Andrew Horn, Alfredian Apocrypha, and the Anglo-Saxon Names of the Mirror of Justices

by STEFAN JURASINSKI, SUNY Brockport

The Mirror of Justices, an anonymous legal treatise of the late thirteenth century, is familiar outside the field of legal history for its unique and undoubtedly spurious narrative of the harsh justice imposed by King Alfred on forty-four corrupt judges. According to the Mirror, Alfred condemned the justices "pur lur faus jugemenz" (for their false judgments) and ordered them to be hanged "en un an taunt cum homicides" (in one year just like homicides) so as to demonstrate the equivalence of judicial homicide and common murder. The Mirror's account occurs at the conclusion of a list of 108 judicial abuses condemned by its author, and is probably meant to show the consonance of his claims with Anglo-Saxon tradition. His narrative is one of many apocryphal accounts of Alfred's reign that surfaced in the decades after the Conquest, all of which held Alfred to have possessed extraordinary gifts as a legislator. Though the account of Alfred's mass execution of justices is unique to the Mirror, apocryphal accounts of Alfred's lawmaking and Solomonic wisdom proliferate in the decades after the Conquest. the most popular of these is the collection of maxims supposedly delivered by the king at a witena gemot and commonly known as the Proverbs of Alfred.