 All right. Good afternoon. It is about five minutes past our official starting time, so we are going to get started here. If you're in line for food, please feel free. Enjoy, but if you can get your food quietly, that'd be great. I am Dan Stagemann. I am the Director of Research Operations here at John Day. I am here to welcome you to the third and final of the Office for the Advancement of Research's sponsored book talks for the fall semester. This book talk, which follows Professor Samantha Magic's Sex Work Politics and Elise Waterston's My Father's Wars, features the edited volume Capital and Corporal Punishment in Anglo-Saxon England, which was co-edited by two of our guests today, Jay Paul Gates, Assistant Professor in our English department here at John Jay, and Nicola Meriotti, who is Assistant Professor of History and Co-Director of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Also here with us today is one of the featured contributors to this volume, Valerie Allen, who is the Chair of our English department and a poor professor here at John Jay. Capital and Corporal Punishment in Anglo-Saxon England is a collection of 10 essays that engage legal, literary, historical, and archaeological evidence to investigate the role of punishment in Anglo-Saxon society. Anglo-Saxon authorities often punished lawbreakers with harsh corporal penalties, such as execution, mutilation, and imprisonment. But despite their severity, these penalties were not arbitrary exercises of power. Rather, they were informed by nuanced philosophies of punishment, which sought to resolve conflict, keep the peace, and enforce Christian morality. I'm going to turn the proceedings over to co-editors Jay Gates. Thanks, Ted. So thank you for actually coming to a late afternoon talk. Ted actually stole a lot of the introductory stuff I was going to say, so I'm just going to go through a little bit of it. For anybody who is interested, there are flyers over on the counter there. We have discounts for the book, so if you want to buy it, there's a discount. If you just want to flip through it and look at it, I left a copy of it. It's there. Please don't take it. It's my only copy. There is a copy, however, in the John Jay Library, if you're interested. So, before I jump into the introductions and discussion, I do want to thank John Jay College and the office for the event for the research for helping to organize this event and for bringing my co-editor, Professor Marafiotti, to New York to speak. She spent all of yesterday flying in. In particular, Dan Stagemann, Senator Rutberg, Laura Luckin have been very helpful in making the arrangements, working with three complicated academic schedules and advertising the event as well. So the three speakers today in order of presentation are Valerie Allen, who as you've heard is full professor and chair of the Department of English at John Jay. Although her work does tend to focus on a bit later period most of the time, she presented an early version of her chapter at the first panel reorganized on capital and focal punishment and was the first person to let me know that the position that I now hold will be coming open. Her work for this volume on blood and money, while bodily focused, was a bit of a shift from her much more light-hearted study of the comic body in her book on Harding, Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages. That's actually her book. Nicole Verfiotti, who is my co-editor for this volume, as you heard as assistant professor in the Department of History at Trinity University. In addition to this volume, her book The King's Body, Burial and Succession in Late Anglo-Saxon England also came out from the University of Toronto Press this year. Finally, I'm Jay Gates. I'm in English. That's all you need to know. So when Nicole and I started organizing conference titles on the theme that would become this volume, our interest in the topic of capital and focal punishment threw out a basic question concerning how the Anglo-Saxons thought about bodies in a legal context and how the body came to carry a convey meeting. We began by pursuing scholars who were interested in legal and judicial action taking on criminal fines, but all of the contributors to this volume went well beyond the categories of capital and focal punishment. And so the presenters today will all speak in particular ways about the boundaries of punishment. One of the most interesting ideas to come out of the volume is that the Anglo-Saxons, at least initially, didn't have much of a concept of punishment. There were systems of law, compensation, vengeance, but these were all concerned with the maintenance of social order and stability rather than with the desire to punish unacceptable behavior. And when we came to think about it, the very concept of punishment itself seemed odd, which to modern years sounds kind of ridiculous. After all, what does it really do? For example, if Nicole, my co-editor, hacks off my arm, I'm a lot better off if she pays me for it, right? If she's punished, I get a little bit of satisfaction. You know, she suffers, she goes to jail, she works in the chain, guys. But I don't get anything out of it. If she pays me, I don't have my arm back, but I at least have money. There's something to that. The Anglo-Saxons themselves stretched the standard definitions of the concept of punishment in order to think not just about bodies and souls, but about how the Anglo-Saxons themselves thought about punishment, its place in the social order, and their responses to it. Punishment was something that they understood socially and had a personal relationship with. The law, Cuban and divine, was no abstraction but something that they were invested in and participated in. They experienced the law as personal as it gave them meaning and voice. Quite literally, the law identified social status and the value of a man's oath through the assignment of where-gilt. That is, man-money. A man who paid for someone to be killed. It could also strip the man who lost his oath-wordedness of legal standing. It acted on their bodies and made the legal subject legible through imprisonment, lashing, mutilation, execution, or deal. I have a lot of these sentences that just go on and that's why I like what I use. It also promised compensation when those bodies were injured, not just the punishment of the offender. However, it's perhaps still too abstract to say that the law did these things. The legal imposition of punishment for the more positive aspects of composition and restitution were done through the agency of authorities. Kings, bishops, alderman and reeds. Increasingly over the course of the Anglo-Saxon period, they made legible their power through action on bodies such as public display of executed criminals. And while individuals did seek justice through self-help, such as feud, they increasingly opted for lawsuits and the mediation of authorities. It's on this theme of the rise of punishment alongside the centralization of power that will jump into considerations of contention between punishment and restitution. The Anglo-Saxons' anxieties about judgment and punishment and to begin to explore the value of thinking about these issues beyond the medieval period. After all, Anglo-American law, at least through the 20th century, is very much influenced by the laws