Wulfstan's Sermon of the Wolf

Wulfstan's Sermon of the Wolf to the English is the only end-times text that is also a state paper. Preached in 1014, in the worst of Æthelred's reign, with the Danish conquest at England's throat and the kingdom dissolving into betrayal and plunder, the archbishop of York read the collapse of his country as the foreground of the collapse of the world: 'the world is in haste, and it approaches the end.' Where other apocalyptic texts unfold their schedules across centuries, Wulfstan's end is contemporary, the 'theft, and murder, and the selling of men against their will,' the Church robbed, the kin betrayed, the slaves escaped and the thralls fled, a catalogue of the kingdom's sins that is at the same time the list of the world's signs. The sermon does not argue that the end will come. It argues that the end is here, in the realm's current behavior, and that the only brake is repentance with works: alms, right laws, and fidelity.

The sermon's rhetoric is the cleanest example of the end as lever. Wulfstan, whose homiletic art Whitelock's edition made famous, was not a millenarian arithmetician; he was an archbishop using the genre's full authority to move a court. Godden's recent study (Apocalypse and Invasion) reads the sermon precisely this way: the apocalypse is Wulfstan's instrument, not his speculation, the end is invoked because the kingdom needs it invoked, and the claim 'the world is in haste' is the strongest possible form of 'England is perishing.'

Wulfstan is the link between the biblical end and the political sermon, and the ancestor of every later preacher who used the end to reform a realm. The remnant he offers is conditional and practical: the English themselves, if they repent now. It is the only apocalypse with a policy recommendation attached, and the recommendation, read across a thousand years, is still being delivered in pulpits and on placards every time the world is declared, once again, to be in haste.

The land where he preached is described under United Kingdom.

The sermon's manuscript life shows its use. It survives in five copies, two full and three excerpted, including CCCC MS 419 where it follows law codes with which it shares language. Dorothy Bethurum's edition established the text; the linguistic evidence, Wulfstan's characteristic rhythmical prose with its double alliteration and fixed formulas, ties the homily to the archbishop's own draftsmanship rather than a school imitator.

Its most quoted passage is also its most legally concrete. The catalogue of horrors, betrayal of lords, breach of sanctuary, church-robbing, the selling of freemen abroad after death, matches Æthelred's code provisions almost clause for clause, which is why historians read the sermon alongside the statutes as one programme in two registers: damnation preached, legislation enacted.