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An Examination of the Laws of William the Conqueror. Steven D University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014 1976 An examination of the laws of William the Conqueror. Steven D. Sargent University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/theses Sargent, Steven D., "An examination of the laws of William the Conqueror." (1976). Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014. 1935. Retrieved from https://scholarworks.umass.edu/theses/1935 This thesis is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014 by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. AN EXAMINATION OF THE LAWS OF WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR A Thesis Presented By Steven Douglas Sargent Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree o MASTER OF ARTS August, 1976 History AN EXAMINATION OF THE LAWS € OF WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR A Thesis by Steven Douglas Sargent Approved as to style and content by: R. D. Ware, Chairman of Committee V. Ilardi , Member A. R. Lewis, Member fid. Juuw G. W. McFarland, Chairman Department of History CONTENTS Chapter I. The Setting of the Leis Willelme ; Legislation under the Norman Kings of England Chapter II. The Manuscript Transmission and Characteristics of the Texts of the Leis Willelme Chapter III. A History of Scholarly Commentary on the Leis Willelme Chapter IV. The Derivation of the Texts of the Leis Willelme Chapter V. The Date and Significance of the Leis Willelme Bibliography CHAPTER I THE SETTING OF THE LEIS WILLELME : LEGISLATION UNDER THE NORMAN KINGS OF ENGLAND The Leis Willelme is a law book composed of fifty- two chapters which purports to contain the laws and customs of Edward the Confessor as they were granted to the English people by William the Conqueror. It is preserved in French and Latin versions, but which language was used in the original composition is uncertain. Upon the answer to this question depends the determination of the work's date and the assessment of the genuineness of its statutes. The goal of this thesis is to elucidate the nature and significance of the Leis Willelme through the investigation of these issues. Before proceeding with a detailed examination of the problems associated with the law book, we must first attempt to characterize the legal milieu of post-Conquest England. For the Leis Willelme is hardly a solitary example of its genre. The Norman Conquest upset and the Anglo-Saxon legal system, disturbing both law and procedure, the twelfth in the end caused a new synthesis from which, beginning in began to century, the common law developed. Yet before this process during which the take definite shape there was a period of confusion make it accurately old law was restated and adapted in an attempt to this time, which reflect the reality of judicial practice. During includes the reigns of the three Norman kings, William I, William II, and Henry I, and that of Stephen, that is, the years 1066-1154, a number of legal works appeared which sought to record the laws either in force in England or which the authors thought should be in force. These works include the Quadripartitus , Leges Henrici Primi , Instituta Cnuti., and Leges Edward i Conf essoris . After examining these documents and the few decrees that can be confidently attributed to one or another of the Norman kings, we can endeavor to characterize the post-Conquest ]egal milieu and, further, try to fit the Leis Willelme into the over- all pattern that these works reveal. Such an inductive process will not necessarily lead to a satisfactory determination of the work's date and significance; these conclusions will more likely result from a careful weighing of the content and language of the document itself. But an acquaintance with the decrees and law books that appeared during the century immediately following the Conquest will help us to reject implausible theories that mean to explain the existence of the Leis Willelme and at the same time to see similarities between the documents that may suggest fruitful hypotheses. A student beginning the study of early English legal history is perhaps surprised to find three of the Conqueror's writs and Henry I f s coronation charter in Felix Liebermann's monumental collection of Old 1 English legislation, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen . The Conquest is such an epochal event that one wonders how works written under the Norman kings fit into this compilation of Anglo-Saxon law. Yet the explanation of this seeming paradox is fairly simple: the Normans, 1 3 F. Liebermann, ed. and trans., Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen , vols. (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1903-16). having no written law code to rival those of the English, merely suffered the conquered people to keep their customary law in the main, while altering it in detail, writ by writ, until it was gradually transformed during the twelfth century into a new and vital legal system. For this reason much of the legislation that we find in the law books of the first century after the Conquest is based on Old English usages, and a review of the monuments of English written law will help us to understand from where the Normans derived their knowledge of these practices. The Anglo-Saxon Legal Heritage That Anglo-Saxon law was being written down almost five centuries before the Conquest is illustrated by the dooms of King Aethelberht of Kent, which date from c. 600. We have evidence of continuous legal activity from this time on through the eleventh century: to demonstrate this one need only mention Ine's code from the end of the seventh century, Of fa's from the end of the eighth, Alfred ' s from the end of the ninth, greater or lesser amounts of legislation from Edward the Elder, Athelstan, Edmund, Edgar, and Ethelred from the tenth, and finally Cnut's codification from the eleventh. One of the landmarks in this series is Alfred's compilation, in which the king tried to produce a work of a more general character by selecting for inclusion the best laws from the various local codes. It is only from this work that we know of Of fa's 2 code, and Ine's work is included as an appendix to it. Although Alfred's code is important, Cnut's compilation of Old o F. L. Attenborough, ed. and trans., The Laws of the Earliest English Kings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), pp. 62-93. 4 English law is the one most often encountered in a variety of forms in the law books written under the Norman kings. In 1016 Cnut, a Dane, succeeded in capturing the English crown, and one of the con- ditions under which he was accepted by his new subjects was that he allow them to continue to live under their customary law. To the English people this body of legislation was represented not by the copious enactments of the unsuccessful and unloved Ethelred (987-1016), but rather by the legal state of affairs that had obtained under good king Edgar (959-75). Thus the Danes and the English are described in the D version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 1018 as having ii 3 "reached an agreement at Oxford according to Edgar's law," and Cnut himself says in his proclamation of 1020 that he will "steadfastly keep the law of Edgar to which all have given their adherence under oath at Oxford." 4 But although four series of laws, totaling thirty-eight 5 as a chapters, are attributed to Edgar, he was probably not remembered that were great legislator and codifier. Rather by the laws of Edgar body of English granted to them Cnut's English subjects "meant the whole especial perhaps law in force in his [Edgar's] time, including in laws as the great Alfred's domboc, which Edgar himself mentions in his 6 authority." (New Brunswick: 3Dorothy Whitelock, ed., The Angl^^axon Chronicle Rutgers University Press, 1961), p. 97. Ljiws of_ the Kings of England J. Robertson, ed. and trans., The Y Press, 1925) - Cambridge University , from Edmund to Henry I (Cambridge: p. 143. Laws, 16-39. 5Liebermann, Gesetze, I, 195-215; Robertson, pp. 6 Sayles, Law and ^gisla^on |E9H H. G. Richardson and G. 0. Edinburgh University Press, 1966) , Aethelberht to Magna Carta, (Edinburgh: p. 23 Presumably it was exactly because the reference to Edgar's laws was so vague that Cnut himself issued a law code in which he specified in detail the content of the legislation by which he had agreed in principle to rule. The work, which comprises 110 chapters, is divided into two parts, I Cnut and II Cnut, which deal with ecclesiastical and secular law 7 respectively. The second part is by far the larger, con- taining eighty-four of the chapters. There is no doubt about its authenticity. It was issued at Winchester at Christmas of a year that cannot be precisely specified, although it was certainly not before 1020 and might possibly be 1027 or sometime between 1029 and 1034. In the work Cnut shows himself to be a transmitter of Old English law rather than a creator and originator of new legislation. Richardson and Sayles find that there is "little, if anything, that is new in it, though some of the articles are not to be found in any earlier legislation that has 8 come down to us." Liebermann notes that the code utilizes about one third of the Anglo-Saxon legal sources that we possess, although it is characterized by a greater fullness in the treatment of the subject matter.
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