II. THE DIALOGUE OF EGBERT, ARCHBISHOP OF YORK A.D. 732-766. ECCLESIASTICAL OATHS AND WERGELDS.
There is a gulf of nearly two centuries in the West-Saxon evidence between the laws of Alfred and the ‘Dooms’ of Ine.[245]
We are taken at a leap, not only beyond all thought of the Northmen’s invasions, but also half a century behind another great epoch of European importance.
The Empire of Charlemagne formed a kind of watershed in Anglo-Saxon as in European history, and was marked, as we have seen, by a permanent change in the currency of the Western world.
Position of Northumbria before the time of Charlemagne.
The Courts of Offa and Egbert were intimately connected with the Imperial Court of Charlemagne, and the transition from the early Anglo-Saxon currency of sceatts to that of the heavier pence was a typical result of the influence of the Empire. It may be that the supremacy of Wessex under Egbert was indirectly another result of it.
The kingdom of Egbert did not extend over Northumbria, and Northumbria had its own independent connection with the Court of Charlemagne. It had its own mode of monetary reckoning in ‘thrymsas,’ and from the Northumbrian fragments already examined we have gained some glimpses into its ancient customs.
The document next to be examined refers to Northumbria, and, as it dates from the period immediately preceding the time of Charlemagne, it helps to bridge over the gulf between the Laws of Alfred and Ine.
Egbert, Archbishop of York, A.D. 750.
It is in the form of a Dialogue or set of questions put to Egbert, Archbishop of York, by his priests, with his answers thereto, and its date may be about A.D. 750.
Egbert, Archbishop of York, was an important figure in Anglo-Saxon history. The brother of Eadbert, the Northumbrian king, the recipient on his accession to his episcopal dignity of the remarkable letter of Bede describing the religious anarchy of his diocese, the founder of the great school at York, in which his pupil Alcuin was educated and from which he migrated to the Court of Charles the Great, Egbert was an important personage, and the centre of beneficent influence in the Northumbrian church and kingdom.
His Roman and clerical point of view.
Moreover, this document, so far as it goes and as regards the matters mentioned in it, deals with the questions raised by it avowedly from an ecclesiastical point of view. The great ecclesiastic comes down upon his diocese from a wider world. He had been educated and ordained deacon at Rome. And just as in the monastic rules of St. Benedict Roman weights and measures were adhered to, so when this archbishop has to speak of money matters, ignoring all local currencies, he still thinks and speaks and calculates in the terms of the Roman Imperial currency, and not in Anglo-Saxon sceatts and scillings, or in the thrymsas of Northumbrian usage.
The Dialogue contains several interesting clauses.
What to be the value of the oaths of clerics.
The first to be noticed is in answer to the question as to the value to be attached to the oaths of the bishop, priest, deacon, and monk. The reply is:—
Ordines supradicti, secundum gradus promotionis, habeant potestatem protestandi: presbiter secundum numerum cxx tributariorum; diaconus vero juxta numerum lx manentium; monachus vero secundum numerum xxx tributariorum, sed hoc in criminali causa. Cæterum si de terminis agrorum oritur altercatio, presbitero liceat juramenti sui adtestatione terram videlicet unius tributarii in jus transferre æcclesiæ. Duobus quoque diaconis id ipsum conceditur. Testificatio vero trium monachorum in id ipsum sufficiat.
The said orders according to their grade of promotion shall have power of protestation. The priest to the number of cxx tributarii; the deacon up to the number of lx ‘manentes;’ the monk to the number ‘xxx tributarii,’ i.e. in a criminal cause. But if the dispute has arisen about the boundaries of lands it shall be lawful to the priest on attestation of his oath to transfer, into the right of the church, land, i.e. of one tributarius. To two deacons also the same is conceded. Let attestation of three monks suffice for the same.
Now, it seems very unlikely that such a question as this about the value of oaths should be asked of the Archbishop if it had already been settled by law in Northumbria. And so we seem to see him here making a claim and laying down a principle for the first time in Northumbria the following of which resulted in his priests being put upon a par with the secular thane as regards the value of their oaths.
In Mercia priest’s oath of same value as that of the thane.
