Early English Laws

There is nothing like reinvigorating your research by attending a conference with some high-quality and thought-provoking papers. I have certainly come back from Denmark and our conference, Early Medieval Law in Context, with lots of ideas for the project stemming from the papers I heard and the discussions I had with other delegates.

The standard of the papers was very high and they were also wide ranging. Perhaps the most pleasing part was to see the many interpretations of ‘ in context’, which included, to name a few, social, historiographical, codicological, palaeographical, and digital. We have already decided to publish some of these papers and more details about this will follow soon.

Just as important, the setting of the conference at the beautiful Carlsberg Academy in Copenhagen, formerly the family residence of the founder of the Carlsberg Breweries, provided a most congenial and conducive way to spend two days. The staff at the Academy were friendly, helpful and efficient, the food was great (can I especially mention the cakes and the dessert?!), the weather was fantastic, and, I think the open bar may have helped too. In any case, the Academy certainly lived up to its long tradition of supporting scholars of all subjects and, on a more personal note, I’ve made some interesting and, what I hope will be, long-lasting contacts. In short, as they say in the advert, “if Carlsberg made conferences…”

The conference season is beginning. Those of you who are heading to the International Congress on Medieval Studies at the Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo this week will be able to meet members of the Early English Laws team at both the digital medievalist poster session on Friday 13 May and also at our session on editing (no. 385) on Saturday 14 May.

In June, my good self will be off to the conference on Law, Violence and Social Bonds at St Andrews University to talk about the Early English Laws project and also about law and rebellions in England and Denmark. The programme for the conference, which looks very exciting, has recently been published and can be found here http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/saims/law/programme.html. To find out more about the conference and to register, see http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/saims/law/index.html.

In addition, I have recently come across two projects that might be of interest to those following this blog. First up is the Relmin project, which has received funding for five years from the European Research Council to investigate the legal status of religious minorities in the Euro-Mediterranean world between the 5^th and the 15^th centuries. The principal investigator, John Tolan (professor of history at L’Université de Nantes) will be giving a paper about the project at our conference in Copenhagen in September (more details here soon). In the meantime if you want to find out more about this exciting project, see http://www.relmin.eu, particularly if you are looking for a new research opportunity, as Relmin currently has available positions for doctoral students and post-doctoral researchers.

The second project, Landscapes of Governance, is a three-year interdisciplinary venture bringing archaeology, place-names and written sources together in a national study of early medieval assembly sites. The project is based at University College, London, and headed by Professors Andrew Reynolds and Barbara Yorke. To find out more about this project, please see http://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/research/projects/assembly. 

More anon.

Apart from the editing interface Jenny blogged about in December, and the collaborative nature of the resource we are building, one of the biggest challenges for the team at the Department for Digital Humanities at King’s College (formerly Centre for Computing in the Humanities) has been modelling a database which could be the basis for the complex set of relationships offered by the transmission of the Early English Laws, and the range of extra material each edition is going to offer.

One of the most complicated tasks was to create a common vocabulary for “everyday” philological terms, such as text, version, witness, and the different kinds of material offered by the resource, i.e. text and scanned images, into the structured reality of a relational database.
For example what constitutes a text? Is an Old English translation of a Latin law code to be considered independently or do they need to be considered part of the same nucleus, hence have the same basic database identifier? How can scanned images of medieval manuscripts be distinguished from scanned images of Liebermann’s nineteenth century editions?
We solved this problem by identifying each component of the text/image universe as entities, and from these building an entity-relationship model (an abstract and conceptual representation of the data). Our model borrowed elements from the FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) model, a conceptual entity-relationship model (developed by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA). This has proved to be very useful in our attempt to discover and separate off hidden conceptual layers.

The Early English Laws project represents an excellent example case study of an issue a digital humanist is often facing: how do you model critical editions from a conceptual point of view? The case study is so interesting that our experience with the Early English Laws will be presented at the international Digital Humanities conference (DH2011) in what we hope is going to be a visually exciting A0 poster.

