SOURCE: Whitelock, Dorothy. “Archbishop Wulfstan, Homilist and Statesman.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. 4th series (1942): 25-45.

[In the following essay, originally delivered as a speech in 1941, Whitelock outlines evidence concerning Wulfstan's life and literary activities in the early eleventh century.]

When Wulfstan II, archbishop of York from 1002 and bishop of Worcester from 1002 to 1016, alias Lupus episcopus, died at York on 28 May 1023, his body was taken for burial to the monastery of Ely, in accordance with his wishes.¹ From the twelfth-century historian of this abbey we get the only mediaeval account of the prelate,² a brief, and in some respects unreliable, account. Among other things, it states that miracles were worked at his tomb, but there is no hint elsewhere that Wulfstan had any special claims to sanctity. There was certainly never any question of canonisation; hence there was little motive for the writing of his life by his contemporaries or successors. When we consider how little we should know of the activities of Dunstan or Oswold if we had been denied the contemporary lives of these saints, it is perhaps not remarkable that political historians of the period refer to Wulfstan, if at all, merely as the author of a sermon, the famous Sermo Lupi ad Anglos,³ revealing contemporary conditions in England, or as the consecrator of Cnut's church at Ashingdon. Even in ecclesiastical histories Wulfstan is given no prominent place. Some mention his appointment to York, some his refoundation of St. Peter's at Gloucester and his consecration of Ashingdon, none, except recently Professor Darlington, who calls him an ardent reformer,⁴ suggest that he had any influence on the Anglo-Saxon church of his time or later.

Yet, leaving aside as biased by private considerations the claims of the Ely historian, we find scattered references to the archbishop in the records of the period that suggest that he was not without influence on affairs. Legal historians have, of course, noted that he is mentioned in connexion with Ethelred's code issued at Enham, though they are guarded as to the precise nature of this connexion. In general, however, the fact that we can to some extent reconstruct his life is due to his being an author as well as a churchman. The identification of him with the author of the sermones Lupi, first made by Wanley in 1705,⁵ and since proved beyond any reasonable doubt,⁶ is the starting-point for any real knowledge of his work and its significance. It is for this reason that I place the homilist before the statesman in the title of this paper, in which I propose to summarise what can be learnt about this prelate and to consider his place in the history of his time. Enough progress has been made in the last twenty years for it to be worth while to take stock of the results. A final estimate can be given only when we have critical editions of all the genuine homilies and of the work known as the Institutes of polity, both of which are in the hands of excellent scholars, Miss Dorothy Bethurum and Professor Karl Jost. It might have been possible to take the subject a little farther to-day if conditions did not deny one access to several manuscripts of primary importance in this investigation.

Wulfstan might long ago have been given his proper position if Napier had brought out the volume of notes and introductions to his edition of 1883,⁷ which contained all the homilies claimed for Wulfstan by Wanley, and a few others. It is quite clear that several homilies in Wanley's list are not by Wulfstan, and Napier showed in 1882⁸ that only the two homilies that immediately follow the rubric Incipiunt sermones Lupi episcopi in all the three manuscripts in which it occurs, together with two others with separate rubrics ascribing them to Lupus, can be proved genuine by the evidence of rubrics. There are, however, several texts⁹ in a style so similar to that of the ‘four genuine homilies’ that no one would doubt Wulfstan's authorship but for a theory that there were ‘Wulfstan imitators’.

The ‘Wulfstan style’ is very distinctive and has been frequently described.¹⁰ It is a forcible, trenchant style, preeminently suited for preaching. It uses a few simple rhythmical patterns and it obtains a strong emphasis, chiefly by the frequent use of intensifying phrases such as mid ealle ‘entirely’, georne ‘eagerly’, ealles to swiðe ‘all too greatly’. It possesses a characteristic vocabulary and syntactical peculiarities. Lists of words, often arranged in pairs, are a frequent feature, as, for example, in this passage from a homily based on a chapter of Leviticus: ‘Then to your harm shall poverty and misery increase, strife and persecution, devastation and famine; and your hearts shall be greatly afraid and the might of your enemies shall grow grievously strong, and, driven asunder, terrified, you will often flee as cowards from a little band. And bad harvests shall oft come upon you through storms, and theft and pestilence shall bring you low, and you shall be given into the power of enemies, who will impoverish and greatly oppress you’¹¹; or in the descriptions of hell that are not rare in his work: ‘There is everlasting fire cruelly stirred up, there is everlasting terror, there is everlasting pain, there is sorrowing and lamentation, and ever unceasing complaint, there is moaning and groaning, there is every misery and the throng of all devils.’¹² Some of these traits would be easy to imitate, and, if Wulfstan was the forceful person I believe him to have been, it would be strange if he exercised no influence on his followers. Every text with a sprinkling of the phrases mentioned above need not be his.¹³ But when we find works possessing not only the obvious characteristics of his style, but also the minor syntactical mannerisms and the preferences in vocabulary, it is more probable that Wulfstan himself is the author. This can hardly be doubted when the work in question reveals an independence of mind incompatible with slavish imitation in style, or when its influence on later laws and canons is so strong as to suggest that it emanated from a person of high standing.¹⁴ Wulfstan had a reputation as a stylist already by 1002, for an anonymous ecclesiastic, writing to him in Latin no later than this year,¹⁵ speaks of ‘the most sweet sagacity of your eloquence and the prolixity as well as the profundity of your elegantly arranged narrative’. As he uses Wulfstan's attainments as his excuse for declining to undertake some translation himself, he apparently did not think them easy to imitate.

