'Don't Try This at Home': The Nature of, and Attitudes Towards, Early Medieval English Domestic Religion (c.650-1150 CE)

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'This project examines the practice and place of English household religion c.650-1150 CE. It seeks to illuminate the nature of lay piety and the tension over its control by exploring what religious rituals occurred in domestic complexes, and the co-existence, convergence, and competition of different practices. It also asks what were clerical attitudes towards household religion, and how, and why, did practices change. Late antique and late medieval scholars have demonstrated domestic devotion can uncover various aspects of everyday life, including secular piety, the institutional and ideological expansion of the Church, and the extent of female agency. However, despite much evidence attesting to early medieval domestic religion, early medieval England has not garnered such scholarship. Only archaeologists Hamerow (2006) and Sofield (2012) have undertaken sustained study, examining symbolically-charged placed deposits within the hall, yet their study focuses on the sixth to late eighth century, and does not explore how these practices coincided with 'orthodox' devotion, such as prayer, relic-worship, or reading. This dearth of research is surprising, since many scholars have highlighted the considerable influence lay individuals had over religious practice, often syncretising idiosyncratic practices with devout faith. Domestic complexes, replete with symbolic connotations, can offer a uniquely intimate insight into lay devotion. Furthermore, Anglo-Saxon England experienced numerous competitions over controlling sacred places, with recent excavations finding a prevalent encroachment of secular ownership of sacred space (Blair 2018). Religious activity in domestic complexes could cause ecclesiastical anxiety, and comparative studies on Frankish material have found that clerical writers increasingly decried domestic religion in order to assert the spiritual primacy of ecclesiastical space. Building on these works, a study of Anglo-Saxon household religion and the attitudes towards it would not only illuminate the creativity of lay religion, but also highlight the tension between secular and ecclesiastical elites over who could (and did) control religious space, and how this authority was created and maintained. I will answer through an interdisciplinary approach - while many disciplinary studies have been insightful, by focusing on a single practice they struggle to explore the relationship between different co-existent rituals. An interdisciplinary approach also helps recover individuals obscured in written sources, and explore how far periodisation and disciplinary boundaries have concealed continuity and change. I will first create a multidisciplinary corpus of evidence, from which trends can be analysed. I will gather data from excavation reports on Anglo-Saxon settlements, and record placed deposits, chapels in domestic complexes, and Christian material culture. Secondly, I intend to compile any references to private household devotion found within narrative sources, such as the Old English Martyrologium's mention of a threshold deposit. Lastly, I will examine prescriptive text, namely law-codes and penitentials, to provide the fullest image for the widest possible section of early medieval society. This seemingly ambitious scope is made manageable by several factors, including the brevity of written references, their often-formulaic nature, and relative rarity. Through this, I aim to tease out references to religious rituals within the household and distinguish any trends. I then seek to interrogate this data and answer why changes occurred, and in doing so, this study would not only fill a historiographical lacuna, but contribute to wider histories on the creation of religious orthodoxy and the interaction between the everyday and institutionalised faith.'