Treasure in the Medieval West

TREASURE IN THE MEDIEVAL WEST

Elizabeth M. Tyler, Editor

YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS

TREASURE IN THE MEDIEVAL WEST

YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS York Medieval Press is published by the University of York's Centre for Medieval Studies in association with Boydell & Brewer Ltd. Our objective is the promotion of innovative scholarship and fresh criticism on medieval culture. We have a special commitment to interdisciplinary study, in line with the Centre's belief that the future of Medieval Studies lies in those areas in which its major constituent disciplines at once inform and challenge each other. Editorial Board (1998±2001): Prof. W. M. Ormrod (Chair; Dept of History) Dr P. P. A. Biller (Dept of History) Dr J. W. Binns (Dept of English & Related Literature) Dr E. C. Norton (Art History) Dr N. F. McDonald (Dept of English & Related Literature) Dr J. D. Richards (Dept of Archaeology) All inquiries of an editorial kind, including suggestions for monographs and essay collections, should be addressed to: The Director, University of York, Centre for Medieval Studies, The King's Manor, York YO1 7EP (E-mail: [email protected]). Publications of York Medieval Press are listed at the back of this volume.

TREASURE IN THE MEDIEVAL WEST

Edited by Elizabeth M. Tyler

YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS

# Contributors 2000 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2000 A York Medieval Press publication in association with The Boydell Press an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9 Woodbridge Suffolk IP12 3DF UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. PO Box 41026 Rochester NY 14604±4126 USA website: http://www.boydell.co.uk and with the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York ISBN 0 9529734 8 0

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Treasure in the medieval West/edited by Elizabeth M. Tyler. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-9529734-8-0 (hc : alk. paper) 1. Civilization, Medieval ± Congresses. 2. Middle Ages ± Congresses. 3. Europe ± Antiquities ± Congresses. 4. Treasure-trove ± Social aspects ± Europe ± History ± To 1500 ± Congresses. 5. Goldwork, Medieval ± Europe ± Congresses. 6. Jewelry, Medieval ± Europe ± Congresses. 7. Coin hoards ± Europe ± Congresses. I. Tyler, E. M. (Elizabeth M.), 1965± CB353.T74 2000 940.1±dc21 99-087227

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Typeset by Joshua Associates Ltd, Oxford Printed in Great Britain by St Edmundsbury Press Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

CONTENTS List of Illustrations

vi

Foreword

ix

List of Contributors

x

List of Abbreviations

xi

1.

Treasure, Death and Display from Rome to the Middle Ages Dominic Janes

1

2.

`You Can't Take It with You': Testaments, Hoards and Moveable Wealth in Europe, 600±1100 Timothy Reuter

11

3.

Burial as Poetry: The Context of Treasure in Anglo-Saxon Graves Martin Carver

25

4.

Ideal and Reality: Versions of Treasure in the Early Anglo-Saxon World Leslie Webster

49

5.

Queens and Treasure in the Early Middle Ages Pauline Stafford

6.

`When Wings Incarnadine with Gold are Spread': The Vita ádwardi Regis and the Display of Treasure at the Court of Edward the Confessor Elizabeth M. Tyler

61

83

7.

The Goldenes RoÈssl and the French Royal Collections Jenny Stratford

8.

`Lusti Tresor': Avarice and The Economics of the Erotic in Gower's Confessio Amantis Nicola F. McDonald

135

9.

`Treasure in Earthen Vessels': Jewellery and Plate in Late Medieval Hoards John Cherry

157

v

109

ILLUSTRATIONS Chapter 3 The Context of Treasure in Anglo-Saxon Graves Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

1 2 3 4

The excavation of Mound 7 at Sutton Hoo in c.1860 The catchment area for the grave-goods found in Mound 1 A plan of the Mound 17 burial at Sutton Hoo The ship burial in Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo

28 33 41 44

Chapter 7 The Goldenes RoÈssl and the French Royal Collections Pl. Pl. Pl. Pl. Pl. Pl. Pl. Pl. Pl.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

The Goldenes RoÈssl, AltoÈtting The Virgin and Child St Catherine St John the Baptist St John the Evangelist Charles VI The Chevalier The Tiger The Horse and Page

110 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120

Fig. 1 Paris in the ®fteenth century Fig. 2 The Bastille

123 124

Chapter 8 Avarice and the Economics of the Erotic in Gower Pl. 1 Pl. 2 Pl. Pl. Pl. Pl. Pl.

3 4 5 6 7

Reader's Sketch. John Gower, Confessio Amantis Combined Avaritia and Luxuria capital (apse exterior), Blesle, Auvergne Avarice (left portal), Mailhat, Auvergne Avarice elbow rest, Norwich Cathedral Avarice bench end, Wiggenhall St Germans, Norfolk Avarice, Roman de la Rose Largesse, Roman de la Rose

vi

137 141 143 145 147 149 155

Illustrations Chapter 9 Jewellery and Plate in Late Medieval Hoards Pl. 1 Pl. 2 Pl. 3

The leaden badge of St Thomas aÁ Becket found with the Tutbury hoard The signet ring found with the Fishpool hoard The ®ve spoons found at Abberley Church, Worcestershire

vii

162 164 170

This Page Intentionally Left Blank

FOREWORD Treasure in the Medieval West publishes nine papers ®rst delivered in 1997 as lectures in the York Medieval Seminar series, held annually at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York. These papers examine aspects of treasure from Late Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages. The volume takes treasure as a broad subject which can be understood in a number of ways, from the economic to the aesthetic, and can be explored from a range of disciplines including history, art history, literature and archaeology. Bringing together work which is characterized by a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, the volume also links interdisciplinary studies with more established work carried out from within the individual disciplines. Across the essays in this volume, with their distinct methodologies and starting points, themes such as gender, fashion, ethnicity, public±private, burial, piety, display and poetics emerge and reemerge in different periods and contexts. The papers highlight the importance of treasure as a powerful cultural reality and a rich metaphor throughout the Middle Ages. In the process of organizing this lecture series and editing the volume, many debts, both intellectual and practical, have been incurred; thanks are owed especially to Catherine Cubitt, Jane Grenville, Louise Harrison, Matthew Holford, Nicola McDonald, Alastair Minnis, Mark Ormrod, Felicity Riddy, Matthew Townend, Andrew Wray, and the Centre for Medieval Studies and the Department of English and Related Literature, University of York. I am grateful to the Holy Chapel at AltoÈtting and the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum for permission to reproduce the photographs of the Goldenes RoÈssl. This volume is dedicated to the memory of James T. Lang: friend, colleague and scholar. Elizabeth M. Tyler York

ix

CONTRIBUTORS Martin Carver Department of Archaeology and Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York John Cherry British Museum Dominic Janes Department of History, King's College London Nicola F. McDonald Department of English and Related Literature and Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York Timothy Reuter Department of History, University of Southampton Pauline Stafford Department of History, University of Liverpool Jenny Stratford Institute of Historical Research, University of London and Royal Holloway, University of London Elizabeth M. Tyler Department of English and Related Literature and Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York Leslie Webster British Museum

x

ABBREVIATIONS AN ASC BAR BL BN CSEL EETS OS EHR LH MGH AA Cap. Fontes Form. Poet. SRG SRL SRM SS PL TRHS

Paris, Archives nationales Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel, ed. C. Plummer and J. Earle, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1892±9) British Archaeological Reports London, British Library Paris, BibliotheÁque nationale Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (Vienna, 1866±) Early English Text Society Original Series English Historical Review (London, 1886±) Gregory of Tours, Libri historiarum, ed. B. Krusch and W. Levison, MGH SRM 1.1 (Hanover, 1937±51) Monumenta Germanica Historica Auctores Antiquissimi, 15 vols. (Berlin, 1877±1919) Capitularia, Legum Sectio II: Capitularia Regum Francorum, ed. A. Boretius and V. Krause, 2 vols. (Hanover, 1883±97) Fontes Iuris Germanici Antique in usum scholarum ex Monumentis Germaniae Historicis separatim editi, 13 vols. (Hanover, 1909±86) Formulae Merowingici et Karolini Aevi, ed. K. Zeumer, Legum Sectio V (Hanover, 1886) Poetae Latini Aevi Carolini, ed. E. Dummler, L. Traube, P. von Winterfeld and K. Strecker, 4 vols. (Hanover, 1881±99) Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi, 63 vols. (Hanover, 1871±1987) Scriptores Rerum Langobardicarum et Italicarum saec. VI±IX, ed. G. Waitz (Hanover, 1878) Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum, ed. B. Krusch and W. Levison, 7 vols. (Hanover, 1885±1951) Scriptores in folio, 30 vols. (Hanover, 1824±1924) Patrologia Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, 217 vols. (Paris, 1841±64) Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (London, 1871±)

xi

1 Treasure, Death and Display from Rome to the Middle Ages Dominic Janes

All periods represent transitions, but the years from 400 to 600 in western Europe witnessed dramatic cultural changes associated with the collapse of Roman power. The nature of society in the post-classical period is much disputed. Can late Antiquity be understood to embrace the Germanic kingdoms, or was their culture something quite new? The evidence of burial practices has traditionally been brought forward as crucial material proof of the latter belief. The remarkable assemblage of treasures and other artefacts brought to light in 1939 at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk powerfully evoked the distant world of early England.1 The ®nds were excitedly reported by the press, making it to the front page of The Daily Telegraph and the equivalent (top item of Home News) in The Times.2 The vast array of artefacts recovered from mound 1 at Sutton Hoo at ®rst sight might appear to evoke a world distant from Roman attitudes and values. However, this assumption has been questioned.3 For example, the seemingly `barbarian' helmet found at Sutton Hoo is now seen as descended in style from late Roman parade helmets.4 Moreover, Germanic animal art in general might seem distinctive 1

2 3

4

R. Bruce-Mitford, The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial, 3 vols. (London, 1975±83), I; M. O. H. Carver, `The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Sutton Hoo: An Interim Report', in The Age of Sutton Hoo: The Seventh Century in North-Western Europe, ed. M. O. H. Carver (Woodbridge, 1992), pp. 343±71; L. Webster, `Death's Diplomacy: Sutton Hoo in the Light of Other Male Princely Burials', in Sutton Hoo: Fifty Years After, ed. R. Farrell and C. Neuman de Vegvar, American Early Medieval Studies 2 (Oxford OH, 1992), pp. 75±81; and J. F. A. Shephard, `The Social Identity of the Individual in Isolated Barrows and Barrow Cemeteries in Anglo-Saxon England', in Space, Hierarchy and Society: Interdisciplinary Studies in Social Area Analysis, ed. B. C. Burnham and J. Kingsbury, BAR International Series 59 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 47±79. The Daily Telegraph, 15 August 1939, p. 1 and The Times, 15 August 1939, p. 19. Carver in the current volume; R. Frank, `Beowulf and Sutton Hoo: The Odd Couple', in Voyage to the Other World: The Legacy of Sutton Hoo, ed. C. B. Kendall and P. S. Wells, Medieval Studies at Minnesota 5 (Minneapolis, 1992), pp. 47±64, esp. p. 57: `the objects of Sutton Hoo, even those most often called barbaric, belong . . . to a European maritime culture that had for centuries imitated Roman ways'. J. Campbell, `The First Christian Kings', in The Anglo-Saxons, ed. J. Campbell (Harmondsworth, 1991), pp. 45±69 (p. 66). Compare the early fourth-century helmet found in Holland shown by A. Peddemors and A. Pol, `Catalogue of the Exhibition ``The Lifestyle of the

1

Dominic Janes enough, but in fact, in its earliest stages, it is far from easy to single out from late Roman provincial production.5 I do not intend to argue that there were no important differences between ®nds and funerary customs in the Roman and post-Roman west, but simply that the two traditions can be understood in evolutionary relation to one another. I shall examine the diversity of burial practices across the period in order to see what broad trends can be seen to emerge and I shall contend that it was the style more than the function of display that varied from Rome to the early Middle Ages. It has been commented that `whether it be dreadful or glorious, real or ideal, death is always the exclusive concern of those who are alive'.6 Funerary rituals are enacted by the living in relation to the deceased. They need not take one particular material form. Processions, speeches and monuments are products of the desire to do the best for the dead, or to be seen to do the best for the dead, or of wanting the deceased one, or yourself, to be remembered.7 These customs can be analysed both in terms of social forms and in terms of the mental constructs of the participants.8 The phenomenon of the careful plotting of one's own funeral or funerary monument can be seen in both ancient and modern times.9 In that general perspective it might appear that special adornments for the deceased, as an act of communication, are effective at the lying in state, but the potential of grave monuments is that they endure to show posterity the public face of a family or individual, whatever it is thought most important to display to posterity, as in the

5

6

7

8

9

Elite'' ', in The Transformation of the Roman World, AD 400±900, ed. L. Webster and M. Brown (London, 1997), pp. 185±93 (p. 185 and pl. 48). S. C. Hawkes, `The Jutish Style: A Study of Germanic Animal Art in Southern England in the Fifth Century AD', Archaeologia 98 (1961), 29±74 (p. 30); C. Hills `The Archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England in the Pagan Period: A Review', Anglo-Saxon England 8 (1979), 297± 329 (pp. 322±4). The main recent study is G. Speake, Anglo-Saxon Animal Art and its Germanic Background (Oxford, 1980). J.-P. Vernant, `Death with Two Faces', in Mortality and Immortality: The Anthropology and Archaeology of Death, ed. S. C. Humphreys and H. King (London, 1981), pp. 285±92 (p. 288). R. Reece, `Burial in Latin Literature: Two Examples', in Burial in the Roman World, ed. R. Reece, Council for British Archaeology, Research Report 22 (London, 1977), pp. 44±5 (p. 44). I. Morris, `The Archaeology of Ancestors: The Saxe/Goldstein Hypothesis Revisited', Cambridge Archaeological Journal 1 (1991), 147±69. A strong case for study of the subjective factor of emotion is made by S. A. Tarlow, `Metaphors of Death in Orkney, A.D. 1560± 1945' (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1995), esp. p. 250. Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, ed. and trans. J. Rolfe, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge MA, 1913±14), Augustus ci.4 (I, 286), who left mandata de funere suo (`directions for his funeral'). Le testament du Lingon: actes de la journeÂe d'eÂtude du 16 mai 1990 organiseÂe au Centre d'EÂtudes Romaines et Gallo-Romaines de l'Universite Lyon III, ed. Y. Le Bohec, Collection du Centre d'EÂtudes Romaines et Gallo-Romaines, nouvelle seÂrie 9 (Lyons, 1991); J. Litten, The English Way of Death: The Common Funeral Since 1450 (London, 1991), p. 133; and J. Mitford, The American Way of Death (London, 1963) provide, respectively, examples from Roman Gaul, seventeenth-century England and twentiethcentury America.

2

Treasure, Death and Display military awards, crowns and medallions depicted on the gravestones of Roman soldiers under the high empire.10 A problem in our understanding of such attitudes is that, in modern Britain at least, death is often seen as a very private matter and hence to be publicly played down. With the exception of major public ®gures it is understood that the dead one is no longer signi®cant save for very close friends and family. We have perhaps been over-impressed by the magni®cence of the greatest early medieval burials with treasures because they stand out amidst the often unspectacular evidence for post-Roman dwellings, cult centres or other life rituals. I would like to suggest that if certain of the early medieval burials seem remarkable to us in their splendour, it is as well to remember the extraordinary profusion and elaborate designs of Roman funerary monuments, especially those of the nouveaux riches of the Principate.11 The burial itself and the tomb were then but one part of the expense of the ceremonial. Roman imperial funeral processions evoked triumphs in which what mattered most was the display of continuing political power.12 Costs of the grandest ancient funerals, if the ®gures can be trusted, could be enormous: Suetonius mentions the ®gure for Vespasian (d. AD 79) of ten million sesterces.13 The periodic recording of funeral costs on monuments gives us a further picture of that world, as with the freedman who, dying in 8 BC, spent one million sesterces on his funeral, having left sixty million in cash donations in his will.14 Although it is, of course, only fair to point out that the other end of the spending league was the rule, as represented by the ashes of paupers which have been found placed in amphorae in the ground in the Via Domitiana at Ostia near Rome.15 The attitude of the living, as I have stressed, was crucial. A recent analysis found that three-quarters of Roman memorial inscriptions mentioned the person(s) who were responsible for the erection of the monument.16 Tombs housing cremation urns were to be tended by heirs, and signs of protection 10

11

12

13

14 15 16

For example, V. A. Max®eld, The Military Decorations of the Roman Army (London, 1981), pls. 6 and 7. H. von Hesberg, RoÈmische Grabbauten (Darmstadt, 1992). Roman death is summarized in J. M. C. Toynbee, Death and Burial in the Roman World (London, 1971); together with the recent analysis of I. Morris, Death-Ritual and Social Structure in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge, 1992). J. Prieur, La mort dans l'antiquite Romaine (Rennes, 1986), p. 24; S. R. F. Price, `From Noble Funerals to Divine Cult: The Consecration of Roman Emperors', in Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremony in Traditional Societies, ed. D. Cannadine and S. R. F. Price, Past and Present Publications (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 56±105. Suetonius, Lives, ed. and trans. Rolfe, Vespasian xix.2 (II, 312±13); R. Duncan-Jones, The Economy of the Roman Empire: Quantitative Studies (Cambridge, 1982), p. 128; Toynbee, Death and Burial, pp. 56±61 on the funus imperatorium. Duncan-Jones, The Economy, p. 128. Duncan-Jones, The Economy, p. 131. E. A. Meyer, `Explaining the Epigraphic Habit in the Roman Empire: The Evidence of Epitaphs', Journal of Roman Studies 80 (1990), 74±96 (p. 75).

3

Dominic Janes might be placed there to prevent violation of the grave.17 Burial outside cities was the legal requirement, due to a sense of pollution, and a fear of dead bodies and of spirits of the dead, whilst ceremonies made sure that good relations with the underworld were maintained.18 From the second century, inhumation spread through the Roman empire. Four emperors of that period, Antoninus, Lucius Verus, Commodus and Didius Julius were inhumed.19 The actual change has been seen as a result of cultural in¯uence from the east, the spread to do with fashions in expressions of emotion and prestige, rather than rapidly altering attitudes to the afterlife. Morris has written that the change from cremation to inhumation at Rome `must, I think, be seen as one purely of form'.20 Roman and local traditions blended in the north-western provinces. In Britain there was a tradition of variously furnished burials before the Roman conquest. At the top end of this range of display was the King Harry Lane site at St. Albans which produced seven enclosures, at the centre of each of which was a main burial with grave goods surrounded by less imposing graves, all dated to the ®rst half of the ®rst century AD.21 It is hard to ®nd clear patterns other than a continuity of diversity under Roman rule, albeit that there was a slow decline over the early empire in furnishing of burials, as high status people adopted the Roman practice of above-ground monuments.22 This trend was continued into the early post-Roman period during the period of rapid Christianization. The fascinating site at Poundbury in Dorset produced, amongst the ordinary burials, six stone mausolea and four other ditched enclosures of the ®fth century. The Christian-themed painted plaster of mausoleum 8 was described as being of a particularly high standard.23 The wetness of the north-west means that organic burial remains are rare in soil burials from that region. There was a lively tradition of sarcophagus burial in Gaul, but, unfortunately for us, the contents of such inhumations 17

18

19 20 21

22

23

Le Testament, ed. Le Bohec, pp. 20±21; Prieur, La Mort, pp. 157±60; J.-C. Hatt, La tombe Gallo-Romaine (Paris, 1986), pp. 85±107. Toynbee, Death and Burial, ch. 3; J. Harries, `Death and the Dead in the Late Roman West', in Death in Towns: Urban Responses to the Dying and the Dead, 100±1600, ed. S. Bassett (Leicester, 1992), pp. 56±67 (p. 59). Prieur, La Mort, p. 27. Morris, Death-Ritual, pp. 31±69 (p. 61). I. M. Stead and V. Rigby, King Harry Lane, English Heritage Archaeological Reports 12 (London, 1989), pp. 80±6. R. Philpott, Burial Practices in Roman Britain: A Survey of Grave Treatment and Furnishing, AD 43±410, BAR British Series 219 (Oxford, 1991), p. 231; G. Halsall, Early Medieval Cemeteries: An Introduction to Burial Archaeology in the Post-Roman West, New Light on the Dark Ages 1 (Skelmorlie, 1995), pp. 6±7; J. Macdonald, `Pagan Religions and Burial Practices in Roman Britain', in Burial in the Roman World, ed. Reece, pp. 35±8. D. E. Farwell and T. L. Molleson, Excavations at Poundbury, 1966±80, vol. 2, The Cemeteries, Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society Monograph Series 11 (Dorchester, 1993), esp. pp. 135±40, by C. J. Sparey Green, on the painted plaster.

4

Treasure, Death and Display could easily be disturbed and have rarely survived. However, one such, recently discovered in Marseille, revealed a woman dressed in a decorated silk tunic.24 Nevertheless, inhumations in the preserving dry sands of the Near East con®rm for us that splendour was maintained in the context of late Roman burials. From such survivals from the later Roman period it is known that many people were buried in their best clothes or else with curtains stuffed round the body.25 Some surviving burial garments are splendidly decorated, with brightly coloured clavi showing scenes such as the life of Christ.26 These practices were sometimes encouraged by churchmen, for example by Epiphanius, fourth-century bishop of Salamis, who advised a church to donate a curtain for a pauper's burial.27 Other clerics, Ambrose for instance, protested about such forms of burial on grounds of unnecessary ostentation.28 It is clear that there was not a uniform line on this issue and that it should be seen as part of the on-going struggle within the Church over ostentation and the use of wealth in general, the consensus of which tended toward the de¯ection of wealth from individuals to the Church as an institution.29 This acted to encourage gifts which might otherwise have entered the grave to be given to the Church which would then provide liturgical commemoration. Epiphanius's action, by contrast, could be seen as an act of charitable benefaction by the Church to someone who had nothing. The picture in Byzantium ± from care for the dying, through washing, anointing and wrapping, then dressing and adorning and ®nally lying in state ± was one of considerable duties to the deceased, and `even the lowliest Byzantine classes made every effort to garb their dead in their ®nest and newest clothing'.30 In the early Byzantine elite funeral what mattered was the presence of the most dazzling items of the greatest value, as can be illustrated by quoting Corippus, who describes Justinian (d. 565) `crowned with a diadem and lying in a purple robe, a body which you might think was resting in sleep rather than in the harshness of death'.31 Such garments 24 25

26 27

28

29 30

31

Information from a personal communication with Bonnie Effros. E. D. Maguire, H. P. Maguire and M. J. Duncan-Flowers, Art and Holy Powers in the Early Christian House, Illinois Byzantine Studies 2 (Urbana, 1989), p. 139. L. Kybalova, Coptic Textiles (London, 1967), p. 34 and cat. no. 83. The Art of the Byzantine Empire, 312±1453: Sources and Documents, ed. and trans. C. Mango (Englewood Cliffs, 1972), p. 43. Ambrose of Milan, De Nabuthae, ed. and trans. F. Govi, Opere di Sant'Ambrogio 6, Opere esegetichi 6 (Milan, 1995), pp. 130±95; iii, `sericae vestes et auro intexta velamina, quibus diviti corpus ambitu, damna viventium, non subsidia defunctorum sunt'. D. Janes, God and Gold in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 153±60. J. Kyriakakis, `Byzantine Burial Customs: Care of the Deceased from Death to Prothesis', Greek Orthodox Theological Review 19 (1974), 37±72 (p. 49). Corippus, In laudem Iustini Augusti minoris, ed. and trans. A. Cameron (London, 1976), i. ll. 240±3 (p. 43): `diademate comptus purpureaque in veste iacens, requiescere somno credere quod posses, non duro funere, corpus' (for English, see p. 92), and Cameron's commentary, p. 140, stating that she had `no reason to doubt that the robe here described did actually exist'.

5

Dominic Janes frequently went beyond the lying in state and into the tomb. Grave-robbing was a well-recognized crime, as in the late sixth-century Palestine known to John Moschus. He relates the confession of a penitent thief to the abbot of the `Giant's monastery': `I heard of the death of the maiden daughter of someone of ®rst rank in this city; also, that she had been buried in many ®ne clothes in a sepulchre outside the city. Now I was already in the habit of doing the forbidden deed [of robbing graves]. I went to the sepulchre by night and began stripping the corpse. I stripped her of all she wore, not even leaving the innermost little garment.'32 The fact is clear, therefore, that the spending of money and the burying of precious goods was a feature of late classical civilization. The original quantity of late Roman grave treasures, such as jewellery, is an unresolved problem. The traditional view has been that burial with many artefacts other than dress items was a speci®cally early medieval and Germanic practice exempli®ed by object-rich cemeteries of the ReihengraÈber (row-grave) civilization. It is now understood that this society was a product of a disturbed and multi-ethnic post-Roman northern Gaul and Rhineland, where societal instability prompted the display of family status at moments of stress such as deaths.33 This tradition did not originate in Germania Libera where grave furnishing was much more modest. James has advanced three possible explanations for the rarity of surviving metal grave-goods in non-frontier areas of Gaul; the unwillingness of the aristocracy to take up `the non-Roman habit of luxury burial', the use of sarcophagi which were easily plunderable, and the re-use of cist and sarcophagus burials which `was probably more destructive of grave-goods than simple grave-robbing'.34 I would contend that, whilst the ®rst idea is incorrect, it has been the latter two factors which have led to the traditional conclusion that Gallo-Romans were buried simply dressed. The situation is unlikely to have been different in Britain, but this is obscured for us by the relative lack of the sarcophagi which would have preserved textiles. Bearing in mind this background, the world of Sutton Hoo is not remarkable in the style, but simply in the scale, of its grave furnishing, albeit that there was a move away from silk as a mark of status toward weaponry and jewellery, both of which were carefully regulated in the Roman world. In classical antiquity `the emperor was able to enjoy a high degree of authority over the use of jewellery as male status symbols . . . In the barbarian societies of the Migration Period, it may well have been open 32

33

34

John Moschus, The Spiritual Meadow, trans. J. Wortley, Cistercian Studies 139 (Kalamazoo, 1992), ch. 78 (p. 62). This took place at either Antioch or Jerusalem, p. 246. This view is usefully summarized by G. Halsall, `The Origins of the ReihengraÈberzivilisation: Forty Years On', in Fifth-Century Gaul: A Crisis of Identity, ed. J. Drinkwater and H. Elton (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 196±207. E. James, The Merovingian Archaeology of South-West Gaul, 2 vols., BAR Supplementary Series 25.1 and 2 (Oxford, 1977), I, 161±93 (I, 163).

6

Treasure, Death and Display to a far wider spectrum of individuals to compete in the use of jewellery as claims to prestige.'35 Post-Roman society was unstable and leaders needed to constantly af®rm their position through gift-giving, both to their followers, and to their kin both alive and when deceased.36 The transition of power was a dangerous moment, and one at which it was crucial to stress prestige and continuity. The display and interment of grave goods would better serve such an immediate purpose, than would the slow construction of stone monuments. Burials were placed in the ground in the world of Sutton Hoo and hence have frequently been preserved from robbing. Therefore, we can be ®rmer in our conclusions that in Anglo-Saxon England people were normally burnt or buried fully dressed, with the latter fashion rapidly eclipsing the former. Goods were either placed in or near the inhumed body, or, in the case of cremations, were more likely collected with the ashes from the pyre. There was great variety in dress and ornaments, many of which were utilitarian and had seen long service, suggesting that there was no single ceremonial style.37 Dress, in the hands of heirs, could be used to show membership of, or exclusion from, the community, to obscure lifetime tensions of power, or to stake a claim for the wealth and prestige of the individual and his or her heirs. Dress was related, it has been identi®ed, to personal identity, gender, social rank, age, familial status, and cultural af®liation.38 Even if there were no stone on the surface, burial mounds, thrown up swiftly by mass labour, could be used to express status.39 Sending wealth into the grave was a phenomenon of late antique society that ¯ourished in the post-Roman period.40 Two crucial factors can be identi®ed in the scale of display; one, the social identity of the individual and, two, the composition and size of the 35

36

37

38

39 40

D. Janes, `The Golden Clasp of the Late Roman State', Early Medieval Europe 5 (1996), 127± 53 (p. 151). Early medieval states can be understood in terms of a retinue surrounding the ruler, providing service in return for gifts (the Personenverbandstaat): H. Steuer, `Archaeology and History: Proposals on the Structure of the Merovingian Kingdom', in The Birth of Europe: Archaeology and Social Development in the First Millenium AD, ed. K. Randsborg, Analecta Romana Instituti Danici, Supplementum 16 (Rome, 1989), pp. 106±22. On treasure gifts in early medieval wills, D. Janes, `Treasure Bequest: Death and Gift in the Early Middle Ages', in The Community, the Family and the Saints: Patterns of Power in Early Medieval Europe, ed. J. Hill and M. Swan, International Medieval Research 4 (Turnhout, 1998), pp. 363±77. K. A. Brush, `Adorning the Dead: The Social Signi®cance of Early Anglo-Saxon Funerary Dress in England (Fifth to Sixth Centuries AD)', 2 vols. (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1993), I, 24. Brush, `Adorning the Dead', p. 25 with full references to case studies; G. Halsall, `Female Status and Power in Early Merovingian Central Austrasia: The Burial Evidence', Early Medieval Europe 5 (1996), 1±24, on gender, age and status. Shephard, `Social Identity'. P. Metcalf and R. Huntingdon, Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1991), p. 16.

7

Dominic Janes social unit recognizing responsibility.41 The style of display, as in the focus on grave-goods, may be related to the possibilities allowed by the economic system, the level of technology and the current fashion within the group. Roman styles of social life, for example, can be seen as a passing phase in the north-western provinces of the empire: for a while to join the evolving classical tradition was both practical and stylish. It is clear that grave goods were not placed in graves for primarily pagan religious reasons.42 After all, some of the grandest furnished burials from Francia came from the churches of Cologne and Saint Denis.43 Changes in style and fashion in burials do not neatly agree with ethnic groups, or religious change, as an interesting ®fth-century anecdote illustrates. That staunch upholder of traditional culture Sidonius, bishop of Clermont and one of the foremost literary ®gures in Gaul at that time, gave a description of grave-diggers desecrating the place where his grandfather, sometime praetorian prefect of Gaul under Constantius III and the ®rst Christian paterfamilias of that line, was buried. The diggers, because time had erased the burial mound, had thought the spot free of bodies. To avoid future mishaps the bishop ordered that an inscribed funeral slab be made.44 There is no evidence that the cemetery was reserved for the family or was even speci®cally Christian. People were just slotted in and expected to be respected by virtue of their burial mound as was commonly the case in the early Middle Ages. In this region of late antique Gaul it was clearly thought that the kin should protect the ancestral graves, and that a stone monument was a useful but not an essential addition. All generalizations must admit the basic fact of mortuary variability.45 Personal and family prejudice was an important factor. Nevertheless, I think there is one important over-riding issue in spurring on activity and expenditure in whatever form: in the nineteenth century and earlier the family did most of the work of washing, laying out the body, carrying it to the grave and burying it. Today we express our concern by paying someone else to do this. Expenditure excuses our need to participate. Both late Roman and early medieval society placed the orchestration of the funeral in the hands of the family. Conspicuous expenditure acted to single out the elite from the masses. Failure to make such an effort would clearly imply that the dead person had been of no signi®cance, or, in general, that the transition from life 41 42

43

44

45

L. R. Binford, An Archaeological Perspective (New York, 1972), pp. 225±6. Against the religion argument in general, P. J. Ucko, `Ethnography and the Archaeological Interpretation of Funerary Remains', World Archaeology 1 (1969), 262±77. J. Werner, `Frankish Royal Tombs in the Cathedrals of Cologne and Saint-Denis', Antiquity 38 (1964), 210±16; Gregory of Tours, Libri historiarum, ed. B. Krusch and W. Levison, MGH SRM 1.1 (Hanover, 1951), pp. 8 and 21. Sidonius Apollinaris, Epistola iii.12, in Poems and Letters, ed. and trans. W. B. Anderson, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge MA, 1936±65). J. M. O'Shea, Mortuary Variability: An Archaeological Investigation (Orlando, 1994).

8

Treasure, Death and Display to death was unimportant. It is and was simply not respectable to strip the corpse of everything.46 In pagan societies featuring a cult of ancestors these imperatives would have been strengthened.47 The use of expense on burials was a feature of Roman as well as of nonRoman society, and so, in late Antiquity, was the placing of precious goods in the grave at least in the sense of splendid dress for the corpse. The importance of such treasures may have been raised in the context of decreased spending on surface monuments, since the ritual act of interment would have then become more prominent. This factor may relate to the more restricted socio-geographical horizons of the early medieval aristocracy, in other words that the audience for funerary ritual was frequently more restricted than under the empire and the act correspondingly more directed to the immediate future of a smaller community. What mattered was preserving the fragile prestige of the family in the absence of Roman legal assurance of property. Subsequently, Christianization may have acted slowly to shift commemorative elaboration from the depositing of goods toward religious ceremonial. Nevertheless, the power of the grand funeral to signal prestige continued to be important for the many great and petty lords of the medieval period. So, if there is an imperative to spend time or money, there remains the issue of the form and style of commemoration. The fascinating case of FreÂnouville in Normandy is illuminating in that it appears to show continuity of burial from the third to the seventh centuries. What changes is the appearance of `Frankish' jewellery. Are we just seeing here an existing population taking up a new fashion?48 The crucial issue is perhaps one of the changing material badges of respectability and prestige, the nature of which would be determined by whatever group was de®ning the cultural forms widely seen as desirable. The illuminating distinction lies between those who were setting the trend and those who subsequently came to follow it. Meyer presents a picture of the epigraphic habit in the Roman empire as a phase during which there was a desire in the provinces to commemorate in a visible and Romanized way so as to signal possession of citizenship.49 Such inscriptions, like Frankish treasure jewellery, can be seen as a passing 46

47

48

49

J.-Ch. Picard, `PreÂsentation du theÁme du colloque', in L'inhumation privileÂgieÂe du IVe au VIIIe sieÁcle en occident, ed. Y. Duval and J.-Ch. Picard (Paris, 1986), pp. 9±12. M. Parker Pearson, `Mortuary Practices, Society and Ideology: An Ethnoarchaeological Study', in Symbolic and Structural Archaeology, ed. I. Hodder (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 89± 113. C. Pilet, La neÂcropole de FreÂnouville: eÂtude d'une population de la ®n du IIIe aÁ la ®n du VIIe sieÁcle, BAR International Series 83 (Oxford, 1980); R. Reece, My Roman Britain, Cotswold Studies 3 (Cirencester, 1988), p. 118; B. Effros, Body and Soul: The Evolution of Mortuary Ritual in Merovingian Gaul (forthcoming), ch. 5. Meyer, `The Epigraphic Habit'. The peak of inscriptional use occurs around the year AD 200 in areas beyond the core of the classical world (by contrast there is no such rise in, for example, Athens).

9

Dominic Janes fashion. The use of gold and silver personal ornaments came into fashion, with these being added to or replacing in importance the luxurious textiles of late Antiquity, a process that was perhaps promoted by the instability of land-holding at the end of Antiquity and by the ensuing focus on movable wealth as a basis for demonstrating prestige and buying loyalty at a time when trading links with the east were disrupted. Over time, society gradually stabilized and written charters re-established security of land tenure. Building traditions resumed and the social use of precious metal treasures, including disposal in graves, declined. These broad patterns, above all the on-going need to dress up the corpse in ®nery, can be discerned from amongst the diversity of burial forms over place and time from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. The end of the Roman peace in north-western Europe led to an enhanced prominence of movable goods as dominant markers of status, but this process should not be seen as a Germanic `barbarization' of a classical way of life, but as a fresh stage in the operation of western society.

10

2 `You Can't Take It with You': Testaments, Hoards and Moveable Wealth in Europe, 600±1100 Timothy Reuter

This essay will examine attitudes to the collection and dispersal of wealth in early medieval Europe and look at how these were applied in the light of the well-known distinction between landed wealth and moveable wealth. The distinction should not need much further explanation. It is evident that both the acquisition and the dispersal of landed wealth were subject to a very large number of restrictions in this period. It is suf®cient to quote only one of a very large number of texts bearing on the subject, Lex Saxonum: `All donations and sales made lawfully shall stand', but `no one is allowed to make a gift of his inheritance, except to the king or a church, so as to make his heir an ex-heir, unless compelled by hunger . . . but he may give or sell serfs' ± serfs standing here for moveable wealth, even though they were more closely associated with land and the ability to work it than any other form of moveable wealth, and even though their disposal also might be more restricted than that of other forms of moveable wealth.1 What is at issue for our purposes is the question of what restrictions existed in law and in thought and custom on how one might dispose of moveable wealth, and how far the point of death constituted a special point in such disposals. We may begin by looking at the treatment of these matters within two rather problematic abstractions: the Judaeo-Christian tradition and the `Germanic' (in bold-type inverted commas) tradition. The phrase `you can't take it with you' ± now perhaps slightly dated ± is a secularized and colloquial version of what the Judaeo-Christian tradition has always seen as a profound truth: the riches of this world are trivial and transitory compared with those of the next. Thesaurus, the Latin word for `treasure', occurs quite frequently in both the Old and New Testaments, and 1

Lex Saxonum, chs. 61±2, in Leges Saxonum und Lex Thuringorum, ed. C. von Schwerin, MGH Fontes 4 (Hanover, 1918), p. 31. On the distinction see also T. Charles-Edwards, `The Distinction Between Land and Moveable Wealth in Anglo-Saxon England', in Medieval Settlement: Continuity and Change, ed. P. H. Sawyer (London, 1976), pp. 180±7. On the special status of slaves/serfs as moveable property see H. Hoffmann, `Kirche und Sklaverei im fruÈheren Mittelalter', Deutsches Archiv fuÈr Erforschung des Mittelalters 42 (1986), 1±24; D. A. E. Pelteret, Slavery in Early Mediaeval England (Woodbridge, 1995), pp. 81±7.

11

Timothy Reuter in both it tends to have a positive connotation when used metaphorically but a negative one when used literally. Moses in the wilderness begs God: `open to them your treasure, the fount of living water' (Numbers 20. 6: the idea of rain as God's treasure which he gives to those who observe his law is echoed in Deuteronomy 28. 12). In the synoptics, Christ is made to say: give to the poor and you shall have treasure in heaven (Matthew 19. 21, Mark 10. 21, Luke 18. 21). By contrast, the treasures of wickedness shall avail nothing (Proverbs 10. 2), and treasures may even be a sign of wickedness, as when Isaiah says of the people of Jacob that they had become like the Philistines: `The land is ®lled with gold and silver, and there is no end of their treasure', which is not meant as praise (Isaiah 2. 7). They are also transient: the locus classicus is Psalm 39. 6: `Surely every man walketh in a vain shew: surely they are disquieted in vain: he heapeth up riches, and knoweth not who shall gather them.' The contrast is at its sharpest in the well-known passage in Matthew 6. 19±21: `Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.' It is often useful when looking at biblical ideas and precepts to examine how these were developed by the Fathers, since such things were rarely received unmediated by the minds of the early and high Middle Ages. As far as treasure and its cognates are concerned the changes do not amount to very much, but there are a few extensions of note. The Fathers made great use of one or two key passages, mostly metaphorical. The idea of laying up treasure in heaven is extended to give it an inverted, negative sense instead of a positive sense, following Romans 2. 5, a much-quoted passage: `treasurest up to thyself wrath against the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgement of God'.2 The positive, because metaphorical, sense of the term `treasure' is extended in particular to knowledge, drawing especially on Colossians 2. 3, `in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge'. By the ninth and tenth centuries it is also frequently used of the bodies of saints, possibly anticipating here the later-medieval notion of the treasury of merits.3 Perhaps most signi®cantly, the accumulated wealth, moveable and landed, of individual great churches came by the Carolingian period to be known as their treasure. Although the idea of a concentrated single physical location, a treasury, for the moveable part of this wealth was slow to develop, by the Carolingian period many of the larger churches had a person who was in charge of it, the `treasurer' (thesaurarius), not necessarily the same person as the camerarius responsible for the church's current account and investment 2

3

E.g. Ambrose, Expositio psalmi cxviii, ed. M. Petschenig, CSEL 62 (Vienna, 1913), i.16 and ii.29 (pp. 16 and 37). E.g. Walahfrid Strabo, Vita S. Galli, ch. 1, in PL 114, 977; Gerhard, Miracula S. Ulrici, ch. 1, ed. G. Waitz, MGH SS 4 (Hanover, 1841), p. 419.

12

Testaments, Hoards and Moveable Wealth policy.4 Except for the more positive attitude to accumulated church wealth which this implied, none of this amounted to any real change of course in the handling of biblical teachings on the subject. The basic distinction between dubious real treasure and valuable metaphorical treasure remained available within the rich Christian moral tradition about the proper attitude to amassed wealth available to the societies of early medieval Europe, societies whose Christianization was a slow and often interrupted process but where nevertheless the values offered by the Christian tradition had become increasingly internalized by the eleventh century.5 But this was not the only strand of thinking which in¯uenced people's behaviour. We know both from casual references in narrative sources and from such heroic poetry as has survived that wealth was amassed by the leaders of barbarian Europe and dispersed: we can take the ring-giving of Old English and Scandinavian poetry as read, but it should be pointed out that though the appropriate literary material has not, as it happens, survived on any scale from continental Europe, there are enough references to hoards and to gifts between leaders and followers to show that the same sorts of attitudes were found there as well. This kind of wealth was there to be used, either by being hoarded or by being dispersed. It is true that we have archaeological evidence for what might be interpreted precisely as attempts to take it with you ± and, incidentally, the extent of early-medieval grave robbery shows that the Matthaean warnings against laying up treasure where thieves could dig it up and abscond with it were not applicable only to the societies of the Near East.6 But there is no reason to interpret even the richest graves as containing anything more than symbolic hoards. The ritual hoarding associated with burial customs, before these were slowly transformed by Christianity in the seventh and eighth centuries, was just that. Neither Childeric's grave at Tournai,7 or Raedwald's (if that is whose it is) at Sutton Hoo,8 are burials which by any stretch of the 4

5 6

7

8

Royal treasurers are found from the sixth century onwards, but the ecclesiastical of®ce appears to be mentioned ®rst in the ninth century, e.g. Hincmar of Rheims, letter to the priests and deacons of Laon, in PL 126, 533; Paschasius Radbertus, Vita Adalhardi, ch. 16, in PL 120, 1517. See on this T. Reuter, `The Conversion of Europe', Early Medieval Europe, forthcoming. Discussed at the colloquium: Zum Grabfrevel in vor- und fruÈhgeschichtlicher Zeit: Untersuchungen zu Grabraub und ``haugbrot'' in Mittel- und Nordeuropa: Bericht uÈber ein Kolloquium der Kommission fuÈr die Altertumskunde Mittel- und Nordeuropas vom 14. bis 16. Februar 1977, ed. H. Jankuhn, H. Nehlsen and H. Roth, Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften in GoÈttingen. Philologisch-Historische Klasse 3 Folge 113 (GoÈttingen, 1978). See on this E. James, The Franks (Oxford, 1988), pp. 58±64 and the discussions of the recent follow-up excavations at Tournai in Revue ArcheÂologique de Picardie 3±4 (1988), 13±43. R. Bruce-Mitford, The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial, 3 vols. (London, 1975±83), I, ch. 10, against the sceptical approach of J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, `The Graves of Kings: An Historical Note on Some Archaeological Evidence', in his Early Medieval History (Oxford, 1975), pp. 39±59; and most recently The Age of Sutton Hoo: The Seventh Century in North-Western Europe, ed. M. O. H. Carver (Woodbridge, 1992).

13

Timothy Reuter imagination might be thought to contain the whole of the wealth their corpses had possessed while still alive. They are merely a selection from what was presumably a much larger whole.9 Nor is the accumulation of hoards punctuated by occasional moments of conspicuous dispersal ± in moments of political crisis, as part of the give and take of `international relations' including the exchange of embassies and brides ± speci®cally `Germanic', whatever that means. The Romans' aeraria had very similar functions, even if they were embedded in a much more complex system of taxation and public expenditure than those found in most of the barbarian kingdoms. There is no structural or functional difference between winning over the Praetorian Guard in the ®rst or second centuries by a distribution from the aerarium on the one hand, and Lothar I's taking a massive silver table from the palace at Aachen in 842 and having it broken up and distributed as hacksilver to his followers on the other.10 Equally, the massive transfers of wealth and precious objects which accompanied, for example, Merovingian marriages with Visigothic princesses used forms of display and dispersal which had already been familiar to the world of Antiquity. So did the diplomatic exchanges between the Christian rulers of northern Europe between 850 and 1050, accompanied as they were by gifts of secular valuables like horses and arms and heavenly ones like relics and costly manuscripts.11 On the one hand we thus have a tradition of contempt for earthly riches of all kinds, which was reinforced by a transformation of people's attitudes to death and the afterlife. However cautious we may choose to be about how effectively Christian values were internalized in the early Middle Ages and about what they meant to individuals, we have good hard evidence for this aspect of the transformation at least, in the way in which aristocrats and rulers all across Europe laid up their treasure in heaven by investing it in monasteries whose main purpose was to commemorate themselves and their ancestors. On the other hand, we have not only a quite different tradition lauding a different kind of dispersal of wealth, but also one which (as we know from ethnographic parallels) to be practised effectively meant largescale investment in acquiring and maintaining supplies of treasure and moveable wealth. From these starting-points we can arrive at three attitudinal strands, at least amongst the members of a small elite ± for reasons 9

10

11

For the purposes of my argument, the complex discussions amongst archaeologists and historians about whether, and how far, burial goods represent either wealth or social status can be ignored: see E. James, `Burial and Status in the Early Medieval West', TRHS 5th s. 39 (1989), 23±40. Annales de Saint-Bertin, ed. F. Grat, J. Vielliard and S. Clemencet, introd. L. Levillain (Paris, 1964), p. 41, s.a. 842. The best introduction to these exchanges is to be found in K. J. Leyser, `The Tenth Century in Byzantine-Western Relationships', in his Medieval Germany and its Neighbours, 900±1250 (London, 1982), pp. 103±37; and K. J. Leyser, `The Ottonians and Wessex', in his Communications and Power in Medieval Europe: The Carolingian and Ottonian Centuries, ed. T. Reuter (London, 1994), pp. 73±104.

14

Testaments, Hoards and Moveable Wealth which will become clear, we have little access to the behaviour and attitudes of people below the level of kings, princes, bishops and great magnates of the status of dux or subregulus or equivalent. The ®rst of these strands is political. Treasures are there to be amassed for conspicuous display, and at appropriate moments for conspicuous dispersal. Death, however, is not an appropriate moment, because the dispersal of treasure is part of what it means to be politically alive. The second is more social and unstructured: one disperses treasures before one's death, as part of the process of `making a good end'. The third is testamentary: treasures are to be dispersed after one's death, and the testament attempts to control this. I shall examine these in turn before trying to pull together some of the points which arise out of the analysis. Many of the references to treasure-hoards in the early Middle Ages imply some kind of institutionalization. Merovingian subkings like Sigebert III got a share of their father's hoard when they were ®rst established. Clearly there was a purely functional aspect to this: they were given a ¯oat, so to speak, to start up in business. But there is more to it than that: it was also part of what made them a king. The institutionalization is also visible in the symbolic dispersal of such treasures. When Charlemagne distributed Desiderius's treasure after 774, or the hoarded wealth of the Avar Hring after 795, or Charles the Bald accumulated treasures from the Italian kingdom in 875±6, there was more to this than the need to win and reward loyalty which I stressed in my 1985 article on `Plunder and Tribute'.12 The dispersal was also a symbolic dispersal of the power, and indeed the existence, of the conquered enemy, just as sharing out the hoards accumulated by dragons ritually stresses the end of the dragon's power and life. We have recently been reminded in the newspapers of the inferences to be drawn from the inventory of Henry VIII's possessions coupled with contemporary accounts of `state occasions': rooms rebuilt for each separate occasion rather like modern-day halls hosting party conferences, piled high with precious cloths and plate.13 Henry VIII may have been a nouveau riche, but he certainly did not invent this kind of thing: we can see its analogues in Notker's and Liudprand's accounts of the reception of ambassadors.14 I display, therefore I am. That such attitudes survived beyond the heroic age even in continental Europe can be seen from the references to state treasure or hoards in Widukind of Corvey's Deeds of the Saxons. In Widukind's account of the 12

13

14

T. Reuter, `Plunder and Tribute in the Carolingian Empire', TRHS 5th s. 35 (1985), 75±94; I would in any case accept the force of the criticisms of the thesis presented there made by J. L. Nelson, The Frankish World 750±900 (London, 1996), pp. xxviii±xxix and P. Fouracre, `Frankish Gaul to 814', in The New Cambridge Medieval History, 2: c. 700±c. 900, ed. R. McKitterick (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 85±109 (p. 107). See the front page story in The Guardian, 30 December 1996, on the inventory, now being edited for the Society of Antiquaries. K. J. Leyser, `Ends and Means in Liudprand of Cremona', in his Communications and Power, ed. Reuter, pp. 125±42.

15

Timothy Reuter Saxon recolonization of northern Germany in the sixth century he describes how Iring was sent by Irminfred to Thiadric `with a submissive message and all his treasures for the sake of peace and voluntary surrender'.15 That was in Saxony's heroic and legendary past, of course; but much the same language is used to describe the way in which Eberhard of Franconia submitted himself to Henry I: `he commended himself to him with all his treasures, he made peace, he achieved friendship', and though the word is not used, probably the same kind of submission is implied in the description of how the dukes Arnulf of Bavaria and Burchard of Suabia submitted to Henry shortly afterwards.16 On Henry's deathbed he designated his son Otto as king, `granting his other sons lands and treasures', much as, say, William the Conqueror did in 1086±7.17 Wichmann, moreover, the anti-hero of much of the third book, is described as taking up arms against his uncle, `calling him a thief of his paternal inheritance and a plunderer of his treasures'.18 What we are talking about here are hoards, accumulations of wealth which were both the product of great power and at the same time its symbol. As Karl Leyser pointed out, such accumulations were generally carried around with them by the great men of the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, and this not just because banking arrangements, so to speak, were primitive and insecure: the wealth was needed so that the great men could show themselves to be great men.19 The accumulation of wealth by churches seems to me to be talked about in the narrative sources of the period in much the same way. Thietmar of Merseburg describes on a number of occasions attempts to rob or otherwise despoil churches of their treasure; there is no real sense that this was a different kind of thing from the treasure which Henry II of Germany rather rashly had sent ahead of him on an expedition mounted against a rebellion, only to ®nd it captured by one of the rebel commanders.20 Equally, when Widukind describes Henry I's refusal to pay the Magyars the tribute claims, he makes him ask, in his set-piece speech before the battle of Riade, whether, after having had to ¯eece his noble followers to ®ll the Magyars' hoard (aerarium), he should now turn to the wealth of the church: `Ought I to 15

16

17 18

19

20

cum supplici legatione et omnibus suis thesauris . . . pro pace et spontanea deditione (Die Sachsengeschichte des Widukind von Korvei, ed. P. Hirsch and H.-E. Lohmann, MGH SRG 60 (Berlin, 1935), i.10 (p. 17)). seque cum omnibus thesauris illi tradidit, pacem fecit, amicitiam promeruit (Die Sachsengeschichte, ed. Hirsch and Lohmann, i.26 (p. 39); for Burchard and Arnulf see i.27 (pp. 39±40)). Die Sachsengeschichte, ed. Hirsch and Lohmann, i.41 (p. 60). Patruum exin arguere, paternae hereditatis raptorem dicere et suorum thesaurorum predonem vocare coepit (Die Sachsengeschichte, ed. Hirsch and Lohmann, iii.24 (p. 116)). K. J. Leyser, `Early Medieval Warfare', in his Communications and Power, ed. Reuter, pp. 29± 50 (pp. 34±5). Compare the accounts of church robbery in Thietmar, Die Chronik des Bischofs Thietmar von Merseburg, ed. R. Holtzmann, MGH SRG n.s. 9 (Berlin, 1935), iii.17 (p. 118), iv.66 (p. 208), v.12 (p. 234), vii.58 (p. 472) with that of Henry II's loss of his treasure, v.34 (p. 258).

