This paper provides a somewhat oblique approach to this volume’s titular focus on the difference between corporal and capital punishment in Anglo-Saxon England. The analysis focuses on how laws regulating injury to male genitalia assess the damage either as an immediate wound to the victim, or as an injury preventing him from producing offspring. In a broader sense, tying in to the theme of this collection, these fines can be seen as regarding the injury either as ‘corporal’ (the victim is maimed) or ‘capital’ (potential offspring cannot be engendered and thus are denied life). Both competing views appear in Anglo-Saxon laws; their sources and disseminations provide a case study into what medieval law can tell us about the transmission, both oral and written, of early medieval laws across the North Sea, linking the Ingvaeonic territories of Anglo-Saxon England and Frisia through several centuries.

Anglo-Saxon and Continental Barbarian Regulations

The Anglo-Saxon laws under consideration are those of Æthelberht of Kent, written in Old English around 600, and those of Alfred the Great, similarly written in the vernacular, and compiled towards the end of the ninth century, following the Viking wars.

The laws of Æthelberht represent the first laws written in the Anglo-Saxon territories. Unlike their cousins on the Continent, the Germanic peoples across the Channel chose to record their laws in the vernacular rather than in Latin. Æthelberht’s rulings on damage to male genitalia read as follows:

64 [64]. Gif man gekyndelice lim awyrdeþ, þrym leudgeldum hine man forgelde.

64. If a person damages the genital organ, let him pay him with three person-prices.

Although the gekyndelice lim would seem, by use of the term lim, to mean specifically the penis, it seems unlikely that the regulations for piercing through and piercing into – and particularly the latter – refer to the penis, as these wounds would require weaponry more delicate than common in Anglo-Saxon England. The two sub-rulings thus, with their considerably lesser reparations, probably imply damage to the scrotum which would not prohibit future procreation; these contrast the main clause, which – by nature of its enormous fine – implies an injury that incapacitates the genitals.