ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the rites in some detail, raising thereby some important questions about the development of the liturgy in England at the close of the tenth century as shown through the transmission of pontifical texts. The widow, as a person possessed both of sexual experience and potentially of some independent means, presented a number of problems to ecclesiastical hierarchies in the early medieval West; the Church’s efforts at controlling such women were directed primarily at restricting widows’ freedom by forcing them into a life of chastity. In societies where aristocratic mortality was high the fate of those of both genders whose spouses predeceased them, particularly those widowed young, acquired a particular significance. Although in England a formal duty to protect widows was laid on the king and the Church only in the late pre-Conquest period,11 there were references to the need to provide physical protection for widows in earlier Anglo-Saxon law-codes.
