Of reaflac and rapina: accusations of violence in two Old English lawsuits and the Libellus Æthelwoldi

This article examines the meaning and function of the Old English noun reaflac in two tenth‐century lawsuit documents, Sawyer 877 and Sawyer 1211. It suggests that reaflac was the vernacular counterpart to the Latin terms violentia and rapina. Such connected terminology suggests that a collection of now lost tenth‐century Old English charters, like S 877 and S 1211 in form, was the original source for the twelfth‐century Ely house chronicle, the Libellus Æthelwoldi. Charter draftsmen purposefully selected a language of violence in order to delegitimize a rival party’s claim to an estate, regardless of whether any acts of violence had taken place. Reaflac formed part of this narrative strategy in early English lawsuit documents because of its association with contemporary discourses on moralized wrongdoing.

These are the crimes by which Wulfbald ruined himself with his lord, namely first, when his father died, he went to his stepmother's estate and took everything that he could find there inside and out, small and great. Then the king sent to him and commanded him to give up what he had seized (he agefe reaflac ða forest). 1 One can imagine the rage felt by Wulfbald's stepmother after he seized the entirety of her estates' moveable wealth. Wulfbald's crimes as described in the charter go on to mount up and expose the limitations of late Anglo-Saxon law enforcement. He ignores the call to restore his stepmother's goods and pay his wergild to King AEthelred not once, but twice; on the second occasion AEthelred instructs Wulfbald to withdraw from his stepmother's lands which he now illegitimately occupies. 2 Wulfbald then takes forcible ownership of lands belonging to his kinsman, Brihtmaer of Bourne, refusing to adhere to the king's two subsequent commands to leave the estates. Wulfbald comes across as a ruthless rogue who stole from his family and refused to cooperate when ordered to restore the properties he had taken. There was no effective mechanism for meting out justice to people like him who not only disrupted the peace but also had both the gall and the clout to defy the king's orders. Eventually, Wulfbald dies without making any recompense. 3 This might have been the end of it, but the narrative closes with a shocking climax. Because Wulfbald was now dead and not in a position to resist, the king's thegn (and Wulfbald's cousin) Eadmaer and his companions claimed and occupied Bourne 'by seizure despite the king' ('on þaet land aet Burnan þaet he on reaflace ongen þaene cynyng hefde'). 4 As Wulfbald's kinsman, Eadmaer had a personal stake in Bourne's fate and, therefore, most likely sought to secure his own rights to it. What mattered more for the writer of S 877, 1 'Þis sind þa forwyrhto þe Wulfbald hine wyþ his hlaford forworthe. Þaet is aerest þa his faedor waes forfaeren þa ferd he to steopmoder land ⁊ nam þaer eal he þaer funde inne ⁊ ute laesse ⁊ mare. Þa send se cyng him to ⁊ bead him þaet he agefe reaflac ða forset': P. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and Bibliography (London, 1969)  though, was Eadmaer's status as a king's thegn, which made the charter's final act even more meaningful: Eadmaer had underestimated Wulfbald's widow and her son, who sought to reclaim Bourne and remove it from his control, killing him along with fifteen of his companions in the process.
These events must have taken place in the 980s or earlier; the text that recounts them (ending the narrative abruptly with the murder of Eadmaer) presents the decisions made at two council meetings in London held in the period 988×990. The account of Wulfbald's criminal activity and his eventual demise survives as an Old English memorandum that probably results from these council meetings but went on to be incorporated into a Latin grant now known as S 877. This document is preserved in the cartulary of the New Minster at Winchester, Liber Abbatiae. The main body of the charter records how in 996 AEthelred granted his mother AElfthryth the estate at Bourne alongside five other locations in Kent. 5 How S 877 came to be in this archive is uncertain as the New Minster held no obvious interest in the estates concerned. 6 On the basis of evidence of several land transactions between AElfthryth and Bishop AEthelwold of Winchester (963-84), Sean Miller speculates that AElfthryth had entrusted her charters to the community at the New Minster for safekeeping. 7 These properties in Kent may represent the lands that were forfeited by Wulfbald's heirs between 988×990 and 996, as a result of the decisions taken by the London councils. At the second meeting, the councillors decided that Eadmaer's death, and his illegitimate occupation of Bourne, was a step too far and resolved to deal with the situation. The dialogue that ensued will never be known, but legal texts from the reigns of AEthelstan and Alfred already exhibited anxieties over the state's ability to bring well-connected aristocrats like Wulfbald and Eadmaer under control. 8 As the kingdom's leaders rehearsed these sorry events, the story coalesced into a compelling narrative of endemic wrongdoing that would justify dispossessing Wulfbald and his family of their lands, wrongfully seized or otherwise. 9 Like other contemporary accounts of past landowner's transgressions, charters served to protect the new owner's rights to the recently forfeited lands against claims arising from earlier stages in the estate's history. 10 Who composed this account is not evident, but the author summed up the charges against Wulfbald and Eadmaer by saying they had taken and held the lands on reaflace.
Reaflac is an Old English noun that survives in three lawsuit documents beyond S 877. These are two other charters dated to AEthelred's reign: S 1454, a chirograph drawn up in 990×993; and S 1457, an institutional statement composed during the 980s. 11 A singlesheet letterknown to modern scholarship as the Cooling Letter (S 1211)written in c.959 to recount a complicated claim to land by Queen Eadgifu, King Edward the Elder's third wife, also mentions reaflac. 12  transforms civil disputes between two opposed parties into a serious criminal case. In S 877, the term reaflac helped charter draftsmen to justify the king's confiscation of all five of the estates in Kent. Reaflac, however, can be artfully vague; it does not specify the nature of the act that has taken place. When Wulfbald sought possession of the properties held by his stepmother and his kinsman Brihtmaer, did he take them with fire and the sword? Had there been fatalities that contributed to the draftsman's assertion of his ruin? These queries present historians with a broader puzzle to solve in terms of the narrative's construction: why did S 877's draftsmen fail to provide further details concerning the violent crime mentioned therein and why did they employ this particular term reaflac?
