The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, Vol. 1: Legislation and its Limits Review

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(More customer reviews)There is nothing quite like this book. There is a footnote in it which must be one of the longest in existence. It concerns the fate of the German Felix Liebermann (1851-1925), whose Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen (`The Laws of the Anglo-Saxons'), published in 1903, was universally admired, but whose academic career was ruined by the outbreak of the First World War. The fact that this footnote is the most entertaining passage in the book says a lot. Unfortunately, it is not otherwise a very `accessible' work. In fact it is almost unreadable - except by the specialist - unless the reader is aware of the subtext.
Patrick Wormald, who died prematurely in 2004, was a brilliant scholar, teacher and essayist. In 1969, he was awarded a `congratulatory' first class honours degree, and was elected as a prize Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford; but he struggled to complete the great book which he worked on for almost thirty years. The Making of English Law (1999) is only the first volume of it and the second was never completed. Moreover, volume I was only ever intended to be journeyman's work: it was volume II which was to have been the masterpiece.
Patrick was a devout Roman Catholic and he had a deep admiration, one might almost say love, for the Anglo-Saxons, which he certainly did not feel for the Normans. In his view, there were 600 years of proud English history before the Nakba of 1066 - years when a society had emerged from barbarism by its own efforts, though with much help from Rome and Christianity. The Anglo-Saxons were the guardians of the Faith; but, in the long night which descended after the Romans withdrew, they also kept the flame of civilisation burning. In the eighth century they produced the best historian of the early Middle Ages in the Venerable Bede. They helped to convert the Germans to Christianity and contributed to the high level of culture to be found at the court of Charlemagne. In the ninth and tenth centuries, they fought off a further wave of Viking barbarians and producing a brilliant vernacular literature. Most importantly, they created a unified kingdom, ruled by codes of law and dedicated to the worship of Christ. In the twelfth century, the kingdom of England was one of the best-governed states in Western Europe because Anglo-Saxon England had been well governed for centuries: Henry II built on foundations laid by Alfred the Great.
I am sure this is what Patrick wanted to say; and if one bears this subtext in mind, volume I of the magnum opus becomes readable, indeed profound. As it is, it is still the indispensable guide to the Anglo-Saxon law codes, the only possible companion to Liebermann's Die Gesezte der Angelsachsen and it will still be read in a hundred years.
Stephen Cooper

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This volume, the first of two comprising The Making of English Law, provides the first full-length account of the Old English law-codes for over eighty years, and the first that has ever been published in the English language.