A Gilds and Things Keeping the Peace in 10th-Century London

GILDS AND THINGS: KEEPING THE PEACE IN 10TH-CENTURY LONDON

Dr Rory Naismith (Lecturer in the History of England before the Norman Conquest in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College). Webinar on Tuesday 4 May 2021.

‘Harley Psalter’ (British Library Harley MS 603, f. 59v), a copy of the Psalms made at Canterbury Cathedral in the early 11th century

If I were speaking to you in person, we would be situated in the pleasant environs of the Temple Church and the law courts. We would be roughly on the boundary of the City of London. Going back a little further, we would also be in what was a sort of no man’s land between the two centres of early medieval and Anglo-Saxon London. This was emphatically not the heart of a big city. But if we were to lift our gaze and look to the west, we would have looked towards Lundenwic: a new urban settlement that emerged in the seventh century, situated in the area between Trafalgar Square and Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

Relative to other settlements of the day, Lundenwic was a major concentration of population, production and trade. It was more a permanent market than a town as we would understand it in institutional terms. And there’s little evidence that it had much of a sort of communal character or identity. Still, there were precious few places like it anywhere in northern Europe, and it was probably one of the biggest permanent or semi-permanent settlements anywhere in Britain. Lundenwic flourished between the seventh and ninth centuries. To trace what happened next, we would need to cast our mind’s eye towards the formidable walls of Roman Londinium. In the middle and later years of the ninth century, people started to gravitate into the Roman city once again, possibly under the pressure of Viking attacks, possibly as part of a kind of gradual spreading out and eastward shuffle of Lundenwic.

There is a key figure who comes into play at this point: Alfred the Great. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that, in 886, Alfred came to London, refurbished its defences, and used it as a base for a ceremonial submission of all the English who were not subject to the Vikings, before he entrusted it to Ethelred, who was the leader of the Mercians, under Alfred’s overlordship. Alfred did not rebuild London from scratch, but in his time, it did start to develop a much stronger unitary identity, best represented by the involvement of the city’s population in military campaigns against the Vikings.

In time, it would become a great city, growing rapidly to become a national focal point of military and financial affairs in the decades around the first millennium. The reign of the King who was ruling at this point, Ethelred II (978–1016), is not remembered as a period of particular glory and victory, but for London it was when things really came together, making it the leading military, economic and political centre of the whole kingdom. But its status in the late ninth and most of the tenth century needs to be kept in perspective. London was not at this point any larger or more important than cities such as Canterbury, Chester, Winchester and York.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that, in 886, Alfred came to London, refurbished its defences, and used it as a base for a ceremonial submission of all the English who were not subject to the Vikings, before he entrusted it to Ethelred, who was the leader of the Mercians, under Alfred’s overlordship. Alfred did not rebuild London from scratch, but in his time, it did start to develop a much stronger unitary identity, best represented by the involvement of the city’s population in military campaigns against the Vikings.

The tenth century was crucial in shaping London as an urban community, although paradoxically the urban community was very much also a rural community at this point. It was not just people who lived in the city who identified with it, and a crucial document in showing this process is sometimes known as the Peace Gild of London, or VI Athelstan, meaning that it was identified as the sixth law code of King Athelstan’s reign, which ran from 924 to 939. Although this was not actually a set of laws issued by the King, it was addressed to him. What we see in this text is a two-way process of lawmaking. Local groups took responsibility for writing up and implementing their own customs in dialogue with the King.

In London, there was a close convergence of royal and local interests. The prime focus of the Peace Gild was theft, a particularly threatening crime in Anglo-Saxon law. Most offences, including murder, crippling injury, rape and property damage, could be settled with compensation to the victim or their family. But payment of compensation and fines depended on knowing who had committed the crime and being able to bring them to justice. That was why theft was so problematic. By definition, it meant the offender got away or at least tried to, and there was no one to challenge or pay up. The Peace Gild and other laws of the same period say that thieves who were caught in the act could expect death, their property being confiscated to pay for the lost goods, and then the surplus split between the thief’s wife – assuming she was not complicit – the King and the gild itself. The scenario the Peace Gild seemed to picture is that someone realised that they had been the victim of a theft and immediately raised the alarm with their neighbours, there being no independent police force to pursue wrongdoers at this point. A posse will then be put together to follow the tracks of the thief. Violence was part and parcel of this self-driven policing. Indeed, the Peace Gild encouraged and condoned it, offering a bounty of 12 pence to whoever actually killed the thief. One of the passage added at the end suggests that Londoners decided to include allowance for cases where guilt was not immediately apparent and could not be ascertained ‘‘on hrædinge’, literally in haste.

