protection of women, and there are traces of Alfred's cautious but effective treatment of the slave question, whereby he first prac tically created a decent and respectable middle-class of society. An amusing doom is that concerning i' spear carelessness" (36), which enacts that "if a man have a spear over his shoulder and a man stake himself on it, he pay the were (the value of a man according to his station) withput the wite (the fine due to king or lord in respect of the offense)." Important dooms deal with the breaking of oaths and pledges (1), stealing in a church (6), lifting cattle (16), confession of debt (22), slander (32), and house-breaking (40). Doom 41, the only one concerning real property, seems to fore shadow a law of entail concerning boc-lands, or estates created by legal process out of the public land, and suggests a final stage in the triumph of prefeudal individualism., As regards the administration of his laws, popular legend errs in attributing to Alfred the invention of trial by jury. Traceable, indeed, in far earlier time, this mode was not really developed until after the Con
quest, when it is first mentioned in the Constitutions of Clarendon; it did not fully supersede the trial by duel until Henry Ill's reign. Equally fictitious is the fourteenth century note in " Eulogium Historiarum" ( IV., 173), that Alfred translated into AngloSaxon the laws of " Dunwallo Molmnucius, primus legifer in Anglia "; and we may re gard as apocryphal the French story of the thirteenth century, that " le Roy Alfred fist prendre XLIV justices en un an tout come homicide, par leur faux judgements" (" Miroir des Justices," 296-8). There is every reason to accept the generous tribute of William of Malmesbury, that Alfred was "a searcher into the judgments made by his officers, a stern corrector of those wrongly delivered " : his rigor and justice were such that, as is said by Richard of Cirencester (iii., 4), he so restored order in the country that gold bracelets could be safely hung up by the roadside! Even if Alfred was no such legislative genius as Edward I, yet he was a worthy exponent of this high function of re sponsible royalty.
