ABSTRACT
Patrick Wormald took pains to examine the social and political rationale governing lex scripta – ‘the original statement of a people’s law in writing’.2 The pre-textual stages of such codification are less easy to ascertain. However, 30 years’ study of the liturgy and its early medieval record has convinced me that service-book collections from pre-twelfth-century western Christendom served their societies much as codified legislation did: they recorded agreed-upon practice, established auctoritas beyond argument through weighty historical witnesses in writing and functioned as resource repositories from which to draw precedent, for whatever the occasion demanded as appropriate and viable. While it is only text that survives today, for the pre-or extra-textual performance of both Anglo-Saxon law and liturgy, and most particularly for the places where they intersect, we should assume not an orthopraxis but a lively, vigorous and ever-changing series of social justice rituals whose pre-codified traces we may yet ascertain. One such trace, found in extant vernacular rather than Latin service-books, is the subject of this study. We shall see that adjurations for ordeals, intended for the laity and preserved in Old English, may be regarded as the result of practical exigencies. These exigencies, when reified into ritual language within service-books, in turn allowed the Church to retain control over the determination of lay as well as clerical innocence or guilt.
