AN'GLO-SAX'ON LAW. The body of law of the Anglo-Saxons. It was not until the close of the nineteenth century that historical inves tigation enabled one to form even a tolerably clear conception of the legal system that pre vailed in England prior to the Norman conquest. The earliest. written records of that system are the Anglo-Saxon "dooms," or judgments, which go back to the sixth century of our era. From the time of Ethelhert of Kent to that of Ed ward the Confessor these records, though frag mentary, appear in an almost unbroken series, supplemented by land charters and wills, collect ed through the industry of modern scholars. These give ms a far from complete, but yet a fairly consistent, idea of the principles and pro cedure of Anglo-Saxon law. This was, even at the time of the Conquest, a primitive law. con cerning itself mostly with the personal relations of free and unfree men, liegemen and lordless men, or outlaws, with crimes of violence—homi cide, wounding, and cattle-stealing—and with a simple and slowly developing law of real prop erty. Contract law, as we understand the term, did not exist. There was no distinction be tween willful and accidental homicide or maim ing, and all crimes were punished by the intlic titm of heavy fines, which were graduated, not according to the atrocity of the deed, but accord ing to the personal status or dignity of the per son injured. Indeed, the law of persons con sisted almost entirely of a graded valuation of the individnars life or limb, and the terms "twelve- hundred- sh il ling man," "t wo- mdred shilling man." were the •ell-understood equiva lents of terms of rank or personal status.
Anglo-Saxon land law was a composite of Teu tonic customary law and the rules growing out of the personal and property relations of lord and vassal, the former probably predominating.
Foie-land (q.v.) was the name given to land the title of which rested on the common, cus tomary, and unwritten law. Land derived by grant from the King was known as boe-land (q.x..), the title resting on the book, or written instrument, creating it. It is in the latter that the elements of a feudal form of tenure existed; but it is probable that all forms of tenure were more or less dependent; though of feudal tenure, in the strict sense of the term, there are only a few traces before the Conquest. The allodial ownership, referred to in the books, was not the "absolute and unqualified property" in land which Blackstone and other later writers had in mind when they used the term. Sometimes it is employed as the equivalent of boc-land, and more often merely as signifying an inheritable estate. See Ationtum; FEUDALISM; TENURE.
The Anglo-Saxon judicial system was of the loosest ppssible description. The public courts— the hundred court and the county cou•t—were popular and local in character, and had no ef fective process for carrying their judgments into effect. There was no supreme judicial tribunal, no curia regis, such as developed in the Norman period and when the king's justice was invoked to remedy an act of injustice committed by the regular tribunals, it was an irregular and extra legal, or at least extra-judicial, power which he was called upon to exercise. Toward the close of the Saxon period, a multiplicity of private courts sprang up, the predecessors of the courts baron of a later date. See MANOR;