How a Widow Becomes a Witch: Land, Loss and Law in Charter S. 1377

ABSTRACT

This essay takes a close look at the events related in Sawyer charter 1377, a late tenth-century account of the execution of a widow, probably for alleged witchcraft, on the south-eastern border of the collapsing Danelaw, and the subsequent real estate deals that her death enabled. The executed widow from this event survives now as a barely legible hapax legomenon, existing only in trace form in a twelfth-century copy of a tenth-century charter – a record that documents the end of this woman’s life in order to erase her from the historical register and legitimize the seizure of her lands. Exploring the known and conjectural micro-history of this woman repositions her at the centre of a remarkable network of gendered, geographic, rhetorical, moral, cultural, legal, political, religious, ethnic and authoritarian values, whose forces converge at the moment of her prosecutorial killing.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Invultuacio, or attempting to harm an individual by doing violence to its effigy, is attested in twelfth-century English law codes as a criminal act, Kittredge, 74–5; and Bonser, 149.

2 All charters are referred to by their Sawyer reference number (for all, see Electronic Sawyer: http://www.esawyer.org.uk). S. 533: dedi cuidum ministro mihi fidelissimo vocitato nomine Ælfsino quandam ruris particulam . III . videlicet mansas in loco ubi solicole illius regionis Ægelesuurð nomen impo suerunt; Kelly, 221–5; see also Hart, 110–11 and 161–2. The authenticity of this charter’s language and content to the tenth century is not in doubt.

3 S. 1377: edited and translated with extensive notes in Kelly, 275–9; edited in Rabin, “Before the Law,” 43–4; edited and translated in Robertson, 68–9; translation here is my own. The authenticity of this charter’s content to the tenth century is not in doubt. On the dating of the charter to slightly after Edgar’s reign, see below, p. 00.

4 E.g., Adkins, 475; Kittredge, 28–9 & 75; Crawford at 112–3 and 116; Davies, 49–51; Bremmer, 69; Saunders, 68; Reynolds, 1; Robertson, 324; Meyer, 69. Davies, 49–51, provides a sympathetic reading of AW, surmising the illegality of her punishment as a form of medieval lynching, but accepts that “the widow and her son had used a form of witchcraft” (49–50), concluding, “If it were not for the charter which notes her death merely as a side-light to the land transaction it formalises, we should only know about fictional Anglo-Saxon witches” (51). See Rabin, “Law and Justice,” 93–6; Smith, 73–6; and Roach, 132–3 for social and legal readings that view S. 1377’s account more dubiously. Hough, “Two Kentish Laws,” 98 n.62, is one of the few critics who question whether the attack was actually witchcraft, but instead a literal, physical attack.

5 Pollington, Leechcraft, 56–7.

6 Bremmer, 69.

7 http://www.pase.ac.uk/

8 See Lees and Overing, 77–9, who discuss a similarly unnamed widow in a later land dispute case, and the rhetorical and cultural strategies of authority at play in such constructing such anonymity through documentary records.

9 Rabin, “Before the Law,” 43.

10 See Kelly, 224–5 for an impressively detailed reading of the topography of S. 533’s vernacular boundary clauses for the Ailsworth estate. The boundaries appear to largely follow the surviving civil parish boundaries for Ailsworth, which the map provided here likewise follows as appropriate.

11 The Roman road Ermine Street connected Lincoln to London; æt Lundene brigce would refer to a bridge to London. See Davies, 51; and Hill.

12 Open Domesday; in 1086 the area had increased to nine hides in value; see also Kelly, 224 and Hart, 162–3.

13 E.g., Alamichel; Stafford, “Women and Norman Conquest,” and Unification and Conquest, 174–6; Richards and Stanfield, 89–99; Rivers, “Widows’ Rights,” and “Legal Status of Widows”; Crick, “Men, Women and Widows”; Nelson; Hough, “The Widow’s Mund”; Klinck, “Bridewealth”; Bremmer and Meyer.

14 Alamichel, 80, 108–116, 123–6; and Hough, “The Widow’s Mund”; see also Lees and Overing, 79–80 and 89; Klinck, “Bridewealth,” 109; Stafford, “Women and Norman Conquest,” 247; Richards and Stanfield, 95; Nelson, 83; Meyer; and Fell et al., 61–2, 86 and 95.

15 Fell et al., 61.

16 Crick, “Men, Women and Widows,” 29; Stafford, Unification, 176, and Stafford, “Women & Norman Conquest,” 236–7.

17 Cf. Crawford, 113.

18 Alamichel, 84–116, esp. 110; Nelson, 94–5; Fell et al., 95. See also Stenton, for a survey of women landowners based on toponymic evidence.

