The White Horse King: The Life of Alfred the Great (27 page)

Once more, the king’s approach was marked by both conservation and innovation. First, Alfred stressed throughout the preface to his domboc the importance of shunning rash or novel alterations in the legal code. Alfred insisted that justice was an eternal virtue—a virtue defined by the character of God and passed on to mankind through divine revelation. Therefore, hasty and ad hoc decrees that addressed immediate national problems without taking the time to reflect on and consider the eternal principles of justice were fated to end in villainy and abuse. Only those laws that had been founded on the eternal principles of justice, had stood the test of time, had been passed on from generation to generation, and had received the approval of the wisest of counsellors should be enacted and enforced by a just king.

To make this point clear, Alfred began the domboc with a translation of the Ten Commandments given to Moses by God on Mount Sinai as recorded in Exodus 20:2–17. This was then followed by a series of lengthy excerpts of Old Testament case law from Exodus 21 to 23, which illustrated how the principles of the Ten Commandments had been applied in various specific precepts that were relevant to the setting of the ancient Near East.

Next, the king included several excerpts from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7), illustrating how when the Son of God, the “healing Christ,” came to this Middle-Earth (the Anglo-Saxon term for the inhabited world of men), he did not do away with or overturn the Old Testament law but merely reapplied the principles of God’s law to the problems facing the Roman-occupied Palestine of the first century. Jesus taught the Golden Rule, exhorting men to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” a principle that succinctly summarized much of the Old Testament law. If a man understood how to apply this one law alone, Alfred reflected, he would need no domboc.

After this lengthy preface, which underlined the king’s deep conviction that justice had been passed down from God to men and that it was the duty of law-givers to study Scripture, history, and the counsel of other men as they made their legislative decrees, Alfred finally listed his collection of one hundred twenty laws. (It is suspected that the total number of one hundred twenty laws was chosen to equal the age of Moses at his death, acknowledging once 200 more the biblical foundation for Alfred’s law code.) In this domboc, more than half of these decrees were actually collected from the law codes of previous Anglo-Saxon kings, primarily Ine, king of Wessex from AD 688 and AD 726. Alfred and his witan composed only the first forty three of the one hundred twenty laws.

Thus it would seem that the publication of Alfred’s domboc signified great continuity with the legal traditions of the king’s predecessors. In actuality, this legal code constituted another of the king’s great innovations. The novelty of the king’s approach toward legal theory is often cited as one of the premiere justifications for the king’s unique sobriquet: “the Great.” By arguing throughout his preface that justice must be an eternal principle, handed down through both Scripture and the legal codes of the land, Alfred established the framework for what would later be known as “common law,” the foundation for the legal system of England for the following millennia, as well as for the legal systems of the former colonies of the British empire—including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, and Pakistan. Alfred was the first Saxon king to give such thought to the enduring nature of law. Ironically, it was just this innovation, this conscious attempt to understand the real source of all law, that drove the king to look for the precepts of his domboc that could reassure the king that his own legislation was consistent with the principles of justice that had been passed on by the healing Christ to the men of Middle-Earth.

When the king of Wessex turned to listing the actual laws of the domboc, he began with the commandment he considered to be “most necessary” for every Anglo-Saxon man to keep, a law that proved to be fundamental to the preservation of English society: Alfred insisted that every Anglo-Saxon man keep his oaths and pledges. Instead of a prohibition of murder, treason, or some other heinous crime, the king saw oath-breaking as the greatest threat to the endurance of his kingdom. Although this prioritization of the keeping of oaths may seem strange to the modern mind, to the Anglo-Saxon it was clear that keeping one’s word stood at the foundation of a civilized society.

To understand the significance of oath-keeping to the king of Wessex, one need only think back on the many times when the integrity and strength of Alfred’s shieldwall during the crushing combat depended on the faithfulness of the oaths that his thegns had pledged during those less-dangerous moments of feasting and boasting in the mead hall. Similarly, one can remember the habitual treachery of the pagan Vikings, whose unctuous pledges of peace were disregarded by the Danes within hours of making the pledge. It seemed to Alfred that oath-keeping truly was the virtue that most clearly distinguished a Christian nation from a pagan nation.

The significance of a man being faithful to his word was not just apparent in confrontations with other nations; it was essential for preserving domestic peace as well. In the courts of Alfred’s day, guilt or innocence was not determined by the presentation of evidence and witnesses. Instead, the accused needed only to produce a certain number of “oath-helpers,” men willing to swear alongside the defendant that he was innocent of the charges brought against him. This may seem naïve, since it would seem easy for a guilty man to find several friends to come and swear an oath to his innocence. By giving so much weight to truthfulness in oath-making, however, Alfred helped to ensure that no man could break his oath without dire consequences. If a man was found to have sworn falsely, he would be ostracized from society, losing his right to weapons, to property, and even to testify to his own innocence in court. Thus, the men of Alfred’s day took great care to ensure that they did not make careless oaths or pledges.

After his exhortations toward oath-keeping and his prescriptions of penalties for the oath-breakers, the king turned his legislative attentions to another pressing issue that constantly threatened to disrupt the domestic peace of any ninth-century Anglo-Saxon community: the thorny problem of revenge killings. Again, to the modern ear, this may sound like a rather obscure and arbitrary category of criminal activity to attract such focused attention from the king’s new domboc. However, the problem of protracted and bloody feuds had long plagued the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, a gruesome holdover from their own pagan ancestral customs.