An article by Professor Jost, published in 1932,¹⁶ has greatly advanced Wulfstan studies. It not only establishes the authenticity of two important homilies, “De baptismate” and “De cristianitate,”¹⁷ but it throws light on Wulfstan's scholarship and methods. For each of these homilies is based on a series of extracts¹⁸ from Latin canonists, and, whereas it had hitherto been assumed that the collection was made by someone else for the homilist's use, Jost points out that the translator reveals familiarity with the original works, sometimes translating parts of the contexts of the selected passages. This suggests that he had made the compilation himself, and for these two homilies alone he read works of Theodulf of Orleans, Jesse of Amiens, Amalarius of Metz, Atto of Vercelli, St. Augustine, as well as Alcuin's Liber de virtutibus et vitiis, the Benedictine Rule and the Poenitentiale Pseudo-Ecgberti. In one place in the homily “De cristianitate,” instead of translating a simple passage of his original,¹⁹ the author replaces it by a quotation from another work in the Wulfstan style, the unpublished De regula canonicorum, a translation of a chapter of Amalarius. As the meaning is exactly the same, it is difficult to see why a different author should have troubled to do this; and this fact, taken together with strong stylistic evidence, makes it extremely probable that the De regula canonicorum is Wulfstan's work. Jost goes on to show that this text can hardly be divorced in authorship from the so-called ‘Canons enacted under King Edgar’,²⁰ which use the same source with the same omissions and the same explanatory addition. Though neither text is derived from the other, both have Wulfstan phrases. The canons survive in two manuscripts from Worcester, and only one describes them as Eadgares gerædnes. As Ælfric's pastoral letter for Wulfsige (993-1001) has been used, this rubric is an error.²¹ We may notice that it is these canons that are the main reason for Stubbs's statement, ‘The ecclesiastical laws of the period [i.e. Dunstan's time] are of the same constructive and progressive stamp.’²² It seems that we must give the credit to Wulfstan, not, with Stubbs, to Dunstan.

This picture of Wulfstan as a man well versed in canonistic literature, excerpting carefully from Latin authors before writing his vernacular sermons, can be strengthened by noting the relationship between a series of Latin extracts from Isaiah and Jeremiah and his “homily VI,” between a similar series from Leviticus and “homily XXVIII,” between a collection of references to Antichrist²³ and “homily XII.”²⁴ Work on Wulfstan's sources is still in its infancy. To those mentioned by Jost can be added a sermon of Abbo of St. Germain²⁵ and the letters of Alcuin.²⁶

An examination of early manuscripts also adds to our knowledge of Wulfstan's learning and interests. As early as 1874 Stubbs²⁷ noted that Vespasian A. xiv contained a Latin poem of panegyric addressed to Wulfstan, under whose patronage the book had been written. No one troubled to follow up this information. It gives us definite proof of Wulfstan's interest in manuscript compilation, and the manuscript in question contains texts that tally with his interests as we know them from other sources, for example the canons of the Synod of Celchyth of 816,²⁸ of the Council of Hertford,²⁹ various papal letters, the Constitutions of Odo³⁰ and several letters of Alcuin, including one which Wulfstan uses in his Sermo Lupi ad Anglos.³¹ A manuscript hitherto unknown to Wulfstan scholars³² is the Copenhagen MS., Gl. kgl. S. 1595 (4to), of the early eleventh century. From the account in the catalogue it is clear that, in addition to a group of penitential letters written by or addressed to Wulfstan, it contains the complete version of a homily of Abbo of St. Germain, of which Wulfstan used an extract for his homily “XXXII”;³³ the series of Latin excerpts above mentioned that are the sources of homilies “V,” “VI” and “XII”; the two pastoral letters written for Wulfstan by Ælfric; probably the chapter of Amalarius which is the source of Wulfstan's De regula canonicorum³⁴; and several Latin texts that occur also in a Worcester manuscript (C.C.C.C. 265).³⁵ The only Old English in the manuscript is a short passage in the Wulfstan style,³⁶ and I have Mr. Ker's permission to mention his discovery that this is in the same hand as the poem in Vespasian A. xiv addressed to Wulfstan. There can be little doubt that the manuscript was compiled for Wulfstan's use or by his instructions. In addition to works already mentioned, it has several more homilies by Abbo of St. Germain, Amalarius's Ecloge de officio misse, another treatise on the mass and some homilies as yet unidentified, apparently mainly concerned with practical instruction rather than abstruse theology.