16

Testaments, Hoards and Moveable Wealth take the treasure sancti®ed to divine service and give it to God's enemies for our redemption?'21 If treasures of the kind we have just been discussing were a symbolic representation of the `institutions' which owned and controlled them, whether these were kings, magnates or bishops, these men nevertheless had individual, `private' souls whose requirements pulled in a rather different direction. According to the twelfth-century Life of Bishop Meinwerk of Paderborn, Meinwerk enjoyed what social anthropologists might perhaps term a `joking relationship' with the Emperor Henry II: there is a story which has been quoted quite frequently about Henry getting a chaplain to alter the ponti®cal which Meinwerk was about to use, so that the text of a prayer was changed from praying for famulis et famulabus to mulis et mulabus, and then complaining bitterly to Meinwerk, after he had read the altered text without comment, that he was not employed to pray for the emperor's mules.22 Less well-known is the anecdote which follows: here the emperor caused Meinwerk to ®nd a scrap of parchment on which was written: `Bishop Meinwerk! Set your house in order, for you will die on the ®fth day!' The author of the Life makes Meinwerk's response to what he saw as a divine omen harmonize with the story of the labourers in the vineyard: he called his vicedominus to him and caused `everything which he possessed by way of money and divers foodstuffs' to be bestowed on the poor, retaining for himself hardly anything `except for a few poor garments for his burial'. Then, freed of all cares, he awaited the hour of his death, passing the time in sacri®ces, vigils and fasts, ®nally lying down in the crypt of his cathedral on the evening of the ®fth day to await his end. Naturally this did not come, and Meinwerk's suspicions were aroused by the emperor's congratulating him as a Lazarus raised from the dead. The story goes on to tell how the emperor and empress and all those aware of the practical joke did public penance in bare feet before the doors of the monastery, ®nally securing absolution from the bishop. Crucially also, the emperor `extended the imperial hand generously in manifold restitution of what had been dispersed in works of mercy.'23 Now we probably ought to be reluctant to accept this as literally true in the sense that an episode like this really took place more or less as described, to be preserved miraculously through oral transmission and recorded by Conrad of Abdinghof something like a century and a half later.24 The 21

22

23 24

Thesaurum diviinis of®ciis sancti®catum tollamne et dabo pro nostra redemptione Dei inimicis? (Die Sachsengeschichte, ed. Hirsch and Lohmann, i.38 (p. 55)). Das Leben des Bischofs Meinwerk von Paderborn, ed. F. Tenckhoff, MGH SRG 59 (Hanover, 1921), ch. 186 (p. 107). Leben des Bischofs Meinwerk, ed. Tenckhoff, ch. 187 (pp. 107±8). On the authorship and date of composition see T. Reuter, `Property Transactions and Social Relations Between Rulers, Bishops and Nobles in Early Eleventh-Century Saxony: The Evidence of the Vita Meinwerci', in Property and Power in the Early Middle Ages, ed. W. Davies and P. Fouracre (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 165±99 (p. 166 n. 5).

17

Timothy Reuter author is after all concerned to show how his hero ful®lled the role set out for bishops, and how he managed his relations with two important rulers, Henry II and Conrad II. But we may be quite willing to see in it an expression of a certain kind of expectation of those who were both wealthy and thought to be at or near the point of death. Here are two more examples of such behaviour. As Ulrich of Augsburg lay on his deathbed in 973, he summoned his camerarius to him and ordered him to lay out all his worldly goods, except for some minimal provision of equipment for the episcopal palace and a fur coat for his successor. It amounted, according to his hagiographer Gerhard, to a few shirts, seven or eight tablecloths, two cloaks and ten shillings in silver. `He gave the silver to the provost Gerhard to be divided amongst the poor; all the rest he ordered to be given to the clergy of the city.' He then ordered his vicedominus and vassals and servants to take all moveable wealth on his estates which was intended for his service and divide it into three parts, of which one was to be given to the priests and the poor while he still lived.25 This also might just about be dismissed as hagiographical topos (though if that is what it is, then it is remarkably laden with circumstantial detail); but in 869 Louis the German, according to the Mainz author of the relevant section of the Annals of Fulda, was lying at the city of Regensburg in Bavaria seriously ill, so much so that the doctors despaired of saving his life. Therefore he took all the gold and silver which could be found in his treasuries and distributed it among various monasteries and spent it upon the poor. For this he deserved to be cured by the heavenly Doctor, to whom he commended himself and all his possessions.26

This is a contemporary or near-contemporary account of Louis' behaviour; it serves to authenticate as plausible elements at least of the Meinwerk anecdote. Such behaviour, it seems to me, has a multiple function. Firstly, it reduces risk to the soul. The will of Rather of Verona begins by saying that any property which he held unjustly should be restored on his death,27 and there is no shortage of references to rulers and others ordering such restitutions on their deathbeds: Henry III did so, for example, as did William the Conqueror.28 Since in the last resort you could not know that everything you had 25

26 27

28

Gerhard, Vita Uodalrici episcopi Augustensis, ch. 26, in Lebensbeschreibungen einiger BischoÈfe des 10.±12. Jahrhunderts, ed. H. Kallfelz, AusgewaÈhlte Quellen zur deutschen Geschichte des Mittelalters 22 (Darmstadt, 1973), pp. 141±5. Annales Fuldenses, ed. F. Kurze, MGH SRG 7 (Hanover, 1891), p. 69. F. Weigle, `Urkunden und Akten zur Geschichte Rathers in Verona', Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken 29 (1939), 1±40 (p. 38). Berthold, Annales, ed. G. H. Pertz, MGH SS 5 (Hanover, 1844), p. 270; The Ecclesiastical History of Ordericus Vitalis, ed. M. Chibnall, 6 vols., Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, 1969± 80), vii.15 (IV, 91).

18

Testaments, Hoards and Moveable Wealth was possessed rightfully, and since unjust possession endangered your soul, it was safer to give it away, or at least to make the offer to do so, if you had time to do so before your end. Of course this applied primarily to landed possessions, but clearly it also extended to moveable wealth as well. Secondly, it ensures that the wealth you have accumulated will be spent in ways which help to assure the salvation of your soul. If you cause such a distribution to take place while you are still alive, you are making sure that it gets done. Who knows what will happen to your wealth once you are dead? `Surely, every man walketh in a vain shew: surely they are disquieted in vain: he heapeth up riches, and knoweth not who shall gather them.' It is worth noting also that behaviour like this was appropriate in a context where institutionality was still closely linked with the person for the time being in control of the institution. A twelfth- or thirteenth-century bishop or king who behaved like this might still have been given good marks by his biographer for suitably holy behaviour. But by that time there would be others around with claims: neither the members of a bishop's cathedral chapter nor his king would thank him for such a dispersal of moveable wealth, nor would the surviving members of the royal family thank a highmedieval king for throwing money at the problem of his soul. The best that could be managed, as society became more routinized and institutionalized, was a symbolic echo of the older practice of total dispersal. Even a highly charismatic ®gure like Hugh of Lincoln acknowledged this, as we hear in Adam of Eynsham's Life: Afterwards when his sickness increased he was advised to make his will, as was the custom, and answered, `I ®nd this practice recently adopted by ecclesiastics a burden,29 for upon my soul I have never possessed, nor do I possess anything of any kind which I did not consider to belong to the church over which I have been ruling and not to myself. However, to prevent the usual usurpations of the exchequer,30 any temporal goods left in my diocese after my death which might seem to be mine I leave to the Lord Jesus Christ for distribution to the needy.' He then summoned the dean and two of his archdeacons and commissioned them to supervise the distribution to the poor of whatever goods they found in his possession.31

29

30

31

This is slightly puzzling, since there are testaments from bishops well before Hugh's time. It may be that it was `recent' within the Anglo-Norman church, and directed against treasury con®scations, as Hugh implies. Somewhat later Richard of Chichester would go a stage further, instructing that the legacies made in his will should be paid for out of claims he still had against Henry III: Saint Richard of Chichester: The Sources for his Life, ed. D. L. Jones, Sussex Record Society 79 (Lewes, 1995), p. 69. Adam of Eynsham, The Life of St Hugh of Lincoln, ed. D. L. Douie and H. Farmer, 2 vols. (London, 1961±2), II, 186±7.

19

Timothy Reuter The passage from Hugh's Life already moves us on from last-minute disposal to preplanned disposal. Ideally, one should have enough time before one's death to set one's house in order and make a good end ± it is a commonplace that whereas we would now prefer to die suddenly without a preceding lengthy decline or illness, in the period we are talking about here such a death was not only feared, but was often taken as a sign of God's anger.32 The wicked are not offered time to repent, or reject it when they are offered it: this is a stock in trade of hagiographers, which long survived (think of the ®nal rencontre between statue and roue in Don Giovanni). Part of setting one's house in order lay precisely in making a will, and so one way of trying to exercise some control over how the treasures amassed during one's lifetime were used after one's death was the will or testament. As far as landed wealth is concerned it was not the only instrument at people's disposal, and in fact donations post obitum, that is, gifts which were to take effect on the donor's death, survive in very much larger numbers from early medieval Europe than do wills. But we can leave post obitum donations out of the reckoning here, because though people might perhaps make oral promises about giving particular items of treasure to individuals or churches, and later subsume these in the provisions of wills, they did not record them in post obitum instruments. These invariably concerned land, and they did not normally make any speci®c provisions about the moveable wealth associated with land (for example, estate inventories). If we want planned disposal of treasure, we need wills. The dif®culty here is that there is no comprehensive survey of the wills which have survived from the early Middle Ages. There is indeed an accessible corpus of Anglo-Saxon wills. There are thirty-nine tenth- and eleventh-century wills in Dorothy Whitelock's edition; besides this there are four pieces from the same period which she explicitly omitted as being wellknown and already edited, and about half-a-dozen ninth-century wills, as well as a handful of other pieces: Sawyer's catalogue has ®fty-six items under this heading altogether.33 This amounts to about 3% of all surviving Anglo-Saxon charter or charter-like texts with some claim to be thought genuine or at least not wholly faked. If this proportion had been repeated on the continent we would have hundreds, perhaps thousands of wills surviving from the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, but in fact the material surviving from the continent is not nearly so plentiful. There are perhaps a dozen Merovingian wills, which have been listed and discussed in a ®ne 32

33

H. Fuhrmann, `Vom ``schlimmen Tod'' oder wie das Mittelalter einen ``guten Tod'' È berall ist Mittelalter (Munich, 1996), pp. 205±24. herbeiwuÈnschte', in his U Anglo-Saxon Wills, ed. D. Whitelock, Cambridge Studies in English Legal History (Cambridge, 1930); most of the pre-tenth-century wills can be found in Select English Historical Documents of the Ninth and Tenth Centuries, ed. F. E. Harmer (Cambridge, 1914). P. H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and Bibliography (London, 1968), nos. 1482±539, provides a full survey.

20

Testaments, Hoards and Moveable Wealth article by Ulrich Nonn,34 and a very small number of will-like documents from early medieval Italy and Spain.35 These early medieval texts in the main concentrate on the disposition of land, and so are less relevant to us here. Birgit Kasten and Gozwin Spreckelmeyer have identi®ed thirteen texts from the eighth and ninth centuries.36 But there is ± to my knowledge ± no study at all of surviving testaments from the post-Carolingian Frankish world, and at present one is reduced to impressionistic guesswork. For example, wills do not appear to have been at all prominent in the deposits of documents surviving from east and west Francia in the post-Carolingian era, but the absence of any survey makes it hard to say how rare they are. There are some clues, however. Emily Tabuteau's very thorough study of eleventhcentury Norman land law makes no mention of either wills or testaments, though she has extensive discussions of donations post obitum.37 The highly document-based monographs by Barbara Rosenwein on Cluny's lands, by Stephen White on donations to monasteries in western France and by Constance Bouchard on the nobility and the Burgundian church also do not mention wills.38 Testaments from the Ottonian era are very rare. Brun of Cologne's will is preserved in Ruotger's Life, as we shall see, and other Ottonian and Salian vitae of bishops occasionally mention the making of wills in connection with the prelate's end, but that is still not a great deal to go on. What are the main characteristics of wills from this period? First, they are generally more concerned with disposition of landed property than of moveable wealth, and indeed a fair proportion of surviving wills make no mention of moveable wealth at all. Anglo-Saxon wills are a special case, because they very often specify a heriot, a grant of arms and horses to the testator's lord (i.e. the king), and indeed they frequently do so at the very

34

35

36

37 38

U. Nonn, `Merowingische Testamente: Studien zum Fortleben einer roÈmischen Urkundenform im Frankenreich', Archiv fuÈr Diplomatik 18 (1972), 1±129. For Visigothic wills see F. Fita, `Patrologia VisigoÂtica', BoletõÂn de la Real Academia de la Historia 49 (1906), 137±169 (pp. 155±7), and Formulae Visigothicae nos. 21, 22 and 26, in MGH Form., pp. 585±6 and 588; for early will-like texts from Italy see Codice Diplomatico Longobardo 1, ed. L. Schiaparelli, Fonti per la storia d'Italia 62 (Rome, 1929), no. 50, and J.O. TjaÈder, Die nichtliterarischen lateinischen Papyri Italiens aus der Zeit 445±700, 1: Papyri 1± 28 (Lund, 1955), nos. 4/5 and 6. I am grateful to my colleague Chris Wickham (Birmingham) for these references. G. Spreckelmeyer, `Zur rechtlichen Funktion mittelalterlicher Testamente', in Recht und Schrift im Mittelalter, ed. P. Classen (Sigmaringen, 1977), pp. 91±113; B. Kasten, `Erbrechtliche VerfuÈgungen des 8/9. Jahrhunderts', Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung fuÈr Rechtsgeschichte, germanistische Abteilung 107 (1990), 236±338. E. Z. Tabuteau, Transfers of Property in Eleventh-Century Norman Law (Chapel Hill, 1988). B. H. Rosenwein, To Be the Neighbor of St Peter: The Social Meaning of Cluny's Property, 909± 1049 (Ithaca, 1989); S. D. White, Custom, Kinship, and Gifts to Saints: The Laudatio Parentum in Western France, 1050±1150 (Chapel Hill, 1988); C. B. Bouchard, Sword, Miter and Cloister: Nobility and the Church in Burgundy, 980±1198 (Ithaca, 1987).

21

Timothy Reuter beginning of the document.39 If we ignore heriots, they correspond much more to the general continental pattern than they might otherwise appear to do. Second, where wills do mention moveable wealth, they show a de®nite tendency to list speci®c objects ± swords, cups and plate, valuable garments ± and to assign them to speci®c destinations, whether these be relatives or churches.40 Money, victuals and other non-individuated forms of wealth are mentioned even less frequently than speci®c items which we might class as treasure. Where money does crop up, it is often by implication to be realized by the sale of an estate, or of an object ± as in the case of Charlemagne's will as preserved by Einhard, for example, but also in a number of Anglo-Saxon wills.41 Finally, indiscriminate donations to `the poor' or to `churches', of the kind familiar from narrative sources, are rare in wills. Many of these points are neatly illustrated by Ruotger's account of Brun of Cologne's will. In Ruotger's narrative Brun's testament looks like a dispersal of the kind already mentioned: he alienated and dispersed all the things he possessed while still alive and in hope, and gave them to the poor; and what he had collected for the ordering of the outward appearance of the buildings of God's churches he divided up appropriately.42

But Ruotger also gives us the actual text of Brun's testament, and it reads quite differently: everything which we have acquired for the church from our private means . . . is to be gathered together by the oeconomus Poppo and carefully assessed. [There then follows a long list of speci®c items with speci®c destinations, e.g.] The golden cup, my seal-ring and the golden bowl in my own administration are to go to St Pantaleon, as well as the candelabra I use daily, a silver horse given to my by the archbishop of Mainz, ten highquality pallia, ten silver vessels from among the better ones, a hundred pounds for the completion of the monastery and three hundred pounds for the extension of the church, three tablecloths, three wall-hangings and as many bench-coverings and thirty cloths . . .43

There is no mention of a general dispersal to the poor in the whole of the will. The treasures recorded in it had been acquired from Brun's `private' means. Whatever we take that to imply precisely, this was why he was in a position 39

40

41

42 43

N. P. Brooks, `Arms, Status and Warfare in Late-Saxon England', in Ethelred the Unready, ed. D. Hill, BAR British Series 58 (Oxford, 1978), pp. 81±104. See the will of Brun of Cologne dealt with below, or that of the ñtheling Athelstan, in Anglo-Saxon Wills, ed. Whitelock, no. 20 (pp. 56±63). Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH SRG 25 (Hanover, 1911), ch. 33 (pp. 37±41): provision for sale of books and other items; Anglo-Saxon Wills, ed. Whitelock, e.g. nos. 26 (álfric, p. 72) and 31 (Thurstan, p. 80). Ruotger, Vita Brunonis, ch. 43, in Lebensbeschreibungen, ed. Kallfelz, p. 246. Ruotger, Vita Brunonis, ch. 49, in Lebensbeschreibungen, ed. Kallfelz, pp. 254±8.

22

Testaments, Hoards and Moveable Wealth to make testamentary provision for their dispersal. But once he had used his wealth to acquire items of this sort they were not only thesaurized but also institutionalized: they could not simply be freely dispersed or turned into liquid assets, but had become objects with an intermediate status between moveable wealth and landed wealth, and subject to at least some of the restrictions applying to the latter. Most of them went to churches endowed or founded by Brun, churches over which his successor would expect to retain some measure of control. We may now try to draw some conclusions from all this. In spite of what looks initially like a sharp contrast in the early Middle Ages between moveable wealth which could be freely disposed of and landed wealth which could not, it would seem that in practice most of those who controlled large amounts of moveable wealth held it in a sense in trust ± kings and great magnates for their heirs, bishops for their successors and their cathedral chapters. The pull of the Judaeo-Christian condemnation of wealth was felt, but it could only have limited application, because although thesaurized objects were still owned, they had changed from being mere `moveable wealth' to being something rather different. It is worth noting that the goods we are here concerned with fell into a category which is known from other sources as well, in particular from Carolingian legislation governing sales and the transfer of moveable property and its neo-Carolingian analogues from Anglo-Saxon England: horses, weapons, items of precious metal.44 They are what modern economists call `positional' goods; investment in them represents not mere investment in their utility, but also investment in their ability to represent status and power. Individuals' ability to divest themselves of these (and hence divest not only themselves but also the institutions they represented of status), even on the point of death, was limited. What this meant was that the problems for institutional continuity which the Judaeo-Christian imperative of repudiating wealth presented, whether the repudiation was during one's lifetime or in particular on the point of death, were met by the mental reservation that many kinds of wealth ± not only land, but treasure as well ± were in fact not fully owned by the individual. Even the seemingly liberated and liberating gesture of giving away moveable wealth (including manumitting slaves, which is a separate and complex issue on which I have not even tried to touch on here) seems to have been more restricted in practice than the generalizing accounts in narrative sources might at ®rst sight suggest, and what was distributed in this way often seems to have been mainly `non-positional' moveable wealth like food and money. Even then, it is clear that it was normally con®ned to the readily available surplus, and did not include everything which might be thought to come in to the category. Ulrich of Augsburg, it should be remembered, ordered his vicedominus and vassals and servants to take all 44

Reuter, `Plunder and Tribute', p. 85.

23

Timothy Reuter moveable wealth on his estates which was intended for his service and divide it into three parts, of which one was to be given to the priests and the poor while he still lived:45 only a third. Similarly, Theodred of London's will orders that the stock which is at Hoxne, which I have acquired there, be taken and divided into two parts, half for the minster, and half to be distributed for my soul. And as much as I found on that estate is to be left on it . . . [a provision repeated for Theodred's other estates at London, Wunemannedune, Sheen and Dengie].46

This makes obvious sense in practical terms, of course ± if such great testators had really been allowed to strip their estates of all moveable wealth, they could have left their successors a damnosa haereditas. But it also meant that the deathbed or post-deathbed distribution of one's wealth to the poor might often, if not invariably, be reduced to the same kind of symbolic gesture implicit in the ritual feeding of the poor by kings and bishops, where we know from accounts like that of Helgaud's life of Robert the Pious that there were often `professional' poor who were kept for precisely this function.47 Ritual dispersal in this sense was much more like the ritual hoarding of early medieval high-status graves than it appears at ®rst sight: each served ultimately to reinforce the continuing possession of wealth. As Annette Weiner puts it, to give is not only to give; it is also to emphasize what you do not give and still hold.48

45 46 47

48

See above, n. 25. Anglo-Saxon Wills, ed. Whitelock, no. 1 (p. 4). Helgaud of Fleury, Vie de Robert le Pieux, ed. and trans. R.-H. Bautier and G. Labory (Paris, 1965), ch. 21 (p. 104). A. B. Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving (Berkeley, 1992).

24

3 Burial as Poetry: The Context of Treasure in Anglo-Saxon Graves Martin Carver

INTRODUCTION

This is a paper about perceptions. It will focus mainly on the early English and what they intended by burying their dead in a certain manner, or on what we think they intended. And in order to tackle that most dif®cult task, I would like to examine some of our own attitudes to the richer burials, and the different kinds of value we ascribe to them. Using Sutton Hoo as an example, I will discuss three ways of rating the treasure that is found in Anglo-Saxon graves: as a deposit of bullion, as accoutrement signalling status or ethnicity and as a kind of self-expression in which belief, desire and anxiety fuse in a single creative outburst. This last, by way of analogy with the more visceral kinds of lyrical composition, I have termed `burial as poetry'.

PERCEPTIONS OF THE VALUE OF ANGLO-SAXON BURIAL FINDS IN MODERN ENGLAND

The ship-burial discovered under Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo in 1939 contained an assemblage which included objects of gold, silver, bronze, iron, wood, leather, textiles, feathers and fur, all of which were given to the British Museum by the landowner, Mrs Edith Pretty.1 `The Sutton Hoo treasure is in the British Museum,' we say, and invite our friends to visit it. Here the T word is being used to denote something generally rich and glittery, and Mound 1 is often described as `the richest burial ever found on British soil' or something similar, with the intended persuasion that, on any scale of wealth, this is a rich one. However richness is not suf®cient in itself to earn the epithet of treasure. Had the British Museum purchased the material in the antiquities market, which I am sure they would do only with considerable circumspection, or been left it by a benefactor without a stated provenance, it 1

R. Bruce-Mitford, The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial, 3 vols. (London, 1975±83) for the full description; M. O. H. Carver, Sutton Hoo: Burial Ground of Kings? (London, 1998) for a summary and new interpretation.

25

Martin Carver would no doubt be called `The Sutton Hoo Collection' or `The Pretty Collection'. A treasure should lie under the ground, where it can be properly guarded by dragons and rediscovered by the valiant, or the lucky. In this respect, that it is found underground, a burial assemblage would resemble a hoard, say like the 400 late Roman silver spoons ploughed up at Hoxne or the Ipswich gold torcs, hoiked out by a mechanical-digger driver and initially dumped by the road-side in the belief that they were bedsprings.2 But if both kinds of ®nd attract the thrill of precious metal brought to light until the current Treasure Act 1996 came into force, the law of England at least made a ®rm distinction between the two.3 If, as with a hoard, it was likely that the objects were buried to be retrieved later, then they were treasure trove and belonged to the crown. If on the other hand, they were buried to stay buried for ever, then they were not treasure at all, but the property of the landowner. This of course was the case with Sutton Hoo Mound 1, which is how the objects came to be in Mrs Pretty's gift. The rationale behind this strange and ancient law is now lost to us, but it might be inferred that at its heart lies a wish by the king of England to counter tax evasion: burial of one's capital assets, in a hoard, at a point committed to memory is a good way of confounding the tax gatherers, especially those of a new regime. The question of who owns rediscovered grave-goods is harder to explain, but here too there is a connection with tax. In Anglo-Saxon communities, grave goods were commonly deposited in the ®fth and sixth centuries, but by the seventh century, with the institution of kingship, and Christian kingship in particular, they are thought to have been commuted to taxation.4 The majority of Anglo-Saxons no longer deposited grave-goods but became liable for `grave-scot' instead, while the aristocracy or a privileged group of some kind (presumably tax-exempt) continued with the deposition of grave-goods until the mid-eighth century.5 It would be logical if ownership of the contents of burial mounds were deemed to belong 2

3 4

5

The Ipswich Gold Torcs were found in 1968 while cutting back land for new gardens. No trace of a burial was found at the site and the ®ve torcs were declared treasure trove. The digger-driver, Mr Tricker, who had taken the torcs directly to Ipswich Museum after he had washed them was awarded an ex-gratia payment of £45,000: E. Owles, `The Ipswich Gold Torcs', Antiquity 43 (1969), 208±12 (p. 208). See L. Webster, in this volume, p. 49. See M. Carver, `Kingship and Material Culture in Early Anglo-Saxon East Anglia', in The Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, ed. S. Bassett, Studies in the Early History of Britain (Leicester, 1989), pp. 141±58. In brief, the hypothesis advanced is that grave goods are used to proclaim membership of a `folk' in a tribal society; but when the tribe has formed into kingdoms, the identity is signalled only in the persons of the monarch and aristocracy to whom tax is paid. If the kingdom is Christian, the people who no longer deposit grave goods pay an equivalent tax to the Church in respect of burial, the `grave-scot'. H. Geake, The Use of Grave Goods in Conversion-Period England, c. 600±c. 850, BAR 261 (Oxford, 1997). Grave goods after c. 650 follow Roman and Byzantine models, and the author (p. 136) sees this as `the ®rst renaissance' and `evidence for a newly constructed pan-English neo-Classical identity'.

26

The Context of Treasure in Anglo-Saxon Graves to no one: grave-goods could have been respected as the pagan aristocracy's strategy for immortality. The Church, as the new supernatural authority, may have had a claim, but there is no evidence that it systematically pillaged the burials, although it would have known perfectly well what they were; perhaps it was superstitious about robbing earlier gods. However there is some evidence that by the thirteenth century6 ± and perhaps already in late Saxon times if we follow Sir George Hill ± it was the king himself who was accepted under English law as the owner (or protector?) of anything found in a burial mound, and could sanction digging for treasure, to the apparent bene®t of the landowner.7 After the Reformation, any remaining inhibitions seem to have been thrown to the wind and tomb-robbing ¯ourished. In a period traditionally associated with the de®ance of superstition, the emptying of burial mounds in Henry VIII's reign may have had as much to do with his claims on capital deposited to another authority, now to be systematically usurped. This is not actually in con¯ict with the law of treasure trove: so much that was reassigned at the Reformation, whether Church property or not, was privatized to the bene®t of royal supporters. It would be a natural decree (although we do not have it) if the new owners were deemed to be entitled to the contents of any burial mounds on their land, while hoards, being construed as tax evasion, were reserved to the monarch. This at least would help explain why of Sutton Hoo's eighteen burial mounds at least six, and probably all, were cut into by means of deep central shafts in the sixteenth century. By 1601 (as can be inferred from map evidence) virtually all the precious objects had been removed and the mounds had subsequently been ploughed. In the nineteenth century, the landowner systematically trenched a majority of the mounds, ®nding most of them already pillaged 6

7

In 1237 Henry III authorized his brother, the earl of Cornwall, to dig into Cornish barrows, and in 1324 Robert Beaupel received permission to dig speci®c barrows in Devon (probably the Chapman barrows near Challacombe) for treasure: B. Marsden, The Early Barrow Diggers (London, 1974), p. 2. By the sixteenth century, there is some reason to believe that the grave-goods in burial mounds were regarded as available to a landowner under licence from the king. In a letter of 30 September 1538 Thomas Toyser complains to Cromwell of `divers ill-doers who have digged for gold and treasure in his lordship of Bryghtwell, Suffolk. If he may have the king's licence to do so, he will not only save such goods and treasure as shall be found there to the king's use, but will the sooner come to the knowledge of these ill-doers': Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. J. Gairdner, 21 vols. (London, 1864±1932), XIII.2, 555. `There is no doubt that in England, at one time, treasure buried in barrows was regarded as the king's property . . . There is every reason for believing that the regality in respect of treasure buried in graves of any kind was accepted by Anglo-Saxon law.' The jury decided in the Sutton Hoo case that the public nature of the deposition at a funeral meant that it was not Treasure Trove, which must be `hidden in the earth or other private place': R. L. S. Bruce-Mitford (ed.), `A Note by Sir George Hill on the Sutton Hoo Treasure Trove Inquest', Antiquaries Journal 30 (1950), 67±8. But Hill does not explain how or when the king's right to the treasure in burial mounds became abrogated to the land owner.

27

The Context of Treasure in Anglo-Saxon Graves (Figure 1).8 These values, in which landowners were entitled to the proceeds of burial mounds, as to other resources on their land, were not modi®ed in this country until the Ancient Monuments Act of 1882, which claimed that in certain designated cases (the `scheduled monuments'), there was a deeper, more enduring asset to be protected, additional to buried treasure, that of knowledge to be won on behalf of people still unborn.9 In theory at least. When I came to attempt the transfer of Sutton Hoo from private to national ownership, a process which began in 1984, I soon discovered the weakness of negotiating for any value that could not be expressed in money. The new landowner was quite willing to part with the site in return for being exempted from £350,000 additional estate duty. But the Capital Transfer Tax Of®ce, while willing for the nation to accept the gift, required to be compensated with money from another source. Since any remaining treasure from the scheduled site had been bequeathed to the British Museum by the Pretty family under deed of covenant, an altrusitic benefactor would have to be found who was willing to put a price of £350,000 on the humps and bumps left by ploughed-out burial mounds. In those preLottery days, the ®rst candidate was the National Heritage Memorial Fund, and the task of evaluation was assigned to the district valuer, who, having tried various ratings on his list, decided that the piece was poor agricultural land, would make an indifferent football pitch owing to the strange undulations of its surface (might they be levelled?) and in view of the fact it was a scheduled monument, had very little development potential. He suggested £10,000, giving it the value appropriate to an unspeci®ed recreational area. The value of the site, in other words, would have been higher if it had been able to earn its own income and therefore had not needed the money. An unexcavated of®cially protected site is, on this scale of values `priceless' in the true sense, that is beyond price and actually worth nothing at all. This conundrum could be termed the Heritage Pricing Paradox. This disappointment was followed by an attempt to convert the graveyard into a capital sum by drawing on an analogy, in this case with the illuminated book of Hiberno-Saxon type. The illuminated book is counted as a source of knowledge and pleasure, but generally has no bullion value. All the same, it did have a price. The price of an Insular codex, made a century or so later in date than Sutton Hoo, had been calculated for insurance purposes by the Figure 1. The excavation of Mound 7 at Sutton Hoo in c.1860. A reconstruction by Victor Ambrus. (From Carver, Sutton Hoo; reproduced by kind permission of the British Museum Company) 8 9

Carver, Sutton Hoo, ch. 7. Strictly speaking the Ancient Monuments legislation created `monuments' rather than resources of knowledge; that is a `heritage' value cherished by government, rather than the global `research' value designed to bene®t the unborn, who have no votes and no money. See M. Carver, `On Archaeological Value', Antiquity 70 (1996), 45±56.

29

Martin Carver British Library which, during the 1980s, lent some of its masterpieces to an exhibition in Stockholm. Every burial mound, I claimed, was the equivalent investment, for an Anglo-Saxon, of making a codex like the Book of Durrow or the Durham Cassiodorus. And every unfurnished grave was the equivalent of a folio of vellum. Supposing there were twenty burial mounds and 500 graves (the number predicted by our site evaluation in 1986), the price of Sutton Hoo could then be computed at £7.5 million, not counting the more traditional `treasure' value which in any case was not on offer. This valuable site was available for the knock-down price of £350,000. It was obviously a bargain, but the National Heritage Memorial Fund were not impressed, and neither was the representative of our next port of call, the Getty Institute. Further complications ensued, because the state in its latest manifestation (the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission, otherwise English Heritage) did not actually want to own Sutton Hoo in any case. Even given the possibility that the earliest burial ground of English kings was an appropriate acquisition for a body calling itself `English Heritage', the new political circumstances of the 1980s invited caution. The site could not be cherished by the state merely as a reservoir of future knowledge ± it must generate suf®cient revenue for its own maintenance. It must pay its way. The situation was only saved by the National Trust and the Lottery: the former inspired by an enlightened view of assets (things which exist `for everyone, for ever', as its centenary motto said); the latter initially with enough money to place value on creative ideas and ®rm convictions without the inconvenience of testing them through the market or the ballot box. However, even this lucky conjuncture could not be seen as either general or enduring. The ethics of public access apart, owning an ancient monument is scarcely feasible nowadays without visitors, and to justify investment in one, the philanthropic redistributors of our era, including the Heritage Lottery Fund, require business plans which are overtly dependent on projected visitor ®gures. The spirit of the age is in favour of deregulation and letting the people choose through their votes or pockets. There is no political will in Britain to invest in an archaeological site on the back of untestable historic values, as opposed to `measurable' forecast earning power. Academic assessments are considered less gilt-edged than market predictions, although in truth both are equally speculative. It can be seen that the current perceptions of the Sutton Hoo treasure are rather varied. Certainly, an assumption that its value is `obvious' is unfounded. For some only the ®scal, for others only the abstract values have much meaning. If we have problems with own attempts at a consensus value for such a celebrated prize, how much can we assume about the values of such ritual depositions for the Anglo-Saxons?

30

The Context of Treasure in Anglo-Saxon Graves

THEORIES OF INTERPRETATION FOR ANGLO-SAXON BURIAL

We hope to assess the meaning of treasure in Anglo-Saxon graves through the sobriety of systematic scholarship. But sober or not, archaeological scholarship (at least) has changed its mind often about which aspects of a people's culture a grave represents. For some there has been no real problem in the interpretation of Sutton Hoo. The Mound 1 grave was rich, therefore it was the burial of a king. It is in East Anglia, therefore the king was a king of East Anglia. It dates around the early seventh century AD, therefore the grave is that of a king of East Anglia who died around then. We have a few to choose from, the most popular being H. M. Chadwick's original choice of Raedwald.10 This attractive conclusion has been challenged by historians as well as archaeologists, on the grounds that it does not explain what the ship-burial was doing there. We should leave aside those historians that deny Raedwald because they would rather have Raegenhere, Eorpwald, Sigebert, Athelhere or kings of Essex, because these count as non-explanations of the same kind.11 Equally unwilling to attempt interpretation are those empirical ®eld archaeologists, who will assert that Sutton Hoo Mound 1 only appears to be rich because it was intact: had other graves been as well preserved (the vast majority have been ri¯ed at some time or another) then it would not occupy such a prominent position in the literature. The assumption is that there may be lots of other Sutton Hoos still undiscovered or already discovered but unrecognized; for the present we can say only that this is how some of the Anglo-Saxons buried some of their dead, and no doubt they had their reasons. There are historians who share this comfortably negative position too. `What we have is not, cannot be, the result of an orderly effort to search out the graves of the powerful' says James Campbell in 1992. `It is a random collection of chance discoveries. Arguments based on the hopeful assumption that it [the collection presumably] may be something more must have feet of clay.'12 10 11

12

H. M. Chadwick, `Who was he?' Antiquity 14 (1940), 76±87. Raedwald: Chadwick, `Who was he?' and Bruce-Mitford, Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial, I, ch. 10; Sigebert: I. Wood, The Merovingian North Sea (Alsingas, 1983), p. 14; Eorpwald: I. Wood, `The Franks and Sutton Hoo', in People and Places in Northern Europe, 500±1600: Essays in Honour of Peter Hayes Sawyer, ed. I. Wood and N. Lund (Woodbridge, 1991), pp. 1±14 (p. 11); Raegenhere: B. Arrhenius, Review of Bruce-Mitford in Medieval Archaeology 22 (1978), 189±95; Athelhere (brother of Anna): F. M. Stenton, `The East Anglian Kings of the Seventh Century', in The Anglo-Saxons: Studies Presented to Bruce Dickins, ed. P. Clemoes (London, 1959), pp. 43±52; Seabert of Essex: M. Parker-Pearson, R. van de Noort and A. Woolf, `Three Men and a Boat: Sutton Hoo and the East Anglian Kingdom', AngloSaxon England 22 (1993), 27±50. J. Campbell, `The Impact of the Sutton Hoo Discovery on the Study of Anglo-Saxon History', in Voyage to the Other World: The Legacy of Sutton Hoo, ed. C. B. Kendall and P. S. Wells, Medieval Studies at Minnesota 5 (Minneapolis, 1992), pp. 79±101 (p. 96).

31

Martin Carver This cryptic statement is presumably intended to imply that archaeologists should not be permitted to argue from less than the total inheritance of the past, even if historians can. If archaeology is not `an expensive way of telling us what we already know' in Peter Sawyer's famous dictum, it can be an even more expensive way of telling us what we are not disposed to believe. Campbell's view of Sutton Hoo is as disparaging as a Londoner's view of the provinces: it might look rich to the gullible (and grateful) archaeologist, but for those in the know, it hardly scores. The coins, he remarks, would not suf®ce to buy one slave, or to provide suf®cient compensation for the removal of eighty toenails from toes other than the big toe.13 Much of Campbell's waggish critique serves to endorse a rather less bizarre paper by Wallace-Hadrill who pointed out very properly that on a general scale of capital assets, Mound 1 was not especially rich, citing in comparison the ®fty wagons of treasure that Chilperic was said to have sent off with his daughter when she went to marry in Spain, or the forty thousand pounds of gold alleged as the fortune of the Ostrogothic princess Amalasuntha.14 This is an important argument to which we will return, but we can note here that it is perfectly compatible with the interpretation of Sutton Hoo as the burial ground of kings. All it requires is the realization that grave goods do not represent capital assets and were never intended to. The coins in the purse, the gold ®ttings, and the cauldrons do not necessarily represent all, or indeed any of the dead man's possessions. `Those men,' says the Beowulf poet, `who dispense wisdom in the hall, worthies here below the heavens, were unable to say in truth who received that cargo,' but we can be reasonably sure that they were not despatching the totality of the deceased's estate.15 Archaeologists of the processualist persuasion, active in the discipline since the 1960s, have not assumed that any grave is absolutely rich just by looking at it. They interpret burial as part of a system or set of systems, which directly or indirectly re¯ect the structure of a community and its social relations. They may attempt to convince you that relative wealth can be measured, by ranking it in terms of the total investment required. Artifacts which are complex and lengthy to make, or which required materials imported over long distances (Figure 2), are clearly more `expensive' in the sense of the expended labour, than objects numerous and easy to make; together the grave goods amount to a statement of identity and rank.16 On 13 14

15

16

Campbell, `Impact', p. 88. J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, `The Graves of Kings: An Historical Note on Some Archaeological Evidence', in his Early Medieval History (Oxford, 1975), pp. 39±59. Beowulf, ll. 50±51, in Anglo-Saxon Poetry, ed. and trans. S. A. J. Bradley (London, 1982), p. 412. C. Arnold, `Wealth and Social Structure: A Matter of Life and Death', in Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries, ed. P. A. Rahtz, T. M. Dickinson and L. Watts, BAR 82 (Oxford, 1980), pp. 81± 142.

32

The Context of Treasure in Anglo-Saxon Graves

Figure 2. The catchment area for the grave-goods found in Mound 1 compared with the distribution of early Christian scriptoria (Carver/Hooper). (From Carver, Sutton Hoo; reproduced by kind permission of the British Museum Company)

33

Martin Carver this scale of values, Sutton Hoo Mound 1 scores high. That is, in the set of all known burials, Mound 1 is richer than most and even ®rst among its peers. However not even these archaeologists have claimed that it represents all the wealth of the individual being honoured. It is, however, a notion that, so to speak, dies hard. Campbell's paper was published in a book entitled Voyage to the Other World, and even in 1992 it was possible to ®nd serious people who believed that grave goods in some way represent the personal possessions of an individual, favourite things needed in the next world, and provisions for an imaginary journey. This sentimental view of burial is very dif®cult to sustain, not only in view of the evidence (a large number of people in the same culture do not have grave goods; does this mean they did not own anything?) but in view of the development of archaeological thought, which can never be the same again after the publication of Claude Levi-Strauss's Structural Anthropology.17 Archaeologists have claimed various of their approaches to interpretation as `structuralism', but the common idea that it has inspired is that material culture, like any other sort of culture, can be used actively and have a meaning beyond its apparent function. This is particularly obvious in the case of a grave, since bodies and grave goods were not absent-mindedly dropped into holes, like broken pottery into a rubbish pit. The dead do not bury themselves, the grave assemblage has to be chosen by someone else; and if chosen, it is constructed, and if constructed, it becomes a creative or an active assemblage intended to have meaning. The model of grave-goods as favourite things cannot be assumed, at least not for all people at all times. It was a short step from this to the realization, already long established in historical studies (especially medieval archaeology), that the meaning of a material culture varied with the place, time, environment, economy and ideology in which it was expressed, or in other words its context.18 Before ®nally taking leave of the old territory of the Anglo-Saxon archaeologist, and since my eventual destination is poetry, we should glance at the way that Sutton Hoo has been used by students of Old English literature for purposes of mutual support and interpretation. This need not be attempted at any length since it has been done so much better than I could do by Roberta Frank in her article `Beowulf and Sutton Hoo: the Odd Couple', a description of a ®fty year relationship of convenience and sin which is de®nitely for adults 17

18

C. Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. C. Jacobson and B. G. Scheopf (New York, 1963; originally published in French, 1958). It took prehistorians some time to realize the implications of evidence that people might structure their lives around beliefs rather than natural resources. For summaries of the theories, see J. D. Richards, The Signi®cance of Form and Decoration of Anglo-Saxon Cremation Urns, BAR 166 (Oxford, 1987) and AngloSaxon Cemeteries, ed. Rahtz, Dickinson and Watts, especially papers by Chapman, Arnold, Pader, Hodder. I. Hodder, Theory and Practice in Archaeology (London, 1992), chs. 2 and 3; M. O. H. Carver, `Digging for Ideas', Antiquity 63 (1989), 666±74.

34

The Context of Treasure in Anglo-Saxon Graves only.19 She explains that the prominence that both Sutton Hoo and Beowulf inevitably enjoy has attracted them to each other and comparisons and parallels drawn between them have become ever more forced. To those familiar with the variety of the early Middle Ages in Scandinavia, Britain and Europe, the connections between the two works are neither more nor less than those appropriate to statements in different media rei®ed in different periods but drawing on a similar mind-set. Ship-burial, which so evocatively connects Beowulf to Sutton Hoo, is a feature of this mind-set. More boldly, Sam Newton assumes that the Sutton Hoo ship-burials were sources for the composer(s) of Beowulf to draw on, and thus constructs an argument claiming East Anglia as its place of composition. The description of Scyld Sce®ng's ship-funeral in Beowulf is seen as an attempt `to explain the mythic origin and purpose of the Old English Royal rite of ship-funeral' and Newton suggests that ship funeral itself might be intended as a re-enactment of an origin myth.20 Few others would now be inclined to see the Beowulf poet as a nostalgic witness to the Sutton Hoo ship-burials, even at second, third or fourth hand, but there is still a detectable tendency in modern scholarship to assume that Sutton Hoo was the reality and Beowulf the evocation of the heroic age; that ship-burial was some pre-Christian norm which `survived' as a mindless old tradition. Christianity, in contrast, was the hot new idea which brought intelligence to the business of ideology and politics.21 I believe this to be a dangerous assumption: we must look at the Paganism of the seventh century as having just as much actuality as the Christianity of the same place and date. Paganism was not mindless or asleep, and as we shall see it was not `tradition' which fuelled it. It was having fresh ideas of its own which happened to be different to those of Christians. Just as the creation of the Book of Durrow in c. 680, or the writing down of Beowulf between the eighth century and the tenth had its context, so had ship-burial, and the same kind of forces drove the creation of each. Newton calls into service the practice of boat-burial to support his claim that Beowulf is a product of an early eighth-century `Danish' East Anglia; so perhaps a few facts about boat burial would be helpful to lead us back on to dry land. Boats are seen on Bronze Age Scandinavian rock art and boat-burial is known in Bronze Age Britain.22 Boat-burial next appears in Scandinavia on 19

20

21

22

R. Frank, `Beowulf and Sutton Hoo: The Odd Couple', in Voyage to the Other World, ed. Kendall and Wells, pp. 47±64. S. Newton, The Origins of Beowulf and the Pre-Viking Kingdom of East Anglia (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 133 and 137; and see H. R. E. Davidson, Gods and Myths of Northern Europe (Harmondsworth, 1964), p. 136, who says the Scyld Sce®ng passage `reads like an attempt to account for a funeral rite'. J. Hines, The Scandinavian Character of Anglian England in the Pre-Viking Period, BAR 124 (Oxford, 1984), gives the archaeological evidence for preViking contact between East Anglia and Scandinavia, particularly Norway. For a recent example, see R. Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe (London, 1997), p. 304: `Peoples who were not yet Christian posed no intellectual challenge.' For what follows, M. O. H. Carver, `Boat Burial in Britain: Ancient Custom or Political

35

Martin Carver Bornholm, where among 1,400 graves of the Roman Iron Age (AD 0±350), were about 45 (dateable between AD 100 and 250) which were identi®ed from the shape of stains in the sand as boat-graves.23 Bornholm is an island in the Baltic, and although now administratively part of Denmark, burial practice there can hardly be used as ancestral to East Anglia by association with the supposed migration to Britain of people from Jutland (now also part of Denmark but 300 miles away). In any case, Angles and Saxons were settled for some 200 years in Britain before they rediscovered their supposed propensity for burying people in boats. The earliest we have, like all the others in England, are in East Anglia, in this case at Snape, where two threemetre long furnished canoe-like boats have been recently excavated and dated, like Sutton Hoo to the early seventh century.24 The Snape cemetery had another burial, that of a ship, originally containing a person wearing a gold ring containing a Roman intaglio. The burial has been dated to the second half of the sixth century, but since it was excavated in 1862 and most of the grave goods have disappeared, it too may have been later in the sixth century or early in the seventh. At Sutton Hoo there are two ship burials, one placed over a chamber, one placed in a trench with a chamber amidships. They are close to each other in date, sharing the work of the same smith, and are dated to the early seventh century. Apart from a curious group of burials under boat-pieces at Caister-on-Sea, there are no more English boat-burials known as yet. In Scandinavia, after Bornholm the focus switches to MaÈlaren in Sweden, where the earliest boat-burials are at Vendel and ValsgaÈrde, and in Norway at Borre both of the seventh or eighth century. The one part of Scandinavia yet to produce a convincing group of boat-burials is Jutland, which hardly supports the case that the practice came over with the Angles, to be reborn in sixth-century East Anglia. Nevertheless, the pre-Viking practitioners are largely based in Scandinavian lands, and it is also in Scandinavia, now including Jutland, that boat-burials ¯ourish again in the Viking period.25 These sporadic outbreaks of boat-burial do not amount to a cultural sequence, in which a custom is supposedly transferred from one land to

23

24

25

Signal?' in The Ship as Symbol in Prehistoric and Medieval Scandinavia, ed. O. CrumlinPedersen and B. Munch Thye, Publications from the National Museum: Studies in Archaeology and History 1 (Copenhagen, 1995), pp. 111±24. O. Crumlin-Pedersen, `BaÊdgrave og GravbaÊde paÊ SlusegaÊrd', in SlusegaÊrdgravpladsen III: Gravformer og Gravskikke BaÊdgravene, ed. S. H. Andersen et al., Jysk Arkaeologisk Selskabs Skrifter 14.3 (Aarhus, 1991), pp. 93±248 (English, pp. 249±62). W. Filmer-Sankey and T. Pestell, Snape, Anglo-Saxon Cemetery: Excavations and Surveys, 1924±1991 (East Anglian Archaeology, forthcoming). M. MuÈller-Wille, `Boat-Graves in Northern Europe', International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 3 (1974), 187±204, lists 263 pre-Viking boat-burials in Scandinavia, and three in England. In the Viking period, boat-burial is found in the majority of lands settled by Vikings between 800 and 1100, including northern Scotland, the Scottish isles and the Isle of Man.

36

The Context of Treasure in Anglo-Saxon Graves another by migration, or even, in this case, by emulation. There are too many discontinuities, and the direction of in¯uence, as between England and the different parts of Scandinavia, is uncertain. From the present evidence we can assert only that boat-burial in England was not a `tradition'; it was introduced in the late sixth or early seventh century on a small scale in one small part of East Anglia. Its occurrence in Scandinavia seems to be similarly speci®c. The argument I attempted to assemble from this exiguous evidence is that the adoption of boat-burial is most easily explained as `rei®cation in context'.26 In other words, that it was done consciously and for a purpose where it was done, and was not needed where it was not done. In East Anglia it was not a lingering-on of previous practice: there was no comparable previous practice to linger on. It was innovative and unexpected, and its explanation must be sought not in far-fetched links with other lands and centuries, but in the context of its own time, East Anglia in the early seventh century. In tracking boat-burial to a people or a culture or even a religion, we are making the wrong assumptions. None of these things adequately explains its adoption. What then is the right assumption? If burial practice is not a practice at all, but a statement which can emerge at any time from a hidden mind-set, how shall we analyse it and discover its context? One answer may be this: treat burial as poetry. A grave is not simply a text, but a text with attitude, a text in¯ated with emotion. It is not the reality behind Beowulf, because a burial is itself not reality and is not meant to be; like poetry, it is a palimpsest of allusions, constructed in a certain time and place. But the allusions are so numerous and their interweft so complex, that the time and the place are the last things we can easily ascertain. It is the allusions themselves which must ®rst be studied. In brief, burial has a language, and until we can understand something of that language, we are bound to concentrate on the externals, and so spend fruitless days searching in someone else's cupboard for our context. The analogy to be drawn between burial and poetry is in the mind, in the way that people thought, not merely a re¯ection of a coincidence of interest. When Dorothy Whitelock says `the ceremonial giving of weapons and jewellery is a favourite subject of poetry' or `some surviving metalwork is handsome enough to tempt a poet to linger over its description', that is not quite it. We get nearer when she says that, in poetic description, there is no great attempt at a speci®c context: `no local peculiarities can be distinguished in the way men fought their battles or drank their mead'.27 This is the experience of Anglo-Saxon cemetery archaeologists too. Much of the content of the rich assemblages, all over the country, seems to be drawn from a common mind-set, rather than local preference. Some zonation is detectable, 26 27

Carver, `Boat Burial in Britain', esp. pp. 121±2. D. Whitelock, The Audience of Beowulf (Oxford, 1951), pp. 92 and 93.

