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The Author. Journal Compilation 2009

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Blackwell Publishing LtdOxford, UKEMEDEarly Medieval Europe0963-94621468-0254 2008 The Author.Journal Compilation Blackwell Publishing LtdXXXOriginal Article

Hospitality in pre-viking Anglo-Saxon EnglandAlban Gautier

Hospitality in pre-vikingAnglo-Saxon England

A

G

This article studies the question of Anglo-Saxon hospitality, that is, in thefirst place, the gift (from a host to a guest) of food, fodder, roof and bedfor a night or for a longer term. Contrary to Romantic visions, it wasnothing like a spontaneous and free practice: Marcel Mauss and otheranthropologists after him have shown that giving and receiving wereobligations, compulsory acts in pre-market societies. In Anglo-SaxonEngland, hospitality was always a duty, strictly limited and framed bycustom. It may have been provided to a single traveller, to a member of

a formal or informal network (particularly ecclesiastical), to a king orto his agents in the form of a pastus

or

feorm: a kind of guesting orcompulsory hospitality which was progressively given up by kings as theybooked lands to religious institutions. The forms and beneficiaries mayvary, but the opposition between spontaneous feasting and compulsoryguesting must not be stressed too much: hospitality was always a kind ofbinding exchange, even when it assumed the shape, the aspect, and eventhe values of a free and open practice.

Hospitality has always been recognized as an important aspect of sup-posed Anglo-Saxon ways and manners. According to John Thrupp,writing in the early nineteenth century, hospitality was a frequent andspontaneous practice in Anglo-Saxon England: kings used to keep anopen table, as can be seen in the example of the thief Leofa, murdererof Edmund the Elder, whom nobody stopped from entering the hallwhere the king was feasting.

1

From monastery to palace, from the home

*

I must thank Rodolphe Dreillard, Janet L. Nelson and Alan Thacker for reading and com-menting upon earlier versions and drafts of this article. The suggestions of the Early MedievalEurope

anonymous referee have also proved very useful, and Paul Fouracre kindly correctedmy English.

1

J. Thrupp, The Anglo-Saxon Home: A History of the Domestic Institutions and Customs of England from the Fifth to the Eleventh Century

(London, 1862), pp. 3029.


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of the churl to the humble cell of the hermit, any man on the road(there would seem to be very few women in that position) would bewelcomed and provided with shelter. And that customary and virtuous

hospitality seems not to have been limited to roof and bed: even whenhe was not greeted with a proper feast, the traveller was at least givensome refreshment before following on his journey. As was customary inthe times when Thrupp was writing, the Anglo-Saxons were seen aspartaking of the natural generosity and simplicity of all Germanic peoples an idealized image directly drawn from the classical descriptionsfound in the moralizing and edifying writings of Roman authors suchas Caesar and Tacitus.

2

Even if many historians would agree today in finding it inappropriateand out of date, this vision of hospitality as one of the natural virtuesof the Anglo-Saxon race seems not to have been recently challenged.Curiously, hospitality and its conditions have not often been addressedas a research subject per se

concerning Anglo-Saxon England. On theother hand, the topic has been explored in relation to other areas ofnorthern Europe in the early medieval period: for Ireland, with a majorarticle by Katharine Simms;

3

for the British and Welsh side of earlymedieval Britain, in several books and articles by Thomas Charles-

Edwards;

4

and to a lesser extent for Norway, in an article by AronGurevich.

5

Carlrichard Brhls book onfodrum

andgistum

also exploresthe subject for the Frankish lands, but strictly from the kings point ofview,

6

and several recent articles by Julie Kerr provide us with aninteresting comparison in twelfth-century England.

7

Fortunately, many parallels exist for the study of hospitality insocieties comparable to that of England in the seventh to ninth centuries.The most important and useful is that of Greece between the eighthand sixth centuries BC, in other words Homeric society and Archaic

Greece: building on the foundations laid by Moses Finley,

8

many classical

2

L. Hellmuth, Gastfreundschaft und Gastrecht bei den Germanen

(Vienna, 1984), pp. 5 ff., 70 ff.

3

K. Simms, Guesting and Feasting in Gaelic Ireland,Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquariesof Ireland

108 (1978), pp. 6795.

4

Most notably in his Early Irish and Welsh Kinship

(Oxford, 1993), pp. 337411.

5

A.Ia. Gurevich, The Early State in Norway, in H.J.M. Claessen and P. Skalnk (eds), TheEarly State

(The Hague, 1978), pp. 40323.

6

C. Brhl, Fodrum, gistum, servitium regis: Studien zu den wirtschaftlischen Grundlagen desKnigtums im Frankenreich und in den frnkischen Nachfolgestaaten Deutschland, Frankreichund Italien vom 6. bis zur Mitte des 14. Jahrhunderts

(Cologne, 1969).

7

J. Kerr, The Open Door: Hospitality and Honour in Twelfth/Early Thirteenth-CenturyEngland, History

87 (2002), pp. 32235; eadem

, Food, Drink and Lodging: Hospitality inTwelfth-Century England, Haskins Society Journal

18 (2006), pp. 7292; eadem

, Welcomethe Coming and Speed the Parting Guest: Hospitality in Twelfth-Century England, Journalof Medieval History

33 (2007), pp. 13046.

8

M. Finley, The World of Odysseus

(New York, 1954).


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historians have tried to define the precise conditions and practices ofhospitality between individuals, kin groups, artificial brotherhoods andof course cities. We can mention, as an example out of a great variety

of approaches, a very stimulating article by Cristiano Grottanelli aboutthe ambiguous status of the guest in Archaic Greece,

9

an ambiguitythat, as I will try to prove, may be observed in Anglo-Saxon Englandas well. The early Greek parallel is all the more interesting because itshares another common feature with Anglo-Saxon England: the sourcesavailable to the historian for both periods and areas are in many wayssimilar. Our knowledge of early Greece relies strongly on a corpus ofpoetry, the most important part of which (the so-called Homericpoems) is fairly undatable, just as Beowulf

and its companion poemsare notoriously difficult to date. This basis can only be complemented,in Greece, by fragments of myths, legal texts, inscriptions and laterhistory-writing. Students of Anglo-Saxon England are admittedly morefortunate since, even without the presence of a significant epigraphiccorpus, we have a very consistent and well-studied body of historyand/or hagiography to add to our poetic sources, among which are, ofcourse, the works of the Venerable Bede. And we have documentarysources: laws from Kent and Wessex from the seventh and late ninth

centuries, and, from the eighth and ninth centuries, several interestingcharters, especially from Mercia.An important study by Hans Conrad Peyer on Gastlichkeit im Mittelalter

concentrates on continental regions, and particularly Germany, in thehigh and later medieval periods, but it can still be used to define theconcept of hospitality in relation to early England. Within the generaldefinition of hospitality as the reception of a stranger who is providedwith food and shelter for the night,

10

Peyer distinguishes five kinds ofhospitality. First, hospitable friendship (

Gastfreundschaft

), also described

as primitive hospitality or archaic-ritual hospitality, is well known inarchaic societies throughout the world and implies an honourable andideally equal relationship between host and guest, which does notpreclude competition. Second, simple hospitality, normally withoutfood (

Gastlichkeit ohne Verpflegung

), is given in any kind of house andprovides the traveller with fire, water, shelter and fodder for his horse.Charitable hospitality (

Liebesgastlichkeit

) is directed towards poorerand weaker members of a society and is (in the Christian West) typicallyprovided by religious houses: it can be given to permanently weak people,such as beggars and orphans, or to temporarily weak beneficiaries, such

9

C. Grottanelli, Lideologia del banchetto e lospite ambiguo, Dialoghi di Archeologia

, ns 3(1981), pp. 12254.

