Reddatur Parentibus: The Vengeance of the Family in Cnut's Homicide Legislation

STEFAN JURASINSKI

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that during his 1018 meeting in Oxford with the leading English ecclesiastical and lay authorities, roughly one year after his accession to the throne in England, Cnut agreed to uphold "the laws of Edgar" during his reign.1 The ultimate outcome of this and subsequent meetings is the code issued at Winchester in 1020, referred to by editorial convention as I and II Cnut. This code contains, respectively, the religious and secular laws of England promulgated under Cnut.2 The code is contained in four manuscripts in Old English. The earliest are British Library, Cotton Nero A.i and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College (CCCC) 201, both dated to the mid-eleventh century; the latest, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College (CCCC) 383 and British Library, Harley 55, belong to the early twelfth century.3 Cnut's code reappears in three twelfth-century Norman Latin tracts intended to acquaint French authorities with English law, the Instituta Cnuti, Consiliatio Cnuti, and Quadripartitus.4 The Leges Henrici Primi, prepared by the same author as the Quadripartitus, also draws heavily on Cnut's legislation.5	1
Scholarship on pre-conquest English law has come to view Cnut's agreement to uphold the laws of Edgar as more a description of the conservative impulses behind his legislation than of any particular fidelity to the laws of Edgar.6 William of Malmsbury's later account of Cnut's legislative activities states that Cnut urged the observance of all the laws promulgated by his predecessors in England, particularly those of Æthelred.7 For the most part, Cnut's code is a recapitulation of the laws of Alfred and Æthelred as well as those of Edgar.8 Indeed, it has been argued that Cnut's code is best seen as a kind of anthology of earlier law, one that tells us less about Cnut's ambitions as a legislator than about his desire to authenticate his royal power by publishing legislation in the fashion of earlier Visigothic and Frankish kings.9 Such a tradition, in which the cultural resonances of royal lawgiving are of at least equal importance to the provisions of the law, is traceable to the earliest English legislation, the seventh-century code of Æthelberht of Kent, which Bede writes was promulgated "according to the examples of the Romans" (iuxta exempla Romanorum).10	2
Cnut's code might contain innovations, though establishing their status as such is a difficult problem.11 As Patrick Wormald has shown, there are reasons to believe that many of the thirty chapters of II Cnut that do not either quote or allude to earlier legislation may have been copied from lost exemplars.12 Among these sourceless chapters is a passage well known in legal-historical studies for the eccentricity of its language and provisions. The standard reading of this chapter in Pollock and Maitland's History of English Law, one that echoes the earlier interpretations of Lambarde, Schmid, and Thorpe, states that cap. 56 of II Cnut requires a murderer "[to] be delivered over to the dead man's kindred."13	3
Recent studies of Cnut's legislation, though accepting this standard interpretation of cap. 56, suggest its potential inadequacies. It is certainly difficult to reconcile provisions for the vengeance of the kin with the ostensible desires of Archbishop Wulfstan, among whose concerns in drafting the code were, according to M. K. Lawson, establishing "a more ordered and more Christian society" and "public peace."14 Bruce O'Brien, perhaps revealing his own puzzlement over the provisions of cap. 56, refers to the short passage as describing "some rude calculus of sympathetic punishment."15 Earlier English legislation had urged payment by the slayer of a monetary compensation (wergild) to the kin or lord of his victim. This was to prevent feud violence, a development that, though attributed by some scholars to ecclesiastical influence, is also described by Tacitus as a traditional practice among the continental Germani.16 The only possible antecedent in the Old English codes for the provisions of II Cnut 56 occurs in cap. 6 of Æthelred's 991 treaty with Olaf Tryggvason, which appears in most standard editions under the title "II Æthelred." This treaty appears to exhort the kinsmen of a slain man to avenge themselves on the killer and take "head for head."17On closer examination, however, any connection between this passage and II Cnut 56 seems dubious. The provisions of II Æthelred 6 concern not simple homicide but the killing of eight or more men, which was held to constitute a breach of the truce (fridbrec).18 Homicides of fewer than eight men were to be remedied by the payment of compensation (bete man pæt fullum were).19	4
The arguments above should not imply that provisions for the payment of wergild had eradicated feud in England. Indeed, Wormald reads the placing of victims of crime under the mund or protection of English kings as merely a reconfiguration of the feud in which its burdens are assumed by the king himself.20 Royal endorsements of bloodfeuding were, however, rare.21 Wormald argues that the apparent willingness in Cnut's legislation to "countenance some of the fundamentals of feud" in chapter 56 (and possibly in I Cnut 5) may be attributable to the legal culture of Cnut and his Scandinavian earls: according to Wormald, Wulfstan "would have needed more than his formidable rhetorical powers to persuade his new royal master amid his Scandinavian entourage of the illegitimacy of kin-vengeance."22 The saga literature of Norway and Iceland does indeed, as has been argued by William Miller, describe sophisticated feuding practices that seem to have substituted for official remedies for violence.23 It should be pointed out, however, that the sagas often describe events that took place long before the introduction of literacy to Iceland and Norway.24 Moreover, it is difficult to know why the Scandinavian descent of Cnut and his earls would have made them more tolerant of feud violence, since the earliest Scandinavian law provides alternatives to the feud analogous to those that had obtained in England.25	5
"Germanic mord"
Another surprising detail of II Cnut 56 is that it is, along with cap. 64, the first discussion of homicide in Old English law to employ the term mord.26 Until cap. 56, mord occurs in legal usage only in compounds.27 It has been argued that these earlier instances of compounded mord refer less to killing than to practices such as witchcraft and conspiracy, whose common feature is that they are conducted in secret.28 Prior studies have also argued that the term as it appears in II Cnut 56, in so far as it seems explicitly connected with the notion of secret homicide, may be a semantic loan from Old Norwegian or Old Danish and that in England it attains the status of a technical legal term only in eleventh-century legislation.29 More recent studies of Cnut's code--most notably Wormald's--suggest that the legal meaning of "mord" may be far less certain than previously assumed.30	6
Some of the scholarly puzzlement over the provisions of cap. 56 may be owing to the unsatisfactory formulation of prior definitions. Maitland's definition of mord as "secret or stealthy killing" suffered no modifications in legal-historical scholarship until the work of Bruce O'Brien, who has furnished us with the most thorough reevaluation to date of the evidence surrounding this early ancestor of Modern English "murder."31 O'Brien's approach to the problem of the semantic history of mord is innovative for its inclusion of literary evidence, principally from Beowulf. According to O'Brien, the Old English cognates for Latin murdrum, mord, and mordor	7
