But the truth is, the present system of our laws, like our language and our learning, is a very mixed and heterogeneous mass:  in some respects our own; in more borrowed from the policy of foreign, nations, and compounded, altered, and variously modified, according to the various necessities which the manners, the religion, and the commerce of the people have at different times imposed.  It is our business, in some measure, to follow and point out these changes and improvements:  a task we undertake, not from any ability for the greatness of such a work, but purely to give some short and plain account of these matters to the very ignorant.

The Law of the Romans seems utterly to have expired in this island together with their empire, and that, too, before the Saxon establishment.  The Anglo-Saxons came into England as conquerors.  They brought their own customs with them, and doubtless did not take laws from, but imposed theirs upon, the people they had vanquished.  These customs of the conquering nation were without question the same, for the greater part, they had observed before their migration from Germany.  The best image we have of them is to be found in Tacitus.  But there is reason to believe that some changes were made suitable to the circumstances of their new settlement, and to the change their constitution must have undergone by adopting a kingly government, not indeed with unlimited sway, but certainly with greater powers than their leaders possessed whilst they continued in Germany.  However, we know very little of what was done in these respects until their conversion to Christianity, a revolution which made still more essential changes in their manners and government.  For immediately after the conversion of Ethelbert, King of Kent, the missionaries, who had introduced the use of letters, and came from Rome full of the ideas of the Roman civil establishment, must have observed the gross defect arising from a want of written and permanent laws.  The king,[83] from their report of the Roman method, and in imitation of it, first digested the most material customs of this kingdom into writing, without having adopted anything from the Roman law, and only adding some regulations for the support and encouragement of the new religion.  These laws still exist, and strongly mark the extreme simplicity of manners and poverty of conception of the legislators.  They are written in the English of that time; and, indeed, all the laws of the Anglo-Saxons continued in that language down to the Norman Conquest.  This was different from the method of the other Northern nations, who made use only of the Latin language in all their codes.  And I take the difference to have arisen from this.  At the time when the Visigoths, the Lombards, the Franks, and the other Northern nations on the continent compiled their laws, the provincial Romans were very numerous amongst them, or, indeed, composed the body of the people.  The Latin, language was yet far from extinguished; so that, as the greatest