Are the sanctions of S 745 ritual ecclesiastical curses?

In Chapter 1, I have tried to show that sanctions are ritual ecclesiastical curses that threaten with excommunication, anathema, and damnation. These curses were used for pronouncing the banishment from the Christian society either in this or the next world or both. I have also pointed out that there existed a general confusion in the early Middle Ages with regard to these terms and their definitions.28 According to Michel Zimmermann, in diplomas this confusion was caused by uneducated scribes.29How are these ecclesiastical curses presented in S 745? With Æthelwold as the probable draftsman, does this charter demonstrate a more precise usage of the relevant terms?

The first ritual ecclesiastical curse in S 745 appears in Sanction 2 with an anathema which is combined with a maledictio, ‘curse’.30 In contrast to most other sanctions, which use the term maledictio in a general sense, Sanction 2 of S 745 refers to a specific curse, namely the one God Himself pronounced on Cain after he had murdered his brother Abel:

27 _{‘We all, who are seen described by name on this privilege by the king’s command, have}

imploringly urged the family of our posterity that they, violating, should not at all make invalid the written guarantee of our hands, which is strengthened by Christ’s cross; if any of [my] successors shall dare to violate [this] with the audacity of rashness, separated from the participation in the body and blood of Jesus Christ, damned in the perpetual ruin he shall be anathemized unless, recovering his senses, he turns around to humble amends when he reconciles with the divine consideration’.

28_{See above, pp. 33-41.} 29

Zimmermann, ‘Vocabulaire latin’, p. 45.

30 _{Sanction 1 lacks the ecclesiastical curses of excommunication and anathema and the curse of} damnation is not pronounced explicitly, but only implied in the sanction’s threat with punishments in hell.

anathema sit et eadem maledictione qua Cain parricida qui fratrem suum Abel stimulante inuidia liuidus intermit mastigia addictus est […] teneatur obnoxius31

Cain’s murder of his brother is turned into a negative exemplumfor those intending to plot against the monks of reformed monasteries, as both parties share the same consequences of their misdeeds. The subsequent account of the misery and torments in hell certainly seems to refer simultaneously to Cain’s and the transgressors’ lot in

the next world.32 The close connection between Cain’s curse and the anathema

pronounced on the transgressors appears to demonstrate that God is liable to put curses into effect. Thus, rather than presenting an additional punishment, the curse on Cain can be read as a negative exemplum that illustrates the anathema as a form of banishment in this life and a damnation into hell in the afterlife.

Sanction 3 contains the curse of damnation, which is accompanied by Doomsday imagery as the transgressor is threatened with being cum ędis in sinistra positum, ‘placed together with the goats on the left side’. This phrase refers to Matthew’s account of the Last Judgement, in which the virtuous sheep, representing the blessed, are separated from the sinful goats, representing the damned (Matt. XXV.32-3). Sanction 3 represents a type of sanction rarely seen in Anglo-Saxon charters. In the manuscript, the visual structure of this passage underlines that Sanction 3 consists of a series of individual curses, as each curse forms one paragraph, and because of the manuscript’s large script, this sanction’s curses go on for pages. While the combination of several curses is well known from other Anglo-Saxon charters, such

31_{‘he shall be anathemized and shall be held punishable without end by the same curse by which Cain} was condemned as a murderer, who, envious with jealousy, had taken from the midst his brother Abel with a whip’.

32_{In Sanction 1, the torments of hell also refer to the protagonists of the negative exemplaand the} transgressors alike; see below, p. 179.

a fast-moving succession of individual curses, whereby each sentence consists of one curse and forms one paragraph, is rather unique. Those who diminish the monastic property of New Minster are virtually ‘bombarded’ with curses. The curses themselves are plain and have none of the horridness of the elaborate sanctions in S 745 or other charters.33 Although Sanction 3 does not terrify its audience with frightening literary imagery, it may still have been intimidating because of the manner in which its curses are delivered. The model for this list of curses in quick succession may have been the catalogue of curses in Deuteronomy XXVIII. However, Deuteronomy would have served as a model only for the style in which the curses in Sanction 3 of S 745 are delivered; it evidently was not a model for the curses themselves, as these are kept general and vague in contrast to the very precise curses of Deuteronomy XXVIII.34

