Kinship in Early Medieval England, AD 600 - 1050: Law, Land, and Literature

This thesis provides the first sustained, modern re-interrogation of the old conceptual paradigms associated with kinship in early medieval England (c.600-1050). While previous studies on early medieval kinship have tended to focus chiefly on royal legislation, the present study takes a different approach. By bringing together a broad range of source types that are not usually considered in conjunction with one another, this thesis sheds new light on this long-neglected topic. In doing so, I answer several key research questions: how did kings interact with family groups, and did these interactions change over time? How were the perceived legal and social obligations of kinship, particularly in terms of feuds and inheritance, managed? How did ecclesiastical communities interact with secular families? And what did contemporaries think about the family - what did this concept mean to them? Throughout the course of answering these questions, I argue that the concept of kinship in the minds of contemporaries was malleable and necessarily flexible in different circumstances, but that an enduring feature of kinship in this society was the centrality of the immediate family above any other relatives. I also explore the different strategies people used to ‘manage’ their relationships with their relatives, demonstrating the gendered nature of people’s experience of marriage, the mutual obligations of the parent-child relationship, as well as the different inheritance strategies contemporaries adopted: the choice of which, I argue, was often dictated by a family’s socio-economic status. The thesis also challenges the well-established trend in historiography that sees lordship and kinship as locked in a zero-sum game with one another, in which the rise of one resulted in the other’s decline: instead, I argue for co-operation and interaction between the two, rather than opposition. Finally, the thesis demonstrates the different obligations that perceived kinship ties brought, as well as the important role of relatives as a practical and emotional support network, and the use of family ties as a key marker of social identity.