Early Medieval Europe - 2020 - Naismith - Gilds States and Societies in The Early Middle Ages

Gilds, states and societies in the early
Middle Ages
RORY NAISMITH
The early medieval gilds of north-west Europe were very different from their
later medieval descendants. They were not specifically urban or economic in
focus, instead being based on religious devotion, feasting and mutual
protection, usually among members united by status and geography.
Treatment of gilds differed sharply between the two main representatives of
the tradition in the region: the Carolingian empire and Anglo-Saxon
England. In the former, gilds were vilified as coniurationes, spontaneous
oath-bound associations, which rulers feared might undermine their
authority and that of the hierarchy they represented. But in the latter gilds
flourished, especially in the tenth and eleventh centuries, when England
produced the first gild statutes of medieval Europe. This contribution
examines these two traditions, and the reasons for the break between them.
Guilds are best known as a pillar of medieval social and economic life in
towns from the twelfth century onwards. Membership of devotional or
trade-based guilds was often a preserve of citizens, or even (as for
instance at London) a prerequisite of citizenship.1 The debate over
whether occupational guilds restricted or stimulated economic
development is of long standing,2 though it is also clear that, whatever
*
I am grateful to Julia Crick, Helen Gittos, Peter Stokes, Francesca Tinti, Charles West and two
anonymous reviewers for comments and advice. Any errors which remain are my own
responsibility.
1
M. Prak, Citizens Without Nations: Urban Citizenship in Europe and the World, c. 1000–1789
(Cambridge, 2018), pp. 83–115; G.A. Williams, Medieval London from Commune to Capital
(London, 1963), pp. 45–7, 185–7 and 191–3.
2
The most thorough recent study is S. Ogilvie, The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis
(Princeton, 2019), with alternative views represented in S.R. Epstein and M. Prak (eds),
Guilds, Innovation, and the European Economy, 1400–1800 (Cambridge, 2008).
Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4) 627–662
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628 Rory Naismith
the commercial interests of some of them, social cohesion lay at the heart
of guilds of all kinds.3 This rich communal life had its foundations in
early medieval institutions that also went by the name of guilds. Yet
the first known guilds of north-west Europe (hereafter referred to as
gilds to distinguish them) did not possess the same urban or economic
associations of so many of their later counterparts: references to them,
and the statutes they sometimes produced, show no particular interest
in trade or craft, or a concentration in towns. For this reason, early
gilds have historically been seen as something of a dead end, ‘isolées au
milieu du Moyen Âge’, as Emile Coornaert put it in 1948;4 a false start
for what would become an important institution once it aligned with
merchants and artisans. But the gilds did leave an imprint on a range
of later communal organizations, from guilds to peace movements and
urban communes.5 Their legacy is more apparent if the gilds are looked
at as a mechanism for building group solidarity. They pioneered the
blend of prandial conviviality and religious devotion that continued to
characterize guilds, confraternities and related associations in
subsequent times,6 as what Gervase Rosser has called ‘a crucial . . .
point of encounter between the individual and the group’.7
Gilds and analogous organizations could be found very widely in early
medieval Europe. Runic inscriptions from eleventh-century Sweden
mention gilds.8 The Book of the Eparch casts light on the gilds of early
tenth-century Constantinople, which formed part of a rich and distinct
tradition that reached back to Roman collegia and was tied closely to
crafts, in a similar way to those of western Europe in the later Middle
Ages.9 Against this wider background, the Anglo-Saxon and
3
G. Rosser, The Art of Solidarity in the Middle Ages: Guilds in England 1250–1550 (Oxford, 2015).
4
E. Coornaert, ‘Les ghildes médiévales (Ve–XVe siècles). Définition – évolution’, Revue
historique 199 (1948), pp. 22–55 and 208–43, at p. 29.
5
See below, pp. 657–9.
6
Rosser, Art of Solidarity, pp. 14–17; O.G. Oexle, ‘Gilden als soziale Gruppen in der
Karolingerzeit’, in H. Jankuhn (ed.), Historische und rechtshistorische Beiträge und
Untersuchungen zur Frühgeschichte der Gilde (Göttingen, 1981), pp. 284–354, at p. 287.
7
Rosser, Art of Solidarity, pp. 76–80.
8
J. Jesch, Ships and Men in the Late Viking Age: The Vocabulary of Runic Inscriptions and Skaldic
Verse (Woodbridge, 2001), pp. 239–41.
9
J. Liu, Collegia Cenonariorum: The Guilds of Textile Dealers in the Roman West (Leiden,
2009), esp. pp. 279–94; G. Dagron, ‘The Urban Economy, Seventh–Twelfth Centuries’,
in A.E. Laiou (ed.), The Economic History of Byzantium from the Seventh through the
Fifteenth Century, 3 parts (Washington, DC, 2002), II, pp. 393–461, at pp. 405–18; G.C.
Maniatis, Guilds, Price Formation and Market Structures in Byzantium (Farnham, 2009);
S.A. Epstein, Wage Labor and Guilds in Medieval Europe (Chapel Hill, 1991), pp. 1–26. It
has sometimes been supposed that collegia persisted in Italy, but this is unlikely to be the
case: P. Racine, ‘Associations de marchands et associations de métiers en Italie de 600 à
1200’, in B. Schwineköper (ed.), Gilden und Zünfte. Kaufmännsche und gewerbliche
Genossenschaften im frühen und hohen Mittelalter (Sigmaringen, 1985), pp. 127–50; Epstein,
Wage Labor, pp. 42–3.
Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

Gilds, states and societies 629
Carolingian gilds make an especially apposite pair for comparison. Late

Anglo-Saxon kings consciously patterned aspects of their rule on
Carolingian precedent;10 the result was an English kingdom that was in
spirit a more convincing heir to the Carolingian legacy than the
empire’s actual successor states across the Channel.11 In both England
and Carolingian Francia, networks of communication that went from
centre to locality were crucial, and were backed up by highly developed
discourses of morality and responsibility that shaped the exercise of
power from top to bottom.12 Links between these vertiginous extremes
were a point of particular concern: as Carolingian legislation often
framed it, the attitude of the potentes towards the pauperes mattered
deeply.13 Both kingdoms also had gilds, probably in significant
numbers, that operated along much the same lines.
It may be helpful at this point to spell out that ‘gild’ is understood here
as a flexible ideal type. Core characteristics of relevant early medieval
organizations include a voluntary, horizontal structure and prominent
convivial and spiritual elements. A significant proportion of gilds seem
to have focused heavily or exclusively on the last of these. But while
there is no reason to doubt the strongly Christian flavour of early
gilds, the surviving sources, which often strongly privilege ecclesiastical
interests, do not necessarily give a balanced impression of their activities.
Prayer and other shared religious devotions took place alongside eating,
drinking and mutual support against misfortune, injustice or feud. From
a modern perspective, the gilds blended elements of prayer groups,
mutual insurance cooperatives, vigilante bands and drinking societies, to
the extent that they resist clear separation into occupational or social
guilds and religious confraternities, a break that was fuzzy even in the
later Middle Ages.14 While a specific situation could precipitate the
10
G. Molyneaux, The Formation of the English Kingdom in the Tenth Century (Oxford, 2015), esp.
pp. 234–7; J. Campbell, Essays in Anglo-Saxon History (London, 1986), pp. 159–65; P. Wormald,
The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century. Volume 1: Legislation and its
Limits (Oxford, 1999), pp. 122–4, 306, 316, 328, 344–5, 363 and 464–5.
11
C. Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 (London, 2009),
pp. 460–6 (in a chapter entitled ‘“Carolingian” England’).
12
M. de Jong, The Penitential State: Authority and Atonement in the Age of Louis the Pious,
814–840 (Cambridge, 2009); R. Stone, Morality and Masculinity in the Carolingian Empire
(Cambridge, 2012), pp. 27–68; J. Sabapathy, Officers and Accountability in Medieval England
1170–1300 (Oxford, 2014), pp. 55–60.
13
Devroey, Puissants et misérables, pp. 317–51; J. Wollasch, ‘Gemeinschaftsbewußtsein und soziale
Leistung im Mittelalter’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 9 (1975), pp. 61–77. Similar discourses
about responsibility in handling wealth also emerged in Anglo-Saxon England: M. Godden,
‘Money, Power and Morality in Late Anglo-Saxon England’, Anglo-Saxon England 19 (1990),
pp. 41–65.
14
S. Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1997),
pp. 67–73; P. Trio, ‘Confraternities as Such, and as a Template for Guilds in the Low
Countries during the Medieval and Early Modern Period’, in K. Eisenbichler (ed.),
A Companion to Medieval and Early Modern Confraternities (Leiden, 2019), pp. 23–44, esp.
pp. 35–6.

630 Rory Naismith
formation of a gild, it would normally be expected to do more than

respond to the immediate challenge. A promise or agreement of some
sort might underpin a gild, albeit not necessarily in the form of an oath.
Gild members would offer regular payment to a common fund or
church, and potentially be liable to fines for breaking gild rules. These
members would mostly or entirely be drawn from below the elite, and
they might include clergy, free or unfree peasants, individuals of
middling status, and women as well as men.15 Social status, alongside
geography and ecclesiastical association, was in fact one of the main
kernels around which gilds coalesced. For that reason, gilds have
sometimes been seen as a vehicle for class-based resistance, but few gild
members really seem to have harboured a desire to stand up against their
dominus or hlaford; as will be seen, that was a road to ruin.16 Solidarity
as constructed through gilds tended to be defined much more narrowly,
in terms of members alone, and in practice gilds were as enmeshed in
vertical as horizontal networks of power, sometimes through
stratification within their own ranks, or by reinforcing an in-group who
stood out from their neighbours.17
Most of these characteristics can be observed on both sides of the
Channel. It is the differences between gilds in Carolingian Francia and
late Anglo-Saxon England that command most attention, however.
These can be understood on two levels. The first relates to sources, and
amounts to differences of appearance that conceal a significant amount
of common ground in the form and function of gilds. Broadly
speaking, Anglo-Saxon gilds are known from texts produced within
gilds, and Carolingian gilds from texts produced outside gilds. This
15
For mediocres, see J.P. Devroey, Puissants et misérables: système social et monde paysan dans
l’Europe des Francs (VIe–IXe siècles) (Brussels, 2006), pp. 208–12; G. Constable, ‘Was there a
Medieval Middle Class? Mediocres (Mediani, Medii ) in the Middle Ages’, in S.K. Cohn and
S.A. Epstein (eds), Portraits of Medieval and Renaissance Living: Essays in Memory of David
Herlihy (Ann Arbor, 1996), pp. 301–23.
16
A view critiqued in Oexle, ‘Gilden als soziale Gruppen’, pp. 301–3 and 329–30; see also
I. Rembold, Conquest and Christianization: Saxony and the Carolingian World, 772–888
(Cambridge, 2018), pp. 116–18 for politicized interpretations of the Stellinga in Cold War
Germany. For the rarity, and mostly unfortunate outcome, of peasant resistance in the
early Middle Ages, see C. Wickham, ‘Space and Society in Early Medieval Peasant
Conflicts’, Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo 50 (2003),
pp. 551–86; C. Wickham, ‘Looking Forward: Peasant Revolts in Europe, 600–1200’, in
J. Firnhaber-Baker (eds), The Routledge History Handbook of Medieval Revolt (London and
New York, 2016), pp. 155–67.
17
J.L. Nelson, ‘Peers in the Early Middle Ages’, in P.A. Stafford, J.L. Nelson and J. Martindale
(eds), Law, Laity and Solidarities: Essays in Honour of Susan Reynolds (Manchester, 2001),
pp. 27–46, at pp. 39–40; A. Gautier, ‘Discours égalitaire et pratiques hiérarchiques dans les
guildes anglo-saxonnes’, in F. Bougard, D. Iogna-Prat and R. Le Jan (eds), Hiérarchie et
stratification sociale dans l’Occident médiéval (400–1100) (Turnhout, 2009), pp. 343–61.