37

Martin Carver but as with brooches of Anglian and Saxon type, they are closer to analogy with a language, an in¯ection or preferred words than real culture-zones. Within the common language, the range of burials is as great as the range of poetic utterance; some are scarcely more than garbled proverbs, some, such as the more meagrely furnished cremations, are impenetrably gnomic, and others are frustratingly repetitive clicheÂs of the warrior;28 but others ± and here Sutton Hoo comes into its own ± have all the power of the special composition for a special occasion. The richer, larger burial mounds are all high investments and all can be read as perorations in a theatre of death. Like poetry, the `vocabulary' of the burial assemblage is not only given to geographical roaming beyond its own culture zone, but even more inventive excursions in time, back to any period for which an object can be found and used as a stage prop. The anachronism of burial deposits, noted in heroic societies the world over and so often shrugged off as the hoarded loot of barbarians, can have as much meaning as the archaic in poetry, or in the art that later exercised the successor artisans to the full: making illuminated manuscripts. The meaning of a burial deposit and the meaning of literary treasure here coincide. Noting a distinction between the gold content which dominates (later) Anglo-Saxon poetic descriptions of treasure, and the silver which ®gures most prominently in contemporary prose and the actual work of metal-smiths, Elizabeth Tyler explains: `Treasure involves imaginative fantasy rooted in the archaic which becomes embedded in the inherited poetic diction.' Thus the material culture described in Beowulf, for example, derives from a world constructed by poetic convention, not a real one.29 I have tried to suggest that in a pre-literate society this argument can be extended to another kind of expression that is not so obviously poetic, but on closer inspection appears to have much in common with the composition of a poem; that is, the furnishing of a wealthy grave.

THE SUTTON HOO CEMETERY AND ITS INTERPRETATION

At this point, it is time to test to what extent our poetic analogy is valid. If we regard the Sutton Hoo burials as examples of self-expression not providing a reality for Anglo-Saxon poetry, but having all the same problems, how does that help their interpretation? Will we merely stay in the realm of myth and imagination, stirring and recycling unprovables, or will there be bene®ts for history and archaeology? What we need is the meaning that was intended by 28

29

H. HaÈrke, `Changing Symbols in a Changing Society: The Anglo-Saxon Weapon Burial Rite in the Seventh Century', in The Age of Sutton Hoo: The Seventh Century in NorthWestern Europe, ed. M. O. H. Carver (Woodbridge, 1992), pp. 149±66. E. M. Tyler, `Treasure and Convention in Old English Verse', Notes and Queries 241 (1996), 2±13 (pp. 11 and 13).

38

The Context of Treasure in Anglo-Saxon Graves burial, and who that meaning was intended for. A ®rst assumption here is that we are most likely to encounter the intentional in a grave the more resources have been expended upon it. In burial, as in other human enterprises, there will be a spectrum from the deliberately creative to the half-hearted and beyond. If there is any constructed message to detect, it will most likely emanate from the richest graves: Sutton Hoo is therefore a reasonable case to examine.30 Sutton Hoo, as we presently know it, was not a folk cemetery, but a cemetery newly founded in the early seventh century by a family or families who had an idea of themselves. The earliest burials were cremations placed in bronze containers and buried in pits under mounds (Mounds 3±7). Under Mound 14 a woman was buried in a richly-furnished chamber-grave and under Mound 17, in separate pits, were a young man and a horse. Two shipburials complete the known repertoire: a ship over a chamber under Mound 2 and a chamber in a ship beneath Mound 1. We can note that the furnishings of the graves were not things done in a corner, but were highly public events. In the case of the two ship-burials this was obviously so ± it would need more resources than the members of one family and their friends to bury a ninetyfoot-long ship under ground, while the pre-requisite for the cremations would be at the least a pyre on which the bodies of numerous animals were burnt.31 We already have therefore, a prima facie case for equating the burials with publicly attended theatrical events, and as such they would be appropriate to the use of stage props rather than just the private possessions of the dead, articles with a great variety of signi®cance and emotion for the onlookers. That is not to say, as we shall see, that there was no intimacy, since within the `palimpsest of allusions' there is room for the intimate too; the private and the public voices are both to be heard in the poem of the grave. The monument used to mark the burial was also designed to draw attention to itself: a large mound, situated in this case on the highest ground in the neighbourhood overlooking the Deben valley. Such mounds would form landmarks, visible from a ship leaving the tidal reaches and approaching the ®rst fordable stretches of the river, where there were landing places on both sides of the river. The mounds were memorials, and they were probably documents too: in the days before bookland, they have been seen as proof of land tenure, the view from the top being equated with the land inherited, an idea which would be possible to test. Our calculations from the quarry ditches have suggested that the larger mounds at Sutton Hoo were 3±3.5 metres high, giant structures visible for miles around in a landscape containing wooden buildings and ruined Roman 30 31

For what follows see Carver, Sutton Hoo, ch. 5. It would have been the animals on the pyre that most caught the eye: horses, sheep, pigs and red deer are some of the species whose charred bones survived to be found at Sutton Hoo: Research by Julie Bond, University of Bradford.

39

Martin Carver villas, an effective way to take possession and control of the members of a new kingdom.32 The use of mounds was not new to Anglo-Saxon England: cemeteries of small mounds are known in sixth-century Kent and suspected in East Anglia too. But the scale is new: it is in the late sixth and early seventh century that the large individual burial mound makes its appearance in England.33 If this is rooted in a tradition, it is a new and emphatic expression of one, attributed on the one hand to the emergence of kings or regional leaders and on the other to the provocation of the Christian mission.34 In the centre of the mound-cemetery and on its periphery were a number of unfurnished burials of individuals who had been executed by beheading or hanging, and physical evidence was also found for a two-post gallows. Radiocarbon dating of human remains and of one of the gallows-posts places these executions in the seventh to tenth century AD, allowing them to be seen as evidence for of®cial retribution by a Christian power at a place still regarded as being pagan.35 The Sutton Hoo theatre can therefore be argued as high status, pre-literate and employing a pagan rhetoric which was recognized in the Christian era that followed. Interestingly for our review of changing values, the mound burials were not only recognized, but respected. Each burial, with its rich furnishings, was central beneath its mound, and the cemetery as a whole remained a landmark and a place of execution for centuries. It could not be claimed that any attempt was made to disguise where the chambers lay. But unlike certain other parts of the world (the Valley of the Kings in Egypt springs to mind) the burial mounds at Sutton Hoo were not robbed within living memory of the mourners: not until a thousand years later in fact. From this it might be inferred that their value as message was more important than their value as buried treasure, and that this abstract value remained current into the Christian period. Only much later, at the time of the Reformation, was the substance of the message lost; the people in power had by then become deaf to the poetry and saw only the bullion. To test the poetry analogy further, I propose to concentrate on the two burials which were not disturbed, those under Mound 17 and under Mound 1, because in both cases we have a good idea, not only of the totality of what the grave contained, but of what happened at the funeral. Mound 17 covered the grave of a young man and his horse (Figure 3). The burial party had dug 32

33

34 35

M. O. H. Carver, `Sutton Hoo in Context', Settimane di studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull'Alto Medioevo 32 (1986), 77±123. J. F. A. Shepherd, `The Social Identity of the Individual in Isolated Barrows and Barrow Cemeteries in Anglo-Saxon England', in Space, Hierarchy and Society: Interdisciplinary Studies in Social Area Analysis, ed. B. C. Burnham and J. Kingsbury, BAR International Series 59 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 47±79; Carver, `Sutton Hoo in Context'; Carver, `Kingship and Material Culture'. Carver, `Sutton Hoo in Context', p. 89. Carver, Sutton Hoo, ch. 6.

40

The Context of Treasure in Anglo-Saxon Graves

Figure 3. A plan of the Mound 17 burial at Sutton Hoo. (From Carver, Sutton Hoo; reproduced by kind permission of the British Museum Company)

two holes side by side at the same time, so the spoil heaps were stacked apart. In one pit were laid two spears and shield which lay ¯at, boss uppermost. Next to this were placed a bucket, a cauldron, and then a bronze bowl and some lamb chops, the position of which show that they had been contained in a haversack. Then, at the west end, the harness, a network of straps belonging to a bridle connected by gilt-bronze disks and pendants, their surfaces busy with writhing animals, and a body harness with pendants of silver; upon this was placed the saddle, and on that a wooden tub of the kind from which a horse might eat his bran. The cof®n was lowered in position; in it lay the body of the young man with his sword and a purse containing a few trinkets. Then the soil was returned; but after only a few spadefulls, a comb was remembered and thrown in: it hit the cof®n and slid down on the north side to rest vertically. Then the horse, a stallion 41

Martin Carver 14.2 hands in height, was killed and placed in the adjacent pit, and this pit too back®lled. Here the few intimate references ± the trinkets, the comb ± are subsumed within the role-playing of a last performance. With his sword and shield and spears, his bravely ornamented horse, his bucket, pot and cauldron, his kitbag, his picnic and his bowl for gruel or scooping water from the crystal streams, this was a proper little Siegfried, ready to embark on a symbolic journey. One can almost hear the Wagnerian dawn breaking and birds calling in the endless forest of his future. These grave-goods, then, were selected, or composed, by the family to give the dead man an appropriate identity, for the edi®cation of the funeral guests and for the gods. Not necessarily his possessions, not necessarily his rank, not necessarily relating to his experience; a statement rather of what is felt about him in the eyes of onlookers and whoever is to meet him next. We say a statement, a signal, but these terms are too detached; it is more of a poem, in which the dream has more authority than the reality. In the Mound 1 ship-burial, on an altogether different scale and representing an investment several orders higher than that of Mound 17, a ship 27 metres long was placed in a trench about the same size with the aid of wooden rollers. Amidships a chamber, a solid plank-and-post building, was constructed to contain the funerary tableau. The chamber had a ¯oor which was covered with rugs. With the roof still off on the south side, the east wall was hung with cauldrons and a tub. A large cof®n was placed on the ¯oor. Inside it, the dead man lay with his feet to the east; in the space beyond his feet was a mailcoat and a pile of personal clothing: linen and wool garments, two pairs of shoes, tapes, garters; a cloak lay over the heap and on this a toilet set with burrwood bottles, knives, combs and so forth. After the lid was put on the cof®n, a yellow cloak, imported from Syria, was thrown over it. At the east end was placed the Anastasius dish with its burnt offerings. In the centre were the drinking horns and drinking bottles; at the west end were the helmet, a pile of twelve silver ®nger bowls, two spoons and a set of playing pieces. Only the west wall now remained to be furnished. Here a bunch of spears with the Coptic bowl in the `trophy' position was leant against the wall. A lyre in its beaver-skin bag hung on a nail. The standard stood against the wall, supported by an iron bracket. The shield on its rim leant against the wall; and to complete the tableau, the whetstone sceptre, supported vertically. A bucket and a lamp were placed on the north side (Figure 4). This tableau was no doubt on view for several days ± a lying in state never to be forgotten by those that saw it. What they saw was not a furnished chamber, in the sense that there was any furniture or room for visitors. It was a man equipped with parade costume and cauldrons, everything necessary to meet the ambassadorial obligations of the upper classes. Children watching then could have been told what each object was and the rightness of its 42

The Context of Treasure in Anglo-Saxon Graves inclusion, not necessarily receiving the same account twice. We, the visitors of a later age, must attempt to deconstruct the tableau without the bene®ts of fossilized memories from a millennium of pagandom. Inside the cof®n is the private zone of the man himself: his pillow, washing bowl, toiletries, linen (underpants) and shoes. But outside the cof®n is the public zone; the equipment for the major functions of an Anglo-Saxon pagan leader: ®ghting, feasting and doing deals. The equipment was made and then selected to represent the message or the mood of the day. The parade gear of gold and garnet has amazed but also puzzled those that see it: it is Roman, say some, looking at the helmet form and the baldric with its shoulder clasps; it is German, say others, looking at the style II animals, the wild boars and the dancing warriors. Of course it is both; the palimpsest of allusions extends to the most complex of the objects too. The sceptre has challenged us to place it in history and many have tried. For Enright it is royal, priestly, Celtic and phallic;36 but I feel its essence lies in a judicious mixture of signs. The whetstone is an emblem of chie¯y power, the sharpener of swords; the faces are those of Germanic gods or ancestors; the stag is a Celtic, British, beast; and the object as a whole is a sceptre in the Byzantine model. It is not a useful object at all, but a metaphor, a tangle of references; the product of a seventh-century `royal-emblem focus group'. An analogy might be found in the `linguist staffs' of West Africa, modern sceptres of authority which have their origins 300 years earlier in the seventeenth-century European gentleman's silver-topped walking cane. They are surmounted with a symbolic animal or proverbial scene in wood adorned with gold-leaf.37 This readiness to encounter, confront and dominate the leading ideas and controversial notions of the day extends throughout the insignia, and because of the emulation of Roman by Germanic and of Germanic by Romano-Celtic people, the references are not always easy to read. The most pagan Germanic aspects of a culture ®nd surprising pre-echoes in Rome. Iron standards, sceptres, rattles, bowls, spoons, platters and incense burners have already performed ritual tasks in Romano-British assemblages in East Anglia three centuries earlier.38 They have been `borrowed' back as metaphors of status. The entertainment provision includes cauldrons to feed the whole entourage of a medium sized court; but it also includes twelve ®nger bowls of the sort used in Roman and Byzantine circles to wash greasy ®ngers and honour the twelve apostles. Whoever the dead man might encounter in Valhalla, be it a British chief, an Irish sub-king, a Scandinavian adventurer, a Byzantine emperor or the Roman pope, he will give a good 36

37

38

M. J. Enright, `The Sutton Hoo Whetstone-Sceptre: A Study in Iconography and Cultural Milieu', Anglo-Saxon England 11 (1983), 119±34. T. F. Garrard, Gold of Africa: Jewellery and Ornaments from Ghana, CoÃte d'Ivoire, Mali and Senegal in the Collection of the Barbier-Mueller Museum (Geneva, 1989), p. 78. R. Hutton, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles (Oxford, 1991), p. 228.

43

Martin Carver

Figure 4. The ship burial in Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo. A reconstruction of the day of burial by Victor Ambrus. (From Carver, Sutton Hoo; reproduced by kind permission of the British Museum Company)

44

The Context of Treasure in Anglo-Saxon Graves

45

Martin Carver account of himself on behalf of the East Angles. Did the mourners and sponsors of this burial really have such an expectation? Did they believe in life after death? There is no necessity to assume they did. An expensive ship and its reusable cargo would hardly be sacri®ced only to satisfy family sentiment or to oblige a priestly mythology. This burial, like Mound 17, is a composition designed to impress and satisfy the living as well as the dead, something to be committed to memory and recounted to those that were not there. So much is, I believe, a reasonable deduction to be made from the character of the individual objects and the assemblage they comprise, provided that the basic premise is accepted: that the objects are selected for burial to reify a vision and not to re¯ect everyday life, culture or ethnicity. That is not to say that everyday life is not referred to; but it is not referred to directly. Can we say that the ritual is religious in the sense of a customary religious practice, a liturgy of belief? This seems unlikely; the Sutton Hoo burials are varied, lacking the repetitive orthodoxy by which some kind of customary regulation might be inferred. On the other hand, this variety (cremation, inhumation, horse-burial, chamber graves, ship-burial) is not easily explained as a group of orthodoxies sharing the same cemetery: burial rites chosen by families with a variety of loosely held religious beliefs, like a modern middle-class shopper. It seems more consistent to credit seventh-century society with a single ethos, but one which allowed a variety of expression. The relationship between gods and men was still direct, in that it had not been captured and regulated by priests; its vocabulary was both archaic and alive and its expression as liberal (or constrained) as its contemporary literature. The silver bowls and spoons have been seen as references to Christianity, and have given rise to the idea of `syncretism', in which the symbiosis of symbols is held to imply a mixture of accepted beliefs. In the case of Sutton Hoo, all the Christian iconography is carried on Byzantine silver-ware which is hardly surprising. But even where a collection of different symbols is more obviously lumped together, we are not entitled to draw the conclusion that the burial represents weak-headed or confused people. Tomb 2 at Ballana, a burial mound of the third to sixth century in post-imperial Nubia, contained a gold cross, a scarab, a gold-strip with a love-charm in corrupt Greek and three lead curses. This surely indicates the capture and subjugation of opposing symbols by a new overarching ritual: tomb-builders know what they are doing.39 39

Carver, `Sutton Hoo in Context', p. 100. A number of historians and archaeologists have expressed the view that burial is `syncretic'or at best unspeci®c: for example E. James, The Franks (Oxford, 1988), pp. 137±45. Fletcher, Conversion, pp. 125, 135, 370 and 373, suggests that pagan burial practice is largely driven by tradition tempered by confusion, but allows, p. 270, a more deliberately creative role to the composition of the Franks Casket. But a major furnished burial ought to be acknowledged as no less an intellectual achievement and investment than a small box.

46

The Context of Treasure in Anglo-Saxon Graves In sum, the burial rites at Sutton Hoo are deliberate and imaginative and cannot be viewed as the last gasp of customary pagan practice. Although many of the elements employed have been seen before, the principal investments ± cremation under a mound and ship-burial ± are new to Britain at this date. These are not re¯ections of tradition, but enormously expensive innovations, which must, therefore, carry the stamp of contemporary meaning. Sutton Hoo is unlikely to represent a particular religion, in the sense of a regulated belief; but all burial is liable to re¯ect ideology, and here the thinking may vary with the burial to allow expression to the hopes and fears of the people of the day. In this sense burial, or high status burial at least, opens a window on contemporary political thought.40 I accept that burial is constrained by economic access ± this is true of all material culture. But the composition of a furnished grave is not, it seems to me, dependant on the wealth or rank of the buried individual, but upon the intended message of the mourners. For that reason, I think poetry, not religion, or culture or status remains the appropriate analogue. So what are the poems about? The burial ground ®rst features cremations under mounds, then a horse burial, and then two ship-burials. There are executions around one mound (Mound 5) which begin with, or shortly after, the mound burials in the seventh century and continue to the tenth. The mound-burials speak of an aristocracy, and probably of royalty. They refer to Scandinavia, and ally themselves with its ideology in the burial rites employed. They acknowledge Roman, Frankish and Byzantine power, but not in a subservient manner. `We are autonomous, maritime, pagan, enterprising and heroic,' they seem to say, `we reject the imperialism of Christian France and its over-regulated over-centralized antiquated European union.' The context of Sutton Hoo goes a long way to explaining such a message. At about the time burial began there, Kent, East Anglia's southern neighbour, had ®nally succumbed to domination by Christian France, and in 597 Augustine was admitted to begin the campaign of Christian imperialism in earnest. The East Angles do not seem to have had kings much before the late sixth century, and it is more than likely that they acquired them in reaction to the dynastic power and predatory agenda which Christianity put into the hands of their neighbours. The `pagan' kingdom is not a very well documented social organization, and if East Anglia wished to become one, it follows that much of the ambassadorial paraphernalia would need to be invented. The East Angles were allied in interests and in descent to the peoples of Scandinavia and northern Germany, who had resisted three centuries of Roman imperialism. It is hardly a surprise that in these circumstances it is mainly the characteristics of Scandinavia that were 40

È berlegungen zur Bedeutung angelsaÈsischer GrabhuÈgel', in Studien zur M. O. H. Carver, `U ArchaÈologie des Ostseeraumes von der Eisenzeit zum Mittelalter: Festschift fuÈr Michael MuÈllerWille, ed. A Wesse (NeumuÈnster, 1998), pp. 259±68.

47

Martin Carver being evoked to signal the ideology and allegiance of the beleaguered kingdom of East Anglia.41 At least that's my story. To read the burials of early medieval England is to see through a glass darkly. In different circumstances their treasure glints through to us as bullion, insignia or poetry, these three; but the greatest of these is poetry. Once the analogy is accepted, the rich Anglo-Saxon grave becomes eligible to interpretations as varied, tantalizing and sophisticated as any elegy in a country churchyard.42

41 42

Carver, `Kingship and Material Culture'; Wood, `The Franks and Sutton Hoo'. I would like to thank Elizabeth Tyler and Leslie Webster for their helpful comments.

48

4 Ideal and Reality: Versions of Treasure in the Early Anglo-Saxon World Leslie Webster

`Treasure': the word carries a seductive and dangerous semantic freight, and never more so than now perhaps, since the new Treasure Act 1996 came into force, enabling artefacts with as little as 10% gold or silver content to be enfolded within its generous embrace ± not to mention pots and chests and all manner of other more mundane objects that might be associated with ®nds of precious metal items.1 This is the legal de®nition, and a very helpful one it is; but of course `treasure' holds many other meanings, both symbolic and concrete. The museum curator's notion of treasure inevitably differs in a number of respects from the statutory de®nition ± and for the journalist or metal detectorist it may be something else again. One could go on; but it is obvious enough that, even within the orbit of current usage, the concept of treasure is no simple, unitary thing. And what is true for us today is equally true of the early medieval period: `treasure' ± earthly or divine, real or symbolic ± may embody many things, and comes in many guises. In this paper, the intention is to examine concepts of treasure among the early Anglo-Saxons, focusing primarily on the archaeological evidence from the ®fth to seventh centuries. I have deliberately excluded consideration of the post-seventh-century archaeological evidence, chie¯y to keep the subject within manageable bounds. But there are also very clear distinctions between the nature of earlier and later Anglo-Saxon treasure ± in material, in deposition circumstances, in the survival of evidence, and also in cultural and social function ± which combine to make the period around 700 a 1

The Treasure Act 1996 replaces the common law of treasure trove in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Under the old law, to be declared treasure trove, and be the property of the crown, an object had to pass three tests: it had to be made substantially of gold or silver, it had to have been deliberately hidden with the intention of recovery, and its owner or his heirs had to be unknown. The new Act removes the need to establish that objects were hidden with the intention of being recovered; it sets out the precious metal content required for a ®nd to qualify as treasure; and it extends the de®nition of treasure to include other objects found in archaeological association with ®nds of treasure. Thus, under the new law, the entire contents of Sutton Hoo Mound 1 would have quali®ed as treasure (see M. O. H. Carver, in this volume, p. 26). A booklet setting out the provisions of the Treasure Act 1996, and the Code of Practice for England and Wales, is available from the DCMS, 2±4 Cockspur Street, London SW1 5DH.

49

Leslie Webster convenient cut-off point. However, the paper concludes with a brief consideration of the relationship of the Anglo-Saxon ideas about treasure as preserved in the archaeological record to what is sometimes assumed to be their literary equivalent in Beowulf, so often invoked as an icon of early Anglo-Saxon treasure culture. For the continental early Germanic successors to Roman imperium, the written sources give abundant evidence of one of the primary functions of treasure in the early medieval period: as an instrument, both practical and symbolic, of royal power.2 Capture and possession of land was one thing, but in an essentially non-urban culture of warrior aristocracy, territory could only be maintained by the getting and giving of treasure, chie¯y through seizure of booty, the imposition of tribute, the receipt of subsidies and exchange of gifts; treasure that in turn was liberally redistributed to ensure the loyalty of followers, and had therefore constantly to be replenished. A king lived by treasure; and not just those northern barbarians still living beyond the limes, but even those who, like the Franks and Ostrogoths, had settled in Roman territory and operated to an extent within the continuations of the ®scal, religious and administrative infrastructure of the former imperium, collecting revenue from estates and taxes, and even, like Theoderic the Ostrogoth, adopting Roman title and custom. The pages of Gregory of Tours, for example, testify over and over to the fabulous quantities of treasure that passed through contemporary and near-contemporary Merovingian hands. When the emperor Anastasius conferred the title of consul on Clovis in 508 the king rode through the streets of Tours dressed in a purple tunic and military cloak and crowned with a diadem, showering gold and silver coins among the people.3 Brunhild, Sigebert's widow, had a gem-studded gold salver of colossal size made as a gift to the Visigothic king, Recared;4 she is elsewhere recorded as having given a silver missorium weighing thirty-seven pounds to the church of St Germain d'Auxerre, bearing scenes from the history of Aeneas with a Greek inscription, and the name of the ®fth-century Visigothic king Thorismund.5 Among the diplomatic gifts brought back by the delegation sent by Chilperic I to the Byzantine emperor in 581 ± or rather among the many precious gifts salvaged from the homecoming shipwreck ± were many gold medallions of one pound each, bearing the emperor's image 2

3

4 5

M. Hardt, `Royal Treasures and Representations in the Early Middle Ages', in Strategies of Distinction: The Construction of Ethnic Communities, 300±800, ed. W. Pohl with H. Reimnitz (Leiden, 1998), pp. 255±80. Gregory of Tours, Libri historiarum, ed. B. Krusch and W. Levison, MGH SRM 1.1 (Hanover, 1951), ii.38. LH ix.28. Cited in The Fourth Book of the Chronicle of Fredegar with its Continuations, ed. and trans. J. M. Wallace-Hadrill (London, 1960), p. 62 fn. 2: missorium qui Thorosmodi nomen scriptum habet; pensat libras 37; habet in se historiam Eneae cum litteris Grecis . . .

50

Versions of Treasure in the Early Anglo-Saxon World and the potent inscription, GLORIA ROMANORUM.6 In 584, when Chilperic's daughter Rigunth was sent off to be married to the Visigothic king, she was provided with an enormous dowry of gold, silver and other precious things, ®lling ®fty carts. Shortly before, Childebert II had received a payment of 50,000 gold solidi from Maurice Tiberius, to secure Frankish intervention against the Lombards.7 As late as 631, we hear how, in order to secure Dagobert's support in his claim to the Visigothic throne, King Sisenand promised him a fabulous gold dish weighing 500 pounds, which had entered the Gothic treasury as a gift from the consul Aetius to King Thorismund, presumably after the battle of the Catalaunian Fields in 451.8 Despite Dagobert's effective intervention, the Goths obstinately refused to hand over the dish, and in the end Dagobert had to make do with a mere 200,000 gold solidi instead. In all of this, and in other such documentary accounts, the sense is that of super-abundant treasure endlessly circulating, never resting long in the royal chest. The archaeological perception of treasure is, on the other hand, very different; here it is encountered in the ultimate state of immobility ± in the grave or in the buried hoard. In contexts such as these, particular conditions have governed the nature of the objects deliberately taken out of circulation for these special purposes; what survives in the record as we encounter it is thus by no means representative of treasure as circulated. We can scarcely begin to understand the dense context of intent which must have enveloped such events, yet it is of course above all in burial contexts that the symbolic, as opposed to practical, functions of treasure, are glimpsed most clearly ± an aspect largely absent from the documentary sources. One revealing exception, however, is the account given by Jordanes of the burial of Attila: In the secrecy of night, they buried his body in the earth. They bound his cof®ns, the ®rst with gold, the second with silver, and the third with the strength of iron, showing by this means that these three things suited the mightiest of kings; iron because he subdued the nations, gold and silver because he received the honours of both empires. They also added the arms of freemen won in the ®ght, trappings of rare worth, sparkling with various gems, and ornaments of all sorts whereby princely state is maintained.9

No matter that this description is not a strictly factual account of an event; it speaks a truth that made sense to its audience. The burial's secrecy was presumably to guard against despoliation;10 but Jordanes' account is at pains 6 7 8 9

10

LH vi.2. LH vi.45 and 42; see Stafford, in this volume. Fredegar, Fourth Book, ed. and trans. Wallace-Hadrill, iv.73. Jordanes, Getica, in Iordanis Romana et Getica, ed. T. Mommsen, MGH AA 5.1 (Berlin, 1882), xlix.258. A major concern in the period, as the many Germanic burial sites robbed in antiquity testify.

51

Leslie Webster to show that its contents (real or imagined) delivered a carefully constructed and wholly public message about how `princely state' is maintained by ®ghting, tribute and treasure. This is precisely what we see in the burial of the Merovingian king, Childeric, at Tournai in 481/2; he is presented at once both as Roman general and Frankish warrior king, accompanied by a purse containing 300 Roman gold and silver coins, richly ornamented weapons, gold-ornamented horse trappings and personal jewellery and insignia of the ®nest quality.11 We know now, from more recent excavations in the vicinity, that he may also have been surrounded by the slaughtered remains of his war-horses.12 This is the warrior king, successor to Roman power, whose princely state is indeed maintained by ornaments of all sorts. His descendants knew all about this, too; Gregory of Tours gives a telling ®rst-hand account of being shown by Chilperic I a fabulous dish of gold, encrusted with gems and weighing 50 pounds. `I have had this designed for the greater glory and renown of the Frankish people', announced the king; `if it is granted to me to live, I propose to have other objects made.'13 This is most certainly GLORIA FRANCORUM; the authentic sound of regal pomp and circumstance, which has its own familiar echo in Anglo-Saxon burial ritual, addressed below. The third- to ®fth-century extensive gold hoards of northern Europe, especially from Scandinavia, give a graphic indication of the astonishing wealth that was reaching the northern tribes beyond the limes in the later years of the empire. Most of it arrived there in the form of coin and medallions, as gifts, payments and subsidies from Rome; bribes to keep restive barbarians quiet; booty, trade, and payment for imperial military service.14 And as the contemporary accounts of fabulous Merovingian treasures suggest, equivalent wealth was circulating in the Germanic successor states to the south. But there are obvious differences in the nature of ®fthand sixth-century treasure between the regions, which are clearly dependent on whether the territory lay within or beyond the limes. Beyond, treasure consists of imperial coin or medallions, often converted into bullion or native jewellery; and gold and silver hoards ± of whatever nature ± are more frequent. Within the former empire, treasure hoards where they survive 11

12

13 14

J. Chi¯et, Anastasis Childerici I Francorum regis, sive thesaurus sepulchralis Tornaci Nerviorum effossus et commentario illustratus (Antwerp, 1655); Hardt, `Royal Treasures', pp. 266±71. R. Brulet, `La seÂpulture du roi ChildeÂric aÁ Tournai et le site funeÂraire', in La noblesse Romaine et les chefs barbares du IIIe au VIIe sieÁcle, ed. F. Vallet and M. Kazanski, Tome IX des MeÂmoires publieÂes par l'Association FrancËaise de l'ArcheÂologie MeÂrovingienne (SaintGermain-en-Laye, 1995), pp. 309±26. LH vi.2; compare Stafford, in this volume, p. 70. M. Axboe and A. Kromann, `DN ODINN P F AUC? Germanic Imperial Portraits on Scandinavian Gold Bracteates', in Ancient Portraiture: Image and Message, ed. T. FischerHansen, Acta Hyperborea 4 (Copenhagen, 1992), pp. 271±305. These grand, perhaps often ritual, deposits of what we must imagine were surpluses paradoxically reveal that much of this fabulous wealth functioned outside the social and economic system of gift-giving.

52

Versions of Treasure in the Early Anglo-Saxon World (such treasure being far more frequently recorded than found) usually consist of Roman or Byzantine plate and coins; although the evidence from many high-status burials, including Childeric's grave, clearly indicates that Germanic jewellery and magni®cent weapons could form a signi®cant element of treasure.15 Against such a backdrop, where does Anglo-Saxon England, within former imperial territory, but always something of a peripheral zone, ®t in to the picture? An obvious key factor in treasure culture must be access to sources of gold and silver, whether late Roman or Byzantine solidi or Visigothic plate. We can see the visible effects of Roman subsidies in the great fourth- to sixth-century Swedish and Danish gold deposits, and the way in which gold continued to percolate through these cultures in the succeeding years. Likewise, the wealth of Merovingian kings, fuelled by Byzantine solidi and Visigothic booty, was disseminated down the line to become visible in the rich material culture of the Neustrian and Austrasian Franks; only after the imperial supplies of solidi dried up in Dagobert's reign, do we see the beginning of the shift to a silver-based economy, which was to dominate western Europe from the eighth century onwards. But in Britain, the situation was evidently rather different. Britain's insularity, its peripheral situation, its relatively early severance from imperial administrative control, and its lack of interest to the Eastern Empire, drastically reduced the treasure-gaining options for Anglo-Saxon kings ± for much of the ®fth and sixth centuries, it appears that access to fresh supplies of gold and silver was very limited. For a while, Roman silver and gold was still available, and probably in some quantity: the great treasures of the early ®fth century, such as those from Coleraine, Traprain, Mildenhall, and Hoxne, open a graphic window onto military and civilian wealth in the late fourth and early ®fth centuries.16 More intriguingly still, the smaller, but no less remarkable, hoard from Patching, Sussex, dated to the late 460s (or even possibly the early 470s), provides the most concrete evidence for a continuing infusion of continental treasure into England.17 This recent discovery consists of twenty-three gold solidi, twenty-seven silver coins, two gold rings and hacksilber including a Germanic swordchape of mid-®fth-century date; many of the gold coins and some of the silver are of types never known to have been found in Britain. They evidently comprise several entirely discrete parcels, and in date run between Gratian (c. 380) and Libius Severus (461±465); the latest coin is 15

16

17

P. PeÂrin, `Les tombes des ``chefs'' du deÂbut de l'eÂpoque meÂrovingienne: datation et interpretation historique', in La noblesse Romaine, ed. Vallet and Kazanski, pp. 247±307. Wealth of the Roman World, AD 300±700, ed. J. P. C. Kent and K. S. Painter (London, 1977), pp. 125±27; A. O. Curle, The Treasure of Traprain (Glasgow, 1923); K. S. Painter, The Mildenhall Treasure (London, 1977); C. Johns and R. Bland, `The Hoxne Late Roman Treasure', Britannia 25 (1995), 165±73. S. White, `The Patching Hoard', Medieval Archaeology 42 (1998), 88±93.

53

Leslie Webster one of a number from an important series of Visigothic pseudo-imperials which was probably minted at Toulouse. Perhaps, as my colleague John Kent has recently suggested,18 this distinctive hoard should be seen as the product of Germanic military adventure in western Gaul; whatever its raison d'eÃtre, it does at least ¯esh out more convincingly the picture hitherto given by the limited and sporadic stray ®nds of ®fth- and sixth-century continental gold and silver coin from Britain.19 Admittedly, secular hoards were relatively rare in Merovingian Gaul throughout this period, as indeed they were everywhere in western Europe between AD 500 and 700; but they still outnumber England's meagre tally, and, as already noted, the written sources over¯ow with ®rst-hand accounts of Frankish treasure. It remains likely that during this period, the quantities of new treasure reaching most of England, by whatever agencies, never matched the wealth available to the continental neighbours. In such a model, limited supplies of existing late Roman gold and silver, eked out by occasional infusions from abroad, were repeatedly recycled, gradually passing down the line, some of it eventually ending up in the buried record; and with the exception of that from Kent, discussed below, the evidence from the well-furnished cemeteries of Anglian and Saxon England reveals a culture where gold and silver only rarely make it into the grave, and even then, in small quantity. This is as true of Sussex and East Anglia, both areas of considerable prosperity in Roman times, as it is of Northumbria, a hoard-free zone in the late Roman period: the pattern is almost universal. `Almost' because the obvious exception is Kent, which, at least from the early years of the sixth century, and probably earlier, was closely linked by dynastic and exchange mechanisms to Merovingian Gaul. The close connection brought gold and silver ± and other luxury commodities, such as garnets ± in considerable quantities into Kent and its satellites on the Isle of Wight; if the elite could dispose of such wealth in burial, the treasuries of the Kentish kings were undoubtedly in good shape. Their fortunes were inextricably linked to those of the Merovingian kingdoms, and it is entirely reasonable to suppose that a fairly regular supply of Byzantine solidi and plate were eventually passing via the Merovingian court into Kent, by diplomatic gift, by exchange, and in dowries for Frankish princesses marrying Kentish kings.20 And when, from the mid-sixth century, the Byzantine empire made increasingly massive payments to the Franks, Kent was the ®rst Anglo-Saxon kingdom to bene®t from this, becoming awash with the new gold ®ligree and 18 19

20

Personal communication, October 1997. See for example S. Rigold, `The Sutton Hoo Coins in the Light of the Contemporary Background of Coinage in England', in R. Bruce-Mitford, The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial, 3 vols. (London, 1975±83), I, 653±77. The Making of England: Anglo-Saxon Art and Culture, AD 600±900, ed. L. Webster and J. Backhouse (London, 1991), pp. 23±4.

54

Versions of Treasure in the Early Anglo-Saxon World Style II jewellery even before the end of the sixth century.21 At the same time, the arrival in Kent of the Augustinian mission, and the mighty cultural and political baggage that went with it, heralded a period of radical change. This is revealed in changes in the deposition of treasure, with, for example, the ®rst re-appearance of hoards since the ®fth century;22 at the same time, the days of interring wealth in the grave were clearly numbered. It is then striking that, at this cultural watershed, some special complexes appear for the ®rst time in the Anglo-Saxon archaeological record. No burial of a Kentish king survives; but notoriously, at Taplow and Sutton Hoo, we have two early seventh-century royal burial treasures that publicly proclaim, through their carefully constructed assemblages, the power dynamics of the time. These burials are an outward and visible witness to ambitious kingdoms competing for domination in the changeful years of the early seventh century. The treasure each contains carries a powerful symbolic message; they are replete with `ornaments whereby princely state is maintained', the honour of the gens, as Attila or Chilperic would have understood it. But the symbolism operates at more than one level: they also present two very speci®c and very different assertions of local political signi®cance. As the detailed cases have been argued in print elsewhere,23 the arguments are summarized here. The massive barrow in Taplow old churchyard keeps a westward watch over a sweep of the Saxon territory of the Thames valley, and even today, despite some punishing Victorian landscaping and the genteel neo-Gothic loomings of Taplow Court, it delivers a substantial frisson of awe.24 Within the barrow, in a substantial wooden chamber, the dead man was laid out accompanied by many of the formal accoutrements of power current among the Germanic ascendancy of the sixth and seventh centuries. He wore a goldtrimmed tunic, girded by a massive gold and garnet buckle and accompanying gold-sheeted clasps, and lay upon a feather mattress; multiple weapons were placed beside him, symbolizing, along with the numerous vessels for feasting and drinking, and other entertainments from the hall, the generosity 21

22

23

24

S. C. Hawkes, J. M. Merrick and D. M. Metcalf, `X-ray Fluorescent Analysis of some Dark Age Coins and Jewellery', Archaeometry 9 (1966), 98±138. C. H. V. Sutherland, Anglo-Saxon Gold Coinage in the Light of the Crondall Hoard (Oxford, 1948), pp. 7±13. L. Webster, `Death's Diplomacy: Sutton Hoo in the Light of Other Male Princely Burials', in Sutton Hoo: Fifty Years After, ed. R. Farrell and C. Neuman de Vegvar, American Early Medieval Studies 2 (Oxford OH, 1992), pp. 75±81; W. Filmer-Sankey, `The Roman Emperor in the Sutton Hoo Ship Burial', Journal of the British Archaeological Association 149 (1996), 1±9; M. Archibald, M. Brown and L. Webster, `Heirs of Rome: The Shaping of Britain, AD 400±900', in The Transformation of the Roman World, AD 400±900, ed. L. Webster and M. Brown (London, 1997), pp. 208±48 (pp. 222±4). L. Webster, `Taplow', in The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England, ed. M. Lapidge, J. Blair, S. Keynes, and D. Scragg (Oxford, 1998), pp. 439±40; K. East and L. Webster, The Anglo-Saxon Princely Burials from Taplow, Broom®eld and Caenby (London, forthcoming).

55

Leslie Webster of a lord to his followers, and the bonds that unite them through gift-giving and hospitality. So far, so good; this is recognizably a version of the standard Germanic princely kit. But what is of particular signi®cance in this assemblage is that all the most prestigious items in the burial appear to be of Kentish manufacture or, like the Byzantine bowl and its stand, probably reached this lonely spot via Kent. These Kentish items include at least three objects that were already ealde lafe, `ancient heirlooms', when they were buried ± the largest pair of drinking horns, which had been remounted in Antiquity, and the splendid gold and garnet buckle which shows considerable signs of wear. The horns were at least seventy years old when buried, and the buckle with its kidney-shaped loop and proto-Style II, possibly as much as forty years old at the time of burial. This treasure, in other words, looks much less like a tally of Kentish diplomatic gifts to a neighbouring ruler, than the heirlooms of a Kentish princely family, augmented by up-tothe-minute additions. Early written sources for this region are lacking, but John Blair's work has suggested that the framework of seventh-century Mercian activity in this part of the Thames valley might be linked to a previous Kentish presence in the area.25 The burial statement may thus be read as a forceful assertion of Kentishness, ¯aunted on the dominant headland above the Thames, a sentinel burial guarding the western approaches to London, an outpost of Kentish power at the gates of Wessex. If the treasure at Taplow was indeed intended to be read as a public signal of Kentish hegemony, the Sutton Hoo Mound 1 burial represents an equally carefully modulated statement of East Anglian dynastic claims. But here, though the dominant situation is similar, and much of the vocabulary is the same ± the familiar feasting and drinking vessels, weapons, gold and garnet jewellery ± the text is a different one. What is on display here is an ambitious Anglo-Saxon dynasty eager to emphasize its claim to authority through a powerful and deliberate evocation of Germanic tradition and Roman antecedence.26 This is by no means an entirely home-grown Anglo-Saxon iconography of power. The decorative images on the helmet, buckle, shoulder clasps and sceptre may be drawn from Germanic tradition, but the forms unequivocally recall those of Roman rule. Massive buckles of this kind depend upon the imposing belts and ®ttings of late Roman of®cial dress; the crested helmet derives from late Antique parade helmets; while the unique shoulder clasps ®nd their closest model in the clasps on the famous Prima Porta representation of Augustus's imperial body armour. The whetstone/sceptre, despite its sombre Germanic faces, is surmounted by a stag emblem raised on a circlet, in direct emulation of the consular sceptre 25

26

J. Blair, `Frithuwold's Kingdom and the Origins of Surrey', in The Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, ed. S. Bassett, Studies in the Early History of Britain (Leicester, 1989), pp. 97±107. Archibald, Brown and Webster, `Heirs of Rome', pp. 222±4.

56

Versions of Treasure in the Early Anglo-Saxon World crowned by wreaths, eagles or other images; and what are the Merovingian coins in the purse, but a local version of largitio? We may think again of Clovis in the streets of Tours scattering coins on the occasion of his consulate. But there is another signi®cant echo of imperium here. This striking tableau of luxury goods from all four quarters of Europe ± Celtic hanging-bowls from the wild west, Byzantine silver from the Eastern Empire, the Swedish shield from an ancestral north, and Frankish coins from southern neighbours ± presents a carefully constructed image of quasi-imperial geographic range. This treasure's message is about as graphic a claim to be the true AngloSaxon successor to Roman rule as one could imagine ± and most signi®cantly, is constructed at a time when Rome's formal relationship with England had just been renewed ± with all the political bene®ts the new religion could offer an ambitious Anglo-Saxon king. It is perhaps no accident that these most politically demonstrative of Anglo-Saxon burials occur at a major cultural watershed in Anglo-Saxon life. Well before the end of the seventh century, the very access to treasure, its economic and political function, and the circumstances controlling its survival were changing rapidly. Byzantine gold supplies no longer reached the west; a coin-based, taxing economy was gradually replacing the less ef®cient strategy of bullion-gathering; and churches increasingly became the recipients of royal treasure, as the symbolic burial of royal treasure was no longer acceptable, and kings were buried within churches rather than under mounds. As literacy advances, and at the same time, the archaeological evidence becomes much more restricted as a result of changes in burial ritual, the written sources begin to give accounts of booty- and tribute-hunting, and of secular treasures themselves, which of course, remained a central concern of Anglo-Saxon kings. Bede, for example, describes how Oswiu attempted to buy off Penda with innumera et maiora quam credi potest ornamenta regia (`an incalculable and incredible store of royal treasures'),27 and Felix's Vita recounts that the princely Saint Guthlac (d. 714) was a dedicated booty hunter before he retired to an eremitical life at Crowland.28 Nevertheless, attitudes to treasure were shifting, and at a fundamental level: not least, Christian teachings about earthly and divine treasures, mediated not only through homiletic teaching, but also through a new intellectualization of the pagan past, were putting a new gloss on the idea of treasure itself. In this area, there is, of course, one text above all which recurs in discussions of treasure and its intimate relationship with the exercise of

27

28

Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. B. Colgrave and R. Mynors, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, 1969), iii.24 (pp. 290±1). Felix's Life of Saint Guthlac, ed. and trans. B. Colgrave, (Cambridge, 1956), XVII. This is, of course, a trope of sainthood, whereby secular warfare is exchanged for engagement with spiritual foes; but the mention of booty-gathering clearly carried contemporary resonance.

57

Leslie Webster power. Impossible to avoid, Beowulf is a treacherous text, whose vivid and seemingly concrete descriptions have too often deceived readers into treating it as something rather like an archaeological textbook. But, like burials and hoards, it is itself a wholly speci®c construct with its own rules, which are not necessarily those by which modern cultural reconstructions are played.29 True, it gives in general terms, an apparent sense of how northern Germanic warrior culture operated on a basis of ± as James Campbell has argued ± raiding, feuds, comitatus loyalty, personal honour, generosity and gift exchange, in which the pursuit, distribution and ®nal consignment of treasure in the form of gold, jewels and weapons, is a major theme.30 But this is treasure with a mission: in the version in which it has come down to us (a single tenth-century manuscript) the poem's concerns have nothing to do with the accurate description of treasure, its uses, and its physical vocabulary. They revolve around the tacit Christian themes of the contest between good and evil, of noble sacri®ce and the rex iustus, just rule. Thus, the ®nal image of treasure in the poem is a tainted one; it is earthly treasure which in the end brings grief and has to be consigned once more to the earth ± gold on greote ‡ñr hit nu gen lifa…/ eldum swa unnyt swa hit ñror wñs (`as unusable by men as it was in that former time'). In such a context, the accounts of Frisian and Scandinavian gold, the twisted rings, the helmets and swords freighted with images, the ancient heirlooms which conjure up memories of ancient feuds, are just so much poetic shorthand for the past, wholly untrustworthy in detail as genuine memories or images of the ®fth, sixth or seventh centuries. The descriptions of the outcast monster Grendel's treasure, and the dragon's ancient pagan hoard, for example, are essentially topoi of those earthly treasures which corrupt, delineated as weapons, rings and costly metal vessels of the kind that appear in scenes of feasting in late Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, or in the gold armlets and drinking cups bequeathed in well-todo late Saxon wills. Most telling of all, they are the very sort of earthly images of luxury and power with which Christ is tempted by Satan in a drawing in the eleventh-century Tiberius Psalter.31 These descriptions in Beowulf invoke contemporary late Saxon images of untold riches more reliably than any fossil memory of a Dark Age treasure, let alone of the prehistoric one described in the dragon's lair. To give only one corroborative example ± we now know that helmets like those from Sutton Hoo and Benty Grange (which correspond to descriptions in the poem, and were thus regarded as signi®cant early dating evidence for the core poem) were in fact current in Northumbria and Mercia at least up to the end of the eighth century, and 29

30

31

L. Webster, `Archaeology and Beowulf', in Beowulf: An Edition with Relevant Shorter Texts, ed. B. Mitchell and F. C. Robinson (Oxford, 1998), pp. 183±94. J. Campbell, `Bede's reges and principes', in his Essays in Anglo-Saxon History (London, 1986), pp. 85±98. London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius C. VI, fol. 10v.

58

Versions of Treasure in the Early Anglo-Saxon World very probably beyond.32 The corollary of this is that this complex and subtle poem needs to be unshackled from the rigid harness of archaeological verisimilitude. Martin Carver has beguilingly asserted that the Sutton Hoo burial is, like Beowulf, a form of poetry, seeing both as dramatic public constructs with particular agendas;33 but the reverse can never be true ± the poem is emphatically not a reliable archaeological indicator, where treasure ± or anything else ± is concerned. Yes, Beowulf gives a picture of the past, and its own past was clearly of central importance to the audience of the poem; it reverberates with ancestral legend and with repeated reference to heirlooms, to the mighty works of forbears, ancient treasure and ealde lafe of all kinds; indeed mention of geardagum, `days gone by', sets the scene in the opening line. But the reality of these descriptions has more to do with the culture of the audience (whether eighth-, ninth- or tenth-century) for whom this version was composed, than with the realities of the distant past. It is about as authentic an account of the heroic age of treasure and plunder as Tennyson's Morte d'Arthur is of events in early sixth-century Britain. This is not to deny that there may have been a limited direct knowledge of past custom and culture: the sword which ®gures in the ñtheling Athelstan's will (1014) as that supposed to have once been King Offa's, may exemplify such occasional survivals.34 And indirectly, no doubt much impressionistic knowledge of the past was transmitted through various agencies, of varying reliability. Prominent among these were both secular oral and ecclesiastical written traditions, each with its own controlling agenda and viewpoint. For instance, burial mounds were a regular feature of the landscape, with an extensive folk-lore, as early place-names reveal; so it is not too hard to see how reconstructions of past burial ritual, stitched together with oral traditions of cremation and boatburial could arise in a seafaring context, and indeed, one in which the church, while condemning heathen practice, had actively colonized pagan and Roman sites. Through such vectors, an image of the past may be not just sustained, but created anew, with its own speci®c meaning and momentum. Thus, in the end, what we encounter in Beowulf is virtual treasure, the idea of treasure, treasure as a moral concept. Nothing more graphically suggests the distance travelled between the free-booting gold-hungry realpolitik of the Anglo-Saxon Dark Ages and the Augustinian Brave New World beyond. 32

33

34

D. Tweddle, The Anglian Helmet from 16±22 Coppergate, The Archaeology of York 17.8 (London, 1992); I. Meadows, `Wollaston: The Pioneer Burial', Current Archaeology 154 (1997), 391±5. M. O. H. Carver, `Ideology and Allegiance in East Anglia', in Sutton Hoo: Fifty Years After, ed. Farrell and Neuman de Vegvar, pp. 173±82 (p. 181); M. O. H. Carver, `Burial as Poetry: the Context of Treasure in Anglo-Saxon Graves', in this volume, pp. 34±8. English Historical Documents I: c. 500±1042, ed. D. Whitelock, 2nd edn (London, 1979), no. 129, pp. 593±6.

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5 Queens and Treasure in the Early Middle Ages Pauline Stafford

In 584, Rigunth, daughter of the Merovingian king Chilperic and his wife Fredegund, was betrothed to Recared, son of the Visigothic king Leuvigild. The story was told in some detail by Gregory of Tours. The marriage had been negotiated between Chilperic and Leuvigild: ambassadors went to and fro concerning the dower and dowry Rigunth was to have; the necessary gifts were sent.1 As the negotiations came to a conclusion Fredegund and Chilperic's young son, Theuderic, died. Chilperic, according to Gregory of Tours, was distraught, and in the circumstances considered not sending Rigunth, but rather Basina, his daughter by another wife, Audovera. Basina was at this time in Queen Radegund's nunnery at Poitiers. In the event, however, preparations for the marriage went ahead; and a huge dowry was assembled for Rigunth.2 Its assembly, according to Gregory, caused considerable trouble. King Childebert, Chilperic's brother, sent envoys to Chilperic and warned him not to remove anything from the towns which he, Chilperic, had taken from his brother's kingdom, forbidding him to touch slaves, horses or pairs of bulls. The dowry was allegedly enormous, including `a vast weight of gold and silver and ®ne clothes' added by Queen Fredegund. Indeed so enormous was it that when Chilperic saw it he feared that his treasures had all gone. But Gregory describes how Fredegund reassured him ± and the Franks: Do not imagine that any of this comes from the treasures amassed by your earlier kings. Everything you see belongs to me. Your illustrious king has been very generous to me, and I have put aside much from my own resources, from the manors granted to me and from revenues and taxes. You too have often given me gifts. From such sources come all the treasures which you see in front of you. None of this has been taken from the public treasury.

