The focus of this chapter is the samtíðarsögur (contemporary sagas) included in the compendium Sturlunga saga, compiled around the beginning of the fourteenth century, which contains narratives dealing largely with the history of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Iceland. The chapter opens by placing Sturlunga saga in the context of other Old Norse-Icelandic historical writing, considering why the distant past of the saga age attracted more attention from Icelandic writers than the period of relatively recent history covered by Sturlunga saga. It outlines what is known of Þórðr Narfason, often identified as the compiler of Sturlunga saga, and describes his interaction with Sturla Þórðarson in 1271−2, considering the possible role of Sturla in the compilation and offering a brief discussion of Sturlu þáttr. The content, structure and themes of the narratives within the compilation are then discussed in turn. The chapter closes with a brief outline of the compilation’s manuscript history, modern editions and critical reception.

Edward Long’s History of Jamaica was published in 1774 and has been in print ever since. It was a text designed to legitimate slavery as central to Britain’s wealth and power and to encourage new white settlers to come to the island. A judgment by Lord Mansfield had persuaded the slave-owners that they could no longer rely on the law to protect their ‘property’ in enslaved men and women. New legitimations were necessary and Long’s encyclopaedic History, encompassing population, politics, the economy, law, and the topography and natural history of the island, was structured around a defence of slavery and natural difference. Long’s History continues to be read by numerous scholars interested in racial difference and in eighteenth-century Britain and its relation to the Caribbean. But it has never been fully contextualized either in his family history or in his place in the Enlightenment. An Enlightenment man, Long was determined to represent plantation slavery as a civilizing process for barbarous Africans. Nor has the History been thought about in terms of its relevance to the present. Key concepts utilized in the analysis of his work are introduced, including racial capitalism, racialization, reproduction and disavowal.

This chapter considers the maintenance of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle at Christ Church Canterbury in the first decade of the twelfth century, as well as the acquisition, adaptation, expansion and recopying of earlier manuscripts of the Chronicle contemporary with it. It argues those involved were of both English and foreign descent and worked with a knowledge of the template for vernacular annalistic writing laid down in King Alfred’s reign and developed over the succeeding 150 years. However, in their overt monastic chauvinism, length, use of first person pronouns and direct speech and disregard for chronological organisation, their additions, especially of documents, also anticipated developments in twelfth-century historiography. The Chronicle tradition in effect came to an end at Christ Church by the 1120s, elsewhere by the 1130s, a consequence of changes in the twelfth-century linguistic ecology, the success of Latin translations and, arguably, the innovations introduced by its early twelfth-century adapters.

This final part of History and the Law is deliberately not labelled a chapter, in order to match ‘A Beginning’, which reproduces Stephen Dunn’s poem ‘History’. There is further reflection on history and the law as narrative, and the practical difficulties facing any historian who attempts to write about the law. The development (and their demise) of legal aid and advice in twentieth-century Britain is related to William Godwin’s writing about law that didn’t happen – wasn’t enacted – in the Commonwealth period. Such narrative difficulties in writing about the law are discussed in reference to the law imaginings of Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and George Agamben.

This chapter charts social conservatives' efforts to provide new historical and philosophical foundations for female sovereignty -- ones in keeping with, rather than at odds with, a patriarchal state. They did this by rewriting the histories of past English queens in order to downplay their agency and leadership. They also did this by valorizing particular Victorian statesmen who they insisted were doing Victoria's work on her behalf. Finally, they did this by stressing the decorative, moral, and fundamentally apolitical role of the female sovereign within the modern British nation-state.