The Legislation and Local Government of King Alfred. 597 Cambridge; that numbered 173 is, in the opinion of experts, "the oldest extant copy of Alfred's laws, second quarter of the tenth century " —-i. e. only a generation later than the death of the king himself; while No. 383 ( the first and third octavos of which have been misplaced in the binding ) is assigned to the middle of the eleventh century. It is fair, then, to give credit to the claim of these dooms, that they represent the body of law enacted by Alfred in the course of his regeneration of the disordered nation of Wessex, which he had saved from the Danes. They show that in his reign re ligion and morality received their sanction from established law, and that here, at any rate, it was not possible to use of his king dom the words of Tacitus concerning the ancient Germans, that " among them good habits of morality are stronger than good laws elsewhere." We must, however, guard against the idea that this code pretended to be such a constructive and systematic statement as are the compilations of an Alphonso the Wise, or a Napoleon Bona parte. If it had been such, it would have been exceptionally foreign to the spirit of all English law. A comparison of the code of Alfred with those of earlier kings shows that he collected and supplemented those of his predecessors; we have his express avowal of this mode of promulgation : "I then, Alfred King, gathered these to gether, and bade to write many of those that our foregoers held, those that seemed to me good; and many of those that seemed not good I set aside with my wise men's counsel, and in otherwise bade to hold them; for that I durst not venture much of mine own to set in writing, for that it was unknown to me what of this would like those that were after us. But those that I met with either in Ine's days mine kinsman, or in Offa's King of Mercia, or in Aethelbehrt's that first took baptism in the English race, those that seemed to
me the rightest, I have gathered them here in and let alone the others." The direct words of this preface suggest the very essentials of growth and elasticity which have made our law enviable to all the world. " Our laws," says Bacon, "are mixed as our language; and as our lan guage is so much the richer, the laws are the more complete." Their principle, pleads Alfred himself, is that of Christian mo rality. "From this one doom a man may think that he should judge every one rightly; he need keep no other doom-book. Let him take care that he judge to no man what he would not that he should judge to him, if he sought doom over him." A closer examination of the code itself shows that it opens with an Anglo-Saxon re-enactment of the Mosaic law ( Exodus xx-xxiii, roughly translated). As Stephen has justly remarked, " it is hard to decide whether these were practically more than a kind of denunciation of homicide on religious grounds, or whether they were actually executed as law." At least one notes, among other points, a sincere at tempt to enforce the distinction between in tentional and unintentional homicide. Of the seventy-seven clauses which contain Alfred's own " dooms," over fifty relate to personal injuries of one kind and another; most of these are borrowed, with slight changes in the amounts of fines, from the Kentish codes, especially Aethelbehrt's. The rest are mainly taken from Ine, whose agri cultural laws, however, are wholly omitted. The word " Dolz-bot " is a term used, mean ing compensation for the striking or stab bing of a man, and it curiously occurs on the hoop of a silver finger-ring found in an Anglo-Saxon cemetery in Cambridgeshire (Lord Braybrooke in Essex Arch. Soc. Trans., ii., 64 ). In Doom 23 the word is used in the case of slitting or biting by a dog. Of the dooms dealing with assault, no less than seven deal especially with the
