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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

Frederick Levi Attenborough (1887-1973) studied at Cambridge and was a Fellow of Emmanuel College between 1920 and 1925. He later became the Principal of University College, Leicester. In 1922 Cambridge University Press published his edition of the early Anglo-Saxon laws, with a facing-page modern English translation. A few years earlier, Felix Lieberman had published his monumental three-volume Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, which is still the definitive specialist edition of the laws (as Attenborough rightly predicted), and which is also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection. Attenborough explains that his work is for social and legal historians who do not read German, or do not require the full critical apparatus and contextual material provided by Lieberman. Attenborough's book covers the laws from Aethelbert to Aethelstan; in 1925 Cambridge published a continuation by Agnes Robertson, The Laws of the Kings of England from Edmund to Henry I, which is also available