penned by Archbishop Wolfstad of York in the late 10th and early 11th centuries. They were first taken up by the Danish Calcler of King Pute and then by the Normans after the 1066 conquest. In those early laws, we see a real tension between the need for the threat of punishment as a means of deterrence and penitential punishment as a means of rehabilitating the criminal, except in the most extreme cases. Such attitudes toward the role of punishment in the criminal justice system seems still to be hotly debated. Similarly, the restrictions on felons in modern American law, even after they have served their sentences, recalls the Anglo-Saxon notion of the guilty as being permanently mocked, whether through the elimination of their legal status, their earthquake it is, or through judicial mutilation. However, what seems to have slipped into the background of the modern discussion, and which is very much worth foregrounding again, is the medieval concern not just with punishing the perpetrator, but making the whole criminal. So the first speaker will be Valerie Allen. Jay, thank you, Dan, and thank you for coming. I'll then talk a little bit, I'll talk slowly, because the first slide is coming up fast, but it's okay. You know, we can do without this. It's fine. Thanks. In my chapter, I looked at two law codes, one from the 7th century and another from the 9th century. And these itemize, in some details, the compensation payments through money for injuries sustained. Here's a taster from the earlier code. Lovely. Thank you. Perfectly done. For each of the four teeth, six shillings, for each of the teeth that stand next to these four shillings, then for each tooth that stands next to them three shillings, and beyond that one shilling for each tooth. You might think that these tariffs look like modern workers' comp injury tables, but the resemblance is only superficial. As I will argue, Anglo-Saxon money really has a very different meaning from modern money. Not only that, these tariffs do not distinguish between deliberate mutilations and accidental injuries. Although not all scholars agree about this point, it does seem to make most sense to assume that the tariffs such as these laid out recommended, maybe maximum amounts, that the work of justice lay in determining how the circumstances of any particular injury modulated the payment. Justice, that is, comes about through a performative discursive process of composing a whole paper payment made out of miscellaneous parts of blood and shillings. In the debate between revenge and punishment, monetary compensation harbours uneasily. Payment in the Anglo-Saxon body of writing is often represented as a dishonourable substitute for revenge, really much better to kill your opponent than to accept money. But it's also equally presented as progress, progress beyond few and towards state-centralised punishment. My argument is that monetary compensation is central to the whole process of justice, because it lays bare the commonality between revenge and punishment, namely that there's a third party mediating and controlling the exchange between opposing factions. As philosopher Emmanuel Levinas says, quote, the drama of forgiveness comprises not just two players but three. Consider the etymology of the word history of the word umpire, which means numpire, which is numpire, meaning non-peer. It's the non-equal, the odd minimum. In punishment, an institutional power, and it doesn't matter whether that's the state or ecclesiastical power or anything, that power acts as an umpire, a vector of force thrusting down vertically upon the offender, carrying a mandated power that preempts reprisal. Even the horizontal vector of revenge between two factions is itself regulated by a third party, by fair play, by fear of loss of public approval when one side goes too far. I hope to show that money serves a therapeutic function. Coins let anger exit your body. They can be held at farm's length. They can be laid down or transmuted into something else. I'll note in passing the conceptual debt that this essay owes to two particular works. The work of medieval legal historian William Ian Miller and Richard Seyford on ancient Greek money. Of course, we all know that money is the ultimate third party, the medium of exchange. Yet, in contrast to modern fiat money, which is a sign only of pure exchange value, Anglo-Saxon money possesses intrinsic value. It's made out of gold or silver, usually, and so it's bullion itself. What I did in this chapter was to set the non-linear evolution from fuge to punishment alongside or parallel to the evolution of money in the same period. That evolution sees England move from a state of zero insular coin production, any residual coins in the 6th century, where continental or ancient Roman ones, to a fiscal economy in the 10th century that was the most sophisticated in Europe. What became immediately apparent and ironically apparent was that the very period when monetary compensation most matters legally, and that's roughly speaking up to the 9th century, is the very same period in which money is least standardised, at least behaves like modern money, and the possibility of rendering good coin is at its most problematic. Does scarcity or instability of coin mean that retribution, demanding payment in blood was more common? I think not. The detail of the tariffs suggests that the computation of equivalent species must have constituted much of the business of just settlement, just as lay in negotiating the frequent disparity between the standard and the instrument of payment. I don't simply mean that if you're short of the coins, you throw in a few chickens. Payment can also include slaves and body bits. I'm deliberately setting blood, coins, and payment in kind on a continuum. There's a deep seated interrelation between flesh and metal, where tariff amounts can get reverse exchanged into bodies. Compensation rendered as a monetary unit of account implicitly recognises its commute between blood and coin. The question I set myself was to identify in what way compensation, whether by coin, commodity, or blood, behaves like money. Compensation behaves like money in satisfying social obligation, and it's often been noted since we're talking about homologies, our English word pay, the verb to pay, derives ultimately from Latin pacare to make peace. Compensation also behaves like money in being quantifiable. There must be agreement that compensation has been made in the right amount, not too much and not too little. That's where you get closure. The Crandall horde in Hampshire, dating from the mid-7th century, yields a mix of Frankish and Anglo-Saxon coins, and it appears to represent a complete man price of 100 shillings. That means that if you killed somebody, you would have to pay their man price, which would be 100 shillings. But only 93 of the coins are regular. The other seven comprise a Byzantine coin that had been broken off a necklace, and six coin-like lumps of metal, three of them completely blank, and three struck to mimic coins, but not coins. The point is to reach the right number. The point is sheer portability, rather than exact shilling value. Compensation behaves like money in using coin as common measure. Imagine, Jay mentioned this earlier, that you had chucked off an enemy's hand in a row, and afterwards the