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5 - Incarceration as Judicial Punishment in Anglo-Saxon England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 March 2023

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Summary

The Old English translation of the Soliloquies of St Augustine contains the following passage on the different experiences of those who set out to seek wisdom:

swa hit bið æac be þam wisdome: ælc þara þe hys wilnað and þe hys geornful byt, he hym mæg cuman to and on hys hyrede wunian and be lybbam, þeah hi hym sume nær sian, sume fyer. swa swa ælces cynges hama beoð sume on bure, sume on healle, sume on odene, sume on carcerne, and lybbað þeah æalle be anes hlafordes are.

so it is too concerning wisdom: each of those who desires it and is eager for it, he may come to it and dwell and live in its company, yet some of them shall be near to it and some further off. Just so in the estate of every king there are some in the chamber, some in the hall, some in the threshing house, some in prison, and nevertheless they all live according to a single lord’s grace.

One of a series of analogies in the Old English text drawn from the courtly world of Anglo-Saxon England, the reference to a royal prison in this passage is recalled subsequently in the text when the translator likens the helpless situation of the damned to that of a man confined in a king’s prison:

Ac hym byð þonne swa swa þam mannum þe her beoð on sumes kincges carcerne gebrohte, and magon geseon ælc dæge heora freond and geahsian be heom þæt þæt hy willað, and ne magon heom þeah na nane gode ne beon.

But it will be for him then as for those men who are here brought into a king’s prison, and they may see their friends each day and ask what they will of them, and yet they [the friends] may not be any use to them.

Neither passage relates directly to anything in the ostensible Latin source of the Soliloquies, and the casual references to the existence of royal prisons might at first glance be taken as evidence for the contemporary practice of incarceration and the availability of prison facilities in Anglo-Saxon England in the late ninth or early tenth centuries.

However, these passages actually raise more questions than they answer.

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Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2014

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