The battle against online pornography is full of outrage, scepticism, and no small amount of hysteria. Recent British legislation criminalising the possession of “extreme” pornography has caused emotional outbursts on both sides of the debate and arguably left consenting adults at risk of prosecution for owning photographs or even computer-generated images of practices which are, in themselves, legal.
When the issue involves child pornography, it becomes even more difficult to discuss, or even consider, objectively. In many ways, that’s how it should be. To talk about the extreme exploitation of children without some emotional reaction is very difficult. Nonetheless, reactions to recent moves against newsgroups which carry child pornography have been angry and cynical.
Discussions of child pornography and abuse will often attract one or two comments about the cultural specificity of attitudes towards the sexuality of children and young people. Past societies, it is pointed out, arranged marriages between infants, and sexual competence was linked to the onset of puberty rather than emotional maturity. The fact that regulating current laws and moralities according to the mores of our ancestors would also have us burning old women with black cats at the stake and washing ourselves maybe once a year, suggests that such an argument may have limited validity. Nonetheless, I was interested in asking what someone like Aelfric would have thought about this argument.
There are two main strands to the question of legislation to censor certain types of content. The first is consideration of the content itself; the second is the question of restricting access to that content.
Attitudes towards children and sexuality are not easy to pick out of extant Old English texts. One of the clearest sources we have are the Old English penitentials, texts which list sins and the penances which must be imposed for them. The kinds of punishments we see here are generally restricted to fasting and, occasionally, corporal punishment. These are ecclesiastical punishments, meted out and administered by priests rather than secular authorities, and it is in these texts that what George Orwell referred to as “sexcrime” is most fully dealt with.
The penitentials suggest that a girl becomes fit to consent (”have jurisdiction over her own body”) at age 13 or 14. A boy is under his father’s jurisdiction until he is 15, when he can choose to become a monk. At these ages, parents can give their children in marriage – we must note, though, that the penitentials emphasise that the young person must consent to the marriage for it to be valid.
Other references to young people are less clear about age. One penitential states that “If a small boy has been forced by a larger one into intercourse, he (is to fast) 5 nights. If he consents to it, he is to fast 15 nights.” These are probably boys living in a monastic context, under the direct jurisdiction of the church. The interesting point to note here is that the penance concentrates on the child we would see as the victim, the younger one, who is punished even if he is forced into sex.
Punishment of victims is also suggested in other penances: “If anyone deprive another of his daughter by force, he is to make amends to the relative and each of them is to fast 1 year on Wednesdays and Fridays on bread and water and on the other days partake of their food except for meat, and afterwards he is to take her in lawful marriage if the relative wishes it.” Again, the age of the daughter is not stipulated, but since the lawful age of marriage appears to have been around 13 or 14, we can assume that this discussion relates to the rape of a girl of that age. Again, not only the perpetrator of the crime but also the victim is made to do penance by fasting. There is, perhaps, a fear that young people who are forced into sex may secretly enjoy it; certainly, they are seen to be defiled by it.
This is just a small selection of the kinds of penances which Aelfric, as a cleric, would have been familiar with. He might well, therefore, have been rather surprised that we set the age of consent at 16 rather than at the onset of puberty. Relatively shorter lifespans and high rates of infant mortality possibly fed into the desirability of marrying young, since it offered a higher chance of successfully raising children. And, of course, Christianity taught that raising children was the highest good of sex. Aelfric made it plain to his congregation that the ideal was for a couple to refrain from sexual activity altogether once they were no longer able to bear children.
To say that a tenth-century monk would be mystified by our particular rules about interaction with children, however, is not to say that he would have approved in any way of sexual abuse and exploitation. Sexualisation was far less prevalent or culturally acceptable to the Anglo-Saxons, and the revealing outfits and t-shirts bearing legends such as “Boy Magnet” or “Sexy” made for four-year-old girls would have horrified Aelfric. The point of human beings, in Aelfric’s view, was not to titivate themselves and make themselves sexually attractive, but to glorify God and to make their souls beautiful to him. Sex for its own sake was not acceptable, whoever one’s sexual partner, and the maltreatment of the vulnerable is a constant theme in his hagiography. The rights of young women and men to choose their own sexual identity, and to refrain from marriage or other relationships which they did not want, were central to some of Aelfric’s most powerful saints’ lives.
We will never know how prevalent the sexual abuse of children may have been in Anglo-Saxon England, especially within families. Pornographic materials relating to children, however, have never been discovered, and the few erotic texts which we have rely on punning and double-entendre rather than explicit descriptions of people or activities. Erotic riddles are found in the Exeter Book, a manuscript which combines religious and secular texts, and which suggests that mild eroticism was even acceptable in an ecclesiastical context. The kind of pornography we see today would almost certainly have disgusted people like Aelfric, and its suppression by any means would no doubt have been very welcome to him.
I have already suggested that Aelfric was no supporter of free dissemination of texts. The taboos of unorthodox religion and sex are certainly areas in which he would have approved of keeping people in the dark, for their own good.
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Childline: an excellent British children's charity.