More on the intricacies of our collaborative editorial tool coming soon.

Occasionally it is nice to be reminded of just how lucky we are to have such a large collection of English law codes and legal treatises surviving from the period before 1215. In particular, the large number of legal texts available in the vernacular continues to amaze and interest scholars and students across the world. In Scandinavia law codes were also taken down in the vernacular and as a consequence they provide a particularly good match for points of comparison and contrast with the early English material.

One example of this is Äldre Västgötalagen (the Elder Westrogothic Law), the earliest text written in Swedish. This particular law is known to have been written down already in the 1220s by the law man (or possibly law speaker?) - Eskil Magnusson. Eskil was a member of a large noble family with an almost mythical history called the Folkungar (lit. ‘folk kings’), whose landholdings seem to have been focused in the areas of Östergötland and Västergötland  (east and west Götaland), spanning the southern parts of the kingdom of Sweden. Ironically, Eskil is not best remembered for his importance in preserving the landlaw, but rather he is known as the older half-brother of Birger jarl, regent of the kingdom in the 1240s and 1250s and credited as the founder of the capital Stockholm.

Although the law code was put down in writing in the 1220s, the oldest exemplar now extant is a book from c. 1290, which may have been a working copy actually used at the law assembly (the thing). The book may have been one of an original 30 or so similar copies made for use at the various local assemblies in the region covered by the law. Now, the law book usually resides in the Swedish royal library (Kungliga biblioteket) in Stockholm but it is currently on tour in Skara, Västergötland – its county of origin. 

Like many of the Anglo-Saxon law codes, compensation to victims stood at the heart of Västgötalagen. For instance, if one killed a free man (that is one from Västergötland) one would pay a fine (bøtæ) of 21 marks. The fine for killing a Swede (a man from Svealand) was 13^1/3 marks, and for killing a Dane or a Norwegian it was 9 marks. The similarities with Anglo-Saxon law codes are apparent. For instance, according to the laws of Æthelberht, king  of Kent c.560-c.616, the killing of a free man resulted in having to pay compensation of 50 shillings. Similarly, in the treaty between Alfred, king of Wessex 871-899, and Guthrum, Viking king of East Anglia (d. c. 890), the price for killing a man (Dane or English) was set at 8 half-marks.

It is hoped that our forthcoming conference in Copenhagen in September will continue to explore some of the similarities and contrasts between the English and Scandinavian laws. In the meantime, if you happen to be able to read one of the Scandinavian languages, you can find out more about the tour of the Västgötalagen through this link: http://www.bt.se/nyheter/boras/vastgotalagen-hemma-igen-se-vad-man-fick-bota-for-en-kapad-tumme(2302550).gm

There is a distinctly international flavour to our activities in 2011.

We will be holding a session at the 46^th International Congress on Medieval Studies, which takes place 12-15 May 2011 at Kalamazoo, Michigan, in the United States. Our session (no. 385) will be held in the morning of Saturday 14 May and features Bruce O’Brien (IHR/University of Mary Washington and Chair of Early English Laws), Lisi Oliver (Louisiana State University), Stefan Jurasinski (SUNY – Brockport) and Eleonora Litta (Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London). The session will explain the project and highlight editorial issues raised by Old English and Latin texts, as well as explore the process of creating online editions.

In September, we will be jetting off to Copenhagen for a two-day conference entitled ‘Early Medieval Law in Context’. This conference, which is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of the Early English Laws project, is a collaboration with the Nordic Medieval Laws project and will feature Professors Bruce O’Brien (IHR, London/University of Mary Washington), Stefan Brink (Aberdeen), Ditlev Tamm (Copenhagen) and John Hines (Cardiff) among the speakers. We are hoping that the conference will bring together both established academics and postgraduate and postdoctoral scholars to present research, exchange ideas, and participate in discussion of laws, law-making and legal interpretation in Western Europe in the early middle ages. A call for papers has just gone out and registration details will be available on the news and events section of our website soon.

