Þær mæn drincen: law and drinking

The topic of drinking has recently risen a strong interest in the field of historical-social and anthropological studies in relation to the various forms of social and community rituals and their components. Most attention has been given to drinking as a complementary component of cooking and eating rituals. However, one cannot ignore that drinking plays a much more important role in Old Germanic societies as it is evident in literary and also non-literary sources. The ritual of drinking is often mentioned in occasion of the signing of agreements, of marriage contracts as well as a means to strengthen mutual relationships or to formalize the promise to meet the obligations that the relationship required. In the present paper, taking as a reference the Anglo-Saxon and Norse literatures, we would like to individuate more precisely the role of drinking as attested in literary sources and figure out whether literary pictures of the act of drinking can be accounted for as reflexes of change in society and according in laws. Written Anglo-Saxon legislation, from its Kentish beginnings in the seventh century to the twelfth century, offers a good field for analysis of the topic of drinking. First of all, being written in the vernacular and not in Latin, it is the only early medieval legislation that offers insight into an early vocabulary of drinking. In addition, the Anglo-Saxon laws allow us to observe the progression between two attitudes towards drinking. The earliest Kentish laws still reflect an archaic concept of drinking as a quasi-juridical institution which enjoys special protection. In relation to the interaction of Germanic law with a converted Christian order, later laws show that the influence of Christianity marked a turning point in developing an idea of drinking as one of the sins that Archbishop Wulfstan loved to deploy in his homilies.