handless party asks for your hand in return. You would understandably prefer to offer a slave as compensation. Having a law, as there is, that says that for a lost hand, 66 shillings, six pennies, and a third of a penny, must be rendered to the injured party, offers a possibility of peace by representing the transaction in theoretical terms through a common measure of coin. There are cases, though, when only one kind of piece will do, and it isn't coin. One ninth-century law states that the slave who rapes another slave must be castrated. No monetary substitution is allowed. With grim wit, the Old English literally means you will pay with his testicles. The slave's testicles function as a kind of special purpose money. Is this revenge, punishment, or payment? Yes. Stamped coinage marks conceptual transformation away from money as commodity, towards money as sign. In a process that eventually sunders those two domains, conventional value stamped on pieces of metal starts to trump its intrinsic bullion value. But I'm looking too far ahead. In this period, coins are both commodity and sign. They belong to an honor culture, just as men do, and their reputations get lost. Coins were vulnerable. Like bodies, they grew old through wear and tear. Indeed, the good died young because the higher the bullion content, the softer the metal, and the more prone it was to abrasion. They could be debased by reduction of weight, and you could detect that by weighing them, or they could be alloyed with cheap metal, reducing the silver content, or by scabbing them. Could you know then, that was assay, you check its purity all the way through. Coins were also vulnerable to being clipped because the edges of the coins were not milled. Am I factoring the verse? That makes more sense. They didn't have milled edges. In the same way that discrepancy can exist between what your eye says, say, and what we do, discrepancy between what a coin says, namely its face value, and what it does, its weight or its purity. In ways striking similar to people, allosaxon coins were subject to social regulation. Just as a suspect coin was subjected to the ordeal of assay being stabbed and tested, so an untrustworthy man or a foreigner was subjected to the ordeal because neither had friends or good standing to swear on his behalf. I've argued for the interchangeability between body parts and coins, and my last point is that this is particularly evident with hands. Hands is the predominant limb to get cut off in punishment in barbarian law. But losing a hand unman's a man in many ways. His ability to uphold the law literally by placing his hand on a gospel book to swear gets compromised, and he literally cannot bear arms. It leaves him also unable to count or measure because regular measures were done by spanning thumb to pinky, like that, or by gauging breath by counting the four fingers. This is a society that counts by pace length and arm spans, where you measure the world against your body. Hands in that world are the basic portion of value. We are used to a different world with fiat money. We understood that law that I cited earlier to mean that a hand is worth 66 shillings, 6 pence, and a third of a penny, but the reverse value is also reversible. You can look at that pile of coins and say, those coins are worth my hand. As money becomes increasingly standardized over the course of the period, value gets more abstract. It gains in autonomy over the individual objects that are valuable. As royal power becomes more centralized, the king in defending the agreed party increasingly becomes the agreed party. And as an offender's ability actively to undo a wrong by payment decreases, he increasingly finds himself able to do very little else but to subject himself to the punishment that descends upon him from high. The question I started with when Jay and I began this project was an important one for Christian Anglo-Saxon lawmakers. How did punishment affect the soul? Around the year 1000, concern for criminal salvation became increasingly prominent in legal discourse. Legislators like Archbishop Wollstone of York who penned law codes for two 11th century kings decreed that the death penalty should be a last resort only. Instead of death, he issued harsh even grisly punishments that allowed the offender to live long enough to repent of his sins and make peace with God. Our volume opens with one of Wollstone's decrees from the early 1020s which lays out the punishment for repeat offenders and I'll quote it in full. His hands or feet or both are to be cut off depending on the deed committed further offences. His eyes should be put out and his nose and ears and upper lip cut off or he should be scout. Whichever of these is decided by those who must judge. Thus one can punish and also save the soul. According to Wollstone's logic the anguish of mutilation would compel the offender to beg God for mercy and this act of repentance would allow his soul ultimately to be saved if clean execution might not be scary enough to force a confession excruciating pain would give the condemned a taste of hell and convince me to save himself while he could. Thus one can punish and also save the soul. At the same time that these gruesome life-sparing punishments were being promoted however it was common practice to bury dead criminals in unconsecrated graves far away from the church cemetery's inhabited by ordinary Christians. Consecrated burial was seen as the first step toward heaven and the exclusion of criminals from hallowed ground identified them as deviants who had forfeited the right to be part of the wider Christian community. Whether or not they had repented before death, unconsecrated burial put them at a significant disadvantage in the afterlife. Now Wollstone apparently disapproved of such burial but there is ample evidence that unconsecrated deviant cemeteries were in regular use through the 11th century. Condemned bodies were crammed into two small graves, jumbled up in burial pits, or left in the open to rot. Located far away from consecrated churchyards and the prayers of the pious, the message of these criminal cemeteries was clear. Burial here put you on the path to hell. Around the year 1000 then there were competing notions of how punishment did or should affect the criminal soul. While one philosophy required lawmakers to demonstrate their own Christian mercy by allowing offenders to make peace with God, the other perspective regarded earthly punishment as a gateway to eternal damnation. It is conceivable that these approaches occasionally operated in tandem with a condemned man given time to confess his sins before being executed and dumped in a pit. But taken together they seem to indicate a degree of confusion, perhaps even anxiety, about how earthly punishment ought to operate upon the soul. If the criminal salvation or damnation could be determined by the people orchestrating his punishment, then secular authorities had an enormous amount of spiritual power. This raises another question. How would punishment affect the souls of those individuals responsible for determining and carrying out legal penalties? We don't know much about judges in the Anglo-Saxon period, but there is an understanding in most early English law that cases would be heard by local or regional magistrates. Although the law was promulgated