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value of friendship. Alfred’s rendering of Augustine’s Soliloquies into Anglo-Saxon was perhaps his freest translation, and in this he reveals a strong Christian faith in the immortality of the soul, and the high Turning a king into a hero 53 value that he placed upon wisdom, reason and the Christian virtues of ‘faith, hope, and charity’. The king’s writings could thus be used both to corroborate and to augment what Asser states about Alfred’s character and concerns. As well as Alfred’s writings, Victorian Alfredianists could also refer to his law-code – a
Charles the Bald in the Edict of Pîtres (864). 27 As well as allowing for close control of coin, it also allowed, in theory, for the king and his moneyers to control the weight of coin and hence the amount of bullion in circulation. That tenth-century kings were very concerned with coinage can be seen in the Grately law code of King Æthelstan (924–39), which mandated that mints could be located only in burhs (fortified towns) and which contained swingeing penalties for coinage offences: loss of hand for the first offence and loss of life for the second. 28 Although
especially as many contemplated why the Republic fell, how Augustus restored it, and why and how subsequent leaders did or didn’t fulfil Augustus’s legacy. For contemporary sources on law there is what survives of the original fourth-century BCE Roman law code, the Twelve Tables ; at the other end of the scale is Justinian’s sixth-century CE Codex , an enormous compendium of Roman law in five parts, assembled by a team of jurists to untangle a thousand years of contradictory, superseded, and obscure laws. The centuries in between include
kin since it could cause feud. The law code is graphic and specific in detailing how an allegation of rape is to be made: let her take the man’s penis in her left hand and put her right hand upon the relics, and let her swear to those relics that he penetrated her with that penis by rape upon her, and that he caused shame and insult to her, and to her kindred and to her lord. 54 It is hard to know whether the above was ever enacted, and it is equally difficult to assess the historicity of
were returned to the correct donors, or their heirs, when the conjugal union was dissolved, either by death or any other means. Valencia was somewhat different from other regions in the Iberian peninsula at the time the Furs were redacted in the thirteenth century, as this law code implemented a marital property system based on the separation of goods. According to the Furs, a dowry of some kind was donated to the groom by his bride and/or another donor. In return, provided she was a donzella (virgin woman), the bride received a counter-gift, called the creix, valued
with injuries to the face: what injury was sufficient to cause ‘incapacity’? Could this be merely æsthetic, or did it require impaired sensory function? If only parts of the body that held substantial function were actionable as ‘members’, which did this include? These were far from new concerns, and Patricia Skinner demonstrates the wide-reaching and detailed frameworks of assessment employed in medieval law codes across Britain. 44 Scottish judge Sir Alexander Seton drew directly on Tagliacozzi for his legal discussion of nasal injury in the late seventeenth
their upbringing. The Alphonsine law code, the Siete partidas , observed that in Spain it had ‘always been customary for honourable men to send their sons to be brought up in the courts of kings so that they might learn to be courteous and educated, and free from villainy and all defects’. 31 England too had a long tradition of sending children into other noble or
French armies brought both bayonets and law codes into the conquered territories. Moreover, this reformist agenda was not simply about improving the efficiency and capacity of the Napoleonic state to extract financial, economic and military resources from subject territories and states. As Stuart Woolf has cogently argued, there was a genuine commitment on the part of the Napoleonic state to
when the government of Charles Rogier introduced reforms, and a conservative reaction was unthinkable in the young, liberal, unitary state. Belgium had a constitution and a liberal representative system, and could boast of a reasonably stable parliamentary culture. The Belgian constitution of 1831 served as a model for the constitutional law code permitted by King Charles Albert of Sardinia of the House of Savoy in Piedmont in 1848. Belgium’s municipal act of 1836 was studied carefully in Turin and The Hague, when the Piedmontese and Dutch governments were devising
ordered a compilation of earlier Egyptian laws.121 Persian documents relating to this period no longer exist, and it is only from the early Ptolemaic Period that there are extant copies of a Demotic version. Although only a small part of the original Demotic corpus is known to have survived, certain of these law codes are suggested to date back to the Saite Period. These surviving documents indicate that the original corpus would have been fairly comprehensive in its scope, covering such topics as leases, matrimonial property settlements and maintenance obligations