s his objective to bring it to pass that 'if we have peace... all the youth now in England, born of freemen who have the means that they may apply to it, may be devoted to learning, as long as they cannot be of use in other employment , until such time as they can read well what is written in English. Those whom one wishes to teach further and to be brought to Holy Orders could be instructed further in the Latin language'. A century later the greatest scholars of the age, Aelfric and Wulfstan, a shade shamefacedly at times, wrote in Anglo-Saxon. The Age of King Ethelred was also the Golden Age of Anglo-Saxon prose: grammarians, schoolmasters, lawyers, and administrators thought and wrote in Anglo-Saxon.
Why was this so? Why was there this persistent concern with and concentration on the vernacular? Were the Anglo-Saxons different from other peoples? Dare we take back our notorious lack of facility or sheer stupidity at language study 1,600 years and more? Is this seeming obsession with theodish so remarkable? Let us first look at four fields where the use of the vernacular was so conspicuous by the last century of Anglo-Saxon England on the part of ealdormen, in the European context both unusual and remarkable, that is to say the fields of law, administration, religion, and literature and learning.
A surprising volume of legal material has survived. Some indeed is in Latin. The Anglo-Saxon Church was part of the universal Church, Matters concerning procedures at baptism, arrangements for church services, penal clauses leading to excommunication and statements of marriage law were recorded by and for the priestly class in the universal language, Latin. But an astonishing amount of legal material went straight into the theodish tongue. Virtually all secular law and much of what we regard as ecclesiastical law when issued and authenticated by the King and the Witan has survived in the vernacular. Perhaps this is matter only for qualified surprise. We are after all dealing with the early Middle Ages and with a society where the vernacular was not Latin-based. The contrasts that come immediately to mind, France and Italy, concern communities where the vernaculars were for the most part Romance tongues. What was French in the eleventh century but Latin badly spoken? In other non-Latin European communities, Celtic and Scandinavian, the vernaculars were used or came to be used in much the same way. What is remarkable is the early nature of the written record that has survived. In the tenth and eleventh centuries it was clearly customary and commonplace that an English king and his advisers should spend much time framing rules and procedures, guidelines for coping with offences and penalties, and that these should be committed to writing and permanence in English, intelligible to all.
Statements of law, framing of general legal rules, are all well and good, but carrying out the mandates is quite another matter, the province of the administrator. There is plentiful evidence of active administrative life in late Anglo- Saxon England on the part of earldormen, thegns, reeves and tax-collectors in the name of the king or of great lords, ecclesiastical and lay (see Glossary at end of article). One feature deserves special mention, the evolution of the sealed writ, the master-product of the Old English secretariat. The writ, as it survives from the end of the period, consists of a government order in the vernacular, sent from the royal court to the local shire courts, stamped and authenticated by the king's great seal. It was often short and to the point, articulating royal government and making the royal will known to the men who counted in the locality, the earls, bishops and thegns assembled in the shire court; and it was in English. A dispute over the discharge of obligations on the Manor of Chew that belonged to the Bishopric of Wells was resolved by Edward the Confessor by a curt order to Earl Harold and 'all my thegns in Somerset' that the King was not going to permit any wrong to be done to the bishop. The range of royal activi