break means that the two traditions must by default be examined

through very different lenses: higher-status gilds loom large in the
English case, threatening and undesirable gilds (or their actions) in the
Carolingian. Terminology is a closely related problem. Words used for
gilds, especially in Latin, depended on general characteristics that also
had wider applications: societas, collecta, confratria, fraternitas and
coniuratio, for example, point variously to the importance of group
identity, communal sentiment and binding oaths.18 The most popular
vernacular term in the Germanic languages, gild and its variants, in
turn had broader connotations of value and payment.19 Not all
occurrences of these labels designated gilds according to the definition
laid out above. There were other kinds of association for which these
terms are also appropriate. Disgruntled Carolingian aristocrats formed
illicit, oath-bound coniurationes sworn to a specific military or political
goal, for example, and such groups had the potential to wreak much
more harm than gilds. Tantamount to rebellions, they represented a
clear and present danger to royal authority: revolts against Charlemagne
in 785 and 792 and against Louis the Pious in 817, among others, were
described as coniurationes by disapproving chroniclers.20
This first set of differences is in some respects a symptom of the
second: real, material breaks between how gilds were viewed in
England and Francia. Put simply, Carolingian kings and bishops were
extremely wary of gilds and the oaths they sometimes involved;
Anglo-Saxon rulers, however, had no misgivings about dealing with
gilds, or indeed allowing them to swear oaths, hold land and pursue
violent retribution on behalf of members. Marc Bloch called attention
to this sharp distinction in his classic survey of Feudal Society. He
explained it with reference to the pervasive ‘relationships of personal
dependence’ (‘les rapports de dépendance personnelle’) in the
Carolingian empire, and the comparative weakness of other
interpersonal structures in Anglo-Saxon England, meaning that kings
had to rely on gilds for the maintenance of public order.21 In his eyes,
18
Oexle, ‘Gilden als soziale Gruppen’, pp. 291–2.
19
K. Düwel, ‘Philologisches zu “Gilde”’, in Jankuhn (ed.), Historische und rechtshistorische
Beiträge, pp. 399–415; K.R. Grinda, ‘Altenglisch (ge )gilda, (ge )gildscipe, (ge )gild(e ): zu den
Bezeichnungen für “Gilde” und “Gildmitglied” in vornormannischen Quellen’, in ibid.,
pp. 370–98; Coornaert, ‘Ghildes médiévales’, pp. 29–31.
20
G. Althoff, Family, Friends and Followers: Political and Social Bonds in Medieval Europe, trans.
C. Carroll (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 91–5; J.L. Nelson, King and Emperor: A New Life of
Charlemagne (London, 2019), pp. 214–21 and 285–8; and R. McKitterick, Perceptions of the
Past in the Early Middle Ages (Notre Dame, 2006), pp. 68–80. For similar organizations in a
later period, see G. Althoff, ‘Conventiculum, conspiratio, coniuratio: The Political Power of
Sworn Associations in Tenth and Eleventh Century Germany’, in M. Aurell, J. Aurell and
M. Herrero (eds), Le sacré et la parole: le serment au Moyen Âge (Paris, 2018), pp. 57–66.
21
M. Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. L.A. Manion, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London, 1962–5), II, p. 420.

632 Rory Naismith
prominent gilds were a symptom of pre-Conquest England’s primitive

state, and it would only be jolted into the mainstream by the arrival of
strong monarchy in 1066. Although Bloch’s core observation still
stands, the background against which he explained it has changed
considerably. The emphasis in English historiography now falls on the
ambition and brutal effectiveness of tenth- and eleventh-century
kingship, and on the diverse personal bonds in the kingdom,22
articulated through a general oath of loyalty to the king from at least
the 940s.23 In West Francia and elsewhere, meanwhile, it has become
more apparent that vertical personal bonds were not in themselves
antithetical to horizontal associations such as gilds: the growth of more
personalized and reified social structures from about 1000 coincided
with the rise of increasingly assertive gilds or gild-like organizations.24
What mattered in relation to gilds was hence how particular
configurations of hierarchy interfaced with particular traditions of
collective action. The question needs to pivot towards how gilds
worked within the elaborate governmental and social edifices of the
Carolingian empire and late Anglo-Saxon England.
In what follows, I will consider each of these two traditions in more
detail before proposing that the underlying break is related to ideas of
governmentality: of who had a right to participate in government, and
under what terms. The fault line was how gilds interacted with the
power structures that existed around them. Gilds were in theory a
spontaneously generated version of one of the basic building blocks of
early medieval politics: interpersonal associations and assemblies, and the
bonds of loyalty that lent them force. In early medieval polities of any
size and ambition, government was essentially a series of mechanisms
that brought local forms of these entities, and the individuals who
dominated them, into more or less effective cooperation with the
central authorities. There was consequently little or no administration
separate from the bonds of lordship and patronage that dominated the
face-to-face ‘small worlds’ of local political action.25 Gilds offered
22
J. Campbell, The Anglo-Saxon State (London, 2000); Wickham, Inheritance, pp. 453–71;
R. Naismith, Medieval European Coinage, with a Catalogue of the Coins in the Fitzwilliam
Museum, Cambridge. 8: Britain and Ireland c. 400–1066 (Cambridge, 2017), pp. 214–16.
23
T. Lambert, Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 2017), pp. 210–13; Molyneaux,
Formation, pp. 63–5.
24
C. West, Reframing the Feudal Revolution: Political and Social Transformation between Marne
and Moselle, c. 800–c. 1100 (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 259–63. See also below, pp. 657–9.
25
A large topic: for a recent overview see C. Wickham, ‘Consensus and Assemblies in the
Romano-Germanic Kingdoms: A Comparative Approach’, in V. Epp and C.H.F. Meyer
(eds), Recht und Konsens im frühen Mittelalter (Ostfildern, 2017), pp. 389–424. For ‘small
worlds’ see W. Davies, Small Worlds: The Village Community in Early Medieval Brittany
(London, 1988).

another kind of structuring principle that raised serious questions of

loyalty and legitimacy in relation to collective action, and had the
potential to emerge as either allies or enemies of rulers.26
Carolingian gilds and coniurationes
Gilds in the Carolingian world are known almost entirely in negative, from a
series of legislative and narrative texts written from an outsider’s perspective:
no gilds are recorded in detail on their own terms, and all references to them
are tinged with suspicion, sometimes graduating to outright vilification.
There was a deep background to this discomfort. Gilds had existed in
Frankish society for a long time before the advent of the Carolingians.
Only one dimension of them is recorded in any detail, however.
‘Conspiracies’ (coniurationes) of priests against bishops had been
condemned since at least the fifth century.27 Not all of these would have
been gilds, but those which lasted and attained a degree of formality, in
effect were. They were a major concern in post-Roman Gaul, as the
network of local churches and of priests serving them expanded, often
bringing tension between episcopal authority and the influence of secular
locals.28 A council at Orléans in 538 singled out priests who joined
coniurationes based on an oath or a written charter.29 This decree points to
why priests’ gilds were such an affront: they undercut episcopal authority.30
Ecclesiastical legislation against priests’ gilds continued into the
seventh and eighth centuries,31 and manuscripts containing relevant
legislative texts continued to be copied through the Carolingian
period.32 A council held at Mainz in 813 also quoted a passage from
Isidore of Seville stipulating that clergy should avoid coniurationes.33
26
Wickham, ‘Consensus and Assemblies’, p. 397.
27
Council of Chalcedon, c. 18 (Acta conciliorum oecumenicorum II: Concilium universale
Chalcedonense, ed. E. Schwartz, 6 vols (Berlin, 1932–8), II.2, p. 38).
28
S. Wood, The Proprietary Church in the Medieval West (Oxford, 2006), pp. 25–30 and 67–74;
R. Godding, Prêtres en Gaule mérovingienne (Brussels, 2001), pp. 240–60.
29
Council of Orléans (538), c. 24 (Concilia Galliae a. 511–695, ed. C. de Clercq, CCSL 148A
(Turnhout, 1963), p. 123). For discussion, see J. Heuclin, Hommes de Dieu et fonctionnaires
du roi en Gaule du Nord du Ve au IXe siècle (348–817) (Villeneuve d’Ascq, 1998), p. 78;
Godding, Prêtres, pp. 289–93.
30
S. Esders and H.J. Mierau, Der althochdeutsche Klerikereid. Bischöfliche Diözesangewalt,
kirchliches Benefizialwesen und volkssprachliche Rechtspraxis im frühmittelalterlichen Baiern
(Hanover, 2000), pp. 22–39.
31
Council of Clichy (626/7), c. 3 (ed. de Clercq, p. 292). See also the Rule of Chrodegang, c. 64
(The Chrodegang Rules: The Rules for the Common Life of the Secular Clergy from the Eighth and
Ninth Centuries, ed. J. Bertram (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 276 and 332), quoting Isidore of Seville,
De ecclesiasticis officiis II.2.ii (Sancti Isidori Episcopi Hispalensis De ecclesiasticis officiis, ed. C.M.
Lawson, CCSL 113 (Turnhout, 1989), p. 53).
32
For example, six of the eleven manuscripts used to construct the CCSL edition of the 538
Council of Orléans date to the Carolingian period (Concilia Galliae, ed. de Clercq, p. 113).
33
Council of Mainz (813), c. 10 (Concilia aevi Karolini, ed. A Werminghoff, MGH Conc. 2, 2 vols
(Hanover and Leipzig, 1906–8), I, p. 263).

634 Rory Naismith
Gilds were still firmly on the agenda of the Frankish church in the ninth
century. The danger they posed to clerical order and obedience was grist
to the mill of censorious bishops, and there were few more censorious
than Hincmar, archbishop of Reims (845–82). The decisions stemming
from an assembly of priests in his province, held at Reims in
November 852, provide a much richer taste of what ecclesiastical
superiors feared gatherings of priests got up to.34 The three relevant
chapters leave the imagination aflame with visions of wild hedonism.
Priests had been attending raucous parties, either alone or with laymen,
where they drank to the saints or to their own souls, got into fights
and told stories to rowdy applause; others indulged in entertainments
involving bears and dancing girls, or even demonic masks. But
Hincmar’s concern with correcting wrongs means that he would have
had no cause to mention other perfectly respectable and productive
activities, such as priests and clerics discussing their ministry when they
met for meals. A short sermon written to be read out at such a meeting
emphasizes charity and care for sick and deceased members.35
The long tradition of reprimanding gatherings of priests laid a
foundation of uncertainty regarding coniurationes that was, under the
Carolingians, transmitted from councils of bishops to kings, and
from priests’ gilds to any gild that presumed to swear an oath.36 That
transference stemmed from the ruling dynasty’s preoccupation with
oaths (sacramenta), long recognized as a way of solemnly affirming the
most fundamental bonds to God, king and others, and of securing
loyalty from the whole male population.37 Two oaths were supposed to
trump all others: baptism, conceived of as a sacramentum between
34
Hincmar, First Episcopal Capitulary, c. 14–15 (Capitula Episcoporum: zweiter Teil, ed.
R. Pokorny and M. Stratmann, MGH Capit. Episc. 2 (Hanover, 1995), pp. 41–3; trans.
C. West, http://hincmar.blogspot.com/2016/03/hincmar-of-rheims-first-episcopal.html).
35
G.G. Meersseman and G. Pacini, Ordo fraternitatis: confraternite e pietà dei laici nel Medioevo,
3 vols (Rome, 1977), I, pp. 35–121 and 150–69 survey religious fraternal organizations from
before about 1050. The sermon is preserved in Bern, Burgerbibliothek AA.90.11. For an
edition, see A. Wilmart, ‘Le règlement ecclésiastique de Berne’, Revue bénédictine 51 (1939),
pp. 37–52, with recent discussion in C. Mériaux, ‘Ordre et hiérarchie au sein du clergé rural
pendant le haut Moyen Âge’, in D. Iogna-Prat, F. Bougard and R. Le Jan (eds), Hiérarchie
et stratification dans l’Occident médiéval 400–1100 (Turnhout, 2008), pp. 19–34, at pp. 130–3.
36
Oexle, ‘Gilden als soziale Gruppen’, pp. 341–8; O.G. Oexle, ‘Conjuratio und Gilden im frühen
Mittelalter. Ein Beitrag der sozialen Kontinuität zwischen Antike und Mittelalter’, in
Schwineköper (ed.), Gilden und Zünfte, pp. 151–214 (repr. in and cited from his Die
Wirklichkeit und das Wissen: Mittelaterforschung, historische Kulturwissenschaft, Geschichte und
Theorie der historischen Erkenntnis (Göttingen, 2011), pp. 496–568, at pp. 512–23.
37
O.M. Phelan, The Formation of Christian Europe: The Carolingians, Baptism, and the Imperium
Christianum (Oxford, 2015), pp. 8–42. On the break from Merovingian oaths of loyalty, see
P. Depreux, ‘La prestation du serment dans le monde franc: formes et fonctions (VIe–IXe
siècles)’, in F. Laurent (ed.), Serment, promesse et engagement: rituels et modalities au Moyen
Âge (Montpellier, 2008), pp. 517–32, at p. 520.