were used to describe two types of killing. The first type includes those killings that could not be settled by compensation, but must inevitably lead to a feud. In Beowulf, the bloody battle between Finn and Hnæf's men, because it involved deception, led to many mordras, which doomed the winter truce between the survivors to a spring of new slayings; these mordras could only be answered "by the edge of a sword." As English kings attempted to control or eliminate feuds more prosaic but similar to these, they assumed greater jurisdiction over just the kinds of slayings, mordras, that would resist composition and lead to feud. Second, mord and mordor were used to label the crime of betrayal of one's lord and the punishment for such treason. Lucifer's rebellion against his Lord, God, was said to have been ealra mordra mæst ("most dreadful of murders").32 The use of literary evidence, however, presents new difficulties along with new benefits. This is particularly true of early Germanic verse with its characteristically specialized poetic vocabulary. As Klaus von See demonstrated in his study of Old Norse legal language, separate meanings seem to have obtained for mord in Scandinavian legal tracts and in skaldic verse. In the former, von See argues, mord and its verbal form myrda designated secret and concealed slaying ("den heimlichen und verheimlichten Totschlag"); all other types of slaying are referred to with terms such as bani, víg, and dráp.33 In skaldic verse, however, no notions of criminality seem to have attended the usage of mord, which refers solely to warriors or to war itself. Kennings containing the term mord are used by skalds as epithets for themselves and for the earls in whose praise the poems were composed. A similar situation, according to von See, seems to govern the use of mord in at least some Germanic verse composed on the Continent, such as the Old High German Hildebrandslied.34 Thus it seems possible that in Old English verse as well, the meanings of mord and mordor may not always be consistent with their juristic meaning in Old English law codes. The Textual Background of II Cnut 56
The problem of isolating the possible "juristic" meaning of Old English mord is discussed below. But first it is necessary to grapple with the complicated textual situation of this chapter. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to a better understanding of the provisions of cap. 56 inheres in the failure of early editors of the code to provide a thorough description of the contents of the manuscripts and to represent the manuscript evidence accurately. The standard reading of the chapter in Pollock and Maitland is based primarily on the version that appears in CCCC 383, which contains alone among the Old English manuscripts considered here the phrase done banan, "the killer." Maitland never realized that the phrase was a twelfth-century interpolation of the manuscript. The addition was not recognized as such until Liebermann's Gesetze, though Liebermann mistakenly assigned this interpolation to the sixteenth century.35 Liebermann's edition appeared too late for Pollock and Maitland's History; they relied on Thorpe's edition of 1840 and Schmid's of 1832, both of which note only that the phrase does not occur in any other manuscript.	8
Though he had been the only scholar to uncover significant evidence against its validity, Liebermann's work was governed by assumptions about the manuscripts that may have prevented him from challenging the standard reading of cap. 56. Liebermann dated all of the Old English manuscripts as post-conquest, or nearly so, and suggested that the extreme ambiguity of the Old English in all versions of cap. 56 was attributable to the lateness of the manuscripts.36 His lack of faith in the Old English versions of cap. 56 led him to regard the three post-conquest Latin translations of Cnut's code as more accurate representations of the Old English archetype than the extant Old English versions themselves.37	9
Liebermann's approach to cap. 56 leads to a number of problems not yet discussed in any studies of Cnut's legislation. First, Liebermann's conviction that the extant Old English versions of II Cnut 56 are corrupt, along with his consequent emphasis on the Latin versions of the chapter, may have led him to dismiss as evidence of corruption some details of the Old English texts, details that might, in fact, have a rational explanation. Second, and perhaps most important, it is possible that the Norman translations of cap. 56 say as much, if not more, about the era in which they were composed as they do about the era whose practices they attempt to render. Bruce O'Brien observes that at many significant points in the post-conquest Latin translations of Cnut's code, "older laws were emended to make them agree with current practices."38 For example, Cnut's law requiring lords to pay the were of any of their men who fled upon an accusation is altered in the Instituta Cnuti "to reflect the liability of pledges and the new Norman time limit of a year and a day for the lord to find the man and so recover the were he had paid."39 That the Norman accounts of Cnut's law of homicide might differ significantly from the Old English versions agrees with what we know of the legislative motives of Henry I. According to William of Malmesbury, Henry was anxious to portray himself to his subjects as a lawmaker of uncompromising severity during the earliest decades of his reign. Consequently he encouraged to some degree of excess the use of corporal punishments: "Principio regni, ut terrore exempli reos inureret, ad membrorum detruncationem, post ad pecuniae solutionem procliuior" (At the beginning of his reign, in order to set a fearful example and make a lasting impression on evildoers, he was more inclined to exact loss of a limb, and later to require monetary payments).40 William's portrait of Henry's legislative aims accords well, as Stephanie Mooers has shown, with judicial records that demonstrate a heavier reliance on corporal punishments than on amercements only in the earliest decades of Henry's reign, the period in which the Leges Henrici Primi and the Latin translations of Cnut's code were composed.41 Nowhere in R. C. van Caenegem's English Lawsuits do we find accounts of killers abandoned to the vengeance of the victim's kin, in spite of the fact that provisions for such remedies occur in the Leges Henrici Primi.42	10
If the evidence is scant for such a practice in Anglo-Norman England, there is virtually no evidence for its existence under Cnut.43 Apart from a twelfth-century emendation of one of the manuscripts, the Old English texts of II Cnut are by no means clear on who is the direct object of the verb phrase agyfe dam magum "give back/give over to the kin." Table 1, in which are reproduced the three Old English versions of cap. 56 and three twelfth-century Latin versions, demonstrates that the standard interpretation of the chapter can only be the result of the impression given to early editors by the Latin translations in the Quadripartitus and Consiliatio Cnuti.44	11
Table 1. The Texts of II Cnut 56   British Library, Cotton Nero A.i   Gif open mord weorde, pæt man sy amyrred, agyfe man pam magum. 7 gif hit tihtle sig, 7 æt lade mistide, deme se bisceop. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 383   Gyf open mord weorde, dæt man amyrred sy, agyue man magum [pone banan]. 7 gif hit tihtle sy, 7 æt lade mistide, deme se bisceop. British Library, Harley 55   Gif open mord weorde, pæt man sy amyrdred, agife man para magum. 7 gif hit tihtle sy, 7 æt lade mistide, deme se bisceop. Instituta Cnuti   Si apertum murdrum fuerit, ut aliquis per illud occidatur, reddatur parentibus suis. Et si purgatio euenerit, et in purgatione ceciderit, episcopus uideat et iudicet. Consiliatio Cnuti   Si mortificatura manifesta fuerit, malefactor cognatis tradatur. Quodsi accusacio sit, et inficianti purgamine male succedat, episcopi iudicium subeat. Quadripartitus   Qui murdrum aperte perpetrabit, reddatur parentibus interfecti. Et si compellatio sit, et in emundatione miseueniat, iudicet episcopus.