It has long been recognised that C.C.C.C. 265, called by Miss Bateson ‘a kind of theological commonplace book specially intended for a bishop's use’,³⁷ is a Worcester book. It shares a number of texts with the Copenhagen manuscript, sometimes in the same order.³⁸ Among them is the source of Wulfstan's De regula canonicorum, and the group of penitential letters. Mr. Ker assigns this manuscript to the mid-eleventh century, later therefore than Wulfstan's episcopate, but as, in addition to the texts mentioned above, it has the source of homily “V” and a continental canon which is probably the source of a chapter in the laws of Ethelred issued under Wulfstan's influence,³⁹ it appears to be at least partially made up of material collected at Worcester during his time. Its other contents include letters of Alcuin, a large collection of canons and penitentials from various sources, and in particular the work known as the Excerptiones Pseudo-Ecgberti. One secular code written in Old English and Latin appears among these items of purely ecclesiastical interest. This is Edgar's fourth code, but its inclusion ceases to appear strange when we remember that it was issued on account of the plague of 962, this misfortune being attributed to the people's sins. It enforces a stricter payment of church dues. As its tone closely resembles much of Wulfstan's writing, this code may well have had a special interest for him.⁴⁰

Several of the texts in this manuscript, including the Excerptiones Pseudo-Ecgberti, though in a different version, appear also in Nero A. i, a manuscript containing many Anglo-Saxon laws and some of Wulfstan's homilies. One of these is a version of the Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, annotated, according to Mr. Ker, by the hand he has detected in the Copenhagen manuscript and in Vespasian A. xiv, as we have already seen, and he would date this hand as early eleventh-century.⁴¹ This supports Keller's opinion that the manuscript is from Worcester,⁴² the most likely scriptorium to have produced three manuscripts all with some connexion with Wulfstan.

Another manuscript that shares many texts with those under discussion is C.C.C.C. 190, given by Bishop Leofric to Exeter. Fehr considers it so closely connected with Ælfric that he would bring it from Eynsham.⁴³ His strongest reason is that it contains a Latin text in the abbreviated form in which Ælfric used it when writing his second pastoral letter for Wulfstan. But on the other hand, it has the shortened form of the Benedictine Office which is the immediate source of the Old English version in the Wulfstan style⁴⁴ and Fehr explains the presence of this in an Ælfric manuscript by suggesting that Ælfric had supplied Wulfstan with this curtailed version. Fehr seems not to have noticed that the manuscript has also the single sentence from one of Alcuin's letters that Wulfstan translated in his Sermo Lupi ad Anglos,⁴⁵ followed by a passage De tribulationibus, a probable source of this homily, and also the extract from Abbo's sermon De coena domini translated by Wulfstan in homily “XXXII,”⁴⁶ the complete sermon being in the Copenhagen manuscript. If Fehr's theory is right, we can only assume that Ælfric made a practice of supplying Wulfstan with catenae ready for his use. But, taking into consideration what we now know of Wulfstan's activity in excerpting passages from Latin authors, and remembering that he had access to the complete works in question in Vespasian A. xiv and the Copenhagen manuscript, it is surely more probable that the manuscript under discussion is based on a collection made at Worcester, and that the shortened version of the source for Ælfric's pastoral letter was sent to him by Wulfstan when he commissioned the letter. Something similar may have happened with regard to the Excerptiones Pseudo-Ecgberti, as Fehr once believed,⁴⁷ but this cannot be determined until a detailed study has been made of this text. We have, however, evidence that Wulfstan did once send to another ecclesiastic some Latin passages for translation, for the letter quoted above⁴⁸ is a refusal to undertake such a task. Wulfstan may have repeated this action in his dealings with Ælfric. Intercourse between Ælfric and Wulfstan is shown also by their both using the decalogue in the form in which it occurs in the Boulogne-sur-Mer MS. 63, Wulfstan in his “De cristianitate,”⁴⁹ Ælfric in his second pastoral for Wulfstan.⁵⁰ This manuscript has the only surviving copy of Ælfric's letter⁵¹ in reply to a lost letter of Wulfstan's, but of course either sender or recipient might have put this on record. Other contents show some connexion with the Worcester group of manuscripts, but at this stage of the investigation it is impossible to decide which way round the influence was exerted. This examination of the manuscripts makes no claim to be exhaustive, but I think that enough has emerged to show great activity in the compiling of manuscripts at Worcester under Wulfstan's influence. To some extent an answer is provided to Miss Bateson's questions:⁵² ‘Who collected these manuscripts? Where were they collected?’

In view of all this, I cannot agree with Fehr's estimate of Wulfstan in the introduction to his edition of Ælfric's pastoral letters.⁵³ He feels that the answers given in the private letter, which Ælfric wrote in reply to one from Wulfstan, imply considerable ignorance on the part of the questioner, and he withdraws a previous suggestion that Ælfric owed his knowledge of the Excerptiones Pseudo-Ecgberti to Wulfstan with the statement: ‘the monk or abbot could not learn much from the archbishop’. It must be remembered that Wulfstan's letter does not survive and we do not know for what purpose he wrote, whether asking for information on matters of which he was ignorant or for support against the views of opponents. Most of the answers relate to ecclesiastical practices current in England though forbidden by the canons and we need not assume abysmal ignorance on Wulfstan's part if he consulted Ælfric on the precise attitude of the canons. Not all the subjects are of an elementary nature;⁵⁴ to some queries Ælfric replies that he has never read anything relating to them; to one query, on the number of times a day a priest may celebrate mass, he can refer only to the usage of his teacher, Bishop Athelwold.