10

H.C. Peyer, Von der Gastfreundschaft zum Gasthaus. Studien zur Gastlichkeit im Mittelalter

,

MGH Schriften

31 (Hanover, 1987), p. 1.


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as travellers, pilgrims and the sick. Sovereignty hospitality (

Herrschafts-gastung

), the fourth kind, is that given from an inferior to an authorityor to its agents, as is the case with compulsory hospitality offered to a

king or with the billeting of soldiers. Finally, commercial hospitality(

gewerbliche Gastlichkeit

) is provided in exchange for money, for instancein a tavern or an inn.

11

These different forms of hospitality often prove difficult to tell fromone another, but they provide a useful frame for discussion. I will dwellhere mostly upon the first and fourth forms. In early Anglo-SaxonEngland, hospitality in lay households and monasteries, when it wasstrictly directed towards the poor, is difficult to trace further than inmonastic rules; and when it was directed towards other social groups itnaturally falls into the primitive and sovereignty forms, because ofthe deep inclusion of religious houses into the fabric of society itself.The numerous charitable xenodochia

and hospitia

, where the poor of the

matriculawere fed and cared for in sixth- and seventh-century Gaul andItaly, are not known for England in the same period they were indeedtypical urban institutions, largely inherited from Late Antique precedents; 12

poverty itself and its alleviations are actually far better known in urbancontexts.13As for inns and taverns, which were very common in Roman

times, the evidence is very sketchy for pre-tenth-century northernEurope,14 and almost absent from the early Anglo-Saxon record, forwhich there seems to be only one mention: in the eighth-century Lifeof Guthlac, two monks lie to the saint about their itinerary in order tostop at the house of a certain widow, where they get drunk but arecaught thanks to a vision of Guthlacs15 and even then, nothing indicatesthat lodging could be taken at that widows house.

This leaves us with two main aspects of hospitality, which will bestudied here: primitive hospitality, ritualized as a form of friendship;

and compulsory hospitality, owed to wielders of legally constitutedpower and to their agents and protgs. This distinction recalls (withsome overlapping) the one drawn by Katharine Simms for early medieval

11 Peyer, Von der Gastfreundschaft zum Gasthaus, pp. 27881.12 M. Mollat, Les pauvres au Moyen ge, 2nd edn (Brussels, 1992), pp. 568; J. Heuclin, Le

devoir de charit durant le haut Moyen ge: les xenodochia, Mlanges de science religieuse( JanuaryMarch 2005), pp. 1124; B. Beaujard, Le xenodochiumen Gaule aue sicle, inS. Crogiez-Petrequin (ed.), Dieu(x) et Hommes. Histoire et iconographie des socits paennes etchrtiennes de lAntiquit nos jours (Mlanges en lhonneur de Franoise Thlamon) (Rouen,2005), pp. 397407.

13 Mollat, Les pauvres, pp. 256.14 Peyer, Von der Gastfreundschaft, pp. 14, 51 ff. 77 ff.15 Felix, Vita Guthlaci, c. 43, ed. B. Colgrave, Felixs Life of Saint Guthlac (Cambridge, 1956): the

tavern is described as cuiusdam viduae casa and domus viduae, and it is a place where onecan inebriari.


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Early Medieval Europe () 2009The Author. Journal Compilation 2009Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Ireland. From the study of legal texts (especially the early eighth-centurytract known as Crth Gablach) and a few poems and narratives, shedistinguishes two kinds of food- and drink-giving: feasting and guesting.16

To Simms, feasting is the feast as anyone understands it nowadays: thehost invites and receives at his table the guests he has chosen, withoutany visible legal obligation. On the other hand, guesting (from GermanGastung) is the word she uses for the legally demanded hospitalitythat some farmers and landlords owed to their superiors: this kind ofhospitality was strictly fixed and limited by custom and law, andconcerned travellers, ones lord, and the king or his men. As we will see,this distinction is useful but partly artificial, and may best be seen as thetwo poles of a single phenomenon, either stressed as honourable andspontaneous, or as compulsory and customary.

In the 840s or 850s, probably in 858, Berhtwulf, king of the Mercians,granted to the community at Breodune17 an exemption from all duesand taxes:

that the aforesaid monastery be liberated and exempted from allthose things that we call cumfeormeand eafor, from the feeding of all

my falconers and that of all my hunters, or from the feeding ofall my horses and that of all my retainers, and from all that incon-venience of eaforand cumfeorme, except in the cases which we namehere: if ambassadors should come from over the sea, or envoys fromthe people of the West Saxons, or from the people of the Northum-brians, if they come around the third hour or around midday letthem have lunch, and if they come after the ninth hour let them havethe night meal, and in the morning let them go on their way. 18

16 Simms, Guesting and Feasting.17 Probably Breedon-on-the-Hill, in Leicestershire, if we follow D. Bulloughs identification: D.

Bullough, What has Ingeld to do with Lindisfarne?,Anglo-Saxon England22 (1993), pp. 93125; see A. Dornier, The Anglo-Saxon Monastery at Breedon-on-the-Hill, Leicestershire, ineadem(ed.), Mercian Studies(Leicester, 1977), pp. 15568.

18 S 197: Qua de re ego Berhtwulfus divino fultus suffragia (sic) rex Merciorum . cum consensu etconsilio principum ac magistratuum Mercianorum gentis . donans donabo venerablili abbatianmundo et ejus famili sanct congregationis Breodunensis monasterii istam libertatisgratiam illius monasterii t Breodune . mihi et omnibus Mrcis tam pro Deo quam prosculo in eleemosinam sempiternam . Id est ut si liberatum et absolutum illud monasterium .ab illis causis quas cum feorme et eafor vocitemus . Tam a pastu ancipitrorum meorum .quam etiam venatorum omnium . vel a pastu equorum meorum omnium . sive ministrorumeorum . Quid plura . ab omni illa incommodidate fres et cum feorme . nisi istis causis quashic nominamus . Praecones si trans mare venirent ad regem venturi vel nuntii de genteOccidentalium Saxonum . vel de gente Norpanhymbrorum . si venirent ad horam tertiamdiei vel ad medium diem dabatur illis prandium . si venirent supra nonam horam tuncdabatur eis noctis pastum . et iterum de mane pergent in viam suam.


