A man who was known to be guilty would have a hard job getting together the requisite number of oath-helpers. Sometimes, a defendant might not be considered 'oath-worthy'. If he had a record as long as your arm, for example, or if he had been caught in the act or with stolen goods. There's one variation in which it's alleged to be a translation of a Saxon word, wǣrloga that means 'oath-breaker.' Naturally, no one wants to be called an oath-breaker, so folks tend to get up in arms about the use of warlock. Consequently, a lot of Wiccans and Pagans tend to distance themselves from the word.

The oath of loyalty

So how did such early societies create an allegiance? How do you create a sense of mutual obligation and responsibility in a people? It is of course a frequently asked question even today - the question of the balance between rights and duties.

In any state you need law, a written statement of the social norms that society, as represented by a governing body, seeks to enforce. And the Anglo-Saxon state produced lots of law - legal texts are among its most distinctive and most characteristic productions.

Of course, to govern a medium-sized state (in early medieval terms) you had to meet rather different concerns from those for which law had previously provided. Early English law had been framed for tribal societies, and was based on the feud, on redress of injury, rather than on a mutual sense of responsibility to the community. In the Viking era, law-making begins to change to reflect new social conditions.

Oath Man Saxon Meaning

'Crime is no longer only an injury to the victim, but a crime against society at large.'

Although no innovator himself, Alfred laid the foundation for a lawful society, making his principal parallel with the Biblical law of Moses. As he saw it, the English could - and should - be a chosen people, answerable to God. In the tenth century, when the English state was created, that perception became the underpinning of the king's law. Crime became no longer an injury to the victim only, but a crime against society at large, against the English nation - the same nation we read of in Archbishop Wulfstan's sermons, or in the 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle'.

The early English courts and their system of administering justice bare no real resemblance to our modern day equivalents, they are truly antiquities of legal history.

Oath Man Saxon Book

A 12th Century court would have been held in the open-air and upon the most significant hill in the area. A local man of power, such as the Sheriff, would have presided over the court but the largest local landowners were bound by custom to attend and be the ‘doomsmen’ (judgment-men) of the court.

The sheriff would take care of the procedures of the court and pronounce the overall sentence but the doomsmen were the ones to find the appropriate doom to fit the facts.

If the two litigants contradicted each other in fact then there was yet no capacity for the holding of cross-examinations and judging the worth of a witness statement. In these circumstances, recourse would be to the supernatural, to prove ‘by God’ that one or the other was correct. This took three forms; (1) oath and oath-helpers, (2) ordeal and, after 1066, (3) trial by battle.

(1) If a man was accused of some offence, he would be required to swear on his word, his oath, the truth (typically that he was innocent). Rarely was his single oath allowed to clear him of the offence. Usually, a number of oath-helpers were needed.

These were people that could give witness to the character of the accused and claim that his oath was ‘clean’. A great deal of early legal procedure focuses on complex mathematical calculations as to the number of oath-helpers needed and the quality of them.

Oath Man Saxon Definition

It seems, at first glance, that you could just call a bunch of friends to acquit you but there were strict ceremonial rules and phrases that had to be followed for oath-helpers. One mispronunciation or stutter and the accused’s adversary would win.

(2) If the charge was criminal, the accused might not be able to use his oath and oath-helpers. The ordeal was more explicitly judgment by God and came in the forms of Water and Fire. A man was lowered into a pit of water that had been blessed to accept innocent people but reject the guilty. If you sunk in the water, you were fished out and innocent but if you floated, you were guilty.

For Fire a white hot iron rod was placed in a man’s hand and he was told to take three paces. His hand would then be bandaged and looked at three days later. If the wound was clean, he was innocent, if it had fouled, he was guilty.

(3) Again, if a criminal accusation was made, the accused and accuser might have to fight in a battle. As long as they were not maimed, too young or too old, they could fight.

If the claim was regarding land then the litigants could choose a champion each to fight in their names. This was meant to be one of their people but in reality the hiring of professional champions became commonplace. If not regarding land, then they must fight in person.

The accuser has an entire day to prove his claim; not by killing the accused but making him give in. If he cannot do so within the day then his claim is false and he has lied to the court.

These forms of trial and proof were slowly frowned upon and taken out of the administration of justice. The ordeals required participation by priests and the Church made the decision to stop ordeals in 1215.

This did not affect trial by battle but in a couple of decades, this had fallen out of favour as well. Interestingly, trial by battle was not officially abolished until 1818 when a litigant threw down a gauntlet in anger in front of the judges of the King’s bench.

The oath-helpers changed their name to become compurgators and were more readily local people. This is one of the foundations of the development of trial by jury, which will be looked at in detail in a later post.