precisely in order to integrate the new legislation of princes with the
legal traditions of peoples.^3
From Roman times ‘decrees’ and ‘statutes’ (the latter glossable as ‘the
institution of laws’) were terms never out of use for the edicts of men in
authority, for the constitution-making of classical Roman emperors was
kept alive into the middle ages in the service of the Church.^4 The influen-
tial writings of Saint Isidore, archbishop of Seville (d. 636), recognized
the need of law-making ‘for the common utility of citizens’.
Charlemagne caused the tribal laws of the Franks (such as the Salic law)
to be read out and where necessary amended, so that judges should in
future ‘judge according to written law and not their own discretion’,
and a century later the English King Alfred similarly aspired to collect
and amend the laws of his predecessors.^5
Prelates and princes expressed a sense of duty to legislate com-
prehensively for ‘the state of the church and the commonwealth
[respublica]’, and a myth became widespread of the founding of nations
by kings who handed down codes of law.^6 The Sachsenspiegelmade
Charlemagne’s framing of a Lex Saxonumthe beginning of Christian
Saxony;^7 and the Welsh credited the tenth-century King Hywel the
Good with the wholesale promulgation of the Lex Walensis at an
assembly of local representatives by whose counsel he examined the
ancient laws rather as Charlemagne and Alfred had done, renewing
some and abolishing others.^8 For one writer, the ninth-century Kenneth
MacAlpine was ‘called the first king [of Scots], not because he was the
first, but because he first established the Scottish laws’, though the
author of Regiam Majestatemclaimed that they were promulgated by
the great abbey-founder King David I (1124–53), acting ‘with the
healthful counsel of the whole realm, the people and the clergy’.^9
192 Legal Ordering of ‘the State of the Realm’
(^3) A. Harding, ‘Legislators, Lawyers and Law-Books’, in Lawyers and Laymen: Studies in
the History of Law presented to Professor Dafydd Jenkins, ed. T. M. Charles-Edwards et al.
(Cardiff: U. of Wales P., 1986), 246–8.
(^4) Examples in Formulae Merowingici et Karolini Aevi, 351 line 5 , 352. 25 , 434. 15 , 482. 25 ,
- 30 etc.; W. E. Brynteson, ‘Roman Law and Legislation in the Middle Ages’, Speculum, 41
(1966).
(^5) Capitularia Regum Francorum,ed. A. Boretius and V. Krause, MGH Legum Sectio 2, 2
vols. (Hanover, 1883–90), i. 105; Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. F. Liebermann, 3 vols.
(Halle, 1903–16), i. 42–6, 47 (49. 9: Aethelberht of Kent, maker of the earliest English laws,
as ‘the first of the English to be baptized’); Dorothy Whitelock, ‘Wulfstan and the Laws of
Cnut’, EHR63 (1948), for the ecclesiastical sources of Anglo-Saxon laws.
(^6) Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Britanniae, ed. J. Hammer (Cambridge, Mass.,
1951), cc. 21–2.
(^7) Sachsenspiegel Landrecht, K. A. Eckhardt, MGH Fontes Iuris Germanici Antiqui, ns1, i
(Göttingen, 1973), 52; cf. G. Theuerkauf, Lex, Speculum, Compendium Iuris(Cologne, 1968),
38 ff.
(^8) The Latin Texts of the Welsh Laws, ed. H. D. Emanuel (Cardiff: Board of Celtic Studies,
1967), 109.
(^9) The Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, i (London, 1844), 597; A. Harding, ‘Regiam