[90] A valuable testimony is borne to the substantial antiquity of this poem, by the fact that Schafarik, who is the chief ethnographer for Sclavonic literature, regards it as a valuable source on account of the Sclavonic names contained in it. I am indebted to Mr. Morfil, of Oriel College, for this information.
CHAPTER VII.
THE WEST SAXON LAWS.
“No other Germanic nation has bequeathed to us out of its earliest experience so rich a treasure of original legal documents as the Anglo-Saxon nation has.” Such is the sentence of Dr. Reinhold Schmid, who upon the basis of former labours, and particularly those of Mr. Benjamin Thorpe, has given us the most compact and complete edition yet produced of the Anglo-Saxon laws.[91]
It might seem as if laws were too far removed from the idea of literature, to merit more than a passing notice here. Writers on modern English literature generally leave the lawyer’s work altogether out of their field. But these are among the things that alter with age. Laws become literary matter just as they become old and obsolete. Then the traces they have left in words and phrases and figures of speech, their very contrasts with the laws of the present, makes them material eminently literary. We know what effective literary use Sir Walter Scott has made of the antiquities and curiosities of law.
And to this may be added another remark. When we are engaged in reconstructing an ancient, we might almost say a lost literature, we need above all things some leading ideas concerning the conditions of social life and opinion and mental development at the period in question. Nothing supplies these things so safely as the laws of the time.
INE’S LAWS.
The oldest extant West Saxon laws are those of King Ine,[92] who reigned thirty-eight years, A.D. 688-726. As the West Saxon power gradually absorbed all other rule in this island, we here find ourselves entering the central stream of history. In the preamble to Ine’s Laws the name of Erconwald, bishop of London, who died in 693, is among the persons present at the Gemôt. Consequently these laws must be referred to the first years of Ine’s reign, and they must be older than the date of the Kentish laws of Wihtred.
The laws of Ine are preserved to us as an appendix of the laws of Alfred. This is the case in all the manuscripts. Not only does the elder code follow the younger, but the numbering is continuous as if welding the two codes into one. Thorpe follows the manuscripts in this arrangement, though not in the numbering of the sections, and the student who consults his edition is apt to be confused with this chronological inversion, unless he has taken note of the cause. Ine reigned over a mixed population of Saxons and Britons, and his code is of a more comprehensive character than that of the Kentish kings. His enactments became, through subsequent re-enactments, the basis of the laws not only of Wessex, but also of all England. Accordingly they seem more intelligible to the modern reader.[93]
9. If any one take revenge before he sue for justice, let him give up what he has seized, and pay for the damage done, and make amends with thirty shillings.