4 - Germanism, Slapping and the Cultural Contexts of Æthelberht's Code: A Reconsideration of Chapters 56–58

Summary

One of the immediate consequences of Pope Gregory's successful mission to Kent toward the end of the sixth century was the preparation of a code by King Æthelberht cataloguing the appropriate compensations for various wrongs. The laconic style in which the bulk of its provisions was composed may show the text's indebtedness to earlier Frankish legislation, something almost to be expected given the pronounced Frankish role in the conversion of Kent. The exact character of Æthelberht's borrowings from Continental legislation is, however, likely to remain enigmatic; indeed, what seem to be borrowings may simply be evidence for a shared legal culture, or result from lines of influence so tenuous that they will inevitably defy efforts of reconstruction. The code offers few if any of the normative aphorisms out of which the so-called historische Rechtsschule built its timeless system of Common Germanic laws, yet scholars have never doubted its place within this system, routinely seeking solutions to some of the code's interpretive problems in the language of much later sources.

More recently, scholarship has come to see the utility of Æthelberht's code for reconstructing sociohistorical formations peculiar to early England, as opposed to those held by Rechtsschule scholarship to have enjoyed a broad and relatively uniform diffusion throughout the Germanic world. Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe and Mary Richards have emphasized how the lists of tariffs that are characteristic of Anglo-Saxon legislation disclose ‘process[es] of reading the material body’ that are distinct to the eras and regions within which these texts were promulgated, and that show, contrary to what we might expect, the ‘value’ of bodies and their component parts varying across temporal and geographical ranges. Early processes of dispute resolution thus seem to have been less concerned with the body as a locus of pain than as a bearer of visual signs. Like the punitive mutilations imposed by later royal codes, wounds resulting from private acts of violence appear within Æthelberht's legislation to have imposed upon victims not only pain, but also the burden of ‘bear[ing] the text of the encounter for all to see and interpret’, and often it is this injury, with its attendant embarrassments, for which the code is concerned to offer monetary remedies.