All this we see in the course of being introduced into Northumbrian usage in answer to local inquiry and local needs, upon the authority of perhaps the very wisest of Saxon prelates.
The wisdom of such accommodation as this on the part of the Church to pagan tribal usage is not the matter in question. The point of the evidence is the proof it gives of the continued strength of tribal usage in England after many generations of occupation and settlement.
III. THE DOOMS OF INE, A.D. 688-725.
The Dooms of King Ine occupy so important a position as the earliest direct information upon Anglo-Saxon custom apart from Kent that they demand careful separate study.
We ought to be able to learn something from them of the aim and spirit of legislation in Wessex two centuries before King Alfred added them to his laws.
Ine’s Dooms apart from Alfred’s.
There is no reason, I think, to suspect that the text of the Dooms of Ine was altered by Alfred. The words already quoted in which he says that in his Dooms he collected together what he thought ‘rightest’ of those things which he met with of the days of Ine and Offa and Ethelbert without adding much of his own are quite consistent with his preservation of King Ine’s laws as a whole, though in some points differing from his own.[248]
King Ine came to the throne in A.D. 688, and he states in his preamble that he issued his ‘Dooms’ with the counsel of Cenred his father and of the Bishops of Winchester and London (who had already had twelve or thirteen years’ experience in their sees) and also with the counsel of all his ealdormen and his Witan:—