in the king's name, these judges were responsible for determining the type and degree of punishment as well as overseeing trials that established guilt or innocence. Significantly, though, when we read about judges in extra legal texts, they are usually doing a poor and shoddy job. Cometators railed against abuses of power, with corrupt greedy judges subverting justice for personal gain. There are also complaints against ignorant or bloodthirsty judges who are so egoistic as judges were in the operation of early English legal proceedings, there was a pervasive anxiety and perhaps even an expectation that judges could not or would not do their jobs well. Still, none of these medieval commentators considered how the act of punishing might have affected the judges themselves. How do these individuals cope with the moral implications of their work? Given the subjectivity involved in rendering verdicts and the way to spiritual consequences on the condemnation, judges surely had concerns about how their own souls would be affected. For example, one bishop, Theodred of London, acting in his capacity as a local magistrate, was called to render judgment against three thieves who had been caught red-handed as they tried to rob a church. Theodred condemned the men to hang, and their sentence was carried out promptly. A bit too promptly, it turned out in the end, for after the execution, Theodred consulted his books and realized that bishops were not allowed to issue death sentences. Instead, it was supposed to focus on saving the souls of criminals. Built with remorse, Theodred performed public penance to atone for his own erroneous judgment. While rules regulating ecclesiastical judges were stricter than those for their secular counterparts, it is not hard to imagine any empathetic individual questioning their own judgment after the fact, especially with so much at stake. If a judge mistakenly condemned an innocent man, or issued an overly harsh sentence through ignorance, would he be held responsible in the afterlife for the harm he committed? Even if every judgment he made was correct, how would a lifetime worth of bloody punishments affect his own soul? The biblical commandment known okides Thou shalt not kill, did not note exceptions for judicial practice. Moreover, the medieval church attached sin to even the most legitimate forms of violence, by killing and invading enemies in a just war. In this context, we might see an alternative motive behind Archbishop Wolfsdam's statement that one can punish and also save his soul. By issuing non-legal sentences, judges protected themselves from the moral dangers of killing. If the offender wasn't put to death, there could be no irreversible harm done. Wolfsdam's logic presents the epitome of Anglo-Saxon discourse on punishment and the soul, and he articulates his position clearly and forcefully. However, a quieter voice promulgated a similar view more than a hundred years earlier. Around the year 900, an anonymous Anglo-Saxon author translated the seminal work of Latin philosophy into old English. Boethius' sixth century treatise the consolation of philosophy. The Anglo-Saxon author took considerable liberties as he translated this long text, and one chapter, chapter 38, expands significantly on Boethius' original discourse on punishment. In this passage, we can identify the English author's own tape on earthly justice, which anticipates Wolfsdam's ideas by more than a century, but engages more extensively with the complexities of punishment and how it was perceived. First, the consolation of philosophy author understands punishment as a sort of penance, which allows criminals to compensate for their sins before they die. The author writes that punishment is like medicine, which needs to be taken whether the patient is willing or not. I quote, Just like a sick person needs to be brought to the doctor so that he can take care of him, so a person who commits evil deeds needs to be brought to the judge so that his wrongs can be cut out and burnt. According to this logic, criminals who are punished for their offenses are better off in the long run than those who get away, but still have evil festering inside them. In this scenario, a responsible judge is not a tormenter of bodies, but a tough love healer of souls. This premise leads to a second theme in this chapter of the consolation of philosophy, that most people don't understand the subtlety of this argument. The old English author repeatedly refers to foolish men who cannot possibly grasp the purpose behind punishment. I know that the people will not believe it, he writes, but those who are punished are happier than those who do the punishing. The author claims that ordinary people regard punishment as something that judges enjoy, a sadistic notion that must be debunked. This point is further expanded in his discussion of how difficult it is to bring rich and powerful offenders to justice. Occasionally, judges are simply unable to control individuals who flout the law and refuse to make amends for their crimes. In some cases, it is impossible to even capture such people. Judges might deeply resent a scenario like this, or they might worry that they might be responsible if an unstoppable criminal went on to harm others. To the untrained eye, however, it would seem that powerful law-breakers could act with impunity while ordinary people would be punished for the slightest offense, a corrupt and stratified system. Nevertheless, our author asserts, this was not actually the case. When good judges are unable to bring powerful offenders to heel, it is not a result of the judge's incompetence or correction, but a divine intervention. This is the third major theme of this passage, that the very worst evildoers are subjected only to God's justice and not to man's. In fact, criminals who manage to avoid punishment on earth are in the worst danger of all. Without the physical punishments which help cleanse the soul, offenders would die with their sins in their head, all but guaranteeing damnation. Furthermore, the longer they lived without repentance, the worse their final punishment would be since they would continue compounding their sins until their eventual death. Accordingly, the old English constellation of philosophy views earthly punishment as a moral obligation. Judges were capable of saving souls that might otherwise have gone astray. Without such intervention, a criminal soul would almost certainly be damned. But in such cases, it was God not any mortal judge who would have the final word. Certainly, this interpretation of earthly justice is consistent with the different strands of thought in Wolfstand's time around the year 1000. Even if a condemned criminal confessed to sins and reconciled with the church, it would be God who made the final decision about his death. Even a criminal condemned to death and buried in unconsecrated ground could be saved if God said so. Although human justice was intended to mirror divine will, mortal men could intervene only so far in determining anyone's fate in the afterlife. But even with this caveat, there seems to be a disconnect between the violence of non-lethal punishments in which a criminal could be severely injured and the oppression of Christian mercy that underpins the rhetoric used by Wolfstand and the old English constellation