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Unfortunately, this charter may be a later forgery, as some (but notall) critics think.19Nevertheless, it is very interesting on the subject ofwhat the duties of hospitality are. The main (and well-known) aspect is

that hospitality is in no way a spontaneous practice. Marcel Mauss andother anthropologists after him have shown that giving and receivingare obligations, compulsory acts in pre-market societies. 20 They havealso shown that giving is always some kind of keeping-while-giving,that a donor always retains some right over his donation and/or overthe donee. That is true of course, as we will see, of hospitality that is,in the first place, the gift of food, fodder, roof and bed for a night orfor a longer term. But, as will become clear, hospitality is not so muchcompulsory as it is regulated. And during the whole period that will beconsidered here, it appears to have been strongly regulated indeed. Evenwhen it was not as strictly organized as it appears in Berhtwulfs charter,it was provided with a frame.

One of the limits and frames set to the practice of hospitality con-cerns its duration. The laws of the Kentish kings Hlothere and Eadric(later seventh century) set a limit of three nights for a host receiving aguest.21A much later mention of a similar rule can help us understandthe meaning of such a limit. Ta night gest, third night agen hine is

the ruling we can read in the so-called Laws of Edward the Confessor,in fact a mid-twelfth-century treatise:22 Two nights a guest, the thirdnight a local, if I dare translate agen hine so. The figures may not bethe same (two nights instead of three), but the assumption is clear, andthe seventh-century Kentish limitation should be interpreted along thesame lines: during the first three days, the guest is only a guest, butafter that time the host may be held responsible for the acts of his guest,just as if the guest had become a member of his retinue. In fact, aduration of three days is sometimes mentioned as the duration of

feasts,23as if a longer period could have led to something more bindingthan mere hospitality. Three nights is also the time of Beowulfs stay

19 See in P. Sawyer,Anglo-Saxon Charters, at [hereafter S], for arguments in favour ofa forgery, and in C. Hart, The EarlyCharters of Northern England(Leicester, 1975), for arguments againstit.

20 See mainly: M. Mauss, Essai sur le don: forme et raison de lchange dans les socitsarchaques (19234), in idem, Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris, 1950), pp. 143279; and M.Godelier, Lnigme du don(Paris, 1996).

21 Hlot. & Ead. 10. Repeated in IICnut 28. Kentish laws (thelberht, Hlothere and Eadric,Wihtred) cited from L. Oliver, The Beginnings of English Law (Toronto, 2002). Other lawscited from F. Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen,Vol. 1: Text und bersetzung(Halle,1903).

22 Kerr, Welcome the Parting Guest, pp. 1423.23 Stephen of Ripon, Vita Wilfridi, c. 17, ed. B. Colgrave, The Life of Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius

Stephanus(Cambridge, 1927).


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under Heorots roof:24one night against Grendel, one night in whichGrendels mother intervenes, one night of rest after both monstersdeaths. And in fact we can see that the hero chooses not to enlist into

Hrothgars retinue (Hrothgar even proposes to adopt him), but prefersto return quickly to the service of his uncle and lord Hygelac. Remainingat Hrothgars court would have meant a shift of allegiance. Such a limit(generally three days or nights) is a common feature in many civilizations:Leopold Hellmuth mentions plenty of examples, from Plautus and theBook of Judges to Icelandic and Islamic rulings, including the memorableDanish saying that A fish and a guest begin to stink on the third day. 25

A further explanation for this limit of three days could be found inthe fact that, as in many societies, the guest is an ambiguous character,and always a potential danger: after all, the Latin words hospes (guest)and hostis(enemy) share a common origin, and both meanings coexistedin Old English gst.26A stranger or a man come from afar, accordingto the laws of both Wihtred and Ine, should shout or blow his hornwhenever he leaves the highway, if he does not want to be taken for athief.27In early Greece, the guest was not only honoured and sacred,he was also, as Cristiano Grottanelli puts it, a dangerous entity frombeyond the borders: in the Homeric poems, the guest had to be tamed,

that is washed, perfumed with oil, and dressed with newclothes, beforehe was received at his hosts table.28Even if such arrangements were notas strictly affirmed in Anglo-Saxon poetry, there are gestures and practicesthat were scheduled in case of the arrival of a guest, in order to forestallhis potentially dangerous aspects. Beowulf and his companions must layaside their weapons when entering Heorot;29the hall itself is providedwith a kind of antechamber functioning like an airlock between thedanger of the outside and the security of the inner hall. In that ante-chamber they wait for Hrothgars summons. It is very interesting to see

that several excavated halls, such as Cowderys Down C12, show tracesof such an antechamber.30

But why might the guest be regarded as a dangerous character? Apartfrom the elusive danger of impurity, very difficult to check in thesources, and from the real danger of violence from the outside (let us

24 R. Girvan, Beowulf and the Seventh Century: Language and Content, 2nd edn (London, 1971),p. 44.

25 Hellmuth, Gastfreundschaft, pp. 24459.26 Hellmuth, Gastfreundschaft, pp. 223; see J. Bosworth, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Oxford,

1898), under gst II.27 Wihtred28; Ine20 (for lawcodes, see n. 21).28 Grottanelli, Lideologia, p. 128.29 Beowulf, ll. 9958, ed. B. Mitchell and F.C. Robinson, Beowulf: An Edition(Oxford, 1998).30 M. Millett and S. James, Excavations at Cowderys Down, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 1978

1981,Archaeological Journal140 (1983), pp. 151279.


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recall the attempted assassination of King Edwin by the West Saxonthegn Eomer as reported by Bede31), there is one concrete and verypractical risk linked to the reception of a guest into an organized war

band. A guest always potentially disrupts the hierarchy of the feast, andof the warband itself, if only because room must be made for him:wherever he is placed in the order of precedence, some members of thecomitatus are bound to feel insulted by their being moved one stepfurther down. Making such a disruption temporary is then of utterimportance. A very interesting parallel can be found in the thirteenth-century Saga of King Hrlf Kraki(which also happens to be one of themajor parallels to Beowulf): when the warrior B2varr Bjarki entersKing Hrlfs hall, he immediately chooses a seat which is much higherin the hall than the one to which he would normally be entitled anattitude which provokes the anger of twelve berserkr warriors of theking. It is only by defeating those twelve warriors and by entering thekings service that B2varr earns the right to sit next to the king. 32 Inother words, B2varr, as a guest, disrupts the rules of precedence, andis immediately and rightly perceived as a danger by those who holdpower and influence in the hall: it is only by claiming for himself andearning through his actions power, influence, and precedence, that he

sets the situation right. Beowulf himself encounters the same kind ofhostility in Heorot from Hunferth, the kings main counsellor. It isonly after the second night, when Beowulf makes it clear that he doesnot intend to stay, that Hunferths attitude changes: on the third day,he even lends him a very precious sword, despite the fact that Beowulfsexpedition to Grendels mere seems doomed to fail and the sword istherefore virtually lost to him.33The removal of the potential threat tohis own position at court on the previous night might be one of theexplanations of the much noted and often poorly explained change of

attitude on the part of Hunferth.We can say, then, that the choice is rather clear for any man enteringanother mans hall and claiming hospitality: either he stays and entershis retinue, or he departs after three days. Such a rule does indeed makesense: it does for the lord, who is responsible for those he welcomes; itdoes for the state and the king, whose aim it is to avoid all cases ofmen for whom no one, and especially no lord, is responsible; it does forthe members of the comitatus, who do not want a newcomer, protectedby his special status as a guest, to question a well-tried hierarchy.

