3 - Circulation

Summary

Abstract

This chapter analyses the logic and dynamics of the circulation of wealth (both movable and immovable) in Northumbria. Its main contention is that wealth circulation is an element that organizes the ruling class as it redistributes the access to the labour of the peasantry among them. The first part of the chapter will analyse how monasteries might have been founded as a strategy to grant autonomy to particular factions of the aristocracy. The second part will analyse how coinage could also represent both the display of power and the ability to extract surplus from the peasantry, highlighting the connection between land donation to the Church and the submission of the peasantry.

Keywords: gift-giving; pre-capitalist exchange; immovable wealth; Northumbrian Charters; numismatic; monastic foundation

1. Land donation

The land is the only thing in the world worth working for, worth fighting for, worth dying for, because it's the only thing that lasts

Gerald O’Hara, Gone With The Wind.

A study of production aiming to elucidate the reproduction of aristocracy would be incomplete if it did not take land granting and transfer into consideration. Land ownership was not only a question of granting autonomy to the different aristocratic families and/or branches. The main hypothesis of this chapter is that land donation was essential for the reproduction as well as for the internal cohesion of the aristocracy. However, the phenomenon of land donation also contained contradictions. The autonomy granted by land donations made to found monasteries represented the breaking of a tie of subordination to central power (the king), and implied different kinds of relations.

Discussing land donation in Northumbria presents a particular problem: namely, the absence of the type of historical source most frequently used to address it: charters. For this reason, a discussion of how to approach this subject will be required. In order to understand how the system of land granting worked, we will explore Bede's Epistola ad Ecgbertum. To better understand the consequences and possibilities of the process, a leap of a few generations will be taken, and the early ninth-century poem known as De Abbatibus explored to discuss family ties to monastic foundations.

1.a Charters, Bede's letter and the donation system

Studies involving the circulation of land in Anglo-Saxon England generally start with the analysis of charters. Charters can illuminate land donation, since they present both the grantee and the receiver of the gift.