ABSTRACT
In the famous Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, written in 1014, Archbishop Wulfstan of York (1002-1023) describes a country ravaged by more than three decades of continuous Viking attacks that had gradually transformed from seasonal raids into invasion and conquest and had met little or no effective resistance from the English leadership.1 He portrays a land beset by economic and political turmoil, its resources exhausted by the repeated payment of exorbitant tributes. He addresses a people who had watched their king, Æthelred, go into exile and welcomed his conqueror, Swein, out of a desperate desire to put an end to the attacks. But, he warns, the current sufferings of the English are no more than they deserve:
This nation, so it seems, has for a long time been made sinful through manifold sins and through many misdeeds: through murders and evil deeds, through avarice and through gluttony, through theft and through pillaging, through traffic in people and through heathen vices, through betrayals and through deceptions, through lawbreaking and through lawlessness, through attacks on relatives and through manslaughter, through attacks on
1 Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, in The Homilies of Wulfstan, ed. Dorothy Bethurum (Oxford, 1957), pp. 267-75 (hereafter Sermo Lupi). The date of 1014 comes from the rubric introducing the sermon in London, British Library MS Cotton Nero A. i: “SERMO LUPI AD ANGLOS QUANDO DANI MAXIME PERSECUTI SUNT EOS, QUOD FUIT ANNO MILLESIMO .XIIII. AB INCARNATIONE DOMINI NOSTRI IESU CRISTI.” The precise dating of the Sermo Lupi and its three versions has been the subject of much debate; Jonathan Wilcox recently offered an extremely precise and quite convincing argument for dating the sermon to the consecration of Ælfwig as bishop of London, and the meeting of the witenagemot (governing council) he suggests accompanied it, in “Wulfstan’s Sermo Lupi ad Anglos as Political Performance: 16 February 1014 and Beyond,” in Wulfstan, Archbishop of York: The Proceedings of the Second Alcuin Conference, ed. Matthew Townend, Studies in the Early Middle Ages 10 (Turnhout, 2004), pp. 375-96. Malcolm Godden argues for an earlier date for the sermon; see “Apocalypse and Invasion in Late Anglo-Saxon England,” in From AngloSaxon to Early Middle English: Studies Presented to E.G. Stanley, ed. Malcolm Godden, Douglas Gray, and Terry Hoad (Oxford, 1994), pp. 130-62. But scholars agree, following the Nero rubric, that the sermon is very much a response to the contemporary situation of Viking attacks and invasion, even if they disagree on the specifics of dating.