19 Alamichel, 105–7, and Young, 174–5; see however, Stafford, “Norman Conquest,” 237–8 and Meyer, 62–63, for a more qualified readings of the early medieval English morgengifu, and the claim that by the tenth century, the distinction between gift and dowry was collapsing. See also Stafford, Unification, 166–7, and Crick, “Posthumous Benefaction”.

20 Meyer, 65–6.

21 Alamichel, 105–6 and 110, Fell et al., 85–7.

22 S. 1309 (ed. and trans. Robertson, 87–8); Alamichel, 110 and Fell et al., 86.

23 See Rivers, “Widows’ Rights,” for a representative example of the earlier arguments that early medieval England was, relatively speaking, a golden era for medieval English widows. See Klinck, “Anglo-Saxon Women,” and Stafford, “Women and the Norman Conquest,” for a review and subsequent critique of such claims.

24 Rivers, “Legal Status of Widows,” 8–10; Thompson, 9; Hollis, .

25 Fell et al., 61–2; Thompson, 5–6 and 9; Hollis, 455.

26 Charter S. 877; ed. and trans in Robertson, 129–30.

27 Rabin, “Forespeca,” at 234. See also Stafford, “Women in the Norman Conquest,” 240 ff. for skeptical readings of lawsuits involving early medieval English women.

28 Rabin, “Law and Justice,” 93. See also Smith, 75; Roach, 132–3; and Davies, 50.

29 Alfred’s introduction to his laws: Liebermann, Die Gesetze, 38–9; II Æthelstan 6, 6.1 (Liebermann, 242).

30 II Æthelstan 6, 6.1 (Liebermann, Die Gesetze, 242).

31 Meaney, at 28–9; see also the following laws: 1 Edward and Guthrum, 11 and Quadritpartitus 2, (Liebermann, Die Gesetze, 134–5), 1 Edmund 6 (Liebermann, Die Gesetze, 186), and 2 Cnut 42 (Liebermann, Die Gesetze, 310).

32 Old English Penitential, in Anglo-Saxon Penitentials: A Cultural Database: www.anglo-saxon.net/penance, 44.12.01–13.01; a similar version exists in the Old English Handbook (ibid. 54.35.01).

33 IV Æthelstan 6.4. See Davies, 50 for the supposition that S. 1377 is evidence of an ordeal by water that considerably predates its legal codification. See also Roach, 131–2.

34 Legal Culture, 289 and 385; see also Rabin, “Forspeca,” 245.

35 See Lambert, 313, and Meyer, 65–9.

36 Alamichel, 108, 116 and 121; Stafford, Unification and Conquest, 176, further notes that, “Widow’s land was part of the old family provisions which nobility successfully exempted from royal forfeiture”.

37 Meyer, 65 and 69; and Keynes and Lapidge, 309 n. 24.

38 Carella, 132.

39 van Houts, 15.

40 Roach, 131–2 reads the events as the culmination of an ongoing local dispute, ending in “mob justice,” that is then later provided legal authority.

41 In S. 1377, the land traded to Wulfstan Uccea for the northern properties of Ailsworth and Yaxley, Washington, is in Sussex. See Kelly, 50 and 224, and 275–6; Hart, 162 for discussion, and charter S. 1447.

42 Kelly, 276. Wulfstan’s byname Uccea would derive from yce, the Old English word for frog, and likely meant “swollen”.

43 Kelly, 48–51.

44 See Rabin, “Parent-Child Litigation,” 289–90.

45 Cf. Kelly, 277.

46 Rivers, “Legal Status of Women,” 7–8.

47 Jayakumar, provides a good overview of the so-called anti-monastic reaction after Edgar’s death. Here again, widows were not spared; in an early eleventh-century addition to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s (version D) entry for 975 castigates the secular leaders of this backlash for, among other actions, repeatedly robbing widows. See Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 46–7.

48 Yorke, 5

The archives of Winchester, Ely and Peterborough demonstrate the way in which Æthelwold relentlessly pursued his aims through law-suits, and transfers and purchase, and if his houses did not possess suitable charters from their foundation period for the lands to which they claimed titles, new charters were constructed in which the history of the house was carefully rehearsed.

49 On post-Edgarian dating, see Kelly, 36 and 276.

50 Hart, 161–3, 177–8, and Kelly, 46–51, 223–4, 236 and 276–9.

51 Hart, 163 and 179 and Kelly, 277–8.

52 Life of St. Æthelwold, translated in Whitelock, 837 (#235). See also Richards and Stanfield, 95 ff. and Nelson, 84 ff.

53 Hollis; Stafford, “Women in the Norman Conquest,” 238; Alamichel, 76–102; Nelson, 82–85; Rivers, “Widows’ Rights,” 209–14; Richards and Stanfield, 95–6; Crick, “Men, Women, and Widows,” 27; Klinck, “Anglo-Saxon Women,” 116–18; and Fell et al., 61–2.