Matthew McHaffie provides an effective solution to this problem by considering how and why accusations of violence were used in lawsuits over property in his study of the Latin term violentia as it appears in eleventh-century French charters and dispute records. Although violentia is cognate with the Modern English word 'violence', McHaffie has shown that it denoted a particular kind of illegal invasive act that is better described as 'violation' or as a 'wrongful use of force', rather than 'violence'. 17 This vocabulary represented the complaining party's contempt that a rival dared to raise a claim against a property that was not rightfully theirs (or so the complaining party believed). The litigant's accusations of violentia was a mechanism by which a dispute over property could be redefined into an offence that fell within a lord's jurisdictional purview. 18 By employing select terminology, litigants purposefully framed their opponent's claim as a violent act so as to map their complaints onto societal expectations of actionable wrong. 19 The claimant could, therefore, evade the difficult question of rightful ownership, which was often not resolved by legal arguments but by questions of patronage. 20 This study focuses on reaflac's use as a label for litigants' actions in S 877 and the Cooling Letter. These texts reflect two different stages of dispute processes: S 877 was composed after the conflict had been resolved whilst the Cooling Letter functioned as a personal statement to be used during an ongoing investigation. 21 I argue that reaflac was a vernacular counterpart to contemporary Latin terminology utilized in other forms of lawsuit documentation. Like violentia, reaflac constituted a recognized rhetorical device that emphasized the violent happenings of a case (real, overstated or imagined) and conveyed a general sense of wrongdoing on the rival group's part to strengthen one's own claims to property. This study is divided into three sections. The first concentrates on defining reaflac by exploring its place in the wider Old English corpus of literature in order to elucidate the specifics of its meaning. The second section explores reaflac's symbiosis with general illegality from the composers' perspective. The third section examines the instances of actual litigant violence in the lawsuit record and how charter draftsmen sought to legitimize one party's actions by placing the charge of reaflac on their opponent's shoulders.
These narratives of violence have been recognized as one way of weaponizing documents, the early medieval charter serving to rewrite the past in a particular way to legitimize the writer's claim in the present and prevent future dispute. 22 Reaflac represents a specific case study of how that objective was realized by the adoption of a carefully constructed narrative strategy. This case study focuses not solely on the events described and the authors' circumstances, but also on the meaning that authors designated to those events and the message they intended to communicate to the text's audience. 23 Reaflac has implications for how other lawsuit documents should be read and can be set alongside a wider discourse of moralized wrongdoing in Old English literature. To develop this point, I will compare the use of reaflac to the Latin vocabulary chosen to reflect the pillaging of estates in the Libellus quorundam insignium operum beati AEthelwoldi episcopi, hereafter referred to as the Libellus. The Libellus is a twelfth-century chronicle commissioned by Bishop Hervey Le Breton (1109-31) concerning land disputes between Ely and the outside world during the last decades of the tenth century. 24 The reasoning behind this comparison is based on the prologue's claim that the Libellus had been translated into Latin from Old English documents dating to the time of Bishop AEthelwold and Abbot Byrhtnoth (970-96), which suggests the existence of a now-lost Ely collection of vernacular charters similar in character to those that used reaflac. 25  rapina and reaflac in OE glosses of Latin texts and the similarities in the specific kinds of violence the terms portray, this study demonstrates that the accusations of violence in the Libellus accurately represent likely uses of reaflac in the original OE. The Libellus, S 877 and S 1211 also show that accusations of both terms were situational and could come and go depending on expediency.

The history of reaflac
Appreciating reaflac's application in different textual genres will elucidate its true meaning as an act of violence and demonstrate how charter draftsmen intended the phrase to be understood. Reaflac adds to the impression that the vocabulary of lawsuits was carefully selected to shape the narrative and held significance that went beyond a simple description of violence. The authors of dispute records consciously applied this term as they crafted rhetorical strategies to build a legal, and indeed a moral, case.

Law codes
The earliest known mention of reaflac appears in Clause 10 of King Ine of Wessex's (689-726) law code, which only survives as an appendix to King Alfred's Domboc. It reads, 'If anyone within the borders of our kingdom commits an act of robbery (reaflác) or seizes anything with violence, he shall restore the plunder (reaflac) and pay a fine of sixty shillings.' 26 Reaflac was an illegal act in the eyes of the law. It was a crime with its own prescribed penalties, which a member of the witan, a litigant or victim could appeal to in an assembly. 27 The term's nature as a general challenge to peace is suggested by S 877's assertion that it was the king or presiding witan who decided if reaflac had taken place. There is reason to believe that the king's early intervention is a metonym for a localized agency that wielded royal authority in the district. S 877's draftsman stated that it was the king (se cyng) who sent to Wulfbald and 'commanded him to give up what he had seized', but at this stage in the legal proceedings it was potentially the hundred court or shire assembly (both otherwise conspicuously absent from the account) that instructed Wulfbald to relinquish the land. 28 Contemporary laws, like III Edgar, dictated that a dispute should only be referred to the king as a last resort, when litigants had failed to obtain justice at a hundred and then at the shire level. 29 Indeed, S 1454 reports that AEthelred relinquished a case because it needed to be first tried in the shire court, which is the opposite progression of events that S 877 seems to portray. 30 The charter draftsman possibly invoked the king's name to accentuate the severity of Wulfbald's disregard of the law. Litigants used this terminology found in contemporary law codes to assert their case's rectitude, associating themselves with the king to show that the law was on their side, regardless of their case's legitimacy. Such a strategy was utilized to place their claim beyond credible doubt.
