I shall now examine the above statement of Lord Selborne.
I have failed to find that Wilkins combined the Grith with the Ordinances of Habam. These Ordinances do not appear at all in his “Saxon Laws.” The four laws of Ethelred which he has are (1) Liber Constitutionum, (2) Mund, (3) Church Grith, (4) Wantage.
Now the “Liber Constitutionum” has 35 articles, of which 19 are ecclesiastical. But Wilkins did not insert it in his “Concilia.” And yet Lord Selborne makes no remark on its omission, but he is careful to note the omission of the Church Grith.
III. His seventh witness is Mr. Price,[189] who commenced to edit, under the instructions of the Record Commissioners, an edition of the “Anglo-Saxon Laws.” Archdeacon Hale, of London, like Lord Selborne, was a great stickler for the non-admission of any tripartite division of tithes in England. He was mainly guided by Wilkins’s edition of 1737, and had not even seen his “Anglo-Saxon Laws,” which were published in 1721. But after having written strongly against the tripartite division, a friend referred him to Ethelred’s law of 1014, in Wilkins’s “Anglo-Saxon Laws.” He became anxious on reading it, and stopped a new edition of his work until he could have the point clearly settled. He consulted Mr. Price, who, on the 26th July, 1832, addressed the following letter to him:—
“It is an unauthorized assemblage of points of canon law, gathered indifferently from foreign and home sources, and he did not think it genuine, because Wilkins had omitted it from his new edition.”[190]
The Archdeacon seemed not to be satisfied with this formal opinion, and so after Price’s death, which occurred soon after he had written the above letter, he consulted another gentleman, “Whose reputation,” says the Archdeacon, “for extensive knowledge of Anglo-Saxon literature is not confined to his own university, or to this country, but whose name I do not consider myself at liberty to mention. He gave me in writing an opinion at variance with that of Mr. Price, and was in favour of the genuineness of the law of Ethelred, and his opinion was founded upon the fact of Schmid having published it in his edition of the Anglo-Saxon Laws, and upon the persuasion that no weight whatever was due to what Wilkins had said or thought upon the subject.”[191] I have always admired the straightforward manner in which the Archdeacon placed the whole matter before the public. A prejudiced person would have kept back the damaging opinion of the unnamed writer. He is therefore much fairer on this matter than Lord Selborne, Mr. Fuller, and Mr. Chancellor Dibdin, who, while quoting Price’s opinion, carefully avoided any reference whatever to the second or favourable opinion, although it is printed in a footnote at the page where Price’s letter appears.[192]
Reinhold Schmid, to whom the Archdeacon’s second referee referred, was Professor of Laws at Jena, and published at Leipzig in 1832 an edition of the “Anglo-Saxon Laws.” “This edition,” says Mr. Thorpe, “is a very creditable publication, decidedly superior to the preceding ones (i.e. Lambarde’s and Wilkins’s). The version is free from the gross errors of Wilkins and generally correct.”[193]
This statement corroborates the independent testimony of the Archdeacon’s unnamed writer.
IV. Lord Selborne’s eighth witness is Professor Freeman, of Oxford.
“Mr. Freeman,” says Lord Selborne, “who seems to have accepted the date A.D. 1014 as evidence that the document represents some public act of that year, was also led to the conclusion that these were ‘hardly laws at all,’ but mere ‘advice,’ and an expression of pious and patriotic feeling, a promise of national amendment rather than legislation strictly so called.”[194]