Although Wulfstan was evidently active in religious reform by his own studies, by encouragement of manuscript compilation, by the issue of a rule of life for canons and a code for the priesthood in general, by the circulation of pastoral letters for the clergy of his diocese and by the preaching of homilies to the laity, he had energy left for other activities. His influence on secular legislation must now be considered. Ethelred's code promulgated at Enham in 1008, which has come down to us in two variant Old English versions⁵⁵ and in a Latin paraphrase, is said in the last to have been issued at the instigation of the archbishops Ælfheah and Wulfstan. Freeman, who had a high opinion of this code, arbitrarily ignores Wulfstan's influence when he says: ‘The whole tone is at once pious and patriotic; the piety is of a kind which, while it strictly enforces every ecclesiastical observance, by no means forgets the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy and truth. In all this we can hardly fail to trace the hand of good Archbishop Ælfheah’.⁵⁶ The Latin paraphrase concludes with the statement: ‘I, Wulfstan, archbishop by the grace of the disposing God, set down in writing these same things,⁵⁷ for the memory of those who come after and also for the benefit of those of the present day and those to come, spurred on namely by the love of God and my neighbour.’ It has been suggested that this statement refers to the Latin version alone, but this seems unnecessary caution when the vernacular codes are, like all subsequent codes of Ethelred, undoubtedly in the Wulfstan style: a style already fully developed in the original version of homily “V” and in homily “X,” both of which are earlier than the code. Moreover, the sources used include the so-called Canons of Edgar, probably, as we have seen above,⁵⁸ a work of Wulfstan's, and the so-called Laws of Edward and Guthrum, which I have suggested elsewhere to be another of his works;⁵⁹ also the Capitula of Theodulf of Orleans, a text used by Wulfstan on another occasion,⁶⁰ and probably a continental canon against the too ready application of the death penalty which occurs only in the Worcester manuscript discussed above, C.C.C.C. 265.⁶¹ The great use made by Wulfstan of this code in his later work must also be considered. His most famous homily, the Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, is largely based on it.⁶² Unless we allow that Wulfstan was the author of the Old English code we are forced to assume that he set his name to a Latin version of a vernacular code written by someone else in his style, and later used his imitator's work for his own impressive homily. This is not very probable and it seems therefore, that if, with Freeman, we wish to attribute the ‘weightier matters of the law’ to Archbishop Ælfheah, we must nevertheless allow Wulfstan credit for the language in which it is couched and familiarity with the sources from which it is drawn. A rather similar employment of Wulfstan to draw up a legal document is on record in a charter⁶³ where, after a transaction has taken place ‘with King Ethelred's leave and the cognisance of Archbishop Ælfheah and Archbishop Wulfstan and all the councillors who were alive at that time in England’, it is stated that ‘the king commanded Archbishop Wulfstan to draw up a charter to this effect’.

Though 1008 is the first year in which Wulfstan is mentioned by name in connexion with legislation, I believe, for reasons that I have stated in full elsewhere,⁶⁴ that he had already composed a code of regulations concerning ecclesiastical observance in the Danelaw, or in part of it. To this code he wrote a preamble explaining that the regulations had been in force since the earliest days of the Danish settlement, being agreed on first by Alfred and Guthrum, and afterwards by Edward and Guthrum. This is the document known as the Laws of Edward and Guthrum and frequent use is made of it by the codes of Ethelred written in the Wulfstan style, and also by those of Cnut. Previous to 1008 no code betrays any knowledge of it. After Wulfstan's death, his work continued to influence legal writings and Cnut's codes share many passages with the Wulfstan homilies.

Wulfstan's authorship has been claimed by Jost⁶⁵ for the ‘poems’ in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 959 D E and 975 D (where E has substituted a prose summary). There are the familiar Wulfstan phrases, e.g. in 959, hit godode georne, ‘things improved greatly’, swa him þearf wæs ‘as was needful for him’, Godes lage lufode ‘he loved God's law; while in 975 there is a Wulfstan ring about Godes wiþærsacan Godes lage bræcon ‘God's adversaries broke God's laws’. This is, however, clearest in the passage: 7 wydewan bestryptan oft and gelome, 7 fela unrihta 7 yfelra unlaga arysan up siððan, 7 áá æfter þam hit yfelode swiðe, ‘and they plundered widows oft and again, and many wrongs and evil injustices rose up afterwards, and it grew greatly worse ever after’.⁶⁶ The similarity recognised by Earle⁶⁷ between the 959 passage and Ælfric's Book of Judges is almost certainly borrowing on the part of the Chronicle, not vice versa. Whether these passages, summaries of the reigns of Edgar and Edward the Martyr respectively, are due to an imitator or to our author himself, they cannot be earlier than the extreme end of the tenth century. If Plummer's suggestion that the original of D and E was by this time in the Worcester diocese be accepted, this addition was more likely to be made at Worcester itself than at Evesham⁶⁸; but in view of the close connexion between Worcester and York, it is not necessary, in order to account for matters of Worcester interest, to assume that this version had left the north. If still in the north, this Wulfstan insertion speaks for York in preference to Ripon.