individual believers and God, with the king or emperor thought of as

guardian of all the faithful;38 and the profession of loyalty that every
man over the age of twelve was expected to swear to the king or
emperor.39 These two oaths made the whole of Frankish society into a
sort of coniuratio writ large, which could be undermined by competing
oaths because they subverted the chain of undivided loyalty that tied
everyone in the kingdom to the king, via his sanctioned representatives.
A capitulary from the 780s or early 790s neatly encapsulated this chain
of reasoning:
as to why oaths are necessary [royal missi] have to explain, first, that
they derive from ancient custom and, second, that those unfaithful
men recently plotted to cause great strife in the realm of the lord
king Charles and conspired against his life and said, when
questioned, that they had not sworn fealty to him.40
As this passage suggests, coniuratio meant any association bound by an
illicit oath, from conclaves of aristocrats who, bolstered by their resources
and followers, posed a very real threat to royal authority, to gatherings of
peasants or local priests who represented more of an ideological than a
material danger.41 The relentless repression of coniurationes sought to
kill several birds with one stone: to prevent conflicting loyalties, to
protect against rebellion by the powerful, and above all to suppress any
who might upset existing hierarchies. That message was directed first
and foremost at regional elites, as in a capitulary of 821 which
addressed the lords of servi who had formed sworn associations that
committed acts of violence in Flanders, around Cassel and Tournai,
‘and in other coastal locations’ (in caeteris maritimis locis).42 The
38
Phelan, Formation.
39
P. Depreux, ‘Les Carolingiens et le serment’, in M.-F. Auzépy and G. Saint-Guillain (eds),
Oralité et lien social au Moyen Âge (Occident, Byzance, Islam): parole donnée, foi jurée, serment
(Paris, 2008), pp. 63–80, at pp. 68–72; M. Becher, Eid und Herrschaft. Untersuchungen zum
Herrscherethos Karls des Großen (Sigmaringen, 1993), esp. pp. 79–87 and 158; C.E. Odegaard,
‘Carolingian Oaths of Fidelity’, Speculum 16 (1941), pp. 284–96; and W. Falkowski and
Y. Sassier (eds), Confiance, bonne foi, fidélité: la notion de ‘fides’ dans la vie des sociétés
médiévales (VIe–XVe siècles) (Paris, 2018). See more widely J.L. Nelson, ‘Carolingian Oaths’,
in Aurell, Aurell and Herrero (eds), Le sacré et la parole, pp. 33–55.
40
‘Quam ob rem istam sacramenta sunt necessaria, per ordine ex antiqua consuetudine explicare
faciant, et quia modo isti infideles homines magnum conturbium in regnum domni Karoli regi
voluerint terminare et in eius vita consiliati sunt et inquisiti dixerunt, quod fidelitatem ei non
iurasset.’ Capitulary of 786, 789 or 792/3, c. 1 (Capitularia regum Francorum. Tomus primus, ed.
A. Boretius, MGH Capit. 1 (Hanover, 1883), p. 66). See comments in Nelson, King and
Emperor, pp. 264–7; McKitterick, Perceptions, p. 72; and Becher, Eid und Herrschaft,
pp. 195–6. For the same concerns in earlier legislation see R. McKitterick, Charlemagne: The
Formation of a European Identity (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 237–43; J.R. Davis, Charlemagne’s
Practice of Empire (Cambridge, 2015), pp. 352–3.
41
McKitterick, Perceptions, pp. 71–3. See below, pp. 638–41.
42
Capitulary of 821, c. 1 and 7 (ed. Boretius, pp. 300–1).

636 Rory Naismith
background here is tantalizingly obscure. 820 and 821 witnessed

unusually wet summers, with dire consequences for the population,
and the inhabitants of the north Frankish littoral – with a long history
of relative independence and economic prosperity – were perhaps
especially inclined to take matters into their own hands.43 From a
broader, comparative perspective, their actions might have amounted to
what is sometimes called ‘slantwise’ resistance, in which marginal actors
redefined their relationship to dominant forces by adopting new kinds
of collective action and identity.44 No punishment was fixed for the
wayward servi of northern Francia, but their lords were threatened with
a fine if any further gilds materialized. This decree probably translated
into violent repression of the coniuratio by the local elite,45 which was
the fate famously meted out to a plucky cohort of peasants between the
Seine and Loire who formed a sworn band to resist the vikings in 859.
They fended off the Northmen successfully, only to be cut down by
the Frankish elite ‘because their association had been made without
due consideration’.46
While many Carolingian capitularies simply forbade coniurationes,47
others allowed for a more nuanced approach depending on either the
nature of their pledge or their relationship to other authorities. In the
earliest capitulary to mention gilds, that of Herstal in 779,
Charlemagne forbade ‘oaths sworn between people in gilds’ (sacramentis
per gildonia invicem coniurantibus), but did allow associations to persist
in the context of almsgiving and protection against fire or shipwreck, as
long as their members avoided taking oaths.48 In a capitulary of 805
Charlemagne laid out tiered punishments for those who had affirmed
their coniuratio with an oath: those with ill intentions were to be put to
43
M. McCormick, P.E. Dutton and P.A. Mayewski, ‘Volcanoes and the Climate Forcing of
Carolingian Europe, A.D. 750–950’, Speculum 82 (2007), pp. 865–95, at pp. 881–4;
C. Loveluck, Northwest Europe in the Early Middle Ages, c. AD 600–1150: A Comparative
Archaeology (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 182–212.
44
S. Bobrycki, ‘The Flailing Women of Dijon: Crowds in Ninth-Century Europe’, Past and
Present 240 (2018), pp. 3–46, at pp. 5 and 31 (citing H. Campbell and J. Heyman,
‘Slantwise: Beyond Domination and Resistance on the Border’, Journal of Contemporary
Ethnography 36 (2007), pp. 3–30).
45
For examples of violence from lords towards peasants, see Stone, Morality and Masculinity,
p. 182; West, Reframing, pp. 56–7.
46
‘Quia incaute sumpta est eorum coniuratio’. Annals of Saint-Bertin 859 (Annales de
Saint-Bertin, ed. F. Grat, J. Vielliard and S. Clémencet (Paris, 1964), p. 80; The Annals of
St-Bertin, trans. J.L. Nelson (Manchester, 1991), p. 89). Cf. Bobrycki, ‘Flailing Women’,
p. 42. A mass of untrained locals also gathered to resist the vikings at Prüm in 882, with less
success: Regino of Prüm, Chronicon, s.a. 882 (Reginonis abbatis Prumiensis Chronicon cum
continuatione Treverensi, ed. F. Kurze, MGH SRG 50 (Hanover, 1890), p. 118; History and
Politics in Late Carolingian and Ottonian Europe: The Chronicle of Regino of Prüm and
Adalbert of Magdeburg, trans. S. MacLean (Manchester, 2009), p. 185).
47
In a capitulary of 789 (c. 26 (ed. Boretius, p. 64)) and at the 794 Council of Frankfurt (c. 31 (ed.
Werminghoff, I, p. 169)) they were prohibited.
48
Capitulary of Herstal (779), c. 16 (ed. Boretius, p. 51).

death, while those without would still suffer flogging and have their hair
shaved off. There was also a second, lower class of penalty for forming an
association with a handshake (per dextras), which was evidently less
troubling than an oath, though still questionable.49 After lambasting
priestly coniurationes, Archbishop Hincmar in his episcopal capitulary
of 852 also addressed what he called geldonias vel confratrias that
extended beyond the clergy. These too were known for ribald antics,
and Hincmar notes that in at least one case a deadly quarrel had arisen
at a gild meeting. But he stopped short of an outright ban, and instead
tried to restrict gilds to acceptable religious activities like offering wax,
wine, prayer and alms, and arranging funerals.50 The last piece of
Carolingian legislation to mention gilds advocated a quite different
approach. Issued just a few months before the death of King Carloman
II (879–84), this capitulary sought to address the supposed decay of
social order in the West Frankish kingdom, and as part of that
endeavour the king asked priests and officers of the local count to
intervene with peasants (villanis) before they could form an ‘association
(collectam) . . . of the kind generally called a gild’ (quam vulgo geldam
vocant) against those who were ravaging or stealing from them. The
hope was that the peasants would bring their complaint to those
officers so that they could ‘prudently and rationally’ (prudenter et
rationabiliter) set things straight.51
One of the few gilds known in any detail from the Carolingian world,
the Stellinga, demonstrates the breadth of attitudes that gilds provoked,
as this group’s position evolved vis-à-vis other power structures. The
Stellinga (meaning something like ‘comrades’ or ‘companions [in
battle]’) were a non-elite association that emerged in Saxony in the
early 840s.52 Integration of the region into the Carolingian order and
the restructuring of its elites around loyalty to the emperor had put
increased pressure on other elements of the population; the result was
marginalization and disadvantage, boiling over into widespread armed
resistance.53 The Stellinga drew on a range of these aggrieved sub-elite
49
Capitulary of 805, c. 10 (ed. Boretius, p. 124). This decree was repeated in a capitulary of Lothar
I in 832 (c. 6) (ed. Boretius and Krause, p. 61).
50
Hincmar, First Episcopal Capitulary, c. 16 (ed. Pokorny and Stratmann, p. 43; trans. West).
51
Capitulary of Ver (884), c. 14 (Capitularia regum Francorum. Tomus secundus, ed. A. Boretius
and V. Krause, MGH Capit. 2 (Hanover, 1897), p. 375).
52
On the name of the Stellinga, see N. Wagner, ‘Der Name der Stellinga’, Beiträge zur
Namenforschung 15 (1980), pp. 128–33. The literature on the Stellinga is vast; for guidance,
including a coherent overview of earlier scholarship, see Rembold, Conquest and
Christianization, pp. 85–140; E.J. Goldberg, ‘Popular Revolt, Dynastic Politics and
Aristocratic Factionalism in the Early Middle Ages: The Saxon “Stellinga” Reconsidered’,
Speculum 70 (1995), pp. 467–501; R. Flierman, Saxon Identities, AD 150–900 (London, 2017),
pp. 126–30; E. Müller-Mertens, ‘Der Stellingaaufstand (841–843). Seine Träger und die Frage
der politischen Macht’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 20 (1972), pp. 818–42.
53
Flierman, Saxon Identities, pp. 89–118 and 129–30.

638 Rory Naismith
groups, named by one observer (in the vernacular and Latin) as frilingi/
ingenuiles and lazzi/serviles; that is to say, freemen and ‘half-free’.54
Under normal conditions their association would probably have been
suppressed in short order by the local elite, leaving little trace behind.
But the early 840s, racked by civil war, was not a normal time. In an
unusual move, Emperor Lothar I (840–55) appealed to the Stellinga for
support against his brother Louis the German (843–76), with whom he
was locked in a struggle for support within Saxony, and promised them
a return to older, more favourable legal customs. At first the Stellinga
enjoyed a degree of success in overthrowing their masters. But they
continued to agitate after Lothar had secured peace with his brothers,
and so in summer 842 Louis the German slaughtered them ‘in a legal
massacre’ (legali . . . cede), as the historian Nithard put it.55 According
to the Annals of Saint-Bertin, 140 ringleaders were beheaded, 14 hanged
and many others mutilated, with yet more being slain after a further
uprising at the end of 842.56
Despite their bloody end, it is unlikely that the Saxon rebels presented
an existential threat to the elite or to Christianity, as some sources
claimed.57 The Stellinga did prey on lords, but probably only those who
were loyal to Louis: this would explain why Lothar was willing to court
them but incurred no obvious dishonour for doing so, and also managed
to keep elite supporters of his own in Saxony. Moreover, it is striking
that Louis himself had to intervene and suppress the movement. The
Stellinga were probably in a better position militarily than most gilds.
There was a long tradition of freemen and the half-free fighting in Saxon
armies,58 and the number of leaders executed in 842 suggests a large
movement; probably significantly bigger than most other coniurationes
and gilds. The complicated case of the Stellinga indicates that armed
engagement with a gild was not necessarily the first, best or only option
on the table. Even Louis the German apparently considered a diplomatic
solution before moving in for the kill.59
The fate of the Stellinga, and the tactics in the capitulary of Ver,
indicate that even forming a gild – let alone swearing an oath or
taking violent action – could be taken as a signal of failure; that the
mechanisms for safeguarding the lower orders of society from excessive
54
Nithard, Historiae IV.2 (Nithard: Histoire des fils de Louis le Pieux, ed. and trans. P. Lauer and
S. Glansdorff (Paris, 2012), pp. 130–2). Cf. Rembold, Conquest and Christianization, pp. 102–3;
Goldberg, ‘Popular Revolt’, pp. 471–8.
55
Nithard, Historiae IV.4 (ed. and trans. Lauer and Glansdorff, p. 142).
56
Annals of Saint-Bertin, s.a. 842 (ed. Grat, Vielliard and Clémencet, pp. 42–3; trans. Nelson, p. 54).
Althoff, Family, Friends and Followers, p. 98; and Rembold, Conquest and Christianization, p. 103
suggest that these different forms of punishment might reflect the status of individual victims.
57
Rembold, Conquest and Christianization, pp. 109–14.
58
59

