ABSTRACT

The early twelfth century has received a good deal of attention from English legal historians because the texts and manuscript copies of Anglo-Saxon law codes produced before c.1125 can be used as evidence both for pre-Conquest law and for the impact of the Norman Conquest on English law. The late twelfth century is conversely a neglected period in the history of Anglo-Saxon law codes, despite the large number of Latin, Anglo-French and English texts created or copied between c.1150 and c.1200 which claim or were thought to represent the law in England before 1066. There are cogent reasons for this neglect. Scholars looking for records to show the consequences of the Conquest on law would say that they did not need to look beyond the evidence provided by the retrospective and present-minded creations of the post-Conquest period to c. 1150, and certainly not at the later copies of these same sources, except when these were needed to produce editions. Those interested in the developing law of the late twelfth century would aver that they were interested in texts that were statements of contemporary law, and especially texts of Henry II’s assizes, the treatise known as Glanvill, charters, and fiscal and judicial rolls, which allowed them to study the stages of the careful crafting of the new system known to us as the common law. The later-twelfth-century copies of Anglo-Saxon laws satisfy neither interest. They appear to be late and derivative memorials of pre-Conquest law and self-evidently disengaged from contemporary legal developments. It is not an unreasonable conclusion that these late copies would not provide useful evidence of late-twelfth-century law.