Tribal Custom in Anglo-Saxon Law / Being an Essay Supplemental to (1) 'The English Village Community', (2) 'The Tribal System in Wales'

by Frederic Seebohm

CHAPTER XI.
DANISH VIEW OF ANGLO-SAXON CUSTOM.

I. THE ‘DE INSTITUTIS LUNDONIE’—OF CNUT (?)

Fresh point of view.

Having thus tried to obtain, from the so-called ‘Laws of Henry I.’ (whatever they may be), a Norman view of Anglo-Saxon custom, we recognise that on some points we may have learned more from this Norman view than could directly have been learned solely from the earlier Anglo-Saxon laws themselves.

The reason of this is obvious. Special laws issued at various times by Saxon kings do not profess to cover the whole ground of existing and well understood custom. Rather should special laws be regarded as modifications of custom made necessary at different periods by new circumstances. Thus no one of the sets of laws can be expected to give a general view of custom as a whole.

It is not strange, then, that we should owe some knowledge of early Anglo-Saxon custom to the Norman Conquest and the necessity after such an event to collect in a more connected and intelligible form what had formerly to some extent been matters of custom and tradition. And so it may be that our next chance of learning more may be found in the study of the documents and fragments belonging to the period of the Danish invasion of England, and especially the moment of transition from the English rule of Ethelred II. to the Danish rule of Cnut.

Danes and English live under their own laws. Danish law assumed to be well known.

The founding of the Danish kingdom of Cnut was an epoch in English history, and indeed in the history of Europe. It was followed inter alia by the legalisation in England of Scandinavian monetary reckoning in marks and ores which had already for some time been in use side by side with the English reckoning in scillings and pounds. And this was typical of the general position of things. In full coincidence with the working of tribal feeling in other countries, into the idea of conquest the amalgamation of the two peoples into one did not enter. Danes continued to live under their laws and the English under theirs, as Franks and Gallo-Romans did under Frankish rule. Certain things were enjoined upon both, but with a difference. It often happens that in documents of this period the ‘law of the English’ is specially explained while the Danish law is referred to as already known, thus revealing a Danish point of view.