oppression had broken down. Yet those mechanisms were highly

one-sided, open to abuse and often closed to those they should have
helped. Non-elites hence found themselves in a double bind. Reliance
on the goodwill of lords was a risky strategy for resolving conflict;
equally, for non-elites to try to resolve problems on their own by
banding together put them in a dangerous position. Despite the shrill
denunciation of gilds, they evidently remained a popular option.
That popularity is partly due to the subjectivity of the sources. Gilds lay
in the eye of the beholder, and in the Carolingian context that beholder
tended to look down disapprovingly from on high and claimed the
authority to identify coniurationes based on the nature of the promise
behind them. As the capitulary of 805 indicates, however, a range of
oaths and promises could prompt consternation. The implication is that
in practice coniurationes were as much about who made a promise and
why as the swearing of oaths tout court; a point illustrated by putting
what is known of coniurationes next to convenientiae. A convenientia
commonly referred to an agreement, or the meeting or document
associated with an agreement.60 The difference lay in how that
agreement was viewed, as functionally convenientiae were very similar to
coniurationes. The former were in fact named as a legitimate alternative
to the latter in Charlemagne’s capitulary of 779,61 and two convenientiae
of named eighth-century bishops pledged to have Masses said for one
another’s souls,62 one of the primary purposes of gilds. The common
ground is still more apparent in the famous convenientia established by
Charles the Bald and his leading secular and ecclesiastical magnates at
Coulaines in 843. This document framed the king and magnates as a
voluntary association for shared peace and reciprocal benefit, secured by
a written pledge to maintain ‘peace and charity’ (pax caritasque) – in
effect a gild of magnates.63
60
A.J. Kosto, ‘The Convenientia in the Early Middle Ages’, Mediaeval Studies 60 (1998), pp. 1–54;
B. Apsner, Vertrag und Konsens im früheren Mittelalter: Studien zu Gesellschaftsprogrammatik
und Staatlichkeit im westfränkischen Reich (Trier, 2006), pp. 73–88.
61
Kosto, ‘Convenientia ’, p. 18.
62
These meetings occurred at Attigny in 762 and at Dingolfing in Bavaria in 776/7 (ed.
Werminghoff, I, pp. 72–3 and 96–7): K. Schmid and O.G. Oexle, ‘Voraussetzungen und
Wirkung des Gebetsbundes von Attigny’, Francia 2 (1974), pp. 71–122.
63
G. Koziol, The Peace of God (Leeds, 2018), pp. 15–16; Kosto, ‘Convenientia’, pp. 18–21; and
E. Magnou-Nortier, Foi et fidélité. Recherches sur l’évolution des liens personnels chez les francs du
VIIe au IXe siècle (Toulouse, 1976). For the text see Boretius and Krause (eds), pp. 253–5, with
selected discussion of context in P. Classen, ‘Die Verträge von Verdun und von Coulaines 843
als politische Grundlagen des Westfränkischen Reiches’, Historische Zeitschrift 196 (1963),
pp. 1–35; J.L. Nelson, ‘The Intellectual in Politics: Context, Content and Authorship in the
Capitulary of Coulaines, November 843’, in L.J. Smith and B. Ward (eds), Intellectual Life in
the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Margaret Gibson (London, 1991), pp. 1–32; eadem, Charles
the Bald (London, 1992), pp. 13–29; A. Krah, Die Entstehung der ‘potestas regia’ im
Westfrankenreich während der ersten Regierungsjahre Kaiser Karls II. (840–877) (Berlin, 2000),
pp. 205–49; Apsner, Vertrag und Konsens, esp. pp. 23–88.

640 Rory Naismith
It must be stressed that there are no grounds for collapsing all

coniurationes and convenientiae into one. These were distinct terms for
what were usually distinct phenomena, and it was the taking of an oath
that supposedly distinguished the one from the other.64 Convenientiae
are normally thought of as being more open in character, characterized
by binding, structured modes of acquiescence in the form of
promises and often a written undertaking.65 Both kinds of association
were thought to accommodate varying degrees of potency in their
oath or promise, however, meaning that in practice legitimacy was a
pivotal, and potentially subjective, distinction: a seditious coniuratio
could essentially be an unacceptable convenientia. It followed that
condemnation of a coniuratio was in effect condemnation of a particular
oath as having been sworn for illicit purposes, or in contravention of
weightier promises.66
This matters because of the number and variety of oaths that were
sworn at all levels of Frankish society. Below the elite, assertory oaths
used to recognize matters of fact are best evidenced. Peasants can be
seen swearing to one another as witnesses or sureties in village-level
gatherings around Redon.67 At larger assemblies of regional or even
wider catchment they might also undertake assertory oaths as witnesses
in the course of a dispute between landowners, or occasionally on
their own behalf.68 Oaths of this kind were unlikely to be construed
as a coniuratio (unless knowingly falsely sworn), but in form cleaved
closely to promissory oaths that committed the swearer to future
64
Apsner, Vertrag und Konsens, p. 83.
65
Kosto, ‘Convenientia ’, esp. pp. 27–32 and 40–3. The relationship between oath and
convenientia became still closer in later times: A.J. Kosto, Making Agreements in Medieval
Catalonia: Power, Order and the Written Word, 1000–1200 (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 65–7 and
143–7.
66
For overviews see Depreux, ‘Carolingiens et le serment’, p. 64 (with idem, ‘Prestation du
serment’); and Esders and Mierau, Klerikereid.
67
Wickham, ‘Consensus and Assemblies’, pp. 406–9; Davies, Small Worlds, pp. 146–52 and 157–9;
eadem, ‘Suretyship in the Cartulaire de Redon’, in T.M. Charles-Edwards, M.E. Owen and D.B.
Walters (eds), Lawyers and Laymen: Studies in the History of Law Presented to Professor Dafydd
Jenkins on his Seventy-Fifth Birthday, Gwyl Ddewi 1986 (Cardiff, 1986), pp. 72–91.
68
Examples can be identified from Redon (Cartulaire de Redon, ed. A. de Courson (Paris, 1863),
no. 46: a peasant and three associates swore on an altar to the veracity of his claim to a piece
of land); St Gall (Urkundenbuch der Abtei St Gallen, ed. H. Wartmann et al., 6 vols (Zurich,
1863–1955), no. 187: a document of 806, in which the count summons the neighbours or
inhabitants of a contentious estate to explain their knowledge of the situation, on the strength
of their oath to the king); Marseille (St Victor: ARTEM (www.cn-telma.fr/originaux/index/),
no. 3966: a document of 844, in which a named list of peasants from a disputed estate are
again called in to explain under oath how their memories of past custom relate to the two
competing claims); and Saint-Denis (ARTEM, no. 3012; Recueil des actes de Charles II le
Chauve, roi de France, ed. M.G. Tessier et al., 3 vols (Paris, 1943–5), no. 228: a well-known
diploma of 861 in which Charles the Bald adjudicated the status of forty-one inhabitants of the
estate at Mitry (dép. Seine-et-Marne), in part based on the testimony, sworn over relics, from
a separate group of twenty-two of their neighbours).

action.69 It was these, less well-recorded but probably also widespread,

that ran a higher risk of condemnation. The label of coniuratio might,
on the one hand, be used to vilify a group who had committed
unacceptable acts, with any associated oath or promise being
construed as illicit. The peasants on the Loire massacred in 859 for
resisting the vikings on their own initiative probably fell into this
category. Another, more insidious group that could also have been
prosecuted on this basis had it ever been brought to justice occurs in
an idiosyncratic account of a vision of St Vaast that was experienced
by an early ninth-century carpenter and written up by the junior
village priest. This vision consisted of warnings for corrupt members
of the pair’s community. Specifically, the carpenter lambasted the
senior village priest and a series of others for banding together in a
nefarious plot to secure dominance over some of the local unfree
population. He chastised this scheme as an oath (sacramentum) that
the priest had wrongfully administered.70 What kind of oath this was
is unclear; it might even have been a false assertory oath. In any case,
it was tainted by association with the wrongdoing of the villagers. A
disgruntled fellow landowner, or a do-gooder bishop, might have
called the miscreants out as a coniuratio if they had found out about
the conspiracy.
On the other hand, a coniuratio could also denote illegitimate oaths
sworn in relation to actions or organizations that were otherwise
acceptable. Only the 805 capitulary made allowance for innocent gilds
of this kind, and they must often have felt the full force of the law
regardless of motive. While plenty of gild members must have
entered into a coniuratio with full cognizance of what they were
doing, others might not have known they were in such a dangerous
organization until it was too late, for the decision as to when a group
had overstepped and become a coniuratio did not lie in the
participants’ hands. The example of the Stellinga illustrates how that
process could play out. Its members may not have consciously set out
to create a gild, and the speed with which they gained ground makes
most sense if they developed out of an existing framework of local
69
Becher, Eid und Herrschaft, p. 13 ; Depreux, ‘Carolingiens et le serment’, p. 64.
70
Apparitio sancti Vedasti (Acta Sanctorum: Februarii I, ed. G. Henschen (Antwerp, 1658),
pp. 803–5; trans. C. West at history.dept.shef.ac.uk/translations/medieval/saint-vaast/). Cf.
C. West, ‘Visions in a Ninth-Century Village: An Early Medieval Microhistory’, History
Workshop Journal 81 (2016), pp. 1–16; and idem, ‘Le saint, le charpentier et le prêtre:
l’Apparitio Sancti Vedasti et les élites dans la Francia du IXe siècle’, in L. Jegou, T. Lienhard
and J. Schneider (eds), Faire lien: aristocratie, réseaux et échanges compétitifs. Mélanges en
l’honneur de Régine Le Jan (Paris, 2015), pp. 237–45. Priests were not supposed to enter into
oaths, though many did: Depreux, ‘Les Carolingiens et le serment’, pp. 65–6; idem,
‘Prestation du serment’, p. 526.

642 Rory Naismith
assemblies.71 In subsequent centuries the Stellinga might have formed

the basis of a sworn body that claimed a degree of autonomy and
agency.72 In the Carolingian world, however, safeguards were in place
to protect the established hierarchy from such threats, weaponizing
legitimacy as it applied to groups and gatherings.
Anglo-Saxon gilds
The gilds that were formed in England between the early tenth and
mid-eleventh centuries were in an important sense the opposite of their
Carolingian counterparts. They are poorly known from direct
references in legal or literary sources, but in five surviving cases gilds set
their rules down in statutes. These texts form the basis of knowledge
about Anglo-Saxon gilds, meaning that the picture of them is wholly
different, if no less frustrating. While the Carolingian gilds and
coniurationes are largely known from outside, the Anglo-Saxon ones are
known from within.73
Although these gild statutes all date from the century and a half after
900, it is clear that gilds had been active in England for a long time before
then. Arguably the earliest of many brief, incidental references to gilds
come in the laws of Ine, king of the West Saxons (688–726), probably
composed 688×694. These refer to gegildan as parties who might seek a
judicial oath in favour of either a slain thief or their killer (the rather
opaque text allows either reading), in the role that the kin or lord
would normally be expected to play.74 Gegilda is indeed the word used
in later gild statutes to refer to members of a gild, and this passage has
hence sometimes been taken as the first reference to gilds in
Anglo-Saxon England.75 An alternative reading, and arguably a likelier
71
72
Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities, p. 33. See also below, pp. 657–9.
73
The relevant texts are surveyed in Grinda, ‘Altenglisch (ge )gilda ’, pp. 371–2; S. Keynes, ‘Guild
Regulations’, in M. Lapidge, J. Blair, S. Keynes and D. Scragg (eds), The Wiley-Blackwell
Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England, 2nd edn (Chichester, 2014), pp. 226–7; J. Gerchow,
Die Gedenküberlieferung der Angelsachsen, mit einem Katalog der libri vitae und Necrologien
(Berlin, 1988), pp. 71–80. For overviews, see G. Rosser, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Gilds’, in J. Blair
(ed.), Minsters and Parish Churches: The Local Church in Transition 950–1200 (Oxford, 1988),
pp. 31–4; and A. Williams, ‘A Place in the Country: Orc of Abbotsbury and Tole of
Tolpuddle, Dorset’, in R. Lavelle and S. Roffey (eds), Danes in Wessex: The Scandinavian
Impact on Southern England, c. 800–c. 1100 (Oxford, 2015), pp. 158–71, at pp. 163–6.
74
Laws of Ine, c. 16 and 21 (Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. F. Liebermann, 3 vols (Halle, 1903–16),
I, pp. 96–7 and 98–9; The Laws of the Earliest English Kings, ed. and trans. F.L. Attenborough
(Cambridge, 1922), pp. 42–3). Different translators have interpreted this passage as referring to
either side of the case: compare Attenborough’s reading with that of English Historical
Documents. Volume I: c. 500–1042, ed. D. Whitelock, 2nd edn (London, 1979) [hereafter
EHD], pp. 400–1.
75
E.g. Epstein, Wage Labor, p. 39.

