Here are a list of my publications. They are all open access!
Ingrid Ivarsen, ‘Innovation and Experimentation in Late Seventh-Century Law: the Case of Theodore, Hlothhere, Wihtræd and Ine’, Anglo-Saxon England 50 (2021): 61–99. Available here
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The late seventh century was a particularly active period of legal writing in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms: three royal decrees, two church council decrees and a number of royal diplomas have survived. This article aims to show that this unusual period was characterised by innovation and experimentation. A key part of the argument is that the form of Anglo-Saxon royal laws changed from the early to the late seventh century due to influence from the form of church council decrees. Other external influences on royal law are also detected. The article introduces the closely connected group of kings and ecclesiastics who were involved in law-making and it places Anglo-Saxon legal production in a wider context of legal learning, by looking at the kinds of legal texts that were known, studied and used in Anglo-Saxon England and especially by this period’s many travellers and expats.Ingrid Ivarsen, ‘King Ine (688–726) and the Writing of English Law in Latin’, The English Historical Review 137 (2022): 1–46. Available here
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It is commonly supposed that all Anglo-Saxon laws were composed in Old English. This article argues that the law-code in the name of King Ine of Wessex (r. 688–726) was written in Latin in his reign and only assumed its surviving Old English form in the ninth century when it was translated from Latin and appended to King Alfred’s law-code. Linguistic evidence indicates that Ine’s language is that of a ninth-century translator, possibly working with Alfred’s law-code, while its legal content is that of seventh-century Wessex. There are also several close parallels to continental legislation in Ine’s laws, both in language and in content. This article suggests that these may be the result of Frankish legislation serving as a model for or inspiration to the makers of Ine’s laws. The translation theory presented here explains many of the notorious linguistic peculiarities and problems of this text and its role within Alfred’s code.Ingrid Ivarsen, ‘A Vernacular Genre? Latin and the Early English Laws’, Journal of Medieval History 47 (2021): 497–508. Available here
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Anglo-Saxon legislation was for the most part written in the vernacular. However, the seventh and eighth centuries may have been more multilingual than the later period. It appears that some of the earliest texts were based closely on Latin sources and that some may even have been composed in Latin. This early multilingualism has been obscured, partly because our view of the period has been shaped by King Alfred’s later promotion of Old English as the sole language of royal law. The practice of vernacular law-writing was not necessarily a feature of the whole Anglo-Saxon period and may only have been firmly established in the late ninth century.Ingrid Ivarsen, ‘Æthelstan, Wulfstan and a Revised History of Tithes in England’, Early Medieval Europe 29 (2021): 225–252. Available here
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The law-text known as I Æthelstan is commonly accepted as the earliest evidence of a legal obligation to pay tithes in England. As it turns out, it might not be. The extant Old English version of I Æthelstan does indeed legislate for tithe payments. However, this version is an eleventh-century revision of the original text, probably penned by Archbishop Wulfstan of York (d. 1023). As I will argue in this article, the original version, which survives only as contained in a twelfth-century translation into Latin, appears to be a call for a one-off charitable alms payment.There is also my PhD thesis, The production of the Anglo-Saxon laws: from Alfred to Cnut, which can be downloaded here.