 'The Unidentified Forts of the Burghai Hidage', Medieval Archaeology, 8 (1964),
74-90, repr. in Nicholas Brooks, Communities and Warfare 700-1400 (London and Rio
Grande, 2000), 93-113.
10 'The Administrative Background to the Burghai Hidage', in The Defence of Wessex:
the Burghai Hidage and Anglo-Saxon Fortifications, ed. David Hill and Alexander Richard
Rumble (Manchester, 1996), 128-50, repr. in Communities and Warfare 700-1400, 114-37.
11 Stafford, this volume.
INTRODUCTION 3
of the earlier ninth century had amalgamated to form the large fleet carrying the
'Great Army', leaving most of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms unable to cope.
12
The second of the three common burdens, bridge-building, became one ofNicholas'
interests rather more recently, when he was invited to contribute to a volume on the
history of Rochester Bridge (published in 1993). Here a charitable trust founded in
the late fourteenth century took over the task of building and maintaining a bridge
which earlier in the middle ages had been a responsibility shared out among local
landowners; a document copied into the twelfth-century Textus Rojfensis explains
how manpower was organised in the Anglo-Saxon period to work on each of the
piers." From the Medway, Nicholas' bridge-inspecting remit has extended across
Europe to other examples of bridges with ancient pasts and continuity of use. ln
14
this volume, Barbara Crawford examines the significance of the cult of St Clement to
comment on the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman fear of dangerous river-crossings:
at Pontefract (as its name suggests, a 'broken' and thus a failed bridge in a part of
England where Anglo-Saxon royal administration was markedly less efficient than
it was in the area south of the Humber) a dedication to Clement may reveal William
the Conqueror's gratitude for a successful passage over the River Aire.
15
The last of the three common burdens, army service, has been a particular
interest of Nicholas throughout his academic career. Nicholas' interest in armour
and weapons was aroused when he was a pupil at Winchester College. Together
with his history teacher at Winchester, H.E. Walker, he explored the evidence of
the Bayeux Tapestry for body armour and weapons, in the process comparing the
portrayal of Anglo-Saxon bymies in the Tapestry with a fragment of relief sculpture,
probably dating to the reign of Cnut, from Old Minster, Winchester, and this was
published in an early volume of the proceedings of the Battle Conference on Anglo
Norman Studies. Also in the late 1970s, through analysis of heriots recorded in
16
wills and those stipulated in law codes, he was able to show that Æthelred greatly
increased the quantity of military equipment that earls, bishops and king's thegns
12 'England in the Ninth Century: the Crucible of Defeat', Transactions of the Royal
Historical Society, 5th ser. 29 (1979), 1-20, delivered 3 February 1978, repr. in Communities
and Warfare7 0()-/400, 48-68; for Peter Sawyer's thesis on Viking numbers, see The Age of the
Vikings (London, 1962), and its 2nd edn (London, 1971 ).
13 Nicholas Brooks, 'Rochester Bridge, AD 43-1381 ', in Traffic and Politics: the
Construction and Management of Rochester Bridge AD 43-1993, ed. Nigel Yates and James
M. Gibson (Woodbridge, 1994), 1-40, repr. in Communities and Warfare 700-1400, 219-65;
idem, 'Church, Crown and Community: Public Work and Seigneurial Responsibilities at
Rochester Bridge', in Warriorsa nd Churchmen in the High Middle Ages: Essays Presented to
Karl Leyser, ed. Timothy Reuter (London, 1992), 1-20.
14 'Medieval European Bridges: a Window onto Changing Concepts of State Power',
Journal of the Haskins Society, 7 (1997 for 1995), 11-29, repr. in Communities and Warfare
700-1400, 1-31.
15 Crawford, this volume.
16 N.P. Brooks and H.E. Walker, 'The Authority and Interpretation of the Bayeux
Tapestry', ANS, 1 (1978), 1-34 and 191-9, repr. in Communities and Warfare 700-1400,
175-218.