Hope to see as many of you as possible there.

Editing the Instituta Cnuti 2: Finding the Witnesses

My first task in editing the Instituta Cnuti has been to locate all of its witnesses—whether preserved in medieval manuscripts or in early modern antiquarian commonplace books.  This task began with the work of the last editor, Felix Liebermann, whose Gesetze der Angelsachsen is still the standard edition of most of the texts being reedited for Early English Laws.  Liebermann had identified the following witnesses by these sigla and shelfmarks:

1.    Cb      Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, Lat. 4771, fols. 1–35.

2.    Ct      Cambridge, Trinity College R. 5. 42, fols. 135ff .

3.    Di      Oxford, Bodley Digby 13, fols. 41ff .

4.    H       Rochester Cathedral, Textus de ecclesia Roffensi per Ernulphum episcopum, fols.  58ff.

5.    Jl       British Museum, Cotton Julius C.II, fols. 65ff.

6.    Jo      Cambridge, St. John’s College G.16, no folios provided.

7.    Ko     Copenhagen, Arne-Magnaeanus 1.

8.    Lb      London, Lambeth 118, fols. 94–104.

9.    Pa      Paris, Bibliothèque nationale Lat. 6044, no folios provided.

10. Pl      A manuscript which was, until 1895, Phillipps 8078, and then belonged to H. S.  Nichols & Co. in London, fols. 11ff.

11. Rc      London, British Museum, Regius 13.C.II, fols. 108–119.

12. Rl      Oxford, Bodley Rawlinson C.641, fols. 30ff.

13. S        London, British Museum Harley 746, fols. 77ff.

14. Sin    Rome, Vatican, Christina reg. 451.

15. T       British Museum, Cotton Titus A.XXVII, fols. 159vff.

16. Va    Rome, Vatican, Christina regina 587, fols. 99v.

17. Vl     British Museum, Cotton Vitellius A.XIII, fols. 189v, 181, 195, and 172.

18. Vc    Rome, Vatican 3495.

Four further copies he listed were not assigned sigla:

19.  British Museum Additional 5485, fols. 39ff.

20.  British Museum, Harley 596, fols. 42ff.

21.  British Museum, Harley 785, fols. 13ff .

22.  Rome, Vatican, Christina reg. 451.

Liebermann listed 22 copies, but this total included lost manuscripts and derivative texts.  Ko had been lost before Liebermann began his work, while Jl, Pa, Rc, Va and Vc, along with the four copies not assigned sigla, were, he concluded,  all derivative of surviving witnesses.

While most of these copies are still where they were in Liebermann’s day, a few had moved.  His Rochester Cathedral manuscript, known familiarly as Textus Roffensis, is now Stroud, Medway Archive and Local Studies Centre, MS DRc/R1.  His Pl, which had been in the Phillipps collection, was acquired by the British Museum, where it is now British Library, Additional MS 35,179.

This is my starting list of witnesses—what Liebermann identified as original witnesses (meaning that no other manuscript stands between these and the archetype) and what he claimed were derivative.  My two first tasks were to see if I could add to the list and to check to see if any he identified as original witnesses or as derivative copies were in fact misidentified.  Index and catalogue searches in major libraries turned up nothing new.  Since the Instituta travels with one version of Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum, I checked Diana Greenway’s 1996 edition to see if there were any there I had missed.  She says that inclusion of the Instituta is one of the distinguishing marks of version 5B, and lists (according to Liebermann’s sigla) Lb (copied in Rc); Jo; Ct; Va and Bd.  Greenway adds two more to Liebermann’s list:

23. Ba             Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Lat. 10185, of which she says Liebermann’s Bd is a  copy.