The principle that one man’s oath was worth more than another’s we have seen already stated in the undated fragment on ‘Mercian oaths,’ which very possibly represented ancient tradition.
A twelve-hynde oath stands for six ceorls’ oaths, because if a man should avenge a twelve-hyndeman he will be fully avenged on six ceorls and his wergeld will be six ceorls’ wergelds (p. 360).
And, further, the right of the priest to be put on equal footing with the thane we have seen recognised in another fragment.
A mass priest’s oath and a secular thane’s are in English law reckoned of equal value, and by reason of the seven church degrees that the mass priest through grace of God has acquired, he is worthy of thane-right (p. 361).
The same principle was recognised in the further fragment on the North People’s wergelds.
The usual statement in Continental and Anglo-Saxon laws as regards compurgation is that a man must clear himself by his oath and the oaths of so many oath-helpers. But in the Laws of Ine, with which the Archbishop was doubtless conversant, another method was followed in some cases. A man must clear himself, not with the oaths of so many oath-helpers, but with an oath of so many hides. The claim of the Archbishop seems to favour the view, suggested but hardly established by various passages in the Laws of Ine, that the twelve-hyndeman’s oath was reckoned at 120 hides.[246]
Oaths of so many hides.
All that one can say is that the Archbishop in claiming that the Northumbrian priest’s oath should be regarded as one of ‘120 tributarii’ seems to have had in his mind what was afterwards generally conceded, i.e. that the priest should be put, in social position, on a par with the thane or twelve-hynde man. Moreover, the Archbishop’s use in this connection of the phrase ‘so many tributarii’ or ‘manentes,’ instead of so many ‘hides,’ is interesting. It helps us to understand that the hide as used in the Laws of Ine was probably the same fiscal or gafol paying unit as the familia of Bede.
Another clause in this interesting document bears more directly upon the question of homicide, and it is valuable as giving information quite independent of the Laws.
It is the answer of the Archbishop to the question, ‘What if a layman shall kill a cleric or a monk, whether the precium sanguinis according to the law natalium parentum shall be paid to his near relations or whether his seniores are to be satisfied by a larger amount—which does your Unanimity sanction?’
The reply is as follows:—
The wergelds of the clergy to be paid to the church.
Quicunque vero ex laicis occiderit episcopum, presbiterum, vel diaconum, aut monachum, agat pœnitentiam secundum gradus pœnitentiæ constitutos, et reddat precium æcclesiæ suæ; pro episcopo secundum [placitum] universalis consilii, pro presbitero octingentos siclos, pro diacono sexingentos, pro monacho vero quadringentos argenteos; nisi aut dignitas natalium vel nobilitas generis majus reposcat precium. Non enim justum est, ut servitium sanctæ professionis in meliori gradu perdat quod exterior vita sub laico habitu habuisse jure parentum dinoscitur.
Whoever indeed of laymen shall have killed a bishop, priest, or deacon or monk shall do penance according to the constituted scale of penitentials, and let him pay the price to his church—for a bishop according to [the decision] of a general Council:
| For a priest | 800 sicli |
| For a deacon | 600 sicli |
| But for a monk | 400 argentei[247] |
unless dignity of birth or nobility of kindred demand a greater precium.
For it is not just that service in a holy profession in a higher grade should lose what secular life in lay dress may be recognised to have by right of parentage.
The wergelds here stated for the clergy are stated in sicli and argentei. The Roman argenteus, as we have seen (after Nero’s time), was the drachma of silver, and the siclus was a didrachma or quarter of an ounce. The Archbishop, therefore, was claiming 200 ounces of silver as the wergeld of his Northumbrian priest.
Stated in Roman silver currency.
Whether he knew it or not, this amounted in value to 4000 sceatts (of 20 to the ounce), i.e. 800 Wessex and 1000 Mercian scillings. So that in claiming for his priest a wergeld of 200 ounces of silver he does not seem to have had in his mind either the Mercian or the Wessex twelve-hyndeman’s wergeld, of 1200 scillings, of 5 or 4 sceatts, but, possibly, as we shall see, a Kentish wergeld of 200 Kentish scillings of 20 sceatts.