Sanction 4 is a typical representative of those Anglo-Saxon sanctions that threaten with all three ritual ecclesiastical curses.35 This sanction contains the ecclesiastical curses of excommunication (expressed as a separation from the sacrament of the Eucharist), damnation and anathema without much literary embellishment. It is not clear whether the past participle clauses pronouncing the excommunication and

damnation respectively illustrate what it means to be anathemized, i.e.

excommunication in this life and damnation in the next, or whether all three curses

33 _{Sanction 3 shares with Sanction 2 the idea that the transgressor shall be in God’s perpetual} persecution:in Dei persecutione continuo(Sanction 2),in Domini manens persecutione(Sanction 3). All other curses of Sanction 3 are too general to be referred to those of other sanctions in S 745. 34

On the importance of the influence of Deuteronomy XXVIII on early medieval cursing, see Niles, ‘Problem’, pp. 1121-3; Little, Benedictine Maledictions, pp. 59-62. Consider also the similarities between the type of sanction in Sanction 3 of S 745 and the so called clamours, i.e. liturgical curses used by monks, especially Cluniac monks, on the continent in the tenth century, see Little, Benedictine Maledictions, esp. pp. 20-6; Little, ‘Formules Monastiques’; see Cubitt, ‘Archbishop Dunstan’ on the possibility of continental influences.

are used synonymously. On the one hand, the transgressor foremost appears to be

anathemized, as anathema sit is the main clause’s predicate, while the past

participles expressing his excommunication and damnation seem to characterize the transgressor further: the transgressor is anathemized, being in the state of excommunication and damnation. On the other hand, reading the curses synonymously is suggested by the use ofanathema in its general meaning of ‘curse’ in the headings of the previous sanctions. This is especially evident in the case of

Sanction 1, which is entitled De illorum anathemate qui monachis insidiantur,

‘concerning the anathema of those who plot against the monks’, without in fact pronouncing an anathema in the strict sense of the word.36 Finally, it is not clear in whose name this sanction is pronounced. All other sanctions of S 745 are evidently pronounced as if spoken by King Edgar. According to Simon Keynes, sanctions that follow the witness-list represent a ‘collective declaration of the witnesses’.37 In the case of S 745 this appears to be the case at first, because this final sanction introduces omnes qui nominatim hoc priuilegio […] uidemur, ‘we all, who are seen described by name on this privilege’, as those in whose name the subsequent sanction is pronounced. Nevertheless, the final sanction itself is written in the first person singular, which can be presumed to refer to King Edgar, as the entire preceding text is written as if spoken by King Edgar. If the sanction was meant to be understood as Edgar’s words, too, one may wonder why the draftsman did not decide in favour of a final elaborate emphasis on Edgar’s quasi-divine status.38On the other hand, if it was meant to be a collective declaration, this may explain the lack of further ideological embellishments that would apply exclusively to the king himself.

36_{On definitions and medieval usage of the termanathema, see above, p. 34.} 37_{Keynes,Diplomas, p. 106, n. 61.}

S 745 appears to incorporate the ambiguity with which the ecclesiastical legal terms of excommunication, anathema and damnation were generally used in the early Middle Ages. As pointed out above, Michel Zimmermann has suggested that this is the case because sanctions were written by uneducated scribes and were thus not regarded as the right places for theological and, for that matter, legal lectures.39 This explanation applies to S 745 only partially. The Refoundation Charter of New Minster was in all probability drafted by Bishop Æthelwold, a highly educated theologian with evidential administrative and legal interests. Æthelwold was likely to have been aware of the theological and legal differences between these three ritual ecclesiastical curses. Nonetheless, S 745 appears to have used the three terms largely synonymously and clearly used the termanathemaas ‘curse’ in its headings. Perhaps the lack of precision in this matter indeed reflects that sanctions were not regarded as suitable for pronouncing ecclesiastical law. In Æthelwold’s Refoundation Charter, the ambiguity between the various terms may have been prompted by the circumstance that not all members of the charter’s audience could have been expected to possess the same knowledge to distinguish between theological and legal subtleties. In fact, S 745 seems to suggest further that these theological and legal subtleties may even have been largely irrelevant. The threat with one or more ecclesiastical curses may have been enough to exhort the audience of S 745 to uphold moral discipline, irrespective of the precise threat pronounced; after all, all three curses, excommunication, anathema and damnation, were common threats aimed at upholding moral discipline.