31 Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum II.9, ed. B. Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors, TheEcclesiastical History of the English People(Oxford, 1969) [hereafter HE].

32 Hrlfs saga Kraka, Chs. 234, ed. J.L. Byock, The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki(London, 1998);G.N. Garmonsway and J. Simpson, Beowulf and its Analogues, 2nd edn (London, 1980).

33 Beowulf, ll. 499528, 145564.


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Another side of this ambiguous status of the guest is visible in thecase of hostages and foster-children who live at another lords court. 34

They were not really part of the comitatus, and need not share the

fate of its members: when Cynewulfs warband was destroyed byCyneheard and his men at Merantunein 786, a Welsh hostage stayingwith the king survived the fight.35Hostages, just like exiles and refugees,were under the protection, but were also the responsibility, of theirhosts. But unlike guests, they were completely in their hosts powerand came to serve them: the Welsh hostage at Merantunefought alongCynewulfs comitatusand was severely wounded in the fight. Hostagesand refugees then had a difficult position. The Deiran Edwin, a refugeeat the court of Rdwald of the East Angles, was protected by his hostagainst his familys enemy, the Bernician thelfrith; but Rdwaldseems to have contemplated rather seriously the possibility of handinghim back to his enemy.36 Edwins nephew Hereric was not as lucky:Ceretic, king of Elmet, who had given him shelter, finally had himpoisoned,37probably in order to please thelfrith.

This form of long-term and forced hospitality was then of a veryspecial kind. If hospitality was normally limited to three nights, it wasalso because such a limit enabled the guest not to contract too heavy

a debt. The hostage or refugee who was protected, fed and shelteredfor many years by the same lord, was in a very awkward position: hereceived without being able to give back. He could then become a meretool in the hands of his host, or an investment for the future. Edwin,for instance, was considered by Rdwald both as a possible foil againstthelfriths ambitions and as a bargaining counter against thelfrithsdemands. When the East Anglian king finally chose the first of thesepossibilities, it is clear that he intended Edwin to be grateful to him,and to acknowledge his overlordship as a payment for his hospitality,

protection, and help. And in fact, it took another ten years beforeEdwin now certainly freed from his debt by Rdwalds death contemplated, through marriage and conversion, the furthering of hisown political agenda.

Apart from the duration of the stay, there are two main kinds of framesand rules for the providing of hospitality. They concern two types ofobligations laid on the host: obligations to the king, as the wielder of

34 For later parallels see R. Lavelle, The Use and Abuse of Hostages in Later Anglo-SaxonEngland, EME14 (2006), pp. 26996.

35 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 755 A: ed. J. Bately in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A CollaborativeEdition, Vol. 3(Cambridge, 1986).

36 HEII.12.37 HEIV.23.


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public authority; and obligations to travellers. The second case seemsvery simple: in such a society, a traveller would be fed and sheltered.But the reality was more complex than that simple rule. In fact, the

precise nature of the hospitality which might or might not be provideddepended on the exact nature of the connection which existed betweenthe potential guest and the potential host, or (more frequently) betweenthe potential guest and those who had power and influence over thepotential host. In other words, a traveller might or might not have beenreceived, and might or might not have got full honourable hospitality,depending on his position within a larger hierarchy.

A much later example might provide us with a useful comparison. Inthe Life of Wulfstan by William of Malmesbury, we are told that thesaint, when he was still only the prior of Worcester cathedral minster,received his bishop and some papal legates.38He had to refresh themwith quality food and to organize a feast, even though it was duringLent and even though, as an ascetic would, he found this a rathershocking thing to do. Such a duty was linked to the status of thetravellers, to Wulfstans own office, and to their relative situation ofsuperiority and inferiority: we can be certain that Wulfstan, for all hisgenerosity and holiness, would not have bothered for more simple

travellers, providing instead an allowance of food more appropriateboth to their status and to the season of the year.This story of Wulfstan can shed light on an episode from Bedes

Prose Life of Cuthbert.39Cuthbert, as praepositus hospitumat the abbeyof Melrose, received a guest on a very stormy day. Even though it wasearly in the day, Cuthbert begged him not to go without having eatensomething; but the traveller, who was in fact an angel in disguise,departed while Cuthbert was busy finding some food, leaving a miraculousloaf of bread. This is a very ordinary story, except for the hour of the

day: for such an ascetic monk as Cuthbert, a meal before the third hour(that is, around ten oclock in the morning in winter) would haveconstituted some kind of indulgence.40 But again, there was nothingspontaneous here: it was fully in conformity with the monks duty tofeed the pauperesas well as the peregrini foreigners and travellers41and with Cuthberts own position as guest-master of the monastery.

38 William of Malmesbury, Vita Wulfstani I.10, ed. M. Winterbottom and R.M. Thomson,William of Mamlesbury, Saints Lives: Lives of SS. Wulfstan, Dunstan, Patrick, Benign andIndract(Oxford, 2002).

39 Bede, Vita Cuthberti prosaica, c. 7, ed. B. Colgrave, Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert(Cambridge,1940) [hereafter VCPr].

40 A. Gautier, Le festin dans lAngleterre anglo-saxonne, VeX Iesicle(Rennes, 2006), pp. 5760.41 Rule of Saint Benedict, Ch. 53, 1, ed. H. Rochais, La Rgle de saint Benot(Paris, 1980): All

guests are to be received as Christ himself; Mollat, Les pauvres, pp. 627, for Carolingiandevelopments.


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Feeding a guest was an obligation, but the consequences of that obligationdepended on the guests status: the simple traveller, without a recom-mendation, would only receive a drink and some bread, whereas the

guest who could give a name as a reference was entitled to a real feast,even to the point of breaking the rules of the monastery. The Verse Lifeof Cuthbert is, in the same episode, also very interesting.42Here againthe angel did not show any letters of recommendation, but he wasfinally recognized (both by Cuthbert and by Bede, but only after hisdeparture) as an exceptional guest, belonging to the heavenly retinue indeed, he came from the celsa aula/aetherea aula: that is, from a (veryspecial) hall and comitatus.

