Violence and Non-Violence in Anglo-Saxon England: AElfric's "Passion of St. Edmund"

Abstract

turn of millennium draws mind back a thousand years to deeply troubled 990s in England, a paradoxical decade that enjoyed a high clerical culture even as Vikings were ravaging land. A newly reformed monastic system was flourishing under king's favor, but this king would be remembered less fondly ever after as AEthelred the Unready. As Simon Keynes says, The internal and cultural affairs of kingdom were able to prosper, but ... external and military affairs of kingdom were not conducted ... with comparable success.(1) That is an understatement: many of our surviving manuscripts and much Latin and Old English literature date from this highly productive decade--which is framed, however, by disastrous Battle of Maldon in 991 and AEthelred's attempt to exterminate Danes in England (mostly merchants and recent settlers) on St. Brice's Day, November 13, 1002. St. Brice's massacre was a desperate gamble that did not pay off. Danes, unsurprisingly, redoubled their efforts and eventually took AEthelred's throne. Keynes admits that massacre well offend modern sensibilities and appear as despicably cruel reaction of a paranoid king to a reported threat against him, but no act of violence on such a scale could have been carried out unless it had general support (205); but that is largely what is so appalling about it. He concludes, There might be good cause if not to applaud then at least to condone rather than to deplore ... massacre of St. Brice's Day (208)--but I don't think so. A millennium later thought of such an Anglo-Saxon Kristalnacht sends a shiver down spine. massacre made a certain kind of sense, of course, as revenge for decades of Viking atrocities. Raids had resumed in 978, year of AEthelred's accession, after nearly a century's remission. From a modern point of view, however, massacre only illustrates terrible inadequacy of revenge as a legal concept, for revenge falls on groups rather than individuals, and within those groups it falls on innocent as well as offending members. massacre reminds us also of a similar horror at beginning of Anglo-Saxon history, slaughter of 1200 monks of Bangor by King AEthelfrith of Northumbria in 605. That massacre too made sense as an act of revenge--divine vengeance, according to Bede, for Celtic Church's refusal to submit to Augustine of Canterbury.(2) In world of medieval violence--in world of violence, period--the Anglo-Saxons enjoy a certain well-deserved reputation. Anglo-Saxon England was site of constant wars and repeated invasions for half a millennium; it was ruled by warrior kings and a warrior class; within and without this class it was hierarchically ordered by an ideology which idealized servitude as loyalty; it developed a precocious form of feudalism; it regulated social violence by a variety of legal transmogrifications of revenge and blood-feud; and it left us a vernacular literature best known for its morbid portrayal of suicidal male heroics and a martial-arts adaptation of Christian faith. Now add Vikings into this picture. For two and a half centuries Vikings shared more than just slaughter-field with Anglo-Saxons. They also shared, increasingly from ninth century on, a national culture with them, culminating in Anglo-Danish kingship of Cnut. In world of violence, of course, reputation of Vikings remains unsurpassed. Even if we restrict ourselves to literature written in Old English, however, poems like Beowulf and Battle of Maldon will still hold pride of place in long tradition of Germanic violence, one as its primary epic, other as late classical formulation of its code--both written along fault-line of Anglo-Scandinavian relations. Not to mention tradition of violence in Christian literature, violence explicit or implicit, brutal or mystified, exposed so nakedly by John P. …

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