Early Medieval Europe - 2022 - Hanlon - of Reaflac and Rapina Accusations of Violence in Two Old English Lawsuits and The

Of reaflac and rapina: accusations of
violence in two Old English lawsuits and

the Libellus Æthelwoldi
BRITTANY HANLON
This article examines the meaning and function of the Old English noun
reaflac in two tenth-century lawsuit documents, Sawyer 877 and Sawyer
1211. It suggests that reaflac was the vernacular counterpart to the Latin
terms violentia and rapina. Such connected terminology suggests that a
collection of now lost tenth-century Old English charters, like S 877 and S
1211 in form, was the original source for the twelfth-century Ely house
chronicle, the Libellus Æthelwoldi. Charter draftsmen purposefully selected
a language of violence in order to delegitimize a rival party’s claim to an
estate, regardless of whether any acts of violence had taken place. Reaflac
formed part of this narrative strategy in early English lawsuit documents
because of its association with contemporary discourses on moralized
wrongdoing.
During the reign of King Æthelred II (978–1013, 1014–16) there was an

emphasis in diplomas on acknowledging an estate owner’s past wrongs,
which had led to the forfeiture of their lands. The charter’s case was
not necessarily a routine event in the daily operation of law in late
Anglo-Saxon England, but its portrayal was calculated to sound as
lawless as possible. One such account is S 877, which tells of Wulfbald
the wayward thegn’s dispossession. The charter opens with a narrative
of Wulfbald’s crimes:
* I am grateful to the peer reviewers for their insightful comments. I would like to thank Prof. Rory
Naismith, Dr Tom Lambert, Dr Calum Platts, Patrick McAlary, Alisa Santikarn, and William
Hanlon for taking the time to read the piece and provide feedback. All errors are my own.
Early Medieval Europe 2023 31 (1) 95–121

© 2022 The Authors. Early Medieval Europe published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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96 Brittany Hanlon
These are the crimes by which Wulfbald ruined himself with his
lord, namely first, when his father died, he went to his
stepmother’s estate and took everything that he could find there
inside and out, small and great. Then the king sent to him and
commanded him to give up what he had seized (he agefe reaflac
ða forest).1
One can imagine the rage felt by Wulfbald’s stepmother after he seized
the entirety of her estates’ moveable wealth. Wulfbald’s crimes as
described in the charter go on to mount up and expose the
limitations of late Anglo-Saxon law enforcement. He ignores the call
to restore his stepmother’s goods and pay his wergild to King
Æthelred not once, but twice; on the second occasion Æthelred
instructs Wulfbald to withdraw from his stepmother’s lands which he
now illegitimately occupies.2 Wulfbald then takes forcible ownership
of lands belonging to his kinsman, Brihtmær of Bourne, refusing to
adhere to the king’s two subsequent commands to leave the estates.
Wulfbald comes across as a ruthless rogue who stole from his family
and refused to cooperate when ordered to restore the properties he
had taken. There was no effective mechanism for meting out justice
to people like him who not only disrupted the peace but also had
both the gall and the clout to defy the king’s orders. Eventually,
Wulfbald dies without making any recompense.3
This might have been the end of it, but the narrative closes with a
shocking climax. Because Wulfbald was now dead and not in a
position to resist, the king’s thegn (and Wulfbald’s cousin) Eadmær
and his companions claimed and occupied Bourne ‘by seizure despite
the king’ (‘on þæt land æt Burnan þæt he on reaflace ongen þæne
cynyng hefde’).4 As Wulfbald’s kinsman, Eadmær had a personal
stake in Bourne’s fate and, therefore, most likely sought to secure his
own rights to it. What mattered more for the writer of S 877,
1
‘Þis sind þa forwyrhto þe Wulfbald hine wyþ his hlaford forworthe. Þæt is ærest þa his fædor
wæs forfæren þa ferd he to steopmoder land ⁊ nam þær eal he þær funde inne ⁊ ute læsse ⁊
mare. Þa send se cyng him to ⁊ bead him þæt he agefe reaflac ða forset’: P. Sawyer,
Anglo-Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and Bibliography (London, 1969) [hereafter S],
no. 877. Anglo-Saxon Charters, ed. and trans. A. Robertson, repr. of 2nd edn (Cambridge,
2009), at pp. 128–31, issued 996. See also Charters of the New Minster, Winchester, ed. S. Miller
(Oxford, 2001), no. 25, at pp. 144–56. Here Miller summarizes Peter Kitson’s alternative reading
of S 877, which proposes that Wulfbald paid the king’s wergild, but refused to vacate the estates.
2
T. Charles-Edwards, ‘The Distinction between Land and Moveable Wealth in Anglo-Saxon
England’, in P. Sawyer (ed.), Medieval Settlements: Continuity and Change (London, 1976),
pp. 180–7, at p. 181. S 877’s first mention of reaflac refers to the plunder of moveable goods,
which may have encompassed money, cattle and slaves.
3
R. Abels, ‘“The Crimes by which Wulfbald Ruined Himself with his Lord”: The Limits of State
Action in Late Anglo-Saxon England’, Reading Medieval Studies 40 (2014), pp. 42–53, at p. 79.
4
S 877 (ed. and trans. Robertson, pp. 130–1).
Early Medieval Europe 2023 31 (1)

Of reaflac and rapina 97
though, was Eadmær’s status as a king’s thegn, which made the

charter’s final act even more meaningful: Eadmær had
underestimated Wulfbald’s widow and her son, who sought to
reclaim Bourne and remove it from his control, killing him along
with fifteen of his companions in the process.
These events must have taken place in the 980s or earlier; the text
that recounts them (ending the narrative abruptly with the murder of
Eadmær) presents the decisions made at two council meetings in
London held in the period 988×990. The account of Wulfbald’s crim-
inal activity and his eventual demise survives as an Old English mem-
orandum that probably results from these council meetings but went
on to be incorporated into a Latin grant now known as S 877. This
document is preserved in the cartulary of the New Minster at Winche-
ster, Liber Abbatiae. The main body of the charter records how in 996
Æthelred granted his mother Ælfthryth the estate at Bourne alongside
five other locations in Kent.5 How S 877 came to be in this archive is
uncertain as the New Minster held no obvious interest in the
estates concerned.6 On the basis of evidence of several land
transactions between Ælfthryth and Bishop Æthelwold of
Winchester (963–84), Sean Miller speculates that Ælfthryth had
entrusted her charters to the community at the New Minster for
safekeeping.7
These properties in Kent may represent the lands that were forfeited
by Wulfbald’s heirs between 988×990 and 996, as a result of the
decisions taken by the London councils. At the second meeting, the
councillors decided that Eadmær’s death, and his illegitimate occupa-
tion of Bourne, was a step too far and resolved to deal with the situa-
tion. The dialogue that ensued will never be known, but legal texts
from the reigns of Æthelstan and Alfred already exhibited anxieties
over the state’s ability to bring well-connected aristocrats like
Wulfbald and Eadmær under control.8 As the kingdom’s leaders
rehearsed these sorry events, the story coalesced into a
compelling narrative of endemic wrongdoing that would justify
dispossessing Wulfbald and his family of their lands, wrongfully seized
or otherwise.9 Like other contemporary accounts of past landowner’s
5
Abels, ‘Limits’, p. 46; New Minster, ed. Miller, p. 148. This mid-fifteenth-century manuscript
wrongly dates the charter to 993 but its internal details, like the indiction (ninth) and the
regnal year (eighteenth), indicate that this was a mistake and that the date should read 996.
6
New Minster, ed. Miller, p. 154.
7
New Minster, ed. Miller, p. 154.
8
S. Keynes, ‘Crime and Punishment in the Reign of Æthelred the Unready’, in N. Lund and I.
Wood (eds), People and Places in Northern Europe, 500–1600: Essays in Honour of Peter Hayes
Sawyer (Woodbridge, 1991), pp. 67–81, at pp. 70–9.
9
On the partisan nature of petition documents like lawsuits see A. Fiore, The Seigneurial

