to its latest phase, has never possessed an authoritative, constructive, systematic, or approximately exhaustive statement, such as was attempted by the great founders of the civil or Continental law, by Justinian or by Napoleon Bonaparte.  Now this is true, even to-day, of our English and our American law.  That is, the great bulk of the law that is administered in our courts is not “written,” it is not in any code.  There are, of course, text-books on the subject, but they are of no binding authority.  It resides in the learning of the judges.  It is what is called court-made law—­“jus dicere,” not “jus dare.”  Our judges are still supposed to tell what the law is, and they sometimes, as the common law is a very elastic thing, have to make new law.  That is, if the precise case isn’t covered by any previous decision or by any statute, the judge or the court will say what the common law ought to be when applied to that state of facts.  So our law is a continually growing law, and largely made still in the old Saxon way, by custom and the judges, and still under the theory that the common law is an existing thing; that the law exists and the judge only expounds.  We have never lost sight of that theory.

These early Anglo-Saxon laws mostly concern only matters of procedure for the courts, or the scale of punishment.  As they assume a knowledge of existing law, they are often hard to understand.  Here are some of the laws of Wessex: 

    A.D. 690.  WESSEX KING INI.

    CAP. 11.  “If any one sell his own countryman, bond or free, though
    he be guilty, over sea, let him pay for him according to his
    ‘wer.’”

As to “wer.”  Now there were slaves in England in those days; at the time of the Conquest the Domesday Book reports twenty-five thousand. Slaves, I mean; not the unfree agricultural laborers, they were in a higher class, but the regularly bound slaves, who were descendants, either of the early British inhabitants or of the Saxons themselves, who had been punished in the courts and had been sentenced into slavery, or men who had voluntarily sold themselves into slavery.  For under early Saxon law a man could sell his child into slavery if the child were under seven years old, and above fourteen the child could sell himself.  This refers, of course, to that; it is really a kind of predecessor of our Thirteenth Amendment; that is, it forbids slavery; it forbids making new slaves.  The word “wer” is the word we have in “wer-wolf,” meaning blood; for instance, “weregild” is a man’s blood money.  Every man had a price from the king down; if a man killed the king he had to pay, we will say, fifty thousand pounds; if a thane, it might be one or two thousand; if an ordinary freeman, one hundred pounds, and so on.