ABSTRACT
Ecclesiastical personnel and Christian concerns were intimately involved in the routine and everyday workings of politics and society, and in the lives of individual Christians. The second of these issues raises questions of the provision of pastoral care, and of Christian ritual, explanations of evil and misfortune, definitions of sin, ideas about how to attain salvation, and provision for the afterlife. The first, the subject of this chapter, involves questions of taxation, the raising of troops and diplomacy, as well as government, law and other aspects of the administration of the late Anglo-Saxon kingdom. At the highest level of government, churchmen were prominent among royalty’s advisers throughout the period, and among the leading political players. Close scrutiny of charters, of episcopal careers, of aspects of the administrative-legal structure, of people and status and of areas and places, shows that they were important at all the lower levels too. So were Christian objects, ordeals and sanctuary.