The king and the Franks were satis®ed by this. The Franks brought their own wedding gifts: gold, silver and horses. By the time Rigunth left for Spain the 1

2

Gregory of Tours, Libri historiarum, ed. B. Krusch and W. Levison, MGH SRM 1.1 (Hanover, 1951), vi.18 and 34. Translations are adapted from Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks, trans. L. Thorpe (Harmondsworth, 1974). LH vi.45; see Webster, in this volume, p. 51.

61

Pauline Stafford assemblage ®lled ®fty carts. Rigunth was accompanied by a huge dowry train which in Gregory's story proceeded to eat, rob and plunder its way south. But as it travelled, members of Rigunth's escort defected, taking with them one hundred of the best horses and their golden bridles. As Rigunth travelled south Chilperic, her father, was murdered whilst hunting at Chelles.3 This `Nero and Herod of our day', who constantly complained that the churches emptied his treasury, came, in Gregory's view, to a ®tting end. His wife, Queen Fredegund, immediately sought sanctuary in the cathedral in Paris, taking part of her treasure which she had with her. That which had been left at Chelles, which included a great golden salver Chilperic had recently had made, was taken by the treasurers, who defected to King Childebert.4 Meanwhile Rigunth and her treasure train had halted at Toulouse. There Duke Desiderius, hearing of King Chilperic's death, took Rigunth's treasure from her, and sealed it away under heavy guard.5 He went to join the claimant to the throne, Gundovald, who was now declared king at Avignon.6 Rigunth was expelled from Toulouse, along with its bishop, and the whole of her treasure was seized by Gundovald.7 The marriage plans were now aborted, and Fredegund had her daughter brought home.8 But according to Gregory, relations between mother and daughter were strained. Their quarrels were allegedly fanned by Fredegund's disapproval of Rigunth's habits of `sleeping with all and sundry'. But the dispute between mother and daughter also involved control of what was left of Chilperic's treasures and the relative positions of the two women in the household; Rigunth asserted her claims to be its mistress, accusing the lowborn Fredegund of being no more than a servant. In the end Fredegund offered the remaining treasures to her daughter, leading her into the strong room and opening a chest full of jewels and precious ornaments. There Fredegund invited Rigunth to put in her hand and take what she found. As Rigunth reached in, her mother seized the lid, slammed it down on her daughter's neck and then leant on it with all her weight. Rigunth was saved from death by the servants, and mother and daughter returned to an even more bitter relationship.9 The story of Rigunth's dowry, or rather Gregory of Tours's story of Rigunth's dowry, is famous. Its full interpretation is beyond the demands of this present enquiry, but it presents an illuminating point of entry for a consideration of early medieval treasure in general, and of queens, royal women and treasure in particular. Treasure is specially valued wealth, capable of bearing special meaning 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

LH LH LH LH LH LH LH

vi.46. vii.4. vii.9. vii.10. vii.32. vii.39. ix.34.

62

Queens and Treasure in the Early Middle Ages and performing important social functions.10 It is that which is scarce, desirable and stored; yet it is also mobile, it can be given and negotiated. Gregory's stories are ®rst a reminder of what counted as treasure in sixthcentury Francia, including gold, silver, gems, horses and precious clothing.11 They indicate some of the sources of that treasure: gifts, from subjects to kings and queens, and from kings and queens to followers; gifts between kings as part of negotiations for marriage or other diplomacy; but also taxes and revenues such as Fredegund claimed were among the sources of her treasure. In Gregory of Tours's world, as later, royal children in general, but royal women in particular, were also treasure. Sons especially were essential to a king and queen with a view to the succession, but daughters with their royal blood carried claims which made them literally precious.12 When Chilperic's son died he thought again about sending his daughter to Spain. Gregory puts into his mouth sentiments which stress the inappropriateness of celebrating a daughter's marriage whilst mourning a son's death. But it may also have crossed Chilperic's, and especially Fredegund's mind, that until another son was born, the claims which Rigunth embodied were especially valuable. Such female claims were often stored, shut away in nunneries, like the treasure which was shut away in strong rooms. Basina's claims had been stowed away at Poitiers by her father. Was it her stepmother Fredegund's idea to have her, not Rigunth, sent to Spain in 584: to withdraw and use another woman's wealth rather than squandering her own, which had now appreciated in value?13 The second point to which Gregory's story testi®es is the place of treasure in the familial and hegemonial politics of this period, particularly in marriage.14 Women like Basina and Rigunth were treasures not only stored, but also exchanged. In the personal bonds which held together hegemonies, marriage was a major instrument; it was also one of the great points at which 10

11 12

13

14

See the idea of `noble' gifts in T. Reuter, `Plunder and Tribute in the Carolingian Empire', TRHS 5th s. 35 (1985), 75±94 passim, and especially at pp. 78 and 84. See also LH v.34, vi.28 and x.21. Compare the description of Pippin, son of Louis the Pious, as the `third gem in the crown' by Walahfrid Strabo, Versus in Aquisgrani palatio editi (MGH Poet. II, 375); and of Mathilda of Quedlinburg in similar terms in the Annals of Quedlinburg: Annales Quedlinburgenses, ed. G. H. Pertz, MGH SS 3 (Hanover, 1839) s.a. 955, 992, 999. In late tenth-century Ottonian Germany royal daughters and treasure were stored together in dynastically-connected nunneries like Quedlinburg. Otto II left a quarter of his treasure to his sister, Mathilda abbess of Quedlinburg, in whose abbey his own daughter, Adelaide, was living, and where she would later become a nun: Thietmar, Die Chronik des Bischofs Thietmar von Merseburg, ed. R. Holtzmann, MGH SRG n.s. 9 (Berlin, 1935), iii.25. When Henry, his cousin, made his bid for the throne he went to Quedlinburg and took animate and inanimate treasure ± pecunia and Adelaide (Thietmar, Chronik, ed. Holtzmann, iv.3). 0n hegemonial rule see below, pp. 79±82; T. Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages, 800± 1056 (London, 1991), especially pp. 94, 123, 161, 166±75 and 179±80.

63

Pauline Stafford treasure was exchanged in early medieval Europe. Queens and princesses at marriage were not only accompanied by and exchanged with treasure, but were treasure in themselves, given, but also, like the enemy's other treasures, sometimes forcibly taken. Animate and inanimate treasures here marked stages in the rituals of negotiation, friendship and domination. The giving and receiving of treasure, the marriage of daughters and the fostering of sons or their taking as hostages, were all part of the same lexicon of social exchange: they overlapped and combined. Gift, hostage or bride derived their value, and thus their strength as bonds, from their importance to giver and receiver, from scarcity and from the links which they retained with the giver.15 On these bases a range of meanings could be constructed from obligation and alliance to subjection and humiliation. The rituals and context were critical in determining which meaning was to be read from these ambiguous actions. Rigunth's marriage was carefully arranged as part of an alliance, and the negotiation and assembled dowry were designed to ®x that meaning; here treasure and woman were to be seen as changing hands between equals. By contrast Queen Radegund, Chilperic's stepmother, now shut away at Poitiers, had been his father Clothar's `share of the booty', after the defeat of her Thuringian family.16 She was treasure not given in friendship, but forcibly taken, emphasizing defeat. Both women were a form of treasure, but their respective meaning or signi®cance was not ®xed forever at the point of exchange. Rigunth's value changed, though it was not lost, with her father's death; Radegund shut away at Poitiers would become a different sort of treasure for the nuns who would later use her cult. Basina and Radegund in Gregory's tales emphasize a recurring association of royal women, royal treasure and religious houses, one which involved ambiguities about ownership inherent in gifts. Royal blood was animate female treasure stored in nunneries: Basina was kept at Radegund's nunnery. Inanimate treasure belonging to royal women might also be there: at a much later date, in the tenth century, the possessions (pecunias) and treasures (thesauri) of Mathilda, Otto I's mother, were kept in religious houses.17 Chilperic considered taking Basina from Poitiers, just as later Mathilda's sons would try to recover her possessions. It is easy to present Chilperic or Mathilda's relatives as robbers of the church, but the issues involved were 15

16 17

From a huge literature on gifts, see e.g. M. Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. I. Cunnison (London, 1954); M. Strathern, The Gender of the Gift (Berkeley, 1988); M. Strathern, Women in Between: Female Roles in a Male World (London, 1972) ± especially important on marriage, women and gifts; A. B. Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving (Berkeley, 1992); and on the early Middle Ages, B. Rosenwein, To Be the Neighbor of St Peter: The Social Meaning of Cluny's Property, 909±1049 (Ithaca, 1989); S. White, Custom, Kinship and Gifts to Saints: The Laudatio Parentum in Western France, 1050±1150 (Chapel Hill, 1988). LH iii.7. Vita Mahthildis Reginae antiquior, ed. D. R. Koepke, MGH SS 10 (Hanover, 1852), pp. 573± 82 (ch. 8, pp. 577±8).

64

Queens and Treasure in the Early Middle Ages more complex and the rightful ownership of the treasure involved far from clear. The same notion of the bond between gift and giver, which underpinned alliances or subjection sealed through marriage, applied to gifts to churches. Families did not lose all link with such treasures: nor, in their view, all claim on it. From her father's point of view, in the circumstances after his son's death, Basina looked like a family treasure. Withdrawing the living as well as the dead family treasures must always have seemed a legitimate option from a lay perspective. There was, however, an equally strong argument that treasures or women had now passed into Church ownership. Gregory of Tours complained that kings like Chilperic took the treasures of the Church: Radegund refused to let Basina go. It is dif®cult to generalize the results of arguments such as these for the women involved. On the one hand they objecti®ed and transacted as treasure royal women like Basina. Mathilda may have hoped to use them to secure more control over her possessions, but the contradictions of this situation provided no automatic protection against loss. Radegund, however, was able to manoeuvre within the tensions between family and church and to use them to her own advantage. If marriage was a major instrument of familial politics, succession was one of their central concerns. Gregory's story underlines the part treasure might play here, too, and suggests that the queen's control of it contributed to her role in these politics. In sixth-century Francia, the whereabouts of a king's treasure at his death was a critical question for a would-be successor. The possession of part or all of it was essential to any successful bid for the throne.18 In the political manoeuvrings of succession politics, the king's treasure was perhaps symbolic of the kingdom and kingship. Final transfers of treasure, like that of the early Carolingian Pippin's treasure from his widow Plectrudis to his son Charles Martel, marked the ®nal transfer of power;19 as late as the end of the eleventh century in England the seizure or inspection of treasure by kings like Rufus or Henry I denoted their seizure or taking over of the kingdom itself.20 Thus if Rigunth's dowry, rambling its way through southern France, could be seen as containing some of her father's as well as her mother's treasure, it may have had special signi®cance for Gundovald, as a claimant to the throne on the death of Chilperic. But whether king's or queen's in origin, Rigunth's wealth was a God-send to Gundovald. 18

19

20

R. Schneider, KoÈnigswahl und KoÈnigserhebung im FruÈhmittelalter: Untersuchungen zur Herrschaftsnachfolge bei den Langobarden und Merowingern (Stuttgart, 1972), esp. pp. 242±6. Fredegar, The Fourth Book of the Chronicle of Fredegar with its Continuations, ed. and trans. J. M. Wallace-Hadrill (London, 1960), pp. 88±9; Liber Historiae Francorum, in Fredegarii et aliorum chronica: vitae Sanctorum, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SRM 2 (Hanover, 1888), pp. 215±328 (chs. 52 and 53 ± the family were not, of course, royal at this date, but the actions of these powerful mayors of the palace and their wives follow a quasi-royal pattern). ASC MS E, s.a. 1087; The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. and trans. M. Chibnall, 6 vols., Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, 1969±80), x.15 (V, 290). Orderic states that Henry tried to take the treasure `ut genuinus haeres' and was resisted by William of Breteuil on the grounds of the superior claims of his brother Robert.

65

Pauline Stafford Treasure was more than symbolic in succession struggles. It was the supremely liquid, movable asset which could be shifted in the ¯uid circumstances of succession in order to secure power. It could be seized, and deployed; its very mobility made it not merely a tool in, but a fundamental cause of, the ¯uidity of early medieval politics in general and succession politics in particular. With treasure so central, the extent and legitimacy of a queen's control of it was critical to her participation in succession politics, or, indeed, in any politics. For Fredegund her own continued survival as a political actor depended on keeping hold of treasure on her husband's death. She seems to have made efforts to retain control, and her loss of that kept at Chelles was a setback.21 Gregory's stories often depend on the fact that Merovingian queens could have access to treasure, and could deploy it politically. Bishop Praetextatus of Rouen was accused of bribing people against King Chilperic; he also had in his possession property given him by Queen Brunhild, Chilperic's enemy. There were those who connected such facts. When Brunhild had a great jewelled gold salver made, and sent it south along with two gold and silver decorated basins, not everyone believed her story that they were wedding gifts. Some suspected that she was aiding the claims of the pretender Gundovald.22 The truth of these particular suspicions matters less than the fact that a sixth-century queen could be the object of them. But if Gregory's stories underline a queen's control of treasure, they also underscore its precariousness. The very mobility of treasure meant that its temporary guardians, like Chilperic's treasurers at Chelles or Duke Desiderius at Toulouse, could easily make off with it, depriving a queen or princess and putting it to their own political uses. In early medieval politics the consent and support of the noble and powerful, maintaining their own access to wealth and power, were always essential.23 Treasure in itself was no simple protection in such politics. It could enable a queen to operate within that system, to build up allies within it, but not to buy her way out of it. If she could not retain the support of enough of those nobles, especially after her husband's death, she would lose both power and treasure together.24 She was vulnerable to such loss precisely because her control of treasure 21

22 23

24

See also LH vii.21 concerning accusations of Chilperic's treasurer by Fredegund, and Gregory's claims that Fredegund had tried to get him to live with her after Chilperic's death; some negotiations between Fredegund and the treasurer Eberulf seem indicated by all this. LH v.18 for Praetextatus; ix.28 for the salver. Late Merovingian France: History and Hagiography, 640±720, ed. and trans. P. Fouracre and R. Gerberding, Manchester Medieval Sources (Manchester, 1996), pp. 56±8. See for example Fredegund herself; Brunhild after the death of Sigibert (LH v.1); compare the successful negotiations with nobles of Nantechildis after the death of Dagobert (Fredegar, Fourth Book, ed. and trans. Wallace-Hadrill, p. 72).

66

Queens and Treasure in the Early Middle Ages derived from transient family roles, or was in some way debatable. Queen Radegund, as an ex-queen and religious woman, was in this sense exceptional. Her convent at Poitiers was a store house of relics and treasures, a threat to the local bishop but useful to the kingdom. Such treasure was semiinstitutional, not, as we have seen, thereby withdrawn from family control, but distanced from it. It helped maintain a voice for Radegund beyond the convent walls.25 Most queens' treasure was more ®rmly tied to family roles and the ful®lment of them, and thus subject to the shifts of the female lifecycle. Some of what Fredegund controlled, both before and after Chilperic's death, had belonged to her husband. Her control of it derived from a wife's position as mistress of the household, a role which queens shared with other women. The link between that role and treasure is con®rmed by cemetery evidence, which indicates that the status of Merovingian married women with children might be signi®ed through jewellery or dress adornment, but also by keys, presumably to household chests.26 This role was, however, governed by lifecycle. As the same cemetery evidence shows, widows stood to lose household position ± and Chilperic's death widowed Fredegund. But once again a woman's position was not straightforward. A widow still had claims.27 She was a living extension of her dead husband, and sometimes an older woman, to whose age respect was due.28 Many early medieval queens who used treasure were widows. This was usually because key transitions of political power, viz. succession to the throne, coincided with those of the female lifecycle, opening opportunities to resist that cycle, as Fredegund was perhaps trying to do after Chilperic's death.29 Queens, with their ability to manoeuvre in politics, could try to extend this period of resistance, most successfully in a minority, as mothers of claimants or underage kings. But the case of Plectrudis suggests they might also deploy other arguable claims. When her husband, Pippin mayor of the palace, died, Plectrudis retained control of his treasure. The seventh-century author of the Liber Historiae Francorum presents her control in a sympathetic way.30 He does not, however, describe her at this point as 25

26

27

28

29

30

Baudonivia, De Vita S. Radegundis Libri II, in Fredegarii et aliorum chronica, ed. Krusch, ch. 16 on her relics and the kingdom; LH ix.40 and 41; I. Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450±751 (London, 1994), p. 138 on the threat to the bishop of Poitiers. G. Halsall, `Female Status and Power in Early Merovingian Central Austrasia: The Burial Evidence', Early Medieval Europe 5 (1996), 1±24. On the complexity of such claims in ninth-century Francia and more generally, see J. L. Nelson, `The Wary Widow', in Property and Power in the Early Middle Ages, ed. W. Davies and P. Fouracre (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 82±113. Though this was itself subject to change over time: cemetery evidence may suggest that old women lost status (Halsall, `Female Status and Power'). See comparative discussion of Queen Emma in P. Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith: Queenship and Women's Power in Eleventh-Century England (Oxford, 1997). Liber Historiae Francorum, chs. 48, 52 and 53; R. A. Gerberding, The Rise of the Carolingians

67

Pauline Stafford vidua, rather as matrona, an especially digni®ed term. His careful choice of terminology may suggest that he was aware that Plectrudis's actions were questionable, not simply common practice; he suggests both the defensibility but also the doubt surrounding her position.31 It was not only stepsons like Charles Martel who might question a widow's right to retain such control. In Gregory's colourful story of the inspection of the treasure chests, Rigunth invokes the status of her mother, and thus of her marriage to Chilperic, implying that only a legitimate wife could have control of household treasure. Here the struggle over household wealth was between daughter and mother.32 Fredegund also, apparently, had treasure which she had amassed in her own right, like that which she claimed to be using to provide for the dowry of Rigunth. This, she alleged, was her own to manoeuvre with. Here Gregory's story implicitly and explicitly raises questions about the distinction between public treasury and private wealth, between kingdom and family, perhaps between gift and taxation, and raises them in ways which may suggest a con¯ict if not confusion in thinking over these issues in Merovingian Gaul. Such questions could not fail to implicate the queen and her position. The whole story and debate about Rigunth's dowry links legitimacy of use of treasure to questions about its sources, and draws boundaries between public and private in doing so. In the tale as he tells it, dowry, marriage and queen's treasure all seem to be demarcated into a private family sphere. Yet in Fredegund's statement the distinctions are blurred. The treasures of earlier kings are in some sense public, suggesting a clear line between family and kingdom; yet her own husband can give her as his wife revenues and taxes,

31

32

and the Liber Historiae Francorum (Oxford, 1987), p. 173 n. 3 notes that the author uses the term to denote widows in a position of power `in matriarchal command of the family fortune and politics'. For matronae in classical Antiquity see T. Hillard, `On the Stage, Behind the Curtain: Images of Politically Active Women in the Late Roman Republic', in Stereotypes of Women in Power: Historical Perspectives and Revisionist Views, ed. B. Garlick, S. Dixon and P. Allen (New York, 1992), pp. 37±64, where the term denotes a position of respect often linked to motherhood. Niermeyer has no entry under matrona; the use of the term in the early Middle Ages would repay further study. Rigunth was an unmarried daughter. In some places and in certain circumstances an unmarried daughter might be entrusted with the household treasures and wealth. When the twelfth-century author of the Life of Christina of Markyate described how her father Autti entrusted his unmarried daughter with his silver, gold and treasure, this was marked by his giving her keys, presumably to chests. When he drove her out he took the keys back: The Life of Christina of Markyate, a Twelfth-Century Recluse, ed. and trans. C. H. Talbot, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, 1959), ch. 23, p. 72. I am grateful to Henrietta Leyser for this reference. The story is told in the context of Christina's refusal to ful®l her family duties and marry. The struggle after Chilperic's death may be between two women, neither of whom had automatic or clear rights in the household, both of whom could mobilize a defensible claim ± the widowed Fredegund and her unmarried daughter.

68

Queens and Treasure in the Early Middle Ages surely public, and she can defend their use. This blurring, or redrawing, is typical of the familial nature of early (perhaps of all) medieval rule, where the line between public and private is unclear or even inappropriate. But Gregory's report of the debate is a reminder that political discourse still included that distinction; and that it was one in which the notion of a kingdom and kingship sat uneasily alongside family control ± never more so than when family treasure could be seen to derive from taxation. Gregory's story thus shows us queens with treasure, and queens and princesses as treasure. It indicates treasure's importance in the politics of marriage and succession, and in the queen's ability to operate there. It gives hints of the dif®culties of such operation and of questions surrounding the queen's control of treasure. The debate over Rigunth's dowry, even more than the story of mother, daughter and the treasure chests, questions any simple reading of what Gregory has to say on these issues. Gregory returns over and over again to the question of treasure, and often to the question of queens and treasure. That repetition seems an indication of the importance of treasure in sixth-century Francia and its politics, and of the involvement of queens; but it may have other signi®cance. Treasure itself cannot be read simply in early medieval sources.33 And historians of women are well aware of how slippery the meaning of women in texts may be. Writers may be using them `to think with', rather than merely describing their actions.34 Their symbolic meanings, especially in relation to wealth, adornment and luxury, call for extra care in interpreting stories combining women and treasure. Gregory, like all sources, needs careful reading here. Gregory of Tours sometimes reveals an almost Roman ideology of the public and the private, which he projects on to the Frankish world and sharpens on its women.35 That distinction is most explicit in Gregory's story of Rigunth's dowry, where the provenance of the treasures being used is made central. It is Fredegund herself who is made to declare the distinction between the public treasure, amassed by earlier kings, and her own treasure, which has been used for the personal familial purposes of Rigunth's dowry. 33

34

35

E. M. Tyler, `Treasure and Convention in Old English Verse', Notes and Queries 241 (1996), 2±13. J. L. Nelson, `Women and the Word in the Earlier Middle Ages', in Women in the Church, ed. W. J. Shiels and D. Wood, Studies in Church History 27 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 53±78 (esp. pp. 58±9 and n. 20). On this Roman/classical distinction, particularly in relation to women, see A. Saxonhouse, `Introduction ± Public and Private: The Paradigm's Power', in Stereotypes of Women in Power, ed. Garlick, Dixon and Allen, pp. 1±9; Hillard, `On the Stage'; J. B. Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton, 1981). I do not wish to revive a simplistic Roman public versus Germanic private dichotomy, criticized for example in Late Merovingian France, ed. and trans. Fouracre and Gerberding, pp. 52±3. Public/private was already an ideological, normative rather than descriptive dichotomy in classical times. As a critique applicable to women, however, it had great importance in classical Antiquity and later.

69

Pauline Stafford The use of her voice is perhaps no accident. Her words suggest that the queen had a treasure of her own, a fact which they con®rm. She has been interpreted as rebuking the Franks for their niggardliness, an interesting case of a woman used to remind men of the proper attitudes to treasure.36 But is Gregory also making another point, about the appropriate distinction of public and private, and using a wife, the Roman symbol of the private, to do it?37 And in the light of this, should Gregory's highlighting of the great gold salver, which Fredegund had left at Chelles at the time of Chilperic's death, and thus lost, be read again? He had already described this treasure in some detail. Chilperic had shown it to him along with gold medallions and other precious things sent to him by the Byzantine Emperor.38 Chilperic had had the salver made `for the greater glory and renown of the Frankish people'. The echo is of the gold medallions which the Emperor had sent, bearing on one side the legend Gloria Romanorum. The king's treasures were to some extent the treasures of his people. Is Gregory implying that such public treasure was not for queens: the people's glory, not that of the royal household?39 In Roman ideology, public and private had positive and negative values. Gregory's thought-world was not, however, purely Roman, but the Christianized Rome of late Antiquity. Gregory's tale culminates in a decision to reverse the ¯ow of taxation by giving to churches; public taxation redressed by private giving, where public and private have arguably taken on other valences. This is even clearer in another tale in which Gregory comments on treasure and its appropriate use.40 When the emperor Tiberius gave treasures to the poor, the augusta Sophia objected that he was bringing the rem publicam to poverty. Here the empress voices the defence of the public, an argument in this context to be rejected. If he is ambiguous about treasure and wealth, it may be a Christian ambiguity he registers, speci®cally in relation to his beÃte noire of taxation in general and taxation of churches in particular.41 The disastrous fortunes of Rigunth's treasure train are recounted in lurid detail, and immediately precede the tale of Chilperic's murder; the death of the `Nero and Herod of our day' casts Chilperic as a signi®cantly 36

37

38 39

40 41

Wood, Merovingian Kingdoms, p. 122; J. L. Nelson, `Queens as Jezebels: The Careers of Brunhild and Balthild in Merovingian History', in Medieval Women, ed. D. Baker, Studies in Church History Subsidia 1 (Oxford, 1978), pp. 31±77 (p. 36). Cf. also LH ix.9, the story of Rauching and his wife, which it is interesting to read with this same public/private ideology in mind. LH vi.2; see also L. Webster in this volume, p. 52. Compare here Paul the Deacon and Rosamund's attempts to ¯ee with `the treasure of the Lombards' (Pauli historia Langobardorum, ii.28±30, in MGH SRL, pp. 7±219 (pp. 87±90) ) perhaps again utilizing a Roman ideological frame of reference. LH v.19. J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Long-Haired Kings (London, 1962), pp. 67±8 on Gregory's ferocious opposition to taxation. On taxation in the Merovingian period see W. Goffart, `Old and New in Merovingian Taxation', Past and Present (1982), 3±21; compare Wood, Merovingian Kingdoms, pp. 62±3.

70

Queens and Treasure in the Early Middle Ages dual incarnation of Roman and Christian evil. The story of Rigunth's dowry and Chilperic's death are surely to be read together. A familial use ± possibly abuse ± of arguably public treasure precedes the nemesis of a man who had ®lled that public treasure at the expense of churches. The presentation is cautionary and didactic: the valuation of the public and private quasi-Roman. Gregory, however, was a Christian bishop, heir to Christianity's discomfort with earthly wealth. That discomfort is explicit in his story of how Fredegund had burnt the taxation records from her husband's treasury after the death of two of her young sons. Again it is Fredegund who speaks: It is the tears of paupers which are the cause of their deaths, the sighs of orphans, the widows' lament. Yet we still keep on amassing wealth . . . we still lay up treasures, we who have no-one to whom we can leave them. Our riches live on after us, the fruits of rapine, hated and accursed . . . Were our treasure houses not already full enough with gold, silver, precious stones, necklaces and every regal adornment . . . now we are losing the most beautiful of all our possessions.

The children died nonetheless, and from that time on, Gregory states, King Chilperic was generous in giving alms to churches and to the poor.42 Children here are a form of treasure, measured in worth against other forms, and beside which those other forms are found wanting. They are part of a story which is a critique of wealth acquired in the wrong ways, amassed in too great quantity. The critique is expressed by a queen ± the controller and amasser of wealth, but also the provider of the treasure of royal children, well placed to assess their relative values. It is a Christian critique, but one which may also voice a conundrum inherent in a system of gift and treasure such as exists in sixth-century Francia as elsewhere in early medieval Europe. That system required the circulation of gifts, of treasure, yet treasure could come dangerously close to freezing a moment in that circulation, turning it into reprehensible hoarding. The treasure houses must be emptied, gifts given, and especially to Christian churches. In stories such as these Gregory was debating wealth, in the context of public/private distinctions, Christian ideals, and notions of gift-giving. He made women central to the argument. That centrality appears to con®rm the link between queens and treasure. It is also a warning of how deeply that link is already embedded in the symbolic meanings of women. The ®nal message of Gregory's stories is that they must be read with care, as must those of other early medieval authors. * If we turn from Gregory of Tours to a broader chronological and geographical framework, the association of queens, and other royal women, 42

LH v.34.

71

Pauline Stafford and treasure remains signi®cant. A preliminary, and certainly incomplete, count numbers some twenty-two or so women certainly, and inferentially perhaps another half-dozen linked in some way to treasure.43 They range in time and date from sixth-, seventh- and eighth-century Francia, sixth-century Ostrogothic and Lombard Italy, ninth-century Carolingian West Francia and Italy, to tenth- and eleventh-century Germany, and seventh-, ninth- and eleventh-century England. The sources include Gregory himself, Venantius Fortunatus, Bede, Fredegar and his continuator, the Liber Historiae Francorum, Paul the Deacon, the Annals of St Bertin, Nithard, Hincmar, hagiography from the sixth to the eleventh century, Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, Thietmar, Wipo, Asser and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles and, if royal women are extended to would-be or quasi-royal women, Liudprand of Cremona. A super®cial reading of those sources underlines some of the patterns found in Gregory, but also suggests change over time. The most explicit references to queens in control of treasure come from the beginning of the period and are often in the context of succession. No fewer than ®ve Merovingian royal widows,44 and several wives,45 held some or all of their husband's treasure; the fact often becomes apparent during succession struggles. The same is true in Paul the Deacon's picture of Lombard Italy, where wife, treasure and claims to the throne, or rather succession plots, are linked in his story of Rosamund.46 Sometimes the securing of queen and treasure were central to a candidate's quest for the throne and legitimation. A king should have treasure, perhaps especially the royal treasure; it was kingly and legitimized a claimant. But a royal widow might also bring legitimacy, transferring not simply the tangible treasure she had in hand, but also claims from her dead husband. The association of queen, treasure and succession appears especially marked at the beginning of the period. But it recurs as late 43

44

45

46

In Merovingian Francia: Chlotild, Fredegund, Theudechild, Brunhild, Plectrudis, Berthetrude, Ultrogotha, Ermenberga, Nantechildis, Radegund; in Italy: Amalasuntha, Rosamund, Theudelinda, Angelberga; in Carolingian West Francia: Judith, Richildis; in tenth- and early eleventh-century France and Germany: Mathilda of Quedlinburg, Theophanu, Gerberga, Edith (wife of Otto I), Mathilda (wife of Henry Fowler), Cunigund, Constance; and in England: áthelburh (Raedwald's wife), Iurminburg, Eadburh, Emma, Edith. Fredegund; Brunhild (LH v.1); Theudechild (LH iv.26); Nantechildis (Fredegar, Fourth Book, ed. and trans. Wallace-Hadrill, p. 72); and Plectrudis (widow of the mayor of the palace, Pippin), whose position appears in this as in so many other respects as quasi-royal (Fredegar, Fourth Book, ed. and trans. Wallace-Hadrill, pp. 87±9 and Liber Historiae Francorum, chs. 52 and 53). Ultrogotha may have held some of Childebert's treasure: certainly the takeover of the treasure by Clothar coincided with her exile (LH iv.20). Berthetrude, wife of Clothar II, had some control of her husband's treasure during his lifetime. When a plot was hatched to deprive her husband of the throne, she was approached and asked to convey what treasures she could to Sion. One of the plotters, Alethius, allegedly wanted to marry her: Fredegar, Fourth Book, ed. and trans. WallaceHadrill, pp. 36±7. See also Balthild, discussed in Nelson, `Queens as Jezebels'. Above, n. 39.

72

Queens and Treasure in the Early Middle Ages as the eleventh century in England, when Queen Emma took control of Cnut's treasure in her manoeuvring over the succession after 1035.47 At certain times and in certain places treasure included the rich insignia of royalty and thus had an explicitly legitimating role: again queens might control it. In ninth-century Francia, tenth-century Italy and eleventh-century Germany some queens held not merely treasure in general, but the symbolic treasures of the royal insignia. Charles the Bald left his insignia with his queen Richildis, who also had possession of much of his treasure sent with her from Italy; it was she who conveyed them to his successor Louis the Stammerer.48 When Berengar attacked Adelaide in his bid for the Italian throne, he captured her, and treasure, which included not only gold and jewels, but also the crown.49 Cunigund, widow of Henry II of Germany, held the insignia during the interregnum after his death and brought them to the new king Conrad after he had been chosen.50 It is likely that Judith, widow of Louis the Pious and mother of Charles the Bald, had possession of royal insignia, or at least rich royal vestments in which a king might suitably celebrate Easter, and that it was she who sent them to her son Charles in 841.51 At issue here is not merely movable wealth to buy support, though clearly Richildis, at least, had control of that too. It was the richly ornamented clothes, sword and crown which symbolized royalty itself. Such symbols were part of the public presentation and differentiation of royalty, and the queen was often responsible for this too. The Capetian queen Constance was concerned for Robert the Pious's dignity, or gloria: when he was robbed of his golden ornaments she saw him as dishonoured by his loss of them.52 Perhaps she, like Edward the Confessor's wife Edith after her,53 or Louis the Pious' Judith before, had some charge of the royal dignity. The queen herself and her bejewelled appearance were an important part of that dignity. When Radegund left the secular world for the convent, she divested 47 48

49

50

51

52

53

ASC MS C, s.a. 1035. Annales de Saint-Bertin, ed. F. Grat, J. Vielliard and S. Clemencet, introd. L. Levillain (Paris, 1964); The Annals of St-Bertin, trans. J. L. Nelson, Manchester Medieval Sources (Manchester, 1991) s.a. 877. Hrotsvitha, Carmen de Gestis Oddonis I Imperatoris, ed. G. H. Pertz, MGH SS 4 (Hanover, 1841), p. 328. Wipo, Gesta Chuonradi Imperatoris, ch. 2 (Die Werke Wipos, ed. H. Bresslau, MGH SRG 61 (Hanover, 1915), p 19; Imperial Lives and Letters of the Eleventh Century, trans. T. E. Mommsen and K .F. Morrison (New York, 1962), p. 65). Nithard, Histoire des ®ls de Louis le Pieux, ed. P. Lauer (Paris, 1926), ii.8 has the story of their quasi-miraculous arrival from Aquitaine, a story which does not seek to stress any human agency; ii.9 makes it clear that Judith was at that time in Aquitaine raising support for Charles; J. L. Nelson, Charles the Bald (London, 1992), p. 114 makes the connection. Helgaud of Fleury, Vie de Robert le Pieux, ed. and trans. R.-H. Bautier and G. Labory (Paris, 1965), ch. 5 (pp. 62±3). The Life of King Edward who Rests at Westminster, ed. F. Barlow, Oxford Medieval Texts, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1992), p. 25; and see E. M. Tyler in this volume, pp. 99±107.

73

Pauline Stafford herself publicly of the jewels and costly garments which she had worn as queen.54 This was a rite of passage in which the `old' woman was put off, in which identity was changed. For a queen, this meant laying aside the treasure of personal adornment, the royal treasures which had publicly de®ned the `old woman'. Queens, whether controlling or displaying treasure, had to have access to its sources. Dignity and display did not come cheap; symbols are material, physical objects not free-¯oating clusters of meaning. Constance, like Fredegund almost half a millennium earlier, received gifts from the nobility.55 Fredegund, rejecting ill-gotten treasure, burned the tax records. If it is legitimate to take together Hincmar's treatise on the organization of the palace, and the Carolingian capitulary De Villis, the ninth-century queen's concern for royal dignity could be connected with her control of royal estates. In the admittedly systematized world of the Welsh law tracts, a queen received a share of the booty of war.56 Some of these sources of wealth and treasure were relatively uncontentious, even (like the booty of war) judged admirable; others were precisely those likely to cause friction between kings and followers or subjects, like taxation if not regular gifts. The queen was not outside this friction, but part of it; and, as an easier target than the king, especially vulnerable to criticism, an obvious scapegoat.57 These examples drawn from across the early Middle Ages suggest immediately that some of the structures of Gregory's world were enduring, as were the potential problems posed by sources of royal wealth in personal monarchy. They point also to possible changes over time. But before such comparisons can be made or changes con®dently asserted, the sources need to be subjected to careful scrutiny. Structures, patterns and differences emerge from sources whose reading is as problematic as is that of Gregory himself. Silences, for example, may not be signi®cant. The queen appears in possession of the symbols of royalty in Francia, in the ninth but not in the ®fth or sixth centuries. Is this a real difference, or one arising from the interests of authors? Hincmar, author of sections of the Annals of Saint Bertin, was especially interested in king-making rituals, and in the insignia which 54

55

56

57

Venantius Fortunatus, Vita S. Radegundis liber I, chs. 13 and 14; Baudonivia, Vita S. Radegundis, ch. 4 (both in Fredegarii et aliorum chronica, ed. Krusch). The Letters and Poems of Fulbert of Chartres, ed. and trans. F. Behrends, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, 1976), pp. 188±9 (Fulk of Anjou to King Robert). Hincmar, De Ordine Palatii, in MGH Cap., II, 515±30 (ch. 22), who made the royal dignity, but also the giving of gifts to the of®cers of the household and embassies, the responsibility of a ninth-century queen; De Villis, chs. 16 and 27 (in MGH Cap., I). Welsh Laws of Court, The Law of Hywel Dda: Law Texts from Medieval Wales, ed. and trans. D. Jenkins (Llandysul, 1986), p. 10: the DW text is rather different; the Queen shared with the king within the realm, but not outside; the captain of the household shared the booty of a foreign country. See also Tyler, in this volume, p. 102.

74

Queens and Treasure in the Early Middle Ages went with them. Neither Gregory of Tours, Fredegar nor the Liber Historiae Francorum, by contrast, shared this interest; the treasure which they record in the hands of queens might well have contained these all-important symbols without the authors feeling the need to stress that fact.58 The apparent contrast between, for example, Merovingian and early English politics, and the role of queens and treasure in both, may again be more a function of sources than of political realities. The constant ambiguities about treasure were only expressed in certain times and places. In England, for example, outside the literary sources, there is little reference to royal women and treasure before the eleventh century and Emma. Asser, telling the story of the ¯ight of the murderous Eadburh, is a rare exception. When she ¯ed the court after her poisonings, she took treasure with her.59 Asser's denigration of Eadburh is part of his attempt to explain and justify the low status of West Saxon queens. The story is deliberately constructed to make its point. Theft and misappropriation of royal treasure by a ¯eeing queen underlines the queen as a problem. The danger in interpreting silence becomes obvious; only a desire to criticize Eadburh reveals any association of her with treasure. Gregory's thinking through of questions about wealth using women occurs in other times and places. Paul the Deacon's story of a ¯eeing Rosamund attempting to take treasure with her shows that he too felt that royal treasure was in some sense public, belonging in some senses to the people of the Lombards and the Franks, and not to the private family of rulers, symbolized, as so often, through its female members. Paul seems to share Gregory's quasiRoman public/private distinction. By the tenth and eleventh centuries there are different critiques, albeit rooted in similar suspicions of wealth. In the eleventh century Otloh of St Emmeram recounts the story of a Vision of a Poor Nun, which features the Empress Theophanu. In it, Theophanu was made repentant for having corrupted the manners of the Germans and Franks by bringing Greek habits of personal adornment with gold and gems when she came as a bride from Byzantium.60 This eleventh-century German author de®ned `German' and `Frank' as puritan, simple, (and implicitly masculine?) by contrast with an `other' which was luxurious, oriental and explicitly feminine. In the grotesque stories of the tenth-century Italian Liudprand of Cremona, Liudprand's pet hate, Willa, hid a gold belt in 58

59 60

The Liber, for example, is interested in treasure, but as plunder, booty, loot and a form of social exchange; Gregory is aware of its political importance, but has little apparent interest in its ritual or symbolic uses: R. A. Gerberding, The Rise of the Carolingians and the Liber Historiae Francorum (Oxford, 1987), pp. 41±2 and 165±6, bringing out the comparison with Gregory. The Liber is interested in loyalty and uses treasure to comment on this; see ch. 18, where betrayers get gilded copper not gold: `false metal' is taken by him who hands his lord to be killed. Gold is here commuted by the morality of the actions in which it is involved ± it ceases to be `noble'. Asser's Life of King Alfred, ed. W. H. Stevenson (Oxford, 1959), ch. 15. Othloh of St Emmeram, Ex Libro Visionum, ed. G. H. Pertz, MGH SS 11 (Hanover, 1854), `Visio decima septime Theophaniae imperatricis ob luxum vestium in purgatorio poenae'.

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Pauline Stafford her vagina.61 Liudprand over-personalizes and sexualizes tenth-century Italian politics. Once again the contrast is of an other, here Italian, with German. Once again gender de®nes the distinction, this time Liudprand's contrast between `Italian hussies and German matrons'.62 In his story of Willa the very source of women's speci®c contribution to wealth was used as the repository of over-valued treasure in a perversion of function too obviously symbolic to invite total credence. All these stories share the recurrent use of gender to discuss questions such as group identity, or the public and the private: all throw doubt on simple readings of the women they describe. The problem of reading such stories is compounded when sanctity is at stake. Here women seem often to be used not simply to de®ne the female form of sanctity, but in de®nitions of its male royal form. Robert the Pious, or rather Helgaud of Fleury's Robert, was a royal saint. He rejected wealth and treasure; as did Edward the Confessor, a fellow eleventh-century royal saint, similarly unconcerned with the external trappings of royalty. Both Robert, and at least in the later reworkings of his Life, Edward, are prodigal with their treasure to the extent of allowing themselves to be robbed.63 They do not give it away to acquire followers and power; they allow the poor to take it from them, in an inversion of gift giving and its normal patterns and purposes. Queen Constance becomes the foil to Robert's pious prodigality: she is avaricious, but also voices the standard attitudes to royal wealth ± that it is there for the glory and dignity of royalty. Robert's and Edward's attitudes to treasure and wealth are inversions, and as male inversions in some respects feminizations.64 It is more normal to ®nd female royal saints giving away treasure so prodigally to the poor and needy that there is none left for its normal uses. Clovis's wife Chlotild, in her tenth-century Life, has exhausted the royal treasures by the time of her death; the Ottonian Mathilda in her tenth-century Vita has nothing left to give on her deathbed.65 These royal women invert royal giving in general, and perhaps speci®cally the great distribution of

61 62

63

64

65

Liudprand, Antapodosis, ed. G. H. Pertz, MGH SS 3 (Hanover, 1839), iv.11 (pp. 318±19). P. Buc, `Italian Hussies and German Matrons: Liutprand of Cremona on Dynastic Legitimacy', FruÈhmittelalterliche Studien 29 (1995), 207±25. Helgaud, Vie de Robert le Pieux, ed. and trans. Bautier and Labory, ch. 5 (pp. 62±3). Aelred of Rievaulx, Vita S. Edwardi Regis, PL 195, 737±90 (195, 746). Interestingly whilst Constance is the ®erce guardian in Helgaud, in Aelred it is the camerarius, Hugolin. Queen Edith, who commissioned the ®rst life of her saintly husband, was very successful in ensuring her own later reputation as well as his. For discussion of Victor Turner's important work on reversal and liminality and its possibly gendered nature see C. Walker Bynum, `Women's Stories, Women's Symbols: A Critique of Victor Turner's Theory of Liminality', in her Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York, 1991), pp. 27±51. Vita Sanctae Chlothildis, ch. 14 (in Fredegarii et aliorum chronica, ed. Krusch, p. 347); Vita Mahthildis Posterior, in MGH SS 4 (Hanover, 1841), pp. 282±392 (ch. 24, pp. 299±300).

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Queens and Treasure in the Early Middle Ages treasure at death, for which Charlemagne left provision, along with Otto II, Eadred, and Alfred.66 In their prodigality saintly royal women are inversions of regality, as is Robert. With them as with him, through the attributes of royal sanctity we hear the discussion of the problem of treasure and its uses in a Christian society. Saints, like women, are good to think with; saintly women doubly so. Once again there is no simple relation between the stories told and the reality behind them. If early medieval authors use women to discuss treasure and its appropriate use, they may be dif®cult guides to the overall pattern of women's association with treasure. Much will depend on the attitudes of the individual author, and even more so his/her purposes, and his/her relationship to the women and families s/he is describing. Caution is certainly necessary when ambiguous early medieval attitudes are constantly thought through in stories involving women. We would be unwise to take at face value a story such as that Asser tells of Eadburh. But there is no need for total despair. Tales like Asser's would have had little meaning without the very associations of queen, treasure and household against which they warned. Saintly royal women's pro¯igate distribution of treasure may re¯ect their structural part in the circulation of royal treasure, exaggerating their normal role as givers alongside kings.67 The gaps and silences in the evidence can never be satisfactorily ®lled, but sometimes they are signi®cant in themselves. The contrast between Gregory and Hincmar is not merely a difference of agendas. Hincmar's agenda was different precisely because king-making rituals were becoming so important in ninth-century Francia. Queens' control of the symbols of royalty may or may not have been new then, but it would certainly have become more signi®cant in this context. Richness and layering of meaning must never be ignored, but meanings are themselves a part of political reality and they are earthed in the material world. The case of eleventh-century England may demonstrate this. There are more references to treasure in eleventh- and early twelfth66

67

The possession of large amounts of treasure and perhaps also its ®nal distribution in this way is quasi-royal in itself; see Rauching, whose possessions eclipsed the royal treasury, and who also claimed to be a son of Clothar, LH ix.9, and comment I. Wood, `Kings, Kingdoms and Consent', in Early Medieval Kingship, ed. P. H. Sawyer and I. N. Wood (Leeds, 1977), pp. 6±29 (p. 15); and compare Wilfrid, whose treasure was seen by Queen Iurminburg and King Ecgfrith as a threat, and who made a distribution at death which recalls those of kings: The Life of Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus, ed. and trans. B. Colgrave (Cambridge, 1927), chs. 24 and 63. See also T. Reuter, pp. 11±24 in this volume. J. McNamara, `Imitatio Helenae: Sainthood as an Attribute of Queenship in the Early Middle Ages', in Saints: Studies in Hagiography, ed. S. Sticca, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies (New York, 1996), pp. 51±80, though this interpretation should not be used to over-emphasize the difference between a queen's and a king's use of treasure, which have more parallels than differences.

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Pauline Stafford century chronicles than at any earlier date in England. There are accounts of Queen Emma taking the treasury at Winchester after Cnut's death, and of her and Queen Edith being deprived of treasure in 1043 and 1051 respectively. These take their place in a long series of chronicle entries: William I leaving his treasure; William Rufus inspecting his father's treasure house; Henry I being left his mother, Queen Mathilda's, treasure and making his famous dash for the royal treasure on his brother's death; Malcolm, king of the Scots, and the Scandinavian raiders of the late eleventh century leaving with treasure; both English and Normans looting it after 1066, and more.68 The sources for the eleventh century in England are simply fuller than for earlier periods, and in fuller sources more references to such activities can be found. But, as in the case of Hincmar, these fuller sources have their own agendas, demonstrably rooted in contemporary politics where treasure had become central. First, eleventh-century England witnessed three complex successions, in 1035, 1087 and 1100, in each of which control of the treasure was important. Succession problems, however, had been just as much a feature of tenthcentury English politics; it is not this alone which marks the eleventh century out. In the eleventh century succession questions were combined with a series of attacks in many of which the treasures of the English kingdom were looted; 1066 was merely the most spectacular of these.69 Behind all this lay growing and novel taxation which, as in Gregory of Tours' Francia, was now a major source of the contents of the royal treasury.70 Taxation and depredation have left tangible material remains in the hoards of English coins of the ®rst half of the eleventh century found in Scandinavia and in English books transferred across the Channel after 1066. This is the context of comment on Queen Emma's access to the royal treasure, one in which all treasure, and its sources and use, had become a focus of contemporary interest. One result, in eleventh-century England as in sixth-century Francia, was a sensitivity to treasure, its sources and uses. The story of Rigunth's dowry was one of the great tales of late sixth century Francia: that of Queen Emma's daughter, Gunnhild, given when she married the Emperor's son, was 68

69

70

See e.g. ASC MS C s.a. 1035, 1043; MS D s.a. 1051, 1068; MS E s.a. 1042, 1076, 1079, 1086, 1087 etc., plus Orderic Vitalis on Henry's seizure of treasure, see above n. 20. See Tyler in this volume, p. 83. Danes at the beginning, ASC MS C s.a. 1006; álfgar in 1055, ASC MS D s.a. 1055; see also Godwine in 1051, ASC MS D s.a. 1051. On taxation see M. K. Lawson, `The Collection of Danegeld and Heregeld in the Reigns of Aethelred II and Cnut', EHR 99 (1984), 721±38 and `''Those Stories Look True'': Levels of Taxation in the Reigns of Aethelred II and Cnut', EHR 104 (1989), 385±406; but compare. J. Gillingham, `''The Most Precious Jewel in the English Crown'': Levels of Danegeld and Heregeld in the Early Eleventh Century', EHR 104 (1989), 373±84; J. Gillingham, `Chronicles and Coins as Evidence for Levels of Tribute and Taxation in Later Tenthand Early Eleventh-Century England', EHR 105 (1990), 939±50; M. K. Lawson, `Danegeld and Heregeld Once More', EHR 105 (1990), 951±61.

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Queens and Treasure in the Early Middle Ages similarly told in song and tale in eleventh-century England. It was still remembered in this way as late as the early twelfth century in the work of William of Malmesbury. William's story and Gregory's are remarkably similar. The scale of the dowry and where it came from were central. And for both William and Gregory the question was made one of public and private treasure; in Gunnhild's case, according to Malmesbury, the nobles stood round wondering what was being taken `from the public purse or the royal treasure'.71 William had read his classical authors, which may in part account for his emphasis on the distinction. But like the song-writers whom he claims to quote, and like Gregory so long before, William was arguably led to think again about treasure in this way because the question of taxation had raised issues of public and private which loot and tribute did not. By the early twelfth century all this had fuelled a critique of royal avarice, which was turned against Henry I's queen, Mathilda.72 Wariness in reading the sources is still clearly necessary. Mathilda and Gunnhild, like Fredegund and Rigunth, paid the price for eleventh-century changes. Queens may have borne an unfair share of the resulting criticism. But the criticism grew out of real changes in royal exactions alongside an out¯ow of English loot. The questions these raised inevitably involved the queen and her place in the structure of politics and rule. The connection between royal women and treasure had come into focus again, its familial and thus debatable nature. Used with caution our sources may thus tell us many things: not only about the entwining of the symbolic meanings of women and treasure, but also about the structures on which those meanings drew and about the shorterterm changes which affected those structures and exposed them to scrutiny. This paper has been concerned with the connections between queens and treasure in the early Middle Ages, and with the problems of reading the sources for those connections. It cannot, and has not, aspired to an overall assessment of those connections, nor of the changes that affected them: such an assessment would be premature and beyond the scope of a single paper. It might, however, be appropriate to end by offering some general patterns and suggestions as a way forward for the study of this subject. The association of queen and treasure in the early Middle Ages arose within polities which combined familial and hegemonial rule. Thus as daughter a queen was herself a form of treasure, given and taken with it in marriage. As wife, partner and extension of her husband ± and speci®cally responsible for the royal dignity ± her household functions included the receiving and dispensing of treasure. As mother she was a provider of 71

72

William of Malmesbury, De gestis regum Anglorum, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols., Rolls Series 90 (London, 1887±9), ii.188 (I, 229±30): `marsupium publicum vel aerarium regum'. William again reports this, De gestis regum v.418 (II, 493±5); further comment in P. Stafford, `The Portrayal of Royal Women in England, mid-Tenth to mid-Twelfth Centuries', in Medieval Queenship, ed. J. C. Parsons (New York, 1993), pp. 143±67.

