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Cyninges fedesl: the king's feeding in Æthelberht, ch. 12

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Lisi Oliver
Lisi Oliver
Affiliation:
Louisiana State University
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Extract

The twelfth-century Textus Roffensis contains a collection of early English laws, of which the first is attributed to Æthelberht of Kent, who reigned c. 580–616. Although these laws remain to us only in a copy made some six centuries later, there are strong linguistic grounds, first proposed by Sievers and Liebermann, and recently elaborated on and expanded by myself, to assume that the text as we have it genuinely reflects a copy of an early original, albeit much changed by generations of scribal modernization. Yet problems of interpretation often arise, among them the difficulty in the definition of hapax legomena: words which occur in the corpus of Old English only in this text. One such term is contained in Æthelberht, ch. 12, which states: ‘Cyninges fedesl XX scillinga forgelde.’ This is presumably formulated along the lines of Æthelberht, ch. 8, which reads: ‘Cyninges mundbyrd L scillinga.’

There is basic agreement among scholars as to the meaning, if not the precise interpretation, of mundbyrd: most would agree with Bosworth's definition of ‘protection, patronage’. Along these lines, the clause can be interpreted as: ‘[For violating] the king's protection: 50 (of) shillings.’ Using this as a template, one might translate iEthelberht, ch. 12, as: ‘[For violating] the king's fedesl: let [the perpetrator pay] 20 (of) shillings.’

Type
Research Article
Information
Anglo-Saxon England , Volume 27 , December 1998 , pp. 31 - 40
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

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References

1 For recent discussion of the dating of Æthelberht's reign, see Brooks, N., ‘The Creation and Early Structure of the Kingdom of Kent’, The Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, ed. Bassett, S. (London, 1989), pp. 55–74Google Scholar, and Wood, I., ‘The Mission of Augustine of Canterbury to the English’, Speculum 69 (1994), 1–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 See Sievers, E., ‘Altnordisches im Beowulf’, BGDSL 12(1887), 168–200, at 174 n.Google Scholar; Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. Liebermann, F., 3 vols. (Halle, 1903–1916)Google Scholar; Oliver, L., ‘The Language of the Early English Laws’ (unpubl. PhD dissertation, Harvard Univ., 1995)Google Scholar, in which I discuss in detail the arguments for archaism in the Kentish laws based on orthography, phonology, morphology and syntax.

3 The manuscript is written continuously, with no breakdown into clauses. In Oliver, , ‘Language of Early English Laws’, pp. 170–234 and 273–85Google Scholar I argue for a new numeration based on the syntactic structure; pending publication of this analysis, I follow the standard breakdown for the sake of easy reference.

4 ‘I do not dare translate the word fedesl.’

5 Hickes, G. and Wanley, H., Linguarum Vett. Septentrionalium Thesaurus Grammatico-Criticus et Archœologicus, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1703–1705)Google Scholar; Wilkins, D., Leges Anglo-Saxonicae (London, 1721)Google Scholar; Harris, J., The History of Kent (London, 1719)Google Scholar; Ancient Laws and Institutes of England, ed. Thorpe, B. (London, 1840)Google Scholar; Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. Schmid, R. (Leipzig, 1858)Google Scholar; Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. Liebermann, Google Scholar; Leges Anglosaxonum 601–925, ed. Eckhardt, K. (Weimar, 1958)Google Scholar; Toller, T. N., An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary: Supplement (Oxford, 1921)Google Scholar; Attenborough, F. L., The Laws of the Earliest English Kings (Cambridge, 1922)Google Scholar; English Historical Documents c. 500–1042, ed. Whitelock, D. (London, 1955; 2nd ed., 1979).Google Scholar

6 Ancient Laws and Institutes, ed. Thorpe, I, 7Google Scholar; Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. Liebermann, III, 7.Google Scholar Puzzling is Liebermann's statement that ‘laut des forgieldan bestand die Verletzung im Erschlagen, nicht im Schänden’ (‘on the basis of forgieldan, the injury consisted of killing, not of shaming’). But Æthelberht, ch. 4 uses forgylde as the verb of restitution for theft, and ch. 5 uses gebete as restitution for killing, so Liebermann's distinction between the two cannot be correct.

