The Laws of King Alfred ("Domboc")
Written law in Old English was already three centuries old when King Alfred set about preparing the book referred to by successors on the throne of Wessex as seo domboc (‘the judgment book’). It resembles nothing before or after in the development of royal lawbooks, and much about the text has struck commentators as defying explanation. Commencing in medias res with the statement ‘The Lord was speaking (Drihten wæs sprecende)’, the domboc goes on to translate loosely the Decalogue and Exodus chs. 21–3, followed by the ‘Council of Jerusalem’ (Acts 15), which abrogated the obligations of early Christians to much of the Mosaic Law. Though this biblical introduction occupies nearly as much space as the laws themselves, its relation to the latter is never made clear. The remainder of the domboc is taken up by 153 clauses of legislation, 76 of them issued by Alfred’s seventh-century predecessor Ine, whose code (found nowhere independent of Alfred’s) occurs here in its entirety.
What motives led Alfred and his circle to build this enigmatic tumulus of ancient and contemporary law? One place to begin is Alfred’s own words, which are sandwiched between the biblical introduction and his own slightly longer collection of ordinances:
Ic ða Ælfred cyning þas togædere gegaderode, ⁊ awritan het monege þara þe ure foregangan heoldon, ða ðe me licodon; ⁊ manege þara þe me ne licodon ic awearp mid minra witena geðeahte, ⁊ on oðre wisan bebead to healdanne.
[Then I, King Alfred, gathered these judgments together and commanded to be written many of them which our ancestors held – those that pleased me; and many of those that displeased me I discarded with the knowledge of my councillors, and bade that they be held in a different manner.]
But this statement tells us something about how the book was assembled, not why. Nor does it shed any light on the farrago of materials through which the reader has by this point been led without explanation. Only when we compare the domboc’s prologue with those of earlier legislation does a sense of Alfred’s purposes begin to emerge. With the exception of Æthelberht (d. 601), who gathered a compilation of laws in Old English ‘after Roman examples (iuxta exempla Romanorum)’ not long after his baptism (see Bede, HE, II.5), all prior works of royal law had been preceded by prefaces of varying length. Though none approaches that of the domboc in scope, all insist (often with the same words) that written decrees (domas) do not threaten but complement the body of long observed custom (designated æ or þeawas). A notable example is the prologue of Hlothere and Eadric’s laws: ‘Hlothere and Eadric, Kings of Kent, extended the laws (æ) which their predecessors had made, by the decrees (domum) which are stated below’ (transl. Attenborough 1922: 19). In the original, the passage just translated gives the impression of aiming for the cadences of Old English verse, presumably to lend the text the appearance of something old and therefore trustworthy:
Hloðhære and Eadric,
Cantwara cyningas,
ecton þa æ,
þa ðe heora aldoras
ær geworhton,
ðyssum domum
þe hyr efter sægeþ.
The domboc’s prologue shows Alfred abandoning the defensive posture with which prior kings had issued their enactments. Rather than confront misgivings through such devices of persuasion as were available to barbarian rulers – in the case of Hlothere and Eadric, doggerel verse – Alfred treats the question of whether writing was an appropriate vehicle for law as if it is no question at all. Beginning with laws written on Sinai by the finger of God, Alfred traces legislation from its divine origins through the first Christian council, here adding to the language of Acts 15 an assertion that the apostles met with no success until fashioning their decree in writing. This and subsequent ‘synods’ established the body of Christian law that the domboc gathers in one place.
