Anglo-Saxon Theology

A long time ago I undertook an Open University course in history (which I failed, by the way), but one of the points that the course made was that in order to really understand history (say, the history of ‘Britain’) it was necessary to understand something about the religion of the people involved. History is much more than events, the narratives of lives, politics, wars, and so on. History is about people and how they behave, and their behaviour is mediated by what they know and what they believe.

A problem with some history is that historians have a tendency to ignore people’s religious faith. This is probably a sign of the times. Faith has increasingly become marginalised in the public sphere and privatised. ‘If it works for you…’ is the mantra of the age, rather than questions along the lines of ‘Is it true?’

This can have some rather odd effects. For example, (and I am not just trying to get at one author)

Pickles, T. (2018). Kingship, Society, and the Church in Anglo-Saxon Yorkshire. Oxford: OUP.

This is an excellent and interesting work on Yorkshire during the Anglo-Saxon period. However, its argument is that the elite moved into the church for economic and social reasons, becoming an ‘ecclesiastical aristocracy’ and preserving their political power. Maybe. But he does not, so far as I recall, suggest that some of the people who became Christians might have believed in the Christian faith and that might have affected how they behaved.

For example, Hild was great-niece of Edwin of the Derians and abbess of Hartlepool, and then Whitby. Hild initially set out to join her sister in the religious life. Pickles (p 61-2) suggests that many of the ‘personalities' of the early Anglo-Saxon Christian age did similar sorts of things. The kin group was clearly important, although Pickles does not that ‘spiritual’ kinship was also a factor, through god-parenthood. Further, the abbeys presided over by Hild did promote cults of the royal lines. But there must be a bit more to it than that.

One problem might be that by concentrating on the stories of these individuals, and stripping them of their moral-didactic content, the faith and belief world that the people moved in also disappears. Conversion and Christian institutions might have offered new possibilities to negotiate social and psychological crises, but they also offered surely a new way of life, a new set of beliefs. Conversion, surely, was not just about social, economic, and political opportunities.

The issue is addressed more fully in another tome:

H. Foxall Forbes. (2013). Heaven and Earth in Anglo-Saxon England: Theology and Society in an Age of Faith. Farnham: Ashgate.

Foxall Forbes has qualifications in both history and theology, and hence a deeper understanding of how the Christian faith might actually have actuated and motivated the people of Anglo-Saxon England. That said, of course, there are still problems: the evidence which we have is, more or less, from the elites. The texts are, by definition, that of the literate classes. Archaeology, where it exists, only gives snapshots of activities, not reasons, motivations of belief worlds.

Nevertheless, Foxall Forbes does argue that Christian theology and the religious beliefs and behaviour that it entailed were important in Anglo-Saxon society. For example, bishops, as royal advisors, intellectuals, and Christians, did influence both the drawing up of laws (and, indeed, drew some of them up) and how they were executed. In particular, Foxall Forbes tackles the vexed question of ordeals as evidence and suggests, quite strongly, that while bishops did not ban the use of ordeals, they did question the value of them in confirming guilt or innocence. They were, in this view, a process of last resort, perhaps, indeed, used as a ritual to give the accused every chance to confess and, perhaps, repent. Repentant sinners were not, in the view of the bishops, to be put to death.

The traffic between theology and society was two-way, of course. It never has not been. Lonergan remarks that theology mediates between the tenets of the Christian faith and the cultural matrix in which that faith is lived out. Thus beliefs of the people, such as purgatory, might not have been part of the core theology of the Christian church of the time, but because people believed in it, and took action to ensure the brevity of their, or their loved ones’s, souls sojourn in the place it became part of the practices of the church, even if the theoretical underpinnings remain obscure. Perhaps, as Foxall Forbes notes, it was just such a prevalent belief that it was more or less unquestioned.

We live in a very different age. Theology and the church have had to reconcile themselves with being marginalised in public life. Bishops no longer draw up law codes for monarchs to issue. If bishops comment on laws they are often told to keep out of politics. If they do not, of course, then they are accused of not taking a lead on moral issues. Neither of these options were really the lot of Anglo-Saxon bishops. The bishops who were involved in law-making seem to have tried, according to their lights and the possibilities of the times, to have ameliorated some of the harsher punishments which the times might have inflicted on criminals.

Theology in Anglo-Saxon England was not the plaything of the elite. Certainly, of course, the elite – bishops and abbots, for example – were the ones educated in theology. But Christian belief permeated society and had an impact at every level, so far as we can tell. Theology was bound up with local elites, national power, and kings, but also with the belief of the wider population and the culture of the times.

For example, a problem in the late eleventh century with a tree overshadowing a church was probably not to do with paganism, but with the priest sitting under it while gambling and drinking. In the overwhelmingly Christian context of of the time, it is, as Foxall Forbes notes, unlikely that St Wulfstan of Worcester would have recognised a genuine pagan if he had fallen out of the tree itself (p. 58).