A significant illustration of this distinction was observed by both HansWerner Goetz and Peter Willmes concerning continental monasteriesin the Carolingian period, where there were generally two separatehospitia: a hospitium diuitumfor the mighty and a hospitium pauperumfor the weak.43 Indeed, the ninth-century plan of St Gall has threehospitia (at least): one for the rich, one for the poor, and a third formonks.44Even if the architecture of Anglo-Saxon monasteries was notas elaborate as that of the ideal institution of the St Gall plan, we knowthat guesthouses existed in some early houses.45In Bedes time there was

a special lodging for the king and his retinue at Lindisfarne, whereasin the time of Irish bishops, before these lodgings were built, the kingused to dine, with a few retainers, at the bishops table;46at Partney inLincolnshire, the abbeys door stood between the nuns dormitory andthe room where a sick guest lay.47

Yet the previous examples are only connected with religious houses,whose rules made it compulsory to receive guests. What of lay hosts?In such matters, we should not put an excessive trust in hagiography:the people who heartily welcomed Cuthbert on his travels seem too

good to be true. It is nevertheless very interesting to note that in onecase, it was Cuthbert himself (and through him, God) who fed his hostsby bringing miraculous food:48 they did not object. Such an examplemay indicate that, among the pauperes, hospitality, if it did really exist,

42 Bede, Vita Cuthberti poetica, ll. 183204, ed. W. Jaager, Bedas metrische Vita sancti Cuthberti(Leipzig, 1935).

43 H.W. Goetz, Social and Military Institutions, in R. McKitterick (ed.), New CambridgeMedieval History, Vol. 2(Cambridge, 1995), p. 478; P. Willmes, Der Herrscher-Adventus imKloster des Frhmittelalters(Munich, 1976), pp. 389, 6970.

44 W. Horn and E. Born, The Plan of St Gall: A Study of the Architecture and Economy of, andLife in a Paradigmatic Carolingian Monastery, 3 vols (Berkeley, 1979), II, p. 139.

45 S. Foot, Monastic Life in Anglo-Saxon England, c.600900(Cambridge, 2006), pp. 1089.46 HEIII.26.47 HEIII.11.48 VCPr, Ch. 12.


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34 Alban Gautier


could take a very original form: it may conceivably mean that it waspossible, even desirable, that the guest should share with his hosts thefood he had brought along for his journey.

Another case in Bedes Prose Life of Cuthbertseems at first to militateagainst this idea. On a Friday, as Cuthbert was travelling, he stoppedat a womans house. The woman characteristically insisted that he notleave the house without eating. As Cuthbert would not break his fast,she insisted on his taking some food for the road, but he againrefused.49 At first sight, we have here another example of Cuthbertsascetism and a poor womans generosity: a classic hagiographical topos.But in fact, nothing in the text tells us that the woman was poor, andthe words used can lead to an interpretation which is far from such atopos: the social setting of this episode is very different from that of theprevious one. The woman is called a religiosa mater familiae: a phrasethat does not designate the poor widow or the simple housewifewhom we might envisage when first reading this exemplum. She was awoman who, either on her own, or with her husband or after his death,was at the head of a familia, a household. Moreover, this lady wasreligiosa, which means that she was connected to the church in one wayor another: she might not have been an abbess, because Bede would

certainly have said so, but she may have had some privileged links witha church (as a consecrated widow? as the head of some kind of houseconvent?), even links of hospitality. This kind of religious life wasknown in early Anglo-Saxon England, where a religiosa femina a singlevowess, to use Sarah Foots phrase could, as long as she possessedenough land, take vows and continue to live on her land, enjoying theprofits of her estate after having taken a vow of chastity and taken thehabit distinctive to that state, often in the context of a special link witha particular minster, which would inherit the land at the death of the

vowess.50 And in fact Bede does say that she was hospitalitatis studiodeuota, devoted to the practice of hospitality. Of course, such a phrasemay only mean that she was accustomed to give shelter to people, andespecially to clerics: but the word deuotio can mean far more than asimple habit, and I think the phrase, here, may be taken in a technicalsense. In fact, it could well be that Cuthbert did not call at anyhouse,but at a household whose duty it was to provide for ecclesiastical travellers,and why not? perhaps even serving as a kind of staging-post for themonastery of Melrose, of which Cuthbert himself was guest-master. Ifwe follow this hypothesis which, of course, can only be a hypothesis

49 VCPr, Ch. 5.50 S. Foot, Veiled Women, 2 vols (Aldershot, 2000), I, pp. 135, 179 ff.


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Cuthberts refusal must be understood not only as an example of hisascetism and his faith: it is also a statement of the power of the abbey.

Cuthbert, of course, is ideally presented here as the one who travels

without burdening himself with care about food, the one who trusts inGod for finding proper hospitality on his way, the one who follows thegospel commandment51 and thus fits into the frame of hagiographicalwriting. The sources, however, show that the provision of hospitalitywas indeed an organized system rather than left to chance. As Berhtwulfsfalconers, hunters and horse grooms well knew, those who travelled inthe service of kings, bishops or abbots, were likely to find on their waysome staging-posts under their masters influence, minsters but also layhouseholds linked to their masters in one way or another.

This leads us to the second aspect of the duty of hospitality: the onethat is more specifically linked to the king and to some concept ofpublic authority. The case of the ambassadors mentioned in Berhtwulfscharter is typical of the strong connection that exists between the practiceof hospitality and the concept of mundium, that is protection in thiscase, princely protection. Travelling in the early Middle Ages was noteasy and it was unthinkable, especially for official travellers such as

ambassadors or papal legates, who went from one kingdom to another, totravel without official support. Such protection and capacity to take foodand shelter on the road must have been conveyed through documents,such as the tractoriaeused in the Frankish kingdom by missi domininciand other officials:52 one them, issued by an eighth-century mayor ofthe palace, amounted, in the words of Franois-Louis Ganshof, toun vritable passeport.53 I have unfortunately not been able to findconvincing examples of such letters in an Anglo-Saxon context, butCharlemagnes envoys to Offa in 796 bore a message of peace by

mouth and by hand, that is by letter, and Alcuin entreated the Mercianking to receive them, his own pupils, with [his] usual benevolence: 54awarm welcome would be better assured for the bearers of such recom-mendations. This recalls the parallel request made in 773 by KingAlhred of the Northumbrians to Archbishop Lul of Mainz for help and

51 Matthew X.515.52 A good example can be found in Marculf, Formulary, 11, ed. K. Zeumer, Formulae Merow-

ingici et Karolini Aevi, MGH Leges5 (Hanover, 1886).53 F.-L. Ganshof, La tractoria. Contribution ltude du droit de gte, Tijdschrift voor rechts-

geschiedenis/Revue dhistoire du droit 8 (1927), pp. 6991, at pp. 823: see Formulae SalicaeBignonianae, 16, ed. Zeumer, Formulae Merowingici et Karolini Aevi.

54 Alcuin, Letters, 101, ed. E. Dmmler, Epistolae Karolini Aevi II, MGH Epistolae 4 (Berlin,1895): Hos disciplinae nostrae et eruditionis discipulos et regiae dignitatis missos ut solitauobis pietate suscipatis, obsecro. Pacificam uero legationem ferunt in ore et in manibus. Etper eos mihi demandare quod uultis.


