90 Sir Frederick Pollock [March 3, 



appeal from a final judgment in the modern sense. Alfred informed 

 himself how justice was administered ; he could require his officers to 

 give an account of the proceedings, and put pressure on them, by the 

 threat of dismissal, to qualify themselves for their duties and redeem 

 themselves from the too common reproach of being quite illiterate. 

 Many of them set to work to learn to read, or at least get by heart, 

 the rules recorded in the king's and his ancestors' dooms. But the 

 time for direct over-riding royal interference, for the establishment of 

 new courts and new procedure, was not yet. Alfred could not do the 

 work of Henry IT. or Edward I.* There is a later legend to the 

 effect that Alfred was not swift enough to restrain the oppressions of 

 his great men in the early part of his reign, and that his reverses 

 were a punishment for this fault.f A likely time, indeed, for judicial 

 reform, with the Danes holding Mercia and barely out of Wessex, 

 aud the local magnates chafing under the most obviously needful 

 measures taken to strengthen the king's authority, and lessen the evils 

 of divided command ! But no twelfth-century chronicler could be 

 happy without a moral. 



King Alfred's laws are extant, the ' dooms ' which were set before 

 his Witan and approved by them towards the end of his reign. 

 Anglo-Saxon law is a technical and thorny subject, and most of its 

 actual contents are extremely remote from anything that is now 

 administered as law in England, though the spirit of publicity and 

 fairness, rough as wero its forms in early times, is not. J Enough to 

 say that Alfred, as a good son of the Church, prefixed to his dooms 

 considerable extracts from the Book of Exodus — it is conceived as an 

 edifying specimen of " written reason " rather than as rules to be 

 actually followed by Englishmen. When he comes to practical busi- 

 ness he consolidates and amends, as we should now say, the customs 

 recorded in various earlier dooms of West-Saxon, Kentish, and 

 Mercian kings, and annexes a revised version of the laws of his 

 ancestor, Ine of Wessex. There is a humane provision for securing 

 a certain number of holidays to hired labourers, which we may well 

 believe to be Alfred's own. His modest and sensible statement of his 

 policy has been often quoted, but must be quoted again : — 



" Now I, King Alfred, gathered all this together and bade write 

 it down : much of the dooms that our forerunners held by, such as 



* Asser, ed. Wise, pp. G9, 72, at the end of the Life. These rhetorical com- 

 ments of a Welshman writing Latin about English customs which he probably 

 did not more than half understand are confused, and to a lawyer exasperating. 

 But real facts must underlie them. After some doubt, I think the passage 

 genuine. A later addition would have been fuller and would have ascribed more 

 power to the king. 



t In the interpolation from the St. Neots Chronicle. Asser, ed. Wise, p. 31. 



X See more in an article of mine on "English Law before the Norman Con- 

 quest." ' Law Quart. Rev.,' July 1898. A critical text of the Anglo-Saxon laws 

 is being edited by Dr. F. Liebermann, of Berlin, for the Savigny-Stiftung: tin' 

 first part (Halle a. S., Max Nicmeyer, 181(8) comes down to Eadinund's lime, and 

 therefore includes the whole of Alfred's and Ine's dooms. 



