The Politics of Ælfric’s Maccabees

Ælfric of Eynsham’s Old English homily on the biblical books of Maccabees is a crucial text in the intellectual history of later Anglo-Saxon England, containing the only discussion of ‘just war’ in the surviving corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature, and the earliest attestation to the ‘Three Orders of Society’. It is now generally understood that Ælfric was writing for a predominantly lay audience, exhorting them to take up arms against the Vikings. This becomes particularly apparent from a close examination of Ælfric’s deviations from, and emendations to, the Vulgate, not all of which have hitherto been noticed. After supplementing this literary analysis with new observations, this article attempts to delineate the historical implications of this interpretation of the text. Once placed within its historical context, Ælfric’s Maccabees appears as a sharp critique of the direction of royal policy under Æthelred the Unready during the 990s, especially the payment of tribute to the Vikings and their conscription as mercenaries. This invites us to reconsider both Ælfric’s own intellectual trajectory and the court politics of Anglo-Saxon England in the final years of the first millennium.