The emendation of CCCC 383 is probably an attempt by a twelfth-century scribe to correct the manuscript so that it might agree with readings given in the Quadripartitus or Consiliatio Cnuti.45 Recent scholarship suggests a reason for this manuscript showing the influence of the Latin tracts, which were prepared at about the same time as the manuscript was copied. Wormald views the twelfth-century manuscripts of Anglo-Saxon law not as ideologically neutral attempts to copy and preserve their contents but as components of a unified "compilatory tradition" established under Henry I, occupied with producing both Latin translations of the laws and copies of the originals in which contents were altered--if only with respect to new principles of selection--to suit current practical and ideological ends.46	12
Another variation among the manuscripts is instructive. All of the manuscripts, with the exception of BL Harley 55, contain amyrred, "ruined, defiled," in place of amyrdred, "slain."47 According to Liebermann, amyrdred reflects the archetype, though it occurs only in the latest of the manuscripts (spelled amyrdred).48 Liebermann's interpretation of cap. 56 is predicated on the notion that the clarity of the Latin tracts in comparison to the extant Old English versions is evidence that archetypal readings were available to the former, as their lingering presence in BL Harley 55 may demonstrate. Moreover, according to Liebermann, the Norman translators may have been more adept at deciphering the contents of these now-lost manuscripts than the copiers of the Old English manuscripts themselves. Liebermann speculates that the lost Old English archetype of II Cnut contained after the jussive subjunctive verb agyfe the abbreviation ·N·, meaning the accusative singular masculine pronoun hine (him). He suggests that the Norman authors (at least the authors of the Quadripartitus and Consiliatio Cnuti) were untroubled by the ambiguities of cap. 56 because versions of the manuscript containing the abbreviated pronoun were probably available to them. These translators, Liebermann asserts, probably understood the abbreviation, whereas subsequent copiers of II Cnut are likely to have overlooked it.49 Thus Liebermann argues that the twelfth-century interpolation, as it agrees with readings in the Consiliatio Cnuti and Quadripartitus, is likely to reflect an archetypal reading of the manuscript, though it does not itself issue from the archetype.50	13
A different, and less conjectural, hypothesis emerges when we include the evidence of the Leges Henrici Primi.51 Cap. 92.19--an expanded recapitulation of the Quadripartitus's rendering of II Cnut 56--adds new emphasis to the treatment of the corpse:52	14
Qui murdrum aperte fecerit siue combusserit uel decapitauerit uel excoriauerit aliterue diffecerit ne cognosci ualeat, ut dictum est, reddatur parentibus interfecti; et si compellatio sit, et in emundatione miseueniat, iudicet episcopus. (Anyone who commits a manifest slaying, whether he has burnt the body or decapitated it or flayed it or mutilated it in some other way, in order that it might not be recognizable, shall, as has been said, be handed over to the relatives of the slain man. If a formal accusation is laid and the accused fails in his attempt to exculpate himself, the bishop shall pass judgment.) Here it seems possible that the author's preoccupation with injuries to the corpse, particularly those that would have made it unrecognizable during an inquest, may have been suggested by the use of amyrred in some Old English manuscripts. Both manuscript readings were certainly available to the authors of the Latin tracts: the Instituta Cnuti's "ut aliquis per illud occidatur" is no doubt a literal reading of a manuscript containing amyrdred or amyrdred. The rendering of II Cnut 56 from the Leges Henrici Primi offers evidence that at some point during his preparation of the Quadripartitus the author was reliant on a manuscript that had already undergone the scribal corruption that changed amyrdred to amyrred in all but one of the extant vernacular manuscripts. Perhaps because the Old English manuscripts available to them were inconsistent, the authors of the Latin tracts simply did not know what to do with the clause in which amyrdred or amyrred appears, given its seemingly tautological relationship with the first clause: hence its omission in every translation but that of the Instituta Cnuti. The apparent attempt to translate the scribal corruption amyrred in the Leges Henrici Primi argues against Liebermann's hypothesis that the authors of the Latin tracts worked (in the case of cap. 56) from Old English exemplars closer to the archetype than the exemplars used by the copyists of the vernacular manuscripts. It also suggests that some of the Old English manuscripts, as is adumbrated by Wormald's description of CCCC 383, are best seen as products of the same milieu responsible for the production of the Latin tracts, composed with the same motives and perhaps influenced by these works on small points of content. Inconsistencies among the Norman Tracts
I have already alluded to the most significant problem with Liebermann's analysis, namely that the Norman legal literature is in no way as unanimous as he implied. The sense of cap. 56 arrived at by the author of the Instituta Cnuti departs from that of his contemporaries and all subsequent editors of II Cnut, a detail omitted from the studies of Schmid and Liebermann. In the Instituta Cnuti it is not the murderer but the victim, identified by the indefinite pronoun in the subordinate clause (aliquis), who should be given back (reddatur) to his family.	15
Among other factors, which can only be speculated upon, the individual competence of the translator may have something to do with the divergence of the Instituta Cnuti from the other two tracts. The Instituta's rendering of cap. 56 is more faithful to the Old English versions than either the Consiliatio Cnuti or the Quadripartitus. Of the three it is the only text that seems to have aimed for a word-for-word rendering of the chapter, preserving as much as possible the syntax of the Old English rather than introducing, as does the Consiliatio, a malefactor who cannot have been present in any Old English exemplars. The Instituta also shows signs of unusual attentiveness to the usage of the Old English exemplar. It is significant, for example, that the Old English code employs a specialized form of the verb "to give." In the text of II Cnut, as well as in the larger corpus of Old English texts, the primary meaning of agyfan seems to have been "give back, return."53 The verb cannot refer to payment of the wergild or any other sort of reparation, since the only verbs used in situations of wergild payment were gebetan and forgyldan. The distinction between verbs associated with the payment of reparation and verbs associated with some other form of legal rendering is strictly maintained in the code, as in II Cnut 63: "Gif hwa reaf-lac gewyrce, agife and forgylde, and beo his weres scyldig wid done cyninge" (If someone should perform robbery, let him give back [the stolen goods] and pay reparation, and let him be liable for the payment of his own wergild to the king).54 At least two of the Norman authors were aware of the important distinction between gyfan and agyfan, since the Instituta and Quadripartitus both render the verb not as dare (give) but reddere (return, restore).	16
We may wonder why, in the standard evaluations of cap. 56, the reading offered by the Instituta Cnuti seems to have been so thoroughly drowned out by that of its famous sibling, the Quadripartitus, whose author has been regarded for over a century as a singularly incompetent translator of Old English.55 Even according to Liebermann's account of cap. 56, the only available evidence that this clause prescribes the delivery of the murderer to the kinsmen of the slain is the probability that the manuscript contained not done banan or anything resembling it, but hine (him). It is certainly difficult to see why abbreviated hine, if it indeed occurred in early manuscript versions, should necessarily refer to the killer. The arguments above show that in the case of cap. 56, it is dangerous to assume that archetypal readings of the Old English manuscripts were always consulted by the authors of the Norman tracts. Perhaps more important, even if it were possible that the archetype contained this abbreviation for hine, this would be inconclusive. On its own, the presence of hine would seem as likely to generate readings such as those of the Instituta Cnuti as those in the Quadripartitus and Consiliatio Cnuti. While all three of the Latin translations render cap. 56 as containing an explicit direct object for agyfe, they are, as demonstrated above, by no means consistent on the matter of whether the object of agyfe is the killer or the victim.	17
