history after the Conquest, when it was introduced wholesale in royal and in feudal courts.  The Scandinavian invasions brought in many northern legal customs, especially in the districts thickly populated with Danes.  The Domesday survey of Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, Norfolk, &c., shows remarkable deviations in local organization and justice (lagmen, sokes), and great peculiarities as to status (socmen, freemen), while from laws and a few charters we can perceive some influence on criminal law (nidings-vaerk), special usages as to fines (lahslit), the keeping of peace, attestation and sureties of acts (faestermen), &c.  But, on the whole, the introduction of Danish and Norse elements, apart from local cases, was more important owing to the conflicts and compromises it called forth and its social results,—­than on account of any distinct trail of Scandinavian views in English law.  The Scandinavian newcomers coalesced easily and quickly with the native population.

[v.02 p.0037]

The direct influence of Roman law was not great during the Saxon period:  we notice neither the transmission of important legal doctrines, chiefly through the medium of Visigothic codes, nor the continuous stream of Roman tradition in local usage.  But indirectly Roman law did exert a by no means insignificant influence through the medium of the Church, which, for all its insular character, was still permeated with Roman ideas and forms of culture.  The Old English “books” are derived in a roundabout way from Roman models, and the tribal law of real property was deeply modified by the introduction of individualistic notions as to ownership, donations, wills, rights of women, &c.  Yet in this respect also the Norman Conquest increased the store of Roman conceptions by breaking the national isolation of the English Church and opening the way for closer intercourse with France and Italy.

5.  It would be useless to attempt to trace in a brief sketch the history of the legal principles embodied in the documents of Anglo-Saxon law.  But it may be of some value to give an outline of a few particularly characteristic subjects.

(a) The Anglo-Saxon legal system cannot be understood unless one realizes the fundamental opposition between folk-right and privilege.  Folk-right is the aggregate of rules, formulated or latent but susceptible of formulation, which can be appealed to as the expression of the juridical consciousness of the people at large or of the communities of which it is composed.  It is tribal in its origin, and differentiated, not according to boundaries between states, but on national and provincial lines.  There may be the folk-right of West and East Saxons, of East Angles, of Kentish men, Mercians, Northumbrians, Danes, Welshmen, and these main folk-right divisions remain even when tribal kingdoms disappear and the people is concentrated in one or two realms.  The chief centres for the