Priest’s wergeld to be 200 Roman ounces of silver.
The Archbishop’s claim falling short of what was ultimately granted in Northumbria is curious as showing that Northumbrian law, at this time, before the inroads of the Norse invaders, was still unsettled, and that the Archbishop may have been influenced by Kentish rather than by West-Saxon or Mercian precedents. It was after another century, and after the Norse invasion and conquest, that the wergelds of the mass-thane and secular-thane in the ‘North People’s Law’ were stated to be alike at 2000 thrymsas, or 1200 Wessex shillings. How much earlier the equation was made in Northumbria we know not.
The next clause to be noticed is that in reply to question viii., viz. ‘If any monks shall mix themselves up with sacrilege, should you now prosecute, if the avengement of the crime pertains to laymen who are their relations?’
The reply is as follows:—
[Apostolus dicit,] omnes causas æcclesiæ debere apud sacerdotes dijudicari. Si qui vero æcclesiastici crimen aliquod inter laicos perpetraverint, homicidium, vel fornicationem, vel furtum agentes, hos placuit a secularibus in quos peccaverunt omnimodo occupari; nisi animo fuerit æcclesiæ pro talibus satisfacere. Laici vero qui sacrilega se contagione miscuerint velatis, non eodem modo quo lex publica fornicarios puniri percensuit, set duplicato xxx siclorum pecunia, hoc est lx argenteos volumus dare ecclesiæ adulterantes, quia graves causæ graviores et acriores querunt curas.
The Apostle declares that all ecclesiastical causes should be settled by priests. But if any ecclesiastics have perpetrated any crime among laymen, homicide or fornication or theft, it has been decreed that they be followed up in every case by laymen against whom they have sinned, unless it be the intention of the Church to make satisfaction for them. But laymen who shall have joined in sacrilegious intercourse with nuns [shall be dealt with] not in the same manner as the public law decrees fornicators to be punished, but double—by the sum of xxx sicli—i.e. we wish adulterers to give to the Church lx argentei, because severe cases require severer and sharper cures.
This passage once again makes it clear that in this ecclesiastical document of the Archbishop of York 30 sicli = 60 argentei or Roman drachmæ.
Ecclesiastical causes to be settled by priests.
And, apart from this monetary question, the clause is interesting as marking the claim that all ecclesiastical causes should be settled by the clergy themselves.
In case of crime by an ecclesiastic against a layman the Church reserved the right to stop the layman’s prosecution by payment of the wergeld or other satisfaction. At the same time the Church was to claim double compensation from laymen committing crime against nuns. It is impossible to disassociate this document from the letter of Bede describing the religious anarchy of the diocese caused by the abuses of the loose monastic system in vogue, and urging the newly appointed prelate, who was not yet Archbishop, to undertake their energetic reformation.
The Church succumbed to the wergeld system.
But for the present purpose the real worth of these statements is the independent evidence they give of the continued strength of the wergeld system and the force of tribal custom in the Northumbrian kingdom before the Norse invasions. The sense of individualism in Christianity was opposed to the solidarity and joint responsibility of the kindred. But instead of fighting against the wergeld system the Church had actually succumbed to it, and adopted it for its own advantage, placing a money price upon the blood of its several ecclesiastical ranks, making the value of the priest four times that of the monk.
The system of compurgation, again, was a part of tribal usage. The Church adopted it and graduated the worth of the oaths of its various grades according to secular usage, making the oath of the priest in evidence four times the value of that of the monk.
In other words, in England, as on the Continent, the clergy, instead of combating tribal custom in these matters, took their place in the order of secular rank according to their several grades, bishops claiming the wergeld of princes, and priests that of thanes, with, however, the obviously useful reservation that if their secular rank by parentage and birth should be higher than their ecclesiastical grade, the higher wergeld should be theirs.
All this we see in the course of being introduced into Northumbrian usage in answer to local inquiry and local needs, upon the authority of perhaps the very wisest of Saxon prelates.
The wisdom of such accommodation as this on the part of the Church to pagan tribal usage is not the matter in question. The point of the evidence is the proof it gives of the continued strength of tribal usage in England after many generations of occupation and settlement.