24. Ab     London, British Library, Additional 21088, which she says is a copy of   Liebermann’s Bd.

I was able to add another manuscript which neither Liebermann nor Greenway was aware of, a manuscript that includes a copy of the Instituta extracted from Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum.  I found this copy by chance.  Liebermann had mentioned a manuscript in the College of Arms that he could not locate, but which he said had a text of the revised version of the Leges Edwardi Confessoris (his ECf retr., now abbreviated for Early English Laws as ECf3).  A manuscript holding the Leges Edwardi did not appear in the 1988 Catalogue of Manuscripts in the College of Arms, ed. L. Campbell and F. Steer, and I decided to see what evidence there was that it had ever been part of the collection.  I initially thought that perhaps Liebermann’s MS Ar had belonged to the collection—Liebermann certainly must have had reason to think it had—but that it had been one of those manuscripts notoriously pawned by John Vincent to his friend Richard Sheldon and never redeemed.  I discovered a text of the Confessor’s laws in the Catalogue of the Books Printed and Manuscripts in the Herald’s Office, produced in May 1690.  There, it was listed as follows: ‘no. 98   King Edward the Confessor’s Laws and severall other things promiscuosly.’  Vincent 98, however, appeared to have disappeared as the librarian, Robert Yorke,  was unable to find it.  I then proceeded through more recent catalogues and found that in the 1788 catalogue it was listed as having been rebound with Vincent 65 and 75.  Vincent 65 did indeed hold all three of these manuscripts, and Vincent 98 had a copy of the Leges Edwardi.  It was not, however, the third version of the Leges, as Liebermann had thought, but the second version.  More important, however, for my present work was my discovery that Vincent 98 also held a copy of the Instituta Cnuti, something none of the earlier catalogues had noted. So quite by chance, I had found a new witness to the Instituta.

25. Ar     London, College of Arms, Vincent 98, [unnumbered, but by my count fols. 42v–49v].

Are there other copies yet to be found?  I suspect there are.  Nevertheless, the labor involved in tracking down further copies, about whose existence I have no clues, would be misspent.  The edition, then, will be built on a base of 25 manuscripts.  This total includes both original witnesses and derivative texts, and rather than take Liebermann and Greenway’s word on this, I will collate the copies to see if I can determine which are which.  That is my next step.

The last few weeks have seen a real leap forward for our website and the way in which we will in the future edit and publish editions of texts and other material. You’ve probably not noticed because most of this work has been done behind the scenes, as it were, by our technical team at CCH, King’s College, London. To coincide with a presentation at our Digital Editing workshop on 18 November, the team developed a new content management system which enables the research team to edit the static content on the live website. What does this actually mean to those of us whose technical knowledge is still confined to sending and receiving emails? Well, this content management system, or database to you and me, replaces the TEI-based publication system and it requires no technical knowledge of xml or html. Instead, it uses highlight and click functions in much the same way as Microsoft Office programmes such as Word or Access. 

The system was first developed for our bibliography and it allowed us to enter text, which could then be highlighted and marked up for author, title of article or monograph, date of publication, subject and so on – information that allows visitors to our website to use the bibliography and to filter or search it according to their own interests. Now, the system has been expanded to include all content on the site and also future materials like manuscript images and editions of specific law codes.

Not only is this system much simpler to use and allows the research team to directly create and edit pages and publish them on the live site, but, in addition, it makes it easier for us to collate and enter information about different texts and manuscripts. For instance, in the last six months I have been trawling my way through our large number of manuscript images, matching each folio to a text and also to the correct page number in the older editions of the laws by Liebermann and Stubbs. This data will eventually enable users to look at and compare specific paragraphs of a law text. Initially, the information was simply entered on an Excel spreadsheet, which then had to be emailed over to the technical team and converted to fit the system; now, however, data can be entered directly, thereby making quite an efficiency saving.

I should perhaps acknowledge the months of hard work that our colleagues in CCH have put in to make the new system work. I’m certain they could tell a different story about all this simplicity!

