Thorpe’s six-text edition in the Rolls Series.  Though not free from defects, this edition is absolutely indispensable for the study of the chronicles and the mutual relations of the different MSS.  A second volume contains the translation.  In 1865 the Clarendon Press published Two Saxon Chronicles (A and E) Parallel, with supplementary extracts from the others, by the Rev. John Earle.  This edition has no translation, but in the notes and introduction a very considerable advance was made.  On this edition is partly based the later edition by the Rev. C. Plummer, already cited above.  In addition to the translations contained in the editions already mentioned, the following have been issued separately.  The first translation into modern English was by Miss Anna Gurney, privately printed in 1819.  This was largely based on Gibson’s edition, and was in turn the basis of Dr. Giles’ translation, published in 1847, and often reprinted.  The best translation is that by the Rev. Joseph Stevenson, in his series of Church Historians of England (1853).  Up to the Conquest it is a revision of the translation contained in Mon.  Hist.  Brit. From that point it is an independent translation.

(C.  PL.)

ANGLO-SAXON LAW. 1.  The body of legal rules and customs which obtained in England before the Norman conquest constitutes, with the Scandinavian laws, the most genuine expression of Teutonic legal thought.  While the so-called “barbaric laws” (leges barbarorum) of the continent, not excepting those compiled in the territory now called Germany, were largely the product of Roman influence, the continuity of Roman life was almost completely broken in the island, and even the Church, the direct heir of Roman tradition, did not carry on a continuous existence:  Canterbury was not a see formed in a Roman province in the same sense as Tours or Reims.  One of the striking expressions of this Teutonism is presented by the language in which the Anglo-Saxon laws were written.  They are uniformly worded in English, while continental laws, apart from the Scandinavian, are all in Latin.  The English dialect in which the Anglo-Saxon laws have been handed down to us is in most cases a common speech derived from West Saxon—­naturally enough as Wessex became the predominant English state, and the court of its kings the principal literary centre from which most of the compilers and scribes derived their dialect and spelling.  Traces of Kentish speech may be detected, however, in the Textus Roffensis, the MS. of the Kentish laws, and Northumbrian dialectical peculiarities are also noticeable on some occasions, while Danish words occur only as technical terms.  At the conquest, Latin takes the place of English in the compilations made to meet the demand for Anglo-Saxon law texts as still applied in practice.

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