SCOTT T. SMITH. Land and Book: Literature and Land Tenure in Anglo-Saxon England.

Abstract

Despite the ‘linguistic turn’ in history, the conscious promotion of interdisciplinarity and the increasing willingness of literature scholars to turn to ‘non-literary’ texts (for example, Tom Bredehoft and Alice Sheppard in their books on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle), it is a rare scholar of Old English literature who is happy reading charters. Scott Smith is such a scholar, also notable for his willingness to move between Old English and Latin. The book under review relates clearly on the one hand to a growing body of work on the construction of ideas of land and landscape (Nicholas Howe has been a leading figure) and on the other to a long and honourable tradition of diplomatics. However, in its specific focus on property, in the stimulating way it relates literary and documentary sources, and in its detailed readings of individual texts, it offers a worthwhile new contribution. The topic of the book is the discourse of land tenure and the way that discourse not only transformed a resource (land) into a cultural artefact (property) but served to engage a range of other questions about identity, power and the human condition in the world. In an introduction, five chapters and conclusion, the book first examines various kinds of charters, in which questions of the history, ownership and transfer of land are obviously central, and then moves on to look at the role of tenurial discourse in other settings such as homily and poetry. The first chapter focuses on royal diplomas, which account for rather less than 1000 of the roughly 1600 surviving documents from pre-Conquest England. This chapter introduces an anxiety over permanent possession, which is a persistent theme through the book: couched in insistently religious language, diplomas ostensibly confer eternal possession of the land granted, and yet at the same time frequently refer to the impermanence of any earthly inheritance—one should grant temporal property (typically, to ecclesiastical foundations) to gain eternal reward. Both ceremonies such as placing of sods on an altar and elements of display in the texts themselves, such as the flamboyant style of the Athelstan A charters, are strategies designed to suppress such tensions and reaffirm the power and the efficacy of the diploma. However, in close readings of selected diplomas, Smith shows how rhetorical elaboration can introduce further doubts, for example over the possibility of dispute or the shifting of royal favour. The topic of dispute is further explored in Chapter 2, which focuses chiefly on one lengthy dispute charter, S1447. Smith examines the narrative strategies of the charter, noting the way local, familial history is enfolded into larger political dynamics: the progress of a dispute between brothers is aligned with the replacement of King Eadwig by King Edgar. Such narratives function to ‘overwrite’ possible alternative accounts—a point already well-made by Sarah Foot in her 2006 essay ‘Reading Anglo-Saxon Charters’, but here allied to much more detailed literary analysis.