98 Brittany Hanlon
transgressions, charters served to protect the new owner’s rights to the

recently forfeited lands against claims arising from earlier stages in the
estate’s history.10 Who composed this account is not evident, but the
author summed up the charges against Wulfbald and Eadmær by say-
ing they had taken and held the lands on reaflace.
Reaflac is an Old English noun that survives in three lawsuit
documents beyond S 877. These are two other charters dated to
Æthelred’s reign: S 1454, a chirograph drawn up in 990×993; and S
1457, an institutional statement composed during the 980s.11 A single-
sheet letter – known to modern scholarship as the Cooling Letter (S
1211) – written in c.959 to recount a complicated claim to land by
Queen Eadgifu, King Edward the Elder’s third wife, also mentions
reaflac.12 Reaflac has various translations. Joseph Bosworth and Thomas
Toller interpreted it as: ‘rapine’, ‘robbery’, ‘spoliation’, ‘plunder’, and
‘what is taken’.13 It appears as a sub-category of ‘an offence’ or ‘luck in
war’ in the Thesaurus of Old English, meaning ‘open robbery’, ‘rapine’,
and ‘extortion’.14 Florence Harmer translated the reference to reaflac in
the Cooling Letter as ‘criminal robbery’, whilst Sean Miller and
Dorothy Whitelock described Wulfbald’s act of reaflac as ‘plunder’ and
‘plundered goods’ respectively.15 Arnold Baines rendered the
perpetration of reaflac by S 1454’s rival claimant Leofwine as ‘what he
had seized’; Agnes Robertson translated reaflac in S 1457 as ‘violent
possession’.16 The notion of forceful seizure in translations of reaflac
Transformation: Power Structures and Political Communication in the Countryside of Central and
Northern Italy, 1080–1130 (Oxford, 2020), at p. 228. See also A. Rabin, ‘Anglo-Saxon Women
Before the Law: A Student Edition of Five Old English Lawsuits’, Old English Newsletter 41.3
(2008), pp. 33–56, at pp. 34–7. On the extent of Æthelred’s personal involvement in
Wulfbald’s case see A. Rabin, ‘Capital Punishment and the Anglo-Saxon Judicial Apparatus: A
Maximum View?’, in J. Gates and N. Marafioti (eds), Capital and Corporal Punishment in
Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge, 2014), pp. 181–99, at pp. 193–6. The glaring omission of
Æthelred’s name on the charter’s witness list evidences his absence from the proceedings.
10
Keynes, ‘Crime’, pp. 77–9.
11
S 1454 (Charters of Christ Church Canterbury, ed. N.P. Brooks and S.E. Kelly (Oxford, 2013), no.
133), issued 990×993; S 1457 (Charters of Rochester, ed. A. Campbell (Oxford, 1973) no. 36),
issued 980s.
12
S 1211 (Charters of Christ Church Canterbury, ed. N.P. Brooks and S.E. Kelly (Oxford, 2013), no.
124) issued 959×975. See also F. Harmer, Select English Historical Documents of the Ninth and
Tenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1914), no. 23, at pp. 37–8; S. Keynes, ‘The “Cuckhamsley
Chirograph”’, in S. Jurasinski and A. Rabin (eds), Languages of the Law in Early Medieval
England: Essays in Memory of Lisi Oliver (Phoenix, 2019), pp. 193–210, at p. 195.
13
J. Bosworth, ‘Reaflac’, in An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online, ed. T. Northcote Toller, C. Sean
and O. Tichy, Faculty of Arts, Charles University (2014), https://bosworthtoller.com/25608
(accessed 11 February 2021).
14
Old English Thesaurus, ed. L. Grundy, C. Kay and J. Roberts, https://oldenglishthesaurus.arts.
gla.ac.uk/category-selection/?qsearch=reaflac (accessed 11 February 2021).
15
Harmer, Select, pp. 38–40; New Minster, ed. Miller, p. 150; D. Whitelock, English Historical
Documents c. 500–1042, 2nd edn (London, 1979), at p. 575.
16
A. Baines, ‘Wynflæd v. Leofwine: A Datchet Lawsuit of 990’, Records of Buckinghamshire 32

transforms civil disputes between two opposed parties into a serious

criminal case. In S 877, the term reaflac helped charter draftsmen to
justify the king’s confiscation of all five of the estates in Kent. Reaflac,
however, can be artfully vague; it does not specify the nature of the act
that has taken place. When Wulfbald sought possession of the
properties held by his stepmother and his kinsman Brihtmær, did he
take them with fire and the sword? Had there been fatalities that
contributed to the draftsman’s assertion of his ruin? These queries
present historians with a broader puzzle to solve in terms of the
narrative’s construction: why did S 877’s draftsmen fail to provide
further details concerning the violent crime mentioned therein and why
did they employ this particular term reaflac?
Matthew McHaffie provides an effective solution to this problem by
considering how and why accusations of violence were used in lawsuits
over property in his study of the Latin term violentia as it appears in
eleventh-century French charters and dispute records. Although
violentia is cognate with the Modern English word ‘violence’, McHaffie
has shown that it denoted a particular kind of illegal invasive act that is
better described as ‘violation’ or as a ‘wrongful use of force’, rather than
‘violence’.17 This vocabulary represented the complaining party’s
contempt that a rival dared to raise a claim against a property that was
not rightfully theirs (or so the complaining party believed). The
litigant’s accusations of violentia was a mechanism by which a dispute
over property could be redefined into an offence that fell within a lord’s
jurisdictional purview.18 By employing select terminology, litigants
purposefully framed their opponent’s claim as a violent act so as to map
their complaints onto societal expectations of actionable wrong.19 The
claimant could, therefore, evade the difficult question of rightful
ownership, which was often not resolved by legal arguments but by
questions of patronage.20 This study focuses on reaflac’s use as a label
for litigants’ actions in S 877 and the Cooling Letter. These texts reflect
two different stages of dispute processes: S 877 was composed after the
conflict had been resolved whilst the Cooling Letter functioned as a
personal statement to be used during an ongoing investigation.21 I
argue that reaflac was a vernacular counterpart to contemporary Latin
terminology utilized in other forms of lawsuit documentation. Like
(1990), pp. 63–75, at pp. 64–6; S 1457 (ed. and trans. Robertson, pp. 122–5).
17
M. McHaffie, ‘Law and Violence in Eleventh-Century France’, Past and Present 238 (2018), pp.
3–41, at p. 22.
18
McHaffie, Law, p. 9.
19
McHaffie, Law, pp. 20, 40.
20
McHaffie, Law, pp. 29–37.
21
Keynes, ‘Cuckhamsley’, pp. 195–6.

100 Brittany Hanlon
violentia, reaflac constituted a recognized rhetorical device that

emphasized the violent happenings of a case (real, overstated or
imagined) and conveyed a general sense of wrongdoing on the rival
group’s part to strengthen one’s own claims to property. This study is
divided into three sections. The first concentrates on defining reaflac by
exploring its place in the wider Old English corpus of literature in
order to elucidate the specifics of its meaning. The second section
explores reaflac’s symbiosis with general illegality from the composers’
perspective. The third section examines the instances of actual litigant
violence in the lawsuit record and how charter draftsmen sought to
legitimize one party’s actions by placing the charge of reaflac on their
opponent’s shoulders.
These narratives of violence have been recognized as one way of
weaponizing documents, the early medieval charter serving to rewrite
the past in a particular way to legitimize the writer’s claim in the
present and prevent future dispute.22 Reaflac represents a specific case
study of how that objective was realized by the adoption of a carefully
constructed narrative strategy. This case study focuses not solely on the
events described and the authors’ circumstances, but also on the
meaning that authors designated to those events and the message they
intended to communicate to the text’s audience.23 Reaflac has
implications for how other lawsuit documents should be read and can
be set alongside a wider discourse of moralized wrongdoing in Old
English literature. To develop this point, I will compare the use of
reaflac to the Latin vocabulary chosen to reflect the pillaging of estates
in the Libellus quorundam insignium operum beati Æthelwoldi episcopi,
hereafter referred to as the Libellus. The Libellus is a twelfth-century
chronicle commissioned by Bishop Hervey Le Breton (1109–31)
concerning land disputes between Ely and the outside world during the
last decades of the tenth century.24 The reasoning behind this
comparison is based on the prologue’s claim that the Libellus had been
translated into Latin from Old English documents dating to the time
of Bishop Æthelwold and Abbot Byrhtnoth (970–96), which suggests
the existence of a now-lost Ely collection of vernacular charters similar
in character to those that used reaflac.25 Drawing on both the pairing of
22
S. Foot, ‘Reading Anglo-Saxon Charters: Memory, Record, or Story?’, in R. Balzaretti and E.
Tyler (eds), Narrative and History in the Early Medieval West (Turnhout, 2006), pp. 39–65, at
p. 62; McHaffie, ‘Law’, p. 18.
23
A. Davenport, Medieval Narrative: An Introduction (Oxford, 2004), at pp. 1–8.
24
A. Kennedy, ‘Law and Litigation in the Libellus Æthelwoldi Episcopi’, Anglo-Saxon England
[hereafter ASE] 24 (1995), pp. 131–83, at p. 131. The Libellus’ contents were later incorporated
into Book II of the twelfth-century history of Ely Abbey, the Liber Eliensis, but it also exists
as a separate text.
25
Kennedy, ‘Libellus’, p. 132.

rapina and reaflac in OE glosses of Latin texts and the similarities in the
specific kinds of violence the terms portray, this study demonstrates that
the accusations of violence in the Libellus accurately represent likely uses
of reaflac in the original OE. The Libellus, S 877 and S 1211 also show that
accusations of both terms were situational and could come and go
depending on expediency.
The history of reaflac
Appreciating reaflac’s application in different textual genres will elucidate its

true meaning as an act of violence and demonstrate how charter draftsmen
intended the phrase to be understood. Reaflac adds to the impression that
the vocabulary of lawsuits was carefully selected to shape the narrative and
held significance that went beyond a simple description of violence. The
authors of dispute records consciously applied this term as they crafted
rhetorical strategies to build a legal, and indeed a moral, case.
Law codes
The earliest known mention of reaflac appears in Clause 10 of King Ine of
Wessex’s (689–726) law code, which only survives as an appendix to King
Alfred’s Domboc. It reads,
‘If anyone within the borders of our kingdom commits an act of
robbery (reaflác) or seizes anything with violence, he shall restore the
plunder (reaflac) and pay a fine of sixty shillings.’26 Reaflac was an
illegal act in the eyes of the law. It was a crime with its own prescribed
penalties, which a member of the witan, a litigant or victim could
appeal to in an assembly.27 The term’s nature as a general challenge to
peace is suggested by S 877’s assertion that it was the king or presiding
witan who decided if reaflac had taken place. There is reason to believe
that the king’s early intervention is a metonym for a localized agency
that wielded royal authority in the district. S 877’s draftsman stated
that it was the king (se cyng) who sent to Wulfbald and ‘commanded
him to give up what he had seized’, but at this stage in the legal
proceedings it was potentially the hundred court or shire assembly
(both otherwise conspicuously absent from the account) that instructed
Wulfbald to relinquish the land.28 Contemporary laws, like III Edgar,
26
‘Gif hwa binnan þam gemærum ures reaflác ⁊ nied-næme dó, agife he ðone reaflac ⁊ geselle LX
scill. to wite’: Laws of Ine, c. 10 (Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. F. Liebermann, 3 vols (Halle,
1903–16), vol. 1, p. 95; The Laws of the Earliest English Kings, ed. and trans. F.L. Attenborough
(Cambridge, 1922), pp. 40–1).
27
See T. Lambert, Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 2017), at pp. 89–90.
28
‘bead him þæt he agefe reaflac ða forset’: S 877 (ed. and trans. Robertson, pp. 128–9); Rabin,
‘Capital’, pp. 193–6.