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Pauline Stafford treasure, in the shape of her children, but then a user of it as she acted and manoeuvred for her sons and grandsons, in a system in which succession was a key issue. This familial politics was combined with hegemonial rule: kingdoms that were more like federations, controlled and held together by marriage ties and similar personal connections rather than ruled in depth. In the resulting situation public and private were not clearly distinguished, indeed that distinction often made little sense. The family was not a private retreat, but the dynastic centre of the kingdom. The household had a particular role within hegemonial rule, as the place where personal relations were created and maintained through fostering and attendance. It was often the place where gifts were exchanged, and to which tribute, renders and loot were brought. Treasure, in all its forms, was the currency of hegemonial politics, as mobile, shifting and personal as hegemony itself. It was a currency of which the queen's own body could be part, as well as one which she could produce, display and readily deploy. This is a model of early medieval politics, and like all heuristic models, it is a simplistic one, which captures certain essentials, but never perfectly describes any particular situation. The model needs to allow for other factors and elements, some at least of which are present from the beginning of the period onwards, which pulled in opposite directions and acted as potential agents for change. First, the existence or development of the of®cial public aspects of kingship was always liable to force the public/private distinction forward. These aspects were expressed for example in lawcodes and symbolized in the elaboration of coronation rituals, as in ninth-century Francia or tenth-century Germany, and were concretely experienced in the growth of taxation. Second, moves towards primogeniture, in some ways linked with the idea of the of®cial indivisible nature of kingship itself, excluded or limited the very succession politics within which royal women used treasure and with it some of the familial politics which had blurred the public/private distinction. Third, it has been argued, the institutionalization of rule through the shift towards formal administrative structures meant that the organization and control of key areas, including treasure, left the physical surroundings of the household. That control was now located in formal structures, to which the queen's essentially familial power did not extend.73 This argument, powerful as it is, may not suf®ciently distinguish between administration and control. The latter never did leave the household as long as personal monarchy remained. This alleged shift is arguably better rede®ned as what Timothy Reuter and others have called the move from hegemonial to territorial lordship and kingship, that is to the more stable structures of the medieval state. It involved a fundamental shift from treasure 73

J. McNamara and S. Wemple, `The Power of Women through the Family in Early Medieval Europe: 500±1100', in Clio's Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women, ed. M. S. Hartman and L. Banner (New York, 1974), pp. 103±18.

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Queens and Treasure in the Early Middle Ages to land and of®ce as the key stuff of patronage, and thus a change in the currency of faction, alliance and support, and of politics. It entailed a move from loot to taxation, from a world where the gift of a great saddled and bridled horse or a gold salver cements and rewards personal loyalties, to one where appointment to lucrative of®ce is more important. It is not a simple development to date, since it occurred at different rates and with more or less thoroughness in different parts of early medieval western Europe. What is clear is that all these factors could combine to produce critiques of rule itself, ones which were likely to include a sharper distinction of the public/private division, and thus potentially to question the sources and use of treasure and wealth and the queen's right to control it. This may have been happening in England by the early twelfth century.74 Even incorporating these factors for change, this is, it must be stressed, still a model, and not a description of unilineal and concurrent developments experienced in a ®xed order over time. Sixth-century Francia had notions of the public/private in a context of intensely familial, hegemonial rule. Eleventh-century England, well on the way to being a territorial state, still had an important place for treasure in its politics, and for a queen in relation to it through her family role. The sources of royal treasure in both sixthcentury Francia and eleventh-century England included taxation. Splendid gifts and cash for payment never lost their function, whilst eleventh-century conquest reasserted the instant rewards of loot.75 And speci®c circumstances might develop particular aspects of the queen's association with treasure in apparent contradiction to the broad developments which the model seems to suggest, as, for example, in the queen's responsibility for the insignia in ninth-century Francia, precisely in the context of the elaboration of a more `of®cial' notion of kingship.76 The scope for the development of an `of®cial' 74 75

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Stafford, `Portrayal of Royal Women'; and see n. 14 above. It may be worth asking whether war in the Middle Ages always to some extent revives aspects of the hegemonial pattern. See Late Merovingian France, ed. and trans. Fouracre and Gerberding, p. 6 for the role of both land and treasure in the Merovingian polity. For ninth-century developments of inauguration rituals and their importance see J. L. Nelson, `Inauguration Rituals', in her Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe (London, 1986), pp. 283±307; Ordines coronationis Franciae, ed. R. A. Jackson (Philadelphia, 1995) and G. Lanoe, `L'ordo de couronnement de Charles le Chauve aÁ Sainte-Croix d'OrleÂans (6 juin 848)', in Kings and Kingship in Medieval Europe, ed. A. J. Duggan, Kings College London Medieval Studies 10 (1993), pp. 41±68. Perhaps in this context ninth-century Frankish kings and emperors appear to have shown more concern with the transfer of their insignia than earlier ones: Louis the Pious personally transferred them to his eldest son Lothar; Charles the Bald made arrangements for their transfer via his queen to his successor Louis; Louis the Stammerer sent the insignia, crown and gold sword adorned with jewels to his son Louis; see Astronomer, Vita Hludovici Imperatoris, ed. G. H. Pertz, MGH SS 2 (Hanover, 1829), pp. 604±48 (ch. 63, p. 647) and Annales de Saint-Bertin, ed. Grat, Vielliard and Clemencet, s.a. 877 and 879. The need to be wary of Merovingian silences has already been noted, but the conclusion that ninth-century kingship was being de®ned more as of®ce, and the role of the insignia in this, seems clear. The queen's role in the

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Pauline Stafford queenship, was, indeed, just one extra factor which meant that the working of the model could never be simple.77 Proposing such broad structures within which to consider queens and treasure does, however, offer many opportunities for comparison, for the recognition of possible continuities, and for the differentiation of the common and structural from the speci®c and contingent in any particular historical context. The structures of familial/dynastic rule long outlasted the early Middle Ages, and queens remained active within them. Treasure, in the sense of precious objects, retained its function as a denoter of status, and its use in patronage, throughout the Middle Ages; and its ownership, let alone the methods of its acquisition, remained problematic and subject to intense criticism, scrutiny and anxiety. How, how far and why the interrelationships of these functions and perceptions changed across the Middle Ages or beyond, and what the signi®cance of this was for queens, are questions which this model opens rather than answers. Responses to them may deepen our understanding not only of the queen but of the working of medieval politics themselves: and not only in the early Middle Ages but across the whole of that period.

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ninth-century polity was still great enough for her to have a role in this shift, and in both places questions over the succession had recently reinforced it. Ninth-century Francia was as critical for the development of queenship as it was for kingship: see J. L. Nelson, `Early Medieval Rites of Queen-Making and the Shaping of Medieval Queenship', in Queens and Queenship in Medieval Europe, ed. A. Duggan (Woodbridge, 1997), pp. 301±15.

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6 `When Wings Incarnadine with Gold are Spread': The Vita ádwardi Regis and the Display of Treasure at the Court of Edward the Confessor Elizabeth M. Tyler

With its vivid and detailed descriptions, the Vita ádwardi Regis shows a marked interest in the secular display of treasure at the court of Edward the Confessor. Moreover, the richness of these descriptions and their centrality to the text's meaning stand out as unusual in an Anglo-Saxon context.1 Elsewhere in this volume, Pauline Stafford draws attention to the increasing frequency of references to treasure in eleventh- and twelfth-century English texts, and interprets this as a re¯ection not only of the fuller nature of these sources, but also of the importance of treasure in the complex political circumstances of the period.2 Even viewed from this perspective, however, the display of treasure in the Vita remains remarkable. This remarkable treasure, which appears in the form of gift-giving,3 a spectacular ship, and Edward's lavish clothing, needs to be understood as much in terms of the text's artistry as its veracity. This paper puts the text's artistry at the centre through the close reading of the passages of display with an eye to literary tradition, convention, the use of ®gurative language and the shape of the narrative as a whole.4 Such a reading sheds light on the place of treasure in eleventh-century England, and also on the nature of the Vita, not only as a literary text, but also as an historical source. The analysis and conclusions offered, ®nally, have implications for the text's relationship to the Encomium 1

2

3 4

All references to the text, quotations and translations are taken from The Life of King Edward who Rests at Westminster, ed. and trans. F. Barlow, Oxford Medieval Texts, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1992). This paper is part of a larger project on treasure and display in late AngloSaxon England. See P. Stafford's contribution to this volume, `Queens and Treasure in the Early Middle Ages', pp. 61±82, esp. pp. 78±9. Stafford's contribution and this article offer complementary approaches to the same text, especially appropriate in an interdisciplinary volume. A broad subject not restricted to gifts of treasure, though that is the major concern here. For literary discussion of the text see: E. K. Heningham, `The Genuineness of the Vita ádwardi Regis', Speculum 21 (1946), 419±56; E. K. Heningham, `The Literary Unity, the Date, and the Purpose of the Lady Edith's Book: The Life of King Edward who Rests at Westminster', Albion 7 (1975), 24±40; Life, ed. Barlow, pp. xviii±xxviii; P. Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith: Queenship and Women's Power in Eleventh-Century England (Oxford, 1997), pp. 40±1, esp. n. 35.

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Elizabeth M. Tyler Emmae Reginae.5 Treasure emerges as a powerful symbol, both on and off the page.

VITA áDWARDI REGIS

Written by an anonymous foreigner, most likely a Fleming in religious orders,6 the Vita ádwardi Regis recounts the events of Edward the Confessor's reign from his succession, following the disastrous (as the author sees it) period of Danish rule, through to the king's death. In the wake of the events of 1065±66 (which include the Northern Rebellion, and subsequent exile of Tostig, the death of Edward, the brief reign of Harold, and the battles of Stamford Bridge and Hastings, as well as their aftermath), the Anonymous also considers Edward's holy life, his celibacy, rejection of pomp and ®nery and the miracles attributed to his intervention. The precise date of the text remains uncertain, but it clearly must be considered a contemporary account.7 Similarly, though its precise political purpose is debatable, it was clearly written in support of Edith, Edward's queen. The Anonymous author tells us as much when he writes that he will praise the queen by recounting the deeds of her husband, Edward, her father, Earl Godwine, and her brothers, the earls Tostig and Harold.8 Throughout, he presents events from Edith's perspective, so much so that she is generally taken to be his informant.9 Edith's role in the production of the Vita plays a part in its unusual focus on the court, a focus which brings treasure and its display to the fore.10 5

6

7

8 9

10

This current paper is a companion piece to E. M. Tyler, ` ``The Eyes of the Beholders were Dazzled'': Treasure and Arti®ce in the Encomium Emmae Reginae', Early Medieval Europe, 8 (1999), 249±70. This article presents a literary analysis of treasure in a text more usually approached in terms of its value as an historical source. The Anonymous has been associated with the religious foundations of St Omer and St Bertin. See R. Southern, `The First Life of Edward the Confessor', EHR 232 (1946), 385±400 (pp. 397±400); Life, ed. Barlow, pp. xliv±lix; Stafford, Queen Emma, p. 41. A. G. Rigg recently challenged the consensus regarding the foreign origins of the Anonymous, suggesting that the author was English: A History of Anglo-Latin Literature, 1066±1422 (Cambridge, 1992), p. 332 n. 18. Its editor, Frank Barlow, argues that it was begun before the misfortunes of 1065±66 and then overtaken by events (Life, ed. Barlow, pp. xxix±xxxiii). Most recently, Stafford sees the whole text as a response, produced in the years 1066±67, to events which preceded and followed Edward's death (Queen Emma, pp. 41 and 45). Southern suggests 1066±67 (`First Life', pp. 385±6) and Heningham 1068±70 (`Literary Unity', pp. 33 and 38±9). E. John follows Barlow (`Edward the Confessor and the Norman Succession', EHR 371 (1979), 241±67 (p. 264) ). Rigg proposes 1066±70 (Anglo-Latin, p. 12). Life, ed. Barlow, pp. 6±8 and 88±90. Life, ed. Barlow, pp. xxi, xlvi and lxi; John, `Norman Succession', p. 248; and Stafford, Queen Emma, pp. 41 and 45. Stafford, Queen Emma, pp. 47±8 and also Life, ed. Barlow, p. xlvi.

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The Vita ádwardi Regis and the Display of Treasure The Vita is a text which invites the literary approach to the representation of treasure which I set out in my introduction. With his poetic invocation of his muse, his alternation of sections in verse and rhymed prose (in a manner which goes back to Boethius and Martianus Capella) and his ostentatious use of classical allusion, the Anonymous announces that he has written a literary piece. Artistry and meaning are carefully bound up in the Vita to a degree that frustrates attempts to use the text as a reliable historical source and which demands a literary approach to its historicity.11 As well as portraying Edward as a second Solomon, the Anonymous aims to depict the reign of Edward as a golden age such as Vergil proclaimed for Augustus;12 his muse tells him to write: eius ut aduentu depresso secula luctu aurea mox Anglis enituere suis; ut post bella Dauid pax succedens Salomonis.13

And using allusions to Suetonius, Sallust and other Latin historians, he aims to cast Edward in the same mould as the Emperors of Rome.14 But both his biblical and classical frameworks at times get away from him. Solomon is not invoked in an entirely unambiguous way in the text,15 and the horrors of the Anonymous's story do not lend themselves to celebrating Edward as Caesar Augustus. The con¯ict between the story the Anonymous would like to tell and the reality of the situation, as well as his own limitations as a writer,16 stands behind the curious nature of the text. It comes together around the 11

12

13

14

15 16

On the style of the Vita see Southern, `First Life', p. 396 and Life, ed. Barlow, pp. xxvii± xxviii. J. T. Rosenthal re¯ects on how scholarly frustration at the failure of the Anonymous `to grasp' what we might see as the `major political problems' of Edward's reign has led to the misreading of the text; see his `Edward the Confessor and Robert the Pious: EleventhCentury Kingship and Biography', Medieval Studies 33 (1971), 7±20 (p. 9). Barlow notes that the Anonymous tells a `simple story' and writes that `he makes a pattern out of recorded or generally remembered events, choosing only those which suited his purpose; and he recalls them with a varying degree of accuracy and vividness' (Life, ed. Barlow, p. lx). N. J. Higham writes that the deeds of Harold and Tostig were `embellished . . . with references to the work of Ovid and Virgil's Aeneid': The Death of Anglo-Saxon England (Stroud, 1997), p. 145. The use of such allusion is, however, more general. How at his coming, with all grief repressed, A golden age shone for his English race, As after David's wars came Solomon and peace. (Life, ed. Barlow, pp. 6±7) See the Aeneid vi.792 and the Eclogues iv, as Barlow notes. Throughout words which echo another text will be marked in bold. This framework does not by any means account for all of the Anonymous's classical references but it is clearly announced and foregrounded. On the use of Suetonius and Sallust, see Heningham, `Genuineness', p. 434; Life, ed. Barlow, p. xxiii. See further below, pp. 103±6. His grasp of classical texts is often confused, see Southern, `First Life', pp. 396±7 and Life, ed. Barlow, p. xxviii, for examples.

85

Elizabeth M. Tyler need to promote Edith,17 and there is unity in the themes, parallels, and juxtapositions which run throughout the text.18 Yet the Vita remains oddly disjointed, as is evident in the fault-lines which undermine the vision of a golden age and which appear when the text moves into a hagiographic mode to recount the miracles associated with Edward.19 As the place of treasure in the text is examined closely, further aspects of the text's careful crafting, but also of the dif®culty the Anonymous encounters in making sense of his biblical and classical references, will emerge.

GIFT-GIVING

The Vita records at length that Edward the Confessor and Edith were both generous ecclesiastical patrons. The Anonymous also mentions the religious gift-giving, in one form or another, of his other major ®gures ± Godwine, Tostig and Harold.20 I will not deal with this subject at length since accounts of kings, queens and aristocrats donating to churches and the poor appear widely in sources for late Anglo-Saxon England and this aspect has been much discussed (particularly with regard to the Benedictine Reform).21 However, the subject calls for attention in view of the centrality of almsgiving and ecclesiastical patronage to the portraits the Anonymous presents of Edward and Edith and, of course, such gift-giving involves display and prestige, as well as genuine piety. There are two main passages involving religious gift-giving which, though not focused on treasure, are important for understanding the ostentatious display of wealth in the Vita. In the ®rst instance, Edward's generosity is linked with secular display, reminding us that the division between the secular and religious in this realm should not be anachronistically overdrawn, though the focus here lies with the former. After recounting the ®nery which Edith, with solicitude, encourages him to wear,22 the Anonymous tells us that Edward gave alms to the poor in his court and widely throughout his kingdom. Edith's giving, however, far outstrips Edward's and yet is done in 17

18 19

20 21

22

On unity around Edith see especially Stafford, Queen Emma, p. 41 and also Life, ed. Barlow, pp. xx±xxi. On literary unity see Heningham, `Literary Unity'; Stafford, Queen Emma, p. 41 n. 35. This lack of unity, especially as highlighted in the collapse of the Vergilian model, does, it seems to me, lend support to Barlow's view that the book was composed across the events of 1065±66, though there are other possible explanations. Life, ed. Barlow, pp. 46, 50, and 52. See C. R. E. Cubitt, `Review Article: The Tenth-Century Benedictine Reform in England', Early Medieval Europe 6 (1997), 77±94 (p. 86) and the important studies: S. D. White, Custom, Kingship, and Gifts to Saints: The Laudatio Parentum in Western France, 1050±1150 (Chapel Hill and London, 1988) and B. Rosenwein, To Be the Neighbor of St Peter: The Social Meaning of Cluny's Property, 909±1049 (Ithaca NY, 1989). See further below, pp. 99±106.

86

The Vita ádwardi Regis and the Display of Treasure such a way as to enhance his honour.23 The donations of king and queen are closely linked too, when ®rst Edward endows Westminster and then Edith, in emulation, endows Wilton. She conceives of her project in more modest terms and thus it achieves completion. The Anonymous uses alms-giving and church patronage to highlight Edward's holiness,24 but in a way which also includes Edith and praises her in terms of her relationship to Edward and stresses their closeness. All of this serves Edith's interests in the aftermath of the Conquest as she attempts to associate herself with Edward's reputation for sanctity to enhance her position.25 More attention is given, however, to secular gift-giving and its political importance. While Edward's actual coronation receives little attention,26 the Anonymous focuses extensively on the post-coronation gift-giving in order to present Edward as a king of European renown and imperial stature. He writes: Et non soli Angli, quibus diuinitus hec prestabatur gratia, uerum conguadet ex uicina germanitate uniuersalis Gallia. Cuius principes, hac exhilarati fama, amica festinant legatis suis mithtjere mandamina, et tanti regis amicitiam expetere cum pacis gratia. Primus ipse Romanorum imperator Heinricus, qui etiam eiusdem Eadwardi regis sororem Gonhildam nomine coniugem duxerat, exhilaratus quod eum in paterna sede inthronizatum didicerat, ad coniungendas in inuicem dextras legatos dirigit, munera imperiali liberalitate exhibenda mittit, et que tantos decebat terrarum dominos pacem et amicitiam sibi suisque prestat et petit. Rex quoque Francorum, item Heinricus nomine, eiusdem Anglorum regis uicina carnis propinquitate consanguineus, eadem nouitate plurimum iocundatus, legatis suis cum eodem exoptatum amicis utriusque pepigit fedus. Rex etiam Danorum licet in®nita inter¯uentis occeani longinquitate dirimatur, legatis tamen suis longo maris terrarumque circuitu defessis pacem et dilectionem eius precatur, patrem eum sibi eligit, seque ut ®lium illi in omnibus subicit, iussusque ab eodem Anglorum rege hanc sponsionem et sacramentis iurat, et obsidibus con®rmat. Ceteri quoque eorundem regum tyranni, et quique potentissimi duces et principes, legatis suis eum

23

24

25 26

This picture of Edith and Edward is not, however, in accord with what historians have deduced about their generosity. Although Edward was lavish to Westminster, they seem to have been modest ecclesiastical benefactors; see: Stafford, Queen Emma, pp. 143±59; E. Mason, Westminster Abbey and Its People, c.1050±c.1216, Studies in the History of Medieval Religion 9 (Woodbridge, 1996), pp. 12±13. Barlow presents a different view but relies heavily on the Vita; see his The English Church 1000±1066: A History of the Later Anglo-Saxon Church, 2nd edn (London, 1979), pp. 51±2. Heningham similarly supports the view of the Vita (`Genuineness', p. 449). This is an aspect of Edward's reputation which gains momentum in post-Conquest writing. See Stafford, `Queens and Treasure', p. 76 above. Stafford, Queen Emma, p. 47. See Life, ed. Barlow, p. 15 n. 32; Barlow notes that the Anonymous gets the location of the coronation wrong, which suggests he is not well informed here.

87

Elizabeth M. Tyler adeunt, amicum et dominum sibi suisque constituunt, eique ®delitatem et seruitium suum in manus ponunt. Mittuntur singulis pro celsitudine sua ab ipso rege regalia munera, queÎ ut nullius quamlibet multiplex regis uel principis umquam equaret muni®centia, regum pulcherrimus et nobilissimus Anglorum rex ádwardus facit eisdem Francorum principibus uel annua uel continua.27

This description of gift-giving is conventional and exaggerated, constructed with literary arti®ce and in some places just plain false, which might lead to the interpretation of this section more in terms of textuality than reality; but this conventionality and literary nature, of course, do not render the passage meaningless.28 The account of the three sets of ambassadors is purposefully structured and the Anonymous does not let veracity de¯ect him from his point. He lists the rulers of Germany, Francia and Denmark in order of decreasing status and closeness of kinship. Henry, Emperor of Germany, comes ®rst and his marriage to Edward's sister is mentioned; never mind that Henry was not yet Emperor.29 Then Henry, the king of the Franks, is mentioned and his kinship 27

28

29

And not only the English, to whom this favour had been shown by heaven, but indeed the whole of Gaul on account of its close kinship rejoiced with them; and its rulers, gladdened by the report, hastened to send by their ambassadors friendly greetings and to seek the friendship of so great a king together with the boon of peace. First, the emperor of the Romans himself, Henry, who besides had married Edward's sister Gunnhild, delighted to learn that Edward had been enthroned in his ancestral seat, dispatched ambassadors to con®rm their amity, sent gifts to be bestowed with imperial generosity, and, as be®tted these great lords of the earth, offered and asked for peace and friendship for him and his vassals. Also, the king of the Franks, another Henry, a close kinsman by blood of the king of the English, much pleased with the news, made with him through ambassadors a treaty welcome to the friends of both. Even the king of the Danes, although separated by the immense distance of the intervening ocean, with ambassadors exhausted by their long travels on land and sea, entreated his peace and love, chose him as a father, submitted himself to him in all things as a son, and by order of the English king af®rmed this agreement by oath and con®rmed it with hostages. Moreover, all the other nobles of those kings and all the most powerful dukes and princes approached him with their ambassadors, made him their friend and lord for them and theirs, and put their fealty and service in his hands. To each of these according to his rank were sent from the king royal gifts, and, so that no generosity, however bountiful, of any king or prince whatsoever should ever equal these gifts, Edward, the most fair and noble of English kings, made them for these same Frankish princes in the form of either annual or perpetual grants. (Life, ed. Barlow, pp. 14±19.) For general comments on this passage see: F. Barlow, `Edward the Confessor's Early Life, Character and Attitudes', in his The Norman Conquest and Beyond (London, 1983), pp. 57± 83 (p. 65); F. Barlow, Edward the Confessor (Berkeley, 1970), pp. 64±5. Southern views this passage as `not possible outside romance' (`First Life', pp. 391±2) and Barlow writes that the passage is `rhetorical' though it `makes sense' (Edward the Confessor, p. 41). See further below, n. 33, for the topos of the ambassadors. Barlow identi®es these perpetual grants as possibly `money ®efs' so we are not considering in this passage simply gifts of visible treasure but general gift-giving (Life, ed. Barlow, p. 18 n. 40). For this kinship see Life, ed. Barlow, p. 16 n. 35. On gift-giving between Ottonian and

88

The Vita ádwardi Regis and the Display of Treasure with Edward is, at the very least, overstated, if not altogether fabricated.30 Finally comes the king of Denmark who is introduced with the conjunction etiam and not named (he is Svein Estrithson); moreover, there is no mention here of his actual kinship with Edward.31 Rather we see the Danish king portrayed as Edward's symbolic son, a relationship which Svein, not Edward, is presented as seeking to establish. The immense distance between Denmark and England is also greatly laboured to further disassociate Edward from the Danes.32 At the centre of this passage also lies the use of gift-gifting to present Edward as imperial. Emperor Henry's imperial generosity, munera imperiali liberalitate, is singled out. Edward, in turn, also gives gifts and (although these presents are denoted as royal, rege regalia munera, and there is clearly a difference in status being marked between Henry and Edward) Edward's gifts advance his imperial pretensions. Leyser connects the use of the `topos of many embassies crowding and elbowing one another to bear gifts to and receive favours from a supereminent ruler' with panegyric of `the imperializing Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman kings of the tenth and eleventh centuries'.33 Immediately after recounting the visits of the ambassadors, the Anonymous portrays Edward as an emperor of the British Isles when he writes that with Edward's accession peace came to all of Britain along with the monarchies of the surrounding islands.34 Elsewhere in the text, the Anonymous portrays Edward as an imperial ruler. For example, in the opening of the Vita, the Muse speaks of Edith at the `imperial side' (lateri . . . imperiali); we have already noted the Vergilian framework adopted by the Anonymous.35 The display involved in Edward's endowment of Westminster

30

31

32 33

34 35

Anglo-Saxon rulers see R. Deshman, `Christus rex et magi reges: Kingship and Christology in Ottonian and Anglo-Saxon Art', FruÈhmittelalterliche Studien 10 (1976), 367±405 (pp. 390±2); K. Leyser, `The Ottonians and Wessex', in his Communications and Power in Medieval Europe: The Carolingian and Ottonian Centuries, ed. T. Reuter (London, 1994), pp. 73±104 (pp. 81±3 and 95±6); S. Keynes, `King Athelstan's Books', in Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies Presented to Peter Clemoes on the Occasion of his Sixth-Fifth Birthday, ed. M. Lapidge and H. Gneuss (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 143±201 (pp. 145±6 and 148±9). See Life, ed. Barlow, pp. 16±17 n. 36 and Southern, `First Life', p. 392. Historians have found this statement of kinship confusing. Svein Estrithson was the son of Estrith, sister of Cnut (Life, ed. Barlow, p. 17 n. 37). Edward's wife Edith was the daughter of Godwine and Gytha, who was the sister of Ulf who married Estrith. At the time of the coronation, though, Edward had not yet married Edith and thus was not strictly speaking yet related to Svein; but the Anonymous is willing to exaggerate kinship and ®ddle with dates to make the links with the two Henrys closer and more signi®cant than they in fact were. On Edward's dealings with Scandinavians and Anglo-Danes see further below, pp. 92±3. See K. Leyser, `Frederick Barbarossa, Henry II and the Hand of St James', in his Medieval Germany and Its Neighbours, 900±1250 (London, 1982), pp. 215±40 (pp. 215±16) as noted in Life, ed. Barlow, p. 16 n. 34. Life, ed. Barlow, p. 18. Life, ed. Barlow, p. 6 and see above, p. 85.

89

Elizabeth M. Tyler also enhanced his imperial image, with the building emulating not only Norman and French models, but also the German imperial church at Speyer.36 Spectacular gift-giving and receiving is an aspect in the Vita of imperial identity. In this passage of gift-giving, the Anonymous departs in places from historical fact to associate an imperial Edward with the Holy Roman Empire and the French, but to distance him, literally and ®guratively, from the Scandinavian world.

SHIPS

After a brief interlude, the Anonymous returns, now in verse, to the subject of gift-giving and here treasure and its display come to the fore, as the focus turns from external to internal politics. He tells us that the nobles at Edward's court presented `rival gifts', and portrays this gift-giving as a manifestation of the joy England experienced with the succession of Edward. Godwine's place as leading earl and hero of the Vita is proclaimed by his gift of a gold ship complete with 120 warriors to Edward. Even though this account appears to be truncated by the loss of pages from the manuscript,37 the Anonymous's concern for detailing the splendour is evident: Laudibus exortis hinc grates concinat orbis, et resonet mecum tua musica gaudia rerum, que lux de celo rutilans in rege nouello Anglis illuxit, gemebundaque corda resoluit; has quoque comicias qua leticia celebrarunt festiui proceres, certatim dona ferentes, agnouere suum regem magnumque patronum. Multa dedere quidem, uerum supereminet omnes larga ducis probitas Godwini munere tali: scapha grauis, longa laterum compage reducta uerticibus binis, sinibus stabat Tamesinis; sedibus equato numerosis ordine lato, a media naui despecto uertice mali, centum bis denis aptata minacibus heris. Aureus e puppi leo prominet; eÎquora prore celse pennato perterret corpore draco aureus, et linguis ¯ammam uomit ore trisulcis. Nobilis appensum preciatur purpura uelum, quo patrum series depicta docet uarias res, bellaque nobilium turbata per equora regum.

36 37

Mason, Westminster Abbey, pp. 14±16. Life, ed. Barlow, p. 21 n. 50.

90

The Vita ádwardi Regis and the Display of Treasure Antemne grauidus sustinet, extensis

stipes roburque uolatus auro rutilantibus alis.38

While some historians have questioned the historicity of the ship and others have accepted its existence,39 its meaning has received little attention. Certainly, its appearance in verse calls on us to read it ®guratively, since much of the material in the verse sections of the Vita is clearly written in a ®gurative, rather than historical, mode, as for example the presentation of Godwine's sons as the four rivers of Paradise.40 The general superlative tone of the passage also leads us to a more ®gurative reading, but this does not demand removing the ship from the historical record. Rather, the fabulousness, which foregrounds this ship within the narrative, and the verse context encourage us to ask what it means rather than to argue about its existence. Several points emerge in the account of Godwine's gift which will be important for considering the place of treasure in mid-eleventh century 38

39

40

Let now with paeans of praise our music sound The earth's thanksgivings and all nature's joy: What heavenly dawn suffused the new-found king, Lit England, and relieved the aching hearts. With what delight the festive lords held court, Presented rival gifts, and recognized Their own illustrious patron, their own king. Much did they give, but overtopped them all Earl Godwin's sterling bounty with this gift: A loaded ship, its slender lines raked up In double prow, lay anchored on the Thames, With many rowing-benches side by side, The towering mast amidships looking down, Equipped for six score fearsome warriors. A golden lion crowns the stern. A winged And golden dragon at the prow affrights The sea, and belches ®re with a triple tongue. Patrician purple pranks the hanging sail, On which are shown th'instructive lineage And the sea battles of our noble kings. The yard-arm strong and heavy holds the sails When wings incarnadine with gold are spread. (Life, ed. Barlow, pp. 20±1) Southern suggests that the Anonymous is confused here and is actually referring to the ship which John of Worcester records Godwine giving to Harthacnut (`First Life', p. 392). The ship is part of the episode which Southern considers more romance than history (see above, n. 28). Barlow is more willing to accept the existence of the ship: see Life, ed. Barlow, pp. 20±1 n. 46 and Barlow, Edward the Confessor, p. 57. R. Fleming (`Domesday Estates of the King and the Godwines: A Study in Late Saxon Politics', Speculum 58 (1983), 987±1007 (p. 988) ) and Stafford (Queen Emma, p. 260 and Uni®cation and Conquest: A Political and Social History of England in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries (London, 1989), p. 80 ) as well as C. R. Dodwell (Anglo-Saxon Art: A New Perspective (Manchester, 1982), pp. 137 and 190) accept the existence of this gift, though perhaps not necessarily in this poetic form. For a list of other similar ships see Tyler, ` ``The Eyes of the Beholders'' ', pp. 264±5. See Life, ed. Barlow, p. 26.

91

Elizabeth M. Tyler England. First let us deal with those points which are made apparent in the text. The ship proclaims Godwine's status and particularly alludes to his wealth, which, as Fleming has argued, outstripped Edward's resources.41 The spectacle of the ship is terrifying, with its golden dragon and lion as well as the menacing warriors which man it. In his description of the sails, the Anonymous dwells on the illustrious English ancestry of Edward, celebrating the newly restored House of Wessex. The purple sails express the imperial aspirations of Edward.42 Thus the Anonymous uses the ship to announce Godwine's status as leading magnate in the kingdom and to suggest that Edward's position is dependent on Godwine and on his West Saxon lineage, both important themes in the text. But this is only a super®cial reading, and the ship has far more to tell us about the political meaning of the Vita and about the display of treasure. To uncover the complexity of this ship's meaning a number of factors need to be considered, including the Scandinavian context of Godwine's gift, the relationship between the description of this ship and the descriptions of the ¯eets of Svein and Cnut in the Encomium Emmae Reginae, the Anglo-Danish aspects of Edward's early reign and the role of Vergilian allusion in the Anonymous's description of the ship. Finally the other gold ship of the Vita, that belonging to Gruffydd, needs to be brought into the picture. Although the Anonymous uses the ship to proclaim Edward as heir of the House of Wessex, spectacular gold ships are closely associated with Scandinavian identity. In looking at the gold ships of the Encomium, I have illustrated that, apart from those of the Vita, all references to golden ships in Anglo-Saxon sources involve Scandinavians. Moreover, gold ships are well attested in Old Norse literature.43 I therefore suggested that the idiom of the spectacular gold ship is clearly Scandinavian. The apparent lack of a Scandinavian context for Godwine's gift to Edward and the very English nature of the gift as portrayed by the Anonymous thus needs reconsideration. First, Godwine is best understood as an Anglo-Dane rather than an Anglo-Saxon, though the text, with its overt hostility to the Danes, suppresses this. He rose to power under the Danish king Cnut and his wife 41 42

43

Fleming, `Domesday Estates', pp. 994 and 1007. But we must not assume that the purple sails are an imperial fabrication by the Anonymous. They occur also in William of Malmesbury's account of the gold ornamented ship given by King Harold of Norway to Athelstan and may represent Scandinavian practice, see William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, The History of the English Kings, ed. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson, and M. Winterbottom, 2 vols., Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, 1998) ii.35 (I, 216). Interestingly, the ship in the Gesta is also associated with a passage recounting the visit of foreign ambassadors and the imperial pretensions of Athelstan. The reference occurs in the section where historians consider William to be closely following his Anglo-Saxon source. See R. Page, ` The Audience of Beowulf and the Vikings', in The Dating of Beowulf, ed. C. Chase (Toronto, 1981), pp. 113±22 (pp. 115±16). See Tyler, ` ``The Eyes of the Beholders'' ', pp. 263-5.

92

The Vita ádwardi Regis and the Display of Treasure Gytha, was a Dane related by marriage to Cnut; many of the children of this marriage had Scandinavian names. After the succession of Edward, he remained a player in Danish politics, supporting his nephew Svein Estrithson as king of Denmark; his son Svein was also involved in Danish affairs. Edward, especially at the beginning of his reign, has to rule within the Anglo-Danish establishment and his suitability for the throne may have owed as much to his kinship with Harthacnut and his recognition of Edward as co-king as to his status as áthelred's son.44 Godwine's gift of a magni®cent ship may have been an assertion of his own Scandinavian roots and may have been intended to remind Edward of his dependency on the Anglo-Danish elite. But the Anonymous's account, particularly with its emphasis on the history of Edward's lineage, turns an assertion of AngloDanish identity into a gesture which acknowledged an English empire. Perhaps Godwine's gift to Edward actually existed, though in a less lavish form, and was so prominent that it could not be written out of the historical record, rather it had to be re-written. Considering the relationship between the Vita and the Encomium adds a further dimension to our understanding of the re-writing of these ships. The Encomium was produced at the behest of Queen Emma, mother of both Harthacnut (son of Cnut) and Edward the Confessor (son of áthelred). Although the identity of the Encomiast remains unknown, it is clear that he was from the Flemish religious foundation of either St Bertin or St Omer and that he relied on Emma as an informant, writing to promote her interests. In the context of Harthacnut's unpopular reign and the uncertainty surrounding the succession, he glori®ed the Danish roots of England's then ruling dynasty.45 Clearly there are many similarities between this text and the Vita 44

45

On Godwine's Anglo-Danish identity and the Anglo-Danish nature of Edward's early rule see Barlow, Edward the Confessor, pp. 43, 56, 89, and 92±3 and all of ch. 1; Barlow, `Early Life', pp. 70±1; M. W. Campbell, `Earl Godwin of Wessex and Edward the Confessor's Promise of the Throne to William of Normandy', Traditio 28 (1972), 141±58 (pp. 145±7); Fleming, `Domesday Estates', p. 994; Higham, Death of Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 116±18; John, `Norman Succession', pp. 243±9. See also the Encomiast's portrayal of Edward as Cnut's son and his association of Edward with Harthacnut in the context of a work which asserts the Anglo-Danish identity of the dynasty (S. Keynes, `Introduction', in Encomium Emmae Reginae, ed. A. Campbell, Camden Classic Reprints 4 (Cambridge, 1998, originially published 1949), xiii±lxxxvii, pp. lxix, lxx, lxxi and the text itself at the end of the Argument. All references to the text, quotations and translation are taken from this edition of the Encomium. On the identity of the Encomiast and the circumstances of the text's production see Encomium, ed. Campbell, pp. xix±xxi; S. KoÈrner, The Battle of Hastings: England and Europe 1035±1066, Bibliotheca Historica Lundensis 14 (Lund, 1964), pp. 48 and 68; M. W. Campbell, `The Encomium Emmae Reginae: Personal Panegyric or Political Propaganda?' Annuale Medievale 19 (1979), 27±45 (p. 27); E. John, `The Encomium Emmae Reginae: A Riddle and a Solution', Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 63 (1980±1), 58±94 (esp. pp. 61±3 and 91±4); Stafford, Queen Emma, pp. 27±8; and most recently, Keynes, `Introduction', pp. xi, xiii±xiv and xxxix.

93

Elizabeth M. Tyler but the question of whether the Anonymous knew the Encomiast's work has remained open.46 The striking number of verbal parallels between the Encomiast's accounts of the ¯eets of Svein and Cnut and the Anonymous' account of Godwine's gift to Edward, provide strong evidence that the Anonymous knew the Encomium.47 Certainly some of the parallels are best attributed to the similar 46

47

Barlow would be surprised if the Encomium were not known to the Anonymous, but writes that we cannot be certain: `Filiation can be suspected, but it cannot be proved' (Life, ed. Barlow, pp. xxi±xxii). John also seems to think it likely that the author of the later work knew the earlier work, but he hedges his bets, writing: `There can surely be no doubt, that . . . he must have had access to a manuscript of the Encomium at St Bertin, and probably at the English court also, ± which does not, of itself, prove that he read it' (`Encomium', pp. 89±90 n. 2). These texts are of course studied together by Stafford in Queen Emma. Barlow draws the reader's attention to the similarity between the ships in the Encomium and the Vita and especially to the passage from the Encomium which runs: `Hinc erat cernere leones. . . . incendia de naribus', Encomium i.4: Life, ed. Barlow, pp. 20±1 n. 46 and n. 47; the verbal parallels are more widespread. Relevant passages from the Encomium: Svein's ¯eet: Aggregati tandem turritas ascendunt puppes, eratis rostris duces singulos uidentibus discriminantes. Hinc enim erat cernere leones auro fusiles in puppibus, hinc autem uolucres in summis malis uenientes austros suis signantes uersibus aut dracones uarios minantes incendia de naribus, illinc homines de solido auro argentoue rutilos uiuis quodammodo non inpares, atque illinc tauros erectis sursum collis protensisque cruribus mugitus cursusque uiuentium simulantes. Uideres quoque delphinos electro fusos, ueteremque rememorantes fabulum de eodem metallo centauros. Eiusdem preterea celaturae multa tibi dicerem insignia, si non monstrorum quae sculpta inerant me laterent nomina. Sed quid nunc tibi latera carinarum memorem, non modo ornatitiis depicta coloribus, uerum etiam aureis argenteisque aspera signis? Regia quoque puppis tanto pulcritudine sui ceteris prestabat, quanto rex suae dignitatis honore milites antecedebat; de qua melius est ut sileam, quam pro magnitudine sui pauca dicam. Tali itaque freti classe dato signo repente gaudentes abeunt, atque uti iussi erant, pars ante, pars retro, equatis tamen rostris, regiae puppi se circumferunt. (Encomium i.4) [When at length they went on board the towered ships, having picked out by observation each man his own leader on the brazen prows. On one side lions moulded in gold were to be seen on the ships, on the other birds on the tops of the masts indicated by their movements the winds as they blew, or dragons of various kinds poured ®re from their nostrils. Here there were glittering men of solid gold or silver nearly comparable to live ones, there bulls with necks raised high and legs outstretched were fashioned leaping and roaring like live ones. One might see dolphins moulded in electrum, and centaurs in the same metal, recalling the ancient fable. In addition, I might describe to you many examples of the same celature, if the names of the monsters which were there fashioned were known to me. But why should I now dwell upon the sides of the ships, which were not only painted with ornate colours, but were covered with gold and silver ®gures? The royal vessel excelled the others in beauty as much as the king preceded the soldiers in the honour of his proper dignity, concerning which it is better that I be silent than that I speak inadequately. Placing their con®dence in such a ¯eet, when the signal was suddenly given, they set out gladly, and, as they had been ordered, placed themselves round about the royal vessel with level prows, some in front and some behind.] Cnut's ¯eet: Tantus quoque decor inerat pupibus, ut intuentium hebetatis luminibus ¯ammeae magis quam [l]igneae uiderentur a longe aspicientibus. Si quando enim sol illis

94

The Vita ádwardi Regis and the Display of Treasure subject matter. Into this category come terms associated with ships (such as navis and puppis) and with kings, as well as the frequent references to aurum and uses of the adjective aureus. Similarly, one might want to attribute the references to leones and dracones (though in the singular on Edward's ship) to actual ornament, real or imagined, on the respective ships and to note that there are more ornamental ®gures in the Encomiast's account (including men, dolphins and bulls). But overlapping vocabulary, which is scattered throughout the passage from the Vita, is not limited to that which can be explained away solely by subject matter. Starting with vocabulary shared by Edward's ship and Svein's ¯eet, we ®nd also: depicta (both); equato (Vita) and equatis (Enc); rutilans and rutilantibus (Vita) and rutilos (Enc). Turning to that shared with Cnut's ships, we ®nd more: bellaque (Vita) and bellatores (Enc); despecto (Vita) and despectui (Enc); ¯amma (in various forms in both); nobilis and nobilium (Vita) and nobiles (Enc); minacibus (Vita) and minaces (Enc); perterret (Vita) and terrerent and terribiles (Enc); roburque (Vita) and robore (Enc). Most of these verbal parallels occur when the same word is applied to an entirely different subject in each passage. Several such echoes would be chance, but the cumulative effect, and especially the use of similar language for fear instilled by Cnut's ¯eet and Edward's ship, suggest strongly that the Encomium in¯uenced the Anonymous. But what does this literal re-writing mean for the interpretation of Edward's ship as a ®gurative re-writing of history? First, it strengthens the iubar inmiscuit radiorum, hinc resplenduit fulgur armorum, illinc uero ¯amma dependentium clipeorum. Ardebat aurum in rostris, fulgebat quoque argentum in uariis nauium ®guris. Tantus siquidem classis erat apparatus, ut, si quam gentem eius uellet expugnare dominus, naues tantum aduersarios terrerent, priusquam earum bellatores pugnam ullam capescerent. Nam quis contrariorum leones auri fulgore terribiles, quis metallinos homines aureo fronte minaces, quis dracones obrizo ardentes, quis tauros radiantibus auro cornibus necem intentantes in puppibus aspiceret, et nullo metu regem tantae copiae formidaret? Praeterea in tanta expeditione nullus inueniebatur seruus, nullus ex seruo libertus, nullus ignobilis, nullus senili aethtjate debilis; omnes enim erant nobiles, omnes plenae aetatis robore ualentes, omnes cuiuis pugnae satis habiles, omnes tantae uelocitatis, ut despectui eis essent equitantium pernicitates. (Encomium ii.4) [So great, also, was the ornamentation of the ships, that the eyes of the beholders were dazzled, and to those looking from afar they seemed of ¯ame rather than of wood. For if at any time the sun cast the splendour of its rays among them, the ¯ashing of arms shone in one place, in another the ¯ame of suspended shields. Gold shone on the prows, silver also ¯ashed on the variously shaped ships. So great, in fact, was the magni®cence of the ¯eet, that if its lord had desired to conquer any people, the ships alone would have terri®ed the enemy, before the warriors whom they carried joined battle at all. For who could look upon the lions of the foe, terrible with the brightness of gold, who upon the men of metal, menacing with golden face, who upon the dragons burning with pure gold, who upon the bulls on the ships threatening death, their horns shining with gold, without feeling any fear for the king of such a force? Furthermore, in this great expedition there was present no slave, no man freed from slavery, no low-born man, no man weakened by age; for all were noble, all strong with the might of mature age, all suf®ciently ®t for any type of ®ghting, all of such great ¯eetness, that they scorned the speed of horsemen.]

95

Elizabeth M. Tyler point that the ships are Scandinavian, and recognizably so. In the Encomium, the ships proclaim the Danish identity of Svein and Cnut. In the Vita, the Anonymous transforms a symbol of Danish identity and uses it to articulate vigorously Edward's English identity. Reality and textuality are here inextricably bound up with each other. A further textual matter which must be considered in interpreting the meaning of Godwine's ship and indeed, the other rival gifts, is the place of Vergilian allusion in the passage from the Vita. There are three possible references to the Aeneid in this passage, two of which are noted by Barlow. The ®rst occurs in the phrase `certatim dona ferentes' (in rivalry bearing gifts), describing the gifts that the nobles presented to Edward. The phrase recalls Laocoon's famous warning in the Aeneid: equo ne credite, Teucri. quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentis.48 (ii.48±9)

We all know to beware of Greeks bearing gifts, especially if it is the Trojan Horse. The ®re-breathing dragon which adorns Edward's ship `linguis ¯ammam uomit ore trisulcis' also comes from the second book of the Aeneid, where Vergil compares the Greek Pyrrhus to a snake, including the phrase: `et linguis micat ore trisulcis'49 (ii.475). This line occurs in the context of the massacre in Troy and the death of Priam, king of Troy, killed by Pyrrhus. It is dif®cult to construe these echoes, to the devastation of Troy, as contributing to the meaning of the passage unless we over-read the text as subversively written against those it praises. Are we to liken the nobles at Edward's court to Greeks bearing gifts? Should we see Godwine as a Pyrrhus ®gure ± if not literally killing Edward, then a threat to his rule? Godwine certainly was a threat to Edward, but not according to the Anonymous. I think, rather, we should attribute these allusions, as well as the others which are sprinkled throughout the text, to the general Vergilian framework in which the Anonymous attempts to cast his story. We must note too that the Anonymous is less skilful than the Encomiast, who deployed Vergilian allusions to much greater effect in his presentation of Imperial Cnut as a second Aeneas.50 A third Vergilian echo of a different sort and not noted by Barlow, needs to be discussed here as well. This instance will return us to our consideration of the relationship between the Vita and the Encomium. Vergil describes Caesar 48

49

50

`Trust not the horse, ye Trojans. Whatever it be, I fear the Greeks, even when bringing gifts.' Text and all translations are taken from Virgil, ed. and trans. H. R. Fairclough, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge MA, 1934). Barlow draws attention to this reference: Life, ed. Barlow, p. 20 n. 45. `and darting from his mouth a three-forked tongue'. Barlow notes this reference: Life, ed. Barlow, p. 21 n. 49. See Tyler, ` ``Eyes of the Beholders'' ', pp. 260±5.

96

The Vita ádwardi Regis and the Display of Treasure Augustus as he is depicted, and thus foretold, on the shield of Aeneas, with these lines: hinc Augustus agens Italos in proelia Caesar cum patribus populoque, Penatibus et magnis dis, stans celsa in puppi, geminas cui tempora ¯ammas laeta vomunt patriumque aperitur vertice sidus.51 (viii.678±81)

The Anonymous picks up many words (noted in bold) in his lines: Aureus e puppi leo prominet; eÎquora prore celse pennato perterret corpore draco aureus, et linguis ¯ammam uomit ore trisulcis.

The words vertex and pater appear in the surrounding lines of the Vita, and I wonder if the mention of the Penates (guardian gods of the household) did not somehow trigger the Anonymous' use of pennatus. Here we have an allusion which makes sense since it links Edward both to Aeneas and Caesar Augustus in a passage which celebrates his lineage and dynasty ± though Edward's sails look backwards rather than forwards as Aeneas's shield did. But this same passage from Vergil stands behind the portrayal of the ships of Svein and especially Cnut in the Encomium, where it is much more fully integrated and developed. I think we see the Anonymous copying the more accomplished Encomiast, though not exactly. The passage from the Encomium echoes the same lines of the Aeneid as does the Vita but without using all of the same words. The Anonymous appears to have recognized the Encomiast's source and gone back to the Aeneid for himself. The Anonymous sees, somewhat dimly it must be said, how the Encomiast deploys his Vergil, and follows in his footsteps to celebrate the restoration of the House of Wessex in imperial language ± even if it involves transposing the idiom of Godwine's very Scandinavian ship. Just as there were two gold ships in the Encomium, a second gold ship occurs in the Vita. Again in verse, the Anonymous laments the division of the house of Godwine when Tostig joins forces with Harold Hardrada at Stamford Bridge against his brother Harold and presents this fraternal rivalry as the end of England's golden age. He comments with horror on the effect of the discord among Godwine's sons and recalls how when Harold and Tostig fought together the Welsh king, Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, was defeated. This defeat is articulated in terms of treasure: Diruitur inimica domus, redimita suppellex diripitur, prede regia pompa patet. 51

`Here Augustus Caesar, leading Italians to strife, with peers and people, and the great gods of the Penates, stands on the lofty stern; his joyous brows pour forth a double ¯ame, and on his head dawns his father's star.'

97

Elizabeth M. Tyler Hinc reduces Angli clara cum laude triumphi sub tantis ducibus hoc retulere decus. Nam fractis ratibus, quarum par non fuit usus huius uel regnum occeanique ducum, proram sum puppi, pondus graue scilicet auri arti®cum studio fusile multiplici, ádwardo regi donant sua signa trophei, direptas gazas nobiliumque uades.52

Here after the defeat of Gruffydd, his treasure and the ornament from his ship is presented to Edward as spoil. The reference to this ornamented ship, which balances Godwine's gift to Edward, has meaning within the narrative to which the Anonymous carefully attends. As he tells us earlier,53 he arti®cially delays his account of this victory, which occurred in 1063, until after he has recounted with tremendous grief the death of Edward and the disastrous events of 1066. The treasure taken from Gruffydd and given to Edward then becomes a symbol of the prosperity which could have been if only Harold and Tostig had continued to act together. Harold's gift recalls his father Godwine's gift and the display of treasure in a secular context is used to emphasize the tragedy of the Norman Conquest. In thinking about the place of treasure in late Anglo-Saxon England, we must return to the question of the context of the gold ships, which even more than Godwine's gift to Edward, appears to involve no Scandinavians. This gold prow of Gruffydd, which is also attested by the Chronicle, appears to undermine the argument about the Scandinavian character of such ornament.54 However, this is not necessarily the case. First, Gruffydd's strong links with Scandinavians may be the source of this prow. In 1058 he joined forces with álgar, the former Earl of Mercia, turned traitor, and Magnus, son of King Harald Hardrada of Norway. Earlier, Gruffydd, like others in the eleventh-century British Isles, allied with and relied on Scandinavians and Hiberno-Scandinavians as a military resource.55 Further evidence that there is a Scandinavian connection, here more textual than real, comes from the 52

53 54 55

The enemy's house is sacked, the girded chests Are broached, and royal pomp exposed to loot. In blaze of glory, ably led, the men Return, and bring back this ®ne ornament: They smashed a ¯eet ± for Welsh control and lore Was not the equal of the Ocean's chiefs ± And take a prow and stern of solid gold, Cast by the smiths' assiduous skill, and this, With looted treasures and the hostages, As proof of victory they give their king. (Life, ed. Barlow, pp. 86±7) Life, ed. Barlow, p. 64. ASC MS D, s.a. 1063; and see Life, ed. Barlow, p. 87 n. 214. See K. L. Maund, Ireland, Wales, and England in the Eleventh Century (Woodbridge, 1991), pp. 164±5; Higham, Death of Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 142 and 189.

