| Summary: | At the heart of the late Anglo-Saxon political order lay a single relationship: the bond between the king and the powerful men of the realm. This thesis is concerned with the ways in which that relationship was established, then developed in written sources; centrally it will explore how kings forged such bonds with members of the lay elite. Chapter One argues that there is little evidence for the existence of a contemporary mentality in which kings attempted to use conceptual mechanisms to impose loyalty onto their men, either in legal or religious terms. Chapter Two proposes a new model for the analysis of royal diplomas for this period, wherein the strategic incentivisation of lay loyalty through the granting of bookland is revealed via the joint consideration of factors such as beneficiary status, rank, participation in the witan on the one hand, and estate size and location on the other. Chapter Three offers new interpretations of a range of extant royal policies from most reigns of the period in relation to the matter of loyalty, and demonstrates in this way that the surviving evidence for kings’ management of their relationships with their lay elites is overwhelmingly characterised by the same overarching principles of constancy, community and active leadership. The thesis concludes that the loyalty of the lay elite in this period could not be taken for granted by kings as a simple corollary of their consecration, but was instead actively cultivated and negotiated. Kings not only offered incentive programmes but created communities of shared interest, devising novel ways in which to define magnates’ identities through their loyalty to their king, and integrating those from frontier regions into the political and social fabric of West Saxon kingship.
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