Chapter 7 - ‘The Saxons, our Ancestors’: Ancient Law and Old English Laws

Summary

The study of law has always been, to some extent, the study of the past, as the philosophy of legal precedent makes clear: any case or decision can be ‘an example or authority for an identical or similar case afterwards arising for a similar question of law.’ Any legal action could affect later actions, and early modern lawyers and judges needed to know the previous decisions to understand the legal processes of their own day. They also needed to know exactly what the law said; as John Considine observes in his study of dictionaries, legal needs drove much of early modern lexicography, for lawyers ‘needed to understand the wording of the laws and their cultural background.’ Both linguistic and cultural history had to be excavated to understand the law, and Nowell and Lambarde worked extensively on both. The Abcedarium's flyleaf contains a legal glossary of Old English words with Latin equivalents, probably copied from London, British Library Cotton Titus A.xxvii and drawn from the twelfth-century Quadripartitus, a Latin translation of Old English law codes. Nowell also transcribed and collated the Anglo-Saxon laws that he found in manuscripts such as London, British Library Cotton Otho B.xi and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 383. His work with the laws led to completed (or near-completed) products in the editions and facing-page translations of the Laws of Alfred and Ine. These codices, manuscript showpieces written on membrane, decorated with colored initials and written in Nowell's best hands, both ‘insular minuscule’ and italic, are by far the most ‘finished’ products Nowell produced.