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Anglo-Saxon Law: Extracts From Early Laws of the English.

The Avalon Project : Anglo-Saxon Law - Extracts From Early Laws of the English. Anglo-Saxon Law - Extracts From Early Laws of the English. The laws of all nations which have developed steadily and in their own seats, with little or no intermixture of foreign elements, are generally perpetuated by custom and oral tradition. Hence the earliest written laws contain amendments of older unwritten customs, or codifications of those customs when they are gradually wearing out of popular recollection. Such documents are then generally obscure, requiring for their elucidation a knowledge of the customs they were intended to amend, which is not easily attainable; and where they are clear, they will be found frequently to contain little more than assessments of fines for offenses and injuries, with very scanty indications of the process by which the laws are made or the fines exacted. Nor is the case much better where codification is attempted; for the diversity of customs being very great, and the code not intended to supersede but to perpetuate them, the lawgiver is apt to become didactic, and to enunciate principles drawn from religion or morality, rather than legal definitions. The following extracts from the Anglo-Saxon Laws and Institutes may seem a very small residuum, after the winnowing of a very bulky 'Corpus Juris.' But they will be found to contain nearly every mention that occurs in the Collection of our Laws of such matters as public assemblies, courts of law, taxation, or the legal machinery on the carrying out of which the discipline of self-government is based. The great bulk of the laws concern chiefly such questions as the practice of compurgation, ordeal, wergild, sanctity of holy places, persons, or things; the immunity of estates belonging to churches; and the tables of penalties for crimes, in their several aspects as offenses against the peace, the family, and the individual. These, as touching Constitutional History in a very indirect way, are here excluded.

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