Saint’s Law: Anglo-Saxon Sanctuary Protection

Patrick Wormald’s handlist of Anglo-Saxon lawsuits begins its gesta and miracula evi-dence with three consecutive suits from Lantfred of Winchester’s c. 972 Translatio et Miracula S. Swithuni.2 The suits, which appear in chapters 25-27, describe the trial by ordeal of a servant accused of “a certain misdeed ” (quodam facinore, 25.3), the mutila-tion of a man accused of robbery, and an “arraignment of a man for appropriation of the king’s corn.”3 Although Wormald classifies the third item, like the first, as a “rescue from prison or penalty ” case in contrast to the sanctuary cases he identifies in the Vita S. Edithae Virginis and De Miraculis S. Edmundi,4 the corn-appropriation or “wheat-thief ” episode rightly belongs in both categories since it intentionally evokes the defin-ing characteristics of sanctuary protection in pre-Conquest legislation. Sanctuary mir-acles are, in fact, quite common in the Anglo-Saxon hagiographic record, informed b