The prime focus of the Peace Gild was theft, a particularly threatening crime in Anglo-Saxon law. Most offences, including murder, crippling injury, rape and property damage, could be settled with compensation to the victim or their family. But payment of compensation and fines depended on knowing who had committed the crime and being able to bring them to justice. That was why theft was so problematic.

Precious little is known about Anglo-Saxon trials for criminal offences such as theft. The problem is that there is a deep cleavage between our two main sources for Anglo-Saxon law: law codes, like the Peace Gild statutes, and then narratives of actual cases. Nonetheless, a little can be surmised about what went on in trials. First, there were no dedicated professional courts, judges or lawyers. Instead, cases were heard before assemblies of free notable people from the surrounding area.

The process varied depending on the case, as well as on the status of the parties involved. Often the real issue was to decide which of the disputants was ‘closer to the oath’, meaning that they could proceed to make formal sworn assertion of the truth of their version of events, supported by a range of character witnesses. If the accuser was closer to the oath, then the accused was guilty, and that was that. If the accused were closer to the oath, they could proceed to what was called an oath of exculpation, which was basically a formal proclamation of innocence. However, accounts of disputes show that a settlement was usually reached before, or immediately after, the oath, meaning that the loser did not suffer the full impact of their defeat. Rather, the point was to arrive at a solution everyone could live with. But that did leave to one side another category of case, where the question was more about the veracity of what the defendant claimed.

Contemporaries could and did use visual, material evidence if any presented itself. But more often than not, there was nothing like this to go on. In such circumstances, the assembled company would turn to what were called ‘ordeals’. These were physical tests designed to invoke a supernatural decision on guilt or innocence. Things like picking up a heated rod of iron and then waiting a few days to see whether the wound festered or healed. If it healed, God favoured the person, and they could go free. If it became infected, the person was judged guilty. Interestingly, they did not usually suffer execution at this point, even for a crime that would normally incur it.

The Peace Gild statutes do not actually say that suspected thieves were subject to an ordeal. The silence on legal arrangements beyond the right to pursue, detain and punish is an obvious missing link in the Peace Gild. There must already have been systems in place for dealing with all the other necessities and processes that the statutes imply. The Gild itself could have constituted a kind of assembly, where these cases might be heard. In other words, it was also its own court. It was both police and court. But this leads us to the question of what kind of entity the Peace Gild was and what kind of city it was based in.

The Peace Gild statutes do not actually say that suspected thieves were subject to an ordeal. The silence on legal arrangements beyond the right to pursue, detain and punish is an obvious missing link in the Peace Gild. There must already have been systems in place for dealing with all the other necessities and processes that the statutes imply. The Gild itself could have constituted a kind of assembly, where these cases might be heard.

The first thing to emphasise is that there was technically no one Peace Gild. The statutes refer to the organisation in the plural – Peace Gilds – though manifestly these operated as a single whole. I am using the spelling ‘gild’ to try and emphasise distance from the later medieval and modern guilds. The 10th century organisations are very different: they have got nothing to do with occupations and trades; they are much more fluid, personal and (in the case of some other gilds) religious organisations. The Peace Gild stands apart from livery companies in several other ways. The City guilds were, at least historically, jealous of membership and the privileges that went with it, including the citizenship of London. Conversely, the Peace Gild was a surprisingly open body. The main requirement of membership seems to have been a willingness to participate in keeping the peace. There was also an annual subscription of four pence, but this could be waived for poor widows, which is important as evidence that there were, or at least could be, women who joined in their own right and served as members of the organisation. This is not to say that the Peace Gild was an egalitarian body. But it was unusual in bringing together a socially diverse body of people, united, it seems, in common legal cause and suspicion of their neighbours.