S 877's charter draftsmen may have also used reaflac not strictly as a technical term but more as an example of heightened emotional (and political) language that could reinforce their appeals to perceived injustices. Uses of the term 'thief ', for example, were purely rhetorical in Ine's law code. Clause 43, for example, addresses destroying trees by fire, stating that the offender will be charged sixty shillings because 'fire is a thief ' ( fyr bið þeof ). 31 Future rivals, like Wulfbald's heirs, would consequently be forced to circumvent previous acts that had been framed as categorically wrong with the use of such weighted language. 32 Ine's laws reveal that already in the seventh century reaflac was firmly associated with violence; hence its attraction as a way of framing a rival landowner's actions in a negative light. Felix Liebermann's translation of reaflac as it appears in Ine's law code as Raub in Modern Germanmeaning robbery, but also with specific connotations of kidnapping, and the notion of 'going on the prowl'seems to be an apt representation of reaflac's basic meaning. 33 Jane Roberts noted that the compiler of Quadripartitusa collection of historic legal documents assembled during the reign of Henry I of England (1100-35)translated reaflac five times as the Latin term robaria (which later became 'robbery' in Modern 29 'no-one shall apply to the king about any case, unless he cannot obtain the benefit of the law or fails to command justice at home', '⁊ ne gesece nan man þone cyngc for nanre spraece, English) and once each as 'rapine' (rapina) and 'greed' (rapacitas). 34 Today robbery is defined as taking the property of another specifically by means of force or intimidation. 35 Although both terms signify the wrongful appropriation of another person's property, this emphasis on violence separates it from theft. This distinction between theft and robbery in the Anglo-Saxon mindset is crucial to reaflac's meaning and explains its use by authors of lawsuit documents. Clause 10 of Ine's law code resembles the present-day definition of robbery in the stress it lays on the offender's aggression, with the noun nied-naeme (formed from the verb nídan, meaning 'to take something forcibly') appearing beside reaflac. Reaflac's prominent position in the Promissio Regis, a vernacular translation of the coronation oath conducted by Archbishop Dunstan (959-88) during King Edgar's (959-75) coronation in 959, also speaks to the term's perceived severity. 36 The oath reads, 'Secondly, I forbid robbery (reaflac) and all unrighteous deeds by all classes of society.' 37 To eradicate reaflac was a royal priority during Edgar's reignwhich perhaps developed from AEthelstan's earlier concern with theft more generallywith it later becoming part of the Crown's image-building and political rhetoric. 38 The coronation oath reflected early English kings' anxieties. Reaflac would have been considered an egregious offence at this time in order to merit such a mention. Theft was also a priority but was seen as a separate crime and was defined on different grounds. Anglo-Saxon society regarded theft as a furtive act; in Tom Lambert's words, it left 'victims impotent, with no knowledge of where to direct their anger'. 39 Theft, unlike reaflac, was thus met with the death penalty from the seventh century onwards, as Ine's law code stated that captured thieves would be killed or pay their wergild to the king. 40 Roberts's study of the Old and Middle English vocabulary for theft and robbery reveals reaflac's enduring connection with its root, reaf, which later became 'reavery', 'robbing', 'rape', and 'robbers', while the Old English terms associated with theft (þeof, þeofend, stalung, and stalu) later became 'theft', 'thieving', 'stealth', and 'stealing'. 41 The litigants of S 877, S 1211, S 1454, and S 1457 did not label their opponent as a 'thief ' (þeof ). Reaflac meant something else. Descriptions of theft did not fulfil the litigants' needs when forming an accusationit was a crime performed in secret, whereas reaflac, a forceful requisition of property, was all too public. Beyond establishing those violent connections, there remains an element of openness to reaflac's place in the legal record, which distinguishes it from theft: the laws do not specify which acts were classed as reaflac nor the exact identity of its victims. In this sense, it is akin to the modern terms, 'pillage' and 'rapine', as the act of reaflac is often translated. To highlight the links between rapine and reaflac in the early English mindset, one must look beyond legal evidence to Alfredian literature.

Alfredian texts
Reaflac begins to appear regularly during the Alfredian period in the closing decades of the ninth century. The translator of the Old English Orosius placed the actions of a shepherd called Viriatus in the realm of rapine and he employed the term reaflac to do so. Viriatus 'was a great thief (þeofmon). Through those thefts (stalunge) he became a robber (reafere), and through that robbery (reaflace) ravaged many towns.' 42 This reaffirms the existence of separate definitions of theft and robbery. Theft can lead to robbery and robbery is in turn a crime committed on a grander scale, involving widespread damage inflicted on whole towns. The E recension of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (hereafter Chronicle) written c.1116 (but based on an earlier manuscript), points to reaflac's previous association with Viking raids and subsequent application in texts that discuss rapine. The Vikings destroyed God's church at Lindisfarne in 793, 'Through plunder and slaughter' (þurh reaflac ⁊ mansleht). 43  been the reason for reaflac's insertion into a lawsuit document; like violentia, it had the ability to flexibly map onto individual complaints. 44 The Viking raids of the ninth and tenth centuries doubtlessly made the audiences of S 1211 and S 877 familiar with images of pillaging, and enabled individuals to apply their own conception of violent dispossession onto the scene when they were exposed to the term reaflac. Later draftsmen may have sought to evoke this mental image when describing their opponents' actions. S 877 surely reflects this idea as the author juxtaposed reaflac with forset, the preterite form of forsittan, meaning 'to be besieged'. 45

Glossed psalters