Having considered the evidence for Wulfstan's varied activities, we are in a better position to reconstruct his career. Of his early training nothing is known. William of Malmesbury's opinion that he was not a monk⁶⁹ is offset by the Ely historian's statement that he was,⁷⁰ and Florence of Worcester⁷¹ gives him the title of abbot in 1002, and this, though incorrect at this date, may have been true at an earlier period. In later life Wulfstan showed great interest in the Fenland abbeys and perhaps this implies some early connexion with the region. Our first clear evidence about him is his consecration to the see of London in 996.⁷² As bishop of London he issued penitential letters, which he later included in a small collection of such letters intended to be used as formulae.⁷³ It is at this time that he received the letter from an anonymous ecclesiastic refusing to translate some archana into Old English at the bishop's request, being debarred by the thought of Wulfstan's eloquence.⁷⁴ I have suggested elsewhere⁷⁵ that some of the eschatological homilies, regarding the end of the world as imminent, may be what obtained him this reputation; as, for example, homily “XII”: ‘for the greatest evil shall come upon mankind, when Antichrist himself shall come, that ever has been in the world; and it seems to us that it is very close to that time, for this world from day to day grows ever worse and worse. Now is there a great need for all God's messengers that they often warn God's people against that terror which is about to come on mankind, lest they be taken unawares and then too quickly ensnared by the devil.’⁷⁶

In the penitential letters, Wulfstan calls himself Lupus, translating the first element of his name, and this name is used in the rubrics to some of his homilies. As he is never given it elsewhere, and as he always signs characters as Wulfstan(us), I am inclined to think that it is a nom-de-plume rather than a nickname, and I suspect him, in using a literary alias at all, to be copying the Carolingian group of scholars, for he certainly was familiar with Alcuin's letters. I have sometimes wondered whether he could have had any thought of Lupus of Ferrières in his mind, but he is unlikely to have known enough about this author to have noticed the similarity of their interests.⁷⁷

It is after his translation in 1002 to the combined sees of Worcester and York that we have evidence of great reforming zeal on Wulfstan's part, zeal no doubt occasioned by his realisation of the laxity of his northern province. He corresponded with Ælfric on canonistic matters and commissioned him to write two pastoral letters for him and to translate them into Old English. One of them he rewrote in his more emphatic style. He translated Amalarius’ De regula canonicorum and for the secular clergy he issued the so-called Canons of Edgar. He addressed a general exhortation to the ‘thanes, ecclesiastical and lay, entrusted to his direction in spiritual concerns’, a document often called his pastoral letter.⁷⁸ His Laws of Edward and Guthrum are concerned with breaches of church regulations primarily in a Danish area; and probably some homilies of clear exposition of the essentials of the Christian faith,⁷⁹ with tirades against heathenism, belong to this period. It would be in line with his other activities if the Law of the Northumbrian Priests had been drawn up at his instigation.⁸⁰ In 1008 he drew up the statutes issued by the king and witan and his influence lies behind all the later codes of this reign. Among them is an ordinance⁸¹ enjoining a three-day fast on the nation, which is closely connected with a homily surviving in two versions.⁸² This, which amplifies the code and illustrates divine retribution from the Old Testament, reads like a sermon preached about the time of the promulgation of the ordinance. A similar attitude is shown in homilies based on the denunciatory passages in the prophets and Leviticus, and the culmination is the Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, preached after Ethelred's exile, and probably in 1014, as is shown by the passage: ‘and a very great treachery it is also in the world that a man should betray his lord to death or drive him, living, from the land; and both have happened in this land: Edward was betrayed and then slain and afterwards burned, and Ethelred was driven out of his land’.⁸³ Wulfstan's disapproval of the acceptance of Swegn is clear, and it would be interesting to know what action he took during the few months while Swegn was king in Northumbria. All that can be ascertained is that he was in York within a fortnight of Swegn's death, for he consecrated Ælfwig bishop of London there on 16 February.⁸⁴

From time to time, we get glimpses of Wulfstan's participation in public affairs. Like other bishops of Worcester, he issues leases of the estates of the see,⁸⁵ one even after Leofsige had been appointed to succeed him in 1016. He appears as legatee in two wills and as executor in one of them. In 1012 the monks at Sherborne asked him to be their advocate before the king when the ætheling Edmund wished to obtain one of their estates, a fact which supports other evidence for his influence with the king. He consecrated Cnut's church at Ashingdon in 1020 and consecrated Æthelnoth as archbishop of Canterbury, writing to Cnut to inform him that he had done so. He placed monks in the monastery of St. Peter at Gloucester, according to the cartulary of the abbey, in 1022.

Enough remains on record of this prelate for us to see him as a man of fiery zeal who, convinced that the misfortunes of his country were a retribution for sin, strove by all means to bring about reform, not confining himself to impassioned denunciation, though of this he was a master. He toiled to improve the standard of learning and morality of the clergy and to bring all classes to an understanding of the Christian faith and a due observance of the laws of the church, and to put an end to the abuses of contemporary life.