98

The Vita ádwardi Regis and the Display of Treasure echoes in this description of the Encomiast's account of Svein's ¯eet. The lines `proram sum puppi, pondus graue scilicet auri/ arti®cum studio fusile multiplici' may recall `auro fusiles in puppibus' of the Encomium.56 In turning to the account of Svein's ships, if he is indeed doing that, the Anonymous may have been responding to the generally recognized Scandinavian character of gold-decorated ships. There have been many threads to this consideration of Edward's gold ship. Before moving on, it will be useful to pull them together to refocus on display of treasure in late Anglo-Saxon England. In the preceding discussion, treasure emerged as prominent within the narrative of the Vita and the shift in meaning of gold ships from Scandinavian in the Encomium to English in the Vita suggested that Godwine's gift had some historicity as a memorable event which could not be written out of the historical record. This prominence and shifting illustrate that display of treasure remained an active and powerful symbol in late Anglo-Saxon political culture.

DRESS

In two passages which recount the concern Edith took for Edward's attire, the Vita contains strikingly unusual accounts of a king and his lavish ®nery. These lines are particularly interesting because the Anonymous does not appear to be concerned only with regalia, clothing associated with the of®ce of king, but with other attire worn by Edward. The ®rst passage occurs in a section in praise of Edith, part of the report of the arrangements for Edward's marriage, and includes a wealth of detail. The passage reads: Quam sollicitam uero se circa eundem regem, super talibus nichil curantem, regiis cultibus parandum prebuerit, quis estimare, quis dicere poterit? . . . Nam cum priscis Anglorum regibus antea moris non fuerit lauciorum cultibus uestimentorum uti preter sagos auro supra paratos et huiusmodi uestes secundum morem gentis, hec a principio sue coniunctionis talibus eum ex suo ipsius opere uel studio redimiuit ornamentis, ut uix ipse Salomon in omni gloria sua ita indutus putari posset. In quibus ornandis non estimabatur quanto preciosi lapides et rare gemme atque uniones candidi pararentur; in clamidibus et tunicis, caligis quoque et calciamentis nulla auri quantitas in uarietate ¯orum multipliciter se 56

Encomium i.4. According to Barlow, the verses on the defeat of Gruffydd contain two echoes of the Aeneid. The Welsh are called `a race bred in Caucasian rocks' (Aeneid iv.366± 7) and Gruffydd is said to be `unequal to this ®ght' (Aeneid i.475). The context of the ®rst allusion is Dido insulting Aeneas's parentage, while the second refers to Troilus killed by Achilles. Neither reference calls for the subversive reading needed to make sense of the allusions to the Aeneid contained in the description of Godwine's gift to Edward, nor do they contribute to the meaning of the passage beyond supporting the Vergilian framework of the Vita. See above, pp. 96±7.

99

Elizabeth M. Tyler effundencium pensabatur. Sedes unique nitebat parata palliis acu operante auro intextis; loca subpedanea tegebantur preciosioribus Hispanie tapetis. Baculus eius ad cotidianum incessum auro et gemmis operiebatur. Sella at phalera eius bestiolis et auiculis auro paratis, ipsa fabrile opus dictante, appendebantur. Postremo quicquid excogitare poterat quod eum deceret, id opere maturandi nulla mora ®eri posset.57

Similar sentiments are expressed much later in the Vita in a shorter passage: Ipsa quoque regalium ornamentorum pompa qua ex of®cio regie uxoris sueÎ ambiebatur, tacite et temporaliter, utique satis expresse dictum sit, nulla animi delectatione utebatur, et non curaret quicquam si non tanto sumptu illi amministrarentur. Of®ciositatem tamen ipsius regineÎ gratam in talibus ducebat, et quibusdam familiarioribus sedulitatem eius in plurimas gratias cum quadam mentis benignitate annotabat.58

These lines occur in a section on the `royal family and court in the reign, with emphasis on the good works of the king and queen and the military exploits of Harold and Tostig'.59 The display of treasure in both of these passages is complex and a number of aspects need to be examined, including the representation of display as foreign, Edith's role, Edward's sanctity, attitudes towards secular wealth and its display, the religious dimensions of the of®ce of king, and the meaning of the ®gure of Solomon. This level of complexity alone would make these passages hard to interpret, but a textual problem adds further dif®culty. The ®rst passage has been restored to the text by Frank Barlow from the Speculum 57

58

59

Who can reckon, who can recount, her [Edward's wife's] solicitude in providing the king, who took no interest in such matters, with royal ®nery? . . . For whereas it had not been the custom for earlier English kings in bygone days to wear clothes of great splendour, apart from cloaks and robes adorned at the top with gold in the national style, Edith, from the very beginning of her marriage, clad him in raiments either embroidered by herself or of her choice, and of such a kind that it could not be thought that even Solomon in all his glory was ever thus arrayed. In the ornamentation of these no count was made of the cost of the precious stones, rare gems and shining pearls that were used. As regards mantles, tunics, boots and shoes, the amount of gold which ¯owed in the various complicated ¯oral designs was not weighed. The throne, adorned with coverings embroidered with gold, gleamed in every part; the ¯oors were strewn with precious carpets from Spain. Edward's staff, for everyday use when walking, was encrusted with gold and gems. His saddle and horse-trappings were hung with little beasts and birds made from gold by smiths under her direction. Finally, any object that she thought would become him was brought to perfection without the slightest delay. (Life, ed. Barlow, pp. 22±5) Moreover, it was quietly, and only for the occasion ± in any case, it should be distinctly said, with no mental pleasure ± that he displayed the pomp of royal ®nery in which the queen obligingly arrayed him. And he would not have cared at all if it had been provided at far less cost. He was, however, grateful for the queen's solicitude in these matters, and with a certain kindness of feeling used to remark on her zeal most appreciatively to his intimates. (Life, ed. Barlow, pp. 62±5) Life, ed. Barlow, p. xx.

100

The Vita ádwardi Regis and the Display of Treasure historale of the fourteenth century chronicler Richard of Cirencester.60 It shares the sentiments of the second, certainly genuine, passage in which, however, the same detailing of treasure, comments on national dress, and reference to Solomon do not occur. Furthermore, in the second passage, the Anonymous explicitly states that Edward only wears such ®nery to attend the divine of®ce and mass and thus places such display in an ecclesiastical rather than secular context. However, the ®gure of Solomon appears elsewhere in the Anonymous's text, as do issues of foreignness.61 On balance the passage is worth considering, but it must be discussed with care and any conclusions drawn considered as provisional. Both passages focus on Edith's concern for Edward's image; she provides him with the luxurious clothes which he would rather disdain. Even though Edward would prefer to reject this ®nery, the passage is one of praise for Edith, who is clearly more than ful®lling her expected role as royal spouse. Throughout her full study of Edith, Stafford emphasizes her political astuteness, which is here evident, and which draws attention to the political importance of display in the late Anglo-Saxon court. The whole focus of the text on the court rather than the battle®eld or the church allows us to see more sharply the political power women exerted and the role of the control of treasure in that power.62 The longer passage singles out Edward's ®nery as atypical of the custom of English kings: English kings wore some gold but the opulence of 60

61

62

Barlow explains his editorial decision thus: `Richard . . . was simply a paste-and-scissors compiler who con®ned editorial interventions to the minimum. He used a manuscript close to, but not identical with, Harley 526, and occasionally gives a better reading. The real treasure-trove, however, is some 500 words concerning Queen Edith and her marriage to Edward which are not taken from Ailred or any other recognizable source. Consequently they would seem to supply about half of the Anonymous's lost c.2. A few characteristic words in praise of Earl Godwin and the general style con®rm the source.' However, there remain reasons to be wary. The level of detail in the description of Edward's ®nery is unparalleled not just within the text but in late Anglo-Saxon descriptions of royalty or nobility (the only passage which comes even close is Byrhtferth's description of Edgar's queen, áfthryth, in her pearl and gem encrusted garment: Vita Oswaldi Archiepiscopi Eboracensis, in The Historians of the Church of York and its Archbishops, ed. J. Raine, 3 vols., Rolls Series 71 (London, 1879±94), I, 399±475 (I, 438). Moreover, Stafford, who generally accepts the restoration, identi®es the reference to Spanish carpets as possibly anachronistic (Stafford, Queen Emma, pp. 42 and 115). Among Richard of Cirencester's sources was Ailred of Riveaulx's twelfth-century life of Edward which included a `prologue in defence of wealth as no barrier to sanctity' (Rigg, Anglo-Latin, p. 14), and perhaps in the unprecedented detail of this passage we ®nd a response to this concern of Ailred's and a critique of royal wealth more developed than that of the eleventh century (on the emerging critique of wealth, see below, p. 105). For Solomon see below, pp. 103±6. For foreigners see the Anonymous's comments on England's Danish rulers and Edward's advisors, pp. 6, 8 and 28±32. See further Stafford's discussion of this passage which focusses on issues of gender and control of treasure in her contribution to this volume, pp. 73±4. Also see her more general comments in Queen Emma and Queen Edith, pp. 42, 47±8 and 115±16.

101

Elizabeth M. Tyler Edward's ®nery was considered foreign. Some display, but not too much, is portrayed as suitable for an English king. This moralizing comment seems particularly likely to have been interpolated by Richard of Cirencester since it is part of the detailing of treasure not shared by the other passage.63 However, foreigners, and their in¯uence on Edward, is a theme which runs throughout the Anonymous's narrative. Moreover, as a similar passage in Einhard's Vita Karoli illustrates, comment on avoidance of foreign dress is not out of place in early medieval royal biography and indeed may be a topos.64 Einhard notes that Charlemagne preferred Frankish, rather than foreign, dress. His Frankish dress entailed some display ± a silk-edged tunic, fur, and a gold or silver ornamented sword are mentioned. On feast days and when meeting foreigners, Charlemagne dresses more luxuriously. The foreign dress which Charlemagne avoids is singled out as more lavish. On only two occasions did Charlemagne allow himself to be attired as a foreigner, when popes Hadrian and Leo persuaded him to adopt Roman, that is Greek, dress. In many ways, Charlemagne seems to present an ideal of restrained ostentation which Edward has breached, although the Anonymous displaces this transgression onto Edith and then weaves it into his praise of her as a good wife.65 Nonetheless, Edward's clothing attracted attention and needed explanation.66 Other sources provide con®rmation that, whoever did the initiating, aspects of Edward's attire, including his regalia, could be described as foreign. Edward's court and kingdom were notable for the presence of Germans, Lotharingians, Flemings, Frenchmen and Normans.67 Among the craftsmen at Edward's court was a German goldsmith, Theodoric, whom Stafford links to the production of Edward's great seal and his coin type of 1057 in which he is enthroned in majesty; the seal and coin type were `both modelled on German Imperial images.'68 According to the Abingdon Chronicle, Edward commissioned the English Abbot Spearhavoc to make him an imperial crown.69 The possibility of Byzantine in¯uence, either direct or via Germany, also needs to be mentioned here.70 Edward continued to use the 63 64 65

66

67

68

69 70

See above, n. 60, for the possible anachronism of the Spanish rug. Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH SRG 25 (Hanover, 1911), ch. 23. On queens as scapegoats in such situations see Stafford, `Queens and Treasure', p. 74, in this volume. Barlow accepts the splendour (Life, ed. Barlow, p. lxvi) but rejects the idea that it was all Edith's doing (Edward the Confessor, pp. 142±3). On foreigners in England and at the Confessor's court see, C. P. Lewis, `The French in England before the Norman Conquest', Anglo-Norman Studies 17 (1994), 123±44; Barlow, English Church, pp. 81±6 and Edward the Confessor, pp. 190±2. Stafford, Queen Emma, pp. 115±16, Barlow, Edward the Confessor, pp. 184±5 and Dodwell, Anglo-Saxon Art, p. 65. Barlow, Edward the Confessor, p. 106. On eleventh-century links between Byzantium and England, see K. Ciggaar `England and Byzantium on the Eve of the Norman Conquest (The Reign of Edward the Confessor)',

102

The Vita ádwardi Regis and the Display of Treasure Byzantine title basileus during his reign.71 When Edward the Confessor's tomb was opened it revealed a cruci®x and silks which have been identi®ed as Byzantine.72 This reminds us that the only foreign clothes Charlemagne consented to wear were Greek. Though not on the same scale, Edward shared Charlemagne's imperial aspirations, aspirations which are evident elsewhere in the Vita, as we have seen. Edith's role in fostering an imperial image for Edward has been highlighted by Stafford, who notes among other things, that the German goldsmith Theodoric remained in her company as late as 1072.73 Greater display than was the norm for English kings may have been part of how an imperial identity was projected for Edward. Another source of Edward's un-English ®nery needs consideration. As I have argued with reference to the Encomium, there may be evidence for a greater display of wealth among the Scandinavian elite than among the English.74 Godwine's gift of a gold-ornamented ship to Edward may need to be understood in these terms. Edith was the daughter of Godwine and his Danish wife Gytha.75 If Edward began his rule in an Anglo-Danish context, perhaps his use of display has roots there as well as in German imitation. It is not surprising that Edith's Danish origins are not foregrounded in a text written at the end or just after Edward's reign, when the importance of his Anglo-Danish connections was no longer a source of his power, and which is openly hostile to the Danes.76 If we follow this line, the passage may show us an Edward who used the display of treasure both in his negotiation of his Anglo-Danish dependency and in his imperial aspirations. The reference to Solomon, whose clothes pale in comparison to Edward's, is dif®cult to interpret, not least of all because it occurs not in the shorter but in the longer, possibly interpolated, passage. Throughout the early Middle Ages Solomon was held up as an exemplum of good kingship, singled out for

71 72

73 74 75

76

Anglo-Norman Studies 5 (1982), 78±96; on links between England and Germany in the late Anglo-Saxon period see K. Leyser, `The Ottonians and Wessex'. For links between Byzantium and Germany in this period see the recent The Empress Theopano: Byzantium and the West at the turn of the First Millenium, ed. Adelbert Davids (Cambridge, 1995). See Stafford, `Queens and Treasure', pp. 75±6, above, for the reaction, at the German court, to the empress Theopanu's Byzantine adornment. Ciggaar, `England and Byzantium', pp. 86 and 96. Ciggaar (`England and Byzantium', pp. 89±96) and Dodwell (Anglo-Saxon Art, pp. 156±65) also consider the problem of whether the silks were those in which Edward was originally buried or whether they were a later addition. These silks may be better understood in the context of Edward's sanctity. Stafford, Queen Emma, pp. 115±16. See Tyler, ` ``Eyes of the Beholders'' '. Stafford notes that in Edith Edward `chose a half-Danish daughter of a man whose career had been built under a foreign king' (Queen Emma, p. 259). See above, pp. 92±3, on Godwine's Anglo-Danish identity. See Heningham, `Literary Unity', p. 26. On Edith's Scandinavian origins being suppressed in the Vita, see Life, ed. Barlow, p. lxiv.

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Elizabeth M. Tyler wisdom, learning, piety and peacefulness but also, and most importantly in this context, for his proper attitude towards wealth. In the biblical account of his reign, God asks him, in a dream, what he would most like to be granted, and instead of asking for worldly prosperity, Solomon asks for wisdom. This pleases God who then grants him wealth and success in this world (for the story of Solomon see I Kings 1±11 and II Chronicles 1±9). Asser recalls this biblical story when he compares Alfred to Solomon, and Sedulius Scottus, writing in the mid-ninth century, presents this Solomon, who sought wisdom rather than wealth and so gained both, as an example in his mirror-forprinces Liber de Rectoribus Christianis.77 Closer in time and place to Edward, Byrhtferth likens Edgar to Solomon in the Vita Oswaldi.78 Solomon as a model for kingship clearly shapes the Vita; the same lines (discussed earlier) which allude to the Aeneid in announcing Edward's reign as a second golden age place the reign in a biblical framework.79 Edward's riches, and his gift-giving, as well as the peace which he brought to the British Isles also suggested Solomon to the Anonymous, who wrote: uideretur innouari in eo illud donatiuum diuini muneris, quo post bellicosum Dauid regnum terrores compescuit preliorum, et succedenti ®lio eius Salomoni in solio glorieÎ pacis exhibuit regnum, ut penitus extinctis omnibus contariis motibus in mansuetudine uiueret, suos cum benignitate regeret, et uniuersa mundi gloria et diuitiis abundantius cunctis terrarum regibus exuberaret.80 77

78 79 80

On Solomon as a model for early medieval kingship, see among others: R. Abels, Alfred the Great (London, 1998), pp. 13, 47, 248±9, 255±6 and 257; H. H. Anton, FuÈrstenspiegel und Herrscherethos in der Karolingerzeit (Bonn, 1968), pp. 51, 430±2; J. L. Nelson, `The Earliest Royal Ordo: Some Liturgical and Historical Aspects', in her Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe (London, 1986), pp. 341±60 (p. 355); J. L. Nelson, `Wealth and Wisdom: The Politics of Alfred the Great', Acta 11 (1984), 31±52 (pp. 35±6); J. L. Nelson, `Kingship and Royal Government', in The New Cambridge Medieval History 2, c. 700±c. 900, ed. R. McKitterick (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 383±430 (pp. 427±8); P. RicheÂ, `La Bible et la vie politique dans le haut Moyen Age', in Le Moyen Age et La Bible, ed. P. Riche and G. Lobrichon (Paris, 1984), pp. 385±400 (pp. 386, 387, 389±91); A. Scharer, `The Writing of History at King Alfred's Court', Early Medieval Europe 5 (1996), 177±206 (pp. 191±3 and 199); P. E. Schramm, `Das Alte und das Neue Testament in der Staatslehre und Staatssymbolik des Mittelalters', Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi Sull'Alto Medioevo 10 (1963), 229±55 (pp. 235±40); J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic Kingship (Oxford, 1971), pp. 48±9, 101±2, 125, 129, 138, 141 and 148. On Solomon in the Vita, see Barlow, `Early Life', p. 57; Barlow, Edward the Confessor , pp. 191±2; Rosenthal, `Edward the Confessor', p. 17. Byrhtferth, Vita Oswaldi, p. 438. See above, p. 85. there seemed to have been renewed in him that grant of heavenly favour, by which David, after a martial reign, repressed the horrors of war, and presented to his son Solomon, who followed him on the throne of glory, a rule of peace, so that, with all counter-movements completely destroyed, he lived in mercy, ruled his people with kindness, and over¯owed more abundantly in the general glory and riches of the world than all the other kings of the earth (Life, ed. Barlow, pp. 18±19). There is another reference

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The Vita ádwardi Regis and the Display of Treasure The Anonymous's reference to Solomon, when describing Edward's attire, may ®t straightforwardly into this biblical framework. But he may also recall Solomon to defend Edward's ostentatious consumption. Stafford writes that by the mid-eleventh century, we begin to see criticism of the `cost of kings and queens' which becomes more typical in the twelfth century. She suggests that the criticism of the cost of the monarchy was a factor in Edward's reform of c. 1060.81 In this context, the ®gure of Solomon may work to remind the reader that wealth is a sign of wisdom and God's favour. Further aspects of the way the ®gure of Solomon is used in the passage on Edward's ®nery may ®t into this critique of wealth, or may simply call on us to reject the reference as added by Richard of Cirencester. In the passage Edith provides apparel for Edward `ut uix ipse Salomon in omni gloria sua ita indutus putari possest'. This echoes not the fantastic descriptions of Solomon's wealth in the Book of Kings but Jesus's admonition in the New Testament: `et de vestimento quid solliciti estis considerate lilia agri quomodo crescunt non laborant nec nent dico autem vobis quoniam nec Salomon in omni gloria sua cooperatus est sicut unum ex istis' (Matthew 6. 28±9).82 A few lines earlier, and also adopting the language of the Vulgate, Edith's concern for Edward's clothing is described as sollicita ± in the shorter passage the term used is of®ciositas. The parallel of Edward and Solomon echoes a passage which does not praise Solomon's riches, and reminds us that although he became a model for kingship, the biblical Solomon was not entirely a praiseworthy ®gure. He ended up worshipping the idols of the women in his harem and his kingdom (I Kings 11. 4) and God, in revenge for his lack of piety, destroys his kingdom after his death (I Kings 11. 9ff). In more ways than one is Solomon a ®tting comparison for Edward, whose kingdom collapses after his reign, though he remained pious. This particular reference to Solomon undermines the laudatory meaning of the references certainly made by the Anonymous, suggesting that it is a later interpolation or pointing to the con¯ict perhaps actually involved in Edward's ostentatious display of wealth, particularly in light of his sanctity, which is the ®nal aspect of this passage which needs consideration. Edward's purported rejection of ®nery also raises the question of how he

81

82

to Solomon, in a passage which Barlow has restored to the Vita from Osbert of Clare. Barlow writes that it is possible that `Osbert is still following the Anonymous' (Life, ed. Barlow, p. 114 n. 289). Stafford, Uni®cation and Conquest, p. 22; P. Stafford, `The Portrayal of Royal Women in England, Mid-Tenth to Mid-Twelfth Centuries', in Medieval Queenship, ed. J. C. Parsons (Stroud, 1993), pp. 143±67 (pp. 147±8, 155, and 166); Stafford, Queen Emma, pp. 104 and 251; Stafford, `Queens and Treasure', p. 79, above. `And for raiment why are you solicitous? Consider the lilies of the ®eld, how they grow: they labour not, neither do they spin. But I say to you, that not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as one of these.' See also Luke 12. 27; both references are noted by Life, ed. Barlow, p. 24 n. 52. Earlier in the same chapter of Matthew, Jesus tells his followers to store their treasure in heaven not on earth.

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Elizabeth M. Tyler could be both wealthy and holy. The Church's teaching on non-ecclesiastical display is clear and frequently expressed in Old English homilies, where ostentation, often expressed in the language of treasure, is condemned out of hand as worldly.83 In these passages from the Vita the possible in¯uence of the Church's teaching on the behaviour of the elite emerges as an important factor. The shorter, certainly genuine passage, accounts for Edward's lavish dress by insisting that he only wore it in church; thus the Anonymous seeks to associate Edward's ®nery with the ecclesiastical rather than secular aspects of kingship. The Vita, in places, verges on hagiography and perhaps its author found a vivid way to express Edward's saintliness in portraying him as disdaining treasure. Since treasure was such a symbol of vanity in AngloSaxon homilies, what better way to present Edward as holy than to claim that he avoided the display?84 But Edward's reputation for holiness is not limited to the Vita and so perhaps we have evidence that Edward himself found in the rejection of ®nery a way to convey his own holiness.85 We are left with the question of whether treasure is a symbol to which his biographer responded or whether it was a symbol to which Edward responded. The relationship between an ecclesiastical ideal expressed in symbolic language and the reality of secular behaviour is not straightforward. But at least here we are not met with the moralizing discourse of ecclesiastical condemnation and utter silence about secular attitudes and practices; we catch, instead, a glimpse of the display of treasure and its political importance. But Edward's claim to saintliness requires that his conspicuous consumption be explained perhaps by drawing on the example of Solomon and certainly by shifting responsibility for it onto Edith.

CONCLUSION

Treasure in the Vita ádwardi is multifaceted and dif®cult to interpret because it carries such a range of, often contradictory, meanings. Within the text, its display conveys English identity and Imperial identity, and yet that display is declared foreign and seems to hide what was once Scandinavian identity. We are presented with ostentation as a sign of good kingship and as problematic 83

84

85

See for example the passage from the tenth-century Vercelli homily 10 which remained current through the twelfth-century: The Vercelli Homilies and Related Texts, ed. D. Scragg, EETS OS 300 (Oxford, 1992), x.218±45; Old English Homilies from MS Bodley 343, ed. S. Irvine, EETS OS 302 (Oxford, 1993), vii.113±35. In fact the Anonymous asserts that Edward avoided all worldly pursuits save hunting: Life, ed. Barlow, p. 62. On Edward's sanctity see Barlow, Edward the Confessor, pp. 131±2; Rosenthal, `Edward the Confessor', pp. 18±19; Stafford, `Queens and Treasure', p. 76, above. On the debate concerning his reputed celibacy, see E. John, `Edward the Confessor and the Celibate Life', Analecta Bollandiana: Revue critique d'hagiographie 97 (1979) 171±8; Life, ed. Barlow, pp. lxxvii±lxxviii.

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The Vita ádwardi Regis and the Display of Treasure in a saint. In all of this, treasure is a site of con¯ict, between secular and religious values, between male and female roles, and between native and foreign. Tellingly, the Anonymous felt that Edward's ostentatious display of treasure needed to be explained. We also saw the way the indebtedness of the Anonymous to the Encomium foregrounds the complicated interaction between textuality and reality which underlies his representation of treasure. Throughout the text, treasure emerges as a powerful symbol whose meaning is worth manipulating, and a literary approach to the text illustrates that display remains a powerful symbol in the real world of Edward the Confessor's court.86

86

I am grateful to the members of the Wessex Medieval Seminar, University of Southampton, for their generous comments on an earlier version of this paper. Thanks go also to Andrew Wray and to my colleagues Dr Catherine Cubitt, Dr Nicola McDonald, and Dr Matthew Townend for their helpful comments and criticisms.

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7 The Goldenes RoÈssl and the French Royal Collections Jenny Stratford

A minute sample of goldsmiths' work has survived from the Middle Ages. Compared with extant works commissioned for churches and religious houses, only an in®nitesimal fraction of objects in gold and silver originally ordered for the use of secular patrons exists today.1 Even rarer are pieces of secular origin for which an uninterrupted history can be written. Yet two objects which were once in the collections of the troubled king of France, Charles VI (1380±1422), fall into this category: the Royal Gold Cup in the British Museum2 and the Goldenes RoÈssl (Plates 1±9). Both objects are exceptional for their history, as well as for their beauty and technical accomplishment. The Goldenes RoÈssl was the New Year's gift of Queen Isabeau of Bavaria to her husband, Charles VI, on 1 January 1405. It stands about 62 cm high and its bullion value is considerable. According to the earliest inventory, it weighed originally 144 Troy ounces of gold and 240 of silver. The Goldenes RoÈssl has survived almost miraculously. It remained in Charles VI's possession for only seven months before being pawned with other treasures to the Queen's brother, Louis of Bavaria. After a complex early history, it reached the pilgrimage church of AltoÈtting, not far from Munich, in the early sixteenth century. In 1801, it was sent to the mint in Munich to be melted down, but was restored to AltoÈtting. In 1921, an attempted robbery severely damaged the object. A restoration soon afterwards repaired much of the damage, but the materials used wore badly. A new and remarkable restoration was 1

2

An earlier version of this article was published in German in Das Goldenes RoÈssl: Ein Meisterwerk der Pariser Hofkunst um 1400, ed. R. Baumstark (Munich, 1995). I am very grateful to Dr Baumstark, to Dr Renata Eikelmann and to her colleagues in the Bavarian National Museum, especially Dr Lorenz Seelig, for their help. I also thank the authorities of the Heiligen Kapelle at AltoÈtting and the administrator, PraÈlat Alois Furtner, for assistance and kind permission to reproduce photographs of the Goldenes RoÈssl. For goldsmiths' work of the later Middle Ages, see J. M. Fritz, Goldschmiedekunst der Gotik in Mitteleuropa (Munich, 1982), passim. For the Royal Gold Cup, see N. Stratford in Les fastes du Gothique: le sieÁcle de Charles V, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, 9 octobre 1981±1er feÂvrier 1982, ed. F. Baron (Paris, 1981), no. 213, with bibliography; J. Stratford, The Bedford Inventories: The Worldly Goods of John, Duke of Bedford, Regent of France (1389±1435), Research Reports of the Society of Antiquaries of London 49 (London, 1993), pp. 319±25.

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Plate 1. The Goldenes RoÈssl, AltoÈtting.

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The Goldenes RoÈssl and the French Royal Collections completed by the Bavarian National Museum in 1995. A special exhibition in the Museum presented the results in context with related manuscripts and goldsmiths' work before the Goldenes RoÈssl was returned to its permanent home in AltoÈtting. The technical descriptions, exceptional colour plates and introductory essays published in the exhibition catalogue should be consulted to amplify the discussion in the next paragraphs. The object takes its name, a modern one, meaning approximately `white horse of gold', from the horse on the lowest level, below the steps (Plates 1, 9). Until the 1921 robbery, the horse's reins, now lost, were attached to the bridle. They were held by the page, who had a baton, now also lost, in his other hand. The idea is that the king, kneeling in armour on the middle level, has just dismounted (Plates 1, 6). Accompanied by his chevalier, who is holding the king's helmet (Plate 7), he is praying to the Virgin and Child on the upper level (Plates 1, 2). At the feet of the Virgin are three infant saints as intercessors (Plates 3, 4 and 5): St John the Evangelist with his attribute, a chalice, in his left hand and ¯owers in his right hand, St John the Baptist with his woolly lamb and St Catherine with a martyr's palm, to whom the Christ Child is offering a ring. This is a very unusual representation of the mystical marriage of St Catherine with the saint shown as an infant. Three techniques, which were innovations around the middle of the fourteenth century, but which reached their fullest development in Paris around 1400, can be seen together on this object. These are pointille or pouncing, for which the medieval term was poincËonneÂ, and two enamelworking techniques, the translucent red enamel on gold, known both in medieval inventories and today as rouge cler, and enamel in the round, known by the modern term, en ronde bosse. The enamel techniques can be seen, for example, on the upper section of the object, with the Virgin and Child in a bower in the form of a terrace, enriched with gold leaves, whitepetalled ¯owers and gems. The sun-burst halo behind the Virgin is an addition from the baroque period, but replaces a halo recorded in 1506. The Virgin and Child and the other ®gures are in gold, executed in the round like small sculptures. They are hollow and worked in thin sheets of metal, apart from the heads and hands which are solid. A ®ne skin of molten glasses has been ®red over the gold to form the enamel in opaque white and blue and in translucent red (rouge cler), blue and green, with subtle tints for details such as complexion, eyes, moustaches and beards. The very dif®cult technique of enamel en ronde bosse (referred to in medieval inventories in phrases which translate as `enamelled in white'), reached its fullest development in the ®gures of the Goldenes RoÈssl, while the ®ve-petalled ¯owers on the trellis are simpler examples of the same technique. Rouge cler can only be carried out successfully on gold. It contrasts dramatically with the opaque white, and is used, for example, on the upper level for the Christ Child's robe, St Catherine's robe, the linings of the Baptist's robe and the angels' mantles. The terrace is in translucent green enamel, decorated with ¯owers. Green 111

Jenny Stratford terraces surrounded by battlements are found on other surviving objects of around 1400, such as the Holy Thorn reliquary in the British Museum, and are often described in inventories. The ¯owers on the terrace and on the blue cushion beneath the Evangelist are not in the round. The molten glasses have been applied in relief like thick paint. Examples of pointille can be seen on all three levels (Plates 1, 7±9). The angels' wings are decorated with feathers in a ®ne pattern of dots. The ¯eurs de lis on the upright surface below the battlemented terrace, the diaper pattern on the ground beneath the king's feet, the cloth which covers the lectern and the horse's saddle are all executed in pointilleÂ. The depth and diameter of the dots on the saddle vary according to the size of the motifs, just one example of the exquisite craftsmanship which makes this such an exceptional object.

THE FRENCH ROYAL INVENTORIES

As a result of fruitful collaboration between scholars from England, France and elsewhere from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the early history of both the Royal Gold Cup and the Goldenes RoÈssl has been gradually uncovered and their subsequent wanderings traced. The ®rst known references were identi®ed in two of the great series of Valois inventories of the late fourteenth and early ®fteenth centuries. In 1869, Jules Labarte (later the editor of the inventory of Charles V), published the earliest entry describing the Goldenes RoÈssl from an inventory of Charles VI begun in 1400.3 In 1892, soon after the Royal Gold Cup, hitherto unknown, had reappeared in Paris, and had been acquired for the British Museum, LeÂopold Delisle (then keeper of manuscripts in the BibliotheÁque nationale), found entries for it both in the 1400 inventory, and in an earlier inventory, the ®rst of Charles VI's reign, begun in 1391.4 What were these inventories? The question is important given the poor survival rate of the actual objects. Apart from their intrinsic interest, such inventories, correctly interpreted, are our best source of information about the lost originals and their techniques; these include pointilleÂ, enamel en ronde bosse and rouge cler, techniques which, as we have seen, are found on the Goldenes RoÈssl, but are documented for much earlier objects, made in 1351± 52, early in the reign of Jean II le Bon, father of Charles V and grandfather of Charles VI.5 3 4 5

J. Labarte, `Le RoÈssel d'or d'AltoÈtting', Annales archeÂologiques 26 (1869), 204±12. L. Delisle, `La coupe d'or du roi Charles V', Journal des Savants n.s. 4 (1906), 233±9. D. Gaborit-Chopin, `Les collections d'orfeÁvrerie des princes francËais au milieu du XIVe sieÁcle d'apreÁs les comptes et inventaires', in Hommage aÁ Hubert Landais: Art, objets d'art, collections: Etudes sur l'art du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance sur l'histoire du gouÃt et des collections (Paris, 1987), pp. 46±52 (p. 50).

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The Goldenes RoÈssl and the French Royal Collections

Plate 2. The Virgin and Child

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Plate 3. St Catherine.

By the end of the reign of Charles V (1364±80), the French Chambre des comptes had perfected the system by which it kept track of the king's valuables: secular and liturgical textiles and books as well as goldsmiths' work. The great inventory of Charles V's possessions, drawn up on the king's orders in 1379±80, just before his death, was published by Labarte in 1879 from a late ®fteenth-century copy. It provides a wealth of information about all these categories of object, not only goldsmiths' work.6 The king's 6

J. Labarte, Inventaire du mobilier de Charles V, roi de France, Collection de documents ineÂdits sur l'histoire de France (Paris, 1879), edited from Paris, BibliotheÁque Nationale, ms. fr. 2705, a late ®fteenth-century copy of the lost original. The lithograph facing p. 1 reproduces fol. 1 of the manuscript, with some of the heraldic attributes of Charles V1 (broom ¯owers, peacock feathers and motto).

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The Goldenes RoÈssl and the French Royal Collections

Plate 4. St John the Baptist.

unbelievably rich collection consisted of 3,906 entries and many more individual items; some entries embrace sets of up to several dozen pieces. These goods were distributed among all the royal residences: the chaÃteaux of Melun, Vincennes, the Louvre, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and the hoÃtels of BeauteÂ-sur-Marne and Saint-Pol. Some objects, such as the cameos at the chaÃteau of Melun, situated to the south of Paris, or the illuminated manuscripts in the king's own chamber at his favourite residence, the chaÃteau of Vincennes, outside Paris to the east, were a `collection' in our modern sense of the word; others were in reserve, ready to enhance the king's magni®cence at secular and liturgical ceremonies, or in the king's hall, chamber, household and chapel during his residence in Paris or elsewhere at one or another of his castles or houses. Depictions of magni®cence from the time of 115

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Plate 5. St John the Evangelist.

The Goldenes RoÈssl and the French Royal Collections

Plate 6. Charles VI. Detail, left pro®le.

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Plate 7. The Chevalier.

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The Goldenes RoÈssl and the French Royal Collections

Plate 8. The Tiger.

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Jenny Stratford

Plate 9. The Horse and Page.

Charles V and Charles VI include the feast given in January 1378 in the Grand' Salle of the Palais de la Cite for the state visit of the king's uncle, the emperor Charles IV of Luxembourg, and his son, Wenceslas, king of the Romans; and the January miniature from the calendar of the TreÁs Riches Heures of Jean de Berry.7 The entries describing Charles V's collections, their actual words usually repeated over and over again in the successive inventories of his son Charles VI's reign, for as long as a piece remained in the royal collections, were designed above all to ensure that the royal of®cer charged with safekeeping valuables was fully accountable. Inventories were normally drawn up afresh at a change of keeper, and checked at his discharge or call to account at the end of his tenure. Descriptions of goldsmiths' work in the French royal inventories ± and also in the princely inventories and other documents produced by the separate Chambres de comptes of the royal dukes, Charles V's brothers, Louis I of Anjou, Jean, duke of Berry and Philip, duke of 7

BN ms. fr. 2813, fol. 473v; see Les Fastes du Gothique, ed. Baron, no. 284 (with bibliography); reproduced in colour in C. Sterling, La peinture meÂdieÂvale aÁ Paris, 1300±1500, 2 vols. (Lausanne, 1987±90), I, ®g. 150; Chantilly, MuseÂe CondeÂ, ms. 65, fol. 1v; see M. Meiss, French Painting in the Time of Jean de Berry: The Limbourgs and their Contemporaries, 2 vols. (New York and London, 1974), II, pl. 539 and numerous colour facsimiles.

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The Goldenes RoÈssl and the French Royal Collections Burgundy, and by Charles VI's brother, Louis, duke of OrleÂans ± almost always state carefully the weight of silver and gold and the types and number of jewels, but descriptions of iconography or techniques are more variable in their degree of precision.8 Financial records of every kind are particularly useful, when they have survived. The wording of orders and receipts for payment often seems to be based on the craftsman or merchant's formula, and offers excellent information about techniques.9 An extensive series of inventories of jewels and plate exists for Charles VI's reign, dating from between 1391 and 1422, and a remarkable recent study by Philippe Henwood permits the survey of the evolution and decline of the royal collections during this whole period.10 Charles VI came to the throne when he was less than twelve years old, inheriting the collections of his father, Charles V. During his minority, heavy inroads were made into his treasure by the regents, the dukes of Anjou and Burgundy. In 1388, three years after his marriage in 1385 to Isabeau of Bavaria, Charles assumed majority government. In the next few years, feasts, spectacles and tournaments followed in rapid succession. The king paid for some of the lavish expenditure (as was usual with kings, princes and magnates) by melting down or selling some of the rich collections he had inherited from his father. Other objects were converted into new pieces, often bearing the king's heraldic insignia: his arms, his colours (black, red, green and white), his broom plant, his beasts (the cerf volant (winged stag), the unicorn with a `v' on its shoulder, the tiger, which accompanies his image on the Goldenes RoÈssl (Plate 8), and the peacock), and his motto, JameÂs (jamais). The ¯eurs de lis of France, seen in pointille on the Goldenes RoÈssl (Plates 1, 7, 8, 9) and in pointille and engraved in relief on the chalice which Charles VI gave to St Catherine's monastery, Sinai,11 enriched old and new pieces. In the years to about 1405, and in spite of the madness with which the king was af¯icted at increasingly frequent intervals from 1392, many new pieces were added to the royal collections, counterbalancing the king's tendency to 8

9

10

11

For the Valois inventories, see R. W. Lightbown, Secular Goldsmiths' Work in Medieval France: A History, Research Reports of the Society of Antiquaries of London 36 (London, 1978), with bibliography; Gaborit-Chopin, `Les collections' and bibliography, pp. 50±1. For this type of record, see the valuable collection of sources assembled by P. Henwood, `Les orfeÁvres parisiens pendant le reÁgne de Charles VI (1380±1422)', Bulletin archeÂologique du Comite des travaux historiques et scienti®ques n.s. 15 (1982), 85±180. P. Henwood, `Le treÂsor royal sous le reÁgne de Charles VI (1380±1422): eÂtude sur les inventaires, les orfeÁvres parisiens et les principaux artistes du roi', Ecole nationale des Chartes: Positions des theÁses (Paris, 1978), pp. 91±8; P. Henwood, `Administration et vie des collections d'orfeÁvrerie royales sous le reÁgne de Charles VI (1380±1422)', BibliotheÁque de l'Ecole des Chartes 138 (1980), 179±215. I thank Monsieur Henwood for the generous loan of his unpublished thesis (1978; title as the published summary). This contains in the third and ®nal volume an invaluable edition of the 1400 inventory with comparative tables permitting the study of all the inventories of Charles VI's reign. Sinai, St Catherine's monastery, see Stratford, Bedford Inventories, pl. 51.

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Jenny Stratford excessive liberality. Many came as presents: from foreign rulers, from French towns which Charles visited for the ®rst time, making his joyeuse entreÂe (solemn entry), and from the queen, the royal dukes and the great of®cers, especially at New Year. After 1405, the costs of the civil war which rent the Armagnacs from the Burgundians, and the resumption of the hostilities with England in the Hundred Years War, contributed to the loss of most of the collections by 1422. In 1391, Charles VI ordered the preparation of an inventory of his jewels and plate, the ®rst of his reign, coinciding with the appointment of a new keeper.12 The king's valuables at the Louvre, Vincennes and Saint-Germainen-Laye were listed (among them the Royal Gold Cup), but not those at Melun, still in the care of the old keeper, nor jewels and plate in current use in the king's own household.13 What use was made of pieces charged to the keeper of the jewels? How often might the king see them? This question cannot be answered fully, but it is clear that the king sometimes sent for objects or visited his collections. An enquiry conducted in 1415 after the discharge of GeÂrard de BruyeÁres, keeper of the jewels and plate from 1400 to 1413, is revealing. In 1409, a period of political upheaval, the keeper had been forced to surrender the keys of the places where the jewels were kept; they had been given to Louis of Bavaria on behalf of his sister, the queen. The enquiry went on to state that new keys had to be made when the king wished to visit his collections or to send for objects.14 The inventories occasionally reveal which objects were sent for. They include a gold salt resting on four wheels and supported by a tiger (one of the king's favourite emblems, especially in the years around 1395). A diamond had been lost from the jewelled crown around the tiger's neck, it was claimed, when the salt was sent to a banquet given by the king to the cardinals on Easter eve, 1399. Another jewelled salt composed of entwined serpents was missing a balas ruby, claimed to have been lost on the same occasion.15 12 13

14

15

BN ms. fr. 21445. Copy of the eighteenth century; original lost. By 1418 the inventories included jewels and plate in the keeping of the of®cers of the household departments at the HoÃtel Saint-Pol, the king's main residence. For 1418 and 1420, see L. DoueÈt d'Arcq, Choix de pieÁces ineÂdites relatives au reÁgne de Charles VI, 2 vols., SocieÂte de l'Histoire de France 119 and 122 (Paris, 1863±64), II, 279±383; for 1422, BN ms. Clairambault 834, pp. 1285±412; BN ms. fr. 7855, pp. 557±616. Other references may be gleaned from accounts, etc., see e.g. the repairs in 1392 to `deux cornes d'un cerf volant de la grant nef de la penneterie du roy', the terraces of the same nef and the screw which secured a tree, by the goldsmith, Guillaume Arrode, cited by Henwood, `Les orfeÁvres parisiens', p. 108, from Paris, Archives nationales, KK 23, fols. 85±101. AN P 2298, pp. 151±152, `quant nous avons voulu aller ou envoyer es lieux ouÁ sont nosdits joyaulx, c'est assavoir en nos Hostels et Chasteaulx du Louvre, de la Bastide Saint Antoine, du Bois de Vincennes et de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, on ait leve les serreures et fait nouvelles clefs . . .'. See for the context, Henwood, `Les orfeÁvres parisiens', p. 197. BN ms. fr. 21446, fol. 47v; the second salt had been in Charles V's collections at Melun. For the dinner, Chronique du Religieux de Saint-Denys, 1380±1422, ed. L. F. Bellaguet, 6 vols., Documents ineÂdits sur l'histoire de France (Paris, 1839±52), II, 678.

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The Goldenes RoÈssl and the French Royal Collections

Figure 1. Paris in the ®fteenth century. After G. Ll. Thompson, Paris and its People under English Rule: The Anglo-Burgundian Regime 1420±1436 (Oxford, 1991) THE TOUR DU COIN AND THE TREASURY IN THE BASTILLE

In January 1400, following a change of keeper, a new inventory was taken of jewels and plate at the Louvre, Vincennes, Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Melun, as well as a new repository, the Bastille, or Bastide Saint Antoine (Figure 1).16 Some of the most valuable pieces in the king's collections had 16

BN ms. fr. 21446, an eighteenth-century copy of the lost original. The contents are: fols. 1± 19, Louvre; fols. 19v±49v, Bastille; fols. 49v±139, Vincennes; fols. 139v±144v, SaintGermain-en-Laye; fols. 145±186, Melun. In all 2,085 entries. A direct comparison is not possible with the 3,906 entries in the inventory of Charles V; it has to take into account e.g. the separate listing of the royal chapel hangings and vestments by 1400 (AN KK 38), see Stratford, Bedford Inventories, pp. 73±82.

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Figure 2. The Bastille. Plan of Larcher Daubancourt, 1766. (Archives du GeÂnie, Vincennes)

recently been moved to the Bastille, as had some of the queen's jewels, carried from the Temple in a walnut chest.17 The proximity of the Bastille to the HoÃtel Saint-Pol, where the king resided almost continually, frequently relapsing into total insanity, but yet needing to keep up the appearance of state whenever his health allowed, was no doubt a factor in the choice of this repository. The Bastille housed Charles V's rings and cameos, brought from Melun, as well as most of the very valuable objects which Charles VI had bought or been given since 1391. In 1405, the Goldenes RoÈssl was added to the treasures in the Bastille, the New Year's gift of Isabeau of Bavaria.18 As we have seen, it remained in the king's possession for only seven months before being pawned to Louis of Bavaria. In contrast to the other chaÃteaux where jewels and plate were kept, the Bastille was a fortress, not a royal residence. It stood at the eastern limit of Paris on the route to Vincennes. Begun under Charles V in 1370, and completed in the reign of Charles VI, the Bastille was surrounded by eight round towers united by a continuous curtain wall. In 1400, the jewels were in the Tour du Coin, the angle tower facing the Temple, then known as La Tour des Joyaux 17

18

Y. Grandeau, `Isabeau de BavieÁre ou l'amour conjugal', in Actes du 102e CongreÁs national des socieÂteÂs savantes, 2 vols. in 1 (Paris, 1979), II, 117±48 (II, 140, with reference). BN ms. fr. 21446, fol. 24.

124

The Goldenes RoÈssl and the French Royal Collections (Figure 2).19 The valuables were kept on the top ¯oor in ten locked cupboards, numbered A-C, F-J (I and J being one) and L-N. The Goldenes RoÈssl was in cupboard A, facing the ®replace. This cupboard contained exclusively objects of gold enriched with jewels. Among them were two elaborate crosses both incorporating ®gures in the round, thirteen gold images, and a pair of gold chandeliers for the chapel, given to the king by the Duke of Berry. The thirteen images included the Goldenes RoÈssl (the last to be listed and probably the newest), besides two other elaborate pieces, the lost Virgin and the St Michael (now known only from eighteenth-century oil paintings in the Bavarian National Museum), which were given by Duke Louis of Bavaria to his burial church of Ingolstadt. The so-called Ingolstadt Virgin incorporated ronde bosse ®gures of King Charles VI and Queen Isabeau, kneeling in prayer and presented to the Virgin by St George and St Elizabeth of Hungary.20 Certain cupboards in the Bastille, for example cupboard M in which the Royal Gold Cup was stored, were ®lled only with secular plate for the table. Yet others contained a mixture of secular and religious plate. What can the grouping of the Goldenes RoÈssl with images and plate for the chapel tell us about its original function? Was it an exclusively sacred object? Perhaps the answer is ambiguous. Some images, such as a St Michael of silver-gilt with a miniature holywater bucket and a sprinkler, given to Charles VI at New Year 1395 by his close relative, the prioress of Poissy, were absorbed into the king's oratory; others were left in store to be admired if the king chose to visit his collections.21 Signi®cantly many of the pieces at the Bastille were new or newly inventoried in the decade 1395 to 1405: all those in cupboard A, all those in the adjacent cupboard, B, consisting of gold images and reliquaries enriched with gems, and the magni®cent ®rst piece in cupboard C, a Holy Thorn reliquary given by Jean de Berry. Several of these pieces were New Year's gifts from the Queen and the royal dukes, and in these three cupboards at the Bastille were the majority of the pieces pawned to Louis of Bavaria in 1405.22 19

20

21

22

BN ms. fr. 21446, fol. 19v: `La Tour du Coing devers Paris du coste du Temple, appelee la Tour des Joyaux'. For the Bastille, see F. Bournon, La Bastille, histoire et description des baÃtiments. Administration, ReÂgime de la prison. EveÂnements historiques (Paris, 1893), pp. 1±13, 163±6 and 238±52; M. Whiteley, `Les reÂsidences princieÁres parisiennes dans la deuxieÁme moitie du Moyen Age', in Sous les paveÂs, la Bastille. ArcheÂologie d'un mythe revolutionnaire (Paris, 1989), pp. 28±36; N. Faucherre, `La Bastille au Moyen Age', in Sous les paveÂs, pp. 38± 49, and pls.; J. Mesqui, ChaÃteaux et enceintes de la France meÂdieÂvale, 2 vols. (Paris, 1991±93), I, 355, ®g. 442, and bibliography. Munich, Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, inv. nos. MA 2607 and 2608; see T. MuÈller and E. SteingraÈber, `Die franzoÈsische Goldemailplastik um 1400', MuÈnchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst 3/5 (1954), 29±79 (cat. nos. 7 and 8, pls. 21 and 22); Goldenes RoÈssl, ed. Baumstark, cat. nos. 2 and 3, with colour plates and bibliography. BN ms. fr. 21445, fol. 30: `Rex . . . cepit penes se dictam ymaginem pro serviendo in ejus oratorio'. In addition to the documents published by M. Frankenburger, `Zur Geschichte des IngoldstaÈdter und Landshuter Herzogsschatzes und des Stiftes AltoÈtting', Repertorium fuÈr Kunstwissenschaft 44 (1924), 23±77, and summarized by MuÈller and SteingraÈber, `Die

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ETRENNES: THE CELEBRATION OF THE NEW YEAR

We may now turn to the question of New Year as the background to Isabeau of Bavaria's gift of the Goldenes RoÈssl to Charles VI on 1 January 1405. In France in the later Middle Ages, the royal chancery began the year at Easter, so that dates in documents written between January and March or April have to be advanced by a year to conform with our modern reckoning. But the ®rst of January, the beginning of the astrological year and of most calendars, was celebrated as New Year's Day, as it had been in ancient Rome.23 Falling between Christmas and Epiphany, New Year's Day was a threefold festival: the Feast of the Circumcision, the Octave of the Nativity, and altogether more pagan, the origin being the festivals and games held in ancient Rome in honour of Janus, the God of gates and new beginnings, the Feast of Fools. The church repeatedly condemned the election of a boy bishop, which took place in Paris and elsewhere in France on New Year's Day, and other more offensive practices, but they survived to the mid-®fteenth century.24 All three aspects are evoked in the sermons from which the lessons of the temporal of the Paris Breviary are taken.25 The Feast of Fools was essentially a popular festival in which the lower clergy and the people participated. But the fantastical costumes ordered year after year for the king and his brother, Louis, duke of OrleÂans, for New Year's Day, con®rm that echoes reached the court.26 Another indication is the gift by the brothers Limbourg, the artists of the TreÁs Riches Heures, of a wonderfully-bound book to Jean de Berry on New Year's Day 1411, which turned out to be a painted block of wood.27

23

24

25

26

27

franzoÈsische Goldemailplastik', pp. 69±71, cat. no. 6, see AN J 426, no. 28, partly printed by L. Mirot, `Galvano Trenta et les joyaux de la couronne', Etudes Lucquoises, in BibliotheÁque de L'Ecole des Chartes 101 (1940), 128±9 and 153±6; Henwood, `Administration', p. 199, with bibliography. A. Giry, Manuel de diplomatique (Paris, 1894), p. 105; R. L. Poole, `The Beginning of the Year in the Middle Ages', reprinted from Proceedings of the British Academy 10 (1921), in his È ber Studies in Chronology and History, ed. A. L. Poole (Oxford, 1934), pp. 1±27; W. Hartke, U Jahrespunkte und Feste insbesondere das Weihnachtsfest (Berlin, 1956); E. J. Bickermann, Chronology of the Ancient World, 2nd edn (Ithaca NY, 1980), p. 65. H. Deni¯e and E. ChaÃtelain, Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, 4 vols. (Paris, 1891±99), IV, 652±6; F. Cabrol in Dictionnaire d'archeÂologie chreÂtienne et de liturgie, III/2 (Paris, 1914), cols. 1717±28; P. Perdrizet, Le calendrier de Paris (Paris, 1933), p. 70; E. C. Rodgers, Discussion of Holidays in the Later Middle Ages (New York, 1940), pp. 88±92. The ®rst three lessons are from Maximus of Turin (PL 57, pp. 255±6), the last three from Bede (PL 94, p. 55); see also V. Leroquais, Le breÂviaire de Philippe le Bon, 2 vols. (Paris, 1929), I, 46±7. J. Roman, Inventaires et documents relatifs aux joyaux et tapisseries des princes d'OrleÂans-Valois, 1389±1481, in Recueil d'anciens inventaires, 1 (Paris, 1896), pp. 79±314 (p. 140 no. 197; p. 175 no. 367, etc.). J. Guiffrey, Inventaires de Jean, duc de Berry (1401±1416), 2 vols. (Paris, 1894±96), I, 265, no. 994.

