The earliest arbitration treaty? A reassessment of the Anglo-Norman treaty of 991*

Abstract

Concluded at Rouen in March 991, the Anglo-Norman treaty has traditionally occupied a very small corner of the huge historiography for King Æthelred’s reign as one of the first of the king’s failures to deal with the threat of renewed viking raids. This article is an attempt to rethink the place and importance of this treaty in the scholarly literature by looking at it from the perspective of how diplomacy was practised in the earlier middle ages. It reveals the treaty as the earliest arbitration treaty in the medieval West and offers alternative ways of viewing the immediate context and circumstances of the negotiations, as well as the persistence of important diplomatic practices across a long period.

Remembering the Vikings: Violence, institutional memory and the instruments of history

“…The treaty of 991 between England and Normandy has traditionally been assumed to result from Æthelred's concern that the Normans were sheltering the vikings who were starting to plague his kingdom. Jenny Benham argues that ‘the actual evidence' for this interpretation ‘is circumstantial’ (Benham, 2020, p. 5); instead, the formulaic clause about not harbouring each other's enemies referred to domestic enemies, given the opposition Æthelred faced from within his kingdom, not viking raiders. Benham concludes that the alluded‐to dispute between Richard, duke of Normandy, and Æthelred arose from attacks on English travellers (Benham, 2020, pp.…”