In going to such lengths to frame his own ordinances, Alfred’s court seems to have been carried along by currents of thought active in most successor states of the Roman empire. Charlemagne (d. 814) had sought to establish Francia on a foundation of books and learning, and situating legal customs in writing represented a major aspect of this undertaking. Though Irish analogues have long been adduced to explain the biblical framework of the domboc, its opening passages most resemble the prologue of the Lex Baiwariorum, which narrates the beginnings of written legislation in the laws of Moses as well as the constitutions of republican Rome. By tracing its origins to unnamed ‘synods’ and ultimately to Acts 15, Alfred implies that royal legislation grew from the same springs that nourished the more established and formidable corpus of ecclesiastical law. Alfred’s use of the term ‘synod’ for these deliberative bodies is not as strange as it might seem: outside of Alfredian prose, ‘synod’ is used regularly in pre-Conquest sources to describe both meetings of bishops and of the royal assembly. As the latter was made up in part of bishops and other elite clergy, the difference between councils and royal assemblies was not always apparent.
Even if its combination of old and new makes the relation of the domboc to Alfred’s own times occasionally uncertain, it remains the best window one could hope for into ninth-century conditions, when Wessex was just emerging from almost a century of Viking activity. Outwardly much of its content seems in keeping with materials such as the Lex Salica, renewed by Charlemagne and even translated in the ninth century into Old High German, and with the laws of Æthelberht. Its primary concern is the regulation of violence, and monetary remedies are suggested for a broad range of injuries and insults. Yet even in a text replete with examples of post-Roman frontier justice, the medieval state is coming into view. Alfred’s laws are, for example, among the first in English to refer to imprisonment. Its function here seems to have overlapped with the protections of sanctuary, adding to these promises that the wrongdoer’s confession and penance might remit his penalties under law.
A capacity to enforce ordinances against crime may also be assumed. Æthelstan VI, a code issued by Alfred’s grandson, establishes the bylaws of a London peace-gild occupied with hunting down offenders guilty of theft. These ‘gilds’ are also attested, though sparsely, in the laws of Ine (§§16, 21) and of Alfred (§§27.1, 28). While their nature in the dōmboc is never made clear, it is reasonable to assume that gilds played a role in the maintenance of order much as they would decades later. As for judges, according to his biographer Asser, Alfred was deeply concerned with elevating the standards of their training and given to admonishing them for their neglect of learning, as he does in the following speech:
I am astonished at this arrogance of yours, since through God’s authority and my own you have enjoyed the office and status of wise men, yet you have neglected the study and application of wisdom. For that reason, I command you either to relinquish immediately the offices of worldly power that you possess, or else to apply yourselves much more attentively to the pursuit of wisdom.
(Transl. Keynes and Lapidge 1983: 110.)
Given the limited and compromised state of the evidence, Asser’s narrative brings us as close as we may come to a full sense of the motivations underlying the dōmboc, particularly its emphasis on writing as the preeminent vehicle of law. Earlier in his reign, Alfred had responded to the decay of learning among West-Saxon clergy by initiating translations of books thought essential to the cultivation of wisdom, such as Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care and Boëthius’s Consolation of Philosophy. That similar purposes accompanied the preparation of the domboc, even if they are not described in the sort of detail one finds in the famous preface to the Alfredian version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care, seems likely from Alfred’s complaint that his judges had neglected wisdom and ought to apply themselves to its study. While Alfred’s text sought to furnish in its clauses solutions to judicial dilemmas, it also aspired to impart to those invested with judicial authority a sense of the history and dignity of their office.
How much the domboc was able to realize such purposes is uncertain. Though Edward the Elder and Æthelstan commended the dōmboc to their reeves (royal proxies invested with judicial authority) as the standard to be followed, neither king gives evidence in his legislation of careful consultation of the text, which is sometimes altered when quoted. During or not long after the lifetime of Alfred, chapter headings were added to the clauses of the domboc, and whoever wrote them seems to have struggled to understand what is said in the chapters themselves. Yet English kings persisted in borrowing from the domboc and insisting on its importance to the end of the Anglo-Saxon period.