The London Peace Gild can be set alongside lots of other voluntary organisations, usually sworn or pledged, that existed across early medieval Europe, based on people who lived in or near the same city, or who shared a connection to the same saint or church, for example. These groups had diverse devotional, administrative, economic and even military functions, and could easily slide from one of these to another, just as they could move from informal status to formal as a political and legal authority, which indeed was what the Peace Gild seemed to be doing.

Within England, the Peace Gild and its status form part of a recognisable tradition of Anglo-Saxon gilds. The word ‘gild’ was originally to do with money and paying, and it probably refers to the members paying into a common fund for mutual protection and conviviality. In the first record of gilds in Anglo-Saxon England, around the year 700, this was precisely the role they played. This law code says that gild members were ‘payers’, perhaps meaning people who stepped in as a kind of substitute or supplementary family in the financial aspect of legal disputes.By the 9th century, gilds were referred to as witnessing land transactions in Kent. So, they clearly had a degree of stability by that time.

Gilds in early medieval England also had an important religious flavour to them. They structured prayer and charity, and crucially also funerals of members. Religious devotions are less prominent in the Peace Gild statutes, but they are there. The leftovers of gild feasts were to be distributed to the Christian poor, and on the death of a gild member, all were to offer a loaf of bread or pay for a priest to say 50 psalms.

Dr Rory Naismith

Gilds in early medieval England also had an important religious flavour to them. They structured prayer and charity, and crucially also funerals of members. Religious devotions are less prominent in the Peace Gild statutes, but they are there. The leftovers of gild feasts were to be distributed to the Christian poor, and on the death of a gild member, all were to offer a loaf of bread or pay for a priest to say 50 psalms.

The Peace Gild of London can be compared most closely to four other English gilds that are known from sets of statutes written in the 10th and early 11th centuries. Two of these come from rural settings, and the others concerned people who live around the urban focal points of Cambridge and Exeter. They do not necessarily reflect the highest elite but certainly those with a significant amount of disposable income. The Cambridge gild is explicitly framed as a gild of ‘thegns’, a thegn at this point being sort of like a knight or member of the gentry in the later Middle Ages – people who were on the cusp of the elite.

What then stands out as distinct about London’s Peace Gild? Compared to the others, it comes off as being unusually large and unusually focused on legal and violent matters. The Peace Gild statutes were also the longest set of gild regulations from early medieval England and the only ones that clearly received additions after first drafting. The Peace Gild was also distinct in how its statutes were preserved, being regarded by later readers as part of the corpus of law codes. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Peace Gild is exceptional in being such an elaborate and ambitious, yet also spontaneous, bottom-up organisation. In that respect, it tells us much about London and about how its character as a defined urban community was coming together and asserting itself in the eyes of the King, and against aggressors in the surrounding countryside. the Peace Gild is exceptional in being such an elaborate and ambitious, yet also spontaneous, bottom-up organisation. In that respect, it tells us much about London and about how its character as a defined urban community was coming together and asserting itself in the eyes of the King, and against aggressors in the surrounding countryside.

London’s Peace Gild may not have had an obvious or direct legacy, but a good argument can be made that parts of it survived to become core elements of the City’s governing infrastructure, some of which, not least the Court of Husting, still survive to this day. It can equally be looked at as a fascinating artefact of its own time, the tenth century. The Peace Gild leads us to think about the nature of the society that made it and all the laws and legal systems available for keeping the peace. If anything, keeping the peace comes across as a paramount concern, because it had to be done with a great deal of effort and design. It did not just mean absence of trouble; it meant active assertion to try and repress violence and disorder.

We see in the Peace Gilds a reflection of the anxieties and potential of early medieval English society as a network of people and communities to claim their own legal jurisdiction under loose overall royal leadership. Londoners, in short, were already looking to their own resources for peace and protection.

Dr Rory Naismith

Lecturer in the History of England before the Norman Conquest, University of Cambridge, Fellow of Corpus Christi College

For the full video recording of this lecture: innertemple.org.uk/peacegild