Celebrations for the 800^th anniversary of Magna Carta in 2015 have begun. Today, the Master of the Rolls Lord Neuberger and Lord Chancellor Ken Clarke are due to address a public launch at a memorial site in Runnymede, where King John sealed Magna Carta in 1215 (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11735060). The event, organised by the Magna Carta Trust, is one in a series of events and campaigns planned by the trust over the next five years. Among the items planned can be found the campaign for an extra bank holiday in 1215, a commemorative stamp and coin, and a number of exhibitions.

Celebrations have also been held for William I’s Charter for London, which in July of this year became one of the first inscriptions to the UK Memory of the World Register, a list of documentary heritage which holds cultural significance specific to the UK (see http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/Corporation/LGNL_Services/Leisure_and_culture/Records_and_archives/Events/UNESCO_World_Register.htm). The register is part of a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) programme to support and raise awareness of archives (see http://www.unesco.org.uk/2010_uk_memory_of_the_world_register). William I’s Charter for London was issued soon after the Battle of Hastings and is the oldest document in the archive of the City of London. Its significance is based on its survival as the earliest royal or imperial document which guarantees the collective rights of the inhabitants of any town. London Metropolitan Archives have kindly given permission for the charter to be part of the Early English Laws and the image of the document together with the edition of the text prepared by Professor David Bates will be available on our website in early 2011.

While celebrating these documents, I thought I’d also mention a few upcoming events at which Early English Laws will have a presence. On Thursday 18 November, we will be holding our annual workshop in the UK. This year we are focussing on the digital aspect of our work and by collaborating with three other projects have put on a programme relating to digital editing (see http://www.earlyenglishlaws.ac.uk/events/workshops/). Early English Laws will also be coming to the US in May 2011, where you’ll be able to find us at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at the Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo. In June, the University of St Andrews is organising a three-day conference on Law, Violence and Social Bonds, c. 900-1250, for which a call for papers has recently gone out (see http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/saims/law/index.html).

If you are planning an event or have news regarding any document featured on the Early English Laws website, please let the project team know.

The Early English Laws project will in the end produce new editions of well over 100 texts of laws from Æthelberht’s Old English dooms to the first Anglo-French law code, the Leis Willelme and the well-known Latin text of Magna Carta 1215.   Like most editions, almost all of the work will be done invisibly.  All one generally sees in any edition is the final product, supported by a statement about witnesses and method.  This is fine, since what we generally want from an edition is the result.  This result is exactly what I will be publishing on the project’s website when I have completed my work on a peculiar Latin text known as the Instituta Cnuti.

What I would like to do here is somewhat different.  I will describe my own process of editing this early twelfth-century Latin law text step by step.  I am making this process transparent— with all its speculations and false turns along with its insights and conclusions—for a few reasons.  I want to convey something of the pleasure editing produces.  As the classicist (and poet) A. E. Housman wrote in 1921, ‘A textual critic engaged upon his business is not at all like Newton investigating the motions of the planets: he is much more like a dog hunting fleas’.  I want to share with you the pleasures of the hunt (the tastiness of the fleas I’ll leave to your imagination). Another reason for these posts is that I want to provide a description of what an editor does, week by week, much in the spirit of J. H. Hexter’s wonderful 1954 essay, ‘The Historian and His Day’.  Here I’ll bring what skills I have in paleography, codicology, medieval Latin, history, and English law to bear on my work with the Instituta.  This will also be a way to convey what is different about doing an edition online–not just the technical differences, but conceptual ones as well, since, unlike what is available in print editions, here many of the key manuscript witnesses will be linked to the text and translation, and commentary space is virtually unlimited.  Last, I am hoping that readers who are trained in the languages and necessary skills will consider participating in future work for the project.  There are already a number of editors and editorial teams at work on some texts, but much more work remains.