It is just possible, then, that Alfred’s domboc may be best understood as the earliest manifestation in England of a gesture fundamental to political ritual in all ages. Seldom does any group of people form itself into a nation without dedicating an altar to some founding document, and it is typically the fate of this document to be more revered than read. The kingdom of Wessex was probably no exception. That the domboc enjoyed such a status for much of the tenth century is obscured by its competition with other documents later on. In 1018, as he incorporated England into his Scandinavian empire, Cnut agreed at Oxford to maintain ‘the laws of Edgar’, a promise that according to commentators owes more to the sterling reputation of this king than his (rather meagre) legislation per se. Another conquest decades later would bring about the elevation of the wholly specious ‘Laws of Edward the Confessor’. Yet echoes may be found even in twelfth- and thirteenth-century sources of Alfred’s tenth-century reputation as a lawgiver. Even if its provisions seem to have been poorly understood during the reigns of Alfred’s son and grandson, it is fair to credit Alfred and his circle with one of the great exercises of rhetorical legerdemain in the history of European public law. Subsequent rulers would wield without apology the lawmaking powers of kingship.
Select Bibliography
Digitised Manuscripts
Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 173:
https://parker.stanford.edu/parker/catalog/wp146tq7625
Medway Archive and Local Studies Centre, Strood, England MS DRc/R1 (‘Textus Roffensis’):
https://luna.manchester.ac.uk/luna/servlet/media/book/showBook/Man4MedievalVC~4~4~990378~142729
Editions
Attenborough, Frederick Levi, ed. and transl. The Laws of the Earliest English Kings (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1922).
Jurasinski, Stefan, and Lisi Oliver, eds. and transl. The Laws of Alfred: The Domboc and the Making of Anglo-Saxon Law (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2021).
Keynes, Simon, and Michael Lapidge, eds. and transl. Alfred the Great. Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources (London: Penguin, 1983).
Liebermann, Felix, ed. Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, 3 vols. (Halle: Niemeyer, 1903–16).
Turk, Milton Haight, ed. The Legal Code of Ælfred the Great (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1893).
Criticism
Abels, Richard. Alfred the Great: War, Kingship and Culture (London: Longmans, 1998).
Carella, B. ‘The Source of the Prologue to the Laws of Alfred’, Peritia 19 (2005), 91–118.
Campbell, James. The Anglo-Saxon State (London: Hambledon, 2000).
Hough, Carole. ‘An Ald Reht’: Essays on Anglo-Saxon Law (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2014).
Lambert, Tom. Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2017).
Marafioti, Nicole. ‘Crime and Sin in the Laws of Alfred,’ in Languages of the Law in Early Medieval England: Essays in Memory of Lisi Oliver, eds. Stefan Jurasinski and Andrew Rabin (Leuven: Peeters, 2019), pp. 59–86.
Levison, Wilhelm. England and the Continent in the Eighth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1946).
O’Brien, Bruce R. God’s Peace and King’s Peace: The Laws of Edward the Confessor (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).
—--, and Barbara Bombi, eds. Textus Roffensis: Law, Language and Libraries in Early Medieval England (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015).
Oliver, Lisi. The Body Legal in Barbarian Law (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2011).
Pratt, David. The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007).
Rabin, Andrew. Crime and Punishment in Anglo-Saxon England, Cambridge Elements: England in the Early Medieval World (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2020).
Richardson, H.G. and G.O. Sayles. Law and Legislation from Æthelberht to Magna Carta (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1966).
Roach, Levi. Kingship and Consent in Anglo-Saxon England, 871-978 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2017).
Schwyter, Jürg Rainer. Old English Legal Language: The Lexical Field of Theft (Odense: Odense Univ. Press, 1996).
Wormald, Patrick. The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, vol. 1: Legislation and Its Limits (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).
—--. ‘Living with King Alfred’, Haskins Society Journal 15 (2004), 1–39.
Stefan Jurasinski is Professor of English at the State University of New York, Brockport. He is the author of The Old English Penitentials and Anglo-Saxon Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) and, with Lisi Oliver, The Laws of Alfred: The Domboc and the Making of Anglo-Saxon Law (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2021). He is currently completing Patrick Wormald’s draft entry on Old English legal materials for Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture (now SOEALLC) and has begun work on a new edition of the laws of Æthelstan.