102 Brittany Hanlon
dictated that a dispute should only be referred to the king as a last

resort, when litigants had failed to obtain justice at a hundred and
then at the shire level.29 Indeed, S 1454 reports that Æthelred
relinquished a case because it needed to be first tried in the shire
court, which is the opposite progression of events that S 877 seems
to portray.30 The charter draftsman possibly invoked the king’s
name to accentuate the severity of Wulfbald’s disregard of the law.
Litigants used this terminology found in contemporary law codes to
assert their case’s rectitude, associating themselves with the king to
show that the law was on their side, regardless of their case’s
legitimacy. Such a strategy was utilized to place their claim beyond
credible doubt.
S 877’s charter draftsmen may have also used reaflac not strictly as a
technical term but more as an example of heightened emotional (and
political) language that could reinforce their appeals to perceived
injustices. Uses of the term ‘thief ’, for example, were purely rhetorical
in Ine’s law code. Clause 43, for example, addresses destroying trees by
fire, stating that the offender will be charged sixty shillings because ‘fire
is a thief ’ ( fyr bið þeof ).31 Future rivals, like Wulfbald’s heirs, would
consequently be forced to circumvent previous acts that had been
framed as categorically wrong with the use of such weighted language.32
Ine’s laws reveal that already in the seventh century reaflac was firmly
associated with violence; hence its attraction as a way of framing a rival
landowner’s actions in a negative light. Felix Liebermann’s translation of
reaflac as it appears in Ine’s law code as Raub in Modern German –
meaning robbery, but also with specific connotations of kidnapping, and
the notion of ‘going on the prowl’ – seems to be an apt representation of
reaflac’s basic meaning.33 Jane Roberts noted that the compiler of
Quadripartitus – a collection of historic legal documents assembled
during the reign of Henry I of England (1100–35) – translated reaflac five
times as the Latin term robaria (which later became ‘robbery’ in Modern
29
‘no-one shall apply to the king about any case, unless he cannot obtain the benefit of the law or
fails to command justice at home’, ‘⁊ ne gesece nan man þone cyngc for nanre spræce, buton he
æt ham rihtes [wyrde] beon ne mote, oððe riht abiddan ne mæg’: III Edgar c. 4
(ed. Liebermann, vol. 1, p. 200; The Laws of the Kings of England: From Edmund to Henry I,
ed. and trans. A. Robertson (Cambridge, 1925), pp. 24–5).
30
31
Laws of Ine, c. 43 (ed. Liebermann, vol. 1, p. 108; trans. Attenborough, pp. 50–1). See also
Clause 13 of Ine’s law code.
32
McHaffie, ‘Law’, p. 40.
33
Laws of Ine, c. 10 (ed. and trans. Liebermann, vol. 1, p. 95). On Ælfric’s comparison of robbers
and the act of plundering to wolves on the prowl: ‘because they lived by rapine, like savage
wolves’, ‘be reaflace swa reaflace swa reðe wulfas’, see Ælfric of Eynsham, Passio Sancti
Albani, Martyris (Item Alia. Acitofel et Absalon) (ed. and trans. W. Skeat, Ælfric’s Lives of
Saints, 4 vols (London, 1881–1900), vol. 1, pp. 414–31, at pp. 424–5).

English) and once each as ‘rapine’ (rapina) and ‘greed’ (rapacitas).34 Today
robbery is defined as taking the property of another specifically by means
of force or intimidation.35 Although both terms signify the wrongful
appropriation of another person’s property, this emphasis on violence
separates it from theft. This distinction between theft and robbery in
the Anglo-Saxon mindset is crucial to reaflac’s meaning and explains
its use by authors of lawsuit documents. Clause 10 of Ine’s law code
resembles the present-day definition of robbery in the stress it lays on
the offender’s aggression, with the noun nied-næme (formed from the
verb nídan, meaning ‘to take something forcibly’) appearing beside
reaflac. Reaflac’s prominent position in the Promissio Regis, a
vernacular translation of the coronation oath conducted by
Archbishop Dunstan (959–88) during King Edgar’s (959–75)
coronation in 959, also speaks to the term’s perceived severity.36 The
oath reads, ‘Secondly, I forbid robbery (reaflac) and all unrighteous
deeds by all classes of society.’37 To eradicate reaflac was a royal
priority during Edgar’s reign – which perhaps developed from
Æthelstan’s earlier concern with theft more generally – with it later
becoming part of the Crown’s image-building and political rhetoric.38
The coronation oath reflected early English kings’ anxieties. Reaflac
would have been considered an egregious offence at this time in order
to merit such a mention.
Theft was also a priority but was seen as a separate crime and was
defined on different grounds. Anglo-Saxon society regarded theft as a
furtive act; in Tom Lambert’s words, it left ‘victims impotent, with no
knowledge of where to direct their anger’.39 Theft, unlike reaflac, was
thus met with the death penalty from the seventh century onwards, as
Ine’s law code stated that captured thieves would be killed or pay their
wergild to the king.40 Roberts’s study of the Old and Middle English
vocabulary for theft and robbery reveals reaflac’s enduring connection
with its root, reaf, which later became ‘reavery’, ‘robbing’, ‘rape’, and
‘robbers’, while the Old English terms associated with theft (þeof,
34
J. Roberts, ‘Robbares and Reuares þat ryche men despoilen: Some Competing Forms’, in
T. Nevalainen, P. Pahta, M. Rissanen and I. Taavitsainen (eds), Placing Middle English in
Context (Berlin, 2000), pp. 235–54, at p. 237.
35
P. Cook, ‘Robbery Violence’, The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 78.2 (1987), pp.
357–76, at pp. 357–9.
36
M. Clayton, ‘The Old English Promissio Regis’, ASE 37 (2008), pp. 91–150, at p. 91.
37
‘oðer is, þæt ic reaflac ⁊ ealle unrihte þing eallum hádum forbeode’: Promissio Regis
(ed. Liebermann, vol. 1, p. 214; ed. and trans. Robertson, pp. 42–3).
38
T. Lambert, ‘Public Order and State Violence: A View from Tenth-Century England’, Radical
History Review 137 (2020), pp. 13–33, at pp. 18–25.
39
T. Lambert, ‘Theft, Homicide and Crime in Late Anglo-Saxon Law’, Past and Present 214.1
(2012), pp. 3–43, at p. 9.
40
Laws of Ine, c. 12 (ed. Liebermann, vol. 1, p. 95; ed. and trans. Attenborough, pp. 40–1).

104 Brittany Hanlon
þeofend, stalung, and stalu) later became ‘theft’, ‘thieving’, ‘stealth’, and
‘stealing’.41 The litigants of S 877, S 1211, S 1454, and S 1457 did not label
their opponent as a ‘thief ’ (þeof ). Reaflac meant something else.
Descriptions of theft did not fulfil the litigants’ needs when forming an
accusation – it was a crime performed in secret, whereas reaflac, a
forceful requisition of property, was all too public. Beyond establishing
those violent connections, there remains an element of openness to
reaflac’s place in the legal record, which distinguishes it from theft: the
laws do not specify which acts were classed as reaflac nor the exact
identity of its victims. In this sense, it is akin to the modern terms,
‘pillage’ and ‘rapine’, as the act of reaflac is often translated. To
highlight the links between rapine and reaflac in the early
English mindset, one must look beyond legal evidence to Alfredian
literature.
Alfredian texts
Reaflac begins to appear regularly during the Alfredian period in the
closing decades of the ninth century. The translator of the Old
English Orosius placed the actions of a shepherd called Viriatus in
the realm of rapine and he employed the term reaflac to do so.
Viriatus ‘was a great thief (þeofmon). Through those thefts (stalunge)
he became a robber (reafere), and through that robbery (reaflace)
ravaged many towns.’42 This reaffirms the existence of separate
definitions of theft and robbery. Theft can lead to robbery and
robbery is in turn a crime committed on a grander scale, involving
widespread damage inflicted on whole towns. The E recension of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (hereafter Chronicle) written c.1116 (but
based on an earlier manuscript), points to reaflac’s previous
association with Viking raids and subsequent application in texts
that discuss rapine. The Vikings destroyed God’s church at
Lindisfarne in 793, ‘Through plunder and slaughter’ (þurh reaflac ⁊
mansleht).43 Both the Orosius and Chronicle craft an image of
aggressors intruding on the lands of innocent victims. Pillaging is an
umbrella term, covering a range of brutal crimes that these texts
failed to specify. An open-ended definition such as this may have
41
Roberts, ‘Robbares’, p. 236.
42
‘wæs micel þeofmon, ⁊ on þære stalunge he wearð reafere ⁊ On ðæm reaflace he him geteah to
micelne monfultum ⁊ monege tunas ofergehergeade’: Orosius (ed. and trans. M. Godden, The
Old English History of the World: An Anglo-Saxon Rewriting of Orosius (Cambridge, MA, 2016),
pp. 304–5).
43
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 793 E (Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel, ed. C. Plummer, 2 vols
(Oxford, 1892–9), vol. 1, p. 9; The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (text): A Revised Translation,
ed. D. Whitelock, with D.C. Douglas and S.I. Tucker (London, 1961; rev. 1965), p. 36 (trans.)).