Eleventh-century writers evidently did not view reaflac as a 'standard' crime. They employed it as a narrative device to tarnish an opponent's character by relating their actions to an offence with both legal and moral dimensions. Interlinear Old English glosses of Latin psalters suggest that rapina (rapine) directly corresponded with reaflac. The Salisbury Psalter, which was likely written in the late tenth century at the nunnery in Shaftesbury, has Old English glosses on certain psalms. society amid the early eleventh-century Viking invasions. Wulfstan declared: Things have not gone well now for a long time at home or abroad, but there has been devastation and famine, burning and bloodshed in every district again and again; and stealing and killing, sedition and pestilence, murrain and disease, malice and hate and spoliation by robbers (rypera reaflac) have harmed us very grievously. 49 He called upon Old Testament imagery of the plight of the Israelites, whilst echoing scenes from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle on the Viking raids on Lindisfarne. 50 Wulfstan paired reaflac with the verb derian, meaning 'to damage', with the church positioned as its victim. The term comes across as an affront to God, as well as a symbol of his wrath. Wulfstan repeated slight variations of these lines in other homilies, reaffirming the importance of this message and the place of reaflac in the ongoing list of English sins, but he also stated: 'And that came about, according to what he said, through robbery by the powerful (þurh ricra reaflac), and through the coveting of ill-gotten gains, through the lawlessness of the people and through unjust judgments […] through gluttony and manifold sins they destroyed their country and themselves they perished.' 51 Wulfstan drew an explicit parallel between, on the one hand, the idea that the sins of the English caused the pressing Danish conquest of England, and, on the other, Gildas' frustrated expression that the sins of the British led to the English invasions during the sixth century. 52 'Robbery by the powerful' and 'the coveting of ill-gotten 49 'Ne dohte hit nu lange inne ne ute: ac waes here 7 hungor, nu bryne 7 blodgyte on gewelhwylcan ende oft 7 gelome. 7 us stalu 7 cwalu, stric 7 steorfa, orfcwealm 7 uncoþu, hol 7 rypera reaflac dered': Wulfstan of York, Larspell (ed. property' resonates with descriptions of reaflac as an opponent's acquisition of lands in contemporary vernacular lawsuits. Wulfstan linked greed for landed wealth with a downfall of epic proportions, which made reaflac another vice with dangerous consequences for the soul. For AElfric, the Holy Apostles' sanctity was derived in part from their ability to resist the urge to commit reaflac: they were not 'drawn by desire of any rapine (aeniges reaflaces), to that which they beheld without'. 53 At the time of S 877's composition then, reaflac's inclusion in a psalm and homilies that addressed greed highlights its significance as an impious act; reaflac reflected on the actor's character and damaged hopes of salvation. This moral dimension to reaflac was an important ingredient in its legal deployment: it not only heightened the illegitimacy of an opponent's behaviour but cast the defendant as the victim of unwarranted aggression beyond what any law-abiding Christian society should accept. The relationship between reaflac and rapina in the Salisbury Psalter supports the notion that reaflac was a vernacular reflex of the Latin discourse on violence, and that its place in lawsuit narratives held a similar function to McHaffie's violentia. 54 This equation has relevance to the Libellus, in which rapina appears with great frequency. For instance, the account of Downham's acquisition distils the idea of the opponent's landholding as an invasion. A certain Leofsige and his wife Sigeflaed were repeatedly accused of rapina after they reneged on an earlier deal that involved selling to the monastery two hides at Downham for fifteen pounds. 55 Leofsige is described as having 'forcibly usurped (abstulit cum rapina) Peterborough and Oundle and Kettering', and 'inflicted violence (rapinam)' against the Holy Church. 56 In Chapter 53, a man called Thurferth also 'took by force' (abstulit cum rapina) the lands at Northwold. 57 Like reaflac's place in lawsuit documents, this choice of language connotes incursive violence. The author paired rapina with abstulitformed from the verb aferre, meaning 'to carry away', 'to deceive', or 'to steal'-just as 53  S 877's author paired reaflac with forset. The juxtaposition of the preposition cum with the noun rapina also closely resembles mid reaflace, which can be found in various Old English texts beyond the legal corpus. For example, in AElfric's homiletic rendition of the biblical Book of the Maccabees, the thegn Heliodorus was instructed to go to the Holy Temple and fetch the treasure therein mid reaflace, translated by Walter Skeat as 'by spoliation'. In both 'with' constructions, the victim is a holy place and the aggressor a lay nobleman, suggesting a contextual connection in the use of this 'with' formulation in different languages. 58 Moreover, both Latin and Old English authors failed to describe how Wulfbald, Leofsige or Thurferth occupied the estate in question, but they each depicted a sudden takeover. The Salisbury Psalter's glosses are difficult to date; Celia and Kenneth Sisam proposed sometime between the end of the tenth century and 1100. 59 Reaflac's gloss of rapina demonstrates that monastic communities of either the late tenth century (when the Old English version of the Libellus was originally composed) or ecclesiastics of the early twelfth century (when the Latin Libellus was transcribed) understood the close relationship between those terms, and could use one to render the other. The correspondence between these words in the psalters highlights the similar way in which authors describe violence in the Libellus and tenth-century dispute records. This is a point in favour of the Libellus' basis on genuine Old English records, but it also suggests that dispute records were not simply conceived as legal documents to build an argument, but also carefully crafted compositions with a moral and didactic value, creating a new frame in which to set violent acts to discourage further damage to ecclesiastical and secular institutions.

Reaflac: an unassailable charge?
The argument for a semantic relationship between reaflac and rapina in the Libellus AEthelwoldi has been established. With this in mind, we can turn to the meaning of reaflac and rapina (and related Latin terminology) as generic terms for wrongdoing that obfuscate the factual details of the legal case. 60 Reaflac did not indicate a specific act but was a matter of one litigant's perspective, signifying a sense of injustice rather than an indication of applied force. This is shown by the accusing parties' vulnerability in the Libellus and S 1211 to counterclaims of violence like reaflac and rapina from rival litigants. The frequency of return accusations of violence and occasionally the king's support of the accused party indicates that these terms did not constitute an unassailable, objective charge.
