It's still winter...

The Anglo-Saxons weren't big fans of bad weather. Not surprising, perhaps, since finding heat and light wasn't a matter of flicking a switch, and freezing conditions made death a real possibility if you were unprotected. For the anonymous author of The Wanderer, cold and damp are metaphors of exile and hardship; the lonely man stirs the ice-cold sea with his hands, as frost and snow and hail darken his already depressed mind. Similar imagery is used by the narrator of The Wife's Lament, imagining her exiled lover sitting under a storm-battered, frosty cliff. Snowmen and hot cocoa are not part of the story in an Anglo-Saxon winter.

With this context in mind, it isn't surprising that destructive storms are one of the signs that Wulfstan interprets as showing God's wrath towards his countrymen. Alongside malice, disease and bloodshed, "excessive taxes have afflicted us, and storms have very often caused failure of crops". Wulfstan sees both the malice of men and the malice of God as just punishments for his nation's sinful excesses: "this nation, as it may appear, has become very corrupt through manifold sins and through many misdeeds: through murder and through evil deeds, through avarice and through greed, through stealing and through robbery, through man-selling and through heathen vices, through betrayals and through frauds, through breaches of law and through deceit, through attacks on kinsmen and through manslaughter, through injury of men in holy orders and through adultery, through incest and through various fornications."

Wulfstan isn't one to pull his punches, his polemical excesses leading modern readers to wonder whether his "Sermo Lupi" isn't really a "Sermo Loopy"... But I digress. We aren't unfamiliar with this kind of rhetoric - though perhaps many of us wish we were. Religious leaders (and others) blaming natural phenomena such as weather conditions and diseases on the wrath of God towards a sinful nation rear their ugly heads occasionally, to the dismay even of some of their co-religionists. But whereas modern Christianity is one religion amongst many, and is constantly subject to disagreement and question, in Wulfstan's time Christanity was officially established as the one true religion of the country. Modern preachers warning us of impending judgement for our sins are likely to provoke humor or disgust in a large number of people. Wulfstan, on the other hand, probably scared the pants off the majority of his audience.

Our ability to question authority when we need to is surely an improvement, and a return to the restrictive orthodoxy of the Anglo-Saxons would hardly gain much support in Modern Britain. Though perhaps we could bring Wulfy back on a one-time contract just to deal with Britney Spears and Amy Winehouse?