one given the reference is to gegildan rather than the actual body they
formed, would see them as a more ad hoc group, assembled specifically
to pay the wergild on behalf of the slayer: a sort of ‘substitute family’
to replace or supplement the help of kin and lord when paying a
compensation that was beyond the means of an individual offender.76
Wergild-sureties who performed that function in later times seem to
have been more distinct from gilds.77 But this role would certainly be
consonant with the root meaning of gegilda and related terms,78 and
points to one practice that brought people and their resources together,
laying the foundation for more sustained gilds.
The only other reference to gilds in Anglo-Saxon legislation comes
two centuries later, in the laws of Alfred the Great (871–99). These
referred to gegildan in essentially the same context as the laws of Ine,
as parties who would be expected to share the burden of paying
wergild (along with paternal and maternal kin), and to receive wergild
(in the absence of kin).79 Whether these refer to standing or temporary
gilds, the contrast with the coolness of Carolingian legislation is
striking. In England gilds were an accepted, in-built element of the
social and legal infrastructure, a kind of supplement to kin in a judicial
setting, and potentially more reliable to boot.80 The only signs of
discomfiture related to the excesses of gilds in a social context. In the
790s or 800s, Alcuin of York wrote to the archbishop of Canterbury,
taking him to task on the English proclivity towards what he called
conventicula (‘little gatherings’): ‘curious meetings, which they are
accustomed to have and call gilds’.81 His specific worry was that these
groups were seducing people away from prayer in church, and leading
them instead to drunken parties in surrounding hills, thereby
undermining episcopal authority.82 Alcuin’s letters imply that already
by about 800 attitudes towards gilds in England seemed
uncomfortably permissive, at least to an expatriate steeped in Frankish
76
Williams, ‘Place in the Country’, p. 165; S. Esders, ‘Wergild and Social Practice in the Early
Middle Ages: A 9th-Century Reichenau Fragment and its Context’, in O. Kano and J.-L.
Lemaître (eds), Entre texte et histoire: études d’histoire médiévale offertes au professeur Shoichi
Sato (Paris, 2015), pp. 117–27; A. Rio, Slavery after Rome, 500–1100 (Oxford, 2017), pp. 67–8.
77
II Edmund, c. 7.2 and Wergild, c. 3 (ed. Liebermann, I, pp. 190–1 and 392–3).
78
Grinda, ‘Altenglisch (ge )gilda ’, pp. 372–5; Düwel, ‘Philologisches zu “Gilde”’, pp. 404–15.
79
Laws of Alfred, c. 27–8 (ed. Liebermann, I, pp. 66–7; ed. and trans. Attenborough, pp. 76–7).
80
W.A. Morris, The Frankpledge System (London, 1910), pp. 8–9.
81
‘Conventus singulares, quos solent habere et nominant coniurationes’. Alcuin, Epistolae,
nos. 290–1 (Epistolae Karolini Aevi: Tomus II, ed. E. Dümmler, MGH Epp. 4 (Berlin, 1895),
pp. 448–9). On the addressees, see D. Bullough, Alcuin: Achievement and Reputation
(Leiden, 2004), p. 86.
82
Oexle, ‘Gilden als soziale Gruppen’, p. 309; Grinda, ‘Altenglisch (ge )gilda ’, pp. 379–81;
Gerchow, Gedenküberlieferung, p. 74; J. Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford,
2005), pp. 177–8.

644 Rory Naismith
customs and expectations.83 Other scattered references from the

mid-ninth century onwards paint much the same picture, and extend
it far beyond raucous feasting. Gilds fulfilled a wide range of
functions, openly and without any obvious opposition.84 They could
be named as collective witnesses in documents,85 as beneficiaries in
wills86 and as owners of land or of a gild-hall.87 They embraced men
and women, and lay and clergy, and could be found in both town and
country. By the mid-eleventh century the growing size and social
complexity of towns meant that more and more inhabitants were in
need of ‘substitute families’ for a combination of social, religious and
legal reasons, leading to a proliferation of gilds. They were on their
way to becoming a major part of urban life, with the first merchant
gilds appearing in English towns by the end of the century.88
The five gilds known from statutes flesh out this sketch considerably,
though they represent only a narrow slice of the full range of gilds in
England. All five statutes pertain to groups largely or wholly made up
of laymen and (possibly or certainly) women of relatively high status;
83
On the convivia associated with Frankish gilds, see Devroey, Puissants et misérables, pp. 146–50;
Oexle, ‘Gilden als soziale Gruppen’, pp. 309–25; idem, ‘Conjuratio und Gilden’, pp. 509–11;
R. Kaiser, Trunkenheit und Gewalt im Mittelalter (Cologne, 2002), pp. 144–65.
84
Archbishop Wulfstan’s Canons of Edgar placed gildscip alongside minster and jurisdictional area
(scriftscir ) among rights of which no priest should try to deprive another (c. 9: Wulfstan’s
Canons of Edgar, ed. R. Fowler (London, 1972), pp. 4–5).
85
P. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and Bibliography (London, 1969) [hereafter
S], no. 1199 (Charters of Christ Church Canterbury, ed. N.P. Brooks and S.E. Kelly (Oxford,
2013), no. 87), issued 858×866. A ‘gild of cnihtas ’ (cniahta gegildan ) was among the five
groups (geferscipas ) cited among the witnesses. For discussion, see N.P. Brooks, The Early
History of the Church of Canterbury: Christ Church from 597 to 1066 (London, 1984), pp. 27–33.
86
S 1498 (Charters of the New Minster, Winchester, ed. S. Miller (Oxford, 2001), no. 25), written
977×982, left £2 to a gild of mass-priests and £1 to a gild of deacons.
87
‘Great’ Domesday Book (=London, The National Archives, E 31/2/1–2), fols 1r and 2r (s. xiex.)
refer (respectively) to a gihalla burgensium in Dover, and to thirty-three acres at Canterbury
which the burgesses held ‘for their gild’ (in gildam suam ) (Domesday Book: A Complete
Translation, ed. A. Williams and G.H. Martin (London, 2002), pp. 3 and 5). At Winchester
in the mid-eleventh century, there was at least one (and more probably two) halls associated
with gilds of cnihtas, and land outside the west gate associated with an ‘Easter gild’ (Winton
Domesday § 10, 34 and 105 (F. Barlow (ed. and trans.), ‘The Winton Domesday’, in
M. Biddle (ed.), Winchester in the Early Middle Ages: An Edition and Discussion of the Winton
Domesday (Oxford, 1976), pp. 1–141, at pp. 34, 39 and 50). See also M. Biddle and
D.J. Keene, ‘Winchester in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, in ibid., pp. 241–448, at
pp. 335–6; D.J. Keene, ‘English Urban Guilds, c. 900–1300: The Purposes and Politics of
Association’, in I.A. Gadd and P. Wallis (eds), Guilds and Associations in Europe, 900–1900
(London, 2006), pp. 3–26, at pp. 8–9; and D.J. Keene, ‘“Knights” before the Round Table:
Cnihtas, Guildhalls and Governance in Early Winchester’, in M. Henig (ed.), Intersections:
The Archaeology and History of Christianity in England, 400–1200. Papers in Honour of
Martin Biddle and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle (Oxford, 2010), pp. 201–11). In London, a gild of
English cnihtas was confirmed as owner of property under Edward the Confessor (S 1103;
Charters of St Paul’s, London, ed. S.E. Kelly (Oxford, 2004), no. 32).
88
Keene, ‘English Urban Guilds’; W. Urry, Canterbury under the Angevin Kings (London, 1967),
pp. 126–7; J. Blair, Building Anglo-Saxon England (Princeton, 2018), p. 406. See also n. 147.

none reflects an association of clergy, or a gild of slaves or peasants.

Furthermore, all were written in Old English, reflecting a broader
increase of secular society’s engagement with the vernacular written
word in the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries, especially for
legal and administrative purposes.89 The context of their preservation
indicates that they were written in an ecclesiastical setting, as well as
that church institutions actively encouraged, and provided a focal point
for, the communal life of gilds. Three of the relevant texts survive
alongside other records entered into holy books owned by minsters:90
these include the gild statutes of Great Bedwyn (Fig. 1),91 Cambridge
(the book itself being held at nearby Ely) (Fig. 2),92 and Exeter
(Fig. 3).93 The texts from Bedwyn and Exeter are thought to date to
the early to mid-tenth century,94 and those from Cambridge to the late
tenth century (certainly after 970).95 Of the other two sets of statutes,
one is preserved as a remarkable single sheet, written sometime
between the 1020s and 1050s and subsequently held among charters at
Abbotsbury Abbey, whose founder – a Dane named Orc – was also the
89
The literature on this is extensive: for an overview see M.T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written
Record: England, 1066–1307, 3rd edn (Oxford, 2013), pp. 30–5; with a recent case study in
R. Gallagher and F. Tinti, ‘Latin, Old English and Documentary Practice at Worcester from
Wærferth to Oswald’, Anglo-Saxon England 46 (2017), pp. 271–325.
90
On this practice see D.N. Dumville, Liturgy and the Ecclesiastical History of Late Anglo-Saxon
England: Four Studies (Woodbridge, 1992), pp. 119–27; and D.A. Woodman (ed.), Charters
of Northern Houses (Oxford, 2012), pp. 317–23; Brooks and Kelly (eds), Charters of Christ
Church, pp. 85–95 and 143–7. For gilds and minsters, see Blair, Church, pp. 453–5.
91
Bern, Burgerbibliothek, 671, fol. 75v (south-west England, Cornwall or Wales; s. ix1; prov.
Great Bedwyn, s. x1; prov. France, s. xi/xii) (H. Gneuss and M. Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon
Manuscripts: A Bibliographical Handlist of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or
Owned in England up to 1100 (Toronto, 2014) [hereafter G&L], no. 794). See also
M. Gretsch, The Intellectual Foundations of the English Benedictine Reform (Cambridge, 1999),
pp. 343–4. The text is best edited in M. Förster, Der Flussname Themse und seine Sippe:
Studien zur Anglisierung keltischer Eignnamen und zur Lautchronologie des Altbritischen
(Munich, 1941), pp. 791–3; see also H. Meritt, ‘Old English Entries in a Manuscript at
Bern’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 33 (1934), pp. 343–51, at pp. 344–6. It is
translated in EHD, no. 138.
92
Cambridge, University Library, Kk.1.24, with London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B.V,
fols 74 and 76, and British Library, Sloane 1044, fol. 2 (Northumbria, s. viii; prov. Ely, s. x)
(G&L, no. 21; D.G. Scragg, A Conspectus of Scribal Hands Writing English, 960–1100
(Cambridge, 2012), nos. 269–71). The statutes (on fols 74r–v) are edited and translated in
Diplomatarium Anglicanum aevi Saxonici: A Collection of English Charters, ed. and trans.
B. Thorpe (London, 1865), pp. 610–13; a more recent translation is EHD, no. 136.
93
London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B.V, fol. 75r (Northumbria, s. viii; prov. Exeter, s. x1)
(G&L, no. 374). The text is edited and translated in P.W. Conner, Anglo-Saxon Exeter:
A Tenth-Century Cultural History (Woodbridge, 1993), pp. 168–9; see also Councils and
Synods, with Other Documents Relating to the English Church. Volume 1: A.D. 871–1204, ed.
and trans. D. Whitelock, M. Brett and C.N.L. Brooke, 2 parts (Oxford, 1981) [hereafter
C&S], no. 16; Diplomatarium, ed. and trans. Thorpe, pp. 613–14; EHD, no. 137.
94
The Exeter statutes pre-date a document on the same folio datable to 955×959.
95
The Cambridge statutes pre-date a document on the same folio of 970×999 (Anglo-Saxon
Charters, ed. and trans. A.J. Robertson (Cambridge, 1939), no. 71).

646 Rory Naismith
Fig. 1 The Bedwyn gild statutes (Bern, Burgerbibliothek, 671, fols 75v–76r;
reproduced with the permission of Burgerbibliothek Bern)
Fig. 2 The Cambridge thegns’ gild statutes (London, British Library, Cotton
Tiberius B.V, fol. 74r–v; reproduced by permission of the British Library)
Fig. 3 The Exeter gild statutes (London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B.V, fol.
75r; reproduced by permission of the British Library)
patron of the gild (Fig. 4).96 This document has visual affinities with
contemporary diplomas and liturgical compositions, suggesting the
kind of resonances it may have conjured. The final set of statutes is
known only from significantly later copies, having been incorporated
into the collections of Anglo-Saxon law that underpin the Textus
Roffensis (Rochester, Cathedral Library, A.3.5) and (in Latin translation)
96
In the possession of the Earls of Ilchester, but deposited in Dorchester, The Dorset History
Centre, since 1997. For a facsimile, see Facsimiles of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, ed.
J. Cameron and trans. W.B. Sanders, 3 vols (Southampton, 1878–84), II, Earl of Ilchester
IV. On its provenance see S. Keynes, ‘The Lost Cartulary of Abbotsbury’, Anglo-Saxon
England 18 (1989), pp. 209–44, esp. p. 215. The text is edited and translated in C&S, no. 67;
see also Diplomatarium, ed. and trans. Thorpe, pp. 605–8; EHD, no. 139. Its date is inferred
from the reference to Orc, who was active from 1024 until his death in or before the period
1058×1066: Keynes, ‘Lost Cartulary’, pp. 208–9; Williams, ‘Place in the Country’, pp. 158–63.

