AS TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH UNDER THE ROYAL WITH THE INTRODUCTION OF THE COMMON LAW By Norman Judges after the Conquest, and its Earliest Proferts in WITH NOTES AND COMMENTS BY JOHN M. STEARNS, A.M., Counsellor-at-Law. NEW YORK AND ALBANY : 1889. Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1889, By JOHN M. STEARNS, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. PRESS OF SPRINGFIELD PRINTING AND BINDING CO., SPRINGFIELD, MASS. PREFACE. HISTORICAL research is the genius of this age. Speculations in science, philosophy, and morals have had their day. Investigation and inquiry rest conclusions on facts known, and on facts ascertained to exist as the necessary results of the relations of what is known to the developed phenomena of what is hidden. and concealed. Effective powers in nature and in the world of thought are often concealed, and spring from sources far beyond the knowledge of man. Yet the existence of these hidden forces is incontrovertible. The child can read the figures and note the movement of the index finger on the dial plate of the clock. But he knows nothing of the forces within that produce the motion. So the body of human knowledge is made up of what we see, and what things seen prove to exist beyond the limit of vision. Facts in history are gathered from original records -writings, hieroglyphics, and visible monumentsfrom whatever makes up the archæology and life of the past. So, in the legal history we propose in this work, neither inference nor tradition is counted sufficient to establish any facts or principles in law, that do not find a permanent support in the legal developments of the age to which they are ascribed. The legal status of England in the ages of the old Saxon laws is better evidence of the principles of the then civil administra |