ABSTRACT
I start with a simple dilemma: Why do I very largely accept Patrick’s arguments concerning Anglo-Saxon law and justice, but remain unconvinced by the predominance which he attributed to that period in the history of English Law? This is not just the characteristic claim for the significance of one’s own period; indeed my conclusions emphasize the significance of a period later than Patrick’s or my own. Rather, it involves Patrick’s approach and interests and their distinctiveness from those of many other historians of English law. Patrick was well aware of these distinctions. When the reviewer of The Making of English Law in the English Historical Review concluded that
Wormald writes somewhat outside the Common Law tradition of legal history, with its emphasis on land law, legal doctrine, and procedure. He starts from kingship, legislation, and crime. Paradoxically, or perhaps unsurprisingly, it is not a Legal Historian, in the orthodox, capitalized, sense, who has produced this outstanding work on the history of law1
Patrick liked this sufficiently that he both quoted it in his Selden Society lecture on ‘Lawyers and the State: the varieties of legal history’, and sent a letter to the reviewer stating that ‘naturally, I particularly liked the conclusion, which is just the sort of perception I have been aiming for.’2
