‘Ge mid wedde ge mid aðe’: the functions of oath and pledge in Anglo-Saxon legal culture
Matthias Ammon, University of Cambridge
In: Historical Research, Volume 86, Issue 233, pages 394–407, August 2013
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2281.12024
ABSTRACT:
The article analyses the Old English terms for ‘pledge-giving’ within the context of Anglo-Saxon law codes and related material such as charters and wills by means of a contextual analysis of the occurrences of such terms. It argues for the centrality of the concept to Anglo-Saxon legal interaction as the means by which agreements, in particular between individuals, were made binding and shows that this had linguistic consequences by tracing the development of the collocation að and wedd (‘oath and pledge’) into a formulaic word pair. Thus the article sheds light on the way in which Oaths and Pledges in Anglo-Saxon Laws were important aspects on the way in which “the prescriptive decrees of the law codes would have functioned in reality” ( and how this changed over time (p. 515).
The article is part of a collection of papers presented at a conference in Copenhagen in 2011 organised in collaboration between three digitisation projects: “Early English Law“, “Nordic Medieval Laws” and “Relmin”.
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Read also about the context of the article in “Medieval Law” in Medieval Histories