Draft Version Nichole Sterling THE ALFRED-GUTHRUM TREATY AS A MODEL FOR BORDER RELATIONS IN THE REIGN OF HENRY I Three Anglo-Saxon treaties concerned with the relations between the Anglo-Saxons and others on their borders are preserved in two compilations from the reign of Henry I (1100-1135). These treaties – Alfred’s treaty with Guthrum, Æthelred II’s treaty with the vikings, and Dunsæte – are preserved in the vernacular in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS 383 (hereafter CCCC 383) and in Latin translations in the various manuscripts of Quadripartitus. These treaties have all been frequently mined for what they can tell us about relations between the Anglo-Saxons and their neighbors. However, scholars have only paused briefly to ponder what these works might have meant in the reign of Henry I. In large part, this must be because it is impossible to prove any particular argument. Nonetheless, questioning what led to the creation of these legal compilations in the first part of the twelfth century may shed some light on their purpose. Henry I’s interests in restoring order, upholding the law, and looking to the past for authority suggest a function for the Anglo-Saxon treaties within the broader governance of his realm. Moreover, the crucial problems of integrating peoples under one ruler and dealing with England’s borders that were clearly at stake in ruling post-Conquest England remained present in Henry I’s reign. If, as has been suggested, the treaty between Alfred and Guthrum was a model for later viking treaties, then it may well have continued to function as a model under Henry I. 1 This is not to say that the Alfred-Guthrum treaty and similar documents were merely meant as exemplars to be copied, but rather these documents presented some of the most common concerns facing settlements of border disputes and offered sample functional responses from the 1 Patrick Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, vol. 1 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 286.