My editorial method is not mysterious.  The method I use is what I would consider the standard method used for editing Latin texts from all periods.  It is a method created in the 19^th century and refined in the 20^th, and is generally referred to as textual criticism  The aim of a textual critic is to reconstruct a text that will be as close to the author’s as possible.  The ‘as possible’ holds within itself one of the many methodological assumptions which I will employ.  What I will actually be reconstructing will be the copy (called an archetype) from which all other copies of my text descend.  This copy may or may not survive, and may or may not be the author’s text.  When a text has a known author—whether John of Salisbury or Bede—the gap between what can and cannot be said about the closeness of the archetype to the author’s text (the original) creates more anxiety on the part of the editor.  Are these, the editor asks, Bede’s own words?  For me, editing an anonymous text, the issue remains but is of less moment.  I may through identification of certain types of errors present in the archetype be able to say that the archetype is probably the author’s text (by and large) or I may have to conclude that it stands at some distance from the original authorial text, and that there is not sufficient justification for emending the text to take me from archetype to author.  The anonymity of my author (or authors) redirects my attention to the many copies of the laws that were produced and used by readers in (mostly) the twelfth century.  The distance between my reconstruction of the archetype and the supposed original diminishes in importance when contemporaries were content with what they had available.

But I get ahead of myself.

What I will be doing over the next year are a series of tasks that are laid out by the method.  First, I have to find all existing copies of the Instituta Cnuti.  This will ensure I have the most evidence possible for understanding the value of my witnesses and for reconstructing the text. Second, I will transcribe all of these witnesses.  The transcriptions will show the relationship of the manuscripts, reveal the eccentricity of some, and provide the basis for the reconstructed text.  Third, I must select my text—which essentially means I have to choose between variant readings in those places where the manuscripts disagree.  This is also the point where I might emend the text in spite of what its witnesses tell me.  Once I have established my text, I conduct my fourth step as an act of quality control.  I read the text and its apparatus against each transcription to ensure that the evidence for what I argue (since the reconstructed text is in itself an argument) is in fact absolutely clear and accurate in my text and apparatus.  The result will be a new critical edition of the Instituta Cnuti.

I will be taking you through each of these steps, one by one, to show a very commonly employed method for editing a Latin text in action.  Editing texts in Old English and Anglo-French, of which there are a great number in this project, are another story entirely!

Bruce O’Brien, chair, Literary Board of the project

The conference season is in full swing and I have had the good fortune to listen to a number of papers on law in the medieval period.

At the recent Battle Conference on Anglo-Norman studies, Professor Stephen D. White of Emory University showed in a masterly paper how the fables in the border of the Bayeux Tapestry might be interpreted within a context of the judicial process, while Thomas Roche of the Archives départementales de la Nièvre discussed the role of the Norman duke in settling disputes in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

On the hottest day of the year so far, I attended a conference on the Imprint of Roman law in Lombard and Carolingian Italy, organised by Projet Volterra (see http://www.ucl.ac.uk/history2/volterra/). Peter Sarris of Trinity College, Cambridge, gave a useful discussion of the colonate in late Antiquity, reminding us all of the difficulties in using legal texts to define the status of people.  Simon Corcoran of University College, London, discussed the practices of the Byzantines in southern Italy, which for me raised some interesting questions about the role of notaries, while Professor Michael Crawford of the Institute of Classical Studies, London, showed, in an insightful paper, the evidence and perceptions of Roman law that can be found in the work of Paul the Deacon. In a tour-de-force, Professor Luca Loschiavo of Teramo university then not only showed the different approaches taken by scholars of Lombard law, but also gave some of us the chance to refresh our Italian.

And, finally I should mention briefly some forthcoming events relating to early legal history. For those who like to plan in advance, a three-day conference on Law, Violence and Social Bonds, c. 900-1250 to be held at St Andrews University in June 2011 (see http://www.history.ac.uk/events/event/1835). Then there is also our annual workshop and our international conference to be held in 2011, the details for both of which will be found here shortly.