7 The Chronicle of Æthelweard, ed. Campbell, A. (Edinburgh, 1962), p. 42.Google Scholar

8 ‘for there is no trace that between “king's protection” and the base sum for punishment (50 and 12 shillings, respectively), there existed a third defined amount of this name and of otherwise unknown application’.

9 Ekwall, E., ‘The English Place-Names Etchells, Nechells’, Mélanges de philologie offerts à M.Johan Vising (Göteborg, 1925), pp. 104–6.Google Scholar

10 Metathesis is the switching of two contiguous sounds, as in OE acsode vs ModE asked vs dialectal aksed. This is generally a sporadic process: however Old English early developed a syllabic constraint against trisyllabic stems ending in [dental continuant]—[1]. That this metathesis holds for the -isla-# suffix and not for the -sla-# suffix (that is, for trisyllabic rather than bisyllabic stems) is demonstrated by the non-metathesized cnosl ‘progeny, kin’, fœsl ‘offspring’, husl ‘eucharist’, rysl ‘fat’, susl ‘torment’, tœsl ‘teasle’ and gewrixl ‘interchange’. I have demonstrated in ‘Language of the Early English Laws’, pp. 135–51Google Scholar, that this metathesis must have been complete in both the northern and southern regions by the mid-eighth century: thus, fedesl would have already been an archaic form by the time of the compilation of the Textus Roffensis.

11 Ekwall, , ‘English Place-Names in Etchells, Nechells’, p. 105.Google Scholar

12 ‘overwhelmingly neuter verbal abstracts’: Meid, W. and Krähe, H., Germanische Sprachwissenschaft, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1967) III, 90.Google Scholar

13 Brunner, K., Altenglische Grammatik (Tübingen, 1942), § 238, n. 2.Google Scholar

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15 Sawyer, P. H., Anglo-Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and Bibliography (London, 1968), p. 406.Google Scholar

16 Anglo-Saxon Charters, ed. Robertson, A. J., 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1956), p. 75.Google Scholar

17 Thus also Whitman, C. H., ‘Old English Mammal Names’ JEGP 6 (1907), 649–56Google Scholar, who defines fēdels as ‘fat beast; probably related to fedan, to feed’. I am indebted to Ben Fortson for reminding me of the Modern German parallel.

18 Die althochdeutschen Glossen, ed. Steinmeyer, E. and Sievers, E., 5 vols. (Berlin, 1879–1922) II, 220.Google Scholar

19 I am indebted to Jesse Gellrich for help in the translation of this passage. This and following citations from Cange, C. Du, Glossarium Mediœ et Infimœ Latinitatis (Paris, 1678) V, 206.Google Scholar

20 Ganshof, F. L., Frankish Institutions under Charlemagne, trans. B., and Lyon, M. (Providence, RI, 1968), pp. 34–45.Google Scholar

21 Sawyer, , Anglo-Saxon Charters, no. 190Google Scholar; EHD I, ed. Whitelock, , no. 85.Google Scholar

22 ‘… not due to the king alone’: Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. Liebermann, III, 80Google Scholar; Charles-Edwards, T., ‘Early Medieval Kingships in the British Isles’, The Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, ed. Bassett, , pp. 28–39, esp. 30–1.Google Scholar

23 Crith Gablach, ed. Binchy, D. A. (Dublin, 1941), pp. 75–6.Google Scholar

24 The Law of Hywel Dda, trans. Jenkins, D. (Llandysul, 1986), p. 128.Google Scholar

25 Stafford, P. A., ‘The “Farm of One Night” and the Organization of King Edward's Estate in Domesday’, EconHR 33 (1980), 491–502, at 491, n. 3.Google Scholar

26 I would like to express my thanks to my colleagues who have been generous with their advice and patience in reading earlier versions of this article: chief (but not solely) among them Charles Donahue, Dan Donoghue, Joshua Katz, Jesse Gellrich, Calvert Watkins and Patrick Wormald, and also to Simon Keynes for his comments on an earlier draft of this paper submitted to this journal.