The relevance of II Cnut 63 to this problem may have escaped Liebermann's attention. The language of cap. 63 is analogous to that of cap. 56, given that the former, consistent with the elliptical style of Old English legal language, leaves unnamed what is to be given back to the victim of robbery. Presumably speakers of Old English, accustomed to the stylistic conventions of their legal language, knew what the verb referred to, much in the same way that they may have known that the verb in II Cnut 56 could refer only to what was "taken away" from the magum or kin, in this case the victim of the slaying. This interpretation is supported by the fact that II Cnut 63 seems to be a reworking of material from Ine 10, another passage regarding reaflac or robbery whose text varies slightly from that of II Cnut 63 and contains the direct object of agyfe, which is missing in II Cnut: "agyfe he done reaflac" (let him give back the stolen goods).56 In the same way, cap. 56 may be derived from a now-lost chapter in which the object of agyfe was present. Indeed, the syntactic similarity of cap. 56 to chapters such as 63 would confirm Wormald's intuition that lost exemplars may lie behind many of the sourceless chapters of II Cnut. As is demonstrated above, the absence of the object seems in at least some instances to be a stylistic feature of the code, or one that indicates that its early audience was aware of what was absent.	18
A New Reading of II Cnut 56
At this point it should be clear that evidence for the presence of state-sanctioned familial revenge in the laws of Cnut is scant even for the most forgiving analysis of manuscript evidence. In this section I propose an interpretation of cap. 56 that agrees with what we know about lawmaking in England as well as in the other Germanic kingdoms of early Western Europe. Renovating the existing legal definitions of mord is a major component of this inquiry since, as I hope to demonstrate below, legislation from Scandinavia and the Continent can do more than previous scholarship has assumed to fill in the silence of insular materials on the legal meaning of this term.	19
We begin with one of the few things we can know with certainty, namely that "open mord" meant not "murder performed openly" but "murder that is discovered."57 II Cnut's treatment of public slaying is described adequately in 48.2: the killer was outlawed (beo he utlah) and was to be expelled with hue and cry; should he be slain during his expulsion, his death was to remain uncompensated (agilde).58 The usage of II Cnut 53 ratifies the interpretation of "open mord" given above: "Gif be cwicum ceorle wif hig be odrum were forlicge and hit open weorde" (If while a man is alive [his] wife lies with another man and it [the deed] becomes discovered).59 Though there are to my knowledge no passages in any of the extant examples of Anglo-Saxon law describing what is to be done during the discovery of a corpse, the problem is treated frequently (as is discussed in more detail below) in other early Germanic legal literature. Cap. 19.7 of the eighth-century Bavarian laws, for example, exhorts discoverers of corpses to bury them promptly (though not secretly) and begins with an introductory clause similar to cap. 56: "Et si aliquis a quolibet mortuus fuerit repertus" (And if someone should be discovered dead in any place).60	20
What happens after the discovery of "mord" in II Cnut 56 is at the center of the problem. The most important objection to the interpretation of the Quadripartitus and Consiliatio Cnuti, and ultimately to the standard interpretation of the passage in contemporary scholarship, is that they scarcely make any sense. The Quadripartitus and Consiliatio Cnuti seem to prescribe that the killer is to be subjected to the judicial ordeal after being handed over to the kin of the person he has slain. We can reasonably assume, however, that no killer was likely to survive a meeting with the kin of his victim, nor was he intended to--a feature of this provision that the author of the Quadripartitus certainly understood.61 A standard means of resolving this problem has been to suggest that cap. 56 might be a description of two types of criminal slaying, one discovered, the other merely accused.62	21
Such a solution adds unnecessary complications to the interpretation of cap. 56. The ordeal does not seem inappropriate if we accept the interpretation offered by the Instituta Cnuti, and there are, as I discuss below, compelling reasons for doing so. Perhaps the greatest argument in its favor is that, while the abandonment of the killer to the vengeance of the family is certainly a novel remedy for violence in the context of Anglo-Saxon law and Germanic law in general, requirements that the killer (or discoverer of the corpse) provide the kin with the body appear in post-conquest English law and throughout Scandinavian and Frankish law. The gesture seems to have served two functions. It might be performed as an act of good faith, a means of signaling an end to feud violence and a willingness to settle disputes by means of compensation. The corpse of a slain man also might be delivered to his kin as a means of asserting noninvolvement in whatever wrongdoing resulted in the death of the victim, for which the ordeal might provide the ultimate proof. Despite its fairly wide attestation in early medieval legal literature, this practice has received little if any scholarly attention. The presence of such a ceremony, however, complements arguments made by William Miller on the conventions of the bloodfeud, in which he notes the "especially active legal existence" of the corpse in Scandinavian and continental literature. Miller mentions dozens of instances from sagas and chronicles in which corpses or possessions of the slain were used in legal ceremonies either to provoke or prevent feud violence on behalf of the dead.63	22
In England the ceremonial return of the corpse to his kin or lord is attested in cap. 74.3 of the Leges Henrici Primi. It should be said that the possible normative value of this passage, as is always the case with the Leges, may be negligible. The interest of the passage lies primarily in the possibility (admittedly remote) that it may be copied from a lost passage of Old English law, as Downer notes that it has no discovered source in any pre-conquest legislation:64	23
Si alicuius homo ex contentione aliqua uel rebus repentinis occidatur, requirat eum dominus suus per plegiam et pro mortuo plenam et eam rectitudinem offerat quam pro uiuo faceret, de quo rectum non diffortiauerit. Si ei denegetur et interim amittatur uel a bestiis aut auibus deuoretur, uel si ab occisoribus inhumetur uel circumsepiatur, hoc preter weram iudicio componatur. (If someone's man is killed as the result of some quarrel or sudden affray, his lord shall demand his body in return for some security, and he shall offer on behalf of the dead man full justice, and the same justice he would perform on his behalf if he were alive, and if he were a person in respect of whom he has not refused to do justice. If the body is denied him, and in the meantime is lost or is devoured by beasts or birds, or if it is buried or enclosed by the slayers, compensation for this, in addition to the payment of wergeld, shall be prescribed by judicial decision.) Unfortunately, the passage cited above may be our only direct evidence of such a practice in England. The author of the Leges might have been influenced here by his reading in Frankish law.65 In the earliest Frankish codes the refusal of a killer to provide the corpse of his victim to the lord or kin of the deceased constituted an additional offense for which the killer would have to pay compensation beyond the sum of the wergild, an interesting analogue for the Leges Henrici Primi's assertion that failure to provide the corpse was an offense to be compensated "preter weram." The conditions under which slaying becomes "murder" in the Frankish codes relate almost entirely to the treatment of the corpse. Explicit prohibitions against the concealment of the corpse can be found cap. 68.5 of the Lex Salica: "Si uero eum in aqua aut in pucium miserit aut de allis aut de ramis uel quislibet rebus celaverit, mallobergo morcherter, solidus MDCCC culpabilis iudicetur" (If however [the victim] will have been placed in a body of water or in a well, or concealed under earth or under branches or other