Witan

For other uses, see Witan (disambiguation).

Anglo-Saxon king with his witan. Biblical scene in the Illustrated Old English Hexateuch (11th century), portraying Pharaoh in court session, after passing judgment on his chief baker and chief cupbearer.

The witan (lit. 'wise men') was the king's council in the Anglo-Saxon government of England from before the 7th century until the 11th century. It was composed of the leading magnates, both ecclesiastic and secular. Meetings of the witan were sometimes called the witenagemot.

Its primary function was to advise the king on subjects such as promulgation of laws, judicial judgments, approval of charters transferring land, settlement of disputes, election of archbishops and bishops and other matters of major national importance. The witan also had to elect and approve the appointment of a new king. Its membership was composed of the most important noblemen, including ealdormen, thegns, and senior clergy.

Before the 20th century, historians considered the witan to be an early representative assembly and direct ancestor of the Parliament of England. Since the 20th century, historians have emphasised the witan's role as an essentially royal institution, highlighting the differences between it and modern parliaments.

Etymology

The Old English word witan means "counsellors" (literally "wise men"). Witenagemot means a "meeting or assembly of counsellors". These terms were used to describe the counsellors of Anglo-Saxon kings. Before the unification of England in the tenth century, separate witenagemots were convened by the kings of the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. A contemporary account of a dispute over an estate in Middlesex in the 950s refers to a decision of the Myrcna witan ("Mercian witan").

The term witan was also used to describe other kinds of counsellors. In the sources, there are mentions of þeodwitan ("people's witan") and Angolcynnes witan ("England's witan"). Wulfstan II, archbishop of York (1002–1023), wrote that "it is incumbent on bishops, that venerable witan always travel with them, and dwell with them, at least of the priesthood; and that they may consult with them… and who may be their counsellors at every time."

John Maddicott described witena gemot as a rare 11th century usage, with only nine pre-Conquest examples, mainly in the crisis of 1051–52. Patrick Wormald was also sceptical, describing witena-gemot as "a word always rare and unattested before 1035".

Royal counsellors

The "wise men" or councilors to the king were the ealdormen (later earls), bishops, thegns, and abbots. The king relied on these magnates for advice and for implementation of royal policy at the local level. When English kings claimed overlordship over their Welsh neighbors, the Welsh kings might also be in attendance. According to historian Bryce Lyon, the witan "was an amoebic sort of organization with no definite composition or function". The term could refer to a large gathering of leading magnates, but it could also refer to a small group of advisers within the royal household.

Knowledge about who made up the witan and who was present at their meetings is provided mainly by lists of witnesses to charters, or grants of land, which were concocted at the witenagemots. The first recorded act of a witenagemot was the law code issued by King Æthelberht of Kent ca. A.D. 600, the earliest document which survives in sustained Old English prose; however, the witan was certainly in existence long before this time. Altogether, about 2,000 charters and 40 law codes survive which attest to the workings of the various meetings of the witan, of which there are around 300 recorded.

Role

Further information: Anglo-Saxon law

The king consulted his witan on significant matters. For example, the king and his advisers drafted laws and submitted them to large witans for consultation and consent. In the words of Lyon, kings "seemed to feel that to consult with men from all parts of the kingdom produced a wider sampling of opinion and gave the law more solid support".

Witans took part in both secular and ecclesiastical legislation. Church law, however, was drafted by the clergy, with lay nobles merely giving consent. Witans only consented to extraordinary taxation that would burden the nobility. For example, the witan consented to the Danegeld. Witans discussed decisions related to war, peace, and treaties. The witan consented to and witnessed the granting of bookland by charter. The declaration of a royal will occurred at witans.

A witan could meet anywhere at any time. Christmas, Lent, and Easter were favorite times because many nobles were at the royal court. London and Winchester were common locations. The king and his court were itinerant, and witenagemots are known to have met in at least 116 locations, including Amesbury, Calne, Cheddar, and Gloucester. The meeting places were often on royal estates, but some witenagemots were convened in the open at prominent rocks, hills, meadows and famous trees.

Electing and deposing kings

The witan was noted by contemporary sources as having the singular power to ceosan to cynige, 'to choose the king' from amongst the (extended) royal family. Nevertheless, at least until the 11th century, royal succession generally followed the "ordinary system of primogeniture". The historian Chadwick interpreted these facts as proof that the so-called election of the king by the witan merely amounted to formal recognition of the deceased king's natural successor. But Liebermann was generally less willing than Chadwick to see the witan's significance as buried under the weight of the royal prerogative:

The influence of the king, or at least of kingship, on the constitution of the assembly seems, therefore, to have been immense. But on the other hand he (the king) was elected by the witan… He could not depose the prelates or ealdormen, who held their office for life, nor indeed the hereditary thanes… At any rate, the king had to get on with the highest statesmen appointed by his predecessor, though possibly disliked by him, until death made a post vacant that he could fill with a relation or a favourite, not, however, without having a certain regard to the wishes of the aristocracy.

Liebermann's more subtle position seems to be vindicated by testimony from abbot Ælfric of Eynsham, the leading homilist of the late tenth century, who wrote:

No man can make himself king, but the people has the choice to choose as king whom they please; but after he is consecrated as king, he then has dominion over the people, and they cannot shake his yoke off their necks.

In addition to having a role in the 'election' of English Kings, it is often held that the witenagemots had the power to depose an unpopular king. However, there are only two occasions when this probably happened, in 757 and 774 with the depositions of kings Sigeberht of Wessex and Alhred of Northumbria respectively.

