Searching for Conversion in the Early English Laws

Early English legal texts are frustrating documents. It is difficult to date them and there is scant evidence to contextualize them; they use archaic language and contain numerous hapax legomena, so that it is not at all clear what some passages actually mean; and the history of royal legislation (and canon law) is dense, complicated and technical. And yet, though this sounds like an unpromising place to start in a search for conversion to Christianity, seventh-century laws are some of the earliest surviving texts which provide evidence about the presence of Christianity in the English kingdoms. In the discussion which follows, I examine how the evidence of early English legal texts can help to address the following questions about conversion in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms: how far is it possible to retrieve any information about ‘native’ religion from the legal material? How was the writing of the laws shaped by the conversion process? What is the effect of a new theology on different audiences, how is it received, and how can we identify that? And how can we identify a community in the process of transition between belief systems? I begin by setting out details of the surviving evidence and its historical context before turning to consider the related concepts of conversion and Christianization, and how evidence for them might be identified. Finally, I explore whether it is possible to see evidence for the reinterpretation of beliefs before and after the introduction of Christianity, specifically with regard to legal process.