been the reason for reaflac’s insertion into a lawsuit document; like
violentia, it had the ability to flexibly map onto individual
complaints.44 The Viking raids of the ninth and tenth centuries
doubtlessly made the audiences of S 1211 and S 877 familiar with
images of pillaging, and enabled individuals to apply their own
conception of violent dispossession onto the scene when they were
exposed to the term reaflac. Later draftsmen may have sought to
evoke this mental image when describing their opponents’ actions. S
877 surely reflects this idea as the author juxtaposed reaflac with
forset, the preterite form of forsittan, meaning ‘to be besieged’.45
Glossed psalters
Eleventh-century writers evidently did not view reaflac as a ‘standard’
crime. They employed it as a narrative device to tarnish an opponent’s
character by relating their actions to an offence with both legal and
moral dimensions. Interlinear Old English glosses of Latin psalters
suggest that rapina (rapine) directly corresponded with reaflac. The
Salisbury Psalter, which was likely written in the late tenth century at
the nunnery in Shaftesbury, has Old English glosses on certain psalms.
The relevant gloss appears above the Latin text in Psalm 61 of the
Vulgate Bible, which focuses on mankind’s vanity: ‘Do not trust in
iniquity, and do not covet robberies (reaflac; rapinas), if riches abound
do not set your heart upon them.’46 Reaflac is glossed as rapina,
exalting the reader not to ‘covet plunder’, in line with the use of reaflac
in Alfredian literature. The Tiberius Psalter and the Arundel Psalter
have similar translations and glosses.47
The term also appears in the Old English homiletic tradition that
sought to bolster the English nation’s moral wellbeing. Ælfric of
Eynsham (d. c.1010) mentioned reaflac six times in his homilies while
Archbishop Wulfstan of York’s (1002–23) homilies referenced reaflac
eleven times, including the infamous Sermo Lupi Ad Anglos
(hereafter Sermo).48 In the Sermo, reaflac was an ailment of English
44
McHaffie, ‘Law’, pp. 20–2.
45
46
‘Nelle ge hihtan on unrihtwisnesse ⁊ reaflac gidsian welan gif hi ætflowan nele ge heortan
tosettan. Nolite sperare in inquitate et rapinas nolite concupiscere diuitiæ si affluent nolite
cor adponere’: The Salisbury Psalter, Salisbury Cathedral, MS 150, fol. 61 (ed. C. Sisam and
K. Sisam, The Salisbury Psalter (Oxford, 1950), p. 157; my trans.).
47
See Toronto Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus entries for reaflac, ed. A.D. Heaney, J.P.
Wilkin and X. Xiang, https://tapor.library.utoronto.ca/doecorpus/ (accessed February 2021).
48
R. Jurovics, ‘Sermo Lupi and the Moral Purpose of Rhetoric’, in B. Huppé and P. Szarmach
(eds), The Old English Homily and its Backgrounds (Albany, 1978), pp. 203–20, at p. 203. See
also Roberts, ‘Robbares’, pp. 239–42 for an analysis of Ælfric’s and Wulfstan’s use of reaflac in
the homiletic tradition.

106 Brittany Hanlon
society amid the early eleventh-century Viking invasions. Wulfstan

declared:
Things have not gone well now for a long time at home or abroad,
but there has been devastation and famine, burning and bloodshed
in every district again and again; and stealing and killing, sedition
and pestilence, murrain and disease, malice and hate and
spoliation by robbers (rypera reaflac) have harmed us very
grievously.49
He called upon Old Testament imagery of the plight of the Israelites,
whilst echoing scenes from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle on the Viking
raids on Lindisfarne.50 Wulfstan paired reaflac with the verb derian,
meaning ‘to damage’, with the church positioned as its victim. The
term comes across as an affront to God, as well as a symbol of his
wrath. Wulfstan repeated slight variations of these lines in other
homilies, reaffirming the importance of this message and the place of
reaflac in the ongoing list of English sins, but he also stated: ‘And
that came about, according to what he said, through robbery by the
powerful (þurh ricra reaflac), and through the coveting of ill-gotten
gains, through the lawlessness of the people and through unjust
judgments […] through gluttony and manifold sins they destroyed
their country and themselves they perished.’51 Wulfstan drew an
explicit parallel between, on the one hand, the idea that the sins of
the English caused the pressing Danish conquest of England,
and, on the other, Gildas’ frustrated expression that the
sins of the British led to the English invasions during the sixth
century.52 ‘Robbery by the powerful’ and ‘the coveting of ill-gotten
49
‘Ne dohte hit nu lange inne ne ute: ac wæs here 7 hungor, nu bryne 7 blodgyte on
gewelhwylcan ende oft 7 gelome. 7 us stalu 7 cwalu, stric 7 steorfa, orfcwealm 7 uncoþu, hol
7 rypera reaflac dered’: Wulfstan of York, Larspell (ed. D. Bethurum, The Homilies of
Wulfstan (Oxford, 1957), p. 257; trans. Whitelock, p. 929).
50
J.T. Lionarons, ‘Napier Homily L: Wulfstan’s Eschatology at the Close of his Career’, in M.
Townend (ed.), Wulfstan, Archbishop of York: The Proceedings of the Second Alcuin Conference
(Turnhout, 2004), pp. 413–28, at p. 414.
51
‘And þæt wæs geworden þæs þe he sæde, þurh ricra reaflac 7 þurh gitsunge wohgestreona, ðurh
leode unlaga & þurh wohdomas s[…] þurh oferfylla 7 mænigfealde synna heora eard hy
forworhtan 7 selfe hy forwudan’: Wulfstan of York, Sermo Lupi Ad Anglos Quando dani
maxime persecute sunt eos quod fuit anno millesimo. XIIII ab incarnatione Domini nostri Iesu
Cristi (ed. Bethurum, pp. 274–5; trans. Whitelock p. 934).
52
P. Wormald, ‘Archbishop Wulfstan: Eleventh-Century State-Builder’, in Townend (ed.),
Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, pp. 9–27, at pp. 20–2. See also D. Carlson, ‘Wulfstan, Alcuin,
Bede, and Gildas: Derivation of a Late Pagan uirga furoris’, Anglia 134 (2016), pp. 285–97.
The comparison between Viking attacks on England and the English aduentus in
fifth-century Britain was not original to Wulfstan; he borrowed this conceit from Alcuin’s
writings.

property’ resonates with descriptions of reaflac as an opponent’s

acquisition of lands in contemporary vernacular lawsuits. Wulfstan
linked greed for landed wealth with a downfall of epic proportions,
which made reaflac another vice with dangerous consequences for the
soul. For Ælfric, the Holy Apostles’ sanctity was derived in part from
their ability to resist the urge to commit reaflac: they were not
‘drawn by desire of any rapine (æniges reaflaces), to that which they
beheld without’.53 At the time of S 877’s composition then, reaflac’s
inclusion in a psalm and homilies that addressed greed highlights its
significance as an impious act; reaflac reflected on the actor’s
character and damaged hopes of salvation. This moral dimension to
reaflac was an important ingredient in its legal deployment: it not
only heightened the illegitimacy of an opponent’s behaviour but cast
the defendant as the victim of unwarranted aggression beyond what
any law-abiding Christian society should accept.
The relationship between reaflac and rapina in the Salisbury Psalter
supports the notion that reaflac was a vernacular reflex of the Latin
discourse on violence, and that its place in lawsuit narratives held a
similar function to McHaffie’s violentia.54 This equation has relevance
to the Libellus, in which rapina appears with great frequency. For
instance, the account of Downham’s acquisition distils the idea of the
opponent’s landholding as an invasion. A certain Leofsige and his wife
Sigeflæd were repeatedly accused of rapina after they reneged on an
earlier deal that involved selling to the monastery two hides at
Downham for fifteen pounds.55 Leofsige is described as having
‘forcibly usurped (abstulit cum rapina) Peterborough and Oundle and
Kettering’, and ‘inflicted violence (rapinam)’ against the Holy
Church.56 In Chapter 53, a man called Thurferth also ‘took by force’
(abstulit cum rapina) the lands at Northwold.57 Like reaflac’s place in
lawsuit documents, this choice of language connotes incursive
violence. The author paired rapina with abstulit – formed from the
verb aferre, meaning ‘to carry away’, ‘to deceive’, or ‘to steal’– just as
53
‘næron mid gecnyrdnysse æniges reaflaces getogene to ðam ðe hi wiðutan sceawodon’: Ælfric of
Eysnsham, The Nativity of St. Andrew the Apostle (ed. and trans. B. Thorpe, The Homilies of the
Anglo-Saxon Church; The First Part Containing the Sermones Catholici or Homilies of Ælfric, in
the Original Anglo-Saxon with an English Version, 2 vols (London, 1844–60), vol. 1, pp.
577–89, at pp. 586–7).
54
P. Wormald, Papers Preparatory to the Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century,
vol. 2: From God’s Law to Common Law, ed. S. Baxter and J. Hudson (London, 2014), at pp.
156–7, http://www.earlyenglishlaws.ac.uk/reference/wormald/ (accessed 11 February 2021).
55
‘abstulit cum rapina Burch et Undelas et Kateringas’, ‘iniuriam ac rapinam’: Libellus Æthelwoldi
[hereafter LA], c. 10. (ed. E. Blake, Liber Eliensis (London, 1962), at p. 84; trans. S. Keynes and
A. Kennedy, Anglo-Saxon Ely (Woodbridge, forthcoming), at p. 9).
56
LA, c. 10 (ed. Blake, p. 84; trans. Keynes and Kennedy, p. 9).
57
LA, c. 53. (ed. Blake, p. 114; trans. Keynes and Kennedy, p. 29).

