Charters, law and the settlement of disputes in Anglo-Saxon England

Abstract

The extant records of Anglo-Saxon dispute settlement and judicial procedure have received remarkably little attention from historians either of English law or of early English society. Just one attempt has been made to assemble and discuss a corpus of cases, exactly a hundred and ten years ago; these ‘select’ thirty-five include three post-dating 1066, two pairs relating to the same disputes and one that would be more properly labelled political melodrama (if, indeed, it ever happened at all); and the relevant residue constitutes less than twenty per cent of even the more informative records. This collection received the most cursory acknowledgement from Maitland in the classic history of early English law. It was more fully used, and to some extent expanded, by Liebermann in the relentlessly learned Sachglossar to his Gesetze der Angelsachsen , but its evidence was always subsidiary to that of the Gesetze themselves. The orthodoxy thus established over forty years has remained substantially entrenched throughout the subsequent seventy. In this article, I shall argue that full analysis of the whole range of specific and descriptive evidence, largely drawn from charters, compels radical reappraisal of the conclusions drawn from prescriptive law codes about Anglo-Saxon litigation. But more must first be said of what ‘orthodoxy’ is, and how it came to subsist.

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