of philosophy. The list of mutilations that I opened with today would certainly qualify as cruel and unusual by our standards, in part because they were explicitly intended to induce physical harm and anguish. This is what we think of when we consider medieval punishment. Deliberate torture, excessive pain, inordinate responses to minor offenses. Even the term medieval is used casually today by the media to describe entirely modern horrors ranging from botched executions to genocide. Even in Anglo-Saxon texts, the idea of medieval punishment is often understood as an abuse of power. A corrupt or ignorant judge is dangerous because he has little regard for the lives and well-being of his subordinates. This is the very perception that the old English constellation attributes to foolish men and which Christian legislators like Wolfstand sought to remedy. Despite the potential severity of criminal penalties then, our book contends that punishment in the Anglo-Saxon period was not in fact an arbitrary exercise of power. Rather than being motivated by cruelty, excess or barbarism, punishment was designed to serve a greater good. Now, I have focused this afternoon on the spiritual concerns, but punishment also helped to discourage transgression, keep the peace, and reinforce the authority of those in power. Punishment was a tool for social control but it was also seen as a way to improve the human experience on earth and in the afterlife. This, I propose, is one of the major differences between notions of punishment in the medieval period and in our own time. In Anglo-Saxon authors, this mortal world was transitory. It was the afterlife that truly mattered and painful punishment on earth was seen as a last resort for those in danger of damnation. True mercy did not manifest upon the body in this life but upon the soul in the next. Though violence was a necessary component of effective punishment, that violence was considered appropriate, legitimate, and even righteous. Thank you. Alright, so given watching, now I've been watching people variously wince and shake their heads at much of what we've been describing, I should start by saying in spite of the evening that I thought that it would be a nice way to start, I don't have pictures. No pictures. This is intentional because I'm dealing with narratives and the narratives that I discussed while highly visual remain textual and so it requires to perform the act of imagining scenes and through them interpreting the narrative. And so I wouldn't encourage you to try to actually envision the scenes that I described and to focus on your own gut reactions as you do. There are going to be a couple of graphic scenes so, you know, there's your drink of water. So, what's come to interest me in particular is the combined meaning-making process of punishment and enduring meaning of both crime and punishment beyond the limits of law and even beyond the Anglo-Saxon period. Poetry and hagiography provide examples of punishments and legal processes that must have been recognizable to an Anglo-Saxon audience in order to convey meaning. The fates of humans or the fates of men, depending on your translation, imagines the bodies of hanged men disintegrating on the gymit and becoming carrion for birds of prey, confirming the infamy of the dead. Poetry is clear that, quote, the criminal should hang, should properly repay the evil he previously did. Other punishments appear as well. Giuliano, refusing marriage and worship of pagan gods, is hung from a beam by our hair, beaten for six hours and placed in prison. Fates of the Apostles recounts two executions of martyrs with swords, three with unspecified weapons and one by beating. Punishment was familiar enough to act as a promotional experience, as would unveil the death of one son at the hands of another, which precluded vengeance as well as restitution, is compared to the impotence of a father watching his son hang down the gallows, quote, his son hangs a comfort to the raven and he did not have the power to help him. Thus, wrong punishment and supportive social order was familiar and also carried a profoundly personal resonance that could convey a sense of alienation. Moreover, representations of punishment continued to be about after the Norman Conquest of 1066. As the was penned by Wolfstein as the calls were discussing, continued to influence Norman legislation so the Anglo-Saxon past, which was a rich source for historians, Norman and Igloge alike, to draw on in supported claims to whites and privileges in England. The Norman historians, of course, dwelt on Harold Godwinson's usurpation of the throne that Edward the Confessor promised to Harold's death as a perfectly just punishment as the biotapestry would have it, hick Harold Rex to effect this est. Here King Harold is killed. The English historians made other kinds of claims, but focused on the criminal English who had brought the nation to a state that it could be conquered first by the Danes, then by the Normans. Thus, those punishments administered to Englishmen before and after the Conquest were made to carry meaning. The most popular villain before the Conquest, one placed at the centre of historical narratives was Adrick, Alderman of Mercia. Depicted as a traitor and a villain during King's Conquest of England and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Adrick inspired those who recorded his role in history to enumerate his many crimes if not to attribute new ones to him, and they did just make things up. And to provide great detail to the scene of his execution. In the 11th and 12th century accounts, Adrick is variously, and I love this story. Adrick is variously killed, killed and thrown over the walls of London, strangled in private and dumped from a window into the Thames, beheaded publicly beheaded and dumped into the Thames, beheaded with his head displayed on the highest tower in London and beheaded with his head displayed on the highest gate in London. With each account it would seem that the historian selects Adrick's story to build into the structure of his larger narrative of the Conquest of England, first by the Anglo-German elements. In fact the Anglo-German historian's treatment of Adrick's execution should catch our attention because as has been noted between 1076 and 1312 not a single English Earl and indeed hardly a single Baron was executed or murdered in England for political reasons. Through the forms of betrayal, discovery, judgment and execution are made to take the historian provides a moral commentary and offers an ideological guide for the audience's interpretation. Here I want to discuss a pair of texts in brief but I believe that they effectively demonstrate the value of tracing the ships and details across historiographical narratives. So in the deeds of the kings of the English people by William of Waltersbury, the guest of Regiment Gore, William elaborates Adrick's story and gives him a much greater role than had any previous account. He also adds information that is not present in any previous accounts and makes clear the consequences of Adrick's actions. For example, a claim of hearing nowhere else is that during the St. Bryce's Day massacre of 1002 that was when King Ethelred declared that all Danes living among the English would be killed on the same day. Adrick murdered Goodhill, the