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The role of Wiglaf 243
For many years I had a dependable lord, until now, when
Heorrenda, a man skilled in song, came into the lands which
the lord had formerly given to me.
The practice of land-holding for longer periods than a
single lifetime (or the duration of the king's pleasure) was
a later development, and almost certainly originated in the
necessity to provide support for the church. 32 In brief,
then, on the basis of current understanding of Anglo­
Saxon land-holding, it would appear extremely likely
that lands granted by Beowulf to Wiglaf are those which
had been granted earlier to Weohstan, for his lifetime
only. The phrase folcrihta gehsoylc, swa his feeder ahte
need imply no more than a life-estate, as Dr Golden has
indicated. 33 The fact that Weohstan held such lands does
not make him a Geat by descent; it only means that he
was rewarded while in the service of a king of the Geats,
Beowulf, as his father had been rewarded in his
lifetime.
We can now turn to Bryan's other points. He
explained Weohstan's presence in Sweden by recourse to
Chadwick, who held that Weohstan the Geat had taken
service with a foreign lord, and was thus forced to fight
against his own nation. 34 As Chadwick points out, a
characteristic of the retinues of Germanic kings is that
•• The granting of such lands to lay persons was a very late practice; John
discusses early (seventh-century) charters from Kent, Surrey, Sussex, and elsewhere,
in his chapters on the origin of book-right (Land Tenure, 1-23). He holds
that 'it seems reasonable to claim that these charters, for all their variety of
formula, share a common legal background, that they intend to confer an
essentially similar kind of right on newly-established or recently founded
churches. This common legal background is called, in the vernacular, bookright,
and land held under its terms, bookland. All the sources take it for
granted that both terms have a precise and currently understood meaning'
(p, 10). In John's view, this book-right bears 'at least a family resemblance'
to the Roman imperial jus perpetuum formula of the granting of lands (p. II).
• 3 See John Golden, Societal Bonds in Old English Heroic Poetry: A Legal
and Typological Study (Cornell University Ph.D. thesis, 1970). Dr Golden
cites a range of contexts in Anglo-Saxon law codes in which folcland is equated
with [olcriht, and concludes: '... the evidence of laws, wills, charters, and
letters seems to suggest that the owner of folcland did not have the freedom to
dispose of it to his heirs without the king's consent, which might be withheld;
and that folcland was traditionally given to the king's retainers in reward for
their services' (p. 126). I am indebted to Dr Golden for aid on the legal aspects
of land tenure in Anglo-Saxon England, and for help in preparing a lecture from
an earlier version of this study.
.. H. M. Chadwick, The Heroic Age (1912), 329-30, 350.