It was a misfortune that Ethelred's reign produced no secular leader of Wulfstan's calibre who could have followed up this religious and moral reform with strong measures for repelling the invader and keeping internal order. The principles stated in the codes composed by Wulfstan are excellent, and agree too closely to the sentiments of his homilies for us to accept Freeman's assumption that Ælfheah is alone responsible.⁸⁶ If at times they read more like a treatise on legal principles than a code of statutes, as, for example, ‘but every deed shall be carefully distinguished and judgment meted out in proportion to the offence, as shall be justifiable in the sight of God and acceptable in the eyes of men’,⁸⁷ or if there is sometimes a note of rather vague appeal, as when, after listing crimes including ‘shameful frauds and foul adulteries, and horrible perjuries and devilish deeds such as murders and homicides, thefts and robberies, covetousness and greed, etc.’⁸⁸ it continues lamely, ‘and lo, let it be clearly understood that all such things are to be censured and not approved’,⁸⁹ it is only fair to note also that the code can be explicit enough about the penalties where new law is being created, as in the statute on desertion from the army,⁹⁰ or on plotting against the king's life.⁹¹

In holding that the Viking raids were a divine retribution, Wulfstan is taking the same stand as Alcuin had done. In one passage on this theme he is actually translating from a letter of Alcuin's: ‘There was a historian in the time of the Britons, called Gildas, who wrote about their misdeeds, how by their sins they so excessively angered God that finally he allowed the army of the English to conquer their land and entirely destroy the flower of the Britons. And that came about, as he said, through robbery by the powerful and through greed for wrongful gains, through the lawlessness of the people and through false judgments, through the slackness and base cowardice of God's messengers, who kept silent about the truth all too often, and mumbled with their jaws where they should have cried aloud. Also through the foul wantonness of the people and through gluttony and manifold sins they destroyed their country and themselves they perished.’⁹² In other places also there are signs of Alcuin's influence.⁹³ If Wulfstan took up a purely ecclesiastical attitude to the problems of his time, this would have been in accord with a body of contemporary opinion; but the terms in which Ælfric's letter to him deprecates any interference by a bishop in secular affairs imply that Wulfstan held a different point of view. Ælfric says: ‘take heed, lest perchance it is said to you by Christ: who constituted you judge of thieves or robbers?’⁹⁴ And a little later: ‘and Paul said: no soldier of God is to involve himself in secular concerns’. We cannot now know whether Wulfstan paid heed to this and kept himself aloof from secular administration, or whether he strove for reform in this also, but, faced with the inertia and corruption of the lay magnates, worked without any noticeable result during Ethelred's reign.

In conclusion, we may turn to the estimate of later generations. In the west midlands, he left no good reputation. Worcester cartularies call him impius, reprobus, and one accuses him of having robbed the monks.⁹⁵ William of Malmesbury speaks rather slightingly of him. The monks of Worcester may have thought that he subordinated their interests to those of his northern see. There is at any rate no record of any personal aggrandisement at their expense. One of his charters, it is true, leases a Worcester estate to his brother, but Oswold had settled a whole series of relations on the lands of the see without any aspersions being cast on his sanctity. We ought however to notice that Ælfric's letter to Wulfstan mentioned above⁹⁶ concludes rather curiously after the valediction, begging him remember the words of the prophet Micah on justice,⁹⁷ and regretting the absence from England of justice free from bribery: ‘we are all blinded by gifts and pervert judgments as gifts instruct us, non habentes retributionem uere iusticiae a deo’⁹⁸. The position of this warning, away from its natural context where the corruption of bishops has been mentioned in general terms, seems a little pointed, as if Ælfric, if not actually aware of a streak of cupidity in Wulfstan's nature, at least thought him exposed to particular temptation.

There is no suggestion of any flaw in his character in the Ely account.⁹⁹ He is ‘an excellent man’, ‘strong in good qualities’, ‘all his qualities and deeds served religion’. As he had been a benefactor of the abbey and it possessed (and still possesses) his body, exaggeration of his importance and his virtues is to be expected. Yet I think we may claim that the following passage, in spite of its extravagant expression, is not entirely without foundation: ‘by them (the kings, Ethelred, Edmund and Cnut), he was loved as a brother and honoured as a father, and frequently summoned to the highest affairs of the realm, as being the most learned of counsellors, in whom spoke the very wisdom of God, as if in some spiritual temple.’

Notes

1. I wish to thank Professor B. Dickins for reading and criticising this article.

2. Historia Eliensis (ed. by D. J. Stewart as Liber Eliensis, i. for the Anglia Christiana Society), ii, cap. 87.

3. See my edition of this text in Methuen's Old English Library, 1939, to which subsequent references refer.

4. E.H.R., li. 392.

5. In G. Hickes, Linguarum veterum septentrionalium thesaurus, ii. 140 f.

6. Despite the Dictionary of national biography, which considers the identification made without ‘any convincing reason’.

7. Wulfstan: Sammlung der ihm zugeschriebenen Homilien nebst Untersuchungen über ihre Echtheit, quoted in this article by the number of the homily.

8. Über die Werke des altenglischen Erzbischofs Wulfstan.

