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Sick-Maintenance in Anglo-Saxon Law
by Lisi Oliver,
Louisiana State University
To tell the Government of England under the old Saxon
laws, seemeth an Utopia to us present; strange and uncouth: yet can there
be no period assign'd, wherein either the frame of those laws was abolished,
or this of ours entertained; but as Day and Night creep insensibly, one
upon the other, so hath this Alteration grown upon us insensibly, every
age altering something, and no age seeing more than what themselves are
Actors in, not thinking it to be otherwise than as themselves discover
it by the present.
Thus the great legal historian Henry Spelman in the seventeenth century
described the process of accretion that characterizes what we have come
to know as Common Law. Spelman's analysis, picturesquely phrased as it is,
reflects a somewhat simplistic view of the "Utopia" of Anglo-Saxon England.
Typical of other medieval legal systems, Anglo-Saxon legal texts, both royal
and ecclesiastical, drew from a variety of sources. First, some rulings
are direct inheritance. For example, archaic syntax in the personal injury
laws in Æthelberht establish that this section of the text has been
largely preserved from earlier oral transmission. Second, some rulings may
be taken, or "borrowed," more or less transparently from other, non-native
legal systems, as the long series of rulings which serves as a preamble
to Alfred's laws, drawn (for the most part) from the Vulgate Bible. Finally,
some clauses may be innovations, created to address specific legal issues
which, arising in practice, were previously unaccounted for in the written
law. A case in point is the prohibition against the abduction of nuns, which
appears for the first time in Alfred's laws as pre-Christian England was
notoriously lacking in sisters of the veil. |
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