He omitted the Laws of the Kentish Kings, the Laws of William the Conqueror and of Henry I. Then are we to infer that Lambarde saw these “documents,” but would not notice them in his collection because “he did not regard them as having the character or authority of laws”?
This is really the logical sequence of Lord Selborne’s inferential canon of criticism, as regards Lambarde’s omission of the Church Grith law. The fact is that he, like Selden and Spelman, had never seen the law.
(4) Wheelock published a second edition of Lambarde’s “Laws” in 1644, in which he added the laws of the Conqueror and of Henry I., but omitted the laws of the Kentish kings. Why? Must the answer be according to Lord Selborne’s canon of criticism, viz., that “he regarded them as not having the character or the authority of laws”? No. He, like Lambarde, had not seen the Kentish laws or the Church Grith law.
(5) John Johnson published a “Collection of the Laws and Canons of the Church of England,” in 1720, mainly founded upon Spelman’s “Concilia.”
Mr. John Baron, in his new edition of Johnson’s collection, published in 1850, says, “Mr. Thorpe publishes some ecclesiastical laws of King Ethelred at pp. 129, 141, 145, which were altogether unknown to Johnson”[186] There is at p. 129 “Liber Constitutionum”; at p. 141 “Grith and Mund”; at p. 145 “Church Grith.”
Mr. Baron’s edition is quoted probably one hundred times by Lord Selborne in his “Facts and Fictions” and “Church Defence,” and he must unquestionably have read Baron’s Prefatory statement that “Grith and Mund” and “Church Grith laws” were unknown to Johnson. Yet in the face of that statement, Lord Selborne says, “If Lambarde, Wheelock, and John Johnson were acquainted with either manuscript (the contrary supposition is improbable), the inference is that they did not regard it (Grith law) as having the character or the authority of a law.” I have taken these five authors seriatim, and the general conclusion is that the Grith law was unknown to each and all of them.
II. His sixth witness is Wilkins. Lord Selborne says:—
“David Wilkins was the first to publish the Church Grith in his ‘Leges Anglo-Saxonica,’ where he combined it in a manner, for which the manuscripts afforded no warrant, with the Ordinances of ‘Habam,’ etc. If he had regarded it as an authentic ecclesiastical law when he afterwards (in A.D. 1737) published his great collection of ‘Acts of Councils’ and other English ecclesiastical documents, it must have found a place there, which it does not.”[187]
Dr. Wilkins was also the first to publish the laws of the Kentish kings.
Mr. Thorpe says of Wilkins’s “Concilia,” “As a monument of industry this edition is very creditable to Dr. Wilkins; at the same time it must, though reluctantly, be acknowledged by every one competent to judge, that as a translator of Anglo-Saxon he not unfrequently betrays an ignorance even of its first principles, that though not unparalleled, is perfectly astounding.”[188]