ABSTRACT
In an unusually lengthy entry for the year 757, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recounts a complex and well-crafted story, which the chronicler and his contemporaries presumably found interesting, dramatic, and perhaps even instructive and which modern scholars have never tired of retelling. Like the account of Sigeberht's deposition, the chronicler's statement that Sigeberht killed ealdorman Cumbra, who had long supported him, also bears on the question of how contemporaries conceptualized the relations between followers and lords. For the purpose or assessing the political significance of lordship and kinship, the famous conclusion to the story is also more ambiguous than conventional interpretations of it suggest. Explicitly or implicitly, conventional interpretations of the story of Cynewulf and Cyneheard articulate several familiar and interrelated themes in modern historical writing on earlier European history: the decline of kinship and family; the rise of contractual lordship; and the rise of the state.