108 Brittany Hanlon
S 877’s author paired reaflac with forset. The juxtaposition of the

preposition cum with the noun rapina also closely resembles mid
reaflace, which can be found in various Old English texts beyond the
legal corpus. For example, in Ælfric’s homiletic rendition of the
biblical Book of the Maccabees, the thegn Heliodorus was instructed
to go to the Holy Temple and fetch the treasure therein mid reaflace,
translated by Walter Skeat as ‘by spoliation’. In both ‘with’
constructions, the victim is a holy place and the aggressor a lay
nobleman, suggesting a contextual connection in the use of this ‘with’
formulation in different languages.58 Moreover, both Latin and Old
English authors failed to describe how Wulfbald, Leofsige or Thurferth
occupied the estate in question, but they each depicted a sudden
takeover. The Salisbury Psalter’s glosses are difficult to date; Celia and
Kenneth Sisam proposed sometime between the end of the tenth
century and 1100.59 Reaflac’s gloss of rapina demonstrates that monastic
communities of either the late tenth century (when the Old English
version of the Libellus was originally composed) or ecclesiastics of the
early twelfth century (when the Latin Libellus was transcribed)
understood the close relationship between those terms, and could use
one to render the other. The correspondence between these words in the
psalters highlights the similar way in which authors describe violence in
the Libellus and tenth-century dispute records. This is a point in favour
of the Libellus’ basis on genuine Old English records, but it also suggests
that dispute records were not simply conceived as legal documents to
build an argument, but also carefully crafted compositions with a moral
and didactic value, creating a new frame in which to set violent acts to
discourage further damage to ecclesiastical and secular institutions.
Reaflac: an unassailable charge?
The argument for a semantic relationship between reaflac and rapina in

the Libellus Æthelwoldi has been established. With this in mind, we can
turn to the meaning of reaflac and rapina (and related Latin
terminology) as generic terms for wrongdoing that obfuscate the factual
details of the legal case.60 Reaflac did not indicate a specific act but was
a matter of one litigant’s perspective, signifying a sense of injustice
rather than an indication of applied force. This is shown by the
accusing parties’ vulnerability in the Libellus and S 1211 to
counterclaims of violence like reaflac and rapina from rival litigants.
58
Ælfric of Eynsham, Passio Machabeorum (ed. and trans. Skeat, vol. 2, pp. 66–124, at pp. 116–19).
59
Sisam and Sisam, Salisbury, p. 14.
60
McHaffie, ‘Law’, pp. 38–9.

The frequency of return accusations of violence and occasionally the

king’s support of the accused party indicates that these terms did not
constitute an unassailable, objective charge.
There are two sides to every story yet one of these is purposefully
obscured, for the extant documents are not non-partisan minutes of a
courtroom case.61 They are either carefully constructed narratives
written from the victor’s perspective, like S 877, or else they formed a
statement of formal ownership, such as the Cooling Letter, prior to the
case’s settlement.62 The lawsuit document’s air of objectivity was
potentially a perspective of great benefit to the accusing party in the
future, as collective memory of the case’s finer details faded into
oblivion. Hence, upon the mention of reaflac with its connotations of
rapine, it becomes easy to assume that Wulfbald had acted as a hostile
interloper, rendering him the villain of the piece.
There is no telling how Wulfbald would have presented his version of
events in writing, but S 877 allows us to make a plausible reconstruction.
The dispute began when Wulfbald’s father died, at which point ‘he went
to his stepmother’s estate and took everything that he could find there
inside and out, small and great’.63 S 877 does not question to whom
the land belonged; it designates it as ‘Wulfbald’s stepmother’s land’.
This statement of ownership alongside the king’s charge of reaflac (or,
as we have seen, more likely the hundred or the shire court’s) leaves no
question as to Wulfbald’s guilt. Wulfbald may have forcefully seized the
property, but he potentially had reason to do so, and bringing reaflac
into the equation functioned to turn the use of violence against him.
The death of Wulfbald’s father intimates that this was a case of
disputed inheritance. A will related to this case does not survive (if one
was ever made) yet Wulfbald’s refusal to leave implies that this land
had, in his mind, been earmarked for him. He may have even claimed
that his stepmother had committed reaflac, turning the same accusation
against the other side.
The Libellus confirms that rival litigants would retaliate using the same
violent terminology as their accusers. Chapter 8 of the Libellus reports
that Ælfwold of Mardleybury sold one hide of land and two weirs at
Stretham to Bishop Æthelwold but then reneged on the deal, claiming
that ‘he had been forced to it and had been afflicted with violence and
61
P. Wormald, ‘Giving God and King their Due’, in P. Wormald (ed.), Legal Culture in the Early
Medieval West: Law as Text, Image and Experience (London, 1999), pp. 333–55, at p. 348.
62
Fiore, Transformation, pp 228–9; S. Keynes, ‘The Fonthill Letter’, in M. Korhammer (ed.),
Words, Texts and Manuscripts: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Presented to Helmut Gneuss on Occasion
of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 53–98, at p. 54.
63
‘ferd he to steopmoder land ⁊ nam þær eal he þær funde inne ⁊ ute læsse ⁊ mare’: S 877 (ed. and
trans. Robertson, pp. 128–9).

110 Brittany Hanlon
pillage (uim ac rapinam)’.64 Ælfwold emphasized the violent wrong by

using the same term, rapina, that the Libellus’ author used when
formulating similar accusations. The difference, however, in our
understanding of the nature of Ælfwold’s complaint comes from seeing
the dispute through the eyes of the Ely community, who framed his
accusation of rapina as a false claim. Moreover, the author declined to
elaborate on the identity of the party whom Ælfwold accused of
forcing him into this deal. This made Ælfwold’s argument seem
ambiguous and difficult for the reader to rate positively, in the same
way that Wulfbald’s multiple refusals to pay his wergild rendered him a
less credible candidate for landownership. The Libellus also recounts
how litigants blamed Æthelwold or Abbot Byrhtnoth for coercing them
into selling or exchanging their lands. Ælfwold the Fat sold Byrhtnoth
three hides at Chippenham in exchange for a hundred shillings per
hide.65 On the appointed day of the exchange, however, a certain Ulf
claimed seventy-five acres of Ælfwold’s land and so Ælfwold could not
close the deal.66 Ulf owed the abbot thirty-six acres of land as part of a
separate tenurial agreement.67 Ælfwold reported this to another
Ælfwold, Ealdorman Æthelwine’s brother, and claimed that the abbot
had ‘circumvented them by deceit, and that Ulf had claimed the land
at his [Byrhtnoth’s] instigation’.68 One may assume that Ælfwold of
Mardleybury accused the community at Ely specifically of the violence
that they had criticized others for during the breakdown of other
tenurial agreements.
The contemporary relevance of violence committed against Ely in the
early eleventh century is striking, given that claims like Ælfwold’s had
been rendered moot by the Norman Conquest in 1066. The original Old
English charters underlying the Libellus aimed to preserve the abbey’s
claims to legitimate acquisition of its estates against counterclaims that
arose after Edgar’s death. Bishop Hervey was renegotiating Ely’s power as
a newly reformed religious house during the early twelfth century.69 The
abbey accordingly sought to cultivate relations with neighbouring
landowners and re-enter the ‘local economy of exchange’.70 A new secular
audience likely compelled the Libellus’ author to preserve the trade-off
64
‘se coactum ad hoc fuisse et uim ac rapinam sibi illatam esse’: LA, c. 8 (ed. Blake, p. 83; trans.
Keynes and Kennedy, p. 7).
65
66
67
68
‘quod abbas eos fraude circumuenisset et quod eo impellente Ulf illam terram calumpniatus
esset’: LA, c. 14 (ed. Blake, p. 90; trans. Keynes and Kennedy, p. 10).
69
C. Clarke, Writing Power in Anglo-Saxon England: Texts, Hierarchies, Economies (Cambridge,
2012), at p. 145.
70
Clarke, Writing Power, pp. 151–4.

between litigants’ accusations of violence, which suggest that violent

terminology itself remained a necessary plot device to aid the abbey’s
twelfth-century goals with a ‘cautionary tale’ concerning Ely’s earlier
successes against external lay threat.71
Freighted with moral concern though charges of reaflac were,
accusations could be resisted, as in the events recounted in the voice of
Queen Eadgifu in the Cooling Letter. The letter’s composition arose
from with a dispute over inheritance: Eadgifu’s father had borrowed
thirty pounds from Goda, entrusting the estate to him as collateral.
Prior to his death, her father returned the money to Goda and
bequeathed the title deeds to Eadgifu, but Goda did not accept this,
withholding the estate from her for six years. Eadgifu pleaded with her
husband, King Edward, who ‘Prohibited him [Goda] the estate […]
Then it happened in the first place that the king so strongly blamed
Goda that he was deprived of all the [land]books and property, all that
he owned.’72 Eadgifu stated that she did not wish to mistreat Goda as
he had mistreated her and returned Goda’s properties, except for two
estates at Osterland. Yet she did not return the title deeds to Goda’s
estates as he had not proven himself trustworthy, implying that Goda
held these estates from Eadgifu as lænland – defined by Bosworth and
Toller as ‘land let on lease which was never out of the possession of the
lessor’.73 Upon King Edward’s death, however, Goda petitioned King
Æthelstan at the witan’s gathering in Hamsey to intercede for the
return of these title deeds. The letter makes little comment on this
stage of the proceedings, merely saying that ‘the king did so’.74 Eadgifu
consequently, ‘gave back to him [Goda] all except the [land]book for
Osterland. And he willingly allowed her that [land]book and humbly
thanked her for the others.’75 This passage, with Eadgifu keeping the
estates at Osterland, suggests that despite the king apparently siding
with her, she and Goda had reached a negotiated settlement. Although
the letter ends with a ruling that found her rival Goda and his sons
guilty of reaflac, forcing Goda to reinstate Eadgifu’s rights to the land at
Cooling, there had been room for his sons, Leofstan and Leofric, to
challenge her case before and after the charge; hence the letter’s
composition c.959. The narrative presents a pendulum swing of which
71
Clarke, Writing Power, p. 153; J. Paxton, ‘Textual Communities in the English Fenlands: A Lay
Audience for Monastic Chronicles?’, Anglo-Norman Studies 26 (2004), pp. 123–38, at p. 123.
72
‘he him þæt land forbead […] Þa gelamp on fyrste þæt se cynincg Godan oncuþe swa swyþe
swa him man ætrehte bec ⁊ land ealle þa þe he ahte’: S 1211 (ed. and trans. Harmer, pp. 37–8).
73
Bosworth, ‘lænland’, https://bosworthtoller.com/20971 (accessed 11 February 2021).
74
‘se cyncg þa swa dyde’: S 1211 (ed. and trans. Harmer, pp. 37–8).
75
‘heo him ealle agef buton Osterlandes bec ⁊ he þa boc unnendre handa hire to let. ⁊ þara oþerra
mid eaðmettum geþancude’: S 1211 (ed. and trans. Harmer, pp. 37–8).

