A larger body of law survives from Anglo-Saxon England than from any other early medieval community. The standard edition of early English legislation, the Gesetze der Angelsachsen of Felix Liebermann (Liebermann 1903–1916), contains roughly seventy pre-Conquest texts, to which can be added well over a thousand Charters, Writs, and Wills. If one also includes the numerous surviving quasi-legislative texts, legal formularies and rituals, and homilies derived from legal sources, it is possible to gain a sense of both the diversity of Anglo-Saxon legal composition and the centrality of such texts to pre-Conquest culture. Yet the importance of the Anglo-Saxon legal corpus lies in more than just its size. Linguists observe that the legislation of Æthelbert (c. 604) is the earliest substantial text to survive in Old English, while monastic charters of the 11th and early 12th centuries are among the latest. Historians of the English Renaissance point out that the editio princeps of Anglo-Saxon law, William Lambarde’s Archaionomia (1568), was one of the first publications to result from the 16th-century revival of Old English scholarship and that a copy now held by the Folger Shakespeare Library even contains what may be a signature of Shakespeare himself. Americanists note the influence of Old English law on the thought of Thomas Jefferson while scholars of 19th-century literature see its traces in the writings of Henry Adams. Nonetheless, this material has yet to attract the scholarly interest given to either the literature of the period or the legal developments of the later Middle Ages. The centuries before the Norman Conquest rarely feature in courses on legal history and introductory Old English students receive only the most cursory exposure to pre-Conquest laws and charters. Despite its comparatively low profile, however, the study of Anglo-Saxon law offers valuable insight into early English concepts of Royal Authority and political identity. It reveals both the capacities and limits of the king’s regulatory power, and in so doing, provides crucial evidence for the process by which disparate kingdoms gradually merged to become a unified English state. More broadly, pre-Conquest legal texts shed light on the various ways in which cultural norms were established, enforced, and, in many cases, challenged. And perhaps most importantly, they provide unparalleled insight into the experiences of Anglo-Saxon England’s diverse inhabitants, both those who enforced the law and those subject to its sway.
Compound heterozygous variants in LAMC3 in association with posterior periventricular nodular heterotopia