objects--the vernacular term is "murder"--let the perpetrator be judged to pay a fine of 1,800 solidi).66 In the later Bavarian laws we find something close to an explanation of why this variety of homicide engendered special penalties. Cap. 19.2, while largely modeled on provisions of the Lex Salica like that cited above, seems an attempt to elaborate on why the killer's concealment of the corpse made him liable for additional fines. The concealment of the corpse was such a heinous offense because the killer placed the body in such a place "ut cadaver reddere non quiverit, quod Baiuuarii murdrida dicunt" (where the body cannot be returned, which the Bavarians call "murder").67 The killer was assessed an additional penalty specifically because the corpse could not be returned for proper burial rites: "[I]nprimis XL solidi conponat eo quod funus ad dignas obsequias reddere non valet; postea cum suo weregeldo conponat" (In the first place let him pay a compensation of 40 solidi, since the corpse cannot be returned for the appropriate burial ceremonies; after this payment has been made let him pay according to the wergeld of the deceased).68 To return the body (reddere) can only have meant, in the context of homicide, returning it to the family or lord of the deceased. A subsequent passage requires explicitly that either the lord or immediate family of the slain ("dominus cadaueris . . . et si liber similiter filium aut fratrum") be responsible for the burial ceremony.69 Scandinavian Law
The examples from Frankish law, although interesting, tell us less than we would like about lawmaking in Anglo-Saxon England. They do, however, give us a sense of the practices that were once "current" in the West Germanic world and that may well have been present in England. However, Anglo-Saxon codifications of the tenth and eleventh centuries were certainly not immune to the influence of Scandinavian law. Æthelred's "Wantage Code," promulgated for use in the Danelaw sometime between 978 and 1008, contains numerous legal terms that almost certainly derive from Old Norse.70 The ultimate victory of the Danes in England, culminating in the reign of Cnut, seems to have strengthened the cultural influence of the Danish and Norwegian occupants of England, and not solely in the north. William of Malmesbury claims with some chagrin that, by the end of Cnut's reign, extensive contact between Danes and Londoners had reduced both to a state of barbarism ("Dani et Lundoniae ciues . . . qui iam pene in barbarorum mores propter frequentem conuictum transierunt").71	24
The treatment of homicide in the early legal literature of Scandinavia may thus be able to tell us a great deal about what might lie behind the provisions of II Cnut 56. Though the earliest codes of West Norse law exist in manuscripts that were prepared long after the adoption of Christianity in Norway and Iceland, this circumstance in no way makes these sources irrelevant for the study of Old English legal texts.72 It is true that any arguments for Scandinavian influence on English law must be tentative, since the extant Scandinavian legal materials can at most only give us a sense of what the preliterate law of Scandinavia, and of the Scandinavian population of England, may have been like. On the other hand, we need not be overly tentative about the usefulness of texts such as the Norwegian Gulathing Law, since we know that it was in existence (though only in an oral form) earlier than 930 and that the earliest Icelandic codifications of the settlement period were heavily indebted to it.73	25
Scandinavian legal custom pertaining to homicide adds to the Frankish prohibitions against concealment of corpses a legal ritual by which one might absolve himself from charges of murder. This ritual, known as víglysing or "confession of the slaying" would, if performed properly, allow one to evade the penalty of full outlawry prescribed for cases of proven mord. The classic example of prescriptions for the víglysing ritual can be found in cap. 87 of the thirteenth-century Icelandic compilation Grágás:74	26
Pat er mælt. par er menn ganga annan veg einn fra vígi da scal veganndinn lysa vígi sam døgris ahond ser. nema hann se afialle eda firde pa scal hann samdøgris er hann kömr af. Hann scal ganga til böar pess er næstr er peirra er hann hygi ohætt fiorve sino af peim söcom oc segia lögfostum manne einom eda fleirom oc queda a pessa lund at. Fundr occar var scal hann queda oc nefna hinn oc segia hvar var. Ec lysi sar pau mer ahond . . . ec lysi sar ef at sárom geriz en vig ef at vigi geriz. (That is decreed: when only one side goes home from a slaying, then the killer is to publish the killing as his deed within the same day; but if he is on a mountain or fjord he must do it on the same day of his return. He is to go to the first house where he thinks his life to be not at risk because of the charge and tell one or more men legally resident there and state it in this way. "We had an encounter," he shall say, and name the victim and say who it was. "I announce that these wounds are my work . . . I publish wounds if wounds are the outcome and killing if killing is the outcome.") An examination of both the Icelandic and Norwegian laws demonstrates that the víglysing had no legal efficacy unless the killer made known in a public way the location of the corpse; it was in fact an essential component of the procedure, as is attested in the well-known formulation of Grágás cap. 88: "En pa er mord ef madr leynir eda hylr hræ eda gengr eigi í gegn" (And that is murder if a man conceals or hides the body, or does not confess).75 That "mord" was a separate offense from simple killing and may have consisted solely of concealing the corpse of the victim is suggested by Völsunga saga, in which the slaying of a thrall by Sigi is designated by the word drepa, and his subsequent burial under a snowbank by myrda.76
Grágás and the Gulathing Law vary significantly from Frankish practice only in that, whereas the latter seems to have required a meeting with the kin of the deceased, the former permitted the killer to avoid any encounters with the kin of the deceased for the sake of his own safety.77 In the Gulathing Law, however, we do find one stark departure from this practice. A person who came upon a corpse, whether or not he had himself committed the homicide, nonetheless incurred an obligation to perform a variant of the víglysing ritual, without which he became liable for charges of murder by the heir or heirs of the deceased. The variety of víglysing to be performed by the discoverer of a corpse explicitly requires that he seek a meeting with the heirs of the deceased, as in cap. 161:78	27
Dat er par enn pa ef pu finnr mann vegenn a morku uti. pa scal hann hylia pat lik fyst. oc segia hinum fyrsta manne til. er hann hittir. oc sœkia fund ervingia ef hann er innan fylkis. ellar skal hann pingbod skera. oc kenna ping. Nu er sa vittr at .vi. aurum er heima sitr um pat ping. pat heiter pingvitit micla. Nu ef hann gerer eigi sva. pa sannar hann ser vig a hendr. ef ervingi vill hanom kenna. (There is still this: that if you find a man slain out in the woods, then shall he [the finder of the corpse] First cover up that body and report [the death] to the first man he meets; and he shall seek a meeting with the dead man's heirs if he is within the fylki; otherwise he shall send out the thing-token and announce [it] to the thing. Now whoever remains away from this thing shall pay six oras: this is called the large thing-Fine. Now if he [the finder of the corpse] does not do [what is here prescribed], then he places the killing in his own hands, if the heir should wish to indict him.) Could the special circumstance described in cap. 161 of the Gulathing Law account for the provisions described in II Cnut 56? The two texts do share a concern with the discovery of wrongful slaying, the importance of a personal meeting between the slayer or the discoverer of the corpse and the kin, and the entitlement of the kin to subsequently level a charge of murder. The objection might be made that, since our earliest extant manuscript of the Gulathing Law was prepared long after the reign of Cnut, the customs described above may have been transmitted by Cnut from England to his Norwegian subjects. However, the possibility that the provisions of II Cnut 56 were brought to Scandinavia by Cnut can be rejected with some certainty, given the account of his attempts at legislation in Norway through his son Svein as narrated in the chronicle Agrip.79 None of these laws relate to homicide, and none of them seem to have survived into later codifications of Norwegian law.