112 Brittany Hanlon
side successive kings supported as Eadgifu’s landownership was the

subject of quarrel at numerous royal assemblies.
As previously stated, the Cooling Letter presents a series of mirrored
events, with litigants appealing to the favour of a king to demand the
return of their lands from their opponent, who has behaved
illegitimately. Which litigant ‘won’ their case depended on which king
reigned and the litigant’s ability to mobilize their personal connection
to that ruler. The letter’s portrayal of the two litigants’ behaviour
during each case as part of the estate’s broader contested history is of
great interest. Eadgifu maintained that while the king commanded
Leofstan and Leofric to return what they had seized from her, a higher
judicial power did not explicitly demand that she hand anything over
when Goda appeared to ‘win’ his case. She restored the title deeds
because Æthelstan politely asked (not ordered) her to, as reflected by
the narrative’s emphasis on Goda’s gratitude, which intimates that
Eadgifu went above and beyond the necessities of diplomacy. It is easy
to lose sight of the conflict between the two and the underlying royal
enforcement behind Eadgifu’s return of Goda’s title deeds. Eadgifu had
disguised her loss and recast it as a moment of generosity. Goda’s
perspective is missing, and we must trust Eadgifu’s word from the
outset. The question lingers as to whether, like Wulfbald, Goda
presented Eadgifu’s actions as reaflac, and did the two trade accusations
of reaflac over the decades, before several kings?
The presentation of Leofstan and Leofric’s actions as if they had used
force also makes little practical sense upon closer examination,
highlighting Eadgifu’s conscious efforts to place them in the wrong.
Although Goda swore an oath confirming the suit’s permanent
settlement, after King Eadred’s death in 955 the lands changed hands
once more. With King Eadwig’s permission, Goda’s sons berypte
(translated as ‘deprived’ by Harmer) Eadgifu’s control of the estate;
Eadwig believed that the brothers had more rights to the lands than
Eadgifu.76 Berypte is formed from the verb be-rypan which also means
‘to plunder’ like its verbal counterparts ripan or a-rypan and their
connotations of ripping.77 After noting the juxtaposition of reaflac and
rypera in two of Wulfstan’s homilies, Jane Roberts suggested a semantic
connection between the two which served to reinforce the image of
‘aggravated robbery’.78 By mentioning reaflac, Eadgifu cultivated this
image of plunder happening to her estates and intimated that despite
royal support, Goda’s sons had perpetrated an illegal act. It is difficult
76
S 1211 (ed. and trans. Harmer, pp. 37–8).
77
Bosworth, ‘be-rypan’, https://bosworthtoller.com/3883 (accessed 11 February 2021).
78
Roberts, ‘Robbares’, p. 240.

to believe that they did so when the law had been on their side: there was
simply no need. This aspect of the narrative suggests that reaflac was here
identified retrospectively and used to besmirch an opponent’s previous
actions – violent or otherwise – as part of a strategy of delegitimization
in the present or future, should another dispute arise.
Although the intended audience of early medieval charters is not
always clear, the insertion of reaflac into narratives like that found in
the Cooling Letter supports the notion of an internal audience; it
constituted a family history of sorts.79 The letter’s preservation suggests
that Goda’s descendants feared being presented with such documents
should they seek to renew their ancestor’s claim. The language of
reaflac also possessed the potential to fortify the ownership rights of
Eadgifu’s successors. In an ecclesiastical context where an institution
stated its claim on contested estates – such as S 1457, written on behalf
of the community at Rochester in Kent – documents predicated on
accusations of reaflac would contribute to a more favourable
institutional history of landownership.80 Whilst charters present a
situation as resolved, that may not always have been the case. There is
a tension between the tone of such records; they attempt to impose
finality and yet their very existence shows how things could change
over several generations. The creation of such a lawsuit document did
not always mean a final victory.
The Libellus presents a Latin counterpart to this moment in Eadgifu’s
lawsuit: several examples where Ely labels a rival’s actions as rapina echo
the subjectivity of reaflac, with the term sometimes appearing when the
rival had been found to be in the right. For instance, Ealdorman
Æthelwine and his brothers had violently seized the lands at Hatfield
from Ely after Edgar had deprived their father of the estate. As the
Libellus describes these actions, ‘they seized (inuadentes) the land and
appropriated (uendicarunt) it to themselves’, and ‘the security of the
land was violated (ac rupto federe terre)’.81 With emphasis on phrases
like inuadentes (the present participle of the verb inuadere, meaning ‘to
invade’) and rupto (meaning ‘burst open’), the Libellus utilizes the same
violent language as reaflac by suggesting that Æthelwine and his
brothers had made a frenzied armed attack on an estate. The threat is
heightened by the verb sibi uendicarunt, which although means ‘to
acquire something by legal process’, also has connotations of
vengeance.82 The Libellus also styles Æthelwine’s family as ‘powerful
79
Foot, ‘Reading’, p. 41.
80
81
‘eandem terram inuadentes sibi uendicarunt’: LA, c. 5 (ed. Blake, p. 79; trans. Keynes and
Kennedy, p. 5).
82
C. Lewis and C. Short, A New Latin Dictionary, (New York, 1891), at p. 1993.

114 Brittany Hanlon
men’ (uiri potentes), depicting the community at Ely as the weak victims
of crime committed by violent secular authorities. The Libellus, S 877
and the Cooling Letter show the intense competition for landed
property faced by churches and widows, even royal ones like Eadgifu.
It is significant that extant references to reaflac in the vernacular lawsuit
record are restricted to these parties.83 Strategic emphasis on weakness
through the mention of reaflac could, paradoxically, become a strength
when parties possessed a limited legal capacity to resolve their disputes.84
Nevertheless, Æthelwine and his brothers seemingly pursued their
claim in the proper judicial manner. The Libellus recounts that ‘when
their claim was set out and presented, the claimants prevailed’; the
brothers pursued their claim to court, probably the shire meeting, and
succeeded there.85 Why would Æthelwine ‘invade’ the land when he
had just obtained a judgement which asserted that Hatfield legitimately
belonged to him? (This seems similar to the situation described by the
Cooling Letter where Goda’s sons illegitimately seized Cooling from
Eadgifu even though King Eadwig had just granted the brothers the
rights to the estate.) Æthelwine’s actions according to the Libellus seem
all the stranger when it is later mentioned that his family were in a
powerful enough position to sell the land back to Ely on their own
terms.86 In the presence of witnesses, Ely exchanged with Æthelwine
landed assets given to the community as part of Wulfstan of Dalham’s
will, alongside five hides of land they received through the forfeiture of
a criminal named Wulfine the Cook.87 The dispute ended, therefore,
with a ‘standard’ land agreement. The nature of reaflac, rapina and
violentia as rhetorical mud to be slung at opponents was evidently well
established. The appearance of inuadentes in cases like Æthelwine’s,
levelled by Ely at a party legally judged to be in the right, suggests that
its rhetorical aspect was glaringly obvious to any member of the witan
83
J. Nelson, ‘The Wary Widow’, in W. Davies and P. Fouracre (eds), Property and Power in the
Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 82–113. See also T. Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth
Century: Power, Lordship, and Origins of European Government (Princeton, 2008), at pp.
307–12; W. Brown, Violence in Medieval Europe (London, 2014), at pp. 106–11; Fiore,
Transformation, pp. 230–5.
84
Rabin, ‘Capital’, p. 188.
85
‘Enarrata ergo ac ostensa sua calumpnia, calumpniatores preualuerunt’: LA, c. 5 (ed. Blake, p.
79; trans. Keynes and Kennedy, p. 5).
86
Assignments of Property to Thorney Abbey (ed. and trans. Robertson, pp. 256–7). The
community desperately needed wood from Hatfield’s estates, not only to build their church
but also to construct a place to rear pigs. There had been eighty-three ‘young swine’ at
Hatfield. See J. Kreiner, ‘Pigs in the Flesh and Fisc: An Early Medieval Ecology’, Past and
Present 236.1 (2017), pp. 3–42, at pp. 4–10; R. Naismith, ‘The Ely Memoranda and the
Economy of the Late Anglo-Saxon Fenland’, ASE 41 (2012), pp. 277–342, at pp. 352–6.
87

