Dying and Death in Later Anglo-Saxon England

The opening of this book reads like the first line of a detective novel: ‘In mid-June, 918, a woman's corpse was carried a hundred kilometres across the West Midlands, from her death-bed in Tamworth to her grave in Gloucester’ (p. 1). Thompson engages her readers and does so by drawing their attention to the details of individuals' lives. Throughout, she oscillates between precise, nuanced discussion of sources that she has found particularly revealing, and their wider context, with the result that she is consistently aware of the diversity of late Anglo-Saxon society. Thompson's subject is the beliefs about death present in Anglo-Saxon England between the reigns of Alfred to William I. What marks this out from other studies of early medieval death is partly its focus on the later period and partly the range of sources upon which she draws, some of them little known: the Vercelli homilies, Oxford, Bodleian, Laud Misc. 482, the Newent stone, gild statutes, charcoal burials, the gravestones from York Minster. Already, one of the impacts of the book has been to encourage archaeologists to re-read the homilies. The breadth of sources studied here is impressive. It is probably inevitable that readers may quibble with details in the discussion of those with which they are particularly familiar. I am not, for example, convinced that Laud Misc. 482 was designed to be used in teaching (pp. 57, 70, 81) rather than as a carefully compiled collection of texts for one person's use. Such minor reservations do not, however, have a substantial impact on the arguments being made. The book is organised thematically and includes a detailed case-study of the experiences and attitudes towards death of Æthelflæd of Mercia; a discussion of key themes, including what it meant to have a Christian burial, which would be very useful for students; a chapter on dying well and preparing for death; one on threats to the body in life and death, including disease and decay; on wyrmas, an Old English word whose referents could include dragons, serpents, lice and maggots; and a final chapter on ‘how excommunication and execution, the instruments of punishment wielded by Church and State, were profoundly informed by an awareness of the Last Judgement’ (p. 207). These are not obvious chapter divisions but they reflect Thompson's familiarity with the sources and her willingness to let them guide her discussion. This is not a book which has a single over-arching thesis; instead it contains many arguments about how death was understood in late Anglo-Saxon England. Among those I found arresting were that some people believed that ‘the corpse retained a degree of consciousness’ (p. 50); that ‘disease is … the result of an assault, which even if sent by God is no straightforward guide to spiritual health’ (p. 101); and that ‘the body, living and dead, is threatened with being eaten at every stage of its existence before the Last Judgement, after which the damned body will continue to be devoured in perpetuity’ (p. 132). The sources emphasise that ‘the significant eschatological experience’ is at ‘the end of time rather than the moment of death’ (p. 195); that Peter was an especially approachable intercessor ‘because he understands sin and repentance from within’ (p. 199); finally that ideas about intercession on Judgement Day were ‘a subject of considerable debate’ in late Anglo-Saxon England (p. 201). One of the stylistic features of this book is the sometimes startlingly clear imagery which reveals its subjects as if in a lightning flash; for example, ‘the ritual surrounding the sick and dying person can be read as an emergency signal aimed at God’ (p. 64), or ‘death prompted a particularly visible assertion of gild identity at Abbotsbury, with fifteen to thirty men riding through the Dorset fields, surrounding a cart carrying the dying man or the corpse’ (p. 115). What impresses me most about this book is the imagination with which it is written. Thompson is too interested in and knowledgeable about late Anglo-Saxon England to be content to look only where the surviving sources direct our attention, though when she speculates, she does so with due care.