We do know that as early as the Wantage Code, details of proof and procedure that had developed among the Anglo-Saxon population of England were being superseded in the Danelaw by traditionally Scandinavian procedures.80 Wulfstan himself, in legislation drafted for Æthelred, denounces the northern practice of holding accusations of homicide to be valid, should such an accusation be made on the very day of the alleged homicide.81 Most interesting, however, is the discussion of homicide in cap. 7.1 of the Old English code known as II Edmund. This requires the kin of a victim of homicide to give security so that the slayer "might approach under safety (grid)" and make his pledge to pay the wergild.82 This chapter is the first known passage of Old English law to use the term grid, one of the most convincing examples of a Scandinavian loanword in the Anglo-Saxon legal corpus.83 Unfortunately, cap. 7.1 of II Edmund does not tell us precisely which form this "pledge" by the slayer may have taken. It is likely that, as is described in cap. 74.3 of the Leges Henrici Primi, one or more of the conditions under which the killer might approach the kin of his victim with a guarantee of grid or safety was his willingness to provide them with the victim's corpse.	28
Awareness of such a custom in England may antedate Edmund's legislation as well as much earlier English codifications. The treatment of homicide in the Frankish and Scandinavian legislation discussed above provides a useful and heretofore neglected paradigm by which to interpret instances of violence in Beowulf.84 Grendel's savage feud against the court of the Danish king Hrothgar, referred to by the poet as mordbealu, "baleful murder" (line 136a), provides one instance in which the victims were, in contrast to the examples mentioned by O'Brien, quite anxious to negotiate for compensation.85 Seemingly, for the poet and for his audience, that Grendel pursues his feud without any apparent desire for a pecuniary settlement is among the most shocking features of his violence:	29
. . . sibbe ne wolde wid manna hwone mægenes Deniga feorhbealo feorran, fea pingian ne pær nænig witena wenan porfte beorhtre bote to banan folmum (154b–158). ([Grendel] did not desire friendship with any of the host of the Danes [so as to] obviate the deadly violence, to settle [the matter] with money, nor did any of the counselors need to expect a bright payment of reparation from the hands of the killer.) One of the more interesting facets of this passage is the description of the circumstances under which compensation is paid in the world of Beowulf. As in Edmund's legislation, the payment of compensation takes place during a personal encounter between the slayer and the kin-group: the money is received "to banan folmum" (from the hands of the killer). It is conceivable that the very reason why Hrothgar's counselors did not expect compensation is the manner in which Grendel's crimes are perpetrated on them. Grendel's homicides, as well as those of his mother, meet both of the criteria outlined in this essay under which killing might be designated as "mord" in early Germanic law. Beowulf's lament for Æschere, a member of Hrothgar's witan killed by Grendel's mother, bears a striking similarity to the description of murder given in cap. 68.5 of the Lex Salica:86 Noder hy hine ne moston, syddan mergen cwom, deadwerigne Denia leode bronde forbærnan, ne on bæl hladan leofne mannan; hio pæt lic ætbær feondes fædmum under firgenstream. (Nor could they, the Danish people, burn the death-weary one with flame, nor place on a pyre that dear man: in a fiend's embrace she bore that body under the mountain stream [2124–2128].) By attacking in secret and carrying off their victims to an underwater den (a further act of concealment, this time of their corpses), Grendel and his mother present themselves as parties unwilling to make settlement and thereby end the feud. Read outside the context of Frankish and Scandinavian provisions for homicide, the poet's assertion that Grendel "did not regret his feud and wickedness" seems only to restate the obvious.87 Within them, it seems a subtle allusion to alternative courses of action that might be pursued by human participants in vendettas, who lack Grendel's preternatural strength and are thus subject to the sort of limitations to which Grendel is immune. In a sense, Grendel and his kin are the law's nightmare, creatures with no regard for the customary practices of feud and feud-settlement, and against whom the standard remedies for violence in the early Germanic world provided no restraints. Conclusions
The discussion above permits us to assert a few things with some certainty. The term "mord" as it is used in II Cnut 56 most likely bears a meaning consistent with its cognates in Frankish and Scandinavian legal literature: not simply "secret or stealthy killing," a definition that is too vague, but "killing followed by concealment of the victim's corpse," or "a failure to provide the kin with the victim's corpse." To say the very least, there is a paucity of evidence for the possibility that II Cnut 56 prescribes the abandonment of killers to the vengeance of their victim's families, nor was such a reading ever supported by the evidence of the manuscripts. Interpreting the chapter as one that enjoins killers to return the corpses of their victims, and discoverers of corpses to do likewise or risk liability for the homicide, restores the sense of the Old English versions and allows us to abandon elaborate and heavily conjectural hypotheses regarding the relationships between pre- and post-conquest versions of the chapter. Doing so also establishes a reading of its contents consistent with what we know of lawmaking both in early medieval England and the early Germanic world in general.	30
Stefan Jurasinski is a doctoral student in the department of English at Indiana University. He wishes to thank R. D. Fulk and Kari Ellen Gade, as well as Christopher Tomlins and the anonymous reviewers for Law and History Review, for reading and commenting upon earlier versions of the essay. Notes 1 The passage occurs only in the D version of the Chronicle, contained in BL Cotton Tiberius B.iv: "7 Dene 7 Engle wurdon sammæle æt Oxanaforda to Eadgares lage" (And the Danes and English were agreed at Oxford [to uphold] the laws of Edgar). See the diplomatic edition of G. P. Cubbin, ed., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle vol 6: MS D (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), 63. For a discussion of this passage and the circumstances surrounding Cnut's legislation in England, see H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles, Law and Legislation from Æthelberht to Magna Carta (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966), 23–29; M. K. Lawson, Cnut: The Danes in England in the Early Eleventh Century (New York: Longman, 1993), 56–63; Patrick Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 1: 346–49. 2 Between the 1018 meeting at Oxford and the promulgation of Cnut's code in 1020 stands the code composed by Wulfstan shortly after the Oxford meeting, contained in CCCC 201. See the discussion and edition of A. G. Kennedy, "Cnut's Code of 1018," Anglo-Saxon England 11 (1983): 57–73. 3 For the most current dates and descriptions of the manuscripts, see N. R. Ker, A Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957); Wormald, Making of English Law, 224–55. The portion of BL Cotton Nero A.i containing Cnut's laws is number 163 in Ker, dated 's xi (med)'; CCCC 383 is number 65 in Ker, 's xi/xii'; BL Harley 55, the latest of the manuscripts, is number 226 in Ker, 's xii (med).' All passages from the Anglo-Saxon codes cited in this article are from Felix Liebermann, ed. and trans., Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, 3 vols. (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1903–16). Translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 4 On these "digests" of pre-conquest law prepared under Henry I, see Felix Liebermann's short monographs: Quadripartitus. Ein englisches Rechtsbuch von 1114 (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1892); Consiliatio Cnuti: eine Übertragung angelsächsischer Gesetze aus dem zwölften Jahrhundert (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1893); Über das englische Rechtsbuch Leges Henrici (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1901); also Richardson and Sayles, Law and Legislation, 41–53; Wormald, Making of English Law, 236–44 (on the Quadripartitus), 404–5 (on the Instituta and Consiliatio Cnuti); idem, "Quadripartitus," in George Garnett and John Hudson, eds., Law and Government in Medieval England and Normandy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 111–47. 