Thegnly Piety and Ecclesiastical Patronage in the Late Old English Kingdom

Summary

I am very pleased to have been given this opportunity to express publicly my debt to Allen Brown.We met in the mid seventies of the last century at a time of my life when I was teaching thirteen hours a week class-contact, in an institution where research, especially historical research and especially medieval historical research, was regarded as irrelevant, and I was contemplating the abandonment of serious academic work. It was Allen's encouragement, the fruit of his attachment to the medieval ideal of amicitia, which encouraged me to persevere, and it is no accident that my earliest piece of printed work (other than my doctoral thesis) appeared in the first volume of the Battle proceedings.

Although this lecture is a tribute to Allen Brown, I am not sure that he would have approved of it. His views on ‘hairy housecarls’ are well-known, and perhaps he would have agreed with Professor Harper-Bill, who, three years ago now, bet me that I couldn't write a paper on pious Old English thegns because they weren’t. Yet Allen would certainly have been sympathetic to my general theme, for one of the many ignorant preconceptions against which he strove was the idea of the medieval warrior-aristocracies as a bunch of mindless thugs with no finer feelings. Moreover as a warrior himself (both in the literal and the metaphorical sense) Allen knew from the inside what thoughts and feelings they might have. On the famous occasion when he and Ian Peirce attempted to re-create the Norman charge up Battle Ridge, Allen's inexperienced mount bolted, and was pulled up by its rider's horsemanship just short of the fence at the bottom of Pyke House's garden. Standing in ‘The Chequers’ afterwards, armed and in full mail, with his helmet on the bar, a pint in one hand and a cigarette in the other, Allen was lamenting the luck of the Browns. I tried to console him: at least he had pulled up the panicking animal and persuaded it back up the slope. ‘Yes’, he replied, ‘when I saw the sun glinting off the barbed wire and the nettle-bed beyond, I realised why in the thick of the melée those chaps would vow to God to found a monastery if only he would let them off this time.’

He was joking, of course, but only in part, for (as the saying goes) many a trueword is spoken in jest.