with experience of similar disputes and was therefore taken with a pinch
of salt.
Chapter 34 of the Libellus presents us with another example of an
‘invasion’ of an estate that seems to be an unrealistic course of action
for a rival party to pursue. Beahmund of Holland supposedly
‘wrongfully laid waste’ (iniuste diripuerunt) to St Æthelthryth’s lands at
Stonea.88 However, as with Goda’s sons and their alleged violent seizure
of Cooling and Osterland, it is unlikely that Beahmund had attacked
Stonea. The text states that he already held the estate on loan; he
simply refused to give it back to Ely. Ely often threw around
accusations of rapine without justification. The dispute over Stonea
closed with Beahmund forfeiting the land. He was also instructed to
pay compensation to the abbot and a fine to the king.89 The presiding
witan, however, only dealt this punishment after Beahmund refused to
answer multiple calls to attend the shire meeting to resolve the suit
raised by the abbot.90 It was Beahmund’s defiance, as opposed to his
supposed violent dispossession of the Ely community, that in the eyes
of the witan was the greater injury. These instances of reaflac and its
Latin counterparts signified an attack on the dispossessed landowner’s
rights rather than an actual attack on the land itself, in a similar way to
the raids mentioned in the Chronicle. This vocabulary had widespread
use in the wider judicial framework. Its repetition across different
circumstances where violence probably did not occur indicates that
such terms formed part of a mental checklist for proving an opponent’s
illegitimacy.
Earthly and divine retribution
While reaflac and rapina convey wrongful use of force, it would be

inaccurate to argue that violence in the accounts of late Anglo-Saxon
disputing processes was restricted to rhetoric. Reaflac very often did
come with genuine violence on one or both sides, but the term’s use
presumes a divide between legitimate force and illegitimate violence.91
Scholars like Lambert have shown how violent retribution was a
perfectly acceptable part of Anglo-Saxon society, but a group or
individual’s use of force soon became a wrongful act of violence, not a
legitimate pursuit of justice, if it meant losing one’s property rights to a
88
LA, c. 34 (ed. Blake, p. 97; Keynes and Kennedy, p. 19).
89
90
91
G. Halsall ‘Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West: An Introductory Survey’, in
G. Halsall (ed.), Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West (Woodbridge, 1998), pp.
1–45, at pp. 7–17.

116 Brittany Hanlon
rival claimant.92 While previous scholarship has emphasized individual,

secular acts of violence that were the focus of contemporary law codes,
it was also possible for there to be ‘corporate’ violence undertaken by
families or institutions, such as monasteries.93 The Libellus’ allusions to
Ely’s use of force to achieve its tenurial goals supports this notion. How
litigants in the vernacular texts reacted to counterclaims by way of
violence or otherwise is unclear. The Cooling Letter does not explain
how the suit finally ended. S 877 reports that the dispute was
suspended with Wulfbald’s death, yet there are no clues as to how he
died. Despite the royal assembly declaring that his life was forfeit to the
king, the charter implies that Wulfbald never suffered punishment as
he died in possession of the disputed estates.94
Eadmær’s murder brought proceedings to a head. The fact that the
charter’s narrative cuts off at this point suggests that the audience is
meant to conclude that while neither party in this internal familial
battle had a legitimate claim to the estate, this was a step too far in
terms of violence, hence the land’s passing into the king’s hands.
The Libellus’ debt to early English dispute records allows historians to
identify additional examples of actual violence in another region of late
tenth-century England that the Latin counterparts to reaflac served to
mask. Alan Kennedy was correct to observe that there were ‘signs of
very rough justice’ in the Libellus that transgressed the legal niceties of
claim and counterclaim.95 Ely’s unforgiving seizure of the estates at
Stonea and the constricti (binding) of Beahmund of Holland in Chapter
34 as punishment for failing to answer the shire meeting’s call on
multiple occasions is reminiscent of the way Wulfbald’s actions were
presented as part of the legal narrative in S 877.96 The abbot also
threatened to force Ælfwold’s family back into slavery if he reneged on
selling Stretham, providing an insight into the ecclesiastical institution’s
propensity for threat when it suited.97 Moreover, in Chapters 11, 28 and
92
P. Hyams, ‘Feud and the State in Late Anglo-Saxon England’, Journal of British Studies 40
(2001), pp. 1–43, at pp. 6–17; Lambert, Law and Order, pp. 2–8, 253–62; Lambert, ‘Public
Order’, pp. 15–25.
93
Keynes, ‘Crime’, pp. 68–81; Abels, ‘Limits’, pp. 49–53.
94
95
Kennedy, ‘Libellus’, pp. 134, 152.
96
‘Statuerunt quoque, ut, si sponte sua hoc reddere nollent, captione suæ pecunie constricti
iustificarentur’, ‘They decided also that if they would not pay this voluntarily, they should
be distrained and punished by seizure of their property’: LA, c. 34 (ed. Blake, p. 97; trans.
97
LA, c. 8 (ed. Blake, pp. 82–4; trans. Keynes and Kennedy, p. 5); see also D. Pelteret, ‘Two Old
English Lists of Serfs’, Mediaeval Studies 48 (1986), pp. 470–513. According to the Libellus,
Abbot Byrthnoth reminded Ælfwold, at the shire meeting at Hertford, that he sold the land
at Stretham in exchange for the freedom of his wife and sons, who had previously been serfs
on Ely’s estates at Hatfield. The implication being that if Ælfwold pursued his dispute
against Ely further, his wife and sons would soon be returned to an unfree status.

46 the opposing litigants died brutal deaths and their claims were
consequently settled, with the lands being returned to their ‘rightful’
owners at Ely Abbey. Leofsige of the Downham dispute ‘died
shamefully and miserably in a ferment of divine vengeance’, while
Ingulf, who seized Brandon against God’s will, ‘took nothing of food
and drink from that day on […] for his heart burst at once’.98
We have no sense of who was responsible for the deaths of these
litigants, or even if they were instead the result of natural causes, as
Ingulf ’s seems to have been. What is interesting is that even though the
Libellus does not specify the circumstances of the rivals’ deaths it
manages to revel in their demise, which is framed as miraculous,
emphasizing righteous, and often vicious, violence as part of divine
dispensation. Byrhtferth of Ramsey (c.970–1020) related a comparable
situation of divine vengeance in the Vita S. Oswaldi, whereby God
punished the unnamed murderers of King Edward the Martyr, striking
one of them blind and causing the others to suffer similarly.99
Byrhtferth and the author of the Libellus potentially had the same
biblical injunction in mind when writing their respective narratives:
‘Vengeance is mine, says the Lord, and I will repay.’100 The deaths of
the Libellus’ litigants were not simply viewed as fortunate coincidences
that worked to Ely’s benefit, they were instead malefactors who
received their divine comeuppance through violence.
Offences against the church implicitly justified a violent supernatural
response, whilst also reinforcing Ely’s claim that God was on their side.
It was surely no coincidence that the text characterized each rival as, at
various points prior to their untimely deaths, a deceiver (deceptor) whose
crimes were rapina, ‘forcibly taking’ (iniuste abstulit) and ‘adding
trickeries to trickeries to reclaim the lands’ (se per dolum recuperaturos
terram quam uendiderant).101 The Libellus surpasses the vernacular
dispute records in the religiously charged language used to describe the
efforts of the abbey’s rivals: these litigants had been marked out as
offending God through laying such a claim.102 Chapter 28’s Uvi,
98
‘ultione diuina feruente turpiter ac miserabiliter interiit’: LA, c. 11 (ed. Blake, p. 85; trans.
Keynes and Kennedy, p. 7); ‘nichil edulii aut liquoris gustauit. Rumpebatur enim sine omni
dilatione cor eius’: LA, c. 46 (ed. Blake, p. 110; trans. Keynes and Kennedy, p. 21).
99
‘One of them endured a semblance of punishment so that he lost both his eyes and suffered an
inexpressible deprivation of both his visions – I mean the loss of sight in life as well as in the
next!’, ‘Vnus autem ex illis talem sustinuit pene similitudinem ut, amissis oculis ambobus,
utrorumque luminum sustineret inedicibile detrimentum – luminum dico istius uite pariter
et future!’: Byrhtferth of Ramsey, Vita S. Oswaldi IV.20 (Byrhtferth of Ramsey, The Lives of
St Oswald and St Ecgwine, ed. and trans. M. Lapidge (Oxford, 2009), pp. 142–5).
100
Deuteronomy XXXII.35; Romans XII.19.
101
LA, c. 11, 28, 46 (ed. Blake, pp. 85, 94, 110; trans. Keynes and Kennedy, pp. 7, 13, 21).
102
Brown, Violence, pp. 69–70.