5 All citations from this text are from L. J. Downer, Leges Henrici Primi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). On the common authorship of the Leges Henrici Primi and Quadripartitus see Liebermann, Über das englische Rechtsbuch Leges Henrici Primi, 53–59; Downer, Leges Henrici Primi, 23–28; Wormald, "Quadripartitus," 133–39; Bruce O'Brien, God's Peace and King's Peace: The Laws of Edward the Confessor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 25. 6 See Dorothy Whitelock, "Wulfstan and the Laws of Cnut," English Historical Review 63 (1948): 433–52; idem, "Wulfstan's Authorship of Cnut's Laws," English Historical Review 70 (1955): 72–85; Richardson and Sayles, Law and Legislation, 27; Patrick Wormald, "Lex Scripta and Verbum Regis: Legislation and Germanic Kingship from Euric to Cnut," in P. H. Sawyer and I. N. Wood, eds., Early Medieval Kingship (Leeds: Leeds University Press, 1977), repr. in Patrick Wormald, Legal Culture in the Early Medieval West: Law as Text, Image and Experience (London: Hambledon, 1999), 35. 7 See William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, ed. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson, and M. Winterbottom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 329 (cap. 183:9). 8 See the chart of the derivation of clauses in I and II Cnut in Wormald, Making of English Law, 355–60. 9 Cnut's code is best seen in the context of other early medieval codifications such as the Lex Romana Visigothorum promulgated by Alaric II, which contained not Germanic law but excerpts from Roman juristic literature and thus the traditional law of the territory he had conquered. Such is the argument of Wormald, "Lex Scripta and Verbum Regis," 35 and passim. 10 On Æthelberht's code, its genesis and its affiliation with "Roman" (more likely Frankish) political and legal culture, see Richardson and Sayles, Law and Legislation, 1–12, 157–69; A. W. B. Simpson, "The Laws of Ethelberht," in Morris Arnold et al., eds., On the Laws and Customs of England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 3–17; Patrick Wormald, "Inter Cetera Bona . . . Genti Suae: Law-Making and Peace-Keeping in the Earliest English Kingdoms," in La giustizia nell'alto medioevo (Spoleto: Centro italiani di studi sull'alto medioevo, 1995), 963–93; idem, Making of English Law, 93–101; Lisi Oliver, "The Language of the Early English Laws" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1995); Stefan Jurasinski, "The Continental Origins of Æthelberht's Code," (forthcoming, Philological Quarterly). The account of Æthelberht's code and the conversion of Kent in the early seventh century occurs in Bede's eulogy of Æthelberht (Historia Ecclesiastica 2.5): see Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, eds., Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 150–51. 11 See Wormald, Making of English Law, 361–62. 12 On the 30 out of 84 chapters of II Cnut with no known source, see Wormald, Making of English Law, 363. 13 Sir Frederick Pollock and Frederic William Maitland, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I (1898; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 52–53. For the earlier translations of cap. 56, see William Lambarde, ed. and trans., Archaionomia (1568; reprint, London: Roger Daniel, 1644), 120; Benjamin Thorpe, ed. and trans., Ancient Laws and Institutes of England (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1840), 175; Rheinhold Schmid, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1832), 303. 14 M. K. Lawson, "Archbishop Wulfstan and the Homiletic Element in the Laws of Æthelred II and Cnut," in The Reign of Cnut: King of England, Denmark and Norway, ed. Alexander Rumble (London: Leicester University Press, 1994), 152. (First published in English Historical Review 107 (1992): 565–87.) 15 Bruce R. O'Brien, "From Mordor to Murdrum: The Preconquest Origin and Norman Revival of the Murder Fine," Speculum 71 (1996): 336. 16 The first mention of compensation for homicide among the Germanic peoples occurs in Tacitus, Germania cap. 21: "luitur enim etiam homicidium certo armentorum ac pecorum numero recipitque satisfactionem universa domus" (For even homicide is remedied by a certain amount of arms or cattle, and the entire household receives satisfaction). See M. Winterbottom and R. M. Ogilvie, eds., Cornelii Taciti opera minora (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 21. On the history of restraints on the feud, see Stanley Rubin, "The Bot or Composition in Anglo-Saxon Law: A Reassessment," Journal of Legal History 17 (1996): 144–54; Patrick Wormald, "Giving God and King Their Due: Conflict and Its Resolution in the Early English State," Settimana di studio del centro italiano di studi sull'alto medioevo 44 (1997), 549–90, repr. in Wormald, Legal Culture in the Early Medieval West, 333–57; Peter Richardson, "Making Thanes: Literature, Rhetoric and State-Formation in Anglo-Saxon England," Philological Quarterly 78 (1999): 220–24. 17 Liebermann, Gesetze, 1: 222–24. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 See Wormald, "Giving God and King Their Due," 336. 21 For possible examples, see I Cnut 5: 2b-d; VIII Æthelred 23–25. 22 Wormald, Making of English Law, 364. 23 See William Ian Miller, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 24 The massive accumulation of literature on the dating of sagas is reviewed in Carol Clover, The Medieval Saga (Ithaca: Cornell University Press); see also Miller, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking, 44. 25 Danish law prescribed payments of compensation for killing and presumably had done so in its prehistory; for a description of the adjudication of homicide in medieval Denmark, see Peter Skautrup, ed., Jyske Lov Text I, Danmarks gamle landskabslove, 2 (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1933), caps. 3.23 (400–403), 1.8 (153). For the early history of Danish law (including the period before laws existed in written form), see Klaus von See, ed. and trans., Das Jütsche Recht (Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1960), 1–19. 26 II Cnut 64 asserts that flagrant homicide (æbere mord) is unamendable (botleas). This passage does not seem to discuss the same variety of homicide dealt with in II Cnut 56, which is, as discussed below, one in which there has been some attempt on the part of the killer to conceal the crime. 27 Outside of legal texts, "mord" and the compounds of which it is the first element seem to designate something other than secret homicide: see entries for "mord" and "mordor" in Richard L. Venezky and Antonette diPaolo Healey, eds., A Microfiche Concordance to Old English (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1985). The use of "mord" in homiletic and literary texts is reviewed exhaustively in O'Brien, "From Mordor to Murdrum," 342–53. O'Brien is more circumspect (if not skeptical) than most scholars who have examined the evidence about the possibility that "mord" in Old English meant anything like "secret homicide" or "assasination." 28 See Schmid, Gesetze, 633. 29 See Horst Haider Munske, Der germanische Rechtswortschatz im Bereich der Missetaten (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1973), 46–47. 30 See Wormald, Making of English Law, 363. 31 For Maitland's treatment of the semantic history of "morth" in pre- and post-conquest English legislation, see History of English Law, 2: 468–69, 485–88; see also J. M. Kaye, "The Early History of Murder and Manslaughter," Law Quarterly Review 88 (1967): 366–67. 32 Bruce O'Brien, God's Peace and King's Peace: The Laws of Edward the Confessor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 79. The cited passage is condensed from his lengthier discussion of the literary usage of mord and mordor in "From Mordor to Murdrum," 345–48. 33 Klaus von See, Altnordische Rechtswörter, Hermaea, 16 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1964), 21–22. 34 Ibid. 35 Liebermann, Gesetze, 3: 210. 36 Liebermann assigns the following dates to the four manuscript versions of Cnut's code: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 383 ("B"), 1125–30; BL, Cotton Nero A.i ("G"), 1070; Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 201 ("D"), 1050–80; BL, Harley 55 ("A"), 1120. See Liebermann, Gesetze, 1: xviii–xliii. 37 Liebermann, Gesetze, 3: 210. 38 O'Brien, God's Peace and King's Peace, 27. 39 Ibid. 40 William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, 742–45. I have preserved the translation of R. A. B. Mynors. 41 Stephanie L. Mooers, "A Reevaluation of Royal Justice under Henry I of England," The American Historical Review 93 (1988): 348–49. 42 See Leges Henrici Primi 70.12, 88.6b (enjoins relatives to be merciful in cases of unintentional homicide), 88.11c, 92.19. 