126

The Goldenes RoÈssl and the French Royal Collections The ceremonial for the presentation of New Year's gifts laid down at the English court of King Henry VII no doubt varied very little from that at the French court earlier in the ®fteenth century. In the morning, the king seated himself in his chamber on a bed of state, and the presentations began. The entry of a messenger bearing the queen's New Year's gift started proceedings; the king remained seated while his other New Year's gifts were brought in strict order of precedence of the donors. Once the messengers had been rewarded on a scale proportionate to the rank of the donor, the king left to hear mass. A similar but separate ceremonial was observed by the queen.28 Financial documents surviving from the French royal household and the households of the royal dukes record gifts such as cups to messengers bringing New Year's gifts, for example from Charles VI to the eÂcuyer tranchant (carver) of the English king, Richard II, in 1398, or from Philip the Good of Burgundy in 1403.29 In 1405, the year Queen Isabeau gave the Goldenes RoÈssl, the king enjoyed a brief period of sanity over New Year, before relapsing into madness. He is likely to have received and presented his gifts in person. Both the king and queen were at the HoÃtel Saint-Pol.30 The depiction of Pierre Salmon presenting his book, the ReÂponses aÁ Charles VI et Lamentation au roi sur son eÂtat to Charles VI in 1409, attributed to the Boucicaut Master, is an approximation of what such a ceremonial would have looked like. The presentation miniature of Christine de Pisan's works to Isabeau of Bavaria is a less formal representation of a ceremonial involving the queen.31 The presents or eÂtrennes given at court on 1 January (the word derives from the Latin strena, the term for presents given at the Roman festival) were strictly proportionate to the estate of the donor and of the recipient. Thus the king gave and received the most expensive presents. A list survives of some of the queen's presents for New Year 1392. She gave the king a gold collar garnished with eighteen rubies (apparently true rubies, more costly than balas rubies, the rose-red variety of spinel ruby), eighteen diamonds and 28

29

30

31

Articles appointed by Henry VII on 31 December 1493 or 1494, see London, British Library, Additional MS 4712, fol. 11. I thank Mrs Ann Payne for this reference. Printed, with variants, from BL Harley MS 642 in A Collection of Ordinances and Regulations for the Government of the Royal Household (London, 1790), p. 120. V. Gay, Glossaire archeÂologique du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance, 2 vols. (Paris, 1883±7; 1928), I, 679, s.v. eÂtrennes, probably for a gold goblet and ewer, BN ms. fr. 21446, fol. 47v. Chronique du Religieux de Saint-Denys, ed. Bellaguet, III, 226; the queen was present from 26 November 1404 to April 1405: see Y. Grandeau, `ItineÂraire d'Isabeau de BavieÁre', Bulletin philologique et historique du Comite des travaux historiques et scienti®ques, 1964 (1967), pp. 617±18. BN ms. fr. 23279, fols. 1v and 53, reproduced in Sterling, La peinture meÂdieÂvale, I, pls. 251 and 252; BL Harley MS 4431, fol. 3, reproduced in Meiss, Limbourgs, ®g. 151 and S. L. Hindman, Christine de Pisan's ``Epistre OtheÂa'': Painting and Politics at the Court of Charles VI, Ponti®cal Institute of Mediaeval Studies and Texts 77 (Toronto, 1986), pl. 4; Goldenes RoÈssl, ed. Baumstark, cat. nos. 4 and 5, with colour plates and bibliography.

127

Jenny Stratford eleven pearls, which cost 994 francs and 100 francs for the workmanship ± a colossal sum when a skilled mason would have to work for four days to earn one livre tournois, the equivalent of a franc. On the same occasion she gave the duke and duchess of Touraine, her brother and sister-in-law, the future duke and duchess of OrleÂans, diamond rings. Her brother, Louis of Bavaria, and the infant princesses, her daughters, received jewelled gold clasps, and the total cost of 2,800 francs was made up by gifts of rings and cups to the women of her household and to her Confessor.32 This early list of presents which the queen gave before the king went mad, conforms with what was expected of a great lady: generosity on a ®tting scale to her familiars down to the most insigni®cant members of her court, the laundress and the cleaning woman.33 From 1393, following the king's madness, unusual arrangements had to be made. As well as acting as regent when the king was `absent' (the contemporary term for his madness), Isabeau, very unusually for a queen of France, had her own argenterie, the ®rst evidence of her growing ®nancial independence.34 The increasing scale of Isabeau's New Year's gifts should be seen in the context of her changed political role. An object such as the Goldenes RoÈssl, weighing, as we have seen, about 144 Troy ounces of gold and 240 of silver, and enriched with gems, was prodigiously costly, quite apart from the workmanship, usually a relatively modest part of the expense. Many references to lost objects in inventories con®rm that expenditure by the king, queen, royal dukes, and great of®cers of state on eÂtrennes accelerated and reached extraordinary amounts in succeeding years. This was to some extent an aspect of the competition between the rival political factions. The Burgundian chronicler, Monstrelet, boasted that in 1410, the year John, duke of Burgundy, founded his short-lived order, a precursor of the Order of the Golden Fleece, more than 14,000 gold ¯orins were spent by the duke on gold and silver-gilt badges of the order, the rabot or mason's plane, and other presents on New Year's Day. This claim is supported by the duke's documented payment of over 17,443 eÂcus in this one year to a single goldsmith for eÂtrennes.35 In 1412, the king spent the huge sum of 9,000 livres just on presents for the queen and the dauphin; in addition, he distributed 32

33

34

35

M. Thibault, Isabeau de BavieÁre, reine de France. La jeunesse, 1370±1405 (Paris, 1903), pp. 181± 2, citing letters of Charles VI ordering payment, BN ms. fr. 25706, fol. 326; Henwood, `Les orfeÁvres parisiens', p. 119, citing the quittance, from BN P.O. 603, Carre no. 3. Christine de Pisan, Le livre du treÂsor de la Cite des Dames, i.19; Christine based her ideas of largesse on John of Salisbury's Polycraticus. Cf. the list of New Year's presents given to ladies of the queen's household in 1392 by Valentina Visconti, later duchess of OrleÂans: Roman, Inventaires, no. IX (pp. 96±7). M. Rey, Les ®nances royales sous Charles VI: les causes du de®cit (1388±1413) (Paris, 1965), pp. 239±55, and passim. Chronique d'Enguerrand de Monstrelet, 1400±1444, ed. L. DoueÈt d' Arcq, 6 vols., SocieÂte de l'Histoire de France (Paris, 1857±62), i.59 (II, 57±8); Henwood, `Les orfeÁvres parisiens', p. 157.

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The Goldenes RoÈssl and the French Royal Collections 3,200 livres to his servants. This was against a background of ®nancial crisis, and it is not surprising to ®nd that the greed of goldsmiths was the object of condemnation in the reforming climate of 1413.36 Smaller tokens were given to the court: 101 little gold peacock badges (one of Charles VI's badges) had been prepared for the king to distribute at New Year 1422; they were sold off after he sickened and died.37 Just as the peacock was the `theme' for 1422, `themes' were chosen in other years for the presents received by the king as well as for those he gave. A fairly long list of the presents Charles VI received for New Year 1395 can be reconstructed from the inventories of 1391 and 1400. The dominant theme was the tiger: in the round, a pair of tigers looking in mirrors on a nef given by the duke of Berry; with broom¯owers on the fruitlets (knobs) of a set of a ewer and goblets which the king bought himself for New Year; in enamel medallions, the tiger looking at itself in a fountain, inside the cover of the pair of ¯agons given by the GeÂneÂraux de Languedoc; and engraved in a roundel with the arms of France on the rims of trenchers, platters, plates and fruit plates given by other great of®cers of state. For the same New Year, Louis of OrleÂans provided himself and the king with houppelandes (long robes) of black damask embroidered with motifs including a tiger seated on a rock, admiring its re¯ection in a fountain.38 The king's tiger badge no doubt alluded to the bestiary, and to the legendary swiftness of the tiger. Many objects were decorated with tigers admiring themselves in a mirror, the mirror often suspended from a tree, or in a fountain: a further reference to the bestiary in one or another of the popular French versions. According to legend, the tiger's speed meant that the only way for the hunter to steal a cub was by a trick. In the Latin Bestiary, the trick was to throw down a curved glass or ball. When the tiger saw its own re¯ection, reduced in size by the curved glass, it would mistake the re¯ection for its cub and abandon the pursuit. In the French bestiary of Pierre de Beauvais and related texts, the tiger was tricked into admiring its own re¯ection in a mirror, which often hangs from a tree. The moral of this version was that the Devil de¯ects man from saving his soul by feasts and other worldly delights. The scene is often illustrated in late medieval French

36 37

38

M. Rey, Les ®nances, p. 488; Henwood, `Les orfeÁvres parisiens', p. 203, with references. Made by Christophe de Herlen, garde du meÂtier in 1435: see G. Ritter, `Extraits du Journal du TreÂsor (1423±1424)', BibliotheÁque de l'Ecole des Chartes 73 (1912), 476. For the king's badges, see Colette Beaune, `Costume et pouvoir en France aÁ la ®n du Moyen Age: les devises royales vers 1400', Revue des sciences humaines 183/3 (1981), 125±46 (especially pp. 141±6). BN ms. fr. 21445, fol. 18 (nef); ms. fr. 21445, fol. 21v and BN ms. fr. 21446, fol. 34 (ewer and goblets); ms. fr. 21445, fol. 19v and ms. fr. 21446, fol. 29v (justes); ms. fr. 21445, fol. 24v and ms. fr. 21446, fol. 49 (trenchers); ms. fr. 21445, fols. 23±23v (plates and platters). The king wears a tiger on his sleeve in the presentation miniature of Christine de Pisan's Le chemin de long estude in BL Harley MS 4431, fol. 178, reproduced in Hindman, Christine de Pisan, pl. 68.

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Jenny Stratford manuscripts, the tiger, as the tiger of the Goldenes RoÈssl (Plate 8), looking very like a dog.39 As one of the most important of the Twelve Days of Christmas, feasts were held on the ®rst of January, and of course toasts were drunk. This no doubt explains the frequency with which hanaps or drinking vessels were given as New Year's presents, or bought by the lord for himself on this day. These could be fantastically costly; they might be decorated with pendant jewels which would be set in motion when the cup was carried or the cover removed (we may compare the fruitlet or jewelled knob on the cover of the later `Hofbecher' of Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy, datable to between 1453 and 1457),40 or with a suitable motto such as `En Bon An'. Louis d'OrleÂans gave his brother, Charles VI, a covered gold hanap costing 2,250 francs in 1397. It was decorated with trails of red and white roses in de plique aÁ jour enamel; the fruitlet was a jewelled `Emperor's' (closed) crown and besides jewels round the cover, hanap and foot, great pendant pearls hung from the hanap and the cover.41 Nefs, great boat-shaped set pieces for the table, far more elaborate than those depicted in the representations of the feasts of Charles V and Jean de Berry, were among the most magni®cent of New Year's gifts. The very large gold nef given to Charles VI by Jean de Berry for New Year 1395 has already been referred to. It was supported by a bear lying on a golden terrace with a semis of engraved ¯eurs de lis. In the castles at the prow and stern of the boat were tigers looking at themselves in mirrors, as we have seen in allusion to a legend of the bestiary, which was represented time and time again in metalwork and embroidery among Charles VI's possessions. The collar and muzzle of the bear and the collars of the tigers were enriched with jewels. This nef is recorded among the French royal collections only in the 1391 inventory. Evidently it pleased the king. A decade later, for New Year 1405, the year of the Goldenes RoÈssl, Jean de Berry gave the king another huge jewelled gold nef. This time the castles contained images of a king and queen, perhaps Charles VI and Isabeau. The ®gures were broken up and melted down with the intention, not carried out, of refashioning them into tigers.42 Another type of secular object chosen for presentation on New Year's Day was personal jewellery: rings, collars and the elaborate little clasps known as fermaux. From a relatively early date, white enamel, that is enamel en ronde bosse, was a favourite medium for these jewels. For New Year 1386, the duke 39

40

41

42

F. McCulloch, Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries, Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures 33 (Chapel Hill, 1960), pp. 75 and 176±7. Vienna, Weltliche Schatzkammer, Inv. Nr. Pl 27, reproduced in Stratford, Bedford Inventories, pl. 42. For a hanap bought by the lord for himself, see e.g. Roman, Inventaires, p. 193 no. 426; for mottoes, Stratford, Bedford Inventories, p. 344; for the gift of Louis of OrleÂans, see BN ms. fr. 21446, fol. 46v; Henwood, `Les orfeÁvres parisiens', p. 193. BN ms. fr. 21445, fol. 18; BN ms. fr. 21446, fol. 48.

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The Goldenes RoÈssl and the French Royal Collections of Burgundy bought the duchess a jewelled gold clasp with a drowning stag pursued by two hounds enamelled in the round. The dromedary brooch in the Bargello evokes the appearance of these lost jewels.43 As in the Virgin's brooch on the Goldenes RoÈssl (Plate 2), the white enamel re¯ecting light provided a contrast with the gems transmitting light. Sacred images enriched with gems were also frequently exchanged as gifts by the king and the royal dukes at New Year. These were often images of a single saint, sometimes incorporating a reliquary. They were often relatively complex, such as the silver-gilt reliquary statue of St Louis as crusader and royal saint acquired by Charles VI for New Year 1395. On a jewelled base supported by cherubim and decorated with the arms of France, the crowned image was ¯anked by two angels. The faces and hands of the angels were executed in white enamel on gold. One angel carried a helmet, the other the arms of France.44 Altogether exceptional were groups or tableaux such as the Goldenes RoÈssl. Another of the greatest extant pieces of goldsmiths' work with images of enamel en ronde bosse of the years around 1400, the Esztergom calvary,45 may have been a New Year's gift. It has also been suggested that the lost St Michael from Ingolstadt is identi®able with an image given to Charles VI by Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy, for New Year 1397.46 The similarity of theme between the Goldenes RoÈssl and the lost Virgin from Ingolstadt must raise the question whether it too was a New Year's gift. Objects incorporating images of the Virgin were of course commissioned on many other occasions, but as we have seen, the central theme of both objects, the Virgin and Child, was especially suitable for the Octave of the Nativity.

VALOIS PORTRAITS AND ENAMEL EN RONDE BOSSE

The image of the king kneeling in devotion, attended by his chevalier and by his varlet, belongs to a group of objects, the majority lost and known only from inventories, with portraits in the round of the king and queen. Such objects were often votive images, and they were not new in the Valois period. 43

44

45

46

Henwood, `Les orfeÁvres parisiens', pp. 130±1, with references; MuÈller and SteingraÈber, `Die franzoÈsische Goldemailplastik', pp. 62 and 76, cat. no. 27. Henwood, `Administration', p. 193, with references; BN ms. fr. 21446, fol. 107, at Vincennes; U. Middeldorf, `On the Origins of ``Email sur Ronde-Bosse'' ', Gazette des Beaux-Arts 6th ser. 55 (1960), 239. Pawned to Louis of Bavaria in 1405, see Mirot, Etudes Lucquoises, pp. 155±6. EÂ. KovaÂcs, The Calvary of King Matthias Corvinus (Budapest, 1983); Stratford, Bedford Inventories, pls. 36 and 37. EÂ. KovaÂcs, `ProbleÁmes de style autour de 1400: l'orfeÁvrerie parisienne et ses sources', Revue de l'Art 28 (1975), 25±33 (pp. 27 and 29).

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Jenny Stratford Joinville, in his life of St Louis, described a silver reliquary in the form of a ship with images of the king, queen and their three children, the master mariner, the mast, the rigging and the rudder. It was ordered from a Paris goldsmith as a thank-offering to Saint-Nicolas-du-Port (Meurthe-et-Moselle), after the king and queen had survived the danger of a shipwreck off Cyprus in 1254.47 This type of votive intention can be discerned in several of the Valois portraits executed in metalwork. In 1368, Charles V gave a reliquary of the Menton de la Madeleine to Saint-Denis, as a thank-offering for the longawaited birth of the Dauphin. Silver-gilt statuettes of the crowned king, queen and dauphin knelt at the Magdalen's feet, while two angels supported the saint; the reliquary, remade by the seventeenth century, was illustrated by FeÂlibien.48 The royal group was repeated in the processional reliquary for the Saint Cloud (nail of the Passion), which Charles VI gave to Saint-Denis in 1397, but there was a signi®cant innovation. The ®gures were in gold and were enamelled. The gold base and column on which the relic was displayed were supported by the French dynastic saints, St Charlemagne and St Louis, presenting the king and queen, who were kneeling on cushions, their hands joined in prayer. The little ®gure of the dauphin knelt bareheaded before the column in the same attitude. The king, like the king on the Goldenes RoÈssl, wore a cotte of ¯eurs de lis; he had a sword and dagger at his side. The queen's robe bore the arms of Bavaria, and the child's mantle was powdered with ¯eurs de lis and dolphins.49 Many elements of these earlier images were repeated in new combinations in the Virgin of Ingolstadt and in the Goldenes RoÈssl. We may recall the crowned king and queen presented by St George and St Elizabeth, and the paired angels of the Ingolstadt Virgin, where, as at AltoÈtting, the Virgin and child are the centre of the group. These precious and sometimes `secular', sometimes `religious' objects can only be fully understood in the context of how they were given and used. The Goldenes RoÈssl of AltoÈtting, this astonishingly rare survival, takes on a richer dimension when it is looked at with the inventories and other documents in mind. The images, the Virgin and Child in the bower, with the infant St Catherine, St John the Baptist and St John the Evangelist on the upper level, the king accompanied by the chevalier kneeling in prayer on the middle level, and the varlet in parti-coloured hose, holding the horse's bridle in his left hand, and once holding a staff in his right hand, standing below the steps on 47

48

49

Jean, Sieur de Joinville, Histoire de Saint Louis, Credo et Lettre aÁ Louis X, ed. N. de Wailly (Paris, 1874), p. 346; R. W. Lightbown, `Ex-Votos in Gold and Silver: A Forgotten Art', Burlington Magazine 121 (1979), 353±9 (p. 356). B. de Montesquiou-Fezensac and D. Gaborit-Chopin, Le treÂsor de Saint-Denis, 3 vols. (Paris, 1973±77), nos. 24 and 35; I, 148±9 and 154; II, 106±10; III, 7 and pl. 2, D; D. Gaborit-Chopin, in Le treÂsor de Saint-Denis, ed. D. Alcouffe (Paris, 1991), pp. 191±200 (p. 198 and ®g. 11). Montesquiou-Fezensac and Gaborit-Chopin, Le treÂsor de Saint-Denis, nos. 21, 203; I, 147; II, 355±65; Gaborit-Chopin, in Le treÂsor, ed. Alcouffe, p. 198.

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The Goldenes RoÈssl and the French Royal Collections the lowest level, belong to New Year's Day, above all a religious festival, but also a secular feast. As the Queen's New Year's gift on 1 January 1405, the Goldenes RoÈssl did not stand alone, but then as now, it was always exceptional.

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8 `Lusti Tresor': Avarice and the Economics of the Erotic in Gower's Confessio Amantis Nicola F. McDonald

I The itemization of `ij ballok pursez ij d.' in a York probate inventory of 14461 offers curious evidence for the coincidence of the sexual and the commercial in the later Middle Ages.2 Since nothing in the inventory suggests that Thomas Gryssop, chapman, was a purveyor of popular medicines, it is unlikely that the purses contain actual testes.3 More probably, they are spherical pouches, with perhaps two internal pockets, whose shape is suggestively reminiscent of the male genitalia. As the Middle English Dictionary suggests: `?a purse resembling an animal's scrotum'. In addition to serving a purely descriptive function, however, the conjunction of `ballok' and `purs' is also ludic and draws its force from the euphemistic, and often irreverent, association of the male sexual organ with a money bag or other receptacle for precious objects. Thomas Gryssop's `ballok pursez' are simultaneously literal and metaphorical. Actual receptacles for money, they are 1

2

3

Testamenta Eboracensia, ed. J. Raine, J. Raine and J. W. Clay, 6 vols., Surtees Society 4, 30, 45, 53, 79 and 106 (1865±1902), III, 103. See also Probate Inventories of the York Diocese, 1350± 1500, ed. P. M. Stell and L. Hampson (York, 1999), p. 155. Throughout this essay, I use the terms commerce and commercial to designate the economic activity of England and France in the late Middle Ages (and the language used to describe that activity), the period identi®ed by Robert Lopez as the `Commercial Revolution': R. Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950±1350 (Englewood Cliffs NJ, 1971); R. Lopez, `The Age of the Commercial Revolution', in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, ed. M. M. Postan and E. Miller, 2 vols., 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1966±87), II, 330±79. The material consequences of that revolution can be found in sites as diverse as church architecture and vernacular poetry; and in both, a preoccupation with the economic comes face to face with a fascination for sex. By adopting Lopez's notion of a `commercial revolution', and by examining the impact of that revolution on particular instances of sexual discourse, I hope to offer an alternative to the economic history of desire charted by T. Laqueur, `Sexual Desire and the Market Economy during the Industrial Revolution', in Discourses of Sexuality: From Aristotle to Aids, ed. D. C. Stanton (Ann Arbor, 1992), pp. 185±215. For the use of animal testicles in popular aphrodisiacs and cures for impotence, see R. Kieckhefer, `Erotic Magic in Medieval Europe', in Sex in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays, ed. J. Salisbury (New York, 1991), pp. 30±55.

135

Nicola F. McDonald identi®ed with the scrotum; and, in so far as the scrotum is itself identi®ed with a money bag,4 they are named accordingly. Despite the clicheÂs that any mention of sex and money inevitably evoke, the `ballok purse' is a potent image; its inherent pluralism, its ability to carry two meanings simultaneously (one sexual and one commercial), is, in short, the subject of this essay. Gryssop's `ballok pursez' are not simply scurrilous anomalies. They point rather to a discursive nexus in which sex and commerce function interdependently. In other words, a nexus in which the discourse of sex draws upon and simultaneously shapes the discourse of commerce and vice versa. As this essay will demonstrate, the discursive interplay between sex and commerce is a feature of both visual and verbal expression. The `ballok purse' provides a convenient (and apt) starting point for a reconsideration of Book 5 of Gower's Confessio Amantis.5 The Confessio charts the confession of a lover, Amans, to Genius, the priest of Venus. The confession, supported by a myriad of narrative exempla, is structured around an examination of the Seven Deadly Sins; it is prefaced by a lengthy commentary on contemporary social ills; and it is interpolated by a not insubstantial body of advice-toprinces material. Weaving its way throughout the confession, often set in opposition to the exemplary narratives, is the story of Amans's love for, and pursuit of, the lady, the shadowy ®gure who is the submerged focus of much of the poem. Although Genius's ostensible purpose is to educate the lover in terms of amorous conduct, he further promises to provide Amans with a general moral education, to teach him to eschew vice and follow virtue. Thus, throughout the Confessio, in a sometimes rather clumsy manner, Genius tries to make his erotic morality consonant with the familiar codes of virtuous Christian conduct. At the core of the Confessio, then, is a preoccupation with moral transformation (amorous and Christian) and with the malleability of the discourses (one for each of the Deadly Sins) that accompany it. Book 5, devoted to the sin of avarice, marks the poem's formal union of sex and commerce. What I want to examine here is how, paradoxically, Gower's adoption of `ballok purse discourse' renders the Confessio poetically impotent.

II On folio 97v of New York, Pierpont Morgan Library PML 689, a copy of Caxton's 1483 edition of Gower's Confessio Amantis, a reader has sketched an illustration in the blank space between the rubrics Explicit Liber Quartus and Incipit Liber Quintus (Plate 1). Undoubtedly executed by an amateur draughtsman, probably some time after 1520, the drawing has attracted 4

5

See Middle English Dictionary, ed. H. Kurath et al. (Ann Arbor, 1954±), s.v. ballok and purs(e 4a, for entries identifying `ballok purse' with the scrotum. John Gower, Confessio Amantis, in The Complete Works of John Gower: The English Works, ed. G. C. Macaulay, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1901). References will be to this edition.

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Avarice and the Economics of the Erotic in Gower

Plate 1. Reader's Sketch. John Gower, Confessio Amantis, fol. 97v. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library PML 689. (Courtesy of the Pierpont Morgan Library)

137

Nicola F. McDonald little scholarly attention and only Martha Driver has ventured an interpretation: One woman holds what may be a money bag as the man gestures toward it, a scene perhaps related to the theme of Avarice treated in Book V, though given the pseudo-classical dress of the three ®gures and the item in question (which bears a distinct resemblance to male genitalia), the drawing may be a visual comment on another action described in Book V, the castration of Saturn by his son Jupiter . . . and the creation of the goddess Venus.6

Driver's reading of the ink sketch is equivocal. Her ambivalence is rooted in the protean quality of the sack held in the outstretched right hand of the central ®gure. The illustration resists easy classi®cation and to solve its puzzle, Driver implies, the ambiguity needs to be resolved: money bag or male genitalia. But what about Thomas Gryssop's `ballok pursez'? The probate inventory, a document distinguished for its lexical exactness and grammatical simplicity, provides evidence for the fusion of the sexual and the commercial (the scrotal pouch and the money bag) in the purse, both the lexical unit and the material object. The controversial sack in the PML 689 ink sketch functions, I propose, as a cognate. That the sketch illustrates the castration of Saturn or the birth of Venus is improbable. Despite the pseudo-classical costume and (possibly) detached genitals, other prominent visual elements (in particular the female ®gure on the left and her relation to the man on the right, toward whom she reaches) ®nd no echo in Gower's account of these events (v.852±9). More likely, the sketch was intended as an illustration of avarice. In formal terms, the drawing depicts a moment of rupture. The richly-dressed central ®gure obtrudes on the peripheral couple (whose costumes invite comparison7) and forcibly separates them. Her outstretched arms form an oblique axis which divides the pair and breaks across the horizontal line of their extended reach, a breach which is underscored by the broken hand-clasp. All of the movement in the scene takes place along this oblique axis: the peripheral pair are propelled away from one another and the eye is drawn down to the purse. Directly below the drawing is printed the epigrammatic Latin verse which introduces Book V of the Confessio. Its opening lines read: `Obstat auaricia nature legibus, et que/ Largus amor poscit, striccius illa vetat' (`Avarice obstructs the laws of nature,/ Strictly denies what liberal Love demands').8 The import of these lines is immediately apparent. The 6

7

8

M. Driver, `Printing the Confessio Amantis: Caxton's Edition in Context', in Re-Visioning Gower, ed. R. F. Yeager (Asheville, 1998), pp. 269±303 (p. 272). The shared features include the square, ornamented necklines, slightly crenellated, close®tting sleeves, lightly demarcated pectorals and breasts, and loose-¯owing hair. The Latin Verses in the Confessio Amantis: An Annotated Translation, trans. S. Echard and C. Fanger, Medieval Texts and Studies 7 (East Lansing, 1991), p. 57.

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Avarice and the Economics of the Erotic in Gower doodler has deftly transformed the verse into a coherent and plausible narrative. Signi®cantly, it is the purse that makes the scene intelligible. It designates the central ®gure as a personi®cation of avarice and, by signalling her denial of largus amor, carries the weight of the narrative. According to Driver's criteria, the puzzle is solved. Yet, proving that the sack is a money bag does not resolve the ambiguity. The suggestive shape (the `distinct resemblance to male genitalia') remains and, I will argue, adds a crucial nuance to the visual argument. Although critics have castigated D. W. Robertson for assuming that the purse ineluctably signals avarice,9 together with the coin-®lled chest, the money bag is the standard iconographic shorthand for this vice. Representations of avarice abound in the visual culture of the later Middle Ages. The importance of the seven deadly sins in the iconography of the Last Judgement;10 their assumption of a key position in the catechetical programmes which followed in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council; and the elevation of avarice, during the so-called Commercial Revolution, to the status of principle deadly sin;11 all contribute to the prominence of the miser in the didactic (and decorative) programmes of the late medieval church.12 Yet, despite the persistence of the purse, the iconographic tradition is remarkably heterogeneous. My interest here is in one small part of that tradition, in a series of rather striking iconographic features that, represented sporadically and in different times and places, are interesting precisely because of their resilience. Although what follows is not comprehensive, it demonstrates that the genital purse which Avarice wields in PML 689 is an example, in miniature and in isolation, of a type of purse that is found elsewhere in the repertoire. The lavish display of genitalia, both male and female, in medieval monumental art shocks and titillates the viewer by turns. The most common explanation for the provocative carvings is that they contribute to the church's programme of didactic iconography. The impudent display of outsized, mutilated or otherwise distorted breasts and genitals provides Robertson writes of Chaucer's Franklin: `we see him riding along wearing a de®ant dagger and a bag of silk suggestive of avarice hanging from his white girdle': D. W. Robertson, `Chaucer's Franklin and his Tale' in his Essays in Medieval Culture (Princeton, 1980), pp. 273±90 (p. 279). 10 See J. Norman, Metamorphosis of an Allegory: The Iconography of the Psychomachia in Medieval Art (New York, 1988). 11 See L. K. Little, `Pride Goes Before Avarice: Social Change and the Vices in Latin Christendom', American Historical Review 76 (1971), 16±49; L. K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Pro®t Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, 1978). 12 A. Katzenellenbogen, Allegories of the Virtues and Vices in Medieval Art, trans. A. J. P. Crick, Studies of the Warburg Institute 10 (London, 1939) and M. Bloom®eld, The Seven Deadly Sins (Michigan, 1952) provide useful introductions to the intellectual and iconographic tradition of the medieval sins. Z. Swiechowski, Sculpture romane d'Auvergne (ClermontFerrand, 1973), offers a detailed analysis of the romanesque in one French deÂpartement. 9

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Nicola F. McDonald graphic evidence of the danger of sexual indulgence. Genital torment is not, however, reserved for the luxurious. The erogenous zones often ®gure as strategic compositional sites, but what is distinctive about the miser is that, as I demonstrate below, the contest for his (or her) genitals is absorbed into the iconographic programme. Avaritia and Luxuria are the vices most often distinguished for individual or elaborate iconographic treatment and, from the eleventh century onward, the two sinners are regularly found side by side.13 At Moissac, for instance, the left side of the porch (the side of the Antichrist) is decorated with larger-than-life sculptures of the tormented pair, surmounted by a narrative scene representing the death of fol dives (c. 1130).14 At the church of Sainte Croix in Bordeaux, the archivolts of the two blind side-porches (c. 1120) illustrate, no less than ®ve times each, the punishment of the miser and the lustful woman.15 At Melbourne in Derbyshire, the two capitals framing the south door (c. 1130±40) exhibit the paired ®gures of Avarice (a naked man, clutching a stirrup-like purse handle, twists energetically around the column) and Lust (a squatting man with splayed legs is entwined with luxuriant vegetation).16 In addition to the associative power of shared physical space, Avarice's distinctive iconographic features at times explicitly mimic those of Luxuria. At Lincoln, three panels of Bishop Alexander's great frieze (c. 1145) are reserved for the Torments of the Damned. On the left, Luxuria: a naked couple is separated by monsters who bite their genitals. On the right, Avaritia: a nude frontal ®gure, with a purse suspended from his neck, is harassed by two naked devils while snakes attack his hands and genitals.17 The identi®cation of lust with avarice, suggested by the coincidence of genital torment, is repeated in a weathered sculpture of a nude miser found in Bury St Edmunds (c. 1140): a purse hangs from his neck; two devils hold him; and snakes bite his genitals.18 The tendency for the two sins to share iconographical attributes and architectural space is, however, given its fullest (and most extraordinary) expression on a decorated chevet window (late twelfth-century) at Blesle (Auvergne) (Plate 2). A naked woman, sporting a snaking head piece, 13

14 15 16

17 18

Katzenellenbogen, Allegories, p. 58; Swiechowski, Sculpture romane, p. 190; and M. Schapiro, `From Mozarabic to Romanesque in Silos', in his Romanesque Art: Selected Papers (London, 1977), pp. 28±101 (pp. 36±8). M. Schapiro, The Sculpture at Moissac (New York, 1985), ®g. 121 and ®gs. 128±31 (details). Katzenellenbogen, Allegories, ®gs. 56 and 57. A. Weir and J. Jerman, Images of Lust: Sexual Carvings on Medieval Churches (London, 1986), ®gs. 29 and 30. See also J. A. Jerman, `Linguistics and Sculpture at Melbourne Church, Derbyshire', Derbyshire Miscellany (1981), 82±7. G. Zarnecki, Romanesque Lincoln: The Sculpture of the Cathedral (Lincoln, 1988), ®g. 90. Zarnecki, Romanesque Lincoln, ®g. 91. See also G. Zarnecki, `Romanesque Objects at Bury St Edmunds', Apollo 85 (1967), 407±13 (®g. 3). The innovative romanesque sculpture of south-western France is commonly cited as the origin of the iconography of the sins in Lincoln and Bury St Edmunds.

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Avarice and the Economics of the Erotic in Gower

Plate 2. Combined Avaritia and Luxuria capital (apse exterior), Blesle, Auvergne. (N. F. McDonald)

straddles an acanthus leaf. She is ¯anked by two crouching naked men; one wears a purse around his neck, the other wields an outsized ring.19 With a voluptuous embrace, the woman suckles an enormous toad and a serpent that issue from the mouths of her companions. This sculpture fuses the familiar attributes of the miser and the luxurious woman in a single arresting image. All three ®gures are redolent with erotic energy; the two misers, thoroughly sexualized, are full participants in the capital's bizarre orgiastic embrace. Although the Blesle sculpture is distinguished for its iconographic exuberance, it is remarkable not so much for its originality (it is not an aberration) as for the intensity of its expression. The iconography at Blesle offers the most complete articulation of the coincidence of two kinds of desire, one sexual and one ®nancial. The sexualized miser recurs with suf®cient frequency in medieval monumental art to suggest that he functions as an iconographic sub-type. It is as an attribute of this sub-type that I want to reconsider the scrotal money bag. At the small romanesque church in Mailhat (Auvergne), a miser (late twelfthcentury) (Plate 3), in accordance with standard iconography, shares the left portal with a luxurious, snake-suckling woman. The ®gures are simple and 19

The sexual signi®cance of the ring in French fabliaux, is discussed by J. Hines, The Fabliau in English (London, 1993), p. 23.

141

Nicola F. McDonald their attributes concise. The miser's purse, however, is distinctly genital (positioned on his groin and enhanced by his well articulated kneecaps) and he holds it with a gesture reminiscent of the megaphallic masturbator. The Mailhat miser is an enigmatic ®gure, but he is not an isolated one. An elbow rest in Norwich Cathedral (c. 1400) depicts Avarice as a bearded man, possibly a merchant, balancing a bag of money between his foreshortened legs (Plate 4). His posture, a full-splayed squat, mimics that of the familiar exhibitionist and the outsized purse invites comparison with the exhibitor's phallus. At Wiggenhall St Germans church in Norfolk, Avarice is included in a series of admonitory bench ends (c. 1400±1425). An angel points a cautionary ®nger at a merchant miser who is half consumed by a hell mouth (Plate 5). It is a scene of vigorous punishment not unlike those on the romanesque tympana. The miser sits inside the mouth, his legs straddled by a protruding tongue that attacks his genitals. One money bag is suspended immediately above the tongue while a further two, snatched from the monster's jaws, are held in the miser's outstretched left hand. The latter purses each contain a well de®ned, spherical treasure and are distinctly scrotal. Like the sculpture in Mailhat, the English carvings employ what Christian Bougoux has called the `grammar of the obscene' to depict the miser's depravity.20 On the Wiggenhall St Germans bench end, the purse functions as part of a larger scene, its genital shape reinforcing a narrative initiated by the monster's tongue. In both Mailhat and Norwich, however, the narrative is replaced by a single symbolic gesture made signi®cant by the purse's coincidence with the miser's genitals. In the iconography of the sexualized miser, the scrotal money bag functions as an identifying attribute. Limited neither to monumental art nor to the male anatomy, it achieves full attributional independence in a remarkable illumination in a French manuscript of the Roman de la Rose (c. 1460). On folio 3 of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 364 (Plate 6), Avarice, described by Guillaume de Lorris as a miserable woman, is seated on a wooden box. Her surcoat is raised; her legs are straddled; and a ballok purse, artfully shaded to accentuate its shape and volume, rests on her groin. Freed from its proper anatomical context, the scrotal purse is a trenchant iconographic motif. It transforms the indigent miser (the standard iconographic type found in Rose manuscripts) into a ®gure laden with sexual signi®cance. It provides thereby a visual nuance that accords with the romance's con¯ation of sacred and erotic registers21 and anticipates the elaborate genital metaphor (the pilgrim's staff and sack) with which the poem concludes. Martha Driver's uncertainty over the identity of the suggestively shaped 20

21

C. Bougoux, Petite grammaire de l'obsceÁne: eÂglises du Duche d'Aquitaine XIe/XIIe sieÁcle (Bordeaux, 1992). See S. Huot, The Romance of the Rose and its Medieval Readers: Interpretation, Reception, Manuscript Transmission (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 273±322.

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Plate 3. Avarice (left portal), Mailhat, Auvergne. (N. F. McDonald)

pouch arises from a perceived incompatibility between the ®gure of Avarice and the depiction of a man's genitals. Yet, as must be clear by now, there is in fact nothing incongruous about such a juxtaposition. The sexualized miser is a recognizable iconographic sub-type, replete with its own identifying attributes. The genital purse, by no means restricted to the male anatomy, has an established iconographic history. Its indeterminate character (in PML 689) may simply result from the technical weakness of an untrained doodler, yet its fusion (or perhaps confusion) of the commercial and the sexual is integral to its meaning. Indeed, as its privileged position suggests, the purse carries all of the nuance of the visual argument. Like Thomas Gryssop's `ballok pursez', there is something ludic about this money bag's protean shape. The Latin verses of the Confessio, distinguished by their compact allusiveness, are rife with sexual puns and Avarice's physical denial of largus 143

Nicola F. McDonald amor neatly captures the innuendo implied by the Latin.22 The purse's full resonance emerges, however, only in relation to the longer English text that it prefaces. Its signi®cance derives from the way in which it participates in, and contributes to, an elaborate dialogue between the economic and the erotic.

III The scrotal money pouch serves as an appropriate metonym for the libidinal economy, an economy which arises from the con¯ation of two worlds of desire, one sexual and one ®nancial. Book 5 of the Confessio Amantis, the book devoted to the sin of avarice, lacks a descriptive title, but two equally plausible alternatives spring to mind: `the economics of the libido' or `the sex life of money'. In Book 5, Gower constructs a discourse of desire that elides the difference between the consumption of goods (including coin) and the consumption of sex. When Christopher Ricks characterized the Confessio as a `metamorphosis in other words', he was referring to Gower's poetic dexterity.23 Gower's language is elastic, perfectly suited to his narrative(s) of transformation. The interchange between sex and commerce is a crucial feature of the book's verbal texture and the detail of its formulation undoubtedly merits closer (more Ricks-like) attention than I can offer here. For the moment, however, I am interested in the limits of Gower's elastic poetry, in the way in which his experiment with sex and money and their point of convergence pushes his poem beyond its breaking point. Book 5 is physically and intellectually at the very centre of the Confessio Amantis. It is two to three times longer than any other confessional book in the poem; it has a more ambitious and intricate structure; and it includes an extended account of idolatry. It con®rms the suspicion, formed by reading his earlier and more explicitly didactic works, the Miroir de l'Omme and the Vox Clamantis, that, for Gower, avarice was the preeminent vice of his day. Book 5 is also commonly cited as the point when the poem's internal logic starts to break down. In his account of idolatry, Genius is forced to denounce Venus (v.1382±1433), thereby revealing the inconsistency of his dual role as amorous counsellor and moral guide. Much recent scholarship has tried to elucidate the complex architectonics of Gower's attempt to fuse Christian and Venusian morality, and most readers are no longer content to dismiss (pace Macaulay) Genius's dilemma as simply `absurd'.24 Yet inconsistencies 22

23

24

For a discussion of Gower's sexual word-play see The Latin Verses, trans. Echard and Fanger, pp. xxix±xlvii. C. Ricks, `Metamorphosis in Other Words', in Gower's Confessio Amantis: Responses and Reassessments, ed. A. J. Minnis (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 5±24. G. C. Macaulay, `John Gower', in The Cambridge History of English Literature II: The End of the Middle Ages, ed. A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller (Cambridge, 1908), pp. 133±55 (p. 150).

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Avarice and the Economics of the Erotic in Gower

Plate 4. Avarice elbow rest, Norwich Cathedral. (N. F. McDonald)

remain (Gower is ®nally able to accord the divergent codes of amorous conduct only by removing Amans from Venus's court) and Book 5 does constitute an important narrative juncture. For reasons that have so far gone unnoticed, Book 5 simply does not work. The coincidence of sexual and commercial desire is treated in Book 5 in Gower's usual encyclopaedic fashion. The identi®cation of sex and money is both metaphoric and literal and it informs every twist and turn of the narrative and its accompanying moralization. From beginning to end, in both the narrative exempla and the frame tale (the confession as well as Amans's relationship with his lady), economic and erotic matters are regularly indistinguishable. Furthermore, the relationship between them is one of reciprocity. Two examples will illustrate my point. In the ®rst, a miser's lust for money is turned into a quasi-sexual relationship with his 145

Nicola F. McDonald beloved `tresor' (v.102). Amans, jealous of the miser, laments to his confessor: . . . fader, I you herde seie Hou thaverous hath yit som weie, Wherof he mai be glad; for he Mai whanne him list his tresor se, And grope and ®ele it al aboute. (v.99±103)

To achieve satisfaction, the miser behaves in explicitly sexual terms, as if he were a lover. In the second example, the equation works the other way; the love relationship is one determined by economic considerations. Amans fears that his relentless, but unsuccessful, pursuit of the lady is a poor investment: I wot the laste of my bargain Schal stonde upon so gret a lost, That I mai neveremor the cost Recovere in this world. . . . (v.4472±75)

He sharply condemns the lady (`Mi ladi mai noght ben excused' (v.4492) ) and concludes in the tone of an irate customer cheated of the merchandise for which he has properly paid: Be large weyhte and gret mesure Sche hath mi love, and I have noght Of that which I have diere boght, And with myn herte I have it paid; ... . . . lo, thus I fare As he that paith for his chaffare, And beith it diere, and yit hath non, So mot he nedes povere gon: Thus beie I diere and have no love. (v.4508±11 and 4521±5)

Gower's fusion of the two types of desire (sexual and commercial) is total. Yet, ultimately, it is from this poetic exuberance that the book's moral ®ssures emerge. The purpose of the Confessio Amantis is to teach Amans to eschew vice and to follow virtue. Genius's task is thus twofold: while exhorting the lover to renounce his avaricious inclinations, he needs to instruct him in the fundamentals of largesse (the vice's standard remedy). This lesson in virtue is absolutely crucial to the project of the Confessio, but here in Book 5 its articulation (requiring a deft negotiation of the richly metaphoric `ballok purse discourse') proves impossible. The remedy for ®nancial avarice, Genius makes clear, is straightforward. Arguing that social instability came only with the invention of coins (and with the attendant rising reverence for gold), he urges: 146

Avarice and the Economics of the Erotic in Gower

Plate 5. Avarice bench end, Wiggenhall St Germans, Norfolk. (N. F. McDonald) Let al such Avarice go, ... I bidde . . . thou . . . . . . hold largesce in his mesure; And if thou se a creature, Which thurgh poverte is falle in nede, Yif him som good, for this I rede To him that wol noght yiven here, What peine he schal have elleswhere. (v.354±62)

What happens, however, when the avarice is not ®nancial, but is part of the erotic equation? Genius is Amans's amorous counsellor; his instructions must accord with the lover's amorous behaviour. Genius concludes Book 5 with a short (204 line) disquisition on the virtue 147

Nicola F. McDonald of largesse, but he is reluctant to relate the virtue back to his code for proper amorous conduct. In this section his only teaching about love concerns neither avarice nor largesse, but prodigality. Prodigality is the vice at the opposite extreme to avarice (it is the sin of giving too much, in contrast to avarice's giving nothing at all), and it shares with avarice the opposed virtue of largesse. Genius warns that the prodigal lover is one who is `to large' (v.7771) of love, one who runs about wildly dispensing love to all and sundry, and one who thereby heedlessly wastes love. Here, as part of his discussion of prodigality, he slips in a short de®nition of proper amorous conduct: For love schal noght bere his pris Be reson, whanne it passeth on. (v.7782±3)

This simple statement, outlining the traditional moral view that love is virtuous only when it is directed toward a single individual, is never expressed in terms of largesse, the virtue that mediates the middle territory between the winners and the wasters. The injunction to love one, and one alone, comes out of the blue, rather like the odd excursus on virginity that intruded into the confessional narrative about 1,500 lines earlier. In the earlier passage, Genius follows the story of Calistona's rape with a series of exempla in praise of virginity; he is, however, quickly challenged by a rather perturbed, but theologically sound, Amans: Yee, fader, al this wel mai be, Bot if alle othre dede so, The world of men were sone go: And in the lawe a man mai ®nde, Hou god to man be weie of kinde Hath set the world to multeplie. (v.6418±23)

Amans's choice of words (`Hath set the world to multeplie') not only matches the Genesis 1. 28 injunction `Be fruitful, and multiply', but also ®ts neatly into the scheme of economic value which pervades Gower's treatment of avarice and largesse; elsewhere in Book 5, the verb `multiply' is used to signify abundant productivity and pro®table earning. Here Amans opposes some kind of sexual largesse (fruitful multiplication) to what he interprets as Genius's restrictive (avaricious) vision of virginity, one of Christianity's most lauded physical states. There is no parallel challenge to Genius's passing celebration of monogamy (a celebration which serves to counter not avarice but prodigality) but these two lines (v.7782±3), promoting a severely limited sexual engagement, in no way offer a de®nition of what constitutes sexual largesse. Genius never does de®ne sexual largesse; but the omission is not his own fault. Given the carefully constructed economy of love that dominates Book 5's discussion, and denunciation, of avarice, it is 148

Avarice and the Economics of the Erotic in Gower

Plate 6. Avarice, Roman de la Rose, fol. 3. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 364. (By permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford)

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Nicola F. McDonald virtually impossible to imagine any kind of sexual largesse that is compatible with Christian morality. To return, brie¯y, to the example of monumental art, I want to examine the iconographic attributes that distinguish largesse; the shorthand features used to identify the Christian virtue neatly underscore the nature of Genius's (and Gower's) dilemma. The prevalence of avarice in the didactic programmes of late-medieval churches (and related artistic media) is matched by the iconographic prominence of largesse. The medieval predilection for pairing the vices with their remedial virtues, a tradition derived ultimately from Prudentius's Psychomachia, has an extensive iconographic history; but the extant material is, in iconographic terms, remarkably homogeneous. Adolf Katzenellenbogen traces the sculptural models for the paired Avaritia and Largitas to two plinth reliefs in the left side-porch of Sens cathedral (late twelfth-century).25 The virtue is, conventionally, hieratic, frontally viewed and seated; her legs are straddled, her stomach is voluptuously curved and her extended arms invite the onlooker to partake of her open coffers. The opposition drawn between the vice and virtue (both women), in terms of their demeanour, their physical stance, and the activity in which they are each engaged is crucial. With the weight of her body, Avarice presses down the lid of a treasure chest. Her contorted ®gure and grasping hands contrast sharply with the upright, regal Largesse who extends herself in a gesture of complete bene®cence. As Emile MaÃle describes the in¯uential model of Largitas, she is `a queen who lays bare all her treasures'.26 The antithesis to avarice is generous expenditure. By distributing treasure, or other hoarded goods, the miser can gain ready absolution. The iconography of largesse makes perfect ®nancial sense, but when the ®gure is read erotically, her identifying attributes take on a meaning that challenges (even contradicts) conventional Christian teaching. Forced to negotiate the boundary between economic and erotic discourses, Genius is, poetically, incapable of fusing Christian and Venusian morality. To return to the poem, I want now to look more closely at the way in which Genius explores (or tries to explore) erotic largesse. In most instances in the Confessio Amantis, the reader, like Amans, is forced to deduce what constitutes virtuous behaviour by reading backwards through the exemplary narratives of what constitutes vice. Often, it is only by learning what he must not do that Amans is given an idea of what he should do. For the purpose of this analysis, I will focus my attention on Amans's relationship with the lady, the woman whom he relentlessly pursues and whom he accuses, at times, of inexcusably avaricious behaviour. The lady is repeatedly 25

26

Katzenellenbogen, Allegories, p. 77. M. Aubert, French Sculpture at the Beginning of the Gothic Period, 1140±1225 (Florence, 1931), pl. 4, no. 2; L. BeÂgule, La CatheÂdral de Sens (Lyons, 1929), ®gs. 42 and 43. E. MaÃle, The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century, trans. D. Nussey (New York, 1958; ®rst published in French, 1913), p. 117 n. 2.

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Avarice and the Economics of the Erotic in Gower depicted as Amans's treasure, a beloved, shining object that is explicitly related to the bags of gold and chests of gilded goods so carefully hoarded by the misers. The unity of the two types of treasured goods is made explicit in the continuation of a passage discussed above. Amans unfavourably compares his own sexual satisfaction with that of the groping miser: . . . thaverous hath yit som weie, Wherof he mai be glad; for he Mai whanne him list his tresor se, And grope and ®ele it al aboute, Bot I fulofte am schet theroute, Ther as my worthi tresor is. (v.100±5)

Throughout Book 5, women and their worth are assessed in explicitly ®nancial terms. Amans's lady is the highly prized object that he covets above all other material goods (`For mihte I gete such a thing,/ I hadde a tresor for a king' (v.91±2) ). She is the one possession for which he openly acknowledges his avaricious designs: If I that tresor mihte gete, ... If I that swete lusti wif Mihte ones welden at my wille, For evere I wolde hire holde stille: And in this wise, taketh kepe, If I hire hadde, I wolde hire kepe, And yit no friday wolde I faste, Thogh I hire kepte and hielde faste.

