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Remembering, Forgetting and Inventing: Attitudes to the Past in England at the End of the First Viking Age

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Sarah Foot
Sarah Foot
Affiliation:
The University of Sussex
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Extract

‘Remember’, King Alfred wrote to his bishops, sending them a copy of the translation he had made of Pope Gregory the Great's Cura pastoralis, ‘remember what punishments befell us in this world when we ourselves did not cherish learning nor transmit it to other men’. To remedy the twofold disaster consequent on this intellectual and pedagogic failure – not just the ransacking of the churches throughout England and loss of their treasures and books, but, worse, the loss to the English of the wisdom the books had preserved – King Alfred arranged to have the young men among his subjects taught to read in the vernacular. Set-texts for this programme were to be supplied by the translating of ‘certain books which are the most necessary for all men to know’. Among these was Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, generally thought to have been translated by the king himself and to include some of Alfred's own musings. Towards the end of his text in the context of a discussion of the nature of God, eternity and the place of humanity in the divine plan, Alfred had Wisdom declare: ‘we can know very little concerning what was before our time, except through memory and inquiry, and even less concerning what comes after us. Only one thing is certainly present to us, namely that which now exists. But to God all is present, what was before, what is now, and what shall be after us. The central point at issue here is the disjunction between what an omniscient deity and frail humanity can know of the past, but it usefully introduces this discussion by linking the process of obtaining information about the past with that of personal memory.

Type
Oral History, Memory and Written Tradition
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 9 , December 1999 , pp. 185 - 200
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1999

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References

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11 I must acknowledge the assistance of Michael Bentley in clarifying my thoughts about memory, and his suggestion that commemoration is a more useful term than social memory.

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16 No bishop of Hexham is recorded beyond Bishop Tidferth who died in 821: Keynes, Simon, ‘Episcopal succession in Anglo-Saxon England’, in Fryde, E. B. et al. , Handbook of British Chronology (3rd edn, 1986), 209–24, at 217Google Scholar. The last known bishop of Dunwich was Æthelwold, who acceded 845 x 870, the date of his death is unknown: ibid., 216; Whitelock, D., ‘The pre-Viking Church in East Anglia’, Anglo-Saxon England, 1 (1972), 1–22, at 17–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The see of Elmham was revived in the later tenth century, following a century of interruption after the death of Bishop Hunberht in 845 or 856X? or? November 869: Keynes, in Fryde, et al. , Handbook, p. 216Google Scholar; Whitelock, , ‘The pre-Viking Church’, 21–2Google Scholar.

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33 The only nunnery explicitly to be mentioned in any contemporaneous account of the process by which the precepts of the Rule of St Benedict were introduced was the Nunnaminster at Winchester: Wulfstan of Winchester, The Life of St Æthelwold, chs 16–18 (ed. and transl. Lapidge, M. and Winterbottom, M., Oxford, 1991, 30–3)Google Scholar.

34 The women's houses that dominate the contemporary sources and later historiography are Amesbury, Barking, Horton, Romsey, Shaftesbury (and its cell at Bradford-on-Avon), Wherwell, Wilton, and the Nunnaminster at Winchester. Their prominence in the literature arises primarily because these are the only houses for which extant charters have survived. I provide here a summary of the argument defended in full in my book Veiled Women: the Disappearance of Nuns from Anglo-Saxon England (2 vols, Ashgate Publishing, forthcoming)Google Scholar: the role of women in the tenth-century Benedictine revolution is analysed in vol. 1, ch. 4.

35 At the time of the Domesday survey the lands of Minster-in-Thanet had come into the possession of St Augustine's, Canterbury, and there was only a church with one priest left on the island, but a congregation of St Mildrith's is attested in the eleventh century and four nuns who held land in alms of the abbotg of St Augustine's in 1086 might, conceivably, have been the remnant of the former Thanet community: Domesday Book, 1, fo. 12ra–b.

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37 These houses are Berkeley, Boxwell, Castor, Cheddar, Leominster, Wareham, Warwick, Wenlock, Wimborne, and Winchcombe.

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39 S 535, AD 948.

40 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 1011 CD; EF have wrongly ‘Leofwine’. The Chronicle of John of Worcester, II The Annals from 450 to 1066, s.a.1011 (ed. Darlington, R. R. et al. , Oxford, 1995. 468–9)Google Scholar.

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