Danish king's sister, thereby giving Swain cause to conquer England. William also first recounted aspects that were retained by later historians. Most important of these is the claim that Adrick had the English king Edmund Ironside murdered. William says as I quote, Ruber implicates Adrick as having, in support of Canute, contrived Edmund's death by means of sermons. There were, it was said, two of the king's chamber limbs to whom he had entrusted his entire life. Adrick won them over with promises and though at first they were horrified at such a monstrous crime, he soon made them his accomplices and as he had planned, when the king took his seat for the requirements of nature, they drove an iron hook into his hinder parts. This form of murder squares nicely with William's judgment of Adrick's character as fex homodome, literally the shit of humanity. The gruesome crime goes well beyond switching sides during a battle. He not only betrays a king but perverts that king's most faithful servants and of course, he's a regicide. He's a threat to king and nation alike. Clearly William's Canute understands this. Quote, in the same year Adrick, to whose infamy I cannot do justice was by the king's command and trapped in his turn by the same trick that he had frequently used in the past to entrap many others and his disgusting spirit was transferred to hell. High words had arisen as a result of some dispute or other and Adrick, emboldened by the services he had rendered, reminded the king as though in a friendly fashion of his desserts and he said, first I abandoned Edmund for you and then also put him to death out of loyalty to you. At these words Canute's expression changed. His face flushed with anger and he delivered sentence forthwith. Then you too he said, will deserve to die if you were guilty of high treason against God and myself by killing your own lord and a brother who is in alliance with me. Thy blood be upon thy head for thy mouth hath testified against thee, saying that thou hast lifted up thy hand against the lord's anointed. And then to avoid a public disturbance the trader was strangled in the same chamber and thrown up the window into the king's hems, thus paying the due penalty for his property. However much Canute sounds like a character out of pulp fiction. He is a wise or at least clever king who can entrap a trader, but however just his judgment of Adrick, this is a political murder rather than an execution. While Adrick is a damning portrayal of a disloyal English aristocrat Williams Canute is an ambiguous royal figure with questionable motives. There is drama here that is more meaningful than the history of the courts. Henry of Huntingdon follows William of Baldsbury in much of his account of Adrick and Canute. He gives us the fullest account of all including the representation of Canute as a just king. What is essential for justice to take place is that everything must be in the open. As in William of Baldsbury's account Adrick is made responsible for Admin's death immediately after Admin and Canute reach an agreement to partition England. However instead of seducing his servants away from him Henry has Adrick sent his own son A few days after this King Edmund was treacherously killed at Oxford This is how he was killed When the king, fearful and most formidable to his enemies was prospering in his kingdom he went one night into the lavatory to answer a call of nature. There the son of Alderman Adrick who by his father's plan was concealed in the pit of the privy struck the king twice with a sharp knife in the private parts and leaving the weapon in his bowels fled away. While the story of Edmund's death remains largely the same he's killed in the privy through Adrick's plot the details are important and stand in for what is omitted from Henry's account. The murder takes place immediately after the partition in which Edmund received Wessex and Canute Mercia, the region that Adrick controlled. Therefore there are suggestions of political maneuvering underlying this account. Second the issue of heirs is established. Adrick sends his son instead of seducing away Admin's servants as in William's version. And Edmund is stabbed in his private parts suggesting the destruction of his line. Adrick's treachery here is depicted as elevating his own family at the expense of the English. King, royal line and community. However Henry's imagery of the betrayal should drive our interpretation. I think taking a cue from William's description of Adrick as Bex Hominem. Henry places Adrick's son beneath the king standing in shit stabbing upward and you can just imagine I'm not describing. I posit that this ought to be seen as a commentary on the aristocracy working actively to elevate themselves. While Henry follows William in recounting that Edmund is murdered according to Adrick's plan, he diverges in having Adrick executed and displayed both as a representation of justice and awarding to would-be traders. Quote, then Adrick came to King Canute and saluted him, saying Hail, soul king! When he disclosed what had happened the king answered as a reward for your great service I shall make you higher than all the English nobles. Then he ordered him to be beheaded and his head to be fixed on a stake on London's highest tower. What stands out in these examples is that as the post-conquest historians look back to the Anglo-Saxon period and attempted to explain the conquest, they not only repeated their sources, they added to and modified them. The stories took on new elements, new details, and conveyed new meanings. Well after they had happened, the crimes and the punishments of the English grew and were continued producing meaning, giving warnings to kings to guard against injustice and treachery, giving spectacular warnings to would-be criminals and traders through long dead characters and explaining to the English that they had been conquered because of a lack of fidelity and unity in the nation. Thus Anglo-Saxon punishment was not only still legible after the Anglo-Saxon period, punishment narratives were still actively written to convey meaning in the post-conquest world. So thank you and that leaves us about 20 minutes for conversation and questions if you're so inclined. As for descriptions of the process, I wish there were. One of the problems with dealing with Anglo-Saxon law and legal culture is we have to patch so much together from very spare evidence. So we have a handful of Anglo-Saxon law suits, maybe 100, 150 or so that outlines some procedure. We have a few narrative sources but for the most part we're still working on that. So I'll talk a little bit about my sources and then pass it along. Certainly the oldest translation of the Consolation of Philosophy is a pretty remarkable text. It's extremely long, extremely intense. But what strikes me about it is that it is done in a fairly loose manner in certain sections. So this was created as part of King Alfred's translation program to turn Latin texts into olden books so everybody could read them. And the looseness with which this particular Chapter 38 was translated suggests to me that the so-called translator was adding quite a bit of his own perspective, which makes it so useful to us in sort of pulling out some information about what judges might have been doing, thinking or feeling at this point, a