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Introduction
The status of women under Old English law is among the most contested topics in Anglo-Saxon studies. Some have argued that the years before the Norman Conquest were "a surprisingly bright period" during which women owned land, exerted significant political influence, and exercised many of the same rights as men.1 Others have said that during this period women were viewed as little more than men's property, subject to the same second-class treatment they received in other early medieval cultures.2 The five charters edited here record lawsuits in which the principal litigants are women of different backgrounds. These documents raise many questions - legal, social, and rhetorical - and illustrate the difficulties involved in addressing this issue. At the same time, they provide vivid depictions of the ways law was practiced, politicized, and (perhaps most importantly) narrated during this period. The way a dispute was recorded influenced not only the future adjudication of similar cases but also the manner in which the law was understood by subsequent judges, lawmakers, and litigants. Records like these can give us deeper understanding of the interactions between competing notions of gender, textuality, and legal authority in AngloSaxon England.
Old English Lawsuits and Lawsuit Records
To understand how pre-Conquest lawsuits were resolved requires knowledge of the surviving case records, yet the source material for this sort of study presents a number of difficulties. Unlike modern law, which has official procedures governing how trials and other disputes are documented, Anglo-Saxon England lacked any formal system for recording what transpired in court. Our knowledge of early legal disputes instead derives from the accounts- often ambiguous, incomplete, or partisan- preserved in other sorts of texts, including saints' lives, chronicles, Domesday Book, and charters. The result is that far fewer lawsuits survive from Anglo-Saxon England than from elsewhere in Europe; the historian Patrick Wormald identified 178 Anglo-Saxon lawsuits suits recorded over approximately 330 years (ca. 740-1066), compared to more than 600 Frankish cases surviving from the same period.3 These records were frequently sponsored by the victorious litigants, who presumably made little effort towards objectivity, and thus the events they recount must always be viewed with a certain suspicion. Their reasons for recording them are indicated by the sorts of cases preserved: most involve disputes...