Reaching back centuries into the dark old Germanic origins of the Anglo-Saxon tribes, the English people had long assumed that the only reasonable way to ensure the safety of one’s own kith and kin was to wage an endlessly escalating campaign of vengeance for any harm done to one’s friends and family. Before the coming of Christianity to the Anglo-Saxon tribes at the end of the sixth century, if a young man’s father or brother was killed in a fight, it became desperately urgent that the young warrior seek out the murderer and hack out revenge for his family name, or die trying. Only an unloving and ungrateful son could watch his father slain by another without vowing then and there to dedicate all his energies to seeking out and slaughtering the killer of his kinsman. This obligation extended not only to the fathers, brothers, and sons of the dead, it also passed through the web of lord–thegn relationships.

The bold oaths proclaimed in the raucous mead halls to stand by the lord in the place of slaughter, refusing to leave his side no matter how great the cost, were always accompanied by the additional boast that, if the lord should be struck down in combat, the faithful thegn would commit his sword and his own life to finding vengeance for his fallen lord. Additionally, the obligation to find revenge was mutually binding between the thegn and his master, meaning that the lord was also obligated to seek vengeance for his slaughtered thegns.

Admittedly, in some ways this communal thirst for bloody revenge could be remarkably productive. First, it was certainly a deterrent to some would-be killers when they were struck by the realization that, in giving way to the momentary heat of anger and resorting to murderous violence, a man could arouse the wrath of an entire clan of Saxon warriors, together with the oath-bound lord and thegns. And second, since inclusion in the houses of great noblemen could afford such a tremendous protection by assuring that a man’s death would not go unavenged, it forced young Anglo-Saxon warriors to carefully guard their standing within these great houses, making them zealous to be true to their oaths and scrupulous in their faithfulness to their lord’s commands. A man cast out of the court of his lord, a man with no family or friends to avenge his blood should he be attacked, became completely vulnerable to the cruel medieval world.

Unsurprisingly, the practice of seeking vengeance for every death, though it may have occasionally dissuaded some warriors from reckless slaughter, still led far too often to an ever-escalating feud, whose final bloody death toll was way out of proportion to the single initial murder that provoked the entire gruesome tragedy. A heated altercation would turn disastrously violent, leaving some poor wretch fatally wounded in the scuffle. His bereaved kinsmen would return later that evening to seek revenge and prove themselves to be true brothers. Of course, the man guilty of the crime would not be easily surrendered by his own faithful friends and family and a second skirmish would erupt, this time leaving dead on both sides. The unquenchable thirst for vengeance would now be rightly claimed by everyone involved, and the violence would continue until the demand for revenge was finally conquered, not by justice or forgiveness but by extermination of entire clans by this insatiable blood thirst.

Seeing the destructive power of the endlessly escalating blood feuds, Alfred realized that something had to be done to curb them. However, in the Anglo-Saxon world, it was understood that the burden was on the victim or the kinsmen of the victim to take the initiative in seeking justice and recompense. The king and his noblemen, though eager to see justice done in the land, normally acted as moderators in these quarrels, not as prosecutors or policemen. Alfred did not want to eliminate entirely the impulse of the Anglo-Saxon men to seek retaliation for the wrongs done to them, since this impulse was the engine that powered the machinery of justice in the early medieval English world. So instead of outlawing the blood feuds entirely, his domboc looked for every opportunity to remove their dangerous potential to escalate into all-out warfare between various clans. Alfred exempted a man who fought to defend his own lord or kinsman in a wrongful attack from incurring a blood feud 205 during the combat. A man who killed another man for committing adultery with his wife was similarly exempt from incurring a blood feud for his bloodshed.

Of course this only touched on a few of the many possible provocations that might launch a feud. To truly mitigate the bloodlust of the retaliating ethic, the king leaned heavily on the practice of replacing vengeful murder with the payment of
wergild
. The wergild or “man money” was a set price given for each man according to his rank, which was paid to the victim’s surviving family in recompense for a wrongful death. Thus, if a common freeman was killed in some argument that became violent, his killer could pay two hundred shillings to the surviving family members and avoid entirely the destructive blood feud that would have otherwise inevitably ensued.

Alfred’s domboc described in detail exactly how the men seeking the recompense of wergild were to go about extracting it. After a wrongful death had occurred, an Anglo-Saxon “posse” would form and search out the accused. If the man was found in the street and, instead of running for safety, he turned to put up a fight, then the posse was free to strike him down in vengeance for his act of murder. If the fugitive turned and fled and was able to make it to his own house or to a consecrated church, then he was not to be touched. The revenge-seeking mob could stay outside for one week, ensuring that the accused did not sneak away. After the seven days, if the man had not come out to fight, then he must surrender his weapons and go peacefully to the house of his enemies, where he would be held for one month while his family gathered the prescribed wergild to make recompense for his crime. If a family felt they did not have the requisite strength to confront the man who had wronged them, they were free to ask their ealdorman to assist. If he refused, then they were welcome to ask the king to intercede on their behalf and lay siege to their enemy until he paid the wergild.

Of course the wergild legislation, a system of rules and regulations by which a man could seek his revenge, seems almost comical to the modern reader. Sometimes the many strange exceptions to the rules and attempts to anticipate possible difficulties in Alfred’s domboc begin to sound more like the collection of bizarre oral traditions surrounding some longstanding playground game at a local elementary school than a serious early medieval legal code.

For instance, if a man was besieged in a consecrated church but the clergy needed the space he was occupying for a service, then the clergy were allowed to find another building in which the man could take refuge. However, Alfred added one important proviso—this new building must not have more doors than the church building. Presumably, this was because the party who was guarding the church building would have allocated their men according to the number of possible exits from the church by which the fugitive might take flight. A sudden shift to a building with more doors could have left the besieging band inadequately staffed to guard the new building effectively. One wonders what previous siege-gone-wrong experience Alfred and his witan had in mind when this law was carefully crafted.