著者

青山 吉信

出版者

公益財団法人 史学会

雑誌

史学雑誌 (ISSN:00182478)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.85, no.10, pp.1371-1415,1490, 1976-10-20 (Released:2017-10-05)

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It is generally known that, when Anglo-Saxon royal charters granted immunities to certain ecclesiastical or lay magnates, they usually reserved three obligations in the royal hands. These are service in the army (fyrd, expeditio), the maintenance of fortresses (burh-bot, arcis constructio) and the repair of bridges (bricg-bot, pontis emendatio). Though it Was not likely to be a generally accepted term in Saxon England, they have been collectively called 'trinoda (or trimoda) necessitas' by modern scholars. In 1914, in his classic thesis, W.H.Stevenson insisted that it was in the late eighth century that the reservation clauses first appeared in the genuine royal charters, but actually these three burdens had been imposed from remote past in spite of the silence of earlier charters. His view has been accepted for ages by most historians, but some scholars have recently begun to criticize him. E.John argues that burh-bot and bricg-bot had not been imposed on the ecclesiastical estates until the middle of eighth century, and fyrd not until late eighth century. N.Brooks offers that the date and the process of the imposition of these burdens may have varied in the different Heptarchic kingdoms. All these obligations are military in their essential character, so it should be emphasized that the successful enforcement of them was deeply connected with the development of royal authority in Anglo-Saxon England. In this paper I intend to examine the above-mentioned theories and then investigate the process of the imposition of burh-bot by Wessex kings in Saxon England after the middle of ninth century.