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care for our embassies to your lord the most glorious King Charles.55

It means that private networks, especially those of ecclesiastics withtransmarine connections such as Alcuin and Lul, were used along with

official contacts: to obtain hospitality in a foreign land, informal andprivate relationships could be as important as official and publicsupport. But important travellers could also be accompanied on theroad by royal or ecclesiastical officials who showed them the way andarranged their stops in the successive staging-posts: in 668, KingEcgbert of Kent sent his prefect Radfrid to the Frankish palace in orderto escort Archbishop Theodore and make sure that he journeyed safelythrough Quentovic to Canterbury.56

What is added in Berhtwulfs charter is that this kingly mundiumwasaccompanied by a number of rights especially the right to be sheltered,and also to be fed and entertained at some estate centres on the road.Donald Bullough noted that Breedon-on-the-Hill lay at less than adays ride from Tamworth, the Mercian kings principal seat of power:the ambassadors travelling up the River Trent from the Humber, orcoming from the south-east, would have been likely to pause at Breedonon their last stage before meeting the king, either stopping for a breakbefore arriving at Tamworth at sunset, or staying the night before

departing again the next morning.57

Such a place would indeed havebeen very suitable for entertaining ambassadors. And we must observethat Berthwulf is said to have decided on Breodune with the consentand advice of the magnates and magistrates of the people of the Mercians:it was not a private decision, but a gift which concerned all Mercians that is, all the Mercian aristocracy.

But the example of Breodune, whether sited at Breedon or not, is alsointeresting because many other duties had been laid on this monasterybefore Berhtwulf decided to exempt it from all except the entertaining

of ambassadors. The charter uses technical vernacular words: eaforandcumfeorme. The supplement to the Bosworth-Toller dictionary linksthe word eafor (of which this charter seems to be the only occurrencein the whole Anglo-Saxon corpus) to the verb aferian, to bring.58Tollerrenders it as an obligation to provide supply and to entertain messengers,a translation obviously given by the context. Maybe the word might

55 Lul, Letters, 121, ed. M. Tangl, Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, MGH Epistolaeselectae1 (Berlin, 1916); D. Whitelock, English Historical Documents, Vol. 1, 2nd edn (London,1979), n. 187, pp. 8334.

56 HEIV.1.57 Bullough, What has Ingeld, p. 122. About Mercian beginnings in the Trent valley, see N.

Brooks, The Formation of the Mercian Kingdom, in S. Bassett (ed.), The Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms(London, 1989), pp. 162, 276, n. 14.

58 T.N. Toller, Supplement to J. Bosworths Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Oxford, 1921), undereafor.


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simply be translated as duty to bring food. The word cumfeorme iseasier to analyse: it combines the words cum, meaning coming, journey,travel; andfeorm, meaning either a duty in kind collected by or for the

king, or a word for food and feast.59

The word cumfeorme can thenbe translated literally as travel-food, travel-tax or, more clumsily, taxintended to cater for travellers. The wording clearly shows that thoseduties, from which the community was released through the charter,could lie on lands that did not belong to the king any more, even ifthey probably were once royal lands. This duty must then be comparedwith the better-known duties of military service and of maintainingwalls and bridges, the famous three common charges of expeditio,arcis et pontis constructiowhich are constantly excluded from nearlyall charters granting liberties.60 One of the reasons why hospitality ismore difficult to trace in the charters may be easy to explain: the dutyof hospitality was very often includedin the general exemptions granted toreligious houses, and not excluded as the three common charges were.

But how can we trace this system of hospitality before exemptionsbecame a current feature? A clause in the laws of thelberht states thatthe kings fedeslwas of twenty shillings.61Unfortunately, this clause isat the very least elliptical, not to say mysterious: the phrase is Cyninges

fedesl xx scillinga forgelde literally: Let the kingsfedeslpay 20 shillings,or maybe something like About the kingsfedesl, let him pay 20 shillings.In the only other instance where it occurs in the whole Old Englishcorpus, the wordfedeslhas the meaning of a fatted animal, but twentyshillings would indeed be a high fine for the stealing, or even killing,of a kings bullock: the idea should probably be rejected.62Liebermannunderstands the word as meaning a fed one, a nutritusof the king: buthere, the sum may be too low, since in the same code the wergild of agrinding slave is fixed at twenty-five shillings. I am far more convinced

by Lisi Olivers interpretation:63fedesl should be understood as anequivalent of the Latinpastus, and the passage translated as [In case ofviolation of the duty to provide] food for the king, let him [who hasnot complied] pay 20 shillings. If fedesl indeed means pastus, we havein thelberhts laws an early example of the duty to feed the king and,no doubt, his retinue. Later in the seventh century, the laws of the WestSaxon Ine mention renders in kind due for the kings feeding (fostre),64

59 Oxford English Dictonary, 1989 edn, under farm1.60 F.M. Stenton,Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1971), pp. 28992: historians have often

called those charges the trimoda necessitas.61 thelberht17 (for lawcodes, see n. 21).62 Proposed by Whitelock, English Historical Documents, p. 392.63 L. Oliver, Cyninges fedesl: The Kings Feeding in thelberht, ch. 12,ASE27 (1998), p. 40.64 Ine70.1 (for lawcodes, see n. 21).


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but this passage is notoriously difficult to analyse: it is full of biblicalreminiscences, and it is impossible to know whether those renders camefrom royal lands or from other lands. Because of the context and the

goals of the law code, Ryan Lavelle prefers the idea of renders from allthe lands within a unit of ten hides.65If so, it is of course impossible toknow whether these renders were consumed by the king in the housesof his subjects as he toured the country, or if they were brought to himas he visited his local tunas.

I actually think that both situations coexisted, at least for a time.Such a regulation, even codification, of the duties of hospitality bringsus back to the distinction drawn by Katharine Simms for ninth- totwelfth-century Ireland between feasting (primitive hospitality) andguesting (sovereignty hospitality). She has shown that the duty toentertain the king and his men increased constantly in pre-NormanIreland, and even more afterwards, both in regions under Normanlords rule and in so-called Gaelic regions.66Similarly, the Welsh lawssuggest that an evolution took place there during the early and highmedieval centuries, when the gwestfa, the kings actual guesting by hisnoble (that is, in Wales, free67) subjects, was progressively replaced byfood-renders taken to the llys, local centres of authority through which

the king toured.68

But such an evolution in Ireland did not take place overnight, andnor did it in England. On the one hand, the vast quantity of ox bonesfound at the early seventh-century royal site of Yeavering suggests thatone of its functions may have been the collection of cattle renders indeed the great enclosure on the site might have been used to keepcattle while waiting for the kings coming, when oxen would have beenculled for the entertainment both of his retinue and of local freemen,the latter feasted upon the very renders they had been yielding during

the previous weeks.69On a more modest scale, the famous story told byBede of Imma, the Northumbrian thegn taken prisoner in a battleagainst the Mercians, shows that peasants were expected to bring foodto a campaigning army: Imma pretends that such was his errand whenhe was made prisoner.70Barbara Yorke has analysed this as a sign thatrenders could be brought to the kings instead of kings moving towards

65 R. Lavelle, Royal Estates in Anglo-Saxon Wessex: Land, Politics and Family Strategies, BARBritish ser. 439 (Oxford, 2007), pp. 1617.