There are two sides to every story yet one of these is purposefully obscured, for the extant documents are not non-partisan minutes of a courtroom case. 61 They are either carefully constructed narratives written from the victor's perspective, like S 877, or else they formed a statement of formal ownership, such as the Cooling Letter, prior to the case's settlement. 62 The lawsuit document's air of objectivity was potentially a perspective of great benefit to the accusing party in the future, as collective memory of the case's finer details faded into oblivion. Hence, upon the mention of reaflac with its connotations of rapine, it becomes easy to assume that Wulfbald had acted as a hostile interloper, rendering him the villain of the piece.
There is no telling how Wulfbald would have presented his version of events in writing, but S 877 allows us to make a plausible reconstruction. The dispute began when Wulfbald's father died, at which point 'he went to his stepmother's estate and took everything that he could find there inside and out, small and great'. 63 S 877 does not question to whom the land belonged; it designates it as 'Wulfbald's stepmother's land'. This statement of ownership alongside the king's charge of reaflac (or, as we have seen, more likely the hundred or the shire court's) leaves no question as to Wulfbald's guilt. Wulfbald may have forcefully seized the property, but he potentially had reason to do so, and bringing reaflac into the equation functioned to turn the use of violence against him. The death of Wulfbald's father intimates that this was a case of disputed inheritance. A will related to this case does not survive (if one was ever made) yet Wulfbald's refusal to leave implies that this land had, in his mind, been earmarked for him. He may have even claimed that his stepmother had committed reaflac, turning the same accusation against the other side.
The Libellus confirms that rival litigants would retaliate using the same violent terminology as their accusers. Chapter 8 of the Libellus reports that AElfwold of Mardleybury sold one hide of land and two weirs at Stretham to Bishop AEthelwold but then reneged on the deal, claiming that 'he had been forced to it and had been afflicted with violence and pillage (uim ac rapinam)'. 64 AElfwold emphasized the violent wrong by using the same term, rapina, that the Libellus' author used when formulating similar accusations. The difference, however, in our understanding of the nature of AElfwold's complaint comes from seeing the dispute through the eyes of the Ely community, who framed his accusation of rapina as a false claim. Moreover, the author declined to elaborate on the identity of the party whom AElfwold accused of forcing him into this deal. This made AElfwold's argument seem ambiguous and difficult for the reader to rate positively, in the same way that Wulfbald's multiple refusals to pay his wergild rendered him a less credible candidate for landownership. The Libellus also recounts how litigants blamed AEthelwold or Abbot Byrhtnoth for coercing them into selling or exchanging their lands. AElfwold the Fat sold Byrhtnoth three hides at Chippenham in exchange for a hundred shillings per hide. 65 On the appointed day of the exchange, however, a certain Ulf claimed seventy-five acres of AElfwold's land and so AElfwold could not close the deal. 66 Ulf owed the abbot thirty-six acres of land as part of a separate tenurial agreement. 67 AElfwold reported this to another AElfwold, Ealdorman AEthelwine's brother, and claimed that the abbot had 'circumvented them by deceit, and that Ulf had claimed the land at his [Byrhtnoth's] instigation'. 68 One may assume that AElfwold of Mardleybury accused the community at Ely specifically of the violence that they had criticized others for during the breakdown of other tenurial agreements. The contemporary relevance of violence committed against Ely in the early eleventh century is striking, given that claims like AElfwold's had been rendered moot by the Norman Conquest in 1066. The original Old English charters underlying the Libellus aimed to preserve the abbey's claims to legitimate acquisition of its estates against counterclaims that arose after Edgar's death. Bishop Hervey was renegotiating Ely's power as a newly reformed religious house during the early twelfth century. 69 The abbey accordingly sought to cultivate relations with neighbouring landowners and re-enter the 'local economy of exchange'. 70 A new secular audience likely compelled the Libellus' author to preserve the trade-off between litigants' accusations of violence, which suggest that violent terminology itself remained a necessary plot device to aid the abbey's twelfth-century goals with a 'cautionary tale' concerning Ely's earlier successes against external lay threat. 71 Freighted with moral concern though charges of reaflac were, accusations could be resisted, as in the events recounted in the voice of Queen Eadgifu in the Cooling Letter. The letter's composition arose from with a dispute over inheritance: Eadgifu's father had borrowed thirty pounds from Goda, entrusting the estate to him as collateral. Prior to his death, her father returned the money to Goda and bequeathed the title deeds to Eadgifu, but Goda did not accept this, withholding the estate from her for six years. Eadgifu pleaded with her husband, King Edward, who 'Prohibited him [Goda] the estate […] Then it happened in the first place that the king so strongly blamed Goda that he was deprived of all the [land]books and property, all that he owned.' 72 Eadgifu stated that she did not wish to mistreat Goda as he had mistreated her and returned Goda's properties, except for two estates at Osterland. Yet she did not return the title deeds to Goda's estates as he had not proven himself trustworthy, implying that Goda held these estates from Eadgifu as laenlanddefined by Bosworth and Toller as 'land let on lease which was never out of the possession of the lessor'. 73 Upon King Edward's death, however, Goda petitioned King AEthelstan at the witan's gathering in Hamsey to intercede for the return of these title deeds. The letter makes little comment on this stage of the proceedings, merely saying that 'the king did so'. 74 Eadgifu consequently, 'gave back to him [Goda] all except the [land]book for Osterland. And he willingly allowed her that [land]book and humbly thanked her for the others.' 75 This passage, with Eadgifu keeping the estates at Osterland, suggests that despite the king apparently siding with her, she and Goda had reached a negotiated settlement. Although the letter ends with a ruling that found her rival Goda and his sons guilty of reaflac, forcing Goda to reinstate Eadgifu's rights to the land at Cooling, there had been room for his sons, Leofstan and Leofric, to challenge her case before and after the charge; hence the letter's composition c.959. The narrative presents a pendulum swing of which side successive kings supported as Eadgifu's landownership was the subject of quarrel at numerous royal assemblies. As previously stated, the Cooling Letter presents a series of mirrored events, with litigants appealing to the favour of a king to demand the return of their lands from their opponent, who has behaved illegitimately. Which litigant 'won' their case depended on which king reigned and the litigant's ability to mobilize their personal connection to that ruler. The letter's portrayal of the two litigants' behaviour during each case as part of the estate's broader contested history is of great interest. Eadgifu maintained that while the king commanded Leofstan and Leofric to return what they had seized from her, a higher judicial power did not explicitly demand that she hand anything over when Goda appeared to 'win' his case. She restored the title deeds because AEthelstan politely asked (not ordered) her to, as reflected by the narrative's emphasis on Goda's gratitude, which intimates that Eadgifu went above and beyond the necessities of diplomacy. It is easy to lose sight of the conflict between the two and the underlying royal enforcement behind Eadgifu's return of Goda's title deeds. Eadgifu had disguised her loss and recast it as a moment of generosity. Goda's perspective is missing, and we must trust Eadgifu's word from the outset. The question lingers as to whether, like Wulfbald, Goda presented Eadgifu's actions as reaflac, and did the two trade accusations of reaflac over the decades, before several kings?