difficult question. As for the archeological evidence in the last 15 or 20 years there has been a great absurd of re-identification of cemeteries as deviant cemeteries. So while at first I believe in the early part of the 20th century these were often identified as Roman cemeteries or something else entirely. Sometimes they're even identified as human sacrifice or neolithic stuff that doesn't hold up to scrutiny today. The thinking is that these were very separate areas that were probably used as execution sites and then the bodies were just left there. What makes this so interesting in the later Anglo-Saxon period is that in the 10th century we start to see a firmer requirement that Christian bodies in good standing with the church be buried in consecrated ground. Before the 10th century it was kind of hit and miss, you didn't lose anything. But starting in the mid 10th century or so everyone wanted to be in those cemeteries attached to church yards and blessed by bishop. So when you have something that is so very separate and where you have burials where limbs are scattered everywhere people's heads put between their legs decomposition setting at different rates suggesting display above ground before burial we get a very different picture of how the reality of Anglo-Saxon justice might have operated. So reading that against the laws we've got a little bit of procedure. Susanna there's not much as the Nicole says about the process. There's less narrows than we would like but you can piece together things and I'm thinking of Beowulf and heroic poetry particularly Beowulf. There's a lot going on there about the honourableness of blood revenge of blood feud. There's also an interesting elision between money and gold or treasure so it's very hard. The hordes the Condal Horde and also Sutton Hoo which is a wonderful you can look it up on the internet but it's a wonderful burial discovery that was made that also contains treasure troves as well and coins so I mean we can trace the actual coins and where they came from but it's also this elision between just valuable stuff and coins. There's not really a strong distinction between them. So heroic poetry I would say is important for the romance in some ways of honourable blood and the law codes, there's also the Angus Saxon Chronicles as well and I think it's interesting to know particularly about the law codes that they really wouldn't have got written down if it hadn't been because of the programmatic Christianising of England because that was a literate culture that wrote in Latin and so things law codes and so it's very hard to separate the theologising of the law from the actual records but I would just add a couple of little things that have nothing to do with paper I think so first we had there actually is a remarkable amount of discussion of process they just don't tell us the details so they say there will be this process of ordeal and it will be the ordeal of the hot iron or the boiling pot or the hot iron you have to carry a hot iron in your head to a certain distance we don't know the distance and then they would bandage it and open it up again a couple of days later and if it was suffering then you were guilty if it was feeling nicely you were fine like God in your need the boiling pot you had to reach into a boiling pot and pull a stone out from the bottom and then they wrapped your head and so on and so forth there was the ordeal of bread and cheese which is the one I would go for where you had to eat bread and cheese and not choke between boiling water and bread and cheese bread and cheese so we see these but they don't give the details and in part I think that's because everybody knew them like they were familiar enough that they were like no this is the process that's how it goes and some of the things that Valerie was talking about we also have certain details a process such as how much wounds are worth and how do you measure them so if I have hit someone in the head and I have wounded their face it's worth more that if I hit them in the head and it's hit by the hair so there's an element of shame if I have hit someone in the head hard enough that I have broken their skull and I can pick a boat out of it depending on the size of that boat chunk they get a particular pavement this also assumes that they would live and we have skulls that are clearly healed with holes in them which means that they could do the surgery to pick out the boat splinters and hit people a lot so they're not as bad as we kind of imagine but the way to actually measure how big that was wasn't to sort of measure it by your arm or your head because it's little it was to put a bowl or a shield across the road and throw it into it but if you could hear it taking it was worth a search for that so there's a weird little process like that but then how far you have to carry the hot iron if you don't know so there are both the answers to this I have answers nobody else has so there are both the answers to this so on the one hand the English accent is traded with the Welsh they in the past 15 years or so we have discovered that there was far more intermarriage than we had ever thought prior to this and that the idea of sort of Englishness versus Britishness that really for several centuries we just assume things were a little bit more flexible now that being said the word for the Welsh that the English is with Welsh which if you've read Beowulf you get Welshfowl she's the queen of frostar yeah the English name Welsh means Welsh it means foreign and it's also a word they used to be sleigh in fact Welshfowl literally means slave sleigh or foreign sleigh so they didn't think highly of them but the evidence that they wanted to develop more and more is ethnicity was not nearly as fixed as we tended to think about it even if they didn't have a terribly high opinion of the British did I answer your question well the problem there is who is in control of which territory English law only is valid in English territory and the Welsh had their own law court codes that are incredibly rich oh yeah but one of the things that we actually get in treaties between the English and the Danes and the English and the Welsh is a man in whichever territory will have the same wear and help which means you have the same legal status so those are treaties that they come to which means they really didn't want to but for some reason or other they came to that piece and they established that that an Englishman and a Danishman or an Englishman and a Welshman would have the same man but wear and help in whichever territory but what we do see and certainly in the early period when there seems to be more reference to the Welshman in early Anglo-Saxon law and in the later period when we start to see the Danes filled that same sort of foreign role in Anglo-Saxon law in the Anglo-Saxon law it is said that they will be judged according to their own cultures value so a Dane will be judged according to the Danish wear and help in Anglo-Saxon law does that make sense the wear and help of his people will apply in Anglo-Saxon law and I can't speak quite so authoritatively to the Welsh but I assume it's comfortable can I just add a random many of you may have come across the Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish you might have come across it in other classes and it opens