Sociology of Anglo-Saxon thegns: from ‘servants’ to ‘elite’
Channel: Denis Sukhino-Khomenko
Date: 2023-07-12

A recording of my talk in Durham (St John's College) at the conference 'Status, Rank or Office? Social Boundaries in England c. 900–1200' (8–10 July 2023) organised by Mary Blanchard, Chelsea Shields-Más, Charlie Rozier, and Lottie Thompson and kindly sponsored by the Haskins Society.

My paper built on some of the theses from my 2021 paper at ICMS (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVP6LvGYxLY) and asked two intertwined questions: what social relationships and conditions did OE þegn presuppose and how/why did it come to presuppose them?
Since long ago, modern historiography has adopted OE þegn to denote lay Anglo-Saxon social elite and has developed two ways of conceptualising its object of study. The prescriptive approach treats thegns as a legal rank defined through a high(er) wergild. The descriptive one rather empirically studies various facets of the said elite, lumps together all its members into one social status, and labels it with an original Old English lexeme. In my contribution at ICMS, I raised some of the problems to the prescriptive approach, namely its source base. In the current paper, I take this argument further: having severed thegns from an exalted wergild as an alleged sine qua non of the social status connoted by this word, I first trace OE þegn’s lexical development. It is argued that one of its meanings, ‘social elite’, was a result of a semantic widening spurred by royal policies of the 10th century and that this meaning took shape only towards the year 1000. I then broach the subject of what can be gathered about the actual social relationships covered by late OE þegn. I make a case that terminologisation of OE þegn and scholarly use, irrespective of chronology and other accompanying considerations, is potentially misleading. Taking a cue from Susan Reynolds’ call (1984, 2011) to distinguish between words, concepts, and phenomena, the paper concludes that even if OE þegn might have undergone a conceptualisation stage, its concurrence with other native lexemes to denote the social phenomenon of lay elite, omission in otherwise expected contexts, and geographical uneven distribution should cause caution for too broad a use.