54 Alamichel, 86–7; for a basic overview of the early medieval English mund(ium) pertaining to widows, see Rivers, “Widows’ Rights,” 208–11; Klinck, “Anglo-Saxon Women,” 109; Klinck, “Bridewealth,” 241–43; Rabin, “Parent-Child Litigation,” 280; and Young, 181–2; for an argument that mund may also extend to protection by widows as well, see Hough, “Widow’s Mund.” See Foot, I, 111–44 for a study of the rise in the number of vowed widows in tenth- and eleventh-century England.

55 Rivers, “Widows’ Rights,” 211.

56 Nelson, 90–95; Hollis, 450–54.

57 Crick, “Men, Women, and Widows,” 36; see Alamichel, 137, for her study of a will (S. 1535) where a widow grants her son land, but stipulates that it pass to the local church upon his death.

58 Alamichel, 96.

59 5 Æthelræd 21 (Liebermann, Die Gesetze, I. 242). Hollis, 444, relates the phrase to the understanding that widows must remain chaste for a year in order to be eligible for royal protection and a choice between remarriage or religious vocation.

60 Alamichel, 93; Richards and Stanfield, 96–7; Hollis, 444, 455 and 457–8. As example, Hollis argues how Wulfstan’s own early-eleventh century legislation in II Cnut that widows who remarry prematurely are to forfeit both inheritance and morning gift “imposes his own preoccupations” (444) and runs counter to precedent and contemporary legislation that sought to protect such widows in the case of compulsory remarriages.

61 S. 1457, c. 980, recounting events from c. 966–80, in Robertson, 122–4.

62 Wormald, “Charters,” 165.

63 On such distinctions of terms, see Meaney, 13–4 and 28–30, Bonser, 145–7; Crawford, 106–12, and Hall, 173; on the literary and documentary predominance of female or feminine practitioners of magic, positive and/or negative in valence, see Richards and Stanfield, 92, and Meaney. See Crawford, 110–12 and Meaney, 28–29 for discussion that in tenth-century England wiccan took on a distinctly feminine denotation; for a contrasting argument, see Fell et al., 66.

64 For a survey of Medeshamsted’s history and alleged Viking destruction c. 870, see Kelly, 2–40.

65 For representative discussions of how “Danishness,” or perceptions of it, were manipulated for political or cultural reasons in the tenth century, see Hadley, The Northern Danelaw, 300–306 and Hadley, “Viking and Native.”

66 For a brief but detailed history of the Danelaw, see Holman.

67 Smyth, 45.

68 Ibid., 43: “As the West Saxon war machine advanced, its mouthpiece, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, could portray Alfred and his descendants … as liberators of the Angelcynn and of acceptably submissive Christian Danes from the yoke of heathen Northmen”. For a discussions of such anxieties, see Wilcox and Hadley.

69 Kelly, 44.

70 See Cameron, 130–8 (“Magical Medicine”) and Bonser, (“Survivals of Paganism”), 118–57. In Bald’s Leechbook, stacan appear as implements of healing in an Insular addition to a southern European procedure to cure an injured head (“Gif man sio heafod-panne”: Cockayne, 342, and Cameron, 39).

71 For a concise discussion of the surviving literary evidence for such late tenth-century anxieties, see Hooke, 31–5 (“Continuing Heathenism”).

72 Meaney, 26. For a related argument that considers the difference between a perceived ethnicity of the Anglo-Scandinavians and their religious beliefs, see Harris, 107–30 (“Wulf among the Pagans”).

73 Richards and Stanfield, 96–7; For a summary of all civil laws against witchcraft from Alfred to Cnut, see Bonser, 148–9.

74 Crawford, 107–11; Hall, “Meanings of Elf,” 172–3 follows Meaney (17–8) in charting the gradual “decline” of the meaning of Old English words originally denoting supernatural females to a more frequently representing mortal figures.

75 Cf. Fell et al., 163, on English kings and the Church’s moral goals: “One is the stamping out of all heathen practices and the encouragement of due respect for the sanctities of the church; the other which is directly connected with this is improvement of sexual morality”. See Smyth, 35–9 on tenth-century English moral distinctions between Christian and heathen Danes.

76 2 Cnut 5.1–2 (Liebermann, Die Gesetze, I. 312); 2 Æthelstan 6 (Liebermann, Die Gesetze, I. 152–53); Cnut’s Proclamation (Liebermann, Die Gesetze, I. 274); Canons of Edgar, XX.16 (Roger Fowler, ed., Wulfstan’s Canons of Edgar, EETS, OS 266 (London: EETS, 1972), 4–5.

77 Thompson, 16.

78 Adkins, 475.