648 Rory Naismith
Fig. 4 The Abbotsbury gild statutes (Dorchester, The Dorset History Centre;
published with the permission of Dorset History Centre, on behalf of the Earl of
Ilchester)
Quadripartitus.97 Referred to by legal scholars as ‘VI Æthelstan’, it

records the ordinances of the ‘peace-gilds’ of London in the time of
King Æthelstan (924–39).98 The peace-gilds’ regulations have
sometimes been hived off from the other gild statutes as a law code,
not altogether helpfully. Both categorizations admit a good deal of
latitude, and overlap in interests and framing.99 At the same time, the
peace-gilds stand out from the other gild statutes in a number of
respects, which will be discussed in due course.
97
On the relationship of these collections see R. Naismith, ‘The Laws of London? IV Æthelred in
Context’, London Journal 44 (2019), pp. 1–16, at pp. 3–5, with references to further discussion.
98
VI Æthelstan (ed. Liebermann, I, pp. 173–83; ed. and trans. Attenborough, pp. 156–69).
99
Law codes, like gild statutes, could be preserved as loose sheets of parchment or in holy books:
Wormald, Making, pp. 181–97.

It will be apparent that there was no set form for the statutes of a gild.
That should not be interpreted as implying that they were in any way
informal or ephemeral; on the contrary, the act of writing such a text
into a sacred book, or onto a single sheet of parchment, carried
considerable weight. It was precisely how one formalized such an
enterprise. The structure and framing of the texts point to a fluid
dialogue as gilds went about crafting their regulations. Two sets of
statutes (Cambridge and Abbotsbury) open with the adverb her (‘here’)
and describe what follows as a gewrit (‘document’), while two others
(Bedwyn and London) refer to the text as a gerædnes (‘ordinance’), as
the Cambridge statutes also do at another point. Cambridge and
Abbotsbury lay out their statutes with impersonal or third-person
constructions, those of Bedwyn and Exeter combine this approach with
occasional instances of the first-person plural, while the peace-gilds of
London use the first-person plural much more consistently and
emphatically. Nothing suggests that any of the gild statutes was directly
dependent on another.100 Rather, the impression is of a widely shared
set of vocabulary and principles that could be picked, mixed and
adapted freely, leading to extensive crossover between the five in terms
of what subject matter they actually touched on. These similarities in
content are best summarized in tabular form (Table 1).
If there is any leitmotif to be discerned here, it is solidarity. The
statutes placed a high premium on participation, emphasizing the oaths
and pledges members made to each other, or even imposing fines on
those who missed meetings. Gild duties were not to be taken lightly,
for while these were voluntary associations, they brought a high degree
of responsibility and involvement in diverse aspects of the lives of
fellow members. The most frequently recurring of these was also the
most inescapable: provision for commemorating, and helping
practically with, the death of members.101 Alms and prayers offered as
part of this process might come direct from the members, from Masses
conducted by priests at gild meetings, or from prayers by monks or
priests paid for by members. A number of these provisions, and others
such as swearing an oath on relics, imply that at least some meetings
took place at an older, larger ‘mother church’ or minster.102 Sometimes
the gild members’ involvement in death and burial went much further,
100
Pace P.W. Conner, ‘Parish Guilds and the Production of Old English Literature in the Public
Sphere’, in V. Blanton (ed.), Intertexts: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Culture Presented to Paul E.
Szarmach (Tempe, 2008), pp. 255–72, at p. 264, which notes structural parallels between
the Abbotsbury and Exeter statutes.
101
V. Thompson, Dying and Death in Later Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge, 2004),
pp. 112–15.
102
Blair, Church, pp. 453–5; Rosser, ‘Anglo-Saxon Gilds’, p. 31. For a gild associated with York
Minster, see n. 119.

650 Rory Naismith
Table 1 Summary of shared points of interest in the five Anglo-Saxon gild statutes
Abbotsbury Bedwyn Cambridge Exeter London
Death and funeral • • • • •

arrangements
Fines for shirking • • •
meetings/duties
Hierarchy within • • • •
membership
Involvement of priest • •
Management of violence • •
Maintenance of internal • • • •
peace
Oath or pledge • •
Obligations fit around • •
other structures
Presentation in • • •
first-person plural
Presentation in • •
impersonal forms
Provisions for feasting • • •
Provision for payments • • • •
in cash or kind
Support in case of house • •
burning down
Timing of meetings • • •
the Cambridge and Abbotsbury statutes expecting members to transport

a dead or dying counterpart to their preferred place of burial. Gilds
thereby enabled a wider swathe of the population to enact the burial of
their preference, mirroring arrangements made by wealthy individuals
directly with churches.103
Material support could also come during the lifetime of members.
Some statutes included a pledge of financial help in case of a house
fire, or (at Exeter) if a member elected to go on ‘the southern
pilgrimage’ (æt suþfore) to Rome. Companionship also came from the
103
Blair, Church, pp. 463–71; A. Williams, ‘Thegnly Piety and Ecclesiastical Patronage in the Late
Old English Kingdom’, Anglo-Norman Studies 24 (2002), pp. 1–24, at pp. 22–4; Thompson,
Dying and Death, p. 114. Compare S 1493 (978×1016) (Codex Diplomaticus Aevi Saxonici, ed.
J.M. Kemble, 6 vols (London, 1839–48), IV, no. 971), in which a husband and wife donate
land to Ramsey, on condition that the monks have their bodies fetched back for burial
upon the couple’s deaths.

feasts that played such a large part in the life of the gilds.104 These might
explain why most of the gilds allowed members to pay dues or fines to the
gild either in cash or in kind – unless this was simply a common practice
outside the higher landowning elite, who seemingly had a strong
preference for precious metal.105 Most gilds had a preferred alternative
commodity: sesters of honey in Cambridge, sheep, wood or ale in
Bedwyn, sesters of wheat in Abbotsbury or an ox in London. But when
the ale flowed freely there was always a risk of conviviality getting out
of hand, and most of the gilds had measures in place to fine members
who insulted one another. The Cambridge thegns’ gild even expected
fines to be levied on the lord of any cniht who drew a weapon in the
course of a meeting, and had provisions for how to handle one
member killing another.
The Anglo-Saxon gilds’ brand of hard-partying spirituality drew the
censure of outside observers, from Alcuin in the eighth century to
Walter Map in the twelfth.106 Yet within England gild feasts and
parties flourished. All five gilds combined religious and worldly
obligations, demonstrating the enthusiasm which lay society dedicated
to institutional Christian life, and the difficulty of drawing a sharp
divide between the two spheres.107 That said, the gilds vary
significantly in emphasis. Those of Abbotsbury and Exeter devote more
attention to the religious (especially liturgical) requirements of
members, as do the incomplete statutes from Great Bedwyn. The
thegns’ gild of Cambridge and the peace-gilds of London stand out for
their detailed discussions of worldly affairs, particularly regarding
violence. The Cambridge statutes focus on the acts of individual
members, and are a major source for the ongoing importance of
retributive violence in late Anglo-Saxon England.108 But the gild’s aim
was to strengthen the position of members in a dispute, or better yet to
prevent disputes altogether: it is worth stressing that the gild’s
provisions do not suggest that quarrels were common. If a member was
killed, the gild demanded its own compensation fee (like the gilds of
104
C. Lee, Feasting the Dead: Food and Drink in Anglo-Saxon Burial Rituals (Woodbridge, 2007),
pp. 48–9.
105
R. Naismith, ‘Payments for Land and Privilege in Anglo-Saxon England’, Anglo-Saxon
England 41 (2012), pp. 277–342, at pp. 308–13.
106
See the anecdote in Walter Map, De nugis curialium II.12 (Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium;
Courtiers’ Trifles, ed. and trans. M.R. James, rev. C.N.L. Brooke and R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford,
1983), pp. 154–5), with Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities, p. 76; Rosser, Art of Solidarity,
pp. 45–6.
107
Rosser, Art of Solidarity, pp. 14–17.
108
P. Hyams, ‘Feud and the State in Late Anglo-Saxon England’, Journal of British Studies 40
(2001), pp. 1–43, esp. pp. 24–5; J. Hudson, The Oxford History of the Laws of England.
Volume II: 871–1216 (Oxford, 2012), pp. 171–5; Lambert, Law and Order, pp. 227–30.

652 Rory Naismith
Ine and Alfred’s law codes), with the whole membership being called on
to exact vengeance if the killer refused. In other words, anyone who
wished to take the life of a gild member would have to face not only
the kin and wergild payments, but the wrath of the whole gild.
Conversely, if a gild member killed someone out of revenge or to
remedy an insult, they could expect financial assistance towards paying
wergild. The gild’s aid had limits: vengeance should not be applied
recklessly, and if a gild member slew anyone ‘foolishly and wantonly’
(mid dysie 7 mid dole) he could expect no help at all.109
The London peace-gilds devoted most of their statutes to measures
against external aggression, particularly theft. They claimed the right
to pursue and summarily execute known thieves, including outside
their own area of jurisdiction, and had measures in place to deal with
kin groups who might resist them and for getting the support of local
reeves in that endeavour. Theft was a recurring concern, bordering on
an obsession, in royal legislation of the early tenth century, and the
aggressive policies of the Londoners in prosecuting it have close
parallels in other texts.110 What the peace-gilds did was therefore not
particularly unusual: what is more striking is that an association of
gilds claimed the authority to do so. As stressed by Susan Reynolds,
there was nothing to stop an association from asserting its rights in
the Middle Ages, so long as it had the will and the clout to do so.111
But there is a sharp contrast here with the Carolingian coniurationes,
which were seen as fundamentally lacking in formal recognition or
legitimate authority. Indeed, as a body that stuck up forcefully against
powerful kindreds who stole from members, the London peace-gilds
did exactly what Carloman II’s 884 capitulary tried to stop. It is true
that the London gilds were exceptional. They emerged at a time of
experimentation and evolution in local government, and although no
other subsequent gilds operated in quite this way, some of the
elements pioneered by the London peace-gilds – such as division into
hundreds and tens – would go on to be core components of a more
uniform English apparatus of local peacekeeping.112 In effect London’s
gilds did the same jobs that other locally constituted bodies would do
in later times with more formally constituted assemblies and officials:
109
On this form of justice, see W.I. Miller, Eye for an Eye (Cambridge, 2004).
110
Wormald, Making, pp. 299 and 305–6; D. Pratt, ‘Written Law and Communication of
Authority in Tenth-Century England’, in C. Leyser, D. Rollason and H. Williams (eds),
England and the Continent in the Tenth Century: Studies in Honour of Wilhelm Levison
(Turnhout, 2010), pp. 331–50, at pp. 334–41; S. Foot, Æthelstan: The First King of England
(New Haven, 2011), pp. 140–6; Lambert, Law and Order, pp. 174–7.
111
Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities, p. 168.
112
Molyneaux, Formation, pp. 243–50.

the gilds provided a way to enact government and law enforcement from
the bottom up.
The peace-gilds of London stand out in a number of other ways, most
notably in structure, size and makeup. Internal references to the
organization were always in the plural, indicating that it was conceived
of as a consortium of smaller units.113 Together these demonstrate the
capacity of gilds, as spontaneous and voluntary entities, to cut across
other structures in society in aid of specific goals.114 There is no reason
to doubt that the hundreds and tens of VI Æthelstan were indeed
groups of individuals (rather than the more abstracted units of the
same names which emerged in later times), in which case the
peace-gild as a whole was surely a much bigger operation than any of
its English counterparts. Its large membership was also highly diverse.
The preface states that the regulations had been agreed by the bishops
and reeves as well as ‘nobles and peasants’ (ge eorlisce ge ceorlisce) who
belonged to London, meaning that it extended beyond the intramural
population to a proportion of those living in the vicinity.115 Women as
well as men were included, and the statutes suggest that there were
indeed both poor and wealthy members: poor widows were excused
membership fees; those without horses were expected to support those
who did have them; and only slaveholders had to contribute to
compensation costs for lost slaves. The peace-gilds would have been
a veritable cross-section of society, though doubtless dominated by
the more influential members who constituted the organization’s
supervisory committee.116
No well-evidenced Anglo-Saxon gilds drew exclusively on lower ranks
of the peasantry, in the way that Carolingian coniurationes servorum or
village-based organizations envisaged by the 884 capitulary are thought
to have done. But it is likely that such groups did exist in England.
They might in fact have been commonplace. A hint of just how
thickly distributed low-level peasant gilds might have been survives
from Exeter in the decades immediately after the Norman Conquest
(1072×1103), in the form of a list of no fewer than fourteen gilds that
113
R. Naismith, ‘The Origins of the Husting and the Folkmoot’, History 104 (2019), pp. 409–24,
at pp. 423–4; Grinda, ‘Altenglisch (ge )gilda ’, pp. 375–9. Felix Liebermann (‘Einleitung zum
Statut der Londoner Friedensgilde unter Aethelstan’, in Mélanges Hermann Fitting, 2 vols
(Montpellier, 1907–8), II, pp. 77–103, at pp. 87–90) was aware of this, but explained it as a
reference to multiple gild members.
114
Naismith, ‘Origins of the Husting’, pp. 416–22.
115
Compare the role of Mainz in M. Innes, ‘People, Places and Power in Carolingian Society’, in
M. de Jong and F. Theuws (eds), Topographies of Power in the Early Middle Ages (Leiden,
2001), pp. 397–437, at pp. 407–11.
116
VI Æthelstan 8.1 (ed. Liebermann, I, p. 178; ed. and trans. Attenborough, pp. 162–3).

