The Tenets of Bocland: Royal Lordship and Sociolinguistics of pre-Norman English Land Proprietorship
Channel: Denis Sukhino-Khomenko
Date: 2023-11-15

This is a recording of my presentation at the Research Seminar at ASNC, University of Cambridge, on 10 November 2023.

Please note my regretful typo on slide 3 (07:15–12:01): Dr Roach's name is spelt 'Levi', not 'Levy'. Also, a minor typo at slide 14 (37:24–38:49) where I typed "2" twice in listing conclusions. And the second to last slide should read 'an' rather than 'and'.

The talk dovetailed into a presentation by Prof Simon Keynes at the 27th Annual Symposium of the Joint Committee on Anglo-Saxon Charters on 12 September 2023, in which Prof Keynes raised some reservations concerning a recently published article by Dr John Blair, ‘The Limits of Bookland’, Anglo-Saxon England, 49 (2020), 197–252. 
My own talk pursued a triple aim:
1. To publicise and subject to scrutiny own approach to Anglo-Saxon royal diplomas with methods of statistics, previously published as ‘Do Manuscripts Burn? The Representativeness of the Corpus of Royal Diplomas of Late pre-Norman England (871–1066): Opening a Discussion’, Graphosphaera: Writing and Written Practices, 2/1 (2022), 175–286 (http://writing.igh.ru/index.php?id=2022-2-1-175-286&setlang=en), before taking it further in English.
2. To subject to critique own original and previously not printed contribution to the discussion of bōcland.
3. To, hopefully, bring diplomas and bōcland together in a preliminary synthesis and re-visit the topic.
The main argument of the talk was a surprising 'yes-and-no' preliminary answer to the question of whether bōcland was an exclusively Southern English phenomenon:
• Yes: in the modern scholarly sense bōcland = land conveyed by royal diploma, because diplomas likely did not proliferated in the “Danelaw”.
• No: in the sense of a historical property phenomenon. West Saxon kings imposed West Saxon encumbrance on conquered land in West Saxon terms: freest land = bōcland (actual charter irrelevant), its owner = king’s thegn (actual vassalage/homage/Königsnähe irrelevant).