118 Brittany Hanlon
‘behaved as one who already had a fatal wound in his body […] after whose
healing indeed through his own want of sense turned the scar back into a
wound’ when he claimed Stonea.103 Additionally, in Chapter 11, Leofsige’s
claim on Downham greatly afflicted the servants of God.104 S 877 and the
Cooling Letter lack this extra detail.
The closest Old English example to the Libellus lies in S 1467’s
description of the desperately ill king Harold Harefoot, which implies
that his sickness was divine punishment for his crime of wresting the
estate at Sandwich from the hands of Christ Church, Canterbury, ‘all
against God’s will’. The text proclaims that ‘the king lay and grew
black’ when confronted with his supposed crime.105 A key difference
with S 1467 was the identity of the defendant: S 877 and S 1211
defended widowed queens and their rights in the face of opposition
from members of the lay elite (although the widow’s defence was
indirect in the case of S 877, as it is possible that the narrative was
composed at an earlier date, before it was clear that Ælfthryth would
acquire the lands). In contrast, S 1467, like the Libellus, seemingly
defended an ecclesiastical institution’s rights versus lay aristocrats. The
issue of agency in S 1467’s narrative is, however, surprisingly
complicated. The charter opens with Harold being accused of seizing
Sandwich: ‘here it is made known in this document that King Harold
had Sandwich taken from Christchurch for his own use, and kept it for
himself for about a year’, and it is to him that the monks go to retrieve
the estate.106 Yet the text is actually more concerned with Abbot
Ælfstan’s misguided attempts to appropriate the estate’s income for
himself. It says very little about the initial seizure, but the implication
is that Sandwich’s occupation was a scheme hatched by the abbot with
Steorra, the king’s steward, so that Ælfstan could gain Sandwich’s
seigneurial profits. Sandwich’s restoration occurs halfway through the
text, but the remaining narrative concerns Ælfstan’s continued exploits.
S 1467 relates how the abbot, for instance, attempted to build a trench
at Ebbsfleet with the intention of providing a channel for the ships he
103
‘qui iam letale uulnus in corpore habebat […] post cuius uero sanationem per propriam
uecordiam cicatricem eandem redegit in uulnus ut’: LA, c. 28 (ed. Blake, p. 94; trans.
104
‘qui seruos Dei tantum afficiebat’: LA, c. 11 (ed. Blake, p. 85; trans. Keynes and Kennedy, p. 7).
105
‘eall ongean Godes willan’; ‘þa læg se king 7 asweartode eall’: S 1467 (ed. and trans. Robertson,
pp. 174–7), issued c.1040. See also Charters of Christ Church Canterbury, ed. N.P. Brooks and S.
E. Kelly (Oxford, 2013), no. 164. Brooks and Kelly note that although S 1467 refers to Harold
as king, this charter was written after his death in March 1040. The draftsmen’s description of
the king’s illness and promise to restore Sandwich to Christ Church functioned as a written
testimony to a royal deathbed attempt to defend Christ Church’s interests in subsequent
reigns.
106
‘Her kyþ on þison gewrite Harold king let beridan Sandwich of Xpēs cyrcean him sylfan to
handa 7 hæfde hit him wel neh twelf monað’: S 1467 (ed. and trans. Robertson, pp. 174–5).

had at Sandwich.107 The attempt failed, at which point the text states that
‘he labours all in vain who labours against the will of Christ’.108 S 1467
portrays Ælfstan as a villain, yet the dispute is still framed at the outset
as an improper seizure by the king, in a similar way to the Libellus’
portrayal of secular intruders on Ely’s estates.109
The twelfth-century Libellus represents a different genre from the Old
English dispute records on which it had likely been based, although they
were composed with the same defensive purposes in mind.110 Simon
Keynes has usefully described it as a ‘house chronicle’, while Catherine
Clarke reminds us that the Libellus was composed with the aim of
depicting Æthelwold as a strong spiritual patron and procurer of lands,
to justify the bishopric’s present landholdings.111 Although the Libellus
uses different conventions and genres from the earlier Old English
dispute records, the picture it paints of opponents is recognizably the
same as that drawn in vernacular documents that use the term reaflac.
Some violent acts must have been carried out by rival litigants, but the
point was to make them look like Godless individuals while violence
carried out by the author’s own party constituted the enforcement of
legitimate justice.
Conclusion
Neither the Old English term reaflac nor the Latin term rapina in the
Libellus elaborated on the nature of the attacks on estates beyond
shared general associations with pillaging. The terms did not denote
theft, which reflected a different conception of crime in late
Anglo-Saxon England. If the likes of Wulfbald, Goda and Leofsige had
committed violence, historians simply cannot extrapolate the details
from a study of the terminology alone. A key difference, however,
between this study of reaflac and McHaffie’s exploration of violentia lies
in the moral weight that accusations of violence added to claims for
rightful possession. McHaffie rejects the argument that the language of
violence in eleventh-century French contexts arose from a monastic
ideology of peace and was used to portray monastic opponents as
immoral. In contrast, draftsmen of tenth-century English charters
purposely chose reaflac because it was suffused with legal and
107
S 1467 (ed. and trans. Robertson), pp. 178–9.
108
‘forþam he swingð eall on idel þe swincð ongean Xpēs willan’: S 1467 (ed. and trans.
Robertson), pp. 178–9.
109
Christ Church, Canterbury, ed. Brooks and Kelly, p. 1152.
110
Halsall, ‘Survey’, p. 6.
111
Clarke, Writing Power, p. 146; S. Keynes, ‘Ely Abbey 672–1109’, in P. Meadows and N. Ramsey
(eds), A History of Ely Cathedral (Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 3–58, at p. 7.

120 Brittany Hanlon
quasi-religious meaning, as demonstrated by the term’s history and

appearance in different literary contexts. Reaflac is emblematic of the
elaborate narrative strategies on display in the Anglo-Saxon charter
tradition, and its relationship (not least through reaflac) to the language
of contemporary literary texts, such as the works of Ælfric and
Wulfstan. Early English charters were not written in abstract; the
draftsmen who constructed them were probably acquainted with, and
informed by, these literary works and potentially vice versa.
Reaflac’s appeal to these draftsmen lay in its flexibility and familiarity,
and its introduction into a case’s narrative could therefore inflict
reputational damage. Wulfbald, Goda and his sons, and certain
individuals in the Libellus come across as immoral murderers picking
on the weak and the pious. This was precisely the point. These cases
are typically founded on dispute inheritance. In most – perhaps all – of
them, a different view could have been taken by the opposite party.
Due to the common appearance of inheritance rights as the cause of
dispute, surely this imagery held promise or problems (depending on
which side one was on) for future generations. The Cooling Letter and
S 877 were likely intended for internal consumption by the heirs of
Eadgifu and Ælfthryth, who would rely on the taint of reaflac persisting
into future generations in contrast to their own predecessors’
legitimacy. The political conditions of early twelfth-century France,
therefore, share some similarities with the legal world of tenth-century
England. Both violentia and reaflac are products of an era in which
patronage often dictated the judgement of a dispute, with the result
that such conflicts were never fully settled; the accession of a new king
or count invited unsuccessful claimants to renew their suits.
As demonstrated by S 877, powerful nobles often defied the shire and
hundred courts, whilst also committing actual violence to stake a claim to
an estate. Yet when people who were in the wrong pillaged, inflicted
damage, or simply made a formal claim on an estate, these acts were
retrospectively labelled as reaflac to delegitimize them. This was because
violence was only truly violence if it raised doubts about the credibility
of your own landholding rights; over-sensationalized images of pillaging
took attention away from that. Historians have frequently used S 877
as a prime example of late Anglo-Saxon society and government’s
lawlessness and lack of state organization, but this study of reaflac
suggests that this was not necessarily the case.112 These narratives of
violent unruly aristocrats were deliberately set down in writing by royal
and ecclesiastical institutions to suit their own purposes when securing
112
Abels, ‘Limits’, pp. 44–7; Rabin, ‘Capital’, pp. 183–8.

property rights. Charter draftsmen evidently became quite adept at using

the rhetoric of illegitimate violence and overemphasizing it where
necessary. In summary, it is apparent that reaflac represented a
commonplace rhetorical appeal used by charter draftsmen and litigants
to tug on the witan’s heartstrings and get the case closed once and for
all in the specialized context of the late Anglo-Saxon property dispute.
Jesus College, Cambridge


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Of reaﬂac and rapina: accusations of

violence in two Old English lawsuits and

During the reign of King Æthelred II (978–1013, 1014–16) there was an

Early Medieval Europe 2023 31 (1) 95–121

Early Medieval Europe 2023 31 (1)

though, was Eadmær’s status as a king’s thegn, which made the

Early Medieval Europe 2023 31 (1)

transgressions, charters served to protect the new owner’s rights to the

Early Medieval Europe 2023 31 (1)

transforms civil disputes between two opposed parties into a serious

Early Medieval Europe 2023 31 (1)

violentia, reaﬂac constituted a recognized rhetorical device that

Early Medieval Europe 2023 31 (1)

The history of reaﬂac

Appreciating reaﬂac’s application in different textual genres will elucidate its

Early Medieval Europe 2023 31 (1)

dictated that a dispute should only be referred to the king as a last

Early Medieval Europe 2023 31 (1)

Early Medieval Europe 2023 31 (1)

Early Medieval Europe 2023 31 (1)

Early Medieval Europe 2023 31 (1)

society amid the early eleventh-century Viking invasions. Wulfstan

Early Medieval Europe 2023 31 (1)

property’ resonates with descriptions of reaﬂac as an opponent’s

Early Medieval Europe 2023 31 (1)

S 877’s author paired reaﬂac with forset. The juxtaposition of the

Reaﬂac: an unassailable charge?

The argument for a semantic relationship between reaﬂac and rapina in

Early Medieval Europe 2023 31 (1)

The frequency of return accusations of violence and occasionally the

Early Medieval Europe 2023 31 (1)

pillage (uim ac rapinam)’.64 Ælfwold emphasized the violent wrong by

Early Medieval Europe 2023 31 (1)

between litigants’ accusations of violence, which suggest that violent

Early Medieval Europe 2023 31 (1)

side successive kings supported as Eadgifu’s landownership was the

Early Medieval Europe 2023 31 (1)

Early Medieval Europe 2023 31 (1)

Early Medieval Europe 2023 31 (1)

Earthly and divine retribution

While reaﬂac and rapina convey wrongful use of force, it would be

Early Medieval Europe 2023 31 (1)

rival claimant.92 While previous scholarship has emphasized individual,

Early Medieval Europe 2023 31 (1)

Early Medieval Europe 2023 31 (1)

Early Medieval Europe 2023 31 (1)

Early Medieval Europe 2023 31 (1)

quasi-religious meaning, as demonstrated by the term’s history and

Early Medieval Europe 2023 31 (1)

property rights. Charter draftsmen evidently became quite adept at using

Early Medieval Europe 2023 31 (1)

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