654 Rory Naismith
Fig. 5 The Exeter village gilds (Exeter, Cathedral Library, 3501, fol. 7r–v; reproduced
with permission of the University of Exeter, Digital Humanities, and the Dean &
Chapter, Exeter Cathedral)
Fig. 6 Map of locations associated with the Exeter village gilds (drawn by the author)

was added to the preliminary folios of a manuscript of the gospels in Old

English (Fig. 5).117 These were much more humble affairs than the gilds
of the statutes. All were associated with named villages situated near
Exeter (some of which contained several gilds) (Fig. 6), but outside the
cathedral’s minster-parish. The members, numbering between twelve
and forty-four per gild, thus sought to supplement and transcend
existing parochial arrangements by paying minute fees of a penny or
two per year in return for prayer and confraternity with the cathedral.
In addition to this important observation, the late Duncan Probert
noted that the lists vary in structure, implying that they derive from
pre-existing documents, and also that in several cases the number of
individuals in a gild matches exactly the number of peasants recorded
at the same location in Domesday Book. Gilds might, in other words,
dominate whole villages,118 and the inhabitants’ efforts may have started
a very long Exeter tradition of secular piety organized through gilds
that extended down to the Reformation.119 Devotional village gilds of
this kind could have been widespread, arising wherever there was a
desire for voluntary association with a church.120 The ‘gild members
and gild sisters’ (gildan 7 gildsweostra) commemorated in bidding
prayers from early eleventh-century York could well have been bound
to the minster on a similar basis.121
The membership of most of the other, better-known gilds was
probably like those of the villages around Exeter in being small and
relatively focused socially. The gild of English cnihtas active in London
under Edward the Confessor was claimed to have been founded by
thirteen men under Edgar, and dissolved voluntarily by fifteen
members in the early twelfth century.122 No other gilds provide exact
numbers, but they tended to follow the London cnihtas in recruiting
117
Now Cambridge, University Library, Ii.2.11, with Exeter, Cathedral Library, 3501 (Exeter, s.
xi3/4) (G&L, no. 15). The first seven leaves, including the list of gilds (7r–v), form the
portion still held in Exeter. Diplomatarium, ed. and trans. Thorpe, pp. 608–10.
118
D. Probert, ‘Exeter’s Gildship and Manumission Records’, in S. Bassett and A.J. Spedding
(eds), Names, Texts and Landscapes in the Middle Ages: A Memorial Volume for Duncan
Probert (Donington, forthcoming).
119
Rosser, ‘Anglo-Saxon Gilds’, pp. 31–2; Connor, ‘Parish Guilds’; N.I. Orme, ‘The Kalendar
Brethren of the City of Exeter’, Report and Transactions of the Devonshire Association 109
(1977), pp. 153–69; F. Barlow, The English Church, 1000–1066: A History of the Later
Anglo-Saxon Church, 2nd edn (London, 1979), pp. 196–8.
120
Or other collective actions, such as the foundation or endowment of a local church: Blair,
Church, pp. 397–401 and 409–10.
121
York, Minster Library, MS Add. 1, fol. 161v (s. xex.–xiin.; prov. York, by 1020–3) (G&L, no.
774). Cf. W.H. Stevenson, ‘Yorkshire Surveys and Other Eleventh-Century Documents in
the York Gospels’, English Historical Review 27 (1912), pp. 1–25, at p. 10; and S. Keynes,
‘The Additions in Old English’, in N. Barker (ed.), The York Gospels (London, 1986), pp.
81–99, at p. 97.
122
The Cartulary of Holy Trinity Aldgate, ed. G.A.J. Hodgett (London, 1971), p. 168.

656 Rory Naismith
from men of relatively elevated social standing. Status looms large in

several respects. The expectations of wealth are representative. Whereas
the London peace-gilds allowed for different levels of wealth, all four
other statutes demanded regular payments of money or other
commodities, which represented significantly larger contributions than
those expected by the Exeter village gilds. Not just anyone could be a
member on these terms. As in the later Middle Ages, the gilds’ prime
recruiting ground lay above the desperately poor, but below the
aristocracy proper.123 One gild was described explicitly as ‘the gild of
thegns in Cambridge’ (þegna gilde on Grantabrycge). ‘Thegns’ here
should be taken as a description of landowners of varying wealth based
in, or more likely around, the town.124 Some thegns were magnates
with property across the kingdom, but those in the Cambridge gild are
more likely to have been local figures anxious to assert what may have
been a newly won status.125 Gilds provided one way to stake a claim to
this position, for the benefit of both one’s peers and others of higher
and lower standing. Joining was itself a performative act, and so too
was feasting, horseplay and religious devotion with one’s fellows.
Preoccupation with degrees of status ran through several gilds. Thegns
of the Cambridge gild brought with them an entourage of armed
retainers, referred to as cnihtas,126 and for whose conduct each thegn
was responsible. During meetings there was a ‘VIP section’ where
cnihtas were not permitted to sit, on pain of a fine. Membership of this
gild was in essence two-tier. The Exeter gild had a similar structure,
with regular members (gegildan) and retainers (cnihtas) receiving
different allowances at communal feasts, while at Abbotsbury the two
tiers consisted of full members (rihtgegyldan) and those who were not
(ungyldan); this gild also had a steward and ‘purveyors’ (feormera),
presumably responsible for arranging practicalities of supply and
catering, who would guard against members bringing in too many guests.
Another, closely associated quality that underpinned the higher-status
Anglo-Saxon gilds (and also the peace-gilds of London) was that they
complemented rather than challenged other organizational structures in
123
Rosser, Art of Solidarity, p. 56.
124
For the evolution of the status of thegn, see H.R. Loyn, ‘Gesiths and Thegns in Anglo-Saxon
England’, English Historical Review 70 (1955), pp. 529–49.
125
F.M. Stenton, ‘The Thriving of the Anglo-Saxon Ceorl’, in his Preparatory to Anglo-Saxon
England, ed. D.M. Stenton (Oxford, 1970), pp. 383–93; C. Senecal, ‘Keeping up with the
Godwinesons: In Pursuit of Aristocratic Status in Late Anglo-Saxon England’, Anglo-Norman
Studies 23 (2001), pp. 251–66; R. Naismith, ‘The Land Market in Anglo-Saxon Society’,
Historical Research 89 (2016), pp. 19–41, at pp. 38–9.
126
On cniht, see J. Gillingham, ‘Thegns and Knights in Eleventh-Century England: Who
was then the Gentleman?’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser. 5 (1995),
pp. 129–54, at pp. 137–9.

society. If anything, they took pains to accommodate the other ties

members had. Whatever oaths and pledges of mutual support that gilds
exacted were not seen as undermining loyalty to king or lord. The only
sets of statutes which refer directly to oaths – those of Cambridge and
London – were also the ones which spelt out most clearly how the
gilds fitted around other authorities.127 The Cambridge gild anticipated
members utilizing the network of reeves to pass word of need on to
their counterparts, and the only legitimate excuse for lack of response
to such a summons was if a member was busy on his lord’s business.128
Similarly, dining under the roof of a king, bishop or ealdorman meant
members were exempt from the fine for feasting with the killer of a
gild member. Obligations to lord and king trumped those to the gild.
The London peace-gilds, meanwhile, invited their ‘noble lord’
(cynehlaford) the king to improve on their regulations, implying he
would see or hear them, and closed their core chapters with an
injunction to ‘let us keep our pledge and peace, as it best please our
lord’:129 their organization, that is, was seen as operating at the pleasure
of the king. The whole document can be read as a bid for royal
acquiescence and recognition.
Gild solidarity in Anglo-Saxon England thus did not automatically
mean confrontation with other bonds and hierarchies. Members of
the higher elite seemingly felt no misgivings about consorting with
gilds. The peace-gilds of London had close associations with the
bishop, and a major Scandinavian landowner, Orc/Urki, was the
patron of the Abbotsbury gild, jointly agreeing the statutes with the
gild brothers.130 Far from being a threat, the gild was a way for Orc,
as a wealthy outsider, to create friends and allies among local
worthies.131
Conclusion
The relatively open attitude of the late Anglo-Saxon ruling establishment

towards gilds diverges sharply from that of the wary Carolingian elite.
127
M. Ammon, ‘“Ge mid wedde ge mid aðe”: The Functions of Oath and Pledge in Anglo-Saxon
Legal Culture’, Historical Research 86 (2013), pp. 515–35.
128
The Exeter statutes also offered illness and lord’s business as the only permissible excuses for
missing more than two meetings.
129
‘Uton healdan ure wedd 7 þæt frið, swa hit urum hlaforde licige.’ VI Æthelstan, c. 9 (ed.
Liebermann, I, p. 181; ed. and trans. Attenborough, pp. 166–7).
130
Keynes, ‘Lost Cartulary’, pp. 208–9; Williams, ‘Place in the Country’; eadem, ‘Thegnly Piety’,
pp. 22–3; T. Bolton, The Empire of Cnut the Great: Conquest and the Consolidation of Power in
Northern Europe in the Early Eleventh Century (Leiden, 2009), pp. 51–5; idem, Cnut the Great
(New Haven, 2017), pp. 115–17.
131
Rosser, ‘Anglo-Saxon Gilds’, p. 32.

658 Rory Naismith
This cautious approach can probably be put down to the ideological

climate of the Carolingian era. From the beginning gilds faced an
uphill struggle: coniurationes had already been tarred by association
with gatherings of wayward priests, and latterly also with aristocratic
rebellions. Nor is it likely that many gilds in the Carolingian period
actually posed a conscious threat, or even involved a formal oath at all.
But promissory oaths of this kind stand out because, if sworn outside
the proper channels, they stood the most chance of incurring the ire of
the secular authorities.132
The problem was that gilds did not fit comfortably into the pyramidal
hierarchy that descended from the king. Active promulgation of this
ordered view of society was one of the hallmarks of the Carolingian
era.133 Efforts to actualize that ideal tied the whole population to the
king, together with a vast imperial ecclesia under imperial tutelage. The
rhetoric with which these structures were framed tended to be
decidedly top-heavy, helping to enshrine an elite core of counts,
bishops and missi.134 Within their own territories, magnates relied on
highly personalized connections with networks of aristocratic
communities.135 There was room for negotiation in how this worked on
a local level, but mainstream Carolingian interpretations of royal
authority emphasized a personalized vision of office and loyalty,
exercised through collective organs that reflected the growing social
superiority of the ruling dynasty and its elite allies.136
This left other groups and other kinds of loyalty out in the cold.
Horizontal associations were supposed to come from shared vertical
ones, on terms set by the elite.137 The baseline view of spontaneous
gatherings was suspicion and incomprehension, shading easily into
condemnation.138 Gilds in the Carolingian world thus remained the
domain of local self-help and solidarity, flying under the radar unless
they registered as a threat, and providing an alternative source of
132
Meersseman and Pacini, Ordo fraternitatis, I, pp. 29–31.
133
Devroey, Puissants et misérables, pp. 32–9; West, Reframing, pp. 102–5.
134
C. Pössel, ‘Authors and Recipients of Carolingian Capitularies, 779–829’, in R. Corradini, R.
Meens, C. Pössel and P. Shaw (eds), Texts and Identities in the Early Middle Ages (Vienna,
2006), pp. 253–76.
135
Innes, State and Society, pp. 124–9; West, Reframing, pp. 50–76. For counts, see Stone,
Morality and Masculinity, pp. 153–5; West, Reframing, pp. 20–2; S. Airlie, ‘The Aristocracy
in the Service of the State in the Carolingian Period’, in S. Airlie, W. Pohl and H. Reimitz
(eds), Staat im frühen Mittelalter (Vienna, 2006), pp. 93–112. For comital office as
ministerium, see de Jong, Penitential State, esp. pp. 151–2.
136
M. Costambeys, M. Innes and S. MacLean, The Carolingian World (Cambridge, 2011), pp.
271–323.
137
West, Reframing, pp. 24–6; Wickham, ‘Consensus and Assemblies’, esp. pp. 409–10.
138
Bobrycki, ‘Flailing Women’.