9. Including the so-called pastoral letter (Napier, xix-xxii), which begins in one version ‘Wulfstan arcebisceop’.

10. Besides the works cited at p. 15 of my edition of the Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, see K. Jost in Anglia, xlvii. 105 ff., and my ‘Wulfstan and the so-called laws of Edward and Guthrum’, E.H.R., lvi. 6 ff.

11. Napier, xxviii (p. 133).

12. Ibid., xxii (p. 114). It is not possible in translating to give the effect obtained by rhyme and alliteration, e.g., sorgung 7 sargung 7 á singal heof; wanung 7 granung, etc.

13. Even the Lord's Prayer is not proof against their insertion: one Old English version (Napier, xxvi) is equivalent to ‘Lead us not into temptation all too greatly’.

14. See Jost, Anglia, lvi. 305.

15. See my note in E.H.R., lii, 460 ff.

16. ‘Einige Wulfstantexte und ihre Quellen’, Anglia, lvi. 265 ff.

17. Napier, v and x. Jost has found an earlier version of v in C.C.C.C. MS. 302, which is closer to the Latin original.

18. Napier, iv and ix.

19. I.e., seniores honorate, iuniores diligite. See Jost., op. cit., p. 287.

20. Viz., the first of the five texts printed by Thorpe under this title and the only one with the slightest claim to it, i.e., the rubric in one manuscript.

21. Wulfstan himself seems to have looked back on Edgar's reign as a golden age of law and order. See VIII Atr 37 and ASC 975D. Perhaps there was a tendency in later times at Worcester to attribute undated codes to his reign.

22. Memorials of St. Dunstan (R.S., 1874), p. cvi.

23. Napier, xi.

24. On pp. 13 f. of my edition of the Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, I suggested that these homilies were authentic, judging by style alone. Since then, I have found their Latin sources in manuscripts otherwise connected with Wulfstan.

25. Cf. infra, pp. 31, 33.

26. Cf. infra, p. 43.

27. Op. cit., p. liv.

28. A. W. Haddan and W. Stubbs, Councils and ecclesiastical documents relating to Great Britain and Ireland, iii. 579-84.

29. Ibid., iii. 118-21.

30. D. Wilkins, Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae, i. 212-14.

31. See infra, p. 43.

32. I owe my knowledge of it to Mr. Neil Ker, who pointed out that it contained the penitential letters mentioned below.

33. Cf. infra, p. 33.

34. One cannot be certain, while the manuscript remains inaccessible, whether the extract is Wulfstan's exact source, which is contained in C.C.C.C. 265.

35. Infra, pp. 31.

36. Published by F. Holthausen in Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum, xxxiv (Neue Folge, xxii), p. 228.

37. E.H.R., x. 712.

38. Like the Copenhagen manuscript, it has Ælfric's two Latin pastoral letters immediately followed by the source of Wulfstan's homily De baptismate and a treatise on the mass. The two manuscripts share also Amalarius, Ecloge de officio misse.

39. Infra, p. 36.

40. It is the interest taken in this code at Worcester that has preserved it for us, for the only other manuscript is the Worcester Nero E. i.

41. It has hitherto been dated late eleventh-century.

42. See Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, p. 1.

43. Englische Studien, xlvi. 337 ff. His other arguments are not very cogent. The manuscript contains Ælfric's pastoral letter for Wulfsige as well as those for Wulfstan, but so does the undoubtedly Worcester manuscript Junius 121. It has a text made up of passages from Athelwold's Regularis concordia and Amalarius, the authorities combined by Ælfric when writing for monks at Eynsham. This is an argument for the authorship of the work, but not for the provenance of the manuscript, for the compilation for the Eynsham monks has been preserved only in a Worcester manuscript, C.C.C.C. 265, and if Ælfric sent a copy of the one work, he may easily have done the same with this one. Since writing this article Fehr has realized that the version of the Excerptiones Pseudo-Ecgberti in C.C.C.C. 190 is not the one used by Ælfric. See his Die Hirtenbriefe Ælfrics in altenglischer und lateinischer Fassung, p. cv. This greatly weakens his case for an Eynsham origin for this manuscript.

44. See E. Feiler, Das Benediktiner-Offizium. … Ein Beitrag zur Wulfstanfrage (Anglistische Forschungen 4), and Fehr, Englische Studien, xlvi. 337 ff.

45. Cf. infra, p. 43.

46. Wulfstan does not use the first paragraph (as printed in Migne, Patrologia Latina, cxxxii. 764 ff.), but begins with the section Vere, fratres charissimi, hoc debetis scire unde fuit incoeptum hoc exemplum, i.e., the passage in C.C.C.C. 190. The Old English omits parts of Abbo's sermon, but I do not know if the Latin in this manuscript does so also, as it is at present inaccessible.

47. Englische Studien, xlvi. 344. Cf. infra, p. 35.

48. Cf. supra, p. 28.

49. Jost, op. cit., pp. 278 f.

50. Fehr, Die Hirtenbriefe Ælfrics …, p. xi.

51. Ibid., pp. 222-7.

52. Op. cit., p. 713.

53. P. cix.

54. The letter deals with a range of subjects, the bars to entry into the priesthood, the limitation of the consecrating of the chrism to Holy Thursday, the abuse by which wine is mixed with water at baptism, the participation of the clergy in battle, etc. The passage in which Ælfric discusses the lawfulness of Caesarian section must have some connexion with the Ely tradition that Wulfstan was born in this way.

