Naval Warfare, the State, and the Archbishops of Canterbury in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries

The following analysis explores some of the military aspects of the archbishopric of Canterbury, in particular in relation to naval warfare, and locates that exploration in wider discussions about the military organisation of the late Anglo-Saxon state and the role played in it by the church. The starting point is the will of Archbishop Ælfric (d. 16 November 1005), the immediate predecessor of the martyred Ælfheah. A copy of Ælfric's will is preserved among the muniments of Abingdon Abbey, in one of the abbey's twelfth-century cartulary-chronicles, British Library, MS. Cotton Claudius B. vi. Ælfric's will is a rather significant document; it is, as Nicholas Brooks has pointed out, our only surviving pre-Conquest archiepiscopal will. It also contains references to bequests of three ships.