Suchergebnisse

Alfred the Great's domboc ('book of laws') is the longest and most ambitious legal text of the Anglo-Saxon period. Alfred places his own laws, dealing with everything from sanctuary to feuding to the theft of bees, between a lengthy translation of legal passages from the Bible and the legislation of the West-Saxon King Ine (r. 688-726), which rival his own in length and scope. This book is the first critical edition of the domboc published in over a century, as well as a new translation. Five introductory chapters offer fresh insights into the laws of Alfred and Ine, considering their backgrounds, their relationship to early medieval legal culture, their manuscript evidence and their reception in later centuries. Rather than a haphazard accumulation of ordinances, the domboc is shown to issue from deep reflection on the nature of law itself, whose effects would permanently alter the development of early English legislation

In the Main City of Gdańsk, a certificate of the city council's control over the legal guardians of children who lost one or both parents, are two books of minors from 1441-1460 and 1451-1460. The supervision of the registers of this type was exercised by the masons. These entries included entries regarding the property of minors entrusted by their guardians to the municipal council for safekeeping. These books also show the further fate of funds belonging to minors and financial operations carried out by their guardians (eg investments in the pension market). They are also an interesting source for research on Gdansk's financial policy in the times of political change, such as the Thirteen Years' War

This edition of the laws promulgated by successive Anglo-Saxon rulers over a period of five centuries was published in three volumes between 1903 and 1916 by the German historian Felix Lieberman (1851-1925), and is still regarded as authoritative. This unique body of early medieval legal writing, unparalleled in other Germanic languages, provides valuable source material for scholars of Old English and of legal history, and Lieberman's thorough engagement with the manuscripts has never been surpassed. His preface explains that owing to factors such as the extreme variability of Old English orthography, and the existence of both Latin and Old English versions of the same material, a traditional edition using just one base manuscript with a critical apparatus would have been too unwieldy. Volume 1 introduces the manuscripts, and gives several parallel versions of each text in Old English and Latin with a facing translation into modern German. Frederick Attenborough's The Laws of the Early English Kings (1922) is also reissued in this series