The witan's powers are illustrated by the following event. In the year 1013 King Æthelred II (Æthelred the Unready) fled the country from Sweyn Forkbeard, who then had the witan proclaim him king. Within a few weeks, however, Sweyn died and Æthelred was called back to England by the witan. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the witan would only receive him back under the condition that he promise to rule better than he had. Æthelred did so, and was reinstated as King of England. His nickname of the 'Unræd' or 'Unready' means ill-advised, indicating that contemporaries regarded those who sat in the witan as part responsible for the failure of his reign.

Norman Conquest

Further information: Government in Norman and Angevin England

This arrangement ended after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, when William I of England replaced the witenagemot with the curia regis, or king's court. However, in a sign of the witenagemot's enduring legacy, the curia regis continued to be dubbed a witan by chroniclers until as late as the 12th century.

Historiography

The "Saxon myth" claimed that the old Saxon witan originated in a representative assembly of English landholders. The claim was that the original assembly was then subsequently disbanded by the Norman invaders and later reappeared as the Parliament of England. This idea was held across the Thirteen Colonies in North America in the years prior to the American Revolution (1776–1783). Among the believers were Americans including Thomas Jefferson and Jonathan Mayhew.

The Whig historians of the 19th century were concerned with explaining the evolution of the English constitution, and they found in the witan a proto-parliament or in the words of Felix Liebermann, "one of the lineal ancestors of the British Parliament". After World War I, historians such as Frank Stenton and Dorothy Whitelock shifted their focus to understanding the Anglo-Saxon period on its on terms. In his 1943 Anglo-Saxon England, Stenton chose to use the term "King's Council" in place of witan and witenagemot. This change in terminology signaled an important change in the way Anglo-Saxon political assemblies were perceived. Instead of proto-parliaments, the assemblies were essentially royal institutions. Other historians followed Stenton's lead.

The witenagemot was in many ways different from the future institution of the Parliament of England; it had substantially different powers and some major limitations, such as a lack of a fixed procedure, schedule, or meeting place. In his 1995 biography of Alfred the Great, historian David Sturdy argues that the witan did not embody modern notions of a "national institution" or a "democratic" body. He writes, "Victorian notions of a national 'witan' are crazy dreams without foundation, myths of a 'democratic parliament' that never was."

While many modern historians avoid the terms witan and witenagemot, few would go as far as Geoffrey Hindley, who described witenagemot as an "essentially Victorian" coinage. The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England prefers "King's Council" but adds that it was known in Old English as the witan.

John Maddicott regarded the word witan with suspicion, even though it is used in sources such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. In his study of the origins of the English parliament, he generally preferred the more neutral word "assembly":

But the word carries with it, however unjustifiably, a fustian air of decayed scholarship, and, in addition, its use may seem to prejudge the answer to an important question: do we have here an institution, a capitalized 'Witan', as it were, or merely a lower-case ad hoc gathering of the wise men who were the king's councillors?

Henrietta Leyser commented in 2017 that for decades historians avoided using the word 'witan' for assemblies in case they were interpreted as proto-parliaments, and she went on: "Recent historiography, however, has reintroduced the term since it is clear that it was generally accepted that certain kinds of business could only be transacted with a substantial number of the king's wise men, in other words, in the company of his 'witan'". She does not mention the term witenagemot.

See also

• Councils of Clovesho
• Elective monarchy
• Kurultai
• Loya Jirga, a similar concept from Afghanistan
• Majlis
• Panchayati Raj
• Thing (assembly)
• Oyomesi

References

Bibliography

• Chadwick, H. M. (1905). Studies on Anglo-Saxon Institutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Garmonsway, George Norman, ed. (1954). The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (2nd ed.). London.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Hindley, Geoffrey (2006). A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons. London: Robinson.
• Hodgkin, Thomas, The History of England from the Earliest Times to the Norman Conquest (New York, 1906; repr. New York 1969)
• Lapidge, Michael; et al., eds. (2001). The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England. Wiley. ISBN 9-780-63122-492-1.
• Leyser, Henrietta (2017). A Short History of the Anglo-Saxons. London: I. B. Taurus. ISBN 978-1-78076-600-3.
• Liebermann, Felix (1913). The National Assembly in the Anglo-Saxon Period. Halle: Max Niemeyer.
• Loyn, H. R. (1984). The Governance of Anglo-Saxon England, 500–1087. Governance of England. Vol. 1. Stanford University Press. ISBN 9780804712170.
• Lyon, Bryce (1980). A Constitutional and Legal History of Medieval England (2nd ed.). W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-95132-4. 1st edition available at the Internet Archive.
• Maddicott, J. R. (2010). The Origins of the English Parliament. Oxford University Press.
• Roach, Levi (2013). Kingship and Consent in Anglo-Saxon England, 871–978: Assemblies and the State in the Early Middle Ages. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9-781-10703-653-6.
• Robertson, Agnes, ed. (1956). Anglo-Saxon Charters (2nd ed.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. OCLC 504288415.
• Sturdy, David (1995). Alfred the Great. Constable. p. 124.
• Thorpe, Benjamin (1840). Ancient Laws and Institutes of England. G. E. Eyre and A. Spottiswoode, printers to the Queen's Most Excellent Majesty.
• Whitelock, Dorothy, Review of The Witenagemot in the Reign of Edward the Confessor by Tryggvi J. Oleson, The English Historical Review 71 (1956): 640–42.
• Wormald, Patrick (1999). The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-13496-4.

Further reading

• Gomme, George Laurence (1880). Primitive Folkmoots; or, Open-Air Assemblies in Britain (PDF). London: William Clowes and Sons, Ltd. Archived (PDF) from the original on 9 October 2022.
• Hollister, C. Warren. The Making of England, 55 B.C. to 1399 (7th ed. 1995) ch 3
• Oleson, Tryggvi J. (1955). The Witenagemot in the Reign of Edward the Confessor. University of Toronto Press. ISBN 9781487581817.