Abstract
ABSTRACTThis essay takes a close look at the events related in Sawyer charter 1377, a late tenth-century account of the execution of a widow, probably for alleged witchcraft, on the south-eastern border of the collapsing Danelaw, and the subsequent real estate deals that her death enabled. The executed widow from this event survives now as a barely legible hapax legomenon, existing only in trace form in a twelfth-century copy of a tenth-century charter – a record that documents the end of this woman’s life in order to erase her from the historical register and legitimize the seizure of her lands. Exploring the known and conjectural micro-history of this woman repositions her at the centre of a remarkable network of gendered, geographic, rhetorical, moral, cultural, legal, political, religious, ethnic and authoritarian values, whose forces converge at the moment of her prosecutorial killing.
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