(v.69 and 76±82)

Amans's deep-seated desire to hold the lady fast, to wield her according to his own will, is one of the more unpleasant, even disturbing, aspects of the lover's character. It is also one aspect of his myopic pursuit that is explicitly condemned by Genius as sinful, avaricious behaviour. Although, at the close of Book 5, Genius, in accordance with Christian morality, de®nes virtuous love as single and monogamous, here, to counter Amans's avaricious tendencies, he implicitly urges a freer and more liberal approach to amorous attachments. Following the passage just quoted (in which Amans admits to his avaricious tendencies), Genius chastises the lover and, returning to the safety of the ®nancial metaphor, condemns the sel®sh miser: Bot Avarice natheles, If he mai geten his encress Of gold, that wole he serve and kepe, For he takth of noght elles kepe, Bot forto ®lle his bagges large; And al is to him bot a charge, For he ne parteth noght withal,

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Nicola F. McDonald Bot kepth it, as a servant schal: And thus, . . . . . . withoute tresorie He is, for man is noght amended With gold, bot if it be despended To mannes us. (v.125±37)

Genius leaves his analogy here. In response to Amans's admission of avaricious behaviour, Genius advocates ®nancial largesse. Avarice's purse must needs be opened and `despended/ To mannes us' (v.136±7). Like the ®gure on the Sens plinth, Largesse must open her ®sts, extend her arms and freely distribute everything that Avarice has hoarded. Amans's avarice is, however, sexual. The logic of the confessional narrative implies that the lover is to deduce, from the ®nancial analogy, the appropriate amorous conduct. The implications are obvious. Genius's injunction, when re-applied to the sin of love-avarice, teaches that Amans's treasure, his beloved lady, should be freely `despended/ To mannes us'. What here constitutes Venus's erotic morality (some kind of `free love') is wholly at odds with any conceivable type of Christian morality. The only way that Genius can prevent his narrative from degenerating into a state of total moral chaos is by hiding behind a veil of metaphor and by trusting that Amans will not pursue his confessor's logic as relentlessly as he does his beloved lady. This is not the only instance in Book 5 in which, if his argument is pursued to its logical conclusion, Genius provides a hint of what, in `Venus bokes', constitutes proper sexual largesse. I will offer one other example of the way in which Christian and erotic codes of conduct here prove to be incompatible. The sinful avarice discussed above concerned the behaviour of Amans; he was too miserly in his insistence on reserving his treasure for his use alone. My second example will explore Amans's criticism of the lady as a miser herself, a woman who is sel®shly unwilling to share her carefully hoarded treasures. While the lady is Amans's treasure, she, in the company of other women, is also endowed with a treasure of her own: her maidenhead. Amans does not himself de®ne his lady's maidenhead as her treasure; it is left to his confessor to identify what, precisely, constitutes the woman's most valuable possession. In the tale of Neptune and Cornix, Genius condemns Neptune for robbing Cornix of her `lusti tresor'. Neptune is intent on taking from her `som pilage,/ Noght of the broches ne the Ringes,/ Bot of some othre smale thinges' (v.6172±4). The rape commences: And hire in bothe his armes hente, And putte his hond toward the cofre, Wher forto robbe he made a profre, That lusti tresor forto stele, Which passeth othre goodes fele And cleped is the maidenhede. (v.6176±81)

152

Avarice and the Economics of the Erotic in Gower That a woman's maidenhead has a speci®c ®nancial value (that it is a monetarily quanti®able treasure) is made clear a little later on in Genius's account of Agamemnon's abduction and rape of a Greek maiden, Criseide, daughter of a certain Crisis. Agamemnon steals Criseide from Phebus's temple and takes `Of thing which was most precious' (v.6441). In order to appease the angry god, he, and some of his compatriots, are later required to return the abducted girl and pay her compensation: And therupon mercy thei soghte Toward the god in sondri wise With preiere and with sacri®se[.] The Maide . . . hom ayein thei sende, And yive hire good ynouh to spende For evere whil sche scholde live: And thus the Senne was foryive. (v.6468±74)

An income for life is given as the ®nancial equivalent of the `smale thinges' each woman keeps secure in her personal `cofre'. In a passage heavily indebted to the Roman de la Rose, Amans laments that his lady and her treasure are too well protected by a ®gure called `Danger': . . . Danger is his rihte name; Which under lock and under keie, That noman mai it stele aweie, Hath al the Tresor underfonge That unto love mai belonge. (v.6620±4).

Amans hopes to use stealth to get past Danger and steal some of the lady's treasure, but this his confessor condemns. Theft, quite simply, is wrong. But the lady too, according to Amans, is wrong. In refusing to distribute her treasure (here valued at a lifetime's comfortable income), to share it freely with those who are needy and poor (as, so far as concerns love, Amans surely is), the lady behaves like the miser; she is avaricious. About this, the confessor says nothing. The logic of love's economy, the logic of Book 5, suggests that Amans is right; his lady is, unforgivably, avaricious. But to suggest that she act in accordance with the teachings of largesse, that, as Emile MaÃle so succinctly puts it, she `lay bare all her treasures', is to suggest a course of action so wholly counter to Christian teaching that it is virtually unimaginable. Amans hints; the confessor ignores the hint; and the narrative moves on to safer ground. When Genius turns, at the end of Book 5, to expound the virtues of largesse, to outline the course of action necessary to counter the vice of avarice, he makes an important omission. He declines to talk about love. Although, over the last seven and a half thousand lines, he has provided a detailed explanation of what constitutes both sexual and ®nancial avarice, in conclusion he is loath to offer anything more than a short account of ®nancial 153

Nicola F. McDonald largesse. An illumination in MS Douce 364 (the manuscript of the Roman de la Rose, discussed above, in which Avarice is depicted as a sexualized miser) makes explicit the distinguishing features of sexual largesse (Plate 7). Here the economic has been totally subsumed in the erotic. A fashionably dressed woman, positioned directly in front of a rich, canopied bed and labelled `largese', reaches out for the lover's hand. The gesture is reminiscent of that of the pseudo-classical couple in the Caxton Gower, but this time the grasp is consummated.27 Gower's con¯ation of sexual and commercial desire provides the foundation for, and logically demands, a code of sexual largesse; yet the poet's simultaneous adherence to the dictates of Christian morality occludes its articulation. In the Confessio, sexual largesse remains hidden and unexplored and it is never offered as a viable alternative to the life of sexual avarice that Venus's priest condemns. In Christian terms, terms which Genius invokes in support of his code of moral conduct, only monogamy and virginity constitute virtuous sexual conduct. In terms of the `economy of love', both states (monogamy and virginity), by insisting that love's treasure be either hoarded or spent sparingly, are necessarily avaricious. What is for the Christian a virtue is for Venus's disciples a vice. And what for Venus's disciples constitutes virtue, the free and generous expenditure of the lady's treasures, is for the Christian a damnable vice.

IV Gower's exploration of desire as simultaneously sexual and economic is largely con®ned to Book 5, but the metaphor of `lusti tresor' also contributes to the poem's resolution. Venus dismisses Amans from her court on account of his old age and impotence. Her language is distinguished by a comic vigour that leaves the lover no room for doubt.28 With brisk ef®ciency, she outlines why `loves lust and lokes hore/ In chambre acorden neveremore' (viii.2403±4): Min herte wolde and I ne may Is noght beloved nou adayes; Er thou make eny suche assaies To love, and faile upon the fet, 27

28

In Chaucer's `Shipman's Tale' a similar de®nition of sexual largesse is offered. The cuckolded merchant counsels his wife: `ne be namoore so large./ Keep bet thy good': Canterbury Tales vii.431±2, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. Benson (Oxford, 1987). My insistence on Venus's harsh vigour runs counter to prevailing critical opinion. John Burrows, for instance, argues that Venus is `gentle and understanding' and he lauds `her quite tactful reference to his [Amans's] probable impotence': J. Burrows, `The Portrayal of Amans in Confessio Amantis', in Gower's Confessio Amantis, ed. Minnis, pp. 5±24 (p. 18). See also J. Dean, `Gather Ye Rosebuds: Gower's Comic Reply to Jean de Meun', in John Gower: Recent Readings, ed. R. F. Yeager (Kalamazoo, 1989), pp. 21±37.

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Avarice and the Economics of the Erotic in Gower

Plate 7. Largesse, Roman de la Rose, fol. 11. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 364. (By permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford)

155

Nicola F. McDonald Betre is to make a beau retret; For thogh thou myhtest love atteigne, Yit were it bot an ydel peine, Whan thou art noght suf®cant To holde love his covenant. Forthi tak hom thin herte ayein, That thou travaile noght in vein, ... I wot and have it wel conceived, Hou that thi will is good ynowh; Bot mor behoveth to the plowh, Wherof the lacketh, as I trowe: So sitte it wel that thou beknowe Thi ®eble astat, er thou beginne Thing wher thou miht non ende winne. What bargain scholde a man assaie, Whan that him lacketh forto paie? Mi Sone, if thou be wel bethoght, This toucheth thee; foryet it noght: The thing is torned into was; That which was whilom grene gras, Is welked hey at time now. Forthi mi conseil is that thou Remembre wel hou thou art old. (viii.2412±39)

Amans's impotence, the natural sexual devaluation that accompanies old age and that plays its part in the popular medieval senex amans jokes, is here the unnameable that Venus nevertheless manages to allude to no less than nine times in an impressive variety of poetic circumlocutions. Ploughing and harvesting, labour and ®nance are among the more popular medieval metaphors for sexual activity (especially common in the fabliau) and here Venus uses them all (and more). Venus's `meticulous indecorum'29 underscores Amans's unsuitability for sexual love and forces the reader to reconsider earlier assumptions about the lover and his relationship with the lady. `What bargain sholde a man assaie,/ Whan that him laketh forto paie?' (viii.2432±3): the ®nancial metaphor of Book 5 here comes to fruition. To return to the little drawing in the Caxton Gower, the drawing in which an authoritative woman repulses the lover while another woman slips out of his grasp and recedes from sight, it can perhaps be reread: the lover `laketh forto paie' (viii.2433), the bejewelled woman holds his purse (the suggestively shaped pouch which contains his treasure), and the `bargain' which he attempts to `assaie' is once and for all beyond his reach.

29

Ricks, `Metamorphosis', p. 30.

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9 `Treasure in Earthen Vessels': Jewellery and Plate in Late Medieval Hoards John Cherry

It's hid in mighty particular places, Huck ± sometimes on Islands, sometimes in rotten chests under the end of a limb of an old dead tree, just where the shadow falls at midnight; but mostly under the ¯oor in ha'nted houses.1

The romance and the mystery of the hiding of treasure is well expressed in these comments from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain written in 1885. On 24 September 1997, the concept of treasure trove in England and Wales was changed and widely expanded. Until then treasure trove only included those objects of gold and silver which had been hidden with the intention of recovery (animus revertendi in the language of the lawyers). The new de®nition of treasure adopted from that date expanded this to include all objects of gold and silver, even single ®nds, more than 300 years old, however they had been deposited.2 The establishment of the intention to recover was always dif®cult to prove, since it was reasonably said that it could not be known whether such an intention really existed, especially for many prehistoric ®nds. It is to be hoped that the change in the law will not distract attention away from considering the intention of the person or persons who were responsible for the hiding of hoards. Those intentions for the hiding of treasure have always fascinated people. This article will review some of the recent studies of post-medieval hoards for which there is some documentary evidence, and will look at some particular issues and evidence of hoarding in the later Middle Ages, and ®nally consider what evidence can be provided by the containers of the hoards.

RECENT TREASURE HOARDS

Two cases where considerable documentary evidence is preserved for the nature of the process of the hiding of the treasure have been drawn to our 1 2

M. Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (London, 1931), ch. 25, p. 200. See L. Webster, in this volume, p. 49.

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John Cherry attention by John Kent and Kenneth Painter, and it is worth rehearsing the main points of their studies to set the context for this discussion. The ®rst case, which was drawn to our attention by Kenneth Painter, dates to 1945, when, at the end of the Second World War, the Russian armies rushed towards Berlin.3 The Russians, seventy kilometres north-east of the city, were poised to overrun the estate of the Lynar-Redern family and the sky was lit up by their artillery. The young Count Alexander zu LynarRedern and his mother were preparing to ¯ee their castle at Gorlsdorf with thirty of their estate workers using a tractor and two trailers. There was no room for their possessions, and so the count decided to hide the best silver and porcelain. This was packed into thirteen wooden crates. After driving four kilometres into the forest, two large holes were dug at different distances from the east side of a ride that was well marked with boundary stones. They lowered the crates with the silver into one and the porcelain into the other. The count determined to recover the treasure and so drew a map based on the distances from the marker stones. He hoped that he might be able to return quickly to the scene to recover it. However, he had to wait until 1995 to see if the treasure was still there. In that year, with the help of the map that he had drawn, he found the two hoards within twenty minutes. The material was subsequently sold at Sotheby's in 1996. The story is particularly interesting to the student of hoards for a number of reasons. First, the hoard was divided into the silver and the porcelain. There were no coins. The count and his mother took portable valuables, such as old master drawings and gold jewellery, with them. The family did not depart until ®ve days after the hiding of the treasure. Secondly, one of the main purposes of hiding the hoard was not ®nancial, but to preserve something of the family's heirlooms. It is clear that most of the wealth of the Redern family was in its landed estates. The silver was mainly the service commissioned from the Parisian silversmith, Odiot, by an ancestor of the count to celebrate his marriage in 1834. Thirdly, the hoard provides interesting evidence of how the hoard might have been misdated from the archaeological evidence alone. If all the newspapers in which the material had been wrapped had perished, the date of the deposition of the porcelain would have been judged to have been around 1900. This would have been based on the date of the latest piece of porcelain in the hoard. On the other hand the latest date of manufacture for a piece of the silver was 1940, which would have led to a different, rather more accurate, estimate of the date of the hoard, but one which still could have led to its attribution to the wrong set of circumstances. The second hoard, which has been regularly cited in numismatic literature, 3

K. S. Painter and E. KuÈnzl, `Two Documented Hoards of Treasure', Antiquaries Journal 77 (1997), 291±326. I am particularly grateful to Kenneth Painter for lending me a copy of his article before it was published and for discussing the problems with me.

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Jewellery and Plate in Late Medieval Hoards particularly by John Kent, is that hidden at the order of Samuel Pepys in 1667, and which is faithfully recorded in his diaries. In June the Dutch ¯eet broke through the chain at Chatham and bore down on the deserted English warships in the river, destroying many of them. On 12 June Pepys was alarmed not only for himself and his money but also for his position. In particular, as a Commissioner for the Admiralty, he clearly thought that some of the blame for the event might rest on him. He therefore resolved to send away his gold coin to his family estate at Brampton in Huntingdonshire. The following day, he sent off his wife and father with £1,300 worth of gold in their night bag. He later sent Richard Gibson, a servant, with another 1,000 gold pieces. On 15 June, Richard returned to say that all was well with the journey of the wife and father. He went on to say that it was not so `with himself who (which I was afeard of and must be wiser another time) had one of his bags broke through his breeches. And some pieces dropt out (not many he thinks but two for he light and took them up), and went back but so could ®nd no more.'4 On 19 June, Pepys was summoned to a meeting of the council and was relieved to ®nd that he was not under investigation for the naval disasters. However, before he went to the meeting, he took care to give his servant his closet key and directions where to ®nd `500 pound and more in silver and gold, and my tallies, to remove in case of any misfortune to me'.5 By October in the same year, Pepys judged that the time had come to recover the gold and went up to Brampton to bring it back to London. Pepys went out at night to dig up the gold. At ®rst it could not be found, but eventually the iron headpieces (helmets) in which it had been hidden were found. He records in his diaries that `the earth was got among the gold and wet, so that the bags were all rotten'. He goes on `and that at last I was forced to take up the headpieces, dirt and all, and as many of the scattered pieces as I could with the dirt to discern them by candle light'. He then washed the coins and found that they were a hundred pieces short. He then went out about midnight and `there by candlelight did make shift to gather forty-®ve pieces more'. Pepys's account must be read in the original to gain the ¯avour of desperation and worry that accompanied this recovery of the treasure, which was very unlike the ease with which the Gorlsdorf hoard was recovered.6 What conclusions can be drawn from these two hoards? It is interesting that here, in contrast to Gorlsdorf, the choice of location was far from any immediate threat. Brampton was clearly determined by the possession of their country estate. It was seventy miles north of London, and the implication for the study of the burial of hoards is that the geographical signi®cance 4

5 6

J. P. C. Kent, `Interpreting Coin Finds', in Coins and the Archaeologist, ed. J. Casey and R. Reese, 2nd edn (London, 1988), pp. 201±17 (esp. pp. 205±6); The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A New and Complete Transcription, ed. R. Latham and W. Matthews, 11 vols. (London, 1970± 83), VIII, 273. Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Latham and Matthews, VIII, 279. Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Latham and Matthews, VIII, 471±5.

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John Cherry of the exact place of burial may not be ascertainable or may be very complex. One may draw the conclusion that the answer may not be obvious ± that the hoard may not be buried where the trouble was at its most intense, or that there may be, as there was in the case with Pepys, a distant or related connection with the place where the hoard was found. Secondly, the hoard was purely in gold coin, and the silver coin was set aside because it was less valuable and the silver plate because it was too bulky. Pepys deliberately selected the portable part of his wealth, as he did before the council meeting. It may be that coin hoards that are composed solely of gold coin may represent either one part of a multiple hoard, or a hoard selected for its portable nature. Thirdly, the coins were carried in bags, and, fourthly, when a treasure is found it is not always complete. In the end, Pepys was twenty or thirty coins short but he did not know whether these were lost by Gibson or whether they were still in the garden. The cynical may wonder whether Gibson was being entirely honest. This account of Pepys and his treasure may be compared with an actual seventeenth-century treasure. In 1827 the so-called `Armada' service was found in a potato barn in a small Devonshire village, some four miles east of Radford, the house of the Harris family. This silver service consisted of thirtyone dishes, all of which were engraved with the arms of Sir Christopher Harris of Radford. The last hallmarked date is 1601/2. Looking simply at the contents of the hoard, it would appear to have been buried shortly after 1602. However the occasion and time that appears most likely for the burial of the hoard is 1645. John Harris, son of Sir Christopher, was a Royalist and in 1645 the Parliamentarian forces sallied forth from Plymouth and removed the Royalists from some of their positions overlooking the harbour. This is the most likely date for the plate to have been taken from the house and secreted some way away. It is, however, worth noting that this is forty years after the last dated object. The total weight of the surviving plates is 495 ounces or some thirty pounds and this may perhaps have limited the distance that it was taken. Both this and the Gorlsdorf porcelain show the limitations of hoards solely composed of objects compared with coinhoards where the often more precise dating of the coins and the understanding of how the hoard ends can throw greater light on the actual date of deposition.7 So what do these cases tell us about the problems of interpreting ®nds in the Middle Ages? First it is best to judge each hoard on its individual circumstances of burial and content. Hoards of plate alone may be less easy to date precisely than hoards with coins. Secondly one should be wary of dating the hoard by the date of the last object. And thirdly there is the factor of portability. Distance and weight are going to affect the place of deposition. 7

D. Thornton and M. Cowell, `The Armada Service: A Set of Late Tudor Dining Silver', Antiquaries Journal 76 (1996), 153±80. The service was acquired by the British Museum in 1992.

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Jewellery and Plate in Late Medieval Hoards Fourthly the nature of the containers may have something to tell us. The Gorlsdorf burial was effectively planned, and the containers were selected in good time. The successful recovery of this material hidden in wooden chests might lead one to suppose that chests would have been the most usual containers for hoards. Pepys, however, used helmets which combined with the poor quality of the cloth lining gave him a great deal of trouble. The `Armada' hoard is not recorded as having any container at all. We will return to the subject of containers later, but ®rst we should consider some of the particular reasons given for hiding late medieval hoards in England and Europe.

THE INTERPRETATION OF LATE MEDIEVAL HOARDS

If we now look back at late medieval hoards, there are a number of such hoards where major political events, rather than local or family disputes, have been seen as determining the reasons for their concealment. Some have been directly associated with war. Of these I will take as examples one from the early fourteenth century, two from the reign of Richard II, and three, of which one is known only from historical evidence, from the period of the Wars of the Roses. One of the clearest examples of a securely dated military hoard in England is the Tutbury, Derbyshire, hoard of 1321±2. This, the largest hoard of coins in the Middle Ages in England, was found in 1831 near the bridge across the river Dove at Tutbury in Derbyshire. Some 20,000 coins were found which appear to have been deposited between 1321 and 1329. This is substantial and heavy. There seems little doubt that it was part of the war resources of Thomas, earl of Lancaster (died 1322), who was in revolt against the king, Edward II. Thomas had marched out of Tutbury to Burton-on-Trent to hold a bridge against the royal forces. The king out¯anked him and William le Packington, the chronicler, says that the earl left behind him at Burton `all his vittels and other things' as he ¯ed to Boroughbridge where he was defeated. No container is mentioned in the accounts of the hoard but there must have been one. Apart from coins, the hoard is said to have contained a gold ring and a leaden pilgrim sign of Thomas aÁ Becket, which provides valuable evidence for dating of the sign before 1322 (Plate 1).8 In the later fourteenth century the reign of Richard II, which has always attracted its share of romantic appeal, has provided an opportunity for speculation on the relationship of hoarding to politics. Of the Beveridge 8

The best recent account of this is H. Tait, `Pilgrim-Signs and Thomas, Earl of Lancaster', British Museum Quarterly 20 (1955±56), 39±47. The earliest account of it is E. Hawkins, `Remarks upon the Coins Lately Discovered in the Bed of the River Dove, Near Tutbury, Staffordshire', Archaeologia 24 (1832), 148±67. See also the account in the Gentlemen's Magazine 101 (1831), 546.

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Plate 1. The leaden badge of St Thomas aÁ Becket found with the Tutbury hoard. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Trustees of the British Museum)

Farm, Westbury, hoard found in 1877, which ended with gold nobles of Richard, it was said, `It may yet be discovered to whom the nobles belonged about 1399 AD; whether it was hidden by a thief or by an honest man in fear of thieves, or of marauders, in troublous times such as attended the deposition of Richard.' The discovery of the Bredgar, Kent, hoard in 1940, which also ended in Richard's reign, provoked a different interpretation. It was thought that this was too late to be linked with the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 and more likely to be concerned with the Appellants in 1388 ± if it were not related to the troubles leading to Richard's death. Finally the Pinchbeck, Lincolnshire, hoard ended with the same coin issues as Bredgar and it has been suggested that this may re¯ect the conditions of 1388 when the Appellants took control of the government. The comments on the Beveridge Farm hoard were made in 1877 and it is fair to say that understanding of the chronology of the coin issues of the reign of Richard II by numismatists has considerably improved since that date. The concentration of three hoards in the later part of the reign is a small but perceptible trend. It is unlikely that they were deposited after the end of the reign of Richard, since the later gold coins of Richard are present in all three hoards but none of the hoards have the gold coins of Henry IV. Although the chronological series of the later 162

Jewellery and Plate in Late Medieval Hoards issues of Richard's coins is clear, the precise dates to be put on the issues with Lettering II and III are not known. Other numismatic factors such as the size of the hoards, the question of whether they end weakly or strongly must also be considered, and in the light of these it seems likely that all these three hoards end in the later years of the reign of Richard II. Exactly which political event in those years they are to be associated with cannot be at present determined, in the way in which the documentary evidence allows us to associate the Tutbury hoard with 1322. Nevertheless the coins here provide a stronger case for dating than, for instance, in the `Armada' hoard. One only wishes that the silver plate had been accompanied by coins.9 A much more precise dating is possible in the case of the hoard found at Fishpool, in Nottinghamshire, in 1966. It was the largest hoard of medieval gold coins from England, consisting of 1,237 gold nobles which would have had a value at the time of burial of about £400. Some 13% of the coin was of Burgundian origin and struck shortly before 1464. The coin series ends quite strongly, and John Kent commented on the strength of the ending in his article on `Interpreting coin ®nds'. The coins enabled its deposition to be precisely dated to the early part of the year 1464 just before or just after the Battle of Hexham in Northumberland, which was a Yorkist victory in the Wars of the Roses. The jewellery in this hoard represents only about 1% of the total value of the hoard and so ®nancially it was not a particularly important element. No evidence of a container was reported in the accounts of the ®nding of the hoard although the presence of such a large number of coins indicates that one must have existed. The jewellery has been described in detail elsewhere. In the hoard there were four rings, of which one was a signet ring with the following device on the bezel. It shows a hawk's lure, with the wings bound with cords, above which is the letter t, a ¯eur-de-lis on each side, and ¯owers on each side of the lure (Plate 2). This device has not been identi®ed. Whether it is the device of the person who deposited the hoard will never be known. The presence of the latest issues of the coins of Edward IV suggests that it may not have been far removed from the royal treasury. It seems likely that the only people who could afford such a sum were either the richest of merchants or a prominent member of one of the opposing factions in the Wars of the Roses.10 9

10

For this see B. Cook, `The Pinchbeck, Lincs., Treasure Trove', Numismatic Chronicle 151 (1991), 183±97. This hoard ends in Richard II's reign and may support the idea that the Bredgar hoard may re¯ect the conditions of 1388. See also D. F. Allen and C. A. Whitton, `The Bredgar Find: With Notes on the Gold Nobles of Richard II', Numismatic Chronicle 6th s. 7 (1947), 161±70 (esp. p. 165). I am grateful to Marion Archibald for advice on the coinage. J. Cherry, `The Medieval Jewellery from the Fishpool, Nottinghamshire, Hoard', Archaeologia 104 (1973), 307±21. There is another hoard deposited at the same time, c. 1465, in eastern England, in Stamford, Lincolnshire: see J. D. A. Thompson, Inventory of British Coin Hoards AD 600±1100 (London, 1956), no. 340; Kent, `Interpreting Coin Finds'.

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Plate 2. The signet ring found with the Fishpool hoard. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Trustees of the British Museum)

The Fishpool hoard has a curious parallel with the story of the death of one of the Lancastrian leaders at that time. William Tailboys of Kyme in Lincolnshire has been cited as a good example of the lawless and wealthy country gentleman of the ®fteenth century. He was a determined opponent of Lord Cromwell in Lincolnshire and maintained a crew of what one chronicler describes as `slaughter laddes' to pursue his vendettas. Tailboys was, however, protected at the court of Henry VI by Lord Beaumont and the earl of Suffolk. But left without support after the fall of Suffolk in 1449, he tried to ingratiate himself with the Yorkists. By 1460±64 he was, as a gambler's last throw, desperately trying to secure Lancastrian support. Present at St Albans and Towton, he remained a prominent Lancastrian 164

Jewellery and Plate in Late Medieval Hoards leader in the north until he was captured after the Battle of Hexham in hiding in a mine near Newcastle in possession of a large part of the Lancastrian funds: charitably we may suppose that he was going to disburse them in the Lancastrian interest. He was at once executed.11 Unlike the Fishpool hoard, the Thame hoard, deposited a few years earlier (1457±60), is a mixed hoard of silver coins and ®ve gold rings, initially thought to be ecclesiastical. Joan Evans suggested that it was buried in the 1540s and that the very ®ne ring included in it was the property of Robert King, the last abbot of Thame. It is now thought more likely that the Thame hoard is roughly contemporary with the Fishpool hoard. The rings here are of exceptional quality, and if the hoard is complete, it looks as if it was someone's rings with their ready cash rather than a hoard to ®nance military operations as one would interpret the Fishpool hoard.12 The concealment of hoards at a time of military activity is easy to understand. There is also in the Middle Ages an example of concealment which owes its origin to social and racial division.

JEWS AND THE BLACK DEATH

It is dif®cult to be precise about the exact circumstances of the hiding of the hoards in the reign of Richard II. However, if we look at the history of hoarding on the continent in the mid-fourteenth century there is one cause of hoarding that stands out in contrast to its absence in England. This cause, entirely lacking in English hoards, is the hatred of the Jews. There are some hoards that can be convincingly attributed to this cause at the time of the Black Death in 1348±49. This particular aspect of the Black Death did not affect England, since the Jews had been expelled by Edward I. In many parts of Europe the plague was blamed on the Jews, who were thought to have poisoned the water supplies. This fear ®rst appeared at Toledo in Spain and spread during 1348 and 1349 towards Germany where it produced dreadful scenes of the killing of Jews. At Strasbourg 299 Jews were burnt alive. Jews in Basle were herded into a wooden shed on an island in the Rhine and burnt alive. The Landgrave Frederick of Meissen was so annoyed that not all Jews 11

12

R. Virgoe, `William Tailboys and Lord Cromwell: Crime and Politics in Lancastrian England', Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 55 (1973), 459±82; The Historical Collections of a Citizen of London in the Fifteenth Century, ed. J. Gairdner, Camden Society n.s. 17 (London, 1876), pp. 219±26. Another late medieval hoard is the Holbrook, Suffolk, hoard which was found with coins and probably deposited before 1490. It is interesting in that it is all silver and includes old brooches: see J. Newman, `A Late Medieval Jewellery and Coin Hoard from Holbrook', Proceedings of Suffolk Institute of Archaeology 38 (1994), 193±5. J. Evans, `A Hoard of Gold Rings and Silver Groats Found Near Thame, Oxfordshire', Antiquaries Journal 21 (1941), 197±202; Cherry, `Medieval Jewellery from the Fishpool Hoard', pp. 320±1.

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John Cherry had been exterminated that he ordered the town council to burn all Jews immediately.13 There are at least four hoards with objects which can be linked to the fate of the Jews, all of which occur in Germany or eastern Europe. The ®rst is the Colmar hoard, discovered in 1863, now split between the Cluny Museum in Paris and the Museum in Colmar. The coins in this hoard enable the date of deposition to be ®xed around 1349, it was found in an area known to have been the Jewish quarter, near the site of a synagogue, and to con®rm this there is in the hoard a Jewish marriage ring which has the Jewish formula Mazel Tou (`good luck'). This formula is in six characters against the enamelled background of the six faces of the pyramidal bezel. The same inscription occurs on a ring found in the `Weissenfels' treasure found in 1826. This was buried after 1310 and before the middle of the fourteenth century.14 The composition and coin evidence of the Munster Stadtweinhaus hoard is very similar to the Colmar hoard but it lacks any speci®cally Jewish objects. It was found near a synagogue, and the year of the deposition, 1348, known from the coins, suggests that it was buried during the persecution of the Jews. It may have been the possession of a Jewish moneylender.15 The most impressive witness to this aspect of history is the treasure found in 1988 in a pot at Sroda Slaska in Poland. It included two pairs of gold pendants, possibly to be interpreted as ear ornaments, a gold bracelet, a gold female crown with eagles, a large Italian thirteenth-century brooch set with an eagle cameo, two rings, and 3,924 silver and thirty-nine gold coins. It was contained in a vessel, but was not discovered until the material had been moved to a land®ll site. The coins suggest that it was hidden in the midfourteenth century. The gold ornaments may have belonged to Emperor Charles IV (1346±78) and may have been given in pawn to the Sroda Jews ± a supposition strengthened by the fact that John of Sroda was secretary and then Chancellor to the Emperor Charles IV.16 None of the Black Death hoards were found in containers, but as we have seen from the more modern hoards, the choice of container provides important evidence both for the circumstances of the hiding of the hoard and the amount of the hoard recovered.

13

14

15

16

J. Edwards, Jews in Christian Europe 1400±1700 (London, 1988); K. R. Stow, Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge MA, 1992). E. Taburet and M. DheÂnin, `Le treÂsor de Colmar', La Revue du Louvre 2 (1984), 89±101. For the `Weissenfels' hoard see J. M. Fritz, Goldschmiedekunst der Gotik in Mitteleuropa (Munich, 1982), ®g. 318e (p. 231). The question of the hoards and their historical context was discussed in detail by Elisabeth Taburet and others in Le treÂsor de Colmar (Colmar, 1999). Fritz, Goldschmiedekunst der Gotik, pls. 310±17 (p. 230); also P. Berghaus, `Neue westfaÈlische MuÈnzschatzfunde', Westfalen 30 (1952), p. 177. E. Gajewska-Prorok, The Treasure of Sroda Slaska (Wroclaw, 1996).

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THE EVIDENCE OF CONTAINERS

What evidence can be deduced about the process of the concealment of the treasure from the choice of containers? We have seen the contrast between the ef®cient concealment of the Gorlsdorf hoard in chests compared with the inef®cient hiding of the Pepys hoard in sacks inside helmets. What conclusions, apart from the desperation of the moment, can one draw about the way in which late medieval hoards were hidden, and in particular are there any conclusions that can be drawn from the hiding of hoards in chests, metal pots or pottery vessels? An immediate observation that can be made is the contrast with the way in which money was normally kept in the castle or treasury. Most valuables in the home would have been kept in a chest or metal box. So it is important to distinguish between the container in which coins were hidden and those in which the valuables were kept.17 The best recent study of containers for medieval hoards is contained in the study that appeared in 1992 of Danish coin hoards dated to between 1241 and 1550. This study is particularly valuable since the Danish royal right to treasure (Danefae) has been consistently and ef®ciently applied over a long period. The publication dealt with 321 hoards. Containers are known for 123 hoards ± a third of the total. Surprisingly only six were in wooden caskets, but thirty-three had purses of some sort, either linen or leather. The most common receptacle was a pottery vessel, which accounted for some sixty hoards, while cast bronze pots held only nine hoards.18 There is no comparable study of English containers. However, in England for the period between 1300 and 1500, there are only twenty-seven hoards that are known to have had containers. The material of four of these is unknown, but of the remainder one is of stone, eight are of metal and the majority, fourteen, are of pottery. They are listed in Appendix I.19 17

18

19

The housing of material in chests in the reign of Henry VIII is discussed by M. Hayward, `The Packing and Transportation of the Possessions of Henry VIII with Particular Reference to the 1547 Inventory', Costume 31 (1997), 8±15. Chests are discussed by P. Eames, Furniture in England, France and the Netherlands from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century (London, 1977), pp. 108±80. J. S. Jensen, K. Bendixen, N.-K. Liebgott, and F. Lindahl, Danmarks middelaldererlige Skattefund c.1050±c.1550 (Copenhagen, 1992), pp. 51±3 (translated into English on pp. 132±4). For a detailed study of the ceramic containers see N.-K. Liebgott, Danske fund af montdateret keramik ca. 950±1450, Nationalmuseets skifter Arkaeologisk-historisk raekke 18 (Copenhagen, 1978). The basic survey of English coin hoards is Thompson, Inventory of British Coin Hoards. It must be noted that Thompson's survey is in some respects inadequate, and must be used in conjunction with H. E. Manville, `Additions and Corrections to Thompson's Inventory and Brown and Dolley's Coin Hoards', British Numismatic Journal 63 (1994), 91±113. See also D. M. Wilson, `Some Archaeological Additions and Corrections to J. D. A. Thompson, ``Inventory of British Coin Hoards'' ', Medieval Archaeology 2 (1958), 169±71.

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John Cherry It is surprising that so few of the hoards were hidden in the most suitable containers for recovery, which would seem to have been wooden chests or metal vessels. Both in Denmark and England the most usual vessels used were those of pottery. In Denmark, between 1300 and 1550, the cauldron was the metal vessel most popularly used. Only the Voldtofte hoard deposited after 1526 was deposited in a metal jug, and that was of pewter.20 Sometimes the cauldron was upside down and was partly used to protect the pot and to serve as a marker when the treasure was recovered. A good example of the use of the cauldron which also provides an excellent illustration of the use of a variety of containers in one hoard was the Radved treasure which was discovered in 1976. There were two containers: one was a bronze pot and the other was a pottery jug, both buried in the same hole. The bronze pot, made in Stralsund in northern Germany, was upside down and covered a spherical pot full of coins, which themselves were contained in a purse made of gut. The coins in the pottery jug were in two purses, one linen and the other in a purse of bladder or gut. The interest is the careful division of the hoard into different parts. It was assumed that the hoard was apparently deposited in a hurry since twenty-three pieces of silver foil jewellery had been cut off from clothing and placed in the top of the jug. It was thought that the treasure was deposited after c. 1365, most probably in 1368±69, at a time when there was a war between the counts of Holstein and some rebellious squires in Jutland on one side and the Danish king Valdemar Atterdag on the other.21 In contrast to this, the use of large cauldrons for the burial of hoards does not appear to be known in Britain outside Scotland. The most notable is the great Aberdeen hoard, where over 12,000 coins were deposited in or after 1324 in a large cauldron, so giving it the name of the `bronze pot' hoard. This is paralleled by the hoard at Kirial found in 1967 which is the largest hoard of coins found in Denmark. It consists of over 80,000 silver coins dated to 1365 plus or minus two years. The size of both the Kirial and the Aberdeen (Kirkgate) hoard suggests that they may not have belonged to one single person but may have been the money chest of a religious or secular community, a pawnbrokers' box, or the harvest of a tax collector's zealous work. However, for the Aberdeen hoard there is a recent paper by N. J. Mayhew who notes that, While linking the hoard with the military events of the period there is no need to subscribe to the belief that these substantial sums of money were intended as payment for the troops. Such sums as those found in Aberdeen are quite compatible with the fortunes of professional and business men in the town.22 20 21

22

Jensen et al., Danmarks middelaldererlige Skattefund, no. 309. Radved in Jensen et al., Danmarks middelaldererlige Skattefund, no. 205, and Liebgott, Danske fund, no. 35. N. J. Mayhew, `The Aberdeen, Upper Kirkgate, hoard of 1886', British Numismatic Journal 44 (1975), 33±50 (esp. p. 36).

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Jewellery and Plate in Late Medieval Hoards Pottery vessels were the most common form of containers selected for the hiding of hoards. Jugs were more commonly used than cooking pots. It is perhaps surprising that no hoards have been found in the pottery money boxes that began to be made in the ®fteenth century.23 None of these bronze or pottery vessels were the ways in which money was kept, with the exception of money boxes. There were of course hoards found without any coins at all.

HOARDS OF SILVER PLATE ALONE

One of the interesting features of the Gorlsdorf hoard was the separation of the silver from the porcelain. The burial of hoards of silver plate without coins may represent the recovery of a hoard where the coins have been buried separately from the silver, or it may be that the silver was buried alone. Hoards of gold plate alone, since the metal was so valuable, do not occur in the later Middle Ages. However the study of these hoards of silver alone sheds a slightly different light on the reasons for the hiding of silver. For the post-medieval period, the `Armada' service hoard was an example of silver buried alone. In the late Middle Ages this feature can be demonstrated by the Gaillon treasure buried in France in the fourteenth century. The circumstances of its discovery are not now clear. It appears to have been found in Normandy before 1851, and to have consisted of at least eight bowls. The ®nd is now split between the Cluny Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum (London) and the Hermitage in Russia.24 Another aspect of hoarding silver alone is the hiding of silver spoons, which was to become more common in the seventeenth century. This may be illustrated by the ®nd of ®ve ®fteenth-century diamond point spoons in the wall of a church at Abberley in Worcestershire in 1965, though it could be that this is only a part of a multiple hoard (Plate 3).25 It is perhaps surprising that there are not more hoards of ecclesiastical material in Britain. One of the most impressive is the mid-thirteenth-century 23

24

25

D. Sturdy and J. Munby, `Early Domestic Sites in Oxford: Excavations in Cornmarket and Queen Street, 1959±62', Oxoniensia 50 (1985), 75±6. R. W. Lightbown, Secular Goldsmiths' Work in Medieval France: A History, Research Reports of the Society of Antiquaries of London 36 (London, 1978), pls. iv±xi; E. Taburet-Delahaye L'orfeÁvrerie gothique, XIIIe±deÂbut XVe sieÁcle, au MuseÂe de Cluny (Paris 1989), pp. 242±5. The Abberley hoard has not been fully published. The habit of hoarding spoons alone continued until the seventeenth century. The hoard from Netherhampton, Wiltshire, and that from Cirencester are notable examples. It is also worth noting that there are two sixteenth-century Danish hoards in which spoons play a major part. They are the Smorum kirke hoard, with eleven silver spoons with coins deposited after 1552, and the Kalundborg II hoard with two spoons without coins deposited 1500±50. See Jensen et al., Danmarks middelaldererlige Skattefund, no. 324 (pp. 282±6) and no. 327 (pp. 287±8).

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Plate 3. The ®ve spoons found at Abberley Church, Worcestershire. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Trustees of the British Museum)

170

Jewellery and Plate in Late Medieval Hoards chalice and paten found in 1890 amidst boulders on the mountainside at Cwm Mynach, near Dolgellau. It has been suggested that they may have belonged to Cymer Abbey nearby, but it is extremely doubtful whether such a poor house would have owned anything as splendid as these two pieces of silver.26 The most obvious ®nd that might be connected with the dissolution of the monasteries is the censer and incense boat, belonging to Ramsey Abbey, found, with other vessels, in Whittelsea Mere in 1854, by James and Frank Coles while ®shing for eels. With them were found two early sixteenthcentury pewter plates stamped with rams heads and some pottery, although it is not clear whether the vessels were contained in the pottery. Although the censer and incense boat both date to the fourteenth century, the dating of the rest of the vessels suggests that it was hidden after the early sixteenth century and the Dissolution is the most likely time.27 The hoard from Ramsey Abbey was not found until 1854. In contrast a hoard in Glastonbury Abbey was found almost immediately after it was hidden. In 1536 Thomas Cromwell's Commissioners visited the abbey, the second wealthiest monastery in England, and found in the vestry and treasury `neither jewels, plate, nor ornaments suf®cient for a poor parish church'. This, not surprisingly, aroused their suspicions. They immediately arrested the two treasurers and the two lay clerks of the vestry and started a diligent inquiry. This led to the recovery of plate that had been hidden in walls, vaults and other places, and of more that had been conveyed into the country (shades of Pepys). It is a great pity that the Letters and Papers of Henry VIII's reign do not give more detail on this but it clearly would have been interpreted today as a multiple hoard. The Commissioners succeeded in recovering 11,000 ounces of silver and a certain amount of gold. Not satis®ed that this was all, they even questioned Abbot Whiting about it on the day of his execution, 16 November 1539. He denied knowledge of anything more ± and left them guessing. Perhaps the hidden treasure of Glastonbury Abbey still lies somewhere in Somerset.28

26

27

28

Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England 1200±1400, ed. J. Alexander and P. Binski (London, 1987), no. 258 (pp. 307±8). The earliest reference is W. H. St John Hope, `SilverGilt Chalice and Paten Found at Dolgelly', Archaeologia 53 (1892), 575±6. The original account of the ®nd is E. Hawkins, `Note on Ramsey Abbey Censer and Boat', Archaeological Journal 8 (1851), 195±6. The censer and incense boat are in the Victoria and Albert Museum (M.268±1923 and M.269±1923); see Age of Chivalry, ed. Alexander and Binski, nos. 121±2. The two pewter plates are in Peterborough Museum (L135 and L138); see Archaeometry 26 (1984), 237±43. Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. J. Gairdner, 21 vols. (London, 1864±1932), XIV.2, 70, 150, and 186.

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CONCLUSION

What can one conclude about the nature of hoarding, and the nature of treasure in the late Middle Ages? To start with the Dissolution of the monasteries, it is worth making the point that the amount hidden is minute compared with the amount seized by the Commissioners. In the later Middle Ages as a whole the amount hidden in hoards is minuscule. Each individual ®nd is a very particular response to particular and unusual circumstances. One must be careful to consider the nature of each individual ®nd, especially whether it is accompanied by coins and what those coins tell us. The dif®culties of interpretation are revealed both by the post-medieval studies and the often limited evidence for the late medieval period. However, it is clear that coin hoards, especially when the whole hoard survives, can give a more precise indication of when they were buried than hoards of objects alone. Occasionally the container can provide a clue to the circumstances of the concealment. Perhaps a fair amount of scepticism should attend the formulation of historical interpretations based on the burial of treasure. Simplistic conclusions about the wealth of the depositor or the circumstances of the time may be unwise. Perhaps we should more often retain Mark Twain's sense of wonder and bewilderment.

APPENDIX I List of English and Welsh hoards 1300±1550 which had containers. The numbers refer to the catalogue by J. D. A. Thompson, and the subsequent article by H. E. Manville (see notes 10 and 19). 1. 22 Balcombe, Sussex, deposited c. 1380. The fourteenth-century bronze tripod vessel in which the coins were found was in the possession of Mr C. W. Gillman of Surbiton in 1951 but its present location is not known. 2. 38 Beaumont, Cumberland, deposited c. 1360. Found most probably in an iron-bound coffer. R. S. Ferguson and C. F. Keary, `Find of Coins at Beaumont, near Carlisle', Numismatic Chronicle 3rd s. 5 (1885), 199±208; Proceedings of the Cumberland and Westmorland Archaeological Society 8 (1885± 6), pp. 373ff. 3. 41a Benacre, Suffolk, deposited after Edward II. Found in an earthen jar. Gentleman's Magazine 37 (1767), p. 558 bis. 4. 42b Biggleswade, Bedfordshire, deposited in the reign of Edward IV. Found in a pot. Gentleman's Magazine 40 (1770), p. 276 bis.

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Jewellery and Plate in Late Medieval Hoards 5. 57a Brinkburn Priory, Northumberland, deposited in the reign of Edward III. Found in a small brass pot. Gentleman's Magazine 3 (1834), p. 636. 6. 97 Congresbury, Somerset, deposited c. 1465±70. Found in a small screw box. Gentleman's Magazine (1828), p. 462. 7. 120 Diss, Norfolk deposited c. 1465? Contained in an earthen vessel. Norfolk Archaeology 7 (1872), pp. 341ff. 8. 148 Durham, no. 1, Neville's Cross, deposited c. 1377±80. The jug is in the British Museum, reg. no. MLA B61. 9. 159 Fenwick, Northumberland, deposited after 1344. Found in a stone chest. 10. 185b Henstridge, near Sherborne, Somerset, deposited in the reign of Edward III. Found neatly folded in a sheet of milled lead. Gentleman's Magazine 78 (1808), p. 40. 11. 186 Hesleyside, Northumberland, deposited 1300±20. Bronze tripod vessel. Archaeologia Aeliana 4 (1855), p. 104. 12. 194 Horsted Keynes, Sussex, deposited c. 1430. See G. C. Brooke, `A Find of Nobles at Horsted Keynes, Sussex', Numismatic Chronicle 5th s. 9 (1929), 285±95. Brooke noted fragments of an earthen jar. 13. 231 Leicester, deposited c. 1180. The base of the pottery container is in the British Museum, reg. no. OA2. 14. 238 Llangynllo, Radnorshire deposited after 1400. Found in a `black crock'. 15. 259 London, no. 20, deposited after 1377. Roach Smith bought the coins together with the remains of the brass casket which contained the hoard. 16. 340 Stamford, Lincolnshire, deposited c. 1465 in a `coarse brown clay pot'. 17. 353 Terrington St Clement, Norfolk, deposited c. 1425. The pot is published by G. C. Dunning, Numismatic Chronicle 6th s. 7 (1948), p. 183. The pot is in King's Lynn Museum. 18. 385 York, no. 2, deposited c. 1320. The following were not mentioned by Thompson: 19. Ardleigh, Essex, deposited after 1422. Earthenware jug in British Museum, MLA reg. no. 1867, 10±4, 1 and B124. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of London 1st s. 3 (1854), p. 98. 20. Dover, Kent deposited after 1205, found in a leaden casket in 1765. See

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John Cherry D. M. Metcalf, `Find Records of Medieval Coins from Gough's Camden's Britannia', Numismatic Chronicle, 6th s. 17 (1957), p. 183. 21. London, Friday Street, two jugs now in the British Museum. R. L. Hobson, Catalogue of the Collection of English Pottery in the Department of British and Mediaeval Antiquities and Ethnography of the British Museum (London, 1903), B11 and 12. 22. Stratton, Bedfordshire, deposited after c. 1412. See Metcalf, `Find Records'. Found in a pot. English and Welsh hoards with containers found after 1956: 23. Attenborough, Nottinghamshire, deposited c. 1420±22. Found in an earthenware pot. M. Archibald, British Numismatic Journal 38 (1969), 50±83. 24. Middridge, Shildon, Durham, deposited 1310 or later. M. M. Archibald, `British and Irish Hoards', Coin Hoards 2 (1976), 111±27 (p. 115 n. 453). 25. Hartford, Huntingdonshire hoard 1964. See Archibald, `British and Irish Hoards', pp. 118±19, and M. M. Archibald and J. P. C. Kent, Numismatic Chronicle 7th s. 14 (1974), 144±7. 26. Wyre Piddle, Worcestershire, c. 1467, deposited in an earthenware pot. See M. Archibald, `Wyre Piddle, Worcs., 1967 Hoard of Fifteenth-Century Silver Coins', Numismatic Chronicle 7th s. 10 (1970), 133±62. 27. Wain¯eet, Lincolnshire, deposited c. 1200. Pot, in British Museum. To be published by B. Nenk in English Medieval Coin Hoards 1 (in press). 28. Reigate, Surrey, deposited at Colley Hill c. 1460. Two small jugs, one Tudor green, the other plain. It is doubtful whether much of the hoard could have been contained in them; the remainder may have been kept in bags. B. Nenk, S. Margeson, and M. Hurley, `Medieval Britain and Ireland in 1990', Medieval Archaeology 35 (1991), p. 192.

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YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS: PUBLICATIONS God's Words, Women's Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing of LateMedieval Women Visionaries, Rosalynn Voaden (1999) Pilgrimage Explored, ed. J. Stopford (1999) Piety, Fraternity and Power: Religious Gilds in Late Medieval Yorkshire 1389±1547, David J. F. Crouch (2000) Courts and Regions in Medieval Europe, ed. Sarah Rees Jones, Richard Marks and A. J. Minnis (2000) York Studies in Medieval Theology II Medieval Theology and the Natural Body, ed. Peter Biller and A. J. Minnis (1997) II Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages, ed. Peter Biller and A. J. Minnis (1998) York Manuscripts Conferences Manuscripts and Readers in Fifteenth-Century England: The Literary Implications of Manuscript Study, ed. Derek Pearsall [Proceedings of the 1981 York Manuscripts Conference] Manuscripts and Texts: Editorial Problems in Later Middle English Literature, ed. Derek Pearsall [Proceedings of the 1985 York Manuscripts Conference] Latin and Vernacular: Studies in Late-Medieval Texts and Manuscripts, ed. A. J. Minnis (1989) [Proceedings of the 1987 York Manuscripts Conference] Regionalism in Late-Medieval Manuscripts and Texts: Essays celebrating the publication of `A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English', ed. Felicity Riddy (1991) [Proceedings of the 1989 York Manuscripts Conference] Late-Medieval Religious Texts and their Transmission: Essays in Honour of A. I. Doyle, ed. A. J. Minnis (1994) [Proceedings of the 1991 York Manuscripts Conference] Prestige, Authority and Power in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts, ed. Felicity Riddy (2000) [Proceedings of the 1994 York Manuscripts Conference]