Early English Laws

The project aims to edit or re-edit, translate, introduce and comment on all 138 early legal codes, edicts and treatises composed in England before the issuing of Magna Carta in 1215, and to make these materials available online and in a printed volume. Purely ecclesiastical texts such as council canons will not be included; penitentials, which have relevance to understanding law, are already available online (e.g., www.anglo-saxon.net). The period c.600-1215 saw the origins of England's common law, and the publication of these documents in a searchable and freely accessible form has the potential both to transform scholarship in the field and to open up a potentially difficult subject to a wider, non-specialist audience. The project website will also include the classic Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen by Felix Liebermann (1903-16), despite its problems still the standard edition cited by scholars for most early English law, and William Stubbs's Select Charters edition (1913) of the Angevin texts, as well as images of all early and important manuscript copies of the texts. All materials on the site will be marked up in XML to allowing searching and browsing, comparison of different versions (produced at different times and often in different languages), the establishment of connections between successive legal codes, and so on. In addition to this internal linkage, the documents will be structured so that they can be searched alongside other sites relating to Anglo-Saxon culture and medieval law, notably those developed by the Centre for Computing in the Humanities.

The need is great. Most of England's early legal texts are only available in Liebermann's edition, and neither his nor any other edition holds all of these important pre-Conquest and early common law texts. A century of scholarship on the laws has rendered Liebermann out of date. While his transcriptions of the Old English material were conscientious, his editions of the later Latin treatises and translations from the century after 1066 are flawed - his transcriptions of the manuscripts contain thousands of errors. Liebermann's own German translation in this edition is considered idiosyncratic and often less than helpful in understanding the originals. Liebermann covers not all early English law, but just Anglo-Saxon law, and included only those post-Conquest legal treatises that claimed to be reporting pre-Conquest law; he included materials that we now know are not law codes or legal texts. By excluding later original works such as those edited by Stubbs, Liebermann's collection reflected the early 20th-century belief that the common law had few to no roots in Anglo-Saxon law. Liebermann's skewing of his selection of sources made it difficult to progress beyond that view. The conventional wisdom has now changed significantly, with the recognition of greater continuity of legal practices over the Conquest as well as clearer appreciation of the specific scope of post-1066 innovations. A collection that bridges the Conquest and includes all legal texts produced during this period will allow better understanding of the origins of England's legal system.

Researchers in many disciplines will benefit from access to a broader collection. Scholarship on these laws has grown enormously in the last quarter of the 20th century, with articles, monographs and occasional editions covering all aspects of the texts: the manuscripts preserving them, their authority, function, languages, legal jargon and relationship to both actual customs and the agendas of rulers. In addition to their use by legal and political historians, they are being mined by social and cultural historians for insight into community mores and the manifestations of power, by literary scholars as texts reflecting significant paradigms of English culture, by linguists for their evidence of lexical borrowing, dialect and language contact, and by archaeologists for comparison to excavations of execution sites.