The presentation of Leofstan and Leofric's actions as if they had used force also makes little practical sense upon closer examination, highlighting Eadgifu's conscious efforts to place them in the wrong. Although Goda swore an oath confirming the suit's permanent settlement, after King Eadred's death in 955 the lands changed hands once more. With King Eadwig's permission, Goda's sons berypte (translated as 'deprived' by Harmer) Eadgifu's control of the estate; Eadwig believed that the brothers had more rights to the lands than Eadgifu. 76 Berypte is formed from the verb be-rypan which also means 'to plunder' like its verbal counterparts ripan or a-rypan and their connotations of ripping. 77 After noting the juxtaposition of reaflac and rypera in two of Wulfstan's homilies, Jane Roberts suggested a semantic connection between the two which served to reinforce the image of 'aggravated robbery'. 78 By mentioning reaflac, Eadgifu cultivated this image of plunder happening to her estates and intimated that despite royal support, Goda's sons had perpetrated an illegal act. It is difficult 76 S 1211 (ed. and trans. Harmer, pp. 37-8). 77 Bosworth, 'be-rypan', https://bosworthtoller.com/3883 (accessed 11 February 2021). 78 Roberts, 'Robbares', p. 240.
to believe that they did so when the law had been on their side: there was simply no need. This aspect of the narrative suggests that reaflac was here identified retrospectively and used to besmirch an opponent's previous actionsviolent or otherwiseas part of a strategy of delegitimization in the present or future, should another dispute arise.
Although the intended audience of early medieval charters is not always clear, the insertion of reaflac into narratives like that found in the Cooling Letter supports the notion of an internal audience; it constituted a family history of sorts. 79 The letter's preservation suggests that Goda's descendants feared being presented with such documents should they seek to renew their ancestor's claim. The language of reaflac also possessed the potential to fortify the ownership rights of Eadgifu's successors. In an ecclesiastical context where an institution stated its claim on contested estatessuch as S 1457, written on behalf of the community at Rochester in Kentdocuments predicated on accusations of reaflac would contribute to a more favourable institutional history of landownership. 80 Whilst charters present a situation as resolved, that may not always have been the case. There is a tension between the tone of such records; they attempt to impose finality and yet their very existence shows how things could change over several generations. The creation of such a lawsuit document did not always mean a final victory.
The Libellus presents a Latin counterpart to this moment in Eadgifu's lawsuit: several examples where Ely labels a rival's actions as rapina echo the subjectivity of reaflac, with the term sometimes appearing when the rival had been found to be in the right. For instance, Ealdorman AEthelwine and his brothers had violently seized the lands at Hatfield from Ely after Edgar had deprived their father of the estate. As the Libellus describes these actions, 'they seized (inuadentes) the land and appropriated (uendicarunt) it to themselves', and 'the security of the land was violated (ac rupto federe terre)'. 81 With emphasis on phrases like inuadentes (the present participle of the verb inuadere, meaning 'to invade') and rupto (meaning 'burst open'), the Libellus utilizes the same violent language as reaflac by suggesting that AEthelwine and his brothers had made a frenzied armed attack on an estate. The threat is heightened by the verb sibi uendicarunt, which although means 'to acquire something by legal process', also has connotations of vengeance. 82 The Libellus also styles AEthelwine's family as 'powerful men' (uiri potentes), depicting the community at Ely as the weak victims of crime committed by violent secular authorities. The Libellus, S 877 and the Cooling Letter show the intense competition for landed property faced by churches and widows, even royal ones like Eadgifu. It is significant that extant references to reaflac in the vernacular lawsuit record are restricted to these parties. 83 Strategic emphasis on weakness through the mention of reaflac could, paradoxically, become a strength when parties possessed a limited legal capacity to resolve their disputes. 84 Nevertheless, AEthelwine and his brothers seemingly pursued their claim in the proper judicial manner. The Libellus recounts that 'when their claim was set out and presented, the claimants prevailed'; the brothers pursued their claim to court, probably the shire meeting, and succeeded there. 85 Why would AEthelwine 'invade' the land when he had just obtained a judgement which asserted that Hatfield legitimately belonged to him? (This seems similar to the situation described by the Cooling Letter where Goda's sons illegitimately seized Cooling from Eadgifu even though King Eadwig had just granted the brothers the rights to the estate.) AEthelwine's actions according to the Libellus seem all the stranger when it is later mentioned that his family were in a powerful enough position to sell the land back to Ely on their own terms. 86 In the presence of witnesses, Ely exchanged with AEthelwine landed assets given to the community as part of Wulfstan of Dalham's will, alongside five hides of land they received through the forfeiture of a criminal named Wulfine the Cook. 87 The dispute ended, therefore, with a 'standard' land agreement. The nature of reaflac, rapina and violentia as rhetorical mud to be slung at opponents was evidently well established. The appearance of inuadentes in cases like AEthelwine's, levelled by Ely at a party legally judged to be in the right, suggests that its rhetorical aspect was glaringly obvious to any member of the witan with experience of similar disputes and was therefore taken with a pinch of salt.
