Writing Land in Anglo-Saxon England

This project considers the ways in which the Anglo-Saxons used writing (in both its documentary and discursive sense) to establish legitimate and enduring possession of property and in doing so formed longstanding cultural ideas that connected writing and holding land. Anglo-Saxon legal texts designed to control the ownership, use, and transmission of property produced a pervasive discourse for land possession with its own terminology and concepts. Composed in Latin and Old English, these texts stipulated specific terms and limits of possession, but more powerfully, they also defined land by establishing its history and charting its boundaries. Land tenure practices were originally an instrument of ecclesiastical institutions, and tenurial texts, originally written in Latin, were heavily inflected with religious language. From at least the late sixth century, for example, land holding in Anglo-Saxon England was framed in a rhetoric of salvation and oppositions between the eternal and transitory. The terminology of land tenure was translated into the vernacular, yielding such terms as bocland and lÌ_nland, which further facilitated the adoption of tenurial language for considering issues of transience, salvation, political power, and sacred history.

Tenurial discourse moved beyond legal texts to inform widely varied textual genres in the vernacular, including homilies, historical writing, biblical narrative poetry, and the lives of native saints. The project examines a range of texts, including Latin diplomas, vernacular leases and dispute narratives, the tenth-century annals of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Guthlac A, and Genesis A, considering them within a matrix of contemporary texts and events in order to examine questions of historical reception. In their engagement with issues of landholding and inheritance, these texts variously enact a tension endemic in the language and practices of land tenure: an assertion of the instrumentality of writing in securing legitimate and longstanding possession, shadowed by an insistent anxiety over the stability of those claims. In using writing as a means to contain dispute over time, the Anglo-Saxons repeatedly inscribed the troubling evidence of past dispute and anticipated loss into their thinking about land.