with a very famous episode from much later period and in France of a Regicide and the very details an excruciating death that he suffered and it's really this period and that opening passage that Nicole started with where pain becomes, and it's again indistinguishable from a whole theological, a theological, theologizing of law and an increasingly ecclesiastically powerful culture but pain becomes interesting psychologically interesting and salvific that by suffering you can there's justice in suffering itself rather than the things that I was looking at where there's a payment to be made and then there's closure and so there's a lot of psychological difference that is quite interesting and it's really starting to come together in the later part of this period I don't think it's good but it's good yes, yes, panels of reputable men I mean you're not aware it was customary law so it wasn't common law so there wasn't these laws were not precedent that have to be enforced everywhere and so they were they were prompts but I would be very surprised if they were uniformly applied but the local community was the repository of customary law and so they would be applying those standards right? yes, but but with increasing centralization especially over the course of the late night century with Alfred this is really moving to a single English nation moving toward they're not prior to Alfred he declares himself to be the final judge you can appeal all the way up to the king and he is the final judge but that's only coming in in the 9th century and the 7th century is very much local and customary that's starting to shift as you get later and yet it is an illusion because the king declares the law, the law is issued in the king's name but on a practical level there are very few cases in my understanding that the king actually judges at very high levels or perhaps when something has been appealed several times then you get the king involved for the most part we don't know who is doing the actual judging there are various sort of regional units we have Shire courts and 100 courts these are the local regional magistrates who are hearing what's going on sometimes these are local noblemen who are in charge of their area other times they are the king's representatives so I think going back to the question that we started off with there's a lot yet to be established about who is actually making these judgments in some cases we can identify particular noblemen or local officials who were involved but sometimes there is just a blank it's a good question if you have answered please let us know immediately in terms of law or in terms of there were many efforts on williams part to retain an apparent continuity with anglo-saxon law but with the domes day survey where basically the entire country got infantry down to the last piglet there was a complete overhaul of government as well as personnel because increasingly people replaced powerful people with their own men at the same time old english remains in circulation for another couple hundred years even though we see a massive overhaul by the 1070s and 1080s the language does not get supplanted so there is clearly a multi-cultural multi-lingual experience happening across that period so the break is certainly real but might not have been perceived quite as tangibly as as we can see it in hindsight it's a possibility and punishment there are after william had really established his overhaul the punishment starts to really shift so that there's a lot less of judicial mutilation which is not to say that there aren't punishment the dormants really got into blinding attestration which are not really taking the anglo-saxons very much but popular executions so you may call on are you asking if the family of the agreed party were holding out for blood I don't think that there's any one answer to that it was very much locally decided and depending on how powerful you were there are stories of families that feuded bitterly they would have periods of truces and then it would all flare up again as well because of somebody because of the other grievance that was decades old not unlike any kind of disturbed area where peace is one for a while and actually that's one of the nice phrases of william miller in miller's book he would talk about the contingency of these payments they were a solution for a while and a while is okay the rationale was hmm it sounds entirely counterintuitive the rationale was that if you sin you must do penance before you die if you refuse to do penance and confess the really awful things you've done then penance needs to be imposed upon you by force and the rationale was that if all of your limbs are chopped off you will ask god to please save you it was seen as something of a poor case of hell you think this is bad you wait until damnation it's gonna be even worse so it didn't it didn't bring you closer to god by virtue of the actual mutilation it brought you closer to god because it really gets you to ask god to save you immediately at the same time this seems very much to be a parallel rationale because my guess is that chopping off someone's hands feet nose and scalp is going to be an awfully good demonstrative act to get other people to stop doing crime we know that people occasionally survived these mutilations either for a couple days or long enough for their family to take them home and try to get them healed somehow you have to really steal yourself to think about this idea of handless, noseless, footless individuals walking around or whatever not to make light of that but because they had violated earthly law if you mess with the king you will suffer badly so you have these two threads operating in tandem here I think but hopefully use that very nasty secular punishment to get you closer to god and man that was the idea the better off you are fun time graining works the same way by the way it's a good question I think punishment of that sort was not meant to rehabilitate in the way that we understand it today there was not much expectation that you would walk away from a severe mutilation go back to work and become a functioning member of society because it was simply impossible I think also these severe mutilations even though they didn't kill you outright or weren't intended to kill you outright my guess is that there was a very low survival rate in this period of time that said I think the real rehabilitation that these authorities were aiming for was the soul and if doing all of this very painful punishment to a criminal body was not enough to get them closer to god to ask god for forgiveness and earn salvation then that body was beyond help and that soul was beyond help as well so it's it's a tough question to answer because the rehabilitation is in the afterlife not in the current life does that answer your question so before everybody rushes out listen to these vital things they would please again if you were here for extra credit because your professor told you to come there are signed up sheets over there sign in and I will give them to your professors two the faculty who are here and the graduate students who are here if you are interested in joining us we're going to have a reception down on the seventh floor and you can follow us down thank you for coming on this evening go have a happy night now thank you