Chapter 34 of the Libellus presents us with another example of an 'invasion' of an estate that seems to be an unrealistic course of action for a rival party to pursue. Beahmund of Holland supposedly 'wrongfully laid waste' (iniuste diripuerunt) to St AEthelthryth's lands at Stonea. 88 However, as with Goda's sons and their alleged violent seizure of Cooling and Osterland, it is unlikely that Beahmund had attacked Stonea. The text states that he already held the estate on loan; he simply refused to give it back to Ely. Ely often threw around accusations of rapine without justification. The dispute over Stonea closed with Beahmund forfeiting the land. He was also instructed to pay compensation to the abbot and a fine to the king. 89 The presiding witan, however, only dealt this punishment after Beahmund refused to answer multiple calls to attend the shire meeting to resolve the suit raised by the abbot. 90 It was Beahmund's defiance, as opposed to his supposed violent dispossession of the Ely community, that in the eyes of the witan was the greater injury. These instances of reaflac and its Latin counterparts signified an attack on the dispossessed landowner's rights rather than an actual attack on the land itself, in a similar way to the raids mentioned in the Chronicle. This vocabulary had widespread use in the wider judicial framework. Its repetition across different circumstances where violence probably did not occur indicates that such terms formed part of a mental checklist for proving an opponent's illegitimacy.

Earthly and divine retribution
While reaflac and rapina convey wrongful use of force, it would be inaccurate to argue that violence in the accounts of late Anglo-Saxon disputing processes was restricted to rhetoric. Reaflac very often did come with genuine violence on one or both sides, but the term's use presumes a divide between legitimate force and illegitimate violence. 91 Scholars like Lambert have shown how violent retribution was a perfectly acceptable part of Anglo-Saxon society, but a group or individual's use of force soon became a wrongful act of violence, not a legitimate pursuit of justice, if it meant losing one's property rights to a rival claimant. 92 While previous scholarship has emphasized individual, secular acts of violence that were the focus of contemporary law codes, it was also possible for there to be 'corporate' violence undertaken by families or institutions, such as monasteries. 93 The Libellus' allusions to Ely's use of force to achieve its tenurial goals supports this notion. How litigants in the vernacular texts reacted to counterclaims by way of violence or otherwise is unclear. The Cooling Letter does not explain how the suit finally ended. S 877 reports that the dispute was suspended with Wulfbald's death, yet there are no clues as to how he died. Despite the royal assembly declaring that his life was forfeit to the king, the charter implies that Wulfbald never suffered punishment as he died in possession of the disputed estates. 94 Eadmaer's murder brought proceedings to a head. The fact that the charter's narrative cuts off at this point suggests that the audience is meant to conclude that while neither party in this internal familial battle had a legitimate claim to the estate, this was a step too far in terms of violence, hence the land's passing into the king's hands.
The Libellus' debt to early English dispute records allows historians to identify additional examples of actual violence in another region of late tenth-century England that the Latin counterparts to reaflac served to mask. Alan Kennedy was correct to observe that there were 'signs of very rough justice' in the Libellus that transgressed the legal niceties of claim and counterclaim. 95 Ely's unforgiving seizure of the estates at Stonea and the constricti (binding) of Beahmund of Holland in Chapter 34 as punishment for failing to answer the shire meeting's call on multiple occasions is reminiscent of the way Wulfbald's actions were presented as part of the legal narrative in S 877. 96 The abbot also threatened to force AElfwold's family back into slavery if he reneged on selling Stretham, providing an insight into the ecclesiastical institution's propensity for threat when it suited. 97 Moreover, in Chapters 11, 28 and consequently settled, with the lands being returned to their 'rightful' owners at Ely Abbey. Leofsige of the Downham dispute 'died shamefully and miserably in a ferment of divine vengeance', while Ingulf, who seized Brandon against God's will, 'took nothing of food and drink from that day on […] for his heart burst at once'. 98 We have no sense of who was responsible for the deaths of these litigants, or even if they were instead the result of natural causes, as Ingulf 's seems to have been. What is interesting is that even though the Libellus does not specify the circumstances of the rivals' deaths it manages to revel in their demise, which is framed as miraculous, emphasizing righteous, and often vicious, violence as part of divine dispensation. Byrhtferth of Ramsey (c.970-1020) related a comparable situation of divine vengeance in the Vita S. Oswaldi, whereby God punished the unnamed murderers of King Edward the Martyr, striking one of them blind and causing the others to suffer similarly. 99 Byrhtferth and the author of the Libellus potentially had the same biblical injunction in mind when writing their respective narratives: 'Vengeance is mine, says the Lord, and I will repay.' 100 The deaths of the Libellus' litigants were not simply viewed as fortunate coincidences that worked to Ely's benefit, they were instead malefactors who received their divine comeuppance through violence.
Offences against the church implicitly justified a violent supernatural response, whilst also reinforcing Ely's claim that God was on their side. It was surely no coincidence that the text characterized each rival as, at various points prior to their untimely deaths, a deceiver (deceptor) whose crimes were rapina, 'forcibly taking' (iniuste abstulit) and 'adding trickeries to trickeries to reclaim the lands' (se per dolum recuperaturos terram quam uendiderant). 101 The Libellus surpasses the vernacular dispute records in the religiously charged language used to describe the efforts of the abbey's rivals: these litigants had been marked out as offending God through laying such a claim. 102 Chapter 28's Uvi, 'behaved as one who already had a fatal wound in his body […] after whose healing indeed through his own want of sense turned the scar back into a wound' when he claimed Stonea. 103 Additionally, in Chapter 11, Leofsige's claim on Downham greatly afflicted the servants of God. 104 S 877 and the Cooling Letter lack this extra detail.
