Of Kings and Cattle Thieves: The Rhetorical Work of the Fonthill Letter

by Scott Thompson Smith, Penn State University

The Fonthill Letter, an Old English account of a tenth-century Anglo- Saxon property dispute, has enjoyed significant scholarly attention in recent years. The Letter survives in an early tenth-century manuscript roughly contemporary with the events it records, which further increases its value as a social document. Despite its textual integrity, the Letter still presents certain difficulties to its readers. In the prefatory matter to the 1878 facsimile of the Letter, for example, W. B. Sanders noted, "This singular document is from its corruptness and curious allusions very difficult to understand, and of some portions I have only been able to guess the meaning." The work of recent scholars has largely alleviated the need for guesswork and cleared away the murk that frustrated Sanders. The legal and historical contexts of the Fonthill Letter have received expert and thorough analysis, as have its linguistic features. The Letter has been considered as possible evidence for lay literacy in the early tenth century and as evidence for the success of King Alfred's educational program. The Fonthill Letter also appears in the recent Cambridge Old English Reader, further increasing its visibility to students and scholars alike.