66 Simms, Guesting and Feasting.67 Charles-Edwards, Early Irish and Welsh Kinship, p. 365.68 Charles-Edwards, Early Irish and Welsh Kinship, pp. 3768069 B. Hope-Taylor, Yeavering: An Anglo-British Centre of Early Northumbria, DOE Archaeolo-

gical Reports 7 (London, 1977), pp. 32532.70 HEIV.22.


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their food.71This reminds us of the word eafor, which we have trans-lated as duty to bring food. On the other hand, these were peasantrenders, that could well have come from the kings lands. What of

freemens and noblemens obligations? It seems well established thatkings, in the seventh century, did feast from time to time at theirsubjects homes. The laws of thelberht make a clear distinctionbetween cases when the king invites to him his people/nobles, andcases when he drinks at a mans home.72Only in the first case is a fineprescribed. It would seem from this example that the king was not athome in a mans home; but does it mean that he had no rights overhis subjects? Of course not. It means that freemen and nobles weresometimes supposed to bring food to the king, but that the king coulddemand the same food by coming to them in person.73

In later Anglo-Saxon England, such duties seem to have been heavy.Two charters, dated as being from the 820s, exempt some lands belongingto Abingdon Abbey and Rochester cathedral from the entertaining ofroyal officers.74 Both seem to have been eleventh-century forgeriesmaking use in part of genuine ninth-century documents: their wordingmay thus reflect an earlier practice.75The Abingdon one mentions theman swollen with pride who can arrive and exact hospitality, and both

charters give a list of those men: kings, princes, dukes, prefects, falconers,horse grooms, hunters, fstingmen and their men. The case of thefstingmen is particularly interesting: they are presented as the kingsmessengers and purveyors, in charge of the courts supply. A charter ofBerhtwulf, issued a few years before the Breodune one, exempted theabbey (here rather irritatingly identified by a majority of critics asBredon in Worcestershire) from those inconveniences which we in theSaxon tongue callfstingmenn.76Another charter from the same Berhtwulfshows that such liberties could be granted to lay donees: it releases

ealdorman thelwulf from the feeding of princes and that difficultywhich we in the Saxon tongue call festingmen at his Berkshire estate ofPangbourne.77

71 B. Yorke, Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England(London and New York, 1990),p. 162.

72 thelberht89: cyning his leode to him gehatep, and cyning t mannes ham drincp (forlawcodes, see n. 21).

73 This is also the interpretation of Oliver, The Beginnings of English Law, pp. 868.74 S 183 and S 271.75 S.E. Kelly, Charters of Abingdon Abbey, Anglo-Saxon Charters 7/8, 2 vols (Oxford, 1988),

pp. 434, n. 9; H. Edwards, The Charters of the Early West Saxon Kingdom, BAR Britishser. 198 (Oxford, 1988), p. 284.

76 S 193 (critics listed in e-Sawyer appear very divided concerning its authenticity): ab illisincommodiis quam nos Saxonica lingua fstingmenn dicimus.

77 S 1271 (considered genuine by a majority of critics as listed in e-Sawyer): a difficultate illaquot nos Saxonice dicimus festingmen. See Kelly, Charters of Abingdon Abbey, n. 12, pp. 549.


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What these charters, both genuine and interpolated, indicate, is thatlandlords found it very burdensome that the kings men (includingfstingmen) should be entitled to be fed on their lands when they

journeyed through or past them. They were ready to pay considerablesums to the king of the Mercians, either in cash, in precious objects oreven in land, to obtain a charter that would relieve them from thoseobligations.78The charters, be they forgeries or not, therefore reveal apractice that could have been common in early ninth century Mercia:rather than entertaining their purveyors or huntsmen79 on their ownlands, the kings and their agents (ducesand such officers) tended tohave them entertained on lay or ecclesiastical lands burdened or formerlyburdened with guesting duties.80What, of course, we cannot know exactlyis whether the eleventh-century forgeries were aimed at suppressing aduty which, being thought of as normal in the ninth century, wasbeginning to be felt as oppressive in the eleventh century, or whetherthey were directed against a new kind of misuse, (re-)emerging in thelater period. What we do know is: first, that the practice and the willto suppress it existed in ninth-century Mercia (there are enough genuinecharters for that); and second, that, in the eleventh century, some religioushouses felt that former kings ought to have exempted them from this

kind of obligation.One point suggested by these documents is that the duty of guestingdid not primarily fall on a person (a landlord, a subject of the king) oran institution (a minster), but on the land itself, even if exemption wasoften granted to a religious house for all its lands at the same time. Ofcourse, many of these lands, before being given, had belonged to theking, or had been public land or folcland, and/or had been burdenedwith guesting duties: it is very likely that the kings agents andfstingmen had entered into the habit of staying on those lands and

receiving guesting for themselves while on their errands. With time,that duty seems to have disappeared from many estates. This could beone of the things that Bede denounced in his letter to Bishop Egbert: 81

kin groups who transferred part of their lands to religious houses thatBede deemed purely secular not only deprived the king of his power ofpatronage by removing land from the circuit of gift-giving, but also,

78 Kelly, Charters of Abingdon Abbey, lists a series of such charters, genuine or not: S 172, S 190,S 194, S 198, S 207, S 218.

79 S 1271 relieves the Pangbourne estate from the obligation to receive men who bear hawks orfalcons, or lead hounds and horses (nec homines illuc mittent qui osceptros uel falconesportant aut canes aut caballos ducunt).

80 P. Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature in Western England, 600800(Cambridge, 1990),pp. 1356.

81 Bede, Letter to Bishop Egbert of York, ed. C. Plummer, Venerabilis Baedae opera historica(Oxford, 1896).


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through the liberties granted to them, deprived him of the suppliesnecessary for his maintenance, and those of his men, on their travelsthroughout the kingdom.

According to S.E. Kelly, by the time of the Viking conquest ofMercia most of these obligations to entertain the court and officialsseem to have been commuted by such transactions.82If this is correct,we should be able to spot, at the end of our period, a few estates inprivate hands still rendering some kind ofpastusto the king. The problemis, of course, that documents are lacking. Even much later, DomesdayBook is of no help, since it is impossible to draw a distinction betweenthe lands that still owed the original due and those that only owed partof it, or owed new dues. What we can state is only an impression: thekings itineraries are well known only from the eleventh centuryonwards, but it seems, as Martin Biddle has shown, that the choices forholding court and feasts whether they included crown-wearings ornot, as seems most probable for the Anglo-Saxon period became, astime went on, more and more restricted to a few major royal centres. 83

A few narrative sources for the tenth and eleventh centuries tell us of amonarch feasting at the hall of one of his subjects (lay or ecclesiastical);but it is never presented as an obligation, always as a free invitation.84

