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brandished treasured regalia and awarded honours to worthy subjects. They appointed and dismissed officials, recast institutions, proclaimed law codes and dispensed justice, promoted or restricted trade, dispatched and received diplomatic delegations, contracted alliances and battled enemies, and commissioned public works. Often they carried out these duties personally, whereas in Europe, many had been
Moses by the Lord (Exodus 20), was the birth of constitutionalism (Finer 1997). For the first time in history, a polity established the principle that the power of the king, or ruler, was restricted by a higher law. As a political historian has observed ‘the monarch [was] bound by an explicit and written law code imposed upon him, coequally with his subjects, from the outside’ (Finer 1997: 239, italics in the original). In introducing this doctrine, the Jews established, before anyone else – and at a time when unrestricted despotism was the order of the day – the
twelve-mile radius) was accorded special treatment and gave rise to a special jurisdiction (and his personal protection). 17 The king’s personal authority and his particular geographical location thus continued to be a significant focus for the exercise of justice. When it came to legislation, the law-codes attributed to the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman kings offered an example of the king’s apparent lead
arrest and the means which they should fulfil their obligations to keep the peace and protect the public. Because it was codified the law was supposed to be readily accessible not just to lawyers - and certainly the codes were ideal for the burgeoning army of Indian pleaders - but to the average member of the ICS. Generally the Indian law codes were held to ‘approach the highest standard of excellence
to England resulted in the conversion of King Aethelbert of Kent in 601, who went on to promulgate a new law code: see Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica i. 26; ii. 5. 49 See Councils and Synods , pp. 733
of Kent’s law code made a similar pronouncement at the same time. 127 Edictum Pistense (a. 864) , ch. 31, in MGH Capit. 2, no. 273, pp. 323–4. 128 J. L. Nelson, ‘England and the continent in the ninth century III: rights and rituals’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , 14 (2004), 1–24, at 11. 129 J.-P. Devroey, ‘Peasant mobility and settlement’, in B. Kasten (ed.), Tätigkeitsfelder und Erfahrungshorizonte des ländlichen Menschen in der frühmittelalterlichen Grundherrschaft (bis ca. 1000) (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2006), pp. 37–48. 130 See
in providing crucial evidence in favour of Ansemirus. The document lists the names of the people summoned as well as those who supported the oath that Ansemirus took to support his claim. This case shows that priests’ control of ecclesiastical dues was a potential source of social disruption. In Anglo-Saxon England a system of tithe payment made its appearance in tenth-century law codes. King Edgar’s legislation of the 960s established that all tithes were to be paid to the old minster, while allowing those thegns who had a church with a graveyard on their
ground level, and for how long, is difficult to assess, but provisions of Lex Salica , Lex Alamannorum and Lex Baiuuariorum are occasionally reflected in Carolingian and Saint-Gall charters, and it is quite clear that Visigothic law was widely known and widely cited in northern Iberia in the ninth and tenth centuries. 89 English law codes, which run from the seventh century, have a separate chain of transmission and are distinctive in being written in the vernacular; in the tenth and eleventh centuries, especially, some of the new rule-making was clearly
language and their law-codes; the second, in Victorian times, witnessed that national search for the genius of English free institutions which discovered its origins in the law and polity of the early Teutonic peasantry. At both periods the links between national and local history were simultaneously racial and institutional. County history, with its origins in Tudor times, ‘was related to the perceived early racial divisions of the country: the British in Cornwall and Wales, with the shires south of the Tees under West-Saxon, Mercian or Danish
that deployed sources and evidence specifically to test Vergil’s statement. Contrary to modern expectations, those maintaining that parliament predated the reign of Henry I also preferred to co-opt, rather than to debunk, the Anglica historia. Sixteenthcentury English scholars were increasingly drawn towards humanist philology, particularly to the illumination of origins through etymology.57 Vergil’s observation that parliamentum derived from French could thus be interpreted as a linguistic comment. As editor of Anglo-Saxon law-codes (in his Archaionomia of 1568