43 See R. C. van Caenegem, ed., English Lawsuits from William I to Richard I, Publications of the Selden Society, 106 (London: Selden Society, 1990). Such requirements are also absent from the records of pre-conquest adjudications of homicide in Patrick Wormald, "A Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Lawsuits," Anglo-Saxon England 17 (1988): 247–81, repr. in Wormald, Legal Culture in the Early Medieval West, 253–89. 44 All texts are from Liebermann, Gesetze, 1: 348–49. The standard translation is by Dorothy Whitelock, ed. and trans., English Historical Documents c. 500–1042 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1955), 427: "If manifest murder occur, so that a man is murdered, the murderer is to be given up to the kinsmen. And if an accusation is brought, and the accused fails at the exculpation, the bishop is to give judgment." See also A. J. Robertson, ed. and trans., The Laws of the Kings of England from Edmund to Henry I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), 203: "If anyone dies by violence and it becomes evident that it is a case of murder, the murderer shall be given up to the kinsmen [of the slain man]. And if the accusation is brought and the attempt [of the accused] to clear himself fails, the bishop shall pronounce judgment." 45 This interpolation is not in the hand of the original scribe of CCCC 383 and should not be assumed to be contemporaneous with the preparation of the manuscript, although it is probable that at least some of the Latin translations of Cnut's laws predate this manuscript. See Leonhard Wroblewski, Über die altenglischen Gesetze des Königs Knut (Berlin: Mayer and Muller, 1901), 11–12. 46 See the description of the relevant manuscripts in Wormald, Making of English Law, 224–55. 47 Bosworth glosses amyrran as "to dissipate, spend, distract, defile, mar, corrupt, spoil, destroy." See Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller, Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1882), 37. 48 Liebermann, Gesetze, 1: 348–49. 49 Evidence that Anglo-Norman translators of I and II Cnut understood the manuscript abbreviation would be, according to Liebermann, the fact that the author of the Quadripartitus preserves in II Cnut 45.3, "aut neget N," where the abbreviation represents hine. Though it is an extremely unusual abbreviation it does occur elsewhere in II Cnut, occurring in all three manuscript versions in chapter 45. 50 Liebermann, Gesetze, 3: 210. 51 I am indebted to Charles D. Wright for suggesting to me the possible importance of amyrred/amyrdred alternations for the Latin tracts. 52 Text and translation are from Downer, Leges Henrici Primi, 292–93. 53 The following examples from Bosworth and Toller's Dictionary are probably relevant: "He wolde hine his fæder agifan" (He wished to return his father to him: Gen 37.22); "Uton agifan dæm esne his wif" (let us restore to the man his wife: Aelfred's Boethius 35.6.). Quoted in Bosworth and Toller, A Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon, 29. 54 Liebermann, Gesetze, 1: 352. 55 See Liebermann, Gesetze, 3: 310; idem, Über das englische Rechtsbuch Leges Henrici, 34–35. 56 See Liebermann, Gesetze, 1: 94: "Gif hwa binnan pam gemærum ures rices reaflac 7 niednæme do, agife he done reaflac 7 geselle LX scill. to wite" (If one should commit robbery and violent seizure [of goods] within the limits of our country, let him give back what was stolen and pay sixty shillings as compensation). 57 This has been the consensus for some time in studies of the code. See O'Brien, "From Mordor to Murdrum," 330 n. 42. 58 Liebermann, Gesetze, 1: 346. 59 Ibid., 348. 60 Ibid., 459. 61 See Leges Henrici Primi, cap. 92.15, in which the author alludes to II Cnut's provision that the slayer be handed over to the relatives of the slain (reddatur parentibus interfecti) so that "he may experience the mercy of those to whom he had displayed none" (misericordium eorum subiturus quibus nullam exhibuit): this can be taken only as the author's ironic endorsement of feud violence. Text and translation are from Downer, Leges Henrici Primi, 290–91. 62 See Liebermann, Gesetze, 1: 349. 63 See William Ian Miller, "Choosing the Avenger: Some Aspects of the Bloodfeud in Medieval Iceland and England," Law and History Review 2 (1983): 189 and passim. 64 Downer, Leges Henrici Primi, 232–33. 65 The Leges Henrici Primi allude to provisions of the Lex Salica in cap. 87.10 and elsewhere. Liebermann maintained that the author of the Leges Henrici Primi was well acquainted with Frankish law. See his Über das englische Rechtsbuch Leges Henrici, 22–23. Downer does not address the matter of Frankish material in the code. For his account of the sources, see Leges Henrici Primi, 28–34. 66 Karl August Eckhardt, ed., Lex Salica, MGH Leges Sectio I (Hanover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1969), 116. 67 Ernst von Schwind, ed., Lex Baiwariorum, MGH Leges Sectio I (Hanover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1935), 455. Here the verb reddere can only be translated as passive. Peculiar constructions and orthographic forms are ubiquitous in Merovingian Latin. The most comprehensive study of these irregularities and their relevance for attempts to date Merovingian legal texts remains that of Rudolph Buchner, Textkritische Untersuchungen zur Lex Ribuaria, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Schriften 5 (Leipzig: Karl W. Hiersemann, 1940), 8–18. See also H. L. Günter Gastroph, Herrschaft und Gesellschaft in der Lex Baiuvariorum (Munich: Stadtarchiv München, 1974), 52. 68 von Schwind, Lex Baiwariorum, 455. 69 Ibid., 458. 70 See Charlotte Neff, "Scandinavian Elements in the Wantage Code of Æthelred II," Journal of Legal History 10 (1989): 286 and passim. 71 See William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, 334 (cap. 188). 72 The laws of the medieval Icelandic commonwealth, known collectively as Grágás, are contained in two thirteenth-century manuscripts, Konungsbók (1260) and Stadarhólsbók (1280). The date of individual provisions is nearly impossible to determine. See Miller, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking, 43. 73 See Neff, "Scandinavian Elements," 303; Halldór Hermannsson, Ancient Laws of Norway and Iceland, Islandica, 4 (Ithaca: Kraus Reprint Corporation), 17. For the account of the first Icelandic codification under Ulfljótr and its indebtedness to the Norwegian Gulathing Law, see Wolfgang Golther, ed., Ares Isländerbuch (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1892), 5–6 (cap. 2.5). 74 Vilhjálmur Finsen, ed., Grágás: Islændernes Lovbog i Fristatens Tid (Copenhagen: Brø drene Berlings bogtrykkeri, 1852), 153. 75 Ibid., 154. 76 "pá kemr upp, at Sigi hefir drepit prælinn ok myrdan" (Then it was discovered, that Sigi had killed the thrall and murdered him). See Uwe Ebel, ed., Völsunga saga (Frankfurt: Haag und Herchen, 1982), 60. 77 R. Keyser and A. Munch, eds., Norges gamle love indtil 1387 (Christiania: Gröndahl, 1846), 1: 63. 78 Ibid., cap. 156, 61. 79 See Bjarni Einarsson, ed., Agrip af Nóregskonungasögum, Islenzk fornrit, 29 (Rekjavík: Hid íslenska fornritafélag, 1984), 28–29. 80 See Neff, "Scandinavian Elements." 81 See Simon Keynes, "Crime and Punishment in the Reign of King Æthelred," in People and Places in Northern Europe 500–1600, ed. Ian Wood and Niels Lund (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1991), 75. See also cap. 32.4 in II Æthelred in Liebermann, Gesetze, 1: 244–45. 82 Liebermann, Gesetze, 1: 188–89. 83 See Neff, "Scandinavian Elements," 289. 84 The amount of scholarship accumulated over the last century on the date of Beowulf is immense. The manuscript, Cotton Vitellius A.xv, dates on paleographic grounds to the early eleventh century, but this circumstance in no way precludes a much earlier date for the poem. Linguistic and metrical data suggest that the poem is a very early composition, possibly dating from the eighth century. The arguments and bibliography are reviewed most recently in Robert E. Bjork and Anita Obermeier, "Date, Provenance, Author, Audiences," in A Beowulf Handbook, ed. Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 13–34. See also Colin Chase, ed., The Dating of "Beowulf," Toronto Old English Series, no. 6 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981). The same volume is discussed in a review article by R. D. Fulk, "Dating Beowulf to the Viking Age," Philological Quarterly 61 (1982): 341–59. 85 All textual examples from Beowulf are from Frederick Klaeber, ed., Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg (Lexington: D. C. Heath, 1922). Texts from Klaeber's edition are reproduced without macrons. 86 See Klaeber, Beowulf, 79–80. The example from the Lex Salica is cited above, n. 66. 87 See lines 136–37 in Klaeber, Beowulf, 6.

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