Things may have sometimes been similar in the earlier centuries: see,for instance, how the Northumbrian kings Ecgfrith and lfwine wereentertained by Wilfrid at Ripon around 660,85or how King Ceolred ofthe Mercians died while feasting at the house of some of his comitesin716.86Not all hospitality given to the king was strict and binding guestingthen, but it may have been more often considered as an obligation,both by the king and his host, as when King Sigeberht of the EastSaxons felt compelled to feast at the hall of one of his thegns, regardlessof the thegn having been excommunicated.87But my impression is that

the actual right of guesting slowly disappeared between the eighth andthe eleventh century as a result of the growth of royal power, just as ineleventh- to thirteenth-century Wales,88 or in Scotland in the sameperiod.89If this is the case, the situation in Britain would have become

82 Kelly, Charters of Abingdon Abbey, p. 58.83 M. Biddle, Seasonal Festival and Residence: Winchester, Westminster and Gloucester in the

Tenth to Twelfth Centuries, Anglo-Norman Studies8 (1985), pp. 5172.84 A. Gautier, Palais, itinraires et ftes alimentaires des rois anglo-saxons aux Xeet XIesicles,

Food and History4.1 (2006), pp. 2944, at p. 37 ff.85 Stephen of Ripon, Vita Wilfridi, c. 17.86 Boniface, Letters, n. 73, p. 344.87 HEIII.22.88 Charles-Edwards, Early Irish and Welsh Kinship, p. 380.89 A. Woolf, From Pictland to Alba, 7891070, New Edinburgh History of Scotland 2 (Edin-

burgh, 2007), pp. 256.


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very different from the Irish one, where the kings guesting steadilyincreased between the eighth and the fourteenth century. 90 Anotherprobable evolution is that it became less and less necessary (or possible)

for the king to come and consume his feormin kind and in person: hisreeves could send him the supplies, or even the money resulting fromthe sale of products of his estates.

It would take too long to study in detail the origins and evolution ofthe feorm:91 we may just say that this render was a pastus, a guestingright comparable to Scottish convethor Welshgwestfa, that was progres-sively abandoned by kings, mainly through donations and charters ofimmunity.92Later on, in the tenth and mainly eleventh centuries, thepractice had almost died out: a law code of Cnut explicitly states thatthe farm-aid (feormfultume) to the king need not be rendered exceptby those who wish to render it.93This means: one, that royal guestinghad then become a marginal practice that could be abandoned withoutendangering royal income; and two, that the king knew that somepeople still had some interest in rendering the feorm. Indeed, thisvoluntary guesting was much more honourable than, say, paying the geld,because it still assumed the shape of an honourable and spontaneousinvitation, because it provided the host with an occasion to demonstrate

his worthiness and generosity,94

and because it was an opportunity toapproach the king in person. When Wenfld, St Wulfhilds aunt,invited an amorous King Edgar to feast at her residence at Wherwell, 95

she may well have thought that guesting the king was a reasonableexpense, and indeed a good investment, if it brought a royal bridegroominto her family.

With the extension of kingdoms (both Wessex and Mercia were, inthe ninth century, becoming rather large), the king was no longer ablewithin a year, or even within two years, to visit in person all places that

owed the feorm. And in the ninth and tenth centuries, the size of theroyal court grew parallel to that of kingdoms: thelwulf s court, even

90 Simms, Guesting and Feasting; Charles-Edwards, Early Irish and Welsh Kinship, pp. 4601.91 P. Stafford, The Farm of One Night and the Organization of King Edwards Estates in

Domesday, Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 33 (1980), pp. 491502. I must also thank RyanLavelle for letting me read his then unpublished article: The Farm of One Night and theOrganization of Royal Estates in Late Anglo-Saxon Wessex, Haskins Society Journal14 (2005),pp. 5382.

92 R. Faith, The English Peasantry and the Growth of Lordship(London, 1997), p. 104, speaks ofprivatization of thefeorm.

93 IICn, 69.1 (for lawcodes, see n. 21).94 This role of honour as an incentive behind hospitality has been remarked upon by J. Kerr,

The Open Door, p. 322, and eadem, Food, Drink and Lodging, p. 73.95 Goscelin, Life of Wulfhild, c. 2, ed. M.L. Colker, Texts of Jocelyn of Canterbury which

Relate to the History of Barking Abbey, Studia Monastica7.2 (1965), pp. 383460.


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more thelstans, must have been far more numerous than Cynewulfsretinue which could be housed in a single building at the royal vill ofMerantune, where it was utterly destroyed.96 Finally, the food-rend

became ever less significant in the overall income of kings, who withthe development of wics and markets resorted from the late seventhcentury onwards to other kinds of taxation: they gradually replaced, oraugmented, the gold, silver and other rich goods derived from plunder,tribute and, to a lesser extent, gift exchange97 which had hithertocomplemented the feormand enlarged the kings revenue. Renouncingthe food-rent in its earliest form, and transforming it into a moneyedconsuetudo, was, then, of interest both to the king and to his potentialhosts: the king got silver, and the potential host saw his duty limited,once and for all, to a set sum of money, that would not grow parallelwith the size of the court.98 Another solution was chosen in Ireland,where, it is true, the kings retinues never grew to the same size, and thenumber of people allowed to follow the king on his guesting itinerarywas limited by law; it was on the other hand paralleled, if much later,in Scotland and in Wales. In England, needless to say, this temporaryrelief from taxation was counterbalanced by the exaction of very heavygeldsand by taxes on trade and coinage.

As a conclusion, we may say that earlier hospitality arrangements werenot completely abandoned in post-viking England: they survived insome particular and arguably derivative forms, such as DomesdayBooks firma unius noctis a mere accounting unit and voluntaryguesting. Royal itinerancy did not disappear, of course, but it may havebecome more and more restricted to a small number of palaces andestates better equipped to received the court, and to the houses of asmall number of very rich and very high nobles. Hospitality in Anglo-

Saxon England was, of course, nothing like a spontaneous and free practice.It was always a duty, strictly limited and framed by custom, just as itwas in Wales or in Ireland. Feasting, then, when it took place at aninferiors home, was always some kind of guesting. Anglo-Saxon societyseems to have been the kind of society where, whenever an inferiorhonoured his lord, the lord used that opportunity to re-affirm hisrights. On the other hand, we can say that whenever the lord demandedwhat was rightly his by custom, his host would use the same opportunityto improve his own Knigsnhe, and draw some kind of prestige through

96 ASC755 A.97 J.R. Maddicott, Prosperity and Power in the Age of Bede and Beowulf , Proceedings of the

British Academy117 (2002), pp. 4971, at p. 49.98 Gautier, Palais, itinraires, pp. 434.


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the fiction of a spontaneous invitation and a freely given hospitality, apractice seen as more honourable than tribute or tax. And as for thehospitality offered by a superior to his inferior, it was also a two-way

exchange, as appeared in the case of protection offered to noble refugeeslike Edwin at the court of Rdwald. This is, of course, how manyanthropologists explain gift-giving: a kind of binding exchange, even ifit assumes the shape, the aspect, and even the values of a free and openpractice.

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