When the Danes had established their empire, they showed themselves no less solicitous than the English to collect and enforce the laws:  seeming desirous to repair all the injuries they had formerly committed against them.  The code of Canute the Great is one of the most moderate, equitable, and full, of any of the old collections.  There was no material change, if any at all, made in their general system by the Danish conquest.  They were of the original country of the Saxons, and could not have differed from them in the groundwork of their policy.  It appears by the league between Alfred and Guthrum, that the Danes took their laws from the English, and accepted them as a favor.  They were more newly come out of the Northern barbarism, and wanted the regulations necessary to a civil society.  But under Canute the English law received considerable improvement.  Many of the old English customs, which, as that monarch justly observes, were truly odious, were abrogated; and, indeed, that code is the last we have that belongs to the period before the Conquest.  That monument called the Laws of Edward the Confessor is certainly of a much later date; and what is extraordinary, though the historians after the Conquest continually speak of the Laws of King Edward, it does not appear that he ever made a collection, or that any such laws existed at that time.  It appears by the preface to the Laws of St. Edward, that these written constitutions were continually falling into disuse.  Although these laws had undoubtedly their authority, it was, notwithstanding, by traditionary customs that the people were for the most part governed, which, as they varied somewhat in different provinces, were distinguished accordingly by the names of the West Saxon, the Mercian, and the Danish Law; but this produced no very remarkable inconvenience, as those customs seemed to differ from each other, and from the written laws, rather in the quantity and nature of their pecuniary mulcts than in anything essential.

If we take a review of these ancient constitutions, we shall observe that their sanctions are mostly confined to the following objects.

1st.  The preservation of the peace.  This is one of the largest titles; and it shows the ancient Saxons to have been a people extremely prone to quarrelling and violence.  In some cases the law ventures only to put this disposition under regulations:[84] prescribing that no man shall fight with another until he has first called him to justice in a legal way; and then lays down the terms under which he may proceed to hostilities.  The other less premeditated quarrels, in meetings for drinking or business, were considered as more or less heinous, according to the rank of the person in whose house the dispute happened, or, to speak the language of that time, whose peace they had violated.