The closest Old English example to the Libellus lies in S 1467's description of the desperately ill king Harold Harefoot, which implies that his sickness was divine punishment for his crime of wresting the estate at Sandwich from the hands of Christ Church, Canterbury, 'all against God's will'. The text proclaims that 'the king lay and grew black' when confronted with his supposed crime. 105 A key difference with S 1467 was the identity of the defendant: S 877 and S 1211 defended widowed queens and their rights in the face of opposition from members of the lay elite (although the widow's defence was indirect in the case of S 877, as it is possible that the narrative was composed at an earlier date, before it was clear that AElfthryth would acquire the lands). In contrast, S 1467, like the Libellus, seemingly defended an ecclesiastical institution's rights versus lay aristocrats. The issue of agency in S 1467's narrative is, however, surprisingly complicated. The charter opens with Harold being accused of seizing Sandwich: 'here it is made known in this document that King Harold had Sandwich taken from Christchurch for his own use, and kept it for himself for about a year', and it is to him that the monks go to retrieve the estate. 106 Yet the text is actually more concerned with Abbot AElfstan's misguided attempts to appropriate the estate's income for himself. It says very little about the initial seizure, but the implication is that Sandwich's occupation was a scheme hatched by the abbot with Steorra, the king's steward, so that AElfstan could gain Sandwich's seigneurial profits. Sandwich's restoration occurs halfway through the text, but the remaining narrative concerns AElfstan's continued exploits. S 1467 relates how the abbot, for instance, attempted to build a trench at Ebbsfleet with the intention of providing a channel for the ships he had at Sandwich. 107 The attempt failed, at which point the text states that 'he labours all in vain who labours against the will of Christ'. 108 S 1467 portrays AElfstan as a villain, yet the dispute is still framed at the outset as an improper seizure by the king, in a similar way to the Libellus' portrayal of secular intruders on Ely's estates. 109 The twelfth-century Libellus represents a different genre from the Old English dispute records on which it had likely been based, although they were composed with the same defensive purposes in mind. 110 Simon Keynes has usefully described it as a 'house chronicle', while Catherine Clarke reminds us that the Libellus was composed with the aim of depicting AEthelwold as a strong spiritual patron and procurer of lands, to justify the bishopric's present landholdings. 111 Although the Libellus uses different conventions and genres from the earlier Old English dispute records, the picture it paints of opponents is recognizably the same as that drawn in vernacular documents that use the term reaflac. Some violent acts must have been carried out by rival litigants, but the point was to make them look like Godless individuals while violence carried out by the author's own party constituted the enforcement of legitimate justice.

Conclusion
Neither the Old English term reaflac nor the Latin term rapina in the Libellus elaborated on the nature of the attacks on estates beyond shared general associations with pillaging. The terms did not denote theft, which reflected a different conception of crime in late Anglo-Saxon England. If the likes of Wulfbald, Goda and Leofsige had committed violence, historians simply cannot extrapolate the details from a study of the terminology alone. A key difference, however, between this study of reaflac and McHaffie's exploration of violentia lies in the moral weight that accusations of violence added to claims for rightful possession. McHaffie rejects the argument that the language of violence in eleventh-century French contexts arose from a monastic ideology of peace and was used to portray monastic opponents as immoral. In contrast, draftsmen of tenth-century English charters purposely chose reaflac because it was suffused with legal and quasi-religious meaning, as demonstrated by the term's history and appearance in different literary contexts. Reaflac is emblematic of the elaborate narrative strategies on display in the Anglo-Saxon charter tradition, and its relationship (not least through reaflac) to the language of contemporary literary texts, such as the works of AElfric and Wulfstan. Early English charters were not written in abstract; the draftsmen who constructed them were probably acquainted with, and informed by, these literary works and potentially vice versa.
Reaflac's appeal to these draftsmen lay in its flexibility and familiarity, and its introduction into a case's narrative could therefore inflict reputational damage. Wulfbald, Goda and his sons, and certain individuals in the Libellus come across as immoral murderers picking on the weak and the pious. This was precisely the point. These cases are typically founded on dispute inheritance. In mostperhaps allof them, a different view could have been taken by the opposite party. Due to the common appearance of inheritance rights as the cause of dispute, surely this imagery held promise or problems (depending on which side one was on) for future generations. The Cooling Letter and S 877 were likely intended for internal consumption by the heirs of Eadgifu and AElfthryth, who would rely on the taint of reaflac persisting into future generations in contrast to their own predecessors' legitimacy. The political conditions of early twelfth-century France, therefore, share some similarities with the legal world of tenth-century England. Both violentia and reaflac are products of an era in which patronage often dictated the judgement of a dispute, with the result that such conflicts were never fully settled; the accession of a new king or count invited unsuccessful claimants to renew their suits.
As demonstrated by S 877, powerful nobles often defied the shire and hundred courts, whilst also committing actual violence to stake a claim to an estate. Yet when people who were in the wrong pillaged, inflicted damage, or simply made a formal claim on an estate, these acts were retrospectively labelled as reaflac to delegitimize them. This was because violence was only truly violence if it raised doubts about the credibility of your own landholding rights; over-sensationalized images of pillaging took attention away from that. Historians have frequently used S 877 as a prime example of late Anglo-Saxon society and government's lawlessness and lack of state organization, but this study of reaflac suggests that this was not necessarily the case. 112 These narratives of violent unruly aristocrats were deliberately set down in writing by royal and ecclesiastical institutions to suit their own purposes when securing