55. Ethelred's Vth and VIth codes.

56. Norman Conquest, i. 368.

57. I.e. the edicts which all the optimates have sworn to keep.

58. Cf. supra, p. 29.

59. E.H.R., lvi. 1 ff.

60. See Jost, op. cit., pp. 293 f.

61. The sentiment has not been expressed in general terms in previous legislation. The English code does not translate the Latin, but gives a summary in its own words, and borrowing is therefore more difficult to prove. In my opinion there is enough similarity to make it highly probable. The most relevant passage reads: ‘Castigandi sunt enim rei diris flagris vel vinculis et in carcerem mittendi sunt et trabibus includendi et plumis piceque perfusi ad spectaculum publicum in cippum mitti debent et diversis penis cruciandi sunt ne animępro quibus ipse dominus passus est, in ęterna pena dispereant.’ The Old English statute (V Atr 3, 3. 1) reads: ‘7 ures hlafordes gerædnes 7 his witena is, þæt man Cristene men for ealles to lytlum to deaðe ne fordeme; ac elles geræde man friðlice steora folce to þearfe, 7 ne forspille for litlum Godes handgeweorc 7 his agenne ceap þe he deore gebohte’, in which friðlice steora seems to summarise the various alternatives of the Latin canon. Wulfstan has already given a closer rendering of the last phrase of the Latin in the previous statute: þæt man þa sawla ne forfare þe Crist mid his agenum life gebohte. For the complete canon, see M. Bateson, op. cit., pp. 726 f.

62. See pp. 15 f. of this homily.

63. KCD 898; A. J. Robertson, Anglo-Saxon Charters, lxxxiii.

64. E.H.R., lvi. 1 ff.

65. Anglia, xlvii. 105 ff.

66. I print as prose, since phrases of an approximately equal length, with almost a verse rhythm, are a feature of Wulfstan's style. Einenkel actually suggests that the Sermo Lupi ad Anglos is a poem, in Anglia, vii. Anzeiger, pp. 200 ff.

67. J. Earle and C. Plummer, Two Saxon chronicles parallel, ii. 152.

68. See also the strong case for the Worcester origin of the later part of D made by Sir Ivor Atkins, E.H.R., lv. 8 ff.

69. Gesta pontificum (R.S. 1870), p. 250.

70. Historia Eliensis, loc. cit.

71. Ed. B. Thorpe, i. 156.

72. ASC 996 F. On the identity of this bishop of London with the homilist and later archbishop, see my article in E.H.R., lii. 460 ff.

73. See supra, p. 31. The group occurs also in the Bodleian MS. Barlow 37, fo. 12.

74. See supra, pp. 28, 34.

75. Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, pp. 12 f.

76. Napier, p. 79.

77. Even if he knew of the manuscript of German customary law which Lupus wrote for Count Eberhard of Friuli, or of his composition of synodal acts, we have no evidence for Wulfstan's own legal activities as early as his use of the name Lupus.

78. Napier, xix-xxii.

79. E.g. Napier, ii and iii.

80. I hope to make a special study of this text later.

81. Ethelred's VIIth code.

82. Napier, xxxv and xxxvi.

83. Ll. 75-80. See also note to ll, 79 ff.

84. ASC 1014 D. Homily “XXXVII,” a sermon preached at the consecration of a bishop, may belong to this occasion or to his consecration of Æthelnoth as archbishop of Canterbury in 1020 or of Edmund as bishop of Durham about the same year.

85. For details concerning the information in this paragraph, see Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, pp. 8 ff.

86. For example, I take it that in referring to the mercy shown in this code Freeman is thinking chiefly of the attempt to stop the slave trade (V Atr 2, VI. 9) and to limit the application of the death penalty (supra, p. 36). The first subject occurs in the Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, the second comes from a continental canon preserved at Worcester in a manuscript with other Wulfstan sources.

87. VI Atr. 10. 2.

88. VI Atr. 28. 2 f.

89. Ibid., 29.

90. V Atr. 28.

91. Ibid., 30.

92. Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, pp. 41 f. Cf. Alcuin to Archbishop Æthelheard, M.G.H., Abt. iv, Epistolae Karolini Ævi, ii. 47. The letter is contained in full in C.C.C.C. MSS. 190, 265, and in Vespasian A. xiv, and the sentence in question is entered separately on fo. 139 of C.C.C.C. MS. 190; see supra, p. 33.

93. For example, he frequently stresses the cowardice of bishops who do not preach to the people of their sins, using the texts quoted by Alcuin again and again when writing to contemporary bishops: clama et ne cesses; exalta quasi tuba vocem tuam; canes muti non valentes latrare.

94. Fehr, op. cit., p. 226.

95. Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, p. 8. Atkins, op. cit., p. 19, calls attention to the scarcity of information about him in Worcester documents.

96. Supra., p. 34†.

97. Micah vi. 8.

98. Fehr, op. cit., p. 227.

99. Historia Eliensis, loc. cit.