support for those who were not, or did not want to be, embroiled in
obligations to the elite hierarchy.139
It was in the context of the etiolation of that hierarchy, and the
shift of the centre of gravity to a more regional level in the tenth
and especially eleventh centuries, that gilds and larger gild-like
organizations found a new lease of life as a way for associations drawn
from people below the elite to exercise collective agency. Success
depended on how they related to other power structures: if arrayed
directly against established interests, gilds faced the same obstacles as
before and were cast in the same terms by detractors. The duke and
his allies violently suppressed peasants in Normandy who wished to
‘live according to their own wishes’ and ‘follow laws of their own’ by
means of a large coniuratio in 996.140 A more successful cousin of
early gilds, the diocesan associations of the ‘Peace of God’ movement,
went in a completely different direction.141 These recalled the London
peace-gilds in their inclusion of bishops and aristocrats, and in their
primary concern with peacekeeping. But they went even further: oaths
of peace towards the church and pauperes, sworn under episcopal
leadership, lay at the heart of the effort. What distinguished them was
a much more formal religious element in their formation and
motivation. On a practical level, the Peace movement also benefited
from being larger and more narrowly focused in purpose than many
gilds, and a similar interest in collective maintenance of peace would
in time also feed into the first urban communes of northern
Europe.142 Towns, with their growing concentrations of people,
migration and complex relationships, were especially fertile ground.
Those of northern Italy in the late eleventh century likewise saw
oath-bound associations of citizens take on a more formal,
governmental character as the infrastructure of royal government
139
C. Wickham, ‘Rural Society in Carolingian Europe’, in R. McKitterick (ed.), The New
Cambridge Medieval History. Volume II, c. 700–c. 900 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 510–37, at pp.
521–3.
140
‘Iuxta suos libitus uiuere . . . legibus uterentur suis’. William of Jumièges, Gesta Normannorum
ducum V.2 (The Gesta Normannorum Ducum of William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis, and
Robert of Torigni, ed. and trans. E.M.C. van Houts, 2 vols (Oxford, 1992–5), II, p. 4). Cf.
B. Gowers, ‘996 and All that: The Norman Peasants’ Revolt Reconsidered’, EME 21 (2013),
pp. 71–98; and Wickham, ‘Space and Society’, pp. 568–74.
141
T. Head and R.W. Landes (eds), The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in
France around the Year 1000 (Ithaca, 1992); D. Barthélemy, L’an mil et la paix de Dieu: la
France chrétienne et féodale (Paris, 1999); Koziol, Peace of God; O.G. Oexle, ‘Peace through
Conspiracy’, in B. Jussen (ed.), Ordering Medieval Society: Perspectives on Intellectual and
Practical Modes of Shaping Social Relations (Philadelphia, 2001), pp. 285–322.
142
A. Vermeesch, Essai sur les origines et la signification de la commune dans le nord de la France
(XIe et XIIe siècles) (Heule, 1966); D. Kennelly, ‘Medieval Towns and the Peace of God’,
Medievalia et humanistica 15 (1962), pp. 42–52; T. Reuter, Medieval Polities and Modern
Mentalities, ed. J.L. Nelson (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 78–9.

660 Rory Naismith
retreated.143 Specific groups within towns also stood to benefit from the
free-standing solidarity and support that gilds offered:144 the first
mercantile gilds emerged in Tiel and other Low Country towns after
about 1000, as commercial growth made it desirable for particular
groups to seek their own advantage at the expense of competitors.145
English gilds prefigure elements of this picture, being jarringly more
visible from the mid-ninth and especially early tenth century onwards.
Far from hiding their light under a bushel, these numerous and diverse
gilds openly owned property and intervened in legal processes. This
situation arose from underlying differences in how legitimate political
and collective action was conceived of. In Carolingian Francia,
legitimacy was the preserve of those in direct touch with royal authority,
leaving spontaneously convoked gilds in a marginal and contentious
political, collective space, ideologically and sometimes violently opposed
to lordly power.146 Gilds and their members had a freer hand to operate
in England because they were treated as, and functioned as, collective
participants in political society. These conditions allowed several kinds
of gild to flourish. The London peace-gilds and Exeter village gilds
indicate something of their variety, as diverse in role and form as the
communities that gave rise to them. But the most important element in
surviving sources consisted of men who sat at the cusp of elite status.
Collectively, such individuals wielded considerable clout in England,
and gilds were an effective way of harnessing it.
The roots of their prominence lie in the relative weakness of English
kings and elites in earlier times. Historically, both had operated in the
midst of a large population of free peasants.147 That situation was
changing in the tenth and eleventh centuries, although it left an
143
C. Wickham, ‘The “Feudal Revolution” and the Origins of Italian City Communes’,
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 24 (2014), pp. 29–55, esp. pp. 47–55; idem,
Sleepwalking into a New World: The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth
Century (Princeton, 2015).
144
T. De Moor, ‘The Silent Revolution: A New Perspective on the Emergence of Commons,
Guilds, and Other Forms of Corporate Collective Action in Western Europe’, International
Review of Social History 53 (2008), pp. 179–212; A.E. Verhulst, The Rise of Cities in
North-West Europe (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 123–31; G. Dilcher, ‘Personale und lokale
Strukturen kaufmännischen Rechts als Vorformen genossenschaftlichen Stadtrechts’, in K.
Friedland (ed.), Gilde und Korporation in den nordeuropäischen Städten des späten Mittelalters
(Cologne, 1984), pp. 65–78.
145
Coornaert, ‘Ghildes médiévales’, pp. 48–55; O.G. Oexle, ‘Die Kaufmannsgilde von Tiel’, in K.
Düwel (ed.), Untersuchungen zu Handel und Verkehr der vor- und frühgesschichtlichen Zeit in
Mittel- und Nordeuropa. 6: Organisationsformen der Kaufmannsvereinigungen in der
Spätantike und im frühen Mittelalter (Göttingen, 1989), pp. 173–96; R. Dessí and S. Ogilvie,
‘Social Capital and Collusion: The Case of Merchant Guilds’, CESifo Working Paper Series
No. 1037 (2003), https://ssrn.com/abstract=449263.
146
Wickham, ‘Looking Forward’, p. 163.
147
C. Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800
(Oxford, 2005), pp. 303–26 and 339–51; idem, Inheritance, pp. 159–64 and 467–71.

important legacy: later Anglo-Saxon kings built up their authority by

collaboration not just with aristocrats and ecclesiastical institutions, but
with a broad base of free landholders, who continued to form the
bedrock of local society. Their role became still more visible and
important as great estates dissolved and opened up possibilities for
smaller landowners: even if only some could claim the status of thegn
and the rest formally remained of lower standing, many would have
been lords of a few hides and those who worked them.148 Successful
members of this increasingly stratified and competitive late
Anglo-Saxon ‘gentry’ should be seen as rising up from the peasantry,
perhaps buying in via the land market, or being parachuted in from
among royal servants.149 Close work on Domesday Book has revealed
just how lush this undergrowth of minor landholders was by the
middle of the eleventh century. About 16 per cent of all the property it
covered was, in 1066, held by some 8,600 named individuals, each
with a total net income from land of less than £100 per annum (and
another 10 per cent of property was held by anonymi, probably of very
humble standing).150
The wealth of these individuals went hand in hand with important
roles in other areas of local society and government. The collective
weight of the ‘gentry’ was probably most apparent in hundred and
shire assemblies.151 Legal judgements and peacekeeping were managed
by the consensus of such groups, who entered into dialogue with the
king on matters of mutual interest.152 Individuals could also serve as
reeves and moneyers on behalf of the king and others.153 All of this
made it worth the while of elites to engage the gentry in networks of
influence and patronage. In England, these relationships worked on
several levels that did not always interlock neatly: land tenure, customary
service and personal commendation could all involve different lords.
148
R. Faith, The English Peasantry and the Growth of Lordship (London, 1997), pp. 153–77; C.
Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain 850–1520 (New Haven,
2002), pp. 29–35; Blair, Church, pp. 370–4.
149
Gillingham, ‘Thegns and Knights’; R. Faith, The Moral Economy of the Countryside:
Anglo-Saxon to Anglo-Norman England (Cambridge, 2019), pp. 110–22; Naismith, ‘Land
Market’, pp. 35–41. Keene, ‘Knights’, makes a case for the mercantile roots of gilds of
cnihtas, and a document from Canterbury dating to 1093×1109 describes a cepmannegild
made up of cnihtan (Urry, Canterbury, p. 385; cf. D.A.E. Pelteret, Catalogue of English
Post-Conquest Vernacular Documents (Woodbridge, 1990), no. 90).
150
S. Baxter and C. Lewis, ‘Domesday Book and the Transformation of English Landed Society,
1066–86’, Anglo-Saxon England 46 (2017), pp. 343–403, at pp. 368 and 370.
151
Wickham, Inheritance, p. 471.
152
Lambert, Law and Order, pp. 1–7 and 169–71; L. Roach, ‘Law Codes and Legal Norms in Later
Anglo-Saxon England’, Historical Research 86 (2013), pp. 465–86.
153
J. Campbell, The Anglo-Saxon State (London, 2000), pp. 13–16 and 207–23; R. Naismith, ‘The
Currency of Power in Late Anglo-Saxon England’, History Compass 17 (2019), https://doi.org/
10.1111/hic3.12579. For the ‘gentry’, Gillingham, ‘Thegns and Knights’.

662 Rory Naismith
This variety of vertical bonds actually conferred a degree of agency on

subordinates, allowing them to pivot between lords with relative ease.154
The initiative did not lie solely in lords’ hands.
A piece that is missing from this picture is the possibility of the
‘gentry’ exercising that initiative on their own, which they were
evidently in a position to do. That initiative was precisely what
gilds represented. They offered a way of articulating collective action
for a stratum of society acutely concerned with status and the
accommodation of other duties to lord and king. Their statutes
capitalized on familiarity with, and respect for, the vernacular written
word. On social, religious and legal grounds, gilds fostered peer-to-peer
solidarity at the same time as helping to assert and create that status; in
effect, they served as both the means and the end of social advancement.
University of Cambridge
154
S. Baxter, The Earls of Mercia: Lordship and Power in Late Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford,
2007), esp. pp. 204–15; idem, ‘Lordship and Justice in Late Anglo-Saxon England: The
Judicial Functions of Soke and Commendation Revisited’, in S. Baxter, C.E. Karkov, J.L.
Neson and D. Pelteret (eds), Early Medieval Studies in Memory of Patrick Wormald
(Aldershot, 2009), pp. 383–420.


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Gilds, states and societies in the early

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

Carolingian gilds make an especially apposite pair for comparison. Late

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

formation of a gild, it would normally be expected to do more than

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

break means that the two traditions must by default be examined

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

prominent gilds were a symptom of pre-Conquest England’s primitive

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

another kind of structuring principle that raised serious questions of

Carolingian gilds and coniurationes

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

individual believers and God, with the king or emperor thought of as

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

background here is tantalizingly obscure. 820 and 821 witnessed

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

oppression had broken down. Yet those mechanisms were highly

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

It must be stressed that there are no grounds for collapsing all

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

action.69 It was these, less well-recorded but probably also widespread,

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

assemblies.71 In subsequent centuries the Stellinga might have formed

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

customs and expectations.83 Other scattered references from the

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

none reﬂects an association of clergy, or a gild of slaves or peasants.

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

Quadripartitus.97 Referred to by legal scholars as ‘VI Æthelstan’, it

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

Abbotsbury Bedwyn Cambridge Exeter London

Death and funeral • • • • •

the Cambridge and Abbotsbury statutes expecting members to transport

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

was added to the preliminary folios of a manuscript of the gospels in Old

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

from men of relatively elevated social standing. Status looms large in

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

society. If anything, they took pains to accommodate the other ties

The relatively open attitude of the late Anglo-Saxon ruling establishment

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

This cautious approach can probably be put down to the ideological

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

important legacy: later Anglo-Saxon kings built up their authority by

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

This variety of vertical bonds actually conferred a degree of agency on

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (4)

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