On the track of lost sheep or simply a wool-gathering: Pastoral paradigms in early Anglo-Saxon political discourse

Nearly half a millennium separates the unification of England under the West Saxon kingdom from the withdrawal of Roman Legions from the British province, yet by the arrival of the Augustinian Mission the political ideal of reunited, centralized rule over sub-Roman Briton had become culturally manifest in the figure of the bretwalda. Into the breach between monarchic theory and its institutionalization the Catholic missionaries thrust their own social system, for which Pope Gregory the Great’s De cura pastorale in some way formed a political manifesto. This paper adopts a cognitive approach to the diachronic study of the metaphorical mapping of pastoralist economy upon political systems of governance in the Early Old English period. In his typological system of economic evolution, Thorstein Veblen posits the cognitive schemata which inform a culture’s archaic ‘predatory’ phase giving way to one structured along a pastoralist model: ‘The subsequent stage of quasi-peaceable industry is usually characterised by an established chattel slavery, herds of cattle, and a servile class of herdsmen and shepherds…’ In the most archaic Old English terms, the predatory ideology was institutionalised within the (ge)dryht, under the leadership of its respective dryhten, yet seventh-century autocratic rule was quickly coalescing around the Anglo-Saxon cynedomas. While the Old English heroic poetry, particularly Beowulf, conserve some historicizing glimpses of princely warrior retinues, such epithets as folces hierde for Hrothgar signal the cognitive blending of pastoralist practice with socio-economics of community building within a highly archaising sociolinguistic register. The earliest known English vernacular poet, Cædmon, was himself reported to have served as a herdsman of some type. Although the reference in Bede’s biography of Caedmon is not usually interpreted metaphorically, in this paper comparisons are drawn among three main Old English sources for their metaphorical extensions of pastoralist cognitive schemata: the heroic poems Beowulf and The Finnsburh Fragment; the Caedmonian Genesis A; and the Alfredian translation of Gregory’s Pastoral Care. The purpose is to assess the role of such idealized cognitive models in actualizing the social stratification which marked the development of the early Anglo-Saxon state.